Jameson Lopp - Securing Your Bitcoins & Data

JohnPaul: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host JohnPaul and this is Digital Gold. Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started my own cryptocurrency out of my parents’ basement back in 2013. The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders [00:00:16] in this space.

[00:00:17] JohnPaul is the founder and CEO of Orm Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orm Capital Ventures. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

JohnPaul: [00:00:29] Today I’m joined by Jameson Lop who is the co-founder and CTO of CASA, a Bitcoin philosopher and a professional cyberpunk. He has been actually building the Bitcoin space since 2015 and has become one of the most respected voices in the Bitcoin developer community. He has previously an engineer at BitGo developing its high-grade multi-sig custody service before [00:00:58] co-founding CASA, a company providing secure wallets and plug-and-play infrastructure solutions for Bitcoin. His mission is to use his skills as a technologist to build tools that empower individuals and he works to achieve this by making it easier for people to take custody of their Bitcoin and manage their private keys.

JohnPaul: [00:01:13] Jameson, welcome to the show.

Jameson: [00:01:15] Thanks for having me. A long time no see.

JohnPaul: [00:01:17] A long time no see. Can you explain to me how I guess you started, how you became a cyberpunk

Jameson: [00:01:24] Jameson? What does that even look like? How do you become a professional cyberpunk? Goes back to the white paper. I was not familiar with the cyberpunk movement or any of the decades of development leading up to Bitcoin. It wasn’t until several years after I had been immersed in Bitcoin that I started looking into the history and realizing this was not [00:01:48] just something that appeared out of thin air but rather was the culmination of efforts of many people around the world for decades of trying and failing other attempts at digital currency. As I was looking into that, reading the historical posts and getting a better understanding of the mindset that those people were in, then I realized that I generally agreed with

Jameson: [00:02:11] it and I wanted to further the cause. So you mentioned before Bitcoin. I think that’s one of the potential flaws people have with Bitcoin. It’s like the first one. How do we know what’s going to be the one that everyone uses? It’s slow. The 10 minute block time. Those are the normal excuses we get for people [00:02:26] why they don’t want to adopt or learn more about Bitcoin. Because like you mentioned, previously there was some other coins or other tries at Bitcoin. Are you able to talk farther on how that research went and maybe one of the projects might have failed and for what reasons?

Jameson: [00:02:40] It’s hard for me to even say how many attempts there were because most of them didn’t even really make it out of the gate. I think DigiCache with David John was probably the one that made it the furthest. I don’t know how many years they operated. I know they raised some funds. They had a working network but eventually it just didn’t get enough adoption and they [00:03:00] shut down. So there were other notable projects like HealthFenny had something called reusable proofs of work which had some similarities with Bitcoin but basically each coin carried its own proof of work along with it. It didn’t have a blockchain though. There were still some missing pieces. I think it hadn’t really solved the double spending problem.

Jameson: [00:03:25] Ultimately the reason all of these things failed was because they were still centralized. That was the unique innovation that Satoshi figured out was how do you create a system like this without a central authority? So from that standpoint, Bitcoin is the first to be able to do it without central authorities but there’s plenty of other reasons why you [00:03:49] would believe that given the level of adoption that Bitcoin has gotten, it’s going to be very difficult to overcome the network effect that has gained so far. Because it is software it can continue to evolve though. It will of course not evolve at anywhere near the pace that for example a web app or a single company software project might change because by design

Jameson: [00:04:13] it’s very difficult to gain consensus across all of the participants to make any non-backwards compatible changes. So when you’re referring to these non-backwards compatible changes and Bitcoin doesn’t have a central authority gate and you are working on and you develop or I believe you have push code to Bitcoin Core. Have you ever committed to the normal, I guess not

JohnPaul: [00:04:35] the normal, but the main Bitcoin client or how does that work from a developer standpoint?

Jameson: [00:04:40] Because I myself have been focused on the mining but I’ve never actually written code for really any Bitcoin clients like you have. Yeah so I am not a protocol developer. The first project that I actually started and still maintain is a fork of the Bitcoin Core client. It’s not a network fork or a protocol fork. [00:05:01] It is still running the Bitcoin node. Basically I just added in a bunch of metrics and instrumentation and built some cool DevOps style dashboards that I put up on a website which you can find at stettoshi.info. It’s like settoshi.info but with an extra T after the first S. And as a result of that I’m not a C++ developer. I really don’t like C++ but I do have some trivial commits in the

Jameson: [00:05:30] Bitcoin Core repository. Generally just things that I ran into when I was mucking around in my own fork. No notable functionality really. Usually just like improvements of documentation or RPC calls or things that only really the developers would care about. So it’s not challenging if you’re familiar with open source development. If you’re familiar with GitHub you basically [00:05:57] if you find something that you think could be improved then you write the code and you submit a pull request and then people review it and you respond to their feedback. And if you can make almost everybody happy if you can get an overwhelming agreement without any notable objections that other people find reasonable objections then your code is going to get merged

Jameson: [00:06:21] for me because the stuff I have implemented it was all really trivial. It would generally get merged in pretty quickly within a matter of days or weeks. If you were doing some massive functionality change with a ton of logic that could be potentially dangerous. If it was buggy then you could very easily be spending months if not years trying to get that code merged in. [00:06:44] Wow and I think that was one of the things I want to talk farther on which is so you mentioned there’s a client code base which is something that you’ve forked over and you’re working on then you have the protocol code which is the main Bitcoin protocol which is decentralized and you just went through the process of really committing code to that depending on the complexity of it.

