What's up everybody welcome back to Bitcoin radio for episode 002 WBTC where Bitcoin lives.
I am Joe Blackburn.
I am your host.
We have a special awesome guest today Mr. Jameson Lopp will be in here soon.
We've got Galen Danziger joining us.
He's the also part of mouse body CTO Jameson Lopp who is our star guest today.
He is the CTO of CASA and he's also been the CTO of Bicco and it's really cool to have
men you know he's one of the early Bitcoin engineers.
He recently in the past year he was the target of a swatting attack from a either disgruntled
or maybe a bad joke gone wrong but nevertheless it wasn't much of a joke when things got real.
We're going to have a little bit of insight on that not to mention as stated before he's
with CASA right now as a CTO but he's been an influential developer and he has a pretty
strong social presence in this space at this point you know.
He's done really well.
He's been probably about as consistent as it gets in principle and ideology.
I do appreciate a lot of the those ideological principles that he stands by.
I share a lot of them with him.
It's really unique to find somebody that I agree with just about on everything and Jameson
kind of he fits that bill.
I've been able to follow him now for a little bit but I've really gotten in tune with him
ever since the I guess it's really been the last year or so that I've really seen his
name pop up and probably the swatting event is what was the first thing that I heard about
him about and then as I started reading some of the stuff he's got tons of material everybody.
I mean he's been author of numerous articles and it's special to have someone with his
insight his experience and his and his knowledge overall to sit down and really have a conversation
with me.
I think that you'll find a lot of relatability to me for someone who speaks at such a high
level and so many different areas.
He also has a really unique way of relating and I've actually been able to emulate some
of that in my presence and in my style.
I've seen him and his way and his caring nature but his discipline in the way that he speaks
to people.
It's really cool.
It's really cool.
So we'll have the interview shortly.
And you everybody has to remember you know we're on episode 002.
I cannot imagine how awesome this is going to get over the next year like the outpouring
the support the amount of people that have touched base and offered you know insight
on a certain guest that that might that might want to be on.
That's what I'm talking about people.
I've really really seen the community step up.
It has been a absolute awesome awesome week.
You know I hope the community is enjoying the the ledger nano giveaways sponsored by
Ledger really appreciate them for having some some some belief in us and seeing us as a
as a group that in a community that is deserving.
Also you know with mouse belt giving away the Bitcoin you know on both parties Ledger
and mouse belt.
I'm so thankful for them.
You know Patrick has really gone out of his way to make sure that CCT has has seen the
love and has has been appreciated and he made that very clear with me early on.
So before we get on this interview special shout out Ledger thanks so much and obviously
mouse belt and Patrick Galen is representing mouse belt today as the as their CTO to to
be on this interview.
And I know he's he's as excited as I am will also you know what we'll we'll address a lot
of things in this interview but one of the things I really want you to to pay attention
to is his delivery and why do you think he's doing this.
That was that was something that you know is this guy real.
That's kind of how I felt you know he says a lot of really great things and he's experienced
a lot.
Is this dude for real.
Is he really is he really this awesome you know that's just my personal you know take
on how his his journey has been his career.
He's done a lot of really cool things.
I'm not saying he's perfect obviously you know everybody's human but but goodness gracious
you know I can say this much.
I appreciate when people are real and that's what you're going to get.
One more point to kind of insert is that over the next couple of weeks or so we're going
to have some pretty cool interviews and starting with this one you know I really enjoyed having
Jeff on on episode one.
There was a reason why I had I wanted Jeff on sitting next to me.
I think that you know our insight our perspective is really unique especially combined and we've
seen about everything you can in social media as far as especially Facebook goes but there's
not much we haven't been exposed to.
If you haven't if you if you didn't listen to episode zero zero one I really suggest
that you do put it on download it put it on your playlist.
It's worth it.
All right so we're moments away from having Jameson on when when we get when we get the
opportunities to have people like Jameson and you know the other I've got some names
I'm holding back right now.
You know our executive producer Josh Donaldson he's he's put some things together for us
and he's he's he's kicking butt right now.
Watch us grow people watch how fast this happens.
This is good.
This is this is legit.
I'm proud to be sitting next to mouse belt and Bitcoin radio in this and folks I'm holding
my tongue right now just because that's how you're supposed to do it.
