Jameson Lopp is a professional cypherpunk, Bitcoin proponent, and the co-founder & Chief Security Officer of Casa (casa.io).
You can check out his work at https://lopp.net.
Today we're here in Lugano, Switzerland, with the
man, the myth, the legend, Jameson Loeb.
Thank you very much, Jameson.
Great to be here.
Jameson is an American cyberpunk.
He's also a bitcoin advocate, software
engineer, and he's one of the
world's leading privacy advocates as well.
In 2017, you became the target of a
swatting attack, and that kind of kicked off
your journey into the privacy world.
I've heard you spend thousands of dollars
in private investigators to make sure that
you were able to basically disappear.
And that was kind of an experiment to
push the envelope on what it takes in
the modern world to achieve privacy.
First of all, I want to personally thank you for that.
I think it's such a great thing to do
for every one of us who takes privacy seriously.
And I think it would be nice to start this
conversation talking about what are your best tips for privacy,
and what did you learn from that experiment?
Yeah, I mean, most of the actual financial
cost of my extreme privacy journey was due
to legal issues of trying to understand what
is possible from a legal standpoint, to set
up to obfuscate my ownership of any publicly
registered property, to obfuscate my actual residential address.
And unfortunately, like, a lot of
that stuff is very jurisdiction specific.
And so while I can talk a lot about what
is available in the American tool set, I really don't
know what's available in a lot of other countries.
And my understanding is that most other countries do not
have the same options for setting up legal entities like
corporations and trusts that can give you this additional veil
over the true ownership of various things.
But the short version is, regardless of
where you are, privacy is about selectively
revealing yourself to the world.
So the biggest shift that I had to
make was a lifestyle and mindset shift, which
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.
