North Carolina has just been a buzz.
I invested in a diamond company that makes lab grown diamonds in North Carolina.
Do you still live in North Carolina?
Yeah, it's a great space.
These days I move around a fair amount.
I've got a whole privacy issue and background there when I got attacked a few years ago.
I still have a lot of family in the Carolinas.
Move around, huh?
Tell us about the SWAT attack.
I guess it's called the SWATing attack.
Is that like when they call people and tell them that something's happening at your house?
Exactly.
Unfortunately, my Twitter presence grew a lot during one of the crypto hype cycles.
I went from being a nobody to having a lot of attention paid to me.
Unfortunately, I got some attention from people who decided they could try to extort me.
They found my home address.
They called up my local law enforcement.
They said that I had shot some people and was holding people hostage and had explosives.
Just used all the right words to get maximum level of response from the police.
I already follow you.
I know who you are.
Perfect.
Yeah, I know.
I already follow you.
I mean, we already, I mean, I can see it right here.
I've been following you for a while and you've been on Twitter about the same time as my
original handle on Twitter, which was early days.
Did you know Jack or how did you get on Twitter so early?
No, you know, it's the same way I got into Bitcoin and other stuff.
It's just I'm a uber nerd.
And so I'm on the uber nerdy websites and I see all the new tech that's coming out and
I play around with it.
And these days I would say I'm on Nostr, which is like the new social media that is completely
crypto decentralized.
You know, no single entity that's controlling it.
Really?
Nostr?
N-O-S-T-R.
Yeah.
Notes and other stuff transmitted by relays.
It was actually developed by a Bitcoin developer a year or so ago and it really started picking
up adoption the past couple of months.
Wow.
Well, I would love for you to tell people about what you do.
I mean, obviously the people that watch my show know that we do a lot of private equity,
that we're a Bitcoin miner, that we're coming out with BitNow.com, which is a metaverse
platform that's effectively not 100% decentralized, but you don't need to ask Mother May I from
Twitter, from the App Store, from Google, from Facebook.
It is link based.
It's all in the browser.
And it's going to accept eventually every form of crypto I can think of.
That's our goal that we can legally take.
But I'm a big Bitcoin advocate.
I own Bitcoin myself.
I mine Bitcoin.
I've been involved with it since 2011.
I've had booms and busts with it.
So can you give our audience just a little bit about your background?
Yeah.
So I have been working in the Bitcoin space for about eight years and I've been really
doing the same fundamental thing, just with slightly different variations.
And that is basically security.
I have been trying to bring the promise of being your own bank to the normal person.
It's always been possible to self custody, to hold your own keys, to be your own bank,
and not be beholden to any third parties.
That's really the impetus for this entire space.
But unfortunately, the vast majority of people who are getting into it, they're just looking
at it as an investment.
They're not understanding the security ramifications of the ideological modification.
And as a result, they're buying some on an exchange and leaving it there.
And then we see stuff like FTX blowing up or way back in the day, Mt. Gox blowing up.
It's almost like every year some major third party custodian blows up and a lot of people
lose their money.
And I'm trying to save people from that because it's not necessary to have your money with
a third party.
Do you think people just want to make it too simple for themselves?
They just rather it be with someone they can say they can blame if something goes wrong?
Because I do remember the Mt. Gox days and obviously the people who were in Mt. Gox got
lucky.
They got held up in bankruptcy for such a long period of time that that Bitcoin became
so much more valuable that it actually ended up being, from what I can tell, a pretty good
investment.
I actually know people that bought claims from Mt. Gox and got paid pretty well for
it.
I'm curious as to why do you think people don't want to self custody?
I mean is it the complexity of not forgetting your passwords?
I think for me, because I keep my Bitcoin at Ernity, which is a company we own, now
they keep it in trust in my name.
So there is a level of safety, but it's still with someone else.
And then I keep some at Coinbase and I've got to tell you, I have fear that I'm going
to lose that crypto, that Bitcoin.
But then I also have fear that if I put it in my own wallet, I'm going to lose it too.
Yeah, well, you know, this is like the fundamental problem.
We're talking about a bearer asset.
So you'd think of it like gold or cash.
Or a bearer bond, yeah.
Anything that can be owned and can be stored can be stolen.
So you know, whether you're holding it yourself, whether you're holding it at a bank or a crypto
custodian or whatever, there's always a way to lose it.
