CRIPTOLUIS - THE JAMESON LOPP INTERVIEW🎙️
I talked to
@lopp
about many topics around Bitcoin during the
@LuganoPlanB
Conference.
This is the transcription of the recorded interview.
Some remarkable quotes✍️
-“At a very low technical level, Bitcoin is not money [...] Ultimately this is a distributed programmable database”
“I can explain things to you but I can't learn them for you”
Special thanks to
@bitrefill
for sponsoring this trip.
FULL INTERVIEW 👇
@CriptoLuis
: So here's the interview with Jameson Lopp, CTO of
@CasaHODL
and Bitcoin advocate, also a cypherpunk, you could say.
I feel that we have so many things to discuss in the Bitcoin space right now. So first, I would like you to introduce yourself for my audience.
@lopp
: Sure. Jameson Lopp. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Casa. I've been working on Bitcoin self-custody solutions for eight years now.
CriptoLuis: So what was your background before getting into Bitcoin? What you were doing?
Lopp: Computer scientists by trade. Spent the first decade of my career working building infrastructure for online marketing.
CriptoLuis: Okay. What would you say is the main solution that Casa provides?
Lopp: Well, it's always been possible to be your own bank with Bitcoin. But the question has always been how much knowledge is required, how difficult is it to understand all of the trade-offs, the best practices, the ways that you architect your self-custody so that you don't shoot yourself on the foot and have a catastrophic loss.
So Casa provides a mobile app that's really easy to use software. And we also are basically a consulting service. We make it easy for you to call in and let us know what you need help with. And then we also hold a key for you so that if you do lose some private keys, we can help you recover your money.
CriptoLuis: So who's your client persona, your ideal client for the solution you provide?
Lopp: Anyone who has enough Bitcoin that it would be a life-changing problem if they lost their Bitcoin. Basically, if you feel like you have enough to lose that you're willing to put in some time and effort to become a client of ours and pay essentially a subscription fee so that you have our consultation services.
CriptoLuis: So now that you provide these custody service, do you believe that self-custody could be hard for certain kinds of people?
Lopp: Well, yeah. I mean, it's hard, especially hard for non-technical people, but even technical people, it comes down to a question of how much time are they willing to put into it. So even we have plenty of technical people who are clients of ours and they see paying a subscription to us as basically a time-saving mechanism because what you're really paying for is the aggregate and the sum of knowledge of all of our employees and myself who have, we've seen a lot of terrible events happen over the past 10 years and we've learned from them and we've developed best practices and then we've created our software with those best practices in mind.
CriptoLuis: And did you have a different way of thinking before realizing that problem? I mean, if you were some type of maximalist or like, because the self-custody and the self-sovereignty has always been present into the Bitcoin space, how do you reconcile those two visions?
Lopp: Yeah, I mean, for the first several years that I was working in the space, I was working for a provider that was really enterprise-focused and so the people that were our clients then, they were very technical and they were engineers and they were generally paid to already be well-versed in the space and be able to navigate all of the pitfalls. But when I founded Casa and we started taking on just more regular people as clients, we got to see that there's a much broader range of skill sets and perspectives and the willingness to put in time to understand all of these problems. And so over the past several years we've learned even more about how the average person might approach self-custody, might be intimidated by various aspects of it.
So what we're trying to do is make it easier and easier and less intimidating because it doesn't really matter if it's possible to be your own bank if most people are too afraid to take on the responsibility that comes along with that.
CriptoLuis: That's definitely an issue. Maybe provided service for individuals or private entities, maybe in first world countries. But what do you think Casa could provide for emerging markets and individuals that live in societies that are not aware of Bitcoin or this approach to personal responsibility?
Lopp: Well, we have a number of different tiers of service that are available and we do in fact have a free wallet that anyone can check out. And while our free tier of service doesn't give you the elimination of all the single points of failure, it's still a single signature wallet on your phone, it does give you some things like automatic backup and encryption of the keys so that it's almost impossible for you to lose that key. So there still are benefits that are available for people even if they don't have like $20 a month to spend on a subscription consultation service.
