161: Exploring Bitcoin with Mattias Geniar

In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Mattias Geniar back on the show to discuss his experiences delving into Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. We start off by chatting about his introduction to Bitcoin, the ‘bear market’ of 2018 and how valuable the ‘Mastering Bitcoin’ book is to understanding its’ internals. From here we move on to the concept of ‘Code is Law’ and the implications of such an approach, the pros n’ cons of being a developer in this space, and how he stores his private keys (not your keys, not your coins!). This leads us to highlight second-layer scaling solutions such as the Lighting Network, and the confusion around projects reusing the Bitcoin name. We then touch upon the power of Ethereum, its’ planned consensus transition from PoW to PoS, and how different it is developing on a distributed platform. Finally, we look at the Mimblewimble protocol and Atomic Swaps, discussing their use-cases and how they can improve the space.