Keeping Your Crypto Safe w/ Nick Neuman

In this episode of Cryptonews Podcast, Matt Zahab interviews Nick Neuman, CEO of Casa, provider of Bitcoin self-custody solutions.

They discuss Nick's journey into crypto, how Case can secure one's Bitcoin in a non-custodial manner, the "Patoshi Pattern" and much more.

Episode timestamps:

0:00 Intro 
2:56 Journey into crypto 
5:42 Single wallet storage vs Multisig storage 
9:23 How Casa secures your Bitcoin 
19:30 Best practices for storing your Bitcoin at home 
28:10 Poker 28:40 Working with Jamison Lopp 
32:03 Simplifying crypto 
37:50 The "Patoshi Pattern" 
40:23 Rapid fire questions 
46:30 Outro 

The episode premiered on May 17, 2021. 

You can listen to it on other platforms here or explore the latest episodes of the Cryptonews Podcast here.

Full episode transcript:

Matt Zahab: 0:00

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Nick Neuman:

 1:40

Thanks man, it's great to be here.

Matt Zahab:

 1:42

Great to have you here as well. So you are currently in Colorado right now?

Nick Neuman:

 1:46

Yep.

Matt Zahab:

 1:46

How is that?

Nick Neuman:

 1:47

it's a good place to be, I enjoy being close to the mountains.

Matt Zahab:

 1:52

For the folks, you can't see right now. Nick looks like there is a beaming light of sun coming right on you. Looks like a lovely place to be. How, I gotta ask, how's the Bitcoin and/or crypto community in Colorado?

Nick Neuman:

 2:04

It's great. There's quite a few companies here that you know, have been around for a while, like shape shift and so there's quite a big community of people in the Colorado area that are involved in you know, Bitcoin and crypto generally. And so it's a fun place to be in especially as things are starting to open up again and we're getting more you know, all the meetups are starting back up again. It's always, it's something that I'm looking forward to.

Matt Zahab:

 2:32

Nice that's awesome. I've never been to Colorado but it's on the bucket list. I have skied a couple times, but huge Colorado Avalanche fan, great hockey see just a great sports city in general, Denver being the city of course. And that is definitely on the bucket list. But before we get into the bread and butter of the show, which is Casa you guys have been absolutely trailblazing and making some incredible moves. I'd love if you could tell our guests how you got into the crypto space and what your past looks like.

Nick Neuman:

 3:01

Yeah, so I actually got into the industry after, you know, I was working at my last job, it was a travel tech company, like you mentioned, and really started just reading a lot about Bitcoin and Ethereum, and got really interested and for fun one weekend decided to participate in the first $ETH Denver hackathon. And the whole idea of going into that hackathon was the fact that private keys are really hard to secure. And it's a very similar idea as what we have behind Casa, which is that this technology will not be adopted on a global scale, if we don't make it easier for people to secure their private keys, because nobody's going to store their life savings in Bitcoin, or very few people will, if they could lose all of it with a simple mistake. So went into this hackathon, $ETH Denver with this idea. I didn't know anybody, I just signed up as a solo hacker and found some people on Slack before hand that like this idea and wanted to work on it. And we built a way to do social recovery of private keys. So you could actually give pieces of your key using a technology called Shamir secret sharing to other like friends and family. And if you ever lost that private key, you could just recover some of those pieces from them and then recreate that key. We ended up winning the hackathon. And so that's when we, I basically left my previous job to start a company around that project. And at the same time, Jeremy, the previous CEO of Casa actually reached out to me and said, hey, we're working on something very similar here. Jamison Lop just joined the team, you should come join us and run product and, you know, help us create, solve the same problem that you're trying to solve. So that was how I got into the space and ended up at Casa

Matt Zahab:

 5:06

And the rest is history. What was the prize for winning that hackathon? Tell me you got like five Bitcoin or 5 $ETH?

Nick Neuman:

 5:14

No way. It was all just pride.

Matt Zahab:

 5:18

Just clout?

Nick Neuman:

 5:19

Bragging rights, basically, I think I met might have gotten like 500 bucks in $ETH maybe? I don't know. So yeah, not very much. But obviously, it totally changed the trajectory of my career and gave me an entry into the Bitcoin industry, which was huge for me. So that was prized enough in itself.

