The Café Bitcoin Podcast

The last day. Brady opened with the count, 37 shows in 50 days, and the campaign's frame: political independence 250 years ago, monetary independence now. Yan Pritzker, Frank Corva, Suze and Alec on stage; Unseen Finance returned at the end. The Liquid hack, plainly. On Sunday somebody sent 4,000 L-BTC to SideSwap's peg-out and the Liquid Federation paid out real Bitcoin. The L-BTC had been create...

A Friday hang that took a turn. Tomer Strolight, Suze, Swan Private's Alec and Matt, then Brandon Quittem and Dirty Coin director Alana. The surprise came from the audience: an anonymous 40-year IMF and central-bank veteran, @UnseenFinance . Brady opened on a viral Instagram video, described on air and unverified at air time: Meta AI's suggested questions on a mother's post surfaced her child's na...

A mining show, and the Space crashed midway. Bob Burnett, elected chairman of OCEAN two days earlier, joined Tom French and Callum Wheeler of RenewaBlox, with Suze and Swan's Alec on stage. ⭐ Burnett's hashrate taxonomy now has three animals: rabbits (home miners, maybe 1 to 2% of hash), wild horses (miners who produce their own power), and captive elephants (industrial miners on someone else's g...

Brandon Quittem walked through an essay he has never published, and Brady said so up front. The idea: Bitcoin resembles the Apache, who held off three empires for centuries because there was no leader to remove. He opened with the disclaimer, and it matters: "analogy, analogy, analogy. It's not one to one. These are just frameworks." ⭐ The mechanism he laid out: a centralized organization has a c...

No booked guest today, and the show was better for it. Brady opened the room to listener Bitcoin questions, and the format ran most of the hour. ⭐ Suze gave the single sharpest illustration of UK debanking anyone has offered on this show: Bitcoin Policy UK calls itself BP UK because naming Bitcoin or crypto makes it materially harder to obtain banking services. The UK debanking inquiry's evidence...

Larry Lepard's third appearance, and his position has sharpened each time. Days 6 and 21 asked whether the Big Print was coming. This one was about the mechanism, and his answer is the bond market. His central claim: yield curve control is the destination. "It has to be. There's no other choice." The open questions he named are what they call it, how they justify it, and what the politics look lik...

The Core Lightning security story, told responsibly. Maintainers found critical vulnerabilities and told CLN operators to shut down until the emergency release. No reported loss of funds, patch within 48 hours, source held back to slow attackers. The part that connects everything: AI found the bugs. Multiple AI-generated vulnerability reports reached the maintainers within days, the exact defendin...

Her read on the Treasury story: the market was orderly and the interventions premature. The selloff was rational, the curve is not even steep, and surprise announcements draw attention to a controlled problem. Her phrase: the Streisand effect. She called the buyback program "a super soft form of yield curve control" and said the reaction in gold and Bitcoin is understandable, because surprise dovi...

Bitcoin pushed into the high $70,000s and held there. Friday closed near $78,300 and the room watched it cross $79,900 live. Cory's read on why it stuck: the move was spot driven, not leveraged. The ETFs took in $1.92 billion last week per Farside, the strongest week since October 2025. BlackRock accounted for $1.3 billion of it, across five consecutive positive days. Treasury may tap roughly $950...

Bitcoin around $77,200, up almost 8% on the day and 23% on the week , and the show opens on the mood rather than the chart. Cory, joining from Istanbul: "the shitposting is just completely off the charts. We're back. We're so back." Brandon's read on the turn: "we needed this one. It was a rough couple months." ⭐ Adam Livingston makes the pragmatic case for sovereign accumulation , and grounds it...

Bitcoin ran about 12% in 24 hours, from roughly $66,000 to $72,000, and the show opens on it. Parker spends the hour on what produced it rather than the number itself: the long end of the Treasury curve is behaving in a way the Treasury cannot fix. ⭐ The catalyst nobody led with: the Treasury announced a $4 billion buyback of long bonds. The 10-year yield sat at 4.68% at the announcement and fell...

Ryan MacLeod, who posts as The Nuclear Bitcoiner, works at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and has spent almost eleven years in the industry as a laboratory technologist. He compares his facility to Idaho National Lab, Oak Ridge, or Savannah River in the US, and Sellafield in the UK. The order of his conversion is the opposite of what you would guess: he did not become a nuclear advocate until after...

