The Pomp Podcast - 292: Jameson Lopp on Bitcoin Privacy & Sovereignty

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Jameson Lopp, a co-founder at Casa. He is one of the most well known technical minds in Bitcoin and has quickly become an expert on personal privacy. In this conversation, Jameson and Anthony discuss the Bitcoin halving, personal privacy, individual sovereignty, risks to Bitcoin's adoption, hash rate in China, and what would change Jameson's mind about Bitcoin. ===============================  BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. www.blockfi.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at www.pompletter.com

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jameson Lopp is a co-founder of Kasa. He's one of the most well-known technical minds in Bitcoin and has quickly become an expert on personal privacy. In this conversation, Jameson and I discussed the Bitcoin halving, personal privacy, individual sovereignty, risk to Bitcoin's adoption, hash rate in china and what would change jameson's mind about bitcoin i really enjoyed this conversation and it was extra special to talk to jameson on the day of the third bitcoin halving before we get into the episode though i want to quickly talk about our sponsors the first is

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companies like BlockFi that are building all of the infrastructure around these assets are incredibly important, and BlockFi is leading the charge. Go check them out, BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Also, don't forget, I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com or go click the link in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Jameson. I hope you guys enjoy. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

digital or more concrete capital management. You should not treat any opinions expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited. I have Jameson Lopp here to celebrate the Bitcoin halving. The third halving, the historic moment calls for none other than one of my favorite people in Bitcoin and an OG in his own right. So thanks for doing this, man. Happy halving day. Yeah, exactly. For those that don't know you, let's just start with your background and kind

of what you did before you got into Bitcoin and then we'll get into those early days. Yeah, I'm a computer scientist by trade. I spent the first decade of my career actually working for an online marketing company doing large scale cloud computing data analytics and actually stripping people's privacy away basically the antithesis of what I try to promote these days so you know that provided some interesting technical challenges but I was never really that interested in the business and it just happened to come across the bitcoin white paper a number of years ago and once I read it I realized it was really fascinating from a computer science standpoint, from an economic standpoint. And just the idea of money as an open collaborative

project was very interesting to me. So started doing some side projects in the Bitcoin space. And after a couple of years, realized there was enough VC money that I could just get paid to continue working on Bitcoin full time. So I've been doing Bitcoin security for five years now, both at an enterprise setting with BitGo and for the past couple of years for individuals at Casa. Yeah. And so I guess let's go back to the first time you read the Bitcoin white paper. Like, how did you come across it? And what was your initial thought? Were you just immediately like, hey, this is the future? Or were you skeptical? How did that go down? No, you know, there's a longer story there.

And it's the same thing that we hear with a lot of people is I'll never actually remember the first time I heard about Bitcoin. because i dismissed it three or four times before i actually read about it and realized what an innovative new solution this was because really i had never thought about money before i'd never thought about who controls these systems and it wasn't until probably the third or fourth time i think it was a slash dot article that i finally clicked on that link i finally read the white paper and it was only like eight or nine pages it's it's not as difficult a technical read as most white papers are so I would definitely recommend everyone read it but when I read that I realized you know this was solving a problem that I had never even thought about before and

it was just really interesting I felt like this had the potential to be revolutionary though of course this was the very early days there was a lot of work that needed to be done and so that was just the beginning of my journey. And we're still in the early days and there's still a lot of work to be done. For sure. And then what kind of gave you the confidence, right? There's a lot of people who will, they'll read the white paper, they'll talk to a friend and it's like, hey, this is interesting, but it's super speculative. And maybe I want to, you know, take kind of 1% of all the money that I have and I'll see what it's about and put a little money in. You, me, many others have, I think, become much larger believers in that and made kind of a bigger financial bet

on that actually being the future. What gave you the confidence of that in the early days? And then kind of how did you think about moving from a fiat denominated majority world to a Bitcoin world? Yeah, I mean, it was a long process. You know, when I first got into it, I only put a little bit of money in just because I figured I need to actually have some in order to play with it in order to better understand how it works it wasn't until two or three years later after i had multiple projects and i had been using it on a regular basis that i actually decided that this was something that even though it was risky i actually wanted to make a large financial commitment and that's when i went to the trouble of figuring out how to turn my retirement money

into a self-directed ira so that i could hold you know real bitcoin in a tax-advantaged account and you know that ended up it was it was a crazy idea at the time you know this was like right after mount gox crash and everybody was telling me how insane i was and it ended up being a good financial bet but really my understanding of the system has continued to evolve every year you know as new things happen and every new thing that happens every event that bitcoin overcomes just strengthens my belief in the resilience of the system. And ultimately, it's less about the technical aspects and more about the human underpinning of all of the people like myself, who we're just frankly not going to give up on this. We're not going to let it die. And that's kind of the mantra that

