Hey, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, JP Baric, and this is Digital Gold.
Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started mining cryptocurrency out of my parents'
basement back in 2013. The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore
how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders
in this space.
JP Baric is the founder and CEO of Orem Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and
podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orem Capital Ventures.
This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon
for investment decisions.
Today I'm joined by Jameson Lopp, who is the co-founder and CTO of CASA, a Bitcoin philosopher
and a professional cyberpunk. He has been actually building the Bitcoin space since
2015 and has become one of the most respected voices in the Bitcoin developer community.
He was previously an engineer at BitGo, developing its high-grade multi-sig custody service before
co-founding CASA, a company providing secure wallets and plug and play infrastructure solutions
for Bitcoin. His mission is to use his skills as a technologist to build tools that empower
individuals, and he works to achieve this by making it easier for people to take custody
of their Bitcoin and manage their private keys. Jameson, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Long time, no see.
Can you explain to me how you became a cyberpunk, Jameson? What does that even look like? How
do you become a professional cyberpunk?
Goes back to the white paper. I was not familiar with the cyberpunk movement or any of the
decades of development leading up to Bitcoin. It wasn't until several years after I'd been
immersed in Bitcoin that I started looking into the history and realizing this was not
just something that appeared out of thin air, but rather was the culmination of efforts
of many people around the world for decades of trying and failing other attempts at digital
currency. As I was looking into that, reading the historical posts and getting a better
understanding of the mindset that those people were in, then I realized that I generally
agreed with it, and I wanted to further the cause.
You mentioned before Bitcoin, I think that's one of the potential flaws people have with
Bitcoin. It's like the first one. How do we know what's going to be the one that everyone
uses? It's slow, the 10 minute block time. Those are the normal, I think, excuses we
get from people why they don't want to adopt or learn more about Bitcoin. Because like
you mentioned, previously there was some other coins or other tries at Bitcoin. Are you able
to talk further on how that research went and maybe what other projects might have failed
and for what reasons?
It's hard for me to even say how many attempts there were because most of them didn't even
really make it out of the gate. I think DigiCash with David Chom was probably the one that
made it the furthest. I don't know how many years they operated. I know they raised some
funds and they had a working network, but eventually it just didn't get enough adoption
and they shut down. There were other notable projects like Halfany had something called
reusable proofs of work, which had some similarities with Bitcoin, but basically each coin carried
its own proof of work along with it. It didn't have a blockchain though. There were still
some missing pieces. I think it hadn't really solved the double spending problem. Ultimately,
the reason all of these things failed was because they were still centralized. That
was the unique innovation that Satoshi figured out was how do you create a system like this
without a central authority? From that standpoint, Bitcoin is the first to be able to do it without
central authorities, but there's plenty of other reasons why you would believe that given
the level of adoption that Bitcoin has gotten, it's going to be very difficult to overcome
the network effect that it has gained so far. Because it is software, it can continue to
evolve though. It will, of course, not evolve at anywhere near the pace that, for example,
a web app or a single company's software project might change because by design, it's very
difficult to gain consensus across all of the participants to make any non-backwards
compatible changes. When you're referring to these non-backwards compatible changes and
Bitcoin doesn't have a central authority and you are working on and you develop, or I believe
you have pushed code to Bitcoin Core, have you ever committed to the normal, I guess
not the normal, but the main Bitcoin client? How does that work from a developer standpoint?
Because I myself have been focused on the mining, but I've never actually written code
for really any Bitcoin clients like you have.
Yeah. I am not a protocol developer. The first project that I actually started and still
maintain is a fork of the Bitcoin Core client. It's not a network fork or a protocol fork.
It is still running the Bitcoin node. Basically, I just added in a bunch of metrics and instrumentation
and built some cool DevOps style dashboards that I put up on a website, which you can
find at setoshi.info. It's like setoshi.info, but with an extra T after the first S. As
a result of that, I'm not a C++ developer. I really don't like C++, but I do have some
trivial commits in the Bitcoin Core repository, generally just things that I ran into when
I was mucking around in my own fork. No notable functionality really, usually just like improvements
of documentation or RPC calls or things that only really the developers would care about.
It's not challenging if you're familiar with open source development, if you're familiar
with GitHub. Basically, if you find something that you think could be improved, then you
write the code and you submit a pull request and then people review it and you respond
to their feedback. If you can make almost everybody happy, if you can get an overwhelming
agreement without any notable objections that other people find reasonable objections, then
your code is going to get merged in. For me, because the stuff I have implemented, it was
all really trivial. It would generally get merged in pretty quickly within a matter of
days or weeks. If you were doing some massive functionality change with a ton of logic that
could be potentially dangerous, if it was buggy, then you could very easily be spending
months if not years trying to get that code merged in.
Wow. I think that was one of the things I want to talk farther on, which is you mentioned
there's a client code base, which is something that you forked over and you're working on.
Then you have the protocol code, which is the main Bitcoin protocol, which is decentralized
and you just went through the process of really committing code to that, depending on the
complexity of it. Are there any upcoming protocol changes or even merge requests that you're
interested in or you're following at the protocol level? Because I think that's something that
no one really talks about.
We actually did get the Taproot logic has been merged into Bitcoin Core, the client.
However, that only really means that you're going to be able to use it on your own private
network. There's still outstanding issues around how it's actually going to get activated
on the main network. Fingers crossed that will happen next year. The main reason why
I'm following that is that it will be directly applicable for us at CASA. The ability to
do aggregated signatures off chain that look like a single signature on chain is going
to be a boon to anyone using multi-signature wallets, which is what CASA's primary focus
is. The reason for that is it's going to, A, improve the privacy because there's no
more fingerprints that you're using the special multi-sig setup. Then it's also going to improve
your fees that you have to pay. Your transaction sizes will be a lot smaller. You'll have to
pay lower fees.
I expect that we're going to see a number of improvements and new applications come
along that leverage both the aggregated signature functionality, hopefully making mixers more
private, and then leveraging this tap script, Merkleized Abstract Syntax Tree functionality,
which is really hard to explain in simple terms, but basically it will enable developers
to create much more complex Bitcoin scripts without having to put the entire script on
the blockchain. Once again, improving the privacy and the scalability of doing these
more complex operations.
That is as I appreciate you walking me through that because tap route, I was like, okay,
what is this thing he's talking about? You mentioned multi-sig wallets and I would say
normal wallets. On a high level for the viewers who don't know, can you explain the difference
and why you see this evolution of multi-sig wallets and why they're just inherently better?
The easiest way to think of Bitcoin security is it's like a lockbox. When you send Bitcoin
to a certain address, the address is just a human readable format. Behind that address,
it's actually a fingerprint for a more complex redeem script, which this script describes
the spending conditions for what data you need to post to the network in order for the
nodes to accept that you are the rightful owner and should be able to spend that value.
The most common way to store your Bitcoin is in a single signature address. That basically
means there's one private key and in order to spend that Bitcoin, you use that private
key to create a cryptographic signature that covers all the details of the transaction
and then you post it to the network and the network validates it and it propagates around
and if you pay an appropriate mining fee, then eventually it gets put into the blockchain
in a block. Now, that's simple, it's straightforward, but you have an obvious single point of failure.
If you lose that key, if an adversary gets that key, then it's game over. They take the
Bitcoin or you can't access the Bitcoin and there's nobody who can get that money back
for you. What we are aiming to do with CASA is to create a self-custody storage setup
that eliminates single points of failure and the way that we do that is both on the technical
side and on the customer service, helping people make decisions about their setup side.
On the technical side, the way that we eliminate single points of failure is by using multiple
keys. Our flagship product is a three out of five multi-sig setup, which means there
are five different devices with five different key sets on them and these get geographically
distributed by you into different locations and in order to spend from your wallet, you
have to add signatures from three different devices. You have to physically travel around
and access these devices and that makes it so that if any one device gets lost or compromised,
you're fine. There's no catastrophic loss. You can replace the device and just keep moving
on with your life. If there is any sort of disaster, then once again, you don't have
to worry about having all kinds of crazy backup schemes or anything like the architecture
of the wallet itself is the backup scheme. It has robustness and resilience built into
it and if we're getting attacked by someone, whether digitally or physically, it's going
to be the bar gets raised to such a level that the attacker would have to be extremely
motivated and basically be willing to take you hostage for a lengthy period of time and
go through multiple different physical locations, which of course is going to be very risky
for them and increase the chance that they get caught. We could spend hours just talking
about the security model and all the different threats that we try to protect against, but
we've got all of those on our website and people can spend hours looking through them.
The whole idea is that being your own bank, it comes with a lot of responsibility and
few people are going to put in the time to think through everything that could go wrong.
What we want to do is leverage the five years of experience that I have, learning a lot
of hard lessons, seeing a lot of people lose their money in a lot of different ways and
build all of these best practices into a very simple piece of software so that people just
follow the directions in the app and they'll be in a very good position from a security
standpoint.
As people are following the directions in the app, as you mentioned, there's trade-offs
I think with expanding the crypto ecosystem and regarding custody more specifically because
with these apps like Robinhood and Cash App, you don't actually own the coins, but with
CASA, you are costing them yourself, correct?
Exactly. We believe that this is important for a variety of reasons. It's important for
the individual because if you're just giving all your keys to a third party, then you've
just thrown out one of the most important aspects of this system, which is getting rid
of centralized middlemen and trusted third parties. If you're leaving your money with
a custodian, then you may feel safer, but you have no way of actually knowing because
the security that is going on in that custodian is a complete black box to you. You have no
insight into what it is. You're just blindly trusting that they're following the best practices.
