pull up so um any second but we can get started just explaining what we're going to be talking
about today. Let's see so okay we are talking about myths about bitcoin
so when we hold on one second
all right I did the rookie mistake where I could hear myself like three times okay
so when we talk about bitcoin myths we're talking about the things that people see in the news on
twitter all over the place and you think like you know what I think that this seems like it's
probably legit it comes from a legitimate news source or somebody that I trust and we're
thinking that these stories that people are telling us are accurate and oftentimes the stories are
really really negative and so as somebody who hears about bitcoin but maybe doesn't understand
it we think yeah bitcoin is xyz and that xyz is normally not like amazing and the best thing ever
and so what we want to do today is talk about the myths that we hear that we can clearly debunk
because they are not true and if you're a new listener you can hear how we're explaining some
of these so that when you hear these stories in the news you're able to say hey wait a minute
let me back up and rethink this is accurate or not so I'm Jessica Lavec I'm the executive director
for c4 and we're really excited to have our cvp committee members here today and special guest
Jameson Lopp so let's start just by doing intros um Dirk do you want to start as you are our
committee chair yeah I'm Dirk Anderson I'm the as you said the committee chair for the cvp committee
um I also sit on the css ccss committee um with Jameson um and um I am the chief technology officer
at salt lending which is a crypto-backed uh lending company
uh very cool
very cool all right yeah I'm Jameson Lopp cto co-founder of casa we're a bitcoin security
service we basically help people help themselves be their own banks and I've been full-time in
bitcoin for eight years now uh really focusing on self-custody that entire time just in different
ways and I also am on the ccss advisory board
very cool and thank you for joining another committee Jameson since you already joined
the ccss one so we appreciate you hopping over to this one today um Rodney
uh everyone my name is Rodney McInnis I am uh COO and AML compliance ninja at Outlier Solutions
um we are AML compliance professionals within Canada um and professional outcasts because we
speak bitcoin to regulators and we speak regulation to bitcoiners so nobody's our friend
oh Rodney I just want to give you a big hug what do you say
I say that with a lot of sarcasm um there's there's a tremendous support from both sides
yeah I'm Hunter Albright I'm an educator and advisor in the bitcoin and crypto space as
Dirk had indicated I have a traditional sort of background from traditional finance and payments
and I had served on the MasterCard Europe board of directors when I was living in Europe uh and
today I'm an educator and advisor for companies in the blockchain and crypto space and a proud
member of the committee awesome Anita yeah hello I think I'm the most recent member of the CBP
I'm honored to be here and um I'm a bitcoin educator I'm the founder of bitcoin for fairness
uh and I'm at the moment in Zimbabwe so I'm traveling African countries trying to foster
grassroots adoption and education about bitcoin and I also wrote a book about bitcoin and have a podcast
yeah your book's behind me all right Janine
hi my name is Janine and I'm also on committee I uh write a newsletter called this month in bitcoin
privacy and I am uh also on the board of opensats which um among other non-profits uh helps raise
money to support bitcoin development and most recently the how to not legal defense fund
awesome so we have a great group here thank you all for taking the time to join today
volunteering with us so that we can teach other people what we know about bitcoin
so I'd like to start by talking about a comment that was put on the bitcoin myth busters one
live stream so a couple weeks ago we met we did this we talked about some other myths that
happened and or that are occurring that people are wondering about and there was somebody who
posted a comment afterwards about what is crypto backed by um and it's talking about many claim
that crypto is a commodity instead of a security some even joke that it is a commodity because
crypto is backed by an expensive electric bill so we wanted to answer this person William Homes
question before we um move into the other myths so um Dirk do you want to start well I was actually
gonna let Jameson start because I thought he had a good point when we were discussing this beforehand
fair enough yeah so you know what is bitcoin backed by well um you know there's a number
of different angles you can take or approaches or perspectives of you know why does bitcoin work or
why does it have value obviously there's uh cryptography game theory so on and so forth
but I think you know what this person is really asking is you know is there an intrinsic value
to it that's the the common thing that people talk about of you know oh for most of human
civilization money was backed by gold or some other like physical precious commodity you know
it wasn't until more recently in history that we had fiat which was just you know money created by
