The Wolf Of All Streets - The Best Way To Keep Your Bitcoin Safe | Jameson Lopp, Casa

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

As the world of Bitcoin continues to grow, it’s no surprise that we’ve seen a rise in cyber security violations. That’s why it’s essential to keep your wallet secure. Co-Founder of Casa and lo...ng-time bitcoin advocate, Jameson Lopp (@lopp), is on a mission to empower you to be your own bank. He joins us on The Wolf of All Streets to discuss the importance of self-sovereignty, how political narratives play a role in the future of bitcoin, and whether or not there’s anything standing in Bitcoin’s way. JOIN THE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR Secure your assets, secure your future, with Arculus. Arculus is the crypto cold storage wallet that combines the world’s strongest security protocols with an easy-to-manage app. Store, swap, and send your crypto all with a simple tap of your Arculus Key™ card. Order the safer, simpler, smarter crypto cold storage solution today at https://amazon.com/arculus EPISODE LINKS • Jameson Lopp: https://twitter.com/lopp • Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This podcast is sponsored by Arculist. Stay tuned for more information on them later in the episode. What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where two times every week I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, music, trading, art, sports, politics, basically anyone with a story to tell. Now, this is the second time that I've had today's guest on the show, and I'm a very happy user of his company, Casa. Now, Jameson Lopp is a cypherpunk, one of the original Bitcoin OGs,
Starting point is 00:00:35 but also an innovator in the space of security and multi-sig and also a passionate advocate for privacy, which is something that has become a hot topic, I think, all over the world now more than ever. So I'm interested in digging into all of that with him. Jameson Mopp, thank you so much for joining today. Glad to be here. And I was just listening to the Melker Project a couple days ago. Oh, wow, man. Ball of notes. I know you're a ball of notes fan. Absolutely. I think I've got pretty much all the stuff you put out still from a decade ago. That's amazing, man. Every once in a while, I definitely feel like I need to get back into it. And then my kids start screaming or something and I get distracted. But I will have a resurgence at
Starting point is 00:01:18 some point. I appreciate that you're still listening to that. So listen, I just realized when I looked back, we haven't had you on the podcast since 2020. I felt like it was much more recent. We talked obviously at length then about what cost it does. We can revisit it now, but what's changed with the company since then? Well, a couple of years ago, we had a bit of a pivot. we basically decided to discontinue our node product and the main reason for that was just it was really really high maintenance and very difficult to give the same level of user experience that we do with our app with our multi-sig product and that's basically because there's just so many more moving pieces and it involved putting hardware inside people's homes in their networks that would have configurations that were unknown to us. And just so many different edge cases, really hard to have a consistent user experience there. discovered that at least at the time, Lightning Network was really more of a enthusiast tinkerer
Starting point is 00:02:28 type of project. And it was hard for us to really build a consistent business use case around it. We basically saturated the market. And after that, there wasn't really much else for our business to grow. Now, over the past couple of years, Lightning Network has matured, has evolved. We're seeing more retail and enterprise level adoption of Lightning Network. And so we're keeping apprised of that and definitely plan on doing a comeback, but not in the same way. Like I said, we want to offer much better user experience. And really with regard to our flagship multi-sig security product, it hasn't been something that we've made massive changes to. It's just been something we've been
Starting point is 00:03:22 iterating on making small changes here and there as we've gotten feedback from our customers, as we've run into new edge cases. And that's kind of the name of the game when it comes to security, especially when you're talking crypto private key security, which is a very new space relative to most other stuff. So continuing to learn, continuing to improve, and the market has been favorable. Interestingly, it seems like everybody has a similar evolution when it comes to security, right? You sort of start, you buy your dog coin or whatever gets you into crypto, you leave your coins on exchange, you find Bitcoin. Of course, once you have enough, you start to maybe hear about,
Starting point is 00:04:05 you know, not your keys, not your coins, moving to a hardware wallet. And eventually, I think when your stack gets big enough, or you take it serious enough, you move on to multisig that you guys offer. That said, it feels to me like there has been a narrative shift where I don't hear not your keys, not your coins as much as I used to. That maybe your average person just puts their coins on an exchange, never thinks about it, and doesn't even take those next steps. Do you think that that's true? I mean, you would know better than me. Yeah, well, we're all biased. We all have our own echo chambers. And so my echo chamber probably has more of that than most people. But this is
Starting point is 00:04:46 something that actually came up just yesterday on a Trezor related space that I was talking about seed storage best practices on. And I basically said that I'm kind of I'm pessimistic on mainstream self-custody becoming the common thing. I would be very surprised if self-custody becomes the default. However, it's because it takes effort. And people are always going to take the most convenient path. This is true for security, for privacy, for pretty much any aspect of someone's life. And we all have very limited time. And unless there's something that really piques our interest, that really makes us want to put a lot of time and resources into diving into, you're just going to take whatever the default most convenient path is. And so as of today, the most convenient path