Jameson: [00:07:02] Is there any upcoming protocol like changes or even merge requests that you’re interested in or you’re following at the protocol level because I think that’s something that no one really talks about. We actually did get the taproot logic has been merged into Bitcoin core the client. However that only really means that you’re going to be able to use it on your own private network. [00:07:28] There’s still outstanding issues around how it’s actually going to get activated on the main network so fingers crossed that will happen next year. The main reason why I’m following that is that it will be directly applicable for us at CASA. The ability to do aggregated signatures off chain that look like a single signature on chain is going to be a boon to anyone using

Jameson: [00:07:54] multi-signature wallets which is what CASA’s primary focus is and the reason for that is it’s going to A improve the privacy because there’s no more fingerprints that you’re using the special multisig setup and then it’s also going to improve your fees that you have to pay. Your transaction sizes will be a lot smaller you’ll have to pay lower fees and I expect that we’re going to see a number of [00:08:21] improvements and new applications come along that leverage both the aggregated signature functionality hopefully making mixers more private and then leveraging this tap scripts merkalized abstract syntax tree functionality which is it’s really hard to explain in simple terms but basically it will enable developers to create much more complex bitcoin scripts without

Jameson: [00:08:48] having to put the entire script on the blockchain once again improving the privacy and the scalability

JohnPaul: [00:08:56] of doing these more complex operations. That is as I appreciate you walking me through that because

Jameson: [00:09:03] taproot I was like okay what is this thing he’s talking about so you mentioned multi-seg wallets

JohnPaul: [00:09:08] and I would say normal wallets come a high level for the viewers who don’t know can you explain

Jameson: [00:09:12] the difference and why you see this evolution of multi-seg wallets and why they’re just inherently better. Yeah so the easiest way to think of I guess bitcoin security is it’s like a lockbox so when you send bitcoin to a certain address the address is just a human readable format behind that address it’s actually a fingerprint for a more complex redeem script which this script [00:09:43] describes the spending conditions for what you what data you need to post to the network in order for the nodes to accept that you are the rightful owner and should be able to spend that value. So the most common way to store your bitcoin is in a single signature address and that basically means there’s one private key and in order to spend that bitcoin you use that private key to

Jameson: [00:10:13] create a cryptographic signature that covers all the details of the transaction and then you post it to the network and the network validates it and it propagates around and if you pay an appropriate mining fee then eventually it gets put into the blockchain in a block. Now that’s simple it’s straightforward but you have an obvious single point of failure you know if you lose that key [00:10:39] if an adversary gets that key then it’s game over they take the bitcoin or you can’t access the bitcoin and there’s nobody who can get that money back for you so what we are aiming to do with CASA is to create a self-custody storage setup that eliminates single points of failure and the way that we do that is both on the the technical side and on the sort of customer service

Jameson: [00:11:14] helping people make decisions about their setup side. On the technical side the way that we eliminate single points of failure is by using multiple keys so our sort of flagship product is a three out of five multi-sig setup which means there are five different devices with five different keys sets on them and these get geographically distributed by you into different locations [00:11:43] and in order to spend from your wallet you have to add signatures from three different devices so you have to physically travel around and access these devices and that makes it so that if any one device gets lost or compromised you’re fine there’s no catastrophic loss you can replace the device and just keep moving on with your life if there is any sort of disaster then once again

Jameson: [00:12:12] you don’t have to worry about having all kinds of crazy backup schemes or anything like the architecture of the wallet itself is the backup scheme it has robustness and resilience built into it and if we’re getting attacked by someone whether digitally or physically it’s going to be the bar gets raised to such a level that the attacker would have to be extremely motivated and basically [00:12:41] be willing to take you hostage for a lengthy period of time and go through multiple different physical locations which of course is going to be very risky for them and increase the chance that they get caught or could spend hours just talking about like the security model and all the different threats that we try to protect against but we’ve got all of those on our website and

Jameson: [00:13:02] some people can spend hours looking through them but the whole idea is that being your own bank it comes with a lot of responsibility and few people are going to put in the time to think through you know everything that could go wrong so what we want to do is leverage the five years of experience that I have learning a lot of hard lessons seeing a lot of people lose their money [00:13:26] in a lot of different ways and build all of these best practices into a very simple piece of software so that people just follow the directions in the app and they’ll be in a very good position from security standpoint and as people are following the directions in the app as you mentioned there’s trade-offs I think with expanding the crypto ecosystem and regarding custody more

Jameson: [00:13:55] specifically because with these apps like Robinhood and Cash App you don’t actually own the coins but with CASA you are costing them yourself correct? Exactly and we believe that this is important for a variety of reasons it’s important for the individual because if you’re just giving all your keys to a third party then you’ve just thrown out one of the most important aspects of this system [00:14:19] which is getting rid of centralized middlemen and trusted third parties if you’re if you’re leaving your money with a custodian then you may feel safer but you have no way of actually knowing because the security that is going on in that custodian is a complete black box to you you have no insight into what it is you’re just blindly trusting that they’re following the best

