Hey everyone, this is Charlie Shrem and you're listening to Untold Stories.
This is a show where we dive deep into the lives and personal histories of some of crypto's
most influential leaders and find out how the crypto movement truly came to be.
Let's dive in.
Today on the show, we had Jameson Lopp.
Jameson is a creator of Statoshi.info, which was a fork of Bitcoin Core that analyzes Bitcoin nodes.
Back in 2012, I think, when he launched that, he's also chief technologist of Casa, a company
that you and I know.
I actually have one of their nodes at home.
They are a private security company in the crypto space, they provide key storage solutions.
Jameson is also a founder of the Mensa Bitcoin Special Interest Group and worked at Bitco
alongside Ben Davidport for a long time.
You could say that Jameson knows security.
He was also famously known as the person who one morning SWAT team showed up at his house
because someone who lied called up the police and said that Jameson was just holding people
hostage.
And the reason that person did that, we think, is because Jameson has been very outspoken
and vocal about Bitcoin and the scaling debate.
And he loves Bitcoin so much that when people come after it, he gets very, very defensive
on it.
And he also wrote a wonderful article and talked about how to actually protect yourself
privately.
We talked 15 different topics, including how to create a fake name for casual interactions,
how to create a VPN for home internet use, how to buy a decoy house to fool the DMV.
We talked about all these different topics, privacy versus security versus convenience.
We explained Bitcoin in some different ways that you're used to.
So enjoy the ads and I'll talk to you guys just right in a minute.
How do you actually live your life on crypto?
How do you do it?
I've been doing it since I first got started with Bitcoin back in, what, like 2011.
But since 2016, I've been using the Bitpay debit card to spend my Bitcoin on a day to
day basis.
And it's been such a great product that I've been using it for over three years.
Bitpay is now sponsoring Untold Stories and they're going to be giving away free Visa
debit cards to all my listeners.
All you have to do is visit bitpay.com forward slash Charlie.
It's such an easy card to use.
You get the card in the mail, you download the Bitpay app, you put Bitcoin on the app
and when you want to send Bitcoin from the app into your debit card, it only takes a
few seconds and you can spend your Bitcoin anywhere credit cards are offered.
It's really so easy.
You almost wonder like, why didn't this come out in 2011 when Bitcoin first launched?
Well, it was very difficult to do.
In fact, I actually tried to launch my own debit card, but I wasn't able to because
the credit card companies were very reluctant to do it.
But now Bitpay launched their product and a lot of other companies have launched credit
cards and debit cards using Bitcoin over the years.
I still will only use the Bitpay card.
I'm very loyal to the brands I like and I hope you guys are too.
The fees are very low.
You can use it to withdraw cash at ATMs.
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A lot of companies have tacked on like super high fees and I don't like that.
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That's bitpay.com forward slash Charlie.
You get a free card.
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Usually the card costs like 10 bucks or more.
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Over the years, a lot of companies have tried doing crypto social networking, but the problem
is that there are a lot of really good social networking apps already out there like Instagram,
Facebook, Snapchat.
How do we build a social network that's perfect for crypto?
Well, I want to talk about Pepo.
Pepo is an amazing social media app that's built for the crypto community.
What's really cool about it is that you can get rewarded for uploading and putting out
good content and you can also reward with crypto people who put up content that you
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It's fast and simple and it's the first crypto powered app to be approved by the Apple and
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Pepo.com.
Enjoy it.
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Jameson, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Glad we were finally able to make this work.
I've recorded like 70 episodes and I've never been late or missed one until today.
I was five minutes late, so I apologize.
No problem.
I have a really funny and good excuse if you want to hear it.
Because something that could only happen in Florida and you're from the southern region
and everything you know, so you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Oh, was it a Florida man story?
It was a Florida woman situation.
But the thing is, when it happens on the internet, you roll your eyes and you're like, whatever,
whatever.
But what people don't realize is that it happens in real life, like all the time.
So I'll tell you exactly.
I'm driving down the road.
We have one major road to go north-south.
I'm coming from a different part of the city and I'm driving.
It's two lanes each way.
Very, very important, busy road.
All of a sudden, lady swerves and stops and blocks two lanes.
And I don't know what happened, but she swerves like she's in front and all the cars are behind
her.
She swerves to the right, stops her car, blocks two lanes, and everyone like stops like short.
Like I almost got into a car accident.
We're trying to figure out what is going on.
All of a sudden, the front door of her, of the passenger door opens up.
I swear to God, it's happened just now.
And she opens the door.
Something opens the door and out of the door runs a possum.
So I'm saying to myself, the fuck is going on here?
God, this is explicit content.
I have a little warning.
I apologize if your kids are in the car because people email me telling me that their kids
are in the car.
I apologize.
I'm sorry, but I can't control my emotions sometimes.
Possum is running around the street.
So you know what?
So she gets out and she starts chasing the possum.
How do I know it's a possum?
Because I know the tail, you know, and what it looks like, you know, it's a big animal.
And she's chasing it around and she starts chasing it off the street now into the sidewalk,
into the, it was like a grocery store parking lot.
So now all of us are sitting here.
We're like, what the?
She leaves her car in the middle of the street and she starts running off chasing this possum
and no one can see her anymore.
I'm like, fuck this shit, turn around and go in a different way.
What is that?
Who does that?
What sounds like a family domestic dispute type of issue at possum and her probably had
a long history.
Yeah.
Something was going on in that car.
I don't know if there's someone.
I don't know what.
I just don't know like how it all went down, but anyways, that's, that's why I was late.
It's a true story.
You can't make it up.
I would, I wish I took a video of it, but I was, I was driving whatever, but anyways,
thank you for, for coming on the show.
My pleasure.
You have a, you have a crazy history in, in the crypto space and we'll get, um, actually
I don't even like to use the term crypto in the, in the Bitcoin space, um, crazy stories.
