TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #29: Jameson Lopp

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Jameson Lopp to discuss a range of topics including private key management, anarcho-capitalism, SWATting, and why we need to be continually optimistic about freedom enabling technologies like Bitcoin. Follow Jameson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lopp Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Use the promo code "CRYPT" at www.thecryptocandle.com for 10% off a crypto candle at checkout. Buy one and you might win some bitcoin!

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It's your boy, Marty Bent. Here on a Tuesday morning, it's Blockchain Week here in New York City. It's crazy. The suits have flooded. Getting away from the chaos, getting an early morning start here in Flatiron at Barstool Sports Studios. We're here with Jamison Lopp. Jamison, welcome to the podcast. Glad to be here. Thanks for coming on, man.

For those of you who don't know, Jameson is a professional cypherpunk, creator of Statoshi, infrastructure engineer at Casa Hodel right now, and was previously at BitGo. But most of you may know him from Twitter, because he gives pretty sage advice out on Twitter. So yeah, Jameson, I'm just curious, what is your tale? How did you find Bitcoin? Well, I can never actually remember the specific article, but I'm pretty sure it was a Slashdot article in mid to late 2012.

And I'm sure it wasn't the first time that I had read an article about Bitcoin, but for whatever reason, I read that article and was like, hey, this thing hasn't gone away. I thought it was going to get hacked and would die. And so I started looking into it more, read the white paper. But then the real catalyst that helped me get past a lot of my initial questions and doubts was actually one of my fellow co-workers sitting in the cubicle next to me. I leaned over and I asked him, hey, you know about this Bitcoin thing? And he was like, oh, yeah, I've been mining and trading it for a couple of years now. So he was able to answer a lot of my initial questions.

And then I got more obsessed with it than he was and went a lot further than he had. And, you know, we still keep in touch and I still try to get him to go full-time Bitcoin, you know, which I ended up doing in 2015. And it's been a wild ride ever since then. I feel like everybody who's like enthralled with Bitcoin is on that journey to find a way to work in Bitcoin 24-7. and yeah well i mean i felt like i was already in it 24 7 just you know trying to be a part of the community and understand and and once i saw all the venture capital money flowing in i was like well maybe i can stop doing this while i'm at my other job and just be doing it while i'm at a job that's actually in the same industry no that's a that's a crazy thing about bitcoin too

it's like it's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you want to contribute to it you can add to the network effect there's many ways to add to the network effect you can run a node you can create the website that you did which is incredible it's my favorite resource in bitcoin go to lop.net his bitcoin resources page a plethora of links that that'll that'll that's my favorite place to push people down the rabbit hole so click on a link a link a day for the next year yeah and and you'll learn a lot about bitcoin um how how active is that site do you know you know how much traffic it gets? Yeah, I mean, I've got some Google Analytics on it, and

obviously it follows the hype cycles where during the peak at the end of 2017 it was getting thousands of hits per day, and these days it's more like a few hundred hits per day. And if anything, though, it's becoming more active

from a community participation standpoint, because I ended up open sourcing it, it's on GitHub, and I get a few pull requests per week now of people wanting to either add links or fixing broken links. This is actually one of the banes of operating this thing is that I've yet to find a good automated crawler that will just notify me when one of the links breaks

because there's a lot of links on there and I'm not clicking through them all. Yeah, it's got to be an arduous process to figure that out. That's what messes me up. It happened to me on Twitter recently. I was looking for a conversation. Somebody changed their Twitter handle. just like the conversation just jumped into the abyss um yeah so what are you most interested in

in bitcoin right now what are you focusing on obviously you're working on casa hodl um how's that process been yeah uh we're actually we're trying to get the the casa twitter account because because everybody thinks the name of the company is casa hodl um so it's just casa like uh like a house or castle or what have you. And I've been, you know, in the security space for a little over three years now. At BitGo, I was primarily working on infrastructure for their hot wallet security, which provides a lot of unique challenges and is really a nightmare, you know, trying to help people operate hot wallets. And now I've pivoted, and at Casa, we are trying to build the ultimate user-friendly cold storage solution, the be-your-own-bank, be-your-own-vault type solution.

