Hello Jameson, and thank you for joining Shoots in Bitcoin. It's a huge pleasure having you here today with me.
Thanks for having me.
Where are you located? I have just, by the way, watched a video with an interview we gave for Bitcoin magazine and you have shared some stuff around blackmailing.
So, please feel free not to disclose your exact location.
I'm somewhere in the United States and I move around a fair amount.
Great. So greetings to United States then.
So Jameson, thank you once again. I love really to know more about the way you have joined the Bitcoin world.
I'm sure it's a question that you're, yeah, you received very often. However, yeah, please.
It's a long story.
But, like a lot of people, I just got interested in it originally as kind of a side project, a hobby of sorts, trying to better understand the system and play around with it and I had a project that I started in 2014, where I basically took the Bitcoin core code
and forked it and added in a bunch of metrics collection and created a website around that to make it easier for people to understand what was going on inside of a Bitcoin node that just sort of started my journey down the technical rabbit hole.
So here's statoshi.info, just have some nice dashboards to display the metrics that my node collects there. And, you know, I felt like that project was a success in the sense that it was referenced by a number of developers over the years to make arguments for and decisions
about changes to Bitcoin and the nodes.
And it wasn't long after that, in 2015, when I had the opportunity to go full time, and that's when I started working for a company called BitGo, basically helping exchanges and other businesses secure large amounts of Bitcoin in their hot wallets, you know, trying to
prevent more of the Mt. Gox style catastrophes from happening.
For about three years I made a slight pivot and helped found CASA, which is also using similar aspects of the Bitcoin protocol, but we're focused on individuals and basically helping the average Bitcoin user feel more confident that they can self custody that they can manage
their own keys they can be their own bank and they can do this without losing sleep at night and worrying about screwing up and losing access to all of their money so this is, it's still a very big fundamental problem and you're helping people actually realize the
potential of Bitcoin because you know it comes with a lot of responsibility.
And it's great that you're working on all these projects that are focused on privacy and security, not your keys, not your coins, so CASA is, I mean, could you please let me know what's the difference between what makes CASA unique?
Because we already have some, let's say, platforms projects in the industry, what's that unique thing that makes a difference?
Sure, I mean there's a few main pillars to CASA and one of them is that we provide a very user friendly mobile app, which lets you view and manage your key set.
The fundamental thing is that we're, we're building on top of best practices and hardware from other manufacturers, so the short version of like what our goal is, is we help people architect a key storage setup that eliminates single points of failure and we do that in a
number of different ways. One of them is that we're helping you create a architecture that actually has multiple keys behind it. This gives you some additional robustness and resilience so basically, if you lose a key or a key gets stolen or destroyed
or whatever, which we assume over a long enough period of time, you have to assume that something bad is going to happen. I mean, this is just the nature of the world and humans make mistakes and so on and so forth.
And so we want to put you in a solution where you can recover from failures, you can make mistakes and not lose access to all your money.
Another big difference between us and a lot of the self custody options is the vast majority of self custody hardware and software that's out there is really a do it yourself type of solution where there will be plenty of documentation if you're
technical or you're willing to put in the time and read and understand, and you can certainly be your own bank and do it all yourself. There's a pretty high learning curve to do that well and to understand all of the potential things that can go wrong so service
is another fairly unique aspect of what we're offering, and that we basically have different tiers of service where if you need someone to really hold your hand through the whole process. We have client advisors who are willing and standing by, you know,
to do more than just reply to an email, you know, a week after you've asked a question like we have people who are actually available to you get on video and phone calls with you and help solve problems and make decisions in real time.
That's great. That's why because I consider to be one of the best platforms so the people who are really into Bitcoin they know about because of that is best in class.
And I better like I'm just saying that you're looking for people careers, what kind of open positions are you currently sourcing for.
We have a few open positions probably mostly in engineering department.
Right. And what about weathering the bear market pretty well because we did have a fundraise. Recently, right before a lot of people started getting really pessimistic.
Lucky people. So you are.
So, everyone who is in the industry since I would say more than four years.
We know that it's going to go back into the other direction, very soon. So, yeah, this pessimistic times are also healthy.
They're bringing back the blood, the balance so it's a. So, you're looking for engineers mainly.
Very good. And by the way I have seen it's in English, and this is Brazilian second language that in Brazil.
