0:00 Hello, and welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces. 0:04 Today is Friday, July 28th. 0:08 Here at LayerTwo Labs, we're thrilled to have one of our favorite Bitcoiners as our featured 0:17 guest today, Dr. Adam Back, co-founder and chief executive officer of Blockstream, one 0:26 of the coolest people to ever live. 0:29 Dr. Back is a famous Bitcoiner for many reasons, among them that he is the only person whose 0:37 name appears in the body of the Bitcoin white paper. 0:43 Welcome to the stage, Paul. 0:47 We're just opening up the space right now. 0:54 Hey. 1:02 I see some familiar faces in the audience. 1:04 It is so awesome to have so many people in our Telegram group and tweeting about Drivechain 1:11 lately. 1:13 We have over 700 members in the Drivechain Telegram group, and Dr. Back is here. 1:20 Why don't I invite him up? 1:24 Our featured speaker today. 1:35 Welcome Adam. 1:36 Thank you for being our guest today. 1:42 Adam, try speaking to make sure that we're connected. 1:54 I don't hear you. 1:55 Paul, do you hear him? 1:56 Yeah, I don't hear you either, unfortunately. 1:57 Oh, wait. 1:58 I saw blue lines appear that time, though. 1:59 Yes, me too. 2:00 Well, you know, people like to get those special headphones or whatever to plug in. 2:09 Yes. 2:10 Yeah. 2:11 Take your time getting set up. 2:12 We can't hear you yet, Adam. 2:21 I have really enjoyed Adam's statements on sidechains, the Zcash sidechain, the Thunder 2:28 large block sidechain, and others. 2:31 His tweets and his comments at the conferences are so awesome. 2:35 Adam, try speaking now to see if you're connected. 2:39 All right. 2:40 How about now? 2:41 Hello? 2:42 Yes. 2:43 Oh, there we go. 2:44 Awesome. 2:45 All right, Paul. 2:46 Take it away if you'd like. 2:51 Oh, yeah. 2:52 Sure. 2:54 Basically, one thought in my head is you've been a very helpful supporter even for a very 3:03 long time. 3:04 I remember ConsenSys 2017, we had a table. 3:09 You organized a little table and an email chain, and then there were also some very 3:15 supportive emails over the years about certain large blocker projects should instead focus 3:22 on this or whatever. 3:24 I guess the main thought in my head is you obviously have gotten it or at least you saw 3:33 some kind of potential in this idea for a really long time. 3:38 The sort of funny question would be, why don't all these other people get it or whatever? 3:44 Something like that. 3:45 I don't know if that's a good ... How do you explain the difference, I guess, between all 3:53 these different reactions to it or something? 3:57 We had a conversation on a panel at Bitcoin Amsterdam, I think it was last year, right? 4:07 There was a panel. 4:11 One of the concepts, I think, is that Bitcoin is good at adapting to- 4:20 Is anyone able to hear Adam? 4:22 Yes, I hear him. 4:24 Okay. 4:25 Good. 4:26 Still working. 4:27 Yeah. 4:28 I think Bitcoin is better at adopting changes that are kind of simple, localized, win-win. 4:41 But for something which has a lot of trade-offs or a sort of more complicated game theory 4:49 or more open-ended, it tends to go into a big discussion topic about whether it's a 4:56 good trade-off or different ways to do it. 5:02 I think Bitcoin is generally a little bit resistant to change, right? 5:07 Because people are defensive of their Bitcoin. 5:09 So I think that made something like small signatures, which was a topic on that panel, 5:16 easier to adopt because it's just a better signature, right? 5:20 So there's not really that much to say about why somebody wouldn't want it. 5:26 You don't have to use it if you don't like it. 5:28 It's a better signature. 5:29 It's more compact. 5:30 It's a little bit better for privacy and so on. 5:32 And so, you know, after a number of years, that was added to Bitcoin with Takro. 5:39 And drive-chain discussion, sorry, drive-chain, side-chain discussion has been around probably 5:45 for a similar amount of time, actually, to Schnorr signatures, was talked about in 2013. 5:54 But I think it's more complicated. 5:59 Now the reason I originally got interested in side-chains and drive-chains was for modularity. 6:07 So, you know, if you think about other systems like the Linux kernel or something, it's a 6:16 monolithic kernel. 6:17 So getting changes into it is complicated. 6:22 Whereas when they added sort of userland modules and kernel modules and things, it became more 6:29 permissionless, I guess you could, you know, you could implement one yourself or something 6:33 like that. 6:34 It enables this kind of more permissionless innovation that you get on layer twos like 6:39 Lightning or Arc or things like that. 6:41 So I was just thinking, you know, it's a pity Bitcoin's not more modular in that way. 6:49 And how could you achieve that? 6:50 And so the side-chain idea was like a potential because the, I guess the main concern with 7:02 adding consensus logic, like with an extension block, which is a different kind of way to 7:11 extend Bitcoin hypothetically, if somebody accidentally makes a bug in the extension 7:16 block, it could like split the network or fork the network or create problems for Bitcoin 7:23 itself. Whereas a side-chain or a drive-chain is, you know, it's its own little world. 7:28 If something goes wrong in there, it has less impact on Bitcoin itself. 7:31 So, yeah, I know it pulls that. 7:37 Yeah, like, so the idea of it being open-ended, I think, is where it really goes, where 7:44 people, people's creativity kind of runs wild or something. 7:47 They just think like anything is possible, whereas with something narrow, it's because 7:53 it's not as, it's because it's not as cool that maybe it's not as controversial or 7:59 something like that. 8:00 Well, I mean, I think you can see it recently in the discussion about covenants, because 8:05 there are lots of different proposals and so, you know, maybe there's a reasonable 8:15 amount of interest in covenants, but there are different ways to do it. 8:24 And so there's a big design space. 8:26 And then I guess there's a sort of feeling of scarcity, like you can't add, you know, 8:32 it would be odd to add half a dozen different ways to do it, just throw them all in a 8:36 bucket, right? So I think people expect, you know, if you think about like a line of 8:43 CPUs, like the Intel CPU and cross-generations, maybe add a few CPU instructions and 8:48 presumably they have, they don't want to add too many instructions. 8:51 So they're thinking real carefully about which instructions can be combined with other 8:57 instructions, provide good value and, you know, not sort of diverge massively from the 9:05 program model of the CPU. 9:06 So I think Bitcoin upcodes are a bit like that. 9:11 Maybe that's another way that the Drivechain or sidechain is different. 9:15 It's sort of when you're actually going to implement it using opcodes and maybe the opcode 9:23 doesn't do it in one shot, but it enables you to build a sidechain using some existing 9:29 operations, operators and opcodes and the new ones. 9:36 But it feels like a kind of a higher level concept, right? 9:42 Like a low-level opcode is like, okay, verify Schnorr signature instead of an ECDA 9:46 signature. And then, you know, the rest of it works similarly to how it works now, whereas 9:52 the Drivechain is a kind of meta opcode or it seems like a higher level programming 9:56 concept, right? So maybe that's, it's a more novel thing for people to get their head 10:01 around implementing an opcode. 10:07 There's certainly much more novelty than I would have thought. 10:10 To me, it was not that complicated of an idea back in November 2015. 10:14 It was just like the SPV proof was already established by the Blockstream October 2014 10:22 paper. So it was kind of like it was already established, I thought, throughout the year 10:27 2014 that the sidechain would like prove the work, but it would not prove the validity 10:34 of the rules. And then it just seemed pretty straightforward that you could just, you'd 10:39 have a counter. It was basically instead of having the sidechain headers, it was just 10:44 on the main chain, you just have like a counter, like someone count up with a little 10:48 clicker, count up to some number of uploads or something. 10:54 And it actually seemed like it was when it first was proposed, you know, made it to the 10:59 top of our Bitcoin, and then a lot of people seem to be very, very positive towards the 11:05 idea and even giving it attention and stuff. 11:09 And the way I tell the story is sort of like the block size war immediately made, first 11:17 of all, anything involving miners became like much more controversial. 11:20 But just like the idea of any large blockers getting what they want or any talk as if 11:26 Bitcoin core weren't perfect. 11:29 So maybe this is me just reading a bunch of emotional baggage into it. 11:34 But this is like kind of like it seemed like pre, it seemed like before the block size, 11:43 like before SegWit2x, it actually seemed like there was much more support for drive 11:48 chain among literally everyone. 11:50 And then the sort of SegWit2x Bitcoin cash happened. 11:54 And then the last thing that people want is something we brought up in the Amsterdam 11:59 thing is that someone wants something with Bitcoin and you say, oh, we can do that as a 12:03 sidechain, do a ZK-SNARK sidechain. 12:06 But then as soon as they leave and then do Zcash or they do BCH, then like they don't 12:12 really want the last thing they want is for Bitcoin to add it now that they have their own 12:15 thing that they think is the best. 12:18 So I kind of thought it was going better before and then Bitcoin cash split and that kind 12:23 of distracted everyone for a while, I think, including me. 12:26 And I was just kind of like, but this is my weird interpretation of how people allocate 12:33 their scarce, because everyone's review time is very scarce, like just even a regular 12:37 person is just a Bitcoin user. 12:40 But I don't know how people look at it now if they joined recently. 12:44 They've been around for so long. 12:45 Yeah, I mean, I think there are obviously new contributors who didn't, you know, weren't 12:58 paying attention to technical stuff through the block size drama. 13:04 But I think you're right that that was, you know, some kind of mixture of dramatic, 13:13 traumatic and exhilarating and profitable, depending on what you did. 13:18 And so I think people were a bit hesitant about, you know, how the next soft fork would 13:25 go. I mean, they were hoping it wouldn't be, it wouldn't, you know, there wouldn't be 13:29 another dramatic event like that activation process. 13:33 Right. 13:34 Yeah, well, yeah, one of the many things it did, of course, is that it made everyone 13:42 like basically afraid to do any soft fork like in the usual historical way, where it 13:48 was really not a big deal at all before. 13:51 And then after SegWit was so weird with the blockade and then user activated soft fork 13:58 and all the questions that entailed as to like, who's should ultimately be trumping 14:03 what and why those weird governance questions. 14:08 I think that was that was huge. 14:12 I think that was bad for every single soft fork. 14:15 I mean, to this day, basically, like now people, isn't it intriguing that like so many 14:20 pull requests could be merged into Bitcoin Core every day and any of them could have 14:24 like an assert zero or some kind of like key logger or some kind of thing? 14:29 Any pull request could have something really bad in it. 14:33 But many of them fail right through and it's not that they fail right through, but it's 14:37 like if one of these pull requests is a soft fork, then it's like treated with an 14:42 enormous amount of anxiety. 14:47 Well, right, I mean, yeah, the rate of changes in terms of the amount of check-ins per 14:55 major version is kind of large. 14:59 It's a fairly active project. 15:00 Right. So, yeah, I mean, that is, you know, you want you want to feel like it's being 15:07 reviewed very carefully. 15:08 And of course, there's a lot of lessons learned since the early days of Bitcoin and 15:14 there is a pretty cautious verification of everything. 15:19 But consensus logic is much riskier. 15:23 And I guess more subtle and possible to make stakes on, you know, there have been small 15:32 issues or issues that had to be worked around with a fix that were not seen at the time 15:39 they were at a rate over the last five years. 15:42 But, yeah, I mean, so I think like in a way the Schnorr and Taproot were like a super 15:52 uncontroversial, localized, you know, opt-in upgrade to a signature. 15:57 So that was a kind of arguably a good sort of type of feature to see how activation would 16:09 be viewed. And it was like largely, you know, uncontroversial and activated. 16:18 I mean, the speedy trial thing and I had a little bit of controversy in it, too, but 16:24 ultimately it progressed. 16:25 I mean, I think the other thing which might be a bit different is, you know, the security 16:39 of a signature is very binary, right? 16:42 You know, as long as you don't lose control of the private keys and you don't make mistakes 16:46 and, you know, serialization and what have you, it's extremely robust and secure and 16:53 has a huge security advantage for the defender. 16:56 I need a point owner. 16:59 Whereas a Drivechain or a sidechain is a more fuzzy kind of game theory thing where 17:05 you're kind of, you know, trying to think about different adversarial scenarios with 17:11 miners and things. 17:12 So I think that that causes people more trepidation because there's not a sort of very 17:22 simple and direct, you know, this is a drop-in replacement. 17:26 It's a signature, you know, what's not to understand kind of thing, right? 17:30 Whereas a Drivechain is like a new piece of game theory about, you know, incentives 17:38 and miner behavior and so on. 17:41 So, you know, I think it's been discussed a lot and it probably works, but it's not 17:49 as binary and convincingly robustly secure, let's say, right? 17:58 Yeah, it's a more complicated thing. 18:00 I completely agree with that in that it is more of a game theory thing, but I think this 18:06 leads to another, this is another weird thing that has like kind of dogged or plagued this 18:13 idea for a long time, which is this whole, people are kind of mixing up layer one and 18:18 layer two, like, you know, like lightning is also much more clear cut than Drivechain, 18:25 but it's like, it should be that you would think it's not anyone's concern on L1 18:33 how insecure an L2 might be, because you don't have to use it. 18:40 So I think that there's people take responsibility for it. 18:45 They take, you know, the Bitcoin core developer might feel responsible for the coins and they 18:51 might think, oh, we're going to let this person use a Drivechain and then maybe the 18:58 coins will be lost by the withdrawal, the minor withdrawal process, the coins may be 19:04 lost. 19:06 But it's kind of like, shouldn't there be a little bit more, shouldn't it be a little 19:10 bit less paternalism? 19:14 Well, maybe. 19:15 I mean, on Lightning, that's kind of the case. 19:18 And actually, I think the security model of Lightning had a few surprises along the way, 19:28 there were issues that were discovered, you know, years after the first version was coded 19:33 and we had to like make workarounds and fix that up and change the clients, change the 19:38 protocols a bit. 19:39 So it wasn't without its surprises, but I guess, you know, it was opt-in and once you 19:48 have the opcodes to enable it, and I guess you could have done it without any opcodes 19:53 in a simple way, you couldn't stop it. 19:57 So I think, you know, surprisingly, the fact that you can't stop something makes people 20:00 pretty relaxed about it, you know, if you could build it anyway. 20:04 I've seen that in like the C language evolution, there was, if you read the history of the 20:12 concatenate operator, the C preprocessor didn't used to have it. 20:16 And I was reading about the history of it, there was a big debate about, you know, would 20:21 it be a sensible thing to add this concatenate operator? 20:25 And people, some people didn't like it, some people did. 20:27 And then finally, somebody proved that with some enormous amount of hackery, you could 20:32 like make your own using the existing preprocessor stuff. 20:36 Some people shrugged, it's like, oh, you can already do it. 20:38 So they added the operator, right? 20:40 So that's a curious effect, right? 20:43 So it makes me think that... 20:46 You and I both know that, like, you and I both know that you already can do like the 20:54 equivalent, what BIP300 is, this is what I think very rarely understood is that BIP300 21:00 is actually putting like a short leash on the miners, but you can already if you want, 21:04 you can already do the miners could just make a wallet. 21:07 And they could say, we promise we'll give these back. 21:11 If only two people who withdraw, we'll make our own EVM chain and we promise to give the 21:17 coins back and be like custodial with the miners as custodians. 21:23 And so because many of the Drivechain, I think many of the Drivechain supporters try 21:29 to do an argument like that. 21:30 They say, well, listen, like that's what we do with merge mining. 21:33 We say like, merge mining is already possible with altcoins. 21:38 It's already possible to just... 21:40 And everything the miners do, because this is where... 21:42 Because it's true that we do the opt-in and you can't stop it. 21:46 That's for Lightning. 21:48 And then it's the same for Drivechain and for maybe miners can steal or for whatever. 