record on this computer all right we are live all right welcome to the sunny ray show today we've got jameson lock one of my favorite people definitely in bitcoin maybe on the planet so jovison thank you for uh for spending some time with us and yeah maybe start with an intro yeah good to see you again uh virtually at least virtually um as for myself i mean i've been in the space for a while uh started getting interested as a hobbyist ooh it was a good eight years ago and started building some open source projects for a few years trying to better understand bitcoin and then was fortunate to be able to go full time around early 2015 and really since then have been focused on a very boring problem that i believe continues to persist in the space which is just how do we make it easier for people to manage their private keys how do we continue to push forward the fulfillment of bitcoin's promise of being your own bank because it's always been possible but it's generally been relegated to the people who are technical or who are willing to spend a lot of time and resources learning how to do it right so if we really want to keep pushing this space forward in a decentralized fashion then i think we continue to make it easier and easier and understand you know where the pain points are around key management cool so why don't we start there and and uh and get a bit deeper on that topic because you're right i do also believe that it's something that's incredibly important and it barely gets talked about um and so okay so let's start with the question of like why why is it important for people to hold bitcoin and that might uh it might help to maybe even proceed that question with like you know why is bitcoin important um but yeah we'd love to kind of dive into that a bit more with you yeah you know there's a few different approaches you can take the more technical approach the more philosophical approach generally i kind of take a blended approach to all of this where you know what is the reason that i got into bitcoin in the first place and that was because i felt like money as an abstract concept should not be something that is dictated by a small group of people like money as an open source project fundamentally made sense to me and i felt like it was humanity's best hope towards making at least a fairer type of monetary system you know it's probably never going to be perfect but at least if anyone who cares enough can give their input then hopefully we'll get to a system that while it may not be perfect for everyone hopefully it is at least less harmful for more people because you don't have a few people controlling it uh at their own whim and to their own benefit so if we assume okay bitcoin has already done a pretty good job of of doing that of being an open project where anyone who really cares can contribute then how do we prevent it from sliding back you know towards what the current financial system is like and in order to do that we need to keep the power as decentralized as possible as spread out as as much as possible we need to empower the individual and for individuals to be empowered they need to be able to take control of what is like the ultimate security model of bitcoin which is commonly referred to as trustlessness uh and permissionlessness though you know there's a whole lot of gotchas uh underneath those words but what i really see that as is you are you're running your own software and you're using your own hardware to verify the entire state of the system and to directly control your private keys so that you're not having to ask anyone for permission to use your money and you're not having trust in the third part that your money is actually there and that means you know you need to have your own self-custody system preferably be running your own fully validating node you know from a technical perspective and this is where you start getting into all of the technical tricky things that can turn a lot of people off because the average person just wants to go to a website and click some buttons and so now we get into this whole issue of you know the sort of the spectrum of convenience versus security versus privacy and and all the other trade-offs that people make and you know the the freedom of a system like this is that people should be able to have the the freedom to choose to trade off security or privacy for convenience but at the very least i think we should try to you know lower the bar as much as possible to get into a high security posture and hopefully you know the lower we can make that bar the more people will opt into a better uh security environment and the result of all of these different individuals opting into that is that we make the whole system actually stronger and more resilient because we're not putting all of the money into the hands of a few people once again so i i i again i don't want to spend like a whole bunch of time because we could probably spend like the whole conversation just on these two next two questions but i think before we can make or before we can dive deep into this argument of like you you need to hold your own private keys we need to touch on two things so one is well you know you made this uh this comment that money should be open source right um and this sounds super weird but one thing i found is that even though most people are like waking up early going to sleep late at night getting in divorces and wars and like trying to like make that you know cash when you ask most people what is money like what really is it you just like kind of stop there it's like crickets and it's literally an infinite number of answers that i've received um which i find super interesting because it's like what um how does that even happen but what is money um you know maybe in a paragraph or two uh you know if we had to try and really distill it down to its main essence yeah and really i don't expect most people to understand money i mean i don't expect most people to understand most things the world is such a complicated place and we have a finite amount of time and resources you can only focus on a few things you know this is why humanity has evolved the way it has to construct these hierarchical systems because that enables specialization and specialization allows for greater efficiency and you know that's how we become more productive both individually and collectively so what is money i mean money is just the way that we decide who owes who what that's that's the simplest way i can think of to describe it because that then can encompass any number of different systems and encompass the fact that money is whatever we collectively agree is money and then of course you have the whole question of what is consensus how do we agree upon it what are the properties that result in humanity in general converging on certain types of systems to be money um but you know there there are properties that make money more appealing and and that is things like you know having the ability to have some decent idea that the value that you put in the money is going to be somewhat the same at some point in the future as it is right now um there are great properties such as the ability to pay someone without having to worry about whether or not the money is going to get to where it's going there are privacy properties the ability to send it without the entire world necessarily knowing what economic transactions are performing but you know that's getting a lot more into the minutia and you you can even get into economic arguments about whether whether money has to have certain properties ultimately i don't think it really matters you know whether one specific system fits all the criteria of money or not is money is money if people use it as such and it works for them very interesting very interesting and then and then this notion well i mean there's been many attempts of trying to make money digital right i mean you could argue that my bank account right is to some extent is digital right i don't really actually handle cash all that much my credit card seems to work on ones and zeros so um i guess like i guess the deeper question here that i was wondering is this like when what was your aha moment when were you like ah like yes like this can actually potentially work uh like when was it like did it take a couple times before you were like yeah i think there's actually something here i'm curious to know your your kind of you know deep dive story well you know like most people i heard about bitcoin a number of times and dismissed it as you know nerd money that was gonna get hacked and everybody was gonna you know have a story that ended in tears and so i unfortunately will never remember the first time i heard about bitcoin because i know i heard about it several times