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So if you're looking for a unique take on the markets, the global economy, and how it all hangs together, then sign up now. The link is in the show notes, so head on over there and you can sign up. This is Jameson Lopp. Welcome to Crypto and Grill. Hi, everyone. That's Crypto and Grill. It's Crypto Dantes here, and I'm joined as usual with none other than Stig of the Pump. Stig, how are you? I'm good. I'm really good. Back in my basement. I always like giving a location update. Yeah. It's quite hot at the moment. Well, we will hear more about the importance of not giving location updates shortly, as I'm sure our guest will tell us the importance of that, or not doing that rather. But look, for our regular listeners, we hope you've enjoyed the last few episodes. We focused more on economics, regulation, and some of the real banking and investment businesses that are starting to now develop and form part of the new digital economy. We wanted to step back to one of our earliest episodes and take a deeper look now at the importance of security, and also on top of that, privacy. There's a lot going on in the world in Hong Kong and protests in China, and we wanted to try and figure out whether there's a link here between the importance of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. To do that and to have a broad ranging conversation about that, we've got none other than Jameson Lopp with us. Jameson, how are you? Not bad. Glad to be here. Excellent. It's fantastic to have you on, and we are really looking forward to this. For the listeners that aren't familiar with you, haven't heard of you before, would you mind giving us a quick background? Let us know a bit about yourself, perhaps your education, early career, and we can move on to where you are today. I mean, that could probably fill a full episode, so maybe cap it to two minutes or so. That would be great. Sure. I am a computer scientist. I graduated with a computer science degree about 10 years ago, spent the first seven years of my career actually in kind of an anti-privacy role. I was stripping people's privacy away by doing analytics at a very large scale for online marketing companies. We were sending out 100 million emails a day and ingesting a ton of tracking data, and my job was to write these large cluster analytics jobs that would crunch all of the data and help marketers figure out how to sell stuff to people even better by specifically targeting them. But I got interested in Bitcoin a number of years ago, both for the ideological perspective and the computer science part, I found that it was actually a very elegant solution to a problem that I had never even thought about. Most people don't really think about how money works. So I got really entranced by the whole idea, went down the rabbit hole, started creating my own projects to better understand Bitcoin, where I forked the Bitcoin Core project and put in a bunch of analytics data trying to kind of add in my own expertise and help people out as much as I could. And then eventually I went full time about four years ago and worked for BitGo for three years doing enterprise wallet security, helping power a lot of exchanges and other large companies. And then for the past year and a half, I've been doing a similar role where I'm now the chief technical officer at Casa, where we are also a multi signature wallet provider, but we're more focused on the personal side. So we're trying to really help people be their own bank, help people fulfill this promise of having sovereignty over your own money, because it's always been technically possible to do that in Bitcoin, but there's been a very high learning curve. So we just want to help bring user friendliness to the best security solution that you can have. Okay, so that really sets this up nicely because what I wanted to talk about was your current role at Casa, what you do, what the overall objective is, and why a person should own a Casa node. So kind of your sales pitch to an extent. But just before we get into that, when you talk about monetary sovereignty, what do you mean by that? Because that might be a new concept to people and how might a person achieve it and why should they even attempt to achieve it? Well there's a number of different aspects to that. And there are some people like Trace Mayer, for example, who has kind of deemed it as different classes or even different class citizens of monetary sovereignty. The really basic one is being able to control your own money and not having to trust a third party. So whenever you have money in a bank or in a brokerage or any traditional financial product, you don't actually have direct control over that. You have to go request to a third party that they do something with your money, whether invest it or withdraw it or transfer it. And while these days it may not seem that way, because in many cases you can just go on a website and click a few buttons and it feels like you do have control over it. If you run into an edge case where the third party decides they don't want to fulfill your request, it very quickly becomes obvious that this is not actually your money. It's just someone else who's holding on to your money for you. So in the Bitcoin space, the way that you achieve that is by controlling your private keys. As long as you have the private keys to your coins, no one can decide whether or not you're able to create a transaction, send your money wherever you want. That is kind of the basic