Jameson Lopp: Privacy, Security, Cypherpunk, Bitcoin, Transhumanism, and Freedom

was just avoid leaking information whenever possible.

And that included in real life, when I'm, you

know, talking to neighbors or people around where I

live, or they don't know my real name, they

don't know what I actually do.

I have a, you know, completely different cover,

identity and pseudonym for stuff like that.

Um, and then, of course, there's all of the digital

privacy stuff of just trying to avoid leaking information.

And to be blunt, it actually involves lying a lot.

And you have to get comfortable with lying a lot.

And you also have to understand that most

of the time, it's legal to lie.

You know, unless you're entering into some sort

of legal contract, you can usually lie about

your name and what you do to any

third party that you're interacting with.

And it's, I would say, not immoral if

you're doing it to protect yourself and you're

not trying to cover up some criminal or

nefarious activities that you're trying to do.

That's super interesting.

And I think it's really interesting that

you mentioned that most of these especially

legal tips for privacy are jurisdiction specific.

Here at Citizen X we talk a lot

about different jurisdictions and there are many options

for incorporations like trusts in N or VVI

companies, Cayman Islands and so on.

But not many people are aware that the US

Is one of the best places for privacy, actually.

And you have many options, for example, limited liability

companies in the US that protect your privacy.

What are your suggestions for incorporating in

the US and protecting your privacy?

Well, I recommend finding a lawyer that deals specifically in

this because they need to know exactly how to set

it up and how to file the paperwork.

And once again, it's a mindset issue because

I've done this multiple times now because the

first time I did it back in 2018,

there were some failures that came up later.

And essentially when you have a privacy leak,

it pretty much destroys everything you set up.

So you have to start all over again.

And the failures were generally a result

of me working with lawyers and bankers

who had never done this before.

And they have a lot of defaults and

the defaults are to put your personal information

into all of these different systems, even though

I spent hours talking to them up front.

And I was like, this is why we're doing this.

You need to not leak my information.

If it's, if, if you're making them go

down a path they've never done before.

It's just the likelihood of a

mistake happening is much higher.

So that's the main thing is, you know, working

with someone who has other privacy oriented clients.

And then past that, there are specific states in

America that are better than others for incorporating, like

New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, probably a few others.

And that basically comes down to what the

legal reporting requirements for like the owners and

managers of LLC are in those states.

But it can get tricky if you're setting

up your corporations in those states and then

you want to acquire property in different states.

This is one thing that I found is that some states

don't like it if you try to acquire property with an

out of state registered entity and they want you to then

re register the entity in the same state.

And then you may not have the same privacy protections.

So it can get pretty complicated.

And this is why it also just Got really expensive.

Right, right.

You mentioned that a big part of

protecting your privacy is your lifestyle.

You are also a big Bitcoin advocate.

But you have mentioned in the past that cash

is a big thing when protecting your privacy.

Why should people care about using cash?

And how does Bitcoin get into all of that?

How do you make using Bitcoin more private

while also using cash to protect your privacy?

Well, because the majority of.

I think what I'm trying to protect against

is not actually the government, it's corporate surveillance.

And I am very familiar with the pervasiveness of

corporate surveillance because I spent the first decade of

my career working for an online marketing company.

And so I was a big data engineer.

And my job was to write software that ingested

these petabytes and petabytes of raw analytics, analytics information

that the company was collecting as a result of

all of the emails and website trackers and other

things that the marketing companies who were our clients

were deploying through our system.

And so my job was to basically help marketers

better target people to sell specific things to them.

So it was not a malicious thing.

It's as capitalism, this is the

incentives at play on the Internet.

Data is a commodity.

And so in many cases, you as an Internet

user are presented with a service for free, but

what you're really doing is you're paying them with

your data that is then used potentially against you.

And the problem there is that your data

is often collected and then repackaged and resold

to numerous different other entities that may not

be quite as careful with it.

