You're listening to the DYOR Podcast, where your host, Tom Bonning Country, helps simplify
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Now here's your host, Tom Bonning Country.
Hey guys, welcome to episode 2 of DYOR.
I'm your host, Tom Bonning Country, and in this episode, we have the one and only Jameson
Lopp, Chief Technology Officer of CASA, come on and just kind of discuss some of the things
that he's been seeing around on the space and his viewpoints on the Lightning Network
as well.
If you don't know Jameson, he is one of the largest figureheads in the cryptocurrency
and bitcoin space, incredible technologist, and just an extremely brilliant guy.
It was an awesome conversation just chatting with him, seeing what he thinks he's going
to play out over the next couple of years, and also learning about his work at CASA as
well.
So make sure you stick around and listen to the whole thing, and yeah, let's get into
it.
Alright guys, today I have the honor of sitting down with Jameson Lopp, the CTO at CASA.
Jameson, I cannot thank you enough for showing up for the show today.
Happy to be here.
It's my honor.
I know you're one of the most respected guys in the bitcoin space, so your input is going
to make a huge difference for the audience.
I'm expecting my audience to be more on the beginner side of things, so if they don't
know too much about you, can you give a little bit of introduction about your background
and how you fell down the bitcoin rabbit hole?
Sure.
So I really started getting interested in bitcoin around 2012.
Of course, this is not when I first heard about it.
As most of us do, we hear about it and dismiss it, and then it just keeps coming back and
coming back, and then eventually we get hooked into it.
But once I did start reading the white paper and reading forums and participating in some
of the conversations, I realized that it was a very elegant computer science problem.
And at the time, I had been a software engineer for five or six years and had been working
on online marketing software that wasn't really that interesting to me, it just had some technical
scaling challenges that kept me busy.
And so once I started thinking about money, which most people don't ever really think
about other than your immediate needs, I realized that money is this abstract concept that really
belongs to humanity at large.
And so it made a lot of sense to me that money should be an open source collaborative project
rather than something that just gets decided upon by a small group of people behind closed
doors.
So I was interested in it both from the technical aspect and more of a philosophical aspect
at the time.
This led me to create a fork of Bitcoin core and try to apply some of my own software engineering
and development skills to this primary Bitcoin implementation to try to help some of the
other engineers better understand what was actually going on inside of the Bitcoin nodes
that they were running.
I felt like that project was fairly successful.
It got referenced by a number of Bitcoin core developers over the years to make arguments
about various technical changes to the protocol.
And yeah, I mean, I was just a hobbyist doing a few side projects and tweeting and talking
to people on social media about Bitcoin for three or four years until it got to the point
that 2015, a lot of venture capital was rolling in and I decided that there was probably enough
opportunity in the space for me to go full time.
And that's when I became an infrastructure engineer at BitGo.
They're a multi-signature enterprise wallet platform.
They basically power a lot of exchanges and payment processors and such.
And that led me to learn a lot more about the day to day operations of actually running
web infrastructure that sits on top of blockchain platforms, did that for about three years.
And then transitioned slightly to another multi-sig security provider called CASA.
The main difference being that instead of focusing on helping enterprises secure their
private keys, we're more focused on helping individuals.
And our primary focus at CASA is to help empower people to make self sovereignty a more feasible
thing for the average person and really to lower the technical bar that is required to
achieve this promise of being your own bank.
It's always been possible to be your own bank in Bitcoin.
It's just required a lot of technical expertise and a lot of dedication to doing really mundane
IT data practices.
And so we want to build those best practices into the software to provide a better user
experience so that the average person can get into this and actually benefit from the
level of security that Bitcoin promises.
I think that's super important because back in 2013, if the average Joe was trying to
get into Bitcoin, I think it was a huge hassle for them if they didn't have any type of technical
background to set up your wallet and make sure that you're securing your keys the right
way and everything like that.
Yeah.
I mean, we still have a long way to go.
I see three main things that Bitcoin needs if we really want to continue evolving.
There's the scalability side in order to actually be able to process enough data for more and
more people to use the system.
There's the security side of the fact that people quite honestly don't want to be their
own bank.
They don't want to have to go through all of the hoops and think about all of the edge
cases to protect their private keys, to protect their money.
And then finally, you know, just usability in general is that as you become a part of
this system that really has very few safety rails, we have unfortunately not done a good
job of building safety rails into the software.
