[00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:06.080]   Hello, and welcome to 21 and 21. I'm Haley Bercow, and today I'm speaking with Jamison Lopp.
[00:00:06.080 --> 00:00:12.340]   Jamison Lopp is a longtime Bitcoiner, cypherpunk, and the co-founder and chief security officer of Casa.
[00:00:12.340 --> 00:00:18.860]   He's well known for his writing on Bitcoin privacy and security and his extensive website of resources, Lopp.net.
[00:00:18.860 --> 00:00:21.440]   Jamison, welcome to Presidio Bitcoin.
[00:00:21.440 --> 00:00:26.160]   First time here. It's been a while, actually, since I've been in the Bay Area.
[00:00:26.160 --> 00:00:29.780]   My initial gig was at BitGo, which is in Palo Alto.
[00:00:30.560 --> 00:00:34.880]   Well, I'm glad that you could make it back and swing by first, but hopefully not your last time.
[00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:41.740]   So we're just going to get through as many questions as we can in 21 minutes. Are you ready?
[00:00:41.740 --> 00:00:42.320]   Fire away.
[00:00:42.320 --> 00:00:47.200]   All right. First question. So you've obviously done a lot. You do a lot.
[00:00:47.200 --> 00:00:50.580]   What's one thing that's top of mind for you right now?
[00:00:51.500 --> 00:01:01.280]   I'm actually mostly focused on what I consider to be really, really long-term existential issues that I think we as Bitcoiners need to be thinking about.
[00:01:01.280 --> 00:01:05.640]   So, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm here today for the Quantum Bitcoin Summit.
[00:01:05.640 --> 00:01:23.260]   And it's why I talk about other sort of vague things like ossification, which I think will eventually have ripple effects with regard to a lot of other things that Bitcoin should probably do to improve itself over the years and decades.
[00:01:25.160 --> 00:01:27.300]   Yes. Quantum is definitely one of those.
[00:01:27.300 --> 00:01:29.200]   And you're here for the Quantum Bitcoin Summit.
[00:01:29.200 --> 00:01:38.480]   So I saw that you recently tweeted about a new Bitcoin improvement protocol proposal aimed at promoting post-quantum crypto migration.
[00:01:39.180 --> 00:01:43.340]   Can you maybe give a high-level explanation in layman's terms for our listeners?
[00:01:43.340 --> 00:01:48.040]   Yeah. So the short version is I'm not saying that we need to do anything today.
[00:01:48.040 --> 00:01:50.000]   Once again, this is a very long-term thing.
[00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:58.380]   I just think that if we get to the point where we do believe that quantum computing has advanced sufficiently,
[00:01:58.380 --> 00:02:02.720]   that it is going to become a threat to Bitcoin's cryptography,
[00:02:03.240 --> 00:02:15.760]   then this is a very different situation that we've never encountered before because we're going to want everyone to actually migrate their funds to new locking scripts and new signature schemes.
[00:02:15.760 --> 00:02:22.180]   And so my proposal is basically how do we think about the incentives and the game theory around that?
[00:02:22.600 --> 00:02:27.500]   Because one of the arguments that I make is that if we do this as an opt-in-only thing,
[00:02:27.500 --> 00:02:37.000]   it's unfortunately probably going to be insufficient simply because a lot of people are ignorant, naive, lazy, procrastinators, so on and so forth.
[00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:41.620]   And that even if we got a significant amount of the ecosystem moved over,
[00:02:41.620 --> 00:02:47.160]   they could still end up being significantly harmed as a result of all of the people who don't do anything.
[00:02:47.160 --> 00:02:52.060]   So this is something that more than developers will need to be thinking about in the future.
[00:02:52.160 --> 00:02:54.320]   This will be Bitcoin users, Bitcoin wallets.
[00:02:54.320 --> 00:02:55.400]   This affects everybody.
[00:02:55.400 --> 00:02:56.500]   It affects everybody.
[00:02:56.500 --> 00:03:03.400]   Do you think there's a way that we can make this kind of more easier on the UX side for people that are less technical?
[00:03:03.400 --> 00:03:05.520]   For sure.
[00:03:05.520 --> 00:03:11.620]   But that is all a moot point unless we first can decide what to do at the protocol level.
