TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #50: Jeremy Welch

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Jeremy Welch, co-Founder and CEO of Casa, to discuss how Jeremy became interested in Bitcoin, how he Casa came to be, and the state of personal data. Follow Jeremy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeremyrwelch Follow Marty on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MartyBent Peep Casa: https://keys.casa/ Use the code "CRYPT" at www.baboontothemoon.com for 10% off a Go-Bag!

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a sunday morning it's a morning podcast weekend morning i might have to put my npr voice on for this just because of the uh the time of day that we're doing this we usually do this at night we're usually drinking we're drinking coffee today but before we jump into the interview my excellent guest uh this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by baboon baboon makes technically excuse me baboon makes technical duffel bags for all your life's adventures these bags use waterproof materials uh tear proof and will last forever every bag comes with the shipping free shipping excuse me in a lifetime guarantee a big fan of lifetime

guarantees around here jeremy uh baboon to the moon is offering this so it's a quality product We only push quality products on this podcast. So Baboon Duffels are called Go Bags. They come in a small size and a large size. Small is your carry-on. Large is your check-in. They have backpack straps. You can carry them around.

They're really aesthetically pleasing. They come in, again, they come in those two sizes. You can take them anywhere. You can drag them to the airport. On any adventures you go to, I'm going to Paris in a couple weeks. I'm going to be bringing my Baboon bag. see why condé nice traveler is calling it the ultimate weekender uh so visit baboon to the moon.com enter the code crypt that's c-r-y-p-t at baboon to the moon.com crypt baboon to the

moon.com code crypt you'll get 10 off of a cool bag all right that was the first like live read of an ad i've done with a guest in studio was that awkward at all jeremy i was totally awkward Totally awkward. Good, man. Yeah, so I'd like to introduce you, Freaks, to Jeremy Welch. How's it going? Welcome to the podcast, CEO of Kasa. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming. We were talking about it earlier. I've been playing around with your product, the Kasa node. Awesome, awesome. We are, me and Matt O'Dell are experimenting with it, and we are going to be the first test for a full resync from scratch. Excellent. Before we dive into Kasa and what you're doing with that product in particular

and what you guys are doing as a company to learn more about you so how'd you get into bitcoin you're charleston boy i'd like to hear that as a former charleston boy myself so yeah uh it's it's been a while um i've uh i i first got into bitcoin so i i worked in yeah i worked in um i worked in tech in new york i actually dropped out of school i went to to duke and i studied political philosophy there and then i dropped out and i came up to new york and was working in tech here uh company ad an advertising tech company that we sold into google around 2010 and so i got this this big lesson as to how the the real internet uh works the advertising based internet uh it was very disconcerting to understand the whole thing uh but spent a little while on that um stayed

about a year at google learned a ton as far as a large company it's impressive how they operated and learned a ton from that even though you know it's a little with with some of my philosophical leanings was uh again a little disconcerting seeing everything um but i went back and i finished up school and i uh at duke finished up undergrad and i specifically was really digging into this question of kind of the nature of capitalism and um yeah we're you know just just what what the hell was going on because it felt like all the people that i was you know coming in new york asking like hey how does this work how does this work how does this work that nobody had any answers right and i this was this was middle of the so 2010 is when we sold the company

we were working on it 2008 um 2009 and so that was you know that was through the kind of tail end mid-end of the financial crisis and even all my finance buddies like people that that worked in banking or trading like they didn't know what's going on it's it's crazy when we look back at it And we have these movies like the big short that, um, kind of, uh, give, give some perspective on it. Um, but it's still, again, it's still crazy. People just act like it didn't happen or they act like, yeah, I mean, oh yeah, we knew, we knew now and people with perspective, but they really didn't.

Uh, and so it's, you had, you had these people like, you know, in the movie, the big short that, that did kind of see where the problems were. And I, and I, you know, there are always these other kind of outside risks in, uh, in the system that just because they're not um playing out right now doesn't mean that they're not there this is uh the ludic fallacy so nassim teleb's ludic fallacy right if you follow he uses actually a turkey as the example is if you follow a turkey's life very prescient timing yeah they get they get plump plump you know they get really really plump and everything's working everything's working and then one day you know we get close to thanksgiving and uh lop off their head right

And if you just followed a turkey's life up until that point, it would seem like a great life. If you project out into the future, the turkey's life had only gotten better up to that point. Little did he or she know they were about to get their head chopped off. Exactly. And what he's describing with this example is tail risk. So that's what you're getting at here. And so I think out of that, I just had all these massive questions about capitalism generally, the kind of broader system we find ourselves in governance and organization and went back to

to duke to one just to hang out and take a break after working like crazy for a while but beyond that to uh to dig into some of those questions i did a bunch of independent studies and um had some really good conversations really good uh reading and dug into some things that eventually that led me to bitcoin we put on a conference too this is uh this is into 2013 early 2014 matt carollo the who's now um i think up here here's a chain code yeah chain code um awesome dude and incredible dude yeah and he uh learn more about better hash people he happened to be at uh unc at the time so we set aside our differences uh with basketball and we still talk shit to each other but um we put together a little conference with a few other people

uh and um yeah it was it was an early there were a bunch of dude people now that are spread out in the ecosystem and we're pretty proud of that fact because we all like strategize we're like how can we get more tetris boys yeah there's those guys there's some uh but one of the other guys was around then is is it um zero x a few people at coinbase uh they're all spread out but it's it's good so i i the the getting back to your core question of how i got into it um it's 2012 2013 and i i was digging into this after we sold that company and i was digging into these bigger questions and then found it then and it just clicked i mean everything that i was looking at and understanding about the nature of money and what matters about money and then i'm also big

into i studied political philosophy and so i think a lot about um i think that the easiest turnaround is just cybernetics like systems theory and um so from from a systems theory perspective you do have these massive massive um massive massive effects that very small parameter changes can have in a system uh whenever you introduce feedback loops and i think that you know looking at bitcoin the structure of bitcoin that the the outside effects it'll have are going to be massive um so yeah yeah it's uh probably the most elaborate tale that we've had uh in a while but it's uh it's always interesting how the the theme is is very similar and uh people uh start with a question like how the hell does all this shit work and why does it work the way

it does it's sort of my tale is i was a senior in high school just so happened to be taking uh intro to economics elective while the world was going to shit and had a very uh yeah very good teacher who was like trying to ask force us to ask the right questions and lead down a path of uh logical thinking how these systems work that's what set me down the path to bitcoin but you coming from like the ad ops uh ad industry uh and seeing the insidious nature of sort of the uh revenue models i guess for yeah i call it pushing clicks right you're pushing clicks you know instead of pushing other drugs whatever i mean you're you're that's what you're doing is you're trying to increase click rate by 0.001 right um you know there's there's been a lot

of backlash against this ecosystem and and one thing i will say i will take this slightly contrarian take because everybody does talk shit now about ads at the time not everybody did uh but there is like a growing movement around that but we wouldn't we wouldn't be at this place we wouldn't have gotten to this place where we we can build these other systems uh if some of those things hadn't come through so i i do think that you know if you again if you follow the the you just follow a pure kind of systems theory perspective and you think about how things evolved this was how things evolved and in the early days it didn't seem like it was going to be that big of an issue like if you look at um if you look at newspapers and the original

