Epicenter (podcast)

Epicenter (formerly Epicenter Bitcoin.) is a podcast about decentralized technologies, blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The show has covered a wide range of technologies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Polkadot, and Cosmos, and touches on technical topics, as well as the economic, legal, social, and regulatory aspects the technology. It was founded by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture in January 2014. Epicenter is released once per week.
== History ==
In late 2013, the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast, hosted by Adam B. Levine, was looking to expand into a network. On an episode of the podcast, Levine offered his help to anyone interested in starting a new Bitcoin podcast. The call for new podcasts would later become a contest in which contestants would submit new show concepts. Let's Talk Bitcoin listeners would vote on their favorite shows and the winners would make it into what would become the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network. 
Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture met on a Skype call organized by Levine in December 2013. Being the only two contestants located in Europe, they decided to enter the contest together. Their contest entry, the pilot episode for Epicenter Bitcoin, was released on December 20th, 2013. Epicenter came in second place to Mad Money Machine and later joined the newly formed Let's Talk Bitcoin Network in February of 2015. Levine has been described by Crain as the "godfather of Epicenter".
Crain and Couture started Epicenter while having never met in person. They met more than a month after the podcast's debut at Room 77 in Berlin on February 12th 2014 while attending the Inside Bitcoins conference that same week. When speaking about their collaboration, Crain says things "turned out very well" and that they were "very lucky because [we] didn't know each other".
=== Early episodes ===
Initially, Epicenter did not feature guests. The show was a conversation between Crain and Couture discussing news and current events in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency space. The first person to appear as a guest on Epicenter was Johann Barbie on episode 7. The episode was recorded from Barbie's apartment as Crain and Couture where in Berlin for a conference. 
In the episodes which followed, guests would more frequently come on the show. The format began to evolve from a news-driven podcast to interviews. Early interviews featured then Bitcoin Core Developer Mike Hearn, Ethereum Co-founders Anthony Di Iorio and Gavin Wood, and signer-songwriter Tatiana Moroz. By episode 13, Epicenter almost always featured a guest interview. 
In the first year of the podcast, Siân Jones frequently appeared on the podcast as a regulatory affairs correspondent. 
Early episodes of Epicenter included a number of interviews conducted at various conferences attended by Crain, Couture and Jones, including Inside Bitcoins in Berlin, CoinSummit in London and the 2014 Bitcoin Foundation conference in Amsterdam.
Starting with episode 42, Epicenter introduced video to the podcast. The episodes were live-streamed on Google Hangouts and the audience had the ability to watch live and ask questions.
On episode 97, Sebastien Couture announced that biochemical engineer Meher Roy would join Epicenter as its third host.Recently it became obvious to us that it would be difficult to keep doing the show, and keep the same level of quality, and keep consistently putting out episode every week without some help. So, we sought out to find a third host. And pretty quickly we converged on one person, on someone that we both respected, [...], and that we knew would bring a high level of understanding and critical thinking to the topics we cover.
=== Name change ===
Prior to 2014, the blockchain ecosystem had largely fallen under the term "bitcoin". However, as the space began to diversify 2014, notably with the creation of the Ethereum project, the more generic term "blockchain" began gaining popularity and traction. In September of 2016, the podcast changed its name from Epicenter Bitcoin to simply Epicenter to reflect this shift. 
== Influence ==
In July of 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released an investigative report in which it concluded that the tokens issued by The DAO (organization)|The DAO, where Security (finance)|securities. The report cites an episode of Epicenter in which Emin Gün Sirer speaks about The DAO
Category:Audio podcasts
Category:Video podcasts