it's very difficult to change bitcoin like it tends to take many years to make significant changes to bitcoin there is actually reason to believe that we may be past the point at which it's possible to make significant changes to bitcoin and so i think that you know since we are relatively sure that on a long enough time frame this is going to become a problem we might as well start working on solutions for it now we need to get ahead of the curve we need to have you know a solution decided upon so that we can roll it out and people can start to migrate their coins because like even once we get all the way to a point where a quantum uh resistance signature scheme is agreed upon it will then still take many years for all of the ecosystem to upgrade and many years for everyone to move their coins hey guys welcome back to the channel today i'm here with co-founder and cto of casa jameson how you doing man all right so just got back from el salvador why bitcoin man why people should buy bitcoin well that's a bit of a loaded question i don't tell people to buy bitcoin and really when people ask me if they should buy bitcoin my answer is you know if you have to answer ask that question then the answer is no if you're not sure whether or not you should be acquiring bitcoin then what you should be doing is educating yourself and that's one of the things that i do you know i run a website with thousands of links to educational resources that will hopefully allow anyone who's willing to put in the time to convince themselves that they should be interested in this and that it is a a potential exit from the the fiat system that we are trapped in by default etfs have come in last year in january and five percent of the total supply is in the hands of blackrock and all the other guys as i call it are you worried should we worry about them owning so much bitcoin what do you think i worry about it and in terms of systemic risk to the system uh so this is a tricky thing to talk about because it's very hard to quantify you know there's no specific amount of bitcoin at which some threshold gets reached at which we should all suddenly um be running around like there's a crisis you know five percent in the hands of a a few large entities is not great but you know i'd be far more worried it was if it was fifty percent this really comes down to governance and to risk of potential edge cases so think of it like uh you know 6102 attacks you know orders by nation states saying you know we're coming in and we're seizing all of this when a large amount of the bitcoin is in a few well-known hands you know regulated financial providers it becomes very very easy for a government to legally or otherwise come in and put pressure on them and try to dictate what happens to those assets from a governance perspective if we're talking about like the future of the bitcoin protocol then this starts to become a little worrying because if you read through the etf prospectus for pretty much any of the etfs they tend to reserve the right to effectively decide in the case of a protocol fork you know which fork is the real bitcoin so um you know one of one of the major things around forking governance is that you know there's no vote but people at least people who self-custody essentially have the right to vote with their feet you know to sell one side of the fork and and potentially buy another side of the fork to you know economically express which version of the protocol they're more interested in so if all of a sudden a huge swath of bitcoin is is no longer allowed to be used in that manner by the quote-unquote owners of of the coins and then rather they're essentially seeding their vote if you will their economic votes to large regulated institutional providers then you can easily see how that could result in unintended consequences and perhaps you know future evolution or lack of evolution of the protocol yeah i'm sure you've seen when blackrock released a video about their kind of other advertisement for bitcoin there was like an asterisk in the end saying 21 million kind of it's not the cap kind of thing so i don't know why they've done it i don't know if it was a legal thing but it was kind of concerning to see because technically 21 million i mean unless we fork into something else like you said yeah that's kind of the cap that's kind of the thing why if we buy the coins yeah i mean i think that that was you know having to get uh permission from lawyers to say certain things that if you think about you know any aspect of bitcoin is not really guaranteed to remain that way in perpetuity from a technical perspective but you know the reason anyone who understands the protocol and the game theory well enough understands that there's a lot of things that are practically unchangeable simply because of how difficult it is to make uh decisions where you're getting the rest of the network to agree to a change are you expecting an in-kind at some point coming in because so far what happens for those of you guys watching and listening if you don't know when you buy an etf you're basically allowing a custodian a third party to have your bitcoin on your behalf and when you sell them well they technically don't have to sell their bitcoin right they can just give you fiat i mean it sounds like some of them are starting to file to be able to do that but i'm not sure what the limitations are going to be you know like i doubt they're going to let people do an in-kind redemption for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars if anything it will probably be pretty limited to maybe institutional providers or otherwise like large uh whales that are worth their time trying to deal with that and also in the us now there is a lot of states i think 15 last time i checked they actually want to use bitcoin as a strategic reserve are you expecting actually