it's pretty ridiculous just like from a common sense perspective that you think that um this guy
who is a billionaire and is like running two multi-billion dollar tech companies simultaneously
also happens to have enough free time to be thinking about like reinventing the monetary
system from scratch this episode of supply shock is powered by core you'll hear more about them
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he invented twitter square and revolutionized social media and point of sale payments but is
jack dorsey satoshi nakamoto welcome to supply shock i'm your host p rizzo the bitcoin historian our guest
here today is none other than co-founder of casa a bitcoin legend found bitcoin when it was trading
under ten dollars in 2012 tweeted about the first having and fought in a blocked eyes war as i'm
talking about jameson lopp who joins us today among those accolades he's also a rigorous researcher who's
known for disproving popular theories about satoshi writing about why craig wright was not satoshi in
2019 and then last year debunking the long-standing myth that how finney the famous cryptographer
was satoshi nakamoto welcome to the program jameson good to be here and i'm also told that i share a bit
of a likeness with dorsey himself now that he's sporting my same beard style yes matching beards well
let's dive into it uh the theory that jack dorsey is satoshi nakamoto obviously to people who have been
around uh for a long time in bitcoin this was a laughable theory you know we laughed and and guffawed
but uh maybe a bit stickier uh than we thought do you want to kind of go into like what the pretext
is and and really like kind of the post that kicked off this exploration of yours and and some of these
details the short version is that they kind of hooked into the fact that you know jack was an og cypherpunk
he was on the mailing list he was studying computer science uh when he was at university and was doing
things like i think wearing the adam back cryptography export t-shirt really when they started trying to go
the rabbit down the rabbit hole and you get more details and and things that would make it seem like
he was actually satoshi that's when it kind of went off the rails and they were talking about all this
numerology stuff and really just like trying to find patterns of characters and transaction hashes and
addresses and time stamps that things happen so you know my general take is like when you're starting to
stretch into the numerology sphere um that's when you're really reaching because you're basically
you're trying to find meaning amongst a bunch of randomness and if you're when you're trying to do
that if there's a large enough data set you're probably going to find things that seem meaningful
yeah i'll pull a few of the ones that i thought you know and this again that's the i think one of
the advantages here were just the length of this twitter post you know people got excited about the idea
they were probably sharing it but when you kind of look in the details uh i'll read some of the more
uh ridiculous ones satoshi joined the bitcoin forum on jack's birthday coincidence but doesn't prove
anything satoshi's last mind block was on jack's dad's birthday uh and again don't know if that's true
sounds convincing uh and then let's see satoshi told hal at a me email about an address that began with ns
you know not super convincing uh jack sends bitcoin to four addresses after hal including one that has jd2m
in the middle so yeah i mean again i think a lot of fluff and this why do you think that people were
uh you know found an appeal on this i guess maybe before we we got with the debunking like what the
people were in the bitcoin space like why do we why do we maybe want jacks or satoshi yeah i mean there
are some people who always uh enjoy kind of having a hero figure um and then you know this is of course
the long-standing greatest unsolved mystery of bitcoin who actually created bitcoin so if someone
actually did successfully prove the identity of satoshi nakamoto you know that would give them a decent
amount of of street cred in some circles of course um i would say in general those of us who consider
ourselves cypherpunks take the perspective that satoshi valued their privacy they did not want to be
identified and beyond that it's uh it's downright dangerous you know both to satoshi potentially to
satoshi's family and it's not great for the bitcoin ecosystem in general because i think it's just better
for the creator to be this mythological figure that only has uh it's like 900 or so data points uh like
posts and related things that they said in that two-year period um versus being a known human who is
probably gonna have said things or done controversial stuff that uh people will try to use against them
and try to use as a sort of slight against bitcoin itself well maybe uh take us into like how you
approach the debunking so you know this got on your radar blew up a couple weeks ago you know the theory
jack is satoshi people tweeting about it uh how did you kind of mentally then go you know okay or how do
you start your research process is there any sort of uh kind of things that you go to now that you've done
this a few times or you you had tried and true tricks or what did you think about i mean it's
difficult to prove a negative regardless of what you're trying to do so we're trying to prove that
someone is not satoshi how do you actually comprehensively do that and i think the best
thing that you can really aspire to is to prove that someone was out and about and doing things where
they were not at a keyboard you know not writing code not uh commenting on bitcoin talk whatever
