The majority of what I'm trying to protect against
is not actually the government.
It's corporate surveillance.
This gets a bit more paranoid,
but I do think that people should probably
be running VPNs all of the time.
If you want real freedom of speech online,
then preferably you're gonna be anonymous.
Do you have any other specific tips
when it comes to traveling abroad?
The problem from the privacy standpoint
is that if you're using air travel, you're screwed.
And one thing that I'm particularly worried about
is the stuff like the Meta Ray-Ban glasses,
real-time facial recognition.
I don't really know of any countermeasures to that.
You have great power that is bestowed upon you
when you're going into self-custody
because the total design space
of how you can architect a self-custody wallet is massive,
but once again, the coin doesn't care.
Today we're here in Lugano, Switzerland
with the man, the myth, the legend, Jameson Lopp.
Thank you very much, Jameson.
Great to be here.
Jameson is an American cypherpunk.
He's also a Bitcoin advocate, software engineer,
and he's one of the world's leading privacy advocates as well.
In 2017, you became the target of a swatting attack
and that kind of kicked off your journey
into the privacy world.
I've heard you spend thousands of dollars
in private investigators to make sure
that you were able to basically disappear
and that was kind of an experiment
to push the envelope on what it takes
in the modern world to achieve privacy.
First of all, I want to personally thank you for that.
I think it's such a great thing to do
for every one of us who takes privacy seriously.
And I think it would be nice
to start this conversation talking about
what are your best tips for privacy
and what did you learn from that experiment?
Yeah, I mean, most of the actual financial cost
of my extreme privacy journey was due to legal issues
of trying to understand what is possible
from a legal standpoint to set up to obfuscate
my ownership of any publicly registered property,
to obfuscate my actual residential address.
And unfortunately, a lot of that stuff
is very jurisdiction specific.
And so while I can talk a lot about what is available
in the American tool set,
I really don't know what's available
in a lot of other countries.
And my understanding is that most other countries
do not have the same options for setting up
legal entities like corporations and trusts
that can give you this additional veil
over the true ownership of various things.
But the short version is regardless of where you are,
privacy is about selectively revealing yourself to the world.
So the biggest shift that I had to make
was a lifestyle and mindset shift,
which was just avoid leaking information
whenever possible.
And that included in real life when I'm talking
to neighbors or people around where I live
or they don't know my real name,
they don't know what I actually do.
I have a completely different cover identity
and pseudonym for stuff like that.
And then of course, there's all of the digital privacy stuff
of just trying to avoid leaking information
and to be blunt, it actually involves lying a lot.
And you have to get comfortable with lying a lot.
And you also have to understand
that most of the time it's legal to lie.
Unless you're entering into some sort of legal contract,
you can usually lie about your name and what you do
to any third party that you're interacting with.
And it's, I would say not immoral
if you're doing it to protect yourself
and you're not trying to cover up some criminal
or nefarious activities that you're trying to do.
That's super interesting.
And I think it's really interesting that you mentioned
that most of these especially legal tips
for privacy are jurisdiction-specific.
Here at CitizenX, we talk a lot about different jurisdictions
and there are many options for incorporations
like trusts in NIVIS or VVI companies,
Cayman Islands and so on.
But not many people are aware that the US
is one of the best places for privacy actually.
And you have many options, for example,
limited liability companies in the US
that protect your privacy.
What are your suggestions for incorporating in the US
and protecting your privacy?
Well, I recommend finding a lawyer
that deals specifically in this
because they need to know exactly how to set it up
and how to file the paperwork.
And once again, it's a mindset issue
because I've done this multiple times now
because the first time I did it back in 2018,
there were some failures that came up later.
And essentially, when you have a privacy leak,
it pretty much destroys everything you've set up.
So you have to start all over again.
And the failures were generally a result of me working
with lawyers and bankers who had never done this before.
And they have a lot of defaults.
And the defaults are to put your personal information
into all of these different systems.
And so even though I spent hours talking to them up front
and I was like, this is why we're doing this,
you need to not leak my information.
If you're making them go down a path
they've never done before,
which is the likelihood of a mistake happening
is much higher.
So that's the main thing is working with someone
who has other privacy-oriented clients.