a these to happen and b for the entire world to say hey wait a second now there is a crypto president because for me there is only one bitcoin president that's bukele right i think trump is a crypto president i don't know if you agree are you you expecting something to happen at a state level where the us is going to actually start stockpiling bitcoin um i've said for a while that i thought that it makes more sense for individual states in the us to pursue reserves and and this is mainly once again from a a game theory perspective um it's the same reason why other nations especially those that don't have their own currencies you know like el salvador the nations that are essentially um being subjected to the whim of the federal reserve um and they don't have their own monetary sovereignty uh that's the same type of relationship that the states have you you know with the the the feds in america and so when you're in that situation it makes more sense for you to pursue uh you know having an asset like bitcoin that can give you some sovereignty so i am more excited about that than i am about a you know a national strategic reserve i think that that's a really tricky thread uh to to try to follow you know when when you are the one that currently has like uh the world reserve currency if you're coming in and saying okay we're also going to be adopting bitcoin you kind of have to have to be willing to say well we're doing this because we might be willing to disrupt ourselves over the long term and you know from one perspective that's a very forward-thinking thing but um it's also kind of like um an innovator's dilemma type of problem where when you're at the top of your game uh you're at the top of the market are you going to do everything you can to you know protect uh yourself and build a moat around whatever your product or service is or are you going to take a big risk and go out there and say um you know maybe we need to be ready for the next big thing because if we don't disrupt ourselves somebody else is going to disrupt us were you expecting solana i mean i'm not going to ask you a meme coin from trump because i don't think anyone was expecting it but um were you expecting some sort of other coins involved into into even just into the conversation or for you was always been bitcoin only well like you said uh trump is the crypto president i mean trump is first and foremost a businessman right he likes making deals uh he likes negotiating so he's um he's not going to be be hindered by some of the uh you know more i guess moral uh aspects that uh people impose upon this space so i know he's made a few references to things like you know american crypto tokens or whatever um and you know ultimately i think a lot of that is going to come down to you know whoever is able to incentivize him uh the most to get what they want so yeah i don't really hold any expectations around that i think it's mostly going to be a battle between the uh you know bitcoin focused people in politics and those who surround trump uh versus all of the alt coiner people who you know have their own incentives to try to get his ear and uh and get him to do favorable things for them i was in nashville when he came in and he spoke in front of us 50 000 people and i mean it's clear to me that he didn't know what bitcoin was i mean rfk did that's my opinion a fantastic speech in regards of what bitcoin is but trump it was a peach to 50 million people in the us so i get it you're fishing for votes no judgment but i guess the silver lining is he's appointing some interesting people around him so i heard also michael sailor was um kind of involved in some sort of a consultancy of course sailor doesn't have any alcohol in his mind so that's actually i think it's a positive but speaking about el salvador i mean you just came back was it your first time there it had been over three years since i visited i went there like right after they passed the bitcoin law and i went to labitconf which i think was the first conference that they had right after that and so i got to observe some of the changes and in general it seems a lot nicer uh safer people are optimistic not as many armed guards standing around everywhere you know there still are some but uh in general it seems to be uh you know people are less on edge and um had a good time and there were plenty of people there at the conference and uh they've definitely made a number of infrastructure improvements over the past three years so uh you know we'll see how that uh keeps going especially with like tether tower and other investments that seem to be coming into the country yeah that was interesting when tether announced a stable coin on bitcoin i have no clue on how that could work but um would you be a fan of a stable coin build on bitcoin what do you think yeah well i mean we've already been there i mean tether originally was on bitcoin way back in the day it's just the technology was very clunky um i would say it's kind of a pre-announcement uh of an announcement right now like you can't actually use tether on lightning as far as i'm aware it'll probably be several months before we see the ecosystem start rolling out actual adoption in wallets and exchanges and such but um i've been pretty neutral on how bitcoin itself is used uh you know this can be fairly controversial you know the there was like the spam debates over the past few years because i'm a technologist i see bitcoin as a neutral platform as kind of a authoritative record of things that record doesn't have to only be the transfer of ownership of utxos and and the underlying satoshi units it can be other things you can you know anchor other systems on top of bitcoin and ultimately you know when you have a system that has even the limited amount of programmability that bitcoin does obviously somebody is going to do stuff with