If you met a cypherpunk in a dark alley, what would you say to him?
Well, if that cypherpunk was Jameson Lopp, you'd probably invite him in to have a beer
and discuss cryptocurrency. As luck would have it, we didn't meet Jameson in a dark alley. Instead,
we invited him to join us on the show to glean from his knowledge of the blockchain world.
You see, Jameson's a software engineer that speaks regular people language,
and that's good because we're bad. Stick around long enough and you'll be bad too.
It's episode number 72 of the Bad Crypto Podcast.
It's a good day to be bad, Mr. Travis Wright, and I'm so glad that we get to
be bad for the whole world.
When you say the whole world, you are not wrong because we are listening to in 190 territories.
Not necessarily the countries.
Well, one of them is VPN. So another one is other regions. And then other regions is right.
And we've said this joke before, but it always makes me laugh is because other regions is right
below Netherlands. And so it always looks like nether regions.
Right. But here's my question. Are any of the countries were heard in shitholes?
Seven of which were shitholes, 183 countries, seven other shitholes.
You have to decide which ones they are. We're not commenting on that, but wherever you're from,
whether you are one of those or one of not those, we're glad you're here and welcome to
the Bad Crypto Podcast. I'm Joel com. That's Travis. Right. And man, I just stepped in it.
That was great. You realize we've had over 1.5 million downloads, Mr. Joel com.
We're racing towards 2 million. Does that mean we have to have another song?
I think we got, you know, if we, if it gets ridiculous, we got to start making a new song
like every month or every twice a month or something, then maybe it will stop.
But we might as well. Is the next highlight, is it then, is it a 2 million or 2.5 million?
Like 2.5 million kind of sounds maybe instead we should set like a crypto goal when Bitcoin hits
25,000, right? Then that could be the next goal for us to come out with a song that nobody wants
to hear. You know what? If you guys want to send us like your own parodies, like we would appreciate
that. That'd be funny. Like should we have a Facebook mastermind post that you can Google?
I guess you can search it over on the side. You can say parodies, you know, bad crypto parodies.
And maybe you have one. You can leave it on a comment there. That'd be good.
You know, we've had some sent in. We had some people have sent them. In fact,
people are sending us stuff. We got in the mail from a woman named Erica Jones. She made these,
this art with these like fused beads. What do you call these?
Of fused beads?
Yeah, they're beads. And she may
Take a picture of it and put it on here. Hold on. Hold it up again. I'll take a picture with mine.
Here. I'll do it right here. One of them is the Bad Crypto podcast. And there are these
Beady Beady things. And she sent a couple others. And she also sent me a Bitcoin t-shirt.
And then that was really nice of her. It's just in many things.
Did you get your Bitcoin wallet? Are you the cool one? You're the cool guy who gets the cool gifts.
I don't give anybody my address. There's some creepy people out there from shitholes.
Did you get your Bitcoin wallet? Dude, that is awesome. No, I did not.
Well, you will be getting one from here. That's beautiful. Thank you. A peer to peer gear is
A peer to peer gear? Yeah, peer to peer gear. And this is actually a physical black leather
wallet with a Bitcoin. That is really nice. Look at that. Embossed in it and smells like cowl.
Smells like cowl. Very nice. Thanks for that gift. And of course, you guys are welcome to send us
anything that you like. You just have to figure out what the address is. And I'm not giving that
away publicly. So there's that. And also want to give a shout out to our sponsor for the month,
the Zillow app. I actually got an email from a boss of Phillips of Zillow. And he says Apple
is just being super slow to approve their app, their first version of the Zillow app into the
app store. But it could be there by now. Maybe not. But when it's there, this is the ICO marketplace.
You'll be able to check out the latest ICOs and vote them up or down. And we're allowed by law.
You'll be able to participate in them. You know, of course, do your due diligence on them. But watch
for the Zillow app in the iOS app store. The URL if you want to learn more is zla.io forward slash
bad and check it out and tell a bossa that we sent you.
Hey, Travis and Joel. This is Daniel from London, but now lives in Los Angeles. Guys, I want to say
thank you so much for all the hard work that you put into creating this amazing show. A friend of
mine that I had not connected with for about almost 10, 15 years had mentioned me about this
show. I downloaded like 30 of your episodes and religiously listened to it. And as a result of
that, I got very interested in the crypto space. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for the
education and the tools that you give me. But also, thank you very much for giving us a platform to
connect with old friends. And now we have this group where a bunch of my old friends from school
haven't seen for years and years. We meet every week, we talk about crypto, crypto related items
and just connect with one another. So it's more than just more than just crypto. It's also about
friendship, too. So thanks, guys. Keep up the great work. All the best.
All right, we also had an email come in from the contact form,
which is on our website. It is the the contact form on the site. Let's go ahead and type in that.
