You know even Bitcoin itself did not appear out of thin air. There were many prior attempts that failed and even when Bitcoin when it came out it actually had a lot of flaws and Satoshi and other early developers had to fix a number of those flaws. So my main point here is that Bing Bong we are live with another edition of the State of Bitcoin podcast where I got the man the myth the legend in the house at the Bitcoin conference, Jameson Law, Jameson welcome to the program. But first obviously we just heard the breaking news here where Trump is planning to potentially keep a strategic reserve of Bitcoin and for his first step is not selling. So I want to hear your initial thoughts and initial reactions behind the whole thing. It sounds like some of sailors ideas might have rubbed off on him. But you know the my main takeaway is something that I just posted the other day is that look Bitcoin doesn't need any help from politicians. All we need is them to get out of the way and they just keep getting in the way blocking us and they're actually being anti-innovation. So you know it's great if they want to do constructive stuff as well but you know stay out of the way and we'll be happy. Yeah and it seems like that was kind of Trump's message throughout the whole thing where he was like pointing about you know Operation Chokepoint 2.0 he's going to finish that and you know kind of abolish some of these things. Now there's been a big attack on privacy in that aspect. Do you think that that's going to still continue or do you think that the U.S. is still kind of doing a full like 180 on the whole Bitcoin policy in general just kind of seeing the buzz around all this and the conference and everything like that? Yeah I mean we didn't really hear any touching on privacy issues so much and really privacy is not top of mind for many people so I would have been surprised if privacy came up. The trend is not great for privacy as well I mean and there were you know some recent regulations that just went into effect this year that actually stripped a lot of privacy protections away some of which I use myself using legal structures for example to protect privacy and ownership of publicly registered assets. So you know there's some court cases that are still held up around that but it's generally not looking good and I don't have any reason to believe that the government is going to give up on its desire for more surveillance. Yeah because it seems like to me that the U.S. government never really hated Bitcoin too much it's just they wanted to know what you're doing with it basically they want to track it and they want to tax it and so that's why we've seen a lot of these lightning wallets and everything like that essentially leave the U.S. now do you kind of agree with me on that point or do you still think that the government you know previously maybe hated Bitcoin and now they're almost doing somewhat of a turn on it because they're seeing how much it can potentially swing an election. Yeah I mean look it's it's the whole Bank Secrecy Act AML KYC regime regulators wanting to have as much information as possible so that they can exert as much control as possible and so it's it's a tricky thing whenever you're asking for a political figure to promise to give up power it's just not in their incentives to do so. Yeah so I mean I think this whole thing is very interesting right I mean first like we're getting businesses start to take Bitcoin on their balance sheet more institutional level adoption than we're seeing more of you know potentially countries right we had El Salvador come on and now we're potentially talking about the U.S. depending on who gets in office and kind of that whole situation but I want to hear about your thoughts potentially on RFK as well because he came in here last year he kind of seemed to read a book almost last year but this year he seemed very well spoken and he did a lot of education in the past year now I'm hopeful Trump could do the same thing if he gets elected and that's kind of the way things go but we shall see so were you impressed with kind of the year-to-year change from RFK and how he was you know talking about Bitcoin and potential policies and things like that? Yeah look I mean the short version is RFK has been doing his homework Trump just started doing his homework maybe a month or two ago so RFK is way ahead of the game and he's able to construct much more salient talking points and much more I think thoughtful policy simply because he's had so much more time to do so it is unfortunate of course that he's in a position that it's you know incredibly unlikely that he's going to end up as president but you know hopefully he does land somewhere where he has a fair amount of influence and he can take those ideas and you know put some pressure on the right people to get them enacted. Yeah I mean 100% so like as a business owner in the U.S. right where you're kind of you know regulating around the Bitcoin and the crypto industry and everything like that how much weight do you put on a lot of these regulations going on like you guys keep a very close eye yeah how are you kind of tracking that as as things are developing here because it is ever changing it seems. Yeah so at Casa our our primary goal is to not be regulated as a financial service and this is tricky to do because we're operating in a fairly gray area of the market where we're primarily operating off of some sort of unwritten rules around like what constitutes custody and what constitutes you know becoming a financial service provider so we would much prefer to have you know clarified rules that say like as long as you only do these things and don't do these things then you're safe but as it is this means that you know we have to maintain pretty active relationships with various political organizations that you know have their ear to the ground because frankly we don't have time to be listening to what all the bureaucrats in DC are saying to each other that this stuff is constantly moving and it's it's always like we might do this drastic thing we might do that drastic thing and and so we don't have the insight to you know