Bitcoin - Bitcoin Takeover

Robin Linus, Art & the 1,000 BTC Prius: A Ride to the TABConf 8 BitDevs Barbecue

Vlad Costea — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 04:12:00 +0000

Nobody needs a Lambo when you can have a Prius. That was my opening line, and I meant it. On the last evening of TABConf 8 in Atlanta, Art picked up Robin Linus and me in a white 2011 Toyota Prius with a BITCOIN license plate and drove us to the BitDevs barbecue. This is the car that early bitcoiner Rassah paid 1,000 BTC for, the car that CoinDesk called "the first car ever purchased with bitcoin", and, at today's prices, the most expensive Prius in the world.

It was supposed to be a short clip. "I was gonna be like a very short video," I admitted halfway through the drive, "but it turned out I think I'm gonna post this as a podcast episode." What you get instead is 79 minutes of BitVM's inventor riffing on Shielded CSV, soft fork politics, Spark and the Taproot annex from the back seat, followed by a barbecue where Citrea, Alpen Labs, LayerTwo Labs and a Shielded Bitcoin co-author all ended up in the same frame (or, in one case, very deliberately out of it).

The Car That Cost 1,000 Bitcoin

"This is a 2011 Toyota Prius, which cost 1000 Bitcoin," I told the camera before we had even left the curb. "Crazy, right?" Robin had a better argument for the brand: "Well, it's Japanese and Satoshi was Japanese supposedly. At least in name."

Art told the story from the driver's seat. The buyer was Rassah, "the dev who made Mycelium," who kept the car for years and "would take it to like shows and conferences." After an accident, the plan was to let insurance write it off. Art would not have it: "I talked with him and you know you can't just toss this thing out, it's like historical thing." He and a partner bought it, a third partner paid to restore it, and the group now shares it and brings it to events.

The public record fills in the rest, with a couple of corrections. Rassah is Dmitry Murashchik, who Bitcoinist described as Mycelium's community manager and "the guy who has a Prius with the Bitcoin license plate" (some outlets report the buyer's name as Michael Tozoni). The car is a 2011 model, but the purchase happened in early 2013. On February 14th, 2013, Rassah explained on Bitcointalk that he had borrowed $15,000 to buy bitcoin, waited for the price to reach his "target price of $22," and sold to replace a 14-year-old car with 240,000 miles on it. The Drive reported he met a private seller in Florida who signed the Prius over for 1,000 BTC, roughly $22,000 at the time.

How exactly did the coins move? Art said "he did four payments of 250," but pinning down the transactions is hard "because in those days they intentionally tried to obscure it." They have narrowed it to about ten candidate payments. I could not verify that part independently, so treat it as Art's account.

The car's later life is well documented. According to Scarce.City's auction page, it went to more than 30 Bitcoin events, was damaged in an accident in 2021 (Art remembered it as 2019) and was restored in 2022. In May 2023 it was auctioned at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami, where it collected signatures from Tone Vays, Andreas Antonopoulos, Rassah, Samson Mow and, fittingly for this episode, Paul Sztorc. BitDegree reported a winning bid of 1.2 BTC. Art remembered Scarce.City as well: "that was a third of a share of the car."

Why the First Car Bought With Bitcoin Matters

Everyone knows the pizza. On May 22nd, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas, and the internet still celebrates it every year. But a pizza is a small, consumable novelty arranged through a forum. A car is different. It is a titled, durable, expensive asset, sold privately between strangers, priced directly in bitcoin and transferred with paperwork that a government recognizes. David Bailey put it bluntly in 2023: "It wasn't just a pizza from Papa Johns, it was substantial. This car was the original Lambo for Bitcoin."

That matters for the oldest argument in Bitcoin. By his own account, Rassah had used bitcoin as his main savings account since June 2011, and when his old car was dying he spent it on something he needed. Robin, a self-described payments maximalist, made the point while we filmed the car: "That car, by the way, is a proof that the people who are saying Bitcoin first needs to be a store of value and then it can become a medium of..." He did not need to finish the sentence. The Prius is the counterexample, a real-world purchase made with bitcoin as money, years before anyone called it digital gold.

Of course, the price chart makes the purchase look absurd in hindsight. "What can you buy with a thousand Bitcoin today, Robin?" I asked. The answer from the front seats was "80 million dollars something," enough that "probably you can buy like the entire street that I grew up in." Art's asking price, by the way, is "a thousand BTC," and he wants it to stay that way: "It's like perma thousand BTC." For Bitcoin Takeover viewers there is a special offer of 999.5 BTC. You are welcome.

Old Wallets, Dream Cars and the Wrong Generation

The ride wandered the way good car conversations do. Robin reminded us how big Mycelium was: "for mobile Mycelium was the thing," while iPhone users mostly ran Blockchain.com. With a 1,000 BTC budget, his dream car turned out to be a Volkswagen Käfer, the Beetle, until I clarified that I meant a thousand bitcoin, not a thousand dollars. Then it was a classic Mercedes-Benz SL: in his eyes, that old Mercedes is "the peak of car design."

One correction belongs here. Robin guessed "this is like the second generation Prius if it's from 2011." It is not. The 2011 model year is the third generation Prius (XW30), sold from 2009 to 2015, which is why the episode carries a small correction card at that moment. And for the record, the odometer read "198,095" miles, which Art reports and which is about 30,000 more than Scarce.City listed in 2023. As someone in the car put it, "a Toyota should run for at least 500,000, so this baby is just getting started."

Shielded CSV and a Million Bitcoin for Payments

What would Robin do with a million bitcoin? "I would invest them all into advertising Bitcoin payments." So he wants to become the new Roger Ver? (If you want the original, my S15 E26 with Roger Ver and Paul's S16 E11 on Roger Ver are still there.)

When I asked how we scale payments, Robin's answer was the paper he co-wrote with Jonas Nick and Liam Eagen, Shielded CSV: Private and Efficient Client-Side Validation. "The Shielded CSV is insanely scalable," he said. The basic protocol handles about 100 transactions per second, aggregation can push that to 4,000, and with optimistic data availability "you can even scale it to I think 100,000 transactions per second. So I think we can put basically all of the world's transactions on Bitcoin." For comparison, he estimated the entire world processes "about 60,000 digital payments per second."

He was gracious toward the big blockers, too. "I'm a payments maximalist, so we are brothers at heart," he said of Roger, and he thinks a block size increase "probably would have been the right choice back then." The real damage of the block size war, in his view, was fragmentation: "We didn't lose them to Bitcoin Cash or BSV. We lost them to Ethereum and then Ethereum lost them to Solana and Tron." Today, the network effects for stablecoins sit with "Tether on Tron," and Robin thinks "gaining network effects is the hard problem," not scaling.

Soft Forks Are About Feelings

I asked Robin what he liked most about TABConf, and he described it as family: "It's very rare that you can just walk into a room and everyone there knows a lot about Bitcoin." The night before, he had dinner with Peter Todd and Paul Sztorc, "two extreme opposites," and the most depressing moment was a betting round on the next soft fork, where "Peter Todd guessing that the Great Consensus Cleanup will come in like 29." (Peter, for his part, was at TABConf to unbox his Zcash ceremony laptop with me.)

Robin is still "very optimistic we're gonna get BIP 448, Template Hash," which he said would let us do "all kinds of cool things with covenants." (Specs: BIP 448 and, for the cleanup, BIP 54.) He would like a SNARK verifier upgrade and maybe Simplicity, and his explanation of how upgrades actually happen was the most cynical thing said all evening: "soft forks are all about feelings and opinions and like points of view, like it's not about technology at all."

His evidence is Taproot (BIP341), which he called "a shitload of complexity for very little gain" that people loved anyway "because the right people pushed for it." The winning formula, he joked, is Greg Maxwell's approval and Pieter Wuille's implementation, which is why he thinks Simplicity has a chance, and why he wants to sell it as the experimental sandbox for post-quantum signatures. For more on how Robin thinks about permissionless development, my S15 E13 with Robin Linus on BitVM and our later {ideal} episode on BitVM optimizations are good companions, along with the BitVM paper itself.

Drivechains, Spark and a Check Engine Light

Back on the road, I read my sponsors and Robin turned one of them into a policy argument. Asked for his favourite, he picked LayerTwo Labs: "Paul is the best. Go to eCash.com, check out drivechains, you can test the software now." Then the real point: "now that Paul forked off, we can finally activate BIP300." In his telling, the only justifiable objection to BIP300 and BIP301 "was that you don't like Paul's Twitter," and he does not entirely disagree: "I love Paul in person but I think his Twitter is a soft fork marketing nightmare." Background reading: S15 E16 with Paul Sztorc, S17 E37 on the eCash launch and my eCash explainer.

Cake Wallet came up next, and Robin called it "the best Monero wallet," then agreed with Seth for Privacy that the missing piece in privacy is UX. (Vik Sharma covered Cake's roadmap on S17 E41.) Spark got the opposite treatment. "Spark is fully custodial," Robin said, "it's just non custodial name only," since you have to trust the server and hardly any wallet implements unilateral exit. His worry is systemic: if regulators stop accepting the non-custodial label, "suddenly you have to KYC half of the ecosystem." Right on cue, the check engine light came on. That is another bitcoin off the price.

The Annex Mafia Arrives at BitDevs

We parked next to another, much cheaper Prius of the same generation, and Robin made "another important service announcement from the annex mafia." His pull request, #36466: policy: make unstructured Taproot annexes standard, would let Bitcoin Core relay transactions that carry data in the Taproot annex, an optional witness field defined in BIP341 that consensus already allows but policy rejects. "You can publish private Bitcoin transactions in the annex and that's why I opened a pull request in Bitcoin Core to make the annex standard," he explained.

"It's just a policy change." It mirrors what Libre Relay already runs, "and even Peter Todd reviewed and he ACKed the pull request." The payoff is Shielded CSV: "private Bitcoin transactions at scale become better with annex standard." His closing plea at the end of the night was even shorter: "Check out the PR, thumbs up, review it, and merge it."

The Privacy Wars Begin

At the barbecue I tried to stage a live battle: Shielded Bitcoin versus Shielded CSV. Present was Misha, Mikhail Komarov, a co-author with Clara Shikhelman and Aleksei Moskvin of Shielded Bitcoin: Private Transfers on the Bitcoin L1, published by [alloc] init in September 2026. Misha prefers to stay off camera, so you will only hear him.

The battle never quite happened, although Robin pointed out that Shielded CSV "is supported by Blockstream right now" and that "Jonas is the first author of the paper." Misha did get the best line about the $44 barbecue ticket, when I asked whether people paid by card or bitcoin: "If we had non-interactive Lightning sure, but we don't have it." Others in line said they had paid with Lightning, two of them via Phoenix.

Then Ekrem Bal walked in. "I'm Ekrem, one of the co-founders of Citrea," he said. "We are building a Bitcoin ZK roll-up and privacy app called Crest." Robin called it "the second coolest product." Ekrem's reply: "There's no second." I declared that "the privacy wars have started on Bitcoin," and somebody offered the winning criterion: "The winner is who stays the longest out of prison." Ekrem had told me more about Citrea and Crest on the S17 E47 TABConf 8 livestream, and Citrea's founder Orkun Kilic was on S15 E18.

Rob Hamilton, Man on the Street

When I handed the microphone to Rob Hamilton, he introduced himself as a "man on the street, Rob Hamilton, reporter for the Bugle, news coming at you live" and immediately did the math: "1,000 Bitcoin, I mean that means each of those wheels must be at least what, like five Bitcoin each." He also reminded everyone that "this is bleeding edge technology back in 2011, this was a hybrid." Rob summed up his own role honestly: "I just started walking with Vlad and now I'm standing here with a microphone and a camera." We agreed he deserves a full episode some day.

This Is Like Bitcoin Uncensored

Somewhere in the steakhouse line, Robin demanded the mic back to discuss "very important political matters," namely Peter Todd's 2029 guess for the Great Consensus Cleanup, "by far the saddest thing in the conference." That is when it hit me. "This is like Bitcoin Uncensored, by the way. This is what they used to do."

About a decade ago, Chris DeRose and Junseth took a camera to Bitcoin conferences and filmed whoever was in the hallway, at the party or in the queue, letting the conversation decide the episode. Nothing here was scheduled. A ride turned into an interview, a parking lot turned into a privacy debate, and a stranger with a microphone became a reporter for the Bugle. If you missed that era, my S15 E44 with Chris DeRose on Bitcoin Uncensored, recorded with Jay Berg, Wayne Vaughan and Paul Sztorc, is the best way to understand it.

Names, Garbled Circuits and zSide

The line was also full of builders. Someone spotted one of the Spaces Protocol people I had interviewed on the livestream, and Robin explained why he bought his own Bitcoin name: a single handle that unifies on-chain, silent payments, Lightning, Ark and Spark addresses. "I just tell you hey I'm Robin at Bitcoin and then you type Robin at Bitcoin into your wallet." Unlike Lightning addresses, which he says "suck" cryptographically because the server can swap the address, Spaces records are verifiable.

