I think it was a Monday morning and in those days I would get up at like 5 or 5.30 in the morning and go to the gym.
And I had done that and when I got to the gym for whatever reason I tweeted out something funny about,
"Oh, it's another Monday and we've still got, you know, block size wars in front of us for the whole week."
And apparently, you know, the attacker saw that and made the assumption that I had just rolled out of bed
and so, you know, I was going to be at home for the next hour or so.
And so they decided, you know, like 7 a.m. was the perfect time to strike.
And so I was coming home from the gym and I run into a roadblock, you know, stop and talk to the cop
and they're like, "Oh, we have a potential active shooter incident."
And so I, of course, got pretty concerned.
It wasn't until, I don't know, took like another 20 or 30 minutes or so before we realized that, you know,
they were actually looking for me.
They were, you know, at my address.
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I am so honored to have with me today Jameson Lopp, who is co-founder and CTO of CASA
and professional cypherpunk. Welcome to Bitcoin people, Jameson.
Glad to be here and to meet another Bitcoin person.
It's lovely of you to be here. You are enormously patient. You've been in the space since 2012,
so that's over 10 years now, and you continue to give your time to new folk in the space,
and you are insanely patient and kind in coming on board here today, and I really appreciate it.
What I would love to do, Jameson, is to go back a little bit in time, go back in history to you as a
child. I want you to take us briefly through some of your career history,
and then we're going to get into your Bitcoin life. You were always an insanely smart human being.
You were reading well above your year level at school. What was that like for you? I would
love to just get a sense of what you were like as a kid and how those years shaped you as a person.
What was your experience of that?
>> Sure. I mean, the short version of how I would describe it is I was the sort of stereotypical
outcast nerd. I was an only child. My parents were very focused on my academic learning.
You could call it very supportive, or you could also say they were very insistent that academics
come before everything else. Oddly, though, they were anti-computer. They saw computers just as
video game machines. I begged for a computer, I think, basically as soon as I learned what one
even was. My friends had them because I had friends whose parents were actually software
engineers. But I did not get a computer until I was in middle school. Once I did, I was just
off to the races, really ingesting as much information as possible, like teaching myself
how to create websites. Then I ended up taking college-level computer science class, I think,
when I was a freshman in high school or something. My interest in computers and computer science just
grew from there. I guess you could say I was always pretty intellectual because I probably
spent more time with books than with humans for a lot of my early childhood, at least when I was
outside of school. I was literally getting wagons of books from the library. I had a special
exemption to go over their maximum number of checked out books. That helped my education,
but it also harmed, I think, my social side of things because it just made me
weirder and nerdier and more outcast because I would make references to things and use words
that my peer group didn't know. They basically thought that in many cases I was speaking a
foreign language. >> Yeah. I find it interesting that,
and we can get into all of this stuff as the conversation unravels, but you had that experience
as a child. You've been subject to a swatting attack that we will discuss a little bit more
in detail as we get there in the timeline of your life. You get a bit of pushback from the community
about your stance on Ethereum and certain alts and where you stand on layer twos and
up-and-coming technologies in the Altcoin space. You have every right to be incredibly wary around
people, and yet you continue to show up to new programs like this to be a really involved member
of the community. You handle people and you handle pushback and criticism with enormous grace and
calm. Where does that come from? >> Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it really was due to getting
interested in stoicism when I was in middle school. That certainly shaped a lot of my views on life,
and it did give me, I think, a sense of calmness and a reliance upon rational thinking,
critical thinking, logical discourse. That, along with the fact that I was bullied a lot as a child,
had to deal with people basically using their emotions rather than their logic on me and seeing
sort of negative consequences of that, that certainly molded my perspective. It gave me
also a strong sense of justice. That ties into some of the stuff that happened after my swatting
of seeking out justice on my own and also just my interest in the space in general.
One of the several reasons why I initially got interested in Bitcoin and then started going down
the rabbit hole and learning about the cypherpunks, it really was the promise of being able to empower
individuals more against oppression. That's what really, I would say, gave my life a sense of
purpose. I always liked computers and I spent the first decade of my career solving interesting
problems, but I never had a real commitment to the industry I was working in. Once I started
going down these rabbit holes, I really decided not so much that I wanted to commit myself to
Bitcoin, but I wanted to commit myself to using my skills as a technologist to empower people,
to build tooling, to disseminate knowledge and information of how to use these tools that have
been created so that they can leverage really an immense amount of power for themselves.
