← THE Bitcoin Podcast
THE Bitcoin Podcast
SECURING YOUR BODY & BITCOIN FOR THE HYPERBITCOINIZED FUTURE | Erik Cason & Jesse Posner (Vora)
01:51:39
Loading summary
Transcript115 lines
- [00:00]
Eric
Self sovereignty in Bitcoin is an extension of the American political tradition. It is in line with what the founding fathers fought for, the same sort of principles. I have no doubt that if they are alive today, they would be bitcoiners.
- [00:17]
Jesse
America is really the only place that bitcoin has a true chance of success. And it's because of the powerful constitutional protections that we have and the ability of the sovereignty of individual states to counteract a rogue federal government and using those powers to balance against one another. We feel like there's a very, very powerful apparatus to be able to resist state overreach. And furthermore, the United States is one of the only places that you actually are entitled to the Castle doctrine, which means that if someone is coming into your home intent on violence and wanting to rob you or cause harm against you or your property, you do have a right to, to engage in deadly force against those individuals. And we believe that this is going to become a very key and critical aspect of being able to provide the self sovereignty.
- [01:08]
Eric
But as the price of bitcoin goes up and as it continues to go up, we need to take self sovereignty to the next level and we need much more robust products and also frankly more expensive products because you know, you wouldn't buy $100 safe off of Amazon and put a million dollars in it. But that's kind of what bitcoiners are doing with their hardware wallets.
- [01:31]
Jesse
We now exist at this end state where the law is a highly dysfunctional thing. And if somebody does choose to rob you, legal or otherwise, in other words, the state choosing to steal from you or criminals, it's not clear if justice will actually be delivered. And that's one of the reasons that we really believe that we need to start empowering ourselves and taking this into our own hands. Because it's. If we allow for ourselves to get to hyper bitcoinized world without a product like this, it's going to be much more threatening, difficult and scary. And the truth is it's going to be much more violent. And it's going to be much more violent because we won't have active deterrent solutions that people will know and understand and will be branded towards that.
- [02:12]
Eric
We live in the future basically like we're already in the hyper bitcoinized world and we're just working backwards from there. And we think that's something that almost no bitcoin company and few bitcoiners really have the conviction about hyper bitcoinization and really take it seriously and really believe with 100% certainty that that's where we're headed, that that is going to happen, that there's going to be massive disruption because of it. That's our base case where we. We know that's happen.
- [02:49]
Jesse
Man. I'm just, like, so impressed with this podcast setup.
- [02:52]
Eric
I know this is a huge upgrade for us.
- [02:54]
Jesse
Yeah. Like, now I need to be podcasting more.
- [02:57]
Walker
Yes. Yes, you do. Like, that's. I think that's. That's really. That should be the takeaway from any podcast that you do is maybe I should do more podcasts. And, like, that's kind of how I.
- [03:08]
Jesse
Feel a lot of the time.
- [03:09]
Walker
Literally, I'm of the opinion, and I've. I've said this to you before, but we. Until we have more bitcoin podcasts than tradfi podcasts, we don't have enough bitcoin podcasts. There are so many just absolute morons out there telling people, like, here's the top 10 dividend stocks you should buy so you can retire. Retire early. And it's like, no, no, God, flood the market with bitcoin podcasts until we have absolutely eviscerated all of the tradfi podcasts.
- [03:36]
Jesse
The thing that amazes me about the tradfi podcast is that they're like. Like, bitcoin's a scam. You couldn't do this. And it's like, like, I've objectively made magnitudes more money than you have, but, like, you have the audacity to tell me that you know better at how this works than me.
- [03:54]
Walker
Who is that one guy, Dave Ramsey, who, like, he's like, oh, yeah, you know, you know that guy, he recently, like, started to come around to bitcoin, but something about him in. In Romanian. And I say Romanian because my wife is Romanian. They have an expression called. It's o faza caricere palme. It means a face that begs for a slapping. And I feel like that applies really well to him. Like, it's just like something about his face. You're like, I just. I just want to give you one of these.
- [04:20]
Eric
There's like a smugness that I think, yes, is one of the ingredients there.
- [04:25]
Jesse
That's like the whole engine that, like, makes bitcoin work is like the. The mixture of smugness and hubris that, like, has people scoff in rejection towards bitcoin.
- [04:36]
Eric
Yeah.
- [04:37]
Jesse
You're a bitcoin person.
- [04:40]
Walker
Oh, exactly. The kind of response I would expect for somebody with bitcoin in their bio is something I get on so many of my posts, especially If I'm trolling a politician and they're like, well, wouldn't expect you to take it seriously, Mr. Bitcoin Man. It's like, you're right. I don't. I think you're absurd, but that's beside the point. You guys are coming from the Presidio, so shout out to Presidio. Bitcoin for giving you guys this sweet spot. I lived in the Presidio for. For a summer once, back in 2012, when I was working in the Bay area.
- [05:17]
Jesse
Whoa. I might have actually lived in the Presidio at the same time.
- [05:20]
Unknown
No fucking way.
- [05:21]
Walker
Seriously?
- [05:22]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [05:23]
Walker
Damn. I was in a house with, like, seven dudes. The house was built for probably two people. It was dirty. But we had a good time. We had a good time.
- [05:34]
Jesse
Yeah. I lived in a house with a bunch of alcoholics. There was one day I came home and I tried to open the door, and it wouldn't open. So I went around back to look through the window, and my roommate was covered in shit, passed out naked up against the door. Apparently he had fell down the stairs and then passed out up against the door. Yeah, it was like a very severe alcoholic culture house. And that's when I was like, do I have a drinking problem? And I was like, I think so.
- [06:04]
Walker
Were we living in the same house? Because that. That eerily describes my experience there too. But I. I think I was part of the problem. So I. I never. Never woke up with. With shit all over me, though.
- [06:18]
Eric
So at least there's that that you remember.
- [06:21]
Walker
Well, touche, touche.
- [06:24]
Jesse
But, yeah, there was a. There was a few times I woke up in places that I don't know how I got there, and I was like, maybe. Maybe I shouldn't drink so heavily.
- [06:32]
Walker
San Francisco was interesting there. I was there for that summer, and then I think, what's. The next summer? I was in San Jose, and so I got, like, a decent little toe dipping into the Bay Area. And like, around that time, like, I remember. I don't remember the homeless problem being what I see it reported on the news today as I remember it being generally pretty. I mean, it's like, it's San Francisco too. So it's like. It's funky and weird, but, like, it felt like it was in a good way at that time. I don't know what the vibe there is now. How does it feel to you? Just like having been there for, like, you know, a number of years?
- [07:16]
Jesse
My experience is like, peak. Peak homeless problem was probably right around before COVID The city's cleaned up a bit since then. In my opinion, it's definitely worse than it was at that time. I think the truth is.
- [07:35]
Walker
Like, I.
- [07:36]
Jesse
Just signed a lease for a new place and just like rent here is absurd. And so there's a lot of like, full time working, living homeless people. And so like, that then corroborates with the mental health issues and like, it's a gigantic mass and nightmare that without fixing the money, there's like no conceivable way of, like, how we actually address this problem in a meaningful way.
- [07:58]
Eric
Right? Yeah. I mean, I think I've heard some people talk about how, you know, the expensive real estate in San Francisco stays higher by there being bad neighborhoods or homelessness problems because it means there's more of a premium on the nice parts of town. So there's sort of a perverse incentive to perpetuate the problem, which does kind of relate to homes being a store of value because people are trying to escape fiat debasement. So yet again, bitcoin fixes this.
- [08:35]
Walker
I feel like just with bitcoin now being almost feeling almost mainstream, it's that indie band that you knew before they were cool and now you're like, yeah, okay, well, all you guys are just posers. But now that we're at this stage and we continue to say things like bitcoin fixes this and mean them very sincerely, it feels like, I don't know about you guys, like, you've been in longer than I have. Like, maybe this is just like this eternal September and you guys have been feeling this forever, but like, it just feels like the. The new batch of people just maybe just don't get that, like, are they in it for the fiat gains in case. And this is something that, you know, you've talked about a lot. Like, the people that are trying to acquire more bitcoin versus the people who are fundamentally trying to acquire more fiat and that being a, like, those being actually diametrically opposed, but perhaps both in service of bitcoin in the long run. I don't know.
- [09:34]
Jesse
Well, this is what the hilarious, like, number go up meme with the Trojan horse is. Is that like, yeah, like, you'll totally get a $10 million Bitcoin. Like, you also don't understand that, like, that means that the entire economy is in significant and severe crisis. And furthermore, like, real bitcoin, like when. When the ticker says Bitcoin's at $10 million a Bitcoin, that means that self custody bitcoin is now at $30 million a bitcoin. And this price differential is apparent in something. And like that's, that's something that like anybody who went through Mount Gox knows is like, the price of Mount Gox bitcoin was much lower than the price of non Mt. Gox bitcoin. And I was. And a lot of people were like, oh, I can like, I can like arbit up on like getting this nice cheap corn and like, no problem with that at all. And I was like, maybe there's a price signal here that you don't full understand. So I think they're both, they both are in service of each other. And I just think it's a deep irony of that. Like, that's why this cycle, we've found ourselves in bed, like essentially with the financiers and the politicians, because we're like, yeah, you can totally get rich off bitcoin. They're like, yeah, it's going to destroy everything that you've worked to build, but you'll totally get rich off it. And they're like, yeah, I don't really understand that first point, but who fucking cares? Bring the horse into Troy. Thanks, guys.
- [10:58]
Eric
Yeah, and I mean, I don't think this applies to everybody, but the orange pill is very real. And I think a lot of people who've come in purely because they're interested in the price gains just by owning bitcoin and learning more about it and getting more evolved, it starts to change your perspective. You start learning about Austrian economics and all kinds of things that you never thought you would be thinking about. And so for some percentage of that crowd, their views are going to change over time. Even if that wasn't the original motivation.
