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Hope you guys enjoy this interview with Jameson Lopp.
What's up, freaks?
Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt.
It's your boy Marty Bent.
Here on a Tuesday morning, it's blockchain week here in New York City.
It's crazy.
The suits have flooded.
Getting away from the chaos, getting an early morning start here in Flatiron at Barstool
Sports Studios.
We're here with Jameson Lopp.
Jameson, welcome to the podcast.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for coming on, man.
For those of you that don't know, Jameson is a professional cypherpunk, creator of StatToshi,
infrastructure engineer at Casa Hodel right now and was previously at BitGo.
But most of you may know him from Twitter because he gives pretty sage advice out on
Twitter.
So yeah, Jameson, I'm just curious.
What is your tale?
How did you find bitcoin?
I can never actually remember the specific article, but I'm pretty sure it was a slash
dot article in like mid to late 2012.
And I'm sure it wasn't the first time that I had read an article about bitcoin.
But for whatever reason, I read that article and was like, hey, this thing hasn't gone
away.
I thought it was going to get hacked and would die.
And so I started looking into it more, read the white paper.
But then the real catalyst that helped me get past a lot of my initial questions and
doubts was actually one of my fellow coworkers sitting in the cubicle next to me.
I leaned over and I asked him, hey, you know about this bitcoin thing?
And he was like, oh yeah, I've been mining and trading it for a couple of years now.
So he was able to answer a lot of my initial questions.
And then I got more obsessed with it than he was and went a lot further than he had.
And we still keep in touch and I still try to get him to go full time bitcoin, which
I ended up doing in 2015.
And it's been a wild ride ever since then.
I feel like everybody is like enthralled with bitcoin is on that journey to find a way to
work a bitcoin 24 seven.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I felt like I was already in it trying to be a part of the community and
understand.
And once I saw all the venture capital money flowing in, I was like, well, maybe I can
stop doing this while I'm at my other job and just be doing it while I'm at a job that's
actually in the same industry.
No, that's a that's a crazy thing about bitcoin too.
It's like it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you want to contribute to it, you can add to the network effect.
There's many ways to add to the network effect.
You can run a node, you can create the website that you did, which is incredible.
My favorite resource in bitcoin, go to lop.net has bitcoin resources page, a plethora of
links that that'll that'll that's my favorite place to push people down the rabbit hole.
Click on a link, a link a day for the next year and you'll learn a lot about bitcoin.
How how active is that site?
Do you know?
You know how much traffic against?
Yeah, I mean, I've got some like Google Analytics on it and, you know, obviously it follows
the hype cycles where, you know, during the peak at the end of 2017, it was getting thousands
of hits per day.
And you know, these days, you know, it's more like a few hundred hits per day.
And if anything, though, it's becoming more active from a community participation standpoint
because I ended up open sourcing and it's on GitHub and I get a few pull requests per
week now wanting to either add links or fixing broken links.
This is actually one of the bans of operating this thing is that I've yet to find a good
automated crawler that will just notify me when one of the links breaks because there's
a lot of links on there.
There's a lot of clicking through.
Yeah, it's a yeah, it's got to be an arduous process to figure that out.
That's what like that's what messes me as it happened to me on Twitter recently, I was
looking for a conversation.
Somebody changed their Twitter handle, which is like the conversation just jumped into
the abyss.
Yeah, so what are you most interested in Bitcoin right now?
What are you focusing on?
Obviously, you're working on Casa Hodel.
How's that process been?
Yeah, we're actually we're trying to get the the Casa Twitter account because because everybody
thinks the name of the company is Casa Hodel.
So it's just Casa like like House or Castle or what have you.
And I've been in the security space for a little over three years now at BitGo.
I was primarily working on infrastructure for their hot wallet security, which provides
a lot of unique challenges and is really a nightmare, you know, trying to help people
operate hot wallets.
And now I've pivoted and at Casa, we are trying to build the ultimate user friendly cold storage
solution, the be your own bank, be your own vault type solution, and the way that we're
doing this is we're trying to merge the usability of a mobile app with the security that you
get from hardware, key signing devices.
So the the Casa app will be just on your phone.
And this is a three out of five multi six solution.
You can you can have one key on your phone like in the secure element.
That'll be a default, though.
I'm going to be pushing to also have an option to not do that and just have yet another device.
But then you will have so you'll then either have three or four hardware devices.
You can bring your own, your Trezor, Ledger in the future, you know, who knows what else
keep keep perhaps any popular device we want to be able to support.
Or we also anticipate basically being a reseller of those devices.
Then you'll you'll basically set up your wallet, initializing it with all these different devices.
