Stephan Livera Podcast

Kara Haas, CPA joins me to discuss Bitcoin auditing and accounting. Especially in relation to Tether, there are many people confused about what an audit is, versus an attestation. And with the Bitmain IPO, some confusion on the correct accounting treatment for Bitcoin. As an accountant and auditor in the field, Kara is able to shed some light on this.

Rigel Walshe (aka CoinsureNZ) joins me to talk about his recent viral adventures in sending Bitcoin transactions without internet on the device itself. His recent stories lit up social media and showed real world usage of TxTenna, a collaboration between GoTenna (mesh networking) and Samourai Wallet (Bitcoin wallet project focused on privacy).

Patri Friedman, MD of Zarko Investment Group and a leader in the seasteading movement joins me to talk about how Bitcoin & Crypto will enable greatly freer markets around the world. We talk about Bitcoin maximalism, Crypto parallels with the dotcom bubble, jurisdictional competition, seasteading and start up cities, law as technology, and more. We also discuss David Friedman's thoughts on Bitcoin & Crypto, and what Patri's late grandfather, Milton Friedman, would have thought on Bitcoin.

Zac Prince, Founder and CEO of BlockFi joins me in this episode to talk about the incredible benefits of Bitcoin as collateral for USD loans. We talk about the 'double whammy' of how it can be used to minimise capital gains taxes, and get an interest deduction on the use of funds. Bitcoin also makes it easier to provide global debt financing in countries where it has traditionally been difficult to operate USD lending.

One of the pseudonymous founders of Samourai Wallet joins me in this exciting episode to talk about Bitcoin privacy techniques that are applied within the wallet and upcoming improvements to their Bitcoin wallet app. Anyone interested to learn more about how Samourai Wallet helps protect privacy will truly enjoy this episode.

Francis Pouliot and Etienne Larrivee (CEO Satoshi Portal and Lead Developer Cyphernode), join me to talk about their newly released open source Bitcoin self-hosted API allowing you to more easily build Bitcoin services and applications. This enables businesses and users to reduce their reliance on commercial Bitcoin APIs, while still offering advanced features and utilities.

Steve Barbour (Founder, Upstream Data) joins me to discuss how he is turning stranded natural gas into Bitcoin mining hashes. His HashGen product uses low value natural gas to improve the economics for Canadian Oil and Gas facilities, while powering Bitcoin mining ASICs. In this discussion we also talk about the 'bitcoin energy use is wasted' narrative, and how bitcoin mining was centralised in the past, but is now decentralising.

Jeremy Welch (Founder of Casa) joins me in this episode to talk about crafting a business around the concept of safely storing bitcoin. We talk about the ethos of Casa, designing services for a sovereign individual, securing top tier talent, and Casa products.

Sergej Kotliar, CEO of Bitrefill joins me to discuss taking bitcoin and lightning payments as an online merchant. We talked about the challenges and benefits of doing this, particularly in how lightning network simplifies the user experience and reduces errors. In the second part of the episode, we talk about 'earner adoption' - the idea that bitcoin's ecosystem can grow from people earning it.

Adam Ficsor (nopara73), a Bitcoin privacy developer and CTO of zkSNACKs joins me to talk about his new wallet, Wasabi Wallet. We talk about:

Privacy being for everyone

Comparison with other privacy projects, such as Monero, or other Bitcoin mixing services

ZeroLink framework

How your Bitcoin Privacy can be broken

How chain analysis works

What Wasabi Wallet does to break chain analysis heuristics

Upcoming Wasabi Wallet launch