(upbeat music)
- Every species that becomes sentient
and develops technology that is sufficient
to start creating signals that propagate
through the universe eventually also hits
this inflection point, which we may be close to,
wherein the power of the technology becomes uncontrollable
and they destroy themselves
for one of a million different reasons.
- Hello there from Bedford.
Yes, I'm home.
I'm back home after a long trip out in the US.
I just wanna say thanks to everybody who came out.
We had about a week in Nashville making podcasts.
Then we went up to Austin and made some podcasts.
And then I went out and made this film about mining,
which I really can't wait to get out to you.
Traveled all over Texas, also went up to Oklahoma,
dipped into Arkansas and Louisiana.
It was an incredible trip
and I'm really excited to get this film out.
I learned so much about Bitcoin mining.
Anyway, listen, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast,
which is brought to you by Gemini,
the only place I'm using for buying Bitcoin.
I'm your host, Peter McCormack.
And today I've got Jameson Lopp back on the phone.
Now, Jameson was the third person
I ever interviewed for the podcast.
I went out to Raleigh, shot some guns with him
and learned all about the tech side of Bitcoin.
And you know, back then,
I didn't understand anything he was talking about,
but he stayed a friend.
We've made a few podcasts since,
but this is the first time we've recorded in person
in a while.
Now this was recorded not long after Luke Dasher
reported up on Twitter
that he'd had some of his Bitcoin hacked.
So Jameson was the perfect person
to talk about Bitcoin security with.
Now we've covered security with Jameson a lot,
but he's also a technologist.
So we got into some other things.
We talked about AI, chatGPT, Nostr,
and a whole bunch of other stuff.
It was a fascinating show,
always great to catch up with Jameson.
Now, if you've got any questions about this,
anything else, please do reach out to me.
I've had a lot of emails recently,
I am trying to catch up, but please do reach out.
I will get back to you.
My email address is hello@whatbitcoindid.com.
Anyway, over to the show, over to Jameson.
(upbeat music)
- Morning, Jameson.
- Good morning.
- Good to see you again.
What is this?
How many times have we recorded in person?
This is the third one.
- That sounds about right.
We might've done a few remote interviews as well.
- Yeah, it's a very different setup from the first time.
Where it was just me and my little trolley.
- Yeah, to be fair, you were the first person
that ever actually brought like professional equipment.
And I was like, who is this guy
who's flying thousands of miles
to set up like a professional studio in my home?
- Well, it wasn't as professional as this.
And we didn't have producer Danny.
We didn't have Jeremy, did it all on my own.
We should tell that story.
I think we've told it before.
Tell it again for people that don't know.
So that was my third ever show.
That was, when was it Danny?
- December, 2017.
- So it's five years ago.
My third episode.
So I was inspired to make the podcast by this guy,
Rich Roll, who did all his interviews in person.
So I was like, I'm gonna do them all in person.
So I did my first one when I was in LA with Luke Martin.
And then I was in the UK and I did it with Trader--
- Coin Trader Nick.
- Coin Trader Nick.
And then this, like it's a famous picture of you.
You know the picture.
You should, we'll have to flash that up.
I see this dude on Twitter with this huge beard,
a massive gun and a make Bitcoin great again hat.
And I was like, I need to interview this guy.
So I just went on your website
and I emailed you and I can't remember the email.
I wonder if we could find it.
- Oh, I'm sure I can find it.
I have everything.
- Oh, we should dig that out.
But I'm sure it was something along the lines of,
"Hi, I've launched a podcast.
Can I come and interview you offline from the UK?
And can you take me to shoot a gun?"
And I turn up at your house
and there are fucking guns everywhere.
How many guns were there a bit?
- Oh, dozens.
- Yeah.
And bear in mind, I'd never seen a gun before.
And so you took me shooting.
We made a podcast, got some barbecue.
I should tell that story as well.
It's only me talking about it.
Sorry, I know I'm interviewing Jameson.
I was a vegan at the time.
'Cause my mom, I gotta get the dates right.
But anyway, I went vegan
and you took me to this barbecue place.
And I was sitting there thinking,
"Fucking hell, I can't.
How do I turn around to this guy with big guns and Bitcoin
and say I'm a vegan?
Can I have some potato without,
I can't, I couldn't even have the salad."
- I'm sure there were a couple of options,
but I had to take you to a real authentic
hole in the wall barbecue shack in North Carolina.
- Well, that was the day I stopped being a vegan.
'Cause I was like, "Well, I can't do this."
And I was like, "Actually, this tastes good."
Actually, do you know what really I remember from that?
Do you remember there was an old guy in there
I was talking to?
- I can't find the full picture,
but it was this one, wasn't it?
- Oh yeah, you gotta find the one with the gun though.
- Yeah.
You can definitely find the one,
Peter Thiel actually put me and Vitalik
in his presentation at Bitcoin in 2022.
- So you don't remember the old guy in there?
- Vaguely, not really.
- So I was chatting to this old guy in there
and he was like, "Where are you from, boy?"
I was like, "I'm from Bedford, it's near London."
And he was chatting away and I was like,
I remember saying to him like, "Oh, have you ever been?"
And he said something along the lines of,
"I've never left the county."
- Sounds about right.
- I haven't left the state, he'd never left the county.
Oh, there we go.
Look at that man, what a fucking badass.
Although you do look like somebody
who would have gone to the Capitol building
on January the 6th.
- Yeah, it's a funny story how that all worked out, right?
Is that things take a life of their own
and the fact that I did this as a satirical video
on request for someone, nobody knows that anymore.
Even you probably don't know that.
- No, no, I did this for Bitcoin Car Talk
way back in the day.
- Was that Mike and Space?
- Yeah, Mike and Space.
- Mike and Space, yeah.
- Yeah, and so I did this way over the top,
hilarious sort of gunned up Bitcoin maximalist video
and he put it in the intro to Bitcoin Car Talk,
one of those episodes.
And of course people took screenshots of it
and then my favorite of course is the people
who transposed this against Vitalik
wearing his like unicorn pajama onesie thing.
But these things are all just memes
and that's one of the hilarious things about this space
is the mimetics of it.
- Have you seen this picture before?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, you look like a fucking badass.
I mean, the glasses, the hat, the gun,
you're looking-- - The body armor.
- Yeah, you got--
- Yeah, it's kind of hard to tell
'cause I'm wearing so much black, but.
- But you'd also do look like a January the 6th.
I love that picture.
That was a very early show we made
and I came to ask you technical stuff
and honestly I had no fucking idea
what you're talking about.
- Well, hopefully you've learned a little since then.
- A little bit, I learned what an ex-pub is.
I learned what an extended public is.
Anyway, dude, welcome back.
It's good, oh, we recorded another time in person
in New York in that little studio.
- Was that around one of the consensus conferences?
- Yes, that was one of my first in-person interviews
with a camera, we rented a studio
and then we went and got burgers.
Yeah, long time ago, man.
- Well, listen, thank you very much for doing that interview
because you said yes and that essentially kickstarted
getting known incredible Bitcoin people
'cause all right, it's Litecoin,
but you got me then Charlie Lee
and Charlie Lee got me so-and-so
and that started the whole journey.
- No, you did the hard work.
- Yeah, but you said yes and--
- That was the easy part.
- Yeah, but it isn't really 'cause I imagine,
at various times you've had lots of requests.
- I very rarely say no.
- I don't feel special.
(laughing)
A lot of people said no early on
or a lot of people didn't reply,
but getting that yes was like a big deal.
That show was a credible show
that went out and gave me credibility.
So I owe you a debt of gratitude for that and various things.
So thank you, Jameson.
Yeah, welcome back.
How are things at Casa?
- Typical bear market shenanigans,
but people are hodling and so that's good.
I mean, from a business perspective,
Casa compared to a lot of the other businesses in the space,
we're a subscription service, so that has pros and cons.
The pros are you have some fairly reliable annual revenue
and so we don't get hit as hard
as the people who are doing BIPs
or basically taking a cut of some other activity.
That's good during the bear markets.
The downside is that we don't see the same
straight up a wall type of revenue increases
during the crazy hype cycles.
So give and take.
- Yeah, I mean, like on the subscription,
I mean, it's not cheap for the package I have,
you have a gold, a platinum and a diamond.
- We have a couple of premium tiers
that are thousands of dollars a year
and then our sort of baseline gold tier
is about 120 a year.
- Yeah, I mean, it's a big jump
for some people to make that step.
And I found with Castle,
I had it for a while before I used it,
like that first step of going through the process
and setting up your multi-sig,
it's actually really easy.
Once you've done it, it's super easy.
- But people are afraid.
- Yeah, 'cause it's, you know,
for like people like me who are non-technical,
a wallet is a big step, like a hardware wallet.
The word multi-signature, like,
is actually, is that two words?
- Yeah.
- But it's one word is multi-sig.
- You can hyphenate it, you can do a one word
and then.
- This fluid, this fluid term,
it's kind of intimidating.
So what do you mean I have to sign with multiple keys
and I have to hide multiple keys?
