Written by Alexandra Moxin
Jameson Lopp is a Professional Cypherpunk, Infrastructure Engineer at Casa and Bitcoin Philosopher. Jameson enjoys building technology that empowers individuals and is interested in opportunities within the Bitcoin and crypto asset ecosystem. Graduating from the University of North Carolina with a degree in computer science, Jameson is passionate about sharing his expertise and technical knowledge of crypto assets, his philosophical approach to understanding the systems, and his opinion on the consensus of their participants.
Jameson is an application infrastructure engineer and early investor in Bitcoin in addition to being founder and creator of Statoshi.info and Bitcoin SIG. Formerly at BitGo, Jameson has been involved in Bitcoin since 2012.
In this episode we cover
- Jameson’s background
- Cypherpunk beliefs and ethics
- The benefits of increasing user privacy and freedom
- What motivated Jameson to get into Bitcoin
- The benefits of having a robust and long standing network, a strong network effect and having most talented engineering team working on the network
- Jameson’s experience with distributed data processing prior to Bitcoin
- The origin story of Casa the multi-signature, multi-device, multi-location vault product
- Some of the features that will be available on the Casa platform
- Why the work in Proof of Work matters and how some of the features in Casa will enable users to be their own secure bank
- Why the iTunes solution was developed first
- Differences between platforms and why Android presents some initial security challenges but a better overall user experience
- Privacy and other benefits of the Purism phone, platform and system
- Some of the emerging trends Jameson sees in Bitcoin and what companies or groups are exploring interesting ideas in engineering and security
- Mt. Gox and calling out bad security practices
- The Lightning Network, Jameson’s thoughts on where it’s going, potential challenges and ways its benefiting Bitcoin
- Ways to leverage social media and other sources to improve channel reputation
- Ways for users to improve privacy and a shout out to Jameson’s upcoming article on privacy (we’ll post a link once it’s published)
- Breaking down Jameson’s Bitcoin Resource List and some of the reasoning behind creating that list
- Why it’s important to run a full node
- Where you can start and some of the system requirements if you’d like to configure and run a full node
- Places you can look to find ways you can help Bitcoin and projects you can contribute to
- How to find and join communities interested in maintaining and furthering Bitcoin
- Jameson’s world renown pinned tweet on Bitcoin
- The strengths and differences of the Bitcoin community and other cryptocurrency communities
- Jameson’s thoughts on different Bitcoin hard forks
- Breaking down Proof of Work and Proof of Stake concepts
- The benefits of Proof of Work and why the energy spend is both market driven and necessary
- Jameson’s tweet about why Bitcoin is driven by conservative development principles
- The resiliency of the Bitcoin network despite multiple attempts to attack it
- The 2013 accidental consensus failure and how it was resolved within a few hours
- The 2018 Build Bitcoin Conference in Lisbon, Portugal
- Upcoming conferences Jameson is speaking at and where he’s part of the review committee
- Jameson’s closing comments to our listeners and how you can reach out to him
You can reach Jameson via his personal website, on twitter and to find out more about what he’s working on at Casa. Find out how you can contribute to the Bitcoin community and Bitcoin development at Bitcoin.org and the Bitcoin Wiki.
Show Links
- Jameson Lopp’s Personal Website
- Bitcoin.cc
- Jameson Lopp’s Bitcoin Resource List
- Jameson Lopp on Twitter
- Casa
- Blockstack Platform
- Bitcoin SIG
- Article from Jameson on configuring and running a full Bitcoin node
- Jameson’s full node resource use via Statoshi.info
- Statoshi.info - Realtime Bitcoin Node Stats
- Bitcoin Core Config Generator
- Bitcoin Physical Attack Log
- Bitcoin.org
- The Bitcoin Wiki
- Jameson’s Triangle Bitcoin Meetup Group
- DCTRL
- Bitcoin-N-Beers
- Jameson’s world renown pinned tweet on Bitcoin
- Jameson’s profile on Medium
- Jameson’s profile on CoinDesk
- Jameson’s profile on Github
- Jameson’s profile via OneName
- Baltic Honeybadger Conference in Latvia, September 22 - 23
- Scaling Bitcoin in Tokyo, October 6 - 7
- Purism
- Article reviewing features of the Librem5 Purism Phone