Jameson: [00:14:44] practices if you were following best practices yourself then you know you don’t have to trust anyone you’re verifying that you’re doing it the right way yourself and also there’s this issue of systemic risk you know at a higher level thinking outside of just the individual risks that you expose yourself to if you’re giving your money to a third party they can exit scam they can be [00:15:11] running a fractional reserve there’s just a million ways that they can still lose the money at a higher level it is unhealthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole if a huge amount of the value in the system is being held by a small number of entities and that’s because you start to get into potential governance style attacks where the reason that this system is robust and resilient

Jameson: [00:15:42] against even theoretical nation state attacks is because there are so many doors that would have to be kicked down so to speak in order to force people to change the rules of the system that they are enforcing with their client software so if you get to the point where there’s only half a dozen or a dozen or enough a small enough number of entities that they can start to coordinate with [00:16:08] each other and collude with each other then the system itself has become a lot more fragile and prone to malicious changes being instituted by a small number of entities that may benefit them and be to the detriment of everyone else in the system and we are essentially just in recreating a central banking cartel again so we’re trying to fight against this inevitable onslaught

Jameson: [00:16:34] of tantalizing convenience that people are falling into because they’re willing to trade their security for convenience and this is a common theme and a number of different aspects of people’s lives we trade a lot of things for convenience unfortunately because our time is precious to us if we do trade a lot of things for convenience I feel like that’s one of the [00:16:59] the number one not problems but one of the reasons why people use the essential authorities or central wallets like Robin Hood Cash App coinbase so how is there anything that’s going to make people feel like they have the same security as a bank using a self custody multi-sig product do you think we’re already there or do you think that there is there are more things that need to be

Jameson: [00:17:20] done to get people comfortable enough using products like CASA you know and have the same compatibility of storing that money in a bank or that asset in the bank where they know it’s not going to get stolen and well at least they believe it’s not going to get stolen there’s still a lot of education that needs to be done still can be very difficult to explain to someone that [00:17:39] their bitcoin don’t exist on any single device because this is simply a paradigm that has never existed before physical things really any other assets that you own you can always point somewhere and say yep this is where the asset you know actually exists or this is the custodian that is you know securing that asset but when you start to create these models where it’s actually

Jameson: [00:18:04] comprised of this amorphous set of things then it breaks a lot of people’s minds and you know it’s difficult to explain to them why this is a better security model because it’s just a completely different security model and people don’t even think about security models when they’re going about their day-to-day lives so i think that in the short to medium term there’s a lot of [00:18:28] education to be done in the long term to get to real mainstream acceptance it’ll become like any other technology where people once again they won’t know how it works but it will be the fact that so many other people use it that it just becomes a sort of de facto thing that you don’t

[00:18:45] even question orm provides a bridge to the digital currency mining world for individual

Jameson: [00:18:49] investors financial institutions and energy companies by combining over seven years of mining experience 24 seven management and directly aligned incentives orm’s managed mining program is the simplest way to enter the digital currency mining market to learn more please visit ormcapitalventors.com it’s trade-off of convenience over over self custody throughout the space as i mentioned on [00:19:11] robin hood on coinbase and i hope the people are moving to a solution where they’re in control of their own bitcoins i’m not very interesting jameson how you explain the fact that bitcoins not necessarily on one device it’s on this ledger that we all believe to be true and i think that was one of the things that i realized back in 2013 when i was coming into blockchain and bitcoin

Jameson: [00:19:32] space was that there was this one truth and you could believe it and it was backed by these computers where we which we’re using energy to mine bitcoin so now jameson we met back in maybe 2013 2015 i think probably 2015 because we were both a local components of components of the bitcoin industry here in you know the south east and just decided that this was the future when [00:19:55] you got into bitcoin in the beginning how did people react to that and did it affect your perception of it or how is that conversation with some of those you know people that are closer to you changed over the years about maybe their perception of bitcoin and you know what you’re doing in the

JohnPaul: [00:20:11] space and all the work you’re putting into can you talk a little bit farther on you know how that

Jameson: [00:20:15] attitude has changed mainly maybe because the price has risen or just because the technology has gotten more awareness yeah i mean i was the crazy guy who would happily spend hours explaining the system to people and i don’t know you know even if they got it from a technical standpoint i think there was generally just so much skepticism and a million reasons of why it might not get [00:20:39] significant adoption why it could fail even from a non-technical standpoint that most people just discounted it i would say you know it could probably count on one hand the number of people who actually ended up sharing my belief back then in the early days and then for the course of several hype cycles bubbles booms crashes a few more people have come along and realize that this is

Jameson: [00:21:06] not a flash in the pan fad that’s going to be disappearing but it’s actually here to stay and i think that that is going to be how it continues to grow it’ll be a little bit at a time though of course the growth will happen in spurts and it’ll be like any other technology that once it becomes readily adopted and essentially ubiquitous then people will just take it for granted [00:21:36] and i think we’ve got a long way to go until we get to that point there’s still a ton of things to be done on the usability side the security side the privacy side i believe that bitcoin is a project that is aiming to be the fairest and you know optimal form of money and we certainly have a number of weaknesses things that could be improved from a technical standpoint that i

