He's one of the most passionate educators about Bitcoin, a self-described cypherfunk, entrepreneur, privacy advocate, and some would say even a rebel. Today, Jameson Lopp sounds off on his life-changing experience with a SWAT team, how he went up the grid, created a life of extreme privacy, and advocates for Bitcoin for all, sounding off on everything from privacy to El Salvador, and it all starts right now on Nomad Capitalist. Jameson Lopp, welcome to Nomad Capitalist. Thanks for having me. Developer, writer, cypherpunk, Bitcoin enthusiast, entrepreneur, that's how you describe yourself. Why did you choose those things, and which things stand out as most important to you in describing yourself? Well, it's been a long journey. I really started out as a developer with a computer science degree, just working on web applications, and over the years, went further and further to the back end of doing large-scale web infrastructure, and then kind of stumbled upon Bitcoin, and that's when I really started going down the rabbit hole, taking on the cypherpunk aspects of trying to understand how to better navigate the information superhighway while still protecting yourself, and I had some major events happen in my life along the way that kind of spurred on the various decisions that I've made there. But I would have to say that these days, my libertarian philosophy has kind of meshed with my entrepreneurialism, and I would even describe myself as really an anarcho-capitalist who is trying to use my technological skills to bring forth what I believe is a more fair type of capitalistic society, rather than what we're dealing with these days, which is a lot more crony capitalism and certainly not fair from many people's standpoint. You've got a very fascinating life story. I want to touch on that in a moment. For those who are not familiar, cypherpunk, what do you mean by that? So there's some interesting connotations that I think come along with that, especially because the cypherpunks are thought to be one of the originators of Bitcoin, but really there's so much more than that. There are many different technologies that you're probably using every day on the internet that are the result of the work of cypherpunks. Things like HTTPS is the encryption that you're using for almost any website that you go to, things that are protecting your credit card details or your general privacy of what you're doing on the internet. These technologies only existed because there were privacy advocates back in the 80s, 90s, and really the early days of the internet, who understood that the internet had great potential, but if we didn't worry about privacy, if we didn't try to build technologies to help protect people's privacy, then the internet would become a panopticon. I would say that even despite all of their efforts, it is generally a panopticon. It's still very difficult to operate online without leaking a lot of information, but this is something that I think is going to be a battle that is never ending. There's nothing really special, I would say, about being a cypherpunk. There are no credentials required. You don't have to be a cryptographer. All you have to do is to be an advocate for the development and use of privacy enhancing technologies. You are a privacy advocate. It's always fastened to me my entire life watching people who start to make more money and suddenly they talk about our mantra of lower taxes, I don't want to pay as much in taxes, or I'd like to pay zero taxes. It's easy to not make any money and say, hey, why don't you pay your taxes. It's easy to tell everyone else you shouldn't have privacy, but yet people want privacy for themselves. You're saying that's been a core element in propagating the development of the internet and now propagating cryptocurrencies and bitcoins, is that my understanding? It is. Unfortunately, I would say the vast majority of people still don't even really think about their privacy, and most people don't really think about their privacy until it's too late and something has gone wrong, and I'm no exception to that. I was actually working, I would say, as an antithesis to a cypherpunk for the first decade of my career. I was actually working for an online marketing company and I was building systems that were ingesting petabytes of raw tracking information and using that to help figure out what people were doing and how you could then better target them and try to sell stuff to them. That was some real, I would say, surveillance capitalism that I was enabling for a number of years and has really helped me understand exactly how difficult it is to remain private just in your day-to-day life now that things are so interconnected. You've been described as burning down your life. Talk to me about to regain your privacy. Tell me how that started and what happened. Yeah, so I was going about living my life, I would say, fairly normal suburban middle class type of existence in America, and then over the years, I kind of gained a voice in the Bitcoin community on Twitter, gained a bit of a social media following, and at some point, this is the type of issue that mainstream celebrities have had to deal with for the past century at least. Once you have a following that becomes large enough, then it's just sort of a law of numbers that there's going to be a few bad actors or a few crazy people in there, and you have to update your threat model because they're going to start doing things that you were not prepared for. Now with the internet, with social media, I would say the threshold for that is lowered greatly. You no longer have to be a celebrity that is