And the way that we're doing this is we're trying to merge the usability of a mobile app with the security that you get from hardware key signing devices. So the Kasa app will be just on your phone, and this is a three out of five multi-sig solution. You can have one key on your phone, like in the secure element that'll be a default though i'm going to be pushing to also have an option to to not do that and just have yet another device but then you will have so you'll then either have three or four hardware devices you can bring your own you know trezor ledger in the future you know who knows what else keep keep perhaps any popular device we want to be able to support or we also anticipate basically being a reseller of those devices and you'll you'll

basically set up your wallet, initializing it with all these different devices, and then Kasa will hold a fifth key as a recovery service to help out with certain disaster scenarios. And then when you want to actually send money out of this vault, you're going to have to go around and go to, you know, the different geographic locations where you're keeping these hardware devices. And so So the interesting thing about this is the hardware devices do a great job of basically making these things unhackable. You know, you could still get like socially engineered or potentially have malware in some of the software you're using and you send it to the wrong address. But most people who are using just a single hardware device are now prone to other types of loss like natural disaster, end of life scenarios that they haven't thought through. And so we think that by distributing these physical devices, that's going to provide yet another layer of protection that not many people have.

And we're actually going to be recommending that they do not keep their seeds for these devices. And this is because when we thought through the security issues with Bitcoin wallets, the very first thing that you do with a wallet is you get a 12 or 24 word seed and you have to write it down. And what does the wallet tell you? It says, store this in a safe place. Well, personally, I believe that is a big fail right there for the average person. Would agree. That was a funny meme that Neeraj had on Twitter last week

when they were talking about Wences, Cesar's underground tunnels. He was like, that feeling when they're talking about these nuclear tunnels where the rich are storing their Bitcoin and I have mine and my seed on a Post-it note, my sock drawer. Exactly. That's a lot of people's security these days. Yeah, and so, you know, we figure that we want to help guide users through best practices, and the best way to do that is to help them avoid as many situations where they could easily shoot themselves in the foot

due to ignorance or just not understanding security. It seems like the CASA model sort of disincentivizes the $5 wrench attack, too, to a certain extent. Yes, that's definitely another thing. Now, you know, there's always going to be some level of physical attack where you might get held hostage, but, you know, if you are being held hostage and then you have to be taken around a lot of different places, especially if you keep some of those keys in, like, access controlled, you know, bank vault or whatever, it's definitely going to be a lot harder for them to pull that off. But, like, with regard to actually keeping track of the seeds, instead of keeping track of the seeds and then, like, trying to restore the hardware if you lose it, we're instead going to be supporting basically key rotation within the app itself. So we have this concept that we call the key shield that will be displayed front and center in the software. And it'll do things like every once in a while ask you to sign a message to verify that you still have the keys. so that we can be sure that you haven't lost them.

And if you can't do that, or if you lose a device or device fails or whatever, then there will be a very simple wizard for you to basically go through and say, you know, this device is lost or compromised, I need to replace it, and walk through the wizard and basically reset up your wallet and transfer the funds to the new set of public keys. That includes the new one where you've replaced the last one. And so basically what we're doing is we're trying to get away from having a requirement for the user to keep track of any unencrypted data or digital keys or whatever. Instead, the user only needs to keep track of a few physical devices, which I think is a lot easier for the average person to get their head around.

yeah that's uh would you argue that's probably one of the biggest hurdles uxy's for mainstream adoption is holding your own keys because what what we're seeing is that people are just trusting these decentralized third parties like coinbase gemini all these exchanges and i i think we need better education and private key management to sort of incentivize people to take well it's a psychological thing too people are used to holding their monies in banks and there's going to have to be a sort of a paradigm shift of of how people view money and securing their own money well it's definitely there's the convenience factor um there's um really the fact that like even even highly technical folks i've i've spoken to a lot of people who they're just not comfortable

with having to go through all of this and so they would actually rather trust um a specialist you That's what we do with banks, right, is we trust these security specialists to take care of all those issues for us. And, of course, we're all familiar with the tradeoffs of trusting particular specialists to do things on our behalf. But this is why, despite the fact that there are so many awesome, cutting-edge, mind-blowing stuff happening in this space, why after being in this space for like five or six years, I'm still just focused on private key management because I feel like it's this foundational thing that we are still a long ways from solving properly.

Right, and that's one of the things that irks me about the space right now is the impatience of everybody. We have a protocol, like the altcoin world, the ICO bubble, whatever you want to call it. It's everybody acting out of impatience. They want everything out of the box right away. And these technologies have been iterated on for decades. And we just got Bitcoin just under a decade ago.

And it's going to take time to fortify the system. Like, if you had to put like a timeline on it, I don't know if you could. But, you know, I think that we've come really far in 10 years, you know, going from zero to having probably tens of millions of people that actually use crypto, having these huge conferences with 8 000 something people at them um getting daily mainstream media attention um i think i was seeing some statistics recently that something like you know over 80 percent of people are at least like aware of cryptocurrencies it's crazy the normalization that's happened over like the last year and a half in particular like finviz.com which is a

website that i used to frequent a lot when i worked like at a hedge fund to follow market prices they have a whole crypto page right now it's crazy it's uh i didn't think it was going to happen this fast yeah and and so i think it's it's easy to um overlook how far we've come and and you know still see that we have a very long road ahead of us and we want to get to the end of that road as quickly as possible and i guess i uh i tweeted something recently where i was like you know, eventually the protocol is going to ossify and Bitcoin is going to become boring and then we're going to stop talking about it.