before i actually looked into it and you know it was probably the third or fourth time that it came up on slashdot or some other news site where i actually looked into it i actually read the white paper and the computer science side of me was like oh you know this is intriguing like first of all i never really thought about how money worked and then second of all i certainly never thought about this byzantine generals problem before it's just not something that was in my field of computer science of what i was building with web apps uh back in the day and so that's what sparked my interest and then it wasn't until i actually jumped through all the hoops of sending wire transfers and actually getting some bitcoin and then being able to exchange it for other things of value that i realized that you know this is actually money it actually works as such and uh it's a project that i think is worth you know putting my time into interesting interesting okay so it's okay so money is money is uh bitcoin is and then you have this i guess this moment in time and before we get into that kind of the concepts i want to dig i want to dig deep into that and i think there's a lot of um stuff that we need to explore but before we do i wanted to just ask you a couple questions so to me you know what you're like a technical guy right so you know the word like unit step function you know what that means right like zero and then you go to like one right to me when i and i was in the financial industry back in the day as well and so when i first discovered bitcoin um there was a part of me that felt like it was like this zero to one moment you know it was like it brought all these like different like philosophical and like you know whether it's like um economical theory game theory you had like cryptography you had all these like really really interesting things coming together to solve quite possibly one of the biggest problems um you know that we've ever faced but uh but you know since then there's been a lot of noise right in this space as well and and some could argue that it's innovation right some could say well no there's actually like crazy awesome things happening there and then you've got this like you've got bitcoin you've got like innovation question mark and then you've got like rujas and like the one coins of the world right so how does one who isn't dedicating their life to this this world to this craft right how are they to figure out what's real and what's not because there's a lot of projects right in this space um so i'm just curious like you you seem like you have a um like a moral compass almost that you've used to kind of navigate over the last few years and i'm just curious to get a bit of pulse on that like what kind of principles what kind of things are you looking for and again like there's been so much innovation in the space how come jamison's not you know writing uh you know tweets and blogs and doing podcasts and why aren't you building your company around that um curious so what is it so not so much about the fiat world i get you know how we kind of relate to that but like this whole everything after world like what are your thoughts on it well it's it's a very simple breadth versus depth type of issue and certainly when ethereum came out i was paying attention to it i mean to my own detriment i am certainly not good at evaluating projects as investment potential and so i certainly try not to give any sort of financial advice because i was there i i could have put a lot of money into ethereum and i didn't and you know the main reason for it was that i read the terms of the ethereum ico and in the terms was a section that said you know we're not going to promise that we're ever going to deliver any software much less working software much less you know meeting any of the grand ideals that we're promising the system can do so uh you know unfortunately for me that turned me off and i should have like realized at the time that it was just you know legalese you know cover your butt type of stuff but um what do i do as an approach to all of this i mean i simply don't have the time to keep track of all of the new projects that are coming out um you know you you could very easily turn that into a full-time job and there are plenty of people who do and then you know speculate based upon their own evaluation of the different projects and the different teams i would say you know i i spent a decent amount of time looking at some of the more you know popular projects that were coming out like during the 2017 cycle and uh you know most of them were just utter trash there's plenty of red flags that give away you know a scam project and that is usually things like white papers that are word salad or that are straight up you know copied from other white papers websites that are more focused on marketing aspects and you know the team of people behind them rather than the actual technology and you know innovative functionality that they're building you know there there's a ton of ways to evaluate different projects and for me it's just i don't really think it's worth my time because the vast majority probably 95 plus percent of them are not gonna go anywhere and so i could spend a ton of time trying to find the diamond and the rough and maybe invest in them or try to help them or whatever but um for for me i see bitcoin as the one that's you know the greatest in the lead it has a clear vision of what it's trying to accomplish you know keeping things simple trying to be the best money possible and it's it's a long ways from being what i would consider optimal money so we still have a ton of work to do and i want to continue working to fulfill that uh singular goal and you know perhaps if we get to the point that i feel like we have uh fulfilled the optimal uh vision of bitcoin then perhaps i will start looking at other projects uh in the space but not necessarily even like the crypto finance space my objective at a very high level when i first transitioned from just doing like data analysis for marketing company to the bitcoin space my my high goal that i basically set for myself was from that point forward to use my skills and my resources to help empower individuals and you know whatever i feel is going to help with that is what i'm going to work on so bitcoin is like the obvious most straightforward solution to that right now there are plenty of other technologies that fulfill similar um type of objectives but in different ways and so that at a very high level is what i want to do and the reason that i want to do that is because i kind of see it as an issue of power in the world today where i think too much power has been concentrated in the hands of too few people and i believe that technology and my skills as as a technologist give me the greatest leverage to help try to you know reverse some of that flow of power very interesting very interesting okay so now dive a bit deeper into why um i was gonna say one thing just one quick thing is that you know i'm always trying to think of different ways of explaining bitcoin to people and more recently it kind of dawned on me that what i'm actually i would say defeating or beating uh by buying bitcoin is time which i'd argue is maybe all of our you know biggest nemesis right um you know whether you're like whether you're thinking about what's happening in the future or some relationship you're in like years ago whether it's like you know death just having like a finite point in time whether it's fearing old days whatever it is let's say by def i mean generally time is what we're all fighting against and i always found that when my mentality wrapped around fiat there was never enough time there was always uh there's always me kind of like running to try and there's always more months than money as i always say it's like you know it was like just never like whether it's like taxes and inflation and you know just like the everything just working against me um and it just felt like i was never gonna get off this treadmill whereas as soon as i bought my first satoshi in 2011 or 12 it wasn't even about like buying it and selling it it was more about like this one-way portal into timelessness and into a world where i wouldn't have to constantly look you know what i mean like feel like i was running out of time um but and i find like the decentralized not the detachment but the the fact that it's like limited and all that it kind of lends to it but but sovereignty right so speak to me about key management speaking about a little bit about i guess from a high level you know what is casa doing right uh you know in terms of like what is the solution and then a bit you know deeper into kind of what like how you guys are actually enabling um you know