And so it's still very easy for users to shoot themselves on the foot and basically have
financial catastrophes just due to the result of not being knowledgeable about something
or just making a simple careless mistake.
Yeah.
I was actually having a conversation with someone yesterday and they said that they
lost their private keys to about 40,000 stellar lumens and they're trying to figure out how
to recover that and everything.
But it's a huge importance for people that are trying to get into the space, private
keys and securing them, because if that's gone, you can't call like 1-800-SATOSHI and
ask them to refund your private keys for you.
Yep.
That's the pros and the cons is that you have a lot more freedom, but the result of more
freedom is you have a lot more responsibility.
Of course.
So let's break that down a little bit more.
So you mentioned scalability, security and usability.
Scalability obviously you believe more so in the Lightning Network more than you do
for the Bitcoin Cash segue, correct?
Yeah.
So on chain scaling, it's an interesting way to describe what I would call vertical scaling.
In computer science, when we're talking about the technical scalability of a system, what
we're really saying is we want the system to be able to process more data, to process
more events and do more things without increasing the cost of running the system faster than
the amount of things that it's processing.
So you start talking about things like linear scaling or quadratic scaling or what have
you basically saying, as we put this amount more data into the system or have it process
this amount more things, either the cost goes up at the same rate of the data and events
or the cost may go up even faster or the cost may go up slower.
And the best type of scaling is where the cost of running the system goes up a lot slower
than the amount of things that it's able to process.
And there are two very high level ways to scale any system.
You can call it vertical scaling versus horizontal scaling, or some people call it scaling up
versus scaling out.
And basically what that means is that you can either just buy much faster hardware and
have that hardware continue to do the same thing, but it's able to do more of it because
it's faster.
And of course, this hardware is going to be a lot more expensive, or you can try to find
ways to offload onto other hardware.
One way to think of this is the way that Google does it where basically they were the first
ones to invent this idea of cloud computing where they just buy a ton of really cheap
computers and use software to turn them into one large, effective supercomputer.
That is a horizontal scaling or a scaling out where you're spreading the data out across
many different things and the cost of processing it does not go up nearly as quickly as it
would if you were trying to buy one single supercomputer.
What we're trying to do in the Bitcoin space is to offload as much of the data processing
onto other networks or specifically if we're talking about lightning network, we're trying
to create layers of other networks on top of Bitcoin where they are leveraging the security
of the Bitcoin blockchain, but they are doing most of the data processing off of the actual
chain and doing it in a more private way so that only the minimum number of participants
even need to know about it in the first place.
And the way that I've described this is it's actually very similar to the internet itself
and the way that the internet was scaled where the internet is actually a seven layer stack
of technologies and the very lowest layer of the internet is called ethernet.
It's a very dumb pipe network basically where you put data onto the wire and it goes out
and gets propagated to everyone else on your local network.
And this is really the way that Bitcoin works where you put data onto the Bitcoin network,
it gets propagated out to all of the other nodes, they all have to process it, validate
it and relay it.
And of course, this does not scale like if the internet worked like that, then you and
I would not be able to have this conversation right now because everyone else who was having
a conversation on the internet would also have to send their data through our computers
and our computers would have to process it and relay it and whatever.
And there's just not enough computational power to do that.
So how do we make the internet be able to do these things?
Well, we build other layers on top of it, which include layers like TCP IP, which route
the data through the minimum number of other participants on the network.
And this creates a much more efficient way of sending data around because we're able
to limit the hardware requirements of who needs to process it.
And it's the same thing with the lightning network, where when we want to send a transaction
on the lightning network, instead of broadcasting it to everyone on the lightning network, we
actually use routing and pathfinding to find the minimum number of lightning nodes that
are necessary to actually do the data passing between one another.
And so I think it's a fairly tried and true way of scaling distributed, decentralized
permissionless networks, but of course it has its own interesting new quirks that are
providing plenty of unique challenges.
Of course, I think that's anything with the developing technology there.
I think it's interesting because from my understanding, the main argument is that at some point in
time, the block sizes are going to get full or it's going to be, as you mentioned, driving
up the price to actually make these transactions occur on chain.
That's kind of where the huge division happened between Segwit and lightning network.
Is that correct?
Segwit is actually a technology that was implemented on Bitcoin and helped enable the lightning
network.
