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Yo, yo, welcome to Crypto 101, the average consumer's guide to cryptocurrency.
This is Matthew Aaron.
And today we have on the professional cypherpunk, the creator of Statoshi and a person that
has almost 150,000 followers on Twitter, Mr. Jameson Lopp.
And Mr. Jameson Lopp has been on podcasts, on YouTube.
He did presentations, wrote articles, and I was thinking, what could Matthew Aaron ask
Jameson that hasn't been asked before?
And after listening to about a half a dozen interviews with him, I realized one thing,
nobody bothered to ask Jameson, Jameson, who are you?
What do you like?
Where were you born?
What do you do?
What do you think?
And why does that and how does that all relate to blockchain and your commitment to the cryptocurrency
and blockchain space and the future of it?
So that's what we're going to do here.
We're going to get to know Jameson a little bit better.
And hopefully at the end of this, you know a little bit about this man, Mr. Jameson Lopp.
But before that, please go to crypto101podcast.com, that's crypto101podcast.com.
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So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation and we will see you after the
show.
Jameson Lopp, welcome to crypto 101.
Glad to be here.
Thank you very much for spending some time with us and letting us get to know you a little
bit.
Sounds good.
So what I want to do today, Jameson, is this.
I have a little bit of an outline of where we want to go.
And I'll be honest, the first time that I heard Jameson Lopp was on the Tom Woods show
with the Bitcoin scaling debate with Roger Veer.
And at the beginning of that, I didn't know who Jameson Lopp was.
But at the end of that, I knew who Jameson Lopp was.
And he was a calm, thoughtful, responsible spokesperson for a certain side of the debate
of the Bitcoin scaling debate.
And at the end of that, I also knew who Roger Veer was and I would not go into that.
And I think that you really highlighted your personality and your temperament in that.
So after that, I just started going down the rabbit hole of different podcasts and different
things like that and starting to get to know your ideas of Bitcoin and your jobs and your
background, your history.
But we never really understood who is Jameson Lopp.
So what we would like to do today is go through who is Jameson.
Is that okay?
This will be a learning experience.
And then also, after we start talking about who is Jameson, we also want to start going
into what made Jameson who he is and what does Jameson think?
What does he think of the world?
What does he think of society?
What kind of world would Jameson want if he could make it right now?
And does Bitcoin fit into that or is Bitcoin only a means to get to where Jameson wants
to go?
And then after that, I would really like to talk a little bit about where is Bitcoin going
in the future and how can average people take advantage of Bitcoin?
And I got a couple of questions just the other day on our Facebook group that says, Matthew,
you have to find somebody that could tell us about the future of getting jobs, employing
and using and being involved with Bitcoin for the average guy that may be a bartender,
a truck driver or a plumber.
How does he transition to this world?
So I guess the first question is, Jameson, where were you born?
Where are you living?
What's up?
Well, I'm a native North Carolinian.
So East Coast, United States.
I think my heritage in North Carolina can be traced back to the late 1700s.
It's been a long tradition of mostly farmers on both sides of my family.
And a number of my family are still very rural folk.
I'm definitely like the most techie person on either side.
And I happen to be the third generation to go to UNC Chapel Hill.
And that has been an interesting journey that from a political standpoint, I've basically
run the whole gamut of grown up in a very conservative family, gone to a very liberal
higher education institution.
And then once I got out in the real world, I started turning more libertarian and then
eventually anarcho-capitalist.
So you were grown up in a conservative household, then you made the switch to maybe liberal
then to libertarian, now to you said anarchist.
And pretty much.
What was the spark to the change in ideology?
And did you clash with your parents?
Over the years, it started changing for me, I guess, around middle school when I started
getting more into science and the scientific method and logical reasoning and all of that
stuff.
And that's when I started clashing around sort of religion and a lot of those upbringings.
And then when I got to university, it was just such a very different atmosphere, different
types of thinking that that sort of molded me a little bit more.
Then I guess over the years, I felt like I was growing more disenfranchised with a lot
of the existing political systems and started looking for completely different alternatives.
Okay.
And so I'm asking this because this seems like that average person's dilemma.
My parents, my mom is a Trump supporter, I am not a Trump supporter.
I don't know if you are a Trump supporter or not, but she voted that way.
I did not.
And I'm not saying I was supporting Hillary, but we definitely had our back and forths
on Facebook and Twitter and all these things.
Did you ever have that point in your parents just look at you and go, you're crazy?
