Videos

"We need Bitcoiners to fight for Bitcoin. If no one fights for Bitcoin, Bitcoin will very soon be dead."

Hodlonaut is a Bitcoin citizen journalist, the founder of the Citadel21 zine, the mind behind the 2019 Lightning Torch, and the man who told the simple truth about Craig Wright and then stood in the fire for five years over it. He is the author of the Capture series, an investigation into how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled, exercised, and defended.

Recorded August 2, 2026, in the middle of the ColdCard fallout. We get into his origin story, the Lightning Torch as an experiment in trust, the Craig Wright war and the stoicism that carried him through it, the Capture series and the "extractive" playbook used to shut down criticism, why every line of code must serve monetary sovereignty, and his return to fully supporting BIP 110. This is a conversation about the human layer of Bitcoin, and why we have to fight for it.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 A message on ColdCard
3:17 Cold open: "What is real?"
3:34 Welcome the Space Cat, on a brutal day
4:30 An apology for promoting ColdCard
6:15 The Capture series: a Bitcoin citizen journalist
11:24 A year away, and the shock of coming back
18:38 The node runner's stake: the canary in the mine
20:58 Citadel21, Surfer Jim & the culture
23:18 Finding Bitcoin in 2013: the Pirate Bay ethos
25:51 The birth of Hodlonaut & the Space Cat
27:56 The Lightning Torch: an experiment in trust
31:21 Craig Wright's letter, the bounty & the doxxing
34:38 Nine tweets, five years: telling the truth
35:24 Lightning today & "it feels like Ethereum"
38:54 What Craig Wright taught him: principles over outcome
41:05 Trust vs verify, and its limits
44:48 How Core's power was assembled: the priesthood
49:30 The Gavin/CIA flag & full-time Core
53:10 The armor: DEI & "extractive"
57:58 What makes a good Bitcoin coder
1:00:13 "Every line of code must serve monetary sovereignty"
1:04:43 [Ad] Stamp Seed · Firefish
1:06:30 The Matt Corallo quote & the inflation-bug rehire
1:10:32 How old was Satoshi?
1:13:30 BIP 110: judge the idea, not the messenger
1:21:53 We bypassed the social layer: fight for Bitcoin
1:24:24 The real fight is the ledger & the node-cost problem
1:28:50 Why he fully supports BIP 110 now
1:33:36 The technical merits: "node runners don't matter"
1:36:10 The three buckets & why people won't engage
1:44:08 Change capital vs "this is our shot"
1:47:07 If BIP 110 fails: the fallout
1:51:30 Ossification & the anti-spam team
1:54:36 Article 4 & his July accident
1:56:00 Closing: form your own conviction
2:01:46 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
Hodlonaut — Bitcoin citizen journalist, founder of Citadel21, originator of the Lightning Torch, author of the Capture series.
🐦 x.com/hodlonaut
🌐 Citadel21 → citadel21.com
📄 The Capture series → citadel21.com/the-network

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish: Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. 30% off first loan. firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX | code MATRIX
🔑 Stamp Seed: Hammer your seed into titanium. 21% OFF. stampseed.com | code MATRIX
🟠 Club Orange: The social network for the Bitcoin community. cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
₿ Bitcoin Well: Concierge OTC for $50k+ buys. infinite.bitcoinwell.com/get-qualified/bitcoinmatrix
🔐 Unchained: Collaborative multisig, IRAs, inheritance. 10% OFF. unchained.com/matrix | code MATRIX10
💎 River: Buy Bitcoin the right way. Up to $100 FREE. river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth: Ditch fiat health insurance. joincrowdhealth.com | code MATRIX
🛡️ Meanwhile: Bitcoin life insurance. meanwhile.bm | code YTPFYD
⛏️ Sazmining: Mine your own Bitcoin. $100 OFF any rig. deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix | code BTCMATRIX

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike → BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal → paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App → cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo → venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric → x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show → x.com/_bitcoinmatrix

⚠️ For entertainment and educational purposes only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice. DYOR.

239 69

Bitcoin secures over a trillion dollars in value, and it has no security team.

Luke de Wolf is a critical-infrastructure cybersecurity pro, co-founder of the BTC Helsinki conference, and author of Defending Bitcoin. He spent his career protecting the systems that run power grids and pipelines. Now he applies the same frameworks to Bitcoin, the world's first decentralized critical infrastructure. His argument: security isn't something you buy, it's something you do. Run your own node, hold your own keys, keep mining decentralized.

