Just a reminder, the content of this show is for informational purposes only. Please visit blockstack.org slash legal slash disclaimers for more info. Hi there and welcome to the Stacks podcast. I'm Zach Valenti. Today we have a conversation between Jameson Lopp, former Bitcoin engineer, professional cypherpunk and CTO at the key security company CASA, and Muneeb Ali, the CEO of BlockstackPBC. Jameson and Muneeb cover a lot of ground here, starting with mining Bitcoin at home, moving on to the importance of personal privacy, delving into the quasi-religious infighting in the crypto space, and more. Without further ado, here's Jameson and Muneeb. Hey man, really excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm jealous of your setup with the mic and all. I want one. Ah, and you can only see the microphone side of things. You don't see the rest of my battle station where I've got six different screens set up. Oh, wow. Yeah, I would love to see that. I bet you have some Bitcoin miners set up in your home as well. Interestingly enough, I only ever mined on testnet, and that was a big enough of a pain that I only did it for maybe four or five months, though I did accumulate a nice stash of testnet Bitcoins. Oh, cool. Speaking of miners, what do you think of these new services? I'm not going to name any, but who are trying to sell kind of like these consumer mining equipment, right? And saying, oh, you can mine any token that you want. I would love to hear your opinion on it. Oh, we could talk about that for a whole hour. But I mean, I like the idea at a high level, kind of like the original idea behind the 21.co miner, where the thesis of that was that essentially Bitcoin or cryptocurrency that is created on site has a sort of additional level of utility or at least a lower level of friction for use compared to crypto that has to be acquired through other means such as an exchange. And it was almost even an idea of basically using your electricity bill as a way to receive crypto. And of course, there's all the sort of micro payments, micro transaction stuff also around that. And of course, the privacy aspects are very nice too, where it's a lot easier for you to just, you know, spend a little bit extra on your utility bill and probably nobody is going to notice compared to having to go through AML KYC exchanges. Yeah, absolutely. I think my feeling around that was the same. I was like, so excited to get the early versions of the 21 devices with Balaji sent some over to us in our office. I think we kept them on for years. But from a purely can this be profitable perspective, I was like, no way if you just quickly do your back of the envelope calculation, especially mining on more mature chains, like it doesn't make a lot of sense if you're a user. But now I think with a bunch of these different types of even potentially proof of stake mechanisms coming up, it can be interesting to just have a dedicated node that you are switching between different types of mining activities. And I completely see the point about this might be the best way to acquire crypto in the most anonymous way possible. I think that's a very, very strong reasoning there. The profitability point is definitely true, but I actually argue that I was preferring that we move to a model where most people are mining unprofitably. And I think I wrote an article in 2015 or so where I was postulating some possible future outcomes of mining in general. And I theorized that the best way to decentralize mining to get it out of the hands of large scale industrial type of data centers would be in fact to get mass amounts of individuals to mine it so unprofitably that it's just not feasible to use the economies of scale to get large profits. And so figuring out other ways to incentivize people to be mining at home is a very interesting endeavor to me. That's interesting because if you look at the first wave of peer-to-peer networks, people would run peers without any incentives whatsoever. So they're burning compute cycles, they're providing different resources to the rest of the peer. I mean, there were some incentives like you would get a better downlink if you're downloading stuff, if you're offering some data to the network as well as an uplink, but not explicit incentives like crypto because people were just still doing it just because they wanted to support the peer-to-peer network. Yeah, there is definitely the aspect, I guess, of people just doing things because they believe in them. But I think it gets more interesting if we can create utility that is built into some sort of device that it may be mining, but the people who are using it aren't necessarily even knowledgeable about the mining aspects. And so that's why we are hearing, I think, some murmurs of people basically trying to build routers that have miners built into them, build other internet devices that have other functionality. And then the mining aspect, it just happens to be an extra add-on feature. I think the tricky thing about all of this, the downside is something that we've learned a lot about with the CASA node. Essentially, what we're doing is we're asking users to become what is essentially a server administrator. And if we really want people to be running these internet-connected devices that need to have pretty good uptime, pretty good network connectivity, and possibly various network configurations, we need to figure out how to automate away as much of those really, I guess, boring IT aspects and really make a nice user interface that does not require the users to really even know what's going on under the hood. Operating your own node is one of those things that computer geeks would love to do it, but they're relatively very small subset of the population. So in order to reach a mass market, you absolutely have to work on much easier user interfaces. Speaking of mining, and