It also helped enable a little bit of on-chain increase of capacity, but only about double
the amount, which is still pretty low, going from maybe seven transactions per second to
like 15.
Of course, there's many variables that take place that can change that.
And even talking about transaction throughput on these networks is a complicated thing because
in Bitcoin, it's not necessarily that one transaction is just one person to one other
person.
A single transaction could be from one entity to a thousand other entities.
It just depends on what data you're actually looking at.
And of course, when we're talking about the scalability of off-chain protocols like lightning,
then the privacy features that are a part of these protocols actually make it so difficult
that you can't even really know how many transactions are happening on those networks.
You can only make some even rougher educated guesses.
But I would say that the primary contention between what some people call small blockers
versus big blockers or on-chain scaling proponents versus off-chain scaling proponents is an
argument between the cost and the people who are proponents of just putting more data on
the blockchain.
They tend to prioritize a low cost of transacting.
And by that, I mean a low minor fee that is attached to a transaction.
They want there to be a very good guarantee that if you put a transaction out onto the
network with the minimum minor fee that it will get confirmed basically in the next block.
Now the trade off to this is that you end up creating nearly unlimited block space and
somebody has to pay for that block space because somebody has to process all those transactions,
validate them, store them, relay them, and ultimately it means that if you're providing
practically free block space, people are going to use it.
This is basically a common good.
You can end up suffering from a tragedy of the commons where people put really silly
things like entire movies on the blockchain or something like that.
We've seen this happen on some of the other Bitcoin forks where people are just putting
a ton of data on there.
And the result is that it makes it impractical for the average enthusiast to run a fully
validating node on those networks.
The storage requirements and bandwidth and computation requirements will just go through
the roof.
The flip side of this, like the people like myself who have spent many years running nodes
on these networks, we tend to prioritize having a low cost of validating the state of the
entire network, basically a lower cost of storing and validating and relaying all of
that blockchain data.
And this is kind of a more conservative position because the trade off is that we're not entirely
sure what the cost of transacting will be.
We only know where we're setting these limits of how much data can be processed by the network.
And the general assumption is that if too many people start putting a lot of data on
there, it creates a market for the transaction fees.
And ultimately, those fees will fluctuate.
They may even go pretty crazy for periods of time.
I think we've seen short periods of time where fees are in the tens of dollars for a transaction.
And what that does is it economically incentivizes people to be more judicious about their use
of block space.
And ultimately, you know, the more valuable types of economic transactions will be the
ones that get put on the blockchain.
The response to this and the fact that it could potentially make it uneconomic for people
to send small amounts of value to each other is what led to the creation of lightning network
and off chain protocols.
Because then you can create a transaction on the blockchain to essentially anchor into
it and then send basically as many transactions as quickly as your computer can process them
for a negligible amount of fee on this other network because it's not being processed by
everyone on the network anymore.
And what we're seeing on lightning is that you're able to make transactions more in the
range of like one satoshi fee as opposed to many thousands of satoshis of fees for transacting
on the blockchain.
My understanding of it is kind of like a private channel.
So if me and you wanted to transact, we would open up a channel, we would upload a certain
amount of Bitcoin to the network or upload it into the channel.
And then we can transact as many times as we want until one of us wants to settle out.
And at that point, the records will get reconciled and uploaded onto the blockchain.
Is that correct?
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, you can think of the blockchain itself as being the record of truth, the the sort
of the judge, jury and executioner for what has actually happened.
So you can engage in these other private transactions off the chain.
But what you're really doing is you're just exchanging real valid Bitcoin transactions
privately between different parties, the parties that are operating these channels.
And at any given time, you can just take one, you can take like the most recent of those
transactions and post it to the Bitcoin network and and settle out as you were saying, there
is, of course, a lot more game theory involved to cover various edge cases and and to improve
the robustness of of being able to get your money back and make sure that nobody is cheating
you privately.
But that that is the long and short of it is that you're exchanging perfectly valid
Bitcoin transactions, you're just choosing to defer the posting of them to the entire
network because you know that you'll be able to transact a lot faster and save a lot of
money on fees, the longer you can defer settling onto the chain.
Thanks for clarifying that for me.
The one piece that I really don't understand too much is I guess the aspect of watch towers.
They're supposed to be the players in the space or in the network that are essentially
making sure that there's no bad actors, correct?
Yes and no.
They're not the only ones doing that.
