Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another episode of nuggets news today
We've got a very special guest someone that I really admire. That's Jameson lop. He's working on Bitcoin the lightning network
He's one of the co-founders of casa, which you've probably heard. We're gonna talk about everything that they do
So thanks for joining us today Jameson
Thanks for having me. I mean, where do we get started you do so much
I'm sure plenty of people already follow you on Twitter
But I guess I just love to get the quick background of what you're doing before you got into Bitcoin
And so that path that led you to become that cypher punk
Sure computer scientist by trade I was basically
Doing large-scale data analysis for online marketers
So actually the antithesis of what I do now and perhaps that's what gave me a bit of perspective of
How much data really flows around the internet and how much?
various organizations are collecting about people because I was I was helping organizations
suck up data from emails and websites and basically
Correlated all together and try to you know better help people
Target customers and and sell stuff to them
So, you know, it was not something that I was ever particularly
enthusiastic about it just posed some interesting technical challenges and kept my be it kept me busy until I got I
Guess the Bitcoin bug a number of years ago
Yeah, I will mute my mic from time to time with that crying baby in the background the best best I can make that's the problem
I've been in isolation, I guess at the moment
I'm plan B put out an interesting article recently about the changes of
States of Bitcoin and back in the day when Bitcoin was, you know
a bit of an experiment and then I sort of had that that payment network and that's where a lot of the debate happens these
Days about you know, is Bitcoin meant to be this digital cash versus it's become this store of gold now
I'm of the belief that you don't know what a technology is going to be best at doing when you make it ten years on and
The world needs hard money probably more than it needs a payment network at the moment
So I'd love to get your thoughts on how that sort of changed
Yeah, so actually just a few days ago. I
Published a blog post and I mean, you know, I've been writing blog post ever since I got into the space
But you know with all the the extra free time now
I think I've been ramping up the the articles that I've been pumping out and
The the article that I wrote it was it was kind of different
Usually I write technical stuff, but this one was actually about memes and I was essentially
talking about
Mimetic theory and how that relates to the narratives of what Bitcoin is and how that evolves over time and and
I think you know, this is something you could have a whole
hour-long episode about in and of itself, but essentially
we're still discovering what the technology is and can do what the limits of it are and we're still discovering what the
human consensus is
for like what the most valuable attributes of the system are and how we are
Comfortable or uncomfortable with changing different
Aspects of the system based upon the trade-offs that result from that and and that's essentially what
like a lot of this scaling debate stuff came down to
after years and years of arguing I kind of boiled it down to a very simple trade-off, which is
cost of creating a transaction versus
cost of
validating the entire system and and so that's where we ended up at kind of a
fundamental philosophical impasse between different people and their own
Perspectives of what Bitcoin is and what trade-offs they were willing to make to the system
But based on what the properties they thought thought were like most valuable to the system
Yeah, and for people at home and I've spoken to Andreas about this as well
And my understanding is there's still a lot of scaling we can get and everyone's in a rush
They want it to happen tomorrow
But there's still a lot of scaling and computer science that we can apply and get transaction counts up even with the one megabyte
size let alone the lightning network, which I know you're really passionate about so
With those scaling techniques a lot of those appear to be sort of 12-24 months away
You know, do you are you got an interest in all of those or are you more focused on the lightning network?
Yeah
That's actually another one of the memes that I mentioned in my article is like, you know, it always seems like we're
12 to 24 months away from things or this and this essentially this is because software is never done
And because we like I said are still exploring
sort of the edges of the possibilities of what can even be done with the system and
It's these trade-offs
That we find ourselves constrained by that make the the people like myself
Who are trying to build on top of the system more challenged?
there are
like like we said
different camps of philosophies around how we could change the system or how the system
Should change based on what we think it should do and and that was another one of the the trade-offs
Kind of as you mentioned is some people were in more of a rush than others
Who they wanted to see the system grow and they were willing to make certain trade-offs to try to see that happen faster
As opposed to other people who said, you know, we're willing to wait. We're willing to
experience some pain and discomfort some growing pains if you will
due to the
Inflexible nature of trying to make certain changes at the the low level
So, I mean i'm i'm very interested in seeing more scalability. I like everyone else want to see
global adoption of the system
But ultimately, I don't want to trade off certain attributes
Such as the cost of someone being able to audit the system themselves
Just so that we can see more people get on boarded and start using the system faster
Yeah, and to pick that apart a bit more. I think the
What say bsv for example has done they've ended up with what i'm not sure maybe 100 200 nodes
And they've got these huge blocks and the data the storage space you require
So that's I just want people at home to beginners to understand that yeah, you can scale really quickly
But that's a massive trade-off and the community has really decided that decentralization
Is so much more important than having these hundred super nodes data centers, whatever
you want to think in the mass
Yeah, I mean that's that's kind of the the fun part about all of this is that we can argue about it until we're blue in the face
But no one can stop anyone else from creating their own version, you know forking off
essentially
Trying a different path
Down this experiment. I mean this the whole thing has been
An experiment since the beginning and it's an open collaborative project where if people want to they can
Try to remain, you know within the consensus of the majority of folks and work within those
Constraints or if they get too frustrated. They may say you know what i'm going to leave
I'm going to try my own thing and if that works, then it should have
Its own value and get its own set of users, etc
And they can compete in the free market essentially a hundred percent and I think we've seen over a hundred forks
If you actually go and have a look, but um, I think it's getting harder and harder for them to survive
Particularly after they've had their harvings and I also think that bitcoin. I'd love to get your thoughts on this
It's almost impossible now to get a hard fork through. Do you think a lot of these upgrades are going to have to be soft forks?
Particularly the privacy focused ones. That's going to be really hard to get through as bitcoins
I guess matured and got its corporate aspects now
Yeah, you know
Privacy
Is going to be another one of the big things that I think people argue about
after scalability and
That's because there are other trade-offs again at play. So, you know, there are other
protocols out there
Whether it's a manero with ring signature type privacy applications or something like zcash with
Zero knowledge proofs
You know these arguably have stronger privacy attributes than bitcoin
But you once again make trade-offs most of the time one of the
Biggest trade-offs that you make uh, is scalability. Uh, these these things tend to you know
Require more data once again more block space
But the the deal breaker I would say that would prevent those strong privacy
Functions from getting into the bitcoin protocol is audit ability of the total supply
So if you get to a point where
The reason you have better privacy is because you're able to completely obscure the values of the transactions then often
that means you can no longer sum up the total value of the money in the system and
You know the 21 million bitcoin limit is one of those
strong
Attributes that uh, I think we can safely say is never going to change in bitcoin
Yeah, we have seen those instances. Haven't we where there's been bugs or
You know, you don't really know if there has been that inflation or something happened to the zcash's and the manero's and whatnot
Do you have any thoughts around that?
Do you think there's someone out there that maybe uh got to meet a few extra here or there before they uh audited or change those bugs
I mean really it's uh
It's a question of you know, how many people could have possibly known about a given uh,
Bug before it was found and patched right is
Um, it seems unlikely but the the fact that you can't prove it one way or another should be enough to I think
Give people pause and you know make them question. You know, what what's really going on here?
