Is Bitcoin Failing? | Alex Gladstein & Paul Sztorc
By Danny Knowles
Aired Jun 19, 2025 · 1h 42m · Last boosted Jun 30, 2025
Chapters
Show Notes
Alex Gladstein is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation, Paul Sztorc is Founder and CEO of LayerTwoLabs and the creator or Drivechains. In this episode, we discuss whether Bitcoin is falling behind the innovation curve, if Lightning Network has failed as a project, and if privacy models like eCash are a dangerous compromise or a practical necessity. We also get into whether hard forks should be revived as a path for progress, how censorship resistance is being weighed against usability, and why Paul believes Bitcoin is accumulating “technical scar tissue.” Finally, we explore whether Bitc...
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Episode Boosts
Every boost sent to this episode, as published to Nostr, newest first.
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How is using custodial lightning sending to another vendor wallet not using real lightning? Sure WoS to WoS is just a db entry but everyone knows it works flawlessly over real lightning, and it's perfect for onboarding new people with no worries about inbound liquidity. I would appreciate Paul's take way more if he didn't use false claims and showing a biased bitterness.
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Alex 🧨
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Paul is arguing that Lightning doesn't work because it doesn't scale to 8 billion? Has anyone claimed it would? Does any monetary system we have scale to the whole world? Appeals to authority, admitting he hasn't used it in recent years, clearly has an axe to grind about a different solution (drive chains). Seeing more and more "OGs" who are disappointing. Slay your heroes, fam.
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Alex's audio was missing at 16 minutes FYI This was a pretty miserable listen. Gave up at 45 minutes when neither Alex or Paul could fathom to make a reasonable statement about how custodial lightning wallets work. Oof
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Wat the fuck lol @npub16le69k9hw…
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I don't know if this is his normal tone but Sztorc sounds quite bitter
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Sorry Paul is pretty delusional with his “Lightning story”, constantly defers to authority, this dev, that engineer… all he talks about is how someone else doesn’t like Lightning and has a bad comment, years ago. While in reality we are using it on a daily basis. Also what other shitcoin would work for 8 billion people today? Strawman.
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This was incredibly annoying to listen to. Sometimes one has to build a case and Alex kept objecting before he even heard the case! I’m not going to opine on who was right or who won because the debate never happened, and it’s not occurring was entirely on Alex. Alex cannot (or will not) see anything other than the immediate benefit of Lighting to those he is passionate about helping. Paul was attempting to say, “I…
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Alex does great work, I really enjoy listening to him speak.
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👍🏻👍🏻
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Alex > Paul But maybe I'm biased, I've followed him for years. Love his work with HRF Fwiw I'm not a huge LN fan or user.