Thank you.
What do you do with the Bitcoin besides it just gather value?
Real estate developers in New York City, they're not buying the real estate because they want to live in it.
Those are people who at some point want to sell the assets out of profit.
People that use fiat currency as a store of value, we call them poor.
People that use fiat currency.
We call them poor.
There's a name for them.
We call them poor.
Okay.
The point is, if you have the superior asset, it's going up forever, Laura.
Forever, Laura.
Forever.
Right now it's about 106,143, Laura, as we kick it off on a Monday night Bitcoin.
From around the world and across the web, the conversation continues powered by Quantum Expeditions.
Bridging digital infrastructure, Bitcoin mining, tapping the strength of energy off gas and off grid.
It's a pretty exciting adventure.
We excited to get into the conversation tonight.
Jameson Lopp, the OG, is with us tonight, Angie.
I'm excited to get into this.
It's going to be a good one.
We're going to find out about quantum computing, the threats surrounding it, and what can we as miners do to help support Jameson and the team over there?
So I'm excited to get into it.
Tweet it out.
Let folks know we are live on a Monday night Bitcoin.
Welcome into it, Ange.
I'll let you introduce our friend, our special guest on the evening, and our CEO and our panel around the room.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
I'm very excited to have Jameson here with us.
Maddie, Doug, Maddie, Doug, and Maddie.
You know, always great to be here with all of you.
But, you know, Jameson, I have followed you for a while, and Maddie met you at the conference not too long ago.
And we'd love to welcome you to the room.
And if you could tell us about yourself and, I guess, what you're doing with CASA, that would be a great start.
Hi there.
Is my setup working?
Yeah, you sound good.
It sure is.
You sound really good.
All right, great.
You never know.
You're running things through Linux and, you know, combined with X not being the most stable platform.
Sometimes things get kind of weird.
But yeah, what am I doing?
In a sense, I'm doing the same thing I've been doing for over a decade now, which is really focusing on self-custody, trying to make the ability for the average person to actually be able to take advantage of Bitcoin's great properties just a little bit easier.
And that really comes down to being able to operate in a sovereign fashion, which means being able to use Bitcoin as a permissionless asset to be able to hold your own keys to not have to trust any other human to do anything because you're just interacting with the protocol directly.
So this is something that Bitcoin has always had the promise of being your own bank, but what you find is that most people are just not ready for the level of responsibility and all of the technical nuances that you tend to need to have if you're putting a substantial portion of your net worth into this newfangled asset and you want to be able to sleep well at night.
So I would say that's like the primary value add of what we're really selling at Kasa.
It is the ability to get you into an architecture that has been well vetted by myself, by a team of experts that are constantly working with quite a few clients that are high net worth and really having the sum aggregate of decades of experience that we have put together from working with people for so long.
And seeing all of the crazy edge cases so that we can then build our software build our solutions around that and make it so that people can just follow the best practices that we've built into the software so that they can be confident that they're not going to have one random thing go wrong that they didn't envision and that lead to a catastrophic loss, which is one of the worst things that can happen in this environment.
It really is the great trade off you know great power comes with great responsibility and we want people to feel confident that they can take on that responsibility and empower themselves.
I know Marty Greenspan was really excited when he met you in Prague and he was really fired up up tonight.
I know I was excited to run into you in Vegas. So I was trying hard not the fanboy, but I'm going to pass the mic to Mr. Greenspan. I know he's up early.
So while he still has time to put together a cohesive thought, I'm gonna let him get in some of his questions and then Doug, I'll turn it over to you. I know you've got some questions as well for James.
Yeah, I appreciate it now 4am here in Israel. I couldn't sleep honestly. I'm very excited about this conversation and obviously where technology as a whole is going right now. I can't stop thinking about, you know, quantum computers coming the way that AI, first of all, is basically 10x everybody's productivity.
And I know that quantum is going to 100x the computer's productivity. But obviously that comes with some very great concerns about what's going to happen with Bitcoin and how are we going to ensure security.
We all grew up on Andreas Antonopoulos' videos. Hey, we'll deal with the problem when it gets here.
Well, from everything I'm seeing, it's here. It's right at our doorstep right now.
So I'd love to hear from yourself a bit about what's being done, what we can do to ensure that Bitcoin remains the safest and most sound store of digital wealth in the world.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot to unpack there. We had a whole conference about it a few months ago in San Francisco just to try to get a better handle around both the problem space and the solution.
And it's tricky because even within Bitcoin, not many of us are cryptographers. You have to go really, really, really low down the development stack to find people who actually understand cryptography within software engineering in general.
You know, we're all standing upon the shoulders of giants. And I'm even though people sometimes refer to me as a Bitcoin core developer or contributor.
I only have very, very trivial commits and code changes and documentation changes to Bitcoin core itself, mostly things that I have run into while developing my own fork of Bitcoin core that I've been maintaining for about a decade.
That's it's really just for like statistics and metrics purposes. But because we're not cryptographers and especially we're not like quantum physicists, there are very few people in the Bitcoin technical space who can really talk about what is the quantum threat.
So try to quantify it because even within the ecosystem of people who are working on quantum computers, there's a lot of hand waviness. There's a number of different organizations out there that are taking a variety of different approaches.
And there's so many unknowns, both on the quantum physics level, on the algorithmic level of the various algorithms that could theoretically be used by a potentially strong enough quantum computer to crack some of these cryptographic algorithms that are fundamental to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies.
And so like the just the amalgamation of all of the unknowns, then when pitted against the fact that Bitcoin itself is very, very difficult to change, it has created a real morass.
And so that's why I started talking about this over a year ago, because that's all that we can really do when it comes to trying to improve Bitcoin or when it comes to trying to defend Bitcoin against an ever evolving threat environment.
And it's just getting that conversation rolling to to talk about the potential things that could go wrong.
And then what are the tools that are available to us?
I think this is going to be a multi multi year conversation.
And the reason why I got it started off recently is because I expect it will probably take four or five, possibly even more years than that to come to a consensus to do something about it.
And so we're trying to work backwards from how long would it take to potentially do a consensus upgrade and potentially a mass migration of funds versus how long do we actually have before this becomes a realistic threat?
And so you've got optimistic and pessimistic scenarios there. I'm still I wouldn't be talking about it if I wasn't optimistic that there's a decent window of opportunity for us to get ahead of it.
And so, you know, I don't think that it's going to be the end of the world in the next few years. I'm optimistic we have a decade.
But even that, I think, is starting to push it just given how difficult it is to have these consensus related conversations and get things rolled out the entire ecosystem.
I want to bring Doug, Doug Hardwick and CEO from Quantum Expeditions. They sponsor the spaces here Monday Night Bitcoin.
Doug, I'm sure as a miner, you probably got lots of questions. How can we support Jameson and what he's doing there?
And let me just bring you into this conversation, Doug, and I'll talk to the mic and bring you in.
Yeah. No, thank you very much, Jameson. It's a pleasure and honor to have you here tonight.
You know, here at Quantum Expeditions, we're building an off grid operation and it's powered by treated natural gas.
And our goal is to take the energy that others waste and turn it into productive Bitcoin hash power.
And so what we're building is more cleaner, more efficient and represents our own version of freedom, but freedom from the grid, as well as, you know, the Bitcoin thesis.
And you've always said from what I could tell is running your own node is kind of essential for sovereignty and network health.
But from your view, how do miners best balance between full node validation and like a raw hash rate production?
Well, I mean, those two things are fairly separate at this point.