that that that others consider controversial or wish didn't happen but this is a permissionless system so people are going to build whatever they can they're going to experiment and then over the long run we'll see you know which technologies find product market fit and get adoption and create sustainable economic systems i agree i mean the block size you know inscriptions ordinaries all those debates they you know we've seen in the past years i think they're fascinating because this is my perspective you might disagree with me or not agree with me but satoshi left nine pages into a white paper that's not much so there's a lot of space for quote interpretation right so i think it should be some sort of a i don't i don't want to say democracy because i hate that word but yeah it's not democracy but um satoshi had a few quotes about this type of thing um some people like to quote satoshi saying that um you know upon its initial release the core design of bitcoin was set in stone and that's somewhat true but i mean that's mainly the game theory of the system was set in stone satoshi also had several quotes basically saying that look um you know there will probably be bugs and the bugs can be fixed if we agree on how to fix them and you know there is room for building other functionality and extending the system's capabilities and if we agree on a certain path of how to do that then once again we can evolve the protocol so i think satoshi was obviously like open-minded experimenter um i think they even talked about other systems like namecoin for example uh you know trying to you know recreate the dns system in a more decentralized way so satoshi was a technologist and i don't think that satoshi would be against people experimenting with this type of technology to see what it's capable of doing a lot of people are asking me about quantum computers and you know what bitcoin is going to do because the sale phrase is going to be cracked and all the money is going to be lost and satoshi's wallet with five percent of the supply of one million bitcoin is going to be lost forever so what's your view here i mean are we in danger with the quantum computers yes and no it's it's mainly a an issue of time and so i guess the easiest way for me to try to describe the issue is that i actually think there's a lot of similarities between the quantum computing threat to bitcoin and like climate change uh you know global the global climate change issues so uh the the reason that there's similarities is that in both cases we can see trends you know like we can see long-term trends where the the earth is like slowly getting warmer over decades and centuries we can see long-term trends in the quantum computing space that the computing power and capabilities of quantum uh are increasing fairly quickly now in both of these cases we're nowhere at like a critical point where people are dying our systems are failing and the reason why this is so controversial is that we don't really know is it five years ten years 30 years 50 years 100 years like you know what when is it a critical problem and so because we don't know that specific point it's hard to work backwards from that and say okay we need to start addressing it by blah the way that i've been looking at it as well it's very difficult to change bitcoin like it tends to take many years to make significant changes to bitcoin there's actually reason to believe that we may be past the point at which it's possible to make significant changes to bitcoin and so i think that you know since we are relatively uh sure that on a long long enough time frame this is going to become a problem we might as well start working on solutions for it now we need to get ahead of the curve we need to have you know a solution decided upon so that we can roll it out and people can start to migrate their coins because like even once we get it all the way to a point where a quantum uh resistance signature scheme is agreed upon it will then still take many years for all of the ecosystem to upgrade and many years for everyone to move their coins that's the really tricky part i did a number of calculations sort of back of the napkin math that you know it would probably take a couple of years worth of block space for everyone to move their coins you know to a new quantum resistant scheme and of course that's assuming that you know everybody's even aware of it and and is you know trying to move their coins and nobody else is trying to do anything else on the bitcoin network so it's uh it's a long-term issue and i don't think that um we have to worry about the system failing anytime in the next few years but we should start preparing for it so that we don't find ourselves in a crisis you know 10 years from now you know is quantum computing going to break bitcoin in five years 10 years 20 years we're not sure but what we do know is that a number of uh like standards organizations and uh and and government like security organizations are basically telling companies that they should start being quantum ready in the next five to ten years and what's your view on altcoins i mean do you support them do you have them do you have any well i like i said i'm a technologist and i'm interested in trying new things so i mean i've played around with alternative cryptocurrencies basically since the beginning uh since i was into bitcoin because i wanted to understand you know how is this thing any different than bitcoin and is it is it worth uh you know the the marketing hype and so you know in the very early days uh 13 14 years ago all of the altcoins were just copy paste uh essentially of the bitcoin core software and with a few minor tweaks uh usually around things like block time or hashing algorithm or what have you and so back then they really weren't that interesting but around you know 2015 like really like when ethereum