If you were following best practices yourself, then you don't have to trust anyone. You're
verifying that you're doing it the right way yourself. Also, there's this issue of systemic
risk. At a higher level, thinking outside of just the individual risks that you expose
yourself to if you're giving your money to a third party, they can exit scam, they can
be running a fractional reserve. There's just a million ways that they can still lose the
money. At a higher level, it is unhealthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole if a
huge amount of the value in the system is being held by a small number of entities.
That's because you start to get into potential governance style attacks, where the reason
that this system is robust and resilient against even theoretical nation state attacks is because
there are so many doors that would have to be kicked down, so to speak, in order to force
people to change the rules of the system that they are enforcing with their client software.
If you get to the point where there's only half a dozen or a dozen or a small enough
number of entities that they can start to coordinate with each other and collude with
each other, then the system itself has become a lot more fragile and prone to malicious
changes being instituted by a small number of entities that may benefit them and be to
the detriment of everyone else in the system. You're essentially just recreating a central
banking cartel again. We're trying to fight against this inevitable onslaught of tantalizing
convenience that people are falling into because they're willing to trade their security for
convenience. This is a common theme in a number of different aspects of people's lives. We
trade a lot of things for convenience, unfortunately, because our time is precious to us.
We do trade a lot of things for convenience. I feel like that's one of the number one,
not problems, but one of the reasons why people use these central authorities or central wallets
like Robinhood, Cash App, Coinbase. Is there anything that's going to make people feel
like they have the same security as a bank using a self-custody multi-sig product? Do
you think we're already there? Or do you think that there are more things that need to be
done to get people comfortable enough using products like CASA and have the same comfortability
of storing that money in a bank or that asset in the bank where they know it's not going
to get stolen and at least they believe it's not going to get stolen?
There's still a lot of education that needs to be done. Still can be very difficult to
explain to someone that their Bitcoin don't exist on any single device because this is
simply a paradigm that has never existed before. Physical things, really any other assets that
you own, you can always point somewhere and say, yep, this is where the asset actually
exists or this is the custodian that is securing that asset. But when you start to create these
models where it's actually comprised of this amorphous set of things, then it breaks a
lot of people's minds and it's difficult to explain to them why this is a better security
model because it's just a completely different security model and people don't even think
about security models when they're going about their day to day lives.
So I think that in the short to medium term, there's a lot of education to be done. In
the long term, to get to real mainstream acceptance, it'll become like any other technology where
people, once again, they won't know how it works, but it will be the fact that so many
other people use it, that it just becomes a sort of de facto thing that you don't even
question.
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Right off of convenience over self custody throughout the space, as I mentioned, on Robinhood,
on Coinbase, and I hope that people are moving to a solution where they are in control of
their own Bitcoins.
I found it very interesting, Jameson, how you explain the fact that Bitcoin's not necessarily
on one device. It's on this ledger that we all believe to be true. And I think that was
one of the things that I realized back in 2013 when I was coming into blockchain and
space was that there was this one truth and you could believe it. And it was backed by
these computers, which were using energy to mine Bitcoin. So now, Jameson, we met back
in maybe 2013, 2015, I think probably 2015, because we were both local components of the
Bitcoin industry here in the Southeast and just decided that this was the future.
When you got into Bitcoin in the beginning, how did people react to that? And did it affect
your perception of it? How has that conversation with some of those people that are closer
to you changed over the years about maybe their perception of Bitcoin and what you're
doing in this space and all the work you're putting into? Can you talk a little bit farther
on how that attitude has changed, mainly maybe because the price has risen or just because
the technology has gotten more awareness?
Yeah, I was the crazy guy who would happily spend hours explaining the system to people.
And I don't know, even if they got it from a technical standpoint, I think there was
generally just so much skepticism and a million reasons of why it might not get significant
adoption. Why it could fail even from a non-technical standpoint that most people just discounted
it. I would say it could probably count on one hand the number of people who actually
ended up sharing my belief back then in the early days and then for the course of several
hype cycles, bubbles, booms, crashes, a few more people have come along and realized that
this is not a flash in the pan fad that's going to be disappearing, but it's actually
here to stay. And I think that is going to be how it continues to grow. It'll be a little
bit at a time though, of course, the growth will happen in spurts and it'll be like any
other technology that once it becomes readily adopted and essentially ubiquitous, then people
will just take it for granted. And I think we've got a long way to go until we get to
that point. There's still a ton of things to be done on the usability side, the security
side, the privacy side. I believe that Bitcoin is a project that is aiming to be the fairest
and optimal form of money. And we certainly have a number of weaknesses, things that could
be improved from a technical standpoint that I believe that I'm going to be continuing
to focus my time for the foreseeable future on improving this system. If we ever get to
the point where I feel like Bitcoin is done, has met all of its goals, then hopefully I
will be able to pivot and work on other technologies that will also empower individuals in different
ways.
So you talk about this empowerment. I think that's one of the things that a lot of the
early Bitcoiners like myself and you really had in their DNA. It was this currency, this
money that was just true and fair and backed by math and really, in my opinion, for the
people. And obviously with getting Bitcoin growth, we've seen a lot of institutions coming
in just because of the nature of the industry and the nature of the asset class. But over
the past five years of being in this space, this idea that Bitcoin is the people's money,
do you still think it resonates with you today and with the community today? Or do you think
it's become more commercialized?
I guess the downside to being open to everyone is that it also means, of course, that it's
open to institutions and larger players who may not care about the ideology and may only
really care about using it for financial hedging and speculation purchases. But that is part
of what you have to deal with. Any tool can be used in a variety of different ways and
you may not agree with all of the ways that they're being used for, but that's fine.
I think one of the things that we have fallen short on is we're a long ways away from being
able to be a ubiquitous form of money that can be used by anyone, including people in
third world countries that don't have access to great financial infrastructure. There have
been some small, good adoption cases, but for a variety of reasons, usability and scalability
being the primary ones, we're still a long way, I think, from having less well-off people
be able to adopt and benefit from this technology. We're still at the point where the people
who are going to be benefiting from it the most are the ones who have the resources and
the time to invest into scaling the learning curve required to get into it.
Chain as a tool, and I think for me, I look at Bitcoin as one of the best tools for society
for scaling trust across a decentralized network. But one of the things I wanted to touch on,
which came out, I believe, two days ago, was that USDC, which is a Coinbase's stablecoin,
with the U.S. government permission, they partnered with the exiled government of Venezuela
and distributed aid to people and healthcare workers in Venezuela. What I saw with that
is now stablecoins are being used as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. This is, I think,
one of the first real public use cases of a nation-state intervening with another nation-state
citizens giving direct aid to the people through a stablecoin or through a blockchain network.
How do you see nation-states and central banks using blockchains as a tool in either a good
or a bad way?
Cryptography in general is a double-edged sword. It can be used for two primary purposes.
One is to obfuscate or to encrypt things to keep them private so that only the intended
recipients can see the data. The other is almost the exact opposite, which is identification
and authentication, basically using cryptography to publicly sign messages to essentially attest
that information has been created or authenticated by no one other than you. I would expect that
institutions, nation-states, whatever, are going to be using these distributed ledgers
for the latter. They certainly could build some privacy functionality into it, but I
don't think that it really is going to be of much benefit for them to do. Rather, I
expect that this type of blockchain or distributed ledger like central bank technology is going
to be used as a tool of control and surveillance.
Now, there certainly are some potential good use cases for it where it would, for example,
be really easy for entities to air drop money on people, for example, but it's also going
to become a lot easier for them to track people's money and I would expect to censor their money
as well. We'll generally expect that cons will probably outweigh the pros, at least
from my perspective, but that's not to say that they'll be 100% complete bad. I'm sure
that they will be able to help some people.
As we see these competing currencies or competing networks show up and really come to scale
over the next 10 years, how do you see the media changing their perspective on Bitcoin
or just the narrative in general to the public either in the United States or across the
globe? Because I feel like the media now has almost looked at Bitcoin, oh, it's too small,
it's still functioning very slowly, it doesn't really work, it's volatile. Do you think that
media story is going to change to where it's more of trying to get consumers to use these
stable backed or the central backed currencies or blockchain networks over Bitcoin almost
like shunning it? Or how do you see that narrative potentially playing out with these two, two
or three or four or five different competing blockchain interests?
I think that in general, the media is just going to echo back to people what they think
they want to hear and that a lot of that is influenced by powerful or reputable people.
What we've seen happen and what I expect happens with a lot of technologies is that early on,
pretty much everyone is skeptical and believes that the new technology is never going to
take off. As these new waves of adopters come in, the people who adopt it, as the total
size of the adopter pool grows, then there will be more and more people who are reputable
for other things outside of that technology that will come in and they will start to essentially
lend their own credibility to the credibility of the new technology.
That's what we've really been seeing happen this past year. We've seen some big heavyweights
from software and finance and other spheres publicly come out and say Bitcoin is an amazing
technology and these are the reasons why you should care about it and why it's important
and why we're investing in it and so on and so forth.
I expect that's going to continue to play out both with Bitcoin and any of these other
technologies. It'll just come down to who are the most powerful and reputable people
behind them and how are they able to influence the media and other narratives.
I think that narrative message has been changing just with, I would say, Michael Saylor coming
on and doing the micro strategy purchasing $500 million worth of Bitcoin on the balance
sheet. It was the first public company to do that publicly and go out and I think that's
created a ton of news and we've seen that cycle of people like Paul Tudor Jones attaching
their name to Bitcoin. I definitely agree with you there, Jameson. I see that continuing
and I think that'll help build the legitimacy in the eyes of, I would say, that 40 to maybe
30 to 50 year old crowd and hopefully that pushes them to continue to learn and be educated
about the technology.
