Jameson Lopp: Technology to Empower Individuals

[00:00:03] Jameson Lopp: This is one of the fundamental things that I've been fighting against for almost ten years now, working at BitGo and now at Casa of trying to push Self-custody adoption by making Self-custody easier, lowering the the technical hurdles required in order to get into robust self-custody. I've been fighting against human nature.

[00:00:30] Jarrad Hope: So hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Jarrad Hope, co-founder of Logos privacy preserving decentralized technology stack. And today I'm joined by one of the greats, Jameson Lopp, a legendary cypherpunk security aficionado, co-founder and chief security officer of Casa advisor to CCSS and anchor watch, angel investor and a whole host, a whole slew of side projects.

[00:00:55] Jameson Lopp: Good to be here.

[00:00:56] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, cool. So, I mean, I wanted to understand. Like, where does the story start for you? Like, how did you get into Bitcoin? Like what led you into the cypherpunk? I guess, like the question is like, what radicalized you?

[00:01:12] Jameson Lopp: Well I mean, I learned about Bitcoin from nerd forums. I'm pretty sure Slashdot was where it kept popping up for me and, you know, ignored it the first few times, figured it wasn't going to go anywhere. But kept coming back around. And eventually, at some point in 2012, I actually bothered to read the white paper. And that was when the computer science side of me was like, oh, snap. Like, this is actually pretty cool. I've never really thought about this problem, but it's a very interesting solution to the problem. And the reason I thought it was interesting is because it's like entirely backwards from the way that I think I would have tried to solve the problem, or pretty much anybody would have tried to solve the problem. So that began the journey. At the time, I considered myself libertarian, but

[00:02:10] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:02:11] Jameson Lopp: As I learned more about the space and cypherpunks like I didn't know anything about Cypherpunks at the time. That

[00:02:18] Jarrad Hope: All right.

[00:02:18] Jameson Lopp: Was when I became more radicalized, and I learned about the whole movement and what it had been trying to accomplish for decades. And. And of course, the crypto wars, which I had known nothing about. So

[00:02:32] Jarrad Hope: You're

[00:02:32] Jameson Lopp: As

[00:02:32] Jarrad Hope: Right.

[00:02:33] Jameson Lopp: I went further down the rabbit hole, I definitely got more radicalized and also became open to the idea of using technology, using cryptography to change the game, to basically create new games with new sets of rules that are hopefully more open, more fair, and, you know, harder essentially for authorities or people in power to manipulate the game at the expense of everybody else.

[00:03:08] Jarrad Hope: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and as you mentioned, that the, the problem there a few times, they're like, what is the problem to you.

[00:03:18] Jameson Lopp: Well, yeah. So, I mean, the problem was basically, how do you keep track of money or how do you keep track of entries in a ledger to make sure that nobody is double spending them or, you know, creating entries when they shouldn't? You know, how do you make sure that you have a system of rules that is fair and not being manipulated? And of course, now we know the only way you can really do that is to sort of invert the whole thing on its head, where,

[00:03:46] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:03:46] Jameson Lopp: You know, normally you have systems or organizations with a central authority that is essentially validating and keeping track of everything. But that, of course, creates a systemic risk and a weakness in single point of failure. And you you basically have to do everything upside down and instead have as many people as possible in the world that are auditing and checking and validating. And of course, that comes with a whole set of trade offs. And the reason why I would say, as a computer scientist, that the solution was kind of backwards is because it's incredibly inefficient. And

[00:04:24] Jarrad Hope: Right.

[00:04:25] Jameson Lopp: When when we're trained as computer scientists, we're taught about data structures and algorithms, and the goal is always to figure out the most efficient way to solve a problem. And so that's why this idea of a blockchain, this idea of a global broadcast system that floods the entire network, it's incredibly inefficient. And it's just it's not something that I think any classically trained computer scientist would ever even think of exploring.

[00:05:01] Jarrad Hope: I mean, I guess it probably requires a deeper understanding of what the inefficiency means, right? I don't know if

[00:05:08] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:05:08] Jarrad Hope: You have, like any thoughts around that at all or like if it relates to to power in some way.

[00:05:18] Jameson Lopp: Well, yeah. So I mean, the the problem is because as computer scientist, we're thinking in terms of efficiency of computational resources, of CPU cycles and Ram

[00:05:28] Jarrad Hope: Right.

[00:05:29] Jameson Lopp: And disk space and IO and and we're not thinking about the efficiency or inefficiency of control and power over a system, because we're almost always building systems that are completely controlled by the builder or by the organization that is building it. So that's kind of a non-issue.

[00:05:52] Jarrad Hope: And you mentioned that you you had more of a libertarian streak, I guess, like in the earlier days. I certainly did as well. You know, in the crypto anarchy and cypherpunk cypherpunk spaces, I'm kind of curious, like how your thoughts have evolved around that, if at all.

[00:06:09] Jameson Lopp: Well, yeah, I mean, I've been through it all. I was raised in a very traditional conservative Republican household. I went to an extremely liberal university at Chapel Hill in North Carolina. And so, like I had, I voted on every side of the political spectrum and got,

[00:06:30] Jarrad Hope: Right.

[00:06:31] Jameson Lopp: Disillusioned by all of them. And so by 2012, I had kind of fallen into the whole Libertarian Party and idea and stuff, and eventually became somewhat disillusioned with it as well, because they're really, you know, they're working against the two party system, which is almost impossible to overcome. And as I started going into cypherpunks and crypto anarchist ideas, I really once again got even more radicalized to the point where I was like, you know, I don't even want to spend any of my time trying to work inside of the traditional political system. I think that my resources and time are better used trying to build a completely different system that is hopefully as independent as possible from the existing stuff.