I've come to believe is that Bitcoin can't fail unless there is a consensus amongst all of us to allow it to fail? Yeah, it's this nuanced version. I think a lot of people, when they see a product or service, they evaluate the technical merits, they evaluate the cash flow, kind of everything you would do with a traditional product. Money in general is very different. And it goes back to this idea that money is a belief system, right? I don't care what the technological underpinning is, whether it's the US dollar or any other currency in the world, it is ultimately a belief system and when you get that belief the only way to have that money fail is when people stop believing right we see that in the fiat world all the time where hyperinflation kind of breaks

the belief of people that it's a store of value and it fails it sounds like you're saying the same thing here it's just with a digital currency called bitcoin rather than any other currency in the world yeah it's great though the um the halving event that's happening today um while I don't believe that in and of itself, this is a major economic or financial catalyst. What it is, is evidence that the rules of the network of the protocol are known by everyone, cannot be manipulated by anyone, and will continue to be predictable and provide a robust foundation that we can build other things on top of. Yeah. Now you have a, I think, number of nuanced views around Bitcoin, around privacy, and kind of the digital world. Some of

that, my understanding, is just ethos-driven, right? You just believe these things. Some of it, though, comes from personal experience. One of those things is the now infamous swatting story. Maybe just kind of for those that don't know that story, quickly tell what happened there, And then we can get into some of the things that you've done in your life and lifestyle to change and kind of prevent yourself from this weird digital world that's coming. Yeah, you know, one of the more insane things about this space is how quickly it grows and how dynamic it is, how many things change, both from a security perspective and a just sort of day to day, I guess, level of interest and people who are paying attention to you. and it was really was the attention uh and it was the the mania of the 2017 hype that drastically changed my life not really so much from the monetary standpoint but more of just going from being some nobody software coder who randomly blathers about libertarian stuff and cryptocurrency

on twitter to a guy who has you know six figures of followers on twitter and that is really no different from what happens to people who become overnight like viral sensations or win the lottery or whatever it's just that your your threat profile can change so quickly in this space and that may be because you're outspoken on social media and have a viral effect there it may be because um you know your wealth goes 10x or 50x overnight and people knew about that because you had been talking about it and so all of a sudden um i start getting attacked in ways that i haven't before and and the thing about the swatting it only takes one person who knows how to make an anonymous phone call and do some simple online searches to find your physical location to

basically target you and send, you know, nation state level attackers to your door, who are ready to commit violence. And so that's what happened to me. I basically caught the attention of the wrong person. And they decided that I had been in Bitcoin for a while, and I could probably be extorted for Bitcoin. And that if they started attacking me in different ways that they could scare me enough to try to buy them off, and that didn't quite work. In fact, they were extorting me for about $50,000, and I ended up spending about that much to completely burn down my life and start it all over again from a privacy perspective, so it was definitely a learning experience. I've written a lot about it, and I've discovered how difficult it really is to live

on the edge of extreme privacy. And the odd thing is that at least in America, this is feasible if you have the time and money, but in many other countries, it's just not legally possible to protect yourself in the way that you can with various like legal entities in the United States. Yeah. And, you know, when you first told me the swatting story, I think part of what was so scary about it is uh when you put yourself in the perspective of the police right when when they're actually showing up uh they have no clue what's going on they have no context all they know is they got this anonymous call uh there's a dangerous situation and uh you actually weren't home if i remember correctly and so you kind of showed up and was like hey what's going on

which you know i'm sure confused them just as much as uh as them already kind of being in this heightened state of panic and so ultimately just scary right yeah that was the only thing that went right was that whenever I make like public comments about things that might somehow be tied to my location I usually do so in a delayed fashion and so my best guess is that that morning I got up I went to the gym and when I was at the gym I made a tweet about waking up and having to deal with stuff with the current drama on Twitter and it was within 30 minutes of that tweet that the SWAT team showed up at my house as I was trying to come back into my neighborhood so I couldn't get into my own neighborhood because they had cordoned it all off and it took a few

minutes uh to figure out that they were looking for me I was the armed assailant that they were trying to track down so I was lucky that you know my local police department had done enough research that they realized that the phone call was not coming from my house or even from my state so they they somewhat knew that it was possibly a fake but of course like you said they have to treat every situation like it's life or death and that is one of the crazy things about this asymmetric attack where someone can spend a few dollars to make an anonymous phone call and get a hundred thousand dollars worth of taxpayer resources pointed at an arbitrary target that's Just the crazy thing about this space in general is how asymmetric some of the attacks and defenses

are. But I'm also very bullish on it because I believe with the technology applying it correctly, we can actually give people a level of security that they wouldn't ever be able to afford before for their assets. Yeah. And so obviously that event was pretty material and one, just a scary experience, but two, it puts you on this path to completely change your life in the way that you interacted both digitally and then also with various assets or communication. Maybe talk a little bit about kind of what that path's been like and then describe like what your life looks like now compared to then. Yeah, so I basically had to figure out, you know, what are all of the different trails of data that you leave laying around as you're going about your normal life

setting up various accounts and services buying things and essentially I had to figure out how do I plug all of these data leaks because this is the particularly challenging thing about privacy is you know keeping the data from getting to people that you don't want it to and so essentially I had to figure out how to create shields, how to create proxies. And I did this in a variety of different ways. I created technical proxies, you know, VPNs and Tor for all of my internet traffic. I created legal proxies through attorneys, through trusts, through anonymous LLCs that did not have my name listed on them as the owner. And then I use proxies for a number of different things like receiving and sending physical goods. You know, I have other mailboxes set up around the

country to receive physical mail. And whenever possible, use third party people, you know, hired proxies uh to avoid having to do any sort of like face-to-face interaction with people who would otherwise potentially ask for my real identity so it's it makes your life a lot complicated that's for sure and it's not it's not free uh from either a time or a money perspective you uh if i remember correctly hired like a private investigator to basically uh double check your work, if you will. What was that like? Yeah. First of all, it took me a while to find what I was looking for. You know, normally you hire PIs to go after other people who owe you money or somehow harmed you. And so it was pretty rare, you know, to ask someone to find yourself.

