Talking Bitcoin and Privacy with Jameson Lopp

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jameson Lopp, cypherpunk and CTO of Casa.

When I think ‘cypherpunk’, you’re the archetype I picture. What got you interested in the movement?

I spent the first several years of my career working in online advertising, so I became very aware of how terrible privacy was for Internet users. Once I got into Bitcoin and started researching its origins, I realized that it didn’t appear out of thin air — it was the result of decades of effort. After being SWATted in 2017 I started taking real-world privacy even more seriously and went to extreme measures to improve my operational security.

Why is Bitcoin important?

For a multitude of reasons, but the fundamental reason that sparked my interest is that money is a concept that belongs to no one — it belongs to humanity at large. As such, it makes sense to me that the nature of money should be an open project rather than something that is controlled opaquely by a small group of people.

Isn’t Bitcoin dying because of the low price/mining death spiral/better altcoins out there?

Far from it! While casual observers may only see the price or a few other high level metrics, when you take a comprehensive multifaceted look at the system, you’ll see that it’s growing.

I have trouble conveying to my mother that uploading photos to Facebook and owning an Amazon Echo is a privacy disaster. What line of reasoning would you use to convince her?

People tend to dismiss the need for privacy because they don’t envision what could go wrong. There’s a saying that information wants to be free — it’s very difficult to keep information from spreading with the current state of communications technology. Thus the only way to operate safely is to assume that any information you post to the Internet may very well “become free” and be available to anyone, even to people with bad intentions such as scammers or stalkers. The more information that an attacker can gather about you the more ammunition they have to use against you in a variety of ways, such as for social engineering their way into your valuable accounts.

I also like to use the Justine Sacco case as an example of unforseen consequences. In the Information Age, it doesn’t take much for you to attract the attention of millions of people. This rings true for me, as I went from having a few thousand to over a hundred thousand Twitter followers in about a year — it’s an impossible task to never anger any of them, and some of them have the means to do a lot of nasty things.

By extension, what are your top 5 OPSEC tips for people who have no awareness when it comes to online privacy/privacy in general?

1. Install ad blocker browser extensions and/or set up a Pi-hole
2. Use cash / prepaid cards / disposable virtual debit cards for purchases
3. Don’t carry around a surveillance device (phone) that is registered in your name
4. Use end-to-end encrypted chat apps such as Signal, Whatsapp
5. Freeze your credit reports

Congratulations on your recent appointment as CTO of Casa! Could you tell us a bit about the multisig offering and the company’s vision for the future?

Thanks! Personal key storage is a tough problem I’ve faced myself and I hope that we can bring a user friendly solution to the masses. Our vault product is a 3 of 5 multisig where the user holds 4 of the 5 keys on different hardware devices while Casa holds 1 for disaster recovery and inheritance purposes. It’s a premium tier service aimed at high net worth individuals, though we intend to expand our offerings in the future.

Our mission at Casa is to help people empower themselves as sovereign individuals. Along this vein we also released our plug and play Bitcoin and Lightning node, to tackle yet another challenge that keeps many nontechnical people from fully realizing the potential that Bitcoin offers. Over the long term we intend to offer more and more user friendly services that reduce the time and skills required to operate in permissionless crypto systems.

What’s the best multisig setup for the average Bitcoiner?

Multisig in and of itself is not a silver bullet — also, everyone’s needs are different. I think Electrum has some pretty good multisig support, though it’s not quite as easy to set up as a Casa vault.

In your view, what are the greatest threats to Bitcoin’s longevity?

Bitcoin can only die if we all agree to let it die — apathy is the greatest threat. Given how energetic Bitcoiners are, even during low hype cycles / bear markets, I don’t forsee it dying any time soon.

What should we be focusing on for adoption?

There was a time when I thought that Bitcoin just needed to be evangelized so that people knew it was a superior option. These days I think building more user friendly and secure software is the best path to adoption. It needs to be dead simple to use — the Internet didn’t get mass adoption by having nerds evangelize how cool the technology was, it got adoption because of the software that opened up new use cases and convenience that caught people’s attention.

I’m not a huge fan of price predictions, so where do you predict the protocol (or additional layers) to be by 2020?

Lightning still has a long way to go on the usability and safety sides, so I’m mostly hoping that it can be made robust enough that we start seeing some larger liquidity providers such as exchanges adding support for it. Once we start getting some real volume flowing around the network, we’ll get to stress more edge cases, watch it break, and then rebuild it to be even stronger than before. This is how we leverage the antifragile nature of networks and scale via failure.

I firmly believe the following question to be the staple of any good interview: would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?

One horse-sized duck, for sure — I’d only need one or two shots from my hunting rifle to bring it down, whereas 100 duck sized horses would require so much reloading that I’d probably be overwhelmed before I took them all out.

Cover photo from Jameson.