CriptoLuis: Okay. What has been your approach to Bitcoin education by yourself? I know you have, I mean you run this website named Statoshi, I use it myself to access resources. It's like what's your main goal with all of what you do in that aspect?
Lopp: Well, a lot of my educational resources site that has like 1500 links on it is purely self-serving because I just get tired of having to explain the same thing over and over again. So I actually spend a little bit of time almost every day making updates to that site, adding and removing things, just making sure the links all work. And that for me is a time saver and I think it's also a time saver for anyone else because I've categorized things so depending on what aspect of Bitcoin you want to look into, you can find every resource that I've ever come across there. So unfortunately it is still a thing where it's complicated and people do have to be willing to invest the time to navigate it. I think there's a good quote like, I can explain things to you but I can't learn them for you.
CriptoLuis: What is Bitcoin?
Lopp: Bitcoin is our attempt at codifying an optimal form of money and that comes along a number of different attributes but essentially in order to be an equitable open affair it needs to be transparent, it needs to be an open-source project where anyone who cares enough can contribute to, they can weigh in. And many other interesting attributes that we generally call self-sovereignty have followed as a result of that.
CriptoLuis: Okay, so in that line of talk I don't know if you have been following these recent innovations in Lightning and Bitcoin that try to make Bitcoin do some other things. We started with Bitcoin as a monetary network but now people are doing all kinds of stuff.
I just had an interview with the guys from Simple Proof, they used the Open Time Stamp Protocol to check on the elections of Guatemala. What do you think about these kinds of applications and potential applications?
Lopp: Yeah, I mean at a very low technical level, Bitcoin is not money. We use Bitcoin as money because of the interesting attributes that the system has. But ultimately this is a distributed programmable database.
And while the functionality that the protocol in the database allow you is very limited on purpose to give you a strong level of security, there is still some flexibility in what you can do. And over the years what we found is there's almost an element of discovery of what happens in this ecosystem. And there's very creative people come along and they find ways to use the protocol that others didn't even envision. So that's what we're seeing happen, people continuing to build new utility, new applications.
CriptoLuis: So what type of applications are you following right now? Like we have this thing with the drivechains and sidechains and all those type of stuff. On the part of Lightning we have the potential tokenization of assets, Taproot Assets🥕, RGB…. What are your thoughts on all these variety of innovations that have come up in the last couple years?
Lopp: Yeah, one of the good and yet unfortunate aspects of the ecosystem is that it has grown to the point where it's accelerating and evolving faster than anyone can really keep track of.
It's not possible for me to have a deep level of understanding of all of these different systems because they're all complicated in their own right. So I'm trying to at least maintain a surface level of understanding of the innovations and keep a general track of which ones seem to be gaining traction, which ones seem to be able to actually deliver on the theoretical promises that they started from the offset. This is also really my job as a CTO is that I need to remain apprised of everything in the ecosystem so that I can see if a particular technology or tool becomes very valuable and has a lot of utility, then it's something that I want us to then incorporate into our own product to leverage the attributes of that piece of the technology.
CriptoLuis: So in that line of thought, what do you think the future of #Bitcoin is going to be?
Lopp: Well, I certainly have my optimistic takes of where I would like to see it go. I obviously want to see adoption continuing. The main thing that I'm focused on is making it easier and easier for people to take self-custody. That's always going to be a challenge where we're facing these third-party custodians who have a massive advantage. The advantage that they have is at least two-fold. One, it's where a lot of the on ramping is still happening. So it's the sort of default where a lot of people are coming into Bitcoin.
I am optimistic. I've been seeing, especially with Lightning, more people directly receiving Lightning payments. If you're getting paid in Bitcoin, then you're less likely to, I think, have that go to a trusted third party.
The other thing is that the technology is going to continue to evolve faster and faster as more developers come in. So it's not even really possible for us to envision what the world might look like 10 years from now. But I do think that people are going to find ways to leverage this distributed database to secure a variety of different things beyond just money.
CriptoLuis: What are your thoughts about the stabilization of the value of Bitcoin? Do you think that Bitcoin is going to remain as database that is fluctuating and it has many things happening into it? Or are we going to reach stability in its value as a monetary asset eventually?
Lopp: Well, I think that it will stabilize as it becomes larger and larger and larger. But it's also almost a weird question to ask because I think that fiat will continue to destabilize. So what are you measuring Bitcoin? If you're measuring it in fiat, it may actually get worse.
CriptoLuis: So what about Bitcoin becoming a fiat-like asset with all these things happening with the ETFs or what people call the paper Bitcoin, the so called ‘BTC’?
Lopp: It's dangerous. I mean, sure it can be good from a liquidity flow perspective, but it's dangerous because I think that this opens up the opportunity for quote unquote paper Bitcoin, Bitcoin IOUs and potentially threatens the sanctity of the 21 million Bitcoin limit.
CriptoLuis: Have you ever had the chance to visit any emerging markets like the ones in Africa or probably El Salvador? What was your experience?
Lopp: Yeah, I did get to go to #ElSalvador a year or two ago and it was definitely a very different experience. The people there they have a very different set of things that they're worried about compared to people in the first world. So I am somewhat optimistic though that people that are in kind of worse economic situations, they don't need to be preached at. They don't need to proselytize these people why they need better money. They already have crappy money and they'll take anything that looks better.
CriptoLuis: Indeed there are many different use cases in the first world and the third world as well. To end that, do you think that maybe the ETFs are an attack from the state or there might be a chance that the state develops another type of attack that comes into the future?
Lopp: I'm not too worried about #ETF being attacked. It's pretty clear that the government organizations are very worried about ETFs. They've been trying to stall them for years now. It's been like eight years and they clearly don't want them to happen for a variety of reasons. But could nation states come up with attacks if they actually get to the point where they feel threatened by Bitcoin?
Yeah, sure. But this is where one of the reasons to be optimistic about Bitcoin is that it's a global network and there are many of us. And ultimately, the power of the people is always greater than that of the government . So governments do a really good job of making themselves look intimidating.
CriptoLuis: You know, I've seen you on Twitter sharing these types of attacks that happen around the world, like people that try to sell Bitcoin on the street and then they get attacked or they got their house robbed. What was the most shocking one for you that you have ever seen that you can remember?
Lopp: Well, actually, there was one that just came out a few days ago where this woman in South Korea 🇰🇷was attacked and actually murdered. So there have been a small number of them that have unfortunately ended in the death of the people who were targeted.☠️
CriptoLuis: So lastly, what do you think about the Plan B forum? How do you like it? This conference? If possible, if you can compare it with other conferences, what's best, what's worse about it?
Lopp: I would say
@LuganoPlanB is probably my favorite, you know, one of my favorite conferences that I go to. They treat the speakers very well. They have excellent food, excellent programming. They make sure everything runs on time. The Swiss 🇨🇭make sure that things run on time. You don't have to worry about people getting behind schedule or whatever. And then they definitely stay on top of me and make sure that I get to where I need to get going.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and what does it matter to know?
Satoshi is the culmination of decades worth of Cypherpunk ideas. Their identity is irrelevant; Bitcoin is powered by contributors and Satoshi stopped contributing 12 years ago.
CriptoLuis: In a succint answer, why Hal Finney is not Satoshi Nakamoto?
Lopp: Hal can't be Satoshi because he was provably doing other things, not at a keyboard, while Satoshi was active.
CriptoLuis: Who is your favorite Satoshi candidate? Who do you think he might be?
Lopp: I think it's immoral to accuse anyone of being Satoshi without irrefutable evidence. I will say I think it's silly that most folks think that the pool of candidates is fewer than 10 people.
CriptoLuis: Where do a beginner should start to learn about Bitcoin in the proper way?
Lopp: http://Bitcoin.page, that has all the resources you need. What is this page? It's my website of educational resources. It might be easier to remember than http://lopp.net.
CriptoLuis: Thank you, Jameson.
Lopp: Thank you, Luis
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