And then past that, there are specific states in America
that are better than others for incorporating
like New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, probably a few others.
And that basically comes down to what the legal reporting
requirements for like the owners and managers of LLC are
in those states, but it can get tricky
if you're setting up your corporations in those states
and then you want to acquire property in different states.
So one thing that I found is that some states don't like it
if you try to acquire property with an out of state registered
entity and they want you to then re-register the entity
in the same state and then you may not have
the same privacy protection.
So it can get pretty complicated
and this is why it also just got really expensive.
Right, right.
You mentioned that a big part of protecting your privacy
is your lifestyle.
You are also a big Bitcoin advocate,
but you have mentioned in the past that cash is a big thing
when protecting your privacy.
Why should people care about using cash
and how does Bitcoin get into all of that?
How do you make using Bitcoin more private
while also using cash to protect your privacy?
Well, because the majority of I think what I'm trying
to protect against is not actually the government.
It's corporate surveillance.
And I am very familiar with the pervasiveness
of corporate surveillance because I spent the first decade
of my career working for an online marketing company.
And so I was a big data engineer and my job was
to write software that ingested these petabytes
and petabytes of raw analytics information
that the company was collecting as a result of all
of the emails and website trackers and other things
that the marketing companies who were our clients
were deploying through our system.
And so my job was to basically help marketers
better target people to sell specific things to them.
So it was not a malicious thing.
This is capitalism.
This is the incentives at play on the internet.
Data is a commodity.
And so in many cases, you as an internet user
are presented with a service for free,
but what you're really doing is you're paying them
with your data that is then used potentially against you.
And the problem there is that your data is often collected
and then repackaged and resold
to numerous different other entities
that may not be quite as careful with it.
And so it essentially becomes inevitable
that as you share data about yourself,
either overtly or unintentionally,
that data will eventually get leaked
and fall into the wrong hands of people
who will be malicious and use it against you.
You have also said that the ability
to control your data should be a fundamental human right.
I think this ties a lot into that.
What are your favorite tools, companies,
services that are privacy focused
and that really help people control their data?
For example, there are some companies
that prioritize file over platform,
others that focus on end-to-end encryption.
And you mentioned that, for example,
when setting up your companies,
it's really important to also set it up
with service providers who share the same ethos
of sovereignty in the end.
So what are your recommendations
or favorite company services tools?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot
and it depends on exactly what you're trying to do.
I tell most people that the biggest, easiest
privacy improvement that you can do
is to just install ad blockers in your browser
and it doesn't cost you anything.
It takes only a couple of minutes
and that will stop a lot of the corporate surveillance
that just sort of happens in the background
as you are going about your life
and browsing the internet.
Beyond that, one service that I like for payments
because cash is not always an option,
especially if you're trying to do internet commerce,
big fan of privacy.com and they essentially allow you
to create as many throwaway virtual debit cards as you want.
And the cool thing with these debit cards
is as long as you put in the right number,
expiration date and CVC code,
you can put in any name and any address that you want,
which is very helpful, especially if you're buying
digital goods or services where you're not physically
having something shipped to you.
If you are having something physically shipped to you,
then there are services that I recommend
that are basically like private mailboxes
and whether that's something like Earth class mail,
which is one of the bigger ones,
or in many cases, you can find smaller local shops
that will just let you rent a little box
for like 20 or $30 a month.
So that once again,
you're not putting your actual address out there.
This gets a bit more paranoid,
but I do think that people should probably
be running VPNs all of the time.
And going down the VPN rabbit hole is really tricky
because unless you're running your own VPN,
which I have written about and is beyond the reach,
I think of most people,
then you're once again, you're trusting a third party
and you don't necessarily know what that VPN is doing.
So the best that I can really offer on the VPN side
is I would recommend using one that doesn't require
any personal information to sign up in the first place,
because obviously whatever information you give
to the VPN provider,
they can then use to basically know who you are
and if they're keeping logs,
because you never know if they are,
even if they claim they're not,
and a government comes in and asks them
for your information.
The only way to ever be sure that your information
is not going to get shared
is to not give it away in the first place.
So for example, I like Mulvad
because you can pay them in Monero or other crypto.
Anonymously and not give them an email address or anything
and they just give you a code that you can plug in
and it just works and it's fast.
