Hello guys, so we are now in Lugano, splendid conference, and we are going to show you our guest after his presentation at the conference, Jameson Lopp, who is the founder and CEO of Casa, in self-custody of Bitcoin. Great to have you here, Jameson. Thanks for having me. So, can you tell us how did you get involved with crypto, when did you first discover it? It's been a while. Ten years ago, actually, I was just an average nerd, reading nerdy news websites, and this Bitcoin thing kept coming up, and I kept dismissing it. I said, oh, this will end badly, everyone's going to lose all their money. And, you know, after hearing about it multiple times over the course of a year or two, I eventually looked into it. And it was once I actually read the white paper, and I realized, you know, this is a very elegant solution to a problem that I've never even thought about. That's when I decided I really wanted to better understand the system and started diving in and creating my own projects and providing data to other developers. And after a couple of years of that, went full-time, and I've been working on Bitcoin wallet software for eight years now. So what was your first venture in crypto? So, the first thing that I ever did was a side project where I actually forked the Bitcoin Core repository, added in a bunch of statistics and metrics, and then released that along with a website, some nice dashboards. And basically the idea was to provide more transparency and insight into what the Bitcoin node itself was doing. And this was to really help developers understand what was going on so they could decide what needs to be worked on. And that did well. It ended up being referenced and cited by a number of developers over the years and gave me some reputation and credibility, which I think helped me eventually get a job full-time working on Bitcoin wallet software, helping exchanges and other companies protect their money. And what did change your mind in terms of perception of Bitcoin in the past, like you told in 2012? I thought that people might respond to it. What changed after? Yeah, I mean, it was a long journey. Obviously, in the early days, I just saw it as an interesting project that had some potential. I wasn't fully committed to it. I think this is a journey that everyone goes through, where as time goes by, every day that the network continues to operate, you get a little bit more confidence that it's going to continue working. As you understand more and more of how and why it works, you gain more confidence. And so over the years, as my technical understanding increased, as my understanding of the game theory and a lot of the other aspects increased, then I became more convicted and I made bigger investments, ended up betting my entire retirement savings on Bitcoin and then betting my entire career on Bitcoin. And so it has worked out, but it's been a rollercoaster. There are highs and lows. So is Bitcoin hedging inflation for you, investments or money? It's a really complicated question. The hedge against inflation narrative is tough because, first of all, people have different measures of inflation. So I think it's not a hedge against inflation in the sense that a hedge is something that's supposed to perform inverse to something else. And the exchange rate is unpredictable. There are certain factors that one can influence in one direction or another. But my thesis all along has been that it's been a very long-term bet against central banks. That's the one thing we can be sure of, is that central banks and governments will continue printing and printing and printing. What happens with the exchange rate on a daily, weekly, monthly, even yearly basis, nobody really knows. And anyone who claims that they do is probably trying to sell you something. But I always saw this as a generation, if not multi-generation, long-term project. We're trying to build fair money. And that was one of the things that really got me curious about it once I looked into the projects and once I really started thinking about what is money because most people just use money without thinking about how it works. But as I started thinking of money as this idea, then it seems to me like since money is just a sort of collective agreement amongst everyone who uses it, that money should be an open source collective project where any who want can contribute to that project. So I felt like the open source ethos fit really well with trying to re-architect money. And I just felt like that was more likely to result in a fairer system. No system is going to be perfectly fair, but it seems less likely to be manipulated by a small number of powerful people behind closed doors. No, I was actually unfortunately very anti-privacy in the sense of what I was working on. So before I went and became a Bitcoin wallet engineer, I spent a decade building infrastructure for email marketing companies. And my job was actually to collect and run analysis over lots of raw tracking data. And so sending out lots of emails, getting lots of analytics back in as a result, and then performing these jobs that would try to predict what people were doing and what they wanted to buy. And it was very anti-privacy because we were tracking everything that we could of what people were doing with the email and then even what they were doing, you know, clicking around on websites. So that gave me a lot of insight into how terrible the internet is with regard to privacy, how hard it is to maintain your privacy from all of the sort of corporate surveillance that happens as you're using the internet on a day-to-day basis. It was a fairly simple pivot for me because I spent my first three years working at a company called BitGo where I was doing enterprise Bitcoin