Hi everyone. Just a reminder that this show is not legal advice, trading advice, financial advice, or personal advice. Enjoy the show and thank you very much. This show is sponsored by NetSuite, a robust all-in-one system to optimize your business. Sorry to interrupt. I just had to pop in and tell everybody about Crypto 101's Johnny's Guide to Cryptocurrency is now available for sale. Pick up a copy of anywhere you enjoy buying your books from. Amazon, Kindle, Paperback, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Paperback, iTunes, Ebook, and much more. You can even pick it up using Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin. Find the link in the description below and pick up your copy today. Yo, yo, welcome to Crypto 101, the average consumer's guide to cryptocurrency. This is Matthew Aaron. And imagine a SWAT team busting down your door, coming into your house. What would you do? Would you practice living anonymously, creating an anonymous ID so nobody could find you? Well, back for his second time on the show, Mr. Jameson Lopp had to do just that. And he's gonna tell us about that plus a whole lot more in this episode of Crypto 101. We go through his journey of creating an anonymous life, a bit of anarcho-capitalism 101, his vision of the future of crypto security, and a whole lot more. And it was an amazing conversation. So please stick around for this conversation. It's a must listen to. But before that, please go to crypto101podcast.com. There you're gonna see a pop-up on our website and it's a link to our book. Click the link, pick up the book. Also follow us on our social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, to see what's going on in the Crypto 101 world. And go to iTunes and subscribe, leave us a rating and a comment. It helps a lot. Think about becoming a patron. Patrons, thank you for supporting us. And if you are a patron for more than six months, please check out the Patreon page. Go there, click the link. You get a copy of Crypto 101's Chinese Guide to Cryptocurrency for being a patron for over six months. As a way to say, thank you. Now without further ado, here's Mr. Jameson Lopp. We'll see you after the show. Jameson Lopp, welcome back to Crypto 101, sir. Good to be here. How have you been doing? It's been about eight months since we spoke last. What have you been up to? Oh, you know, just completely changing my life and burning my old life and starting all over again from scratch. Well, that's a big statement. What does that mean? What is changing your whole life and burning your old life? Besides, I saw that you deleted your Facebook. What's been going on? I moved out of the house that I built 10 years ago and had been living in and basically recreated all of my accounts and property ownership and everything that was tied to my identity, recreated it through legal entities that protect my privacy and have basically rethought every aspect of my life from a privacy standpoint in order to try to prevent any future physical attacks against me. This all stems from that one incident back over a year ago? Yeah, it was basically the swatting incident in October of 2017 that resulted in my whole neighborhood getting locked down and bringing unwanted attention to myself. That's insane. Can you tell us a little bit about that story or what happened? I know that if people follow you on Twitter, they definitely know this story, but if they don't, they have to hear the story. Yeah, if you want all of the details, I have a post on my Medium blog that is basically a minute-by-minute recounting of that day because it was fairly interesting. But suffice to say that I was going about my normal Monday routine and was at the gym and came back home and couldn't get into my own neighborhood because the police had blockaded it. And it took a few minutes, but eventually we figured out that they were actually there to go to my house because they thought that I had killed a bunch of people and was holding other people hostage. So thankfully it all ended without them storming into my house or anything since I was the one who actually ended up approaching the police. And we then figured out pretty quickly that it was some anonymous person who had called my local police department after routing their phone call through some throwaway services to prevent them from being tracked. And they were just trying to get a response from the police in order to scare me and then extort me and try to get me to give them a bunch of money so that they would not continue harassing me. Do you think that this was like a Twitter follower or somebody that's like a Bitcoin minimalist or like somebody that debates with you? Who do you think it was? They did not give any specifics for their motivation other than to say that they were trying to get money out of me, but they didn't try that hard to extort me. I think part of it was they may have just been upset with something that I said or they were jealous about something and trying to feel better about themselves by screwing with me. And there were a lot of other things that they could have done after that. And in fact, after it happened, I had a number of other people in the space privately reach out to me and tell me that they had been swatted or had all kinds of types of extortion and pranking basically happening to them. And so I learned about all of these other things that well-known people have to deal with in this space. Basically, as soon as an attacker can like find your personal information, they can start screwing with a lot of different things, even stuff like getting your power turned off to your house, screwing with your utility bills, even trying to like forge the deed to your house and sell it while you're still in it, all kinds of crazy stuff simply due to the lack of security around most of the services that we're used to using in our day-to-day lives. Man, I'm sorry that happened to you. It's scary. I'm really curious about the steps that you took to basically rebuild your life, an anonymous life. This is Cybersecurity Month of October. We just had two podcasts just about security. And I know this isn't in our outline or what we're supposed to talk about today, but would you mind just going through a couple steps if somebody wanted to have an anonymous life, what they could do? Yeah, and I also have a extremely long blog post that I published about a month ago on Medium where I talk about everything that I've learned over the past year and everything that I've instituted. And the tricky