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Jameson Lopp has been on the front lines of the battle between technologists and those who want to preserve Bitcoin as it is since the scaling debates of 2015–2017.


The topic arouses such passion that many suspect it was a disgruntled Bitcoiner opponent who called down an armed SWAT team to his home, leading him to famously go underground.

Lopp blamed the 2017 incident on the “same old same old: Bitcoin philosophy and scaling debate arguments. A few of the more extreme cases think I’m some kind of manipulative monster.”

Lopp, who is currently the chief technology officer for decentralized wallet service Casa, is an advocate for cautious progress who commands respect among the Bitcoin community.  

Speaking from an undisclosed location, Lopp says he worries the backlash against Ordinals NFTs might result in lower support for much-needed future upgrades. Ordinals were largely an unexpected result of the 2021 Taproot soft fork.

“The problem that I see is that there’s a lot of ossification proponents out there. And they’re pointing at Ordinals and inscriptions and saying, ‘You see, this is what happens when you change the protocol. It gets abused and used in ways that were not intended,’” he says.

But Lopp says the alternative is every bit as risky. He has carefully considered the problem of  Bitcoin’s “ossification” — where the network becomes so big “it kind of gets crushed under its own weight and unable to change itself.”

Beer
Jameson Lopp enjoys a beer bought with Bitcoin. (Twitter)

Lopp uses email as an example of an internet protocol that ossified in the 1990s, leaving it with little ability to deal with the massive volumes of spam that subsequently arose.

Instead, corporations constructed expensive centralized reputation services on top to sort out spam from legit emails, and today, large numbers of emails that don’t comply with the arcane rules of the systems simply disappear into a black hole. And users are still deluged with spam.  



“As of today, something like 90% of all email users are captured by five corporations. So, I think we have to ask ourselves: Is that the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin that we want to see? And if not, then what do we need to do to prevent that?”

For Lopp, scaling Bitcoin — something he’s been agitating for, for years — remains the big challenge as the Lightning Network is “not going to fix everything.”

“If you talk to any of the developers, who’re pretty deep into the protocol, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any of them who think that we should ossify the protocol now. There’s so much work to be done.”

“Honestly, I don’t know how much time we have left to do that.”

Historically, Lopp’s company Casa has been solely focused on Bitcoin, but last month, it outraged puritans on social media by adding Ethereum to its multisignature self-custody solutions. It highlights the fact Bitcoin has a fast-growing challenger snapping at its heels if it lets up the pace. 

Southern Man Jameson Lopp
You can take the Bitcoiner out of the south, but… (Twitter)

Who is Jameson Lopp?

Lopp grew up in a “fairly typical Southern American conservative household” in North Carolina, where his father’s side of the family has lived since the 1700s. It was clear from early on that he was super bright, and his parents pushed him hard to achieve great things at school.

“I read probably several grades above my reading level, and I read all the time. I had a special exemption at the library to check out more books than you are normally allowed to just because I was going through such a high volume of them.”

Placed into high-level courses, he often wound up sitting on his own doing separate assignments from the rest of the class, something of a “social outcast.” 

“On the social side, I would just get even more awkwardness and sort of abuse because I would sometimes use vocabulary that nobody else was using, and they were like, you know, ‘Who is this alien guy?’”

Lopp ended up joining Mensa in 2010, mainly to see if he could pass the test requiring an IQ in the top 2%. Naturally, he set up a Mensa Bitcoin special interest group, though he says super-smart people don’t necessarily get Bitcoin any faster than anyone else and points to the dismissive reaction to Satoshi’s original announcement about Bitcoin.

“The people who were responding to that email were not stupid. They were incredibly intelligent people. But if you’re intelligent enough, you can always find reasons why something won’t work.”

Coming of age

After school, Lopp headed to study computer science at the “very liberal” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brought up to be a very conservative Republican, he says university “swung my perspective a little bit more outside of the sort of family and household standards that I had been used to.” He ended up voting for Obama in 2008, Libertarian in the following election, and now believes he can have more impact building decentralized financial infrastructure than voting.