sovereignty how you're enabling people to you know become owners of their own future in their own time yeah i mean money is basically time storage right for a long time i thought of money as just a way that you buy things but it was also you know after getting into bitcoin that i started thinking of it more in terms of time and that you know the ability actually to buy other people's time is a far more interesting thing than the ability to like buy a yacht or something uh so you know that actually it kind of goes back to my point earlier of like leverage um you know the ability of technology to leverage uh various balances of power or the ability of money to leverage the really the things that you can get done actually i think i just tweeted in the past day or two about uh leverage of code where if you think of code as an employee or i actually think of code as a sort of a manifestation of a single small tiny part of myself is it when i write a certain script a certain function a certain even more complex architected piece of code what i'm really doing is i am projecting my will into reality i thought of something that i want to have happen and i preferably want to have happen over and over again and hopefully even want other people to help have that happen and i turn it into code i test it and um you know there will be of course maintenance required but once i deploy that code it is running 24 7 with very little overhead it doesn't require to you know eat or sleep or or have you know health insurance or all of the other complex things that make human employees a lot more difficult to manage it does require different types of maintenance but in general you get a lot more you bang for your buck especially over the long term now if you're thinking about leverage though in terms of employees um you know you can leverage other people's time by employing them for various things then if you combine those two you know and you you you hire employees to write the code that you want to be written then you're really cooking with gas you know it's like leverage squared i hear you i hear you you know i i i i know this uh this was like a prepared question about i was very curious about this um i don't know if you know but i spent like 10 years in robotics so before i got into bitcoin my wife is a mechatronics engineer i literally helped outfit most of the major robotics labs in the world including stanford georgia tech iit mit um and i work for a company that essentially you know built products for these types of labs and i've been thinking about uh robotics for a long time right so like i play with quadrotors 3d printers we grab a tesla like we're all about like the robot renaissance um but you know lately there's been a lot of talk about have you ever heard of the the term singularity the technological singularity or whatever as he referred to oh yeah definitely um so it's raymond kurzweil you've heard of the guy yeah yeah so you know more so i i always like i read all those books like 20 years ago or 15 years ago or whatever right and always found it really fascinating kind of chucked it to the back of my mind but then more recently you know you've got like elon musk and bill gates and zuckerberg and all these like super uh wealthy like you know technologists talking about you know this this like similar type of idea right where where not necessarily like these narrow bands of artificial intelligence that already exist kind of all over the world but really kind of a coming together and almost like you know humanity giving birth to this this you know something that's far you know that can have you know way more computations per second that has kind of the subtleness of humanity and it's able to interact with us and and all of that so i guess what i'm getting at is i'm curious to know number one i guess your thoughts on do you think i mean and then i'm bringing this up because of what you're saying earlier is do you i drive a tesla it literally drives itself it freaking drives itself people don't even believe me what i tell them it drives itself how many people on earth drive for a living once two years go by and it's like i don't even need to like it's literally from my parking lot to the parking lot of the grocery store and it drops me off and parks itself i mean once it's at that level it's gonna almost like overnight disrupt like a lot of people's jobs especially people who try for a living are we gonna tell those people those people to become programmers and by the way i don't know if you've seen open ai and what they're doing with like you would be able to convert natural language into code like oh my freaking god so even telling someone to become a programmer might not be a long-term sustainable solution um yeah so i'm looking forward to that day right is that right now you know we have a wide variety of programming language languages to choose from and there have been great advancements in programming languages over the past few decades but it is still a huge pain to turn that concept into reality especially in a way that is robust and doesn't break uh around edge cases and so yeah i i really look forward to the day where we have the star trek type of thing of like computer create a program that simulates you know these conditions and then you know a few minutes later you have everything you could ever imagine so that that will certainly be great but you know even then you're gonna have to have some sort of meta scientist you know who is building those systems until you know perhaps we get to that singularity point but you know there are there are a lot of scary things of course that can happen as a result of all of this uh you know kind of to your point about tesla i don't have a tesla because i don't trust all the data collection that it's doing like i don't know what it's doing with all of that information i know why it needs a lot of it but i also know that you know gigabytes and gigabytes of information are getting sent back to tesla headquarters and getting warehoused in a central repository and while yes it's being used to make the system better uh that data i consider all data about me to be a toxic waste of sorts and so there's the question of you know is that risk that i'm taking worth the trade off of having a car that comes when i call is there a car that will you know drive down the highway and probably do a better job at it than i would by myself um and you know these same type of issues come up with basically anything um and especially as we approach the singularity uh the world is just gonna continue to become a weirder and weirder place and you know it is i mean i think we're already in a type of uh early cyberpunk dystopia there's a lot of dystopian things about the world in 2020 uh much less when we start looking forward a few decades it's going to get even crazier so uh we have to try to protect ourselves as much as possible and you understand uh as many of the potential ramifications as possible but there's also just there's so many unforeseeable that i actually believe that you know we're in one of those periods right now in a civilization where everything is evolving so quickly that it's actually one of the most dangerous points in time for our civilization to uh you know go over the brink and self-destruct uh you know there are a number of different things that could go wrong and essentially cause a collapse of everything that we have built yeah not trying to be a downer yeah yeah yeah hey and i'll stop harping on this topic here but just curious as a technologist and this is like more of like a thought experiment something that i've been thinking about is like do you think so like you know that mad scientist you talked about i'm super scared of that guy because like that's exactly what we don't want right like one dude designing like some sort of ai software so i was curious do you think that bitcoin could be could serve as like the nervous system for some sort of like future artificial intelligence like could it because you know i've read a lot of books on ai and then there's a couple of like major concerns that they have one is just the fact that it computes at a very like very fast rate and humans can't even like comprehend how it's coming to its decision like it just does it um so we might need to have checks and balances i i sometimes wonder if it's like humanity's role to try and figure out some way to like give us you know the the leash on this day right um and i don't know like are there like you hear about neural link it's like well you can't beat them join them but like is there a way to again i don't know i don't know it hasn't been have you thought much about ai have you kind of looked into this space like have you seen the open ai the gpt3 project and