21:52 But then where people start to get uncomfortable as they say, well, wait, what about the miners? 21:57 The miners have to run this software, you know, but then we in the Drivechain community, 22:04 we say like, well, you know, miners have to do all kinds of things all the time. 22:08 They don't really have to do anything. 22:09 They could just stop mining or they could not mine in a certain way. 22:12 They don't have to use immersion cooling. 22:13 You know, they could do... 22:14 They don't have to use it. 22:15 They could do whatever they want, whenever they want. 22:17 So it's really not the same. 22:18 They can merge mine altcoins or they can switch pools. 22:22 It doesn't. 22:24 So we try to... 22:25 I think people try to do that, but it doesn't seem to be working. 22:29 But maybe we should... 22:30 They try to do what, sorry? 22:33 Well, we try to say that the type of thing you could do with Drivechain, 22:38 all of it is already being done. 22:40 You know, like we could have a terrible custodial sidechain, 22:43 where you just send Bitcoin over. 22:45 Oh, right. 22:46 You could emulate it. 22:46 Yeah. 22:47 Well, I mean, liquid... 22:48 Where there's nothing happening. 22:51 Liquid coinages. 22:53 I mean, we can do even worse than... 22:55 We could make it like fully custodial, where it's just like, 22:58 you just send it to a Bitcoin wallet created by me, Paul Sztorc. 23:01 And I promise to give everyone back the coins. 23:05 And that is... 23:07 But this is a question that I asked, you know, 23:09 I asked Andrew Polstra and Peter Weil in Amsterdam, 23:14 several Amsterdams ago. 23:15 I don't remember exactly when. 23:16 But I said, this is my question about like, 23:19 people are allowed to spend their Bitcoin on stuff, right? 23:23 And they're allowed to sell their Bitcoin for an altcoin. 23:27 And this is like, you know, this is very similar to that. 23:31 We're just saying, we're sending the Bitcoin to a script 23:34 that unlocks a certain way. 23:36 Do you know what I mean? 23:37 We can already send our coins to miners directly. 23:39 I can already send my coins to whatever, 23:42 Foundry or Jihan Wu or whatever, whoever it is. 23:45 Pick your person. 23:46 I can already... 23:47 Marty Bent, even. 23:48 I can already send my coins to someone who is involved with mining. 23:52 And I can already hope that they would come back. 23:55 And I can already sell my coins for like Solana 23:59 or something that we would all kind of agree is probably not a great idea. 24:02 But the end user can already do that. 24:05 So these ideas don't seem to work. 24:06 I mean, I guess what you're thinking about is something like with the CTV 24:09 can just emulate all the BIP300 parts. 24:11 But I don't think that people appreciate that the design of BIP300 is to... 24:17 is really to make life difficult for the miners. 24:21 Because it's kind of like if they put themselves in a difficult spot, 24:27 like a spot where it's hard for them to steal, 24:29 then it's easier for people to trust them in the first place, 24:32 moving the coins into the sidechain in the first place. 24:37 That's like where I was trying to go with it. 24:40 But I think a lot of people have this view that 24:43 this will decentralize mining or something. 24:45 I don't know. 24:45 They have mysterious views. 24:48 But I try to say, well, this is already... 24:49 all the stuff that's happening here are already... 24:51 So I think someone says something like... 24:55 People will say something like merged mining is bad, so we shouldn't do any more of it via sidechains. 24:59 I think that's something that I still hear from time to time. 25:03 Well, I mean, another comparable, because you were talking about... 25:09 I mean, having a different security trade-off in something... 25:14 I mean, it's curious, because Bitcoin itself, when it was first announced to the world, 25:21 and then after a few years, academics started to comment on it. 25:27 And it was usually fairly derogatory, right? Because they were like, well, it wasn't academically published. 25:31 That didn't seem to sit well with them. And then they'd misunderstand how it works. 25:35 Or they would say it is, you know, its security model is weird, right? 25:41 Like the old eCash systems were using digital signatures, so they were extremely secure. 25:48 But they had... Whereas Bitcoin is like game theory, right? 25:52 So, you know, the good guys versus the bad guys, like 50-50, plus some economic incentive. 25:57 And so it was just different. And it took a while to get over that. 26:04 But it's interesting that, you know, now these days, I think people use Bitcoin as the litmus test, right? 26:14 Like Bitcoin is secure. It's the gold standard. 26:19 And so anything you want to introduce, which has a slightly different security trade-off, 26:27 they'll be immediately suspicious of it. It's like, well, it's not as secure as Bitcoin. 26:32 And my usual answer to that is, well, of course, like, you know, no layer two or, you know, sidechain, etc. 26:39 is typically going to be as secure as Bitcoin or Bitcoin, whatever, you know, clever security technique you come up with, 26:47 Bitcoin would adopt it, like in the main chain, right? 26:50 And so like Lightning is making a trade-off, right? You've got hot wallets, you've got keys online. 26:54 And so it provides an advantage, but it also has security disadvantages. 27:00 And so another comparable is the state chains that Ruben Somsen proposed and is implemented in the Mercury wallet. 27:08 So as I understand that, it's another kind of, I guess, sort of layer two, right? 27:17 With something vaguely like Lightning with like delayed settlement or something. 27:23 And it has weird security trade-off where as long as there's a sort of server that's sort of co-signing or something, 27:35 and as long as it's not trying to steal from you, it's okay. 27:39 You know, if somebody comes to the co-signer afterwards and says, take this coin or freeze this coin, they can't. 27:46 But if they were, you know, if they weren't trustworthy to start with, 27:52 they could, you know, get involved in the payment path and just steal any coin that passed through their hands historically. 27:58 And there's not much you can do about it. 28:00 And, you know, so it's not as widely discussed as well known, but it's implemented. 28:05 You can use it and it doesn't need any opcodes to make it work. 28:09 So I don't know, you know, if that had more flexibility or scope, 28:14 maybe it would elicit the same kind of security trade-off discomfort, let's say, right? 28:25 Yeah. Statechains, I think – I'm a pluralist. I think we should try all these ideas. 28:32 But yeah, the statechains do have the federation that can steal from you, of course. 28:36 I mean, lots of things do. 28:38 And they have the one UTXO size thing. 28:41 But I think there's kind of like – I mean, I tell this story over and over again, and I don't know if anyone – 28:47 people are tired of – probably everyone is tired of hearing this story. 28:50 I think statechains is another example of a data point on this story where it's kind of like – 28:55 because of the block size war and because of the dispute, there was like – 29:02 people really grouped up and there was a lot of like – 29:07 it wasn't as easy to be critical of Bitcoin because people thought that anyone who is – 29:12 anyone who said anything bad about Bitcoin Core, Lightning, statechains, whatever, 29:17 it was like these people are spies sent from the Bitcoin Cash community to spread FUD or something. 29:26 So it's both, I think – sorry. 29:29 Well, I mean, it does happen, right? I mean, altcoins – 29:33 It's both of them. Both of those are examples of things where like – 29:39 we seem to have become like very monocultury or something. Don't you think? Or no? 29:45 Like where it's like – there's like a set – 29:48 well, it's weird because in Bitcoin, there's so many ideas, but they're not – 29:53 like none of them – there's different expectations of like how they will be taken seriously, 29:58 and then there's like will this idea – like should they be done in a certain order or something? 30:06 Well, I mean, I think the – you know, there seems to be a lot of excitement about layer two things, right? 30:13 So the ARK proposal that Burek made only a few months ago seems to create a bit of buzz, 30:21 and the FedeMint protocol, and there's a company with making wallets for it, 30:28 seems to create a lot of excitement in terms of its trade-off. 30:32 But I mean, that is – I think also that that's federated, but arguably very scalable and very private as the trade-off. 30:43 I feel an immense sense of dread with FedeMint. I don't know about you, but I think that it's like you're just asking – 30:51 first of all, I don't think – like people will sign up and then they're going to have to pick like a list 30:54 or they're going to have to pick a group. I think they'll lose a lot of people on that. 30:58 I mean, I hope I'm wrong. I hope it's a big success. 31:01 But I think they'll lose a lot of people at the first step, which is choose your group, 31:06 and then the group will – it's just choose who's going to rug pull you like very soon. 31:11 Well, the rug pull is the – yeah, I mean, the rug pull risk is the trade-off, yeah. 31:16 And I mean, their proposal for that is sort of more inclusive because it's a community thing, right? 31:22 So, you know, different people can run one. 31:26 Whereas Liquid is sort of a similar model in a way, except it's, you know, a group of exchangers and people like that, right? 31:35 So it's sort of more identified and less community. 31:39 But yeah, I mean, in a way, the rug pull risk of – I mean, the theory is that, well, firstly, 31:51 if there's any like individuals or groups of individuals that could steal coins, that worries people, right? 31:59 And in Bitcoin itself, that's pretty hard because, you know, a rollback attack or something is probably very hard to achieve at this point, right? 32:12 The amount of miners and stuff. 32:15 But it's sort of – people think about that in terms of sidechains and Drivechains because the main chain miners – 32:33 well, a user's full node is not validating the sidechain rules. 32:38 Or if it did, there's not much it can do about it because it's not a consensus rule, right? 32:42 So the miners are kind of – a miner could get away with, you know, mining Bitcoin in accordance with Bitcoin rules and stealing from the sidechain or drivechain. 32:53 And so the concept that miners are anonymous, which is, you know, sort of important conceptually, 33:00 because a reason why Bitcoin can have sort of finality and no censorship of transactions and things like that means that people are nervous about a sort of distributed wallet that is controlled by whoever's mining recently, right? 33:23 And some of the proposals are relatively fast payout, and Drivechains takes another approach, which is intentionally slow payout so that humans have time to react. 33:34 Right, yeah. 33:35 But the fast versions – 33:36 Yeah, the fast ones, I think, have a history of not working. 33:40 Like Ethereum has similar versions or something, where it's very fast, and then they just – everything's just taken out of them. 33:47 I mean, in terms of the bridges, yeah, those are kind of infamous. I don't know. People just keep using them anyway. 33:52 But there are so many altcoin bridges that have been emptied of hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years. 33:59 Those just keep happening and happening. 34:01 And you never quite know with those whether the people who operate it or create the software. 34:08 This is a bridge. What it really is is you have to give us all your coins, wallet, and then they just move them. 34:16 Yeah. 34:18 So I think that the fact that sort of conceptually you could portray the wallets in a sidechain as behaving that way is – it's less sort of cut-and-drive, right, because it's not consensus-enforced. 34:43 I mean, I guess it has some similarities with Federmint's trade-off in an abstract way, which is Federmint is not able to audit things because of the privacy, and that's what gives it scalability. 34:57 And with a sidechain or a Drivechain, the full nodes that – like the consensus rules of the main network don't really care too much about the sidechain, so they're not enforcing its rules, and they don't want to enforce its rules because if it had bugs in it, then it could fork the main network. 35:13 And so you have – it's sort of by design, but it has a cost, right? 35:22 So by design, you don't want the consensus rules to enforce the rules of the sidechain, the mainchain consensus rules to enforce the rules of the sidechain, because that's what makes it permissionless and makes it safe for people to try experiments on sidechains that won't bleed through to the mainchain. 35:40 But the trade-off is, well, that's the side effect, right? The consensus rules are not going to protect you. 35:47 So then you're relying on this kind of looser binding, right, of sort of with the fraud-proofs version, but you better hope the fraud-proofs are not censored, or with the slow version. 36:02 Yeah, see, that's why I never thought the fraud-proofs – I thought this is like always pointless, because if 51% is against you, they can filter any message they want out. 36:11 So I always thought it's pointless, and in a way, the Drivechain has the fraud-proofs thing, because what we programmed the sidechain template to do is the sidechain template reduces all the outstanding activity to just the one hash, and then it puts the hash in every block header on the sidechain. 36:29 So it's very, very easy to find – very, very – screaming the correct hash as loud as possible in the easiest-to-find way on the sidechain. 36:39 And that's kind of like the fraud-proof is just to say anyone who runs the software in SPV mode or they run the software in full mode or whatever, they'll certainly know that fraud has been done. 36:51 But you see, the idea of putting the fraud-proof on L1 is just fundamentally impossible, because there's eventually going to be a point where the blockchain either goes left if a certain message is in the blockchain, or it'll go right, and the miners can just censor that message, and they can always control it. 37:07 So I always thought that it was – it was always just going to come down to the miners themselves. 37:10 This is what I thought in 2015 when I was reading some of – I was reading the Blockstream paper, I was reading all the other stuff, and I just thought, well, just push comes to shove. 37:20 This is just the way it's going to be. 37:23 And everything else, even when these people say ZK-SNARK, CoinWitness, whatever, I just thought none of that will work, because the miners will just censor – they'll be ready for that, and they'll just censor anything they don't like. 37:35 And I just thought the only way is to just give the miners the fees, give the miners the price appreciation, and then just make it as absolutely easy as possible to tell – for everyone to tell whether or not this theft is happening and do something about it. 37:53 Yeah. Do you mind summarizing the Blind Merged Mining and why that exists and how it works? 38:07 Absolutely. It exists because I thought the idea – I was like Drivechain November 2015. 38:16 Then I was kind of like whatever. Then Scaling 3 came up, and I wanted to speak there because of how prestigious it is to speak at Scaling Bitcoin. 38:25 So I thought, okay, I'll talk about sidechain scaling. 38:30 And then we had some conversations with yourself, and Matt Corallo was there, and all kinds of other people were there. 38:37 And people were worried about the miners running this software. People didn't like that. 38:43 And then people brought up one funny story that I've heard over the years, which I think is probably true. 38:50 I've heard a couple different people tell it. So it's like they used to merge mine Namecoin, and it was a tiny amount of money. 38:56 But you had to run the Namecoin software because the way merge mining works, traditional merge mining, you have to run the Namecoin software. 39:03 You get like an extra $5 or something every 10 minutes, whereas the Bitcoin block was worth like $7,000 or some huge amount, 1,000x more. 39:15 And then the Namecoin software would crash, and the whole mining farm would shut off. 39:21 And this would take like 35 seconds to restart or something because Namecoin was buggier. 39:28 And then even there were some cases where power is flowing into these machines, but they're off, and so the capacitors just explode and burst into flames or something funny like that would happen. 39:38 And so I was thinking about this after because it was October 2016, and then we had Construct. 39:43 People were talking about blah, blah, blah about the miners, mining centralization. 39:46 So that's really this mining centralization word came up. 39:50 And I decided to publish in January 2017, right before Construct, Blind Merged Mining, which is this thing I had sort of invented. 39:58 This is the mining threat model equilibrium analysis. 40:02 This is all my thoughts. I've just been thinking about this question the whole time. 40:05 When someone tweets about it today in 2023, they don't know that from October 2016 to like January 2017, I already thought more about it than whatever could possibly have been done by people who have just joined recently. 40:24 And so I was really interested in this idea, and I actually thought that the mining centralization argument wasn't good. 40:31 It's not a real thing, which I think we should probably talk about because it's a fascinating idea as to what exactly do people mean when they complain about miners or when they complain about mining centralization, which I think is an absolutely fascinating question. 40:47 But I published this essay, The Mirage of Mining Centralization, that was sort of syndicated because I think people found it interesting. 40:55 And then I had this mining equilibrium model that was also long and people didn't really care about. 41:01 And then I published Blind Merged Mining, and this was all the culmination of all this thought or whatever. 41:06 So the Blind Merged Mining idea is that you can cheat. 41:10 The miners don't necessarily need to run the sidechain full node. 41:14 They can just partner with someone who is. 41:16 That person has the magic bridge that makes it all work is that there's a person who owns layer one coins, have a layer one Bitcoin wallet, and the same person is already using the sidechain for something else. 41:31 So they're just a sidechain user. They have a sidechain node. 41:33 These people already exist. 41:35 Basically, everyone who's a sidechain user has some layer one usage because in order to run the layer two sidechain node, just like in order to run a lightning node, you must run layer one node. 41:46 So this is actually a very easy act. 41:49 So you have these people who are using the layer two sidechain. 41:52 They probably have some coins. 41:54 They probably store most of their coins on L1. 41:56 They probably only use the L2 for whatever feature it is, or it's like a hot wallet like for payments or for whatever. 42:04 So I was like, well, this is the magic is you have the same person standing on both sides. 42:09 And they build the sidechain block paying themselves the fee. 42:12 And then on layer one, the miners just see a message that says, put this code in the Coinbase or put it in a certain spot. 42:21 Put this code in. 42:23 And if you put this code in and move the block from sidechain block 14 to sidechain block 15, I'll pay you this amount of money. 42:31 So the sidechain block is worth five Bitcoin. 42:34 Then they pay 4.99 layer one coins. 42:38 They get five sidechain coins when the block is the side block is mined on layer one. 42:43 They pay 4.99 layer one coins to the miner. 42:47 The miner gets 4.99 coins, so they don't really care. 42:50 And they also have no they're relatively indifferent as to whether or not they themselves decide they're losing money by not running. 42:59 They're not missing out. 43:01 They may miss out slightly, but this is because there's a layer one to layer two exchange rate. 43:05 And because running the sidechain node is actually literally inconvenient. 43:09 So on one hand, they can either run the sidechain node and not run or they don't have to. 43:14 So they could be blind. 43:16 Do they need a pooling protocol to do that? 43:19 Or can that transaction be broadcast so any miner would automatically include it? 43:23 Yeah, I think we made it so that it would just be a broadcasted transaction. 43:27 I think I don't know if they. 43:30 Well, I mean, we have cryptex here, actually. 43:33 Yeah, so you can create a special transaction that is called a BMM request. 43:38 And that includes the hash of the sidechain hash Merkle root and eight more bytes to identify it as being a BMM request, as well as a few bytes of the previous main chain block hash. 43:52 And then a miner who wants to include that transaction. 43:54 They have to include it at a specific height because it has a lock time set. 43:59 And then they also have to include the BMM commitment in the coinbase output of the block that they include the BMM request transaction in. 44:09 So there's basically a way to use the memory pool to create bids for miners to create these BMM commitment hashes in their own coinbases. 44:19 OK, so it sounds like it's not like automatic for existing miners necessarily, but there's a way to do it or something like that. 44:30 Yeah, they would have to update to recognize those transactions and include them correctly. 44:36 They would have to enforce something because we didn't want it. 44:40 We can't have them collect all the bids. 44:42 Like what if everyone you're at an auction house and I say I bid $7, I bid $7.50, I bid $8.00. 44:48 The auctioneer doesn't collect them all. 44:50 So it's actually it's actually kind of weird because we made a special kind of transaction where only one of them can be included per sidechain like per block. 45:00 And so the rest all just expire as invalid. 45:02 So there's a kind of an it's very unusual, whereas most Bitcoin transactions do not have that property at all. 45:10 Where if most of them, if they're valid, they're just always valid and they're just there for the picking kind of. 45:16 So this is a very unusual type of. 45:19 So in our testnet, you'll see every block there will be a little bit of a flood of BMM request transactions. 45:26 And then immediately after the sidechain block is connected, those will all be removed from the memory pool because after they've missed their chance to create the BMM block with the lock time set and the previous main chain block bytes, the BMM request basically expires and they don't lose their money because it's removed from the memory pool. 45:45 It becomes an invalid transaction at that point. 45:49 OK. 45:51 And and I mean, I guess the miner isn't really. 45:55 Checking, right. And it's not really a specific of the blind, much money versus they would choose whoever pays the highest fee. 46:04 Right. But I mean, like if if. 46:06 You know, I guess there's a potential because the miner is maybe not verifying or, you know, they could just cheat that you could get a commitment that is somehow wrong, right? 46:19 Like, it looks like a sidechain commitment, but the hash is wrong when there's no block with that hash. 46:25 Oh, yeah. 46:26 You could do that. 46:28 Yeah. And then the sidechain would have to decide how it handles that. 46:32 Our sidechain examples would ignore that. 46:36 Yeah. 46:38 So that would be just waste money, basically, right? 46:43 Yeah, exactly. 46:45 Yeah. 46:46 You'd be giving up space for real fee paying transactions by doing that. 46:49 The person who has an invalid hash would be like if you you would try to the the the analogy is like if it's included in L1 and it does the BIP301 BMM rules, that would be as if the sidechain block met its difficulty requirement. 47:08 But then maybe the header meets the difficulty requirement or the hash marker meets the difficulty requirement or whatever, because, of course, part of the problem with explaining this is the sidechain. 47:17 People can just do whatever they want and make the architecture whatever they want. 47:20 But the if you meet the difficulty requirement, that doesn't necessarily mean that the block exists or is valid or is a real sidechain block or something. 47:29 So it's kind of like that's kind of how I think of it in my head is that that's the analogy is like you pay and you get included. 47:37 Now you met the difficulty adjustment on the sidechain. 47:40 So that is that one is valid. 47:42 But if there's no vector of transactions or anything, then there's or if there's just no the block is never broadcast, then it's just you would go back. 47:52 This is the key thing is you have to be able to reorder the sidechain without reordering the main chain also. 47:57 So this is like each block kind of refers each code only works for like its spot in the main chain blocks chain and the sidechain block chain. 48:08 It's only and then it doesn't work. 48:11 Actually, what you said is interesting, right? 48:13 So, I mean, the main chain can have reords, but the direction can too. 48:19 So the main chain could be progressing without reords. 48:23 And then there's a commitment to like one height in the Drivechain. 48:27 And then competing one like so it gets an orphan block in the Drivechain. 48:33 And that's valid, I guess, because otherwise you're assuming very tight coordination of, you know, Drivechain liners or something, right? 48:40 So important that I made an image of it in the January 2017. 48:46 And because they remember when I sat down to design it, the whole reason that I the whole reason that it came to exist at all was because of this feedback about from the sidechain idea. 48:59 This is like a sidechain phobia or something, which is like 2016 after scaling three people are like, OK, people are like, we admit that the nodes don't have to run this. 49:10 But maybe the miners have to run it also. 49:12 So I was thinking, like, how do I make it so that the miners are never, ever harmed by not running this? 49:19 That was the whole ground up building of the idea. 49:24 So you have to maintain reords and everything above it reords, including lightning, whatever sidechains, state chain opens everything, everything reords of the main chain reords. 49:35 But the sidechain can reord and without reord. 49:39 And for this reason, I actually wonder about whether or not someone will actually bid up the whole amount, including the main chain miners themselves. 49:47 So I don't know about the L1 to L2 exchange rate for this type of thing, because it would be like p-sniping or something. 49:54 So for everyone, it might be the case that the sidechain block is worth eight Bitcoin in fees or something, whatever number you like. 50:01 But then on LayerOne, even to a huge group of miners or even to anyone, it may only be worth, you know, six Bitcoin or something, because people might think, well, the sidechain block, someone might reord the sidechain block later, then I just paid six on LayerOne. 50:21 But now I get nothing. So you have the reord risk. The reord risk is like a big discount that falls over the whole thing. 50:29 Oh, right. The person who is constructing the blind merge mine is paying for inclusion, but it could get unincluded. So they would pay and not receive the sidechain fees in that case, I guess. Yeah. 50:43 So they pay on L1 in this block, and then there is a sidechain block that pays them the fees, which they may not like as much or whatever, you know. 50:53 So yeah, I mean, I think the analogy is good of difficulty requirement, because that's the case in every blockchain, is that your block might be reordered. 51:02 So this is why the analogy, so I try to emphasize this analogy that what you're doing is, when you when you do the BMM block, you are meeting the difficulty requirement for that block, but you don't know that it won't be orphaned, or everybody. 51:18 Well, I mean, I think that's, that's unavoidable, really. I mean, I think it's good that you, you know, design it in a robust way, because, you know, otherwise, the only way to fix it is centralized. 51:30 Actually, it cracks me up when some of the big block Bitcoin forks, historically, kind of tried to fight against double spans and RBF. And they basically found out, they eventually learned why Bitcoin allows orphans and why there's proof of work. It's a hard way. So it's like, it's inevitable, right? 51:57 Very important. We should explain this to the audience, because it is actually, it's like a kind of a weird deep fact or something. But this is related to like, like, imagine someone finds a block that meets the proof of work requirement, but they just never broadcast it. And you don't know, the block could contain an error, it could have an invalid transaction, or it could be perfectly valid. 52:23 And you don't really know if you should build on it or not. And you have no choice but to basically orphan this block until people say what it is. You have to the orphan is always better. It's always better to just orphan the block and say, I don't know what's going on. But unless I see, unless I get a perfectly perfect block in front of me right now, I'm going to thumbs this down or something. 52:44 I mean, actually, there's an empirical lesson that hopefully miners learned from in BIP66 activation, where too many people were spy mining, i.e. just pulling headers off the pool and mining on them without, before waiting to check if the block is valid. And yeah, they kind of raced away, building on the wrong chain that was coincidentally invalid. 53:13 And that has to be fixed in a hurry. 53:15 The model is an example of, in fact, if everyone who ran their own pool node was totally unaffected by that. 53:23 Right, yeah. 53:24 It's kind of ambiguous if you, if you how quickly you upgraded or something, I suppose. 53:30 Right. 54:01 While also not paying those horrible costs, which I actually think is just the, now they aggressively spy mine. They know if other people are on the same network, and they probably also check it as fast as they can. 54:13 And then. 54:13 Yeah, I think they check after the fact. Right, I think they check after the facts. And if they turn out to be wrong, they'll try to orphan their own mistake kind of thing, right? 54:22 Yeah, and so I think that we now live in a world, thanks to the fact that the nodes were vigilant in that case, and punish the miners. 54:31 We live in a world where everyone is, we get all the benefits of all the different worlds, because we have every, there's no real, like everyone's, the whole mining network switches over to the next block, like basically as fast as humanly possible. 54:42 So we have that benefit. 54:44 That means less money is wasted on stale blocks or orphan blocks or whatever they're called these days. 54:51 Which means that network difficulty is higher. And it means that actually nothing, even though nothing is validated, like in time, it's still validated quickly enough that there's no reorgs even of the invalid blocks, and then everyone running their own node is still. 55:05 I mean, I think that story does also highlight, so I think, you know, the thinking about the sequence of how you might want to go about activating a soft fork, is that you ideally want lots of full nodes, preferably economically relevant ones, like ones that people and services are transacting and verifying things through. 55:34 So you don't want the whole industry to be upgraded before the miners activate, because then if the miners make some kind of mining mistake, the network, you know, fixes it for them, ignores their mistake, otherwise you create mayhem in the network, if the nodes are, like if the important nodes in the network are lagging and not upgraded, that could be problematic. 55:57 So quite interesting. 56:00 It's very bad for running a full node if you don't, if you're like missing one of the, like you're missing like a file, like whatever.h, whatever.cpp, you know what I mean, like there's like hidden validation rules that you don't have, that's not good. 56:16 Well, I mean, I think there's a sort of another kind of, there's a lot of defense in depth thinking that goes into Bitcoin soft forks as well. So I think usually the upgraded transaction is non-standard as well, so that it shouldn't propagate, like it will be accepted if it's in a block, but it won't propagate because it's not standard. 56:46 In a pin-to-pin network, so like that sort of protects against some stuff, I think, indirectly. 56:51 Yeah, I tried to present... 56:53 Yes. 56:53 Good? 56:55 Oh, I was saying in Lisbon, I tried to present something like this, where I was trying to say we should stigmatize, there was like this meta consensus idea, and I was trying to say that sidechains are actually good, because with a sidechain, you are putting the coins into a UTXO, where it kind of is like being a non-standard, where you're saying, we know on layer one that we don't know what these rules are. 57:20 We don't know what they are over there, but we know the BIP300 rules, which are just count to this number, so what we're saying is, don't complain over here, move the complaining over there, and I was thinking that that was the point I tried to make in my talk, consensus and dissent, but no one, I think, understood it at all, unfortunately, except for maybe you, because I remember you asking a question, but other people, I think, were very confused. 57:46 So going back to the centralization risk argument, I think that was partly informed by the kind of arguments presented and the risks that were put as counter-arguments to the big block proposals, right, and say, not sure whether it was Bitcoin Cash or one of the other ones, 58:14 but one of the forks that didn't happen, but basically they wanted some kind of enormous block, like 100 megabytes, a gigabyte or something, right, and my argument to some of the proponents of that, why that might be a bad idea, is like, look, not that many people have fast enough machines and fast enough networks to keep up with that, or to catch up with history and verify it, 58:41 and so you'll end up with a kind of de facto federated system with a handful of nodes in high-speed data centers, and potentially if that escalates over time, you get to a situation where it's more like a private database where nobody gets to see the history, like as a full node, as a power user, yeah, the miners don't give it to you, basically, 59:06 and they say, well, you know, trust the miner, here's the hash, here's the mobile path for you, and you don't need to know, and if that happens, you know, arguably, the sort of centralized producers of, well, of blocks who would be collecting transactions together, they could take the fees, and it'd be hard, it'd be a big barrier to entry to becoming a miner, you know, assuming they don't offer a pool service, right, 59:36 even if they do offer a pool service, it'd be very hard to, well, I mean, if somebody's offering a pool service, they can set the policy, right, so they could be censoring things or, you know, adding, increasing the fees or something, and so it's hard to sort of break in and add a new pool, 1:00:02 but if you get, if you want a certain amount of, a low enough barrier to entry so that you can, so that people can start a new pool, I guess that's one argument, right, and it's a form of, I think there's two, go ahead. 