And so it essentially becomes inevitable that as

you share data about yourself, either overtly or

unintentionally, that data will eventually get leaked and

fall into the wrong hands of people who

will be malicious and use it against you.

You have also said that the ability to control

your data should be a fundamental human right.

I think this ties a lot into that.

What are your favorite tools, companies, services

that are privacy focused and that really

help people control their data.

For example, there are some companies that

prioritize file over platform, you know, others

that focus on end to end encryption.

And you mentioned that, for example, when setting

up your companies, it's really important to also

set it up with service providers who share

the same ethos of sovereignty in the end.

So what are your recommendations

or favorite company services tools?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot and it

depends on exactly what you're trying to do.

I tell most people that the biggest, easiest privacy improvement

that you can do is to just Install ad blockers

in your browser, and it doesn't cost you anything.

It takes only a couple of minutes.

And that will stop a lot of the corporate surveillance

that just sort of happens in the background as you

are going about your life and browsing the Internet.

Beyond that one service that I like for

payments, because cash is not always an option,

especially if you're trying to do Internet commerce.

Big fan of Privacy.com, and they essentially

allow you to create as many throwaway

virtual debit cards as you want.

And the cool thing with these debit cards is as

long as you put in the right number, expiration date

and CVC code, you can put in any name and

any address that you want, which is very helpful, especially

if you're buying digital goods or services where you're not

physically having something shipped to you.

If you are having something physically shipped to

you, then there are services that I recommend

that are basically like private mailboxes.

And whether that's something like Earth Class Mail, which is one

of the bigger ones, or in many cases you can find

smaller local shops that will just let you rent a little

box for like 20 or $30 a month so that once

again, you're not putting your actual address out there.

This gets a bit more paranoid, but I do think that

people should probably be running VPNs all of the time.

And going down the VPN rabbit hole is really tricky

because unless you're running your own vpn, which I have

written about and is beyond the reach I think of

most people, then once again, you're trusting a third party

and you don't necessarily know what that VPN is doing.

So the best that I can really offer on the

VPN side is I would recommend using one that doesn't

require any personal information to sign up in the first

place, because obviously whatever information you give to the VPN

provider, they can then use to basically know who you

are and if they're keeping logs, because you never know

if they are, even if they claim they're not and

government comes in and asks them for your information.

The only way to ever be sure that your

information is not going to get shared is to

not give it away in the first place.

So, for example, I like Mulvad because you can

pay them in Monero or other crypto anonymously and

not give them an email address or anything, and

they just give you a code that you can

plug in and it just works and it's fast.

Yeah, they're really cool.

You really see that they care about your privacy because

they just give you a code and you really see

that they don't store any personal identifiable information.

The VPN topic is really cool because I think we're

seeing a lot of trends right now in the world.

I read your blog post about mask buying Twitter

and that you think, correct me if I'm wrong,

that maybe it's not so much about freedom of

speech, but the really cool thing about Twitter is

the global consciousness that it creates.

But going down the route of freedom of speech, we

have seen in the UK the think before you post

trend and I'm kind of worried about citizenship based censorship

where states don't only try to control what is said

in their land that can be bypassed by VPNs, but

what is said by their citizens.

Any thoughts about that?

Well, I mean if you want real freedom

of speech online, then preferably you're going to

be anonymous so you not have your real

name, face, location, so on and so forth.

Otherwise, if you want freedom of speech without having

to worry about being deplatformed, then you're going to

have to use a protocol that is censorship resistant.

So whether that's something like Nostr or potentially

Mastodon, I think Mastodon and Blue sky are

not as censorship resistant as Nostr.

I mean I use all of them just

so that I can see how they're developing.

But to have the ultimate level of sovereignty and

censorship resistance in these systems, they often require you

to be tech savvy and run your own server

so that you can't be deplatformed.

Nostr is nice because you don't have to run your

own server because it kind of inverts the model so

that you're sending your data to many different servers.

