Hello, this is Jameson Lopp.
And I'm Gary Leland and you're listening to episode 112 of the Crypto Cousins Podcast.
Feed your interest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by joining Hall of Fame podcaster Gary Leland
on the Crypto Cousins Podcast.
And remember, we are all cousins in the world of crypto.
This week's price of Bitcoin $9,458.
That's down $341 or 3.5% over the past seven days.
Howdy, howdy, howdy, Jameson.
Thanks for joining me on the show.
Give you a Texas howdy there.
Great to be here.
Hey, I've kind of gotten, we really don't know each other.
We've never met, but I've been trying to, I've been, we've been kind of chatting a little
bit because I've been trying to get you to bit block boom.
And then I've been messing around with Acasa node, so I thought, wow, I should get Jameson
on the show.
He'd make a great, a great guest.
Hey, could you just give everybody like a one or two minute, just a quick bio?
You bet.
I've been interested in Bitcoin for a number of years and have been working full time in
this space, basically doing infrastructure for security companies since about 2015.
And three years working at BitGo doing enterprise multi-sig wallet infrastructure.
And now I'm coming up on almost two years at Casa, which is similar, but we're basically
offering user friendly multi-sig wallets that are targeted for individuals.
So we're just, I've been spending my entire time in Bitcoin working on very simple issues
of security and usability.
I think that there's still a lot of work that remains to be done just around helping users
be their own bank without having an insanely high learning curve that will turn a lot of
people off to it.
So I think it's really important for us to get this stuff nailed if we ever want to have
mainstream adoption, if we ever want all of the more cutting edge stuff to actually be
usable.
Well, I've been setting up a Casa node and I'll be honest, it's pretty easy.
I'm just kind of not smart sometimes because every time I've had a problem, someone's told
me the solution has been pretty easy.
I should have figured it out.
So I'm really excited about my node now.
Our last episode was someone helping me set up my node as a matter of fact.
So I guess kind of on a node series here, this makes two in a row.
I also heard you call yourself a professional cyberpunk.
Could you explain that?
Professional cypherpunk.
Yeah, there's a slight difference between the two, though there's definitely a lot of
overlap.
I mean, it's kind of a tongue in cheek thing.
The main reason that I put that as like my title on my website is because a lot of media
over the years, whenever they refer to me as like what I am or what I do, they've called
me a self-proclaimed cypherpunk.
And the funny thing about being a cypherpunk is that it pretty much has to be self-proclaimed.
The definition of a cypherpunk is someone who is trying to further the use of privacy
protecting tools as a means to improve society.
And so you have to be an advocate.
You have to be public and basically talking about or building these tools to help people
protect their privacy.
So yes, I'm self-proclaimed and as such, I might as well be a professional cypherpunk.
Sounds like a good way to go, you might as well live proud to it.
Do you live in North Carolina?
I am a native North Carolinian, though these days I'm not too specific about my location.
I forgot, I listened to a lot of podcasts as I was doing my research and you moved and
didn't you just offer a reward if someone could find your house?
Kind of.
So without getting too much into the backstory, I got swatted a couple of years ago and basically
burned down my whole life and started it over with a focus on privacy.
So I do things like I pay private investigators to try to find me to basically do penetration
testing against all of the privacy stuff that I've set up.
I have offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of the person who swatted me, though
it's been a couple of years now.
So I'm not holding out too much hope on that.
Yeah, I listen to a lot of podcasts when I'm going to talk to someone to try to do research.
And I guess that's how I knew you were from North Carolina at one time because I think
you were with Peter McCormick came and shot guns with you in North Carolina, if I'm correct.
That's right.
Yeah.
So none of this is on my questions, just asking stuff I'm interested in so I hope that's okay.
So did you grow up with guns?
I grew up with guns.
We had a gun in every room of my house, two in most rooms.
It actually skipped a generation.
My grandfather was a World War II veteran.
He was basically a bombardier in a B-17 or a B-14, one of the flying fortresses basically.
So he ended up collecting tons of war memorabilia over the years and he had more firearms than
we could even count.