level one. The next level that we're trying to help people achieve is to actually control what the rules of money are. And the way that you do that in Bitcoin is you run a fully validating node. And this basically ensures that nobody is breaking the rules of the system, the rules to which you agree Bitcoin should actually be. And running a node has been fairly difficult before now, at least running a node that is constantly on and it really turns into kind of a systems administration problem. And so that's part of the reason of why we developed the CASA node to go along with our other products. But I believe that when we have a large set of people who are collectively making individual decisions and creating this new type of organic consensus, basically it creates a much more robust system where we're creating a monetary system that has the rules that are the most beneficial to the most number of people or at the very least, the least harmful to the most number of people. It's a very interesting new type of governance or philosophy or what have you. And people have been arguing about how it works for a number of years now. But it's fascinating because it is nothing like the existing system. You have no control whatsoever over the way that the US dollar or the pound or the euro or anything like that works. You just have to use it. Gotcha. So really fascinating. One of the questions I have, probably because a lot of listeners we expect early into this or beginners, how would you describe what a node is to Joe Bloggs on the streets? And then what the difference between a node and mining is, or is there any difference? Yes, and really it gets complicated because of the long history of this space. And originally, nodes and miners were synonymous for the first few years of Bitcoin. But eventually we saw specialization happen and these two different functions split out from each other. But a node is really just a piece of running software is running on a computer. It could be a computer at your house, it could be a computer in a data center, really a computer anywhere that is connected to the internet that you have some sort of administrative control over. And it is running one of several different Bitcoin software implementations. Last I checked, there were probably seven or eight different software implementations of Bitcoin because Bitcoin is fundamentally not software. It is rather just a set of rules. And of course, you can codify these rules in any programming language you want to. So as long as people are writing their code to verify the same set of rules, then all of these different implementations can talk to each other. They can replicate the data from the Bitcoin network to each other. And they can come to consensus of what the actual data should be. That is, the transactions and the blocks that comprise this thing that we call the blockchain. But when you are running a node, it means that you are not trusting anyone to be honest to you. And that is because you are going out, you are connecting to a number of other nodes on the network, you are requesting the transaction and block data from these nodes, but then you download it and you actually verify that all of the data follows the rules of the protocol. And so if you are given bad data or you are given a transaction that, you know, spends the same money twice, all your node has to do is reject it. You throw it away. You don't actually have to do anything. It's this great power. It's almost like a veto power saying, no, I don't believe that this is correct, therefore I don't accept it and you can't make me accept it. And that is what gives this network an incredible level of robustness. I've referred to it as kind of the power of no or the power of apathy that because we have tens of thousands of individual nodes, various entities on the network that can very easily reject anything they don't like, it is pretty much impossible for you to get bad data to replicate through the network. It is pretty much impossible to fool the entire Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole. Okay, so you can run a full node then without having to be effectively a miner as well. You can just verify the transactions but not search for the block reward. Correct. If you are mining, then at least someone needs to be running a node. These days, mining is so specialized that you usually just connect to a pool and the operator of that mining pool is the one who is running the node. But essentially, if you are mining, you are grabbing transactions, you are constructing a valid block because if it is invalid, you are going to get rejected by the network and you are not going to get paid. Once you find a block, if you are lucky enough to find a block by getting the correct proof of work that everyone will agree meets the required difficulty, the computational difficulty, then you can broadcast it out on the network. Everyone validates it. They come to a consensus and they say, okay, you created a block, we are going to add it to the blockchain and we are going to reward you with these new Bitcoins and the transaction fees. So, how does CASA then fit into all of this and what is the overall objective of CASA? Our primary goal at CASA is to help empower individuals and to help improve personal sovereignty. These are very broad goals, but the way that we do that is by attacking both of those two levels of sovereignty that I referred to earlier. The first product that we came out with was CASA Keymaster, which is an Android and iOS mobile app, which makes it extremely simple for you to create a multi-signature wallet. We started out with three of five multi-sig. We now also offer two of three multi-sig. We also have a single sig just for regular spending, but the trick that we did here was we melded extremely friendly interface on these mobile apps with the extreme level of security that you get from hardware devices like Trezors and Ledgers. And so, you are actually managing the keys or the keys themselves are stored on these hardware devices, but you are using our very simple and well-designed mobile app to visualize your security, to manage your various devices, and we took it a step further to both make it more secure and more usable by actually getting rid of the need for the user to manage the seed phrases, the recovery data for the private keys. And the way that we did that was we basically created a more flexible system where if one of your hardware devices stops working or gets stolen or lost or whatever, instead of having to go through and dig up through potentially some arcane backup system where you are trying to keep this seed phrase secure and robustly stored in a way that won't get lost, all you have to do is go buy a new Trezor or Ledger and plug it in and basically click through our wizard in our software to do a key rotation. And the reason why we think that that is a great improvement is because when you get a hardware device and you set it up and it tells you, okay, put this seed phrase somewhere and keep it safe, we believe there is actually an entire iceberg of security and IT knowledge underneath that sentence that the vast majority of people aren't going to understand, they aren't even going to think about and they are going to shoot themselves in the foot by making any number of very simple mistakes such as, for example, just only having one backup of their seed phrase and maybe their house burns down, maybe they have it on a piece of paper and this has actually happened by the way, their maid comes in and thinks it's trash and throws it away. We have heard dozens if not hundreds of kind of sob stories of very, very simple mistakes that people have made that have ended up being catastrophic. And so by completely eliminating the need for people to figure out how to manage seed phrases and rather just say, okay, these are your five devices and you know where those are and you're visualizing them and we're providing you with like health check opportunities to make sure you still have them and they work, it's basically baking the best practices of private key management into the software so that the user doesn't have to go spend a ton of time educating themselves, all they have to do is open the app and use the interfaces that we're providing to them. I'm looking at my dog sitting next to me rather warily that he may eat my private key. I'm sure that has happened to someone. Dog ate my homework meets dog ate my private key, how very meta. So okay, so that's a really great overview of CASA and it sort of serves as a reminder to get a CASA node installed ASAP because I must admit I don't have one yet so I apologize there Jameson. But let's step back a bit and maybe get somewhat philosophical. So one of the things we wanted to talk about was what your big picture view of the world today is and then what we'll do from there is sort of dig into the importance of security privacy and your philosophy around it. Where do you, if you sit back and kind of mull it over, where do you, how do you see things from an economic geopolitical and a technological standpoint at the moment, are we moving towards ever more authoritarian totalitarian regimes, are we seeing the rise of somewhat subversive technologies, is technology good or bad or somewhere in between, what are your views on the big picture? I think the world is becoming a weirder place and there's no way to stop that. I think it is a natural result of communications technology making it easier to see the diversity of perspectives and opinions that people have and also making it easier for I guess the fringe perspectives to find each other and group together and kind of become more powerful and amplify their voices really resulting in much more polarized discourse. So it's odd because I think that very few people thought that it would go this way. It's kind of like in the early days of the internet I think a lot of people were really excited about how improved communications were going to make everyone more knowledgeable because the sum of human knowledge would be at your fingertips. But I think few people really visualized kind of the opposite happening where it would also make it extremely easy to propagate falsehoods, fake news or just extreme opinions to amplify those and kind of brainwash people into thinking really crazy, completely out there ideas. And so that kind of goes to your question at a high level like both economic and geopolitical and everything. I think that it's just more volatile. I think that we kind of we see advancements happening in many directions at very extremes and then the clashes that result from it are really what make this world seem like a much crazier place these days. So what is going to happen with technology? I mean it's kind of a question of like you know is this a trend that will continue forever or will we figure out a way to reconcile these things? That is kind of the million dollar question. I mean we've created technologies that can improve privacy and simultaneously we've created technologies