Hey, it's Anita and this is the Anita Posh Show. Hello everybody and welcome to the Anita Posh Show, where it is my pleasure to keep you up to date with topics around Bitcoin. This episode is special, because it's number 100. That means almost 100 guests have been my interview partners and we're talking about a lot of topics around Bitcoin. You can go to my website and filter for the names of my interview guests and also after the topics we were talking about. Today's guest is Jameson Lopp. He calls himself a professional cypherpunk and his mission is to use his skills as a technology to empower individuals. Jameson is also the co-founder and CTO of CASA, a company dedicated to helping you to secure your Bitcoin. It is our second interview today. You can listen to our previous interview at Anita.link.35. Our topic is the nicely called clean mining or to say it in a more distinct way, censored mining. Is this an attack on Bitcoin and what are the possible outcomes? 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Then subscribe to Anita's Weekly, my newsletter with articles, videos, quotes, short tips on how to use Bitcoin and all that for free. Subscribe to Anita's Weekly at anita.link slash weekly. Hello James and Lop, thank you very much for joining me today in this second interview of ours. Great to be back. Thank you. Especially great because it's my 100th episode. And also we just heard about Tesla's Bitcoin investment. Exciting times. Exactly. But we don't always have only positive events or topics to discuss. There are also, of course, always dangers in a way to Bitcoin. And that's what we want to discuss today. It's the topic of clean mining, if you put it nicely. And if we say it more in a distinct way, it's censored mining. Two of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in North America joined forces to create the digital currency miners of North America, its trade group, a North American mining pool, the first one ever with a legal entity. And basically they want to do clean mining, which means they only want to use or mine transactions that are not on the blacklist by the OFAC, which is the US Government Office of Foreign Assets Control. What do we think about that? Does it need this? Do we really need this when we think about the fact that only 0.33% of all Bitcoin transactions are illicit transactions? What do you think? It is not a step in a direction that I like to see, but if we consider it from the perspective of the way that the network and the protocol works, miners have the freedom to choose which transactions they put into the blocks that they create. So from a voluntary perspective, this is perfectly fine and allowable. Any miner is free not to choose to add a transaction for any reason that they want to. And hopefully this remains a small portion of hash power that is doing this and they're probably doing it because they want to protect themselves from certain legal edge cases. And also I believe the OFAC list is very small. So this is another thing that could change over time if that regulatory entity starts adding tons and tons of Bitcoin addresses, then of course this becomes a bigger and a bigger problem. Or if more mining pools start adding their own types of blacklists and censorship, this becomes a problem. So at the moment, I don't think it's too much to worry about, but you will hear I believe the term slippery slope quite often in discussions about this type of issue. Where do you think does the urge come to exceed regulations? Because it's not even a legal thing that you have to do it at the moment. It's risk management, right? So as you noted, they created an actual company and a legal entity. And now when you create a company, you as an operator of that company, especially if you take on outside investment, you enter into this fiduciary duty to your shareholders to protect their investment and to do whatever is the best for the return on their investment. So that's mainly what it comes down to I believe is risk management and not wanting to expose themselves to potential regulatory pressure. And on the other hand, we have a lot of people who think to themselves, it's okay for me, I've got nothing to hide and it's good that they censor transactions. But this all comes with a high risk of losing completely or privacy or the rest that we still have. It's I think only a matter of time before you start to see second order effects and sort of ripple effects of other people that might get mixed up in issues like this where we've already seen, for example, a number of Bitcoin users have their exchange accounts shut down because they at some point, a few hops before or a few hops after they had a deposit or a withdrawal with an exchange, they used Bitcoin mixing software to help make their funds more private. And there are some exchanges who consider that to be a high risk activity and will shut down your account without really much notice or giving you any way to defend yourself. And once again, I believe that is an example of a company that is just trying to be risk averse and therefore being proactive and potentially causing harm to their users because they don't want themselves to be harmed. Do you know a lot of entities or people who are miners themselves and what do they say about these developments? Are they going to join the one or the other side? I wouldn't say that I know too many miners or at least people that are currently actively mining and the ones that I don't talk to that often. So I haven't heard any large existing miners, like for