0:00 Hello, and welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces. Today is July 14th, 2023, and we at LayerTwo 0:07 Labs are thrilled to have yet another awesome conversation. These are recorded spaces. I'm 0:13 your host, Henry, and LayerTwo Labs provides these spaces to encourage understanding and 0:19 interest in Drivechain, which is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 300 and 301. Everyone who would like to 0:26 come up to the stage and speak is welcome to. We invite everyone, including our most enthusiastic 0:31 fans and our most ardent skeptics, to join us in this conversation for the benefit of the Bitcoin 0:38 community. The goal is to make sure everyone, to the greatest extent possible, understands the 0:45 tremendous potential promise of this new, important technology, which we believe has enormous 0:54 potential to strengthen Bitcoin in many ways. To improve Bitcoin's security, to improve Bitcoin's 1:02 narratives, to improve Bitcoin's breadth of user base, to increase the number of people using 1:09 Bitcoin, the number of ways you can use Bitcoin. There are so many different aspects to how this can 1:16 strengthen the Bitcoin community. Most fundamentally of all, it's about reducing the desire of developers and 1:24 builders to go to altcoins. Instead, they can stay with Bitcoin and build and create value on Bitcoin side 1:35 chains. Bitcoin sidechains are optional. No one has to use them. And therefore, it is a powerful system for 1:43 enabling the many different kinds of Bitcoiners to all be happily using Bitcoin in different ways. We envision a 1:54 future where Bitcoin sidechains are the largest and most successful part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. People using 2:02 Bitcoin sidechains for greater privacy, for greater scaling, and for many other kinds of developments that 2:12 Bitcoin needs. Thanks to those who've joined already. We're excited to have this conversation today as we do every 2:22 Friday. Last time we had hundreds of people listening to our space and discussing it and tweeting about it. Sometimes 2:31 these spaces go for as many as six hours. Today, we're going to aim for just a couple hours. Welcome to the space, Paul. 2:46 How's it going? Happy Friday. 2:49 Hello, happy Friday. We had a lot of people after the last podcast, or whatever space, they were like, wanting to discuss 3:00 further. So we told them all to come. It'd be very interesting if because they seem to be a champing at the bit. Yeah, like 3:08 on Saturday. But I guess six days is a long time. They don't seem to, don't seem to be very punctual. But I think, yeah, 3:18 what was that guy? Mike or whoever? It seems like we had quite a few people who asked a bunch of questions. 3:28 So we had a great conversation. Last week, I think it was last week that we had that extensive discussion with Bob 3:37 McElrath. It was a good discussion. We dug into some details and explored different ideas. It was very nice to have Bob 3:48 here. I hope he comes back soon. Well, I'm, I'm optimistic we'll get a great space today. There's so many different ways to 3:58 look at Drivechain. People have all kinds of different ideas, depending often on their level of reading. If they've studied it 4:06 extensively, they might have more interesting and novel concerns. And if they are totally new to it, they, they can bring a 4:15 fresh perspective. 4:16 And the guy who wanted to talk, maybe we should drag him back in here. 4:22 Sure. I forget exactly the full name of it was like a full large blocker guy who was Oh, yeah, absolutely determined to 4:29 spend hours and hours of my time. Yes. Texting. 4:34 Let me find his name. I know who you mean. 4:37 So I actually had some DMS regarding that. And I think I understand what's going on. His name was Matthew. And then it began 4:43 with a Z. Something was like, let me see. 4:51 Yeah. And if you don't want to hear yet another large blocker conversation, I've heard thousands in my life, then we'll get 5:00 someone else to come up here and speak. That person was really determined to message me over and over again. 5:07 His name is Matthew Zietzke. Z-I-E-T-Z-K-E. I had a DM with someone who I think is his friend. And I think that Matt is just 5:19 someone who generally prefers to have Twitter, written conversations. He's not much of a... 5:26 Yeah, but that's not intellectually honest, because the issue with when you speak, of course, it conveys much more, much 5:34 more. Some people have some kind of reason, like they're trying to remain anonymous, because they're like criticizing 5:40 Vladimir Putin or something, and their like family will be killed. So like, that's a real reason, but not not something 5:45 like this. And so what this person is, what people like to do is they want it to make it like, go on forever. Whereas if 5:56 you just talk to someone, you can just go back and forth. It's when people put their cards on the table, you see how 6:03 confident people are about different things. So that's, it's actually cool. So if people can't do, I mean, human beings 6:13 evolve to do this conversation thing. The text, a lot is lost in the text message. Different groups will read it 6:19 differently. So like, if you're from a camp, you know, Republicans and Democrats texting at each other, you know, like, 6:25 what about like, if two people are getting into like a romantic fight? Should they be texting at each other? 6:30 It's always a bad idea, in my experience. 6:32 Always a bad idea. You have a problem at work? Should you send in a work email? 6:37 I can tell you, like, if I have a disagreement with my wife, I do not text it to her. I wait until we're face to face. So I 6:43 can, you know, benefit from the better quality of communication that's possible, only with verbal discussion. 6:50 Yeah. And it's not just the two people talking, it's the audience as well. So I don't know if that person's, you know, 6:56 that's why. It's the other thing is that the space is like, this is going to go for like, whatever, two hours or three 7:01 hours, then it'll be over. So whereas the text thing will just go on and on for an unlimited amount of time. And you'll 7:08 never know, like, if you have the person's attention or whatever. So I don't know. I mean, they don't. We have like a 7:18 long list, honestly, of people who wanted to talk, but maybe they're not. They're not here. I exactly have 107. 7:25 So I have now sent him via DM to my... I have a DM going with some large blockers. It's, you know, they're very nice 7:34 people. 7:35 They are very nice. 7:38 DM with like Jerry Chan and Hector. 7:41 Yeah, Jerry Chan is nice. I've met Jerry Chan. 7:43 He's a nice guy. 7:45 Some of these people are like ancient. They are, they have been around. 7:49 Jerry is actually named in the Block Size War by Jonathan Beer, you know, where it quotes like a paragraph of him talking in 7:56 Hong Kong in 2012 about Bitcoin. Jerry's an OG. And then, you know, this, so I invited basically these people, Hector, 8:06 Jerry, Matt, and Daniel Krajewicz to like, join our space if they want. 8:11 Daniel Krajewicz is great. Daniel Krajewicz is ironically, a huge fan of Drivechain, or he was before I think he just decided that 8:20 BTC is sort of a lost cause. 8:22 Yeah. 8:23 Daniel Krajewicz is an absolute genius. He's like, his little movies and posts are all like, impression doesn't even begin to 8:31 describe it. He's like on a completely different level. But unfortunately, as with such people, they sometimes, they're so smart that 8:40 they don't fit into their time and place. 8:43 I think it 8:44 and also this makes him unrelatable to the network effects of Bitcoin. Like he just doesn't realize that so few people, you know, take 8:54 are willing to take full large blockism seriously or Craig Wright as anything other than a menace. 9:03 It's interesting how they have a technical argument, which it's so interesting that you and the other small blockers who share your vision have 9:12 not succeeded in coming to terms with these intellectuals in the large blocker camp who seem to think that there is a technical line of 9:23 reasoning that everyone can just do a lot of pruning or some such to and then the large blocks work and that, like why it's a shame that they 9:32 haven't just fully grokked your understanding that others share, but that they 9:38 I certainly meet them like, more than like, I mean, what I say is everyone with with Drivechain, it's sort of like the main complaint of the 9:47 large blocks is that this is the set of stuff that everyone must do to run the node. So since everyone must do it, then it's kind of that's the 9:55 problem. And so with Drivechain, it's kind of like each person can choose what level they want to opt into. So Drivechain is kind of like a sort of a 10:03 pruning of a type of thing. And then I say anyone can just go on any block size they want. They can have large block, small block, whatever. 10:10 Paul, we have them. 10:11 And so I say that it should be allowed. As long as it doesn't interfere with the people who want small blocks. The small block position, I think, is pretty 10:20 simple, which is that they want to, everything that happens on the network is something that they they have to monitor every transaction for double 10:28 spends, see if the block is valid or not. And they just want this list of, it's like a list of chores. They just don't want it to be very long. 10:36 I wanted to introduce someone who I just invited up to the stage, Paul. This is a professor. And we've had a number of very nice DMs over the last 10:47 year. He's written an excellent book on the game theory and mathematics of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. He's one of my favorite people to follow on 10:57 Twitter. And he recently has been asking excellent questions about Drivechain. So maybe you and he can spend some time today, if he's interested in 11:09 hearing his latest set of questions. 11:11 Yeah, I have some formal training in game theory and like, PhD in microeconomics. And I'm a big fan, casually, of like Tom Schelling and other 11:23 people. Tom Schelling is really, he doesn't really fit at all with, like, you want to, someone would be taught game theory in school. He's like, I think 11:33 Professor Warner. Take it away, Professor Warner. 11:37 Okay, thanks. Yeah, I, let's see. So yeah, I'm, you know, Micah Warren, I guess my name's a little bit of a mixed up letter thing. Yeah, I just started looking 11:55 into Drivechain. I've heard about it. And I've kind of casually looked at it. And I kind of jumped into it a little bit. Actually read the details this week, 12:06 trying to understand it. And so I have, I think some, you know, I have some questions. I think I answered some of them when I looked closer. I'm just trying to 12:16 figure out how it works. So to start, like, there's, there's no, if somebody wants to propose a sidechain, this can be anybody for anything with any sort of method of 12:32 determining whether the, you know, what, how the payments work on the sidechain whatsoever, right? 12:40 The idea is to kick that problem from layer one, to the layer two, like the designer or the developer and say, it's kind of like you have an opportunity. It's like you have a layer one is like a ball or 12:53 something. And it's like, if you want to open your restaurant or your store in this mall, I give you the opportunity to succeed, but not you won't necessarily succeed. So but I, the 13:05 default thing would be, you know, like a merge mined blockchain, but it actually does not have to be that the only requirement is that 32 bytes, that the miners be able to find this 32 13:16 bytes of the real withdrawal hash every three months so that they can figure out which withdrawals are real. If they can't do that, then there's no one will know which withdrawals are 13:27 real and which are theft, making it pretty likely that it will be stolen. 13:33 So where does this hash come from? I guess we will ask a different question. Suppose I just say I'm, you know, let's say I have 100 Bitcoin, and I want to will it to my 13:45 children. Can I just go deposit that and say, I'm, you know, when my when I die, and my kids want my Bitcoin, the miners will just approve it is or does there need to be 13:56 Well, no, I think the way that I would maybe explain it is that the problem that it's solved, or the problem that BIP300 tries to solve is this idea that we have basically these alt coins and we have disputes over what the 14:11 blockchain should contain. So there's the large block, small block dispute. And I was just saying, you can get like with merge mining, you can run two blockchains at the same time for free, and with one 14:25 chain. So the goal would really be to have this only work for blockchain. So if you wanted to leave the money to your kids, you would do that on like the layer two chain or layer one chain or 14:38 whatever. 14:39 I guess I'm not asking like, what it was intended to solve, but it might solve what other problems could it solve? 14:45 I think because the idea is that on the blockchain, everything is compressed to hash Merkle root or just this 80 byte header. So you're kind of have strengthened numbers that used to be like an unofficial motto of Bitcoin, because 15:00 everyone's fee added to the same coinbase and everyone was in the same blockchain. So if they reorg the blockchain, it would just reorg everyone's blockchain. And so that would be that's like the idea because it's the same 32 bytes 15:14 withdrawals for everyone, everyone using the sidechain in that three months. So it's, it's, it's pouring all the hopes and dreams and fears and whatever people onto this one simple thing. And that's what kind of would make it more 15:28 likely to work. But there's never inevitable that it would work. 15:33 Yeah, I'm a little bit. So the withdrawals don't have to happen, right? I mean, right. Like, it can be a one way thing that just stays there for a long time, right? Like, I mean, that's why I'm asking about the will I can just, like, I put this 100 Bitcoin in like this lockbox. And then the miners, apparently, I could I could propose this, the miners would hack it and say, we're cool with this. 15:58 And then, you know, 2060, or whatever. 16:02 But I wouldn't do that, though, because the what you want is that you are like, or you'd be in the minor, you being you, me being you. Because I would you'd want the you'd want it to be something where there's, you want the strength in numbers effect, where you want the chain to be generating a lot of fees. See, if you just do that on the layer two chain, then there's 16:29 like a game theoretic idea that if they're going to steal something from the hash is either going to match or it's not. 16:34 I don't follow what you mean by the hash, I mean, there's at some point, so 2060, my son is going to go to a lawyer, and he's going to take my will, he's going to publish the will, he's going to say, I, here's my output address, I'm creating this bundle, which is just one transaction, which takes this 100 Bitcoin and it deposits to this address, and this is in 2060. 16:58 Now, the miners then include this, and then they can, they have to vote yes or no for the next, you know, 13,000, or whatever, 1300 blocks, right? 17:09 Right. But again, I wouldn't do this type of thing. This is an example of a restaurant in the mall that is likely to go out of business, I think. I just wouldn't do it that way. 17:20 I just wouldn't do it that way. 17:21 Yeah, no, you're talking, well, I have nothing. I mean, you're saying you wouldn't do that. But I have 17:32 What's that? 17:33 Well, I'm saying there's a way to accomplish a similar thing where you store it cryptographically on layer two, and then it's doing everywhere. There's like a will store or whatever. That's doing everyone's will. 17:46 Okay, but I don't want to, like, say, I don't know how that thing exists. I don't trust the people that are running it. You know, I don't know, I'm Kanye West or something. And like, people know me. And I just, I have bad password hygiene. I don't trust people to remember my passwords. And I say, hey, I can just do this. 18:05 Allow me to try to help out, you know, because being much less technical than you, it's sometimes is useful for the audience and myself just to kind of make sure we're all on the same page. Professor Warren mentioned a day or two ago, Paul, in a tweet that was very interesting. He asked, could a celebrity make a BIP300 transaction where the goal of the sidechain is to be the celebrity's personal funds that don't involve the 18:33 celebrity having to remember a password, and that the miners would would do the peg out when the celebrity wants. Is that right, Professor? 18:45 Yeah, that's precisely the question. 18:47 Well, it's a little bit like saying, can a celebrity go into the mall and start a restaurant where they're the only employee that works there? Where like, the answer is yes, but it does seem a little confused. 18:59 So I think, I think this is an example of a very interesting and novel, like, imaginative thought experiment. However, I think that the answer that Paul is giving is, is, is right, which is that the way that sidechains will succeed is through being very, 19:18 Okay, but but I don't care. I don't care if sidechains succeed. I mean, I just want to make sure that I don't, I just don't want to forget. 19:24 Yeah, I'm saying, I'm trying to say not sidechains generally, but any individual sidechain is kind of like, as Paul is saying, a restaurant. And as we, his point there is the thrust of his point is that restaurants very often fail. 19:37 So the way that a sidechain will succeed and become large, and understood to be reliable and successful is if it provides consumers exactly what they want, in a very effective way. 19:49 So a niche, tiny, unusual sidechain that doesn't have to do with many people is not going to leverage the technology of Drivechain and persist, probably. It'll fail. 20:03 Like, no, no. So, but my only, I mean, I don't understand that, because my, like, I just have one goal. And that's to save money. I don't care about, like, my goal is, 20:13 Are you familiar? I know, but are you familiar with the concept that the sidechains cannot be launched by an individual person? They are launched through a process that involves the vast majority of hashrate confirming the initiation of the DIP 300 sidechain. 20:31 Right, so it's 90% over the first two weeks. 20:34 So Kanye West is never going to succeed in, oh, Paul can answer the technicals on that. But Kanye West is never going to succeed, probably, in saying, hey, world, I want the whole Bitcoin community to kind of, like, orient towards me. Is that right, Paul? It probably would never happen that way. 20:53 There probably would not be this celebrity sidechain that is just unique to one person. 20:58 Well, I mean, yeah, it's a good question. But, like, we don't know. I mean, say it's 2031, Drivechains, it's finally, you know, it gets passed. And, you know, it's accepted, and the software happens, and then three weeks go by, and there haven't been any solid proposals. And then Kanye West steps up, and people say, hey, this is great. We're going to, like, this is a good way to bring, you know, some popularity and, you know, 21:28 attention to this thing. Maybe he, maybe it does. 21:31 So I think you asked a great question, because, you know, I mean, it's possible, and you can certainly try. And the ordinary sidechain proposals that people contemplate, Professor, have to do with a privacy sidechain, a large block sidechain, and others that are quite obvious examples of technology. 21:49 Since they're already a blockchain, it's like it's already something where all of the activity that happens can just be compressed into one little 32-byte hash, which is just something that the human eye can, at a glance, look at and compare to something else. 22:07 So let's try to get to the, give him an answer exactly to what he asked, which I think we haven't yet crystal clearly done, which is he's asking, if I understand correctly, could there be a sidechain using BIP300/301, the only purpose of which is to provide Kanye West with minor, you know, custody, quote, unquote, of his funds, without him using a password ever? Is that possible, Paul, conceivably? 22:35 It's conceivably possible, yes. 23:05 Basically, kind of like a normative political statement, you're saying, well, we didn't intend this for Kanye West, we didn't intend this for, I don't know, a CBDC, we, maybe we don't want the Chinese government running a CBDC, or maybe, you know, this is completely against the intent. 23:23 And so, if you can get 10%, I guess, you know, to be safe, 13% or something of minors to just say, we don't like this, they're going to veto this right from the get-go, right? 23:36 13%? Well, I don't actually agree, because it's not a question of, like, politics or values, really, it is all, what the minors have to do is maximize the total transaction fees, and also the market, the, you know, the fiat fees. 23:53 So, that is really the criteria by which they would assess all of the sidechain drop-add decisions, they'd say, well, is this going to make our coins more valuable if we do it, or less valuable if we, if we attack, or less or more valuable if we do the withdrawals the right way, or if we advance the blocks? 24:15 So, I think that is, in that sense, it's actually, like, an objective economic consideration that does not necessarily have any political dimension at all, other than… 24:26 I would disagree, I mean, I think, like, it's not completely deterministic, it becomes like the block size wars, where the small blockers were saying, you know, we're trying to maximize the long-term, you know… 24:39 Well, I'm not… 24:45 Go ahead. 24:46 Yeah, I mean, you're on the, I think you're definitely on the… 24:49 Yeah, I mean, you're on the, I think you're definitely on the right track there, but there was a problem with this large blocker view, which is that they did not, you know, this isn't, the idea that you can't beat something with nothing, and what they ended up, they proposed many things, like, half-heartedly, and they had a very disorganized approach, to say the least, so to just, this is a, this is a topic that could fill many hours, but, first, they, Mike Kern proposed Bitcoin XT, which had 8 megabytes, but then it was withdrawn or delayed, 25:17 and then there was Bitcoin Classic, and then that was withdrawn, and then there was SegWit2x, and then Bitcoin FastBlock. 25:22 This is my point, it's like… 25:23 One thing is that I'm going to say, though, is that when they actually had an alternative once, there were futures markets on whether or not we should have SegWit2x or regular, and they were split, like, 85-15 in favor of small blockers. 25:38 So, even in my own paradigm, where I'm saying they must maximize the value of the chain, that's kind of objectively what happened. 25:47 Through one reading of the situation, it may have been, I may be, I may be reading too much into it, but the cold, hard facts of the case are that there was only ever one alternative that was actually proposed that had some kind of futures markets or some kind of expectation, 26:05 and the expectation was that the large block version would be worth about 15%, or rather 15 over 0.85, or whatever that is, percent. 26:15 It would be split 85-15, and then when SegWit, when Bitcoin Cash sort of took over from SegWit2x, it ended up being split about 85-15 for a little while before the large block version ultimately proved to be less valuable. 26:32 Yeah, but this was, like, two years into the argument, right? And so, like, if somebody wants to propose a sidechain, and, you know, if they propose it, like, I guess we're talking, there's a whole political process leading up to them proposing the sidechain so that the miners will, they will get at least 90% support in the two weeks following the time that it gets proposed. 26:57 And so this requires – I mean it's just like – I mean it's almost like Drivechain. Like, it's taken you, like, I don't know, seven years or something, or I don't know how long, but… 27:09 You're right. 27:11 It seems like this is the political process. 27:13 You're right that there's some political process. However, this has been the case with Bitcoin since the beginning. Satoshi made it clear that… 27:19 What I would rather say, actually, is that the way BIP300 is designed is to actually insulate Layer 1 from all of the politics of the situation, which is to say that the politics only – it may affect – it's sort of like something the miners do completely separate from what happens on L1. 27:43 And so your L1, your Layer 1 Bitcoin core node is only going to do the BIP300 rules. It's the BIP300 – it's going to watch as the slots are added or removed and people deposit to them and withdraw, but it doesn't really care about what's happening on the sidechains. 