1:00:16 I've carefully been tracking this, I feel like I'm like a hunter in the wilderness, and I have been tracking this argument also, all around, it's like, what happened in 2015, I mean, the block size war started to heat up in 2015, and so I thought, well, this is interesting, I mean, surely, it was a very interesting thing to happen, and I collect, like I did, like I would later do, in, before the Blind Rogue Mining, I was collecting, I was like, what is this dispute really about, 1:00:43 because you probably remember my talk from Scaling One, when I had that thing about the principle, I said, what is the principle of this matter, like, what is going on in this conversation, was kind of like, I was very interested in this topic, and so I was tracking down everything everyone had said, and I was trying to boil it down, 1:01:02 and I did track it down, with this big block, the problem with big blocks is it does, in fact, make it more expensive, more difficult to run the node, and the full node is checking the block for errors, so the error correcting on the block, I thought it was all about the node cost, and I wrote that post, measuring centralization, and I said, this is all on the full node, this is all on the full node cost, 1:01:30 and that is exactly how I came up with Drivechain, in fact, because I had worked all that out, it was September, and then we went to Scaling One, and then I listened to everything in Scaling One, and we did the breakout groups, and we had all that stuff, and I was like, well, I didn't see any reason why my thing would be wrong, 1:01:48 and I thought, it's all about the full node cost, because the mining cost, the miners already do a bunch of stuff, you know, they already need ASICs, they need electricity, half of them are getting fired all the time anyway, so I was just kind of like, the miners, you have chosen to like, you know, you're like going to like an Olympic boxing ring or something, that's like, so I was like, you signed up to be like a Navy SEAL or something, you're not like, there's not, they're constantly raising the standard, you know, you're going, you're going to try and play, 1:02:19 you know, chess against the world champion, you know, so I was thinking of miners kind of like that, but the nodes, I was like, oh, this node thing, that's something that everyone should do, that is the barrier of joining the network, so I was, many of the arguments that people such as yourself made, I was like, putting it into my head, 1:02:36 and I was thinking, yep, it's all about the node, and that's why Drivechain explicitly draws this exact line, it draws this completely like, you know, church and state separation line between the node and the miners, and it says, well, kind of the miners are, would be expected to do this, they farm this up for merge mining, no big deal, but then the nodes do not have to run the large block thing, 1:03:01 and this is all related to the stuff that we were talking about before, because when you brought up buy and merge mining, I was kind of thinking like, I could come up with this idea, but now, looking back, I wonder if it actually just made people more and more confused, because I really do believe it doesn't matter if the miners need to do something, because the miners need to do a lot, you know, 1:03:23 so now we've brought, we've come full circle, we've come back to this intriguing idea of the, which we should talk about a lot, because I think it's a fascinating idea, because plenty of people then went on to say at Scaling 3, they said, okay, we buy it, the node part, but they said the mining part is also important, and many, many people, David Harding, lots and lots of people that I could name, tons, because I researched all, I was trying to find every time this had ever been mentioned, 1:03:50 and to this day, it happens on Twitter, with Drivechain comes up, miner centralization is bound to also pop up, but it's something that I don't know. 1:04:00 Well, I mean, I think, clearly, I think it's fair to say that running a mining node is a lot more expensive than running a full node. Now, the node part is approximately the same, but, you know, a mining, miners are typically like a farm of them, like, you know, hundreds of kilowatts or megawatts or something, right? 1:04:26 And so, you know, they'll have more bandwidth, because the pool protocols are super chatty, and each individual miner is furiously exchanging work packets with a pool. So, you know, you're going to have a big power bill, you're going to have, you know, each miner might cost $10,000. And, you know, so it's, it's not a cheap activity. 1:04:54 You know, if 1:04:56 Yeah, yeah, completely different planet than what the node costs. The node, you know, running the node might be expensive, but it's not going to cost, you know, like one S9 will get you like a full node for like many years, even at like, probably a large block size. 1:05:10 Right. So, so I think it's, it's useful to sort of put a stick in the ground or try to articulate what's important and why. And I think it is, it is important, you know, that people should be able to run a full node, catch up with the networks and catch the low cost. 1:05:37 So nobody's arguing with that, right? Not your keys, not your coins, and it's important to be able to run a full node. And more people are running full nodes, I think, partly because of lightning, and partly because of the block size drama to protect themselves as a kind of shield, right? Your full node will keep you on the chain that you want to be on. If you're relying on some SPV thing, maybe some service disagrees with you, or you just get taken along, and you're not paying attention. So that's good. 1:06:04 Yeah, that's good. 1:06:35 Some kind of, or zero sync is another one. So there's all the idea of committed commitments to, which is those snapshots that are validated. So those are things that would, you know, cost a miner to create and verify, and maybe cost a full node less, because you're just consuming it, right? 1:06:58 Yeah, I think the Bloom filter is a very good, like, it's very similar to like, how I think of the sidechain. It's like a service that you could do, and it would cost something because the Bloom filter costs, whatever, something, I don't know what it is, but it costs like resources. 1:07:16 Yeah, I mean, zero sync might cost more, because it's doing like, you know, zero knowledge proof creation. And I think sometimes those proofs are more expensive to compute and verify, depending on the technology involved. I think it's true for that type. 1:07:31 Where's the, you know, people, because if I bring up Drivechain on Twitter, some people will sort of push back on it, but they don't push back on Bloom filters. You know, like, so what's going on? 1:07:45 Well, well, I mean, that's, I think it's just because thinking about security tradeoffs is complicated. It's unintuitive to most people. And so as a proxy for that, they'll question everything, and want nothing to nothing to materially change about the balance of things, because they don't necessarily understand from first principles, what would happen if those balances changed a bit. 1:08:13 And so maybe if some of them, you know, if we do think about the first principles, maybe some of them change a bit, that's perfectly reasonable tradeoff, right. And so you might argue that with, you know, some kind of Bloom filter thing, right, let's say it doubles the compute load for mining full node, and adds 10% to a normal full node, and it provides some benefit. 1:08:38 And so you can sync to UTXO commitments, or you can run a more nicer SPB client or something, right. So I think those are tradeoffs that people engage with, without thinking, I mean, they're probably thinking about it, right, the people who work on this kind of protocols, that it is a tradeoff, but they seem to be relatively uncontroversial tradeoffs, as long as they're not enormous, right, you know, like, the compute cost didn't go up by a factor of 1000. 1:09:07 Or, or make it too expensive to run a full node as a client. So I think that, I think that argument is, you know, that that tradeoff is a reasonable thing to say that a mining full node could increase its cost a bit, and like verifying the sidechain of moderate size would fall into that bucket, if you ask me, right, because as you say, they have typically far higher costs, even for somebody with, you know, 1:09:37 a couple of miners in the garage or something, 1:09:39 you have to be very, very small. And then the other thing is, of course, each sidechain, you know, they could just drop it if they it was too expensive. They don't have to do it, they could just say we only it's just like how bloom filter serve like the node services are not all mandatory. 1:09:57 You know, like, yeah, so they can just drop them if they're too. And the other thing that I that I think is not is always, for some reason, people commonly forget this, but that because people imagine they will do a best case, worst case scenario, and they're going to imagine like a sidechain node that costs infinity or something, but, but in order for the sidechain network really exists at all in any meaningful way, 1:10:18 they have to be some people who are using it who are basically 0% minor, there's a sidechain full nodes, they have no hash rate, and they have no interest in mining, you know, and the node has to be cheap enough for them, or this network is just going to not exist. And so Solana or something, it has to, it can't be like, there is a limit before the sidechain will just die off, I think. 1:10:43 Yeah. 1:10:48 So, um, I mean, I think that is an interesting point about when, when it stops making sense to run a blockchain, I think, like, the whole, the whole, like, the key value of a blockchain is that users can audit it, like, not all users have to, but, you know, and for the main chain, you know, people want to audit it. 1:11:18 People want that audit cost to be relatively low. So it can be decentralized and lots of people can do it for a sidechain or Drivechain, they're probably okay with that being a bit of a higher cost, because opt in. And, you know, maybe people want to make a trade off where you need a desktop and a reasonably, you know, consumer bandwidth, but higher bandwidth, let's say, right. 1:11:40 And so that I think people are okay with that trade off. But, you know, if, if it gets to the point where a power user can't really validate the blockchain, without moving into a data center, then it's not really a blockchain anymore, I would say, right, or you're using the wrong data structure. If you got to trust the miners, you could make a more efficient protocol, if that's your argument. 1:12:07 Some of the big block camps, they actually argue that you should trust miners and try to, like, invert the security model. And because you do that, if you want to build something, have people opt into it, but I would argue it's kind of dumb, because the wrong data structure, if that's what you want to do. So I guess, that's not really... 1:12:25 That's not really... 1:12:56 The Drivechain is like a one hash every three months is a lot different than controlling the whole chain, like every message on the chain, and the chain is completely dark, and you can't see what's going on there. 1:13:09 So I guess, I guess the risk perception is that something could make a transition from being, you know, power user verifiable to not verifiable. And you can see the motivation, which is kind of like what some big blockers argued, right? 1:13:30 Yeah, the validation is the node, it's all the node cost. So I always thought you have to break it into different node costs. And the miners, then they run whichever nodes they want. And if the sidechains are very, very giving them a lot of revenue, and the revenue kind of covers their costs. And if other people, if that's where the big blockers want to go, then... 1:13:53 Did I compare... See, this is important about that balance of power risks thing. Like, I compare the large block sidechain to like Vita or Venmo or something, like something where we have people who aren't using Bitcoin at all. 1:14:07 They're probably not going to become cypherpunks tomorrow, but we can move them on the continuum. We want to move as many people on, and we especially want everything to be in Bitcoin, BTC, the coin, 21 billion coins, we want them to be owners. 1:14:23 So I'm thinking, like, how do we just get those people in, like, right now, and they can become small blockers next year? Because right now, they're just they're fiat people. They're infinite blockers. 1:14:36 Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you could see that, you know, a transition from verifiable to non-verifiable could be like... 1:14:54 Could be like, you know, moving from a big block Drivechain to moving to FediMint, 1:14:59 because you can't usefully audit what the Federation is signing, 1:15:05 because some different technical reason, right? Because the blind signatures, 1:15:10 you can never tell that the occlusion of some threshold of the Federation didn't, 1:15:18 like, print extra coins for themselves on the side and peg them out at a time before anybody 1:15:24 noticed that kind of thing, right? I mean, eventually, you notice when it hits zero, 1:15:27 and there's still people with claims and complaining, but it could persist for a while. 1:15:33 So I think that that would be the risk, right, that you could get to that situation, 1:15:39 because the Drivechain block got bigger and bigger until the only people running it are 1:15:45 businesses that don't care, or think, you know, some fractionality is in their interest, 1:15:51 and they keep it quiet or something, right? So now, I don't know if you... I mean, 1:15:59 I think sometimes people... 1:16:00 That's the end user, right? You know, the end user's risk. You could tell a similar story about 1:16:06 basically any other L2, right? You could say there's a custodial thing, it works great for a 1:16:11 while, the owner dies and gives it to his children, they rug pull it. Or you could say lightning, 1:16:20 same thing. You could say people use lightning for a while, but over time, such and such happened. 1:16:26 Custodial lightning took over, or... 1:16:28 Well, I mean, I guess the lightning story could be there are so many channels open that there's 1:16:32 not enough space in blocks to close them. It suddenly starts, like, a mass, you know, 1:16:38 hostile closes of, you know, hundreds of thousands of channels simultaneously, 1:16:43 and there's not enough space blocks to close them out, to counteract them or something, you know? 1:16:51 Would be if we had a magical technology that worked perfectly for everyone, that everyone 1:16:54 liked, and that everyone understood. But if we don't have that magic technology, 1:17:00 then it seems to me the obvious thing that we should do is that each end user 1:17:06 should be presented with some kind of menu of options. 1:17:11 Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that probably, you know, because what I'm describing in terms of 1:17:18 centralization failure, I think people have learned or adopted a philosophical viewpoint 1:17:27 informed by Bitcoin blockchain logic and consensus rules that any kind of 1:17:36 desired outcome should be enforced by a smart contract. Like, the fact that you've got four 1:17:41 nodes verifying the network should, you know, at least game theory or mathematically prevent the 1:17:47 bad thing from happening. But in reality, many things you can't really do that to, right? 1:17:53 Just doesn't happen to work out. And so, you know, you could always say, well, you know, 1:17:58 people could go nuts and things go in a bad direction. And then this, you know, this 1:18:04 particular chain or layer two or arc or lightning or something could, it's kind of self-sovereign, 1:18:14 unilateral withdrawal logic could get degraded by something excessive, right? And, 1:18:25 you know, question is like, yeah, you probably construct arguments like that for 1:18:31 many existing systems, right? Like probably you could make one for lightning, 1:18:35 for a two-way peg sidechain with fraud proofs, you know, if I guess the unilateral 1:18:42 withdrawals could get too many to peg out or something, right? That's another risk. 1:18:47 So I guess we just have to evolve incrementally. I mean, I think like, you've got to say like, 1:18:56 you know, I mean, I think one argument is like technology is too complicated. 1:19:01 I mean, I think one argument is like technology is too complicated to expect a silver bullet for 1:19:05 everything that is future-proof for all possible, you know, evolution and the way that usage evolves 1:19:13 and limits evolve. So realistically, technology evolves incrementally. And, you know, when it 1:19:24 gets close to problems or limits, you know, people get invented and they find new things. 1:19:29 So it sort of evolves biologically. So we shouldn't, you know, give up or reject things 1:19:38 because, you know, there are hypothetical things that could happen in the future, 1:19:45 because we don't know the future and new ideas are evolving all the time. 1:19:49 They happen only to the people who have decided to use each L2, so to speak. So like, 1:19:56 that is how it should be, right? Like that's a nirvana. I mean, is it not, right? 