advertising ecosystem really started with you're talking about putting ads in newspapers and you had all this other news it was useful it wasn't in your face people read it on a sunday it didn't suck you in and it wasn't you know these massively addictive issues and the news that we have today is just dramatically different from what you had at a kind of sunday edition newspaper so i i think again this leads credence to this idea that these very small decisions can balloon and over time with feedback loops can become these massive issues um but i you know advertising started that way and now it's grown into something much more different and we know a path out and we we got to take that path so yeah so that's what i was gonna ask like is there a path out and

because it seems uh like we're pretty inundated and uh we're sort of ingrained in this revenue model of how how to make money on the internet like what is what is the path out you think uh we have to have uh events like data breaches at facebook uh all these other huge companies to have people realize like holy shit maybe this isn't maybe uh the cost of monetizing the internet this way is is too much on an individualistic level yeah you have to have you're gonna have to have not just the the actual data breaches but you need an alternative you need an alternative solution that will be the driver anytime anytime one of those breaches happens it'll drive people more and more to something else and it's i mean i that's similar now that bitcoin exists

when you get a situation like venezuela or you get you know people are finding bitcoin and they're never going to go back and you'll you'll see similar type behavior i think uh in the space but it'll i i i'm uh there's a there's a line and i forget which if this is if this is from a specific book i read um but in terms of technology adoption i do think that kind of key principle is it usually takes a little longer than most people expect to get there but once things start changing it always happens much much much faster than people anticipate yeah it's the line you overestimate what can happen in five years and underestimate what can happen in 10 exactly exactly yeah and essentially we're coming up on on bitcoin's 10-year anniversary right um so how do you think

it's done in this first decade uh you think it's undershot expect your expectations overshot uh It's going to State of the Union from Jeremy Welch. I don't really have expectations. It's just other than like I'm not putting necessarily a timeline on it. And I think that, I think, again, a lot about, I won't go into that much detail on the philosophical side. But I think that. Why not? Well.

Why not? I'm not a huge. Don't be afraid, Jeremy. i i think that i mean i think things are just going to play themselves out so there's not a point in giving a giving a uh necessarily a play-by-play or an expectation or where it could be there is there's some influence that you know we can have but um the time giving a timeline it's it's one thing to give the kind of analysis of what the implications are just from a logical perspective it's another thing to tie in the timeline or a 10 year uh uh and and time itself

like you know that's that's a questionable thing um so putting it just i i think that the one thing i try to do or i i think a lot about is um how we anthropomorphize things we we think about human time spans and we think about like these decade markers but they really don't mean anything uh and so if you if you kind of take a step back from that just say like okay how's the process playing out i mean sure we can we can have these evaluations every once in a while but it's you know a 10-year marker is totally meaningless yeah um we're gonna get to the tweet i have on the screen but first uh i what was i gonna say i completely agree oh yeah not uh i've been really diving uh and liking the notion that that bitcoiners are very descriptive and not prescriptive

you're just describing a reality that exists now and the amount of people that understand this reality is is very small at at the moment but it is we believe i would argue that it is an empirically better way to do things yeah uh compared to the way we're doing them now in certain aspects of our life and we are saying hey this is a better technology it'll take over over time it just people more people need to come to the realization that this exists yeah i i think that even that the term better is is hard to argue about because it just depends on kind of who you are for certain people they like their fiat money and they like their fiat systems and they prefer that they'd prefer the control that comes from that um i think on uh i think it just depends

on how you're measuring right and we we specifically measure our mission at casa is maximizing personal sovereignty and safety and if you look at a an individual person's ability to have control or have sovereignty and safety then i think that yes like from that measure that it is absolutely better and it is measurably better um but there's there's a lot there's a lot that you can judge that on depending on you talk to who you talk to but the other thing too is i think that it will change i think that there are certain types of people that that again if bitcoin's an option they'll choose bitcoin if no bitcoin's there then they're going to be like yeah i love fiat money everything is great and you know um so it's going to be an exciting few few years no

matter what right as as this i i think it has moved a little faster than i expected i will say that like i think that we're in a much better place and everybody that's complaining about a you know it's what are we at today 5500 or 6000 or something uh i know we had a little i don't even pay attention to the price that much anymore i just i think more about like product space and product adoption yeah we're at 5500 stop dumping we're uh we're living off of like 55 44 right now um no that's like this always happens in these interviews i'm like i want to ask you 20 questions at once uh but do it do it because hit all 20 i'll circle back to everything you brought up you brought up the the mission statement of casa yeah and i think you've assembled uh one of the

strongest teams to make that that mission come true i mean james and lop uh elena uh and crew are are people that have yeah we have more we have more that aren't announced yet so yeah yeah i can't we can't we can't uh for security reasons and other things but there's it's it's a crew it's a it's a it's a damn dream team it's crazy and i'm i'm just honored to be around them and learn from everybody um i think that the you know the thing about all of those people coming together is that it just comes down to the mission yeah how did how did this crew assemble it's if they assembled themselves yeah right i mean that's what i'm talking about it's like how did bitcoin assemble how did you know all these pieces were were out there in the ether at some point and

then it kind of came together enough people saw where things needed to go and um i think that you know we're in a similar place my perhaps my only skill was was writing a single mission statement or codifying some of what we were all discussing and then saying hey what do you think about this hey what do you think about this hey what do you think about this and then you know if you if everyone has that discussion everybody agrees yeah that makes sense to me then i you know there's no recruiting there's no that's not kind of how it works it was just a mix of the right timing and also those people recognizing yeah this is actually the most important not just the most important uh thing that they could work on from a business perspective but literally the

most important problem available to humans today to work on and that's that's a crazy statement but it's true right i mean if if if bitcoin you know there are these singular moments in history when when something changes and where what bitcoin does make available if it goes away now that you know all of the other states and uh kind of everybody else is kind of aware as to what it could be um then we're in a we're in a load of hurt it's gonna be it's gonna be a major issue so solving this problem around maintaining your self-sovereignty and uh doing it in an easy to use way and thinking about um you know how we can make bitcoin personal key management all those things improving all those things is just absolutely critical yes and i am very thankful

for the work that you guys are putting into these solutions uh private key management especially it's uh one of the biggest hurdles in the space and so like i fancy myself a product nerd as well in another life i would be a product manager uh i've studied ux in the past i've tried tried to work on product teams uh after transitioning from finance it's hard to break into uh you have to build shit yeah that's what i realized i had to build the newsletter like which is quote unquote a product but uh a poorly designed from aesthetically pleasing uh it's functional that's all it matters people overplay the the aesthetics yeah and aesthetics should even just feed into function ultimately exactly so but that's what i want as a product nerd i think

the way you guys are approaching this this self-sovereign suite of products is beautiful because the private key management was your first year it's basically an iterative process it looks like at this point you figure out custody first and then all right then you figure out uh hardware node management making it easier for people so i just want to get like a peek into your brain of like how how you guys have built this roadmap has it been very okay we're at this point now let's build this or do you guys have like a suite of tools that you already know you're going to build yeah so so um it's a good question i again i think of this process it's not about um so i'd separate it out into two things if we want to talk about like just the the the um product

development uh design and then just kind of the pure how you find a product map in the first place um and so the the second question i think is is is part of what you're asking at first and and that there's something interesting about this question of like what's the difference between capital wealth and something that's useful wealth and then um just another product Uh, and that's a, that's a, you know, and the difference there is that capital wealth, like someone's going to use that to eventually make more money or to survive in kind of a capital based system. And I use an example of, of, um, so say you're, you know, you're some boomer, you've, you've,

uh, pulled out some of your fiat money in a retirement account, whatever. And now you've, you go create, uh, or you go retire and spend your time, uh, remaking or restoring old cars. Right. Like, yeah, there's a market for some of those old cars, but you might be restoring a car in some color and something else. It's like just totally personal to you. The total market of people that would actually buy that car is actually quite small. It may be nonexistent. Now, is that is that car? It's you created something new, but is that actually wealth? Or is that actually capital wealth that can be brought back into the capital system?