thing is that I can give advice that applies to like your digital life, securing your digital accounts and keeping your digital activities more private. But when we then start talking about your physical operational security and privacy, unfortunately in those cases, it often comes down to what jurisdiction you live in because different legal avenues will be available to you. So most of the stuff that I ended up writing about was of course relevant to the United States and living as a citizen there and the various options that we have with regard to setting up LLCs and trusts and other legal entities that you can use to basically shield your identity and create these legal firewalls and legal proxies that make it hard for the average person to penetrate through to find that your identity is the one behind them. Unfortunately, if you want to have extreme privacy like what I've done, you generally have to end up expending a lot of resources both in terms of time and research and often in legal and banking fees as well to set up all of these different things and even figure out what's available to you. How do you feel, man? I mean, you built the house 10 years ago. You just basically took your whole identity and threw it in the garbage. I mean, are you okay? Oh yeah, I mean, I was ready for a change anyways. And this whole thing has been kind of an adventure. You know, I've even gone so far as to stress test it and hire private investigators to try to find me. And so far so good, though one of the things that I talk about in my post is that when we're talking about privacy and security, there's no such thing as perfect privacy or perfect security. It's always a question of how difficult are you gonna make it? What level of resources will be required in order for an attacker to pierce through whatever protections you've set up? And so at the end of the day, nothing I've done would protect me from an agent of a state that has nation level resources behind them. But that's not really what I'm so worried about. I'm mainly worried about these random folks who they know their way around the dark net and they can hack their way in and out of systems and they can get access to various leaked databases. And so really from that standpoint, all I'm trying to do is make sure that my residents and that address is never put into any database along with my real name because I'm just operating under the assumption that every database that this information ever goes into is eventually gonna get leaked regardless of what security precautions that organization takes to try to prevent that from happening. And a link to your website, your medium will all be in the description. You guys have to, if you don't follow Jameson Lopp, please follow him on Twitter and read his post. Very, very good quality material there. But the icing on the cake to your transition to being anonymous was almost justified in your amusement park trip, wasn't it, the other day where you bought a ticket to an amusement park with an anonymous credit card and they didn't allow you in? What happened there? Yeah, and so this has been one of the other kind of adventurous aspects of taking my life down this path is that I've run into various roadblocks where you basically find that usually corporate bureaucracy and the sort of surveillance machine that's running behind a lot of corporations ends up kind of choking when you try to approach it from a privacy standpoint. And so basically I bought tickets to an amusement park recently and went online, made the purchase with a throwaway debit card and basically put in a disposable email address and billing address information when I actually purchased the ticket. And then I noticed that they never actually emailed me the ticket. I had the order confirmation, but unlike the other people that were attending the park with me, I did not receive the email with the actual ticket. So we get to the park and I go up to the check-in counter and give them my confirmation number and the lady looks at it and then she's like, I have to call a manager. So then the manager comes over and they start grilling me. They're like, what's your address? What's your phone number? What's your email address? I'm like, well, these are the ones that I used when I bought the ticket. And they're like, well, why didn't you put your real name on there and your real information? And I'm like, well, I value my privacy. And this was all kind of ridiculous because I was standing there and I was showing them my passport and I was giving them my fingerprint. They do biometric identification at a lot of theme parks now, at least in the United States. And so even after going through all of that, they said, it's our corporate policy that we have to cancel your ticket and refund you. And I was like, okay, so can I buy a new one? And they're like, oh yes, sure. So I take out my wallet and I give them a bunch of cash and then they just give me a new ticket. So this whole experience was just ridiculous. At the end of the day, I still managed to retain about as much of my privacy as I could have by just switching to cash payment. But their bureaucracy dictated that because their surveillance machine could not positively identify me and tie together all those bits of information that they deemed me too suspicious to sell the ticket to. That's logically just ridiculous. The mouse no likey, I guess, huh? Yeah, I mean, the only way I can figure, this is at least probably partially for other security purposes. At least in America, a lot of these places that allow large numbers of people into now have to worry about things like bombings and mass shootings and what have you. But they have huge levels of security when you try to get into them. You have to go through basically airport level security to get into any of these entertainment parks these days. Yeah, security in the parks is a big deal because in the United States, there is a problem with mass shootings or bomb threats and terrorism. And sadly, it's a lot of homegrown terrorism. Do you think that these precautions are needed? I mean, do you feel that all of these things that you had to go through with the burner card, the cash or what have you, even though the cash just makes no logical sense, do you think that the park should have these safety precautions in place? Well, morally, I believe that the owner of that park has the right to dictate whatever terms they wish upon the people who enter. So I don't have any particular right to complain that I should be able to