came out that was one of the biggest very different systems and of course that kind of created a whole new ecosystem that spawned all types of stuff and and since then we've just seen a huge proliferation you can't even keep up with all of them anymore so for me um you know i don't approach any of this stuff from an investment perspective um because really what i found is that you know i can try to evaluate systems from a technical perspective but that rarely has anything to do with how well it performs as an investment investment side of things tends to be more psychological and sort of based upon the marketing uh of the organization behind a given token so that is not my wheelhouse and i don't uh pretend to be an expert in that but the result is that you know the things that i'm more interested in tend to be privacy uh so if there's a network that comes out that says you know we have greatly improved privacy then you know i'm more likely to look into that and try to understand it and see you know is this a tool i can leverage to benefit me you know other than that you know a lot of the stuff that's out there these days is really more catered to the sort of degen defy get rich quick uh aspect of this space and i'm not really into that so i don't pay too much attention to it but i do think it's interesting that i think the number of crypto tokens has basically gone exponential over the past year and the uh bitcoin dominance has actually remained uh quite high regardless of that so if anything i think it's it's really showing more and more differentiation between bitcoin and the rest of the market because there's something like 30 or 40 million different crypto tokens now and and yet you have bitcoin still retaining uh the majority of market share just despite the market itself uh really getting more and more diluted it's such a good point i i also check dominance quite quite often and i can see like you said that is holding steady right so that's why some people are saying oh this cycle we won't see any altcoin season because what we've seen so far is like a christmas tree as i call it bitcoin goes up and then after you have the the coin because people take profit into coins maybe of different reasons but you have a kind of a money circulation into altcoins and do you believe by the way we are still in a four-year cycle and we will stay in a four-year cycle now that we have nations and etfs and different players playing the game so are you expecting for us to technically top up this year or maybe next year or you think we can go into the super cycle so-called i mean the the problem is no one really knows why we have these four-year cycles is it the halving uh i mean maybe that contributes a little bit is it the fact that it's like lined up with presidential cycles maybe i don't know um you know it may just be uh you know um the you know larger like national and global markets also have business cycles and so it may just be that like this is the uh you know crypto business cycle whatever that may be we may not fully understand like all of the variables that go into that but i have been surprised every time that the cycle repeats because i i very similar to what you're saying is like um if everybody is expecting something to happen then from a sort of you know market dynamics and trading perspective then uh folks should start you know front running it right and like essentially someone should be trying to take advantage of that and and if too many people try to do that then that should break the cycle and you know break up whatever the pattern is so um i've like i said i've been surprised the past couple of cycles that it keeps repeating uh you know three annual green candles one red candle keep going uh so i have no reason to believe that it's any different this time because you know last cycle people said this time is different and they were very wrong then uh i i think the the biggest uh the biggest tricky thing for me now is that you know whenever people are you know predicting the future especially of like what the price of bitcoin is going to be it's it's like the stronger the consensus is is that it's going to be something i feel like the more likely that's not what's going to happen so it's like how do you be contrarian to that i don't know everyone was expecting a hundred thousand in the previous cycle right i mean everyone myself included i'm not gonna lie i was expecting at least a hundred thousand and we topped up seventy not even in some exchanges so this time i don't know what's gonna happen and yeah like you said every time we say this is different and they kind of rhyme it's not always the same per se but there is a lot of similarities like you said the three the three green candles and one of the candles so and we all know that bitcoin likes to do what bitcoin likes to do so definitely gonna be an interesting one that's why i think time in the market could be extremely challenging do you play the cycle at all do you have a portion of your portfolio you strategically sell when we catch some points or you just ride and hoddle i never have um i was i was planning on doing that last last cycle but i wasn't planning on selling anything under 100k so you know we never hit it um yeah i may take some off the top this cycle we're we're um you know we also discuss internally of course our own bitcoin treasury management strategies at our company um you know how do we try to you know maximize our our runway and take uh advantage of volatility you know we're not really active traders at the company either but um you know simply because we accept bitcoin for payment we you know build up a decent treasury over the years and uh thankfully i did convince people at the company that we should buy a bunch during the last dip when it got around like 20k or so so um yeah that's the only real trading i guess