0:00 What in the Sam Hill is going on? Why do you want to fork Bitcoin? 0:03 Well, you know, I was a Bitcoin maximalist basically my entire life until now. 0:07 But really, I have some concerns. 0:09 And I think that competition is, you know, the cure for all ills. 0:16 And I think we've been complacent and overconfident for a long time. 0:19 I mean, one thing is we were on the security budget panel. 0:22 So we were like the four of us were like the four doom and gloom people. 0:25 But then opposite us is most of like Twitter. 0:30 Most of like the culture is just saying, oh, Bitcoin is perfect. 0:34 Bitcoin is immortal. 0:35 Don't break Bitcoin. 0:37 Like that was the up next message was don't break Bitcoin for, you know, 0:41 until we got this quantum distraction. 0:43 But we get to that. 0:44 But then it was like, you know, like Michael Saylor's like Bitcoin is hope. 0:48 Jimmy Song is like Bitcoin is God. 0:51 So we got all this like everything's perfect. 0:54 But then some of us have, you know, a few concerns. 0:56 And I have a lot of concerns and I wrote a lot of them down for years. 1:00 And I'm just worried about like, I think we're going in the wrong direction. 1:04 And I think not only do we have these problems, 1:06 but we get less and less honest about them over time. 1:10 And we have more and more in denial about them. 1:12 And so that's a situation where instead of just having a perfect ingredient 1:15 with like one or two problems, we have something that's 1:19 attitude that's spreading. That is. 1:22 Yeah. Yeah. 1:23 I think before we go other than that, it's going perfectly in Bitcoin. 1:27 Well, before we get into like the specifics of the fork, 1:31 I want to you, you know, I hadn't read, you know, we went 1:35 we went to Vegas shortly after you announced this force. 1:37 I didn't really have time to like dive into the eCash dot com and the 1:41 and your rationale. 1:43 And I'll kind of invite you to reprise what you're saying here, which is 1:47 which is, I think, on the number number four of your Q&A. 1:51 Do you really think that a fork, your new coin that can defeat Bitcoin? 1:57 What's what's your response? 2:00 Well, you know, honestly, I'm glad that you asked that, 2:02 because I think a lot of people, you know, jump to conclusions. 2:06 So I'd like to clarify that I don't plan on selling BTC. 2:10 The way I see it is this. 2:12 We're on the Titanic and we are headed sort of for an iceberg. 2:15 I think we'll probably miss the iceberg. 2:17 So I think it's less than 50 percent chance. 2:20 But, you know, if we hit that iceberg, we're all going to die. 2:23 And, you know, it's women and children first. 2:24 So we're going to freeze. 2:25 You and I will be freezing to death. 2:27 That doesn't appeal to me. 2:28 So I'm like sawing apart all the deck chairs and like the dining room table. 2:32 I'm trying to make more life rafts, you know, like really, really fast. 2:36 And I got to tell you, also, one thing that maybe I didn't emphasize 2:40 is that I think we'll miss the iceberg. 2:42 So maybe there's only a 20 percent chance we'll hit. 2:44 And I also think the eCash, it might not be enough to save our lives 2:48 if we hit the iceberg. 2:49 So I think I'm actually going to miss twice. 2:52 This is giving a lot of people an opportunity to point and laugh. 2:55 I'm happy to avail them of that opportunity or whatever, you know, 2:58 do get whatever you like. 3:00 But I think honestly, we may be in for a rough time 3:04 because it's very difficult to change culture anywhere, especially in Bitcoin. 3:10 And I think also it's very difficult to fight the network effect. 3:13 So I don't know. 3:13 But yeah, I think basically there will only be one winning cryptocurrency, 3:16 which is part of why I was a maximalist this whole time. 3:19 That view has not changed one bit. 3:21 So I just think maybe it will be a different one than BTC 3:24 and it will be one that preserves the ownership. 3:26 So I think the ownership set is much more important than people give credit for. 3:29 And I can give a couple examples of that. 3:31 But I think a lot of people intuitively already know that. 3:33 But other people, I think, really believe 3:35 there's something magical about what Bitcoin Core is doing 3:38 and that they're just really great developers, 3:40 even though they haven't developed anything in 99.99 percent of the ideas 3:43 came from Satoshi. 3:45 And instead, we've just done new ideas that are that suck and are terrible. 3:49 So it's a SegWit taproot and lightning network, 3:51 which have all been a complete waste of time 3:53 and have derailed the whole growth of the industry. 3:56 So, Paul, one quick question. 3:58 And then I would love for you to kind of lay the background here 4:01 for some of our listeners 4:02 who are not familiar with the proposal of exactly what the eCash fork does. 4:06 But I guess a tag on question to that before you explain 4:09 what the fork is trying to accomplish and the changes it makes. 4:13 It would per your last point, would success for you 4:16 then look like eCash being the number one cryptocurrency? 4:19 Right. It would. Yeah. 4:20 I think they'll only be number one. 4:22 They'll only be one that wins, I think. 4:23 And even in the long run, many of the fiat currencies will kill themselves also. 4:28 So I don't know exactly what the far future looks like. 4:31 It might be like dollar and crypto, which is like dollars. 4:36 Like, you know, my friend, I have a very funny friend, 4:39 but he would call them like slave bucks or whatever. 4:41 He would say they'll be like the the regulated mainstream one. 4:45 And then they'll be like the Internet, like confusing one. 4:48 That's like for the Uberman. 4:49 But, you know, it could just be that, you know, one takes over. 4:51 Yeah, I don't I don't really get that much the need for like, 4:56 you know, 55 cryptocurrencies. 4:59 OK, so sorry. 5:01 I have a I want to I want to inject a question here. 5:04 OK, so Paul, in your in your justification, it's it's honestly pretty compelling. 5:09 I respect the like arguments you give for why you're doing this. 5:12 A lot of it is you want to provide a viable competitive alternative. 5:16 If hypothetical scenario, if eCash somehow is able to spark 5:22 a change in culture and direction for the Bitcoin network, 5:28 would you consider that a success? 5:30 Yes. Yes, absolutely. OK. 5:33 Yeah. So, Paul, just give us give our listeners a quick rundown 5:36 of the most salient changes as you see them in the eCash fork. 5:40 What are what are you what are you trying to change? 5:42 I think, well, one of them, there's two things about it 5:45 that I think people could wrap their head around. 5:47 One is I'm really trying not to change as much as possible. 5:51 So that's I'm going to unpack that in a second. 5:53 But then secondly, you know, I'm a big show for these merge mined L2s 5:56 called Drivechains. 5:57 That's really the meat of it. 5:59 But these are kind of related because I can activate Drivechains 6:02 without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin core. 6:05 So that's also what I think we should do in BTC right now with Bitcoin core. 6:09 We should just do that. 6:10 We can activate this software without changing any lines of code in BTC. 6:14 That's also what I plan on doing on eCash. 6:15 But really, I think I'm one of the few people, maybe I'm perhaps the only one. 6:19 I'm not sure. 6:20 But I'm doing this hard fork where I'm not really betting on 6:25 me being a benevolent dictator of the fork. 6:27 So like the L1 is going to be exactly the same as Bitcoin core in every way. 6:31 And that is to invite anyone who likes Bitcoin core over to the L1 6:36 because it's going to be basically exactly the same both now and in the future. 6:40 And that's for many of the L2s. 6:42 Many of them will will try to be very similar to successful altcoins, 6:45 such as Zcash and, you know, other other ones that actually have a point. 6:49 Monero, they have like an actual purpose to them. 6:52 And so I'm trying to give everyone what they want. 6:54 And as you can imagine, that has made me a very hated figure on Twitter 6:58 because people don't like it when you give them what they want, 7:02 because that makes everything else they've had in their mind look bad by 7:05 by comparison. But but that's really the idea is for me. 7:10 I'm not I'm very agnostic. 7:12 Like I pass no judgment on what the user wants. 7:15 So when Roger Ver says he wants large blocks, I just say, well, that's that's true. 7:20 But other people say, oh, you know, he shouldn't want that or he actually wants 7:24 something else. He actually wants a lightning network or something like that. 7:26 And then same thing when like people do Monero for privacy. 7:28 People say, well, people try to say that's an insincere want. 7:32 But I try to give everyone what they want. 7:34 That's why that's my shtick. 7:36 So it sounds like you embrace the reality that they're just irreconcilable 7:40 differences of opinion and you try to say, OK, well, in that case, then 7:46 then your Drivechain implementation at least allows for people to express 7:51 those differences of opinion while somehow being related to the same network. 7:54 Am I understanding that correctly? 7:56 That's exactly right. 7:56 And also, that's part of why I'm so dismayed that it's not hasn't been prioritized. 8:02 So, of course, it sort of hurts my feelings a little bit 8:05 that we're not we don't jump at my ideas and jumps the front of the line for everyone. 8:09 But, you know, I can get over that. 8:12 First of all, like we haven't done any ideas like we haven't done 8:14 OP_CAT or something, which is 13 lines of code. 8:17 And that was in the original client. 8:18 And so I think we've lost the ability to soft fork. 8:21 That's why I think this this issue, this whole issue is very, very, very 8:24 like high dimensional. 8:26 So you have to like people have different like groups where they think, 8:30 you know, like we should ossify or they think, you know, Paul is just bitter 8:33 about his idea not being respected. 8:35 But I think it's really hard. 8:36 If you consider all the facts, I think it's bizarre that this idea is not. 8:41 This is kind of a meta idea. 8:43 So this idea says, I mean, we've been losing people constantly left and right. 8:47 So like we originally lost the large blockers in the scaling war. 8:51 Then we had to bet everything on lightning, 8:53 even though lightning basically doesn't work. 8:55 And it certainly cannot scale to eight billion people, 8:57 which is the whole shtick upon it. 8:58 And that's what, you know, big cultural leaders, you know, I've seen Michael 9:02 Saylor say many times like, oh, Bitcoin will scale through using lightning 9:07 and these other layer twos and layer three protocol. 9:10 This is just like a thing. 9:11 But this is the idea in everyone's head. 9:13 And then, of course, like on. 9:15 You know, on Nostra, on Primal, like they have everyone 9:18 they have a little lightning icon is everywhere, 9:20 even though none of the users, the lightning network. 9:22 So the whole thing has become again, this speaks to my point 9:25 about bad ideas spreading and like we have like a zombie team 9:28 that's like biting people and infecting people, it's flipping, you know. 9:31 And so it can be can go really fast as to whether. 9:34 But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is we've been losing people. 9:36 We lost the large blockers. 9:38 We lost the privacy people to like Monero, basically, and see cash. 9:42 We lost the darknet markets and that we lost in the stable coin. 9:45 Volume is on stable coin. 9:47 That was originally Omni. 9:48 That was originally MasterCoin. 9:50 This was originally all these were Bitcoin projects. 9:53 Ethereum. This was a Bitcoin project. 9:55 These were all big. 9:56 All these were Bitcoin projects. 9:58 But we started losing them. 9:59 And although in the past people would have a big conversation about it, 10:03 like when Ethereum came out, it was taken for granted. 10:06 Everyone said in 2015, we will just do sidechains. 10:09 We will have smart contracts on Bitcoin. 10:12 There was like Rootstock is the answer to this. 10:13 Blockstream is the answer, the answer to Ethereum. 10:17 But now we have more and more sour grapes. 10:20 It's harder to talk about it now than ever before, 10:23 where someone will do something new and we'll all just sort of shrug 10:27 and we'll say, well, we never really wanted that. 10:29 We never really wanted privacy on Bitcoin anyway, 10:31 even though that's something that zero percent of people would have said 10:34 back when this stuff was first, when Zcash was first proposed 10:37 as like zero coin on Bitcoin. 10:40 So, Paul, latching on to some of the stuff that you just said there, 10:42 you know, Michael Saylor's on stage waxing poetic 10:45 about the brilliance of Bitcoin L2s and how it's going to scale Bitcoin. 10:48 But part of what I'm understanding from what you're saying is 10:51 the tooling for that obviously has not been prioritized. 10:54 I mean, like you just mentioned, OP_CAT, OP_CTV, all these things 10:57 basically got shelled and kind of overtaken by the quantum talk, 10:59 which we can touch on in a second. 11:01 But you also said that you are not you don't have necessarily sour grapes 11:05 about your proposal being prioritized. 11:07 But I think a lot of people would say 11:08 it seems like you're jumping the queue to get it put in by hard forking. 11:12 What would you say to that criticism? 11:13 Well, yeah, the queue is moving too slow. 11:15 But I mean, I proposed it in November 2015. 11:18 So how how much slower could it possibly get? 11:20 I just I don't understand like what. 11:22 And then it's it's not I don't think like if there were any evidence 11:25 the queue worked, then that would be easier to like agree with. 11:30 But I think OP_CAT really is the smoking gun. 11:33 It says there's this tiny, tiny thing. 11:35 It basically does nothing. 11:37 It just takes X, Y and puts X, Y on the stack. 11:40 And it was in the original version. 11:43 People have by now, if someone had said there was stuff about like stack, 11:47 you know, elements, stack size by now, if anyone had any kind of problem with it, 11:51 you know, it would have been very, very, very easy to. 11:53 This is like the perfect candidate. 11:56 And a lot of people had had enormous support from all the roll up 11:59 Stark Stark where guys and they have lots of money. 12:03 So it's kind of like what is the problem? 12:07 You know, it's not just empirical. 12:08 Like I've talked to many a lot of these people are very good friends of mine. 12:12 Like so even when back in the era of scaling one, scaling two, scaling three, 12:15 this was like 2015, 2016 we were talking to. 12:18 So like I don't want to like necessarily name any names, but like one of the biggest 12:22 people in the space who you guys should interview and he's a super nice guy 12:26 and he's super experienced, Eric Lombroso. 12:28 He was talking about how like we used to do. 12:30 He and I agree completely about like we used to do these soft forks all the time. 12:34 They were never controversial. 12:36 In my view, the op code soft fork should be treated exactly the same 12:40 as any other pull request. 12:41 It's just a tiny detail that you have to have 51 percent 12:45 hash rate upgrade before people can safely use it. 12:48 But there's a tiny, tiny detail that does not mean anything. 12:53 It just means that there'll be a little flag in the software 12:57 and because the miners will periodically update. 12:59 You know, maybe they don't update as fast as people like. 13:01 I think that's great that they don't update because why screw up? 13:04 You know who does think of all those people? 13:05 Like when do you update your phone? 13:07 When do you do like Windows update or whatever? 13:08 Everyone's like we got normal people like installing special weird stuff 13:12 on their computer to stop it from upgrading because it's so annoying. 13:15 But eventually, you know, when you set up a new thing, you upgrade. 13:18 So we can't do the soft fork and it's become political 13:24 purely as a consequence of the scaling of what happened with SegWit. 13:27 This is all this is deranged nonsense. 13:29 That is not a shred of truth or value in it at all. 13:33 And it's just an excuse for everyone to just start weighing in. 13:36 And the whole thing is is crazy. 13:38 And that's that's what you see what I mean. 13:40 It's not just about not having BIP300 like my favorite little BIP that I wrote. 13:43 It's like this is the community that we're in. 13:47 You've shown up to a community and it's it's full of people 13:50 who make their decisions in an insane way. 13:53 So how many other decisions are being made with this screwed up logic? 13:57 And I actually wrote a long post called The Derangements of Bitcoin, 14:01 where I just listed something like 40 or 50 bizarre decisions we have made. 14:06 These are include like, you know, prioritizing the Lightning Network 14:09 like near the top. 14:10 But then I have all kinds of minor bizarre ones also. 14:12 Like there's no BIP 39 word list in Bitcoin Core. 14:15 Like what? Like, why not? 14:16 Like it's all just so I have an endless list. 14:18 You can check out my post, The Derangements of Bitcoin, where I just. 14:21 And that is not BIP 39 is not secure, even though everyone uses it. 14:26 Yeah, it's like I guess. 14:27 Yeah, the ship has sailed on that. 14:29 And they say, well, we need it needs to have like a version number or something. 14:32 Yeah. And it's like not really, because it's just a way of converting integers 14:35 to phrases. So it doesn't really need a version number. 14:38 Not it's not like mission critical, but that's the logic. 14:42 So I want to ask you some specifics about the fork, 14:46 and I think it's kind of interesting. 14:48 A lot of there's a like how the fork actually happens is is pretty interesting. 14:53 That can be you can go a bunch of ways. 14:56 I was looking through your your Q&A and it looks like so for ETA this summer, 15:02 I think it's like August, is it? 15:04 Yes. Late August. OK. 15:06 OK, August. And then at the moment of the fork, 15:10 we have to figure out how the how the network produces blocks. 15:12 And you are doing a one time difficulty reset to the minimum difficulty value. 15:19 Explain why what that is and why you chose to do it that way. 15:25 Well, I have to say, like maybe minimum might be like the minimum asterisk, 15:28 because, of course, there's like the CPU era and then there's like the ASIC era. 15:32 So but what I'm basically thinking is like if you had like a hundred block 15:36 or something like you've had like very, very, very, very, very low investment in mining 15:40 and you how what would it take to find like a block every like five minutes 15:43 or something like that? 15:44 So what I mean is I'm cutting it way, way, way down. 15:47 And there's going to be a lot of chaos at the moment of the fork. 15:49 Probably a lot of right. 15:50 I mean, won't won't just a bunch of miners rev up a few older ASICs? 15:54 And then basically my that's what I'm hoping will happen. 15:56 Because I don't know what the it's a cost benefit analysis. 16:00 And I don't you know, if you hit it too high, you'll never find any blocks. 16:03 And it could like kill the project on its first day when it's getting a lot of attention 16:07 and maybe a lot of so it has to be much better to have too many blocks 16:11 than too few in this case. 16:14 I don't think there's anything bad at all about like the finding like two or three 16:18 thousand blocks in like one day. 16:20 It just means the difficulty will ramp up. 16:22 You got to find the equilibrium somehow. 16:24 And what is the situation in which you have like two miners 16:27 basically just orbiting each other's chains? 16:31 You could, but I think that is not. 16:35 Well, yeah, first of all, there will be like full display, like as I've just said, 16:38 like I expect chaos, like the week of the fork. 16:41 So it will not six confirmations will not be enough. 16:44 And it will have you kind of have to wait. 16:46 Really, the network will be unusable until, you know, the until hash rate stabilizes. 16:51 And there's something like one every ten, between 30 and three minutes. 16:57 But but it will, you know, I'm not sure. 17:01 Theoretically, yes, it makes it easier for but it depends on how many people get involved. 17:06 So if a lot of people are getting involved, they may try to reorg each other. 17:10 Think about even though from a block's point of view, it might look completely insane. 17:15 But from a human point of view, I don't think it really will look that insane. 17:18 It will be like a really weird day and then maybe another second really weird day 17:23 during which you will probably not like you won't reliably count yourself as having received money for, 17:29 you know, you'll be like, I need to wait like until whatever, until Friday or something, 17:32 you know, to make sure that this because this is just the network is in a bizarre state right now. 17:36 It's just coming into existence. 17:38 And so, you know, it will be strange, but it won't be. 17:43 It won't it's not like it'll be like ruined for months. 17:45 It'll just be like this weird piece of time. 17:48 And eventually someone will jump like, you know, whatever, like five hundred thousand blocks ahead. 17:52 And it may be sad, but I do think usually the proof of work works just fine, 17:58 where usually people just shrug and they say, well, we gave it a try, but it's time to fold 18:03 because if we fold and join the longest chain right now, we can just we can go back to finding blocks on it. 18:09 So I think it will work out because of Satoshi's design is very good. 18:12 But we'll find out that we'll be pushing it, obviously, to some extreme in this particular case. 18:17 Well, so on that last note, I have to ask, I mean, are you going to be doing outreach to mining pools and miners 18:23 trying to get support for mining this thing? 18:26 I think that actually that is sort of the tail wagging the dog, right? 18:30 Like people tried to do that before and they didn't succeed at all. 18:33 And I told them so this was back in SegWit2x and I told, you know, it's very bizarre with SegWit2x. 18:39 If that had been a soft fork with 83 percent of the hash power, it would have certainly succeeded 18:44 and there would have been nothing that the and so the entire scaling war would have been a completely different outcome. 18:48 But instead, they tried to do this hard fork and they try to say, we'll get commitments from people. 18:52 All the miners backed out because what it ends up being is it's a commitment to losing money in that particular case. 18:58 So I just think in this case, you just said you said the difficulty low so the miners can make money. 19:03 And then you try, you know, it's going to be the market price on one hand and then the difficulty, like the imputed price, 19:12 you know, the imputed cost from the difficulty. 19:15 So, you know, you can have two networks or one is like, you know, say, for example, let's compare BTC and Bitcoin SV. 19:21 And, you know, BTC is super, super high price, but super high difficulty. 19:26 So you subtract and this is the profit. 19:29 And then you could also have Bitcoin SV, very low price. 19:32 Everyone hates it, but then very low difficulty. 19:37 And then those two could have like a very similar, you know, profit margin or hash price or whatever people would be saying today. 19:44 And so you just have to make sure that difference is OK. 19:47 And yeah, that's the that's basically the logic is like so like a commitment doesn't mean anything compared to what that number is. 19:53 So if that number is there, people will mine. 19:55 If the number is not there, people will back out of the commitment. 19:58 So the answer is kind of no, although I hope that, you know, as people find out about it, some miners are like the contact with questions. 20:04 They say, what algorithm is this, which is the same as Bitcoin, SHA256D and stuff like that. 20:10 So I think but it will all be driven by, you know, the price. 20:13 And if there's an actual if there's actual value to this to this idea or any of the arguments or if there's people believe me that a competitor to Bitcoin is important and valuable thing to help make sure that we're not, you know, making too many mistakes that we never correct in BTC world. 20:30 One last question about the details. 20:31 It looks like yes. 20:32 So you tweet you have, quote, seven Drivechains in development right now. 20:36 You kind of gave a little teaser, you know, like a Zcash styles Drivechain, like a prediction markets Drivechain. 20:42 You've been a big prediction markets guy for a long time. 20:44 Great to see that very, very validated today. 20:47 They're just not really on block chains necessarily. 20:50 Right. Yes. 20:51 I wanted to change that. 20:51 And so what I proposed for prediction markets back in 2013, it was much better in many ways than what you have today with calcium Polymarket. 21:00 I'm actually multidimensional markets. 21:02 First of all, also, you know, everyone can thank me for the automated market makers or stuff that was invented by Robin Hanson, who wrote a paper in 2002. 21:09 But almost no one on the Internet could understand this paper. 21:12 And I had to scour the Internet for alternate explanations. 21:14 But he invented and so did Max Keiser. 21:17 Max Keiser had a different version that he called the virtual specialists in the 90s. 21:24 But it was Robin Hanson's logarithmic market scoring rule and this cross product market scoring rule. 21:29 I put that in the Truthcoin white paper, which was about Bitcoin prediction markets in 2013, 2014. 21:36 And then I was showing that around to the people at the time like this was like Dan Larimer or Vitalik Buterin or whatever. 21:41 And that's how it escaped containment and made it into Ethereum and got big. 21:45 So a lot of this stuff is suggested by me. 21:48 But yeah, the cool thing that I also wrote into the Truthcoin white paper was the decentralized oracle, which is a problem that a lot of people thought could not possibly be solved because it's an incentive where 21:59 everyone has a reason to lie about the outcome. 22:02 So you can trade against the real outcome and just extract all the money. 22:06 So there's a situation where you don't know how many people there are and everyone has an incentive to lie. 22:10 But I wrote this paper about the peer to peer oracle. 22:12 And even we had old people, you know, we had. 22:16 So if you go to BitcoinHiveMind.com, I still have the very old endorsements up there from 2015, which are like Peter Todd, Andrew Polstra. 22:24 We got like Roger Veres up there. 22:26 So it's like so you can see I was very proud of achieving that because this is the truly decentralized prediction market that can't be shut off. 22:34 And this can hit some this could hit some categories that are too taboo even for Cauchy and Polymarket to hit. 22:41 And they would just live immortally. 22:43 So that was what I proposed a long time ago. 22:45 So this is another reason why I'm kind of like sitting around and you're looking at Bitcoin. 22:49 Now, of course, Bitcoin has done very, very, very well. 22:51 You know, the price has skyrocketed. 22:53 We have changed the world. 22:56 We've changed the culture. 22:57 We have the president coming to speak in 2024 at the conference. 23:03 So we've changed a lot. 23:05 You know, we've we've been a big success. 23:08 But really, there's all this other stuff that we could be doing, like whatever happened to the Namecoin project. 23:12 And then this is fractured into other stuff, you know, like what's it called? 23:16 Like I forget, but there's many different ones like Handshake. 23:19 Right. Isn't that one? 23:20 And even like Michael Saylor tried to do decentralized identity with Orange. 23:24 But then he realized, oh, he realized, you know, he showed up and he was like, he thought this was a real technology industry where people did things. 23:30 But then he looked around and he was like, oh, I'm not supposed to do anything here. 23:33 This is part of the problem. 23:34 Yeah. OK, so I got to throw a couple hard questions in because you said, you know, people are afraid to talk about the taboo. 23:41 Let's talk about the money, because there are investors in this. 23:46 You did pass the hat around. 23:48 Right. There's people who are invested in the fork. 23:49 Can you talk about this? 23:51 Can you talk about the reason, rationale and your mindset behind raising money? 23:55 And then, of course, you're forking and giving out the eCash tokens that would otherwise have gone to Satoshi. 24:04 Discuss this. 24:05 Yes. Yeah, this has been like a huge like people are very, very interested in this. 24:11 And some of them seem to think it's like some huge knockdown argument. 24:14 So one thing to emphasize is we have a second version that does not have any financing and does not reassign any coins. 24:22 And it doesn't absolutely none of these things. 24:24 And it still brings all of the same L2 technology to Bitcoin. 24:29 And it doesn't actually change Bitcoin into a hard fork. 24:33 And it doesn't involve any code changes in Bitcoin Core. 24:37 That second version is just what BIP300 is. 24:39 That's what BIP300 is, spend the whole time. 24:41 So there's this alternative this whole time. 24:44 Now, I think part of it also, as you can see, I knew from the block size war that doing the fork involves a lot of people weighing in with their opinion who have no skin in the game. 24:56 And it is. 24:56 It is an upset. It does disturb, you know, you're a disturber of the peace. 24:58 It's like when Gandalf is labeled the disturber of the peace at the beginning of Lord of the Rings and the little farm guys mad at all the kids want the fireworks and that type of thing. 25:07 Yeah. So it's like you've been labeled. That's exactly what has happened, of course. 25:11 So there's the thing about that is there's a kind of stigma for supporting the fork. 25:15 And I knew that we had to change reality, like even if we just changed the reality and we set the precedent that says, if you try to improve Bitcoin, because right now the precedent is if you try to improve Bitcoin, you go to up next and then people write an article that says, don't break Bitcoin. 25:31 And but nothing happens. And it's really miserable. 25:35 And like people like Jeremy Rubin also, they put out CTV activation client and then he quit after a day and he quit. 25:42 Not only did he quit CTV, but he quit all software. He quit all Bitcoin development. 25:47 So far as I know, he quit all computer science development for like a year and a half. 25:52 And then he so like it's we have to change that so that it says, as the story more goes, if you propose an idea for Bitcoin that has some merit in the world where you have some possibility of adding value, then you can get millions of dollars. 26:08 So that's part of the flip. And it's also partly to say like these people who are haters, they are not you know, it's there's a big difference between people putting their money around. 26:20 Because like what makes a good investment is it has to look like a bad investment, but it has to be a good idea, because if everyone knows that it's a good idea, you know, it's like people say like this is like people would come up to me from time to time and they'd say this has nothing to do with Bitcoin. 26:34 But it's like, oh, they asked for my advice with investing because I know I have like a background in economics, like as if that's going to help. 26:39 But they say like, oh, like I love Apple, so I'm going to buy some Apple stock or something. 26:45 Or they say, oh, I think Elon is smart, but it doesn't matter. 26:48 This is just like with the difficulty in the market price. 26:51 The current stock price could maybe be too high on a popular company. 26:55 And then many unpopular companies that might be on death's door, there might be a buy because the price is so low. 27:01 So to make the investment good, it has to appear unpopular and it has to appear unpopular, but actually have a lot of merit. 27:08 So that is partially like on purpose, I think. 27:12 Wait, hang on. 27:14 So are you maybe I'm misconstruing this, but you're saying part of the reason why you want to dole out the eCash equivalent of Satoshi's coins is because it's unpopular. 27:23 Well, you look at how it like it triggered people. 27:25 It got everyone to talk about it. 27:28 Sorry, just to interject one more time. 27:30 Can you understand why a lot of people are uncomfortable with this part of the proposal? 27:34 Because ultimately, the eCash tokens are the private property of whoever owns those coins, right? 27:41 And we're just saying Satoshi. 27:42 Precisely. No, I do understand why. 27:44 And I even understand why everyone uses the phrase steal Satoshi's coins. 27:48 I'll defend you with that one. 27:50 I mean, technically, but it's like people think that it's the Bitcoin. 27:54 People think that it's the Bitcoin. 27:56 Well, let me fully flesh this out, because obviously this has been people have been like so obsessed more than I could have ever. 28:03 I mean, I thought that there would be some element of this, but I had no idea that this would be like the huge thing that would like send this into like millions of commentary. 28:12 So it's true that we're not actually taking any Satoshi's coins. 28:16 And I suppose it's theoretically true that I could probably sue people for slander because it's like they're accusing me of a criminal act or so. 28:22 Not that I would care enough to do that. 28:24 But there's a sense in which they are right, because in Bitcoin, we don't people in Bitcoin. 28:31 We don't think of Bitcoin as purely. 28:34 I'm not sure how to phrase this, but it's kind of like we assert that we assert something about the common good with Bitcoin. 28:40 Like a lot of people see Bitcoin as like a common civilization wide project. 28:45 And so it's not just like, oh, Paul does this, whatever. 28:50 Like Chris does this. Jeff does the whatever. 28:52 You know, and it's like there's this idea of what's best for everyone. 28:56 And it's kind of like a political party. 28:58 They don't just say usually a political party doesn't just say, like, vote for us because we're going to steal everyone else's stuff and give it to. 29:06 They often do this sometimes, but they don't say like that. 29:09 A political party's message is that they are they are advocating for the public good. 29:14 They're saying life would be better if we. 29:18 Improve the roads or whatever. 29:20 So this is a sense in which is right is what I'm saying. 29:23 Life would be better if we switched tracks to this track where Satoshi has hundreds of thousands of fewer coins. 29:30 So there's a sense in which they are right. 29:33 But there are also many senses in which it's like the perfect idea. 29:36 So, I mean, at one point, there's another issue to bring up is that. 29:40 So, like, after I just say there's some merit to what they say, there's also there's also like at least two more senses in which there's absolutely no merit to what they say whatsoever. 29:49 So the two of them would be this. 29:52 One is that they kind of these first of all, these people are presenting themselves. 29:56 Many of them are saying something like, well, this idea is perfect, except for this one flaw. 30:01 Taking Satoshi's coins. 30:02 What we know perfectly well, these people would have criticized BIP300. 30:06 They probably would have criticized OP_CAT. 30:07 They would have criticized like Operturn. 30:09 Some of these people just criticize all kinds of stuff. 30:12 They would have hated any hard fork under any circumstances. 30:17 And so the premise that they would, you know, what they're what they're representing is like as if the project would be improved and they would become a supporter. 30:29 If I if I just change this one part back, I think we know that that's completely untrue. 30:34 And the fact that they even talk as if it's true, I think it says a lot about like how poorly thought out like with their own positions. 30:40 But speaking of that, my second point, I mean, I have more points even than that. 30:43 But the second point is that these people are kind of they want to have it both ways. 30:48 They want to say, well, this is a worthless fork that everyone should ignore. 30:51 It's going to be worth zero, in which case Satoshi doesn't lose anything at all. 30:56 The coins they have to equivocate on how valuable they think this property is that I'm supposedly depriving Satoshi of. 31:02 They think, oh, this fork is going to be a huge success and all this is going to be worth a ton of money. 31:07 And then it's like, oh, that's what Satoshi is losing. 31:10 So these people kind of want to have it all the different ways. 31:12 It's just an example of how just people complain. 31:14 And, you know, I think everyone should emulate this task instead of launching new altcoins. 31:20 We should have lots of this is cuts the splits the difference between like privatizing the sidechain, which is like what an altcoin does. 31:28 And they say, well, launch this, you know, something like a Solana or whatever, where A16Z has like 20 percent of the whole supply. 31:35 But Bitcoiners get nothing. We should do this more in Bitcoin. 31:39 I'm trying to set the example that we should do this because, you know, we have the situation where all Bitcoiners get free coins, including Satoshi. 31:47 Everyone gets free stuff. And then the founder has some reason. 31:51 But there are even more reasons for that as to why I did it. 31:53 Some of them are that the hard fork is very hard. You have to coordinate people in advance. 31:56 The network effects are very strong. You need to hit the ground running with like a new team. 32:00 Like kind of on day one, you want to have all the software. 32:03 Is it better to do a hard fork and say we're going to do this software later? 32:06 When will that software be finished? And so then a lot of stuff will have happened in between. 32:11 So there are lots and lots and lots of reasons why this was a very, very, very clever decision. 32:15 But, yeah, it does appear superficially to go against the property rights idea of Bitcoin. 32:20 And so that's, I think, why people have tried to latch on. 32:22 These are people who would have criticized anything about it that they thought they could get away with. 32:25 And so it's all yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm empathetic to the reality that you just can't have like the cold start. 32:33 It's just impossible to have a perfect cold start to a blockchain these days. 32:36 You can't recreate how Bitcoin emerged. Colin, I think you had another hard question. 32:42 Yeah, I have one last hard question, Paul. So maybe this would be better as a closer. 32:47 I'll just go ahead and throw it in. A lot of hard forks have failed. 32:52 In fact, every single one of them. Yeah, I would agree. 32:55 Outside of, you know, edge case early on. 32:58 The cash is still going along, but it's but it failed in the sense of like it didn't. 33:02 None of them replaced Bitcoin. None of them actually have anywhere close to the market share. 33:06 You know that I already know that. And I'm trying to do it anyway. 33:09 Right. Well, so that's why I want to ask, like, what makes you think this was going to succeed? 33:12 And kind of a second part to this question, similar to the mining pool one. 33:15 Are you going to be doing outreach to exchanges and market makers to assure that there is a market? 33:20 Well, yes, a little bit. But I think. OK, well, first things first. 33:24 So the what if we had to make a list of all the serious hard forks, I think it would only be BCH, really, because Bitcoin SV was a hard fork of BCH. 33:33 And it was also, you know, it's crazy. Craig is a crazy person. 33:36 And everyone, you know, everyone like it was all just a bunch of nonsense. 33:39 But I think some of these people have later acquired teams that where they thought, well, we can make this work somehow. 33:47 But I think Bitcoin Cash actually was something of a success in that when it launched, when it was mainstreamed, when it first came out in August. 33:56 Not when it first came out in August, it was ignored because SegWit2x was still being done at the time. 34:01 But then later in November, when it was like debuted, when they canceled SegWit2x, it rose to become number two on CoinMarketCap. 34:09 And when it hit number two on CoinMarketCap, it was 15 percent of BTC's price. 34:15 The infamous flippening event. 34:17 Right. And that was how I got that quote that that tweet is a congrats on this. 34:21 Seriously, that kind of became a meme for a short time after that, where people would just say congrats on this seriously about like random things, which is funny. 34:29 So if it debuted today at 15 percent of BTC's price, which is certainly not, you know, I'm not guaranteeing that or even whatever. 34:36 But I'm just saying if it did the exact same thing that Bitcoin Cash did, that would put it like number three. 34:40 It would be like next to Ethereum sort of now. 34:43 And Bitcoin Cash flippened in hashrate too. 34:46 They were neck and neck for like a week or two there. 34:49 Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff that went on in the background with Bitmain swapping machines over. 34:53 And Jihan Wu supported that fork a lot. 34:56 He did. 34:57 I don't know if we would call that organic. 35:00 Is that winning or is that an attempted coup? 35:03 Right. I mean, I think that that's an open question. 35:05 Well, I think Bitcoin Cash was, you know, I had a lot of friends who are large blockers, but I've sent emails at the time and I sent public statements. 35:13 And I was on there was a SegWit2x list where they surveyed all these technical people to say, how do you feel about SegWit2x? 35:19 Basically, everyone said, don't do it, including me. 35:22 I said it wouldn't work. So I was on this list. 35:24 This was long before this was like after it came out in like whatever, May or June 2017. 35:29 So I was always a small blocker. 35:31 I'm in favor of small blocks on L1. 35:33 That's different, completely different from L2. 35:35 So when Bitcoin Cash came out, I said, well, this is a bad idea, actually. 35:38 Hard forking once from one megabyte to eight megabytes. 35:43 That just kicks the can down the road. 35:45 And so I think this is more like a BIP300 is more of like a kind of permanent idea because it's built into it. 35:53 The idea that you have these new L2s that would compete. 35:56 And so any idea that you might want later, you can still get within the paradigm. 36:00 Bitcoin Cash also like it decided to just like make all these other changes. 36:06 Let's like these assert zero bugs like, you know what I mean? 36:10 Like they would fork Bitcoin and then they start changing every line of code. 36:13 So someone should go back and do this research project. 36:16 But at one point, I think it was maybe March 2018. 36:20 I tried to look and there was something like 30,000 lines of code had been changed from Bitcoin Cash to BTC, 36:27 including like renaming various variables were named like Blockstream, block size limit, like a silly stuff like that. 36:33 This all this makes it really hard to do like the code diff or whatever. 36:36 My conception is completely different where, again, I'm hard forking specifically to create a competing coin. 36:43 But the L1 software is going to stay equivalent to Bitcoin Core. 36:48 So I think that actually a lot of this stuff I did a little research project where you could track. 36:54 I said, if the coins were like third parties and you just measured BTC, Ethereum and this coin. 37:02 And then you plot them over the time that they came out. 37:06 This is maybe a little confusing, but basically I had so as the candidate, you know, 37:10 as the kind of like what you might call like the independent variable or whatever. 37:14 I was like, so you either do BTC, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash or BTC, Ethereum, Solana or like Avalanche. 37:21 I did like a little list of coins and you can plot. 37:24 How did they do as a percentage of the market cap over their first like year or two years? 37:29 Bitcoin Cash does by far better than Solana, than Cardano, than all these other things. 37:34 So even though I was not a supporter of Bitcoin Cash, I think it did do very well. 37:38 I have a couple other points of data if you're interested, which is that one was for all. 37:43 I think people are much louder when they want to do their little commentary. 37:48 But really, the UTXO sets don't diverge. 37:51 So about a year after Bitcoin Cash had hard forked, more than half of the UTXOs were the same. 37:59 Still a year afterwards. 38:01 And this was a year after this was like, you know, that might have been a million years afterwards 38:05 because so many people weighed in like the same week or like right after and people are buying and selling their coins. 38:11 It also includes a situation where maybe if you wanted to sell 10 percent of your Bitcoin Cash, for example, 38:16 you have to split the whole UTXO. 38:18 So it would look as though you'd split like a whole UTXO of maybe if you have seven coins there. 38:24 But really, you only sold a little bit. 38:26 So I really think that there's like a couple more points I could mention about that. 38:31 But overall, I think people, the Bitcoin owner is very happy to just keep all the coins and say, 38:38 you know what, these technologists are feuding and I'm just going to take all the coins 38:44 and I'm going to keep them in a giant pile like Smaug the dragon and they're just going to lie on all the coins. 38:49 So everyone's got an opinion because what the hard fork does is it says it's a hard fork is being loyal to the Bitcoin owner. 38:58 It says, I'll give you credit for all your coins for free. 39:02 And but what is it disloyal to? 39:04 It's a challenge to Bitcoin core. 39:07 It's a challenge to the media environment. 39:10 It's saying, well, I have a culture, you know, it's saying these people, you know, 39:14 so it's kind of an insult to Bitcoin core or at least introduces competition, which is no fun. 39:20 Like what if I said, oh, I'm going to I told you guys I'm going to start my own like mining podcast and whatever. 39:25 And you'd be like, well, wait, another competitor that I have to deal with. 39:29 But but there's this difference between who is it competing with? 39:33 And those people would obviously have some kind of problem with it, especially on the off chance that it succeeds. 39:38 Because what would the history books say? 39:40 Then then no one would be listening to them and everyone would listen to me. 39:43 And I would say, well, I propose this idea in 2015 and then they didn't do it. 39:47 And so then after I did it, I was proven right. 39:50 And they you know, it was all a big waste of time what they were doing. 39:54 You do bring up a good point, which I will wrap this up with, because we do. 40:00 We have to get on to the rest of our news. 40:02 You do present a good angle, which is it does challenge the media because I'm sitting here going like, man, 40:07 if Paul succeeds and this fork really rips, like, can we have Paul on the podcast anymore? 40:15 I'll keep coming back on the podcast, guys. 40:17 Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. 40:19 And I think that's it really does speak to I think like there's a lot of people who are good, who are critics. 40:24 But, you know, we were at the Bitcoin conference all this past week in Vegas. 40:28 And you're still an invited person. 40:30 You're a you're a close, long friend of a lot, you know, in the Bitcoin community. 40:35 So I thought it really spoke to like people's like at least, you know, 40:38 respect for you and your efforts over the past decade now of, you know, speaking your mind, your opinions. 40:45 I wish we had more time. I'd love to dive into the four to kill by block size of the fork. 40:50 But unfortunately, we got to move on, Paul. 40:53 Where can people go to find out about this fork? Rarely do I think I let a CTA happen for a hard. 40:59 Where can people know about where you're trying to kill Bitcoin? 41:02 Yeah. Well, yeah, there's the website. And then I'm I'm truth going on on Twitter. 41:07 How did you get that domain? 41:11 It was just available. I was thinking about what to name it. 41:14 And I was just like, you know, it was a complete fluke. I thought you had the mortgage. 41:18 I got to show a competing. No, I tell the whole story on on Joel's podcast that I recorded last. 41:25 So I think these should hopefully end up on eCash dot com like whatever I do. 41:29 I think I would try to put it there so that there's a repository. 41:32 So I go into the whole story. It's just like a kind of a fluke. 41:34 It was all available and you could just buy for a very cheap amount. 41:37 And so that's what I did. And that's how I got the name. 41:40 I was I had a couple of like other different names maybe in mind. 41:43 But, yeah, so that was eCash dot com. You got to have a good name. 41:47 And what's the other thing? Oh, the format. Yeah. 41:50 The lowering the block size on L1. Yeah. That's to make it even more decentralized. 41:55 Hey, it's Luke Junior approved closely. 41:59 But you broadcast four kilobytes over ham radio. 42:02 It wasn't that the bunker coin angle or something. 42:05 Well, I think the idea is just just to make it so that, you know, OK, so we want cheap full node. 42:11 And we want like it to be easier to hide the physical location. 42:14 So there are many benefits of smaller block size. 42:17 And since I'm giving people access to unlimited L2 block size, we really don't need, you know, 42:22 you get people look at like the gold window or something like that. 42:25 Or how many transactions Bank of International Settlements does versus the Fed, 42:29 versus like, you know, Bank of America or something or versus Chase Manhattan. 42:32 So we really don't need that. 42:35 This is the issue is you kind of people again, people want to have it both ways. 42:38 They want to say the large blockers say, oh, L1 should be, you know, everyone should transact on L1. 42:44 That's that's actually makes the full node very expensive and difficult to hide physical location, et cetera, et cetera. 42:51 But then people say, oh, people should transact on L2s. 42:55 Well, yeah, that's that's what I believe. 42:57 So we actually don't need when you settle on L1. 42:59 That's kind of like, you know, when you go to the airport and you swap your dollars for euros or something. 43:03 You don't do that as often as when you actually pay on L2s. 43:07 So when you pay today, like, you know, if you pay in America, it's like inside the Fed system. 43:14 That that's just like most of you don't have like an account at the Federal Reserve or the Bank of International Settlements. 43:20 Normal people don't need much. 43:21 They're effectively on layer three or layer four like their whole lives. 43:25 You know what I mean? 43:26 Like they just join the commercial bank at layer three and then they just stay there. 43:30 They don't need to, like, have an account at what would be L1, which would be like the Bank of International Settlements or something like that. 43:38 So that's kind of part of the thinking behind that. 43:41 Paul Sztorc, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the Stork fork. 43:47 Thanks for having me. 43:48 CleanSpark is a market leading data center developer with a proven track record of success. 43:52 NASDAQ CLSK.