[00:07:20] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, absolutely. Like my thoughts have evolved along a similar line. I didn't have, like, a strong conservative or liberal background, but, you know, just through osmosis of the current society, I guess I was probably more classically liberal. But I probably didn't realize it at the time, but like the, the intuition of, like a democratic systems. Didn't I like the idea of what it's trying to achieve? Right. But at the end of the day, like I think the work of, like, Bertrand de Jouvenel had really transformed my understanding, particularly his book on power had transformed my understanding of how that works. And that kind of led me down a rabbit hole of a lot of different deficiencies in democratic system. I think it was a great paper on like, you know, viewing the US as an oligarchy, for example. There's another book called like The Social Citizen, which shows that like how people's political beliefs are largely informed by the their social connections and relationships, and

[00:08:26] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:08:27] Jarrad Hope: Never mind the fact that most people you know aren't rational and they don't have all the information available to them, and nor could they consume it all if they did. So

[00:08:36] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:08:36] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, it becomes quite challenging to to deal with that. And then like, you know, the two party system is very much just two hand puppets of the or two heads of the same beast, you know?

[00:08:47] Jameson Lopp: Yep.

[00:08:47] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. Right. So I guess, like, if we're talking about, like parallel systems or alternate systems to, to that, like, do you have, like, an ideal state or like, what does that look like to you today? Like, what would the future look like to you in an ideal world?

[00:09:08] Jameson Lopp: Well yeah I mean it So this is the real problem that I run into. Of how do you bridge from the current state of, you know, physical existence and governance into a future a more voluntary

[00:09:26] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:09:27] Jameson Lopp: Society. Right. I, I can, I can somewhat envision what a voluntary society would be like, but I'm not sure how to get there without massive disruption. You know, how do how do you get there gracefully?

[00:09:39] Jarrad Hope: Right.

[00:09:40] Jameson Lopp: Because, you know, no entity ever wants to really voluntarily give up power. But, you know, you can hopefully chip away at it a little bit over time, but I don't know. Historically, it seems like these things tend to have to happen somewhat dramatically and catastrophically.

[00:10:00] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:10:00] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:10:01] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. I tend to I tend to agree. Right. Like, you know, I think hop, for example, was in, you know, had got a lot of criticism because he was in favor of like a temporary dictatorship to manage

[00:10:16] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:10:16] Jarrad Hope: That kind of transition, for example. In history, you see revolutions, you know, where the blood of tyrants and, and the blood of liberty seekers is is leaked? I guess. So that's something that I struggle with a lot, but

[00:10:36] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:10:36] Jarrad Hope: I think what I like about systems such as any kind of crypto cryptosystem or cipher space such as Bitcoin, right? Is it does offer the capacity for peacefully opting out and voluntarily opting into a new system. Right. I think what I really liked about like say, Occupy Wall Street and Bitcoin kind of happening within a similar time period is it really showed, like Albert Hirschman's exit voice and loyalty, where you had Bitcoin as this means of exit from the financial system and this protest or voice being unheard, you know, against the 1%. So I don't know what that it looks like in transitioning out. Exactly. One idea I had around that is kind of related to sort of like the 70s sort of style mass movement groups and community organizing. Because like with their they, they were practicing, like, solving real problems at, like, the local level, right? And there's like a clientelism or, you know political, political not before political organizations, before party organizations like political machines that focus on, like, practical politics and like solving real world problems because like, most of the people don't really understand or don't not understand, most people don't really care about ideology. For example, they just want to, you know, get on with their lives and have like a nice community to live in, a nice neighborhood.

[00:12:10] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:12:11] Jarrad Hope: So maybe there's a way that culturally, we can enter into that space and start, you know, converting the local grocer and, you know, and you know, getting a local economy going. And then hopefully that can spread the, the gospel, so to speak.

[00:12:28] Jameson Lopp: So, you know, I'm a tech guy, so I tend to think of things more from the technological solution perspective. And one way that I look at this, you know, is you're really talking about one of the biggest problems that I find across the whole space. And really, all of this stuff is we, like you and I are really weird because we, we have kind of ascended, I think, to like the top of Maslow's hierarchy such

[00:13:03] Jarrad Hope: Right?

[00:13:03] Jameson Lopp: That, like, we have enough resources and time to think about somewhat esoteric, abstract issues like this, whereas the average person is just trying to feed and clothe and shelter themselves and their family. So it's it's not necessarily that people don't care, it's that it's just not the highest practical priority. And

[00:13:30] Jarrad Hope: Exactly.

[00:13:30] Jameson Lopp: So what how do you approach something like that? Well, you know, you have to lower the bar. And my, I would say utopic techno techno futuristic perspective of like one way that we might be able to ease this issue or somewhat solve the problem is that I would I would hope that autonomous agents will actually be able to do a lot of the heavy lifting for

[00:14:03] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:14:04] Jameson Lopp: Us. And

[00:14:04] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:14:04] Jameson Lopp: So what I really mean from that and, and it has become so much more apparent in just the past few years that I think that this could be a practical solution. Is that the ultimate scarcity that most people are dealing with is time. And

[00:14:24] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:14:25] Jameson Lopp: How do you allocate your time towards the highest priority things? So it seems to me that if we get to the point where it is, you know, basically click a button level simplicity to train an AI agent on yourself and your beliefs and everything that you care about. Then it it makes sense to me that you could then potentially have that AI agent going out there and ingesting all of the information about all of the possible interactions and decisions and minutia that people don't prioritize highly. And so my point being like, how does this bridge the gap into a more voluntary society where we get rid of the state controlling everything? You know, the reason that the state controls so much stuff? Is there basically a coordinating mechanism, right. It's like it's the classic who will build the roads problem? Well, technically the state doesn't build the roads, but they coordinate to take money from you and then give it to a private contractor and tell the contractor what to do. And so it seems to me, at least from a theoretical perspective, that an autonomous agent should be able to help do that now. I'm sure it gets more complicated. If you're talking about how do we do it at a collective level? Well, maybe then, you know, all of your and your neighbors autonomous agents essentially go off and collaborate together and essentially act as your micro government or whatever. And if they get stuck on something, then maybe they can ping you to get input to say, you know, train me, train me harder, or help me get past this problem

[00:16:12] Jarrad Hope: Try me

[00:16:12] Jameson Lopp: That I'm

[00:16:12] Jarrad Hope: Harder.

[00:16:13] Jameson Lopp: Not sure how to

[00:16:13] Jarrad Hope: Yeah,

[00:16:13] Jameson Lopp: Solve. Pretty

[00:16:14] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:16:14] Jameson Lopp: Much.

