When he can't compress a complex concept into a few tweets, Jameson writes lengthy technical (and sometimes philosophical) articles to communicate information and opinions he has gathered while building crypto asset infrastructure.
Electrum Server Performance Report (2022)
A quantitative comparison of ElectrumX, Esplora, and Fulcrum electrum server performance.19 November 2022 | Casa Blog
16 November 2022 | Casa Blog
The Death of Decentralized Email
A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.4 November 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
San Francisco 2033: You Will Own Nothing and be Happy
A dystopian cyberpunk future short story.28 October 2022 | Bitcoin Magazine
OpenAI Whisper Transcription Testing
Accuracy and performance testing of OpenAI's transcription software.30 September 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
16 September 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Tests (Round VI)
22 new devices stress tested and reviewed.27 August 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
A Treatise on Bitcoin Seed Backup Device Design
Lessons learned from stress testing dozens of seed phrase backup devices.13 August 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Crypto's Kryptonite: Complexity
Thoughts on navigating the wider crypto ecosystem and evaluating risks of new projects.3 August 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
How to Manage Bitcoin Like a Whale
Approaching your bitcoin investment with a long-term view.11 July 2022 | Casa Blog
27 June 2022 | Casa Blog
11 June 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Ensuring Your Second Life With Bitcoin
Bitcoin and cryonics are both revolutionary technologies - but are the also complementary? Can you "take your bitcoin with you?"18 May 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
28 April 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
The Hunt for the Best Gigabit Home VPN
VPN technology is improving, but how hard is it to actually implement?24 April 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
2 April 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Running Bitcoin Core v0.7 and Earlier
An exploration into eccentricities of trying to sync extremely old versions of Bitcoin Core.19 March 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
19 March 2022 | Cointelegraph
Building Bitcoin Core v0.7 and Earlier
A guide for how to compile binaries for very old Bitcoin Core versions that are no longer available to download.16 March 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
12 March 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
How to Prepare for Hyperinflation
Inflation is at all-time highs after central banks have printed $2 trillion over the past 2 years. How can you prepare for the worst?6 March 2022 | Forbes
Bitcoin Core Performance Evolution
A historical analysis of full validation node sync performance across 9 years of releases.5 March 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
21 February 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Bitcoin’s Last Security Challenge: Simplicity
Bitcoin's "Mayflower Generation" has evolved into a revolutionary army. But, how has the threat landscape changed — and how can they keep their coins safe?12 February 2022 | Cointelegraph
Is the Bitcoin Network Slowing Down?
An investigation into the root cause of node syncing performance drops seen during annual testing.22 January 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
How is the 21 Million Bitcoin Cap Defined and Enforced?
A deep dive into the code that keeps bitcoin's inflation rate on a predictable schedule.12 January 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
3 January 2022 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
3 January 2022 | Bitcoin Magazine
5 Things You Need To Know About Donating Bitcoin To Charity
Tips & tricks for maximizing your charitable contributions.12 December 2021 | Forbes
2021 Bitcoin Node Performance Tests
Testing full validation sync performance of seven Bitcoin node implementations.4 December 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
14 November 2021 | Forbes
13 November 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Stress Test (Round V)
Jameson stress tests another dozen seed backup devices.7 November 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Congressional Bitcoin Believers
Plenty of politicians have opined upon Bitcoin and the crypto industry over the years, but how many of them have skin in the game?19 September 2021 | BTC Times
Lopp's Links for Learning Bitcoin
A guide to exploring the Bitcoin ecosystem and understanding its many facets.18 September 2021 | Forbes
22 August 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Lightning Liquidity Management Guide
Lessons learned from running a routing node on the Lightning Network.7 August 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
1 August 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
How to Protect Contact Forms from Spam with Proof of Work
An argument and guide for using hashcash puzzles to protect contact forms from spammers instead of captchas.18 July 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Casa Client Case Study: The Tinder Trap
Postmortem analysis of a physical attack perpetrated against a Casa client and tips for staying safe on the dating scene.8 July 2021 | Casa Blog
Bitcoin: Redefining F-You Money
Those with traditional F-you money are beholden to no one. Bitcoin changes the game by enabling any user to attain a new level of financial freedom at a low cost.4 July 2021 | Forbes
29 May 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Tor-only Bitcoin & Lightning Guide
A guide for how Lightning users can improve their financial privacy.6 May 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
What is the Taproot Bitcoin Upgrade?
What does Taproot mean for Bitcoin and how does it affect your wallet?4 May 2021 | Casa Blog
Custodial Bitcoin Interest Service Reviews
Jameson tests onboarding to a dozen interest generating bitcoin custody services in a hunt for red flags.25 April 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
From Fat to Fit in Four Months
Lessons learned from my experiment in maximizing weight loss with the least amount of effort.10 April 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
1 April 2021 | Casa Blog
A History of Bitcoin Transaction Dust & Spam Storms
A historical analysis of spam attacks conducted on the Bitcoin network.13 March 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
Announcing Specter Desktop Compatibility
How Casa clients can reduce their reliance upon Casa.3 March 2021 | Casa Blog
Bitcoin Block Time Variance: Theory vs Reality
How well does the historical distribution of timestamps on bitcoin blocks match the expected distribution?20 February 2021 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
24 October 2020 | Casa Blog
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
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
2 May 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
4 April 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
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
17 February 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
12 February 2020 | Casa Blog
12 February 2020 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
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
3 March 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
9 February 2019 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
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
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
25 June 2018 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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 in mystery.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
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
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
24 December 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
21 November 2015 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
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
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
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
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
23 August 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
In Search of a Smarter Hbase Client
Diagnosing and preventing performance issues with problematic Hbase schemas.12 August 2014 | Bronto Engineering
15 July 2014 | Bronto Engineering
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...29 May 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...12 May 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 May 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...27 April 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...21 April 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...8 April 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...3 April 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...24 March 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...19 March 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...10 March 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
How to Invest in Bitcoin Within a Tax Advantaged Retirement Account
Note that the following does not constitute investment advice. Investing in cryptocurrency is high risk...3 March 2014 | Cypherpunk Cogitations
26 September 2012 | Bronto Nation
Beers at Bronto: Kegmaster's Corner
Bronto's acquisition of a double kegerator.24 September 2012 | Bronto Nation
3 August 2012 | Bronto Nation