example, Bitfury or I know Wayne Chun at F2Pool. I haven't even seen them really talk about this very much. So I believe most likely they see it in a similar fashion of that other miner is free to do what they want, but I'm going to do what I want and what I consider to be best for my business. I also think it's interesting from a geopolitical side, basically everything that is developed in this space seems to come out of the US, so also all the regulations. And we here in Europe very often have then suddenly 10 years afterwards, the same regulations as in the US. How is this going to play out? Not all the countries will adapt US regulations. I hope not, and this is I believe one of Bitcoin's most powerful things that it has going for it is the fact that it's a global network, it has supporters and infrastructure all over the world, and most importantly, in different countries that are not on friendly diplomatic relations with each other. And so that is what allows you to use essentially jurisdictional arbitrage to play these countries against each other. So if one country isn't allowing something and that's bad for Bitcoin, then you just go operate in a different country that doesn't care about that. And so hopefully this creates essentially a type of political or regulatory deadlock where we can be somewhat assured that we're not going to see a coalition of every first world nation, every powerful country coming together and agreeing to coordinate an attack of some sort on Bitcoin. Yeah, that's why it's good that there is a lot of decentralization. And from that point of view, one could also argue maybe it's not such a bad thing that there is a minor centralization in China at the moment. I don't know. Yeah, and it's not great to have too much in any one country. And I've written some lengthy articles about why I believe that the hash rate will continue to decentralize throughout the world, mainly because energy is not centralized. Energy is spread all over the world, there's all types of different energy. And the incentives that miners have are to continue to hunt down the absolute cheapest, most plentiful sources of energy. So I believe that naturally over time, we're going to see things continue to spread out. Have you heard about Bitcoin mining in Pakistan? Was that the one where they were saying it took down the electrical grid? No, I don't know. I made an interview with Farooq Ahmed from the Bitcoin Association Pakistan two weeks ago. And he was telling me, and it also was in the news, I think that a region of Pakistan, its short name is PK, is starting to do Bitcoin mining because they also have hydro power. And which I think is a great thing. A funny thing is on the other hand, Bitcoin is banned in Pakistan. So we will see how this goes forward. I think that we also saw some nationalization or at least seizure and operation of equipment in Venezuela a year or so ago, where I believe it was basically like military came in, took a bunch of equipment and then started using it to mine Bitcoin for the state. Exactly. Which is on the one hand outrageous because they seized the miners from people, individuals. But on the other hand, it's funny to see that Venezuelan authorities also see that Bitcoin might give them at least money they can use and that doesn't depreciate so much. So let's go back a little bit to explain to our listeners what Bitcoin mining basically is, who the actors in this mining game in a way are, and what the clean mining actually is and how they would be able to censor transactions. Mining is both a highly technical thing at the protocol level of how it works and how it allows us to provably secure the network with a known quantity of energy expenditure. But it's also from an infrastructure and operations perspective, it's just dead simple in that what you're really doing is you're setting up a bunch of specialized equipment that consumes a large amount of electricity. And this is all done with the goal of doing one thing, which is finding a hash for the next block. And so what is a hash? It's just a fingerprint. It is a couple dozen characters that essentially fingerprints all of the data that's inside of the next block, which is all the transactions and timestamps and everything that is related to that. And the reason why it's so difficult to find this hash is that at a cryptographic level, it is a one-way type of function. You basically, you have to try billions if not trillions of different combinations of modifying pieces of the data that are going into this hash function before you can get a hash that actually has the number of leading zeros that is required by the network. And the number of leading zeros is just what says, we know it was this hard to find this hash that you had to try this approximately this many times of different inputs. And you can work backwards from that to make some estimates about how much electricity is actually being consumed. And why do we go to all of this trouble? It's basically to make it very expensive to rewrite the history of the Bitcoin blockchain. If we have a simple cryptographic function, which is basically just math, and from that we can say, we know that this many joules of energy have to be expended in order to create a block hash at this particular difficulty, then we know that if you want to rewrite the past six blocks of history or the past hundred blocks of history, it's going to take that many more multiples of energy and therefore money to do it because electricity is not free and the infrastructure to set up these mining operations