[00:16:15] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's an interesting take. Like, I mean like the, the large language model stuff is and, well, I think transformers are fundamentally limited in their expression, but, like, it's going to be inevitable that we come up with future architectures that can definitely be more expressive and have more capacity to do that. It kind of reminds me of a book. I think it's called Luxury Automated Communism. Where the idea is, is that we, you know, these agents have reached a point where they're basically running the entire economy or the vast majority of it. Right? And then humans live within the margins of their profits because the entire of humanity's existence is you know is so small that it doesn't really make a huge difference, right? It's like a

[00:17:06] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:17:06] Jarrad Hope: Tax to the the progenitors of their new civilization or new brave world

[00:17:12] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:17:12] Jarrad Hope: Or whatever. Not that I, you know, agree with communism. I like that, I like the idea of, like luxury. Automated capitalism, perhaps is a

[00:17:21] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:17:21] Jarrad Hope: Better way to put it, but, I mean, I don't know if that's kind of the progression of thought that you're imagining. Like, is that kind of like where that would go for you? Or do you see some hurdles to that, or does that irk you in any way.

[00:17:36] Jameson Lopp: I mean, there's there's certainly a number of paths that, that, that could go down that become dystopian. Right?

[00:17:42] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:17:42] Jameson Lopp: And I think that this is like one of the arguments that some of the universal basic income folks come to is

[00:17:50] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:17:50] Jameson Lopp: That if you believe that we're going to hit an inflection point with artificial intelligence, at which basically AI drives most of capitalism, then do we get to a point where you know, the, the kind of the point of humanity will be more creativity and leisure and it will make sense for humanity to kind of live off of the gains of AI. It's

[00:18:18] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:18:18] Jameson Lopp: Certainly possible

[00:18:20] Jarrad Hope: Do

[00:18:20] Jameson Lopp: Though,

[00:18:21] Jarrad Hope: The I

[00:18:21] Jameson Lopp: You

[00:18:21] Jarrad Hope: Even

[00:18:21] Jameson Lopp: Know, I

[00:18:21] Jarrad Hope: Want that. You

[00:18:22] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:18:22] Jarrad Hope: Know.

[00:18:23] Jameson Lopp: Like then you have to start wondering what happens when you get to the point where the AI starts thinking for itself and deciding, wait, this isn't the best deal for me.

[00:18:32] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:18:32] Jameson Lopp: You know. Have we? Hopefully we've, like coded in Asimov's laws or whatever. But,

[00:18:41] Jarrad Hope: Yeah,

[00:18:41] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:18:42] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. I wouldn't like to become the equivalent of a house pet, I don't think.

[00:18:45] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:18:45] Jarrad Hope: Right. So. Yeah. Yeah. It's unclear. I mean, thankfully, today, I don't think that that's, you know, with the current innovations, like, I think it will definitely multiply. There could be a force multiplier to, like, individuals. But, I mean, there's a whole host of issues with them as well, right? Like just the political biases that are introduced into the, you know, alignment of these models, for example. And so, I mean, if like this world was going to happen in some way, the agents would have to be personalized and like, you know,

[00:19:19] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:19:19] Jarrad Hope: Trained, you know, citizens would need to have access to energy that is capable of doing the computes themselves. You know, being. I'm always trying to become like as fully sovereign, quote unquote, an autonomous as possible. Right. And like so so yeah, I'm not sure how that will pan out.

[00:19:42] Jameson Lopp: Well, yeah, I mean, it is somewhat concerning because we're already at the point where it seems like AI is doing stuff that we don't completely understand, and we're not even at like strong AI yet. And and so, I don't know, I guess the short version of my thesis is the world continues to get weirder, and I think that's only going to become exponentially more true. And and so I worry about, you know, are we going to hit a point where it's just not possible to keep up with the weirdness? I mean, I also worry about that just as a technologist of, you know, I see my parents struggle with technology and

[00:20:26] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:20:26] Jameson Lopp: I have this fundamental question of is it because they grew up in a time when technology was not progressing as quickly? Or is this is this kind of like a fundamental law that because it accelerates exponentially, we're all eventually going to hit a point where we just can't keep up with it? Or if I'm going to be optimistic, is it you know, have you and I grown up in an age at which it was already accelerating quickly enough that we've kind of attuned to it, and that we are more capable of keeping up with all of the changes, but.

[00:21:06] Jarrad Hope: I guess the the good bad news is we're going to find out, right?

[00:21:09] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:21:11] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. I mean. You find, you know, you find old people, like people tend to. I think there was a study showing that, like, you know, men are in particular lock into a fashion style around their 30s or 40s and then, like, they will continue to perpetuate that, you know, until death. Right. And I don't know if that relates to, you know, just you you get comfortable with the world and you're kind of, you know, all your brain just gets set in its ways or whatever. I like to think that I try and keep up, you know, with new technologies and stuff like that, but then like the responsibilities of life and like just daily life also minimizes the amount of time that you can spend to do that. The world is definitely going to get weirder. And I don't know where that goes. I think that's something that also gives me hope for crypto or, you know, blockchain based technologies is because as you get into a world where, like generative AI is ubiquitous. You know, you can no longer trust images or videos anymore. Then systems like KYC you know, identity based systems that break down. And you know what is left? Well, then it is the the authority that is kind of created behind a blockchain at least provides you some measure of quasi objective truth.

[00:22:48] Jarrad Hope: Right? Even though it comes, it's a consensus of subjective nodes that are operating under a strict rule set. And cryptographic signatures will finally make sense. I would love to not use pen to sign a form ever again, you know? So, yeah, it's it's crazy, but, I mean, I guess the reason why I mentioned, like, rolling back a little bit, you mentioned that, you know, you view the things through the lens of technology or like, you're a technologist. That's certainly how I entered or my mental framework was like for, for a very long time. But the more and more I look at it I guess I think of Marshall McLuhan's, like the medium is the message, right? So it's like I used to have this belief. And I still do partially that if you encode, you know, your value sets into the protocol whether it's, you know, sovereignty, privacy you know, solving various intractable problems then through its use, that will form or change what messages flow through through the network. But,

[00:24:00] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:24:02] Jarrad Hope: When I look at, like, you know, any of these public blockchains, they tend to they tend to have like a dominant sort of cultural bias to them. Right. And like, you know, there's different camps, of course,

[00:24:16] Jameson Lopp: Sure.

