In October 2017, a SWAT team showed up at Jameson Lopp's house in North Carolina,
allegedly because of a fake complaint by a person angered by one of his tweets.
So he posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 and then embarked on a journey to disappear in
the physical world, unreachable by his enemies and far from the prying eyes of the surveillance state.
Lopp had been obsessed with privacy long before the SWATting. He's visually a throwback to the
long-bearded mathematicians and cypherpunks who in the 90s believed that recent breakthroughs
in cryptography could enable levels of personal freedom and privacy beyond anyone's wildest
dreams. Many of the ideas and technical innovations that came out of the cypherpunk movement were
eventually folded into Bitcoin. "Government is not a monolithic thing which is your enemy.
It's a multitudinous thing which is your enemy." Lopp even calls himself a professional cypherpunk,
carrying on the movement's legacy. The company Lopp co-founded, CASA, is trying to make it
easier for people to hold custody of their own Bitcoin in keeping with the cypherpunk ethos,
instead of storing their money on third-party exchanges where regulators can impose arbitrary
rules. After the SWAT raid, Lopp changed his phone number, set up LLCs to hide his true name and
address, encrypted his communications and even bought a decoy house to serve as a physical
mailing address which he needed to satisfy the DMV's requirement for a driver's license.
To check his work, he hired private investigators to tail him. "We the cypherpunks are dedicated to
building anonymous systems," wrote Eric Hughes in his 1993 manifesto, "and we don't much care if you
don't approve of the software we write." Jameson Lopp is an enigmatic privacy obsessive, fighting
to keep that dream alive.
Why should I self-custody my Bitcoin?
Well, it really comes down to what security model you want and why Bitcoin was created in the first place. 
I mean, you read the white paper, you read what Satoshi said, trusted third parties are security holes. This is a
fundamental issue that we've been dealing with from inception when we talk about being your own
bank. It's something that Satoshi sought to make possible, but from a feasible perspective,
most people don't want to be their own bank. There's a reason why banks exist. People don't
want to have to deal with all of the hassles that come with securing highly valuable things. But
what we're really saying is if you want to have a level of bank security, if you want to be able to
operate in such a way that you don't have to ask permission from a third party, then you do have
to take on some responsibility. And this is a problem that I've been working on for eight years
now, and we're still a long ways away from having it solved. But I do believe we keep making
incremental progress towards decreasing the amount of effort that is required for someone
to be their own bank.
What does that look like, decreasing the amount of effort required?
It involves taking all of these best practices and all of these things that we've learned over
the years, really learning from other people's mistakes and catastrophes and packaging that up
into user-friendly software so that the user doesn't have to read novels and novels of
documents about what the best practices are. Rather, they just follow the instructions of
what the software is telling them to do, and that puts them into a position where they are
automatically following the best practices. Well, so what does that look like a little bit
more concretely? Say I personally am trying to start on the journey specifically, or what are
two or three steps I could take to begin to take control of my own privacy to a greater extent and
stop using Coinbase? Yeah, so I look at it in terms of what do you have to lose and how much value
are you storing in Bitcoin? If somebody is only doing your pocket money, maybe $100, a few $100,
just download one of the free apps out there, and then you have your private keys on your phone.
That is a hot wallet. It is one of the least secure ways of doing it, but it is,
in many ways, still better than having your keys with a third party. If you're going to up a level,
if you have thousands of dollars, a non-trivial amount, that's when you probably want to
invest $50 to $100 in this dedicated hardware device. There's a number of them out there on
the market. None of them are perfect. They all have pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses,
but really any of them is better than none of them, better than having your keys either with
a trusted third party or just on an internet-connected device, which is easier for hackers
to get into.
My living room is going to be littered with air-gapped devices soon.
Perfect.
Especially if you want to become a power user or just try a number of them out, like I said,
they all offer different security models, different user experiences. I have drawers and drawers full
of different ones, and I have plenty of opinions around which ones I like and dislike or would
recommend to people. But then really the next tier is, the best way I can describe it is,
you're trying to eliminate every possible single point of failure. The problem with these bearer
assets, the problem with empowering people with cryptography is that we're essentially handing
toxic waste to them, or radioactive material, if you will. It's a private key that unlocks
the functionality to these assets, these different networks. As long as you can keep that
tiny amount of data safe so that nobody other than yourself has access to it, you're sovereign.
You're immensely powerful within that network. You're able to use the functionality of that
network. But as soon as somebody gets access to that little bit of data, they can basically step
into your shoes. Generally what happens is catastrophic loss. One second and you have
everything. The next second, it's all gone. There is no authority that can get it back for you.
