Hi, this is Wessel Simmons from New Block Media from Amsterdam. We are a publisher from bitcoinmagazine.nl and here we got a weekly special and this episode is with Jameson Lopp. He's famous for his work for BitGo. It's a custodial for digital assets and now he started at Casa, famous for their Lightning notes. Yeah, we talk about various topics like privacy and cypherpunks and obviously his vision on Bitcoin network and technology and of course we dive into the Lightning network. What does it mean? I mean, are we going to pay with Bitcoin and Satoshis and how does he see the off-chain solutions evolve? And yeah, I hope you enjoy the talk and see you around for next time. Yeah, the professional cypherpunk title that I put on my website is a bit tongue in cheek. It's kind of a joke, really a result of a lot of journalists and other people describing me as a quote unquote self-proclaimed cypherpunk. And I always thought that that was kind of funny because that is the only way that you can be a cypherpunk is to proclaim it. It is not a title that is bestowed upon you because a cypherpunk is someone who advocates for the use of strong privacy enhancing technologies generally as a means to enact political and social change. So it is a very self-motivated type of thing. You have to put yourself out there as being a proponent of these technologies and ideas. And so for me, it has become much more important personally over the past few years as my prominence in the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem has resulted in me getting attacked in a number of new ways. And so focusing more on improving my privacy also helps with my security. And I've spent a ton of time and resources on my own privacy, mainly as a result of having a bunch of police show up to my house a few years ago. And I just want to avoid that. Yeah. That's a very sad story and a very known story, of course, and a bizarre story actually. You also have your own blog, I think, in security and privacy tips, isn't it? Yes, I've been blogging pretty much ever since I got into this space, just about whatever is currently interesting to me. So plenty of technical things, but also as I go down any new path where I'm educating myself around all this privacy stuff, I want to share the results of what I've learned and what I've experienced. So whenever I do anything that I think is kind of complicated that I can distill down into an easy to digest format, I try to write up some sort of post about it. And do you still grab back to some of these methods of research or of the cypher funds from the first generation, or like Hal Finney and Timothy May, Zimmerman, or... I mean, it is a very self-motivated thing, right? It's good to know the history and where we came from, but the whole point of all of this is to continue breaking new ground and experimenting with new things and trying to figure out ways that we can continue to fight this battle. Because the whole problem with privacy is that it's in direct conflict with the information age, the fact that information is becoming easier and easier to share and spread. And so it's becoming harder and harder to contain information, to keep any information private and out of the hands of the wrong people. And so this is a never-ending struggle, I think, and you can make plenty of arguments that we're actually losing the battle for privacy. Basically what I have experienced over the past few years is the incredible difficulty to retain your privacy simply because the default for most of our everyday lives now in society is that we're just giving away information at every turn. And when you try to go against the grain to protect it, it ends up costing you a lot of time and resources and also can be uncomfortable because you end up creating a lot of friction with the other people you're interacting with because they're not used to trying to help people retain their privacy. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you gave this example of going to a funfair and then you got checked by their employees and there were... Yeah. Yeah. So that's... So the whole surveillance systems, yeah, I mean, it goes even where you just want to have fun actually and a funfair, but yeah, the impact is quite big on everyday life. Now ultimately, you end up having to become a lot more comfortable at basically at lying or at coming up with cover stories that raise less suspicion than saying, oh, I'm trying to protect my privacy. Because when you go around saying, I'm trying to protect my privacy, that actually makes people question, oh, what is he trying to hide? And so you often end up coming up with other stories of why you don't want to reveal certain information that sounds less suspicious to people. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, you also gave this, yeah, I mean, you actually also shaved your beard because you got all these random check-up checks, security checks at the airports. And I mean, that's the way I understood it, that it's one of the reasons. And because it was just, it was making me stand out. And so I've only ever been recognized randomly out in the real world one time. And that was definitely a result of having a two-foot-long beard. It just makes you so much more unique that people notice. And it's more likely that they would make that correlation in their head that, oh, wait, this is that Jameson guy because he's got that really long beard and he talks about privacy and other nerdy stuff. So now I look a lot more like everybody else and blend in with the crowd. Right. Right. So if we just dive into your personal motivations, I mean, is privacy like the core of your personal, yeah, motivation