I can't wait for that. Yeah, I kind of look forward to that day. It'll also be, it'll be, you know, bittersweet that we succeeded, but now, you know, hopefully by that time there will be some new cool thing that we can be working on. Right. Ossifying the protocol.

Do you think that's possible? I think it's pretty much inevitable with any protocol that achieves sufficient adoption. At least if we're talking about, like, decentralized Internet protocols, you know, you look at SMTP or HTTP, any of these low-level protocols. I challenge anyone to, like, go out and try to find people who are debating making changes to these protocols. I mean, it's just not happening. now there was I guess HTTP2 finally came out recently after many many years of development

actually like Mike Belshi at Bitco had contributed to that before I think he even got into doing Bitcoin stuff that's how long that took but I fully expect that if the protocol continues to the point

that it has like sufficient market penetration then it just becomes too onerous to try to change it and so then we start building stuff on top of it because you don't need to get that same level of consensus to change it what uh what are the features that you would like added before ossification um well do you think bitcoin could survive in perpetuity as is or you know it could survive but you know i think one of the other than of course scalability stuff i mean i think the the biggest uh failure in bitcoin is privacy right now is that it just has terrible

privacy and that's why we have so many other blockchains out there that are competing on the basis of privacy alone is because that is one of bitcoin's greatest deficiencies yeah fungibility is going to be crucial that's that's what i've been saying it's going to be like the next segwit battle is making bitcoin fungible well yeah i mean and that could definitely get interesting once again with the like culture clash between uh asian miners and the rest of the culture class let's let's jump into that there's there's a lot of culture clashes going on all over the place between competing protocols between different uh stakeholders within the incentive system it is crazy you have it is a global decentralized system and you're having to cooperate with people

that frankly you really don't understand their culture at all and so it felt like during the segwit and bitcoin cash debates that the chinese miners just felt like westerners weren't respecting them enough and sort of what they've done which i would agree is merited to some extent like without bitmain we would not be where we are a lot of people hate on bitmain but i've been saying this a lot recently they were one of the few companies early in the early days willing to take the monetary risk and they're reaping the rewards right now um so what what's your what's your view on the culture clash and is there anything we can do to sort of bridge the gap it's it's tough because i i can't claim to actually understand uh you know their their

culture all that well um it's it's tricky because you can you know view the like power balance between the the different entities in the ecosystem um in different ways and you know some people see miners as the powerhouse that, you know, is continually building the blockchain. Whereas other people view them more as, oh, you know, it's the rest of the ecosystem that's actually creating the data that goes in the blockchain

and all the miners are doing is timestamping it. And so it's, there's no real like right or wrong perspective there. Like they're both correct. But then you get into the debate of, well, who really has the power? And so that's why all that, the UASF stuff and the SegWit2x and all of that was fascinating to watch last year. And I was actually disappointed that SegWit2x got called off at the last minute because I wanted to see what was going to happen. Nothing would have happened, right?

They would have missed it or it would have gone into a halt. We found out later that it would have just completely jammed up. Now, I'm sure that eventually they would have fixed that bug and it would have proceeded forward. Jeff Garzik's on to pushing an ICO now, so he's not too worried about it anymore. Yeah, I think he's put that whole mess behind him. Hopefully he's been shamed into irrelevance. Won't make you comment on that. No, but it's interesting.

We found out the intolerant minority has the power in these networks, like full node operators. Oh, yeah. One way that I've put it before is that the most powerful thing in Bitcoin is apathy. You could say the most powerful thing is the power of no, but no is the default. And so I think it ends up being more the power of apathy because the default is disagreement with breaking changes. i would say i'm pretty up all right how many what percentage of the network would you say is apathetic you know for the um you know it is it's hard to say um you know despite all of the the like a arguing and vitriol and and whatnot that happens on social media i think that

you know there there there is no real like representation of the bitcoin community and this is one of the things that that i find kind of amusing is a lot of people who get upset because they like look at uh subreddit that's what i was gonna say it's our bitcoin yeah yeah so many people who think that like our bitcoin is the bitcoin community i'm like are you kidding me like you maybe maybe that's the only place that you go to but honestly like i've been following bitcoin since like 2013 i rarely go on reddit i don't like reddit like i just don't like the ui of reddit it annoys me i've definitely uh stopped talking and conversing to many people on reddit and in general i i find twitter to be uh more better signal to noise i do as well why do you think

that is um i think it's just because you have more power to curate the your own experience right That's one thing. Yeah, people that hate on Twitter, I'm like, you're not using it correctly. Probably not. Right? You have to create lists. You have to. Yeah, you do have to put some work into it.