known by tens of millions of people. In my case, I got to I think maybe 100, 150,000 Twitter followers when the major event in my life happened, which is that my entire neighborhood got shut down by my local law enforcement department. I had a SWAT team come out and surround my house and had a mobile unit there with dozens of highly armed and trained officers. The reason that they did this was that someone with just a little bit of tech savvy was able to figure out my precise address and was able to make a phone call to my law enforcement department and pretend to be me and say the right words to get a high level of lethal force deployed against me, basically saying I had killed people and I was holding people hostage and I had bombs and all of these other things. That's really one of the things that I think has greatly changed with the internet is this level of asymmetry that can happen now where for probably less than $100 worth of resources, someone who knows how to work the system can have hundreds of thousands of actually taxpayer dollar funded lethal force targeted at you in a matter of minutes. The only way to protect against that is privacy. For sure. You are, as I've said, there's so many celebrities with a small C these days. You have 300 plus thousand Twitter followers and as you said, there's some bad apples. To your earlier point, I finished a house recently and I go down to an apartment and I look at the buttons to push to get lit up. They put my name on the button and I said, guys, this isn't going to work. Nobody really thinks about that in a place where my name is not really a very common name and it stands out like a sore thumb in a pretty touristy place in town. That seems to be the worst thing you could do. I said, you got to change that immediately. But so many people don't even think about that. Yeah, it's so easy. It's really the default. Just any website it seems you go to and sign up for even the most trivial service now, you're going to get a form that's going to ask you for all types of invasive information that they really don't need. But of course, the reason that they're asking for it is marketing purposes and they either they may use that information themselves to try to sell things to you or they may just take that and resell it to someone else who will do the same thing. You had the SWAT team come to your house. Did you ever figure out who did this? Not well enough to satisfy law enforcement to actually have action taken against them. I ended up kind of going my own route and offering a bounty for information and I got a number of tips and we have some ideas. But I handed everything that I had over to law enforcement and that was what almost four years ago. Nothing has come of it. I don't expect anything will come of it really. After working with some very well read and understood attorneys like former prosecutors and stuff, they basically made it clear to me that my case was not going to be a priority because I wasn't in quote unquote danger anymore. And so the law enforcement, they have a limited amount of resources and they're going to go after whatever they think are the biggest criminals that are impacting the most people with the highest severity. It seems to me a country with trillions of dollars in tax revenue and sky high tax rates could do a little bit more to solve everyone's problems. What did you learn about the US justice system as they call it from this encounter? Well I certainly don't feel like I've gotten what I paid for and I actually ended up paying tens of thousands of dollars out of my own pockets just to try to do some investigation, to try to build more of a case to hand over to law enforcement. That was kind of the craziest aspect of this whole thing is that I think we are conditioned to believe that if something bad happens to you, then law enforcement is going to throw everything they have to try to, yeah, you're going to get your justice, right? Well it really came down to a pay to play type of thing where it was like, look, law enforcement, they gave up or at least my local law enforcement gave up on the case within about 48 hours when they hit a dead end trying to trace stuff on the tech side. And that's when I started hiring private investigators, myself putting up a bounty, so on and so forth. And even then, I don't regret it, it was still an interesting learning experience, but I feel like I may have had to put in 10 times as much if I really wanted to get some sort of outcome out of all of this, but I put it all behind me at this point. It's a million dollar price in your estimation to get real justice in the United States these days when someone comes out of the blue. You weren't expecting this? You never saw it coming? No, I had not really thought about it. I figured I wasn't harming anyone, so I didn't really have anything to worry about. But I wasn't thinking about the fact that someone might simply want to extort me. And that's really what it came down to. Is that what it was? Yeah, it was a very, very simple extortion. After the fact, I got more messages basically saying, if I don't send a bunch of Bitcoin, then they're going to keep doing even worse things to me. But thankfully, I was correct that they were all bark and no bite and nothing of consequence really happened after that major event. What happened during the incident though? We step over that. The SWAT team comes in. Where are you in all this? Yeah, it was actually fortuitous from the sense that I had just enough OPSEC that I may have saved myself a lot of trouble. So essentially what happened on that day, I believe it was a Monday. Monday morning, I