Starting point is 00:05:40 for most people, because they're getting onboarded through these centralized exchanges is they hook up their bank account, they purchase some crypto tokens, and then that's it. They probably don't even know that withdrawing is an option because it's just it's not something that's common to any other asset. So if you don't really look into it, it's probably not something the exchanges are making very obvious and telling people about self-custody because that's against their incentive to do so. And so the question is, how do you change that? And I think it actually requires a fundamental change in the model of how people get onboarded in the first place. So if you want my optimistic take, I would say I'm more optimistic that more people will get into self-custody if the onboarding process changes. And how does the onboarding process change? I think the most obvious path is that if people start accepting cryptographic tokens and assets as payment for goods and services. If you're receiving those funds directly, you're not
Starting point is 00:06:46 having to go buy them somewhere. I think it's much more likely that you would be receiving them to a self-custody wallet. But that's just speculation. Hopeful that that will become more normal. But even then, it's really hard to say how long that would take to get to that point. It's a really interesting point. I sort of never to get to that point. It's a really interesting point. I sort of never thought of it that way. Because if you are going to purchase Bitcoin in the United States, it's very unlikely you're going to do that outside of the sort of KYC, AML, centralized exchange rails that exist. It's almost impossible.
Starting point is 00:07:20 Yeah. I mean, the average person is going to Google like buy Bitcoin and then they're going to click on a few links. And those are all going to be billion dollar exchanges that have really great SEO or have ads and so on and so forth. So there's a reason why there are tendencies for even decentralized systems to centralize in different ways that's to be expected. But I guess a more philosophical question is like, how much does that really matter? And you could make the argument that, and I make the argument that it's better for as many people as possible to self-custody because it makes the ecosystem more anti-fragile. You don't want all of the money to be held by a handful of people. But also there's a bigger question of, well, I think what really matters is that anyone who cares enough can self-custody. So while we would prefer that everyone self-custody,
Starting point is 00:08:20 as long as we're not preventing people or making it too difficult for someone to hold their own keys and be their own bank, then I think the promise of Bitcoin, of being your own bank is still within reach. And that's really, I would say, one of the main things that we're trying to do at Casa. We're just trying to lower the bar, make it less technically challenging for people to get there. There are a lot of narratives as to why people would self-custody in the first place. Obviously, I think for a lot of people, it sort of starts with, well, what if I get hacked or get phished or get scammed? Sort of in the background has always been because of the threat of your government, right? And I think people in the United States never take that
Starting point is 00:09:01 threat very seriously. But I think with what's happened in Canada over the last month, certainly what's happening in Russia, that that's changing. Are you seeing a shift in narrative from customers, people contacting you talking about, well, if I self-custody, does that mean that there can't be a bank run and they can't come take my assets? Or because I'm protesting, you know, obvious things that we're seeing happening. Yeah. And we've definitely had a lot of existing customers reach out to us and ask, and, you know, especially with the, the conjunction of both the Canada seizures and freezing of accounts. And just in the past week, we've had dozens of companies in the space have uh data leaked uh through third parties that got compromised um that's resulted in a lot of people reaching out to us and asking you know what is the threat
Starting point is 00:09:54 model here like what do i need to do if i want to be nation-state resistant and so you know there's a couple of different ways that you can approach that. I would, I generally say, well, if you want to be 100% nation state resistant, it's kind of similar to a lot of the writing that I've done about wrench attacks, where like the only way that you can be 100% sure that your keys aren't going to be forcibly taken from you is by putting them in a architecture where you yourself don't have direct access to them. Because especially if you're talking about nation state attacks, really any physical coercion, you have to consider yourself a single point of failure. And so you actually have to consider yourself an attacker because you have to assume, you know, whether it's through violence or in some cases, we've actually had clients who were drugged with drugs that made them cooperate. You have to assume that you can be put into a situation where you you can basically be told you have to access your keys. And so if you can access enough keys to spend the funds, then you probably will. So if you want to have your funds safe from that, then it has to be sufficiently challenging for you to be able to do that. And now how do you do that is a much bigger in-depth question. The easiest, well, the simplest, easiest option is what we have a few clients do, which is they actually place their keys in different countries, different jurisdictions.
