Citizen Bitcoin

Today we sit down with ObiWan Kenobit. We talk about what he calls the Decade of Discontent ahead of us as we transition through a currency collapse and into a new monetary era based on bitcoin. We talk about history through the lens of generational change guided by the ideas of William Strauss and Neil Howe and we talk about the second anniversary of his viral piece “Hyperbitcoinization: Winner Takes All” - about how the article holds up and any updates he might make to it 2 years on.

Today we sit down with Prateek Goorha, an economist, professor and autodidact. Prateek has written some of the most underappreciated Bitcoin content out there. His writing runs the gamut from price cycle analysis to contract theory to philosophy. In this one we discuss all three. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Prateek’s medium page and dive in for some great reading!

Alessandro Cecere is CEO at Coinspree, a leading LATAM Bitcoin business based in Caracas, Venezuela. Coinspree provides custodial solutions to institutional investors and merchants. Coinspree has also launched the PandoraBox - a beautiful full node solution. El Sultan Bitcoin made waves on Bitcoin Twitter recently with his cypherpunk satellite setup. Alessandro is incredibly passionate and this episode is insanely bullish. Get yourself ready to get hyped - prep some fiat in case you need to smash that buy button during this ep.

Today we sit down with Bheki Mahlobo, an economics student and active bitcoiner from South Africa. Bheki appears in the new bitcoin documentary Banking on Africa - which is great and you should definitely check it out. Bheki discovered Austrian economics in high school and has gone on to study economics, albeit of the Keynsian variety, at university but describes how he studies Austrian economics on his own. We discuss the state of the economy and of bitcoin in South Africa and running a fill node!

Today we sit down with Stephen Cole, bitcoiner and investor. Stephen is well known on Bitcoin Twitter for his insightful, often funny and expert distilled tweets. He’s an investor in several great Bitcoin companies, including Swan. We talk about Stephen’s Bitcoin background, how he came to learn Austrian economics, the evolution of his political beliefs, and investing in bitcoin companies.

Today we sit down with Jeff Booth author of the new book The Price of Tomorrow. Jeff is a long time tech entrepreneur - He led BuildDirect, a technology company that aimed to simplify the building industry, for nearly two decades and he invests in and sits on the boards of many tech companies. Needless to say Jeff has his finger on the pulse of the global tech industry. In this disucssion we dive into the ideas he’s fleshed out in The Price of Tomorrow - deflationary technology in the time of inflationary monetary policy - the deep societal problems caused by inflationary money - how deflationary technology could combine with the deflationary money that is Bitcoin. We soberly examine the current state of affairs but also consider a bright future ahead and the path to get there.

Today we sit down with Justine, aka @MsHodl - Justine is a bitcoiner who drops smart takes on Twitter. We get into her background and rabbit hole story, we talk about how bitcoin could help rebuild society from the bottom up, about coming to bitcoin from different political perspectives, about “toxicity” in the space and much more.

Erik is a crypto-anarchist, iconoclast, and thinker who has been working in the bitcoin ecosystem since 2012. His primary concerns are the intersections of political, economic, and social theory as they relate to bitcoin specifically - and in this episode we get into all these topics and we start with talk about his time at Coinbase - it’s a wide ranging discussion that was very interesting from start to finish.

Aleks Svetski is founder and CEO of Swan’s Aussie autostacking ally - Amber. In this episode we talk about principles of liberty, freedom, short term thinking vs long term thinking, how an economy is complex like natural systems and natural money arises organically from a free market. It’s always great to hang out with Aleks.

Brandon Quittem published last week the fourth and final installment of his wonderful mycelium/mushroom/medicine/symbiosis series. John Vallis, host of the Bitcoin Rapid Fire podcast, and I both slid right into Brandon’s DMs to schedule him for a pod. I love these two guys and it occurred to me that it’d be a ton of fun to do this thing all together. So we did. This is the first half of our 2 hour 40 minute conversation - you will find the second half on the Bitcoin Rapid Fire podcast feed - just search Bitcoin Rapid Fire in your podcast app or go to https://anchor.fm/john-vallis/. This was a blast, we had a wide ranging conversation that was not at all limited to Bitcoin. In the second half we get crazy cosmic so be sure not to miss it.