Now, you understand that once this money leaves your account, we can't get it back.
And I was like, I realized the risk that I'm taking.
I think this is a good gamble.
And long term ended up paying.
How did you think that? I'm curious.
Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
You'll never have the sacred stone.
You crazy mother.
What is up, crew?
Calvin Wayman here.
And welcome to a brand new episode of the podcast.
Curious with Calvin Wayman, the show where you get to join
the conversations with awesome people around business, tech, tools, people,
pop culture, everything you need to satisfy all that makes you curious.
Brand new episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Let's dive in.
What is up, crew?
Happy Wednesday.
And we're still here talking about Bitcoin.
But before we jump in, if you haven't seen yet from just this last Saturday,
we did our first giveaway.
So every single episode, we've been giving something away.
So if you want to have your chance to win the prize for this episode,
then head over to iTunes or wherever you can review this, give you a review.
That's going to get you a raffle ticket and that's going to put you
in the drawing to win the prize.
So you have a chance every single episode by doing that.
Also, if you want to join the curious community, then you can go to
CalvinWayman.com forward slash podcast group and you will be you can
request to join the Facebook group so that you can join the conversation
around all of these episodes, especially the last few that we've been doing.
A lot of conversation to be had around Bitcoin.
So if you want to join the conversation and not just listen on your way to work
on the way back or at the gym, but actually want to join the conversation
with other listeners on the podcast, again, go to CalvinWayman.com
forward slash podcast group.
Anyway, today we have another Bitcoin curious expert,
a guy named Jameson Lopp.
How are you doing, Jameson?
Doing well.
It's amazing, exciting times in the crypto space as usual.
It is, I have to say one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on not that I not
just the fact that I saw you connected with Joel Calm, who we actually had last
episode, but that beard dude is freaking sick.
Like I've been going mine for about a year.
Like yours looks amazing.
How long have you had that?
It's coming up on, I guess, a little over two years, maybe two and a half years.
That's all man.
It's a beastie.
Have you always had like that streak, like notice that color strand in there?
Has that always been like a part of it?
What is that?
Yeah, I mean, I've had like a really short beard for many years and then I just
finally started letting it grow out.
And yeah, I guess the little wisp really started appearing once I started growing
it longer.
That's interesting.
The weird work with mine is my hair is black.
Everything's dark, but this gets a lot of red.
It's the only part of my body.
So my word does my beard does funny things there.
So again, thanks for coming to chat.
Myself and probably other people that are listening right now, we're kind of
Bitcoin virgins.
Now, of course, we're hearing it on the headlines.
Cryptocurrency is a little bit of a craze right now.
And I understand you've been in it for a little while, like before the masses
came on board and stuff.
So when did you like, what's your story?
Like, when did you first get into Bitcoin?
How'd you hear about it?
And what made you curious to look into it?
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
I mean, Bitcoin is nine years old.
And I guess at this point, I've been involved in it for more than half of its
lifetime.
So I got into it.
It was like late 2012.
I started diving headfirst into it.
I don't even remember like what first got me interested.
It was probably a Slashdot article or something like that.
And I'm sure that I had heard about it several times before and dismissed it.
I think most people do, you know, oh, that system, it's just going to get
hacked.
It's going to fall apart.
Right.
And especially in the early days when it was only like four years old, then it
was a lot more experimental, a lot more volatile and a lot more difficult to
actually get your hands on any.
So, you know, I wanted to get my first bitcoins.
And at the time, I looked around and my best option was actually to do a
wire transfer to some bank in Japan that I had never heard of.
And so, of course, I was sending it to Mt.
Gox.
And that was the first time I'd ever done a wire transfer, had to go to the
bank, spend like 45 minutes there filling out forms and the bankers are
telling me, now you understand that once this money leaves your account, we
can't get it back.
And I was like, I realized the risk that I'm taking.
I think this is a good gamble and long term ended up paying.
How did you think that?
I'm curious.
How did you like back then?
It's like it's just pennies or dollars, right?
Yeah, in terms of like what it's worth.
What made you even think that it was a gamble?
