The four-year cycle seems to have broken.
Hopefully, we've seen a bottom for now.
It's very jarring to see sentiment for precious metals so high, but for Bitcoin so low.
The gold bugs are really squashing us.
And it's always very annoying to see the boomer analog Bitcoin outperform digital gold.
And Bitcoin is going to continue trading like a high-risk tech stock until people stop looking at it as a high-risk tech stock.
And no idea how long that's going to take.
Even if people are buying Bitcoin, but they don't understand what they're buying, they're less likely to hold onto it through the volatile periods.
Peter McCormick had a really good way of putting it, which is that the Bitcoin treasury is a cheat code for your business.
If you can siphon some of your revenue into Bitcoin and hold onto it and then take advantage of the gains over the years, then that's just gravy.
Michael Saylor is the only guy buying Bitcoin in large quantities right now.
He's getting to the level where it's reaching potential systemic risk.
To be clear, I'm not saying that he's over-leveraged.
For me, it's just more of a centralization issue.
And it's even worse because they don't actually custody their own Bitcoin.
I lament the stepping back by Andreas Antonopoulos, who I believe was the real figurehead of calm, rational education in the face of all of the vitriol.
Bitcoin is money if you use it as money.
Bitcoin is an investment if you use it as an investment.
Bitcoin is a photo storage platform if you use it as a photo storage platform.
This all comes back around to one of the initial things is that Bitcoin is a protocol.
It is a programmable, shared, global database.
It has incredibly unique and interesting properties that you can leverage and build on top of.
Welcome back to the Lumen Podcast.
My name is Gareth Jenkinson, and this is officially episode number two.
After a first successful episode with Pierre Richard, we're continuing that momentum with none other than Jamison Lopp.
You will know him as the co-founder and CTO of Casa, which is, of course, one of the best-known Bitcoin self-custody security companies out there.
He's also a prominent cypherpunk and a self-proclaimed professional Bitcoin hodlays, one of my favorite advocates for Bitcoin in general, and one of my favorite cypherpunks as well.
Jameson, it's great to have you on the podcast.
As I mentioned off air, I think the last time we spoke was back in 2023 at Bitcoin Amsterdam.
A lot has happened in Bitcoin since then, but let's just start off there.
Firstly, how are you?
How has 2026 been treating you, and what do you make of the current state of Bitcoin with this big turndown in the markets?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's disappointing.
Generally, I try not to focus on the exchange rate too much, though.
I will say that the thing that irks me the most with what has happened over the past few months is that the gold bugs are really squashing us.
And it's always very annoying to see the boomer analog Bitcoin outperform digital gold.
But, you know, I think one of the common coping mechanism retorts that a good Bitcoiner would say is, this is just another sign that we're so early.
So, you know, you can't control the markets.
But I think the main thing that has been more concerning for me is just that it seems like there's not a whole lot of bid out there.
And it's really annoying that it seems like Michael Saylor is the only guy buying Bitcoin in large quantities right now.
And, you know, that annoys me because I think he's getting to the level where it's reaching potential systemic risk proportions.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that, like, he's over leveraged, he's going to blow up or anything like that.
I know he's got a really a lot of complicated financial machinations going on.
But for me, it's just more of a centralization issue.
And it's even worse because they don't actually custody their own Bitcoin.
So what they're really doing is they are centralizing even more Bitcoin into the hands of a few very, very large custodians.
And that's where the systemic risk comes in.
You know, even if you consider them to be good actors who would never do anything malicious like an FTX style fraud,
it's still always going to be risk of insider attack problems, of like government pressure problems,
of really any number of things that can go wrong when you're custodying Bitcoin.
And that amount of Bitcoin as well.
I think it's pretty crazy to think that he's got over 700,000 Bitcoin.
And there's kind of scant detail on who's actually custodying the Bitcoin, how he's managing those keys.
It's a lot of risk for 700,000 Bitcoin.
Yeah, we actually had a little back and forth a few weeks ago where I was insinuating, you know,
how do they know that they're buying real Bitcoin if they're not actually taking custody of it?
And he had a retort that, like, you know, we do all these audits and such.
And I'm like, I'm sure he does.
But once again, that's a black box.
I can't see what they're auditing.
I have to trust that they are trusting whoever is doing the auditing.
And, you know, just multiple layers of obfuscation and opaqueness, which is antithetical to Bitcoin in general.
So I, of course, I'm always skeptical.
My skepticism does not mean that they're doing anything wrong or bad.
It just means I have no way of verifying.
So, you know, don't trust, verify is one of the common mantras, of course.
And ultimately, there are multiple layers of trust going on if you are, like, buying micro strategy and making assumptions around the security of the Bitcoin that is underlying those securities.
Yeah, look, I think it's fair to be skeptical.
And I definitely have been one of those people online that has, you know, towed the line of being very praising, but at the same time, very skeptical about some of the practices there.
And I do agree with you.
It would put a lot more people's minds at ease if they knew a little bit more detail about how they were taking care of their Bitcoin and what they were doing.
And I mean, also just the general, the complexity of what Sale is doing with the products as well is a lot to digest.
You know, even, I think even if you're a financial professional, you know, like speaking to Pierre last week, he was, you know, he was, I wouldn't say he was gushing over how Sale is doing and everything.
But, you know, he kind of just said that most people don't understand what he's doing and there isn't a lot of risk, but there is still a certain amount of risk with what Sale is doing.
But maybe let's just park Sale for now because we can probe into that a little bit further.
I did find your first comment, though, about gold very interesting because obviously gold was on an absolute tear up above, I think, $5,400 before it, you know, had a bit of a sell-off, which was, I guess, not unexpected.
Peter Schiff was the loudest person in the room.
I met him and interviewed him at Bitcoin Las Vegas last year, and that was very interesting.
And to be honest with you, I think he has a lot more Bitcoin than he likes to let on and he really riles us all up.
But it was very interesting to just see this flight into gold in particular.
And my question to you is, do you think that there is an issue with Bitcoin's sort of understanding around the world?
Not enough people understand what it is and how it works, and that's part of the reason that it didn't, you know, follow how gold kind of traded in the last six months?
There's all this uncertainty about global debt and, you know, central banks now just trying to hedge their bets and buy a load of gold.
Absolutely.