Christian from Alpen Labs agreed to a cameo but would not give a mainnet date: "It's not for me to say. Look at our public channels to find out more." Robin brought up SNARK garbling, the garbled-circuit approach to BitVM-style bridges, saying "there were two papers recently." Christian said Alpen's has "a very long name. Internally we call it Talos," and pointed to another one, "we call it Argo MAC," which is Argo MAC: Garbling with Elliptic Curve MACs by Liam Eagen and Ying Tong Lai. (Alpen Labs researcher Liam Eagen has also published Glock: Garbled Locks for Bitcoin.)

Then Paul Sztorc arrived, and the group put the privacy war to him. The only sensible question came up quickly: "What's the criteria for winning?" He described zSide, LayerTwo Labs' Zcash-style sidechain, which "just takes their Rust crate and plugs it in" and hides the sender, the receiver and the amount, running Orchard "updated after that bug they found." (Josh Swihart told me about that bug on S17 E28.) Paul was not sold on formal verification as a cure-all: "I think it's a red herring." Someone else put it more precisely: "You have to be careful what you prove."

Dubai Plates, BitNames and Truthcoin

I walked Paul over to the Prius, a car he had signed in Miami in 2023. Someone remembered that it "was auctioned off" in Miami Beach, and the conversation turned to Dubai, where buyers "pay $10 million for the car and $40 million for the plate." The Prius, at roughly $80 million in bitcoin terms, holds its own. When someone asked how you can put a price on saving the environment, the reply was pure economist: "you could put prices on that."

Paul's next project is BitNames, a naming sidechain, and Truthcoin is close: "I don't know if it will make the October 31st, but it will be very shortly after." On squatting, his answer was to "split into two worlds": ICANN-style names whose existing owners keep their property rights, and new namespaces like ".bit" where anything goes. You get one identity "just plugged into everything" and, if you want, another for whatever else you do. Then dinner called. "Got to go eat some steak," I said, "and maybe watch the battle between Citrea and Alpen."

Closing the Door

Thirteen years after Rassah sold 1,000 BTC for a used hybrid, the car still does what he bought it for: it gets people from A to B. This time the passengers were the creator of BitVM and co-author of Shielded CSV, a podcaster with a Forks magazine and a pile of sponsors, and eventually half of Bitcoin's privacy research scene. As Robin put it when I asked how the ride compared to his morning Waymo: "Infinitely better than the ride that I had this morning in the self-driving car." Thanks to Art for driving, for not crashing on the one-way streets, and for refusing to let a piece of Bitcoin history get scrapped.

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Time stamps:

0:00 Intro 0:45 Riding in the 1,000 BTC Toyota Prius to the TABConf 8 BitDevs barbecue 1:49 The first car bought with bitcoin: Rassah, Mycelium and the Prius backstory 4:01 Mycelium vs Electrum vs Blockchain.com: early Bitcoin mobile wallets 5:03 What 1,000 BTC buys in 2026 (about $83 million) 6:05 Atlanta trivia: Georgia Tech, Coca-Cola, Waymo and BitPay 7:45 How the Prius was paid: four payments of 250 BTC 8:47 Would Art sell the 1,000 BTC car? The "perma 1,000 BTC" price 11:24 Robin Linus's dream car: VW Beetle vs classic Mercedes-Benz SL 14:09 Need for Speed, pink slips and collectible cars as a store of value 15:10 Payments maximalism: BitPay, KYC and why BTCPay Server exists 17:14 Which Prius generation is a 2011? (third gen XW30) 18:21 Buying a car with bitcoin in 2026, shared ownership and Scarce.City 19:28 Mileage check: 198,095 miles on the bitcoin Prius 22:47 Lost on Atlanta's one-way streets in the Bitcoin car 24:23 "Wife changing technology" and dating bitcoiners 26:31 German cars, Ferraris and Porsches 28:12 Walkaround of the 1,000 BTC Prius 30:18 A million BTC for Bitcoin payments marketing and scaling with Shielded CSV 31:20 Visa throughput vs 100,000 transactions per second 32:22 The Prius as proof of medium of exchange, Roger Ver and the block size war 34:29 Network effects, stablecoins and Tether on Tron 36:03 Waymo self-driving car vs the Prius, and tipping culture 37:42 Robin's TABConf highlights: dinner with Peter Todd and Paul Sztorc 39:18 Great Consensus Cleanup in 2029? BIP 448 Template Hash and covenants 40:50 Simplicity, Taproot and how Bitcoin soft forks really get activated 42:26 Simplicity as a path to post-quantum Bitcoin 43:28 Back on the road with Art 45:16 LayerTwo Labs, eCash airdrop and BIP300 drivechains 46:49 Orange Rock, SideShift and the Forks magazine 49:00 A 999.5 BTC discount, Cake Wallet, Monero and privacy UX 51:05 Wasabi in Cake Wallet?

Spark custody and unilateral exits 54:22 Check engine light and Braiins Hashpower 56:35 Arriving at the BitDevs barbecue: Taproot annex PR #36466 58:45 Lexus and Tesla Cybertruck sightings 59:34 A live battle? Shielded Bitcoin vs Shielded CSV 1:01:09 Ekrem Bal of Citrea joins: Crest and the Bitcoin privacy wars 1:02:20 Tom Jones trivia and showing off the 1,000 BTC car 1:03:42 Rob Hamilton, man on the street 1:05:18 Robin on Peter Todd's 2029 prediction: "This is like Bitcoin Uncensored" 1:06:19 Spaces Protocol, the $44 barbecue and paying with Lightning 1:07:58 Bitcoin names: one human-readable handle for every address type 1:10:05 Christian from Alpen Labs: SNARK garbling papers and Argo MAC 1:11:11 Paul Sztorc joins: Alpen vs Citrea, who wins the privacy wars? 1:12:14 zSide, Zcash Orchard and formal verification 1:13:50 Showing Paul Sztorc the Prius: Dubai plates and $80 million 1:15:57 BitNames, Namecoin and the Truthcoin relaunch 1:17:00 How BitNames prevents squatting with ICANN-based names 1:18:36 Goodbye and one last plug for the annex PR

Peter Todd Unboxes His Zcash Ceremony Laptop, 10 Years After Sprout

Vlad Costea — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:14:19 +0000

Some relics live in museums. This one lives in a sealed envelope labelled “Burnt compute node remains,” and on October 15th, 2026, I carried it to TABConf 8 in Atlanta so its former owner could open it on camera. The owner is Peter Todd. The relic is the laptop he used as his compute node in the 2016 Zcash Sprout trusted setup ceremony, then cooked with a blowtorch in a Canadian clear cut. Peter sold it to me in 2022 for $1111 in bitcoin, and ten years (minus a few days) after the ceremony, I brought the two back together.

The deal was simple. “He will unbox this on camera to remind people why he did this and what this means,” I explained at the start, “and in exchange for this I’ll donate one Zcash to one of his favorite charities.” What followed was 37 minutes of DVDs, melted plastic, British Columbian sand and very honest opinions. As I said halfway through: “I think this is the weirdest unboxing anyone has ever watched.”

From Zerocoin Critic to Ceremony Participant

Peter is an unusual choice for the job of birthing a privacy coin, and he knows it. Back in 2014 he argued against bolting Zerocoin onto Bitcoin, “for the obvious reason that if we actually add it to Bitcoin, you’re creating this big pool of funds that’s likely to get stolen in a cryptographic break.” His position was never anti-privacy. “The idea of privacy isn’t bad,” he told me. “This type of cryptography just is too new to trust it with that much money, especially when, let’s face it, if Bitcoin dies, we may not get a chance to get another Bitcoin.”

A separate currency was a different story. So when Zooko’s team needed six people to each generate a fragment of the secret behind the zk-SNARK parameters (the “cryptographic toxic waste” that, if reassembled, could print counterfeit coins), Peter said yes. Why him? “Because they knew I was adventurous enough to actually say yes and competent enough that it was worthwhile.” He also claimed the gold medal for paranoia: “Out of all the people who were participating I certainly by far did the most thorough attempt of what was possible on my end to make my part of the ceremony secure.”

He has receipts for that claim. His 2016 write-up, Cypherpunk Desert Bus, opens with a wall of disclaimers and a blunt reminder that “you’re trusting me and five other participants not to collude.” For the official version of how the multi-party computation worked, the Electric Coin Company published The Design of the Ceremony, and z.cash keeps a parameter generation page.

The architecture of the 2016 parameter generation. Image: petertodd.org (2016)

Decoy Flights and a 3,000 Kilometer Drive

Peter’s core strategy was to be somewhere nobody could easily watch. “What’s a better way to do that than just go rent an SUV and drive, well, I think it was about 3,000 kilometers across British Columbia.” He even fed potential spies a red herring: he booked flights to a different part of Canada, then “right at the very last minute, I literally went to the airport and right at the counter” bought a ticket to Vancouver, where “a very long, very boring road” with good cell coverage was waiting.

The laptop itself had to be bought blind. “I couldn’t order it online, I couldn’t purchase it in advance,” he said. “I did just literally keep driving until I saw a computer store.” His blog fills in the shopping list: Zooko had told him he needed a fast Intel i7, so he walked out of a Staples with a brand-new MSI GE62 gaming laptop, one of the few new machines that still came with a DVD burner. When I teased him for buying something so fancy, he corrected me: “There was actually pretty high performance requirements to finish the compute in a relatively fast way.”

The IEEE Spectrum piece by Morgen Peck, The Crazy Security Behind the Birth of Zcash, described his station as “one mobile station” making “a mad dash across British Columbia,” and noted that he “ran all of his computations on a laptop encased in a tin foil-lined cardboard box, while driving across Canada.” Peter’s own quote to the magazine is pure gold: “It was my goal to outdo every other station in Canadian cypherpunk glory.”

The compute node riding in the back seat. Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

Discs A to F: The Paper Trail Burned in Plastic

The compute node never touched a network. Instead, Peter explained, “we’d have a separate node burning DVD disks with data, move it to the compute node, put it in, do stuff, burn more stuff, then go back. And that was the communication mechanism.” He held up each disc for the camera: “A, B, C, D, E, and then F,” each one a step of the multi-party computation. The beauty of DVDs, in his words, “is it meant you did have a record,” a supposedly read-only audit trail of everything that went in and out. IEEE Spectrum made the same point: the write-once DVDs, “authenticated by cryptographic hashes,” were meant to put any tampering on the public record.

The network node and DVD workflow, mid-road trip. Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

The Disc A stage of the ceremony. Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

Those discs carry a plot twist. I mentioned that Sean Bowe once told me he was interested in buying them, “because you could generate inflation in the Sprout pool using the information on these.” Peter confirmed the gist: Zcash had a flaw where “the information on the audit records could be used to go and basically create fake proofs.” That was the counterfeiting vulnerability the Electric Coin Company later disclosed as remediated. Peter was not impressed by how quietly it was handled: “Mysteriously, the audit records started disappearing. And quite rightfully, people were wondering, what the fuck’s going on?”

The envelope holding Discs A to F. Photo: Vlad Costea

Those six DVDs, labelled A through F, still sit inside the envelope you see above. Peter sealed it at 00:11 am on Monday, October 24th, 2016, and signed it. It stayed shut for almost nine years, until I unsealed it at 20:45:14 UTC on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025, at Zcash block height 2,946,932, and signed it myself.

He also did not spare the build pipeline. Everyone ran the same software from DVD, built on “this very obscure Linux distribution,” a daily snapshot that “wasn’t deterministically built, so anyone with access to that could have easily just backdoored the whole thing.” Same story with a nightly Rust compiler. “Just layers and layers of places where a backdoor could have” crept in, he sighed, before landing the punchline: “But of course, the math was broken.”

A Clear Cut, a Blowtorch and Some Very Cooked RAM

Once the ceremony was verified, the laptop met its end. “I took this laptop out to literally a clear cut,” Peter said, then defined the term for my European ears: “a chunk of forest where they’ve cut all the trees down.” Careful with his wording, he added: “For legal reasons, I won’t say I set it on fire because that would have been illegal. But I did heat it up enough with that blowtorch that every single place data could have possibly hit, that was pretty gone.” His blog confirms the paperwork side: he checked BC fire bans and burning rules first, wore a respirator, and heated the parts in a metal pan with cameras rolling.

The sandy clear cut chosen for the destruction. Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

When he cracked open the envelope, sealed with packing tape a decade ago, the smell was still there. “It still smells like it was freshly burned,” I noted. “I sealed in the freshness,” Peter replied. Out came pieces of the DVD drive (“the little laser head”), the LCD, the motherboard, and the star of the show, a blackened stick of RAM. Peter gave a quick physics lesson: flash memory traps electrons behind an insulator, and heat sets them free. “There is no way after being literally heated until it was glowing that any data could possibly survive on this. It’s a very cooked piece of RAM.”

Burnt compute node remains. Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

The RAM chips that once held a fragment of the toxic waste. Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

There were bonus souvenirs too. The grit on the circuit board? “That sand that melted into the plastic on the bottom of the circuit board, all the way from British Columbia.” And the keyboard was part of Zcash’s birth: some of the randomness “was generated by literally just mashing the keys,” which Peter insists “is a perfectly good way of generating random numbers.” The lithium cells were the only thing that did not survive the trip home: “If you don’t really want a lithium fire, they kind of suck, so that I just dispose of separately.”