that strip privacy away. Unfortunately, I think that it's a losing battle because it is very tempting for people to give up the privacy because they don't really see the value in it until it's too late. And so they give up their privacy and return for various conveniences. I saw someone post on Twitter that they weren't really worried about giving away their data because they had an unlimited data plan on their mobile contract. I thought that was genius but it just goes to show not everybody gets it or the danger. Staying in that kind of vein, there's two shows that I watched recently on Netflix. One about I think it's Beyond the Curve it's called about the emergence of the flat earth phenomena or the re-emergence of that. I think when you said the world is maybe getting a bit crazier I think I'd add that into the sort of mix there. I hope you're not off that earth of that Jameson but it's certainly out there and there's a whole cohort of people that have found enough evidence to sort of fit their own narrative and then they just live in an echo chamber. But sort of moving on from that slightly is another show that I saw recently which is getting a bit of press and publicity at the moment covering Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and it's called The Great Hack. I was wondering just before we move on to your thoughts about privacy and security, if you've seen it, what you've thought about it and if you haven't seen it more generally. Did Cambridge Analytica do anything wrong? Did Facebook do anything wrong or if people are giving this data up willingly actually should we be surprised that private enterprises are using that and implementing kind of nudge theory to get their own outcomes and that could extend to political elections as well? I did get to see the flat earther one, that was hilarious. I was interested in that for a number of reasons including similar types of things that we've seen in the crypto space where people are creating echo chambers and kind of propagating their own ideology. I did not get to see The Great Hack though I've heard plenty of people talk about it. But it's actually kind of funny because one of my favorite classes when I was in school that I actually ended up being a teaching assistant for was computer ethics. And computer ethics is a really hard thing to get your mind around because of unintended consequences and kind of second order effects of what happens. And one of my favorite examples and this I think went way back to the 1960s or 70s, one of the first real conflicts of computer ethics was the development of these early x-ray machines that were run by computer software and there ended up being some bugs where in certain cases they would overdose and basically irradiate and give a lethal dose of radiation to the patient therefore killing them instead of saving them. And you end up with these really tough questions of who is to blame? The programmer was trying to save people, they were trying to write code and manipulate data in a way that would improve a person's life. And I think that in many cases we as programmers are trying to do that but we are narrowly focused on a very specific problem that we're trying to solve. And I'm not sure that it is even feasible to ask for software engineers, I'm not even sure if it's feasible to ask at a greater level of like organizations to think about or be cognizant of what the unintended consequences, what the second order effects of what you're doing really are going to be. I mean it's kind of like asking people to predict the future. And this is another reason why I think the world is becoming a crazier place is because we are able to manipulate things, manipulate data, manipulate communications and ultimately manipulate perception. And the only way to know what happens as a result is to do it. I mean we're basically running experiments at a rate that has never been seen before. And the question becomes how do we shut down or reverse these experiments if they are deemed to be too risky. And that's where I think you start to see government and regulators come in trying to kind of save us from ourselves but they very well may do the same thing and create unintended consequences that just make even weirder and worse things happen. So this is, as far as I am aware, it's like not really a solvable problem. We just kind of have to wing it and hope that we don't destroy ourselves in the process. This leads us on very nicely to my next question actually because we, in the day job and the work that we do, we end up talking a lot about what's the future role of the government as a state going forward and I guess it'd be good to kind of dig into some of your personal beliefs around the role of government, the role of money, the role of freedom or what freedom actually is. Yeah, I mean ultimately like a lot of people in this space I think I end up falling back to a lot of the principles or at least thoughts that were pinned in the sovereign individual and pinned in the crypto-anarchist manifesto of how technology at a very high level is going to affect the world over the coming generations. But also like I said before, it's going to be some of column A and some of column B where technology is going to continue to empower individuals and that is my own manifesto of a number of years ago when I decided to go full-time Bitcoin. I decided that I was no longer going to think of myself as just a computer scientist who is solving interesting problems, rather I decided that my career goal