Do you remember the first time you heard about Bitcoin, Jameson? Was your initial thought,
this is going to be something I'm going to look into and potentially work on for years
or did you initially disregard it or think it was too complicated to buy and use?
I believe that the vast majority of people you'll talk to will say that they discounted
Bitcoin the first time, perhaps the first several times they heard about it. I know
that I did and that's why I'll never remember the exact first time that I heard about it
because I know I heard about it two or three times at least on various nerd news websites.
I basically laughed and said, oh, this nerd money is going to get hacked and everybody
is going to go broke and it'll all end in tears. It was probably at least six months
if not longer until some Slashdot article, I believe, came along with some development
in the space and I was like, oh, this thing is still around and so that's when I actually
read the white paper and my computer science background kicked in. I was like, oh, wow,
this is actually really an interesting, elegant solution to a problem that I never even thought
about and that's really when it was off to the races. I started going down the rabbit
hole and learning about money in general, which very few people ever bothered to do.
I think there's very few people who just hear a crazy idea and immediately latch on to it
and dive head first. That's why the staying power of this system is something that will
continue to change people's minds as they eventually realize it may take them six months
like me, it may take them years, it may take them decades, but eventually they'll realize
that this thing is not going away and there's probably some good reasons why it hasn't gone
away.
Why it has not fallen away. I think that's one of the biggest things in my life and over
the years because when I got into crypto, I was only like 15 years old and just kept
preaching and preaching. This Bitcoin thing, it's $70, it's $60, it's $50. It's not going
away, guys. It's going to change the world. As a young, naive kid, I was just running
around preaching this new internet money that people were like, okay, yeah, sure. It's this
digital currency. It's going to lose all of its value. It's too volatile.
I think that's one of the things I want to talk about, which is how do you build a good
position in Bitcoin as a safe haven asset or as an investment? What I mean by that is
what I've been telling people now is you want to be buying Bitcoin consistently on a weekly
or monthly basis. You mentioned on another podcast about how you maintain your lower
overhead, but really, how do you know when to hold Bitcoin? Maybe when to sell some for
profits, when to secure more Bitcoins. Obviously, you have to be detailed in the market and
being paying attention, but how do you hold or even tell people or advise people on managing
their Bitcoin position or really growing it and not FOMOing or not selling it when it
goes up by 100% and leaving a huge upside on the table because of just the logarithmic
nature of how Bitcoin grows and how it doesn't scale linearly, like normal stocks and bonds
and other things like that?
I am not a good poster child for the dollar cost averaging because that wasn't even really
a thing back when I got in. There were no tools to do that. I actually bought most of
my Bitcoin in three different major events. There was my initial, oh, I got to get some
of this to play around with it. Then there was a few years later when I was like, oh,
it sounds like there's going to be ETFs and all these other things, so maybe I can front
run it.
I went through this whole process to convert my IRA into a self-directed IRA and then turn
that all into Bitcoin in a matter of a few months. I was dollar cost averaging at that
point because that was after the Mt. Gox crash and the price kept going down and down. At
one point, I'd actually lost half of my retirement because it had gone down so much. Eventually,
the long-term play worked out there. It's just really hard to give general financial
advice. It's because everybody's situation is different. The reason why I was able to
put a decent amount of money into Bitcoin is because I had been diligently following
personal finance forums and the fire style financial investment and budgeting and living
advice for a number of years and had been able to build up a nice savings.
I had multi-month cash savings emergency supply and I was maxing out my 401K. I was able to
allocate money beyond that was just discretionary budget and I was like, I might as well put
it into this Bitcoin thing because I feel like it's going to be a good savings vehicle
and an asset that's not like anything else.
For the average person, I think it comes down to how well off you are. You shouldn't be
like going into debt to buy this speculative asset. You should treat it like a different
type of savings account really and you don't want to put yourself into a position where
you're harming your normal financial budget.
Other than that, it's really just going to come down to conviction and what things you
may be willing to sacrifice because you've lowered your time preference. There's plenty
of things that I could have bought or there are plenty of times when I could have sold
Bitcoin and bought something else and I just never did because I don't know, most like
physical things like Lambos and stuff are not worth it to me. Maybe they will be someday,
but I drove...
I don't know if you know this detail, but obviously I drove the Lotus Elise for a few
years and I had the Bitcoin license plate on it and I considered that kind of an investment
in advertising for Bitcoin, but the Lotus that I bought was actually a salvage title
vehicle that I bought on eBay for really cheap. It looked really expensive, but it was actually
far more affordable than people would have imagined. Even then, I was trying to keep
a low time preference and not spend a lot of money on a flashy car.
I remember that car. It was always something where I was like, that's such a cool car,
Jameson. It definitely did work. I think people thought it was more expensive than it actually
was. The Bitcoin license plate just had that final touch on it, which really nailed it
in the coffin, especially when Bitcoin was rising at that time. I felt like everyone
was like, oh, look, an expensive Lotus, but really you mentioned a great point, which
is lowering your time preference. I feel like that's one of the biggest things about Bitcoin
is you have to have that longer time preference and view this as almost an investment in your
future self. One of the things you also mentioned is how you seem like you prepare for the edge
case really well, not only with CASA, but also in your personal life. Are you able to
talk a little bit more about how you maybe have prepared for this edge case after you
sold the Lotus and you moved off the grid and why you maybe went that route and made
those decisions?
Yeah, and I guess to back up a little bit to one of your earlier questions, it helps
to put your Bitcoin into a high security setup that is difficult to access. Now, that helps
you protect against loss and theft, but it also helps protect you against yourself because
if it takes a lot of effort for you to send your Bitcoin out of your self custody to an
exchange to sell it, then, and we've heard this from a number of CASA clients as well,
it's just less likely that you're going to panic sell. So that can be a good thing as
well over the long run. Now, remind me what the point we were getting towards was.
No worries. That was a great answer on the time preference. Really, how you've transitioned
from going to going off the grid and maybe why you decided to make that move in the first
place and yeah.
Yeah, it's a very long story, but even have several articles and full length presentations
about privacy and all the things that I've learned. But the short version is that the
internet and the communication age, of course, is a double edged sword in the sense that
while it helps us be able to communicate with all types of people now, you reaching out
and making new connections and engaging in all types of interactions, which can be very
productive. The inverse is also true. You can engage in unproductive harmful interactions
and it's also not just you being able to reach out to the world, but now the world can reach
back at you. Especially what happens here with social media phenomenon is that you can
go from being a nobody to having 100,000, if not millions of people all of a sudden
in the blink of an eye looking at you. That can be due to anything like just a single
viral post, for example, that you might make or somebody might make about you. When that
much attention gets cast upon you, your threat level goes through the roof because it's just
a matter of numbers that some small fraction of a percent of people are downright malicious
and will seek to do you harm in order to help themselves. That's really what happened to
me is I went from being a nobody to having hundreds of thousands of people paying attention
to me on Twitter and then eventually some random guy comes along and decides he wants
to try to extort me. That's how I ended up with my whole neighborhood being shut down
by a SWAT team, getting called out to a false bomb and hostage situation at my residence.
That exposed me to this, what I consider to be a sort of asymmetric attack that is a flaw
in our law enforcement system. It can be exploited by anyone who's technically sophisticated
enough. The only defense against that, there are two defenses against that. One is you
continue living your life normally and you just tell, you go to all of your local law
enforcement people and get yourself put on a special watch list so that if any calls
come in, they get flagged as being potential false type of call. Or since I didn't want
to do that, the only other way around it is to essentially change your whole life so that
it's not possible for someone to find your physical address. It's not possible for someone
to then attack you either on their own or by sending other people to your address that
they may even be good intention people like the police, but essentially misusing those
resources. That was a very long journey. It also costs a lot of time and money. And in
the couple of years since I did that, some very good resources have come out so that
I feel like now I can just send people to buy a book that actually has everything that
I wish I had known when I set out on that journey.
And talking about that journey that you went on, I read your New York Times article where
you talked about how to vanish in 15 steps. Can you share a brief summary of maybe some
of those steps or the most important steps for our listeners?
The lowest bar that almost anyone can do is to just use software on your computer to hide
what you're doing, whether it's ad blockers, VPN, Tor, et cetera. Because whenever your
computer talks to another computer, it exchanges your IP address and IP address can be used
to geolocate you. And there's also a ton of other data that gets sent by your browser
that it's preferable to block and things that can be used to track your activity all over.
Something more extreme though, and the thing where few people are going to do this is that
if you want to own any property, you need for that property not to be in your name.
So that means creating some sort of other legal entity like a trust or a corporation
that essentially owns the various property and then you are privately listed as a member
of that corporation and not publicly listed anywhere. Because basically any property that
you pay property taxes on is going into some public database that can be queried by really
anybody. Going a step beyond that is making sure that your name and other personal information
goes into as few private databases as possible. And this is where a lot of overhead comes
in of using pseudonyms, using physical remailer boxes, not getting mail sent in your name
to your home address but rather to other places. It can become complicated. It can become as
complicated as you want because the more layers of obscurity that you use, the more privacy
you theoretically have. And so the short version of all these different techniques is essentially
what you're doing is you're creating proxies. You are shielding yourself from directly interacting
with other things and other people and other legal entities and other organizations. And
every type of interaction that you have, whether it's digital or physical or legal or financial,
there is going to be a way to put a proxy in between you and whatever you're interacting
with. But some cases, it's easy and cheap. Other cases, it's really complicated and expensive.
So it requires a very different perspective on your life and the willingness to put in
a decent amount of effort and think about these things.