Jameson: [00:22:08] believe that i’m going to be continuing to focus my my time for the foreseeable future on improving this system if we ever get to the point where i feel like bitcoin is done has met all of its goals then hopefully i will be able to pivot and work on other technologies that will also empower individuals in different ways so you talk about this empowerment i think that’s one of the [00:22:36] things that a lot of the early bitcoiners like myself and you really had in their dna it was this currency this money that was just true and fair and backed by math and really in my opinion for the people and i obviously with getting bitcoin growth we’ve seen a lot of institutions coming in just because of the nature of the industry and the nature of the asset class but over the

Jameson: [00:22:57] past five years of being in this space this idea that bitcoin is the people’s money do you still think it resonates you know with you today and with the community today or do you think it’s become more commercialized oh i guess the downside to being open to everyone is that it also means of course that it’s open to institutions and larger players who may not care about the ideology and [00:23:21] may only really care about using it for financial like hedging and speculation purchases but that is part of what you have to deal with any tool can be used in a variety of different ways and you may not agree with all the ways that they’re being used for but that’s fine i think one of the the things that we have fallen short on is we’re a long ways away from being able to be

Jameson: [00:23:52] a ubiquitous form of money that can be used by you know anyone including like people in third world countries that don’t have access to to great financial infrastructure there have been some small good adoption cases but for a variety of reasons usability and scalability being the primary ones we’re still a long way i think from having less well off people be able to [00:24:24] adopt and benefit from this technology we’re still at the point where the people who are going to be benefiting from it the most are the ones who have the resources and the time to invest into scaling the learning curve required to get into it chain has a tool and i think for me i look at bitcoin as one of the best tools for society for scaling trust across a decentralized network

Jameson: [00:24:48] but one of the things i wanted to touch on which it came out i believe two days ago was that usdc which is a coin bases stablecoin with the us government permission they partnered with the exile government of venezuela and distributed aid to people and health care workers in venezuela but i saw it that is now stablecoins are being used as a tool of us foreign policy [00:25:12] and this is i think one of the first real public use cases of his nation state intervening with another nation state citizens giving direct aid to the people through a stable coin or through a

JohnPaul: [00:25:23] blockchain network how do you see nation states and central banks using blockchains

Jameson: [00:25:29] as a tool in either a good or or a bad way cryptography in general is a double edged sword it can be used for two primary purposes one is to obfuscate or to encrypt things to keep them private so that only the intended recipients can see the data the other is almost the exact opposite which is identification and authentication basically using cryptography to publicly sign [00:26:04] messages to essentially attest that information has been created or authenticated by no one other than you and so i would expect that institutions nation states whatever are going to be using these distributed ledgers for the latter they certainly could build some privacy functionality into it but i don’t think that it really is going to be of much benefit for them

Jameson: [00:26:39] to do rather i expect that this type of blockchain or distributed ledger like central bank technology is going to be used as a tool of control and surveillance now there certainly are some potential good use cases for it where it would for example be really easy for i think entities to kind of airdrop money on people for example but it’s also but going to become a lot easier [00:27:09] for them to track people’s money and i would expect to censor their money as well we’ll generally expect that cons will probably outweigh the pros at least from my perspective but that’s not to say that they’ll be like 100 complete bad and i’m sure that they will be able to help some people and as we see i guess he’s competing currencies or competing networks show up and really come to

JohnPaul: [00:27:33] scale over the next 10 years how do you see the media changing their perspective on bitcoin or

Jameson: [00:27:41] there’s the narrative in general to the public either in the united states or you know across the globe because i feel like the media now has almost looked at bitcoin oh it’s too small it’s still functioning very slowly like it doesn’t really work it’s volatile do you think that media story is going to change to where it’s more of trying to get consumers to use the stable back or the central backed

JohnPaul: [00:28:02] currencies or blockchain networks over bitcoin almost like shunning it or how do you see that

Jameson: [00:28:07] narrative potentially playing out with these two two or three or four or five different competing blockchain interests i think that in general the media is just going to echo back to people what they think they want to hear and that a lot of that is influenced by powerful or reputable people and what we’ve seen happen and what i expect happens with a lot of technologies is that [00:28:31] early on pretty much everyone is skeptical and believes that the new technology is never going to take off and as these new waves of adopters come in the people who adopt it as the sort of total size of the adopter pool grows then there will be more and more people who are reputable for other things you know outside of that technology that will come in and they will start to

Jameson: [00:28:58] essentially lend their own credibility to the credibility of the new technology and that’s what we’ve really been seeing happen this past year we’ve seen some big heavyweights from software and then finance and other spheres publicly come out and say bitcoin is an amazing technology and these are the reasons why you should care about it and why it’s important and why we are investing in it [00:29:26] and so on and so forth and so i expect that’s going to continue to play out both with bitcoin and any of these other technologies is it’ll just come down to who are the most powerful and reputable people behind them and how are they able to influence the media and other narratives and i think that narrative message has been changing just with the i’d say michael sailor