But it worked out pretty well. And it allowed me to find a couple of leaks, which, you know, resulted in me taking more drastic action the most drastic actually being around my driver license and having to set up another sort of decoy residence and really like the dmv is one of the most aggressive institutions in america when it comes to like verifying your information so uh in order to make sure that my real regular home address didn't show up anywhere i had to make sure I had a decoy somewhere else that is a real place. And of course, it's not cheap to do that. Yeah, I feel like when you get deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole, the more you realize there's a trade-off between privacy and convenience. After everything you went through,

is that the biggest hurdle for other people to do this, just the convenience and kind of the capital needed? Or is it a knowledge gap? Like, why doesn't everyone go do this? Yeah, so it adds friction to many points of your daily life to do this. Before I did it, there wasn't even really a great singular resource that covered all the different aspects of your life. As of today, about a year after I went through all this, this anonymous privacy expert called Michael Basil came out with a book called I think the ultimate guide to privacy it's on Amazon highly recommend it has everything that I did and more so it's certainly possible but once again that's like a three or four hundred page book with a lot of step-by-step instructions

for what you need to go through now the initial onboarding part if you're first of all you have to be willing to pretty much completely burn down your life, sever all ties with your current physical addresses, and start over again. And so you'll easily spend several months doing that. But once you get through that, I would say the ongoing maintenance is not nearly as bad. And where do you feel like the greatest friction is on a day-to-day basis? Is it receiving mail? Is it not going to see people in person? Where is that obstacle? Yeah, I mean, it comes down to how far you really want to take it. So for me, I moved to a different location where no one knew who I was, and I actually created an alias. So no one around here knows my real name. No one knows what I do. um i that's mainly because i wanted to push it to the extreme just to see if it would work you know

see if i would be able to to hide myself in that way but there are different levels of this right you don't need to go to the extreme that i did i think that most people would be far better off if they simply do a weekend of improving their technical privacy and figuring out how to set up ad blockers and vpns and just obscuring their day-to-day web traffic yeah now this brings us to the question of privacy and kind of sovereignty around bitcoin you are probably one of the biggest proponents of this mostly because of the other things you've done in your life let's just start from a high level like what does it mean to have financial privacy and mean to have financial sovereignty? Yeah, they kind of go hand in hand. You know, if you want to be sovereign, you want

to be able to make payments, send money without having to ask permission, then that means you can't have any middlemen that are sitting in there watching everything that you do and then potentially blocking what you're doing. The privacy aspect, I mean, privacy and security are both both very complicated things to quantify, because there's a million different variables, and you have to usually start at the beginning and say, well, what is your threat model? What are you trying to protect yourself against? Because that's how you then decide what precautions you really need to take. The big problem, you know, with the communication age and where we are today with the internet is that people on a regular basis, pretty much every day are sending their personal and in

many cases, private financial information to a number of different third parties. And so over time, that just keeps building up and building up. And each time you give sensitive information to a third party, you're hoping and trusting that they will keep that secure. So over years and years that you've interacted with thousands or tens of thousands of different third parties then the likelihood that one of them is going to get hacked is going to leak that information basically you know approaches one one hundred percent and so that is why that's the hard part is preventing that information from leaking in the first place and why I've gone to the extreme of having you know proxy fake information that I give to all of these third parties instead and

You don't have to go to the extreme of setting up all these different legal entities. There are services out there like privacy.com where you can create unique throwaway debit cards that give you an extra layer of shielding between your regular bank account and the merchants, for example. But these are all things that are covered in the resources. Yeah. And so I guess as part of this, when people hear you say fake information, how much of this is hard to do, but legal versus not legal, but worth the privacy, right? And legal, really what I'm trying to get at is to have you clarify how much of this can be done by a regular individual who's not worried about or who has no desire to even come close to kind of skirting the law, if you will, versus like, hey, I literally just put a fake address on, you know, a piece of, on a document. And if they ever found out that I would get in trouble. yeah you know this is probably one of the most unnerving aspects of it is you know people are generally they want to be honest they don't want to get in trouble for lying and I think that it's actually covered pretty well in the privacy book that I mentioned where at least in America and you know I'm not a

lawyer so don't you know check with your own attorney again I've spent a lot of of time and money on attorneys myself with all of this. At least in America, if you're not signing a legal contract or a legal document, or you're not engaging in some sort of activity with a government agency, then you can absolutely lie about your name and your identity. Like it's not a crime to give a false name or information unless it's to, you know, certain official authorities or you know something in the legal sense but to a merchant it is completely valid to give a fake name and an address that may not even exist and in some cases if you get to the extreme of all of this and you think you've improved your privacy sufficiently then like the final step is actually

disinformation is actually putting your real name and many fake addresses out into the internet and hoping that they get sucked up by all of these uh information engines to then create a smoke screen that makes it almost impossible for someone to figure out you know what is the real information um the alias that you're using uh don't tell me what it is obviously uh but i would love to know is it a ridiculous name or is it a very common name and the reason being uh i've got to imagine that you're having some fun with some of this and uh and there's this element of uh it's serious but also uh there's a little bit of a game aspect to it too right yeah no uh no very common and and that's another thing about you know aliases is you want to pick one that uh will not create any

suspicion it needs to be common based upon your local area and customs and culture and your own background so no uh no mclovin uh type name nope um all right let's get into uh the custody so obviously um maybe talk a little bit just about uh not your keys not your coin um what that means to you uh and then we can get into what you guys are doing at kasa yeah so you know bitcoin is an asset of a form that we've never really seen before it has properties of many different assets You could say it's some sort of hybrid of all of these things, but it definitely seems to be unique in the specific set of properties that it has. Now, one of those properties is that it is a custody-like asset. It's a hard asset that you yourself can control, similar to physical things like gold, precious metals, diamonds, what have you.

it happens to also have these other asset attributes that are mainly because it has digital properties so you know you can send it for example over the internet at practically the speed of light but the ownership asset is a very important attribute for people to understand because of the way that all these other digital online accounts work today most people are they're used to just going to their bank or paypal or some other third-party financial service and logging in and doing whatever they need there and and it's done but if you're for example going to an exchange or some other provider that is a like bitcoin service and you're just logging in and instructing them to do things then what you've done is you've entered into a bank-like

relationship where you're not actually directly controlling that money you're not actually controlling that bitcoin you're instructing a third party who actually controls it to please do these things on your behalf so essentially you don't own bitcoin from a control standpoint you own ious to bitcoin that someone else actually controls and i think it's important for people to understand this distinction because of the way that the system itself operates you know we've created financial infrastructure uh over the past hundred years that has resulted in a fairly small number of large institutions essentially controlling everything we've got these intermediaries that are are watching all of our transactions and you know they're doing it for

our own good, right? So they're, they're trying to protect us from fraud, they're trying to protect illegal activity from happening to people. But ultimately, it's a double edged sword is that they may also end up harming people by blocking various transactions that are not actually causing harm. And you know, this is where you get into legal gray areas, for example, around, like the sex industry or the legal cannabis industry etc etc there's plenty of other examples but one of the biggest features of bitcoin is censorship resistance it is the removal of intermediaries who can block you there's a famous quote i think it's generally that bitcoin is for the payments that they don't want you to make and you know this is i think in the history of bitcoin the

first thing that really proved its censorship resistance was the rise of silk road and darknet markets and while that is as of today a very small fraction of the crypto economy they still continue to exist and you can't stop people from making these payments regardless of whether or a government agrees with it or not and so if we want bitcoin to really fulfill that promise if we want people to be able to reduce the power of what these intermediaries can do then we need to take the power away from them and you know pull it into the hands of the individuals and so that's why i want to continue to see more people you know remove their coins from exchanges and and hold their own private keys but you know this it it makes a lot of people nervous because they've

never done anything like it before there's a million different pitfalls of ways that people can screw up and potentially lose their money and so this is why for the past five years i've i've continued to be focused on the same boring old thing which is just private key management is this fundamental usability layer that i think we need to continue working on in the space and It's what led me to Falun Dikasa a couple of years ago. And I think we've done a great job making strides forward in there. And unfortunately, it's mainly due to very hard lessons that we and others have learned over the years of cataloging everything that you might accidentally do wrong and every way that you might accidentally be tricked into giving your keys, your money to someone else. yeah and so maybe talk a little bit about um you know really the mission behind casa uh and then describe some of the products you guys have built so i think a lot of people think of it as uh it's a company that has a product but you guys actually have multiple products that serve different use

cases yeah i mean our mantra all along has been that we are a personal sovereignty company we are trying to build software that helps people help themselves. One of our employees recently started trying to propagate a new thing where he wants us to say at CASA, we're all about holding your hands, not holding your keys. So, you know, we are non-custodial. We do hold one out of a set of keys for emergency recovery backup purposes and that is mainly to to help people who might shoot themselves in the foot be able to recover from what could otherwise be a catastrophic scenario but our our primary thing that we've been focused on for the past couple of years is self-custody it's how do we take this enormous problem space of everything that could possibly go wrong if you

are controlling your own private keys and build a user interface you know abstraction layer on top of it that makes it as easy to use as a mobile app you know like facebook or whatever so that's really what we've built is we've built a mobile app that is very easy to follow the instructions of how to set up and manage your keys and we've gotten rid of complex things like having to actually take seed phrases and write them down and figure out how to secure them against physical loss and physical theft and instead we're leveraging other technology that other companies have built these hardware devices like trezor ledger cold card and so on to actually maintain the integrity of those keys but really the most important thing that we've done

is we've made multi-sig easier and what is multi-sig it it basically means that in order to send your money you have to have multiple signatures you know multiple authorizations with cryptographic attestation that it's okay to send this money and this is part of the bitcoin protocol, very standard thing, we're not rolling our own crazy setup or anything. And by having these multiple devices that are holding the multiple keys, and then distributing those around different geographic areas, it gives you this level of robustness that eliminates every single point of failure. So I actually truly believe that with, you know, the advent of cryptography and these devices and a properly robust architected setup you

