What's up everybody?
I'm Scott Melker and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast.
We're two times every week.
I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin,
finance, music, trading, art, sports, politics,
basically anyone with a story to tell.
Now, this is the second time that I've had today's guest on the show
and I'm a very happy user of his company, CASA.
Jameson Lopp is a cypherpunk, one of the original Bitcoin OGs,
but also an innovator in the space of security and multisig,
and also a passionate advocate for privacy,
which is something that has become a hot topic,
I think, all over the world now more than ever.
So I'm interested in digging in all of that with him.
Jameson Lopp, thank you so much for joining today.
Glad to be here.
And I was just listening to the Melker project a couple of days ago.
Oh, wow, man.
Ball of notes?
I know you were a Ball of Notes fan.
Absolutely.
I think I've got pretty much all the stuff you put out still from a decade ago.
That's amazing, man.
Every once in a while, I definitely feel like I need to get back into it
and then my kids start screaming or something and I get distracted.
But I will have a resurgence at some point.
I appreciate that you're still listening to that.
So listen, I just realized when I looked back,
we haven't had you on the podcast since 2020.
I felt like it was much more recent.
We talked, obviously, at length then about what cost it does.
We can revisit it now.
But what's changed with the company since then?
Well, a couple of years ago, we had a bit of a pivot.
We basically decided to discontinue our node product.
And the main reason for that was just it was really, really high maintenance
and very difficult to give the same level of user experience
that we do with our app, with our multi-sig product.
And that's basically because there's just so many more moving pieces
and it involved putting hardware inside people's homes,
in their networks that would have configurations that were unknown to us
and just so many different edge cases.
Really hard to have a consistent user experience there.
And also, we really discovered that, at least at the time,
Lightning Network was really more of an enthusiast tinkerer type of project.
And it was hard for us to really build a consistent business use case around it.
We basically saturated the market.
And after that, there wasn't really much else for our business to grow.
Now, over the past couple of years, Lightning Network has matured, has evolved.
We're seeing more retail and enterprise level adoption of Lightning Network.
And so we're keeping apprised of that and definitely plan on doing a comeback,
but not in the same way.
Like I said, we want to offer much better user experience.
And really, with regard to our flagship multisig security product,
it hasn't been something that we've made massive changes to.
It's just been something we've been iterating on,
making small changes here and there as we've gotten feedback from our customers,
as we've run into new edge cases.
And that's kind of the name of the game when it comes to security,
especially when you're talking crypto private key security,
which is a very new space relative to most other stuff.
So continuing to learn, continuing to improve, and the market has been favorable.
Interestingly, it seems like everybody has a similar evolution when it comes to security, right?
You sort of start, you buy your dog coin or whatever gets you into crypto,
you leave your coins on exchange, you find Bitcoin.
Of course, once you have enough, you start to maybe hear about, you know,
not your keys, not your coins, moving to a hardware wallet.
And eventually, I think when your stack gets big enough or you take it serious enough,
you move on to multisig that you guys offer.
That said, it feels to me like there has been a narrative shift where I don't hear
not your keys, not your coins as much as I used to.
That maybe your average person just puts their coins on an exchange,
never thinks about it and doesn't even take those next steps.
Do you think that that's true?
I mean, you would know better than me.
Yeah, well, we're all biased.
We all have our own echo chambers.
And so my echo chamber probably has more of that than most people.
But this is something that actually came up just yesterday on a Trezor related space
that I was talking about seed storage best practices on.
And I basically said that I'm kind of I'm pessimistic on mainstream self-custody,
like becoming the common thing.
I would be very surprised if self-custody becomes the default.
However, if we're and that's, you know, it's because it takes effort and people
are always going to take the most convenient path.
This is true for security, for privacy, for pretty much any aspect of someone's life.
And we all have very limited time.
And unless there's something that really piques our interest, that really makes us
want to put a lot of time and resources into diving into, you're just going to take
whatever the default most convenient path is.
And so as of today, the most convenient path for most people, because they're
getting onboarded through these centralized exchanges, is they hook up their bank
account, they purchase some crypto tokens, and then that's it.
They probably don't even know that withdrawing is an option because it's just
it's not something that's common to any other asset.
So if you don't really look into it, it's probably not something the exchanges are
making very obvious and telling people about self-custody because that's against
their incentive to do so.
And so the question is, how do you change that?
And I think it actually requires a fundamental change in the model of how
people get onboarded in the first place.
