Our guest this week is Ahyke Otutubuike, a technical writer and Bitcoin user based in Nigeria. Nigeria has been in the news this month as its central bank issued a directive prohibiting regulated financial institutions from dealing with cryptocurrency exchanges and companies that touch crypto. Ahyke had a piece in Bitcoin Magazine this past week explaining the situation and adding context for the Bitcoin’s place in Nigeria’s economy overall, and we get additional analysis from him here.

Our guest this week is Alejandro De La Torre, Vice President at Poolin. Alejandro and Poolin are managing taprootactivation.com to improve on the communication and transparency of the Taproot activation process specifically. Poolin has also recently launched hashrate backed token, one that represents 1 Th of hashrate in their own mining operation and is already trading.

After a little holiday break we are kicking off 2021 with a quick hitting episode. Our guest is Molly, head of marketing at HashKey Hub. Molly was Bitcoin Magazine’s first employee in Asia and combines that early Bitcoin experience with a lot of success rolling out Bitcoin products in Asia with Hashkey. This is more of a rapid fire episode with Molly’s perspective on mainstream media coverage of Bitcoin in China, the growth of Bitcoin interest products, the Asian view of GBTC and more.

In this episode with Niall Ferguson, we dig into his recent Bloomberg piece “Bitcoin Is Winning the Covid-19 Monetary Revolution” and discuss the history of financial evolution, including how the current iteration of that evolution is playing out between China and the US and how he views Bitcoin in that context. We also discuss the qualities that make Bitcoin a significant advance and the broader importance of decentralization and sovereignty. Find Niall online niallferguson.com and on...

Our guest this week is Lixin Liu head of hardware at Cobo and creator of Cobo Vault out of Shanghai. Lixin’s background in hardware and international product development made him Discus Fish’s choice when F2 Pool decided to get into the hardware and security game. We talk about building out Bitcoin hardware from the ground up, why it is valuable to the Bitcoin network to have increasing competition in the hardware product space, the difference between what Chinese miners and western retail...

Our guest this week is Alejandro De Le Torre, Vice President at Poolin. Alejandro and Poolin have launched taprootactivation.com to improve on the communication and transparency of the Taproot activation process. Alejandro has been in Bitcoin since 2014 when he founded SendChat, later acquired by wallet and data service Blocktrail, where Alejandro led BD until it was acquired by Bitmain. Inside of Bitmain, Alejandro cofounded BTC.com, and led their European office during the Segwit upgrade...

We have very special episode this week featuring some of the godfathers of Bitcoin: Nick Szabo, Adam Back and David Chaum. This was recorded as a live panel from Seoul at Korea Blockchain Week and is laid out as a history of the ideas and events that led to Bitcoin from their first person accounts, plus their current thoughts on the experiment and what excites them about the future. From the cryptography and cypherpunk movements to David’s DigiCash, Adam’s Hashcash proof-of-work, Nick’s Bit...

Our guest this week is Sathvik Vishwanath, CEO of India based Bitcoin exchange Unocoin. A tech entrepreneur who got into Bitcoin in 2013, starting a Bitcoin meetup group in Bangalore out of which came the founding team of Unocoin, Sathvik as CEO is now leading the company through a new Series A funding round led by Draper Associates. We discus how Unocoin became the market leader in India initially, what the exchange ecosystem in India looks like now, why it is a market playing catchup, and...

Our guest this week is Nishant Sharma, a long time bitcoin mining industry insider in China who is now a founder and partner of BlocksBridge Consulting, a communications strategy and advisory firm focused on the Bitcoin mining sector and serving some of its largest companies. Nishant has been in the mining space since 2014, including 4 years at Bitmain in Beijing. We discuss his time at Bitmain, seeing it grow from a two digit employee company to a dominant player in the industry, trends in...

Our guest this week is Ciara Sun, Head of Global Business and Markets at Huobi Group. Ciara joined Huobi in 2019 first focusing on growth of its institutional business and in her role now now overseeing its growth and product strategy around the world, she gives a great look into what goes into running and growing a global bitcoin company with a diverse range of products. And one that is continuously rolling out new products in very cutthroat markets, including rollouts this year in the...

We are actually in South Africa this week after some newsworthy M&A there involving the Luno exchange and DCG. Our guest is Chris Becker, Blockchain Technologies Lead at Investec based out of Johannesburg. Investec is a commercial and investment bank with a significant presence in South Africa, and Chris started their blockchain practice in 2016 - he talks about Bitcoin in South Africa in that time frame, DCG’s acquisition of Luno, the landscape of Bitcoin companies in SA and trends he...

Our guest this week is Australian Hongkonger and Bitcoin entrepreneur Dave Chapman. Dave is the Executive Director of the publicly listed BC Group and its subsidiary OSL (osl.com), one of Asia's leading digital asset platforms. OSL recently became the first recipient of approval in principle for Type 1 and Type 7 licenses from the Securities and Futures Commission in Hong Kong, allowing them to operate a virtual asset trading platform and deal in securities. It is a significant step from Hong...