can actually do far better than what Bitcoin has promised for many years which is to be your own bank I actually believe we can move beyond that we can be better than our own bank because we can create setups that are more distributed and not prone to single points of failure like a physical bank would be. And so when a lot of people hear secure your own keys, multi-sig, like these I think are scary kind of what appear to be technical terminology and they're thinking, oh my god, I'm gonna have to go read like this technical guidebook and it's gonna be 500 pages and I'm not technical so I just can't figure it out. You guys obviously have built something that makes

that much easier, but maybe just for those that don't understand, what exactly is a key, right? and kind of how does that play into this? Because I think they hear a lot. They see, obviously, not your keys, not your coin, but it's not a physical key, obviously. So maybe kind of explain that a little bit as well. Yeah, you know, it's not a physical key, but we've actually found that by taking these digital keys

and getting rid of the need for people to actually manage the raw information, those seed phrases that are used to create all of the cryptographic keys, we actually pull it back into the physical realm we say okay you're just keeping your keys on this device and you can very easily visualize you know where is this device we actually show you know a visualization in the app that says you know this is your whole set of devices and uh and we give you reminders to you know make sure you check on this one and you perform an integrity

checked so that we know everything is going well um but ultimately the best way to think about bitcoin is that you're you're not just accessing this ledger with everybody's money on it rather when you're creating a bitcoin transaction you are creating inputs where your You're cryptographically signing proof that you own, you know, the values in the ledger. And then you're sending them to outputs. And the outputs, they have scripts that are essentially locking them. It says these are the conditions required in order for the money in this particular Bitcoin structure to be spent. And there's a million different things that you can do with the programming language.

But what we're doing is very simple, which is we're creating a script that says, these are the three different keys that are allowed to sign to spend from this particular Bitcoin structure. And you need two of them in order for the network to accept it. Or we also have a three out of five or a three out of six, it really depends on your level of security. And so then it becomes a lot easier for us to say, okay, we know that these are the devices that are necessary to co-sign a transaction. Now we just need to figure out how are we going to distribute these devices in order to have the best physical redundancy and security. where do you go from here right it's i think a lot of people would say hey it's really cool you guys have built so far uh when you look out over the next one to five years like what else do you guys have ambitions to build and kind of what do you think is possible so one thing that i think not many people in the space have thought through yet is inheritance and we've spent nearly

a year building out a full inheritance product and plan that actually works within the regular estate planning process so you don't have to roll your own that was actually something that I did back in I think 2015 or 2016 I went through creating a last will and testament even though I had no one really to leave it to is I just wanted to make sure that my coins didn't disappear and stay locked up forever so there's a lot of complications around that other even game theory for example ultimately we want to see bitcoin continue to be used by more and more people so you know we have dabbled a bit with lightning network we're i'm sure going to see more types of payment technology come into play. Who knows what may end up being built on a variety of

side chains, for example, and how can we plug those in. But for today, we found that like the most important aspect to work on is helping people secure large amounts of wealth. You know, if they've ended up with a significant portion of their net worth in Bitcoin, how can we help protect that because if if everybody is losing their money left and right then that is going to erode confidence perhaps not in the fundamental protocol but in the ability for the system itself to gain mass adoption and we are also in a way competing against this looming threat of the centralized providers where i know a lot of people are leaving their money on their exchanges simply because they feel like it's better to have it with a team of experts than to take on that

responsibility for themselves. I think that this is a larger issue of us needing to start to, you know, move society in the direction of self-reliance and self-responsibility. But in order to do that, we need to lower the bar. We can't require people to spend weeks or months learning all this technical jargon and thinking through all the edge cases and the security setup so there's still plenty to do there hopefully we don't have to learn many more hard lessons unfortunately i think that as long as large amounts of bitcoin are stored with third parties there will be more hard lessons to be learned yeah it's um it's really interesting i think because there's an ethos driven kind of psychological component to this. And then

there's actually executing it, right? And you guys have done a really good job of putting that position. One of the questions that I got from people, when I asked on Twitter before we did this, was what is something that you believed in the early days that you have softened your stance on? So something that you believed, you know, very strongly, and now either maybe have changed your mind or or softened your stance well i was uh and many people often forget this but i was actually a big blocker back in the day um i i thought that you know one of the premises of bitcoin should be that transactions should be cheap and it wasn't until i actually started working in the space and started having to run a lot of bitcoin nodes that were then being used

by infrastructure, that I realized it's not just about the current transaction throughput. It is about the aggregate, you know, amount of data that the entire blockchain is storing. And if you allow that to accelerate, then it becomes, you know, geometrically, if not exponentially more difficult for a newcomer to come in and validate the entire history and be able to set up their own node and infrastructure. So one of the issues that I ended up having was with people who were only focused on, you know, what is the hardware that is capable with, you know, keeping up with the current volume of transaction, like how many transactions per second can we do that the hardware can keep up with? Basically, nobody was ever thinking about, well, yeah, but how long

does it take to sync from scratch and so you know that's actually one of the projects that i do on an annual basis is i re-sync a whole bunch of nodes not only for bitcoin but also for other popular networks just to compare to see like which ones are becoming easier to audit and which ones are becoming more difficult to audit speaking of other chains there was uh i think every shit Bitcoiner and every intellectually honest person in the comments of my question asking, we know that he's very bullish and has a deep-seated belief in Bitcoin. Is there any other projects in this space that either one you're curious about, think are interesting, or maybe even are kind of a big believer in? Yeah, so I'm interested in anything that promises better