I've been saying that for over a decade, you know, that, you know, once again, you can just look at the exchange rate and you can see it's absurdly low to what I think it would be if everyone understood how it works to the point that they could have confidence in it.
I think, you know, even to this day, Bitcoin is what, you know, 16, 17 years old.
It's relatively new, especially in the context of something like precious metals, which they have a level of confidence simply due to the longevity.
And it seems to me like Bitcoin just trades more like a tech stock than like a long-term store of value.
And that's, I think, a narrative that may take generations to really set in and get people to understand and then trade as such.
So I think I've said several times that, you know, Bitcoin is going to continue trading like a high-risk tech stock until people stop looking at it as a high-risk tech stock.
And I have no idea how long that's going to take.
But that's one of the many reasons why I've focused on education for such a long period of time is that I think that even if people are buying Bitcoin but they don't understand what they're buying,
they're less likely to hold onto it through the volatile periods, and that actually results in more volatility.
So if we actually want it to become a more stable long-term store of value, it's a belief system, right?
You have to have the people there who are believing that that's what it is and coming in and basically being the Michael Saylor of like buying regardless of what the price is.
Yeah, look, I think I had a very valuable learning after publishing the first episode of the podcast last weekend.
I was very, I mean, my channel is still pretty small, doesn't have a lot of subscribers, but it's still got three and a half thousand views.
But the interesting thing to me was the comments.
And a lot of people were like, Bitcoin's a scam, Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme, Bitcoin's user experience sucks and it's expensive to use.
And I was like, all three of these things are categorically false, but clearly there is still a huge misconception about Bitcoin.
And I just wonder if in the past five to 10 years, a lot of the people that have become more prominent influencers in the space have lent too much on the technicalities and haven't lent enough into explaining Bitcoin like I'm five so that the general person on the street does understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin and why people should actually be using it.
Whether it's money or just, you know, a savings tool, what's your gauge on kind of the current state of Bitcoin education and Bitcoin explainers?
And I'll caveat that with your website is my favorite resource on Bitcoin.
You know, your website is the best.
I still go back to it.
I tell people to go to it if they want to learn about Bitcoin.
But I still think that we've missed the trick in terms of explaining people and explain to people in layman's terms what Bitcoin is.
Yeah, I mean, it's some of both, right?
So, you know, first of all, I lament the stepping back by Andreas Antonopoulos, who I believe was the real figurehead of calm, rational education in the face of all of the vitriol.
And that's vitriol not only from the crypto haters, but also from, like, what I call the Puritans.
Some call them the maximalists, but now I consider it.
There's Bitcoin maximalism and then there's a subsect of Bitcoin maximalism that is, like, the really hardcore puritanical sect that is vitriolic even to many of people who consider themselves maximalists.
And, you know, I think he's still doing a bit, but mostly on his Patreon, not so much in public.
And so I think we don't have quite as many of that type of educator.
There's still a number of good educators out there.
But, you know, it's not so much that I think people are doing a bad job of educating about Bitcoin, but that we have also had to deal with just the massive scamminess of the wider industry.
Right.
And so I think one of the most telling recent signals from that is, did you see any of the videos, any of the reaction videos to the Coinbase Super Bowl advertisements?
And, you know, everybody's, like, rocking along, and then it says Coinbase, and they're all like, ah!
And I'm like, I get it, you know?
Coinbase was selling every stupid token under the sun because they're just one of the crypto casinos, and they don't really care about the long-term ethos in comparison to, you know, being able to make the short-term cash grabs when something new and flashy pops up.
And so I think that is the current state of mainstream view of Bitcoin and crypto, because I think most mainstream does not really differentiate between the two.
You have to go fairly far down the rabbit hole to believe that there is any difference between Bitcoin and all of the other crypto tokens.
And so we kind of have that black mark on us, and that's just another thing that I think may take a long period of time to overcome.
If you've been in the space for over a decade like me, you've seen so many different tokens come and go and come and go that you can see the difference, and you can often tell very quickly which token is going to have longevity and which is not.
But for someone who's only been around for like one cycle, or especially if you got burned because you got into one particular fad, whether it was ICOs or NFTs, meme coins, whatever, then obviously that's going to be a huge turnoff if you lost a lot of money.
Why would you turn around and say, oh, maybe I should put a bunch of money into Bitcoin instead?
Yeah. Do you know why Andreas stepped back like he did?
And I do want to just add to that.
I was like, I was really disappointed when I saw Knut Svanholm attacking Andreas.
I think it was late last year on X.
And I was just like, man, Andreas orange-pilled hundreds of thousands of people eloquently.
I don't think there's anyone who understands Bitcoin better than him.
And just because he wrote a book on Ethereum, he's now persona non grata.
Like, is that what we've gotten to?
I mean, of course, none of us want to see the grift of, you know, mindless blockchain protocols and tokens.
But that's not how we should be treating people in the industry that have done an enormous public good for Bitcoin.
I actually just tweeted something a few minutes ago that is kind of similar to that in the sense that I said gratitude is fleeting.
And I think that that's true in this regard as well of, I look, I've experienced the exact same thing.
Andreas and I are both technologists.
And we both got in in like the early, and that was like right around the first altcoin boom.
There was a bunch of different protocols coming out.
The vast majority of them were simple copy-paste of the Bitcoin code.
And we knew that that was not interesting.
But novel protocols that were written from scratch, whether it was Ethereum or Monero or what have you,
like those were actually interesting.
We wanted to understand how they worked and whether or not they might offer things that Bitcoin didn't offer.
And, you know, we could spend hours and hours talking about how the narratives have shifted over the decade.
Back then, it was also thought, or at least one of the common conceptions was let altcoins do what they will,
and we will learn from them, and then we will absorb any good functionality that they prove to the market back into Bitcoin.
Well, that hasn't happened.
And so the same thing has happened to me because I started at BitGo in 2015, and it was a Bitcoin-only company.
And then we added Ethereum and then a bunch of other things because we were powering exchanges,
and that's what our clients demanded, and that's how they made their revenue.
And it did not make any business sense for us to try to, like, impose our own philosophy or morality upon their businesses.
And then a similar thing happened at Casa a few years ago where we had been getting higher and higher volume requests for Ethereum and stable coins from our clients.