Our guest this week is Leo Weese, a long time Bitcoiner in Hong Kong and a Cofounder and president of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong. The Bitcoin Association has been a significant advocate for and communicator about Bitcoin since 2014 as it has established one of the strongest Bitcoin communities in Asia. One of its recent initiates, an advertising campaign highlighting Bitcoin’s traits and potential as magic internet money and digital gold among other taglines has made waves. We...

Our guest this week is Darshan Bathija, founder and CEO of Bank of Hodlers (bankofhodlers.com), an asset backed lending and borrowing platform that I think we will be hearing a lot more of in the future. The company runs out of Singapore and Darshan and most of his team are currently working out of India. Darshan gives great insight into the lending and borrowing markets for retail and institutions in their different geographies from Southeast Asia to Europe and the Americas. He also goes...

Description Our guest this week is Raymond Walintukan, Director of Mining Operations North America for Bitmain. His perspective as someone in charge of running and growing a separate geography for a Chinese company and for Bitmain in particular is an interesting one. We talk about that situation, the workflow, the growth strategy, and dive into how it works operationally and how it fits into the broader Bitmain effort. Raymond also details Bitmain’s North American footprint, the nuances of...

Our guest this week is Dr. Youree Lee, Chief Business officer of Peertec, Co-Founder of W-Foundation, and professor at Hanyang University, based out of Seoul. Peertec is a part of Peer.com a corporate group which includes the exchange GDAC, the Korean media BlockInPress and the Deconomy conference there among other entities. We talk about regulatory developments in Korea over the last year, including Korea’s new tax plan regarding cryptocurry and additional guidance for licensed exchanges....

Our guest this week is Bobby Lee. Bobby is a bitcoin and especially a China bitcoin OG as a cofounder and CEO of BTC China, later BTCC, China’s first bitcoin exchange, and presently the founder and CEO of Ballet (balletcrypto.com). He is always an insightful voice on the importance of Bitcoin and where it sits in the macro landscape. Our talk focuses on that macro landscape and the the cycles that bitcoin has followed to date. Recorded on July 27 as Bitcoin crossed $11k yet again, Bobby...

Our guest this week is Mustafa Yilham, Global Business Development at China based group Bixin. Mustafa was previously director of business development at Huobi and a partner at the Hong Kong based quant fund and finance firm Amber Group. Bixin is a major player in the mining space with over 300 MW and in the wallet space with one of the most popular consumer wallets in China and operates a bitcoin denominated crypto fund of funds of about 6k BTC. At Bixin Mustafa manages international...

Our guest this week is Koji Higashi, a long time bitcoiner and a much sought after and followed industry expert in Japan. He has helped several large companies with market entrance and localization strategies in Japan and is a founder of Koinup. Most recently he has been focused on the Lightning Network and is building products with the team at Nayuta (https://nayuta.co). We talk about how bitcoin has trended in Japan over the past few years and really dive into product development and...

Our gust this week is Feng Liu, founder and editor in chief of Chinese crypto media group ChainNews (chainnews.com). Feng was the former EIC at Bloomberg Business week in China before founding ChainNews at the end of 2017. He shares his firsthand insights into the media industry in China, how coverage of Bitcoin in China happens and has evolved in both the mainstream and industry specific media there. We also get into china’s mining industry as ChainNews recently brought back the annual...

Our guest this week is Charles Yang, head trader at Genesis Block out of Hong Kong. Genesis Block (https://genesisblockhk.com) is a leading OTC trading center in Asia, headquartered in Hong Kong and with operations throughout the region and additional physical locations in Thailand and Korea. It also operates the largest network of Bitcoin ATMs in the region, and its founders have their roots and continuing operations in bitcoin mining. As head of trading, Charles oversees Genesis Block’s OTC...

Our guest this week is Mo Li (Molly), head of marketing at Hashkey Hub. We take a look at items that have been in the news coming out of China over the past week, and she shares her on the ground perspective. Topics: Covid update Mining industry trends coming out of the Chengdu mining summit Severe weather in Sichuan Mining manufacturer competitive landscape and recent developments Bitmain internal situation Bank account freezing related to USDT and BTC OTC usage

Our guest this week is Igor Runets, founder and CEO of BitRiver (bitriver.farm), a large scale mining data center operator in Russia with over 100MW in the irkustk region of Siberia. Igor founded and ran a traditional data center business Servers.Global out of university focused on setting up cloud infrastructure in more difficult parts of the world for western clients and then found bitcoin while getting his MBA at Stanford and wend on from there to found BitRiver. We talk about his going...

Our guest this week is Flex Yang, founder and CEO of Babel Finance ( babel.finance) out of Beijing and Hong Kong. Babel Finance provides crypto-backed loans, deposit services, financing, margin trading, and other derivatives services and has grown into one of the largest commercial crypto banks in Asia. With Babel Finance Flex is aiming to build the JP Morgan of Bitcoin, and initially attacked goal by focusing on lending and other financial services targeting Bitcoin miners in China. Prior to...