The Bitcoin Standard Podcast
Bitcoin and economics from the Austrian school perspective.
Recent episodes
350. The Gold Standard - Presented at the Property & Freedom Society
- Saifedean Ammous presents *The Gold Standard*, an economic fiction book imagining a 20th century where hard money prevented World War I by enabling capital flight via early aviation technology. - The 1915 thought experiment centers on the Bank of England's insolvency (31% gold backing) and a secret 1914 bond-buying scheme (later revealed in 2017) that financed Britain's WWI entry through circulation credit rather than genuine savings. - A Geneva conference convenes neutral powers and economic thinkers (Mises, Liechtenstein's Prince Johann II, Henry Ford, and others) to establish a three-pillar framework: free capital movement, free trade, and self-determination via referenda for any territory over 50,000 residents. - In this alternate timeline, capital flight collapses central bank financing of war; belligerent nations go bankrupt while neutral countries accumulate wealth, eliminating the incentive for conquest and ending WWI without a Versailles Treaty. - Hard money fundamentally changes 20th-century outcomes: living standards rise dramatically, housing affordability improves from 8 years to 1.5 years of labor, technological development accelerates, and unemployment, inflation terminology, and leftism never emerge. - Political systems shift toward competitive governance models where citizens "vote with their feet" rather than voting over leadership, resulting in thousands of smaller polities offering competing tax rates and services.
348. The Bitcoin Standard Course - Lecture 2: Money
- Money solves the problem of moving economic value across time, space, and scale through indirect exchange and media of exchange. - Barter becomes impractical as economies grow because of the "problem of coincidence of wants"—direct exchange fails when goods, scales, or timing don't align. - Desirable properties of money derive logically from solving coincidence failures: divisibility and groupability (scale), portability (space), durability (time), and hardness (resistance to supply inflation). - Hardness—measured by stock-to-flow ratio—is the critical property; easy money whose supply can increase rapidly destroys wealth, while hard money preserves it. - Money becomes a unit of account once it gains network dominance, allowing efficient price expression and enabling complex capital production and division of labor. - The "easy money trap" means anything used as money will see production increase until worthless, unless it has high stock-to-flow ratio; hard money therefore wins through economic reality, not choice.
347. The Bitcoin Standard Course - Launch Lecture
- Saifedean Ammous launches an online course on *The Bitcoin Standard*, revisiting the book nearly 10 years after publication with updated analysis and practical applications. - Bitcoin's inception on October 31, 2008, and its evolution from a cryptographic curiosity to a **$1.7 trillion global asset** held by millions, corporations, and governments. - The regression theorem (Ludwig von Mises) explains how Bitcoin transitioned from an economic good (October 2009, first price: $0.000994) to a medium of exchange (May 2010 pizza transaction at $0.0025). - Bitcoin defined as **distributed peer-to-peer software that enables value transfer in a currency protected from supply inflation without trusted third parties**—automating and decentralizing central bank functions. - The distinction between digital cash (final settlement, no intermediaries) and credit-based money; Bitcoin delivers the finality of physical cash in digital form. - Bitcoin as digital hard money with supply constraints, and its implications for personal freedom, long-term thinking, time preference, and capital accumulation versus government-controlled fiat currency.
345. Bitcoin, Mining, and Stablecoins
- US fiscal crisis and debt sustainability: The US carries $40+ trillion in debt, but dollar dominance persists due to network effects, superior inflation relative to other fiat currencies, and entrenched payment infrastructure; however, long-term Treasury yields at multi-decade highs signal growing market skepticism. - Bitcoin mining at a structural inflection point: Hash rate has experienced its longest bear market in Bitcoin history; Saifedean argues mining may have peaked in late 2025, as the expected value of mining becomes negative when Bitcoin price appreciation falls below ~100% per four-year cycle. - Stablecoins and systemic risk: While stablecoins disintermediate banks more efficiently, they concentrate short-term Treasury holdings at the low end of the yield curve, creating rollover risk if interest rates rise; a crypto crisis coupled with large stablecoin redemptions could force dumping of treasuries during refinancing periods. - Bitcoin halving cycles and volatility decline: Bear market drawdowns have shrunk from 87% (first cycle) to 54% (current cycle), indicating maturation; as more participants understand the four-year halving pattern, volatility should continue declining and attract institutional capital. - Tether's dollar-to-Bitcoin transition potential: Tether's small Bitcoin allocation has outsized impact on BTC price because Bitcoin's $2 trillion market cap dwarfs the $37 trillion Treasury market; over time, Tether could theoretically re-denominate itself as a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin. - MicroStrategy and Bitcoin treasury companies: While attractive conceptually, these firms borrow against Bitcoin holdings—a complex proposition requiring case-by-case balance sheet analysis rather than blanket endorsement.
