Seven and a half years later, I cannot find his Twitter account. I do not know what he is doing now. That makes this episode a time capsule from an era when crypto journalism was a hustle, when a guy in Lahore could outwrite anyone in New York, and when the biggest question in Bitcoin was whether it would survive another year of bear market. Listening back, I hear two colleagues who were comfortable enough with each other to be honest. It was the first episode of this show where I was not nervous. It shows.

(Remaster sponsored by Helen’s Pizza, 183 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, where you can pay for pizza, pasta, and coffee with Bitcoin or shielded Zcash. At the time of recording, one ZEC was worth around $1,600. When we started this remastering effort, it was under $1,000. The pizza tastes better when you pay for it with money nobody can confiscate.)

Bitcoin in Pakistan: The View From Inside

The premise of the episode was simple: how much do we actually know about Bitcoin in our own countries? Omar’s answer for Pakistan was sobering. The community was tiny. The State Bank had already shut down the local exchange by instructing banks to refuse service to anyone dealing in cryptocurrencies, a move that preceded India’s similar crackdown. Most people had never heard of Bitcoin, and the few who had associated it with scams.

Education was the bottleneck: public schooling was underfunded, decent education was expensive, and even the educated elite were largely unaware. Omar illustrated this with a story about registering his daughter for school. The owner, an American woman who had grown up in the United States, asked him what “cryptocurrencies” were when he listed his occupation as a crypto journalist.

The most striking detail was Potcoin, a fork of Litecoin created by a Pakistani developer, with a total market cap of $34,000. Not million. Thousand. It was the entire country’s contribution to the altcoin landscape, and it captured something essential about the gap between the global crypto narrative and local reality.

Freedom House vs. Ground Truth

One of the most valuable exchanges in the episode came when I cited the Freedom House index, which rated Pakistan as “not free” in terms of internet access, citing obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. Omar pushed back immediately and politely. That is not true, he said. You can do pretty much what you want on the internet. Telegram is blocked, yes, but a VPN solves that in thirty seconds. If you want to see real censorship, go to China, where Google and Facebook do not exist without a workaround.

This was a lesson in the limits of institutional metrics. Freedom House was not wrong, exactly. The restrictions exist. But the lived experience of a Pakistani citizen is different from what an index in Washington D.C. captures, and Omar’s willingness to say so, calmly and without defensiveness, is the kind of ground truth that makes these conversations worth having.

Corruption as an Enforcement Gap

I asked whether the government would ever block Bitcoin mining. Omar’s answer was illuminating in a way he may not have intended. No, he said, because they cannot enforce it. Tax collection in Pakistan is so dysfunctional, so riddled with bribery and informal arrangements, that the idea of sending inspectors door to door to check for mining rigs is laughable. People are stealing electricity. The government has bigger problems.

This is the paradox of weak states: the same dysfunction that makes life difficult for ordinary citizens also makes it impossible for the government to effectively suppress Bitcoin. The enforcement gap is the freedom. It is not a comfortable kind of freedom, and Omar was clear that he would trade it for functioning institutions, but it is real.

The Brain Drain Equation

Omar’s Twitter handle was @BrainDrainOmar, and the name was not ironic. It was a diagnosis. Pakistan produces talented people, and those people leave, either physically or digitally, because the local economy cannot pay them what they are worth. Omar worked remotely for foreign publications because a mid-career professional salary in Pakistan was $300 to $400 per month. He could earn multiples of that writing about crypto for outlets based in New York and London.

I connected this to Romania, where we have the second-lowest wages in the European Union and the second-highest emigration rate in the world, behind only Syria, a country at war. Romanians leave for Spain, Italy, and Portugal because the languages are similar and the wages are triple. The result is a domestic economy that cannot fill skilled positions while its best workers send remittances from abroad.

The internet is both the cause and the cure. It enables the brain drain by making remote work possible, but it also allows people like Omar to stay in their home countries while earning international salaries. The question is which force wins, and the answer probably depends on whether local institutions can adapt fast enough to retain the people they cannot afford to lose.

The Petro and the Limits of State-Issued Crypto

Omar asked my opinion on Venezuela’s Petro, the state-issued cryptocurrency that Maduro’s government claimed was backed by oil reserves. My answer was harsh, and I stand by it: the Petro was dishonest from the start. The technical details were never transparent. The supply was controlled by the government. The distribution favored insiders. It was, in structure, an ICO with a flag on it, complete with a pre-sale for elites and vague promises about resource backing.

Omar added the Reuters investigation, a three-to-four-month on-the-ground report from Venezuela that found no evidence of the Petro being used for any transaction, no major exchanges listing it, and no trading volume. The Petro did not fail because it was a bad idea in principle. It failed because it was a centralized product wearing a decentralized costume, and the market could tell the difference.

This led to one of the episode’s most important threads: the people who suffer under sanctions are not the governments being sanctioned. They are the citizens. When the United States and its allies impose trade embargoes on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba, the intended target is the regime. The actual casualty is the person trying to buy food. Bitcoin, for those people, is not an investment or a political statement. It is a lifeline, because it is the only form of money that cannot be confiscated, inflated, or blocked by either their own government or someone else’s.

McDonald’s as Political Ambassador

The most unexpected detour came when I argued that American consumer brands function as political ambassadors. McDonald’s, Starbucks, Colgate: these are not just companies. They are vectors of cultural influence, selling not just products but a lifestyle associated with the free world. When you walk into a McDonald’s in Lahore and order a Big Mac, you are participating in an idea about what standardization, quality, and globalization mean.

Omar’s response was characteristically measured: but is the Big Mac actually better? The local restaurant might make a better burger. The brand is selling perception, not product. I conceded the point but argued that this is precisely the mechanism: Bitcoin, like McDonald’s, can become a world standard not because it is necessarily the best at everything, but because it is the most recognized, the most distributed, and the hardest to shut down. Small restaurants close. Global chains survive. Altcoins die. Bitcoin persists.

The Ethereum Debate

The Constantinople hard fork was days away when we recorded, and Omar expressed genuine trust in Ethereum’s developers, both their technical ability and their honesty. I pushed back with the standard critiques: the premine, the DAO fork, the arbitrary changes to monetary policy, the increasing difficulty of running a node. Omar’s response was the kind of nuance that crypto Twitter rarely tolerates: Bitcoin and Ethereum are conceptually different, they have different use cases, and comparing them directly is less useful than understanding what each is trying to do.

