all right guys bang bang super excited I have Jameson Lopp here to celebrate the
Bitcoin having the third having the historic moment calls for none other
than then one of my favorite people in Bitcoin and an OG in his own right so
thanks for doing this man happy having day yeah exactly for those that don't
know you let's just start with your background and kind of what you did
before you got into Bitcoin and then we'll get into those early days yeah I'm
a computer scientist by trade spent the first decade of my career actually
working for an online marketing company doing large-scale cloud computing data
analytics and actually stripping people's privacy away basically the
antithesis of what I try to promote these days so you know that provided some
interesting technical challenges but I was never really that interested in the
business and it just happened to come across the Bitcoin white paper a number
of years ago and once I read it I realized it was really fascinating from
a computer science standpoint from an economic standpoint and just the idea of
money as an open collaborative project was very interesting to me so started
doing some side projects in the Bitcoin space and after a couple of years
realized there was enough VC money that I could just get paid to continue working
on Bitcoin full-time so I've been doing Bitcoin security for five years now both
at an enterprise setting with BitGo and for the past couple of years for
individuals at Casa yeah and so I guess let's go back to the first time you read
the Bitcoin white paper like how did you come across it and what was your
initial thought were you just immediately like hey this is the future
or were you skeptical how did that go down no you know there's a longer story
there and it's the same thing that we hear with a lot of people is I'll never
actually remember the first time I heard about Bitcoin because I dismissed it
three or four times before I actually read about it and realized what an
innovative new solution this was because really I had never thought about money
before I'd never thought about who controls these systems and it wasn't
until probably the third or fourth time I think it was a slash dot article that
I finally clicked on that link I finally read the white paper and it was only
like eight or nine pages it's it's not as difficult a technical read as most
white papers are so I would definitely recommend everyone read it but when I
read that I realized you know this was solving a problem that I had never even
thought about before and it was just really interesting I felt like this had
the potential to be revolutionary though of course this was the very early days
there was a lot of work that needed to be done and so that was just the
beginning of my journey and we're still in the early days and there's still a
lot of work to be done for sure and then what kind of gave you the
confidence right there's a lot of people who will they'll read the white paper
they'll talk to a friend and it's like hey this is interesting but it's super
speculative and maybe I want to you know take kind of 1% of all the money that I
have and I'll see what it's about and put a little money in you me many
others have I think become much larger believers than that and made kind of a
bigger financial bet on that actually being the future what gave you the
confidence of that in the early days and then kind of how did you think about
moving from a fiat denominated majority world to a Bitcoin world yeah I mean it
was a long process you know when I first got into it I only put a little bit of
money in just because I figured I need to actually have some in order to play
with it in order to better understand how it works it wasn't until two or
three years later after I had multiple projects and I had been using it on a
regular basis that I actually decided that this was something that even though
it was risky I actually wanted to make a large financial commitment and that's
when I went to the trouble of figuring out how to turn my retirement money into
a self-directed IRA so that I could hold real Bitcoin in a tax-advantaged
account and you know that ended up it was it was a crazy idea at the time you
know this was like right after the Mt. Gox crash and everybody was telling me
how insane I was and it ended up being a good financial bet but really my
understanding of the system has continued to evolve every year you know
as new things happen and every new thing that happens every event that Bitcoin
overcomes just strengthens my belief in the resilience of the system and
ultimately it's less about the technical aspects and more about the the human
underpinning of all of the people like myself who were just frankly not going
to give up on this we're not going to let it die and that's kind of the mantra
that I've come to believe is that you know Bitcoin can't fail unless there is
a consensus amongst all of us to allow it to fail
yeah it's um it's this nuanced version I think a lot of people when they see a
product or service they evaluate the technical merits they evaluate the cash
flow kind of all everything you would do with a traditional product money in
general is very different and it goes back to this idea that money is a
belief system right I don't care what the technological and underpinning is
whether it's the US dollar or any other currency in the world it is ultimately a
belief system and when you get that belief the only way to have that money
fail is when people stop believing right we see that in the fiat world all the
time where hyperinflation kind of breaks the belief of people that it's a store
of value and it fails it sounds like you're saying the same thing here it's
just with a digital currency called Bitcoin rather than any other currency
in the world yeah it's great though the the having event that's happening today
while I don't believe that in and of itself this is a major economic or
financial catalyst what it is is evidence that the rules of the network
of the protocol are known by everyone cannot be manipulated by anyone and
will continue to be predictable and provide a robust foundation that we can
build other things on top of yeah now you have a I think a number of nuanced
views around Bitcoin around privacy and kind of the digital world some of that
my understanding is just ethos driven right you like you just believe these
things some of it though comes from personal experience one of those things
is the now infamous swatting story maybe just kind of for those that don't know
that story quickly tell what happened there and then we can get into some of
the things that you've done in your life and lifestyle to change and kind of
prevent yourself from this weird digital world that it's coming yeah you know one
of the more insane things about this space is how quickly it grows and how a
dynamic it is how how many things change both from a security perspective and a
just sort of day-to-day I guess level of interest and people who are paying
