Jameson Lopp's Bitcoin Articles

Bitcoin 2020 Annual Review

Comprehensive coverage of metrics across a number of different verticals in the Bitcoin ecosystem to gauge performance in 2020.

1 January 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Lightning Wallet Recovery Lessons Learned

Recovering funds from a crashed Lightning wallet can be technically challenging - here's what I have learned from performing dozens of recoveries.

20 December 2020 | Casa Blog

The Rise of Bitcoin Corporate Key Management

Maintaining a corporate bitcoin treasury can reap major rewards, but there are significant risks that must be mitigated first.

3 December 2020 | Casa Blog

2020 Bitcoin Node Performance Tests

Annual tests of full validation syncing performance of seven Bitcoin node implementations.

12 November 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Custodian Menace

A small number of custodians hold the private keys to a large amount of bitcoin. This is not good for Bitcoin.

24 October 2020 | Casa Blog

Mind the Bitcoin Address Gap

A guide to preventing and resolving Bitcoin address gap limit edge cases.

11 October 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Multisig Hardware Signing Performance

Jameson tests the performance of popular Bitcoin security hardware devices in various multisig wallet configurations.

12 September 2020 | Casa Blog

On Shitcoins and STOs

A breakdown of different types of cryptographic tokens and the controversies generated by their proponents.

30 August 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Are Chinese Miners a Threat to Bitcoin?

Is the concentration of hashpower within the borders of China a cause for concern about a nation state attack against the network?

9 August 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Tests (Round IV)

Jameson stress tests new metal devices for storing seed phrase backups.

2 August 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Law Enforcement Logs of a Privileged White Male

Reflections upon a variety of encounters I've had with law enforcement throughout my life.

12 July 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Electrum Server Performance Report

Casa engineers compare and contrast the performance of 3 popular Electrum server implementations.

3 July 2020 | Casa Blog

The Dos and Don'ts of Bitcoin Key Management

The Internet is a dangerous place, especially when you're protecting bitcoin. Jameson covers what you need to know to stay safe in this perilous environment.

6 June 2020 | Casa Blog

Casa's Seedless Security Model

Seed phrases are the keys to your bitcoin kingdom; Jameson makes the case for why bitcoin users should not need to manually manage their seed phrase backups.

18 May 2020 | Casa Blog

The Annals of Bitcoin Twitter

Bitcoin has been discussed on Twitter since the first week of the network's operation. The following is my attempt to cover major points in Bitcoin history as told by tweets.

2 May 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Memes Make the Bitcoin

Thoughts on memetic theory and the significance of popular Bitcoin memes.

26 April 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Protect Your Bitcoin from $5 Wrench Attacks

If you're going to be your own bank, you're going to want bank-grade security. Thankfully we can now achieve that at an affordable cost!

21 April 2020 | Casa Blog

How the SEC Nearly Destroyed my Retirement Account

Not your keys, not your coins. Not your certificates, not your stocks.

18 April 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Multisig Time Locking Challenges

Securing your bitcoin with time locks are great in theory, but difficult in practice.

9 April 2020 | Casa Blog

Bitcoin Testnet Block Storms

A deep dive into how 10 lines of code resulted in far-reaching unintended consequences for the Bitcoin test network.

4 April 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Announcing Casa Titanium

The best bitcoin security that money can't buy.

1 April 2020 | Casa Blog

How to Create a Bitcoin/Lightning Email Paywall with BTCPay

A step-by-step guide to building your own bitcoin-powered priority inbox.

22 March 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Build Your Own Casa Node

A step by step guide for users to assemble their own Casa Node for Bitcoin & Lightning.

19 March 2020 | Casa Blog

Virtual Reality Challenges & Opportunities

Thoughts on the social challenges, solutions, and new possibilities we can expect to face as virtual reality adoption continues.

15 March 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Core Contributor Challenges

A look into the history of accepted and rejected pull requests to Bitcoin Core.

14 March 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Satoshi Roundtable VI Recap

A review of selected topics covered such as philanthropy, onboarding, web of trust, identity, BTMs, and PSBT.

17 February 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

A Home Defense Primer

A comprehensive post covering considerations to take when designing a multilayered home defense system.

12 February 2020 | Casa Blog

Firearms for Home Defense

Considerations to take regarding firearm selection, training, and storage for home defense.