And even though both of my parents grew up around guns, as far as I'm aware, neither
of them ever had any firearms.
So it kind of skipped a generation, but my grandfather got me interested and then as
soon as I was old enough to start buying and collecting on my own, I got into it.
So in our house, we didn't have to leave the doors locked because if you came in our house,
you could die in any room if you weren't supposed to be in our house, I guess.
Not that as a kid we were shooting people or anything.
But I find guns a lot of fun to shoot.
I really enjoy going out to the range.
I enjoy guns, they're not sitting around my house everywhere and I don't have them like
my parents did, but I really enjoy guns.
So I found it interesting that you did and I found your whole episode with Peter about
his first experience shooting a gun, a fascinating trip that you took him out to a gun range.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately my kind of dream house would have a shooting range on the property.
I'm not there yet, but maybe someday.
So what I actually do more often is I actually have a virtual reality room that I set up
in my house and that makes it a lot more convenient to do a quick, quote, unquote, shooting session.
There's a bunch of hyper realistic physics and mechanics style shooting games now in
virtual reality that are pretty close to the real thing.
Some friends of mine, they have like 800 acres out in West Texas and they just put in, I
mean, a trap, you know, low and high, you know, or skeet or whatever.
And that is so much fun just to go out there with a bunch of people shooting guns.
I mean, there's nothing like bringing out a bunch of people, everybody bringing their
guns just shooting.
Hey, I heard you talking on Trace's podcast that altcoins really strengthened your belief
in Bitcoin.
You were just talking about how you first, when you got into Bitcoin, maybe you were
seeing what was happening with altcoins and the fact that the altcoins kept dying and
not doing anything actually helped strengthen your thoughts on Bitcoin when you first were
starting.
It was a long time ago.
I know I was kind of reaching there.
Yeah.
So it's been interesting because there are so many experiments going on.
And actually, I think that the, you know, the altcoin air drops that forked directly
off of Bitcoin were probably some of the most interesting experiments to see occur.
And you know, no one knew for sure what was going to happen.
But I believe the fact that Bitcoin has been able to regain or basically maintain such
a high level of dominance along a variety of different metrics, not just market cap.
Market cap is kind of a flawed metric to look at, but the fact that so much of the talent
and the resources are continuing to focus on Bitcoin, despite all of these other experiments
that are going on that may, you know, promise the moon, so to say, has really strengthened
my conviction around the fact that Bitcoin is not going to die as a project because there's
far too many people who are, I guess, ideologically motivated and otherwise motivated from this
almost aerospace engineering type of mindset that, you know, we're going to continue to
build on this protocol, even though it's fairly difficult to do so and to do so in a way that
is conservative enough that we can be sure that we're not going to break anything.
So while it can be very frustrating for the average person to kind of look around at the
space and see all of these other projects that appear to be innovating so quickly and
doing so much better than Bitcoin, over the long run, it has actually kind of flipped
my perspective the other way that, you know, slow and steady is the right way to go with
these type of protocols where we really are securing billions and billions of dollars
worth of value.
Yeah.
So I agree with you that steady path with this much money is the way to go.
But even if something comes out wrong, I mean, Bitcoin is not pushed out to all the nodes
and everything.
They have to accept it.
The new code, if something comes out right.
Oh, yeah.
And I think the dynamics of the quote unquote governance of the network are also interesting
and possibly unique compared to a lot of these other projects.
I think one of the reasons that this space is so contentious and, you know, people are
arguing all the time is that there are a lot of aspects to these different networks that
are very hard to quantify.
And so you end up with people that are kind of yelling at each other or talking past each
other because they're using various buzzwords like centralization or decentralization or
robustness or whatever that are fairly hand wavy and hard to pin down.
And so that's one of the things that over the years I've been trying to better understand
and pin down.
And it's why I sometimes write these 10 page articles is to do a deep dive into exactly
how does this network appear to operate?
Because while the network is based upon a bunch of rules that are written by code, there's
also a bunch of other unwritten rules that we're still basically trying to figure out
how it works.
How does this organic consensus actually operate in Bitcoin?