that we've done and i feel like i'm a terrible trader but i'm always decent at buying the dip like i'm pretty good at getting a feel for you know when there's blood in the streets and everybody says it's all over but i've never been good at uh understanding like where the top is uh where peak fomo is because it seems like it usually goes further than i expect except last cycle where it you know stopped well short of what we expect so um you know i kind of figure you're trying to predict the future is a fool's errand but um i think there are a couple of different sort of management strategies strategies that you can undertake you know if you've been in bitcoin for a few cycles if the vast majority of net worth is in bitcoin and you want to you take a little bit off the top um i've got on my website the uh you know bitcoin savings plan calculator i've seen a few other calculators out there that are based based on other models like power law and whatever um i don't believe in any of the models you know i think models are basically made to be broken but i think that it it may make sense if if you're basically a hundred percent into bitcoin to have some strategy to take a few percent out you know you never want to sell all of your bitcoin or you're probably going to regret it but you know take a few percent out and um improve your quality of life whatever that may be um the never sell your bitcoin crowd does kind of uh annoy me because well it depends on how you interpret that right um you know i i think the reason why i got into bitcoin at the very beginning was is really as a long-term hedge against fiat going down so for me it wasn't about getting rich quick it was about not getting poor over a long long period of time so it's just wealth preservation and the you know the purpose of wealth is to to use it to improve your life to improve other people's lives if you're just sitting on it forever then uh you know you're probably not making great use of it uh you know some other people talk about well you never sell your bitcoin you only like borrow against it and i still feel like a lot of the solutions that we have for that aren't great um you know a lot of people have definitely gotten burned by uh lending out their coins over the years we do i think we we do have a few improvements like there there are some systems out there like lava uh that's built on discrete log contracts that show more promise but they haven't really been around long enough to i think have built up enough of a reputation that you know they don't have any unforeseen edge cases that could fail i'm so glad you by the way you touched on the topic because it drives me nuts like i have everything i have is in bitcoin i'm getting paid in bitcoin how am i supposed to be living my life and i'm not talking about buying rolexes and lamborghini just paying rent like i have to sell bitcoin of course i don't want to do it but if you are plugged in like you said it's such a situation ship you know of course if you if you have a job you're getting paid in fiat and you save into bitcoin yeah great don't sell it but even though at some point you'll have to consider it otherwise if this asset nobody sells nobody sell it well then there's no there's no use for it like it has to circulate right otherwise what's the point i i've told some people like the main reason that i still have a salary is just so that i can reduce uh my need to sell bitcoin but uh that's uh you know it won't be that way forever um and if i think back on over like the past four or five years where i guess i guess you could say i've sold more bitcoin i haven't i haven't sold it to you know buy lambos or other stuff for myself i've mostly sold it uh to actually invest in bitcoin companies or i've donated it uh to uh charities uh preferably those that have like developer grant programs so you know most of the time when i'm like i'm disposing of bitcoin for one reason or another it's actually to put it back into the system kind of you know give back to this thing that has uh done so well for me i agree and there is a karmatic element to it if you get rid of it per se if you if you exchange it into fiat or whatever into assets you're allowing someone else to pick it up so i think there's a karmatic element it's not like a coin that when you sell it you basically you want to exit actually you are offering someone else a chance to you know buy some satoshis which are indeed very limited so i think there is a karmatic element in there that i also like and i wanted to ask you i mean what's the first problem you see when it comes to self-custody is the the wax is the fact that people don't understand how to store it is the fact that they don't know they can self-custody what's the barrier from users to self-custody their bitcoin uh the well the biggest initial barrier is kind of how people get onboarded so the vast majority at least in western world uh get onboarded through you know some regulated entity uh whether that's a crypto exchange like bitcoin like coinbase or kraken or uh what have you or now through the etfs and so and this is one reason why the etfs are concerning now you know people get on boarded through the etfs that's it they're stuck you know there is no withdrawal at least as of today and i doubt there will be for like retail level people if you're getting into one of the you know older crypto exchanges most of the time people are just buying and then they're just letting it sit there and that's it and in some cases this may be because they simply don't know that withdrawing is an option because you know if you're a sort of trad fi investor then that's just not a normal flow right you go to your broker you buy stuff and you're done you don't like transfer it to other brokers it's a pretty rare thing to do so a lot of people probably don't even think about it or you know if