And I think there's a number of factors that result in a lot of people not taking self-custody.
The first one is that you actually have to take action to do that, right?
The default is that people are setting up their accounts on an exchange and they're
wiring their money in and they hit buy.
And this is a user experience that is like any other traditional brokerage.
So you buy your thing, you see the charts there and you just let it sit there.
And with a traditional brokerage, there is no withdraw functionality.
That's just not a thing.
So people are not used to even having that possibility.
So I think a lot of people don't even look into it.
And then of course, if you do look into it, then there's this sort of overwhelming amount
of complexity and knowledge that you need to have if you really want to feel confident
that you can be your own bank.
I mean, there's a reason that banks exist.
They're specialists.
This is the way that human society has evolved for millennia, is that specialization of tasks
has allowed us to outsource stuff to people so they can do things more efficiently and
effectively than if we do it ourselves.
Yeah, there's a sense of security that maybe if something gets messed up, the big institution
will cover you, I guess.
Maybe that's the wrong sense of security.
I didn't think about that.
You're right.
It doesn't really-- there's not really a ready withdrawal feature other than a debit card
at a brokerage firm.
You can take your stocks out, but they don't make it easy.
You have to transfer it, and it's a ton of paperwork.
But I've actually been able to recently trade some Bitcoin with Coinbase and Earnity.
I found Coinbase's platform to be really efficient.
They charge you a lot of fees to take out money if you want it quick.
But if you just overcome the fee for a second, the speed of this whole thing is pretty amazing
now.
So are you suggesting that most people just keep their Bitcoin in some-- how would you
suggest they go about doing that?
Yeah.
So, you know, it's also a question of what's the level of value that you're dealing with.
I think if someone only has a few hundred dollars worth, if it's not a life-changing
amount of money, then you probably don't really want to spend much of your time thinking about
securing it.
If a catastrophe happens and it's not going to affect your life for the rest of your life,
then I wouldn't worry about it too much.
But once you get into the realm of having a sizable nest egg that's going to vary from
person to person, whether it's thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, that's when
I think self-custody starts to make sense.
Spend a hundred dollars and you can buy a dedicated hardware device that will protect
you from like 95 percent of the attacks and hackers and stuff in this space.
At that point, once you withdraw to your Trezor, Ledger, Coldcard, whatever, there's a lot
of good ones out there, then the primary issue you have to deal with then is just a simple
data backup problem of where is your seed phrase, your key backup so that if your house
burns down, you don't lose everything.
But what we do at Casa, we're more on the high end where if you have a life-changing
amount of money, if you have an amount that would really hurt you financially to lose,
that's when you want to start looking at a solution like what we provide where you start
getting into a multi-key architecture.
So we basically put you into a setup such that it's not just a single key because this
is a single point of failure.
We architect a setup so that we're really eliminating single points of failure so that
you can't have one mistake, one human error that results in a catastrophe.
And the way that we do that is pretty simple.
We put keys on different devices in different geographic locations that have different security
properties around them, which basically makes it really, really, really hard to lose enough
of them or to have enough of them destroyed or taken by an attacker that you get locked
out of your own money.
I'm interested in that idea.
Is it Casa.com or Casa.net or how do you get a hold of Casa?
You can go to keys.casa.
K-E-Y-S dot C-A-S-A.
Keys dot Casa.
Okay.
So you're suggesting that the normal way now, which is a bunch of different phrases that
are your backup to get to your wallet, you have a way of setting up something where there's
more safety than that.
If you lose all that, you don't lose everything.
Is that effectively what you just said?
Yeah, pretty much.
Right now, when people take self-custody, the vast majority of them, they're just putting
it onto a single key.
And so now, if anything happens to that, if you don't back it up, if it gets lost, if
the device it's on gets destroyed, there's a lot of things that can go wrong.
And if something does go wrong and you don't have a backup to recover from, then there's
no one in the world who can get your money back.
There is no support line for Bitcoin.
So when you get a little ledger, those little devices that hold your...
What happens if that device gets smashed to smithereens?
There's still a way to recover from that?
Yeah, if you have backed up that seed phrase.
So when you buy it and you initially set it up, it gives you 12 or 24 words.
And those are literally the keys to the kingdom.
It's English words, but they really get turned into a cryptographic key pair.
And they tell you, "Oh, just write down these words on a piece of paper and put it somewhere
safe."
