In this episode, I sat down with Rob Wallace of Bitcoin News for a wide-ranging conversation about two sides of Bitcoin that don’t often get treated together carefully enough: institutional adoption and personal responsibility. We unpacked why firms like BlackRock were drawn to Bitcoin in the first place, how moments like the 2022 gilt crisis and the 2023 banking panic changed the institutional calculus, and why Bitcoin keeps showing up as “crisis money” when the legacy system starts to wobble. Rob brought a market veteran’s perspective to the conversation, while I pushed on what it means for Bitcoiners to think clearly about power, incentives, and the lessons we should actually be learning from past fights inside the protocol and the broader ecosystem.
The back half of the conversation turned hard toward self-custody, security, and culture after the recent COLDCARD fallout. Rob and I talked through what too many people still misunderstand about hardware wallets, recovery, test transactions, multisig, and why generating your own seed with dice may need to become a true Bitcoin rite of passage. We also got into education, pleb slop, the role of media and memes, the importance of communities like the Bitcoin Bugle and the “red team,” and why Bitcoin ultimately needs more people who understand it deeply, not just people who believe in it superficially.
- Bitcoin News: https://bitcoinnews.com/Rob Wallace | Bitcoin News podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/rob-wallace-bitcoin-news/id1854168780libsecp256k1: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1Ian Coleman BIP39 Tool: https://iancoleman.io/bip39/