Essentially 90% of all email users are now captured by about 10 companies, and those 10
companies are really the gatekeepers of the email network. It's actually not difficult to imagine
a similar future for Bitcoin, especially now that institutions are joining. I think it's very easy
to fall into a trap to believe that because Bitcoin is doing well right now, that if we
don't change it, it will continue to do well in perpetuity. And my main point that I'm trying to
get across is that Jamison Lopp is an influential cypherpunk and Bitcoin advocate. He is also the
co-founder and chief security officer of CASA, a Bitcoin security provider. Active in cryptocurrency
since 2012, Lopp is dedicated to empowering individuals through self-custody and private
key management, embodying the cypherpunk ethos of using cryptography to shift power from authorities
to individuals. We assume that this is true and that this could be happening. What is it that
needs to be changed on the base layer? Well, I mean, there's a number of improvement proposals
out there, but this is kind of what I'm afraid will happen is that people will keep denying that
quantum computing is going to be a threat anytime soon. And then by the time there's sufficient
evidence that it is a threat, then it will be too late to save everyone at least because...
Hey, Jamison. Great to have you on the podcast.
Good to be here. Always happy to talk about Bitcoin.
Nice. Yeah, yeah. You recently were in Lugano, I think, and you gave this very interesting speech
also on ossification or it was more or less like a debate that you had with Jimmy Song,
but yeah, that's something I found particularly interesting. But I've also been following you
for quite a while already, obviously. Your awesome web page, Lopp.net is something that we
certainly have to link to because I've been using it a lot myself and I know many Bitcoin friends
who have been referring back to this page all the time. So really cool to have you on the podcast
and talk a few things through, a few things through with you though. That's certainly great.
I had this recent tweet. I think you tweeted it out a few weeks or months even ago, you know,
where I found this particularly interesting, where you were kind of tweeting out,
the purpose of Bitcoin is to neuter the man. I don't know if you still recall this tweet,
I guess you are. So can you elaborate your thoughts regarding this tweet, what you actually meant?
Yeah, I mean, I think I was just coming up with a catchy way of saying that really
the point of Bitcoin, we talk about decentralization a lot, but you can measure
decentralization a number of ways. And really, the most important point of all of the things
that we try to do to keep Bitcoin decentralized is in fact to keep power decentralized. And so
the man is essentially what I think of when you think of like a single entity, you know,
it could potentially be a group of people, but you know, one logical entity person or persons
that coordinate and have so much power over a given system that essentially they can dictate
the course of that system. And so, you know, that's one of the things that we're fighting against
with central banks, for example, is that they essentially sit at the top of the food chain
of the traditional financial system, and they, you know, can pull the puppet strings and move
different levers around really however they want, and the rest of us are beholden to them.
So in Bitcoin, it's a lot more complicated to try to understand the balance of power,
but you know, Bitcoin is crypto anarchy. So it is not a democracy. It is not set up in such a way
that any given group of people can just come together and decide to force changes upon the
entire ecosystem. Then yeah, that's interesting. I mean, because I found this tweet so interesting
because of like, I read this, it was a paper a while back, you know, where some researcher were
kind of like trying to figure out what Bitcoin is in the end, and they kind of likened it to a sort
of new institution that we nowadays have, you know, because they were like saying or arguing,
as humanity, we have been trying to decentralize power, like, all along, you know, by coming up
with different and new institutions, that we had probably the king and the sovereigns back in the
day, you know, which our was quite centralized, and we had all these different institutions,
like where you kind of try to balance power, you know, with checks and balances, and now Bitcoin
can, or that's what the authors of this paper said, it can be neatly integrated into this train
of thought or this trail of thoughts, you know, where you have, yeah, where we're just trying to
build new institutions, and it particularly now probably, as we said, when we'd like to central
banks in terms of money, where we kind of try to decentralize and trust minimize the system,
so I was wondering, I probably this is probably what where you were where you were getting at
with this tweet, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't really like the term institution because that
kind of implies more coherence and generally like hierarchy and order and control that is imposed.
And, you know, when it comes to Bitcoin, it is it's really it's voluntary interaction, so
anyone who cares can contribute in a number of different ways to the system and to, you know,
try to give their input to the system and try to signal to other people and and build consensus
for doing certain things. But no one sits at the top of a hierarchy where they can coordinate or
collude with a small number of people to then drag the rest of the ecosystem along with them. So,
yeah, I wouldn't call it an institution. I do think it's an interesting new form of governance
or organization. And I've spoken about that in a few different presentations over the years.
Yeah, also interesting. Yeah, I'm not calling it an institution. I guess like these authors,
they were coming at it from like a really like research driven and academic background. And
that's why they were kind of like trying to think about Bitcoin in institutional economics terms,
you know, and that's probably why they chose this term. But I would also say probably it's
something else. It's not like your typical institution where you have an hierarchy, but
exactly it's evolving. And then, as you said, it's more like a decentralized network. And that's
what's so interesting about it, probably. In that regard, maybe I have this question, you know,
because I've been asked all the time, like, yeah, then people are like, yo, okay, it makes sense,
you know, we're trying to neuter demand, so to say, we're trying to trust minimize the system,
but Bitcoin can never be completely trust minute or like trust less in the sense, you know,
because you always have humans which are involved, it's a technology after all.
And then you hear this argument, like, who controls Bitcoin? Is it not the case that like
poor developers, for example, really do control Bitcoin after all, because these are the ones who
may be put in the code if there are any changes? Or is that even flawed in the first place, this
you? Well, it's all about checks and balances. So you, you can certainly think of core developers
and protocol level developers, you know, the people who talk about changes to the protocol
itself or the implementations of the protocol. They certainly have influence and they're the
ones who are deciding what to build. But there's a lot of checks and balances there. So for one,
I had some research I did a few years ago into the Bitcoin core as a project and understanding
you know, what's the, what's the like quality assurance threshold of getting code into Bitcoin
core. And, you know, this was a couple of years ago when I ran the numbers, but it basically came
down to like less than 20% of all of the code that people wrote to request that that code get merged
into the Bitcoin core project, what actually made it through the whole gauntlet of review peer review
and acceptance and eventually getting the code in. So point being that first of all,
you know, it's hard to even get code changes into the project because they have a really high bar.
And even if you do get code changes in, and, and that generally means like in order to get a code
change in, you need to not have any like reasonable objections left that are unresolved. So, you know,
anyone who wants to can you comment and review your proposed code changes. And if they have
reasonable objections that remain unresolved, then you're probably not going to get that code in.
But even beyond that, if, if, you know, say the Bitcoin core maintainers became malicious and,
and they pulled in code changes that did not actually have broad consensus, then
the balance of power there is that they can't actually force anyone to run that code. So there's,
there's no automatic updates or deployment mechanisms for Bitcoin node software. And so
due to the fact that just a lot of people are watching these projects, if that happened,
somebody would raise an alarm, basically, you know, on mailing lists on social media and talking
to friends of whatever, and would basically say, you know, don't update your node software because
it has this bad change in it. And, and it's trivial to then, you know, fork off that code base into
a different repository. If, for example, you believe that the maintainers of the Bitcoin
core project were compromised in some way. Yeah, I see exactly. I mean, if we spin this
thought a little wider, or I would say, I mean, the interesting thing you said something about,
you can't force people into something, you know, and I think that's also what I like about Bitcoin.
I don't know if you agree. As you said, I mean, you can't force any obligations on to any users,
because as I understand it, people don't have to download this newest version that you just,
as you described it. So like if we again, compare this to countries, you know, and other like
traditional institutions there, if they're like, as we said, it's a democracy, we have an update in
the sense of people vote, and then like you have a majority that wins and you have a minority that
doesn't win. Then in the end, everyone has to follow this. And if you disagree, you actually have to
go change your place of living, you know, have to migrate to another country. Whereas in Bitcoin,
you don't have to go to another cryptocurrency or something you can still use Bitcoin itself,
but just not upgrade. And I think that's that's a key point, right?
