The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️

Where Critical Thinkers Meet.

Bitcoin, philosophy, and the long view.

🎙️ @CedYoungelman · 🌐

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

Bitcoin didn't win.

Bitcoin can change. Bitcoin is changing. Bitcoin has changed. We fell in love with a thing that was set in stone, and then we bypassed the one layer that actually holds it in place: the humans. While we posted "number go up," the reference implementation was being quietly captured. If no one fights for Bitcoin, Bitcoin will very soon be dead.

Who is actually running Bitcoin Core, and who is allowed to audit them?

@hodlonaut, the Space Cat, the citizen journalist who told the simple truth about Craig Wright and then stood in the fire for five years over it, came on to lay out the fight consuming Bitcoin right now, in plain English: how he found Bitcoin and shepherded the Lightning Torch, what the five-year Craig Wright war taught him about choosing principles over outcome, his Capture series and how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled and defended, the DEI and "extractive" playbook used to shut down anyone who asked questions, why every line of code must serve monetary sovereignty, the real cost of running a node at 10x and 100x, and why he went from BIP-110 skeptic to all-in.

Send this to anyone who thinks Bitcoin already won.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 A message on ColdCard
3:17 Cold open: "What is real?"
3:34 Welcome the Space Cat, on a brutal day
4:30 An apology for promoting ColdCard
6:15 The Capture series: a Bitcoin citizen journalist
11:24 A year away, and the shock of coming back
18:38 The node runner's stake: the canary in the mine
20:58 Citadel21, Surfer Jim & the culture
23:18 Finding Bitcoin in 2013: the Pirate Bay ethos
25:51 The birth of Hodlonaut & the Space Cat
27:56 The Lightning Torch: an experiment in trust
31:21 Craig Wright's letter, the bounty & the doxxing
34:38 Nine tweets, five years: telling the truth
35:24 Lightning today & "it feels like Ethereum"
38:54 What Craig Wright taught him: principles over outcome
41:05 Trust vs verify, and its limits
44:48 How Core's power was assembled: the priesthood
49:30 The Gavin/CIA flag & full-time Core
53:10 The armor: DEI & "extractive"
57:58 What makes a good Bitcoin coder
1:00:13 "Every line of code must serve monetary sovereignty"
1:04:43 Sponsors
1:06:30 The Matt Corallo quote & the inflation-bug rehire
1:10:32 How old was Satoshi?
1:13:30 BIP-110: judge the idea, not the messenger
1:21:53 We bypassed the social layer: fight for Bitcoin
1:24:24 The real fight is the ledger & the node-cost problem
1:28:50 Why he fully supports BIP-110 now
1:33:36 The technical merits: "node runners don't matter"
1:36:10 The three buckets & why people won't engage
1:44:08 Change capital vs "this is our shot"
1:47:07 If BIP-110 fails: the fallout
1:51:30 Ossification & the anti-spam team
1:54:36 Article 4 & his July accident
1:56:00 Closing: form your own conviction
2:01:46 Outro
🎧https://t.co/qQtJDikvVS

Then watch #285: Defending Bitcoin with @lukedewolf, the cybersecurity case for the same fight.
🎧https://t.co/oSRo1qsbzq

[1-year Coinbase Maturity Dave BIP-110⚡️ @davelund_]

Bitcoin has been under attack from the beginning, and it remains under attack today.

[Alan ₿ @alanbwt]

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

— Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life: On Being Vague

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

BIP-110 is dead. The capture Hodlonaut warned about is not. Everything the Space Cat laid out in #286 reads differently now that the vote went the other way. If you skipped it in August, this is the one to go back to. 👇

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

BIP-110 is dead. The capture Hodlonaut warned about is not. Everything the Space Cat laid out in #286 reads differently now that the vote went the other way. If you skipped it in August, this is the one to go back to. 👇

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

Bitcoin didn't win.

Bitcoin can change. Bitcoin is changing. Bitcoin has changed. We fell in love with a thing that was set in stone, and then we bypassed the one layer that actually holds it in place: the humans. While we posted "number go up," the reference implementation was being quietly captured. If no one fights for Bitcoin, Bitcoin will very soon be dead.

Who is actually running Bitcoin Core, and who is allowed to audit them?

