We are recording. Jameson, welcome to the Honeybedger Diaries.
Thanks for having me.
You're in a mystery location, I think, or not? No one knows where you are?
Fewer than 10 people in the world know where I am.
But it's in the States?
Yes, I'm willing to narrow it down to that location.
Somewhere in the States, perfect.
Before this chat, I asked you if there's anything you wanted to talk about.
One thing you mentioned that could be interesting is how the non-aggression principle
relates with the whole COVID situation.
So let's just jump right into that one at first.
Are you a NAP follower, believer? Do you consider yourself a sort of anarcho-capitalist?
I do, I do. I mean, I think that fundamentally all of my libertarian beliefs
can generally be derived from that as a root principle.
And the reason I brought it up is that you do get into some interesting edge cases
where I think there's a lot of gray area. It's very difficult to make obvious decisions
about some situations where people might be unintentionally harming people,
or it might be difficult to tell who is harming people.
And I think this is one of those.
Yeah, because in this case, breathing could be considered aggression?
Yeah, I mean, that's where I think it's actually there's some similarities to,
for example, arguments around pollution or sort of common property type of arguments.
What happens when you're in a situation where you may be unintentionally causing small amounts of harm,
for example, environmental damage, and it's very difficult, if not impossible,
to quantify or even trace who is the origin of this harm.
And the same type of thing, I think, really applies to viruses,
especially if we're in a situation where we're not doing a lot of testing and people may,
A, they may not know that they're infected because they're asymptomatic,
or B, even if they suspect they may be infected,
it just may not be possible for them to confirm one way or another.
So how do you reconcile this? How do you follow the NAP in this context?
Well, you know, the most conservative way to do it, I guess, is self-quarantine.
And then you have to ask, well, what do you do with people who, for whatever reason,
don't want to quarantine or for various reasons are unable to, you know,
they may have to go about their lives and physically interact with other people.
And maybe they can't even find ways to get their hands on adequate protection.
That's when you start getting into really murky, gray areas.
And in some cases, the simple solution seems to be to have the government step in
and either provide things or essentially threaten people, you know,
with various fines or punishments if they don't follow certain rules.
Yeah, but that does not sound like a solution you would endorse, or is it in this case?
I mean, while I certainly admit it could be effective, you know,
threatening people is not something that I'm a fan of.
You get into some odd situations, though.
For example, I just saw something earlier where the police department in Raleigh,
North Carolina was breaking up a protest.
And when they were asked why, they said protesting is a non-essential activity.
And, you know, I can see the perspective on that.
But then, you know, that kind of conflicts with some of the fundamental rights
that we as Americans supposedly have.
Yeah, quite. The other thing you could do if you don't want to get infected is,
of course, stay home yourself.
That would sort of be the argument that, I guess, aligns with NAPA a bit,
that, you know, if you can always choose to stay home and then...
Well, you know, people like myself are privileged enough that that is actually
my normal modus operandi.
So, like, my life hasn't changed much.
But, you know, the vast majority of people are not in positions yet
where they can conduct their business, you know, over the Internet like we can.
Yeah. So, is there just no solution then? Is it just gray area
and we're not sure what to do?
It certainly seems that way.
No, of course, we also live in a world where there are governments
and where there are a lot of people that are, you know,
pressuring various authorities to save them and step in.
And so, that's why we end up with all of these lockdowns.
And then, you know, people end up having a lot more free time to argue
on social media about whether or not the government-imposed sanctions
are worth the various economic and other trade-offs.
So, we can at least debate about it all day long.
What do you think about how the US government has been dealing with it so far?
It's kind of a broad statement because, you know, we have 50 different states
and it seems like...
Well, let's say the national, the federal government.
At the federal level, it seems like there has been a lot of ineptitude
and bureaucracy slowing things down.
And then, you know, various states have been worse to respond than others.
And it's been kind of funny, you know, along with all the extra...
