S17 E7: Colin Harper on Bitcoin Mining, Epstein E-mails & Journalism

0:47Vlad CosteaWelcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 7. We are live with Colin Harper, @AsILayHodling on Twitter. We used to be colleagues at Bitcoin Magazine, and we even shared the same bed in Berlin one night. That was really intense.

1:04Colin HarperYeah, unfortunate for you, because you got that hotel room. And then I was like, Hey, man, I was doing the Living on Bitcoin series in Europe. And I said, I have to pay for my room with Bitcoin or else this isn't legitimate. So I'm just gonna have to shack up with you.

1:17Vlad CosteaAnd of course, you have to make the clarification because you're a married man, and you don't want to involve any ambiguity.

1:26Colin HarperRight, right. Yeah, great conference. I mean, Lightning Conference in Berlin still to this day, one of the best ones I've been to. So 2019.

1:34Vlad CosteaYeah, it was amazing. Or 2018? I'm not even sure at this point. I think it was, I think it was...

1:41Colin Harper2019. No, no, you're right. It was 2018.

1:45Vlad CosteaNo, it was 19. Because I was doing the podcast.

1:49Colin HarperRight.

1:51Vlad CosteaSo almost seven years ago, it was amazing. That's when I first met you in person. And we were hanging out for a bit. I don't think I have seen you in person since. But I know that I've had you on the podcast during season three, I think. And at the time, we discussed about Marxism and your views on the left leaning side of Bitcoin, maybe, and how you view...

2:18Colin HarperKind of, I think the thesis, it was really half baked, honestly, but it was basically the idea that, you know, the left should embrace Bitcoin, like the right does. I don't really think that I thought it through very well at the time. Also, if I had been more savvy on my history, because turns out, when you take History of Socialism in college, they don't tell you these things. But I should have been a little more privy to the history of Romanian resistance against the USSR. So I'm sure that that episode kind of hits you like a truck. When I was talking about Marx and whatnot.

2:50Vlad CosteaSo because I understand the difference, right? You guys never really actually had to deal with this. You look at Sweden or whatever, and you think that's what Marxism is about. But it was pretty tough with the USSR. And I'm sure it's tough right now with the Chinese Communist Party.

3:07Colin HarperYeah, and I would also just put it this way, and then we'll start talking about Bitcoin stuff. The history of the USSR, specifically, the USSR atrocities in Eastern Europe are really not taught in the US, because it's inconvenient. Because then students will ask, well, hang on, weren't they an ally in World War II? Why did we ally with people who had a similar death toll to the Nazis, if not greater? And so I think they just totally avoid it for that reason, right?

3:34Vlad CosteaIt's very inconvenient for left-wing intellectuals to talk about that. And every time it gets brought up, they say, well, that was not real communism. Real communism was never tried, just like real Bitcoin, by the way. Real Bitcoin was never tried. We are still struggling 17 years later to find like a use case and narrative for this. We come up with stuff and then it sort of breaks. And then we go back to the drawing board. But we're still not scaling. I mean, let me not foreshadow the conversation. How do you feel about Bitcoin these days? Like, are you super bullish?

4:14Colin HarperI mean, short term, absolutely not. I think that the price action recently has been a wake-up call for a lot of people. The fact of the matter is gold is fulfilling the monetary use case, the neutral monetary use case that a lot of Bitcoiners wish Bitcoin would fulfill. I don't think that means long term that it won't. I think that there's a lot of liquidity out there. And ultimately, I'm still bullish long term on Bitcoin. There are definitely headwinds. But in the short term, obviously, as we're recording right now, it's testing $73K.

4:49We'll probably visit $70K. We might even go back down to $58K. So $58K gang, rise up. We see y'all. Yeah, I mean, short term, definitely bearish. I think that we're starting to see a little bit of jitters in equities and just global macro markets. The fact that gold and silver have been having these crazy oscillations and price swings indicates that both of those assets are being repriced for different reasons. Silver, more industrial. Gold, more because central banks are hoovering it up. But if we get a recession this year in the US and a global recession as well, or just a stock market crash in the latter half of the year or even now, it's hard to see Bitcoin doing well in that environment.

5:34I mean, ultimately, I think Bitcoin serves as a canary in the coal mine for a lot of these issues. It's usually one of the first sources of liquidity that investors will sell if they need to cover margin for another trade or they need to cover an obligation. And the fact that we're seeing it sell off right now, no one knows. It could be a big player blowing up. But I think that ultimately that could be indicating that the global financial system is having some liquidity issues and people need to shore up their portfolios as a result.

6:06So we'll see what happens. I think long term, I'm still pretty bullish. Short term, though, I don't expect Bitcoin to have a good 2026. I think there's a lot of people thinking that the four year cycle thesis was broken with institutional adoption.

6:21Vlad CosteaI had David Bailey on the show back in November, I think, or December. And this is what he said, that it makes no sense. Why would there be a four year cycle? We should get rid of this.

6:31Colin HarperWhy would there be one now? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a good argument for why there shouldn't be one. But I think, you know, what is it, the saying that man plans and God laughs? I think that we're seeing kind of the fact that the four year cycle, at least from an investor standpoint with the psychology, has not been broken. It's hard to say because I think a lot of the selling we're probably seeing now, too, has to do with ETF holders who are underwater. They started buying when Bitcoin was $60,000 and north of $60,000.

7:03I think the average cost basis was something around $75,000 or $78,000 for ETF holders. And most of that's retail. A lot of that's passive investing or people doing it in their 401(k)s and things like that in the US. So, yeah, I think that people making the argument the four year cycle is over, it was, you know, it made sense at the time. I just don't know if we can say that for certain yet. I will say if Bitcoin does what it has done in prior cycles, typically it sells off to the previous cycles high or just below it.

7:36So like in 2022, it hit $18,000, which is more or less the 2017 peak, you know, between 16 and 20. I mean, it was at $20,000 for like a few hours, if even, and then it sold off, right? But it would just be so funny if that happens again. It's almost like the easiest asset to trade if you can just be dumb enough to think that history will repeat, right? And I don't mean dumb, I don't mean that in like a bad way, but literally if you just strip everything else out and think, what happened last time and will that repeat?

8:08Because that's basically how it's been trading since 2017. You can trade it pretty well, but a lot of people get cute and think that things are changing and they might be to some extent, but I think that market psychology here with the four-year cycle is still kind of gripping a lot of people's mindsets when they trade this thing.

8:25Vlad CosteaWell, we do like to say that this time it's different. Every time it's different, but the four-year cycle is like a constant. And I think it's as powerful as, so in the stock market investing world, there is this meme which says "sell in May and go away", which basically implies that people sell a lot of their investment or whatever in the month of May and they come back in October or November. And if you look at the charts for pretty much every company or index or whatever, you're going to realize that there is some truth to that.

8:57Also in the case of Bitcoin, it sort of works. So May is sort of like the peak until the end of the year. I'm not sure how it worked last year. When was the top, the $125K? Was it in August or September?

9:14Colin HarperI think it did rally to your point. It peaked, or the last all-time high was in October. It was like $127K, $128K. And then of course there was the Liberation Day sell-off, right? So like when the tariffs were hitting, or when Trump announced these blanket tariffs in April, Bitcoin puked to where we are basically right now. So I think this is a really critical support level. If we can stay above like the $70K, $73K, that to me would indicate that maybe there's still some legs and we might actually have a recovery.

9:47But I think the global macro picture is pretty weak right now. And there's also this whole narrative about quantum right now. Obviously we kind of have to address that. Speaking of that, just quick plug, we have a conference, Blockspace does, in New York called OP_NEXT, on April 16th. And we will be talking about a lot of different technical topics from covenants to other software and scaling proposals. But we'll also have a lot of content and programming around quantum computing. We'll have Nick Jonas, or sorry, Jonas Nick. I always get it mixed up with the freaking Jonas Brothers.