and um and that's essentially what i did with hal finney is i was lucky enough to come across a race that
he participated in which happened to conflict with several activities uh satoshi where satoshi was sending
emails and sending bitcoin transactions and basically like we had hard time stamp evidence both of satoshi
doing things and of hal finney doing things where it couldn't possibly be the same person doing both of
those things at the same time so i basically tried to apply that same methodology here and it's actually
pretty funny because jack dorsey is probably the worst candidate that you could point at
to make the claim that they're satoshi because of how public jack dorsey was like jack dorsey was probably
the most avid tweeter back in 2009 and 2010 i i counted up uh 6200 tweets in that two-year period which is
like eight and a half tweets per day so he was tweeting on almost an hourly basis you know if you average it
out and so that is just a really nice uh data set to work with to try to find conflicts with the like 950 or so
time stamped activities that we have of satoshi doing various things all right so you had this
data from how uh you were able to look at the races prove that he couldn't been behind the keyboard and
racing at the same time obviously you know impossible to do uh so was there a smoking gun here with jack
you know you're talking about these tweets obviously you know you could probably tweet on twitter and be
writing on bitcoin talk was he in a conference is there a smoking gun here that uh is driving this this
conclusion that he's not satoshi so i found a dozen or so uh conflicting events and none of these are
quite as strong as the howl uh you know running a race thing or like you know he's not uh on a phone or anything
else um however i think in aggregate like the likelihood that all of these things were somehow uh you know set up ahead of time and manipulated by jack uh it makes it highly unlikely
um so at a very very high level of like looking at the aggregate of just their time stamp activity
in general the first thing that really pops out at you if you chart the hours of the day when satoshi
was doing stuff and when jack was doing stuff you can see very clearly that they're not following the
same pattern and i'm sure we can put the chart up here for people to look at but uh essentially satoshi
followed a very rigorous schedule that it tends to follow what you would expect from someone who is living
in the pacific time zone uh you know their sleep schedule is very consistent over that two-year period
and by sleep schedule i just mean the times that they were not posting where you would assume
that that was because they were asleep jack on the other hand is very well known because there are many
tweets where he talks about this he was bi-coastal and the reason for that is very simple he was running
two big companies uh you know he was he was running both twitter which is based in san francisco and
he was getting a square up and off the ground and square was in new york city so he was regularly going
back and forth between new york city and san francisco and so when you actually look at the chart of jack
dorsey's tweets it is not a consistent sleep schedule and this makes sense because he was bi-coastal he was
going back and forth between time zones that are three hours apart so that's just like the first
very high level thing of course this isn't conclusive in and of itself but it just shows
that from a like high level persona and you know public time stamp perspective they were not following
similar schedules now beyond that like digging into specifics there were a dozen or so specific events
where jack was tweeting about things that he was doing these have i would say different levels of
certainty behind them you know some of these were oh i'm having lunch with someone or i'm out uh shopping
with my friends or i'm at an event like a he liked to go to baseball games a lot and so you know those i
would say would be like lower on the certainty schedule because sure like maybe he could have
somehow slipped in a forum post or something you know while he was doing these more casual things
but there's a few events whereas i would say it's highly unlikely that jack would have been writing code
or posting stuff and some of those are events where he was meeting with uh essentially government figures so
there was one event where he was meeting with the mayor of paris uh there was one event where he was
meeting with cory booker who was the mayor of newark new jersey at the time i also saw a list of milano
the famous activists there yeah um and let's see there was also one event where he met with the president of
chile and i did find a photo of that event uh and and those like those public figure events are very
well time boxed uh because generally you can see a tweet directly before and directly after uh the
meeting when that occurs so we we know you know with a high degree of certainty exactly when the meeting
happened and then there's just a number of other events where he was giving presentations at square
or demoing square in public like there was one time he was at the chicago apple store for several hours
giving demos at the same time that satoshi was posting on bitcoin talk so you know it's things like
that where you know that you know he he was doing an event in public in which he was highly engaged in
whatever that event was and was probably not uh able to like be on his phone or computer uh doing other
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ledden.io to learn more i mean is it possible so it sounds like maybe these were let's just say like put