All right.
Let's get out of this part.
Let's head straight in.
Jameson.
Thanks again everybody for listening.
Here we go.
All right.
Bitcoin radio.
We're finally here.
We have Jameson Lopp joining us.
Jameson is is a early Bitcoin engineer.
He really recently this past year I think most people would have probably heard about
his swatting incident.
I know that's where I first heard his name.
But among many different things he is the CTO of current CTO of CASA has been the CTO
for big.
Jameson.
What's up man.
Welcome to Bitcoin radio.
Hey.
Good to be here.
It's always funny to be referred to as an early Bitcoin anything because I think we're
all early.
Hey.
That's the truth man.
With us today we also have Galen Danzinger.
He's the CTO of mouse belt.
Galen what's going on man.
Oh hey Joe.
I'm doing pretty good here.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Well Jameson you know you kind of have this aura around you.
You know you you have a unique way of talking to people I think in the space that I find
really it's just really endearing.
I've watched a lot of your stuff.
I've read some of your articles.
You seem to attract people because of your so relatable in the way that you speak about
things that you know I find myself emulating that trying to be more like you especially
for the new people coming into the space.
And you know I think that goes back to the amount of time you've been in the space.
You don't have a big ego at least you know publicly and and of course privately at me.
We don't know each other very well but I assume it's probably be very similar to that.
But we'll kind of jump right into you know what it was your kind of your inspiration
for even this this whole thing about crypto.
What inspired you about blockchain early on.
Early on I got into it for two different reasons.
The first one being that I'm a computer scientist and upon reading the white paper I found
that Bitcoin was a very elegant solution to a problem that I had never really given much
thought to.
And simultaneously I had already run the gamut of the political spectrum growing up extremely
conservative in a southern household then going to a liberal university and then eventually
getting out of college and turning more libertarian.
And so at that point in time in my life getting into the libertarian ideology I found it was
also very interesting from that standpoint and the idea that I could combine my ability
to essentially code my own will and and sort of project my my thoughts and my ideology
via programming to try to kind of change the world to reshape various aspects of the world
was incredibly powerful and intriguing to me.
Bro you are speaking my language.
I've never heard anybody put it out there so normal.
That was wonderfully said and so you know I share a lot of those same concepts and same
things that you just mentioned and you know I guess even with the swatting incident which
has was less than a year ago still you know I guess that was November of last year right
Jameson.
Well it was 2017 so I think we're coming up on two years yeah.
Okay yeah my bad you know how the crypto years kind of squished together there but absolutely
so you have you have this experience with the swatting actually let's just tell that
story a little bit.
Why don't you tell everybody kind of the the basics of what happened that day.
Well I have the almost minute by minute breakdown in very long form format on my blog but essentially
I was out and working at the gym and come come home to find that I'm not allowed into
my own neighborhood and why was that.
Well it turned out there was an active shooter situation going on and so the police basically
said I needed to stay out of my own neighborhood and that I should you know tell anyone else
I knew in the neighborhood to get out as soon as possible and so I did that and it didn't
take long before we found out that you know my significant other comes out of my house
and gets stopped by the police who basically interrogate and say hey is everything okay
and of course within a matter of about 30 seconds it was very obvious to everyone involved
that this had been a hoax essentially the the police had been called and someone claiming
to be me had said that they had murdered people and were holding people hostage and that's
why you know they locked down my whole neighborhood they also claimed to have you know explosives
and other weapons and so it was it was thankfully about as as good as it could have been and
along the the lines of that nobody got hurt and they actually did not you know break down
my door or anything like a lot of swatting incidents and that that was only because I
was not at home at the time and I actually you know became aware of what was going on
and was able to call my house and say hey everybody needs to get out so it was you know
a fortuitous set of circumstances but ultimately it ended up I think being a result of the
fact that I had become more of a public figure and sometimes I say things that may piss off
people for one reason or another and I just pissed off the wrong person who happened to
have the ability to make anonymous phone calls and that's really what this entire situation
revealed to me was that there are exploits that our government has unwittingly created
I think as as a result of trying to be helpful there are ways for people to send anonymous
tips and essentially use government forces to target whoever they want to and my you
know my specific example was you know the creation of this false hostage situation and
homicide but in the past couple of years since that happened to me I've I've actually heard
of a number of different incidents where Bitcoiners and prominent people have had various agencies
used against them for example like child protective services or even the ATF and this is it's
just an interesting new dynamic that has resulted from some of these anonymizing and privacy
technologies.