The Anti-Ninja Chair and Ten Years of Footage

My favorite detail from the original write-up is a chair. Peter tilted it against his motel door at night as a homemade intrusion alarm. “The thing I was most impressed with by far was the chair leaning against the door, anti-ninja,” I told him. “What an absolute safety practice we should all be practicing.” Spectrum, for the record, reported that the Boulder station had four security cameras aimed at its offline computer “in the event of a ninja attack,” so ninjas were clearly a shared threat model in 2016.

The “anti-ninja device.” Photo: petertodd.org (2016)

Asked whether he remembered the destruction, Peter went one better: “Not only do I have memories, I have footage. I mean, I recorded the entire thing.” Some of it sits on Amazon S3, and he believes he sent a hard drive of documentation to the Zcash team. It was also “a very early use case for OpenTimestamps,” which, as he pointed out, just celebrated its own tenth anniversary.

Why Peter Sold It, and How It Came Back

So why did one of six Sprout compute nodes end up with a podcaster? Peter’s answer was disarmingly practical: “Taking up space in my apartment. I’m not a very sentimental person. I’m happy to accept some Bitcoin in exchange for sending this off to someone who cares more.” That someone was me: in June 2022 I placed the winning bid under Peter’s thread and paid $1111 in bitcoin, and the transaction confirmed on June 14th, 2022, in block 740,751. When I asked whether the reunion made him nostalgic, he did not budge: “I’m not a nostalgic person, man.”

I am the opposite. I took the laptop to Singapore the week before TABConf, and people were thrilled to see it. I also unboxed it during my six-hour S16 E29 interview with Zooko, where “Peter Todd’s Compute Node, Zcash Ceremony and Trusted Setup” got its own chapter. I waved the remains at Eli Ben-Sasson on S15 E36, who called it “a relic from this very important ceremony,” and it came up again with Sean Bowe on S16 E51, the man whose Halo work later removed the need for trusted setups altogether.

The unboxing even inspired a write-up on X from Shielded Mark, titled “BTW, It’s OK that Vlad unboxed Peter Todd’s Zcash ceremony laptop remains”, published in September 2025 after an earlier unboxing session.

For the record: the laptop might be for sale in exchange for a life-changing amount. Otherwise, I am very comfortable holding it in my collection.

Would He Do It Again? And What About Zcash Today?

With hindsight, Peter would mainly have asked the team to wait: “Could you go hold off like another month? Let’s go fix this crypto vulnerability that I magically know about.” But he would join another ceremony, “especially if someone’s paid me for it.” He also gave Zcash its due. Trusted setups, he said back in his 2013 San Jose days, would be “accepted enough in other lower quality systems,” and “Zcash is a great example that even after multiple possibly could have killed the whole coin incidents, still muddled its way through.”

On Zcash in 2026, he was nuanced. Holders are “very underestimating the risks of them losing everything to a crypto break,” yet “Zcash in combination with other privacy techniques is probably a worthwhile add-on.” He praised the anonymity set and called out chain analysis firms (“the history of chain analysis is full of frauds who lie about what their analysis can do”), but warned that the current design “just doesn’t scale.” He credited the Zashi wallet (now Zodl) and its cross-currency swaps for making Zcash interesting to real users.

Compared with Monero, his summary was crisp: “Zcash uses scarier cryptographic assumptions in exchange for potentially better privacy.” With Monero’s ring signatures, “it could have come from one of 20 places, and in many threat models that’s just not that good.”

We closed by settling my end of the bargain live on Georgia Tech’s guest Wi-Fi: one ZEC, memo “10 year anniversary of Zcash Sprout ceremony,” sent to Peter’s Cake Wallet for his fund buying armored vehicles for Ukrainian soldiers. It arrived in about 90 seconds. “That’ll buy one tenth of a truck,” Peter said.

Listen to Peter Todd on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

You can also watch the full interview on X or on YouTube.

Watch on YouTube

Time stamps:

0:00 Unboxing the compute node, 10 years after Sprout
1:45 From Zerocoin critic to ceremony participant
3:41 Why Peter was picked
4:18 Decoy flights and a 3,000 km drive
6:30 Why it’s called the compute node
6:49 The discs and the audit-record bug
8:10 Discs A to F
9:36 Why Peter sold the laptop
10:02 The other ceremony participants
10:29 Software DVDs and deterministic builds
12:05 Tails as root of trust
13:05 The clear cut and the blowtorch
13:51 Opening the burnt remains
15:15 Very cooked RAM
16:30 A high-end laptop and BC sand
20:05 Mashing keys for randomness
21:06 The motherboard
21:39 The anti-ninja chair
22:51 Zcash survived its trusted setup era
23:47 Donating to Ukraine
24:42 Ten years of footage and OpenTimestamps
25:44 Would Peter do it again?
26:36 The Citrea ceremony
27:39 Nostalgia
27:58 Zcash today
30:10 Zashi, Zodl and swaps
31:48 Zcash vs Monero
33:15 Wrapping up
33:51 Sending 1 ZEC live

S17 E47: Tabconf 8 Livestream with Kevin Loaec, Ekrem Bal, Spaces Protocol & The Bitcoin Pivot

Vlad Costea — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 02:00:09 +0000

On the last day of TABConf 8, I did another livestream from the hallways of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The recording was supposed to add up to one continuous stream. But the WiFi had other plans, so it became two: with a hard cut right after the credit union people and right before Peter Todd sat down. You will find both parts embedded below, and a combined set of timestamps for the audio version.

The setup was the same as the day before: a tripod, a camera, a stack of BTCTKVR Forks! magazines, and whoever walked past the table with something interesting to say. This time that meant Kevin Loaec of Liana explaining why nobody uses the security tools they claim to want, Ekrem Bal of Citrea pivoting a Bitcoin rollup toward privacy, Stu the meme maker who quietly ships script emulation, two builders putting names on Bitcoin with 32 bytes per batch, and a pair of consultants who want credit unions to become Lightning and Ark service providers. “Everyone can be a speaker” is how Kevin described his anti-conference format. In my hallway, everyone was a guest.

Citrea Pivots to Privacy

Ekrem Bal of Citrea, the Bitcoin rollup built by Chainway Labs, gave me the longest technical segment of the day, and his opening line set the theme: Citrea is “pivoting to privacy.” The product is Crest, a privacy app on Citrea, and the pitch was not about hiding from the taxman. In his view there are “physical attacks happening all the time around the world and privacy to me is a solution for that in a way, not the silver bullet.”

I asked what almost a year on mainnet taught them. Testnet had already done a lot of hardening (“we still run the same testnet with almost no downtime”), and the bug bounty has a new problem: “We recently started to receive a lot of like slop findings, AI findings that are incorrect, but some are bugs that we fix.” The user feedback was simpler. “Bridging is hard.” Their first Clementine bridge shipped as a command line tool, which nobody enjoyed, so they built a web app, and then decided Citrea needed a flagship app of its own. That became Crest.

I also tried to get him to admit that Citrea could copy Alpen’s homework on garbled circuits. His answer was more precise than my question: BitVM2 and BitVM3 have the same trust assumptions, and what the newer designs change is operator collateral. Clementine v2 already implements that and makes the requirements “like I don’t know 100x cheaper,” which means more operators and better liveness. After privacy, his list of use cases was lending, vaults, and agent payments. He gave his own AI agent “a spending limit of ten dollars per day,” with the hardware wallet as the authorizer. “It cannot spend all of it or accidentally make it zero but it can play with it.”

Quantum, Covenants & Why OP_CAT Wins

Quantum resistance is the fashionable question of 2026, so I asked it. Citrea’s batch proofs come from a RISC Zero zkVM and are STARKs, which are post-quantum, but they get compressed into Groth16 before going on Bitcoin, and Groth16 is not. Switching to raw STARKs “would make the batch proofs slightly larger but it will still work.”

The bridge is harder: Clementine depends on a lot of pre-signed transactions, and “Bitcoin doesn’t have a post-quantum signature scheme that’s on the protocol right now.” Verifying post-quantum proofs with garbled circuits blows up from about four kilo-vbytes to “a few blocks to even send the proofs on chain.” His conclusion: “the solution of post-quantum L2s is to have more opcodes available on Bitcoin script,” with the Great Script Restoration as “one stone, two birds.”

When I asked what GSR would actually buy Citrea, the answer was security, not speed: “we can get rid of the operators, signers set and then make the whole system work without any trust required.” Then I made him pick a covenant. “I would rather OP_CAT, because with OP_CAT you can do both covenants and also you can verify a STARK proof in a single script.” CTV is “a hacky way” to get a sibling commit, and OP_TEMPLATEHASH removes the sibling commit altogether, so it “wouldn’t improve the BitVM bridges.”

Crest Is Not Tornado Cash

For the record, I asked how Crest differs from Tornado Cash. It runs on Bitcoin through Citrea, and it comes with “a kind of like a proof of innocence compliance system”: if a hacker deposits, the funds get flagged and must be withdrawn, but “they are not frozen, it’s self-custodial.” The team took a grant from Railgun years ago to implement Railgun’s proof of innocence circuits, and he said those circuits already helped catch a hacker who tried to deposit funds there. Some readers will love that and some will hate it. Either way, it is the most explicit compliance-by-design pitch I have heard for Bitcoin privacy.

I reminded him that when I first interviewed Citrea’s founder Orkun, layer 2s were being announced for Bitcoin every week, and Citrea is one of the few that actually launched. Would they have been better off staying on Ethereum? Ekrem said he likes Ethereum people too, but “Bitcoin has this potential to be money and we want to have a part on that.” Bitcoin bridges in their current form are “not the end goal,” just the way around until there is proof of demand for trustless bridges.

Live numbers: “Right now it’s 110 bitcoins,” checkable at app.citrea.xyz. I pointed out that is 110 BTC more than you can currently use on Liquid. His favorite fork was Taproot, “because without Taproot all these Bitcoin things wouldn’t be possible,” and he admitted to liking Zcash: “I wish some of that energy with all the developers creating cool stuff was still on Bitcoin.” He had also just learned the max-locktime replay trick for claiming eCash, and his advice for everyone else was sensible: “if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t risk your coins.”

Kevin Loaec on the Security Nobody Uses

I will start with Kevin Loaec, CEO of Wizardsardine, the company behind Liana. On air I reminded him that “it’s been two and a half years since you were on the show,” and that “at the time you had just launched Liana.”

That first conversation was S15 E9: Kevin Loaec on Liana Wallet, Miniscript & Hardware Wallets, recorded around the end of 2023 and released on December 31, 2023. Back then Kevin walked me through Liana’s timelocked recovery keys for inheritance and company treasuries, the Revault vault project that pushed Wizardsardine into Miniscript early, and how he rated the popular hardware wallets. We also talked about Ledger, which had just had one of its many issues. Neither of us could remember which one this time. “They had a lot of issues,” Kevin said.

This TABConf was “my first and the last one” for him too, and as the organizer of BTC Azores he appreciated the format: “here it’s organic. People just go to tables, do their things.” He even got asked to pay for his ticket as a speaker, because “basically almost everyone is a speaker.”

Then the uncomfortable part. Coldcard, Liquid, a year of exploits, and Liana was built for exactly this: “pretty much built to make sure this kind of bugs or attacks affecting one single device don’t affect you,” with timelocked recovery keys on top of multisig. The problem is the users.

“A lot of people are still using single sig. And they’re like, why? It’s 2026.” On vaults, he was blunt: “We know vaults don’t really have demand, no matter what people say. … Most people don’t even use multisig. So what are we talking about vaults, right?”

He refused to pick a favorite covenant until the field narrows, but he has one requirement: amounts should not be strictly enforced, because in a typical CTV vault, if you deposit the wrong amount, “you might burn money. And that is horrible in my opinion.”

On Coldcard’s random number bug, Kevin, who was involved in the disclosure, said it was “kind of like unthinkable” for a known hardware wallet, “very, very shocking that this bug was there for five years.” I listed my red flags (the license change, the mugs and t-shirts instead of bounties), and he described what a proper report costs: “Typically, you spend at least a full day to do that,” and “Coldcard never really acknowledged any of that.” On the Ledger customer data leak and buying hardware online, he was realistic: you cannot tell an average person to only buy devices in person at conferences. “How realistic is that?”

Later in the stream we talked about funding open source, and he does not want to go the begging route: “I don’t want to be begging to my users.” He also had a clear view on the forks of 2026: “Bitcoin as a system is alive, right? Bitcoin has to follow what the crowd wants.” The return of Bitcoin forks is “the trend again to fork Bitcoin instead of doing a shitcoin. It’s like every decade.”