“These days, I view politics at a very arm’s length amused perspective.”

He worked in email marketing for years in one of the tech areas near Raleigh, moving up from working on the web app to large-scale data analysis. Like most people in tech, he read about Bitcoin a few times and dismissed it as “nerd money that was going to end badly” before finally reading the white paper in 2012.

“I was just blown away,” he says, noting that Satoshi approached the double-spending and Byzantine generals problem from the exact opposite direction of the “performance and efficiency” mindset Lopp had been taught.

“When I read the white paper and I saw the solution to the problem, I was amazed because it was both elegant and ass-backward,” he says. 

“The solution was to make everything really, really expensive in terms of resource usage. I was like, wow, I never in a million years would have thought to try that because it just goes against our nature as computer scientists.”

Jameson Lopp
Supplied image of Jameson Lopp.

Bitcoiners back then were primarily libertarians, cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists, and the chance to find an alternate way forward was part of the appeal.

“We can build alternative power structures, alternative systems that don’t rely upon any of the existing infrastructure. And basically, we can create our own rules for how these systems should operate.”

Lopp forks Bitcoin Core

Within two years, Lopp had created a fork of Bitcoin Core called Statoshi to “bring more transparency and understanding to the internal operations of a Bitcoin node.” He applied for a grant from the Bitcoin Foundation to work full time on the project but never heard back. Five years later, he discovered he’d been successful, but the foundation fell apart before he received any money.

Lopp also applied to work at Coinbase in 2015 and “never even got an interview,” but his work on Statoshi did land him a gig running the nodes for institutional custody and infrastructure provider BitGo. He also began to nurture his public profile, ramping up his research and writing — he’s written for CoinDesk, Cointelegraph and Forbes — tweeting more often, organizing Meetups and presenting at events. He’s now a regular at conferences around the world, but it wasn’t easy to start. 

“I’m definitely an introvert, though you wouldn’t know it because I do all of these public speaking events. But that took a lot of practice to do.”

Jameson Lopp grenade
Lopp was happy to lob the occasion grenade during the scaling debates. (Twitter)

Lopp says the block size wars (2015–2017) was the period when he started to become really well-known in Bitcoiner circles. Initially, he was on the big blocks side, writing an article in 2015 calling for an increase in the 1MB size of blocks to increase capacity and suggesting blocks may one day hit 10GB. He also supported the Bitcoin XT fork of Bitcoin Core, which ended up part of Bitcoin Cash.

“That was really a result of what I had been doing as an engineer for the past decade,” he says, adding that he’d spend much of each year prepping for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales because “if you couldn’t handle that, then it would be a bad user experience, you would lose customers, you would lose money, and the business would not grow as quickly.” He didn’t want Bitcoin to lose potential users through a bad experience with the slow, expensive blockchain.

However, his perspective started to change when he realized the impact bigger blocks would have on his own work at BitGo, writing services that talked to the nodes.

“I started to see the opposite side of the argument,” he explains. “Even with these ‘tiny’ 1MB blocks, it was quite challenging for me to write services that could ingest all of this blockchain data at a very fast pace.”

It took weeks sometimes to get a new indexing service up and running from scratch, and doubling or tripling the block size would require exponentially more resources “to the point where only the largest enterprises who had a lot of money to throw at this problem would even be able to run the nodes and the services on top of them.”

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So, while Lopp ended up strongly supporting SegWit as a practical solution and thinks Bitcoin is superior to any other cryptocurrency as “sound money,” he also sees room for experimentation on other protocols, and on Bitcoin.

“A lot of people get very ideological and, in some cases, puritanical about this stuff,” he says. “Bitcoin is not a kitchen sink type of protocol there. There’s a lot of things that you can’t do on Bitcoin that you can do with other protocols.”

Su Casa, mi Casa

Lopp joined the decentralized Bitcoin self-custody service Casa in 2018 and was soon promoted to chief technology officer. He also has the title of co-founder. Casa is an alternative to centralized custodians and offers a range of multisignature wallet plans that enable users to avoid losing their funds in security incidents and to recover lost or stolen keys. 

