Episode 164 of Futures Radio Show, sponsored by CME Group, the world's leading and most
diverse futures and options exchange.
CME Group's markets help individuals and businesses around the world manage risk and
seize opportunities.
Learn more at futuresfundamentals.com.
Every day, traders and investors dive in to tackle the ever-changing markets to find opportunity.
Futures Radio Show is your number one source for answers to the questions that all market
participants want to ask.
Veteran futures trader Anthony Crudele sits down with the most influential leaders and
top traders in the industry.
Now, here's your host, Anthony Crudele.
Hey everyone, before we get started today, I want to thank our sponsors, CME Group, Trading
Technologies and Top Step Trader.
Now, today I spoke with Jameson Lopp, Infrastructure Team Lead at BitGo.
Today I had a fascinating conversation with Jameson.
I started off by asking Jameson to explain to us in simple terms what Bitcoin is.
We then went on to discuss the fundamental differences between Bitcoin and other blockchains.
Jameson explains Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin forks.
We chatted about the ICO craze and the future of crypto asset trading.
Last but not least, I asked Jameson what the impact will be with the CME launch of Bitcoin
futures.
As usual, thank you all for listening and please enjoy this episode.
Jameson, welcome to the show.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for coming on the show today.
I'm really, really excited about our discussion.
I mean, what a time to speak to you about Bitcoin.
We all know that CME Group recently launched Bitcoin Futures and they're going live here
real soon.
You have been a great resource for myself to learn more about Bitcoin and crypto assets.
So a lot to talk about today, going to have a great discussion.
But before we dive into that, how did you get your starting your industry?
Well, it goes all the way back to 2012 for me when I first heard about Bitcoin, probably
on Slashdot or some other nerd website.
Like most people, I initially dismissed it.
I thought this is going to get hacked.
Everybody's going to lose their money.
It's going to end in tears.
Over the next few months, I kept hearing more about it and somehow it was still staying
around.
I started looking more into it and as I dug into the technical aspects of it, I realized
that it was actually a very elegant design.
It had its number of drawbacks, but it really created something new that the world had never
seen before.
So that really began my journey down the rabbit hole and I started doing side projects just
to try to better expose some of what was going on within these Bitcoin nodes so that both
I and other people could understand how the network was operating.
Eventually after several years, the industry started growing, the venture capital started
flowing in and I realized that I had an opportunity to start doing this full time.
Yeah, that's awesome.
So you started off actually as a skeptic and then became a believer.
As I believe, most of the people that I've met over the years initially started as well.
While this was like my first foray into the concept of digital money, some of the people
who have been working on this, it goes really all the way back to the 1980s.
So talk to us about your current role at BitGo.
So I'm the team lead for our infrastructure services at BitGo.
That basically means that I'm in charge of running a lot of our really low level back
end services that are just keeping our databases up to date with the state of different block
chains, monitoring the network, broadcasting transactions, doing the cryptographic signatures
on them in a secure fashion and just keeping our low level platform humming so that our
wallet teams and other folks who are building the customer facing APIs and user interfaces
are able to do their job without having to worry about like what's going on at the back
end.
Cool.
Way above my pay grade, Jameson.
But as I mentioned, I found you through by searching BitGo because of a CME Group press
release.
Talk to us about how you guys are working with CME Group.
Yeah, this has been a pretty long road.
I think that the conversation has probably began over a year, a year and a half ago,
but basically CME decided that they wanted to try to modernize the infrastructure of
the physical gold trading space.
And so they looked at blockchain technology and realized that this was a new sort of audit
log that could be used to securely prove and transfer the ownership of records in the log.
So while a lot of folks are using your traditional databases these days, that works fine for
a lot of cases where people are willing to just trust each other.
But if you want to be able to prove how many assets there are existing in a certain system
or enable peer to peer trading of these assets, then you're going to need to have some sort
of Byzantine fault-tolerant system that is able to operate without any single operator
that you're relying upon to keep the integrity of the system.
Okay.
Yeah, very cool.
We're going to talk a little bit more about how CME Group has launched Bitcoin Futures
a little bit at the end of the interview here.
