Bitcoin Technology & Economics w/ James O'Beirne

02/25/21 • 49 min

For this episode of the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, Christian Keroles sits down with Bitcoin developer and economist James O’Beirne. James is a Bitcoin core developer with very unique experiences across disciplines being both a bitcoin core contributor as well as a well learnt macro economics scholar. James takes us through his journey from ChainCode Labs in New York to DG Labs back to the states and now to his current project Bitnomial Bitcoin Futures & Options Exchange. James also walks us through his designing of a basic command line interface for ColdCard what he built with no outside dependencies. We close out the conversation discussing James’ experiences trading during the depth of the 2020 economic fears and why his experiences with gold solidified his position that bitcoin is an order of magnitude improvement.

Follow James @jamesob

Follow James @jamesob

Previous Episode

Bitcoin and Podcasting 2.0 with Anita Posch

This week, Christian sits down with long time Bitcoin podcaster and advocate Anita Posch. Anita is the host of the fantastic Anita Posch show where she highlights the efforts of bitcoiners around the globe especially bitcoiners in Africa and Latam.

In this episode ck and Anita focus in on new Podcasting technology being built on top of the bitcoin lightning network. Podcasting started as the ultimate way for individuals to broadcast information without corporate influence. It was a medium for the people. Since it's humble beginnings, Podcasting has turned into a cultural phenomena but its has also become corrupted. Current podcasting infrastructure no longer supports the censorship resistant dream of it's origin. Bitcoin looks to be an answer here for creators to cultivate community and monetize directly with p2p cash.

Listen in to learn more about Anita and the cross roads between bitcoin and the future of podcasting.

Next Episode

Explaining Taproot Activation and LOT=True VS LOT=False - The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado 29

For more technical content like this Subscribe to The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado in your primary podcast app!

http://nadobtc.btc.libsynpro.com/website

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss activation of the Taproot soft fork upgrade, and more specifically, the lock-in on timeout (LOT) parameter. The LOT parameter can be set to either “true” (LOT=true) or “false” (LOT=false).

LOT=false resembles how several previous soft forks were activated. Miners would have one year to coordinate Taproot activation through hash power; if and when a supermajority (probably 90 percent) of miners signal readiness for the upgrade, the soft fork will activate. But if this doesn’t happen within (probably) a year, the upgrade will expire. (After which it could be redeployed.)

LOT=true also lets miners activate the soft fork through hash power, but if they fail to do this within that year, nodes will activate the soft fork regardless.

Aaron and Sjors discuss the benefits and detriments of each option. This also includes some possible scenarios of what could happen if some users set LOT to true, while other users set LOT to false, and the associated risks. Finally, Aaron and Sjors discuss what they think is most likely going to happen with Taproot activation.