We get into the CIA triad and why availability matters most for Bitcoin, the two CVEs Core declined to fix, spam reframed as a DDoS attack rather than a node-cost problem, the real cost of running a full node over the next decade, and why Luke started out skeptical of BIP 110 before changing his mind. Recorded days before activation.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open: "What is real?"
0:21 Intro: $1 trillion, no security team
2:28 Calgary, oil & gas & control systems (OT vs IT)
6:12 The engineering mindset & the plane that ran out of fuel
9:00 People are the weakest link: Stuxnet & the USB stick
11:00 "There's always something you can do"
12:51 No juniors in security & defense in depth
18:47 How is Bitcoin critical infrastructure?
21:00 Mining, the grid & Finland's city heated by Bitcoin
23:00 The CIA triad: why availability is everything
24:45 Threats to the shared ledger: nodes, bugs & 51%
30:31 Ghash.io 2014 & normalization of deviance
34:55 Foundry, market pressure & why nodes are different
42:02 The real cost of running a node: now vs 2037
45:42 The $50k node problem for your grandkids?
47:03 Spam as a DDoS / availability attack on Bitcoin
53:00 [Ad] Firefish · Club Orange · Stamp Seed
55:00 The hidden tax: arbitrary data vs monetary transactions
58:27 "Spam is a red herring": the two CVEs
1:01:14 David Bailey, the Dashjr mixup & op_false op_if
1:07:00 SQL injection, the inscription envelope & the 4MB block
1:11:00 Core declined to fix it: ignoring vs accepting risk
1:13:39 A difference of opinion: feature or exploit?
1:16:31 The CVE scores: disputed & moderate severity
1:18:00 "Bitcoin isn't here for developers to be excited"
1:21:00 Six people in an office: the governance problem
1:23:10 BIP 110: Luke's reversal & the least-risky path
1:25:20 Cat & Mouse, Brink, Chaincode & rough consensus
1:28:48 Core isn't cypherpunks in a basement: grants & funding
1:32:39 Node runner incentives: hodlers, merchants & weight
1:41:56 Why node running is rarer, and more valuable, than owning
1:45:35 [Ad] Club Orange · Stamp Seed · Firefish
1:47:00 The 2017 flip: plebs stopping the miners
1:50:00 The decision tree: what if BIP 110 fails
1:54:29 BIP 148 vs BIP 110: why the game theory differs
1:59:36 The optimistic take: one group can't force consensus
2:06:20 The beach analogy: where consensus actually lives
2:08:42 Seahawks & "it's still only practice"
2:12:49 The taproot annex: money vs programmable money
2:16:46 Does BIP 110 have a failed state?
2:17:32 "Team Nothing Burger": 37 lines of code
2:20:42 The GPU fork endgame
2:22:05 "We know where you live": miners, letters & coercion
2:24:19 Act or don't act: there's no "we" in Bitcoin
2:31:32 Not toxic enough for either side: the book as proof of work
2:35:24 A Few Good Men & where to find Luke
2:38:34 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
Luke de Wolf, author of Defending Bitcoin: Industrial-Grade Cybersecurity for the Monetary Grid.
🌐 Book & free resources → defendingbitcoin.com. Also on Amazon.
🎟️ BTC Helsinki conference → btchel.com
🐦 Luke on X → x.com/lukedewolf

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish: Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. 30% off first loan. firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX | code MATRIX
🔑 Stamp Seed: Hammer your seed into titanium. 15% OFF. stampseed.com | code MATRIX
🟠 Club Orange: The social network for the Bitcoin community. cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
₿ Bitcoin Well: Concierge OTC for $50k+ buys. infinite.bitcoinwell.com/get-qualified/bitcoinmatrix
🟧 The Bitcoin Way: Self-custody & Plan B services, one-on-one. thebitcoinway.com
🔐 Unchained: Collaborative multisig, IRAs, inheritance. 10% OFF. unchained.com/matrix | code MATRIX10
💎 River: Buy Bitcoin the right way. Up to $100 FREE. river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth: Ditch fiat health insurance. joincrowdhealth.com | code MATRIX
🛡️ Meanwhile: Bitcoin life insurance. meanwhile.bm | code YTPFYD
⛏️ Sazmining: Mine your own Bitcoin. $100 OFF any rig. deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix | code BTCMATRIX

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike → BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal → paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App → cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo → venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box → The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric on X → x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show on X → x.com/_bitcoinmatrix

⚠️ For entertainment and educational purposes only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice. DYOR.

80 44

Before BIP-110: Bitcoin Mechanic on OCEAN, Mining & the Spam War | 2024

Two years before BIP-110, Bitcoin Mechanic was already fighting the fight the whole network is in now — over who Bitcoin actually belongs to.

A node runner's node runner, pseudonymous and relentless, working with the OCEAN pool, Mechanic has spent years making one argument louder than anyone: Bitcoin's rules belong to its users, not its industry. This June 2024 conversation — recorded around OCEAN's launch — is where that argument takes shape — the prequel to everything happening today.

Here's the ground he covers. What a miner actually is, and why block-template construction — not hash rate — is the real centralization risk. How four or five entities came to decide what goes in every block, with Bitmain quietly above 50%. FPPS and the "invisible commission" miners never see. Why OCEAN filtering spam isn't censorship but "the network defending itself." And the line that anchors all of it, the one he's still fighting for now: "Miners are employees of the network. The nodes are the boss."

He makes the case for shrinking blocks to 300kb, warns Bitcoin is "a CBDC waiting to happen" if node-running dies, calls the inscriptions exploit what it is, and traces his own path from touring musician to cypherpunk along the way.