He was right about Constantinople, incidentally. It activated without incident. The five EIPs went live. The world did not end.

The Moderate Manifesto

The closing stretch of the episode contains what I now think of as Omar’s moderate manifesto, and it is the part that has aged best. He rejected both extremes: the maximalist view that everything except Bitcoin is a scam, and the statist view that cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes. He rejected the idea that governments are inherently evil, pointing out that governments are created by people, and the people in power are there because of what the majority did or failed to do. He rejected the authority of experts, noting that Nouriel Roubini, for all his awards, is not always right, and that people should use their own brains to evaluate claims.

This was January 2019. The ICO bubble had just burst. The maximalist wars were raging. The narrative battle lines were being drawn between Bitcoin as sound money and everything else as a scam. Omar was having none of it. Nothing is inherently good or bad, he said. It is the situation and what you make of it. Seven years later, with the benefit of hindsight, that sentence holds up better than almost anything else said in the episode.

What Aged Well and What Did Not

The episode is a time capsule, and time capsules are most interesting for what they reveal about the moment of burial. Several things aged remarkably well. Omar’s insistence that privacy coins would maintain a market, because people want financial privacy, has been vindicated by the current Zcash rally and the broader privacy narrative.

His argument that adoption requires simplicity, that nobody cares about Schnorr signatures or hash rates, and that the technology needs to be invisible before it can be universal, is the same argument being made today by every UX-focused wallet developer. His warning about centralized exchanges charging $20 per transaction while claiming to be decentralized alternatives has only become more relevant as the industry consolidated around a handful of gatekeepers.

Other things did not age as well. The Lightning Network, which we both discussed with cautious optimism, has not delivered on its promise of seamless, low-cost payments for the masses. The ETF gateway that I mentioned as a bridge for institutional adoption arrived, but it brought exactly the kind of centralization and custodial concentration that the episode’s philosophical threads warned against. The idea that Bitcoin would become more private over time, through Schnorr signatures and confidential transactions, has not materialized in any meaningful way for the average user.

The most poignant detail, in retrospect, is Omar’s observation about education. The people who need Bitcoin most, in Pakistan, in Venezuela, in every country where the local currency is failing, are the least likely to understand it. Seven years later, that gap has narrowed but not closed. The interfaces are better, the wallets are simpler, but the fundamental challenge remains: how do you explain self-sovereign money to someone who has never been asked to be responsible for their own financial security?

That question does not have a technical answer. It has a human one. And conversations like this one, between two colleagues on opposite sides of the world, talking honestly about what they see and what they do not understand, are part of how that answer gets built.

This is the fourth stop in my effort to rebuild the early catalog with proper audio and honest notes, and the Remastering Bitcoin Takeover project page explains why I bothered. If Omar's moderate streak appealed to you, the first three remasters are worth your evening: Donald McIntyre on Tim May, Nick Szabo and the history of money, John Carvalho on Bitcoin politics, and Zack Voell on Bitcoin as a political instrument.

Listen to Omar Faridi on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & More!

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Time stamps:

0:00 – Intro
0:46 – Remaster Notes: The Crypto Insider Colleague
2:29 – Somewhat Jealous of the Five-Article Days
4:01 – Sponsor Shoutout: Helen’s Pizza in Jersey City
5:25 – The Original Recording: January 2019
6:12 – Omar Faridi: Crypto Journalist in Pakistan
7:47 – The State of Bitcoin in Pakistan
9:02 – Misinformation, Education & the $400 Salary
10:05 – The Exchange the State Bank Shut Down
11:08 – Potcoin: Pakistan’s Own Cryptocurrency ($34,000 Market Cap)
11:53 – The School Owner Who Had Never Heard of Crypto
13:17 – How Free Is Pakistan? A Parliamentary Republic
15:33 – Voting for Parties, Not Presidents
18:06 – Freedom vs. Quality of Life
19:09 – LocalBitcoins & the Day Trader Who Bought From Omar
21:29 – How Free Are You on a Scale of 1 to 10?
23:32 – Freedom House Says “Not Free.” Omar Disagrees
25:11 – Telegram Is Blocked, VPNs Work Fine
26:39 – Would They Block Bitcoin Mining?
28:42 – The Enforcement Problem: Corruption as a Feature
30:05 – People Are Stealing Electricity
31:32 – Could Bitcoin Give Pakistan a Kickstart in World Capitalism?
33:20 – The Stability Argument: Why Volatility Kills Merchant Adoption
35:40 – Alena Vranova’s Embargo Bypass Thesis
38:04 – The Petro: Venezuela’s Dishonest Cryptocurrency
41:30 – The Reuters Investigation: No Evidence of Use
43:14 – Sanctions, Desperation & Who Really Suffers
45:05 – Why Venezuelans Prefer Bitcoin to Bolivars and Dollars
46:50 – ICOs, Central Points of Failure & the Network Effect
48:29 – Putin’s Cryptocurrency Speech & Digital Resources
50:02 – McDonald’s as Political Ambassador: The Big Mac Theory
52:04 – Is the Big Mac Actually Better?
54:39 – Ethereum Classic’s 51% Attack & Network Security
56:00 – Constantinople: The Hard Fork That Almost Happened
59:01 – Why Omar Trusts Ethereum Developers
1:00:36 – Vlad’s Critique: Premine, DAO Fork & Arbitrary Changes
1:03:46 – Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: Different Use Cases
1:06:24 – The Austrian Economics Friend & the Broken System
1:08:46 – Rubini, Stiglitz & the Ponzi Narrative
1:10:03 – SegWit, Schnorr, Lightning & Blockstream Satellites
1:12:20 – Time Magazine: “Bitcoin Is a Guarantee of Liberty”
1:13:36 – Omar’s Rebuttal: Nobody Cares About Schnorr Signatures
1:15:15 – Roger Ver, Bitcoin Cash & the Simplicity Argument
1:17:21 – DigiByte, Dogecoin & the Gateway Drug Theory
1:19:18 – The 50% Supply Problem: Worse Than a Central Bank
1:21:20 – The Gym Analogy: Altcoins as Training Wheels
1:22:46 – Omar’s Moderate Manifesto: Nothing Is Absolutely Good or Bad
1:25:02 – Rubini Is Not Always Right: Use Your Own Brain
1:26:31 – Brain Drain Omar: The Name Explained
1:28:56 – Romania’s Brain Drain: Second Only to Syria
1:31:35 – The Chinese Neighborhood Outside Bucharest
1:34:28 – The Internet Changed Everything
1:37:25 – Jobs That Didn’t Exist: The New Economy
1:39:19 – Why Vlad Recommended Omar for Crypto Insider
1:42:54 – The First Email: Bulky Equipment & “It’s So Easy”
1:44:56 – Stuart Haber Invented Blockchain Before Satoshi
1:46:41 – Coming Full Circle: From Local to Global
1:49:10 – The Orwellian Alternative
1:51:42 – Privacy Coins Will Have a Market
1:54:06 – Decentralized Exchanges & IP Tracking
1:55:04 – Where to Find Omar Faridi
1:56:44 – Closing: The Bitcoin Takeover Continues