Casa began support for Ethereum last month and claims it’s the first company to enable self-custody of both Bitcoin and Ether with up to five keys for distributed security. ERC-20 and NFT support is in the works. 

“Obviously, there were a few clients who fell into the sort of extreme Bitcoin-only camp who went their own way,” says Lopp, adding that this was expected. “Really, it’s this loud, tiny minority that can seem a lot bigger than they are if you’re on social media. But in reality, I would say most of our clients and most Bitcoiners, in general, are pretty moderate and kind of apathetic about all of the drama.”

He says the decision resulted from user demand because many existing clients “do have more diverse portfolios, and they want to have that same level of security for assets other than Bitcoin.”

The loud, tiny minority goes SWATing

The famous SWATing incident happened after his views began to evolve. A 911 caller claimed to be holed up at Lopp’s house with hostages, having already shot someone.

“By my voice, you can tell I’m not in a mental health state right now. I’m on drugs. I’m all over the place. I don’t know what to do. […] If I don’t get $60,000, I’m going to blow the whole fucking block up.”

Heavily armed cops arrived at his home, guns drawn. Lopp wasn’t home at the time and arrived to find his neighborhood shut down and crawling with dozens of patrol units, a SWAT team, a mobile command post, a fire truck and a paramedic. He had a conversation with a cop to find out what happened, not realizing he was the suspect.

Lopp recounts a chat with a cop on his blog. (Cypherpunk Cogitations)

Following the incident, Lopp tweeted a video of himself firing off an AR-15 rifle as a warning to anyone trying to find him.

The incident also inspired Lopp’s radical privacy experiment to live off the grid and off the radar of the authorities. Apart from standard stuff like using VPNs, private mailboxes and using fake names, it also involved setting up a bunch of limited liability companies to apply for bank accounts and credit cards one step removed. He mainly spent cash, used burner phone numbers and even bought “the crappiest, cheapest hole in the wall I could find that has a physical mailbox” as a physical address to get a driver’s license.

“I determined that the amount of effort and especially money that is required to do it is going to price almost everybody out of doing this,” he says, adding the fact that you have to lie to everyone was also likely to deter people from trying it.

“Everyone in my physical proximity, my neighbors, they only know my pseudonym. And you know, I have my backstory, and I literally had to create this whole alternate persona, but not so different, it would be difficult for me to make it believable. So, like, I’m still a software engineer who knows a lot about security.”

Lopp maintains a GitHub list of “known physical Bitcoin attacks,” which spans from Hal Finney getting SWATed in December 2014 to a couple in Queens, New York who in mid July were mugged by assailants disguised as FBI agents that stole their car, $40,000 in cash and their crypto.

The No. 1 lesson to take from the list is that the fewer people who know they can rob you of your crypto by threatening you with a $5 wrench, the better. So it’s interesting to learn that prior to his SWATing, Lopp used to drive around in a flashy Lotus Elise with a BITCOIN license plate, basically inviting attacks.

Although many people thought it was a Lamborghini, Lopp says that “it was actually a salvage title car that I got for $20,000.” He eventually sold it, but he has the BITCOIN license plate hanging on the wall behind him during our interview as a memento. These days, Lopp drives “extremely common vehicles that are mass-produced by the millions.”

Jameson Lopp
The Bitcoin number plate has been retired. (Twitter)

Future progress for Bitcoin

Pushing for progress on Bitcoin while not destroying all of the things Bitcoiners hold dear has always been a thorny problem. Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver couldn’t solve it and went off with the Bitcoin Cash camp, who then split off with Craig “No, I really am Satoshi” Wright heading up Bitcoin SV.

There are also Bitcoiners trying to change it from within, like Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer, who have embraced Ordinals. Wall is also investigating scaling Bitcoin using the same zero-knowledge proof technology being used to scale Ethereum via Starknet.

Lopp says he’s focused on a variety of improvements that can be made to “let people start building more outside of the base protocol.”

“You don’t need to go through the same onerous process to develop on a second layer, you don’t have to make these sweeping consensus changes that are really risky,” he explains.

