Yo, yo, welcome to Crypto 101.
This is Matthew Aaron.
And we're back with another collaboration
with Mr. Michael Nye and his Evolvement Podcast
and Crypto 101.
And this episode is coming from our mobile studios
in New York City's Blockchain Week.
And we brought in Mr. Jameson Lopp.
And for Mr. Jameson Lopp, we had just two questions.
One, what is Lightning Network?
And two, please tell us about your opinion
on Dr. Craig Wright.
Jameson wrote a detailed blog with a lot of research
with proof that he says proves
that Craig Wright is not Satoshi.
And we had to ask him about it.
But before we get into that conversation,
follow us on Twitter at Crypto 101Pod
or my personal Twitter at MatthewAaron101.
Remember, this is not financial advice,
legal advice, investment advice, or personal advice.
And I wanna say thank you to LinkedIn
for sponsoring this episode.
And now, without further ado, here's Jameson Lopp,
Michael Nye, and myself.
We'll see you after the show.
What is going on, everybody?
What is going on?
I am here with my man Matthew and Jameson Lopp.
We are doing a co-interview here with Crypto 101
and Evolvement Podcast here at Consensus.
Jameson, thank you so much for joining, man.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Jameson, you've been on Crypto 101 a couple of times.
I think it might be your first time on Evolvement.
Can you do us a quick one-on-one on Mr. Jameson Lopp?
Where to begin?
Well, I mean, I've been in the Bitcoin space
since it was only a few years old.
I got interested both from a computer science
and a libertarian perspective.
And I went full-time Bitcoin in 2015,
where I worked at Bitgo, doing backend infrastructure
for their enterprise multi-sig wallets.
Did that for three years.
And then a little over a year ago, I pivoted slightly
and I'm still in the private key management
and security space, but instead I'm at Casa,
where we're more focused on individual personal sovereignty
and helping people empower themselves.
If anybody's listened to Crypto 101,
you can hear Jameson Lopp 101 on the show.
You could hear how he basically removed himself
from society and his whole story with that,
which was really good.
And his philosophies on anarcho-capitalism
and being just early days in the space
and computer science and what have you.
So there's a lot of good Jameson Lopp content.
Also, of course, on Lopp.net, you have great 101s
and about everything you need to know about Bitcoin,
the space, in himself and everything is on there.
So those are great resources.
So if you are not knowing what we're gonna talk about,
we're gonna talk about the Lightning Network,
Casa Node, where you're working with Casa.
Before we go into Casa Node and Lightning Network,
how's everybody receiving those papers
that you wrote about Craig Wright?
I mean, I think that most people found it
to be enlightening, not much of what I published
was unknown, but it was just spread out all over the place.
So unless you did a lot of your own research,
you wouldn't know that stuff.
I basically just wanted to create a comprehensive article
that portrayed as much of the evidence as possible.
And clearly, yes, it is a biased article.
I'm trying to steer the user towards one conclusion.
And what is that conclusion?
Well, the conclusion is that it's probably not a good idea
to trust Craig or anything that he says.
But there's an overwhelming amount of evidence
of things that he has fabricated over the years
and things that have shown that he may not necessarily
know as much about the space as he claims to.
Can you give us just a quick summary
of what you found in those and compiled
in that group of writing that you put out?
I mean, I was researching basically his entire life
as far back as I could go.
Things that I presented were a number
of conflicting statements between things that he has said
and things that Satoshi has said,
conflicting data, for example, between sleep patterns
of his own activity during the Satoshi years
and Satoshi's activities.
So just trying to show all of the evidence
that makes it seem highly unlikely
that a lot of his claims are true.
But it's of course impossible
to completely disprove a negative, so.
And why is that important to you?
Why don't you just let it go?
Yes, I wanted to let it go for many years
and I was really hoping that he would kind of fade away.
But just the fact that he has been successful
and persistent, and I believe that quite a few people
have been enamored with him and his personality,
that I wanted to put this out there just so that people
who bother to do even a little amount of research
will be able to find the vast majority
of the evidence that's out there.
