Open your cerebral cortex and shift your lobes into upper beta phase because you are going to have Bitcoin knowledge transmitted directly into your vestibulo cochlear. Your host at Bitcoin Knowledge is Trace Mayer, an early Bitcoin advocate since it cost a quarter but this is not intended to be investment advice, a doctor of jurisprudence but this is definitely not legal advice, and an investor in core cryptocurrency infrastructure including Armory, Bitpay, Kraken, and Mitagio but this is not a recommendation of those services. Here you get fed via direct mind download with pure and free Bitcoin Knowledge. Welcome back to the Bitcoin Knowledge podcast. We have with us Jameson Lopp. He's the creator of statoshi.info, coindesk contributor, contributes to Medium, very prolific on Twitter, has lots of friends there, software engineer, crypto influencer, and you spent three years at BitGo and now you're at CASA. So welcome to the podcast Jameson. Thanks for having me. So what exactly is your role at CASA? Technically my title is infrastructure engineer but I'm really doing high level architectural decisions mostly around security and a little bit around usability. Yeah, and I love the Twitter handle at CASA HODL so you guys are helping people secure institutional size money in Bitcoin, right? Yes. This is really more of a vaulting product than a wallet product because it is intentionally very, very difficult to spend out of. Yeah. How did you, like what was your background before you got into Bitcoin? Well, I was a computer science major but I've always worked in the internet sphere, spent my first 10 years at an email marketing company and I was mainly doing backend stuff there. By the end of it, we kind of rode the wave of cloud computing in 2008, 2009 and I was really managing large scale infrastructure with I don't even know how many petabytes of data where you would have to run large MapReduce jobs to crunch all of this data that was coming in from sending out 100 million emails a day and getting a ton of analytics back that the marketers wanted to analyze so that they could fine tune their marketing machines. Nice. So, you know, one of the things that really ties Bitcoin together is the ideology, you know, and it's born out of this cypherpunk, don't trust, verify, cypherpunks write code. Would you say that you align with that at all? Pretty much, so much so that I somewhat ironically call myself a professional cypherpunk and there really is no such thing. One of the more interesting things I find about this cypherpunk ideology as people see it from the outside is you actually see a lot of times people refer to me or others as quote unquote self-proclaimed cypherpunks or self-professed cypherpunks and I'm like, well, yes. Wow. That's what you do. That's how you do it because you are saying, you know, I am a privacy advocate and it's not a title that is bestowed upon you by someone else, it is something that you put yourself out there. Yeah. It's kind of like you're signing the Declaration of Independence, you know, I mean, you're like a lot of people are slaves and I'm declaring myself free and that's what we're doing with the code. Exactly. We're claiming, you know, different rights in this digital age, whether it's privacy rights with things like PGP, whether it's monetary rights instead of article one, section 10 clause one with monetary rights in the constitution, we've got Bitcoin. So why is it Bitcoin that you've honed in on in this whole cypherpunk area? Yeah. I mean, it was really more that Bitcoin brought me into the cypherpunk ideology and while I have been exposed to a lot of the other crypto assets, especially while working at BitGo, unlike some people, those have actually turned me off to a lot of these other ideas and made me see Bitcoin as, I guess, a more pure or more stable form of crypto asset. It's not let me down nearly as often as a lot of these other projects. Could perhaps you have an example of how one of these other projects has let you down? Usually around changes that were unanticipated and caused problems for me as an application developer that was running on the infrastructure. So a lot of people understand that Bitcoin is interesting because it gives you like a more predictable monetary policy. Yeah, the 21 million and the emission schedule. Yes. But I think it's more predictable than a lot of other systems in multiple ways, especially as just a platform. So are you talking about like backwards compatibility and an aversion towards hard forks and a preference for soft forks? It is both that and what I ran into a lot with other projects like Ethereum and Ripple and some of the other more popular projects is that the resource consumption was not bounded as well. And so we actually ran into a lot of issues multiple times with these networks where we would just have problems with our infrastructure falling over. What do you mean? 32 megabyte blocks don't take more than a couple of gigabytes of RAM to fully validate? Or even, and I don't even know what the relevant comparison is with like the Ripple ledgers, but they allow so much transaction throughput and they claim it as a great thing. But once you actually start running some of these and building on top of them, then there are times when the only way that you can actually stay in sync is to go out and like talk to the developers and ask like, which nodes should I be connecting to right now? Because the ones that I'm connected to are