4, 3, 2, 1.
We're live. James and lop.
How are you today?
Not bad. Good to be here.
Professional cypher pond creator of that Toshi and lop net CTO of casa.
Our things.
Keeping busy.
There's always too much to do and not enough time or time.
We're excited to have you on the show. Thanks. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for joining me.
We met a lightning. A lot of people were like, how do you get Jameson on the show? I want Jameson too. It's like, it's very difficult. It's a very long and convoluted process.
You approach him, say hi to him and ask him if he wants to join.
Yeah, I'm pretty open. And thankfully, I'm still got enough time.
Free time here and there that I can talk to people. So that's important to try to spread information and education.
That's part of the reason why I put so much time into maintaining that website of educational resources.
And that that's what we're trying to do. It's I have an interesting story. When I first started, I was like, maybe the best things to do is to share education with people interested in Bitcoin.
And I started putting together my website and things and then I bumped into your lockdown net. I was like, oh, shit, everything is already done.
There's nothing more to do. It's a pretty full comprehensive suite of information of different kinds.
Very well done, very easy accessible. Great, great work there.
Well, somebody had to do it. And it's I think at this point, six or seven hundred links across several dozen different subcategories.
And it really is becoming a almost daily maintenance type of job.
Just keeping everything fresh, because, you know, sometimes links die on you and people take their websites down and then people are always creating new stuff as well.
So you got to stay on top of it and keep adding the new things. Cool, cool.
OK, a little bit of background on you. I did some research. I didn't find much, which I think is a good thing.
So you're one of the most senior Bitcoin out there. I think you mentioned you started around 2013 or so.
Yeah, you know, I I'll never be able to remember the first time I heard about it.
But I remember it was in like summer, late summer of 2012 when a Slashdot article came across my computer screen.
And I read it and realized that this Bitcoin thing wasn't going away.
And that's when I finally read the white paper and actually got interested in it.
And so I was just a hobbyist for a few years there before I went full time.
Then you went with BitGo first and then now at Casa.
Let me go through a quick intro about what we're doing here in London.
And then I want to hear more about your journey into Bitcoin and moving to full time working on Bitcoin.
So if you don't mind, we're going to start with a quick intro.
What we're doing here in London and then I'll turn it over to you.
And then we have some questions. Sure.
So I started over more than a year ago.
Now I run Bitcoin and Blockchain London, which is thousand one hundred seventy members.
Now we started with like two or three members.
So I grow quite significantly significantly since we started.
And we have mainly three category of events.
One is the intro Bitcoin intro and classes where basically we have mainly newbies
and some intermediate level Bitcoiners that come to learn more about how Bitcoin works,
the protocol, the Bitcoin blockchain and all the related topics,
including the economic side and the monetary side.
We have an event for that coming up.
Actually, we're trying to set up a meetup for people to learn how to run their own full node using Raspberry Pi.
So that should be pretty interesting.
And I'll put up on meetup right after this.
The second is the Bitcoin debate, which grow from the original class
when people were arguing about some of the topics around Bitcoin,
which is kind of happening all the time. So during the class, people were like, what about like,
is mining energy intensive? Are we killing the planet?
I was like, maybe it's good to have arguments taken singularly like as one topic and try to explore that.
And as we go through understanding better the topic,
you understand why it might not be what people tell you it is.
And it's a great way for people to learn because as part of the debate,
they think through the actual argument and sometimes they come to the same conclusion.
And it's very critical because the news usually pump out random information like mining is killing the planet.
So and if you think through for like 10 minutes, then you see that things might not be exactly as they portrayed.
So we come out with this Bitcoin debate.
And lastly, the Bit.No channel that you're on right now, we have Giacomo Zucco as first guest.
And then from there, we have Jeremy from Casa.
We have Mario Gibney from Blockstream, Nicolas Durier, BTC Pay and other Bitcoiners,
Stefan Levera and now you Jameson.
So let's start. We just briefly touch upon your background.
One of the most senior Bitcoiner out there walk us through the journey into Bitcoin.
When was the first time you heard about Bitcoin?
When did you realize it was the thing you should focus on?
How did you transition to work exclusively on Bitcoin?
And then we're going to talk about Casa.
Yeah, it was a multi-year journey for me.
Like I said, I've I probably heard about it in 2011 and just dismissed it several times
as something that was going to get hacked and everybody was going to lose their money.
And it wasn't until later in 2012 when it was probably the third or fourth time
I actually heard about it when I realized it was staying around longer than I expected.
I should probably look into it.
And so once I read the white paper, it intrigued me mainly as a computer scientist
because I realized that this was actually solving this fundamental computer science problem
that I had never even really thought about before the Byzantine generals problem.
And I also realized that I'd never really thought about money before.
And so as I started exploring more into that rabbit hole, I got more and more interested
and also realized that money is this concept that just sort of belongs to humanity in general.
