Welcome to the Guns and Bitcoin Podcast, arming you with the tools and stories to thrive and
survive the cyberpunk dystopia.
What do Bitcoin and guns have in common that makes them a tool for asymmetric defense?
Some men take it as the mantra of free men, but is it just an idea?
How do we make it real?
Today we speak with Jameson Lopp, a self-described professional cypherpunk, and the co-founder
and CTO of Bitcoin protection company, CASA.
Using real-world examples, we discuss how cryptography and firearms can fail or succeed
to protect our digital and physical property.
For digital property, we delve into the story of Larry Harmon, the CEO of Coin Ninja who
was arrested for allegedly laundering $300 million with a bitcoin mixer and subsequently
had all of his bitcoin hardware wallets seized by the Department of Justice.
For physical property, we analyze the 2014 Bundy standoff, an armed confrontation between
federal law enforcement and militia member supporters of cattle rancher Cliven Bundy.
We close the episode discussing how 3D printed guns meld cryptography with firearms, the
apotheosis of come and take it.
Join us at our first annual Bear Arms and Bitcoin conference, taking place Saturday
June 13th and Sunday June 14th in Portland, Oregon.
Register today to enjoy two days of freedom tech in the beautiful Northwest.
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Join a small community free from interference with friendships and freedom tech.
Learn how to protect your personal and business sovereignty against mobs and censors.
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To top off the weekend, enjoy a Sunday morning of target shooting at an outdoor range in
the woods.
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Go to gunsandbitcoin.com forward slash bear dash arms dash 2020.
Jameson, welcome to the Guns and Bitcoin podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Glad you're here.
I've been wanting to do this episode with you for a while.
You have a lot of experience both with Bitcoin and with guns and specifically about what
we're going to talk about today, which is come and take it and applying the ethos of
come and take it in the real world with real world examples and talk about how come and
take it actually can work and not work when it works and when it doesn't work and strategies
for actually being able to challenge different adversaries in doing that.
So let me just start off with the very first question.
So for you, what do Bitcoin and guns have in common that makes them a tool for asymmetric
defense against adversaries?
Well, what we're really talking about here is self-empowerment.
And of course, with Bitcoin, we're talking about taking control of your own money, taking
it out of the hands of third parties where it can be used against you or potentially
abused by other people who have control over those third parties.
And with firearms, this is a very longstanding history, at least in America, of being able
to stand up and defend what you consider to be your rights, your property, your freedoms.
And it helps make the, I guess, trade-offs between the physical power and resources that
you're putting into something so that you can defend yourself against someone with relatively
little resources, relatively little physical strength.
In many ways, it equalizes the playing field, at least against the other average person,
of course.
So we'll probably dig into the fact that there are many different types of attackers out
there and you have to have a plethora of different strategies to deal with different types of
attacks.
What specifically about Bitcoin allows it to be asymmetric against adversaries?
Because we understand guns a little bit better, I think, in this regard.
We understand if you have a rifle and you're up in elevation versus other adversaries,
but Bitcoin can get a little technical.
So could you explain what specifically is it about Bitcoin that gives that protection?
I would say that fundamentally it's about data.
It's about cryptography and how cryptography makes it extremely expensive for someone to
break past your digital defenses and access your private data.
In the context of Bitcoin, of course, we're really talking about private keys, but more
broadly this can be applied to really anything that is digitized.
And so if you are using strong cryptography to encrypt your data, and then once you bring
that into the real world and making many multiple redundant backup copies of that data to make
it more robust against any type of loss or natural disaster, you end up with a system
that is arguably more robust and more difficult to penetrate the defenses than even something
like Fort Knox, for example, which is defended essentially by military-grade personnel and
hardware.
So it's a combination of cryptography.
That's the foundation for all of this.
You can't break math.
And then the distributed nature of things and the other elements of Bitcoin that make
it difficult to actually take your Bitcoin.
So I think the software math part is very strong, but what type of adversaries or attacks
can Bitcoin not defend you against?
Well, ultimately, we are unfortunately still human.
We are still limited in meat space.
And so while you can, with enough dedication and time and effort, create a digital fortress,
so to speak, that is essentially impenetrable, what you really end up with is the fact that
the weak points, aka the humans who are involved in that, are going to become the main targets
by an adversary who has the resources to do so.
And so even when we're talking about extremely high-grade security for high-net-worth individuals
in the Bitcoin space, we still don't have a perfect solution.
I don't think we ever will have a great technical solution to the fact that you could still
get physically attacked and tortured or have a loved one you care about kidnapped and ransom.
There are still a completely separate class of problems that are rooted in the physical
realm that Bitcoin cannot fully solve.
You can protect against some things, but it's unfortunately not at the level yet where we
can digitize ourselves and use the same types of defenses that we can for Bitcoin.
And you've done a lot of work in terms of protecting people, yourself, from physical
attacks.
I know you've been a victim of swatting and you wrote this really great piece about different
strategies you can use to protect your identity and kind of prevent that because that is the
big hole in our defense, and especially when it comes to Bitcoin, it's the meat space.
Like you said, if someone can get at you, get at a loved one, then the cryptography
doesn't help you as much.
So I guess a perfect contrast would be if you're someone that is overseas and you are
pseudonymous and you've been very good with your digital trails and everything else, yeah,
Bitcoin is going to be a very powerful asymmetric defense.
It's going to be hard to break that, but let's say you're a public person in the U.S.
They know where you are.
That's a completely different story.
So I want to go through a real world example of this.
And this just came out in the news a few days ago and it's about the arrest of Larry Harmon.
And I'm just going to read through this so the audience can just bear with me as I read
it because I don't want to miss the details.
So this is from CoinDesk and the title is U.S. Department of Justice Calls Bitcoin Mixing
a Crime in Arrest of Software Developer.
Larry Harmon was arrested this week for allegedly participating in a money laundering conspiracy
worth more than 300 million in cryptocurrency involving darknet marketplace Alphabay.
However, the family of the Coin Ninja CEO claims he was never involved with Alphabay.
Harmon's case raises pressing questions about developer liability in the crypto industry.
In addition to the crypto media site Coin Ninja, Harmon created the Bitcoin mixer Helix, which
sends transactions out in mixed batches so individual payments are harder to trace.
In its indictment, Department of Justice prosecutors refer to Helix as a money transmitting and
money laundering business.
Helix enabled customers for a fee to send bitcoins to designated recipients in a manner
which was designed to conceal and obfuscate the power or owner of the bitcoins, the indictment
continues.
This type of service is commonly referred to as a Bitcoin mixer or Tumblr.
In a statement Thursday, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Brian Benkowoski
made the department's views on Bitcoin mixers clear.
This indictment underscores that seeking to obscure virtual currency transaction in this
way is a crime.
So I'll stop there and then we'll talk about this and then go to the second half.
So we think of Bitcoin's fungibility and anonymity as a strength and I think it is.
But what do you see in this development that could possibly threaten that and going to
our larger theme, how does this affect the come and take it idea with your Bitcoin if
it does it all?
Well, the problem is, of course, he still had a meat space weakness in his setup, which
was at least my understanding, the mixer was custodial and so it was operated by a business,
it was operated by a human, and that's what law enforcement ended up going after.
From a protocol standpoint, we already have ways of engaging in coin mixing and a peer
to peer fashion that is not intermediated by a third party taking custody.
So I don't believe that coin mixing is fundamentally at risk as a result of these latest actions.
I think that custodial coin mixing is certainly a risk and would not recommend anyone go into
that business.
I agree.
I think the problem was a custodial and the non-custodial peer to peer coin mixing probably
is going to not fall under a crime.
We'll see.
I know that Treasury Secretary Munchen had said some things that sounded pretty ominous,
but we'll see what actually comes out of that.
So I think your message answer is that in general, this shouldn't prevent the come and
take it idea in Bitcoin as long as it's non-custodial.
I mean, the coin mixing seems to work if you do it right.
So that's the mixing part.
Now let me read the rest of the article and this is where we talk about how they actually
seized his Bitcoin, if you can say that.
So since the arrest, Larry's wife Margot has received threatening phone calls and texts
from unknown numbers saying the harasser knows the location of her home and she is no longer
safe there.
Gary told Coin Dusk in an interview and quote, now our family is getting threatened because
the FBI decided to tell the world that there might be money hidden with us somehow, Gary
said.
We have no proof of this and are now putting our family in danger.
Gary said all his brother's assets have been frozen and he was denied bail over flight
risk concerns.
As such, the family started a GoFundMe campaign.
Margot said our address is on it, referring to the indictment.
At the bottom hearing, they alleged that he may have had some more Bitcoin.
So that puts us at risk.
Gary said the authorities have already confiscated all of his brother's hardware wallets and
Margot doesn't have any more Bitcoin at home.
So for these two parts, you wrote that great article about personal security and your privacy
and trying to keep people from getting at you.
So what would have been different if this family had been able to kind of do all the
strategies that you've talked about and for the state, for the FBI, but then also for
these people harassing his wife Margot on phone calls.
Yeah, this one's actually tough because even despite all of the protections that I've put
into place, they would not withstand a nation state level attack.
If an attacker with essentially unlimited resources, agents of the state decided to
spend enough time and effort unraveling everything that I had put together, they would be able
to do that.
And that's because I used legal methods of doing so and they would have to spend a lot
of time subpoenaing various entities and essentially peeling off the layers of the onion that I've
set up.
But I think that even I would eventually have to worry about the same type of thing.
This is something where I think the real answer is just not putting all of your eggs in one
basket.
I don't know the details of how his personal hardware devices were stored.