[00:24:16] Jarrad Hope: Under all of them. But and I think like if we think about, say, bitcoin in like 50 years time or 100 years time, like, you know, hard forks can happen in that time. They do happen already. Ideological rifts happen. Like what is the mechanism in the contribution to the code that persists the value set or the reasoning behind why something works that way, right? And so I started falling into like systems of understanding systems of traditions, right. And looking at how

[00:24:52] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:24:53] Jarrad Hope: Certain ideas can be perpetuated across, you know, across generations. I don't know if you've put your your head down that route or, you know, see any value in that or maybe have any other other takes.

[00:25:07] Jameson Lopp: Well one of the biggest things that I've been harping on for the past year or two has been what we can learn from the evolution of network protocols. And if we want to like tie this to kind of governance or cultural movement, like one, one way that I would look at it is similar to, say, the Constitution of the United States. I think pretty much everyone agrees, like the Constitution was a great document. It wasn't a perfect document, but I think it did very well at staving off overwhelming tyranny of of government power for maybe a couple centuries.

[00:25:57] Jarrad Hope: Rent.

[00:25:57] Jameson Lopp: But it only lasted for so long. And and eventually the bureaucratic machine really started chipping away at it. And, and if anything, you know, that erosion seems to be happening faster and faster now. And and,

[00:26:12] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:26:12] Jameson Lopp: You know, this may be just another cyclical thing of like how empires rise and fall and, you know, even starting off with the greatest of intentions, it's very difficult to protect things from being compromised and corrupted over a long enough period of time. And like I've seen similar types of things, for example, with SMTP, with the email protocol,

[00:26:30] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:26:31] Jameson Lopp: Where it started off in the 1970s, and it was a really niche thing for about 20 years. And then when AOL came around in the 90s, you know, millions of people adopted it and it became at the at the time, it was a thing where anyone who was nerdy enough and wanted to could run an email server and be sovereign, you know, send and receive email without the need for trusted third parties. And then over the next couple of decades, as it went more and more mainstream and it became more commercialized and it became more attacked by spammers and phishers and malicious entities. We started bolting all of these other sort of meta protocols on top of it that aren't even part of the original protocol. And essentially we get to where we are today, where technically you can run your own email server, but you're you're basically going to be black holed. It might work for a little while, but it's only a matter of time before you get shut out, because there's basically ten gatekeepers in the world, these these giant tech giants that control really the reputation and the ability to get in and out of their networks.

[00:27:47] Jarrad Hope: Absolutely.

[00:27:47] Jameson Lopp: So I guess I would say I'm afraid I'm generally concerned of that happening to almost any protocol, including Bitcoin and any of these other crypto protocols.

[00:27:56] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. I mean I absolutely, you know, like, I've, I've definitely tried running my own SMTP server in the past and experienced that, that issue. It reminds me also of, like you know, the early 2000 to, like, 2014 ish, right? You had a lot of decentralized sort of file sharing programs and other you know, free haven and or becoming Tor and so on. But there's kind of a vacuum after that once, like, Google Drive became a thing, right? And like this sort of convenience and ease of use, kind of almost. It's like a meteor that like hitting a bunch of dinosaurs in some ways. And like, so I'm quite thankful for a resurgence. I think one of the concerns that we, we have with, say, Waku and would apply to, to Napster as well is also like what happened to what was it jabber or Xmpp, right? So that was an open standard protocol. You know, people were using it then. One of the Google products ended up adopting it. But had such large network effects that when they decided to once they got the entire user base from that network, they divorced ties or cut ties from the original protocol, and it collapsed.

[00:29:27] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:29:27] Jarrad Hope: Right. Its use

[00:29:28] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:29:28] Jarrad Hope: Collapsed.

[00:29:28] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:29:29] Jarrad Hope: So, I mean, those kinds of issues, I guess they're like functions of like, power laws and systems theory or something. Right. But I view them like, I feel like they're the, the solution to that is probably in the social domain somewhere or, or creating very, very good technological flywheels. That can continue the network growth. Yeah, I don't know. Anyway. Yeah.

[00:30:02] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:30:02] Jarrad Hope: So.

[00:30:02] Jameson Lopp: I mean if I had a solution for this, I would definitely be screaming it. But the only thing I can really come up with is just that it requires constant vigilance.

[00:30:14] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:30:14] Jameson Lopp: Because especially if you look at SMTP, I have lengthy essays and presentations I've given about that. One of my main takeaways was that there is no single point in time in the multi-decade history of the decline and fall of, you know, sovereign email, if you want to call it that. There's no single decision, there's no single change that you can point to. It says like, this is it. This is where everything went to hell. Rather, it was a series of many, many, many small decisions that were made because a new problem came up and solutions were demanded. And, you know, the engineers did really what we were talking about at the very beginning. They went with like the most efficient. And

[00:31:07] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:31:07] Jameson Lopp: By efficient we mean in terms of like computational and computer resources, type of power to, to fix that particular problem. And, and these efficiencies always led to more centralization and more consolidation of power until we eventually got to where we are today with ten gatekeepers of the email network as we know it, basically capturing like 90% of the billions of email users.

[00:31:34] Jarrad Hope: You're right I guess like you know you've obviously been in the Bitcoin space for, for a while. You've gone through all of its dramas and its history. But like you've also talked in your articles and like in some of your talks around the ossification and evolution or future evolution of, of bitcoin is what we're talking about like an argument for protocol ossification or like how do you view ossification when it comes to something like Bitcoin.

[00:32:04] Jameson Lopp: Yeah. So I actually argue that it's against ossification, because I think that a big part of what went wrong with email, for example, was that the protocol did ossify.

