Welcome to episode 21 guys
Happy Bitcoin halving day this happens. Just by chance. We didn't plan to do this, but we're gonna do it anyways
Jameson, how are you doing today?
Doing well. It's a good day for countdowns
It is good. John. You put two countdowns on one intro. I didn't know about that
That was a no hate participate sure sure sure
Okay, let's get right into this now. James has got a busy day. He's all over the place a man-to-demand
So Jameson, how did you get into Bitcoin?
Well, I'm a nerd. I'm a computer scientist by trade
and so I would spend a lot of times on nerd sites like slash dot and you know
That's probably not where I first heard about it
But it's definitely where I heard about it for the third or fourth time and eventually ended up reading the white paper and really
Got interested started going down the rabbit hole. It was two years of doing just
enthusiast side projects after
Initially reading the white paper that I then figured I could go full-time
So now I've been full-time doing Bitcoin security for over five years Wow
So you've been full-time so man that puts you back like probably you know starting getting your feelers in it was like 2013
So I actually just tweeted out earlier, but I was there for the first having and it was a complete
You know non-event not not many people were talking about it
And in fact my tweet that I made at the time got like no retweet
And so it's funny to look back on now and and people are asking like why was nobody, you know
Talking to you at the time. I was like, well, nobody was listening to me
I was talking all the time, but nobody was listening. Yeah
You know what? I'm gonna come honest with you guys. This is my first having I got into it in
August of 2017. So you're right right as the run-up was getting going. So this is my first happening
And it seems as though there's a shitload of attention around it for sure every time
You know, it's another order of magnitude of interest and therefore
Larger diversity of people that are doing their own thing and so we get interesting websites and other projects and people building their countdown timers
Yeah, that's so what was the what?
Look, what was the cheapest Bitcoin you ever bought? I mean, what was the price when you first bought it?
It was around the $10 mark. Oh beautiful
That's so was on help not messed up. Oh
You're a mouth gocks. I was
Thankfully, I did not keep my coins on the exchange
Yeah, I know a lot of people who are not quite so fortunate. Well, that would be something that would inspire your future
Your future endeavors because that I mean that is a mess of security right there
Absolutely. Yeah, so hey, I I'm guessing your answer is gonna be freedom
But you can tell me if I'm wrong and we asked this question to every one of our our guests now
Well, what do you think the biggest value proposition of Bitcoin is?
It is actually in taking power away from
Smaller groups of people so it is freedom in a sense
The way that I like to actually portray it
It's not so much that we have taken away or changed the power of existing
Governments or central banks and what they do with their own money rather we have empowered
Everyone else to create their own money. We have really opened up the market
You know freed the market as as it were for money to compete with each other
Yeah, that's that's uh, I guess it's freedom and what it's worth, right? John. What do you think?
That's right, that's right freedom this is all about freedom
It's about a censorship resistant money and James Lobb man. He's got what 220,000 followers
He blew up on Twitter
I already with it like 10,000 and then we had that bull run and then
You know, my man just blew up on people and now he's all about that privacy and security
So so glad we have him on the show man. Yeah. Well, it's a James
It was one of the things I wanted to push back on
I listen to a couple of your podcasts with Peter McCormick and
You know, I'm very curious. Here's your take is but you know
You said something like people aren't used to having their personal responsibility with money
They're used to relying on you know, third party people who take care of all their screw-ups or
Something to that effect. Yeah, and so I guess here's here's my question
I
Mean there's there's a lot of things today with the modern economy that I can get done that I don't have to know how to do
Right. I don't know. I don't have to know how to fix my car for example, right?
I can go to mechanic. I would much rather spend my money to exchange
The mechanics time for fixing my car then actually to understand how to do it myself
Although obviously there's some type of doomsday scenario and I had to fix my own car
I'd probably be screwed. Um, and so, you know, I told John I've been in since I told you guys august of 2017
So I'm beyond three years in and on top of that. I have very very low anxiety
I mean I fight people in the cage for a living or it did right and so I'm not that I don't have a lot
Of fear or anxiety but other people every time I log on to my trades, I'm still like shit. I hope this money's
Hope this Bitcoin still here
I hope this Bitcoin still here. Um, and so I just feel I feel like there is going to need to be
Something that makes all those lazy people
Uh have a really easy capability of getting access to bitcoin or or other crypto
Yeah, you you make an excellent point which is
Is it's understandable how society has evolved to where we are right now, you know, we have
Over millennia created these hierarchical command and control structures and the reason is all efficiency
Right. It is specialization
If if it wasn't for specialization then you would have to worry about growing your own food and and basically worry about basic survival skill
Which is uh far more intensive than you being able to specialize on punching somebody in the face and let other people
Worry about fixing your car or podcast, right?
so
Well, ultimately, you know, the problem is like how does this conflict with some of the mantras we have in bitcoin?