“That’s one of the reasons why I want to see a lot more second layers other than just Lightning. I want to see more sidechains, drive chains, rollups, so on and so forth. Because I think that that is going to enable more innovation, more experimentation.”

Andrew Fenton

Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.

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Govt vows to protect ‘pavement pints’ and make it easier for pubs to extend their opening hours

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Govt vows to protect 'pavement pints' and make it easier for pubs to extend their opening hours

“A wave of new cafes, bars, music venues and outdoor dining” could come to the UK – as the government unveils plans to overhaul planning rules and “breathe new life into the high street”.

Under the proposals, ministers also want to reform licensing rules to make it easier for disused shops to be converted into hospitality venues.

In a statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves said she planned to scrap “clunky, outdated rules… to protect pavement pints, al fresco dining and street parties”.

The reforms also aim to prevent existing pubs, clubs, and music venues from suffering noise complaints when new properties hit the market.

Developers who decide to build near those sites will be required to soundproof their buildings.

Customers drink in an outdoor seating area of a pub in London during pandemic in December 2021
Image:
Reuters file pic

As part of dedicated “hospitality zones”, permission for al fresco dining, street parties and extended opening hours will be fast-tracked.

The government says the reforms aim to modernise outdated planning and licensing rules as part of its Plan for Change, to help small businesses and improve local communities.

More on Hospitality

The rough plans will be subject to a “call for evidence” which could further shape policy.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the proposals will “put the buzz back into our town centres”.

“Red tape has stood in the way of people’s business ideas for too long. Today we’re slashing those barriers to giving small business owners the freedom to flourish,” he said.

The hospitality industry has broadly welcomed the changes but argued tax reform was also essential.

Kate Nicholls, chairwoman of UKHospitality, described the proposals as “positive and encouraging”.

However, she added: “They can’t on their own offset the immediate and mounting cost pressures facing hospitality businesses which threaten to tax out of existence the businesses and jobs that today’s announcement seeks to support.”

Read more from Sky News:
Licensing reforms for London venues
Pubs forced to adapt to survive

While supporting the reforms, Emma McClarkin, chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), had a similar message.

“These changes must go hand in hand with meaningful business rates reform, mitigating staggering employment costs, and a cut in beer duty so that pubs can thrive at the heart of the community,” she said.

In July, BBPA estimated that 378 pubs will shut this year across England, Wales and Scotland, compared with 350 closures in 2024, which it said would amount to more than 5,600 direct job losses.

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Pubs closing at a rate of one a day

Bar chain Brewdog announced this week that it would close 10 sites, partly blaming “rising costs, increased regulation, and economic pressures”.

Andrew Griffith MP, shadow business secretary, said: “Though any cutting of red tape for hospitality businesses is welcome, this is pure hypocrisy and inconsistency from Labour.”

He said the government was “crippling the hospitality industry by doubling business rates, imposing a jobs tax and a full-on strangulation of employment red tape”.

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Heathrow-funded group sending ‘incredibly misleading’ mail to homes across west London, campaigners allege

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Heathrow-funded group sending 'incredibly misleading' mail to homes across west London, campaigners allege

A campaign group for a third runway at Heathrow that gets funding from the airport has been distributing “incredibly misleading” information to households in west London, according to opponents of the expansion.

The group, called Back Heathrow, sent leaflets to people living near the airport, claiming expansion could be the route to a “greener” airport and suggesting it would mean only the “cleanest and quietest aircraft” fly there.

It comes as the airport prepares to submit its planning application for a third runway ahead of the 31 July deadline, following the government’s statement of support for the expansion.

File photo dated 4/1/2016 of an Emirates Airbus A380 plane lands over houses near Heathrow Airport, west London. Exposure to aircraft noise could increase the likelihood of suffering heart attacks, according to a study. Researchers at University College London (UCL) found people who live near airports - and are subjected to noise from planes taking off and landing - may be at greater risk of poor heart health. Issue date: Wednesday January 8, 2025.
Image:
A plane lands over houses near Heathrow Airport. Pic: PA

Back Heathrow calls itself a “local campaign group of over 100,000 residents” and does not mention the funding it receives from the airport in the newsletter.

