1n2.org / reports / max-hillebrand-wcnfull sources list → · local research document — not published
A body of work, counted and linked
Max Hillebrand on World Crypto Network
In eleven months across 2018 and 2019, Max Hillebrand produced more
programming for World Crypto Network than most of its shows managed in a year: six named series of
his own, two books read aloud chapter by chapter, a technical specification, a developer mailing
list, a weekly newsletter, and the Wasabi Wallet documentation the channel is still linked to. This
is all of it, reconciled between the channel's own playlists and the transcript archive.
236 distinct broadcasts · 2018-08-06 to
2019-07-13 · roughly 121 hours · reconciled against
14 playlists and 5,703 archive rows · compiled 2026-10-15
236
distinct broadcasts
6
named series of his own
11
months, end to end
~121
hours of programming
2
books read aloud
Two things to know before reading any number on this page
His name is almost never spelled correctly in the transcripts. These are
whisper-base transcriptions, and the dominant rendering of “Hillebrand” is
hillbrand — 62 rows against 15 for the correct spelling, with
hillibrand (13), hilabrand (4) and helibrand (3) behind it.
Searching the archive for “Max Hillebrand” finds about a sixth of the
material. This is the pattern CORPUS.md §5 catalogues for Augur, Kraken and
Richard Heart, and it applies to him as sharply as to any of them. Nothing on this page is counted
by searching his name.
The counts come from programme identity, not from mentions. Every figure here
is the union of two independent signals: membership of the channel's own playlists, which is the
owner's deliberate grouping made at the time, and a title-strand match across every WCN and Mad
Bitcoins row holding a video id. Where the two disagree, the disagreement is reported rather than
resolved silently.
01The shape of it
The work starts on 2018-07-16 at Mises University in Vienna, where he appears on the channel as
an attendee with a camera, and ends on 2019-07-13. Between those dates the output is extraordinarily
dense and then stops almost completely: there is no long tail. The series overlap rather than
succeed one another — in December 2018 he was running the Rothbard reading, the Optech
newsletter, the ZeroLink reading and the Wasabi tutorials in the same weeks.
These rows do not add up to 236, and should not.
Series overlap: the Rothbard reading is 13 episodes of Bitcoin to the Max and is counted
once in the union. The Mises University playlist is a conference grouping that includes episodes he
does not appear in, so it is listed and excluded from the union. The union figure of
236 is distinct video ids across his named series and readings —
169 in the audio_episode lane,
66 live, 1 video.
02The four named series
Read Rothbard ~ Use Bitcoin
18 episodes,
2018-08-06 to 2019-03-19, all in the live lane, total
24h 03m. Despite the name, this series contains no book readings.
It is a long-form interview show — typically 60 to 100 minutes — whose title is a
slogan rather than a format, and whose guests include Stephan Kinsella on intellectual property,
Adam Kokesh on agorism, Stephan Livera, Giacomo Zucco and the Bitcoin Rabbi. The actual Rothbard
reading happened four months later in a different series; it is covered in
§04.
36 episodes,
2018-09-04 to 2019-05-15, total 51h 13m —
his largest interview series and the one with the clearest editorial line. Guests are the people
building the things: Manfred Karrer on Bisq, Samson Mow and Niko on Liquid, Nopara73 on the Wasabi
1.0 release, Matt Odell on mesh networks and full nodes, NVK, Casa, BTCPayServer, Braiins, goTenna.
Where Read Rothbard is about why, this is about what shipped.
64 episodes,
2018-10-21 to 2019-02-08, total 7h 56m.
This series was not in the brief for this report and is the largest single thing he made.
It is a daily short-form explainer — most episodes run five to eight minutes — that
begins as a vocabulary course (voluntary exchange, private property, scarcity, proof of work, unit
of account) and then, on 2018-12-02, turns into the Rothbard reading for a fortnight before
resuming with a Lightning Network run in February. 62 of its 64 members are held in the archive;
the two that are not are listed in §06.
3 episodes,
2018-09-16 to 2019-02-11. The smallest series and the most personal: it is
his own thesis, “On the Ethical Economics of Bitcoin”, introduced in September 2018 and
then delivered twice — once in November 2018 and again, at 96,000 words of transcript, in
February 2019. He refers to it elsewhere as “my thesis on energy and money”.
2 episodes,
2018-09-16 and 2018-09-25 — a panel series with Niko and Rico that ran
twice and stopped. Both episodes are long (over 100,000 and 78,000 words of transcript
respectively), so this reads less like a series that failed than one that was absorbed into
Open Source Everything, which started the same month and ran for 36.
Three playlists, 51
members between them, 2018-09-12 to 2019-07-10. This is the body of work the
name is usually attached to, and it is unusual in the archive for being close to product
documentation: step-by-step tutorials on installing, generating a wallet, receiving, sending and
running CoinJoins, alongside release coverage and developer interviews. The ZeroLink reading in
§05 is the specification underneath it.
Covered in full, chapter by chapter, on a page of its own:
The books they read on air. In summary:
he read Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money? across 14 broadcasts in December
2018, substituting “Bitcoin” for “gold” inside the sentences as he read,
and completed Part II; he read Hülsmann's The Ethics of Money Production across
14 broadcasts in February and March 2019 and abandoned it halfway. The reading order of both is
reconstructed there from the chapter he names at the top of each episode.