27:57 And whether or not one slot is added, one sidechain is added versus another really makes no difference. So the BIP300 angle is to sanitize that, actually, and thus greatly reduce all the politics. 28:14 The only reason we had SegWit2x in the first place, the only reason we had Bitcoin Cash, the only reason we had these hard fork campaigns, the only reason we have altcoins is because there is no other way for people to get what they want out of Bitcoin. 28:32 And in fact, those things, the hard forks and the altcoins, those are all actually existential threats to Bitcoin because even though it's very unlikely, most of them aren't very good right now, but it's always possible that if one would succeed and then if it's just the way the network effects work… 28:51 Could you describe for us in further interest of his question, could you describe to us… 28:58 I'd rather just listen to what he has to say. 29:02 Yeah, I understand that it insulates L1 from the transactions, but it doesn't seem to insulate the miners from the politics because now there's 256 slots and if this is successful, these are going to be very coveted. 29:22 Well, I mean, I don't know how many sidechains there will be. I think it probably won't be anywhere near 256, but it could. 29:29 But I think this is another key thing, which is that this is an intentional design choice of Drivechain, which is that the list of things that the miners are inferior to the full node network. 29:41 So miners are people who use Bitcoin, but we are protected. It's ironic that the people who were the small blockers don't understand this about Drivechain. 29:54 This is sort of an irony that many, the small blockers think we don't want to be affected by that. 30:00 But the same people said when Brian Armstrong wanted to just have, when they had 83% of the network for SegWit2x, they had, a lot of people said, well, that doesn't matter. 30:13 It doesn't matter how much hash rate you have. The layer one node is going to trump that and they're right. 30:19 That is the point. And it's because of that true fact that the miners can have any politics they want about any subject. 30:27 They can have politics about electrical power. They can have politics about ASICs. They can have politics about literally anything. 30:37 And again, that's something that is kind of between them, you know, and they don't, it doesn't really affect. 30:43 The only thing that could possibly affect you on layer one is whether or not your transaction is censored. 30:48 And that is, that's actually a completely separate question involving, mostly involving privacy, which just the mere existence of Zcash sidechain would actually probably improve. 30:59 But, but that's the whole point is the only thing that the layer one people should care about when it comes to mining is getting their transaction censored. 31:07 As long as they pay a transaction fee and as long as they have privacy, that none of them will be censored because it's just irrational. 31:15 Okay. Well, my concern is now the miners do like, I think you're giving them power because now, I mean, in the past, like in the block wars, it was like the threat the miners had was they could like completely nuke the whole thing. 31:33 Like there's either, there's either they keep mining according to the rules or they nuke the whole thing. And there's really like no in between. 31:42 So now with this Drivechain where they can vote on different proposals, they can maybe disallow certain withdrawals, they can allow certain things to happen or not. 31:57 They can overwrite sidechains if they get upset with them. 32:00 There does seem to be a lot of middle ground now where they can do political things and they can form coalitions and they can say something like, hey, you know, we over here don't believe that Bitcoin should be used for ransomware. 32:16 And so we're going to, you know, destroy, we're going to wipe out any sidechain which is being used for ransomware. And this might be 40% or something. 32:26 Right now every sidechain is wiped out, including ones for ransomware. We don't have any. 32:31 It's really, when you say give power to the miners, this implies that there's like some kind of pie chart or something that someone is losing power and miners are gaining that power from someone. 32:44 But that's not the case because right now there's no sidechains at all. 32:47 So what's really happening is it's creating a whole new opportunity. 32:52 And if miners play ball, then they can make a ton of money using this system. 32:59 And if they don't, then we'll just go back to the way it is now where none of this exists. 33:03 And so it's not really like powers being given to the miners that they didn't have before. 33:08 They still, if you have coins on layer one, they're unaffected by BIP300. 33:13 Your coins are only affected by BIP300 if you spend money into BIP300 script, if you deposit them to a sidechain. 33:20 So if you don't deposit them, then you're exactly where you were before. 33:25 So there's no sense in which anyone is like losing powers of any kind. 33:31 It's true that miners may have different ecology afterwards. 33:36 That's absolutely the case. 33:38 But in 2015, they already all knew each other's phone number and had a shared mempool. 33:42 In fact, more than half of the... I'm not saying that that's a good... 33:46 What I'm saying is it's unrelated. 33:48 It has nothing to do with Drivechain per se. 33:52 So the point... 33:54 But I think you're explicitly giving miners with a 90% threshold to allow new projects. 34:00 I mean, if this is successful... 34:03 Right, but right now there are no new projects. 34:06 Okay, but the whole point is that this would be... 34:08 I mean, you're doing this believing that it would be successful. 34:11 That sidechains will be attractive, that these other sidechains will come in and they'll bring lots of fees. 34:18 I don't think people like altcoins and people seem to like altchains. 34:23 They like alternative designs. 34:25 Zcash seems like better privacy than we could get in Bitcoin. 34:28 It doesn't seem like there's any good scaling other than optional large block sidechains. 34:34 So it seems like not everything needs the same level of decentralization. 34:39 I think there's a lot of ideas that are good that could be done Namecoin in prediction markets. 34:46 So that's what I think, yes. 34:48 Right, and now you're giving the Bitcoin miners the power to approve or disapprove of these things happening on the side and being paid the amount of power though. 34:59 I mean, because they're the ones who benefit. 35:02 They benefit from a higher Bitcoin price since they're always paid in Bitcoin. 35:05 And they benefit from more transaction fees. 35:08 So they benefit if they get it right and they suffer if they get it wrong. 35:11 So who should instead have that power? 35:13 Like, you know, whoever is maintaining it on GitHub or who in your view should have that power? 35:19 Because right now all of the sidechain slots are censored effectively. 35:24 Which to me is no different than censoring someone's Bitcoin transaction. 35:27 But still, I mean, they do have that power, right? 35:34 Like you're saying, well, they should have that power. 35:36 And I'm saying, well, yes, they do. 35:38 They should have that power. 35:40 I mean, you're saying they're going to use this power like somewhat benevolently. 35:44 I'm saying give them an opportunity. 35:46 There's an opportunity. 35:48 If it doesn't work, if the sidechain idea doesn't work, then I would say that we would probably live in a multi-coin world. 35:53 And then all the altcoins, people should probably invest in altcoins because we're just going to have competition. 36:00 We'll have like a Hayekian currency competition world. 36:03 Right. 36:05 I mean, best case scenario from a Drivechain perspective. 36:09 All the sidechains, every new sidechain idea wants to plug into Bitcoin. 36:15 They want to have this two way peg where they can peg in and out. 36:18 Or they're just so dismayed at the idea of doing anything else that they feel like they just have no choice. 36:24 Same reason as everyone uses USB, right? 36:26 Everyone uses a QWERTY keyboard. 36:28 Most people use a language. 36:32 And so now you've given the miners the power to approve this or disapprove this. 36:39 I know, but it's created. 36:41 Right now. 36:43 Well, I mean, sure. 36:45 But I don't know where you're going with the question. 36:47 Well, what I'm going is now the miners have power that they didn't have. 36:51 Right now miners, Bitcoin miners cannot say anything about any other sidechain that doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin. 36:58 Unless they want to redirect their hash. 37:01 I think that's fair. 37:03 But you understand that my point of view is that right now we don't have any. 37:07 We don't have any. 37:09 So it's like the. 37:11 It's like it's not like power is being taken from someone else. 37:17 It's like a successful situation in which this new thing has been created and this new thing is functioning. 37:25 And now the miners in this new. 37:28 I guess what I'm saying is if they misuse their power, we'll just be back to where we are now. 37:38 And if they use the power, great, then everyone is happy. 37:42 OK, but that's but then this becomes sort of like a political statement. 37:46 Like, I mean, I think it's political, though, because it's just again, it's about maximizing fees and the exchange rate. 37:54 But I mean, this is a little bit of human creativity, like it involves a little bit of like the miners would have to take a kind of. 38:04 You have to guess as to what would maximize the value of Bitcoin and do that thing. 38:09 But that's a good thing, I think. 38:11 But I think it's ultimately political. 38:13 I mean, guessing like when we guess whether we should be like going to war with Ukraine or something, we're making some sort of guess that like in the future, the world would be a better place. 38:24 And we're maximizing each of our own like, you know, functionals. 38:29 But I think it's political if your decisions affect a lot of a large group of people. 38:35 Maybe because like otherwise you're saying like if anyone who comes up with a new microchip design, they're guessing that that chip will be. 38:43 But that's not very political. 38:44 You know, someone's doing video game speed running alone in their house. 38:48 They guess, oh, maybe if I did this, I would get a faster time. 38:52 But that's not. 38:54 But just merely having a conjecture and doing more now, knowledge is not. 39:00 But you see that this is a very different world where you have 256 slots that are all optional for the layer one user and that you can pull the plug on later and read. 39:09 You can say, well, we added this slot, but we don't like it anymore. 39:13 We're pulling it. 39:15 Right. I mean, that would be a controversial thing. 39:18 We didn't do this. 39:19 We didn't add this slot. 39:21 And we should have. 39:22 So it has an endless ability to just correct the error. 39:26 Whereas what we have right now is just a one size fits all blockchain where we haven't. 39:32 I mean, Taproot, it's much more political now. 39:36 The politics will fall by like five or six orders of magnitude. 39:41 Do you agree with that or no? 39:42 Because right now. 39:43 No, no. 39:44 Taproot. 39:45 We have like it's like if you work on whether or not something is approved in Bitcoin Core or even gets the attention from reviewers is enormously political. 39:56 Yeah, I think this would expand the politics. 39:59 Like, I mean, the Bitcoin Core stuff, there's like a very small handful of people that can even understand that. 40:06 But say Mark Zuckerberg proposes a sidechain where he's just going to import a bunch of Bitcoin and have like a private, like it's all privately transferred around. 40:19 And then, you know, he says when it transfers out, but it's going to be used on threads and Facebook and everything. 40:24 Yeah, but isn't that less political? 40:26 Because he's on his own chain. 40:27 It doesn't affect L1 and doesn't affect any of the other two chains. 40:32 The decision to let him do this is now up to the miners. 40:36 And some miners will say, no, this is this is great. 40:40 We're going to get a lot of fee revenue for this. 40:43 And then other miners will say, no, he's just going to pull it in. 40:47 And then he's going to rug pull us at some time in the future. 40:51 And they say no. 40:52 And then people start arguing whether it depends on whether you like Mark Zuckerberg or you trust him. 40:58 It seems like a solution to the problem of people disagreeing. 41:03 People always disagree. 41:04 And that's right. 41:07 You're not the effect of the disagreement on other people is worse without the sidechains. 41:14 Oh, because now what if instead of doing the Mark Zuckerberg doing as a sidechain, he does it as a hard worker Bitcoin. 41:23 That's enormously more political. 41:27 People would probably I mean, I think that would be a no go. 41:32 I mean, that's me guessing. 41:35 But like that's ironically, though, it would be a no go because it's so political, because people would say, well, his coalition doesn't include the real Bitcoiners. 41:44 So his idea, which could be a good idea, will never even see the light of day in that situation, which is like many sidechain ideas that have yet to see the light of day, even though they have been. 41:56 Many of them are probably good. 41:58 Many of them are probably bad. 42:00 But the point is that the miners would have a slightly different. 42:04 But the miners already have an enormous number of extremely creative tasks that they have to do. 42:08 Like, for example, the invention of the natural gas flaring credit strategy. 42:15 So like miners are already they already live in a world where the difficulty adjusts every two weeks, the bottom half of the performers are fired, they lose out. 42:25 And so they are already trying to compete as as hard as they can. 42:31 And they have to do everything they can think of to do a good job. 42:37 So this is a situation where they have an incentive to get it right. 42:42 I mean, what what cost what cost does like, you know, someone like Vladimir, the lead maintainer on github.com, who was now no longer, but what cost does he pay if he makes the wrong decision on what feature to merge into Bitcoin Core? 43:04 Or if people on Twitter say we should focus on taproot, or we should not focus on CTV, even though now it's, I think, overwhelmingly clear that CTV would have been better to focus on taproot by like, orders of magnitude. 43:20 But what cost to does Twitter pay or does the lead maintainer pay? 43:29 How do they fall on the totem pole relative to other Bitcoiners by screwing up? 43:35 Whereas the miners, if they screw up, they take in less money than their friend who works in advertising or whatever. 43:42 So they have an incentive to get it right. 43:44 But but when you say get it right, like we don't I mean, we don't know today. 43:49 We do know it. You just keep ignoring this point for some reason, which is that it's about the market exchange rate and the transaction fees. 43:56 But you're saying this like it's deterministic. 43:59 Like if Mark Zuckerberg proposes a sidechain, we don't know if this is going to bring lots of profits or if it will destroy Bitcoin. 44:09 We don't know anything about we don't know anything about anything with certainty. 44:12 But this is at least something where there is a result that has a number. 44:15 And we want the number to be as high as possible. 44:18 Could I know there's there's no result. There's no number. 44:21 There's just I don't know. At the end of the day, after they add the sidechain, there is a number that is whatever the market exchange rate is a big $30,000 per coin. 44:30 Like today, it'd be some other number. 44:33 And the total amount of fees coming in will be a number. 44:36 You could if you want, you could have conditional future markets and you would even know in advance before adding the sidechain. 44:43 Which decision would objectively, according to the best knowledge at the time. 44:48 But again, there's no no one knows anything with certainty. 44:51 Like you can have a conditional prediction market or you can have a prediction market about a coin flip or something. 44:57 And it's just going to say that it's 50 50, like 50 percent likelihood to be heads, 50 percent likely to be tails. 45:05 You flip the coin and if it lands, if it lands heads, then it'll sort of look like the market. 45:10 Why didn't the market give heads 100 percent? 45:13 Well, that's because no one knew there was no knowledge. 45:16 So I don't have a problem with knowledge. 45:19 But you see, that's not a real criticism. 45:22 And this isn't a problem about this is a randomness. 45:25 It's people have these ideas and they think, you know, like a lot or a lot of people are very certain that Twitter is going to go bankrupt in the next year. 45:32 A lot of people are very they're convinced that that's not true. 45:37 And these people are very confident. And you could put them in a prediction market. 45:40 And, you know, maybe, you know, what's the percentage, 20 percent, 23 percent? 45:47 This doesn't translate to an automatic like functional that miners can decide. 45:54 We better all vote yes on this, this meta coin or we better all vote no. 46:01 It's it is a political discussion because it involves so many factors. 46:05 It's not like it's it's not like you're just, you know, throwing some some Poisson distributions in the computer. 46:12 I think what Paul is saying, if I may interject just one point, is that your word, professor, 46:18 your word benevolence is actually the opposite of the correct view because Drivechain leverages profit motive more than the current process for Bitcoin development, 46:31 which is exclusively deliberative, not a competitive system where sidechains can accrue value and demonstrate their potential benefit as a change hypothetically for main chain. 46:45 So this enables a test bed of live real money opt in uses that can then show like, let's say, all of the current BIPs other than Drivechain are tested inside chains that would show which ones accrue value on our stable, which ones aren't. 47:01 And during the test, all of the value of the test is accruing value to Bitcoin through the two way peg. 47:07 So it's more capitalistic and profit motivated than our current system. 47:11 So there's no benevolence involved. 47:13 It's really the opposite. 47:17 But I mean, we couldn't I mean, can we do this with BIP300 and like I mean, can we run a futures market like this is what I understand. 47:24 It's that you're not just comparing a coin's value to like another coin's value. 47:29 You're saying like, I think that over the next indefinite amount of time, we don't I don't know what my time frame is. 47:35 Maybe I'm a miner that's going to be in the business for two years. 47:38 Maybe I'm an investor that's going to be here for 20 years. 47:41 We all have these different functions that we're looking at. 47:44 We're all trying to maximize our own thing. 47:46 And we're talking about like this is deterministic and the market is just going to automatically. 47:50 No, we're not. 47:51 We're not saying the markets are always right. 47:53 Right. People can make mistakes and people are the market. 47:56 However, however, do you agree that miners in Bitcoin today from the very beginning of Bitcoin, it has been assumed that miners are and all Bitcoin users are presumably and potentially anonymous, self-interested and profit motivated. 48:12 However, the self-interested, anonymous and mutually distrusting Drivechain makes the exact same assumptions. 48:22 And it posits it's a hypothesis that miners will act to maximize the value of their ASICs and their fee revenue. 48:31 Right. So this is a. 48:35 OK, but this is this this anonymous, self-interested maximizing that lasts for one block. 48:43 Like you're every block you mine, you're maximizing your revenue for that single block. 48:48 You're not looking two years down the road and saying how how is it going to like. 48:53 No, that's not quite correct. 48:55 The net present value is what matters. 48:57 So we assume the time preference will vary among miners and we assume just like Bitcoin does, that the miners aren't going to attack the value of Bitcoin for any kind of selfish reason, but instead just promote the value of Bitcoin. 49:11 And as Fiat Joffe argues in his excellent essay on Drivechain in favor of it, if the 51 percent of miners can't be trusted to maximize their own profit and the long term benefit of Bitcoin, then probably Bitcoin is at risk already. 49:27 I don't agree with that dichotomy. 49:30 Because I think that you're saying that, you know, 51 percent, there's a huge difference between like 51 percent of miners like attacking the whole thing and tearing it down and 51 percent. 49:48 And 51 percent, like disagreeing with the other, even if they do, even if they do steal, it's only harming those who opt in. 49:54 And the same thing is true with Lightning. 49:56 And it's the same thing that's true with sidechains today that are federated. 49:59 If there's a theft or coercion or accident where the Bitcoin's lost, if you didn't opt into liquid or rootstock, you aren't harmed at all. 50:07 It's strictly better to have Drivechains, strictly better to have Drivechain, which can possibly provide an enormous amount of the necessary fee revenue and value accrual and network effect Bitcoin must maintain to be successful in the future. 50:28 I mean, really what it's about is just giving people an option. 50:32 So it's like, you know, it's like freedom is a choice or whatever that type of a thing. 50:39 So it's like you have the option to go to Subway sandwiches or you have the option to go to McDonald's or you have the option to go to a nice restaurant. 50:49 That's the idea, basically. 50:51 You could say, oh, isn't it political whether or not the bank allows you to borrow money to start a Subway sandwiches, but it's kind of missing the point, I think. 51:04 But it is. I mean, like if I want to a strip club on my block, like this is a political discussion. 51:11 Like, again, if the miner, if it affects the negatively, if the sidechains negatively affect each other, it will bring down the has to bring down the price of Bitcoin and then they just submit just a math problem. 51:24 No, it's that's that's exactly that's that's it. 51:26 It's not a math problem. 51:27 Like, if I, if I say, sir, I need you to just like understand that this is a math problem. 51:35 It is not a math problem. 51:37 It's just the value of the land. 51:39 It's just the value of the land next year, whether or not we build the strip club or not. 51:44 And it's the land value. 51:47 It's just a number. 51:49 OK, but I mean, if I go to the city council, I say I want to do a strip club here and there's going to be people on all sides are going to say, well, it's this is going to go up. 52:00 We're going to destroy the business. 52:02 Well, that's the difference. 52:03 We're going to get tax revenue, we're going to get family staying. 52:08 Yeah, well, people can say X, Y and Z. 52:10 They may be right. They may be wrong, but they can. 52:14 It's like if you say, well, if I change this kind of engine in my car, then it will use less fuel. 52:19 And then someone could say, yes, it will or no, it won't. 52:23 And they could say maybe it will, maybe it won't. 52:27 People would disagree. People disagree about everything. 52:29 Disagreement is very important. 52:31 But this is a thing at the end of the day, they're disagreeing about one a number. 52:36 So, professor, we're saying that Bitcoin should aim towards maximum value accrual. 52:40 And you're introducing the possibility of like a like a like a normative discussion that's separate from profit motive and value accrual. 52:48 Well, no, no, no, no. 52:50 I'm saying like we can have this discussion like like my wife and I were talking about direction. 52:55 She says take I-5. 52:56 I say take I-205. 52:58 Like we're both we're both talking about the same objective, which is to get from here to there with the lowest possible time. 53:07 She starts talking about how Google Maps sucks. 53:10 And I start talking about how Apple Maps sucks. 53:12 And last time and it's we're still maximizing the same thing. 53:16 It's a very specific thing, but we're still having this argument, right? 53:19 That's the point. We have different things in our we have different priors. 53:22 We have different reasons why we're arguing these things. 53:27 It's the same mathematical you then if you're saying that miners will have a conversation and they will be some of them will be saying if this this sidechain is like a strip club, if we add it, the market price would be. 53:40 But that's what I'm saying. 53:42 I'm saying people some people will say we shouldn't add this sidechain. 53:45 Other people will say we should. 53:47 Yes. So I'm saying that is the case. 53:49 But I'm telling you that the the miners at least have an incentive to get this question right. 