January 2019 was a strange time to launch a Bitcoin podcast. The price was digging a grave somewhere around $3,500, the obituaries were being printed in bulk, and yet two twenty-somethings with political science degrees decided the moment was perfect for a crossover episode. I had just started this show, which almost launched under the name BIP, for Bitcoin and Politics, before I concluded the angle was too silly to sustain. Zack Voell was hosting The Coin Pod. The plan was simple: each of us would publish the conversation on our respective feeds.

I held up my end. Zack, it must be noted with affection, did not. The Coin Pod went silent that very month, which makes me the prime suspect in its unsolved disappearance. In the years since, Zack has passed through Messari, Compass Mining, and Blockstream, and has managed to become roughly as unpopular with the church of Bitcoin maximalism as I am, though for opposite reasons. I later interviewed Roger Ver. He did memecoins on Solana. Balance in all things.

What follows is why this conversation, recorded at 4 a.m. Romanian time at the bottom of a brutal bear market, still deserves your attention.

Two Political Science Refugees Walk Into Bitcoin

Most Bitcoin origin stories begin with code or with greed. Ours began with coursework. Zack attended a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania with a strong Austrian economics department, and a roommate who orange-pilled him between classes. My own university was firmly left-wing, offering exactly one Austrian economics lecture buried inside a macroeconomics syllabus. I found Bitcoin through its funeral announcements: the 2014 headlines declaring it a Ponzi scheme and a drug dealer’s toy, which sent me wandering through the Silk Road and the coin mixers of the era out of pure curiosity. I bought in late, got rekt, and stayed for the ideas, which is the most common honest biography in this industry.

The Opt-In Economy

The conversation opens on the question that brought us together: can Bitcoin function as an instrument of international affairs, an oil currency, an embargo bypass? Zack’s answer frames Bitcoin as something genuinely new under the sun, an opt-in economy that no one is forced to use and no one is barred from leaving. Where Locke rejected “voting with your feet” as insufficient, Bitcoin offers a stranger upgrade: voting with your money, exiting one monetary regime for a parallel one without asking permission.

Buried in this section is one of the episode’s most quotable lines, delivered with the calm of someone who had just survived 2018: you only ever really experience one bear market, and that is your first one. Higher highs and higher lows do the emotional anesthesia for every cycle after.

Gridlock Is a Feature

The strongest stretch of the interview is Zack’s parallel between American monetary history and Bitcoin governance, and it holds up remarkably well. Colonial America was a monetary disaster zone: hyperinflated paper scrip in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, tobacco certificates circulating as money substitutes, and a currency situation so chaotic that the British Crown intervened to protect its own trade routes. Digital cash went through the same Darwinian gauntlet, with failed iterations stretching back to the 1980s before Bitcoin finally stuck the landing.

Then comes the insight worth the price of admission. Everyone complains that Congress is gridlocked and that Bitcoin never changes. Both observations are correct, and both are compliments. The Federalist system was designed so that bills move slowly and the status quo dies hard. Nakamoto consensus does the same for the protocol. A lack of novelty is not stagnation. It is the institution working as intended.

A Very American Invention With an Un-American Agenda

I put forward a thesis in this episode that I still find provocative: Bitcoin is a deeply American invention that works against America’s foreign policy interests. The whitepaper’s intellectual pedigree runs through Ralph Merkle, Wei Dai, and David Chaum. Hal Finney received the first transaction. Nick Szabo’s Bit Gold came closest to the design. Even the obligatory counterexample, Adam Back, is the token Brit who allegedly shrugged at Bitcoin until it crossed $1,000.

And yet here was Venezuela trading around an embargo, North Korea rumored to be stockpiling mined coins, and Palestinians receiving aid in a currency no blockade could stop. Zack’s counterpoint is the sharper one: adoption in 2019 was concentrated precisely where Bitcoin was needed least, among the technically literate and socioeconomically comfortable. His resolution is a phrase I have stolen ever since: liberty arbitrage. Bitcoin flows toward oppression the way water flows downhill, because freedom of speech and freedom of money are the two foundational rights from which all others spring.

From FDR’s Gold Grab to Voltaire’s Zero

History buffs get their money’s worth here. We cover FDR’s 1933 gold confiscation, Executive Order 6102 for those keeping score, and Zack’s prediction that a future Digital Asset Confiscation Act is not outside the realm of possibility, merely far harder to enforce against a bearer asset you can memorize.

We wander through Jefferson’s preference for metallic money, his dismissal of paper as roughly as valuable as maple leaves, and Voltaire’s verdict that all paper currency eventually returns to its intrinsic value of zero. Zack coins the condition we all live under: fiat inertia, the inability to imagine money that no one issues, because no living person remembers anything else. Bitcoin’s radicalism is not that it is new. It is that it reminds us of what we forgot.

Money as Trust, Bitcoin as Community

My favorite detour runs through Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, specifically his fable of the first man to fence a plot of land and declare it his, and the second fool who believed him. Nick Szabo’s monetary history supplies the rebuttal: money is a token of trust that lets strangers cooperate, and in that sense it built civilization. Zack extends this into territory that annoyed the maximalists of 2019: money necessarily creates communities, because a currency is only good within the circle of people who accept it. Bitcoin’s community is not an embarrassing accident. It is what money looks like when it is working.