This has always been the promise of cryptography and then the promise of Bitcoin is that you can
empower yourself. But that promise, it's been out of reach for a lot of people for a variety
of different reasons. This is really what I've been doing full-time for the past eight years,
is trying to make it easier for people to attain the level of defensibility and sovereignty that
I've been able to do since I joined the Bitcoin community. So let's go down that track. Let's
talk about what happened to you when you first came across the white paper. And I'm going to
quote here from Cointelegraph. There's an article or an interview that was done with you. Bear with
me. I'm going to quote a few sentences here, about three sentences. "I was just blown away," he says.
This is you, you say, noting that Satoshi approached the double spending and Byzantine
generals problem from the exact opposite direction of the performance and efficiency mindset
Lopp had been taught. "When I read the white paper and I saw the solution to the problem,
I was amazed because it was both elegant and ass-backward," he says. "The solution was to
make everything really, really expensive in terms of resource usage. I was like, wow,
I never in a million years would have thought to try that because it just goes against our nature
as computer scientists." So I've heard this before, but I suppose when I read that, I got...
It helped me get inside the mind of a computer scientist, seeing this thing from the first time
and lighting up with the kind of excitement of coming across something so new. So take me through
that experience, if you wouldn't mind. What happened for you when you first read that white
paper? And then I want to broaden out into the context of 2012. So let's just talk about your
white paper experience first. >> Yeah, so I'll never remember
for certain, but I'm pretty sure that I read the white paper as a result of a Slashdot post.
And Slashdot is just a news site for nerds. It was a lot bigger back in the day. This was before
places like Reddit and Y Combinator existed. And so I had read a number of different technical
white papers over the years. And usually I found them incredibly dense and boring and with a lot
of mathematical equations that I didn't even care to try to dig into. And the Bitcoin white paper
was different for several reasons. But the first was it was just so approachable. It was only like
eight or nine pages. It was written in fairly plain English. It did not have much technical
jargon. It did a good job of explaining the new terms that were in the white paper.
And then when it was explaining what the problem was, I actually found it quite fascinating because
I had never thought about the problem before. I'd never, like most people, never even really
thought about money, how does money work? You generally just use it as it's presented to you.
And as long as it meets your needs, you don't really question what's going on behind the scenes.
So we got through this white paper and I started mulling over it. I thought it seemed like it
made sense. It seemed like it could work. I wasn't convinced that, oh my goodness, this is
the absolute savior for all the world's monetary problems, but I didn't see any major holes in it
right off. And I already knew at the time it had been running for several years. And this was part
of the reason why I read the white paper is because it wasn't the first time I'd heard about
Bitcoin. I had definitely heard about it a few times over the past couple of years. And I had
always just assumed, oh, this is another nerd game that a bunch of people are going to put their
money into and lose everything. It's going to end horribly. So the fact that it continued existing
on the internet, which is very adversarial environment, it made me realize I wanted to
understand it better and that it could be an interesting long-term project. And so the only
way to really learn more about Bitcoin is to actually start using it. So I immediately went
out and I performed my first ever wire transfer. It was actually an international wire transfer to
this little bank in Tokyo. And it took like a week for it to go through. I had to spend several hours
at the bank filling out paperwork, had to get lectured by them several times, basically to make
them confident that I wasn't getting scammed and that I understood that once the money left the
bank account, that there was pretty much no way to get it back. And that was also an interesting
experience because I didn't know it at the time, but that experience was about to really give me
a ruler, a sort of gauge of how difficult it was to send money internationally, because I had never
even tried to do that before via the traditional system versus of course, Bitcoin. Once I eventually
got that account set up at MT Gox and got my first Bitcoins purchased and thankfully withdrawn,
a lot of people say that Gox caught them by surprise or whatever if they were around back
in the day. But the collapse of that exchange was not a surprise at all to me because I was
a web developer. I had been building internet applications for a number of years and I saw how
poorly written and executed their web application was. So I did not trust them for a moment to hold
on to my money for me. Thankfully, unfortunately, a lot of people, I guess, were not quite so savvy.
So that was just the beginning. And for the first year or so, I was just subscribing to the Bitcoin
subreddit and Bitcoin talk and really the small number of places where people were actually
talking about this thing, because it was not really talked about on Twitter or other mainstream
social media. And about a year later, I decided, okay, I want to get more technical. And that's
when I launched a side project where I basically forked Bitcoin core and I added in a bunch of
instrumentation and metrics collection. What I was really doing is the same stuff that I
had been doing for the past several years at my full-time job, sort of a DevOps type of
infrastructure monitoring, trying to bring things to the surface so that you could understand what
was going on, on your machines as they were running. And I felt like this was a good way
to contribute to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is all about transparency and openness. And I felt like
when you were running an actual Bitcoin node, you weren't really sure what it was doing and
there was room for better understanding and improvement. And so that was a nice
initial project that it got referenced by a number of developers over the years.