There are a number of trade offs with lightning that that have to be made in order to get
this you know, higher speeds and lower transactions and lightning from a pure like theoretical
security model is less secure than a transacting Bitcoin purely on chain like you can never
make a protocol that is more secure than the base protocol that it is reliant upon.
Now one of the trade offs is that when you're operating these lightning wallets, you are
required to be more vigilant.
Because like I said, what you're doing is you're passing Bitcoin transactions privately
between different parties.
And therefore you're creating the potential for situations where a channel counterparty
may try to cheat you by posting an old version of a Bitcoin transaction where they had more
money on their side of the channel than they have in the more recent version.
And the way that you protect against this is that when you're updating your channel
state and you're basically creating new private Bitcoin transactions, you're actually signing
a variety of different transactions, some of which are what are called, I believe it's
like recovery transactions or clawback transactions, where if your counterparty tries to cheat
you by posting an old invalid transaction that would give them more money, you can actually
take all of the money away from them because they are required to have already signed a
transaction that that spends those outputs and sends them back to you.
But of course, in order to be able to take advantage of that, you have to be online and
listening for them to potentially try to cheat you by posting that invalid transaction.
And if you're not online, then they could post that transaction.
And if enough time goes by, there are various time locks involved.
But if enough time goes by, then you would not be able to claw that money back.
And so what the watchtowers are doing is that they can listen on your behalf.
I would say, you know, preferably you should be online listening 24 seven, you know, if
you have your own computer that is running your lightning software, you can essentially
be your own watchtower.
But if for some reason you're only using a mobile wallet, and you're not necessarily
going to be online all the time, then you can actually delegate responsibility to an
arbitrary number of third party watchtowers and you can incentivize them to do this by
offering them fees, you know, to say, you know, if you save me from being defrauded,
then I'll pay you, you know, some small fee as a result of that.
And so this is all just another way of trying to improve the robustness of the network against
various adversaries.
And watchtowers are still in the very early stages.
I think the first real like production ready code for it just got merged recently.
And it may they may have gone out in the most recent L and D release past week.
But it's it's so early that it's not even something that I've played around with yet.
So what do you think the major hurdles are for the lightning network right now?
And how long do you think it's going to be until it's going to be user friendly?
The fun thing about, you know, asking for timelines on any of these types of networks
is it's tricky because the work is so decentralized.
You know, there are many different teams that are working on different aspects of the network.
And so, you know, at CASA, we have a team of engineers that are working on several lightning
related products.
But you know, we are not lightning protocol engineers, we are reliant upon changes coming
from the the lightning labs, folks, because we are building software on top of their software.
And as a result, you know, I don't know exactly what the timelines are going to be for for
all the things that they're trying to work on.
I'm only really concerned with what we are able to do right now.
And then as more functionality comes from the lightning developers, you know, we will
try to make that as user friendly as possible for the people that are on our products.
So it's it's one of those things where software is never done.
There's no magic threshold to be crossed, where, you know, suddenly we will be mainstream
adoption ready.
I think that, you know, we have made great strides even over the past year.
There will be plenty of challenges ahead, not only on the usability side, but also on
the understanding of how the liquidity on the lightning network even operates.
That's one of the bigger unknowns.
And we're going to be playing around with a number of different ways to try to onboard
users onto the lightning network and then offer them a variety of different security
models and kind of have to play it by ear, you know, see, see what things actually get
people engaged.
Because if you can't provide some real value for people to spend some time to learn how
this system works and actually use it, then it's going to be pretty much relegated to
the, you know, techie enthusiast types who are interested in it more for like ideological
reasons.
So I think that it's not just about the software.
It's also about, you know, what are the different use cases that are going to come along, you
know, things like try lolly, for example, is a interesting, you know, cash back, but
in Bitcoin type of of user experience, you know, stuff like that, where we can actually
incentivize people to use these networks.
That's also going to be an important piece of getting them into the door.
That's interesting.
So can you talk a little bit more about the liquidity issue that you were just mentioning?
Yeah, so the way that the the lightning network works, you know, is that you are opening channels
with different providers.
And these channels have certain amounts of value in them.
And you know, there will be a certain amount of value on one end of the channel and a certain
amount on the other end.
And when you're quote unquote, sending money, all you're really doing is you're updating
the values on each end of the channel, you know, subtract x, y, y, y, y, y, y, y, y,
x from one end and add x to the other end.
