All right.
Welcome everybody.
Welcome in.
You made it to another episode of the Meme Factory podcast.
This is stream test number 106.
And this evening we are joined by Jameson Law.
Jameson, say hi.
Hi.
So everybody can tell he's real in here.
Now.
Yes.
Wait, let me do the KYC.
Nicely done.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, Jameson, for anybody who may not know who you are, could you give the elevator pitch
of what you do in the space?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a nerd with a bunch of weird hobbies and most of them for the past decade have
centered around Bitcoin.
And for like the past eight or nine years, I've been full time in the space focusing
on self-custody, really multi-sig self-custody for three years, doing more enterprise stuff
at BitGo, helping power exchanges and payment processors.
And then for the past five, six years, slight pivots to Casa, where we're trying to make
robust multi-sig self-custody easier for normies.
Cool.
All right.
Now, this is your first time on the stream, so obviously you don't know all the idiosyncrasies
we have to deal with here.
One of which is that our sponsors require the guest to read some of the ad copy.
I think RD already sent over what was written up for you this evening.
If you could go ahead and rip through that, we can get on with getting paid and have a
good show here.
Absolutely.
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Other fishermen will hate this one trick, saying this type of violent corner-cutting
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But they're just salty losers.
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Or fish.
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Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Amazing.
Well done.
Well done.
All right, now I see you have a theatrical background or something.
I appreciate it.
I have no doubt.
You did a good job.
You did a great job.
Yeah.
All right, now because you did such a good job with that ad, Reid, we want to make sure
that you're fat and you're feeling good.
So I'm going to pass this on over to Becca, who's got your sandwich menu ready to peruse.
Yes, sir.
Mr. Lopp, thank you for joining us this evening.
I have a selection of sandwiches here for you to choose from.
Our first option is the 87 Percenter Sammy.
So this is a high-sodium mixed deli meat sandwich.
It's served in a wizard bag sandwich bag.
And this wizard hat sandwich bag is going to clog up your pipes and the mempool.
Our second sandwich we have is the 13 Percenter Sammy.
This is a scarce beef hash sandwich.
It's made with free roaming beef cows fed by the sunlight, converted the energy or the
energies converted by grass.
It's 100 percent not as toxic as running an ETH node.
And our last sandwich, our house special, is Yellow's Don't Stop Believing Steak Sandwich.
It's been marinated in Red Bull for 738 days.
What I've been doing with my life.
Well, a very important question is, is the Red Bull sugar free?
Yeah, as of lately, yes.
All right.
Well, then I'm totally down for that.
I love a nice aged steak and Red Bull, but I've never tried combining the two.
Excellent.
We'll have that over to you shortly.
Becca, yellow looks different down there.
Can we get a close up of what's changed?
Yellow's down with the sickness.
Is it my is it my idea or I'm getting slimmer in real life and you make me fatter?
OK, I'll make you skinny next time, Yellow.
He's got to put on first before he's going to make us skinny.
Yellow with a six pack.
All right.
So, Jameson, you got a, if I'm not mistaken, you were swatted recently.
What is the story with that?
Recently?
Oh, thankfully, it feels like an eternity ago.
Yeah, that was in twenty seventeen, you know, right around the peak of the bullshittery
and the scaling wars and all of that.
And it.
People speculated that it was related to that, actually didn't know for many years.
You know, it is actually a very, very long story.
But yeah, basically, you know, I was at the gym one morning and tweeted out something about it being a Monday and having a whole week of more scaling debate bullshit ahead of us.
And at that same time, some asshole decided that that must have meant that I was still in bed just getting out and preparing for a day of work.
Thankfully, my OPSEC was good and I was already at the gym.
And so they called in really a hostage situation/bomb threat to my local law enforcement.
And, you know, this is all available on my website, including the audio clips of the 911 calls.
And they basically said all of the right words and triggered a lethal response from law enforcement to come and shut down my whole neighborhood.
And I actually ran into the police blockade on my way back home from the gym.
And they said, "Hey, there's an active shooter incident."
And they wouldn't let me in.
And it actually took about 20, 30 minutes before we figured out that I was the active shooter that they were looking for.
No way.
So, yeah, at that point, I got hauled into the mobile command unit that had set up a couple blocks from my house.
And I'll never forget the first thing when I walked up the steps in there and the captain or lieutenant, whoever was basically on charge at the scene, said, "Sir, do you have any enemies?"
And I just started nodding.
Like, yeah, I have a pretty good idea what happened with all of this.