decree of some authority so the way that I've looked at it for quite a while is that you know
what we're talking about here is not a monetary system that is issued controlled manipulated
by any authority rather it is a voluntary network so the backing while there are many different
technical things that keep the network secure the you know the underlying foundation of all of this
is the humans behind the network and so people who care about bitcoin contribute to the system
and they can do so in a number of different ways you know perhaps they're coders perhaps they're
evangelists perhaps they're running nodes and other parts of the actual technical infrastructure
but at the end of the day the network is backed by the people who care about it and want to see it
continue to operate and succeed and so that's why these networks cannot die until everyone agrees
that they're dead and they're not worth trying to sustain anymore yeah exactly and that's that's why
I wanted Jameson to go and I think you do right that that if that's what it is right I mean the
whether you call it a commodity or a security really has no relevance on how it how it's used
and what it actually is right I mean those are just regulatory terms that get applied to it and
as Rodney mentioned before he started the call they you know they're going to vary from jurisdiction
to jurisdiction as well so it's not even going to be the same thing in in one jurisdiction that is
in the mother because and then part of that is you know with new technology you're always figuring
it out although you know I feel like after a decade you stop calling it new technology but
but maybe not and and so that yeah those the nomenclature of what it is doesn't necessarily
have anything to do with what actually makes it work that's an interesting point when is it
when does it stop being considered new at what point is something no longer
I don't know it's just like yeah when is this something maybe when mass adoption happens or
everybody knows about it I'm not sure um I think almost everybody has heard of bitcoin at this
point I think the actual adoption rate is still probably 10% or lower globally but um one other
metric to look at if you're comparing it to currencies last I checked you know the average
fiat currency only lasts like 20 or 25 years so let's give it another decade or so and like once
once bitcoin has uh survived longer than the average fiat currency then we're really going
that is a fascinating statistic and kind of terrifying I mean I think that the discussion
brings up a couple interesting points one when if you if we if you look back at innovation
there's usually two two key elements about innovation one is how fast the technical
solution gets invented and realized and is possible right and I think we have that has
been proven with bitcoin and it gets proven really quickly uh in many respects with some
technologies but the socializing of it and the adoption and the willingness to trust it
tends to be on a much slower and longer curve than sort of the the feasibility of the technology
and while that curve is accelerating and you can go back and look at sort of the adoption of
technologies over time I think in particular for crypto and for bitcoin it is a harder challenge
for us and for the technology because we're changing business models we're changing representation
as Jameson brought up right in terms of consensus about how does the technology get controlled
but we're also then shifting people's concept of money and so I think there's a lot of things at
play that make it creates natural resistance in people to accept it before they're willing
to adopt and try it and what Anita is doing and many of us in terms of the educational
efforts I think is critical because that is a key first step to letting people consider
a different future than what the status quo is today.
Yeah I think we could maybe take the analogy from the internet I mean when was the internet
not new anymore I mean in 1997 to 2000 the internet was also new for most people and
actually countries like in Africa they were even lagging behind because people here didn't trust
the internet because it's a white technology also and which I in part understand so it's also a
regional difference and I don't know I mean when was the internet for you not new anymore?
That's a good point too like it depends on where we're talking about something right there's
something becomes not a new technology for some people way prior to others right like
cryptographers and people who understand more of the technical side of things many of them
have been like Jameson and Dirk I think you were saying you've been or you know familiar with
bitcoin for a lot longer than someone like me who needed to wait until there was more information
out there and it was explained in a way that someone who's not super technical can understand
and so actually that brings us into our first question which is do you need to be super
technical to be able to use bitcoin and so I think we can continue with this analogy that you had
Anita with the internet and how we've kind of become used to the internet and how we're becoming
used to bitcoin so do we need to be super technical Jameson do you want to start?