344. Can Stablecoins Save the Dollar
- Stablecoins offer genuine benefits (financial inclusion, inflation protection for citizens in weak-currency countries) but do not materially solve US fiscal problems despite Treasury Secretary claims. - Academic models and Federal Reserve analysis estimate stablecoins could lower US borrowing costs by only 20–40 basis points even under extremely optimistic adoption scenarios—insufficient to change the debt trajectory. - Stablecoin growth displaces existing dollar and treasury demand rather than creating entirely new demand; physical cash replacement actually worsens fiscal outcomes because it converts 0% liabilities into 4% interest-bearing obligations. - The shift from long-term to short-term treasury issuance creates severe rollover risk and vulnerability to interest-rate spikes, particularly if stablecoin redemptions accelerate during market stress. - Ammous argues Washington is promoting stablecoins less for fiscal benefit and more as political cover for massive crypto profits by Trump administration officials; the arrangement benefits Bitcoin more than the dollar long-term.
343. Bitcoin Electricity Consumption May Have Peaked
- Bitcoin mining electricity consumption may have peaked in late 2025, with Cambridge data showing consumption falling from ~190 TWh to ~130 TWh range by mid-2026. - Mining becomes unprofitable when expected Bitcoin price growth falls below 18.92% annually (plus dollar devaluation), a threshold the market may have already crossed. - Daily mining subsidy dollar value has not exceeded the March 14, 2024 peak of $165 million despite price recovery, suggesting a structural shift in mining economics. - Mining difficulty has declined for 305 days without reaching a new all-time high—the second-longest such period in Bitcoin history—without major regulatory shocks to explain it. - AI data centers now compete for stranded energy and mining infrastructure, creating a lucrative alternative to Bitcoin mining with potentially superior returns. - Bitcoin's network remains secure regardless of mining scale; transaction fees do not need to reach any particular level to maintain network security.
342. Hardware Wallets: Security or Liability
- The Cold Card entropy backdoor that allowed theft from users for five years without detection is framed by JW as symptomatic of inadequate code review in hardware wallets. - JW argues hardware wallets are fundamentally insecure because only Bitcoin Core has sufficient code review to prevent insider backdoors; Giacomo counters that multisig with commodity hardware combined with specialized devices mitigates—not eliminates—specific threat models. - Disagreement centers on whether users should use Bitcoin Core with generic laptops for key generation and multisig (JW's position) or a hybrid approach including hardware wallets for UX and rate-limiting benefits (Giacomo's position). - Qualified custodians (Coinbase, BitGo, Fidelity) are presented as a reduction-to-absurdity argument: if you won't use Bitcoin Core, they may be safer than hardware wallets, but both are suboptimal compared to self-custody with proper code review. - Threat modeling frameworks differ: JW focuses on organized crime and insider threats; Giacomo emphasizes phishing, local attacks, inheritance planning, and user-specific constraints (wealth, travel, age, technical literacy). - The two agree Bitcoin Core is superior but diverge sharply on practicality: JW claims three hours and $5 achieves secure 3-of-7 multisig for 99% of users; Giacomo argues complexity and UX barriers require specialized hardware for most users and published, persona-based guides remain absent.
341. Bitcoin Custody with Ben Westgate & BTC Pavao
- Bitcoin Core's superiority for key generation and self-custody, with ~18 years of security review and the largest reviewing base of any Bitcoin software making entropy attacks on it statistically less lucrative than other targets. - Hardware wallet risks exposed by the Coldcard entropy bug affecting ~1,000 Bitcoin; emphasis on generic hardware and well-reviewed operating systems (Debian, Linux) over Bitcoin-specific devices. - BIP39 seed phrase flaws including weak key stretching, no error correction, language-dependent word lists, and user temptation to create brain wallets with insufficient entropy; comparison to superior alternatives like Codex 32. - Self-custody setup using air-gapped laptops: offline signing device plus online node synchronizing the blockchain; Bitcoin Core supports offline signing via partially signed transactions (PSBTs) without command-line knowledge required. - Backup strategy using encrypted wallet files (not raw seed phrases) stored on multiple media types (CDs, metal, paper) in separate locations, with passphrases kept apart from wallet files to balance redundancy and security. - Dangers of leverage, derivatives, futures, and lending schemes offered by custodians; these are zero-sum games with liquidation risk and ecosystem harm; gambling with Bitcoin stacks destroys wealth far faster than patient accumulation.