Starting point is 00:11:38 Geographical dispersion. Like, fly me somewhere else to get my wallet, buddy. Right. Yeah. That's the easiest way, at least from a threat modeling perspective. Of course, it's extremely onerous to actually do and set up, and it makes it extremely onerous to go spend those funds. Though we do have some clients, and unfortunately, all of these things add more expense, more
Starting point is 00:12:02 cost, more resources to both setting up and maintaining. But we do have some clients who they can achieve that nation state resistance by having keys on different continents and also have a somewhat less onerous ability to access them because they have people that they employ who have access to those keys. And then they create their own authentication protocols for how to basically prove to that person that they are not under duress and that they want to spend the funds and have them add a signature and so on and so forth. But otherwise, if you're constrained within like one particular jurisdiction, it kind of turns into more of a well, can I sufficiently disperse my
Starting point is 00:12:53 keys into places that can't be found? And so that can get a lot more complicated sort of reasoning through the myriad of different places that you could store keys. Which is funny because then you find people putting it in safe deposit boxes in an actual bank, which is who you're opting out of sort of in the first place. But there's a camera in the bank and if you walk in there with somebody, it's going to be very hard for them to force you. It's very daunting. It's very daunting.
Starting point is 00:13:22 But I mean, to be clear, the actual service you provide takes a minute to set up but it's not complex once you if you have any sort of native crypto knowledge i think we're talking about the steps you can then take to make it even more i guess nation state or hack or or criminal proof? Yeah. I would say a large portion of Kasa's value, it's not necessarily in the technical stuff. Now, the technical stuff is just trying to make it easier to get set up and maintain and manage your key set. And I would argue that we have one of the best user experiences there like any of the multi-sig software wallets.
Starting point is 00:14:05 But in many ways, it's just as valuable, if not more valuable, to have the client services aspect where we're basically consulting with you. Because this is a very personal thing. Everybody has different situations, different resources, different threat models, different people and places that they may be able to access or may be able to consider to use for key storage. And so having a consultant to help you think through the trade-offs, because there's always trade-offs with any of these decisions, is I think a very valuable thing. Because otherwise otherwise that's where you really have to put in days, weeks, months of education if you want to go from not thinking about key security to becoming
Starting point is 00:14:56 like an adversarially minded person who's really deep into this. And that's what we're trying to help people not have to do is you know lean on us for knowledge and expertise um this is what i've like built a lot of the product decisions have come from the what seven years that i've spent uh building key management products and seeing people shoot themselves in the foot in a million different ways right that that that leads to the next point, which is obviously that you talked about someone being a single port of failure, even kind of turning into an attacker on their own assets. Aren't humans, I mean, we're fallible, right? Aren't we the biggest threat to our own assets, being our own bank? Just you die, you lose your keys, you have a fire, you drop a
Starting point is 00:15:46 cup of coffee on a piece of paper. And isn't that why so many people are confident having their assets on an exchange or in a bank or other places? Bottom line, it's really scary to be your own bank. You have to take a lot of personal responsibility to do that. Yeah, I can understand the mindset. And it's something that I hear very often. It's, I'm not a security expert. I don't trust myself to be able to navigate this space that is fraught with peril. I would prefer to trust a specialist to do that. And that's completely understandable, because that's how we operate with the vast majority of different service providers. Like that's, that's how human society has evolved over thousands of years is through specialization. You don't want to be a deep knowledge specialist in every different thing that
Starting point is 00:16:38 you have to do in your life because that it's a, it's a matter of efficiency. And, you know, it's like, is your knowledge really thin and wide or is it deep? And you want to be deep in one thing
Starting point is 00:16:54 because that's how you can generate the most value. But you can't be deep in everything just because you don't have the time. And so the deeper you try to go in the more different categories and aspects of your life, obviously, the less deep you can be. So I understand it. But you know, it creates a very different model. And I think that it kind of undermines one of the fundamental premises of this entire space. And it's unfortunate. It's
Starting point is 00:17:25 unfortunate that that's where we are. And I would say that's what I've been trying to fight against for the past seven years is to continue to push forward, both from a technical standpoint and a user standpoint and a service standpoint, the ability not only for someone to be their own bank, but for the average non-technical person to be confident that they can be their own bank and that they aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot. And there is sort of trust and reputation around that. And I think the longer that we have self-custody services that are going and helping people protect themselves, there is a sort of
Starting point is 00:18:13 viral network effect there. And that's where I would say we actually get a lot of our new clients as referrals from other clients who have been with us for many years and believe and now they are confident that hey i can do this then my buddy you know joe can do this too and so you know i'll refer him so yeah it's it's it's something that continues to take a lot of time and it's it's tricky because we have to be perfect like If we have one major incident, that could potentially set us back quite a bit on the level of confidence that people have in us and in other self-custody systems. entire market was very Bitcoin first, right? And I still believe it should be and potentially you could argue that it is. But last year, I think for the first time, we saw a major shift to where your average person maybe got into the crypto space without ever even knowing about Bitcoin, right? They came through NFTs or some stupid meme dog coin or some other, you know, my friend told
Starting point is 00:19:20 me I'll get rich and win the lottery if I come in. How much of a challenge is that for you guys? I mean, you're still primarily a Bitcoin service, right? Are you opening business to other assets? Are you going to do ERC20s? Or do you just focus on what you're doing and assume that it all comes back to Bitcoin eventually, which it does? Yeah, so we obviously monitor feedback from our clients, you know, what are they demanding? There certainly is demand, I think, for better, like multi sig self custody of other assets, because a lot of these other assets and other networks, like Ethereum, for example, doesn't have native multi sig, you't have native multisig.