Yeah, they're really cool.
You really see that they care about your privacy
because they just give you a code
and you really see that they don't store
any personal identifiable information.
The VPN topic is really cool,
because I think we're seeing a lot of trends
right now in the world.
I read your blog post about Mask buying Twitter
and that you think, correct me if I'm wrong,
that maybe it's not so much about freedom of speech
but the really cool thing about Twitter
is the global consciousness that it creates.
But going down the route of freedom of speech,
we have seen in the UK the thing before your post trend.
And I'm kind of worried about citizenship-based censorship
where states don't only try to control
what is said in their land that can be bypassed by VPNs,
but what is said by their citizens.
Any thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, if you want real freedom of speech online
then preferably you're gonna be anonymous.
So not have your real name, face, location, so on and so forth.
Otherwise, if you want freedom of speech
without having to worry about being de-platformed,
then you're gonna have to use a protocol
that is censorship-resistant.
So whether that's something like Nostra
or potentially Mastodon, I think Mastodon and Blue Sky
are not as censorship-resistant as Nostra.
I mean, I use all of them just so that I can see
how they're developing.
But to have the ultimate level of sovereignty
and censorship resistance in these systems,
they often require you to be tech savvy
and run your own server so that you can't be de-platformed.
Nostra is nice because you don't have to run your own server
because it kind of inverts the model
so that you're sending your data to many different servers
and any one of them can block you, of course,
but the likelihood that all of them
are gonna block you is quite low.
Nice.
I think going from the topic of, you know,
kind of moving yourself in cyberspace with VPNs
to moving yourself physically while traveling,
you have mentioned some tips for traveling.
When you're abroad, you encrypt all your devices
and lock them up.
Do you have any other specific tips
when it comes to traveling abroad?
I mean, mostly around security.
So the problem from the privacy standpoint
is that if you're using air travel, you're screwed.
Like there's no way to have a pseudonym cover identity
that is gonna get you past border control.
Like I said, I'm doing everything legally.
So I'm not gonna go down the path
of like trying to forge a passport
and trick the government, anything like that.
However, you know, if you're not in a rush,
there are usually other means of transportation to travel
which may not be quite as hard on the KYC area.
You know, at least in America,
and I think when I've used trains in Europe,
you know, they don't actually ask you for your ID.
They may ask you for your name,
but once again, you could lie.
You're probably not gonna get checked on that.
One reason that I really like America is that it's,
you know, it's huge.
Like I think it's as large, if not larger than all of Europe
and you can drive through like 95% of it
if you have the time to do so.
And of course, there's no real border checkpoints
as long as you stay inside of the country.
So driving is generally a privacy-conscious thing to do.
However, you know, there's the tolls.
And I have successfully managed to do the toll transponders
in a private manner where once again,
I just register them to an LLC and, you know,
the actual car that is in is also registered to the LLC.
But all of this stuff is like it works for now,
but when I look in the future,
I think it's gonna get harder and harder,
mainly due to the continued pervasiveness of cameras
and facial recognition.
And, you know, one thing that I'm particularly worried about
is the stuff like the Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
There's already been a proof of concept
where some, you know, university graduate
hacked real-time facial recognition
and identity lookup into the glasses.
And so, you know, if that becomes a thing,
I don't really know of any countermeasure to that.
Like there are some products out there
where you can get like infrared lights,
like either in glasses or hoodies or caps or whatever.
But I think that those are far from 100% effective
and they're reliant upon the target camera,
like being an infrared, you know, night mode
or having some other vulnerability where the,
you know, the infrared can essentially override the sensor.
So, I mean, all of this stuff is,
it's constantly moving target
because technology is constantly evolving.
Governments and corporations are constantly seeking
to incorporate the latest technology
so that they can collect more and more data
and use it for whatever their purposes are.
And it seems like the defensive side
of technological innovation
has not been really keeping up.
Yeah, I think that's so interesting,
especially, you know, when it comes to legal methods,
so for example, you know, obscuring your identity
or even half alternative identities,
like not so many people are aware of this,
but there are some countries that allow you
to legally get a passport under a different name,
like for example, Vanua to Dominica,
Turkey with the ethnic script,
they allow you to legally change your name.