And there's many different types of sovereignty within Bitcoin, right?
Most people, I think, look at it from the self custody perspective of like who has the keys, who has the control over being able to manipulate the ledger, so to speak.
You can run nodes, you know, with or without having keys associated with them.
The strongest form of self sovereignty, I think, if you're going kind of full sovereign Bitcoin stack is, of course, you hold your own keys, preferably offline, only use them with dedicated key management devices when you're signing.
And then have a watch only type of software wallet where it only has the public keys that are loaded onto it, onto whatever your internet connected devices, whether it's your laptop, your desktop, your mobile phone, and have that pointed to a node that you're operating yourself.
And that second part that hooking your wallet up to a node that you're operating yourself, that gives you the level of sovereignty in the sense that you know that you're not being defrauded.
You know that you have the accurate up to date version of the Bitcoin blockchain and you know that the money that your wallet is telling you you have is the same money that everyone else in the world, or at least everyone who is running a node connected to the Bitcoin network is going to agree with that.
So I think that, you know, that gets to a sort of level of theoretical esoteric technical issues around sovereignty that a lot of people don't really care about because obviously you can just run software that points to random nodes and check a bunch of random nodes and be fairly sure that no one is lying to you.
But this is also a fundamental part of what you might call Bitcoin governance itself, right?
And there from time to time are contentious issues and debates around the very nature of Bitcoin and what it should be and how we should or should not change it.
And so, you know, using your Bitcoin node as a quote unquote economic node and having that enforce rules to the network is another way of sort of projecting your sovereignty.
This starts getting really deep down the rabbit hole, though, where people can get very confused and think that this is sort of a democratic process where you're voting.
But, you know, this is pure unadulterated crypto anarchy.
And so it's not quite the same thing, but it is the best way to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.
I hope that answers your question, Doug.
We like a bit of anarchy, so that's good.
I just wanted to, yeah, ask people to share the room out.
This is going to be a great conversation.
And again, we're very, very honoured to have you here.
I just wanted to go to something, Jamis, and just a tweet that you had, or sorry, we're not allowed to say tweet anymore, a post that you had made.
And it's something that I often think about, which maybe that's not a good thing.
But you wrote, decide, a quote, decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.
And I often sort of think about and ask people, what three things would you like to be remembered, I guess three words, remembered by, or, you know, it doesn't have to be after you've gone, or when people think of you.
And I've asked people that for, I don't know, 20 or more years.
I know I'm only 21.
I started talking when I was one.
But I always say, kind, funny, and thoughtful.
They're the three words that I would like people to think of when they think of me.
So I'm just wondering, do you have the three words, or specifically to the post that you shared, decide what you would like your obituary to say?
I think I would mostly prefer to be known as, you know, someone who was successful in spreading the word of sovereignty, especially, you know, sovereignty through software and cryptography.
And this is kind of the, I consider it an extension of the cypherpunk movement.
You can sort of wax philosophical about what that means and whether or not we're even really doing a very good job of upholding cypherpunk ideals because, you know, privacy on Bitcoin is not as great as it could be.
But I do like to think that the original cypherpunks, and some of them are still around.
I don't, unfortunately, consider myself OG enough to be an original cypherpunk.
I didn't fight in the first iteration of the crypto wars because I was still a young child.
But, you know, I think that we're well into the second iteration of the crypto wars now and the crypto wars are probably never going to end because this is going to be a never ending struggle.
Of basically the powers that be versus the individual.
And that is, that is really what I decided to dedicate myself to when, when I left my, my fiat mining job a bit over a decade ago, it wasn't to work on Bitcoin full time.
I mean, technically it was, but I decided at that point that I wanted anything that I did in the future to, you know, be meaningful for, for me from a philosophical perspective.
And so I decided that really my mission was to use my powers as a technologist to empower individuals in whatever way that might be.
And it just so happens that your Bitcoin and related protocols that are based upon cryptography and math, I believe, give the individual this asymmetric, asymmetric defensive capability.
That is, it's amazingly powerful, but we haven't done a great job, I think on the UX side and on the scalability side and even on the privacy side to really bring the full potential of these technologies into people's hands.
And Jameson, I love that you're, you're very humble.
Thank you.
You're very modest.
You know, he, he says he's, he's not a cipher, but, but I think you have enough OG cred.
I got into the space in 2017.
You were one of the first voices, uh, that I remember way back in the day, you, I think I had like a hundred some odd thousand followers back then.
And, uh, your voice was one of those that, that I listened to.
And another one of those voices, Mr. Greenspan alluded to earlier was obviously Andreas Antonopoulos.
I want to play a little clip from Andreas and get your comments after this, after what he said, this is like some like seven years ago, but I think it's rather relevant, especially in the light of the quantum conversation we've been having.
Here's what Andreas had to say.
So one of the interesting things that happens is we will know when quantum computing exists, when Satoshi's coins move.
So Jameson, what happens when Satoshi's coins move, what does that do to the market?
What does that do to price?
And what does that do to Bitcoin overall in general?
Would you say?
Yeah.
Uh, I mean, obviously I agree with Andreas at least, uh, theoretically, but I personally hope that that never happens, uh, for one of two reasons or in, in one of two different ways.
Right.
Uh, I think that if that does happen, then there's going to be massive echo.
There's going to be massive echoing economic volatility.
And the real question becomes, you know, can Bitcoin weather that storm?
Um, there will always be some people who take the mindset of, you know, one BTC equals one BTC and the fiat exchange rate is irrelevant.
And that of course is true to an extent, but the, the flip side of that is that we still run on the dollar standard.
And I mean, even, even pretty much every company in the Bitcoin space runs on a dollar standard.
And what, what I mean by that is the vast majority of our, uh, receivables come in through fiat rails and the vast majority of our, uh, invoices that we pay go through fiat.
It is not a pure, uh, circular Bitcoin economy yet.
And I would, I would go so far as to say that, you know, if, if everybody or every, you know, Bitcoin companies, um, fiat payments dried up, uh, because the price of Bitcoin crashed enough for a long enough period of time, it would be very bad for the entire industry.
So, you know, that's what I kind of worry about from an existential crisis perspective.
If we do nothing and a cryptographically relevant quantum computer comes along, I think everyone agrees that any exposed Bitcoin is going to get scooped up.
And, and basically, you know, quantum mind, if you want to call it that, uh, you could call it theft.
You could call it recovery.
It, it doesn't really matter.
I think how you spin it, but whatever entity wins this quantum computing race.
And it is basically like a space race.
It's primarily going on between the United States and China right now.
Um, whoever wins that is going to see this as a massive bounty.
And if they're able to scoop up tens or hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, I don't think they're just going to hodl all of it in perpetuity.
I don't think they're going to become like the next Michael sailor.
I think they're going to dump a decent amount of it.
And even if they don't, it's going to cause massive panic and the, the game theoretical, uh, logical thing for, I think most players in the space to do would be to exit Bitcoin to, to the state relative safety of the dollar.
If they felt like there was going to be a massive economic crash and, and corrections.
So, uh, that's why I have a BIP, a very controversial BIP, but, uh, there, there are reasons why I believe that any rational actor with large holdings in this ecosystem who believes that a quantum threat is on the horizon would prefer to incentivize everyone to upgrade their Bitcoin locking scripts to be safe against the quantum threat.
And then potentially to freeze or burn the coins that don't get migrated in time.
And so of course that is violating what many would say is a fundamental aspect of Bitcoin.
But my counterpoint is that, you know, if we go down this road and the scenario plays out, then the fundamental aspect of Bitcoin is going to get violated one way or another around the, like, not your key is not your coins, uh, perspective.
So, Doug, uh, I think you had a question you wanted to, um, to ask, but, uh, Jameson, thank you so much for that answer.
That's, um, yeah, spot on.
Yeah.
I, that, uh, your answer kind of, uh, goes to our mantra quantum expeditions.
Stay safe.
Number one, then stack sats and hold.
Um, I, I really liked that.
So one of the things that, uh, uh, I will, in my opinion, we'll see what you think, but, uh, do you see Bitcoin miners as more than just a network participant, but like almost like guardians of freedom and energy independence in our digital age?
Okay.
Mining is a fascinating aspect of the ecosystem that I wish I could say I had deeper knowledge of.
I mean, I've played around with it.
Um, I mind on test net three for a summer, like 10 years ago.
And so I became a test net whale, uh, and I'm generally known for, you know, giving out lots and lots of test net coins, which, uh, don't really have any value, but they're, they're very helpful for developers so that we don't have to burn real Bitcoin.
Uh, if we're screwing up and, uh, make a mistake when we're writing wallet or other Bitcoin scripting software.
Um,
Miners can be as ideological or as unbiased and neutral as they want.
Right.
Um, it's choose your own adventure.
Um, it's choose your own adventure.
I think there's a lot of miners out there who they really just look at Bitcoin as a money printer.
Um, as long as they're following the rules of the network, then they know the rules and the game theory around the mining aspects of the ecosystem.
So, you know, you, you guys can focus on things like your, your cost of energy, you know, seeking out, uh, low demand or stranded energy, uh, figuring out ways of making your has, hashing machines, more energy efficient, uh, monitoring them, maintaining them.
It, it can definitely be treated basically as a plumbing job, right?
You know, more like a glorified electrician or power management job.
And then around that, you know, you could also build a lot of interesting financial products.
I think the, the mining ecosystem from a pure financial play perspective is only really getting started.
I think there's a lot more room for people to develop new financial products around hash rates, uh, derivatives, um, power contracts.
I think that, you know, mining is going to revolutionize a number of different aspects outside of Bitcoin itself.
I think we've already seen that also happening just for like from the AI perspective, right?
You've seen a number of miners pivot a bit into AI, and we find that a lot of the innovation and learnings that miners have had over the past decade as they've, they've scaled up from hobbyists running in garages to running at massive data centers or co-locating next to various renewable or stranded energy resources.
They've learned a lot just about power in general and power grids themselves are being reshaped around some of this.
And now a lot of those learnings are being able to be put into use for AI because it turns out AI is also a massive energy hog.
And so I think it's just fascinating how Bitcoin from a variety of different perspectives is changing a variety of different industries.
It's just fascinating to watch and it's, it's accelerating too quickly.
I can't even keep up with everything that's happening these days.
If I could jump in real quick.
I love that answer.
So I, when it comes to miners pivoting to AI, I think what we're going to see is that the big AI or the big mining companies, because we have to be more efficient with our energy, more efficient with our infrastructure.
And more efficient with our CapEx.
And so with that in mind, I think that long run, the miners are going to be bigger money makers than the pure AI companies.
And so we'll, we'll, we'll see how that plays out, but that's, it's funny you bring that up.
So let me ask you, um, from a miner standpoint, you think our normal ordinals and inscriptions have changed the fee dynamics.
And you know what, what you're feeling about adding, you know, uh, these ordinals to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Um, I think they've changed the fee dynamics for short periods of time, but, uh, unfortunately we have yet to really land upon something that seems to generate sustained high demand.
I, I, I, as far as I can tell what these, uh, ordinals, inscriptions, whatever you want to call them, you know, putting the arbitrary data, JPEGs, art, whatever, uh, into the Bitcoin blockchain.
It seems to have primarily come in as a, like a, a bidder of last resort for block space.
And, and the basic result of that is that even though we're, we're, we're at close to almost no demand for block space lately.
And that's why the fee rates actually went even lower than their longstanding default of one Satoshi per virtual bite, uh, over the past few months.
Um, now because of these other uses, it's very rare to see a block that's less than a hundred percent full because now people are going to say, okay, I'm going to just going to fill it up with this other stuff.
Uh, which is, I think many people would agree, arguably low value, especially now that a lot of the sort of NFT, um, hype fell off lately, but apparently it's, it's high enough value that people are at least willing to pay, you know, a few cents, uh, to, to get their inscriptions.
And, and, you know, I don't love it.
I don't think that it's, um, it's not great for long-term demand.
Like I want to see higher levels of higher value demand for block space.
demand for block space.
So I guess it's, it's good that we have some like non-zero demand for block space and we have that level, but I want a 10 exit.
I want a hundred exit.
You know, you're a minor, you're obviously looking out at the longterm of saying, okay.
Uh, you know, the, the supply, uh, emission keeps getting cut in half every four years.
And we're, we're not seeing the commensurate sustained, uh, demand and offset happening from the fee perspective.
So that is one of the reasons why I invest in other companies and protocols and stuff that are trying to build layer twos and other things on top of Bitcoin.
Because as, as a, an angel investor or VC or whatever you want to call me, obviously I expect that the vast majority of those experiments are going to fail.
But I want us to keep going until we can at least get a handful that, uh, have sufficient value accrual and thus demand, uh, creation for block space that they're actually competing with each other.
And so I would say, you know, that's, that's what I don't like about the current environment is that the, uh, the inscribers are not really competing with each other very much.
You know, there's a lot of competition around the having block and other like special block heights where people are launching stuff, but that, that is only creating short periods of high demand.
I want long-term sustained demand and that's why I think we need even more experimentation of people, people building other use cases on top of Bitcoin so that hopefully we can get some real competition in here.
That's what it's all about, man, competition.
I'm just going to reset the room really quick.
Here we are at the bottom of the hour, 30 past, uh, on a Monday night Bitcoin with the OG Jameson Lopp.
He's a founder, engineer, security expert, privacy advocate.
He's also the co-founder and CTO from Casa.
We're talking privacy.
We're talking quantum computing on a Monday night Bitcoin.
The room let folks know that we are here.
Oh man.
I, I see an OG in the room.
Speaking of an OG, Daniel burr, CSU wildcat.
This guy's an OG, uh, in, in the room.
Uh, you probably know him.
You, uh, probably go way back with, with him, Jameson.
But let me just ask you, since you've been talking about, about privacy, what are the top three mistakes you still see new entrants make in custody?
And how can, how can folks minimize, even like from a mining standpoint or even from an institutional standpoint, how can they integrate safely, you know, Bitcoin treasury into their capital?
And what are some of those big mistakes that you see people making that you wish they wouldn't make?
Well, I mean, the biggest mistake, especially at the institutional level is everybody just the giving their coins to a trusted third party.
And I understand from a regulatory perspective, there are certain, uh, asset and funds managers that are like legally required to use a qualified custodian.
But, uh, especially for like the treasury companies, I don't believe they actually have that requirement because the coins technically belong to them.
But I, I understand that even within an organization, you know, taking self custody is a big responsibility.
Um, you, you have to put in a decent amount of, of time and thought, uh, if you're going to set up a treasury at an organization, you have to think through the architecture and the game theory, make sure there's no single points of failure, make sure that you're safe against not only external attackers, but internal attackers.
And, uh, and, uh, and even mistakes.
I mean, I think there was a good example, I believe it was fortress trust, or maybe it was prime trust.
One of those entities, um, they basically, they shot themselves in the foot, right?
They, they had this, uh, multi-sig distributed backup system.
And then apparently they migrated over to a new system of custody and didn't realize they were still sending funds to the old system until they got a really big withdrawal request.
And then they tried to find the keys and realize that, uh, they had not done a good job, um, from an operational perspective of handling employee turnover and, uh, you know, rotating the ownership of keys as employees, uh, came in and out of the company.
So once again, uh, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, but, um, the convenience of using these qualified custodians is trusted third parties.
It's, um, on one hand, it's the, you know, nobody got fired for buying IBM problem.
Um, you know, everybody wants to do the safe thing that everybody else is doing because it doesn't stand out from the crowd.
And if anything goes wrong, you can point fingers and say, well, everybody else was doing it.
Um, but especially when I look at stuff like the ETFs and, uh, you know, the, the overwhelming majority of the ETFs all using Coinbase.
Uh, I just, I, it makes me nervous.
Right.
Yeah.
It makes me, it makes me see.
How many times have we seen Brian's product go down and lock up?
I mean.
Yeah.
And it's not, it's not that, uh, Coinbase is bad.
I mean, they've got a pretty good track record, at least with their own cold storage.
Um, they have bad track records and other aspects.
Like they had been leaking Bitcoin like a sieve, uh, for quite a while, um, with a lot of their individual customers getting, uh, spearfished and social engineered.
And it took them a number of months to figure out that they actually had a internal, uh, attacker, essentially, uh, you know, a bunch of their like, uh, support desk associates were getting bribed overseas and handing over a lot of personal identifiable information that was being used to target customers and social engineer them.
Um, but, um, it's just, you know, you don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket.
And so it's, it's creating fragility and systemic risk for the entire ecosystem, uh, to have so much Bitcoin in one place, regardless of what attackers you might be worried about.
Um, uh, it's, it's also just, it's the, it's, it's human nature.
And that's one thing that I feel like I've been fighting against for the past 10 years is human nature, which is the, the general, the general human decision making of using convenience at the expense of almost everything else.
I think that's something that has gotten, you know, civilization into trouble in a, a variety of different ways.
And it may be a sort of ebb and a flow, uh, that we are doomed to repeat in perpetuity, but, um, somebody has to fight against the cycle.
Um, I think that getting people to be comfortable with taking on this level of responsibility may in fact be like a multi-generational challenge.
And that's just due to how we have evolved our civilization for all of human history.
And that is through, you know, specialization of tasks.
And, and so this is what has allowed our entire economy, our entire civilization to grow and thrive is through specialization of tasks.
But doing that is outsourcing.
You know, many, many important parts of your life to trusted third parties.
So it's great for efficiency.
It's great for, you know, economic power and leverage, but it's bad for robustness.
It, it basically introduces a lot of fragility into whatever system you're doing.
So, you know, simple example of that of course is, you know, food and agriculture.
We've really, really centralized our agricultural production over the centuries with industrialization.
It's been great from a, uh, uh, uh, uh, an economic, you know, throughput perspective.
We, we don't need to have many people who are focusing on farming and agriculture, but if something goes wrong with that system, if it breaks down, I think a lot of people are familiar with the, the concept of, you know, if, if the, um, if the shelves and the stores go empty.
Then you'll probably have chaos within a few weeks.
Uh, it's very bad for all of human civilization, uh, with the level of systemic risk that we now have in a system like that.
And the, it's the same thing with finance.
I mean, it's the same thing with, I think really any sort of power structure and the way that humans tend to organize themselves.
I could listen to you for hours.
I was just, when you were saying, um, all of that, I was actually just thinking, and sorry, if it's too loud, I can go inside.
It's Tuesday lunch, lunchtime here.
So I go and sit in the sun usually.
Um, but do you do, uh, many sort of, I guess, investigations, uh, on hacks, et cetera?
Um, you know, I think a lot of us probably follow Zach, uh, XBT, uh, and sort of the investigations he uncovers or his team uncover.
Um, and it always fascinates me.
And I just wondered if you do sort of any, uh, on your own, I guess, out of interest, um, you know, for your own interests, any investigations?
Uh, it's pretty rare.
Um, I'm on the opposite side.
Like I'm obviously I'm paying attention, uh, to everything that Zach and other security researchers are putting out because every time there is a security failure, that's an opportunity for us to learn.
And assuming that it's something novel, you know, if it's a security failure that's happened a thousand times already, well, that person screwed up.
And unfortunately they're the only one who's maybe going to be learning a lesson from us.
But I think it's, it's far preferable to learn from other people's mistakes than from your own.
And so I definitely try, try to stay apprised of all of those things, but, uh, can't say that I really even have the time to look into that stuff.
And there are people who are far better at it because that's what they spend their entire lives doing now.
Let me ask you this, Jim.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for that.
Go Maddie.
Yeah, no worries.
Cause you, you are a lot of conferences.
I mean, I, I was fortunate to run into you in Vegas.
You probably don't remember, but I'm like, I know you do.
And I'm like keeping it cool.
Trying to be chill.
But when you're at conferences all the time, you meet Maddie Greenspan at conferences.
Let me ask you something at all these conferences as you're traveling around.
Is there a question that you wish people asked you more often rather than the typical ones about Bitcoin?
And if so, what, what do you wish people would ask you at conferences and events or even in spaces like this?
I would say the question that I wish I get asked more is just questions that I haven't heard before.
And that's the, that's the reason why I'm still so deep into the space and intrigued by many aspects of it is there's always more to learn.
And so, you know, when someone comes up to me and ask a question that I've heard a thousand times, it's just purely mechanical knee jerk response at this point.
But anything that is, is novel, you know, looking at a new perspective or a new problem that I haven't heard of that actually makes me stop and think about it.
That's, that's the stuff that really keeps me going.
Fair enough.
I'd like to, I mean, if we're already on, you know, Bitcoin mining and quantum, Jameson, can you like maybe peer into the future of Bitcoin mining roundabout, you know, Q day when, when everybody's going nuts about quantum computers and now Bitcoin is looking a bit vulnerable and now we're upgrading our hardware and everything.
And so, okay, we've got these machines and let's say you're a, I don't know, young startup with some machines, or you're looking to deploy some capital into the market or build out a site or something like that.
What does it, what does the quantum basics look like?
And, you know, how far in advance do we need to plan for something like that?
And I mean, what are some of the aspects of like, we wouldn't be thinking about right now and how that's actually going to play out on the ground?
Well, as it stands right now, I don't think that we're actually going to see much going on with regard to like quantum mining and ASICs, or at least from, from a theoretical perspective, what people have been talking about is that.
Most people are worried about Shor's algorithm, and that is an algorithm that could theoretically be used by a cryptographically relevant quantum computer to essentially reverse engineer ECDSA, which is a fancy way of saying to steal people's Bitcoin if they have public keys exposed on the blockchain.
That is not really applicable when it comes to the SHA-256 hashing that the ASICs themselves are doing.
There's a different algorithm called Grover's algorithm that could theoretically be used by a quantum computer to speed that up.
But from everything that I've heard, and once again, this is getting beyond my expertise to actually understand the math and the physics behind it.
But that seems like that's only going to be maybe like a 5 to 10x speed up.
It's not going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude speed up like Shor's algorithm would be with cracking ECDSA.
So while it might cause a new era of mining at the most, I would expect it to be kind of like what we saw happen with the jump from CPU mining to GPU mining, or from GPU to FPGA, or from that to ASIC.
Which is just a fancy way of saying, you know, there would be some period of maybe a year or two where we have new fleets of hardware coming out and we do see the hash rate exploding, but not so fast that the difficulty adjustment wouldn't be able to take care of it.
So, you know, it'll probably result in some upgrades, but I don't think it's going to be anywhere near as massive volatility that we should be worried about it in the same way that we'd be worried about what happens with actually keeping people's Bitcoin safe from being cracked and stolen.
You had mentioned Grover.
So our machines are safe here then.
Oh, no, go ahead, Marty.
Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.
That's good.
No, I got it.
Well, I just, I just thought it was interesting because he brought up Grover's, Grover's algorithm and that was something I just heard literally last week in a different space that I was in.
And it was something I just heard this, Jameson.
So apparently it can help me as we walk through this in real time here on a Monday Night Bitcoin for folks who explain it like I'm five.
What is Grover's algorithm and it has nothing to do with Grover on Sesame Street, the blue Muppet, right?
I don't think it does, but I just heard this in a space the other day.
And walk us through about the 51% attack vector.
Does it make it easier?
Could it ever make it easier, I guess?
Yeah, I mean, both of these are algorithms that basically could only really be used by a quantum computer and it allows them to perform these specific calculations much more efficiently than what a classical computer could do.
But like I said, like the actual math and physics behind it is beyond my understanding.
So I have to do what a lot of other people do in this space and kind of look at the experts and take their word.
Who are those experts that you're looking at? Because I'm trying to figure this one out, too, in real time.
So who are the experts that you look to? Because you're looked at as one of these experts in the spaces, man.
Well, yeah, so I mean, there's there's a few folks that are focusing on quantum stuff.
Who am I following?
I think like Alex Pruden, for example, is one of the guys.
He's working at Project 11.
They're the ones who are running something called the Q day clock.
And then there's actually a number of people who are actually building these quantum computers, though they're not quite as public or focused on like the Bitcoin aspects of it.
Or this is why we had the Presidio summit a few months ago to get those people to come in and talk to us about what they're thinking through.
And we actually we directly asked them, OK, you know, when you if and when you successfully turn on a quantum computer that's capable of doing these things, are you going to run these algorithms and attack the Bitcoin network?
And suffice to say they wouldn't commit to not doing it.
So I think that.
It's pretty obvious, like what the incentives and game theory are around this, and that especially if you're if you're a startup, then you're going to be economically incentivized to try to recoup a lot of the investments in whatever way possible.
Then on the flip side, there's the whole China issue and the fact that, you know, they have massive amounts being invested in this.
And, you know, you could argue that the the companies in China are effectively just players for the state of China.
And so what what might the the Chinese Communist Party wants to do for or against Bitcoin?
I mean, the game theory also gets pretty interesting if you go down the rabbit hole of, well, what if this happens in a future where China still has very little Bitcoin because they're keeping it fairly banned and under wraps?
But America has actually spooled up massive amounts of resources and built up an even larger strategic Bitcoin reserve than they have today.
Could this turn into effectively like a nation state Cold War, you know, cyber Cold War over these assets?
So I would it can get pretty dark if you think about some of the worst case scenarios.
Hey, Jameson, I just wanted to note, like, you were talking about Grover's algorithm and stuff.
And, you know, it's the reason why it's not as bad is because, like, the bit security of hashing SHA-256 is, you know, 2 to 256, and Grover's algorithm just halves it.
So it's like 2 to the 128, which is still very, very difficult.
I mean, that's beyond, you know, any, any ability to compute.
So like, even when you get up to like 85, 90 bit security, that's, that's pretty much beyond, you know, the capabilities of any amount of power you're going to throw at a compute system, even if they like built up tons and tons of those machines.
So it should be still secure.
There's no reason to believe that we should see a break.
Yeah, I mean, if, if you had a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, it would make far more sense to just try to reverse engineer private keys and sweep that money rather than trying to do something adversarial on the minor side.
Even, even, you know, 51% attack.
I think it's generally overblown because you can only double spend your own coin.
So, you know, maybe a quantum computer threat where you stole a bunch of money and then combine that with a 51% of attack to, to continually re-spend your own money.
Maybe that would make sense, but I suspect it would still be far more economically viable just to keep cracking as many keys as you could rather than undermining people's confidence in the actual mining aspects of the network.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, I, you know, you wonder about how quick it could actually be and how expensive the hardware would be.
I mean, you know, novel cases could maybe they produce some machine that having this, the having of, of that security is not so bad.
So it's like, you would have to get that centralized at a point where it would actually be viable to then go even use the unit to, to, you know, to patch for, um, trying to, trying to discover the next block.
Um, so that, that alone, you know, it wouldn't be like overnight, you know, ASICs are pretty cheap versus some of these quantum computer setups or, you know, they invest billions into.
So you gotta be able to recoup the money you're gonna, you're gonna spend on the units.
So, yeah, I don't, I don't think it's gonna, I don't think that's the problem.
It's more like, can we get a quantum secure scheme in place for, for signing?
And it seems weird, you know, it's, it's a little tentative.
I mean, they had the NIST, I participated at Microsoft in the NIST, um, you know, the trials for the different post quantum signature schemes.
And, you know, through that process, many were broken even after they had deemed them secure in their initial waves.
So it's sort of, I don't know, it's just something where I'm just as weary of some of these new lattice schemes and stuff.
They just seem to always be getting broken every couple of years, you know, one or the other will, we'll have some sort of break.
So I don't know, it'll be a while.
Yeah, the, everything that we're talking about is very hand wavy, especially when it comes to timeframes.
Um, you know, nobody knows if we're talking five, 10, 20, 30 years.
And, um, I guess the very high level, kind of what I was alluding to earlier.
So first we just have to survive getting through Q day, uh, you know, whatever the point is at which people's, uh, private keys could be at risk if their public keys are exposed.
And then at some point in the distant future, just due to natural, uh, you know, deflationary aspects of technology, we would expect quantum computers would continue to get cheaper and cheaper and smaller.
And perhaps someday quantum computers would be kind of like buying a graphics card or buying an ASIC, you know?
So maybe a decade or two in the future, we then have that, that next step up that next evolution within the, the ASIC manufacturing where we're now we see, uh, the ASIC era is over and now it's the quantum ASIC era.
But, you know, that will take a while since I think putting billions of dollars into a quantum computer and then being able to, um, you know, sweep up a lot of Bitcoin makes sense.
And we, we, we, we should expect whoever has the first mover advantage on that to take advantage of it.
And then if we survive that, that's when things I think will get more interesting, but it's also expected that we'll have many, many scientific breakthroughs along the way.
Uh, that was one of the cool aspects of some of the presentations that we had at the Presidio quantum summit, which is that getting to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
I mean, we're still several orders of magnitude away and we need multiple, uh, massive, uh, innovations within the quantum computing space to get there.
But that's only the beginning.
Like once we get past that point with, within the next few orders of magnitude after that, people are expecting, we'll have, you know, massive breakthroughs in the realms of, of things like chemistry, biology and physics that, you know, this is going to have.
You know, massive ripple effects across all of, uh, civilization effectively.
So I, I would think that like, by the time we got to, uh, you know, retail affordable quantum ASICs, it's probably not going to be that interesting.
Do you recall, you know, in terms of the actual schemes of the keys, I, I remember Lamport signature.
I mean, they're like probably one of the only proven, like one not proven as closest proven you can get to quantum secure that we already got.
That we already got and they're pretty good, but I, I, I, there was some like talk in the past about making them available in Bitcoin Lamport signatures.
And I'm curious, do you recall any of that?
I can't off the top of my head.
It has been a while since I've seen anyone bring that up.
Um, but let's see.
So lamp is Lamport a hash base signature.
Yeah.
It's a hash base scheme.
It's like a one way.
So it's, it's like a one single use, but it's like the only one that is been existing for a long time.
So it's like the soundness of it is, is, you know, not in question, but it would take some modifications to Bitcoin.
But like you could do it, like you could do it as a one way bailout if you just had a bunch of like coins sitting around.
Yeah, I think this is some of the debate that's going on recently is just overall the different potentially quantum safe signature schemes.
And most of them have trade-offs in the sense that they have a massive data footprints.
Though the hash base schemes seem to be more efficient and, uh, I guess generally more trustworthy.
So at least one of the things, like if, if you've been following along with Hunter's, uh, quantum resistant BIP, you may have noticed that over the past year to the proposed signature schemes have changed a few times.
And now I think the current iteration of it is to basically support multiple schemes just in different, uh, like tap script branches so that, uh, if one of them ends up getting broken, you can still fall back to a different one.
But that's, that's just like another hand wavy aspect of like all of the unknowns in this space is we, we don't even have an obvious top contender of like, you know, what, what signature scheme should we adopt since they all have trade-offs.
And some of them are what you would consider to be novel cryptography, which is a very scary proposition.
That is scary.
This is great.
Hey, Daniel, I appreciate you coming through on a Monday night Bitcoin.
Uh, you are an OG.
I, I highly respect your work and I know you, uh, you're, you're from the, uh, the Northwest and I'm, I'm, you gotta be loving our Seahawks right now, dude.
I mean, come on, we're looking pretty good at Hawk fans.
Yeah.
I moved to Austin, but, uh, still definitely.
I flew up there for the, unfortunately the first game against the Niners central as well.
So you're a wildcat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, no, I went to Chico state.
It's actually the Ivy league of the West.
Okay.
I thought it was central.
Why?
I thought you went to central for some reason.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chico state is a much less.
Sorry.
No, no, no.
It's okay.
I wish I went to literally any other school.
It turns out.
So that'd be nice.
But you, you, you spent some time though in the Northwest.
If I'm not mistaken, did you not?
Yeah.
No, I live in Seattle.
I lived in Seattle for years.
Yeah.
I remember you when I first got in the space in 2017 and some of the spaces and, and Raul sued
Saud, I think is, uh, gosh, I'm trying to think of some of those old folks back in the day and some of those meetups, uh, and different spaces that I went to.
But I definitely remember seeing you on the timeline and I really appreciate you coming through, man.
You are a fount and a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the industry and the space there.
So mad respects, mad props.
Appreciate you, man.
Um, what about bit 444?
What do you guys think about that?
The temporary soft fork limit arbitrary data storage?
I mean, I knew I'd get him sooner or later.
Go ahead, Jameson.
I'm sure you're.
I'm sure.
Well, remember it's not even bit 444 anymore.
There was so much drama and bullshit around, uh, even the, the number assignment itself.
Uh, I know outside of the normal processes is like, uh, but no, I mean, look, I don't even engage with that debate anymore.
I consider it to be over and those people are, they're flailing.
Um, and I, I don't see having any constructive conversations or debate around that anymore.
It's just rehashing the same old stuff over and over again.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I had to bring it up just cause, you know, it was, it's there.
It's low hanging fruit.
Well, I mean, look, you know, I think the biggest thing, it comes down to this, like the idea that the, well, a couple, a couple things really.
The, they invented some new pseudo legal legal things to be afraid of that don't make any sense.
Like this whole contiguous, uh, bites thing is, is nonsense.
There's nothing in, in legal precedent or in law that says, oh, well, if the bites are contiguous and shoved inside some other larger file versus split up into chunks that you, you know, concatenate, then, then you're liable.
That doesn't exist.
So that's just like a boogeyman they made up to sort of justify fears.
And at the point that it's not legally relevant, whether there's contiguous bites or discontiguous, it really comes down to, you know, what is your goal?
If the goal is to remove spam, we know we can't do that, right?
Because the system includes public keys and hashes.
And you don't know if they're real public keys, quote unquote, and hashes, or if they're just data that someone's chunked together.
So even if you hobbled Bitcoin and removed every opcode and you got it down to like the slimmest thing it could ever be, which is just like send and receive single recipients, single signature at, at worst.
I mean, the best you could do is people would just start breaking up spam into transactions that use, you know, 64 bytes or, you know, 96 bytes or whatever per transaction.
And they would assemble them together and that would be the file.
So there's no way to get rid of it.
That's why it's like, it's sort of just this fool's errand where, you know, it's just going to get hockey pucked back and forth into all these areas.
So why are you even doing it?
Why are you even doing it?
And why are we doing something at the best of the government?
Like if we're so afraid, there's a million other things that they could be afraid of.
I'm personally most afraid of if I'm talking about legal things, I'm more afraid of what they tried to do to Apple in the San Bernardino case and a couple other cases where, you know, the government will argue and has successfully argued in many cases that, you know, you need to adhere to what they're trying to accomplish from like a security or defense perspective by inserting certain things into your products.
In a lot of those cases, like Apple in the San Bernardino case, they wanted them to backdoor, you know, and basically open up a device that a terrorist had had.
And their defense against that was that they didn't have any baseline mechanisms for making that possible.
They would have to like sink significant engineering hours and money into developing something specifically for the government.
And that's compelled first compelled speech against the First Amendment.
And it goes into this, you know, old, I think it's 1798, All Writs Act, which says if there's this undue burden placed upon you for having to comply, even if it's for a national security matter, then you don't have to do it.
The thing I'm most scared about is if we start doing what the crazy end of those filter people want, which is installing highly dynamic, highly targeted, incredibly selective filters that are very heuristic and like targeting transaction, you know, footprints.
So they want to install a system, some of them talked about the phones home, like because it has to be so active and spam is so dynamic that it would like phone home once a day and get the latest filters for your node from where will they say you can download anyone's filters.
But in reality, we know it'll be like Luke's inner sanctum that it's going to get, you know, the white smoke will come up for the day and the filters will go out.
And and if they build that in, my fear is that we lose the undue burden defense under the All Writs Act.
And the government can step in and say, well, I don't actually need you to ship any code you've put together such a great dynamic filter templating system.
We're just going to give you this code that you can put on this endpoint and all the nodes will call and pick it up and you'll filter our stuff, too.
And there's no burden because you literally don't have to change a single byte of the downstream client.
It just it's just this like, you know, you know, declarative, like maybe it runs off a JSON object or something.
Here you go. Just ship this. And I'm more afraid of that than these fantasy scenarios where, like, you're prosecuting people who have absolutely no intent, no specific awareness.
It fails every one of the major criteria for the CSAM argument.
And so I think it's nonsense and we shouldn't be making changes to Bitcoin based on being scared of the government in some far off scenario.
You know what? Yeah, well, that's I mean, that's just the the end result of these people getting backed into a corner.
I mean, they actually painted themselves into a corner from like the technical arguments perspective and created a bunch of pretzel logic to try to explain why this small subset of changes should be OK.
But I think that fundamentally what we're dealing with here is two sides talking past each other.
You've got the highly technical side who's looking at Bitcoin as a system that has a scripting language, you know, it's programmable money.
And how does information theory fundamentally fit into that if you're trying to stop quote unquote spam, which, of course, is being treated as a subjective thing here?
You can also look at spam from an objective economic perspective.
But the flip side is we have people who are approaching the system more from a moral and philosophical perspective.
And I think they're they're they're they're willing to openly admit that you can't stop all spam, but they believe that it is worth trying and is worth playing the game of whack-a-mole to quote unquote send spammers a message.
And effectively what you have is that they're trying to this could be a trigger word that they're trying to gatekeep the network, right?
They're trying to kick people off or kick use cases off that they don't like because they consider them to be non-monetary and and I can understand that perspective.
And I think that pretty much everyone on both sides of the debate can understand that that like, you know, Bitcoin primarily its fundamental use case is money and we want people to use it as money.
And most people don't or aren't interested in the non-monetary aspects of it.
I've been talking about non-monetary aspects of Bitcoin for over a decade.
And I know Daniel has as well because he's been deep into like decentralized ID projects and using Bitcoin as a data anchor.
And, you know, we're both technical guys and we look at this system as a programmable system.
And so that's why I keep coming back to the the the moral philosophical side of the debate is Bitcoin is money and nothing else.
And that's their perspective. And they'll they'll try to do whatever they can to enforce that perspective.
And my counterpoint is Bitcoin is programmable money and that comes with a whole slew of other things.
And I was actually on stage with Luke and mechanic and Lugano a few weeks ago.
And we brought up the fact that, you know, information theory dictates that any even slightly programmable system, you're going to be able to hide data in you're going to be able to stuff arbitrary data in.
And the response that I got from Luke was that information theory is not a thing, it's not applicable.
And so, you know, you just have straight up denial of simple scientific facts of like the way the system works, which I think that's like the fundamental reason why I don't think that this this effort and this proposed fork is going to go anywhere because it just it requires you to deny a lot of reality.
A lot of reality.
Marty Greenspan.
It's just a form of cognitive dissonance, isn't it?
It's like, I believe anybody can do whatever they want with their money, except for drawing pictures on it, that that should be illegal.
Where do these people get off?
Yeah.
And so also, I gave a keynote like three or four years ago, also in Lugano, which was about the history of email and spam, because I was an email engineer for a decade before I became a Bitcoin security engineer.
And so I was on the front lines of watching email evolve or I would say devolve over the course of a decade.
I would say devolve over the course of 30 or 40 years.
I would say devolve over the course of my hour long keynote covering 40 years of history is that SMTP started off in the 70s and 80s as a sovereign protocol where if you wanted to be a user of email, you would run an email server.
You could think of this as an email node.
And this was the software that allowed you to connect to the network of email servers.
And, you know, you were a first class citizen on the email network.
And that worked fine for a decade or two until AOL came along until the masses started joining the internet and started using email.
And then naughty people started to realize, hey, someone has created this amazing messaging system that is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than snail mail.
So why don't I just use that to advertise all my stuff to as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible.
And this was the, you know, the first wave of spam and email and that kicked off massive number of changes and consolidations over about a 20 year period where what happened is as a direct result of trying to filter the spam and mitigate all of the friction and pain and suffering that
suffering that was being put upon the average email user is that we ended up building all of these centralized systems that ended up filtering the spam.
Like they started off trying to filter the spam on the endpoints at the clients with things like beige and filters and so on.
But those were whack-a-mole games.
And that only really lasted for a few years before people realized they needed something more powerful.
And eventually it ended up being reputation based.
And so we built all of these reputation systems and all of those reputation systems ended up being highly centralized around things like domain name and IP address reputation and large centralized blacklist providers.
And basically the cost of running an email server that had high deliverability kept going up and up and up.
And it got to the point where you couldn't afford to operate on the email network unless you had a whole team of like system administrators who were willing to spend all of their time focused on the spam and deliverability issues.
And while I was working at this email service provider, I was there from when I started, we were sending about a hundred thousand emails a day.
And, you know, we had a lot of smart technical guys who were working on the actual infrastructure.
But what I noticed and what I found odd was after I had been there for a few years, we started hiring these people and their title was email deliverability specialists.
And I thought it was odd because they weren't in my department.
They weren't in the engineering department at the company.
So I'm like, what are these people doing?
Well, turns out what they did was they, they were actually relationship managers.
And so their job was to maintain good relationships between us and their counterparts at all of the ISPs, at the blacklists, at any of the big email hubs, because inevitably when we, one of our customers would do something naughty and it would get like our entire IP range or domain on a blacklist, it would negatively impact a large swaths of our customers.
And we would have to go say, you know, pretty please dear blacklisting service.
So we have identified this client and we have discussed with them what they did wrong and remediated the issue and it won't happen again.
Please take us off the blacklist.
And so the short version of this is that that's the level of centralization that email got to purely from a spam mitigation perspective, because we didn't, we didn't have the ability to, to, well, we could have fixed that at the protocol level with hash cash, but nobody listened to Adam back.
Oh, you mentioned my guy.
You mentioned my guy.
Yeah.
So like hash cash would have greatly stemmed the flow of spam by imposing economic costs upon all of the actors.
But we, whoever was dealing with rough consensus for the email protocol back then decided that it wasn't good enough or interesting enough to, to actually implement.
And so instead we just ended up pricing out the vast majority of people from being a sovereign email user.
And today something like 95% of all email users are, are using one of about 10 different companies.
So you could think of it as like, that would be kind of analogous to if Bitcoin got consolidated down to having like 10 nodes, which would, I would say probably be analogous to like BSV or something like that level of centralization, which is quite unfortunate.
And so, you know, from that perspective, I would, I would say email has actually failed.
And this is one of the things that really concerns me about Bitcoin, like long-term game theory, like ossification issues, so on and so forth.
Once again, we got there with email, we got to where we are because not of, there was no grand conspiracy.
There was no like evil cabal that was trying to centralize email.
It was actually a bunch of independent actors over multi-decade periods, all making decisions that seemed to be the right decision at the time, but which resulted in this, this ratcheting up of the cost of being able to operate on the email network to the point that now.
Now, you ask the average person, Hey, do you use email?
And they'll be like, Oh yeah, use it every day.
You know, there's billions and billions of email users.
But from my perspective or from a like sovereignty perspective, no, none of us actually use email.
We're just using a trusted third party who is then interacting with the highly centralized email network.
This monstrosity that is evolved into over a period of 40 years.
I want to, I want to bring it back a little bit to the Bitcoin mining conversation, just because when we're talking about block space and the templates, that again, to me comes up.
Well, I just know enough to be dangerous.
So that's why I love these spaces that we get to talk with brilliant bright minds like yourself.
But it's the miners and the folks and me and you too.
Yes, Angie.
That's right.
Yeah.
Thanks.
You're always factored in, but it's, it's, it's when we're talking about the template and block size and whose transactions are able to go into that, Jameson, that's, this is something that concerns me and keeps me up at night.
Talk to us about the template size, who's getting to get their transactions put in and, and the concerns around all of that.
And, and how do we address that going forward?
Would you say.
Well, I'd say the, the biggest concern kind of related to everything that we've been talking about so far is that a similar type of centralization has occurred within the mining ecosystem.
where, you know, there's basically a dozen or so mining pools and you can think of them as the block template constructors.
And this is once again, the results of a bunch of individual actors doing the economically rational thing and pooling their hash rate together so that they get more consistent mining outputs and rewards.
It's a, which makes sense from like a corporate fiscal management perspective, instead of just solo mining and hoping you hit a block once a month or, or once a year or what have you.
And so.
We we've.
We've.
We've.
Unfortunately centralized a lot of that power into a few hands.
And there are some solutions out there.
Uh, stratum V two is I think one of the, the oldest such solutions.
It's, it's been taking it sweet time.
Uh, getting rolled out, but.
Suffice to say there, there are some solutions out there that would put the, the hands, uh, and the power back into the hands of the individual hashers to construct those block templates.
But, um, adoption has not been meaningful.
It kind of sits with me.
It just sits with me, Doug, you're a Bitcoin miner.
You're the CEO of a mining company.
How does that sit with you?
You got a final comment or anything you want to get in on that one?
Yeah.
Right now.
I'm more than just a, you know, uh, with a mining company, I I've got four little, uh, uh, bid axes over there.
One of them's running on the, uh, on the, uh, uh, lottery and the other three are just supporting the network and throwing a couple of sats in my wallet every so often.
So, you know, I, I, I think that's, uh, an important piece, an important piece of, uh, of the whole ecosystem, if you will, is mining.
But, uh, now Jameson, I really appreciate you coming out tonight.
Uh, I love running over because that means that we're, we've got great conversation going.
When we end right on time, that means that, uh, Hey, things have cooled off too much.
Uh, but anyway, uh, I mean, on the, the mining side, it, it, it is exciting to see how far we've come, you know, going from mining on a notebook to graphic cards and now a six and, and, uh, seeing that, uh, transition, uh, you know, kind of what we're doing off grid is, is, uh, we thought we would, uh, go from.
I go from submersibles and now hydros and, and now the rack mount a six that are hot swappable or not hot swap, but swappable into, uh, uh, AI compute as well as mining on, on the same rack.
So it's really interesting on my end.
And I come from the, the, the energy side, I'm an oil and gas guy.
That's how I got involved in the mining, uh, bit, but I want to, you know, thanks to the, the spirit of Bitcoin, you know, the freedom, decentralization, innovation.
And, uh, thanks to everyone who turned tuned in tonight, uh, shared the room and help make our Monday night Bitcoin.
What it is, uh, longest running Bitcoin Monday night, Bitcoin show on, on X.
So, uh, thanks Jameson for coming out and, uh, any final comments, uh, are welcome.
Yeah, Marty, are you there?
I thought you might have a final comment, but I know you're probably chasing after all the kids in the house.
Yeah.
At five 30 in the morning.
Sure.
No, I'll be waking them up in, uh, in an hour.
It's just going to happen.
Um, no, I just, uh, just very happy to have this conversation and go forward.
I learned a lot today, um, and, uh, stuff that I'm going to take forward.
So, uh, absolute pleasure.
So thank you very much for that.
And thanks everybody, uh, for listening and, uh, for making, uh, quantum great again.
Make quantum great again.
I, um, yeah, thank you so much, uh, Jamison.
Absolute pleasure.
Could keep listening for hours.
Uh, it is so refreshing.
Um, I log into so many, you know, Bitcoin spaces, um, but this has been so refreshing, uh, listening to this rather than the big boys and the peeing contests that are in most of the big rooms, um, that I'm sick of listening to.
So this has been really wonderful.
Uh, we're a very nice close knit community here.
And, um, yeah, it's just been really nice to listen to just, you know, straightforward facts and, you know, not people talking over the top of each other.
And as, as we said, measuring competition.
So thank you very, very much.
And to my wonderful, uh, host, co-host Maddie says, as always.
James, I just want to, I just want to ask, uh, ask you, is there a final call or a final thought you want to leave folks with when it comes to security, when it comes to sovereignty?
You know, like we always like to say, stay safe, stack, sats huddle, right?
That's like our tagline.
That's our call to action.
What would you want to leave folks with right now?
And then I've got one follow-up question after you answer that.
Uh, my main thing, uh, whether it's privacy, security, sovereignty, you know, whatever floats your boat, uh, is that it can, any of these things can be quite daunting.
I mean, Bitcoin itself, we, we call it the Bitcoin rabbit hole because it is this bottomless.
Well, you can explore and branch off into so many different aspects of it.
Uh, I, I don't like even calling myself an expert because as, as I've said, there's so many things that I don't know.
And, and now the space is so large and accelerating in so many directions.
It's not even humanly possible to keep up with everything.
But the most important thing is just, you know, keep learning.
Um, you, you only have to bite off a little bit at a time.
You don't have to become the like Uber privacy or Uber security, uh, conscious person right off the bat.
You know, you just put in a few hours a week and that will automatically compound over time.
You can continue to step up your game and become, uh, even more private, more secure, more sovereign, uh, as the years go by.
That is life advice right there from the OG.
I got one last question that came in, uh, from my cohost from the, uh, the daily spaces that we do 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern to quantum spaces powered by quantum expeditions.
Mad Hatter wants to know because he has a beard like you, he's envious.
What kind of products do you use to keep your beard looking so well trimmed and maintained?
I had to ask cause he's a beard guy.
I'm sorry, Jameson.
What do you use product wise for your beard?
Yeah.
I mean, I've put more time and effort into maintaining my beard than I ever did the hair on top of my head.
Right.
Um, it's, it's so much more work.
You got to do your, your conditioner at least a couple of times a week.
Okay.
Got to get your, uh, do the shampoo usually once a week.
You don't want to, uh, to dry out your, your skin too much.
Yeah.
Definitely want to oil it.
Yeah.
The oil.
I don't want to know.
He specifically said, what about oil?
Ask him about oil.
I thought he was talking about like crude oil, but no, he's talking to goes beard oil.
I'm like, okay.
So what do you got?
What do you got beard oil?
Yeah.
There's a lot of good brands out there.
Uh, can't go wrong with honest Amish.
That's one of my favorites.
Uh, keep it classic.
Okay.
And then, uh, you know, when I'm, when I'm going out and, uh, need to make sure that the beard isn't going wild and a bunch of directions because of the wind or whatever, that's when you got to slap on some, some wax and make sure you keep it in place.
Slap on some wax and keep it in place.
I never knew so much.
Um, so much maintenance went into beards.
Oh, there's a whole subculture there in there.
Jameson.
It's a Reddit for sure.
Uh, and of course it depends, you know, for it varies from person to person, but myself, uh, my, my beard can get a pretty frizzy and tangled and nobody wants a bunch of like dandruff and tangles and nastiness in their beard.
So you gotta, gotta take good care of it.
And the person sitting next to you doesn't want a little beard hair in their food.
So I get it.
You gotta have that hairspray and wax.
There you go.
We've got, we've got grooming suggestions.
What a note to end on here.
Yeah.
Grooming suggestions, security tips, and maybe not financial advice, but all here on a Monday Night Bitcoin.
Again, the OG, Jameson Lopp.
Thank you.
He is the founder, the engineer, the security expert and privacy advocate, the co-founder and CTO from Casa.
And man, I'm following you and I got the notifications on because I want to learn and I want to get better in this game that is called Bitcoin.
Again, until tomorrow morning, 10 AM, when we kick off the conversation again from around the world and across the web with my co-host Mad Hatter.
We will go beyond the block and we will talk about trading Tuesday, market madness and all of that and more.
Until then, thank you to everybody coming through the room.
Stay safe.
Stack sats and hodl.
Not financial advice, but a darn good life suggestion.
Jameson, we thank you and appreciate you.
Thank you, Matt.
Thank you for hosting.
You guys rock.
The point is if you have a superior asset, it's going up forevermore.
Thank you.