Hi, everyone. Welcome to the show. This is the Stefan Lovera podcast, a show about Bitcoin
and Austrian economics. And my guests today are Nick Newman and Jameson Lopp. But firstly,
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in my guests now. So Nick and Jameson. So thank you guys for joining me. And so Jameson,
I think my listeners are already very familiar with you. But Nick, you're the new CEO of
casa. I think maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself.
For sure. And thanks for having us on Stefan. So I started out my career actually in finance
doing investment banking and private equity and eventually, you know, kind of merged that
with my excitement about tech. And that's how I really got interested in Bitcoin. And
so been I've been at casa really since we began at the beginning of 2018, and have been
running product that whole time. And then for the last six months, we made the announcement
in January that I was taking over as CEO. And so since then, things have been going
super well, excited to continue building, you know, the future of self custody for the
Bitcoin community.
That's great. And I really I'm a fan of casa. I think you guys are doing a great job in
terms of making it easy for people to use Bitcoin. But in the way where you are holding
your own keys, and that's a very important aspect of Bitcoin. So I think it'd be good
to just chat a little bit about some recent updates. I saw you guys recently put out the
casa wallet. So can you tell us a little bit about that? And some of your thinking around
why you've introduced the casa wallet, which is distinct, I guess, kind of distinct from
the key master product. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
So casa wallet is actually part of the key master app. And it is just the free version
of that. And so, you know, people can actually if you're an existing key master user, you
can use the casa wallet as a really easy Bitcoin wallet on your phone to hold a smaller amount
of Bitcoin. So the idea behind the casa wallet is that we wanted to give people a very easy
way for them to get started with holding their own keys. People don't quite understand, you
know, somebody who's on Coinbase, it doesn't necessarily always click for them what holding
your own keys means. And so we've actually built a lot of features into key master to
help people better manage and understand private keys. So you can do things like do a health
check of a private key to make sure that it's still on your phone secure element. And these
are the types of things that we think will really help people start to educate themselves
better about how to hold Bitcoin. And we've tried to make it super simple, easy, as really
a first step on that journey towards self sovereignty with the casa wallet.
Great. And so I think many of my listeners are probably more kind of savvy themselves,
but they'll want to know this so that they know what to recommend for their friends,
right. And so let's chat a little bit about the the seedless approach, right. So casa
are famous for the the seedless approach. Can you tell us a little bit about your thinking
on that and how that's implemented into the casa wallet?
Yeah, so we've made, you know, a number of interesting trade offs and decisions over
the past few years, some of which have been controversial. We've been trying new things
that haven't been done before in this space. And really one of the foundational principles
that we landed on when we were originally architecting the multisig three of five casa
product was that when we tried to think through secure storage of that seed phrase, and you
know, how would we get users to be able to back this up in a secure, robust manner that
was also user friendly, it was just adding an incredible level of complexity and friction
to the entire user experience. And this, this is something that has always really been taken
for granted of, oh, you have to write down your seed phrase and keep it in a safe place.
But when we started thinking outside the box and thinking, you know, what if we could somehow
completely get rid of this aspect of maintaining your own funds, then we can simplify the whole
model enormously and get rid of a lot of potential threats and attack vectors. So within the
multisig setup, we created this idea of being able to rotate out your keys and your devices
natively within the app with a very simple workflow. And once we were able to do that,
we realized that, you know, if you can rotate out the keys with just, you know, a few taps
of your finger and going and getting hardware devices, then this means you have essentially
created a self-healing type of setup where you don't need to go dig out a seed phrase
from somewhere and reconstitute your particular hardware device, but rather you can just replace
it completely in a secure fashion by creating a Bitcoin transaction. Taking that a step
further, when we were trying to figure out, well, how do we do seedless for a single sig
setup where you can no longer do that rotation? We basically landed on, well, how do we create
a backup that is kind of like multisig? And essentially, we encrypt the seed phrase and
put it in the user's iCloud or Google driver, you know, whatever native data storage they
have on their phone and have the encryption part, the part that would actually decrypt
that, then stored securely on CASA's server, additionally encrypted with our hardware security
module. So what that essentially does, it creates like a two of two type of multisig
if you want to reconstitute that seed phrase. And it means that, you know, CASA still never
has the private key data. Apple never has the private key data. Google never has it,
you know, requires essentially two factors in order to reconstitute it securely on your
phone.
Yeah. And what we realized around seedless was that taking Bitcoin from the current core
community to the next, you know, million people, the next hundred million people, eliminating
seed phrases as a point of friction is one way to really help with that. Because if you
think about, you know, or if I think about my mom trying to use a seed phrase, for example,
she can barely keep track of her passwords. So how is she going to keep track of this
24 word phrase that actually protects her money? And if she loses that phrase, her money's
gone forever. That's just not going to fly. And so figuring out how to take down some
of these barriers for people is one of the reasons that CASA exists.
And part of the friction there, of course, is it's just, it's IT data management techie
stuff is that if we consider private keys and seed phrases to be kind of like a hazardous
toxic waste, the vast majority of people don't have the skills or the time to figure out
how to handle that correctly. There are a lot of people in the Bitcoin space who have
put in a lot of time and they have the skills to be able to do that. But we're looking beyond,
you know, the current nerds who are willing to go through a lot more effort in order to
do things on their own. And, you know, a good example of this is actually just last week,
but this happens all the time. Someone who was using a hardware device to secure their
funds, as is best practice, lost everything they had, because they unfortunately got tricked
into putting their seed phrase into some malicious software. And, you know, that malicious software
stole all of their money. So, you know, the ability to be able to handle that data is
a very tricky thing to do, especially when we consider that a single mistake can result
in financial catastrophe.
Right. And so, I think that's an interesting example where if you were trying to teach
your friend, okay, be careful what browser extensions you install, be careful what other,
you know, X, Y, and Z, and you'd have to try and coach them through all of these different
aspects where potentially, yeah, maybe there is an opportunity to simplify. So, can you
just walk us through a little bit of the CASA wallet in terms of how, like, what it looks
like from the user perspective when they're trying to recover, for example?
Yeah. So, if they, let's say somebody has the CASA wallet on their phone. Let's say
they're using an iPhone and they actually lose their phone. All they need to do is get
a new phone. During setup, they're going to log into their iCloud account. And so, that
provides one piece of the key. And then they're going to download the CASA app, log in to
their CASA app, and that provides the second piece, the decryption key. And then seamlessly
in the background, the CASA app is just going to pull down the app for the key from iCloud,
decrypt it using the key from CASA server, and then immediately store that decrypted
private key in the phone's secure element. And so, the decrypted private key is never
actually held outside of the secure element of the phone. But from the user's perspective,
it's a very seamless, simple process using accounts that they already have and are already
keeping track of. And so, this is a lot less scary than having their seed phrase on a piece
of paper where if they realize they lost their phone, now they're suddenly thinking, oh man,
I hope I have my seed phrase saved in my sock drawer at home or whatever it is, you know?
And so, it just takes away some of that anxiety. And this wallet is really, it's a beginner
wallet or it's a very easy to use kind of, you know, like literally the wallet you would
keep in your pocket. And so, it's not meant to store a huge amount of funds. That's why
we have the multisig side. And that's why this is all put together in one app. And so,
we really expect this to be, for new Bitcoiners, this is the first step on their journey where
then as they acquire more Bitcoin or Bitcoin goes up in value and they need more security,
they can really easily move up to having a multisig account to secure that Bitcoin.
Gotcha. And I presume then the transition from single signature CASA wallet version
into the two of three is just like a smooth transition up and they would basically buy
a hardware wallet and then become a gold member or can you just talk us through that process?
Yeah, sure. So, let's say somebody is currently using CASA wallet for free. They decide they
want to upgrade to multisig. They'll buy a hardware wallet. You can either, you can buy
one directly from Trezor, Ledger or Coldcard or CASA actually is an authorized reseller
of both Trezor and Ledger. So, you can buy one from us if you want. And then the process
is you sign up for the gold membership, upgrade your account. You'll see that new multisig
key set in the CASA app and you can simply send, you set that up with your hardware wallet,
which is a really easy process and the app guides you through all of that. And then you
just simply send the funds from the CASA wallet single signature to the new multisig that
you just set up. And you still, at that point, you still have access to the CASA wallet.
So, let's say you want to store the majority of your Bitcoin in your multisig savings account
and then the CASA wallets just like your checking account for when you want to put some money
into that poker game or something like that.
Great. Also, there was some discussion online about the question of a wallet being open
source. So, did you guys want to address any of that and just discuss how you're thinking
about the question of closed source versus open source in a Bitcoin wallet?
Yeah, I mean, this is something that we've talked about ever since we started the company,
the various tradeoffs between what you can accomplish with free open source software
versus for profit company that may not open source all of the software that it's writing.
And when you're looking at the multisig product that we've built, that is actually a very
well diversified product because you end up using open source software, your firmware
and hardware from a variety of different companies, which helps you both increase your level of
security from a variety of different threats and decrease the likelihood that all of those
different actors out there have been compromised and will coordinate to work against you.
It gets a little bit trickier when we're talking about a closed source single sig hot wallet.