And then, you know, a lot of people get pissed off about different Reddits. And, you know, they might be pissed off at the Bitcoin subreddit because they don't like how the moderators do certain things. Or you might be pissed off at the BTC Reddit because you don't like how the community on there does things and, you know, downvotes people for certain stuff. Just don't go there. Yeah, just don't go there if you don't like it. I mean, there are, like, dozens of other options for places to talk about this technology. Yeah, what I've actually seen more over the past year is people diving into, like, private chat groups. Yeah.

A lot of the conversation happening there. I mean, that's been happening for the last five years that I've been following it, but I feel like there's been more and more people diving into these side chats. This is actually the tough problem for me is trying to ingest all of these different data streams so that I can stay up to date. And, I mean, I'm constantly throughout the day, I'm hopping back and forth between Twitter and Telegram and WhatsApp and Slack and IRC and some Reddit and probably a few others that I'm not even remembering. And that is because the community is so diverse and spread out and all over the place. And I'm not even hitting everything. I mean, I'm well aware that, like, there are big, like, WeChat rooms, and there are lots of forums.

Like, I don't go to Bitcoin Talk anymore, but, you know, I'm sure there are still people who discuss things on there, but... Remember Bitcoin Talk? That was... I do remember the good old days of Bitcoin Talk. Yeah, yeah. And that was... Is Cobra still behind the helm on that, correct? um i thought it was famous famous is it famous i think so um still waiting for the uh million dollar uh bitcoin talk 2.0 former software by the way it's been a few years i'm not sure what's

going on did they raise money for that um i think so i forget where the money actually came from but it may have been through various uh fundraisers or actual just ad revenue yeah that it made over the years yeah i don't really get a bitcoin talk that much anymore um now it's crazy it feels like i feel sometimes i feel like john snow in the battle of the bastards like when he's climbing up do you watch game of thrones when he's climbing through like the bodies the survives like this wave in particular after the bubble of december it's brought in so many people it's just like sometimes you have to like get your bearing straight there's so many new voices like clamoring around but how many of these how many more cycles do you think we'll go through before

bitcoin becomes more normalized uh i think we've still got a few more to go yeah um i think the the real question is how do you know you know when when we've hit like the saturation point yeah what do you think drives it more like the the underlying tech and the security of the network or the geopolitics like around it the geopolitical state of the world um well i mean this is like a very viral technology so i think that you know the the reason why you see the waves happening like this is is because um you know a few a few things may happen like on the tech side they get people excited and then you know you start to see evangelism and and

basically uh the viral network effects start to spread and basically grab hold of a new set of uninitiated people and then those people some of those people may get excited and you know that's They then do the same thing and it repeats until eventually it peters out and like there's no one really left to who wants to get excited at this phase because the rest of the world does not yet see anything particularly interesting about it. And then eventually it collapses in on itself and you're left with the people who are more likely to have gotten excited due to philosophy or fundamentals of it rather than just like speculation and trying to get rich quick. And then the cycle repeats. so let's dive into the philosophy behind it like that's what another interesting thing that's been uh it's been like as these waves come in is is sort of the bitcoin's roots are very anarcho-capitalistic um bitcoin's monetary policy is very austrian it's very

conflicted with the current way the world works yeah um so you think we have to convert minds as we convert people to bitcoin as well um convert we're using very religious undertones here well it's so there's two ways to look at it um one way which i think i tried to do a lot in the early days was yeah convert people like reason with them like explain to them why this is the superior thing and i actually stopped doing that um and instead um well these days i wait for people who are interested to come to me and ask you know questions and want to be educated um but but i think the more powerful thing is to demonstrate you know the the utility behind these networks and um you know actually getting people to use them and perhaps like showing them

use cases for, for things that they wouldn't normally be able to do. Um, now one, I think one result of if you can get people into the system and then they hold onto their value and they see it go up a crazy amount and they, they start to realize that like the economics of this system are more beneficial than their savings accounts or whatever, then that's one way to get them, um i guess more permanently uh interested in the system from an economic standpoint and never met anybody that hates money and uh it there's no real one one answer though because of the diversity of people who come into it for many different reasons and so that's one of the reasons why i stopped i stopped like proselytizing directly to people because i don't necessarily