So if you want my optimistic take, I would say I'm more optimistic that more
people will get into self-custody if the onboarding process changes.
And how does the onboarding process change?
I think the most obvious path is that if people start accepting cryptographic
tokens and assets as payment for goods and services, if you're receiving those
funds directly, you're not having to go buy them somewhere, I think it's much more
likely that you would be receiving them to a self-custody wallet.
But that's just speculation, hopeful that that will become more normal.
But even then, it's really hard to say how long that would take to get to that point.
And it's a really interesting point.
I sort of never thought of it that way, because if you are going to purchase Bitcoin
in the United States, it's very unlikely you're going to do that outside of the sort
of KYC AML centralized exchange rails that exist.
It's almost impossible.
Yeah, I mean, the average person is going to Google, like, buy Bitcoin, and then
they're going to click on a few links, and those are all going to be billion dollar
exchanges that have really great SEO or have ads, and then so on and so forth.
So there's a reason why there are tendencies for even decentralized systems
to centralize in different ways that's to be expected.
But I guess a more philosophical question is, like, how much does that really
matter?
And you could make the argument that, and I make the argument that it's better
for as many people as possible to self-custody because it makes the ecosystem
more anti-fragile.
You don't want all of the money to be held by a handful of people.
But also, there's a bigger question of, well, I think what really matters is
that anyone who cares enough can self-custody.
So while we would prefer that everyone self-custody, as long as we're not
preventing people or making it too difficult for someone to hold their own
keys and be their own bank, then I think the promise of Bitcoin, of being your
own bank, is still within reach.
And that's really, I would say, one of the main things that we're trying to do
at Casa, we're just trying to lower the bar, make it less technically
challenging for people to get there.
There are a lot of narratives as to why people would self-custody in the first
place, obviously.
I think for a lot of people, it sort of starts with, well, what if I get hacked
or get fished or get scammed?
Sort of in the background has always been because of the threat of your
government, right?
And I think people in the United States never take that threat very seriously.
But I think with what's happened in Canada over the last month, certainly
what's happening in Russia, that that's changing.
Are you seeing a shift in narrative from customers, people contacting you,
talking about, well, if I self-custody, does that mean that there can't be a
bank run and they can't come take my assets or because I'm protesting,
obvious things that we're seeing happening?
Yeah, and we've definitely had a lot of existing customers reach out to us and
ask, especially with the conjunction of both the Canada seizures and freezing
of accounts, and just in the past week, we've had dozens of companies in the
space have data leaked through third parties that got compromised.
That's resulted in a lot of people reaching out to us and asking, you know,
what is the threat model here?
Like, what do I need to do if I want to be nation state resistant?
And so, you know, there's a couple of different ways that you can approach
that.
I would, I generally say, well, if you want to be 100% nation state resistant,
it's kind of similar to a lot of the writing that I've done about wrench
attacks, where like the only way that you can be 100% sure that your keys aren't
going to be forcibly taken from you is by putting them in a architecture where
you yourself don't have direct access to them, because especially if you're
talking about nation state attacks, really any physical coercion, you have
to consider yourself a single point of failure.
And so, you actually have to consider yourself an attacker, because you have
to assume, you know, whether it's through violence or in some cases, we've
actually had clients who were drugged with drugs that made them cooperate.
You have to assume that you can be put into a situation where you can basically
be told you have to access your keys.
And so, if you can access enough keys to spend the funds, then you probably will.
So, if you want to have your funds safe from that, then it has to be sufficiently
challenging for you to be able to do that.
And now, how do you do that is a much bigger in-depth question.
The easiest, well, the simplest, easiest option is what we have a few clients do
which is they actually place their keys in different countries, different
jurisdictions.
Geographical dispersion, like, fly me somewhere else to get my key, to get my
wallet buddy, right, yeah.
That's the easiest way, at least from a threat modeling perspective.
Of course, it's extremely onerous to actually do and set up, and it makes it
extremely onerous to go spend those funds, though we do have some clients,
and unfortunately, all of these things add more expense, more cost, more
resources to both setting up and maintaining.
But we do have some clients who they can achieve that nation-state resistance
by having keys on different continents and also have a somewhat less onerous
ability to access them because they have people that they employ who have
access to those keys, and then they create their own authentication
protocols for how to basically prove to that person that they are not under
duress and that they want to spend the funds and have them add a signature and
so on and so forth.