Yeah, so getting into the lightning network
That's you know, it started off with a flurry
It was growing month on month and it sort of
It really has stalled i'd say in terms of the the growth numbers
But I guess so have crypto markets it tends to grow with the renewed interest and new users and whatnot. So
How have you seen that? Do you have you been a little bit disappointed or is it just that software takes time thing that you were saying before?
So I I think during
2018 we saw
Amazing growth that far surpassed
Anyone's expectations and then 2019 has been more subdued growth
Uh, so, you know, this is probably just another type of of of cycle that we're gonna go through
Um on the technical side there has been
quite a bit of progress and
Progress in terms of of you know both security and like finding security
And privacy flaws that needed to be fixed at the protocol and implementation level
and also
learning a lot about sort of the new economics of this network and
That is
I think going to be one of the trickier things is
You know, we already had bitcoin, which is this ongoing experiment
Nothing had really ever been done like this, uh before, uh, 2009
And then you're building this completely new network on top of it that
Really? No one has ever tried to build a network like this before and so from like an economic and uh, you know
Liquidity management standpoint. This is like game-changing
No one has ever tread here before type of territory
you know, you're going to run into a lot of uh, weird edge cases, you know things that uh, no one
Could have predicted until you actually
Start stressing the network and so that is more of what we've been seeing. I think through
2019
As more people were actually using this network for commerce as more people were trying to
Uh run lightning nodes, not just as hobbyists, but as actual enterprises. That's when you start learning a lot more
Because you you've got real money on the line and so people are going to start
Being more adversarial and you know trying to poke holes and find various issues and uh, you know potentially
You know get money for themselves, you know
A lot of these things, um, they are their own bug bounties, right? As you know, if you can find
A bug in one of these protocols you may be able to make yourself rich. So that's that's when you really start to
Harden these networks because there's real incentive for people to find flaws in them
Yeah, I was gonna say have you heard of the wallet of satoshi the astral network?
The guys that have made the lightning wallet? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So most people most of our audience have had to play around with that
And that's probably the extent of their, um, you know experimentation with the lightning network
But as you say in the past 12 months, we've seen some really cool
I think it's strike where you can do your payments from the fiat world through the lightning network
Andreas was talking about, you know smart routing and whatnot. You might be able to do that
economics. I know that's something that people often criticize and say, you know, a million dollars you might make 50 or 500 dollars a year
So yield wise that's not very attractive. But
Yeah, what are your thoughts on all that?
I personally think that we're always going to have people that want to play around and support the network the oh geez and whatnot
They're going to run this sort of stuff. They don't need it necessarily to be economically viable to begin with
What do you think that yeah long term?
We're going to have people that want to play around and support the network the oh geez and whatnot
We've what do you think that yeah long term we're going to have so many people using that that that you know
Those fees are going to make it economically viable
Yeah, well, I mean this is
It's always been something sort of akin to mining right is that um, there are
Incentives at play that will essentially drive the cost down. Um, it is
I would say an even more competitive type of
Game than mining because at least with mining you have to go out. You have to acquire hardware you have to
You know find cheap electricity there. There's a fair amount of sort of like industrial and enterprise
engineering type of stuff that can
Give some people more of an advantage when you know, they're running things at scale
When it comes to lightning I would say the bar is even lower
All you really need is you have to have some bitcoin and then you have to have some technical ability to
Run the software and then so the the question becomes, you know, where
Where can you possibly get competitive advantages?
And it seems to me like the the majority of the competition over
Providing liquidity on the lightning network is going to come down to
best
Understanding and managing, you know the liquidity of these channels. And so it's it's almost going to become
I think similar to like
You know a day trading type of game, right is where you're
You're you're looking at all of these different flows of value and you're trying to best optimize
How your value is positioned within the network in order to capture as much flow as possible
And so, you know
It seems to me like it's basically going to come down to a numbers game and the more technically sophisticated people
Who are able to write algorithms to figure out this stuff?
They're going to be the ones that have the advantage and are going to be able to
Essentially make the most money, but you know because this
Like I said, it it doesn't really require much capital cost other than the actual bitcoin themselves
I think that's going to result in it being like even more competitive than mining for example
Which is just going to drive the cost down. It's going to
it's going to make the fees even lower to the point that we
We get to we're going to have to get to some
threshold which is probably going to be
akin to
I guess the risk
That is being taken by the people that are operating these liquidity providers
And so I think there have there have been some economists types who have looked at it and said well, it's going to be
This sort of new interest rate or you know, what is the time value of money, right? And
And there have there has been some speculation around what the actual time value of money is
and
I expect that that will be you know
Extremely low in terms of like percentages of value. Yeah
Um, one of the things I was also reading about is the ability to break up those payments
I'm not sure if that has a specific name yet, but
That liquidity it won't all have to go through one node if you want to send a hundred dollars over lightning
And there's not a path you might be able to break it up into five lots of twenty dollars as well. Is that correct?
Yeah
Atomic multi-path payments. Yes, and of course
Yes, and of course this you know
We're talking about really low level technical stuff
Like this is not something that the end user should even have to know is happening
It should all be happening under the hood
you know, you just press, you know pay money and uh, and the
the network the the implementations should figure out, you know, what is the
optimal way for me to push the value through the network and if I have to break it up into a dozen different paths
Because that allows me to use smaller liquidity channels and therefore pay lower fees. Then I'll do that a hundred percent
As you mentioned you do require a bit of technical knowledge and I guess that's why you started up casa
So for those that don't know what casa is, do you want to maybe talk about what it is in some of those products that you guys have?
Yeah, so the the short version is that we're focused on helping people improve their personal sovereignty and the first
first
product that we put out a couple of years ago is essentially a
self-custody solution
It is a multi-signature wallet, which means you have multiple sets of keys that it requires multiple
authorizations multiple sign-offs in order for a transaction to be created
We what we we tried to do is build the
ultimate
security model which is
Safe against of course hackers, but even more importantly
Safe against things like natural disasters and human error
It's in many cases. I think
when once people
Go down the path of being their own bank
They're actually more likely to screw up and lose their money than they are to have someone hack them or attack them and
You know take their bitcoin from them. So
We we built out our security model our threat model and then we said, okay
Well, how do we implement this in a way that doesn't require the user to be technically sophisticated?
