Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 17

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E14 with Kristian Csepcsar — Chief Meme Officer of Braiins & Author of The Ultimate Bitcoin Mining Guide

This one was recorded in person at the undisclosed Braiins office in Prague, the first of a whole series I filmed in their studio. Kristian Csepcsar runs marketing at Braiins (I introduced him as the Chief Meme Officer and he loved it), travels the world with a drone and a giant inflatable Bitcoin to document mining operations, and wrote The Ultimate Bitcoin Mining Guide, which you can download for free or listen to as an audiobook narrated by Guy Swann. He also handed me salami made out of whale, straight from Norway. I ate it anyway.

The main theme was a short history of Bitcoin mining, told by the people who lived most of it. Slush's pool started in late 2010 as the "Bitcoin.cz mining pool", mined its first block on December 16, 2010, and has mined 1.3 million BTC since, which makes Braiins a serious candidate for oldest Bitcoin company in existence. We went through Satoshi's email asking Laszlo to stop GPU mining, the arrival of ASICs, the Butterfly Labs tragedy, the 2011 Linode hack (3,000 BTC that Slush paid back from his own pocket, and which helped give birth to Trezor), and the industry-standard 2% pool fee that was picked more or less at random.

From a post-maximalist perspective, my favorite part was Kristian's rant about the centralization nobody talks about: Bitmain's closed-source firmware on roughly 80% of the world's machines, and Foreman's grip on mining management software, which is far stickier than any pool. We also covered Braiins Hashpower and solo mining as a lottery with better odds than Powerball, the depressing moment when solo mining Bitcoin Cash was briefly more profitable than Bitcoin, public miners pivoting to AI, Bitmain's playbook against challengers, and why Braiins stays KYC-free with Lightning payouts. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: Kristian's episode sits at 3,976 plays across audio, YouTube and X, and the X livestream replay carried most of that with 2,399 views. Turns out whale salami and pool fee archaeology make a decent combo.

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-e14-kristian-csepcsar-on-the-history-of-bitcoin-mining-braiins-hashpower-the-centralization-nobody-talks-about/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWEBRT-1ndw

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=2026-03-20_s17_e14_kristian_czepczar_on_braiins_the_history_of_bitcoin_mining_final.mp3

Graphics:

[nutildah]

Hows your Zcash "investment" doing? 

Remember that?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

LOL.

[Wind_FURY]

Hows your Zcash "investment" doing? 

Remember that?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

LOL.

On what price point did he get in? ZCash has been surging more than any coin this year and last year, and I believe the surge started below $50.00?

LUCKY, but personally I could never HODL a coin such as this. It doesn't give the same feeling of safety that I get from Bitcoin.

[nutildah]

On what price point did he get in? ZCash has been surging more than any coin this year and last year, and I believe the surge started below $50.00?

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.

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

Hows your Zcash "investment" doing? 

Remember that?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

LOL.

On what price point did he get in? ZCash has been surging more than any coin this year and last year, and I believe the surge started below $50.00?

LUCKY, but personally I could never HODL a coin such as this. It doesn't give the same feeling of safety that I get from Bitcoin.

On what price point did he get in? ZCash has been surging more than any coin this year and last year, and I believe the surge started below $50.00?

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.

Zcash is doing pretty good pricewise, but also development wise. Don’t stay zidelined, try a wallet sometime

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

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

Graphics:

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E16 with Summer Meng — CEO of Bitmars, the "ASIC Queen" of Bitmain Miner Distribution

If you want the latest Bitmain hardware in Europe or North America, the machine that everyone else lists as out of stock, Summer Meng is the person you contact. She is the CEO of Bitmars, the largest distributor of Bitmain ASIC miners on two continents. We recorded in person at the Braiins office in Prague, and she ended the episode with one Zcash from Cake Wallet in her brand new wallet (after we found her a phone, since she had left hers behind so it wouldn't interrupt the recording).

Her path into mining was an accident: COVID stranded her in China, a friend suggested a job interview, and she never left. What I found most interesting is that the 2021 China ban is exactly what turned Bitmars into an international business, since the machines suddenly had to go somewhere. She also told me about a second crackdown almost nobody covered, in Xinjiang last December, and the beautifully absurd legal situation where making and selling miners in China is legal, but mining with them is not.

We also talked about how a distributor can undercut the manufacturer, orders of 10,000 ASICs, public miners pivoting to AI, Bitmain's roughly 80% market share (and why Intel and Samsung walked away), impersonation scams, and her Chinese translation of the Braiins mining guide. My favorite part was heat reuse: Nordic projects, ASICs heating pools and drying salami, and small home units that are, in her words, wife approved. Every radiator in your house is more wasteful than a Bitcoin miner. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: 2,349 plays across audio, YouTube and X so far, with the X livestream on top at 1,128. Audio is right behind at 1,011, so people clearly like their ASIC talk in the background, like a miner humming in the living room.

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-e16-summer-meng-on-bitmars-selling-bitcoin-asics-heating-your-home-with-miners/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UqPnxJ2n9U

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=2026-03-27_s17_e16_summer_meng_on_bitmars_asic_miner_distribution_-_25.03.2026_03.20.mp3

Graphics:

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

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

Graphics:

[FinneysTrueVision]

On what price point did he get in? ZCash has been surging more than any coin this year and last year, and I believe the surge started below $50.00?

LUCKY, but personally I could never HODL a coin such as this. It doesn't give the same feeling of safety that I get from Bitcoin.

I remember laughing at Vlad when he made this reply to Adam Back, thinking he was going to get rekt. Zcash had been performing like a typical shitcoin for its entire history up until then, so there wasn’t any reason to expect anything different. ZEC was around $33 on that day and has since gone up more than 30x against both USD and BTC.

In part, I think he just had really lucky timing. The price of Zcash was just starting to recover from its all time low, earlier that same month. Then the VCs and treasury companies came in and started pumping it.

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

On what price point did he get in? ZCash has been surging more than any coin this year and last year, and I believe the surge started below $50.00?

LUCKY, but personally I could never HODL a coin such as this. It doesn't give the same feeling of safety that I get from Bitcoin.

I remember laughing at Vlad when he made this reply to Adam Back, thinking he was going to get rekt. Zcash had been performing like a typical shitcoin for its entire history up until then, so there wasn’t any reason to expect anything different. ZEC was around $33 on that day and has since gone up more than 30x against both USD and BTC.

In part, I think he just had really lucky timing. The price of Zcash was just starting to recover from its all time low, earlier that same month. Then the VCs and treasury companies came in and started pumping it.

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.