Yeah like any technology and the adoption curve that comes with it it's a question of user
experience and so if anyone here was an extremely early adopter of the internet if you use the
internet in the late 80s or early 90s if you were you know a dial-up user and you had to go buy
one of these special modem cards to put into your computer so that you could then you know
get onto a phone line and try to dial into some server in an extremely slow speed you know that
is I think a good analogy if we're looking at you know how hard it is to onboard into new technologies
because generally new technologies they come out and it's just sort of like the proof of concepts
you know the functionality is there but we haven't rough or we haven't smoothed out all the rough
edges to make it easier for the average person and you know what happens is you go through that
adoption curve and the earliest adopters will be the really technical nerdy folks they'll come in
they'll start using it they'll see the value they'll also see the rough edges and some of them will
start dedicating their time and skills and resources to smoothing out the rough edges and I would say
you know that's what I personally have been doing for the past eight years is seeing that the the
promise of being your own bank is a world changing phenomenon but from a practical standpoint we're
not going to change the world unless the average person can actually be their own bank and can be
confident that they can be their own bank because you know we're we're empowering a lot of people
but with that power comes responsibility and the responsibility and the foot guns are what scare
people off so you know I see Bitcoin as still fairly early in the adoption curve but even just
over the past three or four years we've made great advances and especially with people focusing
more on things like retail payments and lightning enabled apps I feel like the user experience
that we're seeing on the second layers especially with lightning stuff a lot more care is being put
into that user experience and making it a lot easier for people to onboard so you know I think
we are getting closer to the level of sort of call it Facebook or Instagram user experience
where the average person can install an app and just you know click a few buttons and get started
that's certainly still true if we're talking about playing around with small amounts of money
you know if it's your if it's your pocket money if it's something that you can afford to lose and
it won't ruin your life then yeah I think that if we are within reach of the average internet
connected person being able to get onboarded and start using Bitcoin I think that there's still
a ways to go if we're talking about making it really easy for people to feel comfortable with
setting up sort of cold storage solution where they have like their life savings and they're
confident enough that nothing will go wrong there but that's that just means that there's
you know there's still a lot of opportunity for us to continue to grow and improve in the space
I think it was interesting with Bitcoin too that yeah that early on it absolutely was all the tech
people right but then we had that bull run in like end of 2017 into 2018 that brought money people
into the game right all of a sudden you had all these like you know finance and money type people
investors and stuff getting involved and I think that that has helped maybe accelerate some of
what Jameson's talking about there right because there is there you know there was there was not
just a need but a demand for you know tools that made it easier and and I think that has maybe
helped in the the last few years with that kind of simplification of adoption
Anita didn't you recently like aren't you seeing payments happening at
grocery stores like didn't you recently I feel like you tweeted something or someone was
actually you can use Bitcoin now yeah that's right so from my perspective here on the ground
I see that wallet of wallets that are like lightning wallets for instance wallet of satoshi I
mean okay it's a custodial lightning wallet but still it's very easy to onboard people even people
who have no clue about Bitcoin but I think the most important thing is to tell them how they can
back up their at least custodial lightning and what you're referring to is two days ago pick and
pay which is one of the biggest supermarket chains in South Africa has started to accept Bitcoin
payments lightning payments and it's that way great in that sense great because they have one
supermarket right next to Bitcoin Akasi the township where the surf coaches get paid in
in Bitcoin with lightning and they have onboarded 10 of the 17 small informal shops inside of the
township to accept Bitcoin but up until now these shop owners had to exchange either to
South African-run or to buy a pit refill voucher to be able to go to the supermarket to restock
their goods and now they don't have to do that anymore and they just can go to pick and pay to
get their things and their bread and their groceries and I think that's a huge step also for
Bitcoin being a money and I think this earning and spending aspect is very very important for
adoption even more in these countries where people don't have money that they can save
so the speculation effect or possibility is not that one that drives adoption here I think it
will be earning and and paying with Bitcoin.
Yeah and I mean that's really cool you said 10 out of 17 have adopted it the stores.
Yes.
I mean it's it's amazing to see that and it's it's the children it's the children also from
the township they have they get smartphones lent out where they have their wallet of satoshi
and they also when they go to school and they do the surfing they here and there get some
satoshis and they then also go to the shops and to pick and pay to buy a soft drink or things like
that so it's really children can do it. Yeah that's cool and actually this brings up another myth
that we often hear which is that in order to use Bitcoin you have to have an entire Bitcoin and
you sort of started touching on this Anita but Janine do you want to talk a little bit about
Bitcoin in terms of how you actually use it if you don't have do you have to start with a whole
Bitcoin can you start with less Anita you brought it up satoshis but what is the difference and how
do we like what is the divisibility in Bitcoin when we're using it as a currency.