Now, it wasn't until just a couple of years ago that I actually caught the guy.
It was a small time of year.
I did, yeah.
Really, what happened was --
[Laughter]
Unfortunately, it was a lot more complicated than what people thought.
Yeah, Yellow, you need to explain how you caught the guy because he has a poop bag thing going on.
Yeah.
So, for the year after that happened, I basically learned a lot about privacy.
And I basically tore down my entire life.
I burned it down.
I moved.
I set up new vehicles, new house, everything underneath, like, trusts and LLCs.
Basically, so my name is no longer on anything that can be tied to a physical location.
And I was doing that in preparation for the next step, which was I put a $100,000 bounty on the motherfucker.
And I said I will not tolerate violence or threats of violence against myself and my family.
And that kicked off a multiyear thing of tips starting to trickle in.
And then of me discovering how difficult it is to actually get in touch with law enforcement to help try to prosecute a case.
Because generally law enforcement and the justice system, they decide what they want to prosecute.
If it's a situation where there's no imminent threat to life or danger or whatever, such as my incident where that was long over and it seemed like there was no more threat, they didn't really care.
And so I had to spend a lot of my own time and money and hire private investigators and find the right lawyers even.
It's very hard to find a lawyer who will help you prosecute a case.
Usually the prosecutors are all government attorneys and the government is telling them what to do.
And all of the private lawyers are defense attorneys.
So thankfully I eventually found a former federal prosecutor who had some connections.
I then was lucky and made some other connections to eventually get in contact with the right cybercrime unit at the FBI.
And I started handing them all of the information that I had collected.
And then I didn't hear from them for a couple of years and the pandemic happened and I figured, okay, well, that's the end of that.
And then it was sometime, I want to say late 2020, early 2021, I got a call from my attorney.
And they're basically like, hey, the FBI found the guy and went to his house and they talked to him and he admitted it.
But the federal district attorney is declining to prosecute because he was only 15 years old at the time.
And apparently there is no federal juvenile justice system.
So I was like, oh, great, all of this for nothing.
But then another month or two went by and we discovered that the state district attorney...
Was it Jack Mullers?
He's the only one that could be that young back then.
But no, we discovered, thankfully, the state district attorney was interested in prosecuting.
And so I ended up flying across the country and going, I was a witness.
The case was pretty open and shut because he pled guilty.
But according to what he said in court, he didn't even know who I was.
And he was basically like, if I knew who you are, I wouldn't have fucked with you.
He was just in the wrong crowd of teenagers that were like SIM swapping and extorting people.
And his particular skill set was swatting people.
So I think that he had actually swatted a lot of people.
I was just the first one who did something about it.
How much skill does it take to swat someone though?
It's just you make a phone call, right?
In order to get away with it, you have to at least be good enough to set up a virtual server and a VoIP system.
And do it in such a way that there's no financial trail that can be tied back to you.
And so he was good enough at doing that.
So basically, when my local law enforcement looked into it, they traced the call back to a server in Texas or something.
And then that's where the trail went cold.
There was nowhere else that they could go.
So it wasn't until I basically put a bounty on his head.
And what happened was his little cohorts, his "friends," like the people in his little teenage cybercrime group were like,
"Oh, $100,000. That sounds good to me."
And the short version is I actually felt sorry for the kid.
I saw a little bit of myself in him.
I fucked up when I was a kid.
I did stupid shit and didn't really understand what all of the consequences would be.
And I think he didn't understand the lethality of what he was potentially doing back then.
So he got a slap on the wrist.
He was basically this kid living in his mother's basement, high school dropout, didn't have any good prospects, really.
And so the terms the court set were like, "You need to get your GED, get a job, get a driver's license," all this other stuff.
So at the end of it, I shook his hand.
I was like, "Look, no hard feelings, but you came at me.
I had to come at you, and I hope that you turn your life around."
I expect I'll never hear from him again, but I do hope that he does end up being better
because he has the skills to use those things for good.
Yeah, especially for a 15-year-old, right?
Yeah, I mean, this is the story of a lot of hackers are kind of like teenage misfits.
Yeah, maybe he becomes a white hacker.
Yeah.
That was racist. What do you mean?
So, yeah, it wasn't fulfilling.
I had hoped it would have been an adult, and I could have gone in there and be like, "I want this guy to spend years in prison," and whatever.
But when I saw who it was and the situation, I was like, "I don't think that prison or any harsh punishment is going to help anybody here."
Nice.
He's probably making memes now.
Yeah.
R.D., was it you?
