Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. I'm here with Jameson Lopp, who is the co-founder
and chief security officer at Casa. Jameson, thanks so much for being with me here today.
My pleasure.
Jameson, I'd love to just start things off and just hearing a little bit about your kind of early background. How did you originally
get into Bitcoin? Can you tell us a little bit about that early journey?
It was a culmination of both my computer science background and my libertarian
interests. And so I learned about Bitcoin because it kept popping up on these nerdy news sites like
Slashdot and dismissed it the first few times and eventually it kept coming up. And so I was like,
I guess I should look into this thing. And then when I finally got around to reading the white paper,
it really intrigued me from a computer science standpoint because Satoshi solved this particular
problem of double spending and pretty much the exact opposite way that I would have. And I think that was
completely unintuitive to any classically trained computer scientist because we are trained to
use the least amount of computational resources to solve a problem. And in several different ways,
Satoshi went the exact opposite of that and said, you know what, we're actually going to use a ton of
resources for this and make things extremely expensive and redundant and so on and so forth. And so
as a result, you end up with this database that is what I like to call the least performant database of
all time. But as a trade off, you get a lot of interesting properties for it.
Wait, what year was this?
That was 2012.
That's pretty remarkable. And did you go all in right away? Were you like bought in or was there
like kind of a slow, progressive journey for you to really be committed to this, this idea of Bitcoin?
No, of course it took some time. And, you know, I think you have to be kind of crazy to
just immediately go all in on any completely new foreign thing that has never existed before. So,
you know, I dipped my toes in because I said, you know, I need to learn more about this. I need to actually
use it, see how it works. See if I believe that the actual production system holds up to the promise of
the white paper. Because I mean, you know, white paper is like nine pages. It's a really high level
technical document, but building actual cryptographic protocols is much, much more involved. And the devil
is always in the details with any sort of complex system. So I had to figure out how to send my first
wire transfer. The bank did not make it easy. I spent like an hour at my bank, filling out all types of
paperwork and having them tell me, Hey, once we send this money, you can never get it back. And it was kind
of sketchy because I was sending money to some little bank in Japan. It happened to be the bank
that was used by this company called MT Gox. And, you know, thankfully it all worked out. The money got
there. I was able to exchange it. I was able to withdraw the Bitcoin, start playing around with it, get some
further. I think bolstering of the belief that this was an actual system of value. You know,
once I was able to exchange the Bitcoin for other things, you know, just purchase little, little retail
items. Um, and I would say it was about a year, year and a half after I had just been playing around with
it and starting to pay attention to the forums that I decided that I wanted to go even deeper. And that's
when I forked the Bitcoin core repository and created a fork. I called statoshi. It's basically
Bitcoin core plus a few hundred lines of code for instrumentation and metrics collection. And this was
because, you know, after spending a year and a half in the space and kind of imbuing a number of the
foundational principles, I realized that one of those is transparency. And I felt like when I was running a
node, I didn't actually know what that node was doing. So I felt like there was a gap and some room
for improvement to bring more transparency to the actual act of operating a Bitcoin node. And so that's
what statoshi did. It basically surfaced a lot of the internal operations of Bitcoin node. You can hook up
pretty charts and visualizations to it. And so for the past 10 years, I've been running a website front end to my
statoshi node at statoshi.info, where anyone can go and kind of see what's happening in what should be like your
average typical default node.
node. Um, it was about a year after that, that I went full time. I started applying to companies and
accepted a position as a, an infrastructure engineer, essentially running nodes, uh, managing, um, blockchain,
indexing, managing, uh, transaction, broadcasting and injection, ingestion, um, across first Bitcoin and then a number of
different other networks for the three years that I was at BitGo. And then after that, it was just a
pretty small pivot for me to take a lot of what I had learned over that period and, uh, co-found Casa,
where we're basically taking a lot of the security best practices, many of which we have built up over the
of the years as, you know, a learning from various catastrophes and failures that have happened.
And just trying to put that all into a nice user-friendly package so that people can really be their own bank and
have the peace of mind and the confidence that they can do it themselves and, you know, not have any reliance upon
trusted third parties that might, uh, screw them over in any number of ways.
That's great. Thank you. Um, I mean, you're widely known, um, at least from my perspective is one of
the most security conscious figures, uh, in Bitcoin. Uh, and this seems to be a really important topic to
you. Um, what is, what are some of the common mistakes that you see Bitcoiners make when it comes to security?