To eliminate single points of failure, we have to implement best practices. We have to leverage
functionality of these protocols to basically use multiple different keys instead of just having one
key. This is generally called multi-signature. It's functionality that a lot of these protocols
offer. That just means that you create keys and you store them in different places on different
types of hardware. You can create resiliency and redundancy. This is really what I've been
doing for almost eight years now in a couple of different companies, a couple of different
capacities. It's trying to make it easier for non-technical, normal people to put themselves
into that position and basically create what I consider to be a better than bank level of security.
Because if you think about it, even the most secure bank vault, even a fortress that is
guarded by military, that is like a single physical location, which is in itself still a
single point of failure. But with cryptography, with private keys now, we can actually decentralize
your security and make it so that an attacker would actually have to compromise many different
points. This just creates a level of security that's never been possible before.
So you were profiled somewhat surprisingly by the New York Times, specifically about your
attempts to evade the surveillance state. What steps did you take to disappear yourself?
It was nearly a year-long process of investigating exactly all the different ways that our data is
leaked. Now I had a fair amount of background of understanding how you get tracked and how
your data gets leaked just as you're doing normal internet browsing activities. Because I spent 10
years working at an email marketing company, I was the guy collecting all of your data and running
analytics on it. And as a result, I'm quite aware of just how many trackers there are whenever
you're doing anything on the internet. So there was that level of technical sophistication of
just trying to block stuff, ad blockers, VPNs, so on and so forth. But that's actually the easy part.
The hard part is more on the legal side, the government side. The most difficult being,
of course, your driver license, things that are tied to your ownership of "real assets."
Like a house.
Like a house, like a car, anything that you have to register with the state.
That's where it gets really tricky and it becomes jurisdiction specific. But there are states where
it is possible to create trusts, it's possible to create corporations that you can use as proxies or
shields to essentially hide the true name, the true ownership. Unfortunately, this is not simple,
it's not cheap. It requires time and money and lawyers. But if you do it and you're
extremely diligent about it, you can button up all of the holes, as it were, and prevent any of the
data from leaking. But it requires an ongoing effort.
Did you make an LLC?
Oh yes. I have a number of different trusts and LLCs. And LLCs owned by other LLCs that are owned
by trusts, it really is a shell game.
So you have layers to this, essentially.
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you have a sense of how much it costs to do that type of thing? Because presumably that's
a barrier that disallows some people from actually evading surveillance the way they want to.
Generally, at least a few thousand dollars.
But outside of just the legal costs, I would say the higher ongoing maintenance costs
is with my driver's license and my "residence," the address that the state considers to be my
residence. And unfortunately, the only way that I've really been able to find a solution to that
is literally find the cheapest apartment, house, hovel, what have you, that has a physical mailbox.
There are ways that you can get really creative. The shortest version of, I guess, a way to describe
it is look into RV life forums or digital nomad forums. There are some states out there, I think,
Nebraska, perhaps, where you can very easily, in a matter of a few weeks, get a driver's license and
establish "residency." But it just depends on how much effort you're willing to put into it.
Both self-custody and disappearing yourself require, from the panopticon, essentially,
require a pretty high level of technical skill. Obviously, disappearing yourself from the state
the way that you did requires so much more skill than self-custody. Is there any way that this can
actually catch on en masse? Yeah, I am definitely bearish on this being adopted even by more than a
small contingent of people. I would say it's really relegated more to the celebrities and
the ultra-wealthy, the people who, for one reason or another, they may have stalkers,
they may suspect that they will have stalkers, or they're just high-profile enough and have enough
wealth that spending thousands of dollars doesn't really mean much to them. It is a form of insurance
policy. When it comes to both privacy and security, unfortunately, my experience over the past decade
has been that basically nobody values their privacy and security until it's too late.
Self-custody, is that something that is likely to catch on with the general public,
or do you think the barrier might still be too high?
There is a high barrier. Like I said, I've been trying to bring it down for eight years,
and there's no end in sight to that. But really, part of the problem is the level of advantage
that custodians and trusted third parties have when it comes to convenience and user experience,
because they control the entire experience.
Do you think there's ever a future where we can get grandmas to self-custody?
Well, it's definitely possible. I can tell you from experience, we have plenty of people
in their 80s who are clients of Casa. We've combined both the user experience and a level
of service. So it's possible, but there's just the question of incentives. And so part of the
problem also is just what is the onboarding process look like? If someone wants to get into Bitcoin,
right now, probably 99% of people get onboarded by signing up at an exchange.