- [11:39]
Walker
It is that beautiful thing. Again, just let's throw out all the cliches. You don't change bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. But it's kind of true. And Eric, I gotta say, I think my favorite moment from the conference in Vegas was like, I happened to be walking by. Carl was at the ladies brunch. I'm walking by the news desk. I see you up there and I'm like, well, I'm obviously just gonna find a seat and sit around. Stick around for this because I'm gonna enjoy it. And they're asking some questions and they go to you and it's, Eric, what do you think about. I'm paraphrasing here, but you know, the basically like the corporatization of bitcoin or like, you know, or the, you know, U.S. government also is starting to, you know, take a keen interest in this strategic reserve, et cetera, et cetera. And you're like, well, I just like to start off by saying, fuck the state. And, like, you went on from there. And I was like, God, that was just. That was just kind of perfect because it. At this time where, like, you've never seen so many suits at a bitcoin conference. And again, I've only been going to them for a few years, and, like, I've seen the difference in the number of suits.
- [12:45]
Unknown
It was very refreshing.
- [12:46]
Walker
So I just wanted to thank you for that publicly.
- [12:48]
Jesse
Thank you. I think a lot of people appreciated that I was, you know, truth be told, I was pretty significantly disappointed to see just how much sycophantry was going on and the other one, you know, and like, I said that at the same time, like, it's really important for people to understand, like, it doesn't matter what the US Government does. Like, what matters is that, like, you get yourself on a bitcoin standard and you have your own bitcoin treasury and that you tell all of your friends and family, like, that you can actually own bitcoin. It's important because you can escape from the endemic and awful inflation. And even more importantly, like, you know, I'm pretty sure the last time that I was on your podcast I pointed this out is, like, you could have listened to us and bought some and, like, your wealth would have appreciated by, like, 30% since then. And, like, every time I talk to you, we'll probably have this conversation again. And, like, it's. I have a lot of empathy because it's really difficult to understand the deflationary nature of bitcoin against a highly inflationary world. But this is also part of orange pilling and why it changes our value set is because we start to understand that it's just really important to understand We've lived inside of a global Keynesian economic world for 70 years where governments made the decision that they were going to essentially overthrow economies everywhere and make everything inflationary and have their hand in it, everything. And bitcoin's like, the one solution we have to that. And that, like, works without the state. And in fact, like, it's so powerful and it is deflationary because of how much the state has messed up the general economic functions with fiat. And yeah, I find it pretty interesting because, like, in a lot of ways, like, this is why I got into the philosophy is that, like, I think marrying all of this stuff up and really understanding, like, well, like, what is this bigger idea of value like, is value just money? Like, is it just economic exchange? And like, how do we really determine that? And like, why is that so important? And I think that once you start to realize like, oh, Bitcoin is actually like a monumental societal level shift where we're moving from a fiat, government owned economic world into a digital self sovereign world where we truly get to make the choice to have sovereignty through cryptography, like that, that actually has a capacity to change the totality of human history itself. And like, where we choose to take the trajectory of humanity towards.
- [15:19]
Eric
Yeah, and this, this actually reminds me of one of my favorite pieces by Eric called the Encrypted Meaning of Crypto. Because it's all about how like the true meaning of Bitcoin encrypts itself very strategically and it's actually in the interest of Bitcoin in terms of its deeper purposes that it's not totally apparent and that it actually masquerades as a scam or as an investment vehicle or now that people have convinced them it's a tool for state power and it can be used to prop up the dollar or all these fantasies that people have, even the shitcoins and all of that, it's better that people think it's a joke or it's a scam or it can be used for all these purposes than to truly understand the deeper and more substantial things that are at stake. Because if that was crystal clear to everyone, then it would be much easier to oppose it and there would be way more interest in stopping it. But the fact that it doesn't look like that to most people means that the true political revolution that it represents can move forward unimpeded because its real meaning is protected by this form of cryptography that hides what's really at stake.
- [16:46]
Walker
Do you think that this is something I've heard Michael Saylor say? I'm sure he's not. And maybe he was the first. I don't know. I'm guessing not though. But he's elaborated on it a lot, which is the idea that Bitcoin is a virus. And like what you're both describing is basically a viral mutation, right? It's a virus being able to adapt and to change what it looks like and how it presents, to be able to basically infect more hosts. And virus has like a negative connotation, but it's like it's a very efficient biological mechanism. Right? It's a very quote, intelligent biological mechanism without being conscious, let's say, which is kind of like you could describe bitcoin in that way it's intelligent, but it's obviously not conscious. It presents in these different ways. I don't know. Is bitcoin a virus that is just bound to infect us all with good stuff though? It's not like something that was created in a lab in Wuhan. It's like, hey, sound money. You don't even need to be vaccinated against it. It's just good. I don't know.
- [17:52]
Eric
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think this has happened throughout history. You cannot stop an idea whose time has come. And the most powerful forces in the world are the memes. Like the idea of freedom. Before we had bitcoin in the 1700s, the idea of freedom was viral and people couldn't forget it. And they start to realize like, yeah, why should we give all our power to the state if the state is unjust, we have a right of revolution and we can create something better. And no matter how many guns or violence or coercion is brought to bear to stop that idea, its propagation moves unimpeded. So that is Bitcoin is just the latest example of this phenomenon that has continued to liberate humanity throughout all of history.
- [18:50]
Jesse
Yeah, I truly think what bitcoin is is that it's the reconnection of the spark that truly is thought itself and intelligence as you called it. And it's because inside fiat world, which fiat means by decree, it's really important to understand that like most forms of logic that people apply are actually these highly authoritarian ideas that have masqueraded as being thought when they're not at all. And just trying to talk to anybody about basic economic principles like that starts to really display itself. But it's even, it starts to get even wider with that because it's like, look like thought itself sort of needs to have like a long chain of logic that like can sell, that can connect to itself and be self referential in a holistic framework. And like the truth is like if you look at the fiat economic system, like it, it breaks down at some point where it's self referential feature trying to point back to itself goes actually we like made all that shit up and like turns out that we built this on sand. And so I think the thing that happens for a lot of people is they go whoa, like there's this like form of logic that could make an economic system. And like it turns out that like you can actually think about that through this proof of work concept. And I think that's what then starts to actually transform people And I think that's why we've spoken a lot about like this sort of rescue from nihilism is that before really understanding bitcoin you can be like, how could we ever win? Everything's totally dark. Like, this place is really bad and abusive and exploitative. And then you realize, oh, like, I can own this thing that I truly own much more than I own anything else that's ever existed. And furthermore, like, it dignifies me in a new and different way through like, quote unquote human rights. But, like, this is my right to encryption. Like you. There's literally nothing anyone can do about it. Like, if I choose to encrypt my information and data, that is something that is given to me very directly through the form of logic that like, is the network. And now that we've collectivized that with each other like that, this is really sort of what the thesis of my book is about is like that, that is cryptographic sovereignty, which I truncated to crypto sovereignty to be tongue in cheek towards both crypto, but also to essentially make a new idiom that I think is really important in that like, we can truly achieve a new form of sovereignty through cryptography. And it's really interesting because like, it's not doing it through violence or any other means. It's actually doing it through an inverting of the order and just being a total refusal to participate within those other systems.
- [21:27]
Unknown
If you're stuck spending dollars, at least stop earning dirty fiat rewards. Use Fold to earn Bitcoin on everyday purchases and regular expenses. Groceries, bills, travel, home improvement. I literally just earned 2203sats buying a $100Amazon gift card on fold. You don't even need to use the fold card itself if you don't want to. You can connect your favorite credit card and double dip with Bitcoin rewards on merchant offers or go all in. Make Fold the center of your personal finances. Buy, earn, save and even get paid in Bitcoin with fold. Head to the link in the show notes to get started with the ultimate savings toolkit. Or go directly to use.foldapp.com r Walker and get yourself $10 in Bitcoin when you sign up. Lets talk about using Bitcoin the way it's meant to be used. Self custodial, lightning fast and ready for the real world. That's exactly what BitKit wallet is all about. Bitkit Wallet is a clean, powerful Bitcoin and lightning mobile wallet that gives you full control on chain and on lightning. You hold the keys Always. Whether you're brand new or are A seasoned Bitcoiner, BitKit's intuitive wallet design makes it simple to send, receive and mail, manage your SATs. QuickPay lets you fire off Lightning payments faster than ever, and seamless integration between on chain and Lightning means your funds are always where you need them. It's your daily driver Bitcoin and Lightning Wallet and it actually feels good to use it. And with modular widgets, you can personalize your experience to match your style. There's even a Lightning node running right on your phone. No custodians, no compromises. Go to BitKit to or search BitKit wallet in your app store and start using Bitcoin like it's meant to be used. That's bitkit to I am definitely not a trader. I'm trying to hold my Bitcoin for the long term and if you're like me, you need to make sure you keep that bitcoin safe by going to Bitbox Swiss Walker and using the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet. Then get your bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody. Bitcoin is chopsolidating right around 100k, but we have companies, nation states and a.
- [24:08]
Walker
Whole lot of plebs like you and.
- [24:09]
Unknown
Me who are stacking harder than ever. So it's going to keep ripping higher. But now is the best time for you to get your security locked down tight with Bitbox Plus. And I can't emphasize this enough, the Bitbox 02 is just easy as hell to use whether you're brand new to bitcoin. It's your first time setting up a hardware wallet so you're a little bit nervous. It's understandable. Or you are a well seasoned psychopath. You will have no problem with the bitbox and again it's fully open source and Bitcoin only. But you don't have to trust me, you can go and verify that for yourself on their GitHub. When you go to Bitbox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So thank you.