They weren't requesting, like, every token under the sun because we do long-term cold storage.
So, you know, the fads that come and go in a year or so, people aren't holding on to significant quantities of that over very long-term periods and asking us to help them with cold storage for it.
But especially the stable coin phenomenon, which, as we've seen over the past few years, has become bigger and bigger and bigger.
That turned into a real use case, and it didn't really make sense for us to keep just leaving that functionality out in the market for other competitors to be able to offer.
So, the same thing kind of happened to me when, you know, I started talking about Ethereum and then, you know, actually writing code and adding support for it multiple times at different businesses because it is, whether you like it or not, Ethereum is one of the top cryptocurrencies.
It has longevity.
I don't think it's going away.
It has many problems.
Bitcoin has many problems, too.
I would say Ethereum has more problems.
But for whatever reason, some people end up backing themselves into this very odd ideological corner where Bitcoin is basically perfect and everything else is evil incarnate.
And if you dare touch it, you are impure and you must be cast out from the Bitcoin social circle and so on.
And I find this a fascinating sociological phenomenon to follow and try to understand.
I think there's a lot of parallels with how, like, religions and other voluntary association organizations happen.
So, you know, I've had a bit of fun poking and prodding and sometimes trolling these small sects of people.
And it's also, it's something that you have to get used to if you're going to be a public figure.
Things change drastically.
So, you know, you probably have a few thousand, maybe 10,000 followers.
I'm not sure right now.
And I've gone through this whole transformation.
When I started in Bitcoin, you know, I had maybe 1,000 followers in 2015.
And then over the next few years, got up to, like, 10,000.
And then during the scaling debates, the block size wars, that's when I got into the hundreds of thousands because I was really going headfirst into all of those debates.
And, you know, appearing on podcasts and conference circuits and stuff.
And so that got a lot of attention to me.
And at each of those levels, like the order of magnitude increase in a number of people that were paying attention to me and interacting with me, there were marked changes in just the stuff that I had to deal with.
And so it's kind of like what celebrities have to deal with, except it's a micro niche thing, but it can still be just as disconcerting.
Even if you, you know, I don't have millions and millions of people, you know, I don't get recognized on the street.
But when I am doing my thing in the public arena in cyberspace, I have enough attention that there's always going to be some small percentage of people that are just pathologically incredibly mean.
And some of them, that's basically what they live to do is try to make people upset and get their attention.
And so you have to learn to start dealing with these various edge cases.
And I don't fault Andreas, for example, for wanting to step away from it because it can get very tiring.
You end up having to put more and more effort into curating the information that comes through to you.
So they're basically muting and blocking and actually filtering out the noise in order to get the signal.
Otherwise, it can very easily become overwhelming.
And if that's not something that you're willing to put in a lot of time maintaining, then it can certainly be very tempting to just step away from it.
Or step into a more private space that you can curate more easily.
And so, you know, what Andreas did was he went to Patreon.
And so by imposing a cost upon people, that's probably the best filter there is out there.
I've done variations of that myself over the years where, like, as you go to my website, there are various ways to contact me.
But the only way to be sure to get my attention was actually to use a contact form that you had to pay in order to get past.
You know, that would be my, like, high signal.
And then all of the other stuff had different levels of filtering and made it lower priority to get my attention.
Look, yeah.
I mean, you've got to go to great lengths to protect your, I guess, your mental energy as well.
And I will just say, like, it was really disappointing to see that.
And I've been a journalist for a long time now.
And I think there's something to be said about being able to think critically.
And I'm the first person to admit that Bitcoin is cut from a different cloth.
And I truly believe that, you know, Ethereum and all these other protocols are important pieces of technology.
And they do different things.
And it doesn't mean we have to sit there and throw stones at them and, you know, just say, call everything else a scam.
Because I just don't think that's true.
You know, I've met enough of these people that have put years and years of their life coding, you know, really building something that they think can bring something positive to society.
And to just say that it's all a scam is just not true.
And so I've never really had that approach.
And I do just find it jarring that there's a lot of people out there that are doing this.
And especially, you know, when I saw some of the hate that Andreas was getting, I'm like, I don't blame him for from disappearing from public life.
But man, what a loss to the rest of us.
Because we really need someone like that right now, you know, because I think you are right.
It's a bit sad that Sailor is the only person buying all the Bitcoin right now and dominating a lot of the mindshare when it comes to how we think and feel about Bitcoin.
And you just go back and watch Andreas's, you know, videos on YouTube, his explainers of Bitcoin, his interview on Joe Rogan.
And it was like, man, this guy was just so good at that.
And I wish he would come back.
I don't think he will because I just don't think it's worth his while anymore.
But it's a loss for the rest of us that I wish had not happened.
I want to talk to you.
I want to say, like, I think that this is an inevitable evolution.
And it's basically, it's the lack, it's a loss of nuance over cohorts coming in.
And so that's like another thing that I've noticed, you know, every cycle, there's a new cohort of people who come in.
And they usually come in via a new narrative, a new vector, a new prominent persona who comes up with new narratives.
So like Sailor has been the primary one for the past cycle or so.
And each time that you have a new wave of adoption, it seems that that generally happens via simplification of the narrative, because that's how you get the virality of the mimetics of what is Bitcoin.
And if Bitcoin is ultimately a mimetic thing, it's, you know, it's, it's technology, but the adoption has to have various mimetics to actually get people into it.
So that's like one of the things that worries me is like, how much further can we devolve down the mimetic rabbit hole to the point where it does really become like McGregor meme of like Bitcoin, good Bitcoin, gold, buy Bitcoin.
Yeah, it does feel like it's gotten to that point.
I want to pull on that thread a little bit.
Tell me how you really feel about Bitcoin treasury companies, because I spoke to Safedine last year and he's someone, obviously, I love the Bitcoin standard.
I think when I read the Bitcoin standard, it kind of, it took me back to 2009 when I was in university.
And I don't know if you ever watched it, there was a documentary called Zeitgeist.
And the reason I love Zeitgeist was it was the first like video that I watched that explained how the US monetary system worked.
And I was like, holy shit, that's how it works.
Like, I didn't realize that's, that's how the monetary system works, you know, fiat money works.
And then I read the Bitcoin standard and it just, it reaffirmed it.
