Jameson Lopp. Good afternoon. Zach. Thanks for coming on the show. Well, it was awfully
convenient so I decided to drop by. Yeah, well, the perks of being coworkers. so we're,
we were going to do a little something different this episode and not talk so much about Bitcoin.
We'll get to it, but this, the context of this and what we've been planning is really
to talk about the history of email, right? That was your work before Bitcoin and how
it got to the, I think he was like abomination or how it got to the state that it is today.
so maybe just start off like explaining what, what is email on the most basic sense
and what is the email protocol? How are they different? Right. So when we talk about email
as a protocol, we're specifically talking about SMTP, which is a simple mail transfer
protocol. And this, this thing has been around for decades. It
wasn't really popularized, I guess, until AOL in the nineties. And then of course it
is really gone mainstream and billions of people are using email on a daily basis, but
it has a very long storied, complex history. And the sort of the nature of email has
changed a lot over time. And so if you want, we can just start at the very beginning where
things were simple and then talk about the layers of complexity that have arisen.
Yeah. Let's, let's start there. So what was the early days of email like? Cause most of
everyone listening is not probably not privy to that. Most people use the Gmail and stuff
of today. Yeah. the very first iterations I believe were actually used on
ARPANET. So this was the predecessor to what we consider to be the internet, the world
wide web, as it is today that really became a thing in the early to mid nineties. And
so back then ARPANET was really a series of like military and academic installations that
were on this very early internet. it was very intensive to get on to ARPANET
and there was, it was a very small community and pretty much everybody knew each other.
It was a very gracious community. Like, it was a bunch of nerds
who were willing to help each other out because they saw the potential of this new thing and
they, they basically wanted to help bootstrap it.
ARPANET meaning the, what does that stand for? The, I don't even really know what the
acronym is. It's so, it's so, so long, long since he used. So it was a sort of fringe
thing in the early days of email, bunch of nerds working on this protocol as you said.
And how did it get to the, I mean, what were like, how did it get to us? Like, you know,
we use it for everything today and critical communications. What, what, what, what happened
that it evolved so quickly and so differently?
Yeah. Well, it was like a lot of technologies, it evolved very
slowly and then it evolved very suddenly. And so, for the first few decades,
it was very slow and there was not a whole lot of innovation or, or even 
people trying to break it or abusing it really the, the, the first abuse of it
or the first notion of a spam email, I think was in the 1980s and it was basically
one sales guy. And I forget what he was selling, some enterprise software or something. Uh,
and he sent out a spam email to basically the entire internet at the time. Wow. And
it got a lot of backlash and enough backlash that really nobody tried to send spam emails
for probably another 10, 15 years, until, the internet started going mainstream
again. But, according to him, he made, he made something like $13 million in sales
from that one email.
Because spam was effective back then. Cause you really, he was the only one, there's no
competition.
And so why, I mean, it, was it something to do with spam that made people not run their
own mail or like, why, why don't people run their own mail servers? Like they run Bitcoin
nodes today.
Yeah. Now that is the really long, complex, question of what changed over
the years. I mean, the simple answer is, asking anyone to run any sort of 24
seven service, is, is kind of an operational task that I think is generally going to be
relegated to the nerds, because it, it requires ongoing resources and maintenance
and the willingness to, to maintain something, so that it's, it has uptime
and it's always responsive because when you're talking about internet protocols, generally,
this is a dynamic thing where two computers are talking to each other.
And so if one computer is not responding correctly, then it's broken. So, 
what happened, not a lot happened, until AOL came along and, and when was
that like, roughly early, mid nineties. so, before that it was very
limited, unless you were some, some sort of academic or military researcher, you
probably didn't have access to ARPANET, but AOL came along and then the sort of commercial
internet as we know it, and all the other ISPs came along and now suddenly
anybody who had a phone line could be connected to the internet. And so all of these ISPs
naturally started offering email as one of their core services. way back
then the worldwide web, when your commercial internet was a thing, it was so tiny. So I
would argue that email was probably more interesting and valuable to people in the very early days
of the internet than the actual worldwide web.
Then the web pages.
Yeah, because now, you could instantly talk to anyone else who was also on that network.
Now, as soon as that happened, other sales people realized this is a new sales channel
that has basically zero cost to reach millions of people.
And it's not a competition either.
