Bitcoin Well Podcast

First ColdCard wallets were drained. Then tampered Ledger devices showed up from third-party sellers. You see, the people who did everything “right” got burned, while the person who left their coins on Coinbase came out fine. Q sits down with Frank Corva (Fedi, ex-Bitcoin Magazine) to unpack the hardware wallet debacles. They talk about why “don’t trust, verify” broke down, community custody and open spec, what Frank saw in Venezuela and Kibera, and why “if Bitcoin remains digital gold, it fails.” Not your keys, not your coins still holds. But the setup that’s right for you might not look like anyone else’s.

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Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.

Future-proof your money.

Bitcoin is trading around $86,000 with ETF demand still accumulating, but the rally is only half the story this week. Bitcoin Well just launched a Bitcoin IRA, and CEO Adam O'Brien is back on the podcast to explain why a non-custodial company built one, how it works, and where it sits on his counterparty ladder.

Adam breaks down the custodial IRA through BitGo, a custodian Bitcoin Well has trusted with its own inventory for years, and the self-custody version offered alongside it. He is direct about the catch: a retirement account is still a captured account, the tax code is a counterparty, and a lost key or a coin migration inside an IRA can cost far more than it would outside one. We also get into this week's market, what a rally near $86,000 does and doesn't tell you, why Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment lets the network adapt to stressed miners without anyone picking winners or arranging a rescue, and how that contrasts with the bank consolidations happening in traditional finance.

If you hold Bitcoin and have a 401k, an RRSP-style account, or any retirement savings sitting in index funds, this conversation will help you decide which rung you're actually on.

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Follow Adam O'Brien: https://x.com/adamobrien

Subscribe to Bitcoin Well for bitcoin news, financial sovereignty, and how to buy, sell, and use bitcoin.

Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.

Future-proof your money.

Adam O'Brien has spent thirteen years trying to subtract counterparties from his life: the bank, the exchange, the custodian, anyone who could freeze, lend out, or lose his bitcoin. This summer proved that subtraction has a floor. The ColdCard entropy failure drained $116 million from people who did everything right, generating their own seed on a trusted device. The Liquid Network lost $320 million without a single key being stolen. Neither failure involved a custodian.

In this episode, Adam walks through what he calls the counterparty ladder, a six-rung framework running from captured legacy retirement assets all the way to bitcoin purchased privately in self-custody, and makes the case that the real question was never "is this trustless," it's "which rung am I actually on." That framework is also the foundation for something Bitcoin Well is launching: a Bitcoin IRA, held custodially through BitGo, with a self-custody option coming after. Adam explains why a company built on non-custodial principles is launching a custodial product, what it would take for him to call the IRA a failure, and why he chose to say the quiet part out loud in the very article announcing it: a retirement account holds captured funds no matter what's inside it, bitcoin included.

Sign up for Bitcoin Well: https://bitcoinwell.com/signup

Learn about Bitcoin Well Infinite: http://bitcoinwell.com/infinite

Follow Adam O'Brien: https://x.com/adamobrien

Subscribe to Bitcoin Well for bitcoin news, financial sovereignty, and how to buy, sell, and use bitcoin.

Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.

Future-proof your money.

Bitcoin is sitting near $84,000 heading into this conversation, 892 days past the halving, with sentiment firmly in greed and ETF demand still described as accumulating. Dr. Jeff Ross joins the podcast to explain why none of those numbers are the real story.

Jeff argues that the separation of money and state is the next necessary evolution in a long historical pattern, the same kind of institutional unbundling that happened when church and state split centuries ago. He walks through where we are in the broader macro cycle, what a Fourth Turning framework says about the stress showing up in markets, sentiment, and policy right now, and why a system built on centrally controlled money cannot be patched, only replaced. We get into the mature, late-cycle conditions bitcoin is trading in today, what long-term holders and institutional flows are actually signaling versus what the headlines claim, and why Jeff thinks the current moment in markets is a symptom of something much larger than a single rate decision or ETF flow number.

This is a big-picture conversation about markets, macro, and monetary history, for anyone trying to understand what's actually breaking and what bitcoin's role is in what comes next.

Sign up for Bitcoin Well: https://bitcoinwell.com/signup

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Follow Dr. Jeff Ross: https://x.com/FormerDrJeff

Subscribe to Bitcoin Well for bitcoin news, financial sovereignty, and how to buy, sell, and use bitcoin.

Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.

Future-proof your money.

In February 2022, Chrystia Freeland told Canada's banks they could freeze accounts without a judge, and they froze 257 of them. Two courts have since ruled it unconstitutional. The Rhodes Trust, founded by Cecil Rhodes as (in his own words) a secret society to place its people where the levers are, made her CEO anyway. Zach reads his essay on what the state could reach and what it couldn't: the bank accounts it took in hours, the 14.6 Bitcoin hand-delivered to truckers in envelopes with handwritten seed phrases, and Nunchuk's reply to the court: "We do not hold any keys." Then Hülsmann's Ethics of Money Production explains why the freeze wasn't the system malfunctioning. It was the system working. Not your keys, not your coins, not your custody, not your say.

Bitcoin Well exists so your Bitcoin lands in a wallet you hold, not an account someone will be told to freeze. Buy Bitcoin straight to self-custody at bitcoinwell.com. New accounts use promo code PODCAST.

Thoughts, pushback, hate mail from Oxford? [email protected]

Bitcoin Well is a non-custodial bitcoin platform that helps people buy, sell and use bitcoin in Canada and the United States. Customers can buy bitcoin online and receive it directly to their personal wallet, or work with Bitcoin Well Infinite for transactions over $50,000. Bitcoin Well also operates a network of Bitcoin ATMs across Canada. Learn more about bitcoin, self-custody and Bitcoin Well's services at bitcoinwell.com

RESOURCES & LINKS:

🚀 Buy Bitcoin/Freedom: https://bitcoinwell.com

📧 Join the Mission (Newsletter): https://bitcoinwell.com/newsletter

📊 Take the Bitcoin Survey: https://bitcoinwell.com/survey

📈 Investor Relations: https://bitcoinwell.com/investors

CONNECT WITH US:

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⚡ Nostr: npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 (https://bitcoinwell.com/nostr)

Today's FOMC decision carries real weight: markets are pricing an 87% probability of a 25 basis point hike, the first since 2023, after the Fed held in July on a divided 9-3 vote. Core inflation is running at 3.3%, the labor market is still warm, and Bitcoin is sitting around $77-79K heading into the announcement.

Ansel Lindner (Bitcoin & Markets) joins us to break down what actually matters here: whether 25 bps is a real policy shift or mostly signaling, what a hike does to that 9-3 dissent, and why the conventional wisdom that rate hikes are automatically bad for Bitcoin might not hold up this time. If there's time, we also push back hard on the framing around the Iran conflict, including the economic angle Ansel may not expect: the same energy shock driving oil prices up sharply is a direct contributor to the inflation the Fed is now hiking to fight.

Sign up for Bitcoin Well: https://bitcoinwell.com/signup

Learn about Bitcoin Well Infinite: http://bitcoinwell.com/infinite

Follow Ansel Lindner: https://x.com/AnselLindner

Subscribe to Bitcoin Well for bitcoin news, market analysis, and how to buy, sell, and use bitcoin.

Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.

Future-proof your money.

In 2008, Zach sat down to read the official story of 9/11 so he could stop thinking about it. That was 18 years ago. This Reads episode walks the record, not the theories: Operation Northwoods and its 35-year classification, the Gulf of Tonkin attack that never happened, Colin Powell's vial, the 567-page Commission report that never mentions Building 7, and NIST conceding 2.25 seconds of freefall. Then it applies Rothbard's cui bono method to the whole quarter century and asks the question that finally matters: how does a state pay for a psyop and the war it sells? It prints. You don't have to agree about Building 7 to see why a money that can't be printed, with a ledger you can check yourself, is the peaceful exit. Just hold your own keys: leave it on an exchange and you've rebuilt the trust relationship you were escaping. Buy Bitcoin straight to your own wallet at bitcoinwell.com, promo code PODCAST.