Then, and that logic of where, you know, you put your keys.
So we'll get into that.
I'm gonna talk about the Ethereum thing.
- Sure.
- I'm not critical, but I am interested
in the motivations, the impact of that.
I saw the criticism, obviously, died down, whatever.
I have sponsors who have support multiple coins,
you know, some shit coins, doesn't bother me.
We do know there's a section of the community
who will react.
- Oh yeah, completely predictable.
- Yeah, so, but I do have an important question,
which I'll come to, but do you wanna talk about
why you did it?
Any of the challenges, impact?
- Yeah, well, actually the challenges,
there's nothing really new on the challenges side
in comparison to what I wrote in 2017
when I was working at BitGo
and we developed a multi-signature Ethereum wallet.
There were a lot of challenges then,
they're pretty much the same today.
The main difference is that, you know,
we have what, another five years of experience
to look at standards and best practices
of doing multi-sig in Ethereum.
And, you know, we didn't wanna roll our own anything.
We didn't wanna become smart contract developers.
So, you know, we're using a well-vetted smart contract
that's already securing untold billions of dollars
worth of Ether and other tokens and stuff.
But, you know, why did we do it?
Well, it's all about markets, right?
And so, some people find this very hard to believe,
but there are a lot of people out there
who own both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And of course, a lot of other things,
there's a long tail distribution
and you start to get into challenging business questions
of deciding where the threshold is
of what makes sense to support.
But suffice to say, over the past few years,
we started losing more and more deals
because we didn't support Ethereum.
And it hurts as a business to lose deals.
And from a self-custody perspective,
the thing that really irks me is when I see,
and I've seen a lot of people do this,
they end up choosing a trusted third-party custodian
because that's the easiest way for them
to secure many different assets.
And that's what, I mean, that just makes me cringe
and it makes me angry.
And so, from my perspective,
everything that I've ever said about Ethereum,
I completely stand by, feel free to go back
through any of my blog posts or podcasts or whatever.
My personal beliefs about Ethereum
and its issues are still there,
but I recognize that there are people
who don't agree with that and they have this need.
And I would rather see them self-custody their Ethereum
if that means that they're also gonna be
self-custodying their Bitcoin.
- So I haven't seen the Ethereum interface
'cause I don't own any or own any tokens,
but is it just Ethereum
or does it support the tokens as well?
- Oh, the smart contract that we're using
could support definitely any ERC-20 token
and possibly other stuff,
but that's further down the line.
We start out with the Ethereum token
because that's what people are demanding.
- Yeah, 'cause I can imagine this,
the only scenario I can imagine I was using it
is if I wanted to store some stable coin dollar on it.
- Yes, and I think that that is a logical next step.
I would say stable coins are probably our next greatest thing
that we have received demand for.
And once again, there are people in the space
who will say stable coins are terrible
and you're essentially bringing fiat into this space,
which we don't need.
But on the other hand, there's plenty of examples of utility
and stable coins helping people.
- I know, it's fucking ludicrous.
Like the world runs on fiat.
Yes, we want to move to Bitcoin,
but I wouldn't live on,
if I lived on a Bitcoin standard entirely,
my net wealth would have been crushed this last eight months
and I would have struggled to pay my team on the business.
So I just think that's fucking ludicrous.
- Oh yeah, I mean, we could do a whole episode
about stable coins and all the problems with them.
They have, of course, all the problems inherent with fiat
and then they usually have a lot of centralization
and security model problems too.
But nonetheless, people have use for them.
- Well, I can imagine a scenario,
'cause I have to balance between
the amount of Bitcoin and fiat I hold.
It's like, again, it's a fluid kind of balance.
I have a both.
But I can imagine, like I know in the UK,
I'm only protected up to 85,000 pounds, right?
I can imagine a scenario where I want to de-risk some of that
and maybe hold some in a stable coin on a multi-sig.
There's a logical reason to do that.
I don't do it at the moment,
but I can certainly see a stronger requirement for that
in more challenging markets, challenging countries.
So like it makes a logical sense.
There's a lot of people in South America
who absolutely love, need, rely, depend on stable coins.
And so I think the logic's there.
The important question really is,
so the thing me and Danny were talking about this morning,
as a Bitcoiner using CarServe for both my football club
and personally, can the introduction of Ethereum
present any risk to my Bitcoin,
or is there a separation within the stack of the code?
- Right, so as with anything,
it depends on the implementation.
I would say with a lot of the wallets out there
that support a long list of assets,
most of them tend to be software-based wallets.
Now there are hardware wallets, of course,
that support many different things,
but it really comes down to
what is managing the keys themselves.
So with Casa, of course,
we have a separation of many different concerns
and we use diversity of different software and hardware.
And the main sticking point of like,
why does introducing other code into the Casa app
not degrade your security with your Bitcoin?
And that's because whenever you're having
to make a transaction,
you're having to go to these different hardware devices
and actually verify the details
of exactly what you're signing.
So of course, anything is possible if enough things go wrong,
but it's like, if you have like both a Trezor
and a Ledger as part of your setup,
how would it be that you would go
to sign a Bitcoin transaction
and those signature operations would create
some other thing that you're not anticipating?
But both of those companies
and their whole software stacks and firmware
and upgrade process,
would all have to be compromised.
At the end of the day, anything can be compromised.
We're just trying to make it as difficult
as possible for that to happen.
So the short version is that,
you're verifying what you're doing
and you're not trusting the Casa software.
- Yeah, I mean, I'm staying with Casa, love the product.
Like I've always loved the app,
but even early on when it was Jeremy Welch
running the company,
I said to him, "Your UX is incredible."
Like, it's not like a Bitcoin company,
it's like a Silicon Valley company.
And for a moron like me,
it makes it super easy to manage a multi-sig.
So I love it, I'm staying with the product.
But what I really wanted to ask is,
'cause there has to be a decision there.
You knew what you were going to face.
There is this ideology around Bitcoin only.
Like I've ignored that myself in what we do,
in that we're a Bitcoin only podcast.
But like we will discuss Ethereum
if it brings something relevant
to the conversation with Bitcoin.
Or we've discussed Monero
if it brings something relevant
to the conversation with Bitcoin.
Or I'll have sponsors who support alternative coins,
because if that enables us
to be able to deliver this message and grow Bitcoin,
we do, we accept that.
But I've lost listeners because of it.
There's people who will not listen to my podcast
because of that.
And I don't know if you can tell me,
but my expectation is you lost some customers.
'Cause I saw some people saying online,
"Well, I've quit.
"I will no longer use it."
Was that a negligible amount?
Can you talk about that?
- Probably won't go into numbers,
but I will say that what you see and hear on Twitter
is greatly magnified versus reality.
Most of the people who are outraged on Twitter,
assuming they're actually people,
I have some evidence that there's some bots
and civil stuff going on.
I'm not of course saying
that all of these Twitter accounts are bots.
A number of them are real people.
But trying to remember actually,
I think Nick Carter described them
as sort of perpetually outraged grievance mob or something.
I know I'm screwing up his definition there,
but it's the people who they wanna complain
about stuff all the time.
And perhaps they're doing it for cloud,
perhaps it's just part of their tribalism.
I fully--
- Could also be honest, held beliefs.
- Oh, definitely.
And I understand the whole toxic Twitter tribe stuff.
I've played a toxic Bitcoin maximalist
on several occasions myself.
- Partaken into them.
- Yeah, and I get it.
And we of course expected to lose some customers.
From a business perspective,
we of course are operating under the thesis
that we are growing the umbrella
and growing our total addressable market.
And that the hardliners
who have the ideological considerations,
we wish them the best
and they're going to go support the Bitcoin only companies.
The only thing that kind of irked me
was some of the discussions around people saying
that this was degrading the security model for Casa clients.
And it's very hard to offend me,
but that is one of the things that I do get offended by
is when people say
that I am putting other people's funds at risk.
I mean, Casa eats its own dog food.
We use Casa for our own corporate treasury.
Our employees use Casa.
This is a friends and family operation, right?
So the claim that I would degrade the security of Bitcoiners
just as a sort of cash grab
to try to get Ethereum market share is offensive to me.
And some people are going to believe that,
they're going to say that,
there's nothing I can do to stop that.
But we are going forward with this.
There's no arguing against it at this point.
Like we've been committed to it for over six months,
probably nine months of research and development.
And maybe it's a bad idea.
Maybe we won't get a significant amount of business from it.
And maybe it goes so terribly that we decide
some years in the future that we drop support for it.
Anything is possible.
This is a fluid environment.
We're going to be actually,
I think Wire just announced
that they were shutting down operations.
Or their future is definitely in peril.
And we use Wire for our buy Bitcoin stuff in the app.
And so most likely that's going to be going away.
I don't know whether or not
we're going to be replacing them with someone else.
It's hard to say, but you know.
I didn't know Wire were in trouble.
Yeah, well, I think they had like a $1.5 billion buyout
that was supposed to happen.
And then that fell through.
And now apparently everything seems to be falling apart.