Starting point is 00:20:06 You actually have to write your own smart contract or use a multisig smart contract that you hope is sufficiently vetted and doesn't have any bugs in it. You know, multisig on a lot of these other networks is a scary proposition if it's not a native part of the protocol. But yeah, I think we are seeing more demand for it. And if you're paying attention to the space, you're seeing a lot of crazy exploits happen and people losing their six and seven figure NFTs. And so, you know, the ability to have a stronger level of security around any cryptographic asset that is worth a substantial amount of value, you know, the value flows to a given asset. And as a result, the value of a security offering for that also continues to
Starting point is 00:21:01 increase. So yeah, we're definitely monitoring it uh i would say this is the same thing that we've said for a long time actually is that casa is not a bitcoin company casa is a a private key management company our our mantra is actually to help individuals become more self-sovereign uh It is not to help people with their Bitcoin. It's just Bitcoin is the first, most obvious, most valuable way to do that. We have a lot of ideas and fanciful, long-term, multi-decade thinking around different ways that we believe that private keys will continue to improve people's sovereignty, not just in financial ways. And we want to be there and be able to provide people with the tools and the best practices, the knowledge, the consultation that help them navigate the space.
Starting point is 00:22:10 So it's something that we're definitely working on. We're not going to try to support the long tail of assets because the problem, I would say the fundamental friction or problem or trade-off that we have with supporting other assets is that we don't want to add other assets to the detriment of our existing services and basically our Bitcoin product. Because it's not just a set it and forget it thing. You know, security is a constantly evolving thing. And if we're taking resources away from Bitcoin security to add all of these other assets, that could result in what I mentioned earlier. Maybe we miss something.
Starting point is 00:23:03 Maybe we end up having some major catastrophic incident because we weren't focused enough on what was happening with Bitcoin. So, you know, we are continuing to grow. We're continuing to add more engineering resources. And as we do that, I expect we'll also be able to add resources to look at other assets while not giving up any of the resources that we're putting into Bitcoin. Let's talk about the fact that the real ethos of the company is around self-sovereignty, not necessarily a Bitcoin. What other aspects would you personally teach people about self-sovereignty outside of buying and securing their Bitcoin? Well, there's a lot of just operational security and privacy issues that it's very hard to make a lot of that stuff easy because security is only really half of the equation here. I try to teach people that security is not just like one shield or one set of things. It's a multi-layered approach. Like if you're doing things the right
Starting point is 00:24:16 way, you have many different layers of security, whether that's digital security or physical security, it all ends up being the same in terms of you want what we call defense in depth, which means that you can think of it as ring fences, I guess, though, of course, each fence, each layer is some other security mechanism, but even outside, I would say the most outermost layer of security, whatever that is for whatever aspect of your life, the ring fence outside of that should actually be privacy. Because if you have strong privacy, that will hopefully prevent most attackers from even getting to your first layer of security because they aren't even looking for you. They don't even know that you should be a target for them. They don't know
Starting point is 00:25:14 that you are a potential high value target or that you own certain things that they could target, so on and so forth. So yeah, there's a lot of knowledge there. And sovereignty can actually be provided to a number of different aspects of your life. So you can, it actually comes into play even more recently over the past few months, but you can think of things like food sovereignty, energy sovereignty. It's almost like prepping, right? Preppers, I think, have a bad rap because some of the extremists who get TV shows made, but there's nothing wrong with being prepared for certain edge cases. And in fact, like a lot of government agencies say you should be prepared to basically be on your own without any help for several weeks, and don't necessarily think of it as like a negative thing or something that you have to be obsessed about. I consider it to be a form of insurance. And it's really any of this sovereignty stuff. It's a fancy word, but what it really means is reducing your reliance on trusted third parties. So whether that's like reducing your reliance on various supply chains or providers of food or energy or security or whatever, it's important to have, I think,
Starting point is 00:26:59 these insurance policies. And I almost even cringe when I call them insurance policies, because I'm actually not a fan of traditional insurance policies. Because if you think about it, a traditional insurance policy is a trusted third party you're entering into a legal contract with, and they're actually highly incentivized to do everything that they can do to not fulfill that legal contract, you know, find loopholes, create loopholes, put in edge cases and say, Oh, well, you didn't meet this. So we don't have to pay anything off. So you know, if you if you want real insurance, it can't be some legal contract, because you probably shouldn't even assume that the legal system is going to uphold it in the way that you want to. Real insurance is being self-sovereign and sustainable and basically self-reliance. We all believe and know that
