Bitcoin, I believe, is only one example. It's the beginning of a much larger trend, where we will have the technology that makes it capable for individuals to be sovereign, not only financially sovereign, but sovereign with their data, with their identity, perhaps even with their physical defense as well. Hi, Jameson. Nice to have you here. It's a pleasure. It's our special series of Baltic Honey Badger 48 show. So the first question, what I usually ask to my guests, what are we drinking today? And what's your favorite alcohol drink? Well, we had to go with the white wine because we couldn't find any bourbon. Unfortunately. But you told me that you like white wine and you're not picky. No, not really, as long as it's not too sweet. Not too sweet. OK, so Jimmy Song actually was recently also filming with us and he mentioned that after he was drinking with you last year, he quit drinking at all. Yes, he, I guess, regretted one night that we had. It was at Satoshi Roundtable and it was all you could drink tequila at the resort. He actually was like, he told me, I agreed because I didn't understand at that point how much Jameson Lopp can drink. So that was the thing. So can you tell me a bit more about your background and how you get into crypto, in particular, into Bitcoin? Sure. My background is really in computer science. I was working as a web developer at the time that I started hearing about Bitcoin. And I don't even know how many times I dismissed it before I actually started looking into it. But several times I saw it come up on nerd websites and figured, oh, this is going to get hacked and everybody's going to lose their money. But after a few years, I realized that it wasn't getting hacked. And that's when I actually bothered to read the white paper and saw that it was actually solving a very interesting computer science problem that I had never even thought about before. And once I realized that, hey, we can actually create a project that is open source and collaborative and it is money, as I started thinking more about money, because not many people really think about how money works, I realized that money is this abstract concept. It doesn't really belong to anyone. It is something that humanity in general has come up with. Then it makes sense to me that the definition and evolution of money should be an open project that anyone who cares about money can participate in. And so bringing the open source ethos to the whole financial system was something I found very interesting. And do you remember the moment when was that click that I need to buy this, or I need to earn this, or? It wasn't necessarily. Did you earn your first Bitcoin, if it's possible? Yeah, I actually decided that I needed to use the system in order to better understand it, because I figured, hey, this is still an experiment. This was many years ago, and the only real option at the time was MtGox. And so I started looking into, well, how do I get money to this MtGox thing and turn it into Bitcoin? And I ended up having to go to the bank and do my first ever wire transfer. And that took me about an hour to fill out the paperwork. And the banker looks at me, and he's like, sir, why do you need to send this international wire transfer? And I'm like, oh, I'm buying this thing called Bitcoin. And we didn't really get into it too much, but they were basically like, do you understand that once we send this, we cannot get your money back? And I had to be like, it's OK. I'm basically assuming all the risk. And if something goes terribly wrong, it's not going to be a financial disaster for me. I'll be able to survive. But thankfully, it all worked out. And I had at least understood the premise of the value of Bitcoin, and I did not keep my Bitcoins on MtGox. So what was your path or journey from getting your first Bitcoin to where you are now, like speaking at the conference, being one of the top engineers in the industry, and all that stuff? What did you do during that journey? It was a long process. Between me originally reading the white paper and then buying my first coins and then getting to working in the industry full time, that was about a three-year process. And the first year after buying was just reading the forums, Bitcoin talk, Reddit, Twitter, anyone who would listen and interact to me. And of course, going and trying to talk about it to all my friends and family who thought I was crazy. They didn't want to talk about it. But after a year of doing that, I decided to take the next step. And that is when I forked the Bitcoin Core software and decided that there was some missing information, essentially. I felt that this system is supposed to be open, transparent, everyone should be able to understand what's going on. But I had started running a Bitcoin node. And I realized that I didn't really understand what was going on inside of that node all the time. And my day job was basically working on back-end infrastructure for a large web application that was email marketing at the time. And I basically thought I could take some of this DevOps experience and my understanding of how to collect and visualize data of ongoing operations and try to do that with a Bitcoin node. So I forked the Bitcoin Core software. I only added about 500 lines of code, but essentially added a bunch of instrumentation and analytics and called that Statoshi, since I was basically collecting stats. And then I created a nice front-end interface to it, put up this statoshi.info website, and said, here you go. I created something. If any of the other developers find value in this, then I'm open to feedback. And while that project never really got much open source contribution, the developers of the protocol have referenced it in a number of different talks over the years, where I believe that at least the data that I've provided to people has helped influence some decisions and arguments that people have made when talking about how do we change the node operation or how do we change the protocol over the long term. So I was fairly pleased with that, especially because I am not a C++ developer and it's not a piece of code that I'm really interested in working on a lot. But that got my foot in the door, got me some additional respect, I guess, in the developer community, and