Jameson: [00:29:49] coming on and doing the micro strategy purchasing 500 million dollars with the bitcoin on the balance sheet it was the first public company to really to do that publicly and go out and i think that’s created a ton of news and we’ve seen that cycle of people like paltry de jones attaching their name to bitcoin so i i definitely agree with you there james and i see that continuing and i think that [00:30:09] will help build the legitimacy in the eyes of i would say you know that 40 to maybe 30 to 50 year old kind of crowd and hopefully that pushes them to continue to learn and be educated about the technology do you remember the first time you heard about bitcoin james and it was your initial thought this is gonna this is gonna something i’m gonna look into and potentially work on for

Jameson: [00:30:32] years or did you initially disregarded i think it was too complicated to buy and use i believe that the vast majority of people you’ll talk to will say that they discounted bitcoin the first time perhaps the first several times they heard about it i know that i did and that’s why i’ll never remember the exact first time that i heard about it because i know i heard about it two or three [00:30:58] times at least on various you know nerd news websites and i basically laughed and said oh this nerd money is gonna get hacked and everybody is gonna go broke and it’ll all end in tears and it wasn’t it was probably at least six months if not longer until some slash dot article i believe came along with some development in the space and i was like oh this thing’s still around

Jameson: [00:31:26] and so that’s when i actually read the white paper and my computer science background kicked in i was like oh wow this is actually really an interesting elegant solution to a problem that i never even thought about and that’s really when it was off to the races i started going down the rabbit hole and learning about money in general which very few people ever bothered to do so that’s uh [00:31:54] i think there’s very few people who just hear a crazy idea and immediately latch on to it and dive head first that’s why the staining power of this system is something that will continue to change people’s minds as they eventually realize it may take them six months like me it may take them years it may take them decades but eventually they’ll realize that this thing is not

Jameson: [00:32:19] going away and there’s probably some good reasons why it hasn’t gone away yeah why it has not fallen away i think that’s one of the biggest things in my life and over the years because when i got into crypto i was only like 15 years old and just kept preaching and preaching this bitcoin thing it’s 70 dollars it’s 60 dollars it’s 50 dollars it’s not going away guys it’s going to change the world [00:32:42] and as a young naive kid i was you know just running around preaching this new internet money that people were like oh okay yeah sure it’s this digital currency it’s gonna lose all of its value it’s too volatile and i think that’s one of the things i want to talk about which is how do you build a good position in bitcoin as a safe haven asset or as an investment and what i mean by that is

Jameson: [00:33:02] what i’ve been telling people now is you want to be buying bitcoin consistently on a weekly or monthly basis you mentioned on another podcast about how you maintain your lower overhead but really how do you know when to hold bitcoin maybe when to sell some for profits when to secure more bitcoins obviously you have to be detailed in the market and paying attention but how do you hold or even [00:33:24] tell people or advise people on managing their bitcoin position or really growing it and not fomoeing or not selling it when it goes up by a hundred percent and leaving a huge upside on the table because of just a logarithmic nature of how bitcoin grows and how it doesn’t scale linearly like normal stocks and bonds and other things like that i’m not a good poster child for the like

Jameson: [00:33:47] dollar cost averaging because that wasn’t even really a thing back when i got in like there were no tools to do that so i actually bought most of my bitcoin in three different major events there was like my initial oh i got to get some of this to play around with it and then there was a few years later when i was like oh it sounds like there’s going to be ETFs and all these other [00:34:12] things so maybe i can front run it and i went through this whole process to convert my ira into a self-directed ira and then turn that all into bitcoin in a matter of a few months i was dollar cost averaging at that point because that was after the mount gox crash and the price kept going down and down and at one point i had actually lost half of my retirement

Jameson: [00:34:33] because it had gone down so much eventually the long-term play worked out there and it’s just really hard to give general financial advice and it’s because everybody’s situation is different there the reason why i was able to put a decent amount of money into bitcoin is because i had been diligently following personal finance forums and the like fire style financial [00:35:05] investment and budgeting and living advice for a number of years and had been able to build up a nice savings and so i i had multi-month cash savings emergency supply and i was maxing out my 401k and i was able to allocate money and beyond that was just discretionary budget and it was like i might as well put it into this bitcoin thing because i feel like it’s going to be a good savings

Jameson: [00:35:33] vehicle and and it’s in the asset it’s not like anything else for the average person i think it comes down to how well off you are you shouldn’t be like going into debt to buy this speculative asset that you should treat it like a different type of savings account really and you don’t want to put yourself into a position where you’re harming your normal financial budget [00:36:00] other than that it’s really just going to come down to conviction and what things you may be willing to sacrifice because you’ve lowered your time preference there’s plenty of things that i could have bought or there are plenty of times when i could have sold bitcoin and bought something else and i just never did because i don’t know it’s most like physical things like lambos and

Jameson: [00:36:25] stuff are not worth it to me maybe they will be someday but i drove lotus is odd so yeah i don’t know if you know this detail but obviously that i drove the lotus elise for a few years and i had the bitcoin license played on it and i i considered that kind of an investment in advertising for bitcoin but the lotus that i bought was actually a salvage [00:36:50] title vehicle that i bought on ebay for really cheap so it it looked really expensive but it was actually far more affordable than people would have imagined even then i was trying to keep a low time preference and not spend a lot of money on a flashy car i remember that car it was always something where i was like oh that’s such a cool car jameson and it definitely did work i think