some of the things was it mark marsden or mar maros or whatever that wrote that did you read that article like uh it's one of the some bitcoin guy out of argentina wrote a yeah yeah yeah anyhow he posted things on bitcoin talk on and then you read the whole article at the end of the article he's like by the way this article wasn't written by me it was written by the open ai that was a bit scary for me um and so yeah so i i do i do you know and i know what kind of like what doctors even do like i mean i think there could be a time in the near future where a nurse is potentially more valued than a doctor because like i can imagine computers making decisions uh like doctors do far more you know better than like a person that needs a relationship oh yeah yeah i mean it's it's kind of insane like the amount of sort of data knowledge and retrieval that is expected of a doctor um you know that's not possible for like the human mind to know all of medical science at this point like it's just too much even if you're a specialist in one tiny part of the medical field you probably still don't uh know everything or once again it's like bitcoin and the crypto space is that even if i'm a bitcoin expert it's just it's physically impossible for me to keep up with all the things happening in the space so it makes sense to use some sort of ai you know knowledge retrieval system because it will be able to pick up things you know the instant that they hit the internet basically and you know merge that into the collective consciousness if you will uh from a like adversarial ai taking over the whole world perspective you know i don't think that uh one of those ais would like run on a like decentralized consensus network simply because you're so computationally slow however what we have seen um even just i think in the past year uh novel new uses of even the bitcoin blockchain as a censorship resistant uh pointer to information and specifically i'm referring to there have been botnets that have used the bitcoin blockchain as a command and control database because these uh these bots uh can essentially you can have your bots infect a million different machines and inevitably in in the sort of botnet space what happens is uh the botnet has some sort of centralized command and control infrastructure it's usually it's using like a domain or an ip address or something else where all of the the worker infected machines will go out and ask for instructions of what should i do now that i've taken over this machine and so when security researchers and government officials or whatever are looking to take down these botnet uh networks they go for the head they just they want to chop off the head and basically all those infected machines they'll still be infected but they won't do anything because they can't get any instructions so the novel thing that has just started happening recently is these botnet operators realize that they can spend a very tiny amount of bitcoin and actually put instructions you know in the bitcoin blockchain with the op return functionality that does nothing but you know link to some website or ip address uh you know somewhere else on the internet it could potentially could even be something like ipfs you know some other distributed data store to basically say all right you know go here and get your updated instructions and there is as you know no one in the world who has the authority or the ability to stop bitcoin transactions from going into the blockchain therefore you now have botnets that are essentially a hydra of you can you know you can cut off the most recent uh infrastructure that is is hosting the commands but all the botnet operator has to do is create another bitcoin transaction with the right data format put it in the blockchain and say all right your new instructions are now located at this other you know completely different part of the internet some server hosted somewhere else and you know it just it turns it into a hydra where no one can uh can permanently stop it and you know that this is maybe a bit controversial but i always felt that like in the future and future i mean like 10 maybe 20 years out i think that bots i think robots will be um like they'll build dwarf human humans in terms of like uh you know their usage like when i think of and i agree with you on the concerns around tesla i think about that stuff too um but but when i picture my automated car in the future passing yours right because that's what's gonna happen right i'm gonna pass yours but the way it's gonna happen is your car is gonna uh send some sort of message saying i've got nothing on my calendar for the next two hours i've got whereas my calendar knows i've got you know a meeting that i'm late for and they're just gonna not do like a wire transfer between one another they're gonna like just send something that feels and looks like tcp um and then your car's gonna go by the way i'm gonna zip past you but i i can't and whether it's my washing machine talking to my tv telling it to come on three hours later because it's on i mean i just i can see there being like an economy between machines and and bitcoin strikes me as something that would make that possible okay um casa so i want to talk about this so i'm going to try and first explain what i understand uh constantly and just my layman's terms so there's there's like these exchanges right there's websites that people can buy uh bitcoin right but once you buy it you don't have to hold your bitcoin sitting on some server uh that's controlled by you know whoever right um and so for the longest time bitcoiners have known that you know the best thing to do is to not have your bitcoin uh on exchanges right the best thing to do is for you to hold your own bitcoin and then you know uh whether it's treasurer or um you know open dime and you know i love the the open time guys just um all these like kind of your wallets hardware wallets if you will that look like usb sticks and you can essentially hold your your crypto there they don't connect to the internet and you're safe-ish okay so i guess to me casa strikes me as like the next kind of evolution right it's like well yeah great you've done that you've got the treasure whatever in your box at home but what if a bad guy comes with a gun and says you know says hey well give me that treasure now all the security in the world and all the math isn't going to work for you because you've got a gun to your head so in that case you're going to want to use something like multi-sig or you're going to i don't even know this is part of my question is like why is it multi-stake is shamier's like you know how are you guys actually making this happen but the idea effectively is that i would have you know maybe m of n maybe three or five keys or two and three keys that i need to reconstruct to be able to access my bitcoin maybe one is in india one is in canada one is buried somewhere in the middle of the ocean or something or a field and um and so i can essentially recreate my keys but anybody who comes to my house i essentially can't because i i don't have all the keys i need to recreate it so is that essentially the problem statement that you're trying to solve for or am i missing something yeah i mean casa is the system that i wanted for myself um the sort of background history is you know i started working for bitgo in early 2015 was basically running bitcoin infrastructure for them they're doing enterprise multi-sig basically helping exchanges and other uh service providers help to secure their hot wallets because you know they need to be constantly transacting they need to be keeping keys online that's the most dangerous thing that you can do but it's a business requirement for a lot of enterprises so you need a lot of extra security and sort of processes around managing those hot wallets so the way that they improved upon just having a single key on a single machine is they split up the key is a two of three multi-sig solution where you need to get signatures from multiple different machines that are secured by completely different type of firewalls and software and human processes etc etc essentially you know making it exponentially more difficult for an attacker because they now have to break into multiple different completely you know separate setup systems you know they have to find ways to exploit not only one system but multiple systems and you know this this was good it was certainly an improvement but it was far from perfect we still had a few incidents over the years where usually what would happen is someone would infiltrate the internal infrastructure of a client and and basically spoof them and and make you know api calls that look legitimate and follow the rules and whatever and so it was still