10:26We'll have Jonas Nick and we'll have Ethan Heilman and a few other developers there discussing the quantum proposals that have been put forward in terms of quantum proofing Bitcoin. And talking about realistic timelines from when we might see a soft fork for that. I think that there's kind of like two camps that are on the quantum side of things. There is that this is never going to happen. It's all bullshit. You know, this is a fantasy computing. It's not even real. And then you have the other camp that's saying this will happen and we should do something about it sooner rather than later so that it doesn't creep up on us.

11:05And I think one thing that's lost in this conversation is humans are really bad at pricing in or visualizing. They're really bad at visualizing exponentials, right? I mean, Bitcoin's price run ups are kind of an example of this. Bitcoin gets really heated when it's running up. People think that it can't go any higher and then it has these parabolic runs. Another good example of this would be the exponential adoption of things like the internet or LLMs. People have a hard time of extrapolating how quickly things can take off and how quickly exponential growth can be baked into systems.

11:47And I think the Bitcoiners who argue that quantum computing is a big risk, they're basically saying is no one is able to accurately price in or accurately figure when this will hit. And I think they're arguing that with advancements in artificial intelligence, AGI and those technologies, you could potentially get a viable quantum computer on a much more accelerated timeline than what we've had previously. And there are researchers who are starting to say that some things are an issue. And I think that this other argument that people are selling because of this, whether or not you think that's retarded, kind of doesn't matter, right?

12:27It's like climate change, right? You can think climate change isn't happening. You can also think that man-made climate change doesn't exist, but people are still adopting policies to address it, right? And so the perception really matters more than the reality of what's actually happening. So in terms of headwinds, I definitely think perception of quantum threat could potentially weigh on Bitcoin's price as certain holders think this might just not be worth the risk. I'm going to de-leverage a little bit or, you know, reallocate my portfolio away from this.

12:59So kind of a tangent, but if you're interested in this, check out opnext.dev. We will have really good programming on this come April 16th in New York when we have that conference.

13:10Vlad CosteaSo, nice plug, Colin. Just wait until you hear mine. And speaking of mines or whatever, I have this device right here. It's the Braiins BMM 101, which is the Bitcoin Mini Miner.

13:28Colin HarperNice.

13:29Vlad CosteaIt's really cool because it has this dashboard that shows you the price and the hash rate and a lot of data. But what's also special about it is basically you can allocate the tiny hash rate from this machine, which is, how much does this one do?

13:45Colin HarperIt's like five terahashes?

13:46Vlad CosteaOne terahash or something? Is it one? Okay. One terahash. So you can allocate it across BCH and BSV or whatever. So you can do like 50% BTC, 30% BCH and 20% BSV, hoping that you're going to get the lottery ticket in multiple places. So it's a pretty cool use case. Of course, it's not very, how should I put it, maxi-friendly. But if you want to maximize whatever it is that you're doing.

14:16Colin HarperI think it's maxi-friendly. It's just where you're pointing your hash rate. You know, I mean, that to your point, most maxis aren't going to do that. They're not going to mine Bcash.

14:27Vlad CosteaOf course not. But you can do that. It's like an extended lottery ticket. You get 50% chances of your hash rate to get a BTC block, but you can also get a BCH block. And that's still some money that you can make anyway. Braiins, which is the company that's building this, also launched the marketplace, which is called Hashpower. The URL is hashpower.braiins.com, Braiins with a double i. What you can do there is rent basically a thousand of these for like five dollars per hour.

14:56So you don't actually have to buy hardware in your home and host it and pay electricity bills. You actually buy your lottery tickets with Bitcoin directly. And there are some interesting use cases that you can generate from this.

15:11Colin HarperSo this is like a cloud mining. This is a cloud mining service. When did they launch this?

15:17Vlad CosteaA couple of weeks ago.

15:19Colin HarperInteresting.

15:20Vlad CosteaI know that you're interested in mining on your podcast and I'm sort of striking an in-between field here. So what's interesting about it is that it's also pretty private in the way that you access it. So I spoke with some of the guys. I don't want to put words in their mouth. I'm not implying that they do this, but you can make your Bitcoin fungible, sort of. Like trade the Bitcoin that you have from Silk Road or whatever for a chance to score. So you look at the pools that are most likely to mine the next block.

15:52And you determine the probability. Let's say that you think that Foundry is going to score the next block. You direct the hashrate that you're purchasing with Silk Road Bitcoin to Foundry. And according to the share that you have in the hashrate, you're going to get fresh, you know, non tainted BTC. So this can be an interesting use case if you want to make your Bitcoin fungible. Or if you want to go full degen, you can try to 51% attack BCH or BSV. Don't sue me, Craig. I'm just saying you can. I'm not saying you should.

16:26Colin HarperThat's interesting. You're giving people advice on how to wash their dirty coins from Silk Road, Vlad.

16:33Vlad CosteaNo, it's not washing. It's just using the Bitcoin network in a way that makes your coins fungible. Fungibility. It's an important property.

16:41Colin HarperThat's a good framing, Vlad. You do well in PR, sir.

16:45Vlad CosteaIf you talk about sound money, you cannot eliminate fungibility as one of the basic qualities of money. So if it's not fungible, it can't be a currency.

16:55Colin HarperIn principle, I totally agree. I just don't think my government would.

16:58Vlad CosteaI don't know about mine, but my government tends to follow what your government does or says.

17:06Colin HarperFor better or for worse, I assume. But this is interesting. Thank you for flagging this. I haven't seen this yet. It's a curious time to launch something like this because hash price has just hit an all-time low. I think they call it hash price. They call hash value BTC-denominated hash price. And hash price, for anyone listening, is just a way to measure mining revenue. So hash price right now is like $33 per petahash per day. So if you have a petahash of mining equipment, then you will make roughly $33 per day. But it's just been getting absolutely crushed because of Bitcoin's sell-off here.

17:51Vlad CosteaYeah, you spend a lot of time analyzing this. I know that your podcast on the Blockspace network used to be called the Mining Pod. But now I checked recently and it's basically the Blockspace podcast, which is more generic. You cover more topics now. Tell me more about that.

18:07Colin HarperYeah, we consolidated them because we had Blockspace and Mining Pod and then it was just we were splitting. We were fracturing the feeds too much. So we just lumped them all together. So I do cover mining stuff a decent amount. Less so now because all of the big miners in the US are going towards AI and high-performance compute loads. I mean, we can talk about that transition if you want to. But it's completely, I don't want to say destroyed the market in the US, but it's completely dampened any sort of mining market here.

18:39Except for some of the smaller guys who are looking for power like on the margins or off-grid sites like oil and gas.

18:46Vlad CosteaOh man, that's desolating when you think about it because it was such a big deal in 2021 when China kicked out most of their miners. I still see the Chinese pools. Some of them are based now in Singapore or Hong Kong or whatever. So they sort of tried to keep their operations close to China and I guess the owners are still Chinese, but they opened new companies in nearby countries. But a lot of the hash power right now, I think it's like 60% or something. It comes from the US and it was specifically because of that moment when the mining moved from China to the US.

19:26I think the issue is that there was a lot of regulation concerning mining. But there was promising growth. There were all of these huge data centers and places that were using green energy that were mining Bitcoin, and it seemed very promising in the beginning. Now there's a regression of that specifically because AI companies are paying more per kilowatt or something, so it's more profitable.

19:54Colin HarperYeah, it's ultimately just a dollars and cents thing. So there are kind of two things working against mining in the US right now. One is power. The US has not meaningfully increased its power generating capacity since 2000. You can go to, there's a really good website called eia.gov. It's the Energy Information Administration or agency. They publish all of these really fabulous stats and all of this really good data on state by state power markets. But if you look at that, you'll see we really grow our electricity generating capacity from 1950 until about 2000, and then it plateaus.