Stu, Memes & Script Emulation

Stu (stutxo on Twitter, by his own spelling on air) sat down during Kevin’s segment, and he immediately did my job by asking Kevin whether vaults would make Liana better. Kevin explained the difference: Liana’s timelock works like a dead man’s switch, while a covenant vault flips it, so “instead of being passive, it becomes active.” Asked what he works on, Stu said “just making memes, basically,” and then casually mentioned he “added script emulation to Bark,” using Jeremy Rubin’s Sapio emulator with VTXOs. Memes as a cover story for actual engineering. Very TABConf.

Spaces Protocol: Names on Bitcoin, 32 Bytes at a Time

Andrew introduced himself as “number one fan” of Spaces Protocol rather than its creator, and explained the motivation: DNS “is something that’s centralized and there is quasi-governmental authority that manages it,” while Bitcoiners “want names that we can control and live forever.” He came to it after looking at Unstoppable Domains on Ethereum and deciding he lives “in Bitcoin land.” Then Buffer, the lead developer, joined. Spaces launched on mainnet “about a month ago,” with around 3,700 top-level spaces registered and about 120 @bitcoin handles.

The technical core is elegant. “The only thing that gets put on Bitcoin is the 32 bytes hash” of a tree root, so a namespace can issue hundreds of thousands of handles in one transaction, and users hold a Merkle inclusion proof tied to their key. Records like payment addresses and social handles are signed and published to relays that work much like Nostr relays. On censorship resistance: “the protocol is open source, the Nacho app is open source, the spaces wallet is open source,” and you can run spaced next to Bitcoin Core and verify everything yourself. Andrew packaged the stack for StartOS as a one click install.

Andrew had registered @tabconf, and when this edition was announced as the last one, he decided to “make the name final too”: free handles for attendees, then a final commitment of an all-zero root so that, in Buffer’s words, “no other handle could be issued at the tabconf namespace.” A souvenir that literally cannot be minted again.

Squatters, Silent Payments & Namecoin’s Ghost

I brought up Namecoin, the first altcoin, which drowned in squatters. Spaces rate-limits the land rush: no more than 10 names enter auction per day, auctions run 10 days on Bitcoin L1, and late bids extend the deadline so “you can’t snipe the thing at the last moment.” Buffer added that this caps registrations at about 3,600 spaces a year. As for an alt-Spaces copying everything: “it’s all about consensus and what the people prefer to use.”

The best warning came from Andrew. Each name comes with a Taproot address bound to its key, and he would “deter people from trying to send payments to that address,” because a well-known, permanent address tied to a findable person raises “your kind of vulnerability for wrench attack.” The better future is silent payments and shared address books, and he has applied for an OpenSats grant to build that.

Top-level spaces expire after a year of inactivity so they cannot get stuck forever, but handles never do: “You own it … no one can take it away.” The two of them came across as people who have thought hard about trade-offs, which is rarer than it should be in naming projects.

The Bitcoin Pivot: Credit Unions as Bitcoin On-Ramps

The second part of the stream picked up mid-sentence with Kyle and his co-founder at The Bitcoin Pivot, who were repeating the “three C’s” framework that the dropped connection had cut off: culture, courage, conviction, then “connection, which leads to the commitment.” Their pitch is to bring Bitcoin to US credit unions, starting custodial and moving members toward “assisted self-custody.” They describe themselves as “an advisory company, a firm where we’re consultants,” vendor-agnostic because “each institution is different.”

I asked for names of people who reacted to their talk. “So I would not name any names.” The reaction they did share was from a developer whose own credit union had just been absorbed, and they cited industry projections that “about a third of credit unions merge together by the year 2030 and then over the next decade after that probably another third.” Their argument is that the not-for-profit structure makes credit unions a natural fit: “Financial literacy is in the DNA of a credit union.”

The part I liked most was about usage. “I really want people using this,” one of them said, describing paying with bitcoin at his local coffee shop with former executives in tow. “Real practical Bitcoin adoption is start using this, not just hold it.” His bigger idea was that credit unions are “perfectly positioned as trusted financial partners” to run Ark or Lightning service providers.

I pushed back on the obvious risk: credit unions putting member bitcoin into something like Aave for six or seven percent. They agreed that is exactly why they want Bitcoiners doing this education, so credit unions are not “going to play financial games.” And for the record, credit unions are insured by the NCUA, not the FDIC. More at Bitcoin for Credit Unions.

Bonus: Peter Todd

Right after the credit union segment, Peter Todd joined the table, and my plan was to go back to the hotel, fetch the Zcash ceremony laptop and “reunite you with the device.” The stream did not survive that plan, so we recorded the Peter Todd interview offline. It will be added as a bonus at the end of the audio episode.

If you want the backstory on the forks and covenants that kept coming up today, start with What the Fork?!.

Listen to Kevin Loaec, Ekrem Bal, Stu, Andrew & Buffer of Spaces Protocol and The Bitcoin Pivot on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

Watch on YouTube

Time stamps:

0:00 Stream warm-up
2:29 Ekrem Bal: Citrea pivots to privacy with Crest
7:22 Privacy and scalability on Citrea
11:30 Privacy as protection from physical attacks
16:00 Lessons from almost a year on mainnet
19:00 User feedback and the Clementine web app
20:13 Alpen, garbled circuits and Clementine v2
21:33 Next use cases: lending, vaults and agent spending limits
22:51 Making Citrea post-quantum
26:21 Great Script Restoration and trust assumptions
29:29 OP_CAT vs CTV vs template hash
31:26 How Crest differs from Tornado Cash
33:12 Railgun and proof of innocence
33:53 Why build on Bitcoin instead of Ethereum
36:23 Favorite fork: Taproot and Zcash envy
38:19 The eCash replay trick
41:24 Skiing and mountaineering
42:51 110 BTC on Citrea
43:34 Kevin Loaec joins
44:31 First and last TABConf and the unconference format
46:21 A bad year: Coldcard, Liquid and Liana
48:00 Stu joins
48:41 Vaults vs Liana’s timelocks
51:59 Most interesting guest and 10 hour episodes
54:02 Forks magazine
55:32 Script emulation on Bark
56:08 Liana videos and Revault
57:32 Favorite covenant and enforced amounts
59:40 Wrench attacks and Liana’s exposure
1:01:07 Ledger leaks and buying hardware online
1:03:41 Coldcard’s RNG bug, license and bounties
1:06:07 Andrew joins: Spaces Protocol
1:10:30 Buffer joins
1:10:55 3,700 spaces and @bitcoin handles
1:11:18 The TABConf name giveaway and delegation
1:14:39 Nacho and payment handles
1:15:39 Burning @tabconf forever
1:17:45 32 bytes on chain and cert relays
1:19:15 Client-side validation and censorship resistance
1:20:18 One click install on StartOS
1:21:14 How Spaces makes money
1:22:17 What stops an alt Spaces?
1:24:01 Namecoin, squatters and 10 auctions a day
1:27:25 Utility: Nacho and social proofs
1:29:37 Don’t reuse your name address: silent payments
1:32:19 Spaces and Bitcoin’s scalability
1:33:39 Do names expire?
1:35:43 One character names
1:37:10 Insight gateways, Nostr and Blossom
1:40:43 The Fabric resolver
1:41:23 Handle pricing
1:44:02 Where to learn more about Spaces
1:47:00 Spaces and the forks
1:53:44 Last call for @tabconf handles
1:55:42 Goodbye Andrew and Buffer
1:57:34 Hallway break
2:00:00 Kevin Loaec returns: Paris, Sparrow and Miniscript
2:05:26 Funding open source without begging users
2:12:33 A horrible year: hacks and forks
2:13:47 Bitcoin follows the crowd
2:28:55 New guest and matching watches
2:29:57 What makes you bullish about Bitcoin?
2:31:05 Closing hallway chatter
2:43:10 Part 2: Back online: The Bitcoin Pivot and the three C’s
2:47:39 How credit unions will custody bitcoin
2:49:28 An advisory firm with vendor-agnostic partners
2:51:47 Why TABConf is welcoming
2:52:26 Feedback and the wave of credit union mergers
2:56:32 Credit unions vs banks: the not-for-profit mission
2:58:32 Lightning and paying with Bitcoin
2:59:10 Credit unions as Lightning service providers
3:00:22 Rehypothecation risk and Aave
3:01:39 NCUA, not FDIC
3:02:07 Where to learn more about The Bitcoin Pivot
3:02:52 Peter Todd arrives and the stream pauses

S17 E46: Livestream from Tabconf 8, Part 1 (feat. Paul Sztorc, Andre Beganski, Alex Lewin, Janusz, Christopher Allen, Will & Michael Tidwell)

Vlad Costea — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:47:44 +0000

There is a funeral happening in the room behind me, and I am not attending it. That was more or less the thesis of this livestream, recorded on October 14th 2026 in the hallway of the Georgia Tech Exhibition Hall in Atlanta, during TABConf 8. Michael Tidwell had already announced that this eighth edition would be the final one, and while he was holding the Town Hall (which everyone, including him, ended up calling the obituary), I parked a tripod under a giant ecash.com banner and grabbed anybody who walked by with something interesting to say.

What followed was 2 hours and 40 minutes of conference-floor chaos: Paul Sztorc demoing quantum-resistant signatures twenty days before his hard fork, a journalist who just swapped Decrypt for MARA, a private AI engineer and a private money builder finding common ground, a cypherpunk who wrote the reference implementation of SSL 3, a man with a list of six people he wants out of federal prison, and finally the organizer of the funeral himself, Michael Tidwell, who walked out of his own wake to sit next to me. My camera died eleven minutes in. The webcam saved the day. You cannot script this, and I would not want to.

Quick housekeeping: this was a live, unedited stream with mics changing hands, people wandering in and out of frame, and comments coming in from the chat. Sponsors for the trip were Cake Wallet, Braiins Hashpower (who paid for my hotel), SideShift.ai (who paid for my plane ticket), Orange Rock and LayerTwo Labs. Nobody paid to be interviewed, and nobody got editorial approval.

Paul Sztorc and the Quantum Soft Fork Nobody Will Run

The first guest was the obvious one, because the backdrop was literally his poster. I introduced Paul as a man “less than 20 days away from launching the masterpiece of his life,” and he immediately downgraded himself: “The worst. Well, okay. We’ll see. That’s for historians to judge, you know?”

He came with a tech demo on a laptop screen that nobody watching could see (we promised screenshots). It was CUSF 2, the second “Core Untouched Soft Fork,” his way of doing soft forks “without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin.” The first one was BIP 300/301 for drivechains. The sequel packs four features: “We have four different quantum resistant signature options.

Two hash, two lattice.” On top of that, OP_VAULT, OP_CTV (the opcode Jeremy Rubin spent years trying to get into Bitcoin, as he told me in S17 E22), and OP_CAT. Scroll to the bottom of the wallet and you get a button that says you can “sweep your coins into a quantum-resistant UTXO.” His words to Nic Carter and the quantum alarm crowd: “problem solved right here.”

It ships in the next version of BitWindow. The catch is that it does nothing on BTC unless a majority of hashrate runs the extra piece of software next to Bitcoin Core, which “should cost them basically nothing.” So when will miners do it? “Never. A million billion years.” Why? “Because they’re all spineless. Spineless cowards with no leadership skills. Or some other reason, I’m sure.” I asked whether the whole point of Bitcoin is not having leaders. “In this case, no.”

On whether quantum is real or a scam to sell vapor hardware, I framed it as Pascal’s Wager: if quantum is fake, we optimized for nothing; if it is real, we had better be ready. The idea that the fix can wait until 2029 or 2032 got called “super overconfident and cocky” on air, because “it just implies that Bitcoin has no competition and nothing else can happen,” while the Zcash side is picking up network effects and some of the VCs who used to back Bitcoin.

Paul ran down the list of use cases that drifted elsewhere: memecoins on Solana, darknet markets on Monero, stablecoin volume that “was originally a Bitcoin project” and now lives off Bitcoin. “So yeah, we could have had all that on Bitcoin this whole time, but instead we have this belief in Bitcoin’s infallibility.” He even recruited Greg Maxwell into the argument, paraphrasing the idea that believing Bitcoin cannot fail is the most likely way for it to fail. “Join our club of Vlad, myself, and Greg Maxwell.” I pointed out that I do not go to the same clubs as Greg Maxwell.

Then the camera died. I switched to the laptop webcam, the angle went crooked, and the room produced the line of the hour: “It’s crooked just like Bitcoin Core.”

Soft Forks Are Reversible, Free Coins Are Free

Back on topic, Paul’s eCash hard fork is the pressure valve for all of the above. As I pitched it on air: “not mandatory, just take free coins and do whatever you want.” Paul’s addition: “that’s the fun part that you don’t have to pay anything.” If you already hold bitcoin, you can claim your eCash and “see what Bitcoin could have looked like if we didn’t have so much of the bad culture, which is against changing anything.” (If you need the backstory, I wrote a whole piece on it: eCash (ECX): Paul Sztorc Forks Bitcoin to Prove a Point, and Paul explained the launch plan in S17 E37.)