Right. And, and so the, the nature of, of email or of the SMTP protocol is actually
rooted in reliability. So it's all about being able to send a message and be very,
very confident that that message will get to the intended recipient. And this
is, this is the same way that the internet itself was architected, right? It was meant
to be a way to pass messages around the world, even in the case of, nuclear war
where there was massive devastation.
Is that like how UDP, cause I've seen the memes where like UDP just sends the message,
doesn't wait for confirmation.
Yeah, it's a different type of protocol. there's so many different internet protocols
out there and they all have different pros and cons and trade offs.
So what was it about AOL? Cause you said like it was pretty niche until AOL came on the
scene and then it became like commercialized and people started, all kinds of salespeople
from all kinds of companies started, started using email. So what did AOL have some, some
particular breakthrough or product or just good user experience? Like why was it that
moment that led to that, explosion of, of new users on the, on the internet and
mail protocol?
Right. So before the nineties, like I said, it was mostly military and academic
installations that were running email servers. in the early nineties, we started
to see corporations start to do it because, at the enterprise level, you would
have full time nerds who could manage that infrastructure. And, and then within a few
years, the, the commercialization of, the retail users and these other enterprises
that started offering email, not just for their own internal employees, but
for any, subscriber to their service. That's when you saw the hockey stick growth
of like, total number of email users.
So before that it was, it was just like your company email address. There was no mail as
a service that any end user could just sign up for. Yeah. That doesn't make sense. Like
I have my like Zach at Casa and it's like most of the emails, like the, the company
related, but at that point, like the, having it like at Gmail or at AOL, that was
the sort of breakthrough where you could use these other people's mail domain names
in terms of mainstream adoption. now in terms of like the technical way that the email
servers were operating, like I said, they were all focused on reliability. So the early
days, these email servers would actually, they would not only accept email, like for
your own corporation, but they would often do something called, acting as an open
relay where they would accept email for almost anything and then try to forward on that message,
basically the same way the internet itself works with like routing messages. Um,
so this was like one of the first things that really got abused is, is that, the spammers,
even possibly before AOL, the spammers realized, oh, there's these corporate networks
out there and there are thousands and thousands of, of end user inboxes that I can reach,
by sending one message to the main email server for this corporation, it will
go to thousands of people. and then basically that same tactic got magnified orders of magnitude
when the retail, and commercialization of the internet came along.
And, and so did, did people, they did, I guess they just didn't have the, like your everyday
end user, it was just, was it easier? Was it more reliable to, to get mail? Cause you
think it's like one of the most critical parts was the certainty of deliverability of the
message, right? So it was at that, is it too technical out of reach or, or, or maybe a
combination of both and why, why that occurred?
So the, the reliability, that was the main, valuable aspect, you
know, it's the instant transportation and communication and the reliability that that
would happen was why email, adoption was so effective, but it was also what resulted
in the spam, being highly adopted and being effective as a marketing tool.
Cause there was a single point to spam. Yeah. Yeah. Because, well it, it greatly decreased
the costs, of, of reaching people. And, and so what happened was the, the, the
costs started to be imposed upon the email server operators. So when the, when the spammers
started getting onto these networks and, sending messages to thousands of people,
the, the email operators at the corporations and at the ISPs, they, they
started seeing their servers, slow down, crash, just have massive spikes in volume
of what was being processed. And, they, and of course they were getting lots
of complaints from the users as well. And so they, they were the ones who were faced
with this problem. so essentially, the, the, the onus of this problem of
spam was, on the, the recipient side. So it was, it was kind of a one sided problem.
Like the spammer could just blast out stuff and, and be fairly, reliable,
that their messages were going to get to the intended destination. So it was a sort
of asymmetry that started causing problems and started really pushing forward the evolution
of what resulted in email becoming very different.
So was it the, I mean, is spam prevention something that's challenging to accomplish
effectively? And was it that the centralized servers like AOL and Google and Yahoo, were
they just much more effective and had the resources to actually deal with this problem
better?
