‘Elegant and ass-backward’: Jameson Lopp’s first impression of Bitcoin
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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Politics
Grooming gangs scandal timeline: What happened, what inquiries there were and how Starmer was involved – after Elon Musk’s accusations
The grooming gangs scandal is back in the headlines after Elon Musk attacked Sir Keir Starmer and minister Jess Phillips for failing children.
The tech billionaire has accused Sir Keir of being “complicit” in the failure of authorities to protect victims and prosecute abusers while the PM was director of public prosecutions from 2008-2013.
Sir Keir has hit back at Musk, saying his record shows how he tackled the issue head-on.
Politics latest: Former child abuse inquiry chair says new inquiry not needed
The row started after it was revealed last week safeguarding minister Jess Phillips rejected calls from Oldham Council for a government inquiry into historical grooming gangs in the town, with Ms Phillips saying the council should lead an inquiry instead.
She has since hit back after Mr Musk’s subsequent attacks on her.
Sky News looks at a timeline of the grooming gangs scandal, inquiries and Sir Keir’s role.
How did the grooming gangs scandal unfold and what prosecutions have there been?
2001: Names of taxi drivers who allegedly picked up girls from care homes in Rotherham to abuse them are passed to the police and council from 2001. The first convictions were not until 2010, with the latest in 2024 – a total of 61.
2004: A Channel 4 documentary about claims young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex by Asian abusers is delayed as police forces warn it could inflame racial tensions. It was finally shown three months later.
2010: 11 men, predominantly of an Asian background, are convicted of offences connected with the sexual exploitation of children in Derbyshire.
2011: Times journalist Andrew Norfolk starts receiving tip-offs about child sexual exploitation by predominantly Asian men in Rotherham. It was his insistence on pursuing the story, despite being called racist and concerns the far-right would latch on to it, that eventually led to a national inquiry.
2011: A girl abused by a grooming gang in Huddersfield writes a letter to a judge about the abuse she had suffered. It was not until 2013 that another victim came forward to police to make formal allegations, then dozens of girls and men were interviewed over the next three years. Victims and their families said they repeatedly told police and authorities but nothing happened.
2011: Operation Bullfinch is launched by the police and council in Oxford to look into a child sex abuse ring in the city. The first convictions are secured in May 2013, then 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020.
May 2012: The first grooming gangs convictions of men from Rochdale and Oldham see nine found guilty of being part of a child sexual exploitation ring run out of two takeaways in Greater Manchester since 2008. A further five from the Rochdale area were jailed the following year.
May 2013: Seven men have been jailed, it emerges, at the conclusion of child sex abuse trials relating to offences in the Telford area.
Elon Musk has accused Sir Keir of being complicit in the cover up of grooming gangs. File pic: Reuters
2014: 13 men are convicted of the sexual exploitation of children in Bristol at the conclusion of Operation Brooke.
2017: A total of 29 men from a Huddersfield grooming gang are charged but a reporting restriction prevents media from reporting on the case to avoid prejudicing other cases. The ban was criticised by far-right groups, with Tommy Robinson – also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – jailed for 13 months (later reduced to nine months) after admitting contempt for filming outside a court during the trial.
2018: Twenty men, mainly of Pakistani origin but the ringleader was Sikh, who were part of the Huddersfield child sex abuse ring are convicted of 120 rape and abuse offences against 15 girls, and sentenced to a total of 221 years.
Three separate trials had to be held as there were so many of them. More men have been convicted since then, bringing the total number to 41 by August 2021.
2023: A Grooming Gangs Taskforce is set up by Rishi Sunak’s government, with qualified officers from all 43 police forces in England and Wales, and data analysts. In May 2024, 550 suspects had been arrested and 4,000 victims identified.
2023: Nine further men are charged with sexual offences in Rotherham under Operation Stovewood. Most of the offences took place between 2003 and 2008.
2024: Operation Stovewood sees 11 more men from Rotherham convicted for the abuse of vulnerable girls.
Read more:
Failure to report child sex abuse to become criminal offence
The child abuse inquiry will only protect children if police have the resources
Child sexual exploitation: ‘I’d wake up with bruises up my legs’
Raped at gunpoint: Telford child abuse victims speak out
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‘Lies’ over grooming gangs
What inquiries have there been?
There have been 10 inquiries and reports into the grooming gangs.
2013: The Home Affairs Select Committee publishes a report into the Rochdale cases, finding the failure to protect children fell to police, social workers and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecutors.
2014: An inquiry into grooming gangs in Rotherham, led by Professor Alexis Jay and commissioned by the council in 2013, finds 1,400 children were sexually abused between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British-Pakistani men.
Then home secretary Theresa May commissions the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales following the Jimmy Savile scandal. Professor Jay became the chair after three others resigned.
Professor Alexis Jay chaired the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
2015: A West Midlands Police report from 2010 is released publicly after a Freedom of Information request by the Birmingham Mail.
It shows police knew five years before that Asian grooming gangs were targeting children outside schools in Birmingham but were worried about community tensions if it was made public.
2015: A report into Rotherham Council’s handling of child sexual abuse, commissioned by the government and led by Baroness Casey, finds the council had a bullying, sexist culture of covering up information and silencing whistleblowers.