Now, this gets really complicated when you're sending through routes that are many different
hops, it creates a more complicated routing problem of you, you know, having to find a
path where there's enough liquidity to be pushed all the way through that path to make
that full payment.
One way that this is being addressed is through something called atomic multipath routing,
which will actually be able to split up the payment across, I don't even know if there's
a limit, but an arbitrary number of different paths, so that you don't necessarily need
to have one single path with all the liquidity, but can instead branch out through many and
then reconverge from a variety of different kind of angles of attack with the net within
the network to your final target.
But then that's kind of like the micro scale liquidity problems.
I think there's also going to be more macro level issues that need to be dealt with.
Interestingly enough, I spoke or I wrote about these in a coin desk article over three years
ago, maybe even maybe even four years ago now, where I talked about the liquidity challenges
that I felt were going to be needed to address.
And I'm sure there will be different types of liquidity attacks that could happen where,
you know, you try to push too much value from like one portion of the network to another
portion of the network.
Because if the channels get too imbalanced, you know, if all of the value gets pushed
from one side of the channel to another side of the channel, then it effectively becomes
unusable in one direction.
So then if you want that channel to be usable for sending value in both directions, you
need to figure out how can I rebalance the liquidity inside of this channel.
There has been some work done on this already.
There are there's at least one piece of open software that I'm aware of that is actively
doing channel rebalance logic.
I'm aware of one other team that is working on that because they presented at Scaling
Bitcoin in Tokyo.
And then there are other functionalities that are being released.
Something called loop out was released by lightning labs recently, which is a way to
allow you to rebalance channels, I guess, with on chain transactions.
And then I also expect that this issue is going to get more interesting when we start
seeing both dual funded channels become a thing, which those, as far as I'm aware, still
are theoretical and none of the software supports them yet.
And also, there are folks I think it's a block stream with their L2 software is working on
multi party channel management, which basically means, you know, the ability to have 10s if
not hundreds of people or entities that share a single channel.
So I mean, this is all going to get very complicated.
But these protocols and I mean, networking protocols in general are complicated.
And so you know, if the average person is having to worry about all of this, then we
will have failed, but I don't think that's the way that it's going to go.
Almost nobody has podcasts these days where they talk about the intricacies of HTTP two,
which was finalized, I think, just in the past year, all of these various networking
technologies, they just work under the hood.
And they get abstracted away by many layers of software to the point that all an end user
is doing is pointing and clicking and you're following instructions on their screen.
So while people like myself are very worried about all of the intricacies of this, because
we're basically building the infrastructure for what we hope to eventually become a mainstream
usable system.
It's not something that the end user is going to have to worry about.
And thankfully, we have very intelligent people like you to build the infrastructure for people
like myself that aren't all that technical.
I think working on that, it's going to be huge to make it easier for people like myself.
But I think that's a good segue into the second issue that you mentioned before was security.
And that's your main focus over at CASA right now, correct?
Yeah, it's fairly evenly balanced between our different products.
I mean, we have two main products, the first one, the original one that we were working
on when I joined is a multi signature key management product, which is trying to get
people to basically have better than bank level security and robustness on their private
keys in a very user friendly like mobile apps style interface.
And then of course, we also have our lightning product sort of Bitcoin light lightning node
in a box plug and play product, and then we're building a few other things around that.
But you know, the all of the the lightning related stuff is still fairly experimental.
It's still fairly reckless to be using like we don't recommend anyone put substantial
amounts of value into lightning software at this point.
But you need to be able to secure your larger amount of wealth that you have in Bitcoin.
If you want to be able to take advantage of these things in the future, you know, otherwise
you, well, you're really more likely to just lose access to it than even you are to have
someone hack into your computer and steal your money from you.
So we're we're trying to build a system that is robust enough that you know, people don't
have to do all of these really complicated IT data practices to continually ensure that
like the integrity of their backup systems are are still functional and that you know,
if they run into some sort of catastrophe that it won't result in them losing access
to all their private keys.
And that's the cost of key master and the cost of node respectively, correct?
Yes.
So the the key master, we have a couple of different levels or tiers on that are sort
of premium solution.
The first one that we came out with is a three out of five multi SIG.
And then just in the past month or so, we've started to announce new tiers with two of
three multi SIG for the masses, if you will.
And that's going to get paired with anyone who's also buying a node.