to do this kind of work or? That's tricky. It's changed over the years. It became a lot more real to me after the swatting incident. Before that, I definitely believed in the ideology, but I wasn't really walking the walk. I wasn't practicing all of these things that I was aware about. And there were a lot more things I wasn't aware about because I didn't spend that much time really trying to maintain my privacy in every possible way. So I originally got into the Bitcoin space more from the ideological perspective of separating money and state. I just felt like the concept of money was something that should be open for everyone to contribute to rather than to only be controlled by a small group of people. So that was more about power. The privacy stuff has built up over the years just as a result of other things that I've done in the space. Okay. Okay. And if you can give one advice and then we will dive into the Bitcoin Lightning Network topics. But if you can give one practical advice for people concerned about their privacy, I mean, what would you advise first hand, I mean, at first? Yeah. So there are many different ways that you could be leaking information and each person basically has to decide what they want to protect themselves against. Most people are not going to spend a ton of time or effort or resources improving their privacy. So normally I say the easiest, lowest hanging fruit for people that they can gather to improve their privacy is just installing a lot of ad blockers in their browsers, potentially setting up a VPN so that they're not exposing all their browsing activity to third parties. But it really does come down to how much effort you're willing to go to. And I've gone to the extreme and it gets a lot harder when you try to take it to the real world privacy level. But if you want to do the easy stuff, there's a lot that you can do to improve your digital privacy or privacy online that doesn't cost a lot of money, just takes a little bit of time to install software that will help you out with that. All right. And do you use Tor on a daily basis? So I'm 100% on multiple VPNs all the time and then Tor I use sparingly. I mean, I usually use it when I want even superior privacy or when I'm trying to do something that is getting blocked by VPNs. There's a lot of services out there that will block VPNs due to abuse, but usually they don't block Tor. Okay, cool. And okay, if we dive into the payments, if you look into private payments, on a personal level, do you do like some private payments via cryptocurrencies or via lightning network or? Yeah. So, you know, most of my payments are still not via crypto or in fact, I would say that in many cases, the payment methods that I use are better privacy than cryptocurrency. So whether that's cash or something like a prepaid debit card or a virtual like unique credit card, there are several services that allow you to create those very easily. I normally only stick to like crypto payments if it's some sort of crypto based service that is selling something related to crypto or they only accept crypto. Otherwise, a lot of times I find that it's more of a hassle to like go dig out my hardware wallet and then write down the accounting stuff to like take capital gains taxes that I'll have to figure out to report on at the end of the year. It's just it's a lot more of a hassle to do crypto in most cases. Yeah, it still is, unfortunately. So yeah, I mean, yeah, the question is, of course, the questions will also focus on Bitcoin, of course, and then we will dive into lightning network. You did a presentation in Berlin on the lightning network. So first, I mean, Bitcoin is now 11 years old, a white paper. But how do you judge or how do you, yeah, what were your expectations of Bitcoin and how do you see the current phase of Bitcoin? I mean, it's obviously a very broad concept of ideology, technology and asset and means of payment, perhaps. So yeah, how do you see the current phase that Bitcoin is in? Well, it's definitely surpassed, I think, most people's expectations in this time period when when I first got interested in and I just thought it was an interesting experiment that in all likelihood would probably fail. And then over the years, as we had multiple adoption cycles and the technology continued to improve, I spent more and more time working on it and eventually went full time and have basically been fully immersed in it and trying to better understand it for for five or six years now. And so I still think that it is something that we're trying to fully understand the implications of and the possibilities for what we can do with it. There are plenty of constraints in place that make it difficult to change Bitcoin. And so you have to spend a lot of time understanding how you can navigate through this kind of maze of constraints and the difficulty in obtaining consensus amongst a large distributed group of people or in many cases, how do you avoid the need for having to obtain that consensus and how do you make changes in a way that don't require going through that very difficult path. So it has definitely come a long way. But from a technology and usability standpoint, we still have a very long way to go both for things like scalability and security. And I mean, this is why I've spent the past five years now focused on the very simple fact of helping people secure their private keys. I think that there is still a fairly high bar for people to be their own bank. And there's a lot that we're going to need to do to make it easy enough for the average mainstream person to feel confident that they can control their own keys without having to worry about losing them