bring my various means of self-defense into that park. It's kind of part of the contract that I'm agreeing to when I enter onto their land and agree to pay for the entertainment services that they're providing. But outside of that, I think that we would be a more robust society if people were generally more capable of defending themselves. Now, this gets into a really hairy situation and questions that people debate about a lot of, well, is an armed society a more polite society or a more robust society? Or is it just a society where people are more likely to kill each other because they are gonna pull out a weapon and use it without first resorting to other means of resolving a dispute? But if I'm following the general gist of how you create anti-fragile networks, then I would think that when you have a bunch of people or nodes or participants in a network or what have you that are basically coexisting with one another, but they can't defend each other, then it creates basically a honeypot for an attacker to go in and cause a lot of damage. And so that's why a lot of these attackers end up going to places that a large crowd of people who are known to have been disarmed and are not going to pose a threat to the attacker because they know they're gonna be able to basically rack up their hit count before they have to worry about someone who can actually defend themselves coming along and shooting back or what have you. So there is no perfect answer. Even if there was a situation where a certain number of people in a crowd were armed and some attacker came along, then there's no guarantee that there would not be basically friendly fire, of course, or casualties between two innocent people due to the fog of war or the chaos of battle or whatever you wanna call it. But I do think that at least from my own experience and having trained with the Krav Maga School and actually running a number of these scenarios where I was playing both attacker and innocent victim in large mass crowd situations, we found that there's no way that you can actually prevent an attacker from causing harm. But the sooner and faster there is some sort of violent response to an attacker and it doesn't even have to be with weapons, but any type of response that the attacker has to stop going on the offensive and has to switch to being on the defensive and that that in and of itself drastically reduces the loss of life. Without going into all of the details of what I've done, I think that any sort of ability to mount even the slightest defense against such an attacker causes them to have to slow down and ultimately reduces the total number of victims. Going back to what you said just at the beginning, you said that a park owner has the right to dictate the rules of his park or his business or what have you. In Ohio, and I don't know if in Virginia, smoking is illegal indoors, in bars and restaurants and what have you. Do you think that's an infringement of their rights as a business owner for the government to come in and say, people can't smoke in your establishment? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if you own a particular piece of land and establishment, then you should be able to dictate the terms of what people are doing in there. Now, I do understand taking this to the logical extreme and something that ends up becoming very controversial and pissing people off is that on a similar vein, I believe that it is the right of a business person to refuse service to someone. And by that, I mean arbitrarily. And that means that yes, it should be possible or should be legal at least for someone to be a bigot or a racist or sexist or what have you. Now, that I think is unconscionable. I don't think anyone should do that. And I don't think it makes logical sense to do that. Why would you pass up on profits and revenue from someone just because of the color of their skin or their genitals or whatever? I would hope that in an ideal society that that would be so illogical that very few people would do it. Or also that as the world becomes more interconnected and reputation is more easily spread and tarnished and what have you, that if someone decided that they wanted to have these type of business practices that make most people's stomachs turn, that that would result in more people shunning them and not doing business with them. But of course, this is all very gray area, murky type stuff, which is why when we talk about what is the ideal world, it's all subjective. There is no ideal world from any one perspective, but rather most of the way that I'm building up these ideas is upon a moral foundation of the non-aggression principle in that no one should be able to use violence or the threat of violence to force someone down a certain path or make certain decisions or do certain things. Talking about the ideal society, one of the political philosophies that you relate with is anarcho-capitalism. And anarcho-capitalism as defined by Alex Lalecker, I'm sorry if I'm getting his name wrong, on a blog post that I saw the other day is as follows. Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy that promotes the removal of a centralized state in favor of individual ownership, private property, and free markets. Anarcho-capitalists believe that the absence of statute society has the tendency to self-regulate through the discipline of the free market. Anarcho-capitalists also believe that instead of having centrally governed courts and law enforcement agencies paid through taxation, private companies chosen by the consumer could fulfill these roles by competing on open markets. Do you agree with that definition? In general, yes. Then what you end up talking about is how ideal of a society would this be? You then end up in many cases arguing with people about equality and whether that means equality of outcome or equality of really beginning of your interactions with other people. And I think one of the things that I generally try to impress upon people is that you read through definitions like this or just lofty wording of ideal outcomes. And I try to impress upon people that I don't think that there is any guarantee or even that a lot of people who push the philosophy of anarcho-capitalism believe that it is going to create a utopia by any means. I don't think that any type of philosophy or governance mechanism or lack of governance mechanism can ever fulfill all of the needs and wants and desires that everyone has and basically solve every problem that humanity has. Rather, like I said, this