1:20:07 Yeah, well, I mean, I think that was being discussed at Scaling One, 1:20:12 and it's unfortunate that, you know, these large block forks didn't actually get packaged up as a 1:20:20 large block opt-in sidechain, because that would allow people who want that trade-off to get what 1:20:26 they wanted, right? And wouldn't need a default drummer. And it would be an okay trade-off, 1:20:33 you know, up to some size, you know, as long as our user can verify stuff, I think it's a fair 1:20:39 trade-off. And just so we can be clear, you're saying that BIP300 could have prevented the 1:20:46 entire Bitcoin Cash Civil War? Well, that's what I thought, like a number of us tried to 1:20:58 suggest that to some of the big block proponents. And I think the typical argument was 1:21:07 that it's too slow, and they wanted to, you know, everything was urgent, 1:21:10 and that would require technology. Imagine where we could be today, then, in that reality. 1:21:18 Large blockers would be better off today, by far, like way, much, much better. I think everyone 1:21:24 would be better. But I think one of the weird things they did with many of their, you know, 1:21:30 whatever, stunts or attempts, I think just discredited themselves, basically unfairly. 1:21:39 So some, like a lot of them, I think, like, they didn't have a better idea, but 1:21:44 they just lost so hard. And also, the other thing, they discredited many other things. Like, 1:21:53 I think the hard fork is actually not as bad of an idea. I think it was like, kind of like, 1:21:58 everyone gets free money, we see another idea in the wild, we try it. But because of the 1:22:04 circumstances of the first big hard fork was like, trying to name it Bitcoin and stuff, 1:22:10 I thought was actually made it so that this institution or this idea of the hard fork 1:22:18 could like, basically, never be used again, or whatever. It kind of like, was very confusing. 1:22:28 So, can I ask something related to you, Mr. Black? What do you think the risks are today 1:22:37 of ossification? Let's just say that we, you know, I guess organically, so to speak, 1:22:44 everything is ossified, whether or not we realize. What do you think the risks are of 1:22:52 something like that happening again, and not being able to be avoided or other risks? 1:22:58 Can you still hear me? 1:23:00 Yeah, we hear you. Yes, we do. 1:23:02 Okay, yeah. The thing looks frozen, but it's still working. Okay. Well, yeah, I mean, I think 1:23:13 Bitcoin still has insufficient modularity, and lacking features on layer one for like, 1:23:24 you know, vaults and covenants and extensibility and modularity. I think, you know, 1:23:32 with some of those things built in, it could make sense to have a fairly ossified base layer, 1:23:39 because then there would be enough modularity and extensibility that other things could be, 1:23:44 you know, evolved by programming without needing to change, you know, opcodes or add opcodes and 1:23:53 things to be done in layer twos that, you know, make different security tradeoffs, I guess. 1:24:01 So, it would be unfortunate if ossification is too close. You know, if we're stuck where we are, 1:24:10 I don't think that would be an unfortunate situation. 1:24:14 Yeah, I think like people say, you were talking about that balance of power thing, 1:24:19 which idea, which I think is 100% correct, which is like people say, well, we don't want to disturb 1:24:24 the way things are too much. But I do really wonder about like, I kind of always think, 1:24:30 well, isn't it disturbing to have just to have a SegWit2x happen or to have a Bitcoin Cash 1:24:36 exist at all, or to have altcoins exist? Like, every day, the people in Ethereum, they wake up 1:24:44 and they have one thought on their mind. This is the same thought they've had since 1:24:49 2016. The whole Ethereum community. And people try to avoid 1:24:58 acknowledging this, but to me, it's clearly the truth that they are thinking every single day 1:25:05 how do we flip Bitcoin and take over? And it's like, you could disable a lot of that if you 1:25:12 just had the ETH sidechain, it would just be like, there would be no... 1:25:22 I mean, maybe they do, like they're probably thinking how to 1:25:25 pump and dump their ICO, like all altcoins. But, you know, personally, 1:25:30 I think it's better to, you know, focus on innovation and not look over your shoulder at what 1:25:37 crazy people are doing, like regulatory risk takers and stuff. But I also think it's implausible that 1:25:46 you know, something so pre-mined and centrally controlled and insecure and buggy could be, 1:25:53 you know, digital gold, right? Like, I think Bitcoin is like... 1:25:57 I said that type of thing in 2015, 2016, 2017. But now, years later, I think people show up 1:26:04 and to them, it looks Bitcoin just looks pre-mined to them. They just say 1991, 1:26:10 they have no real... from their point of view, they don't really see a difference. 1:26:14 Well, I mean, I think there is a phenomena, which is probably like, you know, human psychology or 1:26:22 something, to look at something that has been around longer and had a meteoric rise and feel 1:26:30 that you missed out, right? And so to try and jump on something that looks early and with some good 1:26:37 marketing or, you know, and try to get, you know, try to play with that. And so you see newcomers 1:26:44 go through that experience sometimes and then get burnt by, you know, like, you know, 1:26:51 by, you know, but it's, but I think it's also like a bit unstable because there are many, 1:26:57 you know, there are always new chains trying to... I think like these sort of layer two, 1:27:03 sorry, not layer two, but these sort of smart contract chains are like, kind of 1:27:07 ballistically competing with each other, you know, there's dozens of them, right? And they're all, 1:27:12 you know, I think you have the same effect with Ethereum, right? The people that 1:27:16 were in the Ethereum pre-mine, which literally was a pre-mine, 1:27:22 are looked at disfavorably by newcomers who then are persuaded to go into the next pre-mine, 1:27:28 like, you know, Solana or whatever, there are dozens of them, right? So, you know, it is what 1:27:35 it is, but I think the other thing that's maybe more interesting is that, you know, when apparently 1:27:43 in 2015, when the sidechain paper was released, the price of altcoins went down across the board. 1:27:50 Now, I wasn't paying attention to altcoin prices, so I don't know if that was coincidental, 1:27:53 but apparently it happened, right? And so I think that maybe people were expecting that, 1:27:59 oh no, you know, they believed the feature story, you know, the feature coin story, 1:28:04 that the value is because of the features, and if Bitcoin was going to take all the features, 1:28:09 then it would be harder to market the coins. But I think ultimately these things are, you know, 1:28:14 the altcoins, 20,000 more, 25, I don't know what the number is now. It's a kind of mutually 1:28:22 understood lottery ticket or casino game, right? So, you know, so with the, you know, some of the 1:28:32 Drivechains that you've built as examples, you know, you might think, well, no chain would be 1:28:39 able to bootstrap itself without feature now because you don't need to use it on Bitcoin, 1:28:44 right? But I think that misses the point that, you know, there are people that want to gamble 1:28:48 on those things, right? Or they want to, you know, get connected to the insiders, 1:28:54 get cheap coins early, get discounts for promoting it, et cetera. And there's a whole ecosystem of 1:29:01 people trying to make money off of that. And really what they're doing is, you know, 1:29:05 trying to separate people from their Bitcoin or from their dollars, right? So I think that ecosystem. 1:29:13 Well, a lot of people, I think a lot of people are doing that where they know there are some 1:29:16 people who are deep down, they're Bitcoiners and those people are trying to just maximize the amount 1:29:21 of Bitcoin they have. But there's different people who are the deep down who are Ethereum people, 1:29:26 and those people want to acquire Ethereum and then flip Bitcoin with Ethereum. They 1:29:33 really want, they just think something that moves slowly could be defeated by something that 1:29:38 does this a lot of trial and error and a lot of R&D. 1:29:44 I don't think so, but, you know, they can hold on to their copium, right? 1:29:50 Well, I was just going to say the first part of what you said seemed to say, 1:30:00 like bleeping the feature story and having the altcoin prices crash. 1:30:05 When the sidechain paper came out, I thought you were going in a different direction with 1:30:08 your comments. And I thought you were going to say, aha, this proves that altcoiners know that 1:30:14 the more progress sidechains make, the more doomed they are. And the only reason why they 1:30:18 haven't crashed to zero is because it's dragging its feet on the sidechains. So I thought you were 1:30:22 going to go in a completely different direction. Well, no, I mean, I think people's expectation 1:30:29 maybe shifted over time. So I think that altcoin price crash was not coincidental. I think it was 1:30:36 perception at the time. But then, you know, I mean, of course, sidechains have been slower to 1:30:44 you know, go live and have new features on them, but, and have a variety of features, right, 1:30:50 that are actually live. But I think also, you know, the probably that market has realized that 1:31:03 it doesn't really matter ultimately. I mean, like some of these multi-billion dollar chains 1:31:08 are literally copies of other chains, right? Like the technology is the same, 1:31:12 or very small tweaks. There's different set of promoters and pre-mine owners, 1:31:19 and they're competing with each other. And, you know, some of them have taken like central use 1:31:24 cases away from Ethereum and have higher volume than that. And probably that will change when they 1:31:30 start to get overloaded or something, right? So I'm thinking, my thinking about, 1:31:38 you know, altcoin economics, because it concerned me from the point of view, you know, 1:31:44 of the efficient market hypothesis that if you think these things are silly, and I do, 1:31:49 why isn't the free market able to fix it, right? And so that was perplexing. And I wanted to like, 1:31:55 figure out a way to short them and, you know, profit from correcting this, you know, 1:32:04 defective market situation. And so eventually I came to the conclusion that, you know, 1:32:10 it's just a different market. It's a lottery ticket market and people like gambling. 1:32:16 And so my revised theory is that, you know, 95% or more people that are participating in it have 1:32:24 no illusions that the altcoins they're speculating are going to be digital gold, or that they're 1:32:30 going to last more than a few years. And they're just trying to, you know, play the musical game, 1:32:35 musical chess game. But here's the thing, if you think there's no tech, there must be a tech 1:32:42 like angle, like there must be the bleeping the feature story, like you were saying, 1:32:46 that must be a significant component, because if it's not, then all that needs there to be 1:32:53 some kind of a bid asset sidechain, counterparty sidechain, ordinal sidechain, whatever you call 1:32:58 it, like something with you have, you can just make stuff all the time, like you can make a 1:33:04 lottery, or you can make like NFT, ICOs. So I mean, in some sense, we do see this all the time, 1:33:11 we see ICOs and NFTs, which are just like for fun. But if that were existed, then there's no reason 1:33:21 why there'd be no reason for the altcoins to exist. In order for the story to actually work, 1:33:26 there has to be... I mean, I think they need, you know, because you could say, well, why waste the 1:33:36 bandwidth and the disk space on a blockchain, you know, you can have like centrally operated, 1:33:41 provably for poker games and casino games, this is known like, pre-blockchain technology, right? 1:33:48 And why don't they use that? So then the argument is, well, why don't they do that? 1:33:55 It would be cheaper, you know, you could make, you wouldn't be restricted by technology, right? 1:34:00 You could make up whatever crazy rules you wanted and have a central server provably fairly 1:34:05 enforce them in some kind of, you know, role playing gambling game. But I think that doesn't 1:34:13 work because they probably want the sort of illusion of reality, even if they all know it's 1:34:19 kind of doesn't matter. Yeah, that's what I think. But I think that is still something that if side 1:34:24 chains became mainstreamed, that would actually still crush everyone. It would just not be too 1:34:29 clear. But I have another interesting idea. If you want a theory that you could use on your side, 1:34:36 that this is actually all, that it is not, it's all for gambling and actually sidechains wouldn't 1:34:42 kill it necessarily. It depends. So my theory is that it's actually too difficult for most people 1:34:48 to just create their own like poker stars server or something. But if there's, remember, like didn't 1:34:54 Matt Corral made like the altcoin generator or something like? Yeah, I mean, that also happened. 1:35:00 So it's actually like people actually, it is possible, especially one, the same person could 1:35:05 make like 50 altcoin, they can make 500 altcoins, you know, they figure it out, they just keep doing 1:35:10 it. And so it actually is just literally easier to launch an altcoin like we you and I might think of 1:35:16 it as kind of incredible, because we think of like the long period before Bitcoin and all the numerous 1:35:21 failed attempts to create e currency. But the weird thing is bizarre. But actually, once once 1:35:28 Bitcoin and Litecoin are out, it's very easy to just some guy can be making 1000s. And that could 1:35:34 be the same single guy made on 20,000 of these altcoins. And there are certainly people that are 1:35:40 serial altcoin creators. You know, there are people that infamously create half a dozen of 1:35:46 them, right? So they can't learn, right? Yeah, they learn big. And then of course, 1:35:53 they're evolving in the direction of how to shill a worthless altcoin the best way to they 1:36:00 their lore and their their science is going in that direction. 1:36:04 Well, I mean, I have a theory that it's a kind of lemon market. So 1:36:11 what for Bitcoin or normal technology would be defective actually becomes desirable for a casino 1:36:19 coin. So, you know, like, if you say, well, these guys heavily pre minded, like 80 70 80 90% pre 1:36:28 mind, and they're completely ethical, and they're washed reading it, and they're untrustworthy. 1:36:35 And yet the market would say, well, that's great, because we can really trust that they're going to 1:36:40 pump the heck out of it. And then we can ride along for it and dump it, try and dump it when 1:36:44 they do. And so, you know, something that looks like a hive of villainy, actually becomes an 1:36:53 attractive thing for people to speculate on. And so you get this kind of weird, 1:36:59 so long, perverse, like, high level features of it, right? Where, you know, like a top trumps 1:37:07 game where you're like comparing supercars, which one's better, you know, has more torque, 1:37:12 more horsepower, more cylinders, etc. Right. But in this, in this game, you know, a very, 1:37:19 or is it safety or somebody's, you know, shock, it was Michael Saylor, 1:37:25 the shark duck in a tree or something, right. So you get these crazy creations 1:37:30 that can be successful because casino tokens, but they make no sense, like, you know, 1:37:36 defective technology, defective incentives, but it turns out they're not effective. 1:37:42 They're just optimized for, they're optimized for gamified, you know, casino action, right. 1:37:49 And so we're looking at it in the wrong, wrong way. And it's a different market. 1:37:52 Well, I think this is the case. So what's the end point where, when, when does that stop? 1:37:59 I don't know, like nowhere good, I would say. 1:38:06 I think I have a decent metaphor, which is like, you know, the Cambrian explosion, 1:38:10 that metaphor has been used, but it's kind of like, once you have life, like, it will kind of 1:38:16 like never stops to some extent, where it's like, you have some things evolve, like Bitcoin evolves, 1:38:23 it exists, and then people do the hard work of proving, like, because even Bitcoin was kind of 1:38:27 going nowhere before Silk Road, like the whole experience for like, someone actually using it for 1:38:33 something, the whole gear of it, like WikiLeaks or whatever, and the word gets out. And people, 1:38:41 it doesn't just fracture into a million other pieces immediately, like there's a community 1:38:45 behind it. So the Bitcoin evolves, it proves that crypto can work. And then it's like the 1:38:52 Cambrian explosion is like you have bacteria evolving to infect the, I mean, the bacteria 1:38:58 obviously existed before, but you have like, infectious bacteria that infect larger animals, 1:39:04 or larger creatures. And so the whole thing is like, you have different species. So like, I think 1:39:09 like, you have like, you have like your Bitcoin, then you have like your copycat, like a Litecoin, 1:39:15 then you have like people like maybe like a Dan Larimer, who is like a serial true believer, 1:39:20 you know, when he's actually making something. You and I don't love it, maybe per se, but he's 1:39:26 like making stuff. And then you have like, whatever Solana, and then you have like, whatever, 1:39:35 you have like stuff where it's like evolving in different, it's there's different speciation, 1:39:40 you know, like we have plants, we have fungi. You know what I mean? So that's what I'm trying to 1:39:45 say is, it doesn't ever stop, but you do get clear species, they have like their little like, 1:39:54 they have like their, their markers. 