Yeah you can definitely start with less than a Bitcoin I don't know if that's still a common
misconception it might be but it definitely was still a few years ago where people thought that
they had to get a whole Bitcoin and so part of the myth of Bitcoin is too expensive has to do with
the fact that people assume they had to get a whole Bitcoin in order to use it and you can
obviously get less than that because one Bitcoin is made of satoshis and there's a hundred million
satoshis in each Bitcoin and especially if you use something like the lightning network then you can
make it's it's very feasible to do very small payments in Bitcoin using that so that makes it
even easier for people especially if they live in countries where the value of their national
currency is a lot lower than the dollar or the euro or what have you then that makes it also easier
for them to do commerce with smaller units than what many of us here would be using so yeah that
is a common myth that Bitcoin is too expensive to use a part of that is also to do with fees and
that could be a whole other discussion of why there's a myth about Bitcoin having high fees
and a lot of that has to do with certain wallets having very poor fee management
because they have very poor coin management and I mean a related myth to that is that
people don't understand really where fees come from they think fees are just kind of arbitrary
or it's purely based on for example the it's a combination of congestion in the network and
it's also mostly to do with how much data you're trying to send so if your transaction sizes are
huge because your wallet doesn't know how to construct transactions properly then your
transaction size will be larger than normal and so you will have to pay a higher fee it all has
to do with the amount of data you're trying to send because the Bitcoin prices that directly
because you obviously there's an incentive to avoid creating unnecessarily large transactions
in terms of the data size because you know we're all all of the nodes on the Bitcoin network have
to store this in the blockchain and over time if everybody is creating transactions that are too
large in terms of the data size then that means everybody has to be storing more and more data
and so there's a cost to not managing that well.
I also think we should talk about what is the difference between Bitcoin and Lightning when we
talk about Bitcoin and then we're talking about Lightning and micro payments what does that mean
can somebody jump in and explain that before we move on and keep talking about the divisibility?
We can but it is also part of the scalability myth that we have on the list to talk about later.
Oh okay noted. Derek thank you all right then stay tuned all right so did anyone else want to say
anything about the divisibility part before we move on to the next myth?
The the only thing I want to add is I was shocked by the amount of people that had this
misconception. We bought our business partner a shirt that says you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin
I believe it was an Andreas a shirt from Andreas's site and he wore it around to Bitcoin meetups
when you know around kind of 2018 when people started pouring in and he was shocked by the
amount of people that came up with Bitcoin and he was shocked by the amount of people that came up
to him and started asking him questions and he also had the additional misconception of
thinking he didn't know much about Bitcoin mainly because he hangs around folks who have been in
around the space for quite some time of you know when he kind of interacted with the general
population he was kind of surprised with with how much he actually knew but yeah I was I was pretty
shocked by the amount of people that thought that you had to have a whole Bitcoin in order to
have a whole Bitcoin in order to to do anything related to Bitcoin so. That is such an interesting
point like the idea of it's like a myth that people don't some of us I'm probably included in
this feel like we're phonies and don't know as much as we do because we spend time around people
that know so much more and so yeah that's uh I haven't thought about that really I know you and
I have talked before about this a little bit Rodney but yeah there is that myth that like
okay I'm talking to Jameson and Jameson knows everything about Bitcoin so I don't know anything
and it's like okay that's not necessarily true obviously I don't know as much as Jameson but
like there's still I do still have some information and so if I do wear my you can only a fraction of
a Bitcoin t-shirt and somebody comes up to me it's not like I'm gonna be like um I don't I you know
I'll be able to explain what the divisibility is and what sats are and that kind of a thing so I
feel like that's a good message for anybody who's listening to and wants to be able to um feel more
confident talking about it like if you do know that you know some of the facts even if you don't
know everything about it and somebody asks you a question you can always say what you know and then
refer them to additional resources of people who do know you know more than maybe you do
yeah and I think that that's totally true too the the divisibility the the value of a sat versus
the value of a Bitcoin goes back to what Jameson was talking about earlier too right that if you
want to learn you can play with almost no money right you can uh and and yeah and particularly
you get yourself uh you know a decent lightning wallet and you can play with yeah just you know
you can learn how it works without having to understand the cryptography without having
to understand all of these things fundamentally you can learn how to use it and how it works
functionally um uh with variable money and that's that's going to be one of the best ways for the
community to move forward is this practical experience of low risk transactions you can
play around send stuff to friends send stuff to family members send stuff around the world see how