our conspiracy theory hats on these were fake events like maybe there were you know there's a mode of
motive or intent to hide this activity here you don't you don't think that that's the case here
i mean it's it's always possible um you can you can say okay maybe these things were scripted and uh and
published ahead of time but uh i think the likelihood of these events in particular like being set up as some
sort of uh misdirection is pretty unlikely it's um you know it all follows jack's persona his modus operandi
there are many many many other events that i came across where you know it was within an hour or so but
there wasn't a perfect conflict and contradiction and this is all just because jack is such a public
person and i would say like even beyond the you know finding specific conflicts of stuff
it's pretty ridiculous ridiculous just like from a common sense perspective that you think that um
this guy who is a billionaire and is like running two multi-billion dollar tech companies simultaneously
also happened to have enough free time to be thinking about like reinventing the monetary system from
scratch it's um i guess you know it's technically possible i don't know with elon i mean how many
how many companies is elon running now and he's got 18 kids and three three different wives so you know
maybe this is just a sign of the times that people think jack is sort of one of these these these figures
uh so you're saying no smoking gun here uh but it sounds like you're saying that just uh the strongest
evidence here is really just someone couldn't have been you know doing the detailed kind of level of
work that satoshi was doing and then also running uh these companies maybe you can speak a bit more
like why do you believe that and like what was so difficult about what was satoshi was doing that like
it's unlikely that maybe even on the same day satoshi would have done something else as as opposed to
one of these you know kind of coding events that he was working on well yeah so you know there were
a few of the bitcoin talk posts were essentially him doing a deep level of code testing and uh basically
doing um tech support for people like with the bitcoin code at the time and so like a few of these bitcoin
talk posts he's not just you know posting a few sentences and replying to someone he's also uploading code
he's making code changes and saying yes i i figured out like what this bug was so like he was debugging
some issue which would have meant that like you'd have to have like a full laptop with a development
environment stuff like this is not stuff you can just do on your iphone um so like the the likelihood
that uh you know jack could have been going around just with his iphone and doing all of this stuff uh
is it's just not something you know myself as a computer scientist like we we don't do
that type of stuff on phones the environments just aren't set up for it yeah i've looked at
those satoshi posts on bitcoin talk and i i would agree right a lot of the users were coming to me he
was very involved in bitcoin in the early days so i'm assuming some of these events are talking about
people lost bitcoin they're asking him what happened they're saying that he they couldn't load a wallet and
you know these are things that he had to take very seriously because the project was very new
and the perception of the project was very important and he was essentially a lead developer and you know
lead maintainer and and really the only person that these uh users can go to maybe you can talk a little
bit about that and just sort of what satoshi's kind of goal and just maybe how much time he would have
been putting into the project in those early stages yeah i mean um this is mostly like other early adopters
trying to run or build or modify or write their own code to interact with their bitcoin nodes this is
fairly in-depth technical stuff uh you know dealing with you know platform specific c plus plus
compilation and library issues and stuff like that it's not just like uh faq how do you use the bitcoin rpc
api type of stuff so um you know this is of course in the very early days where you know the bitcoin
it wasn't even bitcoin core back then it was just bitcoin it was the only software in existence and so
anyone who wanted to do anything with bitcoin had to be able to you know get that uh full node and wallet
software up and running and doing what they needed yeah i'm just reading through some of these uh uh you know
uh claims that the uh kind of accuser here i guess is making about jack and uh i'm also just struck by
the you know there seems to be uh this assertion that because jack loves bitcoin and because he speaks
about it so passionately uh and so well that this is sort of grounds for accusing him to be satoshi's
i'll read one of my favorite uh uh you know proof proof points that he's satoshi on uh october 27 23 jack said at
conference bitcoin and satoshi in 2009 was a combination of my childhood my curiosity and
everything that i aspire to be and everything that i loved so what do you what do you think i guess of
this connection where uh just because jack loves bitcoin so much uh he's a plausible candidate for satoshi
because i imagine someone could probably find things that you said that are that are pretty similar to
that and that there's nothing satoshi specific about that quote yeah pretty much i mean um you know bitcoin
was the result of goals that many cypherpunks had been trying to achieve for decades so
you know one of the major claims was he he was an og cypherpunk and there were like 1300 people on that
original list um and i would say sure being on that list makes you a higher priority candidate for being