Questions or pushback: [email protected]

Bitcoin Well is a non-custodial bitcoin platform that helps people buy, sell and use bitcoin in Canada and the United States. Customers can buy bitcoin online and receive it directly to their personal wallet, or work with Bitcoin Well Infinite for transactions over $50,000. Bitcoin Well also operates a network of Bitcoin ATMs across Canada. Learn more about bitcoin, self-custody and Bitcoin Well's services at bitcoinwell.com

RESOURCES & LINKS:

🚀 Buy Bitcoin/Freedom: https://bitcoinwell.com

📧 Join the Mission (Newsletter): https://bitcoinwell.com/newsletter

📊 Take the Bitcoin Survey: https://bitcoinwell.com/survey

📈 Investor Relations: https://bitcoinwell.com/investors

CONNECT WITH US:

🕊️ X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thebitcoinwell

📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/thebitcoinwell

⚡ Nostr: npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 (https://bitcoinwell.com/nostr)

Liquid, the Blockstream sidechain built to give Bitcoin users faster and more private transactions, hit a consensus split this week and "white hat hackers" pulled $320 million out of it. Bitcoin itself never went down. The layer built on top of it did.

Rob from Bitcoin News joins us to go deep on what actually happened with Liquid and why this keeps being the pattern: the same week, the ColdCard attacker moved 45 percent of previously stolen funds in a third wave, and Orionx, a Tether-backed Chilean exchange, shut down after an audit found $7 million in customer funds missing, leaving 100,000 users without refunds. We also get into the real debate of the week: Coinbase's new Bitcoin-backed mortgage product with Better Home & Finance, and whether that's genuine adoption or just Bitcoin becoming collateral for the same debt trap it was supposed to be an exit from. Plus the IMF quietly confirming El Salvador's Bitcoin strategy survived four years of pressure intact, AMC's CEO calling Robinhood's tokenized stock "contemptible," and what's actually at stake in the CLARITY Act's September 15 Senate vote.

Sign up for Bitcoin Well: https://bitcoinwell.com/signup

Learn about Bitcoin Well Infinite: http://bitcoinwell.com/infinite

Follow Rob Wallace on X and YouTube:

https://x.com/\_Rob_Wallace

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyfFeU73MF9uC5mA6lTS0FA

Subscribe to Bitcoin Well for bitcoin news, market analysis, and how to buy, sell, and use bitcoin.

Bitcoin Well is Canada's non-custodial bitcoin company, established in 2013 and publicly traded since 2021 ($BTCW.V). We offer Bitcoin ATMs, personal bitcoin services, and an online bitcoin platform.

Future-proof your money.

There is a camera on a pole near you right now, and it is photographing every car that passes. Adam O'Brien's essay "Jump Out of the Pot" turns that camera around and points it at your bank account: the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that made banks informants, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that made your financial records the bank's property instead of yours, and the 257 Canadian accounts frozen in hours for a perfectly legal donation. Financial privacy isn't about hiding bad things. It's protection against a government that changes the definition of bad things after the fact. The code already protects your coins. Only your habits protect the rest.

Buy Bitcoin straight to your own wallet at bitcoinwell.com. New accounts use code PODCAST.

Bitcoin Well is a non-custodial bitcoin platform that helps people buy, sell and use bitcoin in Canada and the United States. Customers can buy bitcoin online and receive it directly to their personal wallet, or work with Bitcoin Well Infinite for transactions over $50,000. Bitcoin Well also operates a network of Bitcoin ATMs across Canada. Learn more about bitcoin, self-custody and Bitcoin Well's services at bitcoinwell.com

RESOURCES & LINKS:

🚀 Buy Bitcoin/Freedom: https://bitcoinwell.com

📧 Join the Mission (Newsletter): https://bitcoinwell.com/newsletter

📊 Take the Bitcoin Survey: https://bitcoinwell.com/survey

📈 Investor Relations: https://bitcoinwell.com/investors

CONNECT WITH US:

🕊️ X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thebitcoinwell

📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/thebitcoinwell

⚡ Nostr: npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 (https://bitcoinwell.com/nostr)

There is a camera on a pole near you right now, and it is photographing every car that passes. Adam O'Brien's essay "Jump Out of the Pot" turns that camera around and points it at your bank account: the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that made banks informants, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that made your financial records the bank's property instead of yours, and the 257 Canadian accounts frozen in hours for a perfectly legal donation. Financial privacy isn't about hiding bad things. It's protection against a government that changes the definition of bad things after the fact. The code already protects your coins. Only your habits protect the rest.

Buy Bitcoin straight to your own wallet at bitcoinwell.com. New accounts use code PODCAST.