understand all of the connections and relationships to understand if one thing that comes out of one politicians or regulators mouth is something we should even be worried about like what is the likelihood that this thing will actually go from just becoming an idea to becoming law. So we we do have to spend time though you know joining meetings and reading newsletters and basically getting the synopsis from the people who make it their full-time job to be in the know. Yeah and I mean I think that that's a very important aspect of you know just what's going on in this ever-changing landscape I mean Trump was even coming out and saying and he doesn't want to take away any of the bitcoin or crypto jobs from the US he wants to keep them all here now it seems like that I don't know I mean do you I guess trust him in that sense where that can that can happen or you know it's just the that climate in the US just making it more and more difficult to build a business around you because there's just not clarity the inflationary aspect all these different kind of factors that are just making it a little bit harder to build a business in the US. Yeah so as a general rule I don't trust any politician further than I can throw them but you know I I do know Trump is a businessman and he understands business and you know I do believe that he wants the best for America you know with regard to our economy our business infrastructure and so you you note that a lot of the things that he said he was talking about the industry the industry so he's focused on the economic and business aspects of this stuff and you know I think that he is surrounding himself with the right people which is why he's started to get some of the right talking points out there now what does it really mean all it really means is we need to have regulations from actual written down concepts and not the current regime which is regulation by enforcement so like that's why people are fleeing overseas is because there's no clarity we only get clarity basically when you get sued or prosecuted by one of these agencies and so when you're you're living in fear like that you're constantly making this decision of should I even stick around here or should I go somewhere where I can focus on my business and not be worried about you know political change of the wins or you know which bureaucrat is currently sitting in office at some given agency and you know are they going to have some sort of vendetta against me and what I'm trying to do yeah no definitely that makes a lot of sense but you know and it kind of just you know affects overall scaling of business and all that kind of aspect as well but you know obviously we've had a lot of things happen this year in the bitcoin industry a lot of things have changed not only like the presidential candidates that were going over here we've had traditional finance kind of come in now the US seems to be looking at bitcoin more as like an investment and that's kind of you know the way that things are are trending whether it's digital gold however you want to describe it now I know that you've talked at length about like kind of the scaling issues with bitcoin now do you foresee I guess a way to potentially move the and shift the narrative to more of the peer-to-peer transactions here in the US or do you think because of the dollar dominance and kind of the state that we're in that you know as long as we have the dollar and it doesn't completely crash and inflate away that the digital gold narrative will kind of be here to stay for a while yeah I mean Max Kaiser actually said something earlier today where he was basically talking about how I think bitcoin is a mirror and you know one way to rephrase that is you know you you see bitcoin as you are not as bitcoin is so different people can look at bitcoin and see different things and so if we're talking about the United States we have a really good financial infrastructure here pretty much everybody is able to make payments if they have the money to do so we don't have a ton of disenfranchised people compared to most other countries and so for that reason like bitcoin as payment technology has just not been very interesting to people they're sure there there are some censorship issues if you're trying to do gray or black market stuff and so you know that's why silk road was you know one of the big booms that really kicked off this whole industry but by and large you know bitcoin as an investment asset as an inflation hedge as a just completely new asset class is much more interesting to the average American than any of the myriad of interesting like payment technology functionality that could happen and you know I'm a technologist so I'm certainly interested in bitcoin being far more than just digital gold but we have a lot of work to do and that's that's what I'm going to be focused on yeah so is that I guess I mean I think that that gradual progression here in the US as the dollar kind of you know essentially kind of fades away right I mean I kind of see two pass that bitcoin we can get to a hyper bitcoinized world there's either one where the dollar crashes and burns and then we got to rebuild from the ground up or there's one where maybe we have you know the strategic reserve of bitcoin and you know the dollar slowly fades away because you know governments will still be human and print too much on top of it and you know the government essentially has a spending problem so we'll have this slow transition which will give developers more time in order to you know combat some of these problems now say the scenario first happens where everything crashes and burns now how realistic would it be to get a to a hyper bitcoinized world in the next decade or so with development of everything and the issues that we have I mean the lightning network is great in small transactions but it still has some issues and you know running a lightning node and everything like that so do you think that it is realistic to get to a point and maybe the next decade or so where we could see a hyper bitcoinized world yeah I mean 10 years is a sufficiently long enough period of time though you know a