You know trust this don't trust verify, you know be sovereign be your own bank all yada yada yada
yada those things come with additional responsibility if you want the power to really
Take control of your bitcoin and have the censorship resistance and all of these other
Valuable attributes. So what do you do if you want to?
To be your own bank, but you don't want to you know, learn all the technical underpinnings of the protocol
This is where I mean, it's this is really what i've been doing which is
How do we create software where we can leverage, you know, my technical expertise the specialization of myself and and my co-workers that we've
built up over many years learning about bitcoin security and
Allow people to use our software
Which has a lot of the best practices and all this technical mumbo jumbo built into it
So you just follow the directions on the screen and don't have to know all the the dirty it management stuff
But do this in a way where we don't have to have your private keys
So we can't control your money, but we can help you help yourself. It is really
Specialization for self-empowerment is it's kind of what i'm going for nice. Okay, and that's I mean that's
Yeah, so you should uh, you should promote yourself a little bit. It is it is casa hadal and I know I know that's one
One thing john always says to me is you know, you can exchange
Speed for safety or safety for speed but you can only you know, really have one or expediency, right?
And you can really only have one identity. You can only have one or you got to pick what mix of them you're going to have
There are many different trade-offs
Uh, the the most common one that we see in, you know crypto and security is convenience
Versus security. Yeah, it's so it's so much easier just to you know, log into your coinbase account and and you know access your bitcoin
Iou's, you know ask coinbase to do things on your behalf
but then as a result, it's also
Creating a very different threat model where there now there are many other potential points of failure
both like internal to coinbase and external with other people who might get into your account and then
Coinbase to send out the coins to somewhere. You don't want them to go
Didn't they just have something last week? I I think they went down last week and and didn't they have some type of virus or something?
Uh, I mean it was a busy week. They got overwhelmed a bit but um
in general, you know, we see
People get their accounts compromised on exchanges all the time, you know, sometimes it's more sophisticated than other times
But it it really comes down to the fact that you know
Your keys are still online or at least the keys that are being held by this third party are online
And that's one of the many many things that we uh guard against with what we set up at casa
Yeah
um, okay, so
So, okay, so I agree with everything you said there. Um, so with the casa system and maybe you can explain this to everyone
And this is gonna be kind. I feel like this is gonna be tough to explain to new people
But hell let's go for it. Anyways, um, and if I get this wrong, correct me. You have three, uh
Cold wallets, right?
Tracer ledger, whatever and you need a combination of them to access the funds in your account
And this is something then, you know, if you lose one
Then casa can help you replace one of the three which means you still have you, you know, you still have three wallets
And so there's no way anyone can you know hold you at gunpoint or steal your uh tracer and some of your password
And you know just at one swipe because they would have to get all three of them, correct
Yeah, so, uh the fundamental piece of technology that we're leveraging
That's part of the bitcoin protocol is something called multi sig
Basically, it means instead of having a single key sign off on creating a bitcoin transaction. You need several
And we have a couple of different setups
One of them is two out of three where you need two signatures out of three possible
Another at the higher level is three out of five
You know as these numbers go up, you're essentially creating more resiliency more redundancy and we're
Building this on top of like you said the existing hardware
out there like the treasurers and ledgers now the
Really important part is that then the user physically distributes these devices?
Home office friend's house safety deposit box
Uh, we we hold one offline at casa for emergency situations and it's this distribution
That gives you a level of resilience against both attack and just
Simple loss due to any number of things like a house fire natural disaster. What have you the the most?