But otherwise, if you're constrained within, like, one particular
jurisdiction, it kind of turns into more of a, well, can I sufficiently
disperse my keys into places that can't be found?
And so that can get a lot more complicated sort of reasoning through
the myriad of different places that you could store keys.
Which is funny because then you find people putting it in safety deposit
boxes in an actual bank, which is who you're opting out of sort of in the
first place, but there's a camera on the bank, and if you walk in there with
somebody, it's going to be very hard for them to force you.
It's very daunting.
It's very daunting.
But I mean, to be clear, the actual service you provide takes a minute to
set up, but it's not complex once you if you have any sort of native crypto
knowledge, I think we're talking about the steps you can then take to make it
even more, I guess, nation state or hack or criminal proof.
Yeah, you know, I would say a large portion of CASA's value, it's not
necessarily in the technical stuff.
Now, the technical stuff is just trying to make it easier to get set up and
maintain and manage your key set.
And I would argue that, you know, we have one of the best user experiences
there, like any of the multisig software wallets, but in many ways,
it's just as valuable, if not more valuable to have the client services
aspect where we're basically consulting with you because this is a very
personal thing.
Everybody has different situations, different resources, different threat
models, different people and places that they may be able to access or
may be able to consider to use for key storage.
And so having a consultant to help you think through the tradeoffs because
there's always tradeoffs with any of these decisions is, I think, a very
valuable thing because otherwise that's where you really have to put in
days, weeks, months of education if you want to go from not thinking about
key security to becoming like an adversarially minded person who is
really deep into this.
And that's what we're trying to help people not have to do is, you know,
lean on us for knowledge and expertise.
This is what I've built.
A lot of the product decisions have come from the, what, seven years that
I've spent building key management products and seeing people shoot
themselves in the foot a million different ways.
Right.
That leads to the next point, which is obviously that you talked about
someone being a single port of failure, even kind of turning into an attacker
on their own assets.
Aren't humans, I mean, we're fallible, right?
Aren't we the biggest threat to our own assets being our own bank?
Because you die, you lose your keys, you have a fire, you drop a cup of
coffee on a piece of paper.
And isn't that why so many people are confident having their assets on an
exchange or in a bank or other places?
Yeah.
Bottom line, it's really scary to be your own bank.
You have to take a lot of personal responsibility to do that.
Yeah.
I can understand the mindset and it's something that I hear very often.
It's I'm not a security expert.
I don't trust myself to be able to navigate this space that is fraught with
peril.
I would prefer to trust a specialist to do that.
And that's completely understandable because that's how we operate with the
vast majority of different service providers.
That's how human society has evolved over thousands of years is through
specialization.
You don't want to be a deep knowledge specialist in every different thing
that you have to do in your life because it's a matter of efficiency.
Is your knowledge really thin and wide or is it deep?
You want to be deep in one thing because that's how you can generate the most
value.
But you can't be deep in everything just because you don't have the time.
The deeper you try to go in the more different categories and aspects of your life,
obviously the less deep you can be.
I understand it, but it creates a very different model.
I think that it undermines one of the fundamental premises of this entire space.
It's unfortunate that that's where we are.
I would say that's what I've been trying to fight against for the past seven
years is to continue to push forward both from a technical standpoint and a
user standpoint and a service standpoint.
The ability not only for someone to be their own bank, but for the average
non-technical person to be confident that they can be their own bank and that
they aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot.
There is trust and reputation around that and I think the longer that we have
self-custody services that are going and helping people protect themselves,
there is a viral network effect there.
That's where I would say we actually get a lot of our new clients as referrals
from other clients who have been with us for many years and believe and now
they are confident that, hey, I can do this, then my buddy Joe can do this too.
I'll refer him.
It's something that continues to take a lot of time and it's tricky because we
have to be perfect.
If we have one major incident, that could potentially set us back quite a bit
on the level of confidence that people have in us and in other self-custody
systems.
When you started the business, obviously, I think the entire market was very
Bitcoin first.
I still believe it should be and potentially could argue that it is, but
last year, I think for the first time, we saw a major shift to where your
average person maybe got into the crypto space without ever even knowing about
Bitcoin.
They came through NFTs or some stupid meme dog coin or some other.
My friend told me, I'll get rich and win the lottery if I come in.
How much of a challenge is that for you guys?
I mean, you're still primarily a Bitcoin service, right?
Are you opening business to other assets?
Are you going to do ERC20s or do you just focus on what you're doing and assume
that it all comes back to Bitcoin eventually, which it does?
