Welcome to the Total Connector Show. My name is Kevan Davani. My very special guest is
James Lobb. James, James, and thanks so much for coming on my show.
My pleasure.
How are you doing? I think I saw you in Riga and in Berlin on both occasions.
That is correct.
Yeah, wonderful. Okay. Otherwise, unfortunately, we didn't have any opportunity or time. I
would have loved to do this in person, but maybe we can catch up later on or next event.
So James, I have a bunch of questions, of course, for myself, but since I've gone through
your treasure trove of materials, and I've listened to some of your interviews which
you have posted on your own website, lob.net, then you have this other website, it's called
statoshi.info. Maybe we can elaborate a little bit later on that.
Sure.
Yeah. And the other one, yeah, that's the same thing, lob.net. So I can suggest anyone
of my listeners and viewers just check it out. It's really a treasure trove of interviews,
material resources, educational materials. This is what my podcast show, Bitcoin Only,
is about, inspiring. Now, I must say, Jameson, I'm not a technologist, I'm not technical,
I can't deal anything with technical jargon. So I'm trying really with this, the name of
my podcast is The Total Connect, and the name itself implies I'm really attempting my best
to connect the dots, inspire people for themselves to educate themselves, to empower themselves
with really multifaceted knowledge that Bitcoin brings with itself.
Now, you can talk about anything you want, you have at least a full hour if you want,
but I do have some specific questions regarding especially the CASA, full node, security,
privacy, the adoption rate or the adoption possibilities. I also have a little bit of
questions about the Trezor, the advanced and non-advanced mode. So how do you want to do
this? Do you want me to go question after question or should we zoom out a little bit
and maybe I think it's a good idea. I want to ask you, what is Bitcoin for you? What's
the essence, the purpose, the intention, the wish behind Bitcoin? And do you think we could
be much further if there weren't specific obstacles or challenges for mass adoption?
Yeah, it makes sense to begin at the beginning. What is Bitcoin? And that is something that
people have been arguing about ever since the project began. To me, this is all a grand
experiment to try to create a new form of money that is an open collaborative project.
I mean, that is the fundamental reason why I got interested and involved years ago was
because I had never really thought about money or how it worked. But once I read the white
paper and I started thinking about money at a more specific level rather than just using
whatever was given to me, I thought, hey, it makes sense that this is an abstract concept
that kind of belongs to humanity. So why shouldn't it be a project where anyone who cares can
give their input and try to reshape the way that money actually operates? Now, of course,
this creates a lot of complexities because you're going from a system that is essentially
controlled by a small number of people who can probably easily come to a consensus about
what money should be to basically a free for all where there is no traditional hierarchical
governance system. This anarchy, as it were, is a lot more difficult to understand and
people are trying to apply different forms of governance to it. And so far, all of those
attempts have failed. So this is a continuing experiment because no one really fully understands
what it is that we have built here. Like people are still poking at the system and trying
to understand how it responds to different things and how we can evolve it over time.
And of course, this is why we have conferences all over the world to try to get people to
come together to discuss what are our options and amongst those potential options, which
ones do we think are the safest and the sanest and are possible to actually implement while
causing the least amount of harm and disruption to the existing users. So this is something
where you can basically go as deep as you want. And I've gone really, really deep over
the years and have still only really scratched the surface. And I think that as you showed
with some of the resource pages that I maintain, I think I have over 700 or 800 linked resources
on there. And that actually becomes a pretty decent part-time job in and of itself just
trying to maintain this comprehensive list of resources and at least organize it in a
way so that it's not too overwhelming for people because you could easily get lost in
there and never find your way out of the rabbit hole.
Yeah. So James, that's fascinating. Why don't you tell my listeners, what was your path
to Bitcoin? I mean, what's the fundamental root cause of our monetary and economic or
financial, social problems? Do we have to remind, as Eric Vascoel always says, you've
been in a lot of conversations and discussion, panel discussion also with him on different
conferences I've seen and I've experienced myself. So it's real fascinating. Do we need
to remind people? I mean, do you think people really understand what the problem is in regards
to separation of state, government, nation-state, whatever, and money? Do you think people understand
the seriousness of the situation we are in right now?
Well, no. I mean, most people don't have the time to worry about these things. Most people
are just worried about where their next paycheck is going to come from on the sort of, what
is it, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I think a lot of people have their food pretty well
taken care of in most countries, but are still trying to get to that next level where their
shelter and their other bills are something that they actually have to worry about because
they don't have sufficient financial reserves and they have to keep replenishing them. They
have to keep earning money and being able to take care of themselves and pay off their
debts and all these other things. So you pretty much have to get all of your needs taken care
of to get to the point where you have enough free time where you can start worrying about
things like politics or economics or these greater higher level issues with civilization.