possible for someone to get into the system and steal money and so what i realized after working there for several years is that i was spending one to two days every year refreshing my own cold storage setup and this was an extremely onerous thing for me to do i have an article that i wrote about it a few years ago which it was like like a 15 or 20 step process that would take uh you know a day or two and what i was basically doing is you know gathering all my different wallet data and seed phrases and stuff and using an air gapped computer to create an encrypted file system that i would then put onto different data storage drives and i would um i would then shamir secret share the decryption key and then you know i would spread out copies of these encrypted data drives and give one piece of the uh shamir sharing to each of my uh executors if you will because i wanted not only a cold storage system that was secure against attackers i wanted something where if i get hit by a truck my heirs would be able to reconstitute those keys and actually spend the money that's actually one of the harder parts to everything it's like it's easy to secure your keys uh if you want to be you know completely silly about it you know you can basically destroy your keys and they're that's as secure as they'll ever get no one will ever be able to access them including yourself what gets a little bit harder is if you want to secure your keys against everybody in the world except for yourself well then you just need to create a much more diverse and robust set of security that makes it almost impossible for anyone who is not specifically you to get through all the different layers of security but then what if you want to build a system where you can access your keys but if you're dead a few certain other people also are able to access them that just like explodes the complexity even more and is actually something that we've started offering at casa but to kind of step back a bit to like what did we actually just one second sorry when you just said that like they can access it if i die but doesn't that also mean they can access it if i don't die hey the difficulty in setting up a system like that is so tricky um and that's and that's because you know it's the oracle problem right it's the same problem that you know bitcoin and ethereum and all of these other uh things have issues with when you want to do something on the blockchain that is reliant upon an event that happened outside of the bitcoin network or whatever other crypto network you're you're running on and uh yeah so just to jump back in um yeah so i was gonna say so you were talking about you know lawyers and my state getting access to my funds and all that but i mean like i i think about that stuff quite a bit right but i don't think i think most people they just care about themselves so i was just curious um how does somebody you know use your solution or your system to protect their own bitcoin so that they can be super loaded one day when they're old or whatever if they think bitcoin's gonna go to the moon just curious so and from what i understood it's that one thing i liked about it is that if i have to rely blindly on treasure uh you know if something goes wrong with treasure which we've seen in the past you know not treasure specifically but you know what i mean these wallets like you hear oh there's a vulnerability that scares me a bit so um if i want to maximize my chances if i use something like casa i could you know use treasure use a you know another you know brand company's wallet i could use maybe my i think even my phone as like one of the you know keys so can you just talk a little bit about that i mean that seems to me like a super like intelligent way of you know securing your own bitcoins for you yeah yeah we kind of jumped forward to the highest tier most extreme offering that we have with the inheritance set up that is that is a pretty in-depth setup that requires a lot of hand-holding and you know we charge a lot of money for it because of all the time the hours that go into it but um we have a couple of other tiers a very entry-level tier uh only ten dollars a month where all you need is one or two hardware devices and you can set up a two out of three sig essentially just plugging in your ledger or your trezor or your cold card and you know we plan on continuing to add more as as we continue to test other hardware manufacturers but the idea around this at a very high level is to eliminate single points of failure and so while a hardware device on its own is great it's far superior to keeping your coins on an exchange it's far superior to keeping your coins in a like single signature hot wallet on a mobile phone or a computer or whatever you're essentially taking those keys offline you're creating an air gap so that hackers can't steal them there's still a ton of ways that you can lose that money probably i would say more ways that you can shoot yourself in the foot and just lose access to it rather than having it actually stolen from you but there are still plenty of other attack vectors where you could be tricked into sending it that you know we've seen plenty of people lose money to uh essentially uh sophisticated types of phishing now where we have we've improved the technical security of the keys by putting them on dedicated hardware so now the attackers are essentially going after what is the weakest link which is the humans you know the brains where they're hacking people's brains to trick them into sending their money to uh the attackers so uh when we want to eliminate single points of failure it basically means we want to understand that humans make mistakes and we can't build brittle systems that can have a catastrophic failure where you lose all your money because you made one stupid mistake or you got tricked by one stupid piece of malware etc etc so by taking keys putting them on dedicated hardware devices and then distributing them geographically we save you from all types of not only attack vectors but also just loss vectors of things that could go wrong that could you know cause those keys to get destroyed for some reason and then the like the ultimate backup to all of this is that casa holds a key offline where if you lose keys yourself then you can go through an authentication process with us to get us to essentially co-sign a transaction and we can then help you restore your key set so one of the the major differences between us and a lot of other multi-sig providers is that we actually have like flexibility and key rotation built into the app itself so you know if your treasure goes missing stolen destroyed whatever managing seed phrase for that offline somewhere because that turns into a whole complex issue of physical security for uh the the data that is essentially your private keys because you're no longer keeping it on a special dedicated device instead what we enable you to do in the app is essentially go buy a new hardware device off the shelf plug it in and then we walk you through a what is really a wallet sweep transaction to rotate out that old key and move your funds to this new set of keys it's just a it's a more flexible way of thinking about multi-sig okay i don't think i fully understood that so did you just say that even if i lose all my treasure and my all my keys i can come to you guys and there's a process by which i can still retrieve my bitcoin and if that's the case how do i protect against you know mad scientist aka jameson running away from my funds uh yeah so it's not it's not all of them right so the ultimate the trade the trade-off to self-custody is that there will always be a path through which you can lose your money the way that casa designs our system is to basically build guide rails into the app to try to steer people down the road of best practices so that you know we're not assuming that people are reading manuals and spending hours days weeks learning about them rather if they just follow what the app tells them to do they should be in a better situation than 99.9 percent of other bitcoiners so if you're in a two out of three setup for example you can either have one mobile key one hardware device and then the casa key or you can do two different hardware devices in the casa key there's trade-offs there around you know security and trustworthiness like some people may not like the idea of having a mobile key we actually think that the trade-offs with the mobile key are great because we can actually back it up in a secure fashion and we have a blog post about this as well where the the key itself is kept encrypted on the device but then we further create a different encrypted backup of that key that we put in your cloud storage apple storage or google storage whatever