Like, this is the history of money and this is why Bitcoin is a better form of money.
But I was speaking to Safedine last year and his kind of main takeaway was like, we don't really get to choose how people use Bitcoin and what they do with it.
If you want to use it as an individual, you can use it as a savings tool.
You can use it as money.
We see that in circular economies all around the world.
You can use it as a vehicle to launch financial products like Michael Saylor and Strategy is doing.
As someone who's been in the space since 30 years, what do you really think about this?
Did you think that it was a natural evolution that someone would start doing what Saylor is doing with Bitcoin?
From a corporation point of view?
I don't recall anyone really theorizing that avenue happening.
We had certainly theorized nation state adoption at the strategic reserve level.
And I was very surprised when El Salvador announced that they were doing that because I had been theorizing that it was going to be like micronations, you know, that there would be a more linear stair-stepping function of tiny, tiny countries.
That obviously did not have their own currency to manipulate and were at the behest of the dollar.
And El Salvador did fit into that, but they were just much larger than I anticipated any of the early adopters being.
I won't claim to understand the financial engineering that Strategy does.
They are obviously quite good at it and they're building their own narratives and they're able to spin up these flywheels that allow them to accumulate more and more Bitcoin.
And, you know, hopefully they don't blow up.
It seems like they know what they're doing.
I think my main takeaway, especially with what happened over the past year, is that Bitcoin Treasuries make sense for any business.
We had a Bitcoin Treasury and, you know, Bicco IPO'd recently and I think they released their numbers because they're public.
And I think that they have, like, you know, several thousand Bitcoin in their Treasury now.
That's public information.
CASA has operated a Bitcoin Treasury since 2018, since inception.
From, basically, from the people who pay us in Bitcoin, that goes into our Treasury.
And then we manage that as needed, kind of balancing it against our fiat runway.
I think Peter McCormick had a really good way of putting it, which is that, you know, Bitcoin Treasury is a cheat code for your business.
If you can siphon some of your revenue into Bitcoin and hold on to it and then take advantage of the gains over the years, then that's just gravy.
However, what doesn't make sense from my perspective is a Bitcoin Treasury company that is doing nothing but just holding Bitcoin.
Because there are so many different ways that people can get financial exposure to the Bitcoin asset these days that unless you're somehow, unless you're, like, launching your Bitcoin Treasury company in a market where there is no other option, then I don't think you're going to have a great time getting a lot of people to buy your security.
So, in general, I think that it makes sense if you have some other operating business.
Now, it did invest in Nakamoto, and Nakamoto's whole pitch is that they're going to be, you know, the Bitcoin Treasury company of other Bitcoin companies.
They haven't quite fulfilled that vision so far, but the whole market fell apart.
We'll see what happens in the coming years and whether or not they're able to actually fulfill that vision.
But that was, like, the reason why I found it interesting is because their pitch was more than just, oh, we're going to buy Bitcoin and sit on it.
Yeah.
And so, you know, maybe we'll see some other companies out there, but I think that that's really the biggest problem that a lot of these companies that only launched as Bitcoin holding companies are running into is that they don't have the same access to other financial markets like what strategy has with, I guess, the bond market and such.
And they may not have the financial engineering know-how to create these alternative, unique products like what strategy is doing.
So, you know, I think that's why strategy is still number one.
They have a number of – they have, of course, the first mover advantage, but they have a lot of other advantages as well that make it very difficult for other companies to compete in the same market as strategy.
Yeah, look, it's interesting that you say that because Michael Saylor destroyed Danny Knowles on the What Bitcoin Did podcast when he asked him that exact same question.
He was like, don't you think there's a few too many Bitcoin treasury companies that are just doing the pure play Bitcoin treasury, i.e., you know, launch convertible notes and then just buy Bitcoin with it.
But they're not really any other business.
They're just like a holding company buying Bitcoin, issuing debt and buying Bitcoin.
Like, where's the thing, you know, like, where's the proof of work?
What is your business doing?
I understand the Nakamoto route, like David Bailey, they owned a load of media businesses.
They have a fair amount of going concerned businesses underneath that, that would generate profit.
Jack Mallers in 21, they want to do that, you know, essentially strategy is a software, you know, business.
It does actually have a business, but a lot of these other ones don't.
I thought it was a fair question from Danny Knowles and Saylor seemed to take huge exception and I get it.
He's just, he was, I guess he was trying to protect the movement more than anything, but I found it curious that he was so irked by that question when it's a fair question to ask.
Because I think that there are too many, you know, Bitcoin treasury companies that kind of just, you know, borrowed the business model, but they don't really have any, they don't really have any, it doesn't seem like they have any long-term play.
Like, I don't know if you know the company in the UK, B-Hodl, but essentially what they're doing is running lightning infrastructure and that's the underlying business, but they're also operating a Bitcoin treasury company.
And I like that a lot because that's a Bitcoin business that is operating a Bitcoin treasury company and acquiring a small amount of Bitcoin as they go, you know, very, very much within their means.
Whereas the rest of them, I don't know, but look, I think the point is made already, so I won't belabor it, but I wanted to chat to you a little bit about your personal history, Lop, and the house raid that happened and how that kind of ties into your whole belief system about privacy, about self-custody, all of that.
But can you just tell us a story about what happened?
Because it's fascinating for anyone that hasn't heard it.
Yeah, so, you know, like I said, I was really going hard in the scaling debates back in 2015 to 2017.
And near the end of 2017, I had amassed, I don't know, over 100, 150,000 followers.
And a lot of people were very upset at me because of my controversial views.
And as a result of that, one person or a few people got mad enough at me that they decided that they wanted to try to scare me and extort me.
And they basically hit up one of their friends who was very well known for calling in fake SWAT calls on people.
And apparently he didn't even know who I was.
So this was like a multi-hop type of thing.
You know, he was just running in with the wrong crowd.
And they basically, they called up my local law enforcement.
They said all of the key words of, you know, shooting and explosions and hostages and so on and so forth.
And so that got, you know, the maximum law enforcement response, sent out, locked down my whole neighborhood.
And, you know, thankfully ended without incident.
But that kicked off a multi-year journey of me trying to figure out how do I prevent this from ever happening again?
And really, there was a fork in the road.
There's like two options.
There's one, completely disappear.
