Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin
Takeover podcast. I am Vlad, your Bitcoin
Influencer's Influencer and I'm live
here today with Jameson Lopp who is the
CTO of Casa and has been with the
company for about four years now, no, five
years, and I haven't interviewed him
since he started at Casa and it's pretty
cool after so much stuff has happened
and yeah, welcome Jameson. Good to be
back. Well technically you're not back
because previously you were on the
Crypto Insider whatever interviews, now
you're on the Bitcoin Takeover podcast.
So technically it's your first appearance
and it's sweating here, it's super hot, I
could not turn on a fan because it
affects the quality of the audio, so if I
start sweating just like Richard Nixon
during his debate with JFK, then sorry.
Well we all have to make sacrifices.
Well speaking of sacrifices Jameson, I
think that since you left BitGo it
became a much bigger company, now they
custody the funds of MicroStrategy if
I'm not mistaken and possibly also El
Salvador, I heard a rumor. Do you ever
regret not staying with BitGo?
No, I mean you know I left for a number
of reasons but one of the big ones was
just that my sleep was being affected.
I was running a lot of the
infrastructure there and as we started
to expand and added support for many new
networks, it ran into a lot of new
edge cases and issues with basically
maintaining the complexity, so I was
kind of there when we had added support
for a lot of things but we hadn't
necessarily grown that part of the team
commensurately to make it so that you
could spread the load more. But no,
they seem to be doing well and I
certainly wish them the best and I have
my incentives to want them to continue
to do well but you know I kind of
took it as an opportunity to pivot and
continue to use a lot of the knowledge
that I had gained while I was there but
apply it to more of a retail individual
focus. So I felt like BitGo did a pretty
good job kind of raising the bar for
enterprise hot wallet security type of
stuff. I felt like there was room to try
to do the same thing on the individual
side and that's really what we've been
focusing on for the past five years at
Casa, is you know helping individuals
help themselves and be their own bank.
Yeah, it's very hard for me to not notice
that there is a certain similarity. It
seems like BitGo does multi-sig custody
for companies, corporations, nation-states
and whatever and Casa does multi-sig for
individuals so you're not quite a
hundred percent custodians but you do
hold some keys and you are more like
enablers of inheritance or something. So
to some degree you're doing the same job
but for a different type of clients.
Yeah, you know also as I was leaving
BitGo had already spent the past year or
two ramping up on the legal side to also
offer full custody services and so I
think that's a pretty decent chunk of
their business now where they're
actually taking custody on behalf of a
lot of whales and enterprises and you
know that was something that was less
interesting to me though obviously
there's demand, there's a market for it
and I wanted to continue pushing for
pushing forward in what I believe is the
harder path which is getting people to
take responsibility and you take custody
and do what I think is best not only for
themselves but for the entire ecosystem
is kind of pushing back against the
looming threat of convenience that I
believe is a systemic threat and it's a
buzzword but you know it does create
this centralizing force of resulting in
more of the value in the ecosystem being
concentrated in a smaller number of
hands which I think is just bad in
general for all of us.
Yeah, I very much agree with you and I
was going to ask you what's new with
Casa because when the company first
launched it was super cool. I remember
Jeremy Welch when he was the CEO he was
on all the podcasts except for mine for
some reason but he was on all the
podcasts and he was talking about this
cool device the Casa node that was
supposed to enable sovereignty very
easily. I give credit to Casa for
popularizing the idea of node in a box. I
think companies today like Umbrell and
Nodal and RaspiBlitz owe their success
to the fact that Casa popularized that
concept and I am an owner of the first
generation Casa node which was the
Raspberry Pi 3 which wasn't very good
not very slick. It was in the next year
that the Raspberry Pi 4 launched
and you also created a revision that
was short-lived and what's new because I
think that was the coolest phase of
Casa. The first year when you had the
node and when you had this plan to renew
the hardware of your customers every
year or every couple of years and then
you tried it and decided to go full
software support and provide multi-sigs
for customers and to some people I guess
I kind of lost interest in the company
after that point but obviously you have
had clients and you were able to scale
the operations and grow past that point
so what's been going on with Casa? What's
new? Yeah you know I think a lot of
people for whatever reason well I think
it's due to the popularity but a lot of
people actually misunderstand the
timeline of Casa and that actually in
2018 we initially launched with our
multi-sig self custody product. Now at
the time we took kind of a Tesla
approach where it was actually $10,000 a
year you know ultra high premium whale
client only type of product and then
over time we've gone down market. Now it
was I guess a year, year and a half
after that was when we launched the node
so you know the idea was really you know
Casa as a full stack self-sovereignty
type of service and you know I think we
did successfully make it a lot easier
for people to run Bitcoin and Lightning
nodes especially back then you know
Lightning was even more of a beta type
of product than it is today. There was a
lot more rough edges and what we really
found and you know kind of what what
people really want us to explain is like
why did that product not last and it was
a culmination of several factors. One of
them which if you look at the sort of
