World Crypto Networkest. March 2014

The Bitcoin Talk Show

Call-in radio for a currency without a phone number. Mined from the archive, not from memory.
Derrick J. Freeman & Thomas Hunt1-708-23-COINS
The Ledger
208
episodes in the archive
399
hours of bitcoin talk, measured
570
caller segments mined
131
callers with names
18
countries on the call log

A phone line, a price chart, and whoever showed up

The Bitcoin Talk Show took live calls about Bitcoin on the World Crypto Network from 2014-03-19 to 2021-05-26. This site is what the transcripts say happened — episode counts, caller geography, repeat customers, and what everyone actually wanted to talk about.

The earliest episode in the archive is #2, dated 2014-03-19, with Derrick J. Freeman and Thomas Hunt. Episode #1 didn't survive into the archive, which is about the most Bitcoin-in-2014 fact available. The show ran weekly on Wednesdays through early 2015, went quiet for almost three years, then came back in January 2018. Weekly was still its natural gait: the comeback was a short burst — #44–#54, 11 episodes between January 17 and February 16 — then back to roughly one a week through spring. The real exception was one summer: June through September 2018 the show went genuinely daily, 91 episodes in four months, many days twice with an After Dark edition. From October 2018 it was weekly-with-gaps again, tapering through 2019 to the last archived broadcast on 2021-05-26.

Callers dialed 1-516-900-4WCN, later 1-708-23-COINS, later still a Skype handle. They called from United States, Canada, Australia. Some called once, said their piece about the price, and were never heard from again. Mustafa from Illinois, John from ?, Ricardo from France kept coming back.

Every number on this site is mined from Whisper transcripts with regular expressions. Where the transcript is mumbly, the count is conservative. Where a name was garbled, the caller stays unattributed rather than invented.

Heard on the air

“Well, I recently wrote an article about decentralization and kind of the parallels between what I'm seeing in the Bitcoin community and what I see in the local food community.”Liz — 2014-03-19
“I think people need to understand what they are buying so that they don't get scared when the price goes down.”Antronik from Los Angeles — 2018-01-18
“Yeah, so I went to a local meetup for cryptocurrency and I know here the other day and there's about 30 people there which was really cool but it seemed like none of them were interested in Bitcoin at all.”Jeff — 2018-01-19

Quick answers

Broadcast cadence — episodes per month
20142014-03: 22014-04: 42014-05: 52014-06: 32014-07: 52014-08: 32014-09: 32014-10: 32014-11: 32014-12: 32015-01: 420152015-02: 2201620172018-01: 720182018-02: 42018-04: 12018-05: 22018-06: 242018-07: 242018-08: 312018-09: 122018-11: 12018-12: 62019-01: 320192019-02: 42019-03: 32019-04: 12019-05: 52019-07: 32019-08: 22019-09: 32020-01: 120202020-02: 12020-03: 82020-04: 122020-05: 32020-06: 42020-09: 120212021-02: 12021-05: 1

Two eras and a long silence. The 2015–2017 gap is real: no Talk Show episodes exist in the archive between February 2015 and January 2018. And the 2018 wall is not a daily year — it is two distinct pushes. The January–February comeback burst (#44–#54, 11 episodes in a month) and the one true daily stretch, June through September (24 + 24 + 31 + 12 = 91 episodes, After Dark included). Everything either side of those pushes, 2014 to 2021, ran at the weekly pace the show is remembered for.