The Bitcoin Matrix Podcast ⚡️

Bitcoin isn't digital gold. It's not locked in by math. You can kill it. The man who ran money at Peter Thiel's hedge fund came on to explain who's trying — and why the only thing protecting Bitcoin is the people who run nodes. @mattkratter — Bitcoin University founder, former Clarium / Thiel-world macro trader, early Palantir investor — joins me to lay out the fight consuming Bitcoin right now in plain English: why he says Bitcoin Core has "gone rogue," the spam war over OP_RETURN and BIP-110 he calls Bitcoin's last stand, why consensus flows from culture and not code, who actually controls the network (hint: not the miners), and how to mine Bitcoin from home for about $10 a day. Send this to anyone who thinks Bitcoin can't be stopped. TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 01:00 Physics dropout to literature — Stanford & Berkeley 05:27 René Girard & meeting Peter Thiel 07:56 Becoming a trader: Thiel Macro → Clarium 12:43 The PayPal mafia, network effects & the dot-com bottom 20:23 Global macro at Clarium & the 2003 housing-blowup call 24:08 Napster, PayPal & the "new world currency" 28:32 Government as the ultimate customer — Palantir & the CIA (In-Q-Tel) 36:00 Deep-state roots — is Peter Thiel captured? 49:32 Culture is upstream of consensus 57:00 Bitcoin isn't magic — nodes, immutability & the spam risk 1:01:42 Why spam is a problem — tragedy of the commons 1:04:30 Spam since Satoshi & the 2014 OP_RETURN war 1:14:30 The changing of the guard at Bitcoin Core 1:18:43 Core uncaps OP_RETURN to 100,000 bytes 1:28:00 Consensus flows from culture — the 2nd Amendment analogy 1:35:20 BIP-110 — the temporary soft fork 1:44:00 Why small blocks — and running nodes in Cuba 2:18:55 SegWit & the 2017 UASF — how 500 nodes won 2:24:00 The miners are just employees — node runners set the rules 2:41:46 "Firing the miners" — changing proof-of-work 2:55:18 Bitcoin Core went rogue — the last stand 2:58:50 You can kill Bitcoin 3:01:20 Mine Bitcoin from home for ~$10/day, KYC-free 3:11:09 Where to find Matt ▶️ youtube.com/watch?v=xsOjcw…

Bitcoin Mechanic on why the mission dies the moment Bitcoin centralizes: "What Bitcoin purports to do is to end the era of central banking. That's an unbelievably difficult thing to accomplish, and you're obviously up against the most evil, conniving, determined people on the planet to undermine that mission. So you're just not going to be able to do that if you're centralized, because they're just going to find the central points of failure and hold guns to the right heads and make sure it goes the way they want to go. You can't do it." Mining pools. Core development. Funding. Pick your central point of failure. @GrassFedBitcoin on The @_BitcoinMatrix #283. Full conversation here: youtube.com/watch?v=yRjzSb…

The state is the Eye of Sauron — scanning everywhere, and finding no one to target. @GrassFedBitcoin on why a decentralized network exhausts a centralized enemy: there's nowhere for the eye to point. 🎧 The Bitcoin Matrix #283 👇

If This Fails, It's the End' — Bitcoin Mechanic on the Fight for BIP-110 youtu.be/yRjzSb-gKm8?is… via @YouTube choose your weapon. Great work by @CedYoungelman here - watching now.

@_BitcoinMatrix @JeffBooth @_BitcoinMatrix #222: Why 99% Aren’t Ready for $100 Million Bitcoin (But It’s Coming) @AmericanHodl8 opens up about how Bitcoin helped secure his family’s financial future & why most of us underestimate the radical transformation $100M BTC will bring. 📺youtube.com/watch?v=_1hljp…

Luke’s the smartest voice and it’s super easy to see that. - No alterior bags he needs to pedal in a thinly veiled way. - Experience - Values Overall, you always want to optimise for predictability in a system. Knowing the developers value framework (Christianity) increases the predictability and accountability.

From @CedYoungelman podcast youtu.be/yRjzSb-gKm8?is…

Lmao I can 100% agree the Non BIP-110 ppl are some children @GrassFedBitcoin 😂

Bitcoin Mechanic on the state's blind spot: "The state is looking at Bitcoin like: I don't know how to control this thing. People are moving money around without permission. Someone just sent a million dollars from this address to that address — I don't know who address A was, I don't know who address B was, I couldn't stop the transaction. They paid 30 cents in fees, and now it's moving again, through a coin join. And it's just looking around like: who do I target? Who do I throw in jail? And there's no one they can target. If you want to do anything else with money — spend 20 cents on a pack of gum — they want to know about it, throw you in jail over it, investigate you. They're control freaks who want to enslave the whole population. But with Bitcoin, they just don't know who to actually target." @GrassFedBitcoin on The @_BitcoinMatrix #283. Full conversation here: youtube.com/watch?v=yRjzSb…

