The Bitcoin Podcast Network

Ever since OpenBazaar was released, content creators immediately took a liking to this decentralized marketplace approach. For smaller artists and creators, monetization has always been a struggle. This is particularly true in the music industry, where competition is relentless and far too many middlemen want their cut. Myco, a group that can also be found on Bandcamp, has posted their new EP, Vinyl, and CD up for sale on OpenBazaar. They join us this week to talk all about it!

Earlier this year we shed some light on a brand new program. Exosphere Academy added a stream devoted to Ethereum and blockchain technology for the first time. Moritz Bierling was responsible putting the course together and helping participants navigate this exciting new arena. Now, ready to open up the program to a new class starting in early 2017, we welcome Moritz back and new instruct Schlomi to shed light on what to expect, the changes between the last class and this new one, and most importantly, what cool projects came to light from the last class.

Curious what it is like inside a seed-stage accelerator focused on Future Technology? This week, we invite Scott Robinson into the studio, who is the founder partner and director of Plug and Play FinTech, the financial and security focused startup accelerator in partnership with Citi, USAA, Capital One, Intuit, and other corporations. Since the launch of the program in February 2015, Scott and his team have accelerated over 72 FinTech startups and has led numerous investments into the domain. So, the key criteria for potential startups is that they can stand the test of time and build upon the intriguing peer-to-peer network philosophy behind bitcoin’s distributed system.

One of the biggest challenges if we want to secure the Internet of Things centers on identity. Specifically: how will we go about getting billions or hundreds of billions of intelligent devices to connect and communicate with each other securely? It’s not just about Tesla knowing that the device on the other end of a firmware update is a Model S versus a Model X. It’s about the thousands of sensors within that Tesla communicating with the road and other infrastructure, or knowing that a command to brake or swerve is a legitimate command that comes from the driver or another trusted subsystem. This week we invite Blockchain specialist and steategy analyst from Chain of Things, Mr. Conor Colwell, to the show to discuss cryptography, security and IoT industries globally. Chain of Things is set up to explore all security applications within blockchain IoT and look at the development of open-standards for the industry to use. So sit back, press play, and dive in.

BCoin is a bitcoin client which implements BIP-37. It can track transactions, public keys, and public key hashes (bitcoin addresses) without saving the entire blockchain to disk. This means you can have a wallet with a synchronized balance and send and receive payments without keeping track of a 20GB database. BCoin is implemented in pure javascript, and is browserify-able (this means compiling a binding to an ECDSA library is not even required for node.js). For us, the fact that peer to peer communication is not encrypted on the Bitcoin network seems like more of an oversight to me than anything else. They now have begun integrating the Lightning Network. It's called "blight". Purse.io takes over this episode as both Christopher Jeffrey (JJ) who is the CTO & Engineer at Purse and podcast regular Steven McKie join us in the studio. We continue to give you that mid-week goodness.

It is hard to think it's been eight months since Ryan X Charles came onto our show, as we are in dire need of an update on what he was been working on. There are a lot of great content creators on the internet, but most of them aren’t earning any money. Yours is a way to solve this problem. By thoughtfully incentivizing payments to creators, they give people a reason to pay for content on the internet. Their app depends on an integrated bitcoin wallet, and this week they have made important progress enabling small payments with low fees: they have broadcast our first micropayment on bitcoin testnet. Well hot damn. Let's get to it!

It’s no secret that tech has a diversity problem. Women are largely underrepresented, and Blacks and Latinos are almost invisible. While microeconomics assumes national income and aggregate price as given, and explains the determination of relative productions and prices of various goods and services, quite the opposite is true for macroeconomics. It is assumed that the value of bitcoin is directly dependent on its use for transactions. Enter, Collin Thompson, who is a blockchain technology and IoT entrepreneur, and venture capital investor out of Hong Kong.

The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable. Enter DECENT, which provides open-source software that enables users to share unlimited virtual content; the company’s main goal is to give a chance to individuals whose voice is normally controlled. What better person to explain all of this to us than one of the company’s co-founders and CEO? Matej Michalko joins us in the studio this week.

When a ballot proposal that would have replaced the city ordinance failed, Uber and Lyft left Austin, TX as promised. Since May 9, there have been no ride-sharing services available in this city of almost a million people. So it’s no surprise that tech-savvy Austinites, like this episodes special guest, Christopher David, who have taken matters into their own hands without the concern about red tape or corporate bullshit. Arcade City is a rideshare startup designed to be integrated into the Ethereum blockchain. Now, we keep it 100 here at The Bitcoin Podcast and I won't pretend there isn't any skepticism. The thing that worries me about this is that the guy was called out recently for being a bit of a scam artist. Turns out, he has straight forward answers to all our questions. And yes, we do have trust in him and Arcade City.