With all the free time that people have had of actually showing
like the press conferences of, you know, governors of like Florida and New York State
and some of the other big ones that are actually showing how, you know,
in the early days and weeks, they were basically saying,
oh, everything's fine, you don't need to, you know, take any protective measures.
And then, just like week by week, you know, the story keeps changing.
They keep getting updates from the experts about what's actually going on.
And then, of course, Trump has his whole separate thing
where he doesn't really seem to listen to anybody,
though it was, I think, a fascinating turn of events.
There was like one speech that Trump gave
where you could tell that something was different.
I think it was the first time I had ever seen Trump seem like he was actually reading a speech
rather than just pulling, you know, crap out of thin air and, you know,
using his normal soundbites.
And I think you could tell that like somebody had given him a very stern talking to
that this was actually a serious situation
and he needed to actually dispense with real information to the American public.
That was probably the first speech he did after starting taking it seriously.
I remember that one that seemed almost a bit un-Trumpy, the way he was addressing the nation.
So, on the federal level, there's not strict federal rules, right?
It's mostly state-level rules about the lockdowns and these kinds of things.
Yeah, and it does seem like it's probably going to stay that way.
And so, you know, that has then resulted in interesting speculation,
people being like, oh, no, is this like the final breakdown of the federal system
and we're going to, you know, go back to a state-by-state system or maybe even break up the country.
But, I mean, I don't think that's going to happen.
I think it's just that for whatever Trump believes, at the very least in some ways,
it seems like he believes in more hands-off government or smaller government.
And so, he wants to let the more like local governments try to deal with stuff as much as possible.
And, I mean, that is really the way that the sort of federal and state system was originally intended,
is that most of the things are supposed to be handled by states
and unless there's some sort of bigger issue that's, you know, multi-state issue,
which is then when the federal government is sort of supposed to step in and help coordinate things.
Yeah, and it's interesting, it seems that sort of the lefts or the liberals in the US are,
these are now the ones pushing Trump to do more.
As much as they hate Trump, they still want him to do more, apparently.
Well, you know, it's different for different issues,
but whatever side of the political spectrum people are on,
there is often certain issues where they want the government to step in and do certain things.
And so, when it comes to sort of, I guess, you know,
like socializing the protection of Americans against a specific threat like a virus,
that is one thing where liberals tend to be more on the side of,
yes, like we should be enforcing lockdowns and we should basically be telling people what's good for them
so that the dumber folks will realize that they need to actually do this because it's for their own good.
And, you know, and that's more of the sort of, I guess, big brother or, you know, parental style government.
Whereas, you know, on the more conservative side, they're more for small government and more pro-freedom.
And so, that's why you end up with some interesting thing where about 12 of the 50 states
actually have created exemptions in their stay-at-home orders that exclude religious activities.
And I found that particularly fascinating.
I mean, I fully understand this because I was raised in a religious household in the southern United States,
and I went to church every week for 18 years because that was just what we did as part of my family.
And it seems to me like if I look at this adversarially, I'd be like, well,
if I was some sort of like atheist conspiracy group that wanted religious people to hurt themselves,
I would tell them to go congregate, you know, like they always do from week to week.
But that's kind of like the trade-off that you get with that freedom, right,
is you're allowing people to make risky decisions that may end up harming themselves.
This, of course, becomes a more complicated topic than that,
if we're sort of going back to the whole non-aggression principle thing,
because you're not necessarily only putting yourself at risk when you're going out and doing these activities.
Then you are potentially putting many other people at risk if you're the one who's actually infected
and then going and interacting with them.
And then that has all these cascading effects of potentially overloading the health care system, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it very easily blooms out into this situation where you can't even really keep track of all the damage that's done,
though, you know, there are certainly companies and applications that are going to try to do that.
And you get into the whole, you know, contact tracing stuff that Google is rolling out shortly.
Yeah, there are some countries, I think it didn't come up with my podcast,
but I did a podcast with someone from Vietnam yesterday.
For listeners, that's two days ago because I'm putting this online tomorrow.
And I think they have a rule where if you infect people and you weren't wearing a mask,
that's considered, you know, negligence, what's the English word?