long it takes try to work to understand it uh and I do want to sort of make a shameless plug for c4
on the back of Jessica what you were saying I think the for me the the community is fantastic
so and nobody should be afraid to ask somebody because I would say that the community are all
advocates and enthusiasts of the applications and the technology and very willing to share
information to go down rabbit holes with questions that are interesting and and c4 is a great source
for both that community as well as the resources uh from videos to training books and then if you
want to get certified the course is but a way to build up your knowledge to feel more confident
but just to engage and I think along with that is the uh the comfort to say I don't know it's it's
okay to say I'm not sure this is you know as we were discussing before you know a new technology
um and so it's okay to say I don't know and and go look for the like and I mean you can go look
for the answer together with that person depending on the scenario but um this is this is going to be
better than than guessing to be like oh yeah there's there's a hundred thousand satoshi in
every bitcoin then you probably should have verified that response yeah and and I would
argue that the greatest challenge for the community right it is complex technology and there are
experts like Dirk and Jameson and and others that really know the cryptography and all the network
technologies as required but as a community our hardest challenge is how do we simplify it
to really make it easy and for people to come on board and use because the populations that
Anita are working with people that are outside of the developed countries are where in many
respects in my opinion we can make the biggest difference from a numbers of people and changing
people's lives and then that will start to trickle into the more developed countries
uh as they sort of the technology gets proven out and the opportunity to adopt it in
sort of replace standardized payment systems as an example becomes more real
May I add something too please um so it's also a plug but for c4 and bitcoin for fairness
actually we made together a bitcoin flyer uh she also helped um where the idea behind it
is to have a very cheap to produce flyer it's just one page um you can copy it in a copy shop
and then uh bring it to bitcoin meetups so that people I have the experience here people come
they listen to my talk they see my slides I tell them this is the website from Jameson he has a
lot of information these are youtube videos but people here they don't have that internet access
to watch youtube videos for instance so I thought it would be a great idea just to have a handout
for them so they can go home with a small flyer where we lay out the basics of bitcoin how it's
not a scam because most people here believe it's a scam and we also put on how to install for
instance the blue wallet and like on-chain wallet for savings and and the lightning wallet um for
spendings and micro payments and that you can find on the bitcoin for fairness website
yeah I think that learning by doing is I mean that is a philosophy in teaching and learning
that if you are engaged and you're actually doing something you're experiencing it you're more
likely to remember it and to really understand it and I do think asking somebody you know either
sending even some money back and forth send bitcoin to yourself from yourself to practice
and since you can do it with a really small amount and the transaction fees are are very minimal
you can practice back and forth or like in I think it was 2017 I asked Jeanine to help me and we set
up a wallet and went back and forth and it's a hardware wallet for the first time and we just
practiced from it and it wasn't practice like her saying send me your private keys it was her just
walking me through everything and having me um feel more comfortable with using it and it feels
challenging I think at first but it's challenging anytime you do something first if you've never
been into a grocery store before and you walk in and you're expected to make a payment you don't
know what to do if you've never seen your parents or guardian model this purchase before so um I
think saying I don't know and accepting that you might feel kind of silly the first time you do
something is the key to becoming comfortable doing it and one of the things we often hear
is even if we're talking about a small amount or a large amount is that it's not secure right so
there's this fear that even if it's you know five dollars five dollars is five dollars you know a
dollar is a dollar this is still money we're talking about and so no matter what the amount
is we want to make sure that if we work hard for our money which I assume most people do that you
then are sure that you're not going to lose it and it's not going to disappear overnight and so
one of the other myths that we hear about is that there are security issues and people are losing
their bitcoin and therefore the bitcoin network isn't safe and this is a myth and Dirk could you
jump in and start explaining why this is a myth that the bitcoin network isn't secure yeah sure
and um and I do want to be clear right that there uh that there there are risks right and you need
to be careful but the the the myth that bitcoin is somehow inherently insecure um is is the myth
right the cryptography behind it the the algorithms and the methodology with which it's applied um
you know have spent been proven out over the last 12 years right um and uh and they are and it
utilizes um there's there was nothing like inherently new in the components that make up
bitcoin it was the way they were put together and used uh that that was new and innovative but there
was nothing really new in the actual like mathematical technologies behind it when we
hear about all of these you know thefts and and compromises and stuff like that it's really no