And unfortunately, there's an entire mountain of best practices and knowledge hidden under
there and things that can go wrong, which don't really get covered very well by the
hardware manufacturers.
So to set up something where you no longer have to worry about a single mistake causing
catastrophe requires using a solution that either you spend a lot of time architecting
or that some entity like us has spent a lot of time architecting.
I wonder in the FTX situation and all the others, when you saw these initial listing
of coins that were taking place on exchanges and all different kinds of coins, not Bitcoin,
but just other types of, I won't use the word other people use for some of these coins,
but just say other coins.
I wonder in your opinion, did the whole FTX thing happen because of just greed?
What was the reason why it happened?
Because a ton of people put a ton of money into FTX, and a lot of it seemed to be chasing
other coins other than Bitcoin.
I've actually pointed out in a recent article I wrote that said that effectively he did
us a favor because Bitcoin is the standard.
It's not been busted.
You can't steal it from somebody.
No one's ever hacked it.
And I'm just curious as your thoughts about why FTX happened in your opinion.
Yeah, well, you know, the funny thing about that is that after it was all said and done,
we found out FTX actually didn't have any Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin withdrawals, when things started falling apart, the Bitcoin withdrawals just
failed.
They had a number of other coins and they especially had the FTT token, which was the
coin that they themselves created out of thin air and were doing all types of leverage trading
with.
But the short version is that it was a failure of company controls and traditional financial
best practices.
They created this whole web of interrelated companies, and specifically they had their
trading hedge fund that was basically given a backdoor with unlimited margin that was
using customer funds to trade on.
So like there was just rampant fraud and theft happening under the hood there.
And that was all just accounting.
Now this is why we say not your keys, not your coins.
It's because when you give your money to a third party, whether it's a crypto exchange
or just a traditional bank or whatever financial service, you don't actually know what is happening
to the money after that.
It's like it's a complete black box.
So you have to completely trust what they're doing under the hood.
And in this case, they were doing some really shady stuff that ended up blowing up.
Did you think that all that was basically greed driven or was there some other mechanism?
Because to see that they didn't really have Bitcoin was kind of mesmerizing to me.
Like I just can't understand why we need to make this so much more complicated.
Yeah, well, you know, I had my skepticism about Sam for a long time and that was just
completely based upon his demeanor and that he never seemed to hold any of the ideals
of the space.
Like he didn't seem to care about things like censorship, resistance or self custody or
whatever.
Like it was clear all along that he was a traitor.
He was just motivated to do whatever it took to increase his wealth.
And we had the whole effective altruism narrative around that, which you can believe or not
believe.
But the result of that is that I think that his moral compass was a bit off there because
he felt like he was doing it for the greater good, despite the fact that he was harming
people along the way.
And it felt like until the very end, he, I think, thought that he could dig himself out
of that situation.
Got it.
Yeah, I think he still thinks he can dig himself out of that situation.
When it was going a certain way, and they discover 5 billion of new crypto there, I
just think about that scenario and think to myself, well, people were putting the money
in for a reason.
What was the reason you think for FTX coin, their FTT coin?
I'm asking like what was in their mind when you get sold that idea?
What do you think is taking place at the time?
We have the benefit of hindsight, but did you own any FTT coin yourself?
No, I never used FTX.
I've never touched any of those exchange coins.
I'm kind of skeptical of all of the exchange tokens myself.
But my understanding from the people that I've talked to was that FTX did have a pretty
good interface for traders.
It was actually, it was a pretty good way of executing trades.
They had a lot of liquidity.
I think they were one of the very few derivatives exchanges, and so that attracted a lot of
market makers as well.
And the thing that really irks me though, is that some of the larger players and these
well respected funds and market makers, they knew that there was shady stuff going on at
FTX.
They probably didn't suspect it was the level of fraud that it was.
But I went around and I've asked, why were you using it if you suspected that it was
shady?
And the short version is, you got to play the game.
And if they knew their competitors were playing the game on FTX, but they weren't, then you're
missing out on potential revenue there.
So I think there's a bigger story and question around the sort of self-regulation of this
space.
Because like we said, we talked about Mount Gox, it was 2014, many years ago.
And there have been a whole slew of major catastrophes and custodian exchange failures
since.
And what happens every time something major blows up, a lot of people lose a lot of money,
and then for the next month or so, we talk about, hey, we should do proof of reserves
or we should implement some other best practices.
And then people get bored and they moved on.