that may be depending on your device and the decryption key for that is not stored on your phone it's not stored in the cloud it's actually stored on casa server also additionally encrypted with one of our hardware security modules essentially creating like a two of two uh type of backup you know kind of like shamir sharing but without all the complexity behind shamira's sharing um the cool thing about that is that you know if you lose your phone if you upgrade your phone whatever then all you have to do is log back into your casa account and the same apple or google account and it can suck down both of those pieces of data and reconstitute that mobile key all behind the scenes so automated backups especially secure automated backups we're a big fan of what we're not a big fan of is people writing down their seed phrase on a piece of paper and trying to figure out how to physically secure it hey james okay so just to be clear about one thing um casa is obviously a website um i i from my understanding i know casa you guys used to sell a node at one point which was like a hardware device and then there's also a physical hardware device as well right that i plug my treasures into or am i missing something here so casa itself we don't actually manufacture any hardware um we had we had the node but that was all off the shelf you know raspberry pi type stuff like we've never been a hardware manufacturer nor do we want to be the the idea behind getting rid of single points of failure is to actually create a diversity of different security for each key so like i said every multi-sig setup whether it's two or three or three of five will have one key with casa and you know we control those keys completely offline they're never on on any online storage like if if they're needed to be used then they get loaded onto a dedicated air gapped hardware device then you have the mobile key which is like i said it's either on your ios or android phone it is secured by the secure element that is you know in that phone itself to encrypt it and use the various authentication mechanisms that that operating system provides you know it could be biometrics it could be a pin etc it's whatever you have configured on your phone for security and then you have either one hardware device or two hardware devices for two of three or for the three of five you have three different hardware devices and the whole idea around that is once again it's a completely separate type of like computer storage system and also if you have multiple hardware devices then you should use different manufacturers so you know you shouldn't have all treasures or all ledgers or all cold cards because you know there could be some supply chain issue you know there could be a bug you know any number of things and you don't want to put all of your eggs in one basket and that's also why casa itself is not interested in manufacturing a hardware security device because that would that would put more trust in casa and we want to have less trust in cost interesting interesting and by the way like i said i spent i spent 10 years in robotics so i came to the conclusion that they call hardware hardware because it's hard it's also like it's very cumbersome so curious oh so interesting so the node was uh just like a bit of a side project it wasn't really anything that you guys double down on um yeah go ahead guys the the node was a funny thing because it uh from a like sheer uh marketing and branding perspective it starts it surpassed our like uh security service as a like known thing and so due to the popularity of the node that was what we became known for even though we had been doing the multi-seg security service for over a year before we launched the node and so now we're kind of having to readjust and like reacquaint people with the fact that you know we're fundamentally a key management service for people to you know self-custody their own funds and uh the node was a very very different type of thing it was never a high security thing it had a lot of things that could go wrong with it and you know we always told people from the offset it was even in the the set one of the setup screens that said don't put more money on this than you're willing to lose because this is a highly experimental project funny how the internet works right it just kind of runs away with things um okay but just just to kind of clarify just to finish up on this so is it that so if you're someone listening to this and you want to partake in this like you know super high security you know network or system whatever you all you need is you need a legit cell phone so you can download the casa app you need um you know ideally a couple of like maybe a trezor whatever a cool card and i want a ledger maybe right so i've got all those at home so you're saying i can essentially i need to i can get set up i don't know why i thought in my head that there was also another hardware that like acted as like the piece that brought all the different hardwares together um but it doesn't okay good okay so anything else on the before we kind of move over to these last few questions um just curious like any other things you want to you want to maybe mention on the anything you want to clear up in terms of confusion or just maybe sharing i don't know usually people don't like talking about future things but i don't know is there a product that's coming out i guess you said you are you do have a blog or something coming out on the weekend right yeah i mean i'm constantly talking about uh new topics that i i think have not received enough attention um yeah the one thing that we didn't touch on at all with casa because we were mainly talking about the technical aspects of it the unique major difference i would say between casa and any other self-custody setup because of course you can you know we're not recreating the will you there's any number of other software that you can go out and create your own multi-sig setup for one of the main reasons that i would recommend casa is because we have a service component that you're just not going to find with a do-it-yourself solution and that's one of the other major differences with the different tiers is that when you go up into the higher tiers it really turns into more of a bespoke like private client services type of arrangement where you know you have a dedicated client advisor that you know if you have any issues questions you run into anything you can actually get on a phone call with somebody which is almost unheard of in the bitcoin space uh you know with a lot of a lot of providers out there you know if you're using like an open source project then that's all community driven stuff like you might post on a forum and hope that somebody cares enough to respond to you if you're using some sort of like custodial service like an exchange or whatever then you're probably going to send them an email and hope that they respond you know during bull markets you might not get a response for over a month and really with us it's like if you're if you're paying us at a premium tier then we're going to dedicate actual human bandwidth where if you want to get on a phone call or video call or whatever then you'll have dedicated customer support so it's um one of the ways we actually describe that is like at casa we're not here to hold your keys we're here to hold your hand so we're here to help people it's it's a great option for non-technical people or people who are new to the space and don't have the time uh to spend figuring out all of the the minutia around best practices makes sense makes sense hey james i have a question so as somebody who's you know spent what almost eight years in the exchange brokered space um have you have you figured out a way where let's say users of let's say unocoin can hold their funds or bitcoin at like you know i know it sounds almost like an impossible thing but maybe not um where i can hold my bitcoin you know in my possession in in kind of a casa environment but then have those bitcoin and some shape or form show up on an exchange that makes it tradable um i mean i can kind of think of maybe a couple ways but just curious to know is that something you guys have thought about or or come come across oh we've certainly thought about it and we've even talked to some other companies about you know this type of well it what it would essentially require two things uh it would require a like hybrid custody solution where um you have like one key held by the exchange one key held by casa one key held by the user if you can you know think think of how that would would uh essentially put you into a setup okay i just got that okay cool yeah yeah yeah so you know but that that's only the technical part the the thing it's kind of like