Ideologies are great for as long as they are grounded in facts and serve an achievable goal Toxic bitcoin maximalism was mostly a reaction to the 2017 forks, to make sure that the original chain remains known as “Bitcoin” and promising tech like Lightning gets a chance to compete Almost a decade later, Bitcoin is less relevant for payments and the Lightning network is still a small-scale experiment. Other digital money networks emerged and took 40% of what used to be Bitcoin’s market. There used to be a time when everything was a reaction to Bitcoin or an attempt to improve Bitcoin’s design. Today we have projects that don’t care about Bitcoin at all and serve entirely different use cases. You can’t possibly live in complete ignorance like it’s still 2017 and a whole decade of market information doesn’t exist. Update your worldview, adapt to the new conditions. Understand that there are people who don’t give a shit about Bitcoin, but use other blockchains instead. Don’t be afraid of learning. Because if you are and you convince all your friends that ignorance is the way, that’s how Bitcoin keeps on losing market share and relevance. Adapt or die.

Zcash is private Bitcoin Litecoin is faster Bitcoin Kaspa is scalable Bitcoin Decred is governance Bitcoin Bitcoin Cash is big block Bitcoin Ethereum is smart contract Bitcoin Quantus is quantum resistant Bitcoin Monero is reactionary fungible Bitcoin “Bitcoin” is not just a ticker. “Bitcoin” is not just one network. Bitcoin is the name of a movement, the symbol of a revolution, and the ecash that actually changed the world.

Someone who started DCAing into bitcoin in October 2021 and never sold Hasn’t made any profits, didn’t beat inflation, wasn’t able to store any value Would be much better off DCAing into gold or the S&P500 Stop the store of value psyop. Bitcoin’s value proposition is freedom of transactions and unconfiscatable money. The price discovery is just a side effect.

For the first time ever, I am not convinced that Bitcoin will return to its previous all-time high The reason is simple: there is no bullish narrative Store of value/digital gold/reserve asset? It all imploded once institutions got cold feet because of quantum computing risks Freedom money? The project didn’t undergo any upgrades to scale better and receive better privacy. You can only get high throughput & anonymity on ruggable federations, mints & other centralized services. Unconfiscatable wealth? Not so long ago, we witnessed unironic conversations about freezing dust UTXOs. Some people also talk about freezing Satoshi’s coins in the post-quantum future. Both are dangerous precedents that threaten the network’s main value proposition. Permissionless money? There’s an ongoing debate about gatekeeping certain transaction types which an army of religious zealots describes as “spam”. Also, the BitVM builders are already frowned upon for bringing “shitcoin tech” to Bitcoin and filling the block space in unorthodox ways. One coin to rule them all? The current Bitcoin maintainers are against adding anything controversial to Bitcoin. CTV, CSFS, CAT, GSR, BIP300 will probably never happen for as long as there is one popular voice that opposes activation. Which only lends legitimacy to altcoins trying the tech. Beautiful stories about the noble and pure money system that fights against central banking? The Epstein files have effectively tainted the reputation of Bitcoin in the eyes of many normies. Biggest devs were under MIT’s paycheck, some folks even visited Epstein’s island in a time that was crucial for the project’s development. Reputations were destroyed, hopes were broken, new conspiracies emerged. The cyber hornet hivemind that brings peace, unity & laser eyes? The Bitcoin community has never been more divided and hostile – even to people who have been around for many years and brought significant contributions to the project. The purity tests have become so ridiculous that any sane person would purposely fail them. Retail grassroots adoption? People still remember FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, and the other failures of the previous cycle. Lots of money was lost, harsh lessons were learned, the likeliness of having these people embrace decentralized internet money is lower than ever. Hedge against inflation? Oh please, Tether has never been more popular world wide. To third world countries, USDT is the inflation hedge and the most desired medium of exchange. Even in the US the stablecoins are hotter than Bitcoin. The great power grid stabilizer? US miners are pivoting to AI because it pays better. Chinese ones are doing it too. Proof of Work mining is becoming less popular. The uncorrelated asset to protect you and your family from a total financial collapse? Oh please, Bitcoin trades like a tech stock. People invest in it because they hope it will one day fulfill its potential as a global digital cash. So when the stock market crashes, Bitcoin follows the trend. Will Bitcoin survive the reward halvings with empty blocks? Are people willing to pay $100 per transaction? There is still a looming uncertainty concerning these situations. Mostly because a bunch of loud gatekeepers shunned away all experiments that could turn into valuable use cases. Also remember: with the exception of last year’s bubble, every massive bull market has been precedes by a notable network upgrade. Bitcoin needs a new philosophy which embraces innovation in cryptography and computer science, nurtures experimentation & encourages builders to stick around. Arrogant close mindedness won’t work again this time.