1:39:57 Well, the way I'm thinking about it is, apparently, some countries have kind of societal scale problems with pyramid scams, you know, like, I guess, a lot of people are kind of a gambling tendency, a lot of participation in penny stocks, and pyramid scams. And so it runs through the country and the country has like social problem with it and trying to stop it. 1:40:24 And stuff, right. And so, you know, I think those things, if they become too economically impactful, and burning, you know, 10s or 100s of billions of dollars, at some point, somebody has to do something, because it starts, you know, creating economic problems at a country scale or something, right. So I mean, I think the Terra Luna collapse was like $60 billion of retail money. 1:40:54 And that caused a bunch of regulators to wake up and try to do something about it, right, of that particular one. But I think, you know, the, the risk, you know, unless unless it reaches an equilibrium by itself, if the kind of gambling thing is, you know, a scope to grow, it could start to create a problem for like, you know, allocation of capital in the world, and lead to an idiocracy outcome. 1:41:22 And so I think somewhere along the way, if it just gets more and more excessive, like, you know, somebody has to do something about it. 1:41:52 Well, I mean, people buy lottery tickets, too, right? 1:42:21 You know, they do, you know, silly things for amusement, or, you know, it might work. 1:42:33 So it's like, you're the guy that wouldn't buy them, right? 1:42:59 Why is anyone here? Why is anyone in this room at all? Like, you should pick, pick the highest numbers on the screen, but they're all red. You know, they're in the casino, they could go on TD Ameritrade or whatever, and just start trading stocks, and they would be a casino where on average, they'll make seven or so percent. 1:43:21 Yeah, well, I mean, actually, you can see some kind of, in terms of the propensity for people to do stupid stuff with stocks, you can see the kind of game stock thing, right? You get some kind of defunct stock, which is heavily shorted, and rightly so. 1:43:35 And some guys on Reddit, like, short squeeze it, and bankrupt some hedge funds. So, you know, if people want to do stupid stuff, they can find ways to sort of create gambling opportunities out of their stuff, right? So, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, I mean, maybe we should come back to some of the blockchain stuff. 1:43:58 Maybe we should talk about, like, so I would love to, we did, we didn't really get to the whole break into the mining pool business, which is a thought that I have been hunting and tracking and thinking about for a really long time. 1:44:10 But another thing I wanted to be sure to ask you about is, like, you know, I can have, like, this certain, I don't have, like, a big, it's not, like, a crazy strategy, but, like, for a Drivechain, I've been, like, putting out the software, we're trying to put out the BIPs, we're trying to put out the pull requests, we're trying to put out more info on our site, we're collecting people's names for that LayerTwoLabs.com slash friend list. 1:44:33 And, like, I'm on Twitter, we do the spaces. And I just wanted you to maybe just, like, what do you think we should do differently, better, whatever? Are we, is everything going perfectly? Is this just as fast as it goes? Is this, should we do something else? You know, what do you think of that? 1:44:55 Well, I mean, bear in mind that I'm not really, I'm more like somebody that looks at protocols and things. So I haven't actually, and of course, I got, like, active because I got concerned about the block size drama, right. But otherwise, I'm more like applied crypto and other people are doing that kind of stuff. But, you know, I'm an observer of it, the same as you and everybody else that's been in the system for a while. 1:45:22 So my impression is that, you know, things can take, I mean, one aspect is things can take a long time, because Schnorr signatures were coincidentally first talked about in 2013. I was talking about it with some of the developers on IRC. This is before Blockstream. And that only got its way into Bitcoin with a tap routine quite recently, right. 1:45:52 And that was, you know, I guess, what, what caused that to happen? It wasn't, it wasn't me pushing it. It was like, you know, people got to thinking about it, like, well, that's cool. Look what you can do with it. And then technical people start to implement things, implement it in libraries, work out specs, how you could use it. 1:46:15 And, you know, got enough people enthusiastic, they made it happen, right, at least got the technical pieces together around implementation and bits and stuff, and able to get consensus to activate it post, I guess, the last, the most recent soft fork after the SegWit one, which got sort of randomly trapped in the block size drama, right. 1:46:45 Otherwise, I would say that SegWit should have been non-controversial to my perspective. 1:46:51 So, I think, like, the timeframe is kind of interesting, right, that that's, that's quite slow for things to happen organically. 1:47:02 Another kind of observation is just more, like, just looking at it, it seems like you need, like, multiple independent people to be excited about it, and involved in discussions and things. 1:47:19 I think, I think in most technology fields, there's a kind of, you know, trickle down of knowledge and viewpoints, right? There's not that many people that have the expertise, maybe to. 1:47:37 Yeah. Well, there's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with that, which is that I think more people would be excited about it if we could use it somewhere. 1:47:46 Some people say, oh, launch this all on Litecoin or something. 1:47:50 I honestly think if we did that, then there would be some probability that Litecoin would become instantly very, very cool. 1:47:57 They would have a Zcash sidechain, ETH side, who knows what would actually happen in that, that may cause chaos among. 1:48:06 But people have suggested something like that. 1:48:08 Like, I think, what should, like, is there anything, like, you just think we should just stay the course or what would you, you know. 1:48:21 Well, I mean, you can look at another conversation that's happening right now, which is the governance discussion, which is quite an interesting analogy, because it's, it does enable quite a lot of new potential features, including potentially Drivechains in a kind of, you know, inefficient, many, many, many long scripts way perhaps. 1:48:47 But, you know, it does seem like Bitcoin's, you know, the fact that Bitcoin covenants are not possible today seems to be a kind of historical accident. 1:48:55 Like if certain opcodes hadn't been disabled, it would have already been possible. 1:48:58 And just sort of side effects. 1:49:00 So, you know, the limits of programmability seem to be a bit ad hoc. 1:49:06 And certainly covenants would unlock a lot of potential, right. 1:49:11 And so it's interesting to look at the, you know, how that's evolving, discussions around that. 1:49:17 So I think, you know, CTV kind of got pushed a bit too hard and sort of turned some people off. 1:49:24 But there's still an interest in seeing covenant functionality for what it enables, right. 1:49:33 I think the general wider extensibility plus vaults are quite interesting. 1:49:39 What lesson do you think I should learn from CTV experience? 1:49:44 The way it looks to me is kind of like that everyone is crazy. 1:49:51 And what you need to do is quit the community for two years. 1:49:54 Well, I mean, I think what made that controversial was it went from a discussion. 1:50:07 I mean, I guess the annoying thing for people that were interested to see covenants is that there wasn't, you know, there wasn't that much of a critical mass of people tracking and commenting and trying things out and proposing alternatives, right. 1:50:22 So, but I think what caused that flare up was that they kind of skipped to, OK, well, let's let's activate it. 1:50:31 Let's have a discussion about to activate it, how to activate it. 1:50:36 And, you know, presumably discussion about how to activate it, you would normally expect that to happen. 1:50:43 After this consensus that this is this is this is a proposal that a lot of people think is the best option, right, the best method. 1:50:55 So, of course, that caused it. 1:50:58 You know, it's kind of its own problem in a way, though, because it's like, I mean, it's enormously. 1:51:05 They disagree enormously on what to do. You know, Francis Brio said something like should just release a different client, get people to run that like Jeremy Rubin kind of did what what Francis Brio sort of said. 1:51:19 But I don't want to, like, ascribe too much. But I like some people have different views on exactly what you should do to activate. 1:51:25 Yeah, maybe there should be more. I mean, in the past, there was nothing like this, but there was like there was not as much controversy over anything. 1:51:33 And even the SegWit time, I don't think that was a real controversy. 1:51:37 People didn't actually. Miners didn't actually dislike SegWit. What what was thought was the miners needed some way. 1:51:48 The miners thought they weren't getting something that they wanted from the process is how I interpret it is that they. 1:51:55 I think they were also lobbied. 1:51:59 People had convinced them that they they need this two megabyte hard fork box size increase. 1:52:05 So they thought, how do we get that? And they thought this comes from the developers. 1:52:09 And they were sort of right about that. Like, you know, the developers put out the software. 1:52:14 I know that it would not have immediately like there would have been pushback against the developers. 1:52:18 But from their point of view, they were thinking like they the developers have a gun pointed at me. 1:52:24 I'm going to point a gun at them. And it was not the point is the point I'm trying to make has nothing to do with that. 1:52:28 It's just about SegWit was withheld because they thought. 1:52:33 Like, I'll give you your thing that you want when you give me my thing that I want. 1:52:38 Yeah, well, it got like SegWit should be coded differently or something. 1:52:43 Zero percent. Well, I mean, it got a bit political and silly, really. 1:52:47 But my impression was that a lot of the miners didn't really care one way or the other. 1:52:52 But I think people misunderstood the game theory and thought that miners were kingmakers and like whatever the miners, 1:52:58 they thought that activation and the whole blockchain logic was enforced by miners. 1:53:04 And therefore, if they could just, you know, fly to China and persuade enough miners, 1:53:08 they could get the big blocks they wanted or a hard fork. 1:53:11 This is true for every miner activated soft fork. 1:53:15 They are sort of kingmakers. That's not how I would describe it. 1:53:19 But you know what I mean? Like they could just unilaterally activate any minor activated soft fork. 1:53:23 Right. And then it's a cat and mouse game. If people hated it, they'd have to do the. 1:53:28 Well, I think the thing with that is that it's not I mean, technically. 1:53:38 It's the economic full nodes that enforce the consensus rules and the miners just. 1:53:44 You know, also verify the consensus rules, because if they don't, the block will get ignored by the network and that'll be expensive. 1:53:50 Right. So. From that point of view. 1:53:54 From the classical soft fork of like reassigning an op op or whatever for the script interpreter fails sometimes they can. 1:54:01 Because this is our point trying to make in Lisbon that I think no one understood. 1:54:04 But it was like if you do two soft forks for for op op three or something and they're different, then that's actually hard for. 1:54:13 So the order in which you do the soft works is matters. 1:54:18 Well, I mean, I think the thing is, you could hypothetically. 1:54:22 I mean, that's what that's what you mean by a minor soft fork. 1:54:25 And that's that's that was the terminology that evolved because I think one of the Bitcoin folks proposed to do it and it didn't happen in the end. 1:54:34 But that's what they that's where the minor soft fork came from that term. 1:54:39 But I think technically miners could enforce some auxiliary rule that regular full nodes are not looking at. 1:54:48 And but the problem is that would be a weaker model. 1:54:53 Right. Because what we were talking about earlier, where you ideally want the full nodes to be upgraded before the miners activate a new consensus rule. 1:55:04 So you'd be kind of watering down the game theory and doing that right would be key because on day one it would be weak. 1:55:13 And we discussed earlier in this conversation the idea that it's not a good idea. 1:55:18 The miners enforce a rule. We would then probably want them to at least tell us about it so that at least we know what it is. 1:55:25 So where one would be, it would be the dark rule enforced secretly. 1:55:29 And then they explain the rule. And ideally, they would explain the exact open source code or whatever that's enforcing the rule to be the full explanation of the rule. 1:55:37 And then other people would maybe they would upgrade their node. 1:55:41 They'd say, well, miners are enforcing this rule. Then I want to be maybe compatible. 1:55:46 And then over time, it would harden into a user activated soft fork type thing. 1:55:52 Yeah, I mean, I think that's I mean, I think that's dangerous. 1:55:59 Go to the miners and say, well, you activate it. 1:56:03 We'll see if people say no, but I want to know what I would like to know. 1:56:06 Like, why? Because I kind of also know, but I wonder about. 1:56:11 I mean, I think the BIP66 is an example of why not. Right. 1:56:15 Which is, you know, if you're, you know, if only the miners are verifying something and people don't even know about it or they don't agree or they're not enforcing it, then, you know, now you're relying on the current set of miners and they can make mistakes. 1:56:35 Isn't that an example where the miners only hurt themselves? 1:56:39 Anyone who did nothing was unaffected. 1:56:43 If you had a full node, a regular full node, you were unaffected. 1:56:48 I think you could have fun if they activate and then they tell everyone like Jeremy would. 1:56:53 It's kind of impossible that they would secretly completely adopt a rule. 1:56:57 And if they did, we would never know about it anyway, by definition. 1:57:00 So it would like with this scenario. 1:57:02 Jeremy Rubin puts out his thing for discussion first, technically. 1:57:07 Then he has he goes to the miners and the miners say, well, why the heck not? 1:57:12 And he convinces them to the pools, click over, click over. 1:57:18 You know, maybe that's far fetched. 1:57:21 But I mean, I think, you know, 95% BIP-9 regular, what I consider the old regular style of software activation. 1:57:31 The question is, what is wrong with that? 1:57:34 Well, I think it's a dramatic departure from Bitcoin security model in a way, right? 1:57:43 The op-nops are there to be reassigned, though. 1:57:47 They're kind of there to just put a 4-byte version number in each transaction. 1:57:54 I mean, it's kind of like the BSV logic, which I think is, you know, they try to turn things around and say, oh, you should trust the miners. 1:58:01 It doesn't matter that you can't verify blocks. 1:58:03 You've got to trust miners anyway. Miners are in charge. 1:58:06 And, you know, if you take that viewpoint. 1:58:12 It's very different than, you know, for everything else, for everyone who is using it on Monday, it stays exactly the way it was. 1:58:18 And it was not a trust the miners BSV thing in any sense. Right. 1:58:22 Not in the remotest sense. 1:58:24 I mean, I think any. 1:58:28 I think you're either SPV or you're not. Right. 1:58:30 So if you are not aware of or not verifying something that is relevant, you could actually be accepting invalid blocks and not know it. Right. 1:58:40 Well, every block, though, every protocol is an SPV protocol or some other protocol, right? 1:58:46 Some other like super protocol. 1:58:49 Like if I'm a full node of Bitcoin Core 25, I'm SPV of an infinite list of other protocol. 1:58:57 So it can't just be. Right. 1:59:01 But I mean, that is that is a reason why you want to upgrade, like preferably before soft fork is activated, because otherwise you could come out of the wrong side of a bit 66 like situation. Right. 1:59:16 I mean, I just. 1:59:18 At the time, then that's also fixable, though, because that's in effect. 1:59:21 It sort of was with bit nine where it's like you have two weeks. 1:59:24 You can make it longer. You know, you could say miners are going to signal over three months and then you're going to have three months to upgrade. 1:59:33 And we'll know what to do. 1:59:36 And I mean, I'm just a devil's advocate, but I'm just kind of saying I'm saying, isn't the current process we have doesn't really seem to work because it does seem like it's very ambiguous what the process is. 1:59:48 There's going to be a lot of people who can secretly delay things for years or veto things. 1:59:53 It doesn't seem like you explain for context what what the bit 66 situation was. 1:59:59 So miners was by mining was, I think, over half of them, which means they were just pulling. 2:00:12 They were they were connected to a mining pool and to other mining pools. 