Latest / Simply Bitcoin / Bitcoin OG Breaks Down $1.4B RECORD Heist! | EP 1192

Transcript

Bitcoin OG Breaks Down $1.4B RECORD Heist! | EP 1192 · Simply Bitcoin

• 0:00
  Yo Bitcoin has seen one of its most volatile weeks in history
• 0:04
  after we saw a record-breaking $1.4 billion heist that occurred
• 0:09
  last week. This massive buy bit hack from
• 0:13
  an infamous nation nation state hacker group has forced many
• 0:17
  people to reconsider how they hold their Bitcoin.
• 0:21
  Today we reached out to a Bitcoin OG with a / a.
• 0:25
  What is happening? There we go.
• 0:30
  Sorry about that guys. I have I have my Echo in the
• 0:33
  background. Today we reached out to a
• 0:35
  Bitcoin OG with a decorate decade of experience in
• 0:39
  cybersecurity to breakdown everything that happened with
• 0:43
  this hack. And also this morning it was
• 0:46
  Opti and I had to put a fire out, which was absolutely crazy.
• 0:50
  We had some trouble getting the live stream up and going, which
• 0:53
  we managed to fix 10 minutes before the show went live.
• 0:58
  And of course, what Bitcoin OG am I talking about?
• 1:00
  We have the one, the only legendary Jamison Lop in the
• 1:04
  house. Thank you so much for joining
• 1:05
  us, Lop. I know we've had you on Simply
• 1:07
  Bitcoin IRL, but we've never had you on Simply Bitcoin Live, so
• 1:11
  welcome to the show. Always glad to talk about
• 1:14
  Bitcoin. It's so crazy because every time
• 1:18
  we have a big guest coming and joining us, those are the days
• 1:22
  that something goes wrong. So we're rolling with the
• 1:24
  punches. Anyways, let's jump straight
• 1:26
  into today's article. Let me pull it up.
• 1:28
  FBI accuses North Korean backed hackers of stealing $1.5 billion
• 1:35
  in crypto from Dubai based firm It goes on to say the FBI has
• 1:39
  accused North Korean linked hackers of conducting one of the
• 1:43
  largest thefts of cryptocurrency publicly known using some $1.5
• 1:48
  billion worth of etherium from a Dubai based firm.
• 1:52
  The theft earlier this month targeting by bit one of the
• 1:55
  world's largest crypto exchanges represents yet another another
• 1:59
  involving a team of hackers identified by the US government
• 2:03
  by the names of Trader, Trader and the Lazarus group.
• 2:08
  The hackers steal cryptocurrency through the disseminate the
• 2:11
  dissemination of cryptocurrency trading applications that were
• 2:15
  modified to include malware that facilitates theft of
• 2:18
  cryptocurrency. It goes on to say in an online
• 2:22
  public service announcement late Wednesday, the FBI said it
• 2:25
  believed the North Korean backed hackers were, quote, responsible
• 2:29
  for the the theft. Quote, trader, trader actors are
• 2:32
  proceeding rapidly and have converted some of that stolen
• 2:35
  assets, the Bitcoin. I think that's the signal there,
• 2:38
  right? They're getting rid, you know,
• 2:39
  of, of whatever and they're they're buying Bitcoin.
• 2:42
  Other virtual asset dispersed across thousands of addresses on
• 2:46
  multiple black block chains. The FBI said in its
• 2:49
  announcement, quote, it is expected these assets will be
• 2:52
  further laundered and eventually converted to Fiat currency.
• 2:56
  It goes on to say North Korean state media has not acknowledged
• 2:59
  either the theft or the FBI accusation.
• 3:03
  Pyongyang's mission to the United Nations and Geneva did
• 3:06
  not respond to a request for comment from The Associated
• 3:09
  Press. Now here is a post from I
• 3:12
  believe the Buy Bit CEO Ben Zu and he said buy BIC hack
• 3:18
  forensic reports. As promised, here are the
• 3:20
  preliminary reports of the hack conducted by Singa Labs and Vera
• 3:26
  Chains. Screenshot of the conclusion.
• 3:28
  Here is the link to the full report.
• 3:31
  And Lop, we were talking about it earlier before we went on air
• 3:35
  about this report that came out. So Lop, what happened?
• 3:39
  How did this happen? How can an exchange of this size
• 3:43
  with this many customers, how are exchange, how are exchange
• 3:48
  hacks still happening in 2025? You know, after the industry has
• 3:53
  been around for, you know, almost 16 years now.
• 3:56
  We all remember Mount G Ox, You know, I think bit Fenix got
• 3:59
  hacked a couple times, Finance got hacked.
• 4:01
  How's this stuff still happening?
• 4:05
  Well, these are complex systems and, you know, complexity can be
• 4:09
  the enemy of security. I think that's the short version
• 4:11
  of how this happened. There's complexity at many
• 4:14
  different layers and it really starts at the very lowest layer.
• 4:18
  There's a lot of complexity on, you know, these EVM Turing
• 4:22
  complete protocols. And that level of complexity
• 4:28
  means that you can't have the same trustless verification that
• 4:33
  we do on Bitcoin if you're using, you know, one of these
• 4:37
  tiny low powered hardware key management devices.
• 4:42
  So you know, if you've ever used treasure Ledger, cold car and it
• 4:46
  really any of those hardware devices, then you know that when
• 4:50
  you're making a Bitcoin transaction, it explicitly tells
• 4:53
  you on the screen, hey, you're ascending this many SAT's and
• 4:57
  you're sending it to this address and you can confirm it
• 4:59
  all on what is essentially a totally self-contained computer.
• 5:05
  And that's possible to do because Bitcoin is simple and
• 5:09
  the partially or fully signed transaction that you are sending
• 5:14
  to that device is usually only a few 100 bytes, maybe a few
• 5:17
  kilobytes, and it's capable of parsing it and telling you
• 5:20
  exactly what the resulting change to the blockchain is
• 5:25
  going to be. But with these more complex EVM
• 5:29
  type of protocols, you're not signing a transaction that has
• 5:34
  all of that context inside of it.
• 5:37
  You may be signing a more complex transaction that's
• 5:40
  basically sending a command to the EVM, and the only way to
• 5:45
  know what the result of executing that command is, is to
• 5:49
  actually execute the command. So you have to have your own
• 5:53
  full node basically, where you do a test and you then check the
• 5:57
  state's change of what actually happened from executing the
• 6:00
  transaction. So the short version is that you
• 6:04
  can't sign these complex transactions on secure air gap
• 6:08
  hardware because the hardware itself simply does not have all
• 6:13
  of the contextual information necessary to know what the final
• 6:16
  outcome is of that transaction. And then beyond that, there's
• 6:20
  just multiple other layers of of problems that happened in this
• 6:24
  one particular case, particularly that they were
• 6:27
  using a web app, you know, a JavaScript front end to actually
• 6:32
  drive the creation and the coordination of this multi sig
• 6:37
  setup. And anyone who is familiar with
• 6:40
  JavaScript and web apps know that they are just incredibly
• 6:43
  difficult to secure because you can't have integrity checks for
• 6:49
  the code itself. You know, if you're running a
• 6:52
  mobile app or in many cases a desktop app, those applications
• 6:58
  can be cryptographically signed, like the final build of the app
• 7:02
  can be cryptographically signed by the developers of that app.
• 7:06
  And that provides a strong attestation and integrity check
• 7:11
  that the code that you're running is the code that was
• 7:13
  actually written by those developers.
• 7:15
  But with JavaScript, that's just not a thing.
• 7:17
  And So what happened in this case is it appears that Lazarus
• 7:21
  Group, which is these, you know, North Korean state backed
• 7:26
  actors, somehow compromised the AWS like S3 bucket or Cloudflare
• 7:33
  bucket. Like wherever this JavaScript
• 7:35
  was actually hosted. They managed to insert a few
• 7:39
  lines of malicious code that basically said, hey, if this is
• 7:43
  the buy bit wallet that is being used to construct and sign this
• 7:47
  transaction, then do this malicious contract call that
• 7:51
  completely changes the ownership of the contract.
• 7:54
  And they were able to do that because, you know, whatever code
• 7:57
  they put up there just immediately gets sucked down
• 8:00
  into the browser and run and there's no integrity checks to
• 8:03
  make sure that the code was actually written by the NOSA
• 8:07
  safe developers. So they basically they were able
• 8:09
  to completely bypass any of the security mechanisms that's the
• 8:13
  safe team may have had around, you know, code review, peer
• 8:18
  review, the build and deploy process.
• 8:20
  And it appears that this happened because a developer
• 8:24
  developer had some sort of production access API key on
• 8:27
  their machine and that machine got compromised.
• 8:29
  That we don't know all of the details at this time.
• 8:32
  So and, and it's, it's a couple things, so many things to unpack
• 8:36
  there, right? So the first, the first question
• 8:38
  that I have for you, Lop and you know, of course we recommend,
• 8:41
  you know, Bitcoin only hardware wallets, but I'm sure that a lot
• 8:44
  of our listeners still use Ledger.
• 8:46
  It it was the Ledger device itself.
• 8:48
  It it's not compromised, it's the fact that it can't lay out
• 8:53
  all the data effectively on on the constraints of the hardware
• 8:56
  itself and on the screen size. So you can't really actually
• 9:00
  confirm what it is you're signing.
• 9:02
  And if you compare and contrast that with Bitcoin, it's pretty
• 9:05
  straightforward. It's like, look, here's your
• 9:06
  Bitcoin address, here's the change address.
• 9:10
  A lot of good hardware wallets actually lay that out for you.
• 9:13
  Bitcoin only hardware wallets. So it's not the actual Ledger
• 9:16
  device itself that was compromised.
• 9:19
  It was something that was compromised on the software
• 9:21
  level. How how were they able to do
• 9:23
  that? Was is it so essentially did did
• 9:25
  a developer download like a, a malicious software?
• 9:28
  Is that what happened? Probably it's too early to say
• 9:32
  because I think the only forensic report that has been
• 9:35
  released was performed by by bit or at by Bit's request.
• 9:40
  I don't know that they actually had access to this supposed
• 9:44
  developer's machine. Over the long term, you would
• 9:48
  expect that if that's what happened, then a full forensic
• 9:51
  analysis of any compromised endpoints, you know, employee
• 9:55
  laptops and other machines should occur and they should
• 9:59
  then be able to figure out what is the actual root cause of how
• 10:02
  it got compromised. But generally what happens in
• 10:05
  these cases, especially with Lazarus Group, you know, they
• 10:08
  are considered very advanced persistent threat actors, and
• 10:13
  they will spend weeks, if not months poking and prodding and
• 10:17
  trying to social engineer and compromise various employees at
• 10:21
  a company in order to eventually get your production
• 10:24
  infrastructure access. So that usually does involve
• 10:28
  some sort of social engineering to trick an employee into
• 10:33
  installing some sort of software that has a malicious payload.