But you know, that's the nature of the space, right?
Is it, are you worth 1.5 billion or are you worth shit?
2022 was a terrible year to be an investor in this space.
But 2022 was a great year to be a technologist.
And so that is the optimistic take
that I'm kind of walking away from last year with is,
thankfully I consider myself a technologist first.
All of the other stuff is kind of tangential
and a result of my interest in different technology.
But that also kind of comes full circle
to the fact that by many people's definition,
I am a shit coiner.
And I have been called a shit coiner,
probably two outrage incidents a year
for the past four or five years.
And this is because I play around
with any technology that interests me.
And due to my audience,
whenever I talk about any technology,
if there's any kind of even possible
financial incentive there,
if I even talk about it,
then I'm considered as shilling that technology.
- You're a shit coiner.
You're a shit coiner since Grin.
- Oh yeah, yeah.
And so that was an outrage incident
three or four years ago where I was running a Grin node.
And apparently that meant that I was shilling it
and saying that people should be buying and selling it.
But I never bought or sold it.
I don't even know where I would have.
Like none of the exchanges I had accounts on
even had Grin support.
- Yeah, never got listed, I don't think.
- I don't think so.
And it had terrible economics.
Like no one who looked into the economics
would have invested in it.
- Remind me, was it like,
they had a different way of approaching privacy?
- Yeah, it was a privacy coin.
It was using Memble Wemble.
And I have been talking about Memble Wemble
as a protocol since probably 2015,
you know, when it was the first white paper
for Memble Wemble came out.
And I guess that's the short version
is that anyone out there who's been using
Memble Wemble for a long time
and is a big believer in privacy,
anyone out there should expect
that I will be interested in almost anything
that is gonna increase privacy.
So if there's a new shit coin that comes out
and that it claims to have the best privacy ever
in the world, you can bet that I'm gonna be looking into it
and playing around with it and might be talking about it.
That doesn't mean it's investment advice.
- Yeah, listen, look, I think it's fine.
I probably agree with them.
I think it has been a platform which has been used
to spread a lot of shitty projects and shitty ideas.
I'm not a fan of NFTs.
I am not a fan of ICOs anymore,
which is mainly because I lost loads of money on them.
I'm just not really a fan of it,
but I do find it hard to argue against stable coins
and their usage.
We don't have, I don't believe we have
a usable, decent stable coin of Bitcoin.
And it's very hard to argue against that,
especially when you talk to Alex Gladstein,
he talks about how people in these countries
are using stable coins.
And even when Bitcoin is like,
"Well, no, they should be using Bitcoin."
I actually just think it's a moronic statement
because these people are already challenged
maybe by high inflation or capital controls.
This is an option for them.
And people will refer to the tool that's available.
So it doesn't bother me.
I'm shouting at people about Ethereum,
it's not making it go away.
- And we will be seeing stable coins on Bitcoin,
on Lightning.
And we will be seeing the same crowd of people
then decrying the fact that people are using Bitcoin
for fiat operations.
- Well, I think that would be a subset.
- Yeah.
- I think, again, most normal,
I think people who criticize stable coins on any platform,
my expectation is they live a privileged life
and don't understand the difficulties
that other people have.
I think people will always find a tool that helps them.
But my analogy for this is,
people don't really like it,
but my analogy for you guys supporting Ethereum
is kind of like cigarettes.
In that you can absolutely hate Ethereum
and still use Casa,
just as you can absolutely hate cigarettes
and still go to the liquor store and buy a bottle of whiskey.
It is just something you don't like,
you don't agree with, a market that's lied about what it is,
what it represents,
that has some kind of negative connotations attached to it.
But you can just not buy it.
You go and buy your bottle of whiskey and leave
and not buy any cigarettes.
You can go and multi-sig with Casa and store your Bitcoin
and not buy Ethereum.
- Yeah, I think the short version
is that I will never apologize for,
and I will never feel bad about helping people
improve their security, regardless of what that is.
Even if it's security for an asset
that I'm not interested in and that a lot of people hate.
- The YouTube is gonna be on fire.
Okay, can we talk about Luke Dasher
and what happened this week?
- We can try.
- We can try, okay.
Big outrage on Twitter.
Also some horrible dunking, which I didn't like at all.
But my main issue with it was,
I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about.
Okay, storing Bitcoin for me is very simple.
Some people do it in exchange.
Some people do it on a software wallet on their phone.
Some people do it on a hardware wallet.
Some people have multi-sig.
When he explained the scenario, what went wrong,
I just fundamentally didn't understand it.
He talked about PGP.
I've tried to use PGP.
It's not more unfriendly.
It's very tricky tool to use.
So I didn't understand it.
So I'm just gonna throw it to you.
Talk me through what happened.
- Well, to kind of set the stage,
our information is incomplete.
So even anything that I'm going to say
is somewhat speculative and based upon
partial information and tweets
and a few conversations that I've seen.
So take anything that I say with a grain of salt
because it could be wrong.
But my understanding is that Luke had a setup
that actually dated back 10 years.
He said that he had generated these keys in 2012.
So that means this is pre-hierarchical deterministic wallet,
pre-seed phrase.
It's just a bunch of keys.
- Hierarchical deterministic wallets are seed phrases.
- Seed phrases, yes.
So this is most likely he had a Bitcoin Core wallet.dat file
that had just a bunch of private keys in it.
And it sounds like what he was doing
was he was securing that by encrypting it with PGP.
So at rest, he had this big data blob,
which if anybody got ahold of that data blob,
they couldn't do anything with it
'cause you have to have the decryption key
to actually be able to get the data
and then use the private keys related to it.
Now, at some point a few months ago,
he started talking about one or more of his servers
being compromised.
What we don't know is how the servers got compromised.
Some theories are that there was an insider employee attack
at his data hosting provider
who physically accessed his server.
Some people are speculating that it could have been
some sort of software exploit, some sort of vulnerability.
But the speculation is that that most likely
was sort of the entry point
into what eventually turned into the compromise of his coins.
What we don't know is exactly where he was keeping
that wallet file.
Most likely, I think it was on one or more of his computers
at his home, not on his server,
from what I've seen him talk about.
- That's still a hot environment.
- Yeah, I mean, it's still an internet connected computer,
which generally we would call that a hot wallet,
even though the keys were encrypted at rest.
And so what we don't know is how that attacker,
assuming it's the same attacker, which seems likely,
how that attacker got from compromising his server
to compromising his home machines or whatever machines
the actual keys were kept on.
- The PGP key.
- And the wallet itself.
But he did say at some point his PGP key got compromised.
Presumably that was not on the server
and that was also on his home machines.
And if that was the key that he was also using
to encrypt the wallet file,
that would have been game over.
Or if he had some other really long decryption phrase
for the wallet file,
if his machine that he was using to access it
had a key logger,
then eventually once he decided to open up
and decrypt that wallet,
then the attacker would have had everything.
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So let's go into the Jamison Lock world.
My expectation is you have something
that scans your computer to look for key loggers
and things like that.
Is that possible?
Does that exist?
- Well, it depends, right?
So I actually don't have any antivirus that I run.
I mean, all of my machines are Linux machines.
They're generally fairly hardened,
but also I don't keep any key material on them.
So even my PGP keys, for example,
I don't actually have those on my laptops
or my other machines.
I keep those on a YubiKey,
which is just another dedicated device
that does nothing except hold secrets.
So, this is another thing getting back to Luke.
It sounds to me like he was not using
dedicated hardware devices for any of his key material,
his PGP key material, his wallet key material.
I think most people would agree that
had he been using dedicated devices
that are not internet connected devices,
then that would have mitigated this attack.
But for various reasons, I won't speak for him,
Luke does not believe in using hardware devices
for his key material.
I would love to ask him that question
and find out what the answer is.
So if you're storing a PGP key on a YubiKey,
at some point, if you want to transfer some Bitcoin
in a hot environment,
you have to either type it out or paste it.
Yeah, they're the two options.
- Well, if we try to apply using a YubiKey
for what we believe Luke's setup was,
if he had his wallet file encrypted with his PGP key,
then he would run an operation
or he would run a command to decrypt those keys.
And instead of pasting in a passphrase to decrypt them,
his YubiKey, he would have to insert that into the computer
and then it would start blinking
and you'd have to physically tap it
in order to access it and do that decryption op.
- I'm thinking if his machine is compromised,
a key logger would be able to note the keys
that would be in press.
Can they also note copy and paste?
Oh, this is what has been pasted?
- Oh yeah, anything that's copy and pasted,
like anything that is input or output from the computer
could potentially be sucked up by that malware.
So even if you kept your PGP key on a YubiKey,
as soon as you decrypted the file
on that compromised machine,
it would load the contents in the memory.
- That was my next question.
- And any good malware would also be looking
at what is currently in memory and siphoning that off.
- So even in that environment,
the fact that, I mean, it sounds to me like
it doesn't matter even if he has the YubiKey,
keeping that wallet.file in a hot environment
is just massive risk.