Jameson: [00:37:16] people thought it was more expensive that it actually was and the bitcoin license plate just had that final touch on it which really nailed it in the coffin especially bitcoin was rising at that time so i felt like everyone was like oh look an expensive lotus but really you mentioned a great point which is lowering your time preference and i feel like that’s one of the biggest things [00:37:33] about bitcoin is you have to have that longer time preference and view this as almost an investment in your future self and one of the things you also mentioned is how you you seem like you prepare for the edge case really well not only with kasa but also in your personal life are you able to talk a little bit more about how you maybe have prepared for this edge case after you know you sold the

Jameson: [00:37:55] lotus and you moved off the grid and why you maybe went that route and made those decisions yeah and i guess to back up a little bit to one of your earlier questions it helps to put your bitcoin into a high security setup that is difficult to access now that helps you protect against loss and theft but it also helps protect you against yourself because if it takes a lot of [00:38:19] effort for you to send your bitcoin out of your self custody to an exchange to sell it then and we’ve heard this from a number of kasa clients as well it’s just less likely that you’re going to panic sell so that can be a good thing as well over the long run now remind me what the point we were getting toward it was no worries that was a great answer on the like time preference

Jameson: [00:38:42] really how you’ve transitioned from going to going off the grid and maybe why you decided to make that move in the first place yeah it’s a very long story but even have several articles and full-length presentations about privacy and all the things that i’ve learned but the short version is that the internet and the communication age of course is a double-edged sword in the sense that [00:39:14] while it helps us be able to communicate with all types of people now you reaching out and making new connections and engaging in all types of interactions which can be very productive the inverse is also true you can engage in unproductive harmful interactions and it’s also not just you being able to reach out to the world but now the world can reach back at you

Jameson: [00:39:41] and especially what happens here with social media phenomenon is that you can go from being a nobody to having a hundred thousand if not millions of people all of a sudden in the blink of an eye looking at you and that can be due to anything like just a single viral post for example that you might make or somebody might make about you and when that much attention gets cast upon you your [00:40:12] threat level goes through the roof because it’s just a matter of numbers that some small fraction of a percent of people are downright malicious and will seek to do you harm in order to help themselves that’s really what happened to me is i went from being a nobody to having hundreds of thousands of people paying attention to me on twitter and then eventually some random guy comes

Jameson: [00:40:38] along and decides he wants to try to extort me and so that’s how i ended up with my whole neighborhood being shut down by a SWAT team getting called out to a false bomb and hostage situation at my residence and that exposed me to this what i consider to be a sort of asymmetric attack that is a flaw in our law enforcement system that can be exploited by anyone who’s [00:41:05] technically sophisticated enough the only defense against that there are two defenses against that one is you continue living your life normally and you just tell you go you know to all of your local law enforcement people and get yourself put on a special watch list so that if any calls come in they get flagged as being potential false type of call or since i didn’t want to do that

Jameson: [00:41:33] the only other way around it is to essentially change your whole life so that it’s not possible for someone to find your physical address it’s not possible for someone to then attack you either on their own or by sending other people to your address that they may even be good intention people like the police but essentially misusing those resources that was a very long [00:42:02] journey it also costs a lot of time and money and in the couple years since i did that some very good resources have come out so that i feel like now i can just send people to buy a book that actually has everything that i wish i had known when i set out on that journey and talking about that journey that you went on i read your new york times article we talked about how to vanish in 15

Jameson: [00:42:29] steps can you share a brief summary of maybe some of those steps are the most important steps for our listeners the lowest bar that almost anyone can do is to just use software on your computer to hide what you’re doing whether it’s ad blockers vpn the tour etc because whenever your computer talks to another computer it exchanges your ip address and ip address can be used to geo locate [00:42:55] you and there’s also a ton of other data that gets sent by your browser that it’s preferable to block and things that can be used to track your activity all over going more extreme though and the thing where few people are going to do this is that if you want to own any property you need for that property not to be in your name so that means creating some sort of other legal entity like a

Jameson: [00:43:23] trust or a corporation that essentially owns the various property and then your you are privately listed as the a member of that corporation and not publicly listed anywhere because you know any basically any property that you pay property taxes on is going into some public database that can be queried by really anybody going a step beyond that is making sure that your name and other [00:43:51] personal information goes into as few private databases as possible and this is where a lot of overhead comes in of using pseudonyms using physical remailer boxes not getting mail sent in your name to your home address but rather to other places it can become complicated it can become as complicated as you want because the more layers of obscurity that you use the more privacy use

Jameson: [00:44:20] theoretically have and so the the short version of all these different techniques is essentially what you’re doing is you’re creating proxies you are shielding yourself from directly interacting with other things and other people and other legal entities and other organizations and every type of interaction that you have whether it’s digital or physical or legal or financial there [00:44:48] is going to be a way to put a proxy in between you and whatever you’re interacting with but some cases it’s easy and cheap other cases it’s really complicated and expensive so it’s it requires a very different perspective on your life and the willingness to put in a decent amount of effort and think about these things and as we know how hard that is people aren’t really thinking about