2:00:16 And when when they would see that might that the jobs indicate a new block, they would just start building empty blocks on top of it without verifying it without waiting to verify it. 2:00:27 And so I think what happened is by bad luck, you know, you needed a certain amount of upgraded miners with the activation signaling. 2:00:36 But there was some stragglers that hadn't upgraded. 2:00:38 And so I think they spy mines on a block that was actually invalid and mined by a straggler that was below the 95 percent threshold or whatever it was at that time. 2:00:49 And then they all piled on top of it for a while. 2:00:52 I think it was like multiple blocks long right before people figured out what was going on. 2:00:58 And so, you know, if you were running old software, you wouldn't necessarily have been able to tell what was happening. 2:01:07 You know, now there was no malicious behavior there. 2:01:09 It was just an accident. Right. 2:01:10 But you could also construct malicious versions of that that could steal from people who hadn't upgraded. 2:01:16 Yeah, I mean, the overall idea, I think it's not good for, you know, there's a lot of people's money invested in Bitcoin. 2:01:31 And so I think that would be a kind of dramatic variation of the security model and undermine confidence. 2:01:39 And I thought people would fight it. 2:01:41 In reality, you'd end up with probably some kind of UASF-like variant that tried to block the miner-activated soft fork or something. 2:01:53 I don't know. It's not entirely predictable. 2:01:56 I think it's definitely the case that most people, you know, if they're faced with like a change, they probably say, well, you know, most people are actually concerned. 2:02:06 The devil you know versus the devil you don't or something. 2:02:09 So but I think it's also the case that I think it could be people who would worry the reverse. 2:02:15 And they would say, like, listen, like there's not a lot of competitive pressure right now. 2:02:21 But what if there was a different coin that was like moving faster or something? 2:02:29 You know, I'm saying it's not automatically the best thing that it's not automatically the best thing to be conservative because there are plenty of ways that the project could actually die off. 2:02:43 And I think people don't really know the details of like if for something to be a soft fork, like for your old node to still work to some extent. 2:02:51 It really is very limited in what it can do in that sense. 2:02:56 It depends on, you know, you can write weird soft fork, of course. 2:03:01 So, yeah, I don't know. But I'm just saying it's like it's not actually like a fully put together question to just say everything should always take 10 years. 2:03:11 Well, I mean, that is an argument for extensibility and modularity, right? 2:03:19 So that more things can be about like lightning. 2:03:23 I think we can just go and do them in a modular way without needing a consensus change. 2:03:30 Because, you know, I mean, you can think of a consensus change is a bit like IPv6, right? 2:03:35 It took years to get enough cross compatibility and bridges that you can even rely on it, right? 2:03:42 So, of course, with Bitcoin, you need a kind of a defined activation point where the new rules apply. 2:03:50 So, I think, you know, I think consensus as a decision making process is inherently a bit slow because of people action is no action. 2:04:06 And that, you know, I mean, a consensus decision making process, there are organizations that use that for like hundreds of years, right? 2:04:14 So it's not a new phenomena. And if you read about those things, it does seem like that's actually what happened. 2:04:19 You know, something contentious that would just not, you know, take a long time, basically. 2:04:27 But the fact that it does take a long time is a reason why you want more extensibility and modularity. 2:04:35 And extensibility, I mean, like something like simplicity where you can implement more things directly. 2:04:41 And, of course, covenants enable more things to be implemented directly. 2:04:45 So as the expressiveness gets improved, you know, more things become possible to implement directly without needing. 2:04:56 New opcodes, I think it's converging on there. And I hope that people, you know, because, because there are people that would say, you know, ossification is fine, but you know, they're, they're not. There are other people that need that want and would benefit and value a feature that needs a new opcode, right? So, 2:05:14 like, should we, because I think the framing some people think, okay, like 50 people want this thing, like millions of people use Bitcoin, but 50 people want something. How do I frame it like that? I think most people, like 99% of the people, even like most people listening in or something, they're not going to know about, like, it's, let me try to put it this way, like, we split the universe into two timelines, or something like that, right? 2:05:42 So, like, we split the universe into two timelines, or something, the timeline with CTV, or with, like, there's big network effects. So I'm saying in the future, everyone is on boarded with Drivechain or CTV or something else. And that's the world where Bitcoin wins. And it's not that Bitcoin loses in the other world, because there are so many fans of Drivechain, like today or something. It's like, most people will never have heard of any of this. 2:06:12 You know, but they whether or not they can actually be a real user of Bitcoin kind of depends on whatever are colliding. 2:06:22 300. So that's what I'm trying to say is, it's actually, it's not like, oh, we need to what are we going to do if we lose? If we lose Jeremy Rubin, then the project will be dead. Because that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying like, we have to the project. 2:06:38 The project competes is open source software. And there is a limit to how many good ideas you can ignore before it just makes the project uncompetitive. But we're nowhere near that point now. But we will inevitably reach that point, I think at this. 2:06:54 Well, I mean, I think the motive is, I think, probably is meaningful to more people, like in a positive way is that, you know, there's, we all think that the properties of Bitcoin are really cool. And over time, there are more people that want to use it. And of course, Lightning helps, but it's not enough, right? 2:07:25 And, you know, UTXO sharing schemes, okay, that's, that's, you know, maybe that works. But ultimately, there is something higher assurance coming from a UTXO, right? 2:07:39 And so, if, if the technology doesn't evolve to be able to provide more people with UTXOs, then, you know, as a Bitcoin, active user base, that wants to cold store savings and censorship resistant transactions, you know, goes from 100 million to a billion, we have a problem, right, with today's technology. 2:08:02 And so, you know, what, what will break if that, if the technology, you know, if the adoption gets out of technology as well, probably more people will end up using custody or something kind of that will get degraded service, right. So, to our point of view, as technologists that look at these trade offs, they're like, well, sure, we'd be better if they could get something in between, which is, you know, they can get a real UTXO, but it's on a Drivechain or a sidechain that is, you know, got a different security trade off, that would be better, right. 2:08:31 And so, I think it's a good point that we want to find technical solutions for that, because it looks like the adoption is going to be coming. And, you know, it can, it can happen relatively quickly to right, you know. 2:08:48 Yes. And whatever, like the end user demand will be the engine that like sort of pulls the train, so to speak, where it's like, whatever they want will be the thing that gets all the network effects, like if they want custodial, or if they want, you know, like, it'll just be, it's what I'm saying is like, on day one, you turn Jeremy Rubin away, or you just make it take five years instead of taking six months. 2:09:18 That's on day one. And then day later, you know, Brian Armstrong and Coinbase owns every Bitcoin or something, or something like a long timeline. Whatever the end user is going to want will get the network effects, and it'll be self-reinforcing. Maybe it'd be a different, it could be a different coin other than Bitcoin, or it could be something worse. It could be CBTC, I don't know. 2:09:40 Well, I mean, I think, I mean, you can see that, I mean, actually, that with the fee spike, which seems to be caused by the inscriptors, you know, putting JPEGs in the chain, which is a craze like a month or two ago, caused the fees to go up and created service problems for some lightning services. 2:10:09 So, you know, what they ended up doing was, this is Bolts Exchange, so they have a submarine swap to add money to a lightning channel or take money out of a lightning channel. But it involves on-chain transactions, right? And so the fees got high and it stopped working. 2:10:30 So they made a trustless atomic swap, like a submarine swap from liquid Bitcoin to lightning so that they wouldn't need to do an on-chain transaction. And they did it really quickly. They did it in the space of a couple of weeks, and they had an internal alpha, and people were playing with it and stuff, and then it was live. 2:10:51 So, but not all things are easy to do quickly, right? You know, like a whole, like a layer two, like ARK or Federmint, things like that, take quite a while to get enough adoption and wallet technology and stuff. So, yeah, I think... 2:11:08 Well, I mean, I'm sort of pro-ossification to some extent, but I just also think like, well, what should we do now is kind of where I'm kind of boiling it down to, because this idea is not, this certainly wouldn't say this is necessarily quickly, because this is from November 2015 was the original idea. 2:11:25 So we're going to hit very slow on that criteria, no matter what happens now. But I think the bigger question is, like, how should someone like me react to what happened with Jeremy Rubin or like, you know, like, what should I, that's kind of what I'm getting around. 2:11:40 I think, you know, with new technology, you want to see, like, multiple people engaged in, like, analysis and feedback and variants and stuff. Like, there's, I think, somewhere along the way, there was, there have been spurts of, you know, constructive discussion about variants, right, other than Checksick from SAC, which was older and liquid. 2:12:10 There was TX hashed and a few variants, and I think one more recent variant. So, you know, whatever it was that triggered those conversations is good. And, you know, if you get some people who are, you know, get interested in things and see them through to the end, like, you know, I've got the energy to write bits and be actively involved and involved for months at a time. 2:12:41 Get a few of them involved. And I think that's usually what it takes to get soft forks, you know, into a stage where people will want to explore consensus and get, you know, get some kind of wider interest going. 2:13:00 So now you can cultivate that, but that's what observationally, that's what seems to have worked in the past, right? 2:13:07 I mean, thinking like, for example, with Taproot and short signatures, there are a lot of people looking at those bits. I mean, you can look at like the GitHub and I guess the comments on the bits and the code and discussion programs. 2:13:26 And maybe conferences too, like there are some sort of not really a proper conference, but like a hackathon or whatever the IETF calls those kind of things. I think those are constructive. 2:13:39 Isn't there a chance or isn't even highly likely that what has worked for soft forks in the past may not ever work again in the future? If you look at Taproot, it was, I believe, like four years or so between SegWit and Taproot and SegWit itself was like two years between the previous soft fork and SegWit. 2:14:06 And prior to that, and so that means like in the last six years, it's slowing down very meaningfully. 2:14:18 And of course, if we've reached a point where the size of the network or whatever, whatever it is that has grown past the scale of us to be able to really do anything, like say we've reached the point where ossification has kind of organically happened. 2:14:36 It's not like there's a sign that goes up and everybody is made aware that that point has been reached. It might be many years before it becomes obvious and there's kind of just a consensus around the fact that that point has been reached. 2:14:58 And you mentioned, obviously, the downsides of that. So in that case, there might not be value in trying to approach it from different ways that they were trying to push changes, soft forks in other ways. 2:15:19 You want it to succeed, right? I mean, I think it's sort of like for Bitcoin to ossify in the long term, I think is probably good for the base layer to not be undergoing rapid changes as there's more value on top. 2:15:41 But for it to get there, for that to be sensible, I think we need more changes, right? We need extensibility, we need simplicity, we need sidechains, Drivechains and covenants and maybe some more things, right? 2:15:55 But I think the other interesting thing is that maybe there are... I think my feeling is the natural evolutionary pressures are there for Bitcoin to want to reach that sensible ossification stage where the ossification isn't preventing generic innovation in a permissionless way, right? 2:16:22 But I think the other thing is there could be multiple paths to get there, because it doesn't take that much more expressiveness on the chain, because as I said, the limits on expressiveness of Bitcoin scripts are kind of partly accidental due to specific opcodes getting disabled. 2:16:37 Like cat was a quite powerful one and it had bugged coincidentally, right? But as a few more opcodes come in that are more generic or powerful like covenants, I think that might be enough to implement something, right? 2:16:51 Or the other thing is it seems like people are more inclined to accept, to go with extensibility, because extensibility is a kind of positive thing, right? Well, we can do more things with it. Great, let's do it kind of thing, right? 2:17:14 Whereas if it's about a specific use case, they're like, well, I don't know, does that use case have downsides? And then they want to analyze that, right? But whereas if the extensibility, you can use that to build a Drivechain, well, then you get to Drivechains in a different way. And then maybe you get a Drivechain, you build a Drivechain using that, using covenants, for example. 2:17:38 And then a more efficient way comes later, right? Because it's kind of like that C prepressor, for example, right? The fact that it was possible to do it in a kind of hacky way seemed to make people completely okay with, oh, well, let's make it elegant then as it's already possible, right? 2:17:54 Well, that's what I hope though, because it's already… 2:17:58 Almost. 2:18:00 I guess. I mean, what you're saying, we could make one that was only with like nlock time or something. I could like make a mining consortium wallet, and then collect everyone's money. I don't know, it doesn't seem to be… it seems to be going kind of slow, like not in a sense of slow is good, slow and steady. 2:18:23 It just seems to be maybe like not low in the sense that the process is becoming more defective than it was, more bureaucratic, maybe, which is sort of fine. 2:18:37 I mean, I think the progress on covenants is kind of not linear, right? It stopped for a bit, and then people got excited, and there were multiple proposals, extra new proposals, or some people deciding actually maybe CTV was better than they thought, or trying to analyze the equivalence. 2:19:07 Could you implement CTV with APO? That's the one for lightning. And apparently, I think you can do it in one direction, but not the other, which shows that one is slightly more powerful than the other or something. 2:19:24 So those conversations were happening more recently, which I think is useful. So I think to get progress on sidechains and Drivechains, peer-to-peer version, we need to cultivate some conversations like that. So even if people are proposing alternatives, at least they're talking about it, right? And it's a step forward. 2:19:48 Well, my concern is kind of like that to really get the pressure, you actually would need some kind of crisis or some kind of competitor or something. I don't know if that's the case or not, but that's kind of like how I see it is like people, you know, it's like the exam papers due Thursday, and so you procrastinate until Wednesday. 2:20:08 If it was due earlier, they were very good earlier. I don't know, maybe that's not correct. It's kind of like bounded by other things that we've done. 2:20:39 Which is, well, my number one feature request is just don't break it. And then, you know, so if there's any risk, right? 2:20:49 That joke is seen as saying every soft fork has like an X percent chance of breaking it or whatever, which is really not true. 2:20:58 Well, right. I mean, I think, yeah, yeah. So I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying that if… 2:21:03 Don't replace the software with like something else. 2:21:06 I'm just saying that for the people who are interested in Bitcoin for different reasons, and if they're just, you know, using it as an investment, and they might, you know, apart from the custody, they might not feel bad about it being an ETF where they don't even have to touch it. 2:21:25 Like, instead of having a gold bar, they've got a gold ETF and they don't care, right? So for those kind of people, you know, if you complain to them like, oh, Bitcoin is ossifying, it won't be able to have this feature, it won't innovate as permissionlessly, they kind of shrug and say they don't care. 2:21:41 Right. 