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people don't quite understand the concept of crypto anarchy or
anarchy in general. Well, first of all, because nation states have done a good job propagandizing
the word anarchy, so that people think it just means chaos. And of course, all it really means
is without rulers, it doesn't mean that there are no rules in place, as boggles a lot of people's
minds, because they're generally not able to think of how a system of rules could work if
there's no authority to enforce them. Of course, in Bitcoin, we understand that it works by basically
inverting governance on top of its head, so that instead of instead of rules being enforced from
the top down, the rules are enforced from the bottom up with you know, anyone who runs a node.
So one way that I like to think of it is, you know, instead of trying to think of governance
from a nation state level, if you're trying to understand anarchy, think of how do nation states
actually exist at a peer level. So, you know, the nations of the world exist in a state of anarchy
with with each other, you know, there are groups like the United Nations. But once again, they can't
really force other sovereign nations to do things, they can suggest things, you know, they can
potentially impose sanctions or whatever. But one of the major aspects of organizations like
the United Nations is that they still they respect the sovereignty of each nation to basically do
what they want within their own jurisdiction. Yeah, exactly. Great observation. That's exactly
the case. When I was studying like international relations, that was one of the key findings or
that where it dawned on me that there's no state above any states, you know, or like there's
there's actually a state of anarchy among states. So that's certainly interesting.
Well, I mean, you know, I think a lot of people are sympathizing with this also a lot of Bitcoin
are obviously when I talk to them, you know, like Bitcoin is this trustment in my system where we
don't want to kind of also fumble with it in any way, you know, we don't want to, yeah,
mess things up and stuff. So and that's exactly what they say. Yeah, we have to kind of keep
involvement as low as possible, you know, and I think from there, you have a few people who
arrive at this, I would say, yeah, gold or just like assumption that you have to ossify the protocol
sooner than later, you know, because then obviously, everything is set in stone and nothing can be
changed. And that way, it's even harder to kind of mess with this institution, if I want to call
it that, you know, Bitcoin, and you have taken, yeah, like, I'll pick like, yeah, yeah, this
speech, you know, and I think you also published an article that we will link where you were kind of,
yeah, we're against ossification. So can you maybe explain what does ossification even mean,
and then probably why have you spoken out against it?
Yeah, so ossification is almost like a law of physics when it comes to network protocols. There
are many different network protocols that have been around for decades now and have all ossified.
And the reason for this is that if we're talking about protocols, we're basically talking about
a language, you know, it's a way for computers to communicate with each other to accomplish
some specific tasks. So we've got things like email, the SMTP protocol, we've got more fundamental
protocols, there's like seven layers of protocols that actually compose the standard
internet networking stack. And pretty much all of those layers are ossified, this is like TCP, IP,
Ethernet, so on and so forth. And they, they ossify because there is no authority that can
dictate what the protocol is, rather it is once again, it's a voluntary interaction thing where
people run the software that speaks that protocol language. And if we're not speaking the same
language to each other, we effectively can't use the protocol. So there's a network effect issue
where as, you know, as the network grows, as more and more people use a specific protocol,
the value of that network grows. And also the ability to coordinate changes to that protocol
becomes harder and harder. So essentially, the, the, if you want to think of it in terms of,
of physics, it's like the mass of the network grows as more people use it. And if you think it's
like it's going in a certain direction, then the amount of, of energy or effort it takes to move,
you know, to change the velocity of that thing as the mass grows, becomes greater and greater until
it's essentially an immovable object, because there's too many people. And you cannot coordinate
amongst all of them without breaking a large swath of the network, which of course would greatly
reduce the value of the entire network. So this is going to happen to Bitcoin. It may have already
happened. We won't really know until we have a lot of hindsight. And unfortunately, I think
the problem that we've seen with a lot of the conversation around ossification is that I think
it's very easy to fall into a trap to believe that because Bitcoin is doing well right now,
that if we don't change it, it will continue to do well in perpetuity. And my main point that I'm
trying to get across is that you, you know, you can ossify a protocol, but the rest of the world
does not ossify. And so new problems will come up, probably likely problems that are not foreseen.