There are also products I have seen,
like for example, the Palau irresidency ID,
that is, you know, kind of accepted some places.
So you could say that, for example,
you could use it to checking in hotels
or maybe, you know, on a train or something
that is more low level than air travel.
But I think the point of biometrics is such a good point.
And not only that, you know, it's happening,
but also it's happening on the private sector.
It's something that should be probably
taking us seriously as, you know, military technology.
But, you know, we have seen companies
that are, you know, advancing it either through the meta,
glasses, or for example,
work going with the scanning of the eyeballs.
Where do you think the future of biometrics is going?
Do you think it's gonna be controlled only by governments
or there are gonna be private companies
setting up checkpoints like clear in the U.S.?
Well, I mean, I don't think private companies
are going to be as in your face about it.
You know, governments are already there.
You know, when I'm going through border control,
a lot of it is automated now and it's quite convenient.
But on the corporate side,
I think it's just gonna be more that, you know,
every corporation with physical presences
is gonna put cameras everywhere to protect their own property
and to be able to do their own forensic analysis of stuff.
And even, like in the case of retail stores,
I think this is already happening in some cases.
Basically, you know, if you try to steal from the store,
they put you on a blacklist and then they can basically,
in real time, figure out if you're trying to come back
into the store and set off alarms.
But, you know, this is also going to be used
for sort of predictive marketing analytics.
They're going to tag you.
They're gonna watch you as you walk around.
They're gonna look and analyze what you're looking at
and try to figure out, you know,
what it is that you're interested in
and then target you in other ways.
And that's going to be a very cross-platform thing
where the real, you know, the value add of all of this stuff
is that, you know, they've already got a ton of information
and analytics that are being collected in cyberspace
and now they wanna do the same thing in meat space
and then merge them all together
so that they can advertise to you in cyberspace
based off your meat space activities
and possibly even vice versa, you know,
it's not too outrageous to think of a future world
where if more of us are using augmented reality glasses
or even contact lenses or whatever,
that as we're going through meat space,
we're probably gonna see targeted advertisements
within our augmented reality.
Yeah, we both are big fans,
I think of the book The Sovereign Individual.
How accurate do you think the predictions are?
Do you think the future is going in that direction?
Because that future that you mentioned
sounded a lot like The Sovereign Individual
where you are, you know, most of your life is in cyberspace.
And I think, you know, even nowadays,
most of our lives are in cyberspace,
but I think, you know, that kind of technology
can even push it forward faster.
So for me, it's kind of a question of scale.
And when I look at the current state of the world
and try to identify, you know, what are sovereign individuals?
Well, right now, the most prolific sovereign individuals
are actually multinational corporations.
Like, and what I mean is the entities
that have the power to negotiate with nation states.
So the question is, you know, what is required
or how long is it gonna take for that threshold to be lowered?
I would also argue that, you know, billionaires right now
are basically sovereign individuals,
but, you know, millionaires, not so much.
Will we eventually get there?
Maybe, but then on the flip side,
we are seeing some nation states realize,
I think that this is starting to happen.
And I think I've seen some countries basically proposing
to do the same thing that the United States does.
As you were kind of mentioning with free speech,
but with taxation of like, we're gonna tax you
regardless of where you are physically,
because we realize that you could just leave
very easily and not come back.
And, you know, skip out on all of the money
that we want to extort from you.
Right, I think that's gonna happen.
Something that, you know, I hear a lot
is that only the U.S. and Austria
have citizenship-based taxation
and they tax citizens globally,
no matter where they live.
The reality is that there are more countries
that already have it and there are some countries,
many countries in Europe that have some sort
of citizenship-based taxation.
And I think, you know, as nation states
basically become bankrupt and they realize
that most of their high-network individuals, families,
they have already left the country,
they cannot keep taxing them.
The only tool that they will have to go after
these people will be citizenship.
And they will basically try to tax them abroad
and tax them globally to try to, you know,
first tax, then confiscate even.
We have been talking a lot about privacy.
You have mentioned that, you know,
privacy is the other side of the coin for security.
I think you probably have lots of great insights
when it comes to physical security.
A way to think about it, I think it is to, you know,
you have security on a country level
where you have a really safe country
and that's, you know, what many people
that watch us care about.