Were there already like nerd sessions where people are getting together and
like talking about how this is like going to be the future of currency?
Like, was that already happening?
Yeah, yeah.
Four years ago.
Yeah, so back then the vast majority of conversation was happening on
Bitcoin talk and was that like a website or a chat room?
That was the original Bitcoin forum.
I believe Satoshi actually created it himself and then he handed it over to
Themos.
These days, I don't really spend any time on there because the vast majority
of it is like scams and trolls and you know, it's just a lot of noise.
But back then that's where the vast majority of the even the developers
were talking.
It's where the serious people went.
It was where the community formed essentially is what I would guess.
Okay, so through that conversation, had you gone to any live events around
it yet?
Just curious or was it all just online?
No, but I was lucky because I started asking around the office about it and
it turned out that one of the other guys who, you know, worked just a few
feet away from me at the time was already into Bitcoin and had been like
writing trading bot software and so he was able to answer the vast majority
of my questions early on and then I just kept going head first and head
first and surpassed him, you know, going deeper and deeper into it.
Got it when you were getting into it.
Was it more of a something because this is going to be the future.
I'm going to use it as a currency exchange or did you see it as oh my
gosh, this could be like an investment opportunity that if I could buy
and hold that it's going to go like what was it when you were hearing
about it?
Yeah, I did not originally buy as an investment.
I bought it because I wanted to have some to actually use and play around
with like I just saw it as an experiment, you know, an open-source
collaborative project back then.
I mean there had been one or two bubbles, you know from like a dollar
to $30 like it popped up.
Yeah, it popped up here and there.
Yeah, so it was already really volatile and you know, I got into it
with the expectation that it could go to zero.
So I didn't put like my life savings into it or anything and then over
the years as I understood it better and I saw the ecosystem growing.
I started to see it more as an investment.
And so it was several years later.
In fact, right after Mt.
Gox finally crashed and imploded for the last time that was when I was
like, all right, there's blood in the streets.
Everybody thinks Bitcoin is dead.
That's when I went all in and so so just to back up there.
I am such this is how much I've heard and you said Mt.
Gox or something.
Yes, when was that and and what is that?
Like I'm not even privy to what that is.
So Mt.
Gox was the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the like 2011 to 2014 era.
Got it.
It was the platform that used to go buy and trade.
Yeah, it was the most popular one.
There were a few others and of course there had already been some that
had come and gone and gotten hacked and crashed and whatever, but it
was at the time the most reputable.
It had been around the longest.
It had suffered a few hacks, but it always come back from them.
And so then, you know, finally during that that run up to like a
thousand dollars or so that's when things started getting really
wonky and they started like disabling withdrawals and people started
panicking and eventually they shut down and admitted that they were
operating a fractional reserve and they had lost almost everybody's
money.
I see.
So they actually were kind of being a little bit fraudulent kind of
pyramid scheming.
The speculation these days is that they had been operating as a
fractional reserve for probably the vast majority of their existence
and it wasn't until the price really started running away that they
were no longer able to facilitate the withdrawals that people were
requesting.
What's kind of interesting about that is isn't that what most banks
do anyway?
Yes, like our regular banking system.
It is on a fractional reserve system.
Like if you have X and out they can like borrow out like way more
than they actually have.
Yeah.
And so, you know, there after the 2008 economic crisis a lot of
those regulations around the like solvency requirements were made
more strict, but I'm pretty sure that like the the general assets
on hand of most banks is only around by 10 or 20% of the actual
deposits.
I've gotten a little bit more insight into this over the years
because I'm actually on the advisory board for my local credit
union and they have even stricter requirements that they set on
themselves for being able to do those stress tests, but you know
a lot of the other banks.
Just so they don't put themselves in a position to like if that
happened again, like they're not going to go and they're not going
to be put themselves in a like lose everything bankrupt type of
situation.
Yeah, it's when those those bank runs happen when you know, they
run out of liquidity and investors panic and then it just sort of
turns into this runaway of demand for people's money and then
they're no longer able to serve it.
Hence 2008, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's this one.
Everybody's worried about bubbles because bubbles pop and they
turn into these corrections where by the time it's over a lot of
people have lost a lot of money.