And yet the definition of money is pretty tightly controlled by very small groups of people behind closed doors.
So the idea of money as an open collaborative project was also interesting to me philosophically.
So I did what a lot of people did back then and tried to figure out how do I actually get some of these bitcoins.
Not easy. I'm pretty sure this was before Coinbase.
And the easiest way that I could find to actually get my hands on any was to go to my bank
and do an international wire transfer to some other bank in Japan.
And I'd never done a wire transfer before. And I went into my bank.
It took me close to an hour. And my bankers were like, you realize that once you send this money,
we can't get it back for you. And I'm like, it's OK. It's just like an experiment.
I fully realized that I could lose everything. And thankfully, it worked out.
I mean, I was basically sending it to the bank that was being used by MT Gox at the time and got my coins
and thankfully realized that MT Gox was a flaming dumpster with so many problems that I should not keep them on there.
So I did not get goxed like a lot of people. Thankfully, I felt like there were a lot of signs that it was not going to end well.
But after that point, I spent the next year or so just hanging out on forums and talking to people
and not really spending my entire days trying to learn more about it. It was just sort of a hobby.
And until I think it was late 2013, early 2014, I decided I wanted to better understand what was happening with my node.
So I was I was running a Bitcoin node, but it was just running and I didn't I have no real idea like what it was doing.
And I wanted to sort of peek under the hood and figure out what are the actual operations that this node is doing.
So even though I had a very poor handle of C++ and still do, I forked the Bitcoin Core project
and put in a bunch of instrumentation code where I kind of leveraged a lot of the DevOps skills that I had been doing in my full time job
to collect a lot of data of internal operations of the node
and basically send those to an external service that could then aggregate them and then put them into some nice pretty charts that people could look at.
And I basically saw this as me trying to add more transparency to node operation.
I felt like the whole system was based upon openness and transparency, and yet the actual operation of a node was kind of a black box.
And I felt that I could help myself and other developers better understand what was happening.
And so that's basically how Satoshi got started. And I think that it it worked out pretty well.
Satoshi metrics over the years have been referenced by a number of Bitcoin developers to point out, you know, different changes in the system or changes in node operation.
And so I was doing that for a year or so, also just as a side project until 2015 came around.
And I realized that I was spending more and more of my days focusing on Bitcoin and kind of neglecting my full time job.
And the venture capital had started coming into the space.
And I was like, you know what, maybe I can just continue doing what I'm doing, but get paid to do it.
So that's when I started applying at companies and ended up at BitGo because even though they were not looking for remote developers,
they knew who I was because of the Satoshi project and did an interview and a kind of trial basis with them.
And it went well enough that they brought me on full time.
So did that for a couple of years, had a ton of learning experiences and and plenty of security scares that happened over the years, you know,
working for a security company until I got to the point about two years ago when I made a slight pivot where I'm still working on,
you know, multisig private key security, but I pivoted from the enterprise side into the personal side.
And the main reason that I did that was that I felt like we had made a ton of progress on enterprise security and there was still a big gap on the personal side.
It was a personal problem where I realized that I was spending between one and two days every year just refreshing my cold storage setup
and creating a setup that was robust enough that I was confident that if I got hit by a truck,
that my heirs would still be able to recover the money and it wouldn't be permanently lost.
And I realized, you know, it takes me this much time and effort and I really don't want to do it.
The vast majority of people in the space probably don't have a setup that's anywhere near as secure and robust.
And that's basically what we've been working on for the past couple of years at Casa is trying to find a new balance of high security,
but also high usability when it comes to securing your keys.
And then at an even higher level, we're just trying to help people improve their personal sovereignty in every way possible.
So that's also how the the node came into play.
We can talk a bit more about that later on is like, what are the different levels of sovereignty?
You know, what should people be doing in this space?
Yeah, we are. We have few questions about that.
So I'm really into Casa and we have Jeremy here in London at Advancing Bitcoin last year.
So we have it on my meetup to introduce, you know, the people, the members of my meetup into Casa.
And I'm so much into it because I have like two or three major issues that I see in Bitcoin.
One of that is custody, obviously.
And there are different ways to solve the problem of custody.
But not many have been looking at the user interface problem and and people that might not be a programmer,
might not be might not even be a bitcoiner.
Right. And they want to enter the space.
So there is a critical problem of custody management and and greater user interface.
And I think I think Casa has been doing a pretty good job and and I really like the product.
But so I believe in the user learning how to build their own node.
And that's also why you want to run meetups to teach people how to do that, because they need to understand how it works.
But they should also have an alternative.
They don't want to spend the time or they don't want to develop the expertise to understand how how the node works.
So that alternative should be available.
Yeah, that's really what this is all about is it's about time and resources.
And, you know, even though you mentioned stuff like, you know, not everybody's a programmer.
What I've found is like even the really technical people like myself, the programmers will often make compromises and resort to less robust,
less secure solutions simply because we don't want to put in the time.