I mean, this is a riskier threat model. There are more ways that you could lose the money.
There's more potential catastrophic threats. And that is why it is only really meant for
small values. But the tradeoff is you have a much more user friendly experience because
the user doesn't have to go get any specialized hardware. It's all just there on their phone.
Now when we're talking about open source versus closed source in the context of mobile apps,
then it gets even trickier because it is difficult, if not impossible. In fact, we have not yet
really found a way to verify the build of a mobile app that is on the Apple Store or
the Google Play Store. The way that these mobile app stores work is that they require
the applications to be cryptographically signed by the developers in order to get pushed out
to the store. But the actual build process for the app, the actual attestation of what
the code that's being run on the app is not really a part of the experience that Apple
and Google provide. The only real option if you wanted to be sure of what the actual code
was that was running is you would end up having to build the mobile app yourself and load
it onto your phone. This is theoretically possible, at least with Android, but it requires
a fair amount of technical experience. It's really not the people who have the ability
to do that, we are not really targeting them for this experience. This is meant to be for
non-technical people who are very early in their Bitcoin lifecycle. It really seems like
from a free open source software security side of things that it's more of a feel-good
idea of having open source mobile apps if you can't actually verify. We are all familiar
with the mantra of don't trust, verify. If people could verify that the code we open
sourced was the code that was out there on these stores, then I think it would make a
stronger argument for us to be open sourcing it. The other downside is that, like I said,
these apps require cryptographic signatures from the developers to be on the store. There's
also various functionality that we're using, such as some of the pieces of the seed backup
that also require that. Even if you built the app on your own, you would not have a
fully functioning CASA wallet, the user experience that we really intended. There's tradeoffs.
I think that's a totally fair point. I've seen some discussion amongst the community
about things. You might have seen that project. I think it's wallet scrutiny. The idea is,
okay, it's not verifiable. I think for those same reasons that you mentioned, it might
not really be such a fruitful exercise if you can't really verify anyway because of
certain things that are getting inserted into the process, either on Google's Play Store
or on the iPhone or Apple App Store also. I think that's a fair point. I suppose the
other concern is more just around being able to recover. As I understand, for the paid
product with CASA, you have sovereign recovery. Does such a system exist or can it exist in
the single signature version or is it more like only keep small amounts on this wallet?
What's the thinking there?
We actually do have sovereign recovery process for the single signature mobile wallet. It
is a bit different. Instead of having various public key data that you store ahead of time
or get out of the app and use to recreate your wallet using other software, we actually
have the ability to export that seed phrase. Under normal conditions, if you go in and
you tap on the key and you go through the process to export the seed phrase from your
CASA wallet, we will actually mark it as compromised because we assume we can no longer be sure
that that seed phrase has not been taken by an attacker. We no longer allow you to use
those keys within the CASA wallet. If, for example, CASA blew up and our service ceased
to exist, as long as you still have the app on your phone, we also have offline login
ability so you would still be able to authenticate locally with the CASA wallet, log in and go
through that seed phrase export process. We have the instructions available on walletsrecovery.org
and also within the app, you can actually get these sovereign recovery instructions
emailed to you that give you a step-by-step guide of how do you recreate your wallet without
using CASA software, without using our service and be able to recover from even an extreme
disaster scenario where we no longer exist.
Yeah, on the point of where we actually mark that key as compromised, so the point of that
is actually just to give people the heads-up that, hey, this key was exported and you should
generate a new key if you're going to continue using the CASA wallet. That's all that that
does. Then let's say you say, I'm going to export my seed phrase to use a different wallet,
but then you change your mind or something like that. You say, I'm going to keep using
CASA wallet. Well, you can just generate a new key, the app walks you through that, and
then it'll let you just transfer the funds from that previous key to the new key. That
then lets you fully use that key again and is a key that is ensured that the seed phrase
for it isn't floating around out there somewhere. Obviously, if you didn't want to continue
using the CASA wallet or you exported the seed phrase in order to use a different wallet,
you would have full control over those funds once you imported that seed phrase into another
app. Got you. You mentioned earlier that it's all happening encrypted, but is there any
sort of concern around things being stored on Google Drive or on Apple iCloud or is it
just more like you think that that was the best way to balance that trade-off there?
What was the thinking around that? All that Google or Apple even sees is this, I believe
it's 128-bit blob of data that it means nothing to them. They cannot interpret it as anything
sensitive because it has been encrypted. The potential adversarial scenario is, okay, well,
what if Apple and CASA colluded to come together to decrypt this data? That could be a potential
adversarial scenario that people are thinking through. It's another good reason why you
should really only be keeping pocket money in this type of setup. It is not as robust
against various types of loss as the multi-sig hardware-backed offerings that we have.