That's how we orange build the next tech wonders.
All right, so talking about cybercrime, let's talk about ordinals.
No.
We have to?
We don't have to, but I can't figure out if Jameson here is pro or con on this subject based on his Twitter history.
Well, you never know, guys.
They have a page with, it's called "Friends of something," and Zuko is inside.
Jakub is inside, but he's not supporting the project.
I know.
People are in that page that they really don't support it, so we really don't know where is everybody.
I support it insofar as that it triggers people.
There's a couple different ways that I think people look at using Bitcoin.
Some people are like, "Look, if it's not a direct monetary use case, then you're polluting the blockchain, and I don't like what you're doing."
I'm a technologist, so I see Bitcoin as more than just money.
It does have a programming language.
It is a database.
It's the shittiest database I've ever seen in my entire career from a performance standpoint, but it is a database.
You can store data in there, and you can decide how you want to interpret it and read it back and whatever.
I think that inscriptions and things that are really, really data-heavy are generally retarded.
They're not going to survive and last a long time because of the economics.
Is that the technical term, generally retarded?
Pretty much.
Economically retarded.
There's a mismatch between the value and the cost.
It might make sense when there's one sat per byte fees because nobody else wants to use the blockchain,
but I think that spending hundreds of sats per byte and spending tens of thousands of dollars to put stuff on the blockchain,
that just means that you're only going to be able to sustain that if whatever you're doing actually has that level of value.
I see no reason to believe that the cycle that we saw with NFTs a few years ago isn't going to repeat itself in Bitcoin.
It's going to be a hype cycle like anything else.
Maybe a few of them end up sticking around, and if they do,
then it would only be the million-dollar NFTs that people are willing to pay in thousands of dollars.
I feel like you don't believe your own statement there.
None of these are going to be holding any value.
I think you're absolutely right.
It's going to be a hype cycle.
I think we're going to see bullshit again.
I think we're going to see NFTs.
I think the reason people are paying these fees to put their inscriptions in right now is because they're essentially front-running
what they think they're going to make in selling to an unwitting populace.
Would you agree with what that is?
Yeah, I mean, it's in the early speculative phase.
I don't know a ton about the different NFTs.
Obviously, I've heard of the CryptoPunks and the Apes and watched some of the hilarious Yoogalabs screw-ups over the past few years.
Somehow, I'm not entirely sure how, but even those fucking rocks are selling for $100,000 again.
Again?
I think one sold for $100,000 in the past week or two.
You never really know why that is.
My understanding is the fine arts trade itself has a lot of wash trading and money laundering and stuff.
I'm not an art connoisseur, so I don't understand why anybody would ever pay more than maybe a few hundred dollars for something that looks pretty.
Here's how it works, Jamison.
You're a billionaire.
You hire some starving artist for $2,000 to make you a painting.
They create the painting.
You get your buddy, who is also a billionaire, to appraise the painting.
They appraise the painting at $20 million.
It sells at auction for $30 million.
You get a $30 million write-off on your taxes.
It's the same shit that's happening in other countries.
Or if you're a big boy, you do it yourself and you get caught.
Well, you also don't get to keep any of the money because it all went up your nose.
Yes.
Other than ordinary Jamison, what project around Bitcoin or not, and maybe it can be another open source kind of project, you're excited about?
We say he's been working with AI.
I was curious about that.
Yeah, I have.
I've been playing with AI because I feel like it's going to be applicable to many different things.
I use AI on almost a daily basis.
But one of the things that I did early on was I went through and I transcribed every interview and every presentation that I've ever done over the past decade.
And part of that is just because I'm an archival nerd.
Part of it is I wanted to be able to better search through my own stuff.
So now I've got all that stuff on my website.
It's all getting indexed.
Maybe it's good for SEO.
It's definitely good for me when I want to go back and find something that I vaguely remember talking about a long time ago.
And then just a week or two ago, now there's Lopbot or Lop AI, courtesy of Delphi.
And this was actually kind of a culmination of all of the other AI stuff I had been doing.
I was approached by this company and they basically said, "We can train an AI to be you and we just need the data."
And I said, "Lucky for you, I have gigabytes of data that are all of me because I'm an archival nerd."
And so I gave them all of these transcripts and stuff.
And a couple of days later, they came right back at me.
And now you can go talk to my persona.
What kind of data? You said transcripts. What are you talking about?
So I gave them every article and essay I've ever written.
I gave them transcripts of every presentation I've ever given at conferences, of every interview and podcast I've ever done.