And that's because what we're really talking about with a lot of this stuff is boring IT data management stuff.
And nobody wants to do that.
Even if you have the technical ability, it seems to be beneath you.
You know, I've got better things that I could be working on.
This is really boring, you know, making backups, distributing backups, encrypting things,
but also encrypting them in a way that if we get hit by a truck, our loved ones will be able to decrypt them.
And there's so much, I guess, theory that you have to think through of, like, everything that could go wrong.
All the different scenarios, basically.
Yeah, that's actually why about a month ago, we released our wealth security protocol.
And that's like 50 page PDF of all of the different threats and loss vectors that we have thought through and tried to mitigate.
And it's just overwhelming for a single person to try to do.
And it's more likely that they will overlook something.
Eventually, that could be catastrophic.
Yeah, there was a tweet recently by Stefan Levera about, you know, whether or not Bitcoiners should know how to install and maintain a full node.
And obviously, there were the pros and the cons and big debates spun out from that.
But, you know, you do not need to be a developer to join Bitcoin, to be part of the community and even to run your full node.
In fact, there are many Bitcoiners that are not developers, or at least they're not working on the development aspect of Bitcoin.
You have, you know, arts like crypto graffiti and those guys and, you know, history or human machine interaction and podcasts and shows and things like that.
So if you want to be part of the community, you do not need to be a developer.
You can contribute in other ways as well.
Well, and I mean, even just from an adoption and usage standpoint, what we've found is that I think the vast majority of Bitcoiners are not even a part of the community, as you might be referring to it.
And by that, I mean, they never participate or talk about Bitcoin with anyone.
They simply have their Bitcoin and they're going about their lives.
And I actually know a number of people personally, many of whom are very old school adopters who never talk about it.
And they're mostly, you know, like white collar professionals, doctors, lawyers, whatever.
And, you know, this is just a portion of their investment portfolio and they're holding for years and years and potentially decades.
And they don't feel the need to be active or to potentially compromise their operational security by talking about the fact that they have Bitcoin in the first place.
And in many cases, some of these people have millions and millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, but they never spend it.
They continue just, you know, working their job, taking their salary, living their normal life.
And they're just, you know, they're just waiting for the day to come.
It's the same that I experienced in my meetup.
We have like plenty of people that are not developers or they had never heard of Bitcoin before.
And they just come to understand more. And then people, you know, start getting into the debate about, oh, you should learn about multisig, you should learn about.
I'm like, no, you know, there are other ways that they can understand, you know, what they need to know in order to have Bitcoin and to be an artwork.
So let's dig a little bit deeper into CASA.
So for the people that we just spoke about, like a lot of newbies joining my meetup, people that have not heard about Bitcoin before.
So for them, just quickly run them through what is CASA?
Why did you join CASA? What's your goal at CASA?
And how do you see the next five, 10, 20 years planned for CASA?
And what do you think is going to be success for you at CASA?
What does that mean for you?
So at CASA, our motto is basically to improve personal sovereignty.
And, you know, that's very, very broad.
And the first way that we've gone about doing that was with key management and essentially helping people be their own bank.
This is something that Bitcoin has technically enabled people to do for its entire existence.
But the learning curve and the sort of educational requirements and technical skills to do it correctly have been so high that most people don't bother with it.
And we have been trying to lower the bar from a technical standpoint for people to better manage their own assets.
So we look at this from a number of different perspectives of I think actually Trace Mayer puts it into like a first class, second class, third class citizen type of tier.
But it's kind of like the first level that you can take advantage of Bitcoin is simply by owning some.
And, you know, the definition of owning you can debate about.
But I would say, you know, even buying some on a centralized exchange and basically having a Bitcoin IOU from an exchange or another third party is still probably better than not having a Bitcoin IOU in the first place.
Of course, there's a lot of things that could go wrong and that could be lost forever or seized or whatever.
But that's kind of like the first, I think, entry level tier of starting to take advantage of the system.
Now, the next level kind of leveling up into it is to actually take your Bitcoins into your own custody so that you control the private keys so that you essentially get a level of censorship, resistance and robustness that you can be assured that no one will be able to take your money away from you.
And that is really the first level that we're trying to provide to people with the Kasa Keymaster, which is a multi-signature key management application.
We have several different levels of like two of three, three of five and even a three of six, like inheritance plan level that we've rolled out.
And the third level that's kind of after you are effectively doing self custody is what I would say is the sort of self sovereign running your own rules and using a fully validating node setup.
And so that's why about a year ago, we also started selling and shipping the Kasa node. And the idea there was both to make it easier for people to be on the Lightning Network and make fast private payments.
But also as a another feature that would eventually become integrated into this whole suite of packages where we want to have the full node also be used, you know, by the Keymaster application and basically
offload more and more trust away from Kasa servers and onto the users. This will be an interesting balance that we're going to be working on over the next few years essentially of how do we
as Kasa help people help themselves without having too much power and control and trust in us, but still, you know, being available enough that we can
essentially let the users have more power within the system.