base bitcoin protocol development is going very very slowly and you know this is one of the things that I'm being more outspoken about because we have a lot of great proposals out there and I would love to see a number of them get implemented but you know the there's the sort of social dynamics and general issues of network protocols ossifying like it's almost a physics problem with network protocols and becoming harder and harder to change them over time so if anything you know this is why I think we need to really put our foot on the gas and try to get as many improvements into bitcoin earlier rather than later because it's only going to get harder to do so so you know I think there is a path there will it happen uh that's really going to be incumbent on all of us who are participating in it to say you know we need to keep pushing forward because I certainly would not want for there to be a major economic catastrophe anytime in the next few years because you know bitcoin would not be able to handle it at least in the way that we would want the only way that it would really work would be everybody starts trading bitcoin IOUs from Coinbase or something yeah so I mean I want to expand on that so what are like some of the developments that you think that need to be pushed forward and you know does it worry you at all that you know potentially we can get some you know developments pushed in too quickly or is there like you know the the betting process like how are you kind of viewing the quickness comparative to like the battle testing I guess of some of these new recommendations look I think the process itself is extremely conservative and I mean I wouldn't push to make it much more accelerated than it is but I am worried that it is continually decelerating and and it's not so much that developers aren't working as hard like I said we already have a lot of great proposals out there but the problem that we're running into is that developers are more than happy to spend a lot of time thinking very deeply about and constructing improvements to the protocol and and even you know battle testing them you sort of ideologically or on test networks but almost nobody these days wants to take up the mantle and actually champion a proposal through the gauntlet of the you know activation process so that's kind of where we are right now and you know we're going to continue talking about the proposals and doing what we can I think to convince the rest of the world that a you know given proposal has merit now if we want to be more specific the the proposals that I think are most crucial for us to get to a hyper bitcoin eyes world are those that enable more innovation and more development of second layer solutions and so if you think about it there there has been this kind of explosion in L2s lately but a lot of them I think can rightfully be argued are not true L2s in the sense that if you define a bitcoin second layer as something where you should be able to move your money from bitcoin to the other thing back and forth trustlessly like Matt Corallo told us is basically the most important aspect of bitcoin then from that perspective you could argue that the only true L2 that we have right now is lightning and I think it's important to note because I've seen this trend of a lot of people saying oh you know we only need lightning or look we we created lightning we can create other L2s um lightning would not have been possible if we didn't make multiple changes to bitcoin's consensus code and and the rules and you know activated multiple pieces of functionality at the base layer and so my point here is that we have the opportunity to do this again we have the opportunity to activate more functionality at the base layer that will then lead to an explosion of development in L2s because we will then have the ability for people to create these permissionless side chains and and second layers yeah so I guess you know there there's always the narrative of that that that lightning is it's difficult to scale and it's going to take some time and and I know you kind of wanted to you know some of the changes that needed to be made or some changes needed to be made in order to develop lightning now lightning seems to be like an imperfect solution for global payments so would would you think that there would need to be maybe like a secondary kind of L2 created or is there a world where the lightning network can scale and essentially become you know what we use on a day-to-day basis throughout the world right so I I don't think you're ever going to see a perfect silver bullet solution just magically appear out of thin air you know even bitcoin itself did not appear out of thin air there were many prior attempts that failed and even when bitcoin when it came out it actually had a lot of flaws and satoshi and other early developers had to fix a number of those flaws so my main point here is that your technological progress is an iterative thing it's it's very rare that you just all of a sudden have like an amazing you know order of magnitude improvement and so this is true for lightning as well like lightning is not done it has been around you know in production for about five years maybe six years now and even over that period of time it has become easier to use and more reliable but it is not you know infinitely scalable there are proposals that would you know make it more scalable even possibly orders of magnitude more scalable but once again would require more changes to bitcoin's base protocol so this is why I think it's just important that we understand bitcoin has the ability to evolve and we shouldn't throw that out the window because we're afraid that we might break it yeah it seems like there's two sides of the coin right because obviously you know as as you lined it out it's almost like you know just general physics where more people are going to be resistant to that change and I guess like how would to the average bitcoin user the average bitcoin core person are the average person who runs a bitcoin core node and you know everybody can essentially participate in that network how are we going to get that that message to some