- [24:53]
Walker
I'm curious also in this somewhat transitions us into the topic at hand, but is that one of the primary drivers for you guys building out Vora basically to fill that gap because and I don't want, I don't want to steal any thunder here but like without having the ability to actually be protected against super basic attacks against your body and your Bitcoin and like potentially losing it through that. Like, can you even make the claim that you are sovereign, like if you cannot be protected against this most basic thing is that like, am I kind of in the right track there?
- [25:33]
Eric
Yeah, 100%. That's it. And you know, in a lot of ways we, we have the promise of self sovereignty right now, but not the reality of it. And that's why we founded Vora is to make self sovereignty real and not just a larp and not just something that people do, but maybe feel really vulnerable about. And the existing systems were great for Bitcoin's early days when the price of Bitcoin was lower. But as the price of Bitcoin goes up and as it continues to go up, we need to take self sovereignty to the next level and we need much more robust products and also frankly, more expensive products because you know, you wouldn't buy $100 safe off of Amazon and put a million dollars in it. But that's kind of what bitcoiners are doing with their hardware wallets. Like, we need systems that aren't subject to hardware supply chain attacks where you can verify the hardware. We need systems that extend into personal security, home security. So we're protecting people, not just keys, because we're seeing wrench attacks go up and they're really scary and they're going to get worse over time. And so it's not enough to just protect the keys. We need systems that can stop and intervene when there are attacks, that can deter attacks. We also need ways of having recovery systems where you can put keys in multiple places but without being subject to a 6102 attack. Because what a lot of bitcoiners are doing right now is they're putting a threshold of keys in KYC safe deposit boxes and those can be just trivially seized. And so when we look around at the landscape and I've worked on key management and self custody for a long time, I was at Coinbase for four and a half years working on key management and cold storage and multi party computation. I just left the bitkey team. I was there for almost three years. And I'm looking around at all these solutions and just feeling like they're not getting the job done. And so that's why we founded the company. And it also has this philosophical foundation where it's directly inspired by Eric's writings, by the vision that he's put out in terms of what is the deeper meaning that's at stake with Bitcoin, that it is More than number goes up, that it is about self sovereignty, that is about transforming our political systems. And so that's where it's a real bringing together of this philosophical foundation and technical innovation to make self sovereignty real for the hyper bitcoinized world.
- [28:19]
Jesse
Yeah, and I feel very strongly that, you know, like vor really came about from me and Jesse's conversations of, you know, both ourselves and many friends have worked at bitcoin companies that they are all working towards a particular mission. But as they grow and get bigger, that mission starts to dilute and more and more people join the company who aren't frankly, for better word, they're not really bitcoiners. And like they have a different incentive structure. And so I've, I've seen this repeated story arc with dozens of people where they're really highly motivated and committed to getting into a bitcoin company. They start building awesome and amazing products and they find slowly but surely they start running up against fiat incentive structure, working against them of quarterly returns, of making sure your KPIs are hit, of whatever the goal is, instead of the truly overarching goal of like, hey, we're going to make bitcoin better, we're going to make it more secure, we're going to make it more accessible. And they find that that drifts so far that eventually they get pushed out of the company. And it's been really interesting because that's been sort of one of our philosophical slants here is that like Vora is first and foremost a philosophical company and like we're committed to solving what we've been calling the honey badgers dilemma. Like, do we have to make this Choice between a 6102 attack or a wrench attack? Like, do I need to give my keys to a custodian that they could have to comply with giving that money to the government? Or do I hold my keys in a self sovereign way where if someone is directly threatening me, like, I have to give up my bitcoin? And at first we're like, we think that this is solvable, like it shouldn't be too hard. And as we sort of got in the weeds of it, we're like, whoa, this is actually like a really hard problem to solve. And there's a lot of tertiary stuff. And so we've committed a lot of time and energy into R and D to like make some, I think pretty powerful innovations sort of in the space. But also like, it's deeply alarming to me that like right now the best that we can do with collaborative custody means that you are going to be doxing your UTXOs and like that's deeply alarming. And the other thing is like we have the technology to make that different. So one of the things that we really want to do with Vora in our product is like we're going to be shipping with a full node from the get go. And the reason is so that you can do silent payments, so that when somebody does actually get paid, we don't, we don't know that. And there's a number of advancements that Jesse has made on the cryptographic front using zero knowledge proofs and other things that ensure that like we can preserve your privacy because to us like that's a number one goal, is like you deserve to have your privacy and not have us be a direct threat vector to you. And like that that is a complete non negotiable for us. So like if it turns out we have to refactor everything in order to preserve that, that's what we'll have to do. And that's why we're a philosophical company, is like we aren't first and foremost about profits, but we're about making sure that we actually meet the goals. And that's going to be a very, very large bar to handle. But the great thing is, is that it turns out by pushing value all the way up the philosophical chain to be like we're going to make this the most valuable thing. That actually transforms into our opinion becoming what will be one of the most valuable companies in the world. Because people need to have self sovereignty with their data, particularly in the world that we're moving into, where AI is becoming so powerful and sophisticated and like you're going to want to own your own data and have it be cryptographically secured in the same way that your Bitcoin will be in the future. Because if you don't, it means that somebody else is going to be owning, running and essentially controlling how you're going to interface with the Internet.
- [32:06]
Walker
How do you balance the, obviously what is a strong ethos for you guys in driving force this desire to want people to have full control over their own privacy, to not want you guys to be a security hole. How do you balance that with then also wanting to take care or provide protection to other aspects of people's lives like their physical security. Like there have to be some trade offs there, right, to be able to actually provide the one but then respect the other?
- [32:38]
Eric
Yeah, absolutely. It's a devilishly difficult problem to solve. The transaction privacy is more straightforward than the physical security. The big problem with collaborative custody is that one of these collaborative custodians, they have a key and they can use that key to find all the transactions on the blockchain. And that can be solved with cryptography, with some techniques called chain code delegation that we've developed, blind signatures and zero knowledge proofs. And the zero knowledge proofs let us enforce, let the server enforce policies that protect the customer, like spending limits or time delays, without needing to learn the transaction details, the balances of our customers. And so that's how we're able to strike the balance in terms of transaction privacy, as we can use these zero knowledge proofs where the server can enforce whatever policies it needs without learning anything else. But in terms of our alarm systems, that's where there needs to be location data that goes to law enforcement or private security, or both to be able to respond to an attack. And so we're using some technologies there where we can actually build an alarm system that routes this data without our company learning the physical home address, which sounds impossible at first, but one of the technologies we're using there is something called a trusted execution environment. And so certain chips, like some intel chips, AMD chips, they have this feature built into the hardware of the chip where there's a secure enclave where the data in the enclave doesn't leave that part of the chip and it can generate a public key that it can export and you can encrypt data to that public key such that the data can only be decrypted within the trusted execution environment, and the private key doesn't leave the trusted execution environment. And on top of that, these chips have a feature called remote attestation, where the trusted execution environment can provide a hash that tells you what code is running inside of the trusted execution environment and that hash is bound to the public key. So if you want to give private data to a server, but you only want to give that private data to the server, if you know that the exactly how the private data is going to be executed in code, the chip gives you this attestation document with a key where you can have high assurance that if I encrypt data to this key, the only code that can operate on that data is what matches the hash in the attestation document. So what we're able to do is the Vora vault, which is what we call the hardware wallet plus node, that's could be in the form of a server rack that lives in your home. It's going to get this attestation document from our server encrypt the location data to the trusted execution environment. And now the location data only lives in that environment, and we ourselves, as Vora, cannot access that data. We have no way of going inside that chip and pulling out the private data. When we need to route it to emergency services, they will call our server using tls, an encrypted connection that terminates in the trusted execution environment. So an encrypted connection is made between an emergency services API and our trusted execution environment. That t trusted execution environment, the table hands off the location data through the encrypted connection to the emergency services API. So the people who need to respond get that location data in the process. Our company has no ability to see it at all, and we can't decrypt it. If we're forced to do something by the government or somebody else, we literally have no ability to get to that data. One trust vector there is. You have to trust the chip itself that this trusted execution environment was actually implemented correctly. So if intel, let's say, is completely backdoored, there could theoretically be a vulnerability there. None has been discovered. But one way we can diversify that risk is to use multiple chips from multiple vendors and shard the secret across all the chips. So even if one of them is compromised, and all of them would need to be compromised, so we can have both an intel and an AMD chip, and in the future also an ARM chip where all three of them would have to be compromised for this data to be compromised. In addition, there could be an attack where if you have physical access to the chip in the data center, there could be certain attacks that might be able to compromise these environments. So we can actually further diversify the risk by using all three cloud vendors, aws, Google and Microsoft Clouds, and eventually our own data center that we stand up. So now you have to compromise three different types of chips across four different types of cloud vendors. And at that point, the practicality of that is very low. The cost of the attack is so immense that it outweighs whatever kind of monetary value could be extracted from this data. And as these technologies develop over time, and as the size of our company grows over time, we'll be able to make our own open source chips that have even higher degrees of verifiability. But this is going to provide a very high assurance that we can have this encrypted location data that we can give to emergency services without our company ever learning the actual home address in the process.
- [39:05]
Walker
So you guys have thought about this. Like just a little bit then, right?
- [39:08]
Eric
Just a little bit. Yeah.
- [39:10]
Walker
No, that's, I mean, that's, that's awesome. I mean, you're, you are basically trying to decentralize any potential single points of failure and create something that is. Yeah, okay, something maybe could be breached here, but you're not going to breach all aspects of it just because it's not economically feasible to do so. Doing so would require ungodly amounts of both either money or time or collusion or whatever. So it's like, can you ever make risk zero? No. But you're taking it as close as you can to that with this strategy, it seems.
- [39:50]
Eric
Absolutely. And the equation I think about all the time is cost of attack versus reward times probability of success. If the cost of attack is greater than the other side of the equation, then it is economically irrational to mount the attack. And so we do everything possible. You cannot defeat an attacker with infinite resources, but fortunately those aren't the attackers we're facing. And so we do everything possible to drive up that cost of attack such that there are easier targets, softer targets, and that any kind of attacker that tries to mount that attack is essentially going to bankrupt themselves.