Matt Zahab:

 5:42

Oh it's you know, opened up an incredible amount of doors for you and here you are, as the CEO at one of the most important companies within the crypto security space. So moving forward to the whole multi SIG versus your traditional single Bitcoin storage wallet debate. Now, that's a very tough threshold to sort of quantify and rectify, at what point in your Bitcoin journey and as your bag accumulates, when should you switch to a company like Casa who handles the multi SIG, and offers that, you know, multitude layers of security? Or do you just stick with your single $BTC or crypto wallet, and you know, have the house burned down, you lose your keys, whatever the case may be. Tell me the pros and cons of each and how Casa is tackling that problem?

Nick Neuman:

 6:29

Yeah so, I like to think about it as basically, the world is going towards two paths here with people who are storing their Bitcoin. So you either got a super small amount of Bitcoin, and you don't actually need to put a ton of effort into securing it. And so you're maybe really new to this space, you're using a really simple mobile wallet, maybe keeping it on an exchange, you know, you're just getting started with things. And actually, Casa does have a really easy to use mobile wallet for people like this, where they're still holding their own keys but with the way that we've designed it, it feels like you're using a Coinbase or something like that. Then, really, once you start to get into the realm of having a meaningful amount of money stored in Bitcoin, so maybe that's a few $1,000 worth today, which could grow significantly, you know, 10x or more, over the next few years, you need to start thinking about protecting that in a more serious way. And so this is generally when people start thinking about getting a hardware wallet, right. And that just takes things really to the next level in terms of what you need to understand. You need to protect your seed phrase, you need to figure out a place to store the hardware wallet, you need to make sure that you know you, are you going to use a pin, are you going to use a passphrase? What are you going to back your seed up onto? There's so many questions that open up once you get to that hardware wallet stage, and it feels really intimidating for people. So what we like to say is basically that once you hit that hardware wallet stage, our gold plan actually starts to make sense for you because at the gold plan, you still have that hardware wallet that you're using, you know, it's the same hardware wallet you already were going to be using. Except for that you get triple the security of that, because you don't just have that wallet protecting your Bitcoin, you've got two other keys, one is on your phone. And then one is held by Casa. And so what that means is that you don't have to worry as much about how you perfectly protect that single wallet or perfectly backup that seed phrase, you can actually rely on the fact that you have multiple keys and you're allowed to make some mistakes. And so it gives people a lot of peace of mind, even when they're holding you know, point one bitcoin. It gives people just a lot of comfort knowing that not only do they have that one hardware wallet protecting their funds, but they've got another key on their phone and then Casa has got a key themselves which we can use to help people out.

Matt Zahab:

 9:23

So how does Casa store the key? How does that whole relationship look like from your end? How does it look like from the consumers? And what type of capabilities do you guys have with the keys in general? Like a give me a full 360 degree overview of how that relationship looks like.

Nick Neuman:

 9:38

Yeah, so taking a step back what multi SIG means and multi SIG sounds like this complex word, right that you it sounds scary and we hear all the time from clients that oh, I thought this was going to be really complicated. And then I set it up and actually that was way easier than I thought it would be.

Matt Zahab:

 9:57

That's classic crypto making things sound way more complicated that should be

Nick Neuman:

 10:01

Exactly. Yeah, we really should think of a different word besides multi SIG, right? It's like it, like people know what two FA so call it three FA or something like that, right? Anyway, for some reason, people stuck with multi SIG. So the way that it works is that you've got three keys protecting your Bitcoin and you need to have those keys to approve a transaction. So let's say when you have a single key, a single hardware wallet that's protecting your Bitcoin, only that key needs to approve a transaction to actually send Bitcoin, right? With multi SIG, you need two of those three keys as an example with the Casa gold plan setup. So because you don't need all three keys, it means you can lose one of those keys, or even have one of those keys stolen, and you don't lose your Bitcoin. So the way that Casa systems works, specifically, one key is saved on your phone, one key is on a hardware wallet and then one key is held by Casa. And so for the average transaction, you're going to go and you're going to approve it from your phone and your hardware wallet. And then you're going to send the transaction and it goes out just like a normal Bitcoin transaction to whoever you're sending it to. But let's say you lose your hardware wallet. In this scenario, you want to replace that hardware wallet, and then transfer funds to the new healthy multi SIG that has three keys again, as part of that process, you're going to use the mobile key that's on your phone, and the Casa key, which we're holding for you on an offline super secure multiple backed up in different geographic locations, hardware to make sure that that key is always available no matter what happens. So in that scenario, you are using the mobile key and the Casa key to transfer funds still, whereas previously, if you'd lost that hardware wallet, and that was the only thing protecting your Bitcoin, then it kind of SSL, right? It just gives people a lot more room to make a mistake, right, and to feel a lot more comfort about the safety of what could be their life savings. And then when you take it up to the next level of security for Casa, we actually have a three of five multi SIG as well. This is meant for people who are storing 100k or more worth of Bitcoin that's 100k in dollars. And it really gives you just an extra level of resiliency around your security, which you want when you're protecting that much Bitcoin. So in that scenario, you have five keys, one of them is on your phone, three of them are on hardware wallets, typically from different manufacturers, which helps you actually protect against, you know, manufacturer specific defects, like if something goes wrong with ledger, you still can rely on Trezor or cold card, right. So you've got three on hardware wallets, and then one held by Casa. And those higher level tiers that we have our Casa platinum and our Casa diamond tiers also come with a really high level of client service. So sometimes self custody can be intimidating and our client service team really helps people who are securing large amounts of Bitcoin, to do that right, making sure you're not messing things up with your setup, and making sure that you you feel comfortable because you have somebody that you can call and actually get on a video call with us if you want to help you through any number of situations that you might be in with your Bitcoin. So that's the really high level overview of what Casa does across the various product offerings that we have today.

Matt Zahab:

 13:51

Tell me about the last year, the creme de la creme and diamond. Would that be for institutions is that for the Michael sailors who own you know, hundreds of 1000s of Bitcoin?

Nick Neuman:

 14:01

it's generally for people who for high net worth individuals that are holding large amounts of Bitcoin. And they are people who want some of the extra benefits that we have at our diamond level. So this is specifically more customization possibility on the the hardware package that you get, a higher level of, you know, setup assistance and hands on service from our client service team. And the really big kicker for most individuals is the inheritance features. So we actually have built a way that is unique in the industry to allow people to hold their own keys yet still be able to pass their Bitcoin on to their heirs should they die. And so that's something that, you know, is really attractive for people who are holding a large amount of Bitcoin. They want to make sure that their family can access that should anything ever happen to them. So those are what's really appealing for individuals at that tier. But we do also have some businesses that use that product, because we have team features built in there. And so what the team features do is it allows you to distribute keys to different members of a team. So let's say you're a investment firm that is holding Bitcoin, you can actually give a couple of the different partners keys to make sure that everybody needs to agree and sign off on something, if you're going to sell some Bitcoin. So we have hedge funds, we have businesses, we have nonprofits, all that use that diamond tier because of the team features.

Matt Zahab:

 15:48

Interesting. So tell me if I am, again, we'll use the example of Michael sailor, for example, or a company like marathon. If I'm one of those companies, theoretically, now mind you, this would never happen, we hope it would never happen, because you know, Bitcoin would probably fall off a cliff. But what would happen if a company like MicroStrategy or marathon who has 1000s of Bitcoin, what would happen to the industry and the price if there was a hack? And someone got a hold of the keys, someone got a hold of all the Bitcoin and they ran off to a different country? Or what if their CFO let's say that their CFO was the singular holder of all the Bitcoin had all the keys him or herself? What like, what would that look like? What would that just be like? Doomsday?

Nick Neuman:

 16:31

I don't think it would be Doomsday, I mean, maybe at some point in bitcoins past, it would have been a huge setback. But at this point, Bitcoin is a global phenomenon that is extremely well established. And so one company like MicroStrategy, even though they do hold a lot of Bitcoin, if they were to lose that Bitcoin, it might cause a small dip in the price or something because people were overly emotional and reacted. But overall, I don't think it's gonna, it doesn't have an effect on Bitcoin as a protocol, right? It doesn't change the core investment thesis for Bitcoin. And so if that were to happen, that would be very bad for micro strategy, which is why micro strategy hopefully has invested quite a bit and figuring out their their security solution. But I don't think it's going to affect Bitcoin wouldn't affect Bitcoin as a whole.