John Haar, back for his first Café appearance since leaving Swan for Blockware, opens on the 55th anniversary of the Nixon Shock. His argument: gold's own physical properties, the time, trust, and armed transport required to settle in it, are what let the 1971 dollar-gold break happen and stick. No one could credibly refuse. Asked whether the US might literally "back" the dollar with Bitcoin, John...

Yan Pritzker, Swan's cofounder and CTO, walks his new essay on Bitcoin fork history , from the 2015 block size debates through the hard fork scheduled for September 1. Published on the Swan blog and posted to X during the show. His own entry point was Ethereum, not Bitcoin. The 2016 DAO rollback split the chain and created Ethereum Classic, and watching that taught him what a fork actually is befo...

A museum for things that aren't gone yet. Roxana Nasoi of Logos walks through the Museum of Civil Liberties: five halls, twenty major events, a record kept where it can't be quietly edited. Phase one of a past, present, and future campaign. "Liberties, not rights." Roxana explains the word choice: rights imply something that can be granted and revoked. The halls cover control of money, the surveil...

Suze takes us inside the UK's debanking inquiry. A director and co-founder of Bitcoin Policy UK, she's submitting evidence to Parliament's cross-party inquiry this week, and explains what an APPG can and can't do about banks blocking lawful transactions. The numbers are staggering. The Locked Out report found roughly 40% of payments to exchanges blocked or delayed by UK banks, with one exchange re...

Greg Foss is back. After stepping away from Twitter and spending time on Nostr, the veteran credit analyst explains what pulled him back: young people reaching for socialism, and credit markets he sees as far less healthy than equities. The credit default swap thesis. Foss walks through his method: take the CDS spread on U.S. government debt, multiply by total obligations including unfunded liabil...

Cory's argument about narratives. Journalists and bankers keep asking what the catalyst will be, but narrative follows price rather than causing it. Something moves because sellers are exhausted, and the reason gets fitted afterward. The only narrative that matters is Bitcoin being better money for eight billion people. Larry Lepard on what actually moved. The debasement trade began in earnest las...

The theme was looking forward After two brutal weeks the room turned to what comes next, set up by a listener's observation that the philosophical Bitcoin conversation which drew people in around 2020 had gone quiet for years and is audibly back Why the guard dropped Phillip framed Coldcard as a psychic blow because it was the standard for personal sovereignty, and the harder question is why the s...

Suze's Forbes piece, and the question under it. Her Telegram reporting found a persistent identifier that survives restarts, network changes and borders, with the credible risk being targeted surveillance rather than mass tracking. Her real question: why is don't-trust-verify never applied to companies and personalities inside Bitcoin? The confessions, and Cory's calibration. American HODL admitte...

Guy Swan on learning the wrong lessons. The takeaway circulating is "go with the biggest company," which forgets Mt. Gox and FTX and everything else proving size is not safety. His analogy: when a libertarian politician betrays you, libertarianism didn't break, you got scammed. He wants a rule that works forward. His sharpest point: "I don't want a rule that only works in hindsight." Anyone can no...

Dice rolls are now confirmed safe. Portland HODL published a full verification, independently cross-checked by James O'Beirne, Block's engineering team and Rob Hamilton: the Coldcard did use dice entropy rather than falling back to the pseudo-random generator. Fifty or more rolls was sufficient. Still rotate anyway. The prevailing view on the show was that dice-generated seeds are safe but worth r...

A full forensic timeline. Brady traced it end to end: a 2018 MicroPython software fallback sat harmless for three years until March 2021, when Coinkite moved to Bitcoin Core's math library and silently bound seed generation to that fallback. Lopp notes the bug lived in the build system, not the main code. Firmware 4.0.0 is the dividing line. Shipped March 17, 2021. Seeds generated before roughly M...

The event. A firmware flaw in Coldcard seed generation, disclosed the night before, let an attacker recompute private keys outright. By airtime, 594 Bitcoin, put at roughly $38 million on the show, had been swept from about 500 wallets. The mechanism. Yan Pritzker and Swan engineer Steve: the device's true random number generator was present and working, but a March 2021 library change meant the f...

Swan's Phillip Alexander and Brandon Quittem host Day 8 of 50 Days for Freedom: Telegram's auth key ID and the Russian server question; getting debanked for the word Bitcoin, from Wise to Bitcoin Policy UK; Michelle Weekley on Bitcoin ATM bans, shared Claude links indexed by Google, and AI agents with access to your email; and Brandon Quittem on shrinking drawdowns and the retail wave that hasn't...