You can get really philosophical and basically say that Bitcoin is this idea that is kind
of floating out in the ether.
And those of us who are building on it are trying to reach out and grasp that idea and
codify it into machine understandable terms.
But the actual thing of whatever Bitcoin is, is not really fully comprehensible.
We're still trying to figure that out.
Okay.
So, well, are there any good altcoins at all in your opinion?
I'd say it comes down to you have to figure out like what is the purpose of this tool?
Each of these things is supposed to have some sort of utility.
So what are we actually trying to do with it?
There's a reason why Ethereum, for example, is the second most popular network out there
is because it has provided a level of utility for developers to build on that is much more
developer friendly than Bitcoin is for doing really complex stuff.
You can make lots of arguments about, well, if you really try it hard enough, then you
could recreate a bunch of that functionality and basically tie it to Bitcoin.
But it is a lot more complicated to do so.
And there's a lot of trade-offs and that's another one of those things that people have
been yelling at each other for years now about what the trade-offs are and whether or not
it's worth using one network over the other.
So there certainly are networks and protocols out there that have utility.
And I think that the utility of those networks is at least somewhat reflected in the market
caps and how much speculation and trading is going on.
But it's kind of weird how there's such a long tail distribution of all of these other
networks.
You know, there's hundreds of them out there that seem to be practically dead, but it's
so difficult to kill off the networks that they continue to linger on potentially forever,
even if almost nobody is using them.
You basically have to have a consensus amongst everyone in the entire world that a certain
project is unusable and dead in order for it to actually stop functioning.
As long as there's one person running it, it's still going to be there.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
So I want to get into Casa Notament, but I have one more question that I really want
to make sure I understood about Bitcoin and you may be the most knowledgeable or had more
experience with it than anyone I've talked to.
Could you explain to me the Bitcoin repository and then merge access on the Bitcoin repository?
What those are?
Yeah.
And this is one of those things I did a deep dive into on an article that I entitled Who
Controls Bitcoin Core.
And essentially Bitcoin Core is the successor of the original SourceForge repository that
was started.
I forget if Satoshi actually started it or Marty Mulmey started it, but in the very early
days, I think it was after just a few months of development in 2009, a few people started
working on Bitcoin in the SourceForge repository.
And then at some point a few years later, I think it was Gavin Andresen basically migrated
the repository from SourceForge to GitHub and that's where it is now at GitHub slash
Bitcoin slash Bitcoin.
And that is kind of the shelling point where the vast majority of the actual Bitcoin protocol
developers tend to work.
So this is an implementation of the Bitcoin protocol.
And last I checked, I think that there were eight or 10 different Bitcoin implementations.
But just due to the nature of shelling points, the vast majority of the activity happens
in Bitcoin Core.
And then once again, there's this like long tail distribution of developer activity on
the other implementations.
So there are some people who will look at the activity across these implementations
and say, oh, it's all centralized in Bitcoin Core.
And they basically control the Bitcoin protocol.
But that's glossing over a lot of minutia.
One of the more important things, though, being the fact that the people who write the
code in Bitcoin Core cannot force anyone to run their code.
So there is this voluntary free market amongst the different implementations.
And to this day, Bitcoin Core seems to be the most trusted and respected.
Having the most developers also tends to make it more likely that in an open source project,
you will have fewer bugs, you'll have better quality control.
Now when you start digging into how does the actual code change process happen, it's best
described as a meritocracy in that there are no gatekeepers that can prevent you from proposing
code changes.
Anyone who creates a GitHub account can then download the software, make some changes,
and then propose those changes to the Bitcoin Core project.
At which point, various volunteers, I mean, the vast majority of people who work on this
project are unpaid.
They will review the code, run tests against it, suggest changes if they think there are
potential improvements.
Or in some cases, they will just flat out reject it and say, this is a terrible idea
because of X, Y, or Z.
So how does a proposed code change get implemented or get merged into the actual software?
Well, if the reviewers are not making any arguments, or at least logical arguments for
why it should not be added, and they generally have a consensus that the code change would
be beneficial, then eventually a maintainer will come along and say, OK, it looks like
we have consensus that this is a good change.