Uh, you've been around for a while and, um, you've, you've worked and built some amazing
technologies, you know, now at Casa and previously at Bitco and you were doing a lot of things
in your own.
You had, uh, created, I remember when I first ran my note, I started using it.
You created, I remember Satoshi.info, a lot of people to analyze nodes, um, and so let's
jump right into nodes because this was, this is something, uh, really, really, really,
really important, uh, a topic that the health of any blockchain, you know, cause we're,
we're living in, I guess in a multi blockchain world, even though a lot of them are just
scams or bullshit, but we are living in a multi blockchain world and, um, listener node
count is such an important metric, we're not talking about like, well, even with Ethereum,
right?
Um, how many alive nodes you have, um, is such an important, um, piece for decentralization
and it's not the hash rate and it's not the miners.
Yesterday, um, on the show I was recording, um, and we were recording and, um, you know,
we talked about how miners are essentially the janitors in a good way, uh, for, for,
for Bitcoin, but having nodes is so important and you know, when you had launched that just,
just a data reference, no one was really like talking about nodes.
It wasn't, I remember just like Luke this year was talking about how we should all run
full nodes.
Um, why did you launch that and why, you know, I guess that was your first foray.
Um, why was, why are nodes so important?
What are nodes and why should people care?
Why are they so important to the health of any blockchain?
Yeah, this was actually back in May of 2014 and, uh, I recall you actually responded to
my original email announcement where I said, Hey guys, I created this a Satoshi fork of
Bitcoin core and, and really I was just trying to better understand what a node was doing.
I felt like one of the most important and valuable traits of the Bitcoin as a system
is it's openness, it's transparency, it's audit ability.
It's the fact that we can look at everything that is happening and understand what the
network is doing.
And so when I realized that, you know, running a node was an important part of this, I started
trying to understand, okay, well I'm running the node.
What is it doing?
And I felt like there was a lot of opaqueness there where we couldn't really tell what was
going on inside of the node.
So I took some of the skills that I had built up over my 10 year career as a coder and doing
DevOps style dashboards.
And I just put a lot of metrics inside of a Bitcoin core fork where I could then expose
those metrics using pretty dashboards that I could make available to the world.
And that's eventually what turned into statoshi.info, which has been referenced by a number of different
developers and other people in the space over the years.
And so I felt like Statoshi as a project accomplished what I wanted to achieve, which is just to
help people better understand what was going on with the nodes and with the network and
help developers and other players in the ecosystem really argue about what changes we might make
that we might want to make for this reason or that reason based upon seeing what the
node is doing.
And ultimately, you were talking about the number of nodes sort of being one of the measures
of decentralization and people have argued about that, of course, for years and years.
I think that the most important thing is that we try to keep it as accessible and as cost
efficient as possible for anyone who wants to run a node to be able to do so.
Because running a node is what gives you, I would say, the ultimate level of sovereignty
in the system because you are not trusting anyone else.
You are validating everything that has happened on the network against whatever rule set you
choose to run.
But while I would say that holding your own private keys is the first step towards self
sovereignty in Bitcoin, the next step beyond that is then validating the rules of the network
against your private keys so that you are only accepting Bitcoins that you yourself
consider to be legitimate.
And it goes down this really deep philosophical rabbit hole past that technical point.
There's a lot of a lot of people talk about like, not blacklisting, but at some point
down the road, you know, fungibility, having certain Bitcoins be different than other Bitcoins.
And I know this is not physically possible because there's no really such thing as a
Bitcoin.
It's basically consisted of unspent outputs, you know, wrapping people have to wrap their
head around that first and we can kind of go into that for a second.
But essentially, do you think we could ever be in a situation five or 10 years from now
where where certain inputs are, you know, different than others?
Do you think we can have a multi, I guess, different value of different type of Bitcoin?
For example, I have some Virgin coins that I mined in 2012.
I won't ever spend those because or 2011 even, because those are like directly those are
I have a block, a fresh block of Bitcoin that I mine that, you know, and the value to that
is is is invaluable.
I will, you know, do you think we'd ever have a situation where certain where governments
or certain, you know, corporations will start checking, not just and I'm talking about Bitcoin
specifically here, but obviously it pertains to overall crypto.
Do you think we could be in a see that where they're like almost like when you send a Bitcoin
transaction, it needs to be checked, checked against certain lists.
But how would that work?
Because inputs can be broken down, broken down outputs.
You could break a Bitcoin down into 800 million pieces and then put it all back together.
So I mean, I don't know, I'm kind of coming up with an answer as I'm asking you.
Yeah, I mean, we're we're already seeing the beginning phases of a world like that as a
result of companies like Chainalysis and others that are tracking known stolen coins.
Usually any UTXOs that are considered tainted because they were directly tied to some sort
of criminal activity.
I think a good example that I actually tweeted about recently was that there are tens of
thousands of coins from one of the first MT Gox hacks that have been sitting in the same
address ever since the hack back in 2010, 2011 or so.
And those coins are tagged by a number of different services.
If someone tried to move those coins into an exchange, you bet that they would have
a lot of questions to answer for.
And when you're talking about a direct single hop from a known address that stolen coins
were placed into, that's fairly obvious.
But then kind of what you were getting into as well, how many hops down the transaction
chain should these things be considered tainted?
And that's where it gets really murky.
And if you start talking about a coin join and basically mixing everybody's coins up,
you start to get into a level of, well, it's not black and white anymore.
You know, OK, we had some known stolen coins and then we have all these other coins that
nobody really knows the history of.
And so how much do they need to be mixed together before everybody's coins are sufficiently
tainted that the whole process of trying to decide good versus bad coins just becomes
pointless?
And that's what I think a lot of the pro-privacy people in this space would like to see where
currently we're in the situation that there are not enough people are using the privacy
tools so that even the mere fact that you are using privacy tools now is suspicious
and can get your account blocked.
We've seen a little bit of that happening as well from various exchanges basically saying,
oh, you started mixing coins several hops after you withdrew the coins from the exchange.