[00:03:11.620 --> 00:03:18.820]   You know, first you have to make protocol level changes and then it can take years for them to matriculate throughout the rest of the ecosystem and get adopted
[00:03:18.820 --> 00:03:21.500]   and then eventually get down to the actual user level.
[00:03:21.720 --> 00:03:23.580]   Got it.
[00:03:23.580 --> 00:03:31.340]   So you've been in the Bitcoin space for a very long time and you said right now you're focused on these kind of like long-term existential problems.
[00:03:31.340 --> 00:03:35.840]   What's something that you've maybe changed your mind about along the way?
[00:03:37.440 --> 00:03:59.360]   I mean, Bitcoin itself has changed and this is one thing that I've said a few times, which is basically that once you've been in Bitcoin long enough, I think you start to understand that you need to be fairly flexible and understand that, you know, this is kind of a living ecosystem and it does change.
[00:03:59.360 --> 00:04:07.480]   Even if the protocol itself doesn't significantly change, the way that people view the protocol, the way that people use it changes and the narratives of what Bitcoin is change.
[00:04:07.480 --> 00:04:20.660]   So compared to 13, 14 years ago when I first started being interested in it, like what Bitcoin was to the average Bitcoiner, drastically different thing than what it is today.
[00:04:21.020 --> 00:04:30.800]   And of course, that can then have trickle on effects to the long term forward trajectory of what Bitcoin can actually do at a technical level.
[00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:38.840]   You know, if people, what people have in their head is their narrative of what Bitcoin is, is different than what we might be proposing it can do at a technical level.
[00:04:38.840 --> 00:04:44.320]   Well, I think you've already seen a number of the conflicts that can happen as a result of that over the past year or two.
[00:04:44.320 --> 00:04:45.440]   Yes, definitely.
[00:04:45.440 --> 00:04:51.320]   What's a project that you're currently very excited about in the Bitcoin space right now?
[00:04:54.520 --> 00:05:12.340]   I mean, I like to see further development of layer twos and so any novel layer two that is not simply a glorified multi-sig is interesting to me.
[00:05:12.340 --> 00:05:22.380]   So some of the BitVM stuff, I think Citra is one of the first that looks like they're going to get out of the gate with these zero knowledge rollup layers.
[00:05:22.700 --> 00:05:24.360]   That's interesting to me.
[00:05:24.360 --> 00:05:33.420]   There's been a decent amount of development with eCache mints, several different projects there, which you can argue.
[00:05:33.420 --> 00:05:39.720]   I mean, obviously, there's trade-offs to all of these things, but you can argue that they offer somewhat better user experience than Lightning.
[00:05:39.720 --> 00:05:44.000]   Of course, there are security trade-offs, but there's also privacy improvements.
[00:05:46.780 --> 00:05:52.180]   Then most recently, we actually saw Botanics launch.
[00:05:52.180 --> 00:06:01.360]   Now, I think that they are launching with multi-sig, but their ultimate goal is to get to a very different type of pegging mechanism.
[00:06:01.360 --> 00:06:03.620]   That's just the best way to describe it.
[00:06:03.680 --> 00:06:09.260]   They call it spider chain as this sort of rolling, ongoing set of multi-sigs.
[00:06:09.260 --> 00:06:20.760]   So I'm just interested in seeing more experimentation around that, especially anything that is creating a trustless or trust-minimized peg-in and peg-out system.
[00:06:22.960 --> 00:06:27.340]   Are you thinking much about the intersection of AI and Bitcoin?
[00:06:27.340 --> 00:06:39.580]   I mean, I don't think that we're really at the point where AI agents are going to be holding and using Bitcoin.
[00:06:39.940 --> 00:06:43.820]   It's, I mean, over a long period of time, that may be inevitable.
[00:06:43.820 --> 00:06:55.960]   From a day-to-day perspective, most of what I'm seeing AI being used at is sort of development-driven tooling and improvements and stuff.
[00:06:55.960 --> 00:06:58.480]   So it can be helpful from a productivity standpoint.
[00:06:58.480 --> 00:07:04.680]   Sometimes from a security standpoint, it can find bugs that other developers may miss in peer review.
[00:07:05.340 --> 00:07:13.560]   But I think there is a lot of hype right now that somehow like AI plus blockchain equals astounding new innovations.