Do you fear that what's happening now?
So from what I understand is Bitcoin just barely went like it
went up to like 20,000 now.
So you got in a time.
It was like just dollars, right?
Why is it less than a dollar?
So and then it's gone all the way up to 20,000 and right now it
hit like 9 or something.
It's like now at 11 or 12.
Is that right?
Like what's your take on that volatility still happening?
And if it does it like is it fearful?
Is it scary or how do you take it?
Yeah, so well, you know, that is a different type of bubble though.
You know, those are speculative bubbles, which I think are because
of everybody coming on type of a thing.
Yeah, it's it's not the same type of systemic risk that we see in
these systems where a lot of money is being moved around and money
is being created out of thin air and then that's when you no longer
have the Federal Reserve.
Yeah.
And so that's where you get in the issue where like people believe
there's more money in existence than they can actually call in.
Right.
So there there are still issues, especially around the fact that
there are a lot of large custodians that are holding bitcoins.
Thankfully over the years, it seems like the large hacking attempts
have like been diminishing in their severity.
So, you know, we are becoming better and better at securing crypto
assets and that's what I've been doing for the past three years is
working at BitGo and basically helping enterprises secure their crypto.
Yeah, what is that?
So talk to me more about that because I noticed you had that like
what's BitGo and what's it for?
What's it do?
Yeah, so generally the average person who is in the crypto ecosystem
has not heard of BitGo and that's because we're not a consumer
facing company.
What we really yeah, we're b2b company and we are really servicing
enterprises that have to operate hot wallets meaning they have to
be money now to have to be receiving and sending crypto assets,
you know in an automated fashion.
So that's a very risky business to be in because you know, if anybody
gets those private keys, they can take the money and there's no
authority that can get the money back to you.
Okay, so you're doing that second to that.
What is Satoshi?
I like the play on that's the play on what's his name again or the
group of people Satoshi Nakamoto, Satoshi Nakamoto and what's your
take on that by the way, is that like a single person?
Like are you along like do you buy into that like since you've been
in it that long or or what who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
So Satoshi Nakamoto you can get into a lot of different speculation
and conspiracy theories.
I think that you know, it is a person or a small group of people
who were cypherpunks like they were they were on the cypherpunk
mailing list and they were dealing with cryptography and privacy
issues for a number of years and somehow they managed to figure
out a way that they could put all of these existing technologies
together in a way that created the awesome game theory that
resulted in Bitcoin, which is a fairly, you know, sustainable
system.
So like they didn't really create anything new.
They just managed to put these different pieces of the puzzle
together in a way that created a new system.
Has anybody come around or come about and claimed to be him
or the group?
Yeah, well, of course we have Craig Wright who is the most
notorious Satoshi Nakamoto claimant and there's a whole lot
of drama and history around that and his like attempts to prove
to be Satoshi but the short version is like anyone who wants
to prove that they're Satoshi all they have to do is either
sign a message or move some of the bitcoins from those early
blocks that were known to have been mined by him and that would
be, you know, cryptographic mathematical proof that yeah,
it's just so that they because they would have ownership of
it and you would see that moving like whoever moved that had
access to it and whoever had access to it was probably Satoshi
Nakamoto.
Yeah, yeah.
So what's a what's the Toshi the play on this Satoshi Nakamoto?
So Satoshi is my fork of Bitcoin core, which is often known
as the reference client.
It is the Bitcoin protocol implementation that has the most
developer activity around it.
Basically back in 2014.
I wanted to understand the code better.
I wanted to understand the internal operations of fully
validating nodes better.
And basically what I did is I took some of my existing knowledge
in the sort of DevOps space and went in and added a bunch of
instrumentation to the Bitcoin core code and then put some
nice eye candy dashboards on top of it.
And essentially what you've got now is a bunch of metrics
aggregation and analytics of like what is going on on the
Bitcoin network and what is going on inside of this node
that I'm running.
So is that something that's like a plugin that anybody can
have or or what what is that?
Yeah, it's so it's open source fork.