Important thing that we can do is eliminate single points of failure
And that's what scares everybody right is even if you are if you take that first step and you get your coins off the exchange
You put them on a treasurer. Well, now you've got all your keys sitting right here and there's so many things
And it's so easy to do
so many things and so the point is
We we understand your bitcoin has always had the promise of be your own bank
But I think that's not good enough because a bank is still like one single place that could have something go wrong with it
Instead we can actually now with the technology we can do better than a bank
We can create this distributed resilient setup that can withstand any number of attacks and uh disasters that a single bank
Wouldn't be able to and the great thing is we can actually make it easy
Uh with casa, it's just a mobile app like all this technical stuff that we're talking about is all under the hood
It's abstracted away
You're just tapping on the app and following the instructions and plugging in your device when you're prompted to do so
nice
Wow, you know, you know, uh, we have a community, uh called litecoin fam and
We go out and push for adoption
And my friend johnny litecoin. He's he's in the merchant service business and he always says this nobody cares
Until it happens to them
Right. Nobody cares to protect themselves and their information until they get a charge back that they in their they lose money
so so like so many people these days like i've heard your podcast and
When i'm hearing i'm pumped like oh i'm gonna go home and take my phone number off of everything and just whatever but
But because i'm not a victim yet. No because i'm not a victim yet. It doesn't push me to do it. But
Jameson you've been a victim of some crazy things. I've read about that
Yeah, so can you give us a little bit a story of what happened with you at your at your house
yes, so
you know, I have a different perspective than a lot of people and
And part of that is what has happened to me personally part of it is because of what i've seen
While working in the bitcoin security industry
I've i've seen many hard lessons learned by other people
Who made mistakes and ended up losing millions and millions of dollars in an instant?
Now, uh as for myself like shit got real when I had a swat team shut down my whole neighborhood
Yeah
Geez, you know that was that was related to all this bitcoin stuff, you know, basically part of my
rise to prominence on on twitter during the 2017 hype
Resulted in me going from a few thousand to like a hundred thousand followers
And you know, this is just a law of large numbers, you know, any celebrity has to deal with this of once you have enough attention
Uh, once you have, you know millions of people who are watching you
So the statistical likelihood that one or more of them is going to be unhinged and will do something
to try to harm you starts to go up and so I
Reached some threshold where a guy who had the technical ability to know how to place an anonymous phone call
and say the right, uh
The right phrases to my local police department that would get them to send out the swat team
Uh, he managed to do it and he you know, he was trying to extort me for bitcoin because you figured
Hey, this guy's been in bitcoin for a few years. Maybe if I scare him bad enough, he'll just pay me off
Funnily enough the guy was trying to extort me for about fifty thousand dollars in bitcoin
And of course, I didn't pay him anything
But I ended up spending about that much to burn down my entire life and started all over again with a renewed
Oh, man, so the money has been spent but not for you know, it's intended purpose
It's actually instead of a one-time payoff. This has hardened my entire operational security posture
So are you totally off the grid now?
Yeah, I mean it depends on how you define off the grid, you know, obviously I still have internet connection
And i'm still able to communicate. I mean i've worked remotely
For five years the entire time i've been working in bitcoin
however
I'm off the grid from the sense that there is nothing out there that connects my identity to my physical address. I'm using
Proxies of all kinds as a shielding mechanism to protect me
I'm using digital proxies, you know vpns and torr to protect my online, uh traffic i'm using
uh legal proxies in the form of anonymous corporations and trusts where
Um, i'm not listed on those but those are the things that actually own my different properties
they're not connected to me legally creating a paper trail and um, i'm using proxies in the sense of
uh other people where
um
If I want to you know receive physical things
I I have other like private mailboxes that are really people and so I I can you know, that's crazy
We have like a torr network of mailing addresses that like hop physical mail around the country
Stuff like that is wait, that's the thing. All right, so yeah
Really hold on. Oh, so I I so I see I see two things number one ben
You have way more followers than james. So you need to really start thinking
Do you go on public
Uh, okay. So this is where I really wait. Okay. I'm sorry and question number two
Uh, are you really scared for your own safety or is this something that like you're doing it to try to get really good at this
It's more the latter, but i'll tell you my um perspective
Okay, and this this is what really came true. Um
But like the way that I tell people to approach security whether it's physical or digital or whatever
Is that you should think through what your current threat assessment is?
Is and then 10x that and build your security to be you know
Robust against 10x more of whatever it is that you're currently worried about
Yeah, because that's what happened to me, right?