And as we know how hard that is, people aren't really thinking about the custody solutions
or even the privacy, just the amount of data that everyone I think gives up and the openness.
I find it interesting back in middle school when I was growing up, they would teach us
never to put your real information online, never to meet in a stranger online. And then
now in this world, today we live in 2020, everyone is uploading everything they do online
to TikTok or to Instagram. And everyone is talking to everyone else online and meeting
strangers online. So it's crazy how far that message has changed to the majority in the
general public.
Talking about Bitcoin, you tweeted yesterday that Bitcoin is a financial escape pod, camouflage
as a bubble protecting its occupants from the relentless sucking vacuum of fiat. I agree
with you completely. But can you explain a little bit more about what you meant by that
statement and expound on it for our listeners?
So one of the problems with Bitcoin and trying to explain it to people is everybody comes
in with their own perspective. Bitcoin is a multifaceted system. So you may approach
it like I did originally from a technical perspective, you may approach it from a philosophical
political perspective, you may approach it from a financial or economic perspective.
This is what makes it difficult to talk to any one new person because you have to figure
out what their perspective is and how they're approaching it. And in terms of Bitcoin narratives,
I think it's really helpful to just come up with more simple metaphors like that, that
don't require a lot of complicated explanation, but rather just are trying at a very high
level to describe what the purpose of the system is. And there are certain narratives
and perspectives of Bitcoin that I'm not a fan of, but I can't stop people from perpetuating
them. In particular, I really don't like people coming in and just viewing it as like a short
term speculative asset. I've never considered it to be a sort of get rich quick scheme,
but rather to be a don't get poor slowly scheme, because what you're doing is you're getting
rid of the ability for your money, the value of your money to be inflated away over a long
period of time. That was the original reason that I bought some, it was more on a multi
decade investment timeframe, rather than a, oh, this thing is going to go 1000X in the
next few years type of idea. But speaking back to the metaphor though, is that a lot
of people, especially the financial and economist people will just look at it and all they're
looking at is the price charts. And so obviously what they see is a bubble. But bubble phenomenon
occur all over the place, especially when you're talking about the creation and adoption
of new networks. And a network doesn't necessarily even mean like a digital technical network.
It can be any kind of networks. Networks can be biological, for example. And the ebbs and
flows of this, the price and the adoption or whatever will turn some people off because
they don't understand what organic adoption and growth looks like. And they consider it
to be a failure because they, for whatever reason, believe that Bitcoin should have some
sort of predictable steady growth curve in order to be a widely adoptable thing. But
that is not one of the goals of Bitcoin. The goal of Bitcoin is to allow people to interact
with this system that is resilient against change and manipulation by small cabals or
third parties, powerful entities or whatever. Everything else that happens, there are side
effects that it would be nice if there wasn't crazy volatility up and down and people panicking
and losing their money. But those side effects, those are a result of having a truly free
market. And there are not many truly free markets out there. And so this confounds a
lot of economists and other financial types, which is fine. Either they'll eventually get
it or they won't. Sub tweeted a guy just the other day who apparently has been a Bitcoin
skeptic since 2013. And I don't think his skepticism has worked out for him as well
as it would have if he had opened his mind a bit more to it.
You mentioned that people are always looking for that 10%, 20%, 15% return per year and
they expect Bitcoin. We saw the price drop by $2,000 yesterday, last night, and everyone
freaked out. I'm like, no, but it's up. It's all the news media is like Bitcoin is down
$2,000, but it's up insane amounts. It went from 9K to this 19K just in the past 30 to
40 days. People have this assumption that they should be able to get, as you mentioned,
those 10% returns. So why do you think that? Is it because we're just comparing it to the
US dollar? Is it because that's the linear growth that stocks have? Why do you think
people expect this need for Bitcoin to grow at a determined growth rate or determined
value over the next five years or 10 years for it to be an actual currency or for it
to work in the day to day marketplace? Not understanding that what they're comparing
it to is the US dollar, which is being printed in the trillions and has been losing relative
value for the past 70, 80, 100 years. It's just a lack of sophistication and lack
of putting time and effort into actually analyzing the thing. If you want to, there are hundreds
of different metrics that you can track regarding Bitcoin. I think that a lot of people only
track the price because it's easy. It's on all the websites. It's theoretically, if you
believe in free markets, then the price is theoretically the aggregation of all of these
other hundreds of metrics. But because Bitcoin is still so tiny, there's a lot of noise.
I think the signal that we're given from the price is really only applicable at an order
of magnitude level. If you're looking at these changes of single digit percentage changes
per day, that's noise. It's froth. A single billionaire can step in there and move the
price by leaps and bounds if they want to, which is actually, if you've listened to Michael
Saylor talk about how they acquired the Bitcoin, it was actually quite sophisticated that they
were able to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin without even moving
the price. That takes some real dedication and hats off to him. Obviously, that's good
for him. If you're acquiring that much, you don't want to move the market because you're
essentially shooting yourself in the foot. But if someone wanted to, they certainly could
move the market with that level of money. While hundreds of millions of dollars sounds
like a lot of money, there are tons of entities out there that that's a drop in the bucket
for them to play around with.
I think that adoption trend is only going to continue as these entities grow and see
the real value of Bitcoin. I, myself, was, when I read about how they got the Bitcoins
through micro strategy, through their strategies, was amazed by just how liquid the market was
and able to absorb $500 million without really putting a dent in the price of Bitcoin. I
think that helps show me that the fact that this market is huge and will continue to grow.
So, James, I have a quick rapid, a few rapid fire questions. Let me start that again. James,
I have a few rapid fire questions for you. And then I think it's, okay, let me say it
one more time. James, I have a few rapid fire questions for you that I want to run through
and then we'll be done for the day. So real quick, what advice would you give your 18
year old self?
Oh my, I've had plenty of good and bad things happen over the past decade or so, but I don't
really regret them. Everything that happened was learning experiences and got me to where
I am today. I don't know, I think the only real advice would be to remain inquisitive
and keep learning new things. That's how I ended up where I am. I would say some things
happened to me over the years where I probably took a step back from that and was distracted
by other things. But the culmination of all human knowledge is at our fingertips now.
And it's a huge waste for people to be spending a significant portion of their time just dawdling
around and watching cat videos.
They should be learning about Bitcoin instead of doing watching cat videos. What is the
best tip for making the world a better place in your eyes and...
See your own business. I think it's the opposite of your question, but I think one of the things
that makes the world a worse place is when people start trying to meddle in other people's
affairs because they consider it to be the right thing to do. Whatever they decide is
going to be the best for everyone. But this sort of goes back to the free market principles.
I do generally believe that looking out for yourself and not trying to trample on other
people for what you consider to be their own good is just the clearest way to go forward.
And how long is your beard at the moment?
That's a good question. I don't really regularly measure it. It's definitely at least seven
or eight inches long. It's been growing pretty well during the pandemic, though I have not
been taking quite as good care of it because I haven't really had it to go out and be presentable.
Any beard products that you use when you want to be presentable with your 12 inch beard
that you would suggest our listeners check out?
I have to use the products on a regular basis. Otherwise, it'll get all tangled and whatever.
I'm a daily user of Beardsley conditioner. I'm like a weekly user of their shampoo. And
then I use the oil a couple times a week too, though I don't have really a preference for
either one. And then when you're really going out and need to keep everything manageable,
you got to have a nice firm hold wax to use as well. And I think I use, it's called like
Amish something beard balm for that. I think it's honest Amish beard balm.
I love it. So the last question I have for you today is what problem do you face every
day that nobody has solved yet and that you think is possible to solve?
I'm sure there's a multitude of them, but I'm all over the place these days. It's, I
would say one of the most fundamental problems comes down to simple communication issues.
And I think this really manifests itself well on social media. I get to see this because
I have this outsized following. And basically what I, the phenomenon that I get to observe
is that when you have enough followers, you start to realize that no matter what you say,
it's practically impossible. And I don't know if this is a limitation of our English language
or something more fundamental, but it seems to be practically impossible to say something,
even if it's just like a very simple, like one sentence opinion or statement or whatever
and not have that be misinterpreted. It seems like there's always a way that people manage
to misinterpret even like the simplest thing that you say. And that's a fascinating thing
is one of the things that keeps social media interesting because it results in conflict
and strife and then you trying to hone your craft and be more precise in what you're saying.
But I think that this is an interesting, this general phenomenon of communication that it's
still very challenging to say exactly what you mean and ensure that everyone interprets
it the way that you mean it.
I can't agree with you more. The social media train that we all live on and that we interact
with really breeds that confrontation or even a simple statement like 21 million bitcoins.
Jameson, I appreciate you coming on to the podcast. I appreciate everything you've done
for the Bitcoin community over the years, the work you've done on the clients, the work
you've done on multi-sig wallets with Casa. I appreciate really just being not an influencer,
but a someone I could look up to in this space and have looked up to over the past years
and knowing you growing up and meeting in person and talking through meetups. I really
relish those moments of building this community and building bitcoins. So I appreciate that
a lot. Where can our listeners connect with you online after the show?
Very easy to find me on Twitter. My handle is just lop and my website, lop.net has thousands
of different resources that will easily consume a year of your time if you want to dedicate
it to diving down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. The website for Casa is just keys.casa, K-E-Y-S.C-A-S-A,
and we've got a ton of educational resources on there as to why we believe that we've built
a superior security and usable self custody product.
Thanks again, Jameson for that. Appreciate it. And remember to mine on.