Basically, it would require a fair amount of knowledge for
somebody to get in and run on their own unit.
You at least have to have the ability to compile C++ and
then run the binaries and I've got instructions all on there,
but it's very technical thing.
You'd want to be like really actually really into that.
Yeah, one thing I was curious about is like throughout all
of this.
So Bitcoin was kind of the the pioneer of cryptocurrency,
right?
So since then there have been a number of cryptocurrencies
that have come on the frontier.
When I was talking to Joel calm, I think he said there's
like 1400 different cryptocurrencies at least that we
know of right and so can you like kind of explain to me
like like are you still like a bit?
Are you are you more of a fan of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency
in general or blockchain in general?
We haven't even talked about the technology of blockchain
like like where do you land?
Is it are you more of like cryptocurrency is the purest
because it's the first you like other cryptocurrencies in
general and you have like Ethereum or Ripple or whatever
some of these other names are like what's your take there?
Yeah, so in general, I'm still the biggest fan of Bitcoin
for a number of reasons.
It gets pretty complicated because you've got a couple
of different I guess generally broad types of crypto assets.
So you've got your you've got Bitcoin, which is of course
the first and then you've got a million different forks
of Bitcoin many of which are completely worthless.
Worthless because there's no consensus around it because
other people don't want to use it.
What's what makes it useful or yeah, so the you know,
the value of any of these things is entirely subjective
and based upon network effective.
So like the more people who agree that it has value the
more value it has hence the reason it even works right
because Joel was telling me how like there's this process
of of when you send something to somebody like they're
like that's what the mining is or whatever.
Like there needs to be at least six computers or systems
that validate that transaction, right?
So is that kind of saying what you're saying where the
network effect like the validation of people agreeing
that's what gives it the value on the markets.
Yeah, then of course there's technical aspects on the sort
of machine consensus side, but each of so there's suffice
to say because it's open source code anybody can like
copy paste modify it then you have all of these spinoffs
that there's really nothing special about them as they
tweaked like one or two little parameters that nobody
really cares about and so as a result, there's not a lot
of traction not a lot of adoption because then when
you're really talking about the value of these things from
a network standpoint, it's not just like the number of
people that agree and want to use it, but you have to
get exchanges to add support for it businesses and
merchants to add support for him.
So this is a multifaceted type of network effect that
is required to give value to these things.
Is there is there one besides Bitcoin that you have
a favorite of that's a cryptocurrency because of the
certain features that it has like Joe was telling me
like there's somewhere you can like attach like contracts
to it right or something.
So if somebody paid in some sort of cryptocurrency and
you were an artist and you had the contract set up that
not only the singer gets paid, but the drum player
gets paid the manager gets paid like kind of instantly
split apart without have like kind of instantly.
That's just where it all goes.
Like do you have something like that because of some
special feature you like it like the cryptocurrency or
yeah, so I mainly consider myself like a cypherpunk in
terms of my ideology some very, you know, pro privacy.
So I am invested in a few of the privacy coins like
Monero and Zcash.
I think that you know, those have some additional
utility and also they have good developers behind them.
So, you know when I'm trying to decide what I want to
invest in I'm usually looking at it as like this is a
project I want to support whereas, you know, a lot of
people are just trading and they're like this is a
project that I think a lot of other people are going
to buy and so it's going to go up and then I'm going
to sell it.
I don't do that type of trading.
I'm more of a long-term value like fundamentals
investor, but you were asking about smart contracts
and stuff.
So then you start talking about stuff like Ethereum
and Cardano and I think NIM and I think that that type
of functionality is definitely has a lot of utility
and you can see that just like from the price of
Ether over the past year.
But the main reason that I'm not as bullish on that
is because I'm not a big fan of the way that they've
implemented it.
I think that they're going to have a lot more scaling
challenges in the long run and I think that we're
going to see similar type of functionality that gets
tied to Bitcoin, but because Bitcoin protocol developers
have a very different perspective on how to add
functionality.
They tend to be a lot more conservative about like
resource usage that instead you're going to see these
type of smart contract computations happen off the
chain like outside of the consensus system and then
instead you're just going to see the small amounts of
data get embedded into the chain itself, but that's
that's a more like long-term type of operation.