And then Casa will hold a fifth key as a recovery service to help out with certain disastrous
scenarios.
And then when you want to actually send money out of this vault, you're going to have to
go around and go to, you know, the different geographic locations where you're keeping
these hardware devices.
And so the interesting thing about this is the hardware devices do a great job of basically
making these things unhackable.
You know, you could still get like socially engineered or potentially have malware in
in some of the software you're using and you send it to the wrong address.
But most people who are using just a single hardware device are now prone to other types
of loss like natural disaster, end of life scenarios that they haven't thought through.
And so we think that by distributing these physical devices, that's going to provide
yet another layer of protection that not many people have.
And we're actually going to be recommending that they do not keep their seeds for these
devices.
Really?
And this is because when we we thought through the security issues with Bitcoin wallets,
you know, the very first thing that you do with the wallet is you get a 12 or 24 word
seed and you have to write it down.
And what does the wallet tell you?
It says store this in a safe place.
Well, personally, I believe that is a big fail right there for the average person.
Would agree.
That was a that was a funny meme that Neeraj had on on Twitter last week when they were
talking about whence is ours is underground tunnels.
He was like the feeling when they're talking about these these nuclear tunnels where people
the rich are storing their their Bitcoin and I have mine and my seed on a post it note
my sock drawer.
Exactly.
It's a lot of people's security these days.
Yeah.
And so, you know, we figure that we want to help guide users through best practices.
And the best way to do that is to help them avoid as many situations where they could
easily shoot themselves in the foot due to ignorance or just not understanding security.
It seems like the the cost of model sort of disincentivizes the five dollar wrench attack
to to a certain extent.
Yes.
That's that's definitely another thing.
You know, there's always going to be some level of physical attack where you might get
held hostage.
But, you know, if you are being held hostage and then you have to be taken around a lot
of different places, especially if you keep some of those keys and like access controlled,
you know, bank vault or whatever, it's definitely going to be a lot harder for them to pull
that off.
But like with regard to actually keeping track of the seeds, instead of keeping track of
the seeds and then like trying to restore the hardware, if you lose it, we're instead
going to be supporting basically key rotation within the app itself.
So we have this concept that we call the key shield that will be displayed front and center
in the software.
And it'll do things like every once in a while ask you to sign a message to verify that you
still have the keys so that we can be sure that you haven't lost them.
And if you can't do that, or if you lose a device or device fails or whatever, then there
will be a very simple wizard for you to basically go through and say, you know, this device
is lost or compromised.
I need to replace it and walk through the wizard and basically reset up your wallet
and transfer the funds to the new set of public keys.
That includes the new one where you've replaced the last one.
So basically what we're doing is we're trying to get away from having a requirement for
the user to keep track of any unencrypted data or digital keys or whatever.
Instead, the user only needs to keep track of a few physical devices, which I think is
a lot easier for the average person to get their head around.
Yeah, would you argue that's probably one of the biggest hurdles UX wise for mainstream
adoption is holding your own keys because what we're seeing is that people are distrusting
these decentralized third parties like Coinbase, Gemini, all these exchanges.
I think we need better education in private key management to sort of incentivize people
to take...
Well, it's a psychological thing too.
People are used to holding their monies in banks and there's going to have to be a sort
of a paradigm shift of how people view money and securing their own money.
Well, it's definitely...
There's the convenience factor.
There's really the fact that even highly technical folks, I've spoken to a lot of people who
they're just not comfortable with having to go through all of this and so they would actually
rather trust a specialist.
That's what we do with banks, right, is we trust the security specialist to take care
of all those issues for us.
Of course, we're all familiar with the trade-offs of trusting a particular specialist to do
things on our behalf, but this is why despite the fact that there are so many awesome, cutting
edge, mind blowing stuff happening in this space, why after being in this space for like
five or six years, I'm still just focused on private key management because I feel like
it's this foundational thing that we are still a long ways from solving properly.
Right?
That's one of the things that irks me about the space right now is the impatience of everybody.
If we have a protocol like the altcoin world, the ICO bubble, whatever you want to call
it, it's everybody acting out of impatience.
They want everything out of the box right away and these technologies have been iterated
on for decades and we just got Bitcoin just under a decade ago and it's going to take
time to fortify the system.
If you had to put it like a timeline on it, I don't know if you could, but...
I think that we've come really far in 10 years, going from zero to having probably tens of
millions of people that actually use crypto, having these huge conferences with 8,000 something
people at them, getting daily mainstream media attention.
I think I was seeing some statistics recently that something like over 80% of people are
at least like aware of crypto currencies.
