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.