requires a lot of capital. And so it's really just about incentives and you make it expensive to rewrite history, but you also you pay and you reward the miners for doing this job to secure the network. So the result of that very simple operation over the past decade with the Bitcoin price continuing to go up means that we have seen a very large industry that has grown up around this very simple and yet complicated operation of finding these hashes. So I believe at this point in time and really for a number of years, it has been at the level that you basically have to be a large capitalized company in order to get into the space because you need to be doing these operations at a very large scale because what you're looking for is every bit of efficiency that you can get because the cheaper you can do these operations, the greater your profit margins. Really unlikely for anyone to be able to get into this without millions of dollars worth of initial investment. And even then you have to have connections because there's just not enough specialized hardware to go around, especially with the exchange rate continuing to go up. There's probably only about half a dozen, if that, manufacturers of the mining hardware and they tend to be sold out for 6, 9, 12 months in advance. So it's a big game these days and the major downside I think to that is that the level of capital requirements mean that there's not as many entities that are doing this. I, as a technologist, as someone who likes to see Bitcoin as decentralized as possible, I would prefer if an individual could buy something for $100 that they plug in at their house and have it be a part of the mining network. But unfortunately, we have grown past that point. And can you please explain who the different entities are? You have the people who really operate the mining rigs at power stations or something like that. And as you said, the hardware producers and then mining pools. How does this, how is this connected with each other? Yeah, they're all different parts of a sub industry of Bitcoin. So the real initial producers are the companies that are manufacturing the silicon chips that do nothing other than this one particular hash function, the SHA-256 hash function. And they're creating silicon chips that can do that at a level of efficiency that's millions and millions of times more efficient than the processor in your computer. And the reason for that is that you want whatever electricity you send into that chip to be maximized and used nearly 100% to only do that one thing. So these manufacturers then get large orders from the actual miners. These are the people who are going around seeking out these sources of cheap energy. And they can get very creative. We see a lot of them set up very close to hydroelectric facilities because those tend to have 24, 7, 365 energy coming through them and the demand is rarely as high as the supply. So there's usually a lot of excess energy. And excess energy is cheap energy because it's use it or lose it. Either somebody is going to be sucking up that energy using it for something or it's just going to get thrown away. And there are some other novel things that we've seen, everything from people setting up rigs at oil fields to specifically consume the excess natural gas because in many cases that is simply burned off because they don't have the ability or a pipeline to send that natural gas somewhere for refinement and processing. So instead of simply burning it off and filling the air with carbon dioxide, we can instead actually consume it and get a fairly cheap source of energy for Bitcoin mining. We've even seen stuff like I believe some geothermal plants up close near the Arctic area and one particularly novel thing that I've seen in North Carolina in the United States is a facility that had been operating for a while as a used tire recycling facility, which essentially it would burn up all of these used tires and break them down into their constituent elements and then sell off those elements, recycle them. And it turns out that burning of those tires also produces a lot of energy and electricity. And this particular plant was originally selling its electricity back to the local utility company and they realized if we just install a bunch of Bitcoin miners, we can get 10 times as much money for the same thing that we're already doing right now. So that's what you're really seeing is sources of electricity that are either stranded or having to be sold back for very cheap that are just essentially being re-monetized for the Bitcoin network. So that's why a lot of the FUD around Bitcoin boiling the oceans is not quite right because the incentive is actually pointing these miners to use excess energy, which in many cases is renewable, cheap, clean energy. So then finally, there's the mining pools and you can just think of them as coordinators. They're just running some software and some infrastructure where the miners themselves will point their machines at the pool and get work to essentially do that hashing, that brute forcing on. And as they are getting that work and sending back the results, they then get paid out in Bitcoin proportional to how much work that they've done. And we'll probably talk about it a bit more. This creates some interesting dynamics with regard to power and censorship and all that. And up until today, those mining pools are basically informal. They are not companies in that sense. I think so. A number of these pools started off very early on as just one or two people and they were just