If they were all in his house, then I would say that was a pretty terrible decision.
Or if they were all in places that were associated with his name, that's also a pretty terrible
decision.
I do believe that from a private key standpoint, my own distributed setup is robust against
a higher level of potential attacker.
But then this issue just with the home and the address, the only real solution I see
to that is to have multiple homes and addresses preferably that are obscured in different
ways so that at least if your primary address gets burned, you can go somewhere else very
easily.
Those are good points.
So there's really not much of a protection against the state when it comes to your privacy
and your home.
Do you think it could at least maybe slow it down?
What I'm thinking about is red flag laws in swatting.
This happened to a guy, Alex, he goes by Whiskey Warrior and it was kind of a confusing situation.
But the bottom line is if someone calls in a red flag against you and you're inside your
house and you see them coming, would greater security measures at least slow them down
by you even a couple minutes, maybe call 911 or broadcast on social media, prevent something
really bad happening, like kicking down the door and possibly killing you.
Do you think it could at least slow down that or does that not help that at all?
I think there's way too many variables to make a broad general statement.
In my own circumstance, my local police department was somewhat skeptical about the validity.
And so they didn't just go in guns blazing, kick down the door, they actually just shut
down the whole neighborhood and established a perimeter and were like getting the lay
of the land and trying to figure out what to do.
And I could only speculate as to what would have happened if I had not made contact with
them first coming from outside of their perimeter that they had established.
It is certain that if you have a sufficient level of perimeter defenses that will slow
down any entry to some extent, but then of course you have to get into the nitty gritty
details of exactly what your perimeter defenses are.
And of course SWAT teams are especially trained in being able to break through perimeter defenses
as efficiently as possible.
Absolutely.
And then going back to protection, it's not great against the state, but against just
harassers.
Like in the article it says Larry's wife was being harassed and maybe they will escalate
to coming by the house that they know where she lives, hopefully not.
But I think in those cases, what you've written about in terms of privacy protection and home
protection, I would think that would be a pretty strong defense against those types
of adversaries.
Yeah.
And in general, even when I received various threats online, I was fairly confident that
these people were not going to risk their own lives by physically showing up at my residence.
But it's sort of a risk trade off.
You have to kind of make those decisions yourself as to whether or not you think particular
threats are serious.
At the end of the day, you want to be prepared for as much as you possibly can afford to.
And that is why in the home defense post that I just made a week or so ago, I specifically
talk about how home defense is not just about having a gun.
It's not just about having an alarm system.
It's about establishing as many layers and perimeters to a defensive system as possible
so that each of those layers has the potential to dissuade completely an attacker or at the
very least slow them down a bit.
I think a lot of this is deterrence both for your Bitcoin and how you protect it and also
home defense.
To what extent is this just deterrent?
So people kind of know maybe what your house is or what your Bitcoin setup is and they
just decide it's not worth it.
I think the thing that most people have to worry about is just crimes of opportunity.
You're probably not going to be specifically targeted unless you're a highly public figure.
Probably more likely is someone is just going to be going around canvassing your neighborhood
in the middle of the day when most people are at work and try to look for a house that
looks like they'd be able to kick in the door, run in for a minute or two, grab some expensive
stuff and run off.
Other than that, once you start going down the path of what type of attackers might I
have to worry about if they are specifically targeting me, that's when you have to worry
about more heavy duty security and even just sort of day-to-day life of what if someone
just comes and wants to surveil me and wait until I'm no longer in my house and want to
do something to kidnap me or extort me or whatever.
That's when you get into almost the level of having a security professional evaluate
your day-to-day life and figure out your routines and whether or not there are behavioral and
lifestyle changes that you could make to further harden yourself as a target.
You have a GitHub page that shares the different attacks on Bitcoiners and then Coinsure, who
we've had on the podcast, did a talk based on that and he's a former law enforcement
officer and he talks about the different things you can do to protect yourself.
I'll put a link to those in the website.
Let's go on to the second part of this arrest of Larry Harmon and about his Bitcoin.
They said that they took all of his Bitcoin, but they actually said they took all of his
hardware wallets.
There's a debate about what's the best way to secure your Bitcoin.
Is it with a custodian that has different offices in Switzerland and New York?
Is it multi-sig?
Is it a hardware wallet that's in a vault?
We like to think that Bitcoin is resistant to seizure.
We like to think, come and take it, come and take my Bitcoin.
In this instance, would multi-signature have helped him, hurt him, or is it hard to know?
It could have helped, but not if he had all of the keys in locations that were easily
accessible or discoverable by law enforcement or just if he rolled over and pointed out
and said, okay, I keep all of my devices hidden in these places.
Part of it does come down once again to the fact that there will be at least one person
and probably multiple people if you have an inheritance set up that will know the location
of your private keys, even if you have them split up and distributed.
You have to ask yourself, if I get into a certain situation, do I believe that those
people could be compromised or even what would I myself do?
It's hard to even, I think, fathom certain situations.
The way that I've tried to portray it for certain clients at Casa is that you shouldn't
really make any assumptions about what an attacker will or will not do.
This often comes up in terms of duress wallets, for example, and also you probably shouldn't
make any assumptions that you yourself will or will not be able to perform certain actions
while you're under duress.
Build out your security model based upon those things that you can't really be sure what
people will do.
How then do you distribute your keys in a way that essentially cannot be accessed unless
you are fully compliant?
What could Gary have done?
This is hindsight.
I don't actually know the details of things.
This is just an example as a thought exercise.
What would be the best way for Gary to have protected himself either with a Casa service
or something else that gives him the best chance?
Nothing is perfect, but what specifically do you think could have been done to lessen
the chance of this happening, of getting his Bitcoin?
In general, if we're talking about protection against a physical attacker, then you have
to set up your keys in such a way that you don't have access to a sufficient threshold
of them to spend from them.
More specifically, at least against a non-nation state attacker, one of the things that we
think is fairly safe to assume is that if you keep your keys distributed in multiple
access controlled locations that have different types of authentication required, then it's
a lot less likely that someone will kidnap you for a very long period of time and take
you through these locations while you're under duress in order to access them.
Now of course, that doesn't apply to nation states because they can legally force and
coerce you basically to do these things.
Basically I think the only viable alternatives against that are to either distribute your
keys across international borders into countries that don't have any sort of reciprocity agreements
with the United States or just to go super old school and do a geocaching type of treasure
hunt style thing where the actual locations of your keys are not known by anyone other
than yourself and then you would probably have to come up with some scheme as well for
how to secure the location data, but that would get pretty gnarly.
Yeah, and I just thought of maybe a legal question I should ask one of the attorneys
that we've had on, which is if you have a multi-signature setup and your attorney is
one of the signatories, does the government have to or can the government compel the attorney
to hand that over?
I would think at minimum he would be able to file something to prevent that or at least
buy some time because how the government works is they take all your money so that you can't
defend yourself and maybe if you have Bitcoin set up in a certain way, at least they can
only get at it through a longer legal process.
So maybe you can have access to it to pay your attorney, I don't know the laws on that,
but at least maybe you can buy some time because the nation state is very, very difficult.
They're more likely to win unless they simply have a terrible case and they violate the
laws and you didn't do something, of course.
Do you guys at CASA have anything with lawyers, do you have any lawyers, do you get into that
or is that something that's more for customers to try to figure out for themselves that that's
what works best?
Well, I mean, each of our clients is unique and so we're always fielding new types of
questions, though I don't believe we've ever fielded a question like that to my knowledge.
We do work with lawyers and estate attorneys, but mostly for inheritance planning purposes.
I'm not aware of us ever working with anyone to specifically create a nation state proof
style setup, though that would be interesting.
Yeah, nothing else to slow them down and I remember a story from a couple of years ago
where there was a guy who owned, I think it was sort of a gas station, mini-mart type
of food shop.
It was a family business he'd owned for decades and he had a lot of cash payments, you know,
it's a convenience store and he would make the deposits and the IRS thought he was structuring
his payments to basically money launderer, but he wasn't.
That's just how he make the deposits.
They were consistently, I think, right under 10,000.
And what ended up happening was the IRS seized his bank accounts and it was over $100,000,
which is basically his life savings and it took a couple of years to get those back.
The IRS was wrong.
I think they issued an apology.
I think they even had some sort of investigation into the IRS or they did something where they
had to amend their policies and fix some things there.
I guess the point is if he just had that money in Bitcoin, even in just a simple hardware
wallet at his house, the IRS couldn't have called up his banks and said, you know, freeze
these assets and that would have bought him time.
And, you know, that's a very simple thing.
It's not a nation state coming after him like we've talked about, but it prevents just kind
of mistaken identity or just, you know, kind of a mistake.
Well, yeah.
And also just, you know, civil asset forfeiture in general.
We've seen many, many cases of people who are just carrying large amounts of cash and
due to the combination of the war on drugs and the legal ability for law enforcement
departments to seize any drug related asset and use it to fund their own enforcement.
Now you've created these perverse incentives where many enforcement agencies are just saying,
oh, you're carrying too much cash.
You must be a drug dealer.
We're going to take that.
Thanks for your money.
Yeah.
So it's not all or nothing with Bitcoin.
It's not either you have complete protection against seizure of your Bitcoin or you have
none.
It depends on your gradient, depending on your setup and depending on who the adversary
is.
And I think almost everyone, the real threat will be just kind of a dumb criminal crime
of opportunity.
Like you said, it could even go to like, you know, border control law enforcement.
When you go across the border, that's a common site where they want to take your cash or
they pull you over.
So it would protect you there.