And then you can contact us because it's a form. And it says there's a link. There's a link. It
says it says contact Joel and Travis. Yeah. Yeah. And you can click that. And that's a form. So
it's pretty good. It's magical. It is. It's it's a it's a contact way. So hey, Travis and Joel,
we're two crypto crazy Brits on a road trip mission from Barcelona to Slovenia, both of which
countries. Barcelona is not a country, but they listen to us there. You guys, we had a disastrous
journey from a run in with the police, broken snow chains and getting stranded for two days on a
Slovenian mountain, plus a 20 year storm, destroying the power and water to the house they were staying
in. Oh my gosh, this is like an adventure. Then we discovered your podcast and entered the amazing
Republic of bad cryptopia and it's magical internet. We tried listening to three other
cryptocurrency podcasts. Then we found yours, which was by far the best. So we downloaded a
whole load and listened to them while driving through Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Monaco, France
and Spain in our van. We love your mix of info, entertainment and brilliant banter. Keep up,
keep on crypto wing in the free world from salmon Andy from the UK. That's awesome. So they account
for six of the countries we were heard in right there. That's true. Cause all you have to do is
have one person in that country to listen to it. We think we might, well, we might want to do you
guys. Somebody needs to smuggle in a USB into North Korea or, or, you know, maybe we can have,
you know, one of the people that are escaping from North Korea, you know, as they're crossing the DMV,
they're yelling, stay bad. I'm sorry for being so bad, but I must go to the Republic of bad cryptopia.
Nice salmon Andy. That's actually two people. It's not one person named salmon Andy who's pink
and swims. It is Sam and Andy, two people. Now you're just making a bass of yourself.
You're just fishing for compliments. Well, if you guys want to reach out to us and I can't imagine
why you would, there's multiple ways to do it. There's the contact form and then there's the bad
crypto hotline 708-885-9030. I find it funny how often somebody in telegram or on our Facebook
page will say, what's the phone number? I mean, we only say it in every episode, but once again,
708-885-9030 that goes right straight to my pager. Yeah, it beeps him. Yeah. And I look at it and I
go, Oh, somebody called us. I have to, I have to go do surgery at the hospitals.
I love when a guest comes on the show and I say, are you ready? He's like, I'm born
ready. I'm going to take on the crypto world and I'm going to make it my be arch.
And then a Randy macho man Savage. Yeah. Let me tell you something. Bitcoin. Yeah.
No, cause that's who Jameson is folks. Jameson Lopp is a name that you should have heard of
by now because he's made a name for himself. And, uh, in the crypto space, he is a professional
cypher punk. He's the creator of the stuff. She, I don't know what that is, but I'm gonna find out.
And he's a software engineer at bit go. He's super passionate about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin
has a lot to say. And because of that, there's a lot that you need to listen to. We're all
going to learn here. Welcome to the bad crypto podcast, Mr. Jameson Lopp and his Epic beard.
Great to be here. I mean, that's the first thing I want to talk about there is how many
Bitcoin is that beard worth? Cause that's, that's pretty solid. Is that beard on the blockchain?
Beard chain.
It's great to be here. Uh, we're, we're glad you're here. What's it give people a little bit about
your background because you've ended up going down this crypto rabbit hole, but
you existed before crypto existed. So what were you doing? Yeah. So I was a computer science major
and for the first 10 years or so of my career, I was working for a online marketing startup called
Bronto software and basically doing email marketing. Though I was on the real backend,
they're really working with the analytics of all of the data that we had to ingest as a result of
all of the emails that were going out. So over the years I started off doing more front end web
development and then working my way to the very backend doing what came to be known as the cloud
computing, large scale data processing. And while I was doing that, uh, in 2012, I somehow
heard about Bitcoin probably on slash dot or something and started looking into it.
Thankfully had a coworker sitting next to me who had already been into it for a while and was able
to answer a lot of my questions. And I just fell down the rabbit hole and started creating my own
projects, trying to better understand the space and, you know, started talking about it to everybody
that would listen to me and a lot of people who wouldn't. And from my perspective, I've kind of
been doing the same thing for a number of years now. The only thing that's really changed is that
more people are listening to me. Everybody needs a crypto buddy, right? What that's there to say,
Oh, I will take you by the hand and explain this to you. Yeah. Joel and I kind of did that together.
We were like, we were just going back and forth because we were, we were bantering back and forth
about politics, right? And then we were just sort of sharing more and more about crypto. And then
we made, I made an offhanded comment, like how long until we do the Joel and Travis crypto show?
And then two days later it was launched and live and here we are six months later, right?
So everyone needs a crypto buddy. That's, that's, that's a good, that's a good thing.
Actually crypto buddy.com there's let's tokenize that, right? It'll match you up with somebody
that, you know, has the competency that you require. And then you can mentor people in
the crypto space and you get, you know, paid in crypto buddy coins. Yeah. For helping out mentoring
Bitcoin mentors. Very nice. I have a question for you right off the bat. So you just tweeted
this today. You were talking about the lightning network and how cross-chain atomic swaps are going
to be immediate and that it may be happening sooner than we think. Is there some insights
that you could get to the number one thing that our fans want to know about is when will the
lightning network be implemented? How is that going to work? Yeah, it's actually kind of a tricky
question. And I think this is one of the reasons for a lot of the frustration in the space and
especially around the scaling debates and all of that is that, you know, these things are not
software that's being developed by a single company that is, you know, putting out a timeline
and has to meet its own metrics and, you know, has investors breathing down their necks and all this
stuff. It's really a much more amorphous organic evolution. So, you know, even though we can say
things like, oh, from a general standpoint, it seems like the development of this technology
is progressing faster than we had hoped. That doesn't mean that we're able to say, okay, on,
you know, June 2nd, we will deploy the lightning network and everybody will be able to use it.