doing it for fun. And the ones that have survived over the long run, I think have become bigger businesses, especially slush pool is I believe the original mining pool that was first created in late 2010. And they've gone through a number of different iterations. But mining pools also come and go because the switching costs are very low. If the mining pool starts doing something that is either unprofitable or less profitable for the miners, or it's just doing something that the miners disagree with, then it really only takes a matter of minutes or hours, depending upon the miner setup, to update their configuration to point their machines at a different pool. It's a very simple software update. So that switching cost is very low and miners are incentivized to be good to their customers. And miners basically only need electricity and the internet and the computer. Pretty much. It turns into essentially almost like a plumbing type of operation is that if you are running large mining infrastructure, then most of what you're doing is actually very operational, where you are monitoring everything about your mining setup, temperature, airflow. You might have one or two chips out of the 100 chips on a given machine start to fail and you need to get in there and repair things. So it's a 24-7 type of operation where you need to make sure every moving part of this operation is running smoothly because any single thing that is not working is losing you money. And it can be done very remotely in remote areas too, which is the great thing. So when we have the mining pools and the miners, they don't have to be in the same area and also not in the same country. Right though, there is an incentive that you need to have a low latency internet connection between you and by low latency, we mean the fewer number of milliseconds that it takes for your mining hardware to talk to the mining pool, the more profitable it will be because even a matter of milliseconds slowness can result in you losing money because you might lose what is called a block propagation race if you solve a block, but it does not get out onto the network faster than one of your competitors who might solve a block at the same time. And now a short break for the fact of the week sponsored by LocalBitcoins. Bitcoin is known as a digital cryptocurrency operating on the internet. But did you know that if the internet or electricity was to shut down temporarily, Bitcoin would still continue to exist? Bitcoin are digits that will always continue to exist as long as the numbers 2, 4 or 6 continue to exist. When the network will function again after a possible shutdown, and if the keys to Bitcoin wallets are secured, the Bitcoin network will continue its operation as normal. In theory then, Bitcoin can even be mined with a pen and a paper and sent with the help of a carrier pigeon. The Bitcoin blockchain has even been broadcast through a satellite without internet, and a Bitcoin transaction has been sent through radio waves. Thanks to LocalBitcoins for this fact of the week. Do you know of miners who are using the Blockstream satellites to receive the blocks? No, not offhand and I'm not really sure. I would expect that the Blockstream satellite is probably much higher latency than either using the Bitcoin network or until a year ago, there was actually a high speed, super low latency network, I believe it was called the fiber network that Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo came up with. Though it sounds like it actually got decommissioned last year and we've actually seen, I believe the number of orphaned blocks on the network has gone up a bit since then because there are more of these block races happening now. Interesting. Okay, now we have the individual miners who operate the mining, the rigs and all this stuff, and then we have the mining pools. So where does this clean mining now happen? So at one hand, we have Bitcoin addresses that are blacklisted by the OFAC. How much sense does this make when we know that everybody can have hundreds and thousands of Bitcoin addresses? Yeah, so it's definitely a silly start because I think there's only maybe a dozen or so Bitcoin addresses on that list last I checked. But on the other hand, there's nothing preventing them from adding thousands or hundreds of thousands of addresses other than hopefully bureaucracy that makes it difficult for them to do. But I'm not really sure what's required to get onto that list in the first place or how difficult it is. It could certainly become onerous if OFAC put out a block list that had just huge number of addresses on it. That is going to slow certain things down from a technical perspective if the mining pool has to load up a ton of data into their operations to essentially filter these things out and it's definitely doable. But I think the bigger question is what is going to be the relationship and the interplay between some of these analysis companies and these government entities. That's what I would be afraid of would be the next step, where I'm sure that OFAC themselves does not have the capability to do a sophisticated analysis of the blockchain of the network. But they're most likely going to be hiring some of these companies to plug into their software to do this analysis. And that's where I could see it very easily exploding in complexity and length of the blacklist if they just create some sort of integration that then starts to fan out across all of the addresses that have ever touched anything related to something that they'd not cleaned. At the