So I felt like that was a success. And then about a year after that was when enough venture capital
started flowing into the system, enough jobs started getting posted. I realized this was a
good opportunity for me to make a switch because I was already spending so much of my time thinking
about Bitcoin stuff, I might as well just get paid to do it. (laughs)
Indeed. And we're all the more grateful for it. So that's what was going on for you personally.
Contextually around you, a lot was going on in the Bitcoin space. At the time that you got in,
there was... So you're talking about Mt. Gox. You're at the tail end of the WikiLeaks
transitioning or taking Bitcoin payments, so moving from PayPal to Bitcoin.
You've got the first halving in 2012. So there's a range of... Oh, and Silk Road is still going.
And Ross Albrecht and kind of all of that space. How involved were you with any of that? How
familiar were you with the community involved in all of that? What was it like to be involved
in all of those elements of what I'm going to call milestone events in Bitcoin's history
at the personal level? How exposed were you to any of that? And what was the kind of
talk amongst the community online? Yeah, well, I mean, you have to understand
that the earliest wave of adopters back then were ideologues. We were the libertarians.
We were the crypto anarchists. We were the nerdy computer scientists who might also be libertarians,
crypto anarchists, and whatever. I kind of came in with a blend of several different
perspectives that made me interested in this as a project. And it was a really niche community.
So a lot of the stuff that was being talked about were the small number of projects that existed
there. There was not a very diverse number of things that you could do with Bitcoin back then.
I mean, it was considered cool when you could pay this guy in Bitcoin to send you baklava or
alpaca socks. Those were novelties that anybody would even accept it in return for anything else.
And it was those first early purchases of being able to actually receive a physical good in return
for Bitcoin that also, it clicked again where I realized, okay, this is a real thing. There are
people out there who agree with me that it has value and we can engage in economic interactions.
And the only real question at the time was, okay, how far can we take this? And so of course,
Silk Road was the extreme example. And I puttered around on Silk Road. I wanted to understand it as
well. Never actually interacted with it or made any orders. And the main reason for that was I
was just too paranoid. - Didn't buy your drugs on that?
- I was too paranoid because I could never convince myself that the last mile problem of
actually having the physical delivery of the goods sent to my house, I was never convinced that that
was safe enough. So I didn't want to get busted with drugs showing up on my doorstep. I suppose
there's plausible deniability and whatnot, but I don't know. It always seemed too risky to me.
And of course, there was the issue of the privacy of the actual Bitcoin that you were using. Now,
Silk Road had a mixer. And so I think that that gave some people more
conviction that it was safe and private, but really our understanding of Bitcoin privacy
a decade ago was not that great. And we've learned over the years that you have to be
really, really careful if you're doing anything that is creating an immutable public record for
all time. -
Yes, indeed. And it's interesting that you were already so aware of privacy and yet
even someone like you still got caught out later down the track. Let me just, before we get there,
talk about the block size wars because on a timeline, they came next. They came around 2015,
I'm going to say, 2016. -
Yeah, I mean, it was a slow burn up, right? I mean, people had been talking about scalability
probably since, well, really it was since the original announcement thread that Satoshi sent,
people were saying it would never scale. And so there was always a sort of background rumbling
of people talking about scaling. There were a few times early on, I think in the like 2013,
2014 era where Bitcoin initially had no block size limit. I think in late 2009 or early 2010,
Satoshi set that one megabyte block size limit. And this was never a problem until around 2013
or so. And I think it was Satoshi Dice, which was run by Eric Voorhees that generated so much
demand that we didn't hit that one megabyte block size limit. But what happened was back then we had
these soft block size limits that were set by the miners. I think it was initially 250 kilobytes.
And then we hit that. And I think a bunch of the miners upped it to 500. And then we hit that and
they upped it to 750. And then eventually we hit the hard cap within a few years. And once the hard
cap started getting hit and there was nowhere else to go, that's when the debate with the block size
and all of the scaling proposals really went full force. >> Did it get nasty or were people
reasonably civil about it? And what was your experience of that? And where did you, I think
you changed your mind at some point, didn't you? >> Correct.
>> Yeah. Tell me about that. And tell me about not only the changing of your mind,
but how people perceive that amongst the community, the fact that you would change your mind on that.
>> Yeah. So I think one important bit of context is that when I first went full time into Bitcoin,
my job at BitGo was to run infrastructure basically that was in charge of indexing
the blockchain and all of its data and was responsible for managing our transaction sending
queue. Now, as a result of this, our early indexers were all built on top of BitcoinJ,
which was one of the very early Bitcoin client implementations written in Java.