attention to you and it was really was the attention and it was the the mania
of the 2017 hype that drastically changed my life not really so much from
the monetary standpoint but more of just going from being some nobody software
coder who randomly blathers about libertarian stuff and cryptocurrency on
Twitter to a guy who has you know six figures of followers on Twitter and that
is really no different from what happens to people who become overnight like
viral sensations or win the lottery or whatever it's just that your your threat
profile can change so quickly in this space and that may be because you're
outspoken on social media and have a viral effect there it may be because you
know your wealth goes 10 X or 50 X overnight and people knew about that
because you had been talking about it and so all of a sudden I start getting
attacked in ways that I haven't before and and the thing about the swatting it
only takes one person who knows how to make an anonymous phone call and do some
simple online searches to find your physical location to basically target
you and send you know nation-state level attackers to your door who are ready to
commit violence and and so that's what happened to me I basically caught the
attention of the wrong person and they decided that I had been in Bitcoin for
a while and I could probably be extorted for Bitcoin and that if they started
attacking me in different ways that they could scare me enough to try to buy them
off and that didn't quite work in fact I the they were extorting me for about
$50,000 and I ended up spending about that much to completely burn down my
life and started all over again from a privacy perspective so it was definitely
a learning experience I've written a lot about it and I've discovered how
difficult it really is to live on the edge of extreme privacy and the odd
thing is that at least in America this is feasible if you have the time and
money but in many other countries it's just not legally possible to protect
yourself in the way that you can with various like legal entities in the
United States yeah and you know when you first told me the swatting story I think
part of what was so scary about it is when you put yourself in the perspective
of the police right when when they're actually showing up they have no clue
what's going on they have no context all they know is they got this anonymous
call there's a dangerous situation and you actually weren't home if I remember
correctly and so you kind of showed up and was like hey what's going on which
which you know I'm sure confused them just as much as as them already kind of
being in this heightened state of panic and so ultimately just scary right yeah
that was the only thing that went right was that whenever I make like public
comments about things that might somehow be tied to my location I usually do so
in a delayed fashion and so my best guess is that that morning I got up I
went to the gym and when I was at the gym I made a tweet about waking up and
having to deal with stuff with the current drama on Twitter and it was
within 30 minutes of that tweet that the SWAT team showed up at my house as I was
trying to come back into my neighborhood so I couldn't get into my own
neighborhood because they had cordoned it all off and it took a few minutes to
figure out that they were looking for me I was the armed assailant that they were
trying to track down so I was lucky that you know my local police department had
done enough research that they realized that the phone call was not coming from
my house or even from my state so they somewhat knew that it was possibly fake
but of course like you said they have to treat every situation like it's life or
death and that is one of the crazy things about this asymmetric attack where
someone can spend a few dollars to make an anonymous phone call and get
$100,000 worth of taxpayer resources pointed at an arbitrary target that's
just the crazy thing about this space in general is how asymmetric some of the
attacks and defenses are but I'm also very bullish on it because I believe
with the technology applying it correctly we can actually give people a
level of security that they wouldn't ever be able to afford before for their
assets yeah and so obviously that event was was pretty material and you know one
that just a scary experience but two it puts you on this path to completely you
know change your life in the way that you interacted both digitally and then
also with various assets or communication maybe talk a little bit
about kind of what that path's been like and then describe like what your life
looks like now compared to then yeah so I basically had to figure out you know
what are all of the different trails of data that you leave laying around as
you're going about your normal life setting up various accounts and
services buying things and essentially I had to figure out how do I plug all of
these data leaks because this is the particularly challenging thing about
privacy is you know keeping the data from getting to people that you don't
want it to and so essentially I had to figure out how to create shields how to
create proxies and I did this in a variety of different ways I created
technical proxies you know VPNs and Tor for all of my internet traffic I created
legal proxies through attorneys through trusts through anonymous LLCs that did
not have my name listed on them as the owner and then I use proxies for a
number of different things like receiving and sending physical goods you
know I have other mailboxes set up around the country to receive physical
mail and whenever possible use third-party people you know hired
proxies to avoid having to do any sort of like face-to-face interaction with
people who would otherwise potentially ask for my real identity so it's it makes
your life a lot complicated that's for sure and it's not it's not free from
either a time or a money perspective you if I remember correctly hired like a
private investigator to basically double-check your work if you will what
was that like yeah first of all it took me a while to find what I was looking
for you know normally you hire PIs to go after other people who owe you money or
somehow harmed you and so it was pretty rare you know to ask someone to find
yourself but it worked out pretty well and it allowed me to find a couple of
leaks which you know resulted in me taking more drastic action the most
drastic actually being around my driver license and having to set up another
sort of decoy residence and really like the DMV is one of the most aggressive
institutions in America when it comes to like verifying your information so in
order to make sure that my real regular home address didn't show up anywhere I
had to make sure I had a decoy somewhere else that is a real place and of course
it's not cheap to do that yeah I feel like when you get deeper and deeper down
this rabbit hole the more you realize there's a trade-off between privacy and
convenience after everything you went through is that the biggest hurdle for
