Popular Episodes

Today I talk with Andy, Dash, and Mike from Tokyo Citadel. The group’s goal is is to move bitcoin adoption, use and knowledge forward in Tokyo. They run a Bitcoin podcast and organise regular meetups and events. In this episode we discuss Bitcoin in Japan and its perceptions by the public, as well as the bitcoin development and innovation that is taking place and what the current economic & political landscape is.

I talk with Jimmy Djabali of Swiss Bitcoin Pay, an app for easily accepting Bitcoin payments at point of sale. This is an important area of development, and unfortunately there are still not that many solutions out there for making accepting Bitcoin as a business easy. Swiss Bitcoin Pay seeks to fix this with a simple interface that is suitable for shops, restaurants, or any kind of customer-facing business.Jimmy shares how the project came about and his vision for it, as well as the Bitcoin merchant situation in Switzerland including the city of Lugano which has over 300 merchants accepting Bitcoin already. 

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.

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.

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.