And it was, I believe, initially started by Mike Kern. And I think Matt Corallo was also involved.
But at the time, Mike Kern was really the primary maintainer of BitcoinJ. So I interacted with Mike
Kern a fair amount whenever I came across issues with using BitcoinJ. And he and I had very similar
approaches and perspectives to Bitcoin. And this was because we both had similar jobs,
at least before we got into Bitcoin. So he was working at Google, doing very large scale
computing. And I had been working at an email marketing service where I was running infrastructure
and was responsible for basically running jobs that were... They were tasked with running across
these hundreds of server clusters of hundreds of petabytes of raw analytics data that got generated
as a result of the hundred million emails that got sent out through our system every day and all of
the clicks and opens and other tracking metrics that came back. So point being, we had this DevOps
mindset and really there's a capacity planning aspect to DevOps when you're running infrastructure
for large scale applications. And that basically falls along the lines of, you can't just run at
90% or 100% capacity, even though that might be more efficient, cost efficient for you as an
organization, because there tend to be spikes in demand. Demand is very rarely this constant thing.
And this is true for basically anything. For example, just from the fact that we have waking
and sleeping cycles, you often see daily and nightly demand that goes along basically as the
sun is crossing over different populated areas of the earth or weekly cycles because people are at
work or people are at home or out and about. So we had issues at my company because we were a
marketing company where we would have to have excess capacity, really anywhere from three to
five X of what our normal demand was. And this was because on certain days, the internet retail
industry, they create a lot of sales. So be that like your Black Friday or Cyber Monday,
the time is basically coming up to Christmas or other major holidays.
And if you don't have that excess capacity available, what happens? Well, people hit these
hard limits, things start to fail, your customers get pissed off, your customers may leave for a
different service that has better capacity planning. And so this was really the perspective
that he and I and a number of other engineers in the space had, which is that it's not good for us
to be hitting this hard cap because that means people's transactions aren't going through,
they're getting a bad user experience, they're going to seek out alternatives, and that is going
to result in constrained demand for Bitcoin and thus probably a lower value for Bitcoin because
it can't meet all of the demand. And it took me a while, but it was actually a direct result of me
running this infrastructure and seeing how difficult it was to scale with larger and larger
blockchains that helped me understand that that was not the highest priority for the system as a
whole. That there were plenty of alternatives out there for people to make cheap transactions on.
And really, even back then, there were already thousands of altcoins. It was very easy for
someone to spool up an altcoin network and it would be really cheap to transact because
there was no demand for those resources.
So what was the atmosphere at the time? What was the...
The same way that you're talking about capacity and spikes, there's been spikes in the
culture of Bitcoin, I'm going to say, over the years. There's times where it's more acrimonious
and there's times where it's more peaceful. And you've weathered a lot of that along the way.
Just tell me about for what it's worth, and it may not, I mean, maybe there's not all that much
to it, but what was your experience of that like online? What was the backlash you got at the time?
What were... Yeah.
Yeah. So I was an early proponent of Bitcoin XT, which was a proposed hard fork, I think,
basically to eight megabyte blocks, which eight times larger. And I ran a Bitcoin XT node for a
while. I was a moderator of the Bitcoin XT subreddit for a while. And when talking to the
people who voluntarily joined that community, it was fine, of course, because we all had similar
perspectives, but wider on Bitcoin Twitter or actually even on the networks themselves,
it was certainly adversarial. The best example that I can give actually is that at one point,
my entire home internet connection got knocked offline for over a day. And this was basically,
I think it was deemed to be a DNS reflection attack. But suffice to say that someone or some
ones who did not like the idea of the Bitcoin XT and hard forking, they basically did a denial
of service attack on all of the Bitcoin XT nodes that they could find running on the network.
And it just happened to be a type of attack that my ISP literally, they had no defense for. My ISP
literally just shut off my account and said, "We'll let you back on the internet when the attack
stops." So I think that was a good example. There have been similar attacks in the next few years
as other alternative Bitcoin fork implementations came up and certain engineers would basically
look into their code and sometimes they would find an exploit and actually be able to send a
command to these nodes that caused them to crash. And you would see these massive spikes and
declines and node counts on the network going up and down as people were trying to figure out how
to fix these nodes and then exploit them again. So this is why I say Bitcoin is an adversarial
environment. The internet in general is adversarial because you're literally putting a window or a
door right here that billions of people can knock on and try to get through.