you know, we want it to be like a point and click type of thing and so
So what we've done is we've leveraged the security
available from various hardware providers like trezor ledger cold card
To have dedicated hardware devices that actually secure the private keys and then we've built a really slick mobile app
Native mobile app that helps you then manage these devices. So it's a very visual looking app
Um, essentially you've you can visualize your key set, which is made up of these different hardware devices
And it's very easy for you to swap out hardware device
For example if one gets lost or damaged or stolen or whatever and the entire idea is that
We build enough
robustness into this setup where you have multiple sets of
geographically
distributed devices
That it makes it essentially impossible for an attacker to get enough of these to steal your money
but also by
By simply, you know following the instructions in the app and separating your keys your devices
you are then safe against things like
Fire or flood or earthquake or whatever, you know destroying
enough devices
Continuously that you would you know lose ability to access your money
And and also
It gives you enough
robustness that
If you make a mistake, you know, if you accidentally
Destroy a device, you know if your kid finds one of your devices at home
Uh, and and you know throws in the toilet. You don't have to worry about that resulting in financial loss because you have uh
Robustness you have additional backups essentially that you can use in case of disaster
and um and
We're really just trying to make it easy for people
Uh, if you want to check it out, all you have to do is go to our website at keys dot casa
Um
Yeah, i'll link it all in the description below for people
But um, I remember first seeing that metal seed uh storage reviews that you were doing mucking around with the
The flames and all that sort of thing and I think sometimes people don't think about that when they've written down their words
Again the other day someone messaged us and said i'll write down my 12 words in a random order
I thought that would be more secure and I thought i'd be able to remember it at the time but um
So what are some of the newer products you've got coming out because I think something that we need to do and again
This does go against that cypherpunk movement a little bit is the sort of the custodianship
There's a group of people that have they've always bought their apple shares
You know the boomers they've never had to hold their own shares or anything like that
So what are the sort of trade-offs and the multi-sig that you mentioned for people to have like an insurance or that the backup situation?
Yeah, so, you know, this is
One of the things that was challenging for us, you know when we were thinking through that threat model
We actually got to a point where we realized, okay, you know you you buy a trezor
You plug it in and it tells you, you know write down
The seed phrase and keep it in a safe place
And as we were thinking through the the ramifications of that we basically decided
This was asking too much of people, you know to to write down 12 or 24 words and keep them safe
There's just a mountain of technical and security knowledge
that's kind of like
The hidden part of the iceberg to all of that, which as you just said people can very easily screw up
Or or even we've heard tales of you know, someone passes away and they they told their family
Okay, you know if anything happens to me, you know, here's
the the seed phrase to to my wallet and then
The the family like takes a photo of that and starts sending it around asking people what they should do with it, you know
um
the and so, you know the result of this is we actually eliminated seed phrases from our
our setup because
We figured it's too much to ask of people and instead
Uh, we tell people, you know, just let the hardware devices
Manage the seed phrases
You can just think of your security and a more
You know physical sense of this is the physical device that is part of your keyset
If anything happens to it, we build in the functionality for you to essentially rotate that device out
and
and as we've been
Over the years, you know learning more from our our own user feedback
Is uh, we actually got to the point that we we realized there was a lot of demand for an inheritance product
So, you know, we've built out a few different tiers of multi-sig setups over the years
But the most recent one is actually a three of six
inheritance product where the whole idea is that
You have a threshold of these keys and these devices
that are stored
in
Locations that
Would be accessible
Uh given proof of death essentially so you know keep uh, keep a key in a safety deposit box with beneficiary
information on it, uh
Uh, a key is kept with casa where we can sign a transaction given a death certificate
and then
We added another key that would then be kept essentially by your attorney and the attorney would have
A software and instructions for you know
How to add their signature to essentially disperse your funds to your heirs in the event of your death
Yeah, so these are the type of things that we end up spending a lot of time thinking through thinking through all the edge cases
And then trying to build software that makes it extremely simple
For people to go through these fairly complex processes
Yeah, so what were some of the edge cases or the game theory aspects?
You know you get the dodgy lawyer and he goes and gets the the deposit box or what happens if
If casa get hacked or go broke, what are all those situations for the recovery?
Yeah, and and you really have to think adversarially about it
Um, and you know, this is why if you go to our website
We have a link that says how it works and and that uh goes to our our threat model that we developed
uh for our original setup and that is like 40 pages of information around like everything that we
Thought could potentially ever go wrong and how to mitigate against every one of those threats
And so, you know, we don't have enough time to talk about everything that could go wrong and I don't like I don't like, you know
Being a fear monger because you know, a lot of these things are edge cases though. Other things do happen more often
You know, like it's actually
Not that uncommon for someone to have uh, you know a house fire at some point in their lives, for example
so
So, um, the short version is that essentially our goal is to eliminate single points of failure
So like you said you you don't want to trust the lawyer. You don't want to trust the bank
You have to assume
That at any point in time
Anything could be compromised any any any one entity any one piece of software
Uh any one physical location you have to say, okay
what happens if this thing stops working or if this thing turns on me and you know tries to start colluding and
And steal my money, right? And so, you know that that's why
um, we we believe that the best way you can get robustness
against all these different events are
It's it's essentially through decentralization, right? You're you're distributing your risk across multiple
different pieces of hardware software physical locations, it's it's by
Using a diversity of different storage mechanisms
That you then ensure that like no single type of failure will affect many of them
Yeah, I know another thing that's been spoken about is like geolocation
So my device will only work if i'm in, you know, tasmania where I live for example
Do you guys have any like physical locations or is geolocation something else that you've played around with?
Uh, so
We we've certainly thought about sort of geofencing
As it were the the problem with that is twofold
one is that uh
Geo-fencing essentially requires that you use ip
Mapping, uh software to say, okay, you know this ip address is in this location and
That that will fail against any even semi-sophisticated attacker
They'll just use a vpn or or tor or something that will use an ip somewhere else
Um, or you know, you can target where you want your ip to be with with many different vpns and the other issue is that
um
Our software itself is not necessarily
the
uh
most
secure
Part of our setup because we're using the bitcoin protocol
We're using standards within bitcoin for how to do multi-signature
Uh transactions and we have to assume
That if if a sophisticated attacker wanted to
They don't even have to use the casa software
And this is actually this is a feature because we don't want casa and our software in our servers to be a single point of failure
Uh, therefore it's possible to use completely different wallet software to recreate your wallet and spin from it
therefore like any
Any specific security functions that we would put into the casa software could be routed around just by using other
Wallet software to reconstitute your wallet. Sure. So just quickly what is like a
Real low end for just the basic person that doesn't want to store it themselves
Versus someone with millions of dollars and what are the storage costs?
I imagine it's sort of less than or similar to storing physical gold and that sort of thing
Yeah, um
so
There are of course different tiers of
Security and storage that someone can use
If you're going into self-custody
You know, you can download any number of wallets for free
And even just like on your phone and you know withdraw from whatever exchange you purchased at and that costs almost nothing
But you're also exposing yourself to a ton of different risks
really, I would say the first
good option that someone can do is
Spend a hundred dollars buy one of these hardware devices like a trezor ledger cold card really cold card is more advanced
Usage trezor is probably one of the most user friendly
Um and
Withdraw your your money to you know that wallet that hardware device and it's managing your keys and protecting you from
Hackers essentially by making sure that your keys are not on an internet connected device
This is a great step forward in security
But you still have issues with robustness. You still have the single point of failure the single
uh key essentially that could be lost, um
Any number of reasons so then the question is, you know, how do you take another step forward?