Some of them are foreseen like the quantum computing stuff that I've talked about recently.
But if a new problem comes up that is, you know, potentially a critical threat to the
ongoing operation of the network, and you can't actually change the protocol to adapt to that new
threat, then you're going to have some problems. And, you know, one of the things I talked about
a couple of years ago, when I was talking about SMTP, because I spent the first decade of my career
as an email engineer, email went down a multi decade long path where it worked really well
for several decades. But then in the 1990s, as it hit mass adoption, that is when it hit this
inflection point where it became too big to really change the email protocol. But more and more
adversarial actors, aka spammers, were joining the email network and causing lots of problems
because email had not been designed with the concept of anti spam. It had been designed under
the assumption that you wanted to guarantee delivery of email messages. And so what happened
over the next few decades is that because we couldn't put anti spam mechanisms directly into
the protocol, we layered all of these solutions on top of it, which were all highly centralized and
ended up greatly increasing the cost of being able to actually, you know, run a node on the email
network to the point where essentially 90% of all email users are now captured by about 10
companies. And those 10 companies are really the gatekeepers of the email network. And they do
things like manage reputation and blacklists and all of this other stuff. And so it's actually
not difficult to imagine a similar future for Bitcoin, especially now that institutions are
joining. And we're seeing lots of money flow into a small number of centralized custodians.
It's a future that I would like to avoid. And it also gets tricky to talk about because
if you talk to anybody about email, they're like, Oh, yeah, I use email all the time. It's great.
But if you think of email from a sovereign communications platform, nobody is actually
using the email protocol anymore. They're using trusted third parties that are then using the
email protocol in what is now actually a very tiny network of nodes of people actually running
those email servers. So this is kind of the unfortunate thing with in terms of incentives
is the same thing could happen with Bitcoin, where Bitcoin could continue becoming worth more and more
and more money, even as the network itself centralizes more and more. And we start to lose
important properties like permissionlessness and censorship resistance. And that's what I
found the most interesting point about your presentation or like your set of arguments
that you put forward, you know, you're saying like, Okay, the natural core to things is kind of
like that things ossify, you know, and then if we know that at some point, it will happen anyways,
you know, it's almost kind of fatalistic, you know, that you're like, it's gonna happen anyway.
So why not argue for it as long as we can, but that's like, let's not ossify if we there are
still some things that need to be changed in order to, as you now described, maybe avoid a similar
future for Bitcoin as as we have seen as you now neatly described what happened to email. So
that's that's what I find so interesting and also convincing. So, so my kind of question would then
be, okay, if we assume that this is true, and that this could be happening, or we might already be on
the path of like similar centralization in Bitcoin, what is it that needs to be changed on the base
layer? Like if we just a few things for without getting too technical, what is the potential
that could still be achieved by making a few like elemental changes? Well, I mean, there's a number
of improvement proposals out there. There are things that could greatly increase the security
for self custody wallets with covenants and vaults. There are things that could potentially improve
privacy. Whether that's something like cross input signature aggregation, or
even the ability to more easily create permissionless second layers, I think that's a really big one
is that it's been far too difficult to create permissionless second layers, like a lot of the
second layers out there are actually fairly permission, you know, they're like run by federations,
or organizations that could potentially rug pull you. And, you know, I want to see more
experimentation happening in the space and not necessarily at the base layer, but on other
layers where if that layer fails, then it's not going to pose an existential threat to Bitcoin
itself. But, you know, we know that there are things coming down the pipeline. Well, this is
somewhat controversial as well, but the content computing stuff, you know, could potentially
become an issue in 10 to 20 years. I think that also just the block space issue and the block
size debate is going to come back around again, but in a different vein. And I gave a presentation
about that a week ago, though it's not available yet. And essentially, this is related to some of
the stuff I was talking about with the institutionalization where I can foresee a future where almost
everyone gets priced out of using the Bitcoin blockchain. And, you know, that may be because
we have a proliferation of many different second layers and people are able to use those, you
know, more conveniently and cheaply and whatnot. But the issue with second layers is that they
can never provide you with the same security model as being on the Bitcoin blockchain and
self custody. So I think this will become somewhat of a philosophical and potentially economic
issue around, you know, how affordable do we want it to be to be able to operate with the
strongest security model in Bitcoin, which is self custody on the main chain.