And they will merge it in.
And I believe there are six or seven different maintainers at this point, the lead maintainer
being Vladimir Vanderlaan.
But there are about half a dozen other people who also have the ability to merge in that
code.
So ultimately, you can go through different basically game theory type scenarios of saying,
well, what if this one person went rogue or this other person became adversarial and tried
to get changes in that were controversial?
And the end result of all of this and people who try to say, well, one person has more
power than another in this project, the kind of the end result to all of it is that everyone
is watching everyone else.
It's all happening in the open.
It's all transparent.
And so if one of those people who does have more power to merge in code changes started
abusing that power, it would be very quickly apparent.
And that person would either have their power removed, or if it was like Vladimir, who is
the top administrator of the project, if he went rogue and started doing things and no
one was able to remove his technical capabilities to make changes to the project, then the shelling
point would change.
People would fork the code and basically start working on it in a different repository.
And that's how the abuse of power would get resolved.
Wow.
Sounds like it's pretty good mechanism in there to prevent anyone from inside coming
in and destroying, purposely, maliciously or whatever, destroying what we have.
Definitely.
Yeah.
So how many people are involved totally with Bitcoin Core or the group writing code, everything?
Is it a large group of people, a small group of people?
I mean, I don't need an exact number.
I'm just curious.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, once again, one of those things where there's a long tail distribution of
actual contributors.
Over the entire course of the project, I think there have probably been over 500 contributors.
If you look at who is actually making the most day-to-day changes, there's probably
only 10 or so people that are consistently making changes on a day-to-day basis.
Then if you look at any given release, and there's usually several releases per year,
any given release tends these days to have around 100 different contributors.
But of course, with the long tail distribution, the vast majority of those contributors are
usually only making a few lines of code change.
My name will show up in the occasional release as well.
It's not because I am contributing a lot of time or adding any new features.
It's usually just that I'll find one little issue, a tiny little either bug or documentation
issue that I can very easily tweak.
I think over the course of the past five years or so, I'm actually looking at it now.
I've made eight changes, and the total sum of those changes were about 30 lines of code.
As you said, it's not something that a lot of changes are happening on to begin with.
Is everybody who's involved with Bitcoin Core, all volunteers?
Some of them work for companies, let's say, and part of their job description is dedicating
a certain amount of time to working on the Bitcoin project.
I think the most prolific ones tend to be employed.
There are a few people who are basically funded through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative,
I believe.
We've then got a few people who are employed by either Blockstream or Chaincode Labs, or
now Square also has its own crypto team.
There are other people who just work at various companies, and then there's a bunch of freelance
and solo folks, or people like myself who spend the vast majority of our time working
on stuff for our company, but then once in a while, we'll just come across some tiny
little thing with Bitcoin and say, hey, I can contribute a small improvement there.
Right, so you see it and you know something needs to be done, so you just send it in.
I don't consider myself a Bitcoin Core developer.
I am technically a contributor, a very small contributor.
Like I said, I build infrastructure for Bitcoin companies, so I am just as a result of being
on these machines running nodes and finding various issues, either with their operation
or the APIs to control them.
That's usually when I come across things where I find that I can make small contributions.
When I open my CASA, sometimes it'll say there's an update.
Is that sometimes an update because there's been an update by Bitcoin Core, and then sometimes
just CASA's then update on it, or what are those updates?
Yeah, so the vast majority of the time, that will just be CASA code that has changed.
On your actual CASA node, there are nearly a dozen different Dockerized services that
are running.
These are mostly various APIs and the dashboard service that we run on top of Bitcoin Core
and on top of LND.
Those are the ones that we're making changes to almost on a weekly basis.
Then once in a while, a new Bitcoin Core or LND release will come out and we'll update
those services as well.
Now we're going to get into CASA NoMore because I have several questions.
I have a few questions people on Twitter sent in.
Before I do that, I do want to take this opportunity to tell everybody about BitBlock Boom, the
real Bitcoin conference that's coming to Dallas, Texas.