So it was like 200,000 to 300,000 words that I have ever written and spoken.
And I didn't know if this would be enough.
But just from interacting with it and from other people showing me the questions they asked, I'm like, "This is eerily similar."
And so this makes me hopeful because I can see a lot of promise for what AI can do.
Obviously, from both the terrible side of things like authoritarian stuff, but also from the empowerment side.
And I care more about empowering people.
It looks like we are already on the cusp of we should be able to essentially run LLMs in a beefy smartphone.
I think that will be very important to have sort of sovereign AI.
And really what I want to see, there's a lot of things I want to see, but I think one thing that's going to be very important is that we're going to need to have AI agents running on our behalf to deal with all of the bullshit that gets thrown at us.
The world's already a crazy place.
We've got information overload.
So much bullshit getting thrown at us all day long.
There's too much to process.
I want a firewall.
I want a digital Jameson AI firewall that will catch as much of that bullshit as possible and only give me the signal.
Filter out the noise.
So you did recently in Lugano a speech, I think, about how Finian, how he's not Satoshi Nakamoto.
How do you feel combined with the power of AI?
Like in the near future, every one of us having like a model there up in the cloud combined with the AI power and stillometry, we're going to have that answer very, very soon.
Do you feel that's a possible thing to happen?
Yeah, you know, it's kind of like how even with cryptography over a long enough timeframe, data tends to get leaked and cracked.
It's kind of scary to think about what will happen in the future.
I think I've said something to the extent before of where the world is right now is we have this proliferation of data and we still don't really know what the hell to do with it.
There are a few big companies out there like the Googles and Facebooks and stuff that are pretty good at processing it.
But if we had taken all of our computers to our internet and sucked up all of the data that humanity has ever generated, they would be able to understand humanity far better than we understand ourselves.
Because it's like it's a data processing problem.
We have the data, we have the storage.
We have not really been able to process it very well.
And then, of course, that has pros and cons.
But with that said, we at least still have a little bit of privacy in the fact that we're kind of little small amounts of data in this huge pool that's very hard to sift through.
Do you think there is enough data out there from Satoshi that a model can be created and compared with other models from other people?
I mean, just from a writing analysis, I would be skeptical.
It's a good question, though.
I'm not sure how many words we have that were ever written by Satoshi, how that compares to the couple hundred thousand words that I trained my model on.
But the one thing that I'm hopeful about with regard to Satoshi preserving their anonymity is that they left before the heat really got turned up.
So in some of my own research, I'm somewhat hopeful that a lot of those trails have gone cold and a lot of that data has been lost just because it was so long ago before people were even looking to archive it.
You don't think the NSA was running the prison program or anything at that point in time?
Well, as far as we know, they were collecting a ton of data.
Have they tried to use it to find Satoshi? Who knows?
Or did the French collect your data and they were collecting the French data and they were like...
I just hope that we never find out.
Yeah, me too.
My whole point from that is that it's not going to be good for anybody if Satoshi is a man instead of an idea.
That's for sure, yeah.
I mean, if it was Dorian Nakamoto, I wouldn't be too upset.
But yeah, Lugano was interesting.
It was pretty cool getting to hang out with Phil Zimmerman.
He has a lot of interesting stories.
And well, you know, Lugano is actually how I ended up here.
Usually people just contact me through my websites and they're like, "Hey, do you want to come on my stupid podcast?"
I'm like, "I've never heard of you, but sure."
And then I was walking around Lugano and some leprechaun-looking motherfucker jumps in my face and he's,
"My memes, my lucky memes! You stole my lucky memes! You must come and join my factory podcast to pay for your transgressions!"
And I was like, "What the fuck? Okay."
As far as I understand it, it was, "You locked off me watermark!"
[Laughter]
Wrecked.
Not too well.
Wrecked.
And not only that, the guy watermarks also.
I don't know why you would complain, man.
Who do you think is complaining?
Watermarks are misunderstood.
Oh, you are? Okay.
All true artists are, so.
Which is why we understand him completely.
Good artist copy, great artist steal, next generation artist plug your meme into an AI engine to slightly tweak it so that it looks just different enough that it might be unique.
Exactly.
That's why I put the yellow puppet in everything. I don't steal it like that.
Flat Eric might be able to steal it.
Speaking about unique, one of the things we have to worry about is Bitcoin is our unique address is being monitored, essentially. And you've said something to the effect of coin mixing not being enough to obscure transactions. I was wondering if you can elaborate on that a little bit.