• 10:36
  What we've seen pretty often is that they will go after
• 10:40
  developers and in some cases they will, it will try to get
• 10:44
  the developers to download and run, you know, some sort of code
• 10:48
  from GitHub, usually under the auspice of helping them debug
• 10:54
  something or helping them do some sort of, you know, academic
• 10:56
  project. And that code in that GitHub
• 10:59
  project will have a malicious 0 day like exploit that basically
• 11:05
  allows them to get, you know, full access to the machine.
• 11:08
  Gotcha gotcha you know it's it's it's very interesting by the way
• 11:10
  we're about to break 1000 live viewers on the live show.
• 11:15
  If you guys are enjoying simply Bitcoin live so far, make sure
• 11:17
  to smash that like button help us break 100 likes within the
• 11:21
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• 11:23
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• 11:26
  show smash the like button consider subscribing opti crazy
• 11:29
  morning man the day that Jamison lop is joining us on the show.
• 11:33
  We had to put out some fires in a very short amount of time, but
• 11:37
  I'm happy that we we got the show up and running for you
• 11:40
  guys. What are your thoughts on this?
• 11:42
  Man? It was a pretty big deal.
• 11:43
  It, it tanked the price as well, man.
• 11:45
  Like, I think it, it severely affected the price.
• 11:48
  We were at like 99.5. I totally bought the top.
• 11:51
  I always do no shame, don't care.
• 11:54
  But but it, it like it, it, it affected the price, right?
• 11:57
  It, it dumped the price. I think a lot of people had a
• 12:00
  lot of questions. A lot of people are like wait a
• 12:02
  second, hold on, this dude is using a Ledger to sign a
• 12:05
  transaction for a $1.4 billion transaction?
• 12:07
  Like what is going on here? What were your thoughts, Opti?
• 12:11
  Yeah, well, obviously when I saw that video of the Ledger, it was
• 12:14
  like, wait, it's almost like the joke you've been saying for a
• 12:17
  long time that Bryan Armstrong just has a Ledger in his sock
• 12:20
  drawer and that's how he secures the transaction.
• 12:23
  It like literally happened with Bibit.
• 12:25
  So that that was just hilarious. And then just kind of in
• 12:27
  context, you know, this is 1.4. That article said about 1.5.
• 12:32
  I think it's like $1.45 billion hack.
• 12:36
  Obviously it's an Ethereum, but in context, this is what about
• 12:40
  three times the size of the Mt, you know, Mt Gox going down.
• 12:44
  So this is a huge, huge hack here.
• 12:47
  The Lazarus Group obviously came up huge on this hack, whether it
• 12:51
  was social engineering or what have you.
• 12:53
  It's a huge hack. And then before I actually have
• 12:56
  a question for a lot before, but it's kind of what you pointed
• 12:59
  out, Nico. Like it's funny.
• 13:00
  And I was joking about this earlier.
• 13:02
  Why we're kind of setting up the show.
• 13:03
  It's funny that even the real scammers out there don't even
• 13:06
  want Ethereum or any shit coin. And they just flip it into
• 13:08
  Bitcoin instantly and try to get it into Bitcoin.
• 13:11
  You know, a signal for everyone out there that might be Bitcoin
• 13:13
  to Jason. It's like even the real scammers
• 13:15
  don't want the the the shit coin scams.
• 13:18
  They're like, let's put it in the Bitcoin.
• 13:19
  But lot for, you know, for the not so advanced people in the
• 13:23
  audience with this hack, just to be completely clear, is this an
• 13:29
  Ethereum issue or Ledger issue? Can this happen on Bitcoin?
• 13:34
  For someone watching the show right now, you know, maybe
• 13:36
  they're getting a little a little scared if their Bitcoin
• 13:39
  is secured correctly, what would be your advice to them?
• 13:45
  I mean, it's a combination of the complexity of some of these
• 13:48
  protocols and just the way that these hardware devices operate.
• 13:53
  So, you know, I think the take away here is, you know, multi
• 13:58
  sig is not panacea. You know, having your keys
• 14:02
  offline obviously is a good start, but the real question is,
• 14:08
  you know, when you are actually cryptographically signing a
• 14:11
  transaction to move funds, how strongly are you verifying
• 14:15
  exactly what you're signing? And so the problem here is that
• 14:20
  in most cases when people are doing multi sig transactions on
• 14:25
  these EVM networks, they're blind signing because as I said,
• 14:31
  the the hardware simply doesn't have enough information to know
• 14:35
  exactly what the result of the command that you are signing is,
• 14:40
  is going to do to, you know that network to that blockchain.
• 14:44
  So you have to have more safeguards in place.
• 14:47
  You have to have more levels of verification if you are using a
• 14:54
  we could call it a non-native multi sig contract.
• 14:57
  Like the nice thing about Bitcoin is that multi sig is
• 15:00
  baked into the protocol. It is it's very simple.
• 15:05
  The the downside to these, you know, more generic smart
• 15:08
  contracting networks is they don't have multi sig baked into
• 15:11
  the protocol. It ends up being a, you know,
• 15:13
  much more complicated, you know, app, if you will, that is
• 15:18
  written and deployed onto these networks.
• 15:21
  And as a result, those hardware devices simply just don't know
• 15:25
  what to do with it. The one thing that we're seeing
• 15:28
  your Ledger is talking about, well, no one should be doing
• 15:31
  blind signing. They should be doing clear
• 15:33
  signing. And what does that actually
• 15:34
  mean? Well, it basically means Ledger
• 15:36
  wants you to be using their enterprise product where they
• 15:40
  have, you know, a very specific set of smart contracts that
• 15:44
  their servers are aware of. And then they have additional
• 15:47
  sets of interactions between your like Ledger live app
• 15:53
  software that you're running. And then the servers on their
• 15:55
  back end where it's doing just additional levels of
• 15:57
  verification back and forth and sending data to your Ledger
• 16:01
  device so that the Ledger can display exactly what it expects
• 16:05
  the result to be. So, you know, this is still
• 16:08
  additional complexity, but I think it's really it's the best
• 16:11
  that we have to offer at this point in time.
• 16:14
  And you know, we've done similar things at Casa where it's it's,
• 16:18
  you know, a client and server validation basically checking
• 16:22
  each other's work. The problem that occurred here
• 16:26
  with this NOSA safe front end is that everything was happening in
• 16:30
  the browser. Like there was no other machine,
• 16:33
  you know, no other node that was running somewhere that was
• 16:37
  basically being checked against to see exactly what the result
• 16:41
  of the transaction was going to be.
• 16:44
  Got it. Interesting.
• 16:45
  So essentially and and that's that's actually so multi sig is
• 16:48
  built natively into Bitcoin, but with the alternative with the
• 16:53
  altcoins, it's not built natively into them.
• 16:56
  So they have to do it via smart contract.
• 16:59
  And essentially, that's where it, it opens the attack vector,
• 17:03
  so to speak, right? And someone in the chat, I think
• 17:07
  the complexity and I just want to share this.
• 17:11
  I just want to share this screen from, from the by bit fitter by
• 17:16
  bit CEO. And it exactly says what, what
• 17:20
  Lop was saying. So the benign JavaScript file of
• 17:24
  app dot safe dot global appears to have been replaced with
• 17:28
  malicious code on February 19, 2025, specifically targeting
• 17:33
  Ethereum multi sig cold wallet of BI bit.
• 17:36
  The attack was designed to activate during the next BI bit
• 17:39
  transaction which occurred on February 21st, 2025.
• 17:44
  So this is extremely sophisticated lop like these
• 17:47
  guys. This is not child's play.
• 17:50
  Like they knew exactly what they were doing.
• 17:52
  Well, they did because if they had wanted to, they could have
• 17:56
  been sweeping basically everybody's wallets who were
• 18:00
  using the NOSA safe web app. But you know, they were smart
• 18:05
  and they put in that conditional that basically only listed a
• 18:10
  couple of contract addresses because they they didn't want to
• 18:13
  tip their hand. Like this is sort of classic
• 18:17
  game theory of a zero day exploit.
• 18:20
  When you have some sort of massive vulnerability that
• 18:23
  you're trying to monetize, do you immediately start, you know,
• 18:27
  trying to sweep up money from everybody?
• 18:30
  Or do you have a little bit of patience and you basically lie
• 18:34
  in wait until the big whale comes along?
• 18:37
  And so that's what happened here is like they knew that like that
• 18:40
  was the biggest possible wallet that was going to be interacting
• 18:43
  with this code. And so they only had to wait a
• 18:46
  couple of days to basically get the the fish on the hook, so to
• 18:50
  speak. If they had deployed it without
• 18:52
  those conditionals, then, you know, you probably would have
• 18:54
  had people losing a few E here and there and they would have
• 18:59
  raised the alarm because they wouldn't have understood what
• 19:02
  happened. And then, you know, that would
• 19:03
  have resulted in the Gnosis team looking into it and finding the
• 19:07
  problem before they were able to get the 1.4 billion.
• 19:11
  Yeah, well, it's so wow, wow, wow.
• 19:14
  Very is the the the Lazarus group very sophisticated target,
• 19:21
  you know, just lying in wait until they get the big pot.
• 19:24
  Now my question to you, Lop, and I think a lot of people are
• 19:27
  watching this. How do people protect themselves
• 19:31
  from this? Like, I mean, from my vantage
• 19:34
  point, it's like, OK, obviously take self custody Bitcoin, you
• 19:38
  know, the simpler the better, right?
• 19:43
  In my opinion. So what would your professional
• 19:46
  advice? You've been around for a very
• 19:48
  long time in the space. You're obviously, you know, this
• 19:52
  is up your alley, right? You're a security.
• 19:54
  I would consider you a security expert.
• 19:56
  How could people protect themselves from this type of
• 20:00
  attack? Well, yeah, I mean, if you stick
• 20:03
  to Bitcoin and you are using these air gapped hardware
• 20:08
  devices to verify the transaction details on the
• 20:11
  device, then you're gonna be good to go.
• 20:14
  It's not until you start dealing with these more complex
• 20:17
  protocols where you're basically doing, you know, smart contract
• 20:21
  commands where you need to have a more sophisticated setup.
• 20:26
  So you know, if you are gonna go down the route where you're
• 20:30
  using EVM stuff, you can you can simply avoid using these smart
• 20:35
  contracts and you can just use the native, you know, single
• 20:38
  signature on chain functionality.
• 20:41
  And in those cases, your hardware devices will be able to
• 20:45
  display exactly, you know, what the amounts and destination
• 20:49
  addresses of your transactions will be.
• 20:51
  But you know, if you have millions or 10s of millions or
• 20:55
  hundreds of millions of dollars, you basically need to have a
• 20:59
  much more sophisticated set up that's managed by a team.
