SHOW

⚡️ Closing the Loop

by John Vallis

About

Closing the Loop is a podcast about Bitcoin. In it, we will be speaking with the entrepreneurs, developers, and thinkers who are contributing to the evolution of this revolutionary technology. The podcast will also be an ongoing experiment of sorts, leveraging the latest developments in the broader ecosystem, highlighting and implementing solutions that foster censorship-resistant communication and new content monetization models. Join us in discovering the many possibilities that Bitcoin brings!
https://www.seetee.io/

Recent Episodes

⚡️ #19 - Alex Leishman: The Future of Bitcoin Financial Services

This episode's guest is Alex Leishman, founder & CEO of River Financial.River is a bitcoin-native financial services firm that offers bitcoin acquisition and management products for individuals, as well as a variety of institutions and high-net-worth investors, through their private client services division. They've also recently begun offering a bitcoin-mining product, which allows their clients to own their own mining hardware and establish regular bitcoin-denominated income, or what's become known as "sats flow," while River takes care of all the work to make it happen.In this show, Alex and John have a wide-ranging discussion...

⚡️ #18 - Grant Gilliam: Venture Investing in the Bitcoin-Native Ecosystem w/ Ten31

This episode's guest is Grant Gilliam, co-founder and managing partner of Ten 31.Ten31 is a venture capital firm that invests in leading bitcoin-native companies. In addition to that, Ten31 supports and invests in various free and open-source software projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem to help build out the infrastructure necessary for a hyperbitcoinized future.Grant comes from a traditional private equity background and has brought a ton of high-level experience with him to this new endeavor. While Grant and the team at Ten31 recognize the enormous opportunity that investing in early-stage bitcoin-only companies represents, they're...

⚡️ #17 - Alex Gladstein: Why 'The Money' is the Biggest Missing Piece in the Fight for Human Rights

Our guest today is Alex Gladstein. Alex is the Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum, and the Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally.In recent years, Alex has placed particular focus and emphasis on speaking, writing, and educating about bitcoin. In particular, the powerful potential it has to serve as a means for people the world over to protect themselves from various forms of oppression, and establish greater freedom in their lives.His efforts, and in particular his prolific...

⚡️ #16 - Keyan Kousha: Using Bitcoin to Foster 'Natural Communities' Online w/ Stacker News

This episode's guest is Keyan Kousha, founder of Stacker News.Stacker News is a user-generated, feed-style news platform, modeled after Hacker News, but with the important distinction of having natively-integrated bitcoin lightning payments, as a means of fostering more natural communities (think less spam and antisocial behavior), cultivating high-signal bitcoin content, and providing a better user experience overall.Stacker News is still in the very early days of its development, but it's a great showcase of how bitcoin can be used to improve upon an existing model, and in doing so, explore how improved incentives...

⚡️ #15 - Oscar Merry: Building the Value4Value Infrastructure

This episode's guest is Oscar Merry, co-founder of Fountain, a popular Podcasting 2.0 app for sharing clips of your favorite podcast segments. The app is also value4value enabled, which means that it allows you to support your favorite show directly, by streaming and boosting sats.As you may have noticed, we at Seetee are big advocates of the emerging bitcoin lightning-enabled value4value model. We believe that this model is the future of free expression and digital media monetization, and so we love to see other teams working hard to build it into reality.With...

⚡️ #14 - Rodolfo Novak: A Decade of Bitcoin Entrepreneurship

This episode's guest is Rodolfo Novak, co-founder and CEO of Coinkite, a popular bitcoin hardware manufacturing business, which has produced such classic products as the COLDCARD hardware wallet, the OPENDIME, and the BLOCKCLOCK MINI (to ensure one never loses track of Moscow time :p).Rodolfo has been an entrepreneur in the bitcoin space for over a decade and has a ton of unique insights regarding building a business in the space, as well as on bitcoin's history and emergence as a cultural phenomenon.It's apparent that the 'bitcoin ethos' permeates how he and the Coinkite...

⚡️ #13 Gigi: The Future of Value

For our first episode of the year and season, we thought it would be fun to bring Gigi back on for a discussion about what the team has been working on, highlights and developments from Season 1, some thoughts around the evolution of the value4value model, and our focus for the upcoming year.Thanks to everyone involved, the incredible guests we had on for discussions, and all the people who have supported this show and the wider Bitcoin ecosystem.Here's to another great year ahead, as we continue building towards hyperbitcoinization.---

⚡️ #12 - Cory Klippsten: Building a Bitcoin Company for Bitcoiners, by Bitcoiners

This episode's guest is Cory Klippsten, founder and CEO of Swan Bitcoin, a popular US-based service for buying bitcoin.Swan began as a way to make it easy for people to dollar cost average their bitcoin buys, automating them on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Only bitcoin, and only buying. There is no option to sell with Swan — a not-so-subtle suggestion about how people should be engaging this asset.Swan is a great example of a company that benefited tremendously from hiring individuals that have been active and outspoken within the bitcoin space. Their te...

⚡️ #11 - Steve Barbour: The Solution Is to Plug in More ASICs

For this episode, our guest is Steve Barbour, founder and CEO of Upstream Data.Since 2017, Upstream Data has been pioneering solutions to capture methane emissions in the upstream oil and gas industry. Steve and his team monetize the energy at the source with mobile bitcoin-mining rigs.Steve's ingenuity and success have caused many to begin thinking "outside the box" when it comes to potential energy sources for powering the Bitcoin network. This novel way of approaching things has spawned a burgeoning industry for taking wasted, isolated, unused, or underused energy resources, and turning them into...