Yeah, so we obviously monitor feedback from our clients, what are they
demanding?
There certainly is demand, I think, for better multisig self-custody of other
assets because a lot of these other assets and other networks, like Ethereum,
for example, doesn't have native multisig.
You actually have to write your own smart contract or use a multisig smart
contract that you hope is sufficiently vetted and doesn't have any bugs in it.
Multisig on a lot of these other networks is a scary proposition if it's
not a native part of the protocol.
But yeah, I think we are seeing more demand for it.
And if you're paying attention to the space, you're seeing a lot of crazy
exploits happen and people losing their six and seven figure NFTs.
And so the ability to have a stronger level of security around any
cryptographic asset that is worth a substantial amount of value, the value
flows to a given asset and as a result, the value of a security offering for
that also continues to increase.
So yeah, we're definitely monitoring it.
I would say this is the same thing that we've said for a long time, actually,
is that CASA is not a Bitcoin company.
CASA is a private key management company.
Our mantra is actually to help individuals become more self-sovereign.
It is not to help people with their Bitcoin.
It's just Bitcoin is the first, most obvious, most valuable way to do that.
We have a lot of ideas and fanciful, long-term, multi-decade thinking around
different ways that we believe that private keys will continue to improve
people's sovereignty, not just in financial ways.
And we want to be there and be able to provide people with the tools and the
best practices, the knowledge, the consultation that help them navigate the space.
So it's something that we're definitely working on.
We're not going to try to support the long tail of assets because the problem,
I would say the fundamental friction or problem or trade-off that we have with
supporting other assets is that we don't want to add other assets to the detriment
of our existing services and basically our Bitcoin product.
Because it's not just a set it and forget it thing.
Security is a constantly evolving thing.
And if we're taking resources away from Bitcoin security to add all of these other
assets that could result in what I mentioned earlier, maybe we miss something.
Maybe we end up having some major catastrophic incident because we weren't
focused enough on what was happening with Bitcoin.
So we are continuing to grow.
We're continuing to add more engineering resources.
And as we do that, I expect we'll also be able to add resources to look at other
assets while not giving up any of the resources that we're putting into Bitcoin.
Let's talk about the fact that the real ethos of the company is around self-sovereignty,
not necessarily at Bitcoin.
What other aspects would you personally teach people about self-sovereignty outside of
buying and securing your Bitcoin?
Well, there's a lot of just operational security and privacy issues that it's very hard to
make a lot of that stuff easy because security is only really half of the equation here.
I try to teach people that security is not just like one shield or one set of things.
It's a multi-layered approach.
If you're doing things the right way, you have many different layers of security, whether
that's digital security or physical security.
It all ends up being the same in terms of what we call defense in depth, which means
that you can think of it as ring fences, I guess, though, of course, each fence, each
layer is some other security mechanism.
But even outside, I would say the most outermost layer of security, whatever that is for whatever
aspect of your life, the ring fence outside of that should actually be privacy because
if you have strong privacy, that will hopefully prevent most attackers from even getting to
your first layer of security because they aren't even looking for you.
They don't even know that you should be a target for them.
They don't know that you are a potential high value target or that you own certain things
that they could target, so on and so forth.
There's a lot of knowledge there.
Sovereignty can actually be provided to a number of different aspects of your life.
So, you know, it actually comes into play even more recently over the past few months,
but you can think of things like food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, it's almost like prepping,
right?
Preppers, I think, have a bad rap because some of the extremists who get TV shows made,
but there's nothing wrong with being prepared for certain edge cases.
And in fact, like a lot of government agencies say, you should be prepared to basically be
on your own without any help for several weeks because there's any number of disasters that
could happen that could shut down infrastructure and aid and service providers.
So I would basically say, you know, if you want to be more sovereign, start looking into
prepping and don't necessarily think of it as like a negative thing or something that
you have to be obsessed about.
I consider it to be a form of insurance, and it's really any of this sovereignty stuff,
it's a fancy word, but what it really means is reducing your reliance on trusted third
parties.
So whether that's like reducing your reliance on various supply chains or providers of food
or energy or security or whatever, it's important to have, I think, these insurance policies.
And I almost even cringe when I call them insurance policies because I'm actually not
a fan of traditional insurance policies because if you think about it, a traditional insurance
policy is a trusted third party you're entering into a legal contract with, and they're actually
highly incentivized to do everything that they can do to not fulfill that legal contract,
you know, find loopholes, create loopholes, put in edge cases and say, oh, well, you didn't
meet this, so we don't have to pay anything off.