There's always going to be some people who are, you know, upset about decisions that we make because we do make compromises and trade offs where
we, I fully admit that the most private, most, you know, secure setup that one could have would be where you don't trust anyone, you don't tell anyone about your Bitcoin, you do everything yourself, you build everything yourself.
But that's just not feasible for the vast majority of people due to time and skill constraints. So we're trying to provide a more unique position on the market for people who want to have a high level of
robustness, but also want to have, you know, a high level of support. And, you know, if something goes wrong to be able to reach out to an expert and debug it without having to spend hours or days, you know, trying to figure out what's going on under the hood.
Yeah, but and also it's if you're trusting no one and you're doing everything yourself, there is still the physical aspect, the physical risk of, you know, the person selling you the Bitcoin knows that you have the Bitcoin now.
So no matter how you go about limiting trust. And I agree with you is, you know, having the lowest trust is probably the best of all the option if available, you still run some risk. So
Yeah, I mean, it's really, really hard to operate completely independently and privately and securely in this system. You know, it's something where even I who experiment around with different things. I mean, I've used centralized AML KYC exchanges.
Even, you know, these decentralized exchanges didn't really even exist before a couple of years ago. I mean, we're still making progress on a lot of these things, but it's still going to be a long journey, I think, before the ability for the average person to operate completely
privately within the system is really going to be feasible. And I think there's always going to be more convenient but less private alternatives that will be enticing to people.
Actually, it's a good segue into the next question, which is you spoke about privacy. And we know there are a lot of, you know, privacy feature coming off in Bitcoin, Charmin, CoinJoin, JoinMarket, etc. Is CASA looking at those privacy
enhancing features? Yes or no? And if no, why? Yeah, we haven't really looked into implementing any sort of coin tumbling stuff. I've been experimenting with some of these different mixers myself and generally found them to be not as user friendly as I would like.
But ultimately, there is a conflict, I think, between using any of these on chain mixing mechanisms and the insanely high security of our Keymaster setup, which is basically that the way that our Keymaster Multisig is designed to be used is that you'll have multiple
hardware devices that are geographically distributed. This gives you a level of security against both hackers and physical attackers, but also against loss. And by loss, I mean, any number of things like natural disasters or things that could, you know, physically
destroy your keys. And so the natural result of this is that for the Multisig Keymaster, it is by design incredibly difficult to spend from that set of keys. And that is in direct conflict with these mixers, which generally are operating as hot wallets, you know, you need to have your
private keys available on a device and it needs to be interactively creating coin joins with other participants on the network. So that's one downside there. On the privacy side, I would say that the best privacy we are offering is, is more with the lightning
node, where you can deposit some spending money onto your lightning node and now take advantage of all of the privacy that the second layer network offers. But privacy on the first layer, I think, until we get something like signature aggregation, a lot of the coin join
stuff is still pretty onerous. And, you know, if you really want to improve your privacy via coin joins, you need to be doing a decent number of coin joins over a decent number of time, which means, you know, your private keys are potentially exposed on an internet
connected device. So I'm hopeful that once we get to the point that we can have aggregated signatures, that then we'll be able to have coin joins that really do provide a better level of breaking the linkage between the inputs and the outputs on
transactions. Yeah, and I think it's quite important if we want to move to full, you know, payment processor for large corporation and, you know, even individuals as, you know, maybe corporation do not want to leak what they're doing to their
competitors. So, you know, privacy, it's something that at some point will need to be fixed. Thanks for your for your view on that. So as I mentioned at the beginning, I was planning to start this educational resource page and then I bumped into
lop.net and satoshi.info. I was very impressed about satoshi. I mean, lop.net as well, but mainly satoshi. Can you tell us a little bit about are the stats run, you're hosting and maintaining the website and the data that runs behind
satoshi. And, and second, what is the most interesting stats that surprise you that made you learn something about Bitcoin you didn't know. I was really impressed about the peer misbehavior that you're tracking, maybe something there or the number of
will not connect it connected how that change in time, and maybe there is some relationship between the fees price and difficulty target. Yeah, so that is basically a full node that I'm running on a virtual server that also has the rest of my
software stack for collecting and aggregating the metrics and then having a nice Grafana dashboard to render them. And that that machine has been running for probably about five years now so there's there's a lot of metrics on there.
I think there was one really terrible, like crash or disruption that happened a few years ago so if a few of those metrics might be missing I had to do some low level data recovery at one point which was a pain, but most of them are still
there. And there have been some interesting things that I've noticed around for example the like the peer to peer messages that the nodes actually send back and forth.
For example, like, you can actually drill down into the amount of bandwidth that gets used by each type of message, and, and, and see how many of each type of message gets sent.