Well, I mean, I think the most common one is the people who only really look at Bitcoin as a, you know,
financial play. And so they're, maybe they're just buying the ETF or maybe they're just, uh,
setting up a brokerage account and buying on an exchange and leaving it there. And of course,
this is a fundamental, I would say a mistake because it's really, it's against the ethos of the entire
reason that this ecosystem exists, which is a counterparty risk. You know, it's, it's right
there in the white paper where, uh, Satoshi says, you know, these, uh, systems primarily fail, uh, because
of the reliance upon trusted third parties. And so the people who are just getting into Bitcoin and using
trusted third parties, sure. You might financially benefit from it. If nothing goes wrong during the
period that you're, uh, exposed to this, uh, asset. But I think that understanding the fundamentals of
really what sovereignty means, what, um, you know, operating in a permissionless manner in order to
truly have censorship resistance, you know, to be able to use, hold, and move your assets however you want,
without having to ask permission to do so. That's the real power of the system. That's one of the fundamental
things that got me interested in the first place. It wasn't that there was any sort of promise of getting
rich or getting wealthy. And, you know, that the financial promise to me from the beginning was always
as a very, very long-term hedge against inflation. And this is something that I've said many times that,
you know, there's absolutely no promise that the value of Bitcoin will increase in the future,
but you can be quite sure that the value of fiat will decrease in the future. So,
you know, do your own math, uh, make your own predictions. But, um, you know, if you're,
if you're not taking care of your own security, then you can very easily run into a catastrophic loss. And
while the, you know, the rate of large-scale catastrophic losses seems to be decreasing,
it's not over by any means. Um, I mean, you know, we just saw the largest hack of all time a few weeks
ago at Bybit. And, uh, then just a couple of years before that, you know, FTX and a number of other big
entities collapsed. And I have no reason to believe that, uh, we're going to stop seeing large entities
screw up and collapse anytime soon. Uh, I just want to touch on a couple of things. So you,
you comment that one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to Bitcoin security is
using centralized exchanges or maybe ETFs. Um, do you think it's a reasonable first step or, um,
a simple way to onboard people, or are you kind of of the perspective that that whole process really
should be skipped in some meaningful way or at a minimum, maybe you buy there and then move it onto
cold storage? Yeah. I mean, completely bypassing centralized entities for onboarding and offboarding
is possible, but there's a lot more friction. And so I think it's, it's not really
logical to expect many people to bypass them. Um, you know, the convenience factor of just being able
to hook up your bank account is far too high for that. But, you know, if you want the ultimate level
of privacy, then that is probably what you want to do, uh, you know, find some way to avoid the KYC
regime. Um, you know, ultimately any of these centralized entities are going to completely shoot
your privacy because they're legally required to, you know, they are straddling the traditional
banking system and this new financial system. So they have to abide by all of the rules of both systems.
But, um, I think it's, um, it's difficult to convince people to take on that responsibility.
You know, it's, it's a very overwhelming feeling. I think when people realize that they could
potentially make one mistake and have a catastrophic loss. And so that's what Casa exists for as well is,
you know, we put you in a position where you can have failures, you can make mistakes and they won't
result in catastrophic loss. But, um, you know, the vast majority of self custody solutions in this space
don't really have those guardrails around them. And there are often any number of single points of
failure where if something goes wrong, it could result in catastrophic loss. Now that could be a
theft, but really once you get into self custody, it's more likely that the catastrophic loss is just
that you lock yourself out of your own money. Uh, you said, um, that when you got into Bitcoin,
it wasn't because you were hoping that there'd be a value increase, but rather you can definitely count on
a decreasing of value in fiat. Um, I mean, can you explain the difference between those things?
Because if your life is priced in Bitcoin, I guess the value of Bitcoin stays the same and everything
gets cheaper because everything else is priced in fiat. Um, and I've heard other Bitcoin Bitcoiners kind
of talk like that, where it's like, well, I don't really care what the price of Bitcoin is in US dollars.
What I care about is like my house is cheaper in Bitcoin than it was, you know, or to buy a house,
it's less expensive now than it was a couple of years ago.