Okay, and they haven't plans to have cast also in other countries.
Yeah, over the long term you know what you're seeing there is just like the first step into having the main website I think translated into Portuguese, and that was proof of concept that we're able to easily translate it into other things.
So I think the actual translation within our application is a little bit more challenging but we've started work on that. But of course I think the the trickiest thing will actually be expanding our customer support people so that we have, you know, agents
available in many different times and who can speak many different languages.
Right, by the way, Bulgaria is a very good place for outsourcing. I know it's very tricky to outsource such kind of service, however, countries like maybe also Romania.
And here in East Europe, we have very big centers and very big brands and names are outsourcing Kotlin will get in order to have their services 24 by seven. So, it's a tricky thing and you know I think we've seen a lot of companies in the space outsource their tier one support
system to, you know, places like the Philippines or India or whatever you know these big support centers and, you know, I've used a number of companies where I've then had to go through their support system, and you've got to be careful right it's
sometimes be very obvious when the, the agent who is responding to your ticket can only select from like a template, you know pre pre written responses, especially when their response does not really fit or answer the question that you've made and then you have
to get escalated to the next tier support so we definitely aim to have, I guess, a higher quality of frontline support which generally means, you know, having to look for people who have been sort of Bitcoin hobbyists for a while so that they've already
were kind of imbued and a lot of this niche knowledge.
Right. Definitely. No, I'm just talking about the geography is, let's say we are having such capability in general in Bulgaria, and I'm talking about very big companies like Google and Amazon for outsourcing here I'm a person who used to be working
over 10 years for such projects. So, okay. Thank you very much, James and for providing all this information about Gaza so you have mentioned you joined Bitcoin back in 2014, and before that, what do you been doing.
Well, I was a computer scientist, really a software as a service developer for the first decade of my career.
I was, I was working on online marketing applications, and near the end. I had progressed to the point where I was basically doing large scale data analysis and sort of the early days of cloud computing big data, so you know I was actually, in a sense, doing
a subset of a lot of the privacy stuff that I preach these days I was, I was basically collecting a lot of people's data and using it to provide analytics and targeting for online retailers to better sell stuff to be great.
So you definitely have this preparation for taking over such important role as chief technology officer at Gaza.
Okay, and what about your other project.
Which I think very interesting Bitcoin politicians what is it about crowdsource later project politicians. Yeah. Yeah, if you look on my main page I think I have nearly a dozen different random Bitcoin related projects that are listed on.
On the main page there, bottom left yeah and these are all just things that have come up as I've been navigating through the space and run into interesting questions, you know some some of these projects are different types of calculators or sort of utility
tools that I've developed because I found myself needing those tools on a regular basis so I figure why not just, you know, build it and then make it available for everyone to use if they need it.
Other things like the Bitcoin politicians or Bitcoin or like the physical attack logs, these are more of just like historical stuff you know trying to keep track of what is happening in the world with regards to Bitcoin.
So the physical Bitcoin attacks is really anyone who we learn about his has had a physical assault or threats against them that were likely as a result of being known as having a lot of Bitcoin or crypto assets.
The politicians thing. Yeah, that's more of trying to understand which politicians are just full of hot air and which ones have skin in the game, because a number of politicians have made statements about Bitcoin, but they don't actually own it and this is
a rule in the United States where basically anyone who is I think elected to Congress or any number of other like federal offices that are sufficiently high up in the hierarchy.
But from an ethics standpoint, they are required to disclose really everything that they own, and this, this is publicly filed so unfortunately the the search engines to comb through all of this data are not great.
A lot of them are literally just PDFs that you can't even really search through automatically so it requires a lot of hours of labor to go through all of this data and basically see you know does this person have Bitcoin or any other popular crypto
assets listed in their holdings. And if they don't, and they're always talking about how awesome it is I think you know it's a good reason to be a bit suspicious, not necessarily believe what they're saying.
But, you know, it's also interesting to track I think from a partisan standpoint.
I think most anyone would make the argument that you know Bitcoin doesn't care about politics.
There's a pretty big skew, at least in America, where it seems like the vast majority of politicians who are pro Bitcoin or especially who own Bitcoin tend to be on the conservative side of things whereas a number of the more liberal politicians seem to be
up on like ESG you know energy narratives mostly. And I guess they feel pressured not to support Bitcoin because it might make them look weak on the sort of green side of things.