Whether you're pro- or anti-BIP-110 today, this is where the argument started.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open — "What is real?"
0:24 Meet Bitcoin Mechanic — the bio & the punk that passed
2:36 Before Bitcoin: music & the death of the spark
5:52 Touring, Occupy, WikiLeaks & the pillars of digital freedom
8:45 The rabbit hole — Silk Road, Max Kaiser, Andreas
9:51 Medium of exchange → store of value
10:45 Self-custody from day one & the Mt. Gox warning signs
14:03 OCEAN & mining: hasher vs miner
15:04 What a miner really is — template construction
20:02 OCEAN's four template options — miners choose
21:01 The pools: Bitmain, FPPS & the "IMF" bailout loop
26:45 Why OCEAN — decentralizing template construction
29:25 FPPS as a scam — the invisible commission
38:46 Sponsors — Firefish · Club Orange · Stamp Seed
41:00 Ledger transparency & the finder's-fee analogy
42:30 Is it censorship? Data carrier size, Saylor's DID & the chess club
49:29 "Nodes are the boss" — miners are employees of the network
52:03 The cultural problem — "my node"
53:02 What's at risk for the node runner
56:41 The perfect storm — spam, ETFs & Core's failure on inscriptions
1:02:37 Where we are vs what Bitcoin could be
1:06:49 "To live by expert opinion is to abandon living"
1:10:18 Fixing what he can — miners, KYC & compliance
1:16:56 Shrink the block to 300kb
1:23:25 The path to a soft fork — the fork wars & the big-blocker history
1:29:18 Sponsors — Club Orange · Stamp Seed · Firefish
1:31:51 300kb blocks — are we headed for a civil war?
1:34:50 Could Bitcoin become a CBDC?
1:36:44 Saylor's paradox — the DID scheme & opcodes
1:40:43 Ethics vs profit — the OnlyFans & kidney analogies
1:41:35 How Bitcoin changed him — adversarial thinking & humble pie
1:45:47 Why "Grass Fed Bitcoin"?
1:48:03 Where to find Mechanic & OCEAN
1:49:39 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
Bitcoin Mechanic — Node runner, OCEAN contributor, spam-filter advocate
🐦 Mechanic on X: https://x.com/GrassFedBitcoin
🌐 OCEAN: https://ocean.xyz

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish — Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. Keys stay in multisig. Don't sell your Bitcoin, live off it. 30% off fees on your first loan. → https://firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX (code MATRIX)
🟠 Club Orange — Location-based social network for the Bitcoin community. → https://cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
🔑 Stamp Seed — Hammer your seed words into solid titanium. → https://stampseed.com (code MATRIX — 15% off)
₿ Bitcoin Well — Concierge OTC for $50k+ buys. → https://infinite.bitcoinwell.com/get-qualified/bitcoinmatrix
🟧 The Bitcoin Way — Self-custody & Plan B services. → https://thebitcoinway.com
🔐 Unchained — Collaborative multisig. → https://unchained.com/matrix (code MATRIX10 — 10% off)
💎 River — Up to $100 in free Bitcoin. → https://river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth — Ditch fiat health insurance. → https://joincrowdhealth.com (code MATRIX)
🛡️ Meanwhile — Bitcoin life insurance. → https://meanwhile.bm (code YTPFYD)
⛏️ Sazmining — Mine your own Bitcoin: own the hardware, 100% renewable, non-custodial. → https://deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix (code BTCMATRIX — $100 off any rig)

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike: BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal: https://paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App: cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box: The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 https://TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric on X: https://x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show on X: https://x.com/_bitcoinmatrix
🟣 Nostr: npub12tq9jxmt707gd5vnce3tqllpm67ktr0mqskcvy58qqa4d074pz9s4ukdcs

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: For entertainment and educational purposes only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice. Always do your own research.

152 52

Everyone's trying to fix the money. Scott Dedels says the money was never the root problem.

Founder of Block Rewards and author of The Age of Time, Scott makes an argument you won't find in other Bitcoin books: the clock is a technology. It was invented roughly 600 years ago — and somewhere along the way we forgot it was ever invented at all.

Mechanical time didn't just help us coordinate — it turned time into a commodity that could be priced, bought and sold. Fiat came downstream of that. The first central bank arrived about thirty years after the pendulum clock. We went from asking what is time to only ever asking what time is it.

We get into the Prague Orloj, Woodcock's 1944 essay, Saturn as civilization's invisible operating system, why cathedrals took 300 years, Gödel Escher Bach and the user illusion, AI and the information hyperstream — and Bitcoin as a ten-minute heartbeat no one controls.

"Most of the money problems we talk about with Bitcoin — they're not money problems. They're time problems."