Starting point is 00:27:53 cryptocurrencies are the future, but it's still very scary to be your own bank and have to secure your assets. Most of the traditional hardware wallets are hard to use. They're clunky and people lose their private keys. It's not really that efficient. And that's where the Arculus key card comes in. I absolutely love this thing. I've transitioned largely to using it for most of my assets. It's literally just a card that you tap right on your mobile device. You can send, receive, swap, buy and sell crypto with that simple action. It's literally amazing. There's no cords. There's no charging. There's no Bluetooth. The only person that has access to your crypto is you. You guys have got to try it. And guess what? You can buy
Starting point is 00:28:39 it right on Amazon. Go buy your Arculus on Amazon now. A Bitcoin is insurance, right? It's funny, Mark Yusko was on the podcast once and he said something that always resonates with me. And he said, Bitcoin is schmuck insurance, right? He's like, forget even the privacy and all those aspects. It's just insurance against people doing stupid things that you can't control, right? And that sounds like that's basically everything you're describing and and it doesn't have to be that your government comes after you you could just be a hurricane right or a tornado there's a there's a lot of reasons that you could have major problems on display all over the world yeah uh this is one of the things that's very difficult to convey to normies um of like why is bitcoin insurance against schmucks and i would say by schmucks we mean meddlers uh authoritarians
Starting point is 00:29:36 politicians regulators central bankers it's the people in the upper parts of the hierarchies of society that are puppet masters and lever poolers because they don model, both of the system overall and of security models that we can provide for individuals who are using the system. So it's strong and robust against tampering is, I guess, what we really mean by schmuck insurance is that the the thing like the reason that i hate politics and and a lot especially of like aspects of i guess you could call it woke culture or uh a lot of the the censorship and and and basically rug pulling that's happening in mainstream society these days is that when you're operating in these fragile hierarchical command and control systems you have to spend a lot of your time worrying about political bullshit because at any given time, whoever's in power might make some arbitrary decision or
Starting point is 00:31:08 whoever's in power might get swapped out with someone else who has a completely different perspective and starts changing the rules. And that's really why I love Bitcoin is because, you know, the rules aren't going to get arbitrarily changed. And whenever you're living under a rule regime where the rules can be changed, then that undermines almost everything. Your entire worldview, your existence, your security of various aspects of your life can literally get rug pulled from one day to the next. You've been preaching this for a long time, right? And so the early Bitcoiners, which I am not, right? I came in 2016. It was always like, you're crazy. Even me at that point. You guys are crazy.
Starting point is 00:31:58 You're talking about these things. These things can never happen. And for a long time in first world or civilized culture, they weren't happening. Not in my backyard. Talk about Canada, right? If it can happen in Canada, it can happen anywhere, but talk about Canada and your thoughts on what's happening there. Yeah. Well, I am, I'm not by any means a Canadian political expert.
Starting point is 00:32:28 But what we've seen is that there was just a popular uprising against a lot to happen was that the authorities in Canada realized that they couldn't just go in and necessarily wipe these people away and use their law enforcement to push them out of the places that they were setting up and protesting and that it was a lot easier for them rather than by using threats of violence it's so much easier for them to just compel various financial authorities to put you know financial pressure on them and shut down your accounts and so on and so forth and you know, the same thing is happening with Russia and Ukraine, where we're seeing a lot of basically financial cancel culture happening, because it's so much easier to do that than to actually spend billions of dollars putting, you know, military in place and then risking further escalation. So this, I think, will continue to be a common theme for the foreseeable future, which is any of these command and control systems, and the financial system is
Starting point is 00:33:54 certainly one of those, they will be the places that get the most pressure put on them because they are choke points. And that's what any person who is an authority is going to do when they want to try to project their power. They're going to try to find the most convenient way to do that. millions of people by issuing a decree to a handful of different financial institutions. That's so much easier than having to actually put boots on the ground and physically coerce folks. Scary. And I think it's one thing we've all seen nations sanctioned, right? So what we're seeing in Russia, I don't think comes as a surprise, but seeing the citizens who are peacefully protesting effectively sanctioned is a completely different story. Yeah. And, and, you know, this is what a lot of people are afraid of when we talk about these central bank digital currencies. That is you know, a panopticon of surveillance and an even easier choke point where it's not out of, I think, reason to believe that these systems will have very granular controls where you could have a central bank issue money to someone and actually put very specific
