I talk with Brad Henderson, a Power System Engineer and Head of Engineering and Design at ElectroNet, a New Zealand-owned consultancy firm. Brad share some exciting details about a new Bitcoin mining facility that his firm has been involved with on the West Coast of New Zealand. We discuss what energy sovereignty might mean for New Zealand, including the importance of electrifying the economy and how Bitcoin mining and solar power may help create energy abundance.

I host the Kiwi Bitcoin Builders monthly catchup for April 2024. This is a way to bring together people working on awesome Bitcoin businesses and projects in New Zealand. We share what we have been working on and what has been happening in the space. We hear about the Bitcoin Alive conference that was held over in Sydney, follow up on the success of the Lightning Pay beta, as well as hear from Satflow, a new Kiwi Bitcoin business exploring MEV on Bitcoin.

I talk with Matyáš Kuchař, co-founder of BTC Prague in the Czech Republic, Europe’s largest Bitcoin event.We talk about BTC Prague’s origin and Matyáš's connection to New Zealand.We also discuss the Bitcoin scene more broadly in the Czech Republic, with a number of well-known Bitcoin companies and projects emerging from the country.I will be attending BTC Prague 2024, in June which is going to be awesome. There are some great speakers lined up including Adam Back, Michael Saylor, Parker Lewis, Peter Todd and many others.🎉 Use discount code TTOV to get 10% off your BTC Prague tickets!

I talk with Christian Lewe from Blockstream Research. Christian is working on Simplicity, a more robust programming language designed as an alternative to Bitcoin Script. The project that has been in the works for over ten years and has been described by Adam Back as “the last soft fork”, and as Christian shares, enabling simplicity could bypass a lot of the contentious soft fork discussions about things like covenants as this functionality is possible with Simplicity.

I talk with Rupert Carlyon, Founder and Managing Director of Kōura Wealth KiwiSaver. KiwiSaver is the voluntary retirement savings scheme for New Zealand and Kōura Wealth offers a Carbon Neutral Crypto Fund KiwiSaver product, which is Bitcoin only. This is a way for everyday kiwis to get some kind of Bitcoin exposure with government and employer matched contributions and tax benefits. New Zealand was very late to the game with retirement savings schemes and the impact of this is beginning to be felt with very low savings, and old-age poverty issues. With all the talk about the Bitcoin ETFs globally, it is interesting to explore how traditional finance in New Zealand interfaces with Bitcoin, and the regulatory challenges they have had to overcome to get this product launched.

I talk with Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance and Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets. Brett does a lot of work supporting the protection of physical cash, and I reached out to him about an article he wrote “The War On Informality” which explores the implication of financial surveillance by credit cards and private banks.This is a thought-provoking episode. We explore the Commodity Theory of Money vs Credit Theory of Money, power dynamics, the importance of cash, and more. Brett offers some interesting critiques of certain Bitcoin narratives and provides some alternative frameworks for looking at how money works.

I talk with Kieran Nolan about his work combining Bitcoin, teaching, and open-source technology. Kieran’s official role is STEM Wizard, teaching at a primary school in Melbourne, Australia. He has been able to bring tech and learning together into the classroom, including helping kids to run Bitcoin nodes, building projects on Nostr, setting up Minecraft servers with other schools, and more. We discuss teaching and learning, and how kids can be better equiped for our rapidly changing world as well as the challenges with bureaucracy and standards-based education in government schools. Kieran is involved in a huge range of other Bitcoin and education projects including the Mornington Peninsula Bitcoin Group, The School of Bitcoin, the Digital Playhouse Foundation, and more.

I host a Kiwi Bitcoin Builders call with a few people working on Bitcoin businesses, education, and projects in New Zealand. We debrief on the success of the recent Bitkiwi meetup event in Queenstown and also share some of the things that people are working on.

Andrew L. Wilson is an Author and Professor of History of Christianity as well as host of The Disentanglement Podcast, exploring privacy tech and the surveillance state. We discuss in detail severals books about the origin of the state and money, including James C Scott’s, “Seeing Like A State”, Rees-Mogg and Davidson’s “The Sovereign Individual”, and David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”. We discover some interesting parallels between the unconfiscatable nature of Bitcoin and the origins of state power with its ability to tax easily countable grain crops versus something like a potato which grows underground.We also talk about the history of the printing press as it relates to inflation within the church, and Andrew's personal proof of work undertaking a 1000-mile pilgrimage in the footsteps of Martin Luther from Germany to Rome.

I talk with James Viggiano about recent comments made by the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Not soon after we spoke, James shared a clip that went viral of the governor talking frankly about the exorbitant privilege of money printing that the central banks and governments have. James and I talk about some of the game theory from the perspective of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to defend the Kiwi Dollar and their attempts to talk down inflation, and shift the narrative even as the cost of living crisis continues. We also talk about the opportunity for what New Zealand could look like on a Bitcoin standard and how that could interface with the legacy financial system.