The Café Bitcoin Podcast

Jaksot

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  The Finale: Liquid's 4,000 Bitcoin, the Caching Bug, and 50 Days for Freedom Wrapped 08.09.2026 1t 26min

  The fiftieth and final day of 50 Days for Freedom, and the news obliged. Yan Pritzker, Swan's cofounder and CTO, explained the Liquid hack from the inside out: not a stolen key but a caching bug that let a fake transaction pass as one already checked, 4,000 Bitcoin pegged out, 3,400 returned. Frank Corva pressed on the 600 the hackers kept and whether anyone gets made whole. Suze asked why Liquid escaped the scrutiny Bitcoiners apply to everything else. Then the bigger question: how open-source money survives an age of AI attackers. Yan's answer is slow growth, ruthless conservatism, and more eyes. Unseen Finance returned with an insurance idea. Thank you for 50 days.
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  Big Brother was Opt-in, a 40-Year Central Banking Veteran on Surveillance 04.09.2026 1t 24min

  A Friday hang that took an unplanned turn. Tomer Strolight, Brandon Quittem, Suze and Dirty Coin director Alana joined Brady and Swan Private's Alec and Matt, and then an anonymous 40-year veteran of the IMF and central banks came up from the audience. The conversation ran from a viral Meta AI privacy story to whether the institutions building financial surveillance understand what they are building, with the answer coming from someone who sat inside them. Tomer argued against the doom with coal and nuclear as case studies; Brandon brought Kevin Kelly's idea that every technology wants something. Two shows left.
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  Bob Burnett, Tom French and Callum Wheeler on Mining at the Edge of the Grid | 50 Days for Freedom 04.09.2026 1t 28min

  OCEAN's newly elected chairman Bob Burnett joined Tom French and Callum Wheeler of RenewaBlox for a mining show that survived a mid-stream crash. Burnett laid out his taxonomy of hashrate, rabbits, wild horses and captive elephants, and set the target: a third of the network self-powered. Asked whether mining stabilizes the grid, he said the industry overstates its impact, and put numbers on why. RenewaBlox brought Scottish hydro sites stranded by the network operator, a 150-kilowatt export cap leaving power on the table, and a distillery sand battery that could be an ASIC instead. Four days left in the campaign.
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  Brandon Quittem on the Cattle That Broke the Apache, Decentralized Organisms, and Earth's Natural Internet | Day 43 of 50 02.09.2026 1t 29min

  No booked interview, so Brady picked on Brandon Quittem for two essays, one of them still unpublished. Bitcoin as Apache asks why a people with no leader held off three empires for centuries, and why 100 head of cattle finished what armies couldn't. Brandon named the Bitcoin risk plainly and then declined to claim we are there. Then the fungi: how the mycelium essay was written in one night in 2018, why Dan Held's edit got it published, and what a brainless underground network that talks across species has to do with money. Suze on stage, Star Trek in the footnotes.
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  Debanking, Why Sound Money Built the Renaissance, Lightning, Listener Questions | Day 42 of 50 02.09.2026 1t 28min

  No guest, no interview, and one of the better shows of the campaign. Brady opened the floor to listener Bitcoin questions and the room went deep on Lightning, settlement layers and where liquidity actually comes from. Suze reported from the closed UK debanking inquiry with the detail that says everything: Bitcoin Policy UK goes by BP UK because naming Bitcoin makes banking harder. Cory dismantled Bitcoin price models, with $8.5 billion still trapped in GBTC at six times the cost of competing products. Brady closed on four coins across three civilizations, and why sound money makes a long time horizon possible.
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  Café Bitcoin | Larry Lepard on the Debasement Trade, Global Bond Yields, and the Big Print | Day 41 of 50 31.08.2026 1t 11min

  Larry Lepard returned for a third time, and this conversation went where the first two did not: the plumbing. His argument is that the bond market, not the Fed, is now calling the shots, and that yield curve control is the only remaining exit. The average rate on all outstanding US debt now sits below every yield on the curve, so each rollover compounds the problem. Sovereign yields are rising worldwide. Isaiah Douglass pressed him on midterms, Brady on the pensions and insurers required to hold this paper, and Lepard closed on why he considers himself an optimist.
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  Café Bitcoin | The Lightning Fire Drill, Quantum-Proof Transactions, and Defeating the Surveillance State | Day 37 of 50 28.08.2026 1t 22min

  A two-person show that turned into one of the best conversations of the campaign. The Core Lightning fire drill told responsibly, and the bigger story inside it: AI-generated vulnerability reports found the bugs before attackers did, two days after Lyn Alden described exactly that era on this show. Quantum demos with the caveats attached, Jackson Hole through the debt lens, and Suze Ward dismantling the UK's new stablecoin mandate while lawful Bitcoin purchases stay blocked. Then the Flock camera segment: AI surveillance networks rising tenfold in a year, and why Bitcoin remains the hopeful half of the story.
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  Lyn Alden on Café Bitcoin | Bessent vs Druckenmiller, the Bull Market Question, and Why She Writes Science Fiction | Day 35 of 50 25.08.2026 1t 18min