- [40:37]
Walker
I think that's really fascinating. This is a total sidebar, and I don't mean to digress, but if you notice that so many of these recent physical attacks, if we're talking physical attacks on bitcoiners or crypto people have been.
- [40:51]
Unknown
In France, like, yeah, yeah.
- [40:54]
Jesse
It's almost like they don't have a right to protect themselves or something.
- [40:57]
Walker
It's almost like the rule of law is like broken down or something and it's not really a functioning society anymore. Am I off base there?
- [41:07]
Jesse
That sounds like conspiracy theory.
- [41:09]
Walker
Probably just a coincidence.
- [41:11]
Jesse
Important to also understand, back in January there was that influencer who, you know, was being very thoughtless about how she was presenting her crypto holdings, but with that being said, because her partner was armed, like these criminals found very real violence that met them. And while it's definitely not an outcome that is desirable, it's like if people come and threaten you with violence, like I, I don't see any problem whatsoever about meeting them right there and asserting your right to protect yourself, particularly within things like the Castle doctrine. And so another part of VORA is like, we're, we believe that it's time to take on the home security market seriously. Like, ADT is a huge multi billion dollar company and the truth is is that what they offer pales in comparison about the opportunities that are available and particularly the technological development. So one is, is just being able to have your own home self surveillance systems that self encrypt onto our own data server using the same T methodology and has methods to not only share that data with law enforcement or private security, but like it's important that like you control that data too because surprisingly a lot of people, they put up ring cameras and don't understand that like if you live in somewhere like Iowa and smoke weed on your porch that like yes, that can actually be used to incriminate you because you don't own that data. Amazon owns it. So this is just one step in the other direction. And funny enough, something that started out as kind of a joke that we're actually now exploring is actually drone surveillance systems, is that like we have finally gotten to the place that automated drone surveillance is something that is actually feasible at this point in time. And so using that same methodology, there's very powerful tactics that if someone were to trigger a panic button or if there was to be a notification that could trigger these things, that you could actually have a drone or a swarm of drones that could then respond to where your location is and to provide surveillance to the responding law enforcement or private security. And this is really about, it's time that bitcoiners really make a choice to upgrade themselves and start providing their own surveillance and security for themselves. And it's time for us to really upgrade security on a whole because this is moving into a more scary direction. But also like we can't be truly self sovereign if we find that when these instances come up, we're always turning to the state and asking for them to assist us. And so we hope as the company becomes larger and expands that you know, like we will really be able to sort of own that aspect of security as well. And that's really important because I've definitely had incidents where I've had to deal with law enforcement like here in the city when my car was stolen on multiple occasions because at San Francisco, and it was pretty sad and unfortunate to see not only how poorly that turned out, but how much in that process I was victimized by the police department because like there isn't necessarily an incentive to help you out. So these are all things that we've thought very seriously about. And we're taking what we really want Vora to be the next generation of hyper bitcoinized companies. Because other is, is that the entire model of our company is like Bitcoin will be at a million and then 10 million and then $21 million per coin. And that is going to escalate not only the cost of attack, but also the very structure of how security itself is going to be dealt with. And we want to be at the forefront of making sure that that is done in a thoughtful and robust way and that we're not still panicking and sort of following up behind on the price.
- [44:59]
Walker
You know, I got to say, I love that you guys are tackling both sides of this, right? Because there are obviously companies who do multi sig, or a collaborative multi sig custody. I use one of those companies with a bunch of different seeds, and I'm pleased with that company. It has allowed me to sleep better at night. And I know that nobody can come into my house and force me to give up any bitcoin. By the same token, most people that would try to come into my house and do that are stupid. And they. And if I tell them, oh, well, I'm sorry, sir, I have a multi sig, you won't be getting any corn from me. They'll be like, well, okay, then I'll. I'll cut off your finger, and then I'll cut off your wife's finger. And like, you trying to explain your, you know, geographically distributed multi sig to somebody who's coming into your house trying to, like, expecting to come in and do violence against you, that's just not going to work out well for you, like, at all. And so if you're not handling the physical side of the security, it's like, well, then, like, honestly, like, yeah, it's cool that you have this neat little solution, but, like, why bother? I mean, yeah, you should still bother. Like, multi sig is great, but, like, you're just. You're only solving for 50% of the problem, and the other 50% will literally get you killed. Like, the multi sig part stops you from, you know, okay, losing your coins in a stupid way. But if you're not protecting your physical security, if you don't have plans in place for that, like, then what? Like, the option is not you lose your coins. The option is you die. And, like, that's like, no amount of bitcoin is worth my life or my family's life. And so, like, that's like, then how do I protect against that? And so I think it's like, I'd love to dive into that a little bit deeper with you guys because, like, this is something. Obviously, in America, we have guns. Thank God for that. Like, that's. That's fantastic. I myself am a Large enjoyer of guns and have been using them since I was a small child because I'm from Bumble Nor Wisconsin and that's how you grow up. But like a lot of places in the world do not have like only the state has guns. That's a terrifying prospect because then you are completely reliant on the state. So I'm curious, are you guys targeting like, are there different sorts of threat models that you're looking at for like US based customers who do have the ability and right to defend themselves versus international customers? Are you targeting one audience first? How are you guys going about that?
- [47:31]
Eric
Yeah, well, I think we in the US we have some of the strongest legal coverage. You know, not just for the kinds of self defense systems we want to build, but also just for self custody in general. We have a bill of rights. We have the rights remain silent. That's actually something that helps us with 6102 attacks because there's certain recovery methods that are going to require a pin. And we have, we can use something called an OPRF where you can derive a strong key from a short pin. And you know, unlike 12 words or 24 words, like four digits or six digits is something that somebody has a shot of actually being able to memorize. Not required in all cases. But if you think you need to establish your constitutional rights, you can move your coin to something where a testimonial factor is required. And under the fifth Amendment due process rights remain silent. You can't be forced to divulge a memorized PIN or password. And so that's the kind of protection that we're going to most strongly be able to establish in the United States and in other countries that acknowledge that kind of right, but won't be available everywhere. But in terms of wrench attacks, specifically, the initial defense that we're looking at will work wherever we can have emergency services connect to an API over tls. Because what happens is we have this vault at home that's a node that is running online all the time, that has backup network connections. And if the node goes down, we can detect that. And so that will cause our monitoring team to make a phone call to the customer and to check for a verbal password. And if we don't get the right password or if we don't get the person to answer their phone, that triggers this emergency response. And that's something we'll be able to deploy widely to a lot of different places. And we'll have other triggers like if you enter the wrong PIN or if we detect other sorts of anomalies. And this also applies to the mobile app, by the way, where if you're out on the go and you're using the mobile app, and we're going to have a hot wallet that you can use on the mobile app, the bulk of your funds will never be able to move with a phone only. But if you're forced to open that app and you put the wrong pin, we can send your GPS coordinates using this same trusted execution environment system, and we can check by calling the customer to make sure there isn't a false alarm or something like that. And when you check for verbal password to an attacker, they have no way of knowing whether you gave the real verbal password or the wrong verbal password. And so this gives us a really strong mechanism where you don't have to actively hit a panic button just in the course of being attacked. We can get notified and we can respond and we can find out that's where we're starting. That's kind of the mvp, but that's not where we're ending. We're going to keep escalating from there. And we expect home security and personal security is going to evolve with drone technology, with robotics, with AI, with all of these things, we're going to go beyond just people having a gun. And even with a gun, you can get caught by surprise, you can get outnumbered. And so we can create a greater asymmetry between defense and offense by staying on the cutting edge of the technology curve that's accelerating very quickly. And so we'll have to see the legality of those systems in different jurisdictions to the extent we'll be able to roll them out. But we're gonna move very aggressively. And also we're gonna engage in political lobbying, we're gonna engage with politicians to make the case that you need these protections for your citizens. This is about safety. This is about the fundamental principle of the law that's been there for as long as there's law that Eric talked about with the Castle doctrine, people have a right to self defense. If somebody comes to your home with a gun and an intent to harm, there's no reason that that person should be protected from the kind of response that we need to mount. And ultimately, the best form of protection we want is credible deterrence. Because once we establish credible deterrence, criminals aren't going to attack us at all. Right now, organized crime sees the bitcoin community as a soft target, as an easy target, as low hanging fruit. We're going to change that. We're going to make them know and realize that the bitcoin community is the hardest target in the world. That they have much easier targets to go after. And if they come after our customers, they will be caught, they will be punished or worse, and they should not fuck with us.
- [52:49]
Walker
Let me just say I love that because one thing that I always found absurd is that you have these high profile bitcoin or crypto people who get targeted. But it's like, it blows my mind that those people are targeted when you have very publicly super rich, let's say fiat celebrities flaunting their wealth all over Instagram and everywhere. But it's like, what's the difference? Well, with those very rich celebrities, there's no guarantee that they're going to be able to instantly transfer you millions of dollars if you cut off a finger. Like, that's basically, that's the difference is you know that it's going to be harder to get their money out because it's in the fiat system. Their money is in banks. Their money, like it's, it's not so easy to just like, yeah, okay, let me sign a transaction and broadcast this 100%.
- [53:37]
Eric
So we, we have to change that equation where, yeah, we have irreversible anonymous money and that has a lot of attractive properties to an attacker, but not if they know with certainty that first of all, everything's time locked, they're not going to get the bitcoin. And second of all, they're going to get caught, they're going to get punished, we're going to track them down, we're going to put bounties to get information to catch these people. We have a heads on pikes principle, which is that we're going to publicize when we catch these people and we're going to make everybody know that they got caught, they got punished, and it's just gonna be very clear that when somebody sees the Vora logo, if they're a criminal, they're gonna run away screaming in fear because they know that this is not gonna end well for them.