53:54 Whereas the system we have now does not do that at all. 53:58 It's very perverse. 54:00 Let's explore what what he's asking even further to make sure we fully respect it. 54:04 So he's asking, what if the miners and the whole Bitcoin community are torn between should a certain sidechain like let's take let's take Hivemind, for example, Paul, which is my favorite sidechain idea by far. 54:17 So there could be a discussion. 54:18 BIP300 is activated. 54:20 We get a privacy sidechain. 54:21 We get a scaling sidechain. 54:22 But then there is great disagreement about Hivemind. 54:25 Should it be on Bitcoin or not? 54:27 Would it be good for Bitcoin's price and fees or not? 54:30 How would that how would that discussion look? 54:33 Is that the question, professor? 54:35 Is that what you're asking? 54:37 Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I'm saying. 54:40 It's kind of like the same. 54:41 It's the block size wars. 54:43 Both both sides wanted Bitcoin to succeed, but they had completely different arguments. 54:48 And these went on for years. 54:49 Yeah, but you understand that, too. 54:52 Well, I mean, I suppose it's possible that but if people could disagree about anything, they could say, you know, because the issue with the block size war that everyone had to use the same block size. 55:03 So it's kind of a night and day difference in this situation where what this assigning the slot in BIP300 is like 34 bytes or something. 55:13 It's like nothing. 55:14 And you're just like people's wallets, people's nodes are like basically just tracking all the money that is in. 55:21 This one is so. 55:24 Yeah, the reason why it's different, professor, is that if people are debating whether or not Hivemind should be a Bitcoin sidechain, that is a vastly less controversial matter than whether or not there should be a Bitcoin software. 55:39 It's kind of like if you're saying everyone in this town eats, they must eat prison food every day, they have no choice. 55:49 And then I'm saying, well, we should open a food court where we have different restaurants. 55:55 And then if people want to eat the prison food, they still can. 55:59 No one's stopping them. 56:01 But now I have a bunch of choices. 56:04 And then like people come along and they say, well, you know, won't people disagree about what whether or not we should have a Subway sandwiches or a, you know, Pizzeria Uno here? 56:19 And isn't that the same as just what the prison food chef would make? 56:23 So it's the same thing. 56:26 Well, if your goal was to remove people who are saying something like that, I it's hard for me to figure out, you know, what thoughts they have in their head. 56:35 Well, if your goal is to remove politics, then like completely take politics out of the whole situation, then, you know, the prison food is is the safest bet. 56:45 It's kind of like school uniforms. 56:47 Well, I mean, that would be the case if Bitcoin were indestructible. 56:50 But that's not the case at all. 56:51 But that's not the case at all. 56:52 If someone builds something that's really better and is more popular, will eventually flip Bitcoin and then Bitcoin will go to zero and be destroyed. 57:00 Yeah, so, Professor, like if everyone is required to always be happy with main chain Bitcoin without any optional peer to peer sidechains, you know, available to them, then they might just continue to leave Bitcoin to go to places that are more offer more privacy or more scaling or more interesting projects like Hivemind. 57:20 So instead, what DriveGen is all about is enabling optional, optional experimentation and innovation. 57:26 So if you're happy with Bitcoin main chain, you stay there. 57:29 But if you're happy with alternatives, you can opt into those on Bitcoin in a way that brings value and fees to Bitcoin rather than leaving the Bitcoin community. 57:38 So what we're talking about here is the difference between, as you say, politics. 57:42 It's the difference between the contentious nature of changing Bitcoin a main chain versus the less contentious, less momentous nature of of introducing. 57:54 No, I'm not using the block size war as like a direct comparison. 57:59 I'm saying the block size war is an example of people with the same basic objective, but with completely different arguments and completely different calculations. 58:08 The large blockers thought that the large blockers were better. 58:10 Yes, you're making our point, because if, let me say one, I'll be quiet after this, Paul. 58:16 If the large blockers had had the option to use a large block sidechain on Bitcoin, they never would have left. 58:25 And I'm saying it might not have been an option because there might have been 12 percent of the buyers who just said, fuck the large blockers. 58:34 We just want to watch. 58:35 But if they do that and they're mistaken, if they're mistaken to offer this alternative, then they at least suffer a financial penalty. 58:44 But they don't believe they're going to suffer a financial penalty. 58:47 They believe that they're making. 58:48 Yeah, they may be wrong about anything they believe. 58:54 And one thing that the miners, you know. 58:57 The anyone can be mistaken about what they believe, but one thing is that. 59:04 The. I guess what I'm trying to say is there's an actual process now, there's like a process for an idea, so if people actually want to try an idea and then they say they at least know, like, OK, this idea is good enough, we're at 88 and we just need a little bit more. 59:23 So that would at least give someone some kind of idea of like what they should do next, like try to persuade the last four percent or whatever it is. 59:34 Again, I want to keep drawing that contrast to what happens without sidechains, which is that you have to launch the hard fork. 59:41 The hard fork doesn't immediately get half of the market cap of the coin. 59:45 So it's not like a pristine laboratory experiment with all these variables controlled for. 59:50 You need like a new name, you need a new ticker. 59:53 It's it's not a pristine experiment at all. 59:58 So that's again, it's a difference between launching a coin and having the optional L2 chain is big. 1:00:04 But you are correct that miners would have conversations with amongst themselves. 1:00:11 In various ways about which sidechains will they will develop theories about which sidechains will maximize their profit and they will act on those theories and those theories will not be infallible. 1:00:30 So they will have mistakes. 1:00:31 So you're right about all those things. 1:00:35 Yeah, but this is this is what I think is is going to be political because this is just how people behave. 1:00:41 You know, they have different theories and then they argue about the theories and then they form camps and tribes. 1:00:45 And yes, we already have that with stuff like, you know, taproot activation. 1:00:51 And just the block size war is, again, a perfect example of that, where people thought if they could just persuade the miners to join their side, the miners didn't know what to do. 1:01:01 They eventually sort of became large blockers temporarily, but not really. 1:01:06 So we already have a much worse version of it. 1:01:08 This is a version where it's sanitized from L1 and it's at least about opt in optional things. 1:01:14 But, yeah, I think people always disagree. 1:01:16 I mean, people could disagree about, like, you know, what movies they like. 1:01:19 Also, it doesn't affect the L1 Bitcoin. 1:01:22 But, yeah, I guess my my concern is this it introduces politics in a way which is not there with, I mean, on the miners actually voting level. 1:01:36 I mean, people are political, right? 1:01:37 Like, I get that people are going to argue about taproot or whatever, but people being political and actually being having the right having the ability to vote down a project or vote up a project or vote down withdrawal. 1:01:51 We have the we have the world of altcoins. 1:01:54 So that's all the toxicity is political. 1:01:56 Everything Ethereum does versus Bitcoin is political. 1:01:59 So people would prefer to live in a world. 1:02:02 I get why I part of me understands why Drivechain is not as popular as you think it would be, since it enables basically everything at zero risk. 1:02:12 And the reason is that it's just culturally it just landed at a bad place. 1:02:17 It's in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is because the popular Bitcoin belief is just to say that Bitcoin is completely indestructible. 1:02:27 Bitcoin core is the best. 1:02:28 Blockchain is the best development team. 1:02:31 It has the best whatever smart contracting scripting. 1:02:34 Everything that happens in Ethereum is a scam. 1:02:37 Nothing else. Everything else is it's all lies, you know, from the altcoins, Monero, et cetera. 1:02:42 It's all just a government psyop to trick us all and that Bitcoin is going to go to three hundred trillion dollars. 1:02:49 Now you need to do is own this coin and then close your mouth and then we will just make it there as long as we silence the critics of Bitcoin who are spreading FUD. 1:02:58 That is like the mainstream political view. 1:03:02 And that, you know, people just they that's a lot of wishful thinking in that is that no matter what mistakes Bitcoin makes, we don't have to care about whether or not anything said is technically accurate. 1:03:13 We don't need to care about whether or not we are missing easy opportunities. 1:03:17 We don't need to care about whether or not we don't care about growth. 1:03:22 You know, we don't need to care about convincing people to join Bitcoin because they'll eventually they'll just come crawling back. 1:03:28 These are all the cultural ideas that make people just think, well, what's the point of having sidechains at all? 1:03:35 It's a point of Drivechain because there is just Bitcoin is already perfect. 1:03:41 So people who believe that don't know anything about Bitcoin, but that more more people who work in Bitcoin every day up close and who work with lightning network every day up close and who have been in Bitcoin a long time. 1:03:54 We know it's not perfect. 1:03:57 And so the best thing to do is to try and give everyone, you know, give the customer what they want in a way that doesn't affect the other customers who don't want that. 1:04:09 So we have different food court with different restaurants and anyone can get whatever they want. 1:04:16 But a lot of people out there, they just say this prison food is the best and we love prison food. 1:04:20 And why would anyone want to leave? 1:04:23 And especially some people who do try to leave are viciously. 1:04:27 It's like literally like people who try to get out, you know, whatever. 1:04:31 Roger Vera Vitalik, even someone like Jeremy Rubin, who complains, they just get they get like beaten to death. 1:04:38 And then they say, say, see, everyone is really happy here. 1:04:46 I mean, have you done like how much have you like done any Bitcoin development yourself or? 1:04:59 Oh, I haven't done any development myself, no. 1:05:02 You go to like BitDevs? 1:05:04 No. 1:05:05 Do you live in a city that has BitDevs? 1:05:07 Not that I'm aware of. 1:05:09 Well, this is why he has an open mind on Drivechain. 1:05:11 He brings a fresh perspective. 1:05:13 So what are your thoughts about the discussion we've had so far? 1:05:16 Professor, do you are you getting how we feel that right now there's only deliberation. 1:05:22 There's no there's not enough competition and profit motive in the process for building on Bitcoin. 1:05:28 This would enable a more efficient, less controversial, less political type of development on Bitcoin that builds Bitcoin's value and fee revenue. 1:05:39 So it's it's very harmonious with the kinds of things you've been developing over the last year, which is a very detailed and comprehensive look at things like miner revenue and the need for a stable and strong fee revenue for the future of Bitcoin. 1:05:57 This is very harmonious with with your your your like writings on Bitcoin so far. 1:06:04 So I think you're a great candidate for for working through these questions you've had, which have which which I think Drivechain ultimately answers completely, which is this is less political. 1:06:15 Once once it's adopted, Bitcoin has a less political, more seamless, more optional type of development process. 1:06:24 Yeah, I'm not I'm not convinced that putting miners in a position to approve or disapprove projects makes it less political. 1:06:34 I mean, if you go if you go to the restaurant analogy, you have a town, you serve everybody prison food, but then you say we're going to open up a block of restaurants. 1:06:43 Then Subway wants to come in. McDonald's wants to come in. Whatever. Dave's spicy chicken. They all want to come in. And then people's people are going to argue about what what should be coming in and what's healthy and what. 1:06:55 And then whoever gets to make the decision now has power that they did not have. 1:07:02 Well, I think you're right about that. But I mean, again, it's like in that case, maybe the politics has transformed into like something better. 1:07:14 I mean, I think in that case, the important thing to focus on is just how much better it is, how much better life in the town is, how much better it is for the Bitcoin end user. 1:07:23 But, you know, like, would you would someone really say, would someone really say, like, who's living in the town? 1:07:31 Someone who's not a miner, they're not a developer position end user. 1:07:35 Are they really going to say, wow, the biggest mistake we ever made was opening this block of of. 1:07:44 It's kind of like someone who gets like a Netflix subscription and they're like, oh, my life is so difficult, there's too many choices. 1:07:50 I don't know. Out of all the screen entertainment, I don't know what to watch. It's like a first world problem kind of. 1:07:56 I think I might have a great question for you, professor, that maybe will answer this whole discussion. 1:08:02 The question is, which do you feel is going to be a more controversial and more controversial political matter? 1:08:12 Which of the following two things? One, a block size increase on Bitcoin main chain to the introduction of a large block BIP300 sidechain. 1:08:22 Which of those is more political in your view? 1:08:25 Assuming Drivechain exists on Bitcoin today and there are some people who want to increase the Bitcoin main chain block size and other people who want to just introduce an optional sidechain with large blocks. 1:08:36 Which of those is more political and controversial in your view? 1:08:42 I don't know how to measure it. I mean, the the first one is like it's definitely I mean, they're both political, but like it's not going to happen. 1:08:51 So it's not really nobody's arguing it. 1:08:54 Yes, they are. Every day they're arguing it. 1:08:57 Well, I mean, are people seriously still thinking the large block hard fork is going to happen? 1:09:03 I read Bitcoin Twitter all the time every day. 1:09:05 And some of the members of the technical community who are active on Twitter and in this audience who are significant in the discourse on Bitcoin are saying a block size increase at some point in the future, preferably sooner rather than later, is an important part of scaling Bitcoin. 1:09:20 And Drivechain fundamentally says, let's enable those who like Bitcoin as it is to keep main chain Bitcoin small block. 1:09:28 And that way larger blocks are optional. 1:09:30 Let's make everything optional so everybody gets what they want. 1:09:35 Well, I do agree that probably the large block layer one is probably dead after so many humiliating failures. 1:09:42 But I think in the case of the sidechain, it's like people are disagreeing on like this one thing, which is the exchange rate of Bitcoin and the total fees collected by miners. 1:09:54 So at least they have they're all watching the same thing, whereas in the hard fork case, they are arguing about many other things. 1:10:01 Like, you know, like how when should how should we what should we hard fork to and when and how should we deploy that? 1:10:06 And what do we do if someone proposes two hard forks at the same time? 1:10:09 It's about the is it about the block size? 1:10:11 OK, yes. Do we do anything else? Do we do anything from the hard fork list list while we're at it? 1:10:20 You know, it's like it's it's about a lot more than just the block size. 1:10:23 It's like the full node costs versus the fees, the interaction between the two. 1:10:27 If something else is going to be invented later that. 1:10:34 Like it, lightning is going to be invented later, and then we would never need. 1:10:38 We would need this block space less versus more. 1:10:42 So they're actually disagreeing on a lot of stuff, but I don't know. 1:10:45 We've been talking for a while. 1:10:46 Should we hear from anyone else? 1:10:48 Yes, we have one of our friends, Jay Berg. 1:10:52 Welcome to the stage, Jay. 1:10:53 Thank you for joining. 1:10:54 Welcome back. 1:10:55 Share your thoughts. 1:10:57 Hey, I don't I still to this day don't understand how hard it is that you can support this 300 and not 300. 1:11:04 Yeah, the worst part is I agree with 90 percent of, you know, Paul saying, but maybe even 98 percent. 1:11:11 But the last 2 percent is, you know, what I argue about. 1:11:14 But I just want to say regarding the block size increase, you know, SegWit was a block size increase. 1:11:22 Before the Civil War, there was consensus for a block size increase. 1:11:27 Even after the Civil War, consensus was we're going to try to scale on chain before we increase the block size again. 1:11:34 But of course, we want to want to get as much scaling as possible on chain. 1:11:39 That's what we've been doing for 10 years is trying to find ways to scale on chain. 1:11:43 And one of those ways is a block size increase. 1:11:45 So, I mean, how could anyone say block size increases outside consensus? 1:11:52 Anyway, that's just one point. 1:11:56 Yeah, we weren't saying it was outside consensus. 1:11:58 We were just saying that a future increase, again, any further increase would be controversial. 1:12:03 And what I'm trying to ask, and you can ask, why don't we ask you the same question that I asked the professor is, you know, which is less, which is more controversial, changing main chain Bitcoin or introducing a sidechain? 1:12:16 Drive chainers would argue it's absolutely, inherently, necessarily less controversial to add or subtract a sidechain than change the main chain, which everyone must use to be a Bitcoiner. 1:12:28 Right. So what you do is you're trying to cheat and say, we're going to get consensus on all possible things out of the way. 1:12:37 Then there won't be any more drama. 1:12:40 So that's what Drivechain is doing. 1:12:41 It's saying, hey, we're going to reach consensus on every single possible sidechain. 1:12:46 It's okay to put it on the sidechain. 1:12:49 And we're going to have a hash that represents that. 1:12:52 And that takes away all future debates. 1:12:54 I agree. 1:12:55 But the problem is something that could do anything. 1:12:58 Everything could basically do nothing. 1:13:01 So I think the better approach is very simple. 1:13:04 Block size increase or big block sidechain. 1:13:08 Just forget about 301. 1:13:09 Forget about miners voting. 1:13:11 Just choose one. 1:13:13 Choose one that has consensus because you still have the fight of the 300. 1:13:19 What did you mean when you said. 1:13:21 And by the way, I always appreciate your tweets and comments. 1:13:24 But what did you mean when you said that if we can do everything, then we can do nothing. 1:13:28 I didn't understand what that meant. 1:13:31 So if you say if you want to take. 1:13:33 So basically everything is nothing. 1:13:35 A framework that can do everything can do nothing. 1:13:38 Right. That's the point. 1:13:40 Turing completeness is. 1:13:41 Yeah, everyone's trying to get Turing completeness in Bitcoin. 1:13:43 But the reason why Bitcoin works is because it's not. 1:13:46 It's because it solves. 1:13:47 It solves double spends with with, you know, with Nash equilibrium or game theory that the miners, you know, have nothing else to do but, you know, build blocks. 1:13:59 And that has to do with the protocol itself, which is. 1:14:03 But to put it very simply, a double spend is a mutually exclusive transaction. 1:14:08 Only one of them is valid. 1:14:10 That's all the miner could do is decide which one is valid. 1:14:13 And he has nothing to do with that process. 1:14:15 Right. And in the limit, because it's random, some random miner doesn't know that you're making a deal somewhere in Mexico. 1:14:23 But when you add something else, you change that. 1:14:26 And what what the what the extreme is the Turing completeness that you could do anything. 1:14:31 Once you can do anything, you're asking us to come to consensus on all possible sidechains, even though the ones that we don't want. 1:14:38 So instead, let's just pick the one that we do want. 1:14:42 So instead, just just pick the one that we do want and talk about that. 1:14:44 But but I don't I don't quite follow when you say that we get every sidechain that's possible. 1:14:48 We get the ones that people want. 1:14:50 Like we get if people don't want an Ethereum sidechain, then they won't get that. 1:14:55 They'll only get the privacy and the scaling and the Hivemind. 1:14:57 So why are you why are you assuming that every possible sidechain that anyone might desire would necessarily get activated? 1:15:05 Because that's what's the process of the process, because we're you're skipping the hardest. 1:15:12 The hardest part of getting these things activated is going to get the consensus. 1:15:15 Right. Imagine we had to do a soft fork for every single one. 1:15:19 That's my point. I'd rather that and you're right. 1:15:22 I'd rather have it. That's my point. 1:15:23 I'd rather have a soft fork for each individual sidechain than to have a soft fork for all possible side. 1:15:29 But that's that burdens the community with an on. 1:15:31 You know, but Henry, can you just like. 1:15:33 Sure. The process for adding the sidechain is basically it's very much like BIP-9, so it's kind of like soft fork, but there's no code changes. 1:15:46 So isn't that better? 1:15:48 So BIP-9 as far as like signaling. 1:15:53 Right, it's basically 90 percent over two weeks, which is used to be how soft works were activated. 1:16:00 For a time. 1:16:02 OK, so can you see a situation where we just gave miners like we used to be able to UASF. 1:16:08 Now it's well, I guess we could UASF, right? 1:16:13 That's can always be a you can have to add. 1:16:16 You could force the miners to add or to force them to remove the UASF. 1:16:21 I mean, there's only what? 1:16:23 There's only 256 of these, right? 1:16:26 256 slots. 1:16:28 You could just add it again and add 256 more. 1:16:30 You could have sidechains of sidechains. 1:16:32 So right. But OK, it's really kind of so at least one way to do that. 1:16:37 The way UASF works is where everyone knows what's what's what's allowed. 1:16:43 Like we know from socially we understand what the purpose of Bitcoin is in the first place. 1:16:48 That's why UASF works. 1:16:49 I agree. So if we could just say what these 256 are supposed to represent. 1:16:54 They're supposed to represent scaling on chain, pay to pay electronic cash. 1:16:57 Like we just explicitly say what they're supposed to represent and what they're not supposed to represent. 1:17:02 That goes a long way. 1:17:03 But just saying we could do anything and everything is good is it's kind of cheating because we're trying to it's hard enough to get consensus on one thing, like even the simplest, most conservative thing like Bitcoin 19. 1:17:17 But you're saying, no, we want to get consensus on everything at once. 1:17:20 Right. So it's a bigger ask. 1:17:22 And on top of that, you have the hashrate escrow. 1:17:25 So, well, not really, because when we say everything, I just mean that there's a universality to the idea. 1:17:30 Like you have you buy a computer that has USB ports on it. 1:17:33 You say, well, you can plug anything into this. 1:17:36 But they don't literally mean like that's not what people mean when they say plug anything into it. 1:17:41 They mean there's like a standard for emulating any altcoin. 1:17:50 I mean, I'm just going back to the fact that, you know, we know that Turing Complete smart chains are an anti-pattern and we're kind of bringing that into Bitcoin. 1:17:59 That's yeah, I don't I'm not in favor of a Turing Complete. 1:18:02 And I actually think that this is superior because you have the sidechains have categories like the privacy sidechain or the Oracle sidechain or whatever. 1:18:12 And I think, yeah, if you have Turing Complete, then people will write weird contracts in there that will actually attack other chains or just do weird stuff like pay for reorganization or stuff that maybe you wouldn't want. 1:18:26 Like the strip club type of a thing. 