Matt Zahab:

 17:26

Right? So if MicroStrategy used Casa, for example, walk me through the actual physical storage part of it, you said that you have, that you and the team store the keys in different, you know, data centers, different actual physical, you know, infrastructure, hubs, whatever you want to call it, how does that look like? And how much can you tell me what sort of without giving away the secret sauce kind of thing?

Nick Neuman:

 17:50

Well, so, as far as the Casa key goes, I mean, we use basically secure physical locations with offline hardware in different geographies, to store copies of that key and make sure that people, you know, our customers can always be able to utilize that key. But that's only one of the five keys that are protecting somebody's Bitcoin. And so in that example, that you gave her on micro strategy, what they would likely do is give one key to Michael, one key to their CFO, one key to their COO, right. And so each of these people would actually be holding a hardware key, and would have it distributed or held in a different location. So that hardware key can be a Trezor, or a ledger, or a cold card, whatever, you know, whatever brand of hardware wallet you want to use, and they would have those themselves stored in different locations that they would probably decide on as a company as part of their treasury management policy. So generally, you know, Casa, we've only got one key, and it's really up to our customers to store their keys securely. But where our client service team comes in, is they can talk to our clients and say, you know, let's say our clients have questions about the best places, types of places to store keys, or how to think about different security threats in different types of setups. Our client service team is there to really help people talk through all of that. So that's that human touch element that I think a lot of other self custody businesses, or even just simple wallet apps are missing in the industry that Casa offers.

Matt Zahab:

 19:30

I love that. You brought up the point of best practices in regards to where one should store those physical wallets. Give me, give it to me. What are they? I've heard some scary stories, just some absolute just nightmare fuel of people, you know, house burned down or house floods, they have the keys in a notebook and boom, that's the end of it. One, I guess to begin walking through any scary stories that maybe one of your clients has had in the past or or just a story that's gone around through the rivervine and the network and then we'll move forward to best practices.

Nick Neuman:

 20:04

Well, I won't talk about you know, clients scary stories for two reasons. One, just protecting client privacy, but two, we don't really have client scary stories because people that use Casa, it's such a resilient system that you have to do a lot, a lot of things wrong in order to be even at threat of losing your Bitcoin with Casa. So that aside.

Matt Zahab:

 20:33

No one at Casa has ever lost a Bitcoin?

Nick Neuman:

 20:35

No

Matt Zahab:

 20:36

That's incredible. Wow.

Nick Neuman:

 20:37

I mean, we've spent a lot of time designing this system, right. And so we've built it to be something that is extremely resilient and helps people in a simple way, you know, that doesn't take a ton of work from them, secure their Bitcoin and not have to worry about losing it. And so that's why we think it's such a game changer for people and once people understand how the system works, and even just give it a try, you know, we have a 30 day free trial, so people can try it out for themselves. I think they really understand that. And it gives them a lot of comfort. And so as far as some of the stories that you have, you do hear though, it's generally around people who are having, they've got their funds on a single hardware wallet, or on a paper key or something like that and they're either doing one of two things. One they are, they get unlucky, and their house burns down or something like that. And that causes, since they only had that one key, it was a single point of failure and that caused them to lose those funds. Right. The other thing that we see pretty frequently is people will actually try to get too fancy with their setup. And they'll do some crazy treasure hunt type of thing that requires them to have all these instructions written down that they gotta remember, or, you know, maybe they don't even try to write it down because they don't want somebody to find it. And they actually end up losing their Bitcoin because they made the system too complex for themselves. And so complexity is the enemy of security, you want to have a simple, but robust security system. And so that's what Casa has designed. And that's what we give to our clients that when they use our product, to get their peace of mind around their Bitcoin. So as far as best practices go. Generally, what we recommend is the way that the system is built is its multi device, multi signature, multi location. So you've got multiple different types of devices that are holding keys. One's on your phone, there's three on hardware wallets, and those are each different hardware wallets, once held by Casa. So there's a lot of different, there's a lot of protection against attack vectors, just by having diversity in the types of devices holding your keys. Multi signature means that you need more than one key to move funds art explained that earlier. And then multi location is a really critical part. So you're actually, let's say you're an individual using Casa. And whether using two of three or three or five, you are going to take your keys and make sure that no, the amount of keys needed to spend funds are not in the same location. So for example, what some of our clients might do is they'll hold one key on their phone, one key, they'll keep on a hardware wallet at home in a home safe. One key they may put in their office or at a family member's house or some other kind of secondary location. And then one key they'll keep somewhere in a safety deposit box. Sometimes people will leave in keep keys in a totally different country and so it really depends on people's security model. But the key is that the these are not at the same location. This requires you to travel to the various locations in order to move Bitcoin, which can be kind of a pain, right? But that gives you a lot of protection against all of the potential mistakes, or disasters or even theft that could happen if you're keeping everything in one spot. So that separation geographically adds a significant layer of protection for people against a whole range of threats that they might face with their Bitcoin security.