• 21:02
  And you know, you really need to be paying a number of different
• 21:05
  security professionals to try to break your set up and find the
• 21:08
  weaknesses in it. It needs to be a lot more
• 21:12
  sophisticated than just using a web app.
• 21:15
  Yeah, 100% agree. And I think that's where you
• 21:18
  know, it, it it perhaps it gives it gave them a false sense of
• 21:22
  security, right. They're like, oh, we're using
• 21:24
  multi sig. This is fine, you know, Oh, I,
• 21:27
  I'm, I'm looking at I'd like this is something that I've done
• 21:30
  over and over and over again. But that's exactly what the
• 21:33
  social engineering. It's like this is what they they
• 21:35
  rely, they they hope that you kind of fall into this
• 21:40
  convenience trap. This oh, I'm safe.
• 21:42
  My, my, my setup is safe. And you know, they, they pounce
• 21:46
  on the, the opportunity. Not to mention it was a massive
• 21:49
  honey pot because, you know, if, if the, if the reward wasn't so
• 21:54
  great, you know, I don't think they would have gone through the
• 21:57
  amount of effort. Like I'm just reading this
• 21:59
  report and in my mind I'm telling, I'm thinking to myself,
• 22:03
  I'm like, this must have taken months and months and months of
• 22:07
  planning and just checking and seeing until, you know, they
• 22:12
  found a vulnerability. This was not something simple.
• 22:15
  It wasn't like the the Bit Fenix hack, which was a total social,
• 22:19
  social engineering hack attack. This was like a sophisticated
• 22:24
  like Black Hat hacker type of, you know, operation.
• 22:30
  Though we still really don't know the details of the Bit
• 22:33
  Fenix hack. And that's always been
• 22:34
  disconcerting. Like, they never really
• 22:36
  revealed, you know, how the machines got compromised.
• 22:41
  Like how how did Ilya get production infrastructure access
• 22:45
  to the Bit Fenix? There's still so many open
• 22:47
  questions, and I'm afraid at this point we're never going to
• 22:50
  get all of the answers to that. But yeah, so you know, some of
• 22:55
  the people that have been concerned about this have
• 22:59
  basically been saying, well, you know, if a if a multi billion
• 23:02
  dollar exchange can't do self custody correctly, then how do I
• 23:06
  know that I can? Well, you know, first of all,
• 23:10
  you probably don't have a billion dollars that you're
• 23:12
  trying to custody. Like you're not at the same
• 23:15
  level of of threats that you have against you.
• 23:19
  So you know, North Korea isn't going to be sending their hacker
• 23:23
  squad after you for your, you know, few $1000 or, or even
• 23:27
  probably for $1,000,000. They are going after those multi
• 23:31
  100 million and billion dollar targets.
• 23:33
  You know, their time and resources are precious.
• 23:36
  So they're going to go after the big boys.
• 23:39
  Beyond that, you know, part of part of the just Mile High
• 23:44
  aspect of security in this ecosystem is we need to stop
• 23:49
  creating such huge targets. And the way that you do that is
• 23:53
  you get as many people as possible to take their Bitcoin
• 23:56
  into self custody. If the culture is not pushing
• 24:03
  people to educate themselves and to learn and take the
• 24:06
  responsibility of self custody, then the inevitable outcome is
• 24:13
  the vast majority of people have all of their money in just a
• 24:17
  handful of trusted third parties.
• 24:20
  And those are going to be the targets for these state level
• 24:24
  actors who, as you said, are very advanced and persistent.
• 24:28
  And they will spend months and huge amounts of resources
• 24:32
  because they are backed by a nation state.
• 24:35
  And they only have to find, you know, one weakness.
• 24:38
  They only have to win and only have to like, succeed one time
• 24:43
  in order to have massive catastrophic consequences for
• 24:47
  many people. And and as as we've seen, you
• 24:50
  know, the consequences here actually affect everyone in a
• 24:53
  way, even the self custody folks, because whenever a
• 24:59
  attacker manages to get their hands on millions or billions of
• 25:05
  dollars worth of crypto assets, what are they going to do?
• 25:08
  They're going to try to dump it as quickly as possible.
• 25:11
  And, you know, first they're going to try to, you know, move
• 25:14
  it around to make it harder for anyone to try to confiscate.
• 25:18
  You know, I think one of the reasons that they started
• 25:19
  hopping to other chains was because there was a little bit
• 25:22
  of rumbling about, well, maybe we could, you know, rollback
• 25:25
  Ethereum or, you know, make a state change to Ethereum.
• 25:28
  But of course, once they start moving to other chains, that
• 25:30
  becomes, you know, practically impossible, infeasible to get
• 25:34
  consensus to do. But the ultimate medium term
• 25:39
  goal, of course, is for them to get out of the entire crypto
• 25:42
  ecosystem and and basically convert it into Fiat so that
• 25:45
  they can fund, you know, whatever their nation state
• 25:48
  programs are. You know, some some people
• 25:50
  speculate that this is going to funding like North Korean
• 25:53
  military programs. I don't know how much evidence
• 25:55
  we have of exactly where the money is going, but you know,
• 25:58
  it's probably nothing good. Yeah, absolutely.
• 26:01
  And, and one of the thing I found it interesting that they
• 26:06
  converted the ETH to Bitcoin, right?
• 26:08
  I found that interesting. And then, you know, it's, it's,
• 26:13
  let's see what happens. Cause a lot of, I saw, I saw a
• 26:15
  lot of people were talking about it how like they weren't,
• 26:18
  because all these addresses were being followed.
• 26:21
  They weren't going to be able to do anything with that stuff.
• 26:24
  But apparently that's not the case.
• 26:26
  It doesn't look like the Lazarus Group or any of these, you know,
• 26:29
  any of these hackers have any intention of giving that money
• 26:32
  back. So yeah, but that's, that's the
• 26:36
  way it is. Anyhow.
• 26:37
  Anyways, guys, before we move on to the next segment of the show,
• 26:40
  we're going to talk. We're going to be talking about
• 26:42
  the rise of $5.00 wrench attacks all over the world and what you
• 26:47
  can do to protect yourself. Also, Lop wrote an article that
• 26:52
  Jack Dorsey is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 26:55
  Apparently that has been making the rounds on X, that Jack
• 26:59
  Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto. I mean, I could have told you
• 27:02
  that. I could have said, you know,
• 27:03
  like that. You know, I have my suspicions.
• 27:06
  I'll never say them publicly, but Jack Dorsey is not wasn't is
• 27:09
  not on that list. But yeah.
• 27:12
  So we're going to be talking about that, of course.
• 27:13
  And then during the culture segment, we're going to be
• 27:15
  talking about Casa. Casa makes self custody easy.
• 27:20
  It lets you take all the advantages of multi sig, but the
• 27:25
  UI makes it incredibly easy for anyone who doesn't have
• 27:28
  experience with Bitcoin multi sig.
• 27:32
  It allows allows it for anyone to just pick it up and get all
• 27:35
  the benefits of security without the complexity of very
• 27:39
  sophisticated, you know, apps and UI and all that stuff.
• 27:43
  Casa makes it incredibly easy to to do all that.
• 27:46
  So we're going to be talking about that during the culture
• 27:48
  segment. It's going to be an incredible
• 27:50
  show guys, if you guys are enjoying it so far, we already
• 27:53
  broke 100 likes on YouTube. Help us break 200 likes.
• 27:56
  We're almost on four. We're almost at 400 live viewers
• 27:59
  on YouTube alone and 1500 live viewers across all platforms.
• 28:03
  And of course, shout out to the Rumble audience, which has by
• 28:06
  far the most savage chat everyone, the rebel audience, I
• 28:11
  feel like hits us with the metaphoric 2 by 4 every single
• 28:15
  day non-stop. So guys, it's going to be a
• 28:18
  great show. Before we jump into it, I do
• 28:20
  want to give a very special shout out, of course, to simply
• 28:23
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• 28:26
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• 29:02
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• 29:06
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• 29:09
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• 31:44
  years from now and your grandchildren are looking at you
• 31:47
  and they're saying, grandpapa, are you going to, are you going
• 31:49
  to give me your Bitcoin? And you look at them and their
• 31:52
  eyes and you say no because I wrote down my seed phrase on
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• 32:02
  At the time of recording, the Bitcoin price is 84,750 block
• 32:06
  height. That's at a discount, 22%
• 32:09
  discount. Specifically block height
• 32:10
  885,590 SAT's per dollar, 1180 market cap 1.68 trillion Bitcoin
• 32:18
  versus gold market cap 8.3% Percentage issued 94.42% decline
• 32:24
  from all time high -22.4% realized monetary inflation
• 32:29
  .97%. In the grand scheme of things,
• 32:32
  we're just getting started. I love this number.
• 32:35
  When me and Opti started covering this, I believe it was
• 32:37
  at like the 2% level. It's now below 1%.
• 32:41
  Bitcoins realized monetary inflation, continuing to take
• 32:43
  Fiat currencies to absolute school.
• 32:45
  And if you buy Bitcoin right now, you're getting it at a
• 32:48
  22.4% discount. Big of a bit of a dip.
• 32:53
  Anyways, I do want to focus on this because I think our friends
• 32:56
  over at at Casa do such a great job making multi sig easy,
• 33:02
  making your Bitcoin self custody set up extremely secure.
• 33:08
  And a lot of people think that, you know, maybe the wrong
• 33:13
  episode to say this, but I'm going to say this anyways.
• 33:16
  But a lot of people think that the the biggest vulnerability is
• 33:19
  their Bitcoin being hacked, right?
• 33:21
  And there's a Bitcoin being hacked like that's their biggest
• 33:23
  vulnerability. That's what they think.
• 33:27
  But in reality, the biggest vulnerabilities to your Bitcoin
• 33:31
  are two things. You either losing the ability to
• 33:35
  access your Bitcoin because you made your set up way too
• 33:38
  sophisticated and you just don't have the technical know how, so
• 33:41
  you lose your Bitcoin yourself. And then the other, which is the
• 33:44
  more physical type of attack, which is the infamous $5 wrench
• 33:48
  attack. And it seems like those types of
• 33:50
  attacks have been escalating over time and perfect we have
• 33:54
  the the what I consider the master of Bitcoin security on
• 33:58
  the show today. Jamison Lop to talk about all of
• 34:00
  this. So first, starting off with this
• 34:02
  article article, A Chinese man has been, I can't say that on
• 34:06
  YouTube, a Chinese man has been taken out on the southern South
• 34:12
  Korean island of Jeju and what appears to be a cryptocurrency
• 34:18
  robbery. Here's another one.
• 34:20
  An in depth news report on one of the attackers evolved in the
• 34:24
  Danbury kidnapping attempt last year that was linked to a
• 34:29
  several $100 million Bitcoin heist.
