We're helping people protect a few hundred bytes of information.
That's all this really is.
But this few hundred bytes is now the keys to the kingdom that some people have the majority
of their life savings in.
Hello and welcome back to the Coin Stories podcast.
I'm your host, Natalie Brunel, and we are talking to some of the leading voices in Bitcoin.
Their backstories, how they were first introduced to Bitcoin, and their take on what the cryptocurrency
offers.
This podcast does not provide financial advice.
This episode is brought to you by the Bitcoin Conference 2022.
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I'm super excited to share my guest today is Bitcoin security and privacy expert Jameson
Lopp.
Jameson is a professional cypherpunk, a business advisor, and the co-founder and CTO of Kaza.
His mission is to use his skills as a technologist to build tools that empower individuals.
And one way he's striving for that is by making it easier for people to take custody of their
Bitcoin and manage their private keys.
If you follow Jameson, you know that he went on a several year journey to reorganize his
online identity and achieve ultra privacy after a very scary swatting incident, which
we'll get into.
Here's Jameson.
All right.
Jameson, super excited to have you on Coin Stories.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
My pleasure.
All right.
Let's start at the very beginning.
I know that we have to keep some aspects of your identity private, so I'm going to try
to ask you questions that are maybe a little bit more general, but I want to hear just
about your background, your early life.
Where are you from?
North Carolina?
That's right.
I'm a native North Carolinian, and I think my ancestry in North Carolina was actually
traced back to the late 1700s by my grandfather.
Wow.
Well, so what do you know about them?
What do you know about your ancestors?
Well, that they came over from the Lapland region, which I think is near Germany, Austria,
and like our original last name was Lap, but at some point it got Americanized into Lop.
And I think we came in through New York, very New England area.
A number of Lops ended up settling in Pennsylvania, but fairly early my branch of the family tree
came down to North Carolina and had been in that area since I think the early 1800s.
So other than that, I think they fed, they were living fairly normal lives.
Most of my detailed understanding of our history only really begins with my great grandfather.
And then my grandfather was a fairly regular old Joe who ended up fighting in the second
war and he was in B-14 flying fortress, I believe, basically ran like 40 or 50 missions
over Germany right at the very end of the war.
I actually, he died five or six years ago and we found his personal journal that he
never told anybody that he had.
And we learned a lot about his missions and how many of his friends he lost basically
saw going down in flames all around him.
And yeah, he was a pretty tough guy and taught me a lot.
That's amazing.
And so for people who are wondering, Jameson Lopp is your real name, right?
That's correct.
Okay, wait.
So tell me a little bit more about just your upbringing.
What did your parents do?
Did you grow up kind of interested in technology, privacy?
Well, I was definitely nerdy.
Only child.
My parents were very focused on my education and I always did well in school, had plenty
of good opportunities from an academic standpoint, never really did much in terms of athletics.
I was more of a band geek.
And it was kind of weird though, because despite all of my parents' focus on academics, they
really hated technology.
And so I didn't get a computer until I think sixth or seventh grade.
And I think that was mostly a pity purchase because we had moved all the way across the
state and I lost all my friends and I think my parents felt bad for me.
So they finally caved to getting me a computer and that was mid 1990s.
So it was basically still dial-up only at the time, very early days of the internet.
And I just spent a ton of time on there so much so that my parents were always telling
me to go outside and play or go meet up with people.
They didn't understand that I was having interactions with other people all the time, just through
the computer.
They saw it more as like a video game type of thing.
And of course I was playing plenty of games too.
But it got to the point where they would literally take the power cords away so I couldn't turn
it on and so then I would go to various thrift stores and just buy tons of power cables that
I would keep as backups, learning the lessons of having redundancies and preventing single
points of failure.
What did you think about money back then?
Do you remember?
Money was never really a concept that I delved into until I read the Bitcoin white paper
in 2012.
So before that, I think I just used money like anybody else.
I didn't really know much about how it worked at a fundamental level.
And the Bitcoin white paper was interesting because I ended up getting a computer science
degree and was working as a software engineer.
And when I read the white paper, I realized that this was solving an interesting problem
that I had never even thought about.
But the way that it solved it was interesting because it kind of flipped it on its head
as opposed to like a naive way you might go trying to implement some sort of online monetary
system.
So that got me interested from a technical standpoint, it got me interested also from
a philosophical standpoint.
And that was what triggered my interest in learning more about finance and economics
and how money actually works.
Well, I'm just curious before we talk a little bit about how you got into Bitcoin and even
discovering the white paper, when you were growing up, what did you want to be when you
grew up?
And did your family feel comfortable with money?
Did you guys have money?
Yeah.
So I would say I grew up fairly privileged, standard middle class household.
We were well off enough that my mother could stay at home and take care of the household
and my father had, I guess, a pretty well paying white collar job doing marketing for
insurance companies, nothing that was ever that interesting to me, but kept him busy.
And we never really talked much about money.
In fact, I would say my parents were very private about it.
They never talked to me about budgeting or income or really anything like that.
I would say that I didn't even start really looking into personal finance stuff until
I graduated from college and I was finally cut free on my own, had to worry about things
like budgeting and long term planning for my own finances.
It's interesting.
I always ask that question because my upbringing was so different.
I always heard about money because we immigrated here, we didn't have money, so it was like
a constant conversation.
So you went to school to study computer science.
Why?
What did you want to be?
Why computer science?
Yeah.
So I'm sure when I was really young, I wanted to be cool things like an astronaut or firefighter
or whatever.
But when I graduated from high school and I looked at all of the possible majors at
the university, I didn't know what I wanted to be.
I got out the list of all several hundred majors, I guess, started going through it
alphabetically and crossing things off that just sounded terribly boring.
And by the time I got through it, the only thing I had not crossed off was computer science.
So it was a fairly straightforward decision for me.
I knew that I loved pretty much everything about computers.
I didn't know what I was going to do with them over the long run.
But even by the time that I graduated high school, I had already been building websites,
writing some code by hand and had taken a programming class at my local university during
summer school.
That's how nerdy I was.
I went to college when I was still in high school during the summer instead of...
Wow.
Okay.
Well, so what was your early career like?
Were you working while you were in college or what were your first jobs afterwards?
Yeah.
So it was kind of part of, I guess, my interest in being independent was that once I moved
off to college, I never went back, not even during summer.
And of course, I had to sustain myself in order to do that.
So I got multiple jobs when I was a student.
I was fortunate enough that my parents were paying for my tuition, but they wanted me
to come home.
So they were not interested in paying for me to have room and board during the summer.
So in order to cover that, I became a resident advisor during the summers.
And then during the school year, so that I would just have money to pay for extra stuff,
I probably spent most of it on computer hardware, to be honest.