12 February 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

2020 Altcoin Node Sync Tests

Testing sync performance of Ethereum, Monero, and Zcash nodes.

7 February 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Securely Back up Data to Cloud Storage

Jameson researches user-friendly solutions for backing up sensitive data to cloud providers while keeping it safe from third party snooping.

21 January 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

What Are the Key Properties of Bitcoin?

Fundamental principles of Bitcoin that must be preserved to maintain the system's utility.

3 January 2020 | Nakamoto

Bitcoin 2019 Annual Review

50+ metrics across a variety of vertical to gauge ecosystem performance in 2019.

2 January 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Deleting "Crypto Deleted Tweets"

The real story behind the suspension of the "Crypto Deleted Tweets" bot.

18 December 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Griefing "Crypto Deleted Tweets"

A few thoughts on the "Crypto Deleted Tweets" bot and how to improve its signal/noise ratio.

8 December 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Test (Round III)

Stress testing a dozen new metal seed phrase backup devices.

7 December 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

2019 Bitcoin Node Performance Tests

Testing full validation syncing performance of seven Bitcoin node implementations.

10 November 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Security Issues with Browser-Based Bitcoin Wallets

There's more to wallet security than just keeping private keys safe; Jameson covers some often overlooked issues with web browsers.

7 November 2019 | Casa Blog

GrapheneOS: Phone Privacy Protection

Jameson details his experience setting up a Pixel 3 phone with the privacy enhanced Graphene operating system.

2 November 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Shamir's Secret Sharing Shortcomings

Jameson explains why Casa prefers multisig over SSS for securing private keys.

17 October 2019 | Casa Blog

Craig Wright's Copyright Claim

Craig Wright registered a copyright claim on the Bitcoin whitepaper. Does this claim hold any weight?

26 September 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Thoughts on Libra "Blockchain"

An interpretation of the 26 page technical document describing the protocol to be used as a platform for the Libra coin and more.

18 June 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Test (part II)

The results of extreme stress tests on 13 metal seed storage devices.

18 May 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How Many Wrongs Make A Wright?

A presentation of evidence with regard to Craig Wright's claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto.

9 May 2019 | Bitcoin Magazine

Casa Keymaster Security: Mobile Key Overview

A technical explanation of how Casa securely backs up mobile device keys.

9 April 2019 | Casa Blog

Bitcoin Timestamp Security

A deep technical dive into the assurances around the accuracy of timestamps in Bitcoin block headers.

3 March 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Satoshi Roundtable V Recap

Discussions on Lightning Network, Privacy, Sidechains, Secure Hardware, Mnemonic Seed Phrases, Security Tokens, and Grin.

9 February 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Open Sourcing the Casa Node

Improving security through transparency.

31 January 2019 | Casa Blog

Bitcoin by the Numbers - 2018 Recap

An overview of the diverse set of trends observed in the Bitcoin ecosystem during 2018.

1 January 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Who Controls Bitcoin Core?

A deep dive into the security practices and power distribution of the Bitcoin Core project.

15 December 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Full Validation Sync Performance

Jameson tests and compares the initial sync performance of popular Bitcoin implementations.

1 December 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Seed Security Analysis

Jameson demonstrates the dangers of manually manipulating seed phrases by showing how easy it is to reduce their computational security.

24 November 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

A Modest Privacy Protection Proposal

A comprehensive guide to reclaiming your privacy in the surveillance age.

29 September 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Reflections upon a SWATting

Jameson tells the full story of being targeted for SWATting.

28 July 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Switch

Thoughts on end of life planning for crypto asset owners.

21 July 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Test

Jameson tests the limits of various metal key storage devices.

14 July 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Casa’s Privacy Model

Describing what types of privacy Casa customers can expect to have.

25 June 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Satoshi Roundtable IV Recap

Covering our discussions about tribalism, developer education, operational security, drivechains, and Tether.

10 February 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

What the Data Tells Us About Bitcoin in 2017

Statistics show bitcoin is at the forefront of an increasingly complex ecosystem that continues to grow in a variety of ways.

13 January 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure

Lopp covers a number of issues encountered while building a multisig smart contract wallet.

8 January 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Securing Your Financial Sovereignty

An explanation of why fully validating nodes matter and how to make use of them.

22 October 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Can SPV Support a Billion Bitcoin Users?

Lopp takes a deep dive into claims that it's safe to remove bitcoin's block size limit and instead rely on existing SPV methods.