His frustration with the soft fork stalemate is that nobody gives him a reason. Soft forks, in his view, are “opt-in, ignoreable and reversible. And yet we can’t do that.” He had just given a 15 minute talk followed by 45 minutes for the audience to disagree with him, and complained that people mostly agreed: “To me, that seems like more evidence that it must be right.” When I brought up the Luke Dashjr argument that every soft fork eventually becomes mandatory, Paul answered with a language analogy. Nobody is forced to use a new word like “Kafkaesque.” It only spreads if people like it. “That whole eventually part of it is doing a lot of work.”

We took questions from the chat. Someone asked how to claim the coins and joked about how much Michael Saylor would get. Paul’s guess, which he labeled as an assumption: “Well, Saylor doesn’t self custody, I bet.” That reminded me of my conversation with Mike Belshe of BitGo, a company that started with self-custody tools and became one of the largest custodians in the space. The claiming process itself is simple: download the software, it syncs the BTC history, and “an equal number of coins will be waiting for you there.” From there you can split and move them independently.

I also asked Paul about exchange listings, because he refuses to pay for them. His alternative is liquidity pools: “Why spend money to get listed on the exchange? You can add the liquidity.” Whoever fronts the capital earns the trading fees, and the market starts before the network even launches. “Let’s just see who just lists it anyway.”

Midway through, Shinobi walked through the frame. I noted on air that he “still thinks that using Coldcard is a good idea,” while I was wearing a Coldcard around my neck as a trophy for being right about that device. Then Paul left for the Town Hall, and I went fishing for the next guest.

André Beganski on Leaving Decrypt and Journalism as a Public Good

The next person to take the mic was André Beganski, who introduced himself as “a senior content manager at MARA,” at the newly launched MARA Foundation, after a long run as a reporter at Decrypt. I told him I always respected Decrypt’s reading progress bar that made finishing an article feel like a small victory, and I also told him that back in 2018, when I was at a competing outlet, I respected Decrypt for keeping its integrity, “the Block not so much. No offense. I mean, yes offense, get offended.” André, ever the professional: “You’re not going to get a hot take on that.”

He walked me through DL News, the media arm of DeFi Llama, which he praised for going “deeper than anybody else into the technicals” of rollups, like whether there is an escape hatch to pull funds back to L1. I countered with my own war story: Blockworks once wanted me to give up Bitcoin Takeover for a show of theirs called Supply Shock. “I don’t think there’s an amount of money that you can pay me that’s gonna make me quit my dream project,” I said, for a gig that might get shut down in six months. Which, I noted, is roughly what happened.

André told me about a new print crypto magazine called The Ledger, whose first issue has Jeff Benson interviewing sourdough bakers about crypto. He admitted it probably will not win a Pulitzer, but “it’s insightful and it’s entertaining.” In return I handed him a copy of my own BTCTKVR: Forks! magazine, which became his reading material for the flight home.

The serious part of our chat was about the economics of independent media. In the first three or four seasons of this show, I made nothing; Bitcoin Magazine paid the bills. Today I cannot imagine stepping away, and I joked that I am glad I did not become “a mediocre coder right now in C++,” because storytellers are harder to replace with AI.

André pushed it further: “What really separates good publications from bad publications is original news.” Everybody on Twitter repeats the same headlines. Real investigation takes weeks. “I think journalism is a public good if it’s done the right way,” he said, and he called the hype-driven corner of the industry “a product of financial nihilism.”

I told him I do have sponsors rolling at the bottom of the screen and I send them the stats, and if they do not like the numbers, they can drop out. That is the whole arrangement.

Alex Lewin on Private AI, Fedi & Why Privacy Is About Other People

While Orange Rock got its sponsor read (trade without KYC, and please do not gamble with leverage, I cannot endorse that), a new guest sat down. I opened with my line about not attending the funeral, and the nuance arrived right away: “It might not be dead,” since there is a real chance Tidwell gets bored and does it again at some point. “But hello, my name is Alex.”

Alex Lewin works at Finite, “a company called Finite that’s working with organizations like HRF to help them with their sovereign AI strategies,” building privacy-preserving agents and training activists. Before that he spent two and a half years at Fedi, before that Blockspaces, and before that NCR on their Lightning work. He is from Atlanta, moderated BitDevs Atlanta, gave a talk earlier that day, and was playing Capture the Bitcoin. “It’s an honor that everybody comes to our home to hang out and talk about Bitcoin.”

When Janusz (more on him below) joined the table, I asked them to find the overlap between private AI and private money. Alex gave the cleanest answer about why he cares: “Privacy is not that important to me personally as much as it’s an important ingredient for liberty. In order to be free, you have to have privacy.” If you live under a less free government, he added, “privacy is a heck of a lot more important.” My own angle was fungibility: an open internet currency cannot discriminate between coins from Russia and coins from South Africa without fragmenting the internet into camps.

Asked what still makes him bullish after a bruising year, Alex said Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency “that really can’t be changed by a single-digit number of people,” and that its value proposition has not changed, even if “we’re living in spooky times. It’s hard to write open-source software when all the bugs that are in the software will be found and exploited.” He also had an honest moment about AI. Parroting Rob Hamilton, who had just been on stage, he said AI “is going to make Bitcoin better, not worse,” and admitted he went through “a bit of an existential crisis as a software engineer” when his hard-won skills seemed to become obsolete, until the framing flipped: a software engineer with AI tools is more productive, not less valuable.

When I asked about his favorite fork, he would not play along with anything but Bitcoin: “Cryptocurrency in my opinion is only valuable if it’s incredibly decentralized, incredibly incorruptible, and Bitcoin’s the only one in my opinion that has that property to a degree at which I believe in it.” On claiming forked coins, he was equally conservative: “I do not think it’s worth the quick buck to touch on your cold storage.” And if Bitcoin went to zero tomorrow? Three words: “Pivot to AI.”

Janusz on Zark, Zcash Primitives & the Free Market of Privacy

Janusz, who goes by @januszg_ and builds LX, arrived with a project name that was practically designed to troll Ark maximalists. I kept calling it “private Ark.” It is not an Ark. “It’s kind of a joke,” he admitted. He wanted to rename it out of fear that people would be upset, but his co-founder said to keep it. The original idea “was based on like Mercury,” and then the name wrote itself: “Zcash plus Spark equals Zark.” His write-up is Introducing Zark if you want the technical version.

I asked him the clip-worthy question: why bring Zcash privacy to Bitcoin and not Monero privacy? He said he is a fan of both, but that the framing is wrong. “We don’t really want to bring Zcash per se to Bitcoin. I think we want to take the primitives that were developed in that ecosystem that are very useful and can be applied to Bitcoin.”

The goal is a free market of privacy solutions with different trade-offs. He explained the mental model clearly: Monero hides amounts with Bulletproofs and hides senders with ring signatures, making you one of 16 decoys. Zcash’s Orchard pool publishes “a complete black box of unlinkable hashes,” so your anonymity set is everyone in the pool. Applied to Bitcoin, L1 becomes the savings account and this kind of protocol the spending account.

I argued that Zcash, with Tachyon on the horizon, is trying to scale privacy, while Monero’s FCMP++ will make transactions heavier, and that Zcash shares Bitcoin’s code ancestry while Monero comes from CryptoNote and Bytecoin. Janusz was more diplomatic: “We’re in the first inning of research,” and Monero will probably explore L2s too. Even Tachyon cannot escape the historical set of nullifiers that has to be kept forever.

Then he said something I did not expect from a former Zcash contributor. On the recent Orchard bug (covered in depth with Josh Swihart in S17 E28), the soft fork to pause Orchard transactions was coordinated so fast that some major wallet providers did not know it was happening. “What’s to say that coordinating and doing something to, for example, just shut off a pool for whatever reason because some person used it?”

That is exactly why he builds on Bitcoin, even when it is painful. If Bitcoin had a native SNARK verifier, he said, we would never even have these discussions about things like BitVM and witness encryption, and working within those limited constraints is “just a fun thing to do.” As someone at the table summed it up moments later: “Only Bitcoin is stubborn enough to, rather than upgrade itself with something simple, we force ourselves to invent witness encryption to get a feature we want.”

This was his first TABConf, which gave him the best answer to my funeral question: “For me it’s not a funeral because it’s my first one. It’s just a party.” On the fork airdrops, he echoed Alex on not touching his cold storage, but said he would “probably try to acquire some tokens with Paul’s work and play around with it,” especially the Zcash-style drivechain that Paul has always used as his canonical BIP 300 example. If Bitcoin went to zero, he would take a break and “figure out what to do next. I don’t know what I would do.”

Interlude: AI Psychosis and Why You Should Show Up

Somewhere between the privacy talk and the fork talk, the table drifted into the strange mood of 2026. Somebody confessed, “now we’re all in AI psychosis and we’re just clanking all day and prompting our clankers,” without a single meeting in three weeks. I compared it to Europeans discovering coffee and tobacco, and admitted that I have an AI agent that gives me 15 minutes of website fixes every day and keeps a backlog of what I ignored. “Am I working with AI or am I working for AI?”

The conclusion we all agreed on: you can build anything in 15 minutes now, but “just the fact that you made it, it doesn’t mean that anyone will care.” Showing up is what makes people care. The moral of the story, delivered straight to the camera: “Unless I see your face here, I’m going to assume that you’re AI on Twitter.” Followed by a correction from the peanut gallery: “Unless they’re my talks, okay? I want to see a full auditorium.” Paul, back at the table by then, believes he has spoken at all eight TABConfs (“I think I did the keynote maybe twice”). Which prompted the obvious accusation that Paul killed the conference by speaking too often.

Christopher Allen on Randomness, Multisig & the Coldcard Lesson

I had been trying to get Christopher Allen on the show for about three years, and only managed to meet him in Atlanta. He is a legendary cypherpunk, the founder of Blockchain Commons, and as of today “Bitcoin is still my financial reserve.” These days he works lower in the stack: “How do we secure our keys? How do we create systems that are more reliable?” A lot of what went wrong in the past year, he said, was stuff he had been warning about for a while.

His warnings go back to Netscape. When SSL was new and VeriSign was the only certificate authority, servers needed a security review of their randomness before getting a certificate, and his company was the only one willing to do those reviews. “Over half of the software servers that were submitted to us, we in an hour or two found fundamental problems with randomness.”

VeriSign eventually gave up and switched to self-certification. That is why Blockchain Commons built LetheKit, which lets you create seed words offline with dice. But you can only do so much security on chips, so his real advice is structural: “The real solution is not to rely on any single key.” Legacy multisig, MuSig, FROST, heterogeneous key generation.

Their SmartCustody work in 2022 laid out a checklist that takes about an hour. People did not take the hour, and Christopher puts the blame on “the wallet companies of being very narrow,” adding: “We could’ve solved these problems years ago,” and then it “wouldn’t have mattered that Coldcard had a bug.”

I said I felt bad for the victims, who did everything they were told and still lost their funds. Christopher’s criticism of Coinkite was about culture: “I felt like the Coldcard Coinkite team kind of pulled away from the open source community.” He described them building on open source code and later closing it once others started using theirs, which removed any incentive for other teams to review it.

I added my own grievances about how researchers were treated (mugs and t-shirts instead of bounties, downplayed severity). Christopher was more measured on bounties, noting that LLMs are flooding the world with obscure CVEs and many communities cannot afford programs, but drew the line at the withdrawal from shared work: “Bitcoin started as open source.

Satoshi believed in it.” His design mantra is worth framing: “We want no single points of failure, no single points of compromise. Also important is no single points of denial.” That last one is why Blockchain Commons does not recommend BIP 38, after too many people locked themselves out of their own funds.

From RSAREF to TLS 1.0, DigiCash and a UTXO That Revokes Certificates

Then I asked how a cypherpunk who worked on SSL ended up in Bitcoin, and got a history lesson I will happily replay. Christopher’s company was the only organization in the United States besides RSA Data Security that could license the RSA patent through RSAREF, which was free as long as you made less than half a million dollars. That put them on the ground floor with Netscape. “I led the community around creating that standard, writing the reference implementation, and then kind of leading it through the IETF process where it ultimately got renamed TLS.” TLS 1.0 is the culmination. TLS is now the world’s dominant security protocol.

He worked with David Chaum on DigiCash before Chaum moved to the Netherlands, later became CTO of Certicom, and tried to launch a micro-currency in 2000 or 2001. Patents killed it: the Merkle patent blocked Merkle trees and timestamping, and he wanted Schnorr signatures for their aggregation powers, which were also patented. That patent is why we got ECDSA, and why NIST’s secp256r1 curve carries suspicions about where its constants came from, which is also why Satoshi picked secp256k1, with its small, obvious “nothing up my sleeve” numbers. Taproot finally brought Schnorr to Bitcoin.

When the whitepaper circulated in 2008, it looked like “another one of these proposals of many.” He only dove in around 2013, and the appeal was “its ability to do censorship-resistance,” not investment. His first Bitcoin project was using UTXOs to revoke X.509 certificates: tie a certificate to a UTXO, spend it, and within minutes the whole world knows it is revoked. “That became kind of the first prototype of the decentralized identifier.” That led to the DPKI paper (Vitalik was among the authors, he noted), the Rebooting the Web of Trust gatherings twice a year until COVID, and eventually the DID standard.

