this is one of the fundamental things that I've been fighting against um for almost 10 years now working at bitgo and 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 uh I've been fighting against human nature so hello and welcome to the podcast uh I'm Jared hope co-founder logos privacy preserving decentralized technology stack uh and today I'm joined by one of the greats Jameson Lop legendary Cipher Punk uh security a afficionado co-founder and chief security officer of Cara uh advisor to Nick inks and anchor watch angel investor and a whole host whole slew of side projects good to be here yeah cool so I mean I wanted on understand like where does the story start for you like how did you get into to bitcoin like what led you into the cipher Park I guess like the question is like what radicalized you well uh I mean I learned about pcoin From Nerd forums I'm pretty sure slash dot was where it kept popping up for me and you ignored it the first few times figured it wasn't going to go anywhere um 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 you know anybody would have tried to solve the problem so you know that began the journey um at the time I considered myself libertarian but as I learned more about the space and Cipher Punk like I didn't know anything about Cipher punks at the time that was when I became more radicalized you know and I learned about the whole movement and you know what it had been trying to accomplish for decades and uh and of course the crypto Wars uh which I had known nothing about so you know as I went further down the rabbit hole I definitely got more radicalized and also you know became open to the idea of using technology using cryptography to you know change the game to basically create new games with new sets of rules that are hopefully you more open more fair and you know harder essentially for authorities or people in power to manipulate the game at you know the expense of everybody else absolutely yeah I mean you mentioned the the problem there a few times that like what is the the problem to you well yeah so I mean the problem was basically uh how do you keep track of money or how do you keep track of entries in a ledger to make sure that nobody is spending them or you know creating entries when they shouldn't um 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 yeah 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 and weakness and 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 tradeoffs and you know the reason why I would say as a computer scientist that the solution was kind of backwards is because it's incredibly inefficient and uh when when we're trained as computer scientists we're taught about uh data structures and algorithms and the goal is always you figure out the most efficient way to solve a problem and so that's why this you know idea of a blockchain uh this idea of a global broadcast system that floods the entire network is incredibly inefficient and it's just it's not something that I I think any classically trained computer scientist would ever even think of exploring right I mean I guess it probably requires a deeper understanding of what the inefficiency means right I don't know if you have like any thoughts around that um at all or like if it relates to to power in some way well yeah so I mean the the the problem is because as a computer scientist we're thinking in terms of efficiency of computational resources of you know CPU cycles and RAM and space and IO and um and we're not thinking about the efficiency or inefficiency of uh control and power over a system because we're almost always Building Systems that are completely controlled by the Builder by the organization that is building it so that's kind of a nonissue right and you mentioned that you you had more of a a Libertarian streak I I guess like in the earlier days I certainly did as well um you know in crypto Anarchy and Cipher SP Cipher Punk space um I'm kind of curious like how your thoughts have evolved around that if at all well yeah I mean I've been through it all um I was raised in a very traditional Conservative Republican household I went to an extremely liberal uh University at Chapel Hill in North Carolina uh and so like I had I voted on every side of the political spectrum and and got um disillusioned by all of them and so by 2012 I had uh 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 you know as I started going into you know Cipher punks and crypto Anarchist uh ideas I really once again got even more radical 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 uh trying to build a completely different system that is hopefully as independent as possible from uh the existing stuff yeah absolutely like um my thoughts have evolved in along a similar line um I didn't have like a strong uh conservative or liberal background but you know just through osmosis of the current Society I guess I was probably more classically liberal um but um 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 uh but at the end of the day like um I think that the work of like ber deanol really transformed my understand particularly this book on power had transformed my understanding of how that works and that kind of L me down a rabbit hole of a lot of different deficiencies in democratic system um I think there's a great paper on like you know viewing the us as an oligarchy for example um 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 um and never mind the fact that uh most people you know aren't rational and they don't have all the information available into them and nor could they consume at all if they did so yeah becomes quite challenging to to deal with that and then like you know the two- party system is very much just uh two hand puppets of the or two heads of the same beasts you know you're right um so I guess like if we're talking about like uh parallel systems or alternate systems to to that like do you have in 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 well yeah I mean it uh 