Does it have value in that capital system? And I think people people like one question around product management, and one question around just like generally building companies is just because you can create a product doesn't mean that it will translate into something that's actually useful for a business, right? And so there's this nuance around product development that one, you have to solve a problem. You solve it for yourself. You make sure there's a market for other people too. It does have to feed into this kind of having more value and generating capital itself and then if you get some of those things right um uh and and and to contrast that that specific car example then if you build you know if you rebuild a uh or if you just talk about kind

of your average bmw or your average porsche that just is a massive market of or your average tesla right that has a massive market i mean i think tesla was a perfect example there because people didn't know that market was there but elon kind of helped generate that market um but it was obviously everything he's creating people are buying strongly so i i say all that to say to come back to this question of product development and building out a product plan is that you you do have to start somewhere but frequently you'll get these like tugs in different directions on what people will actually pay for and what what will provide value and you have to be careful not to go down certain paths right because certain paths it's just like nobody's going to buy that

even though it might be useful for you or might be useful for the person it may not fund itself And that's why these questions of these underlying business models, such as advertising, are just absolutely critical and why I do think that Bitcoin is going to just absolutely flatten pretty much every company that's been based off an advertising based business model. So Facebook, Google, like all these companies. Why do you think that? Because the underlying core business or the underlying core assumptions, right, the reason why advertising exists in the first place is all driven around a fiat system. It doesn't have to if you, you know, it comes down to kind of payment processing and, you know, running something like lightning network channels is, you know, and if you have, there are still some hurdles and there are some still some costs. um and so you're not gonna open lightning channels with just everyone i mean you have to open one of those channels but the bottom line is that the the cost of interaction on bitcoin network on the

broader kind of programmable money network that we're heading towards means that the incentives around advertising which are basically kind of displaced every year whenever you it's just a cost of processing a transaction like the you know the three bucks or two bucks or whatever you have to pay a payment processor um the the under the overlying business model around google or facebook is just going to collapse out of that um so anyways that's like just kind of some rambling on product development generally but to go back to to cost specifically we actually we started um we were building an application on block stack and we were looking at this that kind of how you would rebuild models what changes we specifically were looking at

Airbnb. So Airbnb, they built their, a lot of people don't know this, but they built their own payment processor. Oh really? Yeah. One of the ways early on, I mean, they're, they're a very technical company. They've got beautiful products, very well built, but there are these certain questions about Airbnb's business model that just doesn't make sense until you start digging into the underlying model. And one of those that we were asking is, is why the hell can't I search by my friends? Like, why can't I search and say, you know, filter all of these Airbnb properties by degree of friends. Like, if I have three degrees away,

you know, I want to stay with that person instead. Yeah. That feature will never get added to Airbnb. I don't know if I'd want that feature. Well, I wanted that feature because I figured it would save money and it would also, like, you know, you get a little bit of trust.

And yeah, there's some of these people that run regular Airbnbs and it's, you know, it's easy to use. I just want to, like, if I ever did, God forbid, if anything ever happened to the house, I wouldn't want that friend of a friend having a scorn thrown my way. Well, that's from the position of a, yeah, I could see that. I could see that.

Like there's definitely kind of the social cost around that. And that's really interesting. And that's a different thing. But ultimately kind of what we were thinking is even just being able to search and filter in a new city. If you could be around somebody that you actually kind of had some connection to, that's a beneficial thing. you also could have you know deals around friends but as we like as we dug more into that ultimately they'll never add it because you could then start routing around the the payment system yeah right you could just say hey i'm going to pay you under the table i know you like i'll cash app you

exactly cash app you something else you have some social connection uh so it is all tied back to their core payment processor and how many other companies are kind of based that way so we we were looking at that question we were building something on block stack and we got a very clear picture of what the stack would look like if you were starting to break everything out and and you have to look at um so you've got uh you you can look at centralizing or decentralizing across a number of different areas around compute itself data storage payments um you know just general kind of public or private sharing um there's a lot around around even kind of making data accessible for search or for future uh you know experiences like comments on an airbnb app

kind of thing like how do you centralize that where is that stored there are all these these other questions and we were looking at what would how would we re-architect something to enable some sort of new experience um in a specifically around home sharing and the the we got a very clear picture into what this kind of future of applications would look like so the first thing we actually built was we built a node um you know the public story right now is that we had the the key management first and then we built the the node but it's actually reversed we actually built a node yeah we built the node first we were running uh bitcoin block stack litecoin actually ran pure coin because we were we were trying to uh uh kind of uh test around with with um proof of

stake or or partial proof of stake systems and see what that was like um and so we built a little node device and we we were selling them uh very very quietly and we were surprised at the interest and then out of that we very quickly saw that there's a massive problem with having a device in your home and having no key management related to it and you know that that then pulls you into these other questions around key management and you shouldn't build key management only for one device you really should build key management overall so we realized that we couldn't even properly tackle a singular device without better key management so we went to that and then only after we had a really good solution around that have we come back around now to the

node and as a whole the experience is really coming together so that i mean jumping back to the the just kind of the process product development process you know that we started one area we saw some clear demand we saw a massive problem and you would lose money if someone just like picked up your box went into the key management side people would pay for that very quickly built started building the business off of that and then have come back around to the full node yeah no it's uh it's crazy like the whole in the i mean i'm one of the first owners of the casa node very excited to thank you also the first to have the uh to have uh a down initial download issue so i'm re-syncing of course but i think from a holistic experience like even that

So you guys have a private Telegram chat too. And for UX data, that's incredible, getting the first users and getting feedback right away. So you guys, that's like an innovation. I mean, Slack groups and Telegram channels have been big in crypto for a community perspective, but taking it to a product perspective, and I was thinking about this last week,

just being on a UX team, this is a revolutionary way to get instant feedback from users and iterate faster. Yeah, it is. I'll tell you something else, though. It's a major issue that hasn't been solved in this space is um we are we are we are um and this is not actually being talked about that much but you have the whole advertising industry right and that one seems a little obvious because you

know if you have data trackers on websites or whatever else the one that people aren't really talking about and specifically around product development is what i call uh surveillance product development where every move you make like if you open any of your iphone apps every single iphone app that you have on your phone is tracking every tap you make every move you make everything you're doing every website you go to is tracking every pixel you click like every movement map it yeah you can see where your mouse goes it's absurd it's absurd uh and that is not going to fly if we're rebuilding in an advertising based internet where everything feedbacks you know flows back into some ad being paid people accept it because they're getting a free product in a place to where

you're actually paying for a product you're self-sovereign it's your own data and your own money that you're worried about that is not going to fly so when i talk about how these companies are going to be wiped out that's another very fundamental way is like we we don't have any tracking in our systems we've ripped out we had we had a um we even had a small like chat thing that would help us with a quick chat in the app with a few clients and we ripped that out too because we just realized that there's way too much data sharing that's happening and so we've minimized our footprint and removed all kind of data and then we rely on out of that we have to rely on direct customer communication uh it's the oldest way to do real product development uh and