And in fact, don't be too surprised
if you see some translations of this article coming out
because from my understanding,
he's been very busy over in Asia.
And so we want to get the word out over there too.
I don't wanna keep going on this
because we're talking about a different topic,
but I'm just really curious
about the community reaction to Craig Wright.
He got delisted from Binance.
He started, then he got delisted from Kraken.
He got delisted from all these exchanges.
Him and Peter McCormick has a really interesting beef
going out, even where t-shirts got printed,
that says Craig Wright is a fraud.
Do you agree with all of these steps taken by the community
and the way that they're going about this?
Or do you think that it should have been a lot more
maybe research-based and a lot less hype
and back and forth and drama?
I mean, I believe that we're just seeing the chaos
of a sort of anarchic system, voluntary interaction.
We're seeing it play out.
Yeah, I mean, I have no issues with it.
There will be people who say that this is censorship,
yada, yada, yada, but really the delisting of assets
by private companies is completely up to them.
Whether they do it for more cold-hearted scientific reasons
or because of more emotional things as a knee-jerk reaction
to certain characters in this space and their own actions,
it doesn't really matter.
Morally, they have the right to list or delist
anything that they want to.
Is this pitchfork democracy, like for example,
Michael, you got attacked by Twitter
about a month or so ago,
just looking at your past or what have you,
and a mob of people came out against you
about some things that you were doing in the past,
which we're not gonna go into that,
and a mob of people are now going after Craig.
Is this pitchfork democracy, is this a good thing?
If, I guess, you believe that the mob
is the one making the decision
or having a high level of influence
on the decisions of these private companies,
and I think that is harder to discern.
I mean, it's clear that there is a surge or change
in sentiment over the past month or two,
especially as a lot of the legal actions started happening.
A lot of people got really pissed off.
But you asked me whether or not
it's the result of the mob's reaction to those
or just the fact that the business owners themselves
have the same sentiments as a lot of people in the mob.
I think the result is the same either way,
but it's hard to tell exactly.
Part of the issue, I think,
is that on some of these exchanges,
the criteria for listing and delisting
may not be well published.
And even if it is the criteria,
and I've talked to a number of people
who have to think about these things,
even if you do have criteria,
it tends to be somewhat vague.
You said vague.
And isn't the crypto space blockchain
or the social ethos about transparency,
so is that vagueness a little bit out of the ethos
of what we're doing here?
In the sense that, I mean, it's private companies, right?
And do you think that, I guess, even better question is,
do you think that vagueness is intentional
and specifically hidden,
or do you think it's just
because they haven't set the right structure?
No, it's just because it's hard to set specific metrics
for these things.
And also it's not something
that has become an issue that often.
So where you're still kind of like on the cutting edge of,
I mean, it's self-regulation, right?
We are coming up with new ways
to self-regulate in this new system.
So there are a lot of things
that standards have not been set.
Agreed, agreed.
It's really interesting,
especially with the whole herd mentality of things.
I think that watching and observing all of that happen
was just interesting to see the human psychology
and how all of it works,
especially within the community here.
But moving off of all that subject,
can you give the audience a little, a basic definition,
a basic outline of what is Lightning Network
for someone who just has no idea what it is?
Yeah, I'll give it a shot.
So for a multitude of reasons,
it is relatively slow and expensive to transact
using a global database
where it has to get replicated to everybody in the world.
And that's the way that blockchains work
is you create a transaction
and it gets propagated to everyone
who's running a node on the network.
Very, very hard to scale that type of interaction.
And in fact, the internet is the same way
where the base level of the internet is called ethernet.
And when you place data onto ethernet,
it just propagates to everyone on the network.
So if the internet worked like that,
we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing right now.
We wouldn't be able to stream video and audio content
because it would have to pass through
everybody else's computer on the internet.
And you can't get hardware that can handle that.
It would be extremely limiting
as to what we could do with the internet.