@hodlonaut, the Space Cat, the citizen journalist who told the simple truth about Craig Wright and then stood in the fire for five years over it, came on to lay out the fight consuming Bitcoin right now, in plain English: how he found Bitcoin and shepherded the Lightning Torch, what the five-year Craig Wright war taught him about choosing principles over outcome, his Capture series and how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled and defended, the DEI and "extractive" playbook used to shut down anyone who asked questions, why every line of code must serve monetary sovereignty, the real cost of running a node at 10x and 100x, and why he went from BIP-110 skeptic to all-in.

Send this to anyone who thinks Bitcoin already won.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 A message on ColdCard
3:17 Cold open: "What is real?"
3:34 Welcome the Space Cat, on a brutal day
4:30 An apology for promoting ColdCard
6:15 The Capture series: a Bitcoin citizen journalist
11:24 A year away, and the shock of coming back
18:38 The node runner's stake: the canary in the mine
20:58 Citadel21, Surfer Jim & the culture
23:18 Finding Bitcoin in 2013: the Pirate Bay ethos
25:51 The birth of Hodlonaut & the Space Cat
27:56 The Lightning Torch: an experiment in trust
31:21 Craig Wright's letter, the bounty & the doxxing
34:38 Nine tweets, five years: telling the truth
35:24 Lightning today & "it feels like Ethereum"
38:54 What Craig Wright taught him: principles over outcome
41:05 Trust vs verify, and its limits
44:48 How Core's power was assembled: the priesthood
49:30 The Gavin/CIA flag & full-time Core
53:10 The armor: DEI & "extractive"
57:58 What makes a good Bitcoin coder
1:00:13 "Every line of code must serve monetary sovereignty"
1:04:43 Sponsors
1:06:30 The Matt Corallo quote & the inflation-bug rehire
1:10:32 How old was Satoshi?
1:13:30 BIP-110: judge the idea, not the messenger
1:21:53 We bypassed the social layer: fight for Bitcoin
1:24:24 The real fight is the ledger & the node-cost problem
1:28:50 Why he fully supports BIP-110 now
1:33:36 The technical merits: "node runners don't matter"
1:36:10 The three buckets & why people won't engage
1:44:08 Change capital vs "this is our shot"
1:47:07 If BIP-110 fails: the fallout
1:51:30 Ossification & the anti-spam team
1:54:36 Article 4 & his July accident
1:56:00 Closing: form your own conviction
2:01:46 Outro
🎧https://t.co/qQtJDikvVS

Then watch #285: Defending Bitcoin with @lukedewolf, the cybersecurity case for the same fight.
🎧https://t.co/oSRo1qsbzq

[Cedric Youngelman ⚡️ @CedYoungelman]

You have to think for yourself.

[Cedric Youngelman ⚡️ @CedYoungelman]

REPOST, from March 2021. "Everyone's a scammer," including you, including me, and it's the most useful thing a bitcoiner can internalize. Reads even better in 2026.

The @_BitcoinMatrix #34: Bitstein - Everyone's A Scammer & Advanced Geopolitical Meme Warfare

Bitstein takes the scarcity of Bitcoin dead seriously, seriously enough to conclude that everyone is trying to take your coins, and to mean that as a heuristic rather than an accusation. Hoarders are scammers. All investments are scams. He called Bitcoin cash flows in 2014. And once you actually sit with why that's true, it rewires how you think about spending, saving, and the lowest-time-preference version of yourself.

Founder of the Nakamoto Institute, co-host of Noded, Austrian economist, and the meme lord himself, @bitstein joins me to go deep: why "everyone's a scammer" is a heuristic and not an accusation, why hoarders are scammers and that's a good thing, how he called Bitcoin cash flows in 2014, praxeology and the rejection of activism for pragmatic reasons, why stacking sats beats stamping your feet at the Fed, Ron Paul as educator rather than politician, "2020 turned everyone into normies," what the Citadel actually means (localized governance, not Elysium), and then the whole second half: how to meme Bitcoin to the moon, rhetoric vs dialectic and knowing which game you're playing, how to get your opponent to effort-post, trigram memes and why distilled ideas win, and how to reframe, agree and amplify, and then dominate.