is to improve the power of the individual because I think that there's already plenty of people and entities out there who are working to strip away the power of the individual and I feel like I contributed to that in my early career and that if I can try to do as much as I can to push against that tide I will at least be able to sleep at night. I don't know how effective I will be individually but hopefully if I can also influence other people to have a similar perspective to myself then we can unite kind of in a good cause together to try to save humanity from authoritarianism. Talking about practical aspects of that then, so how do you practically go about achieving personal or operational security? It's difficult because you have to actually think about it, it is not the default and so if you aren't really holding this as a dear value to your life then what you'll find is you don't have any privacy, like going about your normal life the way that pretty much everybody does, the way that we are conditioned to, you're going to be giving your data away left and right, you're going to be broadcasting your location, your movements, possibly every thought that comes into your head if you're addicted to social media and all of this data is going to get absorbed and you don't know how that data is going to get used. Mostly it's going to get used for marketing purposes but the thing about data that I think most people don't fully appreciate is how information has a property where it just replicates like crazy. Often we hear information wants to be free and that doesn't mean free as in cheap, it means free as in freedom as in as soon as you make a piece of data public you should basically assume that the entire world will eventually know it at this point because of how hyper connected we all are where even if you're putting sensitive data into a quote unquote secure database it's eventually going to leak out and I mean we see this happen almost every day, definitely every week where what is it was just in the past week I think we had like capital one was like a hundred million plus people who had a lot of their sensitive data leaked and I mean this is just becoming such a regular occurrence that we've become desensitized to it and I don't know how many people actually think about that ahead of time but we certainly don't seem to have a lot of uproar as a result of it. I mean I don't recall hearing about like people protesting outside of the offices of Equifax or Capital One or any of these other companies after all their data gets lost and I think part of that reason may be simply that it's so widespread across hundreds of millions of people where even the folks who do end up being directly impacted by it and having their identity stolen or whatever in many cases it's not obvious or not possible to tell what the source of that was. All you really know is that your data got stolen, you can't exactly track who lost your data in the first place and your data is in so many places that it's almost a lost cause unless you go to the extreme like I did and basically like burn down your entire life and start over again from scratch with a focus on not giving your data to basically anybody. I'm really interested to dig into that again to understand whether you are in fact gene hack man out of enemy of the state living inside some kind of metal cage but before we do that I think you raise a really interesting point about what is the second order, third order or the magnitude outcome as a result of these activities. If there's a data hack I think you know if you're personally threatened in the street or there's something physical happens you understand that there's a risk and you're going to take precautions against that event or that outcome happening again. With a data hack nothing happens, you don't know what the outcome is until perhaps years later when perhaps your identity has been stolen or something else has happened. I think one of the things that we've been talking about and thinking about recently is where's the future going for China with a centralized state that has access and control of so much data and when it's implementing social credit scores it's only at that point really that you realize oh okay I've been giving this data away, they've been watching, farming, analyzing and creating all kinds of profiles and now here comes the bad news, I can't get a loan or I can't get a mortgage on my house, my kids can't go to private school because I haven't necessarily been the best citizen. I saw this week actually that there's even tracking and monitoring on screens in airports I think in China that shows where toilets are so it shows a live image of the toilets that are in use which stores are full or being used so you literally can't go to the toilet without the Chinese government taking some kind of record of the event. Just your thoughts on the second order, third order, magnitude impacts of those things would be interesting. I think one of the more concerning things is what is going to happen if you try to opt out of all of this? At what point is the government going to put their foot down and say no this is not something you can opt out of if you don't let us track you then we're basically going to ruin your life and it does seem like China will probably be sort of the test bed for that. I'm fairly hopeful that countries that are more steeped in ideologies of freedom will be able to resist it but then the question is how long will they be able to resist it? Will it only be