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10% Bitcoin back on your first purchase. Yeah. And maybe it's a case of what doesn't
kill you makes you stronger because of course you find out where those weak points are.
So from those kinds of attacks, you then experienced a very personal attack,
2017. Can you talk us through what happened with that? With the swatting,
invasion, I don't know quite what we call it. And what do we know about the motives of the guy?
I know you tracked him down eventually, you found out who it was. Do you know anything about
his motives and why he went down that track? So if you could talk us through the experience
and the unraveling of finding him. So the process, which was no easy process
of then tracking him down and then what you found out about him when you did finally meet him.
Yeah. So, you know, despite me having a decent understanding of privacy leaks,
mainly because my job for so many years had been to sift through all the data that gets collected.
I had never really taken a particularly strong stance protecting my privacy, you know, other
than running things like ad blockers to try to stop a lot of those metrics and, you know, getting
myself off of all the email lists. But I didn't go to many extremes of like running VPNs or
much harder things that are around, you know, protecting your physical location privacy.
So what happened? Well, 2017 was really when all the scaling stuff was coming to a head. We had
a number of different proposals and sort of threats on the table to fork Bitcoin network.
And at some point, I'll never know specifically what it was, but basically I said something
that, you know, triggered some people who must've been more on the large block supporter side.
And they, if we are to believe, you know, what I was told, they basically went to their friend
who had a history of swatting people and said, Hey, you should swat this guy and screw with him
because, you know, we don't like him. And so according to him, he didn't even know who I was.
He wasn't into the whole scaling debate stuff. He was just, you know, a punk teenager who
did this stuff for fun and possibly for profit. I do have plenty of reasons from my research to
suspect that he made a decent amount of money basically extorting people. And then that was
what he attempted to do with me though. I did not send him any money and instead I put a bounty on
his head, which, you know, ended up helping me, but it took, no, it took like three or four years
of investigation and a number of sort of lucky breaks to be able to track the guy down. It was
not easy by any means, especially really what I learned is that law enforcement doesn't really
care about your problems. If you're not in imminent danger it's really hard to prosecute,
you know, sort of white collar crimes. It's also very difficult to find attorneys that will act
proactively on your behalf. Basically what I found out is like the vast majority of
attorneys out there, if they're on the criminal side, they're either for defending people who are
being prosecuted by the state or they are there to, if they're on the aggressive side, usually
they are working for the state. So it's very hard to find like private attorneys that are
prosecutorial. And I was just lucky that I found one who was like a former state prosecutor who
now had a private practice. And so they had some connections with private investigators and FBI
and stuff, but it was also, it was just really hard to get the FBI's attention. Certainly don't
bother calling any of their main phone numbers because that won't get you anywhere. But yeah,
number of lucky breaks later and we end up, you know, I don't know, I forgot about it for like a
year or two. And then I finally got a contact in the cyber crime division with the FBI, handed all
of my findings over to them, didn't hear from them for like another year, thought, you know,
that was it, nothing was going to happen. And then just randomly out of the blue, one day I got a
call from my attorney that says, well, they found him. And the, what was it? The federal district
attorney declined to prosecute because they're a minor. So apparently in America, there is no
like juvenile justice system at the federal level. So like the prosecutor, apparently it doesn't,
they can't really do much or it's not worth their time. Thankfully, few more weeks went by and the
state level district attorney said that they were interested in prosecuting. And then I went through
the whole rigmarole of, you know, flying there and testifying in court and so on and so forth.
But, you know, the kid, he had no record and he had never been caught for anything before. And if
it wasn't for me, he probably wouldn't have been caught for a while. So he basically got a slap on
the wrist and, you know, was told he needed to clean up his act. So hopefully he did. I'll
probably never hear from him again, but I don't hold too much animosity for him because, you know,
he was just a naive young kid. I don't think he fully understood the potential ramifications of
what he was doing. No, that's right. And it's really more about the people who set him up for
it. It occurs to me we haven't actually described here and some people may not know what a swatting
attack actually is and what that looked like. And my understanding is that you weren't actually at
home at the time. I'm not sure if anybody was. I guess I'm curious about the, you know,
the emotions you went through at the time as you saw what was going on, your road was blocked off,
you didn't even know it was your house. So if you could kind of describe a little bit about the scene,
what actually physically happened and what was your, you've talked about your stoicism
and how much that's helped you, but I would imagine there's an element of PTSD after an
event like that. So I'm wondering what the emotional fallout was for you. So if you wouldn't
mind kind of describing the process, but then those kind of immediate days or weeks afterwards
and what went on for you, because you resolved very quickly to go after this guy. And I think
you got quite sort of used that energy in a sort of focused, angry way to, you know, to regroup.