is more of a moral system where we're trying to build a society that is not based upon fear and violence. And it's definitely debatable and up in the air as to whether or not that's even possible. But as I think we'll talk about shortly, we do believe that some of the technologies that are being developed could help us get there. And that is the segue we needed right there. All societies are not gonna be perfect. We can all agree with that. I mean, I'm a Trekkie. I've watched Star Trek growing up, man. And that's the word I wanna live in. I guess that I'm really fascinated by anarcho-capitalism because it's the total opposite, I think, of Star Trek. Yeah, though there definitely could be similarities. So really the more interesting thing about Star Trek, I think, is that it's based upon them living in a post-scarcity society. And so what do you do when you live in a world where technological advancement has gone so far that everyone's basic needs can be met and then they can be free to fulfill their lives by doing absolutely anything or nothing at all? Interesting, interesting. Anyway, going into the blockchain version, because I know this is a crypto show. So talking about an anarcho-capitalist society or any society, in this blog, Alex said that trust is a key factor in making an anarcho-capitalist society a reality. Can you explain how this could work and why blockchain would be important maybe in just building any kind of better society in the future? Yeah, you could call it trust. I would call it reputation. So if you look at the way that society has progressed really over the past few thousand years, it's fairly logical how it's happened where we have created these hierarchies and the hierarchies are basically a command and control structure. And what that does is that allows more efficient means of basically controlling how large, macro aspects of society work and then having lower and lower levels through these hierarchies that do more and more specific things. And that is specifically talking about allowing for a specialization of skills, which if you specialize in one very, very narrow skill set, then you become exceedingly good and exceedingly efficient at it. And so if everyone is specializing in very narrow things, then as a society, as a whole, we can evolve and become more efficient and basically end up passing off a lot of our day-to-day needs to specialists who are taking care of various aspects of our lives, whether that is like the production of food or the storage of our valuable assets or the maintenance of our homes and our vehicles or whatever. And so we don't have to worry about a huge swath of our lives these days because we can pass it off to a specialist who can take care of it at a greatly reduced cost, which can then allow us to spend more time focusing on our own specialty and increasing our production and as a result, getting more money as a result of that and continuing this sort of positive feedback loop. But the result of all of this specialization and these hierarchical command and control systems is that we've created a society that's a lot more fragile, it has a lot more systemic risk in it so that when certain powerful aspects or organizations within the society start to do things that are harmful for most of the society because the incentives are there for them to basically be greedy and do stuff for themselves, that results in these big booms and busts in various sectors like we saw in finance and housing and whatnot. And so if we're able to replace a lot of that with a more distributed system where we can instead of just sort of implicitly trusting in these various powerful entities because they're the ones that have existed, they're the ones that have come into power, but rather trust in various entities and organizations because they have gained and maintained that trust and the rest of our peers agree that they are trustworthy, then hopefully we can create a society that is more robust and can allow greater competition so that if someone or some entity starts basically hurting their own reputation, then it's easier for a competitor to come in and replace them. But this is all very like vague, hand wavy, meta level thinking. If you wanna talk more specifically about doing this, then that's why I think like Bitcoin is something that's a lot easier to get your head around where we are trying to replace one very specific piece of functionality within society, which is money and the financial system. And this, in my opinion, it seems to be the place that a lot of us can focus our efforts on right now because I think that if we can get this right and if we can prove that this particular part of society can in fact be replaced in a way that is more fair and more open, then perhaps, just perhaps we can use that as a model to then replace other parts of society piece by piece. And I don't think that there's ever gonna be like one single point in history where all of a sudden we flip a switch and this all becomes reality. But rather, I do think it's gonna be a very long process that can take decades, if not generations, to slowly replace a lot of the pieces of society that are currently run by highly trusted and highly powerful governments and organizations that are very difficult to displace. And I think that's a great way to do it. So, I think that's a great way to do it. And now a word from our sponsor, NetSuite. Has your company outgrown QuickBooks? Are shared spreadsheets, manual processes and legacy systems costing you time and money? Now is the time for you to move your business to the cloud. Introducing NetSuite by Oracle, the business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy to use cloud platform. NetSuite, you can save time, money and unneeded headaches by managing sales, finance and accounting orders and HR instantly from your desk or even your phone. 