So, you know, if you want real insurance, it can't be some legal contract because you
probably shouldn't even assume that the legal system is going to uphold it in the way that
you want to.
Real insurance is being self-sovereign and sustainable and basically self-reliance.
We all believe and know that cryptocurrencies are the future, but it's still very scary
to be your own bank and have to secure your assets.
Most of the traditional hardware wallets are hard to use.
They're clunky and people lose their private keys.
It's not really that efficient.
And that's where the Arculus key card comes in.
I absolutely love this thing.
I've transitioned largely to using it for most of my assets.
It's literally just a card that you tap right on your mobile device.
You can send, receive, swap, buy, and sell crypto with that simple action.
It's literally amazing.
There's no cords.
There's no charging.
There's no Bluetooth.
Crypto is you.
You guys have got to try it.
And guess what?
You can buy it right on Amazon.
Go buy your Arculus on Amazon now.
Bitcoin is insurance.
It's funny.
Mark Yusko was on the podcast once and he said something that always resonates with me.
And he said Bitcoin is schmuck insurance.
He's like, forget even the privacy and all those aspects.
It's just insurance against people doing stupid things that you can't control.
That sounds like that's basically everything you're describing.
And it doesn't have to be that your government comes after you.
It could just be a hurricane or a tornado.
There's a lot of reasons that you could have major problems on display all over the world.
Yeah.
This is one of the things that's very difficult to convey to normies of why is Bitcoin insurance against schmucks?
And I would say by schmucks, we mean meddlers, authoritarians, politicians, regulators, central bankers.
It's the people in the upper parts of the hierarchies of society that are puppet masters and lever poolers because they don't have power in this system.
And the system, you know, it's open.
We can observe everything that's going on.
And after a decade, we have a very, very good understanding of the security model, both of the system overall and of security models that we can provide for individuals who are using the system.
It's strong and robust against tampering is, I guess, what we really mean by schmuck insurance.
I hate politics and a lot, especially of like aspects of, I guess you could call it woke culture or a lot of the censorship and basically rug pulling that's happening in mainstream society these days is that when you're operating in these fragile,
hierarchical command and control systems.
You have to spend a lot of your time worrying about political bullshit, because at any given time, whoever is in power might make some arbitrary decision, or whoever is in power might get swapped out with someone else who has a completely different
perspective and starts changing the rules. And that's really why I love Bitcoin is because you know the rules aren't going to get arbitrarily changed. And whenever you're living under a rule regime, or the rules can be changed, then
that undermines almost everything, you know, your, your entire worldview your existence, your, your security of various aspects of your life can literally get rug pulled from one day to the next.
You've been preaching this for a long time. Right. And so, it the early bit coiners which I am not right I came in 2016, you're always like it was always like you're crazy even me at that point you guys are crazy you're talking about these things these things can never happen.
And for a long time in first world or you know civilized culture they weren't happening.
Not in my backyard, talk about Canada.
But if it can happen in Canada can happen anywhere but talk about Canada and your thoughts on what's happening there.
Yeah, well, I am I'm not by any means a Canadian political expert, but what we've seen is that there was just a popular uprising against a lot of the the policies that were happening in Canada.
And what, from my perspective seemed to happen was that the, the authorities in Canada, realized that they couldn't just go in and necessarily wipe these people away and you know, use their law enforcement to push them out of the places that they were
lining up and protesting, and that it was a lot easier for them, rather than by using threats of violence.
It's so much easier for them to just compel various financial authorities to put you know financial pressure on them and shut down your accounts and so on and so forth.
And now you know the same thing is happening with Russia and Ukraine where we're seeing a lot of basically financial cancel culture happening, because it's so much easier to do that than to actually spend billions of dollars putting, you know, military in
place, and then risking your further escalation.
This, I think, will continue to be a common theme for the foreseeable future, which is any of these command and control systems and and the financial system is certainly one of those.
They will be the places that get the most pressure put on them, because they are choke points. And, and that's what any person who is an authority is going to do when they want to try to project their power, they're going to try to find the most
efficient way to do that. And when you can affect millions of people by issuing a decree to a handful of different financial institutions. That's so much easier than having to actually put boots on the ground, and you know physically coerce folks.
And I think it's one thing we've all seen nations sanctioned right so what we're seeing in Russia I don't think comes as surprise but seeing the citizens who are peacefully protesting effectively sanctioned as a completely different story.