node in a box history you know Casa was
not the first and we certainly won't be
the last company to offer this type of
product. There were at least two or three
I know that I had I had a Bitnodes
actually had a device for a few years
that they offered and then there was I
think Bitseed I think John Light was a
part of that project for a few years and
and what you find is normally these
node in a box projects they last for a
few years and then they tend to sort of
die off and there's a few reasons for
that. One is it's a very low margin
business right so you're typically using
some sort of Raspberry Pi or similar
many computer device as the hardware
probably going to run you two to three
hundred dollars minimum just for the
base components off the shelf. Then
you're trying to build some nice
software and interface that you can
throw onto that to make it easier for
people to use. So you know how much are
you actually feasibly going to be able
to charge for it you know once it starts
going above five hundred dollars people
the size of the market of people that
are willing to pay that is vanishingly
small you know probably fewer than
ten thousand people total and it's
mostly hobbyists and tinkerers. So we
ended up bumping up against this total
size of the market issue you know we are
a venture-backed company so we are
seeking growth and so when you you see
that your product kind of stalls out and
hits a wall and it doesn't seem to be
much more room for growth that's always
a red flag. Another thing and this is
similar to and related to the cost of
the margin that I was talking about is
it's obviously the cost is not just with
the hardware there's the software
engineering cost to make something
that's nice and usable for less
technical people and then for us one of
the bigger surprises was the cost on the
support side and one of the big reasons
for that is and I've actually given
entire presentations about this
basically when you are deploying
hardware into unknown environments and
unknown networks there's a huge surface
area of unanticipated sort of edge cases
and things that end up going wrong and
that combined with the fact that you
know we had no insight or control over
these devices made it very difficult for
us to get debugging information in many
cases to help people. So you know worst
case scenario if someone couldn't even
access the device over their network to
get debug logs off of it then it's like
we have to walk people through figuring
out how to how to hook a monitor and
keyboard up to it and start running
command line instructions and you know
this it gets really gnarly especially
when you're trying to sell something to
less technical people who probably
aren't familiar with doing that type of
stuff. So you know the short version is
it just it was a great idea it's very
difficult to pull that off and scale it
as a profitable business.
Yeah I remember at one point you were
even giving rewards for people keeping
their nodes online and there was this
application or something that was
sending them lightning rewards and I
think it was too ahead of its time this
was in early 2019 if I'm not mistaken
and I remember being super excited to
about the Kasa node and thinking about
all the possibilities I remember Jack
Dorsey getting one and publishing a
picture of it and at the time he was
still the CEO of Twitter and that was a
big deal because he was not fully
involved in Bitcoin he was just dipping
his toes so it was a huge deal at the
time the Kasa node it's kind of
unfortunate that I think the first
iteration was not super reliable and it
I wasn't sure so half the time I wasn't
sure if it's loading or if it's stuck
and I think that was the biggest issue
in terms of user experience and also I
remember taking it out of the box and it
had this sheet of paper that was saying
go to start.kasa.com or something like
that but in reality the URL was
different so by the time the box got
shipped you had changed the website for
your documentation and stuff so it wasn't
you tried very hard so I can give credit
for all of the Apple packaging and
presentation and the fact that you made
it so easy and convenient and you
basically gave birth to an entire
industry of node in a box devices which
existed prior to Kasa but it wasn't this
big. You urged a lot of people to continue
this pursuit and try to create more
efficient node in a box concepts. We
were basically trying to take our ethos
of improving usability for Bitcoin
tooling so running nodes especially
lightning stuff and all the complexities
around channel management and whatnot it
can be overwhelming for people so the
idea which is what we started off with
self custody is you know the promise of
self custody is quite great but to do it
right and to avoid all of the potential
foot guns that people can basically get
themselves in trouble due to ignorance
it necessitates a much more friendly
user experience really to guide people
down the right path and so we were just
sort of applying that same type of
approach to nodes but of course they're
just mountains and mountains of more
complexity when you have this additional
piece of networked hardware that you
have to manage and you know as it as it
stands today you know we still have to
deal with some complexity and some
things that are outside of our control
even with our self custody service you
know this is by design Kasa is
architected to eliminate single points
of failure so that means you know we
don't want to have a threshold of keys
that could be used to either prevent
someone from spending their money or to
spend their money without their consent
and so as a result that means people are
using key management devices from other
companies other vendors that we have no
control over so this does add a certain
level of complexity and sort of ongoing
maintenance where we have to make sure
that everything that we're doing is
staying in sync with what the rest of
the hardware and firmware and the whole
software stack that our clients are
using is a constantly moving target.