- Yeah, I mean, it creates an incredibly large
attack surface and this kind of,
and this is why it's really frustrating
to see all of the FUD, of course,
everybody attacking self-custody.
- Who do?
- A lot of people out there who have vested interests,
I think, against self-custody saying,
oh, look, even if this prominent protocol developer
can't do it, then why should you believe you can?
And I think that this is an interesting case
of actually being so deep into Bitcoin.
And I think Luke would, once again,
I don't wanna speak for him,
but I think on various occasions he has said
that he's not a security guy.
I mean, he's a protocol and a software guy.
And so he had this very unique setup
with a lot of custom attributes
and also I believe that he revealed a lot of that
to the world, which in and of itself shouldn't be bad
if your setup is secure.
You should be able to reveal the architecture
of your key management if it's secure.
- Yeah, I mean, I could tell you my multi-sig.
- Yeah, security through obscurity is not a thing.
But however, he had so many custom attributes
that it seems there were vulnerabilities.
And this is one of those things
where I think people should keep in mind
the Bitcoin motto, "Verus in numerous."
Strength in numbers. - In numbers, yeah.
- Now, this applies to many different things in this space.
Usually people are talking about
the cryptographic security of public private keys
and the fact that there's so many of them,
like that's why they're secure just through entropy.
But it's also applicable to your security setup,
your architecture for managing your keys.
If you're using an architecture
that you created yourself from scratch
and nobody else uses it and no one has ever vetted it,
it hasn't been stress tested,
it hasn't been adopted by other people,
then it's highly likely that there are some holes
and you have some blind spots.
Like even myself, I'm not omniscient,
I can't see everything.
Having good security, it's kind of a community problem.
It's the same thing with open source, right?
Why does open source work?
It's because you have many different sets of eyes,
many different perspectives
who are all looking at the same thing
and attacking it from different ways.
So if you decide to go out on your own in Bitcoin
and whatever you're doing,
if no one else has done that, it's a lot riskier.
- Yeah, by the way, Danny's just brought this up.
They got my cold wallet too, that doesn't make sense.
- Yeah, I mean, I think that when he talks
about his cold wallet, he's talking about these keys
that he may have generated them offline 10 years ago,
but I think it's pretty clear
that they have been touching the internet
at some point since then.
- Has he tweeted anything else about it?
- No, not really.
So the Samurai guy has though.
I don't actually fully understand what he's saying here.
- See, one of the interesting things is updating
or modernizing your security protocols.
Because when I first got in 2017,
I bought a ledger straight away
and I operated with a single hardware wallet
and my, actually no, I had two.
I had a ledger which had the majority of my,
it was crypto back then, not just Bitcoin.
And I backed up my private key, but that was written
and that was stored somewhere in the house.
I didn't have a lot back then,
we're talking like say 25 grand.
And then I had a Trezor, which was like my day-to-day
and I memorized the pin.
And then what happened is during that year
that became a meaningful amount of value
all on a single hardware wallet with a written,
like I knew I eventually was in a scenario,
but I didn't deal with that for a long time.
- If your house burned down, you'd have a problem, right?
- Yeah, I'd be gone.
Yeah, I'd be screwed.
And so what happened is I eventually got to the point
where I needed to sort this out.
So the first thing was a metal device, I did that.
That still could have been found in my house by somebody.
So I eventually got to MultiSig just because of Casa.
But when I went back to the Trezor,
I couldn't remember the pin.
- Oh. - Yeah.
I hadn't written it down.
I knew kind of what it was.
And I was telling Danny the story earlier
because I wanted to transfer it out into my Casa MultiSig.
Every time I attempted it,
the amount of time to have another go would go up.
- Exponential backup.
- Yeah, so it was, I can't remember what it was.
It was like 30 seconds, then a minute,
then like three minutes, then like eight minutes.
Maybe it was, is that Pythagoras theorem, whatever.
Whatever.
So it was about the fifth try I got it.
'Cause I knew the four numbers-ish,
I think maybe five numbers,
and then eventually figured it out.
So I got there.
But like, that was a meaningful amount of Bitcoin,
but not like a meaningful amount of my stack.
But fuck, I didn't want to lose it.
And so like over time, but I'm now at that point
where I've been very comfortable with Casa,
but I probably need to test my keys.
- Well, and you should be getting reminders
to do health checks.
- I do get my reminders to do health checks.
But to do a full health check,
actually, this is another thing, right?
I've discussed, I've maybe even discussed with you
the idea of publicly stating parts of my security.
But one of those things, what I'm happy to say
is that to fully test my multi-sig,
I have to get on a plane.
And I'm like happy to say that.
And so that's why I haven't got around to it,
'cause I have to get on a plane.
So, yeah, I mean, I can empathize a little bit with Luke
in that like he's had something, it's worked for 10 years.
- It works until it doesn't.
- Yeah, exactly.
But you do need to keep updating.
This is just like following the coins since then.
And I think they've actually now like overnight
gone into ChipMixer,
which I'd never even heard of before.
- What's ChipMixer?
- Just a mixing service.
I don't know much about it or anything about it.
- So Luke, they put Luke Jr., Luke Dasher,
stolen coins on the move, started a peel.
What's a peel chain?
- Well, it just means that they're peeling off amounts
in multiple transactions.
The bulk of the continuing to P2PKH address
and then a small amount peeled off to P2SH address
remaining unspent.
The last two peel address types changed it.
Like, okay, can they keep following this?
- Yeah, you know, these,
the OXT guys are pretty good at what they do.
There's a number of folks who are pretty good
at on-chain analytics.
Of course, eventually over a long enough period of time,
the coins just sort of become part of the rest
of the ecosystem.
They get dispersed throughout many different wallets
and services.
And it just depends on what the attacker does with them
and whether or not they make any mistakes
where they could get caught and identified.
- Presumably that now it's in with ChipMixer,
it's over in terms of tracking it there.
- It's definitely a lot harder.
- I hope he's okay.
Luke's obviously been a very important person for Bitcoin
and has done some amazing things.
That's why I didn't like the dunking on him.
- Oh yeah, I mean, he's a controversial figure
for a variety of reasons,
but I don't think that that's good reason
to wish harm upon him.
- Yeah, I hope he's okay.
Well, yeah, we just have to reiterate to people
they have to take their security seriously.
They have to keep updating their security,
testing their security.
So it's probably a good time to then to talk about
security planning.
I obviously get a lot of emails in the show.
Some people asking me about security.
People bought maybe a ledger and say, what should I do?
Like people get very, very nervous
about using their ledger say for the first time.
And I have the,
it's almost like a copy and paste email now.
It's set it up, back up your private key,
buy a metal seed storage device,
transfer $10 in, wipe it, restore it,
check it's still there.
Then send 10%, send another 15% and then build up.
- That's really one of the most important parts
that I'm actually, I'm kind of disappointed.
As far as I'm aware,
none of the hardware manufacturers out there say,
hey, you should set this all up
and then you should wipe it and then you should reload it.
Like that wiping and reloading
is one of the most important things.
And one of the ways that I think a lot of people
lose their coins is they just don't test the recovery.
And then the first time they go to test it,
they find out something's wrong.
- Yeah, they make a mistake
writing down the recovery keywords.
Yeah, it's the same set of instructions.
So I'm kind of looking to you more for your advice.
Like if you're, like what are the logical steps
you would say to somebody brand new to Bitcoin,
not technically competent,
what would you say the first kind of steps are?
- Well, it depends on what value we're talking about, right?
You know, if someone's dealing with 10 or a hundred dollars,
then I don't think they really need to put a lot of effort
into thinking about security.
You know, if it's a trivial amount
that you would not really care about losing.
The flip side is I think that whatever amount you do have,
you should multiply it by 10.
And that should be the amount that you are thinking about
needs to be secured.
Because of course it's very volatile space
and you can very easily, like you said,
go from having, you know, a thousand dollars to $10,000
or whatever 10X the amount that you had
and your security level is really only appropriate
for one 10th of that.
So, you know, I see it as, you know,
if you're dealing with pocket money,
then you're fine just using a software wallet
on your mobile phone or your desktop or whatever,
because you're probably not going to lose any sleep
if something catastrophic happens to that.
If, you know, if you're dealing with a level
that is thousands of dollars,
if you're talking about, you know, a month's wages
or more, you know, non-trivial amounts,
then you should at least spend 50 or a hundred dollars
to buy a dedicated hardware device for those private keys.
- And look, the hardware devices, you know,
the main players are obvious, Ledger, Trezor,
Cold Card, are the main ones.
Are there any newer ones?
And do you support any other ones?
- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of newer ones
and it's actually hard to even keep track of them all.
- Are there any ones that you as a company rate?
- Yeah, so in addition, so from Cold Card,
you know, based off of the Cold Card platform,
there's the Foundation Passport.
- Can you look that up?
- That, and I believe it's Kobo.
We've started to add some of these devices
that support the, it's called the UR 2.0 spec.
It's basically, it's animated QR codes
for sending the data back and forth.
And we really like those.
And actually I think Blockstream Jade just added support
for this animated QR code spec.