know what their interests are and so i could very easily miss the mark and be wasting my time and so for me at least it's easier just to put educational resources out there and let people who are interested enough find them and then make their own decisions yeah what do you think is the like the number one catalyst for the aha moment i would say for me it was like creating my own personal wallet and writing down the seed phrase for the first time being like holy crap like that was an aha moment for me like taking it off coinbase creating your own wallet and sort of interacting with the system that way yeah uh well for me i mean it was actually making a transaction and getting something in return that was of course this was a long time

ago uh when uh you it was really hard to get bitcoins you basically had to go to mountain gox and do it send a overseas wire transfer and so at the time it definitely had much more of a feel this is some sort of like play token thing but once you exchange that for something else perhaps something that you can hold or something that you then make use of then you're like oh no you know this really is money and people are treating it like money yeah that's uh yeah i think the first thing i ever bought with bitcoin was like a pair of shoes was like holy shit i got new fresh kicks but um here's another like tricky subject we could jump into is like how different agencies different states different municipalities are are defining bitcoin and

it sort of pisses me off as we we can't use it as a currency like we use without without an extreme tax burden um so do you have uh sort of a definition in your mind of how bitcoin should be defined at a regulatory level well the tricky thing about bitcoin and a lot of these crypto assets is that i've referred to them as like chimeras that they have properties of multiple different asset classes and so the result is that you actually end up having multiple government agencies all wanting to define it in a way that suits them best and gives them the most regulatory control over it and um you know time will tell how how that plays out and whether or not it uh it really even matters why wouldn't it matter because um you know regulatory agencies

i mean they can and politicians and whatever they can pass all the laws that they want but if they can't actually enforce them then it's just a joke so uh that's why i think it's particularly going to be interesting to see what happens with the sec and how they react to all of these different offerings and um you know i suspect that they may end up having to to basically give up on trying to define a lot of these things as securities because some of them some of them are kind of securities some of them actually seem to change between being a security and not being a security and And I think that the complexity of some of these crypto assets is such that the government agencies can't possibly be flexible and fast enough to actually deal with them. Yeah.

Now, it's crazy watching the Senate hearings about cryptocurrencies, and it's funny. Some of these politicians are so tech-illiterate. It's like, hell, they're not going to be able to keep up. They can't even pass a budget, let alone make overarching decisions about this stuff. This part of the, I mean, there's a lot of arms races that are constantly happening. There's arms races around security, around privacy, around regulations. And this isn't new. This is why cutting edge technologies often get adopted by criminals because they are aware that governments are slow to adopt and understand various technologies.

So if you can stay ahead of government agencies, then you've got a big edge. So, you know, if the crypto asset ecosystem can continue innovating in crazy ways, then outpace the ability for governments to keep up with it, then that's a very interesting edge that these systems have. Yeah, and that's what I'm pretty sure I picked up this book because of your recommendation, The Sovereign Individual. That's what they jump into a lot of is cryptography has created a shift in the world. logic of violence and the leverage that that individuals have yeah over these nation states now do you think we transition to a post-nation state world uh if we do it's going to take a while yeah it's definitely not going to happen anytime soon not because that's like so that's been like the ethos of the cypherpunks sort of the overarching ethos over the last 30 years is

just creating technologies that enable sovereign individuals to live in peace. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of overlap between cypherpunk and the crypto-anarchist movements. And, you know, I think that crypto-anarchy is a logical extension of, like, cypherpunk ideology of sort of taking it to its final conclusion of what happens when there really is no way for an authority to control the entire system. Yeah. How did you get into it? Like, would you consider yourself a cypherpunk first that found Bitcoin or? No. Well, I mean, I was I was a libertarian. And I mean, I had gone through all the political ideologies over the years.

I mean, I was raised in a very conservative household and ended up going to an extremely liberal university and, you know, ended up being let down by all of these political parties. I mean, I guess by the time I got interested in Bitcoin, I considered myself libertarian, but, you know, Libertarian Party and its candidates in the United States let me down a few times over the years. I didn't fully agree with everything that they were doing, and it was Bitcoin that then led me to, like, anarcho-capitalism and voluntarism. and uh it's it's been uh you know it's i guess been most interesting because i felt like bitcoin could actually make that a reality um now i definitely get a lot of pushback on this uh from you know people who believe that that we need nation states simply because we've had them for so long. And that's how things are. And I think a constant pushback that I get is this belief that like voluntarism or anarcho-capitalism will be a utopia. And I definitely don't think it

will be a utopia, but what we're really trying to do is fix the, the root underpinnings of society to be not based on violence now um there's a lot of tricky things that are you then have to get into after that like how are different uh like public services going to get replaced and whatever people can't fathom it like conversations get heated sometimes when you when you talk about sort of replacing nation states people can't envision a world without governments and how would you envision like a transition we'd get like let's paint the picture of what uh cryptography enabled peaceful like anarcher capitalist world would look like might not be peaceful well i mean the the i guess most important thing that people are worried about