So the short version of why I don't go around and tell everybody to mix their coins is because it's still easy to shoot yourself in the foot. I think a lot of people kind of look at it as a magic black box of, oh, I take my coins and put them in the mixer, I mix them, and then I do whatever I want with them.
And, you know, unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. I generally only advocate coin mixing as you're going to make a transaction. So, you know, if you were going to send a payment to someone, obviously, you don't want them to easily just be able to look on a block explorer and click back once and you see your entire wallet.
So in the case that you are making a payment to someone, and you're not able to do it where you're really like fully spending the UTXOs and not sending change back. If you're not an Uber blockchain nerd, then just send those funds through the mixer and send them directly from the mixer to whoever you want to pay.
And so then if they want to look on a block explorer and see what's going on, they're just going to see a whole mess of inputs and outputs. Other than that, you know, it also gets tricky because if you're dealing with centralized exchanges, then you might shoot yourself in the foot and get yourself banned from the exchanges.
And if you're too close, you know, not enough hops away. I think we saw that like even with like Swan the past week or so basically saying, look, our hands are tied. We're using partners, and our partners have told us that if they detect this stuff, then they're going to shut down your account.
So that's unfortunately the state of things. And I don't know how you feel about privacy coins, but I think there is a pretty good use case for Monero.
I've said for a number of years that if you really need strong privacy, then you should probably just use Monero to make the transaction because you just use the software and you don't have to worry about any sort of intricacies of what's going in and out under the hood. Now, Monero has not been a good investment.
Instant atomic swaps back and forth even?
Yeah, so atomic swaps are possible. Once again, exactly how...
Or do you mean like using a centralized entity to buy and sell and back and forth?
I could do either. So I mean, I think one of the big like Bitcoin Monero atomic swap companies went out of business and shut down recently. I'm not sure how many others are going on. I mean, I think it's fine to just go on to Kraken or whatever and buy some Monero and take it off to self custody.
That's your private transacting pool for whatever you want to do. Everybody has different use cases. But unfortunately, my investments in privacy coins have not done very well over the years. So I would not suggest holding for really long term more of a sort of in and out type of operation.
Talking about green, is Mimblewimble going to come to Bitcoin any day in the future, you think or no?
Well, it came to Litecoin.
Yeah, everything goes to Litecoin.
Yes, Litecoin got segwit first. No, I haven't heard really even much about... I've heard a little bit people talking about extension blocks and Mimblewimble on Litecoin. But unfortunately, this is one of my pessimistic sides of the space is that not enough people care about privacy.
So it's hard to even keep these privacy projects going from a variety of different standpoints because not many people care about them. And if not many people care about them, then there's not going to be much funding flowing into these projects.
Well, that's a subject that at least I am very passionate lately. And that is, lately, I don't know how active you are on Twitter, but lately, all the content is about macro. Like any other aspect of Bitcoin has become like, pretty much nothing. They don't talk about it.
Everyone is pushing the macro stuff. Everybody is making macro content. All the spaces and the podcasts are about that. And it's getting really, really annoying. And I feel us here and a few others like the Temp guys are pushing back and those companies that are pushing that kind of content.
Do you think that people have found their NGU narrative for the next cycle and they don't want to ruin that?
I saw a plan B chart circulating around in the past week. I think stock to flow might be coming back. It might be about time. I think we bounced off the bottom of that channel. Has Eric Wall posted any rainbow charts recently?
Still unbroken that model. Nice. Yeah. But how do you feel about, I don't know if you have noticed it, I don't know how active you are on Twitter.
Well, I mean, I saw some, some memes of macro macro macro, but I don't, I don't, I don't even have time to watch podcasts. I barely have time to go on podcasts. So, you know, everybody has their own niche.
I don't know. I, I'm not an investors and I never really try to get people to invest because of some condition other than the fact that Fiat is going to zero. And I think this, this should be like fucking obvious. Like every Fiat goes to zero. It's just the question of over what timeframe.
So I don't have time to look at all of these 500 different variables of what's going on in the economy and what levers the Fed is pulling or like how the treasury is hiding their latest bailouts plan so that it doesn't actually look like quantitative easing.
At the same time you are running a business on the space. So how do you manage that?
Well, you know, we, Casa is not a financial advisor. We go after the people who already made their financial decisions and are looking for security. And, you know, this, this does upset some people because there's a wide variety of people out there who have diverse profiles and diverse needs.
So we listen to what really our sales and marketing teams are telling us of like, you know, where, where is the money we're, we're not trying to like pull money into any listening to your co-coin or crypto or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So like we, we want to find the people who have a lot to lose because unlike most wallets, we don't harvest your personal information and sell it and try to advertise to you.