That, you know, it's your fault that they got infected, you should have been wearing a mask.
So if you didn't and you infected someone, then you get like jail time of years or something.
Yeah, I mean, there are many different types of crime and punishment,
at least in America when it comes to like causing death of someone else.
And we do have one that's basically negligent homicide,
which is, you know, unintentional actions that resulted in the death of someone else.
And I think it would be really, really hard, at least in the American judicial system,
to get to a point where there was, you know, sufficient data or arguments
that could be used against someone to convict them of that,
unless they had, you know, created some sort of public evidence where they were saying,
oh, I'm going out and I'm going to all these places without any protection and I know what I'm doing.
Well, the other thing you mentioned was the GPS tracking kind of technologies.
Have you looked into these?
I mean, not too much.
I mean, I saw some of the results of some of the tracking that has been happening of,
you know, like the spring breakers in Florida, then dispersing all over the country.
The results.
So I had a tweet a couple of weeks ago where there was basically a video that showed this one service,
which who knows how they get the data.
They probably got some contract with some other company that's slurping up all of the GPS data
from who knows what apps or phones or whatever.
But they were basically able to go down to a very granular level of like a few hundred square meters
and say, you know, give me all the phones that were on this beach in Florida at this time
and then track each and every one of them over the next week or so as they went back home from spring break.
And, you know, that's not surprising to me.
I mean, I've written about privacy and the issues with phones and stuff in general.
And I mean, we're basically carrying around tracking devices voluntarily.
It's very difficult to get a phone set up in a way that it can't be tracked or at least can't be tied to your identity.
You try it probably.
I mean, fundamentally, every phone can be tracked just through triangulation of your cell tower signals.
But if you can at least set up your phone in a way that it's not tied to your identity,
then theoretically that tracking should be less of an issue.
If you really go deep into it, though, and read Michael Basil's guide to privacy,
he makes a good note of the fact that like if you really want to have a phone that can't be tracked at all to you,
you basically have to have multiple phones and then you have to be putting them in Faraday bags,
like whenever you get close to your house and all this other stuff,
because the short version of all this tracking stuff is you'll hear the various companies say things like,
oh, we're anonymizing the tracking data so it can't be linked to you.
But there have been many academic studies that have taken these anonymized data sets
and shown that in many cases it can effectively be de-anonymized by looking and basically taking extra context
of what the various entities being tracked are actually doing and saying,
oh, every day you're going to this address, which is obviously your house,
and then that address, which is obviously your work.
We, with just a few points of information, can figure out the identities of various entities
just by looking at the common places that they're going.
Yeah, sounds a bit like Bitcoin then.
Supposed to be anonymous, but with a little bit of effort doesn't hold up so well.
I think I interrupted you while you were giving me your thoughts on the GPS proposal for this Google one you mentioned.
Well, yeah, so the Google contact tracing, to my knowledge, is not using GPS in as much as it's using Bluetooth.
Right, yeah.
More of a near, you have to be in close physical proximity.
Maybe it's also using GPS as a part of that.
I haven't looked too deeply into it other than I saw some chatter actually for the version of Android that I run on my phone,
which is Graphene OS, which has all the Google services stripped out of it.
There were some discussion from devs and stuff around that.
And the devs were basically like, you don't have anything to worry about because this contact tracing stuff
requires Google Play services and Graphene OS doesn't even have that.
So there's no way it could support it in the first place.
But it sounds like this is going to get pushed out as an update, which is probably just going to be like mandatory pushed out to people.
I doubt that there's going to be any sort of like pop up asking people whether or not they want to have the contact tracing enabled.
I think it's just going to happen under the hood.
Right. I also noticed a lot of people in the States are buying guns.
Why is everyone buying guns, Jameson?
Well, whenever people panic, they start to realize that they are not as well prepared for extreme events.
And so I think whenever people are afraid of some sort of doomsday scenario or breakdown of social order or whatever,
they immediately think to the basic necessities, food, self-defense, shelter.
Hopefully shelter is already taken care of in general.