Well, that's when you get into multisig
We have a very
Simple two out of three multisig service
Where you can actually try it for free?
We're charging ten dollars a month
For like ongoing usage of it
Uh, we consider this to be something that makes sense for really anyone who has more than probably a thousand dollars worth of bitcoin
Uh to take this next step
um
Once you start going up, you know more orders of magnitude
If you have more than a hundred thousand dollars of bitcoin
You probably want to increase the level of robustness and have more than just three key sets
and so
uh
That's why like we have a tier that is more
Geared towards that with three or five and then once you start getting into the like a million dollar plus territory
That's when we start talking about like three of six or even higher potentially, uh
Inheritance solutions having even higher levels of uh robustness
Fantastic. Yeah, I was checking all those out on the website and i'll link that all down below as well guys
um
Finally, I want to look back to the lightning network and privacy with all this happening
I believe some of these upgrades are going to make it a lot more private rather than the on chain
You know opening a channel and and whatnot
Do you want to talk about that?
And again once you're in the lightning network
I think some people don't realize that that itself can be very private or there may be that big node
That's watching everything you do. So where's that sort of technology out at the moment?
Um, yeah, you know, this is an evolving landscape as well. There have been uh,
a couple of different research papers that have been
uh showing places where
the the privacy
Uh could be improved in the lightning network. Um, I mean it's more private by default simply because you're no longer
Globally broadcasting your transaction to everybody on the network. That's the first step
uh
then the
one of the next steps that you can do is
Not publicly broadcast your channels and you can have private channels that are connected to other nodes on the network
So the only other nodes that know about that channel are the ones you're directly connected to
additional privacy is kind of built into the routing around
how the payments actually get pushed through the network and that uses
Some technology that's similar to torr this onion technology
But you know, it's not necessarily perfect, uh, you know, there are
Ways that certain adversaries can try to probe the network. For example, that's that's kind of where I think the forefront of this privacy
uh research is happening right now is
You know if you want to be able to send money through the network you have to somehow
Be able to test whether or not you can send money to a certain destination
Uh, and and that ability to test the ability
Uh to to send money through various, uh paths on the network
Can potentially result in data leaks. Um, but that's starting to get you know, a lot more sophisticated and technical
Uh about you know, what is currently possible with the protocol and these are the type of things that I think will continue to be
um tested and then hardened as
As appropriate as people, you know find flaws and determine things that need to be improved
Yeah, I mean just thinking about that. It sort of reminds me
Um of the concept of like a sonar or a radar where you're putting out
Maybe even fractions of a satoshi and just seeing who's doing what as it comes back to you
And I think again some people don't realize you can break up a satoshi on the lightning network
Um, something i've always wondered about is how does that actually work if you go to settle on chain?
You know, does it I guess it always has to round down it can't give you something that you don't quite have yet
Or how does that work?
Yeah, yeah, it it gets lost essentially
um, and
You know, it can even get more sophisticated than that, right because the
Um, the cost of closing a channel on chain is going to have fees associated with it. So it's even
Even more than just the sub-satoshi issue is that for example
If you're opening a lightning channel, and then you're only sending a payment for a few satoshis
Yeah, or or maybe a hundred satoshis
Then it might be completely pointless if you then only send the one payment and then close it
The channel because you're going to end up paying more in fees than you've saved. And so the you know, the whole point
of lightning network is
To keep these channels open as long as possible and reuse them as many times as possible
In order to avoid having to settle on the blockchain. You know, that's where the real efficiency is is
Is avoiding touching the blockchain due to the cost associated with it?
Yeah. Yeah, I remember reading a lot about the internet in the early days and how
Some aspects of the bitcoin protocol are very similar and these days there's layers of the internet that's routing enormous amounts of information
But it's only you know kilobytes and so when people say oh
How could bitcoin ever become this global network if there's one megabyte block every 10 minutes?
The hope is as we said 12 to 24 months away
That we can get these improvements and do you think that that's a good sort of analogy?
And bitcoin is just going to be this network. There's routing going everywhere. It's very efficient
And then we have the lightning network off to the side for microtransactions. That's the way it's going to play out in your mind
Yeah, I mean as a computer scientist, you know this
layered model
It's the same way the internet was built
You know, you know, it's not a perfect metaphor
Mainly because you know layer zero of the internet is just ethernet the wires essentially that we're pushing the
signals through yeah, and
You know the blockchain would also be considered sort of layer zero
But as we're as we're scaling up
You know, it's it's like I mentioned with these liquidity issues
The way that you know traditional bandwidth on the internet has worked
It's it's generally you've got a two-way street. And yes, there's a cap on like how much data you can send
Usually it's at least at the enterprise level. It's the same amount of data both ways
You know if it's a fiber optic cable or whatever
We're more comfortable with the internet
Fiber optic cable or whatever. Um, we're more constrained when we're building these layers on top of bitcoin
Because we now have a more complicated
Amount of logic that has to go into you know, how is the data being pushed back and forth?
Because it's not just that we have a single like cap on the throughput
It's that we're actually literally like pushing value one way or another
It's it's not a simple two-way street like we have with uh, you know low level internet
Hardware. Yeah, is in there's lots of information or propagating around people are at different stages. Is that what you mean by that?
Yeah, so, you know with the way that information
Flows through the internet
Um
There
There is a similar type of uh, you know routing that happens where you might try different
Different ways to route to a single location and if one doesn't work, then it'll just try a different one
but um the routing itself
does not have the
Uh, it doesn't have the same limitations around like speed and and value
It's I would say even a dumber protocol than what we have on lightning
Because it's just trying to send data
It doesn't really care about the like the bandwidth of what's going on at the the layer below it
But if you're trying to route the value on the lightning network
Um, it's not as simple as oh, I can't reach the destination
You you might still be able to you know, talk to the person at the other destination
But you might just not be able to push the value that you want in that direction due to the state of a specific channel
So, you know, it's it's just more complicated, you know at the routing layer than I would say even the the internet itself is for sure
Yeah, i'm i'm not a real technical person. So that's where I do. Uh enjoy learning about this stuff as well
um
Other networks we've had liquid has become a little bit more popular
I remember hearing at one stage there was a large percentage of exchanges, you know
Even sending between each other taking up that on-chain space
Um, we've seen some tokens start to get issued on there, which is um
Seeing some interesting twitter debates between the the maximalists about tokens on on the lightning network and whatnot
So yeah, do you have any thoughts around liquid?