Full time as of early 2015, hobbyist for a few years before. Thanks for having me. Long
time no see. Goes back to the white paper. I was not familiar with the cypherpunk movement
or any of the decades of development leading up to Bitcoin. It wasn't until several years
after I'd been immersed in Bitcoin that I started looking into the history and realizing
this was not just something that appeared out of thin air, but rather was the culmination
of efforts of many people around the world for decades of trying and failing other attempts
at digital currency. As I was looking into that, reading the historical posts and getting
a better understanding of the mindset that those people were in, then I realized that
I generally agreed with it and I wanted to further the cause.
It's hard for me to even say how many attempts there were because most of them didn't even
really make it out of the gate. I think DigiCash with David Chom was probably the one that
made it the furthest and I don't know how many years they operated. I know they raised
some funds and they had a working network, but eventually it just didn't get enough adoption
and they shut down. There were other notable projects like Halfany had something called
reusable proofs of work, which had some similarities with Bitcoin, but basically each coin carried
its own proof of work along with it. It didn't have a blockchain though. There were still
some missing pieces. I think it hadn't really solved the double spending problem. Ultimately,
the reason all of these things failed was because they were still centralized. That
was the unique innovation that Satoshi figured out was how do you create a system like this
without a central authority? From that standpoint, Bitcoin is the first to be able to do it without
central authorities, but there's plenty of other reasons why you would believe that given
the level of adoption that Bitcoin has gotten, it's going to be very difficult to overcome
the network effect that it has gained so far. Because it is software, it can continue to
evolve though. It will, of course, not evolve at anywhere near the pace that, for example,
a web app or a single company software project might change because by design, it's very
difficult to gain consensus across all of the participants to make any non-backwards
compatible changes.
Yeah, so I am not a protocol developer. The first project that I actually started and
still maintain is a fork of the Bitcoin core client. It's not a network fork or a protocol
fork. It is still running the Bitcoin node. Basically, I just added in a bunch of metrics
and instrumentation and built some cool DevOps style dashboards that I put up on a website,
which you can find at Satoshi.info. It's like Satoshi.info, but with an extra T after the
first S. And as a result of that, I'm not a C++ developer. I really don't like C++,
but I do have some trivial commits in the Bitcoin core repository. Generally, just things that
I ran into when I was mucking around in my own fork. No notable functionality really,
usually just like improvements of documentation or RPC calls or things that only really the
developers would care about. So it's not challenging if you're familiar with open source development.
If you're familiar with GitHub, basically, if you find something that you think could
be improved, then you write the code and you submit a pull request and then people review
it and you respond to their feedback. And if you can make almost everybody happy, if
you can get an overwhelming agreement without any notable objections that other people find
reasonable objections, then your code is going to get merged in. For me, because the stuff
I have implemented, it was all really trivial. It would generally get merged in pretty quickly
within a matter of days or weeks. If you were doing some massive functionality change with
a ton of logic that could be potentially dangerous, if it was buggy, then you could very easily
be spending months, if not years, trying to get that code merged in.
Yeah. So we actually did get the Taproot logic has been merged into Bitcoin Core, the client.
However, that only really means that you're going to be able to use it on your own private
network. There's still outstanding issues around how it's actually going to get activated
on the main network. So fingers crossed that will happen next year. The main reason why
I'm following that is that it will be directly applicable for us at CASA. The ability to
do aggregated signatures off chain that look like a single signature on chain is going
to be a boon to anyone using multi-signature wallets, which is what CASA's primary focus
is. And the reason for that is it's going to improve the privacy because there's no
more fingerprints that you're using the special multi-sig setup. And then it's also going
to improve your fees that you have to pay. Your transaction sizes will be a lot smaller.
You'll have to pay lower fees. And I expect that we're going to see a number of improvements
and new applications come along that leverage both aggregated signature functionality, hopefully
making mixers more private, and then leveraging this tap script, Merkleized Abstract Syntax
Tree functionality, which is really hard to explain in simple terms, but basically it
will enable developers to create much more complex Bitcoin scripts without having to
put the entire script on the blockchain. Once again, improving the privacy and the scalability
of doing these more complex operations. Yeah. So the easiest way to think of, I guess, Bitcoin
security is it's like a lockbox. So when you send Bitcoin to a certain address, the address
is just a human readable format. Behind that address, it's actually a fingerprint for a
more complex redeem script, which this script describes the spending conditions for what
data you need to post to the network in order for the nodes to accept that you are the rightful
owner and should be able to spend that value. So the most common way to store your Bitcoin
is in a single signature address. And that basically means there's one private key. And
in order to spend that Bitcoin, you use that private key to create a cryptographic signature
that covers all the details of the transaction. And then you post it to the network and the
network validates it and it propagates around. And if you pay an appropriate mining fee,
then eventually it gets put into the blockchain in a block. Now, that's simple. It's straightforward.
But you have an obvious single point of failure. If you lose that key, if an adversary gets
that key, then it's game over. They take the Bitcoin or you can't access the Bitcoin and
there's nobody who can get that money back for you.
So what we are aiming to do with CASA is to create a self-custody storage setup that eliminates
single points of failure. And the way that we do that is both on the technical side and
on the sort of customer service, helping people make decisions about their setup side. On
the technical side, the way that we eliminate single points of failure is by using multiple
keys. So our sort of flagship product is a three out of five multi-sig setup, which means
there are five different devices with five different key sets on them. And these get
geographically distributed by you into different locations. And in order to spend from your
wallet, you have to add signatures from three different devices. So you have to physically
travel around and access these devices. And that makes it so that if any one device gets
lost or compromised, you're fine. There's no catastrophic loss. You can replace the
device and just keep moving on with your life.
If there is any sort of disaster, then once again, you don't have to worry about having
all kinds of crazy backup schemes or anything like the architecture of the wallet itself
is the backup scheme. It has robustness and resilience built into it. And if we're getting
attacked by someone, whether digitally or physically, it's going to be the bar gets
raised to such a level that the attacker would have to be extremely motivated and basically
be willing to take you hostage for a lengthy period of time and go through multiple different
physical locations, which of course is going to be very risky for them and increase the
chance that they get caught.
I could spend hours just talking about the security model and all the different threats
that we try to protect against, but we've got all of those on our website and people
can spend hours looking through them. But the whole idea is that being your own bank,
it comes with a lot of responsibility and few people are going to put in the time to
think through everything that could go wrong.
So what we want to do is leverage the five years of experience that I have, learning
a lot of hard lessons, seeing a lot of people lose their money in a lot of different ways
and build all of these best practices into a very simple piece of software so that people
just follow the directions in the app and they'll be in a very good position from a
security standpoint.
Exactly. And we believe that this is important for a variety of reasons. It's important for
the individual because if you're just giving all your keys to a third party, then you've
just thrown out one of the most important aspects of this system, which is getting rid
of centralized middlemen and trusted third parties. If you're leaving your money with
a custodian, then you may feel safer, but you have no way of actually knowing because
the security that is going on in that custodian is a complete black box to you. You have no
insight into what it is. You're just blindly trusting that they're following the best practices.
If you were following best practices yourself, then you don't have to trust anyone. You're
verifying that you're doing it the right way yourself. And also, there's this issue of
systemic risk. At a higher level, thinking outside of just the individual risks that
you expose yourself to if you're giving your money to a third party, they can exit scam,
they can be running a fractional reserve. There's just a million ways that they can
still lose the money. At a higher level, it is unhealthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem as
a whole if a huge amount of the value in the system is being held by a small number of
entities. And that's because you start to get into potential governance style attacks,
where the reason that this system is robust and resilient against even theoretical nation
state attacks is because there are so many doors that would have to be kicked down, so
to speak, in order to force people to change the rules of the system that they are enforcing
with their client software. So if you get to the point where there's only half a dozen
or a dozen or enough, a small enough number of entities that they can start to coordinate
with each other and collude with each other, then the system itself has become a lot more
fragile and prone to malicious changes being instituted by a small number of entities that
may benefit them and be to the detriment of everyone else in the system. You're essentially
just recreating a central banking cartel again. So we're trying to fight against this inevitable
onslaught of tantalizing convenience that people are falling into because they're willing
to trade their security for convenience. And this is a common theme in a number of different
aspects of people's lives. We trade a lot of things for convenience, unfortunately, because
our time is precious to us. There's still a lot of education that needs to be done.
Still can be very difficult to explain to someone that their Bitcoin don't exist on
any single device because this is simply a paradigm that has never existed before. Physical
things, really any other assets that you own, you can always point somewhere and say, yep,
this is where the asset actually exists or this is the custodian that is securing that
asset. But when you start to create these models where it's actually comprised of this
amorphous set of things, then it breaks a lot of people's minds. And it's difficult
to explain to them why this is a better security model because it's just a completely different
security model and people don't even think about security models when they're going about
their day to day lives. So I think that in the short to medium term, there's a lot of
education to be done. In the long term, to get to real mainstream acceptance, it'll become
like any other technology where people, once again, they won't know how it works, but it
will be the fact that so many other people use it that it just becomes a sort of de facto
thing that you don't even question.
Yeah, I mean, I was the crazy guy who would happily spend hours explaining the system
to people. And I don't know, you know, even if they got it from a technical standpoint,
I think there was generally just so much skepticism and a million reasons of why it might not
get significant adoption, why it could fail even from a non-technical standpoint that
most people just discounted it. I would say, you know, it could probably count on one hand
the number of people who actually ended up sharing my belief back then in the early days.
