CoinDesk Podcast Network

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund. The bitcoin halving is just a few days away and the growing excitement is palpable. On this episode of The Breakdown, NLW argues that the excitement is also legitimate, and looks at nine reasons why bitcoin has never been stronger going into one of its every-four-year issuance re...

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund. The second order effects of the COVID-19 crisis are here, and they’re painful. In this episode, NLW looks at how COVID is impacting three industries: Travel and tourism 100m lost jobs expected globally  $2.7 in lost GDP  Airbnb lays of 25% of employees  Music & Concerts From a re...

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund. In a world of centralized mobile money solutions, do decentralized, permissionless currencies matter? Around the world, an estimated 1.7 billion people remain unbanked and lacking access to high quality financial services.  Some projects see cryptocurrency as an answer. In this e...

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund. One month after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Warren Buffett wrote an Op-Ed saying that he was buying stocks. Yet during the Coronavirus crisis, he is sitting firmly on the sidelines.  On Saturday night, the “Oracle of Omaha” spoke for 4.5 hours in the first ever vir...

F2Pool is the largest bitcoin mining pool in the world controlling 20 percent of the collective computational energy, also called hashrate, on the bitcoin network. On the fifth and final episode of Bitcoin Halving 2020: Miner Perspectives, Heller discussed the economic incentives driving cryptocurrency mining and mining pool operations.  This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development...

Two of CoinDesk’s most popular series, NLW’s The Breakdown podcast and the Money Reimagined newsletter by chief content officer Michael Casey, come together for a special podcast microseries in the run up to Consensus: Distributed, our first virtual big-tent event May 11-15. The Breakdown: Money Reimagined builds on themes Casey explores in his newsletter to tell the story of key arenas in the bat...

Danielle DiMartino Booth is the CEO and Chief Strategist of Quill Intelligence. Before that, however, after correctly predicting the mortgage meltdown, she was called upon to serve and spent 9 years as an advisor to the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. That experience led her to write “Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America.” In this episode, Daniel...

The Lebanese pound has lost at least 50% of its value against the dollar since last year. 220,000 people have lost their jobs. Food prices are up 58%. An estimated 75% of the population needs assistance of some kind. And over the last two nights, at least a dozen banks have been torched by protesters.    The catalyst? Not coronavirus, but a massive dollar shortage that is destroying an economy tha...

As the COVID-19 crisis rages, it takes on new economic and political dimensions. The frames for many of the most important questions for the next decade are being set now, in this moment.  On this episode of The Breakdown, NLW is joined by Maya Zehavi, a long-time blockchain consultant known for her insightful domain-spanning takes.  They discuss:  How the COVID-19 health crisis overlapped with a...

The bitcoin halving is just two weeks away. While the COVID-19 crisis pushed attention off the momentous event for a while, the discussion is coming back fast and strong. Google searches for the bitcoin halving already exceeding the 2016 peak, despite almost no mainstream media coverage.  In this episode, NLW breaks down 4 archetypes of people within the larger debates around the bitcoin halving:...

On today's show we've got a pair of interviews for you. First we speak with John Cantrell, the author of Juggernaut, a new messaging layer 3 application being built on top of layer 2 lightning network, which is itself built on top of layer one bitcoin. It's a lot of layers, but as a technological concept currently in beta it's a fascinating project, and we talk about it. (Juggernaut on Github) Aft...

In this episode of the Bitcoin Halving 2020: Miner Perspective podcast series, we take a trip down memory lane back to the early days of bitcoin when miners first began competing for network rewards.  “I think the introduction of [Application Specific Integrated Circuits] was a watershed moment in terms of changing the way bitcoin was mined and secured,” said Galen Moore, senior research analyst f...

Yan Pritzker is the CTO and cofounder of Swan Bitcoin, an automated bitcoin only investing app aiming to be the best onramp to bitcoin. He is also the author of Inventing Bitcoin.  On this episode, he and NLW discuss: How immigrating from the Soviet Union taught Yan about capital controls  Buying bitcoin at $30 in 2011  Why the type of capital available shapes what type of startups entrepreneurs f...