bingo isn't it sorry i don't know the waters but it's a bit like that or not really yeah and so um you may remember bitgo had a service called bitgo instant and the way the bitco instant worked is that you'd have one key at bitco one key at your service and then the third key was with a third uh party like key recovery service and so that's just the technical components what is required though to make that work from an enterprise like organizational level is it requires legal agreements between the two companies that essentially say you know if if the user defaults or if the user meets these other situations then you other company are legally obligated to sign the transaction that sends the money away from the user and into my account and so it is certainly doable the tricky thing that comes into play is that uh usually with exchanges there's uh a very like limited time window to actually execute these things and get them done is like when the markets are moving people need to liquidate really quickly and so you would also need to have some sort of service level agreement in there that says you know not only will i you know co-sign a transaction to send the money to you under these certain circumstances but i will do it within you know this many hours or this many blocks because uh usually what what's the reason why something like that would be happening would be that you got margin called or you know you you hit some other liquidation trigger that required the money to be sent out of your account and to the exchange and then perhaps to somebody else who was then owed that money so it gets a little more complicated and you know once again it it's uh it's going to involve like humans and the legal system so it starts to become more fragile well said okay okay okay so i had a couple questions david said that i wanted to ask you so we touched on maybe pieces that are here and there but okay first question is you know what is what is like one you know truth that you believe that you think most you know and we can go one of two ways either bitcoin or crypto maybe crypto might be the you know blockchain we're gonna call it that most blockchainers would disagree with you on so what's one truth that you know to be true than most you know blockchainers i hate that word but we would disagree with you on i still think and i think i've been saying this for at least five years but i still think that is important that we actually come to some sort of consensus around how much it should actually cost for people to be able to transact on chain and the reason for that is that the the sort of second order effect of that is that if it's too costly to transact on chain then it will be too costly for people to move their funds off of trusted third parties and into self-custody you know this is a very complicated issue because there it you know butts up against issues of how much does it cost to fully validate the whole system and run a full node and whatnot and so you can't you can't let it be zero cost because then the blockchain data will blow up and it becomes too expensive to validate but on the other hand you know if it costs hundreds of dollars to you know withdraw your money to your own wallet then that's going to prevent a lot of people from doing that and you know maybe second layer solutions will be able to get us there but i think it's fundamentally impossible for a second layer solution to ever be as secure as a base layer solution so at least like as it stands right now i don't see i don't foresee people you know holding their life savings and a second layer solution okay fair enough cool cool i i got that um and then and then the same question as it pertains to like the world at large um you know i don't know i mean there's a lot of weirdness going on in the world right now but just wanted to know if you had any you know again strong beliefs where you kind of saw the light or see the light and and most you know people in the world would probably disagree with you on um i mean in general i still believe that uh the like crypto anarchy line of thinking the sovereign individual thesis and that line of thinking for the general trajectory of the world will prove to be true though i also don't necessarily think that that is in conflict with a number of other things especially with you know orwellian nightmare dystopias where it could very well end up being the case that the vast majority of the populace is not free and you know is living in a dystopian surveillance state which we kind of already are uh whereas the you know the financial and technical elite are able to retreat to their citadels as it were and uh you know be true sovereign individuals that are you know wielding a power that is perhaps on on a level similar to if not eventually exceeding that of nation states and this is crazy for people to imagine but like historically it has happened before like there have been plenty of times in history where private individuals wielded power that was you know even like militarily greater than nation states for example um it's just not something that we've seen in the past few centuries very interesting okay so james i i know i've used up like almost my hour and a half with you anything else that you want to talk about you want to ask me you want to i don't know share about uh just recent events i didn't really touch on all this like d5 you know stuff that's going on and all that i mean it doesn't sound like you're you're too into it i did see a little bit of uproar about uh again i don't know if you want to touch on it or not but it's something about some sort of security token offering recently i'm just curious to know here i was curious to know your thoughts on on whether or not you think that you know i'm i'm i'm not gonna lie i i wrestle with with the idea of ethereum a lot in my head because i think so what we were talking about earlier in this call um it didn't feel right at the beginning but i have a hard time justifying that that it doesn't have some value to the world in the sense that it is you know it does pull in a lot of people into the crypto community and a lot of those people end up in bitcoin okay so is that such a terrible thing you know the turing completeness right as an engineer that's something that i understand i get that bitcoin can do it too and that most likely it was left out because of the attack vector that it presents and therefore it never presented something super sexy for me it's like okay well we can do you know while loops and if then um but like the question is do you want to do that for money but they're not trying to design or optimize their own money and i recently had a bit of back and forth with vitalik's dad on twitter as well where you know he was pretty much it was actually in relation to samson and vitalik doing an interview where long story short you know vitalik pretty much admitted that one of the biggest challenges that ethereum faces that it doesn't stand for anything and uh and you know i don't know maybe that's like a good thing in some way but i struggle to find how that's a good thing in the sense that like you know maybe like it's kind of like a swiss army knife it doesn't really stand for something but you know it's this army knife i stand for something it stands for the ability to do lots of things i prefer kitchen sink protocol okay yeah yeah um so yeah that's why i don't know i guess my kind of quick question on that front is do you think d5 is like a re-emergence of like the ico kind of you know wave or or or like you know dexes like as someone who believes in decentralization and someone who's like spent this you know last eight years in centralized exchanges i'd be lying if i said that i didn't you know dream about someday you know our service being obsolete because because you can do it like all on the chain and so when i do see you know glimpses of that when i see protocols like attempting to solve real problems not the bitcoin problem which is money at large but problems i i i just i can't it's hard for me to be like well these guys are all scammers and they're like the rujas like but they're trying to do something that's like legit so i guess i'll just leave it at that like what are your thoughts like how does one you know reconcile like innovation with scamminess so ethereum you know has every right to exist and it is you know going back to sort of the crypto anarchy thinking you know no one can stop anyone from performing these experiments um obviously people get pissed off when they think that you know someone is pushing the line a little too far and like promising too much when it comes to like what what could my experiment potentially be able to offer the world someday this is you know it's almost like a theranose type of