I call it the real Bitcoin conference because I'm not saying this only, but all we talk
about is Bitcoin, so it's a real Bitcoin conference.
We don't talk about altcoins, we're not really into blockchain, we're really into Bitcoin.
The third BitBlock Boom is in Dallas, Texas in August of 2020, starting with a welcome
to BitBlock Boom dinner on Thursday, then there are a lot of events on Friday that other
people are putting on that are kind of in the BitBlock Boom family.
The conference is Saturday and Sunday ends up with a Bitcoin brunch on Sunday.
We have a ton of great speakers and we also have a Bitcoin and guns thing that you might
be interested in, James, where they go out to a shooting range.
I think that's on Friday.
We have a ton of great speakers.
Take a look at the lineup today.
If you use the code CUSINS, C-O-U-S-I-N-S, you'll get 30% off the price of your ticket.
The first two events were fantastic and this one's going to be even better.
Go to bitblockboom.com today and take a look.
I've just started adding speakers and actually tickets probably just went on sale this morning.
Take a look at that and Jameson, you know you're invited to come and invite to speak
whatever you want to do.
If you can do either one, I know you take a vacation that time of the year, so maybe
we'll look up.
Yeah, we'll see.
Yeah, we'll look.
Now, let's get to the CASA node.
Why is it named CASA?
Where did that name come from?
Yeah, it's kind of a long history.
Before CASA was doing Bitcoin stuff, it was actually a distributed Airbnb type of startup
that was building on top of the block stack platform.
I think the initial name was actually Bedkin.
As they were working on that, they realized that there were some fundamental private key
management issues that needed to be solved before they felt like they would be able to
build secure apps on these decentralized platforms.
They pivoted at that time and they kept the home theme and changed to CASA at the time.
The idea was basically that we would continue helping people with homes, but the way that
we would do that would be we would help people basically improve their own personal sovereignty
by helping them secure their keys and secure their data and basically secure everything
that is of value that could be taken out of trusted third parties.
Doing cryptocurrency stuff was just an initial foray.
We certainly have much larger plans, but ultimately we want to help everyone turn their home into
a castle.
Can you say what some of those plans are?
The CASA node ties into all of this.
We ultimately intend to run a variety of different services on the CASA node other than just
cryptocurrency stuff.
Whether that is distributed Dropbox style stuff or potentially even your own email server,
depending on if we get to the point where that seems feasible enough, what we're trying
to do is we're lowering the bar for essentially administering your own server.
As you've seen yourself, it's a very difficult thing to do to get non-technical people to
the point where they are able to run their own machines that are reliable enough to be
used on a daily basis.
Yeah, yeah.
It definitely is.
Like I said, most of the things weren't really that technical.
It's just I'm not technical.
When you get someone like me who's not technical, sometimes, like I was trying to change the
color of my node on the map and I can't put in the hashtag in there.
I couldn't figure out forever not to put the hashtag in there.
As soon as someone told me that, I was like, wow, I'm really pretty stupid, aren't I?
Well, that just means that's one more edge case that we need to add code to be able to
handle.
Yeah.
It was a simple thing.
I just didn't think of it.
Yeah.
Usually, when I mess up, it's usually something pretty simple because like I said, I'm not
really the brightest one in the pack.
Let me ask you this question here.
I'm going to go to a question from one of the listeners, and I don't even know what
this means.
When will Akasa OS image be released?
This is from Secretary of Bitcoin on Twitter.
We're actually paying people out, incentivizing them to do these health checks on a regular
basis to make sure their node is up and running.
So I think we would then have to...
We would get into an interesting business question around, well, do we also want to
continue paying out these Satoshi rewards to people who haven't actually bought Akasa
node, but they've just installed the software on their own hardware?
Not a decision for me to make because I already know it's technically possible.
All right.
Okay.
So let me get a second question out of the way.
This is from Sovereign Hodlnot.
Describe a sufficient dead man switch.
Yeah, this is actually an issue that we've been working on related to our Keymaster product.