Yeah, that's a fair point. Go on, Nick.
I was just going to say that, yeah, to add on to that, we obviously don't collude with
Apple. I'm not going to be calling up my bud, Tim Cook, and saying, hey, I need to get this
mobile key, man. You've got to help me.
That's right. Also, I guess just for my listeners as well, they want to be thinking, okay, I
want to select the right tool for the job. Depending on what, if they're trying to help
a new Bitcoiner, they've got to think, what are they trying to do? If they want to set
up a BTCPay and they need an ex-pub to go into that, well, then CASA Wallet is not the
right choice for them. If they're trying to set up a person who's just hodling, they just
want to start holding a small amount, then potentially that is the right user in this
case, the right tool for the job. Would you say that's the right target that you're going
for here?
Yeah. Actually, though, you can actually use the CASA Wallet with BTCPay because you can
get from within the CASA app, you can get the ex-pub for every single key. You can take
that and then go put it into BTCPay and use that to protect funds that you get through
your store or whatever you're using BTCPay for.
For the most part, the way that we think about this is this is somebody who is so non-technical
that right now you wouldn't feel comfortable referring them to most of the self-custody
wallets that are out there because you're worried that they might lose their funds by
making a mistake. Instead, you're saying, well, you're only doing a couple hundred bucks
of Bitcoin, so just use Coinbase. That's easy and they won't lose it for you.
This is for that type of person who really wants to take that first step into self-sovereignty,
but they're so far at the beginning of their Bitcoin journey that it doesn't make sense
for them to go into this super long technical rabbit hole. We'll guide them through that.
They will learn over time and then they'll be able to take more and more control as they
actually learn what's going on.
Yeah. I think this is an interesting point as well because obviously within Bitcoin,
we love to have a good debate. One of the big debates is around purity testing and how
hardcore are you? Are you doing literally every step on your own? Sometimes we have
these internal debates amongst our Bitcoin world of, oh, this is not fully open source
and you're not fully doing everything yourself. Then the person who's trying to provide a
sort of ramp up for, let's say, newer Bitcoiners, they can get attacked a little bit. We sort
of have this almost like a spectrum of fully self-sovereign and then leaving it all on
a large exchange. The people trying to offer an in-between to try and bring them along
that pathway, sometimes they get attacked a little bit. Is that sort of a tension that
you face or that's essentially the position you're in? You're trying to guide people
through?
Every day. It is interesting to see. I think one of the more interesting aspects of entrepreneurship,
and I don't know if this is more limited to our industry or what, but it's very interesting
to have lots of people coming to you and explaining to you why they are not your target market.
That's essentially what it boils down to is that we realize the capabilities that Bitcoin
makes available to people, especially if you have additional skills or you're willing to
invest additional time to gain the skills required to essentially do everything on your
own. This works for both the privacy aspects and the security aspects. You're never going
to be able to beat the maximum level of privacy and security if you spend a ton of time doing
everything yourself. The trade-off there is that who's going to help you if you screw
up or if you need to understand some obscure thing. You end up having to use community
resources. If you're using free open source software, the level of support is community
based. There's no one out there who owes you an answer to anything. It's a much trickier
type of environment if you're trying to improve your understanding. I put a lot of resources
out there to try to make it easy for people to improve their understanding. At the end
of the day, I think that a lot of people find value in having some experts that they can
just call on the phone or shoot an email to and very quickly get a response back so that
they don't have to go searching through a whole bunch of knowledge that's spread all
over the internet. Just thinking about that ramp of getting people
to the point where they're fully self-sovereign, even the people in the existing Bitcoin community
didn't start off their Bitcoin life unless they're just the most hardcore of the hardcore,
maybe Adam Back or something. They didn't start off their Bitcoin life as the fully
self-sovereign version. You have to start somewhere. In order to bring Bitcoin to the
rest of the world, we have to make some interesting trade-offs. Where we don't compromise is on
people hold their own keys and we aren't trying to track people or sell them ads or trick
them into doing strange things with their Bitcoin. We just want to give them a safe
place where they can learn how to be their own bank. That's our goal. On our way there,
we may rub some people the wrong way, but in the meantime, we'll do our best to keep
building. Right. I think that's a good goal and a good
way to proceed. I think that makes a lot of sense to me. Also, wanted to chat a little
bit about the focus this year with CASA. I understand the focus really is on this wallet
and the key master aspect as opposed to the node. Could you just outline a little bit
around that and what your view is around the node product, which was quite popular, but
it seems to me like the focus with CASA is more towards the key master and the multi-signature
part because you want to nail that part down first. Is that how you're thinking about it?