for a generation or a few generations? Is this something that will inevitably take over the whole world? I think you also can get into some interesting theories around sort of global one world government type situations. Will the world become so hyper connected that even the governments merge and begin to realize that physical boundaries are kind of silly? Maybe we need to have some sort of alien invasion to unite us all before that happens but who knows. Don't go off the earth on us Jameson. You've been on for half an hour and we've sent you to aliens. Or a visit from future me. Exactly. All we can really do is fight against it as much as possible and hope that we can stave off this eventual panopticon of governments. There's also of course the question of whether or not we can create systems that eventually make governments less powerful. There are some theories that sound money like Bitcoin could weaken the power of the states by removing their ability to print money which is essentially just a more subversive form of taxation. There are theories that if governments can't fund their war machines by printing tons of money that may reduce the amount of resources that are spent on destructive technologies and perhaps we'll have at least relatively more investment in constructive technologies. But it's going to be a never ending battle and I think that the allure of capturing and ingesting absolutely every bit of data that you can in order to analyze it is its power. It's just a new form of currency in and of itself because when you become basically omniscient you can start to influence people, you can start to create new rules and basically force them on people possibly even without them knowing it. That is where we're getting into some interesting questions that I think came up around the last election cycle in the United States where people are saying well there's political influence of Russia in the United States and they're basically using our own algorithms against us by having troll farms and bots and whatever push different messages out to basically train the suggestion algorithms on these platforms which then will amplify specific messages even if it's a message that is extreme and not believed by many people if you amplify it enough you might actually be able to convince enough people that this is the truth, this is something they need to believe and then as a result actually start to create almost a groundswell movement of essentially convincing people. It's a random question but a thought that comes to mind is do you think that we're potentially in the future going to end up with a generational divide between those that get this entirely because they're over a younger generation they've been brought up understanding the power of their own personal data from day one versus those that are of the older generations who have kind of grown up with it but don't really care? That is a good question. I guess I don't really know enough younger people to understand their perspective on data and privacy. It is, I'm sure there are going to be generational divides like we're already seeing that children that are coming up in the internet connected age where they're using apps basically as early as toddler age I think that their brains are conditioned to this new type of interface, this new environment, this new hyper connected world much better than even I am. I see stark contrast between the folks who are teenagers and younger versus myself where I got into technology when I was in middle school, high school age versus my own parents who can barely use a keyboard and don't understand web interfaces and the ability to interact interactively with a number of these different interfaces is much more difficult for them. This is also just one of those things where it's very hard to say how the world is going to continue evolving because humans adapt so quickly. It may not be that the existing generations adapt to something but the next generation who never knew anything else will very easily absorb and start to respond to these new technologies probably in ways that we can't even imagine. Very true. As we're going back a bit then, talk us through how you achieved control. How did you wipe that slate clean? How did you drop off the grid? I started by reading several privacy centric books and those were good to set a ground work for real world or meat space privacy. There weren't very many good digital privacy books because I think it's a much newer phenomenon. For more of the digital privacy stuff, I had to do a lot of online research but you basically had to start from first principles of what is the most basic data of yours that is important that can potentially be used against you. That is things like your actual identity, your location, your ownership of various assets and anything that is a public record, usually government records that legally must be available for people to be able to search through and find the results of. I kind of started off with that and saying, okay, I need any public records that have my name on them not to have my location on them. How do you get around that? Well, unfortunately, this becomes a legal problem and it is different for every jurisdiction and in many jurisdictions, you probably don't have a good solution to it but at least in the United States, we have the ability to create corporate entities and there are certain states where you can create corporate entities that obscure the owner of the entity and you can basically have what is often