PODCAST: ‘Let’s Talk Bitcoin!’ Hosts Discuss Libra, China and Cargo Cults

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations.

This week marks the debut of the CoinDesk Podcast Network. By next year, you’ll be able to find new episodes on a variety of topics every day of the week. For now, every Sunday, CoinDesk will play host to deep, nuanced discussions about complex issues with the cast of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin! show.

Let’s Talk Bitcoin! is a long-running independent podcast on the ideas, people and projects powering the cryptocurrency narrative. On this show, we basically talk about everything other than the price.

Since we started this conversation in early 2013, a whole world of blockchains and tokens has sprung up alongside bitcoin, and we talk about those too as real-world events help us see what’s real and what’s just clever marketing.

In this week's discussion

• Disruptive Technology vs. Disruptive Topology
• Libra’s Challenges, China’s Tightrope and an AOL Moment?
• Permission or Anonymity and the Three-Body Problem
• Cargo Cults and DLT Mockingbirds
• Patriotism on the Blockchain
• Bubbles, Naked Shorts and a Helpful Government

Episode 417 credits

Find past episodes here.

Email [email protected] with any questions, comments or suggested discussion topics.

Sponsors: Purse.io, Brave.com & eToro.com

Hosts: Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan

Producer: Adam B. Levine

Editors: Jonas Huck, Adam B. Levine

Music: Jared Rubens, General Fuzz

About the hosts

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a best-selling author, speaker, educator, and one of the world’s foremost bitcoin and open blockchain experts. He is known for delivering electric talks that combine economics, psychology, technology, and game theory with current events, personal anecdotes, and historical precedents effortlessly transliterating the complex issues of blockchain technology out of the abstract and into the real world.

In 2014, Antonopoulos authored the groundbreaking book, Mastering Bitcoin (O’Reilly Media), widely considered to be the best technical guide ever written about the technology. His second book, The Internet of Money, unveiled the “why” of bitcoin – and became a bestseller on Amazon – and led to the wildly successful follow-up The Internet of Money Volume Two. His fourth book, Mastering Ethereum (O’Reilly Media) was published in December of 2018.

He is a teaching fellow with the University of Nicosia, serves on the Oversight Committee for the Bitcoin Reference Rate at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and has appeared as an expert witness in hearings around the world, including the Australian Senate Banking Committee and the Canadian Senate Commerce, Banking and Finance Committee.

Adam B. Levine joined CoinDesk in 2019 as editor of our audio and podcasts division. Previously, Adam founded the long-running Let's Talk Bitcoin! talk show with co-hosts Stephanie Murphy and Andreas M. Antonopoulos.

Finding early success with the show, Adam transformed the podcast's homepage into a full newsdesk and publishing platform, founding the LTB Network in January of 2014 to help broaden the conversation with new and different perspectives. In the spring of that year, he would go on to launch the first and largest tokenized rewards program for creators and their audience. In what many have called an early influential version of "Steemit"; LTBCOIN, which was awarded to both content creators and members of the audience for participation was distributed until the LTBN was acquired by BTC, Inc. in January of 2017.

With the network launched and growing, in late 2014 Adam turned his attention to the practical challenges of administering the tokenized program and founded Tokenly, Inc. There, he led the development of early tokenized vending machines with Swapbot, tokenized identity solution Tokenpass, e-commerce with TokenMarkets.com and media with Token.fm.

Stephanie Murphy, Ph.D. is a scientist, passionate libertarian, prolific voice actor and long-time radio host. Uniquely among the Let’s Talk Bitcoin! crew, she remains an enthusiastic observer of the space but has chosen to keep her professional life separate from her bitcoin fascination.

Jonathan Mohan is an expert in the field of blockchain and distributed ledger technology use case analysis. He has acted in the capacity of strategic planning and development for many projects. Jonathan was a founding contributor of ethereum in January 2014. He was also an original contributing member of ConsenSys, an ethereum development studio as well as the founding contributor to both Factom and EOS. Jonathan formerly led BitcoinNYC, one of the largest blockchain meetups in New York City. Jonathan most recently founded Themys.io