But that takes some doing to get to that place, I would imagine. So can you take us through that?
Yeah, you know, when it actually happened, it was surreal. It was also a lucky break in that I had,
I think it was a Monday morning. And in those days, I would get up at like five or 530 in the
morning and go to the gym. And I had done that. And when I got to the gym, for whatever reason,
I tweeted out something funny about, oh, it's another Monday and we've still got, you know,
block size wars in front of us for the whole week. And apparently, you know, the attacker saw that
and made the assumption that I had just rolled out of bed. And so, you know, I was going to be at
home for the next hour or so. And so they decided, you know, like 7am was the perfect time to strike.
And so I was coming home from the gym and I run into a roadblock, you know, stop and talk to the
cop and they're like, oh, we have a potential active shooter incident. And so I, of course,
got pretty concerned. It wasn't until, I don't know, took like another 20 or 30 minutes or so
before we realized that, you know, they were actually looking for me. They were, you know,
at my address. And I immediately knew what it was like. I knew what swatting was. In fact, like
one of the early Bitcoin developers was swatted in 2014. So it wasn't even the first time that a
Bitcoin person had been swatted. Swatting was more something that was happening in the gaming
community. But basically it's, you know, you find your targets, you find out where they live
and you call their local police department and you use the right words to, you know, create a
highly escalated situation. So in my case, he said, I think he said I had killed somebody and
I had hostages and I had bombs and I was demanding like $50,000 or something. But basically, you know,
just go down the list, you know, just tick all the boxes. You know, this is a highly dangerous,
mentally unstable person who is barricaded in with hostages. So we have to send our highest
level of threat response, which is the SWAT team and shut down their entire neighborhood
with hundreds of houses. So, you know, I knew what that was. And in fact, like when I
jumped up into their mobile command unit, I was like, sorry for the trouble, everybody. You know,
the first thing they asked me was, do you have any enemies? And I was like, oh yeah,
oh yeah. I have a pretty good idea of like why you're all here.
Yeah. Okay. So you've weathered more than your fair share of storms and I know that you've
reorganized your life to increase the level of privacy at a, particularly at a personal level.
You're now, since CASA, well, you're still, it seems to be a constant in your life perhaps,
I was going to say. It seems to be back with pushback that you get around altcoins,
your stance on ordinals, your stance on layer two experimentation and technologies.
So there seems to be this kind of constant pushback and maybe that's what it needs to be.
I mean, you've said the internet and Bitcoin is naturally adversarial and maybe that's what
it needs to be in order to consistently test itself and be pushing back against ideas and
always questioning and always testing, but that's got to be tiresome from your end.
Yeah. I mean, it requires a certain level of commitment, right? So a lot of the people who
were around and were more prominent back then aren't so prominent anymore. In many cases,
they just got tired of dealing with the constant battles as it were. I believe that this is one of,
if not the most important thing that I can be working on right now. And if I really want to,
I can always take a break, but I don't know. It's also kind of an addiction. It is,
I believe, a battle of ideas. And so I don't know if you've been paying attention to some of the
most recent drama, but in many cases, like even in the past couple of weeks with the recent drama,
I haven't even been making arguments for or against the specific proposal that people are
talking about. Rather, most of the time when I'm commenting, it's more meta commentary of like,
you know, this is a logical way to approach debate or, you know, this is an irrational,
emotional way of approaching debate. And so, you know, I'm thinking of it more of,
I guess you could call it thought leader because I'm really, I'm like, I'm talking about how we
should be thinking about things rather than necessarily prescribing that we go one way
or another. - Oh, how fascinating. So you've really become expert over time at how to manage
these things and now able to teach that on the basis of your experience, which is really a kind
of stunning outcome from the process and a positive and a productive outcome from the process. Again,
it's kind of channeling many negative experiences into a really positive outcome for Bitcoin,
for the community, for yourself, for the people around you. - I mean, it's also been an interesting
journey because my social media profile grew so much. It is a very different experience
being on a social network and having a hundred followers versus 10,000 followers versus 100,000
followers. I noticed, you know, marked differences in the reactions that you would get and just sort
of the volume of responses and of course, edge cases. And so one thing that I've said many times,
especially about the swatting incident is that it's not a new thing. You know,
celebrities have always had stalkers, for example, but pre-internet that was limited to a
mega celebrity problem, you know? And this is basically an issue of attention. So thanks to
the internet, you can very easily go from being a nobody who no one is paying attention to,
to, you know, if you're fortunate/unfortunate enough to go viral, you can have either the
praise or the wrath, or probably some of both of millions of people directed at you overnight.