thing where if you saw any of the documentaries around that uh with like elizabeth holmes i got the impression that you know elizabeth may have deluded herself into believing that you know they could deliver on all of the promises that she was making and from my own experience with a lot of ceos you know founders essentially of of startups you have to have a certain level of delusion that what you're doing is possible because if everyone believed that what you were doing was possible then someone else would have already done it it's almost a requirement in order to go out and do innovative things is you have to have not only the belief that it is possible but you have to have the persuasiveness to convince at least some other people that it's possible so that you can you know collectively get your resources together to try to make it happen um and you know that's where it starts to get tricky of you know making promises or making um grandiose statements about what you're going to be able to do which then may result in people committing resources uh that they end up losing i mean this is all just part of the game of trying to build new things so you know ethereum uh deserves its chance like no no one's gonna be able to stop it or shut it down i think the ultimate question will be um you know will it be able to achieve more of the vision of what the people are working on it are trying to do or will it kind of like collapse under its own weight and will you know there end up being more ethereum competitors that kind of take off different pieces of the functionality that is being built on ethereum as a generalized machine and perhaps we have other networks that kind of spawn off and are more specialized and able to do those things better it's really hard to say at this point but just from a computer science standpoint it seems to me like ethereum is uh on a road map to become more complicated and not less complicated and so that's the main reason why it's difficult for me to believe that they're going to be able to you know hit all of the the scaling desires that they want to do um but you know you can make similar arguments about bitcoin and second layer scaling i mean that's a lot more complicated than base layer stuff you know as i've had a lot of hands-on experience uh with doing lightning node stuff at casa for example so um why it's hard for me to distinguish between what i would consider to be a um conscientious malevolent scammer and a person who is perhaps overly optimistic and essentially scamming themselves into believing that a certain thing is possible because you know they might end up being proven right so i yeah i've only i've only called out probably fewer than like 10 what i consider to be conscientious scammers in the space who obviously knew that what they were promising could never be possible most of the other folks in the space i try to give the benefit of the doubt and just look at it as you know they're trying to achieve what is currently impossible and they may fail um but you gotta let them try okay so before i let you go i gotta ask you one more thing so because you brought this up i'll just say these two words and let you kind of go craig right um well maybe there's more than two minutes worth to talk about there but how are you so positive um that he's not who he claims to be well did you read my 20-page article that i published i did so if you had to tld yeah i mean the the reason that i'm so positive i mean the tl dr is that he promised multiple times to provide the very simple straightforward cryptographic evidence that he's that would prove that he was satoshi like that if he was satoshi it would be very easy to do and instead what we have is an entirely insanely complex web of of lies and half truths and distortions and of course there is some truth sprinkled in there to make it seem like it could all be real but it's just it's like the hallmarks of a confidence man and that what he does is he says a lot of things that inspire confidence in him or make him seem to be far more intellectual than he actually is like he tries to act like he's speaking over everyone or speaking at a level uh at which no one else is able to understand him but the true mark of being an intellectual is that you're able to distill complex things into simple matters that you can then explain and educate to people who aren't at your level and i've never seen him do anything like that is always the inverse and you know instead you know creating a complexity instead of you know shedding complexity to help people understand so um it it all has the the hallmarks of a ruse or an affinity scam um you know it's obviously it's hard to tell you know what his actual incentives are um but they're certainly like how did he treat gavin how did he treat gavin yeah um well i believe from what gavin told us like there was there was a a like a fresh laptop that got introduced that was like um it was brought in by i think one of craig wright's assistants so you know that could have been tampered with i'm pretty sure he was running some other software that i don't believe he he ran integrity checks on to make sure that that hadn't been tampered with in general like the whole the whole key like proof process that gavin was subjected to we don't really know the parameters of that it was not a controlled environment therefore there's a ton of different things that could have been tampered with and you know that in and of itself like doing a private key proof session is a red flag in and of itself because the whole point of public private key cryptography is that you can sign a message that you can then show to the entire world and not be worried about any security ramifications um yeah so okay just a couple things on this point so the fact that he said he was gonna prove it and never ended up doing it um does not prove that he's satoshi but also does not disqualify that point and then also his his uh inability to speak at like you know at a very simple pace also i feel doesn't necessarily disqualify him right in the sense that it's probably a signal in the opposite direction but is it uh by the way we're at the end of our hour and a half so i guess what i was you know i was trying to get at is that you know and and then could he have other reasons as to why he doesn't want to publicly disclose i.e like the tax man or something i mean there's always you know i've heard about the australia situation and all that um and so yeah i definitely don't believe in satoshi i just i just uh i just i still didn't i wasn't quite like a hundred percent like you know like god i mean i i i go to church every now and then my wife i'm not religious i don't think god exists i'll just do it as like a hedge against you know i'm completely wrong on this one so i just i just ask myself every now and then you know like how do we like prove without a shadow of a doubt i mean if you look at satoshi whatever his bitcoin he's one of the top like five or ten so he's like you know doing a great job i mean if he is this like hardcore scammer he's doing a great job of convincing you know a lot of people um and he's quite possibly like the best scammer of all time you know with like the rouges you just literally watch like 30 seconds in their video and you're like yeah these guys are smelly but it's like craig has gone like to the end degree to to figure this one out oh yeah i mean so that's what he's relying upon is that you can't prove a negative like it's not possible to disprove that someone is satoshi but what we can prove and what i have in my like how many wrongs make a right article on bitcoin magazine is proving dozens of lies that and contradictions that he's been caught in over the years including uh you know technical misunderstandings of bitcoin that satoshi never would have made in the first place and you know also a very long list of lies like about his academic credentials uh he also has a very lengthy legal history where he has been accused of fraud you know not once but on numerous occasions cool okay so i don't want to take up more your time i don't i think you probably have something else to do but jameson i just want to say thanks again for you know this time really enjoyed it really admire the fact that you're like it seems like one of a few hardcore bitcoiners i really respect that um and yeah that's all i got i mean there's if you want to just end off on like where people can you know find you on twitter um you know your your casa's website as well just so that yeah it's easier for people to get there yep uh my twitter handle is just lop l-o-p-p and you can learn all about casa and our offerings at keys.casa keys.casa awesome all right buddy i guess we'll uh we'll talk again soon just give me one second thanks