Yeah, well, so there were a variety of techniques that were used over the years and, you
know, this became a cat and mouse game, between the spammers and the email server
operators, trying to keep the, the signal to noise ratio for all of their end
users, relatively high. So, what was one of the, really one of the first
things that happened was the email server operator stopped. they turned off, you
know, open relay policies and they said, we're, we're no longer going to relay stuff to other
servers. We're only going to worry about accepting emails for our own domain. Basically. Um,
that worked for a very short period of time. but then, they realized
they needed to start figuring out a way to reject email. And the problem here was actually
that this was in direct conflict with really the primary goal and architecture of email
as a protocol, which is message reliability. so they started, there were
some changes to the protocol to, add some codes around, your, your
emails been rejected temporarily or permanently or whatever. but the, like the specifics
of how and why you might reject that could be pretty arbitrary. And so the, one of the
first things that we saw instituted in, I believe the mid to late nineties was this
idea of content filtering. you may have heard of things like, Bayesian, filters,
which was, spam assassin was a really popular piece of software that did that. And
really the idea around that is, we look at all the spam that's happening and
we look for patterns and then we essentially have kind of, kind of like regular expressions.
we were looking for patterns in the content that, and then we essentially
score the content of the email that's coming in. And if it's, if it's above a certain threshold,
we say this is probably spam, it is unwanted. And that, that kind of worked, but
it also had a lot of false positives. So now we started having non-spam emails getting
flagged as spam, which was causing the opposite problem, but, but, or it was still causing
a problem with the signal to noise ratio. There's the signal was not always getting
through
in a protocol where the deliverability is supposed to be the most, one of the most important
parts. Yep. but, but the protocol has no concept of spam or of, desired
versus undesired messaging.
So I think that's actually, it makes me think like, how, how does one define spam? Is there
a, sort of widely regarded open standard between the major mail providers? Like this
fits the definition of, obviously it's quite complex, I'm sure, but just like in general,
is there a...
Right. well it's, it's subjective and arbitrary, but the definition
of spam is an unwanted message. and so there is no like technical definition for
that other than like a human telling you, I did not want, I did not ask for it. I did
not want this message. So, what happened after your content filtering kind
of petered out as, as being a worthwhile anti-spam measure? well it really turned into reputation
and reputation, can be kind of qualified in a number of different ways, but one of
them was, IP address reputation is like, we're going to look at all of the,
the email coming from your IP address. And if the content is always looking spammy or
if our users are giving us feedback that there's a lot of spam, then we're going to start to,
consider everything from your IP address to be spam and essentially black hole it,
and not accept it.
All right. And now, now we're getting to that point where it's no longer permissionless
is it's censorship and the, the, the individual mail providers are sort of playing a dictator
in that way on what is, what is allowed to get through to the other side, the intended
message recipient and what isn't.
Yeah. but the thing is, a lot of the solutions to spam were actually developed
as like third party businesses. So all of these email reputation businesses sprang into
existence, things where they were operating, blacklists that you could essentially
subscribe to, or, the idea is this company is listening to a lot of the email
you have feedback for, for other email operators and aggregating it all together and creating
and managing their own blacklists. there's various like sender reputation services that
you can opt into and do things to configure aspects of your email so that it will be considered
less spammy.
But but essentially what we're talking about is a gatekeeping is what's starting to happening.
It's like the cost of doing all of these things is also rising, which is continuing to price
out, smaller players from being able to effectively use email.
Do you, do you think it was a mistake that the, the, the, the, the spam prevention measures
were taken sort of off protocol and done by private independent third parties?
yes. In the sense that it opened it up to being very arbitrary, and also, you
know, imposed a lot of costs. You're part of the problem is that everyone was looking
at this as a recipient problem or as a problem for the ISPs or the ESPs, the email service
providers. And that's what I worked for was an email service provider. So, you know,
at my company, we, we were really more on the sending side. and we had thousands
of clients sending many, many millions of emails through our infrastructure every day.
And our job was to do everything humanly possible to, ensure the deliverability of those
messages, which if you kind of think about it is kind of ridiculous because the protocol
itself is supposed to ensure deliverability. But, but what happened was all of these walls
and really the gatekeeping by, the big players, the tech giants and ISPs and the
reputation services were what started causing problems for our clients who were mostly,
on online retail, trying to market and sell stuff to people.
And that's, that's an especially big gray area, right? You're trying to sell stuff to
people. And then, we were trying to help our clients be able to navigate in
both the legal and the, the technical aspects of how, how can you send sales and marketing
messages that are wanted, so they're, they're not, they're not considered that they're
not considered spam by the people who receive them.
And more importantly, they're not considered spam by the intermediaries who are needed
to approve and relay the messages to get to the recipient.
Right. This, as you're saying that it makes, it makes me think of Nostra in some ways today
where the relays, there's so many of the free and open relays today, but there's already,
developing a market for these paid relays. It seems like a similar, problem is sort
of...