Matt Zahab:

 24:48

What do you, what about during a pandemic though? I know, like for example, I'm from Canada and when I go back home, I'm in the States right now I'm in Florida. It's been so grateful can't believe I'm here. It's a treat and a half. Story for another day. Let's say I wanted to go back home. 14 day mandatory quarantine, and three days in a government hotel as well and I spend the other 11 at home. And, you know, what if I had to go parents house, friend's house, you know, aunt, uncle, Grandma, whatever the case may be any, you know, tips or a piece of advice in regards to handling that a factor during a pandemic?

Nick Neuman:

 25:20

Yeah, so we actually, we have a post on our blog about this and we've worked through this problem with a lot of clients too. And it's a combination of a couple of things. One is that it depends on how quickly you expect to need to move Bitcoin. So if you expect to need to move Bitcoin quickly, then you want to take that into account with how you distribute your keys, right, so maybe you're putting a key at a family member's house that even if you weren't able to visit it, because it's across country lines, and there's quarantine or something, you could actually call them up and have them sign a transaction for you. There's also the Casa key, which we've used quite a bit to help people out during the pandemic, which is basically like if they let's say they want to move Bitcoin and they have access to two of their keys, but they're not able to get access to that third key because it's wherever, they can actually call us and we can go through our security checks and sign with our key for them to make sure that they can still move their Bitcoin, even though they can't access some of those keys. So that's one angle that a lot of people don't necessarily think about what the Casa key, but we can help people out with it in more than just emergency type of situations where they've lost keys. We can actually make people's lives a little bit easier by adding a signature from our key without having to you know, that doesn't give us the ability to move Bitcoin for them, which is what, that's the whole point of Casa, only our users can move their Bitcoin. But Casa can be really helpful for that, for those people in certain unexpected scenarios, like a pandemic, right.

Matt Zahab:

 27:11

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Nick Neuman:

 28:16

So I'm terrible at it. But I do enjoy playing poker with friends.

Matt Zahab:

 28:21

Especially during the pandemic. I feel like everyone got into it back in March when you know shit sort of hit the fan. I remember my buddies and I it's the first thing we did. Was that same case with you, playing poker back in March of 2020?

Nick Neuman:

 28:31

No, not quite. But every once in a while we'll get together and play and you know, I usually lose.

Matt Zahab:

 28:40

Nice. That was the nicer organic ad read there and we're going to start tying that into the show. I want to talk a little bit more about Home Security. Jamison Lop who is a character on Twitter, he's really been blowing off. I think he's got hundreds of 1000s of followers now. Firstly, what's he like in person? You work with him, how how cool guy is he?

Nick Neuman:

 29:02

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people think he's this crazy Twitter character because of, you know, his Twitter, right? And there is definitely that side to his personality, right? It takes a lot, a certain kind of person to spend a year plus working on completely going off the grid in terms of personal privacy and Home Security. But for him, it made a lot of sense. You know, he had swatted and he wanted to protect himself and his family and so he went through those steps to do that. But the majority of the time working with Jamison, he's just a normal guy. He's very smart, he knows a lot about Bitcoin security and that's what he brings to Casa that is a huge advantage for us versus really any of the other kind of security focused companies in the space. But he's very, awesome to work with, super chill and, you know, he knows his stuff, which is great.