Well James you know first off fortunately like you said that that situation does sound
like it was resolved as good as it possibly could have been you know given the circumstances
and what they were saying especially because I have actually listened to that that recording
that was saved one of the first in times I ever heard about you was due to this the circumstance
and of course at the time you know I mean I didn't necessarily you know have the opportunity
to just call you or reach out to you you know we're just now getting a chance to meet each
other and but I felt for you man like I like I couldn't imagine pulling up to my neighborhood
and the cops just being like yeah there's an active shooter first your first instinct
I'm just sitting there thinking about my family making sure then come to find out they're
talking about me and I'm like oh dude just to put myself in your chair there I feel for
you Brian I'm impressed of how I can tell by your demeanor now but how calmly it seems
like you were able to make sure that situation did not get worse now a lot moving into like
the next step of this was this kind of social experiment that at least that's how the media
portrayed it I don't I would love to hear your take on this obviously but you went off
the grid man and I guess it was the what was it not the New York Times that wrote the article
that kind of explained how you did this and what you did to kind of allow yourself to
really and they say off the grid but I don't even know if that's the right word for it
it's kind of like just changing everything you know about your life to not be tracked
how would you just put this into your words yeah off the grid isn't quite the best way
to describe it because I would say if you're really going off the grid then you're going
completely dark and you're cutting off contact or at least you're not using your wild stuff
yeah and and so I I'm actually taking what I believe is the more challenging path where
I'm trying to still continue my outreach and continue to use the reputation that I have
built in order to spread my ideas but I'm trying to do it in a way where these people
cannot target me anonymously and you know use various resources of government agencies
to screw with me and and and really and it's not even just targeting via government agencies
some of the things that people can do if they know how to get the right information they
can basically screw with anything that has your name on it like your credit card accounts
your deed to your house your utilities you know they can basically phones yeah they can
pose as you and and turn off or take over any number of of accounts and and you know
essential pieces to your day-to-day life and so I wanted to prevent people from basically
being able to grief me like that and as a result I figured out both legal and technical
ways to essentially shield myself from the rest of the world and and so I'm using proxies
of all kinds I'm using internet proxies to shield my internet traffic I'm using legal
proxies through various entities your corporations and trusts to basically own my property so
that my name is not on any public records and and it's it's really required a very
major change in my day-to-day life though after doing it for over a year now you start
to get used to it it's just new routines new reactions to certain things and once again
I have an extremely long in-depth blog post on my website I believe it's entitled a modest
privacy protection proposal for anyone who actually wants to know all the dirty details
of everything that I had to do but the the short version is I had to burn down my entire
life like I had been living in the same house for 10 years and my address was probably in
hundreds if not thousands of databases James real quick let me ask you this like what would
you say your digital footprint was prior to you recognizing this would you say that you
are already model moderately prepared for keeping your privacy you know like I guess
just away from I mean keeping it your own or did you not even think about it all you
just kind of grew up in this digital age where I mean clearly you were involved at some point
in the in this at the beginning of Bitcoin and as you move forward you know I know that
with the the types of company that you kept it you know it you were you're a developer
you're you're a tech guy right and so privacy is part of that that world what would you
say that digital footprint was before this oh it was huge I mean it was no different
from probably you know any other person in their 20s or 30s who has grown up with all
of this technology it's just it's hard to even understand the full scope of it which
is why trying to clean up what was out there was outside of the realm of possibility and
basically why I had to start over get a blank slate and then very meticulously decide what
data I wanted to create in the first place sure and I saw your like as like I said there's
also the New York Times article that kind of briefly overviews these steps but clearly
it wasn't written as simple as they've made it although they did annotate on their on
their article that it was not so easy for you but what would you say was the biggest
challenge out of all those steps what was the hardest part you know there it was mostly
the the legal stuff like I had to pay some pretty major legal bills for these attorneys
to basically investigate what was possible and investigate what the local jurisdictions
would allow them to do in order to set up entities that could then take ownership of
houses and vehicles and really any publicly registered property that was that was the
most difficult from a resource standpoint and in the sense that you know it costs tens
of thousands of dollars in legal bills and then you know maybe another thousand or so
dollars per year in actual fees for maintaining the various entities on the personal side