Yeah, I see. But I mean, what is your personal feeling then? Like, because like, you know,
we had this, or at least I'm not really that technical, you know, so I don't follow it that
closely. But I feel like as somebody who's still into Bitcoin and loves to follow this
discussions, like from afar, you know, at least the last big upgrade we had was like taproot,
I assume, you know, that's what where I also heard about it. And it felt like there was quite a
majority in the end behind it, you know, and this time around, it feels like there's there's
no nothing really coming to the surface that it feels like, okay, this could be the next big
upgrade. So my question is, you as you as somebody who's following this more closely,
are you like optimistic that like some of these important changes to make base layer
better for base for like layer tools, is something on this on the horizon that could
actually be implemented? Or are we still kind of just wandering in the wilderness? And it feels
like, as you said, this point of ossification for that already behind us, and we're not going to
change anything in the near future? Yeah, I mean, one of the problems is that there's a number of
different op codes and proposals out there that could be used to achieve somewhat similar things.
Though, I would say from some of the more recent presentations I've seen, it seems like
a lot of the layer two developers tend to agree that op cat as an op code would be highly beneficial
to quite a few different projects and to layer to builders in general. Now, whether there's a
concerted effort to do a soft fork just to activate op cat is one open question.
Really, of all of the things going on right now, the one that I think has the greatest potential,
but it's also less ready is Rusty Russell's great script restoration project. And I believe
that would re-enable op cat. It would also re-enable a number of other op codes that have been
disabled for over a decade. And it would do that alongside a kind of safety mechanism framework
to ensure that re-enabling these op codes doesn't create some major exploitable condition where
someone could screw up a lot of the network by essentially creating some sort of script that
was like a resource exhaustion or denial of service attack. Yeah, for sure. Okay. I see. Yeah,
op cat, something I've been hearing and floating around for sure. Exactly. I mean, in the end,
I'm also thinking if I try to think this through from an economic lens sort of and you brought up
incentives as well, you know, I could also imagine that people like sailor, you know,
people who have a lot of Bitcoin miners in the end as well, you know, that they could kind of be
incentivized further down the line because nowadays they've built their business around Bitcoin,
you know, it's not that tiny thing anymore. They're really depending on this to work also long term.
And I've been hearing such stories, you know, I was in Singapore recently where there were a lot of
like Bitcoin layer twos, or like at least like they call themselves like this, you know,
and there were also a lot of like people who were being passed by miners to look around what
projects could we support and their argument was like, they know sure well that at some point,
you know, the thing that you said with block space could be a problem for them as well because
they don't earn enough with only base layer fees, you know, and that's why they could be
incentivized again and maybe big coiners and like true, true OGs and maybe even cypher punks
don't really like this would like to hear this that it could be again a few people who have a
lot of Bitcoin than driving this but it could be one of the options to kind of educate people
like sailor and these people why it's important to have something like this and and do you see
that as a viable route or would you say that's too dangerous after all or
well, you know, sailor, for example, is pretty strongly in the ossification camp and if you
think about his incentives, as far as we know, he doesn't even hold his own coins, you know,
both his personal coins and micro strategies. So from an incentive perspective, this is something
I've been talking about a bit recently, which is like one of the reasons why institutionalization
of Bitcoin is a potential threat to the evolution of the protocol is that the only reason why you
would ever want to improve the Bitcoin protocol is to improve the functionality and really the
ability for what people who self custody their Bitcoin can do with it, whether that's, you know,
coming up with new ways of locking and unlocking your coins or, you know, pegging them into other
networks where you have completely different functionality and stuff that you can do with them.