made it easier for me to actually get a full-time job about a year after that. That's nice. And your website, actually, lopp.net, is quite popular. Many, many people just share it in order to educate others. So it's like a list of different type of sources. Do you work on this? Every day. Every day you do that. What was the reason behind this? You wanted to structure all the information about Bitcoin or just share maybe some insights that you know? Yeah, so this system is a very voluntary system. There is no project manager of Bitcoin that tells people what they should be doing. And so for a lot of people, it can be very difficult to even get started. How can I contribute? Well, I actually found that being very, I guess, greedy and self-serving, everything that I've done is for myself. When I created Satoshi, it's because I wanted to understand what's going on inside of the node. And sure, it would be great to also share with other people. When I went full time into Bitcoin, I was working on basically security in the space and have continued to work on security because it's a very personal problem to me. And I figure it's probably also a big issue for everyone else. But because there's really no one to tell you what to do, it can be difficult for people to understand where the value is. And there's a variety of ways that you can go about trying to do that, whether it's market research or if you just go the lazy path and say, I'm going to work on what is interesting to me. I think that that ends up being most fulfilling and also results in you probably working harder on whatever it is just because you're more passionate about it. Do you think that like Bitcoin, as you mentioned, it's a voluntary system? Is it a strong part of Bitcoin or is it a weak part of Bitcoin? Because you know there's a system where people get paid and they do their job, et cetera, et cetera. But maybe like in Bitcoin, nobody gets paid literally. Like you can have donations, but most of the time, if you don't run an entity, then most probably you won't get paid. It's just like you do that because you want to do that. So is this like a strong part or it's like maybe a weak side of Bitcoin? Well, I think that the actual incentives within the protocol and the network and the ongoing operation are very strong. They've withstood a lot of different types of pressures and attacks over the years. When you step back a bit further though and you're looking at things like developer incentives, that's where it seems to be weaker. We seem to be relying more on this donation and altruism type of model. And there are certainly plenty of debate that could be had about whether that's the best way forward. I know there are other projects where they basically have treasuries, whether it's Decred or Zcash or whatever, where they're setting aside funding. And ultimately, sure, that can help fund things, but then you have to ask yourself who controls the money? How are the decisions made? It can very easily become a political thing. And in many cases, I think that one of the great things about Bitcoin is that it has created this apolitical system. It has, in fact, I believe, created an entirely new form of governance, a new form of self-organization, if you will, where most people are used to this idea of democracy or of at least more formalized governance systems where there's votes that are tallied in some way or people very explicitly have certain powers. But within Bitcoin, the actual rules of how that works are not written down. And in some ways, we're still trying to figure that out. But in other ways, some of the events that have happened over the years have helped us to better understand how it works. And it really is, I believe, an inversion of traditional governance, where traditional governance is you have some power up high. And then they are dictating and commanding and controlling and creating this hierarchical structure. And it's very obvious how that became to be the sort of default for many different pieces of human society. It's because it's very efficient. It's a great way to get things done and allow for specialization of labor, which is ultimately the most efficient way for humans to operate. But it also creates fragility. And we've seen many instances of the fragility and the corruption and skewed incentives that can happen when you are concentrating power within one entity or one small group of people. And so now with Bitcoin, we have this thing where it's actually the inverse. The power is so distributed amongst everyone who is running their software on the network and being a part of the economy that instead, the consensus, instead of being dictated from the top, it has to kind of bubble up from the bottom. And the exact way that happens is really hard to understand or describe because it's organic. It's kind of like trying to understand how does language happen and evolve. How does a new word get created and become popular and gain consensus that the definition of this new word is this thing? And I'm sure there are some people who study language and other types of systems like that. And perhaps they would be interested in also studying Bitcoin. Philosophical question. What is Bitcoin for Jameson Lopp? Well, for me, it is a hedge against the existing system. It's a way of opting out and saying, I think that there is a better way to do the definition of money in finance. And you can take that a step further and say, what are the effects of redefining money and separating the power over money from the corporations and from the states? And you can certainly speculate about how that may change things in the future. But I try not to get too ahead of myself with that. And right now, I just see what is still an experiment, but a very well-vetted experiment that I think is highly unlikely to fail simply because there are so many of us now who are not going to allow it to fail. Even if there are major setbacks, I believe that something that is as distributed as Bitcoin cannot actually die unless it suffers an event that causes everyone who is involved in the system to agree not to work on it anymore, which is hard to even imagine what could do that. Which is basically impossible. But about the existing system, in your opinion, what is the