But I want to talk about your post that you had on CoinDesk.
And it really helped me, your post on CoinDesk, because you said something in there along
the lines of, look, it's okay if you don't understand Bitcoin.
I'm still a student of it.
It just made me feel like, okay, I'm relatable to that, to trading.
Because in my whole career, I've always felt I was a student of trading.
When I first started, I didn't understand markets at all.
And then we evolve and you understand it and more as time goes by, you start to learn more
about it.
So for those that are listening that do not understand what Bitcoin is, can you just give
us a brief overview as to what it is?
So it's really hard to compress all of the technical aspects into just a few sentences
or even a few minutes, because you can easily spend months digging into how the protocol
and the network operate.
But the easiest way that I can describe it in a non-technical level is that throughout
human history, we have kept track of money, which is essentially debts and IOUs in various
types of ledgers.
And normally, these ledgers are going to be administered by some trusted institutions
such as a bank.
And we just trust that the institutions will reconcile the ledgers within their own systems
and possibly with other institutions.
But Bitcoin really turns the whole model upside down.
So instead of just having a few trusted authorities that are keeping track and updating the ledgers
that we're relying upon them to not cheat us, instead, we take the ledger and we replicate
it out so that literally everyone who wants to has a copy of the ledger is verifying all
of the actions that are being done to modify it.
And as a result, is not having to trust anyone else on the network because they are essentially
checking everyone else's work.
And if they catch someone cheating, the entire network basically says, no, we're not going
to allow you to do that.
And as such, instead of having like a single authority that is rejecting cheaters or double
spenders, you have the entire network that is working together to do that.
Can you give me an example of how the network would recognize that someone's cheating?
So at a very, very simple level, the transactions on the network have to be signed cryptographically
with the correct private key that is used to create an address to receive funds.
So then if you want to spend funds from that address, you have to show to the rest of the
network that you were the one that created the address by signing a cryptographic signature
that matches using public private key cryptography.
And then also, I mean, there's many other checks that happen where when you if you do
show a signature that that matches an address, the the nodes on the network will then look
into the ledger and say, well, was this particular piece of value that you're trying to spend
ever spent before?
Does it still exist?
Is it still in a state where it can be spent?
And doing those two checks and many, many dozens of other checks, if everything works
out, then then the nodes on the network will accept it and will update the ledger.
Otherwise, they'll just say, no, you're trying to do something wrong.
We're not going to change anything in the ledger.
Okay, so I want to take it to just another level to where I think a lot of people are
probably listening going, okay, so who's overseeing that?
I mean, look at someone like myself.
I don't know very I know very little about this.
I go to make a transaction using Bitcoin.
Does the system just reject it if the other person is cheating?
Like how am I someone who's a total layman on this recognize that?
Is it automatically done in Bitcoin itself?
That's like the value of Bitcoin, because it can recognize it without me, the end user
having to write.
So when you go into any type of wallet software and create a transaction, it then is broadcast
out on the network, specifically, you're going to broadcast it to one node, that node is
going to look at the transaction, decide whether to accept or reject it.
If it accepts it, then that node will do what we call a gossip protocol and basically tell
all of its friends, hey, do you know about this transaction?
And if they don't, it will then send to them, each of those nodes will then validate.
And if they agree, they will then, you know, tell all their friends about it.
And in that manner, the entire network, which is by many counts, like over 100,000 different
computers around the world, will within a matter of a couple of seconds have have validated
and propagated this transaction to everyone who is currently online.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Thanks for that explanation.
Now that explains to me more the fundamental value of Bitcoin versus the other blockchains.
Talk to us about that.
Why is Bitcoin, it's obviously now become, you know, a word that's being used everywhere
in the world.
And we've had so many other blockchains coming up.
So what is the real fundamental value of Bitcoin versus these other blockchains?
Well, one thing that Bitcoin still has going for it is that, you know, first mover advantage.
It is the oldest of all the crypto currencies, of all the crypto assets, blockchains, what
have you.
