Hows your Zcash "investment" doing? 

Remember that?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

LOL.

I just looked at the chart for the first time in close to a year and I'm forced to eat a big pile of crow.

I just didn't care for it when he started shilling it at the local top with a bunch of other Twitter influencers. This was about a year ago.

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E15 with Danny Plainview & Chad Master — OP_NET, Smart Contracts on Bitcoin L1 & the Great Stablecoin Unlock

Every cycle, Bitcoin gets a new protocol that half of Twitter loves to hate. This season it's OP_NET, which promises Ethereum-grade smart contracts directly on Bitcoin layer 1, with no bridges, no sidechains, no wrapped assets and no gas token. So I invited the two co-founders, Danny Plainview and Chad Master, to defend themselves. We recorded in the days around OP_NET's mainnet activation, and my cat showed up around the eight minute mark, presumably to audit the code.

The technical part was more interesting than the Twitter fights. They call it a consensus protocol rather than a metaprotocol: everything lives in the witness field of standard Bitcoin transactions (no OP_RETURN), contracts compile to WebAssembly and are written in TypeScript, and every node recomputes the exact same state from the blockchain alone. Danny used the Magic Eden shutdown as the cautionary tale for Ordinals and BRC-20, where you're basically hoping that everyone's indexers agree. The honest limitation: an OP_NET transaction is as fast as a Bitcoin transaction, because it is one.

I put on my toxic maximalist hat twice (Liquid USDT, then Tether over Lightning), and Danny had answers for both, plus what might be one of the most quotable lines in the history of this show: "ETH is a much better Bitcoin layer 2 than any existing Bitcoin layer 2." We also covered OP-20S stablecoins with an oracle-set peg, trustless BTC loans without selling, the BIP 110 crowd's miner-incentive and spam objections, why the priority fee makes MEV hard, and the security budget, which is where we found real common ground. There was also a Zcash giveaway from Cake Wallet. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: this one has been played 4,976 times across audio, YouTube and X, and 3,622 of those came from the X livestream replay. Fitting, since half of Twitter loves to hate OP_NET.

Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, Bitcoin.com News, and Braiins Hashpower for sponsoring this episode!

Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e15-danny-plainview-chad-master-on-op_net-smart-contracts-on-bitcoin-l1-the-great-stablecoin-unlock/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLm9wPw8b5U

Listen to this interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Fountain, and many other audio-only platforms (without video, links at the top of the page): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/index.php?name=2026-03-25_s17_e15_danny_chad_on_opnet_eth_smart_contracts_on_bitcoin_layer_1.mp3

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Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E17 with Lukas Hozda — Rust Developer at Braiins & Author of "Building Bitcoin in Rust"

Lukas Hozda is the jack of all trades at Braiins. He joined the company five years ago, straight out of high school (it was the only IT job he ever applied to), and has since been moved across five teams, from Braiins OS to education, HR and marketing, mostly because nobody knows which department should pay for a person who does everything. He found Bitcoin at 12 through a Czech PC magazine, mined on Slush Pool and baked the family computer doing it. We recorded in the soundproofed room at the Braiins office in Prague that once doubled as an ASIC oven.

The reason for his visit is his book, Building Bitcoin in Rust, which teaches you Rust and Bitcoin at the same time by rebuilding a simplified version of the whitepaper: a node, a CPU miner and a "just a bunch of keys" wallet, with an MS Paint animal at the end of every chapter. But the main course was BIP 110, which he spent weeks dissecting. His argument is hard to ignore: Bitcoin is a gossip network, one node relaying a transaction to one miner is enough, filters don't remove anything from blocks, and you cannot ban steganography without crippling legitimate things like multisig and CoinJoins. Push that data out of the public mempool and it goes straight to miners, which makes the fee market opaque. His solution is very market-oriented: let them fork, and let the price decide.

We also talked about the BMM101 mini miner (less heat than a tea candle), drivechains, Braiins Hashpower, the fake node he built to map the network, the Karpeles hard fork proposal and the juicy burger that someone immortalized on the blockchain. And of course, he got his 1 ZEC from Cake Wallet live on air. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: this episode was downloaded 2,872 times so far. Most of them (1,398) came from the X livestream, with audio right behind at 1,327. Not bad for a guy who started out baking the family computer on Slush Pool!

Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, Bitcoin.com News, and Braiins Hashpower for sponsoring this episode!

Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e17-lukas-hozda-on-building-bitcoin-in-rust-why-mempool-filters-cant-work/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiRj_LfZw9E

Listen to this interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Fountain, and many other audio-only platforms (without video, links at the top of the page): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/index.php?name=2026-04-07_s17_e17_lukas_hozda_on_bip110_bitcoin_rust.mp3

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Or maybe, just maybe, my intuition about privacy becoming the next big use case and narrative was correct. It’s something I realized in 2024 after seeing how the Samourai devs got arrested and Wasabi wallet shut down. The new BTC investors don’t want it to have privacy. But privacy is going to be in great demand.

Then I read this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2024/08/08/how-satoshi-collaborator-zooko-wilcox-aims-to-revive-his-zombie-blockchain/

Then I watched former Bitcoin CoinJoin users migrate to Monero.