to you know the general population in order to say hey you know this could be a good potential change but you know there are potential negatives that come come from these changes as well like I mean say what you want about like the ordinals aspect of it there's that's been very controversial and that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for some changes that believe it's like bit 312 if I'm correct but you know all of these changes have had some sort of you know some controversy around it so it's made more people resistant to it so I guess how do we say like you know we need these changes in order to help develop and help the hyper bitcoinization there might be some trade-offs in the in the initial beginning but you know as bitcoin is you know those trade-offs maybe the scam things those you know ordinals eventually will potentially die out like things like that and maybe it's fun and clogging up the network in the in the short term but in the long term it would be better that makes sense are you looking for the best way to store your seed phrase well I've got it for you it's stamp seed they've got the number one punch place where you can order a full on packet where they've got every single thing they've got all the letters you could just get it in there and they've got this sick sick hammer which they've engineered to make it so easy for you to punch in that titanium steel plate and store your seed phrase in the most secure way possible so go ahead and get your bitcoin off of these exchanges and use promo code green candle for 15% off they're helping power their show they've got the bitcoin logo you could punch it into your seed phrase as well if you could see it here they've got a lot of cool stuff and now I'm helping empower you to get your bitcoin off an exchange utilizing stamp seed and storing your seed phrase in the most secure way possible now get to it all right back to the show yeah well you know bitcoin from a governance perspective is crypto anarchy you you don't vote with your node what you do is you kind of you signal to the rest of the network like I will accept these types of transactions so the short version is that it is incumbent upon the node operators if they wish to be running a node as part of the governance process of bitcoin they just need to pay attention whether that's you know reading the mailing list or just reading release notes when a new version comes out because it is important if you're running a node that you're keeping it up to date because there's you know critical security patches that tend to go out as well and if you don't update your software for a long time you can actually be putting yourself in a position of vulnerability but it you know bitcoin is the the sum of all of us who are participating so you know if all you're going to do is download the software and run it you know that can that still gives you empowerment by allowing you to audit what's going on with the ledger but if you want to take that next step and you want to be more active in the governance process then you have to pay attention you have to spend more time and you have to actually talk to other people to you know express your feelings yeah that that makes a lot of sense you know I mean you need to have a deeper understanding right in order to to do that and essentially you know vote right I mean it's it's like what we would do with a democratic election right if everything was you know kind of even in fair at a certain point you know everybody has the same amount of vote you need to be educated in order to realize what where what you're voting towards and kind of moving towards so on the second scenario that I lined out a little bit earlier with this slow kind of development into into a hyperbic coinized world right because we kind of just went over the full crash and burn type of scenario in the slower version how do you see us essentially like kind of getting to a hyper bitcoinized world if you know we have the strategic reserve of bitcoin in the united states and kind of have the dollar do you see us as like potentially keeping the dominance of the dollar for an extended period of time you know we always see that famous meme where the us empire is falling with that potentially bring us back up how do you see that kind of playing out or as a potential to I guess yeah help help the us dominance yeah I mean I think a lot of it is dependent basically on how the rest of the world acts and I guess you could say how like the enemies of America act right and so there does seem to be some movement to try to kill off the petro dollar if that continues that can certainly be problematic you know if if some of the the nations that are acting very favorable towards us because we offer them various like military protections if they change alliances then you know all bets are off so this really it becomes a game of geopolitics right so it's very difficult to speculate on geopolitics is not my forte by any means but there I mean there are a number of ways that the dollar could end up being substantially weakened yeah and it seems like that's kind of the the general trend in that direction now I know you said you are you're you know somewhat worried in the first scenario where you know there's there needs to be faster movement with the development in order to make Bitcoin more of a global payment system and make it efficient for everybody involved now in the longer scenario that could potentially play out by giving you know developers more time and you know just overall just more robustness to the network now in a hyper-Bitcoinized world is do you see any potential flaws in that outside of just you know the scalability and kind of like the transaction speed and the block aspects of it with anything in order to scale is it if you know I'm kind of getting that thing that's right well I mean there's also privacy issues and Bitcoin has terrible privacy lightning is a lot better you know e-cash which is newer has great privacy but it comes with other trade-offs but stepping back even further I think one of the issues that I worry about is is actually related to the governance but even from the