though the trickier thing would just have to be creating my my alter ego my my new pseudonym
basically Shackelford it's it my yeah in my new location my neighbors don't know my real
name like really no one that I interact in my new location knows my new name they only
know me by my pseudonym you still use that name now that pseudonym yeah so that is basically
my pseudonym for for any like real world interaction where I live and you know when I'm traveling
of course I use my my regular name and people know who I am but only when I'm going to like
crypto specific events so I literally have to pretend like I'm a stranger walk up to
you and that's the only way I'll get to know your other your other not real name yeah I
mean anyone who I meet during normal day-to-day life now they get my pseudonym and a very
generic background story of yeah I'm a software engineer I work with like network security
I would love to even even that part of you Jameson is still probably really interesting
even like the parts that is just basic I would I would still like to have that conversation
as as as not Jameson as as neighbor well you know I still have all of my other hobbies
I'm still interested in firearms and hand-to-hand combat and and and personal defense and security
and all this other stuff I just I don't mention the fact that I'm into crypto yep I understand
completely and we have very we have a lot of the same interest I can I can assure you
of that all right so we can we can move a little bit past that and we can talk about
a little bit what you're doing now in the history and and Galen I know you have some
questions about the side of things but why don't you give us a brief background on BitGo
and Casa and really anything else that might fit into that if you want to Jameson yeah
so it was somewhat fortuitous that as my interest in Bitcoin progressed I started my own open
source project where I forked the Bitcoin core and added in a bunch of metrics you know
basically trying to add in some of the DevOps analysis that I had been doing in my normal
day-to-day job and about a year after doing that decided that you know I was already spending
so much time thinking about this space that I might as well try to get paid to do it and
that was right around you know early 2015 a lot of venture capital was coming in and
there were more jobs actually available so I applied at a few places and was lucky that
there was a software engineering spot open at BitGo and it was not advertised as a remote
engineering position and they didn't have any remote engineers but was able to get my
foot in the door due to you know this other the side projects I had been working on and
somewhat as a result of my my tweets as well and you know that just turned into me going
down the rabbit hole of learning all about running enterprise infrastructure and learning
a lot more about the security side of things both you know regular cyber security and private
key management security so you know I did that for three years and it was definitely
an interesting learning experience lots of frustrations because we were servicing mostly
exchanges and other large service providers and you know they had very high demands for
for uptime and reliability and whatnot and eventually I managed to get a sort of cold
call from Jeremy Welch who happened to be a Duke alum and I was living near Duke back
then and actually helping out with some courses at Duke and he came to pitch me and I had
received many pitches before but he basically pitched me a vision of what I thought the
ultimate you know personal wallet would be like and so this was something that I felt
like I myself would want to use and I felt there was a huge need for it and that I would
you know benefit from it and be interested enough to actually work on it myself so switched
over from really doing some multi-sig enterprise security to doing multi-sig personal private
key security so it really was a very small pivot and I was at when that started so that
was just a little over a year ago early 2018 and you know we've been moving along pretty
fast since then and what started out as just the the key master and key management product
has turned into this whole suite of products that are starting to get integrated together
and really becoming a much stronger user-friendly suite of products.
Absolutely so BitGo and CASA are probably the two companies that most people are going
to associate you with how much do you think BitGo played into your influence of CASA and
what you're developing over there?
Well I definitely learned a lot of best practices while I was working at BitGo so you know I've
been able to reuse a lot of that knowledge and also you know I had the opportunity to
meet with a lot of the big players in the space you know a lot of the people who are
actually building these large-scale services that need to have secure products and probably
one of the more interesting experiences that's not really something that you can learn from
a book is that I got to see a variety of situations where users managed to shoot themselves in
the foot and so that became one of our primary focuses at CASA was this user experience of
trying to build in enough guardrails to make it as difficult as possible for the user to
shoot themselves in the foot because in this space if that happens it can be catastrophic
and in many cases no one can help you.
Absolutely.
Okay and Jameson I actually have a question for you sort of on the in the realm of swatting
as well so you had a bunch of armed people in your house and now you're building this
product where you're personally managing your keys is that how do you go from having a bunch
of armed people in your house people knowing your address that could get access to your
wallet to building like a personal wallet instead of like a enterprise custody system?