The reason that I like that is that
it drastically simplifies the user experience.
Like you don't have these USB cables,
you don't have to be plugging stuff in.
You're literally, it's point and shoot
to transfer the data back and forth
for the signing operations.
- That's a cool looking device.
- Yeah, it's not cheap though.
You know, I think Trezor still has the most economical
but it doesn't have that animated QR code support.
So it's a little less user-friendly.
- Every time I use Trezor, it asks me to install a bridge.
- Yeah, basically drivers so that it can talk
to your operating system.
- Yeah, I just trust it and install it.
But I don't like going via a browser.
- Yeah.
- I just don't like that.
Is Trezor still a browser
or have they got software interface yet?
- Well, they have the Trezor suite
that I think they rolled out last year.
- Okay.
Have you seen the new Ledger Stacks?
- I haven't got my hands on it.
I think I said at the time,
I was once again, I was disappointed
that they haven't added a camera
because if they had a camera,
they could then have the animated QR code support.
So my understanding is it's still mostly gonna be USB based.
Maybe they'll have Bluetooth again
like they did with the Nano X.
But I'm not a fan of the Bluetooth stuff either
because I think for most people,
just the process you have to go through
for pairing Bluetooth stuff
is beyond a lot of people's capability.
- Yeah, they do look cool these though.
- They do look cool.
- Yeah.
- I mean, I've seen them in person.
They are very cool.
And I know this is me being an aesthetic person.
I have multiple wallets for day to day things
and just having three or four of them.
I mean, they're not cheap as well,
but having three or four like that is actually useful.
But also I travel with Bitcoin, not a lot,
but I travel with a small amount of Bitcoin
just in case I have to do any transactions while we're away.
This feels like an easier thing to carry around with me.
It feels like something that goes like wallet phone that.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, very cool.
Okay, so like, and then when you get into the world
of like a meaningful amount of Bitcoin,
you're obviously gonna recommend multi-Zoom.
- Well, yeah, so when you get to what I would call
generational wealth, an amount that is a significant portion
of your life savings and that you're probably wanting
to hold onto and pass on,
that's when you start to wanna make sure
that you don't have any single points of failure.
You don't want one thing to go wrong
that could then be catastrophic.
So, there's many different ways
to eliminate single points of failure.
Obviously we're a big fan of multi-SIG
because I think that generally makes it easier.
Now, multi-SIG is more complicated
than a single signature wallet.
You're dealing with more pieces,
you're dealing with more data,
but also if you do it right,
you can end up with a much more robust setup.
But once again, this kind of actually goes back
to the discussion with Luke.
If you're rolling your own multi-SIG setup,
you need to be really, really careful about how you do it
because there's many different ways that you can screw it up
and still introduce single points of failure.
So, if you're going to go with multi-SIG,
then I highly advise using what would be like considered
a standard architecture.
Two of three, three of five,
not doing anything crazy with like scripts
or derivation paths or whatever.
But the big thing is of course,
make sure you can wipe it all and recreate it.
And that's what we're definitely going for
if we're talking about something
that can go through an inheritance process.
It needs to be simple, not just for you,
but for your non-technical family and heirs.
- I think I asked this last time I spoke to you.
You've talked then about people rolling their own multi-SIG,
something I'm never going to do ever
in my entire life on this platform.
- You've kind of done it.
- Have I?
- With Hodl and Phil Geiger.
- When I lost my key.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, exactly.
I'm never going to do that shit.
At the same time, I trust Carcer to roll my multi-SIG for me.
- In a scenario where you guys are doing big tech upgrades,
how much sleep do you lose when you publish the new code?
- Actually, I sleep very well at night
because I know that we don't have a threshold of keys
that could be used against our customers.
Like even if Carcer got completely compromised,
then no one's going to lose their money.
It's the very simple act of each of our clients
having to verify their spending operations
on hardware and software that Carcer has no control over.
That's what helps me sleep at night.
Now that creates challenges for us
because it means that we have
all of these other vendors out there
who are changing their software
and we need to keep all of these pieces moving and in play
and making sure that there aren't breaking changes,
which happened, we actually had one happen a few weeks ago.
And then thankfully the vendor got it fixed very quickly.
But that's part of what you're paying for
is for Carcer to be handling all that technical minutia
and make sure that everything's still operating as expected.
- Man, I could do it.
I would still lose sleep.
You mentioned the inheritance plan in there.
So on a personal level, that's the one thing
I haven't solved in probably the best way possible.
Now, look, I know Carcer has a plan for that,
but just say you can't afford that Carcer solution.
Maybe it's a bit too high for you,
but you do want to make a plan.
Do you have personal recommendations for planning?
Because like I have some,
it puts trust in certain things,
which I don't want to explain here.
And I've tried to put a scenario in
that doesn't put me in a scenario
where anything could be stolen,
but like in a scenario where something happens,
things can be brought together.
And maybe when you explain it,
it's similar to what I'm doing,
but it's like certain recommendations for death planning.
Because I mean, didn't that dude,
that like old crazy Romanian Bitcoin guy drowned?
- Yeah, Merca.
- Yeah, he didn't have inheritance plan set up, supposedly.
- That we know of.
- That we know of, yeah.
- Did he really drown?
Did he really have Bitcoin?
Was he really Romanian?
By the way, he was crazy, right?
- He was one of the most eccentric figures
in the space for sure.
- Who did he death threat?
Peter Wille?
- Andreas.
- Andreas, didn't he death threat Peter Wille as well?
- Yes, and I think that was for Segwit.
- Interesting, conversation for another day.
Okay, so what kind of advice,
recommendations would you have for people?
- Yeah, so inheritance planning for these bearer assets
is a really interesting tight rope to walk.
Because presumably if you're self-custodying,
of course, if you keep all your money with a third party,
then you can just give them inheritance instructions
and assume that they'll follow that.
But if you're self-custodying,
then presumably you want to retain control of your assets
as long as you're alive.
But then you somehow want this switch to flip
when you pass that transitions control
to some predetermined entity or set of people or whatever.
And of course, this is not something that you can do
within the Bitcoin protocol or really any protocol.
It's the Oracle problem, right?
None of these protocols or blockchains
have any understanding of quote unquote, real world events.
So you have to get other humans involved,
humans who are going to be doing things
like authenticating your death certificate
or whatever proof of death there is.
And there's a million different ways to do it.
You roll your own setup essentially.
And some of them may be more trusted than others.
I mean, the very naive thing to do would to be,
have a trusted friend, family, or attorney,
or someone who has like a fiduciary duty to you
and you just give them the keys to the kingdom
and pray that they will be honorable
and not access anything.
The more common thing that we see happen
is people create what I would call treasure hunts.
Distribute keys or you distribute different pieces of keys
or passwords or whatever around across different locations,
different people, and presumably they will come together
and help reconstitute that.
And I should know because that's the type of setup
that I had back in the day.
And I have a lengthy blog post
where I went into describing how I did that,
but it was very technical and never actually--
- You never actually died.
- Well, I never even actually tested it
from the sense of like making my executors
try to follow my instructions.
So I kind of broke one of the cardinal rules there
that it was not well tested
and it very well may not have worked
or it may have been too technical for some of them
to understand 'cause they had to run this like
special Shamir secret sharing software
and they had to get the pieces of the decryption keys
from different places.
But we at CASA, we have a couple of different ways
that you can do the inheritance,
but essentially you're distributing keys
so that you retain access and control and custody
while you're alive.
And then CASA can facilitate
essentially verifying proof of death
and signing with the CASA key.
And then you may involve your attorney
or another trusted entity who would have one key
and be able to do the same.
- So you have a key, they have a key.
Where's the third key come from?
- So there's also a CASA mobile key,
basically your account key is on your phone.
- So you give someone access to the phone?
- Yes. - Yeah.
- Interesting.
I mean, mine's kind of a treasure hunt.
I can't explain what it is.
I'll tell you what, tell you offline.
But mine's kind of a treasure hunt.
I probably should just get the CASA one.
Probably ask Nick to give them to me.
Nick, give it to me.
Cool, brilliant.
Okay, anything else on security we'd not touch?
'Cause I do wanna get into tech with you.
- I think that's enough for now.
I mean, security is another rabbit hole
and it's a never ending battle.
So there's always stuff to talk about,
but it can get a bit repetitive.
- So you said it's been a good year in tech.
What's the thing you've enjoyed most in tech?
- Definitely AI.
That's what I've spent the most time playing around with.
And AI seems to have gone through
a bit of a renaissance in 2022.
Part of that, of course, is the software,
but also there have been hardware advancements
that have gotten us like orders of magnitude improvement.
So I was playing around with the image generation stuff.
Obviously the chat GPT
and other language text-based stuff.
I actually, I published an article in Bitcoin Magazine
that I don't think I've even told anyone this yet,
but the majority of it was actually written with AI.
- There's this dystopian future CBDC piece.
- Oh my God.
- Yeah.
- That's an exclusive.
What Bitcoin did exclusive.
You got to dig that one out.
- Yeah, I'm having a look.