Right. Uh, you know, I think we're basically talking about purchasing power. And I think that the problem
whenever you're talking about value is that, you know, everybody has a unit of account and generally
that's going to be the dollar or whatever your, your nation state's currency of choice is. And that
generally makes sense to talk about because those large nation state currencies are fairly stable. Um,
but you know, once you've been in the space long enough, uh, you realize that it's all relative,
um, you know, especially stability is relative and there can certainly be times of high instability
in fiat currencies as well. So, you know, whenever you're talking about the price of something,
I think it helps to ask of like, well, okay, what are we actually pricing this in and is the thing that
we're pricing it in actually stable. So it's entirely possible for the, you know, the price of Bitcoin to
go up, but the purchasing power to not go up very much. And that's really the case where, you know,
the fiat currency is being inflated. And so it's purchasing power is going down. So that's why I feel
like, you know, the, the real promise, and this is never a promise really in the white paper or
anywhere else, but the prevailing narrative, at least in the early days is that at the very least,
Bitcoin should be a good, uh, store of value or a hedge against inflation. So, you know, the purchasing
power of Bitcoin of course goes up as more people realize or buy into that narrative. But if even if,
if everything was stable and like nobody was buying or selling or trading Bitcoin anymore, then you're
relative to fiat, the, the purchasing power should remain stable, even if the fiat price goes up due to
inflation. Great. Um, when you look at security threats, like state actors or hackers or personal
intelligence, or, um, I mean, even, you know, like kidnappings, um, where, what do you see the biggest
security threat or what are your, what are your thoughts on even some of these things as security
threats? Uh, well, the biggest security threat in terms of what I think the most prevalent, um, at this
point in time is probably going to be social engineering. And this is the case, regardless of
whether or not you have a third party custody or self custody, they're, they're, they're hitting
everybody. Basically the, uh, the only way that you can really be a hundred percent, um, secure against
social engineering would be, I guess, if you have the ETF, like if, if you have, uh, you know,
a financial exposure to Bitcoin, but don't have any way of actually accessing or moving the Bitcoin
itself. Um, sorry. Can you explain social engineering? Yes. So, um, the short version is that like the
security best practices have improved so much over the past decade, it's been
11 and a half years now, uh, since the first hardware wallets came on the scene. And so what
that really means is that we really have the ability to have air gapped keys, you know, for the
past 11 years or so, and that has greatly reduced the ability for various threat actors to, you know,
hack your Bitcoin, uh, cause you're not keeping your Bitcoin hopefully, you know, on an internet connected
device. The number of people who are keeping their Bitcoin on internet connected devices these days is far
lower at least, uh, I think from a like relative, uh, portion, uh, of people who are doing self custody
and, and also the, uh, exchanges themselves and how they're doing stuff is similarly evolved where the
exchanges tend to only keep a small portion of their funds on, you know, hot wallets and internet connected
devices. So where are we going with all this? Uh, it, it means, you know, there's always going to be
attackers. They're just changing their tactics in response because they're always going to be
trying to find the weak and vulnerable, uh, systems and, you know, whatever potential point of failure
that they can expend the least amount of resources to get the most amount of return for. And that means
they can't really go after the keys directly anymore. So what's the weak point? Well, the weak point is the fact
that all of these systems, you know, regardless of what type of custody system you have set up,
regardless of whether or not, you know, you have the keys directly or you're authenticating into some
third party system, the weak point now is generally the humans themselves. So the humans have the various
authentication, um, tools available to them. You know, they have their usernames, their passwords, their various two-factor
authentication. And since it's very difficult for the attackers to bypass those, what they've determined
is it's easier to trick the humans into voluntarily, uh, authenticating into those systems. So you can
think of it as the, the game has changed away from like hacking your computer so much to get your private keys.
the new game is hacking your brain to trick you into voluntarily, you know, sending your Bitcoin, uh, to an attacker.
And usually that, that is basically the case of them posing as some trusted figure, uh,
often an exchange, or sometimes they will pose as like Google, you know, some other big tech company, uh, claiming that your funds are at risk
and imposing a sense of urgency that you need to take action quickly. And they'll basically walk you
through the process of accessing your Bitcoin, whether that's self-custody or on an exchange or whatever,
and then getting you to send it to a new address that is safe, but it's actually an address that belongs to the attacker.
Yeah. That's remarkable. I mean, uh, you know, we hear these stories and, um, and I think when we hear
these stories, we often think, well, that's dumb. Like why would never do that? That seems like an
unintelligent thing to do. But I, I think what you're saying is that like, it's, it's become sophisticated
enough that, you know, smart people can get tricked. Right.
Yeah. And, you know, a number of these, uh, social engineering folks have actually been interviewed,
uh, like the people who have received the, uh, phone calls from them where they were trying to
trick them have realized what's going on and started recording the audio. Um, our CEO at Casa has recorded
a couple. Um, I know, uh, Josh on Seth has also recorded a couple and published them and, you know,
they've opened up in some cases and talked about, you know, how they're doing it and why they're doing it.
And, um, you know, from what some of these guys have said, you know, they're able to trick all types of
smart people, you know, white collar professionals, even like software engineers, developers. Um, it's,
I think it's really just a case of, they have honed their craft and understand the sort of trigger
phrases that get people to become really scared and want to, you know, trust whoever is on the other
end of that phone line and basically follow the directions to in their mind, improve their security.
Yeah. That's remarkable. I mean, that's scary. That, that makes me worry, you know, cause I think,
well, it's like really smart people are doing this. Like, how am I, how am I going to avoid being a
victim of this? Well, the short version is you don't answer your phone, um, especially, especially
from unknown numbers. Um, you know, Coinbase is never going to call you on the phone. Google is never going
to call you on the phone. These big tech giants, they simply don't do that. And so, um, you know,
the, these attackers can spoof the phone number that it looks like it's coming from. Uh, so you
shouldn't ever trust that, uh, you know, phone number or email address or really any incoming message
that is not like strongly cryptographically authenticated, which basically means if you,
if it's not like on signal or key base, uh, or WhatsApp, um, it, it could very easily be spoofed.