One of the key aspects of most plans to reopen the economy is digital contact tracing. This would be an apparatus whereby mobile phones kept track of the other mobile phones they had been physically proximate to, so that if someone were diagnosed with COVID-19, the at-risk people they had been in contact with could be notified. Apple and Google have proposed one plan while a European consortium is...

In this episode Anita speaks with Alakanani Itireleng, who founded the Satoshicentre in Botswana in 2014 and single-handedly built a growing Bitcoin community. She is the heart and center of Bitcoin education there, even the government is relying on her consultancy. This interview was recorded as Anita traveled through southern Africa in February of 2020, just days before the Covid-19 lockdowns we...

QE infinity. Corporate bailouts. Nudgin UBI. The incredible economic phenomena going on now didn’t happen out of the blue. They are the byproducts of a key events spread across the 70 year history of the US dollar led global monetary system.  Luke Gromen is the founder of Forest From The Trees, a macro/thematic research firm. In this episode, Luke provides a TL;DR on those key events that got us t...

Joe McCann currently works in cloud and AI at Microsoft and has spent decades in tech, crypto, and open source communities. He recently wrote a piece called “A New, New World Order” all about the second and third order effects of Covid-19.  In this conversation, Joe and NLW discuss: Localism and the beginning of the end of globalization The return of domestic manufacturing  The ‘Roaring 20s’ of In...

It’s hard to look at recent news from both crypto and traditional markets and not feel like we’re getting pretty mixed signals. Stocks have been recovering, but oil is hitting historic lows. DeFi suffers a major hack over the weekend, but Coinbase sees a major spike in $1200 transactions right as $1200 stimulus checks hit. Cash hoarding is giving pretense for eliminating privacy-preserving money,...

On today’s episode CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen sits down with Bram Cohen, author of the BitTorrent protocol and CEO of Chia. In this wide ranging interview they talk Bram’s early interest in “hard problems”, his unexpected ascent from sketchy to celebrity and much more. Leigh and Bram discuss: The real promise and strengths of cryptocurrency Really interesting problems in cryptocurrency Getting s...

For more information about the bitcoin halving, download the free CoinDesk Research explainer report which features over 30 different charts and additional commentary from mining industry experts. “If price performance following the November 2012 and July 2016 halvings are any indicator, bitcoin’s price should increase significantly over the 10 to 12 month period following the [third] halving.” Th...

Bitcoiners are particularly sensitive to Fed intervention in markets, but the degree to which the Fed is willing to print to backstop basically all risk is drawing the attention of even normal market participants.  On this episode of The Breakdown, NLW is joined by Jared Dillian, market analyst, contrarian, and editor of The Daily Dirt Nap. They discuss: What ‘safe haven’ means in today’s climate...

This week saw the latest salvos in the battle for the future of money.  Libra announced that it would be moving away from a single currency that was backed by a basket of national currency to a model of numerous individual fiat-pegged currencies. While the original model was akin to a disruptive implementation of John Maynard Keynes original concept for a global basket currency (which he called a...

In this episode, we'll join Anita Posch in Zimbabwe as she speaks with Tongayi Choto, a software developer, entrepreneur and a bitcoin maximalist. He founded Afriblocks, a Global Pan-African Freelance platform that connects professionals across the world. They talk about the problems young Zimbabweans are facing and Tongayi's approach to make lives better. Later, Anita answers listener questions a...

As week (one million, it seems) of the COVID-19 lockdown plods on, many are wondering what the economy will look like on the other side. Ryan Selkis is the CEO and founder of Messari. He was one of the earliest voices in crypto to sound the alarm on the potential impact of COVID-19 not only on the health system but on the economy.  In this episode of The Breakdown, Ryan joins @NLW to discuss: Why...

Even as the market tries to make sense of everything happen (or ignores it, depending on your perspective), crypto keeps on plugging along.  Today on The Breakdown @NLW looks at 5 recent crypto stories that are representative of larger trends, including: Coinbase Custody enabling staking for Polkadot DOTs A Telegram-focused exchange shutting down due to regulatory compliance costs A $20k Human IPO...