And, you know, this, this is the way that the nodes talk to each other is there's probably a dozen or so different type of messages that a node can send to another node. But the most common ones it turns out are actually the IV messages the invitation
messages. And that's basically because the way that data propagates around the network is via this gossip mechanism. And what happens is a node creates a transaction or a block, and then it asks all of its peers that it's connected to
say, Do you have the block or the transaction with this hash, and it does that via an invitation message.
Each of those peers will get that message will look in their own database and say, Oh, I do have it. Don't worry about it or they'll say I don't have it please send it to me.
And so, if you don't, if the node doesn't have it, it gets sent the node downloads it verifies it and then repeats the process where it then goes to all of its peer connected nodes and says hey I just got this block or this transaction or whatever.
Do you want it. And in that way, transaction can actually spread across the entire network of nearly 100,000 nodes in just a few seconds. It's a very efficient flood fill mechanism.
In terms of time, but however, it's actually a very inefficient mechanism in terms of bandwidth, you end up with a lot of redundant messages, because there's no real keeping track of who, who has what instead you're just always blasting out
Hey, you want this you want this you want this. And this is something that I've tracked for a while and felt like it was some low hanging fruit, and it turns out there's actually a proposal that has been worked on for at least a year or so and
hopefully we'll be getting into Bitcoin core in the next year or so that will drastically reduce and improve upon the, the invitation message sending so that I think it's actually going to be using something called mini sketch which was developed by Greg Maxwell
and Peter Willa to efficiently like keep track of which nodes have received which things and my understanding is that it's going to reduce bandwidth by a large amount like possibly, possibly more than 50%.
And, and it's, you know, these type of low level protocol improvements that take a lot of work to understand, like, where the inefficiencies are and then to be able to develop improvements for them in a way that is backwards compatible and won't break anything.
And do you do you have an API for that people can connect to.
No no API is. I've only had a few people over the years who have actually asked me for the raw data, and it's actually it's using this stack of software called graphite and Grafana, which store it in these whisper files which is it's kind of like a time series database
and so it's not it's not a relational or non relational database like most people are used to that's easy to query.
So, there are some tools that kind of let you manipulate that stuff but in general, there have been a few people who have really really wanted the data, and I usually just take a snapshot of the data and send all the whisper files to them and point them to the tools but it's unfortunately it's not as programmer friendly as your average database.
Okay, great. Thanks. And so you also track the peer misbehavior have you see any increase in peer misbehavior at some point, maybe, I don't know maybe during segue to x or, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, there have been a number of times when there have been kind of weird activity on the network.
But it's not always obvious. If it's something that is intentional by other people or if it's just due to, like, yeah, yeah running incompatible clients or what, in general, the misbehavior is, it's I mean it's steady, but low.
And then I look at the logs of my node for example, usually a few times a day, my node receives an invalid block.
And these are always invalid blocks was very very low proof of work behind them but I've actually recently noticed that there was one invalid block hash that has been getting propagated or someone has been trying to propagate it on the network for over a year possibly close to
And so, I don't know, it doesn't really make sense that an attacker would create this fake low proof of work block and then continually try to rebroadcast it for several years.
So I don't know if, you know, somebody has some misconfigured know that's like stuck in a loop or what but it's the kind of thing it's really hard to know exactly what those people are doing or how how this odd behavior keeps happening but it doesn't really matter.
All that really matters is that the node keeps validating and it keeps rejecting the invalid block.
They, they do consume bandwidth right this fake.
Yeah, they're not a lot. If I recall correctly, when a node requests a block it actually gets the block header first and checks the proof of work. So the block header is only about 80 bytes. So it's not it's not going to download the whole block until it at least checks a few important things in the block header first.
So again, a good segue to the next topic, which is a Bitcoin attack vectors you, you know, you've been with Bitcoin quite a long time. You know, we know the 51% attack, you know, there are other attacks, obviously the dust attacks when they, you know, mark your, your transaction, or even like a rapid price drop that can impact.
You know, in turn can impact mining, which one is from your perspective, the biggest threat to Bitcoin at the moment.
And, and the next will be, do you consider any mining centralization a current threat to Bitcoin, or you think is getting better so it's not longer on your radar.
Yeah, I mean, that's tough. You know, Bitcoin has weathered many types of attacks over the years.
You know, even we haven't seen dust attacks in a long time because it's become just too expensive to do that. It's hard to even say if like price manipulation should be considered an attack.
You know, I've been saying for a while that I think the the biggest threat to Bitcoin is people getting bored of it and stopping trying to continue to improve it.
I think that the only thing that can really kill Bitcoin is if everyone agrees that it's not worth working on anymore.
You know, this is because, you know, I have a perspective that like the exchange rate is not something that is inherent to the operation of the network.
It's kind of off on the side. It's a result of many other things. And even if the exchange rate crashes, the rest of the system eventually compensates for that.
The miners compensate for it. The block production gets compensated for it. There are people who have said things like, oh, you can have this mining death spiral.
But I think we've seen over the years that that's not a real thing.