satoshi but there's also no reason why satoshi had to have been on that list um it's entirely possible for
for someone to have you know stumbled upon this idea of wanting to create a new type of uh digital currency
and you know figuring out just a completely different way of doing it i mean
if you think about it everybody who had been on the cypherpunks list had failed to come up with a solution
anywhere near what satoshi had done like no one had come up with this idea of using a blockchain data
structure nobody had come up with the idea of using a global proof of work mechanism that adjusts itself
it's entirely possible that satoshi came in completely out of left field and because they had not been
indoctrinated to a lot of the ways that the cypherpunks had done things that's what allowed
them to think differently about it yeah there's one thing about this satoshi research is that there's
a lot of conflicting evidence right so i'll give a couple examples you know the newer emails that we
got last year from the craig wright trial uh from marty malmi and adam back you know there was kind of
this consensus that like satoshi was younger right he was using colloquial words that maybe young
younger people would use but that almost sort of conflicts with you know three or four or five years ago uh
you know there was the popular theory that you know satoshi used double spacing and this is you know
somebody who used a typewriter you know would have have used this or that his style was sort of academic
uh so you know i do think this thread sort of plays around with some of the like open conflicting uh you
know pieces of evidence so maybe let's just go with that age one you know is it because now you know
we think satoshi might be younger is that what makes jack sort of like it gets him pulled into these sort
of conspiracy threads and and maybe where do you fall on that was there anything that's or do you
on that spectrum in terms of like what you think his age might have been i think people like to look
at jack for the same reason that some people have floated the idea that elon musk could be satoshi
is like somebody just wants uh satoshi to be like one of the richest and most powerful people in the world
uh he is right against by by the value of the bitcoin right assuming that they still have the
you know uh a million or so they say uh but yeah i think that the thread is an interesting bit of fan
fiction uh you know uh in terms of just you know what it says more about what people want to be you
know to be satoshi i think um i'll just read another one of my favorite kind of claims here
uh lex friedman asked jack if he was satoshi and jack told him that he wouldn't admit it if he was
uh and the author here is saying this contrasts with nick zabo adam back and how finney who said they
were explicitly not satoshi so is jack's refusal to admit that he's refusal to renounce the satoshiness
making the candidate in your view uh well that was that one interview there was actually a different
interview where he said no no no no no so you know once again i think this is cherry picking um and you
know there's another well there's probably several aspects of the persona that i have not really dug
into very much but like one thing that really just came to mind that um i had thought about is uh and
i learned this while i was doing the research uh jack dorsey actually went on multiple different um tours
of countries as a part of the united states state department so he he did a tour of
russia he did a tour of iraq and maybe one or two other places and so i think just related to like
what we know of satoshi and uh satoshi not really being a fan of big centralized authorities it's once
again it would be very odd for satoshi to be dealing so closely with the federal government and going on
trips and and doing things as a part of that do you think this is testament to really just like the public
perception of jack as well right because he's changed over the years right ever since he left
twitter you know you see the pictures of him with the beard as you mentioned your you know your beard
comparison like in africa doing bitcoin things and there's this kind of rise in viewings jack as this
kind of eccentric uh guy you know just because of what he's doing with bitcoin and the level that he's
supporting it because we also know that you know in some ways if jack wasn't satoshi nakamoto he's
very important in the project today he's funding you know probably over 20 to 30 percent of the of
development you know according to research papers uh so you know maybe in some ways you know he's
sort of earned this this accolade or earned the accusation i guess what do you make of that you
know i think a lot of the people who are accused of being satoshi candidates are bitcoin legends in their
own right like they don't have to be satoshi they have contributed in a variety of different ways to
being uh you know being satoshi in the in the way that we are all satoshi right it's like anyone
who contributes to satoshi is essentially uh building upon the legacy where satoshi you know
left the project uh open to the world so that anyone who cared could contribute to it so the post
uh title jack torsi is not satoshi nagamoto do you think you're a hundred percent definitive do you think
do you think you've proved this to the to the level that you got with how finny and that the the
marketplace is going to be satisfied with your announcement here i think it's pretty close it's
also possible that you know once i put this out that you know some of those events uh perhaps people
who are involved in those events have their own photos or videos or other information that would kind