Like we actually charge money for the service that we provide. So it's a lot harder to get people to pay for privacy or to pay for security. The only people who are going to pay for security are the ones who have a ton to lose.
So, you know, the short version is, you know, we're, we're looking for the whales. We're looking for the people who are basically all in and they, they need to have that, that high upfront security, because if they suffer a loss, then it'll be catastrophic and something that will probably haunt them for the rest of their life.
Yeah. Interesting question, question. This is actually from a friend of mine. I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, the stuff going on with Swan with logos floating around and you just kind of hit on your, your marketing team.
This kind of advising you and just curious if you think, if you think there's any like plausible, you know, information out there that, that a company in the Bitcoin space could be hiding cold or cryptic messaging in their logos, or I'm just curious about y'all's logo and who advised y'all to go with that particular design?
Oh, well that we had one particular designer who came up with, I think half a dozen different designs and we went through multiple phases of vetting the different designs and let's see, we, you know, there, there's some iconography and, and sort of hidden messages in actually both our old logo and our current logo.
The, the problem with the old logo was that it looked way too similar to Coinbase's logo as just sort of a C. One of the sort of hidden piece of the iconography with the original logo, which I'm not sure if people picked up on is that it's actually a keyhole.
If, if you take the logo and you rotate it 90 degrees to the right, it's actually the, the Casa is a keyhole. So, you know, that's the sort of security inference there. Now the new logo, the idea is, you know, it's a home, AKA Casa and it is got the, what do we call it?
The basically the five, the five points within the logo are actually a representation of the key shield that is in our app. When you have a five key setup, we had this pentavid in the app for a long time to make it easy to interact with your different keys.
So, you know, the, those are kind of like the hidden meanings of the iconography.
I hear you on that. I hear you on that. To cut you off. I hear you on that. I'm just curious why, you know, that, that, that swirling symbol is, is very well known. It's on the FBI, you know, a lot of government websites about what the association was of that.
And I'm just curious what kind of marketing team would advise to use that? I mean, I'm not going to try to pin you down, make you answer this question, but, but that's, it's just weird.
No, no, no. I get it. No. After, after it came out and people were like, oh, this is well known to be like pedophilia related. I'm like, well, I'm sorry, but we didn't have anybody who was familiar with pedophilia iconography on our team.
I mean, maybe next time we'll try to hire some people who know more about pedophilia so that we can avoid that. But you know, that, I was, that was, that was a big miss on my part.
Speaking of which you've, you've, you did some diversity hiring policies. So have you, have you gotten more on the team?
So we, we do not have, you know, diversity hiring policies, though. I do recall that some people got upset a couple of years ago about a program where we were sponsoring a...
What do you mean new people?
Sean, you know exactly what I mean, new people, and it's racist.
I was just saying.
Yeah, we, we, there were certainly some people who, who got upset with, it was like a program where we had, I think it was a seat at the Unchained Space in Texas or something.
But obviously that didn't go over very well either.
We all have our issues to deal with.
So, Jameson, you also said recently, I've had this conversation with a few people that Bitcoin layer one is not complete and I don't, I don't fully grasp that argument.
And I thought maybe you'd have some better insights as to why somebody might say that the Bitcoin layer one is incomplete.
Well, it depends on exactly what you want Bitcoin to be right. And whenever you start having this conversation, that's when the knives come out of, you know, what is Bitcoin?
We're all blabbed, so the answer here is like more decentralization for privacy.
Yeah, though, even the privacy thing is contentious, right?
So, you know, a lot of people don't care about privacy and then, you know, trying to implement really strong privacy on Bitcoin actually creates problems.
You end up with conflict trying to balance all of the quote unquote inviolable properties of Bitcoin.
We can never have extremely strong privacy on Bitcoin because it would probably violate the ability to audit the entire supply.
So as much as I would love to have, you know, like sort of Monero or even like zero knowledge level privacy on the base chain, that's probably not going to happen.
But, you know, I do expect we will see some second layers that have that. So what is Bitcoin missing?
I mean, the thing that I think that is missing the most is the holy grail that was promised to us in 2014, which is the permissionless two way pegging mechanism.
And the reason why I think that's important is that if we want to be able to have permissionless innovation, if we want people to be able to scale Bitcoin by creating other networks that are directly pegged to it, then they need to be able to do that without having to use the program.