Yeah I understand that and before I ask
you the next question let me play an
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What do you think about Wasabi Jameson?
It's interesting I don't really do much
coin joining myself I have a sort of
multi-faceted approach to Bitcoin
privacy depending on my needs but you
know I'm I'm somewhat reluctant to coin
join at least any funds I have that I
might want to send to an exchange
because I don't want my
centralized exchange accounts to get
shut down the really the one time that I
would use coin join is if I need to make
a payment that's large enough that I
don't have like enough non KYC Bitcoin
and so if I'm doing that payment and
just sending it to someone then you know
sending it through a coin join first
just so that they couldn't see or try to
figure out through on-chain analysis
like what the rest of my wallet looks
like that's the primary use case that I
have for it but of course there's many
reasons why people may want to be
joining their coins.
Yeah in my case I receive donations and I
don't I have no idea where they come
from and I don't want to know where they
come from so maybe some may argue that
it's worse if I coin join them if these
donations are coming from exchanges but
I don't have the time to check I don't
want to know and I can move the coins
between wallets a few times so that
blockchain analysis that's being
employed by exchanges will think that
the coins have changed owner or
something. But anyway I was going to ask
you about KASA and I think the most
common question that you get from people
who are not certain if they want to use
their service is why would anyone use
KASA instead of setting up Electrum in
five minutes with a couple of hardware
wallets. What is the benefit?
Well there are several you know for one
KASA is not just a wallet you know the
vast majority of wallets out there are of
course free to use sort of a do-it-yourself
type of thing and that's great you know I
think if people are sufficiently
knowledgeable and sophisticated then
rolling your own is certainly feasible
if you put in enough time and effort.
But you know KASA one of our things you
know we come with a pretty slick mobile
app that really guides people through
the whole process so they don't
necessarily have to know all the
intricacies of what they're doing to
both set up the multi-sig and then to
maintain it and have backups. So one
particular point that comes up a lot
with regard to multi-sig you know we're
trying to set these up to help people
put themselves in a very robust position
so that they can make mistakes and so
that if anything goes wrong because
something probably will go wrong over a
long enough time frame that that itself
is not triggering a catastrophic loss.
And one thing for example that comes up
that is easy for people to not understand
if they don't understand you know how
multi-sig works under the hood is is
actually somewhat similar to a problem
that I see people get into even with
single sig which is not understanding
what's required to actually recover your
wallet if you should lose keys or data.
So when you have a multi-sig setup yeah
sure you can create a two of three or a
three of five or whatever and if you
lose one of those keys you know you can
still spend the money but that is
assuming that you still have the the
wallet itself constructed and stored
somewhere. So basically if you lose any
of the public keys that go to that
multi-sig that could actually be a
catastrophic loss. So we could go into
the details why but basically when
you're spending from a multi-sig you
have to provide all of the public key
information which means you know if you
had let's say Electrum or Spectre or
Sparrow or whatever set up and it was a
two of three and you lost one of those
keys if you did not also have the wallet
descriptor or basically all of the
public information with the extended
public keys the derivation paths the
script type these are all things that
are required to be able to reconstruct
and then spend from that multi-sig
wallet then unfortunately you would not
be able to actually spend your money. So
one of the benefits that you get here is
Kasa basically helps you with automatic
backups not only it with one of your
keys gets this automatic encrypted
two-of-two type of cloud backup it also
inherently backs up your public
information as well and we send you a
copy of it at the time that you set up
your wallet but you can also get
another copy of it whenever you want
you know Kasa as long as Kasa doesn't go
away even if Kasa does go away we have
provided people with what we call
sovereign recovery instructions which
includes that information and you know
as I said the whole idea is to get rid
of single points of failure so you know
we have an entire website devoted to
this of like basically everything that
could go wrong. The service support is
another big aspect of it like I said a
lot of these wallets out there they are
basically do-it-yourself you know you
might get community level support so
whoever is even volunteering to help
out on a forum or email list or whatever
what are you paying for at Kasa? What
you're really paying for especially at
the premium tiers is a level of customer
service where you can actually call us
on the phone and you know talk to a
real human you know set up a video chat
if you want and and get hands-on
personalized support not just you know
random tier one email support where
especially if it's a bull market going
on you might not get a response for
weeks.