And so we're going to shut down your account for this or that reason.
But if everybody is doing it, they can't block everybody, at least from a business perspective.
I don't think that would make sense.
Recently I was told that told by a friend of mine who trades with, you know, one of
the big OTC desks, I forget which one.
You know, they have the big ones.
And he got an email from them asking for a list of all his white listed addresses, basically
addresses that he would be sending money from and then addresses that he would be sending
money to after he does a trade like Bitcoin to Ether, you know, a shit coin to another
shit coin, whatever it is.
And I'm saying to myself, well, A, like I'd never be able to do that.
I don't know how I would do that because the address has constantly changed.
But it's also a very bad opsec because even if you're not on purpose using a new address
every single time, most probably whatever, whatever wallet you're using will at some
point create a new address.
I know some of even the bad ones will do it every month or so automatically.
A lot of the exchanges use it.
But you know what they asked for him?
You know what they asked him?
They said, send us your public key.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Give us your entire extended public key so that we can derive all of your addresses.
Exactly.
And for those who don't know, if you get so you have your Bitcoin address that everyone
knows.
But what you don't realize, guys, is that you have in your wallet a public key.
Now, no one could steal your Bitcoin or whatever currency with it.
But what they can do if they have this public key is that they can figure out every single
Bitcoin address that's generated from that public key.
Now, if I have a Bitcoin address that's generated from the same public key and and you have
a Bitcoin address that's generated from the same public key because, you know, I generated
it for you or whatever, no one knows that those two addresses are generated from the
same public key.
There's no way to know.
But if you have that public key, you can do a lot of damage.
And the fear is, I think, is that if the fear is, Jameson, that if that if enough of these
desks and exchanges start asking and requiring for public keys, then they'll be able to connect
a lot of things together and and, you know, the future of Bitcoin could be at risk.
Yeah, that's a pretty dangerous road to go down.
I don't do much trading myself.
So I haven't had anyone ask me that.
But I would certainly be turned off from any desk that asks me.
And even if they did.
So but it's not just the desks.
Sorry.
Yeah.
But that actual setup, funnily enough, even with what we're doing at CASA is that we've
set up our multisig wallets where it's actually a normal thing for the users to completely
rotate not only their addresses, but their public keys as well as you're adding and removing
devices from your your key master multisig setup.
So you know, that doesn't even work for the particular setup that we've created.
That comes down to the privacy versus security aspect.
And I'm really glad you brought that up, because I don't know of anyone that allows you to
generate like all new public keys every single time.
But you know, it comes down to that basic argument of privacy versus security and convenience.
So what I'm afraid will happen, but it probably is happening and will happen to a certain
segment of the industry, is that companies are starting to build products.
And you know, if you've listened to the show before, you've heard me gripe and the listeners
have heard me gripe about this before, is that a lot of companies and people are willing
to like give up privacy and security for the sake of convenience.
Now in any other industry, it's like fine and whatever Facebook, you know, I don't care.
But when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto as a whole, like we're here for a specific reason.
And then it really it's like, OK, fine.
If you want to do that, as long as people understand the difference between custodial
and non-custodial.
You know what a tweet I saw this morning that really pissed me off?
So Coinbase was, I know you're like Coinbase was advertising a new feature and the new
feature allows you to register Ethereum, E.N.S. like direct and send to Ethereum, E.N.S. directly
inside the Coinbase app.
Everyone knows Coinbase is a super custodial wallet.
You know what pissed me off about the tweet?
The tweet said, announcing this new feature, remember, not your keys, not your Bitcoin.
What the fuck?
What does that have to do with what that feature was?
And that's that's lying to people.
You're lying to people because you don't marketing exactly that.
But Jamie, that's what I'm afraid will happen is that if we don't continue with the education,
you know, to educate and entertain, the point of the show is to educate and entertain.
If we don't continue to do that, then I'm afraid that the newer generations, because
you know, you look at immigration, you look at anything, it doesn't happen all at once.
It happened.
It happens in waves and the one wave will educate the next wave.
My fear is that the next waves will not know, you know, all that will will know less the
difference.
But I guess your response will be like, that's OK, there's different segments of the industry
and it is what it is.
Well, I mean, it's part of the freedom of this space is people have the freedom to shoot
themselves in the foot and, you know, we don't even have time to go into the horrible privacy
aspects of the Ethereum name system.
I mean, there have been entire analytic blog posts basically doxing a number of people's
Ethereum is holding because of their use of E&S.
I know it's it's it's pretty crazy situation.
Have you guys at Casa sat down and discuss these topics of privacy, security and convenience?
And we chatted a little bit before and you came back from Satoshi Roundtable and you
sent me a message.
What was I mean, what was the contents of that message?
If we could talk about it and what were the I guess the takeaways from that of going back
to the company?
What do people think Casa is right?
So well, Casa has kind of an interesting history and that we started out doing self custody
where you're trying to help people properly custody their own private keys.
And we're doing that with this multi signature, multi hardware device, multi location type
of setup that we believe is incredibly robust, but also very user friendly.
Now we then went to the next step after about a year of what I referred to earlier of helping
people run their own nodes because we felt like that was the next level of sovereignty
is running your own nodes.
And interestingly enough, we ended up kind of creating these two different markets of
products where we found that a lot of the people who were interested in self custody
and high net worth individuals did not really overlap with the same people who were interested
in running their own nodes who were more of the technical hobbyist and tinkerer types.
And interestingly enough, the node product was far more successful than we ever imagined.
And we kind of started to become known as the node company.
And now this year, we're trying to get back to our roots and help people understand that
we're really a personal sovereignty company.
We want to help you with everything.
And we still do believe that private key management is the first and foremost most important thing.
That's what people are actually using to store significant amounts of wealth.
And that the node stuff is also important, but it's kind of a secondary issue that people
should worry about only after they have sufficiently secured their private keys.