stalled. The government's nodes or this other centralized entities nodes so that we can know exactly what's going on, right? What is your favorite part of Bitcoin then? I mean, like if you came in for this cypherpunk ideology, like, I mean, is it just that you're kind of able to express yourself through Bitcoin? As a user, my favorite part is the freedom to move my money as I wish. Even just a few weeks ago, I had an issue trying to make about a $5,000 purchase through my credit card and it just kept getting declined and declined, declined. Even when I got the bank on the phone and they were like, yeah, we're increasing your temporary limit and we tried it again, declined and contrasting that with any of the times when I've moved value in these crypto networks, I pushed the button, I checked to make sure that the value and the address is what I expect and I confirm it and then within a matter of seconds, it is done. I don't have to do anything else and it's just that frictionlessness. So is that what brought you into Bitcoin? Because it sounds like you weren't necessarily on the cypherpunk email list, so that didn't bring you in. I mean, what brought you into Bitcoin? It was both the libertarian leaning ideology around a lot of it and also the computer science side. So I was originally, as most people, I think very skeptical. I read about it and I was like, oh, this is going to get hacked, everybody is going to lose their money type of thing and then of course, as that did not happen and it kept sticking around, eventually I realized, you know, there might be something that I'm missing here because it seems a lot more robust than I originally anticipated and due to the ideology around it, maybe this is something that's worth putting my time into. So now being a professional cypherpunk, allocating significant amounts of your personal time and professional time into it, what code are you actually writing now? Like, what are you actually doing there at Caso? Mostly more of the backend stuff. So like my specialty is generally around running nodes and writing interfaces for wallet platforms to then talk to. So at BitGo, I was writing multiple different indexing services to ingest all of this data and basically put it in databases in a highly indexed format so that the wallet could get to the data and I'm basically doing the same type of stuff at CASA, though I would say, if anything, I've stepped back like a level higher in doing more high level architecture stuff. So basically trying to make CASA as trust-minimized as possible. Now this is like one of the trade-offs, of course, whenever we talk about centralization and the pros and cons is that we are centralizing the services as a company because we're getting a lot of specialists together and we're able to work better as a team and build something that would be hard to do if we were all individually writing pieces of it. And so the result though is that people are using this service that could potentially be a single point of failure if our infrastructure goes away or collapses or get attacked or whatever. And so I want to allow people to leverage our services so that we can provide bank-like services, financial services without actually being a bank, without actually having the ability to freeze someone's money or take it away from them. So is this looking at... Who's the target market then? Is it individuals, family offices, hedge funds? Well, really most interested in individuals, the larger enterprises that need more of a treasury management solution are probably not going to be as interested in what we're offering because we are not offering a solution where you have a whole group of people that come in and you set up complex rules where you're auditing each other. We're trying to leverage multi-SIG and hardware devices so that a single person can have the most secure but also easy to use setup. And so right now we are targeting high net worth individuals simply because if you get into the consumer market of wallets, the floor for prices is zero. So most consumers are expecting to get a free wallet and it's very hard to make any money providing that type of service without selling personal information or something a little more unscrupulous. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Who knows what blockchain.info does with all that data they collect. So like me, you're a prolific Bitcoin writer and educator and things like that. It's fun. I got admitted. It's definitely a lot of fun. It can be very rewarding being in the battlefield of ideas, but it also has its downside. You were slotted. What exactly happened here? And how has that kind of changed your calculus in terms of kind of giving people free information in this area? Well, this was something that I always knew in the back of my mind was possible because we had heard of it, especially happening in the video gaming community. And it did happen to a few other folks in the Bitcoin community, though I don't think they were particularly public about it. Now... Well, how Finney got slotted. Right. I mean, really, you're going to swat a guy in a wheelchair with Lou Gehrig's? Yeah. And it led to his early death too, because it was during the winter and he was out on the driveway for a significant period of time. And so, I mean, kind of in my opinion, swatting somebody should be considered attempted murder because it's the deployment of lethal force, but you know, anyways, not to usurp your answer