of help corroborate um and one of the really tricky things in what i was doing was going back and uh you're
trying to find preferably video evidence and uh it would be very difficult to go and find stuff that
is like 15 plus years old at this point yeah that's one of the quirks of the internet right i think we
don't have that much data from like the 08 to 12 era so even someone as public as as jack his internet
footprint from that era even though you know by the evidence that you put together it seems like by today's
standards it would be pretty voluminous right if he's meeting with a lesson on mulatto he's meeting
with you know the chilean government we would have a lot of videos photos but you know it seems like
with these older events is that just a link rod that's just that's just how we're gonna have to
we're gonna have to make make sense of this time period so for example like a number of the posts uh
the tweets that i cite from jack actually had photos but that photo service y frog
no longer exists so those photos uh just show up as broken links now um
you know i was also trying to find
any sort of press interviews and he did a ton of press interviews and one of the biggest problems that i ran into
is like i would find times when he was on television or had various video interviews
and i could see that it was on the same date that satoshi was doing stuff but i could not
dial in the granularity to an hour time period that would be sufficiently um sufficiently good enough
to show that it truly was a conflicting activity so you're 99 sure then i guess or what percentage would
you say you're you're you're certain that jack is is not satoshi at this point yeah at least 99 uh you
know i i think it would really require some superhuman level of uh of effort and coordination in order to do
all of this and and you know keep satoshi's persona and activity under the radar and and you know have a
a lot of these events basically like pre-programmed to fire off ahead of time while jack himself was
basically trotting around the globe um and as i mentioned in my article uh he doesn't even like
using like a full-fledged laptop i'm pretty sure that as soon as apple became a thing he went full iphone
ipad and has basically stuck to that ever since because i recall actually having a conversation with him
personally a few years ago where he mentioned that he doesn't even use laptops well i want to talk about
the you know history of debunkings as you as you brought up uh you know peter todd accused of being
satoshi just just last year and and you know has dealt with some of those the physical threats or the
accusations of just the media craze so far it seems like with jack dorsey you know the media pickup on
this theory has been you know i would say somewhat substantial uh you know with with peter it seems like
you know things have died down maybe that that frenzy do you think we're moving out of the
era where being labeled a satoshi like a satoshi candidate is a serious physical threat or threat
to your bitcoin from a you know perspective of costa you're thinking about long-term holdings you know so
is it is it as so many people have been accused of being satoshi that it doesn't matter anymore or do you
think that it still matters from a personal security perspective i think it mostly just depends upon the
strength of the evidence that is provided and so you know all of the satoshi claims so far have been
based upon highly circumstantial evidence and so you know since it's circumstantial it's like yeah it's
possible this person could be but it's by no means incontrovertible and so you know something that i've
said for a long time uh like with regard to craig wright is that like the reason that you know that
people don't really believe craig wright is satoshi is that nobody has tried to wrench attack him and i i
would say like the same thing with you know these other people who've been accused of being satoshi like
if if the evidence was sufficiently strong then i believe that they would be getting attacked but
because it's uh much more hand wavy and it's just like well they could be but there's also a
thousand if not several thousand other potential candidates who fit the same bill it's not worth
someone you're risking their own body and uh performing criminal activities uh on this very tiny sliver of
a chance well i want to talk about that threat uh vector because we've seen some just crazy stories
this year of course the big one that went mainstream uh was the ledger co-founder who was kidnapped him
and his wife uh even disfigured he lost one of his fingers uh this was a kind of 24 48 hour sort of
media scandal where it was breaking in real time over the internet uh but probably the most high profile
case we've seen yet i know you've been tracking the data and kind of looking into these uh stories but uh this
isn't a unique phenomenon it seems to be from your data set that this is that bitcoiners or people who
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more about what your bitcoin can do for you check out ledden.io we recently surpassed the 200 attack
mark and to be clear that's the attacks that we know about and i suspect that this is actually a
minority of the total attacks like i suspect the majority of these events that happen the the victim
doesn't go public with them they do everything that they can to you know keep it out of the media
and in some cases maybe even keep it away from law enforcement uh because they're afraid that
if they go to law enforcement then the media might pick up on it so the short version of all of this is
that there's a rough correlation with the exchange rate the exchange rate is basically a signal i think