is is how do we replace uh public infrastructure and public services anything that is currently socialized. Um, and, and so the, the interesting thing is that when you look into services like, uh, healthcare or, um, roads or plumbing or whatever, those services tend to actually be, uh, performed by private companies, private contractors. It's just, the government is just coordinating. So I think the fundamental question comes down to how do you coordinate in a less authoritarian way and how do you fund those particular things. And so in a voluntary society it would be more based on funding based on usage. And I think the reason that that has not really been possible before is because um actually figuring out uh you know pay-to-play type usage

for all these things would be incredibly onerous but once we are in a a future where it's a lot easier to make like metered micro payments um and and automate a way to to remove a lot of the friction that would be required for that that's when i think this type of stuff actually becomes possible yeah that's um the microtransactions uh subject it's a touchy one people some people don't think it could succeed but um so is this a world do you think that would be enabled like lightning network or yeah i mean potentially uh lightning networks uh have the ability i think to enable uh whole new classes of economic interaction that just aren't possible right Yeah, it sort of goes back to, I believe it would enable something like Balaji described in the machine payable web, right?

So you'd be able to just, that's when things get really interesting, when the machines just start paying each other and we don't even interact. Do you think a lot of Bitcoin usage in the future will be machine to machine? yeah i mean i don't see why not um especially if we we end up basically creating this machine economy i mean the machines need to talk they need to talk to each other you know and and interact economically somehow now they could just i guess do that with their own private databases that some company sets up like a visa style thing but um but it would be more powerful if they were using uh open public network yeah an open public network especially one paper that came out i believe it was yesterday i don't know if you've read this yet but um mesh networks and sort of so

a lot of uh bitcoin transactions are are relayed over the internet right now blockstream has a satellite above us another avenue through which you could you could relay transactions and then this is an interesting one that came a story about it dropped yesterday basically txt or txtena excuse me working with samurai wallet to create sort of a mesh network where you can relay transactions while not being on the internet or not being on a cell network either so how would do you know like much about these mesh networks and how a little bit um that But there are actually a few folks at the conference who are, you know, doing mesh networking stuff, including one guy here in New York. And, you know, this is another, I think, fundamental piece of infrastructure that we need because you can make some pretty good arguments that the Internet itself is not decentralized enough.

You know, we still have too many choke points at ISPs that are easy for for like nation state actors to manipulate or tap or shut down or what have you. And so I am very hopeful that over the coming years, we will see the Internet become more like a truly decentralized peer to peer network. And, you know, that'll still probably start off more centralized at first as we see large companies, like, blanket the earth via satellites and drones and hot air balloons and all that stuff. But once we do have this, like, blanketed internet, then it should be, like, that much easier to start creating your own mesh nodes to then be able to propagate around at ground level. yeah and that's a again like you said like it's important thing to think about in regards to decentralization is you need multiple ways to relay these transactions and so right now we have it through the internet satellites a mesh network uh i believe nick zabo and elaine who are working on shortwave radio transmission yeah they were working on basically you know being able

to bounce signals off the atmosphere to relay them like over uh borders of nation states that trying to censor you but you know that's really really low bandwidth uh but but high censorship resistant operation that's uh like who who would use that like in what scenario would you have to use like a short wave would it be like possible to do that like on a mass adoption level or would it be very specific use cases no i think it would be more specific i mean at least right now it requires uh you know setting up specialized hardware and um i guess if i recall correctly one of the other tricky things is um you you have to be careful about like how you're uh you know directing those signals because it would be possible to triangulate them if you if you're

just like broadcasting all over um you know uh it's a very cypher punky uh type thing to do i'm not sure like how far they intend to take the technology like how easy they want to make it to use just to prove that you can do it it's crazy and then you have people like desantis talking about bouncing radio waves off the moon to do it that way just use the moon as a satellite yeah it seems like a long way to go though because because my understanding is that normally you can bounce them off the ionosphere yeah i was actually talking about that with bitcoin sign guy last night believe it or not we're talking about bouncing stuff off the ionosphere um incredible kid uh one of the best memes in bitcoin to date i would say uh buy bitcoin behind janet yellen um

so there's i don't know how to jump into this topic because swatting are you okay with talking about that yeah i mean i haven't uh reveal like all the details of it i have a blog post though that i'm gonna go into all the details soon okay so we'll let the blog post speak for speak for uh the whole experience but like in general it's a social engineering attack uh you think stuff like that is gonna uh become more common as bitcoin price appreciates yeah well you know this is um kind of an interesting aspect of i guess the rise of crypto anarchy is that now due to the the level of anonymity that sophisticated attackers can pull off on the internet they can actually exploit vulnerabilities that nation-state agencies have