And even if they take your hardware wallet, you can still restore your seed and have your
money to access to defend yourself.
So I think the message here is do what you can to protect your Bitcoin so you can truly
say come and take it and just know the limits and do what you can with what you have, where
you are.
And then over time, trying to work up and beef that up.
It's tricky though, because I would actually say, you know, while we're focusing on actual
attacks here in this episode, the most common way that people are going to lose their Bitcoin
is due to their own negligence, or due to not having a sufficient level of robustness
where they introduce a single point of failure and then something goes wrong and they can
no longer access their private keys.
And so that's actually one of the main reasons why I think Multisig is such an improvement
because you are creating and distributing multiple redundant sets of keys.
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My first Bitcoin that I lost was years ago.
I encrypted my DAT file and I thought I would remember the password.
This is before I understood what password managers were, like KeyKeeper and some other
ones.
And so I encrypted it.
I put this password on it.
Actually it was a passphrase that I thought I would never forget.
I think it was a combination of like my first car, my birthday, the name of my dog, and
I think like a couple of dates or something.
And I tried for a long time with different passwords and passphrase and I couldn't do
it.
So still to this day, I have some Bitcoin there.
But yeah, absolutely.
User error is the main thing.
So whether you use multi-sig or just something simple that you can do is going to work.
And that also goes under duress.
You talked about how capable are you under duress.
And they teach that too in firearms training.
When I got my CCW, we didn't just shoot at a static target.
We shot in the dark.
We shot moving around, shooting from the left hand, the right hand laying down because duress
completely changes things when it comes to guns or trying to access your Bitcoin, right?
For sure.
It's hard to predict how we'll react and that's why training is important.
You got to practice makes perfect and run through different scenarios.
For example, I think let's say today you wake up and say, hey, let's just practice.
If all of a sudden I need to access my Bitcoin, two minutes, can I do it?
Whatever your setup is.
And I think that's a good training exercise.
So now I want to move on to the come and take it idea, but for guns and for real property.
So I want to go over this.
So come and take it for guns or real property.
And for our example, I want to talk about the Bundy standoff and the battle of Bunkerville.
Are you familiar with the Bundy standoff and battle of Bunkerville?
Somewhat.
I don't know all of the details, but of course it was on the news for, I believe several
months.
Yeah.
Well, it's a long story that actually was drawn out over actually years when you look
at the legal cases and everything.
But for those who don't know, basically there's a cattle rancher family called the Bundys
in Nevada and they had been grazing their cattle on federal land for decades, I think
even for generations.
And the family wasn't paying their fees to graze on the land.
And so over the years, eventually this came to a head, the BLM I think won a case that
allowed them to go out and seize the cattle because he wasn't paying those fees or taxes.
And then there was actually an armed standoff between the Bundy family and some members
of kind of a militia and people who came to volunteer to stand up against the BLM and
some federal agencies that showed up to take his cattle and enforce the laws basically.
So if people were just stay with me, I'm going to read this from Wikipedia just to make sure
I get the details right, because that's actually very important.
So this was on April 12th.
So the morning of April 12th, an armed crowd rallied under a banner that read, liberty,
freedom for God we stand.
Most had signs, many of which chided government thugs.
Addressing the protesters, Bundy said, we definitely don't recognize BLM director's
jurisdiction or authority, his arresting power or policing in any way.
And we're about ready to take the country over with force.
After the BLM announced suspension of the roundup, Bundy suggested blocking a highway.
Armed protesters blocked a portion of Interstate 15 for more than two hours, causing traffic
backups for three miles in both directions.
Protesters also converged at the mouth of Gold Butte to preserve where the cattle were
corralled and a tense hour long standoff ensued.
BLM Rangers warned over loudspeakers that they were prepared to use tear gas.
Former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, who was with the protesters, said that they were strategizing
to put all the women up at the front.
If they are going to start shooting, it's going to be women that are going to be televised
all across the world, getting shot by these rogue federal officers.
Protesters with rifles took positions on a highway overpass, offering cover as horse
mounted Wranglers led protesters to face off against BLM Rangers and snipers.
Utah Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, who officially traveled to the Bundy standoff
to convey that Utah did not want the cattle, put the number of federal agents present at
over 200.
According to Las Vegas Assistant Sheriff Joe Lombardo, there were 24 BLM Rangers and Las
Vegas Deputy Sheriffs present at the standoff.
Las Vegas police were not allowed to wear protective gear because of fear that it would
be seen as a provocation.
Clark County Sheriff Glepsy blames escalation of the situation on the BLM, stating to the
Las Vegas Review Journal that the BLM has lied to him about having a place to take the
cattle and BLM did not attend town hall meetings and disregarded his advice as County Sheriff.
So what ended up happening was the federal government, the BLM and the FBI stood down.
And let me just read this last part that explains this.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that tensions reached a critical level during the
standoff with rifles pointing toward each side.
