What is the Bitcoin maximalist reaction to the fact that the European Union wants all citizens to declare all the coins they hold in self-custody? The boating accident? A casual HFSP in between the steak lunch and the steak dinner? How about acknowledging that you were wrong and the purity virtue signaling and the NGU greed kept millions of people away from privacy projects and DeFi and now every user who humbly stacked sats on the most compliant podcaster-endorsed KYC exchange out there and withdrew to the hardware wallet they bought under their name using their home or office address is just one bureaucratic LLM query away from becoming a criminal if he doesn’t disclose every little UTXO? Bitcoin has no untraceable kind of privacy. Your LSP can leak all the data about your activity to the government. Your favorite custodial Lightning wallet can rug you on demand. Running your own Lightning node will most likely make you lose a lot of money and doesn’t scale anyway. While you were jerking off to price charts, the regulators caught up. Now they want your name and your wallet addresses on a list that will definitely get leaked in the future. No privacy, no hope for the future, your hard-earned coins will most likely enrich some EU bureaucrat. You got duped, anon. Thank you for playing!

Total Bitcoin Takeover podcast Season 16 downloads (up until December 5th 2025): 471271 Almost half a million! Thank you all for listening!

Arbitrary data (aka “spam”) is the red herring The goal of Knots is to create a precedent for transaction censorship & UTXO confiscation Why? Because institutional investors, some of which back Ocean pool, consider Satoshi’s coins an existential risk and want to freeze his BTC to effectively prevent him from ever selling. Some of the quantum resistance debates aim for the same goal. But they have lesser credibility due to the unconvincing evidence that quantum computers will be able to crack elliptic curve digital signatures anytime soon. Follow the money.

The block size wars were a mistake All of this development energy should have taken place on one Bitcoin

Interesting altcoins that test + refine ideas first proposed for Bitcoin: Zcash: Zerocash, soft fork proposed for BTC in 2014 Litecoin: MimbleWimble Extension Block, soft fork proposed by Andrew Poelstra for BTC in 2016 Monero: ring signatures, Confidential Transactions, Dandelion++, Bulletproofs, all of which were proposed individually for Bitcoin Decred: CoinJoin by default, smaller blocks & stable Lightning Network Bitcoin Cash: dynamic block size, OP_CAT + a bunch of restored OP codes from the Satoshi era (AND, OR, XOR, DIV, MOD, MUL, LSHIFT, RSHIFT) What else?

Satoshi Nakamoto gave everyone the blueprint to create unstoppable money. Some say that he created the last form of money we’ll ever need, but he also supported the creation of BitNames (later Namecoin). The only kind of maximalist Satoshi proved himself to be is Proof of Work and merged mining maxi. He didn’t care that much about Austrian economics and the “everything divided by 21 million coins” meme. Satoshi was a cypherpunk who gladly supported different use cases for his tech, but wanted a whole galaxy of coins to get secures by the same miners.

Remember last year’s 7-hour interview with Amir Taaki? Well, this year he has booked the entire new year’s eve 😂 So we might just break every record! Got no plans for December 31st 2025? Join our livestream!

It’s more ethical to support interesting altcoins that may push Bitcoin to improve than to put on a suit and shake hands with bankers. One is evolutionary and cypherpunk. The other is regressive and defeatist.

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Bitcoin Takeover

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Over the last week I’ve spoken with 3 Bitcoin devs who are migrating part of their work to Zcash Not because Zcash pays them – they’re frustrated by the shitty dev culture where they must constantly ask for permission to build stuff One is a Lightning dev, one is a Starkware dev, another one is a Counterparty/Ordinal dev and artist. Not everyone wants to take part in the “Knotzi vs Coretard” debate. The revenge chain scenario is very real.

On Bitcoin Takeover podcast, I’ve interviewed 3 of the people sitting at this dinner table (Sergio Lerner, Zooko & @Peter Todd) And over the next couple of months I think I will have 3 more (this is a picture from 2014, taken by Matthew D. Green at Princeton University)

