Popular Episodes

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.

Dash is part of the Tokyo Citadel Group, who I was able to meet when I was travelling through Japan recently. My impression from the Tokyo Citadel was that there was real interest in privacy, security, and the potential threats that Bitcoiners personally face from the nation state. Now this is not unfounded, and we have seen people being detained over things like coinjoins and through chain analysis. But I wanted to understand this perspective more and compare it with the situation in New Zealand.

I talk with Kevin Whitmore from Callaghan Innovation. We discuss payment innovations with the Lightning network, Bitcoin, Nostr, and more. I am encouraged to see an interest in Bitcoin technology from the New Zealand Government. I welcome Callaghan’s approach of objectively looking at everything that comes their way and making judgements based on first principles. Ultimately having a vehicle like Kevin’s work at Callaghan Innovation could be one of the ways New Zealand becomes a first mover in adopting Bitcoin. I am quietly encouraged to see the label "Web3" reclaimed by genuinely decentralised tech such as Nostr, Lightning Zaps, and Fedi.

We talk about Jame Viggiano's project Orange, which hosts a server in the popular multiplayer survival game “Rust”, where you can trade and learn about Bitcoin, have virtual meetups, and complete missions to earn sats.

Andrew Begin is Director of Marketing at Galoy, a company building Bitcoin-native banking infrastructure for organisations. We talk about Galoy’s Bitcoin projects including the open-source Blink Wallet, made popular through Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador. I learn about the vision for the product as well as its Stablesats functionality and how this work. We discuss the power of communities taking ownership of their financial infrastructure, and the opportunities for grassroots Bitcoin adoption in Africa and Latin America. Finally we talk briefly about permaculture and regenerative farming and the connections with Bitcoin thinking.‍