As a result, it has a much larger network effect that goes for many different aspects,
both, you know, trading and general acceptance and number of users that are holding it, but
also a number of developers and a number of skilled people who are contributing to the
ecosystem to continue to improve it over the years.
So from a technical standpoint, it is actually fairly trivial to create your own blockchain.
I mean, this is all open source software.
You can just with a few clicks of a button, copy all of the code, and then it's a little
bit trickier to jumpstart your own new block, Genesis block, if you will.
But very low cost for someone who has the technical chops.
So at this point, I think there are thousands of different blockchains out there, and it's
really a long tail distribution of both the size of their networks and as a result, the
utility and the value of the networks.
Explain mining to me, because this is something that I get asked a lot.
I've read about this and we said earlier, you're always going to be a student.
Well, I've read several things on mining and I still really don't understand it.
Can you give us some insight as to what mining is?
Yeah.
So one of the really interesting aspects of these systems is because there's no administrator,
there's no central controller, it's just this loose mesh that creates its own network.
You have to be extremely paranoid, extremely defensive in how you secure the networks because
everyone who is participating needs to be secure.
And one of the ways that the network is secured against certain types of denial of service
or spam or double spending attacks is this mining, which is one part of how the network
progresses.
It's how the new blocks get added to the blockchain.
And really what we're saying when we're doing that is we are collecting a bunch of recently
created transactions that are floating around the network and we're putting them into a
nice little package, which is a block.
And that is all getting cryptographically hashed and linked to the previous block to
create this tamper evident audit log that goes all the way back to the beginning of
2009 for Bitcoin.
But the interesting part that makes it very, very difficult for just anyone to hop onto
the network and start creating blocks and try to trick people into like what is the
real blockchain is that we require something called proof of work.
And without getting into the nitty gritty details of how hashing operations work, essentially
what we're doing is we are mathematically requiring a proof of energy expenditure.
And we do that by basically requiring these miners to solve a puzzle that the only way
to solve it is to brute force it by trying billions, if not trillions of different possible
combinations.
And the result of that with all the brute forcing is that basically you have to burn
a lot of electricity, you have to convert that electricity into heat as efficiently
and quickly as possible.
So over the years, this has become a really industrialized operation.
And you'll hear a lot of statistics where people are saying, oh, Bitcoin is completely
unsustainable because it requires like the energy that you could use to power your entire
house for a week just to make a single transaction.
And while in some aspects you could take a perspective that says that technically that
is correct, the energy expenditure of mining is actually completely uncorrelated to the
number of transactions in the blocks and on the blockchain.
It is literally a security parameter.
And the network and the market as a whole is paying these miners with the newly created
bitcoins and saying, you know, we are willing to pay this much money every 10 minutes or
so in order to have a certain level of cryptographic security that we know that, you know, computational
attacks will be very unlikely to happen simply because they are so insanely expensive to
pull off that it's actually it makes more sense for someone with that much computational
power to just help the network continue along rather than to try to attack it.
One question I have is I recently just went through having to evacuate leaving Southwest
Florida because of a hurricane.
And at the time I was doing a little bit of trading of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And we got to an area where we couldn't use our phones, there was no internet.
And I was thinking to myself, I didn't own any Bitcoin at the moment and I didn't have
any positions on.
What keeps it online?
You know, like, is there a reset switch or is there I mean, I mean, it's like, what if
I can't access it for periods of time, you know, like, how does maybe at some point does
it ever disappear?
Because people are always like, where is it in a cloud?
What keeps it active?
Right.
And, you know, one of the one of the, I guess, FUD type of arguments that we had to deal
with a lot in the earlier days was especially from the gold bugs, which was that, well,
if you know, if the internet ever goes down or there's like a solar flare or an EMP or
whatever, then Bitcoin will be dead.
And you know, the obvious counter argument to that as well, you know, Bitcoin would only
be dead if the internet was dead.
If the internet was dead, we'd have a lot of bigger problems.
But really, what we're talking about here when when we say like, what is Bitcoin?
Well, I mean, it is the blockchain, it is the ledger, the data itself that is the entire
history of every transaction that's ever happened.