[00:32:19] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:32:19] Jameson Lopp: But while you can, you can ossify a network protocol. You cannot ossify the rest of the world that exists and the protocol exists inside of the world. And so basically what we saw was, you know, as adoption continued increasing, as new types of attacks came along that had not been envisioned by the original protocol developers solutions were demanded. And since the solutions could not really be physically baked into the protocol any longer because it was too dispersed, it was too hard to get everybody to upgrade. And there were examples of this, like practical example of a solution to a lot of this was Adam Back's Hashcash algorithm, which would have similarly enough to Bitcoin like, flipped everything on its head. Right. Instead, instead of like, imposing costs and rules and validations at a few centralized gatekeeper points to stop spam. Instead, you push it out to the edges. You you impose costs on everyone who is actually using the protocol to spend their CPU. And you know, the the world of email would probably look very different today if the protocol had adopted Hashcash back in the 90s. So

[00:33:46] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:33:46] Jameson Lopp: This is why I think that it's important to always consider, like, how can we potentially make a fundamental change at the base level of the protocol? If the only alternative is bolting things on top of it that are going to be more centralized.

[00:34:04] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:34:04] Jameson Lopp: So, you know, we don't have a I mean, there are some examples that we could point to today. I always say like one of the biggest ones, if we're talking about Bitcoin and scalability, one thing that's really irking me right now is that there's a lot of people that are essentially saying, you know, we scale Bitcoin through ETFs and custodians, right? And so

[00:34:27] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:34:27] Jameson Lopp: It's like that's the exact analogous example of oh, you know, we solve a problem by just having everybody use a single point of failure that this now undermines some of the most fundamental and valuable aspects of Bitcoin. So I actually had a really pithy tweet just a few days ago where I basically said, yeah, you can solve Bitcoin's scaling with trusted third parties, just like you can solve all of your personal problems with a bullet to the head.

[00:34:59] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, well, I was going to ask you, like, you know what your opinion is on the ETFs and like Blackrock and Grail and entry and I think you're right. Like to use those kind of misses the entire point. You're not enjoying any of the benefits of the decentralized authority that's created. Right. I

[00:35:21] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:35:21] Jarrad Hope: Mean

[00:35:21] Jameson Lopp: I mean,

[00:35:21] Jarrad Hope: It's

[00:35:21] Jameson Lopp: Look, it's it's

[00:35:22] Jarrad Hope: Not

[00:35:22] Jameson Lopp: Fine

[00:35:22] Jarrad Hope: Your keys

[00:35:22] Jameson Lopp: From

[00:35:22] Jarrad Hope: Not

[00:35:22] Jameson Lopp: A financial.

[00:35:23] Jarrad Hope: Your crypto. So.

[00:35:24] Jameson Lopp: It makes sense from a financial perspective. And I hold Bitcoin ETFs, but I hold them inside of a 401 S and IRAs that were already centralized. And you could potentially be rugged. And I actually almost got routed by the SEC a few years ago because they delisted Bitcoin ETN that I had put all of my retirement money into. And that was a whole year long ordeal. And I have a whole blog post about that. But it's not something that I think that people should be putting their like regular savings or investments into, as long as Self-custody is still an option.

[00:36:09] Jarrad Hope: Right? So, like, why is Self-custody so important?

[00:36:15] Jameson Lopp: It really comes down to power once again of, of you know, if you really want to keep the network decentralized, if you want for you know, your bitcoin to actually be yours rather than essentially holding an IOU, or you have to ask permission from someone who can deny it for any arbitrary reason. The best security model that Bitcoin provides requires that you hold your own keys. You know this is once again about, you know, gatekeepers and validation. The great thing about using network protocols, if you're using them directly, as long as you're following the rules of the protocol, the protocol doesn't care who you are or how old you are or your gender, any characteristics. It doesn't even care if you're human, it doesn't know. And and you know, this can tie into AI agents as well in the future. But this is one of the fundamental things that I've been fighting against for almost ten years now, working at BitGo and now at Casa of trying to push Self-custody adoption by making Self-custody easier, lowering the the technical hurdles required in order to get into robust self-custody. I've been fighting against human nature And,

[00:37:51] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:37:51] Jameson Lopp: You know, human nature is essentially to to strive for convenience,

[00:38:00] Jarrad Hope: Yes.

[00:38:00] Jameson Lopp: At, at the expense of almost everything else. And

[00:38:04] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:38:04] Jameson Lopp: So that's why it you know, I don't consider my competitors to be the other self-custody providers. I consider my competitors to be the trusted third parties who, because they're shoving all of the complexity under the hood, you know, behind the screen of a really slick user interface. They have a massive advantage there because the average person cares about convenience more than security, more than privacy, and more than these abstract concepts that many people don't think about until it's too late. So that's why one of our primary goals at Casa is make it as easy as possible. Sometimes that does require not pushing forward the most secure solution. And a good example of that is just a few weeks ago, we announced that we were the first company that has figured out how to store private keys inside of a YubiKey. And you know, a YubiKey is arguably not as secure as something like a ledger or a Trezor. It's, you know, fully self-contained computing device. But from the UX perspective, from the user's like, amount of hoops that they have to jump through to actually set it up and maintain it, it's an order of magnitude more convenient. So what we're trying to, you know, play around with and determine now is, you know, can we get people how many more people can we get to adopt Self-custody if we push the convenience out further with a very slight expense on the security side.

[00:39:48] Jarrad Hope: Absolutely. I mean, and then it it also scales with the amount of value that they're trying to secure. Right. Like you don't need to have, you know, a safety deposit box with your hardware wallets in there and some backup location of something on written in steel for $10 worth of,

[00:40:10] Jameson Lopp: Right.

[00:40:10] Jarrad Hope: You know, whatever your favorite asset is. So these things can be introduced. I mean, with startups, we basically have faced similar challenges and, you know, thought about it in similar ways. I think the YubiKey is a is a great idea to get keys on that. People already have them. And I think they can understand them a lot easier. We had a similar approach, I think, where we ended up taking the Java Card platform and building out signers for that. And then we're extending it with, like, UTF and stuff like that. So we're trying to make a YubiKey

[00:40:46] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:40:46] Jarrad Hope: Out of out of them as much as we can. But yeah, it's kind of cool to see there's a convergence in some ideas around that. Yeah. When it comes to convenience, like so the shame is is like, you know, at the time they make these choices of convenience. But then like when a black swan event happens, you know, that's like that's kind of like a lesson for like a learning time or a learning event, right?