Oh yeah.
Though it was even more so with my grandparents because they were even more, you know, conservative
and they had a lot of older style thinking, I guess, you know, from, I mean my grandfather
was a World War II veteran.
So he grew up in a very different world and, you know, he still had a lot of those perspectives.
So there was a lot of clashing there, but these days I say, you know, I'm an equal opportunity
offender and I'll say things that can simultaneously piss off both liberals and conservatives.
Very nice.
So when you say you're an equal opportunity offender, what does that mean and what kind
of ideology do you have that is Jameson Lopp?
And why is it different from what we live in now?
Being an anarcho-capitalist to be more specific because some anarchists are actually really
authoritarians.
But it really, for me, fundamentally goes back to the non-aggression principle.
And this is sort of like a moral route upon which I build the rest of my ideologies, which
is that, you know, you should not tolerate aggression against yourself and you should
not aggress against other people.
And you know, that is a very fundamentally different way of thinking than really any
of the modern political ideologies.
Basically these days with all of the hierarchical nation-state systems, it's a top-down enforcement
of like, we're going to fix the world and we're going to make it better and we're going
to do that by threatening certain people with punishment if they do things that we as a
society have generally decided that we do not like.
Okay.
With what you said, I like the non-aggression, but you are a avid Second Amendment enthusiast
or what have you.
How does non-aggression and the right to bear arms and the right to defend yourself, I guess
it's only that you won't strike first, but you have the means to defend yourself as somebody
did.
Correct.
Are guns part of the aggression as well as the non-aggression?
Well, yes.
Like any tool, it can be used for good or evil, can be used for, you know, offensive
or defensive measures.
And so, you know, there's a lot of vilification around these tools because of how some people
use them and as a result people want to, you know, fix the problem and they want to try
to fix that by controlling the tools.
But really what you find is that gun control just means that we centralize the control
of guns into the authorities, you know, the agents of the state as it were.
I would be all in favor of gun control if it meant that nobody could have guns, at least
in a general standpoint.
Of course, then you can also make pretty good arguments that guns are in fact an equalizer,
especially if we're talking about people who are less physically advantaged.
And so, you can in fact see that there are organizations like, I think it's called like
the Pink Pistols or something, which is a like LBGTQ pro-firearm organization where
they say things like, you know, we as, you know, sort of disadvantaged minorities who
get harassed a lot can defend ourselves by carrying these firearms and similar things
like with women, for example, who can defend themselves against men who would very easily
physically overpower them if they really wanted to.
You can really, you can take it both ways, but I think one of the main issues that comes
up in a lot of these debates around politics is that there are some people, probably the
majority of people, who believe that, you know, we can make the world better by laws
and, you know, crime and punishment, right, is, you know, if you have the right set of
punishment for bad behavior, then you make the world a better place.
And generally, the anarchist ideals get misconstrued as anarchists saying that the world will become
a utopia if we get rid of a lot of the nation-state apparatus.
That is not the claim.
The claim is just that the fundamental, like, morality of the way that the world operates
will be in a voluntary nature.
And of course, there's a lot of things that would have to change in order for us to have
voluntary interactions and to replace a lot of the current nation-state apparatus, but
I think that we're getting there.
Technology is making it easier to automate a lot of these things.
And, you know, Bitcoin and blockchains are a part of that.
I'm glad you touched on a lot of those things.
The first thing I want to say is about the firearms.
I understand where you're coming from with the guns.
It's a defense mechanism for people who are maybe less physically advantaged or what have
you.
But then again, there's always the saying that says, guns don't kill people, people
kill people.
Well, planes don't go traveling, but people go traveling.
But these technologies are made to make these things more efficient, traveling more efficient
because of planes.
You know, phones don't call my mom.
I call my mom.
If I can do that via Skype because of, thank you, the internet technology.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people, but this technology makes it really efficient
to kill people.
Yep.
Yes.
I mean, that's completely true.
And so, you know, why would we want this efficient killing technology to only be in the hands
of quote unquote law enforcement officials or, you know, military officials?
I believe that it's better to have power as distributed as possible rather than concentrated
as possible.
And power, of course, can come in many forms, you know, with Bitcoin, we talk about distributing
power over sort of the monetary system.
Distribute that as far as possible, allow people to be sovereign in their power, controlling
their own money.
I basically want to see that type of model for all types of power so that it's as dispersed
as possible and therefore as difficult as possible to be abused on a large scale.
Beautiful.
I like that.
So now you brought in distribution of power with the firearms, distribution of power with
money.
What kind of world does Jameson Lopp envision and see himself living in in the future?
I mean, I am striving to bring crypto anarchy to the world.
The idea that we can use cryptography to secure our interactions and make them not tamperable.
So my perfect world is one in which you can engage in, you know, voluntary commerce and
communication and, you know, exchange of ideas and value without having to worry about what
some third party authority might do in response to that.
What are other ways you think that we need to be decentralized or there has to be more
checks and balances of power in what other aspects of society?
And is Bitcoin the one that starts the fire of making people understand it or is it the
actual tool to get this done?
It may be some of both.
I mean, basically ever since the beginning of Bitcoin, there have been crypto anarchists
and anarcho-capitalists who have dreamed of a long term vision in which the disruption
of nation state issued currencies actually brings about the death of both the welfare
state and the sort of war state, the military industrial complex.
So you know, there are some pretty good arguments to be made that it is in fact like debt and
central bank manipulation of currencies plus, of course, taxation that really enables nation
states to go to war with each other, which has devastating consequences for humanity
and results in hundreds of millions of people getting killed.
So that's a sort of utopistic outlook that, you know, perhaps the liberation of money
away from nation states will in fact be a huge strangle or disincentive for them to
expend billions and billions of dollars on weapons of destruction.
And so blockchain is going to change that how?
Part of the idea, of course, with blockchain just as a data structure is that it's providing
you with a source of truth and, you know, a historical record that does not require
trust in any third party.
So what a lot of these current systems do is that they're using trust in a third party
who specializes in doing one thing to then be more efficient and basically command other
parties to act in certain ways.
So when you start to think of those sort of trust points in the hierarchy as the middleman,
then using these decentralized technologies, which are very good at eliminating middlemen,
that's really, I think, where the value add comes in.
And so whenever there's someone who's maintaining, you know, a trusted record of something and
basically controlling flows of data, whether that's like data coming up through the hierarchy
or coming down from up top, then we may be able to replace them with blockchain, with
smart contract, with some sort of automated program that everyone agrees to and can be
audited and is basically trustworthy because no one trusts it.
Right.
What would this world, what would this technology look like in a normal everyday average American
or Western or any family in the world?
Well, I mean, I think that it's going to have to be pretty much under the hood, you know,
just like how a lot of internet and communications technologies work right now.
So, you know, one not so hard to believe or contrived example of like a decentralized
autonomous organization would in fact be a taxi company.
So it's not hard to think of a fairly near future wherein there's a taxi company that
owns a bunch of self-driving cars and these cars are going around and picking up fares
and they're collecting cryptocurrency from the fares and then they're driving themselves
to refueling stations or maintenance stations or what have you and sort of engaging in this
entire cycle all by themselves, creating, you know, their own little economy.
And then when you look up one level to say, okay, well, you know, where's the command
and control aspect of this, like where's the owner operator who's telling all these taxis
what to do?
Well, it's actually a piece of software, potentially a smart contract, potentially some other,
you know, just software running on some servers that is executing all of these commands and
managing what the fleet of taxis are doing.
So you can kind of take that example and apply it in a number of different places in a more
abstract level.
Right.
I kind of feel that there's going to be a perpetual motion of wealth generation in the
future.
I mean, we have these companies like Datum or these companies that you're going to try
to link to your Facebook and your Google and what have you to control your data.
And you're going to have internet of things in all your appliances and what have you.
So everything that you can touch, do by waking up the morning, going through your day can
actually generate some sort of revenue, some sort of data, some sort of thing that you'll
be able to monetize and move it to companies or blockchain or this, that or the other thing.
And then maybe even taking the taxi, where does he go?
Why did he get there?
How long did it take him to get there?
What cryptocurrency did he pay with?
It was Litecoin or Ethereum, Bitcoin, what have you.
I feel that it might just, society might move in a way where you're always generating revenue
with your data and your involvement into society.
Do you think that that could be the case?
And what would that mean for the average person?
And if you don't, why is that a bad idea?
I haven't thought too much about the sort of day to day stuff or how that would be revenue
generating.
I usually think of it more on the standpoint of what is your particular specialty or your
expertise and how can you automate that?
How can you take whatever skills are valuable to you and have something that is making use
of them, basically running 24 seven and making you money while you're sleeping.
One of the interesting aspects of being a software engineer is that I can project my
will out into the world.