Send this to anyone who still thinks spending their Bitcoin is the altruistic move.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Intro
3:40 Meet Bitstein
4:45 Finding Austrian economics after the 2008 crisis
11:24 From Rothbard to the Mises Circle to the Nakamoto Institute
16:59 How a Mises reading group became a Bitcoin circle
19:00 "Everyone's a Scammer": taking scarcity dead seriously
23:22 Why it's a heuristic, not an accusation
27:21 Hoarders are scammers: selfishness in service of selflessness
31:18 "All investments are scams" and calling Bitcoin cash flows in 2014
36:22 Rejecting activism: the real opportunity cost of voting
41:00 Why stacking sats beats stamping your feet at the Fed
47:00 Ron Paul as educator, not politician
52:27 2008, 9/11, COVID: crisis as the backdrop of a life
56:24 "2020 turned everyone into normies"
59:24 Can an individual be sovereign in America today?
1:07:00 What "Citadel" actually means: localized governance, not Elysium
1:11:17 The citadel in your mind: stoicism, Shawshank, Joseph
1:13:34 "How to Meme Bitcoin to the Moon": the mimetic landscape
1:15:50 Bitblock 2019: the talk that hit Twitter before he left the stage
1:18:46 We live in a rhetorical world
1:19:14 Rhetoric vs dialectic, and which game to play when
1:24:38 Getting your opponent to effort-post
1:29:45 Know when to argue, know when to troll, know your real audience
1:31:26 Trigram memes and why distilled ideas win
1:33:33 Reframe, agree and amplify, dominate: never adopt their frame
1:36:10 Ethical trolling: stick to the truth, keep a low time preference
1:40:25 The American West, buffalo, and regenerative agriculture
1:47:20 Goldstein to Bitstein: hard money baked into the name

[Cedric Youngelman ⚡️ @CedYoungelman]

There is no spoon.

[Shinobi @brian_trollz]

Me watching you realize most Bitcoiners are actually dumber than the average population:

[Club Orange @cluborange]

Yesterday, Club Orange crossed 8M transactions.

We’re now growing at ~1M transactions a month.

And 95% of them are GeoZaps.

GeoZap lets you send sats to people based on their approximate location.

Zap a city.
Zap a country.
Zap a continent.
Zap the entire planet.

Add a message, a link, or an image.

This is what Bitcoin should feel like.

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

@JWWeatherman_ Yea sure. Let’s talk offline. I don’t like some of the changes Core has made to policy but I’m interested in learning more about using Core instead of proprietary hardware and software. Maybe HAC can unblock me and you guys can come back on the pod to discuss as well?

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

Never forget.

Bitcoin will never die. Michael @saylor

[Aaron Siri @AaronSiriSG]

Every health official is free to recommend and attempt to persuade people on the merits – not coerce and certainly not infringe on anyone’s civil or individual rights.
@CedYoungelman @_BitcoinMatrix

[Club Orange @cluborange]

life is hard

make it easier by having bitcoin friends

[Cedric Youngelman ⚡️ @CedYoungelman]

REPOST, from March 2021. Four years later, Bitcoin Twitter is a war zone over spam, BIP-110, and Knots vs Core, and this episode is the playbook for how to fight on it without losing your mind or the plot.

The @_BitcoinMatrix #34: Bitstein - Everyone's A Scammer & Advanced Geopolitical Meme Warfare

Before the current flame wars, Bitstein laid out exactly how the discourse actually works: that we live in a rhetorical world where facts don't move everyone, that there's a time to argue in good faith and a time to troll, and that the fastest way to lose is to let your opponent define your narrative. He also takes the scarcity of Bitcoin dead seriously, seriously enough to call everyone, including you and me, a scammer, and mean it as a compliment.

Founder of the Nakamoto Institute, co-host of Noded, Austrian economist, and the meme lord himself, @bitstein joins me to go deep: why "everyone's a scammer" is a heuristic and not an accusation, why hoarders are scammers and that's a good thing, how he called Bitcoin cash flows in 2014, praxeology and the rejection of activism for pragmatic reasons, why stacking sats beats stamping your feet at the Fed, Ron Paul as educator rather than politician, "2020 turned everyone into normies," what the Citadel actually means (localized governance, not Elysium), rhetoric vs dialectic and knowing which game you're playing, how to get your opponent to effort-post, trigram memes and why distilled ideas win, how to reframe, agree and amplify, and then dominate, and why ethical trolling always comes back to the truth and a low time preference.

Send this to anyone who's currently losing an argument in your replies.