You know, never show my face or do anything in public again and go pure anonymity and privacy and ensure that I don't become a target.
And the alternative is if I wanted to continue being able to converse with people and use my reputation within the ecosystem was to disappear while still remaining in public.
And that's a much more difficult path.
I basically ended up having to sell all of my publicly registered property, real estate vehicles, so on and so forth.
Move, set up all new property under various legal entities like trusts and LLCs where like the true ownership of them is obfuscated.
And, you know, this is a lot of effort.
It costs thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to set up and then thousands of dollars a year to maintain.
And then it's just a massive lifestyle change to ensure that my name never gets associated with my residence and with any of my other property that could be tied to a physical location.
And so that involves, you know, setting up all types of other like mailing addresses for receiving things and phone numbers, email addresses, so on and so forth.
And the first few years were pretty tough, but eventually you kind of get used to it and I would say the trickier thing is actually setting up essentially an alter ego for the people that I actually interact with where I live.
You know, they don't know my name, they don't know my name, they don't know what I do, they only know my alter ego.
So the short version of a lot of this stuff is what I've said is you actually have to get very comfortable with lying and you have to understand that as long as you're not trying to defraud someone, as long as you're not like entering into a legal contract, it's completely legal and moral to lie to people about who you are, especially if you're doing that to protect yourself.
And so I've been doing that for seven, eight years now.
And it's basically second nature.
That's crazy, man.
That is really crazy that you had to go to those links.
But I mean, look, I think if someone swatted my house, that would scare me so badly.
It would be such a jarring experience that you would want to go through all of this.
My second question after that, I mean, with everything that's been happening in France in the past few months, especially since January, you know, that the reports out of France basically said that someone in the central tax authority sold
a load of information on high net worth individuals that, you know, holding a load of either Bitcoin or just cryptocurrency and these people have since been targeted in kidnappings, but it's been going on for more than a year.
How did how did you feel about continuing to travel to Bitcoin conferences and that sort of thing?
And will you go back to France?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not worried about traveling to France.
I would certainly be worried if I was living in France and reporting, you know, to the authorities there.
And actually, this is one of the things where obviously I'm glad that I did what I did because I can sleep well at night.
But I think, you know, I was essentially an early warning example for other prominent people in the space, but now not just prominent people, even people who Bitcoiners who nobody knows anything about because they've never been out at conferences or social media or whatever.
Just the volume of data leaks that are occurring are making many people targets for wrench attacks.
And interestingly enough, like this is the same reason why I don't put my residence address on my tax forms.
I give them a mailbox.
You feel free to go wrench attack that.
You'll have to hang out at that mailbox for a very, very long time before you have any good opportunity.
But it's tricky because, you know, these things get in the news a lot.
And from a relative perspective, it's still accelerating.
2025 was by far the highest number.
I think we averaged over one wrench attack per week, which I had predicted at the end of 2024.
And it's only been accelerating more over the past month.
You know, at least some of this is probably due to that tax official.
But also there have just been a lot more organized crime, for whatever reason, operating in France.
And I know there was like one mastermind who was actually operating out of, I think, Montenegro, but had a lot of French connections.
And who knows how many more of these there are and who knows how many of them are related to the multiple leaks that have happened from Ledger, for example, who I'm sure have a ton of clients in France.
But, you know, it's not just Ledger.
I don't want to pick on any one given person.
KYC in general puts all of us at risk.
And that's why I call it kill your customer, because that's essentially what these regulators are doing,
is they are requiring people to give up extremely sensitive information, put it in databases, which ultimately is going to get leaked,
and ultimately is going to get sold and shared around on dark net criminal webs because it is extremely valuable if you can find someone who may have millions of dollars essentially like lying under the mattress at home.
Look, I come from South Africa, and most South Africans are pretty sensitive about sharing, you know, their home address and stuff.
And when I moved to the Netherlands, like you put your home address on everything, you know.
And I think from the outside coming in, I think the assumption is that you live in a first world country.
Crime shouldn't be a big deal.
Security is good.
The policing is good.
So you shouldn't really worry for your safety.
But what is happening in France is a clear example to everyone that don't take anything for granted anymore,
because that's just not the reality of the world that we live in.
Yeah, well, I mean, policing in general is a tricky subject.
You know, policing and law enforcement works at a high level for like society in general,
but there is no law enforcement organization on Earth that actually protects specific individuals.
That's why the whole like protect and serve thing, I think, is often taken vastly out of context.
They're protecting and serving the general public.
But if you get specifically targeted for something, you know, law enforcement is highly unlikely to actually protect you.
I consider law enforcement to be crime historians rather than crime preventers.
They prevent crime in a very abstract sense that they try to go catch the criminals and lock them up and prevent them from continually reoccurring the crime.
But they're never going to be able to stop people from committing their first few crimes.
Exactly.
It's very reactive.
And look, I mean, most places in the world are different to America.
But I like I don't want to get into a gun debate right now.
But I understand why people should have the right to arm themselves, because you can't just you know, you don't have a policeman at your door 24/7.
That's just not how life works.
So you should be able to protect yourself on the subject of privacy and maintaining it.
Last year was really interesting to see Zcash go through this crazy resurgence.
Obviously, there were lots of high profile influences and people in the industry talking about Zcash and why they thought it was so important.
Obviously, you were around when Monero came around.
What are your thoughts on Monero versus Zcash?
And what are your thoughts on people moving to privacy tokens as opposed to using Bitcoin in this world where we we find ourselves in our privacies increasingly infringed upon?
Yeah, well, as a cypherpunk, I have been interested in any privacy enhancing cryptocurrencies, and I have been a proponent of Monero more than Zcash.
I had a number of problems with Zcash, but I would say they seem to have recognized some of the privacy problems.
Like the biggest problem that I had with Zcash was that it wasn't private by default.
So that's why I always told people to use Monero because it's private by default.
You don't have to configure anything or make sure you're not doing any foot guns.
Now, what seems to have happened with Zcash is they've started creating wallets where the wallets, like I think Zashi was one of them, they don't even allow you to use Zcash in a transparent matter.
And that's how I felt like it always should have been.
But I think this was kind of a vestige of the fact that Zcash was originally forked from Bitcoin Core and basically was Bitcoin protocol plus zero knowledge proof transactions.