I told you Zcash is the revenge chain against the current mental derangement in Bitcoin. Just like Ethereum was the revenge chain for builders who were fed up with the block size war in 2016-2017. To many investors, Bitcoin is not sound money digital energy banana. It’s a tech stock which promises to accomplish the goal outlined in the whitepaper: peer to peer electronic cash. If the goalpost shifts from “let’s make bitcoin the ultimate form of money, with contracts, fungibility & quantum resistance” to “Bitcoin is already perfect, let’s fight about jpeg inscriptions instead”, investors will notice and try to minimize their exposure to risk. So far, Ocean mining has been the most destructive actor in Bitcoin since Craig Wright. The hatred, infighting & division they caused will take years to heal. Meanwhile, Zcash is just building stuff. It’s technologically interesting, way ahead of its time, but still familiar thanks to its Bitcoin roots. Zcash is bringing devs on board to work on privacy that scales to billions of people (Tachyon). Zcash is working on shielded assets (imagine stablecoins that are truly censorship resistant because you cannot know who sent them, to whom, and in which amount). Zcash is the Bitcoin we were promised more than a decade ago, refined and improved over the years. While Bitcoin is dangerously stagnant, Zcash is evolving. And investors love throwing their money at something that’s vibrant and promising. Haters will point out that Zcash was dead until a few months ago. Well, that’s also when bitcoiners lost the plot. Think about it. Also, some of the same things that were being said about Bitcoin in 2013 (that it’s persistent, mathematically sound & usable as both a store of value and a medium of exchange) can be said about Zcash too. There’s a lot of virtue in not giving up… and this industry provides more incentives for developers to pivot to new VC-funded projects. But the Zcash team has been consistent over the last 9 years and honestly deserves this influx of users & developers. It’s fine to be in denial when confronted by new information. But don’t let any ideology blind you. In 2017, it was infighting bitcoiners who guaranteed Ethereum’s status as the number 2 coin. Eight years later, some of the same names are causing an exodus to Zcash. There’s also a narrative shift that’s going on, with privacy (something bitcoiners of today fear) becoming more important in everyday life. A decade ago, financial privacy was for paranoid nerds. Today, it’s what billions of CBDC forced adopters need. Embrace the change, or else stay zidelined and bitter. Either way, you can’t say nobody tried to explain to you what’s happening.

> endorse Trump to put an end to Operation Chokepoint 2.0 > Trump gets elected, says he will stop lawfare & let crypto in the USA thrive > start Bitcoin treasury companies, get rekt by the market > Blame Chokepoint 3.0

Up until last year I was really upset that I never get invited to any of the Bitcoin Magazine conferences Not in Nashville/Vegas, not in Amsterdam, not in Abu Dhabi I used to write for BM, currently run one of the most popular podcasts & also produced competing magazines Ironically, now I get invited to Ethereum conferences despite holding no ETH and not doing anything relevant for their community 🤷🏻‍♂️ But now I also understand the value of being counterculture and not selling out to the suits. While brushing shoulders with politicians and corporate CEOs can be educational, I feel more at home among idealistic nerds who want to change the world with their code. Punk rock is not played in every large expo hall. And I like punk rock quite a lot.

Steve Bannon to Jeffrey Epstein, about people evading taxes with bitcoin: “NSA has ‘em”

Bitcoin is a tech stock, whether you like it or not. Not a digital commodity galaxy brain store of value sound money whatever Most people buy it because they hope it becomes the money of the future. Something that you can use for all payments. And when it drifts away so much from this expected outcome, don’t be surprised that these people sell their bitcoin and look for something else that looks promising. The US dollar is still king, cash still rules everything around us, and Bitcoin no longer poses a threat (or even competes) with the status quo.

Someone should do a Taylor Swift “Blank Space” parody Except that it’s from the point of view of Matthew Krater and the chorus goes “I got a Blank Slate, Coretard and I’ll write your name”.

2013 was the most important year in Bitcoin history It’s when traditional finance guys came up with “Bitcoin 2.0” to lay the foundations of DeFi (Counterparty, Mastercoin, Ethereum) It’s also when cypherpunks created Zerocoin & Zerocash to improve Bitcoin’s privacy with zero knowledge proofs The sad part is that Bitcoin itself didn’t benefit too much from this due to the community’s conservatism. The happy part is that today we have Ethereum + Solana for the contracts/DeFi side and Zcash for the ZK privacy side.

What I like about altcoins is their ability to do what Bitcoin cannot and test ideas that are too experimental for Bitcoin. Privacy, contracts, scalability, anything that is useful to the entire open source money world. What I don’t like about altcoins is arrogance, zero sum thinking, stagnation & virtue signaling. You were not the first one to hit the market, you don’t have the largest community of users, your coin is not the most accepted for payments of them all, and it most likely underperforms Bitcoin for bear market saving. Act like it, build cool stuff to compete for users and market share. Push the research beyond the known boundaries. Refine the user experience. Give people something so cool they didn’t know they wanted it. But don’t stagnate and simply add more years under the belt.

You should really listen to this Time stamps in the description https://www.youtube.com/live/nWeTcQHyryw