Paul came back to the table and Christopher brought up his biggest beef: “We’ve been saying since 2005 or earlier, don’t reuse keys.” Satoshi built that principle in, and yet Ethereum derives from one private key and Nostr uses one private key, which is “really hard to pry out of the bottom of Nostr.” Paul’s defense of the habit was practical: one key pair per identity, multiple identities. “You have Dread Pirate Roberts and then you have Ross Ulbricht.” Christopher had to leave, and promised a part two. I am holding him to it.

Will on Six Privacy Prisoners and 21 Days Before the Midterms

Paul then handed his mic to someone with, in his words, “a very important message”: “Time is of the essence, we only have like 21 days before the midterm election.” The guest introduced himself only as Will, and he had a list. “I’ve been concerned about the grotesque injustice that has been forced on a number of privacy stalwarts, as I’ve given to calling them. There are six cases that I’m aware of.”

He went chronologically. First Larry (most likely Larry Harmon of the Helix mixer), still in federal prison for operating a custodial mixer years ago. Then Ian Freeman, who ran a few Bitcoin ATMs in New Hampshire. Then Roman Sterlingov, the Swedish-Russian dual national accused of operating Bitcoin Fog, whose case Will thinks few people know about because Roman Storm dominates the news.

Will’s claim is that Sterlingov was only a user, and that “the only evidence they were able to produce at trial was this crap from Chainalysis clustering.” He was arrested at LAX in April 2021 on his second visit to the US and denied bail partly because he held four valid passports (Russia issues internal and international passports, and Sweden, like some other countries, issues a second one for travel conflicts).

Next came Roman Storm of Tornado Cash, convicted on the unlicensed money transmitting charge while the jury hung on the two money laundering counts. “So how the hell is he guilty of operating an unlicensed money transmission business? He is not,” Will said, citing FinCEN’s own guidance on non-custodial software. (For more on that trial, see S17 E20 with Amir Taaki, Harry Halpin and Christopher Cialone.) Last, the two Samourai Wallet developers, Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, arrested in SWAT-style raids despite “no criminal record and no history of violence.”

In Will’s account, prosecutors asked FinCEN in the fall of 2023 whether Samourai was a money transmitter, were told it was not, and withheld that from the defense. He also described the judge being changed shortly before a key motions hearing, all motions denied without explanation, and the developers accepting a plea of five and four years plus heavy financial penalties. He recommended reading Keonne’s letters from prison.

The ask: pressure President Trump, “who has pardoned far less deserving people, to issue full pardons with restitution.” Paul jumped in with the political angle, pointing to Aaron Day’s StarkFreedom PAC, which funds third-party Senate candidates in tight races. His pitch was blunt: “If Trump wants this project killed, he should free” them, and people on the left could earn goodwill by promising the same. Then Paul admitted the 21 days figure was improvised: “I’m just making that number up, but we only have a few days.”

Michael Tidwell Walks Out of His Own Funeral

The closing act was the man himself. After someone in the crowd nominated “Roast beef? He’s a very fast talker,” I spotted Michael Tidwell, the organizer of TABConf and of Bitcoin Atlanta, and he came over straight from the Town Hall where he had just eulogized his conference.

First I asked about the Tabbies, the forgotten idea that showed up in his Town Hall slides. “Like the Tonys, the Oscars,” he explained, an award ceremony where “if you got a Tabbie, it’s like a big deal.” Robin Linus got one. They handed out three per year for three years, with guest presenters like Andrew Poelstra and Paul opening the envelopes.

Then the big question: why kill TABConf? “It’s just saturation. That’s like the number one reason. There’s just too many Bitcoin conferences.” Was it David Bailey? “No, not really.” It was “death by a thousand cuts”: Bitcoin++, OPNEXT, Prague, Lugano, and every hometown event people do not want to miss.

He announces dates a year in advance, and other organizers still book over him, which he does not hold against them since he is “also a hypocrite” who enjoys those conferences too. This was my first TABConf, after years of sending magazines and almost making it, and I told him I would have come even if it were not the last one.

On Paul’s eCash, Michael called it “the least dramatized hard fork, the most kosher calm hard fork in recent memory,” and wondered how a fork without emotional stigma will do when people vote with their feet. On drivechains, he described the game theory Paul’s critics keep raising (miners will just steal), and said that if the experiment proves miners constantly steal, it is “a finished experiment.” I had my own mixed feelings: drivechains were supposed to drain the altcoin market of use cases on Bitcoin, and now they launch on a different network.

Debates, No Shilling & How TABConf Got Scammed in 2019

Michael’s TABConf was always a tent for heretics. The BTC versus BCH versus BSV debate (we argued about whether that was 2018 or 2019, and he corrected me: 2019) came from a simple motive: “I don’t want to shrink the Bitcoin community. I want to grow the Bitcoin community.” He even wanted Dash and Monero people in the fold, and said “the Monero people are probably the most reasonable.”

We remembered Amanda B. Johnson and Evan Duffield presenting DarkCoin at a Bitcoin Atlanta monthly meetup. During the ICO craze, the rule was strict: “You can have stage time, you have to answer your questions, you’re not allowed to shill.” And of course, Paul was always “debating someone,” including the famous Peter Todd debate.

Then the trivia I asked for, which he warned was “kind of funny in hindsight, but it’s not funny.” In 2019, trying to save money on catering, he hired a community member who had been coming for a year, wired $10,000 for three days of lunches to a business name that was not the guy’s own, and got bread “with like a slice of cheese and one slice of turkey.”

A few days later the woman who actually made the food called asking to be paid her $1,000. “If you gave me ten thousand, I could have actually gave you real lunches.” The guy, Bobby, pocketed the rest. “And that’s how TABConf got scammed in 2019.” As I put it: it is not just the ICOs and the memecoins, it is also the food people.

He always wanted Greg Maxwell to come, and was surprised Matt Odell never did, “just because he’s really close, like geographically.” Nick Szabo, on the other hand, “never gave me the time of day,” so he could care less. He told me the obituary was held a day early as a deliberate experiment, because around 100 people would leave that night and he wanted as many in the room as possible.

His two favorite memories: the hardcore trivia for BitDevs where people argued about “what was the byte of this sighash flag,” and the standing ovation that ended the Town Hall minutes earlier. “I was like, what do I do? Do I just stand here and walk off? Like, do I wave?” I missed it because I was livestreaming, which feels like the most Bitcoin Takeover sentence possible.

Bitcoin Is Not My Religion, Taproot Is My Favorite Fork

We also covered Atlanta lore: Rassah of Mycelium landing his plane at an airport meetup barbecue and blowing the food off three or four picnic tables with the propellers, Stephen Pair of BitPay coming to TABConf, and Jeff Garzik living in Atlanta for years without showing up. Michael also floated a “Kill Tidwell” comedy format inspired by Kill Tony, one minute per comic, because “Bitcoin has so much drama and memes and people that are constantly online that the memes never stop.”

When I asked his favorite fork (no BTC allowed), he picked a soft fork: “I would say Taproot soft fork was my favorite.” Why? “I love using Taproot. I think it’s great. I think it’s super underutilized.” All the TABConf puzzles are Taproot-related now. Hard forks?

“I like all the hard forks.” To him, the ability to fork is Bitcoin’s nuclear option: “You need hard forks in order to keep everyone in line with the right incentives.” If you think a fork can kill your bitcoin, he asked, “then are you really a bitcoiner?”

His summary: “Bitcoin’s not my religion.” He explained it with a thought experiment about a yellow metal with all of gold’s properties plus one extra, and people who reject it only because it is not gold. Making technology your religion “makes you irrational to evaluate alternatives.”

We disagreed on one thing. I argued for putting a small slice into airdrops and forks you believe in. He thought that is just risk cutting the other way: chase the Luke Dashjr coin or eCash for a 100x and “you’re becoming the most irrational VC possible.” Will he dump his own eCash on October 31st? “No, I’m not gonna dump it. I didn’t dump my Bitcoin Cash.” Then his phone rang, and I let him go with the highest honor I can bestow: my third favorite Michael, after Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson.

Not a Funeral, an Evolution

Somebody at the table said it best near the end: “This is not the death of TABConf. It’s the evolution of TABConf.” The hallway proved it. I flew 17 hours for this, my camera quit, I improvised a setup from two trips to Best Buy and one to Target, and I still came out with one of the most fun episodes of the year. If you missed the talks inside, they will be on YouTube. The conversations outside will not be, unless someone like me is standing there with a tripod. And if you want to dig deeper into the forks we kept mentioning, start with What the Fork?! and the story of Luke’s Bitcoin BLAKE2b fork.

Listen to Paul Sztorc, André Beganski, Alex Lewin, Janusz, Christopher Allen, Will & Michael Tidwell on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

The hallway did not stop on day one. For day two, with Kevin Loaec, Ekrem Bal of Citrea, Spaces Protocol and The Bitcoin Pivot, continue with S17 E47.

Watch on YouTube

Time stamps:
1:55 Welcome to Bitcoin Takeover at TABConf 8 with Paul Sztorc
2:30 CUSF 2 demo: quantum-resistant signatures, OP_VAULT, OP_CTV & OP_CAT
4:30 Sweeping coins into a quantum-resistant UTXO with BitWindow
5:05 Why miners will never run it
5:52 Is quantum FUD? Pascal’s Wager & Saylor
7:50 Bitcoin’s overconfidence & the competition
8:41 How altcoins took Bitcoin’s use cases
10:17 Greg Maxwell & the belief in Bitcoin’s infallibility
11:39 Camera dies, webcam to the rescue
12:30 eCash hard fork: free coins later this month
13:08 Soft forks are opt-in, ignorable & reversible
14:35 Kafkaesque: will soft forks become mandatory?
16:01 Live questions: claiming eCash & does Saylor self-custody?
16:46 Mike Belshe, BitGo & custodians
17:48 The war on crypto, PGP & Enigma
18:44 How to claim your eCash coins
19:13 Liquidity pools instead of paying for exchange listings
21:37 Shinobi walks by & the Coldcard trophy
21:50 Paul leaves for the Town Hall
22:34 Spotting Christopher Allen & sponsor thanks
24:14 André Beganski joins: from Decrypt to MARA Foundation
25:25 Decrypt, The Block & trade publications
25:57 DL News & DeFi Llama
26:49 Blockworks’ offer & Supply Shock
27:43 BTCTKVR: Forks! magazine
28:10 The Ledger magazine & sourdough bakers
29:43 Going independent: Bitcoin Magazine vs Bitcoin Takeover
30:30 Storytellers vs AI
32:13 Original reporting & journalism as a public good
33:54 Sponsors & transparency
34:36 Camera battery woes & how to follow André
35:50 Orange Rock sponsor break
37:55 Alex Lewin joins: Finite & private AI
38:47 Fedi, Blockspaces & NCR
39:28 Atlanta, BitDevs & Capture the Bitcoin
40:14 Janusz joins: Zark = Zcash + Spark
41:38 Private AI meets private money
43:35 Privacy as an ingredient for liberty
44:03 Fungibility & a universal currency
45:21 Why Zcash-style privacy and not Monero?
47:05 Shielded pools vs ring signatures
49:44 Scaling privacy: Tachyon vs FCMP++
51:18 The first inning of privacy research
53:56 A bearish year: what still makes you bullish?
56:23 AI will make Bitcoin better, not worse
57:46 Why aren’t you at the TABConf funeral?
58:50 The hallway track & why showing up matters
1:00:48 AI psychosis & conferences
1:01:36 Coffee, tobacco & AI as a productivity drug
1:03:08 Forks magazine handout
1:03:46 Atlanta’s BeltLine
1:04:52 Favorite conferences: Bitcoin++ & Nashville
1:06:12 The Town Hall & the Tabbies
1:06:47 Paul has spoken at all eight TABConfs
1:07:43 Favorite fork? Bitcoin vs Zcash
1:09:22 The Orchard bug & a coordinated soft fork
1:11:29 Only Bitcoin is stubborn enough to invent witness encryption
1:11:59 Two hard forks this year: Luke’s coin & eCash
1:12:40 Fork strategy: don’t touch cold storage
1:13:43 Zcash as a BIP 300 drivechain
1:14:52 If Bitcoin goes to zero
1:16:13 Christopher Allen joins
1:17:40 Randomness warnings & VeriSign security reviews
1:19:32 LetheKit & dice entropy
1:20:00 Don’t rely on any single key: multisig, MuSig & FROST
1:21:00 Wallet companies & the Coldcard victims
1:22:34 Coinkite, open source & closing the code
1:24:15 No single points of failure, compromise or denial
1:25:08 How Coldcard treated security researchers
1:26:36 Bug bounties in the age of LLMs
1:27:51 Cypherpunks who embraced Bitcoin
1:28:45 Netscape, SSL 2 & the RSAREF license
1:30:18 Writing the SSL 3 reference implementation & TLS 1.0
1:30:47 DigiCash & David Chaum
1:31:29 Certicom, micro-currencies & the Merkle patent
1:32:03 Schnorr patents & ECDSA
1:33:10 secp256r1 suspicions vs secp256k1
1:35:44 Discovering Bitcoin in 2013
1:36:08 UTXOs to revoke X.509 certificates
1:37:08 Decentralized identifiers & DPKI
1:37:37 Paul Sztorc returns: Rebooting the Web of Trust
1:38:32 Namecoin
1:38:59 Christopher’s beef: key reuse in Ethereum & Nostr
1:40:30 BIP 32 & one key pair per identity
1:41:19 Christopher promises a part two
1:42:46 Paul introduces Will: 21 days before the midterms
1:43:35 Will on six privacy prisoners
1:43:59 Larry Harmon & Ian Freeman
1:44:45 Roman Sterlingov & Bitcoin Fog
1:47:32 Roman Storm & Tornado Cash
1:48:19 Samourai: Keonne Rodriguez & William Hill
1:50:59 The judge switch & the plea deals
1:54:25 The pardon campaign
1:55:42 Aaron Day’s StarkFreedom PAC
1:58:52 Michael Tidwell joins
1:59:42 The Tabbies
2:01:29 Why TABConf 8 is the last one
2:02:01 Death by a thousand cuts
2:03:51 My first TABConf & thanking the sponsors
2:05:27 eCash: the calmest hard fork in memory
2:07:16 Will miners steal from drivechains?
2:08:15 TABConf debates: BTC vs BCH vs BSV
2:09:06 Monero, Dash & bringing people into the fold
2:09:51 Amanda B. Johnson & DarkCoin at the monthly meetup
2:11:55 No-shill policy during the ICO craze
2:12:50 Paul Sztorc’s TABConf debates & Peter Todd
2:14:08 How TABConf got scammed in 2019
2:17:58 Greg Maxwell, Nick Szabo & who never came
2:19:45 Why the obituary happened a day early
2:20:31 Forks magazine
2:21:20 Top highlights: hardcore trivia & the standing ovation
2:23:40 What will Michael do with his eCash?
2:24:00 Kill Tidwell: Bitcoin comedy
2:25:12 Matt Odell never came
2:26:13 The first Bitcoin car & Rassah’s plane
2:27:36 Atlanta lore: Jeff Garzik, Stephen Pair & BitPay
2:29:42 Bitcoin is not my religion
2:31:01 Favorite fork: Taproot
2:32:45 I like all the hard forks
2:35:24 Diversifying into airdrops: the most irrational VC
2:38:47 Goodbye Michael & wrap-up