And any one of them can block you, of

course, but the likelihood that all of them are

going to block you is quite low.

Nice.

I think, going from the topic of

moving yourself in cyberspace with VPNs to

moving yourself physically while traveling.

You have mentioned some tips for traveling

when you're abroad, you encrypt all your

devices and lock them, lock them up.

Do you have any other specific tips

when it comes to traveling abroad?

I mean, mostly around security.

So the problem from the privacy standpoint is

that if you're using air travel, you're screwed.

There's no way to have a pseudonym cover identity

that is going to get you past border control.

Like I said, I'm doing everything legally, so I'm not

going to go down the path of trying to forge

a passport and trick the government, anything like that.

However, if you're not in a rush, there are usually other

means of transportation to travel which may not be quite as

hard on the KYC area, at least in America.

And I think when I've used trains in Europe, they

don't actually ask you for your id, they may ask

you for your name, but once again you could lie

and you're probably not going to get checked on that.

One reason that I really like

America is that it's huge.

I think it's as large, if not larger than all

of Europe and you can drive through like 95% of

it if you have the time to do so.

And of course there's no real border checkpoints as

long as you stay inside of the country.

So driving is generally a

privacy conscious thing to do.

However, you know, there's the tolls and I have successfully

managed to do the toll transponders in a private manner

where once again I just register them to an llc.

And you know, the actual car that is

in is also registered to the llc.

But all of this stuff is like, it works for

now, but when I look in the future I think

it's going to get harder and harder mainly due to

the continued pervasiveness of cameras and facial recognition.

And you know, one thing that I'm particularly worried about

is the stuff like the meta ray ban glasses.

There's already been a proof of concept where

some, you know, university graduate hacked real time

facial recognition and identity lookup into the glasses.

And so, you know, if that becomes a thing,

I don't really know of any countermeasure to that.

Like there, there are some products out there where

you can get like infrared lights like either in

glasses or hoodies or caps or whatever.

But I think that those are far from 100%

effective and they're reliant upon the target camera, like

being in infrared night mode or having some other

vulnerability where the infrared can essentially override the sensor.

So I mean all of this stuff is, it's

constantly moving target because technology is constantly evolving.

Governments and corporations are constantly seeking to

incorporate the latest technology so that they

can collect more and more data and

use it for whatever their purposes are.

And it seems like the defensive side of

technological innovation has not been really keeping up.

Yeah, I think that's so interesting, especially when

it comes to legal methods, for example, obscuring

your identity or even half alternative identities.

Not so many people are aware of this, but

there are some countries that allow you to legally

get a passport under a different name like for

example Vanuatu, Dominica, Turkey, with the ethnic script they

allow you to legally change your name.

There are also products I have seen like

for example the Palau E residency ID that

is kind of accepted some places.

So you could say that, for example, you could use

it to check in hotels or maybe on a train

or something that is more low level than air travel.

But I think the point of Biometrics is such

a good point and not only that it's happening,

but also it's happening on the private sector.

It's something that should be probably

taking as seriously as military technology.

But we have seen companies that are advancing

it either through the meta glasses or for

example Worldcoin with the scanning of the eyeballs.

Where do you think the future of Biometrics is going?

Do you think it's going to be controlled only

by governments or there are going to be private

companies setting up checkpoints like clear in the U.S.

well.

I mean, I don't think private companies are going

to be as in your face about it.

You know, governments are already there.

You know, when I'm going through border control, a lot

of it is automated now and it's quite convenient.

But on the corporate side I think it's just

going to be more that, you know, every corporation

with physical presences is going to put cameras everywhere

to protect their own property, you know, to be

able to do their own forensic analysis of stuff.

And even like in the case of retail stores,

I think this is already happening in some cases.

Basically, if you try to steal from the store, they

put you on a blacklist and then they can basically

in real time figure out if you're trying to come

back into the store and set off alarms.

But this is also going to

be used for predictive marketing analytics.

