Over the past few days, I’ve been listening to a few old cryptocurrency podcasts. While some of the information in them is outdated in 2024, I believe they still serve as a fascinating snapshot of a completely different time and a lot of information in them is still surprisingly relevant even today.
One of the hidden gems I’ve found recently is The Monero Monitor Podcast:
“The Monero Monitor Podcast is a biweekly show centered on news and services related to Bitcoin, Monero, and other key cryptocurrencies. Our show primarily takes on an interview style, but also hosts special panel discussions and facilitates relevant technological and ideological debates.”
As the name suggests, this podcast was mainly focused on Monero (XMR) – a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that emphasizes anonymity, fungibility, and non-traceability. Monero (originally BitMonero) emerged out of the cryptocurrency bear market in 2014 and was forked from an earlier cryptocurrency called Bytecoin that while being technologically innovative, was mired in controversy over the way its earliest coins were mined and distributed.
Mike “bigreddmachine” was the host of The Monero Monitor Podcast which he ran from March 2017 to December 2017 during one of cryptocurrency’s greatest bull runs. He was a doctoral student studying aerospace engineering with an internship at NASA and had originally been introduced to cryptocurrencies during the tail end of the 2013 bull market. In each episode, Mike interviews a character in the cryptocurrency space. Despite only publishing 16 episodes, the podcast managed to attract a surprisingly diverse cast of interviewees ranging from ShapeShift founder and CEO Erik Voorhees to Dutch computer scientist John Tromp and even a brief chat with the late eccentric multi-millionaire John McAffee.
One of the more intriguing episodes is the seventh episode where Mike brings in his friend Roy who is a complete Bitcoin newbie and together they engage in a deep dive of Satoshi’s original Bitcoin white paper. At 2 hours and 44 minutes, it’s also the longest episode in the series. More episodes similar to it were planned but unfortunately these never materialized.
Even if you aren’t a fan of Monero, it can still be worth listening to The Monero Monitor Podcast since a lot of the episodes don’t limit their scope entirely to Monero but instead cover the wider cryptocurrency space in general. Examples include interviews with the founders of a Bitcoin lending platform called SALT Lending, a Bitcoin casino called LuckyBit, the cryptocurrency exchanges ShapeShift and Changelly, a nonprofit cryptocurrency research and advocacy organization called Coin Center, as well as the developers of the cryptographic protocols Cuckoo Cycle and Mimblewimble.
And of course, if you are a fan of Monero then there’s plenty of interesting and informative interviews and discussions about that here too.
Mike has an engaging style and clear presentation that makes it hard to believe that this is his first podcast. My only minor nitpick is that the episodes tend to vary wildly in length from 20 minutes to almost 3 hours. Unlike the shorter episodes, the longer episodes tend to come off as bit more meandering and less structured although some might prefer the more spontaneous and conversational style.
It’s a shame that the series ended so early but Mike reveals his reasons for doing so in the final two episodes – his PhD was taking up too much time so the podcast had to take a back seat. It’s a familiar story and I suspect the 2018 bear market also played a role in his decision to retire the series. A quick search shows that Mike’s social media accounts went dormant a few months after The Monero Monitor Podcast ended, came back to life during the cryptocurrency bull run in 2021, before returning to inactivity again in recent years.
You can download and listen to all 16 episodes below:
The Monero Monitor Podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.