Starting point is 00:35:28 encodings and permissions and ability to only spend it at certain places, certain times. And if you don't follow those instructions, then maybe we'll take the money back, just snatch it right out of your account. Use it or lose it, right? And use it on food at this store because we need to prop it up. Yeah. Is that, I mean, is that where we're heading? It seems like that's where we're heading, right? And you, like I said, you've been saying that forever and people would have said that that was nuts, but you can't call it crazy anymore. No, because this is once again beneficial to the authorities. It allows them to project their power even more efficiently, more easily, with a few key strokes now. They won't even have to necessarily ask these few dozen financial institutions. They
Starting point is 00:36:29 will have the control right there at the keyboard. You just go to the right terminal and you'll be able to manipulate the system at the base financial layer. And if I was an authoritarian, I would love to have that level of control over people's money. So I mean, control the money, control everything. I guess then the question becomes, can you reasonably expect to protect your Bitcoin from the government? We talked about nation state protection, but if they show up at your door with a gun and say you own Bitcoin, what do you do, right? Yeah. Well, if you have any there, you should expect that it's going to be seized. So especially for those of us who are prominent public figures in the space, we can't deny. There's no denying that I lost it all in a boating accident that's what
Starting point is 00:37:28 happened to me i might fell out of my pocket on a roller coaster yeah so um you know the the tricky thing is you you also have to discuss well to what lengths are you willing to go to uh because if they show up at your doorstep and um you're not complying and or they just think that you could be complying more then they could put you in a cage and you know what are you gonna do uh hopefully you have resources to hire some nice lawyers who can help you fight against that. But it also becomes very jurisdiction specific. You have to worry about exactly what your of what you've seen them doing because they may be taking steps to basically take more power and make changes to the rules and set new precedents in the legal system that say that they should be able to do things that they've never done before. Security in general, it's always an evolving situation. So you certainly have to pay attention. the pendulum will swing back and forth and maybe they'll push hard enough that privacy will become a major issue, that people will push back and we'll get sensible politicians who put protections in place for the citizens. It just doesn't feel like that's the direction we're heading in now. It feels like we're swinging towards central bank digital currency, complete lack of privacy. You'll own nothing and like it and all the other memes that we sort of are evolving towards?
Starting point is 00:39:30 I think it will hopefully be both. I don't think we're going to be able to stop central bank digital currencies from happening. I think our best bet is to protect the public permissionless networks and make sure that there's optionality there so at least in the united states i'm hopeful you know i've seen hopeful developments with various senators and congressmen that seem to be getting orange pilled um and actually that's one of my projects is i'm tracking which politicians you know own bitcoin Bitcoin because a lot of them say that they're in favor of it, but they actually don't own any. And this is all public record. And so I think they're kind of bullshitters and just pandering. It's politics. Right. Of course. One of my voters, one of my voters want to hear. I need to I need to keep my job.
Starting point is 00:40:20 So there's I think there's a few different fronts that it's helpful to orange pill as many politicians as possible. One thing that I'm a bit dismayed about and concerned about is the fact that it seems like 98 percent of the politicians in America that are pro Bitcoin seem to be Republicans. And this should not be a fucking partisan issue at all the democrats are turning it into one because of all the esg bullshit and really just the fact that they want to be able to control uh the financial system you know i think they don't like the uh the freedom and you know they don't like the the idea that they might not have control over the system but um there's also you know some interesting developments with bitcoiners getting into politics. And this is not a new thing in the sense that a lot of politicians, people who get into
Starting point is 00:41:13 politics, they do that because they've been successful elsewhere in life. And it's just a question of, well, what do I do next? So a lot of people, they build wealth and then they decide to go into politics. I think we're seeing some people follow that path where they build wealth and then they decide to go into politics. I think we're seeing some people follow that path where they just, they got their wealth through Bitcoin, through other crypto assets. And now they're like, well, what can I do? And perhaps one of the best things that you can do is to try to use that wealth to get into positions of power where you can then try to fight against the authoritarians who are trying to destroy
Starting point is 00:41:45 Bitcoin, destroy public permissionless networks. Accumulating money and then going into politics to do good is probably not the norm. I think we now have politicians that go into politics to accumulate wealth. Yeah, it certainly works both ways. And I just hope it doesn't turn into situations where we see like prominent Bitcoiners becoming powerful politicians and then becoming hypocrites. Becoming powerful politicians by the definition of how politicians behave. I don't know. What's interesting to me, though, is that we're talking about this in a very sort of short term, right? The next what happens in the next four years, what happens in the next eight years? Well, in 20 or 30 years, every politician will be Bitcoin native or crypto native, I guess you can call it, depending on your skepticism for the level of which will dominate.