It's actually going to be a much less obvious process. And I think I had a tweet a few days
ago where I was basically saying lightning network technically is already underway being
deployed. Like there are people doing transactions on the main Bitcoin network using the lightning
protocol, but this is the very, very beginning of it. And it's very hard to do that unless
you're a developer and you still don't want to actually risk a lot of money to it because it is
so early. So it's really more that, you know, I've been seeing more and more groups of developers
and teams coming into the space and they're really excited about developing the lightning
and second layer solutions and then building applications on top of that. So I think that
we're seeing a momentum push from a number of different perspectives of how we're eventually
going to get there. Now, on the opposite hand, there have been some things that have been a lot
slower than we've wanted. For example, the segregated witness adoption has been pretty slow
kind of bias there because working at BitGo, we were one of the first enterprises that actually
added support for it. I think we had it ready about two weeks after it activated. Whereas a
lot of these other companies still haven't even announced timeframes for it. So it's an important
first step, you know, to get to this second layer type of world that we're trying to build. So I'm
hoping that, you know, the Coinbases and Krakens and all of the exchanges and large transaction
volume folks will be adding SegWit so that they will be ready to then do the work to add lightning
support. But I think that we are going to see, you know, regular people be able to use it this year.
So many words that you dropped there that just have all kinds of controversy, you know, great
topics we can discuss there. And I want to get into those. But first of all, this is the first
time we've really heard about BitGo on the show. So why don't you tell us what BitGo does, bitgo.com?
Yeah. So the reason that not many people hear about BitGo is because we're not a consumer
facing company. We are an enterprise security service. So really what we are doing is we're
providing as high a security hot wallet as you can get, you know, it's hard to make a perfectly
secure hot wallet where you have private keys that are online, but we make it more secure than
your average wallet by using multi-signature aspects of the protocol so that you never have
enough private key data on a single machine that could then get hacked and have all your money
taken. We instead split those keys up across multiple machines using a two out of three
multi-sig solution for every blockchain that we support. So as a result, you get some interesting
properties where, you know, if the user's machine gets hacked, the hacker doesn't have enough
private key material to steal the money. If BitGo's machines get hacked, same thing,
you would have to simultaneously hack both all of our users and our servers in order to actually
be able to reconstitute this data and make fraudulent transactions to steal the crypto assets.
It's been interesting being in the security side of things, really behind the scenes, you know,
seeing a lot of the more nefarious activities that do go on. You know, it's the honey badger,
you know, adversarial environment to really to the extreme. Everyone who is in this space,
who is, you know, well known or is, you know, on the internet with their services is constantly
being poked and prodded and attacked. And there's real money on the line. And so you have to be
completely vigilant 24 seven and be as proactive as possible with security in this space, because
once you screw up, there's no going back. Oh, absolutely. That is one thing that we
have learned multiple times in our own crypto journey. I actually had somebody, especially
you, Travis, especially me. Yeah. So somebody actually called T-Mobile and did a SIM card
swap. Yeah, you know, that stuff is running rampant. And, you know, so security is really
important now. So as BitGo, is this the web wallet for the exchanges? Or this is a you said it's not
a consumer product? Is it businesses and enterprises who are using this for their own private blockchains?
Or is BitGo primarily being you? Who are the who are the customers? Right. So we started out as a
Bitcoin only service. And some of our larger customers there are folks like Bitstamp and OK
Coin, you know, a number of the medium to larger size exchanges, and then a very long, long tail
of smaller exchanges that, you know, you and even I have not heard of all of them. It's actually a
lot of small exchanges in the in Asia that are popping up. We do have a web wallet, but our primary
usage is through our API. We have SDKs that we provide. So basically, you know, a Bitcoin or
crypto asset service provider that needs to accept and send crypto assets will grab our SDK and
integrate our logic to basically use us as their wallet. And when they're using us as a wallet,
they're they're just making API calls to us where they are half signing transactions locally on
their machines, sending those half signed transactions over to us. And then BitGo essentially
acts as like a an oracle or a code signer. And we are looking at these half signed transactions.
And then we're looking at any number of arbitrary security policies that the user and that we have
set up. And we say, OK, do all of the security policies get passed or is this breaking one of
the security policies? And if any of those flags get tripped, then all we have to do is not
co-sign the transaction and it is never valid. So unless the API calls and transactions can get
through all of our security policies, it never becomes valid from the network standpoint.
That kind of allows us to be a gatekeeper, a security service. And it also because it's a
two out of three multisig solution and BitGo only ever has one out of the three keys,
it means that we are non custodial. So we never have the ability to unilaterally take someone's
money or unilaterally block somebody from using their money. If for some reason BitGo got hacked
or government came in and stole all of our servers and shut us down or there was some sort of
catastrophe, then the customer can go get their backup recovery keys and use software that they
run locally to create transactions and completely route around BitGo, send their money to a new
wallet and continue operating. Jameson, you are kind of like the honey badger yourself,
only you do care. But at the same time, you're a man of many opinions and you just call them
like you seize them. Travis and I were discussing an interview you did with or a debate you had with
Roger, previously known as Bitcoin Jesus Ver. I'm not sure that people refer to him. Is that
anymore? They have lots of names for him. We've interviewed him. We found him to be very amiable
and have no personal issues, but don't call it B cash. It's not B cash. So let's talk about the
whole Bitcoin B cash thing. What's your perspective on this war that has been waged? Yeah, this was
the culmination of several years of arguing. Eventually, one segment of the Bitcoin user
group decided, you know what, we're just talking in circles and we're never going to get to
compromise with the rest of you. So we're going to do what the protocol allows us to do. And we're
going to fork off and create our own network with our own slightly modified protocol that is more
in line with what we believe Bitcoin is supposed to be. And this is great. This is the free market
in action. Now, the con to all of that is that because there's no one controlling these networks,
there's no official marketing agency or whatever for any given network. It's all organic.