moment or in general as it is now, the mining pools basically select the transaction for the next block where they can earn the most. You can set a transaction fee and the higher you set it, the earlier you probably will get your transaction verified. So that would turn that, wouldn't it? So this is where we can be somewhat hopeful that the game theory of the network will continue to play out with regard to censorship resistance. Is that even if one or two or even if a majority of pools were censoring transactions related to certain addresses, then theoretically if you find yourself on the receiving end of the censorship, then you should be able to simply pay a higher fee and you could call it a bribe, but you're essentially, you're offering more money, you're economically incentivizing other miners not to censor you because you're willing to pay more to get your transaction confirmed. So it would get more expensive if you have a transaction that might be otherwise be censored? I would say more expensive if you want to retain the same priority in confirmation time. Otherwise you could spend the same level of fees, but you would have to be more patient because you would have to wait for a non-censoring mining pool to include your transaction. And there is this issue of who gets to decide what transaction goes into the block and historically it has always been the mining pool. Though I believe Slushpool has implemented this new technology, which coincidentally also spearheaded by Matt Corallo, originally known as BetterHash, but now incorporated into the Stratum version 2 mining protocol. It essentially transfers the power to decide which transactions go into a block away from the centralized mining pool and to each individual miner themselves. So that's another way of improving the censorship resistance of this network is that if the mining pool is not the one controlling those things, then I think it's a lot harder for them to become a target, a point of failure by regulatory authorities. I wonder what does this clean mining make sense, which sense does it have because otherwise I can use PayPal or the traditional banking system too if I want to have a clean transaction. I think that probably the majority of cases where people are transacting in Bitcoin, they would not be at much risk of being censored if they used some other network. There are some people who believe that over the long run, this will result in Bitcoin becoming more of a black market type of money because the people who don't need censorship resistance won't be as incentivized to pay for it. We do believe that Bitcoin will probably get more expensive, at least on chain, to make payments. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out here. Hopefully Lightning Network also continues to mature and that will provide both censorship resistance and low transaction fees and it has been maturing for the past few years. That would be my next question. If we pay with Lightning, how does this then come into play? They can't censor Lightning payment basically on the blockchain, can they? Lightning payments get routed through potentially a variety of different Lightning nodes, but even then, any given Lightning node could choose not to forward your payment. But the tricky thing is that due to the, it's called onion-wrapped nature of the routing that happens on the Lightning network, when your payment goes to a certain node to get forward on to another one, that node only knows the next node that it's going to. It doesn't necessarily know the final destination. So even if a lot of Lightning network nodes blacklisted other nodes on the network, they would only be able to blacklist it if it was the next hop. They wouldn't even know that your final destination might be a blacklisted node unless they were the second to last hop. So if that happened though, you just keep trying. It is a network that was designed for you to be able to route around censorship. If you try to make a payment through a certain number of nodes and it doesn't go through, then you just try a different path, try a different path until hopefully eventually you find one. That's the way the internet itself works with routing. I think there are other technical improvements or developments that could prevent basically clean mining from happening. I think coinjoin are a part of that, coinjoins. That could get complicated, especially I think if people started doing coinjoins with like OFAC blacklisted addresses, that would probably create more of a ripple effect. Kind of what I mentioned earlier with the exchanges and exchanges blocking coinjoins is it would, I think it would sweep up a lot more people into this type of censorship. So the problem with this type of stuff in general and especially the anti-privacy stance of some services with regard to coinjoin and even the idea of quote unquote taint on the Bitcoin network of having tainted addresses that are then blacklisted. It's only a problem when it's a small percentage of the network and the activity and whatever. There's an idea that if we got the majority of people to be using these technologies and if we pushed it so far that the majority of Bitcoin addresses were considered tainted, then what are they going to do? These exchanges and other businesses would have a choice. Either we stop making much money because we're blocking almost everything or we just throw up our hands and say that's it, we give up, we can't continue operating like this so we just have to ignore it. So I would definitely love to see a Bitcoin