It's crazy the normalization that's happened over like the last year and a half in particular,
like finviz.com, which is a website that I used to frequent a lot when I worked at a
hedge fund to follow market prices, they have a whole crypto page right now.
It's crazy.
I didn't think it was going to happen this fast.
I think it's easy to overlook how far we've come and still see that we have a very long
road ahead of us and we want to get to the end of that road as quickly as possible.
I guess I tweeted something recently where I was like, you know, eventually the protocol
is going to ossify and Bitcoin is going to become boring and then we're going to stop
talking about it.
I kind of look forward to that day.
It'll be bittersweet that we succeeded, but now hopefully by that time there will be some
new cool thing that we can be working on.
Ossifying the protocol, do you think that's possible?
I think it's pretty much inevitable with any protocol that achieves sufficient adoption
and at least if we're talking about decentralized internet protocols, you look at SMTP or HTTP,
any of these low level protocols.
I challenge anyone to go out and try to find people who are debating making changes to
these protocols.
I mean, it's just not happening.
There was, I guess, HTTP2 finally came out recently after many, many years of development.
Probably like Mike Belshi at Bicco had contributed to that before I think he even got into doing
Bitcoin stuff.
That's how long that took, but I fully expect that if the protocol continues to the point
that it has sufficient market penetration, then it just becomes too onerous to try to
change it and so then we start building stuff on top of it because you don't need to get
that same level of consensus to change it.
What are the features that you would like added before ossification?
Well do you think Bitcoin could survive in perpetuity as is or?
It could survive, but I think one of the other than of course scalability stuff, I mean I
think the biggest failure in Bitcoin is privacy right now is that it just has terrible privacy
and that's why we have so many other blockchains out there that are competing on the basis
of privacy alone is because that is one of Bitcoin's greatest deficiencies.
Yeah fungibility is going to be crucial.
That's what I've been saying is going to be like the next segwit battle is making Bitcoin
fungible.
Well yeah, I mean that could definitely get interesting once again with the like culture
clash between Asian miners and the rest of the world.
Culture clash, let's jump into that.
There's a lot of culture clashes going on all over the place between competing protocols
between different stakeholders within the incentive system.
It is crazy, you have, it is a global decentralized system and you're having to cooperate with
people that frankly you really don't understand their culture at all and so it felt like during
the segwit and Bitcoin cash debates that the Chinese miners just felt like Westerners weren't
respecting them enough and sort of what they've done which I would agree is merited to some
extent without Bitmain we would not be where we are.
A lot of people hate on Bitmain but I've been saying this a lot recently they were one of
the few companies in the early days willing to take the monetary risk and they're reaping
the rewards right now.
So what's your view on the culture clash and is there anything we can do to sort of bridge
the gap?
It's tough because I can't claim to actually understand their culture all that well.
It's tricky because you can view the power balance between the different entities in
the ecosystem in different ways and some people see miners as the powerhouse that is continually
building the blockchain whereas other people view them more as oh you know it's the rest
of the ecosystem that's actually creating the data that goes in the blockchain and all
the miners are doing is time stamping it and so there's no real right or wrong perspective
there like they're both correct but then you get into the debate of well who really has
the power and so that's why all that the UASF stuff and SegWit2x and all of that was fascinating
to watch last year and I was actually disappointed that SegWit2x got called off at the last minute
because I wanted to see what was going to happen.
Nothing would have happened right?
They would have missed it or it would have gone into a halt.
We found out later that it would have just you know completely jammed up now I'm sure
that eventually they would have fixed that bug and it would have proceeded forward.
Jeff Garzick's on to pushing an ICO now so he's not too worried about it anymore.
Yeah I think he's put that whole mess behind him.
Hopefully he's been shamed into irrelevance.
We'll make a comment on that.
Now what is interesting we found out like the intolerant minority has the power in these
networks like full node operators.
Oh yeah one way that I've put it before is that like the most powerful thing in Bitcoin
is apathy.
You know you could say the most powerful thing is the power of no but no is the default and
so I think it ends up being more the power of apathy because the default is disagreement
with breaking changes.
I would say I'm pretty apathetic.
How many what percentage of the network would you say is apathetic?
You know it's hard to say you know despite all of the like arguing and vitriol and what
not that happens on social media I think that you know there is no real like representation
of the Bitcoin community and this is one of the things that I find kind of amusing is
a lot of people who get upset because they like look at subreddit.
That's what I was going to say it's our Bitcoin.
Yeah so many people who think that like our Bitcoin is the Bitcoin community I'm like
are you kidding me like you maybe that's the only place that you go to but honestly
like I've been following Bitcoin since like 2013.
I rarely go on Reddit.