And so you have people out there that are trying to argue and explain their own perspective and
get more people to adopt their network and trash the other network, tell people why it's terrible.
And as a result, you end up with this very interesting nonviolent war, generally nonviolent
war, war of words and war of opinions and perspectives and a lot of rhetoric. And so
it's tricky because I am very biased against, I guess, like religious fundamentalism type of
stuff. And I realize that at the root of all of this, of like, what is Bitcoin, it is fundamentally
a personal ideology. No one can tell you what Bitcoin is. I cannot tell you this is Bitcoin.
These are the specific things that make Bitcoin Bitcoin. You really have to decide that for
yourself. And then let me interrupt you there because are you saying Satoshi Nakamoto's
white paper vision wasn't clear enough that just like scripture, there's ambiguity or room for
interpretation? Definitely. Yes, it was not a like founding document that that has to be interpreted
in a specific way. And, and, you know, then set some sort of requirements that will affect, you
know, the future evolution of Bitcoin. One of the ways that I've described this is that we threw
around a lot of fancy words like permissionlessness and trustlessness and decentralization and stuff.
And Bitcoin does have some very interesting properties that make it unique in compared to
other stores of value and payment systems. And so if you are operating, what I would say is like
the strongest security model that Bitcoin can provide, which is what you get from running a
fully validating node and basically checking everybody else's transactions to make sure that
nobody is breaking any of the rules, then you're in a trustless state where you don't have to trust
any single other person on the network, to be honest to you. However, from a completely different
perspective, you are trusting everyone in aggregate with regard to what the rules actually are.
Because if the network, you know, organically decides to change any rule of Bitcoin, even
something as extreme as like the 21 million coin limit or something as simple as the block size
limit, anything can be changed if the network in general agrees that it should be changed.
It could even be something as nefarious as, oh, we're going to steal all of your coins and
redistribute it to everybody else in a specific way. So there is this interesting kind of like
faith and trust in the idea that everybody else on the network is generally going to agree and
not collude against you specifically.
Well, we can keep making as many, there's as many iterations as there are elements, right?
Because, you know, Bitcoin 10 Bitcoin, aluminum Bitcoin, you know, salts, right? There's all the
anyway, nevermind. Yeah, I want to ask you, but maybe even a tough question here because,
you know, with the transaction speeds and the high fees and I mean, I listened to that whole
interview with Roger Vare and I said, you know what he had some, he had some good points. I
wasn't busting his balls the whole time. I was like, you know what? He does have good points.
The one that he always says and he iterates over and over was about how Bitcoin has become slow,
expensive and unreliable. And that's true because I mean, if you look at blocktivity.info and you
see how many transactions are pulling through the Bitcoin, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain right
now, it's high. A lot of times it's like over 200,000 in the queue. Ethereum is experiencing
that same sort of bottleneck with its growth. A lot of times having 50 to 100,000, you know,
in the queue. So how is that? Is that solved? Is that because I mean, it sounds to me like
in listening to that interview and I think everyone in bad crypto should listen to this.
It's it's the Tom Woods show that came out. I think I don't know what in the 20th or something
like that around December. You guys want to listen to that. So how is how does that get solved?
Because you mentioned in that interview that the Bitcoin core roadmap is different because
there's Bitcoin core. But then there's other people who are working on the protocol as well.
And you mentioned just a minute ago, there's there is no centralized sort of person or team
that says here's what we're going to do. So how does Bitcoin get to the point where they
can solve those problems? The interesting thing about the on chain scaling perspective of will
just, you know, make the block size bigger is that it does work. There may be some people out there
who just straight up say, oh, it doesn't work. But I would say it it does work. We're just not
willing to make the tradeoffs required for it to work. And when I say tradeoffs, I generally mean,
you know, making it more expensive to run fully validating nodes and having that ultimate security
model as we want for as many people as possible to be able to afford to get the maximum security
model out of Bitcoin. So it's, you know, it's very frustrating because demand for this particular
asset is already far exceeding what it is allowing the network to basically process like if,
you know, speaking of Bitcoin as this like organic thing, like if Bitcoin wanted to make
its blocks bigger, and it wanted to process more transactions on the chain than it would. But
for whatever reason, and many reasons, the this thing that is Bitcoin has decided that it does
not want to do that at this point in time. And, you know, that's probably because a lot of the
folks who are making the technical arguments that we should try to be as efficient in our use of
block space as possible and, and try to do these more complex, you know, second layer solutions,
solutions that at least for now, the patients of the Bitcoin holders and the node operators
on the network is outweighing the frustration of the trans actors who are having to wait for
hours or days for their transactions to get confirmed. That's kind of the main contention
that I see going on is the folks who are willing to make the trade offs, some of whom are
prioritizing fast transactions with low fees, other folks who are prioritizing slower transactions,
higher fees, but lower cost of doing a full node that validates all of the rules.