But then you also have, you know, safe cities,
like for example, we're here in Switzerland
that is safe on the country level,
on the city level, on the probably private property level.
And that's what I want to get into right now,
what are your best tips to basically make
your private property as safe as possible?
Well, like I said, on the privacy side,
preferably not to have your name
on the publicly registered property,
but, you know, I would bet that Switzerland
that's probably difficult to do.
A lot of European countries generally require you
to publicize all information about corporations
and other entities.
Though I think Sweden is the worst.
I think that they basically require you
to like publicly post all of your tax information
and income and stuff.
And that's why a number of high net worth Bitcoiners
have been physically attacked in Sweden.
But other than that, you know, it's also interesting
because I would say Europe in general
defaults to stronger physical security.
For whatever reason, I'm sure it's historical.
You know, Europe has had many wars over many centuries.
America, not so much.
In America, you know, we build our houses very cheaply
and there's generally not much physical security.
You know, someone might get a security system or something,
which is usually a joke.
But, you know, we don't have, even for example,
what I'm looking at the window right now,
you know, basically steel shutters across everything
that make it very difficult for someone to physically break in.
And, you know, the construction is gonna be like stone
and cinder block and, you know, that's probably,
I guess because you don't have quite as much lumber
and timber as we do in America.
So it varies.
And these are all trade-offs though, right?
Is like the flip side is that in European countries,
the firearm ownership is usually much more challenging
if it's even possible at all.
You know, Switzerland is, I think, an exception to that.
But even then, I'm pretty sure Switzerland requires you
to keep everything locked up and out of reach.
Whereas in America, we may not have the greatest
physical security for our actual property,
but we're basically allowed to have loaded guns laying around
wherever we want.
And, you know, that's part of the freedom
and responsibility that comes with
some of our constitutional rights.
So, you know, these are all trade-offs.
When it comes to general safety, obviously,
you can just, you can look at the crime statistics.
And generally, if you're living in an area
that is economically well off,
there's not gonna be as much crime.
So, unfortunately, a lot of it comes down
to your own finances and what you can afford.
I think that's super interesting
because of the concept, basically,
of the ascending word and the descending word.
And I think, you know, that also goes a lot
into Bitcoin economics and how there are some places
that are kind of aligned with Bitcoin and the ethos.
And they will probably do well in the long run.
And there are other places that are inevitably declining.
Which places are you bullish on,
especially when it comes to Bitcoin?
Ooh, that's tough.
I mean, I think an easy one is that El Salvador
seems to be on the up and up.
Now, you know, there is some controversy
around how they've done that.
Obviously, if you throw a lot of people in prison,
then those people can't be walking around committing crimes.
So, it's always this trade-off and debate
between safety and freedom, right?
In many countries where I think you could argue
that they are safer, you can also argue
that the individual citizens don't have
the same level of freedom.
And this, I think, has to be an individual decision.
Obviously, I lean more on the side of being less safe
but more free to go about and do what I want
without having some authority telling me
how to live my life.
Nice.
In 2018, you co-founded CASA with the goal
of taking Bitcoin security mainstream
with a new system that allows users
to own their own private keys.
Do you want to get a bit into how CASA makes
holding Bitcoin safer?
So, the short version is that we architect
a key infrastructure where the whole goal
is to eliminate single points of failure.
And really what this means is we understand
that people are human.
Most people, even hardcore Bitcoiners,
are not highly technical people that spend a lot of time
thinking adversarily about their own key management system
and everything that could go wrong.
So, what we've seen over the years is that it's very easy
for someone to, if they're getting into self-custody,
put themselves into a situation
where there are potential single things that could happen
that could result in catastrophic loss.
So, the way that we accomplish this is we have
a very simple mobile app where you follow
the instructions in the mobile app
and when you get to the end of your setup,
you have, think of it as a vault that is distributed
where there are multiple keys,
either like three keys or five keys.
And these keys are distributed across different types
of hardware, software, different manufacturers.
And then CASA will hold one key
as an emergency recovery mechanism.
But the whole idea is that if something goes wrong
with one of your keys, it's not a problem.
Whether it gets lost, stolen, destroyed, whatever,
you still have enough redundancy and resiliency
that you can use the other keys to still move your money
and basically swap out the compromised key,
replace it with a new key and continue forward.