You know, even in the most extreme scenario, if somehow like a nation state managed to nationalize all of the miners in their country and use them for a 51% attack, I suspect that that would be short lived.
And it would create an emergency situation where people would come together and say, OK, this is a critical issue and we need to make some changes in order to mitigate the attack.
So ultimately, you know, I say that Bitcoin is backed by people and the people who care enough to work on maintaining the system and improving the system. And so the only way to really kill it is to kill off everyone who's working on it.
Cool. So we should avoid like conferences where we have every single Bitcoin dev.
Or avoid a blockchain cruises where you put everybody on one little boat.
So Michael asked a question.
I actually know Michael from his running London Bitcoin dev. It's also contributed to lightning. He's working on lightning. He's asking, sure he knows disconnect from this node that is trying to propagate this block with insufficient POW.
Jameson has his node set up to not disconnect, punish this type of activity.
So Satoshi is 100% Bitcoin core plus about 500 lines of instrumentation code.
So I also run it on all default configurations. So it was I felt like it was very important for this to show what a quote unquote normal Bitcoin core node does.
So yeah, I believe that if a peer feeds you an invalid block, then that gets sufficient misbehavior score that results in a ban.
Now, a ban, I don't know off the top of my head, but I think the default ban time is only 24 hours or so.
So it's not like a permanent ban for all time. So it's also possible that there may be multiple different IP addresses that are running nodes that are sending this invalid data.
But overall, this is not a huge concern. It's just like an interesting little thing that shows up once in a while.
It doesn't really have any noticeable impact on the operation of the node or the network as a whole.
Great. Moving to the next topic, which is SegWit 2x and USF time, the user activated software.
So two years or so in retrospect, how did you see the drama unfolding? More importantly, how do you think it changed the Bitcoin community, the positive and the negative side of it?
And maybe we're going to spend a few minutes describing what happened to you during that period and sharing with the people on the channel why privacy is important based on your experience.
Yeah, I mean, I think Bitcoin is it is, of course, this open collaborative project. Now, the result of that is that we will always be debating about what the future direction of the protocol should be.
And so ever since the very beginning, there were people debating on forums about, hey, we should make these changes or those changes or we should worry about these threats or those threats.
And it just started coming to a head as block space was being filled out as the fees to transact on the network were increasing.
And you ultimately ended up with a couple of different camps, one camp that was more on the side of prioritizing low cost of transacting and another camp that was more leaning on the side of low cost of full validation of the entire blockchain.
And there were years and years of debates about this. And ultimately, early on, I thought it was more of a technical debate, but it became obvious to me that it was more an ideological debate.
And when you have a fundamental ideological conflict between different groups of people, there is no way to debate your way around it.
And eventually, after the group that wanted to prioritize low cost of transaction got sufficiently frustrated, they used the only other option because they had been using voice for several years and it was having no effect.
And their other option was exit. And so they exited essentially by forking off with their own protocol and creating their own network.
Now the SegWit2x thing was interesting because that was like an additional wrench in the whole scaling debate where instead of just two sides, you had three sides for most of that year.
And it was additionally interesting for me because I was working at Bitco at the time and our CEO was one of the SegWit2x lead proponents. So we had some interesting debates and conflict at the company during that time.
It all worked out though. I think one of the more interesting things that came out of all of that was kind of the futures markets. I think the futures markets like on Bitfinex ended up being fairly prescient about what people really valued these different attributes as being the
resulting value of Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin ended up being pretty similar to what those markets were. I seem to recall that SegWit2x was also in a similar state.
Those of us who were against SegWit2x were threatening, we're going to dump all of our coins and we're going to crush you into oblivion with our economic power.
But you can yell at people all you want and threaten those type of things, but until the money is actually on the line, it's just empty words.
We did not get to see that actually play out because it got called off at the last minute. And I think that part of the reason for that was that the writing was kind of on the wall with regard to the economics.
Also, there was the fact that Bitcoin ABC announced that they were going to go ahead and fork anyways. I think that sucked a lot of the minor support out of the room for SegWit2x after SegWit had been activated and then we were waiting on the 2x hard fork part of it.
There were a lot of moving pieces going on at the time. The drama and tensions escalated throughout the year and I did end up having a fun situation where I had my entire neighborhood shut down by the police, by someone who called in basically a fake hostage situation.
But I have no reason to believe that that person actually had anything to do with the scaling debate. I think that was just someone who managed to see me on Twitter and wanted to screw with me because I got a larger audience, a larger following during all of this drama.
Plus, there were all these debates going on and I was just becoming more high profile. It's something that anyone who's more high profile has to eventually deal with is the fact that you have more attention cast upon you.
If there's enough eyeballs looking at you, then it's statistically guaranteed that eventually one of those people is going to be either an attacker who would do things that most other people wouldn't do or just someone who has a screw loose and is not rational.
You've wrote a lot about the events that happened to you and also the importance of privacy and how privacy can mitigate some of those risks.