different than somebody hacking a banking website or something right the the um uh yeah sure if if
if you're utilizing some sort of and this is why you know Jameson will get very detailed in the um
you know uh managing your own keys and your own wallets and being your own bank but if you're
utilizing exchanges where you're trading uh you know one crypto for another or just buying your
crypto and then it sits uh you know sits on that exchange for a little bit or you're doing any sort
of centralized um uh sort of um to a product including like uh salt right you know what we
do right because you have in order for us to give you a loan we have to hold the collateral and so
so there's risk that comes with any of these sorts of things and if the security around those
platforms is not good your crypto can get stolen right um but it's the same whereas if you know if
the security around uh your bank is not good somebody can hack your bank and steal your dollars
as well it's not the bitcoin that's actually being compromised it's the website excuse me the website
or the database in just common ways right i mean the the majority of these compromises still today
come from uh phishing where people get access to keys they shouldn't have access to or the ability
to this is a common one the ability to access some sort of communication system where they change
the wallet address that the money is being sent to and now it's just being sent to the wrong place
but there's nothing inherently insecure about the the bitcoin network itself that's compromised in
these um and um jameson and i meant both mentioned earlier that we sit on the ccss which is the
cryptocurrency security standards um uh and uh committee and the goal of that is actually to help
design um a standard for security controls around systems and platforms that are dealing with uh with
cryptocurrencies um so that these sorts of things don't happen because the other place that we see
a lot of issues right is if you just have a lack of internal operating controls in a business right
keys can get lost and then and if you don't have good recovery processes for that the bitcoin's
just gone it's there but it's gone um or you know somebody internally can run off with all of it
uh you know if you don't have good operating controls the same way that they're going to run
off with all of the cash from a bank or any other sort of business so i'll pause there in case
jameson or anybody else wants to kind of jump in on that well i think uh anyone who asks that
question themselves has already revealed that they don't understand security because bitcoin
is not secure i mean nothing is secure you know security is always a question of uh
accessibility and convenience uh versus risk and so like the only thing that is perfectly secure
is something that is also unusable so you know i can tell people how to perfectly secure their bitcoin
by destroying their private keys in one way or another uh that way no one will be able to you
know compromise those keys including yourself you know the reason security is so important is
the reason security is is a very very difficult problem and why uh you know it's it's a good field
to be in regardless of the economic environment is because what we're trying to do is provide a way
for the people we want to be able to access sensitive things to be able to do that but
simultaneously you know prevent everyone we don't want access in those systems from doing it so it's
a uh fine distinction that i think not many people really appreciate because not many people go around
thinking adversarially or thinking from a security mindset so um you know bitcoin as a system is
secure but that's because it's anti-fragile because the the infrastructure of the system
in many different ways is very very distributed so there's no single point of failure that can
be attacked to take down the whole system of course you can you can attack many different
parts of the system and you destroy or degrade pieces of it you can you can certainly cause
havoc but when it comes to you know being secure against actually having you know your funds
compromised lost stolen whatever you know that comes down to each individual entity and whether
or not they're following the best practices and that can be challenging to do as i said
depending on how much value you're trying to secure the more value is is that is at stake
the more resources attackers are going to expend trying to get at that value and therefore the more
diligence you need to put into the security system that you want to erect around those private keys
yeah now that's a great point and a great perspective right i you know i was thinking
of it just from the standpoint of the news stories that people see about you know this
much bitcoin was stolen or this much bitcoin was lost or you know but but that's a great point
right i mean all security is really risk management right and it's just the cost
to try and compromise something versus the value you're going to get for it
and i was just thinking is that there are dozens and dozens of movies out there about bank height
and theft in this but yet there's this conception that banking is the safest place to keep your
money and that if you're using bitcoin that there's this great chance of it being lost but if you put
it in a bank that there's no chance of it being lost let's leave the insurance side out of it but
there is not this perfect system or i don't know maybe i'm just gullible and believe all these you
know armored heist stories but i do know that they do sometimes happen but so what about this
conception that we should be keeping our money in a bank because that is the best way to secure
it there are tons of people that believe this um i'll call out my mom on this she is like what are
you doing um don't you know that i raised you to have a checkbook and i'm like what what's a
checkbook um i think it's one of those in years but so there's like these rules set in place so