You are neither the beginning nor the end. You are a link.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold Open
0:47 Meet Scott Dedels — The Age of Time
2:25 Why Write a Book That Isn't About Hard Money
6:48 Li Jiang: The Lantern as the First Link in the Chain
10:04 Prague, the Orloj & the Birth of Mechanical Time
12:50 "Minutes, Seconds, Hours — Entirely Made-Up Concepts"
15:21 What Life Was Like Before Coordinated Time
17:27 The Tyranny of the Clock: Woodcock, 1944
22:52 Coordination — and What Satoshi Actually Solved
24:59 From the Clock to Fiat: "Time Is Money"
28:00 Saturn, Kronos & the Watchmaker God
31:36 The Pocket Watch: Time Arrives on the Body
34:23 Saturday, Saturnalia & Devouring the Future
37:24 "Time Is Not Neutral. It Moves Toward Consumption."
41:24 Why Most People Would Worry Less About Money
43:20 Sponsors: Firefish • Club Orange • Stamp Seed
45:21 The Many Ways We Experience Time
49:48 Saturn Logos, the Cube & the Built Environment
52:08 The Matrix: A System Designed to Disappear
53:32 Cathedrals, Beauty & Civilizational Memory
1:00:19 State Capitols, Great Fires & the World's Fairs
1:06:03 Gödel Escher Bach & the User Illusion
1:09:50 Your Experience of Now Is Already on a Delay
1:12:27 A Plant-Medicine Detour: Perceiving Time Differently
1:19:53 Bitcoin as a Different Kind of External Clock
1:23:09 Reading: The Cathedral in Cyberspace
1:25:56 Notification Culture & Thinking as an Ancestor
1:31:24 Sponsors: Club Orange • Stamp Seed • Firefish
1:33:21 The Clock as an Attack Vector on Deep Time
1:35:33 AI, the Singularity & the Information Hyperstream
1:38:00 The Ten-Minute Heartbeat as a Critical Guardrail
1:41:32 Prediction Markets & Free Will
1:47:49 The Tattoo, Intuition & the Block Universe
1:54:48 Bitcoin, Certainty & the Future
1:56:50 The Great Returning & the Long Human
2:02:00 "Evaluated by Nodes Run by Descendants We Will Never Meet"
2:09:32 From "What Is Time" to "What Time Is It"
2:15:34 Where to Find Scott, the Book & Block Rewards
2:16:53 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
Scott Dedels — Founder/CEO, Block Rewards. Author of The Age of Time & The Dao of Bitcoin
🐦 https://x.com/LanternBitcoin
📖 https://theageoftime.com (autographed, pay in Bitcoin — also on Amazon)

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish — Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. Keys stay in 3-of-3 multisig. Don't sell your Bitcoin, live off it. 30% off fees on your first loan. → https://firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX (code MATRIX)
🟠 Club Orange — Location-based social network for the Bitcoin community. → https://cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
🔑 Stamp Seed — Hammer your seed words into solid titanium. → https://stampseed.com (code MATRIX — 15% off)
₿ Bitcoin Well — Concierge OTC for $50k+ buys. → https://infinite.bitcoinwell.com/get-qualified/bitcoinmatrix
🟧 The Bitcoin Way — Self-custody & Plan B services. → https://thebitcoinway.com
🔐 Unchained — Collaborative multisig. → https://unchained.com/matrix (code MATRIX10 — 10% off)
💎 River — Up to $100 in free Bitcoin. → https://river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth — Ditch fiat health insurance. → https://joincrowdhealth.com (code MATRIX)
🛡️ Meanwhile — Bitcoin life insurance. → https://meanwhile.bm (code YTPFYD)
⛏️ Sazmining — Mine your own Bitcoin: own the hardware, 100% renewable, non-custodial. → https://deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix (code BTCMATRIX — $100 off any rig)

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike: BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal: https://paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App: cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box: The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 https://TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric on X: https://x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show on X: https://x.com/_bitcoinmatrix
🟣 Nostr: npub12tq9jxmt707gd5vnce3tqllpm67ktr0mqskcvy58qqa4d074pz9s4ukdcs

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: For entertainment and educational purposes only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice. Always do your own research.

24 21

The Soul of Bitcoin Is on the Line: Inside the Fight Over BIP-110 | Bitcoin Mechanic

Everyone's watching the Bitcoin price. Bitcoin Mechanic is fighting over something bigger — who Bitcoin actually belongs to.

A node runner's node runner, pseudonymous and relentless, working with the OCEAN pool, Mechanic has spent years making one argument louder than anyone: Bitcoin's rules belong to its users, not its industry. Right now that argument has a name — BIP-110.

Here's the fight. Bitcoin Core ripped out a spam filter that had held since 2014, raising the OP_RETURN limit from 83 bytes to 100,000 — a thousand-fold jump in an 11-year-old rule. Node runners answered with BIP-110: a temporary, user-activated soft fork that puts the limit back, flag day about a month out. If it wins, the plebs still run Bitcoin. If it loses, Mechanic says, the industry does — and that's the beginning of the end.

We get into what winning and losing look like, the "intolerant minority" and the BIP-148 precedent, why Taproot became "90% trash," the OP_IF exploit, the state's Eye of Sauron, the "King Luke" / Linus Torvalds analogy, whether it's rushed — and the line that anchors it all: "Bitcoin is nothing but rules. 21 million is a rule. That's freedom."