Yeah I was showing the page that shows
the membership types you have a free
plan you have a standard one and the
premium one there seems to be quite a
gap between them the free one of course
is zero dollars and all you get is I
guess access to the wallet and with the
standard one it's not the one that gives
you free hardware wallets right it's the
premium one. Correct yeah the standard is
it's more of a do-it-yourself with email
support I believe our SLA you know
turnaround time for emails is generally
one to two business days though you know
it's normally on the order of hours
especially right now since things are
pretty quiet and like I said the premium
plan yeah you get a nicer onboarding
package and more hand-holding but what
you're really paying for is both
responsive and personalized support so
you know if you need something if
there's an emergency you can literally
contact us within a matter of minutes
at least during the business week
and we have you know emergency sort of
24/7 lines as well. Yeah I think it's
certainly interesting what's going on
here and I noticed that Ethereum has a
central place on your website where you
can learn what it is so how did that
happen how did you switch from a
Bitcoin only company which was also
planning to support Litecoin on the node
in the beginning because of some
investor I guess and then you dropped it
and said you're Bitcoin only and then
you said let's also add Ethereum and I
guess this is also a nice segue into
your article about Bitcoin maximalism
and its origins. Right well so once again
this is an interesting long history that
I think a lot of people have missed
mainly because you know we were so small
in 2018-2019 when we first rolled out the
multi-sig app in 2018 we actually had a
beta Ethereum support in the mobile app
but we ended up removing it because we
just didn't get much demand for it at
the time. I'm just trying to remember
about Litecoin stuff I don't I don't
even remember what we said or didn't say
around Litecoin stuff obviously nothing
ever happened with Litecoin support
didn't have a ton of demand for that and
still don't today but then what we saw
happening over the past couple of years
is more demand you know some from
current customers but really a lot of
this is driven of course by our sales
team and you know they take notes
whenever we lose a deal and we started
seeing a pattern and the pattern was
basically look I'm invested in a number
of different assets and especially if
you don't have Ethereum and Ethereum
related assets then your service is not
particularly helpful for me because then
I have to go find a similar service
somewhere else you know people people
want convenience and as I said at the
very beginning you know we're kind of
fighting against this this convenience
centralizing force and so it was it was
pretty upsetting to see a number of
people saying you know what in terms of
convenience the easiest thing for me to
do with regard to custody is to
literally just give it to you know a
trusted third-party custodian because
they support absolutely everything and
you know I won't have to go around
maintaining you know multiple accounts
multiple wallets and so on so forth so
this for us of course has been market
driven based on you know what people are
telling us they want and of course you
know as expected we get some pushback
from people who you know completely
hate the idea of a theory and want
nothing to do with it and those folks are
of course welcome not to use it you know
we we have a toggle in the app you can
turn it on you can turn it off you can
do what you want with it you can use
Kasa for Bitcoin only you could use it
for a theorem only we do anticipate
adding stable coin support for too long
because that's really the next greatest
thing that has the most demand
interesting and something that I wanted
to ask you before we get into Bitcoin
maximalism is I guess a question that
you don't get too often what happens if
for example I set up a premium account
and I pay $2,100 for one year and then I
stop paying are you going to throw away
the keys or what what's going to happen
no well you know you hold the keys so
because of the way that it's
architected Kasa can't do anything you
know your money just sits there from the
application standpoint what would happen
is that the app goes into basically what
we call withdraw only mode and so you
know if your membership has expired the
only thing the app allows you to do is
to completely sweep the wallet and send
the funds to an external address okay
that's less evil or harsh than I
expected like usually there are these
asterisks asterisks like lawyer
mentions that okay if you don't pay
we're going to shut off this function
and you have to pay again so basically
what's the incentive for someone to
continue other than receiving support
because you set up the customer and then
they can just keep on benefiting from
that setup without paying for a renewal
yeah that's a good point this is
actually something we should probably
hit on more often well there's a couple
of things for one of course you would
lose access to the casa recovery key so
if things started to go wrong with your
other keys and you got down to a point
where you needed a signature from the
casa recovery key I think that would be
a big incentive for you to renew with us
the other thing is that you know this is