30 July 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin and the Benefits of Coopetition

Lopp makes an impassioned argument for the need for more cooperation between the players in the bitcoin space.

14 July 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Challenges of Bitcoin Transaction Fee Estimation

Bitcoin transaction fee estimation is a goldilocks problem wrapped in a future prediction enigma shrouded...

10 May 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Announcing the Bitcoin Core Config Generator

Bitcoin Core is a complex piece of software. Because one of the primary goals of Bitcoin is to enable users to be self sovereign and...

30 March 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Moderation Methods vs Censorship Claims

One of the major points of contention in the Bitcoin community these days revolves around claims of censorship...

13 February 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Nobody Understands Bitcoin (And That's OK)

When I first became interested in bitcoin, I found myself spending countless hours absorbing as much information about it as possible, trying to put all of the pieces together...

13 March 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Statoshi’s Satoshi Roundtable Review

I was fortunate to attend the 2017 Satoshi Roundtable on behalf of BitGo. It was truly a pleasure to meet many...

30 January 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Ledger Blue Review

Ledger's new hardware wallet is the most costly on the market. Does it have the features to justify the expense?

28 January 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

SegWit: The Swiftest Safe Path Forward

I and many of my colleagues at BitGo and across the Bitcoin ecosystem are eager to see...

19 January 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin: 2016 in Review

In addition to my day job as a BitGo engineer, I run Statoshi.info, a site I created in 2014 to track Bitcoin metrics from the perspective...

9 January 2017 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin's Security Model: A Deep Dive

When discussing consensus mechanisms for different cryptocurrencies, one issue that often causes arguments is a lack...

13 November 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Run Bitcoin as a Tor Hidden Service on Ubuntu

Why should you run a Bitcoin hidden service on your node? * It increases the privacy of other Bitcoin users...

19 August 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin: The Trust Anchor in a Sea of Blockchains

Bitcoin has a number of properties that give it utility (and thus value) such as trustlessness, permissionlessness...

23 July 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Building a Better Bitcoin Fee Market

Over the past year we have seen the fee market for bitcoin transactions evolve at a rapid pace. As transaction volume continues to increase, so does the demand for block space, which remains...

8 May 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks

From bitcoin to blockchain to distributed ledgers, the cryptocurrency space is fast evolving, to the...

9 April 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Avoiding Stuck Transactions With BitGo

A lot happens under the hood when sending a Bitcoin transaction - I covered some of the details in a previous...

29 February 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Lightning’s Balancing Act: Challenges Face Bitcoin’s Scalability Savior

The bitcoin community has been discussing the concept of the...

28 February 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Save Bitcoin's Node Network from Centralization

Decentralization is, I would argue, the most important property of the bitcoin network. Without it, many...

30 January 2016 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Statoshi Developer’s Guide

Statoshi is a fork of Bitcoin Core with several hundred additional lines of code for emitting metrics to a StatsD instance. You can view the...

24 December 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Future of Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin mining has evolved rapidly over the last 7 years, with three distinct generations of miners in terms of power efficiency: 1.CPUs (2009–2010) 2. GPUs & FPGAs (2010–2013) 3. ASICs (2013-present)...

19 December 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Scaling Bitcoin: Hong Kong Recap

While many were dubious that it would be successful, I attended the second Scaling Bitcoin workshop with...

8 December 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Case Wallet Review

When I first heard about Case Wallet, I was intrigued. The fact that it used a 2-of-3 multi-sig setup like we do at BitGo made me interested to see if this product would be able...

21 November 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Malevolent Malleability

Transaction malleability is a longstanding issue in the Bitcoin technical community. Bitcoin businesses and developers should be aware of it so that they take action to protect themselves against it.

5 November 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Legislation in North Carolina

I’ve lived in North Carolina my entire life. It’s a great place to live and has a thriving tech scene...

2 October 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

To Node or Not to Node?

Over a year ago I wondered: how many Bitcoin nodes is enough? It turns out that there are several different perspectives...

26 September 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Solo Mine on Bitcoin’s Testnet

I'm a Bitcoin engineer, so I often need to test new code but I don’t want to risk losing valuable bitcoins in case there is a bug. Thankfully...

14 September 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Statoshi.info Account Creation Guide

Now you can create, save, and share your own custom dashboards on statoshi.info! It only takes a couple minutes...