  Lyn Alden joined for the full hour and delivered on every front. On the Treasury story she was calm where the headlines were not: the bond market was orderly, the buybacks are a super soft form of yield curve control, and Bessent is giving long yields the Streisand effect. She partially disagreed with Druckenmiller, argued the realistic endgame is financial repression rather than discipline, answered the bull question with market structure instead of a price target, reframed stablecoins as offshore banking in a smartphone, and closed on AI security and her science fiction novel, The Stolguard Incident.
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  Café Bitcoin | Sticking the Landing, Answering the Maximalism Eulogy, and One Money in a Free Market | Day 34 of 50 24.08.2026 2t 1min

  Bitcoin pushed into the high $70,000s and stayed there, and the room dug into why: a spot-driven move rather than a leveraged one, $1.92 billion of ETF inflows, and a Treasury signalling it may use roughly $950 billion of its own cash to buy back long bonds. Cory Klippsten then answered Nic Carter's essay declaring Bitcoin maximalism dead, rejecting the label and replacing it with a narrower claim about digital monetary scarcity. That opened a genuine disagreement over dollar tokens built on Bitcoin rails, plus Suze Violet Ward on why UK regulators still cannot tell Bitcoin from everything else.
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  Café Bitcoin | Bitcoin Rips 23% on the Week, Privacy in the AI Era, Palantir and Government Capture | Day 31 of 50 21.08.2026 1t 29min

  A Friday hang on a week Bitcoin ran 23%, and the mood in the room is the story as much as the tape. Cory calls the return of the shitposting the real signal that the bear market broke. Adam Livingston makes a game-theoretic case for sovereign accumulation and argues for owning the denominator rather than chasing multiples into an AI boom, while Brandon Quittem lays out the K-shaped recovery and what happens when institutions face the failure of fiat money and the arrival of AI at the same time. Then the show turns to Palantir: Cointelegraph's Robert Baggs brings anonymous MoD engineers who say the question of who owns Britain's data is almost irrelevant next to who can read it, and the mosaic effect explains why. Suze reframes it as a question of leverage rather than ownership. Guy Swann closes it out by demonstrating the alternative he is actually building, peer-to-peer and self-hosted, and argues the reason to be hopeful is that AI has finally made running your own tools realistic.
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  Parker Lewis on the 12% Day, Hank Paulson's "Break the Glass," and Why Spending Bitcoin Is a Saving Question | Day 30 of 50 20.08.2026 1t 23min

  Parker Lewis joins Brady, Cory and Suze the morning after Bitcoin ran roughly 12% to $72,000. The move is the hook, but the conversation is about what produced it: the Treasury announced a $4 billion long-bond buyback and the 10-year yield ended up higher than before the intervention, which Parker reads as evidence the Treasury cannot influence the long end and only the Fed can. From there, Hank Paulson's "break the glass" warning, why he thinks the 2008-and-2020 printing playbook has at most two uses left, and what "regime change" means for a generation of investors conditioned to the Fed put. In the second half he takes on the two strongest objections to spending Bitcoin, Gresham's law and capital gains tax, and reframes both as a saving question rather than a spending one. Plus the ribeye index and the methodology behind it, and Suze's challenge on whether ETFs and custodians are quietly recentralizing access to a decentralized protocol.
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  Café Bitcoin | The Nuclear Bitcoiner on Mining with Small Modular Reactors, and the Paper He Is Taking to a Nuclear Conference | Day 29 of 50 19.08.2026 1t 26min

  Ryan MacLeod, who posts as The Nuclear Bitcoiner, joins Brady, Brandon Quittem, Suze, and Tomer Strolight from inside Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, where he has worked for almost eleven years. The heart of the episode is a paper he will present at a nuclear industry conference in October, proposing Bitcoin mining as a "transitional offtaker" for small modular reactors in remote regions. The argument answers a real financing problem: a reactor sized for present demand constrains a community's growth, while one sized for future demand sits idle for years. Mining buys the otherwise-wasted output and then recedes as regional demand matures, a framing Ryan builds directly on Brandon Quittem's Pioneer Species essay. Along the way, how modular these reactors actually are, the five designs that recently achieved first criticality, the northern Canadian communities still burning shipped-in diesel, and Tomer Strolight's challenge on whether AI data centers outbidding miners for power is a threat or just the next stage of the same story.
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  Café Bitcoin | John Haar Returns for Macro and Mining, 55 Years Off Gold | Day 28 of 50 18.08.2026 1t 25min

  John Haar returns to Café Bitcoin for his first appearance since leaving Swan for Blockware, joining Brady, Suze, Roxana, and Frank Corva on the 55th anniversary of the Nixon Shock. The core argument: gold's own physical constraints, not just political convenience, are what let its convertibility be severed in 1971 and never restored. From there the show moves through confiscation history, a sharp critique of Modern Monetary Theory anchored to a 2022 Larry Summers admission on inflation measurement, Frank Corva's on-the-ground account of MMT advocacy in documentary form, and a five-point breakdown of why Bitcoin mining's explosive 2021-2025 hashrate growth is colliding with the AI buildout's competition for capital, chips, and power. Cory calls in from Istanbul to weigh in on the dollar's reserve-currency position and the AI investment bubble.
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  Café Bitcoin | Yan Pritzker on Bitcoin Fork History, the September 1 Hard Fork, and Why Doing Nothing Is the Safest Move | Day 27 of 50 17.08.2026 1t 20min