We really, at the very end of last year, beginning of this year, we sat down and said, okay,
we're still a small company. We're still growing. How do we have the best impact for the Bitcoin
community as a whole? We realized that this problem around people self-custodying their
Bitcoin was still not fully solved. It was big enough in that every single Bitcoiner
has to deal with this. Let's focus all of our attention on making this as easy and as
doable as possible for everybody. Then we can move on to solving other problems in the
future like how do you run your own node? How do you... The other steps that you can
take along the Bitcoin journey, but this we really identified as a need for every single
person who has Bitcoin. That's why we just wanted to focus our full team's efforts on
that. I presume then the idea is that in future,
you would look at ways potentially to try and have it all connect back to your own node.
Is that something that you would explore? There's multiple tiers of sovereignty, right?
The first step, which is what we're doing with Casa Walla, is just getting your keys
off of third-party services and taking custody. I would say the next step is starting to use
hardware devices, create air gaps so that you're protected from a variety of online
threats. The next step is using multisig, geographically dispersing your keys so that
you're getting additional robustness both against attack and against loss and disaster.
Really the final step in being self-sovereign in Bitcoin space is you've got an extremely
robust setup for your private keys and then you're validating whatever transactions you're
receiving to ensure that you have that model of trustlessness where you're not having to
ask anyone else what the truth is, what the actual value is that you're receiving.
It's always been a long-term thing. We may have jumped the gun a little bit, tried to
get there a little too early, but it's definitely still something that we hold dear as a value.
Yeah. The whole team is excited about offering people the ability to connect their key master
to their own node. That's something that everybody has wanted to do from the start. As we think
about this, it's still important for us and we want to give that to our customers. Whether
that's with the CASA node specifically, or maybe it's just connect to any Electrum node
or something like that, we want to figure out how to get this done and it is something
that we'll work on. Like Jameson said, that's the apex of fully sovereign Bitcoin. We do
want to help people be able to do that.
Fantastic. I think that makes a lot of sense to me. Also, I was keen to discuss what you
guys thought about, well, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this, the Trezor aspect.
Well, I mean, it's not just Trezor, it was the, I guess, just for detail and background
for the listeners. There was basically a bug in BIP 143 and I think it was first actually
noticed by Greg Sanders in 2017. The recent aspect of this happened when Salim Rashid,
a hardware wallet researcher, disclosed a bug in basically exploiting that bug in a
way that could essentially be a problem for hardware wallets. And then, as I understand,
that caused these downstream impacts because Trezor, on their end, tried to fix it up,
but the way they fixed it up made it more difficult for other players in the industry
such as BTCPay and potentially for yourselves. Did you want to just comment a little bit
on that and whether that was made more difficult by using the seedless approach? But essentially,
yeah, essentially, what was your thoughts on that?
We were certainly affected by the changes. I mean, whenever firmware changes happen,
there are potential impacts there. Seedless is not really so much of an issue. The only
time that sometimes becomes an issue is firmware updates that are so major that they're like
rewriting all the data on the device and potentially wiping it out. In those cases, you would actually
be able to use our key rotation mechanism in order to update a device that was completely
out of date. But no, really, the bigger impact that it had with us was that Trezor was making
some changes without talking to the rest of the community and potentially breaking changes.
We had some other issues as well that were actually unrelated to the vulnerability in
question. My main problem was that this vulnerability is an extreme edge case. It requires that
your wallet software be malicious in the first place in order to try to get you to re-sign
the same UTXOs multiple times. It actually requires multiple types of attacks to happen
at the same time, at least if it was going to affect a CASA multisig that is on multiple
different hardware devices. It just seemed like pushing out potentially breaking changes
for such an edge case was not really warranted. As far as I'm aware, we've never seen any
attack like this actually be executed in the wild. But that is part of the fun and dynamic
security space that we're in is that people can make decisions that affect other players
in the space, especially when you're essentially building a platform that other people are
building on top of. I think that's what has created a bunch of contention here. Before
recent times, Trezor was probably more of a monolithic entity where they're creating
hardware and their firmware and their software apps. Basically, the whole stack was mainly
Trezor, Trezor, Trezor. But now as Bitcoin ecosystem has grown, more people, more entities
such as ourselves are using these base-level hardware devices as platforms. It actually
kind of becomes like Bitcoin protocol development is that you have so many potentially unknown
consequences to your decisions and your actions, things that may be affected by changes that
you make that if you don't want to piss people off, you need to start being a lot more conservative
and conscientious about every little change that you're making.
