Anthony Pompliano 0:00
This brings us to the question of privacy and kind of sovereignty around Bitcoin, you are probably one of the biggest proponents of this, mostly because of the other things you’ve done in your life. Let’s just start from a high level, like, what does it mean to have financial privacy and mean to have financial sovereignty?
Jameson Lopp 0:22
Yeah, they kind of go hand in hand. You know, if you want to be sovereign, you want to be able to make payments, send money without having to ask permission, then that means you can’t have any middlemen that are sitting in there watching everything that you do, and then potentially blocking what you’re doing.
The Privacy aspect, I mean, privacy and security are both very complicated things to quantify, because there’s a million different variables and you have to usually start at the beginning and say, Well, what is your threat model? What are you trying to protect yourself against? Because that’s how you then decide what precautions you really need to take.
The big problem with the communication age and where we are today with the internet is that people on a regular basis, pretty much every day are sending their personal and in many cases private financial information to a number of different third parties. And so over time, that just keeps building up and building up. And each time you give sensitive information to a third party, you’re hoping and trusting that they will keep that secure.
So over years and years that you’ve interacted with thousands or 10s of thousands of different third parties, then the likelihood that one of them is going to get hacked is going to leak that information, basically, you know, approaches, one 100%. And so that is why that’s the hard part is preventing that information from leaking in the first place and why I’ve gone to the extreme of having proxy, fake information that I give to all of these third parties instead.
And, you know, you don’t have to go to the extreme of setting up all these different legal entities. There are services out there like privacy comm where you can create unique throw away debit cards that give you an extra layer of shielding between your regular bank account and the merchants, for example, but, you know, these are all things that are covered in the resources.
Anthony Pompliano 2:28
Yeah, and so I guess as part of this, when people hear you say, fake information, how much of this is hard to do, but legal versus not legal, but worth the privacy right and legal? Really what I’m trying to get at is to have you clarify how much of this can be done by a regular individual who’s not worried about or who has no business Hire to even come close to kind of skirting the law, if you will, versus, like, Hey, I literally just put a fake address on, you know, a piece of on a document. And if they ever found out that I would get in trouble.
Jameson Lopp 3:11
Yeah, you know, this is probably one of the most unnerving aspects of it is, you know, people are generally, they want to be honest. They don’t want to get in trouble for lying. And I think that it’s actually covered pretty well in the privacy book that I mentioned. Where, at least in America, and you know, I’m not a lawyer, so don’t check with your own attorney. Again, I’ve spent a lot of time and money on attorneys myself with all of this.
At least in America, if you’re not signing a legal contract or legal document or you’re not engaging in some sort of activity with a government agency, then you can absolutely lie about your name and your identity like it’s not a crime to give false name or information unless it’s to, you know, certain official authorities or, you know, something in the legal sense. But to a merchant, it is completely valid to give a fake name and an address that may not even exist.
And in some cases, if you get to the extreme of all of this and you think you’ve improved your privacy sufficiently, then like the final step is actually disinformation, is actually putting your real name and many fake addresses out into the internet and hoping that they get sucked up by all of these information engines to then create a smokescreen that makes it almost impossible for someone to figure out what is the real information