Yeah, and, and you know this is what a lot of people are afraid of when we talk about these central bank digital currencies. That is going to be, you know, panopticon of surveillance, and an even easier choke point where it's it's not out of.
I think reason to believe that these systems will have very granular controls, where you can have a central bank issue money to someone and actually put very specific encodings and permissions and ability to only spend it at certain places, certain times,
and you know if you don't follow those instructions then maybe we'll take the money back you know just snatch it right out of your account.
Use it or lose it or lose it right and use it on food at this store because we need to prop it up. Yeah, it's.
Is that I mean is that where we're heading. It seems like that's where we're heading right and you like I said you've been saying that forever and people would have said that that was nuts but you can't call it crazy anymore.
No, because this is once again beneficial to the authorities, it allows them to project their power, even more efficiently more easily you know you know with a few keystrokes now.
You know they won't even have to necessarily ask these few dozen financial institutions, they will have the, you know, the control right there at the keyboard, you just go, go to the right terminal and you'll be able to manipulate the system
at the base financial layer. And if I was an authoritarian I would love to have that level of control over people's money.
So I mean control the money control everything I guess then the question becomes, can you reasonably expect to protect your Bitcoin from the government we talked about nation state protection but if they show up at your door with a gun and say you own Bitcoin,
what do you do right.
Yeah, well, if you have any there like you should expect that it's going to be seized. So, you know, especially for those of us who are prominent public figures in the space.
We can't deny.
I lost it all in a boating accident.
That's what happened to me and might fell out of my pocket on a roller coaster.
So, you know, the tricky thing is you, you also have to discuss well to what links, are you willing to go to.
Because if they show up at your doorstep, and you're not complying and or they just think that you could be complying more than they can put you in a cage.
And, you know, what are you going to do. Hopefully you have resources to you know hire some some nice lawyers who can help you fight against that.
But it also becomes very jurisdiction specific.
You have to worry about, you know, exactly what your local government has the power to do when you have to keep yourself apprised of what you've seen them doing because they may be taking steps to basically take more power and and and make changes to
the rules and and make set new precedents and the legal system that say that they should be able to do things that they've never done before.
And security in general.
It's always an evolving situation so you, you certainly have to pay attention.
Feel bad for my kids.
These don't seem to be evolving in the right direction I mean listen there's always the glass half full approach which is that the pendulum will swing back and forth and maybe they'll push hard enough that privacy will become a major issue that people will push back and will
push politicians who put protections in place for the citizens. It just doesn't feel like that's the direction we're heading in now feels like we're swinging towards central bank digital currency complete lack of privacy, you'll own nothing and like it and all the
other means that we we sort of are evolving towards.
I think it will hopefully be both, you know, I don't think we're going to be able to stop central bank digital currencies from happening. I think our best bet is to protect the public permission lists networks and make sure that there's optionality there.
So, at least in the United States. I'm hopeful you know I've seen hopeful developments with various senators and congressmen that seem to be getting orange pilled.
And actually that's one of my projects is I'm tracking, which politicians you own Bitcoin, because a lot of them say that they're in favor of it but they actually don't own any and this is all public record and so I think they're kind of bullshitters and just
it's it's politics right of course what are my voters what what are my voters want to hear I need to I need to keep my job.
So, there's, I think there's a few different fronts that you know it's helpful to orange pill as many politicians as possible.
One thing that I'm a bit dismayed about and concerned about is the fact that it seems like 98% of the politicians in America that are pro Bitcoin seem to be Republicans, and this should not be a fucking partisan issue.
The Democrats are turning it into one because all the ESG bullshit and really just the fact that they want to be able to control the financial system that you know I think they don't like the, the freedom, and you know, they don't like the, the idea that they
might not have control over the system, but there's also, you know, some interesting developments with Bitcoiners getting into politics and this is, you know, this is not a new thing in the sense that a lot of politicians, people who get into politics
they do that because they've been successful elsewhere in life and it's just a question of what do I do next. So a lot of people you know they they build wealth, and then they decide to go into politics I think we're seeing some people follow
that path where they just they got their wealth through Bitcoin, through other crypto assets, and, and now they're like well, what can I do, and perhaps one of the best things that you can do is to try to use that wealth to get into positions of power
where you can then try to fight against the authoritarians who are trying to destroy Bitcoin destroy public permissionless networks.