Yeah. The Trezor team has been talking to us about this and talking about how we can
get some of the issues that cropped up fixed. They've been helpful there. Like Jameson said,
it adds a whole lot more into their development model when they have to start thinking about
everybody that's building on top of Trezor in the ecosystem, which on the one hand is
great because it shows the adoption of Trezor and that they've built something great that
a lot of people use. And then on the other hand, it's kind of a tough situation for them.
So definitely understand the place they're into. And the thing that I come back to though,
just thinking about hardware vulnerabilities in general is that this is one of the reasons
why you want to use Multisig because if you had a vulnerability for a Trezor and that
was your only key securing all of your funds, then maybe you're in trouble. But if you have
a vulnerability on a Trezor, that's one of five keys. Two of the other keys are a ledger,
a cold card. You have actually a lot more redundancy and a lot more security just from
having a more diversified hardware model like that. And so that's one of the reasons why
Multisig is such an interesting and important way to secure large amounts of Bitcoin.
And are you also looking at any other hardware wallets out there? Are there any other ones
that you're interested in potentially adding as an option or is it sort of like none of
them are really mature enough yet? What's the thought there?
It is a dynamic space for sure. We're constantly staying on top of these things. I'm aware
that there are a number of projects out there that we're hoping we'll see drop basically
before the year is out. And as these new hardware devices come out, we'll be evaluating them,
trying to figure out if we can use them to increase the security, increase the usability
of our system. So I am definitely excited to see new types of hardware come out because
I'm sure that they are going to make new decisions on various trade-offs and we're going to get
to play around with them and figure out what can we leverage in order to make a better
Bitcoin experience for people.
Yeah. And one of the interesting things that we've been talking about is some of the wallets
out there are working on like a fully air-gapped QR code based on a screen way to sign. And
so instead of plugging in your Trezor or Ledger directly to your computer to sign something,
you can actually transfer transaction data between a mobile app and a hardware wallet
using QR codes. And one team that's working on this is Foundation Devices. And so there's
some really interesting models that are starting to come out around there, which we will definitely
be looking into and figuring out how to integrate with CASA.
Great. And yeah, I presume with most of these things, it just takes time for the wallet
and the method to be established. And I think, for example, with Coldcard, there was enough
of a community around people who wanted Coldcard. And I suppose that was also part of the driving
factor to try and bring them in. Also, I think an interesting point is just around coming
back to when you're doing a rotation or if there is a vulnerability or if there's some
kind of firmware update. I guess the important point to understand for listeners there is
order of operations matters, right? That you might want to, let's say, check all of your
keys before updating one of them, right? Could you just expand on that idea?
Yeah. So we have the ability within CASA where people can do a health check, like I said
earlier. And what this lets you do is say, okay, is the private key that matches this
wallet still on this device? So like I can sign with it, it's good to go. And you can
do that for every single one of your keys. And so what we recommend is if somebody is
going to do a firmware upgrade on one of their devices, they should do health checks on the
other devices to make sure that they have at least three that they can be signing with
in case that a firmware update wipes the device that they're doing it on then. And so then
that just, from an order of operations perspective, it's like practicing good hygiene of just
making sure that you're fully healthy before you go undergo an operation to update your
firmware. And then, you know, after that happens, if it did wipe the key, then you're you're
totally fine. And you can just use the other keys to rotate that out and create a new wallet.
Yeah. Also, I guess just more broadly in this space, I mean, we are I think some things
happen this year that most people would not obviously things happen this year that most
people would not have predicted. So one example in the CASA model is multi location. But obviously
with Coronavirus and the lockdowns and so on, did that change because people were obviously
locked inside, they weren't able to go to visit all of their keys? Was that something
that came into your own? Obviously, I'm sure it did come into your own thought process
around how Bitcoin people should be thinking about multi signature and management of their
case. Yeah, so this is one of the reasons why multi signature combined with multi location
is helpful, because we've had people who were, you know, maybe their key was inaccessible
in a safety deposit box somewhere that was closed because of all the COVID restrictions.
Well, if they really needed to move funds, they likely had access to some of their other
keys or could utilize the CASA recovery key and rotate that key out. And so then replace
it with a key that's actually under their control. Maybe they can put that in a different
location that isn't closed down. And this is one of the times when having support actually
really comes in handy, because we were talking with some of our platinum and diamond clients
and helping them evaluate their security model and think about their key distribution. And
some of them said, Oh, you know, I think it would be really helpful if you could decrease
the amount of time that you wait to sign with the CASA recovery key for me during this period.
And so that's some of the things that we can do just by having this really hands on customer
support team that you wouldn't necessarily have backing you up in a scenario where you're
doing it fully by yourself.