When did the wave of new crypto start coming?
You've been in there like you about four years you
said, right?
So and Bitcoin was a cryptocurrency is it a pretty
fair consensus that people mostly people agree that
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So since then again around 1400 that we know of when
did that wave come on?
There have been a couple of waves of other ones.
I would say the first waves was around 2013 or so
like there was this big altcoin.
That's fairly late.
That's fairly late, but that was that was this altcoin
boom where it was just a lot of people forking the
Bitcoin code and making very trivial changes and and
so the vast majority of those coins that popped up
around that time.
Nobody even talks about them anymore if they even
exist or operate and then I would say like the next
big point was really with Ethereum when it came out
and I think that it came out in 2015 2016 and after
it had been around for a year or two people started
developing apps and then especially when the ERC 20
token became a standard that's when we see this other
big wave of of the sort of tokenized utility tokens,
you know on top of a theory and that has been that
was a huge boom in 2017.
We do have, you know, a couple of other completely
from scratch coins that have emerged at this point
that are in like the top 10 market cap.
Are you concerned by that competition like because
in America we pretty much have had one I mean, of
course you can buy different things but mostly for
holdings like you could buy gold silver and like
these assets, but we pretty much have USD as the
currency of exchange the means of exchange and now
there's all of these different currencies that
again are multifaceted.
So you could use it for an investment opportunity
or you could do use it as a means of exchange what
you're like, how do you take like that that there
are becoming so many like is there is it a danger in
the competition?
Is it better?
Do you think one's going to rise is Bitcoin already
there like what?
Yeah, just curious how you feel about all the more
competition is great and even competition within
like the own coin of, you know, forking like Bitcoin
for example, and so there then, you know, in late
2017 we had this other boom which was the Bitcoin
like altcoin airdrop where you're forking it at a
specific time and basically giving money to
everybody who owned Bitcoin at that point in time
as it's a new sort of like distribution mechanism
to try to jumpstart a new network and and the same
type of thing happened where like Bitcoin cash and
Bitcoin gold were the first couple there.
And so they got a fair amount of traction and then
we've there have been I think a dozen after that
and then, you know, nobody cares like there's only
so that you end up with a long tail distribution
because there's only so much interest and and
resources that you can capture from the network by
just like creating more of these things.
Okay, I think I take that view too that over all
the law.
I mean, that's the nature of it, right?
Is that it's giving control back to I guess the
masses and not like one central organization like
the Federal Reserve so competition and like open
sources is probably better for for at least the
everyone at the end of the day.
Yeah, I mean the way that I see it is that this
isn't taking power away from banks and governments
and how they decide how their own money operates.
This is allowing anybody with like some technical
skills to create their own money and start printing
it and offer it to the world and then the markets
can decide like what are the best properties of
money and that's kind of the phase that we're in
right now is everybody's interesting and then
people are speculating on the experiments.
So would you say that that everybody is kind of in
a sense becoming their own Federal Reserve
because the Federal Reserve would go bust if
nobody everybody just said, yeah, this is worthless
same with crypto.
But if like is like that's kind of an interesting
thing like we're given the freedom that we could
create it.
And of course other people need to have consensus
and for it to be valuable and everything.
But would you say that that it's kind of like we
all have our own like you said our ability to
print money.
Are we becoming our own Federal Reserve?
Well, yeah, so because money is basically a shared
you can say it's a shared delusion of value.
It's just a shit.
It is faith in a sense you are agreeing with each
other and you are having faith that people will
continue to agree that there is value in the
system and the main difference is that now
instead of us having to have faith in a central
bank or government that is telling us we have to
believe in the value of this particular system
instead anyone can choose their own.
This is crypto anarchy.
It is it is not a system without rules.
It is a system without rulers and you get to
choose the rules that you find most palatable.