So I think that's going to continue happening until we get some sort of coalition of major
players together to say, we need some standards and say that we're not going to give these
people our business unless we have reason to believe that they're at least doing some
basic best practices.
Where do you like to buy your Bitcoin?
Where do you buy that?
Well, my favorite exchange for a long time has been Kraken.
From a security standpoint, they have been really solid.
Now for traders, they may not like it as much because I think they don't have quite the
diversity of tokens to choose from as some of the other exchanges.
And when you buy from Kraken, do you have it delivered to one of your own specialty
products like Casa?
Yeah, my general go to is to treat exchanges like public restrooms.
You want to get in and get out as quickly as possible.
Wow.
Wow.
I've never heard anyone say that, but I will not forget it.
If you don't mind, I might borrow it, but I will give you credit for it.
You bet.
Tell us about Bitco.
I mean, I know who Bitco is.
Are you still involved with them at all or are you completely on your own now?
No, I mean, other than of course being a shareholder.
I worked on Bitco for about three years in the early days when it was targeting helping
exchanges and other enterprise custodians.
The whole idea was these exchanges have to run hot wallets.
They have to be able to regularly process transactions, which means they have to have
their sensitive key material online.
This is a security nightmare for these bearer assets.
So Bitco basically was the first to offer enterprise grade multi-signature wallet.
Idea being that they would have a key, we would have a key, we'd have a whole bunch
of business rules and logic and security mechanisms around how to co-assign transactions and just
try to reduce more of those single points of failures.
It wasn't perfect, but we certainly upped the bar when it came to hot wallet security
for exchanges.
Are they still providing that?
Yeah, yeah.
Still ongoing.
They've added a whole slew of other services in the years since then.
To their credit, we have seen a vast drop off in exchange hot wallet hacks in the recent
years.
These days, exchange collapses tend to more often be due to just straight up exit scams
or fraud rather than a hacker getting into the exchange and draining all the money.
What's your take on the status of the market right now?
What's your take on Bitcoin and the overall crypto market?
I'm still mining away.
We have thousands and thousands, 20-some thousand miners.
I think we've made about $150 million investment.
We're pot committed.
I still own Bitcoin myself.
I'm a massive believer, but I can see how...
I'm also a student of the actual market, a student of the stock market.
I've been an investor.
I ran a hedge fund for so many years.
I've seen these boom bust cycles.
If you look at the bust of FTX, it looks like a bottom to me.
It really looked like a bottom.
I actually bought more in December.
I thought it looked like a bottom.
I bought and I've been buying every day.
I buy every day.
But then I don't want to be the lone wolf out there.
What's your thoughts of the current crypto market and specifically if you could talk
about Bitcoin also after you talk about the crypto market itself?
Yeah, these market cycles have been interesting because it seems like each cycle is different.
I've been looking at a number of statistics over the past several cycles.
The vast majority of the statistics that I saw for activity in the 2017-2018 cycle that
I was expecting would essentially repeat in this cycle did not happen at all.
I think that that's for a few reasons.
I think this past cycle was more institutional driven than retail driven.
It was also more credit bubble driven than actual spot volume buying and holding.
I think that was really, obviously that was the big surprise and that's what resulted
in a lot of these blow ups is just so much leverage getting put into the system that
it wasn't really clear that that was happening because it was being obfuscated through all
of these different large parties lending to each other.
Once again, on closed books, behind closed doors and these black boxes that you can't
actually see.
And so eventually when that all starts to unravel, it happens really quickly.
So where do we go from here?
It's clear we're essentially a year into a good old fashioned bear market.
I do think that the worst is over.
It seems like everything is pretty much unraveled at this point.
And so the only real question from my perspective is, how long does it take for interest to
come back?
And usually that can be a year or two, but you never know what might happen at the macro
level that might drive more people in.
I mean, I certainly would not have expected that a global pandemic would have driven huge
demand for crypto assets, but you never know what might happen next.
Are you Bitcoin central or are you agnostic in the sense that you believe in other forms
of crypto also?
Because I've been learning a lot about Chainlink and Algorand and the validation on chain of
certain behaviors.
And I actually see a use case for it a lot more than I used to.
That doesn't mean I want to invest in it necessarily, because I like Bitcoin and I believe that
since there's only going to be 21 million, I believe in its security.
And so from a pure asset allocation perspective, I think you got to have Bitcoin.
But do you believe in other things other than Bitcoin?
I mean, the short answer is yes.