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 a future more voluntary 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 uh you know how do how do you get there gracefully right because you know no no entity ever wants to really voluntarily give up power um but you know you can hopefully chip away at it a little bit over time but it I don't know historically it seems like these things tend to have to happen somewhat dramatically in C trophically yeah I tend to I tend to agree right like um you know I think Hot For example was in you know had got a lot of criticism because he was in favor of like a temp a temporary dictatorship to manage that kind of transition for example um in history you see revolutions you know where uh the blood of tyrants and uh and the blood of libert Liberty Seekers is uh is uh leaked I guess so um that's something that I struggle with a lot but yeah I think what I like about systems such as or any kind of crypto system or Cipher space such as Bitcoin right is it does offer um the capacity for peacefully opting out and voluntarily opting into a new system right um I think what I really liked about like say Occupy Wall Street and Bitcoin kind of happening with a similar time period is it really showed like Albert Herman's exit voice and loyalty where you had Bitcoin as this means of exit from the financial system and this protest um or voice being unheard um you know against the the 1% so um I don't know what that it looks like in in transitioning out exactly um one idea I had around that is kind of related to um sort of like the 70s sort of style uh mass movement groups and Community organizing um because like with there they they were practicing like solving real problems at like the local level right um and there's like a clientalism or you know uh political political not before the 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 live in right nice neighborhood yeah so maybe there's a way that you know culturally we can enter into that space um and start you know converting the local grosser and you know and uh you know getting a local economy going um and then hopefully that can spread the the gospel so to speak so you know I'm a tech guy so I tend to think of things more from uh the technological solution perspective and one way that I look at this uh you know is you're really talking about uh one of the biggest problems that I find like across the whole space and really all of this stuff is um we like you and I are really weird because uh we we have kind of ascended I think to like the top of maslov's hierarchy such that like we have enough resources and time to think about somewhat esoteric abstract issues like this whereas you know the average person is just trying to feed and clothe and shelter themselves and their family so um it's it's not necessarily that people don't care it's that it's just not the highest practical priority exactly so how do you approach something like that well you know you have to lower the bar and my I would say utopistic techno techno uh futuristic uh perspective of like one way that we might be able to uh ease this issue 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 LIF lifting force and so what I really mean from that and and it is become so much more apparent in just the past few years that I think that this could be uh a practical solution is that um the ultimate scarcity that most people are dealing with is time and you know how do you allocate your time towards you know the highest priority 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 you know 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 to controlling everything you know the reason that the state controls so much stuff is they're they're basically a coordinating mechanism right it's like it's it's the classic who will build the roads problem well technically the state doesn't build the roads but they coordinate to you know take money from you and then give it to a private contractor and tell the contractor what to do um 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 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 uh help me get past this problem that I'm not sure how to solve pretty much yeah right um yeah that's an interesting take like I mean um like the the large language model stuff is uh and well I think Transformers are fundamentally Limited in their expression but like it's going to be inevitable we come up with future architectures can definitely be more expressive and and have more capacity to do that um it kind of reminds me of uh a book I think it's called luxury automated communism um 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 uh and then humans live within the margins of their profits because the entire of humanity existence is um uh you know is so small that it doesn't really make a huge difference right it's like a a tax to the the progenitors of their their new civilization or new Brave World or whatever um not that I uh you know agree with Communism that I like the idea of like uh luxury automated capitalism perhaps is is a 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 for you or do you see some like hurdles to that or um does that irk you in any way uh I mean there's there's certainly a number of paths that that that could go down that become dystopian right um and and I think that this is like one of the arguments that some of the universal basic in income folks come to is that you know 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 um you know the the kind of the point of humanity will be more creativity and Leisure and it will make sense for you Humanity to kind of live off of the gains of AI um it's certainly possible uh do the a want that you know yeah 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 you know have we hopefully we've like uh coded in asimov's laws or or whatever um but yeah I wouldn't like to become the equivalent of a house pet I don't think right so yeah um yeah it's it's unclear um I mean thankfully today I I don't