So the way that internet engineers
got around that limitation
is they created other layers on top of ethernet.
And in fact, there's seven different layers
to the internet technology stack.
But as I think layers two and three are TCP IP,
which are these routing protocols.
And what that allows you to do is say,
hey, I have some data
and I wanna send it over to this other person
at this other address.
Find me the most efficient way of getting it there.
And so basically, those protocols allow you
to only send the data through like the smallest number
of hops that are required.
And that frees up huge amounts of bandwidth
and other resources by extremely limiting
the bandwidth and resources that actually have to get used
to send data back and forth.
So going back to what is lightning,
the same type of approach is being used on Bitcoin
where we have layer zero,
which is global broadcast your transaction to everyone.
And because that can't scale and it gets expensive
in a number of different ways,
we are creating a second layer that does routing.
And so while you're still using the base layer,
you are anchoring into Bitcoin using on-chain transactions.
Once you then rise up to the second layer,
you have new types of addressing and new types
of more efficient routing of the data.
And in this case, data is messages that allow you
to transfer value back and forth.
But now you get on the second layer network and you say,
hey, I wanna send 100 satoshis to someone at this address.
And the network itself will find a short path
for you to do that.
And you'll be able to send these messages back and forth
through only a small number of hops.
Thus, you can now transact basically
with the only limitation being the latency
of the internet itself.
So you can potentially do hundreds of transactions
per second back and forth, back and forth,
depending on the speed of light,
and how quickly your computers talk to each other
because you're only talking to a handful of other computers
rather than having to broadcast to tens of thousands
of computers and then wait for miners
to batch up transactions, yada yada yada.
This guy said, I'll try.
I think he more than tried, I think he nailed it.
I think it was perfect.
And where are we at the current stage of lightning network?
What capacity does this have for Bitcoin
and for the way that we're transacting with it?
Can I add something to that question?
And to that question, I wanna say, why Bitcoin?
If you have to have a layer two protocol
and it might have, like he said,
there's maybe a limitation which you're gonna tell us about,
why not just make something different besides Bitcoin?
Why are we so infatuated with Bitcoin?
Well, a multitude of different reasons,
one of them being that Bitcoin
is still the biggest player in the game,
trying to maintain the aspect of sound money.
From one aspect, creating completely new networks
is also creating new types of money printing.
And then it also creates additional friction.
And so we want all of this to still be self-contained
within the same base ecosystem.
So basically you still abide by the rules of Bitcoin.
We're just creating new rules for new ways
to interact more privately, more quickly.
As for like the limitations around it,
right now it is still fairly early days.
Hashtag reckless is a real thing
because there are still a number of cases
in which you could lose money
if you have like a hardware or software failure.
The ability to recover all of your money
that is like in lightning channels
if you have a catastrophic failure
is not yet at the level
that I would say it's like production ready.
And so we generally say,
if you're going to do stuff on lightning,
don't put more money into it
than you would like walk around with in your wallet
that you would be willing to lose.
Makes a lot of sense.
And I always like to compare it to like old school banking.
So back in the day,
I would have to go to the bank on Monday,
take out money for the week
and get to the bank on Friday for the weekend
if I spent all my money because I went to the bar
on Saturday night, I have nothing for a Sunday.
So it's like, you kind of have to like go to the bank,
figure out how much you want to carry around
and then transact responsibly.
Would that be a good analogy?
So if you're talking about like funding,
funding lightning channels, that type of thing.
Yeah, and that's another reason
why lightning is still early days
is because even in some of the better user interfaces,
the fact that users even have to differentiate
between like on-chain and off-chain funds
I think is a usability failure.
There's a lot of room for improvement there.
And we're still at the level
where one of the greatest challenges
is going to be understanding
how to manage liquidity on this new network.
It's almost gonna be more of an economic challenge
than I think a technical challenge.
And so as of today, a lot of the software
is giving you this like low level detail information
about your channels and stuff.