@_BitcoinMatrix @Croesus_BTC @smarterwebco @_BitcoinCenter @TraceMayer @Excellion @JAN3com @thejobchick @GrantCardone @RobinSeyr @MicroSeed_io @TFL1728 @bramk @TomerStrolight @BITVOLT @jimmysong @Daniel21e15 @natbrunell @DavidBCollum @parkeralewis @keonne @SamouraiWallet @WalkerAmerica @JeffBooth @meanwhile @LeboBTC @AaronRDay @leamuirleyn @Beau_Turner21 @AbundantMines @andyjschoonover @JoinCrowdHealth @IIICapital @peruvian_bull @MarylandHODL21 @CrisReed @conhodlan @unchainedcap @Stamp_Seed @firefish_io @secsovereign @timevalueofbtc @TheBitcoinLayer @Humble_Hodl1111 @ByteFederal @PiusSprenger @Campnakamoto @HammerSeed21 @_BitcoinMatrix #283: @GrassFedBitcoin - Inside Bitcoin's Civil War "If BIP-110 fails, Bitcoin will have had its soul divorced from it. That will spell the end." Bitcoin Mechanic on the spam war, Core gone rogue, and why the nodes are the final boss. 🎧youtube.com/watch?v=yRjzSb…

🎧 @_BitcoinMatrix #283: The Soul of Bitcoin: BIP110 with @GrassFedBitcoin ⚡ Fountain → fountain.fm/episode/IwonPx… 🍎 Apple → podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bit… 🟢 Spotify → open.spotify.com/show/4R41uuVqS… ▶️ YouTube → youtube.com/watch?v=yRjzSb…

MUST WATCH 🚨 "If BIP-110 fails, Bitcoin will have had its soul divorced from it. That will spell the end." @GrassFedBitcoin on the spam war, Core gone rogue, and who really runs Bitcoin. @_BitcoinMatrix #283: Inside Bitcoin's Civil War is out now.

@LapiuPepe @CedYoungelman @GrassFedBitcoin podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

@CedYoungelman @_BitcoinMatrix @GrassFedBitcoin Well, we are well past 5am in Montreal and I don't see it. Got a link?

Tomorrow.

His answer? Yes. "If BIP-110 doesn't win, Bitcoin will have had its soul divorced from it — and that spells the end." @GrassFedBitcoin on why nodes — not miners, not exchanges, not Core — are the soul of Bitcoin. Full episode tomorrow. 🟠

Send this to anyone who thinks the OP_RETURN debate is just about spam filters.

🔁 REPOST, from November 2025. Everything Jimmy Song flagged about Bitcoin Core is now impossible to ignore. Jimmy Song - Is Bitcoin Under Attack From Within? One company asked for 144 bytes. Core didn't raise OP_RETURN from 80 to 160. They went all the way to 100,000 — over hundreds of objections, breaking the precedent that contested changes don't get merged. Then an "inner circle" published a letter speaking for Bitcoin Core. Jimmy has contributed to Core. Nobody even asked him to sign. The author of five Bitcoin books came on to explain who actually funds Core, why the tactics feel like COVID all over again, and why he now says taproot was a mistake. @jimmysong, Bitcoin developer, educator, Core contributor, and author of five books on Bitcoin, joins me for the fourth time to lay out the knots vs. core fight in plain English: relay policy vs. consensus and why policy quietly decides what gets into blocks, the node experiment where Core v30 peers used 200MB of bandwidth in 10 hours while every other client used 6, how five or six pools build the block templates for ~90% of hash rate, the OP_RETURN saga from 40 bytes to 100,000, who funds Core — Chaincode, Spiral, localhost — and why ex-Wall Street traders quietly bankrolling devs deserves scrutiny, the "trust the experts" playbook we all remember from COVID, why taproot was not a wise decision ("90% of the outputs are spam"), and why he wants ossification. "There's a whole bunch of anonymous contributors to Bitcoin Core. You have no idea what their motivations are. Zero. They could be a member of the NSA. You don't know." Send this to anyone who thinks the OP_RETURN debate is just about spam filters. TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 01:06 Jimmy Song's Background 08:58 Relay policy vs. consensus, dust limits, and sub-sat fee relay 09:46 Why uniform relay policy matters 11:00 Compact block relay and stale-block risk explained 17:09 Miner templates, pool concentration, and censorship worries 36:28 "The Core letter": precedent, pushback, and an inner circle? 52:56 Is the fight healthy? 59:41 Who funds Core? Chaincode, Spiral, low-profile funders & incentives 1:05:36 Is Core v30 an existential threat? 1:14:50 Wallets, mempool.space, and sovereignty myths 1:18:35 Bitcoin governance lessons from history 1:23:00 Jimmy's long view: cultural decay, builders vs. complainers 📺youtube.com/watch?v=2zEWPM… Then watch the rest of the trilogy: @LukeDashjr, The @_BitcoinMatrix #196:- "Is Bitcoin In A Civil War?" 📺youtube.com/watch?v=9lmr4W… @mattkratter, The @_BitcoinMatrix #279: "Bitcoin Core Has Gone Rogue." 📺youtube.com/watch?v=xsOjcw…

Satoshi didn’t ask for permission.

What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular.

@reardencode Here’s your URSF

The uglification of the Bitcoin time chain is a really understudied and powerful tool of social, cultural and physical control. Bitcoin needs a foundation built for 1,000 years not for instagram, 15 second attention spans or non-monetary transactions.