here. Yeah. Well, you know, it was obviously it came out of nowhere. It's not like I was expecting it to happen. And once it actually did happen, and thankfully it went about as well as it could have because my local law enforcement did a little bit of research and realized that the phone call was not actually even coming from my state. They didn't even, you know, bust down the door or anything. So, you know, after talking to them and, you know, they realized that I was a public fairly controversial figure. They left pretty quickly after that. They did, they politely asked if they could search my house, but I politely declined. Like, you have no reasonable cause. But, you know, once that was actually over, I definitely started reevaluating a lot of things and being more careful about my online privacy and posting, you know, location related stuff, giving any hints about what I might be up to. But then, you know, over the next few months, I started researching like how to actually start my life over to, you know, sever all my ties because I had been living in the same house for 10 years and like, you can basically Google my address and, you know, public tax records and all this other stuff comes up. So I have spent a considerable amount of time and resources over the past six months basically setting up legal entities and new types of proxies, both technical proxies and human proxies and legal proxies. And I'm at the point now where I'm ready to stress test it. So over the next few weeksĂ  So are you inviting another one? Well, so it'll be multiple levels of stress tests. The first level will be just getting some private investigators to see what they can dig up. And if that goes well, I am considering putting a bounty out there for like, if you're a professional, you know, data sifter digger guy and you can find me, then I'm willing to pay for you to tell me, you know, where the leaks are to see if I can close them up. Well, that might be a little bit nicer way than inviting the NAD's ghoul to come and claim you, right? So would this potentially become a service offering at CASA? Because I could see this being something people would appreciate. Yeah, we've talked about it mainly because, you know, just the education level is the bar is so high to actually understand it's a very multifaceted problem, you know. You're leaking data all over the place. I am very well acquainted with this, you know, running the blog How to Vanish for several years with many millions of visitors. We looked at lots of the different facets and I mean, we had little guides on financial privacy or personal privacy or electronic privacy or financial privacy and like our main book and I mean, and then you've got like state income tax ramifications to get tied in with this and you've got second citizenships and residencies and I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, kind of just the general five or six five theory that you can implement. So I mean, there's really a lot in this whole arena and Bitcoin enables people to be so much more mobile. Most people don't really appreciate the amount of risk that comes from the externalities that get created by the government's requirement for the collection of so much of this data. You know, all this AML, KYC, healthcare regulations, all this stuff, taxes, driver's licenses, I mean, all of these things create tremendous potential attack surfaces and attack vectors to personal safety. And I think a lot of people just kind of take it for granted and don't do anything about it. And so there might be a service, you know, we found it at how to vanish, you know, there was definitely a market, but you know, over the years we noticed that like search traffic for basically these privacy related keywords, it's down 90%. So people seem to be getting less interested in the privacy even though it's getting more important. People think that they're not important enough or they're not going to be targets or whatever. And I think the most important way to look at it is that you don't know what might happen that might make you suddenly important. One of my favorite examples actually is the lady who was, she boarded a flight to go to Africa or something and she tweeted some terrible joke about hoping she didn't get AIDS. By the time she landed, her life was over, it was upside down. And so just like the power of the internet is the ability to suddenly make yourself a target of harassment by millions of people in 140 characters in 30 seconds. And some people are just really crazy, you know, they're just Looney Tunes. Right. And I mean, and that's basically what happened to me is that I went from, you know, in the matter of- You definitely like beat the Bcash community with a stick. So there's no hard evidence that the swatting was due to that because the person who did it didn't specifically say that. So they caught the person. No, no, but they tried to extort me. They sent me some direct threatening voicemails and whatnot. And so they never went into any specifics, but they obviously were more enraged after my tweet after it happened when I was like, you're going to have to try harder than this. That pissed them off even more. And they actually, they threatened a lot to do a lot worse things, but nothing else ever happened after that. And so, you know, I'm pretty sure that that was just some dude in his mom's basement. It sounded like a 20 something year old guy with a Southern accent, but it's not about