So you have private, private node management, private key management nodes, what other type
of products and what other type of things do you know, do we need to we need to do to
protect our financial future?
Well, for us, it's the fact that most people just don't have the time to think through
all the things that could go wrong.
And we think that's one of the big value adds that we have is just all of the hours of time
that we've put into adversarially thinking about key management, self custody.
And so while a lot of people are probably worried about getting their private keys hacked,
because that's what you hear about a lot, to be quite honest, the more pressing danger
in this space is that the user shoots themselves in the foot and just loses access to their
coins and they end up being gone forever.
It's happened to so many people, probably you and me too.
I think everyone who has been in this space long enough has a story of something that
they screwed up that ended up costing them a decent amount of money, at least in today's
terms.
And so since we want to prevent people from hitting any catastrophic failure scenario,
that means we need to understand that people are human, humans make mistakes.
We need to build some flexibility into these systems so that you can make a mistake and
not have a catastrophic loss.
And we think that we've gotten very far with our existing key master product such that
it has a sufficient level of robustness that with the three of five product, you actually
have to lose two different devices, actually three different devices simultaneously to
completely lose access to anything.
We have a sufficient level of redundancy that you can lose two different devices at the
same time and still be able to recover everything.
But going beyond that, then I think the other thing that a lot of people haven't thought
about probably because most of the early adopters in this space are younger is the inheritance
problem and how do you ensure that you simultaneously have control over your own keys, but also
if you get hit by a truck, your heirs will then be able to take control of those keys
and you get into this really delicate balance of trade-offs of ensuring both of those things,
which are kind of in conflict.
I have to like almost take a step back and digest everything you just said.
Do you think the literacy is there?
You've written so much, dude, you've written so much about, I was talking to Peter Todd
last week and he's written a lot, but you've written so much on these subjects, on literacy.
You probably have multiple books just on your website.
It's lopp.net in case anyone wants to check it out, correct?
That's right.
What are some of your favorite topics to write about and what other topics do you think were
not?
Do you do it for fun?
Do you enjoy writing just for your own personal learning development?
Do you learn new things?
Yeah, interestingly enough, almost everything that I have done in this space, anything that
you can find on my website, my presentations, my articles, et cetera, et cetera, it's pretty
much all done for myself.
It's just me cataloging my self-education, I guess.
The way that I approach this is I'm addicted to Bitcoin and I already know I'm going to
be spending most of my waking hours continuing to try to learn more about the system.
As long as I'm doing that, I might as well try to write down what I'm learning and help
other people follow me in that journey.
This is the reason why I ended up creating the Bitcoin resources section of my site.
It was not because I felt like I had to give something like this to the community, but
rather that I was getting harassed with the same questions over and over and over and
over again.
This was really built to be a time saver for myself so that I didn't have to continue repeating
myself and continue looking up specific educational resources.
Instead, now I just say, go to my website, everything's on the website.
That's pretty funny.
I'm interested in, of course, the technical aspects of the system.
I write about technical stuff a lot, but sometimes I lean more philosophical.
Really I think what resulted from the whole scaling debate stuff and governance, that
was this much softer side, less technical viewpoints of what Bitcoin is, what it should
be, how it should evolve.
One of the reasons that I originally got interested in the system, it was, of course, the technical
stuff, but it was also just the concept of money as an open project where anyone who
wants to can collaborate and try to build a system that is a better form of money.
There's no real hard rules around that.
It's just sort of amorphous concept floating out in the ether, as it were.
That's one of the other things that we've been trying to figure out, how this really
all works over the years, and I'm happy to write about it.
I agree with you.
It makes my heart sing that you say that, because we've spoken about this, that Bitcoin
is just this huge experiment, but you know that experiments, in theory, takes a long
time, takes a lot of people, and it takes allowing the market and the people to be efficient
and to do things the way... I guess what I'm trying to say is it requires experimentation
without manipulation.
You brought up the scaling debate.
The way I saw that was people trying to say Bitcoin needs to be this, or we believe Bitcoin
is this, and we want to alter the direction.
This is the key.
We want to alter the direction of Bitcoin in this experiment.
Basically from what I understood, the scaling debate was, here we have an experiment, and
you have these people coming in who want to change the rules of the experiment.
That's not something that you should do.
The question I have for you is, how do we look at developers, how do we look at people
who run nodes, how do we look at miners, how do we look at users, holders?
Are we all in the same, I guess you would say, class in terms of where we fit into the
Bitcoin ecosystem, or are we all one of the same, or are some parties... I'm not asking
this that I know the answer.
This is something that I think about every single day, and I'm really curious to hear
your opinion.
Do you think that we are all the same in that?
Do you think that some parties, like developers for example, are more... What's the word
I'm looking for?
I think you're really referring to almost the balance of power, right?
It's not about power.
It's maintaining that experiment.
It's maintaining the flow.
It's continuing to keep us on the path that was set up almost a decade ago.
Whose responsibility is that?
Is it all of ours?
Yeah.
It is the responsibility of anyone who decides to make it their responsibility, and that's
why we can end up with so much contention, is because we have a variety of people coming
in with a variety of perspectives, and it's inevitable that there will be disagreements
along some points of the system and how it should function.
I think the problem that arises from this is the fact that we are used to existing in
systems of bureaucracy and hierarchical command and control where the rules of governance
are fairly well-defined, and who has the power, who has the final say is also well-defined.
I believe that this is a new form of governance or even anti-governance.
You could potentially even say it's crypto-anarchy, and that has been extremely frustrating for
people because they're just not used to it.
As a result, they start looking around.
If they get frustrated and they feel like things aren't going the way that they want
or they feel like things aren't going anyway, like anywhere at all, then they're going to
look around and try to find an entity or a group who has power or who they believe has
power and might be able to get some changes made.
I think that is where a lot of the contention and inevitably the forking ends up happening
is when some group becomes sufficiently frustrated that they feel like voice is no longer an
option and therefore the only other option is exit.