But one of the fascinating things that happened actually fairly early on is a number of different law enforcement departments around the United States started publicizing.
And I don't know why they made it so public, but they were literally putting out lists that said, you know,
our officers will no longer be responding to calls for service related to and then a whole list of various offenses, you know, generally like nonviolent offenses.
But, you know, I think a lot of people saw that happening and they they they realized that you can't actually 100 percent rely upon law enforcement to come and help you out in certain situations.
And so people realize that, you know, if they want a strong guarantee that that they can be defended against certain types of attacks, they need to actually be able to defend themselves.
I mean, this is something that people like myself say all the time that, you know, it's why why would you wait for five or 10 minutes for a law enforcement officer to show up when you can go get a weapon in 10 seconds and take care of things yourself?
But, you know, this is a whole other argument.
Well, and the other argument, I guess, for guns would be to overthrow the government.
Right. Do you think people would be expecting some sort of martial law situation to develop?
You might you might happen.
I don't think that we are in danger of that happening, though I do recall a few weeks ago, there were a lot of photos and videos going around social media that were showing like caravans and trains full of military equipment.
You know, it was probably National Guard type equipment being moved around the country, and I I generally dismiss those because I'm pretty sure that type of stuff happens all the time.
I mean, I've seen caravans normally as I'm traveling around.
So I think that was people just taking normal activity and blowing out our proportion.
I really don't think that that martial law type of situation is something that we would have to worry about until after we got past the point that like food supply chains started being disrupted.
And while I have seen a few people starting to say that they're worried about food supply chains, it still doesn't seem to be something that I'm worried about.
There may be some intermittent issues with various processors in one place or another, but I've yet to see anything that indicates to me like a full breakdown of supply chains.
But the downside to a situation like that is that if it happened, it could be very fast.
And one of the general, I guess, numbers that gets thrown out a lot is that if supply chains broke down for more than a few days, even a week,
just due to the way our transportation and supply chain systems are set up to be this like just in time service where we're constantly replenishing things because the stores have very, very little extra supply in the back.
They would run out very quickly and that could result in mass panics and breakdown of society and order within just a few days.
So that's just another reason to have a decent supply of food yourself so that you're not worried about it.
But then if you do, you have to ask yourself my supplies if it gets into a situation like that.
So that's how people quickly go from like stocking up on food to stocking up on weapons.
Yeah. Well, the flip side of that solution, I think, and I'm not anti-gun, I'm probably more pro-gun than anti-gun.
I think it's a good thing that the United States has the Second Amendment.
At the same time, I'm not really bothered that we don't have a lot of guns in my country because the flip side is if society,
if there is this sort of breakdown of society and everyone has guns, that could also turn very ugly.
Don't you think? Yeah, I mean, I think it would turn ugly quickly either way.
You know, ultimately, when when people find themselves starving, they're going to start to do desperate things.
You know, I would prefer these people not to have guns.
Well, yeah. So, I mean, firearms are a force multiplier.
You know, they make you more powerful than you are without them.
Same for any weapon, really.
And so I think the main difference, at least that I see, is that you as an individual or a small family
can potentially fend off people who are physically more powerful than you if you have the right weapons and the training.
But it goes both ways, as you know, other people can also gather weapons and training and come together and create groups.
And essentially, you end up with armed conflict between various armed groups or militias or what have you.
And I don't think that I mean, it might accelerate, you know, how how quickly things turn bad.
But I think the inevitable conclusion, like the result ends up being pretty much the same,
is that, you know, people are going to start fighting over scarce resources.
I think I think most Europeans will know how to get their hands on a 3D printer.
Do you have any idea how Europeans would get their hands on bullets?
So that's actually a project that I've seen at least one person on the 3D gun printing movement start to undertake.
There are at least a few people in that community who are like in China, for example, which has pretty strict weapons policies.
And my understanding is that they have found a fairly simple way to create the gunpowder using common materials.
Now, then you have to find yourself like a primer and a casing and a projectile.
