EPISODE 5

(Preview)

Jameson Lopp: Now you understand that once this money leaves your account we can’t get it back.

Calvin Wayman: alright.

Jameson Lopp: And it was like I realize the risk that I’m taking and I think this is a good gamble and long term ended up.

Calvin Wayman: How do you think that, I’m curious..

(Intro Music Plays)

Calvin Wayman: What is up crew. Happy Wednesday. And we’re still here talking about bitcoin. But before we jump in if you haven’t seen yet from just this last Saturday we did our first give away so every single episode we’ve been giving something away. So if you want to have your chance to win the prize for this episode then head over to iTunes or wherever you can review this gave your review. That’s going to get you a raffle ticket. And that’s going to put you in the drawing to win the prize. So you have a chance every single episode by doing that. Also if you want to join the curious community then you can go to calvinwayman.com/podcastgroup and you will be. You can request to join the facebook group so that you can join the conversation around all of these episodes especially the last few that we’ve been doing a lot of conversation to be had around Bitcoin. So if you want to join the conversation and not just listen on your way to work on the way back or at the gym but actually want to join the conversation with other listeners on the podcast again go to calvinwayman.com/podcastgroup. Anyway today we have another bitcoin curious expert a guy named Jameson Lopp . How are you doing Jameson Lopp?

Jameson Lopp: Do and well that’s amazing. Exciting time in the cryptos space as usual.

Calvin Wayman: It is. I have to say one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on. Not that said not just the fact that I saw you connected with Joel Comm who we actually had last episode but that beard dude is freakin sick like I’ve been on mine for about a year. Like here’s me. How long have you had?

Jameson Lopp: That’s coming up on I guess a little over two years maybe two and a half years.

Calvin Wayman:That’s all man it’s beastie. Have you always had like that. Like that color strand in there. Has that always been like a part of it?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah I mean I’ve had like a really short beard for many years and then I just finally started letting it grow out and yeah I guess the little wisp really started appearing once I started growing it longer.

Calvin Wayman:That’s interesting. The weird quirk with mine is my hair is black everything is dark but this gets a lot of red. It’s the only part of my body so my where does my beard does funny things are. So again thanks for coming to chat myself and probably other people that are listening right now. We’re kind of bitcoin virgins. Now of course we’re hearing it on the headlines crypto currencies is a little bit of a craze right now. And I understand you’ve been in it for a little while. Like before the masses came on board and stuff. So when did you like what’s your story like when did you first get into bitcoin. How’d you hear about it? And what made you curious to look into it.

Jameson Lopp: Yeah it’s pretty interesting I mean bitcoin is 9 years old and I guess at this point I’ve been involved in it for more than half its lifetime. So I got into it the way it was like late 2012. I started diving headfirst into it. I don’t even remember what first got me interested that it was probably a Slash dot article or something like that and I’m sure that I had heard about it several times before and dismissed it. I think most people do you know that system is just going to get hacked it’s going to fall apart.

Calvin Wayman: Right.

Jameson Lopp: And especially in the early days when it was only like four years old then it was a lot more experimental a lot more volatile and a lot more difficult to actually get your hands on anything. So you know I wanted to get my first bitcoins and at the time I looked around and my best option was actually to do a wire transfer to some bank in Japan that I had never heard of. So of course I was sending it to Mt. Gox.

Calvin Wayman: aha

Jameson Lopp: and the and that was the first time it ever done a wire transfer had to go to the bank like 45 minutes there filling out forms and the bankers are telling me now you understand that once this money leaves your account we can’t get it back.

Calvin Wayman: alright.

Jameson Lopp: And it was like I realize the risk that I’m taking and I think this is a good gamble and long term ended up.

Calvin Wayman: How did you think that? I’m curious. how did you like back then? It’s like it’s just pennies or dollars right?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

Calvin Wayman: in terms of what it’s . What made you even think that it was a gamble where there already like nerd sessions where people are getting together and like talking about how this is like going to be the future of currency like was that already happening.

Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

Calvin Wayman: Four years ago.

Jameson Lopp: So back then the vast majority of conversation was happening on bitcoin talk.

Calvin Wayman:Was that like a website or a chat room?

Jameson Lopp: That was the original Bitcoin Forum I believe Satoshi actually.