main wrong thing about the existing system? If we speak about financial system, of course. Well, the biggest problem, I think, is fundamentally the opaque nature. It's just that it's a black box, and we cannot look inside it. We have to accept whatever comes outside of the black box, and there's nothing we can really do to change that. The only option seems to be create a completely different separate system that is completely unrelated to the existing system. And of course, the result of having this black box that we don't understand how it operates means that the people who are in control can basically be pulling whatever levers and making whatever arbitrary changes they want. And we may not even know everything that they're doing, possibly until a far future time, but basically until it's far too late to do anything about. And so even the greater financial system as a whole, as we saw in the 2008 crisis, had become so complicated that even the so-called experts that were driving the system had no idea what was actually happening. There were only a few fringe lunatics who could actually take the mile-high view and see how screwed up the system was and could see that it was gonna have a major correction. And I think that in any system like this, that is almost guaranteed to happen over a long enough timeframe. And we're going to continue to see crises happen simply because no one is able to understand the system as a whole. But don't you think that the system, the existing financial system, can be fixed at some point? Like, there's no reason to create another system. Maybe you can just fix the existing one. Well, technically, I'm sure it could be. But the incentives are not there. I think this is true for any system that is controlled by a small group of people, that working from inside the system to try to fix it is generally a lost cause because you're working against the incentives that are already in play. This is a major reason of why, over my life, I went through the entire political spectrum. I was raised in a very conservative household, went to a very liberal university, and after being disappointed by both of those political ideologies, started becoming more libertarian after university, and even voted libertarian for a few cycles. But now I don't even bother voting anymore because I think it's a waste of my time. I don't believe that I am going to be able to have any meaningful impact upon the existing system. I believe that the greatest impact that I can have is to try to create a completely separate system. So can we say that you're a Bitcoin maximalist? It's fair enough to say, but I'm certainly not a 100% purist because I am interested in other experiments. So I've had other technologies come along. I find improved privacy very important. So I'm interested in things like Monero and Zcash and Grin. And part of the problem with some of the extreme maximalists is that I think they're too focused on the monetary aspect. I agree with Bitcoin maximalism from the monetary aspect, but I'm also a computer scientist, and I want to see continual experimentation and evolution of privacy features, many of which are unlikely to get into Bitcoin any time soon. So we ultimately end up in a clash sometimes between myself and more extreme maximalists because they don't like the way that a project was launched. It usually has nothing to do with the technology. They just don't like the fact that a new project is launched and it's essentially printing money in order to fund itself. But even within that, there's a variety of different models, some of which are scammier than others. And I do believe that the fair launch model, which is probably like Grin and Monero are more close to, and Litecoin, where they were announced ahead of time and anybody could mine them and there was no pre-mine, those seem to be about as fair to me as you can get. Some of the other ones like Zcash, where they're essentially taxing you, or Ethereum, where they sell a huge ICO ahead of time, or even a number of other more scammy situations where the developers would have hidden pre-mines that would only get revealed until later, those certainly seem to be less ethical to me if there are things happening that the wider community is not aware about. But I guess the short version is I do believe that just due to the network effects and due to the more conservative nature of Bitcoin developers treating the software more like aerospace engineering than web app engineering ultimately makes Bitcoin a much stronger contender for lasting over the long run. Don't you think that at some point Bitcoin might absorb some of the great security features from other? Yes, this is something that has been discussed for a number of years. And as far as I'm aware, no innovation in another network has been incorporated later into Bitcoin. Maybe create something like specifically for Bitcoin. Yeah, if anything, some developments like technical developments to increase the security and confidential transactions and all that stuff. Yes, and so interestingly enough, with confidential transactions, which are a very cool technology, those are getting implemented on a Bitcoin side chain. So I've actually spoken to a number of people even at this conference about how do we improve Bitcoin privacy. And I would like to see more development happen on Liquid, for example, and make use of the confidential transactions because I've been playing around with mixing software lately. And I think that it's fallen short of my expectations. It's not really that user friendly. And the privacy that you do get from it can very easily be broken if you make a mistake. But if we could, for example, get people to write mixing software that works on Liquid with confidential transactions, that will be a much higher level of privacy than what you can do with Bitcoin mixing. Then the next question is, well, just how do you get from Bitcoin to Liquid and back, preferably without having to go through the PEG process? And I know that there are some people who have successfully demonstrated atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Liquid and other assets. So I think that there's a lot of potential there. And to sum up your point about features getting absorbed into Bitcoin, I think that