Is that going to solve problems and there are good applications of that or is it something that's just very basic for those exchanges?
to send liquidity
Yeah, so I mean theoretically it can help a lot
I mean, I also think and I actually gave a whole talk about uh last year why I think it's incredibly important for us to get
Exchanges onboarded to the lightning network, uh due to liquidity issues
um the ability to have a circular economy
um, that means that we'll have to have
easy ways to basically get on ramps and off ramps to uh
to both fiat and and on-chain bitcoin and like the exchanges are
best suited for that
Uh liquid is interesting. You know, it does seem to be picking up adoption
um
I don't even remember the last time I logged into an exchange though. So, uh, it's it's not clear to me
what the
Exchanges have done to expose liquid to the users or if they're doing much of this integration kind of behind the scenes
Pretty much all behind the scenes. Yeah. Yeah
But I mean
There is last I saw a good reason to believe that somewhere around
half if not more than half
Of the on-chain bitcoin transactions that are occurring are going to and from exchanges
and in many cases
Going from one exchange to another exchange and back and forth and back and forth
Um, I also discussed that in my talk last year of you know, this is extremely wasteful in terms of block space
uh
because in many cases
Um, if these exchanges had their own
Like lightning network paths to to each other for example
Then the the flows would generally cancel out and many of these bitcoin transactions would not even have to happen
You'd just be pushing the value back and forth in a lightning channel
Um, and so, you know liquid can do a similar type of thing. It's just instead of offloading it
To a lightning channel. You're offloading it to the second, uh, you know side chain and um
You know, this is kind of goes back to I guess the very beginning of what I was saying of
With the with more patience
We can look around we can see the constraints of the system
And even though it can be more frustrating
The the engineers like myself who are looking at the way the system is used
Can find obvious points where it is being used inefficiently and try to build solutions
That guide people into uh, best practices of you know, using the system using these scarce resources more efficiently
And you know, that is good for adoption and scalability in general
There are you know, there are a number of different ways to approach scalability and the the naive way
Is your vertical scaling? It's you just you throw more resources at the problem
You put more load on the system and you know, you essentially increase the cost of running the system from a hardware
standpoint
The more challenging way of scaling is to
Uh, use the system less, you know, essentially squeeze more performance out of what you've already got
And and that's really what we're trying to do with bitcoin because by
By using it less we or by using, you know, the main bitcoin blockchain less we
Decrease the amount of data and we decrease the amount
Of growth of the blockchain because the blockchain never gets smaller
It only gets bigger and if we are trying to extrapolate of you know, what's the blockchain going to be like in 10 20 30 years?
You know if we if we really want to build a system that becomes a uh,
You know world reserve
uh financial system
That is mainstream it can be used by anyone
You know, we want this to be something that is going to continue to to continue to be used by anyone
It's going to continue to to function for generations
Yeah
It's funny you say that um, I was hesitant to say that the number of exchange to exchange transactions was like 50
I said that in another interview and the guest said no way. It's not that that high but um, I think you've confirmed
Yeah, it really is. Yeah
there have been analyses and um, and in fact like when
when I worked at bitgo which
Provides uh back-end wallet services for quite a few exchanges
Uh, we could see these flows and so I i've I have directly, you know watched
Uh one exchange send, you know, even every few seconds send a transaction
That may go to multiple other exchanges and and it was extremely frustrating to watch because
There was no way for them to know yeah, because they're just sending it to you know, this random address
Random address they don't know who the addresses belong to
We were in a position where we could see that because we were facilitating all of these transactions and we knew which addresses
belonged to certain other customers that were also exchanges, but it was something where
Even back in 2015 we were thinking like is there some way that we could set up, you know payment channels or some way that we could
You know privately inform
Uh users that are you know sending redundant transactions back and forth and back and forth so that we can get them to save money and not
use all this blockchain data and
You know, it wasn't until lightning network came out and became a thing that we realized that there it would finally be a way
For this efficiency to be gained in a way that didn't require people
Essentially exposing all of their address information to other exchanges. Yeah
And so for people at home, hopefully that liquid side chain the federated chain
A lot of those transactions are now going to go between those exchanges and not clog up the blockchain
And other little features just like is this transaction urgent and you say well
No, I only need it by the weekend or tomorrow when I wake up
So many ways a bit like the power load on your home
Energy system, you know do your washing in the day when your solar panels are on that's the way we can make things more efficient
uh
Lightning network you mentioned a few other applications anything that's taken your interest
I know there's some little sort of gaming apps and and other things that are happening on the lightning network
But so much is possible. Are there any concepts that excite you?
So I
I like anything that
Is shoving a lot of technical complexities under the hood. Um, uh, especially
Well, a lot of applications of any of these technologies the the first things that tend to come out are usually
uh gambling type stuff
And and you know if you think about it, pretty much all of finance is gambling of some sort or another
um
but the the things of like
Being able to directly incentivize
people or pay them as they are
doing other activities without necessarily even uh, knowing what's going on under the hood is the most interesting to me, so
You know in in-game type of payments and and items and stuff like that are are interesting
Obviously, there's a huge
Gaming community and
Gamers are generally used to the idea of like points or or in-game virtual money
Um, and you know, why why have a different virtual monetary system for every game that you're playing if we can have a
digital, you know global platform, um, so that that would be
You know one potential application. That's it's interesting. I think applicable and could could actually get a decent amount of adoption. Yeah
Um, for those that don't know you could still get bitcoin for free in world of warcraft even up to 2013 or so
I think couldn't you?
Hmm simpler time
Let's change gears a bit and talk about uh, the world of finance a lot is changing at the moment. I I think it's
Putting the problems under people's noses whether or not most people are still watching their netflix and they don't care
But I think this is probably the best opportunity we've had with people who got free time
You know, we're definitely seeing views and subscribers and that go up
So does that kind of excite you in some ways that hopefully more people are going down the rabbit hole?
And what aspects make you most bullish about bitcoin?
