"The question that the fiat system answers is the following: who is allowed to counterfeit currency, and how much? Further, who is allowed to have access to money, and who isn't? The answer is political and enforced by violence.The Bitcoin system is answering the same questions, and the answers are as simple as they are ethical: nobody is allowed to counterfeit money, and anyone can access it. No exceptions." – GigiToday we dive into an amazing piece published at Citadel21, and by the one and only Gigi, on the ethics encoded in...

"The financial system in the United States, and for most of the rest of the world for that matter, can basically be thought of as an Excel spreadsheet managed by the Federal Reserve. That’s all it really is. Some of the cells on the spreadsheet are assets, and some of the cells are liabilities. It’s just a ledger that they administrate, and that we all use." – Lyn AldenA subtle but important shift has occurred recently... the Fed became, for the first time in modern history, unprofitable. Lyn Alden breaks down how this h...

I joined John today for an over 2 hour rip on the nature of Bitcoin, numerous technical developments, the trade offs of those in the past, the consequences of changes - even those considered well analyzed and understood, the chaos of consensus around altering consensus, the spirit of Bitcoin vs the letter of the law, and SO much more! This was such an awesome discussion on the nuance and complexity of Bitcoin that I felt I had to share it with the Audionauts. Hope you guys enjoy Don't forget to check out John Valli's show...

There is no magic wand. There is no such thing as a free lunch. When we bail out an institution, a bank, or "depositors" for billions of dollars, someone else LOSES billions of dollars worth of wealth. Their life got harder, their job got cut, the car they needed became less affordable, the house they hoped for their family stays out of reach, they PAID for it. Unfortunately, our government and central bank is either not mature enough to realize that magic is for children, or they are robbing from us knowingly and destroying the lives of the people...

"One aspect that is still massively under-utilized is the programmability of Bitcoin. While simple things like scheduled payments and automated payment splits do exist, we are undoubtedly still trapped in conventional thinking when it comes to the flow of sats.I’d like to share a simple idea that was shared with me a couple of months ago in the hopes that it will spread far and wide and, in the best case, that someone will just go ahead and implement it. (Or a better version of it.)Here is the idea..." – DerGigi

"One immediate lesson many drew from this event was a reconsideration of the risk of fiat liabilities in an environment where trust is lacking (including the trust not to violate territorial integrity and Westphalian sovereignty). This event reinforced the nature of fiat money as a system of centrally maintained ledger entries denominating a unit of account corresponding to a sovereign authority's sphere of power. As such, the use of such a liability as a medium of exchange (or store of value) is contingent on the political assent of that sovereign authority." – Matthew PinesToday we...

"The 20th century was the first where technology enabled forms of violent state competition, as well as peaceful globalization, across the full scale of the Earth. Moreover, the same technology made possible the organization of massive state systems to project power and maintain integrated, centralized control over large, diverse populations and cultures." - Matthew PinesBitcoin Audible is officially 5 years old today! And what a time to be celebrating an anniversary for the show than with a banking crisis and an incredible piece by Matthew Pines on the unraveling of the global monetary and...

"Lightning is the way to make bitcoin the universal mainstream currency it was designed to be. This is how we’re going to bring open financial services to everyone. And we’re scaling Lightning by inviting people to participate and share in the gains." – Roy SheinfeldAs a loose follow up to a recent article on bringing lightning to every user in any app, Roy, from the Breez team, brings us another article laying out their plans to take the LSP model to anyone, by providing an automatic LSP software system so anyone with liquid...

"Over the long run, I view the outcome, one way or the other, more as a matter of technology than politics. From the top-down side, there is the development of Big Data and automated data surveillance capabilities. From the bottom-up side, there is the development of encryption tools and open monetary/information networks. Whichever direction proves more powerful will play a major role in how all sorts of things operate in the decades ahead" – Lyn AldenConcluding the incredible piece by Lyn Alden on the SwanBitcoin blog with Part 2 today. Don't miss it!If y...

"For proponents of privacy and open networks to win becomes a matter of making the technology easy to use, too costly to stamp out, and well-understood by the public." – Lyn AldenToday Lyn Alden brings us another great piece that breaks down the old structure of our monetary and information systems, the consequences that have arisen from them, and ultimately what solutions have be borne of their abuses and frictions. With an exploration of what is needed. and not in this new systems, and what challenges they will bring in trying to make open, permissio...

