I'm Jameson Lopp. I've been involved in Bitcoin and crypto since 2012 and went
full-time in 2015 and I got interested in this space both from a ideological
standpoint and a technical standpoint and really once I realized that Bitcoin
as a technology was not going to be going away or getting hacked and I
started diving deeper into it I got sucked into the rabbit hole or the black
hole as some people call it and I've really been just falling further and
further down it trying to figure out what this thing really is like what is
this system that we've built and where is it going so I've really become
immersed in the space and think about it constantly and just try to distill
what I've understood so far so that the rest of the world can start to follow
the same journey that I've gone through. At Casa we're trying to fill what we
perceive as a gap in the market basically Bitcoin has had this promise
ever since inception that you can be your own bank but what I found over the
years both personally and professionally from from working on different wallet
software is that it's still very very hard to actually be your own bank to
scale this learning curve of figuring out all the technical issues that you
have to overcome in order to have a secure crypto asset wallet so we're
trying to merge the usability of a mobile app with the security that's
offered by hardware key signing devices and we're hoping that this will make it
a much lower barrier to entry for people to actually be their own bank and and
have their own crypto asset vaults where they're not trusting third parties. Over
the past few months we've revamped a lot of the infrastructure and code on the
back end and we've basically got all of the major parts of what you'd want in a
Bitcoin wallet like deterministically generated addresses and segregated
witness support. We are ready to go live on mainnet right now we have the wallet
working and we're gonna start onboarding customers over the coming weeks then
it's going to become a learning experience to try to figure out you know
how much hand-holding is really required for a customer on CASA to get up and
running and then just to be in normal maintenance mode and dealing with
potential edge case issues especially if they lose one or more of their devices.
Hopefully we will be able to automate and build more guide rails into the
software itself to reduce the amount of times that a CASA user needs to actually
reach out to us and get somebody on the phone to get help. So that is sort of the
long-term roadmap for the wallet itself. We of course have a lot of demand for
adding support for other things like Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens. CASA is a
Bitcoin first company so we will prioritize Bitcoin features and
functionality but we at a higher level really just see ourselves as a key
management service. So in the very long term we want to be supporting you know
as many crypto assets as possible but we foresee this moving beyond even crypto
assets like we think that if the the promise of tokenization becomes a thing
and digital identity management becomes a thing then the average person is
actually going to have a lot of different keys that they will need to
manage cryptographic keys to give them access to all types of different things
that they'll need in their daily lives.
We're still in the early days of this crypto asset revolution and personally I
believe that having to deal with private keys is kind of analogous to the early
days of the internet when you basically had to tell people to go buy a modem and
figure out how to plug it in and configuring it to to go talk to an ISP.
We're still at the level where you have very raw tools for people to actually
interface with this technology and really what I'm hoping is that over the
years we will continue to build more layers of abstractions on top of it
that eventually using crypto will be as seamless as what people experience today
when they log into Facebook. Now when you log into Facebook you don't know about
all of the layers of of both internet protocols and even cryptography that are
happening behind the scenes. I just foresee that wallets are going to
continue to get abstracted away further and further to the point that people
won't even know that they have private keys that are being managed on the
back end. I believe that the forking of Bitcoin that happened a lot in 2017 is
something that was inevitable and it is really a fundamental part of these
protocols that they're permissionless and anyone can change them and go create
a for create a new network for any reason whether it's a good reason or a
terrible reason or fully self-serving it doesn't really matter but I think that
as we're going towards this future of like crypto anarchy and self-governance
where anyone can can build these systems however they want and it's really
voluntary interactions that are happening it is going to be somewhat
confusing at first because human society is not really used to this level of like
explosion of complexity but that it's something that we're going to have to
get used to and I think that you'll see different tools and reputation services
basically being built around figuring out like how you should decide what is
the best system that you want to use for your own needs. I expect them to co-exist
for a very very long time it's of course quite possible that there could be some
sort of hyper Bitcoinization event where there are so many people that start to
rush into crypto that it just devalues fiat to a level where it doesn't make
sense for people to keep using it. I certainly hope that we will just
consider you to see more gradual adoption of these protocols and really
what matters most to me is that we have a free and open market and people can
choose so if people choose that you know they want to hold on to fiat and have it
in banks and they feel safer more secure in that particular setup then by all
means they should be able to do that but I'm hoping that we'll be able to prove
to people and convince them that the crypto asset networks are going to be a
more sound monetary system.
The happenings seem to have a sort of delayed effect and you know you could
speculate that that is due to the inflation rates changing so much and the
resulting miners you know not selling as much of the newly created bitcoins but
the the main thing that seems to be happening and we're really hearing more
of it even right now in 2018 is people are starting to realize how Bitcoin
supply curve is really set up and they're realizing oh there's 17 million
out of the 21 million coins have already been created and distributed and the
next 4 million it's going to be a long process to get them all out there and
it's just going to slow down more and more so that combined with people
realizing that a lot of these coins have actually been permanently lost I think
will result in in the true scarcity of them becoming apparent.
Basically just around like the level of fabrication technology and how few
people have the silicon fabrication technology so this is a level of
centralization that I think most people are not pleased with really what I'm
hoping is going to happen is that we've already hit the real level of
sophistication with how you can create and fabricate silicon wafers so like
that these ASICs that are being designed are pretty much on the cutting edge so
we're not going to see any more orders of magnitude of improvement and as a
result I'm hoping it will become cheaper and cheaper lower capital costs for
people to get into the mining game create their own fabricated chips and as
other players like we've I think even seen like Samsung and Intel and Nvidia
start to get into it I do expect that the level of competition in the space
will increase now whether or not that is still sufficiently decentralized is
something that of course you could argue about it's it's really an opinion you
can compare and contrast that centralization with the proof of stake
and look at you know the distribution of ownership of coins and any of these
networks and I suspect that the distribution of the ownership of coins
is even more centralized you know with a small number of entities that are owning
quite a large portion of it the main difference I think is more of how hard
it is for people to come and go from from being in those different consensus
systems at least with proof of work you can go out you can buy new chips and
find you know better electrical prices and start to compete with people
whereas with a proof of stake you actually have to invest more into the
system itself from like a speculative standpoint