We love hearing people's viewpoints on Bitcoin and what they believe are the most important
aspects of crypto. Jameson Lopp is helping as many people as possible understand the importance of
self-custody and providing a way for them to make their Bitcoin as secure as it can be.
He's an old-school Bitcoiner and a technologist with an epic beard. It's been a long time since
he's rocked the mic here in the Republic of Bad Cryptopia, so we've got him back today. It's
all Lopp and you can't stop listening to episode number 699 of the Bad Crypto Podcast.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, Ignition.
All Lopp and you can't stop so you don't drop unless you got a plop.
Sometimes if you got a plop, you got to drop.
Sometimes you got to plop and then we need to hurry up this episode here.
Stop, drop and plop.
Sounds good to me. Now, this is a great episode, man, with Jameson Lopp. I think you guys are
really going to appreciate this one. I don't know who has better resources in crypto than this guy
does. His website is full on. Oh my gosh, he has the best resources. You wouldn't believe the
resources this guy has. It's amazing. It's a bit of media over there. Amazing. You know what? Less
of us, more of Lopp. Here we go with Jameson. We set the Wayback Machine to January 2018,
episode number 72. Mr. Jameson Lopp graced us with his presence and his epic beard, which is
still just as epic today. He's got a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in the crypto space
and helping to bring people into the self-custody world for their Bitcoin wallets. He's got a lot
to say. We're going to find out what his latest thoughts are today. Jameson, welcome back to the
Republic of Bad Cryptopia. Good, sir. Long time no see.
I feel like the beard, you're getting those white strips now, right?
Yes. No, you can definitely go back and check. I think back then I only had like one streak,
but it's growing out further. It's great.
That's the bear market for you. It's like you have beard fangs.
Keep your own Bitcoin. That's nice. That's good. Hey, we appreciate you coming back on the show.
It's been a long time since January of 2018, dude. That's almost six years ago you've been on.
You've kept your finger on the pulse. You've been building a lot of amazing things.
We want to touch base on some of those things. Really, let's give a refresher. Some people might
not know you. Maybe what initially drew you to the whole crypto world and maybe what were some
of your first projects in the space so people can get reacquainted with you?
Yeah. Well, it's been about 11 years now. I think I came across Bitcoin on a slash dot post
back in 2012. I'm sure I had come across it before, probably also on nerdy sites like that.
I had dismissed it as many do as nerd money that everybody was going to lose and would end horribly.
But for some reason, when I saw that particular post, I ended up reading the white paper and
kind of tickled the computer science parts of my brain along with some of the libertarian
beliefs. I thought it was a really interesting project. Unlike most white papers, I could
actually understand it. From there, it just really kicked off exploration down the rabbit hole as
you and many other people have also gotten sucked into over the years.
That's actually coincidentally where I saw Bitcoin the first time. Then I talked to a bunch of
friends about it and they all said that I was stupid and that was a dumb thing. But I mined some
and then it crashed my computer. So instead of going, "Oh my God, I need to get stronger
computers and build a warehouse." I said, "What the hell, dude? You just screwed up my computer.
Oh man, this sucks." So I had to get a new computer and then I lost those Bitcoins. So that was
awesome. Hal Finney actually said something similar. I think he mined on his laptop for a
couple of days, but then he got annoyed because it was making the fan spin too much.
Yeah, so much. Destroyed my computer. I mean, it destroyed the fan, which then the fan was dead
and then the rest of the computer died. But oh, blah, dee, oh, blah, dah.
Well, here we are, five and a half years further down the road from whence we last spoke. The world
economy is just a hot mess, right? Governments are printing more worthless paper money than ever
before. We've got politicians allegedly in control that don't necessarily have the best interests
of citizens at heart. How important do you think Bitcoin is now and how has your thinking evolved
onto its relevancy to our day and age? Oh boy. When I started off with all of this,
it was an interesting thought experiment and I sort of saw it as the type of project that
maybe on a generational timescale, it could be interesting. If you basically have this
deflationary currency that nobody can screw with, then inevitably over decades, other nation states
are going to continue to devalue their currencies. So I think very few of us expected Bitcoin to
grow as quickly as it did. Though once it started doing that in various growth spurts,
now I think some people may have overcorrected on those expectations and expected to go mainstream
any day. But from many different metrics, it has gone mainstream or at least mainstream in terms of
a non-trivial portion of the population knows what it is or they've heard of it. But of course,
they probably have very little fundamental understanding of why it's interesting and why
they should probably be using it. But it has been interesting, I think, to see who has got it per se,
who amongst the global population has seen value in Bitcoin. Obviously, a lot of people don't see
value in it and that's because of their own perspectives and things that they think are good
and bad. But Bitcoin doesn't care. What really matters is those of us that do find it valuable,
and especially those of us who find it valuable enough that we spend our time, energy, resources,
working on the system, maintaining it, trying to better understand it. And
in your case, trying to convey that understanding to a wider audience.