other people to do this just the convenience and kind of the capital
needed or is it a knowledge gap like why doesn't everyone go do this yeah so it
adds friction to many points of your daily life to do this before I did it
there wasn't even really a great singular resource that covered all the
different aspects of your life as of today about a year after I went through
all this this anonymous privacy expert called Michael Basil came out with a
book called I think the ultimate guide to privacy it's on Amazon highly
recommend it has everything that I did and more so it's certainly possible but
once again that's like a three or four hundred page book with a lot of step by
step instructions for what you need to go through now the initial onboarding
part if you're first of all you have to be willing to pretty much completely
burn down your life several ties with your current physical addresses and
start over again and so you'll easily spend several months doing that but
once you get through that I would say the ongoing maintenance is not nearly as
bad and where do you feel like the greatest friction is on a day-to-day
basis is it receiving mail is it not going to see people in person like where
is that obstacle yeah I mean it comes down to how far you really want to take
it so for me I moved to a different location where no one knew who I was and
I actually created an alias so no one around here knows my real name no one
knows what I do that's mainly because I wanted to push it to the extreme just to
see if it would work you know see if I would be able to to hide myself in that
way but there are different levels of this right you don't need to go to the
extreme that I did I think that most people would be far better off if they
simply do a weekend of improving their technical privacy and figuring out how
to set up ad blockers and VPNs and just obscuring their day-to-day web traffic
yeah now this brings us to the question of privacy and kind of sovereignty around
Bitcoin you are probably one of the biggest proponents of this mostly
because of the other things you've done in your life let's just start from a
high level like what does it mean to have financial privacy and mean to have
financial sovereignty yeah they kind of go hand-in-hand you know if you want to
be sovereign you want to be able to make payments send money without having to
ask permission then that means you can't have any middlemen that are sitting in
there watching everything that you do and then potentially blocking what
you're doing the privacy aspect I mean privacy and security are both both very
complicated things to quantify because there's a million different variables
and you have to usually start at the beginning and say well what is your
threat model what are you trying to protect yourself against because that's
how you then decide what precautions you really need to take the big problem you
know with the communication age and where we are today with the internet is
that people on a regular basis pretty much every day are sending their
personal and in many cases private financial information to a number of
different third parties and so over time that just keeps building up and building
up and each time you give sensitive information to a third party you're
hoping and trusting that they will keep that secure so over years and years that
you've interacted with thousands or tens of thousands of different third parties
then the likelihood that one of them is going to get hacked is going to leak
that information basically you know approaches one 100% and so that is why
that's the hard part is preventing that information from leaking in the first
place and why I've gone to the extreme of having you know proxy fake information
that I give to all of these third parties instead and you know you don't
have to go to the extreme of setting up all these different legal entities there
are services out there like privacy comm or you can create unique throwaway
debit cards that give you an extra layer of shielding between your regular bank
account and the merchants for example but you know these are all things that
are covered in the resources yeah and so I guess as part of this when people hear
you say fake information how much of this is hard to do but legal versus not
legal but worth the privacy right and legal really what I'm trying to get at
is to have you clarify how much of this can be done by a regular individual
who's not worried about or who has no desire to even come close to kind of
skirting the law if you will versus what like hey I literally just put a fake
address on you know piece of on a document and if they ever found out that
I would get in trouble yeah you know this is probably one of the most
unnerving aspects of it is you know people are generally they want to be
honest they don't want to get in trouble for lying and I think that it's actually
covered pretty well in the privacy book that I mentioned where at least in
America and you know I'm not a lawyer so don't check with your own attorney again
I've spent a lot of time and money on attorneys myself with all of this at
least in America if you're not signing a legal contract or a legal document or
you're not engaging in some sort of activity with a government agency then
you can absolutely lie about your name and your identity like it's not a crime
to give a false name or information unless it's to you know certain official
authorities or you know something in the legal sense but to a merchant it is
completely valid to give a fake name and an address that may not even exist and
in some cases if you get to the extreme of all of this and you think you've
improved your privacy sufficiently then like the final step is actually
disinformation it's actually putting your real name and many fake addresses
out into the internet and hoping that they get sucked up by all of these
information engines to then create a smoke screen that makes it almost
impossible for someone to figure out you know what is the real information the
alias that you're using don't tell me what it is obviously but I would love to
know is it a ridiculous name or is it a very common name and the reason being
I've got to imagine that you're having some fun with some of this and and
there's this element of it's serious but also there's a little bit of a game
aspect to it too right yeah no no very common and and that's another thing
about you know aliases is you want to pick one that will not create any
suspicion it needs to be common based upon your local area and customs and
culture and your own background so no no make lovin type name no all right let's
get into the custody so obviously maybe talk a little bit just about not your
keys not your coin what that means to you and we can get into what you guys
doing at casa yeah so you know Bitcoin is an asset of a form that we've never
really seen before it has properties of many different assets you could say it's
some sort of hybrid of all of these things but it definitely seems to be