Well, let's let's bounce over to crypto at large. All right, a little away from the tech,
perhaps and more into the future. What in the world is going on? I mean, over the past year,
we saw the market cap, we saw Bitcoin go from a thousand to five figures. And we've seen the
crypto market cap go from 50 billion to over 700 billion. What's your evaluation? What do you think
is going on out there? It's just another cycle, you know, another like s curve adoption cycle. And
really, you know, the mainstream media picking up on this, I think is what has taken it to the next
level. You know, from like personal anecdotes, I've been having and many other people I know,
who have been in the space for a while, have been having a lot of their old, you know, friends and
colleagues that they told about crypto years ago, and were ignored. Those folks are coming back
around now because they're hearing about it, you know, mainstream news. And now they're saying,
oh, well, if you know, if the world in general is starting to talk about this, then maybe it's a
real thing. And it's not a scam. And so it's just, you know, the sort of viral network effect
starting to catch on. Well, I guess the second part of that is, is there anything that can stop
this train? Or is this a locomotive that is just going to keep barreling down the tracks?
I don't think it's going to stop. I think that, you know, things are going to keep changing,
uh, probably in many ways that none of us expect. It'll be very interesting to see, you know, what
the central banks and the governments of the world do in response. And if you want to be more
conspiracy minded, and we believe that the central banks and the governments are not actually stupid
and ignorant, they know what's happening, you know, then there's a high likelihood that they
already are doing things behind the scenes. Uh, and, you know, you can read all about the, you
know, potential, uh, you know, divide and conquer conspiracy tactics that may be going on and may
in fact be, you know, contributing to a lot of the vitriol that we see in the community, trying to
just get us to tear each other apart. While in the meantime, you probably got, uh, the incumbents
that are working on their own projects and hoping to basically create their, their own more centralized
crypto that is, uh, hopefully in their mind, going to overtake Bitcoin and all of these other crypto
assets. But what's the conspiracy? Like what it, what's the theory? Oh, just the, we, we see so
much evidence on social media of, you know, manipulation happening, you know, trying to,
you know, push people's perspectives around. And you're, some people call that out as like
shilling and sock puppetry or just straight up spam. There's a lot of it that happens on Reddit.
I, I see a fair amount on Twitter and you don't know who's actually behind it. Um, it's very easy
for one side of the like scaling debate to say, Oh, it's these people on the other side of the
scaling debate that are doing this. But really for all we know, it's actually third parties who just
want to get us to waste all of our time arguing with each other rather than continuing to build
and improve the system that we have right now. Uh, James, and I have a question around this.
So you just mentioned about the, you know, the conspiracy theories and whatnot. And I mean,
with Bitcoin, you can really put on a conspiracy theories tat and like look at different things
from different angles. And so I have a question for you about this in the original Bitcoin
white paper, you know, there was several different references to different things that, that Satoshi
Nakamoto had pulled from, right? And there's eight of them. And one of them that's missing is
Bitcoin golds, um, or, or bit gold or whatever from Nick Zobo. And another, and another one that
is missing, uh, from what I found is the, it's, it was originally created by the NSA back in 1996,
how to make a mint, the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash. That one wasn't mentioned as
well. And so to me, I look at that and I go, Hmm. And then I go down rabbit holes and I look and I
see, Oh, well look, here's this person, Tatsuki Akamoto. Like is that maybe that part he worked
on that person worked on this particular document. Maybe that like, is, is, is it possible that
Bitcoin was created by the NSA? Definitely, definitely possible. Yeah. But the great thing
is that it doesn't matter. Go on. Yeah. Uh, well, I mean that that's kind of the beauty of open
source. Uh, and the reason why the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't matter because
they don't have the ability to hide any like nefarious, you know, backdoors or exploits or,
or to change the rules or really to have any control over the system. Um, you know, the absolute
worst case scenario that I can see from like having a hostile Satoshi Nakamoto actor would be
that they could dump all of their coins on the market. But I can assure you that if that happens,
there's going to be a lot of people buying those coins up and that it's only going to be like a
temporary, uh, bit of insanity on the markets. But, you know, the protocol itself and the network
would continue operating just fine. Yeah. That was one of the reasons that came to that sort of
thought process, because, you know, if you, you read the initial sort of Bitcoin conversations
between, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto and then, you know, some of the original folks and then how,
you know, Gavin Andreessen was sort of given access to all of this and then the repositories.
And then once he went to the CIA to talk about Bitcoin, then Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared.
And I was like, that was always weird. Like how, how did, uh, Gavin Andreessen sort of get ousted
from being able to even work on Bitcoin? I know it had had, it revolved around the Craig Wright
thing, but like, how did he never get access to these repositories back? Cause it seemed like
they were, they were shunning him somehow. Right. So that's actually kind of a bit of,
of propaganda that you hear. So Gavin and Jeff Garzic and like any of the, or even Mike Hearn,
like any of these folks who contributed to Bitcoin Core in years past, no one is stopping them from
contributing again. Like they aren't being blocked from the repository. Now, Gavin Andreessen had
merge access on the Bitcoin Core repository. That was what was handed over to him from Satoshi.