Awesome. And I guess, yeah, just kind of more broadly, just around, you know, personal security.
I know that's a big focus for you, Jameson, in this age of, you know, surveillance as
well. Are there any other kind of tips or things you're thinking about that people should
be thinking about when they are looking at? Okay, how do I, you know, stay kind of a little
bit more secure or potentially against try and stay a little bit more private?
Really the only thing that I think has changed in the past few months is now it's a lot less
socially awkward to walk around while having your face covered. And I recommend doing that
as much as possible. And hopefully, this will be something where, you know, we'll see a
culture shift to be more like, you know, Asian cultures where it is not frowned upon or considered
odd to be walking around with a mask.
Did you have any tips for the listeners out there, Nick?
You know, I tend to leave the OPSEC tips to Jameson because I go to him for all of my
OPSEC questions. So, you know, I don't have too much to add there, I'd say.
Sure, sure. And look, I think part of it is also just once you start on that journey,
right, because I think people can be a little bit too, what's the word, like disheartened
or not willing to even start. But if you like at least try and take one step at a time,
you can slowly regain or at least try to reduce the impacts to your own privacy and some of
your own security. And I think that's another thing to your credit as well. With the CASA
team, you've got the security updates. So tell us a little bit about what you've been
sharing in the recent security updates.
Yeah, so we have a security newsletter that goes out every week and talks about not just,
you know, Bitcoin security, it talks about lots of data breaches, it talks about privacy
and general cybersecurity problems that may be coming about due to the situations in the
world or decisions that companies are making. And so the way that we view that newsletter
and you can sign up for it on our website is just a really a helpful rundown of the
most important security news from the week. And there's not a lot of the these out there,
you know, you might kind of catch stuff here and there. But we're trying to really just
compile this for our subscribers. And that comes with our quick bullets of, hey, here's
what you should be thinking about with regards to this specific story. And so, you know,
that's something that not everybody knows what to like they may they may see an article
that talks about a data breach. And they may not actually know what to do after that to
ensure they're safe. And so we'll put a few bullets in there that is like, well, you can
go check on have I been pwned to see if yours was your information was included as part
of a data breach, that kind of thing. And so it's just an extension of what we do with
helping people manage their keys and their Bitcoin security into helping people manage
their general personal and cybersecurity. Yeah. And also, I think some of the focus
now I'm slowly starting to I'm starting to get more awareness myself on some of these
other projects of things like, so for example, instead of having Google Drive and Google
Documents, you can have something like Nextcloud, right, like a self hosted, you know, office,
things like that. Are these also aspects that you at the CASA team would be looking at talking
about or trying to teach your subscribers around those elements as well?
Yeah. And one of the things that we so we like these services, one of the the problems
with them right now for especially for some of our user base is that they're still a bit
hard to use. And there is definitely I mean, we see this with Bitcoin key management as
well. There's a significant convenience barrier. So unless you can make it as convenient or
more convenient than the existing services, it's going to be really hard to get people
to switch. And so what we are really excited about, though, is seeing these types of services
like Nextcloud get better over time and iterate on themselves. And it's kind of like Bitcoin,
you know, they've got this early community of hardcore adopters that's very technical
and willing to go through the extra steps they need to take. And then as they grow,
they're actually able to build out a better user experience and get a lot more of the,
you know, later adopters who don't want to mess with all that early stuff. And so I mean,
a good example of a product that I think is really interesting is the helm. It's a personal
email server. And it was it came out like actually right around the same time as the
cost of note, if I remember right, but I've got one sitting behind me on my little desk.
And it was a really, it was a much simpler way to set up your own personal email server
than anything I'd found before. And it's all stored on a device that's sitting locally
in my house. And that's something to me that is, you know, a really interesting step along
this path and something that we really like to see at Casa, because we really envision
this more kind of distributed and and decentralized future where people have a lot more control
over their own wealth, over their own data. And they can do that by using some of these
products like Casa or like next cloud or like the helm.
Right? Yeah. And as I understand as well with email, one of the difficulties is, like you
can run the email server, but then the other difficulty is not getting picked up in the
spam filters of other people's email clients, right?
As someone who spent the first 10 years of his career actually working at an email service
provider, it's a whole hot mess beyond just the technical issues. There's actually a lot
of social networking that goes on between ESPs and ISPs and spam lists. And it's definitely
it's own network and trying to become a provider on that network is it's not as easy as running
your own Bitcoin node.
Maybe someday we'll get there. I think some of this stuff also reminds me of the typical
conversation you might hear when someone says, Oh, everyone should use PGP. And then the
reality is not many people actually use PGP.
And then reality is really hard to use, even for somebody that knows what they're doing.