think that that's uh you know with the current Innovations I can think it'll definitely multiply there could be a force multiplier to like individuals um 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 um 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 trained you know citizens would need to have access to energy that is capable of doing the computes um the themselves um you know being uh I'm always trying to become like as fully Sovereign quote unquote uh or autonomous as possible Right like so so yeah I'm not sure how that'll plan out um 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 uh 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 uh 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 um I I mean I also worry about that just as a technologist of um you know I see my parents struggle with technology and I have this fundamental question of um is it because they grew up in a time when technology was not progressing as quickly uh 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 uh you know have you and I grown up in an age at which it was already accelerating quickly enough that we've kind of tuned to it and that we are more capable of of keeping up with all of the changes but I guess the the good SL bad news is we're going to find out right um yeah I mean you you find you know you find old people like people tend to I think there's a study showing that like you know men uh in particular lock into a fashion style around their 30s or 40s and then they will continue to perpetuate that you know until death right um and I don't know if that relates to you know just you you get comfortable with the world um and you're kind of you know all your brain just gets set in its ways or whatever um 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 uh also minimizes the amount of time that you can uh spend to do that um the world is definitely going to get weirder um 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 uh anymore then systems like kyc um you know identity based systems uh break down um and you know what is left well then it is the uh the authority that is kind of created behind a blockchain at least provides you some measure of Quasi objective truth right even though it comes it's a consensus of subjective nodes that are operating under a restrict rule set um and cryptog signatures will finally makes sense I would love to not use pen to sign a form ever again you know so yeah that's uh that'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 um that's certainly how I entered um what my mental framework was like for for a very long time um but the more and more I look at it um I I guess I think of Martial mlin like the medium is the message right so it's like I used to have this belief um and I still do partially that if you encode you know your value sets into the protocol um whether it's you know sovereignty privacy um you know solving various intractable problems um then through its use that will um form or or change what messages flow through through the network but um when I look at like you know any of these public blockchains they tend to they tend to have like a a dominant sort of cultural bias to them right and like you know there's different camps of course under all of them but um and I I think like if we think about say Bitcoin in like 50 years time or 100 years time like you know hard FS can happen in that time um they do happen already ideological riffs happen like what is the mechanism in the contribution to the code that persists um 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 how certain ideas can be perpetuated you know across Generations I don't know if you put your your head down that route or you know see any value in that or maybe have any other other takes well uh you know 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 um 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 the Constitution of the United States uh I think pretty much everyone agrees like the Constitution was a great document wasn't a perfect document but I think it did very well at you know staving off uh overwhelming tyranny of of government power for maybe a couple centuries um 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 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 is 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 where it started off uh in the 1970s um and it was a really nich thing for about 20 years and then when AOL came around in the 90s uh you know millions of people adopted it and it it became at the at the time it was a thing where anyone who was nerdy enough and wanted to could run uh an email server and be Sovereign you know send and receive email uh without the need for trusted third parties and then over the next couple of decades as it went more and more mainstream um and it became more commercialized and it became um more attacked by you know spammers and and Fishers and malicious entities uh 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 blackold uh it might work for a little while but it's only a matter of time before you get shut out because there's basically 10 Gatekeepers in the world these these giant Tech Giants that uh control really the reputation and the ability to you know get in and out of their networks absolutely I guess I I would say I'm afraid I'm generally concerned if that happening to almost any protocol including Bitcoin uh and any of these other crypto protocols yeah I mean um I absolutely you know like I've I've definitely tried running my own S&T server uh in the past and experiened that that issue uh it reminds me also of like um you know the early 2000s to like 2014 is right you had a lot of decentralized sort of file sharing programs and um other uh you know free Haven and becoming tour and so on um but there's kind of a vacuum after that once like Google Drive became a thing right uh and like this sort of convenience and ease of use kind of almost it's like a meteor like hitting a bunch of dinosaurs in some ways and like so I'm