Yep. People got to figure it out. And I think that we've gone through a couple of bull runs now
since 2017. We started doing the show in 2017 and then we've personally experienced a couple
of bull runs and bear runs now. Bear markets. It's so wild. It's like, "Oh, crypto goes up.
Everybody's interested in crypto. Crypto goes down. People stop being interested in it. Oh,
it goes back up again. The big hype cycle." And it seems to us that the halving's happening right
around the corner, not too long from now. I mean, we're about six months away from it,
maybe a little bit longer, but it seems like we're at about that time where that bull market
starts getting a little itchy, starts rolling a little bit, and now the interest is going to go
back into crypto. So maybe what would you suggest to the new people who are just going to start
figuring out about crypto? They're going to come in again because they always do. And this is this
next big hype cycle. What advice would you have for them? It's very simple. I tell people I don't
give financial advice, but I do give investment advice. And that basically is you should invest
in education. So go to my website, bitcoin.page. There's like 2000 links on there and dozens of
different categories. And it's never too late to start learning about this space. The main thing
that you need to avoid is getting too much FOMO, too hyped up and over eager and basically jumping
in and getting over your head because you need to understand that this is a very unforgiving space.
On one hand, there's some great properties and utility that you can get from this technology.
And that basically is a result of the fact that you can take custody of your keys and you can
interact with these protocols and networks without having to ask for permission, without having
gatekeepers that can screw with you and decide how you can use your own money. But the flip side of
that is you take on a lot of responsibility. And if you make a mistake and you don't know what
you're doing, it can be catastrophic. Your hard drive with 50 bitcoin could end up in the garbage
dump somewhere in Kansas City. Yeah, there's no crypto Karen out there. There's nobody that Karen
can complain to. Hey, where's my bitcoins? I need to know. And I got to tell you, dude,
your resources have grown tremendously. I know it's lopp.net. And I think you got it
mirrored out of the other, which is a bitcoin page. Yeah, bitcoin page goes the same place.
It's just easier for people to remember. I think those resources are spectacular, folks. If you
want to learn more about this, you definitely want to go to there. All those resources are tapped
out. And actually, if you go and look under podcast, you might see a few podcasts. Oh, yeah,
there we are. That's good. So, you know, is we're looking forward, of course, you know, nobody can
actually predict squat. What we can do is we can look at trends, we can look at past history. And
we do know that a having is coming. And those of us who have slogged our way through this bear
market are quite optimistic that next year 2024 and 2025 are going to see all time highs again.
Are you of that same mindset? Well, I certainly hope so. You know, not it would, it would be not
only good for me personally, but it would be good for all of the businesses in the space.
You know, you've surely seen over the past year or so the bear market is rough. A lot of people
have had to kind of downsize, lay people off, really trim the fat so that we can hibernate
through the winter and hopefully emerge in the spring and you'll be ready for the bull. This is
I've done this three or four times. And the bear markets are good for the builders and the
technologists like myself, because there tend to be fewer distractions, though, this time around,
there's still a lot of drama and distractions of all the mess that is still being cleaned up from
a year ago, you know, all the court cases and stuff. But, you know, we can get our heads down
and build more and basically prepare for the next onslaught, because once the bull market does come,
those of us who are running companies in the space, we tend to have the opposite problem where
we are basically struggling to keep our heads above water. Let me let me do a quick follow up
on that. Bitcoin in general, you know, we always say is unstoppable money. Under what circumstances
do you think it would take? How big of a black swan, how swanee must it be in order for Bitcoin
to fail? What is like if you were going to write a piece of fiction and go, this is how it ends,
what would it look like? Well, I can certainly think of plenty of apocalyptic events.