now i think in the future it's going to be the only way yeah no and it's would you it's probably a better way or maybe not well it's hard because people don't people don't know what they people don't know what they exactly what they need you have to it it take it's kind of an art to ask the right questions but i also think that uh you know putting putting everyone in a damn panopticon which is um jeremy bentham panopticon the whole i mean that's effectively what we've built what is it what is that so a panopticon is a a prison design where you had a central tower that looked out on all of the the rooms in the prison okay so the guards would stand in a central tower and the idea is that you'd never know um the prisoners would never know if the guards were

looking in your direction but because the tower was in the center and you had some surveillance there at all times all of the prisoners would behave better because they never knew if if they happen to be looking their direction and weirdly enough if you look at like all of the more recent at least every public school and um a lot of buildings that i've you know that i've i've noticed this i'm sure other people haven't and i'm sure it wasn't the exact reason for the design but a lot of of like kind of open uh floor plans open school plans they're basically designed in the same same system but our the whole surveillance system and the advertising system is based around the same thing right um they're sucking in all this data on you now we have like the chinese

that the score in china right the social score in china uh it's it's fucking panopticon and we have to bitcoin is going to break out of that all these tools like we're not you know people are going to rip out the block stream actually just announced their explorer as well their bitcoin explorer one of the things if you look at a lot of people didn't notice this and it wasn't much discussion one of the things that they said is no tracking right it's like it's going to become a thing it's going to become a big thing more of a social cue then too where people would be like i don't want to use this website unless unless i know they're not tracking me that's exactly right yeah that's it and no this this is something that fascinates me like the idea that maybe we fucked up on the

internet the first time around or something like that the way we structured it and do we have this grand opportunity to rebuild it from scratch doesn't need to be rebuilt from scratch uh or are we able to sort of slowly over time build these tools in a parallel system sure so road to hell is paid with good intentions right yeah and i i think that um you know we've we've just gotten further and further down in the system to where we're looking around and you know some people are waking up and realizing holy shit like this is this is bad and the funny thing is is as the political climate the other thing that i've um i've frequently cited to people as a reason why i i think things will break down and even some of the centralized crypto companies will break down

is that our geopolitical situation is just spiraling out of control it's crazy right it's getting crazy i write about it i've been writing more about like geopolitical than uh happenings than like bitcoin happenings more recently because it's just well the same thing they're the same thing exactly they're going to be the same thing over the long term i mean that's why i talk about like you know bitcoin computing this is this is all the same thing it's going to absorb everything A lot of investors look at it as this niche kind of frontier tech. I'm like, no, no, no. Give it five years and every company is going to be discussing these exact same issues because people don't are not properly anticipating that as the geopolitical situation gets more and more complicated, a lot of the centralized business models will just break down, right?

Why is this? Well, think about just shipping a product, just dealing with customs fees. Very simple one. This doesn't even get into the question of whether the country will actually allow your product in there, whether you would have to do a deal with a country like China and Google and their whole censored web search, right? But just shipping a physical product into a company, customs fees are going up. Trump's playing this whole tariff game. So that's becoming an issue. Borders are going to become more of an issue.

Now you also have the culture wars. and you you know it's going to be very hard most most you know i won't say all but like a lot of consumers are now expecting their companies to start espousing their kind of cultural propositions which is insane right um and so it's it's it's getting harder and harder kennel gender handing up pepsi to someone it's ridiculous man it's crazy um that's scary it's are you optimistic or are you scared no i'm very optimistic i'm very optimistic but i'm um i think that the i think i think it's going to be a lot more painful than most people expect anticipate um but what's what kind of comes out the other end is going to be great yeah so um it's a bit cheesy to say but

it does feel like there's a bit of an awakening happening where people are beginning to think more thoroughly about how yeah uh how the world we built around us uh could be constricting we could be building a prison for ourselves yeah arguably already have and we need to break it down and build build something else yeah that the scary thing on the geopolitical side is that what most people don't think about is okay i'm you know i'm building and what what everybody said this is it's it's you can go look it up what everybody said is oh it's fine it's fine that obama has these you know surveillance powers and we want him to catch the terrorists and want him to and what everybody said was like wait a second if you give if you give obama all of these tools

and then someone else comes in and then you would go ask anybody that supported Obama and now Donald Trump has the same powers, right? And then now everybody's freaking out. Everybody on that side is freaking out about Donald Trump, but anybody that supported Donald Trump is kind of happy about it because he's going down and tackling a bunch of issues.

But then everyone's saying to any Donald Trump supporter, hey, look, if you expand his powers, than if it flips the other back around again than that person's and they're not thinking they're you know they're not even thinking about that yeah no and it's uh that's what i think there was a stat out there i was like people like elect i'm fucking tired of elections i can't take it every two years it's fucking exhausting yep and the hoopla that that happens the the fever the fervor that gets that gets uh driven up by the media and the social pressure to have something to say or pick a side it's fucking bullshit and you go back and look at the stats like

i think 31 the last 35 midterm elections like the uh sitting like the party of the sitting president like lost seats in the house like 31 out of 35 so like there's always going to be like backlash it's it's just noise the same thing fucking happens like and while the same thing's happening like it's it's these presidents and elected officials are making more uh authoritarian dystopian orwellian laws right it doesn't matter who's president or who the incumbent is at any given time it's going to change and right stats prove that and uh that constant back and forth is actually a lack of change in the long run. And it's going to head ahead.

It is heading ahead. Donald Trump's our president. Yeah. And you ultimately, you... One thing that I, again, kind of during this time when I went back and I studied and I was learning about Bitcoin and broader capital system,

another thing I learned, and this is kind of shocking that more people don't realize this, but there's a book that Council on Foreign Relations published so it's not this is not like some fringe theory but they were just tracking waves of uh democratic politics waves of authoritarian politics and there's been this massive surge in authoritarian regimes all over the world and uh that's increased that has not decreased there's no there's no kind of no ebb to that uh more recently and so and that's not something that

people are talking about generally at all um and so again you know bringing that back you know i don't care who you support as president who you support locally in your elections who you support or if you just choose to opt out my i think our you know i won't i won't speak for everybody on our team because we have people across this political spectrum that's one of the beautiful things about our team is everybody believes in this kind of core mission of again maximizing personal sovereignty and safety they have different views as to where they would take that and they would take their lives and that's perfectly acceptable but ultimately what we're bringing about back back to you is that people should just have choice they should have a choice

to check out of a system that is treating them poorly or potentially even you know a catastrophic situation like in venezuela and again people's choices are getting more and more limited and we're trying to add to that so i think it's i think it's really important um that people there are there are a number of kind of short-term views from both investors and companies and even some consumers in terms of kind of what they want in the bitcoin ecosystem uh and if too much of that happens then these long-term things about you know literally just having your own kind of personal independence are going to go by the wayside and we can't let that happen so yeah um no it's a it's never a dull moment it is a it is a an invigorating industry quote unquote to be in

uh like you were saying earlier like it's mission driven you have the chance to disrupt the world and disrupt arguably the biggest app in the world which is money um so one thing that's been big in the crypto twitter sphere recently is like narratives and and the changing of narratives of different projects and whether uh some narratives have more merit over others and i'm sort of it's getting to a point where people are are sort of misconstruing the narratives narrative yeah um if you will uh where people are paying more credence to what may be the loudest narrative at a particular time but it may not necessarily be the best narrative and people are trying to say like bitcoin in particular like uh the store value narrative is pretty new but