Jameson: [00:45:15] the custody solutions or even you know the privacy just the amount of data that everyone I think gives up and the openness I find it interesting back in middle school when I was growing up they would teach us never to put your real information online never to meet in a stranger online and then now in this world today we live in 2020 everyone is uploading everything they do online to TikTok [00:45:37] or to Instagram and everyone is talking to everyone else online and meeting strangers you know online which is crazy how far that message has changed to the majority and the general public talking about bitcoin you tweeted yesterday that bitcoin is a financial escape pod camouflage as a bubble protecting its occupants from the relentless sucking vacuum of fiat I agree with you completely

JohnPaul: [00:46:02] but can you explain a little bit more about what you’ve meant by that statement and expound on it for

Jameson: [00:46:07] listeners so one of the problems with bitcoin and trying to explain it to people is everybody comes in with their own perspective bitcoin is a multifaceted system so you may approach it like I did originally from a technical perspective you may approach it from a like philosophical political perspective you may approach it from a financial or economic perspective this is what [00:46:33] makes it difficult to talk to anyone new person because you have to figure out what their perspective is and how they’re approaching it and in terms of bitcoin narratives I think it’s really helpful to just come up with more simple metaphors like that that don’t require a lot of complicated explanation but rather just are trying at a very high level to describe what the purpose

Jameson: [00:46:59] of the system is and there are certain narratives and perspectives of bitcoin that I’m not a fan of but I can’t stop people from perpetuating them you know in particular I really don’t like people coming in and just viewing it as like a short-term speculative asset I’ve never considered it to be a sort of get rich quick scheme but rather to be a don’t get poor slowly scheme because what you’re [00:47:24] doing is you’re getting rid of the ability for your money the value of your money to be inflated away over a long period of time that was the original reason that I bought some it was more on a multi-decade investment time frame rather than a oh this thing is going to go 1000x in the next few years type of of idea but speaking back to the metaphor though is that a lot of people especially

Jameson: [00:47:53] the financial and economist people will just look at it and they all they’re looking at is the price charts and so obviously what they see is a bubble but bubble phenomenon occur all over the place especially when you’re talking about the creation and adoption of new networks and a network doesn’t necessarily even mean like a digital technical network gonna be any kind of networks [00:48:18] networks can be biological for example and the like the ebbs and flows of this the price and the adoption or whatever will turn some people off because they don’t understand what organic adoption and growth looks like and they consider it to be a failure because they for whatever reason believe that like bikkoyne should have some sort of predictable steady growth curve in order to be

Jameson: [00:48:43] a widely adoptable thing but that is not one of the goals of bikkoyne the goal of bikkoyne is to allow people to interact with this system that is resilient against change in manipulation by small kabals or third parties powerful entities or whatever everything else that happens there are side effects that it would be nice if there wasn’t crazy volatility up and down and [00:49:15] people panicking and losing their money but those side effects those are a result of having a truly free market and there are not many truly free markets out there and so this confounds a lot of economists and other financial types which is fine either they’ll eventually get it or they won’t to sub-tweet it a guy just the other day who apparently has been a bikkoyne skeptic since 2013

Jameson: [00:49:43] and i don’t think his skepticism has worked out from it as well as it would have if he had opened his mind a bit more to it you mentioned that people are always looking for that that 10 20 percent 15 percent return per year and they expect bikkoyne we saw the price drop by two thousand dollars yesterday last night and everyone freaked out i’m like no but it’s up it’s all the news [00:50:04] meters like bikkoyne is down two thousand dollars but it’s up insane amounts went from nine k to this 19 k just in the past 30 to 40 days people have this assumption that they should be able to get as you mentioned those 10 percent returns so why is why do you think that is because we’re just comparing it to the u.s. dollar is it because that’s the linear growth that stocks have why do

Jameson: [00:50:26] you think people expect this need for bikkoyne to grow at a determined growth rate or determined value over you know the next five years or 10 years for it to be an actual currency for it to work in the day-to-day marketplace not understanding that what they’re comparing it to is the u.s. dollar which is being printed in the trillions and is losing relative value over has been losing relative [00:50:48] value for the past 70 80 100 years it’s just a you know lack of sophistication and lack of putting time and effort into actually analyzing the thing if you want to there are hundreds of different metrics that you can track regarding bikkoyne i think that a lot of people only track the price because it’s easy it’s like it’s on all the websites it’s theoretically if you believe in in free

Jameson: [00:51:19] markets then the price is theoretically the sort of aggregation of all of these other hundreds of metrics but because bikkoyne is still so tiny there’s a lot of noise i think the like the signal that we’re given from the price is really only applicable at an order of magnitude level if you’re looking at these exchanges of single digit percentage changes per day like that’s noise it’s froth [00:51:48] a single billionaire can step in there and move the price by leaps and bounds if they want to which is actually if you’ve listened to like michael sailor talk about how they acquired the bikkoyne it was actually quite sophisticated that they were to able to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars with the bikkoyne without even moving the price that takes some real dedication and hats