Yeah well you know technically they didn't make it into the house but they certainly
could have if they had wanted to or if something had gone differently so you know for practical
purposes you know my house was compromised and so that really shows that you should not
have a single point of failure I mean you should not be keeping all of the eggs to your
private key basket in one place even if it's your like highly fortified house.
It really comes down to what is your threat model and I think in a lot of cases you might
say hey you should basically have your threat model be the nation state and the average
person will just look at you and laugh and say oh you're just paranoid but you know in
my case I actually did have agents of the state who were posing a threat to me not because
I had not done anything to threaten them but apparently there are cases where you can be
targeted even though you're not actually causing a threat so there are so many unknown unknowns
out there like this is not really something that I had thought would be an issue I would
have to deal with but if we're talking about not only the security of your setup but also
the robustness of your setup to loss because I think that may in fact be a bigger problem
in this space of people just having something unexpected something crazy happen that causes
destruction of data then we really do need to build systems that are not just secure
enough that we feel reasonably comfortable that they aren't going to fail we need to
build systems that are ten times more secure and robust than we think is reasonable because
we want to be able to handle those crazy edge cases Jameson like let's be real if we ever
if you ever found this dude that that swatted you what would I mean you're gonna kick this
dude's ass and I'll help you not that you need the help but I cannot believe this story
man like it still blows my mind just like like hearing you and hearing how calm you
are and how reasonable you explain these things I can't imagine what was going through your
mind at that moment especially when you found that out I mean any idea as anybody ever come
forward with with admittance or has anybody you know told you who it was actually yes
is this public maybe I missed this because that's that's awesome if you found out who
it was it's not public did you kick his ass so the problem if if you read my blog post
about the swatting you'll notice that I post a hundred thousand dollar bounty for information
that leads to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator sure and I have received from
multiple sources well multiple anonymous sources information that all points to the same person
but unfortunately there there's a problem with the information in that it's all just
hearsay and there's nothing hard sure enough to hand over to law enforcement to essentially
result in arrest and conviction and so while I could try to screw with this person I really
I think that the whole thing was basically a prank done in poor taste and it it's not
even really worth my time trying to pursue so I am happy that I'm in a position now where
I don't have to worry about similar people doing the same thing but I don't think that
revenge is really going to help anything and I suspect that this person is not going to
be living an amazing life in the first place just based upon the other activities that
I'm told that they're involved in you know karma is going to catch up with them eventually
and also in that in that neck of the woods like you just them knowing that you know sometimes
is enough indication and I could I could bet that you might find some peace of mind if
he knows that you know to at least at some point but nevertheless a technician and a
gentleman good on you Jameson I'm very impressed with your calmness as I've noted before okay
so we'll move into this this next question that we have and I guess it it kind of goes
into you know where casa is at the moment and what your expectations are but I before
I really get into that part some statements that you've made in the past have been how
how how much the blockchain industry has to change or how much it's going to change and
if you if you could kind of give us at least a just an outline about what you mean by when
you say it's going to drastically change over the next few years where is it that you see
these pinch points are and what do you think is the reason why these huge changes are coming
well there are several issues that need to be addressed if we really want to get to mainstream
adoption I would say that right now we're at you could possibly call it mainstream acceptance
or main mainstream familiarity in the sense that people have heard of a Bitcoin and they
at least understand that it is something that you can buy and sell and in and basically
use like a currency sure but if we want to get to the point where people are actually
using it then it needs to be easy enough that it doesn't require hours or even days of of
learning of basically you know scaling this mountain of knowledge if you are going to
be able to secure your own private keys and and really take advantage of the ultimate
level of self sovereignty that the system is is providing we don't want to get to mainstream
adoption by just creating banking 2.0 where everybody is buying on Coinbase or some exchange
and then just leaving it there and basically you know having a third party be the custodian
for all of their money because you're creating what we have yeah that that would be recreating
what we have with the only real improvement being the fact that the monetary supply can't
be inflated on a whim sure so if if we want to be able to have this usability and of course
the scalability is another major point that is still being addressed then we need to have
a lot more really layers of software abstraction built on top of the protocols and and that