developer perspective is who is contributing and and so if if 90% of Bitcoin development and contributors are all in America who the hell cares about making these you know highly scalable highly private payment systems if if Americans only see it as digital gold right so point being I and I am somewhat optimistic about this because we are seeing more developers come in but we need to get people from all different backgrounds you know diversity is strength we need to get perspectives from people who are in a number of different situations because Bitcoin is supposed to be the the best money for everyone and if it's going to be the best money for everyone then we need to get the input from everyone to say what do you need you know what is the perfect money that can cater to all of these myriad of you know life situations and threat models that people are dealing with you know there's a lot of people who live in much more oppressive autocratic regimes and they need privacy a lot more than we do just from a you know normal day-to-day living perspective yeah I never really thought of the privacy aspect kind of affecting it down that rabbit hole as well so I mean that is a really interesting point but it seems like there's there is a lot of development going on you know at least starting right they're having uh Bitcoin conferences in Africa I've met a few kind of people from there there's obviously a bunch in Europe as well um and in Asia obviously North America it's kind of growing you know outwards but you know something that that I kind of uh you know is almost resonating with me from what we heard earlier was that Trump wants to bring all the mining all the development all the jobs back to to America so right now majority of the hash rate is already in the U.S. comparatively to every other country um and you know like you said a lot of the development is in the U.S. so is that centralization of I guess the the industries around Bitcoin something that almost scares you a bit yeah I mean centralization from almost any metric is not optimal um now I would say I'm I'm still optimistic long term about hash rate centralization and and Matt Corallo talked about this a little earlier where he said you know actually hash rate is somewhat decentralized but the main reason why I'm optimistic about that is because it's a physics problem energy is decentralized and the incentives behind mining push people to go and find that stranded energy and it's all over the world uh the bigger aspect of centralization with mining that we're worried about right now is really the pools themselves and like who controls the creation of block templates and that's why uh Matt was talking about how bitmain has kind of nefariously gone around and gobbled up a lot of the mining pools in the industry and not told us about it and like the only way we find out about it is from a few very intrepid developers who are monitoring this stuff and and that's why it's preferable once again that we make upgrades to how we're doing this so that we can uh you know further distribute and decentralize that particular power which could be abused yeah and that you know I've heard that uh you know that the bitcoin mining aspect of it is not necessarily as like fos as you know the the rest of the development and is that an area as well that you think that needs to be pushed where there's more free and open source uh aspects in the bitcoin mining pools and kind of 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globe all right enough from me back to the show yeah um I mean I've talked to some miners to try to understand and this is mostly because mining is by far the most cutthroat aspect of this industry and you know it's highly capital driven highly capital intensive and so the the miners tend not to care quite as much about some of the ideology as the developers and and so like I've spoken to some of the largest miners in north america and I've said you know why can't you have one developer who helps you manage your own mining pool you know and they're like well we just can't justify it because right now the mining pools that we use are basically free so you know why would we spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on a developer and then setting up infrastructure and all this other stuff and because for the miners you know it's all about the bottom line yeah and I mean that the way I view the mining industry is is pretty I guess different in a sense of where you know a bitcoin company you like to see our company you like to see maybe putting a strategic reserve of their treasury into bitcoin where I think you know because bitcoin mining is all about the bottom line it's better to distance yourself a little bit from away from the volatility of that asset right if an oil miner essentially would hold oil or gold miner would hold gold it is kind of a in a lot of things you don't really see that in the other industry except for in bitcoin so you know it's it is weird where it's kind of like yeah they care about the bottom line but you also see that they essentially like tweet it out to get the clicks get the likes get everything up maybe get the stock price shooting up and things like that obviously it's all speculation oh yeah well the the public miners are even a weirder business with some of the stuff that goes on there yeah so I mean I think like just just like you know viewing it from like a publicly traded aspect of you know how businesses are run obviously you know CASA is a private business right now but there's a lot more bitcoin companies that are going public or holding you know bitcoin on the balance sheet of public companies we just had full denounce as well so you know from that perspective with sec regulation do you think that is more I guess friendly the more bitcoin companies that become publicly traded because in a sense you know they they want to be working with the sec or is that almost a negative in a sense where you know now we have all this information of whoever is utilizing these products now we got to worry more about privacy more worry more about you know just kind of like the opposite of the bitcoin ethos and