And it, you might be conversing with someone who's not who you think. Um,
and other than that, I mean, it's just, you should be very careful whenever someone reaches out to you
and says that, you know, this is an emergency and you need to take action. Like the, these are all red
flags. And, uh, and oftentimes a lot of these situations can be resolved if people just slow down
and, you know, think about exactly what's going on. Um, because really often in the like
Bitcoin and crypto space, if there is a security failure, um, on your account or your setup or
whatever, like it's already too late, the funds are gone. Uh, you're not going to be getting someone
calling you and saying, Hey, there's a security issue, but your funds are still currently safe,
but you just have to move them really quickly. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Right. Um,
so do you think with the evolution of self custody solutions, um, are we moving to something that's
more user-friendly, uh, from a security models perspective or will, will there always be kind
of this requirement of like fairly reasonable level of technical expertise in order to keep your
Bitcoin secure? I mean, we continue to improve year over year. Um, for example, um, you know, with,
with CASA's setup, it's very strong, it's robust and resilient because there's multiple keys and those are
distributed, uh, amongst a variety of different vectors. And we've actually been able to build upon
that to create other sorts of game theory that make it very simple for people to improve their setup.
So for example, um, we rolled out this inheritance solution like four years ago, and it was really
onerous, it was using like the legal system where you'd have to set up a trust and onboard your estate
attorney and all this other stuff. And, um, it had a lot of friction. So we learned a lot about that.
We learned that, uh, you know, having to do anything that is using the legal system as jurisdiction
specific, just doesn't really scale. And it's always going to have a high level of, um, of onboarding
and setup costs. So after doing that for several years, we said, okay, how can we improve upon this?
And so what we did was we designed just a 100% technical solution that uses, uh, game theory
and distribute the, uh, distribution of keys in a specific way so that you can onboard your beneficiary
in a matter of minutes and, you know, completely bypass, uh, wills and estates and trusts and,
uh, you know, probate and all of this other stuff. Uh, basically it involves doing an encrypted key
share with your recipient. It's as simple as sending a QR code back and forth to each other, um, to onboard
your beneficiary. And once you have onboarded them, all they can really do, like, they can't access
your wallet. They can't even use the key because it's encrypted. All they can do is push a button
that says, I would like to claim that the account owner has passed away. And that kicks off this six
month period of where we're reaching out to the account owner and saying, Hey, this person is saying
you passed away. If that's not the case, you need to log in and basically boot them out of your setup
because they're trying to take your money. And after six months goes by, then their encrypted key
gets, uh, decrypted in our app. And they can also request, uh, a signature from Casa. And basically just with
that, uh, they can then access those funds and, and move them. And, you know, for at least for the two
of three, uh, wallet setup, that means like your, your recipient doesn't even have to have a, uh, a hardware
wallet. They can just do it all with their mobile phone. Okay. Interesting. Um, can you explain, um, coin
joins and tools, uh, like Samurai for those who are kind of newer to the space and trying to get their
minds wrapped around privacy? So the upside of Bitcoin is that it's an incredibly transparent system.
That's easy for anyone to audit. If you just run the Bitcoin node software, the downside is that anyone who
is running that node software can also download the entire history of every transaction that's ever
happened on the blockchain. So if you want to foil various adversaries that are trying to, you know,
de-anonymize the owners of addresses and the movements of funds across the blockchain,
then all you can really do, because you can't, you can't actually like encrypt and hide
the, uh, flows of funds on the blockchain. So your only real option for privacy is to
do what we call, you know, hiding in the crowd. And so this is what, uh, mixing software does.
It basically allows many different people to come together and essentially pool their funds together
and mix them or that some people say coin join, because what this is really doing is it's taking
your, your Bitcoin and by your Bitcoin, we mean your UTXOs, your unspent transaction outputs. Um,
this is how the flows of all Bitcoin through all time happen through transaction inputs and outputs.
And so then if you want to obfuscate the, um, either the, you know, origin or the destination
of, of funds and your wallet, then what you want to do is you want to collaborate with as many other
people as possible to kind of mix your funds together. You know, they go, they all go in,
uh, in one big transaction and then they all come back out and one big transaction and this it's, uh,
it's not perfect privacy, but it's basically, it makes it numerically and statistically different
for, um, anti-privacy adversaries to be able to match up to say like the money that came into this
transaction came back out at this point because there's just so many ins and outs, um, and preferably
of the same value to make it even harder to track. So this has upsides and downsides, right? It's, it's not
something that I recommend to your, your average newbie. Um, because one thing that you're risking
is that you actually could get banned from exchanges if they detect that you're doing this because it
just, it triggers their anti-money laundering rules. Like if they're not sufficiently happy that they know
the source of the funds, or, you know, if you're doing coin joins, it's quite likely that you'll be
mixing in with funds that are like tied to thefts and hacks and stuff. Um, it's also, it can be somewhat
expensive. You know, every time you're mixing, you're having to pay on chain fees. And then finally, it's,
it's tricky to do this securely where you're not exposing your keys to a hot wallet. Uh, pretty much all of
the, um, coin join wallets out there. Uh, this is a highly interactive process. It's somewhat similar to
like running a lightning network wallet where, uh, your, your funds basically have to be online all
the time because you need to be interacting with the other people that are also performing that protocol.