You see, recently, because we are very distant from each other, however, I see on Twitter, there is a lady called Cynthia, I think if I'm not mistaken I'm not sure from which state.
Cynthia Lummis.
She's a Republican Senator out of Wyoming, and she, she has actually been in Bitcoin for a long time I think I first met her in 2017. So she's definitely been interested in it for quite a few years.
Great. So there are people who are definitely working in that direction you know that to make Bitcoin popular as people have to start trusting this technology but it takes time, and it's absolutely normal.
So I'm not going to ask you about the other projects, maybe on the, are you doing all this job on your own, or you're having a small team or someone you trust and who's supporting you for this.
Well for all of the side projects those are literally just me, though, especially the politicians thing I did put that out there for crowdsourcing and I was more of just a brute labor thing and I did have probably half a dozen people who helped me
comb through those thousands of pages of documents. But, you know, most of these projects are fairly small on the coding side like the actual amount of work that needs to be done for the software.
And of course it's a very different story. When we're talking about Casa at Casa it's kind of the opposite where I do very, very little of the coding and more of the high level research and sort of architecture design and wrangling the various
developers. And how many people are you at Casa, how many people are dedicated full time employees only working.
We have over 40 employees at this point.
All of them in USA.
Are you working.
No.
Let's see, but pretty much all North and South America, you know we have a number of employees in Canada, people in the USA are scattered all around. We've never had a real like physical headquarters, it's always been a 100% remote employee company.
And then, I think we've, yeah we have started hiring a few people in South America, and we're just starting to expand into Europe.
I just started expanding to Europe, and in which countries, which countries are you talking to?
Well, you know, so technically we don't care where our clients are. You can be anywhere in the world, though at the moment, you know in order to converse with our client services people, you really need to speak English, or I think we have a few Spanish
speakers, so Spanish could also work. It's, it's more of an issue usually of time zones and being able to coordinate calls, and then just general communication, but we don't have any real like legal limitations when it comes to geographic boundaries or, you
know, wherever our clients may be staying.
Other than sometimes customs is an issue, because we do ship hardware to people, and there are a few countries that are not very nice when it comes to dealing with their customers or sometimes it can be very slow or very expensive, depending on what their policies are.
Right.
Thank you. Thank you so I wish you good luck with this expansion of cause of HODL. If you need some support. I'm here for you.
Okay, so
I'm talking a lot about privacy. In general, privacy and attacks potential attacks. So people have to be once you enter this world, you start realizing how valuable Bitcoin is in general, you have to store it in a very secure way and also you have to
utilize as much as possible.
Your exposure and revealing the revealing of your identity so this is one of the biggest parts of the technology by default. As you said, Bitcoin doesn't care if you're a human.
What are your best tips and tricks for privacy if you're someone who is just now entering this world.
What shall I know if I'm that person.
Yeah, I mean it can be very tricky I think for the average person because I think it's, it's basically in our nature to share information. This is why social media is so popular you know people like to go on to public forums and sites and talk about
themselves and get feedback and, you know, reinforcement from like minded people who they may then associate with and identify as a part of a community and whatnot and humans are social creatures so it's all very understandable.
If you really want to consider, you know, having this shield of privacy that is kind of like your, your outermost layer of your security really, then you have to limit what it is that you're talking about.
You know the easiest thing to do of course is to just not publish any information to the internet, but that that can be a tall ask for for anyone especially younger folks who are used to pretty much living on the internet.
So, you know, for me it's just being more thoughtful.
Whenever you're talking or posting something you know, so you have to think about it adversarially like, am I posting something that could potentially be used against me at some point.
And you know that creates a little bit of cognitive overhead right you have to really make this a part of your, your daily life is just having the sort of like devil, you know, sitting on your shoulder, whispering to you about all the bad things that could happen.
But otherwise, there are a number of technical things that people can do to improve their privacy where it's more of a one time thing set it and forget it.
And so that's basically things like installing ad blockers into your browser to help stop a lot of the tracking that just happens as you're going about your day, going through different websites that would otherwise be able to correlate everywhere that you're hopping around.
In order to of course better sell stuff to you.