It's probably going to be the exact same problem. and, and I wrote a whole article about
this recently. and well, we have the solution, which is great. we didn't have, well,
we had a theoretical solution in 1997, I guess. but so, the, the solution is
to flip the cost problem, away from the recipients and onto the senders.
The ones who are doing this spam.
Yes. because when you can impose a cost upon sending the message, you're turning
it from this arbitrary categorization problem, which is what leads people down the road of
like looking at content or creating the idea of reputation. and, and, and when you
go down the reputation aspect, that's when it turns into permissioned gatekeeping of
having to prove yourself, to be an honest player.
So if you, you flip it on its head and you impose an economic cost on the sender, then
you're really saying this sender believes that, whatever they're doing and
what the message that they're sending is worth, some amount of value to be able
to do this. Now the, the solution in 1997, Adam back, hash cash, uh,
that was actually a protocol level, improvement that he was recommending where you were literally
adding just a small amount of data, like one extra header to the email itself, you know,
probably like a hundred bytes of data. And, and that data would do a few things, but it
would basically say and prove mathematically that I, the sender have expended a certain
amount of CPU cycles and, electricity and value and resources in order to send this
message. And that in and of itself also, greatly, decreases like the, the volume
of messages that anyone sender can send out because you're, you're, you're creating this
bottleneck and resource costs.
Adam: So why didn't, I mean, cause I know Adam back's quite influential in Bitcoin and
it was quoted in the white paper. Why haven't that be a obvious problem that existed then
and having the solution presented some 20 something years ago, like why did that not
really get adopted into the mail protocol?
Josh: I mean, I think at least part of it was a, a network effect and a migration
problem. You can almost look at it as a hard fork versus soft fork problem, right? It's
like if, if you wanted at least as far as I've thought about it, if you wanted to implement,
hash cache, then you, in order for it to actually work, you would have to start
rejecting messages that didn't have a valid hash cache header. Now hash cache was to,
to be clear, it was implemented in spam assassin. And so that was done in a, I guess you could
call it a soft fork or backwards compatible way where if you have a valid hash cache header,
spam assassin would give you a negative score. It would say, Oh, this looks less spammy.
So it wasn't a black and white thing. but like I said, most email providers stopped
using hash or they stopped using spam assassin and content based filtering in general, uh,
for reputation. And now for actual, for, more often it's, it's less about the content
and it's more about actually user action and engagement that is used to decide what is
spam.
Like how they like, like how they're clicking where they're dragging their mouse.
Yeah. Yeah. and, and feedback from the user. and so, but, but so basically it
would have been very hard, to get consensus for every email user, even, even by the late
nineties, we're talking about millions of, of email because there's clients and servers,
yeah, to get, to get them all to agree to implement that. basically the email
as a protocol had ossified by then.
It's too late. Or, I mean, we've, we've discussed quite, quite a few negatives. I mean,
the obvious of using a centralized email services, the convenience and so forth. we've, we've,
we've discussed a few of the cons, which would be, the, the ability to not have permissionless
email or sort of like the man in the middle that's making sure. but then the pros
of being the reliability of it, what, what are some other, what are some other maybe
less obvious drawbacks, or, or positives to using, to using a centralized mail
server versus running, running one on your own, if that's even possible today.
Yeah. Today, I mean, it is theoretically possible, but it's such a high, cost to be able
to follow all of the other rules that have been developed outside of the protocol itself.
this is why entire companies exist to help people with that. I,
I myself, have never run my own personal email server because if you don't have a team
of experts doing it, it's way too much of a time suck. these days it's, you
can run the server and you can send a message from it and it might even work for a little
while, but it's basically guaranteed that you're going to get blacklisted at some point
and probably possibly not even due to your own actions. It could potentially even be
due to actions of people with, an IP address in the same range as yours. Um,
so there's a lot of other things that have happened. Like for example, a lot of, of email
providers, or even ISPs will block port 25 and the reason, and that's the SMTP port.
and the reason for that is that, one of the other things that spammers
did in the early days, they, they started writing malware that to run, in fact, everybody's
computer and send email directly from those computers. So when the ISPs had to deal with
that, what did they do? Well, they just blocked all the traffic from all residential connections
that were trying to send email.