Yeah, other than, hey, we're all screwed in the zombies are here. Yeah, yeah. So, you know,
those are less interesting, because the TLDR of most of those is you've got bigger problems to
deal with. So people are worrying about, you know, we've we've already seen that even, you know,
huge nation states can ban it, and it only makes a small dent in it. So I'm not concerned so much
about governments, at least as a cataclysmic event, because for better or for worse, I would
say probably for better, there is no one world government. So like the governments around the
world are not going to all coordinate with each other and agree on the same thing. So you know,
we have some jurisdictional arbitrage that can keep Bitcoin going, even if major nation states
decide to push against it. But really, the thing that has stuck with me through multiple cycles
is that Bitcoin's biggest enemy is apathy. And so it's tough for me to come up with specific
scenarios. But, you know, for example, if I think the price stayed flat, or went down for many,
many years, you know, that would push a lot of people out that would cause a lot of the businesses
to have to close. And, you know, that could be a kind of downward spiral that results in a lot of
apathy. You know, we already get a lot of the tourists get pushed out, shaken out through the
bear markets already. But a bear market, you know, where those normal cycles got broken, I think,
would potentially cause even more people to become apathetic. But it's hard to imagine a situation
where we actually get to the point that the Bitcoin stops working, because that basically means that
almost everybody in the world has decided that it is no longer worth trying to keep it on life
support. And so, you know, one thing that we've seen with a lot of these like blockchain,
decentralized networks is they're extremely hard to kill. I mean, you look at the, what, 50,000 plus
networks that are out there, and there's a ton of them out there that I mean, for all intents and
purposes, they're dead. But technically, you can still use them, you can still interact with them,
there's still a handful of people running machines around the world that are speaking those protocols.
And while you know, they're not nearly as robust or well maintained, they are technically still
usable. So you know, I think that Bitcoin is not going to die unless literally everything else dies.
And the fact that these networks can be sustained by just a handful of people makes them very,
very difficult to completely kill. You know, they are the cockroaches of the sort of internet.
Yeah, I watched a couple of interviews of you recently. And one of the things that you were
talking about was, you know, you're not completely opposed to a theory. And because people are going
on a theory, and they're trying new things, it's innovative. And sometimes they're doing some silly
things. But what you said was, I would rather than be able to do those silly things on Bitcoin
to explore on Bitcoin. So now we have things like Nostra and Bitcoin, ordinals and some other stuff
that's being built on top of that. Where do you see that ecosystem going? And can you foresee a
time where maybe there's so many ordinals that it's clogged up the network or it's spiking the
rest of the Satoshis that are not connected to to those ordinals? And maybe explain a little bit
about what all that means? Because I'm sure some people just heard that and go, this is bad crypto.
I don't know what the hell any of that is. Yeah, I mean, I think the short version is that I'm a
technologist, and I am always in favor of permissionless innovation. Now, of course,
there's always going to be bad aspects that come along with that when someone can can basically
build an entire new ecosystem and economy with whatever economic rules they want, there are
going to be a lot of questionable or scammy ones out there. But I think that that is kind of the
price that you pay for innovation is that there will be some bad actors that do stupid things. And
you play stupid games, win stupid prizes, we can, we don't have to participate, but we can
certainly watch from the sidelines. And we can learn. And we can learn from their failures,
we can learn from the successes. There. In the early days of Bitcoin, there was a fairly strongly
held thesis that any altcoin that found product market fit and was highly successful with some
bit of new functionality would find that functionality eventually gets subsumed by
the Bitcoin network. Now, that thesis is not really played out. It's hard to think of many
things where that has happened. Other than you know, one one good case, what's not quite the
same thing, though, is that Segwit got activated on litecoin before Bitcoin. I mean, the plan was
to have it on Bitcoin, but it ended up being an interesting sort of test case and, you know,
proof of economic security, I think that made it easier for it to get activated on Bitcoin.
Other than that, you know, sort of novel functionality, we haven't really seen that
getting subsumed. And so I'm still somewhat hopeful that we'll see more and better layer
twos. And this actually kind of segues into some of the side chains and drive chains and now spider
chains discussions that have been having over the past month or two. And if that was another thesis
back from like 2014, 2015, that the Bitcoin ecosystem would would grow and would add more
functionality via having a sort of blossoming ecosystem of many side chains that are pegged
to each other. And what that basically means is you have many different block chains, but under
the hood, they're all still effectively using Bitcoin tokens. You just be able to move your
Bitcoin tokens from one block chain to another, preferably without having to ask permission.