I mean, I'm a technologist and so I've felt for a long time that the real empowering aspect
of this technology, which is cryptography plus blockchain plus the game theory of creating
the incentives that actually drive these networks, it means that there will be quite a few of
them.
And the cost for creating new ones is incredibly low unless you're doing something very, very
novel.
But for me, the problem is more one of limited time and resources.
After a decade, I understand Bitcoin very well.
And I am 100% confident that it's not going to be broken or go away.
With any of these other things, especially the newer they are, the more complicated they
are, the more effort is required to actually understand the system.
And that's because there is more to these systems than just some software or code.
It really is about a lot of the game theory incentives and not just short term, but also
long term.
If you're investing for a period of many years, then I would treat a lot of these things similar
to like a sort of angel investing mindset.
You might put a little bit here or there, but you have to understand that the risk compared
to Bitcoin for almost any of these other networks is insanely high.
Right.
Right.
I guess I'm just fascinated with the validation of like we have a gaming model and it's going
to be open and validated on chain where people can see and test and look at the randomizer
and validate the transactions.
I think in that regard, I guess it's really advanced new technology where effectively
you should be able to be able to check on people's work and not eliminate.
I don't know if you can ever eliminate fraud, but you can eliminate a lot of the bad actors
out there.
I mean, is that your belief in what blockchain can do?
Yeah.
So what are we really talking about?
We're creating these open networks where fundamentally each of these blockchains, each of these protocols,
you're creating your own network.
You're creating really a new game and you're defining the rules of that game.
So I think a lot of people make mistakes because they may assume that all of these other games
that people are creating are somehow competing with Bitcoin.
And that's not necessarily the case.
You may create a protocol and a network that's trying to do something completely different.
Maybe it's not even trying to be nation state resistant like Bitcoin.
Maybe it's more of a consortium or federation of enterprises that's helping facilitate something.
So you have to ask the question, what are we trying to accomplish with this technology?
What's the security model?
Just understand what the different attributes are that you're trying to achieve, and does
the software and the incentives of the system actually achieve whatever the claim is?
Because it's very easy, and this is certainly what happened in 2017, very easy to put a
white paper out that makes a lot of egregious claims, but then they don't actually deliver.
I'm told by my producer you try to avoid public appearances.
Are you still doing that?
So my main thing with privacy is to keep my physical location or home or whatever as secret
as possible because I don't want to have a sneak attack happen again.
I do go to conferences and stuff because my security model is that it's unlikely someone
is going to come up and physically attack me when I'm in front of a thousand people.
I think that's generally probably okay.
That's the thing about my privacy though.
A lot of people sort of retorted when I put out various articles about the extreme privacy
measures I put in place.
They're like, "Well, you're still on Twitter.
If you really cared about privacy, you would just delete everything."
But as you know, we're public figures.
We have built a reputation over many years, and I don't want to just burn down my reputation
and no longer be able to use that to further the causes of what I've been working on for
the past 10 years.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I'm sure people ask you this all the time.
What are your long-term predictions for what happens with Bitcoin price-wise?
My long-term prediction is that it can go to anything, and the main reason for that
is that there is no cap on the total amount of fiat that gets printed.
There's an infinite amount of money at the Federal Reserve, as the saying goes.
The result is, there's no ceiling on the Bitcoin price because there's no ceiling on the amount
of dollars and other fiat that's going out.
Well, I've never looked at it that way.
Wow.
I've always thought there's no ceiling on the number of Bitcoin that'll be produced.
There is a ceiling.
I mean, excuse me, pardon me, that's the opposite.
There's a ceiling of 21 million, and I've looked at it and said, "Well, how many millionaires
are there in the world?" and figured out what would that be, one Bitcoin per millionaire.
The math isn't there.
The demand would be parabolic, and then when you transactionalize it a little bit, that's
a good thought.
There's no ceiling to the amount of Bitcoin that can be bought with fiat currency.
People ask, "Is Bitcoin going to be worth a million or $10 million or whatever?"
But I think eventually you get to the point where it doesn't even matter anymore.
The dollar essentially becomes worthless, as many other fiat currencies tend to do.
It's really more a question of time.
The dollar has done a very good job of holding its value compared to many other fiat currencies
out there, but the history of these currencies over multi-decade timeframes tends to not
be very good.
