Beyond the Code

Mark Karpelès bought a half-price Ledger Nano X, opened it, and found a mass-produced spy implant. The former Mt. Gox CEO explains what he found, and how to check your own wallet.
Mark, now CEO of Karpelès Labs in Japan, spotted the implant before the CryptoBillis story broke. He walks through how it uses an LTE antenna to send data back to the attacker, why he's now sharing his findings with Ledger, and the detector he's building to tell you "clean" or "not clean." He also explains how to open a Nano X yourself.
Then we go back to 2010: accepting Bitcoin for web hosting, taking over Mt. Gox from Jed McCaleb, growing from about 6,000 customers to 1 million in two years, the Silk Road fallout and the $5M US seizure, years under public suspicion, and how he'd build a secure exchange today with all-cold storage and FROST. We finish with AI and CatCard, his custom firmware for the Coldcard.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome, Mark Karpelès
04:11 Karpelès Labs: "specialized in doing the impossible"
06:14 The CryptoBillis Ledger implant story
08:03 Finding a mass-produced implant in a half-price Nano X
12:22 Ledger's response, and cooperating now
14:40 The risk of a broad reseller network
15:50 Mark's implant detector
19:22 How to check a Nano X yourself, and the warranty catch-22
21:17 A cat-and-mouse game with implant makers
23:40 Mark's story: from France to Japan
30:49 Taking over Mt. Gox from Jed McCaleb
34:10 From 6,000 to 1 million customers
35:39 Silk Road, banks and the $5M US seizure
41:11 BIP32/BIP39: what could have saved Mt. Gox
42:24 Living under suspicion
45:42 How he'd build an exchange today
48:44 Bankruptcy and creditor recoveries
51:31 A few months in Israel
55:30 Crypto, AI and 20–30 agents at once
1:00:49 CatCard: custom Coldcard firmware
1:04:00 Where to follow Mark, and a parting warning
Guest: Mark Karpelès – X: https://x.com/MagicalTux
Host: Yitzy Hammer – X: https://x.com/ijhammer · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ijhammer · DLT Law: https://www.dltlaw.io
Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/MeG8kFkCPQQ
More episodes: https://www.beyondthecode.fm/
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I’ve told my wife I might need to retire in five years. Not because I want to stop working—but because I’m wondering whether AI will leave commercial lawyers with a profession that looks anything like the one we know today.
Zohar Fisher, founder of Robus and co-founder of LawFlex, joins me to debate that prediction. He sees disruption coming, but also an opportunity for adaptable lawyers who move quickly and build relationships their clients won’t want to lose.
We explore legal outsourcing, human review of AI-generated work, the uncertain path for junior lawyers, and the shift from hourly billing to value-based legal fees. Zohar explains the idea behind AI-native law firms, while I ask what happens to insurance, professional responsibility and the price clients will pay for human judgment.
We finish with a problem many commercial lawyers will recognize: AI turning a routine agreement into a long list of objections—and making a deal harder to close.
If you’re a lawyer, law student, founder or someone wondering what AI means for your own career, this conversation is for you.
Hosted by Yitzy Hammer on Beyond the Code.

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Diego Borgo helped bring Adidas into the NFT and metaverse world during one of the wildest moments in crypto history.
In this episode, Diego takes us behind the scenes of Adidas’ move into Web3 and reflects on whether the NFT boom was a failed experiment, a successful one, or simply too early.
We also dive deep into branding and storytelling: why great products aren't enough, what tech founders get wrong when explaining what they build, and how brands like Patagonia, Salesforce and Tesla create stories people want to become part of.
But the conversation eventually becomes much more personal. Diego opens up about faith, fatherhood, hope, leaving security behind, and the importance of showing your kids what's possible.
He also shares the story of the wall of images he created during one of the hardest periods of his life — pictures representing the future he wanted — and what happened when he looked back years later and realized he was living it.

Geoff White has spent over a decade at the intersection of technology and organized crime. As Channel 4 News' technology correspondent, he reported on the Snowden leaks, exposed the Talk Talk hack, and dug into fraud across the online dating industry. He's the co-creator of the BBC's Lazarus Heist, a chart-topping podcast on North Korea's hacking operations, and the author of three books — Crime Dot Com, Rinsed, and, for Audible, The Dark Web and AI: Friend or Foe, the latter released back in 2019, well before AI became a household conversation.
In this episode, Geoff joins Yitzy to talk about his path from local newspapers to investigative journalism, the difference between writing a book and building a podcast, and how crypto has genuinely changed the mechanics of money laundering — not made it impossible to trace, but made it faster to move. He also breaks down how his team pieced together 350,000 leaked internal messages from the Conti ransomware gang, translation quirks and all, and gives his take on recent AI-driven hacks, including the Hugging Face/OpenAI incident and the Cold Card wallet exploit — plus why he's skeptical of confident claims about how much AI is actually being used in phishing today.
This episode is brought to you by FirstRead — the AI-powered contract and document tool built for lawyers. Use code BYNDTHECODE10 for 10% off, or sign up here: https://first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026
In this episode, we cover:
00:00 – Intro: who is Geoff White04:14 – From balloon modeler to investigative journalist09:25 – Going freelance and the leap into book writing11:05 – How book deals and advances actually work13:39 – Researching and writing Crime.com15:05 – Meeting Brett Johnson, the "OG of hacking"17:36 – Books vs. podcasts: what changes in the storytelling24:00 – What the reader knows and when: crafting a true-crime narrative26:18 – Rinsed: has crypto made money laundering easier, or just different?35:37 – Inside The Conti Files: leaked chats, translation chaos, and "the grandmas"42:30 – Personal safety and the risks of covering hackers directly44:22 – Revisiting AI: Friend or Foe, written in 201948:05 – The Hugging Face/OpenAI hack, the Cold Card exploit, and self-custody risk50:45 – Why Geoff won't say "AI phishing is worse" without the data
Connect with Geoff :
https://geoffwhite.tech/ (podcast and audiobook links, book purchases and contact details)

In this episode, we cover CJ Hetherington's path from a self-taught teenager trading crypto in the UK's Lake District to Co-Founder and CEO of Limitless, one of the fastest-growing prediction market platforms built on Base.
CJ walks through his early builds - a gamified NFT protocol, the Atlantis World metaverse — and how a chance conversation led him and his Ukrainian co-founder to raise crypto donations for humanitarian aid within hours of the full-scale invasion, eventually hosting a hackathon inside a bomb shelter with Vitalik Buterin. From there, he traces Limitless's founding in late 2023, why staying outside the Polymarket/Kalshi duopoly has been an advantage, the CFTC review process for US market entry, and why he sees institutional hedging — not sports betting — as the real endgame for prediction markets. We close on what Limitless saw in the data during the World Cup and CJ's read on where the broader crypto market is headed next.
Sponsored by FirstRead — the AI-powered contract review tool built for lawyers who don't have time to read every clause twice. Use code BYNDTHECODE10 for 10% off at ⁠first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026⁠.