Where the fuck is this gong coming from? I've been hearing it the whole episode. Who's gonging this shit?
What is that? Beck, what is that?
Is that you Becca? Do you have a fucking gong?
No, I don't have a gong. I win.
I don't hear any gongs. I heard him say something about pegging though and your face lit up, Greg.
Well, that was a phrasing joke right there. I mean, I was letting him run before we made any pegging.
You looked like you just saw Santa Claus.
I did. It was like a present in the middle of the stream.
Yeah, it was.
All right. Seriously, what the fuck's up with the gong?
It's all in your head.
Fair enough. All right. So we're not going to see privacy because the auditing function, but you want to see the privacy?
I mean, I would like to see privacy, but I've already given up on that. I don't think that's going to happen.
I mean, I think that's going to be a problem. I mean, I think that's going to be a problem.
I mean, I think that's going to be a problem.
I have a couple of questions around should we desire Bitcoin to be able to have a billion people doing self custody?
Right now, that would be problematic.
I mostly look at Bitcoin these days as a cryptographic accumulator, which means that like I said, it's a database, but we need to use it as efficiently as possible.
We need to enable basic building blocks for people to go do all the crazy high volume or riskier, you know,
touring complete shit on other networks, but still have it tied to Bitcoin.
And right now it's not clear how this is all going to turn out.
I do also somewhat worry about what happens to the protocol if it ossifies and then we go decades where everything's good and then something goes wrong.
And there's literally no Bitcoin developers around who have ever conducted a fork.
So it's more of like, you know, generational thinking of like, how do we keep the system going?
Because as robust as Bitcoin is, it still needs to be maintained.
You know, software that is not maintained inevitably gets worse and gets fragile and breaks.
This is something that I'll probably post a really long, boring, nerdy thesis about in a year or two.
But it's something that I really started appreciating a lot more when I started doing one of my projects a couple of years ago,
where I tried to go back and built and ran every version of Bitcoin Core that I could.
And I was able to go all the way back to, I think, version 0.3.6, but it started getting really hard.
And you had to start building the software in like really old virtual machines on old operating systems.
And the short version is like software development and software engineering as it is today, we stand upon the shoulders of giants.
It's amazing the leverage that we have as programmers and that there are so many other programmers out there
who have built a lot of these basic building blocks that you just say, I want to pull in this dependency and that dependency.
And I have a lot of functionality that I can use with just like calling a single function
without having to actually write all of the underlying logic.
But all of these dependencies are fucking trusted third parties.
And that means they can break and they do break.
And sometimes in adversarial conditions, they actually get taken over by malicious entities that inject malicious code into your dependencies.
But even aside from that, since I'm mostly just focusing on the fragility issue, it's that these dependencies, they're all very rigid.
And like, you know, this software library requires versions between this range of this software library.
And that software library only works with versions of this range.
And once you start to get to the point where you have complex software that has like hundreds, if not thousands of dependencies,
as all of those underlying dependencies and their libraries are worked on over time,
and those versions keep changing, the compatibility keeps changing,
it just becomes a fucking shit show to keep everything still working.
Because, and this all kind of comes back around to the ossification issue, is that you can ossify software like you can ossify a protocol,
you cannot ossify the rest of the world.
And that's when problems can arise.
Talking about devs and code, my question always, and I was always wondering why the ETH camp is more successful on onboarding new minds in coding
versus the Bitcoin Maxi side, and do you think it just like has to do with incentives?
And if that's so, can we do anything about it?
Can we have an automated kind of tool made that gives them incentives for coding as miners get their incentives for validating the next block?
I mean, I think a lot of it is around tooling and really the capabilities.
It seems to me like a lot of the people that come into building EVM related stuff, they're usually more like web developers,
they're coming in from more traditional, easy user interface and design type stuff.
Yeah, and so like the tooling that has been developed around Ethereum and like Solidity is a pretty easy language to read and write,
not to write securely, but it's easy to read and write to get like the happy case working.
That's what brings in the developer. It's probably the same thing with Solana, I don't really know enough about them,
but that seems to be like what they focused on, right?
And for Bitcoin, well also, Bitcoin's a UTXO model, so the account based stuff, that in and of itself simplifies a lot of just sort of dealing with the logical idea of a wallet.
But no, it seems like most of the Bitcoin stuff and even the tooling, it's just more hardcore.
It's a higher learning curve, like you have to be more dedicated.
It's generally not something that someone sort of jumps in as a weekend project and they're like,
"Oh, look, I have this new proof of concept."
Especially once you start getting to like layer two stuff, for example.