wake up and I went to the gym as I tend to do first thing in the morning. And when I got to the gym, I actually tweeted out something about just getting out of bed and not being prepared for the week. And I'm pretty sure that the attackers saw that and they assumed, oh, he just got out of bed. He must be at home right now. Meanwhile, I was actually at the gym. I was then playing a racquetball with some guys for an hour or so. And it was in fact, when I went back home that I ran into the police barricade around my neighborhood and they wouldn't let me into my own neighborhood. It then took about 20 minutes or so for me to figure out that they were actually there for me. And that was when they got me over to the mobile command posts and I explained to them what I figured was probably going on. They stick a gun in your face? I mean, they have 12 guys carrying you in or what was it like? No, it was very clear to them that I was not a threat. As I was driving by my house to the mobile command post, I saw a bunch of unmarked cars everywhere and then I saw guys basically peeking around the corners of my neighbor's houses where they had taken up positions and they managed to keep it pretty quiet at my actual house. It was once I got a block down the street is where I saw all the actual activity. Obviously, they had set up a perimeter in such a way that they figured if I was in the house, I would not be able to tell what was going on. Right. So they thought you weren't a threat and so it was not something where they're tackling you and they're all, I mean, it was not that. Yeah. The one thing that I do give them credit for is they were apparently already suspicious because they had realized that the phone call had not come from my state, it had come from out of state. So that should be a red flag, of course, because these type of SWATR attackers can't call 911. That's a very localized type of system. They actually have to find a non-emergency number and then get routed into the 911 system. But that and some other potential flags, I think gave them a caution, but I guess for whatever reasons, they were still obliged to send out the entire squad just on the off chance that it might be real. This to me seems like, when I look at all the countries I spend time in around the world, obviously, we don't want to be going around taking hostages and that kind of stuff, but it seems to me probably a lot less intense approach to this in a lot of countries around the world. It seems like, I mean, the U.S. police has become so militarized. It's almost kind of scary. Now you look at all the shootings that are happening, I mean, I almost wonder, do you feel safe living in the United States? Well, you know, the police do have to deal with the fact that America and its citizens are very well armed. And in fact, it was kind of funny because after I explained everything in the mobile command post, the lieutenant who was in charge of the scene offered to clear my house for me. And obviously I declined. I did not think that was necessary. But when I actually thought about it, I got pretty afraid for two reasons. One because my dog was in the house and I'm well aware of the American law enforcement propensity to shoot dogs who seem to be aggressive. And second of all, I realized that I actually had a dozen weapons that were just laying out in my living room because I had been to the shooting range just the day before and I was waiting to clean them all after that. So I did not want to have to deal with explaining all of these rifles laying around, especially after someone had called in a threat saying, this is a crazy guy with a bunch of weapons who's going to shoot people. Yeah. And so that motivated you to go even deeper into the privacy. They say your family members don't know where you live now, is that true? That's right. It's, you know, I've actually moved multiple times over the four year period since then that each time is its own learning experience. And I learned some things the first time around the hard way because of leaks that happened and basically realized that I can't trust anyone to keep information confidential. Even people who I generally would trust with my life, you know, family members, close friends, even people like lawyers who are supposed to be really good at keeping things confidential. It's just, it's a fact of the matter of like how we live our lives that because the default is for people to share everything and, you know, the default is for your family and friends to gossip with each other or just have idle chit chat, you know, to catch up, you know, that's just a part of human nature. And so the only way you can really be sure that information doesn't propagate is to not leak it to anyone in the first place. One of the things that I've learned, you know, with Nomad Capitalist and being overseas and doing things that 99% of people won't do as well as building a company and having employees and having all the things that come with that is, again, almost nobody really gets this and you might say, hey, listen, I had the SWAT team come and they were beaten down my door and I got to really be, and they say, oh yeah, you know, and then they don't really understand at the core what that means. It just, it goes against their natural instinct, as you say. Yep. And really just marketing-based capitalism in general is, you know, some of the leaks that I had were actually through lawyers and bankers that I had direct relationships with that knew my specific situation. And at the end of the day, what would happen is they would type my new address into some form and that would just get