So while there could be various network disruptions that cause like new blocks not to be created
or make it hard for for people to get onto the network for whatever reason, what really
matters for like the integrity of the system in the long term is that many, many, many
copies of the ledger are distributed all around the world.
So even if there was some catastrophic event where like the entire network went down for
days or weeks or months, eventually, you know, people would fix it, it would come back online.
And all of these 100,000 hard drives around the world, they would still have their copies
of the blockchain.
Or even if a lot of them got lost or corrupted, they would be able to, you know, re download
them again, and, you know, heal the network, bring it back online.
And we would continue forward.
So I think that like this is a very robust way of doing things as opposed to traditional
methods where what you're doing is you're you're centralizing all of the information of a specific
system and into a single company.
And you know, that might be in like one data warehouse or a couple of different data warehouses,
which can, you know, be prone to failure in specific catastrophic situations, whereas
if we're really distributing this this data all over the world, you can't really get much
more robust than that.
Okay, I want to move on and talk about Bitcoin forks.
Just as I think I'm getting a better understanding of what Bitcoin is, I wake up one morning
to chaos on Twitter and blogs.
I'm reading everything about Bitcoin forks.
Had no idea this could even happen.
Jameson, what is a Bitcoin fork?
Well, this is one of the governance mechanisms of permissionless network.
And that's one of the more exciting things I think about this space is that we are creating
a new form of governance.
You know, a lot of like libertarians and anarchists got interested in these concepts years ago
because they had visions about, you know, where we might be able to go in a system that
is not ruled by anyone.
And now that the system has grown to the size that it's at, we start to see conflicts, you
know, different visions of how the network should evolve.
So a lot of it really comes down to scalability these days and like, you know, what do we
need to do to onboard more users and what tradeoffs are we willing to make in order
to grow the size of the network?
So the result is that people can change the rules that they are running on their computers.
And if those rules are not backwards compatible with the existing rules, then it forks the
network and you have a sort of competing blockchain that has the same history up to a specific
point and then at the point where some conflicting rule was activated, you then have a fork and
now you have two different blockchains going forward from that point in time.
Okay.
So give us some examples of some Bitcoin forks.
So the, you know, we had a number of proposals for forks over the years and no one ever actually
executed one until August 1st of this year, 2017.
And so that was the Bitcoin cash fork, which essentially increased the block size from
one megabyte to eight megabytes and made a number of other low level changes.
But essentially this was done by a group of people who believed that it's perfectly fine
for us to do a lot more transactions on the blockchain and we don't really have to worry
about a number of the trade-offs that people who disagree with that perspective think need
to be worried about.
Let's talk about ICOs.
Boys, this has become a craze, Jameson.
I hear about them, read about them pretty much on a daily basis now.
And I know very little about what they are.
I mean, I know that they're an initial coin offering.
They named it very similar to an IPO.
I don't think there's a lot of similarities between the two.
You could clarify that for us, but ultimately they become extremely popular.
Can you explain to our audience what an ICO is and why they've gotten to be so popular?
So the easiest way that I can basically describe it is it's kind of like crowdfunding, but
using cryptocurrency in order to do the crowdfund.
There's a lot of downsides to this where people might think that because it sounds like an
IPO that if you invest in it, you might have some sort of shareholder rights, but generally
that is not the case.
Really what you're doing, it's almost more like angel investing or crowdfunding because
you're just throwing some money at a group of people who are making a promise of delivering
some sort of software service at some point in the future.
And you're getting these tokens as a result of the money that you're sending to them.
And depending upon the structure of the software that they're building, those tokens may hopefully
generate demand in the future due to whatever utility that they claim will be provided.
And if you're holding those tokens, hopefully you will then have some sort of return on
your investment.
But of course, there's no guarantee that the tokens will ever actually work to unlock any
sort of functionality on any software.
So you're taking a pretty big risk by investing in them.
Yeah.
I mean, they seem pretty risky, could be a gamble, but what's life without a gamble?
I've taken a gamble or two in my day and some have worked out, some haven't.