They start off using a trusted third party, and usually that's also where they stop.
They either don't look into or they don't understand that withdrawing to self-custody
is an option. Or if they do see it as an option, it's just too scary, they don't want to deal with
it. So I am, I would say, more bullish on a future in which we have more on-ramps, by which I mean
people are engaging in commerce and they're just directly receiving Bitcoin, probably over
a lightning network. And that's something that we're starting to see happen, especially as we're
seeing, for example, Nostr, a new protocol, a new network that has come online that is really more
of a lightning native experience. And with that being integrated into a lot of the clients,
people are very easily just setting up self-custody wallets and directly receiving
money without ever signing up on a custodian or an exchange.
So Nostr is sort of the gateway drug.
Yeah, it's one of many possible futures. I think there's many different ways that we can
create new experiences where people are getting onboarded directly into a self-custody environment.
I think we will have a diverse ecosystem and range of custody, and it doesn't actually
necessarily need to be a binary thing. It doesn't have to be just trusted third party
or just self-custody. And this is actually where some of the recent innovations in Bitcoin scripting
and programming language are becoming very interesting to me as a builder of self-custody
products. But suffice to say, some of the other ways that you could try to find a happy medium
between these two extremes are things like hybrid custody, where you have multiple keys that are
shared perhaps between you, family, other semi-trusted experts. I think that there is a push
happening towards community banking models. This is something that we're seeing, for example,
with the Fetiment project. Feti is building software that's making it easier for your
local family or your local community bank to be providing. That would still be a third-party
custody model, but that would hopefully create a world in which instead of having 10 or 100
custodians holding the majority of Bitcoin for everyone, we would have thousands, if not tens,
or hundreds of thousands of smaller regional custodians that are helping people manage that
money. So the point being, it still gives some risk to the end users, but from a really high level,
you don't have the same level of systemic risk. And that's what really worries me,
is if too much of the Bitcoin goes into too few hands, especially if they're like regulated
companies that can be easily targeted by nation states, that is when Bitcoin itself,
as a network, becomes a bit more prone to nation state actions.
Do you self-custody all of your crypto?
Not all. I have a diverse range of different setups.
What does that breakdown look like? How do you make that decision about how much to self-custody?
Well, some of it is actually legal. For example, retirement funds, it can be much more difficult
to have self-custodied Bitcoin as a part of a retirement fund. It's certainly far more
easy to use one of the products that's out there on the market.
What kinds of changes to Bitcoin's protocol are needed in the coming years?
That's a very controversial topic to say that Bitcoin needs anything at all.
Do you reject the premise?
So I would say Bitcoin doesn't need anything to survive. But as a technologist, I believe that in
order for Bitcoin to thrive and to become more developer-friendly, more secure, at least secure
in terms of end-user security, security models for self-custody, more scalable, then we do want to
see some changes that will make it possible for more permissionless innovation. Basically, we
don't want people to have to screw around with the Bitcoin protocol and make a lot of changes to it.
That's very contentious. We went through multi-year debates around making some changes to Bitcoin a
few years ago. But what we're lacking is the ability for people to go out and easily create
other layers of technologies that are cryptographically linked to Bitcoin, where they
can basically use those as playgrounds for experimentation and be able to do whatever
they want without having to ask permission to change Bitcoin, without having to worry about
accidentally doing something that breaks Bitcoin itself.
Well, so explain a little bit of the controversy surrounding this.
So...
Without making any new enemies, ideally.
Yeah. Well, one example is that whenever you change software, especially when you're changing
something like Bitcoin, which is, it is programmable money. It does have a programming
language, even though it's very basic in what it can do. Whenever you're creating new functionality
that is going to be leveraged by developers, it's always possible that that functionality
could be used in unintended ways. And so we've had a little bit of controversy just over the
past month or two with some people leveraging functionality that got activated a few years ago
to do new things that had not been anticipated. And you could argue that it was not the
intended purpose of the functionality.
Like what?
So basically, people have discovered new ways of storing data in the Bitcoin blockchain that
it wasn't as easy to do before. It was possible, but it just wasn't as easy. And some people get
upset when Bitcoin is used for non-monetary transactions and purposes and data storage.
But I'm a technologist, so I've always looked at Bitcoin as a type of database. It's just the
least efficient type of database that I've ever seen. It's the most difficult database to try
to work with. But as a database, as a store of historical records, it provides some very
interesting guarantees that no database has ever been able to do before.