sucked up into some other system that would start sending out mailings and other information and sharing it with who knows what because these systems can be so complex on the backend that you're not even really sure what's going to happen to all of the data. So I certainly think that having an international footprint can assist in this, but what are your tips? You're sitting in the United States. What are your tips for people who want to take back their privacy and make sure whether it's just, you know, being left alone or whether it's not having a SWAT team come to your house, what do you tell them to do? Well, the one resource that I wish had existed when I started with all of this is actually a book called Extreme Privacy. It's written by Michael Bazell. I believe he's actually a former law enforcement investigator, and he is really living and breathing this. He's a privacy consultant who also does all of these various privacy experiments himself and with his clients. And the one thing that you'll notice if you keep up with that is that he's basically putting out a new edition of the book every year because this is a constantly changing landscape. But the main thing that I start off with telling people is that it can seem really overwhelming because there are so many different aspects to your life that you can try to harden from a privacy perspective, but you don't have to do it all at once. You don't have to go the route that I did where I spent like six months and tens of thousands of dollars to burn down everything and start all over. You can start off, you know, just a few hours at a time working on some of the technological aspects of improving your day-to-day internet use, for example. That'll get you 99% ahead of everybody else in the world. Even if you never get to the point of trying to worry about your physical privacy like I have from a matter of public records and all of that. Just worrying about your digital privacy, you can do that without having to spend a ton of resources. It's mainly just a matter of time investment and changing a few habits. When you say burn down your life, what did you burn down? What are the steps to do that? So I investigated a number of options at the time. After that major event happened, I realized I needed to improve my privacy. The question was, how do I erase everything that's out there? Because I had been living in the same house for about 10 years and that address had been shared with probably thousands of different companies when I bought things or when I signed up for services. At the end of the day, I realized it was going to be impossible to clean all of that up. The only way to really move forward to be sure that my actual location was not plastered all over the internet was to start over. It was to set up a new house and do that in a very privacy oriented manner and then make sure that as I was then going about my day to day life, I was not giving out my real address or my real phone number or really any other important points of contact for myself. Rather, I would have to create proxies. That's really what it comes down to when you're talking about privacy is creating shields, creating proxies for every aspect of your life. Some of that may be technological and may be using things like VPNs so that you're not directly connecting to various web services. That's a technical proxy. It may be a legal proxy where you're setting up a trust or a corporation and you're then having that entity take action on your behalf without having your name on various documents. Or you may end up using what I would basically call people proxies where you may have a friend, a relative, a paid consultant, an attorney or someone like that who is then taking action on your behalf so that once again, your name is not associated with some action but rather their name is associated with it. You see wealthy people doing this all the time. One that's been in the news recently, Bill Gates who is the money manager has the guys in charge of this, the guys in charge of that, creating proxies between yourself. Why not more movements internationally then? It seems like for people who are used to going to the US databases, there are a lot fewer databases in some countries. It's harder for people to adapt to. Maybe fewer people in that country care about you or know who you are. Why not more movements in that realm? Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is very jurisdiction specific and obviously me being an American, I've spent all of my time worrying about what the options are here. The things that I have learned about a lot of other countries is that they tend not to have as many avenues for legally protecting yourself. For example, there are a number of states in America where you can set up a corporation where you don't have to publicly list the manager of that corporation. It's due to the legal statutes of those states. My understanding is that in a lot of European countries and probably most countries in general, anytime you incorporate some sort of legal entity, you have to actually publicly reveal the names of everyone who is involved in that. That gets rid of the corporation as a potential privacy shield. I think that you're mainly only going to be able to use it as a legal liability shield, not so much as a privacy shield in a lot of other countries. There's other aspects of countries, like for example, if you're talking about phone privacy, my understanding is that the majority of countries are actually requiring you to have your government identity directly registered to your SIM card whenever you buy one for mobile phone service. That