They've also made a number of efficiency improvements and improvements to the setup ceremony, which originally was a fairly trusted setup ceremony.
There are other issues, of course, like you could you can take issue with, I think, something like 20% of the mining rewards go to the foundation and so on and so forth.
But I think the main thing that I've come to realize over the years is that while I am a big proponent of privacy, the vast majority of people don't value privacy until it's too late.
And so, you know, my investments in privacy cryptocurrencies have not done well and mostly, I consider the strong privacy cryptocurrencies to be something where you would use it in a transactional fashion.
So if you need to do something that's highly sensitive and you want to be fully anonymous, then maybe you convert some Bitcoin into some Monero or Zcash and then you do your thing and that's it because trying to do privacy on Bitcoin is really, really difficult.
Like, you have to be a pretty technical expert to make sure you're not re-associating like KYC coins with privacy coins.
Like mixers are better than nothing, but they don't, it's not a silver bullet.
I would say like Lightning Network has pretty good privacy, at least as far as we know.
There, there are, there's research and there can be some problems where, especially if you're using a custodial wallet, you don't really have much privacy.
And I think most people are using custodial wallets.
So once again, like when you have to explain like pages and pages of things, like this is how you do it privately, people aren't going to do it or they're going to make a mistake.
And so, you know, using something that is strong privacy by default that doesn't require jumping through a lot of hoops, I think is the way to go.
But like I said, most people don't value privacy until something bad happens and then it's usually too late.
You can't undo it.
No, you can't undo it.
That's a, it's the hard part about it.
And like you said, there's still so much complexity involved.
I mean, I played around with the Zashi wallet when it came out.
Well, it was already in existence last year, but I downloaded it and I played with it.
And yeah, you, it's not, it's not by default shielded Zcash.
If you want to, if you want to shield the Zcash, you have to opt into that, you know?
And like you say, if you use Monero, there's no opt in.
It's just how it is, which, which is one way of doing it.
I'm going to take this in a complete another direction.
The Bitcoin, I guess they're calling it the Bitcoin spam wars proposal, BIP 110.
What are your thoughts on, on the whole core versus not situation?
I'm sure you've had many, many months now to digest it.
You were on a lot of panels last year talking with, with Luke and, and other prominent individuals for
the, for the knots camp, I'm obviously followed lots of, you know, people like Adam Back kind of arguing against that.
Can you give us a, just for perhaps a layman out there that doesn't really understand knots versus core and what's really at stake here at a TLDR.
And then what do you think is the right direction and what middle ground is probably most likely to be found in the next year or so?
Well, the TLDR is that this is the natural result of some of what I mentioned earlier with the puritanical subsect of Bitcoin maximalists.
And essentially there are people out there who are upset that you can do things with Bitcoin other than simply transferring it from one address to another address.
This has always been the case.
Bitcoin is money.
However, Bitcoin is programmable money.
And as soon as you introduce programmability, some sort of programming language, which Bitcoin has a very minimalist programming language based upon something called forth.
But as soon as you allow that programmability, you are enabling creative individuals to start tinkering around with it and coming up with new use cases that you may not have considered or intended or so on and so forth.
And so over the past three or four years, we've seen a number of these use cases get built out on Bitcoin, whether it's things like inscriptions or nulls, NFTs, other basically tokens on top of Bitcoin.
And that has made a number of people.
And that has made a number of people very upset because they say, you should not be able to do this.
This is non-monetary.
You should not be able to embed an image into the blockchain.
I don't want that on my note.
These are all valid feelings for people to feel.
But from a technical perspective, when you start going down the logical rabbit hole of, okay, how would I stop this?
It becomes very difficult because this is a censorship resistant network.
The game theory doesn't really work in favor of trying to stop people from embedding arbitrary data into Bitcoin.
And so we can say that spam, first of all, spam is subjective.
I prefer to use the objective approach when it comes to spam, which is that the way that Bitcoin presents spam is by imposing a cost.
So the way that Bitcoin prevents miners from spamming lots of blocks and it rate limits the creation of blocks is by imposing a cost, which is the difficulty, which is a rough number of hashes that have to be provably inscribed into the block header to prove that some level of energy has been expended and thus cost.
Same thing with arbitrary data in transactions, you have to have fees, transaction fees, and you have to compete in a free and open market of fee rates to basically bribe the miners to include your transactions and whatever data is in them into a block.
And part of the problem and part of the reason why arbitrary data and spam has been so prevalent over the past few years is that not many people are actually using Bitcoin.
And so the fee rates have been at the minimum level pretty much for several years and in fact so minimal that the people started dropping by another 90% below what has historically been considered the 1 satoshi per virtual byte fee rate level.
And so Bitcoin developers saw this happening and they saw that, for example, people were creating non-standard transactions, which means a transaction that is valid via the Bitcoin network rules, but does not get relayed around the network due to policy.
And they were, this started happening because several large miners opened up private APIs where you could directly submit transactions to them.
And so they saw that happening and they're like, ooh, we don't really feel great about that because that's a point of centralization.
Preferably you want any given transaction to get relayed around the entire network so every node operator has a better idea of what the market for block space looks like and can do things like estimate transaction fees, so on and so forth.
And also, you know, you know, that disadvantage is smaller miners who may want to take advantage of including non-standard transactions.
And so this, this became a great point of contention between like what is the best for the decentralization aspects of the network versus what do I as a node operator want being stored on my hard drive.
And I think there are several reasons why this became such a big issue.
One of my theories is that, you know, Luke and Mechanic and the folks at Ocean realized that there were a group of people who were very upset about this and that they could basically capitalize on it and get a great marketing campaign going.
And to their credit, they have gotten a lot of attention over the past year.
However, if their goal was to get this attention in order to get more business and hash rate for Ocean, I would say that has actually failed drastically over the past month or so.
I think they've lost half of their hash rate and they're back around like 1%.
And so I don't think that they're doing great as a business.
I think some of them may see like the writing on the wall.
I'm not privy to their like internal financials or anything, but I do know that a number of investors in Ocean are very upset.
And so, you know, we may see something drastic happen this year with regard to Ocean and leadership and their future direction.
But, you know, there are people who have also capitalized upon this to try to, I think, elevate their own status and influence within the industry.
