Hello, and welcome to 21 and 21. I'm Haley Bercow, and today I'm speaking with Jameson Lopp.
Jameson Lopp is a longtime Bitcoiner, cypherpunk, and the co-founder and chief security officer of
Casa. He's well known for his writing on Bitcoin privacy and security and his extensive website
of resources, Lopp.net. Jameson, welcome to Presidio Bitcoin. First time here. It's been a
while actually since I've been in the Bay Area. My initial gig was at BitGo, which is in Palo Alto.
Well, I'm glad that you could make it back and swing by first, but hopefully not your last time. So we're just going to get through as many questions as we can in 21 minutes. Are you ready?
Fire away.
All right. First question. So you've obviously done a lot. You do a lot. What's one thing that's top of mind for you right now?
I'm actually mostly focused on what I consider to be really, really long-term existential issues that I think we as Bitcoiners need to be thinking about.
So, you know, that's one of the reasons I'm here today for the Quantum Bitcoin Summit.
And it's why I talk about other sort of vague things like ossification, which I think will eventually have ripple effects with regard to a lot of other things that Bitcoin should probably do to improve itself over the years and decades.
Yes, well, Quantum is definitely one of those.
And you're here for the Quantum Bitcoin Summit.
So I saw that you recently tweeted about a new Bitcoin improvement protocol proposal aimed at promoting post-quantum crypto migration.
Can you maybe give a high-level explanation in layman's terms for our listeners?
Yeah, so the short version is I'm not saying that we need to do anything today.
Once again, this is a very long-term thing.
I just think that if we get to the point where we do believe that quantum computing has advanced sufficiently, that it is going to become a threat to Bitcoin's cryptography, then this is a very different situation that we've never encountered before because we're going to want everyone to actually migrate their funds to new locking scripts and new signature schemes.
And so my proposal is basically how do we think about the incentives and the game theory around that? Because one of the arguments that I make is that if we do this as an opt-in only thing, it's unfortunately probably going to be insufficient simply because a lot of people are ignorant, naive, lazy, procrastinators, so on and so forth.
And that even if we got a significant amount of the ecosystem moved over, they could still end up being significantly harmed as a result of all of the people who don't do anything.
So this is something that more than developers will need to be thinking about in the future.
This will be Bitcoin users, Bitcoin wallets.
This affects everybody.
It affects everybody.
Do you think there's a way that we can make this kind of more easier on the UX side for people that are less technical?
For sure.
But that is all a moot point unless we first can decide what to do at the protocol level.
First, you have to make protocol level changes, and then it can take years for them to matriculate throughout the rest of the ecosystem and get adopted and then eventually get down to the actual user level.
Got it.
So you've been in the Bitcoin space for a very long time, and you said right now you're focused on these kind of like long-term existential problems.
what's something that you've maybe changed your mind about along the way
oh um i mean bitcoin itself has changed and and this is one thing that i've said a few times
which is basically that um once you've been in bitcoin long enough i think you start to understand
that you need to be fairly flexible and understand that you know this is kind of a living ecosystem
And it does change, even if the protocol itself doesn't significantly change the way that people view the protocol, the way that people use it changes in the narratives of what Bitcoin is change.
So compared to 13, 14 years ago, when I first started being interested in it, like what Bitcoin was to the average Bitcoiner, drastically different thing than what it is today.
And, of course, that can then have trickle-on effects to the long-term forward trajectory of what Bitcoin can actually do at a technical level.
If what people have in their head is their narrative of what Bitcoin is, is different than what we might be proposing it can do at a technical level.
Well, I think you've already seen a number of the conflicts that can happen as a result of that over the past year or two.
Yes, definitely.
um what's a project that you're currently very excited about in the bitcoin space right now
um i mean i like to see further development of layer twos and so any novel layer two
that is not simply a glorified multi-sig is interesting to me so some of the bit vm stuff
I think Citria is one of the first that looks like they going to get out of the gate with these zero knowledge roll up layers That interesting to me There been a decent amount of development with e mints several different projects there which you can argue I mean obviously there trade offs to all of these things but you can argue that they offer somewhat better user experience than lightning Of course there are security trade but there also privacy improvements And then most recently we actually saw Botanics launch
Now, I think that they are launching with multi-sig, but their ultimate goal is to get to a very different type of pegging mechanism.
The best way to describe it, they call it spider chain, is this sort of rolling, ongoing set of multi-sigs.
So I'm just interested in seeing more experimentation around that, especially anything that is creating a trustless or trust-minimized peg-in and peg-out system.
Are you thinking much about the intersection of AI and Bitcoin?
uh i mean i don't think that we're really at the point where you know ai agents are going to be
holding and using bitcoin it's i mean over a long period of time that may be inevitable
from a day-to-day perspective most of what i'm seeing ai being used at is sort of develop
development-driven tooling and improvements and stuff.
So it can be helpful from a productivity standpoint.
Sometimes from a security standpoint,
it can find bugs that other developers may miss in peer review.
But I think there is a lot of hype right now
that somehow AI plus blockchain equals astounding new innovations.