• 34:33
  Here is the next one. Six men are accused of
• 34:37
  kidnapping 3 family members and a nanny from a Chicago townhouse
• 34:41
  in October and forcing them to transfer $15 million in
• 34:46
  cryptocurrency before releasing them five days later.
• 34:51
  And last but not least, a specific type of worker named
• 34:55
  Zapry Outlaw is charged with kidnapping a man she met at a
• 34:59
  Las Vegas nightclub, taking nearly 300,000 in crypto
• 35:04
  currency from him. The victim might have been under
• 35:08
  the influence of something. So anyways, lop, this seems to
• 35:12
  be happening seems to be escalating.
• 35:15
  I think a lot of things there's trade-offs obviously with self
• 35:18
  custody. Self custody comes with personal
• 35:21
  responsibility comes with responsibility, complete
• 35:24
  responsibility. There is no one 800 number to
• 35:26
  call if you've lost your keys, right?
• 35:29
  And it also, I think, potentially opens you up to a,
• 35:35
  you know, the infamous $5 wrench attack, right?
• 35:38
  You know, like, everyone's thinking like, oh, it's going to
• 35:40
  be the sophisticated Lazarus group.
• 35:42
  But in reality, you buy a $5 wrench and you show up at
• 35:46
  someone's house and you say, I'm not going to leave until you
• 35:48
  give me your Bitcoin. And if not, I'm going to use
• 35:51
  this $5 wrench in ways that you don't like, right?
• 35:54
  So lot like, obviously, you know, you've been doing a great
• 35:58
  job covering all these events that have been happening
• 36:00
  worldwide. But first thing that sticks out
• 36:02
  to me is one happened in Chicago.
• 36:06
  So one happened actually in the United States, which you would
• 36:10
  think in the United States that these types of things weren't
• 36:13
  happening you that you've been covering this for so long.
• 36:17
  Is this surprising at all? I think what we're seeing is
• 36:22
  that just because you live in a safe area doesn't mean that
• 36:27
  you're safe from being targeted. Like these are highly specific,
• 36:32
  highly targeted attacks. Well, some of them are, right.
• 36:36
  So I guess we we need to break down the different types of
• 36:39
  attacks, right? So first of all, there's the
• 36:40
  like the crime of opportunity. And so I think the the one with
• 36:46
  the, as you said, specific type of worker, you know, that that
• 36:51
  sounded more like a crime of opportunity.
• 36:54
  This guy was probably going out, putting himself in a risky
• 36:57
  situation. He was probably flaunting as
• 36:59
  well through talking about how he was doing a lot of crypto
• 37:02
  trading stuff. And so that got him targeted
• 37:05
  just in the moment. Now, I think The thing is that
• 37:10
  people should be more worried about because they're harder to
• 37:13
  protect against are the ones where it's a home invasion type
• 37:17
  thing where you're getting targeted ahead of time.
• 37:20
  And, you know, these people, these attackers are putting a
• 37:23
  lot of effort into, you know, surveilling you and figuring out
• 37:27
  what your sort of day-to-day activities are and then
• 37:31
  essentially taking you hostage. And maybe they do that at your
• 37:35
  house if they feel like your house is not a hard target.
• 37:38
  Or in other cases, like last year, we saw Aceo of Wonderfi in
• 37:44
  Toronto. They just waited for him to exit
• 37:48
  his office at the end of the day, and they threw him into a
• 37:52
  van when he came out into the parking garage going home from
• 37:57
  work. So they were likely surveilling
• 37:59
  him and figured, hey, that's the most vulnerable time for us to
• 38:03
  pick him up. So, you know, I would say in
• 38:06
  general, these are still rare, like in in the greater context
• 38:11
  of how many million people obviously are owners of Bitcoin.
• 38:16
  But we also see the trends and the trend is that there seems to
• 38:21
  be a rough correlation between the exchange rates, you know,
• 38:24
  the general adoption and understanding or awareness of
• 38:29
  Bitcoin and the number of criminals who are then trying to
• 38:33
  apply their own skill sets in extracting these valuable assets
• 38:38
  from targets that are probably not nearly as hard as, you know,
• 38:42
  trying to hit like an armored car or a bank or, you know,
• 38:46
  traditional high value target. Sorry about that.
• 38:53
  And let me ask you something else, Lop, right.
• 38:55
  So you broke it down in the specific types of attacks.
• 38:57
  There's the opportunistic attack, right, with that
• 39:00
  specific type of worker that I said YouTube.
• 39:03
  And then there is the there's the planned attack.
• 39:06
  It seems like that Chicago attack that that seems like a
• 39:10
  pretty big heist 15,000,000. That seems like a planned
• 39:13
  attack. That seems like they they
• 39:15
  scouted that person out. Now my question to you, Lop.
• 39:18
  And you've written amazing articles on this, by the way.
• 39:22
  How do you protect yourself against this?
• 39:24
  Like, you know, how do you how do you go about your life, you
• 39:28
  know, rethinking your your safety and your family safety,
• 39:32
  right? Because us bitcoiners, we have
• 39:34
  this joke of like, look, I love the Second Amendment and I'm
• 39:38
  going to make my house into an effing castle.
• 39:41
  So, you know, like what, what would be the, the, the, what
• 39:46
  would be the advice to someone that potentially is, you know,
• 39:49
  they've been in Bitcoin for a while, they had they take self
• 39:52
  custody, but they they haven't really thought about this
• 39:55
  potential attack vector. What would your advice be to
• 39:58
  them? Yeah, I mean, the first thing is
• 40:01
  don't be an idiot. Don't put yourself into risky
• 40:04
  situations, you know, don't go conducting high value face to
• 40:08
  face trades with large amounts of of cash involved.
• 40:14
  Because you know, that's where a lot of these crimes of semi
• 40:17
  opportunity happen is people targeting the sort of face to
• 40:20
  face OTC traders, getting them to meet up in a sort of secluded
• 40:25
  hotel room or something like that.
• 40:26
  And then basically taking them hostage, tying them up and only
• 40:32
  performing 1/2 of the trade, as it were.
• 40:35
  But for the the more like long term targeted stuff with the
• 40:40
  home invasions and robberies and whatnot, the the main thing that
• 40:43
  you want to focus on is not becoming a target.
• 40:48
  And how do you not become a target?
• 40:50
  Well, you shut up, you don't go around, you know, flaunting
• 40:53
  wealth. You don't broadcast to the
• 40:56
  entire Internet that you're doing stuff with these assets.
• 41:01
  And preferably if, if it's too late for you, if you've already
• 41:05
  basically doxed yourself as being, you know, Bitcoin
• 41:09
  evangelist and holder, then you should take precautions so that
• 41:15
  it's hard to actually find your address where you sleep at
• 41:19
  night. That's what I did a number of
• 41:22
  years ago. It's, it's not easy, but it's
• 41:25
  feasible, at least in the United States.
• 41:29
  It can be more difficult in other countries that don't have,
• 41:31
  you know, some of the same legal options for, you know,
• 41:35
  protecting your address and your ownership of property and stuff.
• 41:40
  But privacy, I would say is the thing that people should be
• 41:44
  investing in the most. You think of, you know, any
• 41:48
  security system should be this multi layered system.
• 41:51
  So you know, you've got your your valuable thing that you're
• 41:53
  protecting at the center and then you're sort of rain fencing
• 41:56
  it with multiple layers of security.
• 41:58
  You never want to only have one layer of security.
• 42:01
  You should assume that various security mechanisms are going to
• 42:04
  get broken through. But at the outermost layer
• 42:09
  beyond the actual security is your privacy.
• 42:13
  And that privacy layer is very important because if you have
• 42:17
  strong privacy, you're not going to get targeted in the 1st place
• 42:20
  and you're not going to have to worry about whether or not your
• 42:22
  various layers of security are going to fail.
• 42:26
  So, you know, I, I do hear people, of course, basically
• 42:30
  saying, oh, I don't have to worry about this because I have
• 42:33
  guns and so on and so forth. And look, I'm a big firearm
• 42:36
  owner myself. There's plenty of photos and
• 42:38
  videos of me with guns on the Internet.
• 42:41
  And, you know, if it gets to that point, then you are in
• 42:47
  trouble. Like it means that all of your
• 42:49
  other privacy and security mechanisms have failed and now
• 42:53
  you're in a sort of last ditch effort to really fight for your
• 42:57
  life. And of course, there are plenty
• 42:59
  of things that can go wrong. Simply having a gun is not a
• 43:03
  guarantee that it will be successfully used to defend
• 43:07
  yourself. I think across the over 200
• 43:10
  different different incidents that I've measured, only only
• 43:15
  two of them were successfully defended with the firearm by the
• 43:19
  victim. And why?
• 43:21
  Why do you think that is? Like, is it just because you're
• 43:24
  again, they have a jump on you, you don't have a jump on them?
• 43:27
  Yeah, you can't be hyper vigilant all the time.
• 43:30
  Like unless you're going to go spend like a quarter, $1,000,000
• 43:33
  a year for 24/7, you know, around the clock bodyguard
• 43:36
  security, like nobody has eyes in the back of their heads and
• 43:38
  everybody has to sleep at some point.
• 43:41
  Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a
• 43:43
  very interesting, it's very interesting topic.
• 43:45
  And you know, it's, it's one of the trade-offs of of self
• 43:48
  custody, right? It's 1 something that I think
• 43:52
  bitcoiners all have to really put some thought into.
• 43:54
  But I agree with, I agree with you lap 100%.
• 43:57
  I think privacy is just that's the easiest one, right?
• 44:01
  Because if no one knows who you are, there's nowhere to look,
• 44:04
  right? And then the also the.
• 44:07
  Go on podcast with your real name and face that would be.
• 44:10
  A terrible idea. And also Opti did that for a
• 44:15
  while. No, I didn't.
• 44:16
  No, I didn't. You're lying.
• 44:17
  You put, you put, you put on a mask for a while.
• 44:20
  Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.
• 44:21
  I wasn't on forever and then Nico wrote me into not being a
• 44:24
  non, so now I'm wrecked. Thank you, Nico.
• 44:29
  But but hey, someone has. Someone has to talk about
• 44:33
  Bitcoin. Someone, someone, you have to do
• 44:36
  it right. But yeah, this is this is a
• 44:38
  very, very fascinating topic. Very interesting topic.
• 44:41
  Lop, if people want to go down the rabbit hole and read some of
• 44:44
  your articles, where could they find them?
• 44:47
  Yeah, check out blog.lop.net. I've got a lot of privacy
• 44:51
  articles there. And in general, if you want to
• 44:55
  go down the privacy rabbit hole, you should spend the like 40 or
• 44:59
  50 bucks to buy Extreme Privacy by Michael Bizzell on Amazon.
• 45:05
  Awesome, awesome. So you go.
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  So yeah, just go check out all this stuff.
