Thank you for tuning in to the Magic Internet Money Podcast.
I'm Brad Mills and this is the podcast where you can learn how to short the banks, unbank
the bank, be your own bank, and bank on Bitcoin baby!
Alright, well this podcast is sponsored by Freedom, Liberty, Free Speech, and Sound Money.
I actually have no sponsors and I'm not taking any so don't ask.
I've been a CASA user for about a year now and today's episode is with the legendary
Jameson Lopp.
He's well known in the space, he's a great adversarial thinker, he's a privacy advocate,
a defender of Bitcoin, and one hell of a model American.
I hope you enjoy this podcast with Jameson Lopp, man I'm embarrassing myself here, forgive
me guys.
I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast with Jameson Lopp.
I learned a thing or two from this episode and I hope you do too, that's why I do the
podcast.
Just like a regular guy that loves Bitcoin and you know I'm not trying to make sponsorship
money or anything like that but I just want to learn more and learn from people who are
smarter than me and I've been trolled on Twitter as people calling me a Bitcoin perma noob.
I've been in Bitcoin since 2011, I ask a lot of weird questions, I'm kind of a weird dude
and yeah I kind of embrace that.
I'm a Bitcoin perma noob and there's nothing wrong with that, 99% of the people are noobs
to Bitcoin so I kind of like embrace that.
So anyways here goes the episode with Jameson, I hope you learn something.
Brad Mills is a partner at Xsquared Ventures.
All opinions expressed by Brad and his guests do not reflect the opinions of Xsquared Ventures
or Xsquared Management.
Investing in cryptocurrencies is high risk and you can get wrecked.
Do not treat any opinion expressed on this show as investment advice but only as an expression
of Brad's opinion.
This podcast is for informational purposes only.
Do not attempt to hodl without doing your research first.
Here we are with Jameson Lopp, the co-founder of CASA and formerly of BitGo right or was
it BitPay?
Yeah, BitGo, I was an infrastructure engineer for a number of years there.
Popular freedom rights activist, popular Bitcoiner, you've got a really big Twitter account where
you post security tips and best practices for Bitcoin.
And random philosophical stuff and yeah funny memes and stuff.
Try to keep it a little bit varied though I do focus a lot on Bitcoin and privacy and
freedom.
So thanks for coming on.
We've never really had a conversation for more than like 10 or 20 minutes before.
I'm happy to finally sit down with you for a little focused chat, pick through your brain
and your beard, see what you left from supper last night.
So you got your beard back.
Last time I saw you was in Mexico I think and you didn't have a beard and I didn't
recognize you.
You sat down across the table from me and I was like, who's this guy?
Like he's being kind of weird looking at me.
No, you weren't being weird.
I was just like, I didn't know who you were.
I changed a lot of stuff for OpSec.
Really I guess I stopped trimming once the pandemic hit and here we are like nine months
later so no idea, no plans, just sort of go with the flow.
That's what happened to me too.
I had a pretty big beard up until about maybe a month ago and then I shaved it off.
I wasn't planning on growing the beard back out.
I do a bear market beard so whenever Bitcoin goes into a bear market, I start to grow until
it comes out of the bear market and then I shave it clean.
I forget how the timing worked out for mine but I feel like I was growing and growing
and growing and then I actually got rid of it after everything had crashed.
So maybe I'll do the same thing again.
So far, I guess I stopped trimming it early this year and Bitcoin's been on the bull run
pretty much ever since then so I think I'll just keep it up and see how it goes.
It's definitely correlated.
So how have you been holding up for the past couple of months?
Have things been crazy with CASA and people coming to you asking about security tips like
what should I do?
How do I get Bitcoin?
How do I secure it?
I bet you've been going crazy.
It's been weird because this macro environment has been really tough on probably the majority
of people.
Most normal people have been negatively affected by it, have had to stop working, get laid
off or drastically change how they work.
For me, it's been the opposite.
My job has not been affected like CASA was already a 100% remote working company.
We were already highly decentralized, didn't even have like a central office to speak of
and so we were already well positioned to continue doing what we had been doing and
oddly enough, within the first couple months of lockdowns and stuff, our business started
going up and I believe that that was just because a lot of people were locked at home
and had a lot of free time to start looking into things like what is money?
What is Bitcoin?
Trying to figure out how to position themselves for this massive change in the macro environment
and then it kind of leveled off for most of the summer but then of course now here we
are again and we've had some gigachads sort of come out of the woodwork and really start
to bring a new level of reputation to Bitcoin in the mainstream financial system and so
that of course has had ripple effects and really the most interesting thing that we're
seeing of course as the price goes up, people who have been in Bitcoin for a while realize
they need to increase their security game and they come to us but more interesting to
us is the people that are coming to us who have never owned Bitcoin and they're really
looking for the full experience.
They want to learn everything about it, they want to get onboarded into it and they want
to have a high level of service and confidence that they can self-custody their Bitcoin.
So it's been working very well for us and we're in a position now where we have the
very good problem of having to figure out how to scale different parts of our business
to make sure that we can continue to meet demand as this thing is hockey sticking.
So for people who don't know what CASA is, I mean I'm a client of CASA and I'm not sponsored
or anything like that.
I just love the idea of having multi-sig geographically distributed protection for my keys so that
I have to take a plane in order to spend my cold storage Bitcoin.
It just makes me feel secure.
I was also into the Lightning node that you guys had built.
What was it called again?
Just the CASA Lightning node?
Yeah, just the CASA node.
We had two iterations of that on Raspberry Pi 3 and then 4.
It was a fun experiment and it got us a lot of I guess marketing traction and cred and
stuff and unfortunately ended up not being an economically viable project for us.
We lost a decent amount of money on it and it sucked because I mean we were charging
$300 and a lot of people thought that was a pretty high price but really the hardware
alone was between $200 and $250.
So if you then think about all of the support services, all of the developer hours that
had to go into that, there was a very low margin on it and it was really a lost leader
but the whole idea behind it was to start trying to build up more of a suite of services
and get people into the whole CASA ecosystem.
Unfortunately we ended up deciding that for the time being it was best to cut that off
so that we could focus only on the key management stuff and that's mainly because running your
own node and doing lightning stuff has interesting properties that are definitely valuable but
a lot of people just don't see the direct value in that in comparison to the direct
value of being sovereign over holding their own money and controlling it and we're really
just talking about orders of magnitude difference in value where someone who is protecting millions
of dollars worth of Bitcoin, it's obvious to them that they want to pay for a self-custody
service that is essentially insurance for that whereas someone who is tinkering around
with a few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars on Lightning Network, the economics just don't
make sense to be paying very much money for the privilege of having a good user experience
to do that.
Yeah, yeah for sure, I mean there's a lot of hobbyists and stuff like that like me and
others that are interested in Lightning Network and we're like buying those nodes up because
we wanted to support Bitcoin scaling out as peer-to-peer cash and like low fee instant
transfer payments for the internet which a lot of us kind of, I mean it seems like all
the Lightning people were like there's no way that we're going to want to support any
altcoins that are trying to do this, it's like all got to be Bitcoin so like Lightning
was the solution so let's just go all in on Lightning at least support and like get involved.
Do you still follow Lightning, like what are your thoughts there like three years or whatever
on from the Bitcoin cash fork?
You had a really interesting take that made me rethink my skepticisms and stuff where
your take was more like the libertarian way of looking at it like I was on the side of
like Roger's evil and he's like an idiot and like all these B cashers are against Bitcoin,
they're working to destroy Bitcoin, obviously there's the people on the Bitcoin cash side
that were like no this is the real Bitcoin, like this is Bitcoin and they would, we would
get into these two day long debates of what is Bitcoin and how, why Bitcoin cash is not
Bitcoin and they would argue why Bitcoin cash is Bitcoin and then you had a really
good tweet one day I saw and it was like well do you remember the tweet?
You can say it if you remember it otherwise I can try to babble on about it.
Oh there's so many of my tweets it's hard to keep them all indexed in my brain so go
for it.
I'm gonna have to pick it up it was really nicely composed one of them was like one camp
will have you think that there is only one Bitcoin, one camp will have you think that
everything is Bitcoin but there's a middle ground where you don't care what people think
about you just know that you run your node and that's Bitcoin to you.
Exactly.
Something like that.
