Interview location: Skype
Interview date: Wednesday 6th Feb, 2019

Following the January 3rd protests in Venezuela and Juan Guaido declaring himself as the interim president, I invited three Venezuelan nationals to discuss the current political crisis:

- Alejandro Machado - Caracas Chronicles
- Giancarlo Fiorella - In Venezuela
- Mauricio Bartolomeo - Ledn

We discuss the current political crisis, the response from the international community and the potential options for ousting the Maduro regime.

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Interview location: Skype
Interview date: Tuesday 22nd Jan, 2019
Company: Zcash
Role: Founder and CEO

One of the significant failings of Digicash, the David Chaum pre-Bitcoin digital currency was centralisation. Decentralisation has become one of the core components of what has made Bitcoin work and a success; shutting it down is only possible under extreme circumstances and no single person can exert control over its future direction.

How decentralised a cryptocurrency is often a measure of its strength or weakness. Maximalists often challenge Zcash as being centralised, and some refer to it as the corporate privacy coin but how much of a risk is this to the future of the currency?

I sat down with the Zcash Founder and CEO, Zooko Wilcox to discuss the intrinsic link between Zcash the company and Zcash the protocol, what risks this presents and how the bear market has affected operations. We also look into Zooko’s past working on Digicash, his discovery of Bitcoin and user adoption in crypto.

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Interview location: Palo Alto
Interview date: Thursday 31st Jan, 2018
Company: Cryptomathic
Role: Cryptographer and Security Expert

A number of pioneers developed the cryptographic and technical foundations for which Bitcoin is built upon. Nick Szabo highlighted a number of these people in his Tweet:

“Inventors of the most important technologies in Bitcoin: digital signatures and Merkle trees (Merkle), elliptic curve crypto (Koblitz), malicious-fault-tolerant consensus (Lamport), elliptic curve crypto (independent inventor: Miller).”

Many others along the way have contributed to the success of Bitcoin, either through early work or attempts at created a digital currency, names such as Adam Back, David Chaum and Szabo himself.

Whitfield Diffie sits alongside all of these people. His work on cryptography should not be forgotten in the history of Bitcoin and I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss this, how he was introduced to Bitcoin and other such topics as privacy and security.

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Interview location: Las Vegas
Interview date: Saturday 26th Jan, 2018
Company: Freelance
Role: Applied Cryptography Consultant

There were many attempts at creating a digital currency before Bitcoin, all failing for different reasons. Bitcoin brought together a number of ideas to solve the double spending which has enabled it to flourish for over a decade.

Peter Todd is one of a select few who can think about and understand Bitcoin at such a level that they can hold influence over ideas for its evolution.

I managed to get the chance to sit down with Peter at Tone Vays Unconfiscatable conference in Las Vegas and discuss the history of Bitcoin, why it worked when other digital currencies failed. We also discuss other relevant topics in the world of Bitcoin including scaling, Lightning and Fungibility but we also consider why other projects are scams and should not be trusted.

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If you enjoy The What Bitcoin Did Podcast you can help support the show my doing the following:

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Interview location: Skype
Interview date: Thursday 17th Jan, 2018
Company: Gab.com
Role: CEO

The Silk Road remains one of the most important Bitcoin projects. The website provided a clear use case for Bitcoin, allowing for the buying and selling of goods outside of government regulations.

Outside of price speculation and trading, there are currently few projects which utilise the full potential within the design of Bitcoin: censorship resistant money. Gab.com is a site which is not only making use of Bitcoin in this way, but it has to for survival.

In the divisive world of free speech, Gab.com has created a platform which does not censor views, opinions and content which some people find tasteless, hateful and/or offensive. Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab believes that this is an essential right in a world where social media giants can control what content is and isn’t allowed.

There are many examples of censorship across these platforms, from Google restricting search results to Alex Jones universal removal from almost every social media and content platform. Whatever you think of Alex Jones, whether you find his views and opinions offensive, censorship across these platforms and the role that social media companies play in determining what content is permissible is a hotly debated subject.

I invited Andrew onto the podcast to discuss free speech, censorship and understand how the company has been affected by their own deplatforming experiences. We also discuss how Gab.com is using Bitcoin to fund their business and thus why Bitcoin is free speech money.

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If you enjoy The What Bitcoin Did Podcast you can help support the show my doing the following:

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Subscribe on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | TuneIn | RSS Feed

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