I was only badger 2018, I believe, and you have presented different ways to improve your privacy. Maybe while you share two or three quick ones for people, maybe not too cumbersome. It's not going to dramatically impact your life.
It's not going to eliminate any social interaction, but it's going to make things a little bit better.
A lot of the things that I've done from a legal standpoint are highly reliant upon your jurisdiction. I'm not familiar with English law or what legal options you have for setting up privacy, protecting corporations or trusts or other entities there.
But that's also more on the extreme side of things is protecting your physical address, making sure that your name is never correlated with your actual residence address anywhere.
For most people who are just looking to improve their privacy a bit, and I generally say, well, install ad blockers on your browsers, set up a VPN, preferably on your home router so that all of your devices get protected by it.
Do things like not, not using your credit cards everywhere. I prefer to use virtual like throw away credit card services where you can create a unique number for each merchant.
You know, you basically have to look at it from an adversarial perspective of what happens to information and the fact that information naturally wants to be free and information spreads so quickly and easily these days that
you have to believe that any information you give to anyone else will eventually be leaked to the entire world.
So this becomes very important when we're talking about any personal identifiable information, whether that's financial information or information about your health records or your address, your physical residence because that can result in other types of attacks happening against you.
It's, you know, it's not just that someone might send the police to your house.
I've, I've had a number of people in this space talk to me about the types of attacks that they've had happen to them.
And you know, if someone knows your name and your address, and especially if they know any other personal information that can be used to like pose as you, and they can start doing all kinds of crazy stuff as a result of the fact that so many of the aspects of our daily
lives are tied to little bits of information that authenticate ourselves. And so I've heard of everything from people having like drugs and other illegal stuff sent to their house and then have like the police tips off about it to people screwing with your utility
bill and like getting your electricity or your water shut off to your house. I've even heard of attempts of people to actually forge and claim the deed to your house to try to like take legal ownership of your house out from underneath you.
A lot of these things are annoyances, and they're annoyances at different levels. Most people don't need to worry about, you know, armed robbers coming to their house and shaking them down, though that does happen from time to time it is, it's, there is at least a few dozen publicly
known incidents of that happening. And I do expect that the rate of those physical attacks will increase in correlation with the exchange rate and general public awareness of Bitcoin. But at a much more general level of like what the average person needs to worry about, it's
just annoyances and disruptions to your life. And the fact that you don't know how information might be used against you in the future.
Thanks. And if people are interested, there are articles online, there's one from the Daily Mail here in the UK and one in the New York Times, where Jameson gets more into the details about it. Let's move into future developments. Why don't you share with us some future developments at CASA? And maybe for people connected that might want to join CASA if you have any openings or anything interesting for people that are interesting in be working with CASA.
Yeah, I mean, over the long term, we will continue to follow our, our mantra of, you know, helping improve personal sovereignty that will also include, I believe, helping people control more of their information. So this this is, you know, privacy and security are two sides to the same coin.
We're going to continue to see, you know, more and more decentralized services and protocols, I believe that help people retain their privacy and sovereignty over a number of things.
This could be anything from just data management to various communications protocols. I mean, we even saw, you know, instant messaging over lightning proof of concept recently. And even the idea of, you know, digital identity, I believe, over the long term will become more important.
One example of that is like Microsoft and their ion service that they're building on top of Bitcoin. And so like I said, we've got key management, we've got securing your, your node by, you know, work.
Eventually, I'm hoping, you know, we will continue to make use of the idea of, you know, running your own server, essentially at home. And that server will run any number of different decentralized services that will improve your privacy and sovereignty.
And, and on the, on the sort of wealth protection side, we're continuing to improve our offerings there just based upon feedback from our existing users.
That is why the latest thing that we've been working on is this inheritance protocol, which is currently in a kind of beta testing phase, because what we found with a lot of our users is that we're essentially selling them peace of mind.
They, they feel like, you know, they've got their money in a system where they don't have to worry about a third party taking it. They don't have to worry about losing it to hackers. They don't have to worry about losing it to natural disasters.
So ultimately, the next question is always like, well, what's the next possible loss vector? And right now, the one we're working on is actual death. How do you create a system that is secure against all types of attack and loss, but is still recoverable by a set of semi trusted entities?
It's, it's, it's kind of naturally in conflict. These two things are naturally in conflict with each other. We're trying to find the right balance.
And, and once again, we'll have another probably 50 page documents that basically outlines all of our thinking around inheritance planning.
And so that's basically the current top of mind issue that we're working on. And, and then, you know, a lot of things that we end up adding in the future will also be based on user feedback.
We, we have a great group of users who give us a lot of feedback all the time. And the most difficult thing is choosing which things, which unfortunately we have to say no to a lot of things just due to time constraints.
You know, which things are going to provide the most value and impact to our users.