network where every transaction is a massive coinjoin with a ton of other addresses and there are other technical improvements coming down the line in Bitcoin that will make that cheaper and more feasible. So hopefully, some years from now, we will start to see that. But I'm pessimistic that will happen because I'm sure that it's going to require effort for people to do and unfortunately, in my past decade of experience in privacy and security, my general learning is that very few people are going to be willing to put in any effort whatsoever to even slightly improve their privacy or security. So unless these technologies become the default standard by a lot of wallets, then I would be surprised if we did get to that massive adoption any time soon. And what are the worst case scenarios? So we think that it could happen that we have a soft fork or a hard fork like on the one hand side, you have clean transactions and on the other hand, you have privacy secured transactions. That is a potential interesting point of conflict where for a number of years after the scaling debate, which was one of the most contentious issues in Bitcoin history, a number of us have believed that the next big contentious issue is going to be privacy. And I certainly hope that we can avoid some sort of forking situation. I hope we can avoid it coming to that. It doesn't feel like we're getting towards that and in fact, with people working on activating Taproot, which is going to come with Schnorr signatures, which is going to be one of those privacy enabling technologies that I mentioned, it doesn't sound like there's much contention or opposition to it at this point. So I am optimistic that at least for the medium term, we'll be able to avoid that, probably come down to the question of what the governments and the agencies are going to do and how well some of them get lobbied or educated or whatnot because they can certainly try to crack down on stuff like this and they can make it very difficult. I certainly don't believe that they could shut down the network in any meaningful way, but they can definitely pressure any of the legal entities that are operating within their jurisdiction and cause some pretty big inconveniences for us. And then we have to hope for the geopolitical game theory to play out in a way. Any other implications that this might have or thoughts about this situation from your side that we haven't mentioned yet? In the discussion I saw between you, Chako Musuko and Jimmy Song at La Bitconf, you also were talking about like hiding the fact that you are mining. So miners can be used or hidden people could say, oh, this is a heater basically. It's not a mining rig. Are these also? Yeah. That kind of gets back to I guess what I said early on is I would really like to see more individual miners so that we can further decentralize this network. And I think I actually, I wrote a speculative article in 2017 or so about how I would like to see that happen because you could use it to heat your home. You could use a miner and like a water heater. I think the primary problem though, and I've slightly changed my stance on that since we spent a couple of years at CASA building and shipping out node in a box products is that I think any of these type of things, these at home Bitcoin infrastructure projects are still too challenging just from a maintenance standpoint of that. If you're not a network engineer getting people to install things on their home network and hoping that it works is a really risky proposition. We've just ran into so many crazy different setups with people's home networks and personal internet and stuff that I think that's one of the big blockers right now. It's really hard to do a plug and play type of device that doesn't require you to have any technical expertise, but maybe something. Yeah, I can. I agree because I have a Raspberry Blitz and I don't have command line knowledge. So I always need to ask my friends to help me out. So I can do upgrades and stuff like that. But as soon as I run into problems, I need to ask my peers. But I'm fine. Yeah, but it's not for people with no experience at all. That's true. You also mentioned peer to pool, I think. What is this? Yeah, so this was an interesting promising technology that was a centralized mining pool. So you would basically run this peer to pool mining software which would then connect to its own network of nodes that were on the peer to pool network and they would coordinate with each other as to what the latest block was and what the next block we'd be working on would be. And it was a great idea from a censorship resistance and decentralization of power type of perspective. Unfortunately, it fell into disrepair over a number of years and it fell out of use. And the simple reason for that is it goes back to what I mentioned a while ago is network latency is that having this additional decentralized network that the miners were using was adding so much latency to them being able to coordinate on the next block that it became less profitable to use than a centralized mining pool. So there were people who used it out of ideological consideration of wanting more decentralization, but they were doing so not necessarily at a loss, but they were leaving money on the table. They could have been making more money. And so over the years, as mining became more and more industrialized, you won't see any for-profit mining company that is using peer to pool because it would not be a fiduciarily responsible thing for them to do for their investors because