I had like a crazy level of storage for the time because I was a huge...
I guess I can admit it now, I'm sure it's beyond the statute of limitations, but I was
pirating stuff like crazy because I had no money, but I loved games and movies and TV
shows and stuff.
And so I probably had one of the biggest peer-to-peer file sharing services on any university campus
back in the day.
It was actually in the early days of Internet2, and there were some new file sharing apps
that came out that only allowed Internet2 college university IP addresses to get on
them.
And you could share files at like 10 megabytes a second at the time, which was insanely fast
compared to speeds that most people had.
But yeah, so I was doing other things.
Actually pretty much all of those jobs were through universities.
So one of the first computer science classes I took was a computer ethics class.
It was also one of my favorite and most interesting.
And immediately after the semester, after taking that, I reached out to the professor
and I said, you know, I want to work for you.
So for the rest of my time at university, I was also a teaching assistant for this computer
ethics class.
Also by my sophomore year, I was doing tech support at the UNC hospital.
So I also for the rest of my time at university was doing sort of part-time in between classes,
just like taking a bus down to the other end of campus where the medical campus was and
going through the hospital, basically fixing all the doctors, computers who were interestingly
enough, mostly tech illiterate, despite how well educated and intelligent that they were.
And then I also at some point started doing some programming jobs for information library
science on campus.
So I think at one point I actually had three, possibly four jobs simultaneously all through
the university, which was fun because then I must have hit some sort of edge case with
the payroll program and they were drastically underpaying me for a little while.
And then they drastically overpaid me for a little while and I got into this whole situation
where it got to where I was within.
I was in my last semester at university and I started getting all these threatening letters
from the finance department at the university that I owed them several thousand dollars
because of their accounting mistakes and overpaying me over the past year or so.
And they threatened not to give me my diploma until I repay all of that.
And I was like, look, you screwed this up for over a year, so you have to give me some
time to fix up your mistakes.
So that was fun.
Okay, wait.
So what was your first job out of college and at what point did you read the white paper?
What were you doing then?
So my first job was at a small startup.
It was called Bronto, sort of like the Brontosaurus.
And it was an email marketing web application, software as a service type of setup.
Started there.
There were only about 15 employees and I actually managed to stay there for almost 10 years.
However, I was changing jobs within the organization every 18 to 24 months.
And that seems to be a fairly standard thing.
I think with computer science folks fresh out of school, they tend to change jobs every
two or three years, usually because you get bored of whatever you're working on or because
you realized you've kind of upped your game, your skills, and you're more marketable.
And it's really, really hard to get massive pay raises while staying at the same company.
So I managed to do that, but it wasn't easy.
It was definitely adversarial.
On three or four different occasions over the years, I went out to the market because
I realized how underpaid I was and I got competing job offers and brought them back to my employer.
And thankfully, the employer always decided that they would prefer to keep me on and they
would match those job offers until it got to the point where after about 10 years and
I had been a Bitcoin enthusiast for a number of years just doing some side projects in
my free time that I decided that I might as well work on it full time because it was the
only thing that I could really even focus on.
I'm sure it was negatively affecting my work as it was already at the time.
And there was really no amount of money that they could offer me to stay on doing marketing
related like statistical analysis stuff.
Well, OK, so tell me about that Bitcoin journey.
Obviously, it seems like you were predisposed to it just with your computer background.
But what really sent you down the rabbit hole?
Tell me about that, picking up the white paper for the first time and just did you buy a
bunch?
What happened?
Right.
So there's the theory of Bitcoin, which I thankfully already had enough skills, I think,
to grasp why I felt like the system had the potential to work from a technical standpoint.
But then there's the reality of Bitcoin.
So it wasn't until some months after reading the white paper and actually acquiring some
Bitcoin and using it and realizing that you could exchange it for other things of value.
That's when it became real to me.
And it was actually a real pain at the time.
I had to go to my bank and fill out several pages of paperwork to send an international
wire transfer to some random bank in Japan in order to get myself some Bitcoin, because
there were not many exchanges at the time.
And this, of course, was Mount Gox, which everyone is familiar with.
And it was a scary experience.
First of all, I had never sent any wire transfer before.
Second of all, the bank were very upfront about telling me that this was a very high
risk thing, that once the money was sent, they couldn't get it back for me.
And so I had to be like, look, I understand this is basically like a new experiment and
I need to get some of this so I can play around with it.
And I'm willing to completely lose all the money that I'm sending over there.
So yeah, I got some of the Bitcoin, started playing around with it.
How much was it then and how much were you willing to send in that manner?
It wasn't a lot.
It was less than a week's salary, basically.
I wasn't risking.
I wasn't treating it like an investment.
And Bitcoin cost how much, a couple hundred?
Well, at the time, it was still in the high single digits.
So it was around $10 or so at the time.
And thankfully, that's when there was, it was probably not the first bubble.
The first bubble really went from, I think, like $2 to $30.
And that had already happened and had crashed down.
And I think the first bubble that I really got to experience was up to like $100 or so
before it crashed back down.
So that was the wild ride.
But I wasn't treating it like an investment, at least not a short-term investment.
I figured that this was really just a hedge against long-term inflation.
So it wasn't until after I basically went all in with my career that I also decided
to go all in with my finances.
And that was actually the first article that I ever wrote about Bitcoin.
It was in 2015, it was right after the Mt. Gox crash and liquidation where tons of people
lost their money.
But that was when I figured that I wanted to turn my retirement into Bitcoin.
And so the first article that I ever wrote about Bitcoin on my blog was how to set up
a self-directed IRA.
Because I found that if you set up a self-directed IRA, you could actually invest it in pretty
much anything.
There's only a few rules around things that you can't invest in, usually things that are
like tied to you personally.
So that required a ton of conviction because I started buying in a high volume from a personal
standpoint of converting most of my net worth.
I started buying when I think the exchange rate was around $700 or $800 because it had
gone up to $1,000 or $1,200 before it started correcting.
And then it went all the way down to I think around $300.
And I was buying the entire way down.
And at one point, I lost half of my retirement value.
So I think my dollar cost average ended up in the high $400 range.
But then it was like a multi-year bear market.
And so there was certainly a while where people were like, oh, you lost all your retirement
money.
And I was like, maybe, but thankfully, I held out for the long term.
OK, wait.
Two questions.
Number one, did you lose anything at Mt.
Gox?
And number two, what changed your mind that you decided to go full in?
What was it?
Because back then compared to today, arguably, inflation wasn't as bad of a crisis or threat.
So what was it where you just had this total shift and you're ready to go all in on something
that most people would say is extraordinarily risky?
Yeah.
So thankfully, I understood not your keys, not your coins before I think Andreas even
coined that phrase.