Its website also does not mention the current financial support and says it “initially launched with funding from Heathrow Airport but we have since grown”.

Back Heathrow also told Sky News it had “always been open” about the support it receives from the airport.

At the bottom of every web page, the organisation says: “Back Heathrow is a group of residents, businesses and community groups who have come together to defend the jobs that rely on Heathrow and to campaign for its secure future.”

Heathrow Airport said it had always been clear about funding Back Heathrow, but would not disclose how much it provides.

Parmjit Dhanda in 2009 at the hustings to be Speaker of the House of Commons. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Parmjit Dhanda in 2009 at the hustings to be Speaker of the House of Commons. Pic: Reuters

Who’s behind Back Heathrow?

The group’s executive director is former Labour minister Parmjit Dhanda, who was MP for Gloucester from 2001 to 2010 and sits on the National Policy Forum – the body responsible for developing Labour policy.

Latest accounts for Back Heathrow show it had five employees, including its two directors, in the financial year ending 30 June 2024. The second director is John Braggins, a former campaign adviser to Tony Blair.

The business had £243,961 in cash, the accounts show.

What are the group saying?

In the newsletter, executive director Mr Dhanda said people ask if Heathrow is sustainable. In answering the question, he appeared to suggest the airport can dictate what types of planes use Heathrow.

“We can build a cleaner, greener and smarter airport – using more sustainable aviation fuel, ensuring only the cleanest and quietest aircraft fly here, reduce stacking in our skies and modernise our airspace to cut emissions in flight,” he wrote.

When asked by Sky News what Back Heathrow meant and what the source for the claim was, the organisation pointed to the airport’s traffic light system of noise and emission measurements for the 50 largest airlines serving Heathrow.

“The scheme helps to see what areas certain airlines are excelling in and where improvements can be made,” a spokesperson said.

But those “cleaner and greener” claims were dismissed as “myths” by one campaigner.

Back Heathrow's spring 2025 newsletter
(use this one)
Image:
Back Heathrow’s spring 2025 newsletter

Finlay Asher is an aerospace engineer and co-founder of Safe Landing, a group of aviation workers and enthusiasts seeking climate improvements in the industry.

He said the emissions savings from sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) were “highly debatable” – but added that even if they were taken at face value, use of these fuels is “relatively low” and so only provides small emissions reductions.

“Air traffic growth at Heathrow will wipe this out,” he said.

Mr Asher also disputed the claim that only the cleanest and quietest aircraft will fly at Heathrow. “There is no policy in place which prevents older generation aircraft from being operated out of any airport,” he said.

As for reducing “stacking” – where aircraft wait over an airport to land – Mr Asher said if that’s the goal, “adding more aircraft to the sky won’t make this easier”.

Opposition to Back Heathrow’s claims also came from Rob Barnstone, founder of the No Third Runway Coalition, which is funded by five local authorities surrounding Heathrow Airport.

He said that regardless of fuel efficiencies or new quieter engines, having the additional 260,000 flights Heathrow has said will be created with an extra runway – in addition to the airport’s current cap of 480,000 – would create “an awful lot of noise”.

“For all the best will in the world, Heathrow is a very, very, very noisy neighbour… When you’re adding a quarter of a million additional flights, that’s going to create an awful lot of emissions, even if they’re using planes that are ever so slightly less environmentally damaging than previous planes,” Mr Barnstone said.

Green claims

Under the heading of “UK sustainable fuel industry for Heathrow”, Back Heathrow said “advances in electric and hydrogen powered aircraft can ensure we meet our environmental targets”.

Elaborating on this, Back Heathrow told Sky News: “Zero-emission electric and hydrogen aircraft are very much the end goal for civil aviation and countries like Norway have set 2040 as the year that all of their short-haul flights will be by electric planes.”

The statement was called “incredibly misleading” by Dr Alex Chapman, senior economist at the left-leaning think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF).