And then, over the course of several hype cycles, bubbles, booms, crashes, a few more
people have come along and realized that this is not a flash in the pan fad that's going
to be disappearing, but it's actually here to stay. And I think that that is going to
be how it continues to grow. It'll be a little bit at a time, though, of course, the growth
will happen in spurts. And it'll be like any other technology that once it becomes readily
adopted and essentially ubiquitous, then people will just take it for granted. And I think
we've got a long way to go until we get to that point. There's still a ton of things
to be done on the usability side, the security side, the privacy side. I believe that Bitcoin
is a project that is aiming to be the fairest and optimal form of money. And we certainly
have a number of weaknesses, things that could be improved from a technical standpoint, that
I believe that I'm going to be continuing to focus my time for the foreseeable future
on improving this system. If we ever get to the point where I feel like Bitcoin is done,
has met all of its goals, then hopefully I will be able to pivot and work on other technologies
that will also empower individuals in different ways. I guess the downside to being open to
everyone is that it also means, of course, that it's open to institutions and larger
players who may not care about the ideology and may only really care about using it for
financial hedging and speculation purchases. But that is part of what you have to deal
with. Any tool can be used in a variety of different ways, and you may not agree with
all of the ways that they're being used for, but that's fine. I think one of the things
that we have fallen short on is we're a long ways away from being able to be a ubiquitous
form of money that can be used by anyone, including people in third world countries
that don't have access to great financial infrastructure. There have been some small
good adoption cases, but for a variety of reasons, usability and scalability being the
primary ones, we're still a long way, I think, from having less well-off people be able to
adopt and benefit from this technology. We're still at the point where the people who are
going to be benefiting from it the most are the ones who have the resources and the time
to invest into scaling the learning curve required to get into it.
Cryptography in general is a double-edged sword. It can be used for two primary purposes.
One is to obfuscate or to encrypt things to keep them private so that only the intended
recipients can see the data. The other is almost the exact opposite, which is identification
and authentication, basically using cryptography to publicly sign messages to essentially attest
that information has been created or authenticated by no one other than you. I would expect that
institutions, nations, states, whatever, are going to be using these distributed ledgers
for the latter. They certainly could build some privacy functionality into it, but I
don't think that it really is going to be of much benefit for them to do. Rather, I
expect that this type of blockchain or distributed ledger like central bank technology is going
to be used as a tool of control and surveillance. Now, there certainly are some potential good
use cases for it where it would, for example, be really easy for, I think, entities to kind
of airdrop money on people, for example, but it's also going to become a lot easier for
them to track people's money and I would expect to censor their money as well. We'll generally
expect that cons will probably outweigh the pros, at least from my perspective, but that's
not to say that they'll be 100% complete bad. I'm sure that they will be able to help some
people. I think that in general, the media is just going to echo back to people what
they think they want to hear and that a lot of that is influenced by powerful or reputable
people and what we've seen happen and what I expect happens with a lot of technologies
is that early on, pretty much everyone is skeptical and believes that the new technology
is never going to take off and as these new waves of adopters come in, the people who
adopt it as the sort of total size of the adopter pool grows, then there will be more
and more people who are reputable for other things outside of that technology that will
come in and they will start to essentially lend their own credibility to the credibility
of the new technology and that's what we've really been seeing happen this past year.
We've seen some big heavyweights from software and then finance and other spheres publicly
come out and say Bitcoin is an amazing technology and these are the reasons why you should care
about it and why it's important and why we're investing in it and so on and so forth. So
I expect that's going to continue to play out both with Bitcoin and any of these other
technologies is it'll just come down to who are the most powerful and reputable people
behind them and how are they able to influence the media and other narratives.
I believe that the vast majority of people you'll talk to will say that they discounted
Bitcoin the first time, perhaps the first several times they heard about it. I know
that I did and that's why I'll never remember the exact first time that I heard about it
because I know I heard about it two or three times at least on various nerd news websites
and I basically laughed and said oh this nerd money is going to get hacked and everybody
is going to go broke and it'll all end in tears. It was probably at least six months
if not longer until some slash dot article I believe came along with some development
in the space and I was like oh this thing is still around and so that's when I actually
read the white paper and my computer science background kicked in I was like oh wow this
is actually really an interesting elegant solution to a problem that I never even thought
about and that's really when it was off to the races I started going down the rabbit
hole and learning about money in general which very few people ever bothered to do. I think
there's very few people who just hear a crazy idea and immediately latch on to it and dive
head first. That's why the staying power of this system is something that will continue
to change people's minds as they eventually realize it may take them six months like me,
it may take them years, it may take them decades but eventually they'll realize that this thing
is not going away and there's probably some good reasons why it hasn't gone away. I'm
not a good poster child for the like dollar cost averaging because that wasn't even really
a thing back when I got in like there were no tools to do that so I actually bought most
of my Bitcoin in three different major events. There was like my initial oh I got to get
some of this to play around with it and then there was a few years later when I was like
oh it sounds like there's going to be ETFs and all these other things so maybe I can
front run it and I went through this whole process to convert my IRA into a self-directed
IRA and then turn that all into Bitcoin in a matter of a few months. I was dollar cost
averaging at that point because that was after the Mt. Gox crash and the price kept going
down and down and at one point I had actually lost half of my retirement because it had
gone down so much. Eventually the long-term play worked out there and it's just really
hard to give general financial advice and it's because everybody's situation is different.
The reason why I was able to put a decent amount of money into Bitcoin is because I
had been diligently following personal finance forums and the like fire style financial investment
and budgeting and living advice for a number of years and had been able to build up a nice
savings and so I had multi-month cash savings emergency supply and I was maxing out my 401k
savings. I was able to allocate money and beyond that was just discretionary budget
and I was like I might as well put it into this Bitcoin thing because I feel like it's
going to be a good savings vehicle and an asset that's not like anything else. For the
average person I think it comes down to how well off you are. You shouldn't be like going
into debt to buy this speculative asset. You should treat it like a different type of savings
account really and you don't want to put yourself into a position where you're harming your
normal financial budget. Other than that it's really just going to come down to conviction
and what things you may be willing to sacrifice because you've lowered your time preference.
There's plenty of things that I could have bought or there are plenty of times when I
could have sold Bitcoin and bought something else and I just never did because I don't
know. Most physical things like Lambos and stuff are not worth it to me. Maybe they will
be someday but I drove. I don't know if you know this detail but obviously I drove the
Lotus Elise for a few years and I had the Bitcoin license plate on it and I considered
that kind of an investment in advertising for Bitcoin but the Lotus that I bought was
actually a salvage title vehicle that I bought on eBay for really cheap. So it looked really
expensive but it was actually far more affordable than people would have imagined. Even then
I was trying to keep a low time preference and not spend a lot of money on a flashy car.
And I guess to back up a little bit to one of your earlier questions, it helps to put
your Bitcoin into a high security setup that is difficult to access. Now it helps you protect
against loss and theft but it also helps protect you against yourself because if it takes a
lot of effort for you to send your Bitcoin out of your self custody to an exchange to
sell it then, and we've heard this from a number of Cossack clients as well, it's just
less likely that you're going to panic sell. So that can be a good thing as well over the
long run. Now remind me what the point we were getting towards was. Yeah, it's a very
long story but even have several articles and full length presentations about privacy
and all the things that I've learned. But the short version is that the internet and
the communication age, of course, is a double edged sword in the sense that while it helps
us be able to communicate with all types of people now, you reaching out and making new
connections and engaging in all types of interactions, which can be very productive. The inverse
is also true. You can engage in unproductive harmful interactions and it's also not just
you being able to reach out to the world but now the world can reach back at you. And especially
what happens here with social media phenomenon is that you can go from being a nobody to
having 100,000 if not millions of people all of a sudden in the blink of an eye looking
at you. And that can be due to anything like just a single viral post, for example, that
you might make or somebody might make about you. And when that much attention gets cast
upon you, your threat level goes through the roof because it's just a matter of numbers
that some small fraction of a percent of people are downright malicious and will seek to do
you harm in order to help themselves. That's really what happened to me is I went from
being a nobody to having hundreds of thousands of people paying attention to me on Twitter
and then eventually some random guy comes along and decides he wants to try to extort
me. And so that's how I ended up with my whole neighborhood being shut down by a SWAT team
getting called out to a false bomb and hostage situation at my residence. And that exposed
me to this, what I consider to be a sort of asymmetric attack that is a flaw in our law
enforcement system that can be exploited by anyone who's technically sophisticated enough.
The only defense against that, there are two defenses against that. One is you continue
living your life normally and you just tell, you go to all of your local law enforcement
people and get yourself put on a special watch list so that if any calls come in, they get
flagged as being potential false type of call. Or since I didn't want to do that, the only
other way around it is to essentially change your whole life so that it's not possible
for someone to find your physical address. It's not possible for someone to then attack
you either on their own or by sending other people to your address that they may even
be good intention people like the police, but essentially misusing those resources.
That was a very long journey. It also costs a lot of time and money. And in the couple
years since I did that, some very good resources have come out so that I feel like now I can
just send people to buy a book that actually has everything that I wish I had known when
I set out on that journey.
The lowest bar that almost anyone can do is to just use software on your computer to hide
what you're doing, whether it's ad blockers, VPN, Tor, et cetera. Because whenever your
computer talks to another computer, it exchanges your IP address and IP address can be used
to geolocate you. And there's also a ton of other data that gets sent by your browser
that it's preferable to block and things that can be used to track your activity all over.
Going more extreme though, and the thing where few people are going to do this is that if
you want to own any property, you need for that property not to be in your name. So that
means creating some sort of other legal entity like a trust or a corporation that essentially
owns the various property and then you are privately listed as a member of that corporation
and not publicly listed anywhere.
Because basically any property that you pay property taxes on is going into some public
database that can be queried by really anybody. Going a step beyond that is making sure that
your name and other personal information goes into as few private databases as possible.