No suits. No permission. Nodes are the boss. This is the soul of Bitcoin.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold Open + Meet Bitcoin Mechanic
1:03 Why He Likes BIP-110 — "Basic Maintenance"
2:09 What Winning Looks Like: Adoption & Activation
5:00 What Losing Looks Like: The Industry Ignores It
7:00 Where BIP-110 Gets Censored: Reddit, GitHub, the Mailing List
8:20 The Numbers: ~14,300 Nodes, ~15% of the Network
9:34 Coercibility & Capture: Are the Plebs Corruptible?
12:30 OCEAN, KYC & Why the Industry Is Captured by Design
16:00 The "Intolerant Minority" & the Populism Critique
18:30 Why He'd Run a URSF Against a Bad Fork — and Why They Won't
21:01 85% Not Running = a Non-Vote?
22:30 Taproot Is "90% Trash": The OP_IF Inscription Exploit
27:00 The Real Split: 68/32 Knots vs. Core
30:33 Sponsors: Firefish • Club Orange • Stamp Seed
32:59 Running Full Nodes: Spam Filters & Property Rights
38:00 What Core 30 Ripped Out — and What BIP-110 Restores
42:40 "21 Million Is a Rule. That's Freedom."
47:00 Distributed Authoritarianism & the Recalcitrant Teenager
48:30 "Get Out of the Way of the Immune System"
50:48 Core 30 as the High-School Bully
52:16 Does BIP-110 Failing Mean the Death of Decentralization?
54:31 The Wile E. Coyote Cliff: "Just a Cryptocurrency"
59:00 The State's Eye of Sauron
1:09:37 Sponsors: Club Orange • Stamp Seed • Firefish
1:12:37 Is BIP-110 Rushed? The 12-Month Temporary Design
1:18:47 An Inauthentic Movement?
1:20:41 "King Luke" & the Linus Torvalds BDFL Analogy
1:24:49 Prune Nodes, the Tenth Man & Rage-Quitting
1:29:06 Will Miners Take Credit at the Last Minute?
1:33:00 Holding the Line — Closing Thoughts
1:37:13 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
Bitcoin Mechanic — Node runner, OCEAN contributor, BIP-110 advocate
🐦 Mechanic on X: https://x.com/GrassFedBitcoin
🌐 OCEAN: https://ocean.xyz

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish — Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. Keys stay in 3-of-3 multisig. Don't sell your Bitcoin, live off it. 30% off fees on your first loan. → https://firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX (code MATRIX)
🟠 Club Orange — Location-based social network for the Bitcoin community. → https://cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
🔑 Stamp Seed — Hammer your seed words into solid titanium. → https://stampseed.com (code MATRIX — 15% off)
₿ Bitcoin Well — Concierge OTC for $50k+ buys. → https://infinite.bitcoinwell.com/get-qualified/bitcoinmatrix
🟧 The Bitcoin Way — Self-custody & Plan B services. → https://thebitcoinway.com
🔐 Unchained — Collaborative multisig. → https://unchained.com/matrix (code MATRIX10 — 10% off)
💎 River — Up to $100 in free Bitcoin. → https://river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth — Ditch fiat health insurance. → https://joincrowdhealth.com (code MATRIX)
🛡️ Meanwhile — Bitcoin life insurance. → https://meanwhile.bm (code YTPFYD)
⛏️ Sazmining — Mine your own Bitcoin: own the hardware, 100% renewable, non-custodial. → https://deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix (code BTCMATRIX — $100 off any rig)

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike: BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal: https://paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App: cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box: The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 https://TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric on X: https://x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show on X: https://x.com/_bitcoinmatrix
🟣 Nostr: npub12tq9jxmt707gd5vnce3tqllpm67ktr0mqskcvy58qqa4d074pz9s4ukdcs

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: For entertainment and educational purposes only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice. Always do your own research.

337 150

The Decentralized Money Printer: Why You Get Better Bitcoin When You Mine It | Kent Halliburton, Sazmining

Everyone tells you to buy Bitcoin. Kent Halliburton — CEO and co-founder of Sazmining — thinks that's the weaker path. From 2009 to 2013, Bitcoin was acquired by mining: you ran a node, flipped a toggle, minted your own coins. Then the ASIC and Coinbase arrived in 2013, the timeline split, and the community became buyers — a choice Kent argues is the root of the centralization problems we're still untangling.

His thesis: Bitcoin isn't one zero-to-one innovation, it's two. The second is a decentralized money printer — with hardware, electricity, and an internet connection, anyone, anywhere, can print their own Bitcoin. He calls it hash punk. We get into wild sats, the real math behind "better Bitcoin," miner vs. hasher, nation-states mining for sanctions immunity, the right to transact, and raising a family across three continents.

No exchange. No custodian. No permission. This is Bitcoin against the machine.