created and that the main one with swatting of course being that these emergency call centers will take a call from anybody even if they don't know who it is or where it came from and they will um they're they're basically um instructed through their own government protocols that they have to treat everything as potentially real and so the result of that is that um you've got you know this one random guy uh ends up spending like 10 minutes of his day and is able to expend probably in excess of a hundred thousand dollars of public resources to lock down my entire neighborhood with dozens of police units and the SWAT team and the mobile command unit and EMS. And I mean, it was, it was crazy. I mean, that's, I was, you know, obviously I was upset that,

that someone targeted me. I knew that it was a possibility, but, um, the, the more upsetting thing was just the general, um, waste of public resources, because I mean, I'm a taxpayer. And So some of that is my resources, too. And I know that this is not a one-off incident. There have been many others like it. And as far as I can tell, they continue to happen. And the law enforcement agencies don't seem to actually be doing anything to try to close this vulnerability. The only thing that I know now is that my particular local law enforcement agency has me on a list that says if this guy, you know, has a call that says it's from his house, you know, saying it's a life or death situation, call this phone number first to verify with him and make sure that it's not fraudulent.

And I'm like, that is not scalable. I mean, that's cool that you're doing that for me, but that is not scalable. finding that in the moment would be I can't imagine that would be easy at all that's ridiculous but but I guess this plays into the drug

war too because a lot of these municipalities need to justify their budgets so in particularly with the drug war like these SWAT teams love going on missions to knock down doors and kill dogs for a minuscule amount of marijuana.

Well, you know, we actually saw, I think, just yesterday, news out of Georgia, just near Atlanta, where there was actually a heist being planned by four or five guys. They were planning on stealing a bunch of Bitcoin, like arm-robbing Bitcoin from a guy. Might have been somebody we know. You know, there are some Bitcoin operations happening in Atlanta. But they actually, as far as I could tell,

coincidentally got busted by the cops while they were planning in the hotel because someone alerted the cops to suspicious possible drug activity but they weren't they weren't drug activity they were actually planning uh a bitcoin robbery yeah holy shit there's uh there's many ways you can get attacked you can get hacked on the internet uh we saw what ryan selkis earlier this week somebody got a hold of his twitter account because they phone ported him phone ported him that's another problem like how come the phone companies can't get this together like uh well that's another awesome thing i guess about once again the rise of crypto anarchy is that these systems are actually creating new incentives that make people find and exploit vulnerabilities that

have been there all along but there was never really a good reason to do it and so what we're seeing now is that phone providers just have terrible security practices with regard to locking down your account and making sure that you are the rightful owner. And, you know, the only the only solution that I have for that, because what we saw with Ryan and a number of other people is that they were still they're still trusting these third parties and they're going to them and saying, hey, you know, put additional security on my account. You know, don't let anyone change the number unless I like physically come into a store with two forms of identification and blah blah blah and inevitably what happens is that a human does not follow that protocol

and therefore the security protocol is completely worthless because these these uh these attackers you know they just keep trying you know if they if they get a support tech that follows the protocol they hang up and they call again and get another one and so the the only solution that I have to that is uh to use a phone service that does not uh support phone porting um without actually having a unique code so like i use google phi and uh anyone is welcome to try to port my phone number but they can't do it without the unique code that i put in because there are no humans that can that have the ability to port it without that code that's interesting that's do you're liking google fi yeah i've used them for several years um they you basically pay

for what you use it's like ten dollars a gig that's not bad at all even international which is awesome and works in like a hundred countries that's crazy no it's also crazy like um like all these attacks and again like crypto like want to cry all these uh hospital computers is getting ransomware for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is helping expose that the emperor wears no clothes when it comes to internet security. Equihash, or Equifax, excuse me. I'm getting my words mixed up.

That's another big one. That was 240 million social security numbers just gone. So it seems like we might have fucked up on internet 1.0, internet 2.0, whatever you'll consider it from a security perspective. Well, yeah, I mean, we created all of these silos of sensitive information, and then, you know, the attackers only need to go get through one door in order to get huge volumes of important data. Yeah. I don't want to get heavy here, but it almost seems like a ticking time bomb to, like, a Fight Club-like scenario. Yeah, if, well, or even, I guess, what was the other, like, cyberpunk dystopian TV show?