Calvin Wayman: Got it.

Jameson Lopp: Created it himself and then he handed it over to famous. These days I don’t really spend any time on there because the vast majority of like scams and trolls.

Calvin Wayman: Sure, you know?

Jameson Lopp: It’s just a lot of noise. But back then that’s where the vast majority of the even the developers were.

Calvin Wayman: It’s where the serious people land it was where the community forget.

Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

Calvin Wayman: Is about without gas. So you go through through that conversation had you gone to any live events around it yet. Just curious or was it all just online.

Jameson Lopp: No but I was lucky because I started asking around the office about it and it turned out that one of the other guys who you know worked just a few feet away from me at the time was already into bitcoin and had been like writing.

Calvin Wayman: Really.

Jameson Lopp: A trading bought software. And so he was able to answer the vast majority of my questions early on and then I just kept going headfirst and first and surpassed him you know going deeper and deeper into it.

Calvin Wayman: Got it. When you were getting into it was it more of a something because this is going to be the future I’m going to use it as a currency exchange or did you see it as “oh my gosh this could be like an investment opportunity that if I could buy and hold that it’s going to go” like What was it when you were hearing about it?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah I did not originally buy as an investment I bought it because I wanted to have some to actually use and play around with. I just saw it as an experiment you know an open source collaborative project back then. I mean there had been one or two bubbles you know from like a dollar to 30 dollars.

Calvin Wayman: like it popped top?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

Calvin Wayman:popped top here and there?

Jameson Lopp: So it was already really volatile. And you know I got into it with the expectation that it could go to zero so I didn’t put my life savings into it or anything. And then over the years as I understood it better and I saw the ecosystem growing I started to see it more as an investment. And so it was several years later in fact right after Mt.Gox finally crashed and imploded for the last time. That was when I was like all right there’s blood in the streets. Everybody thinks bitcoin is dead. That’s when I went all in.

Calvin Wayman: And so just to back up there I am such. This is how much of it and you said mountain gox? Or something?

Jamison: yes.

Calvin Wayman: When was that end? And what is that like? I’m not even privy to what that is?

Jameson Lopp: So Mt.Gox was the biggest Bitcoin exchange in like 2011 to 2014 era.

Calvin Wayman: Got it. It was the platform that used to go by in trade?

Jameson Lopp: yeah. It was the most popular. There were a few others. And of course there had already been some that had come and gone and gotten hacked and crashed and whatever. But it was at the time the most reputable it had been around the longest. It had suffered a few hacks but it always come back from them. And so then you know finally during that run up to like a thousand dollars or so that’s when things started getting really wonky and they started like disabling withdrawals and people started panicking and eventually they shut down and admitted that they were operating a fractional reserve and they had lost almost everybody’s money.

Calvin Wayman: I see. So they actually were kind of being a little bit fraudulent kind of pyramid scheme.

 

Jameson Lopp: The speculation these days is that they had been operating as a fractional reserve for probably the vast majority of their existence and it wasn’t until the price really started running away they were no longer able to facilitate the withdrawals that people were requesting.

Calvin Wayman: What’s kind of interesting about that? Isn’t that what most banks do anyway?  

Jamison: Yes.

Calvin Wayman: Just like our regular pay link system? Fractured reserve system like if you have end and out they can like borrow out like way more than they actually have?

Jameson Lopp:Yeah. And so you know there after the 2008 economic crisis a lot of those regulations around the like solvency requirements were made more strict but I’m pretty sure that like the general assets on hand of most banks is only around by 10 or 20 percent of the actual deposits. I’ve gotten a little bit more insight into this over the years because I’m actually on the advisory board for my local credit union and they have even stricter requirements that they set on themselves for being able to do those stress tests. But you know a lot of the other banks.

Calvin Wayman: Just so they don’t put themselves in a position to like it that happened again like they’re not going to go. They’re not going to be put themselves in. Like lose everything bankrupt type of situation.

Jameson Lopp:Yeah that’s when those those bank runs happen and when they run out of liquidity and investors panic and then it just sort of turns into this runaway of of demand for people’s money and then they’re no longer able to serve it.

Calvin Wayman:Hence 2008. Right?