- [54:27]
Jesse
Yeah. And it's. And like, first I wanna clarify, owning your safety is something that only you can do. It's the same way. It's like, if you're gonna drive a car, you should buckle your seatbelt. If you don't buckle your seatbelt, it's doesn't really matter what happens when you get in a car crash, it's going to be bad. So the same thing, like I'm always pretty pedantic about this with people that like, even if you don't like guns, even if you don't own guns, like, if you are an American, you should probably take a firearm handling course so that you know and understand how a weapon is. Because what do you do in a situation if there is a loaded gun, like, can you unload it? Like, do you feel comfortable with doing that? Would you be safe with doing that? Or do you need to ask somebody else to do your safety? So, like, it's very important to own that safety. But on the next level, it's like we want to essentially have the world's best investigative and response team that happens so that when people see that Vora logo, they go, you know, let's go fuck with somebody else. Like, this isn't going to work out if that. Because right now there's a real opportunity because of the sort of failed socialism that has created the legal portion of the state that like you can perform crimes and get away with it because of how the system functions. We want to let people know that, like, if you're going to be fucking with Vora customers, like, not only will all of that information be very actively given to law enforcement, but there will be specialized individuals that have dealt with this throughout their lives who will be responding to it and doing the full investigation and making sure that you are caught. And I think one of the more interesting ones is I'm pretty sure any of these crypto influencers, if you got in that moment with them where like it's becoming clear that there is an act of robbery going on against them, they would be more than happy to mount up 10% of the total amount of whatever bitcoin or crypto that they own to pay for people to respond and help them. We actually have these abilities and capacities and we would like to develop in that direction because there's no reason that if I'm being robbed at gunpoint, that I shouldn't be able to have other individuals that are within the area who could respond to me, be able to show up and offer assistance. So we're very early on, but we feel confident that, that this is actually a solvable problem. And not only is it solvable, like this is the most important issue to become solvable for bitcoiners. And we want to lead the charge on that by making a Bitcoin first hyper bitcoins company that understands there will actually be a point in time somewhere where because of how the state is failing and collapsing, that getting law enforcement to respond in a meaningful way probably won't be very available and so we're going to need to have alternative sol and we're only going to have those solutions in place by looking out into a future that knows and understands. That's what's coming down the line.
- [57:13]
Eric
And by the way, insurance doesn't solve this problem because even if your bitcoin is insured, if an attacker knows your bitcoin is insured, you're a great target for them because they know you're going to give it up easily. And now you're their atmosphere, like what makes them stop. You know, they get it from you, you get your insurance, you get your bitcoin back. Well now they're going to go back for more and they're going to come back again and again and again. So insurance is great, but insurance by itself does not solve the wrench attack problem.
- [57:48]
Walker
You know, it's a really good point. One thing I want to ask you guys about, maybe part one would be, could either be just like elaborate on the Castle doctrine for folks that maybe.
- [57:58]
Unknown
Are not familiar with this.
- [58:00]
Walker
But then the second part would be just a larger question which is I think in recent years we've seen sort of a lot of bitcoiners say, okay, America is not the place you should be living. If you're a bitcoiner, you shouldn't live in America. You should live in whether it be Dubai or El Salvador. Nothing against those places. I've never been to Dubai. I like El Salvador a lot. It's amazing what they've done. But this kind of almost like anti American sentiment in terms of like, nah, this isn't a good place for bitcoiners. I disagree with that fundamentally because I think that America, again, the fact that you can be armed to the fucking teeth in America actually makes a huge difference. And the fact that we do have certain laws in place that allow you to protect yourself and meet violence with.
- [58:51]
Unknown
Violence in the form of self defense.
- [58:53]
Walker
Is really, really meaningful. And do you see, I mean, with like, is. Is any part of your thesis kind of around like, okay, there's actually going to be a shift towards like bitcoiners are going to bring their physical bodies, but also their capital in cyberspace back to America because of these protections that do exist for Americans because you can take your safety into your own hands. Is that something you guys are kind of like theorizing a little bit?
- [59:20]
Jesse
Because that's the VIBE I'm getting 100%. And this is actually sort of one of the more distant goals. And what Jesse alluded to earlier about doing some work within the political sphere is that we feel very strongly that like, America is really the only place that Bitcoin has a true chance of success. And it's because of the powerful constitutional protections that we have and the ability of the sovereignty of individual states to counteract a rogue federal government and using those powers to balance against one another. We feel like there's a very, very powerful apparatus to be able to resist state overreach. And furthermore, the United States is one of the only places that you actually are entitled to the Castle doctrine, which means that if someone is coming into your home intent on violence and wanting to rob you or cause harm against you or your property, you do have a right to engage in deadly force against those individuals. And we believe that this is going to become a very key and critical aspect of being able to provide the self sovereignty. And one of the things that we stand next to with Vora is that like, let's say that somebody has a Vora safe and somebody does come to their home to rob them. When they engage in using deadly force against them, like we will have their back 100%. We will pay for their lawyers. We will take on the entire cost of making sure that we push that forward. Because to us, this is a really important public demonstration of that. Like you own a Vora vault, our job is to help protect and secure you. Like, we do not end just at the Keys, but this is actually about you as a bitcoiner and this is about us creating a human centric bitcoin company that knows and understands the reason that you own Bitcoin is because of the self sovereignty that that gives you. And that's what we're in service towards. Like our job doesn't just end at the keys, it ends when we know that you're safe and can provide that. And that's the same reason why we'll provide investigative teams and the same reason why we'll provide rapid response teams is that while these are going to be very expensive and difficult problems to solve, they must be solved if we are actually to be able to say that we are people that are self sovereign.
- [61:37]
Eric
Yeah. And as hyper bitcoinization happens, we're going to have access to substantial resources to deploy against these problems. And before I became an engineer and a cryptographer, I was a lawyer. I practiced law for 10 years. I then became inspired by Bitcoin and the cypherpunk vision and the idea that code is law. But I have those roots in my legal training. And Vora has a legal and political strategy and how we see it is, yes, America in many ways, has strayed from the founding principles. The Constitution's been eroded. We have these problems that Eric's highlighted in his writings about permanent states of emergency, suspensions of the normal legal order. We've seen with Snowden and countless examples of how the principles of this country are not as intact as we would like them to be. But those are our roots, and we do have the Constitution, and we do have the vision and philosophy of the Founding Fathers and what influenced them, John Locke and Rousseau and the fundamental principles of liberty and freedom and natural rights and natural law. This is the foundation of this country, and that's never going to go away. And so that's something very powerful that we can tap into and that we can make the case that self sovereignty in Bitcoin is an extension of the American political tradition. It is in line with what the Founding Fathers fought for, the same sort of principles. I have no doubt that if they are alive today, they would be Bitcoiners. And so we are continuing that tradition, and we can take that to the courts, we can take that to the Supreme Court, and we can make that case that what we're doing here is in line with the fundamental legal political principles of the Constitution. And we can fight and win those battles. And we've seen with the NRA their ability to succeed that way, whether it's through lobbying and creating a political situation where gun rights cannot be eroded or winning in the courts and protecting those rights. And so that's the same model we're gonna be using with VORA is that we're gonna be establishing in the law and in the political system that self sovereignty is a sacrosanct political constitutional principle that cannot be violated under any circumstances.
- [64:21]
Walker
What does that look like? I mean, and you know, Case, and I'm curious, too, does this dovetail in with your VP bid alongside American HODL for the presidential run? Is the plan all coming together now?
- [64:36]
Jesse
Apparently so. Like, we'll need to have some great legal conflict where we're obviously thrown away. And I'll just. At that point, that's when I have to be like, we clearly have to overthrow the political establishment. Both. That being said, like, I've been shocked at the amount of tertiary curiosity that's sort of gone on with the Orange Party. And I literally have not talking spoke to anybody, Normie or otherwise, who I haven't been like, look like both parties are absolutely corrupt beyond repair at this point. And so, like, do you agree with that? And, you know, Like, I'll get him and Han, but they'll be like, yeah, like both are extremely problematic. And like, it's. I really do hope that we'll actually get a sincere and realistic Orange Party movement that is committed to the radical principles. And I'm very pedantic about this. Like, I'm not talking about a traditional standard political party, but I'm essentially talking about a rogue syndicalist methodology of having people be like, I'm part of the Orange Party. This is about the education and allowing for individuals to hold and use Bitcoin as self sovereign individuals to influence state level politics and really to get people on board with understanding that, like, if you identify with red or blue, like, you're the enemy. Like, you're the person that has allowed for our country to be destroyed. You're the one that is standing aside and saying that either one of these people who are stealing and destroying the goodness that our country has, that like, you're on their side. And because you identify that way, you're my enemy. I don't want that. But it's very clear that if your guy gets into power, you're okay with them stealing from me. You're okay with them taking my money and using that to make war against people who I've never met and I don't have conflict with. And I think that's a despicable and horrible thing. And I don't know, I always find it really interesting that when you come back to the thing of, like, both parties want to use your money to murder other people and, like, you're okay with that. No one's ever like, yeah, I'm okay with it. Most people object to it. But it's like, that's. That's a very real truth. And I apologize that it might make you feel uncomfortable and it might be difficult to look at, but it is true, you know, and like Obama, who is largely celebrated as being this liberal ideal, it's really important to understand that, like, as a constitutional lawyer, he used his understanding of the Constitution to overcome it specifically so he could do things like kill American children abroad using drone bombing. Like that that happened. That's like a real thing. And I find it deeply alarming that people want to be like, well, you know, he was the son of a terrorist. Like, that's. And it's like, oh, I didn't realize. Like, when we disagree with people, we can kill their children, particularly when they're Americans as well. Hmm, Interesting.