Mr. Robot? Yes, Mr. Robot. That seems pretty plausible. I've never dove into Mr. Robot, but a lot of people tell me I should. but yeah it seems actually there was a mr robot clip going around right after facebook made that announcement about equine and uh it's funny because you see these like big corporate entities enter like mark zuckerberg comes out like we're gonna we got a blockchain team now we're putting a number one guy on it but it's like ah this is like against the whole ethos like you can't i'm definitely interested to see what they come up with uh do you think they make a facebook coin or

I mean, so far the announcement was so vague that it could be anything, and the odds are in the favor of them doing something stupid with regard to blockchain. It's very hard to, I think, do it right, do it in a way that actually makes sense. And in most cases, I think that any blockchain-based protocol that is basically being written and administered by one company is probably doomed to fail. It just doesn't make sense. antithetical to the ethos like i tweeted out like all right facebook you want to get in just experiment with lightning network and make it easy for facebook users yeah send bitcoin between each other and buy bitcoin do that and the network effect you'll create by doing that uh we'll make that bitcoin more valuable in the long run you know i mean that's why i really like

what square is doing with their cash app square cash app is is on point have you used it yet oh Yeah, the UX is incredible. The Bitcoin's in your wallet right away. You can withdraw right away. It seems like Jack's building a bank, right? He's got the credit card connected to the app now, and he just announced that they've got a lot of deals with retailers where you get cash back, which is pretty cool.

And it seems like he might be a Bitcoin maximalist as well. That's the rumblings that I've heard, yeah. Yeah, you came out with a bold prediction like Bitcoin reserve currency of the world in 10 years. That would be crazy. We've got a long way to go until then. Trillions of dollars. Yep.

All right, we'll wrap it up here. I want a wrap-up question. So are you optimistic or pessimistic about the state of Bitcoin at the moment? Definitely optimistic, especially with the Lightning Network. I see a whole new wave of innovation happening because basically innovating on these second-layer networks

is going to be so much easier to do. You don't have to worry about getting in contentious debates with people about changing protocols. You can basically be writing your own stuff and not have to get permission. So I think the permissionless innovation on the second layer networks is going to be a huge boon. And the folks that I talk to about it,

like Alex Bosworth, who worked with me at Bicco for a while, and he's basically diving headfirst into thinking about this new ecosystem. He's always coming up with this new stuff. He's like, oh, I was thinking about this and that, and I just realized that you can do this cool new thing. We never even thought of it before. and so it's just this new uh like acceleration is what it feels like and and seeing a whole new

class of developers get interested yeah that's that's the other thing the developer uh drain or not drain like it's uh interesting seeing developers get more and more interested with this and where would you say the state of like the development world is and from a developer perspective i mean ethereum has the developer community down pat right how would you compare bitcoin and ethereum's development community so they're very different i guess development philosophies between the two communities and i think that ethereum community tends to be like easier to get into um they're you know they they put a lot of of effort into to being easy to get up and running and write your first dApp type of thing.

Whereas in Bitcoin, it does tend to be a steeper learning curve, and there's more focus on being conservative and security practices and whatnot. And so it's definitely harder for new entrants, and that's why I think we can benefit from more developer outreach, and that's why I like to see the stuff that like Jimmy Saw and Chaincode and stuff are doing and you know I want to see more of that because we're definitely seeing

an impact from it yeah Jimmy's class and then what Chaincode and things like the things that companies like Blockstream and Chaincode are doing are awesome for the space the Chaincode residency is very impressive

from what I can tell and they sponsor one of the best meetups in the city thanks for the free pizza um but you have to go on to another podcast uh where can we find out more about you jameson well it's all on lop.net l-o-p-p.net um and you have a parting word of wisdom for the freaks out there um well you know you asked me if i was optimistic or pessimistic. And I think that the answer has to be for everyone to be optimistic because these systems are only going to be as good as what we put into them. And so while, while there is some benefit from, from having like adversarial thinking and like trying to pick things apart,

in general, you should still be optimistic that, you know, there are a lot of, of great talented people that are devoting their lives and resources to getting us towards this vision of a future in which you know no one controls money and you you basically control your own money and and even that's only the very beginning of of what i think is like the future of crypto assets and and really the digital lifestyle is that we have this set of people that are trying to bring control back to yourself. And it's not just about money. I think it's going to be about identity and reputation and just all of your data in general is getting that back under your own control. And so that's why I'm still working on private key management, because I think it's going to be a key piece to

to owning yourself and and and that's where we get once once again back to that concept of the sovereign individual is that uh you know you own everything about you and this gives you like the the best level of freedom that you can possibly have wow powerful stuff one day at a time people one day at a time um that was an incredible interview and you can find me at marty ben on Twitter if you like this podcast please rate subscribe share peace and love it was fun cool