The Rothbard reading is the single most characteristic thing in this archive, so one quote
belongs here too:
♺ whisper-base transcript; wording re-checked against the source transcript.
“We are reading What Has Government Done to Our Money by Murray Rothbard and applying it to Bitcoin. And it works like a charm. Like, every chapter I'm blown away with how perfect Rothbard is describing Bitcoin here.”
Four broadcasts, 2019-04-20 to 2019-05-18, Saturdays at 19:00 UTC — his last format on the
channel, and the inverse of the readings: participants read For a New Liberty at home and
the broadcast is the discussion. There is no playlist for it; it exists in the archive only as a
title strand. Detail on the books page.
The first row is not about the book. “BlockFi & Fractional
Reserve” (2019-03-30) carries the strand name but predates the series and discusses a lending
product. It is shown so its exclusion from the count of four is visible.
05Reading things that are not books
Three further strands use the read-it-out format on material that is not a book. Together they
are 75
broadcasts — more than both book readings and all four named series' worth of
Bitcoin to the Max readings combined. Reading aloud was his default tool, not a special
occasion.
ZeroLink — the Wasabi fungibility framework
14 broadcasts,
2018-12-22 to 2019-01-17, total 1h 42m. The
specification behind Wasabi's Chaumian CoinJoin, read in order — introduction, simplified
protocol, liquidity, performance, the DoS and Sybil attack analyses, pre- and post-mix wallets, and
a closing checklist.
Position 5 of this playlist is a private video —
watch?v=RRhCQrzUYp8✕ checked 2026-10-15: LOGIN_REQUIRED / “Private
video”. It is shown rather than dropped. SXw2CqPc3jc is listed twice by
the channel and appears once above.
Bitcoin Optech newsletter
48 playlist members,
2018-12-09 to 2019-07-09, total 12h 45m — his
longest-running strand of any kind, numbered to match the newsletter issues and running from #0 to
the high thirties, plus a 2018 year-in-review special.
06Where he starts: Mises University, Vienna, July 2018
18 broadcasts,
2018-07-16 to 2018-07-23 — a week of conference coverage that is the
earliest WCN material with his name on it, three weeks before Read Rothbard begins. It
includes the interview with Jörg Guido Hülsmann whose book he would read seven months
later, plus Walter Block, Bob Murphy, Joseph Salerno and Saifedean Ammous on
The Bitcoin Standard.
This playlist is a conference grouping, not a personal one. At least one
member (“Bitcoin $6629 — Price Going Up — Bitcoin Talk Show”) is a
different programme that happens to fall in the same week, and the archive does not establish that
he appears in every other one. For that reason these 18 are listed but excluded from the
236-broadcast union.
Across 14 playlists and 348 playlist memberships, the archive and the channel's own grouping
disagree in exactly three places. All three are recorded rather than smoothed over.
bitcoin-dev playlist position 5. Watch page returns LOGIN_REQUIRED. Was in the
grouping; is no longer public.
A tooling fix this report produced
That private video was initially recorded by the playlist capture as
availability: available. yt-dlp returned it with a null title, null duration and null
availability, and the capture script defaulted an unlabelled member to available — so a dead
member was being counted as live, silently, which is precisely the failure the tombstone handling
exists to prevent. enumerate-playlists.py now flags a member with no title and no
duration as unlabelled-no-metadata for a watch-page check instead of assuming it is
fine.
08Method, and what this page does not claim
How the set was built. Playlist membership for 14 playlists was captured with
yt-dlp --flat-playlist via _scripts/corpus/enumerate-playlists.py on
2026-10-15, including unavailable members as tombstones. That was reconciled against every WCN and Mad
Bitcoins row in brain.db carrying a video id (5,703 rows), joined on video id, and
unioned with a title-strand sweep over the same rows.
Nested shows are excluded from strand matching. An early pass dated his body of work to
March 2022 on the strength of one row — The Bitcoin Group #300, whose title mentions Wasabi
among five other topics and which he is not in. Nested shows (The Bitcoin Group, Today in Bitcoin,
The Bitcoin Talk Show) are now filtered out before strand matching, which returns the honest end
date of 2019-07-13.
Transcription. All of this material is whisper-base, the weakest model in
the archive. The one quote printed on this page was re-checked word by word against its source
transcript.
Attribution. His series are single-voice programmes in which he names himself in the cold
open, which is tier A under CONVENTIONS.md §6. Nothing on this page is attributed from
writing style or subject matter, and no panel episode is quoted.
Not claimed: that this is every WCN appearance he ever made — a guest spot on
someone else's panel under a title that names neither him nor a strand would not surface. Not
claimed: that any figure here is a WCN episode count. Nothing has been promoted into the show
registry.
09Sources
Everything below is archive material — the local transcript corpus and the channel's own
playlist metadata. There are no outside sources on this page, which is a
meaningful statement about its basis: nothing here rests on a biography, an interview given
elsewhere, or any account of his work other than the recordings themselves. The licence and
publisher research behind the book claims lives on
the books page.
verified present in the archive with a transcript, link resolved.
playlist only in the channel's playlist, no transcript row held.
dead checked and found unavailable; kept so the gap is visible.