quite thankful for a Resurgence I I think um one of the concerns that we we have with say waku and would apply to to Noster as well um is also like what happened to uh what was it um jabber or xmt right um so that was an open standard protocol um you know people were using it uh then um one of the Google products ended up adopting it uh 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 right coll so I mean those kinds of issues I guess they're like functions of like power laws in systems theory or something right but um I view them like I feel like that the the solution to that is probably in the social domain somewhere or or creating very very good technological fly wheels um that can continue the network growth um yeah I I don't know yeah I mean um if I had a solution for this I would definitely be screaming it but I the only thing I can really come up with is just that it requires constant vigilance um because especially if you look at SMTP I have linky essays and presentations I've given about that uh one of my main takeaways was that there is no single point in time in the like multi-decade history of the decline and fall of uh you know Sovereign email if you want to call it that there's no single decision there's no single change that where 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 uh because a new problem came up and solutions were demanded and you know the engineers did uh really what we were talking about at the very beginning they went with like the most efficient and and by efficient we mean in terms of like you know computational uh and and Computer Resources type of power uh 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 10 Gatekeepers of the email Network as we know basically capturing like 90% of the billions of email users yeah right I I guess like um you know you've obviously been in the the Bitcoin space for for a while you've gone through all of its dramas and its history um but like you've also talked in your articles and in like in some of your talks around the osificante for protocol oif or like how do you view oif when it comes to something like Bitcoin yeah so um I actually argue that uh it's against OIC because I think that a a big part of what went wrong with email for example was that the protocol did aify but while you can you can aify a network protocol you cannot aify the rest of the world that exists and you know 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 um 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 um and there were examples of this like practical example of a solution to a lot of this was adom back's hash cash 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 you know stop spam uh instead you you push it out to the edges you you impose costs on everyone who is actually using the the protocol to you spend their CPU um and you know the the world of email would probably look very different today if the the protocol had U adopted hash cash back in the 90s so uh 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 uh if the only alternative is you know bolting things on top of it that are going to be more centralized so you we don't have a I mean there are some examples that we could point to today I would 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 uh and so so like that's the exact um analogous example of oh you know we solve a problem by just having everybody use a single point of failure and that this now undermines some of the most fundamental and valuable aspects of Bitcoin so oh I actually had a really pithy tweet just a few days ago where I I I basically said yeah you can solve Bitcoin scaling with trusted third parties just like you can solve all of your personal problems with a bullet to the head yeah well I was going to ask you like you know what your opinion is on the the the ETFs and like Black Rock and gr 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 um yeah I mean look it's it's fine from a final it makes sense from a financial perspective and I hold Bitcoin ETFs but I hold them inside of you know 401ks and IRAs uh that were already centralized and you know could potentially be rugged uh and I actually almost got rugged by the SEC a few years ago because they delisted uh a Bitcoin etn that I I had put all of my retirement money into and that was a whole year-long ordeal I have a whole blog post about that um but um 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 right so like why is self custody so important uh it it really comes down to power once again of of um you know if you really want to keep the network decentralized if you want for um you your Bitcoin to actually be yours rather than uh essentially holding an IOU where you have to ask permission from someone who can deny it for any arbitrary reason um the best security model that Bitcoin provides requires that you hold your own Keys um 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 how old you are you know your gender any characteristics it doesn't even care if you're human it doesn't know and um and this can tie into AI agents as well in the future um but this is one of the fundamental things that I've been fighting against um for almost 10 years now working at bitgo and 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 uh I've been fighting against human nature and you know human nature is essentially to uh to for convenience at the expense of almost everything else and so that's why it um you know I don't consider my competitors to be the other self- custody providers I I consider my competitors to be the trusted third parties who because they're shoving all the complexity you know under the hood you know behind the screen of a really slick user interface um they have a massive Advantage there because the average person cares about convenience more than security more than privacy you know more than these abstract Concepts that many people don't think about until it's too late so uh 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 um you know 