Is that the San Francisco?
- Yes.
San Francisco 2033 or something like that.
- Okay.
Let's just read the first couple of paragraphs.
This is a science fiction piece by James.
Okay, good morning.
I'm gently awoken by my smartwatch's soothing female voice.
It's a bit robotic,
but does have a touch of personality and charm.
Today is Monday.
It's my birthday.
Today is Monday, October 31st, 2033.
It continues.
Your weekly basic income is 3,400.
What the fuck?
And has your weekly basic income of $3,432
has been deposited in your account.
1,049 was held, withheld to pay your student loan.
$2,300 was withheld for your landlord,
Blackstone Hathaway.
Shit, that's a bit more than last week.
There must've been another inflation adjustment.
So what did you do?
Did you do it bit by bit?
- Yeah, I forget which service I even used.
It was a prompt generation tool
where I could write a basic outline of the story
and it would just start filling in pieces
and then I could sort of roll the dice
and get different paragraphs and then choose a paragraph
and then say, okay, now take this and ingest it
and do the next paragraph.
Or I could even say,
now delve deeper into this character's backstory and so on.
- Yeah, I mean, look, I love ChatGBT.
I think it's amazing.
Danny, we're using it now.
Tell Jameson.
- Well, we kind of used it as a joke first
'cause it came up in the interview with Danny Scott.
And so when I first played with it,
I typed in some prompts to get a podcast description
and it was pretty good, but we didn't use it.
And so then after the Danny Scott show,
we did actually use it in his description.
And I don't think they're good enough all the time.
- Do you want to bring it up?
- Yeah, I will.
I don't think they're good enough all the time,
but they give you a really good structure
at least to work from.
- And it's a bit like with Raoul Bedford.
I do the match reports,
but actually what happens is the commentator
writes a match report and then I go through it
and like update it, just get in the style we want.
But it saves me hours
because he's done the majority of the work.
- Yeah, and that's really what I think AI
is gonna be doing.
It's not gonna be completely displacing jobs.
It's gonna be another tool that gives people
an order of magnitude performance improvement
with what they're doing.
So this was 100% written by AI.
- Okay, in this episode of this podcast,
I sit down with Danny Scott, the CEO of Coin Corner,
a Bitcoin exchange based in the UK.
Danny has built Coin Corner into a successful business
without relying on VC funding.
And he shares his insights on the challenges
and opportunities of doing so
in a highly competitive world of Bitcoin.
During our conversation,
we discussed the current state of Bitcoin adoption
and the importance of making cryptocurrency accessible
and user-friendly for those who are new to the space.
Danny shares his thoughts on the role
of the Lightning Network in driving adoption
and how it's pretty, I haven't actually read this.
It's pretty good.
- Yeah.
- And there's like, as I read it,
there's a couple of bits I'll change.
So like making cryptocurrency accessible.
- Yeah.
- It would be of either making the cryptocurrency
or Bitcoin accessible.
Overall, it's a fascinating,
that's a bit self-indulgent.
- Yeah.
- Overall, it's a fascinating conversation
with a true industry leader.
Tune in to hear Danny's insights
on building a Bitcoin business,
driving adoption in the future of Bitcoin industry.
Do you know what I do like about it?
But maybe I don't like about it.
It feels more polished.
It feels of something like maybe the BBC would do.
- Well, maybe they use an AI,
but there's bits that are a bit cringe,
but like you could use that
and then build out off it very easily.
- Well, if I was writing a description,
I reckon someone like that is spend 15, 20 minutes,
but would check GBT in two minutes.
- Yeah.
- You just read through an editor.
- Yeah, I much prefer to edit something
than have to write the whole thing from scratch.
- And you are testing it for something else?
- Well, after the show with David Zell,
someone got in touch and said we could input the audio
from the podcast and use it to generate show notes,
which would definitely save time.
- Yeah, and I've been doing that myself.
I just wrapped up a month long archival project
where my problem is pretty much every interview
I've ever done is hosted by other people.
And over the past 10 years, link rot sets in.
People take their sites offline, we lose content.
And so I got tired of that happening.
And so I wrote some scripts to basically suck down
every video and MP3 that I've ever been in
over the past 10 years.
And once I had them all, this is 45 gigabytes of files.
I then wrote some other scripts to extract the audio
and then yet another script
and doing this all in bulk, of course,
to take those audio files and transcribe them
with OpenAI Whisper.
- Okay, but it's the finding bit.
Is that AI or is that just Google search?
- Well, the finding bit was easy as a result of my OCD
because I already have all of them linked on my website.
So I wrote a script to basically parse through
all the URLs on my website.
- Can you bring up the chat, GBT?
- Yeah.
- Just want to try something here.
- Try this one.
Tell the story of Jameson Lopp.
'Cause this is what is good.
And Peter McCormack's day of fun shooting guns.
This is what I love.
I've done so many of these just like stupid little things.
Oh, so it's looking for a story.
See, that's weird 'cause we used to have it write in stories.
- Maybe if we say, tell me a fictional story.
- Ah.
Yeah, so that's weird 'cause it used to do that.
I was getting it to write stories.
- This actually goes back to censorship.
You know, they've really been clamping down
on what the AI can do.
All of these different AI services
because people are abusing them.
- Yeah, but hold on.
Then what's the point in having it?
Are they worried about like university kids
having their coursework written on it?
- There's so many different things
that people are worried about.
Whether it's just like low level biases
that are inherent in this stuff.
'Cause all of this stuff is being trained
off of data and all of the data is being generated by humans
and humans have biases.
And so it's going to be representative
of some subset of humanity.
- This show is brought to you by Gemini,
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- I mean, it's like the internet or Bitcoin
can be used for good or bad, right?
- Yeah.
- We know that with Bitcoin,
I always go back to Peter Van Valkenburgh's
Senate testimony where he said,
"For every person you talk about using Bitcoin
for money laundering, I'm going to tell you about
I'm going to use Bitcoin in Nigeria
to campaign against police violence."
I always think that's a great way
of telling the story of technology.
AI, we can use this to write descriptions and save us time,
to do show notes.
I'm going to come back to that as well, by the way.
But also, kids are going to be able to use it
to not have to do coursework.
The cat's out of the bag.
- Well, this is kind of like security.
This is going to be a never-ending battle.
So, I've already seen stories of professors and teachers
saying that they're suspecting certain students
of using these AI text generators
to do their essays for them.
And then just in the past week or so,
we saw one university student create a "AI detector."
- I heard about this.
- But this is going to go back and forth.
Then the AI is going to be modified
and people are going to basically be "hacking."
With this, it's more about trying different prompts
to work their way around the filters.
That's what I would say these AI hackers have been doing,
is we're understanding that the people
who are running the servers for this stuff,
they're filtering things,
especially on the image generators,
'cause of course, there's a lot of crazy stuff
you could do there.
But there's always ways to work your way around it.
These are essentially, this prompt generation
is a new sphere of programming language.
It's just not a very well-defined programming language.
And so, people are trying to really push the limits
of what's possible with it.
And as they do that,
the folks that are running these services are then saying,
"Oh, we need to stop that."
And so, it's just the same old, same old issue of censorship.
- So, interestingly, Danny's just doing a test
on an AI content detector.
- And this is the description from that Danny Scott show
that was 100% AI.
- And he thinks it's 2% human generated.
- It's pretty good.
- Yeah, interesting.
Go and get one of our other descriptions.
- All right.
- And just see what happens with that.
Going back to the show notes, Danny,
what I don't know is, if you can read the content,
how does it know what is something
we would want as a show note?
Again, I think it'd probably give you a massive list
and you would then have to just edit it.
- Yeah.
Same with the timestamps.
How does it know what a section is?
- I don't know if it could do timestamp.
- No, it can.
The guy, the email I forwarded you this morning, right?
That was, he said he can do timestamps.
If he gets to the point where it can do show notes,
timestamps, and transcriptions,
like, it puts people out of work for us.
I mean, here you go.
I've just put another description in
that was human generated and it's got it 100%.
- That's fascinating.
That is fascinating.
So I wonder how it's doing that,
I don't know what the rules are.
But look, whatever.
The cat is out of the bag with this.
- Yep.
- People use it for good and people use it for bad.
I think in this scenario,
there's a lot of good that you can use it for
and efficiencies.
The downside of that is people potentially losing jobs.
- Yeah.
You could identify that in our world.
I struggle to see too much evil it can be used for
on text generation yet.
But it feels like we're now in this very early stage
of this AI thing that might move quickly.
- Yeah, I mean.
- The robots are coming.
- Well, I think the very first thing I would look at
is what do a lot of scammers do
and why couldn't you have an AI bot
that basically follows the rules for some particular scam
that people perpetrate over the internet?
- Yeah, that's very true.
- Yeah.
- Can you ask them to write code?
Yeah.
- I saw somebody said they put some coding,
I can't remember what the language was
and they wanted to convert it to Python
and it converted it to Python
and executed and worked instantly.
- Wow.
- I can't remember what,
can you think of a language you would convert
from something to Python?