I noticed that I was, cause I set up a Google cloud server and it wouldn't let me open,
cause I tried to run my own mail server and I was like, nope. That's actually what's
sort of led me down this thought of wanting to have this conversation with you is that
I was, I've, I've been using a Gmail for my, podcast email. And I was like, well,
it would look way more official if I had like, my own email domain, kind of like
you have. So, I mean, you have, cause you have app@lop.net. So how do you, if you're
not running your own mail server, how does one still get that, identity if
you will, even though, and maybe you could, could you explain the difference between having
something that looks like, that's identified and branded as your mail server
versus actually running your own mail server?
Right. So, basically you can set up DNS records, the MX records
basically for, that, that say, I own this domain and, and by the way, the
mail servers that handle email for this domain, incoming emails, these are the IP addresses
of those email servers. And all of that, like you said, it can look good,
but from a like personal sovereignty perspective, it's all third parties all the way down. Like
domain name system is third parties and controlled by ICANN, which is controlled by government
entities.
It wasn't supposed to be this way, right? Like this was not the initial vision of the
mail protocol. I, to my understanding.
Yeah. I mean, the idea of, of an internet protocol is that anyone who follows
the technical specification of the internet protocol should receive the guarantees that
that protocol provides. And that's really what we're talking about now is all of these
other meta rules that have been, slapped on top of the email protocol over a very long
period of time, decades, that have crippled the underlying protocol to the point that
it actually no longer works.
So it's like, it's not even really a protocol in the same way that we would look at Bitcoin's
rules as a protocol, right? Because if you as Bitcoiners, if you fit the rules, it's
it works. but this is, is not, not the case anymore. Were there, I mean, other than
the just slow and steady, shift towards centralization, which just maybe may
be due to laziness or lack of education or lack of a reason, other than that, like,
what do you think were some major perhaps mistakes or, or, or, or sort of things that
led us to, to get here in the development of evail over the last 20, 25 years, the critical
junctions that we crossed that maybe affected the outcome later on.
Yeah. I mean, there was no one single decision and there was, it wasn't a conspiracy. It
wasn't the result of some authority coming in. really it was, it was a matter of
incentives and people choosing the sort of naive easiest solution for stuff.
So they were looking out for their own individual incentives or like what's the, but isn't Bitcoin
in that with that same sort of game theory, like looking out for yourself somehow makes
the whole system work. it's the protocol sort of expects you to be selfish in a way
and a number of different ways. Yes. Like that's why, that's why Bitcoin has survived
for so long is because the incentives are pretty well aligned, but the, not in every
way though. the incentives, I would say like from a self sovereignty
perspective, the incentives in Bitcoin are not as perfectly aligned as I would like.
And we can already see plenty of examples of that. And really the biggest one is just
the fact that, the vast majority of people are acquiring their Bitcoin through a trusted
third party. And then the default, that's the default path. And then the default, uh,
next step is nothing and they just leave it with that trusted third party.
Right. And that to me is analogous to using the mail server that somebody else is running.
sure. You may, you may get, get your Bitcoin most of the time, or you may, if
when somebody sends a deposit to your address, normally you'll probably get it. But what
if, what if that provider decides, Oh, no, no, no, this isn't fit. This doesn't work.
Yeah, pretty much. So, if you in an optimal environment, if you were running
your own email server, then it should not be possible for you to be de-platformed, right?
You're sovereign as long as you have an internet connection, which, even the
ISPs themselves, but I mean, I've, I've, I've set up, multiple redundant
ISPs, just for that reason. But, now, with both like, your, your Gmail
account or your, Coinbase account or, or whatever, if you do, or if you do the
wrong thing or you don't do the right thing, or you're even just like living in the wrong
place, any number of arbitrary things that you do or do not do may result in, uh,
you being disenfranchised, your account shut down, you no longer have access to your, your
email or to your money or whatever. And so it's really the same type of problem.
Right. And, and so when you're using Bitcoin in this custodial way, you're essentially
taking a step backwards in a way and, or you're, you're, you're going the email problems that
were already figured out where we were kind of going backwards and not learning from those
mistakes that were made. Have we, have we already started making, I mean, clearly it
sounds like we are, we need to be cautious and quite alert about this because it sounds
like we're heading, or at least we could be heading down the wrong path when it comes
to Bitcoin and, and the protocol development. I mean, it's still early, right? We're, we're
less than 15 or basically 15 years in, and part of what sparked the nature of this
conversation was that I'm worried that if we don't take action sooner, this is that
critical juncture in time where it could be co-opted where if, if, five to 10
years from now, people are still major, by, by most cases using Coinbase as
their wallet, not using self custody. I, I fear that it may too be compromised and a
protocol level, especially once it becomes ossified.
