CoinDesk Podcast Network

CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen is joined by cognitive economist Leigh Caldwell, author of “The Psychology of Price,” to talk about mental health and cryptocurrency in a time of coronavirus crisis.  People who struggle with anxiety, gambling addiction, and a wide array of other other mental health issues may want to develop healthy habits for engaging with financial tools like cryptocurrency. Most Am...

Peter McCormack is the host of What Bitcoin Did and the Defiance podcast. He recently returned from travel to a number of countries in South America including Venezuela and Colombia as well as the Turkey-Greece border.  In this off-the-cuff and wide ranging conversation, Peter and @NLW discuss Bitcoiner politics and the bitcoin community’s reaction to the potential for increased state power in the...

In this 1st part of the “Bitcoin in Africa” podcast documentary series, join Anita as she learns about the current living situation of Zimbabweans and the country's political history. Combining on-the-ground recordings, interviews and thoughtful narration, she paints a picture of why things are how they are, as well as the state of human rights and free speech. Recorded February 2020 in the run-up...

In his daily Coronavirus press briefing today, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said “our main scramble now is ventilators.” The state anticipates that within 45 days, it could need 37,000 ventilators. It currently has 3000.  Bruce Fenton was one of the early crypto community canaries in the coal mine warning of the impending threat of Coronavirus. As the world has caught up to the warning, he has s...

President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced a significant slate of upcoming stimulus measures, including deferred taxes and direct payments to Americans (although those details remain to be seen).  On this episode of The Breakdown, 10T holdings CEO Dan Tapiero joins to discuss: How this forthcoming stimulus might impact the bitcoin narrative Why some traditional safe havens like...

Over the weekend, the Fed decided it couldn’t wait for Wednesday’s planned meeting to act, cutting interest rates to nearly 0%. It also announced $700 billion of direct capital injection through the purchase of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed debt.  The question is whether this action can actually calm markets? So far, it’s not looking great. Within minutes, emergency circuit breakers were...

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Last week the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show gathered to discuss a new consensus driven approach to DeFi oracles and to revisit Johnston's Law (anything that can be decentralized will be decentralized) with the man who coined the phrase so many years ago. Listen/subscribe to the CoinDesk Podcast feed for unique perspectives and fresh daily insi...

The cypherpunk movement has expanded far beyond the 2,000 people who subscribed to mailing lists in the 1990s. In 2018, Entrepreneur reported there are more than 8,000 posts on Bitcointalk every day, while Coinbase garnered millions of user accounts. Such experimental technology is no longer the realm of just a few thousand geeks. However, across the board, even in 2020 cypherpunk projects rarely...

Massive and novel government intervention in markets is now a foregone conclusion, but what happens to bitcoin as the dust settles?  Description  Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced more than a trillion dollars in liquidity injections into the market. In the coming weeks, many observers expect trillions of more in stimulus in a variety of exotic new intervention tactics.  While this will (hop...

The Coronavirus got really extra real today for markets. A two and a half week selloff was tipped to the next level by a major ratcheting up of action from the US government (which still seemed clearly to be not enough to calm markets).  In bitcoin, this meant a drop from around $8000 yesterday to under $6000 today - a head-spinning dump, especially for those who are more recent to crypto.  Still,...

The week of February 12, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was reaching new all time highs. Meanwhile, China’s quarantine of the 11 million people in Wuhan was three weeks old and expanding to other parts of the country.  While the global equities markets have finally started to catch up to the fear of a global pandemic, the Coronavirus has been one a profound case study in the power of narratives...

Whatever you thought of the uncorrelated or safe haven narratives a few weeks ago, it’s hard to deny that bitcoin and crypto are moving in lock step with equities - even mirroring a small bounce in the morning that retreated in the early afternoon.  On this episode of The Breakdown, NLW looks at hot takes on the narrative from Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and crypto investor Ari David Paul.  Not all...

Bitcoin’s price has cratered, but it’s nothing compared to the broader market havoc. From the Coronavirus scare to an oil price war, a confluence of factors is aligning to make it a very rough Monday.  On this episode of The Breakdown, @nlw is joined by Delphi Digital’s Kevin Kelly to discuss: Why the stock market is just catching up to what the bond markets have been saying Why the bond markets h...

CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen is joined by Elena Giralt, the Electric Coin Company’s product marketing associate known for her research on cryptocurrency usage in Latin America, to talk about how digital assets can subvert power dynamics.  According to the Brookings Institute, roughly 4.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country so far, which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees calle...

As the Coronavirus took hold in China, officials in the Hubei province tracked potential patients by examining purchase records for cough and flu medicine for the previous month.  Welcome to the new frontiers of privacy. In this wide-ranging episode, @NLW chats with former lead maintainer of Monero and Tari co-founder Riccardo Spagni - aka @FluffyPony on Twitter - about privacy in the context of:...

CoinDesk reporter Leigh Cuen is joined by Binance US CEO Catherine Coley and Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon to debunk myths about gender for International Women’s Day.  There’s a common myth that women are less likely to be interested in bitcoin than men. The reality is people with higher income levels have a greater propensity for cryptocurrency and women still earn significantl...

It was another good day for global crypto, as South Korea votes to formally integrate the industry into the existing financial system, opening the market to new players and potentially improving services for crypto companies.  In New York state, meanwhile, a recently renovated power plant is taking advantage of low cost energy with 7000 bitcoin miners. This is part of a larger trend of US-based mi...

Yesterday, The Information reported that Facebook’s Calibra wallet would be abandoning the backed-by-a-basket-of-currencies Libra for a set of fiat-backed digital currencies for different regions. The company quickly amended that while they would be launching those fiat-based digital currencies, they weren’t abandoning Libra. In this episode, @NLW argues that these fiat digital currencies could be...

Today is Super Tuesday - the biggest day of the US primary election season. Increasingly, prediction markets and pollsters suggest it’s a two person race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders (although Mike Bloomberg has insisted he’s staying in).  In this episode, NLW breaks down each candidate in the context of their positions vis a vis cryptocurrency, as well as looking at the possible role of t...

When everyone wrote their 2020 crypto prediction pieces, China featured prominently in everything from the exchange business to enterprise blockchain to the potential impact of a forthcoming digital yuan.  Coronavirus erased those issues from focus. On this episode of The Breakdown, @NLW is joined by Matthew Graham, CEO of Sino Global Capital. For the past 7 years, Matthew has lived in China and f...

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Earlier this week the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show gathered to discuss Coronavirus and its potential impacts or disruptions to the decentralized world of bitcoin. Later, we hear from correspondent George Ettinger about the indications of a "Dumb Currency Singularity" taking place at the IRS right now (also presented in full text below). Liste...

After weeks of not reacting to Coronavirus, the markets took a profound turn for the worse this week, leading ultimately to the fastest correction - i.e. loss of 10% - in recorded history.  In this episode of The Breakdown, @NLW is joined by crypto trader, DJ, and broad market thinker Scott Melker to discuss: What the crypto markets demonstrated this week What recent price action suggests about th...

Last Friday on Ethereum’s core developer call, the devs agreed to push forward a controversial anti-ASICs consensus algorithm switch known as ProgPoW.  The broader Ethereum community was not pleased, and has spent the last week debating both ProgPoW itself as well as the way decisions in the community get made.  In this 101-guide to the controversy, @nlw breaks down: What is ProgPoW The history of...

Bitcoin is having a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. Many are using the dump - which from a timing perspective aligns with a broader market selloff among Coronavirus fears - as a way to diminish the “bitcoin as a safe haven” narrative.  In this episode, @nlw revisits that narrative and argues that it is uncomfortably bunched up with the uncorrelated asset narrative, or, as Chamath Palihap...

In the pantheon of crypto hacks, “SIM jacking” is one of the worst. The hack, which is less a hack and more social engineering, is basically a form of identity theft, with the attacker swapping a victim's sim card remotely, usually with the help of your cell phone carrier, and then breaking into their email, crypto, bank accounts, basically all the stuff you definitely don’t want someone to break...