So that was really the first thing that we ever put out was this three of five multi-sig
be your own bank product.
And after onboarding a bunch of users and then talking through not only their day-to-day
use but their long-term use, the inheritance problem is a very difficult problem to solve
mainly because it's so personal.
And so you may have seen we recently put out this 50-page wealth security protocol document.
We've actually got one of the authors of the Glacier Protocol who has been working for
us for about a year, and he's been working on that security protocol.
He's also been working on an inheritance protocol, and that has been slow and steady progress.
But once again, it's the type of thing where we've been beta testing it with some of our
own employees internally and with a few clients who are willing to try it out.
But essentially, the inheritance protocol is even more complicated because it's reliant
upon things like what jurisdiction you're in, it's going to have to be customized based
upon your own family and your heirs and how that needs to be set up.
And so we're trying to build out this.
It's a protocol but it's essentially a guide that maps out all of the different possible
paths for your unique inheritance situation.
And so there are decisions that will have to be made around how does an inheritance
withdrawal and payout process get triggered.
I think that to get back to actually answer the question of what is a good dead man switch,
I don't think at this time that there is any good technical dead man switch.
You can certainly build dead man switch that will fire if anything happens to you and you're
unable to push a button or whatever to basically signal that you're still alive.
So then you get into more complicated edge cases of, well, what if you are just out of
reach of the internet for a really long period of time?
Or what if you are in or even incarcerated or in like a medically induced coma and in
all likelihood, you will be a free person eventually but not for a long time.
If you create these technical dead man switches that don't account for those possible edge
cases, then they may accidentally fire even though you're still alive and you're just
unable to prevent them from firing.
So basically what I'm getting at is that I think that any dead man switch is essentially
going to have to operate in a similar way that current estate processes work, which
is that you actually have to have sign off from various humans who are willing to put
their own reputations on the line to attest to the fact that you are either dead or incapacitated
to the point that it's not feasible that you will ever be able to make your own decisions
again.
That's why this is such a complicated process is because it's not a simple black and white
thing.
There's a lot of gray area.
Yeah, there is a lot of cases where you could just temporarily be not able to check in or
push the button or whatever it is you do to prevent the dead man switch from going into
place and then it takes over.
So thanks for those questions guys.
I was at a, at the last bit block boom we were at, we were safe at Ian had a dinner
and a guy was sitting across from me.
A couple of us were talking about casanoids and this gentleman was like going, do I make
any money running a casanoid and I said, no, I don't, you don't run it for making money.
I'm not making any money.
And they were, well, why should I waste my time buying a casanoid and running that?
What would you say to that person?
I would actually send them to another one of my 10 page articles entitled, you know,
securing your financial sovereignty, which goes into the actual incentives for running
a node.
So you're correct that, you know, running a lightning node, even if it's got a ton of
channels open and routing a decent number of transactions, the return on investment
for that is going to be measured in, you know, pennies or maybe like a dollar a month if
you like, you try really hard to set up your, your liquidity well.
But the, the, the real incentive for running nodes on these networks is so that you are
in the optimal security posture, which means that you're not trusting anybody else not
to lie to you because you're verifying everything yourself.
So you know that when you receive a payment, you have actually received that payment and
there's no chance that a third party is lying to you about receiving a payment.
Okay.
So you, it's just for control, basically to control your own destiny.
So right now with a Casanoid, you can, when you start up Casanoid, if I'm correct, you
can put in, is it 1.6 Bitcoin or 0.16?
Let's see.
The maximum for a single channel, I believe is 0.16 Bitcoin.
So you could have up to that much in, you know, several dozen channels.
I think we limit it to several dozen just due to the processing power of the Raspberry
Pi.
Is that per channel or is that the limit on how much I can upload to my Casanoid?
No, that's per channel.
We don't have a hard limit of how much money you can put on there yourself, though we do
recommend that you only put as much on there as you're willing to lose.
You know, it's still early days.
There are potential like catastrophic loss scenarios.
We've had some fun times where people have had hardware failures and then we've had to
expend a lot of resources trying to help them, you know, basically retrieve corrupted data
to, you know, reconstitute their wallet, which was not fun.