Right. So there's, a big problem, which is a convenience. Like we have to assume that
the vast majority of people will take the path of least resistance, the most convenient
path. And so that's, that's why, right now it's actually, I believe a problem that
people get, they get onboarded through, not only centralized custodians,
but through the AML KYC regime, which greatly increases your deep platforming risk. Um,
and there are, there are certainly risks lower in the protocol. Like if we, if we look at
it from a scaling perspective, an optimistic take is that the, the scaling wars were
actually quite reminiscent of some of the email scaling history where, you know,
one of the big problems, the centralization that happened with email and the ecosystem
of email providers was the fact that higher and higher costs were getting, loaded
onto the email server operators, essentially the folks handling the receiving and processing
of all of this email. There's a nearly perfect parallel with the Bitcoin scaling debates
where a lot of the big companies, really the custodial exchanges, mostly in Bitcoin, what
did they say? They were saying we're having to deal with a higher load of sending and
receiving Bitcoin. And because the block size is constrained, it's creating a lot more.
So they wanted bigger blocks and they wanted to increase the cost and the load for running
a full node because that would have decreased their costs around like development and maintenance
and using the protocol more efficiently. and the Bitcoin ecosystem fought
back against that. And because of the incentives and the way that Bitcoin as a protocol works,
it was able to fend off that, you could call it an attack. Some people consider
an upgrade, it's, it's a matter of perspective, but from, from what we're
talking about, it would have been an attack on the sovereignty of being able to operate
as your own entity on the Bitcoin network. so I believe that from that perspective,
Bitcoin as a protocol has stronger, game theory around, selfishness
potentially making it more robust against what we have seen happen with email. but
there still is this commercialization aspect of the, the use of the protocol. And so this
is why, I mean, for over eight years, my focus has been on making self custody easier because
it's not the default and the, unless it gets easier and easier, fewer and
fewer relative like percentage of people who come in through these custodians are going
to even be interested in taking on the challenge and, the responsibility of self
custody. And, there's also just additional, costs around the, you know,
the complexity of, of using the protocol on a regular basis, which the, the centralized
providers have a much easier time of because they get to hide all of that stuff under the
hood and pretty much. So it's, it's a very interesting ongoing battle, you know,
for the sovereignty of people in this space.
And, and it sounds to me that you believe that we're still very much in that critical
point of, of the battle for sovereignty for Bitcoin's protocol development. Like we're,
we may have won the battle, the first, or maybe not even the first, but we may have
won the block size wars battle, which when you explain it like that, it seems encouraging,
rather than have succumbed to that centralized pressure. But it also sounds like that is
not the okay. We're not done yet. We can't hang up our caps and call it a day.
No. So, in 2017, when we finally got segregated witness, uh,
soft fork activated, that opened up a whole new slew of possibilities. And, you
know, now in the, the five, six years since then, we start to see lightning
and, and even other protocols on top of Bitcoin being developed, which have been spurred by
that. And, and, one of the concerning things is I certainly, especially with
some of the recent drama around inscriptions and stuff, I, I see concerning, black
and white, kind of judgment and behavior about protocol changes. Basically people saying
we need to ossify the protocol and never change it again. Now, from, from one
perspective that can be a good thing because it gives everyone, some, uh,
assurance that, you, you use Bitcoin as it is right now and no one's gonna rug
you by changing the protocol and breaking stuff. But the flip side of that, which actually
takes us back to 1997 with hash cash, imagine if hash cash had actually gotten merged
into the email protocol and how everything might have changed and you've gone very differently
over the next 20 years. so my point being that we should not, blindly exclude all
possibilities of protocol changes because they're very well, maybe protocol changes
out there that will actually increase sovereignty. And, at a very high level, one
example of that is if we want Bitcoin to go mainstream and we want a billion people or
billions of people to be sovereign Bitcoin holders, they need to have their own UTXOs
or we need to have new protocols for UTXO sharing that don't exist right now. And the
only way currently that I see forward will require protocol changes to enable that type
of stuff. So otherwise, if we also find the Bitcoin protocol right now, the only
way that I see Bitcoin adoption growing by orders of magnitude is if more people come
into centralized custodians and just leave all their money with the third party. And
what are we doing? We're essentially recreating the traditional banking system
with less privacy because everything is publicly broadcast. Huh. And so, I mean, is there this
sort of, it sounds, is there like a, some lessons that can be learned from the, from
the way that email's developed here to make sure that we can sort of track our progress
against, as we go through the next 10 to, five, 10 to 15 years and Bitcoin
does sort of become ossified because I imagine it will eventually get to that point. If people
are calling for it now, they've been calling for it. It's becoming more likely.