him. It's about that when you get to the level that you have hundreds of thousands of people who are focused on you, then there's probably going to be at least one or two nut jobs. And it's those few people that you have to worry about. Yeah. And you have no idea whether it's like collateral damage because you're in a picture with a friend who says some stupid thing that then blows up and goes viral, you know, and like, oh, this person in the picture, you know. So and would you say like just a Bitcoin security in general, this is where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? That's the idea. Now, for me, this has turned into, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of prevention and changing my life significantly. And maybe I've overdone it. But the problem is that when I look at what has happened over the past five years or so, and if I take that and extrapolate it, then it gets really scary. And so I just want to be better safe than sorry type of situation. Well, being in the battlefield of ideas is not for the faint of heart. You know, and this is a field where we don't know what five or 10 years out looks like in terms of government coercion, in terms of, you know, financial resources and price and just all the many different factors that Bitcoin touches. It could go a million different ways. You know, it could end up with the Bitcoin barons and their crypto citadels or I think a best case scenario is that it just it becomes so pervasive and mainstream that I don't have to talk about it anymore. Like when Bitcoin and crypto becomes boring, you know, that's when I think our work is done. But until then. But then we might have additional layers like you're lightning network and you got additional layers that might even get built clear up on top of that. So I mean, looking at like the crypto citadels, I can just see Jameson like up on top of like 57.1, right? Like you're on the 104 New York City just perched up in your dragon's den. What are you most excited about looking out over the next, you know, let's say two to three years? Yeah, it is really these next layers. I think that the the level of development is actually going to continue to accelerate because it should be easier for for developers to start creating entirely new classes of applications where, you know, they don't have to get a consensus from from any implementations to like add features to the low level protocol. And this is because they're interacting on the second layer. Like in lightning is that, you know, we're once again, we're talking about Bitcoin as a platform of, you know, we have this very stable platform and now slowly but surely people are starting to build on top of it as that stability is becoming more obvious. The fifth network effect of developers. And you know, you can speculate about all the different ways that this can go, but just the ability to unlock economic activity that hasn't been possible before on traditional financial networks, I think is one of the more interesting aspects of of what we can do here. Well, it's been a wonderful interview so far. Let's end with one question. What would be like one or two pieces of advice that you want to leave for everybody? Well, the one thing that I've harped on a lot is that nobody understands Bitcoin. And that's what that's really saying is that, you know, it's this underlying human consensus is like, yeah, we have code, we have infrastructure, we have technical things you can understand. But you know, what one of the things that we're trying to do here is to really figure out like what is the human consensus for the optimal or most fair form of money. And so you have to be flexible is that I've I've changed my mind over the years of like how I view Bitcoin. And I think that most of that is because I've done a better job reaching out and trying to ingest everybody else's perspective so that I can just get a more global view of the whole system. So, you know, when you're starting out, you can't possibly have that view. And you may end up getting surprised because your understanding of Bitcoin changes. Other than that, invest in education more than more than just like investing in the actual assets themselves, because if you have the education, then you should be able to make better informed decisions and hopefully actually be able to navigate through this future of crypto anarchy, which is going to look a lot different than for the recent few generations even. Well, I think those are two excellent pieces of advice. Be humble and invest in yourself, like can't really get much better than that. We've had a tremendous interview today with Jameson Lopp, founder at Casa, BitGo, security engineer, Bitcoin thought leader, neckbeard extraordinaire, and, you know, cypherpunk, who's out there writing code and building the future that we're going to that we're going to have. Thanks so much for being with us, Jameson. My pleasure. Be sure to get a copy of the free Bitcoin guide at FreeBitcoinGuide.com. Got a question or suggestion? Record your voice at Bitcoin.KN. Don't be shy. To help the show, share Bitcoin.KN with friends, post about it on Reddit, and otherwise, spam the interwebs. Your iTunes comments and five-star reviews are very important to us. Please continue tuning into the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast, where we release interviews with the top people in the Bitcoin world. Now take some choline and let that Bitcoin knowledge consolidate.