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+I'm Jameson Lopp. I've been involved in Bitcoin and crypto since 2012 and went
+full-time in 2015 and I got interested in this space both from a ideological
+standpoint and a technical standpoint and really once I realized that Bitcoin
+as a technology was not going to be going away or getting hacked and I
+started diving deeper into it I got sucked into the rabbit hole or the black
+hole as some people call it and I've really been just falling further and
+further down it trying to figure out what this thing really is like what is
+this system that we've built and where is it going so I've really become
+immersed in the space and think about it constantly and just try to distill
+what I've understood so far so that the rest of the world can start to follow
+the same journey that I've gone through. At Casa we're trying to fill what we
+perceive as a gap in the market basically Bitcoin has had this promise
+ever since inception that you can be your own bank but what I found over the
+years both personally and professionally from from working on different wallet
+software is that it's still very very hard to actually be your own bank to
+scale this learning curve of figuring out all the technical issues that you
+have to overcome in order to have a secure crypto asset wallet so we're
+trying to merge the usability of a mobile app with the security that's
+offered by hardware key signing devices and we're hoping that this will make it
+a much lower barrier to entry for people to actually be their own bank and and
+have their own crypto asset vaults where they're not trusting third parties. Over
+the past few months we've revamped a lot of the infrastructure and code on the
+back end and we've basically got all of the major parts of what you'd want in a
+Bitcoin wallet like deterministically generated addresses and segregated
+witness support. We are ready to go live on mainnet right now we have the wallet
+working and we're gonna start onboarding customers over the coming weeks then
+it's going to become a learning experience to try to figure out you know
+how much hand-holding is really required for a customer on CASA to get up and
+running and then just to be in normal maintenance mode and dealing with
+potential edge case issues especially if they lose one or more of their devices.
+Hopefully we will be able to automate and build more guide rails into the
+software itself to reduce the amount of times that a CASA user needs to actually
+reach out to us and get somebody on the phone to get help. So that is sort of the
+long-term roadmap for the wallet itself we of course have a lot of demand for
+adding support for other things like Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens. CASA is a
+Bitcoin first company so we will prioritize Bitcoin features and
+functionality but we at a higher level really just see ourselves as a key
+management service. So in the very long term we want to be supporting you know
+as many crypto assets as possible but we foresee this moving beyond even crypto
+assets like we think that if the the promise of tokenization becomes a thing
+and digital identity management becomes a thing then the average person is
+actually going to have a lot of different keys that they will need to
+manage cryptographic keys to give them access to all types of different things
+that they'll need in their daily lives.
+We're still in the early days of this crypto asset revolution and personally I
+believe that having to deal with private keys is kind of analogous to the early
+days of the internet when you basically had to tell people to go buy a modem and
+figure out how to plug it in and configuring it to to go talk to an ISP.
+We're still at the level where you have very raw tools for people to actually
+interface with this technology and really what I'm hoping is that over the
+years we will continue to build more layers of abstractions on top of it
+that eventually using crypto will be as seamless as what people experience today
+when they log into Facebook. Now when you log into Facebook you don't know about
+all of the layers of of both internet protocols and even cryptography that are
+happening behind the scenes. I just foresee that that wallets are going to
+continue to get abstracted away further and further to the point that people
+won't even know that they have private keys that are being managed on the
+backend. I believe that the forking of Bitcoin that happened a lot in 2017 is
+something that was inevitable and it is really a fundamental part of these
+protocols that they're permissionless and anyone can change them and go create
+a for create a new network for any reason whether it's a good reason or a
+terrible reason or fully self-serving it doesn't really matter but I think that
+as we're going towards this future of like crypto anarchy and self-governance
+where anyone can can build these systems however they want and it's really
+voluntary interactions that are happening it is going to be somewhat
+confusing at first because human society is not really used to this level of like
+explosion of complexity but that it's something that we're going to have to
+get used to and I think that you'll see different tools and reputation services
+basically being built around figuring out like how you should decide what is
+the best system that you want to use for your own needs. I expect them to coexist
+for a very very long time it's of course quite possible that there could be some
+sort of hyper Bitcoinization event where there are so many people that start to
+rush into crypto that it just devalues fiat to a level where it doesn't make
+sense for people to keep using it I certainly hope that we will just
+consider you to see more gradual adoption of these protocols and really
+what matters most to me is that we have a free and open market and people can
+choose so if people choose that you know they want to hold on to fiat and have it
+in banks and they feel safer more secure in that particular setup then by all
+means they should be able to do that but I'm hoping that we'll be able to prove
+to people and convince them that the crypto asset networks are going to be a
+more sound monetary system.
+The havenings seem to have a sort of delayed effect and you know you could
+speculate that that is due to the inflation rates changing so much and the
+resulting miners you know not selling as much of the newly created bitcoins but
+the the main thing that seems to be happening and we're really hearing more
+of it even right now in 2018 is people are starting to realize how Bitcoin
+supply curve is really set up and they're realizing oh there's 17 million
+out of the 21 million coins have already been created and distributed and the
+next 4 million it's going to be a long process to get them all out there and
+it's just going to slow down more and more so that combined with people
+realizing that a lot of these coins have actually been permanently lost I think
+will result in in the true scarcity of them becoming apparent.
+Basically just around like the level of fabrication technology and how few
+people have the silicon fabrication technology so this is a level of
+centralization that I think most people are not pleased with really what I'm
+hoping is going to happen is that we've already hit the real level of
+sophistication with how you can create and fabricate silicon wafers so like
+the these ASICs that are being designed are pretty much on the cutting edge so
+we're not going to see any more orders of magnitude of improvement and as a
+result I'm hoping it will become cheaper and cheaper lower capital costs for
+people to get into the mining game create their own fabricated chips and as
+other players like we've I think even seen like Samsung and Intel and Nvidia
+start to get into it I do expect that the level of competition in the space
+will increase now whether or not that is still sufficiently decentralized is
+something that of course you could argue about it's it's really an opinion you
+can compare and contrast that centralization with the proof of stake
+and look at you know the distribution of ownership of coins and any of these
+networks and I suspect that the distribution of the ownership of coins
+is even more centralized you know with a small number of entities that are owning
+quite a large portion of it the main difference I think is more of how hard
+it is for people to come and go from from being in those different consensus
+systems at least with proof of work you can go out you can buy new chips and
+find you know better electrical prices and start to compete with people
+whereas with a proof of stake you actually have to invest more into the
+system itself from like a speculative standpoint