getting the government starting to meddle into the bitcoin space um I don't know I think it would probably be more likely to become a problem if we saw a lot of these publicly traded entities screw up and bankrupt themselves and a lot of people lose a lot of money and there certainly has been some of that you know some of these miners basically got highly leveraged and I don't know that any necessarily went out of business but I think some of them kind of got like fire sold yeah that's fair to say so yeah I want to get into more about like the multi-seg and kind of the aspect of the self custody and holding your own keys in that aspect because you know as bitcoin starts to develop you know there's already what they're saying there's maybe four million coins already lost so the 21 million cap is essentially you know now what what is that 17 so do you think that uh scalability of more people kind of holding that self custody almost quote unquote making a self donation to the network can hurt bitcoin in the long term or do you think that that would just be a positive oh it's the old deflation monster question right um and I don't think any anyone who is in the bitcoin industry is going to subscribe to the Keynesian theory so deflation I I don't really have a problem with it and it's mainly because at the end of the day you have basic necessities you know you have to feed clothes and shelter yourself and sure I think a deflationary environment would disincentivize frivolous purchases um but that's probably for the best uh of course it depends on what you're looking for it we have now you know quite a lengthy history of having this very consumer driven society where it's is a buy buy buy buy buy um and so you know would from a macro level would the economy slow down a bit if we were no longer doing that yeah sure probably but um I think the theory is also that over the long term it would it would smooth out a lot of this like volatility of the business you know boom and bust cycles yeah and I and I think that you know that that's fair to say um but if you kind of look at like the bitcoin cycles now like the four-year cycle almost lines up a lot with like the business cycle so you know with the having and everything like that people try to equate that with essentially you know uh helping that boom and bust cycle if that makes sense I for one don't really see it that way anymore because there's like like what eight percent of the coins left to be mined at this point so I don't really see eight percent driving that you know the price action and kind of the volatility I see it more as the bitcoin hollars and and maybe those donations to the network where you know people are either losing their keys or just at this point refuse to sell now do you subscribe to that theory as well or do you think like the having is still going to be more increasingly important as far as like you know I guess the price volatility goes I mean I think having is a narrative and you know maybe the narrative does have enough of a psychological impact that that's what's causing the cycle to happen but it's mystified me as well like every time the having comes around I'm like surely history won't repeat itself again right because you you generally expect that when a market um repeats itself multiple times then people should start trading against it and uh and you know the pattern should disappear but so far that hasn't happened and maybe it is because uh it's more of uh the effect that the the business cycle of the mainstream world is still having upon bitcoin and maybe if bitcoin gets big enough then that will finally um stop happening I mean it does seem like the the volatility is trending downward with each cycle at least from a relative perspective so you know will we eventually reach an equilibrium I don't know yeah I mean so the volatility aspect is something that I've you know kind of like pondered on a lot here recently because of just the new information implementation of these ETFs now obviously we've got black rock and all these other big money managers coming in and buying up a ton of bitcoin um just in dollar figures and so now with that and the potential of like the US government buying bitcoin and and uh at least holding it there seems like there would be a lot bigger players where that volatility could spike up again now for the average bitcoin pleb just holding a few you know sats or a couple million sats like kind of getting into the game do you see that as you know I mean I guess essentially a positive because of just the of that digital scarcity aspect where you don't necessarily need you know a full coin or whatnot or do you think that this the amount of money and capital being flowed into bitcoin and the attention around it is maybe a little early on because bitcoin's only a 15 year old asset at this point well I think there's a natural distribution system um basically as long as people are using bitcoin as a savings and not as like a a major you know trading vehicle for most of their net worth then you know I think if people just are consistently you know cost averaging in then they should be fine and not have to worry about the volatility sure it goes up it goes down um but as long as you're doing that over a long enough period of time you get to the point where the absolute like dollar figure of your portfolio may swing wildly up and down but from a relative perspective uh over the many years like I said it does dampen and then on the flip side of that you know as bitcoin grows and becomes worth multiple trillions of dollars then as I referred to the sort of natural distribution the the OG whales who just have an insane amount of it they kind of provide a buffer or backstop there where they kind of put foots on the brakes once it goes too crazy and they you know will offload their coins to and that will of course result in dampening the volatility yeah it's interesting because it's all kind of I guess it's almost like a human behavior question at that point like how would a human react when you know their bags are getting pumped and you know vice versa on their way down because you know generally speaking we've seen