I can write these instructions for how I want to manipulate data or execute certain ideas
and then computers can basically be doing that on my behalf 24 seven 365.
So that's kind of like going back to the taxi example I brought up is, okay, I have an idea
for a business.
So I want to run a taxi business, but I don't want to actually spend all of my time running
a taxi business.
I want to figure out how to codify my idea of the business and then have computers actually
execute the business itself.
So perhaps that type of concept can be used once we have the ability to run these new
types of programs that give us better operational security and can really be their own organizations
and this can potentially get even crazier when you start talking about machine learning
and artificial intelligence and all of the things that computers are going to be better
and better at doing.
Right.
Jameson, I'm going to take this back a little bit and just go a little less serious.
You have 142,000 followers on Twitter.
At one point, did you wake up in the morning and go, holy shit, I have 142,000 followers
on Twitter?
Well, 2017 was pretty crazy.
Once I got over 100,000, it started being just hard to believe, but I think it was really
just following the hype cycle there in 2017 and for whatever reason, I must have picked
up the attention of a few bigger players in the space.
I think like Naval Ravikant, for example, and actually Jack Dorsey at Twitter and some
other big folks like that.
All I can really guess is that somehow their listening and following me extended my reach.
I might have gotten a few retweets here and there from them, which really exploded the
following.
It's really tapered off a lot though.
After the recent correction, at the peak of it, I was getting more than 1,000 followers
every day and at this point, I think it's a few hundred followers a day.
I expect the same thing to keep happening with future hype cycles just in general as
more people start coming into the space and then some of them go to Twitter or other social
media and start looking for the folks who are saying interesting things to follow.
Whether that's from investing standpoint or ideological standpoint or whatever, it gets
people into crypto in the first place.
I think this is still just the beginning.
Even the most popular folks in crypto, I think Charlie Lee is kind of leading follower scoreboards
these days.
I think he's getting like 700,000 plus and I've spoken to him.
I'm like, dude, how do you get that many?
He's like, I don't know.
I just talk to a lot of people.
He seems to think that it's just engagement of... Basically, the more time you spend
on Twitter, the more folks you interact with, the larger your reach becomes.
As long as you're not posting really crappy, low-grade stuff, then there's going to be
people who are interested in all different aspects of the crypto ecosystem.
With how many followers you have, do you feel that you have this new responsibility when
you communicate on Twitter?
A little bit.
I mean, I changed my tone a little bit a few years ago.
In the early days of the scaling debate, I was pretty angry.
I was frustrated that I felt like the experience of Bitcoin was changing for the worse and
that Bitcoin was stalling out on the innovation front.
I was frustrated with some of the moderation actions that were happening on different forums.
I became a big supporter of Bitcoin XT and I actually was a moderator of the Bitcoin
XT subreddit and I did that for at least six months until eventually I realized that basically
what had happened was we had created this new community of extremely negative, pessimistic,
unhappy people and it was just creating its own negativity cycle.
I got fed up with that and distanced myself from it and tried to just be more optimistic
in general over the past few years.
I think that that may be one of the reasons why my follower count has gone up a lot more
is because I try to avoid engaging in vitriol and hate and mudslinging and just the general
negativity that a lot of people seem to hold.
I think it's not very productive and it certainly upsets some people that they kind of see it
as like a group think or double think and sometimes an example of this would be, oh,
the price is up, well, that means Bitcoin's doing great and adoption is awesome and we're
going to the moon.
Oh, the price is down, oh, it means Bitcoin's on sale, we can buy more and we'll just wait
for it to go back up again.
That type of double think can be off-putting for some people but I think that optimism
in general is an important part of the community cohesiveness and that what we're doing here
is we have these very interesting technical innovations but there's also some very fascinating
sociological phenomenon that is going on and that is part of the reason why you see so
much clashing between different subsets of these ideologies but really what we're doing
is we're trying to build a community and an ecosystem and having some self-reinforcing
memes and inside jokes and all this other stuff is one important aspect of that.
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Now, back to the show.
What things upset you in terms of the space, companies, ideas, people?
It's very easy to get frustrated by things that you don't like, especially because no
one actually has control over any of the aspects of these systems.
This actually kind of goes back to the difference in political systems of, you know, basically
with a lot of the political systems, these representative democracies that we see all
over the world, when people get upset, they lash out and, you know, yell at their legislators
and basically try to pressure them to change things.
