I talk with Rigel Walshe (AKA CoinsureNZ), who gave a speech at the Baltic Honeybadger conference this year titled “Bitcoin as a Religious Phenomenon”. We explore this topic and how in many ways Bitcoin provides meaning and purpose in a chaotic world.
Whether it is the rapid growth in local bitcoin meetups post-covid, the spread of ideas such as self-sovereignty and rules for moral action, or the state of Bitcoin Culture on Twitter, the development of the social layer of Bitcoin is undeniable in recent years.
We try to understand this movement and how it scales to the world.
We also talk about Rigel’s time working in the New Zealand Police and what he learned there, and his current life in Latin America.
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Links:
Rigel Walshe on Twitter - https://twitter.com/CoinsureNZ
Baltic Honeybadger 2023 Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsPqVqX5VJc&t=398s
Rigel Walshe on Medium - https://medium.com/@CoinsureNZ
Rigel Walshe on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@coinsurenz9697
Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm
Bitcoin Psychopaths vs Bitcoin Sociopaths - Baltic Honeybadger 2022 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlhg1KGbZ04
Rigel on Swan Bitcoin - https://www.swanbitcoin.com/what-happens-to-bitcoin-if-the-internet-goes-down/
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.
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 SJF, a Sound Artist based in the U.K. We explore questions about privacy and the panopticon of surveillance as we move on from the chaos of 2022, and how Bitcoin's Proof of Work ethos can help inspire and enable creative endeavours.
Kishin Kato is a Japanese Bitcoiner working on various Lightning and Bitcoin education-focussed projects, and heavily involved with the Bitcoin community in Japan. We discuss some of the broad connections between Japan and New Zealand, including the state of agriculture, free trade, financial gatekeepers, as well as the emergence of different Bitcoin narratives.
I talk with Hanoz Bilia, the founder of The Altruist, a new Bitcoin education and community space based in the Auckland CBD. The Altruist is NZ's first dedicated Bitcoin space and is a great project helping connect Bitcoiners and people interested about Bitcoin in real life! We discuss Hanoz's motivation to start the space, the importance of providing resources for people to learn and