Accumulating money and then going into politics to do good is probably not the norm I think we now have politicians that go into politics to accumulate wealth.
Yeah, it certainly works both ways.
And I just hope it doesn't turn into situations where we see like prominent Bitcoiners becoming powerful politicians, and then becoming hypocrites, but becoming powerful politicians.
What's interesting to me though is that we're talking about this in a very sort of short term right the next what happens in the next four years what happens in the next eight years. Well in 20 or 30 years, every politician will be Bitcoin native or crypto native
I guess you can call it depending on your skepticism for the level of which will dominate. But, like, if you're 10 now or 12 or 15 years never going to really have lived in a world where Bitcoin wasn't a part of your financial narrative so at the very least
it's just going to be a matter of time before those are the people in power and it's just a part of their lives right.
I certainly hope so.
You know, we'll see what happens with all these political narratives I think a lot of it is posturing and the one thing that I do really like about, at least like the United States Congress is that the trend, as far as I can tell over the
past 1020 years is towards more and more deadlocking and being able to get less and less done and that's like my every two years it's a complete flip right so my favorite type of government is the government that can't actually do anything.
So I do hope that that trend continues, but in the meantime, if you're paying attention to politics, it all it seems really volatile and it's like every few weeks like somebody is coming out with some new ridiculous bill that is basically trying to
ban different aspects of these, these systems that are just trying to improve people's freedom.
Yeah, it's it's hard to believe that the government is going to value our privacy or freedom, moving forward, but I mean maybe maybe that's just pessimistic I don't know.
There has been some conversation around CBD sees where, certainly in the United States, it seems like they've kicked the can much further down the road and there are people talking about the privacy threats of it happening.
I actually as you said with gridlock I don't really believe we're going to see a central bank digital currency very soon in the United States, I think we'll be very very far behind.
Maybe that's hopeful.
Yeah, but you can be sure you know each nation stage is going to be paying attention to what the others are doing. And that's also why I really hope that you know El Salvador doesn't fuck things up.
Yeah, it that's really crazy that I that was my flight I was so excited about it when it was announced at the Bitcoin conference I was there last year the excitement around it was palpable.
But two hours later I was sitting there and I thought man.
This is like a very small nation they're adopting Bitcoin, and there's an equal chance they blow it as it's a successful. And if they blow it, they could stop all of the momentum actually I'm not saying I believe that will happen or that would be intentional, or
it wouldn't just be pressure from the World Bank or IMF that causes that to happen. Right, but we're still watching almost a year later they're delaying the bonds, there's, you know, they could go either way still it feels like.
Yeah, and, you know, I visited there for a week.
And it was an interesting experience for sure.
There's also just a lot of politics and play there as well and so I, I don't have any specific, like, opinion, or value like one way or another when it comes to the political leaders of El Salvador, like, in general I don't trust any political leaders
I don't have any reason to trust those leaders anymore than anyone else.
The best I can do is, is hope that they understand what they're doing, and that they're doing it for the right reasons that we hope.
And it's, you know, I've also have, I've, I've heard stories from people who have worked with them that basically they can be very fickle, and that it's sometimes it's hard to tell what their true intentions are so.
Yeah, it's like you said I was kind of coin toss of how it's all going to go down.
It's still a government.
Like, and that sort of lends to an interesting trend I think we've seen among Bitcoiners and in crypto in general which is that it sort of started off you know pump short the bankers long Bitcoin, and that sort of turned into well these institutions
and countries and all this adoption it makes the number go up so maybe that's good. Right, is there a cognitive dissonance there about sort of adoption from countries or companies that's in conflict with our own personal interest or should we just a cheer.
Should we just cheer for any adoption because we're small and we need all hands on deck.
You know, it's like they say Bitcoin is for enemies. So, this is why trying to project politics or political narratives into who's using Bitcoin is really ridiculous because, yes, it's great that we're cheering for you know all of the donations to Ukraine
to help them try to fight against the onslaught of amazingly like powerful aggressor.
There's, I don't think there's anything wrong with helping people to defend themselves against aggression.
On the flip side, you can't just turn around and start screaming about well Russian oligarchs could be using Bitcoin to protect their assets was like no shit like that's the whole point. That is the whole point is for everyone, regardless of if you're poor or wealthy,
or what country you're in, or you know what your genetic ancestry was really any aspect of yourself you know the Bitcoin network, the protocol, it doesn't care who you are all it cares about is that you know you have the keys, and that allows you to secure and spend your
assets, you know without having to worry about any of the stuff that we've been talking about you know random authorities coming down on you and censoring you blocking you stealing from you so on.