"This context highlights the importance of the 1920–1921 depression. Here the government and Fed did the exact opposite of what the experts now recommend. We have just about the closest thing to a controlled experiment in macroeconomics that one could desire. To repeat, it’s not that the government boosted the budget at a slower rate, or that the Fed provided a tad less liquidity. On the contrary, the government slashed its budget tremendously, and the Fed hiked rates to record highs. We thus have a fairly clear-cut experiment to test the efficacy of the Keynesian and monetarist remedies." – Robert Murphy...

"But for me, when I think about what Bitcoin’s properties are as a store-of-value asset and then compare those properties to the existing store-of-value assets out there… Bitcoin is by far the best. For that matter, if Bitcoin continues to outperform because of its unparalleled properties (and the world begins to come to terms with the reasons for that performance), it is a real stretch to say that Bitcoin will only convince 30% of the money stored in bonds and fiat money to re-allocate to Bitcoin. Particularly because of the scale of inflationary money printing that will be nec...

"People are very quick to project technology adoption curves onto Bitcoin. But the problem is that Bitcoin is not just a technology. It’s not just a smartphone, or a computer, or a social network, or a new stock or security, or a new payment method, or a search engine, or a messaging platform, or any other new product, app or service. Bitcoin is an entire techno-socio-economic transformation. It’s a reinvention of money from the ground up, incompatible with any prior primitives. So, it’s not only orders of magnitude larger as a shift, but it’s also completely...

I recently had an awesome two-hour marathon chat about P2P social media with BitKarrot from the Nostrovia podcast. We chatted about the challenges and future of decentralized social media, touched on other developments in the space, and sprinkling in some extra chaos and uncertainty on the future of AI. This was a crazy ride through today's tech and the future its taking us to. Don't miss this one.Check out the Nostrovia Podcast to take a deep dive into all things Nostr!https://fountain.fm/show/EHr7oroKVhkIAWNTGGRn

Hot wallets, cold wallets, hardware wallets, custodial wallets, lightning wallets, holy crap! What does all of this mean and how do they relate to your keys and your bitcoin? That is what we are covering in today's episode, Bitcoin Basics episode 4, all about wallets and transactions.Here is a reference to all of the wallets I use most often and for you to explore when setting up your own. I will also have this available on bitcoinaudible.com so it is easy to find down the road.Wallets Guy...

Nostr, OP_VAULT, decentralized media, privacy, the incredible progress of the past few years, the challenges of making Bitcoin hardware, why bear markets are the best time in Bitcoin, and of course, the new Coldcard Q1. NVK and I catch up on everything happening in the Bitcoin space and what has us excited to build to faster. Don't miss an awesome 2 hour marathon with the founder of Coinkite and creator of the Coldcard.NVK's Nostr Pubkey: npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8Guy's Nostr...

"Here is a little story of how I built a #Bitcoin Lightning payments app used by more than 10,000 users at the time running on two Raspberry Pi's from my bedroom... My conclusion: The banks are so f**kd" - CalleBTCCheck out the original thread for more projects Callebtc is involved in, and follow Calle on Nostr at the links below:Thread = https://twitter.com/callebtc/status/1618332559175450626?s=46&t=7-IMl_MRDoUK3LABiP2KYwNostr = npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg

Not your keys, not your coins. What does this mean? Your Bitcoin keys are literally the keys to the kingdom. They are everything, they are the sole arbiter of ownership of the bitcoins behind them if you have your keys, and they are the impenetrable fortress for the bitcoins behind keys you do not have. They are the judge, the jury, and the verdict. If you can grasp and internalize the relationship between you, your keys, and your bitcoin, then you can safely and confidently use bitcoin. And that's exactly what we are going to do, in t...

"If Fedipools prove to be viable we could find ourselves in a world where bitcoin mining pool centralization risk is significantly reduced and the worries that many have today cease to exist. By creating a federation of different miners who act as guardians of a mint dedicated to producing blocks and distributing rewards you create a completely new and more robust incentive model at the pool layer." - Marty BentToday we dig into another Bent by good ol' uncle Marty on a potential and exciting solution laid out by Matt Odell to the...

"This is the end of Lightning as a niche technology and the beginning of Lightning as a (ubiquitous) Service. In a few years, Lightning functionality will be so universal that nobody will even notice it any more, and it will be so useful that nobody will want to live without it. Like phones. Like shoes. Like concrete. Like the alphabet." - Roy SheinfeldToday we dive into an incredible announcement that will change the way we think of and interact with lightning. Destroying the barriers to entry and use, removing delays for onboarding and r...