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  This is all stuff, guys, that you have to think about if
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  you're taking Bitcoin into self custody, especially you've been
• 45:30
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  about geographically separating your seed phrases, think about
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  decoy wallets. Those are all things that could
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  Anyways, guys, we're going to jump into the news segment where
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• 48:43
  All right, everybody, let us let's talk about this gentleman
• 48:46
  right here, Jack Dorsey, which lot believes is Satoshi
• 48:50
  Nakamoto. No, just kidding.
• 48:51
  That's a joke. Blop.
• 48:53
  You dropped this article on your blog, blog.lop.net.
• 48:58
  The title of the audio the title, the title of the article
• 49:01
  for the audio listeners is Jack Dorsey is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 49:06
  Compilation of evidence that Jack Dorsey could not be the
• 49:09
  creator of Bitcoin. So let's go through some of
• 49:12
  that. Lately some folks have been
• 49:14
  pushing 1/2 baked narrative that Jack is Satoshi and you can find
• 49:18
  the arguments here. First one from Sean Murray Why
• 49:21
  Jack Dorsey is Satoshi Nakamoto. Jack Dorsey was one out of the
• 49:25
  1300 confirmed cyber puns in 1996 in his UMR e-mail wore an
• 49:31
  atom back T-shirt in the UMR yearbook.
• 49:35
  UMR students were called minors. Was a computer science and math
• 49:39
  major with an interest in crypto.
• 49:41
  Continues to go. Anyways, you guys get the point.
• 49:46
  Back to Lops blog and here this is Matthew Siegel.
• 49:50
  He says in the spirit of Full disclosure in intellectual
• 49:53
  honesty, prosperity's judgement and rigorous debate, I would
• 49:57
  like to share my strong belief. I have become personally
• 50:00
  convinced that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square and founder of X is
• 50:03
  Bitcoin's founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
• 50:06
  And he posted this was April, this was February 18th, this was
• 50:09
  February 15th. Wow, OK, this is all coming all
• 50:12
  all around the same time. But you know and Lop says here
• 50:17
  we go again. 2014 we found Satoshi, turns out he was hiding
• 50:21
  in plain sight and we listed in the phone book. 2025 we found
• 50:25
  Satoshi. Turns out he was hiding in plain
• 50:27
  sight and appearing on national television wearing Satoshi
• 50:31
  shirt. I have to play the meme.
• 50:33
  Here we go anyway. Continues to say it's true that
• 50:39
  Jack was a cyberpunk and a programmer, but that's the
• 50:42
  strongest evidence available to support the this theory.
• 50:45
  Everything else is circumstantial if not outright
• 50:48
  mental gymnastics via numerology.
• 50:51
  I will once again point out that Satoshi hunting is a Dick move,
• 50:55
  and thus I once again find myself interested in
• 50:58
  discrediting said Dicks. If you're going to post a
• 51:01
  Satoshi claim, you should put as much effort into trying to
• 51:04
  disprove improve your own thesis as you do trying to improve it.
• 51:08
  Otherwise you risk looking like a fool.
• 51:11
  Accusing someone of being Satoshi without providing
• 51:13
  bulletproof evidence makes you a massive asshole because you're
• 51:17
  painting a target on them. It continues to say.
• 51:21
  The funny thing about Jack is that unlike most cyberpunks, he
• 51:24
  was an extremely public individual.
• 51:26
  Who posted who? Who posted what he was up to on
• 51:30
  nearly an hourly basis during 2009 and 2010.
• 51:34
  Jack posted over 6200 tweets. This gives us a much larger data
• 51:39
  set to work with compared to Satoshi, who created fewer than
• 51:44
  1000 time stamps events during the same period.
• 51:47
  A little common sense. During that time period of 2009
• 51:51
  and 2010, Jack Dorsey was not only chairman of the board of
• 51:54
  Twitter, but also the CEO of the fledgling startup Square.
• 51:58
  It's quite clear that he was an extremely busy person, not only
• 52:01
  oversight, overseeing multiple companies, but traveling around
• 52:05
  the world, meeting important people, doing press conferences,
• 52:08
  speaking at conferences, and promoting philanthropic causes
• 52:11
  and more. His activities do not fit the
• 52:14
  profile of someone who had the time and mental bandwidth to
• 52:17
  also be. Did we lose Nico?
• 52:24
  It seems like it's. OK, OK.
• 52:27
  Oh wait, he's back. Oh did did I drop out?
• 52:29
  Yeah, for a second. You're back.
• 52:30
  You're back. What?
• 52:31
  What part? What part did I drop out?
• 52:33
  Of the persona part. Oh, OK, all right, perfect.
• 52:37
  I mean, so everything, the little common sense, all that.
• 52:40
  OK, anyways and. So the the my point here about
• 52:43
  Windows is that we know Satoshi was building on Windows.
• 52:47
  The first version was Windows only, so I shouldn't clarify
• 52:50
  that. Yeah, so, Lop, first of all,
• 52:53
  excellent article kind of debunking all of this.
• 52:56
  What, you know, what motivated you to do this?
• 53:00
  I mean, it's kind of a self-explanatory.
• 53:01
  You feel like these people are Dicks.
• 53:03
  Why are they Dicks for trying to expose Satoshi Nakamoto?
• 53:08
  Yeah, I guess I'll leave that to the very end the the conclusion
• 53:11
  in which I basically say that, look, Satoshi should be an idea
• 53:15
  and a myth. You know, I think we are all
• 53:18
  Satoshi. You know, Satoshi left the
• 53:19
  project to us. And the problem comes in when
• 53:23
  you try to paint Satoshi as a singular figure of a human
• 53:27
  being. You know, a human being is
• 53:29
  fragile as a single point of failure is going to be human.
• 53:34
  They're going to have said or done probably controversial
• 53:37
  things that people are going to dig into and try to use to
• 53:41
  basically cast aspersions upon the entire Bitcoin project.
• 53:46
  So as a result, I think Bitcoin is stronger when there is no,
• 53:50
  you know, single human point that people can basically try
• 53:55
  to. Denigrate 100%.
• 53:58
  And I think that's something that Bitcoiners fundamentally
• 54:01
  understand. I think if you've been in
• 54:03
  Bitcoin long enough, you understand that it's actually
• 54:08
  better that Satoshi's identity is never discovered because it
• 54:12
  if it is discovered, it it essentially connects his
• 54:14
  identity to a mortal, to a human being.
• 54:16
  Human beings have flaws, right? Human beings, you know, they
• 54:20
  have to sleep, they have to do other things, right?
• 54:23
  They have to eat. But if if he remains this
• 54:26
  mythological figure, there's really no flaws there, right?
• 54:30
  You only have like, you know, certain interactions that he's
• 54:34
  had. I know in the CSW lawsuit, it
• 54:38
  was very interesting to, to see some of some extra
• 54:42
  communications that Satoshi had that wasn't exposed to the
• 54:45
  public, right? So I, I fundamentally agree, I
• 54:48
  think the less we know, know about Satoshi, the better.
• 54:52
  I think that if you've been in Bitcoin long enough, you've come
• 54:57
  to realize that knowing the identity of Satoshi is not
• 55:01
  important. It's what Satoshi did is that is
• 55:04
  important. And I think it would be actually
• 55:07
  a negative to the industry and to the movement because this is
• 55:10
  really what Bitcoin is if we discovered his identity.
• 55:13
  I don't think that's ever going to happen, by the way.
• 55:16
  And I don't think those coins are ever going to move, by the
• 55:19
  way. Also, I think that he under, he
• 55:23
  fundamentally understood that he created something bigger than
• 55:27
  himself and that's why he walked away and left it to its own
• 55:30
  devices. And here we are 16 years later
• 55:33
  and we're talking about nation state adoption and all that
• 55:37
  stuff. So it's been a tremendous
• 55:39
  success. So if you're look, if you're
• 55:40
  still trying to discover Satoshi's identity, you don't
• 55:44
  get Bitcoin. That's my take.
• 55:46
  My maybe I'm wrong, but that that's my opinion.
• 55:49
  Opti, what's your take on this brother?
• 55:52
  Yeah, well, I'm with lap on this one.
• 55:55
  I don't think Jack Dorsey is Satoshi and I don't really need
• 55:59
  any any evidence for this. It's maybe it's just a vibe
• 56:02
  check here. I just I does makes no sense to
• 56:05
  me. And I I find it interesting
• 56:07
  though part of this idea, like you were saying, Nico, if you
• 56:10
  are trying to find out who Satoshi is, you don't understand
• 56:12
  Bitcoin. I find it interesting that
• 56:15
  usually for a lot of new people in Bitcoin, this is like their
• 56:18
  one caveat. This is the one thing that they
• 56:21
  always say that, you know, makes them not trust Bitcoin.
• 56:24
  And us Bitcoiners are completely opposite.
• 56:26
  It's like this is a good thing that we don't know who Satoshi
• 56:28
  is, whereas most people come in. It's like, how could you trust
• 56:31
  this Internet money thing with an anonymous creator?
• 56:34
  Like, don't you want to know who it is?
• 56:36
  And I'm like, no, it doesn't matter.
• 56:37
  This is the beauty of it. This is this is the whole point
• 56:40
  that the creator came anonymous, gave us a gift and disappeared
• 56:44
  like Batman. And this, This is why no.
• 56:46
  One controls the. Network, but an interesting kind
• 56:49
  of take on this is that those bitcoiners on Twitter that are
• 56:53
  saying this they're not like newbie bitcoiners.
• 56:56
  And so I, I find it kind of interesting that they are
• 56:58
  pushing this narrative and I wonder what the incentive is and
• 57:01
  you know that's that's kind of my take on this.
• 57:03
  It's like it's not like they're new people into the space that
• 57:06
  are saying this. They've been around for a couple
• 57:08
  of years and now they're pushing this.
• 57:10
  So that's what that's like the things that gets me kind of
• 57:13
  wondering, like what what is the incentive to push that?
• 57:16
  Jack Dorsey is Satoshi. But yeah, like I said, it's it's
• 57:19
  usually newer people in the space that come in and they
• 57:22
  wonder who Satoshi is. And all of us here that been
• 57:24
  around for a while were like, dude, it doesn't matter.
• 57:27
  I don't care. I literally don't care.
• 57:28
  I don't ever want to know. I hope he never comes out.
• 57:31
  But it's funny that when new people come in, they always ask
• 57:33
  the same questions. Like, how could you trust this
• 57:36
  money? You don't even know who created.
• 57:37
  I'm like, this is a good thing. What are you talking about?
• 57:40
  Do you even understand what's going on here?
• 57:42
  I think that some people just want to have a hero or a leader
• 57:45
  figure and that, you know, it would be cool if Satoshi
• 57:48
  happened to also be this guy who's a billionaire and one of
• 57:51
  the richest people outside of the Bitcoin, the Satoshi mind.