You're this your privacy is kind of its own rabbit hole, similar to Bitcoin, and that you can go as deep into it and put as much resources into it as you feel like.
So it becomes more of a question of how much privacy or how much security. Do I really need.
And, you know, the main thing that I try to convey to people on both of these topics really any large topic like this is, it can seem overwhelming because there is really more information out there than you could ever possibly ingest and understand.
And you're just spending a few hours on it at a time, you know, perhaps do one or two things each weekend to try to improve yourself then taking these little steps, making small changes, rather than like the massive change that that I made a few years ago.
I think it could be a lot more approachable for people just bite off a little bit at a time and see how you feel about it.
What kind of change you you have made something big. Sorry.
So, you know, four or five years ago, after you know I had the physical attack at my house, where the whole neighborhood got shut down by the police because someone had targeted me.
I spent about a year researching privacy, and then implementing a plan that cost me a lot of time a lot of money required me to move and basically sell off all of my assets that were tied to my name, and then start all over again.
You know that's that's a very extreme thing that generally the only people that do that are people who have some sort of threat against them, you know, whether it's like a domestic situation or a, you know, celebrity stalker situation or whatever where you
know you have reason to believe that people are trying to find you and may cause you harm. So, you know, most people don't need to do that. If you, if you start start early. If you have good privacy you know if I had had better privacy from the beginning
I wouldn't have ended up having to do that but it was because I didn't really care about privacy until something bad happened to me which I think is the way it goes for most people ended up having to put a lot more effort and resources and actually fixing my privacy
situation.
Right, and what's the outcome of this situation did you manage actually to find the person.
Yeah, and it took
four years.
And yeah, I had a long blog post that I made that ended up sort of summarizing that whole journey of, you know, trying to deal with private investigators and different law enforcement agencies and prosecutors and all this other stuff so it was.
It was not a fun time and I was, I was, I was actually surprised that it ended up concluding because most of the people in my situation who have like a random SWAT attack against them.
Never actually get solved. And that's because it's, it's one of those things where if law enforcement believes that there's no like imminent threat, and, you know, they're the harm that was caused wasn't measurable and like large amounts of money or physical
protection or whatever then they tend to de prioritize it. And so I ended up having to spend a lot of my own resources to try to push the whole case forward.
I don't know what to say honestly because obviously, if you, if it was someone else who did not have the capabilities that you have the technical competencies and in general, maybe the mental part because you're not stop thinking about maybe there is the next one
and this is, it cannot be reimbursed this psychological pressure that you have experienced with anything so I do really believe, and I hope, let's say I hope is a better word that it's going to change in the future.
And we are going to feel more secure with people in general.
Okay, Jameson.
Thank you very much for for this conversation. It's really a huge pleasure having you and talking to you from the other part of the world.
I would like to ask you as maybe the last question for you, what, what kind of, let's say, future projects you have in mind, or something that you haven't disclosed yet and you'd like to share only for shows in Bitcoin.
Do you have any message kind of information, or just let's say some final words and things you'd like to share with me and my audience.
Well, you know so CASA for the past four years has been focused on helping people self custody their Bitcoin. But for a long time. I've said you know CASA is not necessarily a Bitcoin company, we see Bitcoin as the most obvious highest impact way of pushing self sovereignty
at this time you're given the tools that are available to us and so our thesis is that you can greatly empower individuals through cryptography and cryptography meaning various protocols and functionality that people can access through the use of private keys.
And so, you know what we're here to do is to help people manage their private keys, because we think that eventually these these keys are going to be incredibly important to the average person to unlock all types of different aspects of their daily life so that is kind of the
main vision for us is, you know, we want to help people not only be their own bank, but be sovereign with regard to any of their assets any of their like identity management.
We want to help adults that becomes a mainstream popular form of securing transferring controlling value and different aspects of your life so you know we're not here to, I guess,
create the wheel or do anything novel that no one else is doing rather where we're staying apprised of everything that's happening in the ecosystem, and really want to unlock functionality that is currently too advanced for most people to take advantage
of you and we, we want to make self sovereignty, easier and more approachable so I guess that's the without revealing any specifics that's the sort of the short version of the long term vision for us.
Thank you, James and very much, and I wish you and your team. What's the fork and success to implementing this important mission.
Thanks for having me.