"Furthermore, when Bitcoiners develop privacy and scaling technology for Bitcoin, we make it substantially more challenging for anti-coiners to make the case that a war on Bitcoin is winnable. When more of us demonstrate the unmatched power of Lightning Network payments in small nations, influential legislators and bankers in the U.S. take note and are far less likely to support an adversarial strategy towards Bitcoin." - Cory KlippstenFor read 700 we take ourselves to the Swan Bitcoin blog with an excellent call to arms by CEO Cory Klippsten. A call to do everything...

One thing to make abundantly clear: Nostr is a protocol. It’s a set of rules that servers and clients use to communicate (just like Bitcoin, email or Bittorrent). Nostr is not an app nor a “platform” (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), but many applications can be built on top of Nostr. In the words of Edward Snowden, “If a platform is a silo, a protocol is a river: no one owns it, and everyone is free to swim.” – Walker V.If you have been hearing about this Nostr thing, and wanted to know what it was and how to...

In order to truly understand why Bitcoin works, we must understand a fundamental tool that operates at basically every level of the system. The hash function. And using the hash function, we can build one of the most important elements of the game theory that keeps the system honest, Proof of work. This is the second episode of the Bitcoin Basics series: Hashes & Proofs of WorkTo play around yourself with the hashing tools discussed you can:- open a Terminal window on your Mac or Linux computer and type...  sha...

"But, I keep coming to the same conclusion: We are here for this movement. We are here to build a parallel economy that will eventually take over the old fiat system.I’m not a dev, I don’t have a large audience, I don’t have meetings with Jeff Bezos or presidents like Jack Ballers (no, that is not a typo).One day, I came to this realization: I’m not the only one struggling transporting people into the new world. Cough, cough... .01%. We are all struggling to unplug people from the matrix. Hence, my motivat...

"To wit, we have raised the debt limit 22 times from 1997 to 2022. Yep, we’ve raised the limit 22 times in 25 years. Let that sink in for a moment. OK, so now that we’re all on the same you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me-with-the-endless-and-reckless-spending-of-the-US-Government page, let’s dig into the mechanics a bit." – James LavishWe've hit the awful, shocking, totally unexpected debt ceiling again! OH MY! What ever will we do this time? Wait... I've got a brilliant plan. The Treasury can mint a Trillion Dollar Coin! And our problems will go away. Is this utter genius... or is this an em...

Mathias and Paolo join us for a Twitter Spaces AMA to answer all of your questions about this cutting-edge technology. Plus, don't forget to check out KEET's mobile release! The app is available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Tune in now for a thrilling Q&A on the future of privacy, secure communication, data sovereignty, & the nascent P2P economy.Everything to check out to dive into the P2P revolution:keet.ioholepunch.tosynonym.toslashtags.to

WEN MOBILE!? No more do we have to ask because Keet mobile has finally arrived! Download from the App Store or Google Play to check it out and join us in the P2P revolution. This is only the beginning, a foundation for an entirely new way to interact on the internet and we dive into all of it with many questions you sent to me to ask Mathias and Paolo who are breathing life into new P2P, fully encrypted applications. You don't want to miss it.Everything to check out to dive...

"Today no money in the world fully performs all three services. National currencies are being used as means-of-payment and standard-of-value money, b u t none in this inflationary age is an assured store-of-value money. In fact, a foremost concern to voters and politicians everywhere is that so many currencies are so rapidly losing their value in terms of commodities and services. Commodities like gold and silver, which are being used as store-of-value money, are not being used as either means-of-payment or standard-of-value money. Thus the world we have so long known, in which most currencies were redeemable at a...

Sure, everyone tells me that bitcoin is a new technology. That it's magic money for the internet and tokens you can buy and stick in an app that will probably be worth more later. But seriously... what the hell does all of that mean? I get that Bitcoin is a thing, but 'What is it?'Well let's get into it, with the first episode of Bitcoin Basics.Other episodes & works mentioned to dive deeper into these ideas are linked below:Guy's Take #44 - Bitcoin is Not What you Think...

"All of this is important because there has been a resurrection of Burns-type positions in the current debate about the cause of higher inflation rates. Senator Elizabeth Warren blames the rising inflation on greedy corporations raising their prices. Others have blamed rising prices on the greater prevalence of monopolies. Antitrust is apparently an anti-inflation tool. Make no mistake, these ideas are wrong. A belief that greed is responsible for inflation requires a belief that firms waited 40 years to collectively and simultaneously raise prices—an amazing level of planning and discipline." - Joshua HendriksonITs imp...

