Jameson Lopp on the Value of ‘Vires in Numeris/Strength in Numbers’

When did you first get started in crypto (and what did you do before)?

I spent the first decade of my career working in a variety of engineering positions for an email marketing company, eventually landing on large-scale data analysis right when distributed cloud computing was starting to become a big deal. 

I first became interested in Bitcoin in 2012. Two years later I started my first Bitcoin project (Statoshi) to better understand what was going on inside of a node. A year after that I went full time and became the first infrastructure engineer at BitGo.

What is your vision for the future of the crypto industry, and how may that have changed since the corona pandemic began?

My extremely long-term vision is to be able to use cryptography to protect many other aspects of our lives. Perhaps, some day, even to protect our lives as well… though that will require our consciousness to be digitized. We made a step in the right direction as Bitcoiners started organizing meetups in virtual reality at the onset of the pandemic!

Since the beginning of the year, what benefits of cryptocurrency have become more visible? Drawbacks?

Protection from money printing has generally been off people’s radar, but now it’s front and center. Bitcoin is finally starting to get more of the respect it deserves as a completely new asset class.

On the downside, a lot of new entrants who are interested in using Bitcoin as a hedge don’t seem to have grasped the importance of self custody in order to fully realize the benefits. In many cases I suspect that the effort required to learn how to self custody turns many people off from it.

Has the pandemic made living off the grid easier or more difficult?

Easier, if anything. It’s now even more common for various services to offer contactless delivery options where they drop things off at your front door. It’s also no longer considered suspicious to walk around wearing a mask.

How has the $6 trillion US bailout changed or solidified your views on the traditional financial system?

Solidified; it’s been over a decade since the last egregious overreach by the financial elites but now they’re doing it again. By creating billions of dollars and handing it out to their cronies with no transparency, it becomes clear that the system is rigged against the average person.

What advice would you give to someone just getting into cryptocurrencies, i.e. buying and trading (what steps are absolutely necessary, in your opinion, in terms of privacy?)

It’s important to invest in education before investing your money, that’s why I built and maintain https://bitcoin.page. I don’t recommend trading unless you’re already an experienced trader, otherwise you’ll just end up giving your money to the professionals.

The most important thing is to learn the risks so that you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot and losing all your money. This is a high risk, high reward type of environment. 

You’ve written about the significance of meme culture for Bitcoin. Do you have a favorite meme, or one you think really encapsulates the sector?

I like “vires in numeris / strength in numbers” because it’s applicable from a variety of perspectives:

* The cryptography securing private keys is based upon large numbers

* The proof-of-work securing the blockchain against being rewritten is based upon brute forcing the solution to a huge problem space

* The decentralized nature of the network makes it robust against physical attack — there are too many “doors to kick down” for such an attack to be feasible.