So there's a lot of downsides. Then the only real upside is slightly improved privacy, which as I said,
can get you in trouble depending on who you're interacting with. Okay. That's great. So you're
not really a proponent of, of, of coin joins, eh? I think that it requires a fairly advanced knowledge,
uh, to get away with using and not shooting yourself in the foot. I think if you want better privacy on
Bitcoin, um, using lightning network is going to be more user friendly, but then of course it depends
on exactly like what type of a wallet setup you're using as well. Yeah. Okay. Great. Um,
I'm interested in kind of how you live sovereignly. Obviously Bitcoin is a big part of this. Are there
other ways in which you kind of have removed yourself from the system? Um, you know, I mean,
in food production and how you view relationships, educating children. I mean, there's so many different
ideas around this. How, how seriously do you take sovereign living? I mean, I'm not at a hundred percent.
I do hope, you know, someday, uh, when I'm not spending all of my time, um, working on building a company
that I'll be able to branch out into other things like, you know, I want to, um, get better at,
you know, energy production, food production, um, you know, sort of long-term self-sustainability.
Um, as it stands right now, most of what I have spent my time on is more privacy related. And so that's
just how do I live in such a way that I'm not associating my identity with where I sleep at night.
So that involves a lot of obfuscation, a lot of, um, proxies, and this is proxies in a number of
different ways. This is, uh, you know, internet proxies, legal proxies, physical mail proxies,
basically setting up, you know, other points where, um, people can interact with me, or I may,
from a like legal perspective, be interacting with, uh, you know, property and, you know,
acquiring and disposing of publicly registered property through other legal entities that cannot
be directly tied to me. This is pretty onerous thing. Very, very few people do it because there's,
there's a cost. Uh, there's obviously financial costs, uh, for setting up and maintaining all of
this. And then there's just ongoing maintenance costs and lifestyle change costs. So, you know,
if, if I want to, uh, get my mail, for example, I have, I have a system of mailboxes scattered all
over the country and, you know, they'll, they'll receive my mail. They'll even tell me what it is
and scan it for me if I want. And, uh, you know, in most cases, I don't need to actually physically
open it. Um, I can just see it digitally and tell them to dispose of it. But in some cases I may need to
physically receive it and have them kind of forward on my mail from there. And, um,
you know, this is not a hundred percent foolproof. I've had plenty of failures over the years where
mail has gone missing, or I even had one time, um, in the early days where I accidentally set up a
forwarding loop between two of my mailboxes. And I, it took me nine months to figure out that one mailbox
was sending mail to the other and which was then sending it directly back. And so by the time that I
got that loop broken, I have this like huge stack of mostly junk mail stuff that I didn't really need.
But of course there were a few important things in there. So it's a, it's a learning process.
I mean, that's fascinating. Um, I had read or heard at some point that you had paid some in
private investigators to see if they could find you. Um, is that true? And can you tell us that story?
Yeah. Uh, and I've done that in a few different ways. Um, I've done like one off private investigators,
and just pay them a few thousand dollars to, Hey, you know, spend a thousand dollars of your time
trying to figure out where I am. Um, I've also done it through some of my own attorneys, uh, basically
because there's a few different ways that you can try to track somebody down. There's the, there's OSINT,
which is sort of, it's called open source intelligence systems, which is basically like any public data that
pretty much anybody can get their hands on often through data brokers or just various online searches.
And then there's more privileged and private, uh, intelligence and access that often only, um,
attorneys, um, or people who work in the, um, skip tracing business or the, uh, like the tracking down
of people who owe money business. Um, you know, people who have access to more private databases. And so
that's why I, I ended up going often with the legal attorney or private investigator route because they
have access to more privileged systems. And I figure, you know, if I can't be found through that, then
I'm fairly safe. And they haven't found you yet. That's right. Uh, actually even had a number of years
ago when I was, uh, I was working with the FBI as a victim, uh, after I got swatted and I was speaking to
one of the FBI investigators on my case and I said, Hey, I'd just be interested to know where you think
I live. And, uh, actually had, you know, they, they looked it up and gave me the address that I was
hoping for. So, uh, I'm not saying that like, I, I, none of the, what I set up is really meant to be
nation state, um, proof, uh, because it's all done legally and through the legal system. So like if,
if, um, government agencies, if law enforcement was after me, they would be able to peel away these
various layers of privacy and eventually find me more likely they would just pick me up when I went to
an airport. Right. And so like, how far do you go with this? Do you like, when you go to the grocery store,
are you wearing a hat and sunglasses so people don't recognize you? Like, do they always think
you're just Jack Dorsey? Cause you guys look similar. Um, you know, like how far do you go with this?