Matt Zahab:

 30:07

He has an article on your blog called a home defense primer, how to secure your home Jamison Lop style. I'm sure you've checked that out. It was hilarious. Hilarious, but also, you know, very much needed on the extremely thorough, very thorough on the flip side, almost like you feel like he could be in a movie like a Steven Seagal movie or something like literally Hollywood with how he boarded up his house. Can you talk a little bit about some of those practices you mentioned?

Nick Neuman:

 30:35

I mean, I think Jamison would be the best person to talk about him. But I think that he's got some, he has some really interesting suggestions in there that people, the average person wouldn't really think about. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to protect, specifically against home invasion. And Jameson spent a lot of time thinking about this. And he spent a lot of time testing stuff. And so one thing that was that I found super interesting was, there's actually this like film that you can apply to your windows, which makes them a lot harder to break. And so it makes it harder for a thief to kind of break a window and get into your house. And so there's actually this super old video of Jamison testing these out, he's got like some old windows, he found somewhere sitting outside on the side of his house. He's got like a crowbar or a bat or something. And one of these windows, he put the film on the other one he didn't. And he like breaks the first window without the film, and it just totally breaks. And then he tries the second one, and it shatters. But it holds still. And that's what the film actually helps it do. So there's just a lot of kind of hidden gems type of suggestions in that post, and then some of Jameson's other content on his personal blog that a lot of people wouldn't think about when it comes to Home Security.

Matt Zahab:

 32:03

I like that. I want to move forward and talk a little bit about how the general public and sort of the average Joe's and Jill's who are just getting into bitcoin and are, you know, slowly but surely accumulating that bag and making it grow larger and larger? What are some of the things that that companies like Casa can do to really get them on board to really sort of, you know, incorporate these crypto storage best practices?

Nick Neuman:

 32:31

I think that a big mistake that a lot of people who have been in Bitcoin for a while make is they talk to people who are new to the space, like they have been in Bitcoin and been researching Bitcoin for as long as themselves. And so they're telling that they're throwing all this stuff at them about, you know, you got to do you got to run a node, it's got to be over Tor, you got to use x, you know, multi SIG software, to stay perfectly private, make sure you backup your seed phrases on, you know, multiple pieces of metal and different locations and it's a lot for somebody who is new to Bitcoin to handle. And I think that people really underestimate how much of a mistake that is because what that causes people to do is it causes them to say, I don't think I can handle holding my own keys, I'm just gonna leave this with Coinbase, because they probably know what they're doing more than me. What I see as the job of Casa and should be the job of other companies in the Bitcoin space, is to build that bridge, and make it easy for people to actually have the, to participate in those best practices. And to be able to take advantage of the benefit of holding their own keys without having to feel like they need to spend hours and hours of their life researching this and keeping up with it. The most successful companies are going to be the ones that build that bridge between the average person who doesn't live their life researching Bitcoin, and the person who is super secure because they've done all of the work to make sure that they know every single possible threat vector and have accounted for it. Casa sits in the middle there, brings that kind of superpower of having all of that time and research from one end of the spectrum, to the newbie end of the spectrum by simply building it into our product in a way that's really easy to use. And so that's what I really see as the responsibility of a lot of companies in the Bitcoin space is to help widen bitcoins reach and adoption among all of these people who are interested but feel intimidated by the amount of knowledge that you have to have, and the amount of things you have to do and keep up with in order to be a successful Bitcoiner, for example. So it's really about figuring out, how do we explain this in the simplest way possible? And how do we build the simplest product that offers the right level of security for the right person and meets them really where they are in their Bitcoin journey.

Matt Zahab:

 35:32

You guys have obviously done an incredible job at that and even going on your website, me personally, I don't have Casa, I wish I end big enough bag. I very well could use Casa and you know, I'm gonna message you after this, and we will get something going. But on your website, you've laid out everything in such simplistic terms, it's you have the problem, you know, the how the why the what and the solution. And like, I feel like that's a big part where, when you first get into crypto, like you spoke about you're storing your keys on metal and multi SIG and different geo locations, it's an absolute shit show, but as CEO, like, how do you sort of motivate your team across all different sectors of the company to really hammer down on the simplicity aspect? Because I completely agree with you. It's such a hard part and it's one of the biggest barriers of adoption for the average Joe or Jill. How do you motivate your team to really nail down that simplicity factor?