So I don't have a great solution for it.
I mean, we can look at other stuff though.
I mean, you could look at Rootstock. Rootstock is a Bitcoin merged mine side chain, but it also has EVM compatibility.
And you can actually use pretty much all of the EVM tools on Rootstock.
Why isn't Rootstock doing amazingly well?
There's a lot of different variables going on there.
And at least some of it I'm sure has to do with marketing, which is certainly not my forte.
Marketing.
And that's always the marketing.
Well, you've been super generous with your time this evening, Jameson.
We're getting to the end of our time.
And I want to make sure we've got time for Artie.
He had a special question he formulated for you this evening.
I want to make sure we get to it before he runs out of breath here.
He's been talking so much.
Thanks for coming on, Jameson, and being a good sport.
This is my question.
If the Meme Factory did exist, and we all know that it doesn't, which one of us would you like?
Which one of us would you retweet?
Which one of us would you mute?
And which one of us would you zap?
Ooh.
I would like Greg because he has some good questions.
You know, he seems to be running the show.
You hear that, everybody?
I haven't --
Greg's running the show.
That's scary.
Yeah.
I haven't even had the good opportunity to --
He's pointing to the quality.
Haven't even had a good chance to say "Fuck you, Greg," today.
So maybe next time.
I would retweet RD to appease your mean butthurt.
I would --
I'd probably have to mute Yellow because I can't even understand what the hell he's saying most of the time.
Yeah, but he likes my macro, macro, macro meme, man.
That was good.
That was good.
Yeah, just stick to one word and maybe we'll keep it legit.
And then I would definitely zap Becca because she's eating for two.
And she's the only one doing any actual work on this shit show, making the sandwiches.
She's not the only one eating for two, okay?
[Laughter]
Broke, you really missed an opportunity on that one.
What?
Yeah.
Exactly.
All right.
And --
Yes.
Want to pass it along to --
Did we get everybody?
Did we get a mute, a like, a retweet, and a zap?
All right, cool.
Yes.
Sean's turn.
So, Jamison, do you know what happens at block height 840,000?
Well, I've heard that you're having a party.
Yes, we are.
Yes, we are.
It is the having party.
Have you ever been to a having party before?
You've been around a while.
You know, I don't think I have.
You've never been to a having party.
That is a miss, because there are only about 30-some-odd havings that will ever exist in the history of the world.
And we are beginning to start to enjoy them and celebrate them.
And we're having a having party this April 30th through the 5th down in El Salvador.
Come on down.
It's going to be awesome.
Have you been down to El Salvador yet?
I have, indeed.
I was there, I think, a couple of years ago for the BitConf.
I got the presidential treatment, too.
Got a full bodyguard escort and everything.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Was it great?
Was that your bodyguard down there?
You know, it was actually -- it was pretty tricky, because they did not speak a word of English.
So we had to translate everything through WhatsApp.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
That is true.
There's not much English that's spoken down there.
So if you're going to come down, you've got to learn Spanish, which is easier for some and it's hard for others.
But come on down to Having Party 2024.
This is the first of many having parties that we will be throwing.
And you don't want to miss the first, because there's going to be a lot more, but only a limited amount, just like Bitcoin.
I'm taking the approach that enough people down there will be able to speak Spanish.
They'll be able to relay what I'm trying to get across.
Yeah, you just got to know like "baño," right?
That's a good one to know.
Yeah, "baño," "potato."
What's Spanish for potato?
Mucho hambre.
Mucho hambre.
That's right.
I'm very hungry.
That's very hungry, Greg.
Thank you.
The H is silent, Rope.
Come on.
Hambre.
Come on, man.
I'm going to step on my joke here.
Come on, Sean.
Jameson, I'd be remiss if I didn't give you an opportunity to show any product, services, or links you want to send out.
Anything you've got listed on Twitter will be in the show notes this evening.
And if you mention Ethereum, we'll get it.
Ha-ha!
Well, we have plenty of Bitcoin pages on casa.io.
C-A-S-A dot I-O.
You can learn all about our offerings there.
We've even got inheritance planning for those of you who are planning on dying soon.
Other than that, Bitcoin.page for my educational resources.
And I have a million different ways of contacting me on my website.
But I highly recommend that you just pay me in Bitcoin through my paid contact form.
All right.
Thank you, Jameson.
And we say thank you for everybody for joining us this evening.
We really appreciate you taking time out of your day to spend it with us.
Much of regards.
You bet.
So, everybody, be safe.
Have a good night.