And so we saw similar types of political actions and rhetoric happening inside Bitcoin over
the past few years.
And really, like all of those things pretty much failed because Bitcoin doesn't work like
that.
There are no authorities that control it, as much as you might hear, you know, various
fod about Blockstream or AXA or Bilderberg or whatever, like there are no entities that
have control over these networks.
And it's, you know, it's so convenient to come up with some scapegoats so that people
can rally around and hate on those scapegoats and, you know, create their own echo chambers.
But that's just not how it works.
It is a very distributed system of individuals and these individuals cannot be coerced to
do certain things against their will.
It really is a different method of finding consensus.
And so that's kind of what led me to take more of a Zen approach.
And I really, I outlined a lot of my philosophy there in the article that I wrote called Nobody
Understands Bitcoin.
I think that you kind of have to take that approach that, you know, none of us really
know what Bitcoin is.
We're still exploring and trying to figure out and the system is kind of emerging over
the years as we begin to learn more about, you know, how we can interact with it.
So there's a lot of people who are experimenting and trying different things, technical things
or social things.
They're basically poking the system and trying to see if they can manipulate it in certain
ways.
But I think there's no point in getting upset about any of this, even if you think that
someone is doing some sort of action that is completely reprehensible.
I mean, sure, you can yell at them on Twitter or Reddit or whatever.
But I think that ultimately that is not going to have much of an effect.
You're just going to be wasting your time.
What is something that you love in this space?
The community has become one of my best networks of friends and like-minded people.
It's become this, you know, common thread with people all over the world where I have
I've done more traveling in the past few years than I've done in my entire life.
It transcends, you know, nation states, borders, cultures, what have you.
You can be from any type of background and have some aspect of these crypto systems that
gets you interested.
And it doesn't all have to be one thing and it doesn't have to be a libertarian ideology.
You know, you might be in some third world country that just has a really, really terrible
currency.
And so you now have a great incentive to get involved in something that has basically positioned
itself as your escape hatch.
Cool, man.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't bring this up.
Hey, congratulations on the new job.
Thanks.
Yeah, technically today was my first day, so I've got to dive in head first.
Do you want to tell anybody about the new company or the new job?
Sure.
Well, I guess you could say I'm a partner in CASA, which is a new cold storage, non-custodial
multi-sig solution.
We're starting with Bitcoin.
We'll potentially add a few others once we feel like we get the initial concepts up and
running solidly.
But the general idea being that it's actually straightforward to get the ultimate security
in Bitcoin.
All you have to do is take the private keys offline and never let them touch the internet.
And once you do that, you bring it into the realm of physical security, which is a pretty
well understood problem.
So that enables people to quote unquote be their own bank.
But there's a reason we have banks, and that's because very few people want to go through
all of the measures that you really have to do to have good physical security.
So at CASA, we are building a 305 multi-sig solution.
And the idea is that CASA will hold one of those keys as a recovery mechanism.
You're going to hold three keys on separate hardware signing devices, preferably separate
companies and brands.
And then you'll have one key in a trusted execution environment, like a secure element
on your phone.
And you'll run a mobile app on the phone, which can then use these other hardware devices
to actually sign.
But the idea being that you keep all of these keys in geographically separate locations
so that A, a hacker can't get in and take them because they're not actually connected
to the internet.
And B, even if a physical attacker came to you, then it's going to be very, very difficult
and time consuming to actually go and round up all of the keys.
Especially if you're holding them, you might hold one or two in a bank itself.
So we're trying to bring that level of bank security to people who have so much crypto
wealth that they want something that is better than a bank, but they also don't want to spend
days and days of actually going through onerous security procedures in order to secure the
private key material.
We feel like the hardware wallets that are out on the market do a very good job of that.
We just need to leverage them with the right software and the right user flow to allow
people to set up and manage these keys in a fashion that a fairly normal human should
be able to follow directions.
I really, really hope I have that problem one day, that I have so much cryptocurrency
I need to look for you guys to help me with that.
And anybody in particular you guys are going to be reaching out to, to put their crypto
in there?
Twinkle Vosses, Brock Pierce, Roger Veer?
Well we have already had quite a few people reach out to us, so I think that we shouldn't
have to do too much marketing.
I think that we've stumbled upon sort of a gap in the marketplace for this type of offering.
So it sounds like they're probably going to come to us.
Cool man.
Cool.
Well congratulations on that and good luck with your new project.
Thanks.