And that's completely normal.
I don't know how well that's working out for them.
Like I track a lot of these metrics and it seems to me like there's only maybe a few thousand people who are really hardcore proponents of this idea.
And that the overwhelming majority of Bitcoiners either simply don't care.
They think the whole thing is stupid or they're actively in opposition for a variety of technical or economic reasons or so on.
And so the short version is my prediction that nothing will actually happen from this.
This is why I went on stage in El Salvador or no, it was Switzerland back in October with Luke and Mechanic.
And I said, OK, yeah, you can call me a bad actor and you can be vitriolic and all of this stuff.
But ultimately, I don't care what you think about me.
What I want to know is what are you going to do?
What are you going to do to try to enforce your view of what Bitcoin should be upon the network?
And that's what I think they've been struggling with.
Yeah, they've got people running nodes.
But as far as I can tell, there are no what I would call substantial economic actors that run nodes that support this.
I'm not aware of any custodians who support it.
I'm not aware of any big mining pools that support it.
And so the game theory, as far as I can tell, is that either nothing is going to happen or if this particular sect of puritanical Bitcoiners becomes desperate enough, they may end up forking off to their own little fork.
Maybe they change the proof of work.
Maybe they change some other aspects of it.
And that fork will perform about as well as the other forks of Bitcoin historically have performed.
So in general, I don't really talk about it much anymore because I feel like the issue has been pretty much beaten to death and that there's not really anything new happening.
And the main thing that I'm interested in is understanding the game theory and whether or not there is any economic power supporting this thing.
And so for I think it was actually about a week ago, I started offering bets if any BIP 110 supporter wants to enter into a fork futures contract with me, a trustless protocol driven and enforced futures contract.
I am more than happy to put my Bitcoin on the line that says that BIP 110 is not going to do anything.
And if you want to take the opposite side of that bet, then I'm happy to work with you to put that together.
And the main reason that I'm doing that is once again is a signal.
I'm trying to find the economic signal that is is hopefully out there amongst all of the noise of the podcasters and the bloggers and the tweeters and the so on, because talk is cheap.
And Bitcoin ultimately runs on game theory and economics, not on people being upset.
Yeah, for sure.
And the true signal of that is whether you're willing to put your money where your mouth is.
So I'm glad that you challenged that.
My one question is like, do you think that Luke is is very serious and genuine about his concerns about CSAM on the Bitcoin protocol?
And the reason I asked this is last year at Bitcoin Amsterdam, I sat down with Adam back and we had a we had like a half an hour conversation and I asked him the same thing.
I'm like, the reality is it's very difficult to even, you know, have a block explorer that allows you to, you know, bring this arbitrary data and visualize it as an image.
Right. So is that just a marketing gimmick?
Um, you know, going really hard with this.
If you support this, then you support child porn on the Bitcoin network, which I think is just like, it's a stretch.
It's actually, it's almost like emotional blackmail in a way to say, like, if you don't agree with this, you're agreeing with child porn on the, on the Bitcoin network.
And I, I just don't think that it's, it's genuinely true.
Well, I try not to think about like what Luke truly believes because it, I don't know if you read the blog posts that I wrote last year is entitled.
It's not a serious project, but I went into a very deep dive into Luke's history and the things that he believes.
And he believes some really wacky stuff, at least as far as we can tell, he believes some really wacky, he's said some really wacky stuff about what he believes.
And he's ultimately an authoritarian.
I think that his ethos does not jive very well with the realities of the crypto anarchic state of the Bitcoin network.
And he is very anti-anarchy.
And I think I had a number of quotes in there about that.
So, I mean, I think it's, it's fully possible that he believes what he's saying, but ultimately what he believes and what these other Puritans believe is irrelevant within the greater context of the game theory of the network.
If, if they don't have any economic power, if they're not willing to put their money where their mouths are, then nothing is going to happen.
And that's why I think that ultimately spending a lot of time engaging with them at this point is just a waste.
I had several theories, like I had the whole ocean marketing theory about it.
Also think, like I said, because of the results of my offer to do a trustless futures contract and that I can't find a single BIP 110 supporter who will put money on the line.
And they all say, oh, you're gambling and this is also immoral and so on and so forth.
One of my theories of like, it seems illogical that they're so heavy and, and into supporting this idea vocally, but not financially.
I, one of my theories and several of them have said this is that they believe that merely acting zitriolic and acting like we are going to rug the spammers and saying these things will stop people from doing it on Bitcoin.
And I find that to be illogical because you can just look at the blockchain and see that people are still doing this.
They're doing it less because we're in a bear market and people aren't buying and selling and trading these silly meme coins and tokens and stuff.
But like I said, it's a fascinating sociological phenomenon.
Unfortunately, unlike with the Bitcoin cash and BSV forks, I don't think I'm going to have a chance to actually make any money off of it.
Damn it.
Yeah, look, I'm not going to give it any more time than that.
Other than, yeah, I mean, like I've seen some of Luke's takes on, on X and I've never met him.
I've never had a chance to speak to him.
And like, I'm a very open minded person.
I'm a journalist.
I'm happy to have conversations with everyone and we're gladly, you know, hear his side of the story.
But I think he's, he's been so vitriolic about everything.
It's, it's kind of hard at this point to take it seriously.
And for me, the overarching kind of solution to all of this is that the Bitcoin network works the way that it works.
And the fee mechanism is the mechanism that, you know, should sort out spam.
If people just start spamming the network, it's going to get very, very costly to do.
And at some point the people that are spamming the network are going to be like, man, I'm not going to spend all this money, you know, putting all these JPEGs on Bitcoin or all these NFTs.
I'm going to go do it on Polygon or, you know, stockware or something, you know, I'm just not going to do it here.
It's not worth my while.
And so I think the solution solves itself.
But what like a crazy tangent and arc that's been for Bitcoin in the last year.
Look, we're approaching the hour mark.
And I know that we've taken a long time to talk about this.
I think I want to just kind of wrap up with your general views on where Bitcoin goes from here.
Obviously, I know you're not someone who's very focused on price.
And when I spoke to Pierre in the first episode, you know, he's big into Austrian economics and he's like, man, price is the biggest signal.
It's what matters the most.
But we are in a very interesting kind of time in like in history and lots of different things are happening.