But the three of five multi SIG is the product that I think kind of stands in a class on
its own, because we've created a system where the user has four out of aha.
Let's see, my problem is that I was looking at my other thing here that I was recording
on.
You were asking about the key master, right?
All right.
So our key master is essentially a private key management solution.
And we have a couple of different tiers on the key master, the flagship product, the
one that we first came out with a year or so ago is a three out of five multi SIG.
And this is a setup where the user has one key on their mobile device, and then three
keys on geographically separated hardware devices like treasures and ledgers.
We support off the shelf hardware, we're not trying to be like a hardware security company.
And then the last key is held by CASA offline as a disaster recovery scenario.
But what we're trying to do to make this a more user friendly solution is a couple of
different things.
First of all, we totally got rid of the need for people to store their recovery seed phrases.
We believe that that's a very user unfriendly thing that very few users understand how to
properly secure and back up those seed phrases.
And those seed phrases are essentially all of your private keys.
And so it's kind of weird that as a ecosystem, we have developed really excellent hardware
for securing private keys.
But if you go by a treasurer ledger, the first thing it does is it shows you the seed phrase
and it says, you know, write this down and keep it safe.
And there's just like an iceberg of security and data practice information that is laying
underneath those simple words of, you know, keep it safe.
And we think it's unreasonable to expect the average person to really understand everything
that is involved in that.
And so as a result, we decided to try to get rid of the need for seed phrases.
And the way that we've done that is that, like I said, we have these multisig wallet
products where if you lose one of your devices or really if anything happens to one of your
devices and you can no longer access it, we have actually built the key rotation functionality
into the mobile app itself.
So all you have to do is go in and click on that device and say, Hey, I need to replace
this device, you go buy a new treasurer ledger, what have you, and plug it in and we walk
you through the basically recreation of that key set and creation of a transaction to rotate
you over to the new key set.
And then you're back at full integrity in a matter of minutes without having to go around
and like try to find your seed phrases and hope that they haven't been lost and all this
other stuff.
It's just a more flexible and dynamic way of approaching multisig security.
And so, you know, there's a three of five product.
We've also got the two of three products that we announced recently, it's going to be more
available to the masses at a lower cost where I think anyone who buys a node actually will
get that gold level membership as well.
And so what we're trying to do is offer a product that we want it to be, you know, one
of the most user friendly on the market, but we also want to be able to provide a level
of service that is not really seen in the crypto security space.
And merging that all together with a more like full fledged suite of products where,
you know, the node is also becoming a part of this whole self sovereignty package is
that we want people to be able to have a level of independence where they feel comfortable.
They are in full control of their assets.
But if something does go wrong, they can reach out to us and get some professional services
to help them out, but not in a way where we actually have any influencer or control over
their assets.
Can you talk a little bit more about the node and what a node is and why it's so important?
So a node or more specifically a full node or fully validating node is, in my opinion,
one of the most important aspects of these decentralized distributed networks.
It really plays into both the security of the individual that's using the network and
the security of the network as a whole.
You could even make an argument that it has a lot to do with the quote unquote governance
or lack thereof within these networks.
Essentially what it means is that we have created a protocol and this protocol allows
us to talk to each other and say, Hey, I'm going to make an update to this ledger and
I'm going to move this value from one address to another address.
But there's a whole lot of stuff going on underneath that various rules and validations.
And there are different levels of validation that you as an end user can be participating
in on these networks.
You could be using these networks with essentially no validation whatsoever by using a like custodial
web based wallet, for example, where all you're really doing is manipulating IOUs in somebody
else's database and you're trusting that they're not going to do anything bad or screw up.
There's a level of validation on the networks called SPV or simplified payment verification
where you can be running software on your computer or on your mobile phone, whatever
that does reach out to the nodes on this network.
And all it really does is it asks for a very simple cryptographic proof of inclusion.
It looks for certain addresses in the blockchain and then asks nodes to prove that a transaction
that was related to one of those addresses actually happened in some specific block.
This is basically a proof of existence that that thing happened, but you're still susceptible
to things such as a node lying by omission and just not giving you any proof or anything.
You're also susceptible to the fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of other rules
within the protocol that could be broken and the full node could lie to you about that.