20:31Part of the reason it plateaus is because we started decommissioning coal plants during the whole environmental movement. We started trying to replace that baseload with intermittent renewables. Baseloads are things that are going to be able to have basically 99 to 100% uptime. That's things like nuclear, nat gas, coal, hydro. And then the renewables that you slap on top of that, or to try to replace that like wind and solar, they don't work as well. They don't generate electricity 100% of the time like these other things do.

21:06So the reason I say that is it's working against mining in the sense that miners were the only big, they were the only big power producers coming into places like Texas and saying, yeah, we will buy up 100 megawatt, 200 megawatt, 500 megawatt lots of power at a time. But no one else was really doing that because the US's industrial base has been gutted since NAFTA and prior to that. And so miners were coming in, buying up power assets, buying up land. They're the only ones building to consume multiple hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts at a time.

21:41And then the AI boom came and all of the AI companies and the data center companies said, oh, shit, there's not enough power to go around. But then they look around at these Bitcoin miners, and they're the ones sitting on all these huge blocks of power. So the Bitcoin miners started expanding into that business line. And so then that's the second thing working against the Bitcoin mining industry here is that, like you said, it's just dollars and cents. They're going to make more money monetizing those megawatts for high performance compute and AI loads than they are for Bitcoin mining right now.

22:12I mean, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but the dollar per megawatt potential is just like 5x, in some cases, or more, what they can make for mining Bitcoin under current conditions. So what you're basically seeing is all of the big public miners are kind of like putting pause on Bitcoin mining. A lot of them are selling their ASICs. And some of those ASICs are actually ending up in Northern Europe, in places like Iceland, Sweden, Finland, or, Iceland, Sweden, maybe Finland, and Norway.

22:46Some of them are ending up in South America, anywhere where people will buy them because there aren't, like you said, the US was the dominant player in Bitcoin mining since 2021, probably 40-50% of hashrate. It's hard to really quantify, though. And the big ones are divesting away from Bitcoin mining. And they're building data centers. Most of them are building the data center themselves. Like, so they're building what we call a powered shell, where they like they build out the power infrastructure, they build the data center, but another company will come in and actually host GPUs.

23:19So the classic example of this, the first Bitcoin miner to really do this was Core Scientific. They started retrofitting their Bitcoin mines, and then CoreWeave, their key partner, is going to bring the GPUs in and host them at the site. The only miner who's really kind of not doing this and bucking that trend is IREN. What they're doing is they're doing it all. They're building the data center and the power and they're going to buy the GPUs to run them. That's a much higher upside play, but more risk because you actually have to execute not just on building the site, but actually managing the GPU cluster, which is just a whole other ballgame.

23:53Like Bitcoin miners are power managers first. They're not really computer and software engineer guys, right?

23:59Vlad CosteaSo, yeah, I think two very important questions are branching out from your statement. First of all, why is it that the Bitcoin miners are not Bitcoin bulls, as in it seems like their conviction is very weak and they're just selling their electricity to the highest bidder after they spent a lot of money buying the ASICs, which are useless for AI. The second question that emerges from this is why aren't the Bitcoin miners trying to maximize their revenue in any way? Because they're just waiting for the price to go up and the block subsidy to basically cover their costs and bring them profits.

24:39But they're not thinking in terms of how do we push the Bitcoin network to process more fees or whatever, so that the revenue increases.

24:49Colin HarperYeah, a lot of thoughts on the second one. But for your first question, I mean, some of the early Bitcoin miners were Bitcoin maximalists and like are hardcore Bitcoiners. And I think a good amount of the smaller miners are. But if we look at the biggest players in the space, like the public miners, they definitely have I mean, I'm friends with a lot of the folks running some of these companies, or at least, you know, in middle management, some in the C-suite. And some of them are true Bitcoin believers.

25:14But the fact of the matter is they're public companies with a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to make the most money possible. So if they have someone who's going to pay more for their electrons, and they're just going to go with that option, right. And I think it's the responsible one. I think a lot of these people are mercenaries in the sense of like, they just want to make money, like most of us, right? They're not really ideologically driven. Some miners might be ideologically driven, lower, you know, on the smaller scale of things, but a lot of them are really just trying to find ways to produce Bitcoin under spot.

25:49And then if they can now have a new way to generate revenue above what Bitcoin will give them, then they're going to take that every day. The other thing to remember, too, is in terms of like you're talking about them spending a bunch of money on ASICs that are now worthless. A lot of these public companies are, how to put it, they farm their shareholders by selling equity. Like if you look at some of the biggest miners, like MARA, the dilution, their shareholder dilution, ie like their, the rate at which they issue new shares to cover costs is

26:18Absolutely insane. In no other business would this be tolerated if it weren't a high growth business, with historically like high upside because of Bitcoin. A lot of these miners used to trade, like high beta plays to Bitcoin. Beta meaning they move higher when Bitcoin moves high. They also move lower when Bitcoin moves low. But they traded like high beta trades against Bitcoin in like 2020 and 2021. Because there weren't, there wasn't an ETF. There weren't as many avenues for institutions to have exposure to Bitcoin as an asset class.

26:53But mining was one of those. Their correlation to Bitcoin actually breaks down when the ETF comes out. I did a chart like a few, a year or so ago, where if you look at the actual volatility and the correlation between stock price movements versus Bitcoin movements, the Bitcoin miners have a lower correlation to Bitcoin over like the last year or two than they did in the prior cycle. Because now people have the ETF. So like you don't need another vehicle for exposure, right? It's the same thing with Bitcoin treasury companies.

27:20You know, do you need 12 of those things? No, you don't. Because now you have the ETF. Maybe there was a, there's an argument to be made where Strategy had a value for people as a Bitcoin wrapper before an ETF. But I don't think that's the case anymore. And in terms of the revenue question, I will say that there actually are a lot of folks on the Bitcoin mining side who have invested time and resources and funds into exploring ways to boost revenue from Bitcoin's block space.

27:53I mean, if you look at the ordinals and inscriptions thing, for example, right? A lot of Bitcoin mining companies were involved in that either by launching collections, funding wallets and funding, you know, new token standards like BRC-20 and things like that, or Runes. There was a lot of cross-pollination between the mining space and ordinals and inscriptions early on for exactly what you're saying. Because they wanted to have more, they wanted to have more fees on the network. And miners were eating really well, especially particularly in, I believe it was, I believe Q3 and Q4 of 2024 or 2023, the revenues coming, the fee revenue coming from ordinals was absolutely astounding.

28:41And, you know, people thought like, oh, there's a new normal here or something like that, right? For transaction fees, of course, I was always of the mindset that NFTs are really kind of dumb. They're cool for some people, but the speculative mania we saw was clearly unsustainable. So I'd say that it's not necessarily fair to say that they're not focused on that. I do think the bigger ones aren't. Like if you go to like a public miner or a big private miner, the guys in the C-suite there have like very little functional understanding of how Bitcoin works.

29:13They're just trying to make money. So they're not as incentivized to do it. Or they're not as curious as others are. But, and I think the last thing I'll say on that, too, is like there have been efforts to try to incubate layer twos and other things like inscriptions that will drive block space demand. But the fact of the matter is that it's just like no one's using those tools. You know, very few people are using layer twos today on Bitcoin for anything other than simple transactions, like through lightning, honestly.

29:44And I think that it's kind of a product in search of a user, because most Bitcoiners just want to hold their coins. The people who, a lot of the people who buy Bitcoin nowadays are honestly, they're not even comfortable using a hardware wallet. Like so they're certainly not going to go to, you know, like, they're not going to go use some sort of zero-knowledge proof layer two or something, or lock their funds into something that they barely understand to begin with.

30:11Vlad CosteaSo yeah, but I disagree with you in the sense that these ZK rollups are not for the hodlers. They're for the 100K BTC, I think there's more than this, that's locked on Ethereum for wrapped BTC. So I think that's sort of the target audience to try to provide the same features with better security, and less trust.