Okay.
I don't know why I thought that was total on the node itself for some reason.
So going back to your earlier comments about things that y'all were thinking about adding,
you know, in the future, you know, as email and stuff like that, and with the fact that
the Raspberry Pi is constantly being upgraded, does my Casanoid have a limited shelf life?
Maybe two years and then I'm going to have to upgrade it or would it work for much longer
than that?
But if I want all the features, I would have to buy a newer version.
Yeah.
So we put a terabyte hard drive on there to essentially future proof it.
I believe that that would easily last for about 10 years, assuming no hardware failures.
So just in terms of storage space.
But the assumption that we make is that yes, you know, you're going to want to upgrade
every few years because the hardware is continuing to get better.
And so, you know, with CASA, we're basically doing this annual subscription plan.
And the idea is that, you know, as we come out with new nodes, we will be sending them
to our subscribers who are, you know, kept up to date and renewed with their subscription.
So I expect that you would be getting, you know, upgraded hardware.
I think we're going to be targeting every two years, though I don't think that we've
like officially put anything in writing yet because that does seem to be about the cycle
that we're seeing, you know, major improvements on this tiny, like mini PC platform.
When the CASA node came out originally, was it originally a subscription model or was
it just, I thought it was just you bought it.
So when we initially started out, the first thing that we ever did was the KeyMaster three
of five multi-sig and KeyMaster has always been a subscription model.
Then it was like nine months after KeyMaster came out that we announced the CASA node.
And at the time, that was just, oh, you're buying the node and that's it.
But within, I think, six months or so, we started creating other tiers for KeyMaster
and basically bundling it all together and saying, okay, you know, the CASA node is now
going to be at this like gold tier within the CASA ecosystem.
And so at the gold tier, you get the node, you get the two of three multi-sig and you
get a hardware device to work with the KeyMaster product.
Basically at this point, everything that we are selling is, you know, within some sort
of tiered subscription model.
So when I bought mine, I bought it and then maybe a few months later, I received a treasure
in the mail and a CASA bag in the mail.
So that meant that I was on the subscription model when I bought it and that was part of
the package.
Yeah.
You should have received an email as well that said, hey, as a CASA node purchaser,
you can get the gold subscription for like the next year or so.
Okay.
And I probably didn't.
I just don't remember.
Okay.
Well, that answers my questions on that because I was curious.
When you said that, I just didn't remember at the time that it was that way.
So is there anything new coming out on the CASA node that we can look forward to?
I mean, the biggest thing that we're working on right now is getting all of the current
software built and running on the Raspberry Pi 4 platform.
That's just going to be this intermediate upgrade for the next few months or so because
we're already working on the next major upgrade, which will hopefully be ready sometime next
year.
Continuing to look out further and further of what we're going to be able to add, faster
hardware is a requirement in order for us to run other types of software.
The 3B plus is pretty maxed out just with Bitcoin Core and LND.
And we have a lot of requests in the pipeline for people who want to run things like BTC
pay server, for example.
So we want to make sure that we have hardware that is not struggling in order to run these
things.
It really needs to be a lot more reliable and performant if we want people to be hooking
up these nodes to their actual commerce integrations.
So is there an advantage to...I have nine channels, I think, to my node, and some people
have hundreds, it looks like.
What is the advantage to someone for having hundreds of channels versus someone like me
who has nine, let's say?
Is there an advantage?
Is it something that someone like me wants to spend time getting more channels because
it's somehow advantageous to me?
I think that after you've got half a dozen or so channels, you should be sufficiently
diversified that you don't have a ton of routing problems.
When you're getting into dozens or hundreds of channels, that's getting into enterprise
tier of maybe you're running a highly connected service that is receiving a ton of payments
and you need to have a lot more liquidity that is distributed across many channels,
or maybe you're trying to optimize for your routing fees to actually make money off of
that, which is a very difficult thing to do.
There have been several people who have written up reports of their own experiments along
those lines.
I think for the average person, if you're just using it because you want to make the
occasional payment, then half a dozen channels or so should be fine.