Central banks definitely seem to be buying gold.
Do you think that we are going to see people lean more and more heavily into Bitcoin in the next few years?
Irrelevant of the price, are you still hopeful about the Bitcoin movement?
Well, yeah, if I wasn't, I wouldn't be here.
Yeah, it's it's a weird market.
So first of all, the four year cycle seems to have broken.
So, you know, anything, well, anything can always happen.
But that that seems to be a big differentiator.
Unfortunately, it was broken in the direction I think none of us wanted it to see broken.
But, you know, we we do seem to have a new floor of like institutional demand.
There's a lot of selling happening, but there's also a lot of buying happening.
So hopefully we've seen a bottom for now.
Who knows where sentiment can go?
It's just it's very jarring to see sentiment for precious metals so high, but for Bitcoin so low.
The nice thing is because I'm technical, I'm a builder is that I can always fall back on my social circle, which is not the people who are talking about macro economics and stuff, but rather the people who are building cool stuff on top of Bitcoin.
And so there's plenty of cool projects happening out there.
You know, people that are building either on top of like Nostr, Lightning Network, eCache, merging all of these things together with AI agentic phenomenon to start controlling like coding or access to other resources.
There's a there's still a lot of interesting things going on.
But of course, that's really far so far down the rabbit hole that it's not really going to get like mainstream normie people interested.
And so unfortunately, I I do think that having like the Michael sailors of the world out there, like talking to the corporate side of things and and the El Salvador is hopefully out there talking to their pure nation states is it's an important part of the puzzle.
You know, we all contribute in our own fashion.
Yeah.
I guess the other thing that I did want to ask you about before we wrap up is your thoughts as Bitcoin as money.
And if we are still moving in the right direction to make that happen, because Michael Sato has spoken very openly that, you know, he doesn't really see Bitcoin as money.
He sees it as, you know, a tool for digital credit and a store of value.
I spoke to David Marcus, I think about three, three weeks ago, and he had such a fascinating story.
I didn't know this about the Facebook DM Libra project, but they had originally tried to to do it on Bitcoin lightning.
And he basically said at the time it just wasn't fit for purpose and they couldn't pull it off.
And they got close to doing DM.
And then, you know, global regulators were like, no, this is going to completely break the financial system and fabric of the world.
And so I got shut down and he moved on and obviously he's at LightSpark now.
And what they're doing with Spark is is really, really interesting.
And he's very bullish on the future of Bitcoin for payments.
And I think what what's interesting about how they've approached it is abstracting the infrastructure away from, you know, the user experience.
So if I have a bank account in America and I want to send funds to whatever my family in the Netherlands, I can do this through their rails.
And the value transfer actually happens on Bitcoin on LightSpark will spark the network.
I, you know, Bitcoin lightning.
But I just see a bank transfer happening.
I'm not privy to what's happening in the background.
Do you think that that's the future of Bitcoin payments as opposed to lightning wallets and that kind of stuff?
You know, most people having to download a Bitcoin type software, rather integrating it into conventional TradFi applications and systems and abstracting that complexity away.
Well, ultimately, abstracting complexity away is what gets adoption.
And that's like one of the main things that we've been focused on at Casa for eight years now is that the promise of being your own bank has always been there.
For Bitcoin, but all of the responsibility, all of the potential foot guns have been this like massive like iceberg under the surface of like the promise at the top of be your own bank.
That's ultimately the thing is I don't know what use case is going to win out.
And and I think it's it's funny when people say Bitcoin is blank because Bitcoin is what you use it for.
So Bitcoin is money if you use it as money.
Bitcoin is a investment if you use it as an investment.
Bitcoin is a photo storage platform if you use it as a photo storage platform.
This all I think comes back around to one of the initial things is a Bitcoin is a protocol.
It is a programmable shared global database.
It's it's the least performance database that I have ever come across in my entire career of being a software engineer, but it has incredibly unique and interesting properties that you can leverage and build on top of.
And so I think that's the main thing that we should be encouraging is everyone to be building on top of Bitcoin for whatever use case they think that it can facilitate.
And ultimately, the market should sort these things out.
Like I said, I am not concerned about the whole spam debate thing.
If anything, I would say one of our problems is that people aren't spamming Bitcoin enough.
Because the fee market is so low that that actually leads to long term concerns about what some people might call the security budget or the thermodynamic sustainability of the mining ecosystem.
I did crunch a bunch of numbers recently where I think if we stay on the same trajectory, this current mining epoch, we should end up with slightly more revenue and aggregate for miners during this epoch as the last and every mining epoch has increased revenue for miners.
And so what I've said for a while is that if we ever get to a point where the exchange rate doesn't double over a four year period or in a more complicated fashion, if miner revenue in aggregate over an epoch goes down, that's when I think we need to start being concerned about what's going on with the market for block space.
And then some people are obviously going to start saying, well, do we need to have inflation?
You know, that turns into a whole can of worms, which a lot of people would prefer to avoid ever discussing.
And hopefully it doesn't become a problem.
Hopefully we can, from people building on top of Bitcoin, we can find a use case that drives sufficient and ongoing demand for block space so that we have a fee market that is actually competitive and not just people doing the very minimal fee for.
Yeah. And just as a layman explainer for people listening out there, obviously what Jamison is referring to is in the future when the block reward, the subsidy that miners get for mining a block gets smaller and smaller, the incentive to continue, you know, maintaining the network and mining blocks is the fees that they get from transactions in those blocks.
So it's important that people actually use the Bitcoin network so that it has a security budget going forward.
The incentive for miners is obviously the fees and the block reward, but as the block reward gets less and less, then we need to make sure that we still have fees.
So Jamison, this has been an absolutely fantastic conversation.
I just want to say thank you so much for your time.
If anyone out there is interested in learning more about CASA or any of the other projects that you're involved, you can check out his website.
It's LOP.net.
If you want to learn anything about Bitcoin, this is one of the first pages I tell people to go and look at.
And of course, you can follow him on X.
It's @LOP.
So it's pretty easy to find.
One of my favorite Bitcoiners, I'm very, very happy you obliged me with this episode.
And I look forward to number two in a few weeks or a year or a month.
We'll see what happens.
But thanks so much.
And hopefully we catch up again soon.
Thanks for having me.