30:34Colin HarperI would agree with that. I think that I agree with what you're saying, like, that's the target audience. I guess there's just a mismatch in user experience. I think it's really hard to get people who use Ethereum to like gel with Bitcoin's UTXO model, and kind of vice versa. It's also just much slower. I mean, obviously, this is what the layer twos are supposed to solve for. But there are also just network effects, right? Like, why does no one use Bluesky? Right? Even if it's kind of branded as trying to take, like, Twitter's left-leaning sphere and give them a place to speak.

31:08It's because the network effects of Twitter are just too good. And I think it's similar with Ethereum. You had years of developer mindshare building out all of these DeFi tools, with the added benefit of like printing money, right? I mean, DeFi Summer, right, and the yield farming stuff that took place in like 2020, was just basically printing money. And I think that when you have all of that liquidity captured in one system, it can all be funny money. It's all basically just gambling and BS anyway.

31:38But the fact of the matter is that does create this kind of like network effect within that system that keeps people contained there, because there's not really an incentive to go to these other, to Bitcoin, which has never been, you know, it's not a system built for just minting endless tokens, and for these kind of reward systems to try to attract users, right? That's just never really been its MO. But on your note about like trying to get people to move over from like Ethereum and other systems, some of the earliest adopters of ordinals and inscriptions were actually Ethereum guys.

32:13And what was really interesting is they were like porting over to Bitcoin and learning how to run a node and learning how to construct transactions from scratch, so that they could be early adopters on this new NFT standard, which was pretty cool to see. Obviously, a lot of that ecosystem is basically dead at this point. But it can be done, I guess, to your point.

32:29Vlad CosteaYeah, so I'm going to plug two sponsors in this context. First, there is SideShift. So if you have WBTC wrapped on Ethereum, and you want to swap that back to the true Bitcoin, you can do it on SideShift with minimal friction. And especially if someone wants to pay you in that and you're like, no, man, I'm not gonna touch your tokenized shitcoin. You can just instead of installing an Ethereum wallet and setting up MetaMask and buying ETH for gas and whatever, you just put your Bitcoin address into SideShift.

33:04And then you click the shift button. And what comes next is this interface where you copy the Ethereum address, you send it to the person wanting to send the Ethereum asset. And once the transaction is done, you're gonna receive BTC to the address that you own. It's simple. They have a lot of liquidity and they're not available in the US for reasons which concern your wonderful politicians. Anyway, SideShift, a lot of liquidity and low fees, check them out. And they also swap stablecoins and whatever permissioned assets you can come up with and are popular these days.

33:43And there's also LayerTwo Labs, which is doing drivechains. And they are advocates of miners activating this. I think at this point, they're working on something that's called CUSF, which is the Core Untouched Soft Fork. They hope that once miners are gonna be starving, then they will activate these merged mining options, which enables them to secure these sidechains, which have all sorts of features that users might want on Bitcoin. And you can test the software today at layertwolabs.com/download. It's available on a Bitcoin signet.

34:19And they have a sidechain for Ethereum, for Zcash, for Namecoin, for a large block version of Bitcoin, which is prunable. So they delete the older blocks, because they don't have to store all the information. And also a quantum resistant sidechain, which I'm not sure exactly how it works, because it's a very recent addition. And this is part of the argument, Colin, when it comes to miners wanting to collect more fees, because they can also try merged mining with, I think, Namecoin is the coin that Satoshi made sure that it's going to be merged mined.

34:56So the miners can collect that and dump it on the market. And there's also Rootstock, RSK, which is sort of a federated sidechain on Bitcoin. And that one also has some users and is popular in some communities in Argentina. And they can also collect that one. And if they want to dump it on the market for extra revenue, like why isn't merged mining more explored among miners?

35:19Colin HarperIt is actually, I think, you know, I used to work at Luxor Technology, which is a Bitcoin mining pool based here in the US, and a mining software and services provider. And they did explore merge mining. In fact, when I was there, I don't know if they still do it, but they did merge-mine Rootstock. And the fees from it were negligible. It just wasn't that... Like, a lot of these platforms just don't really have the users to sustain any meaningful revenue.

35:49Funnily enough, I think one of the more lucrative merge mining offerings that mining pools offer will be Litecoin and Dogecoin, as sad as that is. That's often very popular for merge mining, because they both run Scrypt for the hashing algorithm. And you can, especially when things are ripping, you can make good money doing that.

36:10Vlad CosteaSo that's the reason why Litecoin didn't pump this bull market, because the miners are incentivized to hold Dogecoin and sell Litecoin.

36:19Colin HarperYeah, I mean, maybe. It's funny. Yeah. So that being said, these things are being explored. I just think that on the one hand, you probably won't hear about them very much, because it's really just communicated from mining pool to miners. And also, some of the they're not that meaningful in terms of boosting revenue. I mean, it's still better, right than doing nothing. But ultimately, it's not as lucrative. And you know, there are some other ones like Fractal Bitcoin, which were, you know, it was touted as a way to boost revenue with merge mining as well.

37:01But I think a lot of that is going on in the background, people just don't know about it. I think that's also important to understand, too. When we talk about miners, like in this context, really, we're talking about mining pools more than anything. Solo miners make up a vanishingly small sliver of the network at this point.

37:25Vlad CosteaThat's very depressing, by the way, because every bull cycle has sort of a dominant narrative and the use case, like this is the way in which you can use this. And this is why you should buy it. And so far, I don't think we have come up with something that really sticks, except for speculation, like just hoping that the price will go up. We haven't been very efficient at making payments happen. I think tokens like USDT, which started out on Bitcoin on the Omni layer and went to Ethereum, I think it constantly has like 2x trading volume pretty much every day compared to Bitcoin.

38:08And that one is considered to be a much more popular option for people wanting to send money around the world. And for a while, Bitcoin was being advertised as something that's good for remittances, that's good for the third world, for banking the unbanked and stuff like this. All of this was taken by stablecoins right now. Bitcoin was rebranded from something that you can use for payments for something that you shouldn't use for payments. And instead, you should just hold it until, I don't know when. Michael Saylor says he's gonna die with his Bitcoin, or whatever.

38:47Colin HarperYeah, I, you know, I would frame it this way. I mean, I do agree with you that I think the early promise of Bitcoin, or at least the thing that got the early cypherpunks really excited about it. And I think that's best exemplified in its use on the Silk Road. You know, to me, the Silk Road is the single most important phenomenon in Bitcoin's early existence, because it proved that this money is uncensorable and permissionless. If you can buy things that are illegal online with this technology, then that really proves the use case of censorship resistant money, right?

39:28And I think that the early promise of that, to your point, Vlad, it is true. It's been totally overshadowed by the store of value narrative. That being said, I don't really know what else we should expect if this thing explodes in value like it has, right? I mean, if you're looking at like 10,000% returns over whatever time period, right? If you're even looking at 200% or 100% over a pretty short time period compared to other investments, it's really hard to see how that's not a selling point for a lot of people.

39:58And then I also think that it's not necessarily the fault of Bitcoin or of the people working on it, that people decide to hoard it rather than spend it. That's market psychology, you know, ultimately. There's a reason why they want Tether instead of Bitcoin is because Bitcoin, for people who use cryptocurrencies in countries where they don't have strong currencies or they want an offshore account, oftentimes Bitcoin might be their savings account and then they'll use Tether like a checking account, right? And so I think that's totally rational, you know?

40:32There are plenty of things with Lightning that could be better. I think that there are arguments to be made that maybe we bet on the wrong horse early on because Lightning is pretty clunky, you know? That being said, non-custodial or a custodial Lightning wallet, I know people don't like that because it's not totally cypherpunk or whatever. It works pretty well, honestly. And if you're only keeping 100, 200 bucks on it to spend, I don't really see that as being a huge problem. And it's kind of akin to using something like Tether, I would say.