I went from having a few thousand to a hundred thousand followers my my threat profile ballooned because I had so much more attention
So much more scrutiny people trying to poke and prod and find the holes in my system
I mean, yeah, that was the only time I got physically attacked
But I mean I was getting digitally attacked like all my different online properties really being attacked
You know on a regular basis once I went into the bitcoin security space
And that's just you know, spearfishing becomes a thing whenever you're protecting a lot of people's money
But um, I do go out physically
But this is one thing where i've really taken it to the extreme is that I moved to a new location
And I created an alias. So no one around here knows my real name and identity
They know my alias then they know that I work as a software engineer so I can maintain the like technical
facade as it were but
Part of it is just that that's another shield where no one here even knows that I am me
Therefore, it's not even possible for them to leak that information
What?
Come on
You probably you probably won't tell us your fake name. Will you no probably not but it's like, you know, it's common probable name, right?
It's something that right rodney smith
Not too common
Okay, and you move and you move to a place where nobody knew you because obviously like if you move one town over
And someone saw you then they'd be like no, no, no, that's that's not
That's not bob. That's that's Jameson. Yeah, but you know, um
I had only ever been recognized in real life one time and that's when I was in silicon valley
So it wasn't that surprising. Okay, so I can still get away with it
Do you go to any like say, you know, like last year I went to the light clean invention
Do you go to any any type of things like that? Oh, yeah. I mean I still go to to various
Physical bitcoin and crypto events. I just take care in how I travel to them. Got it. Got it
Okay. Wow, that that's fascinating and love I know you're and I know you're a big
Uh gun lover, right your your freedom of the second amendment. You love all that and and right before the show
I mean you even you know showed me that you're not playing around. So you carry with guns
Yeah, I mean i'm always within you know close reach of
It's uh, I mean this is just another part of security posture, you know if if I have a physical attacker
Um, I would prefer not to have to engage them hand-to-hand. Uh, you know if I have the ability to amplify my power
And I have you know training and a number of different weapons that I can do that with then i'm going to use whatever
I can to my advantage
Wow
Jamie said we're gonna ask you if we ever meet you we're gonna say put the gun down
Let's fight man-to-man because that's the only chance we got against you
So I have to admit
That I I did a couple years of krav maga training. So I don't fight cleanly. I don't play by any rules
I might actually gouge your eyes out
Um, I've been my guy
Oh my
The lineman the line of good fight. He gouged my eyes like a son of a gun
That was that was not really fun at all. I don't know how the ref did not catch it. Um
Yeah, so
Okay, Jameson, um
You know one of the other things that I picked up
uh from your peter mccormick podcast was
Uh, you I don't want to say you didn't have a strong opinion, but you were more kind of
Low-key, I don't want to say neutral, but you know, like not really really strongly opinionated on the bitcoin versus bcash
Uh topic and I found it interesting because usually people have a really really really strong opinion
They're either this side or this side and that's it but you were kind of like, ah, I kind of see his perspective
I kind of see their perspective and I see what they're getting at and I really like that. I appreciate that
So could you uh, just you know elaborate that for our listeners, right? So
I would say I have a strong opinion that I believe that you know, the conservative bitcoin, um
Protocol development that has been going on for several years is the the right path
But this is not a thing about right or wrong
It is about perspectives and trade-offs of what people are willing to make
I understand it because I was a big blocker in the early days myself. It wasn't until I started
Having to run bitcoin nodes and build bitcoin infrastructure that I started to realize what some of these trade-offs really were
and so fundamentally the uh scaling debate within bitcoin that culminated in 2017 was
a clash between wanting to prioritize the cost of on-chain transactions
versus the perspective of wanting to prioritize the
um cost of auditing the history of the entire blockchain and these two are are
uh essentially in conflict with each other because in order to keep
Transactions cheap in order to keep those uh, the block space cheap
you have to have
Potentially infinitely large blocks. You have to just keep increasing the block size to to whatever is required to prevent there being any pressure
um
To get into the next block and as you do that
It creates more and more data and the blockchain never removes data. It just keeps adding data
and you are geometrically increasing the amount of data that then has to be verified by someone who wants to come and join the
network and that was what I had an ultimate problem with is that
I was seeing the ability to run a node become more and more expensive
Yeah, what do you think about that john?
All right. I can't I don't even know john. Are you passionate one way or the other?