They're going to tag you, they're going

to watch you as you walk around.

They're going to look and analyze what you're looking at

and try to figure out what it is that you're

interested in and then target you in other ways.

And that's going to be a very cross platform

thing where the value add of all of this

stuff is that they've already got a ton of

information and analytics that are being collected in cyberspace

and now they want to do the same thing

in meatspace and then merge them all together so

that they can advertise to you in cyberspace based

off your meatspace activities and possibly even vice versa.

It's not too outrageous to think of a future

world where if more of us are using augmented

Reality glasses or even contact lenses or whatever that

as we're going through meatspace, we're probably going to

see targeted advertisements within our augmented reality.

Yeah, we both are big fans, I

think, of the book the Sovereign Individual.

How accurate do you think the predictions are?

Do you think the future is going in that direction?

Because that feature that you mentioned sounded

a lot like the sovereign individual.

Where you are most of your life is in cyberspace.

And I think even nowadays most

of our lives are in cyberspace.

But I think that kind of technology

can even push it forward faster.

So for me it's kind of a question of scale.

And when I look at the current state of the

world and try to identify what are sovereign individuals?

Well, right now the most prolific

sovereign individuals are actually multinational corporations.

And what I mean is the entities that

have the power to negotiate with nation states.

So the question is what is required or how long is

it going to take for that threshold to be lowered?

I would also argue that billionaires

right now are basically sovereign individuals,

but millionaires, not so much.

Will we eventually get there? Maybe.

But then on the flip side, we are seeing some nation

states realize, I think that this is starting to happen.

And I think I've seen some countries basically proposing to do

the same thing that the United States does, as you were

kind of mentioning, with free speech, but with taxation of like

we're going to tax you regardless of where you are physically

because we realize that you could just leave very easily and

not come back and skip out on all of the money

that we want to extort from you.

Right.

I think that's going to happen.

Something that I hear a lot is that only

the US and Eritrea have citizenship based taxation and

they tax citizens globally no matter where they live.

The reality is that there are more countries

that already have it and there are some

countries, many countries in Europe that have some

sort of citizenship based taxation.

And I think, you know, as nation states basically

become bankrupt and they realize that most of their

high net worth individuals, families, they have already left

the country, they cannot keep taxing them.

The only tool that they will have to

go after these people will be citizenship.

And they will basically try to tax

them abroad and tax them globally to

try to first tax, then confiscate even.

We have been talking a lot about privacy.

You have mentioned that privacy is the

other side of the coin for security.

I think you probably have lots of great

insights when it comes to physical security.

A way to think about it, I think it

is to you have security on a country level.

Where you have a really safe country and that's

what many people that watch us care about.

But then you also have safe cities,

like for example, we're here in Switzerland.

That is safe on the country level, on the

city level, on the probably private property level.

And that's what I want to get into right now.

What are your best tips to basically make

your private property as safe as possible?

Well, like I said on the privacy side,

preferably not to have your name on the

publicly registered property, but I would bet that

Switzerland, that's probably difficult to do.

A lot of European countries generally require you

to publicize all information about corporations and other

entities, though I think Sweden is the worst.

I think that they basically require you to publicly post

all of your tax information and income and stuff.

And that's why a number of high net

worth bitcoiners have been physically attacked in Sweden.

But other than that, you know, it's also

interesting because I would say Europe in general

defaults to stronger physical security for whatever reason.

I'm sure it's historical.

You know, Europe has had many wars over many centuries.

America not so much.

In America we build our houses very cheaply

and there's generally not much physical security.

Someone might get a security system or something, which

is usually a joke, but we don't have even,

for example, what I'm looking at the window right

now, basically steel shutters across everything that make it

very difficult for someone to physically break in.

The construction is going to be

stoic stone and cinder block.

And that's probably, I guess, because you don't have quite

as much lumber and timber as we do in America.

So it varies.

And these are all trade offs though, right?