it you know multi-sig is a more complex
type of setup and one thing that I've
certainly learned over the years is that
it's not a set it and forget it type of
operation and I kind of hinted at this
earlier where I was talking about how
there is this you know these additional
levels of complexity with you know
managing the the hardware and the
software libraries you know basically
all of the pieces of hardware and
software that you're using as
constituent pieces of your distributed
multi-sig wallet and the short version
is that this is why one of the core
pieces of functionality that we've had
in the app from the very beginning is
what we call health checks and that's
basically you know every six months or
so you should probably be interacting
with each of these keys and a health
check in our app basically it's you know
doing a Bitcoin signed message so it's
just proving that you still have the
ability to cryptographically sign with
your keys you don't necessarily have to
sign a transaction and you move money
around though what happens in the app is
that you know if you have signed with a
key for any reason whether it's just a
message or for a transaction then the
timer kind of starts and if if you go
six months and you haven't done any
sort of activity then we start
annoying you with some warnings or
saying hey you should probably do a
health check just to make sure
everything's good and so what am I
getting to well you know we have had
some tenuous situations with some
customers over the years who didn't do
their health checks and went you know
two three four years without ever
touching any of their keys and then you
know they come back after many years and
they start realizing oh all my firmware
is out of date and it's not compatible
with this software library or maybe even
firmware so out of date that I need to
upgrade it past a version at which it
wipes the key off of the hardware due to
some security vulnerability that the
firmware update is patching so you know
there basically there are things that
can go wrong if you're not staying on
top of the health of your key set you
know this is one of the trade-offs where
multi-sig is more complex it requires a
bit more touch points but if you're
staying on top of it you end up with a
more robust distributed setup but it
certainly requires more work than just
putting 12 words on a metal plate and
burying it in the ground for 30 years
yep I guess I have another question for
you regarding the difference between
multi-sig and Shamir as described by
Slip39 but before that let me play
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OG I hope you like the pump it loomed
our girls oh you're muted sorry yeah I
can't say I'm familiar with them but
that's very professional oh it's an old
meme you should look at a pump it loomed
art it's pretty insane basically someone
after I posted this someone accused me
of promoting prostitution and I told
them that I apologize the next time I'm
gonna get real prostitutes but anyway
where was I getting yeah slip 39 versus
multi-sig how would you describe the
difference and why should anyone still
use multi-sig yeah I mean you know I
think Shamir's sacred secret sharing can
make sense for backups it's not
something that I think you would want to
use in an ongoing basis and we do have a
lengthy blog post I think from 2019 or
2020 where we compare and contrast some
of the issues with secret sharing and
one difference is that with Shamir
secret sharing you basically end up
having to reconstitute all the keys in a
single location so you know you it
really it is designed for basically
single signature setups we're not a big
fan of single signature setups or
whenever you have a threshold of signing
keys in one geographic location or on
one device or whatever just because that
means you know if something has gone
wrong there it's a potential
catastrophic loss you also don't have
auditability in terms of you know let's
say let's say you had a Shamir secret
sharing scheme and backup and and then
one day you wake up and all of your
money is gone you know how do you figure
out what was compromised and with the
Shamir secret sharing this you know
reconstitution is done completely
offline and privately and you have no
way of knowing which shares were
actually used to reconstitute the key so
one of the nice things about multi-sig
is that you know in the event that
something goes wrong you can at least
have some auditability where it's
literally on the blockchain where you
can see you know which keys were used to
sign a given transaction it's also you
know this may change but at least for
the time being it's trickier to modify
in the sense that you know we have this
concept of key rotation in Kasa and
that's basically that you know you're
you're not married to any one of your
keys in your key set you should consider
them somewhat expendable and you know
assume that they could be compromised
something could go wrong but if
something does go wrong it's quite
simple in our app to just tap on that
key and mark it as compromised and buy
another hardware device off the shelf
and we'll walk you through you're
rotating your funds over basically
swapping out that key you know if you
want to change one of your shards and
the Shamir secrets sharing setup
are you or you want to you know change
the sort of M of N like the threshold
and how distributed is and you