Yeah. I, I haven't been too worried about the, uh, physical privacy stuff. I mean, you know,
there's cameras pretty much everywhere these days. Um, over the longterm, I do expect, you know,
facial recognition technology is going to be a problem, especially when it's in the hands of the
average person, but I don't get recognized. Um, you know, I don't go on mainstream media. Um,
I, I, I try to avoid going to anything that I think will get like national level of coverage.
And that's because I don't want to get recognized and I've only ever been recognized a handful of times
over the past decade, you know, outside of conference venues. So it's, it's something that I track,
you know, I did have somebody recognize me last month in New York, but that was only like the
third time that ever happened. You know, as it happens, if it starts happening more and more
frequently, then I'll probably adjust to compensate. I mean, shaving the beard would be the first obvious
step. It would, it would change the way you look significantly. Um, so if someone is looking to
kind of going through the early steps of, uh, sovereignty, uh, trying to engage in full
financial sovereignty, controlling their Bitcoin, securing their digital life, um, what are some of
the things that you recommend for those who are starting the journey?
Well, go to my website. Um, yeah, I have like 1500 links and resources. Uh, just go to bitcoin.page to,
to check out all of those. But, um, I think the, the main thing is that it's a journey, you know, you, you
don't have to get to a hundred percent and really nobody ever gets to a hundred percent, but just by
dedicating a little bit of time to it, you can slowly build upon a foundation. And, you know, after several
years, you'll probably be, uh, you know, better off than 99% of people out there. I mean, I think, you know,
a lot of people you'll get in the top, like 5% of privacy. If you just install a few ad blockers
in your browser, you know, that'll prevent a lot of the corporate surveillance that just happens on a
daily basis. But, you know, getting to the sort of extreme level of privacy of what I've done, like I said,
requires setting up a number of different things. You know, I have tons of email addresses and phone
numbers and physical mailboxes and legal entities and all this other stuff that I have to maintain.
And then I have to not screw up. Right. Uh, it's, it's really more of the, the mindset change. Um,
first of setting all of that up and then getting into the, the mindset where you don't accidentally leak
or divulge information. So it all comes down to, I think, what your threat model is, um,
you know, who, who you think might be coming after you, but at least for people in the Bitcoin space,
I think the best thing that you can do is just don't talk about your Bitcoin. You don't,
don't, uh, share your, your great, uh, success story. You know, if the price has gone up a lot,
don't tell anyone how much you have. If you're going to be talking about it online publicly,
preferably don't do it with your real name. Uh, it's much better to take the Satoshi route and,
you know, use a pseudonym because that's just one more layer of obfuscation that will prevent people from
trying to track you down. You have a pin tweet, or at least you did a little while ago. I feel like
it was like an only fans girl who was talking about how much money she made. And, um, you know,
why are you so interested in these stories? Um, I don't remember the exact details of what happened to
her, but, um, this seems to be like really interesting to you. Yeah. Uh, this is one of my many projects
projects is basically tracking the physical attacks against, uh, Bitcoiners. And I mean,
I am one of those victims. Like I said, in 2017, I got swatted and extorted and they didn't get
anything from me, but the situation could have ended very badly if not for a few sort of lucky
circumstances and factors. And then I ended up spending several years and a lot of my own money,
basically tracking down my own attacker in order to get some sense of justice. And I have several blog
posts where I talk about, you know, all of what transpired over the years there. And, um,
I just, I think it's an interesting space to follow
on the, on the digital attack side of things. Um, it seems like a lot of people who are doing the,
the fishing and the SIM swapping, the social engineering are actually mostly teenagers.
And so my own attacker was actually 15 years old, uh, when they swatted me. Yeah.
So, sorry, can you explain swatting? I don't think it's commonly known like what that actually is.
Uh, basically it's when someone finds your home address, calls up your local law enforcement,
and then uses the appropriate trigger phrases to get them to deploy, you know, lethal force against you,
basically sending the SWAT team to your house. And so that usually involves saying, you know,
you've killed people and maybe you have hostages, you have weapons. Uh, in my case, they said,
I had hostages and I had bombs and I was, you know, demanding ransom and all this other stuff.
And so, you know, it's pretty easy actually to get law enforcement to deploy a large amount of lethal
force. If you just say the right words and there's a big disconnect, there's a big, um, sort of asymmetry
between the cost of someone, uh, pulling that attack off versus like the cost of the law enforcement
resources and all of the public resources that get tied up. And then potentially the, um, end result,
there have been several people who have been killed, um, who were targeted because they had SWAT
teams show up and, you know, maybe they, they were a law abiding gun owner and they got kind of freaked out.