you know people sort of foam away and when it goes up and then sell off when it's going down yeah well so that's what the newbies do and then the OGs are doing the exact opposite right and so you have these two counterbalancing forces and so the OGs are you know get I think over time you get better at selling the top and buying the bottom and and as that happens that the volatility compresses because you have more people who are like oh it's way you know way too hot right now I'll I'll put the foot on the brake and then vice versa you know when there's blood in the streets I'm gonna scoop up those cheap coins yeah that makes sense and I mean once you're longer into Bitcoin you know you kind of are used to the volatility riding the waves up and down that aspect of it as well but you know we kind of got it touched on it briefly about like the multi-sig aspect and kind of people losing their keys now how important do you think that is going to be going forward even though you know we have the ETF products but I think as more people start to research into Bitcoin maybe that's their first touch point they buy the ETF and they want the actual physical you know Bitcoin holding it themselves how important do you think like the multi-sig is going to be just for the development of self custody to give people more comfortability because they've never really had to do anything like this previously you know maybe you had the money underneath the mattress sort of thing but you know actually having that personal responsibility is foreign to a lot of people at this point are you looking for the easiest way to get your Bitcoin off an exchange well I've got it for you it's foundation devices they've got the number one hardware wallet in the passport they've even got a concierge service that can help you get your Bitcoin off an exchange within one hour private onboarding session and they've got a great app too which will give you extremely extremely extremely private features on that app so you can use Bitcoin in the most secure way possible so I've been working hard trying to get sponsors to help you get your Bitcoin off an exchange and I found it with foundation and you can store your seed phrase with a stamp seed punch plate as well so pair all those together use promo code green candle at foundation.xyz and you'll get $10 off your entire order all right that's enough for me back to the show. Well this is what I've been focused on for nearly a decade and I think that really what I'm fighting against is human nature so it's a very tough fight because human nature is to prefer convenience at the expense of almost all else and so that's why the ETFs are so popular that's why Coinbase has millions and millions of Bitcoin in custody it's because people are not confident that they can take on the responsibility that is required to do self-custody and so that's why my mission for the past decade has been to make self-custody more robust and more convenient and one of the ways that we do that is by eliminating single points of failure and there are many different strategies to do that but the big one of course is to make it so that you don't just have one key that if you screw up if it gets lost stolen whatever then it's a catastrophe so this is what we're doing at CASA we're bundling both the best in class hardware we're building best in class software with a very simple user interface and offering the best in class human support and that's one of the things like a lot of wallets and self-custody solutions don't have is they don't have the ability for you to actually get on a call with an expert and walk through a a lot of the decisions that have to be made a lot of personal decisions and and b help you if you run into any weird technical error with any of the hardware or software because you know it is still a lot of the hardware that's out there is still you know built by nerds for nerds yeah yeah and i mean that that's definitely yeah fair to say i think that that is developing and it's getting into a way but you said something interesting there where you know humans human nature is basically you know to give a bunch of trade-offs for convenience now do you see i guess like the best way in order to develop and make more widespread bitcoin usage as to develop products that are very similar to you know almost like utilizing bitcoin where you don't even know you're using bitcoin this to send it back and forth right like you know strikes like a great example with sending remittances or like maybe potentially getting bitcoin like as an apple pay or like tap to pay those kind of products do you think that that would be necessary to develop and kind of you know continue the widespread adoption of bitcoin or do you think like everybody's just gonna have to like learn a new skill in a sense on how to you know maybe transact and in bitcoin and move it that way i think it's certainly possible to abstract away a lot of these complexities under the hood and you know i'm optimistic that especially if we get some of these protocol changes that i'm hoping for that if we have this sort of proliferation of second layers and solutions that are tied to bitcoin somehow that we're going to have all types of assets and payments and crazy functionality that people can do and under the hood a lot of it may be like transported over lightning network for example the question then just becomes how are the keys managed and what's how is the software running these various protocols now the cool thing is we we're also seeing advancements in secure hardware at least in the sense that you know over the past few years it's basically become a standard for any halfway decent smartphone to have a secure element and there's some new standards actually that are coming out that are being leveraged uh they're leveraging that hardware so there's actually a new somewhat new standard called past keys which is being pushed forward by both google and apple and it's starting to get rolled out across a lot of websites now past key technology it uses private keys and if you're using it on your phone those private keys are getting secured in your your key ring on your