And it's really, it's the fact that your life can change so suddenly as a result of
the attention that, you know, this is what catches people unaware. And it's one of the
reasons why I think privacy is so important and it's hard to overstate. The average person
will probably go most of their life, you know, never having to deal with this type of problem,
but you can almost think of it as being a loser of the social media lottery, if you will.
If you do or say something that triggers people in the right way, then you may find that due to
the law of large numbers, and I still am optimistic, I believe the vast majority of people
are good moral people who don't want to hurt others, but there is some small, you know,
single digit, maybe even less percentage of people out there who they don't abide by the same
ethics. They don't have problems, you know, attacking others in order to try to achieve
some end. And so, you know, that's the real reason why I got swatted is because I had so
much attention and, you know, I triggered enough people that eventually one of them who had the
skill set to pull off the swatting and had the right mental frame of mind to want to actually do
it, you know, that's what happened. And because I didn't have the right defenses in place,
they were able to pull that off. Now, you know, years and tens of thousands of dollars and many
lifestyle changes later, I am confident that that type of person can't pull that off against me
again, but it really is a high bar to cross over. >> Yeah, indeed, indeed. I want to move towards
something a bit more optimistic and I want to come back to kind of Bitcoin and what it means
for the world and your original reasons for getting into Bitcoin, being driven by that
sense of justice that you were. So this is a two-part question. In 2012 or 2015, could you
have imagined Bitcoin being where it is today in terms of global adoption and politicians talking
about their policies like for Bitcoin in the 2024 election? So could you have imagined that?
And second part, therefore, predicting forward, what do you imagine another 10 years from that?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think that the pace has caught most of the early adopters by surprise. I mean,
we sometimes had these discussions of where might this thing go over the long term, but I generally
had more of a generational take on it. I was like, you know, maybe 30, 20, 30 years from now,
it'll be pretty big. Also, that's kind of the lifespan of the average fiat currency is like 20,
25 years. So I'm like, if Bitcoin can survive past that, then it's really proven itself to be
better than fiat and at least that way. So it's hard to imagine because humans experience time
and experience things linearly. Our brains extrapolate things linearly. So it's very
difficult for us to predict a rate of change that is actually exponential. So yeah, it's hard for me
to even imagine. I try not to get my heads in the clouds too much because I've seen some people who
try to put on their exponential thinking cap and then they can take it too far and they're like,
"Oh, we're all going to be millionaires next year," type of thing. So I try to stay more
focused on the short term and what I can do to keep pushing forward. And the sort of hope is that
if there are enough other people out there like myself who are contributing, whatever skills they
have, you don't have to be technical to be contributing to this space. Look at yourself.
I don't know if you consider yourself like a historian or a sociologist or whatever,
but we're all contributing in our own way, trying to improve the system, trying to help others
understand what it is. And if you're helping other people understand it, then perhaps that will have
a domino effect of getting some of those people to contribute their own skills. And this is how
you get the network to grow, not just linearly, but also exponentially. It's almost like a reverse
Ponzi scheme, right? It's like you get two people and they get two people and they get two people,
and everything to the power of two. That's how things really start to go crazy. And that's one
of the reasons why Bitcoin has these crazy up and down market cycles. And I think that that is going
to continue for the foreseeable future. - I don't normally ask this question,
of people, but you've been through three Hardings. So I have to ask you,
I need to ask for a price prediction for maybe 10 years from now, let's say 2033.
- Yeah, I mean, I don't do price predictions because
we don't know what's going to happen to fiat, right? My only conviction, it's not that Bitcoin
is going to keep going up in price. My only conviction is that the value of fiat is going
to keep going down in price. So even if I said, Bitcoin is going to be worth a million dollars
10 years from now, that actually doesn't mean very much because it's possible that a million dollars
isn't worth the same as it is today. And not only possible, it's basically guaranteed.
- Yeah, absolutely. And it's the right way to look at it. That makes a great deal of sense
and it ties into what, well, I'm just going to say Greg Foss, but many folk in the Bitcoin community,
we know that fiat, if nothing else, is trending towards zero. So,
it doesn't leave much choice. It doesn't leave much choice in terms of the average person looking
around for investment options and living their life in some sort of reasonable manner.
Jameson, where to next for your personal journey?
What are you working on and what do you want to be working on? So you're saying you don't have
a specific vision necessarily for Bitcoin world as it were, but what's your particular vision
for yourself? -
Well, I mean, a lot of my time is just focused on my company and I'm not a business savvy person.