makes it a lot more difficult unless you're willing to buy an illegal or under-the-counter type of SIM card that is not registered to your identity. That's just a couple of things, but at the end of the day, there are so many different aspects of your life that you have to deal with that this is something that is going to require a decent amount of research, especially if you're in a smaller country that probably doesn't have as many privacy-conscious individuals. Perhaps one could argue that while they should be more privacy-conscious, perhaps there are fewer of these issues. I would say there are certainly places where you can create these kind of structures and many people do. Probably harder to get bank accounts and things like that. Just for having the structure, I would say there's probably a good number of structures you could use. Let's talk and pivot about CASA, a company that I believe you helped create that uses some of these principles in the cryptocurrency space. Tell us about CASA. I've been working full-time in the Bitcoin security space for six years now. I spent the first three years of that helping enterprises like exchanges and payment processors secure their private keys so that they didn't get hacked and lose all of their Bitcoin. I pivoted after a few years to basically do the same thing except for focusing on individuals helping manage their Bitcoin. This was a personal problem where I realized that despite me being in the space and being so knowledgeable, I was spending basically a whole weekend every year dealing with and refreshing my own cold storage setup, trying to follow all the best practices so that I didn't get hacked, so that I didn't lose my keys, essentially making sure that if I got hit by a truck, all of my Bitcoin wouldn't just disappear and become inaccessible. There's a lot of different aspects of being your own bank that you have to worry about that people haven't really had to deal with before. This is a new paradigm. There's a reason why banks exist, and that's to abstract away a lot of those complexities. We believe that in order for Bitcoin as a system to really maximize its utility and for people to really be able to take advantage of all of its attributes, then we don't want to just recreate the banking system. We don't want people to feel so overwhelmed with managing their own private keys that they just throw up their hands and say, oh, I'll just leave it on an exchange or I'll let some other third party hold onto it for me because they're the experts and I don't want to deal with all of this. The point of CASA at a really high level is for us to provide software and client services that help people help themselves. It is a way for you to self-custody your Bitcoin assets where you aren't having to deal with every little aspect of deciding how to architect it. We've essentially created a very robust and diverse key management architecture so that we have eliminated single points of failure. You no longer have to worry about losing one hardware device or losing one paper backup and having a catastrophic loss where all of your money is gone forever. We do this with a variety of different aspects of the protocol and the ecosystem, but the short version is we have multiple different keys that are geographically distributed across multiple different locations that you decide and they're stored on multiple different brands and manufacturers of hardware key management devices. This allows us to have enough redundancy that a natural disaster or a physical attacker or whatever is not going to be able to gain or destroy enough key material that they would then be able to steal your money or lock you out of your money. If something goes wrong, you can actually just go buy a new hardware device and perform a rotation within our system to bring yourself back up to 100%. Don't want to go too much into the weeds here, but suffice to say that we believe this is the future of being your own bank because it gives you enough flexibility to both feel like you're in control of your assets, but also be able to set up an inheritance system where the keys are distributed enough and other people can come together as a part of the estate process to be able to reconstitute your funds if something does happen to you. But it's a very complex and personal thing and that's why there's a lot of client service that goes into it because there are still decisions that need to be made and there's always trade-offs between security and convenience. Do you worry that with the increasing acceptance of Bitcoin that you see more people for whom convenience is a higher priority than security, privacy? Yeah, because I think that is, once again, it's human nature. It's kind of the way that our society has evolved that we have created these hierarchical structures that are much more efficient, that allow you in a system of capitalism to be more productive because you're allowing for specialization. The result of that is that you can specialize in one very niche thing and be highly productive at it, be highly rewarded for it. The result is you then, because you have a scarcity of time, you're not dealing with many other aspects of your life. Obviously nobody at this point has what I would say would be like food sovereignty or energy sovereignty. Very few of them have financial sovereignty and it's because we are now relying upon these other third parties who are specializing in those things to more efficiently deliver those services to us. This kind of requires a different type of thinking of understanding that the trade-off to the high efficiency specialized hierarchical