um yeah jameson right so i think an easy way kind of covering the whole security thing including
you know whether you use a custodian is that anything that can be owned can be stolen
anything that can be owned can be lost and if you look at the entirety of uh classes of attack
and loss vectors uh we'll focus on private keys uh here but every attack and loss vector that can
every attack and loss vector that can happen under a self-custody model can also happen under a
third-party custody model additionally you have a new class of attacks under the third-party custody
model that involve you know insider attacks of any number of employees at that custodian
or um you know any number of outsiders who may somehow find uh vulnerability and be able to get
themselves inside uh the black box of of whatever that custodian is so it's difficult to reason
about all of these specific things that could go wrong within a custodian because you don't know
what practices they're actually following and this i mean this is why we have c4 this is why we have
standards and why we have rolled out the auditor program is to try to bring some transparency
to these black boxes even then you know it's not perfect um but it's certainly i think a lot better
than what you're going to be able to get with your traditional financial institutions um you know
compliance is a thing uh best practice is a thing like there's all of these like
you know sock uh related uh compliance standards that that your traditional institutions can
try to achieve though you know i would say a lot of it is really just around auditing uh and making
sure that if something does go wrong you can figure out what went wrong i think it's even more
challenging in uh private key management because it's it's harder to recover from mistakes you know
within the banking system not all of the time but much of the time if money is moved
and it wasn't supposed to there's a way to try to claw that money back so and especially if you
catch it quickly um and even if you don't you know the things that your your parents are probably
used to is that one positive aspect you could argue that the banking system provides is the
socialization of losses so they're kind of providing a sort of insurance against certain
types of losses where you can screw up and lose your money but you get it back and of course this
isn't free uh we're all paying the costs of this we're paying costs in in terms of fees and
bureaucracy and and all of the the regulations that go along with that these are all hidden costs
um then i pros and cons of that versus uh you know bitcoin related stuff is you you generally
end up paying those costs more transparently and upfront with whatever you're doing you know
with whatever you're doing so um it's security versus convenience and unfortunately i think
the default is still today and probably will for the foreseeable future be that people come in
to a custodian and never leave probably because they don't know they have the option or because
they are simply too scared to start to uh climb that mountain of knowledge that is necessary
to to feel comfortable withdrawing to self-custody
and i think we have 200 years on top of that of um you know marketing and advertising
creating this you know association with brand and brand loyalty right as well right so i mean
there are chevy people and there are ford people and there are coke people and there are pepsi
people and there are chase people and there are wells fargo people and there you know they we
have this this notion just inherently that that you know this is just how it's done right and
this is kind of one of the challenges with some with new technology it's the opposite side of
the challenge with the new technology we were talking about earlier too right that people are
just like they're inherently resistant to change and this is how you do it and your mom is like
writing checks because she learned to write checks and that's just how you do it right
and so i think there is just kind of that that you know until you really understand the benefits
of being your own bank the idea that i can send money to somebody on the other side of the world
and they'll have it 10 minutes from now not three days from now not after paying exorbitant a ch
fees not after the bank just sitting on my money for an extra few days so that they can make a
little more interest off of it you know the you know until you understand some of the benefits
and the value of it it's easier just to keep doing what you've always done sorry anita i think you
were going to say something there as well yeah i just wanted to add to the notion of banks can
be trusted more than bitcoin or technology can so if you say to someone here in zimbabwe
um do you trust your bank they laugh at you because no most african people do not trust their banks
because either the bureaucracy is high or they don't have access anyhow or the fees are here
interestingly enough much higher than in europe for instance so in south i think south africa is
one of the countries where banking fees are the highest and that is where people have least money
and so i think that's also a reason why why bitcoin here um has such a like fertile ground
for adoption because people don't trust banks and they are actually happy to use something else
with which they really can pay borderless and and cheap and um that's just an add-on to the thing
that we have in in our heads in the so-called western world that banks can be trusted or are
more secure yeah that's not the case here i think like to that point one of the interesting things
i hear quite often and i'm sure this will probably make uh dirk and Jameson kind of shudder a bit
uh but is is uh is bank level encryption um which i like i it's not really a thing um it's just a
term that gets thrown around a lot like it's it's ultra secure and super safe and and i think we've
kind of touched on the point that that's not a thing um it's just the balance of comfort versus