24 June 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Challenges of Block Chain Indexing

Over the past several months I’ve had the pleasure of enhancing BitGo's block chain indexing service — a core...

1 June 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

(De)centralized Block Chain Scaling

Lately there has been a great deal of debate around increasing the maximum block size allowed by the Bitcoin protocol because we're approaching the current 1 MB limit. While this...

17 May 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Create a BitGo Wallet with a Mycelium Entropy Generated Offline Key

BitGo provides a secure non-custodial Bitcoin wallet using our P2SH multisignature technology...

7 April 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Challenges of Optimizing Unspent Output Selection

When we talk about bitcoins being stored on the block chain, most people speak in terms of “address balances" which makes sense from an accounting perspective, but this is not...

23 February 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Fix Amazon Instant Video Streaming in Ubuntu

If you’re an Ubuntu user who is trying to play Amazon Instant Videos but you’re encountering an error that looks like this: Player Update: An error occurred and your player could not...

20 December 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Graphite & Grafana Performance Tips

If you’re using Graphite to monitor your systems, your dashboards are probably only accessible to a few people in your organization and page load performance...

13 December 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

A Puzzling Bitcoin Treasure Hunt

After reading about Coin Artist’s epic Dark Wallet puzzle I decided to try my hand at crafting a (slightly less difficult) steganographic bitcoin treasure hunt...

9 December 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Generate a Custom Bitcoin Address with an AMD GPU on Ubuntu

Have you ever wanted a bitcoin address that was more personalized and recognizable than the standard...

8 November 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Thoughts on Secure Storage of Bitcoins and Other Crypto Backed Assets

Depending upon the value of your crypto assets, you’ll need to take different levels of precautions in order to provide sufficient...

5 October 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Future of Statoshi

I am a software engineer who has spent the past 7 years scaling my employer's web application from a several server infrastructure capable of sending a hundred thousand emails a day to a several hundred server infrastructure that sends a hundred...

23 August 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Baron Bios: The Who’s Who of the Cryptocurrency Community

I'm not sure if it was YTCracker who coined the term “Bitcoin Baron," but I’ve found it fascinating to observe the Bitcoin early adopters who have played public roles in shaping...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The State of the Bitcoin Network

Friends, followers, fellow Internet denizens: twenty-six years ago, Timothy May predicted that cryptologic methods would fundamentally...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Announcing Statoshi.info: A public Statoshi dashboard

A common criticism of Statoshi is that it is too complicated for the average person to configure...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Announcing Statoshi: Realtime Bitcoin Node Statistics

I've been on a quest for the past several months since I first asked the question: how many Bitcoin nodes are enough?

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Bitcoin Nodes: How Many is Enough?

Should we be worried about the declining number of nodes? It’s fairly straightforward to see the computational strength of the Bitcoin mining infrastructure growing...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Peeking Under the Hood of a Running Bitcoin Node

I'’'ve been running a Bitcoin full node for over a year now, but the only insight I ever had into what it was doing was how many...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to Set Up a Bitcoin Full Node

Help support the network at little cost! In a previous post I discussed the functions of full nodes and how the complexity of Bitcoin’s network makes it difficult to discern how many nodes are actually needed...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Multifaceted Nature of Bitcoin

It’s indisputable that Bitcoin is a controversial topic. It results in people to asking questions like "what is money?" and "what is value?" — questions that many people live...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

How to set up an IDE for developing Bitcoin Core on Linux

Recently I decided that browsing the Bitcoin Core source code in a text editor was not sufficient; I wanted to leverage the features...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

The Value of Bitcoin’s Infrastructure

Debunking the myth of "intrinsic value". We often hear from naysayers that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it’s simply software, a hodgepodge of digital bits and bytes that only exist in the ether of the Internet...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Zerocoin: Zero Knowledge for Infinite Anonymity

Many people mistakenly describe Bitcoin as an anonymous digital currency. This is not true by a long shot — Bitcoin can be best described...

7 June 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations

Seeking Superior Subscriber Segmentation System Scalability

Building a new iteration of our segmentation engine in a never-ending quest for better performance.

28 October 2014 | Bronto Engineering

In Search of a Smarter Hbase Client

Diagnosing and preventing performance issues with problematic Hbase schemas.

12 August 2014 | Bronto Engineering

Introducing the Bronto Kegbot

Building advanced alcohol automation in a self-service beer system.