I had a question on Facebook the other day and a couple guys asked, how do average people
get into Bitcoin or blockchain or start getting employed in the crypto space?
For the average person who might not be skilled in coding or doesn't have a technical background
but really wants to start looking at a career in blockchain, what would you suggest?
Well there are definitely, as more companies come into the space then there are more non-technical
positions available, so there's definitely a big demand for recruiters right now but
also just more traditional aspects of business like accounting and HR and marketing and what
have you and in fact I recently added a new section to my Bitcoin resources list which
is crypto careers and I think there's at least like half a dozen different sites out there
that are dedicated to different job listings.
So while I think the technical positions are still probably in order of magnitude greater
in number than non-technical, that is more of an indication of how early we are in the
stage that we're still in the early building stages where the folks who are most in demand
are the builders.
So one of the questions I've been getting more often is how do I become a programmer
so then I can then become a blockchain developer and that is something that I think there's
not really a simple answer to.
There are various programming courses that you can take online or boot camps that are
a couple of months but those are generally like learn how to do web programming classes
whereas to actually get into doing crypto financial stuff especially if you're at the
protocol level you really shouldn't be doing that unless you've got at least like a four-year
computer science degree if not like a master's or PhD because that level of software engineering
is more analogous to like aerospace engineering than to web development.
It's a lot less forgiving.
You need to be much more of a perfectionist in order to build these type of systems so
that they don't get exploited.
And your site is lop.net, l-o-p-p dot net right?
Yeah.
Cool.
I think people are going to start checking that out right and they hear that they're
like oh careers all right.
Just a question about the space in like apps and things like that, maybe this is too direct
but why does everything suck?
I mean I don't know what the problem is.
Is the problem the technology or is it a problem with the developers?
Because besides like maybe Exodus wallet everything looks horrible, is not user friendly, but
you have like an app store on iTunes or Google Play that have beautifully designed apps and
games and things like that that are working properly and then somebody downloads a wallet
and they're like this isn't the future?
What?
So where's the disconnect between things that are happening on the blockchain, even these
companies that are coming out they're raising hundreds of millions or billions of dollars
and the people and the user interface.
Well there is a little bit of a disconnect simply because the underlying technology is
a lot less forgiving and you can run into edge cases where if the developer didn't think
about these edge cases ahead of time then it can very easily end in you having like
a wallet that basically gets stuck.
What is an edge case?
So basically a like specific scenario where the user performs an action and potentially
like the data tied to their wallet or their account or what have you is in a state that
the developers did not consider.
So one example of this would be something that I've seen many times over the years where
a user creates a wallet that receives thousands and thousands of tiny little transactions
over the years and then they go to spend it and their wallet tells them they have say
a balance of 10 bitcoins and they say okay I want to spend these 10 bitcoins and they
try to spend it and the wallet just fails.
It tries to create a transaction and it says you know can't do it and it's not obvious
to the user what's going on because the wallet's telling them their balance is 10 bitcoins
but what they don't understand and what the wallet isn't communicating to them is that
under the hood there are various limits where you can only create a transaction that has
you know so many hundred inputs at a time and so you know their actual balance that
they can spend in one transaction is more like half a bitcoin and so I think that's
one of the main disconnects in the traditional financial system if you have a certain amount
of money then that's how much you have and you can send it and if you want to send it
all at once you can probably do that but in these systems you know it's a completely different
data structure under the hood and the network itself will not allow certain actions to happen.
So that's one cause of it.
I think another cause is just that a lot of the folks who are getting into it early in
the game tend to be the nerdier like backend type engineers at least you know that's what
I am.
That's what I think.
The vast majority of us at BitGo were more of the backend coders and we started to hire
more front-end design folks but only really in the past year or so.
So I think it's you know it's gonna get better as the ecosystem grows and matures you'll
start hiring more designers who are thinking more like the web app developers and mobile
app developers but even then you know they're gonna need to get trained to understand what's
going on under the hood in order to actually translate this into a user experience that
is manageable.
Right.
A couple of general questions.
What is Jameson listening to reading and watching these days?
Well mostly Twitter.
Just Twitter.
What's on your Spotify?
So I actually I do not really listen to music much anymore.
I used to back in the day but these days if I'm listening to anything then it's probably
going to be some sort of presentation whether it's like Andreas' latest presentation because
he pumps those out pretty often or the occasional podcast.
I mean there's so many podcasts today that I can't you know even listen to a tiny fraction
of them.