potential loss um and usability so it's it's one of the ones that i hear quite often um bank level
security bank level encryption that just people think is like this you know upper echelon of
security that is the pinnacle of achievement once you've gotten that um but if you're doing some
sort of stock to audit or accounting audit or anything like that you're only good like it's
only as good as the auditor and and if anybody's been paying attention to kind of um auditor
penalties recently uh they're not super great at it so you know yeah there's big accounting firms
that will charge you an arm and a leg to check a box for you but that's not really adding value
where you know something like the ccss ccss as an example um shows that there's you know a better
level of understanding at least rather than um you know juniors that kind of refresh out of school
looking through your documentation is bank level encryption like military grade encryption
bonds exactly yeah i want to build on the concept rodney brought it up and dirt could mention
earlier about risk management and you know from from my perspective you know this is all about
the responsibility that any one of us wants to take on regarding risk management and for many
for decades right we've delegated that risk management to brands that we've trusted
uh or we believed were trustworthy and now we have opportunities to take not delegate and say we want
to take control of it and one of the things that i think is interesting with bitcoin and
cryptocurrencies right is the multi-key signature opportunity that we can do multi-sig ourselves
we can do multi-sig with a group of people we can do multi-sig across organizations as a way
of taking control of that risk management at different levels in different forms which is
a real change in terms of the solution compared to what we've been used to and creates the
opportunity to migrate the trust from brands and from organizations to processes which we then can
choose how much we participate in and i can tell at this point we're going to have to have a third
one of these jessica because we're we've barely bent at our list of myths yeah i know i was
noticing that too i think that at our next live stream which is on december 1st what we'll do is
tie in more myths because our plan for that live stream is to talk about this idea that bitcoin is
dead and anita how many times did you say there was like some article or something didn't you say
earlier or somebody did that you saw it was like put in the news as bitcoin is dead a certain number
of times is that you yeah 464 times there's a website like bitcoin obituaries and they are
collecting um newspaper headlines and articles that are saying bitcoin is dead the last uh was
from october 19 and the title is people still in crypto are like kamikaze yeah i mean i think it's
easy to jump into this um what's it called it's like this drama like people want to latch on to
something that's like exciting i can't think of the word right now but it's like oh it's dead
like here's a news flash right and so it keeps happening over and over again because newspapers
and news sources want to sell articles and it's the headlines that make it seem like this is this
thrilling new thing but it's funny if it's been said that many times you would think that it
wasn't that exciting anymore for me when i see something about it i'm like oh god here we go
again i just roll my eyes but i'm sure you know eight years ago when i saw it in i'm trying to
do math yeah when i would see it i would just be like okay like the people that i know that are
working on this like i hope that they know what they're doing which is probably what people say
to me now um so it just does take um i feel like that analytical side and being able to look what
they're saying in the article and recognize that volatility does not mean that it's not useful
um and sort of look at the underpinnings more and so a couple of the topics that we didn't get to
today that we wanted to talk about was the volatility of it and how volatility means it's
not as useful we wanted to talk about how bitcoin isn't being used as a currency which Anita you
touched on a little bit but i do want to talk more about that later and also the scalability
issue and how bitcoin is scaling but there's this myth that it isn't the idea that bitcoin is only
good for individuals sending it one person back and not for companies and then the the big kahuna
that bitcoin is dead and so we will follow up on december 1st with these myths if there are other
things you've heard about bitcoin that you're like is that true or isn't it put it either in
the comments to this video or twitter linkedin any of our posts and we'll try to address that
then as well derrick did you want to say anything else about this
um okay well any closing remarks from anyone
i'd just like to thank Jameson again for uh for joining us today uh and uh as always i appreciate
his participation and and and like you right when i chat you you know with folks like him i feel
like a total pretender as well so um and we have another special guest at our next live stream
andreas entonopoulos will be talking about the bitcoin is dead myth with us so um stick around
for that and yes Jameson thank you for volunteering um for this committee when you're part of another
committee likewise to derrick i think it's says a lot about c4 that we have so many volunteers who
are willing to donate your time because you believe in what it is that we're doing and you see education
as important because i will tell you that not everyone does see education as important it blows
my mind maybe that's just because i'm an educator at heart but it is really the most important piece
to this puzzle in terms of everyone starting to learn about it and to be able to use it as making
it seem accessible so thank you all for joining really appreciate it and we'll see you on december
first for our next live stream um thank you very good thanks everybody