Starting point is 00:42:37 But like if you're 10 now or 12 or 15, you're never going to really have lived in a world where Bitcoin wasn't a part of your financial narrative. So at the very least, it's just going to be a matter of time before those are the people in power and it's just a part of their lives, right? I certainly hope so. We'll see what happens with all these political narratives. I think a lot of it is posturing. And the one thing that I do really like about at least like the United States Congress is that the trend, as far as I can tell, over the past 10, 20 years is towards more and more deadlocking and being able to get less and less done. And that's like my every two years, it's a complete flip, right? So my favorite type of government is the government that can't actually do anything. So I do hope that that trend continues. But in the meantime, if you're paying attention to politics, it all, it seems really volatile. And it's like, every few weeks, like somebody is coming out with some new ridiculous bill that is basically trying
Starting point is 00:43:52 to ban different aspects of these, these systems that are just trying to improve people's freedom. Yeah, it's, it's hard to believe that the government is going to value our privacy or freedom moving forward. But I mean, maybe maybe that's just pessimistic. I don't know. There has been some conversation around CBDCs where certainly in the United States, it seems like they've kicked the can much further down the road. And there are people talking about the privacy threats of it happening. I actually, as you said, with gridlock, I don't really believe we're going to see a central bank digital currency very soon in the United States. I think we'll be very, very far behind. Maybe that's hopeful. Yeah, but you can be sure, you know, each nation state is going to be paying attention to what the others are doing.
Starting point is 00:44:42 And that's also why I really hope that, you know, El Salvador doesn't fuck things up because everybody's paying attention to what the others are doing. And that's also why I really hope that, you know, El Salvador doesn't fuck things up because everybody's paying attention. Yeah, that's really crazy. That was my, like, I was so excited about it when it was announced at the Bitcoin conference. I was there last year. The excitement around it was palpable. Well, two hours later, I was sitting there and I thought, man, this is like a very small nation. They're adopting Bitcoin and there's an equal chance they blow it as it's a successful. And if they blow it, they could stop all of the momentum, actually. I'm not saying I believe that will happen or that would be intentional or it wouldn't just be pressure from the World Bank or IMF that causes that to happen.
Starting point is 00:45:22 Right. But we're still watching almost a year later, they're delaying the bonds. There's, you know, it could go either way still, it feels like. Yeah. And, you know, I visited there for a week. And it was an interesting experience for sure uh there's also just a lot of politics in play there as well and so uh i i don't have any specific like opinion or uh value like one way or another when it comes to the political leaders of el salvador like in general i don't trust any political leaders of El Salvador. Like in general, I don't trust any political leaders. I don't have any reason to trust those leaders any more than anyone else. Best I can do is, is hope that they understand what they're doing and that they're doing it for the right reasons that we hope um but it's you know i've also i've i've i've heard stories from people who have worked with them that uh basically they they can be very fickle and that it's it's sometimes it's
Starting point is 00:46:35 hard to tell what their true intentions are so um yeah it's like you said, it's kind of a coin toss of how it's all going to go down. It's still a government. Yeah. You know, like, and that sort of lends to an interesting trend I think we've seen among Bitcoiners and in crypto in general, which is that it sort of started off, you know, pomp, short the bankers, long Bitcoin. And that sort of turned into, well, these institutions and countries and all this adoption, it makes the number go up. So maybe that's good, right? Is there a cognitive dissonance there about sort of adoption from countries or companies that's in conflict with our own personal interest? Or should we just cheer for any adoption because we're small and we need all hands on deck? Well, it's like they say, Bitcoin is for enemies. So
Starting point is 00:47:32 this is why trying to project politics or political narratives into who's using Bitcoin is really ridiculous because yes, it's great that we're cheering for, you know, all of the donations to Ukraine to help them try to fight against the onslaught of amazingly like powerful aggressor. There's, I don't think there's anything wrong with helping people to defend themselves against aggression. On the flip side, you can't just turn around and start screaming about, well, Russian oligarchs could be using Bitcoin to protect their assets. if you're poor or wealthy or what country you're in or what your genetic ancestry was or any aspect of yourself. The Bitcoin network, the protocol, it doesn't care who you are. All it cares about is that you have the keys and that allows you to secure and spend your assets, you know, without having to worry about any of this stuff that we've been talking about, you know, random authorities coming down on you and
Starting point is 00:48:51 censoring you, blocking you, stealing from you, so on. Yeah. It's, I talk about that all the time, but it's like saying that an oligarch sent someone an email about something they intended to do and instead of blocking and being like ban email. Exactly. Right? Ban the internet. There's fake news there. Right? Don't attack the source of the fake news.