So I don't expect that we'll ever get to the point where most or even many people worry
about this type of stuff, but I also don't think it's necessary that everyone has to
understand that everyone has to worry about it. There are a number of different studies
that have shown that in order to enact meaningful change, you only really need a small single
digit percentage of the populace to become very, very interested in getting change to
happen. And so I think that while we should try to educate as many people as possible,
it's fine if the vast majority of people don't have the time or resources to worry about
this stuff.
Yeah. You said a couple of very, very, very essential important things. First of all,
yeah, I do agree with you. It's people don't have the time. They don't have to, but it
is the situation is a little bit schizophrenic because I'm in Austria, you know, wherever
in Europe, Western, you know, developed country, whatever. And then you've got the other countries
like Venezuela, Turkey, Argentina, Iran, high inflation, high inflation, sanctions, embargoes,
real suffering. The pain point has been reached. They feel it and they go into action. You
don't need to do much explaining, even though, you know, most of them probably still don't
know what, you know, how Bitcoin really works. You know, do I? I don't. I mean, I've been
in this rabbit hole for three years and I'm still learning and learning and you're going
into deeper and deeper rabbit holes, but there is something in between. I mean, either people,
I think people over here in Western developed countries, Western States, they are much more
there. You know, they feel comfortable. I mean, that's, that's the argument they give
me like spontaneously. Anybody, you know, who you ask, it's like, what do you need Bitcoin
for? You know, I can, you know, pay my proverbial coffee with this and that. And then on the
other extreme, you've got people who feel the social, economical, real existential threat.
And so I'm trying here to find, I think this is why we're doing this also, or why that's
the intention of my podcast also, and so many other educational materials. There's so many,
you know, wonderful podcasters, beginning with Steve Libera and Peter McCormack and,
you know, all these people out there, I think they all have understood, comprehended the
ethos, the logic, the, the, the only choice option we have with Bitcoin. And to be honest
with you, I mean, very frank, I think we're going to be fucked as hell if we cannot, you
know, implement or mass adopt Bitcoin as, as soon as possible. And you talked about
the thing, this critical mass or something like that, like a marginal number of people
that, that triggers this, maybe this chain reaction, just, you know, paraphrasing here.
But do you see, like, there's, do you think there is an, there's a way, there's an opportunity
here, there's, is there ways to improve the educational process, the technological process,
the implementation? Do you think there's going to be more communication cooperation?
Yeah. So it's really weird. You know, you, you noted a number of really good educators
in the space. And I think one of the problems is there's a big disconnect. And it's almost
kind of ironic that it seems like the vast majority of the education and discussion and,
and resources are all in English. I know there are some people who work on translating things
into other languages, but it's, it's almost kind of ironic that I think the people who
could benefit the most from this technology do not have the same level of educational
resources available to them. I think there's also some really big disconnects between the
East and the West, you know, mainly due to language and cultural barriers. It's very
hard for me and probably a lot of other people to understand, you know, what is going on
in, in China and Russia, for example, with their Bitcoin communities. And so they may
have a very different understanding and perspective of what Bitcoin is. And, you know, that can
potentially cause a lot of issues in the future. But the, the other thing though, is that I
don't believe that the technology is currently available to scale in the way that we want
it to. So I'm kind of okay with the fact that not everyone is using Bitcoin right now because
it would actually not work very well if we got everyone onto a Bitcoin unless, unless
they were using Bitcoin through third party custodians, which, you know, it's not the
way that we want them to use it. And that is a debate in and of itself. There are some
people who believe that even if Bitcoin never scaled the way we want it to, that even if
most people were using Bitcoin banks or exchanges, that it would still be an improvement on the
current system because you would still be able to do things like audit the total supply
and, you know, prevent runaway inflation and whatnot. But of course, you know, we want
to try to make this system the best that possibly can be in every possible way. And it's a very
big challenge to do that. And it's going to take a lot of time and effort to continue
to make these incremental improvements.
After this lightning conference in Berlin, what's your position now? What's your take?
What is your view on the degree of improvement of implementation of how far are we, you know,
or are it from your perspective, what are the problems, the challenges when it comes
to lightning this second layer? I mean, at the end of the day, you know, it's about,
it's so unbelievable. It's 2019, it's the year 2019, and we still haven't figured out
how people can transact freely. I mean, this is what it all boils down to, right? I mean,
freely without censorship and with the hardest and scarcest money. So yeah, we're getting
there. But where do you see the problem challenges? How can we improve it?