So, you know, people who are more on the traditional finance side of this who are just
leaving their Bitcoin with trusted third parties, they aren't going to really see any benefit because
they're not actually using the Bitcoin protocol. So that's one of the big problems I see with
incentives. Miners is an interesting issue of incentives to think of. And I spoke about this
in my recent block space economics talk, where I was basically saying that, you know, if we want to
be able to pay for the thermodynamic security of Bitcoin, which is a fancy way of saying pay the
miners and be able to do that sustainably in perpetuity, then we need to ensure that there's
always more demand for block space than supply. And this is a really tricky thing, especially
as we see more Bitcoin layers come out. Because in from from one perspective,
certain types of Bitcoin layers are somewhat analogous to doing a block size increase,
because essentially each Bitcoin layer kind of has its own block space. It may have its own
blockchain. It may or may not. But like even if you think about something like Lightning Network,
where it doesn't have its own blockchain, the sort of logical end result of pegging your coins
into channels on the Lightning Network is that you are greatly reducing the amount of
main chain block space that you're using. And so my point there is that
new layers coming online and achieving adoption can both decrease the demand for main chain block
space. But depending upon how they settle back onto the main chain, they can also increase demand
for block space. It just really depends on what the dynamics of that specific layer and the use
cases are. For example, I'm expecting Citria's zero knowledge roll up to actually use a lot
of Bitcoin block space. And the main reason for that is because Bitcoin doesn't actually have
any native way in the protocol of doing verification of zero knowledge roll ups. So
if, for example, over the long term, zero knowledge roll ups like Citria end up proving themselves,
then perhaps there could even be a conversation at some point of greatly improving the efficiency
of how those roll ups get verified on the main chain, which would reduce block space.
But it's basically it's going to be, I think, its own complicated and volatile dynamic
over the coming years and decades, because there's just so many different variables at play and we
can't really predict how they're all going to play out. Yeah, great points. I mean, I heard similar
points raised by Nick Carter as well, exactly in terms of block space that it can be positive as
well as kind of disadvantages as well. But yeah, I mean, do your points about in institutions,
because that's exactly what I thought. And now that I think about it, it's also not so bullish
from a PLEPS perspective, because if you have institutions who hold maybe a paper Bitcoin,
they might be incentivized in terms of the price. But I mean, they have no incentive of
implementing probably stuff that further down the line, strengthens us as PLEPS and helps us to
kind of keep on using Bitcoin in a decentralized way. And that's why that's exactly the problem.
We have sort of a collective action problem and they, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's also
it's a security issue in the sense that it's creating more systemic risk and fragility.
If a lot of coins go into a small number of hands, and of course, they're going to become
really high value targets for theft, hacking, or even government seizure. But it's also a
governance issue for the future direction of the protocol, because at least in terms of the ETFs,
most of those ETFs have language written into them that the ETF issue essentially has sole
discretion at deciding how to treat different forks of the Bitcoin protocol. So one of the
primary votes, if you will, that people have when it comes to Bitcoin forks is buying and
selling, essentially trading the different forks to basically create an economic vote
to move with their feet, if you were, to the networks that they prefer. And
it's really unclear how that might play out if we did get into some sort of contentious fork
scenario. Yeah, also quite an interesting point, obviously. Yeah, I mean, ETFs is so something
that I think further down the line, yeah, could be something that shocks Bitcoin and they don't
think about this like thoroughly enough nowadays, even though, as you said, there's so many variables,
but I could see a scenario where they could kind of come around and kind of surprise us in a maybe
not so positive way. But let's hope not. I mean, I would like to steer this discussion also real
quick to the quantum, you know, risk that you already mentioned, you know, as one of the
maybe biggest risks out there that not enough people are talking about. So maybe, because two
questions, you know, what actually is at risk through quantum computing, because I keep on hearing
people asking this question, they're like, Oh, will there be more Bitcoin than these 21 million,
you know, or will Bitcoins, can they just be stolen? So what actually is at risk? And then
the other question, yeah, maybe I'll go with that one first. Yeah. Yeah. So quantum computers would
not allow you to break the rules of the protocol. But it would, you could say it would violate one
of the sort of fundamental properties that we hold dear, which is, you know, not your keys,
not your coins, the flip side of that is supposed to be, you know, your keys, only your coins.
