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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week Jarrad Hope spoke to Jameson Lopp to discuss his decade-long effort to promote self-custody in Bitcoin by lowering technical barriers for users, emphasizing the fight against human nature's preference for convenience over security. Lopp traces his journey into Bitcoin and Cypherpunk ideology, highlighting the appeal of cryptography in creating open and fair systems resistant to manipulation. Both Lopp and Hope explore various technological solutions and the challenges inherent in privacy and decentralization, such as the pitfalls of centralization in legacy protocols and the need for vigilant, iterative improvements in Bitcoin. Finally, Lopp underscores the importance of evolving Bitcoin's base protocol to foster more innovation at the second layer, while maintaining the decentralized ethos of the network.

<p>Logos Podcast is a bi-weekly interview show about building sovereign communities: the people, philosophies, challenges, and solutions. We invite the world's foremost experts and radical thinkers to discuss how to emancipate from repressive systems through new social, political, and economic institutions.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>

Logos Podcast is a bi-weekly interview show about building sovereign communities: the people, philosophies, challenges, and solutions. We invite the world's foremost experts and radical thinkers to discuss how to emancipate from repressive systems through new social, political, and economic institutions.

Jarrad Hope

Logos Podcast

<p>This week Jarrad Hope spoke to <a href="https://www.lopp.net/">Jameson Lopp</a> to discuss his decade-long effort to promote self-custody in Bitcoin by lowering technical barriers for users, emphasizing the fight against human nature's preference for convenience over security.&nbsp;Lopp traces his journey into Bitcoin and Cypherpunk ideology, highlighting the appeal of cryptography in creating open and fair systems resistant to manipulation.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Both Lopp and Hope explore various technological solutions and the challenges inherent in privacy and decentralization, such as the pitfalls of centralization in legacy protocols and the need for vigilant, iterative improvements in Bitcoin.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Finally, Lopp underscores the importance of evolving Bitcoin's base protocol to foster more innovation at the second layer, while maintaining the decentralized ethos of the network.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>