to any number of different attackers or loss vectors. And so while it's great to see all of these cutting edge improvements and technology changes, I still think there's plenty of work to be done at the very low level of just private key management. All right. All right. Right. Yeah. You talked about constraints. What do you see as the biggest constraint if we focus on the decentralized governance aspect of Bitcoin? It's very frustrating for a lot of people because there hasn't ever really been a system like this before. People are used to more traditional hierarchical command and control type governance systems. And so that's kind of what we saw through all the scaling debate drama was people trying to find ways to basically take a vote, whether it's like, do we let the miners vote on things? Do we let the developers vote on things? Do the nodes vote on things? And that's just not how Bitcoin works. There is no really efficient way to take a vote to test the consensus of the variety of diverse participants that are making up the system. And so ultimately, you end up with a rift between kind of the high time preference and the low time preference people. Some people will believe, oh, we need to make these changes as soon as possible, otherwise terrible things will happen. And then other people will say, well, if we start rushing and making changes, then it's more likely that terrible things will happen. And that's kind of like the crux of the scaling debate. It was also boiled down to a fundamental ideological difference between prioritizing low cost of making a transaction versus prioritizing the low cost of being able to fully validate the entire history of the blockchain. And ultimately, we saw that these were basically irreconcilable differences. And that's what resulted in the forking of Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. And looking back, I think you shared a graph of the hash rate of the different networks. I mean, of course, Bitcoin or Bitcoin Core and then the forks. And actually, if you look at the health of the system, then we can conclude that, yeah, I mean, these forks, yeah, didn't pull it off, actually. I mean, if you look at the security and the hash rate of their networks, or what's your conclusion? Well, ultimately, and there were a lot of debates about miners and what role they play in the system, but I'm still quite sure that miners are basically employed by a given network, or at least a given network makes an offer to miners that basically says, we will pay you, you know, this block subsidy and these transaction fees, if in return, you will point your hash power at securing our network. And so the result of all of this, the forks and whatnot, has been that the majority of the value has remained in Bitcoin, both from block subsidy and from transaction fees. I think I saw a statistic that just in the past day or so, there was something like $250,000 in transaction fees on Bitcoin, whereas any of the forks like Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, all in total had less than $1,000 in transaction fees. So that kind of goes to show like where the economic incentives are for miners to point their hash power. And you know, you can argue all day long about why it ended up being the Bitcoin fork versus any other fork. But you know, we do have that empirical evidence that it seems like the majority of value, whatever that may be, store value, medium of exchange, et cetera, et cetera, has remained in Bitcoin. And that's what is incentivizing the most minor hash rate to remain there. Right. Right. Yeah, we've seen exponential growth and hash rate. And what are your expectations of the hash rate of the Bitcoin layer? Or Bitcoin layer one, actually, the main chain of Bitcoin? Well, we seem to have pretty much reached the limit of the technical capabilities of improving Silicon manufacturing. Like I don't think that we're going to see another order of magnitude efficiency improvement with the mining hardware. So asking what the hash power is going to look like is basically asking what do you think the exchange rate of Bitcoin is going to be like? Or what do you think that the transaction fees are going to be like? And so I do expect that over the long run, we will either continue to see more of these bubble like cycles or something catastrophic will happen and the whole system will crash. So I think that it has to keep going up significantly. It has to keep growing significantly. Because I think the least likely scenario is that we stall out and we remain where we are right now. Right. Right. Okay. So before we will dive into the scaling problem and scaling Bitcoin, I think it was also at the presentation in Berlin that you shared a few graphs about network protocols and network activities. Well, actually, also, you concluded that most of the transactions on Bitcoin are still on centralized exchanges, right? Yes, and a lot of them are going from one exchange to another exchange. Yeah. So is that I mean, do we have like, is there some what's your position in this centralized decentralized discussion or debate or is it is it like a good thing or a bad thing that central parties or is it just a natural outcome of, of, of, yeah, of this system? Yeah, I mean, I think that centralization is a sort of naturally occurring force, mainly because that's where you get the easiest value capture. You know, if you can become an intermediary, then you can capture a lot of value with economic transactions. And so at the moment, these centralized exchanges are, I think, unquestionably capturing the largest amount of value in the system. In fact, exchanges are probably one of the few highly profitable