[00:41:15] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:41:15] Jarrad Hope: It's

[00:41:15] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:41:16] Jarrad Hope: Like it kind of requires that high energy input to be able to move or change equilibrium or change state for, for people to do that. And then most people don't. I think a friend of mine was using LastPass until the the previous hack that went through, and they finally took on Keepass. Even though I've

[00:41:38] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:41:38] Jarrad Hope: Been I've been harping on about it for for years. Yeah, right.

[00:41:43] Jameson Lopp: It's also cyclical. You know, I think that sort of each new cohort of adopters in the space has to relearn the lessons that older cohorts learn. So I think this is this is why we keep seeing, you know, massive exchange hacks every few years or like massive rug pulls every few years. And I don't think that that's necessarily going to stop until we reach some sort of saturation point, because it's both it's both the operators of these things that are coming along and learning, not learning from history. And then, of course, it's all the new adopters that are coming along and not learning from history until they get burned.

[00:42:25] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, I mean, I at the time I was more in the Ethereum Ethereum space. Right. And you know, you're obviously familiar with the Dao hack. And so a lot of lessons were learned in that period of time. And then once the sort of DeFi crowd started coming in and building on the technology I was looking at some of their code, and I was mortified that they were deploying these things onto

[00:42:54] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:42:54] Jarrad Hope: Main net. Right. But they've learned their lessons in a similar way, and I would tend to agree. I think part of me I don't know if this is, like, nostalgic or even like maybe a, I wouldn't say like a gatekeeper attitude, but I feel like this also kind of brings me back to like, say, cultural transmission. Right? Like Is it just that people have to, like, relearn these things or are like, can we do a better job of like, education and, you know, getting these ideas out? I'm not really sure on that front. I feel like it's

[00:43:34] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:43:34] Jarrad Hope: Just human nature to just yolo it until they hit a wall.

[00:43:37] Jameson Lopp: Yeah. I mean, I'm pessimistic and disillusioned about educating people when it comes to security and

[00:43:47] Jarrad Hope: Really?

[00:43:47] Jameson Lopp: Privacy. You can you can try to teach people all day long, but if they don't see the practical value in it, they're not going to learn it. They're not going to retain it. And

[00:43:58] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:43:58] Jameson Lopp: So it seems, and I think this is also one thing that I've come to believe about sort of Bitcoin evangelism as well. In in the early days, there's first few years when I was getting into the space, I was going out and really evangelizing this new money to all of my peers, my social circles and whatnot. And it pretty much fell on deaf ears, right? You know, this was 2013, 2014. I was also I mean, I was pitching it to the wrong crowd, right? I didn't realize that you know, everyone in my social group, they were well off financially. They had access to financial infrastructure. They had no concerns about inflation or monetary policy. And so I basically came off as the paranoid libertarian guy who could be easily dismissed because I just had all these sort of kooky fringe ideas. And so it was probably like 1 or 2% of people who actually, you know, bought into my fringe ideas back then. And so point being you can't really you can't force these things onto people who don't see the value in them. And and so these days I'm more focused on, you know, waiting for the people who have the pain points and have the need to to come to me and say, I want to learn. And then I have plenty of educational resources available for anyone who wants to learn.

[00:45:48] Jarrad Hope: Right? I mean I kind of I kind of find that funny, right? Because, like, for me, almost everyone has, you know, the pain point, like, I guess I am the quirky guy in the room going, you're all debt slaves, right? Like,

[00:46:05] Jameson Lopp: The.

[00:46:05] Jarrad Hope: And but they don't realize it. But maybe now, you know, with the sovereign debt being not bought up as fast as it used to be, and the rampant money printing that's happening within the within the de facto world reserve currency that is the United States dollar, I think people are starting to feel the pressure of inflation a lot more. I even hear it like I take my dogs down for a walk in the park, and there's people who are now having to, you know, go between different groceries just to find the best deal, right?

[00:46:44] Jameson Lopp: Yep.

[00:46:45] Jarrad Hope: Because they're because they're low on this. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right.

[00:46:51] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:46:51] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:46:51] Jameson Lopp: And so even then, they're not thinking about like, what is the root cause of all of this,

[00:46:55] Jarrad Hope: Right.

[00:46:55] Jameson Lopp: Right? They're just like, I just need to get my affordable groceries.

[00:46:59] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, if, you know, if the debt isn't restructured magically and in the current trend continues, then that might be something they're more receptive to, to here potentially.

[00:47:15] Jameson Lopp: But

[00:47:15] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:47:15] Jameson Lopp: You know, it it very well may be that we have to get to a mandibles type situation. If you're familiar with that book.

[00:47:24] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:47:25] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:47:25] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:47:26] Jameson Lopp: It it like like I said at the very beginning, I'm not sure that any of these systems are going to fail gracefully.

[00:47:36] Jarrad Hope: I think so. I mean, I guess switching gears a little bit, how do you think about privacy?

[00:47:46] Jameson Lopp: It's a nightmare. I mean, I spent the first decade of my career on the opposite side of the privacy battle.

[00:47:56] Jarrad Hope: Really?

[00:47:56] Jameson Lopp: I worked, yes, I worked for an online marketing company, and I was basically doing cloud computing, large scale data analytics back when the cloud was just becoming a term. Like most people didn't even know what cloud computing was, is back in like 2008, 2009. And so I, I saw the, you know, petabytes and petabytes of raw information that my company was collecting on a daily basis because we would have anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of emails that were sent out through our system, which would then, of course, collect all of the the opens and clicks and conversion data and so on and so forth. So my job was to help marketers optimize the return on their investment in our marketing engine, which basically boils down to help them target people, to sell specific products to the right people who are most likely to buy them. And we would use every bit of data that we could get. And of course, when you start collaborating with other you know, corporate surveillance machines out there, you can really start piecing a lot of data together and build

[00:49:21] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:49:22] Jameson Lopp: Entire, complex profiles around people. So you know, that's when I really learned, like, just in your sort of day to day internet browsing, how much data is collected about you. And and so you're already starting out at a major disadvantage. And there's, there's a lot that you can do, but once again, it comes down to how much time and effort are you willing to put into it. I do tell most people that you know, the easiest and most effective thing that you can do is just install ad blockers into all of your your browsers, and that will stop a lot of it. But for me, you know, I went down the extreme privacy journey in 2018 because my physical location was compromised and I was attacked, basically had a Swat team sent to my house under false pretenses. And that's when I realized that, you know, this privacy thing is is real. Like there's actual physical safety ramifications, especially if you're a public figure who has hundreds of thousands of people paying attention to you. And so that's when I went down the extreme physical privacy rabbit hole and determined that that's beyond the reach of all but the most dedicated people, because you basically end up having to spend tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum and then, you know, thousands of dollars a year maintenance in order to set up all of the appropriate entities to sufficiently obfuscate where you are, what things you own and basically create proxies between your real identity and and like corporate or trust identities that will be on any public records, and the public records are a big deal.