340. Fiat, gold & bitcoin: Interview with Mark Moss.
- Fiat currency loses purchasing power through continuous money supply expansion, forcing individuals to become part-time hedge fund managers rather than savers. - The political structure of democracy incentivizes governments to run money printers because politicians promise benefits within their term while externalizing costs to future generations. - Gold historically grew its supply at 1.5–2% annually but cannot function as modern money due to settlement constraints and government restrictions on gold banking. - Bitcoin offers superior monetary properties to gold: lower supply growth, faster international settlement without intermediaries, and room for appreciation from a small market cap (~$1.2–1.5 trillion versus gold's ~$25–30 trillion). - The on-chain transaction capacity debate misses the point; Bitcoin's jackpot is killing inflation through decentralized final settlement, not requiring every transaction to occur on-chain. - Using cheap government-created debt to buy Bitcoin is a rational but risky strategy that accelerates fiat devaluation, though governments may eventually restrict borrowing to purchase Bitcoin.
339. DIY Bitcoin with HAC
- DIY Bitcoin storage using generic hardware and open-source software (Linux, Bitcoin Core) is more secure than specialized hardware wallets because it avoids concentrated attack surfaces and supply-chain risks. - The Coldcard vulnerability exemplifies how Bitcoin-specific hardware becomes a high-value target for attackers; the flaw in its random number generator went undetected for five years because restrictive licensing discouraged expert code review. - Bitcoin Core and established cryptographic standards (OpenSSL, OpenSSH) benefit from decades of scrutiny by the world's best engineers, making them more trustworthy than bespoke hardware wallet implementations that "reinvent the wheel." - Multi-signature vaults on generic laptops running Bitcoin Core provide superior key management, redundancy, and protection compared to single-key solutions, mitigating both theft and loss risks. - Users should run their own full node on one computer and maintain an offline signing device on a second computer to eliminate reliance on third-party backends and maximize sovereignty. - BIP39 seed derivation was designed for low-power hardware devices and uses weak memory-hard algorithms, making passphrases vulnerable to brute-force attacks even on devices marketed as highly secure.
338. How Gold Could Have Gone Global - The Gold Standard Audiobook, Chapter 9
- Saifedean Ammous reads Chapter 9 of his book *The Gold Standard*, a counterfactual narrative exploring how international settlement might have evolved on hard money rather than fiat. - The chapter develops themes central to Bitcoin: custody, monetary sovereignty, decentralized settlement, and the power of technological innovation to solve monetary problems. - A fictional gold-clearing airline network (Bleriot Transport Corporation) emerges as a response to banking system fragility, offering peer-to-peer gold settlement without central bank intermediation. - The narrative illustrates how commercial demand—not patents or legal monopolies—drives innovation; the Wright brothers abandon costly patent litigation to focus on engineering and accept a partnership with Bleriot. - Gold's historical weakness (slow transport across distances) is solved by aviation, enabling fast final settlement and eliminating reliance on fractional-reserve banking and credit cycles. - The story parallels Bitcoin's role: both provide censorship-resistant, verifiable settlement independent of state or banking control, and both gain adoption fastest during financial crises.
337. ColdCard Hack & Seedsigner with Seed
- SeedSigner is an open-source DIY hardware wallet project using off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi components (no WiFi/Bluetooth), designed to reduce centralization risk in Bitcoin cold storage versus commercial vendors. - Coldcard vulnerability exposed systemic risks when a single dominant hardware wallet manufacturer has weak entropy implementation; the bug affected users who trusted the device's random number generation instead of rolling dice. - Decentralization of custody is critical—mining pools learned this lesson during 51% attacks; the same principle applies to cold storage to avoid single points of failure affecting large portions of the community. - Multi-vendor multisig (combining SeedSigner with Trezor, BitBox, or Jade) provides resilience; if one vendor's software or hardware is compromised, the quorum remains intact and funds are not lost. - Analog key storage (written seed phrases on physical media) is more attack-resistant than digital storage; users should treat them as primary and distribute across multiple secure locations. - DIY offline laptop approach (e.g., BitAddress.org on an air-gapped computer) remains viable, cheaper than hardware wallets, and eliminates supply-chain attack vectors—though less convenient than purpose-built devices.