So all that I ever did with Mt.
Gox is I wired them dollars, immediately bought the Bitcoin, and immediately withdrew it to
self-custody.
Smart.
And self-custody at the time, that was also, I would say, a big change.
It's more complicated than what you can do today.
There were no hardware devices.
There was no Trezor.
There was only really software wallets.
So I was basically running this Bitcoin Core software.
The full node is a very heavyweight application to run on a laptop.
And I was basically keeping those keys on the laptop.
I don't think at the time I even really knew about air-gapped computer stuff.
So that's basically what I was keeping my life savings on for several years before I
really started going more down the security rabbit hole.
And especially once Trezors came out, obviously switched over to that.
But what made me so convicted?
I think that I just started realizing that the system was so widely distributed from
so many different aspects of how it was operating that I became more and more convinced that
it was like the internet itself, that it could not be shut down, regardless of what any individual
actor might do to screw up.
So while this was actually my very first interview about Bitcoin was in I think February of 2014.
And there was a local bakery in Durham, North Carolina, started accepting Bitcoin.
I think they may have been one of the first brick and mortar shops in North Carolina
to accept Bitcoin.
And I learned about it somehow that they were going to start accepting it on a certain day.
And I went and I showed up, I was like first or second person in line.
There was only a couple other nerds there who were doing the same thing.
And the local news station showed up and they interviewed me about it.
And they were asking, the only thing they were interested in was like, well, isn't this
Bitcoin thing dying?
Because Mt. Gox crashed, everybody lost all their money.
And I was explaining to them that Mt. Gox is basically just one user on the network.
And this is a system that has no bailouts.
So they made a mistake, people will have to pay for it.
But eventually the system will recover.
And over the long run, I was proven right, but definitely that was one of those moments
where everybody was saying that Bitcoin was dead.
And my conviction was telling me basically the opposite, because this was not the first
time and I've had a number of other experiences throughout my life where I've had people telling
me that whatever I believed in was completely a fad that was over and done.
And the first one that really happened to me was actually when I was going to college.
Like I told you, I decided on computer science.
Well, this was very early 2000s.
And a lot of people that I told that I was doing computer science major said, oh, that's
a shame because the internet was a fad and the bubble popped and it's all over.
And I was like, you know, I think this internet thing is going to be around for a while.
So I'm not too worried about it.
And so while at the time, it was actually kind of tough to get a job in the software
engineering space.
By the time I graduated from college, we were back in very bullish times.
And then it was actually just a year or so after that, there was the great crash of 2008
that thankfully I had only just started investing in doing retirement planning at the time.
And even though my portfolio got cut in half, it was only like a year's worth of investment.
And I got to ride the bull market after that.
That's amazing.
You know, I love watching the early videos of when the internet came out, even news programs
that talked about what is this at symbol and what is the internet.
And I remember watching Katie Couric talking about it on the Today show.
And she's like, I don't think I'm going to use it.
I think it's just going to be something that some people decide to use and not others.
And just in not a long amount of time, I mean, it's transformed all of our lives.
So I kind of equate it to Bitcoin.
And I'm sure you've heard the comparisons of just the adoption rate, right?
We're adopting faster than the internet.
Is that right?
Well, yeah, I think this is what's happening generally over time is that the adoption curves
for technology are becoming steeper.
That is, people are adopting new technologies faster and faster.
So just as other things like technology in general is accelerating, supply chains have
continued to become more and more efficient and faster, though, of course, at the expense
of robustness, that's a whole other set of issues we can talk about.
But the world is becoming a smaller place.
And I still am just constantly amazed by the acceleration of technology.
And when we say technology, it doesn't have to be the internet and computer stuff.
I just made a remark last night where I just got a high end flashlight.
It was a few hundred dollars.
But what I hadn't realized is the state of flashlight technology and the electronics,
not just the bulbs, of course, the bulbs are one part, but the entire hardware stack that
constitutes a handheld flashlight is actually improved in terms of performance and durability
over the past decade.
It's gotten at least an order of magnitude better.
And so I got this flashlight that I've been testing out and you can literally illuminate
an entire football field with a handheld flashlight now for a few hundred dollars.
And this is just one example.
I mean, other people also commented on even hair dryers are like 10 times better than
they were 10 years ago.
I bought a hairdryer recently that it's instantly as hot as you want.
It blows as hard as you want, but it's not insanely loud.
They've managed to do that while also reducing the decibel level and improving the acoustics.
So it's, I think, great to be a technologist because it's really easy to be an optimist
if you just extrapolate going back a decade or two decades.
Yeah, no, that's so true.
Well, so what was your first kind of job in Bitcoin?
You leave your job, you're working in Bitcoin full time.
How did you get from sort of that, I guess, that point of the journey to all of a sudden
now, people know who you are and you have this squatting incident that has taken up
so much of the last several years of your life?
Yeah.
So I started looking around.
I was in North Carolina.
I was going to Bitcoin meetups.
I ended up founding a more technical Bitcoin meetup, but I think that was after I started
full time, so probably 2015 or so.
So it was early 2015.
I saw a bunch of venture capital coming into the space.
I saw a lot of job openings, but nothing in North Carolina.
It was all happening in Silicon Valley.
So I start looking around and I forget why, but I was not interested in moving to Silicon
Valley.
I think it was probably mostly politics and the fact that I was aware of the high taxes
and the fact that several of the firearms that I owned were illegal in California.
So I wanted to continue staying in North Carolina, but work for Bitcoin, which that cut down
my opportunities quite a bit.
There were only a couple of companies that were hiring engineering jobs that were even
open to the possibility of having a remote worker.
So I ended up accepting a position at BitGo.
I was their first remote worker and we ended up bringing on quite a few remote workers
in the years after that.
But at the time, it actually reminded me of my first company at Bronto, because once again,
there were only about a dozen or so people working there, but ended up being a very high
growth startup.
So Bronto, in the 10 years I was there, went from 15 to 300 employees and then ended up
having an acquisition a few years after I left BitGo.
I worked there for three years and we went from a dozen to probably 60 or 70 employees.
And then I think today, three years later, they have several hundred employees.
So it's been interesting to ride these startup waves.
One thing that I've learned though is that I do a lot better in startups that have under
50 employees, because you start creating all these hierarchies and bureaucracies that slow
things down.
And I like the freedom.
I like to be able to move quickly and not have to ask permission from too many people.
So how did this squatting event happen?
Bitcoin was targeting you and obviously we'll get to the discovery of who it was and maybe
the surprise when it came to that person's identity.
But how did that happen?
Yeah.
Well, as soon as I learned about Bitcoin, I started occasionally just tweeting my thoughts
on it.
And at the time in 2012, 2013, before that bubble up to $1,000 or so, nobody was really
paying attention to me.