  Swan cofounder and CTO Yan Pritzker joins Brady to walk through his new essay on Bitcoin fork history, from the 2010 forum post where Satoshi told Jeff Garzik a block size patch would fork him off the network, through the block size wars, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and Craig Wright's courtroom defeat. Suze adds firsthand reporting from the Wright trial. The heart of the episode is practical: with a hard fork scheduled for September 1, Yan explains replay attacks and why the safest action for almost everyone is to do absolutely nothing, and never type a seed phrase into anything.
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  Café Bitcoin | Orwellian Overreach, the Museum of Civil Liberties, and the Freedom Tech Field Guide | Day 24 of 50 14.08.2026 1t 19min

  A last-minute booking becomes one of the campaign's best conversations. Roxana Nasoi of Logos tours the Museum of Civil Liberties, a record of eroded freedoms kept where it can't be quietly edited, launched almost exactly fifty-five years after Nixon closed the gold window. Suze connects it to her reporting: surveillance that stays invisible until it isn't, and anti-money-laundering rules that miss the laundering. Then the conversation turns practical: mesh networks, mixnets, home servers, local AI, and a weekend-built chess app with no memory. Brandon Quittem closes with survey data on who adopts freedom technology before it's necessary, and who arrives next.
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  Café Bitcoin | Self-Custody with Nick Neuman, Money Without Permission and Debanking | Day 23 of 50 13.08.2026 1t 23min

  A debanking masterclass and a surprise guest. Suze, director and co-founder of Bitcoin Policy UK, takes the room inside the UK Parliament's inquiry into banks blocking lawful Bitcoin businesses, with numbers that stagger: 40% of payments to exchanges blocked or delayed. Then Nick Neuman, CEO of Casa, pops in with a view from inside the Coldcard response, why multisig wallets held up, and whether Bitcoin keeps its value if it all ends up inside ETFs. Plus the block size wars as a lesson in who really governs Bitcoin, the positive case for self-custody, and Suze's reporting from Lebanon to Liechtenstein.
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  Greg Foss on Bitcoin as Insurance, Credit Signals in the AI Boom, and Do the Math | 50 Days for Freedom, Day 22 12.08.2026 1t 15min

  Greg Foss returns to Café Bitcoin after time away from Twitter, and the conversation runs straight at the credit markets. He walks through his credit default swap framing of Bitcoin, explains why he treats it as insurance rather than a risk asset, and argues the 10-year Treasury matters more than anything the Fed administers. The room digs into widening credit spreads across AI infrastructure, Bitcoin mining versus AI data centers, what the ETFs did and did not change, and pensions slowly moving in. Foss closes on something unexpected: he does not want the U.S. dollar to fail, and believes a Bitcoin reserve would make it stronger.
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  Café Bitcoin | Larry Lepard and Greg Foss on Japan as the Seminal Event, Credit as the Warning, and Why Timing Beats Everyone | Day 21 of 50 11.08.2026 1t 31min

  Larry Lepard returns with Greg Foss and Dr. Jeff Ross for the most macro-heavy hour of the campaign. Lepard makes the case that Japan is the seminal event of the year, that a swap line is money printing regardless of what it is called, and that the incoming Fed chair will be forced into dovishness by arithmetic rather than conviction. He is candid that he has been early before. Foss argues credit markets are always the first warning and raises a structural objection to how Bitcoin treasury companies describe their preferred shares. Cory opens on why narrative always follows price.
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  Café Bitcoin | Jeff Ross on Energy Money, Why Abundance Still Needs Scarcity, and Study Before You Stack | Day 20 of 50 10.08.2026 39min

  Note this Space was sadly rugged before we could wrap up. After a fortnight dominated by the Coldcard failure, the room deliberately turns forward. Suz makes the episode's sharpest argument, that she no longer tells people to buy Bitcoin but to study it, since understanding is the only thing that survives a drawdown. Jeff Ross returns from two years away to lay out Bitcoin as energy money, a thesis reaching back through Buckminster Fuller and Henry Ford, and to reject the claim that abundance makes money obsolete. Cory argues cryptography is the single genuine asymmetry available to individuals. Brandon Quittem closes on empathy, force versus free markets, and touching grass.
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  Café Bitcoin | Slay Your Heroes, the Fourth Turning, and Certainty Lowers Your Guard | Day 17 of 50 06.08.2026 1t 25min

  Suze brings her Forbes reporting on Telegram's privacy claims and asks why Bitcoiners never point don't-trust-verify at their own companies and personalities, which becomes the episode's spine. American HODL and Odell's admissions about hero worship get examined, with Cory drawing a line between those who claim technical authority and those who never did. Brandon Quittem then reads the Fourth Turning: wealth inequality as signpost, a Cold War 2.0 climax rather than total war, horseshoe theory on populism, and an unusually candid retraction of his own 2030 timeline. He closes on why doomscrolling makes you ineffective.