for uh global adoption and an understanding of bitcoin and so as the global understanding of bitcoin continues
to expand then of course that means that some small criminally minded element of people who start to
learn about it are going to be looking at it from their perspective of you know i have this skill set i know
how to perform these types of attacks is it potentially a much higher return on investment
and lower risk to me if i am targeting you know people who are likely to have access to a lot of
this newfangled digital bearer asset uh because of course it is uh it's giving you a lot of like the
benefits of gold with much better transportability uh and the ability to you know essentially
instantaneously transport millions if not tens of millions of dollars worth of value uh without having
to have a physical burden associated with that do you decide that the ledger attack was a wake-up call
that it was unique is it just this captured the attention just because of just the nature of how it
unfolded like what do you think that that event uh you know why do you think that event was so notable
and captured that attention in ways others i mean i think it was notable because ledger is one of the
biggest and most well-known companies in this space it was not unique in the sense that it's not the first
time that uh you know an executive or someone high up uh like a founder of a crypto company has been attacked
uh it was only i think a few months earlier when we saw the ceo of wonderfy get kidnapped uh from the
parking garage at his office in toronto and you know essentially got thrown in a van and got uh the
same type of deal where uh basically they ransomed him to get something like a million dollar payoff from
the company itself so you know this is the same type of thing except um i think they asked for
like 10 million dollars from one of the executives at ledger and you know thankfully ledger had the
wherewithal and the connections to basically assemble a team of people to deal with this threat during that
48 hour period and they were able to get a pretty good conclusion from it where you know both the victims
were returned mostly unharmed and they were able to actually uh freeze and get most of the ransom
money back well when i'm bringing in the multi-state component obviously casa myself a customer you know
you're helping people secure bitcoin with the technology to its fullest kind of securing it in multiple
jurisdictions maybe with multiple different passwords kind of you know using bitcoin to the maximum
sovereign uh extent do we get a sense that like with these attacks that like people are
more or less vulnerable with with different types of setups i mean obviously you know there's a scale
where you know people might have just cell phone wallets and you know a single hardware wallet or
something like a multi-sig uh do we know that like one of these is particular or they're you know more
effective uh or to these attacks are they so bad that you know maybe people are forced to kind of fork
over coins even in situations where you know like we saw with the german government where you know they
were able to arrest somebody and even though they had a hardware wallet with a private key maybe
protecting it they simply you know were kind of forced to hand things over i guess like how do you
think about this these threat setups and how effective they are in the wild actually well i think the biggest
misconception uh or mistake that i see people making is they're they're conflating two very different
security problems on one hand you have the security problem of you know how secure are your keys or how
secure essentially is your wallet and and your coins and you know what whatever is required in order to
you spend those funds on the other hand you have the uh security issue of your physical body um and so
obviously the the problem here is that your physical body is always going to be a single point of failure
um you know it's always possible for some bad actor to penetrate whatever physical security mechanisms you have
and essentially take you hostage you know put you under duress and so you know there are a lot of things
that you can do obviously to mitigate and prevent those types of attacks and i i have tons of
recommendations and writings that i have published regarding that but if we understand that your body
is always going to be a potential single point of failure then the only way to truly secure your assets
is to ensure that you are not a single point of failure for your assets so you have to imagine the
situation where you can be forced to jump through any and all authentication hoops that you have set up
you know all of the digital and physical security mechanisms that you have for your keys so that
means you know the only way to ensure that your assets themselves can't just be taken under threat of
force is if you yourself don't have direct immediate access to them and that's where multi-sig comes into
play you know multi-sig in and of itself is not panacea it really depends on the details of how you set it up
and preferably um you want to inject as much diversity into your setup as possible you want your keys
to physically be dispersed far and wide and be behind different sets of physical and digital security mechanisms
and you want it to take time uh a lot of a lot of the you know security uh prevention mechanisms
especially when it when it comes to physical attack stuff is uh basically forcing uh slowdowns
so that you know if if an attacker wants to get through various security mechanisms and protocols it
actually requires waiting a long period of time and the reason for this this is a major disincentive to