Yeah, I mean, digital scarcity is hard. Building secure systems on the internet is hard. That
is, that's really the trade off, you know, when you're moving outside of this like closed
ecosystem or walled garden where, you know, one entity controls it and they can put up,
you know, really intensive security measures because they control everything versus going
to a completely open system kind of turns everything on its head requires a lot more
work on the security side. But, you know, the thing with lightning is that we're actually
we're creating this new economic network where it's never really existed before, you know,
requiring liquidity to actually exist in a like provably cryptographic sense rather than
just being able to make up numbers and push them over the internet between, you know,
central banks or whatever. So there are many issues both on the sort of economic and liquidity
side also on the security side because, you know, now we're going back to more of a hot
wallet model than a cold wallet. And also, really the presentation that I gave in the
lightning conference in Berlin was all about what's really required to get enterprises
onto the lightning network. And that's going to be very important from a liquidity side.
But the enterprises have much higher standards for robustness and risk. So we need a lot
of improvements on the technical side for their like day to day operations. So, you
know, this is once again, it's going to be years of effort. And, you know, what we're
doing at CASA and what a lot of other companies are doing with lightning is they are running,
you know, these risky services and they are encountering failures and they're learning
from the failures and they're continuing to iterate and improve upon it. And, you know,
it's very difficult to extrapolate to say, oh, we just need to have, you know, this many
more years of failures before like, you know, enterprises will be in an acceptable position
to adopt it. It's going to be a gradual thing. That's why there is, you know, the whole like
lightning network is going to be ready in 18 months meme is kind of a running joke is
that, you know, software is never done. There's never going to be a point at which we say,
okay, you know, we don't have to do anything more for lightning network. Like there's always
going to be more room for improvement. But better than two weeks because Max Hillebrand
always has two weeks, right? Yeah, yeah. I think 18 months is a better expectation because
it's far enough away that people will forget about whatever promises you made 18 months
ago. But it's, you know, it could go into a lot of deep technical weeds about the potential
improvements. But, you know, there's even more potential improvements at the base layer
that could result in the orders of magnitude of improvement at the second layer with lightning
network. So there is a huge amount of potential things that could happen over the coming years
and, you know, hopefully they will all happen. And you can get very hand wavy about talking
about things like basically like shared lightning channels between hundreds or thousands of
people and, you know, ways to continue to get orders of magnitude improvement. But as
it stands right now, that's still all on the like to do list. So, you know, I don't think
that we're going to be at, you know, mainstream adoption levels anytime, even in the next
few years. All right. You talked about institutions like enterprises. Now I know it's all about,
you know, trial and error. And it's like life, you know, we've got to learn and comprehend
consciously out of these mistakes and errors. But do you think institutions could bring
like a positive trajectory into this development? Like in terms of you mentioned liquidity,
yeah, custodial, I think it's inevitable. There will be people who will need custodial,
right? There's no other way to do this other than custodial. So there's going to be a majority
or I don't know, a number of people. How do you think institutions could contribute to
this process positively or in terms of speed? Well, I mean, I suspect that most of them
are just going to be building their own systems or integrating, you know, the lightning technology
into their existing systems. It would be great if some of them came in and started contributing
at the protocol layer. But I mean, we already saw, you know, on the Bitcoin protocol side,
even as many different large companies came forward and were even making billions of dollars
a year, very few, if any of them ended up contributing much back to the protocol itself.
So it's not something that I would hold out too much hope for. If anything, you know,
the institution stuff is, I think more later phase of, you know, once the technology is
more mature, then they will adopt it. And, you know, that will onboard more people.
So it's going to take years. That's for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, that's a realistic
assessment here, I guess. Well, then, let me ask you a couple of specific questions
and then we'll come back, maybe we'll zoom out again. The cause of full node, I finally
ordered it. I'm waiting, we're waiting for all for the version two. Yeah. Now, if I may
say that, I mean, I, you know, the average person like myself, let's say, you know, can
afford that, no problem. You know, it's $300 and then you've got additional $300 subscription
fee per year. Do you think it is feasible to, you know, for this normal package is called
the golden version to lower the price in or, and then, you know, maybe through competition
or I don't know, through further development, make this a little bit more affordable for
people for the lower class, you know, below. Well, I mean, a lot of that comes down to
what is, what is the cheapest hardware that is available. And so, you know, we're trying
to get, you know, small form factor, you know, Raspberry Pi type hardware, which all in all,
I think, you know, Raspberry Pi boards usually go for like 50 to a hundred dollars, but then
you need like some decent storage, which is probably going to be another hundred dollars.