- You said save two days of work.
- Huh?
- Save them two days of work.
- I saw Jeremy saying save,
so you've seen that tweet, yeah.
So do you remember what code it was?
Like from what?
- I don't know if it was a function,
I don't remember which kind of function,
I don't know if it was a JavaScript or not.
- So two days of work was saved,
converted from one programming language to another.
Again, fascinating and great.
Puts people out of work, potentially,
but drives efficiencies.
- Well, I mean, if you think about it,
as a programmer,
I've always found it to be incredibly inefficient
basically with the interface of how I talk to the machine
and how I instruct the machine of what I want it to do.
This is why programming pays so well
and why it's so difficult,
is because the machine does exactly what we tell it to
and the vast majority of time,
what we're telling it is not actually what we want.
And that's because of the limitations
of programming languages
and just the complexity of software.
So my ideal future is a Star Trek future,
computer, create a simulation that does this thing
and then a few hours go by
and it gives you the result or whatever.
And even past that, right now we have text-based AI.
We're prompting it now with,
instead of having to learn the syntax and semantics
of some foreign computer programming language,
you're able to use English
and probably other languages.
I'm not familiar with what they've done
with regard to other foreign languages,
but there's no reason why you couldn't use
any human language.
And even that, that's a huge leap forward,
but that is only the beginning.
I actually wrote an article about Elon Musk and Twitter
and stuff earlier last year,
where I said, what I'm really looking forward to
is direct neural interface with the machines.
Now, of course, there's pros and cons,
but if you think about it from an efficiency standpoint,
of course, there's huge security ramifications,
but from an efficiency standpoint,
even what we're doing right now,
me having to think something,
then having to translate it into English
and then it has to get transferred through the air
and interpreted by your ears
and turned into signals in your brain,
that is incredibly inefficient
when there's no reason why we couldn't have
a direct neural electrical signal
to neural electrical signal interface.
- Yeah, but do you want that?
- Well, yes, I'm sure this will create
more dystopian outcomes as well.
- So Danny's found the tweet.
I just gave chatGBT 200 lines of JavaScript code
and asked it to translate the code into Python.
The code passes text using regular expressions.
It was complex.
Two minutes later, I had Python code that worked flawlessly.
The thing just saved me a couple of days of work.
That's fucking insane.
- Yeah, so my, well, firstly,
I think Twitter is gonna get damaged by this.
I think there are nefarious actors
and as well as just some morons
who are going to spin up accounts with chatGBT
and start arguing.
- Oh, I've seen them already.
And I've actually,
I've run the Turing test questions against some of them
and it's been obvious that they're not human.
- Mad.
- Like it's just gonna get to a stage
where talking to people you don't know
is gonna be pointless.
Like I almost gonna get to a point in my Twitter
and just like only wanna see people I know.
That's gonna become pointless.
But I'm also like looking forward towards this kind of,
not looking forward as in excited,
but just looking forward considering like the singularity
of all these technologies coming together.
Quantum, AI, Neuralink.
I think it's a bit shit.
I think I don't wanna go and live in a cabin
and only speak to humans and have no technology.
I can see a scenario where people start to reject technology
and want to live without it.
I can see a scenario where I get a bit older
and I'm like, do you know what?
I don't want a phone, maybe an old dial up, a hand phone
and go and live in a cabin somewhere with a dog.
Danny pops around occasionally.
- Yeah, I mean, especially if you're being bombarded
with noise all day long.
And I'm an optimist.
So I think that there will be solutions to all of this.
One solution, for example, to the issue of noise
and reputation on social networks is actually something
I've talked about a few times, Hive.
They're essentially mapping social networks.
They're starting with Twitter,
but they've mapped something like 400 different
quote unquote communities or call them interest groups
or specialties on Twitter.
And they're just using the sort of connection graphs
to show where are people focusing their attention?
And it's a very hard thing to fake.
You can spin up a million bots,
but you can't convince a million people to follow them.
- Unless you're a really good bot.
- Yeah, unless you're actually creating
real valuable content, in which case,
maybe it's a signal bot, not a noise bot.
- What's that film where the guy falls in love
with a AI bot?
Is it him, her, she?
- Or her.
- Her, yeah.
Have you seen that film?
- Yeah.
- I mean, a brilliant film.
She was pretty convinced and he fell in love.
- Yeah, I'm sure that will happen.
- Yeah.
It's when they combine it with a real doll.
Have you ever seen that film, "Lance and the Real Doll"?
Yeah, it's a good film.
- Yeah, I don't know, man.
It's just like we're going a bit too far.
- This is the thing, right?
Is that this is why it's great to be a technologist
because technology is not just going forward linearly.
It's accelerating.
And so it is very exciting to keep track of.
I mean, it's also very scary
because humans generally don't like change.
Or at least we like to say that we don't like change.
We're very adaptive humans.
So in hindsight, you look back over the past few years
or decades or whatever, and change has been crazy.
And yet we somehow keep adapting to it.
And so we will keep adapting.
It will keep creating more and more weirdness.
If someone from today is looking 10 years in the future,
I can guarantee you their mind will be blown.
But the people who are living in the present day
in the future will be like, yep, this is how things are now.
- What about combining AI with CRISPR
and just saying like, yeah,
like some fucking crazy kid in his dorm.
Yeah, create me something that is as dangerous as Ebola,
but spreads like COVID.
Map it out.
- Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of ramifications
when it comes to biotechnology.
I'm especially afraid of nanotechnology.
There's this one dystopian apocalypse
that's called the gray goo scenario.
But essentially that's a scenario
where nanobots go out of control replicating,
and there's no way for us to stop them.
And they turn the entire earth into nanorobots,
and there's no way to escape them.
- Man, see, I just want to go and live in a cabin.
I don't know, it's too far.
I kind of feel like we've got to live
through this golden age of technology.
And then we might also,
because of the exponential nature of technology,
live through the start of the dystopian era.
I know you're an optimist.
- Well, I mean, but there's also the great filter question,
which this is more of an astrophysics question
of like, why don't we hear signals from other species?
- Sanny's paradox.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so, the simple explanation is that every species
that becomes sentient and develops technology
that is sufficient to start creating signals
that propagate through the universe
eventually also hits this inflection point,
which we may be close to,
wherein the power of the technology becomes uncontrollable
and they destroy themselves
for one of a million different reasons.
(Sanny chuckles)
- Yeah, Jesus Christ, man.
All right, what about Nostra?
- Yes, that's an interesting new protocol.
What is it?
I think it's notes and other stuff transmitted by relay
is what actually the acronym stands for.
And a lot of people are looking at it and saying,
"Oh, it's the new Twitter."
But it's not a social network.
It's literally just a protocol for passing messages
around a peer-to-peer network.
And these messages are cryptographically signed
and they have some interesting attributes.
But there's a lot of pros of what you can build
on top of a network like that.
There's also a lot of challenges
that are gonna have to be overcome
if Nostra is going to become a globally adopted network.
- So, it is a protocol,
but you can build a Twitter on top of it?
- Yes.
- Yeah, so what are its main challenges?
'Cause I mean, look, most people listening to this
will have heard of it.
A lot of people signed up and checked it out.
- Yeah, I mean, there's some scaling challenges.
There's some security challenges.
Like one of the problems right now
is that you have a single public-private key pair
and you're reusing that for everything.
So if that ever gets compromised, you're screwed.
Like there's no way to revoke that
and change to another key.
I think that's gonna be addressed, of course.
You would want perhaps some sort
of hierarchical deterministic wallet
where you can migrate what key you're using.
There's also ways to do that
with like decentralized identifiers
of which there are a number of different projects out there
which would allow you to have like your identity
that is then separate from the actual keys
that you're using for this.
And also right now,
most people who are using Nostra clients
are literally pasting their private key
into an internet-connected device.
There's a few ways around that as well.
And hopefully you'll eventually just have
your dedicated hardware device that you'll use for that.
On the scaling standpoint,
it's kind of like Bitcoin in the sense
that it's kind of like a flood fill network.
All of the relays are essentially listening to each other
and you can filter things out.
But in general right now,
if you broadcast a message and it's correctly signed,
it's generally gonna go
to all of the other relays out there.
And so there's a question of how much can that scale
before we start to see some limitations,
whether it's bandwidth limitations,
disk storage limitations, what are the incentives?
What is the game theory of the network?
Is it denial of service protected?
So like when you run a Bitcoin node,
Bitcoin node software has a ton
of different denial of service checks that it's running
whenever it's receiving new data.
And if you do something to violate any of those,
it considers you a bad peer and it basically cuts you off
and it stops talking to you.
I don't know the Nostradamus relays well enough to say
if they have enough denial of service checks built in.
If they don't, then there's going to be some growing pains.
And I expect more tools and rules
are gonna be built around that.
And then there's also just the incentive question
of who's running the nodes,
why or how are you going to let other random third parties
like connect to your node?
Are you going to require some sort of small fee?
I know there is an improvement proposal
that would allow you to actually attach some proof of work
to your Nostra messages.
