"Using the COLDCARD Mk4 is pretty straightforward. Yet, what goes on under the hood is far from obvious. Technical documentation, the hardware specifications and code used are available, yet not easily understandable by all. To best understand what’s going on under the hood, we will go through the process of setting up a COLDCARD and using it."— Tristan Borges Solari Today we are going to take a bit of a dive into the inner workings of hardware wallets, and the security and thinking around...

Sometimes life will make you feel stuck, it will wear you down and gaslight you into believing you have made no progress. Small, persistent progress is hard to see, and its only when you take a big step back that it becomes clear. Today I explore the parallels between life's ups and downs and Bitcoin's market volatility and where we are today. I'll share why Bitcoin's limited supply and steady upward push make it a powerful reminder of the importance of seemingly tiny, but unceasing...

"Dark merchants would never use Lightning, right? Because well, you need a node ID, an entity... Versus Ark, you're not a node or entity. All you are is entropy. You're just a public key with silent payment style tweaking. That means no address reuse. By default, coins gets mixed in each round. In a scalable and convenient way. And so it's all private. You can't tell who pays what and when and what amount really. It is great and appealing for privacy people, and I can see Ark dominating Dark...

"An argument for doing a consensus cleanup soft-fork first, prior to enabling any new opcodes or other features for new types of L2’s, is that we’d learn more about how willing the wider community is to implement what should be a relatively uncontroversial soft-fork that arguably benefits everyone." — Peter Todd In this deep dive into Bitcoin's Layer 2 solutions, we explore Peter Todd's comprehensive analysis of soft fork and covenant proposals. What are the trade-offs between different...

"Lightning achieved a many-to-one mapping of transactions to transactions... But creating even a single UTXO per user is, arguably, not good enough. So there are many proposals out there to achieve even greater scaling by allowing multiple users to share a single UTXO in a self-sovereign way. Again, collapsing another “space” dimension of scaling users into one UTXO."— Peter Todd Today we dive into Peter Todd's recent review of the various Layer 2 covenant proposals and the soft forks...

It's Here! Today I am thrilled to introduce the first episode of Guy's Roundtable. I've assembled a group of OG bitcoiners for a new monthly series where we dissect the latest developments in the bitcoin world. In this inaugural episode, we set the stage for what promises to be an enlightening journey through the ever-evolving Bitcoin landscape. Our mission? To keep you informed, spark thoughtful discussions, insult the right people, apologize to no one, and gain insight from the lunatics...

Is the Bitcoin-Dollar theory a path to salvation or destruction for the US currency? Stablecoin issuers have become major buyers of US bonds, and political figures have flipped the script to embrace Bitcoin. What does this mean for the future of money, and will Bitocin reinforce dollar dominance or pave the way for a new monetary standard? It's time for a Guy's Take episode. Links to check out Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin's research on the Bitcoin Dollar theory The Bitcoin Reformation by...

"It’s been amazingly freeing because I don’t worry about my investments, mostly because I don’t have very many. I’m on a Bitcoin standard and I keep my value in my unit of account." — Jimmy SongWhat's the difference between investing in Bitcoin and living on a Bitcoin standard? In this episode, we explore Jimmy Song's insights on how shifting your unit of account to Bitcoin can transform your perspective on money, investing, and economic value. Find out how a Bitcoin standard frees us from...

"The end result was a historical wealth transfer from regular Americans to a handful of billionaires. This wealth transfer, which was heavily premeditated and provably used the COVID-19 crisis as cover, should be treated as an unprecedented theft from the American taxpayer. Yet few Americans know that it even happened." — Unlimited Hangout We've always supposed that Bitcoin was going to challenge the dollar and reign in the irresponsible and corrupt monopoly held by the US govt over the...

"The government is more than half of the economy. They control everything.What this new battleground is showing is that in the Bitcoin world, within the Bitcoin environment, they're going to have to Samourai Wallet every one of us to get that money, which means it's not going to work. There's either going to be a revolution or society goes from a quiet fraud of 60% of our wealth to guns and whips stealing 60% of our wealth. That second one is not sustainable."- Guy Swann   In this episode of...

"The Fed, knowingly or not, is basically in charge of the global financial system. They may shout, “We raise rates in the US to fight inflation, global consequences be damned!!” – But that’s a hell of a lot more difficult to follow when large G7 countries are in the early stages of a full blown currency crisis.The most serious implication is that the Fed is responsible for supplying dollars to everyone. When they raise rates, they trigger a margin call on the entire world." — Peruvian...

"The government and the corporate environment so desperately want us to centralize so they can they can have total surveillance and they can have backdoors into everybody's stuff.They're abusive and everything, but not everything's imploded yet. And that continues on. But we continue in this trajectory until at some point, the some little thing breaks or somebody actually makes a concerted effort to land an attack. And just because it's so clear that we are so vulnerable, and we realize that...

