I am starting a Bitcoin PodcastI am starting a Bitcoin Podcast

Good bitcoiners can't launch shitcoins so they launch podcasts instead. Therefore, I'll be announcing sometime soon a podcast where I interview podcast hosts about their shows and this show will be especially cool because its sponsors will be the podcast hosts I'm interviewing and you won't be interrupted by ad-reads because the entire show is an ad. But you won't mind this because Bitcoin podcast hosts are actually a very fascinating group of people who have played an integral role in the story of Bitcoin and even the advertisements for their shows will be interesting.

In many cases, starting a new Bitcoin podcast cannot be avoided. It is the natural human response to a severe encounter with Bitcoin. Indeed, it's surprising that there isn't a podcast supply company that accepts Bitcoin. Something to consider there.

Anyhow, there is a rich and fulsome history here with plenty of scandal and sensationalism. Bitcoiners have been making podcasts since 2011 and the orange coin wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for all of them.

What follows is a brief survey of Bitcoin podcasting. If I don't mention your podcast, it's not because I don't like it, but just that there are so many Bitcoin podcasts naming them all would turn any article into a list. And if I'm light on the details of more recent podcasts, it's because I went deep on the origins of Bitcoin podcasting and spent many hours establishing the provenance of the very first Bitcoin podcast.

#40HPW and PODCONF#40HPW and PODCONF

Bitcoin podcasting probably reached its apogee on January 17, 2025, when the @thebitcoinbugle created the last Bitcoin hashtag:

This celebration of Bitcoin's traditional craft, podcasting, encouraged people to listen to at least forty hours of Bitcoin podcasts per week and became a rallying cry for decentralized freedom itself. Even though I suspect it was meant as a lighthearted jest, #40HPW was a prescient observation: when looking at the week that begins on January 17, 2025 and goes to January 23, 2025, there were 36 Bitcoin podcasts that released episodes totaling 2707 minutes, or just over 45 hours (#1506073). Listening to Bitcoin podcasts is, indeed, a full-time job.

The year before #40HPW, saw the launch of PODCONF, showcasing the strong institutional support that had gathered around the Bitcoin podcasting industry. I believe PODCONF achieved wide success because by 2024 most Bitcoin podcasts had taken on corporate sponsors. Indeed, some corporations had even launched Bitcoin podcasts of their own. For example, see Onramp's The Last Trade, Unchained's The Bitcoin Frontier, and Strive's MSTR True North.

If your Bitcoin company didn't have a podcast, it was unlikely that it would be successful. At the very least, founders were expected to make frequent appearances on interview-based podcasts. While many of the interview-based podcasts had gotten their start earlier, a new wave appeared including shows like You're the Voice, Bitcoin Rails Podcast, All In Bitcoin, and Build with Bitcoin.

2022: The great bear-market podcast explosion2022: The great bear-market podcast explosion

More Bitcoin podcasts were started in 2022 than any other year.^[1] I suspect that 2021's price increases created a lot of interest and energy which had nowhere go when everything started to collapse. And so that energy was turned into podcasts. But this also meant that these podcasters couldn't get by on hype alone.

2022 gave rise to such shows as Bitcoin Optech Newsletter Recap Podcast, Bitcoin . Review, Stacker News Live, The Hell Money Podcast, and POD256. Many of these were technical or aimed at specific niches and most of them are still on-going. They are nerdy and fun podcasts that place less emphasis on guests, focusing on news and developments instead. This is one of my favorite eras of Bitcoin podcasting.

2017-2021: The era of the Bitcoin Variety Show2017-2021: The era of the Bitcoin Variety Show

The podcasting industrial complex really came into full bloom during this era. These hour-long interview shows featured a guest whose primary qualification seemed to be having previously been a guest on some other podcast. I'm still a little confused how any new guests ever made it into the circuit, but once a Bitcoin person appeared on one podcast, you could be pretty sure that they would soon show up on most of the others. One of the most common practices of this time was to interview the hosts of other Bitcoin podcasts, but as we shall see, Bitcoin podcasters have been doing this from the very beginning.

Shows like Marty Bent's Tales from the Crypt "a podcast about the weird world of crypto," Peter McCormack's What Bitcoin Did, Guy Swann's Bitcoin Audible, and The Stephan Livera Podcast were all started in late 2017 or early 2018.

Later on, we would get interview shows like Citadel Dispatch, What Is Money, The Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, Bitcoin Fundamentals and Coin Stories Podcast.

Some notable exceptions to this trend were the The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado / Bitcoin Explained, The Bitcoin And Podcast (a daily show that is still on-going), and The Path to Bitcoin.

2015: Bitcoin Uncensored2015: Bitcoin Uncensored

Clearly, a show where the first episode begins "Dog is on the alert! Butthole!" ("What's up party people?" became their tagline in Episode 2) is going to be packed with useful Bitcoin content. For about two years, Junseth and Chris Derose delivered smooth Bitcoin news and conversation while wearing hats.

Paul Sztorc was an occasional guest and Roger Ver, as were many people in the camming and sex industry or who were just on the edges of legality.