attackers especially physical attackers because they want to get in and out as quickly as possible
they don't want to be holding someone hostage for a really long period of time the longer they're
holding someone hostage the more likely it is that law enforcement is going to track them down and find
them and it's not going to end well for the attackers and you know that's what happened in the ledger situation
so um you know the short version to all of this is that it's it's very context specific there's a lot of
decisions that go into it but it's certainly possible to have a setup that is wrench attack proof
so you know we're we're happy to you know help people understand exactly how you put yourself into
that situation but i don't want people to get too comfortable or have this this idea that having
a sufficiently distributed multi-sig setup will somehow prevent you from getting physically attacked
and the reason for that is that you know your attackers don't necessarily know your specific setup and
even if you broadcast it to the world they may not believe you this is the same reason why i don't
recommend relying upon a duress wallet as a a wrench attack mitigation mechanism because we just don't
know what would happen if you if you if you give some token offering to an attacker you don't know if that
will appease them and make them go away or if they have enough information where they're expecting you know
order of magnitude more money you might just piss them off and make things worse we just don't we
don't have enough data points of some of these specific decisions that can happen inside of a rich attack
scenario the only one that we really know related to that is there was one attack a few years ago where
a trader got home invaded and tied up and uh you know they were essentially torturing him and he immediately
handed over his full wallet but they didn't believe that that was everything they they thought that he was giving up a
you know token duress wallet offering and so they kept torturing him for several hours until they were finally satisfied that he actually had given everything over
wow bleak stuff uh and of course not everybody you know with their own security like uh jack dorsey where
i imagine he's uh traveling around but uh so where are you at with your setup obviously you know you got
casa you're securing your own bitcoin you have famously disappeared from the internet or removed your
personal information the new york times article you know about you i think from 2019 was that uh you
know you had gone to the maximum extent like what are you trying to perfect like in your personal setup uh at this point is it just the the physical body like you're trying to
uh you know figure out the taekwondo or like how to do that or like where where can you improve like uh
your setup yeah i mean for me there's there's a number of like physical security improvements that i
would like to implement at my residences but um i'm you know i'm i'm in just such a different tier uh i think
than 99.9 percent of people where i've already put in a lot of the work and spent a ton of resources
ensuring that the actual homes where i spend time are not tied to my identity in any way whatsoever
and so you know that gives me this whole other uh security layer which is really the privacy layer but
you know that's the important thing with all of this uh is that you know privacy is an important aspect
of security so if security is basically uh all of the mechanisms and multiple layers of authentication
that you have in place to stop or slow down an attacker who is attacking you but if you push it out
logically even further than that it's like well i would prefer not to get attacked in the first place
and how do you do that well you make sure that you're not a target and how do you make sure you're
not a target you don't give anybody a target to attack so you don't give them an address to go to
to then surveil and figure out what the physical security is like i mean there there are several
cases with these wrench attacks where the uh attackers were somewhat well organized gangs of multiple
people and they would spend you know weeks surveilling the target understanding you know when they come and
when they go and um that's the really tricky thing if if you're living a fairly normal life you're not just
like living in a bunker 24 7 uh even if you have a highly physically secure you know fortified physical
residence you're probably going to leave at some point in time and so what are you going to do then
like are you going to have an armored car with multiple bodyguards you know that's out of reach for
the vast majority of people but if you're being surveilled by a wrench attacker they're gonna they're
gonna try to figure out your patterns they're gonna try to figure out you know where in your normal daily
activities is the weakest point where there's almost no security and that's when they're gonna go after
you and try to kidnap you well obviously uh you know the newer rebuttal to some of this stuff is you
know maybe to take a page out of the larry think or michael saylor playbook which you know michael saylor
holding you know most of his bitcoin it seems at coinbase and in the case of you know the bitcoin etfs
you can have a lot of exposure to bitcoin without holding bitcoin at all so how do you how do you
kind of combat the claim uh to people who are saying you know i don't want to think about the
the wrench attack maybe the best way is to just give it a larry fink and the folks over black rock and uh
you know you can go you can go read the black rock offices in new york and and take my uh etf shares if you
if you want my bitcoin uh i think there was the uh case a few weeks ago where the uh you know popular