we've seen they don't necessarily have to get absorbed into the base protocol. We have better privacy features on layer two on Lightning Network. And then you could also consider side chains to be a kind of layer two. So whatever ends up being the most valuable for people, someone is going to find out a way to do it. They may not be able to get it into the base Bitcoin protocol, but they'll probably figure out a way to make it available to Bitcoiners to use. So you mentioned that you're interested in security and you're working in the security field. And you mentioned that it's a personal interest or personal reasons to be. Can you explain what are the reasons and all that? Yeah, so in order to be your own bank, you have to have a really high level of knowledge about a variety of different things, both on the technical side, on the physical security side. And you also have to be methodical with a lot of boring IT data practices. That's where a lot of people, I think, get lost. Even highly technical people like myself, and I've talked to a number of other people in the space, even if we know how to do it, a lot of people will just fail to make regular backups of their data. Yes. And you would think that the incentive is there, especially if you have a life-changing amount of money stored in the system. But for whatever reason, it's just not hardwired into humans to do these really boring, repetitive, methodical tasks. So I found myself, once I got to the point where losing my bitcoins would seriously hurt me, I created my own system for cold storage. And it took me between one and two days every year to basically refresh this cold storage, verify the integrity of what I had, update any new sets of private keys or wallets or whatever, and then redistribute it. And it also required a high level of technical ability, because I was using various encryption and splitting types of programs, and then having to write instructions for how my heirs would be able to execute the last will and testament and actually be able to inherit this stuff. And so I looked at it. And I said, well, A, I would prefer not to have to spend all this time on it. And B, if it takes me this long, then most people are not going to do it at all. So having a more user-friendly setup was something that I really wanted to see. And I felt there was a big gap in the market for that. And that's when I transitioned from BitGo to CASA. So I went from doing more enterprise-level security to doing individual personal security. And after two years, I think we've made a lot of great progress now. And actually now, we seem to be more focused on trying to explain to people why what we have built is so much better than a lot of the other options that are out there. You are a pretty sophisticated user, technically very well-skilled. And you are like your coder, programmer. So you know all the important things. And you know all the hiding things that regular people just don't know. What are your top advices for a person who is not familiar with the things that you are familiar with, doesn't have skills, doesn't have ability to code, and he just want to preserve his privacy, and he wants to at least think or to store his Bitcoin securely? What are those minimum advices that you can give? Yeah, well, there is education that is required. You don't have to understand how the protocol works at a low level. You need to at least understand, hey, I have some private data that needs to stay private and needs to be recoverable. And in fact, the inheritance aspect, I think, is one of the most complicated. And very few people think about it. And we're still working on inheritance protocols at CASA. This is more complicated than just your regular security, because everyone's situation is unique. People live in different jurisdictions with different laws around how estates are handled. And so for basically every person, this is going to require some guidance. So that's why we think that's another valuable service that we'll be able to offer to people. But for the person who is first getting into it, the best options that I have are all listed on my website. I have a security section. I have a privacy section. And with any of these things, it's like an onion. You can start peeling off one layer. And you can go as deep as you want to. And once again, it has to be a personal choice around how much effort are you willing to put into your privacy, how much effort are you willing to put into your security. Most of that comes down to what are your threats that you're afraid of, and what is the level of value that you're trying to protect. And I think one of the bigger errors that a lot of people make in this space is not being over-optimistic about where Bitcoin will go, by which I mean they may create a level of privacy and security that is appropriate for their current holdings and their current situation. But due to the volatility of Bitcoin, both from a price standpoint and just from a public awareness standpoint, you can very easily, from one year to the next, find yourself in a situation where you have 10 times as much value to protect. Or in my case, you might have 10 times as many people who are paying attention to you, and therefore 10 times as many potential attackers who are looking at you and trying to poke and prod and find any weaknesses in your own setup. And so I think that it does pay to be a little bit more paranoid and try to achieve a level of security and privacy that is at least several multiples, if not like 10x more than you think you actually need. You need to have some sort of buffer zone there. But that means that you need to educate yourself even more than you feel like you need to educate yourself at this time. What is the easiest way, in your opinion, the easiest way to store Bitcoin safely? Well, I mean, the number one thing that I tell people is you should be using hardware devices, treasure, ledger, cold card, what have you. That automatically protects you from pretty much any remote attack. Even if you get malware on your computer, as long as you're verifying on the screen of the device, you're protected. The next thing that you have to worry about then is general robustness. So getting rid of any single point of failure, you should assume that your