41:00But ultimately I think that Bitcoin is for whatever you want to use it for. And so that's why I still am really bullish on it in the sense that, yeah, people are saving it more than spending it right now. Transaction volume is dead. But I don't see stablecoins as an alternative at all because ultimately they can be frozen like that. This has happened before. Tether, USDC, all of these stablecoins have complied with exchanges or law enforcement at some point to freeze funds if there has been a hack or if there's been some misallocation of funds or what have you, some snafu that leads to funds being lost in some way.

41:36They all end up complying. And so for me, that's just not fuck you money. That's not anything that's close to what Bitcoin offers in terms of being valuable. So I look at Bitcoin as kind of a dual case insurance fund. If we look at actual dollar debasement, I do think that it will do well if the dollar continues to decline in value, which I expect it will. But I also look at it as insurance against kind of totalitarian overreach over finances. Because if you are running the right infrastructure, people can't keep you from transacting.

42:07And that may be forgotten or lost on a lot of people right now. But I think that there will come a time when that's maybe a little more pertinent and is actually useful for people. And once that time comes, if you don't have it, you're fucked. So, yeah.

42:23Vlad CosteaI'm actually curious what you think about Paper Bitcoin Summer. But before I let you answer to this wonderful question, which is very insignificant in the grand scheme of things, I'll plug noones.com, which is the peer-to-peer marketplace that tries to empower the Global South. It's created by the former CEO of Paxful, who was not happy with the regulations that were targeting his exchange. So he decided to start a new project, which is focused on empowering people from Africa, from the Middle East, from South America.

42:53So basically, if you decide to use noones.com, you are giving more liquidity, you are putting it into the hands of people who will hustle their way into making more money. So, in a way, it is speculative, but it also helps people who want to use it in the way that it was supposed to be used. And I think the ways in which you can support the cause is also to use their debit card for spending, if you're into that, or to check out their spot exchange, or I think they also have a marketplace for all sorts of goods and services.

43:29So check it out, I think it's pretty nice, and they have a cool interface which looks 8-bit, which is like a plug on the fact that it's spelled as N-O-O-N-E-S, and the fact that it's NES, they used 8-bit graphics, I don't know. I don't think it's available in the US, once again, sorry guys. And yeah, and there's also...

43:50Colin HarperWe never get any of the fun toys, we never get to play with anything fun.

43:54Vlad CosteaYeah, you guys don't even get airdrops, which is funny. Like, why would you not have access to get airdrops, makes no sense to me. But it seems like the SEC has a different, or used to have a different opinion, I'm not sure anymore about anything. Anyway, last sponsor, but not last in, like, hierarchy or whatever, I just picked a random order. Bitcoin.com News, which used to be this place that was saying that Bitcoin Cash is faster and has lower fees than Bitcoin, and now they're orange, and they have pretty good news coverage, and most people are not even aware of it, that they rebranded, so my job is to tell everyone that this is the case.

44:31And I do like that they're sort of like an in-between news outlet, they're not as political as Bitcoin Magazine, and they're not as institutional as Coinbase. Not Coinbase, CoinDesk, there are too many coin websites out there. So check it out, it's interesting, you find news about gold sometimes, you find news about stuff that we talk about in this episode, mining and the Epstein files, which are coming, by the way, they're sort of advertised on a short notice, and I did not even check with Colin if he's open to talking about them.

45:07But yeah, check it out, it's news.bitcoin.com. And now let's dive into the question that I had for you.

45:16Colin HarperWhich was?

45:18Vlad CosteaOh, I was hoping that you remembered.

45:22Colin HarperI don't think you phrased it as a question.

45:23Vlad CosteaPaper Bitcoin Summer.

45:24Colin HarperOh, that's right. Like, what are you asking specifically?

45:29Vlad CosteaIt's fine that you don't remember, because I don't think it's such a big deal, but it was a big deal, because it sort of scammed a lot of people, it was like a free pass.

45:37Colin HarperOh yeah, like the treasury companies?

45:38Vlad CosteaYeah, it was a free pass to shitcoin for the people who have been monks for so many years, and they said don't touch anything else except for Bitcoin, and suddenly they got a free pass.

45:48Colin HarperIt may have been the most retarded thing I have ever seen, honestly, and I've seen a lot of really retarded things, and the reason why it was so retarded is I expect this from like the shitcoin scammers, right? The crazy stuff like meme coins and things like that. I actually think meme coins are kind of funny in the sense that at least we're not pretending like these things do anything anymore. It's not like the ICO bubble or the DeFi bubble. It's just totally bare, stripped down, nihilistic, we just want to make money, right?

46:19So I've seen a lot of bullshit since I started covering the space in 2017, and this definitely takes the cake in the sense that there was a veneer of legitimacy because these were publicly traded companies and are publicly traded companies, but I mean they're basically like pink sheet stocks. If you've ever seen, you know, like Wolf of Wall Street, I mean, they probably wouldn't even market these... I mean, actually, they probably would have, but these would have been the things that Jordan Belfort and all of his gaggle of misfits would have been pushing on people, right?

46:53And what was just amazing to me about it is I don't think a lot of the people who launched them really understood the waters they were swimming in, right? You know, to look at one in particular that I think really bore the brunt of a lot of negative press for maybe good reasons, like NAKA, right? Ultimately, when you're launching a Bitcoin treasury company, the only thing that matters, or really the two things that really matter the most are marketing and your capital structure. The reason why Michael Saylor has dominated this is not just because he was the first to do it, but because the way that Strategy actually structures its capital is pretty intelligent compared to a lot of the newcomers.

47:38And what I mean by that is, like, do you have a bunch of different levers to pull? I don't understand all of them. I'm not a finance expert. But like the two basic ones are you either issue equity, so you sell shares on the open market through like an at-the-market offering, or you do what Strategy did and you spin out these dividend-paying stocks, the preferreds, I think there were like four of them, then maybe five. Or you take on debt. Usually for Strategy, this debt was convertible debt, and the people buying that convertible debt, they're either going to be paid in shares of the company later on, or they are going to be paid in dollars to satisfy the debt.

48:19Obviously, for Strategy, a lot of that convertible debt that they issued early on was probably paid out in shares, and the people who bought that debt did really well. Or sorry, the people who issued that debt did very well. Well, for some of the newcomers, they don't have expertise in capital markets necessarily, and I think this was really demonstrated with the private placement that NAKA did back last summer. So they did a private placement before the KindlyMD merger closed. So they merged with KindlyMD, which is like a medical company, and I think, my timeline is probably wrong about this, but in the summer of 2025, they did a private placement for like $500 million or something like that, and then all of those shares unlocked at the same time, and it destroyed the price.

49:11And so that's a great example of a way in which the capital structure was detrimental and deleterious to the actual stock and the shareholders, right? The timing was such that Treasury companies were already pretty weak, you know, and then all of a sudden you have all these early shareholders, early buyers dumping on the market at the same time, and then your stock price gets driven into the dust. I think ultimately if you look across the entire Bitcoin treasury company, paper summer mania, the outcome was so obvious, and I think in foresight it was obvious to a lot of people, and in hindsight it's even more obvious.

49:54I never touched these things because I didn't really see the value. You know, I get it, whatever. But like, why would I pay, I get it, like, you know, Michael Saylor's GigaChad, he's super smart guy, he's the best guy ever, whatever, but why would I pay your company a premium to buy Bitcoin, to hold Bitcoin for me, when I can just go buy it myself? The ETFs exist, especially, and there are no other barriers to entry for me to have allocation to this asset. Why am I paying 2x, 3x what the value of your Bitcoin is?

50:25The whole multiple on the net asset value thing never made any sense to me. Like, I don't understand why I would pay more for a Bitcoin than I would if I were just going to go buy one, which is basically what you're doing if you're buying a treasury company when they're trading above their Bitcoin holdings. One of the biggest misallocations of capital I think we've seen, I think it probably actually set Bitcoin back further, despite all of the buying these companies did, because there's just so much capital destruction from these events, and a lot of people are going to be turned away from this entire sector for a long time because of it.