And so a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, which as far as we know, does not currently exist.
But if you look at the trajectory of advancements in quantum computing, depending upon different
estimates you make with the many variables that play in quantum computing, potentially in the
next 10 or 20 years, we could get to the point where a quantum computer has enough computational
power that it could perform something which is called Schor's algorithm. And Schor's algorithm
basically is a way of reducing the complexity of public private key cryptography, such that,
you know, if you if you give a classical computer a public key, the only way that it's going to
be able to get the private key is to brute force and try like every possible private key.
And this is one of the many reasons why cryptography and Bitcoin is secure is because it
would just take, you know, longer than the life of the universe to crack a private key that matches
a given public key. But with powerful quantum computer Schor's algorithm can greatly reduce
that time so that it actually becomes feasible to find the private key that corresponds to a public
key. So, you know, what does that put at risk? Well, it puts at risk all of the pay to public
key coins from the first couple of years of Bitcoin. So that would include what is considered
to probably be Satoshi's coins. It also puts at risk all of the coins that are in reused addresses
because a lot of the newer types of Bitcoin addresses, you don't put the public key
directly on the chain as part of the address, it's actually based off of a hash of the public key.
But as soon as you spend those funds, you have to reveal the public key. So suffice to say,
you know, if I had a powerful quantum computer, you go to the like Bitcoin rich list, and you see
like Binance hot wallet, Bitfinex hot wallet, like all of these exchanges that put all of their
money into like one address, there are several addresses that have hundreds of thousands of
Bitcoin in them. And they've been reusing those addresses. So the public keys to those addresses
are on the blockchain and publicly available. So, you know, basically, we would expect that the
incentive would be so great that someone who had a quantum computer would basically start
cracking those private keys and stealing the money and doing whatever they felt like with.
And of course, that would cause, you know, widespread market chaos.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what I would you mentioned the Satoshi's stash, you know,
it's the Satoshi's coins. And there I have the question like, maybe it's a new question. But I
mean, isn't it inevitable that at some point, these will be cracked, you know, if we if you
assume technological progress on quantum computing, because if we assume that the Satoshi is dead even
and the keys don't exist anymore, nobody has the keys, they can be changed to a new address format,
you know, because nobody can swap them. So at some point, somebody will find this treasure
truth and unlock it, right? Well, that's if we don't do anything about it, right? So one of the
main points of my talk is that whether we do something or do nothing, then some of bitcoins,
you know, inviolable properties are going to get violated. So either this concept of only your keys,
only your coins is going to get violated because a quantum attacker is going to steal them.
Or we would have to disallow spending from those funds. So like if if we were to go down the path
of rolling out some sort of quantum resistance, Bitcoin address, locking scheme, and we would
then have a migration path. This is one of the reasons why I think we should be talking about it
today, even though it's not currently a crisis, is because it would take years, many years to
for people for everybody in Bitcoin, who's still alive and paying attention to migrate their coins
to some new quantum resistance scheme. And and so, you know, if we were to go down that path,
I think one of the really controversial questions would be,
A, do we set a date, you know, a block height after which you can no longer move your non-quantum
resistant coins because we suspect that it would be a high probability that it's actually a quantum
attacker who's doing that. Or do we just throw up our hands and say, you know what, we're going to
let the quantum attackers essentially start mining all of these coins and potentially wreak havoc on
the market. Yeah, such interesting hypothetical thoughts, or like at least not as hypothetical as
you are describing, you know, but still like kind of things we have to think about. I mean,
one last point, and I think you already kind of hinted at this, you know, but because that's
something I'm hearing a lot, you know, being out of Switzerland, you know, people say, yeah, no
problem. And once this is really a pressing problem, we just upgrade, you know, that we we
refined ourselves within the Bitcoin community, because it is an actual problem. And then we
can upgrade. And I'm always like, maybe that doesn't work in the end, because that's exactly how
Switzerland also works, you know, in a sort of direct democracy sense, that's some argument we
keep on hearing against Switzerland, like, yeah, you might be direct democracy, everything is
decentralized, but it always takes so long to make upgrades to the political system. And I
feel like Bitcoin is exactly the same or even worse, you know, so I think you already hinted at
this. Once this is a problem, it might already be too late. It's, it's funny, because I think
there's a lot of parallels between the quantum computing debate, and the climate change debate.