And there are, I think four or five people who have merge access, but that in and of itself is
not particularly special because everybody is watching the repository. Like I watched the
repository. I don't have merge access. I've made a few minor contributions to Core and I never needed
any special permission. I just wrote the code and opened the pull request. And I mean, this is how
open source development works. And so you'll hear a lot of whining about Gavin and Jeff being
quote unquote ousted and having their access removed. But the reality is if you can go look
at their GitHub contributions and you'll see that they had not contributed anything to the Bitcoin
Core repository for over a year, maybe several years at the time when their merge access was
finally removed. So from a technical standpoint, it was really more of just cleaning up the,
the merge access. Like if someone's not going to use it, there's no reason to have it there
because it's, if anything, just like a security liability. Oh, that makes total sense. That's
great. I'm glad you clarified that because that was, that's always been one of those things. It
was like, so what's going on over there with that? Like, how are they just able to arbitrarily boot
somebody out who got the keys to the castle given to them by Satoshi? So that, that always seemed
a little strange to me. Yeah. So like even the folks who do have merge access, like Vladimir and
maybe Peter and a few other people that the reason I say that that's not particularly powerful is
because even if you have the ability to change the code in the repository and you manage to do it
without anybody noticing, then that doesn't allow you to actually deploy the code out onto the
network. There is no like automatic update of Bitcoin nodes. And this is by design, this is
a counter point or counter balance to developer power is that in order to update your node,
the operator has to manually go, you know, get the new code, download it, install it and run it.
And, and that is meant as a, a point of, you know, hopefully requiring these node
operators to be a bit more diligent about exactly what the rules are that they are agreeing to run.
Well, and it seems now that because the code is open source that anybody can go in and create a
fork, right? Here we are in a certain block. It's going to fork. And now we've got Bitcoin,
you know, fill in the blank. We, we have our own crypto bad coin. So, you know, maybe we just need
to fork Bitcoin, Travis and call it Bitcoin bad, right? Rather than have our own token, just Bitcoin
bad and just having Bitcoin in it will be worth like $70 billion. That's genius. Isn't that how
it works? That's how it works until it doesn't. I really see a lot of parallels of what's happening
now with all of the altcoin airdrops to back in like 2012, 2013, when altcoins really became a
thing. What you saw actually, even back then, Matt Corallo actually wrote an altcoin generator,
which it was very similar to what we have now with the fork gen. But once it became really,
really easy for anybody to create an altcoin, the value of them dropped significantly. So you
ended up with a very long tail distribution of low value altcoins. And so now the same thing is
happening with the Bitcoin forks, where the first few where it was very hard for those people to do
that, they had to have a lot of developer talent and generally had a lot more resources and
marketing. They managed to capture a decent amount of value and convince people that maybe they
actually have a viable project. And now you just have all of the folks coming in who have done
nothing more than click a few buttons and put up some marketing propaganda. And they're not going
to be able to convince many people to store their money in that system. But look what's happening
with those alts now. Many alts are just also taking off like crazy. Is this an indicator
of things to come? Or is this just a weird bit of hysteria that's going to die down and people are
going to end up losing a lot of money? I mean, I think it's, you know, free market greed is,
you know, people want to invest in the next Bitcoin. And as a result, you see a lot of
novices to the crypto ecosystem that are coming in and they're saying, Oh, I can't afford a whole
Bitcoin. So look at that ripple thing. That's only, you know, 50 cents a dollar. I'll put all
my money into that. Oh, now it's $2, $3. You know, this is a winner right here. And so you do
enter into hype cycles with all of these different assets. I haven't seen any analysis recently,
but I know over the years I've seen a few different analysis that was showing for like Bitcoin and
Ethereum that, you know, the vast majority of the value, probably like 80% of the value in these
things is speculative. And then the minority, maybe 10, 20% of the value is utility of the people who
are actually like using it on a regular basis. Yeah, we had an interview recently with Lex
Salkolin. He's the futurist over at Autonomous Research. And we were talking about the different
blockchains that are out there. And he made a, he made a great analogy about, you know, well, you
want to make sure that all the highways are set up great before you get people in cars on them,
right? So before you start building out these decentralized apps and you want to make sure that
your highway is set up and secure and good to go, and that was a great analogy. And so it leads
into my next question to you is what are some of the other blockchains out there aside from Bitcoin?
I know you're pretty much, you're focused mostly on Bitcoin, but I'm sure that you have, you know,
you've, you've done some research on some of those other ones or some of the other blockchains that
are coming up. And I, I wanted to see which ones do you think aside from Ethereum have the most
potential in the, in the future? So in general, the ones that I think are the best for actually
putting money into tend to be the larger ones, you know, in the top like 20 or so of the crypto
market caps. For me specifically being, you know, more cypher punk minded, I, I invest in the,
the privacy centric coins like Monero and Zcash. I think that, you know, that is, you know, actual
utility that I'm interested in. When you're talking about more of the smart contract stuff
and, and Ethereum and, and whatnot, you could definitely argue has greater potential,
but I'm not convinced that they will be able to realize it in a secure fashion simply because the,
the trade-off that you're making for having much greater flexibility and ease of development is
that you have a much larger attack surface and, you know, things that could potentially get
exploited and go wrong. So I think it's been maybe almost a year at this point since Ethereum is at
any particularly bad protocol level issues, but we have seen even just in the past few months
a number of issues of smart contracts being exploited, especially with like the multi-sig
smart contracts. And on that note, I'm actually going to be publishing a blog post soon. Like
it's already done. It's just waiting to get published about all of the challenges that I
and my team have had to deal with, with Ethereum infrastructure over the past year and a half. So
we actually did not one, but two different attempts at building Ethereum multi-sig wallet
infrastructure. We had to scrap the first one for several technical reasons.