I don't like Reddit like I just don't like the UI of Reddit and it annoys me.
I've definitely stopped talking and conversing to many people on Reddit and in general I
find Twitter to be more better signal to noise.
I do as well.
Why do you think that is?
I think it's just because you have more power to curate your own experience.
That's one thing.
Yeah people that hate on Twitter I'm like you're not using it correctly.
Probably not.
Right.
You have to create lists.
Yeah you do have to put some work into it and then you know a lot of people get pissed
off on about different Reddits and you know they might be pissed off at the Bitcoin subreddit
because they don't like how the moderators do certain things or you might be pissed off
at the BTC Reddit because you don't like how the community on there does things and you
know downvotes people for certain stuff but.
Just don't go there.
If you don't like it I mean there are like dozens of other options for places to talk
about this technology.
Yeah what I've actually seen more over the past year is people diving into like private
chat groups.
Yeah.
A lot of the conversation happening there.
I mean that's been happening for the last five years I've been following it but I feel
like more there's been more and more people diving into these these side chats.
This is actually the tough problem for me is trying to ingest all of these different
data streams so that I can stay up to date and I mean I'm constantly throughout the day
I'm hopping back and forth between Twitter and Telegram and WhatsApp and Slack and IRC
and some Reddit and probably a few others that I'm not even remembering and that is
because the community is so diverse and spread out and all over the place and I'm not even
hitting everything.
I mean I'm well aware that like there are big like we chat rooms and there are lots
of forums like I don't go to Bitcoin Talk anymore but I'm sure there are still people
who who discuss things on there but.
Remember Bitcoin Talk that was.
I do remember the good old days of Bitcoin Talk.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that was is Cobra still still behind the helm on that correct.
I thought it was Themos.
Themos.
Is it Themos?
I think so.
Still waiting for the million dollar Bitcoin Talk 2.0 for software by the way.
It's been a few years.
I'm not sure what's going on.
Did they raise money for that?
I think so.
I forget where the money actually came from but it may have been through various fundraisers
or actual just ad revenue that it made over the years.
Yeah I don't really get a Bitcoin Talk that much anymore.
That's crazy.
It feels like I feel sometimes I feel like Jon Snow in the Battle of the Bastards like
when he's climbing up.
Do you watch Game of Thrones?
Yeah.
When he's climbing through like the bodies.
It's like this wave in particular after the bubble of December it's brought in so many
people it's just like sometimes you have to like get your bearings straight.
There's so many new voices like clamoring around but how many of these how many more
cycles do you think we'll go through before Bitcoin becomes more normalized?
I think we've still got a few more to go.
Yeah.
I think the real question is how do you know you know when we've hit like the saturation
point?
Yeah.
What do you think drives it more like the underlying tech and the security of the network
or the geopolitics like around at the geopolitical state of the world?
Well I mean this is like a very viral technology so I think that you know the reason why you
see the waves happening like this is because you know a few things may happen like on the
tech side that get people excited and then you know you start to see evangelism and basically
the viral network effects start to spread and basically grab hold of a new set of uninitiated
people and then those people some of those people may get excited and you know that's
they then do the same thing and it repeats until eventually it peters out and like there's
no one really left to who wants to get excited at this phase because they the rest of the
world does not yet see anything particularly interesting about it and then eventually it
collapses in on itself and you're left with the people who are more likely to have gotten
excited due to philosophy or fundamentals of it rather than just like speculation and
trying to get rich quick yeah and then the cycle repeats.
So let's dive into the philosophy behind it like that's what another interesting thing
that's been it's been like as these waves come in is is sort of the Bitcoin's roots
are very anarcho-capitalistic Bitcoin's monetary policy is very Austrian it's very conflicted
with the current way the world works yeah so you think we have to convert minds as we
convert people to Bitcoin as well? Convert reason very religious undertones here well
it's so there's two ways to look at it one way which I think I tried to do a lot in the
early days was yeah convert people like reason with them like explain to them why this is
the superior thing and I actually stopped doing that and instead well these days I wait
for people who are interested to come to me and ask you know questions and want to be
educated but but I think the more powerful thing is to demonstrate you know the the utility
behind these networks and you know actually getting people to use them and perhaps like
showing them use cases for for things that they wouldn't normally be able to do now one
I think one result of if you can get people into the system and then they hold on to their
value and they see it go up a crazy amount and they start to realize that like the economics
of this system are more beneficial than their savings account or whatever then that's one
way to get them I guess more permanently interested in the system from an economic standpoint
and never met anybody that hates money and it there's no real one one answer though because
of the diversity of people who come into it for many different reasons and so that's one
of the reasons why I stopped like proselytizing directly to people because I don't necessarily
know what their interests are and so I could very easily miss the mark and be wasting my
time and so for me at least it's easier just to put educational resources out there and
let people who are interested enough find them and then make their own decisions yeah
what do you think is the like the number one catalyst for the aha moment I would say for
me it was like creating my own personal wallet and writing down the seed phrase for the first
time being like holy crap like that was an aha moment for me like taking it off coin
base creating your own wallet and sort of interacting with the system that way yeah
well for me I mean it was actually making a transaction and getting something in return
that was of course this was a long time ago when you it was really hard to get bitcoins
you basically had to go to Mountain Gox send a overseas wire transfer and so at the time
it definitely had much more of a feel of this is some sort of like play token thing but
once you exchange that for something else perhaps something that you can hold or something
that you then make use of then you're like oh no you know this really is money and people
are treating it like money yeah that's uh yeah I think the first thing I ever bought
with Bitcoin was like a pair of shoes was like holy shit I got new fresh kicks but um
another like tricky subject we could jump into is like how different agencies different
states different municipalities are are defining Bitcoin and it sort of pisses me off is we
we can't use it as a currency it like we use without without an extreme tax burden so do
you have sort of a definition in your mind of how Bitcoin should be defined on a regulatory
level well the tricky thing about Bitcoin and a lot of these crypto assets is that I've
referred to them as like chimeras they have properties of multiple different asset classes
and so the result is that you actually end up having multiple government agencies all
wanting to define it in a way that suits them best and gives them the most regulatory control
over it and you know time will tell how how that plays out and whether or not it it really
even matters why wouldn't it matter because you know regulatory agencies I mean they can
and politicians and whatever they can pass all the laws that they want but if they can't
actually enforce them then it's just a joke so that's why I think it's particularly going
to be interesting to see what happens with the SEC and how they react to all of these
different offerings and you know I suspect that they may end up having to to basically
give up on trying to define a lot of these things as securities because some of them
some of them are kind of securities some of them actually seem to change between being
a security and not being a security and like I just I think that the complexity of some
of these crypto assets is such that the government agencies can't possibly be like flexible and
fast enough to actually deal with them yeah now it's crazy watching the Senate hearings
about cryptocurrencies and it's funny some of these politicians are so tech illiterate
it's like how they're not going to be able to keep up they can't make they can't even
pass a budget let alone make overarching decisions about this stuff this part of the I mean there's
a lot of arms races that are constantly happening you know there's arms races around security
around privacy around regulations and and this isn't new you know this is why cutting
edge technologies often get adopted by criminals because they are aware that governments are
slow to adopt and understand various technologies so if you can stay ahead of government agencies
then you've got a big edge so you know if the crypto asset ecosystem can continue innovating
and in crazy ways then outpace the ability for governments to keep up with it then that's
a very interesting edge that these systems have yeah and that's what I'm pretty sure
I picked up this book because of your recommendation the sovereign individual that's what they
jump into a lot of his cryptography has created a shift in the in the logic of violence and
the leverage that that individuals have yeah over these nation states now do you think
we transition to a post-nation state world if we do it's going to take a while yeah it's
definitely not going to happen anytime soon because that's like so that's been like the
ethos of the cypher punks sort of the overarching ethos over the last 30 years is just creating
technologies that enable sovereign individuals to to live in peace yeah I mean there's a
lot of overlap between cypher punk and the crypto anarchist movements and you know I
think that crypto anarchy is a logical extension of like cypher punk ideology of sort of taking
it to its final conclusion of what happens when there really is no way for an authority
to control the entire system yeah how did you get into it like would you consider yourself
a cypher punk first that found bitcoin or no well I mean I was I was a libertarian and
I mean I had I had gone through all the political ideologies over the years I mean I was raised
a very conservative household and ended up going to an extremely liberal university and
you know ended up being let down by all of these political parties I mean I guess by
the time I got interested in bitcoin I considered myself libertarian but you know libertarian
party and its candidates in the United States let me down a few times over the years I didn't
fully agree with everything that they were doing and it was bitcoin that then led me
to like anarcho-capitalism and voluntarism and it's been a you know it's I guess been
most interesting because I felt like bitcoin could actually make that a reality now I definitely
get a lot of pushback on this from you know people who believe that that we need nation
states simply because we've had them for so long and that's how things are and I think
a constant pushback that I get is this belief that like voluntarism or anarcho-capitalism
will be a utopia and I definitely don't think it'll be a utopia but what we're really trying
to do is fix the the root underpinnings of society to be not based on violence now there's
a lot of tricky things that you then have to get into after that of like how are different
like public services going to get replaced and whatever people can fathom it like conversations
get heated sometimes when you when you talk about sort of replacing nation states people
can envision a world without governments and how would you envision like a transition we'd
get like let's paint the picture of what cryptography enabled peaceful like anarcho-capitalist world
would look like might not be peaceful well I mean the the I guess most important thing
that people are worried about is is how do we replace public infrastructure and public
services anything that is currently socialized and and so the the interesting thing is that
when you look into services like health care or roads or plumbing or whatever those services
tend to actually be performed by private companies I mean private contractors it's just the government
is just coordinating so I think the fundamental question comes down to how do you coordinate
in a like less authoritarian way and then how do you fund those particular things and
and so in a in a voluntary society it would be more based on funding based on usage and
I think the the reason that that has not really been possible before is because actually figuring
out you know pay-to-play type usage for all these things would be incredibly onerous but
once we are in a future where it's a lot easier to make like metered micro payments and and
automate a way to remove a lot of the friction that would be required for that that's when
I think this type of stuff actually becomes possible yeah that's the microtransactions
subject it's a touch on the people some people don't think it could succeed but so is this
a world do you think that would be enabled like lightning network or yeah I mean potentially
lightning networks have the ability I think to enable whole new classes of economic interaction
that just aren't possible right now yeah it sort of goes back to one enable what I believe
it would enable something like Balaji described in the machine payable web right so you'd
be able to just that's when things get really interesting when the machines just start paying
each other and we don't even interact do you think a lot of Bitcoin usage in the future
will be machine to machine over yeah I mean I don't see why not especially if we we end
up basically creating this machine economy I mean the machines need to talk they need
to talk to each other you know and and interact economically somehow now they could just I
guess do that with their own private databases that some company sets up like a visa style
thing but but it would be more powerful if they were using open public network yeah an
open public network actually one paper that came out I believe it was yesterday I don't
know if you've read this yet but mesh networks and sort of so a lot of Bitcoin transactions
are are relayed over the internet right now Blockstream has a satellite above us another
avenue through which you could you could relay transactions and then this is an interesting
one that came a story about it dropped yesterday basically txt or txtenna excuse me working
with samurai wallet to create sort of a mesh network where you can relay transactions while
not being on the internet or not being on a cell network either so how do you know like
much about these mesh networks and how a little bit that there are actually a few folks at
the conference who are you know doing mesh networking stuff including one guy here in
New York and and you know this is another I think fundamental piece of infrastructure
that we need because you can make some pretty good arguments that the internet itself is
not decentralized enough you know we still have too many choke points at ISPs that are
easy for for like nation state actors to manipulate or tap or shut down or what have you and so
I am very hopeful that over the coming years we will see the internet become more like
a truly decentralized peer-to-peer network and you know that'll still probably start
off more centralized at first as we see large companies like blanket the earth via satellites
and drones and hot air balloons and all that stuff but but once we do have this like blanketed
internet then it should be like that much easier to start creating your own mesh nodes
to then be able to propagate around at ground level yeah and that's a again like you said
like it's important thing to think about in regards to decentralization as you need multiple
ways to relay these transactions and so right now we have it through the internet satellites
a mesh network I believe Nick Szabo and Elaine who are working on shortwave radio transmission
yeah they were working on basically you know being able to bounce signals off the atmosphere
to relay them like over borders of nation states but you know that's really really low
bandwidth but but high censorship resistant operation that's a like who would use that
like in what scenario would you have to use like a shortwave would it be like possible
to do them like on a mass adoption level or would it be very specific use cases no I think
it would be more specific I mean at least right now it requires you know setting up
specialized hardware and I guess if I recall correctly one of the other tricky things is
you have to be careful about like how you're you know directing those signals because it
would be possible to triangulate them if you if you're just like broadcasting all over
you know it's a very cypher punky type thing to do I'm not sure like how far they intend
to take the technology like how easy they want to make it to use just to prove that
you can do it it's crazy and then you have people like DeSantis talking about bouncing
radio waves off the moon to do it that way just use the moon as a satellite yeah it seems
like a long way to go though because my understanding is that normally you can bounce them off the
ionosphere mm-hmm yeah I was actually talking about that with Bitcoin sign guy last night
believe it or not we're talking about bouncing stuff off the ionosphere incredible kid one
of the best memes in Bitcoin to date I would say buy Bitcoin behind Janet Yellen so there's
I don't know how to jump into this topic is squatting are you okay with talking about
that yeah I mean I haven't revealed like all the details of it I have a blog post though
that I'm gonna go into all the details soon okay so we'll let the blog post speak for
speak for the whole experience but like in general it's a social engineering attack you
think stuff like that is gonna become more common as Bitcoin price appreciates yeah well
you know this is kind of an interesting aspect of I guess the rise of crypto anarchy is that
now due to the the level of anonymity that sophisticated attackers can pull off on the
internet they can actually exploit vulnerabilities that nation-state agencies have created and
that the main one with swatting of course being that these emergency call centers will
take a call from anybody even if they don't know who it is or where it came from and they
will they're they're basically instructed through their own government protocols that
they have to treat everything as potentially real and so the result of that is that you've
got you know this one random guy ends up spending like ten minutes of his day and is able to
expend probably in excess of a hundred thousand dollars of public resources to lock down my
entire neighborhood with dozens of police units and the SWAT team and the mobile command
unit and EMS and I mean it was holy shit it was crazy I mean that's I was you know obviously
I was upset that that someone targeted me I knew that it was a possibility but the more
upsetting thing was just the general waste of public resources because I mean I'm a taxpayer
and so some of that was my resources too and and I know that this is not a one-off incident
there have been many others like it and as far as I can tell they continue to happen
and the law enforcement agencies don't seem to actually be doing anything to try to close
this vulnerability the only the only thing that I know now is that my particular local
law enforcement agency has me on a list that says if this guy you know has a call that
says it's from his house you know saying it's a life-or-death situation call this phone
number first to verify with him and make sure that it's not fraudulent like that is not
scalable I mean that's cool that you're doing that for me but that is not scalable finding
that in the moment would be I can't imagine that would be easy at all that's ridiculous
but but it goes this plays into the drug war too because a lot of these municipalities
need to justify their budgets so in particularly with the drug war like these SWAT teams love
going on on missions to knock down doors and kill dogs for for a minuscule amount of marijuana
well you know we actually saw I think just yesterday news out of Georgia just near Atlanta
where there was actually a heist being planned by four or five guys they were planning on
stealing a bunch of Bitcoin like arm-robbing Bitcoin from a guy might have been somebody
we know you know there are some Bitcoin operations happening in Atlanta but they actually it
as far as I could tell coincidentally got busted by the cops while they were planning
in the hotel because someone alerted the cops to suspicious possible drug activity but they
weren't they weren't drug activity they were actually planning a Bitcoin robbery yeah holy
shit there's a there's many ways you can get attacked you get hacked on the internet we
saw what Ryan Selkis earlier this week somebody got a hold of his Twitter account because
they phone ported him phone ported him that's another problem like how come the phone companies
can't get this together like well that's another awesome thing I guess about once again the
rise of crypto anarchy is that these systems are actually creating new incentives that
make people find and exploit vulnerabilities that have been there all along but there was
never really a good reason to do it and so what we're seeing now is that phone providers
just have terrible security practices with regard to locking down your account and making
sure that you are the rightful owner and you know the only the only solution that I have
for that because what we saw with Ryan and a number of other people is that they were
still they're still trusting these third parties and they're going to them and saying hey you
know put additional security on my account you know don't let anyone change the number
unless I like physically come into a store with two forms of identification and blah
blah blah and inevitably what happens is that a human does not follow that protocol and
therefore the security protocol is completely worthless because these these these attackers
you know they just keep trying and if they if they get a support tech that follows the
protocol they hang up and they call again and get another one and so the the only solution
I have to that is to use a phone service that does not support phone porting without actually
having a unique code so like I use Google Fi and anyone is welcome to try to port my
phone number but they can't do it without the unique code that I put in because there
are no humans that can that have the ability to port it without that code that's interesting
that's do you like in Google Fi yeah I've used a price point for several years they
you basically pay for what you use it's like ten dollars a gig it's not bad at all even
international which is awesome it works in like a hundred countries that's crazy no it's
also crazy like like all these attacks and again like crypto like want to cry all these
hospital computers getting getting ransomware for Bitcoin it's Bitcoin is helping expose
that the Emperor wears no clothes when it comes to internet security yeah Equihash or
Equifax excuse me getting my words mixed up that's another big one like that was two hundred
forty million social security numbers just gone so it seems like we might have fucked
up on internet 1.0 internet 2.0 whatever you'll consider it from a security perspective like
well yeah I mean we created all of these silos of sensitive information and then you know
the attackers only need to go get through one door in order to get huge volumes of important
data yeah it seems I don't want to get heavy here but it almost seems like a ticking time
bomb to like a fight club like scenario yeah if well or or even I guess what was the other
like cyberpunk dystopian TV show mr. robot yes mr. robot that that seems pretty plausible
I've never did I've never dove into a mr. robot but a lot of people tell me I should
but yeah it seems actually there was a mr. robot clip going around right after Facebook
made that announcement about ecoin and it's funny because you see these like big corporate
entities enter like Mark Zuckerberg comes out like we're gonna we got a blockchain team
now we're putting a normal one guy on it but it's like this is like against the whole ethos
like you can't I'm definitely interested to see what they come up with do you think they
make a Facebook coin or I mean you're so far the announcement was so vague that it could
be anything and you know the odds are in the favor of them doing something stupid with
regard to blockchain it's you know it's very hard to I think do it right do it in a way
that actually makes sense and in most cases I think that any like blockchain based protocol
that is basically being written and administered by one company is probably doomed to fail
yes it doesn't make sense antithetical to the ethos like I tweeted out like all right
Facebook you want to get in just experiment with lightning network and make it easy for
Facebook users yeah send Bitcoin between each other and buy Bitcoin do that and the network
effect you'll create by doing that will make that Bitcoin more valuable in the long run
you know I mean that's why I really like what square is doing with their cash out square
cash app is is on point have you used it yet oh yeah yeah the UX is incredible the bitcoins
in your wallet right away it's you can withdraw right away it's a seems like Jack's building
a bank all right he's got the credit card connected to the app now and he just announced
that they've got a lot of deals with with retailers where you get the where you get
like cash back which is a which is pretty cool and it seems like he he might be a Bitcoin
maximalist as well that's the the rumblings that I've heard yeah yeah he came out with
a bold prediction like Bitcoin reserve currency the world in ten years that would be crazy
we've got a long way to go till then the trillions of dollars yeah all right wrap it up here
on a wrap-up question so are you optimistic or pessimistic about the state of Bitcoin
at the moment definitely optimistic especially with lightning network I just I see a whole
new wave of innovation happening because basically innovating on these second layer networks
is going to be so much easier to do like it's you don't have to worry about getting in contentious
debates with people about changing protocols you can basically be be writing your own stuff
and not have to get permission so I think like the permission permissionless innovation
on the second layer networks is going to be a huge boon and the folks that I talked to
about it like Alex Bosworth who worked with me at Bicco for a while and you know he is
basically diving headfirst into thinking about this new ecosystem you know he's always coming
up with this new stuff he's like oh I was thinking about this and that and I just realized
that you can do this cool new thing we never even thought of it before and so it's just
this new like acceleration is what it feels like and seeing a whole new class of developers
get interested yeah that's the other thing the developer drain or not drain like it's
interesting seeing developers get more and more interested with this and where would
you say the state of like the development world is and from a developer perspective
I mean Ethereum has the developer community down pat right how would you compare Bitcoin
and Ethereum's development community so they're very different I guess development philosophies
between the two communities and I think that Ethereum community tends to be like easier
to get into there you know they put a lot of effort into being like easy to get up and
running and you know write your first DAP type of thing whereas in Bitcoin it does tend
to be a steeper learning curve and there's more focus on being conservative and security
practices and whatnot and so it's definitely harder for new entrants and that's why I think
we can benefit from more developer outreach and that's why I like to see this stuff like
Jimmy saw and ChainCode and stuff are doing and you know I want to see more of that because
we're definitely seeing an impact from it yeah now it's a Jimmy's class and then what
ChainCode and things like the things that companies like Blockstream and ChainCode are
doing are awesome for the space the ChainCode residency is very impressive from what I can
tell and they sponsor one of the best meetups in the city thanks for the free pizza but
you have to go on to another podcast where can we find out more about you Jameson?
Well it's all on lop.net l-o-p-p dot net and you have a parting word of wisdom for the
freaks out there?
Well you know you asked me if I was optimistic or pessimistic and I think that the answer
has to be for everyone to be optimistic because these systems are only going to be as good
as what we put into them and so while there is some benefit from having like adversarial
thinking and like trying to pick things apart in general you should still be optimistic
that you know there are a lot of great talented people that are devoting their lives and resources
to getting us towards this vision of a future in which you know no one controls money and
you basically control your own money and even that's only the very beginning of what I think
is like the future of crypto assets and really the like digital lifestyle is that we have
this set of people that are trying to bring control back to yourself and it's not just
about money I think it's going to be about identity and reputation and just all of your
data in general is getting that back under your own control and so that's why I'm still
working on private key management because I think it's going to be a key piece to owning
yourself and that's where we get once again back to that concept of the sovereign individual
is that you know you own everything about you and this gives you like the best level
of freedom that you can possibly have.
Wow powerful stuff one day at a time people one day at a time that was an incredible interview
and you can find me at Marty Bent on Twitter if you like this podcast please rate subscribe
share peace and love it was fun cool.