enterprises that you can have in the ecosystem right now. So there's, there's a very large disincentive for exchanges to, I think, decentralize themselves. It's a lot of work to do that and still be able to capture a lot of value. So I think it is kind of inevitable, but that, you know, we do have plenty of people that are working on options to help decentralize that. But I kind of see it as an intermediary onboarding phase. We're going to need to have these like on ramps and off ramps as long as Bitcoin is small and is not being used as a unit of account and does not have a true circular economy. And this is kind of what I talked about with the lightning presentation is that I think we all understand that we want to get to a point where you can remain completely inside of the Bitcoin ecosystem and pay for everything in Bitcoin. But there's a lot of work that we're going to have to do to get to that point where, where everyone, both individuals and enterprises are all accepting, you know, sending and receiving Bitcoin or lightning payments or whatever. And until we get to that point, it's going to be very important to have these sort of fiat conversion options. Could you work at an exchange? I mean, there are some, I listened to this interview with Pierre Rochard for instance, and he started to work at Kraken, but could you work at an exchange or? So interestingly enough, I, for the first three years of my full-time Bitcoin career, I worked behind the scenes and I was working at Bitgo, which was powering a lot of exchanges. So I've seen a fair amount of, you know, at least the Bitcoin side of what goes on behind the scenes there. I probably would not want to work at a regular exchange or really at any company that's doing AML KYC stuff just because of the privacy implications. Hmm. Hmm. All right. Right. Right. And actually you made the transfer to, to Casa. Why? Why Casa? What's the reason? I mean, there, there obviously are a manufacturer of also equipment. I mean the notes and software of course, but also hardware. Well originally it was, it was a fairly small pivot because I basically went from doing a multi-SIG security for enterprises at Bitgo to doing multi-SIG security for individuals at Casa. You know, Casa has a whole suite of products now. We seem to be better known for our node stuff, probably because it's much lower price point and we have a lot more people who are as a result buying the lower price point stuff. But our real bread and butter product is our key master, which makes it very easy for people to create high security multi-SIG wallets and manage them in a way that's never really been possible before with a really user-friendly interface. So the reason why I did that switch was that I felt like we had made a lot of progress improving enterprise, private key security, but there was still a lot of work to be done to make it easier for individuals to attain that same level of security. And I think we've actually made a lot of progress in that regard. It was, it was a personal problem amongst everything else where I realized, you know, I was spending one to two days every year, refreshing my own cold storage setup in a very highly technical complex process that I was also doing as a means of inheritance planning so that if I got hit by a truck, hopefully my heirs would be able to recover my money. And it was a really, it was a frustrating thing because, you know, I had a fairly high degree of confidence that it would work if I died suddenly, but I wasn't 100% confident. And I knew that if I was having that problem, then I'm sure a lot of others were having it. And we've built a product now that I think is giving a lot of people peace of mind with regard to the security of their funds and to the idea that if something terrible does happen to them, their heirs will be able to access them. Yeah, I think it's a good development that we have these more professional products that are covering that because that's of course, yeah, very important for kids or grandkids or other family members to get access to your keys or slash Bitcoin. Yeah. So yeah, let's talk about scalability. I mean, some say Bitcoin, does Bitcoin have a problem with scalability? Obviously, you think that Bitcoin has a scaling problem? Oh, certainly. But I mean, pretty much any technology has scaling challenges. It's just that Bitcoin has some uniquely difficult scaling challenges that your average technology doesn't. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So and one of the developments is the Lightning network and it's still I mean, we've covered a few weeks back towards this bug, a few bugs on the Lightning network. So it's still like experiments. It's still in the experimental phase or how do you see the current phase of the Lightning network? Yeah, I would I would still say that it's fairly beta. I mean, people who are enthusiastic enough to put some time into it and are willing to encounter the occasional failure, they're able to use it pretty well right now. I would say personally, like, you know, it depends on a ton of different factors. But a failure rate of maybe around 10% that I've experienced personally, and I don't believe that a payments technology is really going to be capable of going mainstream until the failure rate is like well below 1%. And there's a lot of different challenges that will need to be overcome on the software side in order to continue improving that reliability. Right, right, right. And I mean, one of the users are also advised to don't have that large amount of Bitcoin or Satoshi's on Lightning network, right? I mean, it's still yeah. So you know, we've what we've seen, you know, from all