My standby is let's talk Bitcoin.
Andreas does a really good job distilling a lot of complex concepts and that's you know
something that I am always aiming to be better at.
So you know if he comes up with a great way to explain some concepts then I'm absolutely
gonna steal it and then use it to you know continue to help spread the Bitcoin mind
virus across the world and hopefully if I say something interesting that is also good
then he'll steal whatever I said and use that and you know we're all just trying to build
off of each other's work here.
Right on man.
Right on.
That's cool.
If somebody was coming into the crypto space and this was the first podcast they listened
to because Crypto 101 is great with that in the SEO it's like they say hey Crypto 101
hey and we pop up so they start listening so it's very possible this could be the first
podcast they listen to.
What would you want them to know about getting into the crypto space and how would you want
them to conduct themselves?
So one of the main things is that this is kind of a wild west because it's so new and
people are just coming up with new ideas and you can make a strong argument that the whole
thing is still an experiment but also because there's no authority there are certainly quote
unquote thought leaders and authority figures and whatnot but really none of them actually
have any power over the system.
They might have some sort of social media influence but because no one really controls
the system you have to realize that this is an open collaborative project and that's the
reason why I got into it initially it was just from the high level of saying you know
what is money?
You know money is this concept that I think belongs to humanity at large and as such humanity
at large should have input into how money works.
So anyone who actually cares enough to contribute their time and their resources into saying
you know I believe that money should work in this way they should be able to do that.
You know we shouldn't have the aspects of our monetary system dictated to us by some
authority who claims to you know know how to run the economy or what have you.
So because of that everyone should realize that like their input matters.
You shouldn't allow someone to make appeals to authority whether that's you know saying
oh you know Satoshi's vision was this or whether it's saying you know Andreas Antonopoulos's
vision is this or Jameson Lopp's vision is that.
No what matters is your vision.
You know what do you think the attributes of a sound monetary system should be?
Well let us know like if it's something different than what everyone else is saying then you
should contribute and you can contribute from a code standpoint you can contribute from
a social standpoint.
Like one of the reasons that I think that sort of crypto Twitter and the other social
networks are so on fire all the time is that what we're really trying to do is come to
consensus.
We're constantly trying to find the you know human meat space consensus of what this monetary
system should be like.
Eventually that gets turned into code but the fundamental you know underpinnings of
the code are in fact the wills of the humans that are involved in the system.
Thank you for that answer but it brings me to another question.
The question is how does somebody let me frame this.
I didn't know about the monetary system that I think is important until I moved abroad.
I'm calling you from Taiwan right now and it wasn't until I needed to start getting
money from the states into China when I was living in China and then it wasn't until I
had to get the money out and it wasn't until I spent time in Hong Kong and saw a lot of
the Filipino workers there try to get money back to their home and then the government
trying to tax the money that they've been taxed on already in the Hong Kong trying to
send back to their family tax it again as income and then I didn't really understand
again and this is just a recent evolution of how important cryptocurrency is and how
functional it is until I started having bloggers and editors and people around the world honestly
and I had to start sending them funds and interacting with them.
So how does somebody from maybe their life start actually putting the importance of this
monetary system and start framing it and moving it forward?
Yeah well I mean you've basically described the sort of organic nature that brings certain
people into the system and that's why I think the growth of the system should not so much
be current users and insiders evangelizing the system but rather it should be the engineers
who are building it and then creating utility for the people who are experiencing the pain
points you know with the existing traditional systems so that they search out for alternatives.
So I mean it sounds like that's basically how you got into it is that you know you encountered
so much friction and so many different pain points that you started looking for alternative
payment systems and it just so happened that some of them existed.
So I kind of I want this to continue to grow organically because I'm actually a little
bit worried with like the recent bubble.
We may have you know overhyped and overextended a bit because you know to be honest if crypto
went completely mainstream tomorrow where like you know everybody around the world started
using these systems then it just wouldn't work.
I mean none of these systems have the technical capability at the moment of actually offloading
all of the activity the economic activity from traditional networks.
So I think that it is important that you know we continue to grow you know one bubble at
a time as it were.
So if something does bring a person into this space then once you actually get into it I
think it's important to learn the history of how we got to where we are today because
if you don't do that you're going to inevitably repeat the mistakes of history that is you
know you know you're gonna go and and try different things or recommend different things
that have been done a thousand times before.