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 yubi key and um you know a Ubbi key is arguably not as secure as something like a ledger or a treasure this you know fully self-contained Computing device but from the ux perspective from the users uh like amount of Hoops that they have to jump through to actually set it up and maintain M 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 like very slight expense on the security side yeah absolutely I mean and then it it also scales with the amount of value that they're trying to secure right like um you don't need to have you know a a safety deposit box with your Hardware wallets in there and some backup location of something on written in steel for $10 worth of uh you know whatever your favorite asset is um so this be introduced uh I mean with status we basically you know have faced similar challenges and you know thought about it in similar ways um I think the UB key is a is a great idea um to get keys on that people already have them uh and uh I think they can understand them a lot easier uh we had a similar approach I think uh where we ended up taking like the Java card platform and building out signers for that um and then we're extending it with like UTF and stuff like that so we're trying to make a U out of out of them as much as we can um but yeah it's kind of cool to see there's a convergence in in some ideas around that um yeah when it comes the convenience like so the shame is is like you know at the time they make these like 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 learning event right um it's like it kind of requires that high energy um input to be able to move change equilibrium or change State uh for for people to do that and then most people don't I think um a friend of mine was using last pass until the uh the previous hack that went through and they finally took on key pass even though I've been I've been hopping on about it for for years um yeah right it's also cyclical um you know I think that sort of each new cohort of adopters and the space has to relearn the lessons that older cohorts learn so I think this is uh this is why we keep seeing you know massive exchange hacks every few years or like massive rug pulls every few years um and I don't think that that's necessarily going to stop until we reach some sort of saturation point because you know it's both it's both The Operators of these things that are coming along and and learning not learning from history and then of course it's all the the new adopters that are coming along and not learning from history until they get burned yeah I mean I I I at the time I was more in the ethereum uh ethereum space right and uh you know you're obviously familiar with the the Dow hack um and so a lot of lessons were learned in that period of time uh and then once the sort of defi crowd started coming in and building on the technology uh I was looking at some of their code and I was mortified that they were deploying these things onto Main net right um but they've learned their lessons in a similar way and uh I would tend to agree I think um part ofy uh 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 um is it just that people have to like relearn these things or like can we do a better job of like educ education uh and you know getting these ideas out I'm I'm not really sure on that front um I feel like it's a human nature to just YOLO it until they a wall yeah I mean I'm uh pessimistic and disillusioned about educating people when it comes to security and privacy um you can you can you're try to teach people all day long but um 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 so it it seems and and I think this is also one thing that I've come to believe about sort of Bitcoin evangelism as well uh in in the early days those first few years um when I was getting into the space I was going out and really evangelizing this new money to all of my peers my my you know Social Circles and whatnot and it pretty much fell on death years right um you know this was 2013 2014 um I was also I mean I was pitching it to the wrong crowd right I didn't realize that um you know everyone in my social group they were well off financially they had access to um the financial infrastructure they had no concerns about inflation or you know monetary policy and so I basically came off as the 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 one or two percent of people who actually you know bought into my uh Fringe ideas back then and so point being um you you can't really you can't force these things onto people who don't see the value in them and um and so these days I'm more focus on you know waiting for the people who have the the pain points and have the need to to come to me and say I want to learn and then you know I have plenty of educational resources available for anyone who wants to learn right I mean uh I kind of find 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 um but they don't realize it but uh maybe now you know with um the sovereign debt being not uh bought up as fast as it used to be um and the rampant money printing that's happening within uh within the de facto World Reserve currency that is United States dollar I think people are starting to feel the pressure over inflation a lot more um I even hear it like I take my dogs down for a walk in the park uh and there's people who are now having to you know go between different groceries just to find the best deal right because they're um because they're lower on this maso's hierarchy of needs right um yeah and so even then they're not thinking about like what is the root cause of all of this right they're just like I just to get my affordable groceries yeah yeah but I mean if Trends you know if if the debt isn't restructured magically and the current Trend continues then that might be something they're more receptive to to hear potentially um but you know it it very well may be that we have to get to a a mandibles type situation if you're familiar with that book um it