And this is where a lot of overhead comes in of using pseudonyms, using physical remailer
boxes, not getting mail sent in your name to your home address, but rather to other
places. It can become complicated. It can become as complicated as you want because
the more layers of obscurity that you use, the more privacy you theoretically have.
And so the short version of all these different techniques is essentially what you're doing
is you're creating proxies. You are shielding yourself from directly interacting with other
things and other people and other legal entities and other organizations. And every type of
interaction that you have, whether it's digital or physical or legal or financial, there is
going to be a way to put a proxy in between you and whatever you're interacting with.
But some cases it's easy and cheap. Other cases it's really complicated and expensive.
So it requires a very different perspective on your life and the willingness to put in
a decent amount of effort and think about these things.
So one of the problems with Bitcoin and trying to explain it to people is everybody comes
in with their own perspective. Bitcoin is a multifaceted system. So you may approach
it like I did originally from a technical perspective. You may approach it from a philosophical,
political perspective. You may approach it from a financial or economic perspective.
This is what makes it difficult to talk to any one new person because you have to figure
out what their perspective is and how they're approaching it. And in terms of Bitcoin narratives,
I think it's really helpful to just come up with more simple metaphors like that that
don't require a lot of complicated explanation, but rather just are trying at a very high
level to describe what the purpose of the system is. And there are certain narratives
and perspectives of Bitcoin that I'm not a fan of, but I can't stop people from perpetuating
them. In particular, I really don't like people coming in and just viewing it as like a short
term speculative asset. I've never considered it to be a sort of get rich quick scheme,
but rather to be a don't get poor slowly scheme because what you're doing is you're getting
rid of the ability for your money, the value of your money to be inflated away over a long
period of time. That was the original reason that I bought some. It was more on a multi-decade
investment timeframe rather than a, oh, this thing is going to go 1000X in the next few
years type of idea. But speaking back to the metaphor though, is that a lot of people,
especially the financial and economist people will just look at it and all they're looking
at is the price charts. And so obviously what they see is a bubble. But bubble phenomenon
occur all over the place, especially when you're talking about the creation and adoption
of new networks. And a network doesn't necessarily even mean like a digital technical network.
It can be any kind of networks. Networks can be biological, for example. And the ebbs and
flows of this, the price and the adoption or whatever will turn some people off because
they don't understand what organic adoption and growth looks like. And they consider it
to be a failure because they, for whatever reason, believe that Bitcoin should have some
sort of predictable steady growth curve in order to be a widely adoptable thing. But
that is not one of the goals of Bitcoin. The goal of Bitcoin is to allow people to interact
with this system that is resilient against change and manipulation by small cabals or
third parties, powerful entities or whatever. Everything else that happens, there are side
effects that it would be nice if there wasn't crazy volatility up and down and people panicking
and losing their money. But those side effects, those are a result of having a truly free
market. And there are not many truly free markets out there. And so this confounds a
lot of economists and other financial types, which is fine. Either they'll eventually get
it or they won't. Sub tweeted a guy just the other day who apparently has been a Bitcoin
skeptic since 2013. And I don't think his skepticism has worked out for him as well
as it would have if he had opened his mind a bit more to it. It's just a lack of sophistication
and lack of putting time and effort into actually analyzing the thing. If you want to. There
are hundreds of different metrics that you can track regarding Bitcoin. I think that
a lot of people only track the price because it's easy. It's like it's on all the websites.
It's theoretically, if you believe in free markets, then the price is theoretically the
sort of aggregation of all of these other hundreds of metrics. But because Bitcoin is
still so tiny, there's a lot of noise. I think the signal that we're given from the price
is really only applicable at an order of magnitude level. If you're looking at these changes
of single digit percentage changes per day, that's noise. It's froth. A single billionaire
can step in there and move the price by leaps and bounds if they want to. Which is actually,
if you've listened to Michael Saylor talk about how they acquired the Bitcoin, it was
actually quite sophisticated that they were able to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars
with the Bitcoin without even moving the price. That takes some real dedication. Hats off
to him. Obviously, that's good for him. If you're acquiring that much, you don't want
to move the market because you're essentially shooting yourself in the foot. But if someone
wanted to, they certainly could move the market with that level of money.
While hundreds of millions of dollars sounds like a lot of money, there are tons of entities
out there that that's a drop in the bucket for them to play around with. Oh my. I've
had plenty of good and bad things happen over the past decade or so, but I don't really
regret them. Everything that happened was learning experiences and got me to where I
am today. I don't know. I think the only real advice would be to remain inquisitive and
keep learning new things. That's how I ended up where I am. I would say some things happened
to me over the years where I probably took a step back from that and was distracted by
other things. But the culmination of all human knowledge is at our fingertips now, and it's
a huge waste for people to be spending a significant portion of their time just dawdling around
and watching cat videos.
Minding your own business. I think it's the opposite of your question, but I think one
of the things that makes the world a worse place is when people start trying to meddle
in other people's affairs because they consider it to be the right thing to do. Whatever they
decide is going to be the best for everyone. But this goes back to the free market principles.
I do generally believe that looking out for yourself and not trying to trample on other
people for what you consider to be their own good is just the clearest way to go forward.
That's a good question. I don't really regularly measure it. It's definitely at least seven
or eight inches long. It's been growing pretty well during the pandemic, though I have not
been taking quite as good care of it because I haven't really had to go out and be that
presentable.
I have to use the products on a regular basis. Otherwise, it'll get all tangled and whatever.
I'm a daily user of Beardsley conditioner. I'm like a weekly user of their shampoo and
then I use the oil a couple times a week, too, though I don't have really a preference
for either one. And then when you're really going out and need to keep everything manageable,
you got to have a nice firm hold wax to use as well. And I think I use, it's called like
Amish something beard balm for that. I think it's honest Amish beard balm.
I'm sure there's a multitude of them, but I'm all over the place these days. I would
say one of the most fundamental problems comes down to simple communication issues. And I
think this really manifests itself well on social media. I get to see this because I
have this outsized following. And basically, the phenomenon that I get to observe is that
when you have enough followers, you start to realize that no matter what you say, it's
practically impossible. And I don't know if this is a limitation of our English language
or something more fundamental, but it seems to be practically impossible to say something,
even if it's just like a very simple like one sentence opinion or statement or whatever
and not have that be misinterpreted. It seems like there's always a way that people manage
to misinterpret even like the simplest thing that you say. And that's a fascinating thing.
It's one of the things that keeps social media interesting because it results in conflict
and strife and then you trying to hone your craft and be more precise in what you're saying.
But I think that this is an interesting general phenomenon of communication, that it is still
very challenging to say exactly what you mean and ensure that everyone interprets it the
way that you mean it. Very easy to find me on Twitter. My handle is just lop and my website
lop.net has thousands of different resources that will easily consume a year of your time
if you want to dedicate it to diving down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. The website for CASA
is just keys.casa. And we've got a ton of educational resources on there as to why we
believe that we've built a superior security and usable self custody product.
Today I'm joined by Jameson Lopp, who is the co founder and CTO of CASA, a Bitcoin
philosopher and professional cypherpunk. He's been actively building in the Bitcoin space
since 2015. Is that earlier than 2015? You've been building the Bitcoin space? I feel like
it has been. Okay, I'll start that again. Today I'm joined by Jameson Lopp, who is the
co founder and CTO of CASA, a Bitcoin philosopher and a professional cyberpunk. He has been
actively building the Bitcoin space since 2015 and has become one of the most respected
voices in the Bitcoin developer community. He was previously an engineer at BitGo developing
its high grade multi-sig custody service before co founding CASA, a company providing secure
wallets and plug and play infrastructure solutions for Bitcoin. His mission is to use his skills
as a technologist to build tools that empower individuals. And he works to achieve this
by making it easier for people to take custody of their Bitcoin and manage their private
keys. Jameson, welcome to the show. Long time no see. So can you explain to me how I guess
you started, how you became a cyberpunk, Jameson? What does that even look like? How do you
become a professional cyberpunk? So you mentioned before Bitcoin, I think that's one of the
potential flaws people have with Bitcoin. Like it's like the first one. How do we know
what's going to be the one that everyone uses? It's slow, the 10 minute blog time. Those
are the normal, I think, excuses we get from people why they don't want to adopt or learn
more about Bitcoin. Because like you mentioned, previously, there was some other coins or
other tries at Bitcoin. Are you able to talk further on how that research went? And maybe
what other projects might have failed? And for what reasons? So when you're referring
to these non backwards compatible changes, and Bitcoin doesn't have essential authority
and you are working on and you develop, or I believe you have pushed code to Bitcoin
core. Have you ever committed to the normal, I guess not the normal, but the main Bitcoin
client? Or how does that work from a developer standpoint? Because I myself have been focused
on the mining, but I've never actually written code for really any Bitcoin clients like you
have. Wow. And I think that was one of the things I want to talk farther on, which is,
so you mentioned there's a client code base, which is something that you forked over and
you're working on. Then you have the protocol code, which is the main Bitcoin protocol,
which is decentralized. And you just went through the process of really committing code
to that, depending on the complexity of it. Are there any upcoming protocol changes or
even merge requests that you're interested in or you're following at the protocol level?
Because I think that's something that no one really talks about. That is, as I appreciate
you walking me through that, because Taproot, I was like, okay, what is this thing he's
talking about? So you mentioned multi-sig wallets and I would say normal wallets. On
a high level for the viewers who don't know, can you explain the difference and why you
see this evolution of multi-sig wallets and why they're just inherently better? And as
people are following the directions in the app, as you mentioned, there's trade-offs,
I think, with expanding the crypto ecosystem and regarding custody more specifically. Because
with these apps like Robinhood and Cash App, you don't actually own the coins. But with
Kasa, you are costing them yourself, correct? We do trade a lot of things for convenience.
