We're on Facebook Fam, we are back at it again here at ConsenSys 2017, and now we're joined
by Jameson Lopp, who is the software engineer at BitGo.
Great to have you here, Jameson.
Nice to be here.
Absolutely.
How are you enjoying the conference so far?
Oh, it's been great.
I love just seeing all these people that I interact with online that I only really get
to see maybe once a year.
And speaking of interaction, you also moderated a panel a little bit earlier.
Tell us about that.
What was the topic of discussion?
Did it get feisty, fiery on stage, or was it, you know, cool, calm, collected?
Sure.
So, I mean, you could argue that the Bitcoin scaling debate has been happening for years
and years, but it has mostly been simmering until about two years ago when it really started
boiling over.
And so there's been a lot of vitriol, a lot of attacks on people's character, and, you
know, social media, it can be really hard to be emotional and empathize with people.
So I think it's great that we can continue these debates in person and be a little bit
more calm and professional.
Thanks.
A little bit more civilized.
When you're not behind the curtain tossing things.
So that's great to hear.
When we think about how we would describe blockchain to this next generation that's
upcoming, how would you describe blockchain to a fifth grader, if you had to?
Sure.
Well, what are the fifth graders into these days?
Pokemon, maybe?
Pokemon.
All right.
So you've gone around and you've captured a lot of Pokemon, and you want to be able
to trade your Pokemon with your friends.
Well, how are you going to keep track of that?
That becomes a real big question, especially when you're talking about money or anything
of value.
And so generally, what we have done is we have a bank or some entity out there that
is just keeping track of who owns what.
So if you want to trade with your friend, then you're actually going to tell the Pokemon
people that, hey, I want to trade Charizard for Squirtle, and they will take care of that
on their end.
And that probably works fine and well for Pokemon.
But what if you have a super duper rare Pokemon that's worth a million dollars, and you don't
want to trust some third party who is potentially going to be able to steal them from you and
not perform that trade?
So the way that we get around that problem is that instead of having a single entity
that's keeping track, we instead say, OK, everybody is going to keep track of everything.
So when you want to trade Charizard for Squirtle, you basically tell all of your friends who
do Pokemon trading that, hey, myself and Alex are going to be doing this trade.
And then all of your friends say, OK, we wrote that down, and you're good to go.
And we'll keep that history forever and ever.
And if we ever need to go back and look at it, we can double check.
And so it really just comes down to you have everybody checking each other's work, rather
than really relying upon one person that you trust to not lie or cheat or steal.
Absolutely.
Tell us a little bit about BitGo as well, some of the work that you're doing, how it
got its start.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, so BitGo was started by Ben Davenport and Mike Belshi a number of years ago, because
they basically realized that they had all these Bitcoins, and their friends had Bitcoins,
and they were not very confident in how safe and secure they were.
They were afraid they were going to get hacked.
And so they decided to use what at the time was a very new piece of functionality in Bitcoin
called P2SH, which allows us to do multi-signature securing and transacting of the Bitcoins themselves.
So basically, with the multi-signature, instead of just having a single key that unlocks your
Bitcoins, we can use three different keys that you essentially have to use at least
two of them in order to unlock the coins and move them around.
We make it safer by then making sure that those keys are on completely different computers.
So basically, you create a wallet at BitGo, it's a two out of three key solution.
We hold a key, you hold a key, and then you have a third key as your recovery mechanism.
So if somebody hacks you, they don't have enough information to steal your coins.
If somebody hacks us, they don't have enough information to steal your Bitcoins.
It's just much more secure by separating out this sensitive information.
Absolutely.
And security, of course, a major concern.
I mean, this conversation is lit, but this light is not, clearly.
When you think about security of the overall blockchain, Bitcoin, discussion of industry,
how does security play into this overall discussion as well?
So security and usability, I believe, are two of the biggest problems that are really
holding back what I would call mainstream adoption.
And the security is a really big problem because we like to say that Bitcoin is the slipperiest
substance on earth.
It's more slippery than Teflon.
If you lose your Bitcoin, you can lose it in a millisecond and it is gone and you can
never get it back.
There is no third party or auditor or authority that can retrieve your coins for you once
they've been stolen.
So the same thing that could have been your benefit, which would have been the third party,
is now actually kind of unfortunate that it's not involved in the conversation?
Yes.
It cuts both ways.
So the trade-off is you have the potential for a level of security that could never before
be done even with banks and financial institutions.
On the flip side, you literally have to be your own bank.
So you have to be cognizant of the security and have the appropriate protections in place
because if there's a single crack, then the hackers will get in there and you will be
out of luck.
Absolutely.
Now, when we think about the next 12 to 18 months in this overall industry, what excites
you the most right now?
Really the biggest problem is what we've been debating is scalability.
The biggest problem is this night, right?
Yeah, is that, you know, say that we can get security and usability at any manageable level
where your average millennial can just pick it up and use it, well, the problem then becomes
how do we actually support the entire world being able to use these systems?
Because from a technical standpoint, they actually are a lot less efficient, so we have
to be a lot more creative in our solutions of both how we write the solutions and how
we deploy the solutions.
There's many different facets to being able to upgrade these type of systems that no single
person controls.
Yeah, definitely.
So when we think about the next generation who might want to get into this industry,
what piece of advice would you have for them?
You cannot learn too much before dipping your toes in.
I probably spent several months just learning about the system before I even got my first
points.
Alternatively, a lot of people think that you have to buy a whole Bitcoin or a whole
Ethereum token or whatever, but these things are divisible to eight, if not more, decimal
places.
So you can buy $10, $20, play around with it, not have to worry about the security because
you probably don't care if $20 gets hacked.
So it's a matter of time and effort at this point because there's a high learning curve.
But if you're willing to spend the time, then you can really start to see the value in the
system that the average person might not quite get.
When considering the value of the overall ecosystem around blockchain, I'm certainly
hoping that we have a lot of that next generation that is interested enough to make sure that
we can continue advancing the conversation and the innovation forward, especially in
this industry.
Thank you very much for stopping by the Facebook Live show for a little bit, Jameson, and thank
you all for watching live on Facebook.
Stay tuned for more coming from right here.