How do you actually live your life on crypto?
How do you do it?
I've been doing it since I first got started with Bitcoin back in, what, like 2011, but
since 2016, I've been using the Bitpay debit card to spend my Bitcoin on a day-to-day basis.
And it's been such a great product that I've been using it for over three years.
Bitpay is now sponsoring Untold Stories, and they're going to be giving away free Visa debit
cards to all my listeners.
All you have to do is visit bitpay.com forward slash Charlie.
It's such an easy card to use.
You get the card in the mail, you download the Bitpay app, you put Bitcoin on the app,
and when you want to send Bitcoin from the app into your debit card, it only takes a
few seconds and you can spend your Bitcoin anywhere credit cards are offered.
It's really so easy.
You almost wonder, like, why didn't this come out in 2011 when Bitcoin first launched?
Well, it was very difficult to do.
In fact, I actually tried to launch my own debit card, but I wasn't able to because the
credit card companies were very reluctant to do it.
But now Bitpay launched their product and a lot of other companies have launched credit
cards and debit cards using Bitcoin over the years.
I still will only use the Bitpay card.
I'm very loyal to the brands I like, and I hope you guys are too.
The fees are very low.
You can use it to withdraw cash at ATMs.
You can use it all around the world with very, very low fees.
A lot of companies have tacked on like super high fees and I don't like that.
So check it out, bitpay.com forward slash Charlie.
That's bitpay.com forward slash Charlie.
You get a free card.
You don't have to pay for it.
Usually the card costs like 10 bucks or more.
There's a commitment, but you don't have to do that here.
It's a free card.
There's literally no reason to not try it out.
I've been using it for over three years.
So check it out and thanks for listening to Untold Stories.
Over the years, I've learned a lot from crypto winters.
A lot of the bull and bear markets, and there's a lot of things that I've learned.
But one of the most important things that I've learned is that community is one of our
strongest assets.
It allows us to continue working together and talking to each other during the good
times, the bad times, and hopefully not the ugly times.
Over the past few months, I've been speaking with the Pepo team.
These guys have spent years working with members of the crypto community and learning what
we want in social sharing apps.
I'm really excited that Pepo is now one of the sponsors for Untold Stories.
Even in the few weeks since they launched Pepo at DevCon, not that long ago, I've seen
them make so many improvements like hashtag search based on feedback from people using
the app and so many different features that combine the best parts of what we already
love, that parts of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, but it combines it in a perfect way with such
a nice user experience and good security, it combines them so perfectly that it looks
like and it actually was built for the crypto community.
You can download the app by going to pepo.com forward slash stories and you can find me
there at Charlie Shrimp, the same as my Twitter handle.
I've been doing my own internal scaling debate, like post scaling debate, and I really don't
like even talking about the scaling debate or whatever.
But internally, I'm doing my own experiment and I'm saying to myself, okay, Charlie, like
what went on, went on.
So now that I have the opportunity to talk to brilliant people like yourself, now I want
to know how do you scale?
Was it the right move what we did or is it better to scale on chain?
Because I want to do another experiment, so I'm talking to you.
Yesterday I spoke to, we had Bram Cohen on the show, we had Peter Todd, but I also have
people like Amin Gun Sirer, I recorded with him.
Of course I will never have Craig Wright on the show because that's just fucking fraud.
But I did have Amin because I think he's a very smart person while socially may not be
the best and he gets into a lot of Twitter fights, but he's very smart.
So I sat with him and we asked the same questions.
I asked him, Peter Todd, I asked him Chris Bram Cohen, the overall consensus now that
this, and I know you're smiling probably because you know what I'm going to say, the overall
consensus from everyone on both sides of the debate is that scaling on chain is the dumbest
idea you could possibly do, that fast scaling is not smart scaling and that the way we scaled
was the right way to scale and doing things on chain won't allow, not only create a million
new attack vectors and things that will break, but won't allow people to maintain the ability
to run nodes and to have a healthy network going back to what we said in the beginning
of the episode for the listeners.
You know, if you have bigger blocks, if you have 10 gigabyte blocks, only one or two people
can actually run nodes and you don't have a decentralized system.
The point is that because this wasn't on Twitter, because it wasn't contentious, because I was
able to have frank, honest, polite conversations with these people who were like, dude, they
were like, I mean, you got swatted.
They came to your house with AR 15, the SWAT team came to your house over this fucking
thing.
Right?
It's all related.
I know it's all, it's all related.
It's all, so it's, it's kind of, it's kind of crazy that now you could be having the
same conversation with the same people, but it's like, might as well be having over a
cup of tea.
I guess the issue with, with scaling was this fundamental contention of, of priorities and
do we prioritize the low cost of transacting or do we prioritize the low cost of validating
the entire network history and that became the crux of the issue of, you know, do we
need to continue having the same type of on chain experience in order to continue growing
the network, et cetera, et cetera.
And of course, you know, you can argue about this until you're blue in the face, but ultimately
the, the way that the governance of Bitcoin works, it's, it's kind of the, the fact that
a lot of power is given to the incumbent, if you will, you have to convince people to
change if you want to make breaking changes and that's a very, very difficult to do.
That's the best part though.
That's the best.
I think it's a good thing.
Yeah.
So what happened that day?
I mean, who did you piss off?
What happened?
You know, ultimately the, the swatting thing was due to the general rise of crypto, you
know, 2017, my, I guess, following on Twitter, growing from a few thousand to over a hundred
thousand people during that time and, and just my reach, ultimately a lot of other people,
you know, seeing the things I was talking about and randomly, unfortunately you're going
to have some people who are a bit off and are willing to do unsavory things.
And if you have hundreds of thousands of people listening to you, then there probably will
be one or two psychopaths in there who will be willing to try to do something stupid and
attack you.
And while, you know, I don't have any indications that that person did it because they hated
me for my position in the scaling debate.