I had maybe a couple of hundred followers.
And from my perspective, I just kept doing the same thing.
Whenever something interesting came up that was Bitcoin related, I would tweet it out.
And I kind of see it as kind of like the quote that you hear from a lot of people regarding
startups and IPOs and stuff that they were an overnight success of 10 years of hard work.
And so I think it was just sort of me consistently writing tweets and blog posts and other pieces,
sometimes publishing software as well, that over about a 10 year period, eventually that
just created larger and larger audience.
So by the time the 2017 bull market cycle was really ramping up, I think by then I had
over 100,000 followers.
It would be interesting to see, I think, how my following chart went over time, but I'm
pretty sure it was hockey stick that basically got triggered during the various bull markets.
And this happened to coincide with the great scaling debate it had been building up for
several years in Bitcoin.
And there had been a lot of heated discussions.
And at some point, there were some people who saw me arguing on Twitter and decided
that I would be a good target to prank and to try to extort.
And so that's when someone essentially, they swatted me, which means that they made a phone
call to my local law enforcement and they said the right keywords to trigger a tactical
response team.
So swatting is this phenomenon that has been happening since the late 2000s.
It originated in the video gaming and streaming community where someone would be playing video
games and having a camera on them.
And if they pissed somebody off or perhaps a rival of some sort, the goal would be to
try to capture them on their own camera on their live stream with a SWAT team coming
through the door and screwing everything.
So this has morphed over the years as Bitcoin has changed some of the incentives and essentially
swatting can now be used as a harassment and extortion technique.
Because what you're really doing is you're directing your physical force and potentially
deadly violent people at an arbitrary target if you just say the right words.
So basically, you have to find that person's address and then claim that there's some
sort of incident going on at that address that is a life or death violent situation.
And what did they say about you?
It was like hostage?
Yeah.
So in my case, they said that they were me and that I had killed someone and had a hostage
and had a bomb in the house.
They basically said all the things that you know are going to get a SWAT team triggered.
And so this resulted in my whole neighborhood being shut down and it was a somewhat traumatic
experience.
You realize how vulnerable you really are.
And it kicked off about a year of me using my own resources to better understand what
high privacy options are, you know, how to really hide where you are and what you're
doing while following the law, you know, using completely legal techniques.
And once I had moved away from my address, basically cut ties with everything that was
creating a link between me and my location.
That's when I went on the offensive and I started trying to track down the person who
did that to me.
Yeah.
So let's talk a little bit about that journey because I know you spent a lot of money.
And I read this really interesting New York Times article about just all the ways in which
you decided to change your identity or, you know, not change your identity, but make it
difficult for someone to track you down and really hone in on privacy.
And it's just so many aspects that you'd never even think about.
Like you have to find a state, first of all, that allows you to not use a name when you
file for an LLC, right?
And then there's like a DMV situation for you to buy a car.
Can you just like walk us through all the things that you did, maybe how much it cost
you and why you decided to go to such lengths?
Yeah, so when it comes to privacy, one reason it can be overwhelming is that there's just
so many different aspects of your life that you can try to make private.
And there are plenty of things that someone can do just by spending a weekend, you know,
improving your online privacy, installing ad blockers, setting up VPNs to protect your
real IP address from being leaked, setting up more private email addresses and setting
up password managers so that you're not reusing information across different websites.
After that, you can look into financial privacy.
There are various options where you can essentially set up throw away virtual credit cards or
you're not reusing once again, the same information everywhere.
But the extreme level of privacy, if you're trying to protect yourself and your physical
location so that you can't be targeted and swatted and have physical violence be threatened
against you, that's the really hard thing.
A lot of that is really a result, I think, of corporate surveillance.
There's also some government aspects in there.
The tricky thing from a corporate surveillance standpoint is you have to realize that every
time you have any sort of economic interaction with someone these days, you're providing
an address, even if you're not having something physically shipped to you.
So setting up private mailboxes that are not your residence and using them for receiving
everything or even as your billing address on credit cards, just so you don't have your
home address as credit card, that's a fairly simple, straightforward way to protect most
of that stuff.
But then the really hard part is the government-related identity stuff, especially things around taxes,
around DMV, around any publicly registered assets.
So usually that means house and car, maybe boat, things that are registered in your name
that you pay property tax on.
Those tend to be the things that create links between you and your residence.
And in order to sever those links, you have to use other legal structures such as trusts
and LLCs to own that property in the first place and essentially have the names of those
trusts and LLCs on the publicly registered forms and documents so that your name isn't
even on them.
But this creates a lot more complexity.
You're basically creating this whole legal framework that is acting as a firewall between
you and the rest of the world that can see these publicly registered assets.
But I mean, you do interviews, right?
So people in your community must know who you are and can't someone just see where you
drive home?
I mean, how much of a secret have you been able to keep with your identity?
Right.
So no one in my physical neighborhood knows my real identity.
They know my pseudonym that I give to them.
And obviously, I have a backstory and I'll tell them I work in cybersecurity.
But I know enough about cybersecurity that I can talk about other aspects of cybersecurity
unrelated to crypto.
And even if someone who did recognize me saw me out in public, and even then if they saw
me getting into my car, and even then if they looked at the license plate and somehow were
able to look up information for that, that would not tie me back to my actual address
because the car is owned by an LLC and the LLC is registered with a registered agent
at a completely different address.
So that's like what I said at the very beginning, there's so many different aspects of it.
Now, it could very well be that we get to the point where facial recognition is so ubiquitous
that any average person can basically use facial recognition software to try to look
you up.
We're not at that point yet.
But this is a dynamic environment and I'll just have to adjust as needed going forward.
What was the most surprising part of this journey to make yourself so, so private that
maybe people would benefit from learning?
So there's pros and cons.
So is that I'm in the United States and the United States affords you to use some things
like some jurisdictional arbitrage where some states have better privacy than others and
you can set up these trusts and LLCs in other states and then use them wherever you need
them.
One of the cons, of course, is it's expensive.
You're basically retaining attorneys and accountants and then other specialists, registered agents
and whatnot, to set up and then maintain these legal structures.
But it is better than a lot of other countries.
So my understanding is it's very difficult, if not nearly impossible, to set up stuff
similar to this in a lot of European countries, for example, because even if you create the
same legal structures, you're basically still forced to expose a lot of the internal ownership
of the legal structures to the public.
So you basically you're losing the privacy aspects of them.
Also things like with phones in the US, it's more difficult than it used to be, but it's
still possible to get a phone or specifically a SIM card anonymously without providing your
identification, whereas in a lot of other countries, it's kind of like the DMV requirements
where they're not going to give you anything unless you basically do AML KYC.
DMV stuff in the US is one of the most onerous.