So from that standpoint I actually I think I have a section once again on my website
that's like crypto history and I think one of the first parts of that is the historical
article I wrote about the cypherpunk movement you know going all the way back to the 80s.
What is a cypherpunk?
The cypherpunks were basically a bunch of nerds in Silicon Valley in the 80s who were
very privacy conscious and they saw you know the rise of the internet starting to happen
and they realized that the internet was actually horribly horribly open and transparent in
terms of privacy.
Basically there was no privacy on the internet and they foresaw you know a sort of dystopian
Orwellian future where everything that you were doing was was getting surveilled because
of how easy that was and so they really committed themselves to building privacy enhancing technologies
and that resulted in things like PGP and SSL and a lot of the encryption technologies that
are commonly used today and along with these other encryption technologies there were folks
who were trying to build digital money and so there were in fact probably dozens of different
digital monies created over the decades and they all failed generally because they were
all centralized and had single points of failure and then of course eventually in 2008-2009
Bitcoin comes along and if you look at the history a lot of the cypherpunks actually
dismissed it.
They said oh this has been tried before it's going to fail for this reason and that reason
and whatever and so you know when Bitcoin came out it was not this widely heralded amazing
thing in the eyes of the cypherpunks it was just another project that was probably doomed
to failure so it in fact kind of became the unicorn and became the one that succeeded
and we've been working on it for what nine years now and now it is actually spawned this
entire ecosystem just off of the few fairly simple ideas that were put together by Satoshi
Nakamoto.
Besides the ecosystem that it's spawned is it actually a good technology?
Something that's going to be used in the future?
The idea is there the idea and seen it implemented but is Bitcoin the future?
Well yeah I mean the question I think becomes like is Bitcoin the my space of cryptos and
so you know will it get supplanted by a superior network essentially and I think that like
social network or music sharing technology analogy doesn't really work as well because
while Bitcoin is a sort of social network of sorts it is fundamentally a protocol and
so what you're really asking is you know will this protocol get supplanted by a new protocol
and from that standpoint I think it's important to once again look at history and see like
the history of networking protocols and how those have changed over the years and if you
look at them actually what tends to happen with popular protocols is that they ossify
they kind of freeze and people stop changing them because they don't want to break anything
and so you can look at you know HTTP for example or SMTP the email protocol these things have
not changed I think in 20 years and they are not perfect they you know they could be improved
but at this point they're so widespread that rather than anyone trying to improve at the
protocol level they're improving it on layers above that protocol.
So I think that a similar type of evolution is going to happen with crypto asset protocols.
Very good point.
Very very good point.
Who's a person or a project that you would tell people to pay attention to in the space?
Well I'm highly biased but you know my answer is generally going to be pay attention to
the cypher punks and so that doesn't mean just Bitcoin folks.
When I'm looking at technical privacy conscious individuals who I believe are vicious in terms
of ripping apart ideas and yet polite in terms of you know having social interactions those
are the type of people that I want to see building this technology and so you know I
respect a lot of the folks who contribute to Bitcoin core I respect a lot of the folks
who contribute to Zcash and Monero I'm a big fan of the contributors to Memble Wemble and
Lightning for me it's more about A are the people smart but B do they hold the ideals
you know the same values that I have and can they communicate and collaborate and so as
a result you know there are people and projects out there that I believe don't hold the same
ideals and they aren't as good at collaborating or communicating in adult fashions so I try
to just avoid them you know I don't want to waste my time arguing with them or telling
them that they're bad people or anything I just want to spend my time collaborating
with the people that I think are going to take us to that crypto-anarchy vision that
I'm holding in my head and trying to bring into reality Jameson thank you very much for
coming on the show and thank you very much for the hour of your time to sit here and
a couple Skype drop calls so we have to recall a couple times that pesky internet it's so
complicated and unreliable feels only on the blockchain have a good night I hope to talk
again will do been a pleasure all right brother bye
thank you very much for listening to this episode of crypto 101 I'm not gonna take much
more of your time because already been about an hour Jameson if you're listening thank
you very much for coming on the show it was a pleasure and an honor to talk to you also
like always apogeecrypto.com this site is not only checking your prices you can also
go on there and see your charts track your portfolio you can get links to the coins websites
and Twitter's and Instagram's and whatever all from this site your favorite podcasts
are there your favorite YouTube's are there also if you want your crypto news go to whenmoon.co
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check out their sites and if you haven't heard Aaron Paul on ICO 101 check it out a crypto
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next episode of crypto 101