- [67:29]
Walker
Give the man another Nobel Peace Prize. Amazing. Like, wow. No, nothing Says nothing says peace like bombs. But I guess Nobel, that's his whole shtick, right? Yeah, right. It kind of, kind of worked together. No, I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens in these next few years and decades because I think there's no denying that we are in the middle of a fourth turning. I'm also of the opinion this is a thesis I'm working on, I might even have to write about it, but that we're seeing a convergence of cycles. If you're familiar with Polybius anacyclosis, we also seem to be somewhere near the end of that cycle in the aglocracy, like verging on the mob rule sense. We're in the midst of a long term debt cycle. If you look at Ray Dalio's, we're in the midst of a bunch of other. All of these different cycles that have been proposed by various thinkers. We seem to be nearing the tipping point of all of them. And I think that's going to make for very, very drastic and violent change. And I mean violence, both in the, let's say, metaphorical sense, but then also probably in the literal sense. That's typically how things happen when there's massive changes. Is there is violence, I mean, a little bit to the south of you guys right now in California, there is a lot of violence going on. I don't know how that's going to resolve itself. Maybe it just won't. It seems that these things tend not to resolve themselves, but they're mostly peaceful, so it's okay. But how do you guys prepare for the. Like, are you, are you building for the world that is now or are you building for the world that is to come? Is it a little bit of both? Because like, I think you're the only company that is tackling both sides of this. Again, the, let's say the cryptographic side of this and the very physical human side of this. How do you build with the structures we have now? But then prepare yourself for what may be an incredibly tumultuous period where the reorganization of the world makes it look vastly different than it is today.
- [69:34]
Eric
We live in the future. Basically. We're already in the hyper bitcoinized world and we're just working backwards from there. And we think that's something that almost no bitcoin company and few bitcoiners really have the conviction about hyper bitcoinization and really take it seriously and really believe with 100% certainty that that's where we're headed. That that is going to happen, that there's going to be massive disruption because of it. And that's our base case. We know that's happening for. For sure. And so we're trying to think through, okay, if that is happening, what kind of companies do we need to exist, what kind of products do we need to exist, what kind of services, what kind of political philosophies, what kind of legal frameworks, what are the things that we need to put in place right now so that when this event arrives, we're ready for it, we're prepared for it, and that ideally we. It can be nonviolent, or at least the minimum amount of violence that can occur. Because if we can plan in advance and if we can put the right systems in place, it doesn't need to be violent, it doesn't need to take that form. And that's one of the most powerful things about bitcoin that we've never had before in history, which is that we can completely transform the legal, economic, and political system without any coercion whatsoever, just by providing a superior alternative that's going to create the change just by providing ideas, by providing mathematics, by providing technology that will win people over. And we can establish our moral superiority to the status quo. Because the status quo is. Its essence, is violence. That's how it operates. Everything is coercive. Everything is through at the, you know, the barrel of the gun or a jackbooted thug. Like, that's how it operates. That's how it thinks for any kind of social change. It can only do that through throwing people in cages. Bitcoin is different. Bitcoin doesn't need to use those mechanisms to create changes. And that's a bright line that we are drawing to say how we are different from the status quo, how we're going to win over the hearts and minds, because we have a better system that is more peaceful, that is more beneficial, that is more free. And so we think a lot about the future. We think a lot about how to prepare today for what's coming. And Eric and I have been in bitcoin for a while now, and we kind of have a track record of being able to anticipate things that nobody thinks are going to happen, and yet they occur. And so we're just kind of bringing that to the next level.
- [72:41]
Jesse
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons that's allowed for us to start designing it in the way that it is, because it's really only even been in the last few years that the technologies have been available to actually try to be able to build a truly open source and verifiable computer from silicone to software, like these FPGAs, like the new Tropic Square chip, like the, these are all very new advancements. And then when you start to pair this stuff with the advancements that we're seeing in AI with the advancements that we've been seeing in drone tech, like there becomes a very different future that's available where the asymmetric relationship between the state, violent actors and the individual allows for itself to actually become much more equalized. And so like, I feel very confident that within five years that any individual that has a Vora vault at their house, there is going to be triggers that are going to allow for them to deploy their drone surveillance. And anybody that has came to that house will be marked and surveilled, like their gate recognition will be tracked and that that information will be used to identify them. And like, that's something that we think is really important because we want violent thugs and criminals to know, like you, you won't have somewhere to hide. Like you have now permanently branded and marked yourself with that. You are an individual that will go after our customers. And we have an entire team and division of people that are dedicated to finding you and bringing you to justice. And that's because we now exist at this end state where the law is a highly dysfunctional thing. And if somebody does choose to rob you, legal or otherwise, in other words, the state choosing to steal from you or criminals, it's not clear if justice will actually be delivered. And that's one of the reasons that we really believe that we need to start empowering ourselves and taking this into our own hands. Because if we allow for ourselves to get to hyper bitcoinized world without a product like this, it's going to be much more threatening, difficult and scary. And the truth is it's going to be much more violent. And it's going to be much more violent because we won't have active deterrent solutions that people will know and understand and will be branded towards that. And so, you know, and the other one is that like as large and as much potential as this company has, again it comes back to like, we're building this for philosophical reasons. Like it's really important to us to have this product out in the world, not because it's going to make us both a bunch of money, but because people deserve to have this new and different upgrade that truly allows for them to, to have sovereign custody of their bitcoin rather than needing to collaborate with somebody for that sovereignty or just try to take it all on their own.
- [75:38]
Walker
I mean, to that point, Eric, you've. And Jesse, I'm not sure about your situation, but Eric, I mean, you came out of retirement for this basically, like, this is not something you, let's say, were forced to do. And by the way, did you guys meet at Coinbase? Is that how you guys.
- [75:57]
Jesse
Yeah, it was.
- [75:58]
Eric
Wow.
- [75:58]
Jesse
I would do like introduction coin conversations for like any new employees. And it was funny because Jesse came in, I was like, hey, I'm Eric, I love bitcoin because of this deeper philosophical aspect that I'm really into. And he was like, oh, wow. He was like, do you know about this philosopher Carl Schmitt? And I was like, yeah, I'm actually really well read in Carl Schmidt. And we were both just blown away immediately. And that really became the basis of what is now our long and deep standing friendship, is that not only were we both bitcoiners before and came in with this deep philosophical commitment towards bitcoin, but we both truly believe that bitcoin has the potential to change the world in a radical way, but only if we take responsibility for it. And so for me, I'd sort of done my retirement thing. But the truth is within that you have this idea that you'll ride off into the sunset and then you get out there and you're like, huh, this is kind of boring, to be honest with you. And also, like, there's these other things that need to be built that are really important, like, why aren't these people, why aren't these things being built? And furthermore, like, I need that challenge for myself. And after really taking some time and energy to think about it, I realize, like, frankly, like, nobody else can actually build this because, like, we're the only people with this unique perspective. We're the only people that have this philosophical background. I mean, Jesse is arguably one of the best applied cryptographers in the world. Like, I seem to have some of the deepest and most philosophically aligned thoughts with Bitcoin. And furthermore, because we're not motivated by the fiat short term incentives, there's an ability to build a company that has a 2050 and 100 year timeline in front of it. And that's what we're building. You know, like I, I've wrote a philosophical document that's this, like, it's a 20 page document about like what Vora is. And like, in that we talk about the year 2045 and what Vora is doing and how the product has developed from there. And like the only reason that we can do that is because we're, we're not concerned with quarters, but with epochs. Like we're not concerned with making sure that we satisfy the short term fiat gains, but that we look at the long term Bitco sustainability of the company. And I think that's only really available for people that have been involved in the space for a long time and thought very deeply and intently about what Bitcoin is and how it's going to change the world.
- [78:35]
Eric
Yeah. And we're going to actually build that into the compensation structure for every single employee at the company. That part of their future compensation is going to be time locked bitcoin that is stored in, in a Vora vault in their own home. So if this system is not safe for our customers, it's not safe for the employees. And you better believe they're going to be extra motivated to protect that privacy to make sure the alarm system works, to make sure there's no backdoors because all the incentives will be aligned.
- [79:09]
Walker
That's, I mean that's, that's actually brilliant. That is quite possibly the most like alignment enforcing incentive structure I've ever heard of. That's genius. Yeah, I love that. Well, I'm curious, can you guys talk at all about the actual home vault side of it all without. I don't want you guys to give away anything that shouldn't be given away, but whatever you can talk about. Can we get into a little bit more of some of the nitty gritties there? Because you mentioned just a lot of these supply chain concerns and all this. Can you talk through that a little bit like why that's actually important, what that means, how you guys are addressing it?
- [79:49]
Eric
Yeah, absolutely. Because a lot of bitcoiners, they insist on multi vendor multisig for good reason. Because they're worried about supply chain attacks. We want to provide something where a customer is going to feel safe working with a single vendor Voro without needing to diversify among multiple hardware wallets. Other bitcoiners I know, they insist on commodity hardware where they consider any specialized bitcoin hardware is subject to a supply chain attack. They want to be able to walk into a random Best Buy, pick a chip at random and use that to secure their Bitcoin.
- [80:29]
Jesse
Because the likelihood real quick, just for people that don't know what exactly is a supply chain attack.