• 57:56
  I think that's a similar reason why some people have floated the
• 57:58
  Elon Musk theory, which is, you know, similarly ridiculous.
• 58:02
  But, you know, people come in and I think they want to know
• 58:06
  who Satoshi is because they think that there might be a
• 58:08
  backdoor in the code. You know, Satoshi could be the
• 58:10
  NSA or the CIA, and it doesn't matter because we know what the
• 58:15
  code does. We can look at it.
• 58:16
  It's open source. It's been reviewed by countless
• 58:19
  individuals who have tried to find weaknesses in it for 15
• 58:23
  years now and then I think some other people are slightly
• 58:26
  worried about the economics aspect of, you know, one person
• 58:29
  controlling such a large portion of the supply.
• 58:33
  And I tend to agree with Nico that the coins are never going
• 58:36
  to move. I have a blog post a few years
• 58:38
  ago entitled Satoshi was Not a Greedy Minor in which I go into
• 58:43
  the really deep technical details of Satoshi's mining
• 58:47
  operation and I show that they actually mined a lot slower than
• 58:52
  they could have. And so my thesis or Satoshi's
• 58:55
  mining operation is that it was never meant to accumulate coins.
• 59:01
  It was really meant to act as a heartbeat for the network.
• 59:04
  And you can actually see that Satoshi would stop mining for 5
• 59:08
  minutes after finding a block to basically give the rest of the
• 59:13
  world a chance to try to find a block.
• 59:15
  And then over the the years, Satoshi actually decreased their
• 59:20
  hash rate as the hash rate of the rest of that network
• 59:23
  increased. And so that that was because
• 59:26
  they no longer needed to be that stabilizing force to ensure that
• 59:30
  blocks were still being produced at a consistent rate in those
• 59:33
  very early days. 100% no. And he was, and I remember some
• 59:38
  of the earlier, earlier communications.
• 59:41
  Lop to add to your point, he was like basically saying like guys
• 59:44
  like calm, you know, like, let's make sure that this hash is
• 59:47
  distributed right? Like let's calm down because in
• 59:51
  the beginning it was, it was, it was very delicate.
• 59:53
  You could you can even make an argument that it was, it was
• 59:56
  centralized. Lop, isn't there a story that
• 59:58
  essentially Satoshi ran Bitcoin and stealth in the for like,
• 1:00:04
  kind of like in the very, very early days on purpose?
• 1:00:10
  I'm not sure what you mean by stealth.
• 1:00:12
  I mean, I think he, he. He was running.
• 1:00:14
  He was running the software by himself.
• 1:00:19
  No, like there were other early miners even in the first, you
• 1:00:23
  know, day or so of blocks. If I recall correctly, there was
• 1:00:27
  actually some logic in the Bitcoin client at the time where
• 1:00:32
  it would not start mining blocks until there was at least some
• 1:00:35
  other peer connected to the node.
• 1:00:38
  Interesting. So he so someone else had to is
• 1:00:42
  is that I don't want to ask what that person is, but I mean like,
• 1:00:46
  like some of these people are are public, are they not?
• 1:00:50
  Yes, we do know some of the very early minors and then there are
• 1:00:53
  plenty of those early blocks that as far as we know have not
• 1:00:57
  been attributed to any specific identity.
• 1:00:59
  Yeah, those guys, they're doing it right.
• 1:01:01
  They're doing it right. They're watching all this
• 1:01:03
  content, they're going to the conferences.
• 1:01:05
  They. They're not.
• 1:01:06
  Going to the conferences. No, they might.
• 1:01:08
  You have no idea. You would have no idea, right?
• 1:01:11
  Anyways, alright guys. Hey wait, Nico, before we go on,
• 1:01:13
  since we got Lop here, SpongeBob SquarePants in the chat has a
• 1:01:16
  question here, and I think Lop's perfect, perfect person to add,
• 1:01:20
  why hasn't Satoshi's wallet's been hacked?
• 1:01:24
  Well, the keys might have been destroyed.
• 1:01:26
  I think there's there's plenty of reason to believe why the
• 1:01:29
  keys are no longer laying around.
• 1:01:33
  Like I said, you know, my take away from looking into Satoshi's
• 1:01:38
  mining activities was that it was actually a very specialized
• 1:01:42
  machine with it was running specialized multi threaded
• 1:01:46
  mining software that was not like public open source mining
• 1:01:50
  software was not the software that was built into the Bitcoin
• 1:01:53
  client at the time. And so that's, you know, another
• 1:01:57
  reason why I believe that Satoshi basically just had that
• 1:02:00
  infrastructure running to keep the network going for those
• 1:02:04
  first 18 months to 24 months. And then once the network seemed
• 1:02:09
  like it had bootstrapped itself, they turned it off.
• 1:02:11
  So you know what happened to those keys?
• 1:02:14
  Maybe they destroyed them, maybe they still exist.
• 1:02:18
  But I think it's basically there.
• 1:02:20
  That money is like too hot. Like I don't know how you would
• 1:02:23
  actually spend any of that money without putting yourself at
• 1:02:26
  extreme risk of of being doxed. 100%, I 100% agree with that.
• 1:02:31
  I do, I do. Before we move on to the next
• 1:02:33
  segment, I do want to end or you know, finish off some of the
• 1:02:38
  reasons as to why Jack Dorsey is not Satoshi.
• 1:02:41
  A LOP lined it up there, lined it up here because I'm sure Jack
• 1:02:46
  used Windows at some point in his life, but he has been a die
• 1:02:49
  hard Apple fan ever since the original iPhone came out.
• 1:02:52
  And it says can't use my computer because both my Magic
• 1:02:55
  Track pack and keyboard are out of batteries.
• 1:02:58
  And it says most of the evidence in this report is based upon
• 1:03:01
  timestamps, meet space activities.
• 1:03:03
  Jack was bicoastal in 2009 and 2010, frequently alternating
• 1:03:07
  between San Francisco and New York because those are the
• 1:03:09
  locations of Twitter HQ. And then I think this is the
• 1:03:13
  most interesting one right here. I think out of out of the things
• 1:03:16
  that you've posted LOP. This to me is, I mean, like,
• 1:03:20
  unless Satoshi could be two places at the same time, like I
• 1:03:24
  feel like Jack Dorsey just planning all of this, you know.
• 1:03:28
  But anyways, so Satoshi's public activity hour of the day.
• 1:03:32
  And then here is Jack Dorsey's public Jack Dorsey's tweets hour
• 1:03:38
  of the day. Obviously he needs to be awake
• 1:03:40
  to tweet. I mean, I mean, I don't know
• 1:03:42
  Lop. He could be the sophisticated
• 1:03:44
  shadow coder and be planning his tweets.
• 1:03:48
  Technically, like any activity can be automated, right, But you
• 1:03:52
  know, you you kind of have to go with the Occam's razor on on
• 1:03:56
  yes, like is the more complicated question or answer
• 1:04:00
  to it really the more likely one.
• 1:04:01
  I think that. I have a question for you.
• 1:04:04
  Lop like it. It seems like Satoshi based on
• 1:04:08
  this. What?
• 1:04:10
  Seems like he was on the E in US time zone.
• 1:04:14
  Yeah, it really lines up well with what you would consider to
• 1:04:17
  be a typical waking and sleeping schedule of someone on the
• 1:04:20
  Pacific Time zone. Interesting.
• 1:04:24
  Very, very OK All right everybody, we're going to move
• 1:04:26
  on to the culture segment. We have tons.
• 1:04:29
  We have tons to cover and tons to talk about.
• 1:04:32
  We're going to be talking about Casa.
• 1:04:34
  It makes multi sig easy. It makes self custody easy.
• 1:04:38
  There's an app that I've been recommending to friends and
• 1:04:40
  family because I want them to have all the benefits of taking
• 1:04:44
  self custody, but also but not losing their keys.
• 1:04:49
  I don't know how many times I've found myself in the situation
• 1:04:51
  where either, you know, just family members of mine.
• 1:04:54
  They're like Nico, I lost my seed phrase.
• 1:04:56
  I'm like, don't worry, we can just replace it, right?
• 1:04:59
  So the Casa app enables that makes it easy.
• 1:05:02
  So we're going to talk about all of that.
• 1:05:04
  We're going to hit the culture segment.
• 1:05:05
  We will be right back. I want to give a shout out to
• 1:05:09
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• 1:06:47
  All right, everybody, we are back guys.
• 1:06:49
  So we're going to talk about Casa and of course we have
• 1:06:52
  Jameson Lop here in the house joining us today on Simply
• 1:06:55
  Bitcoin Live. Jameson is the CTO of Casa.
• 1:07:00
  Jameson quick elevator pitch. If you had one minute in an
• 1:07:04
  elevator with someone and they're like Jameson, what is
• 1:07:08
  this Casa thing? How would you describe it?
• 1:07:12
  So basically, we help you be your own bank and we make it
• 1:07:17
  easy to do so because you know, when you are setting up
• 1:07:21
  essentially your own bank security, there's many, many
• 1:07:23
  different decisions to be made, many best practices to be
• 1:07:26
  followed. And if you're not deep in the
• 1:07:29
  weeds of all of that, then it's very helpful to have a software
• 1:07:34
  that basically guides you down following best practices, and to
• 1:07:38
  have actual humans that you can talk to who can help you
• 1:07:42
  understand the trade-offs of the different decisions that need to
• 1:07:46
  be made. Great, and I love I love that
• 1:07:49
  phrase. We help you be your own bank.
• 1:07:52
  That that's a very, very powerful statement.
• 1:07:55
  And and I agree. I think, you know, taking
• 1:07:59
  Bitcoin into self custody, especially with multi sig and
• 1:08:02
  all the capabilities that that gives you, you feel like your
• 1:08:05
  own bank. It's it's it's badass AF.
• 1:08:08
  Do you have any questions before I move on?
• 1:08:10
  Yeah, definitely. So when we were starting the
• 1:08:13
  show, I asked Slob, what's the main message you want to get
• 1:08:15
  across to our audience and Lop said it very simply that we are
• 1:08:19
  fighting an uphill battle of convenience when it comes to
• 1:08:22
  self custody. So can we elaborate on that for
• 1:08:25
  the audience? I know our audience is pretty
• 1:08:26
  much most of them are self custody maximalist, but we still
• 1:08:30
  see some people that are on the fence about taking their Bitcoin
• 1:08:33
  into personal custody. Yeah.
• 1:08:36
  I mean, beyond just, you know, our operations as a company, you
• 1:08:40
  know, this is a systemic issue for the entire ecosystem.
• 1:08:44
  And my sort of black pill view of privacy and security is that,
• 1:08:52
  you know, unfortunately, human nature is to prioritize
• 1:08:55
  convenience at the expense of almost everything else.
• 1:08:58
  And we know that using a trusted third party to hold your money
• 1:09:03
  for you is always going to be the most convenient thing.