And of course, projectiles generally just lead, which I think is not that difficult to get a hold of if you really want to.
I think the most difficult things are the casing and the primers.
And I've actually just in the past couple of weeks started seeing one guy start to experiment with plastic casings.
I don't know how well that is going.
But the one thing that is guaranteed is that people are going to continue to experiment and innovate.
And we may be surprised with how innovative they actually can be.
Are you a prepper yourself? I guess you are.
Yeah, I mean, I would say so.
Even despite the negative connotations, I wouldn't call myself a doomsday prepper in the sense that I don't prepare for one specific event that I am convinced is going to happen.
Rather, I try to prepare for just common disruptions.
I mean, even our own government, like FEMA, for example, and other government agencies have disaster preparation recommendations where they generally say every citizen should be prepared to take care of themselves for at least a week without any supplies that are available to them.
And that's just due to natural disasters and things that happen on a semi-regular basis.
I just take that to a bit more extreme and have several months worth of supplies that I could live off of.
And then I have plans for ways that could potentially be more long term, multi-year, eventually trying to become more sustainable and self-contained type of living.
But there's no guarantee that any of that would work.
Everybody has a great plan until they get punched in the face type of thing.
And it's not something that I have a ton of time to dedicate to.
It's more of like something that I slowly built up my preparations and my plans over a matter of years.
And I'm really just in maintenance mode at this point.
Where do you think the economic situation is heading?
What do you see happening in that area?
Yeah, I mean, that's the trillion dollar question, right?
Is how quickly can we get out of this lockdown?
Because if the lockdown keeps going on for months and months, I don't think there's like $1,200 stimulus checks are going to be enough for people.
And if some of the numbers I was seeing were right, where something like 50% of Americans have either been unemployed or somehow reduced pay,
that definitely doesn't seem sustainable.
I definitely hope that we don't have to see how that plays out, because if the way that the government tries to handle it is just by printing more money,
that's going to create some pretty crazy side effects.
I mean, some of them might be good for Bitcoin, but I think in general, it's going to be bad for almost everybody.
How so? What do you what would you expect?
So, you know, part of it is the fact that your prices for most of your goods are going to be going up while a lot of people have less money to spend.
And there's also just some weird ways that the money itself seems to be getting divvied up.
The biggest one being that a lot of it seems to be going to major corporations and Wall Street, as it were,
which then results in the stock market going up while we are actually in one of the worst economic crises that we've seen in decades.
Well, that's what happened in Venezuela as well.
I think the stock market went up like 30,000 percent or whatever, which obviously was just the inflation making its way to the stock market.
Yeah, so mass inequality, that's one result.
Yeah, you know, and that's assuming that everything else keeps working well, you know, that supply chains don't break down.
If if we get to that point, then that's when Jameson is going to start to worry a little bit.
Yeah, that's when Jameson gets nervous.
I have to go dust off some of the armory.
Well, what about Bitcoin then?
You already mentioned it and the happening is coming up as well.
What's what's Bitcoin going to be doing in this sort of scenario?
You know, it seems like the perfect storm, right?
We've got a change in the supply or at least the rate of new issuance of Bitcoin, which as I've said publicly,
I don't think that that in and of itself inherently does anything economically.
I think it's more of a point that people can fixate around and create, you know, press and coverage around.
And, you know, essentially, you don't believe in the plan B.
I don't believe in any models because I've been around so long.
I've seen every model get broken.
And, you know, I think every model eventually does get broken because they're based on the past and no one can predict the future.
But like I said, it seems like the perfect storm.
Like it seems like this is a situation where not only do we have the predictable change in an issuance of Bitcoin,
we have that contrasted against wildly unpredictable issuance in fiat.
And combined with the fact that now a lot of people are stuck at home and just, you know,
like talking to each other and spending more time on social media.
Like I've seen my social media engagement go up significantly during this period.
And I assume it's because more people are just on Twitter, you know, while they're working from home or not working from home or whatever.
And so then the question becomes, you know, how many of those people research Bitcoin and then potentially see the value in it, decide to invest in it?