A new police inquiry into child sexual abuse in Rotherham is launched, with 19 men and two women convicted in 2016 and 2017 of sexual offences dating back to the late 1980s.
Former detective Maggie Oliver became a whistleblower for victims. Pic: PA
2015: A serious case review by Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership finds 373 children (including 50 boys) could have been groomed and sexually exploited in the city. It accused Thames Valley Police of not believing children when they complained.
2019: An independent review into historic child sexual exploitation in Oldham shisha bars from 2011 to 2014 is commissioned by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham after Oldham council requested it.
2020: The Home Office refuses to release research into grooming gangs as it said it is not in the public interest. Following public pressure it releases the report, which finds no credible evidence any one ethnic group is over represented in child sexual exploitation. It is branded a whitewash by critics.
2022: The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse by Professor Jay is published after 12 years. It finds police and councils downplayed the scale of the problem and children were often blamed for their abuse.
It makes recommendations, including mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse by people working with children, the establishment of a national financial compensation scheme for victims “let down by institutions” and the creation of a child protection authority.
Several inquiries have found grooming gang victims were not believed and there were fears of racism accusations. File pic
2022: Oldham councillors called for a government inquiry into grooming gangs in the town but the Conservative government rejected it and said the local authority should commission a review.
2022: Greater Manchester’s inquiry into Oldham grooming gangs was released. It found the police and council failed to protect vulnerable children and covered up their failings.
2022: The Telford independent inquiry was published and found more than 1,000 children in the town were sexually exploited and the abuse was allowed to continue for years, with children often blamed.
The inquiry found issues were not investigated because of nervousness about race, with teachers and youth workers discouraged from reporting child sexual exploitation.
2024: Oldham councillors again called for a government inquiry but safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said the council had to carry it out.
What is Sir Keir Starmer’s involvement?
2008-2013: Sir Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions (DPP), head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) which conducts criminal prosecutions in England and Wales, for five years.
2009: The CPS was criticised for not prosecuting Rochdale grooming gang suspects in 2008 and 2009. It said the main victim was “unreliable” so dropped the case.
2010-2011: In that financial year, child sexual abuse prosecutions reached 4,794 – the highest during Sir Keir’s time as DPP. In 2016/17, nearly there were nearly 7,200 prosecutions.
2011: The decision to not prosecute in Rochdale was overturned by Nazir Afzal, chief prosecutor for northwest England, appointed by Sir Keir.
2013: A Home Affairs Committee report said unlike other agencies, the CPS had “readily admitted victims had been let down by them and have attempted both to discover the cause of this systemic failure and to improve the way things are done so as to avoid a repetition of such events”.
Keir Starmer and Elon Musk have been sparring over the PM’s role in the grooming gangs scandal. Pic: PA
The report added: “Mr Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as DPP.”
Maggie Oliver, a former Manchester detective and whistleblower, told the BBC the CPS “bears a great deal of responsibility for the failures around this issue”, including bringing inadequate charges and blaming victims.
2013: Sir Keir revised guidance on child sexual exploitation to make future prosecutions easier. Before, victims may not have been viewed as credible if they had not complained immediately, if they had used drugs or alcohol, or dressed and acted in particular ways.
2013: The Child Sexual Abuse Review Panel was created by Sir Keir to review CPS decisions not to bring charges or terminate proceedings after 5 June 2013.
What has Elon Musk said?
The billionaire, who posts on X, which he owns, many times every day, has also given a series of interviews, and has commented on the grooming gangs and child sex exploitation cases in the past. He has shown support for both Reform and Tommy Robinson and began to post about the grooming gangs scandal regularly, in response to others, in late December and early January.
31 December: In response to an X post referencing the grooming gangs and claiming “out of political correctness, the government did everything it could to cover up the crimes”, Mr Musk replied: “The government officials responsible, including those in the judiciary, need to fired in shame over this”
In response to a post that claimed that “Parents who attempted to rescue their children were arrested when the police arrived”, he said on X: “So many people at all levels of power in the UK need to be in prison for this.”
1 January: Then, after a series of other posts responding to people expressing similar views, including sympathy for Tommy Robinson and support for Reform, he responded to a post saying “Labour’s Jess Phillips, Minister for Safeguarding, refused to back a public inquiry into child exploitation in Oldham” by saying: “Shameful conduct by Jess Phillips. Throw her out.”
2 January: He responds to a poster by calling for a new election, then…
He posts: “In the UK, serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service’s approval for the police to charge suspects. Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer, 2008 -2013
“Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Stamer. The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Stamer (head of the CPS at the time).”
Responding to a post criticising what someone called the legacy media, he said: “This is the same media that hid the fact that a quarter million little girls were – still are – being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain. They are beneath contempt. Despicable human beings.”
3 January: In response to a post talking about the cost of another public inquiry, he says: “No UK government inquiry for the gang rape of innocent little girls, but £22M spent on an obviously violent lunatic. Shame, shame, shame.”
He went on to accuse Keir Starmer of being “guilty of complicity” and accusing Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist”.
4 January: He responded to an article in The Daily Telegraph, which claimed to show how the grooming scandal was “covered up”, by saying “How the rape of Britain was covered up” and then later added: “The sniveling cowards who allowed the mass rape of little girls in Britain are still in power … for now”.
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