So, it's kind of a different way of thinking about
managing your Bitcoin, where instead of having
all of your eggs in one basket in the sense of
like all of your money in one seed phrase,
your one treasure, ledger, or whatever,
because there are things that could go wrong with that,
you instead distribute them geographically,
cryptographically and across many different companies
that are writing different software and hardware
to prevent things like supply chain attacks.
So, it's a really complicated series of thought experiments
and potential loss and threat vectors
that we have thought through over the years
and we have them all published on our website
of like, this is why we do it this way.
But the idea is that you follow the instructions,
you follow our guidance and you basically end up
in as bulletproof of a self-custody setup
as I think it's possible to do these days.
That's fascinating, especially the part
about single points of failure.
I personally spend a lot of time
thinking about single points of failure.
I think one of the biggest ones that people fall into
is just having one passport and one citizenship.
But going more into the self-custody thing,
Michael Saylor recently said that self-custodies
were paranoid crypto-anarchists
that worry about the government seizing your Bitcoin
to which you replied that most 6102 gold scissors
occurred at financial institutions
that held gold on behalf of clients.
For example, Frederick Barber Campbell
tried to withdraw 5,000 ounces from Chase Bank.
They reported him and the gold was confiscated.
Those who kept gold in self-custody were safe.
Yeah, but it's not just about that, right?
Because if you only talk about government seizure risk,
then I think the average person
will consider you to be a paranoid person
because government seizure happens so rarely.
And so it's not a threat that they consider
to be a high risk.
But what I would say is that if we look
across the past decade of history in this space,
leaving your money with a trusted third party is high risk.
A large percentage of trusted third parties
have failed over the years.
And maybe it's because they're malicious
and they stole people's money.
Maybe it's because they're incompetent
and they got hacked.
Or in some cases, they were incompetent
and they literally lost their own keys
and locked themselves out of it.
So the best way that I've been able to describe
at a very, very high level,
like the difference between all of the risks of self-custody
versus the risk of trusted third party custody
is that self-custody is essentially a subset
of the risks of trusted third party custody.
Because if you think about it,
when you leave your money with a custodian,
they are doing self-custody.
So they are exposed to all of the risks of self-custody.
And I think the average person may say,
well, yeah, and that's fine
because they're professionals, right?
They know what they're doing.
They think about this all of the time.
And that is true to an extent.
But in addition to all of the self-custody risks,
you have this extra layer of risks
of things like insider attacks.
You don't know what that custodian is doing
from a security perspective.
Like none of these custodians publish
their internal security protocols.
You have, this is why they're trusted.
And you also have to, like I said, worry about
incompetency, they might screw up.
And then once again, you do have to worry more
about government seizure risk because what's happening,
and this is true for both government attacks
and just any other type of hacker or attacker,
is that you are creating a massive honeypot
because you have thousands, if not millions of people
putting their money in one place
that's creating a really high value juicy target
which is incentivizing attackers to potentially spend
a huge amount of resources trying to crack into it
because the bounty for something like Coinbase
is what, millions of Bitcoin?
I don't even know how many like tens of billions
or hundreds of billions of dollars that is at the moment.
So it's risky not only for you as an individual.
It also, when we're talking about custodians
that are getting to that size,
it becomes a systemic risk to the entire ecosystem.
So for example, one of the things I'm really worried about
is the fact that something like 90% of the Bitcoin ETFs
all keep their money at Coinbase.
And now I'm starting to sort of raise the alarm
of if we sort of look out long-term multi-decade
and we try to assume what a future
of mass adoption is gonna look like.
Well, if mass adoption mostly happens
through these ETF products,
how much Bitcoin is gonna end up in the hands
of five or 10 entities?
That is very risky from a number of different perspectives
that I just explained.
I'm also a big fan of thinking long-term.
And one of my favorite features of CASA
is that it really shows that Bitcoin
is a generational asset,
allowing you to set up your Bitcoin inheritance plan.
What are your best tips?
What is the best way to set up your Bitcoin inheritance plan?
Yeah, so similar to just all of the issues related
to setting up your own self-custody wallet
is that it's a tricky thing that is fraught with peril
because you have great power that is bestowed upon you
when you're going into self-custody
because you get to decide many different parameters
of how you're doing it.