And, you know, what is the size of the new cohort of Bitcoiners?
And that, that, however, is trickier to to kind of settle on because the result, I think, of all of this economic uncertainty is that
at least the average person who is going to be more worried about, you know, living from paycheck to paycheck.
And so they're going to be more focused on regaining their economic stability that they have lost.
However, the people who are already economically advantaged are probably not going to be as worried about that.
And they're going to have more free time to be spending educating themselves and thinking about monetary policy, et cetera, et cetera.
And those people are probably more likely to actually think, well, oh, I've got a decent amount of assets,
but they're all in stocks or bonds or whatever. And maybe I should diversify some into Bitcoin.
So I think that's those are the people that are more likely to become like the new Bitcoin cohort as a part of all of this.
You know, how how large a percentage of of society that is, I don't know.
You could speculate about that. But that's also but it's a pretty wealthy part of society.
It is. And so who knows how much they would decide to diversify.
But I think that we certainly have been hearing inklings of this where even at Casa,
we've we've been having people come to us who don't own Bitcoin at all.
But they're in that higher net worth segment of people who are saying, I want to diversify into Bitcoin.
And I want you to help me walk through this process and figure out how to manage my own keys, et cetera, et cetera.
So there are certainly people who are already going down that path.
And, you know, if things continue to get worse, then perhaps more of them will.
Yeah. So really the safe haven type of use case. And you think Bitcoin is ready for that?
I think that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Is that if enough people believe it's a safe haven, then it becomes a safe haven.
So the I think the reason why like the correlation for all of these assets basically went to one
during the past few weeks is because everybody got scared for the same reasons.
And they decided that they wanted to flee to what they considered to be the safe haven,
which was generally dollars. And, you know, also there's there's a lot of large institutional traders now.
They're also trading Bitcoin that that may have resulted in them selling off Bitcoin
because they were still viewing it as a high risk speculative asset.
The question becomes, you know, what has to take place for that mindset to change?
I think a lot of us sort of OG Bitcoiners are already in that mindset.
But if a lot of the new money that's coming in is, you know, weak hands or they don't have that mindset,
then they are going to contribute to Bitcoin being more correlated with stocks.
And, you know, this is, I think, just part of the need for various narratives,
sort of the mind virus of Bitcoin to the memes and all of that.
Like that's it's all it's all part of the deal is that we need to convince other people
of what we have come to believe in that Bitcoin can be the safe haven asset,
because if they believe it is, it becomes one.
Yeah, I totally agree with that.
But I also mean, is it ready for it in security wise, scalability wise?
There are there are many different considerations, right?
I believe a lot in what we've built at Casa in terms of taking a lot of the security best practices
and putting a really, really simple user interface on top of them.
I think that we've made great strides forward and usability in terms of helping people secure
their own keys, because we've managed to gloss over a lot of the technical aspects.
And we've really turned it into a plug and play, you know,
follow the instructions on the screen type of process.
There's still, however, a lot of work to be done on the scalability and the privacy sides.
That is something where, you know, it could certainly turn into another, like,
2017 situation where, you know, everybody is making a ton of transactions on the network
and it gets bogged down for periods of time because the demand is so high.
But I think that we're going to keep fluctuating back and forth against that type of issue.
It's like without that pressure, then there's no incentive for people to be more mindful
about how they're using Bitcoin as a network.
And in fact, I think just on Sunday, I tweeted out something where I was basically saying,
you know, I just paid over 500 people on chain with Bitcoin and it cost me $1.20.
And it's because I was mindful about how I was doing it.
I wasn't just going out and creating a million different transactions that are all chained
together and, you know, just blindly clicking through the wallet.
I actually spent a bit more time thinking about how I was going to do it.
But there is going to be friction.
And that is kind of on all of us as people who are building the infrastructure that are
being used by people to create this diverse ecosystem.
If the software that people are using doesn't make it clear that they might not be following
best practices for whatever, then the network is going to allow them to do it and then they're
not going to notice until something unexpected happens and then they're going to have to
go ask for help.