Okay so a Satoshi-era wallet transferred 9k BTC to Coinbase Good for him, made a fortune just by being patient But the most important question is: why sell now? Did the OG whale lose faith in the project? Because if he still hoped Bitcoin was the future of money, he’d sell 100 for living expenses and keep the rest for another decade or so. Or maybe he’s dying and doesn’t have a good inheritance plan? Bottom line: when the guys who believed in bitcoin when the price was 0 are exiting, it’s never a good sign. These are the idealists who supported the project since its inception.

A fork of Bitchat but it’s called bitch at

Quantum-resistant signatures are much larger in size than ECDSA Larger signatures -> more block space taken up by a single transaction -> higher transaction fees Hot take: a quantum upgrade for Bitcoin should be accompanied by a block size increase

Over the last 22 months, I’ve recorded more than 100 Bitcoin Takeover podcast episodes in this tiny apartment room It feels bittersweet to leave it empty and unrecognizable But I got evicted and tonight I’ve seen it for the last time Farewell, old desk! New adventures await

Vik Sharma didn’t join the show only to brag about the great Zcash integration and the Monero community’s reactions: he also presented a demo of the Lightning network feature, which is bound to get added to Cake Wallet within weeks. On top of Bitcoin privacy tools such as Silent Payments and PayJoin, now users of Cake Wallet will also be able to move their BTC to the second layer in order to send transactions that confirm faster and get better privacy. This would make Cake the only multi-coin wallet which adds Lightning support, as all the existing ones are BTC-only (unless you count L-BTC or R-BTC as altcoins).

Bitcoin Takeover

S17 E6: Vik Sharma on Ending Wars Between Privacy Coins - Bitcoin Takeover

Cake Wallet CEO Vik Sharma joins the show in order to talk about integrating Zcash and adding support for the Lightning network.

I think Tone Vays makes an interesting point about the Knots faction: they’re broke lol I mean, what kind of person complains about spending $100 extra on a hard drive and expects new software to run flawlessly on a Raspberry Pi from 7 years ago?

If we don’t actually improve Bitcoin BTC will get tokenized on other networks WBTC on ETH is already the most popular L2/sidechain with 121k BTC spread across 164k addresses BTCx on Zano is already a thing: Monero privacy for bridged bitcoin Shielded assets on Zcash are coming. DarkFi is coming too. There is a non-zero chance that the future of Bitcoin happens outside of the mother blockchain

How many Bitcoin podcasts are older than 7 years and still publish new episodes regularly?

This is the most concerning thing I’ve read in the Epstein files: Plotting to control Bitcoin development. Finding a power vacuum when the Foundation shut down in order to grab the top 3 developers. Possibly influencing development for the next few years.

If you’re going to listen to one podcast episode this weekend Check out my recent interview with Paul Sztorc In which he talks about the multiple Bitcoin derangements This will help you understand why the market is so red and 17 years later we still can’t make banks obsolete https://www.youtube.com/live/GMX_Agbe-9w?si=5xwFAOcn4U23fkVX

How low should Bitcoin go in order to once again have an honest conversation about upgrades?

I’ve started uploading Bitcoin Takeover Podcast episodes to Rumble & Odysee Also, I returned to writing blog posts & adding my content in Bitcoin Talk threads It’s mostly a preservation measure to make my work harder to censor If you’re on any of these platforms, subscribe!

New year, new graphics Have you taken a look the new aesthetic of Bitcoin Takeover podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & pretty much every audio-only platform out there?

> Satoshi Nakamoto was a time traveling alien AI who descended upon mortals to bring the perfect money > in July 2010, German programmer ArtForz sent an e-mail to Satoshi & Gavin Andresen to disclose a bug that makes it possible to spend bitcoins from somebody else’s wallet (1 Return bug, look it up)

Can anyone show me where the winning is? Bitcoin didn’t scale in a non-custodial way. Didn’t get adopted for payments at a satisfactory rate compared to 10 years ago. Didn’t become a fungible currency. Didn’t add smart contracts. No quantum resistance either.

Apple Podcasts is amazing Now it automatically transcribes the audio and generates chapters that listeners can navigate Ready within the first minute of listening to an episode! Give it a try on your iPhone, now my long-form content easier to digest!