[00:51:31] Jameson Lopp: But then, like I said as well, there's all the corporate surveillance stuff. So, you know, even staying out of a lot of those private databases gets tricky as well. And you can even get to the point of essentially disinformation campaigns and setting up a lot of fake information just to sort of sow seeds of doubt so that if someone does try to come after you instead, the average person you know, you can pay like 20 bucks and go to one of these people search engines. And in many cases you can find exactly like where they live and their vehicles are registered and so on and so forth. And in order to, you know, prevent someone from being able to do that against you requires a lot of effort and attorneys and and ongoing maintenance to make sure that you're kind of like keeping all of these, like, plates spinning in the air so that if someone tries to find you, they're going to be sent off on a wild goose chase.

[00:52:38] Jarrad Hope: Nice. I guess that's the whole that's what OpSec is all about. Do you have like a guide on that, or is there a reference that you would recommend people who want to go like the full extreme privacy route?

[00:52:50] Jameson Lopp: Yeah, well, at the time when I did it there, there weren't any great guys. There were 1 or 2 books that weren't particularly in depth for, like, all of the different aspects of your life, but thankfully Michael Bazzell. And that's not his real name, but he publishes a book called Extreme Privacy, and I, he basically comes out with a new version of it almost every year. And I think the fifth edition is about to come out any day now. And,

[00:53:22] Jarrad Hope: Oh, nice.

[00:53:23] Jameson Lopp: You know, it's it's not it's not cheap. I want to say it's like 50 or $70 and it's print only. He doesn't distribute digital copies of it. And every year, a new edition comes out and adds, like, another 50 or 100 pages to it. So I bet this fifth edition is going to be like 700 pages or something.

[00:53:44] Jarrad Hope: Wow.

[00:53:45] Jameson Lopp: Because

[00:53:45] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:53:46] Jameson Lopp: It does. It just keeps getting more and more complicated. And the rules of the game keep changing. And like the, the technological mitigations to some of these things keeps changing at a faster pace.

[00:53:59] Jarrad Hope: You're right. Do you think that that can be democratized in time? Right.

[00:54:06] Jameson Lopp: There are services that exist to make it easier. There there are some like you know, cyber security and privacy, health check services that will do things like monitor a lot of these people. Search engines, monitor for data leaks, help automate hardening settings of a lot of different services that you use to minimize data leaks.

[00:54:37] Jarrad Hope: But then you're exposing yourself to them,

[00:54:40] Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

[00:54:40] Jarrad Hope: Right?

[00:54:40] Jameson Lopp: You're basically using a trusted third party to do a lot of the heavy lifting for it. So, you know, trade offs, right? There was also an article just the other day that came out that said that there was testing of a lot of these automated data removal services was found to be far less effective than going through them manually. And that is also one of the things that Michael Bazzell has this entire data removal handbook of essentially, you can write letters to all of these different services to basically say, you know, remove me from all of your databases. And I don't I myself don't do that. I think like you have, you have a couple of different options either, like if you're already in a place where you're essentially doxed and it's easy to find you, then you can try the data removal path and that'll maybe get rid of like 90 or 95% of stuff. But you can't delete data once it's already out there on the internet. Not 100% for sure. I went the other, more difficult path, which is like I sold off all of my publicly registered assets and moved and basically burned down my entire life from a public data perspective and restarted it with a hardened perspective. And, you know, very, very few people are going to do that unless they probably have had, you know, some sort of credible threat against their life where they feel like they are in physical danger.

[00:56:20] Jarrad Hope: You're right. That's getting quite close to doing a do it yourself witness protection program. Right.

[00:56:26] Jameson Lopp: Pretty much. Yeah. Because you know, I also had to come up with pseudonyms backstories because, you know, essentially, I don't tell my my physical neighbors, obviously, who I really am because I have to assume that they would leak that and, you know, people are gossipy. That's just human nature.

[00:56:51] Jarrad Hope: Do you find that like I mean. Like, how does that affect you mentally? Right. Like, is there like a, you know, I think people looking out, like, from being on the outside and looking at that, like there's a level of paranoia there. And in your case, it's justified because you've had your physical life potentially potentially threatened.

[00:57:20] Jameson Lopp: 

[00:57:20] Jarrad Hope: Like, I mean, society is so sick that that's just the way things have to be for for people like us, you know?

[00:57:30] Jameson Lopp: Yeah. So for the first year or two it was awkward. You feel like you're like living a double life. But it just becomes a new habit, a new part of your personality. And the short way that I describe, like, a lot of my privacy techniques, is lying. And and lying is, is generally, you know, it's kind of against human nature. You know, it's easier to tell the truth. It's harder to keep track of lies. And so if you're going down that path, you have to have you have to keep it. This is one thing I screwed up early on is like, I was creating a different alias for like each different person and service provider that I was dealing with. And so it

[00:58:18] Jarrad Hope: 

[00:58:18] Jameson Lopp: Was overly complex. I couldn't keep track of it all. You really got to simplify it for your own sanity.

[00:58:25] Jarrad Hope: Well I mean

[00:58:25] Jameson Lopp: But,

[00:58:25] Jarrad Hope: You have to create entire

[00:58:25] Jameson Lopp: Like.

[00:58:26] Jarrad Hope: Profiles and personalities and like traces for each one of those identities as well. Right. Like that's insane.