And then of course, there is the actual costs of all the software that we write and the
support that we give. I think we also throw in a hardware wallet device as well. So, I
think if we're talking about ways to get new hardware shipped to people to run as knows,
you're going to be hard pressed to ever get that below the probably a hundred to $150
price point. And that is assuming hardware only that is if, if the user is then going
to go get some software and install it and basically set up everything themselves, it's
definitely possible to get your own new hardware node running up for that level of cost. The
only way to get what I would say is a really cheap, affordable node is to you reuse old
hardware that you already have laying around. You know, maybe you have a like five year
old or 10 year old laptop or desktop. That's just sitting in a closet. You know, that would
be essentially free to get up and running. And the nice thing about all of the Bitcoin
and lightning software is that it's not that computationally intensive. You can run it
on really old hardware. It'll be a little bit slower, but it'll still do what it's meant
to do. So, from that perspective, if we're talking about like how, how would we get people
in the third world countries running nodes and all of that? I think it would, it would
probably be more along those lines of repurposing old hardware because you can get the software
for free. But once again, that still does require at least small amount of technical
ability and time and resources to set that up. So, you know, what we're aiming for with
CASA, it is not going to be the cheapest solution. You know, we're not trying to onboard absolutely
everybody. Right now, our target audience is, you know, the enthusiast who has some
extra money that they'd be willing to spend, but they don't have the technical savvy or
they just don't have the time to get in there and, you know, run the software and maintain
it. And we're trying to lower the bar on the technical side for people to be able to take
advantage of running a full node and self-custodying their own keys. And, you know, there are plenty
of costs involved to all the development that we have to do to make things easier for people.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, it just, the subscription fee, which I think could be, you know, done
away with, I mean, the subscription fee is for like losing a key. So you, you know, so people have that
service two out of three or three out of five keys, right? Multi-signature, you know, is that, is that
the service? Right. So, you know, the thing about CASA is we're not just selling a node. We have
an entire suite of products and they're meant to work together to get you the best like
self-sovereignty solution available. And so the subscription is really for support and continued
like access to the multi-sig setup and recovery from certain failure scenarios if something goes
wrong there. And also, you know, if we were, if we were just selling nodes standalone, then it
gets kind of weird from a support perspective of what happens now that there's going to be like a
secondary market with, you know, V1 nodes floating around, you know, how much support do we want to
give to people who, you know, we don't know how they actually got their node because they didn't
buy it from us.
Yeah. So, but still updates would be anytime possible, right? Yeah. Okay. You mentioned in
your, one of your interviews that I listened to was called Bitcoin custody and key management on
the blockchain VC podcast. You said it's actually with the CASA node, you know, comes that this
Trezor hardware wallet. So it is not actually, because of that service, it is actually not
advised to write down that seed phrase or the monomic phrase. Could you elaborate on that? Or
do you think it could still be useful sort of as a last joker? You know, I'm just, you know,
thinking worst case scenario, what if something goes totally bust and, you know, the company or
you still have, would still have that seed.
So to be clear, the Trezor that we are sending is meant to be used in the CASA multisig wallet. So
the basic multisig is two out of three. We also have a three out of five key shield that's sort
of more premium tier. And if you want to understand more about our seedless model, the best thing to
do is actually go on our website and look at our wealth security protocol, which is it's like 50 or
60 pages of in depth explanation of every possible attack and loss vector that we've thought through
when we were designing our multisig wallets, and, and basically how we mitigate against those
things. And we do specifically talk about the seed issue. And that this is, as far as I'm aware, we
are the only wallet out there that actually has the seedless setup where the thesis that we built
this all upon is that asking the user to do anything technical or to have any like special
security knowledge is a big a foot gun, if you will. It's, it creates a lot of possibilities for
failure. And we should not assume that the user has any particular knowledge or expertise. And the
problem that we kept running into when we were thinking about, well, you know, what do you actually
do when you set up a multisig wallet with hardware devices? Well, when you go plug in your hardware
device for the first time, it says, okay, these are your 12 or 24 words, write them down, keep them
in a safe place. And if you think about it, that sentence has an entire iceberg of like technical
and security knowledge underneath it, that it just completely glosses over. And, and we realized, you
know, we can't assume that the user knows how to keep a seed phrase safe, or that the user is going
to follow the best practices for putting their seed phrase like in a tamper evident bag in an
access controlled location and having, you know, multiple redundant backups and yada, yada, yada.