means on top of not just Bitcoin but on top of lightning as well because we've learned
a lot about lightning at Casa from from selling and running these nodes for almost a year
now and there's still a lot that needs to be shoved under the hood basically the the
way that that I put is it like as long as people or as long as the average user needs
to actually understand like the difference between on chain Bitcoin and off chain lightning
or as long as the average user needs to actually be exposed to the fact that there are these
things called channels and that you know you have to manage liquidity in the channels and
yada yada then it's only going to remain basically a project that is used by nerds and and you
know hobbyists who are technical or have the wherewithal to put in a lot of time to figure
it out and so that's why I think that you're still going to see a lot more innovation to
come where we basically figure out how we can continue to build smarter software that
builds all of these best practices into the software so that it really is as easy as you
know signing up for Facebook or Uber or what have you it's like it needs to be as easy
as using a mobile app where you can just click through and follow the instructions and you
you don't have to rtfm as they say because the user is not going to read any instruction
manuals no matter how much time you put into it that's that's another thing that I've definitely
learned over my software career you know seeing a lot of great documentation written and then
get completely ignored yeah that was me I apologize for that no I think that that's
pretty much human nature people are just lazy when it comes to that but a beautiful explanation
there Jameson Galen I know you had some thoughts on these these ideas and some of this ideology
yeah yeah no I remember the first time that I was setting up a multi-signature wallet
it was a friend and I had got a little bit more money in a transaction than we're used
to we're thinking well maybe we shouldn't have a single point of failure we're trying
to set it up and after a little over an hour of trying to figure out exactly how how it
might work we ended up just using a regular wallet that first time and later so I felt
that that same UX trouble especially with multi-signature stuff so what exactly are
you doing at casa to help that like what types of UX things are you are you working into
this yeah so on the key management side what we're really trying to do is meld the level
of security that you get from these dedicated key management devices like the ledger and
trezor and cold card and we're trying to merge that into the usability of a mobile app so
if you're using casa key master we are basically allowing you to very easily visualize what
your multi-sig setup is manager devices your keys and you know instead of requiring the
user to back up and manage their seed phrases for these things because that's essentially
your private keys we believe that it is in fact a much better user experience to create
a more flexible type of multi-signature setup where we call it the seedless setup but you
initialize your hardware devices plug them in get your your key shield setup in our app
and then if something happens basically some sort of catastrophe some sort of theft or
loss where in a regular scenario the user would then have to go dig up their seed phrase
and and reconstitute that particular set of keys on a new device we instead provide a
wizard inside of the app where you just click on your device and you say I need to replace
this device you go buy a new one off the shelf or from us or whatever plug it in and we walk
you through the process of essentially doing a key rotation in the wallet and so we think
that you know just creating the ability for users to click through and do what is under
the hood an extremely complex operation of of sweeping all the UTXOs and creating a transaction
to sign them over to a new set of keys is both a lot more user friendly and ultimately
a lot more secure because we can prevent the the need for the user to be handling this
private key data in the first place and there's just an entire mountain of knowledge under
the the simple phrase that a lot of these devices tell you when you set them up which
is here is your seed phrase write it down and keep it safe and you know there's so
much both IT knowledge and security knowledge required to to do that correctly we think
it's easier if you can just completely bypass it oh absolutely yeah that's really cool
so I know you got for the the key management I see that you have like two major offerings
you have a two of three multi-signature and a three of five multi-signature and you're
offering them both it looks like just for individual users can you elaborate like a
little bit more on how those work who might want to use it why they need to use it yeah
so we have a number of different tiers we do have a single signature basically mobile
key wallet which you know you should probably only keep like a few hundred dollars on for
your day-to-day spending but for the actual like secure vault style products the two of
three is kind of our entry level you know basically having one hardware device that
is protecting one set of keys and then another set of keys and cold storage that casa has
and is only used for disaster recovery situations and then finally you always have a key set
on your your actual mobile device which is encrypted via the secure element that is available
in your mobile phone hardware and that initial like two of three multi-sig we recommend you
know anywhere from like a thousand to maybe ten thousand or a hundred thousand dollars
worth it kind of makes sense for that level of funds to keep secured because you've got
a better level of redundancy than just having you know one seed phrase or one hardware device