referred to as anonymous LLCs or even kind of like shell corporations, corporations within corporations within corporations. Essentially, you can kind of think of it as using the structure of our own legal system to protect yourself against your own legal system. It really starts with that and then once you have that foundation, you then have to realize that every time you put your information into any website, into any database, really any time you give your information to any third party provider, you have to assume that they are going to either give it to other people either willingly or unwillingly just due to the nature of data and information wanting to be free and that basically means you have to do one of two things. You either have to use a proxy of some sort and this proxy, many people think of proxies in terms of the internet and network proxies like VPNs but you can use proxies in terms of legal entities, in terms of other humans, friends, family, attorneys, basically to create a firewall between yourself and your real information and whatever it is all these third parties have. You can either do that with proxies or you can just lie to them. It varies case by case on every different interaction I have but I'm basically either giving these proxy corporate information to third parties or I'm just giving them junk because it's not illegal for me to lie to a random website that I sign up for and give them a fake address. It really doesn't matter. In many cases, companies are asking for far more data than they actually need in order for you to maintain a relationship with them and so I'll give them an email address that's not connected to me, I'll use a throwaway credit card that can't be traced to me, it doesn't have my name on it. It ultimately results in you having to understand all of these possible different interactions and there's far too many of them to list here but I have a very in-depth article on my blog that lists every interaction that I've had to change my own behaviour for in order to protect my own information. And am I right in saying I did hear an interview with you previously when all of this, not training, but I guess that you put into practice actually came into use one day when you were the subject of what's called a SWAT attack, is that right? Or did you take all this action as a result of that? It was as a result of that, it was when my entire neighbourhood was shut down by the police and I had a dozen or so officers with rifles surrounding my house that I realised that really anyone with the slightest modicum of internet savvy could find my physical address and then could use a throwaway voiceover IP telephony service to place a phone call to my local police department and claim that they were me and that I had murdered a bunch of people and were holding other people hostage and essentially leverage their knowledge of technology in order to use the force of the state against me. And that was really the scary thing, was I've been a libertarian for a long time, I've generally been anti-government in a variety of different ways, but I always thought that as long as I was a good citizen, I didn't break any major laws, I didn't hurt anyone, that I didn't have to worry about the state actually threatening me. I never thought that the state may have created a bunch of exploits that could be used by other random people against me and the swatting thing is one of the more extreme variants, but we, at least over the past couple of years, I've heard a number of people tell me about a variety of other ways that resources of the state have been aimed at them by random third parties. Some examples of this are child protective services, people can submit anonymous complaints against you and claim that you're abusing your children in some way and you'll have agents of the state knocking on your door. Another example is, as you're probably aware, I'm also an avid firearm enthusiast and we have an organization called the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency, which it turns out people can also submit tips and complaints to and I've heard of people who have essentially been red flagged as a result of that and have gone to go to try to purchase a firearm and been refused because there is a flag in the system that they may be dangerous, they may be involved in terrorism and basically there's an active investigation going on because someone submitted a tip that they need to be looked into. And so I'm sure there are a variety of other ways as well, there's just so many different government organizations that have various law enforcement arms that the only way to protect yourself against a number of these types of attacks is to make it so that anonymous people can't tell the government, go look at this person, go kick down their door. I bet the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency and Explosives Agency have the best Christmas parties though. Quite possibly. Okay, that's really interesting and so taking us down a route that not many of our other sort of sessions have gone down on the importance of privacy. So bring this full circle as we're kind of approaching the end. What are your views on the importance then of Bitcoin? Do you think Bitcoin should have privacy embedded into it or a privacy option or do you think it's more important to have almost a kind of bi-metallic standard, a standard where Bitcoin perhaps could be the base settlement and other protocols, Zcash or Monero could serve as those privacy coins. And