privacy so i'm interested in things like monero zcash grin uh you know any insanely out there new like cryptographic primitives that people are playing around with uh these are often far too experimental for us to imagine them being brought onto bitcoin anytime soon but um i would say that the thing that I find least interesting are the various networks that claim to be like infinitely scalable with free transactions. I think that that is not being intellectually honest because someone has to pay for it. Ultimately, it's the infrastructure providers. Ultimately, you end up, you know, centralizing around a smaller and smaller number of them. I think a A good example of that would probably be EOS,

which I believe only has like a few dozen validators. And I actually tried to set up an EOS validator just to see, and like, it was too difficult even for my beefy machine. So it's interesting to see the trade-offs that certain people are willing to make. And even if you only have a few dozen nodes or whatever on the network, you can run it. It'll probably be fine, but the trade-offs are not something that I think the majority of people are going to be willing to accept.

For sure. What do you think the biggest risk to Bitcoin adoption is? Well, that has been an easy one for a long time, and it's just simple apathy. This is where it gets really complicated because there is such a diversity of people out there. And I actually think that, well, I might be changing my mind a little bit because of the current macro environment. But for a long time, I felt like trying to sell first world citizens on the idea of Bitcoin was almost a lost cause unless they were hardcore libertarian or Austrian economics follower. because the the current financial system works pretty well for most people in their own perspective now people with different perspectives people in countries with hyperinflations you don't even have to sell them on bitcoin at all you just tell them you know uh the supply

is capped at 21 million and they're sold at that point because they understand they've had to live through it. Now, the real question, which I find interesting to be happening, you know, right during this halving period, is how many people in the first world countries start to wake up and realize that, you know, their wealth is actually being stolen from them a little, little by little year over year, and eventually over their lifetime, it'll add up to be a significant fraction of value that has been taken from them in, I would say, an even more subversive way than taxation. It's like a form of taxation that is very difficult for people to even detect because it happens over a long period of time. I've said a bunch of times before that the financial system is based on 50%

or more not understanding how money works right right it's very much a um you can call it a secret right you i mean you can call it whatever you want but ultimately uh not only is taxation but it's taxation without people even realizing right and actually people who get hit the hardest by it but people who live in cash definitely don't understand it right um what um you're a big gun nut uh which i appreciate uh having grown up in in north carolina uh what is your favorite gun and why um well my favorite one that i own which i think is quite uh versatile and also my recommendation for home defense is a suppressed 45 caliber chris vector with an extended 30 round magazine um this is a subsonic rounds so with the suppressor on there it's great for home defense

because you aren't going to deafen yourself and potentially create an even worse situation if you're not able to tell you know where attackers are in your house um it was actually funny story uh i bought it on the recommendation of john mcafee's bodyguard so i was hanging out with mcafee a few years ago on a sort of business related uh venture and uh i was shooting the shit with his bodyguard for a while and all and we started talking guns and you know after 20 minutes of talking guns he was like oh man you got to get a chris vector and so i did and it was some of the best firearm advice I've received. How often do you go practice? Are you somebody who does a lot of drills and goes to shoot quite a bit or not so much?

Not as often as I've wanted to lately. Running a company makes it a lot harder. And in fact, the weird thing is I've gotten into virtual reality over the past couple of years. And even though it's not quite the same experience it's so much more convenient for me to walk over one room and and pull up a gun range in virtual reality i don't have to uh pack up all my guns and ammo schlep them over to a range fire everything and then come back and disassemble everything and clean it um so you know i really only get to do that every few months at this point it's also much cheaper to go do it in virtual reality right for sure um what is uh your thoughts around the china hash rate uh there's a lot of detractors that would say hey there's so much

hash rate of bitcoin that's in china um how do you kind of think through that yeah i mean it's not optimal if we're thinking about nation state level attacks um but even within China the actual mining farms are highly distributed and my understanding is a number of them are you know really like out in the middle of nowhere like jungle locations you know basically directly plugged into a hydroelectric dam so it would be an interesting thought experiment to think through you know how much resources would really have to be committed by the Chinese government in order to to go in and take these things over and use them for malicious purpose and you know if they did and they would then need to do so at their own detriment um you know the

whole point of the incentives around mining is that it's more profitable to go along with the network and get paid by the network than it is to attack the network but you know assume china has infinite money and for whatever reason they need to kill bitcoin the worst that they could really do is either double spend the money that they already have in bitcoin or simply perform a denial of service attack where they stop confirming transactions and then reorganize away any blocks from other miners who do confirm transactions so with either one of those it would be apparent to the rest of us within you know a matter of a few blocks and and so there would be essentially an emergency situation you know flag would go up amongst a lot of people like myself and we would

come together and we would have to analyze the situation and if we determined that it looked like it was a you know chinese nation-state-led attack that was actually going against the incentives of the network, then we would need to figure out, you know, what is the best way to respond to this? Is it something that we believe would be able to go on indefinitely? Or should we wait it out? Or should we propose some sort of code change that essentially neuters the existing hashing hardware? Yeah, it's crazy to go down that game theory route. We don't have time to do that today, but I could talk to you about that for days and days. One of the questions that I got that I thought was really interesting was, what is your suggestion or where can you point people