Las Vegas station KLASTV also reported that guns were pointed at officers.
Assistant Sheriff Lombardo recounted that they were in my face, yelling profanities and pointing
weapons and said we were outgunned, outmanned, and there would not have been a good result
from it.
And then finally, a photojournalist from Reuters wrote that armed supporters had taken up tactical
positions on government officers and that one man pointing a rifle in the direction
of BLM employees said, I've got a clear shot for them.
And other men said, I'm ready to pull the trigger if fired upon.
So eventually the Las Vegas Police Department deescalated the situation and basically the
federal government left.
So thanks to everyone in Jameson for letting me read all that.
Taking this to come and take it.
So they came to take his horses, his physical property, and it appears that by being armed,
he was able to prevent them from coming and taking it.
So what is a lesson that you see here with the Bundy standoff, either good or bad?
Well you know what it is, it's about discrepancy of force.
And one thing that I always get a tickle out of when anti-firearm folks on social media
will harangue me with things like if the government wants to come for you, your AR-15 isn't going
to stop them.
It's because they're all assuming a situation where it's just me in my house and then a
plethora of agents surround my house and do whatever they want.
And in a situation like that, they're completely correct.
I mean, one person with a gun against dozens has no chance.
It doesn't matter how much training you have.
But the thing about this is that agents of the state are humans.
I think in most cases they believe they're doing the right thing, but they're not in
the business of getting themselves killed.
Law enforcement officers are not the same as military personnel.
Even though some of them may have former military training, they are civilians.
Even though law enforcement press often likes to try to differentiate between civilians
and law enforcement, law enforcement officers are civilians.
There's only civilians and military, and they're clearly not military.
So point being, when law enforcement or agents of the state are going to do some sort of
enforcement action, they meticulously plan this so that they have an overwhelming discrepancy
of force.
I mean, it's the shock and awe factor, if you will, because they want to minimize the
risk of harm or injury happening to themselves and generally disregard whatever is on the
other side of the gun that they're pointing at.
So if we want to get into a situation where it's this come and take it mentality and we
are trying to stand up against agents of the state, then it doesn't have to be a perfectly
one-to-one number.
Unfortunately, from all of the stuff that I think the Wikipedia article talks about,
I'm not sure that they ever actually give us a number of how many armed protesters there
were.
But even if there were only a couple of dozen, I think it changes the situation drastically
so that the agents who are there to perform the action no longer feel like they have a
99% chance of coming out of this alive.
And that is really what changes the game, is when you're escalating things to the point
that people's lives are on the line.
And that's really what I think that assistant sheriff was making the point of, was that
they were outgunned.
And even though they may have been able to quote unquote win a battle, I think it would
have ended up with heavy losses of life on both sides.
And that was just not worth it.
So when it comes to come and take it, we also need to remember it's pure numbers.
So if it was just Clive Bundy with his deer rifle, it would have been different.
I mean, they would have just taken him away and it wouldn't have been a problem.
But when you start adding more people, especially if they are taken seriously because they have
different rifles, they appear that they're wearing body armor, they appear that they
know what they're doing, they're coordinating, that's a completely different story.
So come and take it also can involve relying on other people, not just trying to be a lone
ranger and also deterrence, you know, I think that's what you were talking about was they
were just deterring something bad from happening because the law enforcement officers looked
at the equation and said, you know what?
This isn't worth it.
We're used to being in the overwhelming force.
We're not that I'm just a regular guy.
This is just my job.
Do I want to risk one of these guys, you know, getting a shot at me and they just decided
no.
I think this might be one reason why the Bundy standoff ended peacefully rather than turning
into a Ruby Ridge or a Waco where the federal government had a clear overwhelming amount
of power.
So what do you see that the difference between Ruby Ridge Waco and then the Bundy standoff
as well?
Yeah, I mean, I think Ruby Ridge was fewer than a dozen people, right?
And then I forget how many people were in Waco, but also, you know, Waco was a compound
and they had basically barricaded themselves in there and they were completely surrounded
by, if I recall correctly, some like heavy armor and, and, you know, somehow that fire
got started.
I suspect that I think most of the deaths from Waco were actually fire related and not
a firefight related.
But you know, we can break down the situations all day long, but you know, there's so many
variables to take into account.
And it's hard to say precisely that, you know, oh, if we only changed this one variable,
then the whole outcome would be different.
In this situation, like you said, it has decades of history and it's not just one small like
family or one small cult or whatever.
They actually had a diverse group of individuals who ended up uniting around a common cause.
And also the history, I think the tragedy at Waco, I think changed some things on all
sides.
And I think social media and the proliferation of the internet, everyone being able to upload
photos and videos have actually in some ways helped people because that's another cost
we haven't talked about is the cost to reputation.
And sometimes the state seems to get away with things and other times they actually
don't.