Jameson Lopp:Yeah, it’s what everybody is worried about bubbles because bubbles pop and they turn into these corrections where by the time it’s over a lot of people have lost a lot of money.

Calvin Wayman:Do you fear that what’s happening now. From what I understand is bitcoin just barely when it went up to like 20,000 now. So you got in a time it was like just dollars right?

Jameson Lopp: Right.

Calvin Wayman: That less than a dollar. So and then it’s gone all the way up to 20,000. Right now it’s hit like 9 or something it’s like now at 11 or 12. Is that right? Like what’s your take on that volatility still happening and if it doesn’t like is it fearful is it scarier how do you take it?

Jameson Lopp: Yes, well you know that is a different type of bubble though. You know those are speculative bubbles which I think are..

Calvin Wayman: Because of everybody coming on top of it?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah. It’s not the same type of systemic risk that we see in these systems where a lot of money is being moved around and money is being created out of thin air. And then when you no longer have.

Calvin Wayman: like the Federal Reserve?

Jameson Lopp: yeah. And so that’s where you get in the issue where people believe there is more money in existence than they can actually call in.

Calvin Wayman: Right.

Jameson Lopp: So there are there are still issues especially around the fact that there are a lot of large custodians that are holding bitcoins. Thankfully over the years it seems like the large hacking attempts have been diminishing in their severity. So you know we are becoming better and better at securing crypto assets and that’s what I have been doing for the past three years is working at bingo and basically helping enterprises secure their crypto.

Calvin Wayman: Yeah, what is that? So talk to me more about that because I noticed you had that. Like what’s BitGo.? and what’s it for? what to do?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah so. Generally the average person who is in the crypto ecosystem has not heard of it go. And that’s because we’re not a consumer facing company. What we really.

Calvin Wayman: really?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah, were B2B company and we are really servicing enterprises that have to operate hot wallets meaning they have to be.

Calvin Wayman: money now?

Jameson Lopp: they have to be receiving and sending crypto assets. You know in an automated fashion. So that’s a very risky business to be in because you know if anybody gets those private keys they can take the money and there is no authority that can get the money back to you.

Calvin Wayman: Ok. so you’re doing that. Second to that. What is Satoshi? Like that play on. That’s the play on what’s his name again? That group of people?

Jameson Lopp: yes, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Calvin Wayman: Satoshi Nakamoto and what’s your take on that by the way is that like a single person like you along,like you buy into that? Since you’ve been at that longer or what? Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Jameson Lopp: So Satoshi Nakamoto. You can get into a lot of different speculation and conspiracy theories. I think that you know it is a person or a small group of people who were cypherpunks like they were they were on the cypherpunk mailing list and they were dealing with cryptography and privacy issues for a number of years and somehow they managed to figure out a way that they could put all of these existing technologies together in a way that created the awesome game theory that resulted in Bitcoin which is a fairly sustainable system so they didn’t really create anything new. They just managed to put these different pieces of the puzzle together in a way that created a new system.

Calvin Wayman: Has anybody come around or come out and claimed Tipped him or that group?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah. Well of course we have Craig Wright who is the most notorious Satoshi Nakamoto claimant and there is a whole lot of drama and history around that and his attempts to prove to be Satoshi. But the short version is like anyone who wants to prove that there’s Satoshi they all have to do is either sign a message or move some of the bitcoins from those early blocks that were known to have been mined by him. And that would be you know cryptographic mathematical proof that you just saw.  

Calvin Wayman: Yeah, cause they would have ownership of it. And you see that movie whoever movie that had access to it and whoever had access to is probably Satoshi Nakamoto.

Jameson Lopp: Yeah.

Calvin Wayman: So what’s Satoshi the play on this Satoshi Nakamoto?

Jameson Lopp: yes. Satoshi is my fork of Bitcoin Core which is often known as the reference client. It is the bitcoin protocol implementation that has the most developer activity around it. Basically back in 2014 I wanted to understand the code better. I wanted to understand the internal operations of fully validating nodes better and basically what I did is I took some of my existing knowledge in this sort of depth of space and went in and added a bunch of instrumentation to the bitcoin core code and then put some nice eye candy dashboards on top of it and essentially what you’ve got now is a bunch of metrics aggregation and analytics like what is going on on the bitcoin network and what is going on inside of this node that I’m running.