You know the definition of Bitcoin is personal to oneself and what one is defending it to
be by running the node and enforcing those rules and that's one of the things that throws
a lot of people for a loop is that throughout human history we have built these you know
hierarchical organizations where someone or some group of people is dictating what the
real thing is and so people default to trying to shove these systems into that type of
model but really what it is is it's more like language or religion where it's a personal
thing and when people disagree they split off they create different languages or different
you know variations and dialects of language or they create different sects and forks and
branches of religion and the specific things that you're believing and doing and you know
that's really I think what any like voluntary organization is doomed to be like because
humans are so diverse that it's highly unlikely you're ever going to be able to get everyone
to agree on even one simple little thing so having a system that is capable of handling
those disagreements in a fashion that doesn't require people killing each other to try to
settle on which one is the real one I think is a massive improvement over a lot of our
existing systems now it can create a fair amount of confusion in the interim as people
are trying to adjust to this new mode of reality so did you leave bit go because of the bitcoin
cash thing because of segwit 2x or or was it something else that was a you know facet
that didn't help but you know what I was doing on the back end from mid to late 2016 all
the way through the end of the bull run in like 2018 when I left was you know adding
support for all these other things it was really like ethereum and all of the tokens
along with that that were the biggest pain but it was also ripple all the bitcoin forks
really just the complexity of our infrastructure exploded and the bitcoin forks were actually
pretty good I remember bitcoin gold had a few weird aspects to it that made my life
unpleasant but good as in what like not a lot of workload yes because you know most
of the bitcoin forks were fairly straightforward and minimal change sets so you just had to
tweak a few configs and you could generally add support for them without you know hundreds
of developer hours and and then usually you're running the node you just you know spool up
a lot of the same infrastructure same alerts etc etc but just running the ethereum nodes
and the ripple nodes they were just constantly stalling and crashing and paging me in the
middle of night and making my life miserable basically so I was not interested in continuing
to do that and it just sort of coincided with me you know meeting up with the other casa
co-founders in early 2018 and realizing that there was a good opportunity for me to take
everything that I had learned over the past three years and try to pivot that from a enterprise
type of environment to applying it to an individual self-custody mindset I felt like there was
a pretty big gap in the market for a robust and yet user-friendly self-custody option
so it was something that I felt I had the unique skills to be able to contribute to
and bring a new fresh perspective to and it was also a personal issue that I was still
spending basically a weekend every year refreshing my own cold storage setup and it was such
a pain that I could only imagine that almost nobody was going to go to you know the level
of doing what I would consider to be the best practices and you know the more that we can
do to lower the bar to being self-sovereign that's just good for everyone it's good
for the world it's good for bitcoin it is my ultimate career mission when before bitcoin
I was basically a large-scale data analysis architect for online marketing company your
writing jobs that would ingest petabytes and petabytes of raw analytics data really the
antithesis of a lot of the stuff that I preach now but also I think gave me a good perspective
on how much tracking really goes on on the internet when I decided to leave that I at
the same time decided that I wanted to devote my career to an actual mission rather than
just oh I'm gonna do neat computer science challenges and the mission that I chose was
not bitcoin it was more meta than that it was that I wanted to use my skills as a technologist
to help improve the individual power you know fight back against this creep of the centralization
of power over people in and essentially use the asymmetric capabilities of technology
to give you a better defense to individuals and you know in a roundabout way it's kind
of a way to like fight back against large corporations and governments and all of that
that's really my my high-level mission and so if I ever get to the point where I feel
like bitcoin is not the most obvious way to do that if I feel like bitcoin has matured
enough then I would probably just look for something else in the tech space that I felt
was another empowering technology that needed to be worked on so that it was easier for
people to use that's an awesome mission I mean have you got that like written down like
you use that as a as like a driving statement or something or did you just come up with
that what was it you're gonna use technology to empower to empower the individuals yes
yes my mission is to use my skills as a technologist to build tools that will empower individuals
that's that's the simple version of it and I suspect that that was just kind of born
out of reading the white paper and other cypherpunk literature that's interesting so you had a
really probably well-paying job at this crazy marketing company doing these these really
advanced data processing things were using AI back then or was that before deep learning
or no no at the time it was the early days of the distributed computing like Hadoop map
reduce no sequel days it was right around like 2008 2009 oh yeah Hadoop no sequel I
know what you're talking about I have no idea so so those are technologies that were actually
born out of Google where you know Google built that technology in the early 2000s and then
eventually they open source the algorithms and people built open source versions of it
and that's really when like large-scale internet data processing took off is when it became
possible for small to medium-sized companies to do what Google did and leverage the power
of using many many many cheap computers to essentially create one huge supercomputer
at a cost you know far below what an actual supercomputer would would run so it's been
interesting because I certainly saw plenty of parallels where I got into the the big
data computer science community if you will before it was really a thing and I saw it
grow and it got to the point where there were conferences all the time I start going to
conferences about big data and and map reduce and all of these other technologies and then
really the same thing happened you know five six years later when I went into Bitcoin and
then once again the money started flowing into that system and we start having conferences
and and you know people start asking you to do consulting and stuff and so did you go
straight from that job to then Bitcoin yes yes well so I worked I worked at only one
company before Bitcoin but I was with it from 15 employees to 300 employees and I changed
jobs within the company probably every 18 to 24 months so that was a good growth opportunity
but I was never passionate about helping marketers sell stuff to people and get you know better
ROI it was just interesting scaling problems on the technology side so when I got into
Bitcoin of course I've managed to be working full-time for I guess over five years now
and even though there's you know plenty of times when it gets kind of tedious and repetitive
like I'm still passionate about the high level goal there and so I just I can't see myself
you know burning out in the same way you know yeah you're working on your mission even this
when I was doing the stuff at Bitco it got very annoying you know getting woken up in
the middle of the night all of the time but I still kept doing it you know I never just
like threw up my hands and said I'm not doing this anymore I just waited for a better opportunity
to come along that I felt was more focused on the specific part of the crypto ecosystem
that I thought was most valuable to work on.
So your mission then obviously it makes sense that you're going to be working with CASA
or like co-founded CASA and working on that because it does have an impact on people's
ability to store their wealth in a sovereign way and a safe way.
What made you decide to do like a CASA type of thing versus making like a hardware wallet
like say Rodolfo with open dimes and the cold cards?
Well you know I stuck to what I knew right so I am not a hardware guy I would have had
such a steep learning curve to do hardware and you know I felt like Bitgo got a lot of
things right and I wanted to build a similar model to that where you know you're building
redundancy into the system but you know we learned some hard lessons at Bitgo over the
years there were some failures and they were never technical failures on Bitgo's side like
when it came to any of the thefts or anything.
The failures always came down to human mistakes usually with how the client would configure
their use of Bitgo and so I felt like you know if we wanted to take this Bitgo multi-sig
model and take it to the next level then we had to actually restrict the options of how
you could configure it and so you know this is one of the things that I think for a lot
of OG Bitcoiners they actually dislike about CASA because there are a ton of things that
CASA does not let you do with your Bitcoin there's a ton of features that we simply do
not expose at all and most of the time this is a conscious decision and it's because a
lot of these features have foot guns in them and we don't even like want it to be possible
for a user to accidentally try to do something neat and you know have a catastrophic loss.
So you know simplicity and usability are two big facets that we try to follow because we
believe that they are very important to the security of a system if you're managing large
amounts of money on your own is that we can't assume that the people doing this are nerds.
We can't assume that they're going to read the manual you know you have to build it kind
of like the way that any mainstream type of software like you know a Facebook or a Twitter
or whatever works where they need to be able to pick it up and just look at the user interface
and follow it and that will you know result in them getting the job done and you know
not expose any ways to you know have a catastrophic loss in the process.
So I think that CASA is a fairly unique approach to Bitcoin key management and that's great
I think like more diversity of options across the ecosystem is great.
I also think that you know the ability for people to manage their own keys you know using
standalone software without any you know service added or anything like that you know is going
to continue to get easier and easier and it's great for more people to have more options
to be able to do things on their own.
For us we are targeting the I guess lowest common denominator like we're targeting just
sort of like the normal person who has not been into Bitcoin and does not spend much
time thinking or educating themselves about Bitcoin you know we just want to be that like
entry level high secure usability type of setup.
So it's certainly a different way of going about things but more diversity is great in
this system.
At a macro level we want to make sure that we don't want the convenience of custodial
providers to result in all of the Bitcoin you know being stored by a small number of
entities because then you know that is just creating systemic risk, it's creating weakness
in the system and it is essentially posing the problem of like another Segwit2x type
of coordination and I would really like to avoid that happening again but it may be an
inevitability you know if we continue on the same track if we don't continue to push back
against that encroachment of centralized custody.
Yeah for sure so when you see like Grayscale buying up all the Bitcoins and PayPal buying
up all the Bitcoins and all these big companies now like even with Michael Saylor and Micro
Strategies like I'm still unsure about you know his true intentions or whether or not
he's going to turn into a Roger you know what I mean like I'm not sure if he's going to
want to exert his influence of his massive treasury and the same with like Barry from
Grayscale it kind of felt like he shifted from a true Bitcoiner to just like a profit
maximalist and wasn't really about the agenda of like why most of us got into Bitcoin in
the first place.
So do you think that like the detractors that are saying that Bitcoin's wealth is concentrating
to the top do you think they have a point or do you think that it's just misunderstanding
what's happening and it's still kind of healthy and you know you're one of the people fighting
to make sure that like you said it trends in a better direction and does get more decentralized
and distributed.
Yeah there's multiple aspects to that so there will always be people who are detractors with
regard to I guess it's the Gini coefficient you know the sort of distribution of wealth
in the system.
Yeah you rub the block and then it comes out the Bitcoin comes out.
That's something that it's silly to expect the distribution of wealth in Bitcoin to be
you know more distributed than it is in the rest of the world you know that has never
been a goal or a promise of Bitcoin so I don't know why people would project that as a goal
or something that it should be like.
The goal has been to be able to use the system yourself without anyone else you know screwing
with your money and being able to dictate how you use it.
So I think you know that while it's not great it's worse if all of those you know one percenters
end up using one or two custodians to keep all of their money in because that's when
it gets really concentrated.
If every billionaire or every multimillionaire who has a sizable portion of their portfolio
in Bitcoin was self-custodying then I would not be worried about that because it would
still be really really hard for them to all coordinate amongst themselves to make some
sort of adversarial change to the network but when all of the you know family offices
and sovereign wealth funds and other large institutions start putting all of their private
keys into a handful you know half a dozen or a dozen different custodial entities that's
when I start to get really worried because coordinating amongst a dozen entities is totally
feasible.
I forget what the list of you know organizations on the like Segwit2x signing thing was but
I think it was around that and so you know you want it to require coordination amongst
thousands or hundreds of thousands of entities because that's when it just completely breaks
down and that's where the real strength of the network comes out in being able to you
know coordinate consensus amongst a huge number of independent actors that probably don't
agree with each other on every other aspect of existence.