And so from that perspective,
there's like a decision tree.
There's many different decisions that need to be made.
And the total design space
of how you can architect a self-custody wallet is massive
and not all of those potential paths are safe.
So it's easy if you're not an expert
and you don't think about this all the time,
it's easy to make some decisions
that end up actually weakening your setup
rather than strengthening it.
And then that becomes doubly true
if you're going down the path of inheritance
because when you are setting up self-custody,
what you're trying to do is set up an architecture
so that no one other than you
can access and spend your Bitcoin.
When you wanna take that next step
into making your setup inheritance friendly,
now you're walking this really weird tightrope
where you want it so that only you can access your Bitcoin
while you're alive,
but when you die,
you magically want the security architecture to change
so that someone or some designated set of beneficiaries
can access it.
And so assuming that you don't want your beneficiaries
to be able to access your money while you're still alive,
this gets tricky.
But the really cool thing about multi-sig
is that once again, that expands the design space
of how we can set up your architecture.
And essentially, key sharing is what it comes down to.
Like that's the path that we went down,
though it wasn't the first path that we went down.
Actually, we had an inheritance product
for a couple of years that was more legal inheritance based.
And with that, we were onboarding like your family attorney
or your executor or someone to share keys with.
And we found that it didn't scale very well.
And so the inheritance solution that we just rolled out
I would say four or five months ago
is has no legal requirements to it.
So like you can be in any jurisdiction
and it works the same
because it's just essentially a software solution.
And basically what you do is you onboard your beneficiary
by sharing an encrypted version of one of your keys with them.
And what the CASA app does
is we create our own set of game theory around this.
So essentially you onboard your beneficiary,
you share an encrypted key with them.
They can't do anything with it because it's encrypted.
And if you die, your beneficiary is able to go in the app
and basically tap on a button that says,
I want to request kicking off the inheritance process.
When they do that, we start emailing you and contacting you
and saying, hey, your beneficiary said you died.
If you're still alive, click this button
or call us on the phone or contact us somehow
so that we can kick your beneficiary out
because they may be malicious.
And basically we keep trying to contact you for six months.
And if that time period goes by
and you have not contested or disputed
the inheritance kickoff,
then we allow the beneficiary to decrypt
and use that key to initiate a transaction.
But once again, they only have one key.
So they then have to request from us
to co-sign the transaction.
And then once we'll finally co-sign a transaction
after another waiting period,
then the money can move however they wish.
I love the part that right now
it doesn't require any legal setup.
It's literally the network over the state, right?
It wins every single day.
Yeah, inheritance is really tricky
because I think most people are used to legal inheritance.
And if you have a brokerage account
or other traditional financial accounts,
you may, for example, have beneficiaries listed on them.
And it's actually, I've learned a lot
about legal inheritance over the past few years
as a result of researching and building all of this stuff.
And discovered that there's a lot of foot guns
in legal inheritance as well.
For example, it could actually be a bad idea
to list specific beneficiaries
on traditional financial accounts.
And the reason for that is that that over,
it tends to override, at least in America,
it overrides the sort of default
of your local jurisdiction of how inheritance plays out.
And it can also even override anything
that you specified in your last will and testament.
And people may be thinking, well, who cares?
Well, the real problem that tends to happen with this
is that people tend to set up their inheritance plan
and then, of course, not die for many decades
and never go back and look at their inheritance configuration
for that entire period of time.
And so what often happens is that the values
of your different accounts may wildly change
and no longer be in balance over time.
And you might accidentally end up giving 70%
of your net worth to one beneficiary
and then the other one loses out.
And legally, there's nothing that can be done
unless, of course, they all agree
to redistribute it themselves.
So basically, it's a game theory problem
that becomes additionally complicated
because people tend not to maintain it over time.
I tend to think that most taxation is theft,
but definitely the one I think it's the biggest theft
of the mall is inheritance taxes,
because you just have a massive loss
and then here comes the state and asks for some tax.
Where's Bitcoin when it comes to inheritance tax?
Well, as far as I'm aware,
I mean, at least in America,
it's treated like any other asset.