Yeah, it's.
I talk about that all the time but it's like saying that an oligarch sent someone an email about something they intended to do and instead of blocking and being like ban email.
Exactly, right, ban the internet there's fake news there. Right, don't attack the source of the fake news is ban the technology which is completely agnostic and has nothing to do with the intention.
It's crazy.
You know, it's a, you know, when when all you have is a hammer everything you see is a nail so the, you know, authoritarians the people in power, whenever they see anything that they perceive to be wrong, then the solution, of course, must be to come down
with threats of violence to stop you from being able to do that so authoritarians gonna authoritate I suppose.
Regulators are going to regulate right so like Nate dog and Warren G.
But is there is regulation a major threat to crypto let me even rephrase that is there anything left that can stop Bitcoin from being successful.
It's such a weird question but is there anything left is it, is it a 51% attack from some nation state is it a outright ban in the United States which won't happen. Obviously, is there anything left that can that can stop this train.
I mean, there's always, I mean there's always threats, but with any threat you have to talk about okay well what is the cost of someone performing this attack and what is the, the ROI I guess, what do you get in return for investing in that attack.
So, I do think that the, you know, China banning Bitcoin mining and us bouncing back from that within a matter of months is one of the great stress tests that the Bitcoin network has seen, and I think it outperforms most people's expectations.
Now could the same thing happen you know, could like all G 17 nations are all UN nations come together and say we're banning Bitcoin mining and try to like crush it from that perspective, I guess, but you know this is actually.
I think why Bitcoin is very interesting from a geopolitical standpoint, it's the whole idea is much like the internet itself.
China, Russia, like any, any country can erect firewalls and try to set up borders and restrictions on what happens with the internet in their country, but we're really talking about information, and it's very difficult to truly impede the flow of information,
because there's so many different ways now that you can transfer information.
So, I'm sure there are threats out there but you know it's very complicated you can you can go into like a rabbit hole for any given threat like could the US ban Bitcoin.
Why, why not. And just the fact that so many different countries have different political systems different legal systems it's that that diversity, which gives you optionality it's the diversity of all of these different systems that makes it incredibly
that they will all be able to collude simultaneously in order to try to attack Bitcoin so as a result, there's always going to be somewhere else for Bitcoin enthusiasts for Bitcoin infrastructure to go to.
So that's why I think fundamentally this is a highly resilient network.
Bitcoin, Bitcoin dropped 50% in value.
Can you imagine if the stock market dropped 50% in 10 days, the circuit breakers manipulation and that would occur to try to backstop it.
It's not even close it's the funniest thing when people try to say that Bitcoin is manipulated or that stock market is a free market. Bitcoin is the only free market we got left.
Yeah, I really believe it.
Yeah, it's amazing. I think I actually tweeted something just a few days ago, where I was I was trying to buy some equity, and I was doing it during market hours, which first of all, you know, 35 hours a week that's ridiculous.
Right. And then I tried to buy it and and it said, Oh, we're not processing by orders right now. Like this is just ridiculous. I mean, you know, I'm used to 24 7365.
And that is one of the things that I think one of the many aspects of these ecosystems, where you know we're pushing forward to the point that as you said, people who were born in the past 10 years they're going to be crypto native.
If they go sign up for a brokerage, they're going to run into all these stupid eccentricities that compared to the crypto native experience it's going to be a huge turn off.
Either, they're not going to, you know, put much time effort and value into those traditional assets, or maybe, you know, those traditional systems will finally get some fire up under their ass to improve their system everything.
And that's the future of course, is that everything becomes 24 seven it's all blockchain based and remove on with our lives so James I mean we somehow ran out of time that was one of the fastest hours and we don't even try to do an hour anymore so you know that
it was a good conversation. Where can everybody follow you after this and more importantly obviously to check out cost so like I said I mean I use it right so I'm a huge proponent I absolutely love it and I sleep much better at night ever since I became a customer.
Well, anyone can find me on Twitter at LOP LOPP highly recommend everyone check out my Bitcoin educational resources at Bitcoin dot page. And then finally you can check out casa and our security offerings at keys dot casa.
That's a essay.
Absolutely this is the space moves, seemingly slowly over the matter of days but when you look back over a few years it's exponentially accelerating.
Yes, slowly than all at once. Thank you again.
Let's go.