Sometimes they recorded live in Blockchain Beach in the Florida Keys. But wherever they were, Junseth and DeRose had a kind of contagious exuberance for the things they talked about. I've never met them, but they seem like they would be very fun to hang around and this makes the podcast immensely enjoyable.

Jameson Lopp hosts a pretty good repository of Bitcoin Uncensored episodes. Unfortunately, they aren't in chronological order. All 239 hours seem to be in order on this whyp it page by Woosah, but I've had trouble accessing it on occasion. So much so that I posted my own recording of Episode 1 here: #1504302. I recommend downloading the archive if you get lucky and can access it.

2013: Let's Talk Bitcoin and Mad Bitcoins2013: Let's Talk Bitcoin and Mad Bitcoins

In April of 2013 two of the long-running-est Bitcoin podcasts got started: Mad Bitcoins and Let's Talk Bitcoin.

Mad Bitcoins was started by Thomas Hunt, wearing a distinctive Mad Hatter in goggles costume, supposedly the remains of his Burning Man outfit and using a mock newscaster tone over a psychedelic background to deliver a “five-minute news show that’s fun, maybe a little silly, but also a little serious at times.”

Hunt went on to spawn something called the World Crypto Network in which he is still active in 2026 and which has spawned an impressive number of bitcoin podcast spinoffs including The Bitcoin Group with Andreas Antonopoulos, You, Me, and BTC, and Max Hillebrand's Read Rothbard, Use Bitcoin.

Hunt does not seem to be producing the 5-minute version of Mad Bitcoins any more (the last I found is from April 2023), so it's difficult to say whether it counts as the longest running Bitcoin podcast, but if it isn't, its ten year run is amazingly impressive. Hunt's boisterous opening "Good morning, Bitcoins!" is something you might consider using as an alarm clock tone.

If Mad Bitcoins isn't the longest running Bitcoin podcast, Let's Talk Bitcoin probably is.

Started by Adam Levine the same month as Mad Bitcoins, Let's Talk Bitcoin featured Andreas Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy and Levine. Unlike Mad Bitcoins, Let's Talk Bitcoin was a serious discussion of news and developments in Bitcoin. Levine had a background in audio engineering and had done podcasts before, so the production value was pretty high from the beginning.

Let's Talk Bitcoin pioneered the weekly roundup panel that has remained a pillar of Bitcoin podcasting. If you've ever had the pleasure of listening to a group Bitcoiners sit around and blithely pontificate upon the week's current events, you owe a little thank you to Adam Levine.

Let's Talk Bitcoin turned into a network (as these things seem to do) and also spawned a number of other podcasts, including The Bitcoin Game with Rob Mitchell, The Tatiana Show and eventually Bitcoin Magazine Weekly Bits. Let's Talk Bitcoin itself would change it's name in 2021 to become Speaking of Bitcoin and air its final episode on August 20, 2022.

Interestingly, Let's Talk Bitcoin tried creating a coin on Counterparty which was supposed to power a Let's Talk Bitcoin forum and content platform. Here's what a BitcoinTalk announcement post had to say about it:

LTBcoin is the proprietary token for the Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network. It is the exclusive token accepted for sponsorships. It will provide the user a significant discount in the network wide and ACT-specific e-commerce stores. It can be used in the network for tipping and will generally be useful in every corner of the LTB universe.

This is one of the earliest instances I've found of something that looks like zapping. As much as I enjoy writing forum posts that make fun of the podcasters, we may not be so different after all.

Let's Talk Bitcoin wasn't Levine's first Bitcoin podcast. He had already been a part of several others under a different name (Atom), including one of the very first Bitcoin podcasts in 2011.

2011: Bitcoin Podcast Summer2011: Bitcoin Podcast Summer

Gawker published "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug" on June 1st, 2011. Five Bitcoin podcasts got started that summer.

Perhaps the most surprisingly-named was the Bitcoin Porn Podcast (tagline: "A Pioneer...or a pervert: let's look at a booty together"). Announced in late June on BitcoinTalk, Bitcoin Porn ran a tumblr -nsfw where he featured Bitcoin news stories and...porn.^[2] Unsurprisingly, he changed the name of his podcast to Hashing It Out and it seems to have only ever recorded two episodes.

A kid going by SuperPC had a YouTube channel called Fancy Show Tech, and did an episode on Bitcoin in June 2011. SuperPC got the Bitcoin bug and started a weekly review podcast about Bitcoin in July called Bitcoin Review (or maybe Bitcoin Dreams?). The first episode is pretty great: SuperPC and co-host Eric review the first Bitcoin wallet for Android.

Bitcoin Review continued throughout the summer, recording 7 episodes that I could find. As would become the custom with Bitcoin podcasts, two of the episodes feature interviews with other Bitcoin podcasters: Episode 2 (Atlas) and Episode 7 (Atom).

Atlas and Atom started their podcast, BitTalk, just a few weeks before SuperPC, with the first episode airing on July 1st, 2011. The intro features a clip from The Network and the show is highly entertaining. BitTalk ran throughout 2011, although most of the episodes are no longer available.