I assume you're talking a little bit about ordinals,
the ability to put JPEGs on the blockchain or what have you. What do you think of that?
Right. I mean, I'm quite neutral. I'm ambivalent on it. I'm personally not interested in
NFTs or trading other tokens that people are creating using the Bitcoin blockchain to do that.
But I'm a free market proponent. So I'm not against people developing new functionality
and new ways of having economic interactions using Bitcoin and related technology.
This is controversial because I think there's generally two perspectives that are being taken
with regard to how Bitcoin "should be used". It's how do you try to describe or define
"spam", spammy use of the blockchain, because the Bitcoin blockchain is a scarce shared resource.
You can certainly run into a sort of tragedy of the common situation whenever you have
a scarce shared resource. So on one hand, you have people who essentially are placing subjective
arguments around what they believe should be a Bitcoin transaction. And generally that comes
down to, well, a Bitcoin transaction should just be sending Satoshi's value from one person to
another and that's it. It's not about putting a bunch of data into the blockchain and then calling
it something else and then saying it's a token transfer. Their subjective perspective says that
that is not the original intended design and use of Bitcoin. But as it is with any subjective
arguments, people will take the opposite side of that and say, "Hey, you should be able to
do whatever you want as long as the protocol says it's valid." So I consider the opposite side of
that usually to be more of an objective economic argument, which is the only definition of spam
when it comes to Bitcoin transactions and use of the network that I can figure is,
are you paying a competitive fee to get into the blockchain? What are you willing to pay? Because
if you're willing to pay more than someone else, then that probably means that what you're doing
is more valuable to you than what someone else is doing if they're not willing to pay as much.
And that seems to be the most reasonable way to decide what data goes into the blockchain,
because we cannot put the entire world's data into the blockchain.
I'm really curious. Does Bitcoin have a developer shortage, especially compared to
like Ethereum? There is definitely far fewer developers. And I think a big part of that
is because of how much more limited the functionality is, how much less developer
friendly a lot of the tooling is. But that is changing. We are seeing, for example,
there's something called many scripts that has been developed over the past few years.
And I'm seeing more and more tooling that is coming up around making it easier for developers
to create more complex locking scripts with many different logical branches and conditions and
basically allowing us to create much more interesting self custody security models.
Okay. So say I were super concerned about hyperinflation, not to the point where I would
make any sort of like thing like that. But how should someone prepare for hyperinflation?
Well, as Satoshi said, it might make sense to get a little bit just in case this catches on.
So, holding, I've always looked at Bitcoin from inception of when I got into it. I've
looked at it as a sort of hedge, a very long term hedge. Bitcoin does not have any guarantees or
even have any goals with regard to its price and its exchange rate. It has no concept of its own
exchange rate. However, while we can't be sure of what's going to happen with Bitcoin's exchange
rate, it's very volatile over a short, medium term time periods could go up, down, whatever.
What we can be quite sure of is that the central banks are going to continue printing more and more
fiat. So the way that I often sum that up is, there's no ceiling on the Bitcoin price, but
that's only because there's no floor on the fiat price because they're going to continue diluting
it for years and generations. It's basically a guarantee that the central bankers themselves
don't deny. Critics would say, though, if you're looking at it as a hedge, we're in a time of
pretty rapid inflation in the US. And so why haven't we seen a huge uptick in adoption? How
would you respond to those critics? Well, where are we seeing adoption? I mean,
I expect we're seeing more adoption in the countries that are seeing hyperinflation.
America, of course, has seen an uptick in inflation, but it hasn't been anywhere near
what some countries like Venezuela, for example, have seen. So it's a multivariate problem,
and it's difficult even for me to opine upon why certain people may adopt or not adopt Bitcoin.
We are in a pretty privileged financial position. Basically, if you have a credit card,
if you have a bank account, you probably don't have a lot of incentives to look into hedges
against hyperinflation. Even though the dollar is going to continue to inflate,
I think the hyperinflation risk of the dollar is still pretty low, at least relative to a lot of
other countries. One thing we've noticed so far walking around this conference has been everything
from Free Ross to, you know, screw Dr. Fauci and RFK Jr. type things. There's a cultural component
that we're noticing here that seems pretty different than the cyberpunk movement.
Your company has come under fire. You guys are in some ways Ethereum proponents.
What do you think of this sort of cultural strain that's present within some of this
Bitcoin community? Yeah, you know, over the years, while I'm very interested in the technology,
I would say one of the more surprising things has been the sociological phenomenon and the
interesting cultural divisions and strife that have happened for a variety of different reasons.