We (up 'til now) haven't talked to much about the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is a network of payment channels. When Alice wants to pay Carol, or Dave, or Susan, she finds the shortest route and makes a payment through the route using smart contracts. If Alice cannot find any route to pay Dave, Alice opens up a channel directly to Dave. Makes sense? No? Well...for starters our guest is Olaoluwa Osuntokun who might know a thing or two about it. In addition, Steven Mckie (Yours) and Valerian Bennett (PopChest) join us as the Bitcoin Justice League assembles to talk how this network affects their own creations.

The "vibe" around Bitcoin has been neutral to negative for two years now and plenty of bitcoiners are tiring of the politics around the block size limit. Ethereum is young and exciting but not like anything else in the crypto space. A recurring theme at the Satoshi Roundtable is that Bitcoin problems are leading to rise in Ethereum interest. Enter our guest this week, Anthony Di Iorio, CEO and founder of Jaxx and Decentral, who co-founded Ethereum in 2013. Jaxx and ShapeShift together will, without doubt, be the easiest solution for buying ether with bitcoin (and vice versa) ‒ and it’s done right in your Jaxx wallet.

Our guest today is Mariana Dahan is the Senior Operations Officer in the Office of the World Bank catalyzing progress towards identification systems using 21st century technology solutions. With Google Trends data showing that searches for the word “blockchain” have exponentially increased, we may be entering the peak of the hype cycle for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. That’s because its decentralized approach to verifying changes in important information addresses the centuries-old problem of trust, a social resource that is all too often in short supply, especially amid the current era’s rampant concerns over the security of valuable data.

Part 2 of the Steven McKie character piece is concluded. In addition, this episode we are talking with Max Kordek, the founder of a new decentralized platform called Lisk. Since the launch of Lisk there was a lot of confusion about what it really is, and what it enables people to do in the future. Max gladly came on our show to clean up some misunderstandings, and explain briefly what Lisk is and what it isn’t. LISK will go to the moonnn; only need patience! Oh, and part 2 of our character piece of Steven McKie! We bring the goods!

With the economy still far from recovered, it seems like a less-than-ideal time to start a new business. Yet right now is actually the perfect opportunity to dream big, follow your passion and create your own path to success. Take Arthur Falls for example, who whilst unemployed learned about crypto and now has one of the leading podcasts surrounding ethereum. Arthur’s itinerant employment history in the New Zealand orchard industry and Maine lobster fishery, sparked his interest in economics and international finance. Funny how like works, yes? Now, he leads ConsenSys Media, a decentralized organization with personnel spanning four continents!

Our guest today is Greg Slepak, Software developer of Espionage 3 & founder of the okTurtles Foundation, who talked about the bitcoin block size debate as surfacing "politics" in the bitcoin ecosystem. The politics are intense, there are ways that bitcoin governance is like government, and proposals to fork the software are kind of like constitutional amendments. After Greg talked to us, I'm increasingly comfortable thinking of bitcoin governance as a market phenomenon.

Matt Liston of the Gnosis prediction market platform discusses the upcoming crowdsale and the structure of the DAO which will manage it’s development. When not DAO-whispering he composes algorithmic music and dreams of a future Skynet-on-a-blockchain. Ethereum is part of a movement in tech to create a decentralized infrastructure that will rely on an uncontrolled network of computers to be the arbiter between them, rather than a central service or agency. Its called a trustless system. We prefer...Skynet. Welcome to an oasis of futures – a safe place for extreme ideas.

Another double header episode! Up first, Don Konforty, who is an expert on collaboration via the net, and the wisdom of crowds. We also have Greg Meredith, who has been working in the blockchain space, helping Ethereum with formal verification of their proof-of-stake protocol, Synereo’s formally-verified smart contracting language would have prevented the attack on The DAO. They come on the show to discuss all these developments and more.

The Thiel Foundation has announced its 2016 Fellows with a new class of 29 people focusing on technology and software development. Thiel Fellows receive $100,000 to work on new projects that advance technology. Augur will be one of the first cryptocurrency-related projects joining the Thiel Fellows program. Joey Krug is currently making Augur’s consensus implementation faster and more accurate. That's not all! Listen now and you get Tony Swish, podcast regular, and Augur's Director of Marketing for free! Boom! Stacked episode playas!

Andrew Lee, co-founder of Purse, had a common frustration that Bitcoin didn’t offer any incentive for normal people to use it, and had a hunch that he could use blockchain escrows to liquidate Amazon gift cards and deliver great deals. That hunch proved to be correct - and transacted over $4.5M and saved users almost a million dollars. But we don't just talk about it -- we be about it, by....talking about it...with HIM! In addition, PopChest announced they are shutting down. Is this the end of bitcoin + microtransactions? We offer up our thoughts, ideas, and criticisms because we want and need PopChest to get better to serve the community to the best of their ability.

Things aren't looking good. Currencies everywhere are in dire restraints. The credit agency Fitch sees potential catastrophe for the EU if the Italian banking system fails. China is crash landing their economy. Right now the argument that bitcoin will die is very difficult to make based on past experiences. We tackle how bitcoin navigated in a world where massive currency crises are the norm. Who better to join us, right as the halvening hits, than Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and well-respected figures in bitcoin. The next halvening is on July, 2020. See you there!