basically have to start all over from
the beginning and you know change out
all of those pieces of the backup
that's just a few things off the top of
my head but you know basically it's I
think it's a bit more rigid whereas
multi-sigs a bit more flexible when you
said that the public information
displayed on the blockchain can change
you referred to tap root multi-sigs
right well really any any type of
multi-sig that you're doing on the
blockchain you know all of all of those
public keys that are being used and all
of the the relevant signatures you can
see you know which public keys they
correspond to okay now let's get into
before we get to Bitcoin maximalism
let's get into your views on metal
plates that you publish I guess every
year you look into new products you also
do benchmarks with hardware wallets
which I think are interesting and they
remind me of the computer magazines I
used to buy back in the day to see tests
and benchmarks and all sorts of
parameters that I can compare except
that you take them to some extreme
levels and you even smash even try all
sorts of situations that maybe are not
realistic but can happen maybe one in
ten million cases so what inspires you
to pursue that methodology and also why
did you give crypto still a bad review
because you did not break it you just
bent it
okay so well for one you know because I
get questions from people saying what's
the best metal backup and I needed to be
able to you know quantitatively be able
to defend I think my assertions and also
you know at the time when I started
doing it I really didn't know I just
wanted to you know be adversarial and
try to figure out you know exactly what
level of stress is required to cause
these things to fail so the the takeaway
from I think I've tested like 70 or 75
devices at this point and the table
takeaway is to keep it simple and by
keep it simple I basically mean like the
less parts there are involved the less
potential points of failure there are so
my experience has been that the the best
and most robust forms of backups are the
ones that are literally just one big
hunk of metal and then even going
further than that there's a question of
how do you actually inscribe the data
onto the metal whether it's etching
hammering you know stamping or doing a
simple dot in my experience the best was
actually acid etching but I only ever
found one kit that did that of course
you can always do it yourself if you're
able to get like some wax and a 9-volt
battery and some saline solution and
electrodes and stuff but other than that
the best format and really easiest
format seems to be the simple straight
punch and just putting a divot into a
grid somewhere the the short version of
the problems that I had with the
crypto steel and really was this tile
little yeah so I will say I like the
crypto steel capsule more than the
cassette I think where the capsule
succeeds where the cassette tends to
fail in the sense that certain types of
heat application and crushing
application and my tests would deform
the cassette enough that the tiles would
be able to get loose and fall out of it
and then you know you have a big problem
of either you've lost the tiles or even
if the tiles all stayed in place you you
find yourself faced with a sort of
combinatorial complexity of trying to
figure out how to put them back in the
right order so the the the crypto steel
capsule is better at at keeping you know
all of that data together because of
course it is literally encapsulating it
so even if it gets bent and it's most
likely all of those tiles will stay in
the same place the one thing that I ran
into with it is that you know if it did
get bent you're gonna have to get some
heavy equipment to be able to cut it
back open and preferably delicately
enough not to destroy the tiles that are
inside yeah you are not able in your
test to break this but you're able to
bend it yeah and I think you gave it a
four-star review specifically because
you said that it's like a Schrodinger's
cat situation you're not even to remove
it to figure out if the tiles are still
intact but at the same time it it didn't
break so it was an interesting situation
at the same time you got asked the
question who the hell tries to bend this
mm-hmm yeah so you know why do I do a
it's a 20 ton hydraulic press that I use
and what am I trying to simulate there I
think the most likely type of scenario
would be you know someone where they
have stored it inside of a large
building and then there's a building
collapse whether that's due to fire or
earthquake or flood or whatever now you
know these are extreme situations and
you know many people may not even be
storing their backup in a place that
could be susceptible to that type of
condition but you know this is really me
trying to put the data out there so that
people know you know if they are exposed
to that certain type of stress you know
should they expect to be able to recover
the data okay let's get into
maximalism because this is my favorite
topic of all of them you spend so much
time documenting and writing a long
article about the history of maximalism
you gave credit to the best-known
Romanian Bitcoiner who is Mitch
Pescu and you presented him as one of
the first people to express Bitcoin
only opinions in a very toxic way that
were dismissive of everyone and
everything else and I think you did a