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Intro
3:40 Meet Bitstein
4:45 Finding Austrian economics after the 2008 crisis
11:24 From Rothbard to the Mises Circle to the Nakamoto Institute
16:59 How a Mises reading group became a Bitcoin circle
19:00 "Everyone's a Scammer": taking scarcity dead seriously
23:22 Why it's a heuristic, not an accusation
27:21 Hoarders are scammers: selfishness in service of selflessness
31:18 "All investments are scams" and calling Bitcoin cash flows in 2014
36:22 Rejecting activism: the real opportunity cost of voting
41:00 Why stacking sats beats stamping your feet at the Fed
47:00 Ron Paul as educator, not politician
52:27 2008, 9/11, COVID: crisis as the backdrop of a life
56:24 "2020 turned everyone into normies"
59:24 Can an individual be sovereign in America today?
1:07:00 What "Citadel" actually means: localized governance, not Elysium
1:11:17 The citadel in your mind: stoicism, Shawshank, Joseph
1:13:34 "How to Meme Bitcoin to the Moon": the mimetic landscape
1:15:50 Bitblock 2019: the talk that hit Twitter before he left the stage
1:18:46 We live in a rhetorical world
1:19:14 Rhetoric vs dialectic, and which game to play when
1:24:38 Getting your opponent to effort-post
1:29:45 Know when to argue, know when to troll, know your real audience
1:31:26 Trigram memes and why distilled ideas win
1:33:33 Reframe, agree and amplify, dominate: never adopt their frame
1:36:10 Ethical trolling: stick to the truth, keep a low time preference
1:40:25 The American West, buffalo, and regenerative agriculture
1:47:20 Goldstein to Bitstein: hard money baked into the name

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

#167: The Dollar Endgame - A New Rome with @peruvian_bull

We discuss how the Federal Reserve stole the American Dream, the sword of Damocles hanging over the Treasury's head and how central banks are trapped in a black hole of their own design.

https://t.co/RlmZVXQIxu

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

@MrMrsBeLoombah @peruvian_bull No, not that I know of

[The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️ @_BitcoinMatrix]

#167: The Dollar Endgame - A New Rome with @peruvian_bull

We discuss how the Federal Reserve stole the American Dream, the sword of Damocles hanging over the Treasury's head and how central banks are trapped in a black hole of their own design.

https://t.co/RlmZVXQIxu

[Cedric Youngelman ⚡️ @CedYoungelman]

Aaron Siri on why "informed consent" is broken:

"Where I really take issue is the consent part. It's the parent who read all the primary sources, who's really informed about these products — and then doesn't want to consent. They've been informed. They are choosing not to consent.

And then they're told: okay, no problem — but now your kid can't go to school, you can't have a job, you can't be part of public civil society. Well, then the consent isn't worthwhile. That is destructive to consent.

Most people don't wake up and decide to take a socially ostracizing position that gets their kids kicked out of school. And once they've seen the clinical trial data with their own eyes — you can't unlearn that."

@AaronSiriSG on The @_BitcoinMatrix #287.

[John E. Montana @JohnEMontana]

Kudos to @CedYoungelman who did a huge public service hosting attorney @AaronSiriSG who laid out the facts with prosecutorial precision vs. the USG & Big Pharma. The 2nd worst thing the USG has done in the last 40yrs is the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. Strip vaccine makers of ordinary & punitive liability for design defects & you strip out the only force that ever kept product safety honest. The worst thing? Leaving it on the books. For every year the Act survives, the betrayal isn't a mistake anymore. It's policy. AS "When you look around the product landscape, there is no other product in the US, where you cannot sue for design defect claim." H/T @DavidBCollum https://t.co/IAmdPzUWYo

[Dave Collum @DavidBCollum]

@CedYoungelman @_BitcoinMatrix @Croesus_BTC @smarterwebco @_BitcoinCenter @TraceMayer @Excellion @JAN3com @amanda_goodall @GrantCardone @RobinSeyr @MicroSeed_io @TFL1728 @bramk @TomerStrolight @BITVOLT @jimmysong @Daniel21e15 @natbrunell @parkeralewis @keonne @SamouraiWallet @WalkerAmerica @JeffBooth @meanwhile @LeboBTC @AaronRDay @leamuirleyn @Beau_Turner21 @AbundantMines @andyjschoonover @JoinCrowdHealth @IIICapital @peruvian_bull @MarylandHODL21 @CrisReed @conhodlan @unchainedcap @Stamp_Seed @firefish_io @secsovereign @timevalueofbtc @TheBitcoinLayer @Humble_Hodl1111 @ByteFederal @PiusSprenger @Campnakamoto @HammerSeed21 @AaronSiriSG Cedric. Youtube had to have stepped on this podcast.

[Cedric Youngelman ⚡️ @CedYoungelman]

Thank you for sharing @DavidBCollum. The part that stops people cold: the first shot a newborn gets was licensed on a trial of 147 kids, 5 days, no control group — and it's all on the FDA's site. Go check it yourself.