type of system is that you're creating a lot of fragility. One example, just looking at supply chains, which I would hope would be very obvious to people after the year of the pandemic, is that these just-in-time delivery systems, which are highly optimized, they are not as robust and it's very easy for them to break down if some sort of shock event happens. That type of issue exists in many different aspects of our lives. Not just supply change, the financial system, as anyone saw in 2008, the fragility that happened there, we expect that type of thing, is going to continue happening in many different aspects of human civilization. You really have to decide for yourself how much robustness do you want? Are you willing to give up some convenience in order for having more sovereignty, more robustness against some of these edge case shock events? That's definitely something I've seen as someone who spent a lot of time as a perpetual traveler, having some sovereignty, having some control over things like food, water, having a place where you have those things is important because what you learn as a perpetual traveler is everyone's controlling where you live, where you sleep, if you stay in a hotel or some kind of vacation rental, if you're eating out all the time, you have no control. It's really remarkable to think about that, how so many of us are outsourcing those parts of our lives. A couple of quick more questions, El Salvador, the Bitcoin developments there, your thoughts on that? It's interesting. I actually kind of predicted it about three years ago, though I was surprised because I kind of assumed it would have been an even smaller country, some sort of micro nation. The reason this is interesting is really just from a macro game theory point of view. Once some small nations start getting into the Bitcoin game, they start realizing that there's a lot for them to potentially gain there by opting out of the current financial system, no longer being at the whim and the mercy of things like the IMF or the Federal Reserve. It's interesting because it gets other small countries starting to think in the same way. What we're hoping for, of course, is that this is the first of many dominoes. If you get enough of those dominoes falling, then larger countries start to think the same way. That's how we may actually get to the point of a mainstream Bitcoin adoption where it really is operating on the global stage as a player at the same level of things like the dollar and the euro and whatnot. I will say from the libertarian standpoint, I'm not a fan of laws that compel people to have to use certain things. I'm not so much a fan of the idea that people in El Salvador will be forced to accept Bitcoin. I think that one of the great values of the system is that it should be voluntary and people should adopt it because they realize that it's in their best interest to do so. At the very least, I think this will get more people learning more about it, understanding what the value proposition is. Is there a limit that a country like El Salvador, we've talked about how, and I've been to El Salvador and interesting, it really had a hard time pushing people in El Salvador, honestly. It's interesting to see that this got done, but is there a limit to how many more small nimble countries, in this case with visionary type people in charge, do you run out of those eventually? Because I don't see the United States saying, hey, we're going to tear ourselves down or burn our life down as you did to adopt Bitcoin, though. But there are many different aspects, I think, of scaling Bitcoin as a system that are going to be hurdles to overcome. There are technical scaling issues. There are a lot of language issues where I think that Bitcoin has primarily been English dominated and a lot of the resources out there have not been sufficiently translated to a lot of other languages. There's going to be barriers to adoption simply because of how far behind a number of these other communities are. I think it's going to take a number of years to get them caught up with the rest of the world and those of us that are still trying to push the envelope forward. You have a lot of great resources. People should check out your website. This is, as I can tell, very important to you, educating people from the beginning. Where do they find your resources and why is that so important to you? Sure. My website is lopp.net, L-O-P-P dot net, though. You can also get to the resources by going to bitcoin.page. That may be easier for people to remember. This is just one of a dozen side projects that I've maintained for a number of years in this space. It's essentially a map of what I consider to be every quality educational resource that I come across to help people better understand aspects of Bitcoin. If you go on there, you'll realize that there's something like a couple dozen different sub sections. Each section has several dozen links. All in all, there's probably close to a thousand links off that website, which you could easily spend months, if not a year, trying to traverse them all. I think this really is a testament to the complexity of the system and how many different angles there are to it. You can approach Bitcoin from whatever interests you most and then branch out from there. Lopp.net is the website, Jameson Lopp. Thank you for being with us and sharing your story. Thanks for having me. People ask, Andrew, how do I get the most out of Nomadic Capitalist? How do I begin my Nomadic Capitalist journey? The first thing people do is they start right where you're at. 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