Welcome to the Free Cities podcast.
My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of the Free Cities podcast. These are the episodes which
are only available to our subscribers on Fountain and I'll be dropping them in the weeks that the
regular release episode is one that subscribers have already been granted early access to.
A little background behind the episode. This is part one of two separate conversations I had with
the Bitcoin OG GG, which sadly, until this point at least, have never actually been heard by anyone
other than me and him Back in the summer of 2021 I was working on a personal film project with the Australian filmmaker Richard James From my part this involved carrying out a series of interviews with prominent bitcoiners discussing the subject of proof of work which was
also to be the name of the film back then. As now, in fact, I believed that understanding proof of work
was key to greater acceptance of bitcoin in the mainstream world.
and particularly with regards to energy consumption which was certainly a hot topic at the time
how things have changed anyway understanding proof of work is probably one of the harder aspects
of bitcoin to wrap your head around and since i consider gg to be one of the key people
on this subject i was super grateful to end up recording for nearly four hours with him
The conversation ventures into many different parts of the Bitcoin rabbit hole, including in part two at least.
So you'll have to wait for this.
But some fascinating conversation about the spiritual aspects of Bitcoin's emergence and Gigi's personal story of discovery and transformation, which is just incredible.
Now bear in mind this conversation often falls into a question and answer context which isn my preferred way of talking as you probably know from listening to the podcast nor is speaking over the internet
which brought up its own problems in this recording. You'll hear Gigi's internet cut out
no less than four times during this discussion. I tried to edit the cuts out, but often it's better
to just hear them in order to understand the true flow of the discussion. Anyway, long story short,
this film project fell foul to the so-called pandemic, which was still kind of raging in the
background at the time of recording. I ended up closing up my office and going abroad with my
family to escape the draconian measures the UK was experiencing at the time as a result, this
interview, plus many more, with the likes of Nick Carter, Brandon Quittam, Max Hillebrand,
Thomas Strohleich, Knut Zvonholm, Harry Suddok, the name but a few, have all sat idle on a hard
drive for the last four years. Now I hate seeing things go to waste, so I figured this might be
the perfect place to finally publish these conversations You discover tons of signal here of course but what I found fascinating was observing just how much things have changed since these discussions back in 2021 and I don mean just my own understanding
of the subjects discussed I mean I remember really struggling with the concept of proof of work
but also the massive changes we've seen in the adoption and the public image of Bitcoin itself.
Anyway, here's the conversation. I would class Gigi probably as, well in my case at least,
the most respected Bitcoiner out there. He's been at the sharp end of the Bitcoin wedge for a very
long time and I think these two interviews represent an excellent snapshot into that
particular moment in Bitcoin's history. It's GG. So obviously there's a ton of alpha too,
of course. Anyway, enjoy the conversation and see you on the next one.
Thank you.