Depends on the state, but generally we'll ask for two, if not three or four really strong
proofs of not only your identity, but of your living at the address where you're giving
for your vehicle registration and driver license and whatnot.
And the only way I've really found around that is to actually have a real residence
and address somewhere that you just simply don't hang out at that often.
Wow.
Okay.
I have more specific questions about this, but I want to zoom out for a second and just
ask why do you feel privacy is so important?
I mean, in this increasingly digital world where companies and corporations are collecting
our data and there's surveillance technology, why should we care about privacy, in your
opinion?
Well, I could spend an hour talking about all of the things that could go wrong.
And obviously I have this extreme example of having a SWAT team come to my house.
I think the extreme example is that you might have some sort of physical violence directed
at you.
This is generally not something that people need to be worried about unless they are a
really public figure with a large audience or they are doing something that is basically
creating enemies that would go to that extreme of wanting to perpetrate violence against
you.
But I think the bigger thing is that you just don't know what might happen in the future.
And while this type of swatting, stalking, harassment stuff pre-internet age was generally
relegated to your superstar celebrities who had hundreds of millions of fans and therefore
just due to the law of large numbers, there's going to be a few nut jobs in there.
You're going to have somebody who's going to do something that is potentially dangerous
for whatever reason.
And what I think the internet has done is it's really lowered the bar.
It's made it so much easier for people to perpetrate crimes and potentially violence
against you that you might think that nobody is ever going to care or do anything like
that against you.
But because of the internet, you can go overnight from being a nobody to being someone who has
the attention and potentially the ire of tens or hundreds of millions of people.
And good examples of that, one that I often give is Justine Sacco, who was a marketing
manager at some marketing firm in New York.
And she had family, I think, in South Africa or something.
And she was flying there for the holidays.
And before she got on the plane, she tweeted some sort of racially insensitive thing about
like hoping she didn't get AIDS when she went to South Africa.
And that blew up.
It became viral.
She had like 200 followers on Twitter.
But that tweet went so viral that I think hundreds of millions of people saw it.
And so some of them were sufficiently enraged that they started harassing her family, her
employer.
Some of them even showed up at the airport to see her get off the plane when she landed.
I think she ended up getting fired and having a lot of other consequences just due to one
really bad joke that she made.
So you never know when something crazy like that could happen because it's so much easier
for it to happen today.
And this is also kind of what happened to me over a longer period of time, over a matter
of years.
I went from being a nobody to having hundreds of thousands of people pay attention to me.
And eventually, one of them who had the skills and the poor enough judgment decided that
they wanted to perpetrate this against me.
Yeah, and how hard was it to figure out who that person was and what's the result of that
investigation?
Because you recently got an update, right?
Oh, yeah.
It was difficult because they, unlike me, they were already operating from a highly
privacy conscious setup.
I think this was because they had been doing a number of illegal things, and so they knew
that they needed that level of protection.
So it took four years to get to a conclusion in the case.
There are many points at which it could have fallen apart.
The whole investigation could have stopped.
But it cost me over, I think, $10,000 just in terms of legal fees, paying for attorneys,
private investigators, whatnot.
One of the big triggers, I think, that helped even get the investigation started was putting
a very large $100,000 bounty out on this person.
And so that's what helped get some of those tips to come in.
But then I also, I had to have some luck on top of everything else.
It was really hard to find lawyers who would work with someone who is interested in prosecuting
rather than defending.
I think the vast majority of private legal practices are for defense rather than offense.
Usually it's the state that does the prosecuting.
But I did not have a lot of success whenever I tried to reach out to law enforcement and
state officials.
And after about a year of trying to contact someone with the FBI, I finally got in contact
with someone only because I made sort of happenstance connection at a Bitcoin related event.
So it's hard.
It's really hard to get justice, especially if it's not what would be considered a high
priority, high threat to life type of crime.
Well, so who was it?
It was some punk teenager who, oddly enough, I am not at liberty to discuss their details
because they're a juvenile.
And so we ended up going through the juvenile justice system.
And you're basically supposed to protect these juveniles until they're adults.
And once they're adults, if they screw up, then everything becomes publicized.
Well, so what was your reaction to finding out this person's age?
And if you could have a conversation with this person, what would you say?
Yeah, it wasn't completely surprising.
It made sense because teenagers, they tend to understand technology even better than
the older folks who might be in their 30s and beyond.
And also, it's more likely that you don't understand the consequences of doing stuff
like that.
So I think it was a perfect storm of skills and ability and lack of understanding consequences
that resulted in that.
And I did actually get to meet and talk to this person.
And I basically flew to one of the hearings at the juvenile court and basically spoke
my piece, gave my perspective on the whole situation.
And I tended to believe their story that they, at the time, did not realize the seriousness
of it.
And they were kind of thinking it was like a prank phone call.
Wow.
OK.
So obviously, you had the means to go into this journey to privacy that a lot of people
probably would not take the way that you did.
What's one thing that the average person can do?
What's one very important thing that someone can do to protect themselves as we're transacting
online, especially for people who have Bitcoin?
Yeah, most important thing, I think, is just taking a few minutes to install a bunch of
ad blockers on your browsers.
That'll save you from a lot of the corporate surveillance that happens.
Like I said, I worked for an online marketing company for 10 years.
My job was actually to ingest all of this raw tracking data that gets picked up from
pixels in your emails, tracking cookies, and other code that's on every website that you
load, and then basically pull that all together and write tools for marketers to then be able
to better sell stuff to you based on your profile that we build up.
So I certainly understood very early on how poor privacy experience was for the average
person just browsing the internet.
Next step you can do after that, like I said, was get a VPN because that's how you hide
your IP address, which also hides your rough geolocation.
From then on, for less than $50 a month, you can get a PO box or some sort of private mailbox
so that you can disassociate your shipping and billing address with your actual residence.
I would say if you're willing to spend a couple hundred dollars a month, you can get 90, 95%
of the way there.
It's that last 5% to 10%, especially with the government related stuff, the legal related
stuff, that the cost and the amount of time and resources just goes exponential.
So I'm assuming we should always say no to the accept cookies prompt that comes up on
all these websites, right?
What are the ad blockers that you recommend?
What are the companies?
I have multiple installed.
I recommend installing uBlock Origin.
That's a free one you can load a bunch of lists into.
I would also install all of the stuff from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I think they have one called Privacy Badger.
They also have an extension that's called, I think, something like SSL always or HTTPS
always, which will basically force as many of your website connections as possible to
go over SSL.
So everything's encrypted, just providing with more privacy there.
That's going to cover the vast majority of it, but even this will create inconvenience.
From time to time, you will find yourself trying to use a website and it won't work.