IMPORTANT ColdCard SECURITY UPDATE
- COLDCARD vulnerability disclosure: A serious randomness flaw has been found in some COLDCARD devices affecting Bitcoin seed generation. Users who relied on the device for entropy are at immediate risk. - Risk assessment and mitigation: Users with 50+ private dice rolls or strong BIP39 passphrases face lower risk; however, the recommendation is to migrate regardless to eliminate uncertainty. - Migration process: Five-step procedure outlined: generate new seed on unaffected airgapped device, verify backup, confirm fingerprint and address on hardware itself, send test transaction, verify full functionality before moving remaining funds. - Alternative custody during transition: If self-custody setup takes time, temporarily moving Bitcoin to a trusted exchange or custodian is acceptable while establishing a secure new wallet. - Scam exploitation warning: Fraudsters will attempt to exploit the disclosure. Never share seed words, passphrases, or enter them into websites, chatbots, or unsolicited tools. No legitimate helper needs your seed. - Follow CoinKite updates: Check official COLDCARD disclosures and Twitter (@SaferDean) for ongoing vulnerability details and firmware-specific risk ranges.
336. Rothbard at 100 Conference: Talks by Ammous, Hoppe, Kinsella & de Mombynes
- Rothbard on Palestine and property rights: Saifeddin Ammous examined Rothbard's dissection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, showing how Austrian economics—anchored in property rights—naturally leads to conclusions about land dispossession and the impossibility of displacing an existing population without violent conflict. - Rothbard's prescience on fixed-supply money: Ammous highlighted that Rothbard advocated for a fixed money supply in the 1960s–80s when it seemed heretical, laying intellectual groundwork that later enabled understanding of Bitcoin. - War and empire: Hans Hoppe discussed how internally liberal states—paradoxically—tend to pursue the most aggressive foreign policies, using externalized costs (taxation, conscription) to fund imperial expansion abroad. - Intellectual property critique: Stephen Kinsella presented Rothbard's "greatest hits," emphasizing his defense of argumentation ethics, title-transfer theory of contract, and early opposition to intellectual property and defamation law—areas where Rothbard came close to rejecting IP entirely. - Obstacles to becoming Rothbardian: Hoppe recounted how his generation in post-WWII Germany absorbed official narratives about guilt and democracy, later rejecting them through reading Rothbard on monetary policy, state monopolies, central banking, and affirmative action perversions of justice. - Bitcoin as digital sound money: Opening remarks and closing segments explored whether Rothbard would recognize Bitcoin as fulfilling his vision of money separated from state control, even if he initially preferred gold remonetization.
335. Bitcoin & the Surveillance State with Cory Klippsten
- Accelerating surveillance and control mechanisms: EU requiring ID registration for social media access, VPN bans spreading across Europe and the US, rapid CBDC rollout, and de facto digital currency regimes through stablecoins that enable government censorship. - Stablecoins as dollar extension, not threat: Circle and Tether function as CBDCs under government oversight; expansion to hundreds of stablecoins will rebrand as dollars within banking apps. They provide runway for fiat system but cannot fundamentally alter unsustainable debt dynamics. - Bitcoin's only credible competition: Gold and the dollar are the realistic contenders; altcoins are finished. Gold faces structural limits as a digital-age monetary asset; the dollar dominates but inflation and spending will erode its value over time. - Political and economic rot discrediting free markets: Trump's administration failed to cut spending or reduce war; instead enabled crypto fraud and kleptocracy. This failure is driving legitimate backlash toward socialism and communism, making Bitcoin's freedom narrative more urgent. - Swan's custody and financial tools: Launched RBX (real Bitcoin exchange) to let GBTC holders swap to on-chain Bitcoin without capital gains tax; Vigil Protocol provides family financial orchestration software for inheritance planning and asset coordination. - Timing and conviction: Current bear sentiment offers ideal stacking conditions. Bitcoin's network effects and absolute scarcity advantage over gold and fiat strengthen as macro uncertainty deepens; halving in two years provides supply tailwind.
334. Principles of Economics Lecture 18: Civilization
- Civilization emerges when reason restrains instinct, enabling capital accumulation, division of labor, and sustained peace through voluntary cooperation rather than coercion or violence. - Three drivers power human civilization: lowered time preference (savings and capital investment), division of labor and specialization, and human ingenuity and technological innovation. - The cost of civilization is high—humans must suppress immediate animalistic impulses and adopt behaviors like honesty, property respect, and delayed gratification; most people willingly accept this cost because civilization produces vastly better material outcomes. - Argumentation ethics (Hoppe's framework): the act of arguing against property rights and civilization is performatively contradictory—arguing presupposes acceptance of property rights and relies entirely on products of capitalist civilization to make the argument itself. - Fiat money has undermined civilization since World War I by destroying economic calculation, raising time preference, eroding capital accumulation, breaking contract sanctity, and enabling state monopoly over money and law enforcement. - Bitcoin offers a technological solution to central banking: a capped-supply, decentralized monetary system that restores sound money, enables international economic participation without state intermediaries, and potentially reverses fiat's civilizational damage.