51:02Vlad CosteaThis was beautiful, Colin, like, really nice. It's interesting that you took a jab at David Bailey's NAKA, which was, or still is, his treasury company, and he's still saying that he's holding and he's going to bring it back into profit, and this is just like a bear market in Bitcoin, and it's going to go up once again sometime, I don't know when. But it's also interesting that through this, he got to live his fantasy of basically buying $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in one order. So, yeah, if there is any silver lining or nice story that came out of this, he got to live his fantasy of buying $1 billion.

51:48Colin HarperAnd he bought close to the top. We wrote about this at Blockspace, and if you do the math on there, I think it was their quarterly filing for Q3, if you look at the math for their cost basis, it was like $126,000 per coin. But I was told after the fact that the real number is more like $118,000 per coin. I don't really understand the discrepancy, but the math on the actual filing says $126,000. Either way you slice it, they basically bought at the top. And so, yeah, I mean, going back to what you were saying, I don't really know what goes on in your head to do that unless you're just kind of swept up in the mania.

52:43And this happens with every bull market, it happens with literally everything that gets touched by this industry, is that people lose their heads because the volatility is so crazy. And now they're trying to buy Bitcoin Magazine. I think within one of the filings, there was a clause that said that they retain an option to purchase Bitcoin Magazine in shares of NAKA, which is the one thing that will make this difficult because the shares aren't worth very much right now. But it was some crazy number. Don't quote me on this, but like $300 million or something, I think was what I remember.

53:21Again, it's like basically all shares and maybe a little bit of cash. But I'd be really interested to see if that goes through because then you're basically tying the fates of those two companies together. And I think that's really a shame because like, you know, for what it's worth, and for all the missteps over the years, like BTC Inc and Bitcoin Magazine had a really good thing going there, man. I mean, the Bitcoin conference is huge. It's a great conference. They have the print mag now and the website's humming along.

53:53So I really hope that it doesn't get dragged down with the ship, but we'll see.

54:01Vlad CosteaI just want to give a shout out to the Bitcoin podcasters who decided that they should host these people and they should indirectly or more or less directly promote treasury companies, starting with What Bitcoin Did, The Investor's Podcast Network, the Pomp Podcast. I think The Bitcoin Standard Podcast was sort of negative on Saylor's Strategy, so they get like a good point. Pierre Rochard with the Bitcoin for Corporations show, he hosted a bunch of guys who spoke about treasury models. Tim Kotzman from the Bitcoin Treasuries podcast. There is even a Bitcoin Treasuries podcast that emerged.

54:44And there's also Yves Graf and Quentin from One Chair Podcast, and they spoke about it. Congratulations, guys, like you made a bunch of people lose money. I'm not going to call you anything. I'm just going to say exactly what you did.

54:57Colin HarperYeah, I think the incentives were really broken for that because, I mean, if you look at the run up of these companies in the summer of 2025, it was spectacular. And so clearly everyone's going to want to try to cash in on that in some way they can, whether that be through actual dollars or through just the attention economy and having a show on it. Right. We were pretty critical of it on the Blockspace pod the entire time because I just didn't really see any value in it, you know, and I still don't.

55:27And I don't think that these things are going to come back the way that people think that they are.

55:35Vlad CosteaThat's a good comment. I don't know where this is going. I don't know if it's going to be like the ICO or the NFT market where you have like the quote-unquote blue chips that come back for some reason. But I still don't get the point. For me, it was always like it defeats the purpose. Why does Bitcoin exist? To enable you to make these sorts of payments and also store value in a way that you can move across borders and blah, blah. Why would you buy a paper asset that describes it?

56:04I would never touch that. It's pointless. I'm not going to comment on the purpose of it. I'm just commenting on the utility of it. Like it's something that someone can take away from you. It's something that someone can just inflate because it's a piece of paper. There is nothing that stops someone else from creating another one to dilute the purchasing power of the one that you have. So, yeah, I guess it's for what Pierre Rochard calls the speculative attack, which is this way of integrating corporations to buy Bitcoin. And that's how you get to hyperbitcoinization, I think.

56:46Colin HarperYeah, I mean, and you know, if you look at that for companies that actually generate money, sure. I mean, I think that like Tesla, for instance, holding Bitcoin or other companies holding Bitcoin that are actually cash flowing. I see no problem with that. And I think it will long term probably accrue value for the company. But none of these companies have actual cash generating businesses. You know, I don't think that Strategy is a Ponzi scheme like people in TradFi brand it as, but it is Ponzi-esque in the sense that to pay out dividends for their preferreds, they have to sell shares into the open market or take on debt to pay that off because they don't actually produce enough income.

57:31I mean, Strategy still does have a software business. But if you look at how much it earns versus its obligations, it's nowhere near enough to pay off dividends or to pay and to pay down debt if they need to.

57:44Vlad CosteaI remember when I saw Michael Saylor at BTC Prague here in Europe. I think this was in May of 2025. He was telling everyone to basically borrow a million dollars, take money from everyone who's not going to ask for it back, like your parents, your close friends, your brothers. Borrow from your bank, take out a second mortgage, borrow from your parents if you have to, borrow from your grandma, borrow from everyone and put it into Bitcoin.

58:12Colin HarperThat's such a good impression.

58:15Vlad CosteaThank you. I'm going to ask someone to make a short clip of this. But yeah, someone from TradFi who was next to me basically told me while we were watching this, I did not get like a seat. I was just standing trying to understand what this is about, because the previous year he was talking about the triple maxi, which means you hold Bitcoin, you whatever. But the third one is that you take on debt to buy more Bitcoin and you leverage your whole future for the purpose of buying more Bitcoin.

58:49And the TradFi guy close to me said, you know, if this happened in the world of stock markets or whatever, if this was like a company CEO telling you to do this with the company stock, everyone would dump right now. Because it means that they're desperate and they're running out of liquidity and they're asking everyone to make something super irrational for the purpose of taking the price up. And Saylor is sort of doing the same, but he has a different audience of people who have conviction in the future of this project. And that's why it's still working.

59:24Colin HarperYeah, I think Strategy is the only one that you can say in terms of blue chips that actually might have a future, maybe Metaplanet. You know, it doesn't feel great that Strategy owns like 700,000 Bitcoin. Doesn't feel great. You know, I'm gonna be the first to say that I don't really like seeing that. I think that, you know, we need to take a good long look at the kind of risks that that would bring for Bitcoin long term. But going back to what you're saying, the advice that he's giving there honestly only really works if you time it perfectly.

59:59I know a lot of people, and I don't know a lot of people, but I know of Bitcoiners who will max out credit cards or who will take out 0% interest credit cards to long Bitcoin during bull cycles with this thesis in mind. The only way in which this doesn't fuck you is if Bitcoin is ripping and you actually manage your capital well enough and you sell, you manage your risk well enough, which most people just quite frankly aren't equipped to do. And it's not even that they're not smart enough, it's that their emotions take hold in a bull or a bear market.

1:00:28And when they're exuberant and euphoric, they don't sell anything. And then that gets them into trouble. But the only way this really also works is if you're doing this during a hyperinflation event. So like if you actually did have a hyperinflating economy and you take on debt to buy hard assets, that debt's going to be worth basically nothing in a short enough time to where it's not as risky. But I think most people would do well to not heed what Saylor's saying, and honestly it's one of those things that makes me think he's a spook, honestly, because it's like that's just such destructive advice for the majority of people.

1:01:05But and speaking of that, maybe this is a good segue into the Epstein files because...

1:01:10Vlad CosteaOh, interesting. Spicy. I was also going to mention this, so before we go into Epstein files, I just want to mention that Paper Bitcoin Summer was like the Seinfeld of investment. Like when they went to CBS or something to pitch their show during the show, which was very made up, because this was broadcast on NBC, I'm not sure, one of these two. Anyway, they had to answer the question, what kind of show is it? And they said, well, it's about nothing. What do you do? Nothing. So how does any of this make sense? Bitcoin, treasury companies, it's sort of the same.