phone by your secure element the hardware that's in your phone and most of these this past key technology right now is being used for two-factor authentication so you know you have your username password and then you'll have actually the private key and the past key that is used to prove that you are who you say you are just as a different factor now this is the related actually to the product announcement that kasa just had this week where we have started implementing past key technology but we've been doing it to actually secure your bitcoin private keys and the the major thing that we announced this week was that we figured out a way to do that with ube keys which are an extremely common simple like usb device that there's like 20 million of them that are already in use has 10 10 years of history behind it and now it's possible for you to actually use this past key technology as an envelope to wrap a bitcoin private key that you you could you can secure it in the ube key you can also secure it you know on your phone using the secure element there so long story short you know we're continuing to make progress on all of these things and security continues to make progress and so if you think about it now as this past key technology is getting rolled out almost overnight we're going to see tens if not hundreds of millions of people who are suddenly using private key technology secured by dedicated hardware in their phones to authenticate uh with a variety of different services and I think you know that's only the beginning yeah it seems like then you know technology companies are starting to get into more of the privacy aspect because of you know potential to get frauds I mean there's always obviously the bitcoiners know like the google password managers also is not necessarily safe place to to hold uh you know anything your private keys holding your uh private keys on a google drive right essentially you get your gmail password taken everything can get taken at a certain point so um I think like it sounds like technology companies are starting to realize that so are you noticing more of a trend in that as well where it's whether it's you know apple with the iphone and google and whatever um these smartphones kind of I guess moving towards privacy as well because you know we saw apple with the app store too kind of take away the the tracking aspect of other apps or at least giving you that that option to to not allow that so do you see that as like a growing trend just in the technology sector as well yeah apple's actually done a lot especially with adding more protections to your cloud drive on on iCloud and so they they do a great job of you know doing a lot of crazy technical stuff behind the hood and then slap in a really simple user interface on top of it and so I think it's just a great example of why I'm optimistic that while these are very challenging problems that they can be solved and they can be presented to users so that the user doesn't actually have to know what's going on under the hood but this is also this is the entire arc of technological innovation throughout civilization nobody other than really computer scientists actually understands what's happening if they like go on x or facebook or load their email uh most people they just see the screen as it's presented to them and it's a fairly intuitive thing and it's it's basically a requirement that you know as a part of user interface design that you just make it intuitive because nobody reads the manual right you can write all the documentation you want only the like two percent of nerds are ever going to read the documentation so if it's not just blindingly obvious how something should be interacted with then it's not going to get adopted and so you know apple google a lot of the big huge tech giants they have figured out you know how do we do all this crazy complex stuff behind the scenes and then present a just extremely simplified interface and that's also what we attempt to do at kasa yeah i mean hey i think that that's the attempt and you know kind of what everybody in the technology sector is trying to do right it's all very difficult problems but make it easy to use on the user now you've been in the bitcoin a very a bitcoin space a very long time building a company for a decade coming in even even before that as well so you know what is one thing that you think or that has surprised you of how far we've come here sitting here in 2024 15 years it yeah i mean i'm surprised that you know heads of nation states are already talking about it and mainly at like the geopolitical level and max and stacey also talked about this earlier today a i was somewhat surprised when el salvador was the first country to you know say bitcoin is legal tender and we're going to start accumulating bitcoin because i expected it would be a micro nation that did that first and so compared to a lot of smaller nations el salvador is actually reasonably large and but now i think it blew all of our minds that united states would be the next one after that i expected you know bukele going to be going around like latin america talking to his peers and say hey you guys need to get in on this uh but if us actually gets in on it first that's just like another giant step forward and if the u.s starts doing it you know like all the other big countries are going to start talking to each other yeah 100 well james and you've been very generous with your time and i appreciate you coming down and uh yeah joining me here after this long day of the conference um is there anything uh that you want to do to shout out kasa where can more people find out about kasa and what you guys are doing it yeah it's kasa.io and you can always check out my bitcoin resources site at bitcoin dot page there we go awesome stuff and james and thanks so much for you bet thank you for tuning into the latest episode of the state of bitcoin podcast if you really enjoyed this one i've got another one cooking up for you you can click that right here and you can go to the next episode which is an absolute banger where you know i'm bringing you 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