333. The Fiat Trap with Nicolas Cary
- Money as a civilizational force: inflation shapes savings, building, governance, war financing, and time preference across generations - Academic blind spot on inflation: central bank and government funding of economics research creates institutional disincentive to examine inflation's systemic harms - Fiat as credit creation: banks "mine" money through lending, not from reserves, which incentivizes mass debt and devalues all existing currency holders - Wealth preservation strategy for the rich: maintaining large negative fiat balances (debt) while acquiring hard assets that appreciate, rather than holding cash - Time preference and monetary hardness: softer money (higher inflation) raises time preference and short-termism; harder money enables delayed gratification and long-term civilization building - Bitcoin as opt-out: hard money eliminates need for constant financial speculation and hedge-fund-style portfolio management to preserve purchasing power
332. Principles of Economics Lecture 17: Defense
- Defense and law are economic goods subject to market principles, not uniquely governmental functions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, private security personnel now outnumber state security globally. - The state itself commits violence through taxation enforcement; Austrian economics extends analysis beyond classical liberal arguments to critique the state's legitimacy as a monopoly on violence. - Economic calculation requires private property rights and price signals. Without them, governments cannot rationally allocate defense resources (e.g., how many police for a billionaire's house vs. a school). - British common law and modern private arbitration demonstrate that law and order emerge from voluntary, competing courts without territorial monopolies—not from state coercion. - Sophisticated weapons and military capability depend on capitalist production, division of labor, and capital accumulation, not state monopoly. Even criminals rely on market-produced goods. - Free-market defense would emphasize self-defense legitimacy, contractual jurisdiction choices, insurance-linked security, and social sanctions (boycotts, ostracism) rather than state enforcement.
331. Palestine, Israel & Property Rights - Interview with Mario Nawfal
- Property rights as the core issue: The Palestinian-Israeli conflict stems fundamentally from denial of property rights to non-Jews in historic Palestine, not religious or ethnic hatred spanning millennia. - Land ownership disparity: In 1945, Jewish population owned 5.6% of Palestinian land. Today the Israeli government controls ~93% of land within Israel proper and 80% across all of historic Palestine, leasing almost exclusively to Jews. - Systematic displacement methods: Israel has used war-triggered property laws, absentee laws, "present absentee" status, security pretexts, building permit denial, and settlement expansion to expropriate Palestinian land over 80 years—including destruction of 400–500 villages between 1947–1948. - Comparison to other conflicts: Unlike historical ethnic tensions, Jewish minorities lived peacefully in Palestine for 1,300 years before systematic dispossession began. The conflict is policy-driven, not civilizational. - Peace requires property rights restoration: Turning a "new page" without restoring equal property rights for Palestinians merely institutionalizes slavery and guarantees continued conflict; any resolution must restore Palestinians' foundational right to own land. - Geopolitical shift and U.S. leverage: Recent regional power rebalancing (Iran's growing influence, U.S. sentiment shift) may be eroding Israel's decades of unilateral impunity, potentially creating pragmatic incentives for rights-based solutions.
330. Rothbard At 100 - A Tribute And Assessment
- Murray Rothbard's intellectual legacy and status as the greatest 20th-century social theorist, combining praxeological Austrian economics with radical anarcho-capitalist political philosophy - The founding and 20-year mission of the Property and Freedom Society as the institutional embodiment of Austro-libertarian thought and Rothbard's uncompromising intellectual radicalism - Rothbard's marginalization in mainstream academia and policy circles due to his anarcho-capitalist stance, opposition to interventionist foreign policy, and criticism of neoconservative Zionism and Israel-first policy - Hans Hoppe's personal decade-long association with Rothbard (1985–1995) and the formative lessons learned: revisionist historiography, prudent judgment of imperfect political actors, and steadfast intellectual integrity despite professional and social cost - The contrast between Rothbard's theoretical uncompromisingness and personal gentleness; his extreme humility and generosity with credit and advice despite towering achievements - The radicalization of Rothbard's thought in his final years, moving further right against egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and "politically correct" libertarianism; his influence on later movements including Ron Paul and populist libertarianism