The flip side is that in European countries

the firearm ownership is usually much more challenging,

if it's even possible at all.

Switzerland is, I think, an exception to that.

But even then, I'm pretty sure Switzerland requires you

to keep everything locked up and out of reach.

Whereas in America we may not have

the greatest physical security for our actual

property, but we're basically allowed to have

loaded guns laying around wherever we want.

And that's part of the freedom and responsibility

that comes with some of our constitutional rights.

So, you know, these are all trade

offs when it comes to general safety.

Obviously you can just, you can look at

the crime statistics and generally if you're living

in an area that is economically well off,

there's not going to be as much crime.

So unfortunately a lot of it comes down to

your own finances and what you can afford.

I think that's super interesting because

of the concept basically of the

ascending world and the ascending world.

And I think that also goes a lot into bitcoin

economics and how there are some places that are kind

of aligned with bitcoin and the ethos and they will

probably do well in the long run.

And there are other places

that are inevitably declining.

Which places are you bullish on,

especially when it comes to bitcoin?

Ooh, that's tough.

I mean, I think an easy one is that El

Salvador seems to be on the up and up now.

You know, there is some controversy

around how they've done that.

Obviously if you throw a lot of people in prison,

then those people can't be walking around committing crimes.

So it's always this trade off

in debate between safety and freedom. Right.

In many countries where I think you could argue that

they are safer, you could also argue that the individual

citizens don't have the same level of freedom.

And this I think has to be an individual decision.

Obviously, I lean more on the side of being less safe,

but more free to go about and do what I want

without having some authority telling me how to live my life.

Nice.

In 2018, you co founded CASA with the goal

of taking bitcoin security mainstream with a new system

that allows users to own their own private keys.

Do you want to get a bit

into how CASA makes holding bitcoin safer?

So the short version is that we architect

a, a key infrastructure where the whole goal

is to eliminate single points of failure.

Really what this means is we

understand that people are human.

Most people, even hardcore bitcoiners, are not like

highly technical people that spend a lot of

time thinking adversarially about their own key management

system and everything that could go wrong.

So what we've seen over the years is that

it's very easy for someone to, if they're getting

into self custody, put themselves into a situation where

there are potential single things that could happen that

could result in catastrophic loss.

So the way that we accomplish this is we have

a very simple mobile app where you follow the instructions

and the mobile app and when you get to the

end of your setup, you have think of it as

a vault that is distributed where there are multiple keys,

either like three keys or five keys.

And these keys are distributed across different

types of hardware, software, different manufacturers.

And then CASA will hold one

key as this emergency recovery mechanism.

But the whole idea is that if something goes

wrong with one of your keys, it's not a

problem whether if it gets lost, stolen, destroyed, whatever,

you still have Enough redundancy and resiliency that you

can use the other keys to still move your

money and basically swap out the compromised key, replace

it with a new key and continue forward.

So it's kind of a different way of thinking

about managing your Bitcoin where instead of having all

of your eggs in one basket, in the sense

of all of your money in one seed phrase,

your one treasure ledger or whatever, because there are

things that could go wrong with that, you instead

distribute them geographically, cryptographically and across many different companies

that are writing different software and hardware to prevent

things like supply chain attacks.

So it's a really complicated series of thought experiments

and potential loss and threat vectors that we have

thought through over the years and we have them

all published on our website of like this is

why we do it this way.

But the idea is that you follow the instructions,

you follow our guidance and you basically end up

in as bulletproof of a self custody setup as

I think it's possible to do these days.

That's fascinating, especially the part

about single points of failure.

I personally spend a lot of time

think about single points of failure.

I think one of the biggest one that people fall

into is just having one, one passport and one citizenship

but going more into the self custody thing.

Michael Saylor recently said that self custody

is for paranoid crypto anarchists that worry

about the government ceasing your Bitcoin.

To which you replied that most 61 or

2 world seizures occurred at financial institutions that

held gold on behalf of clients.