⚡️ #10 - David Bailey: Celebrating Bitcoin Culture

This episode's guest is David Bailey, CEO of BTC Inc., the company behind Bitcoin Magazine, The Bitcoin Conference, and several other brands in the Bitcoin ecosystem.Due to his involvement in Bitcoin since 2013, David has a ton of interesting insights and anecdotes to tell. Not only about the early days of Bitcoin and how things have evolved and progressed, but also personal stories about big successes, painful setbacks, and how he and his team navigate this emerging phenomenon and bring value to others.Today, David and his stellar team of hardcore bitcoiners are hitting their...

⚡️ #09 - Adam Curry: Can't Stop the Signal

Today's guest is legendary broadcaster turned podcaster Adam Curry.Adam has had an extremely rich, unique, and interesting career in media.What began as pirate radio in Europe during his teens led to becoming a popular MTV VJ as well as several entrepreneurial ventures in the early days of the internet. Later on, he was one of the first to use and popularize the new medium of podcasting, defining in part what podcasting is and how it is best understood.Since that time, Adam has been a strong advocate for the value for...

⚡️ #08 - Preston Pysh: A Once in a Millennium Opportunity

Today's guest is Preston Pysh, co-creator of The Investor's Podcast Network, one of the top global podcast brands for financial education.While his podcast network covers the goings-on in finance, investing, and economics broadly, Preston has more recently focused exclusively on Bitcoin. He is now hosting a weekly discussion with the top entrepreneurs, authors, and investors in this rapidly growing ecosystem.Preston is highly respected amongst his peers for his thoughtful, articulate, and insightful takes on the complex dynamics of the global economy and investing landscape and the impact that the emergence of bitcoin is...

⚡️ #07 - Dhruv Bansal: Bitcoin-Native Financial Services w/ Unchained Capital

Today's guest is Dhruv Bansal, co-founder and CSO at Unchained Capital. Unchained is a bitcoin-native financial services company that builds products to help individuals and organizations to better custody and hodl their bitcoin.Crucial to this is their focus on collaborative custody using multisig, which allows them to offer robust key management solutions, transparent bitcoin collateralized loans, retirement and inheritance planning, and likely much more in the future.Unchained has built a great open-source tool called Caravan, which not only supports their product offering but makes valuable new ways of managing and using bitcoin available...

⚡️ #06 - Whit Gibbs: Now Everyone Can Mine Bitcoin

Today's guest is Whit Gibbs, co-founder, and CEO of Compass Mining.According to their website, "Compass is a Bitcoin-first company, on a mission to support the decentralized growth of hashrate and strengthen network security, by helping more people learn, explore and mine Bitcoin."In the last couple of years, interest in bitcoin mining has seemingly exploded as the industry has developed and as more and more people begin to understand just how diverse its impact will be and the opportunity that it therefore represents.Additionally, many individuals are beginning to get involved, not...

⚡️ #05 - Roy Sheinfeld: The Interface of the Peer to Peer Lightning Economy w/ Breez

Today's guest on Closing the Loop is Roy Sheinfeld. Roy is the CEO and Co-Founder of Breez, a mobile app that aspires to be 'The interface of the peer to peer lightning economy.'Roy and his team have taken a nascent, though still largely intimidating technology and abstracted away much of the complexity so that the average user can begin to interact with it and leverage the tremendous value which the lightning network increasingly represents.Podcasting 2.0, and the value for value model, are important focuses for us here at Closing the Loop, and Breez...

⚡️ #04 - Daniel Buchner: Decentralized Identity on Bitcoin w/ Microsoft's ION

Today's guest on Closing the Loop is Daniel Buchner. Daniel is the Senior Product Manager for Decentralized Identity at Microsoft, which in March of 2021 culminated in the launch of ION.ION is an open, public, permissionless Layer 2 Decentralized Identifier network that runs atop the Bitcoin timechain.As life becomes increasingly digital and concerns around privacy and control of personal data become increasingly important, we thought it would be interesting to speak with Daniel to see how he and the team at ION are leveraging bitcoin's unique attributes to build solutions that put control of data...

⚡️ #03 - Harry Sudock: Bitcoin Mining at GRIID, the Evolution of Energy Production, and Human Flourishing

Today's guest is Harry Sudock, VP of Strategy at GRIID, a company that procures low-cost, renewable energy to build, manage, and operate a growing portfolio of vertically-integrated bitcoin mining facilities.Harry is incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about the bitcoin mining industry and extremely dedicated to the cause of Bitcoin generally.John and Harry discuss the mining ecosystem, the impact he believes it will have on energy companies and markets, and what the implications may be for humanity more broadly.We would like to invite you to listen to this episode on one of...

⚡️ #02 - Paul Itoi: Stakwork, Sphinx Chat, and the Bitcoin Lightning Economy

Paul Itoi is the founder and CEO of Stakwork and has been a tech entrepreneur since the mid-nineties. In his spare time, Paul is also one of the driving forces behind the open-source, lightning-powered chat-app, called Sphinx. As Paul puts it, Stakwork pays the bills, but Sphinx just needed to exist, so they built it.Unlike most people, Paul's entry into bitcoin was not out of an interest in the investment case or really anything to do with the 'base layer.' Instead, Paul was drawn in by his interest in the Lightning Network, a 2nd layer...

⚡️ #01 - Gigi: Introduction to Closing the Loop

For the inaugural episode of Closing the Loop, it is a genuine honor to introduce you to a highly respected bitcoiner and dear friend of mine, who goes by the name of Gigi.Gigi is a father, educator, meme artist, author, philosopher, and someone who is fully committed to serving the bitcoin project and seeing it succeed.He curates the website bitcoin-resources.com, where much of the top bitcoin content can be found for anyone seeking to get up to speed.His first book, 21 Lessons, is a fascinating and rich exploration of the...