Is it you know, the qe's the negative rates these bailings, you know
Lebanon is the latest country to set their banks on fire to me
It's just this perfect storm of stars aligning, but yeah, I love to get your thoughts on all that
Yeah, you know and the fact that this is all happening
At the the time of the you know, once every four year
Having event is also quite fortuitous
You know
I don't personally believe that the having itself
Magically changes as much with regard to like pricing and exchange rates
But I do think that it it creates a
a buzz it creates a
a a buzz it creates more interest and it results in people
looking into bitcoin and
I think that in this case what's going to happen is back in
2017 bitcoin really went mainstream from a
Not from a usage standpoint, but from a sort of word of mouth of i've heard of it type of standpoint
You know mainstream media picked up on it covered it quite a bit during the last mania phase
And then you know the bubble crashed and I suspect the vast majority of people who had heard about it
Decided that bitcoin probably died and you know, the fad was over
And my hope is that this time around we'll have another mainstream media cycle around the having
now
also coupled with
A new perspective of some of the monetary attributes of the system in the context of what's happening
With central banks and governments all around the world
due to
the the latest financial crisis
And and this will result in a lot of people saying wait a minute
I thought that bitcoin thing died off, you know years ago
How is it still around because really this is what I think has happened to a lot of us, you know, even myself
very few of us
Who heard about bitcoin the first time or immediately like oh my god
This is so amazing drop everything with this bitcoin thing. No, I mean generally it takes multiple times of you
Keep hearing about it. You keep hearing about it
Even for me
I'll never remember when the first time I heard about bitcoin was because I know that I dismissed it several times as you know
some sort of
Some sort of online system that was going to get hacked. I figured everybody was going to lose their money
And it wasn't until probably the third or fourth time
I kept hearing about it and realizing that the system was somehow continuing to operate
That I actually looked into it read the white paper and started going down the rabbit hole
So I do believe that you know, this has all of these events happening
uh in conjunction with each other have a great
opportunity to
You know get a lot more people
Interested into actually looking at the system and hopefully, you know that will then result in some subset of them actually
Deciding to try it out
I think that's one thing that isn't appreciated in australia or the u.s
Where we have pretty decent financial systems compared to these other countries
Um, everyone has their own story to tell if you're in lebanon at the moment
Just being able to send money or get your hands on your own money
You know custody makes bitcoin interesting for you
You wouldn't even care if there's a 21 million limit just the fact that you can get your hands on your own money
Makes that valuable, you know
You're coming at it from a technical angle and I know technical people are going to challenge all these things the double spend problem
And whatnot when they first read about it
Which for me it was a light bulb moment as soon as I read about it
Of course, I was a gold bug and when you go so we've got this goal
But now we're in this digital age and this is digital. So it just depends everyone has their own unique
Um aspect of it, which people yeah, I think they really forget about that sometimes
Yeah, so that's actually why I
I stopped
directly
Evangelizing bitcoin to friends family and strangers, you know for the first few years I was into it
I was going around, you know trying to spread the word of bitcoin
But eventually I realized that you know, everyone has their own perspective and I don't necessarily know what that is
And instead it makes more sense just for me to
Put the information out there. You know, that's why I run the educational
Resources site. I just want to make it easy for people who are looking for information to find
The information that's most relevant to them
um
And and also to continue to build the system to make it more user friendly because then you know, whatever someone's use case is
if it's
Friendly enough for them to make use of it and feel confident that they can use it without shooting themselves in the foot
Then it doesn't matter why they would need it. It doesn't matter what properties they find most valuable
what's important is that they can use it and that they
They don't have to
feel like they need to you know, keep their money with a
custodian because they're not
They're not confident that they can you know secure their own private keys and then that's why
You know, i've been full-time bitcoin for over five years now and i'm still working on a very
Low-level simple problem of private key management. It's not
It's not sexy. It's not cutting edge like the lightning network
But I think it's still it's a fundamental
um issue that we need to continue to improve if we want the system to
Get more and more adoption
Yeah
I think the wallet space is one that probably hasn't had enough like venture investing or it's it's still not there
I think we forget sometimes as technical people when I set up a ledger for someone for the first time like it is still
It is still really hard work. That's a big barrier to entry and people end up on exchanges keeping all their their coins on those exchanges
Yeah, this is um, I don't know the stats off the top of my head, but I mean I would say
the vast majority of wallets, um
The vast majority of non-custodial wallets are just free open-store software and you know
That's good in and of itself for a number of reasons. But also it means you're not going to get
uh, the the same level of uh, you know user experience and support, uh,
Uh, because you don't have you know a paid team of people that are standing by to help out with user problems
It's all volunteer based
on the other hand a lot of the
the money and the technical development and the user friendliness
Uh is all happening in the custodial space because those are the money makers, uh, the exchanges, you know
They're basically printing money. You're taking fees off of every trade that happens
And um, and it's kind of unfortunate that you know, the custodial providers are able to provide a better user experience
Uh for this and a number of other reasons and so
That is why it is particularly challenging for for me and a small number of other entities to to try to
You know build
Uh for-profit but a self-custody type of wallets
It's yeah, I just wonder if there's another way to provide some services and whatnot to get a bit of revenue
As you say because I just think that would be it would be so amazing if you could just say
You know go to bitcoin.org download this wallet. It's so easy to use, you know, you'll love it set up this other thing
But um, we're still not quite. Yeah that are there yet, but um, that's just because we're still early I think in the piece
Um, the next question I had was about the financial
behavior of governments and central banks
Um, you spoke about that meme culture at the beginning
I've read that article, but i'm sure you mentioned the the burr the money printer that's going around at the moment
Yeah, I just think that gets people to say. Oh, yeah governments are printing money
What's a central bank do? Are they printing money as well start some on that that question?
Do you think they are starting to change their behavior because a lot of people were worried about the bail ins after cyprus
Whereas I get a feeling now that that's not really a threat because governments and and the fed come out and say we're going
To print unlimited amount of money they go on
I think it was nightly news in the u.s
And say withdraw all you want we're going to keep printing
So do you think we're already getting to the point where bitcoin is making people financial people change their behavior?
Yeah, and I was actually just talking to someone about this recently because there have been I think a few
European countries that have like started enacting negative interest rates
And I think you know that type of stuff is even better for bitcoin because it's more obvious, right?
It's obvious when the balance in your bank account starts going down
and so that is a great incentive for people to start looking for
Uh other places to park their their money. I remember now. Um, I was discussing
Stable coins and tether with with someone and we were we were discussing
why
Why is there so much demand for stable coins? And this was actually one of the things was that
um
if if someone doesn't care about bitcoin and doesn't want to expose themselves to the volatility, but they want to
Escape from negative interest rates then going into a stable coin is one way to do that because you at least get to hold
Your your own money and it's also
uh, you know
it's
Going to be directly pegged to uh, you know dollar or some other fiat value. Um
But then if you're talking to talk about
well
the you know money printing and inflation
that is
A lot less obvious, right? It's it's it's I would say one of the most uh
At least understood. Yeah. Well, it's to me. It's one of the most insidious forms of taxation
because
It is very difficult to quantify and very difficult for people to even notice, you know
uh
if we're talking about
You know your your uh tax on your salary or on your property or on your purchases like these taxes are fairly obvious
You know the tax that you're paying because you see the numbers uh in in the bill somewhere
But what is the tax that you're paying?
On the devaluation of your money, you know, even then, you know
you
you might be
Told by certain government agencies that the inflation rate is x or y but it's very hard to validate that
Uh, and the methods that they use for those figures are questionable in many cases
So yeah, uh it that means it's less. I think it's less of an incentive
for people uh, or at least at the very least it means that the people
who
Look start looking into bitcoin because of this are going to have to be more sophisticated
uh, you know people who have
um
More time and more resources to even think about this type of problem
Whereas you know, most people are just worried about their next paycheck, you know paying their bills keeping food on the table
Those those people are less likely to be in a position where they're able to think about these more
Abstract less obvious issues. Yeah, that was we've done a lot of videos about this
About the stealth tax of inflation and and whatnot
But once that penny drops as you say with the negative interest rates that that really is a game changer
It's only another 25 basis point cut that central banks have done hundreds of times around the world
But once we have them in the us and in australia where we haven't quite got there yet
I really think that's the last penny to drop and all of a sudden. It's the currency wars everywhere. Um
Let's go to this this better option
now when all this happens, it's
It's going to become obvious to people and governments that bitcoin is the the better currency
They're going to start to attack it more
We're already sort of seeing this path to maybe a digital identity and central bank digital currencies where they can monitor everything
How do you see that playing out?