the Bitcoin and Lightning nodes that we've shipped out at Casa is that there aren't really huge security issues. There was that one bug a few weeks back, but I don't think that we ever had any confirmation that that was actually exploited to steal money from anyone. Really the more common loss vector tends to be like catastrophic hardware crashes and the challenges with recovering funds from corrupted data. And so that's where we have things like watch towers that are coming out to help with certain losses. But really, I think ultimately, we're going to need to have just more robust backup systems for all of the channel data. Right, right. If you look at the network itself, I mean, the whole logic within the network with the payment channels and the nodes, of course, the payment routes, et cetera, is there is there's still I mean, of course, there's this whole new ecosystem, actually, you described as a new economic system. So what are the how can we Yeah, actually, better those What do you say? What are the challenges in that respect? I mean, within the network itself? Yeah, it's, I think mostly going to come down to liquidity management. I don't think that there's really anything quite like this that has been built before. And so figuring out how to manage your own liquidity in a way that makes the payments and routing more reliable is what I think a lot of engineering effort is going to have to go into. And as I discussed in my talk, the really important factor to making liquidity management easier is going to be having ways of rebalancing these channels, preferably by making out of band payments to liquidity providers, aka exchanges. Once we have more exchanges on the lightning network, then it would be possible for you to set up a basically a conversion of fiat to lightning or vice versa, so that you can continue to rebalance the money in your channels so that you don't have to close out the channels and you can just keep them open for potentially an indefinite period of time and continue using them for payments without having to fall back to on-chain transactions. Right, right. So possibly there's this route of fiat unwrap on exchange and then a direct line to your payment channel. So for instance, there's this connection between your lightning wallet and an exchange for instance, or what is it? Yeah, so basically it would depend on whether or not you're more making payments to people or receiving payments from people that will the sort of net imbalance between the flow of money between yourself and other people is going to change whether or not you end up with too much lightning value on your end of the channels or if you are running out of value on your channels for making payments. And regardless of which one of those it is, you would want to interact with an exchange to rebalance it. So if you had too much value on your end of the channels and it was making it difficult to receive more payments, then you would want to send some of that value to the exchange and then they could send you a fiat payment via traditional network in exchange for that or vice versa. If you'd need more value, then you could send a fiat payment to the exchange and then they would push value to you over the lightning network to rebalance your channels. So we can conclude that we still need fiat money. I mean, we still need fiat money in this new build system. For the time being, yeah. So until we get to the point where there's a fully circular economy, then you're going to need something like that. If we get to the point where everyone is on this new network, then you're not going to have to rebalance your funds with an exchange, but rather you're going to be rebalancing by making other payments or receiving other payments from other parties, whether it's as your salary as an employee or if you're a business and you're receiving a lot of payments for things that you sell, you would then be making payments to your suppliers. This is really the natural flow of money in any healthy economy is the money is always moving around between different people. It's not just all being collected in one place and sitting there. All right. All right. One of the pleads you made in Berlin was also to have more businesses on the Lightning Network. Is that also a part of this circular economy, of course? Yeah, mainly because the vast majority of payments are not between individuals, but they are rather between an individual and a business. It's retail is where the vast majority of payments happen. Then of course, a fair amount of payments of larger value, but lower total volume are between businesses themselves. The whole point of that was that if only individuals are on the Lightning Network, then there's not going to be a lot of opportunity to use it because not very much economic interaction happens just between two individuals. Then is this Lightning Network in your eyes good enough or ready for more mass usage or mass adoption? Right now, it's good enough for the enthusiasts who are willing to put some effort into it. One of the things that I was talking about with regard to enterprises in that talk that I gave was that enterprises have a lower risk tolerance. They're generally dealing with much larger amounts of money, or in many cases, they may be dealing with money that technically doesn't belong to them, like exchanges, for example. What we need if we want to get to that next level of enterprise adoption is a number of different things, mostly around reliability and robustness. Right now, there are too many potential failures that could cause that business to lose the money that they're using on the Lightning Network. Part of this is going to be software improvements, but I think a lot of it is also going to just be creating new standards and best practices around how to manage high... I have a lot of that is going to be things like infrastructure of how do you set up your machine so that if you have some catastrophic hardware failure, you can always recover from it and not lose any of the money that was in that Lightning node. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's actually a new kind of network. I mean, we've also seen utilities like messaging. I mean, I saw a tweet retweeted by you, like a sort of messaging app on Lightning, that kind of utilities are disrupting, yeah, or erupting, I must say. Well, yeah, I mean, the biggest change that I think can happen from this is sort of realization of true micro payments. What does it really mean when you can start streaming pennies or even fractions of a penny for small utilities? Sometimes that means we can get rid of a lot of subscription models where generally if you want to use a service, you're going to have to pay them for at least a month of service ahead of time. But what if you only want to use a service for a few minutes? Right now, it's not really feasible to pay a service for a few minutes of usage. So I think that this potentially creates a lot more economic efficiency with regard to how we interact with any number of entities or enterprises online. It could also make a lot of difference with regard to like Internet of Things type interactions where we can actually have computers paying computers for things. This is interesting both from the ability to sell tiny, tiny amounts of valuable services or even as sort of anti-spam measure, you know, it's kind of like hash cash. But you know, just the ability of preventing abuse of systems by requiring payments, you know, it's the HTTP 402 payment required code finally being realized after like 30 years. I think that the possibilities are enormous. Oh, wow. So it's all kinds of things can can pay each other like computers or cars or perhaps houses or energy uses it within houses or I mean, that's kind of Yeah, I mean, it's I think basically going to be limited by our imagination. Once the the network and the infrastructure are reliable enough, I expect that it will be as easy for your average developer to add support for this as just, you know, importing a new standard code library and then telling the machine, okay, you know, accept or require payments for these operations. Yeah, very, very interesting. So okay, let's a few questions. I mean, is there actually an alternative to the lightning network? I mean, we've seen, for instance, some some side chains, of course, we have to look with side chain of blockstream, of course, but there's also that has also a connection with the lightning network. So so do we have alternatives for the lightning network or is it better just to focus now on lightning and yeah, and build on that? Yeah, so some of these side chains are interesting, like liquid, because it has additional functionality with the confidential transactions that add a new level of privacy to what you're doing. But really, even any of these on chain things, and like, you know, you can also set up potentially atomic swaps across other chains, where you're, you're, you're actually making a payment with a different coin, and basically just exchanging a coin on one chain for a coin on another chain. There's a lot of different possibilities, but I don't think that any of them are going to be as fast or as efficient as the off chain systems. And really, you know, we're still exploring what the real privacy ramifications of this are. But I think that in general, any any sort of on chain operation is creating data that is going to be shared with the entire world, whereas off chain stuff is inherently more private, simply because you're not sharing the data with everyone, you're only sharing it with a small number of people. All right, so that's a big plus. I mean, if I mean, if you look into private concerning with privacy, when we need private transactions, for instance, then then, then it's better, of course, to have an off chain possibility. Yeah. Yeah, I think there was actually one of the chain analysis companies was asked recently if they were looking into trying to analyze lightning network payments. And they basically said, No, we don't think that that's even possible. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So do you do you have actually time to look into other projects in this space? Or are you primarily focusing on on, of course, Gaza, lightning and Bitcoin or I mean, I remember your tweet that you were running a grin notes, for instance, I'm not sure if still running a grin notes. Yeah, actually, I just upgraded it again last week. And, you know, that's, you know, it's just another project, I run a lot of nodes, actually. And in fact, right now I'm in the middle of another annual round of node performance testing. I'm basically testing several different Bitcoin nodes to see how quickly they sync. And then I've historically also been testing, Ethereum nodes, Monero, Zcash, and maybe something else, just to try to compare all these different nodes and networks from a performance standpoint. Yeah, I think it's on Twitter that one of these nodes, they performed quite well. I think it was called Bitcoin or something. So far, Bitcoin was interesting, because it has been the only node that actually got faster over the past year. A lot of these other nodes are getting slower and slower, which you do kind of expect because the blockchain keeps getting larger and larger. And so that's why I think it's an interesting thing to test to see, you