then also scalability, you know, longer term for Bitcoin, is Bitcoin the one protocol that we want to get behind or will this diverse portfolio of cryptocurrencies that the state can't necessarily influence and control emerge? What are your views? Well I think that there are going to be a plethora of protocols out there but I think there are a number of reasons why we see that even after 10 years Bitcoin is still dominant despite the fact that you could argue that other protocols may have been more advanced in different ways. You know, personally I'm a big fan of these privacy oriented protocols whether it's Zcash, Monero, Grin, I find them all very interesting. All of these things of course are still experiments, even Bitcoin is still an experiment. We're still trying to improve and it's a long way from being a like 1.0 solid product. It's not done by any means but I think that it's tricky just from a usability perspective. I may have a better grasp on the complexities because I've worked on wallet software for a number of years but what you find is that when you're trying to manage a dozen or even dozens of different crypto assets it becomes a real pain because there's not a whole lot of good management software that supports all of these things and so you end up having a dozen different wallets potentially. Even some of the wallets that do support every crypto asset under the sun, often they are like software only wallets and essentially what you're doing is you're putting all of your private keys for all of your crypto assets into one piece of software which I find to be a very scary proposition. You're basically creating a single point of failure. For long term holding as well I only really advocate that people use multi signature wallets for long term holding. If you want to eliminate single points of failure you can't be using a single signature wallet. Should privacy be added to Bitcoin I think that it's inevitable. There are a number of people who are working on it but the type of privacy that you see being developed for Bitcoin is not the same as what you see on other networks mainly due to the constraints of how difficult it is to change the protocol and the extreme conservatism of the developers. Instead of seeing really cutting edge unique cryptographic constructions getting added to Bitcoin, instead we see basically ways of minimizing and aggregating data so that you can have a lot of people who are interacting with the protocol but they're doing it in a way that they're basically hiding in the crowd. We're seeing improvements in the line of aggregate signatures for example. We're seeing improvements in the line of being able to hide your scripts, your complexity of your scripts so that you're not putting them all on the public blockchain. You're only revealing the minimum amount of data that is necessary to do your business. And then of course you're seeing these second layer networks as well. You're seeing both Lightning Network and then you're seeing side chains like RSK and Liquid where you may be able to leverage more creative cryptographic constructions on there to have better privacy as well. But it's definitely got a long way to go and it's really hard to say how long it's going to be before we really believe that Bitcoin can no longer really be analyzed. There's just so many different types of attacks that can happen. It's not just about on chain analysis. You also have to worry about people who are listening to the network. You also have to worry about the fact that there's a lot of third party custodians that are doing AML KYC and probably leaking your personal data to other analysis companies or government agencies. And so there's a lot more to it than just protocol changes. I think we also need to have a better way to actually have on ramps and off ramps for example that don't require you to give up a lot of private information. So if you were to pick a leading protocol then, who would you look at? Would you look at someone like Monero or Zcash or even MembleWimble? I like Monero and MembleWimble the most, mainly from a practical standpoint. My main problem with Zcash is that while they have a great level of potential privacy, the vast majority of wallet software out there doesn't actually support it. So last I checked, 99% of Zcash transactions were unshielded, meaning that they have no different level of privacy than a regular Bitcoin transaction because it is a fork of Bitcoin. So if we can get to the point where, and I know the Zcash folks have been talking about this, but if they can get to the point where the shielded transactions are like the default and possibly even the mandatory only possibility, then I think Zcash would be a much stronger network in terms of privacy. Cool. Jameson, we're about out of time, but it wouldn't be an episode of Crypto and Grill before discussing what you would put on the barbecue. So let's flash forward into a dystopian future where you and your secret band of other pseudo spooks are invited to your lair for a barbecue and to celebrate completely breaking away from the system. What are you going to put on the barbecue to keep everyone fed and happy? And yeah, what's your choice? Well it really depends on how much time I have. As much time as you want. It's your event, Jameson. You can have a week, a month, however long you want. Well I'm a big fan of nice, you know, slow roasted rack of ribs. Good choice. I think that was my choice way back at the beginning. Excellent. Well, look, this has been fantastic.