The highest level of security and validation on these networks is the full node or the
fully validating node, and that is where you're running a piece of software, preferably 24-7-365,
that is listening to all the transactions and blocks on the network and for every piece
of data that it gets, it validates the entirety of the rule set of the protocol and decides
whether or not to accept or reject that transaction, that block, what have you.
And when you're running a fully validating node, you are no longer having to trust anyone
else on the network.
I have a very lengthy blog post from a few years ago on CoinDesk entitled Bitcoin Security
Model where I go into all the details around this, but the security model is essentially
such that you only need to have one single honest peer talking to you on the network.
Even if all of the other peers are lying to you, as long as you have one honest peer giving
you the real data, you can validate that that's the real data and everything else is a lie.
As far as I'm aware, this is one of the strongest levels of security on the internet in general
that you can get with regard to not being lied to by anyone.
And so if you're running a fully validating node, then you can validate that the money
that you're receiving is real, you're not being defrauded with fake transactions or
double-span transactions or what have you.
But you can also participate in a way in the governance of the network of saying, I'm running
this rule set and if you or other people on the network decide you want to change the
rules, then I'm not going to follow along with your rule changes unless I explicitly
agree to them and I change the software that I'm running to basically change the rules
that I'm validating.
And this, in my opinion, is also a fascinating thing because it inverts traditional governance.
Traditional governance is hierarchical, you know, top-down command and control where you
have a small number of people who are making the decisions and they may be dictators or
autocrats, they may be democratically elected, they may be founders or owners of a company
or on the board or whatever, it doesn't really matter.
Pretty much all traditional governance concentrates power in the hands of a few people because
that's a more efficient and effective way to get things done.
But now this is flipping that all on its head and we have bottom-up governance where it's
not democracy.
There's no way for anyone or even any set of entities on the network to compel anyone
else on the network to do anything.
It is, I believe, the purest form of anarchy where every single individual gets to decide
for themselves what rules they want to agree to and what they want the governance of the
network to be.
And so that has resulted in some very fascinating dramas and forks and other governance debates
over the years, but it's just one other interesting aspect of all this network and the evolution
of these protocols and I do believe that it is very important that as many people as possible
have the ability to run these nodes because it will make it more difficult for any centralization
of power to try to change the network in a way that most people disagree with.
That was really insightful.
So you guys are trying to essentially make the CASA node so it's more like a plug and
play type thing and it's very user-friendly so people have the sovereignty and can protect
themselves.
Yes.
So when you have the CASA node, you're running a fully validating Bitcoin node and then you're
also running a Lightning node side by side and the Lightning node is talking to the Bitcoin
node.
That is increasing the security of your Lightning wallet and all of the things that you're doing
on the Lightning network.
You guys also have a health check on the website.
Yeah, I believe that's just like our general security guidance that we're doing.
Okay, cool.
I'm interested.
I know we're running out of time.
I'm just interested to get your opinion on what do you think that the main driver of
Bitcoin adoption will be?
I have speculated for a while now because I spent my first several years in the Bitcoin
space, kind of evangelizing it to all my friends and family and it was only probably single
digit percentages of people who actually believed in me or thought I wasn't completely insane
and listened to me and bought into the ideology behind it.
As a result of that, I stopped really trying to reach out to people who are comfortable
in first world countries that have pretty decent financial infrastructure.
I suspect that the people who will be most incentivized to adopt these technologies will
be the ones who do not have access to traditional banking infrastructure.
Despite the fact that we have seen many failures in traditional banking infrastructure.
In my experience, not many people give it a second thought.
It's almost like the people like myself who are worried about that or, you know, we're
worried about long term inflation or, you know, the things that central banks may do.
We are generally dismissed as being overly paranoid, at least by the other folks in the
first world countries that I've talked into.
But the people who are in countries that actually suffer from hyperinflation or who have very
limited access to banking networks, the disparity is so great for them that I think that it's
sufficient incentive for them to adopt this new technology that may be too challenging
or too much of a learning curve for someone in the first world.
But for someone who doesn't have the ability to send or store money very well at all, I
think that they would be more likely to learn how this new technology works and actually
try it out and benefit from it.
So it would be very interesting to see if that is the way that it plays out where basically
third world countries end up with faster adoption than first world countries.
But it depends on efforts from a lot of different people because for whatever reason, I think
technology in general is still very first world and English focused.
So I'm very happy whenever I see new efforts on the translation side of trying to make
things more clarified for people who don't speak English.
Cool.