- [80:35]
Eric
Yeah, so supply chain attack can take different forms. I mean the first form it could take is that the chip when it's manufactured, there's a backdoor in the actual atomic structure of the chip itself. Another form of supply chain attack can be even if the physical structure of the chip has full integrity, that the microcode, which is the lowest level software that lives on the chip, is compromised. And in most cases that microcode is completely opaque. It's not open source, there's no way to verify it. Another form of supply chain attack is that the actual chip is swapped out somewhere between when it's made and when it gets into the customer's hands. And we've seen very sophisticated attacks by organized crime against credit card readers, against all kinds of hardened systems where they've been able to swap out the hardware. And we have no idea what kind of nation state level attacks might be applied to intel or AMD or any of these chips. That's the foundation of the hardware wallet. If the chip is compromised, the whole system is compromised. For example, to generate a cryptographic key relies on entropy, it relies on randomness that no one else can predict. But if the chip is compromised, if the microcode is compromised, if the physical structure of the chip is compromised, it can produce keys according to patterns that some attacker knows. And they can wait a very long time before they perform the attack. They can wait for hyper Bitcoinization to happen before they take everybody's Bitcoin. And so defending against these attacks is of paramount importance. And we've put a lot of time and energy to figure out how to do this in a way that nobody else is doing. And so, like I said, the actual physical enclosure of the vault is a server rack. And we specifically chose that because we don't want it to be obvious to your guests that you have a ton of Bitcoin at your home. So it just looks like, hey, I've got a server, no big deal. In that server rack, we have an offline component and an air gap and an online component. And we're still in R and D. Some of these details may change. We have a plan for a prototype. Eventually we're going to have custom boards. But what we're looking at for the prototype is first of all, the offline component has a chip called an fpga, which is a programmable ship. And there's a specific chip called the ICE40 that has a completely open source tool chain and an open source bit stream. So you can, using open source tools, you can download the hardware configuration for the chip, compile it yourself, and load it onto the chip. So that removes the microcode Attack where there's no software layer on the chip that's opaque, that could be that you haven't built and inspected yourself. And the other thing that can be done with an FPGA is you can randomize the layout. So there's different ways to program the gate arrays in the chip that provide the same functionality. So if you're an attacker who tried to compromise the way the transistors are laid out in the chip, the fact that we're randomizing the layout makes it much more difficult for the attacker to be able to predict what physical part of the chip they need to compromise. On top of that, what we're going to do is we're going to select for every one of these vaults, we're going to have three FPGA chips. We're going to select one at random and ship that to the customer, take the other two chips, delid them and put them under an electron microscope and send the results to the customer. So if there's a hardware attack, that attacker would have to have picked one of the three chips that we select at random and attack that and not the other two. So there's a very high chance that we're going to catch that hardware attack. That's step one. Now, we also have the online portion of the box. So we're using a Raptor blackboard motherboard, which is the only open source motherboard. There's also Talos, but they're all made by Raptor. So the whole firmware, the whole bios, everything about the board is open source. It uses an IBM Power 9 chip, which has open source microcode, and that's the server component of the chip that's always online. And when the vault signs for keys, it's going to have a two of two between those two chips, but not just a two of two. So we're also considering to add the Tropic Square chip, which is this brand new chip that has been specifically designed for hardware wallets. And it has some of the best in class tamper detection technology. So if that chip is tampered with, it will wipe its secrets. So we can actually do a three of three between all three chips. So all of them would have to be backdoored, all of them would have to be compromised for a hardware supply chain attack to succeed. And then the last thing we're doing is we're going to have an open socket on the motherboard. So if you do want to go to Best Buy and buy a chip at random, you can plop that into the motherboard and now all four chips have to be backdoored in order to compromise the system. And so now we're way beyond multi vendor multisig because even with multi vendor multisig, all of the vendors could be compromised, like your Trezor and your ledger could be compromised. And so with this kind of four or four setup, with all these measures that we're putting into place, the probability of a hardware supply chain attack taking place against the system becomes negligible.
- [87:07]
Walker
Jesus Christ.
- [87:09]
Jesse
He's a good guy.
- [87:11]
Walker
I mean, that's just kind of awesome. Okay, my natural next question though is all these things you're talking about being able to verify all these things, how do you envision this presenting to the actual end user though? Because presumably there are a lot of people with a lot of Bitcoin who may be technically not as literate as you would imagine they would be having so much bitcoin. Is this still something where on the, like the, you know, the UI UX side, you're looking at making this very comfortable for the, let's say the bitcoin layman who has, in a hyper bitcoinized world still accumulated a fortune of coin, but you know, he is not, or she is not a very technical quote person.
- [87:58]
Jesse
Well, and that, that's the next component that comes along is that like right now this is all buildable. Like you could, you could build this out on your own, it would have some difficulties for it, but it's not even that technically difficult. What we want to do is we really want to position ourselves as being the Apple of bitcoin so that you have this high end premium product that you're going to pay extra for, but it means that you plug this in and you now have a Bitcoin full node, you have a beautiful new and different ux. We're really excited about the designer that we've been working with. He has deep expertise and understanding in Bitcoin and wants to approach it differently as well. And we think that there is a massive opportunity to essentially take the full Bitcoin vertical, make that into a great Apple like presentation, to have a plug and play solution that's easy, intuitive and fluid to use. But once you've established that, we're also doing sort of the Tesla market approach in that this is first going to be a premium product that's designed for whole coiners, but as it addresses the market, that market then expands out to where eventually like what we really want to be is in people's personal home data server because the world that we're moving into. Everyone's going to need to have their own personal data server. If they're going to want to run, say, an LLM that will be both their personal assistant, have personal information and health information about them. And you're going to need to have the same degree of security for that information as you're going to need for your Bitcoin. And furthermore, as all of these vaults are deployed, there becomes a real opportunity to make them interoperable with each other on their own protocol level using the cryptographic key storage that we have on there. So now we've actually gone from being just a bitcoin vault to now were a decentralized cryptographic key storage provider that has essentially a decentralized cloud solution that is interoperable with other safes. So the ultimate mission is going to be that, let's say you are one of these ultra high net wealth individuals that has your place in Aspen, New York and France. You can have your three nodes all running in tandem with each other, communicating to each other and verifying for each other so that like, if, if the socialists in France choose to like, seize your property in France, well, it turns out that it's backed up and stored on the other servers that you have because of the way that they've been programmed to collaborate with each other. So these are all distant ideas, but this is the big vision we're going for. Because the other one that we found in conversations with people that we find almost ridiculous in some ways is that a lot of people think really small. Like they don't, they really don't fully embrace that bitcoin is going to transform the world. And that that's already happening. And I thought it was interesting, even earlier today somebody said, like, bitcoin penetration is essentially zero at this point in time. Like, it's still totally new. And with that perspective, we can allow for ourselves to step back and say, well, if that is true, and if bitcoin is going to keep conquering and kicking ass as it has over the last 10 years, there is not only a massive opportunity, but probably the most massive opportunity to build on top of the tech stack to make something truly incredible and very similar to if you asked Steve Jobs in 1978, like, hey, like, where do you think the world's at in 1995? He would tell you, yeah, there's going to be an Apple computer in most homes in the United States. People would laugh at you. And that's what the reality became. And that's what we believe Vora has the opportunity to do as well is that because of the way and direction that both Bitcoin and the Internet are moving, people are going to need to have their own home data servers that will have very strong cryptographic and security protections. And absolutely nobody is approaching that market right now. Despite the fact that this is arguably a multi trillion dollar market cap.
- [91:53]
Eric
Yeah, and 100% it's going to be easy to use, it's going to be plug and play. You don't have to be technical at all. That's a big limitation of the current systems, is the level of education and knowledge you have to have to use. Self custody is a huge barrier. And even for experts it's easy to screw it up. It's easy. You make one mistake and the whole system doesn't work. And so UX and security go hand in hand. And it should take care of foot guns, it should guide the user through the process in such a way that anybody can use it. Bitcoin. We want everybody who wants to use Bitcoin to be able to use Bitcoin. No matter how technical or non technical you are, self sovereignty belongs to everyone. And so that's our goal. And in terms of what Eric is talking about, with the kind of decentralized network that the vaults can bootstrap, this trusted execution technology that I talked about for the server also exists in every Vora vault. So every Vora vault can also has a trusted execution environment that can provide a remote attestation. And there's completely new types of decentralized networks, not with a token, there's no new token here, but a decentralized network where each node in the network is providing a remote attestation, telling the other nodes the code that it's running. And so we can build all kinds of new applications on top of that. Decentralized cloud storage, decentralized PIN servers, decentralized blind signers, all the stuff that we're doing with our server, eventually we'll be able to decentralize across the vault network. And one of the big breakthroughs in terms of UX that we're going to deliver is we're going to revolutionize the Bitcoin address. Not with the technology we invented, but we're going to actually deploy it, which is what Eric alluded to earlier, which is silent payments. And part of silent payments is privacy. But the other thing about silent payments is we're going to be able to have a human readable static identifier as your Bitcoin address. So my Bitcoin address is going to be Jesseora IO, that's my Bitcoin address. Not 1C x 3, 4, 5, whatever. It's human readable, it's static and it's also completely private. That's what silent payments, that's what's so powerful about silent payments. And right now, addresses are a UX nightmare. You have to generate a brand new one and every time you do that, you have to secure it. You have to figure out, is this the person's address? Did it get man in the middle? How do I actually verify that this is their correct address? And so this is going to help us secure bitcoin addresses because you can have the most fancy key management, key arrangement, multisig system in the world. If the address is compromised, it doesn't matter, you're going to send all your Bitcoin to the attacker's address. So one of the big hangups with silent payments, the reason we haven't seen it more widely deployed is because they don't work well with light clients. You can't do silent payments on your phone. You need a full node to scan every block to do a diffie Hellman derivation for every single input to find the silent payment addresses. And most people aren't running full nodes. And especially if you're not technically inclined, it's not that easy to set it up and keep it up all the time and figure out how to connect it to your Bitcoin wallet. And so by having an integrated full node in the box, this means that we can also have silent payments for all of our customers. And now we can have these human readable bitcoin addresses.
- [96:01]
Walker
Can you just explain again in more layman terms what the significance of the silent payment is, how that actually works. Just so for anyone who's listening and is like, yes, yes, I understand that, I think, but like, what is the significance of this for you guys? And why does this actually matter? Why should anyone care about this?