And there's no way that lightning is going to become
a mainstream adopted thing
if it requires people to understand channels.
It's just the same way that the internet
could not have become mainstream adopted thing
if people needed to understand
like how to plug in their modem
and configure various aspects of it
in order to talk to some remote server or whatever.
These days, most of the internet technology is plug and play.
I mean, you know, you buy a mobile phone
and the internet on it just works.
You don't have to really do anything
other than pay your internet service provider.
So we're talking about this new layer.
Do you foresee that this is the final solution
for scalability and for this issue that we face?
Or do you think that this is just step one
and we're gonna have to build other layers into the future?
Or is it layers or is it innovations on the layer?
Yeah, I don't know.
That's even a better question.
It's some of both.
There's some theoretical work actually
with layers that would exist
between the Bitcoin-based layer and Lightning layer.
And I think a little bit of work with people
doing layers above Lightning network.
And that's the interesting thing about the layered approach
is that it does enable permissionless innovation.
And as a result, I think greater acceleration of innovation
because we're not having to like quibble
over consensus related things.
When you're working on different layers,
then all you have to do is find one other person
who agrees with you to abide
by whatever new rules of the protocol
you want to come up with.
I think that there probably will be more intermediary type
of layers for scalability reasons.
So when I said there's this one work
on like a middle layer between the two
that I was referring to this idea of L2,
which is more around channel management
in the sense of multi-user channels.
Because the reason why Lightning network
at least in its current state is not the end all solution
is that you still have throughput limits
with the base chain.
And so if you need to make a couple of on-chain transactions
in order to open and close these payment channels
and each user probably needs to have
at least a few payment channels,
you're still limited with regard to how quickly
you can onboard and offboard people.
Since the Bitcoin blockchain,
even if everybody's being really efficient
using SegWit and other techniques,
probably not gonna be able to do more
than like 10 transactions per second on the base chain.
However, if we can come up with more efficient ways
so that you could, for example,
share a Lightning channel amongst 1000 users,
that's several order of magnitude improvement there.
And then there's a variety of other things
that people are working on with regard to making
the whole on-chain off-chain thing more seamless
where if you have issues,
you can split out money from the off-chain
to on-chain and vice versa.
Interesting, really interesting.
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Now back to the show.
For everybody who's listening,
who is new to Lightning Network
and even new to Bitcoin, why is this solution needed?
Like, why is this important?
Well, both scalability and privacy.
And in terms of scalability,
some of the things that we get are much cheaper transactions,
much faster transactions where you're not waiting
for minor confirmations.
It's cheaper transactions
because you're not posting data globally.
You're only updating data states
between a few nodes on the network.
Is it gonna stay cheap if we have like a big bull,
like to 20,000 Bitcoin again?
Is it gonna stay cheap?
And so this I think becomes more
a question of liquidity management.
So the economics of transacting on chain are fairly simple.
And that is, we have a certain amount of block weight
or block space, whatever you wanna refer to.
And when the demand for that amount of data gets exceeded,
then we enter into a fee market scenario
where it becomes this bidding war.
It can be challenging if you're trying to predict
where that's going.
It's fairly simple to understand.
Or as soon as you go over the limit,
you hit like an auction style thing.
On Lightning, however,
you're not bidding for this global scarce block space.
Rather, you are using liquidity
across a much more complex network structure.
I'm sure you've seen the visualizations
of the Lightning network.
I mean, it's just a hodgepodge graph
where there are clusters.
From a technical standpoint,
it's called a scale-free architecture
where there are some larger players
and then smaller players
and then really tiny players out on the edge.
But when you're sending money,
it depends on where you are in the network graph
and where the recipient is in the network graph.
There's a lot more complexity under the hood
with actually getting that value pushed
from one side of the graph to the other.
And so then this is where there's gonna be
a lot of research and there already has been some.
Then the question becomes,
how well does the Lightning network as a protocol,
how well does it like rebalance itself?
One of the main reasons from an economic standpoint
that the Lightning network ought to work well
is because in a normal economy,
money is not just flowing one way.