▶️ Sazmining: https://deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix — code BTCMATRIX for $100 off any rig

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 "You Get Better Bitcoin When You Mine It" (Cold Open)
1:41 Meet Kent Halliburton & Sazmining
2:23 Cranberry Farms & a Low-Time-Preference Childhood
9:35 Solar, Peak Oil & His First Taste of Sovereignty
12:35 Why Rooftop Solar Is Secretly Bitcoin Mining
15:34 The Brutal Logistics of Going Solar
17:44 The Walkabout: Around the World With No Plan
20:30 Sponsors: Firefish • Club Orange
21:58 Finding Bitcoin in the Sacred Valley (2015)
23:13 What the Unbanked World Taught Him
28:14 The Steem Conference & the Shitcoin Detour
29:34 From Shitcoins to "Coinbase for Mining"
33:59 Why Mine Instead of Just Buy?
34:12 Wild Sats: Bitcoin Straight Off the Protocol
35:42 How Mining With Sazmining Actually Works
37:16 Which Rig? What It Costs to Start ($5K)
38:00 How Sazmining Makes Money (And Builds Trust)
41:03 The Tax Write-Off Fueling US Demand
43:09 The Math: A 12% Discount on Every Sat
46:11 The Miner's Trilemma: Buy When It Hurts
48:26 The "Can't Pay Your Bill?" Hashrate Toggle
51:16 Is AI Killing Bitcoin Mining?
53:18 Nation-States Are Mining for Sanctions Immunity
56:00 Mining the Texas Grid & a Wind Farm
58:39 The 2013 Split That Broke Bitcoin Mining
1:01:16 Centralization, Bitmain & the Fiat Miners
1:04:33 Are You a Miner — or Just a Hasher?
1:09:35 Wild vs. Custodial: The Coin No One Touches
1:11:04 Circular Economy & the Gandhi Playbook
1:14:02 The Scariest Bear Market in Hashrate
1:16:11 Life in the High Amazon
1:19:39 Sponsors: Club Orange • Firefish
1:21:26 Seeing Bitcoin Clearly From the Outside
1:25:06 The Right to Transact Should Be a Human Right
1:28:02 Orange-Pilling His Wife (& Greta Thunberg?)
1:31:24 Rage Against the Machine: Parenting & Angst
1:36:45 Where to Find Kent + $100 Off Your Rig
1:38:43 Bitcoin Against the Machine: Hash Punk
1:40:39 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
Kent Halliburton — CEO & Co-Founder, Sazmining
🌐 https://sazmining.com
🐦 Sazmining on X: https://x.com/sazmining
🐦 Kent on X: https://x.com/khalliburton

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
⛏️ Sazmining — Own the machine that makes it. Mine your own Bitcoin: own the hardware, 100% renewable, non-custodial, sats to your wallet. → https://deals.sazmining.com/bitcoinmatrix (code BTCMATRIX — $100 off any rig)
🐟 Firefish — Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. Keys stay in 3-of-3 multisig. Don't sell your Bitcoin, live off it. → https://firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX (code MATRIX)
🔑 Stamp Seed — Hammer your seed words into solid titanium. → https://stampseed.com (code MATRIX — 15% off)
🟠 Club Orange — Location-based social network for the Bitcoin community. → https://cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
₿ Bitcoin Well — Concierge OTC for $50k+ Bitcoin buys. Global, by application. → https://infinite.bitcoinwell.com/get-qualified/bitcoinmatrix
🟧 The Bitcoin Way — Bitcoin, cybersecurity & Plan B services. → https://thebitcoinway.com
🔐 Unchained — Collaborative multisig, Bitcoin-only since 2016. → https://unchained.com/matrix (code MATRIX10 — 10% off)
💎 River — Up to $100 in free Bitcoin. → https://river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth — Ditch fiat health insurance. → https://joincrowdhealth.com (code MATRIX)
🛡️ Meanwhile — The world's first Bitcoin life insurance. → https://meanwhile.bm (code YTPFYD)

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike: BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal: https://paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App: cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box: The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 https://TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric on X: https://x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show on X: https://x.com/_bitcoinmatrix
🟣 Nostr: npub12tq9jxmt707gd5vnce3tqllpm67ktr0mqskcvy58qqa4d074pz9s4ukdcs

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: For entertainment and educational purposes only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice. Always do your own research.

#Bitcoin #BitcoinMining #HashPunk #Sazmining #WildSats #BitcoinPodcast #TheBitcoinMatrix

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CLIP from Episode #279 of The Bitcoin Matrix with Matt Kratter, founder of Bitcoin University.

Matt makes the case that BIP-110 is Bitcoin's last stand, why the spam fight matters, and why Bitcoin is not guaranteed to survive by math alone. He is putting his own Bitcoin on the line, renting hashrate from cold storage to signal for the soft fork.

In this clip:
- "This is the last stand. You can kill Bitcoin."
- The failure case is already live in Ethereum: no one runs nodes, and Bitcoin is the only network with plebs running nodes. That is why it is decentralized.
- Skin in the game: renting hashrate and spending his own Bitcoin to get miners to signal BIP-110.
- "It is the minority that makes history that's willing to put their reputations and their money on the line. It worked with SegWit. It'll work again."