What role do you see the rise of mobile phones and social media playing and helping people
prevent adversaries from taking their Bitcoin or taking their guns or taking their property?
That's tough because I actually most often think of it the other way around is usually
that, you know, social media can result in you leaking information that, you know, creates
weaknesses and makes you a more viable target for people.
Though if we are talking about, you know, nation state level attacks, then the ability
to spread information so quickly that it can't be censored, I think, is an important factor
that results in us being able to create these social movements at a pace that wasn't really
possible before.
So, you know, there was a lot of, you know, grassroots effort like during the civil rights
era, you know, during the various anti-war protests in Vietnam and moving forward.
And you can only imagine, you know, how different or how much more accelerated those things
would have been if they had been able to proliferate using modern technology at the speed of light
rather than having to rely more upon word of mouth and people actually picking up and
making phone calls to one another and newspapers and all the other types of traditional communications.
So social media, the internet is double-edged sword.
On one hand, it can help you, like you said, the examples of civil rights, maybe with the
Bundy Ranch standoff, it could raise the reputation cost of certain people, might spread ideas.
On the other hand, it can leak your information and Coinsure talked about this on his podcast
referring to attacks on Bitcoiners and I think it's also in your GitHub.
And he was talking about, hey, look at a basic strategy is your op-site.
Your basic strategy is to not advertise certain things, whether it's where you are, where
you're going, who you're with, all sorts of things.
So social media is kind of a blessing and a curse when it comes to your security.
We've talked about come and take it in terms of Bitcoin and in terms of physical property
and even guns.
So I want to put this all together and apply the come and take it philosophy to 3D printed
guns, because 3D printed guns are interesting.
They're both digital and physical.
So they offer some unique advantages when it comes to asymmetric defense.
And so let's talk about that.
How do you see 3D printed guns as an asymmetric defense, either physically or digitally?
Well, now we are lowering the cost, at least in technical terms, for someone to be able
to create a level of defense that before now required you to, in many cases, jump through
various hoops in order to actually obtain a firearm legally.
And I mostly like the idea of 3D printed guns because it allows you to have another level
of robustness, basically this idea of having backups that if something goes wrong with
your gun, you just make another one in less than a day or so.
And that I think makes the most sense in terms of nation state style attacks of one of the
main reasons why a lot of people in America are pro-firearms other than self-defense is
just the idea that it is really the last bastion of defense against tyranny.
And so I often get asked by people like, why do I have so many guns?
I mean, I can only hold one or two guns at a time.
One of my reasons for that, other than that I find them an interesting hobby, is that
if we ever get to the point where my friends and family who don't have weapons end up needing
them, then I'll be able to facilitate that.
And I think that if we continue to see the proliferation of 3D printing gun technology,
then my cache of firearms may end up becoming obsolete because I can just create a new cache
of firearms in a fairly short period of time as needed.
So with 3D printed guns, it's kind of two things.
It's being able to make new ones, which is a big deal, obviously.
And then it's also because they're digital files to begin with, it offers a similar protection
to say Bitcoin where there's some encryption maybe.
Maybe if the files are encrypted or maybe they're sent through encrypted means so people
don't know they're being sent or what they have.
And so now just like similar to Bitcoin to get at those files, it's slightly similar
to Bitcoin in the sense of you're maybe using encryption in different various games to spread
files.
Like you might spread kind of the private keys with Bitcoin, now you're spreading the
files.
Well, you can't stop the signal, right?
That's the main idea is that every time we can take something physical that likes to
be controlled by the government, if authorities want to regulate it, if we can turn that physical
thing into a digital thing, then it becomes basically impossible to regulate.
When it comes to the 3D printed guns, obviously we know how to protect and propagate the information
required to print them.
And then what we've done is we've basically taken it down to the base layer of the raw
materials and asking a government to regulate things like plastic or metal tubes.
It just becomes laughable because these are common items that are used for a million different
things.
Yeah.
I see a lot of parallels with the 3D printing guns in Bitcoin.
One of them being the decentralization and decentralization in several ways.
One just the parts, whereas a gun is a completed item that you then go and buy at a gun store
it's centralized by a completed gun by companies that make them and also the gun dealers of
course.
Whereas with DIY guns, you've got plastic over here and you've got a metal bar over
here and trigger components so you can buy from this other place.
So just decentralizing that is a big advantage.
And then of course it's decentralized in the manufacturer.
So there might be 20 people who can make the same gun and maybe all 20 of those people
are off the radar.
Maybe there's just one guy who's on the radar, they crack down on him, but the other 19 are
still doing what they're doing.
And another thing is I think encryption comes from a Latin word meaning hidden, maybe something
like that.
It could be wrong.
Then if you have these 3D files that are quote unquote hidden, that's another layer to all
this.
So it's kind of an exciting new world that we're moving towards where it's this weird
hybrid of the physical and the digital world.