unique in the specific set of properties that it has now one of those properties
is that it is a it is a custody like asset it's a hard asset that you
yourself can control similar to physical things like gold precious metals
diamonds what have you it happens to also have these other asset attributes
that are mainly because it has digital properties so you know you can send it
for example over the internet at practically the speed of light but the
ownership asset is a very important attribute for people to understand
because of the way that all these other digital online accounts work today most
people are they're used to just going to their bank or PayPal or some other
third-party financial service and logging in and doing whatever they need
there and and it's done but if you're for example going to an exchange or some
other provider that is a like Bitcoin service and you're just logging in and
instructing them to do things then what you've done is you've entered into a
bank like relationship where you're not actually directly controlling that money
you're not actually controlling that Bitcoin you're instructing a third
party who actually controls it to please do these things on your behalf so
essentially you don't own Bitcoin from a control standpoint you own IOUs to
Bitcoin that someone else actually controls and I think it's important for
people to understand this distinction because of the way that the system itself
operates you know we've created financial infrastructure over the past
hundred years that has resulted in a fairly small number of large
institutions essentially controlling everything we've got these intermediaries
that are watching all of our transactions and you know they're doing
it for our own good right so they're they're trying to protect us from fraud
they're trying to protect illegal activity from happening to people but
ultimately it's a double-edged sword is that they may also end up harming people
by blocking various transactions that are not actually causing harm and you
know this is where you get into legal gray areas for example around like the
sex industry or the legal cannabis industry etc etc there's plenty of other
examples but one of the biggest features of Bitcoin is censorship resistance it
is the removal of intermediaries who can block you there's a famous quote I think
it's generally that Bitcoin is for the payments that they don't want you to
make and you know this is I think in the history of Bitcoin that the first thing
that really proved its censorship resistance was the rise of Silk Road and
darknet markets and while that is as of today a very small fraction of the
crypto economy they still continue to exist and you can't stop people from
making these payments regardless of whether or not a government agrees with
it or not and so if we want Bitcoin to really fulfill that promise if we want
people to be able to reduce the power of what these intermediaries can do then we
need to take the power away from them and you know pull it into the hands of
the individuals and so that's why I want to continue to see more people you know
remove their coins from exchanges and and hold their own private keys but you
know this it it makes a lot of people nervous because they've never done
anything like it before there's a million different pitfalls of ways that
people can screw up and potentially lose their money and so this is why for the
past five years I've I've continued to be focused on the same boring old thing
which is just private key management is this fundamental usability layer that I
think we need to continue working on in the space and it's what led me to found
Casa a couple of years ago and I think we've done a great job making strides
forward in there and unfortunately that's mainly due to very hard lessons
that we and others have learned over the years of cataloging everything that you
might accidentally do wrong and every way that you might actually accidentally
be tricked into giving your your keys your money to someone else yeah and so
maybe talk a little bit about you know really the mission behind Casa and then
describe some of the products you guys have built so I think a lot of people
think of it as it's a company that has a product but you guys actually have
multiple products that serve different use cases yeah I mean our mantra all
along has been that we are a personal sovereignty company we are trying to
build software that helps people help themselves one of our our employees it
recently started trying to propagate a new thing where he wants us to say at
Casa we're all about holding your hands not holding your keys so you know we are
non-custodial we do hold one out of a set of keys for emergency recovery
backup purposes and that is mainly to have to help people who might shoot
themselves in the foot be able to recover from what could otherwise be a
catastrophic scenario but our primary thing that we've been focused on for the
past couple of years is self-custody it's how do we take this enormous problem
space of everything that could possibly go wrong if you are controlling your own
private keys and build a user interface you know abstraction layer on top of it
that makes it as easy to use as a mobile app you know like Facebook or whatever
so that's really what we've built is we've built a mobile app that is very
easy to follow the instructions of how to set up and manage your keys and
we've gotten rid of complex things like having to actually take seed phrases and
write them down and figure out how to secure them against physical loss and
physical theft and instead we're leveraging other technology that other
companies have built these hardware devices like Trezor or Ledger or Cold
Card and so on to actually maintain the integrity of those keys but really the
most important thing that we've done is we've made multi-sig easier and what is
multi-sig it basically means that in order to send your money you have to
have multiple signatures you know multiple authorizations with
cryptographic attestation that it's okay to send this money and this is part of
the Bitcoin protocol very standard thing we're not rolling our own crazy setup or
anything and by having these multiple devices that are holding the multiple
keys and then distributing those around different geographic areas it gives you
this level of robustness that eliminates every single point of failure so I
actually truly believe that with you know the advent of cryptography and
these devices and a properly robust architected setup you can actually do
far better than what Bitcoin has promised for many years which is to be
your own bank I actually believe we can move beyond that we can be better than
our own bank because we can create setups that are more distributed and not
prone to single points of failure like a physical bank would be and so when a lot
of people here secure your own keys multi-sig like these I think are scary
kind of what appear to be technical terminology and they're thinking oh my