I feel like that's one of the number one, not problems, but one of the reasons why people
use these central authorities or central wallets like Robinhood, Cash App, Coinbase. So is
there anything that's going to make people feel like they have the same security as a
bank using a self-custody multi-sig product? Do you think we're already there? Or do you
think that there are more things that need to be done to get people comfortable enough
using products like Kasa and have the same comfortability of storing that money in a
bank or that asset in the bank where they know it's not going to get stolen and at least
they believe it's not going to get stolen? It's a trade-off of convenience over self-custody
throughout the space, as I mentioned, on Robinhood, on Coinbase. And I hope that people are moving
to a solution where they are in control of their own bitcoins. I found it very interesting,
James, in how you explain the fact that bitcoin's not necessarily on one device. It's on this
ledger that we all believe to be true. And I think that was one of the things that I
realized back in 2013 when I was coming into blockchain and bitcoin space was that there
was this one truth, and you could believe it, and it was backed by these computers which
were using energy to mine bitcoins. So now, James, we met back in maybe 2013, 2015, I
think probably 2015, because we were both local components of the bitcoin industry here
in the Southeast and just decided that this was the future. When you got into bitcoin
in the beginning, how did people react to that? And did it affect your perception of
bitcoin? How has that conversation with some of those people that are closer to you changed
over the years about maybe their perception of bitcoin and what you're doing in this space
and all the work you're putting into? Can you talk a little bit farther on how that
attitude has changed, mainly maybe because the price has risen or just because the technology
has gotten more awareness?
So you talk about this empowerment. I think that's one of the things that a lot of the
early bitcoiners like myself and you really had in their DNA. It was this currency, this
money that was just true and fair and backed by math and really, in my opinion, for the
people. Obviously, with getting bitcoin growth, we've seen a lot of institutions coming in
just because of the nature of the industry and the nature of the asset class. But over
the past five years of being in this space, this idea that bitcoin is the people's money,
do you still think it resonates with you today and with the community today or do you think
it's become more commercialized?
Bitcoin as a tool and I think for me, I look at bitcoin as one of the best tools for society
for scaling trust across a decentralized network. But one of the things I wanted to touch on,
which came out, I believe two days ago, was that USDC, which is Coinbase's stablecoin,
with the US government permission, they partnered with the exiled government of Venezuela and
distributed aid to people and healthcare workers in Venezuela. What I saw with that is now
stablecoins are being used as a tool of US foreign policy. This is, I think, one of the
first real public use cases of a nation state intervening with another nation state's citizens
giving direct aid to the people through a stablecoin or through a blockchain network.
How do you see nation states and central banks using blockchains as a tool in either a good
or a bad way?
As we see, I guess, these competing currencies or competing networks show up and really come
to scale over the next 10 years, how do you see the media changing their perspective on
Bitcoin or just the narrative in general to the public, either in the United States or
across the globe? Because I feel like the media now has almost looked at Bitcoin, oh,
it's too small, it's still functioning very slowly, it doesn't really work, it's volatile.
Do you think that media story is going to change to where it's more of trying to get
consumers to use these stable-backed or the central-backed currencies or blockchain networks
over Bitcoin, almost shunning it? Or how do you see that narrative potentially playing
out with these two, two or three or four or five different competing blockchain interests?
I think that narrative message has been changing just with, I would say, Michael Saylor coming
on and doing the micro strategy, purchasing $500 million worth of Bitcoin on the balance
sheet. It was the first public company to do that publicly and go out and I think that's
created a ton of news. And we've seen that cycle of people like Paul Tudor Jones attaching
their name to Bitcoin. So I definitely agree with you there, James, and I see that continuing
and I think that'll help build the legitimacy in the eyes of, I would say, that 40 to maybe
30 to 50 year old kind of crowd. And hopefully that pushes them to continue to learn and
be educated about the technology. Do you remember the first time you heard about Bitcoin, James?
Was your initial thought, this is something I'm going to look into and potentially work
on for years? Or did you initially disregard it or think it was too complicated to buy
and use? Why it has not fallen away. I think that's one of the biggest things in my life
and over the years, because when I got into crypto, I was only like 15 years old and just
kept preaching and preaching. This Bitcoin thing, it's $70, it's $60, it's $50. It's
not going away, guys. It's going to change the world. And as a young, naive kid, I was
just running around preaching this new internet money that people were like, oh, okay, yeah,
sure. This digital currency is going to lose all of its value. It's too volatile. And I
think that's one of the things I want to talk about, which is how do you build a good position
in Bitcoin as a safe haven asset or as an investment? And what I mean by that is what
I've been telling people now is you want to be buying Bitcoin consistently on a weekly
or monthly basis.
You mentioned on another podcast about how you maintain your lower overhead. But really,
how do you know when to hold Bitcoin? Maybe when to sell some for profits, when to secure
more Bitcoins. Obviously, you have to be detailed in the market and being paying attention.
But how do you hold or even tell people or advise people on managing their Bitcoin position
or really growing it and not FOMO-ing or not selling it when it goes up by 100% and leaving
a huge upside on the table because of just the logarithmic nature of how Bitcoin grows
and how it doesn't scale linearly, like normal stocks and bonds and other things like that.
This is R though. I remember that car. It was always something where I was like, oh,
that's such a cool car, Jameson. And it definitely did work. I think people thought it was more
expensive than it actually was. And the Bitcoin license plate just had that final touch on
it, which really nailed it in the coffin, especially if Bitcoin was rising at that time.
So I felt like I was like, oh, look, an expensive Lotus. But really, you mentioned a great point,
which is lowering your time preference. And I feel like that's one of the biggest things
about Bitcoin is you have to have that longer time preference and view this as almost an
investment in your future self.
And one of the things you also mentioned is how you seem like you prepare for the edge
case really well, not only with Casa, but also in your personal life. Are you able to
talk a little bit more about how you maybe have prepared for this edge case after you
sold the Lotus and you moved off the grid and why you maybe went that route and made
those decisions?
No worries. That was a great answer on the time preference. Really how you've transitioned
from going to going off the grid and maybe why you decided to make that move in the first
place. And yeah.
And talking about that journey that you went on, I read your New York Times article. You
talked about how to vanish in 15 steps. Can you share a brief summary of maybe some of
those steps or the most important steps for our listeners?
And as we know how hard that is, people aren't really thinking about the custody solutions
or even the privacy, just the amount of data that everyone I think gives up and the openness.
I find it interesting back in middle school when I was growing up, they would teach us
never to put your real information online, never to meet in a stranger online. And then
now in this world, today we live in 2020, everyone is uploading everything they do online
to TikTok or to Instagram and everyone is talking to everyone else online and meeting
strangers online. So it's crazy how far that message has changed to the majority in the
general public.
Talking about Bitcoin, you tweeted yesterday that Bitcoin is a financial escape pod, camouflage
as a bubble, protecting its occupants from the relentless sucking vacuum of fiat. I agree
with you completely, but can you explain a little bit more about what you meant by that
statement and expound on it for our listeners?
You mentioned that people are always looking for that 10%, 20%, 15% return per year and
they expect Bitcoin. We saw the price drop by $2,000 yesterday last night and everyone
freaked out. I'm like, no, but it's up. It's all the news media is like Bitcoin is down
to $2,000, but it's up insane amounts. It went from 9K to this 19K just in the past
30 to 40 days. People have this assumption that they should be able to get, as you mentioned,
those 10% returns. So why do you think that? Is it because we're just comparing it to the
US dollar? Is it because that's the linear growth that stocks have? Why do you think
people expect this need for Bitcoin to grow at a determined growth rate or determined
value over the next five years or 10 years for it to be an actual currency or for it
to work in the day-to-day marketplace, not understanding that what they're comparing
it to is the US dollar, which is being printed in the trillions and is losing relative value
over, has been losing relative value for the past 70, 80, 100 years.
I think that adoption trend is only going to continue as these entities grow and see
the real value of Bitcoin. I, myself, was when I read about how they got the Bitcoins
through the strategies, was amazed by just how liquid the market was and able to absorb
$500 million without really putting a dent in the price of Bitcoin. I think that helps
show me that the fact that this market is huge and will continue to grow.
So, James, I have a quick rapid, a few rapid-fire questions. Let me start again. James, I have
a few rapid-fire questions for you. And then I think it's one more time. James, I have
a few rapid-fire questions for you that I want to run through and then we'll be done
for the day.
So, real quick, what advice would you give your 18-year-old self? They should be learning
about Bitcoin instead of doing watching cat videos. What is the best tip for making the
world a better place in your eyes? And how long is your beard at the moment? Any beard
products that you use when you want to be presentable with your 12-inch beard that you
would suggest our listeners check out? I love it. So, the last question I have for you today
is what problem do you face every day that nobody has solved yet and that you think is
possible to solve?
I can't agree with you more. The social media train that we all live on and that we interact
with really breeds that confrontation or even a simple statement like 21 million Bitcoins.
Jameson, I appreciate you coming on to the podcast. I appreciate everything you've done
for the Bitcoin community over the years, the work you've done on the clients, the work
you've done on multi-sig wallets with CASA. I appreciate really just being not an influencer,
but someone I could look up to in this space and have looked up to over the past years
and knowing you growing up and meeting in person and talking through meetups. I really
relish those moments of building this community and building Bitcoin. So, I appreciate that
a lot. Where can our listeners connect with you online after the show? Thanks again, Jameson,
for that. I appreciate it. And remember to mine on.
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