To combine two things, combining Bitcoin with 3D printed guns.
This has been important for these guys.
For example, if you want to print a Glock and some of the models, you have to have this
little aluminum rail.
There's been a couple of people who have started to make those and selling them and the only
way they can sell them is to accept Bitcoin for payments for a couple of reasons.
One either they're not set up as a merchant, like they don't have a credit card account,
things like that, but mostly it's been for kind of privacy reasons.
And so to me, this has been a really great use case for Bitcoin is being able to have
this sort of censorship resistance and privacy and they've done this not just for say buying
aluminum rails and these are perfectly legal rails.
So it's kind of ridiculous they have to go to this extent, but that's what it is.
But also some fundraising, like there was a bounty for someone to make a rifled barrel
nine millimeter using electrochemical machining and I think they had about $215.
We contributed a little bit of Bitcoin to that.
And so what role do you see Bitcoin playing in this future of 3D printed guns or maybe
the gun industry in general?
I believe that we're already pretty sure that we know what to expect from traditional payment
processing companies.
We've already seen it happening on social media and somewhat on various crowdfunding
platforms, but we basically have to expect that anyone who is doing controversial actions
or saying controversial things is putting themselves at the risk of being deplatformed
by whatever services they are relying upon.
And so that is, of course, the primary use case of Bitcoin is acting as this neutral
platform that has no politics powering it.
Rather, you could even say it is powered by anti-politics.
And if this movement continues to grow, then I expect there will continue to be more friction
between the various platforms.
Or even seeing plenty of people in the 3D gun printing movement getting booted off of
various social media, for example, then I think that's just going to push more people
towards using censorship resistant solutions and Bitcoin is just one of those.
Yeah, I agree.
And this is why I've been talking a lot lately about not emphasizing so much HODL.
It's very important to HODL.
It helps people, it helps Bitcoin, but remembering that Bitcoin does have this incredible power
for censorship resistant payments.
And we've seen different platforms, like you said, kick off gun owners and gun businesses
like Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, they won't do business with gun related things.
And of course, you have things like Patreon and all these other platforms where you just
can't use their system for any gun related things.
And I agree with you, this is going to continue to escalate and it's going to be about deplatforming
and mobs.
For example, this morning I was on Keybase in one of the gun groups and someone shared
this research article and basically they said that people doing these DIY guns are extremists.
And then you've seen people say that, you know, like the Virginia rally was like this
white supremacist Nazi rally, even though there was people of all races and walks of
life there.
And this is a new tactic that they're now going to use is calling people, they're going
to call gun owners and gun advocates racist and white supremacist, which is a very, very
powerful way to, you know, defeat people and to deplatform.
And so before you can be blocked from certain services just by having legitimate gun business,
in the future, I think you'll be blocked from services just by being labeled a gun supremacist
or an extremist or a white supremacist.
And that's very, very dangerous.
Or an ammosexual.
And ammosexual is something you brag about, but you're right.
Maybe that'll be the latest, the latest tag that they'll put on you and yeah, you're dangerous.
Well, Jameson, thanks for coming on the show.
Let's wrap up.
So Jameson, what are you working on in the next six months and year?
The same thing I've been working on for the past five years, which is really self custody
of private keys.
That is, you know, for the first three years I was full-time Bitcoin, I was at BitGo working
on enterprise, multisig, non-custodial solutions.
And then for the past two years at CASA, I've been working on a similar thing, but targeted
for individuals and helping people self custody their own keys.
And it really is about thinking through all of the things that can go wrong.
We have our threat model that is hosted on docs.keys.casa, that's docs.keyys.casa, which
goes through the threat model that we developed our software solution around.
And really the CASA key master is a multi-signature, multi-device, multi-location setup where we
try to ensure that there is no single point of failure in the entire setup so that you're
robust both against digital attackers, physical attackers, and all types of natural disasters.
And what are the different membership levels or pricing for the CASA services?
We've got a few different levels.
Entry level is only about $10 a month.
We then have some higher tier levels that are a lot more hands-on and customized for
each individual and those range in like several hundred dollars per month.
And there are different services around basically inheritance and team-based signing stuff at
the extreme levels where that's really for people who find themselves in the position
of having like a significant fraction of their net worth in Bitcoin and want to self custody
themselves.
But perhaps they don't have the technical sophistication or simply the time to think
through a threat model that encompasses everything that can go wrong.
And so I think that's where a lot of our value add is just around the amount of time and
experience that we've put into thinking adversarially and then building a very user-friendly interface
that's a point and click for people to manage their keys.
I'll include a link to of course CASA, the documents link and your other articles, one
about OPSEC and then the other one about personal security and all these things so that people
can kind of take a look at what you guys do and maybe they want to sign up for it or maybe
just can learn something that they can do themselves.
So Jameson, thanks again for coming on the guns and Bitcoin podcast.
My pleasure.
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