god I'm gonna have to go read like this technical guidebook and it's gonna be
500 pages and I'm not technical so I just can't figure it out you guys
obviously have built something that makes that much easier but maybe just
for those that don't understand what exactly is a key right and kind of how
does that play into this because I think they hear a lot they see obviously you
know not your keys not your coin but it's not a physical key obviously so
maybe kind of explain that a little bit as well yeah you know it's it's not a
physical key but we've actually found that by taking these digital keys and
you know getting rid of the need for people to actually manage the raw
information those seed phrases that are used to create all of the cryptographic
keys we actually pull it back into the physical realm we say okay you're just
keeping your keys on this device and you can very easily visualize you know where
is this device we actually show you know a visualization in the app that says you
know this is your whole set of devices and and we give you reminders to you
know make sure you check on this one and you perform an integrity check so that
we know everything is going well but ultimately the best way to think about
Bitcoin is that you're you're not just accessing this ledger with everybody's
money on it rather when you're creating a Bitcoin transaction you are creating
inputs where you're cryptographically signing proof that you own you
know the values in the ledger and then you're sending them to outputs and the
outputs they have scripts that are essentially locking them it says these
are the conditions required in order for the money in in this particular Bitcoin
structure to be spent and there's a million different things that you can do
with the programming language but what we're doing is very simple which is
we're creating a script that says these are the three different keys that are
allowed to sign to spend from this particular Bitcoin structure and you
need two of them in order for the network to accept it or we also have a
three out of five or a three out of six it really depends on your level of
security and so then it becomes a lot easier for us to say okay we know that
these are the devices that are necessary to co-sign a transaction now we just
need to figure out how are we going to distribute these devices in order to
have the best you know physical redundancy and security where do you go
from here right it's I think a lot of people would say hey it's really cool
you guys have built so far when you look out over the next one to five years like
what else do you guys have ambitions to build and kind of what do you think is
possible so one thing that I think not many people in the space have thought
through yet is inheritance and we've spent nearly a year building out a full
inheritance product and plan that actually works within the regular estate
planning process so you don't have to roll your own that was actually
something that I did back and I think 2015 or 2016 I went through creating a
last will and testament even though I had no one really to leave it to is I
just wanted to make sure that my coins didn't disappear and stay locked up
forever so there's a lot of complications around that other even game
theory for example ultimately we want to see Bitcoin continue to be used by more
and more people so you know we have dabbled a bit with lightning network
we're I'm sure gonna see more types of payment technology come into play who
knows what may end up being built on a variety of side chains for example and
how how can we plug those in but for today we've found that like the most
important aspect to work on is helping people secure large amounts of wealth
you know if they've ended up with a significant portion of their net worth
in Bitcoin how can we help protect that because if everybody is losing their
money left and right then that is gonna erode confidence perhaps not in the
fundamental protocol but in the ability for the system itself to gain mass
adoption and we are also in a way competing against this looming threat of
the centralized providers where I know a lot of people are leaving their money on
their exchanges simply because they feel like it's better to have it with a team
of experts than to take on that responsibility for themselves I think
that this is a larger issue of us needing to start to you know move society
in the direction of self-reliance and self-responsibility but in order to do
that we need to lower the bar we can't require people to spend weeks or months
learning all this technical jargon and thinking through all the edge cases and
the security setup so there's still plenty to do there hopefully we don't
have to learn many more hard lessons unfortunately I think that as long as
large amounts of Bitcoin are stored with third parties there will be more hard
lessons to be learned yeah it's um it's really interesting I think because
there's an ethos driven kind of psychological component to this and then
they're actually executing it right and you guys have done a really good job of
putting in that position one of the questions that I got from people when I
asked on Twitter before we did this was what is something that you believed in
the early days that you have softened your stance on so something that you
believed you know very strongly and now either maybe have changed your mind or
softened your stance well I was and many people often forget this but I was
actually a big blocker back in the day I I thought that you know one of the
premises of Bitcoin should be that transactions should be cheap and it
wasn't until I actually started working in the space and started having to run
a lot of Bitcoin nodes that were then being used by infrastructure that I
realized it's not just about the current transaction throughput it is about the
aggregate you know amount of data that the entire blockchain is storing and if
you allow that to accelerate then it becomes you know geometrically if not
exponentially more difficult for a newcomer to come in and validate the
entire history and be able to set up their own node and infrastructure so one
of the the issues that I ended up having was with people who were only focused on
you know what is the hardware that is capable with you know keeping up with
the current volume of transaction like how many transactions per second can we
do that the hardware can keep up with basically nobody was ever thinking about
well yeah but how long does it take to sync from scratch and so you know that's
actually one of the projects that I do on an annual basis is I resync a whole
bunch of nodes not only for Bitcoin but also for other popular networks just to
compare to see like which ones are becoming easier to audit and which ones
are becoming more difficult to audit speaking of other chains there was I
think every shit coiner and every intellectually honest person in the
comments of my question asking we know that he's very bullish and has a
deep-seated belief in Bitcoin is there any other projects in this space that