1:01:45Like, what do you guys do? Nothing. What do you mean nothing? Well, we just buy Bitcoin and we hold and we sit on it. Do you actually produce something? No. Do you have a product? No. Do you have a service? No. What do you actually do? We just buy Bitcoin and sell shares to buy more Bitcoin. It's very nihilistic from this point of view. Like, there's nothing behind it. As soon as the price plummets, they're gonna have to sell their Bitcoin, which I guess leads to a much more drastic decrease in the market valuation.

1:01:59So it's really horrible. But I guess it's a lesson that we had to learn during this journey. Like, it's part of Bitcoin's mainstream adoption phase.

1:02:29Colin HarperYeah, I think so. And I think for most of them, like, I think Strategy is a long way away from having to sell. Like, the way that their trade unwinds, it's a much, how to put it, it's a much more difficult road for that trade to unwind for them. But for some of these newcomers, absolutely. I mean, especially if they get delisted or if they go bankrupt. But going back to the Epstein files as a tie-in, can I share my screen? Is that something I'm allowed to do here?

1:03:04Vlad CosteaOf course you're allowed.

1:03:06Colin HarperOkay, I just didn't know if I had permissions here. Okay, so...

1:03:12Vlad CosteaPermissionless space.

1:03:14Colin HarperAlrighty, let me, let me share this really quickly. This is the one, yes, this is the one. So this is an email from, can you see this?

1:03:26Vlad CosteaLet me adjust, yeah, I can see.

1:03:28Colin HarperThis is an email from 2010 from one Peggy Siegel, who is a publisher in the Epstein universe. I don't know her full bio, but if you look into Epstein's network, he had all these publishers and PR and media people that he was involved with, right? Because you want to set narratives and you want to agenda set and frame stories, right?

1:03:50So, but she was involved in setting up this, basically this gala. I think it was, I think it was around the, I'm not sure if this says, the title here says Cannes. I don't know if it was related to the film festival, but there was an independent filmmaker's gala that Michael Saylor in 2010 sponsored for $25,000 for food and drink. And here's what Peggy Siegel had to say about the GigaChad: "Michael Saylor giving $25,000 for food and the opportunity to get his name on an invite and meet a hip group.

1:04:26Saylor is a complete creep. He has no personality, sort of like a zombie on a drug. We had a smart director sitting next to him and his idiot gorgeous date and could not get any conversation out of him, except 'I have a yacht and I'm going to Cannes,' and I walked him around and he was so weird that even I ran away from him. There is an obvious personal disconnect and I don't think I can take his money and deliver a better life because he has no feel for social behavior."

1:04:56Brutal takedown. I mean, these are people who have no scruples with some of the most heinous acts of any people in power that you can imagine, but somehow this guy is like too awkward for them that doesn't fit the profile. I mean, take that for what it's worth, right? I don't think...

1:05:13Vlad CosteaSome people try to spin it and they said, wait a second. If the world's elite pedophiles don't like this guy, then it must be really someone that we should associate ourselves with. But they're basically saying that he's horrible and he could not even maintain a conversation. And this also explains why everyone who told me that they met Saylor over dinner or in private settings, they said he cannot speak about anything except for Bitcoin. And it makes sense because this guy is super awkward. For many years, I guess he was like the laughing stock of his generation of company investors and CEOs because he started MicroStrategy around the same time as Jeff Bezos started Amazon or something.

1:05:57And now he finally found the niche where he is cool and people listen to him and he is interesting overall. So why would he give away the fact that he's uninteresting and he's a creep when he can just come up with all of these crazy narratives about the hive mind and how Bitcoin works with digital energy, cyber hornets. Yeah.

1:06:20Colin HarperYeah. Yeah. I mean, Bitcoiners like that he pumps their bags ultimately. And I think you're right. Like he's probably just like a super awkward guy. I don't think he's an idiot. I'll say that much. Like clearly he was smart enough to recognize that this is a strategy that would work and he executed on it in such a way that was successful. So I wouldn't go as far as to say that, but I just, I thought that was super interesting that that was in there. And there are a few other tidbits of really interesting Bitcoin lore. I mean, Brock Pierce, you know, infamously of EOS, also Blockchain Capital.

1:06:54Vlad CosteaAnd before that, he was like the chair or something of the Bitcoin Foundation.

1:07:02Colin HarperYes. Yeah. Anyway, he is, was extensively in touch with Epstein for many, many years. And it seems as though Epstein through Blockchain Capital funded a number of, a number of companies. Like, they gave Blockchain Capital $3 million to invest in Coinbase, which Blockchain Capital then repurchased that stake from Epstein in January 2018 for $15 million. At the time it probably seemed like a bad call because that was when Bitcoin was crashing, but Coinbase is worth like $50 billion now. So pretty good call.

1:07:41A few other things. Epstein was introduced to Gavin Andresen shortly after Gavin talked to the CIA or around the same time.

1:07:52Vlad CosteaThat's the part that I find most interesting, the connection between Bitcoin developers and Epstein, because I can speculate all day about the other stuff, but this is the information that really affects the entire space and explains a lot about the block size wars and everything that happened afterwards. There's also Blockstream that was involved. The former CEO, what's his name? Austin Hill.

1:08:18Colin HarperAustin Hill.

1:08:20Vlad CosteaYeah. He's the one who supposedly, according to the information in the emails, went to the island. And Adam Back is also mentioned a few times, also as Andy Back one time. I think Epstein sort of misremembered his name.

1:08:36Colin HarperYeah. So Blockstream, via Joi Ito, who used to be the head of MIT's Media Lab, took like a $500,000 investment that was, again, it was Epstein's associates paid Joi and then Joi paid Blockstream for the investment. Later that investment was, I think, clawed back. They said it was a conflict of interest, or Adam said. I don't think that, the one thing I do think is important to remember with a lot of this is that for a lot of early stage Bitcoin companies, having anyone interested in investing in you would have been a godsend because like you couldn't even have banking relationships.

1:09:20So I would just be hesitant to automatically assume bad intent or malice, or any sort of unscrupulous activity as a result of these things. Because there are other Bitcoin developers like Jeremy Rubin, who was interacting with Epstein quite frequently, but he was introduced to Epstein through Joi, who led the MIT Bitcoin lab while Jeremy was at MIT. And Jeremy was this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Bitcoin guy. He led the Bitcoin Club at MIT. Epstein gave them I think like $120,000 for Bitcoin Club activities throughout the year through Joi.

1:10:00So ultimately, you would be talking to this guy because he might be able to actually fund all the things that you want to do with this crazy new open source project, right? So I think that in those instances, like with Jeremy and probably with Blockstream, it's just a matter of, you know, this guy has a lot of money and I might be able to use some of that money to further my goals. So I don't really assign any blame there. But the Brock Pierce stuff is really interesting though.

1:10:27I won't necessarily defend him. And the fact that Blockchain Capital was kind of a nexus for funds, to fund things within the Bitcoin ecosystem from Jeremy, or from Jeffrey, excuse me, is pretty interesting. And with regards to Gavin meeting him, it seems like that happened. But there's only a few emails in the files that mention Gavin, and none after 2011. Although Gavin was the chief scientist of Blockchain Capital up through at least 2015, I think, and then he just kind of completely exits the scene.

1:11:00Vlad CosteaSo yeah, I put something on the screen. To me, this is the most interesting of all the emails. And it has the interesting parts underlined. I'm gonna read from my phone because it's easier for me to do it. But I just put this here in the middle. So people can read.