And, you know, they had a gun or they had an erratic movement and, you know, law enforcement
sometimes has itchy trigger fingers. So, um, that's just one example. Uh, then like that's the,
that's the low risk example, like to, to commit some sort of digital attack like that, you know, the,
that adversary, they're not actually putting themselves at very much risk. They're basically
having other people go put themselves in physical danger. Um, but the next level with these wrench
attacks where the attacker is actually physically going somewhere, uh, taking someone hostage,
you know, possibly torturing them, you know, essentially trying to extract the, the assets
from them directly. That's, you know, that's the extreme end of, I think, any type of attack that
can happen in this space. And so I like to track them to understand, you know, where is the criminal
elements at the moment with regards to their understanding of the space and also where,
where is our kind of overall security posture as an entire ecosystem? Because every time that a
Bitcoiner gets successfully wrench attacked, that's sending a signal. It's sending information out into the
world that says it is a high return on investment activity to physically attack known Bitcoin holders.
And that's bad for every Bitcoin holder. We, we want attacks against us to fail. And we want that
information to percolate throughout the world so that, uh, we don't look like the easy soft targets.
And so how successful with kind of your history of tracking this, how successful are these attacks?
Uh, very, I would say they only fail like one to 2% of the time that we're aware of. Um, yeah,
so I've, I've cataloged over 200, um, publicly known attacks. There's actually many more out there because
most of them don't ever get reported. Um, and as far as we're aware, yeah, there's only been two or three
where they had, the victim has like successfully defended themselves. And, and actually this, this,
this, this, the recent one that I'm a Amaranth, uh, attack in, uh, Texas was one of those few, uh,
because, um, I think her husband actually realized that something was going wrong and, um, started
shooting at the attackers and they fled pretty quickly. Oh, so it wasn't that he had sophisticated
security set up. It's that he had a gun and he just protected himself.
Pretty much. Uh, yeah, there was, I think the first ever successful defense, um, occurred
around 10 years ago. And it was a guy in Florida who was conducting a face-to-face trade with someone,
which is by the way about the riskiest activity you can do. That's where most of these physical
attacks happen with, uh, face-to-face trades, you know, people bringing high amounts of Bitcoin
or cash or whatever, uh, meeting somewhere private, uh, don't do that. And, uh, and, but thankfully
that guy who was going to be a victim had, uh, a gun on him and was able to defend himself.
So your thoughts on gun ownership?
I mean, it's pretty much, uh, I think necessity if, if you want to believe that you're truly sovereign.
Um, that's a whole other, you know, can of worms to go down. Of course, in America, uh, you know,
we have the second amendment, which I argue is really more to be a check and a balance against
the power of the government itself. Um, sure. It's, it's also related to self-defense,
but I think the, the problem, regardless of where you are, you have to ask yourself like,
what is the actual threat that I'm worried about that I need to guard against? And in, in many cases,
even if you live somewhere where you're not legally allowed to have weapons and defend yourself, um,
the criminals probably don't care about that. And they probably are going to have weapons and arm
themselves. So you have to ask yourself, how am I going to defend against that?
I mean, that's always the challenge, right? It's like, well, if the criminals are going to have
access to these, uh, weapons, um, yeah, it can be, it can be a difficult situation, uh, you know,
especially in European countries where there just isn't the existence of these weapons. I mean,
here in Canada, we don't have the same, um, the same freedom around, uh, firearms as in the United
States, but we do have, you know, fairly reasonable gun ownership laws where we can have hunting rifles
and shotguns and things like that. Um, and so when you look at these situations and you think to
yourself, okay, the average Bitcoin or, you know, or the average person wants to hold Bitcoin and then
they think about the security threat and then they think, well, if I just hold the ETF, you know,
I don't have to worry about all this kind of stuff. Is this a, is this a big detractor from, uh,
self-sovereignty, um, Bitcoin holders?
I think it's, it's the convenience of the ETF. That is, uh, one of the greatest threats, uh,
that we have in this space. It's, um, you know, it's very easy for people, uh, to access it through
their traditional brokerage accounts. As you said, they then don't have to, or they think they don't
have to worry about the security aspects of it because it's so easy to just hand wave away counterparty
risk. And, and of course everybody's going to be like, oh, you know, these ETFs are
highly reputable institutions and they're not going to screw anything up. And maybe that's the case.
Of course, I don't like the fact that 90% of these ETF funds are all held by one custodian at Coinbase.
That is a highly centralizing factor that invites, um, attacks because there's so much money in one place.
Um, I think it also, it creates systemic risk in a number of different ways. You know, even if you
think, uh, Coinbase will never screw up, there's always the 6102 attack, you know, the government
confiscation attack, which actually might be more likely now that the U S federal government
is getting more interested in Bitcoin as an asset. Um, and so this is why I think you have to ask yourself,
like, do you just care about the financial exposure and aspects of it, or do you actually care about,
you know, being able to operate in this parallel financial system without having to ask permission?