You know, uh, it just can't you just can't keep increasing the blocks
I think I think second layer solution is is was was the most important to keep
Like put a fortress around bitcoin and don't mess with it because the security and everything is just censorship resistance. It's
Nothing can compete with bitcoin, right?
So I think we just leave it as is until it's it's impossible to continue and then we figure it out then
But I think I think you're right. I think bitcoin right now we need so it's about incentives, right?
The whole system is about incentives and as I was seeing
um
Creating a system where there's no fee pressure and transactions are always practically free
That does not incentivize people to use the block space
uh wisely or judiciously
I mean just put whatever you want on there if you want to see you know, look at eos or look at
uh bitcoin sv or whatever and and how
Unmaintainably large these systems are becoming like I I can't even run an eos node
um
uh bsv knows probably pretty hard too, so
uh if if we really want these systems to
be
Maintainable and and run not just for a few years
But for generations like if we're really trying to replace money and build a global system
It needs to be something that is accessible for people as many people as possible in as many ways as possible
Yeah, that's I was actually brought there. Go ahead john
So even ethereum blockchain it takes how long to download the whole blockchain? Yeah. Well, you know that that's an issue of
Complexity of you know, they have so many more, uh, you know features built into their protocol
It's much more computationally intensive to the point that now like you can't even
Really sink the ethereum blockchain if you have a spinning disk hard drive
You need to have at least a solid state hard drive
there's just so many operations that have to happen to get through there and
It's fascinating to see how the communities change in response to these things is that usually they end up making trade-offs
Oh just you know use the light client, you know, just skip forward to you know, a thousand blocks ago and and
Assume that everything that happened before that is honestly being told to you by whatever nodes you're connected to
So it's once again, it's all about trade-offs
That's not flying with the bitcoin maxima
So james man like uh, you know, we have very like new people coming into this space
We get emails all the time say okay. Mma fans ufc fans. Just just regular average joe, right?
Okay, we I just we just invested in bitcoin. We just had eddie alvarez the underground team
the ex
UFC champion
Uh give ben asking a shout out on twitter says finally I bought it. Okay, then I bought it now
I didn't ask but I would have said just just wait. There's probably a pullback coming up here
You know wait like two days or something. Maybe
time to market
Yeah
No, it's part. It's all part of the process. You gotta go through it. There's no shortcut
Average regular people
So what are some of the things that we can do as best practice?
to protect our information and have a little bit of privacy or
You know because the things that you're doing is I gotta say it's kind of extreme, right? Yep. So, uh
For regular people what are some of the best practices that you you would suggest to them?
So
If you just spend a weekend looking at some of the technical things you can do
Uh, you know setting up a vpn to help obscure your traffic installing ad blockers in your browsers
I mean
simple things like that will get you like 95 percent of the way better than than
other people who are using the internet on a regular basis, so my
Original job like the first 10 years of my career was actually spent doing
Uh large-scale data analysis for online marketing companies and it was really the antithesis of what I do today and perhaps
Contributes a bit to my perspective of understanding how much data is really being scooped up and analyzed
It's you know
pretty much every web page that you're going to out there is shock full of various trackers that are sending your
Data back to some large farm that's then trying to like cross
Analyze it and correlate it with other tracking things. You've done on other websites that share similar
uh, you know tracker scripts on them and
Uh, most of it is innocuous enough. They're just trying to sell you more shit, but uh, ultimately the the data
is uh potentially sensitive and you don't know
What's going to happen if it leaks and it gets into the wrong hands?
And that's what we continue to see happen over and over and over again
Is that every time people are trusting their data with third parties?
It's it's just it's a ticking time bomb until some hacker gets in and that data gets abused
Yes, it's that's uh, that's no joke. Um
Okay, so and I want to one more I guess i don't know
I feel like that was a deep topic for our audience john, but i'm gonna go one more semi-deep question Jameson
I actually I meant to tell you I meant to tag you this morning because I do I do something called mental monday
I talk about thought processes for sports and stuff
And there was there you were one of three people who all said roughly the same thing
Um, which is it's it's uh, anti-fragile fighting to seem to leave right that whole that whole thought process
Justin gachey after uh his fight on saturday night when he won
He said I needed to lose to change I needed to get beat to get better
I realized I wasn't doing this this this and this and um, you know
I think that's such an important thought process for people to have and a lot of people
They don't want to feel the pain right because losing or failure it comes the drags belong pain with it
But then you need the pain to force you to change was what just engage you said and great people understand this
You were talking about?