house will get set on fire or flooded or have a natural disaster. You may or may not want to assume that a physical attacker will come in and try to rob you. This, once again, comes down to your own, I guess, level of publicity and how many people you tell that you are involved in this space. But once you get at least that level of security and robustness, then the final frontier is the inheritance aspect. A lot of physical security, maybe, as well? Yeah, so the physical security being either against someone who is just breaking in when you're not at home or possibly against someone who's breaking in when you are at home. The downside, if you get to the point where you're worried about a hostage situation or whatever, is that Bitcoin doesn't really protect against that any more than anything else does. This is a general problem that anyone who is publicly known to be wealthy is going to have to deal with. And the main difference of this traditional wealth versus crypto asset wealth is that now, I think, as the criminals start to better understand these systems, they start to understand that they are actually more likely to get a larger reward, a larger payoff, from attacking someone who has $1 million worth of crypto than they would attacking someone who has $10 or $100 million in less liquid assets. It's a lot harder to steal money from someone who owns a bunch of stocks or bonds or a baseball team, very hard to steal a baseball team, or very hard to steal real estate. So that's the main difference that Bitcoin has brought, is it has kind of lowered the threshold for your level of wealth, at which you need to worry more about the physical attacks. You're also famous for some tweets. Everyone knows that you are a fan, or you love guns. Is it about the security, or you just love it? You love it before Bitcoin, and then it just goes. Yes, I was into self-defense, generally, long before I was into Bitcoin. So I'm interested in firearms, both from a personal defense issue, from a defense against tyrants, aggressive nation state actions issue, even defense against alien invaders issue, or zombies, or whatever you want to call it. And then I also find it an interesting hobby from a physics and mechanical engineering aspect. I'm also interested in it just as a skills and training thing. I've done a number of different close combat training scenarios. Some of those through firearms trainers, some through a Krav Maga school. So I did self-defense not only with firearms, but also with other weapons, with hand-to-hand combat. I trained Krav Maga for a couple of years, which I found to be very informative, mainly because it let me better understand my physical limits and what I'm capable of doing, and giving me better situational awareness. I think that those things are all generally good and healthy for anyone just to understand. I mean, even if you don't own any weapons or whatever, it's still good to have knowledge. If you find yourself in a situation where there is a shooter, having a little bit of training of understanding how to get away, or in the worst case scenario, how to at least try to defend yourself is potentially a life-changing bit of knowledge. So I've even done weekend training classes of mass shooter scenarios, where I and many other people are unarmed, and we're at the movie theater, or we're at the office, or whatever, and terrorists come in. What do you do? Well, I mean, some people are probably going to die, but if the victims even put up, what we really found through a lot of those scenarios was that in every scenario that we ran, and we ran hundreds of them, people would die. But the scenarios where the unarmed people put up resistance, even if it was something as simple as taking a chair and throwing it at the guy with the gun, that throws the attacker off. Because when someone is going in and they're planning on shooting a bunch of unarmed people, they are not expecting resistance. And as soon as they hit resistance, it actually throws them back. And they have to think for a few seconds, and every second counts in those situations. So this is the type of thing that not many people are into, but I find it interesting. It's like a real life video game, except you're actually talking about life or death situations. And while I doubt that I will ever find myself in such a situation, and I'll do everything that I can to avoid it, it's insurance. And I like to have insurance against even the most improbable situations. Because as far as I know, I only get one life. I want to do as much as I can to extend that for as far as possible. Yeah, because the funny thing about the Bitcoin, it goes now, it's like Bitcoin maximalist goes hand in hand, this Bitcoin meat and guns. But you're missing the meat part as far as I understand. You're not like carnivore. I'm not a carnivore, but I do enjoy meat. Yeah, which is a good thing. OK, I have another question. In terms of security, and actually in terms of the guns, you're from US, and you have a problem with mass shooting and all that stuff. What is your position on that? Well, at a very high level, any freedom ultimately comes with responsibility. And there are always going to be people who cannot handle certain responsibility. So giving freedom to people or allowing them to exercise their freedom means you're taking the risk that some people are going to abuse that freedom. It is basically a guarantee. Now, a lot of people are upset both in the US and around the world because they look at statistics and they say thousands of people, I think it's around 20,000 per year, are being shot in homicide situations. The mass shootings is particularly interesting because it's actually a relatively small number of people who are getting killed compared to shootings in general or many other types of violence, but that grabs attention. It's sensational. The media picks up on it, and people fixate on the mass shooting aspect. They tend to also be more tragic because most mass shooters are going to specifically target places where they know that everyone is unarmed and they will be able to have more casualties. So I think that one of the harsh truths that very few people talk about when we're having the debates around gun control and mass shootings is this kind of unsaid thing