And so instead, we said, okay, user should throw away the seed and we will, we will instead keep
the security model that is visualized within our application as the different devices in your
multisig setup. And the nice thing about using these hardware devices is that you can do things
like have health checks. And so if you're not sure if your hardware device is still good, then you
just go into the app and you click on health check and, and you plug in your hardware device and you
sign a cryptographic message, which can then, you know, validate that the device is working as
intended. If anything goes wrong, if you lose a device, it stops working, whatever, we actually
built in this key rotation mechanism into the application. So you just go buy a new Trezor
Ledger, what have you, you can buy it from us, you can buy it from the manufacturer, doesn't
really matter. And initialize it, plug it in. And we actually walk you through basically sweeping
the funds off of the existing multisig and sending them to the new multisig setup with that new
device replacing the other one. And so we believe this is a much more flexible system, you're able
to respond to threats and losses a lot faster. And it's just easier to think about logically from a
security perspective, because you don't have potentially plain text, you know, clear text seed
phrases floating around who knows where throughout the world, we know that the private keys are all
secured within specialized hardware. Let me tell you my opinion or my feeling why that is actually
a really good idea and advantage is because of, you know, personal experience that, you know, when
you have a Trezor, you need to do regular updates or whatever, whenever it's needed. And I remember
the last one of the last updates, it was 1.8.3 on Trezor, Trezor one, the first model, it literally
asked me to type in the whatever the 1224 monomic phrase into the keyboard and then into the browser.
Now, and I already told Trezor that or whatever the responsible decision makers, I told them, it
would would have been really advisable and wise to tell the customers that or warn them that maybe
should, you know, maybe they should do the advanced mode. So they so they whatever they click or they
confirm the 12 or 24 words on the device itself and not on the keyboard. And I think that's a
really dangerous risk people are going, you know, with whatever key loggers and all these things.
I mean, so with with the first of all, my question is, would the update still be done? You would
still have the customer would still have to do the updates right on the on the Trezor itself,
right? So this is an interesting question, actually. Though with regard to what you were saying,
that's actually it's particularly scary because there have been a number of malicious Trezor
wallet websites that have popped up that ask you to type in your seed phrase. So that is actually
something that I've written a blog post about I haven't published yet. But I'll be discussing a
lot of issues with any browser based operations with wallets because that just creates a huge
attack surface. But with regard to the actual firmware updates, it's kind of interesting.
I've looked into this myself. Not all firmware updates actually wipe the device. It seems like
only the firmware updates that are patching like a vulnerability with an exploit where the seed
could get extracted end up doing that. And so this is something that we actually stay on top of,
and we inform our customers if we believe it's something that they need to do. But most of the
time, we actually find that it's not really necessary for our users to update their firmware
because the old firmware continues to work fine. And in some cases, even when it is a security
update, we find that it is actually not really changing the security model of our setup because
our setup uses multiple geographically distributed devices. So even if an exploit was used against
one of the devices that was physically taken by an attacker, that would not be sufficient for your
wallet to be compromised. James, I had an email correspondence back and forth with Trezor,
and they told me, yeah, there's an option, advanced mode. I said, well, it would have been nice if I
had known about it. Maybe I didn't read the instructional manual of dozens of pages first,
but I'm always speaking from the perspective of an average user. So if I had known that,
I would have already activated the advanced mode and I wouldn't have, in case of a firmware update,
type in the words into the keyboard and into the browser. I mean, that's totally crazy,
but maybe they've improved. I hope I've done some constructive feedback. But from a security
standpoint, I think that's pretty risky stuff. I mean, yeah, just wanted to...
Was that with the Trezor 1? Because at least with the Model T,
you should be able to actually do more things on the screen.
Yeah. Yeah, Trezor 1. Yeah, that's the issue because the Model T, the second version,
the extended version, is already by default, right? Only display on its device. So, I mean,
we talk about security, privacy, and that's the whole point of having a hardware wallet.
This is not a criticism. I'm just saying, as a feedback, maybe it could have been done by
default. That's the only thing I'm saying. Why isn't the advanced mode not by default?
But otherwise, I'm really... I'm one of the hugest fans of Trezor and now, from now on,
Casa because it's really... I'm a total fan of... Because this is really what is needed in this
space. User-friendly, user experience, ease of use, intuitive handling without needing to understand.
I don't know how the internet works. Email, you just go in, pop it up, and you do your stuff.
I'm just hoping and wishing that this aspect could be more worked on.
