S1 E1 Remastered: Donald McIntyre on Bitcoin, The Teachings of Tim May & Nick Szabo, and the History of Money

Donald Hugh McIntyre passed in 2025, but is remembered as one of the most insightful polymaths... while his blog Etherplan lives on. The episode came out in the first week of February 2019, ran two hours, and set the genetic code for Bitcoin Takeover podcast.

Time stamps:

00:02:45 – Introduction: who is Donald McIntyre

00:04:49 – Was Bitcoin inevitable?

00:06:29 – 10,000 years of top-down structures vs 3.5 million years of evolution

00:08:27 – Cypherpunks: Chaum, Tim May, Nick Szabo

00:09:43 – The ancient desire for unconfiscatable money

00:11:55 – Bitcoin as a bottom-up system

00:12:39 – Living in a dual world: banks vs private keys

00:15:02 – Trusted third parties are security holes

00:16:40 – Nick Szabo's social scalability explained

00:18:27 – Why banking excludes: the unbanked in the US and Latin America

00:20:14 – Privacy, intelligence agencies & the false sense of security

00:21:13 – Is Bitcoin enough to make people demand decentralization?

00:23:23 – Asia's interest in Ethereum Classic & immutability

00:24:51 – Mt. Gox, breaches & untrustworthy third parties

00:25:57 – Not your keys, not your coins

00:27:28 – JP Morgan's building & the marketing of strength

00:28:45 – The instant gratification bribe

00:29:58 – The tradeoff: security means inefficiency

00:31:27 – The high performance fallacy

00:32:26 – Decentralization theater & scammers

00:33:48 – Hyperbitcoinization: elites first or the people who need it?

00:36:26 – The jet set analogy: how technologies bootstrap

00:40:54 – The Lindy effect

00:41:47 – The geeks got in before the bankers

00:43:25 – The token as intrinsic to the protocol

00:46:27 – Bitcoin as a biological invention

00:47:02 – How Nick Szabo thinks (and why he went to law school)

00:48:38 – Shelling Out: the origins of money

00:51:20 – The 150-person brain & money as a bridge between strangers

00:52:39 – Dawkins & reciprocal altruism

00:53:52 – Stone tools, subjective value & the first trade

00:56:15 – Reading Szabo 30 times: one article = six months of university

01:00:52 – Lomekwi, Oldowan & Acheulean: Donald's stone tool theory

01:03:42 – Stashes of hand axes as prehistoric vaults

01:04:58 – Is money millions of years old?

01:07:51 – Darwin, Dawkins & John Maynard Smith

01:08:31 – The logic of animal conflict

01:10:53 – Territory, asymmetry & conflict minimization

01:12:08 – Money as a conflict minimization device

01:12:36 – Bitcoin's game theory & the Byzantine generals problem

01:15:32 – Chimpanzees, bipedalism & why our brains grew

01:17:19 – Bitcoin carnivores

01:17:40 – Szabo & Satoshi: the Newton-Leibniz parallel

01:19:23 – Satoshi's credits: bit gold, RPOW, Hashcash, b-money

01:19:59 – The mystery of Wei Dai

01:20:54 – Remembering Tim May

01:21:53 – The JW Weatherman interview & the CoinDesk piece

01:23:40 – Tim May as the father figure who was never satisfied

01:24:39 – Why not David Chaum? The Elixxir disappointment

01:26:35 – Never underestimate the elders

01:28:08 – What the cypherpunks built: Tor, WikiLeaks, BitTorrent

01:30:17 – Napster, Megaupload & the raid in New Zealand

01:30:30 – Cryptography as a wall: violence made useless

01:34:10 – The shifting Ethereum narrative

01:35:27 – World computer: a marketing confession

01:38:11 – The spectrum from marketers to scammers

01:39:59 – The DAO fork fight & leaving for Ethereum Classic

01:40:44 – What Ethereum Classic adds to Bitcoin

01:41:17 – Liquid & RSK: glorified trusted third parties

01:41:57 – Turing completeness on the base layer

01:43:48 – The future: four or five networks

01:44:26 – ETC's monetary policy: 210 to 230 million

01:46:19 – The 51% attack that happened that week

01:47:48 – 220,000 ETC, 15 double spends & 5,000 confirmations

01:49:15 – The $5,000 ETC thesis

01:50:37 – What happens when Ethereum moves to proof of stake

01:51:37 – ProgPoW, the issuance cut & doing everything wrong

01:52:16 – The Nick Johnson poll on reversing double spends

01:52:54 – The Parity bailout & the precedent of the DAO

01:54:53 – Bitcoin: soft forks, Schnorr & the SHA-256 exception

01:57:09 – Governments will never voluntarily give up fiat

01:59:14 – Donald's criticisms of Bitcoin

02:00:02 – The 21 million cap as a political decision

02:01:13 – The miner lobby scenario, 40 years from now

02:02:09 – Merge mining, drivechains & the super miners

02:02:14 – Miners as the future Google and Apple

02:04:46 – Paul Sztorc, Truth Coin & the guest suggestion

02:05:40 – "Do you think I have a chance with Nick Szabo?"

02:06:31 – The selfish joy of podcasting

02:09:51 – Enlightening, a Lightning pun & goodbye