Russia, Bernie Madoff & the $10 Billion Rumor

Every 2019 artifact needs its absurd news cycle, and ours was the rumor that Vladimir Putin was preparing to buy $10 billion of Bitcoin as a reserve asset. The source was an economist named Vladislav Ginko, whom Zack had actually messaged about a podcast appearance before the man went AWOL. The credibility of the rumor can be assessed by Ginko’s other public position: that Bernie Madoff, the septuagenarian Wall Street fraudster, is the true Satoshi Nakamoto and must be freed. Case closed, gently.

What makes this section worth revisiting is how it aged. In 2019, a nation-state buying Bitcoin was a joke about a scammer’s tweet. In the years since, El Salvador made it legal tender and strategic Bitcoin reserves became a topic of serious policy in Washington. The joke became the thesis. Meanwhile, Maduro confiscating mining hardware and Kim Jong-un quietly stockpiling coins were early signs of exactly the dynamic Zack identified: oppressive regimes grasp the incentive structure of Bitcoin faster than free ones do, which remains an uncomfortable thought worth sitting with.

Deplatforming and Money as Speech

Recorded weeks after the Patreon purge that sent Jordan Peterson looking for the exit and left Gab scrambling for banking rails, the episode captures the exact moment the Bitcoin narrative pivoted from sound money for libertarians to free speech for everyone. Zack cites a sociology paper listing the four freedoms money should confer: buy what you want, from whom you want, when you want, on terms you accept. Fiat checks none of them reliably. Bitcoin checks all four out of the gate. Once that penetrates the collective consciousness, adoption follows. Seven years later, the deplatforming debate has only grown louder.

The Inconvenience of Freedom

The closing argument is the honest one. Credit cards forgive forgotten PINs. Banks reverse mistakes. Bitcoin forgives nothing, asks you to run your own node, and makes you the sole custodian of your wealth. Zack’s formulation deserves quoting: trust is never destroyed, only moved, and Bitcoin moves it from fallible third parties onto your own shoulders. You become your own single point of failure, which is sobering and liberating in the same breath. Watching society slowly prepare itself for that responsibility has been the story of the years since.

Orange Pilling Your Date

And then there is the romance segment, the reason this episode gets quoted at conferences. Zack was chronicling his New York dating life on Twitter, where “so what do you do?” admits no good answer when the answer is Bitcoin. I countered with my 2017 strategy: let the date pay the bill, reimburse my half in BTC or Litecoin, and say “you’re going to thank me later.”

Results varied. Pro tip from the transcript: never attempt this in the middle of a bull run, because the subsequent crash becomes your fault forever. Both of us, for the record, ended the episode cautiously optimistic about the women we were seeing. I knocked on wood on air. Listen to find out whether it worked.

If you’re glad, then I’m Vlad.

Listen to this Remaster with Zack Voell on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts & More!

▶ Play video Watch on YouTube

Time stamps: 

0:00 – Intro
0:46 – Remaster Notes: This Show Was Almost Called “Bitcoin & Politics”
2:12 – Sponsor Shoutout: Helen’s Pizza in Jersey City
3:30 – The Crossover Episode Zack Never Published
4:41 – The Original Recording: January 2019
5:42 – Bitcoin as a Tool of International Affairs
7:49 – Bitcoin Obituaries, Silk Road Curiosity & Getting Rekt
11:39 – The Opt-In Economy: Voting With Your Money
13:26 – “You Only Ever Experience One Bear Market: Your First”
16:54 – The US Dollar’s Outlaw Origins
17:55 – Colonial Currency Disasters & Tobacco Money
20:27 – Thirty Years of Failed Internet Money
21:51 – Gridlock Is a Feature: Congress & Nakamoto Consensus
22:37 – Bitcoin: A Very American Invention
24:47 – Why Americans Seem to Own the Narrative
27:18 – The White Paper’s American Pedigree
30:44 – Could Bitcoin Have Come Out of China or Russia?
31:35 – Liberty Arbitrage & the Two Foundational Freedoms
35:15 – FDR’s Gold Confiscation
37:43 – Jefferson, Madison & the Hard Money Founders
39:10 – Voltaire’s Zero & the Fiat Inertia
43:08 – Rousseau, Property & Money as a Token of Trust
48:02 – Rational Ignorance: The Questions We Never Ask
50:55 – The Bitcoin Crash Course & Why Money Creates Community
55:36 – The Bitcoin Noob Moniker
58:52 – Dating as a Bitcoiner in New York City
1:02:58 – “But That’s Not Real Money”
1:04:15 – Paying Your Half of the Date in Bitcoin (2017 Edition)
1:09:48 – The Russia Bitcoin Reserve Rumor
1:13:48 – Bernie Madoff Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto
1:17:19 – Who Adopts First: The Unbanked or the Privileged?
1:20:18 – Deplatforming, Gab, Patreon & Money as Speech
1:23:07 – The Four Freedoms of Money
1:26:05 – The Inconvenience of Freedom
1:29:20 – Your Own Single Point of Failure
1:31:09 – If You’re Glad, Then I’m Vlad

There is a certain irony in remastering an interview whose subject once told me he dislikes repeating himself. Yet here we are. This conversation with John Carvalho, recorded in January 2019, barely a week after my grandmother died and weeks before I launched this podcast to the world, holds up remarkably well. Not because John was always right. He would be the first to reject that framing. It holds up because the method was right: doubt everything, follow incentives, refuse the mold.

At the time, John was riding the tailwinds of his now-legendary interview with Roger Ver, the one that ended with a flipped middle finger and a Bcash dance for the ages. He was living in Romania, which gave us an odd kinship, and a few months later he became one of the first Bitcoiners I ever met in person. He agreed to be a guest when nobody knew what Bitcoin Takeover was. That act of generosity helped carry the entire first season, which I released Netflix-style, all ten episodes at once, a decision I have since filed under “ambitious but unwise.”