security or helping exchanges and other companies. And what I realized is we made a lot of progress on best practices and security for companies, but we had not made the same type of progress for individuals. So founding CASA was a very simple pivot of saying I'm going to take everything that I've learned over the past several years and we're going to re-implement it, but in a way that is easier for the average person to take advantage of. And the way that you do that is you have to build software where you're designing it with the best practices in mind, where the software is guiding them down the path. Because nobody is going to read any manuals that you write. If you don't basically force them to do the right thing, then they're probably going to make mistakes. And why do you focus exactly on Bitcoin, not on any other? It's mostly a matter of time. It becomes a very complicated topic, but the way that I sum it up is you can either go really deep into one topic and do really, really well at it. And that's what I've been doing with Bitcoin. I have worked on other cryptocurrencies, but what I found is as you have to start learning about and then learning all the intricacies and best practices of these other tokens and networks and whatever, what you're doing is you're spreading yourself really wide and thin. So it's not possible to have the same depth of knowledge across many different sectors within the industry. So if I had infinite time, I would try to have really deep knowledge in many more things. Obviously, I have my interests. I'm generally more interested in the privacy focused cryptocurrencies. But I see what has happened over the past five, six years and the ecosystem has grown to the point that it's not possible for anyone to be an expert in the entire ecosystem anymore. So you just have to choose what you find most interesting and fulfilling. Yeah, that's true. And do you plan the Kaza expansion maybe in the future, like to hire other specialists and offer some others? Yes. So Kaza, what we are doing is we're trying to empower individuals. And that doesn't even necessarily mean just crypto. We start with Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the most valuable asset and it's obvious why people need to protect it. But there are so many other things that we expect will be digitized and that we expect will end up being secured with cryptography and private keys. And so what we want to do is to facilitate the adoption of these technologies to make it easier for the average people to actually fulfill the promise of the technology without them having to be really nerdy and spend a lot of time understanding how it works. And Isabel, are you more retail focused or do you have a lot of clients among businesses? We are definitely more focused on individuals. Everywhere from high net worth individuals, some family offices, maybe some very small businesses that have like a small corporate treasury. But we're definitely much more focused on just the average person who needs help getting themselves into a secure setup. How are you different as well from BitGo or other custody solutions? Yeah, there are a lot of different wallets out there to choose from. Most of them are free. And one of the things about free wallets is that you get what you pay for, especially in terms of service and support. So while we offer wallet software, that's only one piece of what we offer. What we're also offering is a key management service where we will hold one of your keys out of your multi-signature setup, which we can help then provide recovery services for if something goes wrong with your other keys. We also are just offering consultation in general. It's very rare in this space to be able to get on the phone with a service provider if something goes wrong. And if something goes wrong, you're probably going to be really nervous that you might lose a lot of money. So being able to put people into a situation where they have peace of mind, both due to the actual security of their setup and because they know that they have experts that they can call and ask any questions, that's what we're really here for, is we want people to be confident that they can self-custody. We believe that self-custody is important for really the integrity of the entire ecosystem. If people are not confident that they can do that, they're going to leave all their money with a third party and then we're just re-implementing the banking system all over again. Yes, so today I talked about the history of email as a protocol and how over many decades it went from being a very decentralized network to being a very centralized network with only maybe 10 different companies that are handling 90-something percent of the email traffic out there. And there are a lot of parallels. You can look at other internet technologies and even the internet itself now has a number of points of centralization. And so the takeaway is that it's easy to start out decentralized, but what happens over a long period of time is you run into these tradeoffs between security and convenience, and unfortunately the default for most people is to choose convenience and forego security, forego privacy, forego robustness of whatever network or other technology they're using. And so this is something that we need to be aware of and actively fight against whenever we see changes being proposed or implemented anywhere in the ecosystem that are creating more centralization and more potential weakness and points of failure. It's important to speak up and say, hey, you know, this is going to cause problems. Yes, I mean, we all knew it was coming. It was in the original plans, you know, since what, 2015, 2016. And, you know, I think it just provides a very different