they would be lowering the return on the investment. So I'm not sure if we'll ever see a comeback of that. I think it may just be a fundamental network engineering problem that can't be overcome. Okay. What is your general opinion now? Are you rather optimistic or a little bit pessimistic about the future of mining? I'm not too worried about it. The things that I've really liked over the past few years is seeing these more and more novel uses and exploration of clean and renewable energy sources. So I'm definitely optimistic on that standpoint. I'm also optimistic that mining will continue to decentralize around the world. As to the censorship issues, it's not great, but I think that one of the strengths and the resilience of Bitcoin as a network in general is that we're all watching each other. And in fact, there is, I believe, BitMEX is running their own network observer software now that is looking at all of the mining pools and detecting which ones, if any, may be running less profitable algorithms for their transaction inclusion. And the reason that they're doing that is because if you can tell that a mining pool is not optimizing their transactions by including the ones that have the highest fees and would be the most profitable for them, then it's a sign that they may be doing some sort of censorship. So my point being that it will not be difficult for us to realize if other mining pools start to censor transactions. And if they do, we can alert everybody so that if there are miners on that given pool, they may choose to point their hardware at a different pool that will be better for them from an economic standpoint and I believe better from an ideological standpoint. That's just part of the game. We'll see how the game continues to play out. Can I, as an individual, do something? I can't decide which mining pool takes my transaction. Correct. All you can do is put a fee on your transaction. When it comes to mining, either you have a miner and you're contributing some hash power and you can vote on which mining pool you're using by pointing your hash power at that. Otherwise, there's not too much else that you can do. The main power that an individual user has in Bitcoin is to run their own node. But what that is doing is it's enforcing that the Bitcoin that you receive are following the rules of the network that you agree with. The tricky thing about mining is, like we said, miners don't have to include any transactions. The rules of the network say that a block only has to have that Coinbase output that pays to the miner. It doesn't have to have any other transactions other than that. The only reason that they would add other transactions is because they're incentivized to do. Okay. Great. Thank you very much, James. Let's close this now and I'm going to ask you about CASA because I think we forgot at the beginning, you are the co-founder and CTO of CASA and you also got some news. Yes, we did recently close out a funding round, which is nice to have behind us and this will just enable us to continue growing. We've really seen a huge influx in clients, of course, over the past six months as Bitcoin has started a new bull market. More people are looking into it, especially more high net worth individuals looking to get into Bitcoin to diversify their portfolio for the first time. Our goal, our mission, which has been for nearly three years now is just to make it easier for people to be their own bank. We use a variety of different technologies within Bitcoin to do that, to provide a high security experience but also a smooth user experience that doesn't require you to be highly technical in order to feel confident in holding your own private keys. Okay. Basically, I think with your solution, correct me if I'm wrong, you can hold your own keys but you don't have to secure your keys yourself at home or somewhere else. The general setup, it uses multi-signature aspect of the protocol, which means that you are putting your money into addresses that require multiple different keys to sign off on them in order to create a transaction. Then a lot of the security that we help provide from that is that your different keys are going to be held on different specialized devices like treasurers, ledgers, cold card, and then you're going to physically distribute those devices around different locations and that gives you a level of robustness both against different types of attacks and just loss, house fire, flood, any type of natural disaster. It's a very well thought out architecture but it's very easy for you to set up and maintain. Okay. Great. Thank you. Please tell us where people can find you and follow your work. You've got a great website with Bitcoin resources. Yes, I've got about 1,500 links on lop.net, l-o-p-p dot net and you can find plenty of updates from me on a daily basis on Twitter where my handle is just lop. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining me. It was a pleasure to have you and see you. I hope in person someday again. Indeed. Thanks. Thanks so much for joining the Anita Posh Show today to learn more about Bitcoin. You can find the show notes for this conversation on anita.link slash show. If you want to get the best stories in Bitcoin from my point of view in your mailbox, go to anita.link slash weekly and subscribe. And if you have a question or just want to send me some feedback, drop me a line at hello at anitaposh.com. See you next week when it's time for the Anita Posh Show. Next week, start with yes, Delicate Beats, content, idea and production, Anita Posh.