know, how the performance is changing over the years as more and more data has to be processed by the node to get it to sync from genesis. All right, all right. And can you, is there an explanation for this, yeah, for Bitcoin, the performance of Bitcoin? Oh, yeah, they've made several improvements. They completely rewrote their block storage file system, and they also removed some caching mechanisms that normally are meant to speed things up by preventing you from having to do a lot of disk reads and writes. But they actually determined that in their case, their UTXO cache was slowing things down. So I think that the main point that I try to get across from these tests is that a number of these nodes still have potential optimizations that could make them faster. And I just think it's interesting to see which nodes have teams that are actually working on that and which ones seem to ignore those issues. All right, right. Yeah, just one or two questions. I mean, there was some criticism or criticism between brackets was this blog post in which you actually explained the type of design decisions you made with CasaNode1. One of the things was the HTTP instead of the HTTPS. Perhaps you can explain just to give some insight into these choices. Right, so the criticism was that theoretically a compromised machine on your home network could intercept traffic to and from your CasaNode if you were accessing it over HTTP with your local network. As we stated, technically this is correct, however, our own analysis of the risk of this versus many other bad things happening is incredibly low. The reason that we chose not to go with the SSL route is because that would require users to go through a fairly scary looking browser error that would basically be telling them that something is terribly wrong and like the SSL certificate could not be validated. And so we chose to bypass that for usability reasons because we felt that the possibility of this seed phrase being intercepted on their local network was fairly low. Now I tell you from my own experience and seeing our support queue and the issues that people have had with the node, I am not aware of a single case of anyone actually having money stolen from their CasaNode via a compromised machine on their local network or any other security exploit. Rather every case that I can think of where people lost money was due to simple hardware failure or corrupted data with the lightning node. So while the criticism was technically correct, we believe that it was vastly overblown in terms of the actual risk to users compared to the many, many other risks that are inherent to running this software. Okay, okay, okay and if we dive into the hardware issues, I mean some of the users, for instance also me personally, I just want to build this Raspberry Pi node. Is it something that you would advise? I mean is this hardware capable of running a node? So the CasaNode 1 was on a Raspberry Pi 3B+, which I would say is right at the sort of minimum level of what you would run a node on. The main reason for that is that if you were doing a full sync from scratch on a Raspberry Pi 3, it's going to take probably a month. And so we were shipping those nodes with most of the blockchain data already synced. Now we still gave people the option to re-sync if they were patient enough to do so. However, if you're going to build on a Raspberry Pi, I would highly recommend using the Raspberry Pi 4, which came out recently and that's the platform we're using for the CasaNode 2. With that hardware you can sync in a little over one day. So much more feasible from a performance standpoint to have a fully self-validated blockchain. And also just due to having better processors and more memory, et cetera, et cetera, you're also going to be able to run multiple other services, whereas just running like Bitcoin and Lightning on the Raspberry Pi 3 was pretty much maxing out the performance capabilities. So we're quite hopeful that we're going to be able to run a variety of different things, different services on the 4 that was not really feasible on the 3. All right, all right, all right. So what can we expect from Casa? I mean, with some colleagues we made the comparison for instance with Apple, I mean, in essence you are a hardware manufacturer, I mean, and there's still some possibilities to introduce new products, et cetera, I mean. Yeah, kind of, I mean, we also, we don't really see ourselves as that same level of hardware manufacturer because we're still using mostly off the shelf parts. For the Casanova 2, we are having a custom case created, but other than that, all of the actual electronics and stuff is retail available hardware. Now perhaps someday we will get to the point where we actually create custom boards and try to get even better performance and efficiency than you can with one of these retail boards. But at the moment we still mainly see ourselves as a software company. Also because like I said, we have a variety of different services. We've got the Keymaster service, we've got the Sats app, which is a mobile app that connects you to your Bitcoin and Lightning node. And I would say the vast majority of our resources are actually spent on the software side rather than the hardware side. All right, all right, all right. Okay. And the Sats app is a non-custodial app or because that's also a bit of a sensible point nowadays. Yeah, yeah. And so the Sats app is actually, it connects you directly to your Casanova over Tor. So it's really just like a mobile front end for your Bitcoin and Lightning node. Cool. Yeah. Thank you very much again for your time. Have a nice day. Thanks for having me. Talk to you later.