But in regard to ICOs, can you give us a gauge as to how many ICOs there are out there and
how many of them actually end up becoming successful tokens or coins?
I would be pretty sure that we're well over the thousand mark at this point, because I
think that I saw recently that there were basically like 10 per day going on at this
point.
And off the top of my head, like I can't think of any that have already proven to become
like a popular platform.
I think they're still mostly used for speculative trading.
Some of the older ones would be, I know like the Augur Prediction Market, they've done
a lot of work over the years.
And you can really go on to like any of the coin market cap sites to see like which of
the tokens are actually trading and doing well.
I think I do hear some about like the first blood ICO getting used as well.
But you know, there's a long tail distribution again, where only really a few projects are
going to succeed in this space.
Let's talk about some permission blockchains.
I mentioned one earlier that BitGo has actually helped CME with, with Royal Mint Gold.
You mentioned one to me called Prova.
And I am really not familiar with these.
I mean, I've read a little bit about them.
Explain to us what permission blockchains are.
And talk to us about how popular you think they are going to be in the future.
Yeah.
So these blockchains, these protocols can provide a number of different valuable features.
And there are ways that you can gain utility from using them without necessarily having
a like totally open permissionless system like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
If really what you're looking for is just like a better type of audit log, then you
can still build permissioning layers into a blockchain system.
So like what we did at BitGo in conjunction with CME and the Royal Mint was we forked
one of the Bitcoin nodes, one of those code bases.
And we felt like Bitcoin was a very well suited, robust, vetted solution.
We didn't want to do anything too complex like with smart contracts, because those are
still so new and have a number of issues that are being worked out.
So we took Bitcoin, that code base, created our own new genesis block and added in a bunch
of administrative functionality such that you can have different overseers of different
parts of the system who are cryptographically authorized to then make changes to the system
that like a normal user would not be able to do.
So with the Royal Mint Gold for example, we have administrators, the highest level administrators
are able to provision keys for wallet providers, for validators on the network.
They're able to do things like actually allocate and deallocate the assets on the network.
And then the other entities such as the wallets and the validators can then use their keys
to do other specific actions such as signing blocks or co-signing transactions on behalf
of users.
So there's a heavy level of AML KYC type of thought that has gone into the Royal Mint
Gold fork software.
But really what we're going for is just general ability to digitize physical assets that are
going to be held under custody of some known entity.
So in this case, that would be the Royal Mint.
Yeah.
This sounds like a game changer to me, Jameson.
I don't know, but I could be wrong.
But I have a feeling that a lot of industries, a lot of businesses are going to be searching
out this technology.
What industries right now do you see that would probably have the highest demand for
this type of blockchain technology?
Yeah, so I think the general way that a lot of the industries that are looking into this
technology are approaching it is, well, if we already have some sort of network of entities
who are probably semi-trusted, maybe probably not fully trusted, but if they are already
essentially forming some sort of consensus network where they're trying to reconcile
various balance sheets or really any sort of data that needs to be tracked and audited
and done in a secure fashion that can't be forged, then a blockchain data structure is
going to provide potentially greater efficiency gains and greater robustness and security
against tampering.
So you can create a permissioned network that is essentially just mirroring what your existing
business relationships are and then just have those businesses now use a new type of technology
under the hood to continue doing the same type of reconciliation that they've been doing
for years.
Now, from the Bitco side, what customer adoption in the ecosystem beyond the crypto players,
what does that look like?
Well, we're getting a lot of demand for just general private key management, I would say.
That's kind of the direction that we're going where we are a non-custodial software as a
service provider and we are really basically just helping people manage their private keys.
And while for the years before 2017, we were just helping people with Bitcoin private keys,
we're now looking across the industry and saying, well, we foresee a digitization of
many different types of assets and all of those are going to have some sort of private
key data that is used to prove ownership of the assets and to transfer ownership of the
assets.
And we believe that we're well positioned to help secure any type of private key digital
assets that may arise on the markets as this technology continues to proliferate.
How do you see the future of crypto asset trading?
So it's already been kind of a wild west over the past few years and that's what I think
gets a lot of bad press is various exchanges getting hacked or falling over for whatever
reason.
