Popular Episodes

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.

Sam Kivi is the CTO and Director at Grid Share, a New Zealand company building flexible load infrastructure centred around renewable energy and Bitcoin mining. We talk about how flexible load works, and the benefits that it provides to the power grid, how it interacts with renewable power generation, and what the opportunities and challenges are, given New Zealand’s unique energy mix. We also discuss the emerging opportunities for landfill methane capture, and what it actually takes to put in the proof of work to stand up a mining operation as Grid Share have done. Sam also shares a new initiative from the company, offering hosting services for Bitcoin miners in New Zealand.

Bitkiwi Dan is one of the co-founders of the BitKiwi meetup events in New Zealand. We canvas a range of topics from government decision-making and how political neutrality works in the public sector to what it might take to form a new Bitcoin political party in New Zealand. Dan is also a Chartered Accountant and we discuss the opportunity around businesses wanting to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet, integrating with legacy banks, and how the bitcoin circular economy could develop.

I talk with Dr. Simon Collins, founder of Stackr, a sustainable Bitcoin mining company based in New Zealand. We talk about NZ's unique renewable energy mix, the importance of miner collaboration, and future opportunities to integrate Bitcoin mining with industrial heat processes.

Rabble is a software developer and hacker based in Wellington, New Zealand. Rabble was lead engineer at Odeo, where he hired Jack Dorsey into the company, which would later pivot into becoming Twitter. Since then he has been focussed on building impactful projects and social media with the open & decentralised vision that Twitter originally had in its early years but which was eventually lost. Rabble has created the Nostr client Nos.social, and is involved with ⁠Ahau.io⁠, a Māori community tool built on Nostr’s predecessor protocol, Secure Scuttlebutt.