I don't know how widely that's been implemented,
but that's just a high level gist of,
there are open issues that are going to need to be resolved,
but I expect that the network is going to continue to grow.
It's gonna have growing pains.
And as long as there is sufficient interest
and development around it,
then people are gonna find solutions to these issues.
- Okay, we need to play a little bit more with,
so we'll check that out.
Is there anything else that excites you?
- Good question.
I mean, most of the stuff that I've been doing
has been around AI and combining different aspects of AI.
So I think people see these tools
and they don't really extrapolate
what the tool is gonna be able to do in several years.
So like we see people creating images
and right now all they're thinking about is,
oh, I can type in a prompt
and I can get a cool two-dimensional image or whatever.
But obviously that's only the beginning.
The next steps we're gonna see,
three-dimensional models.
I think this is already starting to happen.
We should expect that architects and designers,
game designers and whatever are gonna be able to use AI
to start generating entire virtual worlds.
I've already seen AI image generation
added as a plugin to 3D modeling tools.
So that you can say,
I've created this landscape or this cityscape or whatever,
and I don't wanna have to spend days
like finding and applying textures.
I'm just gonna type in a prompt and I would say,
make this building look like Gothic architecture
from the 1500s or whatever, boom.
So this is why I say,
sure, AI may get rid of some jobs,
but in general, it's just gonna accelerate our productivity
and be a new set of tools that much like how computing
and the internet in general has affected every industry.
I think AI is gonna have a similar reach.
- Yeah, well, until we replace ourselves with robots
who are more efficient,
and there'll be that transitionary stage,
which is neural link.
And then we'll just replace the bits of it.
Like we won't need the body
'cause the body is fucking useless.
We can probably make a better body
and then we'll all be gone.
- Yeah, but then, I mean,
kind of getting back to Bitcoin and stuff,
Lightning Network has definitely been interesting
to see all of the new developments
that have been going on there.
I think in my annual report that I put out recently,
I showed that the actual capacity of Lightning Network,
it's gone up in Bitcoin terms over the past year.
I think it's gone down a little in dollar terms,
of course, due to the exchange rate.
- But up in Bitcoin terms is a better measure.
- If you're using it as your unit of count, yeah.
But in general, we're seeing more and more businesses
that are building on top of it.
And who knows what's gonna happen
once we have other assets and other tokens
on Lightning.
But I also think that this is going to supercharge
a number of just other networks and services
in the ecosystem.
Kind of getting back to Nostra again,
I had a tweet where I said,
it's actually quite appropriate
that Nostra was invented by a Lightning developer
because I think that that's gonna be
a very important integration
in order to get the incentives right
for a network like this.
And if we can get to a point where we really have
these decentralized peer-to-peer networks
where the incentives are such that you can access them
and use them by actually paying for what you're using
and doing all of this without AML, KYC,
privacy ramifications,
this is getting us towards more of the anarcho-capitalistic
cyberpunk future that I've been trying to build
for a decade.
- Yeah.
I mean, it's very exciting.
I'm with you on the AI.
The AI is very exciting,
but I think it's really cool that Lightning's growing.
I think the different use cases people are discovering
for Lightning.
I love this idea of moving fiat money around the world
on the Lightning network and bypassing banks.
I think that's a super cool idea.
So I think there's lots of cool things happening.
I can't believe after five years
we're actually sat here doing this again.
That is also,
I wonder if we'll be here in five more years doing this.
- If we are, then it's once again,
it's gonna be another order of magnitude of weirdness
that has transpired since then.
- Yeah, we might record it in the metaverse.
And Danny might've been replaced by AI.
We might've generated all the surroundings using AI.
- We can generate it to look just like this.
- Yeah.
Yeah, it'd be pretty cool.
- Yeah, I mean, I was really interested in VR,
especially at the beginning of the pandemic.
There was a number of VR related meetups and stuff
that seems to have plateaued over the past couple of years,
but I'm hopeful that something like Neuralink
will actually be like the next step.
You know, it's still,
it's very clunky to actually put on a headset.
And there's a number of things you have to configure.
If you want a good VR setup,
where it's driven by a PC,
the standalone ones just don't have enough processing power
to do the same level of video graphics and whatnot.
But-
- But there's competition coming into that market
because Apple have just announced theirs, kinda.
- Kinda.
- Kinda leaked.
- Yeah, we'll see.
- I mean, look, I've got the original first Oculus Rift.
When I've used it for what I've used it for, I've loved it.
Not for gaming.
The gaming, there's just not decent games,
but the more exercise side of gaming I have liked.
So there's like a thing where you use like these discs,
like you either punch them or duck under them.
Like it's a good workout.
There's the boxing game, which is an unbelievable workout
where you feel like you're in the ring.
You need that feedback.
So like if you hit the, like,
it feels like you're being hit.
- Yeah.
- Or it pushes your head back.
But as a workout, it's fucking insane and it's fun.
That's the only stuff I've really liked on it.
And also like, and get people to walk the plank
and then pushing them over.
But that's it.
But I'm interested in it.
It just feels like there isn't enough money in it
for the developers to make the game.
I'm like the boxing game I like
is made by one dude on his own.
- Yep.
- You know, it's not like you've got Square Enix.
Is it Square Enix at the company?
Yeah, it's not like they've got like hundreds of people
working on single games yet.
So like, I think maybe if we get to that point,
I think it'd be interesting.
Have you got a VR?
- Nope, never done it.
- Never done, not even?
- Never tried it.
- Next time in the UK, I'll show you that.
Have you done the walk the plank?
- Oh yeah.
The funny thing is I did the walk the plank in 2002.
- What?
- Yeah, I know, right?
This is actually not a new thing.
- Were you just walking on a plank?
(laughing)
- So it was when I was hunting for universities to go to
when I was in high school.
I went to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
and they had one of the preeminent graphics departments.
And they had a room about the size of the house
that we're in right now.
That was their VR lab.
And you know, this is multimillion dollar equipment
back then, but they let me go through a simulation,
which it was a plank simulation over,
it wasn't over, like the one that you did
was probably at the top of a building.
- Top of the skyscraper, yeah.
- The one that they did was literally just over like a pit.
You know, it was much more simple,
but it was the same type of effect
where you would feel like you would fall off.
- Do you know this walk the plank thing?
- Yeah, I've heard you talk about it.
- Yeah, I'm telling you,
like I'm not somebody who loves heights.
Like you feel it, you believe you're up there.
And I can do it, I can like look under my goggles,
I can see my floor and then I can look up
and there's no way I'm jumping off the end of that plank.
I just can't do it.
I think I like the idea of VR.
I like, I kind of like the idea of VR
in a world where we can make the podcast.
We do this in person because you cannot replicate
this conversation we're having over Zoom.
It just doesn't work, it's different.
It's a different conversation.
You have, the latency is different.
You have a different emotional connection.
Everything about it is different.
I think that gap can be closed with VR.
I believe it can be.
So that's maybe, I'll tell you what,
if it's ever available, we'll do that one first, you and I.
- Absolutely.
- James, it's good to see you.
Thank you for coming in.
Appreciate everything you do.
Appreciate you from episode three of "What Bitcoin Did."
Where do you want to send people to?
- Well, the easiest way to find me is at lopp.net,
L-O-P-P.net.
And from there you can find all my resources
and Twitter account and so on and so forth.
But I think the short version take away
of a lot of this stuff, you seem to focus a lot
on the dystopian aspects.
I'm the techno optimist.
I think that humanity is gonna continue
to keep stumbling forward.
And there's not really too much use worrying
about the million different apocalyptic scenarios
that may or may not happen.
- I will try and be more of an optimist.
Thank you for everything you've done,
not just for me, but in Bitcoin
and just being a general badass.
Appreciate you so much, man.
All right, what did you make of that?
Did you enjoy that?
It's always great to get Jameson back on the show.
Yeah, he was the third interview I ever did.
The first time I flew out for a show
and yeah, we stayed friends since
and always love getting him on the podcast
to talk about Bitcoin, but you know,
it was a lot of fun to talk about AI
and chat GBT with him as well.
Now, listen, the Luke Dasher stuff,
I think this isn't a good example
of why people cannot handle Bitcoin security themselves.
Luke Dasher set up was particularly unique to him
and that's been around a long time.
I am a big supporter of people storing their Bitcoin
with their hardware wallets.
I don't think it's particularly difficult.
I think my sponsor Ledger does a great job
of making this easy.
So I'm not buying this whole distraction
that people cannot manage their private keys.
They can.
The wallets that we have available now
have come on so far.
Even the multi-sig wallets by the likes of Kasa
and Unchained are pretty good.
So yeah, I'm not buying it.
Anyway, big thanks to Jameson.
Loved making this show.
Some of that AI tech is now becoming more readily available
and you know, we're even looking at it ourselves.
So pretty cool stuff.
Okay, if you've got any questions about this
or anything else, please do reach out to me.
My email address is hello@wattbitcoin.com.
Have a great week and I will see you all on Wednesday.
(upbeat music)