The Bitcoin Podcast

Demetrick, Dr. Corey Petty, and Jesse are joined by founder and investor Joe for a conversation that cuts through sixteen years of crypto noise with one provocative thesis: crypto is only about trading.

Joe walks the guys through all five hype cycles, from Silk Road to Mt. Gox to the 2017 ICO mania to NFTs to today, and shows how the top of every cycle has been defined by a single dominant trading narrative. Everything else, he argues, is undercurrent. The conversation traces how he arrived at this conclusion after the chaos of ETHDenver 2023 sent him back to first principles, including the poker code buried in the original Bitcoin commit.

From there the guys get into where the next hype cycle is forming. Joe demos a tap trading app he is building that strips away every chart, button, and knob until trading feels closer to a mobile game than a Bloomberg terminal. Green for good, red for bad, prediction markets baked in. The crew riffs on PVP tournaments, head to head trading streams on Twitch and Kick, and why apps optimized for volatility win when traditional markets get quiet.

Plus: Anatoly's legendary bag working of Hyperliquid on Solana, why a normal person will never love a candlestick chart, and Corey announces he is winding down Archivist and open sourcing the IP.

Drop questions in the YouTube comments. Join the Discord. The Pope conversation got pushed to next week.

Demetrick and Dr. Corey Petty fly solo this week (Jesse missed the memo) to break down the regulatory squeeze tightening around crypto.

The new U.S. ruling banning native yield on stablecoins is the headline. The guys unpack what it actually means: stablecoins are getting institutionalized, the barrier to entry just got a lot taller, and only players with deep legal benches will route around the rules. Surveillance, control, or both?

Corey explains how USDC dependency quietly de-decentralized DAI, and Demetrick raises the bigger question: with foreign nations buying less U.S. Treasury debt, stablecoin issuers are stepping into that role. What happens when crypto companies become the dollar's biggest buyers?

Also covered: Stripe's new agentic wallet infrastructure for AI agents, the latest bill targeting crypto payment rails, and why the no middlemen dream keeps colliding with human nature. Plus Demetrick's weekend speaking to financial advisors who are finally opening up to crypto.

Eleven years of The Bitcoin Podcast in three weeks. Over one thousand episodes. Thanks for sticking around.

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No financial advice. Just the conversation.

This week on The Bitcoin Podcast, Jessie pulls back the curtain on the gym software he's been quietly building, an MRO (maintenance, repair & operations) platform designed to give gym owners something they've never had: real data. Every piece of equipment gets a digital record, like a VIN number for a car, maintenance history, repair logs, and predictive analytics that can save small gym owners thousands per year. It's the unglamorous infrastructure play hiding inside a billion-dollar industry that private equity hollowed out.

Then Dr. Corey Petty and Demetrick cut through the legislative noise on two bills reshaping U.S. crypto:

The GENIUS Act brings stablecoins into a real regulatory framework, opening the door for banks and institutions, protecting users from algorithmic collapses (think Luna), and creating a state-level pathway for smaller issuers. The catch? No yield on stablecoins, no FDIC insurance, and Big Tech gets to issue them without full banking standards.

The CLARITY Act is the one builders have been waiting for, it ends regulation-by-enforcement, draws a clean line between CFTC and SEC jurisdiction, and has rare bipartisan support. But it's stalled in the Senate while the banking lobby actively fights it, and every month it drags, more crypto innovation moves offshore.

Honest, unfiltered, and always building.

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What happens when the hurricane hits and every cell tower goes dark? For one father working the night shift at a hospital during Hurricane Helene, that was not a hypothetical. It was eleven hours of silence with no way to reach his family.

Kenneth and Josh from the Georgia Statewide Mesh Coalition join Dee and Jesse to break down mesh networking, the decentralized communication technology that keeps working when everything else fails. No cell towers. No ISP. No single point of failure. Just a resilient, self-routing network built by the community, for the community.

Learn what mesh actually is, how Meshtastic works, and why this technology might be the most important thing you have never set up yet.

When the grid goes down, will you still be able to communicate?

The crew is back and they've got receipts. After a two-week hiatus (Corey had very important meetings, we swear), Demetrick, Dr. Corey Petty, and Jessie are reunited and ready to vibe.

This episode? Pure unfiltered conversation with a little Bitcoin and a little chaos.

Bitcoin's Scarcity Era is Officially HereThe 20 millionth Bitcoin was mined, and suddenly the media wants to act surprised. The boys break down why the "only 21 million" math has always been the point and whether the market will finally behave like the old heads always said it would.