• 1:09:05
  Basically pushing off all of the responsibility to someone else
• 1:09:11
  is easy. And we do that in many different
• 1:09:13
  aspects of our lives. So it's basically second nature
• 1:09:16
  to us. So what we're trying to do is
• 1:09:19
  we're trying to make it as easy as possible, reduce as much
• 1:09:22
  friction as possible so that people can be more confident to
• 1:09:26
  take that responsibility. And we want people to be able to
• 1:09:31
  sleep at night with the understanding that, you know,
• 1:09:35
  they can do self custody without screwing it up and without
• 1:09:38
  having to worry that, you know, there's a weakness somewhere or
• 1:09:42
  that, you know, one thing might go wrong and be catastrophic.
• 1:09:45
  So that's everything that we're doing is to put people into an
• 1:09:49
  architecture that eliminates single points of failure because
• 1:09:53
  we understand things go wrong, humans make mistakes, and you
• 1:09:57
  don't want to be in a really brittle set up where one thing
• 1:10:00
  going wrong results in you losing all of your assets.
• 1:10:04
  Totally lot you've been in Bitcoin for a long time, your
• 1:10:08
  cybersecurity expert from your vantage point from where we are
• 1:10:12
  today, do you think self custody or rather the idea of people
• 1:10:17
  self custody, do you think that's going to improve or is
• 1:10:19
  this will this always be a niche idea for the the like average
• 1:10:23
  mainstream layman? I, I suspect that in relative
• 1:10:29
  terms, you know, as we go more mainstream, that the vast
• 1:10:34
  majority of adoption will happen through trusted third parties.
• 1:10:38
  I think that's just the, the reality of the situation, at
• 1:10:41
  least in our lifetimes. The problem here, it really is,
• 1:10:47
  I think cultural and it, and it's also, it's a result of how
• 1:10:51
  human civilization has developed over millennia is that we have
• 1:10:56
  created these economic powerhouses that have been able
• 1:11:00
  to leverage extreme efficiency and performance gains through
• 1:11:05
  specialization of tasks. And, and so we've created these
• 1:11:09
  systems where you're outsourcing the vast majority of the, you
• 1:11:13
  know, important aspects of your lives to 3rd party specialists
• 1:11:17
  because they're going to be better at doing something than
• 1:11:20
  you are if you had to do everything yourself.
• 1:11:23
  Like, This is why it's so much easier and efficient for us to
• 1:11:27
  go to the grocery store than it is to grow our own food and
• 1:11:29
  slaughter our own animals. However, while that's convenient
• 1:11:36
  and it's efficient, it is also fragile.
• 1:11:40
  It's, it's creating all of these potential points of failure such
• 1:11:44
  that, you know, if the supply chains for food and, and
• 1:11:48
  delivery of important, you know, medicines and, and other
• 1:11:52
  physical items broke down, you know, we'd be in pretty dire
• 1:11:56
  straits within a week or two with the way that the modern
• 1:11:59
  society is architected. So that similar thing basically
• 1:12:04
  trickles down to, you know, where we are with self custody.
• 1:12:07
  You know, people who have bank accounts are used to the idea of
• 1:12:11
  having all of their money in a trusted third party who's
• 1:12:14
  managing it for them. And so this is, as a result, is
• 1:12:17
  kind of a cultural issue where I suspect that it could take
• 1:12:22
  generations for us to kind of reverse course on that and
• 1:12:27
  really teach our children and our grandchildren to take
• 1:12:31
  responsibility for some of these extremely important aspects of
• 1:12:34
  their lives. Totally.
• 1:12:35
  Yeah, I, I, I very much agree that it's a culture issue.
• 1:12:39
  Now you did kind of mention about businesses and Bitcoin
• 1:12:42
  treasuries. So as someone that is working on
• 1:12:46
  a Bitcoin treasury product, how big of a product or a problem do
• 1:12:50
  you think that these honeypots are like Coinbase and etcetera
• 1:12:55
  in the in the space right now? We know a lot of the Bitcoin
• 1:12:57
  ETFs are all custody essentially at the same companies.
• 1:13:00
  And obviously it's your kind of life motto here.
• 1:13:04
  Your life purpose is to obviously destroy, distribute
• 1:13:07
  that security away from these honeypots.
• 1:13:10
  So how big of an issue do you think this is?
• 1:13:13
  And is this something that you think, you know, that keeps you
• 1:13:16
  up at night? Do you think we might see
• 1:13:18
  another, I don't know, exchange blow up?
• 1:13:20
  Like what? What's your thoughts on that, on
• 1:13:22
  that perspective? Oh, I mean, look at what
• 1:13:27
  happened last week, right? Like this is it's not stopping.
• 1:13:30
  I mean, we are, we are improving security best practices, but
• 1:13:35
  security is a cat and mouse game.
• 1:13:37
  It's a never ending battle. And so as this ecosystem
• 1:13:40
  continues to grow and the total value of the ecosystem grows,
• 1:13:44
  and then the total value of the single points of failure,
• 1:13:47
  honeypot custodians continues to grow, then that means that the
• 1:13:53
  attackers are incentivized to spend even more resources trying
• 1:13:57
  to find the weaknesses in them because the payoff of of a
• 1:14:00
  successful attack is also growing.
• 1:14:03
  So, you know, I think that in terms of risk, it's just it's
• 1:14:07
  better to distribute risk across millions of different points
• 1:14:12
  such that, you know, if, if the average individual has a, a
• 1:14:17
  failure and, and their self custody gets successfully
• 1:14:21
  attacked, yes, it could be very bad for that individual.
• 1:14:24
  But there's no, you know, ripple effects across the rest of the
• 1:14:27
  ecosystem where, where you, you don't have like one failure
• 1:14:32
  causing hundreds of thousands or millions of people to lose their
• 1:14:35
  money instantaneously. And then you don't have the the
• 1:14:39
  economic pressure, as we talked about earlier of, you know, a
• 1:14:42
  billion dollars worth of liquidity trying to be extracted
• 1:14:46
  from the system as quickly as possible by the attackers.
• 1:14:49
  So LOP, we have a, we have a A. It seems like we have a Casa
• 1:14:52
  user in the chat, so I don't know how to pronounce that.
• 1:14:56
  OP, do you want to give it a go? Psycho Psycho psycho 05 says
• 1:15:01
  Lop. Can we have foundation and cold
• 1:15:03
  cards for signing devices? I haven't used Casa because we
• 1:15:06
  get sent treasors. Yeah, we support both of those
• 1:15:11
  devices and you know, you can either buy them for yourself off
• 1:15:15
  the shelf or it really depends on like which tier you're at.
• 1:15:18
  I think we only really offer the customization of hardware at the
• 1:15:24
  private clients tier if I recall correctly.
• 1:15:26
  But you can you can definitely buy any of our supported devices
• 1:15:32
  and we support the cold card Mark four and the Q both seem to
• 1:15:38
  work pretty well as well as foundation passport.
• 1:15:41
  It just it depends on if you prefer doing the like AQR code
• 1:15:46
  based signing or not. And that can be a bit tricky.
• 1:15:49
  I have you know several articles about multi sig performance
• 1:15:53
  testing of like signing really large data size transactions.
• 1:15:58
  Yeah. And and let me ask you something
• 1:16:00
  else, Lob. So maybe in in the chat, the
• 1:16:06
  supplies right and the reason that I love the cost of product
• 1:16:09
  is again, it makes the whole self custody aspect easy without
• 1:16:14
  sacrificing convenience. And I think you guys have
• 1:16:17
  mastered the UIUI is incredible even has a little haptic tick to
• 1:16:22
  make you feel good when you sign something right.
• 1:16:25
  So and I think that makes it very easy for someone that
• 1:16:29
  perhaps is transitioning from the Fiat standard, the Fiat
• 1:16:32
  matrix to a Bitcoin standard where they're taking self
• 1:16:35
  custody. And it kind of gives them the
• 1:16:37
  same vibe of, oh, this is like a bank, but it's not a bank
• 1:16:40
  because it's self custody. So you guys cover a lot of the
• 1:16:43
  complexities there. What would your pitch be to
• 1:16:46
  Someone Like, You know, like, hey, look, I I already have a
• 1:16:49
  single sig and then I'm using, you know, I'm using a passport,
• 1:16:53
  I'm using a cold card and you know, I'm on I have Sparrow
• 1:16:56
  like, you know, why should I use Casa?
• 1:17:00
  Now look, if you are comfortable with using the totally free
• 1:17:04
  tools that are out there, then go for it.
• 1:17:08
  You know, nothing, nothing that we do can't be replicated by
• 1:17:12
  someone if you put in enough time and effort to do so.
• 1:17:15
  And in fact, like if you want to try to replicate everything that
• 1:17:19
  we've done, I highly recommend that you look up our wealth
• 1:17:23
  security protocol. And that is several dozen pages
• 1:17:28
  explaining all of the threats that we're trying to mitigate
• 1:17:32
  and exactly what steps that and decisions that we made in our
• 1:17:36
  architecture to mitigate those threats.
• 1:17:40
  But really I think a lot of it comes down, as I said earlier,
• 1:17:44
  to convenience, to really providing a very simple user
• 1:17:50
  experience. Like we on purpose, we do not
• 1:17:53
  offer a lot of the more advanced functionality that you can do
• 1:17:57
  with Bitcoin. And that's because we think that
• 1:17:59
  it's actually kind of dangerous, You know, it could be a foot gun
• 1:18:03
  in the hands of an unsophisticated user.
• 1:18:05
  So what we're trying to do is we're trying to build super high
• 1:18:09
  security and cold storage set up that eliminates single points of
• 1:18:13
  failure and is accessible to a non-technical user that you may
• 1:18:19
  not know all of the insurance and outs of the protocol and
• 1:18:22
  security best practices and such.
• 1:18:24
  So what you're really doing is you're saving yourself a lot of
• 1:18:28
  effort of having to learn all of those best practices and put
• 1:18:32
  them into place. But it's certainly possible to
• 1:18:35
  do it yourself. And you know, I think that's one
• 1:18:38
  of the great things about Bitcoin, like you don't need us
• 1:18:42
  to self custody. We're really here to help you
• 1:18:46
  get into the best possible position as quickly and as
• 1:18:50
  easily as possible. A. 100% and but someone who it
• 1:18:57
  learning, learn, I learned self learn multi sigs, specifically
• 1:19:01
  using electron and Sparrow. There's different standards.
• 1:19:04
  People don't realize this, right?
• 1:19:06
  If you don't update your devices, all of a sudden it's
• 1:19:09
  like, wait a second. Oh my God, I can't spend right
• 1:19:12
  there. There's there's a lot.
• 1:19:13
  It's it's a very deep rabbit hole.
• 1:19:14
  Ladies and gentlemen, electron crashes when you like.