it like like I said at the very beginning I'm not sure that any of these systems are going to fail gracefully yeah I think so I mean I guess Switching gears a little bit how do you think about privacy it's a nightmare I mean um I spent the first decade of my career on the opposite side of the Privacy battle um I worked yes I worked for an online marketing company and I was basically doing cloud computing large scale data analytics uh back when the cloud was just becoming a term like most people didn't even know what cloud computing was this back in like 2008 2009 um and so I I saw the uh you know pedabytes and pedabytes of raw information that my company was collecting on a daily basis because we would have anywhere from you know tens to uh hundreds of of millions of emails that were sent out through our system which would then of course collect all of the uh 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 um you know corporate surveillance machines out there you can really start piecing a lot of data together and you know build entire complex profiles around people so um you know that's when I really learned like just in your sort of daytoday internet browsing how much data is collected about you and and so you're already starting out at a major disadvantage uh and there's there's a lot that you can do but once again it comes down to like how much time and effort are you willing to put into it I do tell most people that um you know the easiest and most effective thing that you can do is just install ad blockers into all of your uh your browsers and that will stop a lot of it but um for me you know I went down the extreme privacy journey in 2018 because um my physical location was compromised and I was uh attacked basically had a a SWAT team sent to my house uh under false pretenses and that's when I realized that you know this privacy thing is is real uh like there's actual you know 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 uh extreme physical privacy rabbit hole and determined that you know 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 uh in order to you know set up all of the appropriate entities to uh sufficiently obfuscate where you are what things you own uh and and and basically create proxies between your real identity and um and like corporate or trust identities that will be on public records um and the public records are a big deal but then like I said as well there's all the corporate surveillance stuff um so you know even staying out of a lot of those private databases gets tricky as well and you you can even get to the point of essentially uh disinformation campaigns and and you know setting up a lot of fake information just to sort of sew seeds of Doubt so that if someone does try to come after you instead the average person uh you know you can pay like 20 bucks and and go to one of these uh 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 um and in order to you know prevent someone from being able to do that against you um requires a lot of effort and attorneys and uh and ongoing maintenance to make sure that you're kind of like keeping all of these like plates spinning in the air uh so that um if someone tries to find you they're gonna be sent off on a wild goose chase nice I guess that's the whole that's what opsc 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 yeah uh well at the time when I did it there there weren't any great guys there were one or two books uh that weren't particularly indepth for like all the different aspects of your life but thankfully um Michael bazelle and that's not his real name but um he publishes a book called Extreme privacy and I it 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 you know it's it's not uh 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 um 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 because it it does it just keeps getting more and more complicated um and the the rules of the game keep changing uh and like the the technological mitigations some of these things keeps changing at a faster pace you're right do you think that that can be democratized in time right there are services that uh exist to make it easier um there there are some like uh you know cyber security and privacy health check services that will do things like monitor a lot of these people search engines monit for data leaks um help automate hardening settings of a lot of different services that you use to minimize data leaks um but then you're exposing yourself to them yeah you're you're basically using a trusted third party to you know do a lot of the heavy lifting for it uh so you know tradeoffs right um there was also an article just the other day that came out that said that uh there was testing of a lot of these automated data removal services was found to be far less effective than uh going through them manually and that is also one of the things that Michael bazelle has this entire uh data removal Handbook of uh essentially you can write letters to all of these different services to basically say you know remove me from all of your databases and um I I don't I myself don't do that um I think like you have you have a couple of different options uh either like if you're already in a a place where you're essentially docked 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 know you can't delete data once it's already out there on the internet um not you know 100% uh for sure um I went the other more difficult path which is like I sold off all of my publicly registered assets and moved and and basically burned down my entire life from a a public data perspective and and you restarted it with a a hardened uh 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 you're right that's uh getting quite close to doing do a self- witness protection program right pretty much yeah because um you know I also have to come up with uh pseudonyms uh Back stories because you know essentially I don't tell my uh my physical neighbors obviously Who I Really Am uh because I