The Mad Bitcoins archive
594 episodes since April 21, 2013. The longest continuous take on the crypto industry that exists on YouTube — and now, with transcripts and a database, the longest continuous take that's actually searchable.
The very first episode of Mad Bitcoins is a 4-minute clip from April 21, 2013 titled "Butterfly Labs actually shipped something — gigahash in the wild." It is, in its own quiet way, a primary source. Most of what people remember about that era is bad: Butterfly Labs eventually became a punchline. But on that day, in that clip, a unit had shipped, and somebody had pointed a camera at it.
The show kept running. 594 episodes later, the archive has become something that did not exist when the show started: a continuous on-tape record of what Bitcoin people thought was important on a given afternoon between 2013 and now.
What the archive covers
The 1n2.org reports project pulls from this archive constantly. A short tour of what's already been pulled out:
- The Early MB Era — 52 verbatim quotes across 47 episodes between 2013 and 2016. The altcoins, exchanges, kiosks, wallets, regulators, and on-air guests that built the early crypto industry on tape, including the Zcash launch and the first Bitcoin ATM rollouts.
- Strippers, Sex & Bitcoin Conference Etiquette — how MB, TBG and WCN covered the sexualization of crypto conferences across a decade. The moment Andreas Antonopoulos surfaced the issue on Bitcoin Group #26 is in there, verbatim.
- The Bitcoin ATM Scam — Eight Years On Tape — 2,636 transcripts searched. The first scam warning is from October 2018; the FBI's $333M number didn't show up until January 2026. 34 verbatim quotes across 18 episodes.
- The Rise of the Video Game Industry — not strictly MB, but shows how the same long-form, on-tape, every-number-footnoted methodology travels.
- Is Adam Back Satoshi? — the New York Times said yes. The archive has years of him saying his actual thing.
The shape of the show
Mad Bitcoins is not a single format. The early episodes are 3-to-5-minute on-the-street takes shot in San Francisco. The middle years bring in interviews from conferences — Miami, Vegas, Hong Kong. The recent stretch is more reflective: longer, more retrospective, often pulling from older clips. The episode count is biased toward the years 2013–2016, when the show was running multiple times a week.
Why the count is 594
The exact number is the canonical episode count in brain.db as of this writing — the cross-source reconciled total counting YouTube uploads, podcast feed entries, and the rebroadcast files in the local mirror. It's slightly different from earlier round-number estimates (an old "600+" appears in some headers; an old "599" appears in others). 594 is the live number from the tracker; it ticks forward as new episodes go up.
Why the archive matters
Most people on the Bitcoin internet don't have a tape record of their own positions. Mad Bitcoins does. That's the entire premise of the reports series: pull the transcript, find the on-air moment, quote it verbatim, link the episode. The archive is the source.
The same archive is also useful as a cultural record outside of vindication. It captures what conferences felt like, what fees looked like at a given block height, what got hyped that turned out to be nothing, what got dismissed that turned out to be everything. That's worth keeping searchable.