- [96:20]
Eric
Yeah, so, you know, it starts with the principle of, you know, in Bitcoin we never want to reuse addresses. You know, we, we could have one address. You know, a lot of people do this. You put like a, a tipping address on your website, but. And then everybody can send to it. But now you have a privacy problem because all your payments are linked to this one address. And in terms of making it human readable, basically you can use secure DNS to take a human address, a human readable address, connect to a server and it would resolve with some data like a bitcoin address or a Public key. So if address reuse wasn't a problem, we could do that just with the Bitcoin technology that exists today, you'd have something that looks like an email address. It would verify, assert against the domain name that's signed by the domain's key. So you know, is it man in the middle? And it would resolve to the bitcoin address. But because of address reuse, there's a privacy problem. So that's why XPubs were invented. Now with XPubs, you could have an XPub where you could put an XPub out there and you could derive a new address from the XPub, and anybody who wants to send you bitcoin could derive a new address. But the problem with the XPub is anybody who has the XPub, they can derive all the addresses and they know they belong to the same wallet. So if you make your XPub public, it doesn't really help in terms of privacy. It helps a wallet internally be able to generate many, many addresses, new addresses. You know, you're using your hardware wallet, you're generating a new address that's all being derived from the same root public key using an XPub. But if you give that XPub to somebody now, they can derive all your addresses. Which is the problem with a lot of these collaborative custodian systems is they have everybody's XPubs and they can derive everybody's addresses. So silent payments was created to solve this problem where you have a static public key that never changes and you give this public key to everybody that you want to send you bitcoin or you make it resolvable with a human being readable domain, where they look up the human readable address and they get the public key. But then they do something called a Diffie Hellman derivation. And Diffie Hellman is one of the foundational cryptographic innovations that revolutionized cryptography in the 70s and made it is at the basis of, you know, when you connect to a website with HTTPs, underneath it is a Diffie Hellman derivation. And what Diffie Hellman is is that if you take a public key and a private key, let's say you have Alice and Bob, Alice has a private key and gets Bob's public key. And Alice can take her private key and combine it with Bob's public key to generate a number, to generate a secret. Now Bob can take Alice's public key and his private key and derive the exact same secret. So let's say Alice and Bob are communicating over an insecure channel. You have Eve, the Eavesdropper can see any of the data that Alice sends to Bob or Bob sends to Alice, they need to establish a secure communications channel such that the eavesdropper can't decrypt the data. And so if they just sent a secret over the channel, well, Eve's going to read the secret and they're screwed. So instead, what can happen is Alice sends her public key over the channel to Bob and Bob sends his public key over the channel to Alice. So they have each other's public keys. Now that they have these each other's public keys, they do this Diffie Hellman derivation on each side and they derive the same secret. But Eve can't derive that secret, because the only way to derive that secret is she would need to know either Alice's private key or Bob's private key. And without either of those private keys, and those private keys aren't sent over the channel, it's impossible to derive this secret. And once they both have a common secret, they can use that as an encryption and decryption key to encrypt their data and send messages back and forth and authenticate those messages. So Silent Payments uses the same principle, which is if I want to send you Bitcoin and I know your public key, I can do a Diffie Hellman derivation with my private key and generate a shared secret and embed that into a bitcoin address. And the only person who can find that address on the blockchain, even if I know your public key, if I don't know the private key of the sender, I don't know that secret and I can't find it on the blockchain. And so now we only need this one public key. We don't need an XPub. We just have a static public key that never changes. But each sender can generate a unique secret that only they and the recipient can identify. And the reason you need a full node is to the recipient to identify their transactions on the blockchain. Unlike an XPub where it's a very simple calculation and they can just look up the addresses they need to scan through every single input in every single new block. Do this Diffie Hellman derivation to see. Oh, is this a payment that was sent to me? And you can't do that on a phone and you need a full node to do that, unless you want to offload that to some server or some third party service that then is going to learn all your transactions and your bitcoin balance in the process.
- [102:54]
Walker
I appreciate very much the explanation because I think it's like sometimes these terms are thrown around and again, this is a product that can help the non technical people too. This is not something that you need to be an expert cryptographer to be able to use, but it helps to be able to understand some of the stuff going on behind it. So you understand what, why it's so powerful for you and why this actually helps to preserve your privacy. Not just from anyone who, you know, Eve the eavesdropper, but from the vendor who's actually providing you with the solution in the first place, which is arguably more dangerous potentially.
- [103:30]
Eric
Absolutely.
- [103:31]
Jesse
Wasn't that a great explanation of a Diffie Hellman exchange? The first time that he explained that to me when we were at his house one night, I was like, whoa. Like that's how cryptography, if he works. That's amazing.
- [103:42]
Walker
Yeah, honestly that was, that was incredible because I've like read around this stuff before and that was the single best explanation that I've, that I've ever seen about it. And I feel like I, I just gained like I, I gained a little bit more intelligence there. So I appreciate it. I, I want to be conscious of your guys time but I also want to make sure. Was there anything else from the, the VORA product or the Vora philosophy that we didn't get a chance to kind of COVID here today?
- [104:09]
Jesse
The only one I want to point out is. So Vora comes from the Latin term Melvora capensis, which is the honey badger. And you can see we have this nice piece of swag and we have our nice honey badger logo. And the reason why is because like bitcoin is the honey badger of money. And we believe that that honey badger of money, it's the honey badger, doesn't tolerate what we've called the honey badger's dilemma where they're forced to choose between 6102. Attack or wrench? Attack. The the honey badger intransigently refuses to be attacked on either side and will viciously attack and defend itself. And that's the goal of VORA, is we want your VORA vault to be the thing that displays your self sovereignty in the world and will viciously attack and defend you against either one of these attack vectors. And we invite you, Please come to Vora IO. Sign up for our wait list for when we're going to start doing marketing and advertising. And yeah, this is just the beginning of a very long and probably at times difficult journey. But we really want to become the premier and preliminary Bitcoin brand in the world because this is where we're at and we do need to have this full stack available to us. That's really going to make the message clear that bitcoin is here to stay. It's not going away. Hyper bitcoinization is going to happen and everybody from the technical to the non technical is welcome to these solutions. And it's our market that we want to address.
- [105:40]
Eric
Yeah, and don't dox yourself, use a temporary email address or something that isn't linked to your identity. For our email list, we don't want to know the emails of all the bitcoiners that have all the biggest stacks. We don't want to know who you are, we don't want to know anything about you. So we're just giving you this email form so you can stay notified about our updates. We also have a PGP key on the website and an email address. So if you want to send us an encrypted email. This company is all about bitcoiners. We want to know what you like, what you don't like. Don't trust us. Everything we do is going to be verifiable. Everything's going to be open source. We encourage adversarial thinking. If you can poke holes in our designs, please do and tell us about it. We're all in this together and you know, that's what Vora is all about.
- [106:35]
Walker
Fucking right. You guys have time for one more question?
- [106:38]
Eric
Sure.
- [106:40]
Walker
What does hyper Bitcoinization actually look like and mean to you?
- [106:47]
Eric
I mean for me, hyper Bitcoinization means that Bitcoin is the dominant and primary monetary instrument on earth. That fiat currency has been firmly displaced by Bitcoin. That Bitcoin has achieved all the three categories of money. Store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. Everything's priced in Bitcoin and you know, it, it, it is become synonymous with money.
- [107:23]
Jesse
Yeah, for me it's pretty much the same of that. Bitcoin becomes the global currency. Everybody uses it. Unit of account, pricing, medium of exchange. And more exciting is that like we've now witnessed profound transformations of the economy. Like I don't, I don't think property will have nearly the same influence or affect it once does. I think that the entire module of how people approach economics will be really different. And most exciting is like, I think that the world becomes a much more radically free and liberated place. And frankly I believe that very similar to how the American ideals that came out of 1776 then pushed out into the world. I think that there's a very similar opportunity for that to happen. Because Bitcoin will not work in a command and control economy like the CCCP runs. It simply won't function there. And so I think that there is a very extraordinary opportunity to provide for those that live in the global south, an opportunity to have the same sort of American style revolution through an economic front. And we want Vora to be able to support those individuals in that quest towards their own self sovereignty. And we really hope that as the product develops and builds that we will have the same thoughtful, forward looking solutions for those individuals as we will for Americans as well.
- [109:01]
Walker
Damn right. That's a hell of a note to end on. Guys. I appreciate you both coming on here and talking about this. I'm fascinated by it. I'm gonna give you a, an alias email because I, I like to create lots of burners. So you're not, you're not getting my real one, you spooks, but exactly that's.
- [109:19]
Jesse
How you should regard us.
- [109:20]
Walker
So good, good. But seriously guys, thank you and thanks for, thanks for working on this and building this. It's one of those things that gives me a lot of hope in the future when I see hardcore state disrespecting bitcoiners building really fucking cool freedom tech that will ultimately allow us all to be more sovereign or move along that spectrum of sovereignty towards an I, you know, a more ideal future. So thank you guys. I fucking appreciate you both. I'll link you both and also I'll link the Vora IO in the description. But yeah, thanks for your time guys. This was, this was a pleasure.
- [109:55]
Jesse
Thanks to you as well and the work that you do as well.
- [109:58]
Eric
Yeah, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to talk about Vora. Really appreciate it.
- [110:04]
Walker
Me being a podcaster is basically equivalent to advanced cryptography. I mean it's, it's essentially, you know, it's, it's basically the same thing. No, appreciate you guys. We're going to cut this now. Thanks to all the folks on Nostr who joined in the live stream too. There were more than 25 of you. One point, we got up to like 100. So, hey, folks on, folks on Noer care about. That's great to see. All right, I'm going to cut this now, guys. Thank you. And cut.
- [110:39]
Unknown
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.net Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram @tcoin podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab the sponsor links. Head to substack.com walker America to get episodes emailed to you, and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant, so thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.