You know can trump come out and say i'm going to ban bitcoin
Is that irrelevant because it's going to be adopted in a hundred other countries by then what do you think about all that?
So
the
The biggest reason why i'm not
is worried about
major
Governments like first world country governments trying to ban bitcoin is actually because I believe at this point
That there are too many
Rich and powerful people who own bitcoin
And I think in many cases politicians are some of those people
Um, but but even outside of the politicians, I think uh, you know a lot of
Capitalists and even wall street folks and even even people that work at banks who understand this
They're they're already into bitcoin because they understand, you know the hedge that it uh, it gives them
as protection against some of the flaws in the existing system and so
I think you know
the one of the amazing things about bitcoin is just the incentive alignment and and how well it seems to
Align incentives to protect itself
um
I think I saw a statistic earlier today that said that
um, you know bitcoin
Spends its entire budget as a system on defense
And if you compare that to uh military budgets, it would be the like forty first
uh largest country in terms of like defense spending
Um, and that's you know, just from like a proof of work standpoint
so it's it's pretty amazing how robust the system is and
and the fact that
it
Incentivizes people by creating a neutral system that they know can't
Be pulled out from under them that even the people who are in positions of power to pull the rug out from the rest of us
the rest of us, you know via legal avenues or applications of
Use of force by nation states to try to pressure various people into doing things
even even those people
are
uh
Incentivized to take advantage of bitcoin and protect themselves by holding it and by
Uh, you know not wanting to to try to to make bitcoin illegal. Yeah, I think that's an interesting answer and
And that might upset the you know, some of the cypher punks who don't want rich
You know rich white guys in america to be the ones that are sticking out for bitcoin in some ways
Um, do you get what I mean there versus, you know
This fully decentralized all the little guys in the world that need it the most have it
Versus that end of town sticking up for bitcoin
Uh, yeah
Well, I mean I I would think that you know in general the cypher punk ethos is you know you
you create
Software and you distribute it widely enough that it cannot be destroyed because it is information, you know as
As we can digitize more and more things we can then make them more defensible
And I I think it's it's funny when we talk about security, you know of like wallets, for example, then
the the ultimate attacker in any
Wallet security
Scenario and any threat model is of course the nation state that is like the most powerful
Force that exists
and so
People who take things to the extreme say, okay is this
Particular setup secure against a nation state attacker
and
in many cases
We can say well
when it comes to
cyber security and securing
private keys, for example, you can achieve a level of
uh security against a nation state attacker because now you have the ability to distribute
your private key material across jurisdictional boundaries and essentially put your keys in different countries that don't cooperate with each other
and so then the the
the logical push back to that is well, yeah, but the the nation state could still
Come to your house and throw you in prison and essentially coerce you
Into you know going around and and getting all your keys and whatever and and that's where I kind of say
Well, this is really the final frontier
Is that until we get to the point that we can digitize our consciousness?
We won't be able to secure
Ourselves our own bodies against nation state attacks. So
Hopefully, you know, this is getting into like transhumanism and whatnot
But at some point if we can I believe digitize ourselves then we can finally leverage
the
asymmetric defenses that cryptography and math
Uh have enabled us to defend many of these other things
Against powerful adversaries that have far more resources than we do
But we're able to defend against them because of the nature of
Cryptography, so hopefully someday we'll be able to you know defend ourselves our own consciousness our own beings
With the power of math, but who knows when that'll be awesome
I that wasn't a question on my list, but I do want to circle back to that. Um
you mentioned mining and it's funny that climate change was
Sort of being the narrative that was pushed and central banks were going to save us from climate change before they were going to save us
from this virus
Um, what are your thoughts on renewables?
Should somewhere like australia just start building solar panels and be mining bitcoin to pay it off?
And do you think bitcoin can get to 100%?
Renewable in the next few years, you know, these are tricky questions because we're talking about
Distributed systems that no one controls like they're they're there
There's no way to even know what percentage of bitcoin has run on renewables
All that we know is that the incentives encourage people to find
The cheapest power and the cheapest power is almost always going to be renewables
In some cases it may be stranded power like we have seen
Some folks that are, you know burning off, you know flared natural gas that otherwise
Otherwise would have just been burned off and released in the atmosphere rather than actually used spare capacity. Yeah
When people say, you know china's got the majority of hash power and mining pools and whatnot
Do you think that that's sort of reached that point also in moore's law where we're going to see more competition
We've got big mining farms. We know are setting up in the u.s
Yeah, the microchip sort of stuff's becoming more competitive now
Do you think that that's at a great point where we're going to see more distribution in mining?
Yeah, you know
The problem with china, they have multiple advantages. They have pretty much all of the silicon fabrication
And also they have a ton of hydroelectric power
which I believe the rainy season is starting again and
Essentially, you know close to free power like more power than you can possibly use
Uh getting generated by all of their dams
So this is something that's gonna, you know require a lot of work. I mean people are being
Innovative right is like like we said we we've essentially seen a new
Type of venture of people
going out and trying to find
excess energy like the
The incentives just didn't exist before bitcoin for people to go find
Cheap power that may be stranded somewhere because there was nothing you could do with it. Yeah
So, you know, who knows what in
Ingenious type of solutions people may come up with. I mean I was even aware of
A facility in the united states that was essentially like burning old spare tires or something
to generate power
And like they were already doing that to generate power, but then they realized that hey
We could instead of selling this power back to the grid. We could use it to mine bitcoin
You know because it's even more profitable to do that. So
You know, i'm not an energy expert by any means
So it's for me. It's just uh, it's fascinating to hear about all of these different use cases
Oh for sure. The last question I had before we'll get into some of the philosophical stuff you mentioned
One thing that I again, I don't think he's touched on enough is that
The value of having that secure distributed network and we've seen someone like microsoft come along and say well
Let's piggyback our id system off of bitcoin and we've got other
protocols that are sort of
Piggybacking into bitcoin and whatnot as well. Um, do you think that that is something that again gives it value?
To different people we'll see more of that piggybacking
Yeah, uh and um
I've written about this extensively as well and have an entire section of my
resources site dedicated to it, um
I I refer to it as data anchoring. Um, you know essentially
Um using the bitcoin blockchain as an anchor
Because we know what its properties are. We know
How secure it is against the data and the blockchain being rewritten? And so then the question becomes
well, if we want to
Gain some of these properties of like audit audit ability and immutability for our own system
But we know that we can't simply shove all of our own data into the blockchain because
It protects itself against that by making it expensive
then
Can we use this resource more efficiently?
And and generally the answer to that is okay. We create our own system
And then we we use cryptography to essentially
Create, you know
Merkle trees, for example that can be used to prove large amounts of data that exist in our system
And then we just take like the very root
Of that merkle tree and put that into the bitcoin blockchain on a regular basis and that is our anchoring point so that you can
you can
Run bitcoin you can get the data
That you validated on the bitcoin blockchain and then you can also run this other system
and then you can basically compare the data make sure that uh, nothing has been screwed with uh, at the very least, you know, getting a
Tamper resistant fingerprint of like snapshots and whatever this other system is
And of course you can get more complicated than that. And that's how we end up with things like the um,
Various side chains or layer two networks with lightning. Yeah
One thing I do want to ask about the the
Memes in the money printer again, we've seen I think china and russia really accumulate gold fairly quietly over the past
Sort of decade and there's this turning away from the u.s. Dollar
Narrative, do you think that if you're a struggling country, you've got a money printer
You've got nothing to lose by starting to buy bitcoin secretly. Do you think that could already be happening?