have to assume that they would leak that uh and you know PE people are gossipy that's just human nature you find that like uh 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 you know your physical life potentially potentially threatened um like I mean is society so sick that that's just the way things have to be for for people like us you know uh yeah so for the first year or two it was awkward uh you you feel like you're like living a double life um but it just becomes a a new habit a new part of your personality and uh the short way that I describe like a lot of my privacy techniques is lying uh and and lying is is generally you know it's kind of against human nature um you know it's it's 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 uh Alias for like each different person and service provider that I was dealing with and so it was overly complex I couldn't keep track of it all you really got to simplify it for your own sanity um profiles and personalities and like traces for each one of those identities as well right like that's insane yeah I mean you can go as far with it as you want to um but it is a lot of mental overhead and um you know the short version to a lot of this privacy stuff is and I think that Michael bazelle says this as well is that um at least in America uh the vast majority of time it's completely legal to lie about who you are and what you do um really the only times that it's illegal is when you're entering into some sort of like legal contract where you know 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 um 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 uh phone numbers and a ton of different um uh 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 segregation between like different aspects of your life 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 uh I can see the utility in this case for sure um I mean it sounds like it's going to become more and more required especially like uh what's happening in the UK right now right um 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 yeah um but also in the long term I'm somewhat pessimistic uh on on the physical privacy stuff too um uh you know thankfully we don't have a ton of like physical surveillance in America at least outside of the big cities um but you know to give you an example um like I have um toll booth uh scanner thing right and and thankfully you know even though that's tracking what the car is going through you know my car is not registered to me the toll booth scanner thing is also registered to a corporation uh but you know they could be taking photos and potentially doing facial recognition as you're passing through there um and in general I do expect that we're gonna hit a point where I won't be able to go out um into meat space and not be recognized and and you know one of one of the reasons for that uh is things like uh I think like meta has those Rayband glasses for example that have the camera built into them kind of like Google Google Glass from a decade ago but even better um 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 um uh you know augmented reality display that will be able to like pick up your your faces uh 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 yeah yeah everyone will have a body cam one way other I mean they already do it's just in their pockets right um y so that's a tough problem I I guess in speaking of like counter measures uh is there any like uh there's you know obviously like uh other sort of privacy projects have come up such as like zcash or Monero trying to address uh 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 or evolve in any way well uh I am doubtful we will ever see uh privacy protection that this sort of Monero or shielded zcash transaction level of privacy uh because those make it difficult to audit the like the supply against inflation bugs for example I think zcash actually had uh an inflation bug I I think it may they don't think that it was exploited but there there was an inflation bu they patch at some point um and you know there are a number of potential privacy improvements but these are all going to be sort of iterative um 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 it like there is a potential path to a future in which bit coin economically incentivizes it for you to participate in coin join mixing where it would be cheaper to transact via coin join uh 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 gotcha gotcha well uh we're out of time unfortunately I'd love to continue chatting with you um I guess like to to wrap it up uh what are you most hopeful for or like you know what are you excited for in the upcoming short or medium-term future um and you know if there's any other recommended reads that uh the audience should check out uh well in Bitcoin land uh 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 um I would say a lot of them are centralized in various ways or are speculative upon certain changes happening to the Bas layer protocol and this is I think one of going to be one of the main things that I'm going to be uh harping on and and pushing for is that um 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 um but that they're also the sort of aifi 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 uh 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 uh explosion of innovation in the second layer space and um and that's I think the main thing that I want to see happen is um just improvements that allow for more building on top of Bitcoin without having to make tradeoffs of having like centralized Gatekeepers like in and out of second layers it's this uh the prom that we were given a decade ago uh with the side chains white paper that we were going to have this you know 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 uh perhaps we will really see a new Renaissance of building on top of Bitcoin fingers crossed I'm looking forward to it all right well well thank you so much for your time thanks for having me