During Bitcoin's 17th year of existence, Bitcoin Takeover podcast continues its weekly interview streak with season 17!
The goal of this thread is to document these interviews on this historic platform — as I'm sure that many of the individuals who joined the show will play more significant roles in the future.
Bitcoin Takeover Podcast is a rather nerdy show, which focuses on builders, coders, and cypherpunks who dare to defy the Orwellian status quo and focus on shaping a future that's closer to their dream. I also tend to favor the discovery of OGs in order to compare their expectations from the early days with the status quo.
To me, the podcast host, Bitcoin is more like Linux: open source software that anyone can view, copy, modify, and deploy in different shapes and for different purposes. Satoshi himself was open to Namecoin as a merge mined chain... and speaking of, I will publish an interview with the current Namecoin maintainer pretty soon!
2026 also marks Bitcoin Takeover Podcast's 7th anniversary; so throughout the year, I will try to document everything interesting that is happening in the space.
As a Bitcoin post-maximalist, I believe that experimentation and exploration are very important in order to understand how Bitcoin can be improved and which features have most market demand. Everything that exists outside of BTC provides open source software or precious information. So if Bitcoin decides to add privacy at the base layer, implement various layer two setups, or dive into the intricate world of smart contracts, there are lots of options to choose from and their tradeoffs are much better understood. On the other hand, if Bitcoin ossifies and no significant upgrade gets added, it's still important to know which networks and protocols work best for supplementing some of the missing features.
Unlike many of the podcasts out there, the explicit goal is not to present Bitcoin as the perfect money, the sacred invention that was bestowed upon us by a godly time-traveling AI, or the financial asset that will go up forever against the US dollar. Call it Eastern European pragmatism or whatever, but I like to minimize speculation and deal with the lesser convenient facts. I don't believe Bitcoin will improve if we irrationally worship it. I also don't think it's healthy to promote it as something that it's not, or even to subject it to the fractional reserve schemes that motivated the creation of Bitcoin in the first place!
Without further ado, I will leave a link to the podcast's main page and encourage everyone interested to subscribe on their favorite platform. Thank you for reading my post and I hope you will check out the show too:
https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/Season 17 intro/trailer:
https://youtu.be/ESK_zFyYyI8Graphics:
