Okay, looks like we're all here. Once again, thanks for joining us, everybody. I'm John
with CASA and I'm pleased to be joined by Jameson Lopp and Ron Stoner, also with CASA
and our special guest, John Stokes. And we're excited to be talking about Bitcoin citadels
today. And this is a good topic at a good time. I mean, Bitcoin is rattling around 36k
right now. And Bitcoin citadels are very much a low time preference activity. And so with
that, we'll start with you, Ron, can you introduce yourself and how you came to be interested
in the Bitcoin citadel space?
Yeah, I've been in the Bitcoin space for a while now. And just like everybody else, I
love the memes. But I think there's a lesson to be learned here when we talk about citadels.
So I'm Ron Stoner. I'm the head of security at CASA. I'm also a security and privacy enthusiast.
I'm a hacker. And that all kind of gravitated me towards the Bitcoin space initially. And
while I haven't constructed my own citadel just yet, I do know that, you know, while
history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme to some extent. So I'm excited
to be here today with our guests to talk about what we can kind of learn from history when
we're constructing our own fortified Bitcoin citadel.
Perfect. And Jameson, if you could introduce yourself.
Sure. I've been a Bitcoin enthusiast for a decade and have spent half of that time working
full time in the space focused on private key management and helping people basically
be their own banks. And the citadel concept is certainly related to all of that, though
it tends to be more of a projection from the digital security to the physical security.
And just to, I think, give people a little bit of history, if you aren't aware the origin
of the Bitcoin citadel term, it actually comes from a rather famous random Reddit post that
was made, I think, back in like 2014 or 2015. It was called the Bitcoin Time Traveler. And
you can easily look up and find this post, but they basically said that, you know, they
had come back in time from the far future in a hyper Bitcoinized world. And they talked
about all of the terrible catastrophic things that happened to people who didn't have any
Bitcoin and how the people who did have Bitcoin ended up surviving and thriving, but essentially
having to defend themselves from all of the folks who were left behind and rapidly depreciating
fiat and all of the outrage and violence that resulted from that. And so the citadel meme
was from this story and the idea that the Bitcoiners essentially had to go into hiding
and construct their own massive fortified citadels to essentially create their own physical
communities that were protected from the rest of the world that was very angry at them for
being able to protect their finances.
Perfect. Thank you. And John, if you could introduce yourself to the group and walk us
through your background a little bit.
Sure. I was having some audio issues, but I think it may have been something on my end.
Can you guys hear me okay now? Sure. Yeah. Okay, great. So I'm John Stokes and I am one
of the I'm an investor and in the prepared.com and was an editor there for a couple of years.
And now I'm a I'm attached to a project in the web three space that I'm not like super
public about yet. But I have kind of gone down the Bitcoin and general kind of web three
rabbit hole. I was a skeptic of Bitcoin and crypto for a long time up until I think probably
early 2018 or something and I kind of flipped because I kind of got it at that point. So
I am a lot later to to the concept than you guys. But at the prepared and in my personal
life, you know, I've been doing a fair amount of thinking about and a little bit of writing
about crypto and kind of, you know, digital sovereignty and sovereign tools and, you know,
the role of Bitcoin as like a kind of a safe haven asset. So so that's my that's my kind
of general background.
Thank you. And at this point, we'll open it up to all three of our panelists. But um,
so um, walk me through how you think about a Citadel personally, is that do you think
about upgrading your current home or do you go around scouting out a future location for
this fortress?
Think that probably depends on your current situation. If you're already living in an
area that you feel is fortified and has some of the security controls that you need, you
can probably just enhance that current situation. But if you're in another situation where you
don't have any security or your security is more lax, then you may want to start thinking
about some of these things when you're looking for those locations. And historically, Citadels
were kind of the last fashion for communities and cities and armies under siege, they were
refugees and strongholds. And we've served a lot of different purposes throughout time,
which I think we'll touch on. But this is the stuff we want to think about when we're
looking at those locations. And there's some some things I think we can grab from that
where when we think about Citadels, the one that always jumps to mind is the star, right,
the star pattern. And the reasons for that was to deflect cannonball so that they couldn't
take direct hits. So when we start to learn or learn about that, we can take lessons about
how can we apply that to kind of our own homes, our own fortifications, our own Citadels,
so to speak.
I think as really a recurring theme when we talk about anything, whether it's privacy,
security, the preparation for various edge cases in your life, it can be very overwhelming
for people who are just starting to think about it. But the important thing is to understand
that you can always start small, you know, kind of as the saying goes, you know, how do
you eat an elephant, you do it one bite at a time. So you don't have to go all in and
be an extremist or be one of those, I guess, extreme preppers that you see on the TV shows
or whatever. When we talk about preparing for things, it's because we understand that
there is a high likelihood of certain bad things happening to you over a long period
of time in your life. And some things, of course, are more likely than others. And you just kind
of have to approach it from an insurance perspective. And when we talk about insurance,
of course, we don't mean going and buying an insurance policy because you really shouldn't
be relying upon a third party to pay out in some situation. We're really talking about
creating your own insurance policies where you have either the skills or the physical
resources, or potentially even the social networks and other economic connections that
you have built up over time that you can then rely upon as safety nets to help you through
the tough times. Yeah, I really like the way that James has put that because I myself,
I'm an incrementalist, and I certainly believe that people should do what they can. And I also
approach prepping with a kind of a hedge mindset. It's a hedge on the sort of downfall of
civilization and loss of access to basic services, things like those. But I start with myself,
and I think mostly in terms of options. So, you know, for me, I started small with like a bug out
bag and a single, you know, firearm, which was a double barrel shotgun, I got an old timey one,
because I was in San Francisco. And so I got this like, there's a genre of shooting called
cowboy action shooting, where people use these old west guns. So I got this old western looking
double barrel shotgun, a coach gun, because I thought, well, I'm in San Francisco. And if people
see this, they won't be freaked out because it looks kind of cool and antiquey. But it's also,
of course, it's a 12 gauge. And so it's serious business. And so, you know, just this idea of
I'm going to start small, I'm going to do things that are appropriate to the setting that I'm in.
I mean, you know, I didn't want to create problems for myself in Noe Valley in San Francisco by going
like the full AR 15. And when I did get an AR 15, I bought like a guitar case soft bag to carry it
to the range. So people would think I was going out to guitar practice or something. So I'm always
thinking of small things that I can do incremental things that I can do to increase my optionality
and to increase my resilience, because that's the main thing that you want in an emergency is you
want options. And so I'm always thinking about mobility and about location and about my social
network and who my friends are. And just the whole range of things. And as far as like the
Citadel concept, you know, I'm on like a 17 acre ranchette, like right north of, of Austin. And I
have a lot of resilient type things here. I have a couple of thousand gallon, you know, water tank
that's hooked up to my well. So I have a cache of water. I have backup power. I have a lot of a lot
of things, but I'm not totally off grid. I mean, I could be, you know, I could, I could sustain
off grid for, for a couple of weeks and still have power. And I could certainly sustain a lot
longer than that and still have food. But I also think, you know, what if I do have to leave? And
and one thing that I, that I will say by way of a little bit of, you know, qualification to the
Citadel concept is I certainly like the idea. And I like the idea of digging in and fortifying,
but I also like fear being wedded to a particular location or a particular place longer than is
rational. So, you know, we just bought this past summer, an Airstream. It's a nice travel trailer
and we've done some family trips in it, but it's also a bug out vehicle. And so I want to have that
as an option. And I certainly would not want to stay here on this property longer than I could
I could reasonably defend it or longer than was reasonable, simply because this is where my giant
stash of stuff is. So I put that out there because, you know, I think people should should keep an
open mind about mobility. One of the key things in a disaster is, is knowing when to move and when
to stay put. And this this is true for every kind of emergency from, you know, avalanches and being
lost in the wilderness to, you know, something like, you know, Kosovo. So the difference between
who lives and who dies is often that is also often that that sense of, of when I should stay put and
when I should be mobile. And so I'm always kind of have that top of mind. Yeah, I like, you know,
I said insurance, you said optionality. When I as a computer scientist, you know, I try to generally
think of things very logically as like decision trees almost, and kind of trying to tie this all
in to what we really started off with, we're talking about starting small, I think another way
to frame it is start off by preparing to, you know, be able to sustain yourself for a couple of weeks,
which I think is is the kind of the federal guidelines from FEMA, they basically say, you
know, every citizen should be able to sustain themselves for several weeks without any aid,
because, you know, you never know what type of hurricane, earthquake or other fairly common
natural disaster could happen that will completely wipe out all of the public services. So that's
something that is basically like the minimum, I think that anyone should be able to do. And it's
not really asking a lot for you to have that small of a stockpile. But then, as you spend more time
thinking about this, as you continue to increase your preps, what you're really doing is you're
pushing out the timeframe of how much longer you can sustain yourself and your family. And as you're
pushing out that timeframe, you're also pushing out kind of the, you know, the number of variables
and the number of different decisions that you might have to make. So once you get into the,
you know, months or years timeframe, you know, the just from the sheer amount of time and sheer
amount of other variables and other people and things that may be happening in your environment
based upon whatever the primary problem is that you're facing, you know, you can easily
end up with orders of magnitude, greater complexity and potential things that you have to prepare for,
which is why it can seem, I think, very overwhelming for people who are looking at it from
that really high level. Jameson and John also touched on something that I don't think most
people are thinking about. And they said social networks when they were mentioning options and
some things to consider. And with the Citadel, it was essentially a city within a city. So
it was either for the community or for the military under siege during wartime. So when
we're in these apocalyptic scenarios, or when Bitcoin, this is the dominant premier currency,
and we're all transacting in it, we've all got our independent sovereign Citadels, we still need to
kind of think about the community aspect as well as who we're associating with and what resources
we have available. There's some security trade offs to that, you know, being the lone wolf,
bunkered in the mountain with a lot of resources is great for survival aspect. But at some point,
we do need to start making connections and communication and rebuilding, right and relying
on each other. So my skill set in electronics, troubleshooting and soldering could be traded
for farming skill sets. And there's trade offs there where, you know, we've seen the walking
dead with Alexandria, and there's internal strife and attackers, you have to worry about some of
that there's a security trade off. But when we're looking for our Citadel, or constructing our
Citadel, we should be starting small and crewing our own skills and resources. But also thinking
about who else is going to be in our community? Who else are we going to rely on? What are going
to be the qualifiers for all of that, if we are in a disaster or an apocalyptic scenario?
Okay. So imagine for a minute that we wake up tomorrow and the apocalypse
has happened again. It's March 2020 on steroids. What is the very first thing that you should do?
So I think the first thing I'm going to do is get my bug out bag and start to take a very quick
inventory of what I have in my immediate vicinity. I'm going to look for USB battery packs,
old Android phones are great for bug out bags and for situations because you can
flash them with custom firmwares, you can have communication apps on there.
And I'm going to look for my basic necessities for things like first aid, food, water, fire,
and communications.
Yeah, likewise. I mean, I have, I have bug out bags that are packed for the family,
and they're always ready. And I have gone to the expense of, of having fully kitted out. No,
I say go on to the expense. We got a lot of stuff at the prepared that we reviewed. And I will say
if you guys haven't checked out the prepared.com, I'm not just saying this to show the site, but
we did not recommend anything on the site that we would not want to use. And so, you know,
I'm fortunate that I went through a lot of gear and tested a lot of gear. And I was able to retain
a lot of that stuff to populate the bug out bags. But one of the key factors with the bag bags that
I have for my family is that they're always packed and they're always ready to grab and go. I'm not
dipping into them. So like if I have an item in a bug out bag that I want to use in my day to day
life, you know, like maybe a pair of pliers or a letterman tool or something, I just, I get another
one. And I leave, you know, one in the bag. And then I have one that I use for my daily life,
which also fits with the rule of two is one and one is not. So, so I would grab my bags,
which are which are in order and squared away. And I would make sure that I have that and then
and then I would start to assemble my food and kind of make sure that that is ready and staged
so that I can bail if I want to, because that's what I'm going to be thinking about is, am I going
to be moving or am I going to be staying? And if I'm going to move, I don't want the food
to be upstairs. I want it to be near the door. So I would start to make arrangements basically
to get out of Dodge without actually getting out while waiting to assess.
And I guess along those same lines, it seems to me like whenever I just want to browse and
put a little bit of time into trying to get a new kit for a specific situation, it seems to me like
there's a lot of stuff out there that's just low quality crap that has been marketed and has the
SEO and everything where you're searching for a fast solution that has quote unquote everything
you need. But they're probably just giving you a lot of junk and stuff that may actually end up
failing if your life actually depends on it. So I guess would you say it's fair to say that
we need some better, more reliable sources of information like they're prepared to be sure
that we're not getting ripped off? Yeah, absolutely. We bought and evaluated a
number of these pre-made kits and they were not good. And what we ended up with was just
stuff that we made ourselves. And so, you know, myself, Tom Rader, who was at thefirearmblog.com,
John Ramey, who was the founder of the prepared. We are all preparedness geeks. And part of what
this was for us was an exercise in coming together and building our own kits out and trying to
understand what was the best and what we wanted. So like Tom is a former Navy medic. And so he's
also, he does wilderness medicine and, you know, austere medicine, stuff like this. He trains
wildland firefighters. And so I didn't get any first aid stuff until Tom was done with the first
aid kit guide. Similarly, I am a knife nerd. And so it wasn't until I got a bunch of knives and I
tested them or a bunch of sharpening equipment and I tried it all out and I evaluated it that the
other guys, I could tell them, hey, this is what you want to go and get. And so it was sort of like
a group project to evaluate different types of gear, like tarps. You know, I tested different
tarps. I tested, I load tested paracord. I abrasion tested paracord. I, you know, bought all the
different brands off Amazon and tried it. And yeah, it's a hard thing to find an outlet or,
you know, a thing that you can trust, but you also, you want to take the time and select
things that are quality and not by a pre-made kit. I mean, there's really not a pre-made kit
that I can recommend for anyone. So. Okay. And so kind of moving a little bit further down this
scenario to where maybe the, this has moved beyond the first couple of weeks that you should be
reasonably prepared for. What, how does your, how does your mindset shift? What considerations
do you have now once you get past those two weeks? For me, I think I'm starting to think about
longer term sustainability. What are my power sources? What systems do I have that are relying
on other systems, whether it's irrigation and dirty water and the gray water types of filtration.
So I'm starting to think about that longer term and to John's point, kind of figuring out like,
am I going to be staying here for another period of time or are we going to have to move based off
of our resources? And that's really going to be dependent on food and environmental conditions.
We use things in bug out bags, like hand crank radios and solar chargers. And I'm actually very
interested to see some of John's reviews on that stuff. Cause I probably need to update some of my
own equipment. But when we get to that point, we need to start thinking about power and generation
and how are we going to start to rebuild society and survive long-term without just having to rely
on like caveman tools and technology. Yeah. I personally, in the long-term,
I am always thinking about food, you know, top of mind. I mean, I'm, I have three kids and anybody
that has kids knows that you just spend a lot of time buying groceries so that, you know,
they can turn groceries into trash that you then take out. So, so the calorie needs are immense.
And, you know, we have like a substantial stash here, but that is finite. And I myself am not
like a big, you know, agrarian type of person. And in fact, we have a staffer at the prepared
Josh centers who grows a lot of his own stuff. And like, you know, most people that get into small
farming, you realize just how big of a task it is. There is, there's basically a reason. Like if you
think about efficient markets and you think about how people leave villages, farming villages in
rural China and cram into sweatshops where they are worked, you know, 80 hours a week, and they
somehow find that preferable to going back to the farm. There's a reason that the market is
structured that way because farming is really hard and really risky. It's really, really difficult
and takes a lot of specialized knowledge. If you're going to get enough calories to feed any number
of people. So, so that that's a thing that I think many people dramatically overestimate how, how tough
it's going to be to just spin up a quick farm out of some seeds and start eating. You know, the other
thing is, is of course hunting and wildlife. I did the math at one point, and I figured out like, I
got stats on how many squirrels per acre there were in Austin, and, and how many calories are in a
squirrel. And like how many squirrels that I alone would have to kill every day if I was going to
eat squirrels in the apocalypse. And it was just like some preposterous number of squirrels. And
of course, that would be just me doing it, you know, much less like the whole neighborhood. You
know, similar like with deer, I mean, there are a lot of deer around, but those are very lean animal
and you need, you know, more fat. So if you plan to just shoot deer or rabbits or hog, even hogs or
whatever, those food sources will be, will be gone quickly in a bad situation. So, so I'm always
thinking about food and where I can get it, and where I can like sync up. I mean, of course, I'm
totally willing to farm, but I don't have, you know, the equipment or the specialized knowledge.
And to that end, I am also thinking about comms. You know, I want to get more into ham radio, I
have like the standard prepper, like bow thing, you know, ham things that I barely know how to use.
But I'm always trying to think about comms and about gathering intel and trying to understand,
you know, where food is and where people are. And is there something going on somewhere else
that could be a better setup than where I am.
To your point, if you have the farm and you have to abandon your location, you can't take the farm
with you, right? So you put in all that time and energy and waiting for the return to the farm.
For the return that you may not end up ever seeing. And then the other thing with food
stores is John's right, you need to have enough food if you're bunkering down in your location.
But if you need to be mobile, you also have to move all of that food. And there's weight
considerations and some logistics around that as well. So as he's saying, you do need to start
thinking about how are you going to hunt and how are you going to eat on the move because
you may not have your 100 pounds of food stores for three months, right?
I think it is a lot harder, of course, to be a nomad than it is to be, you know, someone who's
set in place and has a much larger set of resources available to you. And this is
another issue, I guess, that I've kind of run into because a lot of the stuff John's saying is
really hitting home where, you know, I have the same ham radio and I have seed vaults and all
this other stuff. But to be quite honest, I have not invested the time on the educational side
to really understand how to make use of all of these resources. Really, the kind of quick and
dirty thing that I've done is that I bought a bunch of books that I figure if I really need to,
and if for some reason the internet and other educational resources aren't available, I at
least have a sort of minimum viable library of survival knowledge that I know will still be here
at least as long as my library is still intact and that, you know, hopefully if I got into a
situation, I would at least have enough time to read through the materials on hand and bring
myself up to speed. Okay. Oh, John, sorry, did you have something? Yeah, I was just going to follow
up on that and what Jameson said and say, you know, this obviously, you quickly sort of understand
why survival is a group effort. And again, the importance of a network. I mean, I personally,
of the opinion, I have told this to interviewers that have interviewed me about preparedness. I'm
like, man, you know, I cultivate a network of in my personal life of people who are successful
and who know how to navigate uncertainty. And a lot of preppers have a kind of mindset where
they're like, well, you know, I'm not really winning right now. But when the apocalypse happens,
I'm going to have all this stuff and then I will win. And my feeling about that is that if you
can't win with the wind at your back, the wind of civilization at your back, then when everything
gets about a thousand times harder, you're not going to magically start winning. So when I think
about who I want to see in my driveway, if the shit hits the fan, it's not the guy that has all
the gear. It's the guy that or the the gal or the family where these people I know that they know
how to solve problems. I know that now they know how to think on their feet. I know that they can
learn quickly and acquire new skills quickly, and that they can get up to speed and that they are
able to work and coordinate and those kinds of problem solving skills and social skills. And
that's that kind of stuff is is more valuable to me than gear, because because my assumption,
first off, I'm in a weird situation in which I have a lot of gear. But, you know, there's gear
everywhere. You can't eat gear. And I certainly imagine that like in a really bad scenario, there
will be a lot of gear laying around, you know, that we will be able to make use of. That doesn't
mean that I want slack on having my own stash. But it's just it's, you know, we kind of have a
super abundance of stuff and of gear that we can make do with. But the real scarcity is going to
be food and people that can figure out how to get it and how to make it and how to process it.
And for me, that could come certainly from my network, whether or not they know how to do it
right now. I too have, you know, kind of a mini library of this kind of stuff. And I have friends
that, you know, we can figure out how to do all kinds of things together. And I think that probably
a certain amount of farming is among them. So at least I hope maybe that's maybe that's a fantasy.
Good deal. So something that we haven't quite touched on yet is something that Bitcoiners
think about a lot, where some people some Bitcoiners think about Citadels through an
emergency lens, and some think of it through a more long term hedge against persecution type of
facility. And so if you're setting out to to be anti fragile on almost like a geopolitical sphere,
how would you start down that effort?
Well, I mean, we're almost talking about, I guess, setting up independent nation state kind of, you
know, micro states or whatever, you know, sovereign, see steadying efforts, most of those
have not gone very well so far, though, I think from a least from a geopolitical standpoint,
at least in some of the like, see steadying fiction that I've read, it seems like, you know,
you need to get a minimum viable, diverse population of citizens from many different
countries to try to make it politically unsuitable for any one nation to try to attack you unprovoked.
But I think a viable see steadying effort is probably still a ways away. It seems like even
the cruise ship based efforts have not gone very well so far.
I think these, these independent nation states or Citadels. One thing I like to use as an example
of kind of a modern day one. If you've ever heard of Iron Mountain, they hold the majority of credit
card records and sensitive information and magnetic tape backups. And I like to look at their
kind of structure they're building to a mountain. They've got tons of security, they've got
environmental protection against fire, flood, tornadoes. Nobody's really breaking into there.
And I think the Citadel, the purpose of this was to provide some comfort for the citizens and the
inhabitants. So number one, they wouldn't rebel, they would see that you had these forces and
a show of force. But number two, some of these Citadels had weapons aimed over the city and
towards the city. So if they were invaded, the inhabitants knew that they could retreat and be
protected. So I would want to see those similar concepts, right? It's one thing to talk, but it's
another to walk the walk. And if you can't show me that you're going to have enough security or
take security seriously to control the citizens or the inhabitants of your Citadel, I don't know
that you're going to be successful in the long term. As Jameson said with some of the cruise ships,
even with some of the micronations, I'm a big fan of sea land. But I don't know that sea land would
be considered a Citadel in a sense, because they have been attacked and taken over before. So you
need to think about that kind of on the grander level with the lessons from history on what you
can incorporate. And I think looking at an Iron Mountain, I would want to see some copy and pastes
of that in these individual nation states to give me a sense of security.
I personally, I mean, I do worry about financial repression, like political repression and stuff
like this. And I think the thing to do is to do, you know, what we, many of us in this space are
trying to do, which is to build out a portfolio of sovereign tools that allow you to, you know,
do things like be your own bank or be your own cloud provider or what have you. And just kind
of focus on things like security and privacy, and that such, you know, and not to get to whatever,
but you know, a lot of the I think a lot of the things in the web three space right now,
work against that. Because there's just so much focus on, you know, JPEGs and other kinds of
things. And, you know, I think, you know, I know, I'm not like anti NFT or anything, but
it almost feels like a little bit of an uphill battle to keep people's attention focused on,
on the meat of trying to build a new internet that, that, that is just where ownership is
distributed and decentralized. When everybody is like chasing, you know, or at least, I think,
still, you know, kind of, kind of chasing quick and easy, fast returns. So,
Yeah, I think that's always going to be an issue, right? I mean, with any new wave of technological
adoption, you know, you'll have the, the idealists who perhaps got in a bit earlier, because they had
the rose colored glasses on of saying, you know, we can improve society through this technology.
But then eventually the other folks come in and want to capitalize on it for quick gains. And,
in many cases, the, the earlier adopter idealists may get drowned out. And, you know, in the
you know, in this case, you know, I feel like, you know, the very early adopters of Bitcoin
were generally like the crypto anarchist or ultra libertarian or gold bug folks who were,
you know, they were looking on a much longer timeframe of saying, you know, perhaps this could
topple central banks over many decades or whatever. But then the other use cases came in,
and then other people started creating similar systems for with other functionality. And,
and now, like you said, it is hard to maintain people's attention because
freedom and security and privacy are not really like sexy topics to talk about. It's, it's not,
it's not a cool fad that can keep everybody's attention when you've got so many other
millions of new things coming out every day that are much more exciting to talk about. So the,
but the bones are still there, right? So we still have the infrastructure. And these are
public permissionless systems. So people can build what they want to achieve the goals that they want.
And it can certainly be, I think, a bit demotivating when it feels like the vast
majority of people aren't interested in achieving the same goals as you or if you you may have
different priorities, you know, talking about your privacy or robustness or, you know, sort of
adversarial thinking use cases, which very few people, I think, have that perspective, rather,
they they see what's put in front of them and kind of the happy use case path rather than thinking
about all the terrible things that could go wrong, which is, you know, I think really fits in well
with the topic here, because it seems like talking about preparing for edge cases has really been
stigmatized over the past few years, decades, what have you, you know, even even especially with,
I guess, the the media talking about prepping, you know, it's usually the extreme folks who are
really like bordering on mental illness, because they're allowing it to negatively affect really
many other aspects of their lives, because that's all they ever think about. But, you know,
I think it's important that we do try to make it clear that this is something that is it's healthy
to think about and spend at least a little bit of time preparing, you don't have to, you know,
make your whole life and identity about it. That's a really good point. I think everybody
knows somebody, I have a relative that's a that's a bit of a prepper. And their one big hesitation
with Bitcoin is this type of fraud scenario. And they ask, you know, what happens if the government
turns off the internet? We saw that a little bit in Kazakhstan, I don't remember what the details
were about it. But so if internet access became, you know, kind of dicey, didn't exist at all,
how would you still use Bitcoin? And how would you adapt to that scenario?
I personally love this question. This is something I thought about a lot. And I'm happy to say that
I think we're at a point where it wouldn't matter now. We've got a lot of people that are running
nodes in their homes that have sovereign copies of the chain. We've got satellites already up in
space owned by various companies that are transacting with the protocol. We can use shortwave
radio and SMS and all kinds of medium to transact even if the maybe the transactions per second
isn't as high as it is today. On the current network, we can still adapt the protocol and
having worked in this space, I've encountered a ton of smart people that I know that if you put
this in a room for a week and said, you know, you have no communication, make Bitcoin work,
we could probably come up with some very novel ideas. And especially when your back is against
the wall. And you know, you have to really make it count. There's some really genius moments that
can occur there. So I think knowing the protocol and having all the tech specs and being able to
know how this works and working with it just makes it so that if we have to have to communicate or
adapt the protocol to other mediums, it's not going to be an impossible challenge. Whereas
the first couple of years in Bitcoin's life, I don't think that was as possible.
Yeah, I mean, I'm in the Starlink beta. And my my delivery day just got pushed back. But still,
I expect to have, you know, Starlink here in the next year or two. So so yeah, once that's off,
once all those are going, then it's sort of like, if you have solar, you have internet.
But but for myself, you know, I the way that I model catastrophes and grid down grids down grid
downs are is more like localized pockets of trauma, I'm always assuming that the lights are going to
be on somewhere. Now there are there are, you know, really bad scenarios, World War Three,
or the Carrington event or something like this, where that may not be the case. Although I will
say, from my research, the UK grid has has been hardened up pretty well. Apparently, they're taking
this solar flare stuff quite seriously. And so I always assume that there's going to be power
somewhere and that there's going to be internet somewhere. And so that's part of the reason that
I think about mobility. And for me, Bitcoin is sort of the ultimate, the ultimate bug out, you
know, get out of dodge thing, the fact that I can that can memorize a string of words. And,
and that represents an unlimited amount of money, however much I can store is is amazing. You know,
that's, that's, that's the ultimate inflexibility and optionality and in liquidity. So, so that's
how I think about Bitcoin is a prep, I think about Bitcoin is a prep in a context where I have to
leave Texas or I have to leave the US because things are bad here. But things are still fine
in, you know, Singapore, or India, or South America, or something like this. So, so that's
sort of, you know, my, my kind of larger threat model.
Yeah, I think Bitcoin is a refugee asset or, you know, capital flight, you know, evasion of
capital controls is definitely a pretty strong edge case that we have heard of people using it,
actually, I think some of the strongest use cases that we've heard that have actually happened are
basically, you know, like, abused women in countries, where, you know, there's very
authoritarian male dominated society. And I've heard a number of stories of Bitcoin enabling
women to essentially, you know, store their own wealth, even when they weren't allowed to do that,
and then eventually be able to get out of that situation. But of course, it could certainly help
you get out of any number of other similar situations. As, as long as you're able to carry
just those few words with you.
Perfect. So, we're getting ready to open up q&a. But before we do, and we'll give some people some
time to request. If you were going to think over Bitcoin citadels and everything we've touched on,
what would your final thoughts be?
Mine would be to practice your prep. So I know a lot of people that check off the box to say I have
a bug out bag, or, you know, I bought a water filtration system, I'm good to go. But I've never
seen them read the manual, you know, rtfm, and understand how to use it, what the different
functions are, how it works, how it works, how it works, how it works, how it works, how it works,
where it could fail, all the things that you know, John's talked about that he's tested with his
crew, they don't practice their prep or practice their bug out. And I think the people that are
running the drill to say, you know, shit has hit the fan, let's go. Let's rehearse this and see
where we're failing and revise the process. You know, you wouldn't run a business that way just
to say everything's good, we're not going to worry about it. We're going to come up with some
policies, procedures, we're going to test it, and then we're going to continue to run it. So,
we're going to test it, and then we're going to continue to revise it and evolve it over time to
adjust the different factors. And I think we've seen that in the world, the state of the world and
the risks that people feel are the most riskiest to them today, are different than they were five
years ago, they're probably different than they were two years ago, due to the pandemic. So I
think you need to constantly be assessing and testing your prep and your plan and your your
citadel layout to look for inefficiencies and weak points and see where it can be revised.
Kind of along a similar vein, as I said at the very beginning, I view a lot of this as
insurance plans, except it's more of a, you know, sovereign do it yourself
insurance. And so I would suggest creating a budget. And really, I think of it as a budget
in terms of like percentage of your time or percentage of your financial or other resources.
So, you know, you don't like I said, you don't want to get carried away, you don't want to turn
into one of those extreme prepper lunatics that they put on TV, because it makes everyone look
crazy and entertaining. But you know, if you want to say, hey, I'm going to take, you know,
1% of my time and and assets or 2% of my time and assets, and devote that into just thinking
about preparing for edge cases that will hopefully never happen. Then I think that's a sane, logical
way of going about, you know, putting yourself in a situation where if the worst does happen,
then you will be better off than the vast majority of other people who put 0% of their
time and resources and you're preparing for it. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, I reiterate
that testing your the point that Ron made that testing your year is key. And you know, I actually
wrote about this at the prepared in a blog post where I went, my oldest daughter and I
went just on our property, we have some woods on the property here. And we just did a one night
camp out with our bug out bags, and we use them to make a fire and that kind of stuff. And
I learned like a lot about what was working with my kids, and what I liked and what I didn't like.
And just from that one small exercise, it was great. I got like a lot of good information. The
other thing I did recently as I started rucking up the road by my house. And so I got my bug out
bag, which is about, I think 40 pounds. And I worked up from 25, then to 40. And then, and then
I got some rug plates and got to 45. But I started rucking. And so I was doing this for like two or
three miles at a time. And I learned, you know, quite a bit about footwear, and fatigue, and you
know, all this kind of stuff. And I certainly changed up like my footwear and my sock
configuration and reset my expectations around them. I mean, I have a I have a set of doomsday
boots that are whites, whites, custom bounty hunters. And those things are bomb proof, but
they're also the pair of them is six pounds. And that is just it doesn't work if I if I'm if I'm
on foot, if I'm in an on foot bug out. And so knowing that in theory was one thing, but then
actually hauling my bug out bag around and trying different shoes on was a game changer for me. And
so it again, you don't have to do like a full fire drill bug out whatever I mean, that's nice, you
should if you can, but even small things like going on a two mile hike with your kit are
spending one night in a local park with your bug out bag. Even that kind of stuff is you're going
to learn so much from doing that you're gonna be like crap, man. I got to do this more. I got to
do more of this. So yeah, that's that's definitely what what everyone who gets into this should be
doing.
Thanks. All right, so we'll open up q&a Pablo, I added you to the stage. Do you have a question
for the panel? Yeah, thanks. You you mentioned that, that you were not very bullish on things
like sea setting. I understand the reservations on that. But what what about things like, like
people are like experimenting in like Honduras with this company called Prospera that pretty much
bought an island with the approval of the government and trying to build a new private city.
And the concept from Balaji of starting cloud cities of like having a network online of the
community line. And then that gives you the leverage of negotiating with other governments
to well, like offer to build them like a little Hong Kong, because you're bringing in the network,
they just give you the land, you sort of like use part of their security to like start a city,
Citadel, really. But I don't know, it's like, what do you guys think on that? I know, I know
it's different from sea setting, which is far fetched. But yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's certainly, I think, worth experimenting with that type of stuff.
This is it's all related, right? Is like, what you're really talking about is, it's not full,
100% autonomy and independence, but it's essentially, you know, negotiating protection
and other services from some more established nation state. I think that's a logical stepping
stone. You know, we certainly don't have any reason to believe that we're going to go, you know,
100% to the like soft full sovereign individual thesis, without any intermediary steps. It's,
I think the, just to be more, a little more clear on my whole perspective on sea setting,
is that really, the, the problem is living at sea is a very harsh environment. And also,
the defensive capabilities at sea are very different than on land, there's, there's nowhere
to hide. And there's just a handful of nation states that have an insane level of weapons
superiority when it comes to naval warfare. So that's, I would say that and just sort of the
resource issues are why a pure sea setting, I think, is a bit trickier. But, you know,
doing something like an island that is, is going to have better level of resources,
I think, definitely makes sense.
I agree with that. I think some of these need to be attempted. Some of them will fail,
and some of them will prosper, we'll see some benefits. But I think they're all learning
experiences to get us to kind of a common goal in the end.
Thanks. Thanks for the comments.
Raymond, I added you to the stage. Do you have a question? Yeah, this is more so for Jameson,
but welcome anybody else's thoughts or inputs. But I wanted to take it back to the very first
point of, you know, the incrementalism versus like looking for your own brand new Citadel,
where it was at the very end of 2019. But in the end of 2019, it was, you know,
the end of 2019. But in the Defense Department bill for like the US government, there's a
last minute amendment that was proposed that basically unsealed all of the ability to create
anonymous LLCs. And Jameson's is directed to you because of your, you know, modest
proposal on privacy. But I actually did think that was a really good idea. And I had like
jotted down, you know, notes for myself, like, should I ever want to do this, that was going
to be some optionality. So I wanted to know if anybody had any input on updates on that amendment
and the implications of that, other than a threat from government within your risk model,
because it's the obvious one. I just didn't know if there was any other things that I'm missing.
I have actually crashed halfway through your question. So I missed most of it. So maybe
someone else should chime in first. I think he was referencing the corporate
Transparency Act on the defense bill and how it de-anonymizes LLCs. And if there's any updates
on better ways to go about that, or is that still doable in the modern world based off of
your findings and your guide you've posted to Jameson? I don't know of any updates myself
from that corporate Transparency Act. Yeah, I think I must have missed that myself as well.
So that's something that I need to look into. Oh, good. New is a shot in the dark. I just
want to toss it out there. Thanks, everybody. So while we're waiting on anybody else to ask
questions, I have a question of my own for more of the intense Citadel preparations.
Something I think about a lot is that, especially as it relates to these larger groups,
is that eventually they end up on the government radar. And there were situations like Waco,
you know, 20 years ago, where it turned into all-out warfare. And so if you were going to
try and make short-term, long-term preparations and you were wary of government action,
what could you do to stay away from that risk and not provoke them?
I think not fanning the flames, as you said, not provoking to begin to make yourself a target
is the first one. And I think a lot of these groups that are targeted are vocal or end up
becoming exposed through insiders joining them, or their agenda takes kind of a different
turn from the original intent. For me, I like using the privacy and security tools that are
available to me. So I always consider that communications are compromised, that Big Brother
is always listening, you know, 1984 kind of mindset. So currently in my daily life, I just
like to use encryption technology, privacy tools, different things to help shield my
communications and not make me as an easily intercepted target in that regard. So I think
if people do that, that'll help. But I think you need to be wary of disinformation and how these
types of campaigns are executed to target these groups and cause internal strife. And a lot of
this is playbooks that have been written by three-letter agencies that are decades old.
Even today, we see, you know, misinformation campaigns on both sides of the fence regarding
potential wars that could be happening. And that's all kind of architected for a reason to promote
agendas. So I think having an understanding and an awareness and an educational understanding of how
how do these groups get disseminated? How do they come in and break them apart by causing internal
strife by causing misinformation? These are all standard playbooks that we can review, and it'll
help us when, you know, they're attempted to be used against us. Thank you. I've got to go ahead,
John. Yeah, I would follow up on that and say that, you know, not just it's important to it's
important to use these tools. It's also important that we evangelize them. And that as many we get
as many people as possible to use them so so that the choice to use them doesn't draw scrutiny,
because it's just a norm. And this is one of the things that that I think about a lot with the
different privacy and security tools that I'm interested in. I'm also, you know, somebody who
was kind of interested as a journalist and technologist in a lot of the like non KYC
Bitcoin stuff that's going on. And, you know, I I am hesitant to really run any substantial amount
of money through such things, because I don't want to draw the eye of saran. But I would love it if
there were such a norm around using these tools that there's just like too many of us doing it to
track. And so I think that evangelizing and promoting these tools, and also, if you're
in technology, if you're a programmer, if you have skills, contributing to make them more user
friendly and to solve some of the last mile problems that these tools have. I think that
that is key because the faster that we create a kind of preference cascade and a set of norms
for people are flipping to secure chat as a norm, and they're flipping to decentralized social
networks as a norm, the the better it's going to be. Because everybody is using these tools, and
everybody is taking privacy and security seriously, or at least a critical mass of people are
totally agree with that. GPG is one of the best pieces of software that's out there for encryption
and communication privacy. But if you ask anybody that's ever onboarded to it or has used it, the
user experience and the user interface just doesn't exist. It's not easy to do. It's very
technical. It's very low level. But in my mind, that's a tool that is if you're used to Bitcoin
and understanding a public private key pair, you can understand how to use GPG. It's not a hard
jump. But the second anybody tries to do it, it's not intuitive. It's not easy to use. And as a
result, it's not adopted. So to John's point, like, I want to see all of this user experience
come up the part where everybody's using GPG and has a GPG key published on a key server, so I can
talk to you encrypted. But unfortunately, because that UI UX component isn't there yet, you know,
the adoption hasn't increased. And that's a shame. That's a great piece of software that I will
evangelize that till the end of my days. I mean, I think the problem is that a lot of the the great
tools that are out there, they are, you know, they are specific software that is like, use this if
you care about privacy and security, and that pretty much automatically buckets it into a very
small subset of the population who cares about that. And it's important for us as technology
for us as technologists, I think to build that into what you might call regular software.
So for example, you know, Ron knows how terrible GPG is because he has to onboard people onto it
every day. But I built some GPG functionality into my own website, for example. So if you use
the web form to contact me on my website, you just click a button and it'll GPG encrypt the message
to my key. And you know, this is something where I was able to spend, you know, five minutes
coding this up. And and thus, you know, abstract away a lot of the complexities that anyone else
would have to do to, you know, set up a GPG compatible email client to be able to encrypt
the information. But that's like, that's the type of thing that we need to do, especially if we're
building software is build software for whatever functionality you want, and then where you can
kind of shoehorn in the privacy and security behind the scenes and just kind of, you know,
trick people into automatically using it by default. That's the only way that I really see
any of this stuff becoming mainstream. Thank you. Sorry, if I get this name wrong,
Uzor, I added you to the stage. Do you have a question?
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for adding me. I just joined this place right now and
I'm listening to the conversation. And yeah, I'm very happy to be here.
I'm listening to you guys. So I just joined right now. So I don't have any questions at the moment.
Okay, so I have another question. So do you does somebody need to
run a node for it to be a proper Bitcoin Citadel?
I don't know if that's necessarily a qualifier. I think it's a good thing to do just as a practice
of habit, if you're thinking of Citadel type of world, because my Ron Citadel at some point may
need to talk to Jameson Citadel for barter for trade, or just for protection, temporary protection.
And it would be great for us to be able to take independent, disparate, sovereign copies of the
chain and come up with some sort of, you know, some sort of, you know, some sort of, you know,
sovereign copies of the chain and compare them to each other. And by running a node, I have that
available, I can grab my Raspberry Pi or my Intel NUC or whatever I'm using it on, or even a USB
drive that has synced chain data, you know, once a night. And to me, if we're going to be reconstructing
society and living in the Citadel world, because of some apocalyptic or disaster scenario, having
my own copy of that chain data, if I'm a true believer in the system, I think is going to be
invaluable. And, you know, you never know, you may be the person that saves Bitcoin, because you had
the 100% non corrupted copy of the chain data. And I don't think that's very plausible. But that's
the idea behind it, right? So to me, I am going to try to take a copy of my node or keep a copy of
that chain data in my Citadel. And that's the purpose of it is to fortify and, you know, protect
those sensitive documents, protect the resources, have a place to wait it out until the sky is clear,
and you can come back out again. Obviously, you need to be running a node in a secure server room,
along with the rest of the security equipment that is constantly monitoring your Citadel and
automating various aspects of it. And definitely need to have an excellent fire suppression system
in there, you know, flood the whole thing with gas to make sure that it goes out immediately.
Justin Bitcoin, I added you to the stage. Do you have a question?
Yeah, sure. Thanks. I actually just stepped in. So I don't know how much you guys have talked about
this already. But I had a question about no KYC Bitcoin. And I think actually, James and I reached
out to you using your website, which has an unbelievable amount of resources on it that
I've used. So while I'm here, I might as well say thank you for putting all that up and for being
responsive to questions that I've had in the past. But, you know, this question is on,
you know, what are some of the benefits of having no KYC Bitcoin? And what are some of the things
to think about, like when you're thinking about specifically who you're protecting or who you're
trying to establish privacy from, whether it be exchanges or all the way up to like nation state
level, you know, people who might be interested in and who has the keys to your to various addresses
that you have? Non KYC Bitcoin is something I've been hearing a lot more about over the past year
or two. And I think people are waking up to the different surveillance tools that are out there,
the chain analysis tools, they see improvements in taproot with security and privacy. And that
gets them asking, you know, what's security and privacy? Let me start to go down the rabbit hole
to see what's being exposed. In my mind, having some non KYC Bitcoin or even extremely old Bitcoin,
if you are a person that holds casacious coins, those coins haven't moved in, you know, quite
some time, they haven't gone through any mixers or tornado cash or any of the things that flag chain
analysis because it didn't exist at the time. And those coins have remained dormant. So there's
actually a premium that some people are willing to pay for older coins that are non tainted is
what they say, or are non KYC coins. And there's a variety of ways I think that you can do that
through different avenues through rewards programs, the lightning network, through just doing,
you know, labor for for fees, and then sending that to a wallet that's not your main wallet.
And that's the other thing I always caution people is it's very hard to keep your Bitcoin
separate. The second you mix inputs or wallets, or you try to consolidate that stuff, it's very
easy to then tie that to an identity, whether that identity, personal information is known or not.
