Jameson Lopp’s first impression of Bitcoin – Cointelegraph Magazine

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.”