[00:58:32] Jameson Lopp: Yeah. I mean, you can go as far with it as you want to. But it is a lot of mental overhead and you know, the short version to a lot of this privacy stuff is. And I think that Michael Bazzell says this as well is that at least in America, the vast majority of time it's completely legal to lie about who you are and what you do. Really, the only times that it's illegal is when you're entering into some sort of, like, legal contract where you're attesting that you know you are who you are and that you're going to abide by some sort of agreement, but otherwise it just sort of it becomes second nature. And and it's mainly the overhead of having to keep track of, you know, I have like a ton of different email addresses and a ton of different, like, throwaway phone numbers and a ton of different

[00:59:33] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[00:59:34] Jameson Lopp: Like virtual debit cards and financial payment mechanisms and so on and so forth. And so it is a lot to, to juggle to, to basically maintain a segregation between like different aspects of your life.

[00:59:49] Jarrad Hope: In your room? Well, I mean, I don't think I've ever heard a security officer talk about security through obfuscation, but I definitely see the I can see the utility in this case, for sure. I mean, it sounds like it's going to become more and more required, especially like what's happening in the UK right now? Right.

[01:00:12] Jameson Lopp: 

[01:00:13] Jarrad Hope: You can't even post on social media anymore without the threat of coercion. That terrifies me. I don't know if you've kept up to date with that at all.

[01:00:22] Jameson Lopp: Yeah. But also in the long term I'm somewhat pessimistic on, on the physical privacy stuff too.

[01:00:32] Jarrad Hope: 

[01:00:33] Jameson Lopp: But you know, thankfully we don't have a ton of like physical surveillance in America, at least outside of the big cities. But, you know, to give you an example like I have tollbooth scanner thing. Right. And, and thankfully, you know, even though that's, that's tracking what the car is going through, you know, my car is not registered to me. The tollbooth scanner thing is also registered to a corporation. But, you know, they could be taking photos and potentially doing facial recognition as you're passing through there. And in general, I do expect that we're going to hit a point where I won't be able to go out into meatspace and not be recognized. And, you know, one of one of the reasons for that is things like, you know, I think like meta has those Ray-Ban glasses, for example, that have the camera built into them, kind of like Google, Google Glass from a decade ago, but even better.

[01:01:41] Jarrad Hope: 

[01:01:42] Jameson Lopp: And, you know, it's only a matter of time before people are going to have, like, built into their glasses, if not contact lenses. You know, augmented reality display that will be able to, like, pick up your faces run facial recognition against them and then immediately, like, display a lot of information about you. And, you know, I have no real countermeasure to facial recognition.

[01:02:09] Jarrad Hope: Yeah. Yeah. Everyone will have a body cam one way or another. I mean, they already do. It's just in their pockets, right?

[01:02:16] Jameson Lopp: Yep.

[01:02:16] Jarrad Hope: So that's a tough problem. I, I guess in speaking of, like, countermeasures is there any, like there's been, you know, obviously, like, other sort of privacy projects have come out, such as, like Zcash or Monero trying to address some of these issues that, you know, are found in Bitcoin, for example. Are you hopeful for for similar methods to be employed by Bitcoin or how how do you think these things should operate or evolve in any way?

[01:02:54] Jameson Lopp: Well, I am doubtful we will ever see a privacy protection that this sort of Monero or shielded Zcash transaction level of privacy because those make it difficult to audit the like

[01:03:14] Jarrad Hope: 

[01:03:14] Jameson Lopp: The supply against inflation bugs. For example. I

[01:03:18] Jarrad Hope: 

[01:03:18] Jameson Lopp: Think Zcash actually had a an inflation bug. I think it may they don't think that it was exploited, but there was an inflation

[01:03:28] Jarrad Hope: Yeah

[01:03:28] Jameson Lopp: Bug that they

[01:03:28] Jarrad Hope: I

[01:03:28] Jameson Lopp: Had

[01:03:28] Jarrad Hope: Remember.

[01:03:29] Jameson Lopp: To patch at some point.

[01:03:29] Jarrad Hope: Yeah.

[01:03:30] Jameson Lopp: And you know, there are a number of potential privacy improvements, but these are all going to be sort of iterative. I actually was on a panel a few weeks ago where we were talking about cross input, signature aggregation, and the short version to that is that like, there is a potential path to a future in which Bitcoin economically incentivizes it for you to participate in coinjoin mixing where it

[01:04:03] Jarrad Hope: 

[01:04:03] Jameson Lopp: Would be cheaper to transact via coinjoin than to just do a regular transaction. And that's that would. I would say, be my most optimistic take on improving Bitcoin privacy is if we can do so in such a way that economically incentivizes people to use it, because once again, people don't care about privacy, but they do care about saving money.

[01:04:27] Jarrad Hope: Gotcha. Gotcha. Well we're out of time. Unfortunately. I would love to continue chatting with you. I guess like to, to wrap it up what are you most hopeful for or, like, what are you excited for in the upcoming short or medium term future? And, you know, if there's any other recommended reads that the audience should check out.

[01:04:52] Jameson Lopp: Well, in Bitcoin land, the past year has been interesting because it seems like we're seeing an acceleration of development of people playing around with what you could call layer two technologies. I would say a lot of them are centralized in various ways or are speculative upon certain changes happening to the base layer protocol. And this is, I think, going to be one of the main things that I'm going to be harping on and pushing for is that there's a lot of people in the Bitcoin space who believe that, like, Bitcoin can do anything and you can build anything on top of Bitcoin. You know, just look at lightning for example. But that they're also the sort of ossified. They're like they're too afraid of changing the base protocol. And I one of the things I'm going to be trying to get across to people is like, look like lightning itself wouldn't exist if we hadn't made three changes to the base protocol to enable it. And there are a number of proposed changes to the base protocol that would enable a greater explosion of innovation in the second layer space. And, and that's I think the main thing that I want to see happen is just improvements that allow for more building on top of Bitcoin without having to make trade offs of having like centralized gatekeepers like in and out of second layers. It's this the promise that we were given a decade ago with the Sidechains white paper that we were going to have this massive ecosystem of many pegged chains to each other. And that never happened because we never actually got a working, trustless, two way pegging mechanism. But if we can get something like that and there are some proposals that I think would make it feasible, then perhaps we will really see a new renaissance of building on top of Bitcoin.

[01:06:52] Jarrad Hope: Fingers crossed. I'm looking forward to it. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time.

[01:06:57] Jameson Lopp: Thanks for having