1:18:28 And I think they would eventually just get that's inefficient because when you do something like Ethereum, you need something like gas to account for the fact that everything is using different resources. 1:18:39 When you have a sidechain, you really don't need that. 1:18:41 They can all have their own global state or the state that's local to the sidechain. 1:18:46 So I can do a lot of heavy lifting. 1:18:48 If you have something like Thunder that could scale Bitcoin infinitely, scale the pair to pair UTXO set infinitely on a sidechain. 1:18:56 Why do we need another sidechain? 1:18:58 I don't understand. 1:18:59 Well, for Zcash, like a Zcash privacy sidechain. 1:19:03 Yeah, but that's such there's only like a handful of those. 1:19:05 Like there's five of them. 1:19:06 So we could just list them out. 1:19:07 Like this is what's expected. 1:19:09 This, this, this and this. 1:19:10 And if we come up with something in 10. 1:19:13 Well, I mean, I have done that. 1:19:14 I mean, I've already made a little list on drivechain.info on what I think we would have. 1:19:18 But why is it important to you that our knowledge today of what sidechains are good. 1:19:23 It's consensus. 1:19:24 It's permanent. 1:19:25 It's consensus. 1:19:26 It just needs to be explicit. 1:19:28 But the thing is, this is a list of things that I think we should try to give people an optional version of. 1:19:34 But even that is something that people might disagree with. 1:19:37 And so in the future, they might say, well, we didn't write that. 1:19:40 Right. 1:19:41 So don't you see it's a little difficult to get someone to agree with all possible ones, even though. 1:19:46 So that includes all the ones they disagree with when we can't even come up with a list of five that we agree with today. 1:19:52 We could come up with a list of five. 1:19:54 I think, again, it's like you buy a computer with a USB port versus one with like special ports for each thing. 1:20:01 They say, well, let's list them out. 1:20:02 A keyboard, a webcam. 1:20:05 You know, but maybe like they didn't realize before COVID, you wouldn't realize that everyone would probably want to buy a nice microphone or maybe like a ring light or something. 1:20:14 Ten years from now, we do this again and we say we want to do another another five. 1:20:20 And that's why we're going to add AI and quantum computing and, you know, aliens, you know. 1:20:25 Well, sure. But that is the obvious downside that we have to go through this whole process again. 1:20:31 But the upside of going through the process is what's the upside of going through the process? 1:20:36 It's UASF. It's the only way this thing works. 1:20:41 I think that I actually don't really believe in like for a while, I thought that like informed consent was a really good thing. 1:20:52 I mean, I still think that, but now I just think the idea that the regular layperson on Twitter would know anything about these issues is basically zero percent likelihood. 1:21:02 So they're never going to know. 1:21:04 So they're not going to know anything about Zcash sidechain or whatever. 1:21:08 So that's that's marketing. I know that's a marketing problem. 1:21:11 I agree. I mean, back in the day, it was all about the devs and science and stuff. 1:21:16 Yeah, I would say about SegWit, people didn't know at the time. 1:21:19 Few people did, but most people didn't know it was a block size increase. 1:21:22 I didn't either. I didn't until after the Civil War, you know, which is insane. 1:21:27 A lot of people still to this day, people think that somehow it achieves the more transactions by like efficiently shrinking. 1:21:34 People think it's backwards compatible, too. People think it's not a hard fork. 1:21:37 I mean, it's a completely different block. 1:21:40 Yeah, completely different. 1:21:42 Completely different. 1:21:43 But we had nuance back then. Back then we had. 1:21:45 OK, so Luke and everyone's saying, OK, listen, we're going to we're going to sell this thing because it is good. 1:21:50 But we're going to sell it in a way that we don't have to. 1:21:52 We don't have to put thousands of plebs in computer science 101. 1:21:57 So we're going to say things like, oh, it's backwards compatible, you know, blah, blah, blah. 1:22:01 It's conservative. It's not really a block size increase because it's backwards compatible. 1:22:05 This is the most we could squeeze out of it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 1:22:08 And that's kind of like what we're you know, what we're hoping we could do next for the next nuance. 1:22:12 But all nuance got lost at the Civil War. 1:22:16 And then with Taproot, that's kind of like people just threw up their hands and it was like, you know, we spent all this time. 1:22:23 I think it's getting worse. Oh, I certainly think it's getting worse over time. 1:22:27 I think it's because the community is growing and it's a huge proportion of new people. 1:22:31 And those people, those people that you described earlier, the Maxis that that think Bitcoin is great, it's going to do awesome on its own. 1:22:40 That's dwindling really fast. You know, like there's not that many of those. 1:22:46 There's loud ones and at the USD at the USD conferences. But, you know, there's not there's really not those Maxis anymore that really believe Bitcoin is just going to go hyper on its own without any dev help. 1:23:03 I mean, that's just insane. Right. But I think for a while there was a lot of people. 1:23:08 I mean, I think probably don't you think like Michael said? 1:23:11 Yeah, Michael said, I would say there's a couple, there's like four, right? There's four big loud people. 1:23:15 You know, like if you go to a conference for three days and there's not one mention of a bit the whole time on stage, you know, you're in the wrong place. 1:23:21 Right. Things like that. But it used to be the pubs would be like, listen, eventually the devs are going to figure it out. 1:23:30 The devs are going to figure something out. We know there's some way of working on it. 1:23:34 But one by one, the devs started leaving because, you know, they just after the Civil War, everybody just wanted to keep fighting. 1:23:45 Yeah, I think the Civil War did raise an issue that like either something has to be built that is either like lightning network shaped or is like some kind of like solution to a large block layer one. 1:24:00 Like something needs to something new needs to be created. 1:24:04 And that created this like the idea of like a roadmap or the idea of like future expectations of large groups of people. 1:24:13 I mean, it took a while for us to actually figure out that two way pegs are impossible. It took a long time, a lot of research. 1:24:22 And each as each researcher figured that out, they kind of was like, oh, shit. 1:24:28 You know, what we kind of implied, we promised, you know, during the Civil War is we can't really come through with it. 1:24:35 You think two way peg is impossible? It's of course possible like at some level of security. 1:24:40 Two way peg? 1:24:42 Well, you have you have Liquid Federation, and then you have BIP300. I mean, you have to choose a group to trust. 1:24:53 Well, I don't think that's the case. BIP300 is a decentralized mining process. You don't like pick a group of people, pick the miners. 1:25:01 But it's an ongoing process, like the people who they stand to gain or lose. 1:25:11 If the withdrawals are going through correctly or not. 1:25:17 There's like, it's so slow and transparent. 1:25:20 There's things that would happen if you kind of error correct the process. 1:25:26 There's no fix. I mean, like if you say like a lot of people like to FPV security. 1:25:33 The large blockers, they were like pro FPV level security and they still are. 1:25:40 If you say that that FPV sidechain is custodial or like requires trust, then you're saying that, you know, Electrum wallet requires trust or something. 1:25:52 Where it's sort of like not really what it originally meant. 1:25:55 These words are changing their definition an awful lot, I think. 1:25:59 I mean, in the limit, someone wrote a paper once that says any two way peg sidechain is in essence a block size increase. 1:26:10 I don't agree with that, whoever said that. 1:26:12 Well, because the miners at the end of the day, someone has to go look at the sidechain. 1:26:17 Yeah, because layer one, it doesn't enforce the actual peg in the other reverse direction. 1:26:24 So they can do the stuff, oh my gosh, whatever that is, it's a lot of times. 1:26:32 Whatever happens, like the miners could theoretically mine a bunch of L1 blocks, mine a bunch of L2 blocks, ignore what was happening on the L2, collect all the L2 sidechain block fees. 1:26:45 And then steal all the coins or withdraw them to someone where they don't even know if the recipient is the real recipient or not. 1:26:52 They do all that and they could do all that without ever looking at, without there even being sidechain node software. 1:27:07 So they can't do the whole thing blind if they want. 1:27:10 I mean, now we get into the other problem is, if that's the way... 1:27:14 Yeah, what is the problem with... 1:27:16 So here's the problem. 1:27:18 On the one hand, you're the only person in the entire world, I think. 1:27:22 Right. 1:27:23 Not that that makes you wrong, I'm just saying it's very interesting. 1:27:25 Okay, so the problem is this, if you say BMM somehow secures the sidechain, how could it secure the sidechain? 1:27:34 There's only one way it could secure the sidechain. 1:27:37 It's because of the proof of work and the distribution of SHA-66 hash rate that somehow that immutable hash says something about decentralization. 1:27:49 But if that's the case, if it secures the sidechain, then it also creates MEV because that means that the miners do in fact have a say in what happens in the sidechain. 1:28:01 They can't have it both ways. 1:28:04 Yeah, the miners have a say in what happens on the sidechain, but they do not... 1:28:08 They get all of the value, what you might call the MEV, like let's say the MEV is $12. 1:28:14 The layer 1 miner gets the $12, but they don't have to run the sidechain node. 1:28:22 So they don't actually have to do anything. 1:28:24 Someone is doing the MEV, but it's not the layer 1 miner. 1:28:27 No, they could do it. 1:28:29 They don't have to. 1:28:30 Well, they could do it. 1:28:32 Right, but by having the hash, not anyone, but in the limit you need the hash rate to do it. 1:28:39 Yeah, but nothing hinges on it. They get the $12 whether they do it or not, so they probably won't do it. 1:28:47 I mean, it usually doesn't work like that because it's a very expensive build to actually get the MEV. 1:28:54 So the theory is that they won't even invest in building it if they know it's expensive. 1:29:01 The sidechain block constructor is a sidechain full node that is not a layer 1 miner. 1:29:07 So let's say the block is normally worth $6 of transaction fees, but there's an additional $6 of MEV that if they pay $2, 1:29:17 they can pull another $6 out of this on the sidechain, which has nothing to do with layer 1 whatsoever. 1:29:25 They will run their node, they collect the transactions, they say I'm getting $6. 1:29:31 That's great, I like that. 1:29:33 And then they'll say, oh wait, I can pay $2 to get another $6. 1:29:38 So now the block is worth $10 to them since they've invested the $2 in, 1:29:43 and now the sidechain block is worth $10. 1:29:46 They go over to L1, this is a prospective block. 1:29:50 They go over to L1 and then they say, someone out there is saying, I'll pay $6 if you blessed this sidechain block, sidechain block 43, for me. 1:30:02 And then they say, I'll pay $7. 1:30:05 And then they get into a bidding war with someone else who did the MEV. 1:30:09 It goes for $9.99. 1:30:12 So they get $10 on the sidechain, they pay $9.99 on L1. 1:30:16 The miner gets paid on L1, and they don't even see the sidechain node. 1:30:20 So even though there is, whether or not the MEV is a decision made by the sidechain developer and it does not affect L1. 1:30:28 Yeah, I mean, it's obfuscation. 1:30:33 It's a separation of obfuscation. 1:30:35 But I mean, there's theories about if you're willing to do something against social consensus, if nobody could find out. 1:30:47 There's a lot of different things here. 1:30:49 It's not always easy to figure out how much you want to bid for this particular MEV. 1:30:55 If you actually have the hash rate, you're just saying, I'll take it for free if I could get it. 1:30:59 If not, I won't. 1:31:01 I'm not going to go pay some external miner. 1:31:03 I'll try to do it myself. 1:31:06 Well, the sidechain nodes have no hash rate. 1:31:09 They just bid. 1:31:11 I know, but the thing is that sidechain nodes are secured by BIP301, right? 1:31:16 Yes or no? 1:31:18 In BIP301, the sidechain node, whether or not the block meets the proof-of-work requirement. 1:31:24 So that's like if the header meets the proof-of-work requirement on L1. 1:31:28 That's like whether or not they are included in the L1 Coinbase. 1:31:33 That is the same thing. 1:31:35 So like in Bitcoin L1, you first get the 80 byte header and you say, does this meet the proof-of-work? 1:31:42 Then if it does, you download the block and you check it against all the rules. 1:31:46 So on the sidechain, you first see if the sidechain header, if that hash made it into Layer 1 Coinbase. 1:31:54 And if it does make it into Layer 1 Coinbase, then you say, okay, this sidechain block met the proof-of-work requirement. 1:32:03 And then you download the sidechain block. 1:32:05 What does that mean? What is the assumption when you say met the proof-of-work? 1:32:09 The assumption is that it's secure because of proof-of-work SHA-256 mining is decentralized. 1:32:17 So now we're looking at Bitcoin mainchain to decide the state of the sidechain. 1:32:25 Because it goes in that direction. That's the good direction. 1:32:30 The thing is you have no way to tell if this miner actually is a sidechain miner that made the mainchain block. 1:32:38 And he actually did a bunch of frontrunning and it just, oh, it just happened. 1:32:41 And everyone's like on the sidechains, oh, it just happens to be that that one got in before this one. That's weird. 1:32:47 And they don't even notice that it's being actively manipulated, right? 1:32:51 So that's the story I'm getting at. 1:32:54 If you say security, I don't know exactly what you mean by that. 1:32:58 I mean, maybe this will help to point out that the hash of the sidechain header is in L1. 1:33:04 So it is protected by it. It's no different than any other L1 transaction in that way. 1:33:08 Right. Okay. So now we can talk about, you could do the same thing in an OP return. 1:33:14 You just say, hey, like Ordinals, just pick an OP return and it's the same immutability, right? 1:33:19 And here's the critical part. What changes when you go from an OP return into the Coinbase? 1:33:26 And this is the very nuanced question. Like what changes? And that's the problem. 1:33:33 Very little. But the whole point of this is why BIP301 is not even really that required. 1:33:38 But what it does do is BIP301 allows it to make it so that when you bid on the block, the miner will only take the highest bid. 1:33:49 They won't just take everyone's bid. Like everyone says, I'll pay $4, I'll pay $4.10, I'll pay $4.12. 1:33:55 They can only take the highest bid. They have to include the... 1:33:59 Moving into the Coinbase system means that you know that it was the Bitcoin miners that had someone with the proof of work who blessed the message with the proof of work. 1:34:10 So BIP301 is just about having the two people be able to coordinate without trusting each other. 1:34:15 Right. And exactly. 1:34:17 What are they trusting? They're trusting the distribution of SHA-236 hash rate is not centralized. That's right? 1:34:24 I don't really think so because I think... 1:34:26 But you just said they don't have to trust each other. So what are they trusting? 1:34:29 How are you solving them not trusting each other by having some random miner and trying to put it in the Coinbase? What do you gain from that? 1:34:39 What they would do instead if they couldn't use BIP301 is they would just have a relationship with the mining pool and they would say, 1:34:51 I will make your sidechain blocks for you. I will pay myself the transaction fee. And then after, in the next block, after you include my hash, I will pay you in L1 or I'll pay you up front. 1:35:04 Either way, it doesn't make any difference. 1:35:06 There's another way to do this. You could do APL. APL could do this. 1:35:09 You just need a bidding. If you just need a fee bidding system, that could be done without a sell for. Right? 1:35:15 Like a double spend system like any previous. Anyone could pay. 1:35:17 Yeah, I don't really think that... 301 is like... I just thought it will ride along with the 300 soft fork because, again, when I proposed all this, it was November 2015 and soft forks were actually not a big deal. 1:35:29 And there were in fact three done the very next month, I think, if I remember correctly. 1:35:33 So I was just like, whatever. And I broke it into two BIPs to make it easier to read. 1:35:39 So they're not like mutually... because you could always have a sidechain that doesn't. This is what Professor War... or whatever. I only see the first part of his name. 1:35:50 But he was asking about that earlier. You don't really need... it doesn't really need to even be a blockchain. It could be like some weird nebulous thing. 1:35:57 So it doesn't necessarily need to be a blind merge mine, although I think that's a big mistake. 1:36:01 Because you see the benefits of Blind Merged Mining, right? 1:36:02 Yeah, I know. The benefit is the UASF risk. The only reason why miners... the miners are going to make a very quick decision when they're building their mining operation. 1:36:13 They're going to say, are we going to hire people to research how to manipulate this thing or not? 1:36:19 And that's the instant... and we just want them to say every time that they're not going, they're just going to run the fucking software and not do anything. 1:36:26 That's why it works. They don't even try. 1:36:28 They don't even try. No, they won't. 1:36:30 That's what BIP301 tries to do. 1:36:32 Because BIP301 says, you don't even have to re... you don't even have to run the software at all. Someone else does that and they just bid up the block. 1:36:39 And if they get 8 Bitcoin worth of value out of this block, the bid would be 7.999. 1:36:45 It's a question of do they want to. Not if they could. Do they want to do it, right? But anyway. 1:36:50 If they want to, I don't really see a problem with that either because they'll build the block and they'll get 8 Bitcoin on the sidechain. 1:36:57 And maybe 8 Bitcoin on the sidechain is worth 7.999 on the mainchain, especially after you account for the fact that running the node will have some costs, even though it'll be almost certainly very, very small compared to every other... 1:37:10 Right. So now all of a sudden you have a, what's it called? You have like a Uniswap sidechain, something. Some massive FTX, monstrosity. 1:37:21 DYDX meets FTX on a Bitcoin sidechain. 1:37:24 And it's very nuanced and abstract, but it's pure manipulation if you get enough retail flow. 1:37:32 Right, yes. I understand. 1:37:33 So at that point, right, when the miners are building, they're doing their cashflow analysis. I mean, a lot of them are capitulating right now into ASICs. 1:37:43 They're going to say, oh, wow, okay, let's get Wall Street in and let's build this thing and actually let's centralize it. 1:37:49 So the point is, the point is you don't want protocols that open that up. And we know what it is that opens that up. 1:37:58 I actually disagree. I think that it is a good thing because think about it like, you have to look at it from my point of view, which is the sidechain point of view is that if they build the Uniswap sidechain, it doesn't affect like the large block sidechain or the prediction market sidechain or the mainchain. 1:38:15 It's just its own thing, its own restaurant, and it has soundproof walls. 1:38:19 So they do things like opening a weird store, S&M club, but they are going to be collecting the transaction fees from that. 1:38:28 So as far as I'm concerned, this is a good thing. It's just a minor thing. We want Bitcoin to grow, to have more users. We want more transaction fees. 1:38:35 So I'm just going to tell you how this ends. The way it ends is after $50 million of quant research and building and programmers and quants and everything, 1:38:43 they're going to come to a point where, hey, we're mining this block. We really want this MUV. We lost it. So let's not switch the head. I'm not going to switch the head. 1:38:56 I'm going to keep going because to me, it's worth it more the next one minute, 60 seconds to keep trying to reorg. And we saw this happen. 1:39:06 So that's the only thing I'm saying that it could affect the mainchain mining. 1:39:10 I totally agree with that. So let me just unpack that a little bit more, which is that that also applies to any situation where the blockchain has lots of fees where it doesn't have a block subsidy. 1:39:20 And again, the sidechain can reorg without affecting any of the other sidechains or the mainchain. 1:39:27 The difference is that this protocol is actually broken, manipulating retail on a massive scale versus one that's just the fees that we all know about. 1:39:36 That's the difference. That's the only difference. 1:39:39 It's like these protocols don't belong. Not only don't they get secured by blockchain. 1:39:44 They don't get secured by miner. The miner is a centralization. It's like, we're going to choose one random miner in Sri Lanka every 10 minutes and let him front run everyone. 1:39:58 Like, why would we choose him? There's no reason to choose him. The choice that we're choosing him only works for double spend prevention. 1:40:05 When the again, when the UTXO, it's a mutually exclusive transaction, all he could do is choose between one double spend and the other. He doesn't know anything about my transaction in Chicago. So he doesn't care which one goes in. 1:40:19 That's the point. 1:40:20 Well, it's funny you say that because I think it's kind of a separate point. But even going on this point, I think, I'm very curious as to why do you treat MEV differently than just a transaction that pays a very high fee? 1:40:34 Oh, because MEV is a terrible terminology. I mean, it's, okay, let's say we have a game of rock, paper, scissors on the blockchain. And people are just as dumb as they are. And people are going to start putting money down to bet on rock and assuming it's somehow secure because blockchain secure. 1:40:56 When obviously, anyone who's dumb enough to make the first move loses every time. And in the limit, the miner wins every time. Right? That's broken. It's a broken game of rock, paper, scissors. It doesn't work. It's bad science. It's bad for everyone. And it shouldn't exist. And it shouldn't affect Bitcoin. 1:41:13 It's just a bad protocol because it's a multiplayer game, an open multiplayer game, and we give the miner the ultimate way to win every time. It's just not something you would use if you were trying to design the system. Right? So that's what I'm saying. 1:41:30 I mean, not really. I mean, I don't understand. I mean, some of my friends want to go to the casino sometimes. And as a former professional statistician, I find this absurd, but I still go. And I play blackjack. 1:41:43 Okay, MEV to exchange is a double spend to money. If we said we're going to create electronic cash, but double spends happen every once in a while, we're like, no, let's not have double spends happening. Because that's what we're trying to do. 1:41:55 Again, it only happens on the weird Uniswap chain. This is like the restaurant with soundproof walls or whatever. It's like they're doing something weird over there. They're losing money. It's like having a little casino in the food court. And, you know, I don't really get it, but people seem to enjoy it. And, you know, they pay, they pay rent, they pay whatever the equivalent of... 1:42:15 All we have to say is the same type of protocols, the same type of protocols that make Bitcoin work is what we should put on sidechains. And that means anything where the miners are only looking at fees and it's mutually exclusive transactions, right? 1:42:30 Well, it does go a little bit against the whole point of sidechains is that a lot of people disagree over what types of things should be on them. And that's kind of the whole point, which is that some people say, I really want the Zcash sidechain. And other people say, we can't have too much privacy because it makes it harder to tell if we have inflated past 21 million coins. And some people love assets. 1:42:52 Right. But yeah, so... 1:42:54 Counterparty issuing stuff on the blockchain or other people. 