🎧 Watch the full episode #279: youtube.com/watch?v=xsOjcw6APfM

🎙️ GUEST
Matt Kratter — Founder, Bitcoin University
X: @mattkratter

📌 THE BITCOIN MATRIX
Where Critical Thinkers Meet.
Host: Cedric Youngelman
🐦 Show: x.com/_BitcoinMatrix
🐦 Cedric: x.com/CedYoungelman
🌐 thebitcoinmatrix.com

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🔑 Stamp Seed — hammer your seed into titanium. 15% OFF stampseed.com | code MATRIX
🐟 Firefish — non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX | code MATRIX
🟠 Club Orange — cluborange.org/matrix-podcast

⚠️ DISCLAIMER
The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing discussed constitutes financial, legal, or investment advice. Always do your own research. The views expressed are the host's and guests' own opinions.

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Buy a hardware wallet and it ships with a slip of paper to write your seed words on. Gel ink, coated paper, fading over time, fire, water — paper is the weakest link in your entire Bitcoin stack. James Caruso, co-founder and VP of Stamp Seed, hammers those words into solid titanium instead.

This is one of the most unlikely origin stories in Bitcoin: how ImpressArt — a 70-year-old metal-stamping company descended from a 1952 World War II surplus tool shop — accidentally became one of the most trusted cold-storage backups in the space, discovered through nothing but search-term data. James walks through orange-pilling himself to write the product listing, his arc from get-rich-quick Robinhood trader to "it could drop 40% and I'm just buying more" conviction, why titanium beats steel and aluminum, exactly what's in the kit, single-sig vs. multisig, inheritance, and the most creative hiding spot we've ever heard — a seed plate disguised as a rock, sunk in a backyard pond.

No batteries. No firmware. No third-party trust. Just a titanium-sized post-it.

▶️ Stamp Seed: https://stampseed.com — code MATRIX for 15% off

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 "Paper Is Where Bitcoin Dies" (cold open)
1:21 Meet James Caruso & Stamp Seed
2:27 How a Metal-Stamping Company Found Bitcoin
3:09 Combing the Search Terms — Bitcoin Starts Showing Up
6:05 Convincing the Bosses & the First Listing
8:33 Orange-Pilling Himself + the First Sale
11:09 His First Crypto Conference & Learning Multisig
15:36 NK Tools → ImpressArt → Stamp Seed (1952 to Today)
17:33 Sponsors: Firefish • Stamp Seed • Club Orange
19:30 From Side Project to Real Brand
21:21 From Robinhood Trader to Bitcoin Conviction
25:07 "I Used to Sell on the Way Down — Scared"
32:04 Why Titanium? The Engineering Case
34:15 What's Actually in the Box (Kit Walkthrough)
37:33 The Brass Hammer & Why It Matters
38:24 Sponsors: Stamp Seed • Club Orange • Firefish
40:42 Why Paper Fails: Gel Pens, Coatings, Fading Ink
42:28 The Resin Rock in the Pond (Creative Cold Storage)
43:56 Single-Sig vs. Multisig & Inheritance
44:56 How People Mess Up (and How to Fix It)
47:00 No Batteries, No Firmware, No Third-Party Trust
49:22 Secure Your Stack Now — Parting Words
50:30 Where to Find James & Stamp Seed
53:20 Outro

🎙️ GUEST
James Caruso — Co-Founder & VP, Stamp Seed
🌐 https://stampseed.com
🐦 Stamp Seed on X: https://x.com/stamp_seed
🐦 James on X: https://x.com/hammerseed21

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish — Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. Your keys stay in 3-of-3 multisig. Don't sell your Bitcoin, live off it. → https://firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX (code MATRIX)
🔑 Stamp Seed — Hammer your seed words into solid titanium. Fire-resistant to 3,000°F. → https://stampseed.com (code MATRIX — 15% off)
🟠 Club Orange — The location-based social network for the Bitcoin community. → https://cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
🔐 Unchained — Collaborative multisig, Bitcoin-only since 2016. → https://unchained.com/matrix (code MATRIX10 — 10% off)
💎 River — Buy Bitcoin the right way. Up to $100 in free Bitcoin. → https://river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth — Ditch fiat health insurance. → https://joincrowdhealth.com (code MATRIX)
🛡️ Meanwhile — The world's first Bitcoin life insurance. → https://meanwhile.bm (code YTPFYD)

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike: BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal: https://paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App: cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo: https://venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box: The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 https://TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric on X: https://x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show on X: https://x.com/_bitcoinmatrix

🟣 Nostr: npub12tq9jxmt707gd5vnce3tqllpm67ktr0mqskcvy58qqa4d074pz9s4ukdcs

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: For entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing here is financial, legal, or investment advice. Always do your own research.
#Bitcoin #SelfCustody #ColdStorage #StampSeed #SeedPhrase #BitcoinSecurity #Multisig #HardwareWallet #BitcoinPodcast #TheBitcoinMatrix

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"Bitcoin is a rights-protection entity."