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It's going to, it's changing, already changing the way we people think about how society can be constructed. And I'm kind of curious about what society looks like to you after 10 years or a generation or multiple generations, if everything is laid out, and I know this is a little bit Star Trek thinking, talking about a sci-fi in the future, but what would it look like to you? For me, I have the model of Star Trek. I have the post-scarcity society that as you said, I have flying through space, getting my food from a replicator, healthcare is free, everything's free. But what would your society look like if everything goes according to plan, according to Jameson Lopp's plan? So you know, the question of like, will everything be free? That gets into almost like a basic income or, you know. I guess I don't wanna say would everything be free. That's not my question. My question is, what would Jameson Lopp think? Would you still have to compete for the best healthcare? Would you still have to compete for the best job? Is competition among yourself or is it competition against your neighbor? And are there still, let's just say, poor people? Is there still poverty? Is that something that's needed in the construction of any global society? Let's just say to encourage people to keep moving forward. Yeah, I mean, I do think that there will always be quote unquote poor people and quote unquote rich people. But if you think about it, poor and rich is actually a relative term. And if you look at, you know, the definition of poor and rich people over the long term, over, you know, many generations and centuries, then a quote unquote poor person today, at least in a first world country, is far better off than the richest aristocracy was, you know, a few hundred years ago. And that is mainly due to technology and, you know, the effects of capitalism and competition. And so I do believe that it is important that we continue to have these elements of competition to incentivize people to continue trying to better themselves. Now, how will that change? I'm very hopeful that with the continual evolution of robotics and artificial intelligence and all of that, that, you know, the way that people compete changes. I certainly believe that any so-called blue collar jobs of today, any like manual labor type jobs, are not befitting of any human. Like no human should be performing repetitive physical motion as part of the way that they sustain themselves. Like that is, in my opinion, a complete waste of human resources. I believe that a human, our greatest resource is our mind and our creativity. And that, you know, as a result, one of these, whether it's a post scarcity society or just a highly advanced society where we have managed to continue to automate away a lot of these menial tasks, which, you know, of course, a lot of Luddites are gonna scream, you know, that those machines are going to, you know, get rid of a lot of jobs. I think that that's a good thing. Now, at least in the longterm, it's a good thing. We will have to deal with issues in the short term of, you know, job shock and retraining and what have you, because I think that the pace of technological innovation is going to continue to accelerate at a rate that is not possible for the average human to basically keep up with if we can't continue to find ways to keep people engaged. It very well may be that large portions of the population end up having to sort of be socialized because like, you know, we may even lose like an entire generation or two of people to the mechanization and, you know, artificial intelligence gains that happen. But over the long run, humans do adapt. And, you know, even within a matter of years, you know, humans can get completely retrained to be thinking about and specializing in completely different fields and industries. And so once again, there's no utopistic outcome here. There is always going to be conflict and strife, but I do believe that even despite a lot of the pain that is going to be felt at like a global level, that ultimately we will continue lifting humanity up, you know, by our own bootstraps as it were, so that each generation will successfully be in a better position than the one before it. That is at least assuming that we manage to get through the next few hundred years without completely destroying our planet and killing each other. I 100% agree with the repetitive motion in jobs like that. It's just, it really is not human. It's funny, my ICO 101 host, Aaron Paul, just tweeted probably just an hour ago of how people go into his job. And he's a general manager of a place that does repetitive motion. And people go in there and they say, hey, do you want to work here? They're like, yes. And they say, how many hours a week do you want to work? And they're like, yeah, we'll work 40, 45. When really they mean, and this is what he said, they mean they want to work 25 because, you know, doing that job is just, it just steals your soul, honestly. It steals your soul. But you said ways to get people engaged. And we're going to switch this over to Bitcoin and blockchain for a little bit because we hope I want to keep my listeners engaged since this is a Bitcoin blockchain cryptocurrency show. Moving into this future or the society, trustless or based off a reputation, what advances or steps are being made right now in crypto and in technological advancements to get us to where you see we need to go and developments of say wallets and decentralization in the technology? You know, this is something that I've been focused on for a number of years and that a lot of other people are also focused on is it's the technical aspects of building hardware and software that enables people to take advantage of the protocols and the systems that have been developed but that are still so complicated that the average user is never going to understand how they work but that's not the goal either because if you look at the way the internet has progressed, for example, almost nobody who uses the internet today knows how it works. They don't know what's going on under the hood but rather we've built so many layers of abstraction on top of this base set of protocols that a toddler can pick up a phone or a tablet now and start just poking around and exploring and figuring things out and entertaining themselves and educating themselves and, you know, making basically use of the entire sum of human knowledge that is now at their fingertips and this kind of goes back to what I was talking about, you know, retraining and issues there with kind of wage gaps and shocks and the labor market is that one of the reasons that I believe that it won't be as bad as it could have been if this had happened in an earlier age is because we now have this level of communications networking where knowledge is practically free, you know, for the cost of an internet connection, 10, 20, $30 a month, at least in the United States, hopefully less elsewhere. I think a number of countries actually provide internet access for basically free that now all you are really limited by is your own curiosity. Going into the internet a little