• 1:19:18
  There's so many like you know, and that's what I love about
• 1:19:22
  Casa is that you guys make this easy.
• 1:19:26
  You guys make something that is highly complex, easy to use for
• 1:19:31
  the everyday user and of course you guys offer support and all
• 1:19:34
  that stuff. Now my question to you, Lop, is,
• 1:19:38
  so you guys offer a two of three and a three of five.
• 1:19:41
  What happened for anyone doesn't know.
• 1:19:43
  So the two of three you hold, the user holds two of two of the
• 1:19:49
  three keys Casa owns one or not owns, but holds one key.
• 1:19:53
  And then for the three of five, Casa holds one key, the user
• 1:19:58
  holds four. One of the keys is on your
• 1:20:01
  phone, which is backed up to iCloud or the Google equivalent.
• 1:20:05
  And then the the the rest of the three keys the the user, the
• 1:20:12
  user holds. Now, what's really interesting
• 1:20:14
  about the three of five? Is that it actually feels like
• 1:20:17
  you're signing a two of three because the the phone key, it's
• 1:20:22
  like a basically it's like as soon as it's, you know, you, you
• 1:20:25
  put in your phone password with your face or your fingerprint,
• 1:20:28
  it like it signs automatically, right.
• 1:20:31
  So the experience is is very pleasant in in my experience.
• 1:20:36
  And let me let me ask you something lop, So what what
• 1:20:39
  happens if Casa disappears? You know, could, could people
• 1:20:42
  still access their Bitcoin? Like, for whatever reason, the
• 1:20:44
  app is pulled from the from the App Store, You know, something
• 1:20:49
  funky happens, you know, would, could people still sovereign
• 1:20:52
  recover their Bitcoin? Absolutely and because we're not
• 1:20:57
  doing anything proprietary here, we're not doing any sort of like
• 1:21:00
  proprietary multi party computation or should be your
• 1:21:03
  secret sharing or anything like that.
• 1:21:05
  We're doing the you know, native on chain multi sig, which means
• 1:21:10
  that there are many other wallet software out there that supports
• 1:21:13
  the same thing. So, you know, we added wallet
• 1:21:16
  descriptor support last year that makes it really easy to,
• 1:21:21
  you know, export and import the sort of skeleton, you know,
• 1:21:24
  descriptor of your wallet. And you know, you can import
• 1:21:28
  that into like Electron or Sparrow, you know, any, any
• 1:21:32
  other wallet that supports sort of arbitrary complex multi sig
• 1:21:36
  setups. And the first thing that
• 1:21:39
  actually happens when you finish initializing your multi sig
• 1:21:44
  vault with Casa is that we send you instructions for what we
• 1:21:48
  call sovereign recovery. And that's basically, you know,
• 1:21:51
  if Casa ceases to function or exist or, or for whatever is not
• 1:21:55
  working, then you have the your step by step instructions for
• 1:22:00
  how to recreate your wallet and spend your funds without ever
• 1:22:04
  relying upon our software or our infrastructure.
• 1:22:06
  So I say this a lot, but the primary point of Casa is to
• 1:22:11
  eliminate single points of failure, and that includes Casa
• 1:22:13
  itself as an organization. Yeah, and, and you guys do a
• 1:22:17
  very good job at that because I've been in situations where,
• 1:22:20
  and I mentioned this earlier where you know, someone loses
• 1:22:25
  one of their keys on their multi sig setup.
• 1:22:28
  It's incredibly easy to replace you just you you press a button,
• 1:22:32
  a little haptic makes you feel good about losing your key,
• 1:22:36
  sends you an e-mail, you plug in your new device and boom, BOM
• 1:22:40
  Bing. You know, your, your, you know,
• 1:22:42
  your, you know, your wallet is, is good to go without that UI.
• 1:22:46
  You don't know the only way, you know, by trial and error.
• 1:22:52
  And it took me a while and you know, Sparrow wasn't around, but
• 1:22:56
  so I had to learn a lot of this stuff on Electrum and I'm still
• 1:22:59
  an electrum junkie and I love electrum, despite what people
• 1:23:02
  say. OK, it's a great wallet.
• 1:23:05
  But yeah, it it you guys essentially make a very
• 1:23:09
  sophisticated thing incredibly easy to use without sacrificing
• 1:23:15
  security. And it's convenient for people
• 1:23:18
  that want to benefit from multi sig, but again, don't have the
• 1:23:22
  technical capability of technical know how to to to go
• 1:23:25
  down that. Now my question to you LOB as
• 1:23:27
  well is, OK, so let's talk about geographically multi sig,
• 1:23:34
  geographically separated keys, right?
• 1:23:37
  Because I think that is incredibly important, especially
• 1:23:39
  if you're using multi sig. Could you talk a little bit
• 1:23:42
  about that, right, Keeping your keys in different locations and
• 1:23:46
  that obviously helps protect you from, you know, $5 Reg attack,
• 1:23:51
  which we were talking earlier. And there's something that
• 1:23:53
  you've said in the past that really resonated with me and
• 1:23:56
  I've never forgotten it. It will take an attacker just as
• 1:24:03
  much time to spend your Bitcoin than it takes you to spend your
• 1:24:07
  Bitcoin. And that's the way that you
• 1:24:08
  should be looking at it, right? So if it's if it takes you 10
• 1:24:12
  minutes to, you know, sign your big sign a transaction, send
• 1:24:17
  your Bitcoin out of cold storage in your mind, the back of your
• 1:24:20
  mind, you'd be like, it will take an attacker 10 minutes to
• 1:24:22
  send Bitcoin, whatever. But if you know that your multi
• 1:24:25
  sig setup and your keys are geographically separated, so it
• 1:24:29
  takes some couple hours to go, you know, from place A to place
• 1:24:34
  B and etcetera, etcetera, then it becomes a little bit more
• 1:24:37
  complex, right? And then it's not just a, you
• 1:24:40
  know, let me just jump in here and stay a couple hours.
• 1:24:42
  Now it's like, Oh my God, this might take a couple days.
• 1:24:45
  Obviously that raises the risk for the attacker himself.
• 1:24:50
  So it's it's just some some things to talk about.
• 1:24:53
  So can you talk a little bit about that Lop geographically
• 1:24:56
  separated keys for multi sig? Well, yeah, so the name of the
• 1:25:01
  game when it comes to building the best possible multi sig
• 1:25:07
  setup, because multi sig in and of itself is not panacea.
• 1:25:11
  If you keep all your keys at home, then congratulations,
• 1:25:15
  you've introduced a single point of failure to your multi sig
• 1:25:17
  setup. Distributing the keys in as many
• 1:25:23
  different ways as possible is what gives you great strength,
• 1:25:27
  and it actually lets you leverage the benefit of what we
• 1:25:31
  call additive security. It's basically, you know,
• 1:25:35
  strength through diversity. And this is diversity in a
• 1:25:39
  number of different things. You know, you mentioned
• 1:25:40
  geographic diversity, but also you want diversity of like what
• 1:25:45
  devices they're stored on, what are the physical security
• 1:25:49
  protocols around where each device is.
• 1:25:53
  And basically you want all of these things to be different
• 1:25:58
  because when something goes wrong, you want that particular
• 1:26:03
  attack or failure scenario to only affect one of your keys and
• 1:26:07
  not affect all of your keys. And when you're in a more of a,
• 1:26:11
  you know, homogeneous set up, then it's more likely that you
• 1:26:15
  have one weakness that could potentially affect enough of
• 1:26:18
  your keys that either your money gets lost or stolen.
• 1:26:22
  So you're having geographic separation.
• 1:26:25
  Yes. I mean, it's, it's obviously
• 1:26:28
  that's the way to protect against wrench attacks.
• 1:26:30
  But even more commonly, it's just how you protect against
• 1:26:33
  natural disasters and, you know, things going wrong like your
• 1:26:37
  house burning down. We've had clients whose houses
• 1:26:39
  burned down. We've had clients who have been
• 1:26:42
  in flood zones and if, you know, had various types of
• 1:26:47
  catastrophic destruction to their primary residence.
• 1:26:51
  And so having you know, keys in different geographic areas that
• 1:26:55
  are, you know, prone to different types of weather and
• 1:26:59
  natural disaster events gives you some improved, you know,
• 1:27:03
  robustness there. If you want to take it to the
• 1:27:05
  extreme, not just upon like wrench attacks, but upon like
• 1:27:09
  nation states 61O2 seizure style attacks, our most paranoid
• 1:27:15
  clients actually go to the extreme of distributing their
• 1:27:19
  keys in different countries, different jurisdictions that you
• 1:27:23
  do not play nicely with each other.
• 1:27:27
  So that, you know, it's unlikely for A61O2 attack to be able to
• 1:27:30
  reach across borders and be able to, you know, force the turning
• 1:27:37
  over of those keys that are, you know, outside of the reach of
• 1:27:40
  any given justice system. Yeah, love the way guys, this is
• 1:27:45
  all things that you got to think about.
• 1:27:47
  These are all things again, with great power comes great
• 1:27:49
  responsibility. That's what self custody is all
• 1:27:51
  about. Casa makes it incredibly easy.
• 1:27:54
  If you feel intimidated by the the tech stuff, and I'm telling
• 1:27:58
  you, someone who loves computers, the trial and error
• 1:28:02
  that I had to end the mini heart attacks.
• 1:28:04
  No one tells you that, right? The the trial and error of
• 1:28:08
  having to learn this stuff was not a was not a a a walk in the
• 1:28:13
  park. So this is a great way to
• 1:28:16
  especially if if you hold a decent amount of Bitcoin, you
• 1:28:19
  should definitely have it on multi sig like I I can't
• 1:28:22
  recommend that enough. I think a single sig is just
• 1:28:25
  like so it's a terrible idea in so many.
• 1:28:28
  Point of failure right there in the name.
• 1:28:31
  Yeah, exactly. So if you if if you know you've
• 1:28:34
  been a Bitcoin for a while, I highly, highly recommend multi
• 1:28:37
  Sig and Casa makes it incredibly, incredibly easy
• 1:28:41
  without sacrificing security. I want to give a very special
• 1:28:44
  shout out to our guest today, Jamison Lop.
• 1:28:46
  Go check out his blog blog.lop.net.
• 1:28:50
  And of course, go check out Casa.
• 1:28:52
  Go to Casa dot IO slash simply. Of course, today's show was
• 1:28:57
  February 27th, 2025. I'm your host Nico, our guest
• 1:29:00
  today, Lop and of course, my legendary Co host Optimus
• 1:29:03
  Fields. We'll see you guys tomorrow for
• 1:29:05
  a brand new episode of Simply Bitcoin Live.
• 1:29:09
  Today's episode was brought to you by bitcoinwell.com, a
• 1:29:12
  Bitcoin only platform on a mission to enable financial
• 1:29:16
  independence.