So Bitcoin started off and it really was the earliest adopters of Bitcoin, I would say,
were hardcore libertarians, anarcho-capitalists. They saw this as freedom money and it really was
us against the world. We're developing a parallel economy, if you will. And it ties in with
cypherpunk movement from the sense that cypherpunks write code. They don't ask permission. They just
build and they put it out there for the market to accept, digest, reject, what have you. Now,
over the years, Bitcoin has been attacked by a number of different people and entities and a
number of different ways, especially as it has gone more mainstream and there have been boom and
bust cycles and a lot of people have been hurt in various collapses and we've seen various calls,
you know, anti-Bitcoin, anti-the entire crypto space. This has, you know, solidified even more
of the sort of us against the rest of the world to some of these people. And as the space has
become larger and more diverse, we're actually seeing a fracturing even within the Bitcoin
quote unquote community. You know, some people will get triggered if you even call it a community
because, you know, there is a saying, which is Bitcoin is for enemies. This is really supposed
to be a neutral technology and platform where anyone who follows the rules can use it regardless
of if anyone else disagrees with who they are and what they're doing. So, you know, there are certain,
I would say, sub communities or sub groups of people that have coalesced over the years.
Some of them are more vitriolic than others and, you know, they coalesce because they have certain
shared principles, shared views of, you know, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.
And so that's some of the stuff that we have to deal with, especially on social media.
There is, it actually comes down to some phenomenon. There's a great article out there,
I think it's called, it's like about knights and mooks. And it basically, it's similar to
sort of political theater and phenomenon where, you know, you build up your narratives, you build
your audience and your following and your community. And one of the ways that you create a
more cohesive audience is by having enemies that you attack in certain ideological ways. And so
basically that same thing has unfolded within Bitcoin. And one of the results now is that,
you know, the quote unquote Bitcoin maximalist is actually a very large, diverse tent. And there
are different subgroups within that tent that have, you know, different shared beliefs.
- Is the culture around it a good or a bad thing? You're saying there's a lot of sort of circling
the wagons. Does that lead to more people ultimately being interested? Is it a spectacle
that people are drawn to? Or is there some amount of, you know, it sort of straying from what people
were initially attracted to? - Yeah, I mean, it's some of both. You
know, there are certainly a lot of people who get turned off by some of the vitriol from some of the
groups, whereas other people, you know, get interested and sucked into it. But if anything,
I think it may be overblown. I think the real high level view of it is that even with all of the
drama and strife and stuff that happens on various platforms in and around Bitcoin, the vast majority
of people who use Bitcoin don't know about any of that. You know, they're not tuned in to those
social networks or at least those particular areas and communities where the drama and strife is
happening. They just see Bitcoin as a thing that they're using. - You were talking a little bit
about how you really like the bear market, the fact that there's a little bit less hype where
the hype has been deflated surrounding crypto and Bitcoin. And we're seeing that a little bit at this
conference. It's, you know, much more sparsely attended compared to past years. You were saying
that you think this is actually a really good thing. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
- Absolutely. I'm not a fan of the mania bull run phases because of the type of people that it
attracts. When the, really the, we might call them the tourists or the LARPers, or in many cases,
the scammers, the con men show up. It's because they see, you know, fast, easy money. You know,
they're here to get rich quick. And, you know, I'm in this for the long term. I look at Bitcoin as
our best opportunity to create a multi-generational project. You know, I think the average lifespan of
a fiat currency is measured in decades. Bitcoin, I think we're coming up on 14 years. So Bitcoin is
actually getting close to exceeding the lifespan of the average fiat currency. And because it's an
open source project, I believe it is very well positioned to last for decades, if not centuries,
as long as we take care of it and maintain it. But getting back to the, you know, building during
bear markets, it's just, it's a lot more peaceful and easy to do because you have fewer distractions.
You know, as developers, we're able to put our heads down and, you know, focus on creating new
functionality, delivering based on the demands of our clients and our users. And that's what we've
seen happening, really, even just this year, like the past five or six months, it's been great from
a developer standpoint. You know, even though I'm neutral on stuff like ordinals and tokens,
it's just, it's interesting to see that innovation happening. And yes, you know, it creates some
conflict, but I like to see conflict and friction because, you know, that's how we come up with
new challenges, which we then find new solutions to. Jameson Lopp, thank you for sitting down
with Reason.
Great to be here!