either one you're curious about think are interesting or maybe even are kind
of a big believer yeah so I am I'm interested in anything that promises
better privacy so I'm interested in things like Monero Z cash grin you know
any insanely out there new like cryptographic primitives that people are
playing around with these are often far too experimental for us to imagine them
being brought on to Bitcoin anytime soon but I would say that the thing that I
find least interesting are the the various networks that claim to be like
infinitely scalable with free transactions I think that that is not
being intellectually honest because someone has to pay for it ultimately
it's the infrastructure providers ultimately you end up you know
centralizing around a smaller and smaller number of them I think a good
example of that would probably be EOS which I believe only has like a few
dozen validators and I actually tried to set up an EOS validator just to see
and like it was too difficult even for my beefy machine so it's interesting to
see the trade-offs that certain people are willing to make and you know even if
you only have a few dozen nodes or whatever on the network you know you can
run it it'll it'll probably be fine but the trade-offs are not something that I
think the majority of people are going to be willing to accept for sure what do
you think the biggest risk to Bitcoin adoption is well that has been an easy
one for a long time and it's just simple apathy this is where it gets really
complicated because there's such a diversity of people out there and I I
actually think that well I might be changing my mind a little bit because of
the current macro environment but for a long time I felt like trying to sell
first-world citizens on the idea of Bitcoin was almost a lost cause unless
they were hardcore libertarian or Austrian you know economics follower
because the the current financial system works pretty well for most people in
their own perspective now people with different perspectives people in
countries with hyperinflations you don't even have to sell them on Bitcoin at
all you just tell them you know the supply is capped at 21 million and
they're sold at that point because they understand they've had to live through
it now the real question which I find interesting to be happening you know
right during this having period is how many people in the first world countries
start to wake up and realize that you know their wealth is actually being
stolen from them a little little by little year over year and eventually over
their lifetime it'll add up to be a significant fraction of value that has
been taken from them and I would say an even more subversive way than taxation
it's like a form of taxation that is very difficult for people to even detect
because it happens over a long period of time it I've said a bunch of times
before that the financial system is based on 50% or more not understanding
how money works right right it's very much a you can call it a secret right you
I mean call it whatever you want but ultimately not only is taxation but it's
taxation without people even realizing it right and actually people who get hit
the hardest by it but people who live in cash definitely don't understand it
right what um you're a big gun nut which I appreciate having grown up in in North
Carolina what is your favorite gun and why um well my favorite one that I own
which I think is quite versatile and also my recommendation for home defense
is a suppressed 45 caliber Chris vector with an extended 30 round magazine this
is a subsonic rounds with the suppressor on there it's great for home defense
because you aren't going to deafen yourself and potentially create an even
worse situation if you're not able to tell you know where attackers are in
your house it was actually funny story I bought it on the recommendation of John
McAfee's bodyguard so I was hanging out with McAfee a few years ago on a sort
of business related venture and I was shooting the shit with his bodyguard for
a while and all and we started talking guns and you know after 20 minutes of
talking guns he was like oh man you got to get a Chris vector and so I did and
it was some of the best firearm advice I've received how often do you go
practice are you somebody who who does a lot of drills and goes to shoot quite a
bit or or not so much not as often as I've wanted to lately you know running a
company makes it a lot harder and in fact the weird thing is you know I've
gotten into virtual reality over the past couple of years and even though
it's not quite the same experience it's so much more convenient for me to walk
over one room and pull up a gun range in virtual reality I don't have to pack up
all my guns and ammo schlep them over to a range fire everything and then come
back and disassemble everything and clean it so you know I really only get
to do that every few months at this point it's also much cheaper to go do it
in virtual reality right for sure what is your thoughts around the China hash
rate there's a lot of detractors that would say hey there's so much hash rate
of Bitcoin that's in China how do you kind of think through that yeah I mean
it's not optimal if we're thinking about nation-state level attacks but even
within China the actual mining farms are highly distributed and my
understanding is a number of them are you know really like out in the middle
of nowhere like jungle locations you know basically directly plugged into a
hydroelectric dam so it would be an interesting thought experiment to think
through you know how much resources would really have to be committed by
the Chinese government in order to go in and take these things over and use them
for malicious purpose and you know if they did and they would then need to do
so at their own detriment you know the whole point of the incentives around
mining is that it's more profitable to go along with the network and get paid
by the network than it is to attack the network but you know assume China has
infinite money and for whatever reason they need to kill Bitcoin the worst that
they could really do is either double spend the money that they already have
in Bitcoin or simply perform a denial of service attack where they stop
confirming transactions and then reorganize away any blocks from other
miners who do confirm transactions so with either one of those it would be
apparent to the rest of us within you know a matter of a few blocks and and so
there would be essentially an emergency situation you know flag would go up
amongst a lot of people like myself and we would come together and we would have
to analyze the situation and if we determined that it looked like it was a
you know Chinese nation-state led attack that was actually going against the
incentives of the network then we would need to figure out you know what is the
best way to respond to this is it something that we believe would be able
to go on indefinitely or should we wait it out or should we propose some sort of