tremendous job congratulations on that
one thanks for someone who doesn't have
maybe two hours to read that entire
blog post could you please make a short
summary of what Bitcoin maximalism is and
the different phases through which it
went yeah it is you know a lengthy like
decade-plus long history but you know
maximalism really started out as a
rejection of people trying to print
their own money with cheap copied
projects you know in the early days
there was Bitcoin and then there was
just altcoins and you know all of the
altcoins for the first few years of
bitcoins existence were literal and
copy/paste clones of the Bitcoin
repository you know just tweaking a few
parameters so that it created a
different network with you know
trivially different attributes I
remember and in the early days a lot of
people were trying to pump alternative
networks that literally the only
difference was the mining algorithm and
they were treating it like somehow you
know the mining algorithm itself would
create value or the people would care
about that but you know in reality no
one really cares what mining algorithm
powers a network other than the miners
themselves you know then you know things
started to get a bit more complicated
when we saw some alternative you know
from scratch code bases come out whether
that was the crypto note stuff and
Monero, Ethereum of course which ended up
becoming the sort of predominant altcoin
and you know we saw more rejection of
sort of kitchen sink trying to solve
everything with a blockchain type of
approach to this stuff and you know it
became more complex because a lot of
these projects really obfuscating
various centralizing factors and
control of their their networks and the
governance process and whatnot I think
there was you remember was it Dash that
had like master nodes or something oh
yeah it had this kind of it was kind of
like a fake form of staking like
there's so many different kinds of
staking out there and staking is not
always the same type of thing I mean
we've even seen though wasn't it like
Richard Heart and his HEX thing he
claimed that you were staking HEX but it
wasn't even staking it was really just
like locking up your money for a long
period of time yes things have gotten a
lot more complicated people are like
overloading terms you know basically
trying to make it sound like they're one
thing when they're really another you
know it's a lot of marketing hype and
it's it can be hard to cut through the
bullshit I think things really came to a
head though during the scaling wars and
I think that's when you know toxic
maximalism really had its time to shine
and that's when I think toxic
maximalism probably makes the most sense
it's when someone is trying to undermine
the Bitcoin network itself from within
trying to make contentious changes and
you're kind of fighting against that and
so you know we saw a whole new group of
people kind of rise up in prominence
during the scaling debates many of them
got worn out after several years of this
stuff and you once things calm down
especially once all of the Bitcoin forks
had really proven themselves not to have
staying power things calmed calm down
for a few years and then I think it got
interesting again around the pandemic
time because you know Bitcoin itself
didn't really have any sort of
existential crisis going on but a lot of
people suddenly found themselves you
know sitting at home with not a lot to do
and a lot a lot of new people came into
Bitcoin at the time and and we had this
kind of kind of like a holdover you know
from the folks who who found toxic
maximalism to be an interesting part of
their lives during the scaling debates
like people kind of going back to that
and and kind of indoctrinating a new set
of people into a lot of the the tenets
around toxic maximalism and so it got
interesting because a lot of those
newcomers they ended up they end up kind
of absorbing the memetics of toxic
maximalism without necessarily knowing
all of the details and history around
like you know where those things came
from so that itself got its own kind of
viral effect and it's been interesting
to see how a lot of those talk talking
points have been amplified and reiterated
and sometimes slightly been like dumbed
down over the years to the point where
you know it can be frustrating sometimes
for the folks who have been around for a
long time to try to interact with the
newcomers. Yeah I like to joke sometimes
that we want mass adoption but we don't
want to deal with the masses it's a
paradox I guess but I got to play another
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I like those girls. Anyway on the topic
of maximalism what I want to say is that
you're right about this. There seems to
be this rising trend of maximalism
becoming a lifestyle and it's not just
the monetary affinity itself it's also
the merchandise. It's the products that
you buy to signal to the others that
you're part of the group and I did
notice that there are some products that
get endorsed and promoted as part of
that... I wanted to call it a cult but I
don't want to... part of that group but
it seems to be very American to some
extent. We Europeans are much more
reasonable but Americans they read the
Bitcoin standard and it seems like they
find a new purpose in life and they
they're like yeah this is my new
identity this is what I want to do now.