you know in your house or in a bank vault or whatever because even bank vaults can have
things go wrong and having a little bit more diversity of keeping these things geographically
separated is really what gives you an improved level of security and robustness against both
theft and loss scenarios but of course if you're securing a much larger amount of money
you know hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars then you're going to want to have
even a greater level of robustness and that's when people will be more interested in doing
a three of five setup because with that you can actually lose two different devices at
the same time and still be able to recover and some you know some of the extreme scenarios
of people who really are thinking about like nation-state level attacks they may go so
far as to put some of the devices in different countries or different jurisdictions to prevent
various legal threats against them and while these products are mostly developed for the
individual we do have what we call the the diamond tier which is a three of five multi
sig product that is also multi-user and that is a type of setup that can make sense for
something like a family office or a small hedge fund where you have maybe two or three
people who are managing a single wallet absolutely go ahead Galen yeah so I think that's a really
cool product setup so I do know BitGo also offers a multi-signature product can you elaborate
on the differences between Casa and BitGo yeah so BitGo well you know BitGo has multiple
products as well they also have a custodial product now which is more targeted towards
like the institutional investors but the the multi-sig product that BitGo has been touting
all along is a two of three setup and in that setup you have one key that is held by the
user usually on a hot server of some type you then have one key that is held by BitGo
also semi-hot like it's on it's on a computer you know it's secured by various security
modules but it is used actively to co-sign transactions and then you have a third key
that is either held by the user in their own cold storage setup or held by yet another
third party as a key recovery service the idea being that you have a level of robustness
there that BitGo could cease to exist and you can still recover your funds but the biggest
difference is the fact that the key that BitGo is holding is being actively used and in a
normal transaction signing flow BitGo is going to co-sign the transaction now the powerful
thing there and the reason why this makes a lot of sense for enterprises is that BitGo
then has a fairly complex policy engine that each user can customize to basically put in
their own security policies and this can be anything from white lists and black lists
of IP addresses or crypto addresses it can be things like velocity limits you know time
of day type things basically you know anything that that you the user in BitGo can come up
with it's possible to create rules here and and you know this is this is basically like
an Oracle style setup except the Oracle is BitGo rather than you know some like smart
contract that's running on a blockchain on its own and it definitely provides a much
better level of security than you know just running a single signature hot wallet for
whatever your service is but if you're going for cold storage level security it's there
are still you know some potential failure scenarios there so at CASA while we do have
one of the keys it is never on an internet connected computer it's not actively used
for signing transactions we don't have any sort of co-signing engine that is actively
used we would only ever actually sign with the CASA key after going through a fairly
lengthy process that usually has a several day waiting period and a variety of verifications
that go on and it's really only meant to be used for disaster recovery so I think that
you know both of these systems have their own good use cases and it doesn't necessarily
make sense to you know see the two as competitors even though we are offering similar multi
SIG M of N models it's a good point no and I appreciate that Jameson Galen great questions
man I'm glad you infused those Jameson look man I know that your time is precious so we
won't hold you up much longer I do have a couple more things I want to ask you I'm going
to do my quickfire with you real quick I hope you hope you're quick on your feet Jameson
because I'm coming fast you ready ready what's your favorite movie of all time primer ooh
nice okay Bitcoin as a political party yes or no absolutely not favorite moment in crypto
I think the most touching moment was when the million dollar fundraiser spur of the
moment for Andreas Antonopoulos occurred a couple years ago that's a great answer by
the way I love that most people are like oh when I hit 10,000 blah blah blah no that's
legit all right best technical mind or maybe your hero in the blockchain space I have to
go with Peter Willie fair favorite personality in the space ooh if we're going for outgoing
personalities I'd probably have to go with Max Kaiser okay cool for a second I thought
you're gonna say roger ver just kidding all right fake Toshi or real Toshi totally fake
Toshi fair I almost said his name but I'd rather not completely agree all right well
great answers I think those were really good questions I'm glad that you were you're quick
to some people are like oh I don't know this person that person you did well there all
right Jameson any last words for us man uh well the the thing that I usually close with
is that the best thing that you can invest in in this space is education oh well I can
appreciate that Galen I appreciate your your time today as well thanks for bringing your
questions in and look Bitcoin radio the crypto verse it belongs to all of us this is where
Bitcoin lives everybody thanks for thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time