Do you think that the, uh, American government's, um, now kind of commitment to at least hold the
Bitcoin that they currently have, which they've confiscated? Do you mean that, uh, in a meaningful
way? Like now they have interest, so maybe they'll start confiscating Bitcoin. Is that a legitimate threat?
Uh, it does potentially create somewhat of a perverse incentive. I think, uh, if, if so, all they've
really said is, um, we're going to do this in a budget neutral fashion, right? If we're going to acquire
more Bitcoin, we need to do so without taking more taxpayer money. What does that really mean? Uh, I don't
think we're going to know for a little while. Um, but you know, seizing and confiscating funds is
definitely one option. So we, I think have to hope that, uh, they don't come up with like new types of
crimes to try to pin on people in order to confiscate those funds.
Right. Yeah. I mean, that's an interesting perspective for sure. Um, one last thing,
Jameson, I want to ask you before you go, I've heard people say that they're not proponents of
governments, um, or central authorities holding Bitcoin because it fundamentally strengthens their
position. And many libertarians, we want to see governments less strong. And, um, and if we believe
that Bitcoin is such a powerful asset, um, this fundamentally strengthens the government's
position rather than weakens it. And there's this thought that we want to see governments collapse.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Well, I mean, from a game theory perspective,
I think over the long run, everyone is incentivized to hold Bitcoin and that includes nation states,
though. I think it actually makes less sense for the U S federal government, you know, being, uh,
the government behind the current global reserve currency. Uh, they're kind of like working against
themselves a bit by doing that. It makes sense for pretty much any other nation state to do that.
I mean, I think it made sense for El Salvador to do that because they didn't even have their own
currency. They were, they were really operating under the thumb of the, um, federal reserve and the,
the U S banking system from, from that perspective. So, you know, smaller countries that don't have
much financial or monetary autonomy. I think it makes sense. It also makes sense for, um, U S states,
I think, because they're in a similar position where they don't really have any control over the banking
system. It's really more, uh, at the federal level. So I think it's something that we should expect.
Um, and this is just kind of the nature of the game. I, I personally, I would have liked more time
before institutions and nation states got into the space because I would like to see Bitcoin to be more
distributed amongst individuals. But, uh, for a variety of reasons, we seem to have skipped past the
mass adoption at the retail and individual level phase. And that surprised me. And I think what I failed
to account for was how quickly the viral nature of the kind of the game theory of, uh, selling, you know,
selling the idea of Bitcoin up the ladder was. Um, and, and so I think, you know, that's really taken off
around the, like the 2020 era, you know, when Michael Saylor started getting in, when, when several other
billionaires started getting interested, um, you know, they, they talk to each other. Right. So that's,
that's how, that's how adoption has gone, uh, with each cycle, there's like a new cohort and each
cohort has its own attributes. And so since the 2020 cycle was, had a lot of billionaires and, uh, you know,
traditional financial wealth management players starting to get into it. Now we're, we're starting
into like the next cycle after that. And what we're seeing is the effects of those people who have been
going out and essentially pitching Bitcoin to their peer groups and to, you know, the larger institutions
and governments that they work with. Is it a problem that we have kind of these, these kind of heroes in
Bitcoin, like you mentioned, Michael Saylor, um, you know, I think, I guess, Donald Trump, um, and, and
others and, and are, is there a big risk that they make a mistake that they cause issues that they're
heroes and then they fall from grace because of, you know, things that people do, people make mistakes.
Uh, yeah. Uh, and that has already happened plenty of times over our history. Um, um, you know,
there, there's the, the saying, you know, either you die here or live long enough to become the villain.
And I think that's just as applicable in this situation as anything else. Um, there've already
been a few points of friction, I think between Saylor and much of the community. Saylor has a big, uh,
following for a number of reasons, but he's also, you know, got a whole like micro strategy, um,
owners following behind him, you know, people who want to, you know, kind of pump that asset in
addition to Bitcoin. And, um, you know, he, he's the business guy. Uh, he's got his own narratives
and things that he works on and he's not the cypher punk guy. He's not the crypto anarchist guy.
So, uh, you know, there's already been some friction there between his like acceptance of
states and governments, uh, versus some of, I would say the more OG, uh, folks who have been around
longer. And I think that that friction is probably going to increase. Um, you know, he's also seems to be
very pro ossify the protocol. And so I'm on the opposite side of that. I think there's going to
be more friction there in the future as well. That's, that's great. Um, Jameson, I really
appreciate your time. It's been super insightful conversation. I mean, I've learned a lot, uh,
just chatting with you. This is, this is a really great, I appreciate your time. Um, and, uh, it's been
super educational to learn, uh, more about some of your very public journey, uh, in privacy and also
some of the, your, uh, in-depth knowledge, uh, on Bitcoin. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.