"Last night, lightning struck our house and burned it down. I escaped wearing only my nightclothes. In an instant, everything was vaporised. Laptop? Cinders. Phone? Ashes. Home server? A smouldering wreck. Yubikey? A charred chunk of gristle. This presents something of a problem." – EdentToday we read a story told from the perspective of someone who's entire life changed by the strike of lightning, and suddenly they were locked out of everything. A great short read to start thinking about the failure modes of our security setup, and which definitely got me to reconsider a couple of el...

"But as with all new technology, it can be incredibly hard to explain what’s actually happening, without getting too complex. This got me thinking about Bitcoin education and how to ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) with Bitcoin Lightning, enter… Bitcoin Lightning: The Airport Analogy" - Danny ScottToday we hit a short piece but a really great analogy in order to make sense of the lightning network. Since I've recently had a few people ask me about this and a fellow audionaut made a great suggestion for a short article, I thought this would...

Today we break into the racket that is the IMF and World Bank monetary imperialism. Piggy backing off Gladstein's remarkable piece detailing the horrific consequences of this system and the clear intent and disregard for human life and basic freedoms, we discuss the fundamental principles of sound money that would be a basis to prevent this, how the fiat system gets around this balancing forces and corrupts the incentives, and how Bitcoin and a global neutral standard may finally bring about its end. Listen to the full work by Gladstein, of the other piece...

"Bitcoin is paradoxical. It is simple yet complicated, ever-changing yet unchangeable. A novel machine without any novel parts; a technological innovation that isn't really about technology. You can't touch it, yet it is hard money. You can't see it, yet it will show you a vision of the future. You can't possess it, yet thousands of people seem to be possessed by it." - DergigiIn the spirit of getting back to some of the basics, I want to open up a series of hitting basic concepts around bitcoin and how to use and...

The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimately puts one person in charge of what’s available and seen, or not. This is by definition a single point of failure, no matter how great the person, and over time will fracture the public conversation, and may lead to more control by governments and corporations around the world." - Jack DorseyJack Dorsey makes the case for a native social media protocol in this short, but important piece reflecting on the failures of Twitter, an...

Bringing back one of my favorites today that I mention often but we haven't covered in a very long time. This is an essential piece diving into the complexities and profound depth in the market establishment of a price. And why the very notion of the price being "wrong" or fixing it, is self-evidently impossible, as the only information we have to make a comparison, is given to us by emerging prices in the market. Hayek takes us on a journey in this incredible piece that is not to be skipped.The original article...

How much economic ignorance can you fit into 1 minute and 54 seconds? Well apparently its quite a lot. Peter Zeihan confidently embarrassed himself on Joe Rogan's podcast recently by going on a short rip regarding Bitcoin's negative value and how a reliable, fixed money causes economic disaster but the inflated, debt drowned political currency is more valuable. And how counterfeiters have rightfully earned the wealth they steal, but savers gaining some purchasing power as the economy grows is "unviable."We dive into a short clip of Peter Zeihan and take it apart, piece by ignorant...

"Bitcoin is not a hedge against inflation; it is the permanent solution to inflation, and those are two very different things." - Parker LewisParker Lewis is back in action with the 18th installment of the Gradually, Then Suddenly series on its way to becoming a phenomenal book. Check out the many other articles in this series at the link below, but you don't want to miss this one. Bitcoin isn't a hedge against inflation, its the solution to it.Find the article and Parker's other works, plus subscribe...

"If your money requires permission to be spent, it is not your money. If your money has counterparty risk, it is not money—but credit. If your money steals from you, it is not your money—but a control and financing mechanism of your government. If your money requires identity, it is not money but a social credit score system." - DergigiToday we dive into a short but excellent piece by Gigi in his new collection of recent articles and works around his new book, 21 Ways. Don't miss the original 21 Lessons that you can...

"So they fire out digital chaff frantically in every direction, they play whack-a-mole with high-engagement nodes that are or could be threats. The enemy is now reactively defending themselves, not proactively steering the course. This is the Titanic and we are the iceberg." - AristophanesWe start the year off with a very interesting piece about the state of the ideological world and how the speed and connectivity of our ideas and information has massively changed the world already and fundamentally shaken the legitimacy of established authorities. What does this look like and what...