1:11:22Okay, so it's an email from Jeffrey Epstein to Joichi Ito. I guess that's who you call Joi. Yes, the subject is a reply to "Digital Currency Initiative," from April 25, 2015. And he says, "FYI, used gift funds to underwrite this, which allowed us to move quickly and win this round. Thanks." Basically, this is about... So let me read the other part, too. "The way that Bitcoin is organized currently is that there are five core developers, and around 100 contributors to the core code. The five core developers are like Linus Torvalds of Linux. They decide what changes are made to the core code.

1:12:10One of the five is the lead developer, Wladimir, and one is the chief scientist, Gavin. Gavin, Wladimir, and Cory..." That's Cory Fields, an important contributing developer, and he worked on Project Hamilton, which is MIT's CBDC pilot. This is like my note. Now I will continue reading. "...were being paid out of a nonprofit organization called the Bitcoin Foundation. A few weeks ago, it blew up quote unquote, when one of the board members declared the foundation bankrupt." And there's a link to the Bitcoin Foundation web page for this.

1:12:47"Many organizations scrambled to step into the vacuum created by the foundation and, quote unquote, take control of the developers. We moved quickly talking to all the various stakeholders and the three developers decided to join the Media Lab. This is a big win for us." So this was April 25, 2015, before the block size wars started. And basically, MIT Media Lab took under their funding program the three biggest developers in Bitcoin: Wladimir van der Laan, who had been maintainer up until like three years ago or something, when he stepped down.

1:13:27There was also Gavin Andresen, who is basically the guy who received stewardship of the project from Satoshi, and had been like, the biggest voice for a while in Bitcoin. Everyone respected him. It was, I think, up until BIP 101, which he proposed for what later became Bitcoin XT and Classic and Unlimited and merged into Bitcoin Cash. And Cory Fields was considered this genius, right? Like, brilliant coder who was like the next Gavin. Maybe some people looked up to him like he was the successor of Gavin Andresen.

1:14:03And all of these three guys went to receive funding from the MIT Media Lab, which isn't evil in and of itself. But it makes you wonder what their real intentions are. And maybe that part of the culture that was created around Bitcoin development, like the excessive conservatism is also part of the reason why we are here. And we don't use Bitcoin more as money.

1:14:30Colin HarperYeah, I don't know if I would draw that conclusion from it. But I will say that I think you're right to ask, you know, what purpose does Jeffrey Epstein's, call it what you want, influence or interference serve for the regime, or what some people call the deep state? It's just whatever this, you know, this cabal of elites represents, right? Because we know that Epstein was always trying to keep tabs on up and coming technologies, and he wanted to fund them. And he wanted to get the people who were on the bleeding edge of these technologies in his pockets or under his influence in some capacity, right?

1:15:13So it makes sense that he would try to get the brightest people in Bitcoin kind of under a roof that he already had his fingers in, right? He donated $825,000 to MIT, from what we know from this latest, or not even this latest batch, this was known for a while. And of that, like $525,000 went to the MIT Bitcoin lab. But I think it does kind of bear, it does make you wonder, like, what was the purpose? What was he trying to do to steer development, if at all?

1:15:45He was probably just trying to get his eyes on it, and his ears on the ground to figure out what was going on early on. And there were so many things that he was involved in that this probably took a backseat, I would imagine, especially considering it didn't really start taking off until, I would say, after his death in 2019. You know, after a totally normal suicide, guys, totally normal. Anyway, a few other things, Vlad, then I need to hop off. Apologies.

1:16:14I'm having a good time here, though. Going back to what you were saying, about just a lot of this stuff, I highly recommend y'all go check out some of Kyle Torpey's reporting on what he's found in the Epstein files. There's an email to Coinbase investors in February 2016, which is, again, further evidence that Epstein did actually have an investment in Coinbase, where he talks about the block size wars, and refers to, you know, small blockers as being kind of ideologically minded. It's kind of interesting to see, like, the block size wars show up in some ways in the Epstein files.

1:16:50Again, the Venn diagram is just crazy. The other really good find, and perhaps maybe the most important one of the whole batch yet that I can see from Kyle here, is one where Epstein met with the New York Department of Financial Services' Ben Lawsky during the development of the BitLicense. So I'm reading directly from Kyle's Twitter here. "According to emails in the DOJ files, Jeffrey Epstein met with the New York Superintendent of Financial Services, Ben Lawsky, in 2014. At the time, Lawsky was developing the BitLicense for the New York Department of Financial Services.

1:17:25The BitLicense was the first major Bitcoin regulation established in the US, albeit on the state level. Super heavy-handed, for those who don't know, super heavy-handed regulation really kneecapped a lot of startups and companies trying to establish in New York, and basically created a super high hurdle, near impossible hurdle to clear for companies that were trying to get licensed to do Bitcoin and crypto business in the state of New York. Following his time at NYDFS, Lawsky was involved with the industry he regulated while at the department.

1:17:57He was on the board of directors at Ripple for a number of years, and another firm, NYDIG, received a BitLicense nine months after Lawsky joined it. In one email, Epstein claimed Lawsky should implement some sort of pro-Bitcoin tax policy in New York. Blockstream co-founder and then-CEO Austin Hill also asked Epstein for advice on an industry petition related to the BitLicense." So, clearly Epstein was either, I think the least charitable way to read it is that he was trying to influence these things.

1:18:24The most charitable way to read it is that he was trying to figure out how all these things are working and how it's evolving. To try to figure out how he can extract, or how he can exercise influence and pull levers to push things in the direction for, you know, his cronies. So anyway.

1:18:43Vlad CosteaI like that we're ending this on a cliffhanger. We don't know anything, we just saw some emails that came up, I think it was on the 31st of January that they came out. This is three days later and we're still trying to make sense of what's happening. What I can tell is that Amir Taaki was also contacted by them, and he was described as not trying to build a business. "Crazy open source folks who are radicals, their motivations are in line with WikiLeaks or Wikipedia."

1:19:11Colin HarperYep, that was Jason Calacanis saying that to Epstein. He was the one who I think introduced Epstein or turned him on to the Bitcoin guys.

1:19:19Vlad CosteaColin, I understand you have to go. Can you tell people where they can follow you and how they can get more of your content?

1:19:29Colin HarperYes, thank you Vlad, very much. I had a great time, man. We'll have to do this again, maybe for a longer session if you're open. Y'all can find me on Twitter slash X at As I Lay Hodling. You can find our work at Blockspace Media, at blockspace.media. You can find us on YouTube, you can also find our podcast wherever you get them, just type in Blockspace Media. And then if you're interested in technical discussion, like nitty gritty Bitcoin stuff, super nerdy, check out opnext.dev.

1:20:00It is our conference in New York on April 16th, 2026. We will be having a lot of Bitcoin developers on talking about everything from scaling to some of the L2s that we touched on here and also quantum. Vlad, thank you so much, man. This was super fun. I hope you're doing well. I'm glad to see Bitcoin Takeover Podcast still going strong. One of the longest running podcasts in Bitcoin, and we love to see you still operating and grinding, man. Thanks for having me on.

1:20:26Vlad CosteaI hope you all come to the birthday, which is the birthday party on Sunday.

1:20:31Colin HarperOkay, yeah.

1:20:33Vlad CosteaI mean, it's virtual, right? I'm gonna do like a Twitter Space.

1:20:36Colin HarperOkay, I'll keep an eye out for it.

1:20:39Vlad CosteaThank you, sir. Also, is As I Lay Hodling a reference to As I Lay Dying?

1:20:45Colin HarperIt is, but not the As I Lay Dying you're thinking of. It's not the band. It's actually the book that the band took its name from. It's a book by William Faulkner, published, I believe, in the '30s. I don't know the exact date, but yeah.

1:20:58Vlad CosteaSo are you saying that Hodling is like dying?

1:21:03Colin HarperYes.

1:21:04Vlad CosteaOkay. Bad news, hodlers. Okay, I'll see you later, party people. I'll let Colin go. Goodbye, and thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to my show and his show also. Bye. See you, bud.

1:21:17Colin HarperCheers.