We did that around the time that the network was getting exploited a lot at the end of 2016.
And then we came back and basically started all over from scratch and spent most of 2017
working on that. And we encountered a lot of very unique challenges that we had not anticipated.
It's those damn crypto kiddies. They pretty much destroyed the Ethereum blockchain and yet
Ethereum has broken a thousand. It's a really amazing thing. So what about all these other
altcoins that are coming out there? We interview a lot of companies on here for our ICO spotlights
that are all over the map as far as the utility behind what they're attempting to create. Do you
see that there will be literally thousands and thousands of different tokens for individual uses
or is this an experiment that we're going to wake up and go, you know what, there's a few coins
and all these others that it's just not going to work. I mean, it's definitely in the experiment
phase right now, but while you can make the argument that there are various laws of nature
that tend to cause like a sound monetary system to consume all of the other ones.
A lot of these things are not just straight up money. They're doing all these other utilitarian
things. So I think that, yes, it will be a very diverse set of crypto networks and some of them
will enable just new types of economic interaction that you just can't do on other networks.
I don't think that we'll have one single network that does everything. That's another reason why
I'm skeptical of Ethereum is because the idea that one single network will be able to do all
the types of computation that you want to do, that poses even more scalability and security
challenges in it than Bitcoin is facing. And Bitcoin has some really, really tough challenges
ahead. Yeah, it's so crazy when there's so many companies that are building on top of Ethereum
and then the capacity of Ethereum better handle that, right? And it's not handling it right now
and the price is still going up. So that's a fascinating sort of a challenge that is there
for them for sure. One company that we had on that I thought was really interesting and with you being
a security guy, you might like them. Have you done any research on Quantstamp at all? No,
I can't say I have. Yeah. So what they want to be is they want to be the verisign of Ethereum and
smart contracts across all blockchains. So we had it, we did an ICO spotlight with them,
so they basically are going to go in and verify that each one of those smart contracts are
completely legit and compliant and secure, and then give them that seal of approval,
sort of like you would see on the verisign websites back in the day, or still still see that.
I have a question. So we had some questions that popped in from some of our users. One of the guys
on Twitter, Shane Kennedy, at Shane underscore Kennedy. You want to know what courses or resources
would you recommend for someone who wants to learn programming in order to eventually become
a Bitcoin developer? Yeah. So if you have no programming experience whatsoever, then you're
definitely going to need to start out with some very general courses. I don't have any off the
top of my head that I am aware of, but there's a plethora of different MOOCs and stuff that you
can use to start off with something easy like Python or Node.js. It's also tricky because
I see two different types of software developers, and there's the type, which is like myself,
where I got a formal four year computer science education, and I had to learn all of these really,
really low level theories about computer science before I even really started trying to build any
complex applications. And then there's the folks who just skip past all of that and dive right into,
okay, here's how you start writing your first scripts. And then we'll worry about all of the
other stuff like figuring out how to determine orders of magnitude of code, execution speed,
and good programming practices for building large, complex architectures of applications
in order to make them easier to maintain. It's a lot easier these days for people to just jump in
and start writing code, but if you do that, it's very hard to write high quality code that is going
to last and be maintainable. So I'm not sure if there is a great resource that can really allow
you to skip all of the low level computer science that I think is necessary if you're going to be
doing crypto asset programming, because this type of development is more akin to aerospace engineering
than it is to web development. And I did web development for like the first 10 years of my
career. And that was, at times, you know, it could be a bit scary when you have an application
that is servicing millions and millions of users, you don't want it to go down for a single second.
But if it does screw up and go down, then it's okay. You just go in, you fix it, you deploy new
code, you deploy new hardware, and you bring it back online. And you'll have some upset users,
but generally, you know, nobody gets particularly hurt. But then with crypto assets, if you make a
mistake, you know, with cryptography in general, if there's a single exploitable condition in there,
and some attacker finds it, then now a lot of people have lost a lot of money, and you can't
just go out there and, you know, deploy some new code to fix it. In a lot of these cases, a lot of
times, that's it, you're done. There are no take backs. So I think that in order to really
get to the level of doing crypto asset engineering, you kind of have to go through
a much more rigorous computer science background. Interesting stuff. Those of you that might have
like somehow ended up into the show before the beginning, we're talking to Jameson Lopp, his
official website is lopp.net. That's where you'll find his articles, his presentations,
other interviews. He's got an amazing resource page over there that somehow doesn't include
bad crypto. I don't know, how do we fix that? How do we fix that? Oh, well, you see, it's open
source. And there's a link at the top. All you need to do is you go on to the GitHub and you
submit your first pull request. If you can't figure out how to do that, well, then that's your first
homework task. Then you're screwed and you get nothing. All the links to his social profiles
as well. Jameson, as we get ready to wrap up, why don't you give us your boldest prediction
for 2018 in the crypto space? Boldest prediction. Well, I believe that we are going to start seeing
sovereign wealth funds and not just institutions, but really huge managed pools of assets start
to say, we need exposure to crypto assets. And this is going to change the tide where Bitcoin
and crypto is no longer just seen as a toy play thing, but actually starts to be seen as a hedge
as a hedge on the same level as like gold itself. That's something that we were talking about
recently. I think Joel and I were having some conversations and I, with my co-author of my book,
Digital Sense, we had a powwow with a couple of countries that are interested in creating
their own sovereign blockchain to do that exact thing. They want to tokenize their oil reserves.