Thankfully, I'm not CEO. I would be a terrible CEO having to deal with all of those different
moving parts and especially deal with the sort of human relationships side of things.
But my goal is to continue surveying the landscape of what is available from a technology perspective
and figuring out if there's room for me to make it easier for people to use some of the tooling
that still holds great power and holds great potential. And so, in terms of what Casa does
or what I want to do, I kind of see Casa as an extension of a consulting service. I have people
come to me all the time who want me to do consulting for them, but I'm like, "This is what
Casa is for. It's security consulting. I do brain dumps on our employees. They learn from our
clients and teach me about what people are having problems with." We are all together trying to
navigate the very dangerous and complex world of being your own bank. And we're trying to make it
easier and allow people to be more confident that they can do it because I see this as a...
It can become an existential crisis if we don't constantly fight the battle
because really what the battle is, it's a battle of sovereignty versus convenience.
And the unfortunate thing and the reason why I'm kind of bearish on security and privacy
in general is because the past decade has taught me that humans tend to prioritize convenience
over everything else. Even when it's in their best interests not to do so, this is just human
nature and this is why it needs to be as convenient as possible to be your own bank.
But even stepping back from that, I do believe that Casa and my own journey, it'll be much
bigger than just Bitcoin or just crypto assets. Fundamentally, the technology of cryptography
has the potential to change many different aspects of our lives. At a societal level,
it has helped to secure internet commerce as we know it. But the internet itself is still a crazy
and dangerous place and there are many, many different areas that need room for improvement.
And so I think that we're going to see cryptography and the technologies that come
out of this ecosystem be used to help people empower themselves in other ways.
So one example, social media, I'm a big fan of Nostra now. This is using public-private key
cryptography. It's creating a completely different, more decentralized architecture
for how we actually send and store the data for social networking. And even more than that,
it's actually much more than just a social network. I especially think that we will
eventually land on some sort of identity solution. This is one of those unicorns,
like a number of different teams have been working on for years and we have yet to settle
on a standard. But I think that one of the big missing pieces to this whole
sovereign ecosystem that we're trying to build on the internet is identity and reputation.
But we need to settle on exactly what system we're going to use for that. And
it better not be WorldCoin is all I can say. >> It better not be WorldCoin, indeed.
Jameson, you've been enormously generous with your time as you always are with these interviews.
You're incredibly patient and giving in terms of your knowledge and your insight and your capacity
to explain in very plain English and simple terms for us non-techies. You are a resource in your own
right. You have a page that brings together all the most amazing resources in Bitcoin.
Do you have any last words or final thoughts or something that's really top of mind for you at
the moment or something you'd like to get out there to anyone who might be listening
who may be newer to this space? >> Basically, don't get overwhelmed.
Don't bite off more than you can chew. There's no rush on any of this. You can dip your toes in.
The most important thing that I think you can invest in is education. And so that's why
I spend time almost every day updating my resources website. Every time I find a new tool
or a new educational resource, I put it on there. Not just for everyone else. I initially started
doing this for myself just because I wanted to be able to keep track of everything and be able to
answer questions when people came to me so that I didn't have to go Googling all over the internet.
So yeah, there's no rush. You don't have to feel overwhelmed. You don't have to be technical. I
think if you start going down the rabbit hole, if you think that this technology, the ideas behind
these systems are interesting, if you think that this is perhaps a better way for us to try to move
civilization forward in some aspects, I think that you should try to find a way to contribute.
There's many ways to do that. There's many companies out there that are looking for all
types of different skill sets. You don't have to be a programmer by any means. And anything you do
contribute is going to help us get to where we're all trying to go. So it can be adversarial,
especially if you're trying to talk to people on social media. But this is a voluntary system,
right? You don't owe anything to anyone. If someone is being mean to you, you can just
stop talking to them. And I do that all the time. I wish I could even tell you how many thousands of
accounts I've blocked and muted over the years, but Twitter won't make that easy for me to find
out. I've just started doing that recently. I'm only just learning how to do that and how to
manage that. Jameson, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. And
go well and be well and keep doing what you're doing. You're an amazing, amazing resource to
this space. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I think that orthodoxy interprets aid and
development as being wasteful, but probably good intention. It's probably what most people think of
when they think about aid. But a lot of people are like, oh, my gosh, only a certain percentage
of the money I send gets to the recipient. We should be doing more. That's what you hear a lot
about in the mainstream economic orthodoxy is we're not doing enough lending to poor countries
and we're not giving them enough capital and we're not giving them enough aid. That is profoundly
incorrect in my view in as much as the aid and development industry as a whole is mainly lending,
not gifts.