they are aware that that's an option then they just don't want to deal with the responsibility you know they're afraid they're going to screw it up and you know in a way that's an accurate fear to have that's like once you once you withdraw to self-custody you are taking on a lot of responsibility there are things that you can do that will basically cause you to lose your money forever so that's why i've been focused on improving self-custody for a decade now is that i think that if it's not easy if it's not something that people can get comfortable with then of course they're not going to do it they're just going to leave their bitcoin with a trusted third party and you know i see that is antithetical to like the entire reason that this space exists so like i said it's it's it's kind of like a an ongoing war between the convenience of trusted third parties and the responsibility but the potential empowerment that can come with self-custody so you know when i decided to switch my career a decade ago i decided that i wanted to have like a mission and my mission wasn't bitcoin rather i decided that i wanted my mission to be to use my skills as a technologist to help empower individuals so you know that can mean a number of different things but i feel like you know bitcoin and self-custody is one of the um highest value most direct ways to do that and you know thanks to your cryptography and software in general there are a number of different tools and things that you can do out there to empower yourself and you know protect yourself from the man or trusted third parties or or what have you but uh you know doing that with your finances i think the financial aspect is one of the most um long-term empowering empowering things because of course if you have you know sovereign wealth that just opens up a lot of other opportunities for you over the long term it sounds really complicated to explain to someone that you guys can help with self-custody because the first thing people are going to think about is like wait so am i losing then my bitcoin do you have an onboarding where you kind of explain the process to new clients yeah and you know we have several different tiers all the way from a um basically 250 a year 20 a month annualized mostly do-it-yourself setup where you get email support from us and you know we provide you with the mobile app which is your primary guidance for you know how do you set up and maintain your key set to your funds and then at higher level tiers what you're really paying for with us is higher level of consultation because ultimately there's a lot of decisions that go into creating your own bank and figuring out the security of you know how you're storing and distributing and accessing the keys and the the primary thing that we're trying to help people do here is to create a setup that eliminates single points of failure because we have to understand people are human people make mistakes things go wrong you know there can be uh catastrophes whether that's like house fire or other natural disasters or there can be you know issues with software and hardware and you know million different types of attacks or just failures that over a long period of time can tend to happen so you know you want your setup to be resilient and robust enough that when those failures happen it does not result in catastrophic loss of funds and the way that we achieve that is by using you know multi-sig or another way of saying it is multiple keys that are used to access your funds so think of it as if you're a harry potter fan it's kind of like a horcrux right uh if you want to access the great power within we actually we say you know you have to have a threshold of pieces of these keys and you distribute them them geographically and on different software different hardware and basically think about everything that could go wrong and then put you into a system where when any given thing does go wrong it should only affect one key and then you can use your other keys to effectively recover from that and you know heal your setup and continue moving forward it's like a more dynamic management system i think for your vault if you want to think of it that way uh i think one problem a lot of people tend to fall into in this space is they're like okay i set up my cold storage i just i set it up and then i bury it and i forget about it for 10 years right uh well there's a number of things that can go wrong during that period why i think that you should not just uh forget about it for a long period of time and so you know we're we're believers in more active management and uh sort of active checking that your security is healthy and has not degraded over time do you recommend for example for whoever is storing their bitcoin into a treasure or ledger to update the firmware if it's a security update then i think it's it's a good idea if it's just an update where they're like adding more crypto tokens then you may not care about that you know whenever you're doing those firmware updates you definitely want to be sure that you have your seed phrase backup because we've seen no shortage of times when doing firmware updates has wiped devices 100 and this is another issue by the way which is where do you store it how do you keep it which is a completely different chapter right that's why casa hold guys again in the description you will find jameson link and of course casa hodl because i strongly recommend to look into it it's good to at least explore different parts to make sure that you save your bitcoin in the most safe and secure way possible so well jameson thank you so much man it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show really appreciate you coming in and sharing your knowledge with us thank you thank you again thanks for having me guys thank you so much for watching and we'll see you on the next one