It was my rise to prominence, which was somewhat due to my being in the forefront of the scaling
debate that ended up kicking that off and I think resulted in me attracting the attention
of that person.
And you know, that's still an ongoing thing.
We may, I think that's been, yeah, it's been over two years now and I put out a reward
for information related to it, but it may, it may never get solved.
I mean, really these, these things are very difficult for, for law enforcement to track
down.
But there was a lot of good that came out of that at your expense, unfortunately.
And the good that came out of that is that people like myself was able to read about
your experience and learn from it and also learn how to become better at protecting our
privacy.
And there were, out of that situation, you had New York Times, TechCrunch, mainstream
media writing very in-depth articles about how specifically you stay private and how
you protect yourself.
And of course you left, you probably left some out there, but I want to, if you will,
I'd like to go, you know, go over them for the sake of the listeners.
I think it's, and maybe I can, I can mention each one and then you can just talk a second
about it because I, I did about six or seven of the things that you, maybe more than that.
And it fundamentally changed my life.
I sleep at night better.
So I think that these are very basic things that if, if our listeners can, can do, then
it would help them a lot, not just with their crypto lives, but with their, their, their
privacy, their, their, their just future, their, their lives, their, their personal
lives.
Absolutely.
And of course you and I are in a different position for most of the listeners and we
already knocked ourselves and we're very public figures.
Dude, people write handwritten letters to my house.
Like it's cool.
Like I'm flattered, but it's creepy.
So please don't do that guys.
Like email me, my email address is right on the website, untiltstories.com.
I promise you, I will read it and I promise you that if it's a little bit, even if it's
has basic level of sanity, I will respond.
But getting back into these 15 things.
Okay.
So the first on the list, those 15 things, um, create a new corporate identity.
Is this just a thing like an, an LLC should, you know, to, and we'll go into more specifics
of why this is important, but should this be onshore offshore if they're in the U S
just a, you know, an LLC would suffice.
Yes.
So just any LLC, you want to set it up anonymously and there are a few States like New Mexico
and Wyoming, for example, that allow you to register an LLC and not have to actually list
the owner of the LLC.
Another option, if you don't want to go through one of those privacy protecting States is
if you have someone you trust, who isn't connected to you publicly, you know, you could have
essentially a single member LLC where your, your friend is the owner that's publicly listed.
But then in the private incorporation documents, it lists that you are the 100% sole member
of the LLC that actually has power and control over all the assets.
There are two types.
That's actually a very good idea.
Um, I should have prefaced this earlier, but I guess there are three types of parties that
would come after someone, right?
So you'd have a government and I guess I don't think any of these 15 things would sufficiently
protect you if the government was coming after you and you weren't hiding it somewhere in
the US.
So that's not what we're, we're going for here.
Just, just for the listeners.
And then the other types of their individuals.
So there are individuals that, you know, want to do what they did to you, uh, if they're
individuals that don't like you, um, stalkers, this is a great, you know, the great list
for if you have stalkers.
But then the one that I'm afraid about is more of like the non-government groups, like
a corporation or even like a religious body.
I don't know if you know, but I left a very religious, uh, um, organization and that organization
like went after my wife for a while and they even offered her like money to break up with
me and they staked out her house.
It was a whole cluster fuck going back 2011.
Um, so that's the type of group that I'm worried for, but also the individuals.
So going back to the list, um, set up a new bank account and payment cards, um, using
the new corporate identity, carry cash is number three and get a new phone number.
So those four things are super important for basic things that I think everyone should
do and you think right now, um, and then you talked about number five was stop using your
phone for directions.
How do I do this?
We rely on Google maps.
We use it for everything, especially when you travel.
How do you not?
How do you, is there a, is there a private version of Google maps, a decentralized version
of it?
It doesn't track your location?
Uh, yeah, there are a number of options.
Um, I think an easy one, if you're in a car is, you know, use a navigation system that's,
you know, standalone, uh, vehicle based.
Uh, if you do want to use your phone, there are a number of, uh, of apps, I think like
open street maps, for example, where you have to download, you know, the entire state or
the entire region of maps directly to your phone, but then you have all that data locally
and you're, you're not making all of these, you know, uh, API calls over the internet
to some third party about where you're going.
So you can still get a similar level of directions.
And I'm pretty sure it's the same data that, that Google street maps uses.
That's actually good to know.
So I'm going to, uh, download, download some of those, but I think that people really,
really, really rely on, on, uh, on Google maps.
What about, um, Uber lift?
Are there better ways?
You know, I rely on Uber lift.
I probably use it, uh, not Uber specifically, but one of the other ones, uh, very consistently,
um, not just because I'm drinking and driving, just because I don't like to drive at night.
Um, I don't, you know, my eyesight's not that good.
So how do, uh, how do we mitigate that?
Cause that's a big thing.
Yeah.
So actually I have both Uber and lift accounts, uh, set up that are not in my name.
And I set them up using these, uh, anonymous throw away virtual debit cards.
And I just put a pseudonym in as my name and billing address.
And uh, they never asked me for any type of ID, you know, the, uh, I think they only really
ID the people that are doing the driving, not the passengers.
That's actually good to know, um, make up a fake name for casual interactions.
This is a significant one.
I think this is one of the most significant ones and I know they get more significant,
but to start, uh, being known by, especially in like the town or city or village that you
live in by like a completely different persona, uh, name and everything, it's, it's difficult.
And then, and then, um, I guess, won't people be able to figure out who you really are?
I guess with me and you, it's different, but for, for a non public person, it's doable.
Well, you know, I was a little worried about this at first.
Uh, after it was, it was odd for the first few months, but eventually you get used to
it.
And really, um, you know, we should be a little bit humble here.
You and, you and I, uh, we are, we're, I think we are kind of a new type of celebrity.
We're a very niche celebrity.
Um, maybe you get, uh, recognized more in real life, but to be quite honest, I, I've
only ever been recognized in real life one time outside of a Bitcoin conference.
