Privacy and security and freedom all kind of go hand in hand.
It basically comes down to using proxies for everything.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I'm here at Consensus 2019 with Jameson Lopp, who is the CTO of CASA.
Thanks so much for chatting with me.
Anytime.
So I wanted to talk about the CASA ethos of individual sovereignty.
This is something that your company really just drills down on the importance of that.
Why do you think that this is important?
Well, it's important because it's hard.
We've had this idea in Bitcoin since inception of being your own bank.
However, what we found is that it's too difficult for the average person.
There's a very, very high learning curve that needs to be scaled in order to understand
all of the complexities that go along with the security of keeping your private keys
actually private in a way from attackers.
The first product that we actually offered was a key management service.
It's a multi-sig vault style product where we're leveraging hardware devices that are
already on the market, Trezor, Ledger, et cetera.
Once you have geographically dispersed sets of keys, that protects you not only against
attackers but also against a variety of different types of loss due to a natural disaster.
EMP protection, that is just one of many, many different attacks or at least loss vectors
that can happen that most people just don't think about.
We are trying to build hardware and software products and services that have those protections
built into them.
One of the pieces of being sovereign in the system is maintaining your own keys.
That's what that first solution was about.
The next piece though is if you want to operate with the strongest security model where you're
not trusting other third parties to not lie to you, then you need to run a fully validating
node on the network.
That node is basically acting as a sentry.
They are acting as an auditor and making sure that no one is breaking the rules that you
have agreed to by using a Bitcoin protocol.
A lot of people don't bother to do this because the downside is that when we're asking people
to run a full node, what we're really saying is we want you to become a server administrator.
Very few people want to even put in the time required to understanding various networking
and IT management complexities.
We have once again tried to lower the bar, lower the technical requirements to be able
to operate a node in this environment.
We've gotten to the point where we can ship a box to you.
You just plug in a few cables and wait a few minutes and then pull up basically a web app
where you can then have an administrative dashboard to see what's going on with your
node to use the Bitcoin and Lightning wallets within the node and use them in a way that
you are no longer trusting anyone else on the network.
Forcing a very complex system into a simple setup like that, I can imagine it was a long
process.
There are of course many things that can go wrong, but we've built this system to be as
robust as possible and try to recover from software failures, though there are still
the occasional hardware failures.
We even believe that just as a result of international shipping, we get a lot of hardware damage
but at a more common level most of it is networking complexities and the fact that we're shipping
a device off that is going to be installed in an environment that we have no idea what
it's like.
I would say in the majority of cases it works fine, no problem, but there are a variety
of edge cases that we've run into where users may be running a router that is different
enough from most other routers that it's hard for them to get it to open up to basically
talk to from outside of their home network.
We've even encountered issues where for a variety of reasons the user doesn't even have
a public IP address or they have a public IP address and it changes all the time and
that screws things up.
We actually just rolled out Tor support in the past few weeks, spent a lot of time on
that and we did this not just because we like the privacy improvements, but it turns out
that Tor actually solves a lot of networking complexities.
You can completely bypass a lot of these issues when you're talking over the Tor network.
It just works, the addressing just works, it gives you security and encryption that
just works.
There's more surveillance than ever, there's more overreach than ever, it is getting harder
and harder for a person to live what I would call a free life and to do things where they
have control over their own choices.
So what are some suggestions that you would give to people for just incremental improvements?
Privacy and security and freedom all kind of go hand in hand.
I wrote a very lengthy article about my own journey into extreme privacy last year.
It basically comes down to using proxies for everything and so that may be straightforward
from a computer standpoint of using VPNs and Tor and whatnot, but then on the financial
side using proxies so that your real financial accounts are hidden behind other layers so
that your real name is not associated with your day-to-day activities or physical location
or whatever, but rather using legal entities or other friends, family or higher to help
basically to undertake the actual interactions that may leak sensitive data.
It seems like it's a big trade-off for convenience for security and privacy and as soon as you
start trying to live a life that is more private, that's not an easy feat.
How do we convince people that this is an undertaking worth taking, that this is something
that is important and will make their lives better?
It is a difficult thing.
Now we can talk about things like the inevitability of data breaches, information wants to be
free and what are the possible consequences of that?
If you imagine the worst case scenario and how much trouble it would be to clean that
up and then compare it to how much trouble and resources you have to put into prevention,
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I think of it as an insurance policy.
So everyone has their own risks that they need to evaluate what might happen, but it's
also difficult this day and age to evaluate some of the risks of being exposed because
it's very easy to accidentally attract unwanted attention because of how information is disseminated
these days.
It's very easy to do or say something that, for example, goes viral and one day you're
a nobody and the next day you have millions of people who are focusing their attention
on you.
What do you say to the detractors who say that all of this is overkill?
I would say that I'm not operating to work well in the day-to-day case.
I'm operating to be protected against the worst case scenario.
It is true that most people will probably be able to go through their lives without
taking any extreme privacy protections and they'll be fine, but it's also true that
a lot of people will not.
And so you don't know what that is going to be and so it's just a sort of better safe
than sorry type of situation.
It's the same reason why, like in the Bitcoin ecosystem, because we think very adversarially
about things, we don't want to get into an edge case situation that was deemed to be
highly unlikely but ends up happening and ends up causing a catastrophe and causing
a lot of damage.
Right.
Better be safe than sorry.
It seems to be the ethos.
Well, I really appreciate your time and all of the efforts you are making at CASA to give
people back individual sovereignty.
I think it's a really important endeavor, so thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.