The funny part about it, as I talk all the time about, people think of the dollar today
and they don't realize how, based on how long we've been around, how short of a timeframe
the dollar has been around and what it looked like even 50, 60 years ago when the Bank of
Illinois was printing their own dollars, when you would print them at local reserves and
you'd print them at local banks and even had their own different forms of dollars.
We think of it as impenetrable, and I don't want to say the best of the worst, but it's
the best of all the fiat that's out there.
It's backed by bullets, effectively.
It's backed by oil production and bullets.
You further see the dollar strengthen when you see Russia do what it did to its own people
and to Ukraine.
People go, "Do I want to own those rubles because I can get wiped out in one day?
I can get my stuff taken away from me."
And then you've seen the yen go basically nowhere for 20-something years.
I mean, recently it's done some stuff.
So it is the best of what we have in the fiat world.
I assume you agree with that, right?
Yeah.
There are things that are changing.
The level of debt that America has to service, that is also going to the moon, so to speak.
There's definitely a question of, is there some inflection point at which that really
starts to negatively impact our ability to remain the currency of the world?
Don't you think there's going to be one day where every person discovers that they need
Bitcoin?
Because in the world of digital assets, people say, "Well, the US dollar is going to be digitized."
Well, it kind of already is, right?
I mean, I can just use Zelle.
And I'm not buying the US dollar so it can appreciate other than if it appreciates against
another form of fiat currency.
And I'm not buying the US dollar to appreciate against Bitcoin.
So is there any other choice?
I'm just curious in your mind.
When I look at all the math, I go, "I don't know if there's any other choice."
In your mind, is there some other choice other than Bitcoin?
I mean, if you think about in terms of you could own hard assets, which is, they're denominated
in dollars for sure, right?
But they're going to have a certain amount of innate value if you buy the right hard
asset.
But what other choice do people have other than to that dollar to be deflated?
It costs more money aggregate, costs go up.
But this Bitcoin where you don't have to pay to service it, you don't have to pay a fee,
there's no cost to retain it.
When I own a piece, a bunch of actually, a lot of real estate, and it costs me money
every month to keep that real estate going.
Yeah, you don't really own it.
Yeah, you don't really own it because it can take it away from you.
In fact, if I don't pay my HOA fees, they put a lien on my house, right?
So effectively, isn't Bitcoin one of the purest assets out there?
But you see Charlie Munger, it's a longer question, but you start Charlie Munger like
just jawboning it to death.
But is he not just jawboning his own book?
Because the reality for him is that some of his business like World Book Encyclopedia,
if you were just the owner of that company, that got eviscerated by technology, right?
Microsoft started putting the CD-ROM out and the encyclopedia was on it, no one to buy
it anymore.
So what am I missing that people don't understand about how this may be the purest form of holding
an asset that doesn't cost you a thing to service it?
Yeah, you know, Munger and Buffett, they have built impressive empires by diversifying across
many different assets very thoughtfully.
And so they've managed to avoid catastrophic loss in that way.
The interesting thing about Bitcoin compared to any other assets, even various hard assets
and physical things, is that it gives you this level of security that has actually never
been possible before.
And this all goes back to the multi-key distribution stuff that we do at Casa, which is that you
can create a security model for this asset that is stronger than any bank, that is stronger
than any vault, that cannot be penetrated by the world's most powerful army, you know,
if you architect it correctly, because you're basically eliminating the single point of
failure, which includes the ability for some authority to come in and just seize your asset.
So from the defensibility perspective, and I'm the security guy, so that's usually the
first thing that I look at, that's very interesting.
And then you essentially have something that it acts kind of like a hard asset from an
investment perspective.
And then like we said, you can secure it more easily and far better than a hard asset.
But also you can teleport it around the world nearly instantaneously without having to ask
permission from anyone to do so.
So it's this weird amalgamation of like internet and communication age plus hard sovereign
assets that I think it's very hard to find that combination in any other asset.
For security purposes, I'd love to talk about how do they get a hold of, is it Keys or KeyCasa?
Keys with K-E-Y-S?
Keys.Casa.
Yeah.
Keys.Casa.
We're going to put that up in the links down below, obviously with the podcast.
Obviously security is a big deal.
I appreciate all the work you're doing.
When we leave today and you talk about security, what should we be telling people right now
about what they're doing today?
Like I want to like them to hear you clear as day saying, these are the things you should
worry about.
If you own say two or three Bitcoin, you know, that's 20, 30, 40, 70, a hundred thousand
dollars worth of Bitcoin and you want to protect that.