It's flowing around and around and around.
And the way that the Lightning network works,
if it's going around and back and forth in circles,
that should be efficient
because you're able to keep your channels
fairly well balanced.
But because a channel is a very simple structure
where you have value on one end
and value on the other end,
if a channel gets into a state where it's highly unbalanced
and like all the value is on one end,
it becomes less useful
because now you can only send value one way
rather than send value both ways.
So there's gonna be a lot of work
that needs to be done around automatic rebalancing
of these channels, both at a micro scale,
but also at a macro scale.
That's the one thing that is really still up in the air
is how is this all gonna work at a macro scale?
And we just need to keep growing the network
and keep observing it.
And as issues are found,
the technical folks will need to come up with solutions.
We heard about the TPS limits.
Is there a value limit of transactions right now?
Not as a consensus mechanism.
As I said earlier, the rules on these networks,
you only need to have your direct counterparties
to agree with you on what the rules are.
So there is a limit that is generally agreed upon right now,
which is like 0.1 something Bitcoin
as the total value limit.
And then I think it's about a quarter of that
as the max transaction limit.
But that is the sort of default soft limit.
There's no technical reason why you can't change that
in your own client.
There's even something called Wumbo,
where you can set Wumbo on your node,
which basically means I'm a no limit node,
like I will accept anything.
I'm super reckless, yada, yada, yada.
And so in general, what I think you're gonna see happen
is as time goes by and as more of these edge cases
are found and fixed and we feel more confident
in the safety and robustness of the network in general,
then you'll see developers say,
okay, we'll start to bump these limits up
because we feel like it's less likely
that people are gonna encounter catastrophic scenarios.
So the main reason that they're low right now
is because we know there are catastrophic scenarios.
Users have lost money and we want to limit those losses.
Got you.
And how does CASA node play into all of this?
What is the role that it plays with Lightning Network?
What products do you have?
Just give us the 101 on that.
We are completely new to CASA.
Even though there's a CASA node running in the office,
I haven't played with it yet.
Well, it should be clear by now,
this is all very complicated, and so.
Well, you're making it sound pretty easy.
You're making it sound simple, but yeah, I can tell.
I kind of get it.
So what we're trying to do is make it easy
from an operational standpoint.
And the downside to these crypto networks
is that in order to fully realize their potential
and enter into the quote unquote trustless security model
where you are completely sovereign unto yourself,
you basically have to become a server administrator.
And asking normal people to become server administrators
is not a feasible thing.
I mean, it requires networking knowledge
and IT knowledge and time.
And a lot of people just don't have time
to be constantly maintaining a mini server
that they're running.
So we created the CASA node as this plug and play device,
which is fairly low powered,
but we are building a lot of the maintenance logic
into our own software.
So we have software that is managing the plethora
of other services that are running on the device.
And so the way that we do that is it's, you know,
dockerizing everything.
So we're running LND as a Lightning node,
Bitcoin Core as a Bitcoin node,
we're running Tor services,
we're running our own dashboard services,
and then a number of other like middleware
and sort of update management services.
And so all you really need to do is plug your node
into power and ethernet and you're off to the races.
We've had to overcome a lot of different complexities
that you encounter when you start having people
install devices behind their home routers,
a lot of networking issues.
But we've actually found that Tor helps us completely
bypass a lot of the networking complexities.
Interesting.
You no longer have to do like port forwarding,
you no longer have to worry about like IP address
assignments or IP address like rotations that can happen.
So it's running a Bitcoin full node then on that.
How big is a Bitcoin full node right now in terms of data?
It's a little over 200 gigabytes.
Okay, and how much storage is in the class of node?
So we've got a terabyte drive on there
is one of those two and a half inch terabyte drives.
Okay.
So that'll last for a while.
How long you think?
So I mean, literally there is a time limit on that node
unless you could upgrade is upgradable?
Yeah, well, I think if I recall correctly,
we've kind of settled on shooting for our
plug and play node devices to have an expected use time
of maybe two years.