who they bought crypto on a KYC or AML exchange? They've now moved that off into a hardware wallet or a Kasa device, but they would like to try to reinstate some of that privacy. What's the best thing that they can look at or where can they go educate themselves on how to reestablish some of that privacy yes so this is not the type of thing that is easy as just flipping a switch and doing it all at once because there's a variety of different methods and it really comes down to do you want to stay on the existing network and and try to improve the privacy of your utxos your bitcoins on on that network are you willing to uh pay a small exchange fee to exchange to a more privacy oriented coin and move some money around there um it i think it basically comes down to

how much time are you willing to put into it how much in fees uh are you willing to put into it i've played around with for example trying to be a market maker on join market to actually get paid to mix coins and unfortunately um i barely broke even with like paying for the transaction of fees but that is one way that you can do it that will not cost you much money the the problem in general that i have with the various techniques that you need to improve privacy is that you have to take your coins out of cold storage if you're doing mixing you need to put them into some sort of mixing software like join market or wasabi or samurai dojo and those coins need to be hot they need to be on an internet connected device potentially for days depending on how many rounds

of mixing you're doing so you should if you have a large amount of money you should only be doing a little bit of it at a time and then moving those funds off to a new wallet which is your your cleanly fresh coins otherwise you can also you know go out and try to find uh one of those non-aml kyc like atomic swap exchanges exchange your bitcoin a little bit of a at a time for something like monero zcash whatever possibly move it around a little bit on there and then maybe eventually you also want to atomic swap it back but ultimately what you're trying to do is you're trying to break those links. Uh, and it's hard to do that if you're not technically sophisticated. Will that change over time? I certainly hope so, especially with like the

next major upgrade that we're going to be getting, uh, when we see Schnorr signatures, which will essentially allow for signature aggregation to happen that will drastically improve the privacy attributes of bitcoin mixers and actually another thing which i'm i'm still not quite sure about but for example there is the liquid side chain and it has a feature called confidential transactions And it seems to me like someone should build a mixer on Liquid that is a confidential transaction mixer. So I don't know why anyone wouldn't do that. Maybe we just need to properly incentivize people. three questions to end it for you uh what would have to happen for you to change your mind on bitcoin like what is the one or two things that could occur where you would throw your hands up and say uh this isn't going to play out how i thought or i no longer believe in bitcoin

that is tough i mean there are scenarios where you know if if enough like government resources were put into it to try to like track down everyone who was using bitcoin you know perhaps by putting pressure on all the exchanges you know if if it was outright banned uh that would certainly turn most people off to it i think it would still continue to exist it would still operate but probably at a much lower price because the size of the network would shrink and it would it would be you know a completely different adversarial situation especially for me because i'm well known and even though i have a great level of privacy like the government could find me if they really wanted to um otherwise i think it's it's unlikely that there would be

a catastrophic event that was not recoverable from like even though there are many potentially catastrophic events like you know quantum computing or breaking of of important cryptographic primitives like those things would most likely be catastrophic for many other systems that are much larger than bitcoin and so that would be more of a like worldwide global catastrophe type of issue of people having bigger problems to worry about um but other than that like i really i continue to think that the most likely way for bitcoin to die is through apathy and you know if it stagnates for years on end and you know people stop contributing to it stop trying to make it better that's when it becomes a lot less interesting is that if i i look at this thing

as you know the open source collaborative project for money then the most important thing that we can continue to do is to continue to improve it so that it becomes better and better option than the existing fiat system let's hope we never see any of those things happen what uh what's the most important book you've ever read oh i mean we have a few that are required reading at casa and one of them is the sovereign individual and i i continue to think that it's quite prescient and uh i i see it happening in the news, you know, all the time, where it seems like we're in the days right now where you basically have to be a billionaire to be a sovereign individual and have, you know, a nation state

level sway, you know, you're at the point where you can negotiate with nation states, essentially on a fairly level playing field. But I do continue to believe that technology and the power that cryptography gives to people will continue to lower that bar that would be a fantastic role to live in i really really hope you're right there uh last question before you get to ask me one to finish up uh aliens believer or non-believer oh yeah i mean it's uh statistically practically guaranteed why well you know it's hard to even hold the numbers in your head But the sheer number of possibilities and number of other ecosystems out there that are similar to ours and thus likely have life, it's just, you know, it's kind of like mining, right? is if you try enough times eventually you'll find that impossible number to find so i think you'll

find the impossibly uh right mixture of chemicals and other uh elements required to create life it's scary to think about how big the universe is just the universe right like and then you get into other galaxies and kind of the infinity type stuff and it's just like jesus what that like I don't know. It makes your stomach drop sometimes to think about it. What, um, what one question do you have for me to, uh, to finish this up? Uh, good question. So am I correct? Is your, is your background in marketing? uh no growth yeah growth stuff for sure um i uh i ran a couple of growth teams at uh at facebook and uh and snapchat okay so would you would you say that you're applying your

same type of growth mindset to bitcoin um to some degree i would say uh so two things that I think are true. One, the beauty of money is it's one of the most viral products in the world, right? And if I want to send somebody Bitcoin, I pull them into the network if they're not already there, right? And so that ends up being a very similar tactic to what a lot of companies try to create with virality. Money just inherently has that. And then two is education is always a big thing. Awareness is a big thing, right? And there's no bigger awareness or education campaign than what's going on right now in the macro environment, right? I mean, you know, I love the saying of like, the Federal Reserve running a $2 trillion marketing campaign for Bitcoin,