And that sort of that permissionless two way pecking mechanism, unfortunately, has yet to
be developed. Yeah, that's not what happened at all. Instead, we have all of these other
chains and L2s. And by the way, you get five points for use of the word subsumed. I think
that may be the first time that has been used on the show. So you get points. You can spend those
on nothing, but they're yours. Congratulations. You are a technologist and as one, you are building
technology. And, you know, we've all spoken for quite some time and written about the fact that
if you don't have your keys, it's not really your crypto. You can easily get hacked, lose it,
so forth. And you are a huge evangelist for holding your own keys so much so that you have
developed software product at keys.casa. Tell us what this is all about. Yeah, so I guess I switched
over to Casa just a few months after we last spoke. The short version is that for the first
three years that I was working full time in the space, I was working for a company called BitGo,
and they were one of the first multi-signature wallets out there, but they were specifically
targeting enterprises. So BitGo basically was kind of the security product that was used by a
lot of exchange and payment processors. And we learned a lot over the few years when I was there,
and I felt like there was still a hole in the market. And that was basically, you know, a
highly secure but user-friendly for individuals type of product. So Casa is really what I believe
is the best self-custody product that we can architect with the current technology. Now,
there are some nice improvements on the technology that are coming down the pipeline,
and we're definitely doing research and development on. But the short version is that
I saw many catastrophes over the years, and I started building this sort of mental checklist
of best practices of how to do self-custody. And as you know, if you look at my website,
there's a huge amount of resources, really an overwhelming amount of resources,
even if you just go to the security section and you try to learn how to do self-custody, right?
So the goal of Casa is to put forward a user-friendly wallet that as long as you just
follow the instructions that are presented to you in the mobile app, you get yourself into this
architecture that is highly robust, and it eliminates single points of failure. So that's
the number one thing that we keep in mind whenever we're doing anything at Casa is that we're
developing products that don't have single points of failure. And the reason for that is that we
understand that people are human, people make mistakes, people aren't security experts, and
we want to remove a lot of the rough edges, a lot of the foot guns from self-custody that result in
people losing their money, in many cases, just locking themselves out of their money. And so
having multiple keys on multiple different hardware devices in multiple different geographic
locations, we found gives you a level of resilience so that you can have failures and you can
gracefully recover from those failures. - So my question would be around this then.
'Cause it looks like it's just a mobile app or it's a desktop app, does it have a hardware
component to it? 'Cause I'm not seeing one if it does. - Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, it's not
possible with Casa, like we don't let you have a multi-sig setup where all of the keys are on
internet connected devices, that would be a huge potential point of failure. So we offer both two
of three multi-sig and three of five multi-sig and different levels of support plans. I think
that's one of our big differentiators is really that at our premium tiers, what you're really
paying for, sure, you're getting a nice software user experience, but what you're really paying for
is a white glove, your consultation. So you can literally get on the phone with us, basically
think of it as a bunch of mini Jamesons who have been trained, gotten all the knowledge dumped from
me on the best practices. And we help people navigate the decisions that need to be made.
Everyone has a different set of variables in their life, different threats to incorporate into their
security model, different levels of convenience versus security that they're going to be
interested in making those trade-offs. And we help you make those decisions while not actually
taking control of your money. Though we do hold one key as an emergency recovery mechanism
that you can set different authentication protocols with us of how that key can be
requested to be used. And that can help you get out of certain sticky situations.
- I think of a bunch of mini Jamesons running around. Do they all have the beard?
That's what I want to know. That's important. - Very few.
- Let me ask this then. So say, as more people get involved with crypto and then populations
get older, people die, is there something built in for retirement or even to inheritance kind
of thing if somebody passes along? - Yeah. Inheritance is kind of
the final solution. So a lot of people get into self-custody and there's a million
different ways that you can do self-custody, but getting an inheritance set up is this really
interesting balancing act because on one hand, you want to put yourself into an architecture
where only you are able to spend your money, but then you magically want this switch to flip
if you cease to live. And then you want some predetermined person or set of people to be able
to spend your money after that. So yeah, we do have an inheritance product and that is at our
highest level tier because that requires even more consultation, more planning, more thinking about
all of the different situations. - It's a perplexing problem because
some people, I mean, what's going to happen is you have this expert who knows in their own world,
all right, I set up Casa, I got it up, I'm pretty proficient with how it all works. And then now
they're dead and then, oh no, and then the people who are probably going to come in are way less
sophisticated to try to figure out how to grab whatever crypto is in that account. So that can
definitely create an issue. - Yeah. And that's, I think,
another reason you might want a service like Casa to be able to facilitate recovery in inheritance
situations. So you still have the experts available and we can help the heirs, the beneficiaries
to get through that process. And there's a lot of decisions to be made. For example,
it may not just be a question of, okay, what happens if I get hit by a truck? Some people,
of course, they start thinking about inheritance more when they have kids. And if you want to take
it to the extreme, you may also want to be assured that if both you and your spouse get hit by a
truck at the same time, but your kids survive, you want to be able to get out of that situation
as well. So it's a very complicated problem with a number of different moving parts, but-
- Kind of morbid, but- - We do have experience.