That's because your privacy ad blocker stuff will be preventing some code from running
that it turns out is critical for some of the functionality on that website.
So there's always some sort of trade-off between convenience and privacy and security.
That's so true.
Well, before I start to wrap up, because I want to hear a little bit about CASA and your
current updates, but just all of this makes me very curious about Satoshi and just how
much Satoshi, whoever that person or group is, knew about security and privacy.
So basically, there's no way to track where those initial notes and emails and blog posts
came from.
Why was it so hard to track down Satoshi?
They were just that good at OPSEC?
Yeah.
From what we can tell, Satoshi certainly seemed to be a cypherpunk.
From the potential trails or breadcrumbs that they could have left, they were pretty much
always using some sort of privacy preserving service.
So for example, I think Satoshi was using GMX and possibly Vestomail.
They were using some email services that were known to be better privacy preserving.
I think there may have been a few places where people thought that they got some IP addresses,
but it looked like Satoshi was probably using VPN.
They also registered the bitcoin.org domain, and I think they used a privacy preserving
service for that where they likely mailed an envelope of cash to that service basically
to pay for it because this was before there were any real private cryptocurrencies or
any other options.
So from what we can tell, a lot of people tried to track down Satoshi for years, but
it seems like they did a good enough job preserving their privacy.
Part of that, I think, was the fact that they were doing this back when nobody cared who
Satoshi was because bitcoin was some silly little experimental project.
I think that the fact that Satoshi left very early on and did not continue creating more
potential breadcrumbs that could be used to track them, that was also helpful because
when you're trying to go back in time and find information to track people down, it
can become a lot harder because things tend to get deleted and lost.
Yeah.
Do you think about the identity and why do you think that the person disappeared?
Well, all we know is that they said that they moved on to other things.
I would be incredibly interested to know what those things were, though there are various
theories that Satoshi was someone who is now a deceased, so it may be that they were dealing
with their own health problems.
It may have just been that they saw the writing on the wall.
I mean, they did make a reference, I think, to one of the early bitcoin developers going
and giving a talk at the CIA.
I think that freaked them out.
They realized that it was becoming too big of a deal and they probably would not be able
to continue being unobserved.
Do any of those early developers that were communicating with Satoshi, does anyone or
does the government do you think know Satoshi's real identity?
Do you think there's someone who knows who Satoshi is?
I think there has to be someone out there who knows, but no one who has ever claimed
to be Satoshi or claimed to know Satoshi has ever been able to provide sufficient proof
of that.
If folks at the government know, they're certainly not talking.
All right.
So tell me a little bit about CASA.
Tell me about your position and how all that came about.
Yeah, so I spent three years building infrastructure at BitGo.
That's where I learned a lot about private key security and also just became interested
in this non-custodial idea of being able to build Bitcoin wallets where the service may
hold one key to help in certain situations, but never has enough keys to spend other people's
money or stop them from being able to spend other people's money.
So CASA was really a small pivot for me to go from using this technology to help people
be their own banks, mainly for enterprises, to switching to helping individuals.
So this was the result of many years of hard-learned lessons.
A lot of people lost a lot of money over the first decade or so in Bitcoin, and so we've
learned a lot of things not to do.
Now the problem with all of this is that it's a lot of knowledge.
It's a high barrier for newcomers to scale in order to absorb all of the information
that I have over the years.
So in order to help people bypass that and to lower the bar, make it a better user experience,
we basically have to build the software to guide people down the right path.
And so that's what we've really been doing at CASA where we've been using this multi-signature
technology.
We're building on top of hardware key management devices that are produced by a number of different
companies other than us by design.
We don't want to be a single point of failure who is creating too many of the internal aspects
of the system.
And we're basically providing an easy way for someone to get onboarded into what I consider
to be a better than bank level self-custody setup, where if you spend an hour onboarding
yourself into CASA, you end up with a system protecting your Bitcoin that is highly distributed
and has no single points of failure by a design.
And all you have to do is follow the instructions in the app to get set up.
So by putting people into a highly defensible, robust position just by following the guidance
in the app, we can prevent them from being a victim of many different types of both attacks
and loss due to negligence and you're shooting yourself in the foot and so on and so forth.
So it's about creating robustness and redundancy.
And the crazy thing is this whole industry of self-custody is built around the idea that
we're helping people protect a few hundred bytes of information.
That's all this really is.
But this few hundred bytes is now the keys to the kingdom that some people have the majority
of their life savings in.
So we need to make sure that people can be comfortable and confident that they can hold
that themselves.
So is this essentially holding someone's hand to be their own bank and they're still very
much responsible?
Or is this taking some of that pressure off of them because you have this distributed
network that will be sort of a backup and help them through that aspect of safety and
custody?
Yeah.
So there's, I would say several aspects of CASA that are an important focus for us.
The first one is user experience, so having a really well-designed app that you run on
your phone that guides you through the setup and the maintenance of this under-the-hood
complex multi-signature wallet that uses multiple keys on multiple devices in multiple geographic
locations.
The next one is service, where there are very few self-custody Bitcoin wallets out there
that are a company that provides a high level of customer service.
A lot of the wallets out there, it's free software where you download it, you run it,
and you figure out how to do it.
It's sort of a caveat and story or use it at your own risk, but you're responsible for
figuring it out.
So we also provide a high level of service, depending on your tier, our higher level tiers,
you get dedicated client advisors that you can literally schedule phone calls with and
talk about whatever you want.
We also find it important to give people the peace of mind that they need.
That's really one of the most common pieces of feedback that we get.
I would say one of them is that people tend to be surprised at how easy it is to get onboarded
because it is a complex system under the hood, but like I said, it only takes an hour or
so to get onboarded.
And then the next one is just the ability to get feedback and feel comfortable that
you have a setup that is not going to get lost or hacked or whatever.
So a lot of people come to us, they might have had their money still in the exchange
where they bought it.
They might have had it on a single hardware device that was in a safe and they were just
super worried about what might happen to that hardware device.
But once they get into a system where they know that they have sufficiently dispersed
the risk, such that it's unlikely that any single event was going to cause a catastrophe,
then it's a lot easier for them to have peace of mind and go about their life without even
worrying about what's going to happen to their Bitcoin.
Yeah, I think that's such an important point and it's so critical because I think if we're
going to get to mass adoption, the majority of people are not going to feel safe just
putting something on essentially what they consider a hard drive and putting it in a
safe or keeping it maybe on an exchange that potentially they heard accounts got hacked
or something or a SIM swap happened.
So I think that this is such an important area so that people can feel comfortable finally
getting in the space.
Do you agree?
I think this is what we need for mass adoption.
Yeah.
So I did this originally, it was so much a self-serving thing.
Like I said, I had been at Bitco for about three years building infrastructure.