At which point we're gonna be upgrading people
and that's actually one of the things that we changed
recently with our business model as we change it
to more of a subscription model so that you'd get
not only the node but you also get our key management
software and then support services and upgrades
when the new hardware comes out.
Interesting, because I'm learning a lot from this.
So when you're running your node and you said
it's who your subscription service,
right now you buy it, plug and play.
How do you imagine it's gonna turn into
a subscription service and when you're running your node
are you getting paid while you're running your node
and how does that work?
And also how does the node benefit the Lightning network?
Right, so technically when you are routing
through your node you can collect fees.
A lot of people sort of got a little hyped up
about this whole fee collection thing.
So they thought they were gonna make more
than they actually are.
Yeah, I mean it is not going to be
a highly profitable venture.
The fees are. You're not retiring.
No, the fees are mostly there as a denial
of service prevention, right?
Okay.
Because people are using some resources,
you are providing a service and you don't want
someone to just spam you.
But I think the default fee is only like one satoshi
for routing a transaction through your node.
I don't even know what the dollar figure, 0.00 is like
a tiny fraction of a cent.
Right.
But that's also, that's part of the reason
why this is a great thing is because now you can send money
orders of magnitude cheaper than you can
using on-chain transactions.
So this is almost like a philanthropic endeavor
for somebody to buy a custom node and run it at their house
and spend the money on it.
If you're doing it to help the network, yes.
And that's also been the case for running Bitcoin nodes
if you're not directly pointing your own wallets at it
is that you're, you can almost see it as being analogous
to seeding a torrent, which is a great thing.
And you know, a lot of people seed torrents
and they don't actually get financially compensated for it
but they realize that it's an important part
of making the whole system work.
But with torrents, it's one of those things like
you have it on your, it's almost like automatic.
You know, it's like, I already downloaded it.
I have it on my computer.
So it's just kind of like does it by itself
is because I have it.
So I guess it's kind of like a forced exchange
because I want and you want as well.
And so once I get it, somebody else wants it
but I want other things.
So it's almost like a forced exchange.
Is the Lightning Network kind of like that?
Is it a forced exchange or is because it sounds like
it's just you're running the node
and you're just kind of, it's a one way transaction
because the fees are so small.
It is a peer to peer network
and you have to be connected to at least some peers
in order to be able to use it.
And this kind of goes back to the whole liquidity issue.
One of the things that has cropped up as an issue
is like the inbound liquidity problem.
So if you spool up a Lightning node,
nothing really happens by default.
You just learn about other nodes
but you can't actually make any payments.
In order to make payments,
you have to start opening these channels.
And by kind of the default is you open channels
to other parties, which means you are funding them
on your side.
It is possible to have dual funded channels theoretically
but there's no real support for that yet.
So that means you're opening up these channels
where all the funding is on your side.
So you can make payments.
You make payments through those counterparties
and then they'll forward it on to other people.
But if you wanna receive payments,
you need to have someone open a channel to you
where the liquidity is on their side
and can get pushed to your side.
So we are starting to see some services crop up
for like inbound liquidity.
I think BitRefill has their Thor service, for example.
Kind of going to your question,
there is cooperation that needs to be involved.
Like you need to have some people offer liquidity
if you want to receive money.
You've been around for a while.
How do you feel about the evolution of the space right now?
We've seen this whole ICO boom in the end of 2017,
beginning of 2018.
We see IEOs coming up now.
Do you think this is all net positive
for the cryptocurrency blockchain industry?
Do you think it's all trash?
What's your opinion on it?
It's kind of like there's no such thing as bad press, right?
Even with all the scams that come out,
I mean, they attract attention
and I imagine that at least some people
who learn about the crypto space because of scams
will then continue to do research
and hopefully figure out what the differentiators are.
I don't think it can be prevented.
So yeah, I just got to kind of go with the flow.