Yeah it's interesting I haven't tried to
do a sort of demographic breakdown but
there are also we're seeing other types
of culture kind of seep into it and it
may be more American. I've certainly seen
more sort of like American conservative
values coming up you know whether that's
you know various like Christian morality
stuff or you know you could call it like
right-wing conservative politics. That's
really tricky though because a lot of
people you paint me as a right-winger
but I'm an you know an avid anarcho
capitalist like you know I'm not a
winger of any kind. But that's a true right-winger
because left means more state intervention
right means no state intervention so you
are true right-winger. In a sense
though right but they always mean
Republican at least in America when you
get called a right-winger it always
means you're like a Trump supporter or
whatever which is you know it's
ridiculous but you know that's something
that I think American libertarians have
had to deal with for many years but yeah
I mean the you know the maximalism thing
that's you know it was like a 30 page
article I ended up writing because it is
so complicated and it really is it's not
a technical thing it is it's more of a
sociological phenomenon and I think that
you know when you unwind it it does make
sense of how we got to where we are
today and and I think you just have to
ask yourself the question of you know do
you want to put yourself in that
ideological camp or are you more
open-minded and so I think I've always
been more open-minded I'm a
technologist first I'm interested in
using whatever the tools are that I
think can best empower me and other
people and I get plenty of flack from
you know maximalists or otherwise in the
community whenever I mention anything
other than Bitcoin because I think that
that particular tool might actually be
best for some other use case. So many
people made fun of you for that running
grin tweet years ago like they still use
it as a way to prove that okay this guy
failed so much he had such a bad idea at
the time to run this client but just for
the record I can make fun all day of
these people but I agree with about 90%
of what they're saying and I also
believe that Ethereum is a scam because
of its launch and because of its
incentives and the way that is
centralized and uses this political game
to appear that it's decentralized to
have good PR nobody blamed it for
increasing the prices of video cards for
gamers. Gamers were blaming Bitcoin
actually which was stupid because nobody
minds with GPUs anymore but I can
understand that there are some exchanges
that do stuff and there are some
business people that do stuff with what
used to be colored coins and
counterparty. Initially Ethereum started
as a Bitcoin 2.0 proposal and a lot of
people don't remember that that in 2014
2015 there was this idea that we should
do much more on the blockchain we should
create assets that get traded in a
decentralized way just like you trade
Bitcoin and Ethereum is an
implementation on that idea so initially
it was like an extension of what Bitcoin
is doing. I can agree that it had a
72 million ETH pre-mine and it's kind
of rigged in terms of economics but
people find it useful for whatever
putting NFTs on it for fun stuff that
you can do on Bitcoin technically but
you get very much frowned upon if you do
it on Bitcoin just like you did your
wizard. Yeah and I mean that's what I
think we should expect you know this is
a space of permissionless innovation and
people are going to have demands for
functionality that probably shouldn't be
on Bitcoin and that's okay so you know
if you don't want that stuff on Bitcoin
it seems kind of silly to be yelling at
people for doing it on other networks
There was a fun moment in 2021 when
Counterparty made a comeback and Rare
Pepe's were all the rage because everyone
was searching for the historic NFTs and
they found Rare Pepe and Spells of
Genesis which are some of the oldest and
it was interesting to see that people
were once again creating Counterparty
NFTs and the people who have been doing
this for years were getting attention
once again and people were like you
should not do this on Bitcoin and then
okay but you want me to do it on a
shitcoin? No that's evil you're giving
the shitcoin volume and you're giving it
use cases don't touch it. Okay but you
supposed to do this? And they don't have
an answer for this. They say okay wait
for RGB and I can agree that RGB is
promising but it's not ready yet. Same
for taproot assets formerly Taro. I'm
not sure if there is a solution for this
but we have to agree that it's
permissionless tech so as you proved
with your ordinal inscription on the
wizard you can use Bitcoin for whatever
you want as long as you pay the fee and
we have I guess ideologically to keep it
at that. Yep Bitcoin is for enemies so
support your enemies. Are you the enemy
Jameson? I try not to be but I think it's
pretty much inevitable whenever
you have a large enough number of people
paying attention to you someone will
find reasons to declare you to be an
enemy. Yeah unfortunately you just told
me that you have to go. I made a mistake.
I didn't distinguish between EST and ET.
They are kind of the same to me but it
Fiat time zones. Exactly so you have to
go. So thank you very much Jameson for
participating this interview. I feel
sorry for the people in the chat who ask
questions and I did not pay attention to
them but maybe we can do another
interview some other time I guess. Maybe
less than five years from now. Yes let's
do that not in five years. So thank you
once again and I'll see you in another
episode. I'll see you in Riga I hope. I'll
be in Europe I won't make it to Riga
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