So taking kind of a step back now, like what's
the big picture for this for you for cryptocurrency
in this whole world like how I imagine this is
it's almost like it's 1993 or whatever and we're
talking about this thing called the internet and
we're trying to explain to other people that know
like it's this like web of network and you can
send information back and forth and we're going
to be able to send zeros and ones and bits and
bytes and one day we'll be able to like communicate
on the other side of the world instantaneously
and we'll be able to send money from our banks
through ones and zeros like it would have been a
very confusing thing.
But now we take it for granted because it's like
right here in the palm of our hands with our phone
and everything and it's just encompasses our entire
life like big picture like that.
Do you feel like cryptocurrency or the whole
blockchain like world is something that is about
to make a huge cultural shift that we can't go back
on like what's the big picture view of this?
Yeah.
And so I often make remarks where I am comparing
this current innovation to the internet itself
where the internet basically fundamentally changed
how humans can communicate and just that very
small but fundamental thing then allowed many
many different innovations to be piled on top of
it as a new platform.
Amazon social platforms all that stuff.
Yeah.
And so now what we're doing is we're creating a
new type of network for economic interaction and
and you could you take a very naive view and just
say, oh, it's just people sending money back and
forth.
But there's so much more to it because we're
automating it.
We're getting rid of a lot of the trust.
We can actually create entirely new methods of
economic interaction that were never feasible
before.
So good example, of course, is micro payments and
we're really talking about like penny payments.
If not sub penny payments, you can start to talk
about really amazing things of like Internet of
Things meets crypto economics where we start
having these little devices on the internet start
economically interacting with each other.
That's where, you know, the sort of automation of
the future and interconnection of everything
starts to provide a lot of interesting new
possibilities.
What's just kind of wrapping up here.
One thing we haven't talked about yet is blockchain.
What is blockchain and how does it interact with
all of this?
Blockchain is very loaded term that gets used
incorrectly the vast majority of the time.
And so, of course, I'm a tech guy.
Blockchain is just a data format.
It's really a lot of the other things around
blockchains that make them interesting.
Is there something you could compare it to that
is like more of that like analogous or like that
you could say it's like the Internet or it's like
this other platform that we can kind of that we
can relay it to?
Yeah, so, you know, the best or at least easiest
way to think of it is it's like it's a write-only
log.
Like it's a new type of data store where you can
add stuff to it, but you can't delete stuff.
Delete it's like the it's the ledger where the
transactions go, right?
Yeah, and but of course then you have to start
talking about well, what are all of the other
facets of the system that is using this blockchain
as a database because really if all you have is
a blockchain and you don't have any consensus
mechanisms or anything else around it, then it's
still possible for someone to go and rewrite it.
It's just you get this tamper evidence because
you'll see that like someone has changed the data
and it breaks this cryptographic link between
pieces of the data.
It's Bitcoin adds additional guarantees on top
of that by using proof of work as a consensus
mechanism, which makes it insanely computationally
and financially challenging to go back and rewrite
the data.
It becomes very expensive from the like electricity
standpoint.
Did Satoshi Nakamoto create the blockchain
mechanism to or just the cryptocurrency Bitcoin?
Yeah, so blockchain I believe as a like data
format had been created at least five or ten years
before that and got it.
So it's pretty what was it used for before?
I'm not aware of any like production usage of it.
Like most of these things including like proof of
work had only really been theoretical.
So like Adam Back created a hashcash in the late
90s and that was actually originally meant to be
an anti-spam mechanism for email, but it just never
took off for one reason or another.
You know, I was actually in the email industry for
like the first 10 years of my career and at one
point I did look into like adding hashcash email
headers to all of our outgoing stuff because
there is some anti-spam software that would
actually give you like a better score if you did
that, but in general like nobody ended up using
it, but then you know Satoshi comes along and
says, oh, you know, we can actually use this as a
sort of denial of service protection against
someone rewriting the blockchain.
And so we're just going to use it to make it very
expensive for someone to rewrite the blockchain
and that will give us some better data guarantees
for the history of this ledger.
Where are you using it now?
Like how are you using cryptocurrency right now?
Is it still a new frontier?
More people are coming on board, but it's hit the
point where it's definitely mainstream because
it's hitting all the major headlines.
Your cab drivers talking about it.