For example, Frederick Barber Campbell tried to

withdraw 5,000 ounces from Chase Bank.

They reported him and the gold was confiscated.

Those who kept gold in self custody were safe.

Yeah, but you know, it is, it's not just about that.

Right.

Because if you only, if you only talk about government

seizure risk, then I think the average person will consider

you to be a paranoid person because government seizure happens

so rarely and so it's not a threat that they

consider to be a high risk.

But what I would say is that if we look

across the past decade of history in this space, leaving

your money with a trusted third party is high risk.

A large percentage of trusted third

parties have failed over the years.

And maybe it's because they're malicious

and they stole people's money.

Maybe it's because they're incompetent and they got

hacked or in some cases they were incompetent

and they literally lost their own keys and

locked themselves out of it.

So the best way that I've been able

to describe at a Very, very high level.

Like the difference between all of the risks of

self custody versus the risk of trusted third party

custody is that self custody is essentially a subset

of the risks of trusted third party custody.

Because if you think about it, when you leave your

money with a custodian, they are doing self custody.

So they are exposed to all of

the, the risks of self custody.

And I think the average person may say, well,

yeah, and that's fine because they're professionals, right?

They know what they're doing, they think

about this all of the time.

And that is true to an extent.

But in addition to all of the self

custody risks, you have this extra layer of

risks of things like insider attacks.

You know, you don't know what that

custodian is doing from a security perspective.

Like, none of these custodians

publish their internal security protocols.

This is why they're trusted.

And you also have to, like I said,

worry about incompetency, they might screw up.

And then once again, you do have

to worry more about government seizure risk.

Because what's happening, and this is true for both

government attacks and just any other type of hacker

or attacker, is that you are creating a massive

honeypot because you have thousands, if not millions of

people putting their money in one place.

That's creating a really high value juicy target, which

is incentivizing attackers to potentially spend a huge amount

of resources, is trying to crack into it.

Because the bounty for something like

Coinbase is what millions of Bitcoin.

I don't even know how many tens of billions or

hundreds of billions of dollars that is at the moment.

It's risky not only for you as an

individual, it also, when we're talking about custodians

that are getting to that size, it becomes

a systemic risk to the entire ecosystem.

So, for example, one of the things I'm really worried

about is the fact that something like 90% of the

Bitcoin ETFs all keep their money at Coinbase.

And now I'm starting to sort of raise the alarm

of if we sort of look out long term, multi

decade, and we try to assume what a future of

mass adoption is going to look like.

Well, if mass, mass adoption mostly happens through these

ETF products, how much Bitcoin is going to end

up in the hands of five or ten entities?

That is very risky from a number

of different perspectives that I just explained.

I'm also a big fan of thinking long term.

And one of my favorite features of CASA is that

it really shows that Bitcoin is a generational asset allowing

you to set up your Bitcoin inheritance plan.

What are your best tips?

What is the best way to

set up your Bitcoin inheritance plan?

Yeah, so similar to just all of the issues

related to setting up your own self custody wallet

is that it's a, it's a, it's a tricky

thing that is fraught with peril because you have

great power that is bestowed upon you when you're

going into self custody because you get to decide

many different parameters of how you're doing it.

And so from that perspective, there's like a decision

tree, there's many different decisions that need to be

made and the total design space of how you

can architect a self custody wallet is massive.

And not all of those potential paths are safe.

So it's easy if you're not an expert and

you don't think about this all the time, it's

easy to make some decisions that end up actually

weakening your setup rather than strengthening it.

And then that becomes doubly true if

you're going down the path of inheritance.

Because when you are setting up self custody, what

you're trying to do is set up an architecture

so that no one other than you can access

and spend your Bitcoin when you want to take

that next step into making your setup inheritance friendly.