"In fact, this is the key feature that re-energized me toward Nostr a second time after my initial experience with it. Bitcoin and Nostr combined together work like an international decentralized open-source Venmo. It’s a method of payment combined with payment discovery."— Lyn Alden How might Nostr's open-source protocol transform our digital identities and interactions? What challenges lie ahead for its adoption and sustainability? Join us as we explore the power of Nostr with Lyn Alden's...

"It would be wrong to think of Cypherpunks as a formal group. It's more a gathering of those who share a predilection for codes, a passion for privacy, and the gumption to do something about it. Anyone who decides to spread personal crypto or its gospel is a traveler in the territory of Cypherpunk." — Steven Levy Today we journey back to 1993 to explore a seminal article on the cypherpunk movement and the battle for digital privacy. How have the concerns raised three decades ago evolved in...

"My thinking is always resilience. How did I make Proton resilient? And the conclusion I came to after thinking about it for a long time is actually the best way to be resilient is to enable the entire Proton community of 100 million people to very, very easily adopt Bitcoin, which is a form of money that's outside of centralized control." ~ Andy Yen In this episode of Bitcoin Audible, we dive into a fascinating conversation with Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, uncovering the intriguing story of...

"Lightning has already achieved a critical mass. It’s already obvious how a Cashu subnetwork and Fedimint subnetworks will communicate with each other: Lightning. That’s how they were designed, so switching the common language between networks would require rebuilding most of their parts. Like English, whatever language subnetworks use internally, Lightning is the language they use to speak to each other, and it’s already locked in." ~ Roy Sheinfeld Lightning is emerging as the common...

"Historically, what do nations do when they're on a gold standard and they need to fight a war? They just suspend the gold standard. The difference is that what Bitcoin brings is this decentralization, where if you were truly on a Bitcoin standard, someone in Washington, D.C. couldn't just say, "We're going off the Bitcoin standard now." That's the power that Bitcoin has, that you can actually have a chance at separating money and the state, and that is the most important thing in the world...

Is Trump's speech at Bitcoin 2024 a sign of genuine support or just typical political pandering? Today we explore the implications of politicians courting the Bitcoin community, questions the motives behind their promises, and explores the potential for Bitcoin to reshape the geopolitical landscape. Will the next election cycle mark a turning point for Bitcoin's role in politics, or is this just the newest form of political grifting? Links to check out  The Chain of Custody: The “Mafia”...

"Something else has to go down in order for something to go up. That's why it is specifically a relative weight between all of these things... You can't just charge $100,000 dollars for something if nobody has that money, and then think that you're gonna sell it. You'll never can't sell it for that. You can't sell something for an amount of money that doesn't exist. Just look at the stock market. You're just looking at money printing going into the financial system before going into...

It's time to accept some hard truths. Today we are going to challenge some common assumptions about Bitcoin's scalability, privacy, and transaction fees. Is Bitcoin really even global peer-to-peer cash for everyone? Is privacy even still in the cards for Bitcoin? Is there anything left in crypto at all? And what will be the future nature of fees when Bitcoin is a global dominant store of value, and is there an analogous market can we explore today for insight into what this market may look...

"I really wanted to screen share stuff with people and make it as easy as possible and I got fed up. So I was just like, okay, you know, let's throw this up and let's stick on a nostr log in and let's add lightning zaps to it as a starting point. It was pushed out a bit prematurely, but... I think a lot of people want to use it.. they want a way to talk to other people where you're not really getting tracked.We want to be able to provide a space where people don't feel like there's some...

"Only the giant corporations are gonna have this and anybody less than a billion dollars, these won't exist. And that was scary, I was like, this can undo what Bitcoin is doing unless we get ahead of this. Luckily I actually now think that despite the fact that there will elements of centralizing forces in AI, this will contribute more to the diseconomies of scale of the giant corporate setup and the government institutions in the sense that the bigger you are, the less it helps you."~ Guy...

"The former Speaker predicts "The dollar will suffer a major confidence shock” and as a result asks, “What can be done?” His immediate answer is to “start by taking stablecoins seriously.” Dollar-backed stablecoins are arriving as “an important net purchaser of U.S. government debt,” with stablecoin issuers now the 18th largest holder of US Debt. Ryan goes on to say that “if fiat-backed dollar stablecoin issuers were a country,” that nation “would sit just outside the top 10 in countries...

"Much like the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program has facilitated the placement of its trained, ideological allies in positions of top political power around the world, groups like Endeavor and their equivalents help ensure that similarly controlled business leaders dominate the private sector and become the public face of emerging market monopolies that are, ultimately, part of a broader network." ~ Mark Goodwin & Whitney Webb What if a network of powerful governments...

"You eliminate 99% of the attack surface to a single moment in time, which is the beginning. And when you do that, would-be attackers are forced to take risks and make mistakes. You know, when someone is planning on doing election fraud, this doesn't mean that it's impossible for them to do it. But it narrows the window so much that they are likely going to mess up. And when they mess up, you catch them." ~ CarlinoWhen people usually talk about alternative bitcoin "utility" they often mean...