Yeah, so I kind of I think of it is you. First of all, you want to have a decent understanding
of how chain analysis works. But the the short version is that you should assume that an
adversary will be able to look both hops backwards from a payment and hops forward from a payment.
So that that being said, you know, if you're paying someone, do you want them to be able to
see, you know, what pool of funds that came from? And you know, what could go wrong if they do see
what pool of funds that came from? Similarly, if you are getting paid by someone, is it a problem
that they could then monitor those funds and see where they end up going? And so from from that
perspective, I usually I segregate funds, of course, based on if I acquired them through an exchange
or through some other, you know, peer to peer barter method or whatever. And, you know, if
if it is a situation where I think that, for example, if I want to send coins to an exchange
to change them for fiat or something else, because I need something else, and those coins were
involved in anything, whether it be, you know, mixing or some other type of activity that happened
before the coins got there, I would probably avoid wanting to do that happen. So normally,
you know, the funds that I send to a KYC exchange or funds that I originally acquired through KYC
exchange, you know, try to keep things segregated in that fashion. And then kind of going the other
way around, you know, if if I'm perhaps doing something that's like gray market or could
otherwise get flagged by an exchange, if they saw that I had just taken if I had made a purchase on
exchange and then sent that somewhere else, that could then get flagged, you know, I want to avoid
doing that. And thus, you know, those type of gray market activities or privacy sensitive activities
are things that I would prefer to use coins that are non KYC coins. So it's really just more of a
risk profile thing. And from my perspective, it's just like, what do I do to make sure that none of
these regulated entities are going to scrutinize me too much and shut down my accounts? I think
for me, I'm sorry. My interest is is also like philosophical in the sense that like, you know,
it's not really cash equivalent. If there's KYC, there's no KYC, you know, on a wad of dollar bills.
And, and I like that. And that is a little bit linked to the freedom aspect for me. So so this
is partly the reason why I'm interested in it. And also the last thing that Jameson said, you
know, I chase will shut your account down for literally anything. Now, you know, I actually I
have a, I have an LLC that I got. I have a domain name that I bought a couple of like, like 10 years
ago that has blaze in the name, and it was going to be for like a messaging app that I was going to
write, it was going to be a really fast messaging app, hence the blaze. And then of course, blaze
is now associated with, with the marijuana's. And so I picked that domain name. And I picked that
and I picked that for an LLC name for a password for a consulting vehicle. And I paid a friend of
mine out of that. So so his bank account, he was he had a bank account. And so he got some payments
from this LLC that has blaze in the name. And his account was just summarily nuked from orbit. And,
and it seems like like there's no explanation. And it seems pretty clear that they thought that he
was doing something to do with like, you know, marijuana through the mail or something. And so
this is sort of a long winded way of saying like, it doesn't take much for them to put your your
funds on lockdown and to make your life miserable. So, so yeah, I actually wrote a medium post about
this, I had a similar issue, or not similar issue, but I had an issue with the state of Massachusetts
that claimed that I owed them income taxes for years when I had not even lived there in many
years. And so they falsely claimed that I owed them income taxes, because at the time I had worked,
you know, I was one of the founders of our statnica. And our statnica was headquartered in
Massachusetts. And so they tried to claim Massachusetts or think on, etc, etc. So they
they sent me this letter, asking for this insane amount of money. And while I was working on it,
they just froze my bank accounts. And so I, I hired a lawyer, and I talked to this, this guy
that specializes in this, he was like, Look, Chase will just freeze your bank accounts in Texas.
Or actually, the time was in California, in California, when they get a letter from the
Massachusetts Department of Revenue, there doesn't need to be a court order, there doesn't need to be
a ruling, they just get a nasty gram. And then you're done. And the reason is that they have
offices in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts is a state and they don't want to make Massachusetts
angry. And they don't care about you very much. And they care about Massachusetts. And so, you know,
all my credit card stops working, I couldn't get into my Chase bank account. And you know, eventually,
I got the situation resolved. But again, there was no due process. It was just sudden death.
And I think that this is a reason why the KYC stuff is important to retain that, that sovereignty
from from a system that is, is way too centralized. And, you know, doesn't care about me or you,
and doesn't even really care about the law half the time.
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, guys. That was those are all really good perspectives. If it's okay, I have
I have like a quick follow up. The I'm wondering what you guys, you know, I hear. So I've been
trying to very slowly and very carefully establish as much of an okay, why see stack as I can get.
And I'm wondering what your guys thoughts are on, like I hear Odell and some other people talk about
like coin joins and other things, mixing services, pros versus cons on those, like, is it worth it?
Like, are those coins then going to be flagged and in the future? Or are, you know, I just wondered
in general, what your guys thoughts are on those? Yeah, so this is kind of related to what I said
earlier, is that I at least I personally almost think of it as two distinct sets of money. And
this is unfortunate, because in an optimal situation, Bitcoin would be purely fungible,
and we wouldn't have to be even thinking about privacy, but we are not there yet.
So in order to make up for those shortcomings. And this is this is, you know, purely focused on
on chain stuff, of course, is is that, you know, coin join and mixing is great, especially if you
can do it and get paid to do it. Like if you're a maker on join market, for example, I personally,
I would not be like, I would not be participating in multiple rounds of mixing and paying fees for
mixing on a continuous basis. I think that's a bit overboard and inefficient. I would only really
deal in mixing if you're going to be making a payment, for example, you know, to obscure,
you know, what the pool of funds was that the payment came from. Though, you know, now more
efficient methods are coming out for that with like, I think it's the pay to join protocol,
for example. But you should assume that if you're doing any coin join or mixing stuff that
essentially, this kind of goes to what john was saying, the the set of people doing that is not
large enough, and you're going to get mixed in with bad actors who are using, you know, stolen
or otherwise illicit funds. And therefore, you're essentially going to be tainting your funds. But
your funds are only tainted from the perspective of these regulated entities. You know, you're not
going to, if you're going to go participate in some peer to peer economic interaction,
nobody's running a chain analysis bullshit on your retail payment that you're going to go
buy some good or service from someone, they just see that they got the money. And that's all they
care about. If they're not essentially a bank, and, you know, a regulated entity, they're not
going to be doing all of that stuff. So that's why I think it just makes sense to think of it as
having your no KYC and strong privacy set of money. And then on the other side, you may have some,
you know, KYC money, you can kind of think of it as this is like the investment pool. And this is,
you know, what I keep a very strong accounting of and make sure that all of the associated entities
get paid off as as per their appropriate dealings with, you know, IRS and other departments of
revenue and states and all that stuff. So it's, it's unfortunately more complicated than I think
it should be. But if, if you mix the two, you're probably going to have problems and you're most
likely going to find yourself shut off of all of these regulated KYC services, and then you'll get
to live the pure Bitcoin only life, I guess. I can tell you that having worked for a few exchanges,
Jameson is correct. And it may not even just be something where it's like you did a coin joiner
or mixer and you know, you're one hop away, they'll detect it two hops away or even three hops away.
So some people try to get crafty and say, well, I'll mix it and I'll send it to another address.