[00:07:13.560 --> 00:07:18.060]   I haven't really seen anything along that line that has blown my mind.
[00:07:18.060 --> 00:07:24.540]   But I do think that AI will improve productivity really across the board with pretty much every industry.
[00:07:24.540 --> 00:07:27.640]   AI is definitely big.
[00:07:27.640 --> 00:07:32.420]   In San Francisco right now, we had a pretty cool hackathon where we did kind of Bitcoin AI themed.
[00:07:32.640 --> 00:07:37.880]   There was some cool projects being built, especially with vibe coding coming out and making it much easier to prototype.
[00:07:37.880 --> 00:07:41.600]   Well, as a security professional, vibe coding is very scary to me.
[00:07:41.600 --> 00:07:42.700]   Yes.
[00:07:42.700 --> 00:07:46.160]   You can do it in like fun ways, but I would say yes.
[00:07:46.160 --> 00:07:48.220]   It's still like prototype level probably.
[00:07:48.220 --> 00:07:52.200]   So you write a lot.
[00:07:52.200 --> 00:07:55.640]   I need to know, do you have a secret with writer's block?
[00:07:55.640 --> 00:07:57.320]   Do you ever face it?
[00:07:57.320 --> 00:07:58.520]   What are your tips and tricks?
[00:07:59.240 --> 00:08:02.740]   Yeah, well, I don't use AI to write.
[00:08:02.740 --> 00:08:05.740]   I'd probably be a lot faster and more productive.
[00:08:05.740 --> 00:08:10.920]   For me, though, it's just I pick away at things.
[00:08:10.920 --> 00:08:20.820]   So while some people may think that I write a lot, I generally only publish one long form post per month.
[00:08:21.520 --> 00:08:31.100]   But the way that I do that is that at any given time, I probably have several dozen drafts and I don't just sit down and write one long term thing.
[00:08:31.100 --> 00:08:37.580]   Many of these have been in draft mode for half a year or even several years.
[00:08:37.860 --> 00:08:46.880]   And it's really just whenever something strikes my mind or piques my interest, then I make sure I go write it down.
[00:08:46.880 --> 00:08:47.820]   I actually find like.
[00:08:48.780 --> 00:09:00.220]   As a sort of life pro tip, like whenever you have an interesting idea, especially for me, a lot of my interesting ideas happen like right as I'm about to go to sleep.
[00:09:00.220 --> 00:09:09.660]   But one of the most important things that you can do is write down that idea as soon as you think about it, because otherwise your mind is eventually going to drift on to other things.
[00:09:09.780 --> 00:09:13.100]   You may forget about it. You may come back around to it in days, weeks, months or whatever.
[00:09:13.100 --> 00:09:24.520]   But, you know, having a list of these ideas and for me, a lot of that is just my drafts, my long, long form blog post drafts that I can keep coming back to keep iterating upon.
[00:09:24.520 --> 00:09:31.780]   And then eventually if I get some idea fleshed out to the point where I think it's like ready for public presentation, then I just put it out there.
[00:09:31.780 --> 00:09:35.840]   Definitely takes discipline to even post one post a month.
[00:09:35.900 --> 00:09:49.200]   So I respect that. In terms of new ideas that you say that you kind of like piqued your interest, have there been any books or articles that you have read recently that have maybe blew your mind that you want to share?
[00:09:49.200 --> 00:09:58.080]   Well, if we're talking about the AI stuff, there was this website post that came out recently.
[00:09:58.080 --> 00:10:01.620]   I think it was called like 2027 or something. It was just like a year.
[00:10:01.780 --> 00:10:09.980]   And it basically detailed how we could get into sort of runaway AI acceleration.
[00:10:09.980 --> 00:10:13.620]   And this made me think more about how.
[00:10:13.620 --> 00:10:22.940]   While as a paranoid security guy, I do think about a lot of edge cases, I'm like a prepper in many different ways.
[00:10:23.940 --> 00:10:32.620]   I'm not so much worried about Terminator, Skynet level, AGI destroying all of humanity.
[00:10:32.620 --> 00:10:50.400]   While that's always a possibility, what I'm actually more worried about at a very, very high level is the fact that, you know, humans are fairly adaptable creatures, but we can only adapt so quickly to things.