The Best Quotes from Every Episode of Bitcoin Takeover Podcast! (2019-2026)

Vlad Costea — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 23:13:00 +0000

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast records an oral history of Bitcoin through long-form interviews with the developers, entrepreneurs, cypherpunks, and critics who build, invest, and criticize the status quo. This page collects ten memorable quotes from each episode, Seasons 1 through 17, taken from episode transcripts, with a link to the full episode next to each one.

The 21 Bitcoin Takeover Podcast quotes that write history

Martti Malmi: “Everything was centralized, so I was googling for something like a peer-to-peer currency, and then Bitcoin came up; it had just been published.”
S16 E12: Martti Malmi on Bitcoin in 2009 at 9:15 — Satoshi Nakamoto's first collaborator, creator of Bitcoin Talk and first content manager on Bitcoin.org, describing how he found the project just after it was published.
Phil Zimmermann: “I think Bitcoin is a very clever protocol, and I have enormous respect for the guy who invented it.”
S14 E15: Phil Zimmermann on PGP at 27:43 — The creator of PGP, the encryption tool at the center of the 1990s crypto wars, gives his view of Bitcoin and its inventor.
Vitalik Buterin: “To me, the tribe should be first and foremost not about a particular asset, but about the underlying ideals. I hope that as Ethereum we can continue to convince all of you that we can be very effective stewards of those ideals, making sure that financial self-sovereignty and a free and open internet can continue to be a reality for people, even during a time when lots of people don’t want it to be.”
S16 E24: Vitalik Buterin on Bitcoin & Ethereum at 2:49:53 — Ethereum’s co-founder, who started out writing about Bitcoin, arguing that crypto should be loyal to the cypherpunk ideals of self-sovereignty and a free internet rather than to any one coin.
Roger Ver: “Bitcoin was never supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme. It was supposed to be a get-free-quick scheme.”
S15 E26: Roger Ver on Bitcoin at 5:01 — Early 2011 Bitcoin investor and evangelist who sold his Lamborghini to buy more bitcoin under $1, and later became the most popular supporter of big blocks.
Peter Todd: “My big one is that I think Bitcoin should have a small bit of inflation. My argument only becomes relevant in maybe another 20 years anyway, so it doesn’t really matter that much right now.”
S4 E7: Peter Todd on Security at 1:31:03 — A long-time Bitcoin Core contributor making his case for tail emission, still an open debate concerning Bitcoin’s security budget.
Erik Voorhees: “As Bitcoin grows, as this stuff becomes more popular and more widespread, it actually starts challenging government sovereignty over money.”
S8 E3: Erik Voorhees on Self Custody at 15:51 — The founder of SatoshiDice and ShapeShift on why Bitcoin collides with state control of money.
Charlie Lee: “Bitcoin is the best form of money that human civilization has ever encountered.”
S15 E30: Charlie Lee on Lightning & Litecoin at 21:10 — The creator of Litecoin and a former Coinbase engineer ranking Bitcoin as money.
Andrew Poelstra: “There was all this fighting about how to activate it without a civil war, when nobody was actually against Taproot.”
S15 E17: Andrew Poelstra on Covenants at 35:01 — Blockstream’s research director, who worked on the Schnorr and Taproot research, describing the 2021 activation fight.
Mark Karpelès: “If I had to do it again, I would do it again, but not the same way.”
S17 E10: Mark Karpelès on Mt. Gox at 12:51 — The former CEO of Mt. Gox, whose 2014 collapse is one of the defining events of Bitcoin’s history, on whether he would do it again.
Slush: “I think the security of open source is the way to achieve security.”
S8 E8: Slush on Trezor at 6:46 — The founder of the first Bitcoin mining pool and co-founder of Trezor refers to open source as the basis of security.
Zooko: “I’m not Satoshi. I wish. I tried to be Satoshi for two years at DigiCash, trying to figure out how to make Chaumian DigiCash decentralized.”
S16 E29: Zooko on Ecash, Bitcoin & Zcash at 1:21:01 — The Zcash founder, who worked at DigiCash in the 1990s, on the years he spent trying to make Chaumian ecash decentralized before Bitcoin did it.
Jeff Garzik: “One of the things that made me sad about Bitcoin maximalism is that people take it to an extreme, really dumping on developers who just want to try something new and interesting.”
S15 E70: Jeff Garzik on Hemi at 48:06 — A Bitcoin Core developer from the Satoshi era explains where maximalism goes wrong.
Eric Voskuil: “You can’t be involved with Bitcoin and not have a node.”
S15 E22: Eric Voskuil on Libbitcoin at 2:03:33 — The lead developer of libbitcoin, an alternative full-node implementation, talks about the importance of running your own node.
Jameson Lopp: “There’s also going to be a controversial discussion about what we do with all the Bitcoin sitting in quantum-vulnerable UTXOs.”
S15 E66: Jameson Lopp on Ossification at 57:06 — The Casa co-founder and security engineer on the quantum-vulnerable coins question, still an ongoing debate.
Casey Rodarmor: “Bitcoin’s money use case is really important, but it only resonates with a small number of people. If we can make Bitcoin do more things, and more interesting things, then we can make Bitcoin resonate with more and more people.”
S13 E3: Casey Rodarmor on Ordinals at 1:47:42 — The creator of Ordinals and inscriptions, the protocol that reopened the blockspace debate in 2023.
Riccardo Spagni: “In a truly permissionless system, a miner shouldn’t have enough information to be able to prevent a transaction. Bitcoin does not have privacy, and that means permissionlessness is a social construct: the only reason Bitcoin remains permissionless is that there is a social contract around it.”
S17 E8: Riccardo Spagni on Monero & Privacy at 30:02 — The former Monero lead maintainer on why, without privacy, Bitcoin’s permissionlessness rests only on a social contract.
Paul Sztorc: “All these people are making a huge mistake, because when the miners care more about fees than the block reward, the endgame will be merge-mined L2s that pay transaction fees to the miners.”
S15 E68: Paul Sztorc on Activating Drivechains via CUSF at 1:09:54 — The author of the drivechain proposals (BIP 300/301) on why the endgame for Bitcoin’s security is merge-mined layer 2s that pay their fees to miners.
Udi Wertheimer: “The only reason the Bitcoin supply can’t be inflated is that the community protects it like nothing else.”
S2 E2: Udi Wertheimer on Being a Bitcoiner at 9:46 — A Bitcoin developer, later a Taproot Wizards co-founder, on social consensus as the guard of the supply cap.
Giacomo Zucco: “If they can coordinate easily, that means they are a giant attack surface, because then the government knows that this group of developers is easy to coordinate.”
S2 E8: Giacomo Zucco on Bitcoin-Only Events at 29:47 — A long-time Italian Bitcoin educator on why developers that are easy to coordinate are a security risk.
Eli Ben-Sasson: “The vision is that integrity should never be assumed. It should always be demonstrated publicly for all to verify.”
S15 E36: Eli Ben-Sasson on STARKs at 44:09 — The co-inventor of STARKs and co-author of the Zerocash paper stating the idea behind validity proofs.
Mike Belshe: “If you’ve got a protocol that can be easily changed, then of course you can’t get that level of trust.”
S16 E1: Mike Belshe on BitGo at 23:23 — The BitGo CEO, who co-created the SPDY protocol behind HTTP/2, on why a protocol that resists change earns trust.

Season 1

S1 E1: Donald McIntyre on Bitcoin, The Teachings of Tim May and Nick Szabo, and the History of Money

Donald McIntyre is a collaborator of Nick Szabo’s, and a man who left behind the world of mainstream finance (he previously worked at UBS Securities and Morgan Stanley) to embrace the cypherpunk ethos.

Guest: Donald McIntyre · Aired: 2019-02-02 · Listen to this episode

Best quotes

Donald McIntyre: “Systems such as money, either gold coins or fiat money imposed by governments, are pretty new. We still have brains evolved for the previous stage, not for these huge nations and cities that we live in now.”
Donald McIntyre: “In terms of property and privacy, we have completely delegated to these third parties because of a false sense of security. With Bitcoin, as long as we have our private key, it is definitely ours.”
Donald McIntyre: “Nick Szabo is a brilliant person, not only because of what he has written, but because of the way he thinks. Within the cypherpunks, I think he must have been a very unique member.”
Donald McIntyre: “I tell Nick that I have to read his articles like 30 times, because there’s so much information in each paragraph. One of Nick Szabo’s articles is like six months of university courses.”
Donald McIntyre: “Nick came to the conclusion that money was a trust minimization device. There was a link between money and trusted third parties: money is a device to reduce trust.”
Donald McIntyre: “We evolved to use money as a conflict minimization device. The reason I go to a store and give them money instead of stealing is that it’s much less costly, for me and for the store owner, than stealing from each other all the time.”
Donald McIntyre: “I think that Bitcoin is first about anthropology, biology, conflict minimization, economic behavior, evolution and game theory. It’s all those things first.”
Donald McIntyre: “Tim May was very rational, and whenever he had to be skeptical, he was skeptical. It was like having a fatherly figure who is never satisfied with what you do, so you keep trying to be better all the time.”
Donald McIntyre: “I don’t think the whole world, eight or nine billion people in 50 years, is going to build all its systems on top of only one blockchain like Bitcoin. I think people are going to diversify.”
Donald McIntyre: “The 21 million monetary policy is a political decision. Maybe in ten or forty years, miners that are very powerful will say: ‘Now the block reward is only half a bitcoin per block, and I don’t like that. I want more money.’”