Corey's Portugal TripDr. Petty just got back from Lisbon where he spoke at a live community event alongside heavy hitters from the open-source and decentralized web world, including folks from the Internet Archive. What's actually being built out there and why does it matter?

The Crypto Honesty CheckWhy has crypto spent years selling people a Web2 experience wrapped in a Web3 bow? The guys go there, calling out token projects that confused "decentralized" with "worse performance for no good reason" and naming what actually matters: data sovereignty, decentralized identity, and real infrastructure.

Big Tech's Empty PromiseIs Instagram actually worth anything? A surprisingly moving meditation on photo albums, Kodak pictures, and why a plastic binder at grandma's house hits harder than a million followers.

Plus shoutouts to Corey's hot wife, Michael B. Jordan winning an Oscar for Sinners, and the debut of "Quantum Tom."

The Bitcoin Podcast, where the takes are hot, the tech is real, and the jive is unmatched.

Want to win $10 in Bitcoin? Join the Discord, post a lip sync of the intro, and it's yours. First five new members only.

Can Bitcoin survive the impending Quantum threat?

In this episode we sit down with Griff Green, one of the earliest DAO builders and a core figure in Ethereum’s governance history — from the original DAO era through today’s next-generation coordination experiments.Griff was closely involved around the first DAO and helped lead white-hat recovery efforts during the 2016 DAO crisis. Since then, he has gone on to co-found and support multiple ecosystem projects focused on decentralized funding, public goods, and governance design, including Giveth, the Commons Stack, and several token engineering and coordination initiatives.This is not a surface-level DAO hype conversation. This is a rebuild conversation.We go deep on what actually failed in early DAO designs, what people misunderstood about decentralized governance, and what it will realistically take to redo the DAO model in a way that works — socially, economically, and technically.We cover:What really went wrong (and right) with the first DAOLessons learned from DAO governance failures and exploitsWhy most DAOs struggle with participation and decision qualityIncentive design vs voting designFunding public goods without governance captureToken engineering, bonding curves, and coordination mechanismsWhat a “DAO 2.0” architecture needs to includeWhether truly decentralized governance can scaleIf you care about DAOs, crypto governance, public goods funding, or coordination at scale — this conversation is required context from someone who was there at the beginning and is still building forward.Subscribe for more deep crypto conversations — no price talk, no hype cycles, just signal.Drop your question in the comments:👉 What must change for DAOs to actually work this time?👉 Subscribe, comment, and clip your favorite moment.👉 Tell us in the comments: What’s your biggest question about re-architecting DAOs?

Join us as we dissect the evolving landscape of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), moving beyond the "chat room with a bank account" stereotype. We dive into Vitalik Buterin's vision for better DAOs, exploring critical functions like improved oracles and dispute resolution, and debate the role of human politics versus programmatic efficiency. Discover how concepts like "problem geometry" and "sequenced governance" offer a path to more mature, robust, and effective DAOs, leveraging cutting-edge tools like AI and Zero-Knowledge proofs to overcome decision fatigue and human vulnerabilities.

Most DAOs sound great… until it’s time to make decisions, pay contributors, and ship work consistently. In this episode, we’re designing the ideal DAO and confronting the hard parts: governance that doesn’t stall, incentives that don’t get gamed, treasury systems that protect the community, and a structure that can scale without losing its mission.

Crypto didn’t remove trust — it refactored it.Which means the real question isn’t whether blockchains work… it’s whether the people who build them bear any responsibility for what happens next.In this episode we extend the previous conversation on crypto literacy, privacy UX, and incentive design to tackle a hard question with no clean answers:Do builders have responsibility beyond tooling?We explore the “blacksmith problem,” the myth of neutral systems, and how zero-knowledge, chain analysis, and UX choices shape outcomes — intentionally or not. This is not a price talk episode. It’s about the ethics, incentives, and trade-offs embedded in decentralized infrastructure.Topics Covered • Crypto literacy and centralization of expertise • Privacy vs usability (and why it’s not zero-sum) • Trust: from institutions → networks → intermediaries • The “neutral tools” dilemma in Web3 • When incentives create harm (and who owns it) • ZK systems, mixers, forensics, and emergent behavior • Builders vs system designers vs policymakersKey QuestionWhere does technical responsibility end, and ethical responsibility begin?If you’re new hereThis episode continues directly from last week’s cliffhanger. Go watch that one first if you want the full arc.Join the CommunityJoin the Discord for builders, OGs, privacy folks, ZK learners, and lurkers:(QR code in the video)Support the ShowLike, comment, subscribe, and clip moments that hit you. We actually watch them.For CommentersAnswer this in one word:Do builders have responsibility beyond tooling? — YES or NO?