right? And so I think a lot of that stuff looks very similar to how a company would set up marketing and virality, referrals, all that kind of stuff, obviously, but it's a decentralized system that Noe's, you know, kind of coordinating resources to do that. The second piece of it is that I really think about the growth things that we did and kind of how can I individually participate. And one of those things is around pulling people from other communities or audiences into Bitcoin, right? And so one of the things I did about, I don't know, maybe six months ago or so, I decided, Hey, I'm going to change the name on a lot of what I was doing to be less Bitcoin or crypto specific and do more of a, like, I want to talk to interesting people. I want to write about

things other than just Bitcoin. And there was questions in the beginning of like, Hey, are you like abandoning Bitcoin? Or like, do you not believe in it anymore? And when it says no, actually it's the exact opposite. Like I believe in it more today than I ever have. But I also know that if I was to personally take the podcast, for example, if I was to approach somebody and say, do you want to come on my crypto podcast? There's a lot of people who say yes, but there's even more people who would say no. If instead I say, hey, do you want to come on this podcast that has a bunch of other smart, successful people that you admire? And one of the questions maybe about Bitcoin, not as big of a deal, right? They're much more open to that. So that's been

interesting. And the other thing is on like the investing side, that entire business, like we've always looked at it as where's the intersection of like traditional technology infrastructure and this world, right? So obviously we've got a pretty significant position in Bitcoin itself, in the funds, but also like what are all the things that need to be built in and around to make this viable, right? And I think that there's a lot of opportunities there. And so it's, you're kind of providing growth with capital. But ultimately, you know, I tell everyone of our founders, like, they're doing the hard work, right? It's, you know, they're the ones who actually have to solve the technical problems. They're the ones who have to recruit and retain

employees. They're the ones who have to actually scale the businesses, get contracts signed, kind of do all that stuff. And, you know, look, some of it is, it's going to be hard no matter what industry you're operating in as an entrepreneur. But some of this stuff is very kind of specific whether it's regulatory or otherwise um that just makes it harder in this space i think so final related question since i believe you're the originator or at least popularized the meme of the virus is spreading is bitcoin the virus or is it the vaccine so uh i don't actually remember why i originally tweeted that and i think it was kind of like a throwaway comment at first and for whatever reason like people like latched on to it so i was like

Yeah, like feedback loop. Cool. I'll tweet that again. Right. And the next thing you know, I tweeted a bunch of times. For obvious reasons, that phrase has been retired for the time being. I was recently asked, do I think it has to be retired forever? Or can it make a comeback? Probably retired forever. At least for the foreseeable future. uh but but i think that you know um i didn't know this it was marco santori actually told me this uh in the early days of bitcoin like 2011 to 13 uh there was this uh comment around like a mind virus right and so when i when i first started saying it i was thinking more like virality right kind of the way a virus spreads uh he said that actually people had used the terminology mind virus which i thought was uh pretty applicable um but that's how kind of like offensively it spreads through the world i think to your point like when you look at it as as a solution it's definitely the vaccine right and uh and it can be both it can be everything yeah and i think that's

part of like people who don't haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this they're kind of like what do you guys mean it could be everything like you know how how come uh you can apply bitcoin to all things and uh marty bent has a great way of putting it he's like look if you fix the money you can fix the world right and I just think like that phrase really explains a lot of why it's so important to the global economy but also to kind of everybody's individual lives and lifestyles and so it's a it's a pretty important you know thing to work on I think people like yourself and others who you know are actually technically helping build it I always say like you're the most important people out there uh and also probably um if bitcoin was to fail i actually

go with like somehow there's a self-inflicted wound like something gets pushed or there's some issue whatever i don't think there's a high likelihood of it happening but to me like that's actually the the most likely thing because i generally think bitcoiners are going to solve the problems that they're presented with right and kind of keep going where uh where can we send people where do you want to send them uh either to find you online or or learn more about casa yeah uh so casa very easy just keys dot casa keys dot c-a-s-a will take you to our site with all of our security related material and as for myself my site is lop.net and you can find my twitter my articles i've written um and all of my 550 or so educational resource links i will give

you uh a major major vote of um approval in that your where i think it's lop.net slash bitcoin yeah i send people there all the time it is by far the most robust uh resource page i think on the internet so bitcoin.page will take you directly there if that's easier for people to remember whatever you're doing keep updating that because that uh when people say how do i learn about bitcoin i send them there and i'm always scared like i'm going to overwhelm them but i just warn them like listen just work your way through these links and uh and you'll be a an expert in no time start at the top absolutely well listen james i really appreciate you doing this um we'll uh we'll link to a cost i think people should go and and check it out and uh from

everybody i just appreciate all the uh the work that you've done because uh you are one of uh most important people helping build, uh, build this future world that we all want. My pleasure. I'm here to help. Happy having. All right, guys, I really appreciate you listening to that episode. I loved it. Hopefully you found it valuable before I let you go. Don't forget to go and subscribe on your favorite podcast channel to this podcast, leave a review, leave five stars, help me get more people listening to all this great information if you also want we publish these on youtube in video format you can just search my name anthony pompliano on youtube and find the channel subscribe there i hope you guys

are enjoying all this i'm loving making it and so we will see you on the next episode