you go back to bitcointalk.org how finney was talking about like bitcoin as a settlement layer for banks in 2010 yeah so did you have any views on this uh do you have a particular narrative that you like uh or view of bitcoin and how it should scale going forward um so again i'll jump back to this like perception of it doesn't totally matter yeah um these these like i you know i'm i'm not aiming to be a thought leader i think that like any of the pushes around thought leadership like ultimately we just have i i kind of constantly push back to individuals like whatever you kind of core belief is whatever you want to um and i and i think that you know trying to shape that too much is is a uh is an issue um but i think that i think that

ultimately you know we've been through this wave and we've we've this is not the second one right like um uh where we've seen some of the same projects try to come back and be tokenized uh you know different waves and as of the sec action on friday right um i haven't read the full document i've read snippets of it but it's doesn't look good it doesn't look good it doesn't look good um no that's actually we can jump into that too that's uh so i i've i've i was about to send this tweet out later but i'm i'm you know i'll make the statement that crypto is dead long live crypto yeah that's it i mean crypto is dead so crypto in particular crypto is dead yeah that that concept i think i think that that was the marker the sec marker and i don't think it's

going to be apparent to to everyone or it won't ripple out extremely fast but give it a few months and you know let's see how many of these projects actually refund their investors and just this kind of crypto industry um is yeah it got crypto's dead last year was insane man it got out it got out of control yeah really quickly like really quickly like to the point where like everybody was talking about it everybody was like trying to make up a build a company or a business plan around a token model not even understanding what it is like i had to go to consensus last summer uh with barstool because like they wanted like some ico wanted to like advertise on barstool and i that's oh boy that's how i trojan horse myself into consensus it was

like what the fuck is going on it was like as like an observer it was crazy to see uh a mania filled with such a lack of knowledge or lack of understanding of what people are actually working with yeah happened in real time it was like looking around like many times throughout last year especially towards the end of the year where i was like am i crazy like is is this really going to take over is is tron going to take over the world right stuff like that um so it'll be interesting to see because compared to 2014 2015 where really that mania was more like copy paste code of bitcoin change parameters make a proof of stake for work pre-mine whatever totally whatever and ethereum just made it considerably easier uh with the erc20 tokens

but it'll be interesting to see as this bear market persists uh what gets built and what the next mania looks like do you think you think it'll be as broad do you think uh thousands of tokens will will be pumping in the future or do you think uh there will be a a chaff that rises to the top there will be another mania um and i'm asking you but i will i don't like to predict anything i'm asking you yeah but but i yeah i i there will be another mania i mean there's this this is like just getting back to kind of human systems and how um human investment works and how you have these um uh renee gerard and his whole uh theory around memetic meg theory i don't know if you know that that one uh big old memes here yeah so memetic theory actually shifts out of like so you have

mimesis and memes which is really dawkins and then renee gerard uh memetic theory is about how people learn and about social contagion and about like the uh about how violence emerges in cultures okay have you heard this at all no let's get up into it okay okay so um uh and this guy actually the reason why peter teal originally invested in facebook was purely based out of his deep understanding of memetic theory and he actually studied with gerard and it's a kind of core from what i've read it's a kind of core influence of his philosophy and his investing outlook um but the way that the the way in a very oversimplified uh explanation the if you have you have you have desire basically that comes from humans and and that uh they they

desire certain outcomes or that desire certain products and the way that you know we're connected we're talking as two human beings and you have a third person in the room uh and now we're all kind of connected and talking and exchanging information um and ultimately the kind of hierarchy of respect in the room actually dictates kind of where the desire amongst all the humans flows okay um and so if you have so if you uh you know if you like cold brew coffee right and i have a lot of respect for you uh and i've never had cold brew coffee before but i see you drinking cold brew coffee then i'm likely to try to drink some cold brew coffee right because i my respect for you kind of channels through that into the products the other things you use

um so very easy kind of it is a very easy way to explain how the kind of celebrity power and how that whole world has kind of emerged and why it's important because instagram thotties yeah people need people need this uh people need this kind of mechanism right and signaling mechanism right yeah it is it is it's signaling a status mechanism uh all the status games kind of come out of uh parts of this but the renee's theory and it's mimesis mimesis is just mimicry right okay and so the way humans learn is through mimesis they out of some respect or some kind of draw into another person that they see someone do something and then they repeat that same behavior and it's so you can actually watch this like ripple out over when uh you know if if so uh

another kind of example around this is if you look at like elite athletes one person breaks a record all of a sudden like a ton of other people break that record yeah but it takes one person to like break through and then everybody else channeling and seeing okay this is possible and then it happens and similar with products you get these massive um these these massive celebrities that people are following and desire to be like or desire to be with and then they say they're buying one product and boom like that thing just explodes in sales and the product didn't change so what changed it was like people's desire somehow yeah um so ultimately that comes back to he explains that violence actually erupts whenever you have a zero-sum situation so if there's only

one cold brew coffee right and now we have a whole room of people they respect marty that they all want cold brew coffee then violence is going to erupt somehow there's going to be a fight to get to that singular resource now the reason everybody wants that cold brew coffee is total bullshit it's just out of this like memetic contagion mechanism yeah you should not be trying to imitate me yeah yeah well that's that's the lesson right is that you got to be really careful about whether the decisions you're making are based on you know just imitation of someone or whether you actually have kind of good reason for that um so do you actively uh like walk your life with this in mind like thinking am i after i think after i i was aware of it i definitely

thought through like okay am i being an influence or being manipulated well no it's not so much manipulated it's just it's just you know how much of what i'm doing and how much of the direction i'm going or if i'm responsible for a company and we're you know talking as a team and deciding where what to build or what to do like how much of that is based off of our drawing in from other people and how much of it is based off of what we've built up and kind of a rational analysis ourselves and i think that again coming back to this idea of not having of of encouraging people to really dig in themselves and not just take like we're on a podcast and i'm going to espouse some opinions and not just to suck down my opinions blindly um uh is you know is is an

interesting thing um and i and it's it's indicative that that i think that the age that we find ourselves in this whole idea of memetic contagion explains a lot of the kind of terrible situations with social media and the fury that people get into and the um you know it's it's crazy like people have gone out of their minds it's like a bunch of damn zombies and taking instagram photos and all this stuff it's and it's it's happening so fast like it's crazy how like this stuff's only 10 years old really facebook's about 10 years old yep 2008 yeah where was it no no yeah 2008 actually no i don't remember yeah it was it was around i think 0506 yeah and then it's it was all you know you know universities at first in high school and then it like went on and on i remember

when facebook first came out i was like a freshman or sophomore in high school and i was driving to school with a senior and i'd be like oh dude you're gonna download facebook he's like no way man not college yet like need to wait till i get that edu uh address to download it was like but then completely exploded into the the monolithic uh sauron that sauron that is that yeah um it's crazy to see that happen very quickly and what what uh what lessons are we going to learn going forward because i don't i don't think i don't think facebook will be around for for perpetuity i think they're yeah we'll see we'll see it's going to be interesting i mean they've they've gotten a lot of flack recently um i think they're fucking up pretty bad to the

point where people are the the uh everybody's still on instagram so yeah that's the thing people people kind of are one of the other principles around that is that eventually you have a sacrifice so the memetic theory thing is that um socially religion served this purpose of of kind of calming violence because you would have some level of a sacrifice and sometimes that would take the case of like you know witch burning or whatever and then when someone sacrificed then everybody's back at peace because that person was you know the big bad person that was causing all the problems so right now like is facebook this kind of uh sacrifice that's happening now are people putting all the blame there even though they're