And with my own personal holdings, I found myself spending an entire weekend every year
just as an annual refresher to basically update my cold storage and redistribute the data
for that because also I was worried about inheritance issues, getting hit by a truck
and nobody knowing how to actually get to those private keys.
And I was just like, this is insane.
I'm supposed to be one of the most preeminent experts on Bitcoin security.
And this is a huge hassle for me and I do it because it's a substantial portion of my
net worth.
I can only imagine what the average person who doesn't have this, they might not be as
incentivized, they probably don't have the same level of skill set.
And I wanted something that I also could be more confident in that people would be able
to recover for inheritance and that I didn't have to spend a day or two every year updating.
Rather, it was just already automatically redundant.
And that's sort of the individual focus, but when you step back and you take the 10,000
foot view of what this means and why it's important that the average person has this
type of access to being their own bank and doing so without a lot of effort, it's actually
important for, I believe, the structural integrity of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
Because if people aren't confident and comfortable in being their own bank, then they are going
to end up falling back to what they consider to be the trusted experts.
And essentially what we end up with, again, is just a lot of highly centralized custodians
was kind of recreating the original system that we were trying to get away from.
So what are your competitors in this space?
Well, from a really high level of view, you could say our competitors are any sort of
Bitcoin system for custodying funds.
So it depends on how you break things up.
You could say that self-custody is competing against custody.
So we're competing against a lot of the exchanges and other like professional custody
services that really just act like banks.
Within the self-custody space, you could say we're competing against all of the free services
that don't have great quality of support because you're not paying for support, it's just sort
of an add on that's baked into perhaps if you like buy a hardware device, they probably
have some additional margin that helps cover support there.
Otherwise you're really only getting community support and you're hoping that somebody on
some forum might respond to you.
Within the paid self-custody space, there are even fewer options.
One of the only ones that really comes to mind is Unchained where they also have a multi-sig
self-custody plus service and consulting.
So it's kind of like a niche within a niche.
But my thesis on that is that this type of self-custody setup is actually incredibly
important and a lot of people either don't even know that self-custody is a thing or
they don't understand why they should value it or if they are in a self-custody setup,
they may have set it up a long time ago and have just kind of forgot about it or in many
cases what we found are they are afraid to touch it because every time you mess with
your private keys, there's a potential that something might go wrong.
Well, so for anyone that's wondering this in the audience, if you have a Ledger or Trasor,
would you also get CASA or is it an either or situation?
Yeah, you can do both.
So we have a basically $10 a month lowest tier plan where if you already have a hardware
device, you can basically bring that device, create your two of three CASA wallet and that
hardware device you plug in and we take the public keys off of that hardware device and
use it to create a multi-sig and then it would be very easy for you to essentially do a withdrawal
from the only Trasor or only Ledger funds to the multi-sig, which is then still using
the Trasor or Ledger, but it's only one out of three different keys that are on there.
And this can be, I think, kind of complicated for people to understand what is multi-sig,
what is a multi-key setup.
The best way to think about it, I think, is in terms of a lockbox.
So whenever you generate a Bitcoin address, what's behind that address is actually something
called a redeem script, which is a set of code that describes the spending conditions
for what is required in order to be able to move the funds at that address.
And for most people, this is a single signature address that says, you know, I need one signature
from one private key that matches the public key that is embedded inside of this redeem
script.
With multi-sig, we're taking that to the next level, where it's essentially a piece of code
that says in order to spend these funds, you have to add two signatures that match any
two of these three private keys, or you have to add three signatures that match any three
of these five public keys.
And so this is very similar to like having a lockbox in a bank, where if you've ever
had one, you may realize that at least the good ones, they don't have only one key.
They actually have two different keys that have to be inserted and turned in order to
open that up.
And that's because it gives you a better trust model so that you're more confident that the
employee with the key can't just go in and open it on their own, whereas if someone stole
the key from you and went in on their own, they wouldn't be able to do that without an
employee who's also doing other authentication.
And so this is why I say you get to be better than bank level security, because you can
have a setup that is even more distributed and more robust in terms of the authentication
than you would have to get inside of a high security bank vault.
Yeah.
I think this is such great information, because I do believe that as we get to that maybe
$1 million per coin, or I think it's going to go even higher, this is going to be huge.
This is going to be so, so, so important, because I think that the people that are coming
in late, there's going to be threats to the people who have Bitcoin and have had it for
a very long time.
So I think getting that information out is just so paramount.
I just wanted to ask you very quickly, you don't have to go in the weeds, but I think
there are people who wonder the inheritance issue.
Like if something were to happen to me, how does that all work?
Is this a very emerging space where people are dealing with wills and how to actually
pass on their Bitcoin?
Because I would imagine people just want to hold it to give to their children, right?
How does that work?
Right.
So if this is something that you are worried about, the only really in-depth guide that
I'm aware of is Pamela Morgan's crypto asset planning guide, which you can order on Amazon.
Highly recommend it.
I learned a number of things from it, because it's not just about the technical aspects.
It's also about legal and social aspects to think about.
From a technical perspective, Bitcoin, the network, the protocol, it doesn't know anything
about you, your identity or your beneficiaries or anything like that.
All it knows is whether or not a sufficient number of signatures have been put on a transaction
to spend funds from an address.
So what it boils down to is you putting the keys in some sort of storage where you can
access them while you're alive, but other people can't.
But if you pass on a certain subset of beneficiaries that you have designated that can access them.
And to do this, within multisig, the reason we like this setup is that you can create
say a three of five multisig setup where you have a key on your phone that is always accessible
by you.
You then have three different hardware devices that you distribute around.
And then you have a key that is held offline by CASA.
And so what we set people up with for a three of five inheritance setup is we recommend
that they put one of those hardware devices in a safety deposit box that has beneficiary
information listed on it.
And this is safe to do even if you consider something like an insider attack by that safety
deposit box company because it's only one out of the five keys.
We then recommend having a key that is accessible by either your state attorney or an executor
to your will that they know where it is, perhaps you make a copy of that key and give them
a copy of it, or they just know how to access it and unlock it.
And once again, this is safe because even if they try to collude against you, they can
only get that one key.
And then the CASA key that we hold is similar to the safety deposit box key in the sense
that we will take down beneficiary information and essentially require the same type of proof
of death process that the safety deposit box would.
So at any given time, you have access to four out of the five keys and you can request,
of course, signatures from CASA.
However, if you die, the CASA key, the friend or executor key, and then the beneficiary
key and the safety deposit box can all be accessed through fairly standard processes.
And that's what's great about distributing all of this information around is the level
of robustness.
And what you're really doing is you're also minimizing trust.
So it's hard for people to collude against you because they probably don't even know
who the other people they'd have to collude with are.