How do they go about doing that?
Yeah, you know, it's not something that you can cover in just one or two sentences, but
I do have a very comprehensive website full of resources that they can just go to Bitcoin.page
and I've got all of the like wallet and security guides that are set up there.
But the short version is, like I said, if you're at that level of sort of intermediate
to medium amount of value that it would hurt to lose, then you only really need to spend
a hundred or $200 to actually get the sort of the hardware setup that you need.
But it's the best practices and the understanding of how do you actually employ that correctly
to make sure that you don't have a single mistake happen that results in catastrophic
loss.
So where do people go to listen to other things you talk about?
Because I presume you're an educator too.
It's the way you talk, the way you hold yourself out.
It seems like you're educating people.
Where do they go to educate it at?
I have every article and podcast and any presentation I've ever done is actually on my website at
lop.net.
Jameson Lopp, I appreciate your time.
I know this is a little unusual for me because we just talked about security only and I could
have proselytized about what I think about Bitcoin, but I'd really like to learn more
about your products.
So Keys Kasa, when a person uses that service, do they pay a fee, like a monthly fee to be
part of that?
How do they, is it a subscription?
How do they use your service?
Yeah, so we are a annual subscription based service.
We have several different tiers.
One is as low as about $10 a month.
That's more of the sort of do it yourself, we'll give you sort of email support.
Our higher level tiers are more in the range of several thousand dollars a year.
And what you're really paying for there is a concierge class service of having an actual
human who specializes in understanding all of the complexities around self custody, who
you can talk to on the phone or have a video call with, which is something that's almost
unheard of in this space.
It's very hard to get actual human support, especially during bull markets when everybody
is trying to figure out what is going on, how do I use this stuff?
Exchanges are like public restrooms.
You want to get in there, use it, and get out as quickly as you can.
James Nalop, I appreciate your time.
That was fun.
You're definitely obviously educated in the security space.
We will be putting up a lot of stuff about you and obviously our pre-podcast before we
play it live.
Hopefully everyone can learn something about security.
I feel bad for the people out there that really didn't practice it.
And unfortunately, you probably have a generation of people that have gotten burned at FTX and
other exchanges where they've left their crypto there and didn't follow your advice, which
I presume you've been giving out for years about why they should be banking themselves.
But I'm sure this is a topic that you and I are going to talk about again.
And I hope you come back.
I appreciate you being understanding about this being settlement day for something for
me.
I'm going to check all your stuff out, obviously.
I know BitGo, we custodian at a major institution who's been in the news recently ourselves.
So this is a topic that I'm pretty nervous about.
I'd love to discuss with you privately.
Maybe there's an opportunity for you to look at our protocol because we obviously get a
lot of Bitcoin every day from our mining.
And to say that I'm not nervous is a lie.
I'm incredibly nervous.
And but nervousness brings opportunity.
Hopefully we can learn from you.
Appreciate your time.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Great to have you and always happy to talk about our solutions.
And we very well may have something that would work for you too.
And we see a number of teams who actually split between having some funds in custody
and some in self custody as sort of a hedge.
Yeah, I think as a public company, we have a different level that our auditor requires
us.
And the interesting thing about Bitcoin, and I want to say this to you, is that we're having
the hardest trouble banking with people.
It's really miserable, to be honest with you.
We've had so many banks, we're with them and they kick us out later because we Bitcoin
mine.
It's just really, it makes no sense to me about how you could do some on Coinbase with
all these banks, but we can't do it.
So really, it's still the Wild West, in my opinion, still a long ways to go.
The services of CASA and the stuff you're doing, consulting, is going to be needed for
a long time as Bitcoin gets adopted.
But I, like you, believe it's going to be a major adoption, it's going to continue on.
And I think it's almost, you know, Greg Foss, a guy I really like, has said it's almost
the purest form of asset he's ever seen.
This coming from a guy from a credit standpoint.
So I'm a big believer and I'm really thrilled that you were on the show and hopefully we'll
loop back, I'll talk to my producer and see if there's a time where when there's another
topic we can do something together.
We have a Bitcoin conference every year.
I'd love to invite you to that and we'll work on that security thing for you.
So we'll make sure we have good security at these conferences because a lot of people,
I have some haters out there myself.
So take care.
Great.
Thanks.
Be well.
Namaste to you.
Don't be wrong yet.
There's a reason for it.
I did get that right.