influencer plan b you know said that uh he has everything in and etfs and people were sort of
saying hey this is a smart way to prevent a personal attack so your thoughts on that well once again i don't
think that that's gonna prevent anything you're assuming that people are gonna believe you in the
first place uh so yes if you put take all of your bitcoin and you put it into an etf that doesn't even
have the ability to withdraw it then that has accomplished the uh goal of of eliminating your
physical body as a single point of failure uh for you know transferring all of your assets
and you've done that by adding in a single point of failure by giving all of your money to a trusted
third party what could go wrong uh we only have about 15 years of history of what could go wrong
so you know you're giving up some of the fundamental properties of bitcoin like the the reason why this
entire system was invented in the first place uh simply because you're afraid of this one
particular edge case uh attack risk so uh yes i mean it's an option um but once again i don't
think it'll necessarily prevent you from being targeted because as i said you know the security
of your assets and the security of your physical body are two very different problems well you got
me thinking about that decoy wallet right now i don't know if i didn't know this was a thing and
now you know i'm weighing the trade-offs here so uh well there's there's a lot of things that could go wrong
though i think i have a whole blog post about why i think it's a bad idea and there's just a lot of
things that could go wrong um and a lot of reasons why your decoy wallet may not be um sufficiently
appealing to the attacker it may not look like a real wallet like if you're not putting in a lot of
effort to regularly maintain it and access it um and then of course you're also assuming that in this
high duress scenario that it's very hard to uh do a practice run where you have you know all the
endorphins adrenaline other stuff you know rushing through your system uh you might forget how to
access that dress wallet uh you know there's just so many different things that could go wrong it's why
i don't really recommend relying on it well winding down the pod here uh when i ended transitioning to
a segment uh we're going to do a rapid fire kind of end question so i'm going to ask a series of
questions we'll get about 20 30 seconds to answer them keep it kind of fun wind down a little bit
first question what was you ask satoshi nakamoto if you uh were to meet them i would ask uh when they
left what were the other things that they had moved on to that's a good one what's the best thing
president donald trump has done for bitcoin since he was elected uh starting to chip away at all of
the government apparati that were holding us back and uh persecuting us for so many years what's the
most incorrect thing about bitcoin that most people you meet still believe uh that it's anonymous
that one has lingered for a long time what's the most embarrassing thing that you have ever done
uh with your bitcoin i mean we we've all spent bitcoin on stupid stuff right i definitely spent some on um
a like a 30-year bucket of a shelf stable freeze-dried food like multiple bitcoin
on one bucket of food have you tried any of the freeze-dried food or how is it no i still have
it it's got a 30-year uh shelf so you know i'm sure i'll i'll look at it 20 years from now and uh
every time i do so it will it'll really make my head hurt when i think about like how many like
billions of dollars i spent on it well hey if you ever really need that it might uh there might be a
equilibrium moment there okay what's the best book or resource for understanding bitcoin that you read or
recommend my favorite bitcoin book at the moment would have to be broken money by lynn alden
that one's getting pretty popular why why is that uh it's because it's not just about bitcoin it's
about you know the first half of the book is basically about the entire monetary system
and then it transitions into bitcoin and how bitcoin uh fixes a lot of the problems that the first half
of the book talks about that bitcoin didn't exist what other asset would you be bullish on
uh i would pretty much be all in on tech stocks uh you know before bitcoin i was into things like um
uh netflix uh back in the early day like in in the 2000s um and so you know i probably would have been
into nvidia and amazon and such have you got orange pill anyone in the world uh who would have been that
is a tough one you know i've given up on orange pilling people so long ago there are some big
targets out there you know tim cook uh maybe maybe kanye though he's coming around i guess
with his own car on yeah you know i hate going after celebrities these days because i think it's a
slippery slope um i mean if i could if i could orange pill someone i mean it would probably be uh some of those
friends and family who have not believed me for so long and and you know the main reason is that i
think that they'll be a lot better off if they get it jack dorsey is not satoshi nakamoto on blah
lop.net or blog.lab.net uh jameson where can people read more about your stuff well still on x uh at lop
and uh on nostr at an in pub that i couldn't possibly remember off the top of my head
um or as you said lop.net bitcoin.page also gets you to the same place amazing all right well jameson
thanks for joining us this has been the supply shock podcast we'll see you the digital asset summit
later this march i'll be bringing a bitcoin a flavor to the crypto conversation there jameson until next time
keep disproving uh the satoshis out there appreciate it will do