Right. And so I think the equivalent is like trying to build something like Signal, right?
Something like it's accessible to the typical consumer level, and therefore, we'll get more
use. And therefore, in some ways, you can get a lot more scale with that, although it's
not the purest option, let's say.
Yeah. And maybe one day, you know, Signal's like a good example of a stepping stone. Maybe
one day Signal will figure out a really easy way for people to actually manage their encryption
key.
And that's something that is really interesting. And but it's it's definitely not something
that the majority of people are ready for right now. And so Signal, I think, is doing
a great job at being one of those intermediate steps of, yeah, okay, we're getting you off
of SMS, where anybody can read everything you say, and getting you onto something that's
a little more encrypted. And it's even better than something like WhatsApp, where it's all,
you know, totally flowing through their servers and readable by Facebook. So I think Signal's
a great example of somebody that's bridging the gap there.
Yeah. I wonder if you guys have explored any of these other messaging apps like the Riot
Matrix? Well, I think Riot is a client and Matrix is the protocol. I'm not sure if you
guys have explored any of that as also.
Yes, it is one of our favorites, actually.
We actually use it as a company.
Yeah. Oh, there you go.
I've been using it for several years. You know, it's great for, you know, small team internal
communication stuff. I remember at BitGo, you know, we were looking for an alternative
to get off of Slack as soon as possible. And it was great when Matrix became stable enough
to use.
Yeah. And the interesting thing about Matrix and Riot is that you can tell that as a small
team, it's definitely usable. And so we use it and we kind of deal with some of the quirks.
But for every new person that joins your Matrix server, if you're fully self-hosting this
like we are to keep everything fully indented and encrypted, then they have to verify every
other person in the company that they want to talk to. And every person in the company
has to verify them. And so when you start to talk about companies that are hundreds,
thousands of people, this gets way harder to do. And so I know that Riot's been working
on a bunch of improvements to this. And even in the two years that we've been using it,
it's become way easier to verify keys with people. But getting to that next step is just
another example of like, it's going to take some time before they can really make that
jump into a mass audience.
So I guess with many of these things, I guess part of the theme here is taking stuff that
used to be kind of out there in the open and trying to find ways to bring it back where
you have a little bit more control, or in some cases, full control. So I guess different
things will be at different places in the journey. So I think now in terms of Bitcoin,
it's becoming more and more easy now to hold your own keys, but perhaps a little bit more
difficult to do multi-signature on your own. And so we've got guided providers. And then
similarly with things like email and other things, they're all kind of on this journey.
But at the same time, there's kind of tension kind of pushing the other way, because as
an example, there might be some new feature that comes out and everyone wants the convenience
of that. So how are you thinking about that? Do you think people are nowadays slowly waking
up to that aspect of like, okay, I need to actually take some more control over this?
Or are people just kind of sucked into convenience?
I think it's a really difficult question because it's very easy to think of this from the perspective
of our Bitcoin Twitter echo chamber, where we believe everybody in the world wants to
be fully self-sovereign. And it's challenging to go outside of that bubble and even talk
to your friends who aren't Bitcoiners and hear that they don't necessarily care about
that. So that's part of what we view as CASA's job is actually to tell that story in a way
that helps people understand why it's important. And I think that it is aided by the fact that
our governments and world in general is kind of falling apart in some areas right now.
And so that accelerates the process for people to kind of wake up, as you say. And so we
are seeing more people saying, I want to hold my own keys. I understand the dangers of not
doing that. I think we've saw, I saw an article last week maybe talking about how there's
a big spike in signal downloads. So people who were actually going to protests wanting
fully end-to-end encrypted messaging. And so that's, it's definitely accelerated by
what's going on in the world right now. But I think we're still at the very beginning
of this. And as a community, we really have to think about how we are going to spread
this and tell this story in a way that's accessible to more than just ourselves, because that's
how we're going to make some of these important trends and ways to think about life, like
in a self-sovereign manner where you have real control over your wealth and data. That's
how we're going to help that grow is by really thinking about that from outside of our normal
box. So to answer your question succinctly, I think it's being accelerated, but we're
still early stages.
Yeah, great comments. And look, I think that's just about all we've got time for. So Nick
and Jameson, thank you very much for joining me. I've really enjoyed chatting with you.
How can my listeners find you guys online? Yep. So check us out at at casa hodl on Twitter.
Our website is keys.casa and our blog is blog.keys.casa. And of course, personally, you can always
follow the inimitable lop at lop on Twitter. My Twitter is at in Newman. Fantastic. Well,
I think that's pretty much it. So thank you for joining me, guys. Thanks for having us.
See you guys in the citadels.