that the level of casualties and people who are getting killed and hurt as a result of the freedom of bearing firearms in America is actually acceptable, that it is the natural consequence of giving more freedom to the people to be able to have these weapons that can cause such destruction. So a lot of people will get upset because they want there to be zero deaths, and I want there to be zero deaths, but my priority is with people being able to defend themselves. And I think that you're basically balancing freedom against general safety with firearms and with a number of other things, and you can go to any extreme where obviously, if we wanted every citizen to be perfectly safe, I know how to do that. It's very easy. You put every individual citizen inside of a cell so that they cannot physically interact with any other citizen, and now we have achieved perfect safety at the expense of all of your freedom. So do you take it to the other extreme and say, OK, we give everyone the ultimate level of freedom and then just accept the natural consequences that some people are going to hurt each other as a result? Or where we are right now is we're somewhere in the middle, where we have a fair amount of freedom, but there's still a lot of things that Americans can't do. It's very hard, if not impossible, to buy more powerful weapons. Sometimes you can buy decommissioned fighter jets and stuff that fly but don't have any weapons, but it's actually interesting if you go back and you look in the past. Hundreds of years ago, there were private citizens who owned essentially machines of war. There were private individual citizens who owned large war frigates that would go out and they would hunt pirates or they would fight against the navies of other nations. And there are a million different reasons that you could postulate as to why is gun-related violence worse these days than it was back then or maybe it wasn't. There are so many variables that change in society. It's very hard to pin down certain analysis of even America today versus America in the past or even America today versus any other country because I think it's far more than just access to guns. There are cultural issues. There are socioeconomic issues. And for me, it's less about trying to engineer the optimal trade-off of freedom versus safety, and it's more about focusing on the fundamental morality of should someone be able to defend themselves against a threat? And ultimately, then we get to the point of, well, OK, what threats should someone be able to defend themselves against? And I would argue that a private citizen should be able to defend themselves against a military-level threat if they are capable of building, maintaining, and wielding whatever that technology is. I actually find the fixation on specific characteristics of firearms to be particularly laughable because I am looking at the future, and I am trying to extrapolate, well, firearms and weapons, it's just technology. It's just tools. Sure, they are tools that are designed to inflict damage and kill people. But nonetheless, these tools are neutral in and of themselves. It is the humans that wield the tools that use them in good or bad ways. And firearm technology is going to continue to evolve. We are already seeing the ability for people with minimal sophisticated technical aptitude to build their own firearms at home. I think that trend is going to continue. And in fact, firearms at the very low level, it is still a very primitive technology where we're combusting gunpowder and actually firing this projectile at a target. And so you know that eventually we're going to move past that. We're going to have things like laser guns or other types of remote technology that causes harm to people. And what's going to happen then? Are we going to have to fight the battle all over again? Right now, people will say the Second Amendment of the Constitution in America was written at a time that people only had buskets. They didn't envision that there would be semi-automatic firearms or fully automatic firearms. And so what if we put ourselves 500 years in the future? Are we really believing that citizens are going to be stuck 500 years in the future only using the weapons that are currently available? I find that highly unlikely. Whatever technology is invented will proliferate and will eventually become cheaper and more accessible to the individual. Now, most people tend to jump to things like nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. It's certainly possible that certain biological weapons will get to the point that it's easy for someone to manufacture them at home. The future in general becomes a lot more scary and crazy when you start to think about these things. Personally, I'm particularly worried about nanotechnology. And there's actually an apocalyptic scenario called the gray goo scenario. And that is one in which someone is tinkering around with nanorobots. And they create a self-replicating nanorobot that will basically go to any molecule they can find and rebuild new copies of itself. And that due to exponential blowout, if there's some sort of programming error where it doesn't stop replicating, then within a week or two, the entire world turns into nanorobots. And there's nowhere you can go to escape them. So technology is a very powerful thing, but it's also very unpredictable. We don't really know which way the world is going to go. But I believe a lot in the cryptoanarchist manifesto, which is basically stating that technology is going to continue to lower the cost for individuals to be able to defend themselves, at least in the communications standpoint. I think it's going to be from a variety of different perspectives. And it'll be fascinating to see how nation states react to that and whether they'll even be able to survive that. Because I think the balance of power in general is going to be rather volatile. So basically, with Bitcoin, you can be your own bank. But with all these technologies, you will be your own army. Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin, I believe, is only one example. It's the beginning of a much larger trend, where we will have the technology that makes it capable for individuals to be sovereign, not only financially sovereign, but sovereign with their data, with their identity, perhaps even with their physical defense as well. So last year, during the conference, you made a presentation about the incident that happened with you a few years ago, I think. If it's possible, can you describe the incident? What happened? Because not many of our viewers knew that. Yes, and I believe that this is something that is also mostly an American phenomenon. Part of it is probably due to gun proliferation and the fact that many citizens have guns. But essentially, what happened was a anonymous person who was unhappy with me and wanted to scare me and try to extort me placed a phone call to my local police department and claimed to be me and claimed that they had murdered people and were holding other people hostage and that they had explosives. So as a result, the police came in. They shut down my entire neighborhood, wouldn't let anybody in or out. And luckily enough, I was not home at the time. I was actually working out at the gym. And I came home. And the police would not let me into my own neighborhood. And I started asking them what's going on. And it didn't take long for us to figure out that I was the person that they were looking for. And I explained to them that I knew exactly what had happened, this swatting incident. Swatting had been a phenomenon that started out in the online video game community, where teenagers would essentially piss each other off while playing these games. And then one of them would call the police and get them to essentially attack the other gamer, often while that gamer was live streaming on a webcam. So the attacker would actually get satisfaction of seeing the police bust down the door and scare that person. And so this essentially exposes a flaw in the nation-state apparatus, that law enforcement has created an exploitable vulnerability, where they are basically required to go check on any perceived threat. And at least in America, and probably a number of other countries, there is reason, there is plausible reason for them to believe that the threat may try to kill them as they are approaching. So they end up using an extreme level of force against that threat. And as a result, I had to analyze this particular threat against me and realize that the only way that I could be safe against it would be for no one to know my address so that they could not tell the police to go check out this person who is a danger to society. So I had to burn down my entire life from a public record standpoint and start all over again and basically move and create new types of legal structures that protected me from having my name listed on any public database or even any private database that would connect my name to my address. Was it due to your involvement with Bitcoin? Yes, I mean, it was because I was a public Bitcoin personality on Twitter. And so this person figured, hey, he has Bitcoin. I'm going to scare him and extort him. And so I got some threatening voicemails. But I basically operated under the assumption that this person did not have the guts to actually physically threaten me themselves. They're only able to do it online or through other proxies like my local police department. And so I ignored all of their threats and just started over. Was that person found or it's like ongoing investigation, something like this? It's an ongoing and practically dead investigation. My local police department gave up within a day or two. They traced the call back to a server out of state. And then basically, it ended there because they had rented the server using either throw away a credit card or probably cryptocurrency or something. But they claimed that they handed the case over to the FBI and that I would hear from the FBI in a week or so. But the FBI never even contacted me. So I put out a $100,000 bounty on this person for information leading to their arrest and conviction. And I've received some tips, but nothing that is actionable. I've learned a lot more about our justice system in America and have actually come to see that it's entirely overwhelmed unless you are in a current life or death situation. Police and FBI have much higher priorities that they're dealing with. So me getting swatted is really low on the priority list for these folks. So I don't expect much to come of it other than that I've been successfully living for over a year now without any further instance. That's great. And I wish you many, many years with no problems. You recently also tweeted out that you made some research on the Greg Wright case, but you weren't capable, I think, to publish it due to some legal issues. What was it? Well, I don't remember the specific points. The research that I did publish was at least 10 pages, if not more, worth of background information. Some of the things that I published were regarding his pre-Bitcoin involvement in various illegitimate activities and also just a number of other things that attorneys deemed was too much on the character defamation side. But I would argue that he doesn't have much of a character to defame. Regardless, while I haven't been able to publish that information, I have been able to share it with other people in the space, especially those who have been involved in engagements due to Craig Wright's legal tenacity. Let's talk about Casa Hodel. Why did you join this project? It was, once again, mostly self-serving. I felt like there was a need for better user experience in the space and also for trying to build software in a way that the best practices are part of the software. So we've talked about how there's a really high learning curve for security and privacy and just generally being your own bank. And while we'll never be able to get rid of all of the educational requirements, there are a lot of just simpler day-to-day things that you can build into the software. So what we've done with the multi-signature setup at Casa is we've actually gotten rid of the need for users to secure seed phrases. We've done that by creating a more flexible system where it's actually very easy for you to rotate out a set of keys and just go buy a new hardware device off the shelf and plug it in. So if anything happens to one of your devices, it only takes you a few minutes to replace it. We are also just building