Yeah. I mean, this is one of the issues, I think, with security. I mean, you're always making a
trade-off of usability versus security. And with a lot of the security-focused companies, I think
they focus on security sometimes to the detriment of usability. And I think that's one of the unique
things about Casa is we're definitely focusing on security, but we also have a very high priority
for usability. And that's something we have a lot of arguments about is what are the acceptable
trade-offs for us that we're willing to make the usability basically at a higher level than you
find with most of the other software out there. All right. Let me see if I have a couple of other
questions. I mean, to be honest with you, I don't want to repeat questions which I've already
discussed or elaborated on those excellent interviews and podcasts. People should just check
it out on lob.net slash interviews. It's really a treasure trove of information, knowledge,
and wisdom, and really for the sake of comprehension. So, all right, you talked about
challenges for the Lightning Network, engineering the liquidity in automatic fashion,
user understanding channels, Bitcoin wallet only. Oh, this is really an awesome topic or subtopic.
Bitcoin wallet only. You talked about the Bitcoin wallet only or Bitcoin wallet, which does
everything by default or automatically. What you're talking about like interoperability,
sort of, I'm just paraphrasing it, you know, vice versa, Bitcoin Wallet, Lightning Network,
Bitcoin Wallet, Lightning Network, Lightning Network, Bitcoin wallet, maybe even coin mixing,
everything by default. Would that be the ultimate solution?
Yeah. Well, from the like, when will Lightning Network go mainstream standpoint, I don't think
that that will happen until we can abstract away a lot of these low level issues like
channel management and liquidity. And really, you have to ask yourself, does it even make sense
that a user needs to know the difference between funds that are in a Lightning channel versus funds
that are just on chain? The user just wants to make a payment. I mean, they want to pay somebody,
they don't really care how it happens, they just want it to happen. And they don't want to have to
like manually open channels and figure out liquidity issues and all this other stuff.
So that is one of the long term challenges with all of this is to figure out how do we take all
of these issues that are currently being manually managed by advanced enthusiast users, and write
software that basically replicates whatever the actions that humans are doing right now,
so that in the future, all of that stuff can be done by the software. And all the user has to do
is point and click and scan a QR code and the payment just happens under the hood.
Great. So I want to talk, like we have got approximately 20 minutes, I want to have a
little bit of your broader perspective, your bigger picture on the situation that we have right now,
geopolitically, macroeconomically, we could have a recession by the end of next year, 2020,
and that these are experts saying this. We could have the ultimate dream of the
International Monetary Fund or whatever central banks to establish a cashless society.
Do you think all these factors with inflation, hyperinflation, negative rate interest policy,
maybe even negative bail in on depositing accounts, this could accelerate the process
of people flocking, it is like where I am going to store my wealth, how I am going to
circumvent the capital control or inflation, hyperinflation, bail in.
There is a school of thought that Bitcoin doesn't necessarily have to evolve much. All it has to do
is not fail because it seems pretty much guaranteed that the existing system is going to fail in
multiple ways. How catastrophically is it going to fail? That is up for debate. But it is clear
that a lot of people are going to be harmed, and those are the people who are then going
to be incentivized to look into alternative solutions. That is another reason why I think
that it is important that we continue trying to scale the system to make it more user-friendly,
so that when those people find themselves in a situation where they are looking for alternatives,
they don't find Bitcoin to be too onerous to take advantage of.
James, what is your vision? Just for the sake of imagination,
what do you think would happen once Bitcoin becomes so implemented and so, I don't know,
ossified, implemented, monetary root layering is fully developed? This is one of my favorite
questions because it goes back to Safed Namou's book, page 96-98, where he compares the 19th and
20th century. By the way, I talked also very interestingly to Adam back about this in my
interview with him. I want to have your position, your perspective. What do you think could change?
What would be the chain reaction on a social, scientific, technological, structural level
for our society, for human civilization? There are certainly plenty of utopian ideals
of what may happen with all of that. One of the biggest questions, I think, is
what are the things that are currently being bought and paid for via inflation or via
manipulation of the money supply? If that manipulation is no longer possible,
what are the side effects of all of that? While some people talk about things like,
oh, taxation is going to become impossible and that's going to starve the nation state and whatever,
I don't necessarily believe that because as long as we are physical beings that must reside within
some sort of geographic boundary that is controlled by a military-backed nation state, they're probably
going to be able to find you and extract some resources from you. I think the more logical
question is what happens when the starvation of inflation occurs? That will probably have some
major ripple effects through the banking system, the economy will result in geopolitical changes
because, actually, this happened during the Facebook or Libra hearings last week. There was
a senator who came right out and said, you know, Mr. Zuckerberg, America prefers to use the dollar
as a tool to basically pressure our enemies financially. We would much rather do that than
send troops into an enemy country. That really struck me with how transparent they were about
the weaponization of the dollar. Of course, I think most people are familiar with the petrodollar and
how that could have some major ripple effects if the dollar was no longer the primary denomination
for trading oil and potentially other large commodity markets. But I'm not an economist. I
don't necessarily know how that's all going to play out. There are folks who are hoping for
hyper Bitcoinization and that maybe Bitcoin ends up replacing the dollar as a unit of account for
many things, which would be, of course, great for anyone in the Bitcoin space. But before that
happens, I mean, I think there is going to be a lot of turmoil. And the unfortunate part of all
this is, you know, change often helps people, but it often hurts people as well. It hurts the
incumbents who are currently benefiting from whatever the rules of the current system are.