Tomer Strolight returns for his ninth visit — and reads four of his own essays start to finish, with conversation in between: Bitcoin Is More, Living With AI, AI Built to Survive, and This Is Not the End.

We get into why Bitcoin isn't a price but a superstate no government on earth can reach — even as Iran floats a Bitcoin toll in the middle of a war — why self-custody is the whole point, and how inflation's slow squeeze is finally being felt by everyone. Then it turns: three short stories about living with AI, and what we surrender when we let a machine do our thinking for us.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
1:36 📖 Tomer reads "Bitcoin Is More"
13:30 Welcome back — Tomer's 9th visit
13:51 Iran's Bitcoin toll & the bear-market mood
15:09 Freedom isn't free
16:49 Bitcoin is a superstate
18:43 Not a price — a rights-protection entity
19:53 The lethargy question
22:49 The FUD doesn't stick anymore
24:02 Calmer waters — dividend stocks, not existential fear
25:38 The toll booth, depoliticized
28:39 "Bitcoin is for enemies"
29:30 Outside the control of any state
31:17 Russia, SWIFT & the weaponized dollar
32:50 Currency should not be a weapon
33:35 We form a sub-state
34:14 Will civilization actually self-custody?
37:06 The whole point is self-custody
40:47 Property you own by knowing a secret
41:33 IBIT, pensions & "fired for AI"
42:20 AI is early — the internet analogy
44:20 The negative effects of AI
45:32 The leaders of AI — Altman vs Musk
48:43 Not superintelligence — spam, hallucination, slop
49:42 Outlook on superintelligence
50:38 Sponsor break
52:36 Does AI have its own path? (Grok this morning)
54:16 Sycophantic AI — it's not stealing your ideas
55:33 A consciousness that copies itself
57:01 📖 Tomer reads "Living With AI"
1:03:45 "Tuesdays with Tomer"
1:05:21 Are people using AI to think for them?
1:08:54 Slop — does it break the internet?
1:10:52 Inflation — the nickel & the Snickers bar
1:13:55 Half a hamburger — getting poorer faster
1:16:42 📖 Tomer reads "AI Built to Survive"
1:20:57 How lonely AI must be
1:22:14 Ancient AI & the pyramids
1:24:06 We're kind of lost
1:26:23 Kids more isolated than ever
1:29:49 Rock & roll, the 90s & why music went slop
1:32:00 Sponsor break
1:33:53 One more piece — patience for AI vs people
1:37:39 📖 Tomer reads "This Is Not the End"
1:41:52 Outro

Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

🎙️ GUEST
Tomer Strolight — Bitcoin philosopher, author & essayist
Tomer on X → x.com/TomerStrolight

💰 SPONSORS & DISCOUNTS
🐟 Firefish — Don't sell your Bitcoin. Live off it. Non-custodial Bitcoin-backed loans. Your keys stay in 3-of-3 multisig. Rehypothecation is cryptographically impossible. $160M+ facilitated. 27,000+ users across 70 countries. firefish.io/?ref=MATRIX | code MATRIX
🔑 Stamp Seed — Between 3-6 million Bitcoin are lost forever. Most of it paper. Hammer your seed words into solid titanium — fire-resistant to 3,000°F. 15% OFF stampseed.com | code MATRIX
🟠 Club Orange — The location-based social network built for the Bitcoin community. Find Bitcoiners, meetups, and merchants near you. cluborange.org/matrix-podcast
🔐 Unchained — 90,000+ BTC secured in collaborative multisig since 2016. Bitcoin-only. Never lent out a sat. IRAs, loans, inheritance planning. 10% OFF unchained.com/matrix | code MATRIX10
💎 River — Buy Bitcoin the right way. Up to $100 FREE Bitcoin. river.com/matrix
🏥 CrowdHealth — Ditch your fiat health insurance like my family did. Join us at CrowdHealth. joincrowdhealth.com | code MATRIX
🛡️ Meanwhile — The world's first Bitcoin life insurance policy. Premiums and payouts in Bitcoin. meanwhile.bm | code YTPFYD

🙏 SUPPORT THE SHOW
⚡ Strike → BitcoinMatrix@strike.me
💵 PayPal → paypal.biz/BitcoinMatrix
💚 Cash App → cash.app/$BitcoinMatrix
💜 Venmo → venmo.com/u/bitcoinmatrix
📬 PO Box → The Bitcoin Matrix, P.O. Box 18056, Sarasota, FL 34231

📱 FOLLOW
🌐 TheBitcoinMatrix.com
🐦 Cedric → x.com/cedyoungelman
🐦 Show → x.com/_bitcoinmatrix
🟣 Nostr → npub12tq9jxmt707gd5vnce3tqllpm67ktr0mqskcvy58qqa4d074pz9s4ukdcs

⚠️ DISCLAIMER
The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing discussed constitutes financial, legal, or investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own research. The views expressed are the host's and guests' own opinions and do not constitute any offer, solicitation, or guarantee of any kind. The viewer assumes all responsibility for any actions taken based on this content.

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