So I have not had an issue with people seeing me and actually knowing who I am.
You never get anyone try to like, uh, Google you or, or, I mean, what, can you tell me
what name you go by?
Or is that that's private?
That's a stupid question.
No, no, I wouldn't give out my, my, uh, pseudonym, uh, so, you know, people can Google my pseudonym
and they won't find anything.
All right.
If they asked me, if they asked me for social media stuff, I just say, I'm not on social
media.
I'm going to start being known as John Bon Jovi.
I don't even like John Bon Jovi.
I don't like his music either.
Not his music, but I was in a concert of his once and it was raining, so I had a very bad
experience and because of that, I don't like John Bon Jovi, but that's a different, that's,
that's neither here nor there.
Okay.
The next one on the list, create a VPN for home internet use.
This is actually, I like this idea, not just because for, for being able to, so for those
who, for the listeners, all traffic going through your home router and internet is readable
and viewable by like your ISP by how many different parties, how many different people,
probably hundreds of different people can go in at any point of time and look at your
internet history.
It's scary thought.
If you think about it, like these are not people that are in high positions.
These are lower to middle level managers.
Let's go back to SIM jacking for a second.
I don't want to, you know, I'll bring that up for one second.
Although the SIM jacking that was happening with AT&T with people stealing phone numbers,
it wasn't happening by hackers.
SIM jacking that was done by AT&T was happening by a low level manager working inside AT&T.
So with Jameson, what you're talking about here is encrypting all traffic that leaves
your home.
So any traffic that you do on your home computer, I think this is one of the most important
ones on your list.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's a basic level.
I would say like a lot of things we're talking about here is very extreme and it's because
I completely burned down my entire life and started over.
So like the pseudonym stuff, most people won't do, but I think the internet level things
of just, you know, blocking most of the trackers on the internet or encrypting your traffic
through a VPN is something that a lot of people can get done in a weekend, you know, a few
hours of work.
Okay.
Is there a good piece of software that, or is there a specific router?
Like how, how easy is it to set up a VPN?
Because you can go the next level and you know, for security, you can basically, you
know, if you trade crypto or do anything on the internet, you can IP whitelist and then
you could basically say that any, you know, you not only two factor authentication or
regular login, but someone would have to spoof your, or somehow get into your VPN because
you can force, you know, login from only from that IP address.
Is there a, is there a, a non-difficult way to do this for, for normal people who are
using Linksys routers like myself or whatever?
I don't even know what I'm using.
Maybe Google life.
I don't know.
There are some options though.
I haven't tried the pre-configured ones.
If you just do a search for VPN routers, you'll, you'll find some options where you can basically
buy a router that is already configured with software where you can run the VPN at the
router level.
I, I recommend running the VPN at the router level instead of on each device, just because
it's easier to make sure that it's always on and you can also set it up so that essentially
it has a, an automatic shutoff where if the VPN stops working for some reason, it blocks
all of your internet traffic.
And that comes in really handy because the first few months I was trying this out on
my own, the VPN would randomly die and I wouldn't notice for days until I realized that, you
know, I wasn't getting all of those Google capture, you know, identify the sidewalks
on the streets and the signs and stuff because I was no longer sending my traffic through
the VPN.
But really I would say the, the best guide that I can recommend for people is this $35
book you can buy, it came out just last year and it's the book that I wish I had had when
I started doing all of this is called Extreme Privacy, What It Takes to Disappear in America.
And that will outline all the different things you can do, both from a digital perspective
and a legal perspective and a physical perspective and you choose the things that you feel like
are good.
It's called Extreme Privacy, What It Takes to Disappear in America.
It was written by, well, his pseudonym is Michael Basil, but of course that's not his
real name.
Yeah.
And then some of the, some of the later ones on the list was buy a boring car, you know,
buy a decoy house to fool the DMV.
And that's actually a pretty important one because if you can have a driver's license
with an address that is not a place that you live at, you can do things like, for example,
what you said about Uber, you could even, if you didn't want to use a pseudonym, you
have to use that driver's license, at least this way your house is private.
And so there are a lot of, there are a lot of different ways, but then you, do you really
wear a disguise?
I mean, I'll wear hats and sunglasses fairly often and I think that's good enough.
Yeah, that is probably good enough.
Okay, cool.
So, I mean, have you, you've been doing this for a year or two now.
Has your life been inconvenienced or, you know, by, by following, you know, this list
or have you kind of like got comfortable in, in it, or has it really just maybe more of
like a minor inconvenience that you've learned to, it just get, you get used to it after,
after a few days or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, there are certainly inconveniences, but most of the time at this point, after
you've been maintaining the lifestyle for a while, the only major inconveniences are
when you want to do something new that you've never done before, and then you have to kind
of think through ahead of time, you know, what are the steps I need to take.
But, you know, there are just some lifestyle changes that you make for, for example, whenever
I'm traveling, I carry my passport with me, even if it's only domestic, and that's because
you can use your passport as your ID without having to show anyone your driver's license
that has an address on it.
Oh, that's a very good point.
I didn't think about that, but then, you know, if you travel with your passport, you risk
losing it, but it's not a difficult thing to get it back.
What's next for you?
You, you know, you worked at BitGo for a long time, and then now CASA.
If anyone follows your life, you do some really cool shit, what other cool shit are you working
on?
What, you know, what excites you personally, I know guns do, and one day when I get my
right to own a gun back, we'll go shooting together, but legally, I can't shoot a gun.
Yeah, you know, I'm keeping track of the whole 3D gun printing stuff.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to take that up as a hobby.
One of my other hobbies I took up recently about a year ago was virtual reality.
And interestingly enough, now that is starting to intersect with Bitcoin, and we've started
holding Bitcoin virtual reality meetups, which is really cool, because now we can have what
is, you know, essentially like a Bitcoin conference, but have people from all over the world join.