The Bitcoin Foundation: A Platform for Egos

Much of the early conversation circles the Bitcoin Foundation, the industry’s first political entity, founded by the likes of Mark Karpelès and Charlie Shrem. John’s verdict, delivered in 2019, is surgical: mostly ineffective, mostly a platform for the egos of early Bitcoin businessmen, never a genuine force for adoption or education. Brock Pierce still invoked his board membership as a credential at the time, which John dismissed as a “totally unimportant tag.”

What makes this section worth revisiting is what came after. John described trying to help the Foundation’s failed relaunch, advising Bruce Fenton and the new director on messaging and focus, only to watch his conceptual advice get ignored while his grammar corrections made it through. Then came the B Foundation, Giacomo Zucco and Alena Vranova’s attempt at funding development, which Bitcoin Twitter attacked before it had done anything at all.

John defended it then. Today, developer funding has matured into Brink, OpenSats, HRF’s Bitcoin Development Fund, and Spiral, all operating roughly along the lines John outlined: focused, unglamorous, and deliberately not claiming to represent Bitcoin. The lesson he drew in 2019, that organizing benevolence for a leaderless system is nearly impossible, turned out to be a feature description, not a bug report.

The Roger Ver Interview, From the Inside

Six years of retellings have mythologized the Ver interview, so the 2019 account is valuable precisely because it is fresh. John confirms it was not scripted. He prepared like a boxer: he studied Ver’s recent appearances, learned the party line, anticipated the sidesteps, and meditated beforehand. The repeated “Bcash” was not bait, at least not at first. He said “Bitcoin Cash” correctly a dozen times before the slip that triggered the walkout threat. Once the finger came out, the gloves came off.

His analysis of Ver’s debate technique remains the sharpest I have heard: reduce the paradigm until only a black-and-white choice remains, then claim victory inside that tiny frame. The countermove, zooming out into nihilism where nothing means anything, he attributes to Chris DeRose. Years later, when I interviewed Corbin Fraser on BTC vs BCH, Deadalnix on forking Bitcoin, and Roger Ver himself twice, the scaling wars looked like archaeology. In 2019 they were live combat, and John was in the trenches.

His boldest claim from that era: fighting the market burns the fighter. Roger’s resources, however large, were fuel being spent against an unstoppable train, and the BSV fork was, in John’s reading, a manufactured liquidity event. He gave Bitcoin Cash one or two years of lifespan. He was wrong on the timeline but right on the trajectory, and the wreckage of that ecosystem, which I recently dissected with Kurt Wuckert Jr., is the evidence.

Blockstream, Skepticism, and an Evolving Position

Here is where the remaster earns its keep. In 2019 John praised Blockstream’s developers and contributions while openly doubting the business model: satellites and sidechains are infrastructure, not revenue, and Liquid’s market fit looked thin to him even at launch. Fast forward to S17 E11, recorded this year, and you hear a man who has sharpened that skepticism into a worldview. The polite doubts about sidechains hardened into a sweeping critique of the “tick size dilemma,” Lightning’s economics, Bitcoin maximalism as a social phenomenon, and what he calls the Bitcoin Depression: a community fragmented between treasury companies, laser-eyed influencers, and builders wondering where the cypherpunks went.

The throughline is not contradiction. It is the same posture applied to a changed landscape. The 2019 John doubted Blockstream’s revenue. The 2025 John doubts whether Bitcoin’s culture survived its own financialization. Same man, same lens, different decade of evidence.

There is also personal evolution worth noting. In 2019, John described himself as a dropout comic book artist turned graphic designer who learned economics from smart friends and argued his way out of childhood punishments in Massachusetts. By S15 E23 he was CEO of Synonym, building Bitkit and Pubky, pitching an “Atomic Economy” where identity, reputation, and payments are rebuilt from cryptographic primitives rather than platforms.

The critic became a founder. The lone wolf got a pack. And yet the reflexes survived: when I pressed him this year on Synonym’s Tether adjacency, on maximalism, on his own contradictions, he did not flinch. He zoomed neither in nor out. He stayed in the paradigm, which is exactly what he taught in this 2019 recording.

Small Wins Over Hyperbitcoinization

The closing stretch contains what I now consider the most prescient part of the interview. Asked about hyperbitcoinization, John rejected the fantasy of waking up a millionaire. He wanted small stories and small wins: Venezuela, Palestine, North Korea, people escaping oppression one transaction at a time, nation states quietly accumulating until the game theory locks in and “everybody is scared to not have.” He predicted disruptive effects within ten years, including gold and stock valuations bending under a better store of value.

In 2025, with nation state reserves openly discussed, ETFs holding more than Satoshi, and treasury companies copying Saylor, the shape of his prediction looks eerily accurate, even if the spirit differs. He wanted politicians holding Bitcoin so they would stop trying to kill it. He got that. He also got Michael Saylor turning Bitcoin into a financial engineering substrate, which is a different animal entirely, and one he now critiques with the same ferocity he once aimed at Roger Ver.

Also worth preserving for the record: his theory that “bitcoins want to be free,” that holding them is like holding the One Ring, and his classification of Bitcoin as a “consensus Ponzi,” distinguishable from the classic kind only by the absence of a man at the top. Both statements would get him ratioed by two opposite camps today, which is probably how he would know they are still worth saying.

Why Remaster This

Listening back, I hear a younger me, insecure, with a stranger accent, asking a guest to pronounce Saifedean Ammous and fumbling the Cantillon effect. I also hear the foundation of everything this podcast became: long form, unscripted, unafraid of silence, willing to let a guest think out loud. John has appeared on this show eight or nine times since, the third most popular guest ever. He keeps coming back because he is perpetually searching for what is true, indifferent to what others think, and incapable of staying boring for more than one episode in a row.

The 2019 opinions have aged in various directions. Bitcoin Cash did not die in two years, but its community did undergo a handful of changes of the guards. The Bitcoin Foundation’s successors became real institutions. The Lightning developers John praised as a new generation are now, some of them, the establishment he questions. That is what time does. What does not change is the value of a mind that refuses both the zoomed-in trap and the zoomed-out escape, and insists on arguing inside reality.

Seven years ago he ended our call by saying the best information travels the most. This remaster is me holding him to it.

Listen to this John Carvalho Remaster on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & more!