1:42:57 I get it. So now you're getting into the fact that people are clueless. I get it. So that's, that's a different argument than I have nothing... 1:43:04 People disagree. And I think that people make, you know, people, trial and error is a good... 1:43:10 But we saw, I don't know, we have 10 years of Ethereum. I still don't... 1:43:15 May I take a stab at trying to crystallize what's being discussed just for the benefit of our audience, who might be less technical than you two? It sounds to me like what Jay is saying, and Jay, please correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like what you're saying is, if we had a $200 billion sidechain today that was the same as Ethereum, then you believe that the negative effects that some Ethereum users experience would be... 1:43:44 Suffered by the not only the users on the sidechain, but in your view, there would be trickle down of those negative effects to main chain Bitcoin users in some form of negative consequence. 1:43:56 Whereas what Paul is saying is the sidechain users opt in and then they benefit or don't benefit from the sidechain's features and patterns. And that main chain is only benefiting from higher fees and value of Bitcoin. There's no experience on this Ethereum sidechain that trickles down in any negative way to the main chain. Is that your view? 1:44:20 Yeah, exactly. So exactly. And it's very specific. There's a specific thing that does trickle down. And we saw this in Ethereum. And Paul even agrees. And that specific thing is an instantaneous reorg attempt. So instead of everyone's going to change their mining algorithm to not follow it ahead, but try to make a mathematical economic... 1:44:43 That's not a layer two on Ethereum. That's Ethereum main chain, whereas in Drivechain, it would be on a sidechain. 1:44:50 No, no, no, no. It's layer two smart contracts affecting the main chain miners to reorg. This was a big deal. No one ever thought it would happen. It didn't actually happen, but it almost did. There was an emergency thing with Vitalik. People are writing software that are going to try to reorg the chain for MEV. 1:45:14 It did in some sense happen in Bitcoin history also, at least once with the value overflow or underflow bug. 1:45:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm talking about a systematic change in the incentive structure of the mining. 1:45:33 Well, I think the... But again, the goal is to have these things be connected in some way, but also as separated as possible. So it's a little strange because we seem to be mostly on the same page where it's like, even if they decide that their best shot at reorging L2 is to also reorg L1, which is like, that would cost them a lot because they'd actually have to find blocks, right? 1:46:03 Whereas to reorg L2, they do not. 1:46:05 Yeah, I know. 1:46:06 So that's a pretty big difference. But if they decide, okay, we want to reorg L1, do they have to reorg L1 and then while they're at it, they're going to try to do a bunch of double spending? 1:46:19 No, no, they're not double spending. They're just saying, I'm in the middle of trying to mine. I know what I get if I find a nonce. And it's worth more. And I'm going to put in the risk of not working on this new head. 1:46:32 I mean, it's a pure formula. I mean, I could write it down. There will be a formula that says, I'm no longer going to just switch every time someone else finds a block. I'm going to wait until it's in my best interest to. 1:46:45 I guess they call it selfish mining. I'm just saying, it is a little thing that could happen. And you admitted that. So that's fine. I think the most important thing is just to say that it's possible. 1:46:55 And then the question is, why do we want to enable all possible sidechains, even the ones that we don't like, even the ones that you don't like? And if the answer is, it's because the plebs are clueless. And that's the only way we can get in. 1:47:08 That's not the answer. 1:47:09 But that's an easy question, Jay. It's because what some people like, one man's trash is another man's treasure, so to speak. If someone likes something, what if someone said, we can do any sidechain we want as long as it's not the large block sidechain? 1:47:25 Yeah, but the thing is, we have to admit that mass manipulation of retail through obfuscation is bad. And we see it happening. 1:47:37 I don't. I mean, as a first principle, I mean, I take it as a matter of principle that if some user wants to pay a transaction fee for something, and if a miner wants to mine that, and some developer wants to write the software for that, and some investor wants to hold that coin, like if these people all want something. 1:47:57 Yeah, but the retail doesn't know it. 1:47:59 Yeah, they're getting manipulated. 1:48:00 First of all, we have to say that that should be allowed. If they really don't want it, they'll learn eventually, won't they? I mean, how did we all learn? You know, everyone's got to learn sometime. 1:48:12 Well, Satoshi understood it, right? 1:48:15 I mean, you're saying that there's something that they voluntarily do that's bad for them. But that's just... 1:48:20 No, no, no. By adding, they're going to look to Bitcoin consensus. They'd be like, huh, these guys that are smartest people in the world, that must be it secures the network somehow. I'm my game of rock, paper, scissors. I just end up losing every time. But that's just my bad luck, because obviously, it's on Bitcoin, it's secure. Right? That's what I'm saying. Instead, we just say no. The only things that we can secure are the things that we can secure. 1:48:47 I don't really think that's that likely. I don't think people really say, well, rock, paper, scissors on blockchain on Bitcoin is probably more secure. I think probably just most people just don't really know. I met a lot of lay people at parties and they're just like, oh, should I invest in whatever coin or whatever coin? Things I've never heard of. They really don't know about these nuances. 1:49:08 Most people, they heard about Ethereum and Bitcoin at the same time, they don't even really see... 1:49:12 The difference between ordinals, ordinals before BRC20 and ordinals after BRC20. So ordinals has no effect on fee until the front running shit started. I mean, you see it everywhere. When something is just Bitcoin or just UTXO like Chia or even Cardano, anything that doesn't have turning completeness is different than ones that do. And it just brings the wrong element, but I'll shut up now. 1:49:42 I'd like to ask a terminology question. 1:49:47 OK. 1:49:49 So when we talk about MEV, there seems to be two very distinct types of MEV. One is this like really easy front running, which happens in a block. Like if we play rock, paper, scissors, and then this is basically over the next block. 1:50:02 And this is what happens. And this is what Paul is saying. It does not pass through. I mean, it doesn't go through the blood brain barrier. It doesn't get to Bitcoin because once some block is mined, you know, that difference has already been arbitraged between the miner and the sidechain miner. But there's this different type of MEV, which involves reorging maybe a block or two blocks. Do we have a different word for that? 1:50:27 Why is it? I don't think it's any different. I think MEV. So I see MEV as reordering transactions. So today in Bitcoin. 1:50:35 Well, but that can be that can be within a block. I mean. 1:50:37 Within a block. Yeah, within a block. 1:50:38 You don't have an order within a block. 1:50:40 Within a block. It's all about within a block, right? 1:50:43 Yeah, but I'm saying like the block has not been formed yet. 1:50:46 Right. So you're making the block. You're making the block. You're making the block and you put a value on it. 1:50:52 Right. 1:50:54 So why are you going to reorg? So when you're looking for the nods. 1:50:56 No reorg yet. 1:50:58 Right. You're looking for the nods. Right. You're looking. You're looking. You're looking. You didn't find it. Somebody else found it. And you're like, no, no, no, that's not good enough. I know. I really want to find this one. It's worth a lot more than the risk of losing the next block. So I'm going to keep mining. That's all I mean by reorg. I just mean I'm going to change. 1:51:14 Yeah, but I'm saying there's a different type of MEV. And I think this is what Paul was describing first. 1:51:18 Yeah. 1:51:19 And that's where you choose the order. Well, that's what I'm saying. We need new terminology. We need to talk about. 1:51:24 Well, that's what Ethereum did when they found that, you know, the problem was brought up to them in 2014, whatever. 1:51:29 You know, what you do is, you know, I guess what you do is you say you try to make it sound better than manipulation, front running, like scam, fraud. Right. You call it MEV. 1:51:39 And then all of a sudden, next thing you know, there's some good MEV and some bad MEV. Like when I say MEV, I mean manipulation of retail fraud like tech. 1:51:47 That costs a minor, no marginal cost because the block has not been formed yet and they could still wet concrete. And then he's saying there's a different kind of MEV would cost money if you if you wanted to reorg. 1:52:01 And that would that has the potential of inconveniencing other people who's in the block. They're in the block and they think now this block might reorg because this confirmation isn't real because it would happen. 1:52:15 It could happen in Bitcoin also. Like if you fast forward to the future where there's no block subsidy and then someone puts like a transaction in a block that pays like an unbelievably huge transaction fee of like 10 million dollars, then you might think like, well, I have one confirmation now. 1:52:30 But then you think, isn't someone going to just chase this fee and try again? And there have been different theories about that. I kind of think that the theory never really unwinds because if you go for that, you need to find two blocks in a row. 1:52:46 But then the first person is losing their giant fee that they just got. So they have an incentive to keep fighting on their chain. So I actually think it wouldn't be an issue. 1:52:54 I think the big miner eventually takes it. 1:52:59 You need an outlier fee. 1:53:02 I think the first whoever found it first just takes it because it's too difficult to coordinate. If you have a split, if someone finds we have block three million and then three hundred and three million one has a block that pays like a 40 billion dollar transaction fee. 1:53:16 That's because the mining company didn't hire a team of quants to build this for them. That's the difference. They're just going to forget about it. It's not worth it. It happens once every 10 years. 1:53:30 And then someone says, well, I want to find that block because that block has a 40 billion dollar thing. So they might go for it. But the thing is, the first person who found it, they already have it. And they're going to think, wait a minute, I want to double down on having it. 1:53:48 And now it kind of, there's no real way of resolving it. So I think that maybe they would try. But I think, but yeah, this is an interesting case where the, just someone paying a fee would de-confirm the blocks. And we want, we always want the confirmations to mean something. So that is very different. 1:54:07 No, I just wanted you to admit this. Once you admitted it, I'm fine. Admit that this is a non-zero. 1:54:34 Because when you reorg outside, you have to actually find new blocks with a group of work. But inside, you only have to pay. You only have to use your Coinbase space and move back. It's one mainchain block per sidechain block. 1:54:47 So as soon as you can reorg independently, there's like no reason. Or, I mean, you could, as we were talking, you could say, someone could say, listen, I think our best shot at getting the sidechain block is to reorg the mainchain block and every single sidechain block above it in some kind of surprise attack. In order to do that, you have to find multiple mainchain blocks. 1:55:14 And in the limit, it works best when there's a single control, someone, a single centralized control. 1:55:25 Yeah, it's kind of like implausible, I think, but you know, it's all theoretically possible. 1:55:29 The whole thing about confirmations is about, there's an intriguing thing about confirmations, which is that if you are worried about them, you always have the option as like a merchant to say, this is sort of a passing the buck to some extent, but it's like you can always say, well, we require six confirmations, we require 10 confirmations, we require, you can change how many confirmations you require based on like your own level of paranoia. 1:55:54 I mean, Bitcoin, you need zero confirmation. The merchant has less risk with zero confirmation than any other means of payment that exists. 1:56:00 I agree with that. 1:56:02 It's retarded. But also this whole idea that the plebs have, and all the software is built with is binary confirmed, binary confirmed, RBF, full RBF, is assumption that binary confirmed means something. 1:56:14 When one day there will be a confirmation that gets reorg and all the software is going to break. Everyone has this obsession, you got to wait for a confirmation, I have to wait, it's not confirmed yet, it's not legit until it's confirmed. 1:56:29 And one day it's going to be confirmed and then not confirmed, then everything's going to break and then people are going to realize, oh, there's no such thing as confirmed. 1:56:37 I would agree with that. I mean, obviously there's a difference between zero confirmations and one. That's kind of a little bit of a difference. I'm sure you would agree to some extent. 1:56:45 But I think also your bigger point was more correct, which is that the credit card company can charge you back like a lot. So Bitcoin is way outlier. 1:56:54 Right. So that's a big point. There should be no merchants that wait for confirmation. And the only problem is it's amazing stuff. 1:57:03 It's very rare. There's very rare situations where Amazon can do zero confirmations because if you cancel the transaction, they can just cancel the order. They just don't ship it to you. 1:57:16 Exactly. 1:57:17 In a real world, you're often on security cameras if you're buying coffee or something. They'll know. They'll be able to know exactly who it is. Get arrested for shoplifting or something. 1:57:26 And the risk is that the user is going to make a mistake and double spend by mistake because his wallet doesn't understand zero confirmations correctly or he goes home with a second wallet with the same key. 1:57:39 I agree with you that zero confirmations is an outlier in terms of how final it is. 1:57:44 We could fix the wallets. And then the wallets basically say, you could just say, I want to be honest. I want to pay my Starbucks. I don't want to double spend them. And then your wallets could help you not double spend them. 1:57:57 I mean it's like a simple thing that we just decided not to look into. 1:58:03 And of course if a merchant, again, this is what I was trying to say before, is each merchant has their own life situation. Like if you're selling a boat or something and this is your only thing that you own and you really need this, make sure you have this money, you would wait for many confirmations. 1:58:17 Of course. You stand there, right? 1:58:20 If you're someone like Walmart, maybe you know that you're going to eat whatever, 4% of the inventory from shoplifting or whatever you want to call it, breakage. 1:58:31 So maybe they just do zero confirmations and they just have numbers. They have boardroom meetings every quarter about how much money they lose, which is not very much. 1:58:39 There are people who have been taking zero confirmations for eight years. Zero, zero double spend. 1:58:44 So that's what I'm saying though about the whole – that's how we got onto this, which is we were just asked about the reorg version. 1:58:52 And so the reorg thing is bad, but it's kind of like – it's bad relative to a perfect world, but actually it's still very, very good relative to the existing world of payments. 1:59:04 And BIP301 tries to completely neutralize that, but – there you go. 1:59:13 And that phenomenon also applies to layer one if someone pays a huge – one random bitcoin transaction with a huge transaction fee. 1:59:22 So that's – all that is – 1:59:24 Why are you so against just limiting sidechains to UTXO bitcoin script? 1:59:30 I think that there's a lot of cool stuff that's being invented. I believe in innovation really. 1:59:34 I think that it's wrong for me to say that I know what everyone will invent in the future. 1:59:40 But we know what bitcoin's proof of work adds. It only secures – we should only allow sidechains that are secured by the proof of work by a merged client. 1:59:49 Like that's the point. Why else are we doing it if it actually makes it worse? 1:59:55 Makes what worse? 1:59:57 The sidechain protocol. 1:59:59 Well, I think there's lots of things a sidechain could do. Like you don't see any value in Zcash at all or Namecoin. 2:00:06 Z – Namecoin? I mean, Namecoin – I don't know. Namecoin works. Yeah, Namecoin's fine. Works with bitcoin and UTXO. 2:00:13 But now you want Namecoin, you know. You just said that only the logs work with sidechain. Now you're like – 2:00:20 No, no, no, no, no. Only blockchain – only sidechains that, we could just say, have no – reordering of transactions doesn't change the state. Something like that, right? 2:00:33 Well, again, I guess I already explained it and you already agreed that this can already happen with bitcoin, UTXO, just one large fee that could change the state. 2:00:42 Across blocks? 2:00:44 No, across blocks, sorry. I'm saying entry blocks. 2:00:47 Oh, it's the same thing. 2:00:51 Right, but the distribution of SHA-2336 hashrate makes it – yeah, we're giving – that's good MEV. That's where the good MEV comes in. We want that MEV. 2:01:04 I think just take it as a first principle that we should not censor something if everyone wants to do it. If a bunch of people want to do it – a miner, a user. 2:01:19 Right, but the way you're getting there is by saying we're going to let everyone – we're going to allow anyone to do anything, even though nobody wants to do it and nobody agrees with any of it, just so we could find those couple of things that we agree with. 2:01:31 I'm just saying we should just find a couple of things we agree with and stop there. 2:01:36 May I ask a clarifying question? Jay, some people who are concerned with merged mining are worried about – 2:01:44 I think we have to go, unfortunately, for now, but I don't know if there's anyone who's absolutely dying to ask a question. Then maybe I have another 300 seconds. 2:01:56 Yeah, Paul has to go to a podcast. He has to go to a podcast. Do you want to ask him a final question, Jay? 2:02:01 Yeah, just I think – are you open to thinking about limiting the sidechain? 2:02:12 Well, I'm open to anything if there's a good reason, but when you say limiting the sidechain to stuff that's only UTXO, so there would maybe be no Ethereum sidechain, I think copying the Ethereum sidechain is clever because it lets you – because no one is safe. 2:02:27 Bitcoin will copy everything in its path. And the software is already Turing-complete, like any piece of software, like the C++ compiler that made Bitcoin Core, that is Turing-complete or whatever you want to call it. 2:02:40 So people can do stuff. They're going to do whatever they want to do. And how would we – why is it layer one's business whether or not something is – so I don't really understand the question. 2:02:57 The process of double spend prevention works with a set of incentives that the miner can't really do anything but look at the fees. And the incentive is that all he could do is decide between two double spends. 2:03:18 And since he has no connection to that transaction, there's nothing that's secure. So we're basically saying this is how we get decentralization. Every 10 minutes we centralize. We pick some random scam artist in the world. We say you get to pick this block. 2:03:34 But we know you can't do anything because of the protocol. There's nothing you can do to us. So you're just going to help us and get paid. We just don't want to break that. That's all I'm just trying to say. 2:03:45 Okay. I think that is a good sort of perspective. But the idea is that only the people who opt in to this chain will be affected. So the people want to do it. So I don't know. I don't really buy the fact that we should stop people from doing something that they want to do. 2:04:11 I think that's more what I want to be about is more about helping everyone get what they want to do. And that was part of the whole why sidechains were a response to the block size war because I thought, well, why can't we just let everyone – people want different things, but why can't we just let everyone get what they want? 2:04:27 And that's kind of what I want to let people do what they want to do. And if they want to make these trades that leave them open to being scammed by miners, if they want to do that, then they want to do that, I think. 2:04:44 As long as it doesn't affect anyone else. Anyway, this is fun. I have to go. So hang out. Have fun hanging out. 2:04:48 Thank you, Paul. And thank you to our speakers. We'll hang out for a bit more. Everyone's free to remain. 2:04:55 Of course, I don't have Paul's technical knowledge level, but we can continue chatting for maybe half an hour. 2:05:02 Maybe we can collect questions if there's anything. Anyway, see everyone later. 2:05:09 Thank you, Paul. And thank you for those who've spoken so far, Jay and Professor Warren. 2:05:15 It was really awesome to hear your questions. And Jay, I think you very perfectly articulated some of the most sophisticated ideas that people have presented regarding the way that Blind Merged Mining works. 2:05:33 And I think your analysis and your technical expression of them is so helpful because the only way this project ever moves forward is if people think critically and carefully about it as you are. 2:05:47 So it's great. I mean, to my less technical ears, it kind of sounds like the question is as follows. 2:05:55 Suppose we had Ethereum as a sidechain on Bitcoin today. Suppose it's the largest sidechain. Suppose we have all this Wall Street type activity on a sidechain, a BIP300 sidechain. 2:06:09 Would that in any way harm mainchain Bitcoin and harm people who haven't opted in? 2:06:16 Or would all of the effects be exclusively positive, as drivechainers generally say, where higher value for Bitcoin, because, of course, it would be Bitcoin on the sidechain as the primary unit of account, not Ethereum. 2:06:35 So we'd get Bitcoin number going up, higher fees, higher value. That's the Drivechain vision. But your objection, if I understand it correctly, is there could be complicated consequences that are negative. 2:06:49 And then it becomes a question of, are we comfortable with those negatives if we believe they're much smaller than the positives? Is that fair? 2:07:00 Yes. It's just the extra 60 second reorder attempt by miners. And Paul agrees that that could happen. If that's OK, that's fine. Just put it out there that that could happen. So miners will change their way of mining. That's all. 2:07:18 OK, then my question is, do you agree that this line of criticism or this line of concern is not a line of concern about Drivechain specifically? 2:07:28 It is rather if Drivechain is adopted, then this line of concern is appropriate to be voiced when the question becomes, should there be a Ethereum type sidechain? 2:07:42 Because if we do Drivechain, we don't necessarily get every sidechain imaginable. There has to be miners acting the creation of the sidechain. So there has to be community will. 2:07:54 So we would first get a large block sidechain and a privacy sidechain because who's going to object to that after a Drivechain has been adopted? Everyone would be like, yeah. 2:08:02 Right. Yeah. So all you have to do is explicitly say that. I'm not saying you have to change the code. I'm saying you have to explicitly say that 301 is meant for things that we agree to. That's just it's not meant for. 2:08:16 Yeah. So the debate over. So your concern isn't about every possible sidechain. It's about financialized sidechains. So I think that's a good question. And maybe your view will be accepted in a strong way. 2:08:32 And then maybe the community would hesitate or decline to ever have a sidechain like Ethereum, but still would be OK with the large block and the privacy sidechain. 2:08:43 What if we could actually make a sidechain that solves the problem better than Ethereum? Shouldn't that be the goal to actually have sidechains that are good and do work? 2:08:57 Of course. So the Ethereum clone that's on the Drivechain testnet right now we have two, Ethereum and Zcash. Some changes are made like the Zcash sidechain. The coders, I had nothing to do with it of course, the coders stripped out the developer tax that the Zcash altcoin has. 2:09:18 So there are some changes, but basically the core technology of Ethereum and Zcash is preserved. Of course. 