Nick Neuman:

 36:30

I think the key is that I don't motivate my team to do that. My team is already motivated to do that, you know, I'm super lucky to basically work with amazing people who are all working towards the same mission of making Bitcoin security simpler for people. And so I don't have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to motivate my team. You know, they're, in fact, a lot of times they're motivating me with the ideas that they come up with the things that they're building and we just have one of the best teams, like I would say in the world, right? Definitely the best team in Bitcoin security. And so I'm incredibly lucky to work with people that I do and this is just built into the company's DNA because every person at the company believes in it, in the importance of this simplicity, so much. So it's not something that we have to, you know, constantly be driving from some top down perspective, right? It's really, it's a very much bottoms up thing that everybody on the team believes is important.

Matt Zahab:

 37:50

You are a good CEO Nick. Damn, damn good. And I'm sure your team is very grateful for you. A couple more questions before we wrap up. If you were a betting man, who is Satoshi?

Nick Neuman:

 38:03

I, honestly, I don't know. But the like, the best bet was probably Hal Finney. But you know, even that, I don't know, and so it very well could have been a group of people. I know Jamison has actually done quite a bit of like research and looked into some of the early mining patterns around this and like there's this other mining pattern that I don't know too much about so don't ask me but it's called the Potosi pattern, which he's like, written all this stuff on. Anyway, I think he and Sergio Lerner have like worked on some of that stuff. So Jamison has done a lot of research into this and still hasn't found out who Satoshi is. So I don't think anybody's you know, there may be a couple of people that figured it out. But if they did, they're keeping super tight lipped.

Matt Zahab:

 38:58

And that was called the Patoshi like pa t Patosi pattern?

Nick Neuman:

 39:01

Yeah, basically, Satoshi but switched the s for a P. And it was this kind of weird early miner that could have been somehow related to Satoshi or maybe it was somebody else who was just early in the community. And Jamison's done a bunch of research on that and anyway, it's pretty interesting doing this kind of archeological digging into the the history of Bitcoin. A super interesting article that I read recently was written by Pete Rizzo in Bitcoin magazine, and it's basically going into the disappearance of Satoshi so it walks through a kind of the early Bitcoin talk forum posts that Satoshi what was in conversations around and I think is really enlightening from the perspective of understanding some of bitcoins early history, and how Satoshi interacted with other people that were working on developing Bitcoin and that had ideas around Bitcoin. And it's just something that I think it's well worth reading that article. And because if you were to try and go find that stuff yourself, it would take a really long time. But Pete did a great job of aggregating all of that, all of the relevant stuff, and building kind of a story out of it, which was just super interesting.

Matt Zahab:

 40:23

We'll put that in the show notes. I did read that as well and that was incredible. Last question for you. When will Bitcoin hit 100k?

Nick Neuman:

 40:30

It's sometime this year. I think it's probably going to be in like September, if I had to, if you're going to nail me down on a month kind of thing, I'd say September. And then I think there's potential that it hits like 150 200 by December, and then that's about the end of the bull market. And then we drop back down to 50 to 70 range.

Matt Zahab:

 40:55

Wait, why do you think it'll drop down so far after after hits 150 kind of thing.

Nick Neuman:

 41:00

If you look at past bull markets, you see a very similar pattern. So looking at 2017, for example. Before the 2017 bull market, the previous all time high, was about one and a half times the sorry, the previous all time high was in the 1000 range. In 2017, bull market, Bitcoin goes from that kind of 1000 range to 20,000 and then it drops back all the way down to 3000. That 3000 was about one to one and a half times the right previous all time high of 1000 and change like 1500 or somewhere between 1000 1500. So if you apply that to today, that there was a similar thing that happened in the bull market before that in like 2013, or whatever it was. So if you apply that to today, the previous all time high for Bitcoin was about was 20k. And if you're looking at like, what what could it run up to? Probably 10 to 20 times that if you're following previous bull market trajectories. And then it likely drops to one to two times the 1 to 3, I guess times the previous all time high of 20. So that puts you in this realm of like 40 to 60 ish. So I think that all of that is complete guesses. And who knows really what's going to happen with Bitcoin. But if you're kind of following these patterns, you could make like an educated guess based on past bull runs of what it might do. Then again, we could be in some supercycle, like Dan held talks about where Bitcoin doesn't ever have another major crash like that, because there's so many more institutions, and there's so much more adoption globally and just infrastructure globally built around Bitcoin market. I think that it's really hard to say, but that would be my guess.