There's going to continue to be a lot of volatility
in the space and who knows what will cause
the next bull cycle and crash,
but it's almost inevitable that we're going to still see
a number of cycles until we really get
to like full market penetration.
And what does that look like?
What's your vision on what full market penetration
would even look like in our world?
Kind of going back to talking about
like mainstream adoption of the internet.
I think that it means that there will be a lot of use cases
where Bitcoin is getting used
and the people don't even know that they're using it.
One good example for that is,
there's a lot of non-financial applications
and it was really cool to see the Microsoft announcement
with their decentralized ID project
where they're actually using Bitcoin.
They're anchoring into the Bitcoin blockchain,
putting a lot more data on the IPFS
that there are pointers to.
And this is arguably another second layer network
that's being layered on top of Bitcoin,
but it in and of itself is not that interesting.
It becomes interesting then when you think of third layers
and applications that start to leverage that.
And I would imagine that these applications
don't necessarily even need to tell their users
that hey, several layers down,
you're actually using Bitcoin on this.
It's just like when someone opens up their phone
and they're on Facebook or Twitter or whatever,
they have no clue how many complicated technological layers
every button they press are going through.
No, people care if it's on AWS or whatever,
they just use it.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah. Definitely makes sense.
Going back to how this is all working out,
like he asked the question of ICO, IEOs,
all this, like you said,
there's no such thing as bad press.
Speaking to you for a while,
and just actually looking at what you just said
to previous questions like pitchfork democracy,
you like this discourse, you like this conflict,
you like this friction in this space, you think it's good.
Am I correct with that?
This is one of the original reasons
why I got interested in the space
because I read the white paper
and then I thought about money,
which most people never really think about,
what is money, how does money work?
But once I started looking into how money actually works,
and I was like, money is this abstract concept
that belongs to humanity at large,
so shouldn't it be an open source project
where anyone who cares enough can contribute
and voice their opinions?
And so I think the same is true for any other open platform,
any other means of creating ways for interacting,
whether it's like communication interaction
or economic interaction or whatever,
building this voluntary society,
then it's important that everyone can engage in discourse.
Though of course it gets complicated
because voluntary interaction
also means freedom of association,
which means that no one is obligated
to listen or respond to you.
And that's when some people can get very upset.
Right, when's enough enough, man?
Look, Bitcoin has forked to different coins,
those different coins have forked into different coins,
and some people are getting not only really popular,
really rich, when's enough enough?
When you start looking at Bitcoin
and this whole system of, especially forks, man,
it's like, how do you keep encouraged
that this is a solution for money in general?
Because it sucks when somebody forks a Bitcoin
and all of a sudden calls it Bitcoin zebra or whatever,
and he starts shilling their Bitcoin zebra
as the new payment solution with scalability
or whatever the hell, because we have block sizes
of 300 gigabytes or whatever the hell they're gonna claim,
and they become rich, and then they go away
and the coin fails because of whatever.
What about that discourse?
I mean, what about that friction?
It's kind of bullshit.
This is the result, I think,
of there not being much self-regulation in the space
because it's so new, and-
But then it goes back to that pitchfork democracy, so.
Well, I'm hopeful that type of thing
will not be able to happen in perpetuity
because there is this kind of global consciousness, right,
of we learn from history and from mistakes,
and so there will always be scammers
and there will always be con men
who come up with new approaches,
new flavors of tricking people
into parting ways with their money,
but I don't think they're gonna be able
to keep doing the same thing,
and we already saw that play out with Bitcoin, right,
is we saw, I think, 50 different Bitcoin forks,
and the first one had a lot of prominent people behind it
and its ideology captured a non-trivial percentage
of the existing Bitcoin user base,
and then with each subsequent fork, though,
it's smaller and smaller and smaller
until it basically, it's dust.
There's a long tail, but it falls off really quickly.