code change that essentially neuters the existing hashing hardware yeah it's
crazy to go down that game theory route we don't have time to do that today but
I could talk to you about that for days and days one of the questions that I got
that I thought was really interesting was what is your suggestion or where can
you point people who they bought crypto on a KYC or AML exchange they've now
moved that off into a hardware wallet or cost of device but they would like to
try to reinstate some of that privacy what's the best thing that they can look
at or where can they go educate themselves on how to reestablish some of
that privacy yes so this is not the type of thing that is easy as just flipping a
switch and doing it all at once because there's a variety of different methods
and it really comes down to do you want to stay on the existing network and try
to improve the privacy of your UTXOs your bitcoins on on that network are you
willing to pay a small exchange fee to exchange to a more privacy oriented coin
and move some money around there it I think it basically comes down to how
much time are you willing to put into it how much in fees are you willing to put
into it I've played around with for example trying to be a market maker on
joint market to actually get paid to mix coins and unfortunately I barely broke
even with like paying for the transaction of fees but that is one way
that you can do it that will not cost you much money the the problem in
general that I have with the various techniques that you need to improve
privacy is that you have to take your coins out of cold storage if you're
doing mixing you need to put them into some sort of mixing software like join
market or wasabi or samurai dojo and those coins need to be hot they need to
be on an internet connected device potentially for days depending on how
many rounds of mixing you're doing so you should if you have a large amount of
money you should only be doing a little bit of it at a time and then moving
those funds off to a new wallet which is your cleanly fresh coins otherwise you
can also go out and try to find one of those non AML KYC like atomic swap
exchanges exchange your Bitcoin a little bit of a at a time for something like
Monero Z cash whatever possibly move it around a little bit on there and then
maybe eventually you also want to atomic swap it back but ultimately what you're
trying to do is you're trying to break those links and it's hard to do that if
you're not technically sophisticated will that change over time I certainly hope
so especially with like the next major upgrade that we're gonna be getting when
we see snore signatures which will essentially allow for signature
aggregation to happen that will drastically improve the privacy
attributes of Bitcoin mixers and actually another thing which I'm I'm
still not quite sure about but for example there is the liquid side chain
and it has a feature called confidential transactions and it seems to me like
someone should build a mixer on liquid that is a confidential transaction mixer
so I don't know why anyone wouldn't do that maybe we just need to properly
incentivize people three questions to end it for you what would have to happen
for you to change your mind on Bitcoin like what is the one or two things that
could occur where you would throw your hands up and say this isn't gonna play
out how I thought or I no longer believe in Bitcoin hmm that is tough I mean
there are scenarios where you know if if enough like government resources were
put into it to try to like track down everyone who was using Bitcoin you know
perhaps by putting pressure on all the exchanges you know if if it was outright
banned that would certainly turn most people off to it I think it would still
continue to exist it would still operate but probably at a much lower price
because the size of the network would shrink and it would it would be you know
a completely different adversarial situation especially for me because I'm
well known and even though I have a great level of privacy like government
could find me if they really wanted to otherwise I think it's it's unlikely that
there would be a catastrophic event that was not recoverable from like even
though there are many potentially catastrophic events like you know
quantum computing or breaking of important cryptographic primitives like
those things would most likely be catastrophic for many other systems
that are much larger than Bitcoin and so that would be more of a like worldwide
global catastrophe type of issue of people having bigger problems to worry
about but other than that like I really I continue to think that the most likely
way for Bitcoin to die is through apathy and you know if it stagnates for years
on end and you know people stop contributing to it stop trying to make
it better that's when it becomes a lot less interesting is that if I look at
this thing as you know the open source collaborative project for money then the
most important thing that we can continue to do is to continue to improve
it so that it becomes better and better option than the existing fiat system
let's hope we never see any of those things happen what what's the most
important book you've ever read I mean we have a few that are required reading
at Casa and one of them is the sovereign individual and I continue to think that
it's quite prescient and I I see it happening in the news you know all the
time where it seems like we're in the days right now where you basically have
to be a billionaire to be a sovereign individual and have you know the nation
state level sway you know you're at the point where you can negotiate with
nation states essentially on a fairly level playing field but I do continue to
believe that technology and you know the power that cryptography gives to people
will continue to lower that bar that would be a fantastic role to live in I
have really really hope you're right there last question before you get to
ask me one to finish up aliens believer or non-believer oh yeah I mean it's a
statistically practically guaranteed why well you know it's hard to even hold
the numbers in your head but the sheer number of possibilities and and number
of other ecosystems out there that are similar to ours and thus likely have
life it's just you know with if it's kind of like mining right is if you try
enough times eventually you'll find that impossible number to find so I think
you'll find the impossibly right mixture of chemicals and other elements required
to create life it's scary to think about how big the universe is just the unit
right like and then you get into other galaxies and kind of the infinity type
stuff and it's just like Jesus what that like I don't know it makes your stomach
drop sometimes I think about it what um what one question do you have for me to
finish this up good question so am I correct is your is your background in
marketing no growth yeah growth stuff for sure I ran a couple of growth teams
at a at Facebook and Snapchat okay so would you would you say that you're