not the only one um they're the scapegoat they are the scapegoat right now more recently one thing that annoyed me is um um what's the guy's name the uh salesforce guy mark benioff hey yeah i had that tweet up too uh mark benioff man he um uh talking shit calling out facebook um yet they suck down salesforce sucks down a ton of data pot meat kettle yeah pot meat kettle they suck down a ton of data yeah and i find it incredibly creepy that benioff put the i mean people were joking about it for for uh you're talking about sauron but he put the kind of sauron the eye of sauron on the yeah the eye of sauron on the salesforce tower on halloween on halloween yeah i remember that and someone someone brought this out it was like a joke thing but i like

i thought it was like the whole layering in the last few weeks with benioff has just been bizarre because he's coming out just like talking crap about facebook and how it's like cigarettes and all this stuff yet salesforce i don't know if you've ever um talked to a salesforce like yeah i had somebody using salesforce to like track you down close a sale but they have all these data tracking tools and the same data tracking tools that facebook is using uh you know salesforce is also using to just close sales yeah so they're sucking down a ton of data and they're throwing rocks yeah yeah silly um okay so how do how do we solve this problem how do we how do you see casa to solving some of these problems in the long run.

Obviously, you've got the node. Are you allowed to talk to what we'll be expanding into into the future? Yeah, I can speak to it a little bit. We've got a few more things we're announcing before the end of the year that are pretty exciting. But ultimately, it just comes back down to personal computing.

If you back into just a cybernetics point of view and control loops right now the loops that we go through basically like you know you make a decision you open um instagram or you open one of these other apps that app is you know the loop from you making a single decision and then the kind of response the data that comes back to you right now is being manipulated by hundreds thousands tens of thousands of organizations other robots other systems we need to get back to a place to where we can have some level of computing and some level of hey i want to i want some assistance in doing a task which is what a computer is i mean you're just getting some information

assistance we need the ability to have that assistance be one hop literally like i put an input it does a calculation it's only in my kind of local control and then i get the response and there's nothing else influencing it now that's uh it's fascinating and i guess like i keep asking very similar questions because the crux of it like are the incumbents is the model uh that they're currently using so good that the fight against a newer model will be will be pretty big like are you expecting a big fight from from incumbent systems or you think yeah yeah yeah once they sense that there's a real threat right now they haven't they don't believe that there's a real threat i do i do have some intel that they're that some of them are moving faster behind the

scenes than most people anticipate so they know there's something on the horizon but i think building systems too yeah yeah building building competitive systems like you know for personal compute or uh well not necessarily for personal compute just like trying to reinvent themselves to survive and where this is all going to like form fit bitcoin functionalities on or uh kind of yeah i mean just the newer the newer overall model which i do think i think like bitcoin is the core representation there of you know you can you could have your own personal miner too if you wanted to it's not it's not uh given the the efficiency around mining uh bitcoin and the costs around mining bitcoin and the difficulty um that's not going to play out totally but the

system was designed in a way with running nodes running your own compute having things local i think that even having a trezor and a ledger right are really important and there's something about trezors and ledgers that even before a node that is um that people haven't fully caught on to yet um what's this because the trezor and the ledger are fully local compute now if you are using one of the browsers one of the trezor ledger browsers that is reaching out to you know some outside servers and you're still routing some transactions but the local um you know holding your private key generating your private key um all that is local yeah it never leaves the device um it never even comes onto the computer that you know you're interacting with yeah that has that has not

happened for like the last 20 or 30 years everything has been sucked into a cloud in some capacity and having fully local data lockdown data that has not been happening so it's it's it's really significant that there's like even just this glimmer of that and we want to push we're trying to push more and more uh in that direction now it's uh it's treasure uh in particular that's exactly what you were describing earlier like one call like that's all it does is it communicates with the the trezor api or the trezor uh wallet um page the bridge they call it and it just requests send back you have no idea what's going on on the device uh which is beautiful um and i love that degree of certainty that that these types of products provide right and the control

you have with your iphone apps is just an illusion right right compared to that because in that control like you literally like there's nothing you unplug that in between that the command that's being sent out you unplug your device and it just fails and with your local phones everything i mean there's there's reports that you know uh some of the spy organizations can even turn on phones and turn on microphones and who the hell knows if that's legit but dude it's definitely legit but you know regardless of that argument sake there it's like you know are you really in control of your device you're not so we need to we need to take control again of our local devices and have uh and it's going to be kind of a slow roll we've what we've built already with lightning

and bitcoin simplified interface it's beautiful it works we've already built api layers below that to manage the device manage more node types manage like other things so we'll be announcing more and more but we're going to allow you to do more and more with that device and with future devices and there's a lot there's a lot coming down the pipe we're excited uh to build and you know we've we've seen a phenomenal response from the community um but we are working very hard to give you know even more types of experiences both built on bitcoin and lightning but also you know not just built on those um now that you have that local compute there yeah no you guys are doing an incredible job again thank you thanks thank you that the team deserves all the praise i just like

you know i'm i've i'm a i'm a cheerleader and i've been helping with product design and doing anything i can and running around helping with sales but the team is just incredible and there's you know i i'm continually blown away by the the level of product the level of design the level of just customer support right even as has been uh everybody's been doing a phenomenal job the team is incredible yeah um to pivot back to uh more philosophical musings what if we don't succeed what if we fail and what if uh we continue down this path that we're that we're on right now into a more dystopian like future do you think that's possible do you think in the bitcoin project and the ethos behind the cypherpunk movement in particular is imperative that more people adopt

it um i don't think that i think ultimately the the kind of core tenets of the cypherpunk movement are not not everyone's going to read you know cypherpunk manifesto and go through and and and relate to that yeah but i think that the core tenets around freedom and control and what it means to be you know in control of yourself and your family and your data and um that those things do resonate strongly yeah and people will come around and are coming around more and more to that so um yeah but if you i mean you're asking if what happens if we don't what happens if if something you know breaks falls apart i mean i do think that there will be other there will be other bugs yeah there will be other movements there will be other edges in the system

i mean it's it's always this is all um you know one system builds up and there's there's a kind of a counter to the extremes that that system creates um and that the uh duopoly of systems is is consistent i mean you always see things at extremes um and i think that so so something else will emerge in time and this is not if you look at even bitcoin you know how many uh e-cash and how many how many other versions of of of um cash distributed cash e-gold were were you happened before bitcoin took hold um so it won't it won't be the last but there will be other challenges yeah you know yeah i'm just really worried about a black mirror future in china is really showing uh yeah how that can be become a reality yeah well i think i think

ultimately it comes down to um you know the only way we're going to stop it is it's not out of a single company or a single person it or a single you know we have to work together and it can't be can't be led just by casa like we're doing everything to make it easier for people but um you know it's not just going to be trezor it's not just going to be ledger it's not just going to be it it takes it's going to take a lot of teamwork because what everyone in this ecosystem is up against on the other side is is just huge yeah i mean that's why this podcast exists is to get these ideas out there and just get more people thinking about um man no and it's been fun i say this all all the time but this podcast is selfish you get to talk smart people

like nice nice and and pick your brain um speaking of picking your brain i've had this tweet up i've been staring at it the whole goddamn time all right what's what's fascinating that we live in a world dominated by qwerty keyboards and newtonian time systems should seriously concern bitcoiners yeah it's a it's a mini thread here two tweet mini thread second tweet bitcoin will outlast us all but that doesn't mean it's not possible that it's that a stupid inefficient intermediate system could take hold for a decade if we're not careful for decades excuse me yeah what do you mean by this my site's going by the way i should be able to read this pretty easily yeah it's so it's funny this this tweet didn't get a lot of traction when i sent it out um i'm gonna retweet it right now

there it goes and i i you know i i actually wipe my tweets every week i think really yeah so i don't i don't keep anything up um and i um so i i don't think i'm ever really looking for you know massive visibility it's like yeah it's it's it's like i want to push the idea out into the world and i'm looking for feedback and i'm looking for kind of engagement but it's something that i've uh observed that is valuable for myself and so i push it out to see if it's so it's it's interesting that you like out of that you know my positioning about even why i push these out that this one stuck out to you and to bring it up and and discuss it yeah it does stick out to me it's interesting yeah it's like we like bitcoin makes you think about like the incumbent systems you

live with and the monetary system in particular for me is what it started yeah and then like yeah bitcoin could be a giant clock as well so that makes you think differently about time well i think i think i think bitcoin's clock is is different like the way it the way it works is not based off of pure newtonian time so i i so um so first off qwerty keyboards like there's that tidbit of this and then there's the newtonian time piece and then there's the so let's like break down the the actual tweet um qwerty keyboards why do we have qwerty keyboards i have no idea because some people that's just the way they typed at one type typewriters correct yeah because you needed the letters spread out a certain way so they didn't collide with each

other well that's even like up for debate when you go back and look at the history of why it was actually drawn out i think the original design came from some uh it was some typewriters it was also um what do you call people telegram writers right there were some of the early i guess early typists that were hearing a telegram that's routed in they type it out they that gets sent out and um you know ultimately that turns into waves of typists that are just typing out documents and you know you see these scenes you watch like uh you watch a show like madman or something and you see these uh you know teams that are just on typewriters like typing out memos uh it's absurd to think about you know prior to word and prior to the personal computers we've had and that you

know this is this is how things built up um but what they found now as they've dug more and more into the keyboard layout is that it's incredibly inefficient cordy keyboards are incredibly inefficient the to what extent the weight um i believe that the left-handed side is like overweighted in terms of how often you use some of those keys and it's something like 70 30 it's Something like that. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I just know it's incredibly inefficient. So you have alternative layouts like Dvorak.

There are a lot of engineers that have adopted alternative keyboard layouts because they're aware of this fact and they're like, this is fucking stupid. I can't imagine trying to relearn a keyboard. But that's the thing, right? Is that we now know how inefficient it is. okay and millions billions of people use a keyboard at some point every day

and yet knowing how inefficient it is billions of people are still using keyboard every day the same one and why hasn't it changed well if you look at tooling wise just making the machine that makes a macbook's keyboard right has already been geared towards qwerty and the cost of of of making that change at a large scale doesn't just in turn because people just they they use the keyboard um and and it works enough for them so they're not going to change that keyboard but it's just it's one of these one of these examples of how once how how critical early decisions are and once a decision is made and something's put out there into the world that it starts to shape you know it starts to kind of shape back in on feedback in on uh the rest of the system and

that sometimes you can get these incredibly inefficient patterns that come out there that just can't be corrected yeah as they scale no and that's a very prescient point to bring up because satoshi uh his decision to go with what was it base 48 or base for the um for the encoding of the the addresses uh he chose base 48 i believe as opposed to base 64 or he actually made up a whole new system because the ux of addresses if you had capital o's zeros uh lowercase l's and capital i's it would confuse users so that yeah yeah yeah that's right that's right that design decision from the outset has uh thankfully helped us avoid a terrible ux problem that would have existed yes yes so it comes down to small things like that and i think that the more you look at

bitcoin the more you find these very small decisions it's like holy shit right yeah we we avoided a catastrophe by this tiny little thing um now but out of that what's interesting is that it has at a scale bitcoin has taken taken hold and it has uh it is scaled still largest by market cap still just in terms of mining hash power um but what i'm where i'm driving towards is that you know we hear investors talk all the time about replacements for bitcoin and replacements this and that and it's it's insane it's insanity right because you're looking at this system that has all these sub pieces that are just incredibly important and we can build on top of it and there's no reason yet whether it's there you know whether it's greed or whether it's the kind of

underlying drive like i don't know what is driving driving it totally but there is a possibility that we're still early enough in the game that someone else could come up with some some other system or even a layer two system that's not as well designed that could uh could create a lot of mayhem take hold yeah um so what should we be thinking about what should be what with this in mind how should we approach uh our our building of bitcoin into the future building of bitcoin yeah um i'm not gonna tell you that okay you should do it yourself right like think about it think about it everything you do like and how you're using your own systems and how you're you know running your own node or holding your own keys or you know if cost is doing something

stupid call us and tell us like we want to know it's i i mean we we try to be really really careful we're we're also operating at scale and trying to scale up and trying to serve more people but there are a lot of small things that we get wrong and we we do our best but it's like i i just encourage i think that for all the all of the people that have been complaining about like the vitriol and in the ecosystem and how sharp people are talking on i mean come on we're talking about like the future of capitalism and civilization and humanity and people yeah people are like talking about how oh my god someone was mean to me like are you serious are you kidding me Go ask, like, four to five generations back,

go ask your grandfather or grandmother, you know, what they think about this amazing world we live in and about whether that, like, that mean statement is an issue. Sack the fuck up, people. Yeah, it's crazy. We are tackling one of the biggest problems in the world. And you asked for, I don't want to say criticism, but you asked for feedback about Kasa.

Matt O'Dell has been doing the re-sync from scratch. He's 65% of the way there. Excellent. FlashCheck is probably above that right now. Yeah. He has a few questions for you. New software updates. How are those rolled out?

Privacy OPSEC issue from running a node without VPN or Tor. Yep. Communication with the node is done without encryption. I think for ease of use. Correct. But it's restricted to your own LAN. If your router is compromised, though, this could become an issue. Correct.

So just to expound upon these thoughts. Excellent analysis. matt all good points all valid points we all we have we actually have uh stuff in the works for all of these bring that up for just a sec just i i can um i want to make sure and hit all of them so yes new software updates are coming they they should roll out about once a week but we have a few things we had one that rolled out there was a small fix um from the privacy side and the optic side uh the tour is coming tour sport is coming um better vbn sport is also coming the we wanted to get something out the door one thing that is important to us is like shipping

on time and like actually showing up with a real product and getting something out the door and starting that feedback loop and a lot of companies have not have not shipped at all um and so getting it out the door was was important to us and we made a few decisions and we we looked at the judge between privacy and security and what the issues were we're early enough in lightning network that we have disclaimers everywhere that you know it is still early enough that there could be a bug in the in our software there could be a bug in bitcoin or lightning software that causes some of the your money to be lost so we are very up front with people that you know be careful about how you're using the device and um you know don't put a shit ton of money on the device

or just you know be aware of the risks but out of that again we're early enough on that we wanted to get something on the door that people could start using knowing that as the volume of money throwing flowing through these systems increases that we would we would catch up with vpm support tour support lots of other privacy features so that was a decision you know on why to ship now without tor support i think it's a reasonable trade-off yeah and as again as the as as usage increases like that will be out soon i'm hoping by end of the year but we we're working on it now um as far as communication with the nodes done without encryption that is also correct that was also same decision um we we do have a scheme that we're working on and we have a i can't go into