2:09:26 The problem isn't the Ethereum sidechain. The problem is the rock, paper, scissors sidechain. 2:09:30 Right. And your view is that it wouldn't just harm those playing rock, paper, scissors. It would harm the mainchain. 2:09:38 If it's big enough, if it's big enough, it will centralize hash rate. 2:09:43 So there's two separate concerns then. One is, does hash rate centralize as a result of the financialized sidechain? And the other is, does the reorg activity harm users on mainchain? 2:10:00 It harms the users on the sidechain, but in the process, the profit derived leads to centralization of the miners on mainchain. Is that right? Is that what you're saying? 2:10:13 Yeah. I mean, just when every time Paul says there's zero risk and there's zero effect on mainchain, I'm saying no, there's not zero effect. There's a 60 second effect for a miner. 2:10:25 He has an incentive not to switch. That's all. And we know this because we saw it happen over 10 years in Ethereum. That's the limit. 2:10:35 I'm curious. Did you follow? I didn't follow. He says that you can reorg a sidechain without reorging the mainchain. But if that's the case, I don't understand what's the point of reorg. 2:10:47 Exactly. So that's hard to write. So you could actually, in the sidechain, all you have to do is pay more than the previous fee, right? 2:10:57 To who? 2:10:58 Back to the mainchain miners, right? So the next block, so you don't have to. The next block, basically, if you think of a linear reorg, a linear fork, let's say a linear hard fork. 2:11:10 You keep the old fork. Then you say, hey, this is the point of the reorg. But you still have a linear events. So the event in the Bitcoin mainchain is linear. But on the sidechain, it actually reorgs. Does that make sense? 2:11:24 Okay. So block 1000 in the sidechain gets mined. Block 1001, right? And then somebody goes back and then the subsequent block on Bitcoin pays a miner to remine block 1001. And that's not a problem. There's no issues with that as far as the validity of the blockchain blocks. 2:11:47 Right. And then that begs the question, why do we need the miners? Why do we need Bitcoin? 2:11:53 So you can just go back 20 blocks and just put a heavy bid. Because the blockchain might have paid either way, right? 2:12:04 Yeah. But who's going to do that? 2:12:07 Well, the thing is, there's no zero. You've taken the whole probability out of it, right? If I just tell you I'm going to pay for the next 20 blocks, then I can just do it, right? And I don't have to win 20 lotteries. 2:12:21 I mean, that's why proof of work works is if you have, you know, you can't just buy 10 blocks in a row, you have to get super lucky. But if the way you're describing this, you can buy old forks of the sidechain, then you can just pay to like, arbitrarily, I mean, you got to pay a little bit of money. You know, you pay the price of 30 blocks to do a 30 block reorg, which is linear, which is seems really problematic if that's how it works. 2:12:48 I mean, yeah, it's an old concept, but it kind of, yeah. Also, why would you spend that money unless your sidechain peers agree? Like, you also have to get consensual consensus or else you're just wasting money. 2:13:04 But it's the Blind Merged Mining problem. It's ordinals. It's anyone who says that you get security, like stacks, anyone who says you get security, Bitcoin security on a layer two, it has the same problem. 2:13:16 You need some sort of finality on layer two to solve that problem. 2:13:21 Right. 2:13:46 It can be a fork. I didn't realize it could be a fork. 2:13:49 I think within the Bitcoin block, I know the original merge mining spec, I'm not sure about the Drivechain one, but I know that if you're in between block 1000 and 1001 of Bitcoin and there's 10 blocks of the sidechain, you could definitely reorg those, right? 2:14:04 Because it's just the same hash power in between the two blocks that can affect the state of the secondary blocks. 2:14:11 But once you have the state transition on Bitcoin, then the sidechain is kind of locked to that unless you have a layer one reorg, which would be a Bitcoin reorg, which would cost a lot more, like seven to ten million dollars, whatever it is. 2:14:26 Oh, OK. Yeah, I guess I'm still confused. So you're saying suppose on the sidechain I send a transaction to a Bitcoin miner which says I'm mining block 1001. 2:14:36 The Bitcoin miner mines that, right? 2:14:39 Can the next Bitcoin miner of the next block mine block 994? 2:14:47 Yeah. I mean, if he's selfishly mining, he could be doing that kind of. 2:14:52 I mean, it's subsequential to the block which mine 1001 on the sidechain. 2:14:58 Oh, I don't think so. I mean, maybe Paul can answer that. I don't. I think that wouldn't be possible because that's not the canonical chain. It's building off of 99, 999. 2:15:10 So you wouldn't be able to go backwards, but you'd be able to selfishly mine and reorganize that if you have enough power. 2:15:18 Not on the Bitcoin level. I mean, because I was hearing one thing. I was hearing different things. 2:15:26 So just say we're block 800,000 Bitcoin, we're block 1000 sidechain. I mine block 1001. This gets written on block 800,001 of the Bitcoin blockchain. 2:15:38 I can't go back and rewrite the sidechain from a previous block on block 800,002 in Bitcoin. 2:15:46 Okay. Hey, someone is late for the podcast I was going to. So I thought I'd just hang out here until late. 2:15:53 Yeah. Paul, why don't you tell them about reorganizing the sidechain? 2:15:58 There's a diagram. 2:15:59 In a linear fashion. 2:16:01 The Blind Merged Mining post has an image that kind of explains this. But yeah, and it has similar to the number he was using where it's like. 2:16:10 So yeah, if you're finding one main chain block every 10 minutes and you never reorg, then each sidechain block is kind of like a tiny little thing in there that it refers to its previous sidechain block. 2:16:26 So what you can do is you can have like if maybe you had block a main chain block ABCDEF. 2:16:32 And your main chain block D, you'll find sidechain block 37. 2:16:37 Then in main chain block E, the next one, you can say I am finding a new sidechain block that is not it doesn't extend the tip does not extend the tip of the sidechain. 2:16:49 It instead goes back to sidechain block 18 or something. 2:16:53 And I'm going to find new 19, 19B. 2:16:56 And then in the next block, you can do 20B. 2:16:59 And then eventually you'll overtake it. 2:17:03 And then the sidechain nodes will consider that the canonical thing. 2:17:07 And the reason why you must do that, by the way, just in case anyone's wondering, is that someone can find a block. 2:17:14 This happens in any blockchain, Bitcoin, sidechain, mainchain, whatever. 2:17:18 You can find a block and then not disclose it. 2:17:21 And then no one will know if it's valid or if it's invalid. 2:17:26 And so they won't know what to deal with it. 2:17:28 So they have to treat it as though it's invalid until it's fully disclosed. 2:17:32 Because they can never have you just say, keep it a secret for 10 years and then reveal it as invalid. 2:17:38 And then that will destroy the chain. 2:17:41 Is that the blind aspect? 2:17:43 No, that just happens to be something else that is true. 2:17:47 That's true of all things, is that you can never withhold the contents of the block that must be treated as invalid. 2:17:55 I put the code in the desk. 2:17:58 And, yeah, I don't know if you could find it. 2:18:01 I'll let Jack. Jack probably knows more than anyone else about this stuff. 2:18:06 He's the inventor of, what, Ciscoin. 2:18:09 So I put my faith in him. 2:18:13 I saw you and Paul on here, so I'd love to… 2:18:16 It's good to see you, man. 2:18:19 I was wondering about the blind aspect of it. 2:18:22 Does that help in selfish mining at all? 2:18:27 I have an unorthodox view of selfish mining, which is that it doesn't converge the strategy. 2:18:31 Because if you selfish mine, then you have an edge with… 2:18:37 Selfish mining says instead of having an edge at 51%, you have an edge at 34% or whatever the number is. 2:18:43 But I don't think that's really the case because someone can always form a different group that has 37% and they selfish mine. 2:18:51 And then they'll be beating you. 2:18:53 And then the way it works is they'll just keep being bid up until 51%. 2:18:58 And so it's the same thing. 2:19:00 And then from the upper direction, if you have 60% and you selfish mine, you'll always win. 2:19:07 But the 40% who are always losing, they can kind of deal with 11% of the 60% because they're always getting nothing. 2:19:14 So my view is that none of it actually converges and that it's just 50%. 2:19:19 It's always just 51% attack. 2:19:21 And so I don't think selfish mining ended up making too big of a difference. 2:19:24 Sorry, guys. I actually found out that the person is on time now, so I have to leave again for real. 2:19:30 Anyways, have fun. See you guys later. 2:19:33 I think that makes a lot of sense. 2:19:36 I mean, that's why we call it 51%. 2:19:38 It always converges towards that, right? 2:19:42 Yeah, that selfish mining aspect was why Luke Dashjr. showed. 2:19:48 He was bearish on the aspects of merge mining as well. 2:19:51 And with CoiledCoin, he actually physically attacked using his pool by creating empty blocks and trying to prove out that OxPow doesn't actually work in practice. 2:20:02 Because he can selfishly mine the blocks of CoiledCoin by not affecting Bitcoin and only affecting CoiledCoin. 2:20:13 I think that was a really big setback for merge mining because people lost faith in it a little bit just because of that attack. 2:20:23 But then I think what Stacks and Risk was trying to do was get around that. 2:20:30 I think maybe Paul's Drivechain gets around some of that as well. 2:20:35 There's always a risk of someone selfishly mining just because they want to screw around with the sidechain somehow. 2:20:41 So you need to solve for that somehow. 2:20:45 Yeah, I mean, the fact that you can do it linearly seems really bad. 2:20:49 I didn't realize this. 2:20:51 Proof-of-work works because it's statistically impossible to take 12% of the hash rate and get six blocks in a row. 2:21:00 But if you can just put up enough money and say, I'm going to reorg this chain 600 blocks and it's just sort of like a fixed number that you can just throw out there. 2:21:14 Anybody with a little bit of cash can just sort of do whatever they want with any chain. 2:21:21 Yeah, especially if you're a government and you want to try it. 2:21:24 Just like what Luke Dash did with CoiledCoin. 2:21:27 He controlled a pool. 2:21:29 If you throw up enough money, you do an MEV attack on this thing and say, I'm going to roll this thing back a thousand blocks to try to make people lose confidence on it. 2:21:41 That's something, as merge mining people, we have to worry about. 2:21:46 My take there is you have to have a finality event for multiple reasons. 2:21:51 One reason is to avoid selfish mining if you had a finality event. 2:21:55 But you do have the problem of, okay, well, if you're adding finality, how are you doing that? 2:21:59 How are you not relegating to proof-of-stake or some sort of subset of super nodes? 2:22:03 And that is a bigger challenge. 2:22:05 Risks try to do it in different ways. 2:22:07 Stacks try to do it in different ways to try to keep that problem at bay. 2:22:12 That, to me, when Satoshi came up with the merge mining proposal, to me that was the biggest thing. 2:22:18 How do you avoid situations where you can either MEV or pay for attacks and it's disproportionate to the value sitting on there, too. 2:22:28 The secondary part is to Jay's concern that if you financialize the sidechains, and they're also deflationary instruments, just like Bitcoin, you have a parasitic behavior. 2:22:41 That if that situation and the TVL of the layer two ends up surpassing or catching up to Bitcoin to the point like how Dogecoin surpassed Litecoin in a way, 2:22:54 then you have situations where it's parasitic to the parent where people will want to just go to the sidechain. 2:23:01 And that's not what we want. 2:23:03 You want Bitcoin as a gold base, as a core system that doesn't change. 2:23:07 It's there. It's secure. 2:23:09 You want to create that financial backing for the secondary layer, but you don't want parasitic behavior as well. 2:23:16 So I think you need to solve those two things. 2:23:19 Once you can add the financiality, then you do have decentralized sequencing and all these free things you start to get. 2:23:26 But without financializing it, it's really hard to get network effects and to create a secure system on layer two. 2:23:34 Some of the guys like what Celestia is working on with Rollkit is to try to create a Bitcoin layer two. 2:23:39 But they are doing it in a way where the data is stored off chain and they're trying to store the state on Bitcoin. 2:23:47 There's one proposal to store the actual data also, as well as the state on Bitcoin. 2:23:52 But you don't have the flexibility to bridge in and out as nicely. 2:23:57 Maybe with Taproot and Mast you could do that. 2:24:00 If you have financialization, it makes it better. 2:24:03 But you have to worry about parasitic behavior there. 2:24:06 That's what I worry about. 2:24:08 That was very interesting, by the way. 2:24:10 Thank you for those thoughts. 2:24:12 You made a point about Litecoin and how Dogecoin is merged mined with it. 2:24:18 But isn't there an important difference where that's a merged mined altcoin, 2:24:24 whereas Drivechain is focused on merged mined sidechains? 2:24:29 If one of the sidechains were so successful and popular that its value began to rival the value of the Bitcoin on mainchain that isn't in hashrate escrow, 2:24:43 then that would be a signal, a market signal, that the value of this sidechain and its stability and the user's demand for it is such that perhaps that technology should be brought down to mainchain Bitcoin. 2:24:59 So in a sense, it's unreasonable to expect that a sidechain would grow bigger than Bitcoin in terms of the Bitcoin not in hashrate escrow. 2:25:10 Because we would say, OK, this is a very popular sidechain. 2:25:15 That's a market signal that Bitcoiners want that technology. 2:25:19 And if it's existing in a stable, positive way, then it could just be a way for the community to understand that we should bring the technology down to the mainchain potentially. 2:25:32 Unless, for example, there would be a reason not to do that. 2:25:36 But what about that line of reasoning? 2:25:39 Like, yeah, Dogecoin dwarfs Litecoin, but that's because it's on a sidechain. 2:25:46 You can't bring the Doge tech down to the Litecoin. 2:25:49 Well, there is no Doge tech. 2:25:51 I think that makes sense. 2:25:53 It's a misnomer. 2:25:54 Because Dogecoin is not focusing on any extra utility that Litecoin doesn't present. 2:25:59 So I would say the TVL of the sidechain can actually surpass the TVL of the basechain in some certain ways, like active utility. 2:26:07 And that goes back to, again, the parasitic behavior of the financialization of the asset of the sidechain. 2:26:13 So if you have the sidechain focusing on utility, it's a total different ballgame than what Bitcoin is. 2:26:18 Bitcoin is a store of value. 2:26:20 It's a court system. 2:26:21 It's a settlement system where it's like the money aspect of Bitcoin is probably the biggest thing you can have across the ecosystem. 2:26:29 And then you have utility on top. 2:26:31 Almost like the sidechains would be commodity instruments. 2:26:35 And commodity instruments are like gas to serve for running my car or doing smart contract calls. 2:26:41 Not store of value. 2:26:43 And Ethereum had an interesting proposal, EIP-1559, around creating tokenomics for utility only. 2:26:54 I came kind of bearish on the concept, but it grew on me that it creates sort of like an inflation-based growth metric on the tokenomic growth. 2:27:07 So, for example, if a lot of people are using the system, it becomes deflationary. 2:27:12 If not a lot of people are, it becomes inflationary. 2:27:15 And so you have this supply-demand equilibrium built into that system. 2:27:20 You don't want to take away from the fact that the ultimate store of value would be Bitcoin. 2:27:26 But the utility could be unlocked by driving that value back to Bitcoin, not in a parasitic way. 2:27:33 Dogecoin and Litecoin are different because they're both competing for deflation. 2:27:38 I think Dogecoin has unlimited inflation. 2:27:41 But the utility of Dogecoin is pretty much the same as Litecoin. 2:27:45 There is no extra opcodes or something like that. 2:27:48 I know they have this EVM thing going on they're thinking about, but it's not native to the base, right? 2:27:55 So do you like the idea? 2:27:58 I mean, I just want to hear your thoughts because I've never spoken to you before and you're much more technical than I am. 2:28:02 Do you like the idea in general that it would be cool for people to have an opt-in sidechain to get more privacy or more scaling, 2:28:12 where the cash token on the sidechain shares Bitcoin's monetary policy? 2:28:16 Meaning that, and you were just saying this in different words, that Dogecoin and Litecoin as tokens compete existentially for monetary premium. 2:28:25 And that's where the parasitic dimension exists. 2:28:28 But there is no competition for monetary premium between a synthetic Bitcoin on a two-way peg sidechain and the Bitcoin on mainchain because they share the exact same monetary policy. 2:28:41 There can never be more than 21 million Bitcoin across every Bitcoin sidechain and mainchain in total if we consider the hash rate escrowed Bitcoin to be not circulating. 2:28:54 And therefore, when you're finished on the sidechain and you're pegging back into mainchain, you're burning units on the sidechain and returning those units into circulating supply on mainchain. 2:29:06 So does that scheme appeal to you? 2:29:09 Like it's, you know, as some say, Drivechain is like we're adding utility and therefore increasing the total addressable market of Bitcoin without adding any inflation. 2:29:20 Yeah, I mean, I think that's what risk or one of the risk or stacks was also attempting, right, to actually use actual Bitcoin. 2:29:31 I think it gets philosophical here. 2:29:33 And my take is, yeah, privacy privacy makes sense. 2:29:38 But general Turing complete layers can offer privacy. 2:29:43 Besides. 2:29:44 On a tangent, UTXO provides better privacy because especially with ZK proofs, you can prove client side validation of transactions and you could, I think what Cardano was going after was client side ZK proofs, but they didn't get to the LayerTwo aspect yet. 2:30:01 But having client side UTXO proofs can open the doors to ZK privacy and also smart contracts and all that. So you can get privacy and win at the same time as create economies of scale. But that's on a tangent that the whole aspect of having the same coin serve as utility. 2:30:20 I deviate away from that. I think I think something like EIP 5059 with utility based tokenomics, that's not parasitic, but it's more like gas consuming, would open doors to more utility because people are holding Bitcoin. 2:30:35 They're stacking it. They're not spending it as gas. I don't want to spend my Bitcoin. I want to hold it because I know the game of Bitcoin is much different than the game of driving a car and spending it buying oil. It's different. 2:30:53 So I find the smart contracts generally the utility behind that needs to be a little bit different because it's very utility focused. So having a tokenomic paradigm that buys into that utility focus is critical. That's the philosophical shift that I have compared to using actual Bitcoin. 2:31:11 Because there's only 21 million and how are you going to serve a utility framework with AI coming with bots that are going to be using this stuff doing thousands of transactions a second just for themselves before even humans get into the picture? 2:31:25 You're going to be driving up costs, especially the monetary premium Bitcoin. You'll be driving out all the regular people who work less than the minimum wage. That's the problem I have. If you have a utility based monetary system, you don't have a situation where there's such a high premium on the instrument. 2:31:46 Could you explain further what you meant there? You were kind of over my head. This is Henry speaking. I work for Paul at LayerTwo Labs. I didn't understand how AI has anything to do with a problem arising in the context of sidechains. 2:32:04 And also I didn't understand how the increase in the monetary premium, meaning the increase in the purchasing power of Bitcoin, somehow disempowers poor people. I don't understand. You're sort of describing, in very interesting words, a conflict of interest between those who want to hold Bitcoin as a savings vehicle and those who want to see Bitcoin monetized in an economy of peer to peer applications on sidechains. 2:32:34 I don't think there's a conflict there. I mean, anytime someone holds Bitcoin, they are engaging in the store of value utility of Bitcoin. And anytime they hold it, there is logically necessarily the expectation eventually of spending it at some point in the future. 2:32:49 So store of value and medium of exchange are inextricably linked. There's no competition between those who want to store and those who want to spend. It's all the same thing. Higher value for Bitcoin is strictly good for everyone involved in Bitcoin. Why is it a bad thing? It's infinitely divisible in theory. 2:33:11 Well, up to the maximum amount of Satoshis, right? And at some point you have people other than humans entering the system, bidding up the fee market to use the resources. And there's a set resource cost for every state. Everything that's adding state bloat is adding the exponential cost. And anything you're adding for the data on the ZK side is adding cost. So you've got to pay for that. 2:33:36 If everything's priced in Bitcoin, there's a very high premium you're paying to get your transaction through in the fee market. Now, I can see maybe if Drivechain with, and I didn't understand the blind aspect, is adding a way for you to use that Bitcoin in a way where the sequencing is taken care of because there's no need for decentralized sequencing. 2:34:02 With merge mining, you don't get that. With maybe Drivechains, you get that. And in my mind, if you have to pay for sequencing, then you have a network cost. You have to generate revenue as a network to create a security environment for your network to survive. 2:34:22 That sequencing has set costs. That's where you have a utility-based tokenomics system that can secure that system much better than if it was relying on the miners taking Bitcoin and then charging higher premium, which would drive up the fee market for users on that system. 2:34:39 So imagine if one Satoshi was priced out of reach, and each transaction might cost two or three Satoshis in the scenario where Bitcoin is $10 million. That's where I was thinking you'd be potentially priced out. It can't get lower than one Satoshi. That's the minimum amount you can send on a payment channel or on Bitcoin, right? 2:35:03 Okay. So if I understand you correctly, which I don't claim to, your idea is that there might be a problem for Bitcoin, whether Drivechain exists or not, in the form of one Satoshi being worth $50. So therefore, Bitcoin has a problem with divisibility in your view. Is that correct in the long term? 2:35:26 It depends on the fee market and the sequencing mechanisms of these layer twos, because if they're tied directly to the sequencing of Bitcoin, which is through miners, then potentially you can solve some of that problem. 2:35:42 I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. But are you talking about the value of Bitcoin going up too high or the value of the block space? Because those are totally separate things. One can go up and the other can go down sometimes. 2:35:59 Yeah. I mean, the block space you can try to solve for differently. Like what we did in SIS was we had a separate block space just for roll up data availability. But if you're tying the instrument, so if you didn't have SIS, you just have Bitcoin and through sidechains, you're saying you have to pay gas with the Satoshis. 2:36:22 And if Bitcoin goes up too high compared to everything else around it, especially if you're paying server costs and ZK and all that stuff, then is there a situation where each Satoshi is going to start pricing out people, given the fact that these sidechains are focused very much on utility, less on the storage aspect? 2:36:44 Just for my simple understanding, are you talking about the price of Bitcoin being high and that being a problem or the price of the block space being high and that being a problem? Which one? 2:36:55 The block space is already set, right? 2:36:57 So we're saying in the sidechain proposal, you're storing blocks in probably somewhere else and then you're uploading the state route to Bitcoin or however sidechains works. 2:37:09 And merge mining, it's just the block header. But what happens if, let's just walk through this and potentially you guys have solutions here, but let's walk through this. If Bitcoin is at $10 or $15 million each, what happens in that scenario if there's a sidechain that's using that? Like a privacy Zcash? 2:37:31 Can you just, for my understanding, because I'm not that technical, can you tell me, are you talking about a problem where Bitcoin is very valuable and that creates a problem or where Bitcoin block space is very valuable and that creates a problem? Which one? 2:37:44 Well, let's walk through both. Just Bitcoin, the price, and then the block space we can deal with separately. 2:37:52 Okay, so you're saying there could be a problem if Bitcoin becomes extremely valuable and that Bitcoin becoming extremely valuable, is it your view that Drivechain would lead to that problem? 2:38:02 I feel like a lot of people in Bitcoin want it to become the world's money and that would mean it has a market capitalization in the trillions between like $100 and $200 trillion. 2:38:13 So if that is our shared goal, of course, many things will change between now and then. Perhaps the protocol will evolve to overcome any growing pains of the nature that you're describing, where there's like a technical issue with divisibility, as you seem to describe and perceive. 2:38:29 But I feel like, you know, on the other hand, you're talking about, we should also discuss like, would there be problems with the block space being valuable? 2:38:38 But I feel like it's a majority view in the Bitcoin community, as far as I can tell, that the block space on main chain becoming more valuable, or rather the total transaction fee rate increasing on main chain as the subsidy diminishes, is an important sign of the success of Bitcoin, you know, fee driven security. 2:38:58 And this is something that people who oppose Drivechain agree with, to some extent, I think, that we need high fees in the future for miners as the subsidy declines. 2:39:08 So I feel like if either of the concerns you're describing of higher token price or higher block space value, either of those are actually things that are signs of Bitcoin's success. 2:39:20 But of course, you might be right that there are interesting technical questions about how those would pan out. 2:39:26 Yeah, I mean, success for someone on the speculation of Bitcoin as a store value is different than the success of utility of serving the masses for someone who doesn't have a job in Africa or India to get involved in the global economy. 2:39:40 To me, those are two separate problems. 2:39:42 One is a utility focused problem. 2:39:44 One is empowering you through digital wealth and retaining your purchasing power. 2:39:50 Right. 2:39:51 So if your block space gets more expensive, the price of Bitcoin is getting more expensive. 2:39:54 That's an exponential problem to the cost of trying to do utility transaction. 2:39:58 And that philosophically led us to a fundamentally different design where we don't rely on the consensus of Bitcoin. 2:40:06 We rely on the mining of Bitcoin. 2:40:08 And the mining of Bitcoin is the treasure chest. 2:40:11 Basically, the difficulty in hashrate applied in separate sidechains makes a lot more sense, at least to me for now, than tying actual Satoshi usage because of that utility aspect. 2:40:24 Now, it's not a let's create a new token and pump that thing. 2:40:27 But it's more of let's create a utility focused tokenomic system that is not geared towards just store of value. 2:40:35 It probably even doesn't even want that high of store of value, probably more focused on utility based on usage. 2:40:43 So if it's not being used, that thing shouldn't be creating revenue because it's not secure. 2:40:47 But if it is being used, it's creating revenue and being secure. 2:40:50 But it shouldn't affect the security should be still borrowed in a way from the difficulty of Bitcoin. 2:40:56 And that was our kind of takeaway from all of our thinking and research. 2:41:02 So the Cisco and system, which I'm not that familiar with, like if I understand correctly, there is a token that's involved, like as you say, tokenomics. 2:41:10 And I think that the reason why Drivechain is compelling to some people is like me, is that there is no alternative token necessarily involved in a Drivechain sidechain. 2:41:25 Unlike stacks and Cisco in my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, there is another token involved with its own monetary policy. 2:41:33 And as Gavin Andreessen said, you know, a decade ago, like every time we have a new token with a new monetary policy, we are arguably violating the monetary policy of Bitcoin. 2:41:47 We're arguably doing like inflation. 2:41:50 So the best possible long term future for the world would be to have one monetary policy, the one we already have, Bitcoin, and to have all all use of money be using that monetary policy. 2:42:05 Whether you're long term savers, wanting digital gold on main chain with high decentralization, or whether you want to opt into a scaling layer for your coffee purchases, such as a large block sidechain that shares Bitcoin's monetary policy. 2:42:18 So no one's getting, as you say, priced out, you know, from the token or the block space because people can opt into the layer that appeals to them based on their values and preferences and spending power. 2:42:32 So if you're someone who's poor in Africa, like you mentioned, like that person probably will be using Thunder. 2:42:38 Thunder is the large block Bitcoin sidechain that if it ever exists, will have very low fees because it's going to have a block size that's many times larger than the main chain. 2:42:50 So they're not going to get priced out of using a layer on Bitcoin in the same way that if you're an ordinary person, you don't need to like charge up your iPhone by plugging into a power plant. 2:43:04 You don't have to go to layer one of the energy infrastructure, which is a nuclear power plant to charge your iPhone. 2:43:10 You're going to plug in your iPhone on a layer that is more efficient and cheaper and simpler for you, which is like plugging into the socket in your wall, in your apartment or house. 2:43:21 You don't have to go to the base layer of the entire energy infrastructure and plug directly into a power plant. 2:43:27 Now, if you're a huge energy user, like an institution that's going to run a data center, maybe you'll want to be co-located with the power center as like a quote unquote layer one energy user. 2:43:39 So I think Bitcoin will become layered in the future if it is to succeed, which I think it will. 2:43:46 And people will go into the layer that they want, whether it's for privacy or for low fees. 2:43:52 And then all those layers will share the same monetary policy. 2:43:55 That way there's no inflation because inflation is just a tax on people who are saving. 2:44:00 So we don't need to have any new tokens. 2:44:02 We just infinitely scale Bitcoin with infinite divisibility, even if the protocol right now doesn't allow for true, literal, infinite divisibility. 2:44:11 I think that, you know, that's like this is like a problem of worrying about what happened with Bitcoin goes to like 15 million dollars a coin. 2:44:19 That's like a problem you want to have. 2:44:22 And it's in the far future. 2:44:25 Is that a fair description? 2:44:27 Yeah, I mean, I think the solution you're describing is you open up the block space and through Blind Merged Mining, you can apply the same instrument and policy. 2:44:40 But because of the larger block space, the fee market is depressed for the same Satoshis. 2:44:47 So even if it's 15 million dollars a coin, the Satoshi can give you more purchasing power on the bigger block space because there's more supply available for to do your utility based transactions. 2:45:00 Could I ask you another question? 2:45:01 And then I want others to like jump in because this is just a free form chat. 2:45:05 I know we have others in the stage who've been waiting a little while to chat and we don't have Paul here anymore. 2:45:09 So if you ask a highly technical question, I won't know the answer probably. 2:45:15 But like one thing I wonder about with this coin is like if this is I know almost nothing about it. 2:45:22 But if it's a project that intends to provide more functionality and that kind of leverages Bitcoin in some way, why not use RSK where the native token, the main native token in my understanding is a synthetic Bitcoin. 2:45:37 Right. RBTC. 2:45:39 It's redeemable for Bitcoin through a two way peg. 2:45:42 There isn't this old coin, whereas with this coin, like the whole thing is like if I understand correctly, like stacks where there's like another token that competes existentially for monetary premium against Bitcoin. 2:45:54 Like, isn't it great not to have that other token involved? 2:45:57 And Rootstock, as I understand its current form, doesn't leverage like a separate token that goes up if people use Rootstock more. 2:46:08 It's not like all about like, you know, like Stacks has a token, right? 2:46:12 Like Cisco has a token, but Rootstock doesn't. 2:46:15 It's more like Liquid where it's a little bit more economically aligned with the accrual of value to Bitcoin, not some other token. 2:46:23 Is that a fair observation? 2:46:28 Yeah, I mean, I can see. 2:46:29 I mean, that's most of the Bitcoiners would come at it from that angle. 2:46:35 But from my perspective, the securing of that secondary system, which has its own, obviously has its own blocks. 2:46:42 And in our example, we have Finality, which is neither what Risk or Stacks are trying to do, which requires its own setup and system with what we call masternodes. 2:46:54 Those guys are just voting on the chain tip and fall back to longest chain rule in case there's a dispute. 2:47:02 So it's almost like what Ethereum is trying to do with their system, but falling back to Bitcoin's longest chain rule. 2:47:09 So to do that, you know, we've opted for the EIP 1559 sort of solution. 2:47:18 On top of that, we view that critical Finality aspect, which is required for a few reasons. 2:47:27 One, the selfish mining concern we were talking about. 2:47:30 But second, pruning of the data availability, which is used on the rollups. 2:47:34 And that data availability is very, very, a very specific problem when you're scaling up sidechains to the layer of Syscoin in this case, which is what Ethereum is also solving. 2:47:46 You get into the need to solve for that in a way where you don't want that token to be store value only. 2:47:57 You need that to be utility focused. 2:47:59 And there's a couple like one example I'll give is the block reward. 2:48:05 The block reward of on the on the Syscoin UTXO side is always inflating a minimum amount no matter what. 2:48:13 Even when the thing deflates towards zero, there's a minimum amount that's paid to those validators to always keep them around. 2:48:21 So 100 years down the road, they're not relying only on fees. 2:48:24 They're still getting a block premium. 2:48:29 And then on the EVM side, there is a static inflate inflated reward always paid to miners. 2:48:35 It never deflates. And that's what the AP 1559. 2:48:39 So it keeps around the incentives and to give back to not be parasitic to Bitcoin. 2:48:46 Those rewards are not up only store value. 2:48:49 It's it's based on inflating when needed and deflating when needed. 2:48:55 We always merge mine with Bitcoin. 2:48:57 So you cannot mine a Syscoin block on its own. 2:49:01 You have to mine Bitcoin. 2:49:03 So in some ways, when Bitcoin fee market is the only thing that is paying the miners, there's these sidechains or merge mine chains that will guarantee subsidy. 2:49:13 But the only way to get them is to mine Bitcoin. 2:49:16 That's kind of how we tie that narrative. 2:49:18 I get what you're saying. 2:49:20 That was very interesting. 2:49:21 I mean, I agree to the extent I understand. 2:49:24 Of course, merge mine altcoins like Syscoin are paying fees to Bitcoin miners. 2:49:30 And Satoshi invented that. 2:49:32 And it's never been a problem in Bitcoin so far. 2:49:35 I mean, I haven't heard anyone say that Rootstock is, you know, the three Bitcoin per month that Rootstock is paying to Bitcoin miners isn't like, you know, creating a disaster on Bitcoin. 2:49:46 How much fees currently is Syscoin paying per month to the Bitcoin mining community that chooses to merge mine Syscoin? 2:49:56 Do you know? 2:49:58 It's fairly like the way it was structured was a smaller percent is paid to the Bitcoin miners because they get this for free. 2:50:07 They're effectively mining without doing any extra work. 2:50:11 They're taking the existing work and they're taking that nonce and they're able to solve a secondary chain. 2:50:17 And you can depress the amount that you have to give to them. 2:50:20 So like 15 percent of the block reward is given out to the Bitcoin miners, including the EVM, which is a static reward. 2:50:28 And then there's a larger percent given to the validators because those are the guys are doing actual work for the block. 2:50:34 Yeah, I was just curious. 2:50:35 Like, what's the amount? 2:50:37 In terms of fiat, it's probably fairly low because the market cap of Sys is like 80 or 90 million only. 2:50:46 So it's a very small amount. 2:50:48 It's probably three to five, three to five million dollars a year, probably just to the to the merge miners. 2:50:58 Because recently I was we were talking in this space a couple of months ago with Gabriel Kerman of Rootstock. 2:51:03 And he said, if I recall correctly, that about three about three Bitcoin per month is the amount of fee income that Bitcoin miners receive from merged mining Rootstock. 2:51:17 Rootstock is like if last time I checked, like roughly 100 million dollar like sidechain on Bitcoin, the largest source of merged mine revenue for Bitcoin miners and roughly about half of all Bitcoin hash rate is merged mining Rootstock. 2:51:34 So it sounds like Syscoin might be some like roughly similar to those figures. 2:51:39 And it's yeah, it's a market rate. 2:51:42 It's I mean, once if Rootstock went up, obviously the revenue would go up if it's used the same thing. 2:51:50 Right. But the main takeaway we have is when the fees go to zero, we don't we try not to be parasitic because we are focused more on the way that the structure is set up is to create these validators which require for Sybil protection. 2:52:06 It requires some sort of amount of Syscoin to start these up. 2:52:09 They are directly tied to the health of this coin because they're creating finality for the system blockchain. 2:52:15 They're not earning Bitcoin, so they don't have this ancillary kind of side effect of I don't really care about this coin because I'm caring only about Bitcoin and therefore I will not create finality events on this coin because I don't care about it. 2:52:28 They own the base instrument asset of Sys and the merge mining takes care of, OK, I have enough difficulty in hash rate coming from Bitcoin. 2:52:37 And then the protocol itself ensures to give back to Bitcoin because you cannot mine Syscoin on its own. 2:52:43 There has to be a parent merge mining chain to mine it. 2:52:48 So even if the TVL of Sys goes to 10 billion or 100 billion, you still have to mine Bitcoin. 2:52:54 And when the fee market goes to zero, you have a guaranteed source of income coming in every block, not just fees. 2:53:01 That's I mean, that's the philosophical difference that I think we know. 2:53:05 A lot of people are wondering whether fee reliant economic security in the long term is viable. 2:53:12 I think that it's an exciting thing to have Bitcoin with no inflation and or more precisely just Bitcoin with 21 million hard cap. 2:53:24 That's an exciting, important feature. 2:53:27 And it would be awesome to see that succeed. 2:53:30 Every block chain in the world being merged mine with Bitcoin is one way to aspire. 2:53:37 That's one aspiration which might be sufficient to make Bitcoin successfully secured from fees alone. 2:53:45 So that's that's a cool thing. 2:53:49 If you have no inflation and because inflation tends towards zero, it goes towards like one Satoshi per block or something. 2:53:57 Right. In the long run, how would you ensure crypto economic security of the larger block space of a sidechain? 2:54:06 Say it's 100 megabytes. 2:54:07 The security of each BIP300 301 sidechain is a function of the fees paid on that specific sidechain. 2:54:18 So in that sense. 2:54:21 There is an interesting open question. 2:54:24 To which Drivechain has the optimistic hypothesis that there would be bootstrapping similar to similar to the way Bitcoin when it on the first instant it existed. 2:54:35 It didn't have like the powerful security it has today. 2:54:40 You know, there's a bootstrapping mechanism, of course. 2:54:43 The inflation subsidy in Bitcoin played an important role in that bootstrapping, but there's something that also helps these sidechains happen, even though they have no no subsidy, all they have is fees for economic security, the sidechains do have an important thing. 2:54:58 They share something with the largest cryptocurrency in the world. They share Bitcoin's monetary policy. They share Bitcoin's unit of account. And they share Bitcoin's miners. So when you're using a sidechain, you're you're opting into something which is different than Bitcoin in terms of features, but it's the same as Bitcoin in terms of monetary policy. 2:55:27 And mine and hash rate. So the economic security, you're right. It's tiny when a sidechain is starting out and then it'll it's logically a necessity that every Drivechain sidechain will never be as economically secure as the main chain, because the main chain's economic security has three things. 2:55:49 It's got the inflation of Bitcoin for the next hundred years. And it's also got the fees on the main chain, plus the fees on every sidechain, which are, we expect, almost entirely delivered to main chain miners. So like the main chain economic security will be massive because it'll be the sum of the security on every merged mine sidechain, plus the inflation on the main chain, which is right now the majority of security most days. 2:56:19 So that would be like if the sidechain ends up creating a whole bunch of utility, the fee market, the fee paid out would be much higher than the base fees on Bitcoin. But that's OK, because it's a sum. So, yeah, I mean, that now I understand why. 2:56:34 Yeah, why Paul's been so bullish on Drivechain. I guess there's always a tradeoff to this. Right. And I always look for that. The first tradeoff I found was probably the price out of pricing out people at some point. But like you said, that's that's a problem for the future. And for me, I'm more of a stickler trying to if I see a problem that I'm not OK with, I will. 2:57:00 It'll be a blocker for me. And to me, the blocker for looking at that long term vision of are you pricing out people if everyone's tending towards using this? Can you devise something that might not might not have that is where the philosophical design differences are. But I totally get the proposal now, even technically. 2:57:23 Bitcoinization in the most powerful, like, you know, hypothetical future where like the whole world Bitcoinizes, the effect on the poorest people will be astronomically positive. Like if you're a poor person in a developing country right now, you're you're like the last person in the global economy to receive new dollars. 2:57:45 So it's actually the poor outside of America who are bearing the burden of the senior age profits accrued by those close to the money printer in America, which is the financial institutions and the recipients of the government's payments for, you know, the military industrial complex, etc. 2:58:08 So what about people that haven't been born yet? Like, say, the fifth generation from now and those people are may or may not be priced out, right? 2:58:17 No one is priced out from money that is divisible. There's no such thing as being priced out from Bitcoin. I mean, currently, let's compare like right now, the status quo is if you're a poor person, you're bearing the burden of inflation because you're not close to the money printer. 2:58:34 You're the last to receive new money and others who received it earlier used it to bid up the prices of goods and services. So the Cantillon effect burdens the poor, especially outside of America, literally far from the money printer. 2:58:49 So that's the Cantillon effect. Now, with Bitcoin, there is no Cantillon effect, I would argue, because everyone already knows how much money there's going to be ever in Bitcoin. 2:59:02 And it's only 21 million. And those who want to speculate on its adoption are doing a service and they could be wrong or they could be drawdowns. So they're they're bearing risk. So there's no like Cantillon effect in Bitcoin, I would say. 2:59:18 And in the current system, there's like a terrible Cantillon effect of endless money printing forever. So, I mean, I just feel like the poor are those that you're talking about being like harmed, but they're actually benefited entirely and the most by the eradication of that Cantillon effect that arises from the seigniorage of fiat money. 2:59:40 Oh, you know, I get that. I get the fiat side for sure. Yeah, it's more of in the scenario of satoshis being priced, pricing people out in the future, like the fifth generation now, their families never owned a satoshi or they have to work more to earn that one satoshi. 2:59:58 So the cost around them in relation to all other public goods is much higher than another design, which is what I'm saying. But I mean, that's a problem for the future. So I get the design decisions and what it is about. That's why I came on because I wanted to know the design decisions and what drove it. So that makes sense. 3:00:22 Awesome. Well, those were all great questions. And a lot of what you said was above my head. So I appreciate you saying it for those who understood it. 3:00:30 No, dude, you nailed it. You really described what it's doing. So I think you're definitely on the ball with the tech as well. 3:00:40 Crypto Voyager. Why don't you jump in? You've been waiting patiently to say something. What's on your mind? Do you like Drivechains? Do you hate them? What do you think? 3:00:49 Hi, Jack Deep. It's a very nice conversation. Very, very technical. Definitely. I have one question, Jack Deep. You were saying something about increasing block size. What was that about? That's one question. And then I actually have a question on the whole layer two, layer three, and all the other layers. 3:01:12 I assume they have to finalize on the main chain. How is that supposed to work then afterwards? Is it just a hash that gets implemented on that? And not only that, since the fear of increasing block size is the fear of the loss of decentralization. 3:01:36 Would that not mean that the centralization just moves up a layer and then that layer two, whatever that will be, is then completely centralized? 3:01:46 It's not completely centralized. It looks like he departed. Maybe he had to go to listening to handle something. But the Drivechain view is that centralization or decentralization in Bitcoin is a function of the cost to validate. 3:02:06 So it's not the number of nodes. It's not how much the fees are. It's how much does it cost to validate that you were paid Bitcoin. 3:02:21 So this translates to how much does it cost a person to buy a laptop and pay for the Internet? And how long do they have to wait? What are all the costs associated with validating Bitcoin transactions that they receive? 3:02:39 So in the view of the small blockers, which drive chainers emphatically are in favor of small blocks on the base layer of Bitcoin. In fact, some of the leading drive chainers agree with those who have suggested that a block size decrease would be favorable for Bitcoin main chain. 3:03:00 So drive chainers think that Bitcoin is decentralized when the cost of a main chain full node is low. Not thousands of dollars, but hundreds of dollars. And ideally something that people could do on their smartphones with ease. 3:03:15 So it would be great if an ordinary smartphone was able to easily have a full node for layer one. And that would be decentralization in the Drivechain view. So you're perfectly right to point out that if the large block sidechain is more expensive to validate, then it'll be less decentralized. 3:03:37 But it'll be optional. You can opt in to the degree of decentralization you desire. Do you want digital gold or do you want really low fees? There's a choice. There's a tradeoff. And Drivechain aspires to give different users who have different values and preferences options that do not mean that they have to leave Bitcoin to use an altcoin. 3:04:05 Instead, they can stay in Bitcoin and keep on paying fees to Bitcoin miners and keep on participating in Bitcoin's monetary policy while opting in to a lower decentralization, higher scalability sidechain. 3:04:25 Go ahead with your rebuttal. 3:04:26 No, it's not a rebuttal. That's not it. Okay, so my question is, I have been using Bitcoin for a while now, and I've never had a note. And not only that, in the white paper, it basically states that for me as a user that is not producing blocks, the way that I should kind of like validate that the money I receive is correct is not correct. 3:04:56 It is by me just looking up the Merkle roots and the hash of that transaction that I receive. And doing that, I just ask the miner or a group of miners that is that valid? And they say, well, this is the longest chain. That thing is correct. And that's it. And that's just basically 40 kilobytes. I can do that on my phone. I don't have to have the whole node. 3:05:18 Yes. And that's what Satoshi talked about. He talked about SPV. He talked about ordinary users not being network nodes and how in the future, there would be a certain number, he said, probably not more than 100,000, if I recall, network nodes. And by network nodes, he meant people producing blocks and collecting fees and whatnot. 3:05:43 So the thing is, crypto lover, crypto voyager, the thing is, a lot of people don't share that view that you described, which is that, you know, we should have, you seem to be suggesting large blocks on mainchain and then reliance in the way that you just articulated. 3:06:03 Many people, including Paul Sztorc and others who favor Bitcoin, who favor Drivechain or don't, many people believe that small blocks on mainchain is important and necessary. And I tend to agree with them entirely. So what Drivechain wants to do is give you and people like you who have your view, a way to participate in Bitcoin's monetary policy and miners without giving up on what you desire. 3:06:32 Which is the benefits of larger blocks. So with Drivechain, big blockers get the big block version of Bitcoin they want. And the small blockers get the small block version of Bitcoin that they want. And they co-exist like the bumper sticker with the, you know, the sickle and crescent and the different cross and like we all co-exist as a big happy family. 3:06:55 We sing Kumbaya and we smoke the peace pipe. And that's because you get large blocks, I get small blocks. And, you know, Mary over here wants a privacy protocol that uses Bitcoin's monetary policy. And Tommy over there wants Ethereum sidechain to do his whatever. So everyone gets what they want, but we're all going to share Bitcoin unit of account and Bitcoin hash rate. 3:07:25 We're all going to pay fees to the same set of miners. And that is like the that's the most powerful idea to me, because when everybody gets what they want, then the synergistic collaborative system is going to be really big and very successful. 3:07:44 Whereas if we have this balkanized multi-chain world of everyone having different altcoins, instead of all the chains sharing monetary policy and miners, like Drivechain has, like if we do this other thing where there's like a thousand different coins, then like each system is weak and they're all competing. And then like the movement for peer to peer cash is weaker than if we all combine forces. 3:08:11 So what Drivechain wants to do is have everyone get into the same, the same bus. And this bus is going to be powered by the same, like the same miners, everyone sharing, pooling together transaction fees, using everyone using the same unit of account. 3:08:27 It's much more powerful because then we have like the powerful network effect where BTC is the only unit of account on every single blockchain. That is the goal. That's a very powerful thing. Network effects are more powerful in the market for money than in any other economic market. Network effects are very important in the market for money. 3:08:51 The money that will survive in the far future is the one that has the most adoption. So what Drivechain wants to do is give everybody what they want as much as possible, as long as they're still using BTC as their unit of account and paying into the same miner set. So does that resonate? 3:09:12 Oh, it resonates completely with me. I'm definitely a Bitcoin maxi. Any other chain that is not Bitcoin takes away from the market cap of what actually we want in the world. And not only that, we should be using just one single protocol. So I agree with you on that one completely. 3:09:36 My question is, again, how does it finalize on the layer one? And second, isn't there then the fear of the small blockers is that if you have big blocks, you cannot verify all the movements. Wouldn't that just be moved to layer two? 3:10:02 So let's say the Drivechain works, and you have 8 billion people using Drivechain, you have 80 billion IoT devices using Drivechain, and all that. And yes, definitely on the 21 million Bitcoin stuff, they are all using the same unit of account. 3:10:19 But all that data is then processed and stored in one single lump sum network, in the case of Drivechain layer two. Isn't that just moving the centralization part of all those transactions, just moving it one layer up? 3:10:42 So if you look at it like a pyramid, like a triangle, it's just an inverted triangle. So the big blockers say everything on layer one, you can have some sidechains for some other funky stuff, but the base is where everything gets kind of like moved. 3:11:00 So you have a very broad base, or you have the small block way of thinking that the triangle is then on its head, like the pointy end on the bottom. So everybody has just a small verifying node. 3:11:18 But that big, big data storage of all the transactions that have happened, because I presume that those transactions still have to be stored somewhere, be it on layer two, wherever, that also has to be stored in server farms. What's the difference? 3:11:35 So we've been going for three hours now. You asked a very good question. Your question is basically the question that is at the root of the large blocker view on protocol design. I welcome anyone in the audience who wants to answer that, on behalf of small blockers, myself included. 3:11:57 I'm getting a little bit tired, not from your questions, but from the duration of this space. But I'm happy to continue going. But I basically don't have what I would describe as the comprehensive theoretical and historical knowledge to provide the best possible small blocker arguments that you're requesting. 3:12:20 And some people do have that knowledge. Some people, like Paul and others here, lived through the block size war and understand all of the potential arguments of the large blockers and the question you're asking about, which is the inverted pyramid and that sort of thing. 3:12:37 But what I understand is more on the human level, which is that some people want large blocks, others want small blocks. That's just the fact of reality. It doesn't matter who's right. Drivechain lets both the large blockers and the small blockers get what they want, arguably. And that alone is a powerful solution. 3:12:58 It is an alternative to there being competing altcoins, one with large blocks, one with small blocks. And then we see who wins the monetary premium battle, who accrues value and who doesn't. Instead, with Drivechain, we give the small blockers the layer they want and the large blockers the layer they want. 3:13:20 And it must be that layer one is small because of the nature of cumulative decentralization. In other words, if you're using layer two, if you're using a large block sidechain, you are experiencing the combination of layer one block size plus the layer two block size that you've opted into. 3:13:44 So therefore, we must have the large blocks on a second layer, not the first layer. This is a core idea of Drivechain. Everyone is experiencing necessarily all of the cumulative layers they've opted into. So if you buy Bitcoin, you're participating in the decentralization of mainchain Bitcoin. 3:14:04 If you then opt in to a BIP300 large block sidechain, now the decentralization that you're experiencing is the combination of the small block mainchain plus the large block sidechain. If we were to invert that and have the mainchain be large block, that would effectively be a mandatory block size increase on everyone. 3:14:27 And it would eliminate the ability for people to experience small block Bitcoin, because if they opt in to some sidechain that has small blocks, they are already experiencing the large block hypothetical mainchain Bitcoin that you would prefer. 3:14:47 So I feel that we have to give people what they want, and we can't deprive small blockers of their preferred experience. So we have to make large blocks optional, not mandatory. And that's what Drivechain does. And if Drivechain had existed from day one on Bitcoin in 2008, if it had existed when Bitcoin was first announced, maybe there never would have been a block size war. 3:15:13 Maybe people would just happily have used a large block sidechain without any objections or grievances. So that's the Drivechain view as best as I can give it. 3:15:27 If you're tired, you can close the space and I would just ask to keep that question open. And when Paul comes back, maybe talk about it. That's one. On the opt-in question that you were saying, I'm not really sure about that. 3:15:50 So in small block theory, since the fee market ever gets higher, the more demand there is on chain one, well, on layer one, I kind of like see how you say, yes, the small blockers get what they want and the big blockers get what they want. 3:16:09 But the big blockers in that regard would be forced economically to use option two, to use layer two, unless you have enough capital, enough economic resources to use layer one, to actually say, I have the ability to take that opt-in option to use layer one. That's my point. 3:16:36 Layer one is not optional. Layer one is mandatory. 3:16:41 I understand. Layer one is mandatory. Yeah, definitely. I agree with you on that one. That's not what I mean. What I mean is if I'm, for example, a poor person in the world and the world is already hyper Bitcoinized and everybody's using Bitcoin, be it layer one, layer two, layer whatever. 3:17:00 If I don't have enough money to pay the transaction fees on layer one, I am actually forced to use layer two. That's what I'm saying. And Jack Deep is a speaker again. So if Jack Deep could answer my first question on increasing block size, that would be amazing. And that's basically all from me. 3:17:22 Yeah, that's an awesome question. I think the host kind of nailed it a little bit. But I think, you know, I'm almost ball blocker as well. I view blocks, like you're saying, the tip at the bottom, at the extras pyramid. 3:17:36 An extras pyramid of value is everything is a derivative down to the base, which would be something like Bitcoin, right? The ultimate store of value. Everything else would be trading at a discount, especially when you have when you have Malthusian scares, right? 3:17:52 When you have Malthusian scares, then you drive everything drives back down to the base. So I view that from an economic perspective, it makes sense. But if you look at Bitcoin and you're trying to scale through bigger blocks, the function of a blockchain is twofold. It's executions and it's data availability. 3:18:09 You have to take the data to reproduce the state. So there is an inherent execution to calculate the state through the data. So if you break the blockchain into two parts, then you have a data availability problem, which is what we've been trying to solve for. And any settlement layer will have that data availability problem. It's an abundance when you have a big state and you want to have censorship resistance to your sidechain. You need that data availability solved. 3:18:36 And then the execution in order for us to scale. First and foremost, the biggest bottleneck was execution, right? It's how many transactions you could do. That's based on the block size. If you remove the transactions off of the base and you have a more decentralized base, more full nodes can run a lighter way. Then you have executions moved off to the sidechain. 3:18:58 But then you still need censorship resistance in some ways. In terms of sidechains, it doesn't matter too much because it's just Bitcoin. What I mean by censorship resistance is when you start to create a base layer and you have all these sorts of tokens, like say IBM and stock tokens start to come in and USDC and USDT. You can say in a hyper Bitcoinization world, there's no other tokens. But in my world, there's going to be a whole bunch of tokens. 3:19:21 So when you're trying to move those tokens into your scalable execution layers, even if one sidechain is just a base and it's not meant to be where all the retailers transact, it's another base towards another sidechain where the execution is actually say 10,000 TPS. You have this data availability problem and that is inherited. 3:19:43 If you go down the scalability far enough, you will always end up at that problem and you need to solve for that a little bit differently. 3:19:47 And what Ethereum is doing in their next update is something called protodank sharding, and that is trying to create a side cart of data, not to inflate the block base for size, but put it in a separate fee market because that data gets pruned after some amount of time. 3:20:09 That fee market becomes much cheaper. So overall, systemically, it becomes a much more efficient system if you can separate the execution from the data. 3:20:20 Some purists might say that the data must live next to the execution. Otherwise, you start taking tradeoffs. And that's true. But I would say the best way to get everyone involved to use this thing, the claim of the Leiden Network white paper of everyone should be able to do one or two transactions, everyone in the world, the 7 billion people should be able to do one or two transactions a day. 3:20:45 That claim cannot really come alive unless you start to break up the data layers and execution layers. Just increasing the block size doesn't solve that problem. 3:20:56 Well said. Yeah. Ethereum is grappling with these different questions. Some have suggested that what they're doing is trying to pursue very roughly a Drivechain like design, albeit in a way that's kind of misguided and confused. 3:21:14 If you have only Ethereum and only Ethereum was moving to sidechains, then it's Drivechain. But Ethereum is playing around with a whole bunch of other random tokens. And so those random tokens need to go in and out of these sidechains. And that is something that Drivechain wasn't solving. 3:21:32 So if it's just Bitcoin in the world, then Drivechain is fine because you have smart contracts there. 3:21:38 The drive chainers, we do want that all of the large block Bitcoiners who left Bitcoin in the block size war, we want all of them to come back to Bitcoin and use the large block sidechain and the other sidechains. 3:21:53 We want to completely reunite everyone who's ever used Bitcoin and eliminate all of the altcoin communities. We want to make it that no one has any hope to compete with Bitcoin. 3:22:05 We want to make it that everyone believes that any new idea that's at all of any potential value will become on Bitcoin. So we think sidechains have a very big part in that future. 3:22:17 So Crypto Voyager, I would encourage you to DM me on this account, LayerTwo Labs, with your availability to have a debate if you're interested with Paul. 3:22:30 Because I think what we need to do is stamp out the incorrect understanding that is persisting among some people that large blocks on mainchain Bitcoin would be a good idea. 3:22:41 So we need to have a debate where whoever has the most comprehensive understanding of the alleged benefits of large block mainchain Bitcoin debate that with Paul. 3:22:54 And we'll make sure that we get down to the brass tacks, get down to the fundamental question of which is better, mainchain being large block or small block, because this debate has to end. 3:23:06 We have to get to the bottom of this so that people aren't still confused and unsure about the topic. 3:23:14 So let me know if you want to debate because I recently had some tweets that I saw where some large blockers were saying the things you're saying about the inverted pyramid and whatnot. 3:23:26 But then I invited them today to come and I messaged three well-known large blockers. They didn't come here and debate with us today. 3:23:34 So, you know, they're friends of mine. They're friendly people. They're smart people. But I believe they're wrong. 3:23:41 I believe Paul can beat them in a in a civil debate on the question of should we have Drivechain or should we have large block mainchain? 3:23:51 Like the answer is Drivechain. And we need to like get everyone on the same page as soon as possible for the sake of sound money and freedom. 3:23:58 We need to have everyone agreeing. We can't have this like endless debate going on eight years about whether we should, you know, multiply the mainchain block size. 3:24:08 So the monolithic versus modular debate, right? 3:24:11 Yeah. You or someone else, Crypto Voyager, should DM me and say that like you want to have a block size debate with Paul. We can do it at the next week's space. 3:24:21 This space meets every week on Friday. So we can do it next Friday. If someone will step forward, is it going to be you or is it going to be someone else? 3:24:29 Like, let me know. We're happy to have the discussion. And I promise you that if I'm hosting it in this Twitter space, you'll get completely good treatment. 3:24:40 There'll be no interrupting or name calling. You'll have every opportunity to make the case to Paul or whoever, you know, we bring to represent the small block view. 3:24:53 Does that sound good to you, Crypto Voyager? 3:24:56 I'm not so sure that I'm qualified enough to debate that one and to settle the block size. That's a little bit too much for me. But definitely, yes. 3:25:11 Thanks very much. I gave you a follow. I'll send you a DM and I'll find my champion to put in the ring. 3:25:20 I would not say that Paul is the leader of the small blockers. He's just one of the key voices that all the way back in 2015, he wrote that post called Measuring Decentralization on Truthcoin.info, his blog. 3:25:35 And that Measuring Decentralization post articulated what others have believed for years. So I'm not saying he invented it. I'm saying the opposite. He subscribes to the small blocker view. 3:25:48 But that post crystallized, in the view of some, the argument, which is that Bitcoin decentralization increases when the cost to validate decreases. 3:26:01 So if you think differently, and that we could have large blocks, and everyone could be pruning and on SPV, etc., and that that'd be just as good, strictly just as good, without any detriment or trade-off, then have someone come forward and debate Paul on that. 3:26:18 And we'll get to the bottom of it, because we have to settle this. It can't just go on forever. 3:26:23 And then I invited these large blockers to come here and they declined. 3:26:28 So it's disappointing. 3:26:31 So you let me know, you talk to your large block contacts and see if one of them will step forward to have a debate on this matter. 3:26:39 Because then it'd be great for Drivechain. That way we can move forward and those people might then become supporters of Drivechain and rejoin the Bitcoin community and help Drivechain become adopted. 3:26:53 Rather than continue with their Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV experiments, which compete with Bitcoin for monetary premium. 3:27:02 Okay, fine. I'll try my best to get somebody to do that. 3:27:10 Jackthief, apparently, the way that you're thinking with Ethereum, me and LayerTwo Labs are kind of in agreement. There can only be one and it's not going to be Ethereum. So choose between small block or big block. 3:27:33 Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think it's small blocks. And I think blockchains are court systems. So you need to treat them as a court system, not as a transaction processor. 3:27:43 So you need to break things down into parts, into modularity. And that's what Drivechains are trying to do. 3:27:49 Even with Drivechains, I think Paul's going to hit the data availability problem when he goes down to it. You're thinking about layers on top of Drivechains to create composable experiences. 3:28:01 You're going to have the data availability problem. So we've already thought ahead with a lot of this and solved some of these problems. 3:28:07 And I think some of these problems could be transferred back into concepts such as Drivechain, you know, as they encounter these issues. 3:28:15 And I know RISK has hit those issues. They're trying to solve it. And Ethereum is solving with protodank charting. We've solved it with proof of data availability. 3:28:22 You always will end up at that data availability problem if you're trying to scale this stuff, regardless if you're a monolithic or a modular blockchain. 3:28:31 Well, this has been a really great conversation. Thank you, Professor Michael Warren, who spoke earlier. And that was the main part of our conversation today. 3:28:43 And thank you also, Jay Berg, who spoke also very well. And thank you, Jagdeep, as well as Crypto Voyager. You spoke very well. Thank you for being here. 3:28:53 Thank you to our listeners, those who listen live right now, as well as those who listen on demand. 3:28:59 These are recorded spaces hosted by LayerTwo Labs every week on Friday. 3:29:04 Everyone is welcome to be here, whether you're a Drivechain critic, a skeptic, a newcomer or an enthusiastic supporter. 3:29:12 We appreciate you listening. And if you want to learn more, like let's say you're a Drivechain critic. 3:29:18 Let's say you want to stop this project. I would encourage you to read Paul's blog, find out what he thinks in detail. 3:29:29 He's written many long essays on there, all about block size, the privacy sidechain, the scaling sidechain, and an enormous amount of writing. 3:29:38 It's like a textbook, how much he's put on his blog. So you can find out what he thinks, get really into the details, and then DM me. 3:29:45 We'll schedule a debate. It'll be just you and Paul. So if you're an important listener in this space right now, who is a critic of this project, 3:29:55 I encourage you to do your research and then come prepared to debate things. And you'll have extremely fair treatment from me. 3:30:02 You'll have every opportunity to find out, for you in the audience, who has the stronger argument. 3:30:07 We'll get down to the fundamental questions about whatever it is that's concerning you about Drivechain, whether it's MEV, whether it's miners stealing, 3:30:17 whether it's decentralization, whether it's that you prefer large blocks, or whatever is the concern. 3:30:25 We'll get down to the most fundamental question. And that's how we'll move forward. 3:30:31 So thanks, everyone, for listening. If you want to engage in the coming days before our next space, the ways you can do it are, 3:30:41 we have the Drivechain Telegram group. Everyone's welcome to be there. 3:30:45 You can find a link to that on the drivechain.info website, or you can also find a link to our Telegram group on the LayerTwoLabs.com website. 3:30:57 We also have other ways you can interact. In addition to the Telegram group, you can download our software at LayerTwoLabs.com and participate in the Drivechain testnet. 3:31:08 So that means you download the software and you can actually run the software of the sidechains, which is one of them for privacy, 3:31:15 which is based on Zcash, and the other ones for smart contracts based on Ethereum. 3:31:20 So you can get involved in a technical way or just by reading. And everyone's welcome to do all of that. 3:31:28 So yeah, go to LayerTwoLabs.com. Also, make sure if you're interested in this topic that you have actually read the BIPs. 3:31:34 So make sure you're familiar with those BIPs, because that's really the core. The BIP, as well as the code, it's all available for review. 3:31:43 So thanks for everyone who's exploring that content and getting involved. 3:31:49 So I guess we'll wrap up now and reconvene in one week from now. 3:31:54 And it was great to have everyone chatting and listening. These are recorded spaces. You can listen to our prior recorded spaces. 3:32:01 We've had excellent interviews with some in the audience, like Moonsettler and Hampus, and many others have come. 3:32:07 And those conversations are great, and they're available. If you just look through the layer2labs Twitter timeline, 3:32:14 you'll find those recordings of those spaces where we've been privileged to have those guests speak. 3:32:20 So thanks, everyone. I guess I'll see you in one week from now. 3:32:26 Thanks for listening. Have a great Friday. 3:32:37 .