- Yeah. - It's part of the situation, right?
So we're all going there. So I didn't even know that .Casa was a domain, a top level domain
extension, of course, Casa Espanol for house and keys.Casa. It's like you own all the Casa now,
'cause you named your brand after the TLD, which I think is super smart. So you guys can check out
Casa, this episode not brought to you by Casa. This is not a paid advertisement here. We do
want you to check out what Jameson is doing though. So I'm curious to know when you are
explaining Bitcoin to a lay person for the first time, let's assume that they really don't know,
what is the simplest route that you take to explain it to somebody so they immediately get it
and it doesn't take, well, it's kind of like, well, let me explain decentralization to you and
self-custody and how do you do it? - Well, there's no one size fits all thing
for it. What I found over the years is that if you just sort of start blabbering, based on your
own perspectives, there's a very high likelihood that your audience will not be interested or not
get it. So to do it right, you need to know your audience. You need to understand what things will
be interesting to them. So I made a lot of mistakes. - Explain it to mom. Explain it to mom.
Somebody who's like, I've heard of this thing, you crazy kids with your magical internet money,
why should I care? - Yeah. There are plenty of metaphors out there. I think the digital gold
metaphor is one of the simplest for people to understand because it encapsulates a number of
aspects of the system, mainly that it's really more like a natural phenomenon than it is a system
that is run by any specific entity. A lot of the properties of the system, while theoretically they
could be changed, the game theory, the dynamics of the system make them basically inviolable.
So the idea that we're essentially creating an alternative financial system that it has no
knowledge of the existing financial system and you can use it without having to ask anyone for
permission. All you have to do is you follow the rules of the system. The system will allow you to
manipulate it. Beyond that, of course, the exact mechanics of this basically magical system can get
really tricky to understand. It is, I think it's pretty fascinating that the whole thing worked.
And if you look at the people early on who were trying to understand it, probably like 98% of
even the early cypherpunks scoffed and said, no, this will never work because of X, Y, or Z. But
just so happens that Satoshi managed to figure out the game theory and it's been working for
14 years now. Yeah, that's great. I want to ask about this. One thing I've always thought about
is that with Ethereum, they have those stable coins, right? USDC, USDT, there's a lot of debate
on how those are good or not, or if they're backed by real money or how it goes. Do we think we might
ever see a Bitcoin stable coin? Because it's weird, right? Because Bitcoin's always pegged to the US
dollar. The US dollars could potentially be doing some weird stuff here as we reach the end of life
cycle for the old financial system, right? And it's like one of those things, it's like, okay,
we know crypto is going to go up, crypto is going to go down. Sometimes it's good if you're a trader,
you want to get out and maybe put it in a stable coin because you know the volatility of it.
But there's not a Bitcoin stable coin yet. Is that something that we could foresee in the future?
Well, there is something called stable sats, which is a way of representing dollars over
lightning networks. And I think that it's basically like a type of derivative. So,
depending on how you classify it, that might count as a Bitcoin stable coin. I'm sure that
over the next year or two, we are going to see some of the existing stable coins start to issue
their tokens on lightning network, as taproot assets becomes a thing and works its way into
production. I think RGB is another project that can also let you do similar tokenization.
And kind of going back to some of your early questions about ordinals and stuff, I'm not
bullish. While I'm interested in seeing people do the permissionless innovation, I'm not particularly
bullish about any of it that is working on the main chain, especially if you're using a lot of
data in block space, because we already know that's not going to scale long term. So, even if
those on-chain or on the base chain products and pieces of functionality do become a sort of long
term use thing, I think they're going to be very niche markets, simply because it's going to crowd
out anything except the very highest value use cases. So, when do you think that we make that
move on the technology adoption curve from early adopter to the beginning of mainstream adoption?