Matt Zahab:

 43:18

I love the explanation behind it too. Can I ask you one more question? And this is totally not mine, I'm stealing this from Patrick O'Shaughnessy invest like the best, I don't know, if you ever checked out his pod it is absolutely incredible. The last question he asks all of his guests is, what is the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

Nick Neuman:

 43:35

This is a good question. I've listened to his podcast and actually always think about this question whenever he asked it to somebody else.

Matt Zahab:

 43:43

Me too.

Nick Neuman:

 43:44

It's so hard to answer, honestly. Because there's been so many nice things that people have done for me in my life, right from my parents, raising me lovingly and like encouraging me to be the best form of myself to my wife today, supporting me through like crazy startup life, where I work probably way too much. Like there's a lot of things that family and friends have done for me throughout my life. So this is a crap answer, but like, I think it's somewhere between my family helping me grow as a person and my wife supporting me every single day in Casa in the journey of building Casa right. And my goal has always been that if I ever get on that podcast, I'm going to have a really great answer to that. But since you since this wasn't your original question, and you kind of pulled this one on me without me thinking about it, you get the crap answer.

Matt Zahab:

 44:48

Fair, fair enough. It's again, I listened to most of the episodes that he drops. It's just, it's a phenomenal podcast. You learn so much in such a condensed time period and it's probably I don't know you're clearly a podcast guy, is there a better question on the podcast circuit? Like maybe pomps? Like, do you believe in aliens? But like that just gets

Nick Neuman:

 45:08

I do like pomps do you believe in aliens question

Matt Zahab:

 45:10

That's a good one too.

Nick Neuman:

 45:12

But I think the Do you believe in aliens is a much more straightforward question than what's the nicest thing somebody has ever done for you. Because there's so many points in people's lives, especially successful people that are going on, like invest like the best, the podcast. There's so many points when people have like, given them lucky breaks and help them achieve something that they wouldn't have achieved by themselves that it's like, I don't know how people pull out the single one thing that's the nicest thing. That's why it's it's a great question. It gets a great story out of people and it also, I think, just helps to put a lot of perspective for the people on his podcast, it shows people listening that like, you know, somebody doesn't become successful by themselves. There's always somebody along the way that's helped them with a huge leg up many times to take advantage of certain opportunities, etc. So it's a great question

Matt Zahab:

 46:09

You're bang on. Is there a better one, though? Like, I'm curious, we've been buzzing on this for a while, you think that that is probably the best question?

Nick Neuman:

 46:17

I think it's probably the best one that I've heard in terms of a recurring, thoughtful question that really makes you think and has a lot of aspects to it. It's the best one that I've heard.

Matt Zahab:

 46:30

Okay, well, folks, you heard it here first. I'm going to get to the drawing board, I'm going to grab that whiteboard and that marker, and I'm going to work some magic and hopefully, I will come up with the best ending pod question there is, but Nick, this was incredible. Learned a shit ton, you and Casa are both inspirations and the work you're doing in the space is absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for coming on. And I hope you had a blast because I certainly did too.

Nick Neuman:

 46:56

Thank you, man. Yeah, this was fun. And let's get you set up with Casa.

Matt Zahab:

 47:00

Yes, that needs to happen. And Jamison Lop if you are listening to this, hopefully you are, get on the pod as well, we'd love to have you on. I know you're storyteller and you have some great ones. Nick, thanks again. Folks, this is the cryptonews podcast. I want to give a quick shout out to our whole team who helped set this up. This is one of my favorite episodes so far with Nick Neuman from Casa, CEO of casa. If you enjoyed listening to this, please subscribe as it means the world we are dropping episodes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Thank you to everyone and a big thanks to Nish from Sinha PR consulting who helped s t this up. You're the man f lks Hope you enjoyed listening a d we will see you all shortly. Bye bye.