What you call luck is what I describe as information asymmetry: I just paid attention to information that most people chose to ignore. Of course nobody can predict the future. But arrogantly assuming that the status quo will be preserved in perpetuity is more dangerous than exploring something that’s clearly brewing underneath the surface. We are living times of change and nothing is permanent.

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E18 with Dr. K (Karl Kreder) — Architect of the Quai Network, on SOAP Merge Mining & Scaling Proof of Work

Dr. K (Karl Kreder) is the architect of the Quai Network, a layered proof of work blockchain built for high throughput, and this was his second appearance on the show. Quai had just been listed on Kraken the week we recorded, so we started with a rematch: the last time he was here, a live Quai transaction took the better part of five minutes. This time we used Blip Pay, and after a QR code that refused to scan and an address I managed to fat-finger, the transaction landed in seconds. A viewer even sent me 200 QUAI unprompted along the way, so thank you, whoever you are.

The centerpiece is SOAP, the Subsidy Open Market Acquisition Protocol (yes, it's a Fight Club reference). Quai merge mines Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Ravencoin, pays miners only in QUAI, then sells the merge-mined coins on the market to buy QUAI and burn it. According to Dr. K, that pays miners roughly 5 to 10 percent more than mining BTC or BCH directly. We also went through Kaspa's block sampling vs Quai's workshares, why SOAP is not Qubic, why proof of stake fails what he calls the Iran test, and his one-word magic wand answer for Bitcoin: CTV. Whether you like it or not, a protocol that drains the moat and forces chains to compete on utility is the most credible forcing function I've seen in a while.

Then, about an hour and a half in, Dr. K casually announced that he had unified physics that same week: a 130-page paper built on four axioms and the concept of distinguishability. His own equations made him flip on quantum computing live on air ("Yesterday I did not. Today I do."). We also covered Qi (the private energy dollar), node requirements and the Greg Maxwell test, Claude vs GPT for research, academia, NIPoPoWs and FUD-ing Quai, while Krypto with a K won 1 ZEC from Cake Wallet. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: Dr. K's episode has collected 3,924 plays across audio, YouTube and X, and the X livestream replay leads with 1,842 of them. Not bad for a show where the guest unified physics around the 1:25 mark.

Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, Bitcoin.com News, and Braiins Hashpower for sponsoring this episode!

Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e18-dr-k-on-scaling-proof-of-work-soaping-the-competition-with-quai-unifying-physics/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M67oEW2zKkI

Listen to this interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Fountain, and many other audio-only platforms (without video, links at the top of the page): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/index.php?name=2026-04-12_s17_e18_dr._k_karl_kreder_on_quai_scaling_proof_of_work.mp3

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Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E19 with Amaury Séchet (Deadalnix) — Creator of Bitcoin Cash & eCash (XEC)

Amaury Séchet is the developer who forked Bitcoin in August 2017 to create Bitcoin Cash, and three years later forked Bitcoin Cash itself after the developer funding dispute. That second chain became eCash (XEC), which keeps Nakamoto proof of work untouched and adds Avalanche on top for near-instant finality. Two years after our first interview, I invited him back and introduced him as the Greg Maxwell of the big blockers. He took it with a shrug: "Okay, fair enough."

The episode runs four and a half hours and works like a history seminar. I pulled up a fan-made map of every Bitcoin fork and Amaury corrected it in real time: Bitcoin XT, Unlimited and Classic, the testnet that split three ways over the Sigops limit, why BCH never adopted SegWit, CTOR, BSV ("Craig is Satoshi, so whatever Craig says is gospel") and CashTokens, which he considers a dead end. He also told the story of a private 2016 chat with more than 50% of the hashrate at the table, where Bitcoin Unlimited's Andrew Stone called the activation plan "collusion". That's when Amaury gave up on the big block leadership and started working on what became Bitcoin Cash. His verdict on the whole war: Ethereum won it.

We also talked about quantum FUD (what really scares him is the normalization of confiscation, from BIP 360 freezing Satoshi's coins to unfreezing Mt. Gox coins), fractional reserve as a throughput technology, drivechain withdrawal times, CashFusion, and Hal Finney's 2010 post on Bitcoin-backed banks, which he read in full and agreed with. Since Cake Wallet doesn't support XEC yet, we made a trade on air: I introduce him to Cake Wallet's CEO, he introduces me to Jason Dreyze. Agree with him or not, it's rare to hear someone this honest about his own side's mistakes. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: Amaury's episode is up about 6% since our first monthly count in April 2026 and now stands at 5,210 plays, with 2,473 of them coming from the X livestream. Four and a half hours of fork archaeology clearly found its audience.

Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, Bitcoin.com News, and Braiins Hashpower for sponsoring this episode!

Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e19-amaury-sechet-on-forking-bitcoin-twice-quantum-fud-scars-from-the-block-size-wars/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiVwfHOY-i8

Listen to this interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Fountain, and many other audio-only platforms (without video, links at the top of the page): https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/index.php?name=2026-04-18_s17_e19_deadalnix_amaury_sechet_on_forking_bitcoin_ecash.mp3

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