So this is kind of the result of us having this sort of common public good, the blockchain,
the network, et cetera, et cetera, is that those of us who are building the interfaces
to it need to make them more intuitive and more clear to the end users so that people
don't have to spend days and weeks and months educating themselves how everything is working
under the hood.
Do you ascribe to the Eric Foskowel sort of stages of Bitcoin prediction story where we're
in the honeymoon phase and we'll get to the black market phase next?
Do you think Bitcoin could get banned?
I'll explain why I'm asking.
If you sort of look at the 20s and 30s, we had a big market crash in 29 and then the
new deal was needed.
So they banned gold.
So the sort of modern equivalent of that would be to ban Bitcoin, right?
Could Bitcoin survive that?
Is Bitcoin ready for that?
Or would it happen or I'm just speculating?
I felt like that we are several years past the point of Bitcoin being banned and that's
mainly due to incentives.
I think that there are too many powerful people who have Bitcoin now to allow that to happen.
Politicians, billionaires, what have you, just due to the way that the existing system
works.
I think the incentives are already set up that a ban would be protested behind the
scenes by a lot of powerful people.
Right.
Interesting.
Speaking of, I just mentioned black market, I saw you found PPE on the black market, on
the darkness.
Yeah, I was interested to know.
It seemed like an obvious thing, but I wanted to go check for myself and indeed it's there.
If there's an arbitrage opportunity to be had, somebody is going to exploit it and if
they're not allowed to do it in the white markets, then they're going to find a free
market that doesn't shut them down.
What did you find?
Masks, I assume, anything else?
Yeah.
Well, also all of the drugs, the various drugs that people are saying.
Chloroquine?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Basically all of them, the malaria drug, et cetera, et cetera.
Any of the things that people are saying are helping fight against the virus you can find.
If you don't get a doctor's prescription, you get it online.
Yeah.
As long as, well, at least on the PPE side, we're hearing a number of reports of interceptions
of packages, though it's unclear if various authorities would intercept small packages.
It seems to more be the really large shipments of millions of masks and stuff like that.
All right.
The last topic I want to discuss, I know you keep track pretty closely of Bitcoin Cash
and BSV as well, I think.
How did these happenings go?
What can we learn from them?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think BSV has the same difficulty adjustment as Bitcoin Cash because of when
it forked off.
I haven't kept extremely close track of the protocol development, though I don't think
there has been much on BSV side.
But suffice to say, with a proof of work system, things tend not to go well if you're running
a network that has only one or 2% of the hash power of whatever the dominant network is.
The result of that is that when Bitcoin Cash originally forked off in 2017, they made some
tweaks to the difficulty algorithm to make sure that they were actually going to get
some blocks just to get going after the fork.
And then there were some problems found with that.
So they made some more tweaks to the difficulty adjustment algorithm.
And the result of it now is that there are miners who are doing the logical thing and
they're switching between different networks to maximize their profitability.
And this switching between networks actually seems to exacerbate the sort of range of block
times that happens on Bitcoin Cash and BSV to the point that while, yes, their difficulty
adjustment algorithms are still working in the sense that over a long enough time frame,
they are averaging out to 10 minutes per block.
What's happening in reality is that you're going sometimes an hour to an hour and a half
between blocks.
And then other times you're getting a block every couple of minutes.
And so it averages out to 10 minutes, but the volatility is much more extreme in the
sense that if you're sending a transaction and you need confirmations, or especially
if you're sending to an exchange and you need, say, 10 or 20 confirmations, you're going
to be waiting a while in many cases.
Though in other cases, maybe you'll only need to wait a few minutes.
Yeah.
And I think the other thing is it's incredibly cheap to attack the network now, right?
Yeah, theoretically.
And there is a question of why hasn't anyone done that?
Bitcoin Gold got attacked several times.
And I think that you can attack Bitcoin Gold for like $1,000 if not less at this point.
Though the other question becomes, how do you profit from that?
And generally, it's via an exchange, right?