Starting point is 00:49:14 Just ban the technology, which is completely agnostic and has nothing to do with the intention. It's crazy. That drives me nuts it's uh you know when when all you have is a hammer everything you see is a nail so the you know authoritarians the people in power whenever they see anything that they perceive to be wrong then the solution of course must be to come down with threats of violence uh to to stop you from being able to do that. So authoritarians gonna authoritate, I suppose. Regulators are gonna regulate, right? So like Natog and Warren G. But is regulation a major threat to crypto? Let me even rephrase that. Is there anything left that can stop Bitcoin from
Starting point is 00:50:06 being successful? It's already successful. It's such a weird question. But is there anything left? Is it a 51% attack from some nation state? Is it a outright ban in the United States, which won't happen? Obviously, is there anything left that can that can stop this train? I mean, there's always I mean, there's always threats, but with any threat, you have to talk about, okay, well, what is the cost of someone performing this attack? And what is the, the ROI, I guess, what do you get in return for investing in that attack? So I do think that the, you know, China banning Bitcoin mining and us balancing back from that within a matter of months is one of the great stress tests that the Bitcoin network has seen. And I think it outperforms most people's expectations. Now, could the same thing happen?
Starting point is 00:51:08 Could all G17 nations or all UN nations come together and say we're banning Bitcoin mining and try to crush it from that perspective? I guess. But you know, this is actually, this is why Bitcoin is very interesting from a geopolitical standpoint. It's the whole idea is much like the internet itself. You know, China, Russia, like any, any country can erect firewalls and try to set up borders and restrictions on what happens with the internet in their country. But we're really talking about information. And it's very difficult to truly impede the flow of information because there's so many different ways now that you can
Starting point is 00:52:05 transfer information. So I'm sure there are threats out there, but it's very complicated. You can go into like a rabbit hole for any given threat, like could the US ban Bitcoin? Why? Why not? And just the fact that so many different countries have different political systems, different legal systems. It's that diversity, which gives you optionality. It's the diversity of all of these different systems that makes it incredibly unlikely that they will all be able to collude simultaneously in order to try to attack Bitcoin. So as a result, there's always going to be somewhere else for Bitcoin enthusiasts, for Bitcoin infrastructure to go to. So that's why I think fundamentally, this is a highly resilient network. Other networks, maybe not so resilient if they only have like a dozen or so companies that are
Starting point is 00:53:13 essentially running the infrastructure for the network. I mean, Bitcoin dropped 50% in value May 19th last year, right? In 10 days, in 10 days, 50% of the hash rate went offline and the network just kept on going and people kept on holding and people kept on. Can you imagine if the stock market dropped 50% in 10 days, the circuit breakers manipulation that would occur to try to backstop it? It's not even close. It's the funniest thing when people try to say that Bitcoin is manipulated or that stock market is a free market. Bitcoin is the only free market we got left. I really believe it. And yeah, it's amazing. I think I actually tweeted something just a few days ago where I was trying to buy some equity and I was doing it during market hours, which first of all, 35 hours
Starting point is 00:54:09 a week, that's ridiculous. Yeah, great. And then I tried to buy it and it said, oh, we're not processing buy orders right now. Like, this is just ridiculous. I mean, I'm used to 24-7, 365. And that is one of the things that I think, one of the many aspects of these ecosystems where we're pushing forward to the point that, as you said, people who were born in the past 10 years,
Starting point is 00:54:37 they're going to be crypto native. If they go sign up for a brokerage, they're going to run into all these stupid eccentricities that compared to the crypto native experience, it's going to be a huge turnoff. So either they're not going to put much time, effort and value into those traditional assets, or maybe those traditional systems will finally get some fire up under their ass to improve their their systems everything of course i mean that that's the future that that's the future of course is that everything becomes 24 7 it's all blockchain based and we move on with our lives so james and man we somehow ran out of time that was one of the fastest hours and we don't even try to do an hour anymore so you know that it was a good conversation.
Starting point is 00:55:25 Where can everybody follow you after this? And more importantly, obviously, to check out Koso. Like I said, I mean, I use it, right? So I'm a huge proponent. I absolutely love it. And I sleep much better at night ever since I became a customer. Well, anyone can find me on Twitter at Lopp, L-O-P-P. I highly recommend everyone check out my Bitcoin educational resources at bitcoin.page.
Starting point is 00:55:52 And then finally, you can check out Kasa and our security offerings at keys.kasa. So that's C-A-S-A. Oh man, I really appreciate you taking the time and always the insight. And it's fun to come back around after a couple of years and see it all playing out in real time. Absolutely. This is the space moves seemingly slowly over the matter of days. But when you look back over a few years, it's exponentially accelerating. Yes, slowly than all at once. Thank you again.
Starting point is 00:56:22 Thanks for having me.

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