Statechains, and Trading the Panopticon for Magical Internet Money

The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations.

Every Sunday, CoinDesk plays host to deep, nuanced discussions about complex issues with the cast of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin! show.

On this week's episode….

Segment 1

“Long Bitcoin, Short the World? Trading the Panopticon for Magical Internet Money”

• CoinDesk’s Nolan Bauerle hosts a fascinating discussion with EricWeinstein at Invest: New York 2019
• They talk about embedded growth obligations and the sociopathic companies they engender…
• ...and Tuur Demeester’s Bitcoin Reformation
• Is everything fine, or are we already experiencing a low-grade revolution?
• The big value of blockchains is that they replicate the real-world “It just works," if imperfectly.
• Much more in this wide-ranging fireside chat

Segment 2

“New Tools, Layers, and Tradeoffs for Scaling Blockchains”

• In Segment 2, the hosts of Let’s Talk Bitcoin are joined by RubenSomsen to dig into his proposal for blockchain-agnostic “Statechains”
• A low-trust, low knowledge, high accessibility approach to sidechains
• Pairing Statechains with Lightning Networks
• Ruben’s journey from podcasting enthusiast to scaling innovator

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.

Episode 418 Credits:

Sponsors: Edge.app, Brave.comand eToro.com

Hosts: Adam B. Levine , Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy and Ruben Somsen

Special thanks to Invest: NY 2019, Nolan Bauerle and Eric Weinstein

Producer: Adam B. Levine

Editors: Jonas, 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, PhD. 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 to 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