bit, you said that the internet is built on layers and layers, so it's easy enough for even a toddler to use it. That's interesting because there's a lot of debates lately about Bitcoin. A lot of people coming out to say they're anti-Bitcoin, but internet debates are still happening with banks, companies, governments about, you know, multi-topics, if it's net neutrality, if it's access as a human right, or even censorship. These debates will never stop. You wrote in a tweet the other day, which I thought was a great tweet, by the way, was Bitcoin is not going to succeed due to its proponents engaging in successful debates with skeptics and antagonists. It will succeed by offering a superior product to the global market that outcompetes banks and nation states. Can you go into a little bit about your ideas and thoughts about not only the internet debates, the blockchain and Bitcoin debates that are happening with a lot of anti-Bitcoin people out there, and your tweet, and what does that mean? One thing that I've kind of come to believe over the years is that it doesn't really matter what the outsiders say. And by outsiders, I mean like the people who aren't actually really participating in this ecosystem. That's because if you don't have skin in the game, then the rest of the ecosystem has no incentive to listen to you. You don't have any power. I guess the very worst thing that you can do, I guess, is to cause loss of confidence and try to get current people who do have skin in the game to basically throw up their hands and quit. That is why when people ask me what I believe like the greatest weakness of Bitcoin is, or what is the thing that is most likely to cause it to fail, I generally respond with apathy. And that's because as long as there are sufficient level of interest in people who are willing to participate and to dedicate their time and other resources into maintaining the system and continuing to evolve it, then I don't think that there is anything, technical or otherwise, that can cause a permanent failure of the system. So basically, these networks, these systems, they can potentially fail, but even if you can find a way to exploit the code, the software, the network, and cause it to stop functioning as expected, for whatever reason, I think that that's only going to be temporary because if the machine consensus fails, then we just fall back to the human consensus, which means the people who are interested in keeping the system going come together and say, okay, we have a problem. How do we fix it and move forward? And there are a number of examples of that happening in Bitcoin and plenty of other networks, which really it goes to show the anti-fragility of these networks. And so if you want to kind of brainstorm about ways to really kill the network and make it fragile, then the only way that I can see that happening is by getting a large number of the participants to stop participating, thus making the network more fragile. So engaging in these debates is important. You need people to, because you're going to have these people coming out that don't have skin in the game. They're not invested. They're just sitting there to spoil some bullshit, to make people doubt what's going on, doubt Bitcoin, doubt the network, get out of the network, stop participating. And then that's the only way, like you said, it's going to kill Bitcoin. But so you have to have somebody come back and debate them. It's not just about the product. Is that correct or no? Maybe. So if literally no one engaged these people and they have a huge audience, then they could potentially have enough influence to stifle the adoption, basically slow down the number of new entrants to the network. But from what I've seen, generally these folks are coming along and they're just repeating the same arguments that we've heard for years and years. And they're very, very rarely convincing anyone who has been a participant in the network to give up because they're not saying anything new at this point. So I think that a lot of the antagonists at this point are mainly doing so to try to bolster their own reputation and create controversy and basically get more followers on social media. And that may result in more media appearances and more money for them tangentially through other means. But I personally don't have the time and wherewithal to try to fight these people because there's a fairly well-accepted mantra out there that the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is like an order of magnitude greater than it is to create it. And so from that standpoint, FUD and bullshit is this asymmetric battle where you could very easily get overwhelmed and expend all of your resources trying to counter it, where I believe that the more efficient means of allocating your resources are actually to building things because when you're building things, it doesn't matter how much FUD someone can come up with. They can't undo what you've done. They can't destroy what you've built just by creating lies and fear. I can't stop giggling over here about that one, by the way. I never heard that, the order of magnitude. But just out of curiosity, when somebody walks up to you, please don't say you just walk away. But if somebody walks up to you and say Bitcoin's a Ponzi scheme, how do you answer them? Usually I go into the definition of a Ponzi scheme, which is that the money from the new entrance gets redistributed to the old adopters and directly profits them. But in Bitcoin, it acts as any other publicly traded asset, which means that sure, while new people coming in and buying is going to increase the exchange rate, it is by no means guaranteed that their money is going directly into the pockets of the people who already have these assets. You're basically describing how any free market works. It's easy to see how people could think of it as a Ponzi scheme, but you have to go through the steps to make them understand that absolutely every publicly traded asset behaves in the same way that Bitcoin behaves from a market valuation standpoint and that the people who are in the market and have been in it longer than others, yes, the value of their holdings is higher, but the main reason behind that is because they took more risk in putting their money into the market when it was a lot lower, a lot smaller, a lot more volatile, and thus much less of a guarantee that it was even going to continue to exist in the long run. So Ponzi schemes, there are plenty of those that are being run on top of Bitcoin or