Okay, great. Thanks. So if anyone from the chat wants to ask more questions, I see one from Michael. I have one last question for you as we're running out of time.
And you did ask about jobs though. If you just go to angel.co slash casa, you'll see that we have five jobs open, most of them are engineering, but also we've got one for a client advisor.
Okay, usually at the end of the interview, we usually ask some fun or interesting questions. I generally ask like top three books, but this time I wanted to ask you different questions since you're one of the most senior.
Who do you think among the Bitcoiners, the person that you came across as the most knowledge of Bitcoin across multiple aspects like, you know, economics, networks, cryptography, privacy, game theory, everything.
Who do you think is the most knowledgeable?
Yeah, I mean, it may be kind of cliche, but I do have a lot of respect for Greg Maxwell. I've met with him a number of times.
We, we talk all of the time, like when, when I'm writing articles that are really, really deep, I'll often, you know, ask him for a review, see what he thinks about it.
And, you know, he definitely has the technical knowledge, but I think that he also had a lot of knowledge around sort of the social side of things.
Adam back similarly. And it's kind of funny, you know, the way the whole like block stream conspiracy stuff has worked out over the years.
For those of us who have who have been in the system before long before block stream ever existed.
Block stream was just a name. I mean, these people, many of the people who comprise block stream were working on this long before and block stream was just a sort of way for them to become more officially affiliated with each other.
But, you know, some of these same OGs have been in the space, you know, providing their insights and and and helping protect us against a number of attacks and failures over the years.
Great. Thanks. So let's go to the chat. Michael says, do casa have to deal with a lot of lightning Ellen D related support tickets, given large non technical user base.
Yeah, I mean, lightning is definitely still a beta project, you know, and every time we upgrade our Ellen D on the cost and nodes we generally run into a few issues that we have to deal with, simply because there are so many things that are changing under the hood.
The, I mean, the biggest challenge with the node is just the fact that we're deploying hardware into an unknown environment. And so we found a lot of networking issues over the past year that we had to deal with.
And we've actually been able to fix a lot of those by implementing tour services, which simultaneously improves the security and privacy of the networking components, but it also helps us get past a lot of these really weird like home router and networking
issues, we just completely bypass it with tour. But on the support side.
There have been I mean, there's a lot of failures that happen that are not obvious or difficult to debug or explain could be anything due to liquidity or pathfinding stuff.
Or even, you know, people just having their like channel counterparties go offline, and there's so many different edge cases that that's what a lot of our engineering time has been spent on over the past year is trying to detect an edge case like automatically
and then either resolve it automatically or at the very least, make it easier for the user to understand what has happened. And I think that that's going to continue to be the case for a while.
I don't think that this type of like lightning as a service is going to be mainstreamable until we can automatically handle almost any failure, but even more importantly, abstract away a lot of the complexities of what's going on under the hood.
And by that I mean, the fact that the user even has to go in and has to like, figure out channels and channel management. That's already a fail from a mainstream standpoint.
The you know there is this autopilot functionality but at the moment that's very early it's very naive. It's, it's not really using much logic in terms of liquidity management it's just sort of randomly opening channels and hoping for the best.
And so this is where there is a ton of room for improvement. And I believe that a lot of the engineering efforts, you know, at the lightning implementation level over the coming years will will be focused around liquidity management and they're definitely
they're they're making a lot of improvements there but it's also, it's the type of thing where it's not even possible to just write all the code that makes it all work well because we don't even really know how it's all going to work you know we're building
this network that has never been built before. So it's a kind of learn as you go. I think actually Andreas Antonopoulos put it best in one of his talks where he talked about, we're going to continue to fail.
And by failing we learn, and then we improve, and then we hit some other bottleneck or some other edge case that fails, and then we fix it we keep moving on and this is you know, it's kind of the result of your software is never finished, but we will continue
improving it continuing improving it. And I get asked all the time you know when do you think lightning will be ready, and you know there's, there's not going to be a clear demarcation, it will continue to improve to the point that a new set of users with a certain
skill level, or amount of time and resources they're willing to put in it will adopt it, and then it will continue to improve, and you know the bar will continue to lower over time as to what is required to actually operate on this network, until hopefully
we get to the point where it's it's basically like, you know, running an app on your phone, and all you have to do is click around a few buttons, and you're good to go.
Great. Any other questions from the chat.
Okay, that's all I wanted to cover for today. Thanks again, Jameson for joining us. Hope to see you in London soon.
You're obviously welcome, if you're in London, to join our meetup.
And to have these again in the future, if possible, for the people connected. Subscribe to Bitno channel, the link, you can find it below. For those in London, join us at Bitcoin and blockchain London, again the link below, if you want to be a member.
And for those on Twitter and Telegram. Again, the link is below if you want to follow, follow our chat and discussion.
Thanks again, Jameson. Thanks for having me. Good afternoon, everyone and good morning to you.
And have a good rest of the day. You too. Bye.
Thank you guys. Bye bye.