exact detail about how that works right now uh but we had a an alpha working version whenever we launched the node but we decided to pull it out because complexity was an issue there were issues that it you know it could um cause some login issues and just again a user interface and being able to use the node could cause some issues so we pulled that out um and are relying on the fact that you're on your local land your local wi-fi um again for the amount of money that that's being currently spent and currently used on the system um you know it shouldn't be an issue you should be on your own private land you should be on your own private wi-fi we uh we are very very public about that or very very upfront about that um but we are we do have some solutions for that

as well that uh that will be out uh pretty soon so both of those all all good points and i'm i'm appreciative to matt for digging in and and seeing those and bringing those up uh and any other questions people have uh please let us know but we have we have solutions for these we are very aware and and those were made for specific just for a specific reason to get these out the door so people could start using them yeah no and i think that's a like i said a reasonable trade-off to make and i think shipping on time is important and you want that that feedback as quickly as exactly and this is exactly the feedback we want because again coming to the product development side if you're not practicing surveillance product development and we're not tracking

everything you're doing then it comes down to you actually using the product so we got it to the place that we knew would be um good enough that was you know great user experience has some few security trade-offs we we know we want to improve those but we wanted to get them into people's hands so we could start getting feedback as soon as possible and so we could start working on the next iterations of everything in this both the software more applications uh and there's there's more coming down the path so sweet no love it again i can't wait uh can't wait to start experimenting more with it once everything's synced uh so what what lightning network in particular what's what excites you most about that uh what are you seeing uh just i honestly

just like the recent the recent increases in overall volume on the network just in the last week i mean i think you've seen the total yeah i think you've seen a total number of bitcoins on the network uh practically double go or a little more oh yeah um it's not the last few weeks andreas brecken like just i i think i think there are there are probably one or two one or two nodes that have just been loading up and putting more bitcoins on and that's that's great like and i and i i think that that's um you know we've been bringing more attention to the network there's some other teams that have been bringing more attention to the network um and so you know getting more excitement around that more people using it and more liquidity on the network is

awesome yeah um and then so beyond what you guys are building like product wise uh are you contributing like to the open source stuff or obvious um that was a terrible way to frame the question um obviously it's a big uh crux of argument in this space is how do you incentivize development yes like what chain code does and what blockstream does by sponsoring developers right work solely on the protocol or totally on the bitcoin repository or lightning whatever it maybe, uh, is a growing trend. And do you guys, obviously your work contributes to this, uh, indirectly, but are you focused directly as well? So we, so a few things there, one, um, we do actually, we've done, we've done a few sponsorships of some other conferences that are

very heavily focused on research side and not on, uh, yeah, token shit. Um, so that's, that's one. and that's you know very direct um i think it was scaling bitcoin out in japan uh tokyo i think that's that's the conference and jameson went out there and we sponsored that uh two in terms of we we have been contributing to um our own code to some existing open source repositories okay um some of those have been around signing some of those have been treasurer ledger as we find bugs to find issues like we you know we've we've contributed uh third thing is that we will be open sourcing some different components of the node um most of the node uh in its current iteration and so that should be out relatively soon we have a post coming that will explain our open source

strategy the reason why we haven't posted any of that to date is that there is it is actually like we're so we're we're fighting an internal battle to develop new features develop new products test ourselves um just get the damn thing out the door and then managing open source community managing you know packaging it right we want to make sure that it's it's packaged well too and uh and those those things and and building an open source project is a very different endeavor um ultimately i think that it is important to support open source communities support open source code i think that private source code in some cases is perfectly fine it just it's just a question of what you're contributing to and what the security trade-offs are and so some parts of

our system will be fully private some parts will be fully open source all of that is being decided with a very strict security framework um and and just in terms of kind of how we're trying to build the best experience possible yeah no that's uh it's important it's a holistic experience is uh is very important and it feels like i mean it's been said on twitter i don't know if you agree with this or like this uh uh description but it costs to become like a uh lifestyle brand almost for cypherpunks or people that like the supreme of bitcoin almost like interesting i have i heard that uh yeah i mean i i think ultimately as long as we can solve this problem of helping give people self-control and self-sovereignty then like you know i don't i don't give a shit

what people think of it like us or how we how we end up as a brand or whatever if we solve that problem yeah so i i you know we we view the world where we're heading um it is almost an ideal state If we can get everything open source on a local device that you control, it's reliable. I mean, that is an ideal state. Getting to that point, how you get there is a multi-tiered approach. You're going to have to have some private, some public. You may take some code that's fully private for a long time

and then open source it kind of all at once after a couple years of being developed. We may take, right now, there are some pieces that are centralized and there are some pieces that are decentralized in terms of what we're doing. But all of it is based around this core security model of the core mission of maximizing personal sovereignty and safety. And so I think that, and one thing that we actually, you don't see a lot of discussion on our website or elsewhere about decentralize this, decentralize that, decentralize all the things. It's not about decentralization.

Decentralization is just a path. The thing that I constantly say is resilience is a key. What we're, what we want is, you know, personally controlled, resilient computing, resilient tools. We want to, we want resilient lives. We want to have resources and family and experiences and build communities together that can survive in a variety of environments. And, um, and so it's all about resiliency. Now, the way you get that resiliency, decentralization is one way. but there are other areas to where decentralization actually hurts your resiliency so the measure for us is around that security and resiliency even privacy i think i think some people over oversell and overplay this question of privacy like privacy is not the actual goal it's not just about privacy it's ultimately about your control and there are some cases you know where you can walk in a public square or whatever and your privacy is shit but it's like as long as the public square is safe

it's okay yeah it ultimately just comes down to that question of resiliency and privacy is again a means to gain that resiliency in some cases yeah the ability to have the choice privacy is imperative right um which is a important distinction um yes that's right yeah that's exactly right yeah um no this has been a fascinating conversation man awesome thank you for having me man thanks for coming on what uh what's your parting note for the freaks out there um let's see anything bitcoin life yeah uh give us feedback go buy node uh store.casa and follow us on twitter casa hodl h-o-d-l um we are there's a lot more coming just just in the next few weeks actually that i'm excited about so keep an eye on those things and um yeah give us

give us any feedback you have anybody that's using your node uh send payments connect to us we've got some open channels um but we are we are excited we're excited the response of the community has been amazing um we're excited to continue contributing to that and growing that and uh cost of nodes make a great stocking stuffer so they do actually we we're announcing one other product too that is i think we're going to sell out of pretty quick yeah so definitely keep this is not this is definitely going to be a stocking stuffer and it's it's um it's cheaper than a cost of note it's not a it's it'll be interesting but i definitely like that one's a real stocking stuffer so keep an eye on god damn it jeremy i can't want to spend any more money on

christmas well it's i'm just telling you this thing's cool it's i'm excited about it and we i was hoping to get it out in november but we we were a little delayed but we'll be announcing in another couple weeks uh but it's a it's a pretty simple product and so it's once once it's out i think people will get why we're doing it but again it all just fuels back into maximizing personal sovereignty and safety dude oh yeah it's crazy it's crazy to me that a company didn't exist like that's just the sole goal right up until now that's crazy um we'd be you know i think that being a we we joke that we're like just a sovereign service corporation and if like all we exist to do is just help feed you ways to be sovereign that's i mean that's that's awesome

pretty sick it's a hell of a hell of a business pretty sick gig thank you again for building it uh thanks for coming through the studio on the sunday morning yeah of course of course thanks for hosting me thanks for coming uh i'm very much looking forward to what you guys are dropping in the coming weeks i uh will definitely be tweeting about it possibly writing about it too probably talking about a rabbit hole recap uh peace and love freaks