I haven't really seen anything along that line that has blown my mind,
But I do think that AI will improve productivity really across the board with pretty much every industry.
AI is definitely big.
In San Francisco right now, we had a pretty cool hackathon where we did kind of Bitcoin AI themed.
And there was some cool projects being built, especially with vibe coding coming out, making it much easier to prototype.
Well, as a security professional, vibe coding is very scary to me.
Yes.
you can do it in like fun ways but I would say yes it's still like prototype level probably
so you write a lot I need to know do you have a secret with writer's block do you ever have
do you ever face it what are your tips and tricks yeah well I don't use AI to write I'd probably be
a lot faster and more productive. For me, though, it's just I pick away at things. So while some
people may think that I write a lot, I generally only publish one long form post per month.
But the way that I do that is that at any given time, I probably have several dozen drafts. And
I don't just sit down and write one long-term thing. Many of these have been in draft mode for
half a year or even several years. And it's really just whenever something strikes my mind or piques
my interest, then I make sure I go write it down. I actually find like as a sort of life pro tip,
like whenever you have an interesting idea especially for me a lot of my interesting
ideas happen like right as i'm about to go to sleep uh but one of the most important things
that you can do is write down that idea as soon as you think about it because otherwise your mind
is eventually going to drift on to other things you may forget about it you may come back around
to it in days weeks months or whatever but you know having a list of these ideas and and for me
a lot of that is just my drafts, my long form blog post drafts that I can keep coming back to,
keep iterating upon. And then eventually, if I get some idea fleshed out to the point where I
think it's like ready for public presentation, then I just put it out there. Definitely takes
discipline to even post one post a month. So I respect that. In terms of new ideas that you say
that you kind of like piqued your interest, have there been any books or articles that you have
read recently that have maybe blew your mind that you want to share?
Well, if we're talking about the AI stuff, there was this website post that came out recently. I
think it was called like 2027 or something. It was just like a year. And it basically detailed
how we could get into a sort of runaway AI acceleration. And this made me think more about
how while as a paranoid security guy,
I do think about a lot of edge cases.
I'm like a prepper in many different ways.
I'm not so much worried about Terminator, Skynet level,
AGI destroying all of humanity.
While that's always a possibility,
what I'm actually more worried about
at a very, very high level
is the fact that humans are fairly adaptable creatures,
but we can only adapt so quickly to things.
And I think there's a lot of arguments you can make
where technology is accelerating at pace
that has actually become very difficult for us to adapt
to various societal changes that happen
as a result of the impact of technology.
And so what I really worry about is that AI
and then AI essentially training itself
and becoming faster and faster
and more effective at accelerating
whatever it can do,
that that will just have trickle effects to all of the rest of technology innovation society and that we eventually we just might get to the point where we create some tool
or some set of things that are so powerful
that we are not able to create
the defensive countermeasures to them fast enough
and that that can ultimately be
massively destructive to humanity.
Definitely a wild world we're living
and things are evolving quickly.
Speaking of the future, what does a world on the Bitcoin standard look like to you?
Well, I would hope that it would be one where most people have sovereign Bitcoin in the sense that they're not simply trusting third parties.
And that is one of the many long-term things that I'm very worried about because of the trends, the directions that we're going in right now are the opposite of that. As many are saying, it's a paper Bitcoin summer that's happening right now.
We're essentially getting trad fi into Bitcoin and recreating much of the centralized traditional banking system, which is very convenient for people. But of course, they're giving up a lot of sovereignty to do so.
but um you know the the future where people are actually using bitcoin on a daily basis for
commerce and whatever that is going to require us to get to the unit of account level we're still a
very very very long way away from that and uh unfortunately i think that there's going to have
to be a lot more turmoil in the the fiat currency world for that to happen but i think the goal would
be that it's not that Bitcoin has to be like the only currency in existence, but rather
it just needs to be recognized and used at the same scale as other major international
currencies.
Speaking of unit of account, there's a lot of talk of sats versus Bitcoin.
Do you have any thoughts if we should reframe the way we talk about the fractions of Bitcoin?
I'm of two minds.
unit bias is a real psychological issue. And there certainly are plenty of people who end up buying
other altcoins because they're cheaper and they think they might go up more. But I've also said
for a long time that if you don't understand that you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin, you shouldn't
be buying any Bitcoin in the first place because you're not ready for the responsibility that comes
with being a Bitcoin owner. So I think part of it is, do we want to onboard people faster or do we
want to be patient and allow them to educate themselves more? But to get to that future world
where Bitcoin is used for commerce on a daily basis, then I think obviously sats will be the
standard because nobody's going to be spending entire Bitcoins unless they're buying a house or
something are you worried if sats is a standard and people are using it as you know daily currency
that we won't even hear the word bitcoin much anymore if everything is denominated in sats
uh i doubt it i mean we've got bitcoin branding on every app and every wallet and software and
hardware and stuff out there um and you know one of the interesting things coming to san francisco
is just seeing the word bitcoin a lot more often as you're going around than you do really anywhere
else in the country. Yes, we're seeing the word more. Yeah, something on the Spiral team that we
think a lot about is how we can promote Bitcoin as money kind of beyond just digital gold. How do
you think that we can get people to use Bitcoin as money more? This is another thing where I think
we should avoid trying to try too hard. I think the incentives are already there. I harken back to
my early days when I was trying to convince my peers and colleagues that,
you know,
you should get some of this Bitcoin thing because like inflation is a for sure
thing.