And then just like what last month, I guess, Venezuela is now doing that with their new
Petro coin. So we're starting to see the beginnings of that taking place right now.
Yeah. It's the whole space is growing so quickly and you can ask me a lot of things about like,
what do I think of this coin or that coin? And really my honest opinion and answer in most cases
is I have no idea because I can't keep up with it all anymore. It does move quickly. What are
your favorite resources to keep up with stuff? Let's see. Well, for me, I'm mostly on Twitter,
which should be pretty apparent. I like Twitter more than any other social media platform because
I think it allows you to customize exactly what you're seeing. Stuff like Reddit and Facebook
and whatever is a lot more noisy. And so these days, my time is very precious and I want to
curate the content as much as possible. But really following the small number of other
curators on Twitter, I find allows me to get a pretty diverse set of content. That's also
high quality. I love your pinned tweet. It's, you know, from November of 2017 and says,
welcome to Bitcoin newcomers. Here's your FAQ question. Who should I trust? Answer. Nobody
question. When should I sell? Answer. Never question is Bitcoin dying because and then
you've got a blank so people could fill whatever they want. Your answer is no. What have I gotten
myself into? Nobody knows. And how do I learn more? And it's got a link to your site. I love
it. Straightforward talk. And of course, in your profile picture, you're wearing a make Bitcoin
great again hat. I love that too. It's exciting times. And I imagine that it's only going to
continue to get crazier. So great. Well, thank you so much for coming on to bad crypto, man.
That's been a great pleasure. I know our audience is going to love this and you'll get some some
new people probably becoming aware of all the great things that you're doing. So thank you
for being a friend of the show. And we look forward over time to watching you continue to
be awesome in the space. So thanks for all you do. Thanks for having me.
Good stuff from Mr. Jameson Lopp. You are now considered a friend of the show and are welcome
to come drop it like it's hot. Anytime you want, drop it like it's lop, just lop it in there.
I tell you what, now this guy was legit. I really like talking to Jameson, really sharp dude.
And I mean his, he has an amazing beard and anytime somebody is that smart and has an amazing
beard and has been in Bitcoin and has been in this ecosystem, as long as he have has like,
he's one of the top guys that we've talked to so far. We've talked to some amazing people.
I really liked that dude. I hope to have him on the show again.
And wait, do you see the guests that we have coming up and an FYI more interviews are happening
lately. And there's two reasons for that. One, we're meeting more fascinating people.
And, you know, Travis and I, we're still learning and we learn more from having them on here,
just like you're learning along with us. Reason number two is we've got a lot of travels going
on. In fact, as you're listening to the show right now, Travis is actually on a cruise.
We, we had to pre record this week's episodes because Travis is on the blockchain cruise. He's
hanging out right now with Ronnie Moas and, and, and McAfee and, and a bunch of others. And are
you Travis? That's only true if they listened to it within like that two or three day window.
Yeah. Technically like right now, Travis is sitting here.
And yeah, well, as of, yeah, when this, when this, when this episode airs, when it first goes out,
you're on the cruise. So I'm talking, Hey, Travis, are you having a good time on the cruise?
Oh my gosh. You guys, that one time with that thing by the deal was so awesome. Yeah. And that,
and that, and we did some things and oh my gosh, there was water everywhere.
Well, hopefully not everywhere. We don't want to repeat of a, you know, Titanic or anything,
but luckily I checked the weather. There are no typhoons coming. That was my concern. I was like,
it's all cool. As long as like, no, like super typhoons, but the ship will be full of crypto
tycoons with no wifi. I can imagine this, like all the world's most famous crypto people on one boat
with no wifi. Nobody can check their crypto holdings. You're going to have to just talk
to each other and speculate on what's happening with EOS and Neo. So anyway, you know, we're,
we're fluid here and the format of the show evolves depending upon, um, you know, availability and
what's going on. And that means, you know, when we're recording something in advance, it means
that there's not going to be current news because we don't want to say, Hey, look at that Bitcoin is
at 14,000. And when the episode actually errors, it's at, you know, 12 or 22. And yeah, that's,
that's not right. We did that. We did that with the ripple one, like we recorded it ahead of time.
And it was like ripple at a, you know, a hundred billion or whatever it's like, it was like a
totally low amount. It was number four in the market cap. That's where it was. And by the time
the episode aired, it was number two in market cap. You know, we, we want to be bad. We are bad.
We don't want to be horrible. That's true. We want to be classy with our badness. Yeah.
So we appreciate you guys. Thanks for listening and our ever growing audience. You're the best.
Please tell a friend about bad crypto podcasts because they will love you and they might even
want some of your bad coin, which we're not giving away as of the 18th anymore. So those of you who
got it, you're the baddest of all. So stay bad. The bad crypto podcast is a production of bad
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