Bitcoin was clearly a serious attempt at making a Bitcoin media empire. In it's final iteration, the BitTalk website looked like something that would give current Bitcoin media a run for their money. They had a Facebook page, a tumblr, and numerous Twitter accounts (BitTalkRadio and BitTalkTv).

Keeping with the tradition, Atlas and Atom did a guest appearance on the only other Bitcoin podcast that was still alive: Bruce Wagner's Bitcoin Show.

The first Bitcoin podcast?The first Bitcoin podcast?

Bruce Wagner was running a tech channel on YouTube possibly as early as 2006, but certainly by March, 2009. At that point it was called the Bruce and Ed Show. By 2011, the channel was called onlyonetv and Bruce and Ed aired the first episode of The Bitcoin Show (BitcoinTalk announcement) on April 21, 2011 -- featuring Plato and Bitcoin's first roadtrip (#1503887).

The Bitcoin Show had a pretty good run, spawning a Spanish language edition (El Show de Bitcoin) and a French edition (Le Bitcoin Show). The first episode of Le Bitcoin Show happens to be an interview with Mark Karpeles. The Bitcoin Show ran for 56 episodes, featuring guests like Erik Voorhees and Charlie Shrem as well as Bitcoin podcasters Atom and Atlas.

Bruce Wagner was also responsible for the first Bitcoin Conference. It seems like one of the attractions at the conference was Bruce Wagner's live interview show where guests lined up to come on his show and say something about Bitcoin. It's definitely worth watching.

The Bitcoin Show probably would have had a long run, but unfortunately it got caught up in a number of controversies.

In episode 33, Wagner announced that MyBitcoin.com had disappeared and that "all of its account holders' bitcoins are gone." Wagner says that he and Ed lost 25,000 bitcoins. The MyBitcoin disaster seems to have been the catalyst for a lot of community anger direction at Wagner, some of which produced into allegations of misconduct on Wagner's part, as well as some legal trouble.

The first Bitcoin podcast!The first Bitcoin podcast!

Although The Bitcoin Show was the most well-established Bitcoin podcast of the 2011 era, it wasn't actually the first. Atlas, the co-host of BitTalk began producing episodes of something called the Bitcoin Forum Podcast two weeks before The Bitcoin Show first aired.

Atlas posted the first episode on YouTube on April 4, 2011:

The next day, Atlas posted links to the episode on BitcoinTalk using an anonymous account.

Episode 2 aired on April 8 and was advertised on BitcoinTalk with Atlas' new account. There's also a page about the episode on something called Bitcoin Media

The Bitcoin Podcast continued until May 21 (five episodes in total), but I can't find recordings of the last three. Atlas continued advertising it on BitcoinTalk, though: Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5. It seems like Atlas was having a little trouble with it: here's a late-April post where he's asking if anyone was interested in being a co-host. This is not surprising, considering that Atlas was quite young (17 by his own admission).

As we have seen, Atlas eventually paired up with Atom (Adam Levine) to make BitTalk. Levine describes Atlas as very idealistic. By way of example he told me that Atlas stepped away from being a mod on r/bitcoin (which Levine says Atlas started) because Atlas felt inadequate, and that he had violated his libertarian principles in some manner. Atlas seemed to have a fairly free-market attitude toward the subreddit:

r/bitcoin was put up for auction on r/BitMarket (as well as on r/bitcoin) in July 2011 (BitcoinTalk post). The post was removed. At some point Atlas seems to have deleted his reddit account, and I haven't been able to find much trace of him since (two Twitter accounts haven't been used since 2011: @Atlas_ and @AtlasGo).

Early mentions of Bitcoin on other podcasts and radio showsEarly mentions of Bitcoin on other podcasts and radio shows

The thing about podcasters is that they always need something new to talk about. And so it is entirely natural that the first people to really begin to talk about Bitcoin were podcasters. Before any single show was dedicated to Bitcoin, there were a number of podcasts with episodes featuring Bitcoin.

Most famously, Russ Roberts interviewed Gavin Andresen on EconTalk on 4 April 2011, and this often gets referred to as the "first Bitcoin podcast." But even before this in March, a show called Bad Philosophy had an episode called "Some People Talking about Bitcoin" and even earlier in the month Omega Tau did an episode featuring Bitcoin and Gavin Andresen.

But Bitcoin crossed the airwaves even earlier than this: Norah Young on CBC Radio's Spark! covered Bitcoin in an episode airing on February 27 -- this episode features the famous Richard Nixon speech announcing the suspension of the gold standard and an interview with a Dr Andrew Winston.

In early February, on the 9th, the Security Now show featured Bitcoin in an episode (#287) where Steve Gibson gives an oft-quoted description of it.

But the first mention of Bitcoin on a podcast that I've been able to find is actually from 2010. On December 02, The Morning Show on a libertarian network called the One Radio Network with Patrick Timpone interviewed Bruce Wagner about Bitcoin.

So, it seems that our friend Bruce Wagner may yet be able to claim the title of the first Bitcoin podcaster.

1. This isn't quite true: more were started in 2020, but I don't like those ones quite as much. ↩

2. Bitcoin and porn go way back. Here's an interesting thread about the camming industry and bitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20984.msg269597#msg269597 ↩