If you're not doing a multisig and you're worried about inheritance, then you either
have to do what I did in the early days, which requires a really high level of technical
sophistication basically taking these single seed phrases, these private keys, and putting
them in some sort of encrypted file volume, which you then take the decryption passphrase
to and split that up in multiple ways and then hand out those splits to different people
in order to make it difficult for them to collude against you.
But I have a whole write up about that on a blog I made a few years ago, but it's not
something that I would recommend.
It's still fairly brittle and requires technical sophistication for these beneficiaries to
be able to set up and recover.
Or for people who aren't that technically sophisticated, what we often see is what we
call the treasure map.
And someone will generally bang out their seed phrase onto a piece of metal and then
maybe go hide that somewhere and then have a treasure map of how to go find that.
That can certainly work, but if it doesn't work, if at some point that treasure map gets
lost or destroyed or the people just don't understand how to follow the treasure map,
then the money becomes irrecoverable.
This is also fascinating.
Thank you so much.
Before I ask my last question, is there just anything else you wanted to talk about or
share you think people should know?
There's more than we could ever possibly cover.
I mean, the main thing, I think, when it comes to Bitcoin and all of its complexities is
that I'm focused on security, which is a fairly straightforward, simple thing.
There are so many people out there who are working on much more crazy, pushing the envelope
type of stuff in this space.
And also the fact that this system is so multifaceted, you don't have to be technical to be interested
in it.
There are plenty of people who are interested in Bitcoin for other reasons.
It's their economic or philosophical or whatnot.
And so it's such a complex, multifaceted space, you can spend your time focusing on whatever
is most interesting to you.
And that's why if you want to figure out how to go further down the rabbit hole, you should
just go to bitcoin.page, which is my educational resources site that has, I can't even keep
track, probably like 1,500 links with dozens of different subsections.
So you can spend as much or as little time as you want learning more about this space.
Awesome.
I love it.
I will link that in the description of this episode.
And my last question is just, where do you see Bitcoin in 10 years?
I think the next 10 will just be so pivotal.
We've already moved in the direction of mass adoption.
It's growing very quickly, but I think there are also these major challenges ahead of us,
right?
There are these big names like Hillary Clinton coming out saying that this type of currency
or technology threatens nation states.
I think there are some really scary narratives out there that are going to discourage the
majority of people who still have their assets in cash or cash equivalents from entering.
So how do you think this is going to play out in 10 years?
And where do you see Bitcoin in 10 years?
I am not as worried about nation state level issues.
We already weathered something like six years of China FUD and crackdowns to the point that
they almost effectively completely banned Bitcoin.
And yet, as I said earlier, my conviction, my thesis from very early on is that this
thing cannot be stopped.
And if some of the most powerful nation states in the world decide to crack down on it, it's
going to continue to survive.
Now, there's no guarantees about what its value or exchange rate will be, but from a
purely technical perspective, the network is going to continue.
So I'm especially less worried about politicians in America.
I think we're already at the point, and this is one of my many Bitcoin projects, bitcoinpoliticians.org,
I think is the website I set up for that, where now I'm tracking which politicians actually
own Bitcoin.
I think this is important from an incentive standpoint.
We should want as many politicians as possible to own Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, there's far fewer who own it than who even talk optimistically about it.
So I'm somewhat skeptical about the people who are always talking really nicely about
it and then don't actually own any, because how can they really understand it if they
never even used it?
But I think that the ownership of Bitcoin is already so dispersed and so many powerful
and influential people own it that they're going to be applying their own pressure against
politicians who then hopefully will also become owners who will then be incentivized to not
do anything stupid regarding Bitcoin.
So I'm less worried about that from a macro perspective, even though there's certainly
going to be folks who are doing the ESG arguments and basically wailing about different things
that they're unhappy about.
But they can complain all they want.
I don't think the Bitcoin network really cares.
From a macro perspective, I'm more interested in seeing what's happening with El Salvador
for example, and that being the first domino.
I think that this is not going to be a one off event, it's just the first in a series
of many, because while the individual is incentivized to opt out of fiat and into sound money, which
is my thesis that I entered into many years ago, this same thesis holds true for corporations,
the same thesis holds true for many institutions, all the way up to the nation state level,
especially for nation states that don't have their own monetary sovereignty and they're
currently at the whim of other nation states and the central banks and treasurers of those
other nation states.
So I think this is why El Salvador was the first mover when it comes to nation state
adoption because they're smart enough to realize what the first mover advantage is at this
scale.
Yeah, and actually, I don't know if you have time to share, but you just came back from
El Salvador, right?
So you were there for that massive announcement, Bitcoin city, pretty much no taxes except
sales tax, right?
No capital gains, no property tax.
How was your trip and what's your response to that announcement?
Yeah, it was interesting.
El Salvador is still a fairly tense place.
It's probably one of the rougher countries that I've ever visited, still plenty of security
threats and issues in the country.
And there's a lot of skepticism.
I can understand it because I would be skeptical of any government telling me, hey, you should
do this because it's good for you.
Also, just the history of El Salvador and their previous generations of governments.
I think a number of them were basically highly corrupt and exit scammed and stole a bunch
of money from the citizens and basically left without using it to actually help the citizens.
And so there are plenty of people who are skeptical and afraid that the same thing may
be happening now.
And basically what I just said last night is that this is a very interesting experiment.
There are plenty of ways that it could fail and we certainly as Bitcoiners want to see
it succeed so that I hope as many people as possible who have the resources and the time
can find some way to contribute to helping the efforts in El Salvador.
It's going to be a very important test case and there are lots of other countries who
are going to be watching and they're going to make decisions based upon the outcome of
what happens in El Salvador.
But even if it does fail, I think we should be focused on helping the citizens of El Salvador
to understand Bitcoin and its value proposition because my hope is that they will then understand
the value of self-custody so that even if the government does screw up, if something
goes horribly wrong with like Chivo, with the government run Bitcoin banking services,
that if the situation is such that a lot of El Salvadorans are self-custodying, then they
won't be as exposed to those risks even if there is a massive catastrophe at the government
level.
They will still be able to continue being sovereign Bitcoin users.
Yeah, no, totally.
So in 10 years, you would guess probably more nation states, right?
What do you think the market cap will be?
Absolutely.
So I have no idea.
One thing that I say commonly is that I don't necessarily believe that the value of Bitcoin
will continue going up, but I am 100% convinced that the value of fiat will continue going
down.
So make of that what you will.
Got it.
One Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin.
Got it.
Well, thank you so much, Jameson, for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Coin Stories.
I'd love to connect with you if you have questions or guest requests, so feel free to get in
touch on Twitter at Nat Brunel or Instagram at Natalie Brunel.
Take care until next time.