What are you looking forward to the most?
What excites you the most about the space right now?
Well we've got a number of interesting things happening both on the privacy front and the
scalability front.
And interestingly enough, they actually tend to go hand in hand.
Things like aggregate signatures, for example, will continue to decrease the size of on-chain
transactions but also increase the privacy by essentially obscuring who the participants
and the transactions are in the first place.
And that level of scalability can then even be additionally applied to lightning channels
themselves.
So it all goes hand in hand.
I am definitely interested in seeing improved privacy on the Bitcoin network because I think
it's been lagging behind for a number of years and it actually ends up affecting the fungibility
of the money itself, which is one of the most important properties.
So until we get to the point where it's not even possible for someone to look at a Bitcoin
transaction and say, oh, you know, that money came from these addresses or these entities
with these wallet clusters and we still have a fair amount of work to do to make Bitcoin
more fungible.
What are some of the myths or misconceptions around Bitcoin or blockchain specifically
that you'd want to help clear up?
There's so many.
I mean, it's hard to even keep track of which ones are the most popular these days.
I was actually at a conference recently, it was a traditional financial conference, and
I was asked about some things of like, well, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger say things
like Bitcoin is rat poison and Bitcoin has lots of criminals and scam artists and whatnot.
And I actually tend to agree with some of those statements in the sense that Bitcoin
is rat poison for anyone who wants to control how money works.
And it does attract a lot of scam artists.
Any new technology tends to attract criminals and scam artists because they know that law
enforcement hasn't yet caught up to the way that the technology works.
We have already seen various cases come out where law enforcement is showing that they
are catching up with how the technology works and are able to incorporate different tools
into their investigations where looking at like the analysis of funds flow on Bitcoin,
for example, is still only one part of the investigation.
I don't think that it is a single conclusive thing in and of itself.
I mean, any money or at least any sound money that is censorship resistant is going to be
used for illegal things.
And of course, cash is the best example of that.
And it's probably controversial, but I say that the way that we know that Bitcoin is
working well is if it is used for more illegal things.
If anything, I think despite all of the hype around like terrorists using crypto for funding,
I think there have been several reports that have shown that that's generally not true,
that they much prefer to use cash or gold or, you know, things that are even less traceable
than Bitcoin is.
You recently tweeted that you have an article coming out probably around next week or so
regarding Craig Wright.
Is it safe to say that you don't believe he's the real Satoshi?
It is a very long and complicated story, and I'm not sure that many people even know everything.
Even I only still have theories around Craig's whole life and what led him to get to where
he is today.
I have not really found any of the attributes of Satoshi that I would expect when I look
into the things that he's done or what he's said.
I'm not even sure that he knows how to write very much code or he really has the level
of expertise that he claims to have from all of his academic credentials.
There's just a lot of really questionable things in his history that I have found.
And while my article will not have all of the questionable things, what I really tried
to focus on was a lot of the contradictions.
And I think that there is pretty conclusive evidence that he has made a lot of things
up over the years.
And so for me, it's less about whether or not he is Satoshi or was connected to the
creators of Bitcoin.
It's more about whether or not he's a credible person.
Gotcha.
Well, I'll definitely make sure to link to that article in the show notes when it does
come out.
Final question, what's one piece of advice that you'd give to someone who's just starting
out and looking to invest in the space?
Well, that it is still the Wild West.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong if you get in over your head.
I would suspect that almost everyone who has been in the space long enough has lost some
money at one point or another due to various screw ups.
I have plenty of incidents that I could come up with myself off the top of my head of times
that I have screwed up.
So it's really just that you have to be careful.
When people ask me whether or not they should invest in Bitcoin, I tell them that if they
have to ask, then the answer is no.
What I basically mean is that you should invest in education yourself.
I have some pretty good educational resources on my website that you can easily spend months
going through, and it's not until you have convinced yourself that it is a system worth
supporting that you should actually put any money into it.
So if the listeners want to learn a little bit more about the resources that you have
or even the cost of KeyMaster and Node, how can they do so?
So my educational resources are at bitcoin.page and lightning.how.
And then CASA's website is keys.casa.
That's keys.casa.
Awesome.
Again, Jameson, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show.
We'll have to do this again sometime soon just to catch up, see what else you're working
on over at CASA and maybe some other just general Bitcoin questions.
Sounds good.
Thanks for having me.
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