Calvin Wayman: So is that something that’s like a plug in that anybody can have? Or what is that?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah it’s open source fork. Basically it would require a fair amount of knowledge for somebody to get in and run on their own and at least have to have the ability to compile C++ and then run the binary areas and I’ve got instructions on there. But it’s a very technical thing that you’d want to be like really actually really into that.

Calvin Wayman: One thing I was curious about is like throughout all of this. So Bitcoin was kind of the pioneer of crypto currency right? So since then there have been a number of crypto currencies that have come on the frontier. When I was talking to Joel Comm I think he said there’s like 4,400 different crypto currencies at least..

Jameson Lopp: That we know all.

Calvin Wayman: that we know all right. And so can you like kind of explain to me like like are you still like a bit.Are you more of a fan of bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general or block chain in general we haven’t even talked about the technology of blocking like like where do you land? Is it are you more of like crypto currency is the purest because it’s the first that you like other crypto currencies in general and you have like a theory Emery’s or RIPL or whatever some of these other names are like. What’s your take there?

Jameson Lopp: Yes, so in general I’m still the biggest fan of bitcoin for a number of reasons. It gets pretty complicated because you’ve got a couple difference I guess. Generally broad types of crypto assets. So you’ve got Bitcoin which is of course the first and then you’ve got a million different forks of bitcoin many of which are completely worthless.

Calvin Wayman: Worthless because there’s no consensus around it because other people don’t want to use it. What’s what makes it useful are?

Jameson Lopp: Yes. Actually the value of any of these things is entirely subjective and based upon network effect. So unlike the more total of people who agree that it has value the more value it has.

Calvin Wayman: Hence the reason it even works right because Joel was telling me how like there’s this process of when you send something to somebody like that. That’s what the mining is or whatever like there needs to be at least six computers or systems that validate that transaction right? So it that kind of saying what you’re saying where the network effect like the validation of people like ringing that’s what gives it the value?

Jameson Lopp: On the markets. Yeah Then of course there’s technical aspects on this sort of machine consensus side. But ative so suffice to say because it’s open source code anybody can copy paste modify it. Then you have all of these spin offs that there’s really nothing special about them as they tweak like one or two little parameters that nobody really cares about. And so as a result there’s not a lot of traction and a lot of adoption because then when you’re really talking about the value of these things from a network standpoint it’s not just like the number of people that agree and want to use it but you have to get exchanges to add support for businesses and merchants to support form. So this is a multi faceted type of network effect that is required to give value to these things.

Calvin Wayman: Is there one besides bitcoin that you have a favorite of a crypto currency because of the certain features that it has. Like you was telling me like there’s some where you can like attached like contracts to?

Jameson Lopp: Right.

Calvin Wayman: Or something so if somebody paid in some sort of crypto currency and you’re an artist and you had the contract set up that not only the singer gets paid but the drum player gets paid the manager gets paid like kind of instantly split apart. Without that kind of instantly that’s just where it goes. Like do you have something like that because of some special feature you like it like the crypto currency?

Jameson Lopp: Yes. I mainly consider myself like a cypherpunk in terms of my ideology some very pro privacy. So I am invested in a few of the privacy coin’s like Manero and Gcash I think that you know those have some additional utility and also they have good developers behind them. So you know when I’m trying to decide what I want to invest in I’m usually looking at it as like this is a project I want to support. Whereas you know a lot of people are just trading and they’re like This is a project that I think a lot of other people are going to buy and so it’s going to go up and then I’m going to sell it.

Calvin Wayman: Right.

Jameson Lopp: Will do that trading. I’m more of a long term value like fundamentals investor. But you were asking about smart contracts and stuff so then you started talking about stuff like theory and Dano and I think NIM. And I think that that type of functionality is definitely has a lot of utility and you can see that just like from the price of ether over the past year. But the main reason that I’m not as bullish on that is because I’m not a big fan of the way that they’ve implemented it. I think that they’re going to have a lot more scaling challenges in the long run. And I think that we’re going to see similar type of functionality that gets tied to bitcoin but because Bitcoin protocol developers have a very different perspective on how to add functionality. They tend to be a lot more conservative about like resource usage that instead we’re going to see these type of smart contract computations happen off the chain like outside of the consensus system and then instead you’re just going to see small amounts of data get embedded into the chain itself. But that’s more like long term type of operation.