[00:10:50.400 --> 00:11:03.180]   And I think there's a lot of arguments you can make where technology is accelerating a pace that has actually become very difficult for us to adapt to various societal changes that happen as a result of the impact of technology.
[00:11:03.180 --> 00:11:15.820]   And so what I really worry about is that, you know, AI and then AI essentially training itself and becoming faster and faster and more effective at accelerating whatever it can do.
[00:11:15.920 --> 00:11:37.880]   That that will just have trickle down effects to all of the rest of technology, innovation, society, and that we eventually we just might get to the point where we create some tool or some set of things that are so powerful that we are not able to create the defensive countermeasures to them fast enough.
[00:11:37.880 --> 00:11:46.240]   And that that can ultimately be massively destructive to humanity, definitely a wild world we're living and things are evolving quickly.
[00:11:46.240 --> 00:11:53.560]   Speaking of the future, what does a world on the Bitcoin standard look like to you?
[00:11:53.560 --> 00:12:10.600]   Well, I would hope that it would be one where most people have sovereign Bitcoin in the sense that, you know, they're not simply trusting third parties.
[00:12:10.600 --> 00:12:19.460]   And that is one of the many long term things that I'm very worried about because of the trends, the directions that we're going in right now are the opposite of that.
[00:12:19.460 --> 00:12:37.180]   You know, this is as many are saying, it's a paper Bitcoin summer that's happening right now where we're essentially getting trad fi into Bitcoin and recreating much of the centralized traditional banking system, which is very convenient for people.
[00:12:37.180 --> 00:12:55.460]   But, you know, the the future where people are actually using Bitcoin on a daily basis for commerce and whatever that is going to require us to get to the unit of account level.
[00:12:55.460 --> 00:12:58.780]   We're still a very, very, very, very long way away from that.
[00:12:58.780 --> 00:13:07.420]   And unfortunately, I think that there's going to have to be a lot more turmoil in the fiat currency world for that to happen.
[00:13:07.420 --> 00:13:21.700]   But I think the goal would be that it's not that Bitcoin has to be like the only currency in existence, but rather it just needs to be recognized and used at the same scale as other major international currencies.
[00:13:23.700 --> 00:13:29.080]   Speaking of unit of account, there is a lot of talk of sats versus Bitcoin.
[00:13:29.080 --> 00:13:34.360]   Do you have any thoughts if we should reframe the way we talk about the fractions of Bitcoin?
[00:13:34.360 --> 00:13:37.640]   I'm of two minds.
[00:13:37.640 --> 00:13:49.600]   Unit bias is a real psychological issue, and there certainly are plenty of people who end up buying other alt coins because they're cheaper and they think they might go up more.
[00:13:50.700 --> 00:14:03.740]   But I've also said for a long time that if you don't understand that you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin, you shouldn't be buying any Bitcoin in the first place because you're not ready for the responsibility that comes with being a Bitcoin owner.
[00:14:04.460 --> 00:14:15.660]   So I think part of it is, you know, do we want to onboard people faster or do we want to be patient and allow them to educate themselves more?
[00:14:17.100 --> 00:14:29.200]   To get to that future world where Bitcoin is used for commerce on a daily basis, then I think obviously sats will be the standard because nobody's going to be spending entire Bitcoins unless they're buying a house or something.
[00:14:29.200 --> 00:14:39.040]   Are you worried if sats is a standard and people are using it as, you know, daily currency that we won't even hear the word Bitcoin much anymore?
[00:14:39.040 --> 00:14:45.880]   If everything is denominated in sats, I doubt it.
[00:14:45.880 --> 00:14:50.980]   I mean, we've got Bitcoin branding on every app and every wallet and software and hardware and stuff out there.
[00:14:51.980 --> 00:14:59.760]   And, you know, one of the interesting things coming to San Francisco is just seeing the word Bitcoin a lot more often as you're going around than you do really anywhere else in the country.
[00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:02.060]   Yes, we're seeing the word more.
[00:15:02.060 --> 00:15:09.340]   Yeah, something on the spiral team that we think a lot about is how we can promote Bitcoin as money kind of beyond just digital gold.
[00:15:09.340 --> 00:15:14.500]   How do you think that we can get people to use Bitcoin as money more?
