Bitcoin is up 11,000,000% since this 2011 podcast episode

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Can BitCoin be “trusted”? Will anyone accept bitcoins as payment? Could bitcoin eventually replace national currencies and “break the monopoly power of the Federal Reserve”?

These were questions fielded by then-lead developer Gavin Andresen, 14 years ago this week. Andresen was speaking on the first podcast episode dedicated to “BitCoin.” (The price was a cool $0.73.)

This hour-long EconTalk chat was recorded in March 2011, back in the very early months of GPU mining. It’s still worth listening to this episode, for nothing more than to transport yourself back to your first few times hearing about Bitcoin.

You can relive the curiosity in real time, as Andresen walks host Russ Roberts — the one who sounds eerily like Michael Saylor — through the basics (as they were when you mined coins on your laptop and they traded for 90 cents apiece).

Those days are obviously long gone. Almost 95% of the bitcoin supply has been mined, and solo mining is no longer guaranteed to net any bitcoin at all. It’s that enshrined scarcity that’s now drawing institutions and sovereigns to buy bitcoin that already exists. They don’t even need to run the software.

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But just because mining is not necessarily profitable now doesn’t mean it’s not possible — you can mine Bitcoin today with solo rigs like the BitAxe, PiAxe, and other customized Raspberry Pi builds. And solo miners regularly solve blocks — at least more than a dozen over the past year — with their luck usually boosted by donated or otherwise shared hash rate.

However, it’s still so rare now that when solo miners do solve blocks, we collectively celebrate: Successful solo mining is the exception and not the rule, even if it wasn’t always meant to be that way.

We know that Satoshi had pushed to “postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network,” and in the first two years encouraged Laszlo Hanyecz to slow down work on GPU mining, saying that “the big attraction is that anybody can download Bitcoin and start mining with their laptop.”

It was those laptop miners who bootstrapped bitcoin with their CPUs. Satoshi, by opting not to sell his coins, left the responsibility of distributing and decentralizing the supply with new users.

Whether those initial miners were aware of their critical role in bitcoin’s future is moot — they were interacting with the Bitcoin network in a tangible way that supported Satoshi’s vision of what it could be.

This all means that solo mining is anything but performative. Far from it. Consider solo mining on par with spiritually fighting alongside Satoshi in the trenches of the GPU arms race.

Because Bitcoin is more than a technology — it’s a supratechnology, encompassing computer science, math, sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology and economics.

Listening back to Andresen speak in 2011, what stuck most of all is that the reason Bitcoin is so attractive to institutions and sovereign nations in 2025 is very different from what made it so interesting to early adopters in the nascent 2010s. And that’s okay.

In the podcast, Andresen reasons that when Bitcoin mining reaches the point it has today, i.e. when it takes “dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces […] big iron to actually do all that transaction processing,” that those who’d been generating bitcoins on their own computers, “and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit,” might not be so happy about “trusting someone running these bigger data computers.”

Obviously, there are many reasons to solo-mine bitcoin, even with the few extra steps required now compared to 2011.

But most importantly, among them is the very off chance that you’ll (at least for the time it takes for Bitcoin to add the next block) be the one to dictate the state of the network — not multibillion-dollar companies or other hypercapitalized operations, however well-intentioned.

— David Canellis

Rizzo’s take, the Bitcoin Historian

“Benevolent dictator.” “De-facto lead.”

While there’s a lot of nice descriptions about Bitcoin’s inner-workings in this 2011 podcast (I personally think mainstream coverage of the subject was actually better “back then”), it’s hard not to focus squarely on its real historical significance.

This podcast provides an almost eerie backdrop to the events that would force Gavin Andresen from his “leadership position” in the open-source project he inherited from Satoshi not some months before the recording.

Fast-forward to the 23:00 mark, and you’ll find Andresen opening up about some of the thornier parts of the software development process that are still a mystery (even to people who have spent a decade watching the Bitcoin charts like me).

At around this mark, Andresen begins diving into the rights and privileges he believed he had as project maintainer, which, while common to open-source projects, were eventually torn away by the project users, who didn’t want to run his more experimental forks.

As Bitcoin begins to consider coming soft fork upgrades, (see my most recent conversation with Jeremy Rubin), it’s a reminder that the core of the system remains fragile human consensus, along with software, a written medium that, due to the nature of evolving hardware, must change.

That Andresen himself was eventually evicted over his attempts to exert authority over this process makes listening to this podcast, with this context, bittersweet.

— Rizzo

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