Would you do that? Is it going to happen soon once these currency wars heat up?
What do you think about that? Yeah, um, I mean
I've speculated about that for a number of years
You know, once again, you just you look at the system you look at the incentives
It I think makes complete sense for certain nation states, uh, especially the smaller ones to consider
Uh, decoupling themselves from a you know, petrodollar, uh based system and um
I think it was actually several years ago. I was saying that I expected it wouldn't be too many more years before we saw some tiny
Micronation somewhere essentially declare a bitcoin to be their uh
Official currency. I mean, I know we've had like liberalization
You know one of these other like libertarian states do that, but um, you know
I i'm not sure that really counts
I I think that it it will only be a matter of time before we see like maybe some small island nation, for example
Go this route. We tried to do it in tasmania in 2013
We got a few atms and uh, then bitcoin went into a two-year bear market and it didn't take off. Yeah
Yeah, let's go back to four
So guys, that's probably it for the technical and bitcoin discussion if you don't like thinking about uh, consciousness
Then you might want to tune out now, but um, yeah something that I love thinking about got into meditation a few years ago
Once you start to learn about how dna works and how you can store data on dna and the more you learn about computers
I just think it's
Makes me think that maybe we're in that simulation or and either way
Look at it. It is just so fascinating. So yeah, what are your thoughts on all that?
Well, that's that's a huge question
Yeah, how how do we know, you know, what is real is is the the universe a hologram?
Etc. I try not to think about it too much. Uh,
You know, it can be it can lead to existential crisis, right?
Um, I like focusing on uh, smaller problems that I feel like I can actually have an impact on
Yeah, I mean for me
The like accelerating rate of technical change
Point where I can't even keep up with everything that is changing and um
You know, what what what does that mean with regard to?
humanity and you know
How do we continue to to operate that?
So I think that's a huge question
I think that's a huge question, too
I think that's a huge question, too
I think that's a huge question, too
I think that's a huge question, too
We continue to to operate as a society like there there's so many
implications that you can't even possibly
Predict. I mean, that's how we end up with these like black mirrors, uh type
Situations right of like, uh dystopias
People getting trapped inside of uh simulations or or whatever. I mean, I'm
I am like a a virtual reality
Reality enthusiast so I spend at least a few hours a week in virtual reality and
You know if I try to
Project where the technological
Trends are going to take us, you know
It's probably only a matter of of years before we get to the point where you have like fully immersive virtual reality
That is almost indistinguishable
Uh from the real world. I mean, I I think that that will
Basically require us to have like human computer brain interface, uh type situation, but I mean there's
I don't think there's any fundamental reason why that can't be achievable
If we consider the brain to just be an organic machine that we don't fully understand yet
Yeah, I completely agree it's just uh, it's just ones and zeros it's just um neurons firing on or off
And um, there's some interesting work by stuart hameroff. I'm not sure if you've heard of him
He's an anathesis. So he was really trying to work out
Well, why do these chemical molecules make us conscious or unconscious?
And he drilled down into some very interesting work if anyone's interested in that
Um, sometimes I do like to think about it because it puts things in perspective about how I guess small and insignificant and unknown
We are in the universe when you've had a stressful day
Yeah, uh, so I I did I recently read
the I am bob
Uh series, I don't know if you're familiar with that
but
essentially, this is a science fiction series where
It's a
computer scientist startup entrepreneur guy who
Essentially subscribed himself to a cryogenic service
This is something that I found a number of people in the bitcoin space
Are also into I mean hal finney, for example, you know, he's preserved
um
and
Uh, so this guy he gets hit by a truck and then he wakes up a few hundred years later
Except he doesn't wake up in a body. He has actually been digitized and he now exists inside of a computer system that he controls
and
It you know, it starts to raise a lot of philosophical questions
What is consciousness?
Especially what happens if we can digitize our consciousness? What are the implications of that?
Uh, you know
What happens if you can then clone an infinite number of yourself?
And distribute it and essentially this whole series
is
uh
the result of him
Uh exploring the stars and essentially replicating himself
and becoming this digital explorer where he's
He's able to travel, you know, the
Enormous distances across the universe because he just puts himself to sleep, you know for hundreds or thousands of years and wakes up wherever
His destination is and uh, it's fascinating things to think about. Um, you know, i'm
I've read a few other similar type of books like that and I mean
If we're if we're going down the route of you know, what what does it mean to become effectively immortal?
That could potentially be a very boring thing
unless we also have the ability to
explore the infinite universe, right and and so, uh,
then
There's also this question of
uh, you know, I guess the heat death of the universe if if we do become immortal, uh, then
Can we escape that?
Uh, would we somehow be able to escape into alternate dimensions into other?
you know dimensions that have not yet died their own heat death and
Yeah, this is
It's a fun thought experiment that you could spend quite a bit of time talking about absolutely
And I think we've probably stretched people's imaginations there after an hour of talking about bitcoin as well
So great place to finish. That's been fantastic jamperson
I'm going to put all the links to follow your work and your website and casa down below any final thoughts for people
Oh, we've we've covered so much, uh
Uh, but no, I mean in in general, uh,
Each of these topics that we've talked about have a nearly endless depth to them, right and you
We as humans, you know our greatest limitation I think is time and
The the the hardest thing that you have to figure out is, you know, how are you going to prioritize your time?
Are you going to go super deep into one topic? Are you going to go more deep into one topic?
Are you going to go super deep into one topic? Are you going to go more shallow and try to get a real breadth of?
different topics that you're interested in and
I think uh, you know for me at least
Spending the past number of years going super deep into the bitcoin rabbit hole has been particularly rewarding
but the
the
amazing thing
about the current state of our world is that you know, we have the entire sum of human knowledge at our fingertips and so
um, I i'll probably screw up the
however, i've seen it worded but it's like
we're at a point in time right now where
um
We're we're too late to be explorers of the world like
The earth has been pretty much well explored except maybe for a few places, you know in oceans, the mariana trench or whatever
But we're too early to explore the universe like we don't have
The the technology to escape the gravity well very easily at this point
Uh right now, I think the real
frontier of exploration is just in human knowledge, uh, and in you know, thinking through
what all the possibilities and implications are of technology and society and so
Uh, I think that that neatly kind of summarizes a lot of the different things that we've talked about today
I'm going to try and pick a crafty title out of that last quote. I think jameson. So that's been awesome, mate
Um, I really appreciate your time. I hope you've enjoyed it too and guys at home
Um, and yeah, we'll have to do this again in the future
Awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks guys