Yeah that's interesting for sure I never gave that too much thought before I've always
just thought more about the distribution of nodes and distribution of mining power not
so much the distribution of coins because bitcoin is not proof of stake so you can't
directly influence the protocol with your coins but in a game theory situation where
grayscale and cash app and PayPal kind of all get together and say well we want to we want
to do whatever change we want to make 30 million bitcoins instead of 21 million or whatever
even if Segwit2x proved that the miners don't have the power to change they're just rewarded
they're just like security guards for us and we pay them and it's the node operators that
have the power right now and the developers like sort of more than the businesses and
the miners but potentially in the future yeah this if this trends in the keeps trending
in the same direction as it is right now with all these family offices sovereign wealth
funds and all these huge people that don't come into bitcoin for the activists reasons
and for like the philosophical reasons why you came into bitcoin because you're trying
to as a technologist build tools to help empower people these people are just like I want a
million dollar bitcoin I just want money so if somebody co-opted the leadership there
at these corporations that are putting their treasury in allocation to bitcoin now they're
looking at this more from like a corporate share perspective like they've got to do what
makes their shares more valuable and if increasing the blocks to two megabytes makes their shares
more valuable and they can somehow co-opt a majority of not just miners and hash power
but bitcoin potentially they'd have another shot at doing that there's also that the economic
side right I mean the miners the nodes you know it's all related but also the economics
the actual ownership because remember what we've seen with bitcoin forks is that while
there would be a lot of posturing ahead of time about which fork is going to win it all
comes down to putting your money where your mouth is so you know there are usually futures
markets but even at the time of the fork the holders of last resort you know the ones who
detest the idea of whatever the other side of the protocol or the network fork will be
they will dump that for more of their the one that they prefer and you know that is
where the real battle of economics ends up being fought and then the result of that economic
battle is what then drives you know the miners to point their hash rate at one network or
another and really like the whole rest of the ecosystem ends up following in line behind
that so you know it would be interesting to see you know what would happen if you had
sort of you know institutional bitcoin fork off and then sort of activist cypherpunk self
sovereign bitcoin fight against that and maybe even lose the initial economic battle but
you know perhaps over the long term end up realizing more value because that's what
the rest of the world wants there's also the issue of what can these custodians legally
do so if you you look at what happened with like the bitcoin cash fork i think some different
custodians did different things some of them just said you know what we're not supporting
it at all like if you want to deal with it then you have to withdraw your coins and figure
out how to fork yourself others said okay we'll split and do a snapshot at the time
of the fork and allow you to withdraw our trade or whatever there were very very few
custodians that liquidated one side of the fork you know without asking permission i
think that greyscale did liquidate the bitcoin cash and just credited you with more bitcoin
i think there may have been one or two small exchanges that did the same thing but this
is actually where it would turn into more of a legal issue where i'm sure there were
some lawsuits but it would not at all surprise me if you know some fork like that was coming
you should expect that bitcoin holders or at least some of them would end up suing custodians
you know to say you know you do not have the legal right to dispose of any assets that
are you know like airdropped to me or whatever so that could be one legal hurdle at least
against the custodians that are holding other people's money but the you know the family
offices and sovereign wealth funds and and corporate treasuries of course that's their
money so they would be able to liquidate as they please is it possible to do something
like what matt carallo built with the fiber network and the better hash algorithm where
it addresses the centralization of hash power in the mining pools by giving more of the
voting power to the individual miners that are contributing to the hash and contributing
to the pool because for people don't understand back in 2011 it was easy to mine bitcoin everybody
was when satoshi released bitcoin there was a button in the program so it's like start
mining and you know just heat up your computer and mine you some bitcoins when i got involved
in 2011 i was mining with my gaming computer i was mining with my gpu and there's still
i think the option to mine right in bitcoin core was there or maybe it was still there
but it wasn't effective because they had released gpu mining software or something and i remember
i had a rack in my laundry room of gpus and i was mining bitcoin and we were not making
any bitcoin at the beginning and then we're like well this is too hard there's too much
hash power so there was people creating pools so the pool is like well listen everybody
that's mining with their graphics cards just contribute to our pool and then we'll mine
the bitcoin and get the 50 block reward and split it amongst proportionally whoever is
contributing hash power so it's like a co-op it's like a bitcoin co-op a mining co-op back
then that was that was like cool and it was still distributed but now it's gotten so like
commercialized that nvidia and all these companies are making chips for mining bitcoins and it's
over 50 percent of the hash power is in china and a lot of the pools are getting pretty
big and it's a lot more professional miners and and businesses and stuff like gold mining
so there's like a resistance to that in the bitcoin community like people want to encourage
more pools to start up and mining hash power to split and i'm mostly not i'm not telling
you this i'm trying to explain to the listener like what bringing us up to here what why
this is important some bitcoin core developers created this algorithm better hash which is
and like a layer zero for block propagation called fiber network which allows the individual
miner that's like the guy with his one asic computer two asic computers or whatever to
be able to have more direct control over like voting signaling and stuff like that to help
decentralize mining even though the pools would still be the big large percentage it
would be like more power back to the individual miners now that's not getting widely adopted
unfortunately either because it seems just like it's why would someone integrate that
like why would a pool integrate that it'd be like the stock market using ethereum for
putting all securities or something like why would they do that they have full control
over the stock market why do they want to put it on a public network you know it's not
in their incentive and not in their best option to give away their power that they have even
if they're not exercising it in terms of the mining pools but why do you think that that
hasn't gone and is there hope for do you think mining centralization to trend in the opposite
direction so it won't be as risky to have all this mining power in china and on all
the pools yeah so you know this has become an incredibly complex part of the ecosystem
at least on the protocol side of things what happened with better hash was that the idea
for that got implemented and improved and extended and actually is now a part of the
stratum to mining protocol and i believe that was essentially a collaboration between matt
carollo and trezor and their mining pool software so as far as i know you know they're probably
the only mining pool that is currently doing stratum v2 hopefully you know eventually more
pools will also implement stratum v2 what is stratum v2 so stratum is basically a protocol
that has been used for many years basically for a hasher a hashing machine to connect
to a mining pool and get little pieces of work from that mining pool hash it send the
work back and do that in a really efficient manner and so implementing better hash into
stratum v2 basically allows you know that hasher to create the template you know and
to decide you know how what the actual attributes of the block that is hashing are you know
push some more of the power away from the mining pool and into the edges now at a sort
of macro level with mining centralization i am fairly optimistic that china will not
be able to maintain its dominance indefinitely it's been able to maintain dominance for
a couple of reasons a because they have you know most of the silicon fabrication in their
country b because they have insanely cheap excess hydroelectric power during the wet
seasons and then during the dry seasons they have fairly cheap coal power so you know those
factors all combined together have resulted in a lot of the hashing equipment that gets
created in china simply staying in china we are seeing a variety of different efforts
to essentially explore excess renewable energy resources that are currently trapped and as
a result are essentially free or if not you know incredibly cheap because there is no
demand for them so you were seeing people do things like go out to oil drillers and
say hey you've got all this natural gas that you're just you're literally burning because
you have nothing you can do with it you don't have the like pipeline to send it somewhere
to actually sell it so how about we just put some equipment in your oil field use that
to generate electricity and mine bitcoin do you know offhand like what percentage of the
energy from oil mining is wasted in in that flaring process no i really don't but i'm
sure if you asked i think it's a steve barber you know he's one of the main guys doing that
i'm sure he would know all of the ins and outs of that aspect of the industry but we've
even seen stuff like um i know there was a a waste facility that was doing things like
you know burning old tires and and recycling the constituent parts of them and there are
some folks who have managed to integrate that uh generation of electricity from from like
these old waste tires into mining for bitcoin okay i found it five percent five percent
of the world's energy is wasted in flaring gas so bitcoin i think was estimated at 0.25
percent of the world's energy usage a couple of years ago just burning off natural gas
is five percent of the world's natural gas supplies just burnt that so i guess for the
people that think like oh the environmental impacts of bitcoin mining listen if you're
concerned about that you should be hopeful that bitcoiners are trying to capture that
wasted energy instead of having people create new energy just switch to that reusable energy
that's come like literally being burnt it's just being wasted there's nothing productive
400 million metric tons of co2 yeah go into the atmosphere same as 77 million cars just
by flaring that's crazy so we could at least help with uh moving bitcoin mining to those
so you're hopeful that those types of things will help bitcoin mining to be decentralized
even more away from concentration in one geographical area spread it out wherever there's mine uh
oil or tire burning tire fields or whatever ultimately it is it's not natural for excess
energy to only exist in one location in the globe so you know as bitcoin continues to
grow it'll decentralize it was so prevalent in china too was because of the natural uh
or not natural but the ghost cities that they had this wasted hydroelectric power so a lot
of people were opportunistic and created these bitcoin mining farms and centralized a lot
of the control there because it was free wasted energy so like even though a lot of mining
power is or a lot of electricity is used for proof of work it's a lot of it i'm pretty
sure a significant amount like almost the majority of it is like renewable or wasted
energy that would have otherwise just gone into the atmosphere anyways yeah i mean it
simply does not make economic sense to use energy for which there is really any demand
whatsoever because if there's demand for that energy then there are people who are going
to be willing to outbid you for it 74 percent of bitcoin mining powered with renewable energy
there you go environmentalists you don't have to worry well i mean maybe you can worry yourself
a little bit depending on what sources you read but you don't have to worry that bitcoin's
causing the end of humanity you were saying that you're hopeful because of that and i
kind of cut you off curious about the flaring process but was there something else you were
going to say too um well no it's just that you know energy is naturally going to be decentralized
and because miners are incentivized to find the excess energy then it's only natural that
they will consider to disperse around the globe and you know we're going to see other
nations sort of rise to prominence and having your significant mining operations so then
we're hopeful that things like better hash can help distribute mining influence back
to the individual why can't we do something like you guys could do this why why don't
you create better hodl and you go to like paypal and any of these funds and stuff like
that and pitch them on like the the philosophical reasons for encouraging some other high net
worths to take control of their keys in a way with casa that helps to distribute the
potential for governments or lobbyists or something in the future to use the concentration
of bitcoin wealth in a way that might negatively impact the current mission of bitcoin which
is kind of the same as your mission to like use technology to help what was it help empower
individuals yeah but you know it's ultimately an it's an incentives problem right is that
generally you know companies are motivated by profits and as a result discount the benefits
to their individual clients you know they're generally they're going to do what's best
for the company's income stream and one of the issues with trying to convince custodians
that are holding a lot of bitcoin to essentially stop doing that is that i think that bitcoin
is going to continue to become more and more of a financialized asset and we're going
to see more and more banking type activities happening around it and as a result the large
centralized custodians will become the new types of banks you know be you're already
seeing you know offering of lending for example so you know they're i think going to be looking
for ways to continue to make money off of you know holding the keys it's going to be
harder to make money off of not holding the keys and i think that's a risk that a lot
of them are willing to take but at some point it was square actually that
jack dorsey said this on an interview his philosophy is like this space is so nascent
and there's so so much of like a wide ocean of profits that are out there that they're
investing in things like btc pay server which they compete with with square not with square
cash app but with square cash app yeah so maybe the thought is there that there are
some ceos or or executives at these companies that are like him and that might see that
yeah it makes sense for the betterment of bitcoin in the long term this is a potential
attack vector and we saw with segway 2x that exactly what you just said happened the companies
wanted to put their interests over the interests of their users and they decided to push the
costs of being more efficient with their transactions onto the users and just say well let's just
double the block size instead of optimizing their usage of bitcoin so that was a lesson
that we learned and hopefully that they learned well some of them didn't learn some of them
just invested in ethereum and shitcoin icos and stuff and tried to build something else
but potentially there is a an avenue there that there's a case for trying to like pitch
this better hodl thing to to like the big companies and say listen just you're helping
to keep bitcoin decentralized which is in your best interest and if bitcoin splits because
of this a potential attack vector in the future that might it's not a risk right now but it
might be if things continue on this trend you should do your part right now you should
start thinking right now about how you can help decentralize the control of keys and
give the empowerment back to the individual and maybe you know maybe they might even start
like paying you guys to do that they might start like paying you to educate their high
net worth clients and because like we were saying earlier you were having a hard time
sometimes trying to explain to people like because they ask you where's my bitcoin when
it goes into casa can you explain that like what's the difference between bit.go and casa
like for someone who's not like into the technical stuff like you can't visualize like okay well
when i go to bit.go they got it in a vault somewhere where does it go when i put it in
casa well bit.go is a little bit more complicated now because they offer both services but actually
stepping back one second sort of like to the whole idea around various ceos helping protect
bitcoin or whatever there's actually a quote from mark andreson that i think about on a
regular basis where it was actually back in 2014 that he predicted that bitcoin would
outgrow its fringe libertarian politics that that really got it kickstarted he he basically
said he believed that as bitcoin became mainstream that you know mainstream thinking would sort
of engulf the operation of bitcoin and so that is something that i am still worried
about you know i don't necessarily i think you know sort of libertarian philosophy is
still a fairly fringe thing this is why i think it's so important for us to be on social
media to do podcasts to do various press things to continue to reinforce the ideology the
culture of your self-sovereignty and other important aspects of the bitcoin ethos because
if we aren't always pushing back against the mainstream then being subsumed by mainstream
ideology and all of the terrible things that comes from that is a real possibility so that's
something that you know i don't have any hard predictions one way or another other than
it's going to continue to be a battle for the foreseeable future but you know asking
about sort of the self-custody of you know multi-sig stuff so the thing about the way
that bitcoin actually works at a protocol level is is you have to understand that the bitcoin
themselves are entries on a ledger you know this ledger is the blockchain that's being
distributed you know around 100 000 nodes all over the world you know the ledger the
blockchain is what says you know this amount of bitcoin value belongs to this bitcoin address
and an address is just a human readable form of what is going on an even lower level which
is the bitcoin script and and so basically every time you send bitcoin to an address
what you're really doing is you're sending it to a you could even call it a smart contract
it is a bit of code that describes the spending conditions for what is required to be able
to to move that bitcoin to another address and there's a number of different ways that
you know you can describe the spending conditions you know bitcoin has its own programming language
it's very similar to fourth which is a fairly old school very simple programming language
and so a lot of people use a script that is just a single signature it says you know if
you can provide a single cryptographic signature that matches this public key then you're allowed
to spend the bitcoin but when you start going into multisig the scripts get a little bit
more complicated and so instead of just saying we need one signature that matches this one
public key instead you say well we need three signatures and here are five public keys and
if if you can match any three of those five public keys then you have you know met the
spending conditions to be able to spend this so you know the blockchain is keeping track
of of those spending conditions essentially and then it is up to you to actually provide
the signatures and you do that by manipulating private keys the private keys aren't on the
blockchain they have to be held by you and there's a million different ways to do that
because we're just talking about tiny amount of data you know you could keep it on a mobile
phone you could keep it on a computer you could keep it on one of these dedicated hardware
devices and so if you are doing for example what casa does where you have a three of five
multisig and you have four different devices that you're managing and then casa has one
offline cold storage key that it's managing then the question really becomes where are
these five different devices and what is required to access them and actually be able to use
that cryptographic material to create the signatures that are required you know that's
where the bitcoin is it is distributed across these five different devices and the way that
we try to get to an extreme level of security and robustness and redundancy that will protect
you against all types of different things not just attackers but also loss due to any
number of accidents or disasters or whatever is you know we put these keys on a diversity
of different devices which are different hardware different software you know it's not all casa
hardware all casa software because we don't even want casa to be a single point of failure
and then we distribute those you know we'll help the user distribute those you know give
them essentially advice on what we recommend we don't even want to know where they're putting
them because once again that could create some potential security issues and so you
know where does the bitcoin exist well it doesn't exist in any one place anymore and
that is what is so powerful wait you lost my bitcoin that's what's so powerful about
this technology like i am hard pressed to think of any asset that does not exist in
a single place and when you have an asset that doesn't exist in a single place then
there's no single place for an attacker to steal it from there's no single catastrophic
event that could happen that you know wipes that asset off the face of the earth you know
unless the entire earth of course you know gets hit by an asteroid or whatever maybe
you want to distribute your keys across mars and and the moon eventually but we'll worry
about that you know in a few decades you know what i thought would be really interesting
bury one of your casa devices inside of the foundation of a newly constructed building
two two of the casa devices in in the in the foundation of a newly constructed building
and that way it has to become worth more than the building to destroy the building to get
the bitcoin wouldn't that be the ultimate cold storage yeah that's uh you know that's
this kind of like a fancy version of the like kialara or cassatius coins or whatever but
you know the other thing though what what we like to do at casa is rather than just
like putting your seed phrase on a piece of metal and burying it we like the idea of having
a more flexible and you know user manageable experience where you know we have health check
functionality that's built in so you don't have to wonder anymore whether or not your
keys are still working like this was another fundamental problem especially with a lot
of og folks that were using things like paper wallets or just super cold storage is they
actually got into this issue that i have sometimes referred to it's kind of like schrodinger's
cat but it's like satoshi's cold storage and in that as long as you don't try to spend
your bitcoin it might still be there you might still have access to it but this can create
an issue where you're afraid to go try to touch your keys because you might find out
that you actually lost them a long time ago uh so you know this was you know making people
afraid how could that happen there's a million ways right you know any sort of corruption
i mean there's even ways to screw up you know loading your bitcoin from a paper wallet into
a piece of software that can essentially send all of your bitcoin into the ether you send
it to an address that you don't even have the private key to anymore yeah this was this
was a common issue with paper wallets where uh people would spend like a tiny amount out
of their paper wallet and the other 99 would go to a change address that that software
created and then they would shut down their their air gap computer and it the private
key for that change address would cease to exist no way this is why we have actual health
check uh we have health check functionality built into our app where you can actually
plug in the device and sign a cryptographic message using one of the standard bitcoin
protocol for message signing and basically show that you can still manipulate those keys
and you can do that without actually having to spend the bitcoin which is something that
i don't think you you see many other wallets supporting let me ask you something else going
back to that scary scenario because i want to be aware of this for when my friends and
are asking me like you know what should i use and stuff is that possible for like a
green address or or a treasure or a cold card or something like that where you got the seed
phrase backed up somewhere is it possible to somehow lose your bitcoin when like for
after two or three years later i didn't think it was so that's more difficult um what i
would actually recommend doing is i have a kasa blog post from a couple months ago it's
called the do's and don'ts of bitcoin key management which goes i literally listed every
every type of loss vector that we have ever seen before if you have the seed phrase that
you can deterministically generate all those private keys from then technically you can't
lose the keys to you know any addresses that are generated from that however it is possible
and as far as i know this is still theoretical i don't think we've seen malware that does
this but there are attacks that could cause you to send your bitcoin to a derivation path
that does exist within your seed phrase but that you don't know and so essentially it
sends all your money to an address that you technically still control but because you
don't know where it is and the sort of expansive space of all derivation paths is you know
like a million wallets million addresses deep inside your your wallet or something basically
yeah yeah so this would be a form of like a ransom attack where the attacker would not
be able to steal your bitcoin but they would be able to hide it from you they would essentially
have to ransom a sort of information exchange where you know they would tell you how to
spend the bitcoin but what they would probably do is they would construct an unsigned transaction
that sent a certain amount of the bitcoin to them and a certain amount back to you and
then say okay you can sign it and if you sign it then we're going to be splitting what's
there otherwise you cannot sign it and you burn everything oh my god okay so that's not
yet there but that's a theoretical attack that could happen with what though because
if you've got it would have to happen when you're setting up the wallet and generating
the seed phrase this attack would happen while you were constructing a transaction so it
would basically require some sort of malicious code in your wallet that you use to construct
the transaction and then once you broadcast that transaction and set the money most likely
what would happen is you would be sending money somewhere and the code in the wallet
would manipulate the change address of the rest of those funds to go back to your wallet
but would go to a weird derivation path and so why wouldn't they why wouldn't they just
make it so that it would go to their wallet because if you're you if you're using a hardware
device you have to verify you know if it's going to an external address the hardware
wallet will ask you to verify that so it would become very obvious if you saw a lot of your
funds leaving your wallet however hardware wallets generally do not ask you to verify
change addresses that are going back into the same wallet but because of this theoretical
attack you know some of these hardware device manufacturers have been changing their firmware
to look for things like you know weird derivation paths and warn you about that interesting who
discovered this I believe that these type of ransom attacks were originally brought
forth by a security researcher who goes by the charlatan and I believe he's a shift crypto
security researcher from Toronto like the pay case guys or shift crypto in Switzerland
the makers of the bit box hardware okay so but for most right now most people that are
like buying their first bitcoin say today or tomorrow and they're buying like 500 bucks
worth of Bitcoin we're not talking like dynastic wealth or anything like that just you know
someone wants to save up for a PlayStation 6 and you know maybe maybe a Tesla or something
in 2025 or something like that so they buy 500 bucks right now open it's going to go
to 5,000 you know like that type of a person they probably don't have to worry about this
type of attack for their 500 bucks on green address like blockstreams green wallet or or
a treasure right or would they I mean it's like I said it's a very fringe theoretical
attack that require it would require like some popular wallet software to be compromised
and I mean we have certainly seen wallet software compromised before just not in that specific
manner usually if wallet software gets compromised you know most wallet software is single signature
and will have direct access to the keys so the attacker would just literally take the
money rather than doing something more devious like this this is part of the problem right
with bitcoin security is that it just depends on how deep you want to go and for a lot of
people the really tough question is how deep do I need to go on my worries about these
edge case risks you know based upon the current level of value that I have and you know part
of that is always going to be a personal decision the easy way that I tell people to think about
it is take whatever the current value of your bitcoin holdings are multiply it by 10 and
then decide you know what do I think a reasonable level of precautions and security and redundancy
for that amount of value is and institute that now because as we know bitcoin can go
crazy during bull markets and you don't want to be caught unaware where now you have ten
times as much value and you're securing it with a level of security that is not appropriate
yeah that makes sense that's good I've never heard that before that's a great analogy trace
talked about it in a couple of times I've heard him talk about like a friend of his
that had bought like some bitcoin like in 2015 or something like that and it was like
at the time like a thousand bucks a bitcoin and this guy's a millionaire so he just didn't
really think too hard about it called him up in like 2018 or you know December 2017
or something when bitcoin hit 20k he's like so bitcoin I have is like worth like 200 grand
like how do I take it off my blockchain.info and put it on a real and it was gone because
I guess something somehow like he had gotten hacked or something or blockchain.info had
this weird bug where somebody got access to some of the coins I don't remember what exactly
happened but it's a great idea and I think I'll start adopting that it's like take what
you're buying now multiply it by 10 and think about like what would you do in that scenario
to protect your bitcoin because if you're really holding for long term and not just
like tricking yourself into thinking that you can hold for long terms you should think
about it as multiply by 10 I'm just starting to think about that myself actually I'm like
I should probably revisit my security a little bit if I should multiply everything by 10
so how did you go from when you were with your previous job I know I'm going all the
way back to the beginning here but just occurred to me to then like what was it about bitcoin
that got you excited instead of AI or like privacy VPN or Tor or like one of these other
technologies that could help you know with with people's liberty and freedom and stuff
what was it about bitcoin that that grabbed you.
It was you know it was both the philosophical aspect of you know what is money and who should
be able to define how money works combined with my computer science interests of well
money as an open source project is seems very interesting you know what if we could take
this abstract concept and allow anybody who wants to to essentially chime in and help
build what they believe the optimal version of money will be and so you know back then
this was just a very interesting experiment I think it took several years before there
was like enough venture capital coming into the space that I was able to actually leave
my career and and go full time into bitcoin but I definitely got sucked into it from a
tech perspective very quickly it was early 2014 was when I launched my fork of bitcoin
core and by fork I mean software fork not altcoin it was just bitcoin core with a bunch
of instrumentation added to it where I was trying to take some of the DevOps experience
that I had with distributed systems and and build some cool dashboards and and essentially
collect more metrics and expose more of the internal operations of what happens in a bitcoin
node and and that was a project that I think achieved its goals you know a number of bitcoin
developers over the years referenced Satoshi metrics when making arguments about you know
different changes to make to the software so it was definitely a hobby for a few years
and then you know once the mount gox bubble was over and we we kind of got over that that
was when I went full time you know 2015 2016 bear market was the beginning of of my career
and I was I was just you know focused on building and you know helping people better be able
to protect what they had I think a lot of us have been surprised by how quickly the
whole thing has grown even when I see stuff of you know people making these really what
seemed to be absurd or outrageous projections of what's going to happen to the space and
even though they seem to actually be becoming true it's still hard to believe you know how
quickly this all happened were you one of those people like a 2014-15 that was thinking
this could get the 10k or or were you just like no and you know I guess one of my more
popular tweets the one that I have pinned right now kind of gets to the heart of why
I made a significant investment and it was not because I thought that it was going to
be going up by orders of magnitude and value it was simply because I knew that fiat was
going to continue going down in value so I never saw it as a way to get rich I saw it
as a way to not get poor yeah bitcoin isn't a get rich quick scheme it's a don't get poor
slowly scheme I think you had another one too that was or maybe it wasn't you but somebody
had one that was bitcoin is a get rich quick scheme or dressed up in a something like technology
I can't remember that was a novel Ravikant tweet where you remember it you were saying
it's like a it's like a way to topple tyrants dressed up in a get rich quick scheme or something
yeah something like that I love that one too but okay so I actually was one of the people
that thought 10,000 was possible I used to think people saying a million was nuts yeah
I remember there was like a there was a really long you know one of those epic Bitcoin talk
threads where it was Peter something and he had his like a million dollar logarithmic regression
model or something you got broken years ago but you know now we see similar things like
stock to flow it is theoretically possible I mean I've said myself there's no there's
no ceiling on the Bitcoin price because there's no floor on the value of fiat
Preston Pish yesterday our last episode that I did I did with Preston Pish and he got me
excited like listen to him talk about Bitcoin I was getting those feelings back again of
like 2011 2012 days I'm he's talking about Bitcoin is gonna be like millions of dollars
a coin because fiat is gonna be worth it's not gonna be the world reserve currency anymore
and Bitcoin will like he's one of those guys that really believes that the new unit of
account is gonna be Bitcoin almost that hyper Bitcoin ization thing but not from a perspective
of like the world's gonna fall apart and it's gonna be anarchy it's more like the world
is just gonna need to transition to an asset that's trustless and can't be debased and
is apolitical and bitcoins the only thing that works on in a in a world of the internet
and it will be an exodus for balance sheets to get away from dollars and get on to something
like Bitcoin so he really does think it's gonna be pointless to even think about the
price of Bitcoin in dollar terms yeah so this is I guess what has been interesting to see
happen over the past decade is that the people who are saying stuff like that in 2010 were
lunatics because the only point zero zero zero you know one percent of the population
would dare believe such a thing but over the years you know as the the mind virus that
is Bitcoin as sound money continues to perpetuate and propagate amongst more and more people
and then eventually what's happening now is you know it's being propagated amongst more
and more reputable already wealthy people from mainstream and then they're gonna you
know start essentially perpetuating it amongst larger and larger circles with greater and
greater liquidity and deep pockets and whatever is that you know Satoshi Nakamoto's quote
will continue to ring true and that it might make sense to get some just in case it catches
on you know that is really like the flywheel of Bitcoin adoption which you know the flip
side of it is naive people look at this and they see a Ponzi scheme because they don't
understand how that all publicly traded assets work like this that you know the value of
most things is based upon you know what people believe it to be and so you know when when
you have narratives that can spread like a virus and get more people you know sucked
into the system and grow the network effect and the value goes up and and that's why we
see these you know bubble like waves of adoption that I do believe will continue to happen
for at least a few more cycles yeah man that would be nuts but I had a tweet this morning
I was just thinking I was writing in my journal and I was just trying to like thought popped
up to me I was like when has there ever been a time in history when so many philosophically
minded activists that are anarchists and libertarians and anti-authoritarian and skeptics of status
quo when in history has so many of them become wealthy and become the power class has that
ever happened in history like I was thinking back to like the American Revolution maybe
or or like the the Scottish War of Independence and like the 1300s yeah or explorers perhaps
you know the people who dared to go out where no one else dared but typically those people
are not philosophically minded about freedom and and and fighting oppression and empowering
people through technology like you like typically those people are just entrepreneurs like any
other market like the real estate bubble or tech stocks in the 90s or just the stock market
in general it's always people that get rich even entrepreneurs like wealthy tech entrepreneurs
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs they don't have a cohesive tribe mind about the power of freedom
and free speech and technology and democracy I guess capitalism like all these rules about
freedom right they've never gotten like rich from that before because they in value that
so much that they were just putting everything they had into this one thing that promoted
freedom and promoted liberty usually people get rich because of business activity and
maybe their their philosophical views don't match up at all and they're that creates wars
actually because it's like well I'm so rich now I control this power and territory I don't
believe what you believe your god is not right my god is better let's fight has there been
a time in history when cypher punks and stuff like people with that type of mentality have
become the 1% probably not at a large scale no I mean you know there's there I'm sure
that you know there are definitely you know one-offs but you know I think this is why
a lot of people say that they believe Bitcoin will be like the largest wealth transfer and
history it's certainly possible what do you think that looks like when the 1% are Bitcoiners
there are dystopian visions there are utopian visions the reality I'm sure will be somewhere
in between the biggest question that comes to mind for me is the obvious fact that no
one gives up power willingly and you know to what extremes will the current entities
in power do to try to retain their hold over that power will it succeed who is going to
get hurt I certainly don't believe that it will be a 100% peaceful transition I'm sure
that there will be you know death throes of the existing system that will cause harm people
even the remote possibility of that is all the more reason for people to prioritize their
operational security and privacy so that if we end up going down that road they don't
become a target yeah there's the dystopian world of the machine turns against the virus
that mind virus of Bitcoin that does threaten the operating system so they start prosecuting
you know they start going after make it illegal all that which you know Peter Schiff and those
guys would love to see that happen all these traditional economists that make their money
and there have been spending their entire lives thinking about money but not about Bitcoin
and they totally missed Bitcoin they keep missing it those people would love like Steve
Mnuchin and people like that would love to just be able to squash Bitcoin so yeah for
sure there's definitely like possibility of both ways happening it could it could happen
that enough people get elected into politics and Bitcoiners start to influence politicians
and you know lobbyists and everything best case scenario is that a lot of the establishment
folks end up becoming Bitcoin adopters and thus become incentivized not to try to kill
it and I think we're already at least partially on the way there I mean we just got then we
just get like one of our first congressmen or congresswomen is now a Bitcoin proponent
from Wyoming so you can see like the mind virus starting to spread within the political
establishment yeah Rand Paul actually accepted Bitcoin I think for his congressional run
a few years back and Ron Paul's been kind of like positive about Bitcoin for a few years
he runs his poll every every year about what would you rather have if you were forced to
hold it for 10 years cash bonds stock or Bitcoin and Bitcoin has been winning more and more
I think it was was it like Jared Polis in Colorado was one of the first to accept Bitcoin
for his political campaign back in like 2013 or 2014 and I remember I remember donating
to that I think that was worthwhile even though I don't want to think about how many Bitcoin
I donated to him well that is why you know that whole thing about spreading the virus
to the people in power so that it can then spread down to the plebeian class right like
the rest of us that don't have the power and don't have the power of manipulation and like
politicians really dedicate their lives to manipulating other people most of them some
of them are there for altruistic means like they really want to change things they really
want to serve but most of them are there to get rich and to control other people it seems
so that's why people like pomp are so valuable for Bitcoin like he speaks the language of
Wall Street and institutional investors and he's out there convincing billionaires that
Bitcoin could potentially replace the US dollar as the world reserve currency and telling
them showing them the benefits of like why they should get some and get off zero just
get a little bit because once they put 0.5 percent of their net worth in Bitcoin and
they see it go up to 10 percent of their net worth I mean they're gonna want to more favorably
write laws that protects Bitcoin and doesn't persecute Bitcoin so I think he's one of our
national Bitcoin treasures I used to be a bit skeptical of him but over the years I've
definitely grown to like pomp a lot more even though he's like says a lot of like cheesy
things on Twitter with rocket emojis and all this stuff it's just a good engagement but
when you listen to him speak he's good.
He's a growth hacker on social media for sure.
So going back again to something you said throughout a common thread through this conversation
I want to ask you about open source money right you said that was something that was
really intriguing to you and that's a lot of a lot of the cohort from the early days
was like motivated by just the simple fact that now there was a money that was open source
and decentralized and you also said you talked about the quote from Andreessen Horowitz and
how he thought that was going to outgrow the libertarian roots and you know it's going
to succumb to mainstream thinking and why you think it's so important that that activists
and Bitcoiners like true Bitcoiners go and do interviews with the regular mainstream
people so that they can be exposed and we can still influence the proper original like
activist mindset that Bitcoin was created for in the first case and the properties of
decentralization and censorship resistance and all that rather than just number go up.
So you know we've been seeing over the last couple of years a huge shift towards mainstream
investors Silicon Valley investors VCs all investing in DeFi and Ethereum and pushing
this narrative that open source money is Ethereum it's DeFi and Bitcoin is just slow to upgrade
and Bitcoin is they decided that they weren't going to upgrade like all these bullshit like
straw man arguments are just being pushed in the mainstream and I'm seeing people come
to me now just saying Bitcoin and Ethereum in the same sentence as if they're the same
thing but you're publicly on Twitter you're not adversarial you're just talking about
Bitcoin freedom and things that we can all agree on for the most part.
So one how do you control yourself online to not be toxic so I just have such a struggle
with that how do you control yourself to not go down that path of just trolling all these
people saying this stuff and two like what do you say to people coming to you that are
say wealthy like a hundred millionaires or something like that or even millionaires or
even just you know whatever friends and stuff that are like oh should I also buy some DeFi
Ethereum like that's the future of money right like that's where that's where everything's
going there right like what do you say to those people?
Well you know I don't have the time to waste arguing with people really I will I certainly
make points and you know on a weekly basis some DeFi smart contract is getting hacked
or flash attacked or drained that's what I generally stick to is like okay you know you
want secure self-sovereign money well you know these smart contracts that are still
being deployed on Ethereum are just Swiss cheese only degenerate gamblers are going
to be putting their money into these things and a lot of them are just straight up obvious
Ponzi schemes and yet it's some of these basically Ponzi schemes that are driving
a lot of the like on-chain activity with Ethereum it's hard to distinguish I think real value
like real long-term value versus flash in the pan stuff because you know Ethereum has
gone through a number of narrative changes but the two big price and adoption waves that
we've seen in Ethereum were both driven by speculation on other things that are being
built on Ethereum so of course we had the ICO burnt boom which was a wave of unregistered
securities many of which were also simply scams it was just like a white paper with
a veneer on top of like a website and some slick marketing and no real like technical
development I think something like 80 or 90 percent of those ended up being straight up
exit scams this is the free market at work is that a fool will be parted with their hard-earned
Bitcoin or their hard-earned Ethereum or whatever it may be you know there's plenty of scams
that happen on Bitcoin too they're just not facilitated usually in quite such elegant
and complex ways because it's harder to build those complex type of arrangements on Bitcoin
at the moment and then you know now we see DeFi and it's very similar to ICO where it's
get rich quick schemes and you know a lot of these are zero-sum games so what it really
amounts to is I think I had some tweets about this too that you know DeFi is a game for
sophisticated Ethereum users to extract value from unsophisticated Ethereum users that's
basically how I see it in its current incarnation of course there's a million reasons why it
could have more long-term potential and one of the tricky things about the financial space
in general is that to be quite honest a lot of finance even mainstream finance is sophisticated
forms of gambling and so it can be very difficult to extricate cheap degenerate gambling schemes
versus more interesting like long-term helpful for the economy type of gambling and I'm not
you know the financial expert so I try not to pontificate upon that I really stick more
to what I see as the like security and scalability problems but you know the freedom of any of
these networks is that you know people will have the opportunity to make bad choices and
lose their money I think that you know Bitcoin over the long term taking a more conservative
approach it will be it'll be like the you know the tortoise and the hare type of thing
you can argue about it all day long what about the people who say that Bitcoin is not upgrading
and it's boring and it's now all this new innovation is happening on Ethereum with DeFi
and dApps and whatever and optimistic roll-ups and these other like 18 different layer two
tokens that that are going on that they're using to say that we're gonna scale but Bitcoin
is just gonna stay at one megabyte that is this the the Silicon Valley mindset I think
is what gets more attracted to Ethereum because it's the build fast and break things type
of mindset and and those type of people may not care that all of these things on Ethereum
are breaking and people are losing money left and right because they see it as a sort of
cost of innovation what will come of that over the long term is anyone's you know anyone's
guess and that's why there's you know so much speculation going on but I think at the end
of the day people don't want their money to be exciting they want it to be you know secure
and available so the other issue I think with all of this is one of narratives and you know
every crypto protocol community has its own drive and need to do organic marketing which
is always you know forward-looking of these are the technical developments in the space
and so you know Ethereum has plenty of those and you know I think the vast majority of
them will end up coming to not they will be failed experiments but maybe some of them
will be successful you know the biggest looming issue I think is the fact that Ethereum is
basically planning on changing everything about itself over the next few years and you
can once again pontificate on how awesome this will be but what you don't hear much
people talking about is what a massive burden it will be on the existing infrastructure
providers to migrate between you know two totally different systems and you know how
feasible that will be but you know the timelines keep changing the estimates of what it will
be able to do seem to keep fluctuating but the one thing that seems to stay constant
is that you know it's always a few years away so now I think what we've seen with some of
the narratives is that in order to make it not seem like it's a few years away now we're
talking about like five different phases and the first four phases are basically useless
for normal users so it's just a weird thing to get like it's actually codified the Ponzi
rules like version one is just lock up your coins that's it just lock them up it's a weird
thing to get excited about but um yeah I mean you could argue that similar things have happened
with lightning network for example as you know some people are getting a little too
overeager and it's rarely the developers right the developers tend to be the most conservative
and understanding of how many hurdles there are between here and a like fully mainstream
usable type of protocol so this is just another aspect of these distributed networks where
the people who tend to get more uh hopium in their system and start spreading you know
new narratives can result in a wave of other people getting excited about stuff that's
actually not going to happen for quite a while if ever so I mean like yeah you look at there's
a lot of problems with ethereum like you said there's a lot of smart contract exploits and
flash loans and the fees are like $20 right now on in the middle of the day if you want
to swap a coin on ponzi swap or uniswap I mean if you want to swap a ponzi receipt for
ether usdc or something like that or stablecoin it's really expensive so it's kind of broke
in in that regard I mean botolik and those guys used to say that bitcoin was too expensive
at five cents a transaction and now it's ethereum is way more expensive than bitcoin and if
you want to do any kind of complex smart contract execution like a dy dx long or short or any
one of these like really complicated financial products like curve or whatever like any of
them it's like 50 bucks to do a transaction 25 minimum 50 I paid 300 dollars to do a short
an ethereum short on one of these fulcrum or something like that in the summer I was
messing around with it like I've never paid a fee on bitcoin over 100 bucks even when
Roger Ver was claiming at the height of the block wars or whatever the bitcoin wars that
he was paying 100 bucks a transaction I never paid that high I paid 300 bucks on ethereum
so it's hard for me because I'm like you I'm trying to be like the way that you looked
at bitcoin cash versus bitcoin and what is bitcoin right like I think it was you that
also said something that when people were calling for like the SEC to go after Roger
and stuff like that and wishing he was arrested and things it was like you were saying like
hey like we shouldn't be saying that because we're volunteers and libertarians and stuff
let's just let the free market sort this out I think it was kind of the message that you're
sending I try to think more like that now as well because I caught myself in that line
of thinking too like this guy is like literally telling people that bitcoin cash is bitcoin
so when they go to buy bitcoin they're actually buying bitcoin cash and he's tricking them
into thinking it's bitcoin like that's a fraudulent activity but there was all this debate over
whether or not that's fraudulent and and people then started to get pissed off saying let's
get him arrested let's sue him all this stuff and I was kind of caught up in that too but
then people like you were more being more reasonable about it and saying let the market
sort it out and like you decide what bitcoin is for yourself don't don't stress out about
what this guy thinks bitcoin is the market will sort it out bitcoin doesn't need our help even
though the crowd swarm immune system of bitcoin activates regardless of of anything it seems when
someone's attacking bitcoin whether it's roger ver or peter schiff or mark cuban or whatever
whatever rich guy of the month that missed bitcoin is trying to attack bitcoin so I try
to apply that logic now with ethereum and defy and it's really hard because the mission that you
came to the space with and the mission that so many of us came to the space with was like this
anarchist cypherpunk kind of interest in libertarianism all kind of with those philosophies
and like you said most of the people with the ethereum defy stuff they're they're like move
fast break things silicon valley web programmers things like that but now we're seeing more like
technologists start to be attracted by the war chests that they're they're building by selling
these pump and dump tokens to the market on coinbase like curve and all this stuff wi-fi
all this stuff is getting like pumped on these exchanges and they're developing these huge war
chests so they're attracting really smart thinkers and coders to start working on these layer two
things and develop these interesting protocols like automatic market making whatever the uniswap
the idea of uniswap i actually like that as a as a technology for money i think like something
like that is useful for the world obviously the way that the ethereum people chose to use it was
with ponzi schemes so so i that's not that useful for the world but the technology itself is pretty
interesting so it comes back to me that the incentives of the people behind bitcoin seem
to be unadulterated even still and the just the fact alone that it's encouraged by the leadership
in ethereum to make your own coin and sell it to people and then i mean a bunch of twitter
influencers like ethereum twitter influencers were caught in a pump and dump chat talking
about like dumping on people and like manipulating the market and all that and then when they got
called out for it in the summer most of these defy protocols like were defending them and they
were just saying oh they're good people they're good they're just having some fun it's like these
guys are actually like doing literal definition of pump and dump on uniswap and the ethos just
seems to be like it's an experiment and i find myself triggered when friends of mine are just
like not seeing that you know when they're not not seeing that it's kind of morally questionable
to do these types of token printings and then put vc back money in and fake liquidity and
buy them up and make them look like there's real users behind it and then sell it as if it's like
decentralized open source money for the world like the mission that you're driven by and that like
i'm driven by and even roger ver is driven by that mission even though he's totally wrong about what
bitcoin is that's his like unquestionably i know roger ver really thinks he's building
peer-to-peer cash like that's what he's trying to do he's also invested in tons of ico's and
promotes shit coins and is like a vc invested in z cash and all these things sure he wants to make
some money he was the first guy to buy a lamba with bitcoin he said he doesn't care which network
becomes peer-to-peer digital cash he doesn't care if it's bitcoin or bitcoin cash or dash or whatever
he said that after though he said it after he was like proven wrong with his big block argument he
started shifting at first he was like bitcoin jesus and you know he embraced that and kind of
laughed off oh i don't call myself that he was loved being bitcoin jesus he loved having bitcoin
dot com but then he got censored and his opinions weren't being respected because they're kind of
stupid technically i mean and he got pushed out like the the immune system pushed him out
and then he shifted his mentality it felt like towards like oh i don't care which one it is it
could be z cash it could be this it's it's a mix of it felt like to me anyway it was kind of genuine
and not genuine but it's not sustainable though it's like i don't you have to create real value
like you obviously you've talked about how you know you can you can raise some silicon valley
money you can pump your metrics you can make it look like something is highly valid valuable
and being used and i think the question there is like this is the the tried and true fake it till
you make it type of tactic i don't think it's possible for either of us to definitively say
whether that that is going to work in the long term i i mean i think that i as an entrepreneur
as a capitalist i believe you have to actually create real value and you know maybe it's possible
that you have something that has real value and you have to fake it to make it to get other people
to see that value but i'm certainly skeptical that you can create value with zero-sum games
i mean the the only value that i see there is if you're acting as the house and you're the one
you're taking you know skimming off the top yeah that was d5 version 1 that was what curve and
uniswap and all those companies you know don't call them protocols they're companies right like
they're companies that built dapps protocol dapps i guess but they're not decentralized protocols
like bitcoin is so these companies like curve and yearn and and and uniswap and all that they were
just taking fees and they were making money on the fees but the uh the apys were not attractive
enough to it was starting to bring in a lot of money because the vcs have deep pockets and
in the summer when they started printing tokens on top of those lending and fee generation events
that's when everything went nuts and that's when it sucked in all this capital um because people
are kind of looking at this you know 100 apy i can get 100 return by putting in this vault
and whatever and all that apy was generated from these shit coins that were they were printing
from nothing and dumping on the public on uh on coinbase so it was all fake value and we've seen
all the apys come down so you're totally right there like they didn't really create something
that was as valuable as the bubble sort of like d5 bubble valuations got to and a bunch of them
came way down in price already but as bitcoin's heating up we're at like 19 18 000 whatever it
is now what do you say to like bitcoiners that are listening to this that are probably going to
start getting triggered when we start seeing things like rip will go up 30 percent in a day again
for another year it seems like things are destined to the cycles destined to repeat again and like
people are just going to convince new coiners to buy shit coins and get wrecked again but there's
going to be a good time when when these altcoins are going up like crazy and it's going to dominate
our feeds and people are going to be rubbing it in our noses even though bitcoin is like winning
I think would become an interesting moral question of you know maybe you should buy
you know how ricardo always says uh buy a hundred dollars of every scam
you know maybe there is a philosophical argument for why you should buy small amounts of of shit
coins so that you can dump them at the top and you know continue continue to teach the newbies
their lesson you know it seems to me like that's going to happen either way and that as i've said
for a while every og crypto trader that i've come across only trades so that they can end up with
more bitcoin so like that's why i think that we're going to continue to see those type of
waves happen because you know the crypto traders will be trading bitcoin for a while and then
maybe it'll stall out and they'll get bored and so they'll cycle into something else because hey
this is a new opportunity for us to ride another wave and eventually liquidate it for yet more
bitcoin because they know that you know bitcoin is the scarce reserve asset and these other things
are potentially interesting short-term games that you can play to try to end up with more digital
gold yeah i mean i i don't do much trading myself because generally when i do trade i just
uh end up with less money than i would have had by holding so do you not get triggered by it though
like when you see ripple go up 30 yesterday what what were you thinking of course i was like any
day where like the the other coins go up more than bitcoin is not great but also if you just zoom out
on the btc to ripple chart you see like the massive decline and then yesterday was actually
was actually one little beep like you know just tiny little notch up so you know that's it's kind
of like our human monkey brain tendency you look at one number and you're like oh my god and it's
hard to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of yes uh you know people will get excited because
they see they're almost always only looking at the fiat denominated charts you say oh
my favorite shit coin went up by 50 but you've always got to go look at it against the bitcoin
chart because the bitcoin is the reserve assets and like i said like that's what the pros are
actually trying to accumulate it's actually like uh i've been seeing more of these crypto twitter
guys because i hang out with them on telegram and stuff i'm a kind of bitcoin maximalist that's
also a closet shitcoiner and i also want to know what i'm skeptical of so i'm participating in these
chat rooms and like trying to find out what the scaling solutions are and the technology behind
it i'm just trying to look like put myself in the shoes of the average person like the person that's
listening to my podcast they're probably getting inundated with pitches from shit coiners saying
all bitcoin is 18 grand it's a bull market but that's too expensive buy ripple it's only 50
cents and then they go and look and like see all this news about how it's with the banks and all
this crap and they're like oh i'm gonna get this one this could go up to 18 000 just like bitcoin
meanwhile they're not looking at the total supply and all this so i'm trying to like fully immerse
myself in the bubble and see like what our new entrance what are new corners being exposed to
because i'm not a technical guy i'm not a coder like you i don't have the time i mean i have the
extra time because i don't have something taking up all my time so some of these traders are
actually switching to thinking in terms of dollars now like for some reason it used to be like that
in 2014 15 16 part of 17 most of 17 everybody was measuring in sats like they were looking
at the price of their shit coins and sats and they were measuring their portfolio in bitcoin
but since 2019 tail end of 18 19 and now not everyone but a lot of the newer or the successful
altcoin traders are actually measuring their portfolios in dollars and well that just shows
they don't get it i mean why would you want more dollar why would you want more fiat i know yeah
that's why i started thinking about altcoins last year as a separate asset class but why bitcoin
is a separate act like bitcoin is a separate asset class and crypto is another separate asset
class they're not the same asset class and they shouldn't be talked about in the same sentences
with people are thinking about like how do i diversify whatever people that say ethereum and
bitcoin are just like it's like saying penny stocks and junk bonds like they're different
they're they're sure you can invest in penny stocks you can invest in corporate bonds you
can invest in sovereign bonds you can invest in forex currencies that doesn't mean you should get
some u.s treasuries and some junk rated like corporate bonds just in case the corporate
bond goes up 10x so i started thinking about it like that and it frustrates me when i see
people like real vision that were like proponents of bitcoin starting to say that stuff like
ethereum and bitcoin crypto and all this stuff it's like all these new wave of investors are now
going to get suckered into like losing their bitcoin because people don't really understand
like you said the activist principles the decentralization the center the the economic
hard money properties of bitcoin it makes it so different like you could make a logical argument
to say that bitcoin is in an asset class with things like monero or i don't know any of these
other coins that are trying to be money but most of these off coins are just trying to be pump and
dumps or trying to be like a stock like a digital stock like defy tokens are kind of like governance
represent representing governance like that's not what bitcoin is so anyways the story this is
turning into a therapy session i guess i just got to get a better mission a like you because
you've got a mission that you know and you're focused on that mission so sure you'll see you'll
see these things it'll trigger you a little bit but you're actively working towards helping people
use technology that you're creating to give them more power of control over their lives and i guess
you just got to like not you don't have the mind space right to to be responding to these trolls
that are trying to tell you to buy show and you know low low time preference you know if i see a
particularly egregious tweet that's you know predicting the toppling of bitcoin or whatever
then i'll i have a habit of archiving it and setting a calendar reminder at a far future date
just so that i can dunk on them in a few years nice yeah there's this ethereum guy spencer noon
that was really making these outrageous predictions in 2016 or 17 he ended up deleting
all of his stupid predictions that ethereum was going to flip in bitcoin by 2018 and all this
stuff and now he's got like probably triple the amount of followers as he did when he made those
stupid claims so these people even though we can dunk on them they're still gaining influence
because of these silicon valley types and these crypto exchanges they need for their bottom line
they need these shit coins to be traded with high volumes they need to part new coiners with with
from their bitcoin which kind of like makes me feel so pissed off that they're manipulating new
people in bitcoin to get rid of their bitcoin like they have bitcoin they're early they have the
hardest asset that's ever been created they have it and they're getting swindled by the freaking
companies that are building on bitcoin like they're trying to just make their stock price go up so
they're they're they're fooling people into trading away their their wealth for something that's
95 guaranteed to go down in value over the long time frame so what should i do jameson what should
i do about it from a like a voluntary uh principles standpoint you know you only have a duty to yourself
um you certainly don't have the moral authority to to try to step in and and you know force
anyone to do something or not do something you know for their own good but um you know the best
thing that you can do if you want to help those people is you you inform them you know you create
educational content and you know because this is a voluntary thing they may choose to ignore you
they may choose to decide that you know the people on the other side are making better arguments and
they'll you know they'll make those decisions and you know this is the the free market playing out
means that some people will get suckered and the important thing is that you don't get suckered
whether or not that type of thing over a long term and large scale will lead to other issues
that's hard to say right i mean we spoke very early on about the sort of like centralization
issues of of large amounts of bitcoin going to a few hands and you know one example that i would
point out is like look at eos they raised i think 140 000 bitcoin for their protocol who's using
that what have they built on that like what value have they actually created last i am aware block
dot one as a company i think is mainly you're using that treasury as as sort of like a venture
capital and just investing in a bunch of other stuff it could be because of my own filter bubble
that is preventing me from seeing it but i don't see a whole lot of people talking about all the
cool stuff you can do on eos these days yeah no definitely the like eos i'm trying to find it here
because ridolfo had tweeted recently public companies that that have treasury yeah it's
on the bitcoin treasury site yeah it's crazy the amount of coins that they control and tasos and
it's nuts that they have this huge supply of bitcoin and yeah i mean i'm in a i'm in a chat
with brandon from from block one brendan i mean and occasionally he chimes in and he talks about
the stupidest things like he like for a guy that controls that much bitcoin he's an idiot i'm sorry
like if he thinks he thinks the miners control bitcoin he still thinks that after after the fork
and everything he still thinks the miners control bitcoin and he's talking in the group about like
how eos is solving the problem and blockchain is going to solve the problems of bitcoin and
like they still don't get it they still didn't learn any lessons from the fork they still they
they still think that i don't know if they're just not paying attention or they're intellectually
being dishonest or they really believe that these things i don't really know brendan but um you know
i'm familiar with daniel larimer who you know he's a really interesting story right because
you know he i don't know how many people know this but he was the one who was the recipient of
satoshi's probably like most terse quote right is the like if i don't have i'm sorry i don't
if you don't get it or don't believe me i don't have time to convince you like he was telling
that to daniel larimer and it's been fascinating to watch daniel over the past decade or so
continue to not get it like he i've lost count of how many different projects daniel has done
and you know it's because he just he doesn't he has a different perspective on how these systems
should work and it seems like every couple of years he cycles through like starting over again
from scratch and basically trying to create the next bitcoin so you know maybe maybe now you know
you know eos has so much money that he'll give up trying to like start over from scratch but
it's just been an interesting thing to watch some people just aren't going to get it bite master 77
i think is his name on bitcoin talk yeah something like that and yeah that's hilarious it's like
satoshi the most famous like butt whooping of bitcoin talk that the legendary satoshi quote
is to daniel who ended up creating bit shares and then angel shares and steam it and block one
just shit coin after shit going ico after ico but the last thing let's let's kind of leave it at
this like people like daniel aramor who were there when satoshi was creating bitcoin you know they
were there there's a lot of them there's a lot of people in the bitcoin foundation in the early days
who most of them went on to create or support another coin and for another use case and mostly
for greed reasons like mostly because they they knew they could just raise millions of dollars
from people who wanted to get up on this greed train and you know get on the blockchain train
and it's uh it's unfortunate to see all these early people turning against bitcoin whether they
realize that they're turning against bitcoin by supporting other projects that kind of degrade
away or are trying to degrade away at the the use case of bitcoin they're they're holding bitcoin
still yeah that's that's i think one of the best things and um i forget if it was like nick carter
was made a point about that but you know it's like you know putting your money where your mouth is
and generally speaking most of these people are not going to disclose the fact that they're still
keeping most of their wealth in bitcoin because it exposes the truth for what it really is that
they know that that you know bitcoin is the solid reserve asset i mean this is why eos has a huge
bitcoin treasury and they didn't dump it all for more eos tokens yeah exactly because eos went down
like 90 percent in the bear market why wouldn't they sell their bitcoin to buy back their eos if
they realize if yeah and they i'm sure they did buy some of it but they they made the smart
financial decision to stop buying that useless eos asset and hold on to their bitcoin but that's not
just the insiders and the whales and the early adopters that still have tons of bitcoin there's
a problem with like kind of going back to what we talked about earlier with newer people coming in
that are whether they're investors or developers the investors are getting fooled by exchanges and
and crypto traders that are just promoting the get rich quick like with altcoin stuff and affiliate
links for exchanges they can make some money people are getting sucked into that it's unfortunate
but then there's also the people that are developers like young developers or even real
distributed systems developers or cryptographers are even coming in now and and they're being lured
away from bitcoin to the the the bright lights of consensus as massive treasury of like whatever
token they want to print today you know like there's lots of funding available for these people
and they're getting kind of this false sense of bitcoin is not evolving and there's no technical
developments on bitcoin to get excited about or that they can't contribute and make a difference
to the future of money which is bitcoin not these other coins so can you give like leave somebody
that might be that person that might be listening to this thinking like okay you're making good
arguments about the money side of things but i want to work on this stuff like you you came into
the space and you're like i want to build software that affects people's lives what would you say to
somebody that's in your shoes but now when there's defy and all these other things where they think
maybe that open source money is defy and maybe this will help people if i start a new company
for like micro loans for people in third world countries on ethereum or something like that
is there a good philosophical pitch you can give somebody that that like can show them that they
can still make an impact in bitcoin well so you know what we're really talking about here is
different platforms you know the goal or someone's goal may be to you know help people
by providing a new service obviously if they're an entrepreneur they want to find a way to help
people by providing a new service and somehow charging for it so the question comes down to
like what are you actually doing what are the properties of the service you're providing
and you know what technology will enable you to leverage those properties with the the least
amount of headache and i think that one of the reasons a lot of people jump to ethereum is
because ethereum has the most developer friendly like on-chain programming language when you're
bootstrapping a startup you're generally look looking at the fastest cheapest way to get a
minimum viable product off the ground and i think ethereum to its credit is quite good for that
unfortunately i think a lot of people don't look at the multi-year horizon and to see all of the
other rocky roadblocks along the way whether it's things like you know scaling fees the fact that
the entire system is going to be overhauled and it's not entirely clear what the ramifications
of you know how you're going to have to rewrite everything and change your infrastructure are so
i would approach it for more of a you know time preference issue like if you're low time preference
and you're building for the long term then it's worth doing more upfront building costs and do it
right the first time and build on a solid foundation rather than you know building your
castle on sand right yeah that makes sense do you follow the latest technological upgrades that are
happening i mean i'm not falling super close i was wondering if you could just kind of bring us up
quickly to speed on what is being developed on bitcoin like why it's not what they're saying it
is it's not just sitting at one megabytes and everybody's just sitting at home looking at the
number go up and like not working on making it better yeah so uh you know the people who say
nothing's happening on bitcoin are just simply misinformed because there's so much happening on
bitcoin that i can't keep track of at all so i prioritize of course keeping track of the low
level based protocol stuff and you know how we might integrate that into casa so for example
the taproot and snore aggregate signature stuff that will hopefully activate next year will be
very interesting to casa users because it will enable us to improve the privacy and scalability
and transaction fees for their multi-sig transactions it will also enable us to create
a much more complex spending script constructions without you know bloating the amount of data size
and thus transaction fees going into the blockchain there's a lot of interesting
possibilities down there i gave a whole talk about that at mit back at the beginning of the year
and some of the complexities and trade-offs there and then beyond even just the like base level
protocol stuff there are multiple uh second layer protocol things going on uh both with lightning
network liquid side chain rsk side chain and even um i don't know if you would call them third layer
stuff but there are you know people who are then building on top of lightning there's a i think
it's the rgb project that is looking to do a sort of lightning based tokens there's also
efforts to bring essentially defy to bitcoin i know there's the sovereign project that's that's
looking to do actual like trustless swapping of tokens and stuff on on bitcoin so i mean that
that's just a few things like i can't even keep track of all of the projects that are trying to
do stuff or even keep track of like all the stuff that's happening on lightning because lightning
is still a very you know fast moving project with a lot of developments continually happening there's
still a lot of challenges that need to be overcome there but it's by no means a dead or stalled
project it's a very vibrant ecosystem with a lot of people building on top of this platform
and you know maybe we just don't hype it up enough or maybe we don't have enough pump and dump
projects with people marketing it to get as much engagement as some of the you know ethereum defy
based stuff but it's it's kind of like i said i think it's the tortoise and the hare type of
game is that you know we're going to keep going forward making projects that prove themselves over
the long term rather than doing a bunch of flash in the pan stuff that people forget about in a
few years do you think there's any solid pitch that we can make for any cypher punks that are
actually working on ethereum stuff that why they should come over to bitcoin and kind of give up
the token printing ways and come back to decentralization um well there's certainly
still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve bitcoin privacy and you know there's
there's no shortage of projects that you could do to improve bitcoin privacy and kind of going
back to your earlier point about funding in general i'm i'm also optimistic that the funding
for bitcoin developers is continuing to improve we're seeing more and more uh independent entities
that are providing developer grants and so you know if you want to work on bitcoin privacy for
example the uh the human rights foundation has a a dedicated grant project that is doing nothing but
you're raising money to pay for developers to specifically improve bitcoin privacy so
there's plenty to work on awesome okay well thank you very much for the chat it's been great
i'm trying to think like what's the best way that someone could learn about
whether they're just starting with bitcoin or they're just kind of like found this podcast
because they they searched on apple podcasts like how to buy bitcoin or something like that
like what what what do they follow you on casa they go to casa or should they go to twitter or
what do you recommend for people to kind of engage with you know for real time updates from me my
twitter handle is l-o-p-p but if you want the fire hose of bitcoin educational resources you're
going to want to go to my site at bitcoin.page and there are somewhere around six or seven
hundred linked resources on that site alone just for bitcoin you know every aspect of the system so
whatever parts that interest you we've got something to keep you busy for several months
epic you got something super simple for all the people that are lazy and they're just like i just
want one button yeah yeah well so obviously you know the first section on bitcoin.page is the
getting started section and so that starts out with the simplest you know explain it like i'm
five stuff and then gets progressively more complex so you can go go until you feel like you
are basically out of your depth awesome well thanks very much lop i appreciate the conversation
glad we could finally chat hopefully we'll do another one my pleasure thanks for having me
all right thank you to Jameson and thank you to real exony who left me a review in germany
the german bitcoin scene is awesome das bitcoin okay he says 10 out of 10 would huddle again
hey that rhymes thanks for the review real exony and listen thank you to everybody who's been
sending in reviews every rating helps me keep going and if you if you got something out of
any of the episodes all i ask is for you just leave me a review and put me in your will uh
DM me on twitter at bradmillscan i'll get you in contact with the lawyer for the details for the
will if you haven't got your target amount of bitcoin yet check out Jameson's website
lopp.net and keep dollar cost averaging in until then next time i'm brad mills you're welcome