security model. And it's not one that I'm a fan of because the incentives are now for people who want to stake their coins to just give them to a third party. And so now we have, I forget what percentage, but the vast majority of Ethereum that is currently staked is on a handful of exchanges. And the unfortunate thing about exchanges is they tend to be regulated entities. They are large targets for governments, for hackers, because they hold large amounts of money. So while, you know, we haven't seen any active attacks yet, it is creating a potential attack point where, you know, these organizations may find themselves pressured to comply with certain regulations, which I would argue kind of defeats the purpose of trying to have a decentralized network. You're supposed to have jurisdictional arbitrage so that no jurisdiction can have control over the network. And do you hold any other assets besides the coins? Mostly privacy coins. I really, I'm not a good trader. And so I very rarely trade or speculate in the first place. And I've certainly missed out on plenty of opportunities, but it's once again, it's a matter of time and effort of how much can I even look into trying to analyze a certain thing. And even what I've found is that it's almost useless for me to try to analyze something and decide whether it's a good investment, because, you know, at least doing short, medium-term speculation, it's more about the psychology of everybody else and what they are going to find value in. And I'm very bad at that, so I don't even try. And what are your thoughts about Zika Knowledge Groups, Zika Robots? In general, it's good both as a privacy technology and a scaling technology. Now, you know, we actually had some interesting research that was published just a few weeks ago about implementing zero-knowledge type of alternative, you know, layer two on top of Bitcoin. Whether or not that actually happens, it may be controversial, but it seems promising. And I'm always interested in any technology that can improve privacy and scalability without having to change the underlying protocol. And what are your advices for user privacy, like how ordinary people should care about privacy? Well, it's because you don't know how your data might get used against you. You know, the default for most people is, oh, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to worry about. But the problem is that when a lot of your day-to-day actions are getting tracked, logged, stored, some very weird things can happen on the sort of big data analysis side. And this is what I used to do 10 years ago. You never know what sort of correlations might be made against you. You know, there's some very interesting examples out there. Some of them are more innocuous. Like, there have been examples of teenage girls who got pregnant, and based on their web browsing and other activities online, some of the corporations determined, oh, it looks like they might be pregnant. And so they started sending material to their home, and basically the secret got out, even though they hadn't told anybody yet. And so that may be a less damaging, possibly more humorous anecdote for some people, but along that same vein, you may be doing something that seems innocuous today, and then the laws change. And all of a sudden, the data may get used against you and put pressure on you, cause a sort of upheaval in your own life. So we've also seen, just due to the viral nature of the Internet and Internet outrage, for example, one of the things that causes problems for people is that you may be a nobody. You know, you're just a normal person, you're not a celebrity or anything like that, but if you do or say the right thing or the wrong thing, then that one action, if it triggers people's psychology, that can go viral and you can become sort of overnight mini-celebrity and have the ire, the attention, the hatred of millions of people directed at you overnight. And that's when people's privacy really gets tested, and the fact that they probably don't have privacy. And in some cases, you may have people showing up at your house or your office starting to cause bad situations. So I think in summary, it's all about the unknown. There are so many sort of unforeseeable potential futures, things that can go wrong, that would make you wish you had privacy. Thankfully, my wallets have always been quite safe. I've certainly had a few close calls over the years with custodians, and thankfully I had always withdrawn my money before the custodian went bust. But no, thankfully from a hacking perspective, as soon as hardware wallets became a thing back in 2015 or so, I was an early adopter there. And now you have your own custody. And can you share as well some of your common plans for the development process? Well, for us, we are continuing to survey the ecosystem and see what is there the most demand for. So even just here at the conference today, there were some new technologies that have been unveiled. And so we're not going to jump in and commit to adding any of them immediately, but what we're going to do is we start playing around with them and figure out, you know, what is the value here? Is this something that our customers would find useful? Is there a way for us to sharpen the edges, you know, to make it more user-friendly? Because that's, I think, one of our big value adds. So the general story is, you know, any service that requires the usage of private keys for people to be able to make use of, if there is enough demand for that, you know, we will try to find a way to facilitate it. So good luck with your development and hope to see as well more users, users faster and better user experience. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. My pleasure.