And then I'll send it to the exchange. And there's a lot of ways you can mess up with chain analysis
and common shared inputs and all the ways that they analyze that. So I think, you know, being
aware that that you are setting yourself up to potentially be flagged and frozen, especially if
you're dealing with a US based business, because they have to work with regulators, they have to
work with suspicious activity reports and different lists of individuals that are participating in
terrorism and money laundering. And there's lists of addresses that are flagged if they see those
transactions come through. So if you've associated with them, you're now adding yourself to that.
And this was, this was also one of the big problems with, I think, Tor when it first came out,
the onion routing privacy web browsing technology, in that they needed a bigger signal to noise pool,
where a lot of people were scared to use Tor and our spies wouldn't want to use it for
communicating messages, because there weren't enough users. So when they saw encrypted traffic
going over the line, it was very easy to say, this is something I need to be looking at. And I think
that, you know, these exchanges and these business regulated entities are seeing these transactions
come one, two, three hops away from a mixer and going, this is something I need to look at.
In my opinion, though, I think this is a point in time problem. And I say that for two reasons. The
first one is that the protocol is going to constantly evolve and change. And there's
going to be different security and privacy enhancements with signature aggregation and
different ways to encapsulate and transmit data in secure and private ways. So in five years from
now, or 10 years from now, I think that landscape is going to look a little bit different, even if
some of those features may only be in BIP or draft format. The second thing is, you know, this
protocol is going to change, we're going to update. Sorry, I lost my train of thought there.
The other thing is regulation hampers innovation. And I think that this is still a battle that's
being fought and little wars are being won here and there on different sides. And I think the
regulation landscape is going to look different. And I'm very eager to see where that goes, because
some people are saying, you know, the regulation is not going to work in this industry and with
these technologies. And it's a matter of time before we all figure that out. Right. And other
people are saying, well, in order for Bitcoin or for the greater crypto community to survive
cryptocurrency community, you need some some base level of regulation to provide that comfort for
people. So I think that's going to look different in a landscape from five or 10 years. And that's
really going to dictate the way these businesses work. If more of these software wallets and things
are using pay joins and coin joins, and some of these new cool features by default, that signal
to notice pool gets bigger, and then it is harder to identify and track some of those types of
transactions. So I think this will work itself out over time. Yeah, this. Okay, I wanted to ask,
I wanted to ask if we're trying to maintain no KYC Bitcoin transaction, how do we then Okay,
let's assume you want to buy, let's say you want to buy Bitcoin using Fiat. So how is that even
possible? If you want to do that on Coinbase, they will over you, of course, you have to verify your
account, and you have to provide all the KYC needed. And that's the case with them being as
a major exchanges. So how do we maintain no KYC on major exchanges, and as well as be able to buy
cryptos using Fiat? How is that possible? Well, to be clear, you would either have to use a peer to
peer exchange, like bisque or a possibly like, well, even local bitcoins may require KYC now,
but essentially, one of the, you know, meet up face to face and exchange cash for coins type of
services. None of the major mainstream exchanges are going to be no KYC. But I would say like the
the ultimate no KYC functionality is by exchanging instead of exchanging Fiat for crypto, exchange
exchange goods and services for crypto, you become a merchant, become a consultant who accepts your
preferred cryptocurrency for these services that you provide. You know, that's really how we get to
having more of a full circle economy in this space. And while you Ron mentioned, there's a
number of different technological improvements that could happen. There's also just the the social
and adoption aspect. For example, you know, we already have mixing technology, the prob,
the real problem. I mean, of course, there are ways to make the mixing technology better, but
we wouldn't have to if more people were using the mixing technology. So you know, if any of
these large mainstream wallets were to implement mixing technology and doing that automatically,
then all of a sudden, this this pool of you know, quote unquote tainted funds would become so huge
that the heuristics of trying to call, you know, certain coins tainted or flag them as suspicious
would just become useless. Or, you know, similarly, even if we saw any of the large custodial
providers start to do mixing, you know, this, this, obviously, there's reasons they're not doing it,
they're afraid to do that, they're afraid there might be legal ramifications. But if they started
putting the pressure on by starting to do it, and especially if it became a domino effect, then
this would just become a non issue overnight. Simply because the, the, the size of the pool of
people that you know, you're able to essentially hide amongst, it becomes a it's no longer like a
trivial portion of people, it's just it's so big that the, the numbers don't make sense to try to,
to try to, you know, red flag people, if it's a significant portion of the overall economy.
Okay, so we have time for one more question. And this came in through DM. So what, what is the one
thing I know for guys, it's phone wallet keys, typically, when you get out the door, and you know,
you may not make it back, what's the one thing you're going to take with you? And I'm just going to
go ahead and say your phone can't be the answer. John mentioned it earlier, and it spoke to me,
I'm a I'm a knife guy. I think having a battle tested knife, it's going to function for a
defensive weapon. It's a tool you can use to make and destruct things. There's so many uses you can
have with a knife that I feel like I, other than a Leatherman, I don't know that I would want any
other tool on my person. Yeah, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go with the Leatherman as well. I have a
Leatherman charge. But you know, my everyday carry Leatherman is one of the one of the Leatherman free
models. It's the one that's sort of like the charge. I can't remember off the top of my head,
which one it is. But even like a Skeletool CX, I pretty much always have some flavor of Leatherman
on me. And if I couldn't manage with anything else, if that was it, it would have to be a
Leatherman, a charge, a wave, something of that nature. Yeah, definitely want a multi tool of
some sort. And, and even there's a few keychain based tools you can get that are like six or
10 in one tools. And they're incredibly compact and can just come in really handy if you need
like a small pry bar or screwdriver or cutting tool or whatever, not necessarily even like a
full fledged knife to some utility perspective. But other than that, of course, if you're in a
jurisdiction that allows it, you got to have a subcompact 45 caliber in the in your waistband,
of course. I will mention depending on regulations to there are some ways around these things. So
the Jameson's point, my wife's keychain has a little mold of a pit bullhead, but the ears
are spikes. And you can put your fingers through the eye holes and use this as a defensive weapon
if you need to. And they make two versions of this, they make a metal one and a silicon rubber one.
And if you go get caught carrying the metal one that isn't a legal weapon, and you will be detained.
If you get caught with the silicon one that does not qualify as a weapon in some jurisdictions,
and is perfectly legal to carry. So know the differences, look up your local laws, and I would
see what what works and what's applicable to you for everyday carry. I was just gonna say,
I was waiting for Jamie's Jameson's say a disguise. I've heard you talk about that
before. That would have been a good one. You know, the the whole the the eds. So I'm in Texas,
and I have a concealed carry license and I do carry. And this is that the concealed carry movement
is actually a pretty good model for a lot of what we've been discussing with these privacy tools,
like the coin mixing and stuff like this, in the sense that it's become legalized and normalized.
And lots of people do it. I mean, my dad and mom have licenses. So the fact that you have
a concealed carry license, and that you have a weapon on your person, when you're at the
grocery store or wherever you are, that does not flag you for any extra scrutiny, because everybody
does it. So yeah, bonus points if you're in a constitutional carry state where you don't even
have to have a license. Jameson said he was a fan of the 45. I like the subcompact single stack
nine millimeter myself, but they each their own heresy. Perfect. Well, thank you everyone
for joining us. It's been a great conversation. And for those that didn't catch it at the start,
a recording will be available. This sleek new feature from Twitter spaces. And yeah,
have a good evening. And in the meantime, don't trust verify. Thank you. Thank you guys.
Thank you, everybody. Good night.