And, and by that, I mean, like, we can we can all see the trends. But what none of us can say for
sure is like, at what point are we all dead? Because if we knew at what point we're all dead,
it would be very easy to kind of work backwards from that and say, okay, we need to start
implementing the fix before now. So this is kind of what I am afraid will happen with Bitcoin is
that people will keep denying that quantum computing is going to be a threat anytime soon.
And then by the time there's sufficient evidence that it is a threat, then it will be too late
to save to save everyone at least, because actually getting through the whole process
of changing Bitcoin, and then once again, related to what we talked about earlier with
governance and how it's, you know, it's all voluntary. And there's no way for us to like
email every Bitcoin user and say, hey, you better upgrade now or you might lose your money.
So this is why I think problems like this need to be solved many, many years before we expect
it to become critical. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, this all sounded now maybe a little bit
too bleak or could be taken as really bleak, as a really bleak outlook. So my question is,
you really seem to be still active in the Bitcoin space and you're still around. So
something must be giving you hope. Otherwise, you probably would have left and said, no,
it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense anymore. So what is it? If we want to kind of distill
some hope and into into the listeners and people that are watching this?
Well, yes. So the, I think, conclusion of my ossification article that I published
yesterday was essentially that I see this as a question of, are you optimistic about
Bitcoin as a system and the sort of governance and game theory behind it? Or are you
pessimistic that it's really fragile? So I am optimistic that Bitcoin is anti-fragile.
And this basically is because there are many of us out there who are talking to each other and
we're discussing these issues and we're trying to move forward and continue to improve the protocol
and try to mitigate problems that we're foreseeing on the horizon. And I think the people who are
more on the ossification side, they're less driven by optimism. They're more driven by
fear and pessimism that something's going to go wrong and therefore it's better for us not to touch
anything. But I see, you know, Bitcoin is an open source project and its strength comes from having
a wide diversity of people who are contributing to it and who are looking at it from a number of
different perspectives. The more people that you have contributing to a software project,
the stronger it is because it's less and less likely that some sort of exploit or vulnerability
is going to go unnoticed. And so one of my fears around ossification is if we all say,
okay, we're not going to touch Bitcoin anymore, then that will result in fewer people paying
attention to it, which will decrease the number of eyes and perspectives looking at it and make
it more likely that we miss something, we miss some sort of new threat that appears and that comes
in and becomes critical to the project. Yeah, I see. Yeah, thanks a lot for sharing this. Yeah.
Well, Jameson, thanks a lot. I think that's pretty much what I wanted to cover with you. I had
some more questions in terms of self custody and the do's and don'ts, but maybe I'll save this up
for a future episode maybe. And yeah, thanks a lot for taking the time. Maybe one last question,
you know, given this podcast is called Less Noise More Single, any high signal person that comes to
mind that we should be talking to in the near future? Yeah, so, well, you know, I'm really
technical. So I mostly, I pay attention to a lot of the developers rather than the influencers.
And if you're, if you're not familiar with Brandon Black, I think he goes by Reardon code on X.
He's been making a lot of progress and thinking more about a protocol level improvements and
how that can lead to more permissionless innovation on second layers. And
he and I go fairly way back. He worked with me for a few years. We've worked at several
the same companies over the years. And he's a really smart guy. And I think he's also got, you
know, a really long term view and vision for how we keep progressing Bitcoin.
Cool. Yeah, great. It's certainly a name I've never heard. Maybe on X, I see a nice, I've seen a
couple of tweets, but I just doesn't ring a bell right now. But certainly somebody do check out.
So always nice to, to also learn new things on that front. So Jameson, thanks a lot and have a great
time. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Bye.