other best practices in the fact that we are visualizing your security on your main screen. So you can actually think in your head, OK, I know that I have keys here and here and here and here. And every once in a while, I should do a health check, which we also make very easy to do with a few clicks in our app. Make sure that your hardware devices are still functioning. And if they're not, then you just go buy a new one and swap it out. And this is something where we're trying to find the sweet spot of personal sovereignty. Up until this point, if you want to be fully sovereign, if you want to not have to trust anyone else, then you have to learn how everything works. And you have to do everything by yourself without telling anyone else so nobody else knows what you're doing. But we're trying to find a middle ground where we are not actually holding anyone's money. We are not a trusted third party custodian, but we are a service provider who is giving guidance and basically imparting our expertise of everything that we've learned over the past years to our users. So there's always going to be a slight privacy trade-off because you have to at least communicate with us somehow. We're not requiring AML, KYC. We don't even care if we know your real name, but we need to have at least an email address or some way to communicate with you. But we do believe that it is possible for us to build a service where we can essentially help people be sovereign so that they don't have to spend their entire lives worrying about and trying to be sovereign. In simple words, basically, what Casa Hodel do? So we have a number of services. Our company motto is to help improve personal sovereignty. And right now, the initial way that we do that, the first product that we put out is the multi-signature KeyMaster application. And that supports three of five multi-sig, two of three multi-sig, and a single sig for your spending money. But the idea behind the KeyMaster is that with three of five, you'll have one set of keys on your phone that's secured by the hardware element on the phone. You then have three different hardware devices, preferably from different country or different companies to get rid of supply chain attack issues. And then the fifth set of keys is held offline in cold storage by Casa. So that gives you a really strong setup, because the idea is that you physically distribute these devices geographically. That gives you robustness both against attackers, because you're not keeping all your keys in one place, and robustness against any number of catastrophes, fire, flood, natural disaster, whatever. We've spent a lot of time thinking about the threat model. And we actually published about a 50-page paper recently on our website with our wealth security protocol, where if someone really wants to understand, they can read this and read every possible threat and loss vector, and how the Casa KeyMaster mitigates against all of those. But the idea is that now by using hardware, security hardware that is available on the retail market, by using geographic distributed setup, and by checking in on the health from time to time, you can actually achieve better than bank level security, and a fairly easy user-friendly interface. So the idea is that we provide the interface to people that then helps guide them along this path of maintaining and managing their own keys, which is something that before now was mostly relegated to experts or people who are a lot more IT savvy. Final two questions that I usually ask to everyone, every guest that I have. In your opinion, who is Satoshi Nakamoto? I've heard a lot of theories over the years. I've heard everything from it's an advanced artificial intelligence from the future that came back to invent money. I've heard it was a team at the NSA. I've heard it was an elderly mathematician lady who worked for the CIA. As far as I know, it could have been a teenager in China or India or something. But it does seem fairly likely that it was a cypherpunk, which would narrow down the possibilities a lot more, or maybe a small team of cypherpunks. But I hope that we never find out. Never meet your heroes. Yeah, if you would have an opportunity actually to meet to know who is Satoshi Nakamoto, and only you would know that. Would you use that opportunity? I mean, I don't think I would want the responsibility of knowing. Too many things could go wrong. I wouldn't want to even possibly be able to compromise the identity. Unless, of course, it was someone who has died. I think that there is a fairly good chance that Satoshi Nakamoto is no longer alive, because that's the best way to keep a secret. So that would explain how they've been able to remain silent for so long and unknown. And another one. I usually ask all my guests to make a prediction, to choose a date somewhere in the future, and to make a Bitcoin price prediction. And we put this prediction when your episode is out. We put this prediction on our prediction platform. So maybe someone can do an opposite prediction. So what is your price prediction? Choose any date in the future that you want, and just shut it out. Yeah, I mean, I really don't do price predictions. So if I had to do one, it would have to be beyond my lifetime so that I don't have to get embarrassed about it being wrong. You can just name above or beyond a certain level, like above, I don't know, 50,000 or beyond 50,000, and just any date in the future. It would be nice if it would be a nearest future. Well, yes, but the future is very hard to predict. Well, let's try. I think a better question is, what happens to the price when the halvings basically become inconsequential? And so we've got at least like another 10 or 20 years of halvings. So what does the price look like in 2040? I mean, I think that Bitcoin being 10 years old right now, if Bitcoin reaches 20, then it will be on the verge of outlasting the average fiat currency. If Bitcoin reaches 30, then it's unlikely that it's going to die, I think, at all, because it's shown to be more robust than pretty much every fiat currency. So I definitely would think that if it reaches the year 2040, that it would have to be over a million dollars a coin. That's a good prediction. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.