▶ Play video Watch on YouTube

Time stamps:

0:00 – Intro: Why This Episode Matters
4:16 – Welcome: John Carvalho, the Bitcoin Error Log
5:17 – Bitcoin Politics and the Early Days
6:39 – The Bitcoin Foundation: Ego Platform or Useful Body?
8:53 – First Contact: Silk Road, Forums and IRC
11:40 – Buying Bitcoin in 2012: Mt. Gox, Dwolla and BitInstant
13:20 – The Foundation’s Founders and Its Failures
15:45 – The Rebranding Effort and Why It Failed Again
17:04 – The Impossibility of Organizing Benevolent Bitcoin
20:04 – Bitcoin Core, Communication and the Leaderless Project
23:50 – No Official Narrative: Bitcoin’s Many Stories
25:49 – Consensus as the Lowest Common Denominator
28:01 – Should Everything Be on a Blockchain?
28:58 – Surviving Market Cycles: Everyone Who Sold Was Wrong
32:46 – Bitcoins Want to Be Free: The Lord of the Rings Theory
34:05 – Roger Ver Attacks Andreas Antonopoulos
37:08 – How Big Is Bitcoin Really? The Coinbase Illusion
40:52 – Media Conglomerates and Hidden Concentration
42:13 – Decentralization Theater and arewedecentralizedyet.com
42:47 – Refusing BitPay and Political Spending
44:46 – Censorship Resistance as Bitcoin’s Core Purpose
46:46 – Debunking “Swiss Bank Account in Your Pocket”
48:26 – What Caused the 2017 Bull Run?
51:31 – Stocks as Stores of Value and What Bitcoin Will Cure
53:44 – No College Degree: Comic Books, Punk Rock and Design
56:19 – Massachusetts [Redacted]: Growing Up Arguing
57:21 – Preparing for the Roger Ver Interview
58:32 – The Bcash Moment: Triggered, Not Scripted
1:00:46 – Roger’s Debate Tactics: Zoom In, Zoom Out
1:04:36 – Skepticism as a Survival Skill
1:05:32 – Blockstream: Great Developers, Unclear Business Model
1:09:28 – r/btc Conspiracies and the AXA Myth
1:13:48 – Roger’s War Chest and the Cost of Fighting Markets
1:18:17 – Will Roger Ever Come Back to Bitcoin?
1:20:40 – Pepe Politics and the Attention Economy
1:22:11 – The Evolution of Bitcoin and the Lightning Generation
1:23:06 – Bitrefill, Gift Cards and the Circular Economy
1:26:09 – Steemit Critique: Gamify, Don’t Scam
1:27:16 – Brave, BAT and the Nonsense of Paid Attention
1:30:52 – Hitchcock’s Bladder Rule and Final Questions
1:31:55 – Hyperbitcoinization: Hype, Greed and Small Wins
1:35:17 – Nation States Secretly Accumulating Bitcoin?
1:36:29 – Bitcoin and the Shift in Global Power
1:39:32 – Merchant Adoption and the Tax Man Problem
1:42:06 – Bitcoin in 10 Years: Disruption Incoming
1:43:43 – Bitcoin Is a Consensus Ponzi (and So Is All Money)
1:44:26 – The Cantillon Effect and Inflationary Money
1:47:59 – Closing: A Bitcoin Every Thousand Years

We recorded S1 E1 in January 2019, one month after Tim May died and only days after Ethereum Classic suffered the 51% attack that dominates the final stretch of the conversation. The episode came out in the first week of February 2019, ran two hours and nine minutes, and set the genetic code for everything this show became: cypherpunk history, the anthropology of money, and Nick Szabo’s writing treated with the seriousness of scripture.

Donald confessed he had to read each Szabo article about 30 times, and insisted that one article equals six months of university courses. Seventeen seasons later, the show notes on the original episode page still describe it as the single closest experience to having the Bit gold inventor himself on the show. That remains true.

I was 26, insecure about my English, and terrified that two non-native speakers would fail to produce the word “unconfiscatable.” We managed. What follows is a look back at what that first conversation actually contained, because it contained a lot.

Was Bitcoin inevitable?

Donald’s answer was the first indication that this would not be a normal interview. Instead of talking about 2008 or the cypherpunk mailing list, he went back 3.5 million years. Humans spent most of their evolutionary history in small groups and families, and only in the last ten thousand years, after the last ice age, did we assemble into villages, city-states, nations, and empires. Top-down government and top-down money are, on that timescale, brand new.

Our brains are still calibrated for the previous stage, which is why life in metropolitan areas of 20 or 30 million people produces a permanent low-grade cognitive dissonance. Bitcoin itself may not have been inevitable, he argued, but the discomfort was. The cypherpunks, starting with David Chaum in the 80s and continuing with Tim May, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney, simply rationalized that discomfort and set out to build online environments where the individual comes first and the structures above get blurred instead.

Trust minimization and social scalability

The centerpiece of the first hour was Szabo’s concept of social scalability, which Donald called a paradox: for a system to be usable by the most people possible, it needs less human participation in its operation. Institutions run by limited human brains can only cope by excluding everybody and letting people in one by one, manually, after they prove they are good customers. That is the American banking system, and it is why tens of millions remain unbanked even in rich countries, while in much of Latin America the unbanked are the majority. A network of nodes with unbreakable rules has no such bottleneck. The less social intervention, the more socially scalable.

From there: trusted third parties are security holes, everything we do on Zoom, Amazon, or Alexa passes through a central server, and we live in a dual world where a decade-old paradigm of self-custodied property coexists with the old one in which institutions hold everything and grant us access to what is ours. Donald’s conclusion aged well: for the masses to migrate, it is not enough that Bitcoin exists. Trusted third parties also have to keep proving themselves untrustworthy, through breaches, hacks, and dishonesty, until the lesson sticks.

Not your keys, and the high performance fallacy

The “not your keys, not your coins” sermon delivered here in 2019 needs no update. Donald added two flourishes that stuck with me. First, the marketing of strength: JP Morgan spent 120 years showing off its New York building because our small brains read architecture as solvency, even though the building is worth a rounding error against the trillions in deposits.

Second, what he called the fallacy of high performance: PayPal’s instant gratification is a bribe. Security through proof of work means deliberate inefficiency, and a decentralized system will never beat Amazon’s servers on speed. Any chain promising a billion transactions per second with no energy cost and full security is doing what Parallel Industries called decentralization theater. His verdict was blunt: either you are ignorant, or you are a scammer.