Is it these ETFs for BlackRock and Vanguard and whoever else? Or does that not even put us there
yet? Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're already somewhat there. I believe Coinbase has said that
there's something like 20 or 30 million crypto owners in America. I'm assuming that's based off
their own internal metrics. Yeah. They put that on that can that they distributed recently. Yeah.
Yeah. That's not nothing. That is definitely like very early adoption.
10, 15%. Yeah, that's pretty good. Maybe we are. It is fascinating watching this stuff go. And
in this new life cycle, it looks like, wow, as the halving happens again, and what it's going to go
down to what 3.125 or something much smaller. And then so each subsequent halvings are going to seem
to have less of an impact on the overall volume because, you know, really 90 plus percent of
Bitcoin has been mined almost. Right. So it's like most of it's already out there. A lot of people
are holding it. They're not selling it. They're keeping it in their own place. I think this is
maybe kind of a dual question. Do you think we'll get to a time where Bitcoin no longer has
eight decimal points, but maybe they say, hey, there's only there's only 21 million of them.
So let's move this to 10 decimal points or 12 decimal points. That way, that's a toshi can get
broke down into smaller amounts, because it seems like if there's only a finite amount, then the
only way to go is to divide that way. That's super deflationary potential. Yeah. Well, so
I don't think that'll happen anytime soon at the base layer. And that's primarily a function of
the way that the fees work like the I think we would need like much larger block sizes and lower
fees in order to justify further subdivision, because, you know, the fees you're I think in
best case scenario, you're paying at least a few hundred satoshis for an on chain transaction fee
at the very lowest fee rate that is currently allowed and relayed. However, it is already
possible to send million satoshi increments on lightning network. This gets into some interesting
philosophical quandaries, because technically, if you send less than one satoshi on the lightning
network, you're not necessarily guaranteed that you would be able to close that out on the main
chain, once again, because of the the fee situation. But I think it is interesting.
You know, that facilitates things like machine payments, you know, really paying for resources
on demand, you can start to have these meaningful economic interactions that are simply not possible
at any scale with the traditional financial system, because, you know, they have so much more
overhead. Now, maybe a Bitcoin gets up to a million dollars, then satoshi is worth like a penny or
something, right? And then then it's like, okay, maybe we need to do it. But man, for Bitcoin to
get up to a million dollars, we got away, we got a ways to go. What do you think, Joel? What do you
think? Let's ask John with Jameson, what do you think about this next cycle? Not being a financial
advisor being just guessing? Do we hit 250,000 this cycle? Or 150,000? What do you think any
ballpark? Any guess? And you don't have to eat your dick if you if you don't.
Yeah, you know, another reason why I think that price predictions aren't necessarily interesting
is because it's actually a two variable equation. Bitcoin going to $250,000 doesn't necessarily mean
that you're going to be able to buy a house with one Bitcoin. It could be that if fiat has
collapsed so much, it's the $250,000. That's why I've always thought when Bitcoin hits a million,
it's because the dollar has tanked, right? So something crazy has happened. Yeah, that's a good
point. Well, Bitcoin millionaire, but it doesn't matter because it costs me half a million for a
roll of toilet paper. So well, let's let's let's close out with this then, you know, hindsight is,
is the best vision of all. And if you're going to look back, let's say to when you first discovered
Bitcoin, what does Jameson today want? You know, younger Jameson who just discovered Bitcoin to
know? Hmm, mainly, that I should care about privacy more. Unfortunately, I had to learn my privacy
lesson the hard way of getting swatted and then having to spend a lot of time and money, basically
burning down my old life and starting over again. Those are really the two things, especially in
this space, but really in general, working in cybersecurity is, this is why I'm somewhat bearish
on humanity in terms of privacy and security, because humans are so you could say lazy.