um
You know how bitcoin is open for attack essentially all the time 24 7
But this is not this is not a flaw. This is a feature. It only makes it stronger
So, uh, I don't know if there's a simple way to elaborate on that a little bit
But hopefully you can go a little bit into it. Yeah, I mean
Metaphors tend to work really well in this space just to get rid of a lot of the complexity
And I think the the simplest metaphor that we can use is just your your own immune system
You know if we think of bitcoin as an organism and a number of people
Include including like prominent cryptographers have called bitcoin a new form of life. It is this kind of decentralized
centralized
Organization that's comprised of all of us
Regardless of whether you're a speculator or a coder or a shit poster
I mean, we're all contributing in our own way to uh, the this ethos this thing that is bitcoin
and that's part of the reason why no one can understand what it is is because it is so diverse and distributed but
If we think in terms of how your own body fights off bad things, it's
You have this army of
You know like white blood cells that are going around looking for bad things
and when they see a bad thing they react and they may create antibodies that help fight them off and
It's really the same type of thing within bitcoin
But at a more macro level where the white blood cells are the people like myself or really anyone
who is paying attention and looking for behavior that they consider to be antithetical to the ethos of the system
It may be technical things. It may be social things
you know
There are plenty of people who would say that
Some of the 2017 and scaling drama was a social attack on bitcoin
There's this whole thing with segwit 2x being like a cabal of small
organizations basically enterprises within the bitcoin ecosystem
trying to force through a change against consensus
It's all a fascinating thing to think about like from a governance perspective
But I think that if you just think of it as an organism
That is made up of many people it starts to make a lot more sense
Like that's why it's so chaotic is you know, there is no no one authority that's controlling all this
We're all doing our own thing and whatever bitcoin is just sort of organically evolves
is spontaneously as a result of all these chaotic interactions
That makes yeah, that's good to explain it actually that they may think something funny right ready for this john
You inspired me you and here's yeah, you inspired me
So I have a bunch of high school kids that come over and they work
at my house in the summer on the disc golf course and you know john's all about using the
Uh, whatever crypto when he's out and about, you know being an evangelist
And so I told all these kids I said listen track your hours this summer
I will pay you in bitcoin
And if on august 31st it is below the price at which i'd paid you I won't make up the difference, right?
So if you work 10 hours, you're supposed to be 100 bucks and it's over 90 that point time
I'll make up to 10 bucks. I said if you gain you get to keep the gain
So I paid I paid one kid. I think it was for eight hours or something. You know, he's ever working
And and the next day he's like, oh I just made three more dollars, you know, because bitcoin went up
You know yesterday he texted me like oh what the hell I just lost seven dollars i'm like
Oh my goodness
He's he's getting fired up over three bucks and seven bucks. It was it was I was dying laughing
Oh man, yeah, we got to get people used to the volatility, you know, um, it takes a while
uh to strap in to the bitcoin roller coaster and really I consider it, uh,
to be like
You're an og if you've survived an entire hype cycle, you know once you've
Been through the mania phase where it looks like everything's going to the moon. Nothing could go wrong
And then if you survive the the 80 90 crash
Where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth and you manage to get through that without panic
Smiling and and essentially rage quitting then you're probably on the path to becoming a true hodler
Yes, I I agree. Hey lob. Have you seen have
Lob, have you seen uh ben askren fight? Uh, robbie lawler. Did you see that fight? No, I haven't. Oh
Okay, so you didn't watch that fight and and uh ben askren will teach you how to survive
Adversity and come out on top you will see in that fight
I I know I you know, I was watching the fight and I literally was so worried
Because he was getting hit with some shots that would have knocked
99.99 percent of the people in this world out and then he just rose from the ashes like bitcoin
Came back and and bulldog took them, you know, so, um, I I mean
Go ahead. That's not what I was thinking john. I'm not thinking about myself getting punched
I'm thinking I got in I got in right as you know as we were doing the run-up
And so I've seen mostly this, you know, and uh, i've held the whole time
So listen, I am deserved a really really really nice bull run right now
After after a two-year bear market, I think we all do but you know, this is the way things go
Hopefully history somewhat repeats. Oh, I forgot to ask you
Jameson the other day ben askren did a one-minute bitcoin halving, uh explanation
And I think it's over like 80 000 views on instagram and twitter. Nice. Did you see it?