And it's still a very similar model to how trading has occurred traditionally, at least
for the electronic age, though, of course, these exchanges in many cases tend to be unregulated
fly by night companies that don't have particularly long standing reputations.
And from really the security standpoint, you're creating a huge honeypot when you're moving
a lot of these highly liquid crypto assets into the custody of a single entity.
No matter how trusted they are, it becomes a huge target for hackers since if they get
in, they can take everything and there's nobody who can reverse those transactions.
So I think long term, what I would really like to see to sort of further the ideals
of this space is decentralized exchanges.
And so you may start to hear terms being thrown around such as cross chain atomic swaps.
And really what that is a fancy way of saying that we're going to have trustless cryptographic
protocols that allow you to do real peer to peer trading in real time with other people
who want to trade a crypto asset on another blockchain with whatever crypto asset you're
currently holding.
So I think that a lot of trading will eventually become peer to peer trading such that you
will basically be running your own exchange per se, you know, with software on your computer
that is automatically going out and doing the matching of orders.
Cross chain atomic swaps, did I get that right?
That's right.
Wow, my mind's already spinning after hearing that, but I appreciate the insight.
Now last but not least, CME launched Bitcoin Futures.
I mean, from my perspective, I haven't been more excited about a new product at CME and
I can't remember when.
I mean, I was really excited when they introduced the 10 year ultra, but this is big.
What impact of any do you think it will have on Bitcoin?
Well, I just hope that it helps us find the true value of Bitcoin, you know, even faster
than than what we've been doing so far.
It's going to be great just to have more reputable institutions coming into the space and hopefully,
you know, providing even more liquidity than we've had before.
So it wasn't that long ago, you know, just a few years ago, I remember that, you know,
relatively tiny events would cause shockwaves across the entire ecosystem because the various
exchanges simply like couldn't keep up, they couldn't handle demand, they would just fall
over and sometimes that would actually exacerbate the boom and bust cycles in Bitcoin.
And so I'm hoping that, you know, as we have more of these larger traditional institutions
coming in and opening up new avenues of liquidity, that that that will both help the markets
get to where the true value of Bitcoin is, but also just make them more stable.
So you know, obviously the volatility is something that a lot of people over the years have said
is terrible for Bitcoin if it's to be a currency.
I think we're still many years away from it being anything that you would consider stable.
And this is really just like the next step in the path to getting there.
Yeah.
Speaking of price of Bitcoin, it's sitting just above 7,000 as we record here today.
And I'm wondering if it continues to go up, does it price itself out?
Does it actually hurt Bitcoin by continuing to go higher and then nobody is able to participate
in it the way that it was meant to be used?
Yes and no.
So because Bitcoin is subdivisible to like eight decimal places and could trivially be
changed to subdivide even further, it should always be possible for someone to buy a dollar
or 50 cents or whatever of Bitcoin.
However, on the scalability side of things, due to the fact that there is a very scarce
resource and the size of blocks and the number of transactions that you can get into the
blockchain over a certain period of time, what's end up happening is as the price goes
up, the kind of minimum transaction value that is economically feasible for someone
to spend is also going up.
So whereas in years past, you could make a Bitcoin transaction for like a penny or five
cents these days, it can easily be a dollar or several dollars if you're trying to do
it during a very busy time of the day or week.
So what we're trying to do with the scalability issues is find more efficient ways for people
to create Bitcoin transactions, which in many cases will be what we call off chain transactions
that are anchored to a transaction that is in the blockchain.
But this is where the technology gets sort of an order of magnitude more complicated.
And we've got a lot of smart people working on it.
But suffice to say, there's a lot of work that is yet to be done so that we can eventually
have a Bitcoin that really is capable of becoming a mainstream thing from a technological standpoint.
See, now I look at Bitcoin now more like an index, more like the DAX, the way it moves,
not like a currency would move.
And I'm just curious how they get price stability so it can be used as a currency.
Now hopefully the futures can provide that, which I think they will provide some price
stability to Bitcoin.