Yeah. I mean, I think pretty much everyone agrees that ossification is a natural process
of all internet protocols. It's, it's, it's simply a, a function of, of like friction,
and the larger a network gets, the harder it is to change.
To change it. Right. And when there's implicit monetary incentives in it too, it makes it
even harder to, to change it.
So, what is the lesson? I mean, I think there's, there's no one specific rule
that we can say, Oh, as long as we don't let this happen, we'll be fine. rather I believe
the lesson is actually instilling the culture of valuing sovereignty. and so that is
where, you said, well, it very early on, you were like, well, wasn't email all
about being able to send messages reliably? Yes. But I don't believe there was ever a
culture of everyone should be able to run their own email server. I don't think that
was ever a value. And so as, as a result, it was very easy for it to be corporatized.
And once you corporatize that, your, the incentives are completely different and
like the, the, the willingness to impose costs in various places become very different.
Something as I must imagine is because it's something as rudimentary as money, there's
more skin in the game, like maybe not everyone is involved, is so passionate
about the sovereignty of their email or communications. Some people maybe just don't, but, but the,
the money touches darn near every aspect of life. Do you think that that perhaps is why,
or do you have another idea of why that may be the case? Why are people more focused on
sovereignty and why did that element of sovereignty, come about in the Bitcoin world where
it maybe didn't in the email world? Yeah. I mean, I think it is naturally a touchier
and more political subject. and, and of course money has been around for
a long time and we have countless examples of ways that authorities have screwed with
money. so there's a lot more historical knowledge and learning, I think that can be
applied there. Whereas, new message networks were not really a thing. Like, you
know, traditionally message networks had always been just about like physically somebody carrying
a piece of, of mail from one place to another. Right. And then, and I guess like I'm trying
to put myself in the, the situation of somebody in the nineties who's in business and you
know what you were operating before it was much slower, much less efficient, much less
effective, right? The guy was, you said the guy that's did the first spam made, made a
killing on it. So at that moment, it seemed probably like the trade-offs of the convenience
were far outweighed the, the negatives of the, what, what, what, what the path that
it may lead people down. How do we know if we're on that path today in Bitcoin and are
there ways that we can measure, like, is it a number of coins held on exchanges increasing
or decreasing? What are the things can we look at? There's a lot of metrics we can look
at now, of course, it's a pseudonymous network, so we can't say, exactly
this number of people do this thing, but we can get some rough metrics around while we
know somewhere in the range of 15 to 50,000 nodes are being operated out there. You know,
some people probably run multiple nodes like myself. yeah. we, we can do some rough
on-chain analytics and say, this percentage of, of total Bitcoin is held by
like known custodian third parties. and then we can kind of hope that that means that
the rest of it is more widely dispersed amongst individuals. So yeah, there's stuff that we
can definitely keep, tracking and, and, that's also what I've been doing,
since 2014 with some of the services that I've been running. but it's just about
vigilance. And so, if you see something that looks like it's trending in a concerning
direction, then you have to start yelling and, hope that you can get some people
to come together to say, yes, we agree that this is a problem. and you let's work
on a solution. Yeah. I've, the Bitcoin community is the most passionate group of people about
a specific idea that I've ever seen them and the environmentalists that glue their hands
to the stuff that's like the polar opposites, but that's the dedication we need to, to fight.
So I, I wonder if, if, if you think like there, as we just naturally gravitate more
people into the ecosystem, as it hits more and more aspects of life, if, if, if you think
that that if left on its own accord, like we don't take the vigilance, right. We just
kind of let it, let it go and let it, let it do its thing. Like, are we, are we sort
of trending in the right direction right now? Or are we sort of trending against the sovereignty
direction? Like if we don't take action, I mean, a little bit of both. you know,
we've done well on the, minimizing the cost of running a full node. it would
be far worse if any of the other scaling proposals had gone through, like if the block sizes
were larger, it would be much, much harder, more expensive to run a full node, which hurts
the distribution of the network. Right. Yeah. the, I think that the thing
that I'm most worried about is just the general pace of protocol development where, I
guess at this point it has been several years since taproot was activated and we don't really
have any other changes on kind of up, for, for, for being implemented and
activated.