But that's a nice that's a nice way of putting it. The human condition is to take the path of
least resistance to achieve whatever you think your goal is. And that combined with the fact that
we have now thousands and thousands of years of human civilization where we have created
more economically productive and viable systems by seeding our power and our skills to other people
to basically be specialists in one or two things. It's this really weird trade off where now it is,
it's considered normal to have other trusted third parties facilitate things that literally
keep you alive. I mean, most of us would die within a few weeks if the supply chains broke
down, if critical parts of our civilization infrastructure stopped working. And the kind of
the scary thing is how fragile a lot of these systems are. But on the flip side, they're also
anti fragile because we have all of these people around the world who are constantly fixing various
aspects of civilization. So, you know, in general, I would I would want to be more privacy and
security conscious upfront. Because if you don't do that, you know, you might be able to go your
whole life without a problem happening. But there's always the possibility. And if you have a
major security or privacy event, it can be catastrophic if you're not prepared for it. So
suffice to say, I'm a fan of prepping, prepping in every possible way. You know, we talk a lot
about financial sovereignty, being a sort of sovereign individual, at least in the context of
Bitcoin. But I think that people should take that perspective and try to apply it to as many
different aspects of their lives as possible. I would tell my younger Joel, buy, you know,
mine, a thousand Bitcoin or so and sock it away and don't touch it. Then mine was a lot simpler
than yours. Anyway, Jameson. I love that. Bearish on humanity. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, man. The
website for all things Jameson, LOPP.net, L-O-P-P dot net. And as Travis mentioned, the resources
that he has here, this is definitely worthy of a bookmark. So much content right here on Bitcoin
resources, everything that you could ever want. This might be the most definitive resource site
that I have seen yet. So Jameson, thanks again, dude, for coming on. I guess we'll see you in
five and a half years. Hopefully less than that. Okay. See how we just, we got right into that
interview, Trav. We were just like, boom, you just got to hear what Jameson's got to say. Hope you
guys check out the show notes with the links to all his resources at bad co.in forward slash six
nine nine and get secure with your Bitcoins. That's right in the Casa. So yeah, not, not a sponsored,
you know, podcast at all, but just want to chat with him because he's been a true thought leader,
man. He got, he got a Bitcoin at the same time as me, but he looked at it in a little different
way. Like I was like, damn, it ruined my computer. He's like, oh my God, this is the best thing.
I was like, screw you Bitcoin, you piece of shit scam. He's like, oh damn, this is going to be
great. You know, I look at that and I go, I always laugh because I don't laugh. I silently cry,
but I look at it and I go, man, I was buying so much gold and silver in 2011.
And then my gold and silver now is worth about half of what I paid for it. If I had only taken
a quarter of that and put it in Bitcoin, I would be somewhere in the most ridiculous house you've
ever seen and live in large. But it's like, I didn't do that. And it's like, wow, man, it's like
seeing gold and silver, what it was doing then. It was almost like the 1980s whenever the Hunt
brothers were manipulating the silver markets, 50 bucks. Cause like silver hit almost 45 or
something then I remember, but I do have some cool, amazing Epic coins still Joel. So I got
that going for me. So there's something, it's not a complete wash. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys are going
to want to tune into our next episode because it's number 700 7 0 0. And we're going to be talking a
lot about our thoughts of what's happened so far, the story so far, especially thoughts from being
in the midst of this bear market and perhaps getting ready to come out the other side,
the bear market birth canal, if you will. Is that a, is that a really good,
well, that's what it is. It's like during the bear market, everybody gets nice and fat.
And then during the bear market, we're all in the bull market. Everybody's getting nice and fat in
the bear market. We're all getting skinny. Cause we're burning that fat. And we're like, come on,
bull market. Let's go again. We're ready to go. I'm about 20 pounds later. Speaking of burning.
Right now I've been burning. That's all calories that you gained when you went on that cruise.
Yeah. It's you. You're not too far from the truth, dude. You're back to normal now
because you're telling me I'm just here on this cruise eating every buffet possible. And when I
come back, I'm going to lose some weight. So basically you lost some weight, but it was all
the weight you gained on the cruise. So shut up, shut up. Why you gotta be mean to me. I'm not
going to want to do episode 700. If you mean to me, okay, screw you guys. Let's just stay at 6 99.
That's a good number. Nikola Tesla would approve of this number. 69.9. No, the six, three, six,
and nine were Nikola Tesla's energy frequency vibrations of the universe. It's all tied
together. And so he loved them every time he would stay in a hotel. It always had to add up to the
number three in some way. He was very, very focused around the numbers three, six, and nine.
So this is episode six, nine, nine. So this is one of the most powerful episodes in all of bad
crypto. So my gosh, you guys need to make sure six 93 or number three 69. Guys, make sure you're
subscribed. Tell a friend we'll see on episode number 700 until then please of bad staying.
Shall you be, if I'm going to do that, I should feel like Yoda badge. You must stay.
That sounded more like Fozzie bear.
Fozzie bear needs to go to the bathroom now.
The Bad Crypto Podcast is a production of Bad Crypto LLC. The content of the show,
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