Calvin Wayman: When did the wave of new crypto start coming? You’ve been in there like about four years she said, Right? So, and Bitcoin was a crypto currency as it were a pretty fair consensus that people mostly people agree that Bitcoin was the first crypto currency?

Jameson Lopp: Definitely yeah.

Calvin Wayman: Yeah, okay. So since then again around 4900 that we know of when did that wave come on?

Jameson Lopp: There had been a wave.

Calvin Wayman: A wave that rather was?

Jameson Lopp: I would say the first wave was around 2013 or so like there was this big alt coin.

Calvin Wayman: that’s fairly late.

Jameson Lopp: but that was that was this alt coin boom where it is just a lot of people forking the bitcoin code and making very trivial changes. And so the vast majority of those coins that popped up around that time. Nobody even talks about them anymore. If you exist or operate. And then I would say like the next big point was really with Ethereum when it came out. And I think that it came out in 2015-2016 and after it had been around for a year or two and people started developing apps and then especially when the C20 token became a standard. That’s when we see this other big wave of sort of tokenized utility tokens you know on top of a theory and that has been that was a huge boom in 2017. We do have you know a couple of other completely from scratch coins that have emerged at this point that are in the top 10 in market cap.

Calvin Wayman: Are you concerned by that competition? Because in America we pretty much have had one. I mean of course you can buy different things but it’s mostly for holdings like you could buy gold silver and like these assets but we pretty much have USD as the currency of exchange. That means of exchange. And now there’s all of these different currencies that again are multifaceted so you could use it for an investment opportunity or you could do use it as a means of exchange what you like. How do you take like that that there are becoming so many like is there. Is that a danger in the competition is it better do you think once going arises Is Bitcoin already there. Like what. Yeah,Just curious how you feel about it.

Jameson Lopp: More competition is great and even competition within like the own coining of of you know forking like bitcoin for example.

Calvin Wayman: Forking bitcoin.Right?

Jameson Lopp: And so you know in late 2017 we had this other boom which was the bitcoin coin airdrop where you’re forking it at a specific time and basically giving money to everybody who owns bitcoin at that point in time. There’s a new sort of like a distribution mechanism to try to start a new network. And the same type of thing happened where like bitcoin cash Bitcoin Gold were the first couple there and so they got a fair amount of traction. And then there have been I think a dozen after that and then you know nobody cares. There’s only so you know with a long tail distribution because there’s only so much interest and resources that you can capture from the network by just creating more of these things.

Calvin Wayman: OK. I think I take that view too that over the last I mean that’s the nature of it right is that it’s giving control back to I guess the masses and not like one central organization like the Federal Reserve. So competition and like open sources is probably better for for at least the everyone at the end of the day.

Jameson Lopp:Yeah, I mean..

Calvin Wayman: What’s your?

Jameson Lopp: the way that I see it is that this isn’t taking away from banks and governments and how they decide how their own money operates. This is allowing anybody with some technical skills to create their own money and start doing it and offer it to the world. And then the markets can decide like what are the best properties of money. And that’s kind of the phase that we’re in right now is everybody.

Calvin Wayman: Interesting.

Jameson Lopp: And then people are speculating on the experiments.

Calvin Wayman: So you say that everybody is kind of in a sense becoming their own federal reserve because the Federal Reserve would go bust if nobody everybody just said yeah this is worthless. Same with crypto but like that’s kind of an interesting thing like we’re given the freedom that we could create it. And of course other people need consensus and for it to be valuable and everything. But would you say that that it’s kind of like we all have our own. Like you said our ability to print money. Are we becoming our own Federal Reserve?

Jameson Lopp: Well yes so because money is basically a shared. You could say it’s a shared delusion of value. It’s just it is faith in a sense you are agreeing with each other and you are having faith that people will continue to agree that there is value in the system. And the main difference is that now instead of us having to have faith and a central bank or government that is telling us we have to believe in the value of this particular system. Instead anyone can choose their own. This is crypto anarchy. It is it is not a system without rules it is a system without rulers. And you get to choose the path that you find most palatable.