And then you also get into a lot of the ideology,
the sort of questions around,
well, we're almost creating something
that it's kind of like a religion
or a cult, the reason that the network exists
is due to a shared ideology,
a shared agreement and belief upon a certain set of rules
and mostly a certain set of goals,
but not necessarily sharing the same goals,
and then as we go through time,
we find that there are slight rifts
in the goals and trade-offs that people agree upon,
and when those rifts are significant enough,
it's always choice between voice and exit,
and some people, especially when they're in
the small minority on a certain issue,
they eventually realize that voice
is not gonna get them anywhere,
and that's when they exit, and that's what results in forks.
The only thing I heard there is
Jesus could be Satoshi Nakamoto.
You said religion, you said cults,
and I know Nye over here, his eyebrows went up.
Love that stuff, I love those conversations.
They're so interesting.
But I mean, when you say religion and you say cult,
I see blinded following, just people following blind.
Are people following Bitcoin blind?
I mean, I know you said that it is the only
sovereign money a little bit ago, the only proven solution.
That's why you're building these other two protocols
on Bitcoin.
At some point, even Catholicism,
let's just look at the Catholic Church
and everything that's happening in that.
I mean, at some point, you just go,
something's wrong with that, right?
But people, there's still a billion Catholics out there.
When is the point when the cultism
and the religion aspect of Bitcoin turned toxic?
Specifically, I believe it happens when a large portion
of the community is not doing their own research
and rather is only listening to a few trusted figures.
And when do you know that?
Does the Catholic Church know that about themselves?
I mean, it's not like you look at yourself and go,
hey, I'm the...
I think that's the main problem.
I think it's when people become ignorant
of the potential downfalls and choose to be ignorant
of the potential downfalls rather than looking and saying,
you know what, Bitcoin is great in these aspects,
like Catholicism might be great
in terms of some ethics and morals
where it also has all of these things over here
that aren't great.
Same thing with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's great because of all of these things,
but I think the community also needs to look at
the negative side of the thing,
the things that we still, not even negative,
just things we have to improve upon
before we can go mainstream
and actually have the sound money to everyone.
That's my opinion.
There's a lot of very vocal people in the space
and some people who have amassed huge followings.
I mean, I am one of the people
who has amassed huge followings and I can't prevent it,
but I can only hope that people don't blindly believe
everything that I say.
I try to point people in the right direction
and then sometimes I do make claims
that should probably be investigated,
but there's, I think the space is a lot more rife
with people who make wild claims without any support
because they're just trying to further their own benefit.
Right on.
Jameson Lopp, it's always a pleasure to have you on this show.
I always love talking to you,
but I have one final question.
I don't know if Nye has any more final questions,
but my final question is,
are you gonna grow back out the beard?
You know, the thing about beard care is that to do it right,
it takes a lot of time every day.
I mean, you were rocking it there for a while.
Yeah, but I've become so busy,
especially once I stepped into CTO position,
and it's not just the time aspect,
there's also operational security,
where part of operational security
is you don't wanna stand out in a crowd.
So I just, I wanna look like another regular guy,
not someone who is either homeless
or is so like enamored with hipster beard care
that I've got something coming all the way down my chest.
Another downside, which nobody tells you about though,
when you have a beard that long,
is during the summer,
you get a really weird pattern on your skin.
Oh wow, okay.
You get this really weird tan line.
I never thought about that.
Yeah, you can get a V-shaped tan line all the way down.
That's very odd.
So basically,
so people can actually tell what time it is
by looking at the shadow.
Look at Jameson's beard, it's five o'clock.
I love it, man.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
It was really good to meet you
and really good to pick your brand on all these topics.
Thanks for having me. Thanks, Jameson.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Crypto 101.
In our next episodes of Crypto 101,
we're gonna go back to 101 episodes
on different projects in the space.
We have a huge database of all kinds of interviews
with 101s on some of your favorite projects.
So I'm excited to start putting those out for you
in next episodes.
And then after that,
we get back to New York Boxing Week
with more great conversations from people
that were hanging out with nine and myself
in New York City.
I wanna say thank you to Randy for editing this episode.
And don't forget,
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