Field	Value
Name and ticker	eCash, ECX (practice coins on Alpha and Beta: pECX)
Not to be confused with	eCash (XEC), Amaury Séchet’s Bitcoin Cash fork; Cashu and Fedimint ecash; David Chaum’s 1990s eCash
Category	UTXO hard fork of Bitcoin, built to activate BIP-300 and BIP-301 natively
Announced	24 April 2026, on X, originally for a single fork near block 964,000 in August
Staged launch	Announced 8 August: Alpha, Beta, then a permanent Mainnet
Alpha	Forked from Bitcoin block 963,647 on 23 August 2026; first Alpha block 963,648 at difficulty 1, coinbase tag `/layertree-ecash/`
Beta	Fired 19 September 2026, around Bitcoin block 967,680
Mainnet	Around Bitcoin block 973,728, on or about 31 October 2026, the whitepaper’s 18th anniversary
Distribution	Every Bitcoin address at the Mainnet snapshot receives ECX 1:1; no claim, no form, no registration
Proof of work	SHA-256d, with a one-time difficulty reset to the minimum at the fork
Node	`ecash-com/bitcoin`, forked from Bitcoin Core v31.1, plus the `bip300301_enforcer` companion
Sidechains at launch	Seven Options: Thunder, zSide, BitNames, BitAssets, Truthcoin, Photon, CoinShift
Replay protection	Opt-in and one-directional: ECX transactions with `nLockTime = 499999999`
Satoshi’s coins	220 hard-coded transactions reassign part of the Patoshi-pattern coins on the ECX ledger only; about 600,000 stay, about 500,000 go to pre-launch investors
Alpha hashrate	About 5 PH/s in late August, about 9.7 PH/s on 17 September, roughly 0.001 percent of Bitcoin’s
Market	No tracked price. CoinMarketCap has an “eCash (ECX)” page with self-reported supply; pECX trades informally

Slot	Sidechain	What it is for
2	BitNames	Decentralized names and identity
4	BitAssets	Issuing and trading tokens
9	Thunder	Large blocks for cheap, high-volume payments
13	Truthcoin	Hivemind prediction markets, Paul’s original project
98	zSide	Zcash-style shielded privacy
99	Photon	Post-quantum signatures and vaults
255	CoinShift	Swaps between eCash and other coins

	Bitcoin	Bitcoin Cash	Bitcoin BLAKE2b	eCash (ECX)
Scaling bet	Small base layer, Lightning and other L2s	Bigger base blocks for everyone	Smaller base blocks, money only	Unchanged base layer, opt-in sidechains
Proof of work	SHA-256d	SHA-256d	BLAKE2b	SHA-256d
New features	Rarely, by soft fork	Yearly, by hard fork	Removes features	Mostly off the main chain, via sidechains
Relationship with miners	Miners signal; users enforce	Miners choose the software	Miners distrusted, rewards locked 45 days	Miners judge sidechain withdrawals
Relationship with Bitcoin Core	Is Bitcoin Core	Left in 2017	Left in 2026	Keeps merging Core
Genesis controversy	None	None	Mandatory signaling at 2.53 percent	Reassigned Patoshi coins

Criterion	Evidence
Technical ambition	Native BIP-300 and BIP-301; seven sidechains at launch; enforcer architecture; staged public rehearsal; continued merging of Bitcoin Core. The most ambitious feature set of any fork in this issue
Political radicalism	Fork after a decade of failed soft fork advocacy; reassignment of about 500,000 Patoshi-pattern coins to investors; opt-in replay protection; a name that collides with XEC; a founder who calls Core developers “corrupt”
Adoption	Pre-Mainnet; Alpha and Beta live; pECX traded informally; about 150,000 pECX burned; CoinMarketCap page with self-reported supply; major exchanges still cautious
Scalability claims vs measurement	Claims: global scale through Thunder and other sidechains. Measured: sidechains activated and a withdrawal bundle proposed on Alpha; no sustained throughput data yet
Decentralization	One company, one node implementation, one enforcer; SHA-256d lets any Bitcoin miner join; a concentrated investor allocation at genesis
Security model	Main-chain coins protected like Bitcoin’s; sidechain escrows protected by months-long majority miner voting; Alpha hashrate about 0.001 percent of Bitcoin’s
Long-run viability	Funded company since 2022; open repositories; public rehearsal culture; stated willingness to stand down if Bitcoin activates BIP-300. Counter-signals: Patoshi stigma, name confusion, thin security at launch
Speculative context	Upside: first real evidence for Drivechains, and a free airdrop to every self-custodied holder. Downside: replay losses, exchange non-support, a chain secured by a sliver of Bitcoin’s hashrate

Field	Value
Names	Bitcoin BLAKE2b, Bitcoin BIP110, BTCB2, XBT; the project itself also says BIP110, and Luke Dashjr calls it BTC
Category	UTXO hard fork of Bitcoin with a new proof of work; every BTC holder at block 961,631 holds the same balance on this chain
Last common block	961,631, mined 8 August 2026 at 19:33:48 UTC
Split	961,632 at about 20:12 UTC on 8 August, the first block of BIP-110’s mandatory signaling period
SHA-256d stall	Eight blocks (961,632 to 961,639) in 22 days, the last one tagged OCEAN on 28 August
First BLAKE2b block	961,640, 30 August 2026 at 06:14 UTC, mined by SilentWave
Proof of work	BLAKE2b with a 164-byte version-2 header; Bitcoin’s 2,016-block retarget kept
Temporary rules	Reduced-data rules and an 800,000 weight unit cap (about 300 kB) until 1 September 2027
Client	Bitcoin Knots 29.4.1.knots20260508
Supply	Same 21 million cap and halvings; 20,067,600 coins at the split; next halving at block 1,050,000
Coinbase maturity	100 blocks, rising to 6,480 blocks (about 45 days) for rewards mined from 973,440 to 979,920
Hashrate	About 17 PH/s of BLAKE2b across 27 pools (8 September); not comparable with Bitcoin’s SHA-256d exahashes
Height	972,506 on 17 September, about 5,170 blocks ahead of Bitcoin
Price	Peak $1,799 (5 September); $270 to $315 (21 September)
Market cap	Not listed on CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap; no meaningful figure exists

Date	Event
Jul 2026	Adam Back calls BIP-110 “idiocracy”; signaling hovers around 1 to 2 percent
8 Aug	Mandatory signaling begins at 961,632; chain splits at 2.53 percent peak support
9 to 10 Aug	Motion to remove Luke as BIP editor; Knots Discord meeting assigns hard fork work
11 to 12 Aug	Commit-reveal lottery on Testnet4 selects BLAKE2b from six candidates
15 Aug	Minority chain stalled at 961,635; more than 400,000 replayed transactions waiting
28 Aug	Last SHA-256d block, 961,639, tagged OCEAN
29 Aug	Luke resigns from OCEAN; SHA-256 miners asked to stop
30 Aug	BLAKE2b activates at 961,640 with the New York Post headline in the coinbase
2 Sep	Final Knots 29.4.1 release
~2 Sep	First trades on Neoxa as BTCB2 around $80, on a 131.7 percent bid-ask spread
5 Sep	Peak at $1,799
8 Sep	Neoxa renames it XBT; Alphapool passes 50 percent of hashrate; blacklist patch appears
15 Sep	Luke opens Knots PR #419, “Long coinbase maturity”
21 Sep	PR #419 merged; price $270 to $315
22 Sep	45-day maturity window begins at block 973,440
1 Sep 2027	Reduced-data rules and 300 kB cap scheduled to expire

Venue	Ticker	Pairs	Notes
Neoxa / NeoxEX	XBT (since 8 Sep; the market URL still reads BTCB2_USDC)	USDC, USDT, BTC	First venue; about USD 916,000 in 24h volume on its USDC book on 8 September; publicly endorsed the 45-day maturity soft fork
NonKYC	BTCB2	USDT, BTC	Internal record names the asset “Bitcoin BIP110 (BLAKE2b)”; about $280,000 in 24h volume on 17 September
SafeTrade	BIP110 and XBT	USDT	Very thin; the BIP110/USDT market has at times shown as disabled

Criterion	Evidence
Technical ambition	New PoW chosen and deployed in 19 days; 164-byte header with tx-count commitment and XOR key; SIGHASH_UNIFIED; long coinbase maturity. Real engineering on a rushed schedule
Political radicalism	Mandatory signaling at 2.53 percent support; “Spamcoin”; exchanges accused of selling “fake bitcoins”; consensus blacklist proposed against a pool; planned reward forfeiture for “non-miners.” The most radical governance posture in this issue after BSV
Adoption	Neoxa (XBT), NonKYC (BTCB2), SafeTrade (BIP110/XBT); no CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap listing; no major exchange
Scalability claims vs measurement	Explicitly anti-throughput: 300 kB blocks until 1 September 2027
Decentralization	Single client and single lead developer; one pool briefly above 50 percent; DATUM template-building as the proposed remedy
Security model	About 17 PH/s of BLAKE2b, drawn from the Siacoin ASIC market; immune to SHA-256 ASICs; 45-day maturity against rented hash; replay protection opt-in only
Long-run viability	Continuous blocks since 30 August; active development; three-phase miner plan. Counter-signals: 84 percent drawdown, ticker chaos, hostility to exchanges, rules expiring in 2027
Speculative context	Upside: a pure-money brand for the anti-inscription camp. Downside: illiquidity, replay losses, mistaken deposits to BTC addresses, and a miner base that may not wait 45 days to be paid

Bitcoin - Bitcoin Takeover

Robin Linus, Art & the 1,000 BTC Prius: A Ride to the TABConf 8 BitDevs Barbecue

The Car That Cost 1,000 Bitcoin

Why the First Car Bought With Bitcoin Matters

Old Wallets, Dream Cars and the Wrong Generation

Shielded CSV and a Million Bitcoin for Payments

Soft Forks Are About Feelings

Drivechains, Spark and a Check Engine Light

The Annex Mafia Arrives at BitDevs

The Privacy Wars Begin

Rob Hamilton, Man on the Street

This Is Like Bitcoin Uncensored

Names, Garbled Circuits and zSide

Dubai Plates, BitNames and Truthcoin

Closing the Door

Listen to Robin Linus, Art & Friends on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

Time stamps:

Peter Todd Unboxes His Zcash Ceremony Laptop, 10 Years After Sprout

From Zerocoin Critic to Ceremony Participant

Decoy Flights and a 3,000 Kilometer Drive

Discs A to F: The Paper Trail Burned in Plastic

A Clear Cut, a Blowtorch and Some Very Cooked RAM

The Anti-Ninja Chair and Ten Years of Footage

Why Peter Sold It, and How It Came Back

Would He Do It Again? And What About Zcash Today?

Listen to Peter Todd on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

S17 E47: Tabconf 8 Livestream with Kevin Loaec, Ekrem Bal, Spaces Protocol & The Bitcoin Pivot

Citrea Pivots to Privacy

Quantum, Covenants & Why OP_CAT Wins

Crest Is Not Tornado Cash

Kevin Loaec on the Security Nobody Uses

Stu, Memes & Script Emulation

Spaces Protocol: Names on Bitcoin, 32 Bytes at a Time

Squatters, Silent Payments & Namecoin’s Ghost

The Bitcoin Pivot: Credit Unions as Bitcoin On-Ramps

Bonus: Peter Todd

Listen to Kevin Loaec, Ekrem Bal, Stu, Andrew & Buffer of Spaces Protocol and The Bitcoin Pivot on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

S17 E46: Livestream from Tabconf 8, Part 1 (feat. Paul Sztorc, Andre Beganski, Alex Lewin, Janusz, Christopher Allen, Will & Michael Tidwell)

Paul Sztorc and the Quantum Soft Fork Nobody Will Run

Soft Forks Are Reversible, Free Coins Are Free

André Beganski on Leaving Decrypt and Journalism as a Public Good

Alex Lewin on Private AI, Fedi & Why Privacy Is About Other People

Janusz on Zark, Zcash Primitives & the Free Market of Privacy

Interlude: AI Psychosis and Why You Should Show Up

Christopher Allen on Randomness, Multisig & the Coldcard Lesson

From RSAREF to TLS 1.0, DigiCash and a UTXO That Revokes Certificates

Will on Six Privacy Prisoners and 21 Days Before the Midterms

Michael Tidwell Walks Out of His Own Funeral

Debates, No Shilling & How TABConf Got Scammed in 2019

Bitcoin Is Not My Religion, Taproot Is My Favorite Fork

Not a Funeral, an Evolution

Listen to Paul Sztorc, André Beganski, Alex Lewin, Janusz, Christopher Allen, Will & Michael Tidwell on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and More

The Best Quotes from Every Episode of Bitcoin Takeover Podcast! (2019-2026)

The 21 Bitcoin Takeover Podcast quotes that write history

Season 1

S1 E1: Donald McIntyre on Bitcoin, The Teachings of Tim May and Nick Szabo, and the History of Money

Best quotes

S1 E2: John Carvalho on Being a Long-Time Bitcoiner and Getting Engaged in Bitcoin Politics

Best quotes

S1 E3: Zack Voell on Bitcoin as a Political Mean, The Opt-In Economy, and Dating as a Bitcoiner

Best quotes

S1 E4: Omar Faridi on Bitcoin in Pakistan and Rebalancing the World Economy

Best quotes

S1 E5: Matt B on Bitcoin in Ireland and New Zealand, Satoshi Nakamoto Conspiracies, and More

Best quotes

S1 E6: Buzz Lightyear on Protecting Bitcoin

Best quotes

S1 E7: Avi Rosten on John Stuart Mill, Getting Into Bitcoin, and Meeting David Chaum

Best quotes

S1 E8: Anthony Lusardi on Bitcoin in New York, Scalability, and Altcoins

Best quotes

S1 E9: Crypto Brekkie (Brekkie van Bitcoin) on Loving Bitcoin, International Relations, and What BTC Can Do For Arts and Entertainment

Best quotes

S1 E10: Alena Vranova on Bitcoin as a Mean for Fairer Politics

Best quotes

Season 2

S2 E1: Wassim Alsindi on Bitcoin as a Time Machine

Best quotes

S2 E2: Udi Wertheimer on Being a Bitcoiner

Best quotes