The book club for open-source builders who take decentralization seriously.
Bitlemmas is a video podcast and community for open-source maintainers, protocol designers, and community stewards who want to apply Bitcoin-grade decentralization and participatory governance to real infrastructure — not just talk about it.
Every episode reviews and debates books on Bitcoin, monetary history, decentralized programming, and community governance — then connects those ideas back to working code and real projects.
📚 Book reviews & author interviews
⚙️ Protocol design & governance deep dives
🏛️ Coverage from the annual Bitlemmas Austin conference
If you build open-source software and want the infrastructure you rely on to stay free, resilient, and community-controlled — this channel is for you.
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The Bitlemmas Podcast
Episode 11 drops soon.
This one covers Digital Technology and Democratic Theory: Democracy in the Digital Public Sphere, a book that every technologist, policy thinker, and engaged citizen should know about.
The core argument: digital systems are now part of governance whether we designed them that way or not. That means democratic theory needs to shape how these systems are built, not just how they are regulated after the fact.
We break down four counterintuitive truths the book surfaces:
More speech does not automatically produce better democracy. The public square is privately governed and largely opaque. Exclusion and silence are political acts, not neutral outcomes. And democracy has an architecture that can be redesigned.
We also walk through the aperture vs. filter framework, the private speech governance pipeline, and what the book calls the "democracy stack," a layered model for locating where accountability actually breaks down.
If you have been thinking about platform power, content moderation, or what it really means for citizens to have a voice online, this episode will give you sharper tools for that conversation.
Stay tuned here you YouTube and on www.bitlemmas.com. The full recorded episode is coming shortly.
#Democracy #DigitalPolicy #Bitlemmas #CivicTech #Platform
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The Bitlemmas Podcast
Today we will be recording this one — dropping in the next few days!
We will cover 'Thinking in Systems' by Donella Meadows, and honestly this book hits differently than most of the reads we've done.
The big idea: the reason things stay broken isn't bad people or bad luck — it's structure. Feedback loops, delays, and the goals baked into a system explain almost everything that "shouldn't" be happening but keeps happening anyway.
Some of what we will get into:
- Why reinforcing loops snowball (good and bad)
- How delays make well-intentioned fixes backfire
- The "drift to low performance" trap — and why lowering standards only makes things worse
- Leverage points: why the most powerful levers (paradigms, goals) are the ones we almost never pull
The part about tragedy of the commons and policy resistance hit especially close to home for thinking about crypto, markets, and tech ecosystems.
Episode drops soon. Subscribe so you don't miss it 👇
What system in your life feels stuck right now? Drop it in the comments, might be a future episode.
#ThinkingInSystems #DonellaMeadows #SystemsThinking #Bitlemmas #BookReview #Podcast
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