And of course, you don't have to go through all the hassle of traveling and accommodations.
It's just, you know, two minutes set up to get your VR rig booted up, and then you join
in and talk to them.
Oh, I got to join.
I'm, I have an Oculus Quest.
Nice.
What's your favorite game?
Do you play games?
Oh, yeah, I play a lot of VR.
Of course, I play a lot of first person shooters.
It's once again, it's a lot more convenient than getting all your real guns together and
schlepping over to the range.
I haven't found any good ones though.
Any good first person shooters though, for the Oculus Quest, or what do you use?
What handset do you use?
So I'm on the Vive Pro, which is pretty high end.
I just want Grand Theft Auto, that's all I want.
The Valve Index is probably the best one right now, though I think they're all sold out.
But I like a lot of the zombie shooter games like Arizona Sunshine.
I've also actually been playing a lot of Borderlands 2 recently, because they ported that over
to VR.
And then I've heard that the new Walking Dead VR game is supposed to be pretty awesome.
You know, I remember when I had ordered on Indiegogo, the first Oculus Rift.
And shoot, I wish I kept it, because it's probably a collector's item down the road.
But I was part of the pre-sale or whatever, and I got it like six months later.
And I remember putting it on for the first time, and there were very little games, it
was very little of anything.
You needed a computer, a PC nonetheless.
And immediately after playing it for like five minutes, I threw up.
Because you got sick, and VR wasn't ready for mainstream adoption.
And one could argue that it's still not ready for mainstream adoption.
If you look at the parallels between the crypto industry and the VR industry, it almost grows
together.
Like, yes, Bitcoin is not ready for mainstream, but neither is VR.
But VR still has, it's still a billion dollar industry, just like Bitcoin is.
And there are people that use it.
And a lot of people that use VR nowadays would be happy if VR stayed where it is today, just
with more and better games, better technology.
But in terms of like, you don't want grandmas on the street or grandpas on the street using
a VR handset.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I mean, we're seeing the same level of development happen in the VR space where the hardware
continues to improve.
We're going to continue to get better and better dexterity and visualization of people's
real world movements in the virtual world.
And eventually it'll become like Ready Player One, where you've got your full haptic feedback
suit and you're 100% immersed into it.
That would be crazy if that would ever happen.
That really, really would be.
You're a member of the Mensa Bitcoin Special Interest Group.
What's going on over there?
Should I take the test?
Is it worth it?
Yeah.
You know, that was one of the things that I also did early on.
I joined Mensa.
I just wanted to see if I could get in.
And then once I did, there was no Bitcoin group.
So I started a Bitcoin group.
It's a pretty low volume discussion list.
And Mensa provided some interesting insights to me.
I had no idea what to expect, but I think I can boil it down to the fact that even people
in Mensa who are supposedly the top 1% IQ, they have the same range of flaws and same
range of perspectives as anyone else that I've talked to.
And so the main difference that I've noticed, though, is that most of the time this also
comes along with some severe social trade-offs.
So I've gone to some Mensa annual gatherings, for example.
And it's fascinating to see how they set up their conferences.
How do they?
OK.
So the best way I can describe it is, you know, you go to a conference, you go to the
registration table, you have to give them your name, you get your swag bag and your
name badge and whatnot.
Yeah.
So at Mensa, you do that and then there is a second table right next to it.
And the second table is full of various colored stickers.
And one set of colors is to denote your receptiveness to physical touch.
So green, yellow and red, basically because a lot of people who are going to these conferences,
they lack the social skills to infer how someone might be receptive to being physically touched.
Is it just about touch or is it overall social characteristics in general?
Yeah, I mean, it's basically like if I've got a red sticker on, I don't want you getting
up in my space.
If I have a green sticker on, feel free to come up and hug me without even asking for
permission type of thing.
And then another, I believe another set of stickers was actually for sexuality.
And I think it's probably the same type of thing there.
It's just that a lot of the people who are attending don't have the ability to figure
out those things through normal conversation.
So it has to be plastered right in front of them.
How do you take the test for that?
Can you just go on Mensa and take a test or you have to go physically sit down for one?
Yeah.
If you go to Mensa.org, there should be a way to find like where your local tests are.
I think, you know, normally in large cities, they have one or two tests per year and it's
a proctored exam.
That's like three hours.
Is it hard?
It's I don't know if you've ever done an IQ test before, but it's not like a fact type
of test.
It's problem solving?
Yeah, it's like associations mostly is like if this is to that, then this is to that,
you know, logic type stuff.
Is there a right answer though?
I guess I've never been good at those because I don't understand the point.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a lot more abstract and conceptual than it is, you know, just like doing math
or answering factual based questions.
And there's definitely right and wrong answers.
And the way that the tests are built is that you're not expected to finish.
And part of the score is like how far you can get into the test before you run out of
time.
Oh, interesting.
Speaking of gatherings of brilliant people and socially awkward people, how was the Toshi
Roundtable this year?
It was a delightful winter break as usual, you know, got to hang out with a lot of people
and we always have a lot of insightful conversations and, you know, I write up everything that
I learn from that and I try to go to the discussions that are about things that I have less experience
in.
But in general, I would say it was an optimistic group of people there and a lot of people
feeling like, you know, we've turned the corner on the latest bear market and a lot of great
things are going to be coming out in the next year or two.
From your mouth to the ears of the magic sky people, as they say.
That's what Roger would say to me because I was religious and when I was hanging out
with Roger, this is when I was still in the religious organization, I would say like from
your mouth to God's ears.
And Roger would say to me, no, from your mouth to the ears of the magic sky people.
Indeed.
Jameson Lopp, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
L-O-P-P dot net.
What's your Twitter so people can follow you?
It's also L-O-P-P.
Can't miss me.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much again for coming on the show.
Great conversation and I can't wait to release it.
Thanks for having me.
Hey everyone.
Thanks for listening.
New episodes of Untold Stories are released every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 a.m. EST on
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