But once again, what price and at what level of volatility, if it remains this high volatility,
is it just ruled out as a currency?
Yeah, the market cap of Bitcoin is over $100 billion now.
And we've seen people speculate as to it doesn't need to be in the trillions or tens of trillions
of dollars to achieve some sort of stability.
Really it's almost more like it needs to eat a certain percentage of other forex markets
or other types of assets.
If you want to think of it as a digital gold or store of value, then maybe it really needs
to get a certain level of adoption from those type of traders who are keeping a lot of value
stored in gold or other precious commodities.
Yeah, I agree with that.
That's exactly what I think it needs as well.
Fantastic stuff today, but we're not done.
I have some rapid fire questions if you're ready for those.
Sure.
All right, everyone, our rapid fire segment is sponsored by Trading Technologies.
Trade the global markets from virtually anywhere with TT.
They are the world's fastest commercially available futures trading platform.
Create your account and try it now free at trittnow.com.
First question for Jameson, who has influenced your life the most and why?
I would have to say I'm a really big fan of Naval Ravikant, not only from all of the stuff
that he's done in the tech space, but also just sort of his philosophy.
I think that really that has helped me take a kind of Zen approach to the chaos that we're
seeing in the Bitcoin and crypto asset world.
What's the number one resource you spend your time on?
Well, I'm going to have to go with Twitter.
These days, that's mainly because I've gone so far deep into the technicals of this space
that now I've kind of popped out the top and I am really more looking at the whole ecosystem
from a social standpoint and really trying to understand perspectives of all the different
major players and how their views bounce off of each other to create this sort of human
consensus for whatever it is that this system is we're trying to build.
What's your favorite book about crypto assets?
I would recommend Nathaniel Popper's book, it's called Digital Gold, and it's a number
of interesting stories about the early adopters in this space and some of the crazy things
that they did to help get the ecosystem bootstrapped.
What's the best piece of advice you've received about being a software engineer?
Really never stop learning.
The space is always changing and I've probably changed what I work on every couple of years.
There's always something new to be looking at, to stay on the cutting edge.
If you are on the cutting edge, it may feel like you're doing something at the time that
is not really understood or valued by the rest of the world, but inevitably a few years
later you find that you are in high demand and you've left everyone else behind.
It has resulted in some great opportunities for me during my career.
Now if you can give a piece of advice to the new people interested in getting involved
in the crypto space, what would it be?
Basically, you don't want to jump in head first without really knowing what you're doing.
As a result, I have a large portion of my website devoted to educational resources because
there's such a high learning curve in this space and there are so many different pitfalls
that can result in you losing everything.
If you make one technical misstep, there's no one out there who is going to be able to
save you and get your assets back.
Bitcoin right now is sitting just above 7,000.
Is it higher or lower a year from now?
I'm going to go with higher.
We have our dips every now and then, but I think that the long term trajectory is up
and the market is still incredibly tiny compared to what its full potential is.
Final question for today.
If you weren't a software engineer, you'd be doing what?
I would definitely be doing something related to the Liberty movement.
My career goal is not so much like Bitcoin and crypto assets, but rather helping to empower
the individual, trying to help change the world from a governance level such that people
have more power and more responsibility to do what they feel is the right thing.
You said your number one resource is Twitter.
Where can people find you on Twitter?
Well, I managed to get one of these great four letter handles.
It's just L-O-P-P, my last name.
Everybody, Jameson is a must follow on Twitter.
If you're interested in crypto assets, then I highly suggest you go and follow him on
Twitter.
Jameson, where's a website that people can go and check out?
You can also find me at lopp.net.
I've got all my educational resources up there and pretty much all of the content that I've
ever produced, various articles and presentations and interviews.
Jameson, what can I say?
Thank you so much for educating us today.
I have been waiting for this interview and I just thoroughly enjoyed it.
It was fantastic.
I really appreciate you taking the time to coming on Futures Radio Show.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for listening to Futures Radio Show.
If you have any questions or comments for myself or my guests, please visit futuresradioshow.com
and sign up to be a premium member for free.
If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes.