Jameson Lopp
Jameson Lopp is a Bitcoin software engineer and security researcher who is co-founder and chief security officer of the self-custody company Casa. He built the Bitcoin node statistics project Statoshi, ran nodes at BitGoBitGoBitGo is an American digital asset custody and infrastructure company founded in 2013 by Mike Belshe. It offers custody, wallets, staking, trading, financing, stablecoin and settlement services, and its subsidiary BitGo Bank & Trust, National Association, is a national trust bank regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BTGO in January 2026 and is the custodian and infrastructure provider for World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin.Open the full entry and joined Casa in 2018; in recent years he has focused on the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin and is one of the authors of the migration proposal BIP-361.
Contents11 sections
Key facts
Early Years
Lopp grew up in North Carolina, studied computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then worked for years on email-marketing software.[1]
2012–2014Early Writing and Statoshi
His article index includes posts written for the Bronto Nation company blog in 2012, and since March 2014 he has published Bitcoin essays on his own blog, Cypherpunk Cogitations.[2]
In May 2014 he made an instance of Statoshi, his Bitcoin node statistics project, public as statoshi.info, presenting node statistics through Grafana dashboards.[3]
His other projects include a range of Bitcoin calculators, a Bitcoin Core config generator and a Physical Attack Log.[4]
2015–2017BitGo and SegWit
He has been building bitcoin wallets since 2015.[5]
In January 2017, while working at the bitcoin custody firm BitGo, he wrote that he and many colleagues were eager to see Segregated Witness activated, calling it “a giant leap forward in the evolution of the Bitcoin protocol.”[6]
October 2017Swatting
On October 16, 2017, a hoax 911 caller claimed to have killed someone and taken hostages at his home, sending dozens of armed police there while he was away. In a 2018 essay Lopp wrote that both the call and a later threatening voicemail demanded $50,000 or its equivalent in bitcoin.[7]
2018Joining Casa
He joined Casa in 2018 and was soon promoted to chief technology officer.[1]
March 2025Against Quantum Recovery of Bitcoin
In March 2025 he published “Against Allowing Quantum Recovery of Bitcoin,” the first essay in his quantum series. He wrote that the issue is “far from a crisis” but worth discussing seriously given how hard Bitcoin is to change, and argued for putting coins in quantum-vulnerable addresses out of everyone’s reach rather than letting holders of quantum computers take them.[8]
2026BIP-361
Lopp is one of the authors of BIP-361, which would phase out quantum-vulnerable legacy signatures: Phase A would bar sending funds to legacy address types and Phase B would invalidate legacy signatures, effectively freezing unmigrated coins. As of April 2026 it remained a draft with no activation timeline.[9]
September 2026Essay on the Quantum Migration Debate
In September 2026 he published “Bitcoin’s Quantum Migration Debate,” arguing that every serious option violates a principle Bitcoin users care about and that the real question is how to minimize total property-rights violations once elliptic-curve signatures stop reliably authenticating ownership, not merely whether to freeze coins.[10]
October 2026On the Quantum Timeline
In an October 2026 video interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Lopp said a quantum computer able to break Bitcoin was still orders of magnitude away, but added that “if we have less than a decade, we’re behind.”[11]
He estimated that about 2.6 million BTC, roughly 13% of supply, could never migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography.[11]
Current Roles: Casa Security Chief and Adviser
Lopp is co-founder and chief security officer of Casa, an adviser to CCSS and AnchorWatch, and an angel investor. On his website he describes his mission as using his skills as a technologist “to build tools that empower individuals.”[12]
Sources
- ‘Elegant and ass-backward’: Jameson Lopp’s first impression of Bitcoin (opens in a new window)
- Jameson Lopp :: Articles (opens in a new window)
- Announcing Statoshi.info (opens in a new window)
- Jameson Lopp :: Projects (opens in a new window)
- Jameson Lopp - Casa Blog (opens in a new window)
- SegWit: The Swiftest Safe Path Forward (opens in a new window)
- Reflections Upon a SWATting (opens in a new window)
- Against Allowing Quantum Recovery of Bitcoin (opens in a new window)
- Bitcoin Developers Propose Bitcoin Quantum Migration Plan That Would Freeze Legacy Coins (opens in a new window)
- Bitcoin's Quantum Migration Debate (opens in a new window)
- Is Bitcoin's Q-Day a Decade Away? Even Skeptics Say It's Running Late (opens in a new window)
- Jameson Lopp :: Professional Cypherpunk (opens in a new window)