[00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:22.820]   This is another thing where I think we should avoid trying to try too hard.
[00:15:22.820 --> 00:15:25.480]   I think the incentives are already there.
[00:15:25.480 --> 00:15:36.720]   I hearken back to my early days when I was trying to convince my peers and colleagues that, you know, you should get some of this Bitcoin thing because like inflation is a for sure thing.
[00:15:36.760 --> 00:15:45.320]   It's going to happen. And they scoffed at me, you know, and this is, you know, in the early 2010s, like inflation is not a big deal.
[00:15:45.320 --> 00:15:54.380]   Well, of course, here over the past couple of years, people in the United States, people are finally recognizing, you know, actually inflation is a real threat.
[00:15:54.380 --> 00:16:03.580]   So from that perspective, I think patience is all you really need because all the central banks have pretty much doomed themselves.
[00:16:03.580 --> 00:16:06.220]   Like this is their policy is to inflate the currency.
[00:16:06.220 --> 00:16:10.420]   So all you have to do is wait long enough for people to recognize it.
[00:16:10.420 --> 00:16:23.080]   And I think also that over a long enough period of time, folks are going to look around and they're going to see, wait, these people who adopted Bitcoin seem to be doing a lot better than those of us who didn't.
[00:16:23.080 --> 00:16:24.780]   Maybe they were on to something.
[00:16:26.860 --> 00:16:35.400]   I agree. Well, hopefully people start using Bitcoin more as money and the UX and applications definitely have to get better to encourage more of that.
[00:16:37.920 --> 00:16:41.240]   Do you have any spicy Bitcoin takes?
[00:16:41.240 --> 00:16:42.580]   Oh, yes.
[00:16:42.580 --> 00:16:49.980]   Well, you know, I published my first Bitcoin improvement proposal this week, which is controversial unto itself.
[00:16:50.480 --> 00:17:19.560]   Basically, the idea being that due to the issues around incentives and the game theory of a post-quantum world that we should actually seek to incentivize people to migrate their coins into quantum secure setups by telling them like a concrete deadline of like, if you don't do it by then, you won't be able to spend your coins, at least by the regular path.
[00:17:19.560 --> 00:17:26.180]   Hopefully at this summit or over the coming months and years, we will come up with alternate quantum safe recovery schemes.
[00:17:26.180 --> 00:17:34.940]   But my spicy take there being that we should actually just completely cut off the ability for quantum vulnerable spending of Bitcoin to happen.
[00:17:34.940 --> 00:17:39.820]   And I did have another controversial proposal.
[00:17:39.820 --> 00:17:49.540]   I haven't written it up as a formal Bitcoin improvement proposal, but something that I've been toying with for the past year or so, which is essentially a dynamic block size.
[00:17:49.980 --> 00:17:52.620]   And this, once again, is a very long term thing.
[00:17:52.900 --> 00:18:05.620]   I think that we should take advantage of the deflationary aspects of hardware and computing to be able to offer more block space to the world over the long term.
[00:18:06.320 --> 00:18:10.540]   Now, obviously, anyone who knows about the scaling debates knows this is a very controversial thing.
[00:18:10.540 --> 00:18:19.740]   And I have a number of arguments that every argument about block size has always been flawed and that we need to approach it from more of an economic perspective.
[00:18:19.740 --> 00:18:30.020]   And so I did have this rough concept I sketched out a few months ago of Goldie blocks, which is essentially a dynamic block size that it doesn't only go up in size.
[00:18:30.020 --> 00:18:31.820]   It also decreases the block size.
[00:18:31.980 --> 00:18:39.820]   And it does so by looking at the economic conditions and the demand of block space, essentially recognizing that this is a market.
[00:18:39.820 --> 00:18:45.940]   And right now the market is constrained with a very set flat supply.
[00:18:45.940 --> 00:18:47.820]   But the demand goes up and down.
[00:18:47.820 --> 00:19:00.280]   So much like how the difficulty adjustment for Bitcoin goes up and down to match the demand and supply for hash rate, I think we should do something similar with the actual amount of block space that's available.
[00:19:00.640 --> 00:19:01.740]   I'll keep an eye out.