And what's very difficult to predict is how desperate those incumbents will become and what
things they might do to try to, you know, grasp at retaining the last bits of the power that they see
slipping away from them. So the only thing that I am fairly confident about is that, you know,
the world is going to continue to get weirder and more complex and potentially more chaotic.
Yeah, very good point, Mick. You know, Eric Raskol, you know, personally, anyway, he writes this on
Libitcoin, his articles, and there was this discussion on Twitter, other means principle,
it's called. And I'm just going to quote a sentence out of it. I just want to know your
thoughts about this. He says, this conflict in connection with Bitcoin, this conflict between
state and individuals for control of money will pass through up to four phases anticipated by
the Bitcoin security model. These may overlap and vary regionally, but are each clearly identifiable.
First, honeymoon, second, black market, third, competition, and fourth, surrender. So there's
this process, obviously, that it sounds logical also to me, you know, because it won't be like
without sort of a fight or a conflict or resistance. Where do you see this going? I mean,
do you see this process, this evolution, like with in regards to states, nation states and
seniorage taxes, this is the whole point, I guess, we're paying taxes. So is this going to change?
Well, on the bright side, I think that a lot of the fears that governments were going to clamp down
and completely ban Bitcoin and you kick down people's doors, that has mostly gone away. You
know, sure, there are a few countries that have effectively banned it. But even, you know, just in
the past few weeks, we've seen, you know, China start to talk about blockchain technology initiatives
and completely reversing some of their bans on various speech around this technology. And so
I'm optimistic that at least in a lot of the Western countries and, you know, potentially others
as well, it seems like a lot of politicians are already invested in and benefiting from Bitcoin.
And so from that perspective, it's already kind of infected the government, hopefully, to the
extent that a lot of these governments would not be willing to ban it because the politicians would
actually be harming themselves. And so it's an interesting juxtaposition of the benefits to the
individuals who are even part of the government versus the government as a whole, which is clearly
not going to benefit from having a competitive monetary system. But it's just, that's what you
have to look at, right, is you have to look at the incentives and the game theory. And it seems to be
working out pretty well so far.
Yeah, it seems they're doing us a really great favor, I always say, you know, this, because
everything is sort of a lot of things are working out independently from one another, but it's still
connected. So all these processes, you know, with China and whatever federal chairman, the chairman
of Federal Reserve or Donald Trump or the Treasury Secretary making a statement, now the hearings in
the Congress. And as you say, you know, now they are, they've got skin in the game now, a lot of
them, right, decision makers, lawmakers, politicians, regulators. So it's really a fascinating time to
live in. So, James, first of all, I want to really appreciate your sharing knowledge, would you for
the last 10 minutes we have left, anything essential, like somebody would come up to you,
totally, you know, not knowledgeable about Bitcoin, what would be like the essential information you
would give him or her to, you know, if this person is inspired or open minded, where would you send
him to? I mean, what, where should he start in the rabbit hole?