And what what is your thoughts on his one-minute brief explanation?
Of bitcoin halving. No, I wish I had uh, i'll have to check it out though. Is it uh
How technical then check check it out after the podcast. Well, and I I want you to grade him
One to ten and how he did because he likes compliments, you know, you know the one thing that was really hard john
I'll tell you I usually try to do things in one take but I want to do it in one minute because that's instagram time
What's got to go to the you know, the the longer frame and getting it in a minute was really really tough
I had to do it
I should send you an outtake because one time I almost nailed it and then I misspoke and then I started again
Which misspeaking is fine, but then I realized damn it
I'm going to miss it by like three seconds and I started to cuss up a storm. I was so annoyed
You know what though so many people watched it because with one minute it was brief
And and you had it on the whiteboard and you were talking like you were a coach. You know what I mean?
So I like it but Jameson. I got one. I got one other issue that oh that really bothers me, right?
Whenever I go to like a grocery store or or to buy something
They always ask me for my phone number and my email and you know
I don't i'm like I don't give out my email. I I don't like to give out my phone number
And the funny thing is they look at me like i'm so weird, right?
And people behind me who are lining up they're like, you know, what are you doing? Just giving me an email. I'm like
No, I don't want to give my email and it's not because of big security reasons
I just don't like to be spammed all the time. Yeah, you know
So it's just it's the same thing when you go to a restaurant, right?
They say oh, do you want cheese with that? Do you want fries with that?
Do and then they don't even tell you that it's going to cost extra until you go to the lot at when
Go to pay and and your bill has has gone up
So it's these practices that the corporations are doing to to to to steal your information
So they can send you something behind the scenes. So uh, what do you think about that?
That's I don't like to feel like
A dummy for not wanting to give out my phone number and email. That's it
Yeah
It for me, it depends on my mood. How much of an asshole do I want to be?
You know if if I want to push back and be like not going to happen, you know
Then I might just be adversarial
But most of the time if I if I don't want to create a scene and whatever then I just give them fake info
I mean, they don't know there's no way for them to validate
so, uh, you can make up, uh
An email or phone number that's that's easy to remember and just go with that
All right. Hey, let's do uh
John we'll run out of time. Let's do our rapid fire questions
And then i'm gonna thank our sponsor and then we're out of here. Is that sound good jameson?
Sounds good. All right rapid fire favorite follow on crypto twitter
Favorite follower of mine. No, no, no who you follow who's the favorite if you could follow me
Follow one person on crypto twitter. Who would it be? Uh, well, it's got to be andreas antinopoulos
He was basically, uh the guy that inspired me the most to to you know
Be a public voice and try to help people understand bitcoin. Awesome. Okay, then
Hopefully is that he might he might get to in a row. What is your favorite?
Uh crypto book
Oh, um, I have to say bitcoin billionaires, uh, because there were some interesting tidbits in there about like the the winklevoss and charlie shram, etc
It's uh, less of a technical book and more of a just like interesting personal history. Yeah, that was a fun fun fun and easy read
Um, okay question number three. Who is satoshi?
Uh, I think satoshi is the time-traveling artificial intelligence from the future
Is that a joke?
Okay
Uh best price guess for december 31 2020
Oh god, yeah, uh, I preface everything by by saying I have no idea about prices. Yeah, um
But I guess it depends on if you believe in the stock-to-flow model that everyone else does
So I like to be conservative though, so
Instead of saying two hundred fifty thousand dollars. I'll say how about we we shoot for fifty thousand and be happy that it's an all-time high
I would be happy with that
Um, okay, james says that that's a good one
That's the guy who got into bitcoin at ten dollars. Yeah, right. That's only five five. What 500x?
We're missing a zero. Um
Okay, jameson. We appreciate it. Let me give one quick shout out to our sponsor blockfi
You get $100 free today sign up for an account put $200 in uh, you guys see that scrolling at the bottom of our screen
Just go to the link try.blockfi.com
Plus bitcoin having promo slash funky jameson. That was a blast. We appreciate you taking the time
I know you're very very busy today and guys we have I believe four blocks left
Enjoy the rest of your days. Happy having peace guys. All right. Stay funky everyone