This is what I believe is going to be one of the most challenging things in the long
term for Lightning Network is the liquidity aspect.
We have a lot more work to be done to automatically manage the liquidity across the channels and
to even manage the channels themselves.
I don't think that Lightning Network is going to be capable of being a mainstream thing
as long as channels are something that the user even has to know about.
Until we can get to the point where the economics of channel liquidity are so well understood
that we can have software that's automatically managing all of that under the hood and opening
and closing and rebalancing channels without the user even knowing it's happening.
That's one of the major inflection points at which this technology will actually be
able to go mainstream is if we can get past that point.
So does that have to do with when you're setting up your Casanoid, I don't know if I'm stating
this correctly, but it has an option for automatically maybe opening channels?
Yeah.
There is an autopilot option that is a feature, it's built into L&D and right now it's extremely
naive.
It's kind of a spray and pray approach.
It just like finds random nodes on the network and opens channels with them.
It doesn't really do much at all with regard to actually looking at the liquidity and how
it's balanced across the channels.
This is something where there is ongoing research and like I said, I believe it is a necessary
improvement in order for Lightning to be usable.
Really I think that a mainstream Lightning wallet would not even really differentiate
between Bitcoin on-chain or Lightning off-chain.
It would basically just say Bitcoin and you would make a deposit into your wallet and
then the wallet itself would figure out automatically how much of that money to put into Lightning
channels and how to distribute it and how to essentially maintain the liquidity over
time.
So you basically, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you could probably see
a day where all nodes come with an autopilot and you turn them on and plug them in and
then they go out and find channels and open channels up and then you could add some channels
if you had a friend that had one and you wanted to have a direct channel with him for some
reason.
But for the most part, it would just open channels.
Definitely.
This is something that I've talked to a few of the Lightning protocol developers about
is do you think that the Lightning network graph will emulate a social connection graph?
If so, perhaps we should have that type of feature where you can basically connect to
your friends.
Of course, that almost requires this other identity layer, which of course other projects
are working on identity layers as well.
Even now, it is still so early in this experiment that it's unclear exactly how the network
is going to evolve over the long run.
But it does seem to be following some of the rough distributions that I actually wrote
about in 2015 or so where there does seem to be a fairly long tail distribution of the
value where a lot of the value is going to be in a few major providers and then there
will be concentric circles emanating out from that where there are then some medium scale
providers and then even further out from that is all of the individuals who just have basically
their pocket money in their Lightning wallets.
On the topic of the social network of it naming your nodes, whatever, can't you do that now
with the phone app though?
Can it give you an option to name your node?
Yeah.
So you can put a name on there.
I mean, I don't really understand why you would want to do that in the first place because
I think that you should be running your node on Tor only with no identifying features.
Like even the color thing is just kind of a silly little feature.
I don't know how that even got in there in the first place.
I figured maybe it made it stand out on the solar system map, you know what I mean?
If everybody says blue isn't yours is orange and I thought maybe you were trying to acquire
channels that say, Hey, look at the orange one here.
Who is that?
You know, that's all I can figure out.
Oh my gosh.
What's your favorite podcast?
What podcast do you listen to?
Yeah.
So I actually, I barely have time to go on podcasts.
I very rarely listen to podcasts though.
When I do, I really like what Bitcoin did with Peter McCormick.
I like what grinds my gears with Meltem Demires and Jill Carlson.
And I've also listened to a decent number of episodes of Noted, which I believe is Pierre
Richard and Michael Goldstein.
Yeah.
Well, those are all three great podcasts.
Before we get out of here, is there anything you want to add that I may not have covered?
I think that's quite a bit.
I'm good.
So where can people follow you at?
You can find me on Twitter.
My handle is l-o-p-p.
You could also find me on my website where I have all of my resources and interviews
and articles and everything I've ever done related to Bitcoin, which is at lop.net.
Well, Jameson, I appreciate you coming on the show.
This went a little longer, but I started having questions that came up that were interesting
to me.
Thank you very much for coming on the show.
My pleasure.
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