I'm not aware of any countries that have specific exemptions
for Bitcoin inheritance stuff,
but once again, Bitcoin doesn't care.
So obviously it's up to you and your beneficiaries
to manage that.
Well, it's really, I guess the executor of your estate
is the one who's going to be in charge of making sure
that all taxes and creditors of the estate are paid off
before the remaining assets are distributed
to the beneficiaries.
And that's actually another thing
that I learned about inheritance, at least in America.
A lot of people think that being an executor
of an estate is like a great honor.
It's actually a huge liability.
Like if you screw something up,
you can be personally liable
for the financial consequences of screwing that up.
Wow.
To wrap up this conversation,
this is a question that I've seen going
kind of viral in different places.
Up to you if you want to get into more or less detail,
but when you pass away,
how do you plan to leave your Bitcoin to your hairs?
Well, through a carefully constructed inheritance plan,
I haven't thought about it too much
because I think I've still got a ways to go
and we won't go down this rabbit hole,
but I'm also big into like longevity and biohacking stuff.
And so I'm optimistic that if I can take care of myself
for a few more decades,
then medical science will continue to progress
that hopefully we'll be able to live well past 100,
maybe even 150 if we were able to essentially regenerate
ourselves at a cellular level.
So this actually does potentially bring up
a very different issue which I have published
an article about which is,
and this is because I haven't entirely decided personally
on how I'm going to do this,
but are you familiar with cryonics?
Yeah.
Right, so like I said,
well, I'm a transhumanist.
I'm interested in life extension.
I'm interested in cryonics.
I'm not a subscriber yet of any of those services
because they do have issues.
You know, a lot of them go bankrupt
and the body is thaw and don't get preserved.
But I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about
and published some thoughts on taking your Bitcoin with you.
And by which I mean these security ramifications
of how would you secure Bitcoin
if you were cryogenically preserved
and doing that under the hope that you may be thought out
in hundreds or even thousands of years,
depending of course on how long it takes the technology.
And this essentially gets you into even crazier
extreme edge case game theory than the inheritance stuff
because if you think about it,
your body basically goes into a trusted third party custodian.
So I've talked to a number of people about this
and the most common thing people say is,
oh, I'll just memorize my seed phrase.
And I'm like, no, you have to assume that the company
that thaws you out can scan your brain
and extract all of the information from it.
So that's not gonna work.
And then there's all these other issues around
how technology and you could potentially have key failure
or key rot over centuries or millennia.
How do you do that in a way
that you can feel comfortable about?
And I actually suspect that the answer
is gonna come down to family
and actually instilling values within your family
to create a sort of trust chain of generations.
And what I mean by this,
and there's actually this concept
in the cryogenics community, what did they call it?
I think they call it the domino of love or something
and I might be butchering that.
But the idea is that you get frozen,
what is the incentive for anybody to thaw you out,
especially a thousand years in the future
where you probably have no marketable skill set,
you have no real use to society
other than as a historical artifact.
So this is another game theory issue.
So the domino of love theory is you have children,
you instill in them the values that you have
and do the best you can to make sure that they love you
and they want you to be around.
And then hopefully they do the same with their children,
they do the same with their children.
And so if that chain remains unbroken,
then at some arbitrary point in the future,
the technology will improve enough
that we can start to thaw people out.
But the thing is, it's gonna go in reverse order
because the earlier you get cryogenically preserved,
the more damage there will be to your body
and therefore the greater the level of technology
will be required in order to revive you.
So it's actually, you're not gonna be revived first,
it's your great, great, great, great, great grandchildren
will be revived first.
Well, why are they gonna get revived?
Well, it's because their children are still alive
and they're like, I don't wanna bring my parents back.
And so then once they're back
and the technology progresses,
then hopefully they say, oh, I wanna bring my parents back.
And then that chain goes all the way back,
hopefully, you know, optimistically,
so that eventually your children get thought out
and the technology progresses and they thaw you out.
But yeah, this is some like crazy theoretical
edge case stuff that's, you know, sci-fi
but also somewhat realistic game theory
trying to figure out how would you ever even deal
with these type of issues.
But that's the type of stuff I find interesting.
That's right.
I really enjoyed talking.
Thank you very much, Jameson.
Thanks for having me.