Now you're walking this really weird tightrope where you want

it so that only you can access your Bitcoin while

you're alive, but when you die, you magically want want

the security architecture to change so that someone or some

designated set of beneficiaries can access it, assuming that you

don't want your beneficiaries to be able to access your

money while you're still alive.

This gets tricky.

But the really cool thing about multisig is

that once again, that expands the design space

of how we can set up your architecture.

And essentially key sharing is what it comes down to.

That's the path that we went down, though it

wasn't the first path that we went down actually.

We had an inheritance product for a couple

of years that was more legal, inheritance based.

And with that we were onboarding your family attorney

or your executor or someone to share keys with.

And we found that that didn't scale very well.

And so the inheritance solution that we just

rolled out, I would say four or five

months ago, has no legal requirements to it.

So you can be in any jurisdiction.

And it works the same because

it's just essentially a software solution.

And basically what you do is you onboard

your beneficiary by sharing an encrypted version of

one of your keys with them.

And what the CASA app does is we create

our own set of game theory around this.

So essentially, you onboard your beneficiary, you

share an encrypted key with them.

They can't do anything with it because it's encrypted.

You die.

Your beneficiary is able to go in the app

and basically tap on a button that says, I

want to request kicking off the inheritance process.

When they do that, we start emailing you and contacting

you and saying, hey, your beneficiary said you died.

If you're still alive, click this button or call us

on the phone or contact us somehow so that we

can kick your beneficiary out because they may be malicious.

And basically we keep trying to

contact you for six months.

And if that time period goes by and

you have not contested or disputed the inheritance

kickoff, then we allow the beneficiary to decrypt

and use that key to initiate a transaction.

But once again, they only have one key.

So they then have to request from

us to co sign the transaction.

And then once we'll finally co sign

a transaction after another waiting period, then

the money can move however they wish.

I love the part that right now

it doesn't require any legal setup.

It's literally the network over the state. Right.

It wins every.

Every single day.

Yeah, inheritance is really tricky because I think

most people are used to legal inheritance, and

if you have a brokerage account or other

traditional financial accounts, you may, for example, have

beneficiaries listed on them.

And it's actually, I've learned a lot about legal inheritance

over the past few years as a result of researching

and building all of this stuff and discovered that there's

a lot of foot guns in legal inheritance as well.

For example, it could actually be a bad idea

to list specific beneficiaries on traditional financial accounts.

And the reason for that is that tends to

override, at least in America, it overrides the default

of your local jurisdiction of how inheritance plays out.

And it can also even override anything that

you specified in your last will and testament.

And people may be thinking, well, who cares?

Well, the real problem that tends to happen with

this is that people tend to set up their

inheritance plan and then, of course, not die for

many decades and never go back and look at

their inheritance configuration for that entire period of time.

And so what often happens is that the values of

your different accounts may wildly change and no Longer be

in balance over time, and you might accidentally end up

giving 70% of your net worth to one beneficiary, and

then the other one loses out.

And legally, you know, there's nothing that

can be done, unless, of course, they

all agree to redistribute it themselves.

So basically, it's a.

It's a game theory problem that

becomes additionally complicated because people tend

not to maintain it over time.

I tend to think that, you know, most taxation is

theft, but definitely the one I think it's the biggest

theft of them all is inheritance taxes, because, you know,

you just have a massive loss, and then here comes

the state and asks for some, you know, tax.

Where's Bitcoin when it comes to inheritance tax?

Well, as far as I'm aware, I mean, at

least in America, it's treated like any other asset.

I'm not aware of any countries that

have specific exemptions for bitcoin inheritance stuff.

But once again, Bitcoin doesn't care.

So obviously, it's up to you

and your beneficiaries to manage that.

Well, it's really, It's.

I guess the executor of your estate is the one

who's going to be in charge of making sure that

all taxes and creditors of the estate are paid off

before the remaining assets are distributed to the beneficiaries.

And that's actually another thing

that I learned about inheritance.

At least in America.

A lot of people think that being an executor

of an estate is like a great honor.