especially mining different chains, what's your current working theory on, let's say five years from now or 10 years from now? Do you believe in a world where everything just converges to Bitcoin because it's by far the most secure network and blockchains start collapsing on top of Bitcoin, especially with new types of technologies coming up as well? Or do you see a world where there's more fragmentation, like everything gets tokenized and people are slapping a blockchain onto every single thing, and there are thousands of different types of tokens and blockchains somewhere in the middle. What's your current working theory, or has it evolved over the last five years? Yeah, that's complicated. I think that my perspective has changed some, and at least one of the reasons why it's changed and why I think that there will be, at least for the foreseeable future, a very wide variety of different decentralized and distributed token-based networks is that back in the day, I approached most of it from a security perspective of, well, Bitcoin has the greatest security and both from a hash rate perspective and from a just general bright minds who are working on it, and from the perspective, of course, that it's the greatest bug bounty and thus is being attacked the most. But what we've seen at least over the past few years is actually kind of baffling, but we've seen a lot of these other networks get attacked, and it's just a lot harder to actually destroy these networks. Even the ones that seem to have a lot of bugs and exploits and are somewhat trivial to attack from different perspectives, they just keep getting attacked and keep getting attacked. It seems like maybe the vast majority of users either don't know or don't care, and there's this level of ambivalence around it where even if there is a major problem, developers and other people who do care will come together, fix the problem, and move on. That is kind of the anti-fragile nature of a lot of these networks, even the ones that are minuscule in comparison to Bitcoin. So I think that essentially we're going to have thousands of these cockroaches basically running around and continuing to exist, though they will probably not be as utilized as Bitcoin, but it's just so difficult to kill them that I think that there will continue to be communities that keep a lot of these things running even if it's just on life support. Speaking of a debt of a blockchain-based system, what do you consider the debts to be? When does a blockchain die? Is it when there is no exchange left that the list says or there are no active nodes? What's the definition there? Well, in order for the network to cease existing, there needs to be not more than one or two nodes, I guess. But of course, I guess what's more interesting is not just the technical question of whether or not some machines are running the protocol, but whether or not there are people that are using the protocol and maintaining the protocol. And what does that even mean from a maintenance standpoint is hard to say, I think, because the lifetime of a lot of these things is so short. And one of the examples that I like to use is Dogecoin, where I believe it has not had any development in probably three years now, but the network is still running. And so that's kind of an interesting open question of how long can one of these networks, especially if it's a network that is like a fork of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin keeps moving forward, and perhaps even various exploits are found and patched in Bitcoin, but then nobody is maintaining the downstream fork, how long can that thing really keep going before someone does manage to completely destroy it? And I just think that a lot of these questions are still open ended, because we have yet to see a lot of the different possible attacks and failures and death scenarios. I think I agree with you in terms of a world where I don't know about hundreds of useful tokens out there, but I think definitely a handful, maybe tens of them, which are serious networks, they're very hard to attack, they have real utility, they have real communities behind them. So that brings me to kind of like the user experience for people who are using these services. The idea of a crypto token is still kind of like very new or like foreign to normal internet users. And thinking that for using different internet services, you would require like all these different types of tokens in your wallet. Like how do you see the internet evolve, like let's say five years from now, where the concept becomes kind of like more familiar? And how would a typical user interact with the internet if crypto networks take off as you and I believe that they would? Well, the real trade off between most of this is usability and security. And so we have seen some software wallets come out that support almost every crypto asset under the sun. So they can improve the usability there by having all your private keys in one place. But the downside is now all your private keys are in one place. So perhaps that gets sort of melded along with improvements in the hardware space, where especially like Ledger, for example, seems to support quite a wide variety of these different tokens. Will we get to the point where people will actually make the effort of getting a special security hardware for this? Or perhaps will it go the other way where a lot of the common hardware manufacturers, sort of like what we're seeing, I think recently with one of the phone manufacturers, you're coming out with your special Bitcoin support in their phone. Perhaps the hardware will just start to be rolled out with your common everyday computing platforms. That's, I guess, a more feasible scenario, I think, because it requires less action on the part of the mainstream user where you just go buy your phone or your laptop or your tablet or whatever, like you always have. And it just happens to also have crypto security hardware built into it. There's a lot of different ways that it could go. But when it comes to mainstream adoption, I think it's the onus for a lot of this stuff to really go mainstream is going to be on the enterprises to basically build in defaults so that people don't have to be making a lot of choices. They don't have to be scaling really steep learning curves. It just sort of gets presented to them with a nice interface that's no more complicated than any of your popular social networking apps. Yeah. So I think similarly, let's say that we start seeing a lot of Web 3 applications and these tokens, especially the private keys, are not only used to own digital money like Bitcoin, but also a bunch of other valuable assets like your login information for most of these applications that you're using or reputation systems like your, let's say, your Uber driver, Uber like app driver, and you've built up a reputation over many years in the app. And now that reputation is linked with your private key and your login information, these assets start becoming more and more valuable. And in a way, it sounds like a scary world to live in as well. Let's say that on average, people are now keeping like 20, 30% of their net worth in crypto tokens. That also means that they start becoming targets as well, right? And I think this is something that you've looked into a lot, both from a privacy perspective. I love that article that came out in the New York Times that talked about kind of like how to disappear from the face of the earth featuring you. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on what do you think about personal privacy, especially in this world where your crypto assets might be worth so much that there's a real risk involved in terms of your personal stake. The way that I've been approaching this from a macro perspective is that we are in the early days where there are people who are quote unquote being their own bank. And right now, a lot of the criminals are still sort of catching up to that. And so some of them are starting to realize that, hey, these nerds are being their own banks, but they don't actually know much about physical security. So we're going to exploit their weakness on the physical side, because it's a lot easier to attack one person than it is to actually attack a bank that has been operating for years or decades, operating on top of a security model that has been evolving for basically all of human history, because physical security is a very well-known problem that has huge industry built up around it. And so attacking someone who has really mostly been concerned with the digital security side and has been concerned with the digital security side and hasn't really even thought about the physical security side becomes a much more valuable proposition. So what do we have to do? Well, it needs to be kind of like a herd immune defense, where we can expect that criminals will continue to perform physical attacks until they start failing, until we get to the point where the vast majority of the physical attacks against crypto owners are failing because the crypto owners have sufficiently secured their keys so that a physical attack against the owner does not result in a loss of all the keys. And so that's why I've been so interested in working on multi-SIG key management solutions now for like four years, first on the enterprise side and now more on the personal and individual side. I think that there's so much innovation going on in this space and yet a lot of it is happening on really, really cutting edge, pushing the envelope type stuff, whereas we still have not yet really completely solved the very simple or it's not even simple, but the very fundamental problem of key management. So there's still a lot of work to be done there. And kind of going back to what we were talking about with the complexities of asking someone to be a server administrator, there's even probably more complexities with asking someone to be their own bank and understand both the digital and the physical security issues that revolve around that. So we're trying to build software and hardware solutions that have all of those best practices baked into the product so that the user just has to follow the instructions on the screen in order to get the strongest security model that these networks make available to us. Yes, speaking of key management, what's the latest at CASA? Are there any exciting product updates that you'd love to share with the audience? Well, we're working on a few things that haven't been announced, but in general, what has been happening over the past few months is we've been evolving our product lines, the original product line being CASA KeyMaster, which is a multi-SIG key management application. We've started off with a three of five multi-SIG format, and all of these are also hardware based. So we're leveraging Trezors and Ledgers and other hardware that's already on the market to create these multi-SIG wallets that are geographically dispersed and essentially make the user secure both against various attackers, but also pretty much every loss vector that we can think of, including the user themselves and negligence and whatnot. And so we started off with trying to create the most extreme secure vault type of solution. And then we've kind of worked our way backwards actually to a two of three multi-SIG that is easier to use, lower price tier, basically comes with anyone who buys a node will get this level of multi-SIG management. And then of course, eventually just a single SIG hot wallet for everyday spending. But once we had got those three different tiers of products out, we actually went back and we were looking at our plug and play Bitcoin enlightening node and saying, okay, you know, this is a nice solution for sovereignty from a different perspective, which is of course, just validating the state of the network, but we can do more to integrate that in to the actual KeyMaster product. So we're working on a few different things right now to basically make the KeyMaster product and the node product integrate with each other better so that you can further reduce the trust that you have on CASA and our servers and, you know, offload more of the queries, offload more of the validation to your own server at home, basically. Got it. Well, it's exciting to see the product wall. I don't know if you know this, but we have an early generation CASA node running in one of our conference rooms here at BlockSigPBC. And I think Jeremy, he's a friend of the project, like even before the company was called CASA. Yeah, I believe, I think that was originally called the CASA computer, if I recall correctly, but that was actually even before I joined the company. Yeah, it's, I think there was, there were some ideas around kind of like a home sharing solution. And I think I remember this out of our previous office where we would love to host Jeremy once in a while and brainstorm like different ideas about what can be done, especially in the context of, context of BlockStack as well. Like he really wanted to integrate our platform at different levels in the application. I would love to hear kind of like your outside perspective on, on BlockStack. Like I think you've been a friend of the project for some years now. You've seen our architecture evolve. What does it look like we're focusing on from, from the outside? Well, from my perspective, it is, it's, you know, another take on trying to decentralize as much of the internet stack as possible. That's, I think one of the more interesting things of what's going on with this space is, you know, we start off with Bitcoin and people start to learn about the features that you get from a sufficiently decentralized network. And then ultimately people start looking at the rest of the world, or at least the rest of the internet connected world. And they start realizing that there's a lot of pieces of the infrastructure that are actually probably more fragile and brittle than we would like. And so being able to move past a lot of these points of centralization, especially, you know, with what we've been seeing happening on the computing side in general of like everything moving to the quote unquote cloud, that's actually just centralizing a lot of computing and networking into the hands of a few small companies. And thus the result of course, being that when even the smallest little thing goes wrong with one of these handful of companies, it can affect thousands, if not millions of people. The idea that we can move back to a more decentralized platform, you know, is I think going to make it more robust because we can push a lot of the security and a lot of the reliability issues out to the edge, so to speak. So that, you know, if a problem does happen, and it's more likely to be localized with one specific user or specific service than it is with being widespread across large numbers of services and users. That's definitely been our motivation. And we've been focusing a lot on developers, like basically, the idea is that we will figure out the problems and computer science challenges at the infrastructure there. And then we want to give the right tools to the developers so that they can go off and build these decentralized applications on top. And I don't know if you saw this, but just today I signed up on this email service called D-mail, that's built on top of block stack. And I just like tweeted out that, hey, I just joined, and you can send me email on wneed.id. And since morning, it's been like so exciting. I'm getting messages from all sorts of like block stack supporters, who are also signing up and actually chatting with me on that fully decentralized, fully encrypted email, which is actually not SMTP. It's not using the old incorrect protocols. It's something completely different built on top of block stack. But does it fix the spam problem? I think you can potentially do something very interesting there, right? Because every time every user now has a wallet address, right? So you can actually demand, you know, some sort of a payment attached with your message. Otherwise, it's not going to hit your inbox. And these could be micro transactions. Yeah, you know, I would actually be very interested to see a really decentralized social media app. Because, you know, we did see, I guess it was Mastodon, right? There was a short period of time where a lot of people were using Mastodon. But of course, it's federated. It's not like fully censorship resistant, etc. And then today, I think we saw like block.one announced that, you know, they were releasing a new EOS based social app. But the way that they're going to fix the problem of trolling and spam is that they're going to do like KYC AML basically on everyone and require government IDs for every account. And that just made me cringe so badly. Interesting. So I haven't seen their announcement. Like my first question would be, like, are they thinking that all the data will be stored on the US blockchain? Because I think that the last time I checked their block producers were kind of like running out of disk space. And there were only like four nodes out of 21 that were keeping a full copy of the blockchain. Yeah, I think that they were having a lot of RAM issues. I saw something about like $20 million worth of RAM being purchased by some of the block producers. It kind of goes back to this issue of like, what are these networks? You know, it's almost like each one of these networks has their own ideology and personality and is willing to make different trade-offs. And I guess EOS seems to be one of the more governance friendly slash enterprise focused blockchains where they're willing to make a lot more trade-offs than a lot of the other blockchain networks are. That makes me think about the crypto communities. Like these are networks with very kind of like active, enthusiastic communities around them. And in many ways, the network is valuable because of the community, because of all the believers who are holding these tokens or actively participating or even like building on the network or building core protocols. And we've seen this unfold on Reddit or crypto Twitter, where sometimes there are these tribes that form and people are attacking other communities. And it's very fascinating. In many ways, the entire industry is so small that you could argue that, you know, the blue ocean is outside of our industry right now. So instead of being like internally focused, people should be externally focused in terms of like expanding the size of the market. But there seems to be like a fair amount of tension and infighting that goes on as well. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. Yeah, I agree on the idea that we should be expanding the size of the pie. That's also, that's another topic that I gave a very long presentation about. Two years ago, it was actually at the conference where Bitcoin ABC ended up getting announced. And I was trying to urge people not to fork off and not to leave the network and fight over it. And I was like, leave the network and fight over a small number of users, but rather to work together to increase the size of the pie. Of course, that presentation didn't really have much of effect on the course of things in the Bitcoin space. But this is something that is just part of the phenomenon that I think we're trying to understand. And I am glad that there are a number of sociologists who are observing a lot of these things that are going on. I'm sure it will provide a lot of interesting research material that people are going to publish some fascinating revelations about in the future. But part of it, at least in the Bitcoin side, is that there's at least a large number of the early adopters who are very anti-authoritarian. And so anyone who comes along and even like phrases, suggestions in a way that could be construed as somewhat authoritarian, or as like trying to force people to do certain things or make certain changes, will generally get a backlash. And of course, there's also very heavy pro-privacy stance held by a lot of people. So anything that might vaguely even negatively affect privacy or fungibility or whatnot will also get large backlash. Did the Bitcoin community get better? Well, let me give you some background. So I used to follow Bitcoin a lot more closely, I would say, between 2014, 2016 or so. And then at some point, I think once these big wars started happening between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin and a couple of other players that I will not name the first in the community, my reaction was a little bit like, I'm just going to disconnect a little bit, let it settle down, let these people like settle their disputes. And do you feel like that over time, it's becoming like more toxic? And I hate that word, or it's getting better? Because one way you can think of this is like, people who supported like, you know, big blogs, they forked off, and now they are their own community. And maybe theoretically, that makes sense that they can have their own thing and leave the rest of the folks alone? Or is it playing out that way? So I would say that the downside to projects forking is that, well, there's multiple things that can happen. I mean, there have been forks, like between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, where, as far as I could tell, the Ethereum Classic supporters were content with basically following their own path, their own vision for what Ethereum should be. And I haven't seen a ton of animosity between those two forks. But with the Bitcoin fork, or actually like 50 plus Bitcoin forks, pretty much all of those people who were behind the action of forking them, they were doing so because they felt like they were basically improving Bitcoin and that their fork should become the dominant player. And so ultimately, when that doesn't happen, the question becomes, you know, how long will the supporters continue to try to make their fork of Bitcoin be the dominant Bitcoin fork? And I guess, once again, it's one of those open-ended questions. Well, you know, on the Bitcoin cash side, it seemed to do really well for a few months during that bull market and then did really poorly during the bear market. And then last I checked is around like 5% exchange rate and hash rate and whatnot. And then most of the other forks are even tinier, negligible in pretty much every metric that you could conceive of. But these things are so hard to kill that they may very well continue to exist for years, if not decades, and, you know, until the point that perhaps only the most ardent supporters are still around and maintaining them and trying to improve them. You know, this is part of this system that is fascinating because it is the philosophical and ideological side. And, you know, outsiders may look at it and say, oh, this is like cult-like behavior or, you know, almost religious fervor type of behavior. And there definitely are some similarities and overlaps because it's not all just technical. That was, I think, one of the greatest revelations that I had after, you know, a year or two of the block-sized debates, the scaling wars was that, yes, a lot of the arguments that are happening are technical, but fundamentally the schism is ideological and it's about trade-offs that people are willing to make. It's about differences in vision for what the system should be capable of doing. And that's why I think that there are cases where you simply cannot reconcile two different ideologies. The same thing has happened, you know, in various religions, for example, for thousands of years. Like, there's a reason why there's, you know, Catholics and Protestants. And even within Protestantism, I think there's hundreds of different forks that have basically happened over many generations where essentially you find that within a certain group of people, they disagree about one fundamental thing and there's no way to reconcile it. Therefore, they part ways and they continue on their own path. And I think that's basically what we've seen within the crypto asset ecosystem. That's super interesting. So it was more contentious because everyone was trying to say, this is the real Bitcoin or no, this is the real Bitcoin. They all kind of wanted the brand name of Bitcoin so that when new users discover it, they wanted the new users to go to their kind of like real Bitcoin. Pretty much. And it's because, you know, there is no authority that can define what Bitcoin is or even what it should be. You will certainly see various people who will try to defer to some sort of entity as an authority. And we've seen a variety of entities such as miners, for example. I think with the Bitcoin Cash folks, they were generally saying, you know, miners get to decide what the definition of Bitcoin is. Several of the other Bitcoin forks have gone the same way. Whereas I think it's a lot more complicated than that. And that it's hard to even describe how the definition of Bitcoin comes about because it's like trying to define, you know, how the definition of some colloquial word has come about. It just sort of spontaneously and organically happens over a period of time. And even the meaning of a word today or the definition of Bitcoin today may not be what it is, you know, several years from now. Yeah, I find the analogy of religion like super interesting here, not only because of the forks, but also because sometimes logic doesn't appeal to the die-hard followers, right? Like they follow a certain community or quote unquote religion because of emotional reasons or because they really believe in something and you can't reason with logic with that person. Almost sounds like, you know, I grew up in Pakistan and there were a lot of very religious people around me. And this is something I've noticed that I tend to gravitate towards logic and reasoning or engineering and science. Whereas a lot of people around me, like I couldn't reason with them based on logic. And sometimes I get this similar feeling in crypto as well, where you say something that you didn't even mean to direct at some particular community and they would just like jump on you for questioning their beliefs of how technology should work. Like it's funny in a way that they are working with something that is purely technical, but their belief system is not purely technical at all. Absolutely. And in fact, I mean, this happens to me regularly, but just yesterday I had someone respond to one of my tweets and basically say, you know, can you show me where in the Bitcoin white paper it says that we should use segregated witness or, you know, where in the Bitcoin white paper does it say that we should be batching transactions for efficiency? And it's almost like a type of fundamentalism that people can fall into because, you know, along that similar type of quote unquote logic, you know, we could say, well, you know, where in the early protocols of the 1970s and 1980s did it say that we should be routing our packets through the minimum number of nodes on the internet rather than doing a global broadcast mechanism? It's so hard to reconcile the evolution of technology with some sort of fundamental principles because technology tends to evolve in ways that almost nobody can predict. Yeah. And maybe it's nostalgia that doesn't kind of tends to forget how the internet actually evolved. But my early memories of the internet are actually of a very, very friendly community. They were like pro open source. They were very much like, if there's a new person that we're going to try and help that person who bought to learn about this new upcoming protocol. And maybe that's just my memory. Maybe there were competing solutions that those guys used to fight it out, or there were there was toxic elements even back then as well, because most of the other standards now like our protocols has died down. Like we only remember the winners, but it's interesting to kind of like draw the analogy between those early protocols, especially the ones that ended up kind of just fading away. Worse is what we're seeing in crypto right now, but there's almost like too many different options available and they're all trying to differentiate each other instead of kind of like, you know, expanding the size of the market, which we talked about earlier. Yeah. I mean, I would be very interested in reading some historical works about the early internet protocol wars. I've, I spent a little bit of time trying to find stuff around that and it was really hard for me to find anything. And maybe that's because, you know, history is written by the winner type of situation, but I think that there probably could be a number of insights hidden in there. Unfortunately, it may require, you know, someone spending a lot of time actually going around and interviewing some of the primary participants to get the firsthand accounts. Yeah. I think one thing that I can tell you about is this almost constant war between keeping the core of the network simple versus keeping the core of the network more complicated. And that's kind of like the beginning of the end-to-end design principle by David Clark, who was the chief protocol architect for the internet. And he was basically pushing for keeping the complexity at the edges and not in the middle of the network. And there were competing architectures like active networking is one of them where they were trying to put a lot of complexity at the routers or in the middle of the network. And they basically kind of like faded away over time. And similarly, like, even if you look at operating systems, there have been similar, almost like different architectures that at one point were trying to fight each other. Unix was a new concept where they were like, we will keep the base functionality extremely simple so that people can build more complicated things on top of it. Other operating systems were basically very, very complicated. And complex at the operating system level. And I think we're seeing that play out in blockchains as well, especially in the world where I operate and where there are these different platforms for building these applications that are taking different routes where some like Ethereum or US, they're going for the complexity in the middle of the network. So the network is supposed to do everything for you, approaches like ours, which are more in the camp of let's keep it simple. Let's keep complexity at the edges. Right. So, but this, this team of, so the core based thing be simple versus complex is something that I've seen repeating a lot in the history of computers in general. Yeah. And I mean, we can make all the arguments that we want about, you know, which one should be preferred or whatever, but I think ultimately they're going to all have to play out. And this is kind of like why I think that the best thing that can happen in the long run is that these networks continue to get attacked and overloaded and we'll see which ones can essentially rise from the ashes. Absolutely. I think in the end, it's the market that ends up deciding for four different factors. I think it's not even, I think there's a market recent quote that it's not the best technology that ends up winning. It's the best marketed technology that ends up winning. I noticed that you've done a bunch of work helping new beginners, kind of like helping educate them, giving them kind of like the right resources or what they should be reading. You want to tell the audience a little bit about these resources you maintain on your website, which are super helpful by the way. I find myself sending links to them a lot of times in my emails and things like that. Yeah. I mean, I bounce around and I do a lot of different things. I'm actually not doing that much coding anymore. But even just in the broader ecosystem, I think one of the most valuable things that those of us who have been in it for a long time can try to do is to distill the knowledge and basically lower the steepness of the learning curves to get into the system and start understanding it and start being able to contribute to it. Like you said, this is still a very small ecosystem and if we're going to continue to grow it and get anywhere close to mainstream usage, then we need a lot more people that are contributing to it as well. So one of the reasons why I put all of these resources together and maintain them, which is actually a non-trivial amount of work because on the Bitcoin resources page on lop.net, there are I think 500 links or so. And of course, due to the nature of the web, links are always breaking and changing, getting updated. People's SSL certificates are expiring. There's always something going on. But I open-sourced my website mainly so that other people can contribute updates and new resources as they come about. And the main reason why I created it in the first place was simply because I was getting really tired of having to do long-winded explanations to every single person that I came across. And so I found this is one of the reasons why I do a lot of writing as well. It's just I want to create a single comprehensive resource about a topic and just be able to send a URL to somebody rather than have to try to continually re-explain complex topics. So try to find the best, highest quality resource about one specific aspect of this system and put those URLs on my website in a way that's fairly easy to find. And this is a constant process of evolution as well, where now I'm dealing with the issue of, well, it's just an overwhelming amount of links on one page. So I feel like I need to re-architect the whole thing and create an easier type of path that people can be guided through so that they don't just see a link with 500 pages on it and give up immediately. Yeah, it's very comprehensive. I'm on the website right now. And I see that you have Bitcoin resources and then Lightning resources. Is there any other category or you're thinking of adding? If you had time in the future? Oh, that is, it's hard to say because it basically comes down to what people are asking me about the most. When I find myself constantly having to go and research things and send them to people, that is when I usually start getting something into my head about, well, maybe I should write an article. Maybe I should create a slide presentation. Maybe I should create a page on my website. It really comes down to what I feel like people are having the most trouble understanding, having the most trouble finding. And that's also why one of my hobbies in the space is kind of like a Bitcoin historian or archaeologists. I really like researching what was going on in the early days to try to understand what path the developers and the early community went down, like how we got to where we are today. And I'm actually working on my next blog post slash presentation right now where I'm trying to figure out like what the unwritten rules of Bitcoin are. Of course, I can never define Bitcoin, but this will probably be a lifelong continuing journey of trying to encapsulate as much of the ethos of Bitcoin into words as possible. That's awesome. I would like to read that whenever it's ready. And speaking of like what to add next, if you have the time, personally, I think I'll be super interested in a section on personal security. I think you've written some blog post about it, but in terms of kind of like breaking it down, to here are the simple things that everyone should be doing and here is the hardcore deep dive into if you really care about this particular aspect, here's how you really go down securing yourself. Yeah, that's it's interesting that you should note that because that is one of the dozen blog post drafts that I have right now is one that is more about like physical personal security, one on one. And it's tricky, like I have had a number of people reach out to me over the past year or so and basically ask if I do personal security consulting. And I'm like, no, I mean, that sounds like a lot of fun, but I really don't have time for that type of stuff. Switching topics a little bit, what's a more controversial opinion that you hold that you would kind of like think twice about before tweeting it out? Well, I would say the things that I have been self-censoring more frequently these days are some of the, I guess, more libertarian type viewpoints. I don't tweet as much these days about like firearms and weapons and physical self-defense type stuff. I also try to stay out of a lot of the, I guess you would call it social justice type of stuff. And this kind of loops back around to like the idea of the tribes and the communities and whatnot, because I guess to sum up some of the stuff that happened in the past week or so in Bitcoin, where there was a lot of anger and contentiousness around the idea of quote unquote Bitcoin culture and inclusivity or exclusivity or caring about people's feelings or whatever. It was tricky for me because I could see both sides of it. And I believe that if the goal of Bitcoin is to become a global monetary system where it's an open system that anyone who cares enough can participate in, then one of our goals should be to be as inclusive as possible and try to get input and feedback from as many diverse perspectives and people as possible so that we can better understand what the desirable properties of a global digital currency actually are. Now, on the other side, there were a lot of more technologists, but a lot of people who were more of the honey badger mindset of, well, Bitcoin is anti-fragile and it doesn't have feelings and it doesn't really care what you think. And they have some valid points along all of that. But I think that we can try to be inclusive, at least the point of not being assholes to newcomers and being patient with new people and not necessarily assuming malice of people because they say or suggest something that we think is a bad idea or might be trying to subvert Bitcoin somehow. And we should be able to do that without excluding everyone who doesn't agree with all of our philosophies and what have you. We still need to be able to politely tell people that, no, your suggestions have already happened on numerous occasions and it's not going to happen in the protocol or this is against fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin. And I guess part of that comes around to why I'm writing the blog post that I am right now. It's trying to tease out a lot of these unwritten rules and basically the ethos of at least the current set of Bitcoin adopters or outspoken Bitcoin contributors. And I think this is something that we'll probably have to struggle with for quite a while. There's so many different aspects to it. Even at a higher level, I think during some of these conversations over the past week, I had some people who were basically saying, well, thank you for all of the work that you've done with trying to educate people. And my response in my response was, well, I feel like I've actually failed significantly on the education part because I am really only an English speaker and everything that I have done has been very focused on English speaking resources. And I think I've failed a large portion of the world and the potential global community because it seems like Western values are probably more dominant in this space because that's where a lot of the discussion at least around protocol development and evolution of the system is happening. And it seems like there's probably a pretty decent barrier between East and West and possibly even other cultures of people who we really ought to be interested in getting more input from. Absolutely. And I think at least it was good to see those discussions happen so that people are thinking about those topics and thinking about how inclusive are you really being in some of these ecosystems which might end up impacting a very large population of the world if they're successful. So I think they're definitely the right topics to be talking about. Well, so I want to be respectful of your time as well for those who are not already following you on Twitter or know about your website. Do you want to tell the people where they can find you? Very easy to find me because I'm the only Jameson Lopp in the world, but my Twitter handle is lopp and my website is lopp.net. But if that's hard to remember, it's very easy to get to the Bitcoin resources page because I also have a URL for that. Just bitcoin.page will take you directly to all my educational resources. Awesome. Well, it was great briefly bumping into you in the New York blockchain week and awesome to chat more with you on our platforms. Thanks for having me. Take care. This has been the Stacks Podcast. As Jameson mentioned, you can follow him on Twitter at lopp. That's L-O-P-P. You can follow Muneeb on Twitter at Muneeb and I'm at Zach Valente. If you liked this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review for the show wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about building decentralized apps, please visit blockstack.org. The music in this episode is by Andrew Applepie. Check out AndrewApplepie.com for more. Until next time, thank you for listening.