[00:19:01.740 --> 00:19:04.180]   I didn't realize that was your first Bitcoin improvement protocol.
[00:19:04.180 --> 00:19:07.220]   Yeah, it's it's not written up as a BIP yet.
[00:19:07.220 --> 00:19:09.280]   I'm still tinkering with it.
[00:19:09.280 --> 00:19:14.260]   A few more questions on an optimistic note.
[00:19:14.260 --> 00:19:18.580]   What gives you the most hope for Bitcoin's future that's happening today?
[00:19:18.580 --> 00:19:25.240]   Well, what gives me the most hope is the fact that governments and central banks continue shooting themselves in the foot.
[00:19:25.360 --> 00:19:46.380]   Like I said, from a long term perspective, my long term pessimism and negativity about those institutions is what gives me hope that people will see that money is a concept that should not be owned or controlled by any person or group of people.
[00:19:46.380 --> 00:20:04.480]   And that I think money as an open source project is the fairest, most appropriate way to go about creating this really shared agreement amongst humanity of how to decide who has what value.
[00:20:04.480 --> 00:20:14.280]   What advice would you give to people that are either new to the Bitcoin space or thinking about jumping in?
[00:20:16.380 --> 00:20:22.560]   Well, I always say invest in education before you invest too much financially.
[00:20:22.560 --> 00:20:32.840]   These things kind of go, I think, in and lockstep with each other is personally, when I first got into it, I was learning a little.
[00:20:32.840 --> 00:20:39.060]   I was buying a little and I would learn more and then be like, oh, I need to have more and bought more and learn even more.
[00:20:40.100 --> 00:20:45.900]   So one thing I say very often, whenever someone asks, should I buy Bitcoin?
[00:20:45.900 --> 00:20:53.560]   I say, if you have to ask that question, the answer is no, because you're simply not far enough down the rabbit hole.
[00:20:53.560 --> 00:20:58.420]   So a similar thing with if you want to get in and contribute to the ecosystem.
[00:20:59.240 --> 00:21:02.820]   I have a ton of resources out there and they're spread out all over the Internet.
[00:21:02.820 --> 00:21:13.800]   But if you go to Bitcoin dot page, which goes to my LOP dot net site, just check out the developer and technical resources there.
[00:21:13.800 --> 00:21:28.560]   And there's a ton of reading material, tons of online classes and even a number of offline meat space classes that you can go to learn all about the industry and hopefully get yourself a gig.
[00:21:29.240 --> 00:21:33.520]   Your resources were very helpful to me when I was first learning about Bitcoin.
[00:21:33.520 --> 00:21:35.780]   So I appreciate all the time that you've put into that.
[00:21:35.780 --> 00:21:37.540]   Last question.
[00:21:37.540 --> 00:21:41.120]   If you could leave our listeners with a single thought about Bitcoin, what would it be?
[00:21:46.700 --> 00:21:54.480]   The most important thing that you can do to contribute to Bitcoin is continue discussing it with other Bitcoiners.
[00:21:54.480 --> 00:21:57.020]   That's how we make forward progress.
[00:21:57.020 --> 00:22:08.880]   And the most dangerous thing to Bitcoin over the long term is apathy and people not talking to each other and discussing how we can continue to improve.
[00:22:09.720 --> 00:22:10.700]   I love that.
[00:22:10.700 --> 00:22:14.400]   And that's exactly what we're about to do in like 15 minutes.
[00:22:14.400 --> 00:22:22.080]   Well, if our listeners don't know where they can find you, where should they go to learn more about you, follow along with what you're doing?
[00:22:22.080 --> 00:22:31.900]   Everything about me, every resource that I have ever created, all of my contact information and stuff is on LOP dot net.
[00:22:31.900 --> 00:22:32.740]   Perfect.
[00:22:32.740 --> 00:22:33.260]   Easy.
[00:22:33.260 --> 00:22:36.340]   Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show.
[00:22:36.340 --> 00:22:41.600]   I hope you enjoy the rest of your time at Presidio Bitcoin and have fruitful conversations at the Quantum Bitcoin Summit.
[00:22:41.600 --> 00:22:42.640]   Thanks for having me.
[00:22:42.640 --> 00:22:43.000]   Of course.
[00:22:43.000 --> 00:22:43.380]   Thank you.