Jameson: [00:52:12] off to him you know obviously that’s good for him if you’re acquiring that much you don’t want to move the market because you’re essentially shooting yourself in the foot but if someone wanted to they certainly could move the market with that level of money and while hundreds of millions dollars sounds like a lot of money there are tons of entities out there that’s a drop in the bucket [00:52:33] for them to play around with and i think that that adoption trend is only going to continue as these entities grow and see the real value of bikkoyne i myself was when i read about how they got the bikkoyne’s through micro strategy through their strategies was amazed by just how liquid the market was enabled to absorb 500 million dollars without really putting a dent in the price of

Jameson: [00:52:54] bikkoyne i think that helps show me that the fact that this market is huge and will continue to grow jones i have a few rapid fire questions for you that i want to run through and then we’ll be done

JohnPaul: [00:53:03] for the day so real quick what advice would you give your 18 year old self oh my i’ve had plenty

Jameson: [00:53:11] of good and bad things happen over the past decade or so but i don’t really regret them every thing that happened was learning experiences and got me to where i am today i don’t know i think the only real advice would be to remain inquisitive and keep learning new things that’s how i ended up where i am i would say some things happened to me over the years where i probably took a step back [00:53:38] from that and was distracted by other things but the culmination of all human knowledge is at our fingertips now and it’s a huge waste for people to be spending a significant portion of their time just doggling around and watching cat videos they should be learning about bikkoyne instead of doing watching cat videos what is the best tip for making the world a better place in your eyes

Jameson: [00:54:06] minding your own business i think it’s the opposite of your question but i think one of the things that makes the world a worse place is when people start trying to meddle in other people’s affairs because they consider it to be the right thing to do that they whatever they decide is going to be the best for everyone but this sort of goes back to the free market principles i do generally believe that [00:54:31] looking out for yourself and not trying to trample on other people for what you consider to be their own good is just the clearest way to go forward and how long is your beard at the moment that’s a good question i don’t really regularly measure it’s definitely at least seven or eight inches long it’s it’s been growing pretty well during the pandemic i have not been taking quite

Jameson: [00:54:59] as good care of it because i haven’t really have it to go out and be that presentable any beard products that you use when you want to be presentable with your 12 inch beard that you would suggest our listeners check out i have to use the products on a regular basis otherwise it’ll get all tangle and whatever i’m a daily user of beardsly conditioner i’m like a weekly user of their shampoo and then [00:55:25] i use the oil a couple times a week too though i don’t have really a preference for either one and then when you’re really going out and need to keep everything manageable you got to have a nice firm hold wax to to use as well and i think i use it’s called like amish something beard balm for that honest i think it’s honest amish beard balm i love it so the last question i have for

Jameson: [00:55:49] you today is what problem do you face every day that nobody has solved yet and i think is possible to solve i’m sure there’s a multitude of them but i’m all over the place these days it’s i would say one of one of the most like fundamental problems comes down to simple communication issues and i think this really manifests itself well on social media i get to see this because i have [00:56:23] this outsized following and basically what i the phenomenon that i get to observe is that when you have enough followers you start to realize that no matter what you say it’s practically impossible and i don’t know if this is a limitation of our english language or something more fundamental but it seems to be practically impossible to say something even if it’s just like a very simple

Jameson: [00:56:53] like one sentence opinion or statement or whatever and not have that be misinterpreted it seems like there’s always a way that people manage to misinterpret even like the simplest thing that you say and that’s a fascinating thing it’s one of the things that keeps social media interesting because it results in conflict and strife and then you trying to to hone your craft and be more precise in what [00:57:21] you’re saying but i think that this is an interesting this general phenomenon of communication that it is still very challenging to say exactly what you mean and ensure that everyone interprets the way that you mean it i can’t agree with you more the social media train that we all live on and that we interact with really breeds that that confrontation or in every free even a simple

JohnPaul: [00:57:45] statement like 21 million bitcoins jimison why i appreciate you coming on to the podcast i appreciate

Jameson: [00:57:52] everything you’ve done for the bitcoin community over the years the work you’ve done the clients

JohnPaul: [00:57:57] the work you’ve done on multi-sig wallets with kasa i appreciate really just being in

Jameson: [00:58:03] not an influencer but a someone i could look up to in this space and have looked up to over the past years and you know when you’re growing up and meeting in in person and in talking through meetups

JohnPaul: [00:58:13] i really relish those moments of building this community and building bitcoin so i appreciate

Jameson: [00:58:19] that a lot what can our listeners connect with you online after the show very easy to find me on twitter my handle is just lop and my website lop.net has thousands of different resources that will easily consume a year of your time if you want to dedicate it to diving down the bitcoin rabbit hole the website for kasa is just keys.kasa k-e-y-s dot c-a-s-a and we’ve got a ton of educational [00:58:52] resources on there as to why we believe that we’ve built a superior security and usable self-costity

[00:58:59] product thanks again jameson for that appreciate it and remember to mine on i hope you enjoyed today’s episode of digital gold be sure to subscribe so you’re notified when the new episode drops don’t forget to leave us a five-star review to support our journey to become the number one crypto podcast thanks so much for listening and until next time mine on

Jameson: [00:59:45] so