"This is the root of our cultural concern for crypto DeFi. The cultural, and arguably even structural, commitment to financialization is extremely difficult to reconcile with this core purpose of securities. In a sense, none of this is surprising given the foundations of crypto DeFi. If you jump straight to “decentralized securities” without first nailing down decentralized money and peer-to-peer technology, the urge to financialize is obvious, because what other value or utility can you even attempt to provide?" - Allen & AndersCheck out the full write up with numerous links and references for digg...

This is the full, unabridged reading of Alex Gladstein's work, "STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT: HOW THE IMF AND WORLD BANK REPRESS POOR COUNTRIES AND FUNNEL THEIR RESOURCES TO RICH ONES" published with Bitcoin Magazine.Link to the original read for the plethora of links and references to dig further into this incredible story.https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/imf-world-bank-repress-poor-countriesDon't forget to check out our amazing sponsors:• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a deca...

"Research from Mexico — a typical country in terms of consistent involvement historically from the Bank and Fund — shows that for every 2% decrease in GDP, the mortality rate increased by 1%.Now consider that as a result of structural adjustment, the GDP of dozens of countries in the Third World between the 1960s and 1990s suffered double-digit contractions. Despite massive population growth, many of these economies stagnated or shrank over 15-25 year periods. Meaning: the Bank and the Fund’s policies likely killed tens of millions of people." - Alex GladsteinToday we finally comple...

"The “generosity” of the West enabled unaccountable leaders to plunge their nations into debt deeper than ever before. The system was, as Payer writes in “Lent And Lost,” a straightforward Ponzi scheme: the new loans went straight to paying for the old loans. The system needed to grow to avoid collapse." - Alex GladsteinWERE BACK! We've got a bit of a lengthy introduction today while I mostly apologize and ramble about why I missed more than a weeks worth of episodes, but we are getting back into it with a huge backlog of amazing...

"Far from playing the role of good samaritan, the Fund does not even follow the timeless human tradition, established more than 4,000 years ago by Hammurabi in ancient Babylon, of forgiving interest after natural disasters. In 1985, a devastating earthquake hit Mexico City, killing more than 5,000 people and causing $5 billion of damage. Fund staff — who claim to be saviors, helping to end poverty and save countries in crisis — arrived a few days later, demanding to be repaid." - Alex GladsteinIf you aren't pissed off yet with Parts 1 & 2, this section is surely to push you over the...

"To give an example of what this might look like in a given year, in 2012 developing countries received $1.3 trillion, including all income, aid and investment. But that same year, more than $3.3 trillion flowed out. In other words, according to anthropologist Jason Hickel, “developing countries sent $2 trillion more to the rest of the world than they received.”When all the flows were added up from 1960 to 2017, a grim truth emerged: $62 trillion was drained out of the developing world" - Alex GladsteinToday we continue through Gladstein's incredible exploration of the monetary damage and syst...

"A 2014 analysis showed that the IMF had attached, on average, 20 conditions to each loan it gave out in the previous two years, a historic increase. Countries like Jamaica, Greece and Cyprus have borrowed in recent years with an average of 35 conditions each. It is worth noting that Bank and Fund conditions have never included protections on free speech or human rights, or restrictions on military spending or police violence." - Alex GladsteinToday we dive into the first part of another incredible exploration of the corruption and monetary manipulation engaged in by the IMF...

There are about a million claims out there as to what blockchains are going to fix, and how NFTs are going to be used to unlock your house, and how DAOs will be used to enforce and decide laws, but what truth is there to this really? And more importantly, does a blockchain really solve these problems? What are the inherent trust issues, and where are the vulnerabilities? Today we dive into this concept and cover many of the most touted "use cases" for blockchain and talk about what could be needed to solve them, and whether blockchain is...

"A data-driven exploration proving that Lightning scales bitcoin payments beyond Visa and that second-layer innovation is the way." - Stanislov KozlovskiCheck out the original article at:https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/lighting-network-makes-bitcoin-scalableBoost Bitcoin Audible on Fountain to get the best Bitcoin podcast to the top of the leaderboards 😘Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors:• Dive into the Bitcoin only wallet, the cypherpunk calculator, and a company that has built secure Bitcoin products for nearly a decade. Code BITCO...

“They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” - Matt TaibbiDidn't have time to read that whole thread on the censorship of Twitter and the obvious politicization of all of our social networks and big tech platforms? Well I'm happy to dive it. We read Part 1 of The Twitter Files today with a bit of a heated Guy's Take on why all this i...