Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E23 with Hunter Beast & Mark Karpelès BIP 360 Author & Former Mt. Gox CEO on Quantum-Proofing BitcoinI was interviewing Hunter Beast at the LayerTwo Labs booth in Las Vegas about BIP 360 and Surmount Systems when Mark Karpelès literally walked into the frame mid-sentence. The guy writing Bitcoin's quantum future, sitting next to the guy who taught Bitcoin its most expensive lesson about "not your keys, not your coins." You cannot script that, so I handed Mark the mic and mostly became a spectator on my own show.
Hunter left Marathon to become CTO of Surmount Systems with a June 1st "speedrun" mandate: test BIP 360 across Core, Knots, Libre Relay and friends, push BIP 54 (Great Consensus Cleanup), and stop turning quantum into a permanent conference panel. Mark and Hunter then went deep on why hash-based signatures kill xpub-style HD wallets, why Taproot's exposed keys are a problem for a 100k BTC cold wallet, and whether Satoshi's ~1.1M P2PK coins should be frozen (Mark) or throttled with Glass v2 at one coin per block over ~32 years (Hunter). Along the way: Snowden's Penetrating Hard Targets program, the 2027 US ECC ban vs a strategic Bitcoin reserve, mempool snipers, and Mark's Tibane wallet that drops BIP 39 entirely because restaurant napkin seed phrases and camera-everywhere glasses are a terrible combo.
We also covered the Ecash fork from a trustee's angle (valuable forks have to be distributed; worthless ones can be ignored), Hunter's Ordinals confession ("it doesn't scale"), and Mark's real reason for Vegas: Magic: The Gathering, where he lost every match and still had a great time. About an hour of quantum urgency, Mt. Gox scars, and Turing-complete card games. I hope that you will find it useful!
Stats for nerds: 2,860 downloads and views so far, up about 8% since the first monthly count in May 2026. The X livestream leads with 1,327 of them not bad for a booth chat that got hijacked by the ghost of Mt. Gox!
Below, you will find links to the podcast. Special thanks to SideShift, LayerTwo Labs, Cake Wallet, and Orange Rock for sponsoring this episode!Blog post about this interview (includes complete time stamps):
https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e23-hunter-beast-mark-karpeles-on-quantum-proofing-bitcoin-satoshis-coins-the-ghost-of-mt-gox/Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11orkEbtb4Listen 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/media/2026-05-10_s17_e23_hunter_beast_mark_karpeles_on_bitcoin_quantum_resnstance_ecash.mp3Graphics:
