Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Progressive Bitcoiner podcast.
I'm your host, Trey Walsh, and today we have an amazing guest for you.
We have Jameson Lopp on the podcast and really excited to have him on.
He was hugely instrumental in my own journey into Bitcoin and understanding all things
privacy tech, as well as a wealth of knowledge through his articles that he's written and
his own company, Casa, as well.
So we discussed a lot of things in Bitcoin, what it's been like being in the Bitcoin ecosystem
the past 10 years.
We've talked about privacy and tech.
We talked about Bitcoin culture stuff and his Bitcoin Maxi article and a host of other
things, including some of his own background.
So I really think you'll enjoy this episode and encourage you to look into his own articles,
his own research and writings and things like that, which you can find in the show notes
through his website and following along on social media to Jameson.
So really hope you enjoy this episode.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback for us, all is welcome.
Please feel free to reach out to us at hello@progressivebitcoiner.com.
And we're continuing to run those affiliate promo links for Jason Meyer's book, A Progressive's
Case for Bitcoin, as well as through SaaS Mining for their renewable Bitcoin mining,
both companies through Bitcoin Magazine and SaaS Mining that I really love and appreciate.
So if you want to check those out, those are going to be in the show notes as well.
And hope you enjoy the episode and we'll see you again next week.
Hey, Jameson, welcome to the Progressive Bitcoiner podcast.
How's it going?
Not bad.
Glad to be here.
Yeah.
Thanks for jumping on.
So we revamped the podcast.
We've had two official, a few releases so far and super thrilled that you're jumping
on.
And one of the reasons that I really wanted to have you on the podcast in general and
our target audience is a bit more mainstream, a bit more ideally folks from the left that
might not even know about Bitcoin.
That's kind of the goal.
It's still a Bitcoin podcast, so it's still got Bitcoiners listening.
But I'd love for folks from the left who are curious to come on.
And I really like your takes on privacy, on tech, on what are some of the things that
we shouldn't necessarily compromise on and why should folks care about these things.
And I think there's a massive gap from the left when it comes to things like this.
So that's one of the reasons I was really excited to have you come on the podcast.
I listened recently to your talk as well.
I think you were at the Bitcoin conference with Robert Breedlove.
Some folks from my audience might not listen to that podcast.
So it's kind of getting some of those similar things, but also mixing it up.
But for folks that don't know you or don't know about you, what's a quick summary?
Who you are, what you do, how long you've been in the space, that kind of thing.
Yeah, it's been a decade now for me.
I'm a computer scientist by trade.
I got interested in Bitcoin from reading about it on nerdy websites like Slashdot back in
the day.
And basically, I ignored it for a few years, like I think most people do.
And it kept coming back, kept coming back.
And finally, I read the white paper, and that's when it blew my mind as a computer scientist,
like seeing the elegant but completely backwards way that this problem was solved.
I never would have tried to solve the double spending problem, the Byzantine generals problem
in the way that Satoshi did, because it's just incredibly inefficient, and it goes against
all of my training as a software engineer.
So that blew my mind.
I started doing a few open source projects.
And then within a year, I was so hooked on it that I was like, "You know what, I might
as well try to get paid to do this because I'm spending all of my free time on it."
So I went full time in early 2015, and really since then have spent the past eight years
just working on building wallets and building private key management software and infrastructure
and helping with the best practices and the standards around that.
Because while the space has really exploded in complexity, and a lot of people are doing
really cutting edge stuff, I think it all still rests on this foundation of letting
people be able to and be confident in managing the private keys and having self custody,
and really the empowerment aspect, empowering yourselves through the private keys in order
to unlock and access all of these interesting technological functions that are coming along.
So that's the tech side of it.
I don't know if you want my political background as well, because that's quite varied.
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
Why not?
Yeah, so I'm a good old boy, North Carolina, probably 10 generation North Carolinian.
My lineage was traced back to, I think, the 1600s by my grandfather.
I'm from Virginia myself, so similar lineage.
So just across the line there.
Yeah, so I was raised extremely conservative, religious household, was really indoctrinated
into that.
I voted for, I think, George W. Bush was my first presidential election, when I was still
in college.
But then I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, third generation
graduate from there, extremely liberal institution.
And so I really swung the other way, ended up voting for Obama in 2008, because I was
like, "Oh, this is something different, hope and change, I can really buy into this."
And then I observed what happened over the next four years.
And I was like, "Wait a minute, why is he still bombing all of these people?
Why are we still engaged in all these wars with people that I don't have any problems
with?"
So I became disillusioned there as well.
And I think I ended up voting for Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate in 2012, kind of
a protest vote.
Obviously, I knew libertarian candidates not going to win.
And then that was the last time I voted.
I don't even vote anymore.
I believe that the best use of my time is to use my skills as a technologist to help
people empower themselves with the stuff that we're going to be talking about today.
Democracy and republics in general, it's interesting governance.
But to be quite honest, I find the governance of Bitcoin and these new systems to be far
more interesting.
Yeah, so we exchanged some emails and you mentioned that's one of the things that could
be interesting to get into.
So let's talk about that a little bit.
And we can go 30,000 foot explaining to someone who might not even understand the first thing
about cypherpunks, Bitcoin, cryptography, any of the landscape, and then go down deeper
if you'd like.
But when you say that governance structure and comparing the two worlds, because I'm
starting to get there myself, been a lifelong Democrat voter, grew up in the South conservative
as well and kind of shifted after college actually.
So for me, I'm also seeing year after year, the same things are happening, the same issues,
the same wars, regardless of political candidates.
One of the reasons I love Bitcoin so much is like this might actually help fix some
of these things or start to unwind some of this mess so we can address maybe some of
these other things.
Right.
So I'm kind of in a similar boat of where I'm starting to just separate those two worlds
and say, what can I do to actually make some change because this system doesn't seem to
be working.
So when you talk about governance, can you explain a bit what you mean by that?
When we talk about governance, we talk about any sort of organization that has to have
some way of really maintaining its cohesiveness over time as humans join and depart that organization.
There has to be some sort of structure that sort of maintains a semblance of stability.
As much as we can hate on the many, many problems with governance in America, it is still, I
think, objectively better than many, many other countries that have far less stability
and transition of power between different people and parties.
The traditional way that we think of governance is usually hierarchical structures.
This is a very logical thing, a logical way for humans to organize themselves.
This happens both at the individual organization level and at the higher level of society and
civilization.
The way that we advance civilization is through specialization.
The result of that is that people watching this podcast today probably don't spend a
meaningful portion of their lives worrying about where the food on their table is going
to come from.
The reason for that is that we outsource that.
Really, we outsource many, many, many aspects of our lives these days to specialists.
You probably don't work on your own plumbing or electrical or other issues with your house
or your car or whatever, even though technically you could if you put in the time and effort
and resources.
It's just you don't have the same leverage.
Specializing in one specific thing allows you to have a much higher level of efficiency
and output and leverage.
Therefore, it's better economically for you to get paid money to do that one thing because
it's more valuable than it is for you to become a generalist tradesman where you know how
to do everything yourself because you're just not going to be able to do things as quickly
as someone who spends their entire life doing that one thing.
This is logical from an economic perspective.
It has allowed us to create incredibly complex civilization and advanced technology at an
insane rate.
But the downside and what people tend not to notice or think about because it just happens
in the background is that it introduces a lot of fragility.
To put it in the context of this space, it introduces a lot of centralization.
The specialization is centralization.
And so you end up relying upon a lot of trusted third parties from many different aspects
of your life.
So one simple example of that is now, especially if you get into the sort of prepper community
or you talk about how do I survive if there's some major catastrophe, something that comes
up very often that you hear about is the sort of three-day supply chain problem.
It's like we've created an economy that's incredibly efficient in transporting goods
around.
So we have all of these just-in-time supply chains.
So you always have fresh food getting delivered to your grocery store.
Well, if that system shuts down, if those trucks stop driving, if those cargo ships
stop running, as we kind of saw happen during the pandemic a little bit, major, major first
and second order effects happen.
And a lot of people are not well positioned to be able to ride out those kinds of disruptions.
So we have a kind of weird balance to strike.
And I'm mainly focused on trying to improve my self-sovereignty and trying to help other
people improve their self-sovereignty.
So at least within the context of Bitcoin, we mainly do that within finance and the banking
system.
But there are certainly many other aspects of your life that you can apply the same thing
to.
So from the governance perspective, we have highly centralized governing parties now.
I already spoke about the sort of third-party candidates basically being just a protest
vote because of all of the power that has been concentrated within the Democrats and
the Republicans.
And anyone else who doesn't tow the party line of one of those major parties doesn't
really have much of a chance, which is unfortunate.
Then if you look at the way that Bitcoin itself as a system is governed, it's actually completely
flipped on its head.
And so instead of having this new top-down hierarchical organization, it's actually a
bottom-up organically grown type of consensus system.
So when you're operating on the Bitcoin network, you operate your node, you validate the rules
that you agree to, but you aren't voting on anything.
There is no concept of majority wins other than kind of with the hash rate.
That's a special case.
It doesn't really get to decide the rules.
And so instead we have this system that it really, I think, can be best described as
anarchy because it is a system of rules without rulers.
So instead, we have to kind of fumble around and figure out how does the overlap of everybody
running their own rule systems coalesce into this thing that we call Bitcoin.
And usually that's extremely stable, though sometimes, for example, during the 2017 era
fork wars, it can get a bit less stable and more dramatic.
There's a lot there.
I'll start with, again, trying to, you know, because I've heard similar things you've said
on other podcasts in your articles, but trying to pivot a bit more to this potential audience.
Why should progressives and those on the left care about this?
So me speaking for myself as a progressive, as someone on the left, I really care about
this.
But a lot of those on the left, I think, don't think about this as much or aren't as concerned
about this.
I would say things like anarchical system, centralization, Bitcoin, those are like trigger
words for the left in a lot of ways.
In general, a lot of people just don't know much about it, period.
But for those that do, some have decided those things and associations are bad.
So from a progressive's perspective, if you were to articulate why a progressive should
care about this versus a libertarian or conservative who might naturally be skeptical of those
things – and again, there's issues there, right?
You have the same kind of worship of monarchy in a different way.
Why should those on the left care about this and want to advocate for a system that you
described?
So, you know, I think this actually applies to everyone.
But one of the ways that I look at it is – and this is why I generally look at politics from
a sort of arm's length amused standpoint, like I don't really want to get too involved
in politics – is because the political games that our systems have developed into is basically
one of rug pulling, is the best way I can describe it in terms of like Bitcoin and crypto
ecosystem, because it is a winner-take-all type of battle, right?
Whoever's candidate or whoever's party wins the votes, they are the ones who have
all of the power.
There's no split ratio of power based on the percentage of votes you got or any more
complex – like we don't even do ranked choice voting in America, you know?
So the stability, I think, which is what makes this so much more appealing in that if you
are "sovereign" in whatever system you're using, you don't have to worry about a bunch
of other people banding together and basically deciding to change the rules of the system
out from under you.
So this is why Bitcoin as a system is incredibly stable.
There is a lot of drama and political-esque debate within the system, but there's not
the same undercurrent of "I can rug pull you and change the rules if I gain a sufficient
quota of votes."
So that empowerment, you could frame it in a number of different ways, but from a progressive
perspective, perhaps you would frame it from a minority rights viewpoint of "you can
be any type of minority within the Bitcoin ecosystem."
First of all, Bitcoin doesn't even know or care about your attributes.
But even if you're a minority in the sense of what you believe the rules of Bitcoin should
be and the actual governance of the system, you don't have at least the same threshold
of rug pull risk.
It's not a 51% risk of the rules being changed.
It's more like 99% of the ecosystem would have to agree to change the rules without
your consent.
Also, it's difficult to quantify, but roughly it's more...
I hate to use the word "fair" because that can be a trigger word as well, but the governance
of Bitcoin, I best describe it as instead of being a system where you just have to get
the slight majority of people to agree to a change, and thus the changes can be a lot
more fickle and unpredictable, which is basically the way most Western democracies seem to work
these days.
Rather the incentives and the game theory around the system that we call Bitcoin is
one such that a change is incredibly unlikely to go through and get enacted and get adopted
unless it is not harming people.
And it is objectively good for at least some substantial portion of the user base, but
it is especially important that there's no strong and logical objections to why a change
would harm a portion of the community.
So you could call that conservative in a sense, like the protocol changes itself are fairly
conservative, but I see it as a security and defense mechanism that it highly weights not
breaking anything for anyone who is a historic user of the system.
Yeah, no, I completely agree with that.
And I think to pivoting a little bit, one of the things I want to bring up, there could
be some people that subscribe to the New York Times and from this podcast, and one of the
more public things that was probably released about you or most mainstream was that article
that came out in 2019 that talked about you're talking about the protocol and things like
that, but also privacy and things like that.
So you had an article that come out, I think it was 2019, talking about privacy and some
of the steps you went through almost as an exercise.
And again, kind of the same question, why should people care about that?
Why should people care about privacy?
And how did that interview come about?
And for those that don't know, there's this article, I might link it in the show notes
as well, where Jameson described the steps to kind of erase yourself, is that a good
way to put it, from being found and ultimate privacy and trying that out.
So describe that a little bit and why people should also care about that.
Yeah, so this is another result of technology really changing some of the incentives of
other systems.
And in particular, what happened to me was I kind of rose in prominence on social media
during the scaling debates and during sort of my early years being full time working
in this space.
And so I went from being a nobody with 1000 followers to being someone with hundreds of
thousands of followers.
And this sort of kicks off a law of large numbers in terms of audience.
And that if you have enough people paying attention to you, it's inevitable that one
or more of them will be unhinged or will be willing to do things that you would consider
illogical or not nice.
So I would say I am generally an optimist or have a positive outlook on humanity in
the sense that I believe that the vast majority of people are quote unquote good and they
don't want to hurt other people, at least not obviously, not directly.
And that's one of the reasons why democracy or democratic republics I think work generally
okay.
Unfortunately, with technology, some of the repercussions and sort of attack and defense
games have really changed.
And so this is it's not dissimilar to what celebrities have had to deal with ever since
mass media became a thing.
And if you have millions of people paying attention to you, for example, you'll probably
have some stalkers.
Now what has changed is that the sort of level of fame, if you will, required to hit that
threshold of risk is much lower and it can happen much, much faster.
So basically the point being, even though I'm not a celebrity, I'm this like niche
micro celebrity in this one particular sector, it exploded within a year or so and I was
not prepared to defend myself against these potential attackers.
So I ended up having my entire neighborhood shut down by a SWAT team because somebody
who I pissed off decided to leverage their technological skills to be able to place an
anonymous phone call to my local law enforcement.
And then essentially, I would almost call it, you know, hacking the rules of law enforcement
by using the appropriate trigger words that they knew would create the ultimate lethal
response and get dozens of highly and heavily armed guys out surrounding my house.
So basically they said I had killed people and had a bunch of guns and explosives and
was holding hostages and all of this.
And of course, meanwhile, I was just at the gym, completely unaware of what was going
on until I tried to get back into my neighborhood and was told that there was an armed person
threatening.
And it took us a little while to figure out that I was supposed to be that armed person.
But that particular incident ended as well as it could have, but it could have ended
with me dead because I do have firearms and I could have ended up being shot by the police
as several people who were swatted over the past few years have been shot and killed and
they were innocent victims.
So what had happened here is that in this particular case, we once again have this massive
asymmetry in the sense that someone who has the right skills for less than $10 can have
hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of basically military hardware and personnel
deployed against a specific target.
And they can do so without putting themselves in any physical danger whatsoever.
There's this massive disconnect between the sort of resource costs and the risk.
And so swatting has become a bigger and bigger problem, at least in America.
And there's a lot of other reasons behind that that we don't need to go into and I don't
think would surprise people.
But that basically is what triggered me to go on to this whole privacy adventure to figure
out, okay, what is the cost for me to be able to defend myself against these type of attacks?
And the short version is tens of thousands of dollars and probably a hundred plus hours
of effort of understanding what both the technical and legal options are for protecting your
privacy so that people can't target you.
With this article, how did that come about, actually?
Did the New York Times reach out to you?
Was there a reporter?
How was that started, that that conversation even happened?
Yeah, well, like pretty much everything I've done for the past decade, I'm constantly researching
and I have weird hobbies.
And so whenever I undertake a new research project, I don't do it secretly.
I basically write down my process and I try to, I think of it as like forging a new path
and trying to leave breadcrumb trails for other people who are interested to follow
me.
So I spent a year doing the research and implementing all of this.
And then I ended up publishing one of my 30-page articles about everything that I had done.
And then I gave some keynote presentations and so on and so forth.
So I think that was Nathaniel Popper, the journalist who, he had been paying attention
and eventually was like, "Hey, let's do a short synopsis article on all of this."
And so far, so good.
I implemented all of that in 2018 and it's been five years so far.
There have been one or two minor leaks and I've had to learn and redo a few things as
a result, but it really does become a lifestyle.
And so there's a really, really high bar to get to the level that I wanted to.
But once you get there, it's not too difficult to maintain.
Do you, in terms of reasonable privacy that you would advocate for folks, what are some
of those things that you would advocate?
If someone is zero knowledge privacy, zero.
Maybe they're kind of like me when I started to get into Bitcoin, then you start learning
about privacy, then you start learning about OpenLedger, which is good, but also how do
you want to...
And then you go down that rabbit hole.
So where should some people start in their privacy journey, if you will?
That are some of the, you think the most important things if we're looking to the next five,
10 years.
Yeah, I think very few people will go to the effort of trying to maintain your physical
location privacy, but you can spend a weekend and just vastly improve your day-to-day internet
privacy.
You know, install some decent ad blockers so that you can be safer from some of the
corporate surveillance that happens as you're just browsing around the web.
Perhaps switch to a more private email company that's not going to be scanning all of your
information and trying to use it to sell stuff to you.
Installing a VPN client so that your ISP can't be spying on you.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit that only takes a few hours to implement and it doesn't
really cost anything because most of the software and services out there are free.
It wasn't really until I got to the legal aspect of trying to create trusts and corporations
and actually hide my physical property.
So the things like real estate, vehicles, driver's license, those are the things where
you end up spending an order of magnitude more resources trying to figure out how to
protect and very few people are going to do that.
But if you ask me, why should someone do that?
This kind of goes back to how technology has really changed the game.
And there are numerous examples of this now, but essentially you can go from being a nobody
to being somebody who has the ire of millions of people directed at them.
And this happens all the time.
Some random person on a social media site may post something and maybe they only have
a few hundred followers.
But if you post the right combination of words at the right time, then you can "go viral".
And if you go viral on something that is a politically sensitive issue, you can very
easily piss off tens of millions of people.
And then within that subset of tens of millions of people, there may be a few who try to track
you down and try to screw with you somehow.
I've personally started to think about that more.
Again, just having a little bit more followers coming at and into Bitcoin from a cultural
perspective and sociological perspective, which I want to get into.
And my general tendency is not to block people, not do any of that unless it's a personal
attack against me or my family.
There has been some of those and it's made me think more about those steps, about my
physical location, about disclosing if and when I'm going to a meetup.
Some things that are very Bitcoin friendly that we want to advertise.
It's made me think twice about that.
I can't imagine then having 500,000 followers, whatever it is you are and your voice in the
space and some of the other more political things specific to crypto and Bitcoin that
you might hold that might piss some people off.
So it's made me think about that.
And it's just one of those unfortunate realities of the world we're in.
That's a much harder issue to address is the sickness of why would people do that?
Why would people swat your house?
Why would people do that?
Those are on the rise.
But like you said, there's a lot of companies and a lot of protocols, open source stuff
that is also on the rise.
That's getting easier and easier.
It's easier now than it was two years ago to access a lot of these things, whether it's
in Bitcoin or privacy.
So that's really cool.
But even just me experiencing a little bit, I had to take a step back and say, "Oh, I
really have to think about what I'm putting out there."
Like, "Oh, that picture has something in the background that says what restaurant I might
be at or what."
So it's made me think more.
And again, there's a balance, right?
Because I also have friends or family members that can go in the opposite direction where
if you live your life in daily fear, that's also not a way to live.
So it's tough.
And there's always a bit of, I hate using the word compromise, but there is.
And I think everyone has to ask that question for themselves.
What is that compromise?
Because you can live as physically off the grid and not have human connections being
in a bunker type of compromise, or how do you live in daily life, go about your life
understanding there's risk, understanding I could go out today and something bad could
happen.
This is why I went to the extreme level of effort.
I had family and friends who were like, "Why did you do all of this?
You could have just deleted your Twitter, deleted your presence."
And I'm like, "Yeah, I could be the mountain man who cut off all communication with the
world.
And as a result, I diminish my attack surface because I'm not "leaking information" anymore."
This is what we do.
But we are humans.
We are social creatures.
We do strive to have connections and interactions.
And for me, I felt like my job was not done.
I still have a lot to contribute to this ecosystem.
And another thing I could have done, of course, is to come back as a pseudonym.
But then I wouldn't be able to go to the physical meetups and conferences and stuff.
And I had already spent six years building my reputation.
I didn't want to have to throw it all away and start over again from scratch.
So this was a compromise for me, a trade-off of saying, "If I want to continue to be able
to contribute in the way that I have, then I need to invest a lot more resources in basically
increasing my defensive posture."
I also like asking almost every guest, depending on what they're working on, "What do you think
is your intrinsic motivation for wanting to help and build?"
And I get the sense that you're doing a lot of this because you deeply care about people
in the world.
And then your avenue is as a technologist, cypherpunk, whatever way you want to describe
yourself or others might.
What do you think is your intrinsic motivation?
Whether that was like, "Oh, since a kid," or "My family," or for me, even growing up
religious, there's some of that that stayed with me that I think has been good in terms
of I want to try to help the world.
So what for you is the main motivator?
You might say, "Oh, I like working on this," but the intrinsic, "I want to help humanity,"
where do you think that motivation comes from?
I actually think that there's a decent amount of it is kind of an issue that could be traced
back to my childhood in the sense that I was the nerdy outcast who got bullied a lot as
a child.
And I really regret not pushing back on that more at the time.
And so I get really triggered by any time I see people basically being victimized by
any sort of authority or power.
And so one of the things that really motivates me is empowering individuals/disempowering
large concentrations of power.
So when I learned about Bitcoin, when I started learning more about money, because I, like
most people, didn't really understand the mechanics of money back in the day, I saw
very quickly what the massive abuse of power this was.
That money is this concept that it shouldn't belong to anyone.
It belongs to humanity.
It should be a collective agreement amongst us all of what money is and how we use it
and what its properties are.
And so the idea that money is basically defined by a small group of not even elected people
who mainly convene behind closed doors and use these arcane processes that a bunch of
people try to prognosticate about, it just rubs me the wrong way.
And so in general, whenever I can distribute power more, and like I said, I think using
my skills as a technologist to help distribute power more is really the most effective way
that I can contribute to the system.
So you could call it fairness, I guess.
But really, I think that we have the potential to reshape the world, reshape many aspects
of the world more than just money, but even many aspects of society and how we interact
with each other through technology.
And anyone who's paying attention can see that there is massive friction between the
traditional powers that be and all of these new technologies and the ways that they could
change the world and could change the way that the masses basically coordinate with
each other.
So going back to governance, I see, like I said, that the hierarchical and bureaucratic
systems of governance are completely logical.
It makes complete sense that this is how humanity has evolved civilization.
But I believe we're at an inflection point now where we have the ability to change our
coordination mechanisms and basically create new coordination mechanisms that are not as
fragile and are not as prone to abuse because they're more open, transparent, and distribute
power further than the existing systems.
And I want to give you credit too.
I think you're more than a technologist in the sense of your articles and writings.
And if people haven't explored, I'll link your website, which I think you have most,
if not all of your articles there.
Great writer, great, you analyze people.
And my background is in sociology.
And I think you're kind of at least an amateur sociologist.
If not more than that, it's one of my favorite things to talk about and focus on.
And for me, that's my gift and eyes is on that realm.
So for me, I resonate with a lot of your writings.
I'm getting more into the technology stuff since getting into Bitcoin, but my background
is philosophy, sociology, political theory.
So one thing I wanted to comment on, again, why I feel the need to even host this podcast,
write things that I do, talk about progressive issues in Bitcoin is because I don't think
there's enough content targeted at a mainstream or left-leaning audience in terms of Bitcoin
and in terms of some of the other things that are important to Bitcoin or the other issues
in the world.
So I want to talk about your history of Bitcoin maximalism article.
What made you want to write that?
What was your focus on that?
And maybe not to connect too much to your childhood, but there is a bit of bullying
in a way that you probably experienced that people have experienced in the space, whether
it was Casa taking on Ethereum or any of the other Bitcoin maximalist takes.
But for you, what was your motivation in that?
I thought it was a brilliant article.
Reference it in something that I wrote.
And yeah, just wanted to touch on that and talk about that.
Oh yeah.
And I've been canceled more times than I can count at this point.
But also, that goes along with the game, law of large number of audience.
It's not possible to please everyone.
And really what happens or what you see occur as you grow an audience is, I don't think
I talked about this in the article because it's kind of tangential, but your audience
has a mental model of you.
And this perception is based upon what you selectively choose to reveal to the world.
And it's basically inevitable that over a long enough period of time, if you have a
large enough number of people who have built various mental models of you, you will then
eventually do or say something that breaks that mental model.
And for some people, they'll be moderate.
They'll be like, "Oh, okay.
I didn't know that.
I'm going to adjust my mental model of this person."
But other people, they just can't handle it.
They're like, "You have betrayed me.
I thought that you were a pure Bitcoin or a real Bitcoin maximalist or whatever."
So that is a somewhat amusing but also disappointing thing to see from people.
But I've seen these patterns happen so many times over the years.
And I've seen this evolution of certain sets of beliefs in the space and also a sort of
fracturing of the community that I felt like this is not unique.
We have seen plenty of historical examples of this.
And this could be tied to politics.
This could be tied to any number of types of human organizations.
I think that there is something inherent to human organizations, at least in belief systems,
that once again, as the system grows in orders of magnitude of people who are "subscribing"
to a set of beliefs, that it's also inevitable that there will be schisms and there will
be fracturing within those communities as they grow too large and can no longer really
stay in complete consensus with each other.
So an obvious example, of course, is religion.
Many major religions have many different sub-sects of slightly different beliefs that have caused
massive rifts.
And I think a lot of the stuff that happens in Bitcoin is kind of like governance and
politics and other sociological mechanisms, but on steroids.
Everything's happening 10 or 100 times faster than it may have happened a thousand years
ago.
So it is fascinating to watch.
I do have the technological background and the technology is what I have focused on a
lot.
But definitely the sociological aspects of this ecosystem have been one of the greatest
surprises to me, one of the most fascinating things to observe.
And unfortunately, it's not my specialty.
I am certainly an amateur, but I do try to observe and report and try to explain at least
as well as I can exactly what has happened over the years and how have the different
major groups and belief systems within the ecosystem evolved and where are we today?
And I think one of the major takeaways is that much like in politics, there is a very
loud minority of extremists.
And I think the moderates are generally quiet and get overlooked.
And so because of my prominence in the ecosystem, I just want to try to get it out there that
the extremists do not represent us.
Well, in fact, nobody represents anyone other than themselves in this system.
It's not a democracy.
But the relatively small number of people on some social networks that espouse more
vitriolic views, it's actually a tiny minority of the total user base.
And you don't have to pay attention to them if you don't want to.
Yeah, I don't take issue with if there's an account that's tweeting.
And again, you know, I talk about Twitter and social media, and I'm like, okay, it's
whatever.
But also in terms of Bitcoin, Twitter is the place where people go for resources, right?
Or they can see different articles of, you know, whatever about Bitcoin that's usually
FUD or it's a specific tech sector type thing.
So they go to Twitter.
But in terms of, you know, on Twitter, if there's someone a lot of the garbage you'll
see or kind of hate or toxic masculinity and toxic maximalism, you know, they might have
three or four hundred followers, right?
Trolling accounts, it's a human conditional thing.
The issue I take is when there is a prominent Bitcoin that has a massive following, that
is a voice in the space that if you type in Bitcoin, they could come up on YouTube or
they could come up on Twitter saying things that has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
And they say their sole focus is Bitcoin education.
And again, I do not care people's views.
I am a progressive, but much in the libertarian sense of like, you do you, just don't hurt
people.
That's usually my starting point with this.
And I think for most progressive Bitcoiners, because if we're progressive, we're also Bitcoiners
and that comes with something else.
So I take issue more with that.
And the biggest thing for me is people can say all they want that Bitcoin is apolitical.
Bitcoin doesn't care.
But the reality is the mainstream population and politics as it is today, they do care
about image.
They do care about perception.
We can say, oh, just ignore it.
And I agree with what you're saying on that point.
And I think that's what we should advocate for.
But slowly we're turning the tide when someone types in Bitcoin or looks at Bitcoin, they're
seeing a bit more just on Bitcoin or they're seeing a bit more like Jason Meyers, a progressive
case for Bitcoin, where they see things articulated in a way that they might be able to understand
from their language.
We shouldn't have to do those things.
But for the time being, there's a huge amount of hate and FUD from the left.
There's a huge amount of political cheerleading from the right, of demagogues, I would personally
believe from the Republican Party using Bitcoin as a tool to get votes.
When I don't buy that, I don't think we should buy any politician's word on Bitcoin.
Don't trust verify.
And again, like you said, it's completely flipping the model on its head as well in
terms of Bitcoin.
It's like, it's not democratic, but it's fair, but we don't have a mental model for it in
general.
So yeah, my biggest thing is this perception stuff does matter.
You might say it shouldn't, but it does.
And I think you've articulated that really well too in the Maxi article.
And just understanding the history of all of this is really important and really fascinating.
It is.
So what do you do about it?
So I know I said ignore.
I think once again, if we look at this from a numbers perspective, what I would advocate
is yes, we actually, we should ignore the vitriolic people.
I mute and block vitriolic people.
I don't want them in my feed.
I don't even want to be tempted to engage with them because I think that if you engage
with them, you're feeding them, you know, don't feed the trolls.
Right.
So, but you can't be silent either because that is what results in what you were mentioning
where people search for Bitcoin and they find the people who are perpetually online spewing
all of this nonsense.
Instead, what you have to do is you have to realize that the moderates greatly outnumber
the extremists.
So what the moderates need to do is they need to keep publishing moderate educational content.
You know, you have to be the future that you want to see.
And I think that if that happens, like if the moderate stopped just being silent and
being afraid of being attacked by the extremists, you know, this is the internet.
If they attack you, you block them or mute them, right?
You don't have to worry about getting punched in the face at like a political rally or something.
So I do encourage people to not be silent because you're afraid that someone will be
mean to you.
It does require a bit thicker skin.
I probably have some of the thickest skin out there because of all of the abuse that
I have suffered over the years on the internet.
But at this point, when someone says something extremely hateful to me, I just take pity
on them.
You know, I feel sad that this is your life, that you're spewing hate all day long.
And so that's the mute list for me.
But it's a type of problem where we do need people to be more active and out there and
engaging with each other.
Otherwise, you know, once again, like politics, you know, the people who drum up the votes
are the ones who are going to win.
Now I do think the politicization of Bitcoin is absurd.
It's ridiculous to me that it seems to be all Republicans that are saying positive things
about this space.
And I do have a project where I'm actually tracking, you know, don't trust verify, you
know, all of these politicians, they have to disclose their finances, right?
So I have a site where I track the politicians and I'm like, all right, publication as well.
What was that outlet through?
Was it was that recent in the last year or two where you also said, kind of putting your
money where your mouth is?
Let's see what and I don't know if that one was super recent, but I did see that where
you're tracking that.
So is that the same project or is this different?
Yeah, that's my like Bitcoin politicians project.
I've got a GitHub page with it.
And the only downside is that it's really, really onerous to go through all of the financial
filings because most of them are still filing scanned PDFs.
So you can't even search for you literally have to read through like tens or hundreds
of pages of stuff.
And you know, suffice to say, even the majority of politicians who say good things about Bitcoin
don't actually own any, which makes me doubt whether or not they truly believe what they're
saying.
And of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, it's unfortunate and disconcerting
that it seems like the liberal platform position on Bitcoin mostly seems to be spurred on by
ESG arguments.
And that's, I hold the firm belief, and I guess this was more controversial as well
for some reason.
I do hold the firm belief that it's only a matter of time.
These narratives will shift.
My argument is I personally believe Bitcoin is going to win regardless.
It's just, will it be an easier fight?
Is there ways we can work together on these things and help advance this so that can help
people and help our system even sooner?
Yes, I think so.
So I think in the end, BlackRock's a perfect example.
Like again, that's a whole other conversation, but which we can even touch on, but completely
flipping the narrative there, whether that's good or bad.
For me, that's the Trojan horse theory of like Bitcoin can be used for everyone, by
everyone, if BlackRock is your enemy, which in large parts, you talk about Occupy, you
talk about the left, Anarchal, that is a type of enemy or those institutions.
They're going to get into Bitcoin.
It's only a matter of time until, same thing with Democrats.
You'll see some sort of narrative start shifting or they'll kind of like take an L, kind of
like the SEC might take a loss on some things and then they'll start to ramp up.
They're talking about it in certain ways.
Just like I think Apple will integrate at some point, the Lightning Network.
I firmly believe that people are like, "That's the opposite to Apple's."
And I'm like, "Okay, but it's going to be the standard for the world in one way or another."
Whatever that standard looks like, whether it's just international trade or whether it's
actually our peer to peer money here in the United States in the next five years, I think
that is all coming.
So again, I think that shift is already starting and there's a lot of people out here and I'm
trying to as well to fight for that to happen sooner rather than like, "Oh, you get Bitcoin
at the price you deserve."
I'm like, "I hate that rationale.
I really do."
For some people, I would like that personally.
I'd be like, "Yeah, screw you.
You get Bitcoin at the price you deserve or you're benefiting from this current system."
But in general, I think it's coming, but I think there's ways we can make this transition
easier if you will and more inclusive to use that word as well.
Yeah.
That actually reminds me of my least favorite Satoshi quote, which is the one where he says,
"If you don't get it, I don't have time."
And people use that all the time.
And it's so, I don't know, I think it's stuck up to say that as if your time is worth Satoshi's
time.
Yeah.
Right.
It's one thing for Satoshi to say it.
And yeah, that's really true.
That's so funny.
I want to make sure also to get to, we're talking about mainstream stuff.
You're involved with Casa, which I think is a great company.
I've also been using Casa as well.
I would highly recommend in terms of normal people accessing Bitcoin cold storage.
I think it's a really, really great, great way to use it.
So what is it like and what are your thoughts on just building a, because also people are
like, "Oh, for-profit businesses or businesses, we're about open protocols," which you can
have open protocols with businesses, but just having businesses, having some people from
the left would be like, "That's just private wealth entering into Bitcoin and messing everything
up."
And there's the whole gambit from a private business, creating Bitcoin products all the
way to BlackRock Bitcoin ETF.
Some people conflate the two, but for you, where do you strike that balance in terms
of having a business, a fiat business in some ways, a business in the world of that governance
engaging with Bitcoin?
What are your thoughts on that?
And what some of the Ethereum stuff aside, what do you think are some of the pros and
cons to that kind of approach versus just an open source, all hands on deck as if they're
Bitcoin core developers just kind of working on it in their free time?
Yeah, I mean, they're very different models.
And it's especially weird to see some pushback in the space from people who, they almost
seem like anti-capitalists.
It's really weird to be in a space that hinges on freedom and then seeing people come along
and say, "Oh, it's immoral for you to be running a business and trying to create profit
as a result."
I mean, profit is a motivator.
It motivates at many different levels.
And I think the short version is that when you're running a venture capital funded business,
one of the main differences is that you are motivated to work hard and work quickly because
you have a timeline and you're burning money.
You basically take on debt, you sell equity, and venture firms will speculate as to the
risk involved with that.
And you basically, you're putting pressure on yourself.
You're putting yourself on the clock and you're saying, "We have to be able to create
value in a short period of time here.
And if we don't, we fail and it all falls apart."
The flip side of that doing either bootstraps or just free open source organization type
of stuff is that it's less fragile in the sense that you're not under the gun.
But also, you don't have the same level of motivation.
And so people may come and go.
It's harder to incentivize stable, committed development or people contributing to the
project if you don't have a pool of funds to actually be paying people salaries.
This was something that even Bitcoin protocol development struggled with for many years
because there's no aspect of the Bitcoin protocol that creates funding for development
of Bitcoin.
Whereas a number of these other protocols, many of which may arguably be unregistered
securities, they do have treasuries for that protocol and they can fund themselves.
So I see it as more of just a funding and incentive model.
And of course, it's not guaranteed that it's going to succeed.
But I think that it is required if you want to compete.
Because if nobody in the Bitcoin ecosystem was doing for-profit businesses, then I can
pretty much guarantee you that a bunch of people in other crypto protocols and ecosystems
will be doing that.
And they will have more capital.
They will be able to advance and develop the infrastructure and software and really just
the usability of their systems at a far greater pace.
So I think it's important just from a competition standpoint.
And it's also good that we have a variety of aspects to build from.
So while Casa itself is not an open source project, we use open source projects as the
foundation of what we're building on top of.
And this helps us to create a system where even though Casa is a company, we can architect
it so that Casa is not a single point of failure.
Speaking of protocols and funding, Nostr.
So I love Nostr.
I want to talk about Nostr more on this podcast in general with guests.
So Nostr is one such protocol where there's a lot of clients, virtually little companies,
if you will, depending on what the client is.
And again, technologically, it doesn't exactly work this way.
But for those listening that don't know about Nostr, one of the easiest ways I relate it
to people at a 30,000 foot view is you have email and you have many different email services.
You have Gmail, you have Outlook, you have Yahoo, you have whatever.
Those are kind of like the clients.
But again, that's a centralized version.
So once you pull in that thread, that's not exactly how it works.
But Nostr is email.
It's also a way of messaging and email.
But Nostr has one of those things right now that I see is a problem is funding and increasing
more long term funding for Nostr.
For me, I think it could be like Bitcoin in the sense that the Bitcoin protocol you mentioned
funding was an issue.
More for profit companies, private companies, public companies, whatever were generated
and they started investing funding in the protocol because it benefits them and vice
versa.
Do you see Nostr heading in that same direction?
Would you advocate for more actually incorporated businesses being built as clients that utilize
Nostr and talk about that?
Because I know you love Nostr as well and have talked about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that will happen.
And I think there will be a lot of overlap.
I bet you that what we'll see is a number of the Bitcoin and crypto focused venture
capital firms will start putting checks into "Nostr businesses" at least in part because
it is so tightly integrated with Lightning Network.
I think it's sort of a natural evolution.
And this actually goes back to what I said about 30 minutes ago of my belief that these
technologies are enabling new ways of coordinating society.
That's actually how I see Nostr is that it is a decentralized message bus.
Now that doesn't mean anything to the non-technical people who are watching this, but essentially
you can think of it as the cloud, where in reality the cloud is tens of millions of machines
and very complex configurations.
But if you just think of it as one logical thing, the cloud is just like a hard drive
that you can remotely put files on and you don't have to worry about all of the minutia
of how it's operating.
Similarly, Nostr is a place where you can just put messages and anyone can then see
them and reply to them, interact with them.
And under the hood, there's a lot of different servers and there's a whole protocol.
But at the end of the day, that allows you to have a new way of coordinating with other
humans.
Now, the first application of that was basically Twitter clones.
But we've even seen stuff of using this decentralized message bus for coordinating playing games
with people like chess.
We actually had a team of client, or a team of Casa engineers at a hackathon recently
that created a project they called Munster, which is a way of coordinating multi-sig wallets.
And basically, having three or five or however many people you want all using the same wallet.
And when you're then coordinating, setting up the wallet and creating and signing the
transactions, all of that data is actually happening through the Nostr network.
So that's just a couple examples of how now, any time where there is a human coordination
problem and doing that coordination through a centralized or trusted third party could
create a choke point or a potential for censorship.
Now we have this alternative way of coordinating and sharing messages that is far more robust.
And as a result, this is basically like a new primitive, aka a new low level type of
technology that you could bolt onto and build on top of many, many different things.
So it's exciting to see as a technologist.
You know, Nostr is the protocol even as what, maybe two years old, two and a half technically.
And then I joined onto a client and I like and advocate Domus, again, Apple stuff, another
conversation.
Because also Domus to me has the most mainstream look and feel of a social media Twitter.
The others are getting better as well.
And I think Domus has gotten some pretty good funding as well that we'll see long term.
But do you think Twitter will incorporate Nostr?
Do you see that as inevitable in the way that Bitcoin might be inevitable to some circumstances?
Because also when I talk to my friends on the left about using Twitter, using whatever,
and again, Twitter is where things are still happening.
So I'm still reluctantly using it.
The podcast, we're still reluctantly using it, that kind of thing.
But I'm trying to pull more people over.
You see Twitter using it.
Sometimes I talk to people on the left, I'm like, "Listen, we all hate Elon for different
reasons."
From the left, billionaire wealth, greed, all of this stuff.
Censorship in weird ways, working with foreign governments to censor even though he's free
speech, all of this stuff.
Do you see Twitter utilizing Nostr?
And also what is your selling point for Nostr to mainstream folks that don't know anything
about it?
Yeah, well, this is almost like the politics and governance argument again, is that when
you ask, "What will Twitter do?"
What we're really saying is, "What will Elon do?"
And Elon can be unpredictable.
And like you said, even though he talks the whole free speech, maximalism thing, he's
very hypocritical about it.
Elon is not Jack.
Jack has said on numerous occasions that he greatly regrets creating Twitter as a company
instead of as a protocol.
And Jack has put his money where his mouth is and is funding not only Nostr, but also
Blue Sky.
And he seems to care more about those fundamental issues.
So it is kind of interesting though, that I think Meta is now dipping their toes into
Mastodon and using the ActivityPub protocol there.
And that has created an insane amount of drama in the Mastodon ecosystem about whether or
not they're going to defederate their instances from the Meta Mastodon instance and so on
and so forth.
But yeah, I think Nostr is still way too early to get adoption from any of the big
tech companies.
It's going to need a lot more growth and investment before I think it's taken seriously.
You mentioned Blue Sky.
Have you utilized Blue Sky much?
What do you think of that?
From my understanding, I know they're still a bit centralized at this point.
They're working to decentralize and incorporate.
Do you see it as two sides of the same coin as Nostr?
Do you specifically advocate for one more than another?
Do you see it as just this is a good enterprise to experiment with?
I kind of lump Blue Sky and Mastodon into the same bucket because what we're really
talking about is federated instances.
And Mastodon is much--
Because it seems more people on the left.
Blue Sky, at least in my opinion, and I don't interact with it much.
I have a Blue Sky account for this podcast to just try to reach different audiences.
It's a very overwhelmingly left audience in terms of what I'm seeing with that as an opposition
to Twitter.
We feel okay on Twitter.
We feel that it's-- that particular audience feels that it's just more right wing and free
of speech in that regard.
Again, their opinion.
So they turned to Blue Sky as the safe place for the left.
That's the way I've seen it.
That's the way it's characterized as well.
So I've seen that.
So yeah, I was curious your thoughts on Blue Sky.
Yeah, I don't think it's going to end well.
And the reason that I say that is because of the drama that we've already seen happen
on numerous occasions on Mastodon.
More recently, it's been ramping up.
But for example, in the early days of the pandemic, I believe, Rodolfo Novak, head of
CoinKite, created the BitcoinHackers Mastodon instance.
And it had thousands of people sign up for it.
And if I recall correctly, a number of other large Mastodon instances chose to defederate
from the BitcoinHackers instance because they considered it, quote unquote, "right wing,"
extremists, yada, yada, yada.
And so this is fine, I think, from a sort of voluntary coordination standpoint.
This is the freedom that the protocol allows.
But we've seen that happening more and more often now.
And part of the problem with this federation and defederation stuff is that apparently
with these protocols, at least with the ActivityPub protocol from Mastodon, when you defederate,
you're basically severing all of the connections and all of the followers between the instances.
And even if you refederate again an hour later, a day later, it doesn't recreate those connections.
So it's, I think, a massive point of fragility and politicization that is not going to end
well.
And as far as I know, BlueSky basically works the same way in the sense that it's federated
instances, even though I'm not aware of many other instances of that protocol running.
But Nostra is different.
And the reason that it's different is that you don't have an account on an instance.
Like you do with BlueSky or Mastodon, you are literally having to go to their website
and create a username and password.
It is a more traditional web2 experience, even though the protocol does afford you some
portability in the sense that it is technically possible for you to move from one instance
to another.
I did that myself a year or two ago.
I was on one of the big Mastodon instances and I was like, "You know what?
I don't want to get rug pulled.
I'm going to run my own Mastodon node that I don't even let anyone else sign up for because
it's a terrible administrative thing to run one of these instances.
It's not very highly performant software.
But I'll run my own instance and that way no one can defrederate me and I don't have
to worry about essentially losing my followers because they'll be following my instance directly."
So on Nostra, you're not creating a login.
You're not creating an entry in anybody's database.
You're literally just generating a public-private key pair.
And then you're connecting to any number of arbitrary servers whenever you want to read
data or write notes.
And so while you still have the risk that any instance or any relay that you connect
to is under no obligation to respond to your queries or to allow you to post notes to them,
if they decide to do that, they can only affect their own relay.
They cannot affect your activity on other relays.
And so the rug pull risk is basically zero as long as you have your clients set up so
that you are replicating and querying data across many different relays.
And last thing on Nostra, what do you think?
So it seems BlueSky took the approach of content moderation and legitimacy in that regard because
people are used to that.
They're used to like going social media.
You can't just say everything you want because that's dangerous or harmful or scary, especially,
you know, I'll say from folks on the left, you know, the right, there's different things,
right?
I think both sides do it in different ways, but I'll talk from a progressive standpoint
here.
So they took moderation more seriously, if you will, in that regard.
Nostra, they seem to be doing the opposite where they're like, let's build up these relays.
Let's get this infrastructure rolling.
Let's play around with this.
Right.
And I guess like a better word, like cypherpunk way, let's just build, roll out.
It is still a bit of a Bitcoin chat room.
You know, it's getting less and less that.
How do you think Nostra can handle content moderation?
So obviously you mentioned like you can't be censored, right?
You can jump to different relays.
You can have multiple.
I think I operate on like 14 different relays and it works pretty well.
But also I'm not necessarily trying to just get canceled or reported.
There are reporting mechanisms, right?
And you can flag content.
But what do you think, how would you start to approach that?
Because that's when I think you gather more legitimacy for Nostra the protocol and for
clients or should we even care?
I guess is the question.
No, we should care.
Moderation is a fascinating topic in and of itself.
This actually goes back to, I get triggered by abuse of power, right?
And especially during the scaling debates, a number of moderators, especially on Reddit,
triggered me and a bunch of other people because they just arbitrarily decided you can't talk
about these things.
And they were allowed to do that because they control the subreddit that they're moderating.
I think that the issue of moderation or at least the implementation of moderation needs
to be flipped on its head.
So once again, the problem is it's one of humans and fickleness and getting rug pulled.
If you have humans who are, they're sitting basically as a middleman between the deluge
of content that is being published and then the content that you are consuming and they're
trying to act as a quality filter for that, then they're not always going to get it right.
And in some cases, the difference in beliefs between the human moderators and you may clash.
So this is not a perfect solution that can really be implemented right now, but my long-term
vision for things like moderation, and I think this will apply to a number of different aspects
of our lives and how we manage these coordination mechanisms if we start using less centralized
coordination mechanisms.
I think that what we really need is personal AI assistance.
And what I mean by that is each of us knows what type of content we want to see and what
type of content we don't want to see.
And the problem right now is that either you have to do all of this moderation and curation
manually and I've spent countless hours on Twitter manually curating what I see, what
words get muted, what people I don't see because I think that they are creating too much noise
and not enough signal.
And I do believe that if an AI was trained with enough data of my own personal content
likes and dislikes, that we could then replace these human moderators with our own personal
client-side filtering.
And that is a way that we could still achieve what we want to achieve, which is high signal,
low noise, but do so in a way that's less prone to arbitrary censorship.
Do you think there's any potential harm in that from a technology standpoint that can
be done?
And I do see that.
That's a really interesting point.
And I think that could very easily happen sooner than we think.
What if someone's content preference is really bad, like not healthy, probably not good for
them, not good for society as like human beings.
How do we live cohesively with each other, at least in the US, not to mention globally?
It's a question I always ask in terms of this because I am from the left of freedom maximalist
in theory, but then seeing there's a sickness, you can't really heal that through censorship,
but you also can't heal that through open floodgates or whatever the opposite of that
would be.
Do you see downsides to that?
How would you address that from a technology standpoint?
Or would we not?
Yeah, this is sort of the trust and safety argument, right?
Is that I certainly don't have a solution for this, but this is an interesting sociological
problem of, I almost think of it as the internet now, it has not fulfilled the utopistic dreams
of human society.
We now have the sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips.
Therefore, all of humanity that has internet access is enlightened and logical and makes
better decisions as a result of access to this human knowledge.
Because the flip side of that, of course, is the disinformation, the misinformation,
the highly skewed and biased narratives that get propagated.
That is not something that I have a technological answer for.
But once again, it's sort of a sociological phenomenon.
You're kind of at least potentially asking, how do we prevent people from getting stuck
in echo chambers that then lead to extremism?
That would be very interesting to try to solve from a technical perspective, but I think
that it is a result of the freedom that we are affording to people to curate their own
content and really the fact that you're programming yourself.
I think a lot of people don't recognize that you are what you eat and your brain is
what the information that you consume is.
Some people might say, "Oh, we need sort of health and safety labels and warnings on
potentially dangerous content," but that's a whole other slippery slope.
It's an unfortunate downside to the communication age is that it's not just the information
age, it's also the misinformation age.
Yeah.
I thought we were going to crack the code on that one, Jameson.
Yeah, because I think it starts with each individual has to want to live a good life
and want to live the life that is healthy for them.
I think it starts there.
Society's reaction, government's reactions on both sides have been, "We are going to
take that opportunity away from people and we're going to decide for them."
That clearly is not working.
Yeah.
I mean, a kind of similar concept that I definitely had crossed my mind recently is it would be
incredibly helpful if you had autonomous AI agents that were looking at the content that
you consume and if they could tell that you're consuming something that's just flat out false.
Just pop up with, "Link me to the Snopes article," or whatever, "Link me to the reputable source
of information that shows that this is a lie and that you should not trust this source."
There's certainly potential for that, but then ultimately the question is going to be,
do you force that on people?
Can people opt out of that?
There's always this conflict of freedom and safety.
We're going to have to do a follow-up conversation because I've got a lot more thoughts to pull
on that.
That's awesome.
One quick last question because it's one of my favorite notes, and I think you tweeted
this as well, that you've ever done because I also love the show.
But The Last of Us, season one, episode three.
I looked it up again recently just to make sure.
I think you said this was one of the most beautiful episodes of television or something
like that.
I love Nick Offerman.
I love Ron Swanson in terms of just like I love Parks and Rec and I make so many jokes
about Ron Swanson as a Bitcoiner and obviously he's a gold bug.
But he kind of lived out that character again in The Last of Us.
And if people haven't seen the show, it has nothing to do with what we're talking about
really.
But I love the show.
I think it's great.
I didn't play the video game, but that episode was absolutely beautiful and amazing and I
love all the actors.
So for you, you seemed to really enjoy that and let the world know that you did.
You know, I am a kind of a fan of like the apocalypse porn genre, whether it's the zombie
apocalypse or any number of dystopian futures.
The problem with a lot of them, of course, is that in many cases there's unrealistic
aspects of it.
But I felt like that series and really that episode in particular, it was great because
it showed some aspects of humanity that came through despite all of the struggles that
they were going through.
And I think it's through most people for a loop for what you would generally expect from
a sort of dystopian future television show.
So are you optimistic when you look out at our future as humanity?
You're obviously talking about AI and positive waves, which some people don't.
So you mentioned you're an optimistic person.
I think you probably have an optimistic take just when you look out.
But what's your take when you're looking out at the future of all of this as a technologist,
as someone who cares about humanity as well and the things you mentioned?
Are you optimistic with where we're headed?
It's a weird dichotomy.
I am extremely optimistic on some things and extremely pessimistic on others.
And from a sort of cosmological scale, I'm pessimistic that humans will get through the
Great Filter event and that we won't essentially destroy ourselves due to not having the ability
to wield the power of the technology that we have developed.
There is reason to believe that there's a good reason why we're not hearing any signals
of intelligent life from anywhere else in the universe.
And it's likely because if there was intelligent life elsewhere, they destroyed themselves
too quickly.
Oh, so not in the way of like, "Oh, we want to stay away from them because they seem dangerous,"
but in the way of they've already destroyed themselves.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know if I've heard that before.
That's interesting.
It's a fairly common sort of astrophysics/philosophical question of, "Can your civilization pass
through this filter event?"
We have managed not to nuke ourselves to death yet, but of course, the potential is still
there.
And as someone who's focused on preventing single points of failures for eight years,
I see humanity as a single point of failure on the Earth.
So I do have some similarities with Elon Musk of wanting to get humanity on a multi-planetary
system just to reduce the potential for catastrophic loss.
But it's weird because I'm optimistic that technology will continue to improve the quality
of life for people, or at least the potential is there, and that lots of people will continue
to improve, for example, medical technology and especially with AI now, continue to reduce
the amount of manual labor that humans need to do so that humans ought to be more free
to follow pursuits that are higher level type of work and more creative pursuits and do
the things that humans are good at.
On the flip side, I'm very pessimistic because I see that the incentives and human nature
are such that humans prefer convenience over almost everything else.
They prefer convenience over privacy, convenience over security.
This is an incentive issue because we always try to take the path of least resistance.
And so I guess one of the ways that you could potentially try to engineer around that is
by understanding that defaults are extremely sticky.
So there is an entire area of research now when it comes to technology and the sort of
second order effects of technology that I think were a big miss over the past few decades
of we were just sort of careening head first into accelerating technological development
without thinking through all of the edge cases of how this could affect society.
So we have, I think, the potential and the tools to better shape what is going to happen
in the future.
But I'm also pessimistic because the powers that be are not going to just hand over their
power to these other systems.
There's definitely going to be a fight in a number of different ways, but the fight
for freedom is never over.
It's something that must be constantly guarded against.
I do my part by trying to make it easier for people to be sovereign, at least within Bitcoin.
And over the long term, I expect I'll be helping people be sovereign in a number of different
aspects of their lives as cryptographic protocols and private key ownership and the technologies
related to that offer more and more empowerment.
But the question and the constant battle that's always going to be there is the fact that
the centralized providers are probably always going to be more convenient.
And at least for the foreseeable future, they're also the defaults.
And that's what makes it a really uphill battle for us to fight against.
So in the example of Bitcoin, one of the big problems is people come in and they buy on
a centralized exchange and usually that's it.
The very fact that you have to take action to withdraw to self-custody is a showstopper
for a lot of people.
So that's why I think one of the best things for actual Bitcoin adoption and self-custody
is actually pushing forward more circular economies so that people are actually working
for and getting paid in Bitcoin.
Awesome.
Well, let's end things there.
We'll have to do this again because the number of things you said I want to have another
conversation on.
But thank you so much.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
Or I'll put your website in the footnotes for people to go to because I think that'll
probably link up to most of the places you would want to send folks.
But anything else you want to mention or anywhere else to send people to if they're interested?
Yeah, check out the Bitcoin.page.
That goes to my educational resources.
And really, that's what I tell people when they come to me and they're like, "Hey, should
I invest in Bitcoin?"
My go-to is, "Well, you should invest in education.
Go check out all of these educational resources.
Do your own research.
Decide for yourself."
I'm not a financial advisor.
I can only tell you what the benefits of being in Bitcoin and self-custody are.
I'm not here for trading advice or to speculate on what's going to happen over any time frame
with the purchasing power of this asset.
And if you're someone on the left and you're looking for good information about why Bitcoin
is good for humanity, why we care about this, why we care about privacy, I would highly
recommend following Jameson Lopp.
I think you do a great job of just focusing on signal, focusing on what's important without
some of the other noise that I think can be distracting, especially for folks on the left.
So thank you for that.
Thank you for your contributions.
And thanks for jumping on.
This was great.
Yeah, great to be here and see you soon.