Who adopts first?

I made my usual argument that hyperbitcoinization should start where the need is greatest: Venezuela, Palestine, the unbanked. Donald pushed back with the jet set analogy. In the 1950s only the rich could fly, and that is precisely why I can fly Denver to New Orleans for 90 dollars today. Costly technologies bootstrap through wealthy early adopters, then scale down to everyone else.

Add the Lindy effect on top (every year Bitcoin survives without a security breach convinces more of the world) and the pattern is not illogical, just unfair-looking. He also made an observation I still think about: unlike the internet, where the protocol was free and only startups captured value, Bitcoin’s token is intrinsic to the protocol. The price must go up for security to go up. The geeks and cypherpunks got in before the bankers this time, and some of them never even cared about the money.

Money as a biological invention

This is the part of the episode people still mention to me. Donald’s method was pure Szabo: do not start from the technology, start from human history, ethnography, and biology, and ask why money, property, and agreements matter in the first place. From Shelling Out: The Origins of Money he took the Yurok shell money, the wampum belts, the Inca woven cloth, and the flint points, then combined them with the brain’s roughly 150-person trust limit to reach Szabo’s conclusion: money is a trust minimization device, a bridge between groups that share neither genes nor trust. Then he went further than Szabo, and said so openly, because as a self-described amateur he is free to speculate where a scientist is not.

His speculation: money might be millions of years old. The crude Lomekwi tools of 3.3 million years ago were purely functional, but the Acheulean hand axes of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, are beautiful, standardized, produced in specialized workshops far from the raw material, and archaeologists find them in stashes of up to 200 pieces, stacked together in places with no bones and no signs of use. Donald reads those stashes as vaults: objects valued beyond their function, stored like gold or bitcoin, and occasionally spent into circulation.

Somewhere in deep time, Alice had meat, Bob had a stone tool, neither trusted the other, and the tool settled the debt immediately. That, plus Darwin, plus Dawkins’ reciprocal altruism, plus John Maynard Smith’s evolutionary game theory, gave him the full synthesis: fighting is costly, so evolution produced conflict minimization devices like territory and first possession. Private property and money are the human versions. Bitcoin replicates three million years of this behavior in code, which is why, in his words, Bitcoin is first about anthropology, biology, and game theory, and only second about engineering.

Tim May, Wei Dai, and the cypherpunk lineage

Tim May had died the previous month, and Donald, who had interacted with him for three years, delivered an impromptu eulogy. May owned no bitcoin, grumbled that the space was turning into a new PayPal, and told an interviewer he preferred rocks and gold because he had no personal use for borderless transfer. Donald read this as the father figure who is never satisfied, the skeptic whose refusal to applaud sends everyone back to work harder.

He pointed listeners to May’s long-form interview with JW Weatherman and his tenth-anniversary piece for CoinDesk, both of which say exactly what May had been saying privately. On David Chaum he was respectful but disappointed: Elixxir’s promise of full privacy, full scalability, full security, and 100 million transactions per second tripped every wire from the earlier discussion. The moment Donald hears all three promises in one sentence, he stops paying attention. I countered with the observation that we should never underestimate the elders, which remains good advice.

The roll call matters historically: Satoshi formally credited Bit gold, Hal Finney’s RPOW, Adam Back’s Hashcash, and Wei Dai’s b-money, and Donald compared the Szabo-Satoshi overlap to Newton and Leibniz, with Szabo getting the worse deal yet remaining remarkably supportive. And when I asked which cypherpunk projects succeeded outside Bitcoin, the list came quickly: Tor, WikiLeaks, peer-to-peer file sharing, BitTorrent. Napster and Megaupload died precisely because a central party could be raided. His summary of the whole philosophy deserves quoting: in a community protected by cryptography, violence is not absent because it was stopped, but because it is not useful. Breaking the math costs more than whatever you could steal. The wall is the conflict minimization device.

Ethereum Classic, and the attack that was days old

The final third is a time capsule. Donald admitted, with a candor rare in this industry, that he had spent years using the world computer buzzwords and inflating things, first because he was still learning, then because simplification sells. He described the DAO fork as a huge fight in which he was a very little minority, staying on the Ethereum side until 2018 when Coinbase listed ETC and he moved for good.

His pitch for what ETC adds to Bitcoin was crisp: identical principles (proof of work, fixed supply, immutability), plus Turing completeness on the base layer. Lightning he called amazing; Liquid and RSK he dismissed as glorified trusted third parties because both need a federation of companies holding the keys.

Then the news, raw at the time: the 51% attack had started on January 5th, the community was alerted by Pierre Rochard on the 6th, Coinbase published its full report on the 7th, an attacker had rented hashpower, executed 15 double spends, and walked away with roughly 220,000 ETC. The interim recommendation was 2,500 to 5,000 confirmations. Donald’s honesty about it is striking in hindsight: principles and design are not enough, the network must grow until the attack cost is prohibitive. His ten-year target of $5,000 per ETC has not materialized and the market has not been kind to it, though the deadline is technically still running.

One prediction did land, at least for a while: when Ethereum abandoned proof of work in 2022, much of that hashpower flowed to Ethereum Classic, exactly as he said it would. The rest of his ETH commentary (the ProgPoW dalliance, the issuance cut from 3 to 2 per block, the expectation that the Parity funds would eventually be reimbursed, the argument that the DAO created a precedent that can always be invoked again) reads like a summary of every critique this site has published since, including my DAO fork comic strip. ETCDEV’s side of that era is preserved in my later interview with Igor Artamonov, and the broader season one context in the first 109 episodes retrospective.

Donald’s critique of Bitcoin

The ending surprised many listeners at the time: the Szabo disciple turned his method on Bitcoin itself. Two threats, both social. First, the 21 million cap is not enforced by proof of work; it is a political agreement among nodes, and in forty years powerful miners whose revenue has halved away might lobby, bribe, and threaten their way to a higher block reward. Second, merge mining and drivechains would concentrate Bitcoin’s miners into what he called super miners, securing trillions across sidechains and becoming the new Google and Apple, gatekeepers who decide which innovations get mined.