I can't remember if that was Warren Buffett or
whoever that once your cab driver starts talking
about something that's when you know, you really
need to be cautious and careful.
Are you using it for a means of exchange at all
yet?
Are you using it for currency exchange?
Are you mostly just buying and holding and playing
with it still?
Like how have you personally been using it since
you've been in it for like four years?
Yeah, I've never really used it to buy everyday
items and there's you know, there's been a lot of
people who have been upset especially with regard
to the scaling debates and stuff who they're sad
that certain things have gotten priced out of
being like economically feasible on Bitcoin lately.
But like for the vast majority of purchases like
I personally, you know living in a country that
has really good financial infrastructure.
I have a ton of credit cards.
My bank account is hooked up to all kinds of
different services.
Most of most of my bills get auto drafted.
It's like I don't need to pay with cryptocurrency
for the vast majority of things like the real
promise of crypto assets I believe is that a you
can store your own money without trusting a third
party like a bank or some other service and b you
can transact without trusting a third party that
could censor your transaction.
So I think that there are types of transactions
that are very well suited for crypto and that
would be stuff like donating to political
organizations that might get censored by payment
network.
So like WikiLeaks is a really good example and
they've benefited a lot from Bitcoin or you know
doing things that are like gray market black market
type stuff right.
But you know I do hope that we will get to the
point where payment for like regular everyday
stuff is feasible again.
You know once we have more mainstream second layer
networks that's been progressing very very quickly
just over the past few months and I'm actually
looking forward to using some of my crypto assets
to help capitalize the second layer networks and
may even end up getting a sort of income from
that without going into too many of the complexities
basically.
If you're running nodes on the lightning network
you can take tiny fees for helping to route the
money around the network.
Sure cool.
So let's say more people people listen to this
myself.
We want to go deeper in the rabbit hole.
What's been your means of like understanding it
historically and like and what's the best means
today in 2018?
What if we want to learn more about Bitcoin?
Where's the most or cryptocurrency blockchain the
most high-level quality information outside of I
guess just YouTubing it and going down the rabbit
hole there like do you have a place that we can
start?
Yeah, and just due to the nature of the system like
so much information is spread out all over the
place and I started collecting and centralizing
the information on my website a few years ago.
Awesome.
So what's your website?
It's just lop.net l-o-p-p dot net lop.net.
Yeah, I've got a Bitcoin resources page on there
that has lots of sections, you know, whether you're
interested in like the technicals deep dive stuff
trading stuff learning more about securing your own
pretty much everything that you need to know is on
there and there's probably enough material on there
to keep you busy for six months to a year.
Awesome.
Okay.
So if you're listening to this you want to learn
more about Bitcoin cryptocurrency blockchain go
to lop l-o-p-p dot net.
I'm going to go over there right after this interview
because again, yes, sometimes just hearing it first
second third fourth time.
That's when you finally click and the light bulb
goes off.
And so that's what I'm aiming to do here.
Is there anywhere else to that people could interact
with you?
Are you on any of the socials at all Facebook or
Instagram or anything like that?
Spend most of my time on Twitter and the handle is
just lop l-o-p-p.
That is man.
So simple.
I freaking love it.
Just l-o-p-p like yeah, if you can some somebody's
tell me like somebody who got the first initial to
their name on Instagram and it's now worth like
thousands of dollars because everybody so many other
people want it like that's that's super simple.
So if you want to interact with my man Jameson lop
you can interact with him on Twitter.
Just go to l-o-p-p on Twitter.
Hey Jameson.
Thank you so much man for coming on and shedding a
little bit of light on this new but exciting world
of cryptocurrency.
And yeah, we just greatly appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right.
And again, if you want to put your name in the raffle
for the prize for this episode will be given away
the prize in within 48 hours.
We'll probably do it within the Facebook group.
So again to get a raffle ticket for the prize then
go make a review for the podcast and that gives you
a raffle ticket to win the prize and if you want to
join the conversation around Bitcoin or any other
the episodes then go over to the Facebook page.
You can request to join by going to
CalvinWehman.com forward slash podcast group.
Thanks guys.
Have a good rest of your Wednesday.