Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Season 17

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E23 with Hunter Beast & Mark Karpelès — BIP 360 Author & Former Mt. Gox CEO on Quantum-Proofing Bitcoin

I 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=L11orkEbtb4

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/media/2026-05-10_s17_e23_hunter_beast_mark_karpeles_on_bitcoin_quantum_resnstance_ecash.mp3

Graphics:

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, S17 E24 with Zach Herbert — Foundation CEO on Passport Prime, KeyOS & Why Air-Gapped Is Over

Some interviews you plan for weeks. This one I planned around a box. Two weeks after Zach Herbert handed me a Passport Prime at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, I unboxed their brand-new flagship live on stream, in front of the CEO's face, while he joked that if he had been paying me he would never have let me do that. Fourth appearance for Zach on this show, going back to S8 E5 in 2021 when Foundation was still Foundation Devices and the original Passport had not even shipped.

We went through what actually changed: a factory reset so you can resell the device, Quantum Link (post-quantum encryption riding on Bluetooth, with firmware updates over the same tunnel), Magic Backup via Shamir across NFC key cards, and KeyOS — a message-passing microkernel they spent three years building from scratch instead of shipping Android. We erased the device live and restored seeds, passwords and a Nostr key from a card (after a connection gremlin froze us for a bit). Zach's case for Passport over Coldcard: better entropy, fully open-source board and firmware, a real UX, and it was not the one in the August Coldcard incident. Then the AI angle: Passport as the human approval layer so agent API keys and payments sit on offline hardware, not in the cloud. Plus Made in USA assembly, Foundation Shield at $5/month, an open app store with Cake as the first third-party KeyOS app, and promo code BTCTKVR for a free bumper case.

Somewhere in the middle Jack Reacher 1982 won 1 ZEC courtesy of Cake Wallet by guessing Zach's secret number. About two and a half hours of live hardware theatre from someone I have watched go from a Medium hit piece to what I still think is the most interesting hardware wallet company in Bitcoin. I hope that you will find it useful!

Stats for nerds: 3,014 downloads and views so far. Audio leads with 1,340 — not bad for a Vegas unboxing where the CEO watched me factory-reset his own flagship on stream!

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-e24-zach-herbert-on-passport-prime-keyos-the-end-of-air-gapped/

Listen to this interview on YouTube (with video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piIhSCxHC6o

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/media/2026-05-15_s17_e24-_zach_herbert_on_hardware_wallets_ai.mp3

Graphics:

[buwaytress]

^ Air-gapped is over? I'm just beginning to really think about it properly actually, especially after the recent Ledger fail. And the Passport has a 1% rate of bad units? You're... not serious are you? =)

[Vlad BTCTKVR]

^ Air-gapped is over? I'm just beginning to really think about it properly actually, especially after the recent Ledger fail. And the Passport has a 1% rate of bad units? You're... not serious are you? =)

Ha, no, I wasn't claiming Foundation ships one brick in a hundred. That 1% was Zach nervously watching me unbox his brand-new flagship live in Vegas and hoping we wouldn't land on the unlucky unit where something goes wrong. For why he's actually done with air-gapped, jump to 02:30:39 in the same episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piIhSCxHC6o&t=9039s (blog with the timestamps here: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s17-e24-zach-herbert-on-passport-prime-keyos-the-end-of-air-gapped/).