He named Paul Sztorc of Truth Coin as the man pushing drivechains, complained affectionately that Paul only likes to talk to scientists, and then, in a moment that became show lore, recommended me a must-have guest it would take eight seasons to book. History duly delivered: the BIP 300 debate is now one of the liveliest in Bitcoin, and LayerTwo Labs, Paul’s company, sponsors this very podcast. Donald would have had opinions, and I would have paid to hear them.

As we wrapped up, I asked whether I had any chance of interviewing Nick Szabo. Donald offered his email on the spot and suggested the questions: Bit gold’s two-layer design, so close to what Lightning became. The interview never happened, and Szabo remains the white whale of this show. The last exchange was a pun: the conversation had been enlightening, which makes us, in the end, marketing animals for the Lightning Network. Then goodbye, and the podcast had officially begun.

In memoriam

Some episodes are content; this one is a foundation stone. Donald gave a two-hour masterclass to a kid with a brand new microphone, split the episode’s donation address 50/50 without being asked, complimented my research on air when I badly needed the confidence, and set the intellectual standard every guest since has been measured against. He kept writing, podcasting, and fighting for Ethereum Classic until the end. When I spoke at the Proof of Work Summit in Prague in 2023, this conversation was the one I credited on stage. Rest in peace, Donald. The amateur did fine.

Listen to Donald McIntyre on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, RSS & revisit the original episode page with the full transcript!

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Time stamps:

00:02:45 – Introduction: who is Donald McIntyre

00:04:49 – Was Bitcoin inevitable?

00:06:29 – 10,000 years of top-down structures vs 3.5 million years of evolution

00:08:27 – Cypherpunks: Chaum, Tim May, Nick Szabo

00:09:43 – The ancient desire for unconfiscatable money

00:11:55 – Bitcoin as a bottom-up system

00:12:39 – Living in a dual world: banks vs private keys

00:15:02 – Trusted third parties are security holes

00:16:40 – Nick Szabo’s social scalability explained

00:18:27 – Why banking excludes: the unbanked in the US and Latin America

00:20:14 – Privacy, intelligence agencies & the false sense of security

00:21:13 – Is Bitcoin enough to make people demand decentralization?

00:23:23 – Asia’s interest in Ethereum Classic & immutability

00:24:51 – Mt. Gox, breaches & untrustworthy third parties

00:25:57 – Not your keys, not your coins

00:27:28 – JP Morgan’s building & the marketing of strength

00:28:45 – The instant gratification bribe

00:29:58 – The tradeoff: security means inefficiency

00:31:27 – The high performance fallacy

00:32:26 – Decentralization theater & scammers

00:33:48 – Hyperbitcoinization: elites first or the people who need it?

00:36:26 – The jet set analogy: how technologies bootstrap

00:40:54 – The Lindy effect

00:41:47 – The geeks got in before the bankers

00:43:25 – The token as intrinsic to the protocol

00:46:27 – Bitcoin as a biological invention

00:47:02 – How Nick Szabo thinks (and why he went to law school)

00:48:38 – Shelling Out: the origins of money

00:51:20 – The 150-person brain & money as a bridge between strangers

00:52:39 – Dawkins & reciprocal altruism

00:53:52 – Stone tools, subjective value & the first trade

00:56:15 – Reading Szabo 30 times: one article = six months of university

01:00:52 – Lomekwi, Oldowan & Acheulean: Donald’s stone tool theory

01:03:42 – Stashes of hand axes as prehistoric vaults

01:04:58 – Is money millions of years old?

01:07:51 – Darwin, Dawkins & John Maynard Smith

01:08:31 – The logic of animal conflict

01:10:53 – Territory, asymmetry & conflict minimization

01:12:08 – Money as a conflict minimization device

01:12:36 – Bitcoin’s game theory & the Byzantine generals problem

01:15:32 – Chimpanzees, bipedalism & why our brains grew

01:17:19 – Bitcoin carnivores

01:17:40 – Szabo & Satoshi: the Newton-Leibniz parallel

01:19:23 – Satoshi’s credits: bit gold, RPOW, Hashcash, b-money

01:19:59 – The mystery of Wei Dai

01:20:54 – Remembering Tim May

01:21:53 – The JW Weatherman interview & the CoinDesk piece

01:23:40 – Tim May as the father figure who was never satisfied

01:24:39 – Why not David Chaum? The Elixxir disappointment

01:26:35 – Never underestimate the elders

01:28:08 – What the cypherpunks built: Tor, WikiLeaks, BitTorrent

01:30:17 – Napster, Megaupload & the raid in New Zealand

01:30:30 – Cryptography as a wall: violence made useless

01:34:10 – The shifting Ethereum narrative

01:35:27 – World computer: a marketing confession

01:38:11 – The spectrum from marketers to scammers

01:39:59 – The DAO fork fight & leaving for Ethereum Classic

01:40:44 – What Ethereum Classic adds to Bitcoin

01:41:17 – Liquid & RSK: glorified trusted third parties

01:41:57 – Turing completeness on the base layer

01:43:48 – The future: four or five networks

01:44:26 – ETC’s monetary policy: 210 to 230 million

01:46:19 – The 51% attack that happened that week

01:47:48 – 220,000 ETC, 15 double spends & 5,000 confirmations

01:49:15 – The $5,000 ETC thesis

01:50:37 – What happens when Ethereum moves to proof of stake

01:51:37 – ProgPoW, the issuance cut & doing everything wrong

01:52:16 – The Nick Johnson poll on reversing double spends

01:52:54 – The Parity bailout & the precedent of the DAO

01:54:53 – Bitcoin: soft forks, Schnorr & the SHA-256 exception

01:57:09 – Governments will never voluntarily give up fiat

01:59:14 – Donald’s criticisms of Bitcoin

02:00:02 – The 21 million cap as a political decision

02:01:13 – The miner lobby scenario, 40 years from now

02:02:09 – Merge mining, drivechains & the super miners

02:02:14 – Miners as the future Google and Apple

02:04:46 – Paul Sztorc, Truth Coin & the guest suggestion

02:05:40 – “Do you think I have a chance with Nick Szabo?”

02:06:31 – The selfish joy of podcasting

02:09:51 – Enlightening, a Lightning pun & goodbye