Calvin Wayman: So taking kind of a step back now like, what’s the big picture for this for you for crypto currency in this whole world? Like how I imagine this? It’s almost like it’s 1993 or whatever and we’re talking about this thing called the Internet and we’re trying to explain to other people that know like it’s like web a network and you can send information back and forth and we’re going to be able to send zeros and ones and bits and bytes and one day we’ll be able to like communicate on the other side of the world instantaneously and we’ll be able to send money from our banks through ones and sterols like it would have been a very confusing thing but now we take it for granted because it’s like right here in the palm of our hands with our phone and everything and it’s just encompasses our entire life like big picture like that. Do you feel like crypto currency or the whole block chain like world is something that is about to make a huge cultural shift that we can’t go back on like what’s with the big picture view of this?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah. And so I often make remarks where I am comparing this current innovation to the Internet itself where the Internet basically fundamentally changed how humans can communicate and it just that that very small but fundamental thing then allowed many many different innovations to be piled on top of it as a new platform.

Calvin Wayman: Amazon social platforms all that stuff.

Jameson Lopp: And so now what we’re doing is we’re creating a new type of network for economic interaction. And and you could take a very naive view and just say oh it’s just people sending money back and forth. There’s so much more to it because we’re automating it. We’re getting rid of a lot of the trust we can actually create entirely new methods of economic interaction that were never feasible before. So good example of course is micro payments and we’re really talking about Penny payments if not stop any payments you can start to talk about really amazing things of like Internet of Things meets crypto economics where we start having these little devices on the Internet start economically interacting with each other. That’s where you know the sort of automation of the future and interconnection of everything starts to provide a lot of interesting new possibilities.

Calvin Wayman: What’s just kind of wrapping up here. One thing we haven’t talked about yet is block chain. What is block chain and how does it interact with all of this?

Jameson Lopp: Block chain is a very loaded term that gets used incorrectly. The vast majority of the time. So of course I’m a tech guy block chain is just a data format. It’s it’s really a lot of the other things around block chains that make them interesting.

Calvin Wayman: Is there something you could compare it to that is like more analagous or like that you could say it’s like the Internet or it’s like this other platform that we can kind of that we can relate to?

Jameson Lopp:Yes, so you know the best or easiest way to think of it is it’s like it’s a right only log like it’s a new type of data store and it can add stuff to it but you can’t delete.

Calvin Wayman: You can’t delete. It’s like the if the ledger where the transactions go. Right?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah. But of course then you have to start talking about what are all of the other facets of the system that is using this block chain as a database. Because really if you have is a block chain and you don’t have any consensus mechanisms or anything else around it then it’s still possible for someone to go in and rewrite it. It’s just you get this tamper evidence because you’ll see that someone has changed the data and it breaks this cryptographic link between users of the data. It’s bitcoin adds additional guarantees on top of that by using proof of work as a consensus mechanism which makes it insanely computationally and financially challenging to go back and rewrite the data. It becomes very expensive from the Unlike electricity standpoint.

Calvin Wayman: It’s Satoshi Nakamoto create the block mechanism to or just the cryptocurrency coin?

Jameson Lopp: Yes, a block chain I believe as a data format had been created at least five or ten years before that and ..

Calvin Wayman: got it.

Jameson Lopp: So, it is pretty.

Calvin Wayman: what was it used for before?

Jameson Lopp: I’m not aware of any like production usage of most of these things including like proof of work had only really been theoretical so like Adam back created a hash cash in the late 90’s and that was actually originally meant to be an antispam mechanism for e-mail but it just never took off for for one reason or another. You know I was actually in the e-mail industry for like the first 10 years of my career. And at one point I did look into like adding hash cash email headers to all of our outgoing stuff because there is some spam antispam software that would actually give you a better score if you did that. But in general nobody ended up using it. But then you know Satoshi comes along and says oh you know we can actually use this as a sort of denial of service protection against someone rewriting the block chain. And so we’re just we’re just going to use it to make it very expensive for someone to rewrite the block chain and that will give us some better data guarantees for the history of this ledger.