You deposit onto an exchange and then you swap it out for something else and then you
withdraw it and then you reorganize the blockchain to get your original coins back.
So it's actually kind of an ethical issue.
If you do have the hash power to do that, effectively, who are you going to steal from
is what it comes down to because you can only double spend your own coins.
You have to send your coins to somebody else, convince them to give you something of value
in exchange and then basically reorganize the blockchain to get your coins back, which
is effectively stealing from the counterparty.
So that may also explain why it's not happening as much.
And then there's also just sort of the issue of can you do it anonymously?
And in many cases, if we're talking about large amounts of minor hash power, that's
hard to get a hold of anonymously, like for a short period of time.
Yeah, except you don't need that much while you probably still need a few percent should
do.
Yeah, which is still a lot because Bitcoin is so powerful.
Do you expect anything from not price related, but mining related from happening?
Four years ago, there was a lot of chats about...
Minor death spiral.
I've lost count of how many minor death spiral cycles we've been through because there have
also been death spiral cycles around forking events.
But no, I mean, it seems like we've already adjusted a lot.
I think the hash rate scaled back a lot, especially over the past few months with the price downturn.
And I think a lot of miners sort of preemptively turning their machines off in anticipation
of all of this.
So no, not really expecting much disruption at all.
I remember actually the first halving where we were all sitting around in anticipation
of like, is this going to happen or is something going to screw up?
Because it had never happened before.
And then the second halving, I guess there was more FUD around that simply because the
size of the community had grown a lot and a lot of people had not been around for the
first halving.
And so that is kind of interesting to see if that happens again, simply because there
are a lot of newcomers compared to the last one.
But as these events continue to happen predictably every four years or so, I think the FUD ought
to die off.
Yeah, all right, let's make an answer to this.
Are you the type of guy, just a quick question, when you go to the supermarket, do you do
the whole mask thing and the glasses thing?
Well you know, I don't remember the last time I've been to a supermarket.
That's another thing that has not changed for me because I've been getting all my stuff
delivered for years now.
It's a rare event for me to go out and do, I guess, normal shopping type behavior.
If you don't go out, you don't need PPE, I guess.
Surely you get out sometimes, Jameson.
You can't live just inside your whole life.
Well you know, I do enjoy going for motorcycle rides and I do take my dog for walks almost
every day.
So I get out and if I really wanted to, I actually think I tweeted a photo of it, part
of my prep.
I have real gas masks with plenty of replacement filters.
If I ever really felt like I needed to go full biological hazard suit, I could.
I have one that's like the World War I type.
It fits, it works as far as I know.
I've never had to use it.
You got to test it out though because you got to make sure that you know how to put
the filter on correctly.
With a number of these, there's usually a little plastic insert that you need to get
out from inside the filter.
Otherwise you might accidentally suffocate yourself.
There was a plastic thing on the outside, which I mean I've tried it on.
I just haven't tried it in a toxic environment to see if I could still breathe.
That's the thing I haven't tried.
All right.
Anything else?
Did we miss anything?
Is there something you want to show before we log off?
No, I mean I think I showed CASA sufficiently.
But really, I think CASA is great for Bitcoiners of any type.
It's kind of like what I said is that we've built such a user-friendly, simple interface
to all this stuff that I think that we're really poised for a lot of newcomers who aren't
familiar at all with Bitcoin to come in and start self-custodying their own keys.
Good.
We need more of that.
Do you know how many coins aren't being self-custodied?
You're right from all the stats as well, of course.
Yeah.
These are all estimates.
I have seen estimates of what the known custodians are.
I am fairly confident that the majority, even the vast majority of Bitcoins are self-custodied.
I think that amongst the well-known custodians that some of the sums that I saw were in the
maybe 4 million, 5 million Bitcoin range.
That's custodian.
Yeah.
Most of them are, as far as we know, it's really hard to tell.
Of course, that also includes probably several million lost coins and the quote unquote Satoshi
coins and all that stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm going to end the recording now, Jameson.
Thanks for being on.
Thanks for having me.