on top of these other networks, but the underlying asset itself in no way guarantees to the early holders that they will get more money out of the system than they originally put in. And there's absolutely no guarantee of price whatsoever within the protocol and within the system. Before we go into general questions, is there anything that you would like to touch on or things that we didn't cover that you want to cover? I mean, we've covered quite a bit, but of course, the system is so complex that there's always more to talk about. There's always more to talk about when it comes to ideology, technology, just the space in general. We can be talking for hours, days. What do you think of the crypto space these days? Just in general, like the people, the tech, the advancements, when you open your Twitter, as you're very active on it, what do you think of what's happening right now? Well, I think one of the biggest changes and one of the more things is that a lot more quote unquote reputable organizations have come into this space. Just, I think, a day or two ago, we had a big announcement from Fidelity, which is one of the largest custodians of assets in the world. I forget how many trillion dollars worth they have. And while this announcement from them may be a surprise to a lot of people, for folks like myself, we've known that Fidelity has actually been tinkering around in this space for several years. They've just been doing it on the down low, not really being too public about it. And that is actually a pretty similar reflection to what is happening with a lot of other well-known traditional financial giants, that they actually started playing around with and trying to understand this technology a year, even two or three years ago. But of course, they're a lot more cautious and have not jumped in head first. They're just dipping their toes in the water. And so that's why you hear these people that are talking about the wave of institutional buyers or institutional FOMO or whatever. And I think that that is going to happen eventually, though there's no guarantee as to when it will happen. But point being, a lot of the existing establishment is, in fact, preparing itself to start onboarding and helping more mainstream adoption to occur within this system. I'm just looking up the top asset management firms. And I already got two prices for them. But it's in the trillions. I saw the first thing that came up was $7.2 trillion of assets under their management, which is insane. Well, welcome to the crypto space, Fidelity. We'll see you on crypto Twitter. Who do you respect in the crypto space? If you're following somebody on Twitter, I wonder if this is going to change from eight months ago. Who do you follow? Who do you read? And who do you always engage with? I most respect the educators and the builders. So Andrea Santanopoulos has always been one of the people that I respect the most. He has also managed to remain fairly neutral and not piss too many people off, which is quite an accomplishment. People like Jimmy Song, who are both developers and educators. And then some more up-and-comers, like Justin Bowen, for example, who has his own Bitcoin programming class that he has started recently. And I got to meet him as well at Baltic Honey Badger Conference. So I'm just interested in anyone who is helping create infrastructure and who is helping onboard more people that spread the viral effect of this system, because it is still so new and so, I guess, overwhelming for new entrants to get in and wrap their heads around, that it's inspirational to see new people come in and start contributing in absolutely any way possible. And that doesn't even necessarily mean writing code, but really figuring out how you can use your existing skill set to help build out this system and increase adoption and make it easier for others to understand. Is there anybody's Twitter that you follow for entertainment purposes? Let's see. McAfee. Pretty much. Well, I would say Brian Hoffman has had a number of entertaining parody videos. John McAfee can be somewhat entertaining in a very out-there kind of way. Outside of the crypto space, I don't follow too many non-crypto accounts, but I do follow one that's very interesting, and it's called 60 Second Docs. And basically, it's really short 60 second documentaries that are about all kinds of different people all over the world. And I've learned a lot from them and actually seen a lot of really weird and crazy stuff as a result. Oh, dude, that's cool. I'm going to check that out. What projects are you looking at that are game changers at the moment? I think eight months ago, you said the multi-sig wallet. Are you sticking with that one, or you have something else in mind? I've been doing non-custodial multi-sig wallet development for almost four years now. And I guess since the last time we spoke, I switched jobs. And I no longer work for BitGo. Now I work for CASA, but I'm still doing multi-sig wallet development. So I do believe that that particular model is going to be able to provide the best level of security and usability for people. I've just pivoted from focusing on enterprise-level wallet management to high net worth individual wallet management. So you still think that those are the game changers. High-level wallet management is going to change the future of blockchain. Well, if we want to get to a point where people can actually be their own banks and have better than bank-level security in a user-friendly fashion, where they don't have to spend the same level of resources as a bank in order to secure their money, yeah, that is the thesis of what we're doing at CASA, which is that over the long run, years, decades, generations, our thesis is that the management of private keys is going to become more and more important and integral to your day-to-day life. And so that means it's going to be a lot more than just Bitcoin and access to your financial accounts. But it will probably be such that you will be using private keys to manage many different aspects of your life and whether that's access to online accounts, access to physical property that you own. It can be used as authentication and proof of ownership mechanisms for quite a few different things, including your own identity, of course. So that's kind of the boring answer to what's going to help increase this adoption of technology and change the world. In terms of more cutting-edge stuff, though, that people are experimenting with, I'm very interested in the MimbleWimble