How the Email Protocol was Captured by 5 Gatekeepers with Jameson Lopp | Value Stack 40
Jameson Lopp has been building multisig Bitcoin wallets since 2015. He is the founder and CTO of Casa and also founded Mensa's Bitcoin Special Interest Group, the Triangle Bitcoin & Business meetup, and several open source Bitcoin projects.
He enjoys researching various aspects of the ecosystem and giving presentations about what he has learned the hard way while trying to write robust software that can withstand both adversaries and unsophisticated users.
In Value Stack Episode 40, we discuss the history of email and spam prevention, and the actions / missteps that led to centralizing forces of the Mail Protocol, SMTP, into the control of a few gatekeepers over time.
We expand on whether these same forces and gatekeepers are developing and might be present in the Bitcoin protocol today, if the similar missteps are being made, or if we've already fought those battles and learned from previous mistakes.
Support the show here, or by listening to the podcast directly on Fountain app!
Special thanks to Dez and Cory who filmed the episode - check out their channel and other work at DezCor Media!
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:25 What is email and SMTP?
1:20 ARPANET - the early days of email
2:45 The beginning of email spam
4:17 Why most people don't run their own mail servers today
5:22 AOL and the meteroic rise of commercialized internet
8:50 How uptime needs and free open relays led to centralization
10:24 How spam prevention measures led to centralization over time
14:53 How do email providers define what is spam today?
16:40 Spam solutions as a business and beginnings of email gatekeeping
20:03 Flipping the game theory - imposing economic costs on spam senders (Hashcash)
22:30 Why didn't Hashcash get adopted into the Mail Protocol?
25:00 Blacklisting, port blocking, and challenges of self-hosting mail servers
28:30 Third parties all the way down - "meta-rules" that crippled SMTP
29:40 How misaligned incentives led to centralization of email
31:00 Bitcoin's incentives - are the better thought out?
32:20 Points of failure and redundancy
34:20 KYC, the Scaling Wards, censorship, and the custodial problem
37:00 Is bitcoin still vulnerable to incentives that create centralizing forces?
38:55 Should we ossify the bitcoin protocol now?
40:00 Are there scaling issues for self-custody bitcoin long term?
42:00 Importance of the bitcoin culture of Sovereignty
43:30 Why monetary and messaging protocols are different
45:07 Tracking custodial-held bitcoin on-chain
46:20 Is bitcoin headed in the right direction?
49:00 Are out-of-protocol abstractions a bad thing?
51:10 How can people get involved in helping bitcoin succeed?
53:55 Outro
He enjoys researching various aspects of the ecosystem and giving presentations about what he has learned the hard way while trying to write robust software that can withstand both adversaries and unsophisticated users.
In Value Stack Episode 40, we discuss the history of email and spam prevention, and the actions / missteps that led to centralizing forces of the Mail Protocol, SMTP, into the control of a few gatekeepers over time.
We expand on whether these same forces and gatekeepers are developing and might be present in the Bitcoin protocol today, if the similar missteps are being made, or if we've already fought those battles and learned from previous mistakes.
Support the show here, or by listening to the podcast directly on Fountain app!
Special thanks to Dez and Cory who filmed the episode - check out their channel and other work at DezCor Media!
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:25 What is email and SMTP?
1:20 ARPANET - the early days of email
2:45 The beginning of email spam
4:17 Why most people don't run their own mail servers today
5:22 AOL and the meteroic rise of commercialized internet
8:50 How uptime needs and free open relays led to centralization
10:24 How spam prevention measures led to centralization over time
14:53 How do email providers define what is spam today?
16:40 Spam solutions as a business and beginnings of email gatekeeping
20:03 Flipping the game theory - imposing economic costs on spam senders (Hashcash)
22:30 Why didn't Hashcash get adopted into the Mail Protocol?
25:00 Blacklisting, port blocking, and challenges of self-hosting mail servers
28:30 Third parties all the way down - "meta-rules" that crippled SMTP
29:40 How misaligned incentives led to centralization of email
31:00 Bitcoin's incentives - are the better thought out?
32:20 Points of failure and redundancy
34:20 KYC, the Scaling Wards, censorship, and the custodial problem
37:00 Is bitcoin still vulnerable to incentives that create centralizing forces?
38:55 Should we ossify the bitcoin protocol now?
40:00 Are there scaling issues for self-custody bitcoin long term?
42:00 Importance of the bitcoin culture of Sovereignty
43:30 Why monetary and messaging protocols are different
45:07 Tracking custodial-held bitcoin on-chain
46:20 Is bitcoin headed in the right direction?
49:00 Are out-of-protocol abstractions a bad thing?
51:10 How can people get involved in helping bitcoin succeed?
53:55 Outro
Activity