It's going to happen.
And they scoffed at me,
you know,
and this is,
you know,
in the early 2010s,
they're like,
inflation's not a big deal.
Well,
of course here over the past couple of years,
people in the,
in the United States,
people are finally recognizing,
you know,
actually inflation is a real threat.
So from that perspective,
I think patience is all you really need because all the central banks have pretty much doomed themselves.
Like this is their policy is to inflate the currency.
So all you have to do is wait long enough for people to recognize it.
And I think also that over a long enough period of time, folks are going to look around and they're going to say, wait, these people who adopted Bitcoin seem to be doing a lot better than those of us who didn't.
Maybe they were on to something.
I agree. Well, hopefully people start using Bitcoin more as money and the UX and applications definitely have to get better to encourage more of that.
Do you have any spicy Bitcoin takes?
Oh yes Well I published my first Bitcoin improvement proposal this week which is controversial unto itself Basically the idea being that due to the issues around incentives and the game theory of a post world that we should actually seek to incentivize people to migrate their coins into quantum secure setups by telling them like a concrete deadline of like if you don
do it by then you won't be able to spend your coins at least by the regular pass hopefully
at this summit or over the coming months and years we will come up with alternate quantum
safe recovery schemes. But my spicy take there being that we should actually just completely cut
off the ability for quantum vulnerable spending of Bitcoin to happen. And I did have another
controversial proposal. I haven't written it up as a formal Bitcoin improvement proposal,
but something that I've been toying with for the past year or so, which is essentially a dynamic
block size idea. And this, once again, is a very long-term thing. I think that we should
take advantage of the deflationary aspects of hardware and computing to be able to offer more
block space to the world over the long term. Now, obviously, anyone who knows about the scaling
debates knows this is a very controversial thing. And I have a number of arguments that
every argument about block size has always been flawed and that we need to approach it for more
of an economic perspective. And so I did have this rough concept I sketched out a few months
ago of Goldie blocks, which is essentially a dynamic block size that it doesn't only go up
in size, it also decreases the block size. And it does so by looking at the economic conditions and
the demand of block space, essentially recognizing that this is a market. And right now the market is
constrained with a very set flat supply, but the demand goes up and down. So much like how
the difficulty adjustment for Bitcoin goes up and down to match the demand and supply for hash rate,
I think we should do something similar with the actual amount of block space that's available.
I'll keep an eye out. I didn't realize that was your first Bitcoin improvement protocol.
It's not written up as a BIP yet. I'm still tinkering with it.
few more questions on an optimistic note what gives you the most hope for bitcoin's future
that's happening today uh well what gives me the most hope is the fact that governments and
central banks continue shooting themselves in the foot like i said from a long-term perspective
my uh long-term pessimism and negativity about those institutions is what gives me hope that
people will see that money is a concept that should not be owned or controlled by any person
or group of people and that i think money as an open source project is the fairest most
appropriate way to go about creating this really shared agreement amongst humanity of how to decide
who has what value.
What advice would you give to people
that are either new to the Bitcoin space
or thinking about jumping in?
Well, I always say invest in education
before you invest too much financially.
These things kind of go, I think,
in lockstep with each other.
is personally, when I first got into it,
I was learning a little, I was buying a little,
and I would learn more and they'd be like,
oh, I need to have more and bought more and learn even more.
So one thing I say very often,
whenever someone asks, should I buy Bitcoin?
I say, if you have to ask that question,
the answer is no,
because you're simply not far enough down the rabbit hole.
So a similar thing with if you want to get in
and contribute to the ecosystem.
I have a ton of resources out there
and they're spread out all over the internet.
But if you go to bitcoin.page,
which goes to my lop.net site,
just check out the developer
and technical resources there.
And there's a ton of reading material,
tons of online classes,
and even a number of offline meat space classes
that you can go to learn all about the industry.
and hopefully get yourself a gig.
Your resources were very helpful to me
when I was first learning about Bitcoin.
So I appreciate all the time that you've put into that.
Last question.
If you could leave our listeners
with a single thought about Bitcoin,
what would it be?
The most important thing that you can do
to contribute to Bitcoin
is continue discussing it with other Bitcoiners.
That's how we make forward progress. And the most dangerous thing to Bitcoin over the long term is apathy and people not talking to each other and discussing how we can continue to improve.
I love that. And that's exactly what we're about to do in like 15 minutes.
Well, if our listeners don't know where they can find you, where should they go to learn more about you, follow along with what you're doing?
everything about me every resource that i have ever created all of my uh contact information
and stuff is on lop.net perfect easy well thank you so much for hopping on the show i hope you
enjoy the rest of your time at presidio bitcoin and have fruitful conversations at the quantum
bitcoin summit thanks for having me of course thank you