applying your same type of growth mindset to Bitcoin to some degree I
would say so two things that I think are true one the beauty of money is it's one
of the most viral products in the world right and if I want to send somebody
Bitcoin I pull them into the network if they're not already there right and so
that ends up being a very similar tactic to what a lot of companies try to create
with virality money just inherently has that and then two is education is always
a big thing awareness is a big thing right and there's no bigger awareness or
education campaign than what's going on right now in the macro environment right
I mean look you know I love the saying of like the Federal Reserve running a
two trillion dollar marketing campaign for Bitcoin right and so I think a lot
of that stuff looks very similar to how a company would set up marketing and
virality referrals all that kind of stuff obviously but it's a decentralized
system that nobody's you know kind of coordinating resources to do that the
second piece of it is that I really think about the growth things that we
did and kind of how can I individually participate and one of those things is
around pulling people from other communities or audiences into Bitcoin
right and so one of the things I did about maybe six months ago or so I
decided hey I'm gonna change the name on a lot of what I was doing to be less
Bitcoin or crypto specific and do more of like I want to talk to interesting
people I want to write about things other than just Bitcoin and there was
questions in the beginning of like hey are you like abandoning Bitcoin or like
do you not believe in it anymore there's no actually is the exact opposite like I
believe in it more today than I ever have but I also know that if I was to
personally take the podcast for example if I was to approach somebody and say do
you want to come on my crypto podcast there's a lot of people who say yes but
there's even more people who would say no if instead I say hey do you want to
come on this podcast that has a bunch of other smart successful people that you
admire and one of the questions may be about Bitcoin not as big of a deal
right they're much more open to that so that's been interesting and the other
thing is on like the investing side that entire business like we've always looked
at it as where's the intersection of like traditional technology infrastructure
and this world right so obviously we've got a pretty significant position in
Bitcoin itself in the funds but also like what are all the things that need
to be built in and around to make this viable right and I think that there's a
lot of opportunities there and so it's you're kind of providing growth with
capital but ultimately you know I tell everyone of our founders like they're
doing the hard work right it's you know they're the ones who actually have to
solve the technical problems they're the ones who have to recruit and retain
employees they're the ones who have to actually scale the businesses get
contracts signed kind of do all that stuff and you know look some of it is
it's gonna be hard no matter what industry you're operating in as an
entrepreneur but some of this stuff is very kind of specific whether it's
regulatory or otherwise that just makes it harder in this space I think so final
related question since I believe you're the originator or at least popularize
the meme of the virus is spreading is Bitcoin the virus or is it the vaccine
so I don't actually remember why I originally tweeted that and I think it
was kind of like a throwaway comment at first and for whatever reason like
people like latched on to it sounds like yeah like feedback loop cool I'll tweet
that again right and the next you know I tweeted a bunch of times for obvious
reasons that race has been retired from time being I was recently asked do I
think it has to be retired forever or can it make a comeback probably retired
forever at least for the foreseeable future but but I think that you know I
didn't know this it was Marco Santori actually told me this in the early days
of Bitcoin like 2011 to 13 there was this comment around like a mind virus
right and so when I when I first heard saying it I was thinking more like
virality right kind of the way virus spreads he said that actually people
had used the terminology mind virus which I thought was pretty applicable but
that's how kind of like offensively it spreads through the world I think to
your point like when you look at it as as a solution it's definitely the
vaccine right and it can be both it can be everything yeah and I think that's
part of like people who don't haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this
they're kind of like what do you guys mean it could be everything like you
know how come you can apply Bitcoin to all things and Marty Bent has a great
way of putting it he's like look if you fix the money you can fix the world
right and I just think like that phrase really explains a lot of why it's so
important to the global economy but also to kind of everybody's individual lives
and lifestyles and so it's a it's a pretty important you know thing to work
on I think people like yourself and others who you know are actually
technically helping build it I always say like you're the most important
people out there and also probably if Bitcoin was to fail I actually go with
like somehow there's a self-inflicted wound like something gets pushed or
there's some issue whatever I don't think there's a high likelihood of it
happening but to me like that's actually the the most likely thing because I
generally think that corners are gonna solve the problems that they're
presented with right and kind of keep going where where can we send people
where do you want to send them either to find you online or or learn more about
CASA yeah so CASA very easy just keys dot CASA keys dot CASA will take you to
our site with all of our security related material and as for myself my
site is lop.net and you can find my Twitter my articles I've written and all
of my 550 or so educational resource links I will give you a major major vote
of approval in that you're where I think it's lop.net slash Bitcoin yeah I send
people there all the time it is by far the most robust resource page I think on
the internet so Bitcoin dot page will take you directly there if that's easier
for people to remember whatever you're doing keep updating that because that
when people say how do I learn about Bitcoin I send them there and I'm always
scared like I'm gonna overwhelm them but I just warn them like listen just work
your way through these links and and you'll be an expert in no time start at
the top absolutely well listen James I really appreciate you doing this we'll
we'll link to CASA I think people should go and check it out and for everybody I
just appreciate all the work that you've done because you are one of the most
important people helping build build this future world that we all want my
pleasure I'm here to help happy having