Calvin Wayman: Where are you using it now? Like how are you using crypto currency right now? It’s still still a new frontier. More people are coming onboard but it’s at the point where it’s definitely mainstream because it’s hitting all the major headlines your cab cabdrivers talking about it.  I can remember that was Warren Buffett or whoever. Once your cabdriver starts talking about something that’s when you know you really need to be cautious and careful. Are you using it for a means of exchange at all yet or are you using it for currency exchange or are you mostly just buying and holding and and and playing with it still like how you personally been using it since you’ve been in it for like four years?

Jameson Lopp: Yeah I’ve never really used it to buy everyday items. And there’s you know there’s been a lot of people who have been upset especially with regard to the scaling debates and stuff. They’re sad that certain things have gotten priced out of being like economically feasible on bitcoin lately. But for the vast majority of purchases like I personally you know living in a country that has really good financial infrastructure I have a ton of credit cards my bank account is hooked up to all kinds of different services most of most of my bills get onto drafted. It’s like I don’t need to pay with crypt ocurrency for the vast majority of things like the real promise of crypto assets I believe is that A you can store your own money without trusting a third party like some other service and B you can transact without trusting a third party that could censor your transaction. So I think that our types of transactions that are very well suited for crypto and that would be stuff like donating to political organizations that might get censored by a payment network so like WikiLeaks is a really good example and they’ve benefited a lot from Bitcoin or you know doing things that are like grey market black market type stuff.

Calvin Wayman: Right.

Jameson Lopp: But you know I do hope that we will get to the point where payment for like regular everyday stuff is feasible again. You know once we have more mainstream second layer networks that’s been progressing very quickly just over the past few months. And I’m actually looking forward to using some of my crypto assets to help capitalize the second letter networks and may even end up getting a sort of income from that without going into too many of the complexities sickly if you’re running nodes on the lightning network you can take tiny fees for helping to route the money around it.

Calvin Wayman: Sure. So let’s say more people listen to this myself. We want to go deeper in the rabbit hole. What’s been your means of understanding it historically and like and what’s the best means today in 2018. What if we want to learn more about bitcoin? Where does the most or crypto currency block chain the most high level quality information. Outside of I guess just YouTube buying it and going down the rabbit hole there like do you have a place that we can start.

Jameson Lopp: Yeah and just due to the nature of the system like so much information is spread out all over the place.

Calvin Wayman: yes.

Jameson Lopp: I started collecting and centralizing the information on my website a few years ago.

Calvin Wayman: Awesome. So what’s your website?

Jameson Lopp: Just lopp.net.

Calvin Wayman: Lopp.net.

Jameson Lopp: Yep I’ve got a bitcoin resources page on there that has lots of sections. Whether you’re interested in the technicals deep dive stuff trading stuff. Learning more about securing your own. Pretty much everything that you need to know is on there and there is probably enough material on there to keep you busy for six months to a year.

Calvin Wayman: Awesome. Ok, so if you’re listening to this you want to learn more about bitcoin crypto currency block chain. Go to: Lopp.net. I’m going to go over there right after this interview because again yes sometimes just hearing it first, second, third, fourth time that’s when you finally click the lightbulb goes off and so that’s what I’m aiming to do here. Is there anywhere else that people could interact with you or you on any of the socials at all Facebook or Instagram or anything like that?

Jameson Lopp: I spend most of my time on Twitter and the handle it was just lopp.

Calvin Wayman: That is man so simple. I freaking missed L.O.P.P. like. Yeah. If you can somebody tell me like somebody who got the first initial to their name on Instagram and it’s now weres like thousands of dollars. So many other people want it like super simple so you want to interact with my man Jameson Lopp a lot you can interact with him on Twitter. Just go to L.O.P.P. on Twitter. Hey Jameson Lopp thank you so much man for coming on and shedding a little bit of light on this new but exciting world of crypto currency. And yeah we just greatly appreciate it.

Jameson Lopp: My pleasure.

Calvin Wayman: Alright. And again if you want to put your name in the raffle for the prize for this episode we’ll be giving away the prize in within 48 hours. We’ll probably do it with in the Facebook group. So again to get a raffle ticket for the prize. Then go make a review for the podcast and that gives you a raffle ticket to win the prize and if you want to join the conversation around Bitcoin or any other episodes then go over to the Facebook page you can request to join. By going to calvinwayman.com/podcastgroup . Thanks guys. Have a good rest of your Wednesday.