It's actually a huge liability.

Like, if you screw something up, you

can be personally liable for the financial

consequences of screwing that up.

Wow.

To wrap up this conversation, you know,

this is a question that I've seen

going kind of viral in different places.

Up to you, if you want to get into more or less detail.

But when you pass away, how do you

plan to leave your Bitcoin to your heirs?

Well, you know, through a

carefully constructed inheritance plan.

Yeah, I haven't thought about it too much because

I think I've still got a ways to go.

And I'm, you know, we won't go

down this rabbit hole, but I'm.

I'm also big into, like,

longevity and biohacking stuff.

And so I'm.

I'm optimistic that, you know, if I can take care of

myself for a few more decades, then, you know, medical science

will continue to progress that, you know, hopefully we'll be able

to live well past 100, maybe even 150.

You know, if we were able to

essentially regenerate ourselves at a cellular level.

So this actually does potentially bring up a very

different issue which I have published an article about,

which is, and this is because I haven't entirely

decided personally on how I'm going to do this,

but are you familiar with cryonics?

Yeah.

Right.

So like I said, I.

Well, I'm a transhumanist, I'm interested in

life extension, I'm interested in cryonics.

I'm not a subscriber yet of any of

those services because they do have issues.

You know, a lot of them go bankrupt and

the body is thaw and, and don't get preserved.

But I have spent a fair amount of

time thinking about and published some thoughts on

taking your bitcoin with you, and by which

I mean these security ramifications of how would

you secure Bitcoin if you were cryogenically preserved?

And doing that under the hope that, you know, you may

be thawed out in hundreds or even thousands of years, depending

of course on how long it takes the technology.

And this essentially gets you into even crazier extreme

edge case game theory than the inheritance stuff, because

if you think about it, your body basically goes

into a trusted third party custodian.

So I've talked to a number of people about

this and the most common thing people say is,

oh, I'll just memorize my seed phrase.

And I'm like, no, you have to assume that

the company that thaws you out can scan your

brain and extract all of the information from it.

So that's not going to work.

And then there's all these other issues around

how technology and you could potentially have key

failure or key wrought over centuries or millennia.

How do you do that in a

way that you can feel comfortable about?

And I actually suspect that the answer is

going to come down to family and actually

instilling values within your family to create a

sort of trust chain of generations.

And what I mean by this, and, and

there's actually this concept in the cryogenics community.

What did they call it?

I think they call it the domino of love or something.

And I might be butchering that, but

the idea is that you get frozen.

What is the incentive for anybody to thaw you out,

especially a thousand years in the future where you probably

have no marketable skill set, you have no real use

to society other than as a historical artifact.

So this is another game theory issue.

So the domino of love theory is you have children,

you instill in them the values that you have and

do the best you can to make sure that they

love you and they want you to be around.

And then hopefully they do the same with their children.

They do the same with their children.

And so if that chain remains unbroken, then at some

arbitrary point in the future, the technology will improve enough

that we can start to thaw people out.

But the thing is, it's going to go in

reverse order because the earlier you get cryogenically preserved,

the more damage there will be to your body

and therefore the greater the level of technology will

be required in order to revive you.

So it's actually you're not going to be revived first.

It's your great, great, great, great,

great grandchildren will be revived first.

Well, why are they going to get revived?

Well, it's because their children are still alive and

they're like, I want to bring my parents back.

And so then once they're back and the

technology progresses, then hopefully they say, oh, I

want to bring my parents back.

And then that chain goes all the way

back, hopefully, optimistically, so that eventually you, your

children get thawed out and the technology progresses

and they thaw you out.

But yeah, this is some like,

crazy theoretical edge case stuff.

That's sci fi, but also somewhat realistic game theory

and trying to figure out how would you ever

even deal with these type of issues, but that's

the type of stuff I find interesting.

That's great.

I really enjoyed talking.

Thank you very much, Jameson.

Thanks for having me.