protocol. So the GRIN project is an implementation of that. And that is promising extreme privacy and extreme scalability for a financial transacting protocol. Similar type of thing with Lightning Network, where I think since the last time we've talked, the Lightning Network really took a step forward towards actual adoption and basically getting out in a beta release, where a bunch of developers and tinkerers have actually started building on top of it. And we've seen a number of interesting laps show up, which have been proofs of concepts that I believe show that it's actually going to be a lot easier for developers to dip their toes into this ecosystem by building applications that work on the second-layer networks that's going to basically enable a lot more functionality and better end-user experience for fast and responsive crypto asset interactions. If somebody was just coming into the space right now, and this was the first podcast they listened to, what would you want them to know? Well, it can all be very overwhelming. And there's a pretty high learning curve. You can easily dedicate your entire life to doing nothing more than trying to understand what is actually going on. I mean, this whole ecosystem has grown to the point where, as of a year or two ago, I don't think it's possible for any single person to actually keep up with all of the developments. And so it's kind of funny of people coming to me and considering me like the expert or the guru. And yet, I get asked a lot of questions about projects that I've never even heard of. Or even if I have heard of them, I haven't even been able to barely look at them, much less evaluate them rigorously. And so I don't know everything. And I don't have time to know everything. I am generally focused on Bitcoin and focused on privacy-centric protocols, basically anything that I think is falling under the cypherpunk umbrella of trying to bring about a world in which we're able to make strong privacy the default for people. Because that, I believe, is a key ingredient to freedom, is the ability to selectively disclose what you're doing to the rest of the world. I think I was just thinking that I should probably move that question to the beginning of the podcast. Yes, overwhelming. Yeah, well, I would tell any new person to go check out my Bitcoin resources on lop.net. I have tried to organize them in a way such that the resources at the top start out very high-level, simple explanation. And then the further down you go on the page, the deeper and deeper you get into the technical guts of this system, both from the software technical side of things and from the philosophical side of things. Right on. I will make sure that that's linked in the description. That's lop.net. Great site to check out all kinds of blogs, technicals, tweets, Jameson, all kinds of things. Check out his site. Really quick, before we go, Jameson, and before we ask this last couple of questions, I want to say thank you very much for the 50 minutes to an hour of your time. I appreciate it. And thank you for coming back on the show, man. My pleasure. Doing a lot of these these days, but to be fair, doing interviews and podcasts is orders of magnitude easier than getting on a plane and flying across the ocean for a 30-minute speech at a conference. That is for damn sure. You don't have to deal with the jet lag and all that stuff. You were just in Japan, correct? Yeah, scaling Bitcoin. I think that was my fourth scaling Bitcoin. I've been to all of them except for the very first one. Right on, right on. Going into pop culture, anything in TV, books, Netflix you're watching, listening to, or reading these days? Well, for entertainment, I usually stick to the dystopian, cyberpunk, future-esque type of stuff. Actually, I would say the thing that best fits that bill would probably be altered carbon on Netflix. And of course, I also try to keep with any of the zombie-related doomsday stuff. While zombies aren't everyone's cup of tea, I do believe that if you're into preparing for a zombie apocalypse, that'll actually prepare you for quite a few more realistic disaster scenarios that can happen in the real world. Any chance you like the TV show, The Expanse? You know, I've seen that come up in my feed a few times, but I have not gotten to watch it, so no comment. Check it out. I think it's one of the best TV shows made ever. It's excellent, in my opinion, though. What are you listening to these days? What can I add to the Crypto 101 Spotify playlist from Jameson Lopp? Most of the time, when I'm listening to stuff, it's actually podcasts. But in terms of songs, I've got a few that I have in my Bitcoin repertoire. I think that everyone has to listen to Bitcoin Baron by Whitey Cracker. That's a classic from 2013. And I've actually met Bryce a few times. Whitey Cracker comes to a number of the Bitcoin events. And more recently, I'm actually a fan of this track called Plan B that the co-founder of Unocoin, Sonny Ray, put out under the DJ name of Bitcoin Boy. It's a nicely done amateur hip hop track. And then finally, and this may come as a surprise to a lot of people who know me, I'm going to have to say the Bitcoin Cash song by Lil Windex is, in fact, one of my favorite crypto theme songs of all time. Even though I may not agree with the philosophy behind Bitcoin Cash, this particular music video was perfectly done as a rap video. And it was just so ridiculous that I probably watched it several dozen times and was highly entertained by it. Right on, man, I think those are great selections. Jameson Lab, thank you again. And man, good luck with getting your name off the books, getting your name out of the bureaucracy, and well, just disappearing. Yeah, getting it out is the easy thing. Keeping it out is the hard thing. So time will tell. All right, well, good luck with keeping it out. We'll talk to you again, sir. Thank you very much. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Crypto 101. Jameson, thank you for coming on the show. And I hope to talk to you again in the near future. In the next episode of Crypto 101, we have an ICO 101 episode with LendingBlock. And after that, a Crypto 101 episode with Mr. John McAfee in John McAfee 101. Before we go today, like always, ApogeeCrypto.com, A-P-O-G-E-E Crypto.com for your real-time prices, CryptoNews.com for your news. And finally, thank you very much to Mr. Jay LaBella for editing this episode. We'll see you in next episodes of Crypto 101. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Crypto 101.