Yeah. And, and, and, and people will continue building stuff, you know,
that doesn't require consensus changes, but, it's the moving forward with more protocol
improvements, at some pace, like I want to at least see something every few
years, otherwise it gets longer and longer and longer. And, the,
the longer it has been since the last consensus change, the, I guess, stronger the, uh,
ossification proponents will become.
Right. At the same time, I hear people, criticizing the use of taproot or for, for
inscriptions and ordinals. to my, like, I don't claim to understand like the technical
aspect of that stuff well, but to my understanding, it is, it is similar to this sort of shared,
abstraction. It reminds me of the, the third party tools that are coming about from
email long ago that aren't part of the protocol where it sort of exists in its own little
rule set.
And as long as people agree to operate it, it's not necessarily part of the, of the protocol.
is that like, and you, you don't have to have a fully formed opinion about this,
but like, do you think these sort of abstractions that are away from the protocol, like inscriptions,
which are really being categorized on, ordinals.com, for example, like, are
those the types of things that we need to be careful about or, or is that totally fine?
Or is it too soon to tell even?
I think that any protocol that is sufficiently complex or, or even really what it is, is
any protocol that has its own programming language, which Bitcoin does, will inevitably
result in some savvy developers hacking quote unquote unintended or unforeseen functionality
into it. That should be kind of a given.
Okay.
Now, I don't think that it harms Bitcoin. If anything, I think it's interesting to see
people experiment with, I, I,
And they're paying the fee, they're paying the fee, like the, the cost is on the sender.
Right.
That spam, if people are saying it's spam, it's like, well, they are paying the fees.
Yeah. So this is also a much larger debate and interesting historical question around,
quote unquote, Bitcoin maximalism, because really the original stance I would
say of Bitcoin maximalism was that everything will inevitably be built on top of Bitcoin.
Now it's a very vague, everything is a wide, wide range.
Yeah. And, and, and I think what we've seen with some of the drama is that
there will always be some people who are upset with how some things are built on top of Bitcoin.
but that is also the permissionless nature of the protocol is that you, thankfully
you don't have to ask for permission, at least as we're standing right now, as long as you
follow the rules of the protocol, you can be as creative as you want.
So with that, we'll wrap by, what are some couple, what are a couple of things that people
who are passionate about Bitcoin succeeding and want it to develop and not suffer the
same fate of the email protocol?
What are some things that they can do to participate and help strengthen the network from, from
that sort of centralization over time?
I always tell people to leverage the skills that you already have.
I feel like a lot of people come into the space and they're like, Oh, I'm not technical.
Therefore I can't contribute to the Bitcoin.
And that's absolutely false.
And, if you're a good communicator, you can contribute by helping to disseminate
knowledge by helping to distill values into memes that spread, more quickly, than
having to make memes.
Yeah.
I mean, it memes can be interesting and we can have a whole other episode about memetics
within Bitcoin and some of the weird things that have resulted.
But it's like I said, I think the best defense of all of this is just vigilance and
awareness and values.
And especially as Bitcoin goes mainstream, I don't expect that that culture and, and
those values will scale at the same way, but I also don't think they have to.
I think with the game theory and the way that the protocol and network are set up, if anyone
who wants to participate generally can, we try to make the cost of participating
in various ways as low as possible.
But anyone who cares enough to devote the time and resources to participate, there's,
there's no gatekeeper that will stop them from doing so.
So once you have decided that you want to participate in different ways, whether it's
by running a node, whether it's by, participating in discussions or maybe
even helping with development, that is helping to grow the network and make
it even more robust and anti-fragile.
So if you then become an advocate and you start orange pilling, friends and family,
that just grows the network effect and makes it even more robust.
Right.
Just because it's a technology and internet protocol doesn't mean the only way that you
can contribute to it is through coding.
There's a whole world out there that, money will touch every aspect.
Money already does touch every aspect of life.
And if Bitcoin is money and believe it'll become the world's reserve money someday,
then it too will touch every aspect of it.
So, well, thank you for coming on and, and, pontificating.
I got that fitted in, about, the history of email and, the future of Bitcoin.
And we will do our part together to make sure we, we keep it decentralized, right?
You bet.
It's, it's up to all of us.
There you go.
Wise words from Mr. Jameson Lopp.
Thanks for going on.
Thanks for having me.