Well, I specifically have a getting started page on my website, which is, you know, a bunch of
non-technical explanations. I think we've even got some like, you know, cartoons and animated
stuff there, that it kind of explains the system at a really high level as, you know, a way of
proving ownership of assets and transferring assets, you know, without a third party. Yeah,
it was the getting started link. You were right there on Bitcoin resources. Yeah, getting started
is right there on the left. And so, yeah, first steps, you know, basic facts, frequently asked
questions, but then like the, you know, explain Bitcoin like I'm five will be able to be
by most people. And then, you know, I have plenty of other more in depth, technical explanations,
if people really care. But I also say that the Bitcoin white paper is actually a pretty easy
read. Most people probably hear white paper and they think, oh, this is going to be really
technical and above my head. But Satoshi wrote the white paper in fairly plain terms. There's
not a whole lot of technical jargon in there. And even if it is too much, I've got like some
annotated versions of the white paper that go into even more detail of explaining, you know,
exactly what any of the technical explanations are. And so, you know, you don't necessarily
even have to understand what any of those like algorithms or functions are in there. I think the
diagrams explain a lot. But can I ask you something, Jameson? The first time you read,
because I hear this from a lot of people, you know, who are really even Andreas Antonopoulos,
like reading it the first time, people just brush it away. Was that in your case too? Or did you
like, did it make click in your head, in your brain? No, I definitely dismissed Bitcoin the
first few times that I just heard about it in the news. But then, you know, the third or fourth or
fifth time or whatever that it kept coming up, I decided, okay, it's not dying. I should probably
look into it. And so that is when I actually read the white paper. And when I read the white paper,
I was pretty amazed. I was like, this is actually an amazing solution to a computer science problem
that I had never even really thought about. And so that intrigued me because I had a computer
science degree. And so it got me interested from a technical standpoint. But of course,
I was also simultaneously interested just from a philosophical sort of libertarian standpoint as
well. And the white paper does not explain actually quite a few things. There are a ton of things
that are missing from the white paper. But it does a great job of explaining just the high level
concepts of how do you build a system that is not reliant upon trusted third parties to come to
consensus. Gotcha. Yeah, I just found the annotated version of yours. Really great. Yeah, it's, wow,
what a treasure trove of information. This is great. This is great stuff. Yeah, people need to,
I mean, you know, take upon their responsibility and educate themselves. I mean, all we can do is
really give them the inspirations, the knowledge is really there. It's open source. It's freely
available. And there's tons of really excellent material with a podcast, videos, interviews,
articles written on medium.com. It's just endless. Yeah, but here's the thing about all of the
education and resources. The reason why people should be doing that and educating themselves
is because it is such a new system. It's still risky. It's still complicated. If we get to the
point where this is a mainstream adopted thing, then people won't need to educate themselves about
much of it at all, except maybe that they need to, you know, have a backup of their seed phrase or
something. Other than that, you know, it's just like the internet. Like you said, you don't know
how the internet works or email works. It's because the people who are using it, you know, 20, 30
years ago, they had to educate themselves about how it was working at a low level because not many
layers of abstraction had been built on top of it to make it user friendly. You had to know how to
get on the command line and, you know, dial your modem into like a specific telephony based ISP
and, you know, potentially even configure the like frequency and baud of your modem and all this
other stuff. But now, you know, people just go buy a mobile phone and start tapping around on it and
they can accomplish amazing things. And I fully expect that the same thing is going to happen with
Bitcoin, Lightning and any other technologies that are built on top of it is that we get to the point
where it's so easy to use, you know, you can basically hand a phone or a tablet to a toddler
and they can start working their way through and making payments without asking anybody for permission.
So, Jameson, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I really appreciate your commitment,
you know, your ethos, you know, all your work is you in the background. If you had like one title
that you would give this interview, what would it be? What have we talked about, in essence?
Is it about freedom? Is it about adoption? Is it about evolution? What is it about? Is it about,
you know, what is it? Well, I mean, I think that we've mostly covered just the complexity of this
space. It is and it continues to be a system that is so complicated and has so many different facets
to it that you can choose one of them and dig in as deep as you want to, or you can, you know,
try to go broad and cover a lot at a high level. But, you know, the ultimate
issue with, I think, education and trying to learn more about stuff in this space is that
everyone should just follow their own path. I often get questions from people of like,
you know, I want to contribute to this space, you know, what do I need to learn? Or, you know,
what should I contribute to this space? And ultimately, because there is no authority,
there is no project manager, there is no real way to specifically point people to a specific path,
to say, you know, this is the path that you have to take. I think that everyone has to take their
own path and explore whatever pieces of the system they find most interesting. And, you know, if
you're non-technical, then you're probably not going to go down the technical side, but maybe
you're more interested in the economics or the finance or aspects of like governance and consensus.
Bitcoin needs to have as many, you know, experts in different areas as possible because this is an
organic, open community movement. So, as long as people are educating themselves about something,
then that will give you the ability to contribute back with whatever discussions arise in the future
about what we need to do to make this system better. Beautiful, Asiyat. Yeah, I totally agree
with you. Jameson, thank you so much for sharing your time, your knowledge, and your wisdom. And
hope to see you soon, maybe at some other event, conference, or maybe on a panel discussion. And
yeah, appreciate everything you do and hope to, yeah, talk to you soon again. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. All right. Bye.
Welcome to the podcast show by Keevan Devani, the total connector, total Bitcoin, awesome economics,
the hardest and scarcest money ever created in human history, Bitcoin.