“There’s just absolutely no confidence that those aircraft are going to have any meaningful impact on emissions and commercial aviation in any reasonable time frame. And, yeah, we can all speculate as to what may not happen in 50 years’ time. But I think the people living around the airport should be given the information about what’s actually realistic.”

Even if the technology were available, the runway may not be ready for it, Dr Chapman said.

“Perhaps more importantly, there’s been no indication so far that the proposed new runway is being built to cater for those types of aircraft, because a runway that caters to electrical, hydrogen powered aircraft would be very different to one that was for conventional fuel, particularly in terms of the fuelling infrastructure around it that would be required: pipes to pipe hydrogen, massive charging power facilities.”

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Heathrow CEO on expansion plans

While work is under way to develop electric aircraft, there are currently no commercial electric flights taking place. The best-case scenario is battery-powered flights that may be suitable for short journeys.

But as a major international airport, more than 40% of Heathrow’s flights are long-haul and medium-haul.

And while airlines such as easyJet have called for government funding to develop hydrogen flying suitable for short-haul flights, there are obstacles to making regular commercial flights a reality.

Providing enough hydrogen for the plane journeys from renewable sources will be challenging, as will transporting the fuel, and reworking airport infrastructure for hydrogen refuelling.

Plans for hydrogen aircraft are at least a decade away, with Airbus saying it wants to get a 100-seat hydrogen plane in the air by 2035 – although Back Heathrow’s estimates for a third runway have flights taking off in 2034.

For now, rising emissions from flying are risking the UK’s climate targets, according to the independent government advisers of the Climate Change Committee, who found flights contribute more greenhouse gas than the entire electricity supply sector.

Back Heathrow's spring 2025 newsletter
(use this one)
Image:
Back Heathrow’s spring 2025 newsletter

Expanding at ‘full capacity’

On the first page of the newsletter, Back Heathrow says “Heathrow is at full capacity”, but the company told Sky News the airport has been “operating at 98% capacity since 2005”.

Despite its 98% capacity, Heathrow Airport has broken passenger number records every year for the past 14 years – excluding the pandemic years of 2020 to 2023.

Dr Chapman said Heathrow is at capacity regarding the government-imposed flight cap, not at the capacity of the current runway infrastructure.

“So if the government were, for example, to lift that cap on the number of aircraft movements, it’s pretty likely that they could actually fly 10% to 20% more flights out of the existing infrastructure,” he said.

As aeroplanes have expanded to carry more passengers, the airport has welcomed more people, he added.

The airport earlier this month announced plans to increase its capacity by 10 million passengers a year, before a third runway is built, and to raise the charge paid by passengers to fund the investment.

Read more:
New internet rules come into force – here’s what is changing
Good economic news as sunny weather boosted retail sales

How have the group and the airport responded?

A Heathrow spokesperson said: “Back Heathrow represents tens of thousands of local people who want to make their views known on the importance of Heathrow to their communities and livelihoods today and into the future.

“We have always been clear that, alongside individual residents, local business groups and trade unions, we provide funding for Back Heathrow to provide a voice for local people who historically have not been heard in the debate about expanding Heathrow.”

Speaking for the campaign group, Mr Dhanda said: “At Back Heathrow we are proud of our link to Heathrow Airport (the clue is in the name).

“We have always been open about the fact that we receive support from the airport and that they helped set the organisation up to balance the debate about expansion at a time when the voices of ordinary working people from the diverse communities around Heathrow were not being heard.”

“Back Heathrow also receives support from trade unions, local businesses and residents from amongst the 100,000 registered supporters it now has,” he added.

“We want an end to the dither and delay. Back Heathrow supporters want to see economic growth and the thousands of new jobs and apprenticeships a new runway will create.”

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Demographics will ‘leapfrog’ Bitcoin adoption in Pakistan — Bilal Bin Saqib

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<div>Demographics will 'leapfrog' Bitcoin adoption in Pakistan — Bilal Bin Saqib</div>

<div>Demographics will 'leapfrog' Bitcoin adoption in Pakistan — Bilal Bin Saqib</div>

A young and tech-savvy population, combating inflationary pressures, is driving Bitcoin adoption and a new financial system in Pakistan.

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