2:21:42 But for the rest of us, we think this is really bad because now, you know, what's the side effect going to be? 2:21:46 How about all Bitcoin users? 2:21:48 Right. 2:21:50 The network effects mean whoever cares about the most users is just going to win, and every other coin will eventually go to zero is my view. 2:21:59 Right. Well, I mean, I suspect that what's going to happen is Bitcoin is going to win regardless. It's just that it will have the unfortunate effect of, you know, if people can't own UTXOs and transact without censorship resistance, then it will be a degraded future where, you know, a lot of users won't have as good of assurances they're getting from Bitcoin. 2:22:22 Bitcoin would clearly beat everything that exists. I don't think any of the competitors are that good, including Ethereum, including whatever. Take your pick. 2:22:32 Yeah. 2:22:34 But I think this is wrong to generalize. The current set are very weak, I think. I don't think there has been strong competition. We're still very early as far as the… 2:22:52 So you're saying that maybe a competent altcoin might emerge eventually? 2:22:57 Right, at some point, yeah. And there have been none that are that competent. And if one emerged that was like half competent and more popular than Bitcoin, then I would think like, yeah, then that would send Bitcoin to zero eventually. 2:23:11 I think that people, you know, because, I mean, if that's true or not, I don't think people are going to find it persuasive because they are pretty much convinced that Bitcoin will succeed in one way, even if just as a savings technology that's not much transacted or not even, you know, that only 10% of people own UTXOs or only 1% of people own UTXOs and the rest are using custodians or ETFs. 2:23:41 So, like, for some people, they would be okay with that outcome. Now, we wouldn't because that is not self-sovereign, you know, not your keys, not your coins, etc. So we desperately want to find a way to scale it without degrading security or having opt-in security layers or sidechains and things like that, right? 2:24:05 So, I think we need it to happen because otherwise the future is less good. But I think that it can happen incrementally in like three or four different tracks, right? So, one way is if some of these covenant opcodes get implemented, that might be enough new expressive power to implement a drag chain, you know, maybe with some big, annoying scripts or something. 2:24:32 But still, right? 2:25:03 Just build it all on network effects will be slower to arrive in Bitcoin than in the competent altcoin. That doesn't exist yet. And then as a result, they will not even be owners when the competent altcoin becomes more popular. And then they are actually – so now it didn't even work as a savings account. So even by their own criterion, they call it a failure. 2:25:30 Yeah. I mean, I think it is a short-sighted view in a sense that, you know, it's kind of like people buying internet stocks and they're not interested in the internet, right? So they're like, well, the internet might – there seems to be people excited about the internet. I don't care, but I'm going to buy some stocks because I think they'll, you know, put the price up. 2:25:52 But the point is that, you know, what's driving the price, right? It's adoption and why people are adopting because of the censorship resistance and the bearer assurances and things. So, you know, the people just investing in the asset class, I mean, it's, you know, I'll say just, I mean, that's a clear, strong part of Bitcoin's adoption driver. 2:26:16 So we shouldn't knock that. But the value they're investing in is because of the technology too, right? So they need the technology to, you know, to keep working as the scale increases and support different trade-offs. Or it's less valuable, right? It doesn't reach its potential. It's less valuable, I think. 2:26:39 Because it's not only that they want – I agree with that. People do want the censorship-resistant payments. They want the privacy. They want the self-sovereignty. But they also – they really, really need to be on the network that ends up being the one that everyone uses because I really think it's sort of like speaking English versus Esperanto or something. You know, it's like – they just don't realize that they want that. 2:27:05 They're buying the internet stock. They're not interested in the internet. They don't realize their counter-internet will just – 2:27:36 But I think that's, like, at least by usage, that's a small percentage. But, you know, they could be right too, right? Which is, you know, it's like TCPIP. Could something displace TCPIP? Yeah, maybe not. You know, not enough incentive. Nobody cares to change. 2:28:01 But that's not a reason for us. I mean, we want the technology to reach its full potential and deliver value to anybody who wants to own a UTXO and have censorship-resistant transactions to be able to have them, right? 2:28:14 Yeah, and of course they might think, which would be very clever of them, they may think, well, listen, the community is important, so they will bring my UTXO along for the ride. The new thing will be whatever, hard fork in Bitcoin or have to import the UTXO set or something like that. 2:28:32 So they think, I'm just going to own this and I'll probably be good, which would probably be a pretty smart thing. I would actually say that's probably pretty smart if a person doesn't have time to look into all this minutia. 2:28:42 I mean, people do that, right? I mean, that was the fork phenomena and the airdrop phenomena, right? 2:28:47 Trying to, because I guess a new coin, when there's 25,000 coins or however many there are today, the primary problem is lost in a sea of noise, right? 2:28:58 Got to find a reason for anybody to care about it, so they need like a massive pre-mine, a massive marketing budget, you know, and to get anybody to care about it, so hence the airdrop trick, right? 2:29:09 Yeah, but I think that's difficult at this point. 2:29:16 Anyway, I mean, I think that multiple of these strands can get there too, right? 2:29:25 So covenants, maybe that gets there. I think it'd be interesting to analyze if all of those covenant variants would enable Drivechains or if one is better or if there are changes that would make it easier to do. 2:29:42 Interesting to cross-compare. 2:29:47 Yeah, again, I mean, it's designed to be very efficient and whatever, but I think your point would be you get the actual Drivechain, then you do… 2:29:57 I mean, you get like the kind of simulated or, you know what I mean, like a backdoor kind of, and then you just tell people, by the way, you should just merge this because it just cleans up something that a lot of people already do, which I think… 2:30:14 Well, I mean, you can see that with Lightning, right, in the sense that the current Lightning is made more efficient and it's free management, I think, with the APO or other solutions to the current limitation. 2:30:30 People say that, but actually then other people say that without the punishment transaction, it won't work, so they say… 2:30:39 Well, I mean, I think it's not actually as adversarial as they like to think it is, but it's a fair point, right? If you can grief on something all day with no penalty and you don't have an ethical boundary to that, then why wouldn't you just keep doing that? You still promise once in a while, right? 2:30:56 Yeah, so the heads I win, the tails I break even. 2:30:59 Right, yeah. 2:31:03 Yeah, so anyway, but I mean, I think it's a sort of analogous situation, right, which is something is working but not as efficient as it could be, and so it seems like… 2:31:14 Yeah, that's an easy sell because this is an improvement on an inefficient thing that already… It's just an efficiency improvement at that point. 2:31:23 Right, so I mean, if you can… And I think the efficiency maybe doesn't even matter that much if there are not that many commitments, if there's only one commitment transaction per block or if it's infrequent or what have you. 2:31:37 But it does, I think, because of the sort of limit of, you know, because it's open source and people are working on what they find interesting, one thing that drives interest is usage, right? 2:31:50 So if people are using something and it's cool and there are cool things happening over there and they'll get interested to read about it and then get enthusiastic for making it more efficient, right? 2:32:01 So I think that's one path. Another possible path is simplicity, which is, you know, if Bitcoin… I mean, it's not quite ready yet, but, you know, if Bitcoin had simplicity, then you could probably make a pretty efficient Drivechain or just implement, you know, BIP300 using it or something, right? 2:32:19 Or close. So that would be another path. And that is, you know, the pitch for why Liquid or Bitcoin might want simplicity is that it's a candidate for ossification, which is it's enough self-extensibility that you could implement something like Schnorr from scratch without needing a soft fork other than for kind of competition efficiency reasons. 2:32:45 People keep complaining about BIP300 itself. It's sort of like it's simplicity, but only on L2. 2:32:52 Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I think that because it's… 2:32:55 There's all these people complaining about crazy, weird theories about what BIP300 might do. Shouldn't it all just apply double for simplicity or something? 2:33:05 Well… 2:33:06 I would be happy for it all to be over, but I would just think… 2:33:10 I mean, that's an interesting question. 2:33:12 What's simplicity changes minor centralization or whatever. 2:33:15 Well, we haven't had that debate yet. So, you know, we'll see how it works out. But, right. But I think it might be different because it's super low level. So people are going to look at it and compare it to… 2:33:31 I mean, would there be a mistake in comparison there? Because it would enable BIP300. So it's actually, in a weird way, it's higher level because it's… 2:33:38 Right. But I think people don't have to be logical in their inferences. They look at the increment, right? 2:33:44 Right. 2:33:45 So it's kind of like the C preprocessor example I gave. So, you know, when there was a question of adding a CatNet operator, big debate, when somebody shows it's already possible, you go, okay, great, let's optimize it, right? 2:33:58 So it just completely changes the discussion. So I think… 2:34:02 I remember you saying a couple of months ago that simplicity is at minimum five years away. Can you explain then what that timeline… what is happening in those five years? Why is it five years away? 2:34:14 Well, I mean, it's not concrete. I'm just looking at, you know, the Schnorr signatures, like how long things have gone from idea phase to adoption. But, you know, like there's a team of people working on simplicity, so the technology is evolving pretty fast, and we're hoping to get it into liquid relatively soon, like this year or something, in a live form. 2:34:36 But, you know, it's the same challenge as covenants or Drivechains, right? So now you have it, and then people have to… and simplicity is doing, you know, novel things that… in a sort of different program model. 2:34:56 So people don't like to accept things they don't understand. So it'll probably take, you know, enough developers to get up to speed and understand how it works to say that, okay, now I get it, seems good to me kind of thing, right? So you need that kind of viewpoint, where I think a Drivechain is easier to understand, probably. So that's possibly a downside. 2:35:17 But… oh, and another direction which could, you know, change the game is more and more compact and efficiently verifiable signatures of execution, like Snarks and Starks and Bulletproofs and things. 2:35:35 So the research guys at Blockstream recently published a paper called Bulletproofs++, which is, you know, got some more interesting efficiency optimizations in it. So… and an indication that you might be able to efficiently implement unlinkability using it. 2:36:00 So that's… it shows that that area is progressing. Of course, there are multiple kind of zero-knowledge proof frameworks that, you know, implement whole circuits, but many of them are using novel security assumptions. 2:36:18 And so I think it'd be difficult for Bitcoin to adopt them, but Bulletproofs is using similar kind of assumptions to Schnorr and ECBSA. So I think it's the kind of security assumption that is more likely to be adoptable by Bitcoin, let's say. 2:36:37 So, you know, that path is… I couldn't place a timeline on that because I think those proof systems are not efficient enough yet. And there's also a kind of question mark around them. 2:36:56 But, like, in theory, if they got efficient enough to do what Greg Maxwell talked about on Bitcoin Talk in, I don't know, 2012, 2013, whenever it was, about implementing a sidechain using… I mean, basically it was a sidechain, but before that term was coined. 2:37:15 But where the sidechain logic is enforced by the mainchain using a zero-knowledge proof or proof of execution, you could get scalability, you know. So it might be expensive for miners, but we might have a different problem. 2:37:35 I think, right, because then don't you have to bike-shed, like, every detail of, like, the prover and whatever. Like, I haven't looked into it that much. And, of course, every day that passes in that timeline, we get almost certainly closer and closer to the point of authentication. 2:37:56 Yeah, I mean, I think that the zero-knowledge proof stuff, while it's evolving, is probably further away than… I think probably the covenants path might be the quickest, and then Drivechains or simplicity in terms of potential path modularity. 2:38:23 Well, should we invite other people to speak, maybe? We seem to have a lot of people here. 2:38:28 Sure. I have two quick questions of my own. Adam, thank you so much for being here. You mentioned that Drivechains are more peer-to-peer than the ordinary sidechains that exist today. In some tweets, you used that phrase, more peer-to-peer, and you said that today. Can you say, in your words, how is a Drivechain sidechain more peer-to-peer than the sidechains Bitcoin has today? 2:38:50 Well, I mean, the sidechains Bitcoin has today are federated, I guess, you know, Liquid and Rootstock and Statechains, although they're not exactly sidechains, and Federment, also not exactly a sidechain, but also federated. 2:39:10 And so, Drivechain and the peer-to-peer sidechains are… there is no kind of fixed federation. The peg is operated as a result of, you know, random miners participating in a protocol, so it's much more dynamic and anonymous in its operation. 2:39:36 Thank you. 2:39:37 Yeah. 2:40:07 I'm not sure. I mean, effectively, there's a supply and demand constraint, so, you know, Lightning enables a lot more transactions, but they're much cheaper transactions, and so that, you know, the scalability of a layer to increase the supply, and if the supply gets ahead of demand, then it won't be as efficient. 2:40:37 It won't flow much capacity back, and, you know, so, for example, if for some, you know, there was some technological solution that enabled Bitcoin to have, like, super large blocks with no side effects, no centralization side effects, the fee market would collapse, right, because there's an excessive capacity. 2:40:57 And so, I think it's a bit of a balance, like, we don't really know. Like, today, the technology is hard to scale, and so that tends to create fee pressure, but if the scalability got ahead of, you know, transaction demand, the fees could collapse too, right? So, I'm not sure. 2:41:18 But there's the area of the rectangle that matters. Like, the fee rate, you know, in the supply and demand graph, the price, like, dollars per transaction, that may be high or low, but that may minimize, maximize, or something else. 2:41:38 Well, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, I think there's, I don't know what the economic term for it is, Paul probably knows, where, sort of, capacity creates new demand, you know, so, if there's capacity to make enormous amounts of super low cost transactions that, you know, have the characteristics you're interested in, then other people will get busy and make new applications or use cases that use it up. 2:42:05 And then, you know, the supply will get used up, and more value will be delivered. So, presumably, there'll be a way for people to get paid for it, for miners to get paid. 2:42:16 Oh, yeah, they may have different, you know, there may be different use cases, a different, there's a lot of demand at a small or low fee, less demand at a higher fee. 2:42:29 But, I mean, do you see what I mean, though? If there is, even if there's a lot of demand, but an infinite supply, then the fees will basically be, like, converge on zero, right, or near it. 2:42:43 Right, that'd be a rectangle that is very, very wide and not very tall. But you could still multiply, you know, because if it's like a million, if it's like a hundred billion transactions that pay one fat each. 2:42:56 Yeah. 2:43:00 Yeah, it's just kind of a question. It's kind of an unknown. I don't think anyone really knows, per se. But, yeah, why don't we go, why don't we let people speak if they want to speak? 2:43:13 Oflo, thanks for waiting so long to speak. You've had your hand up a long time. Please go ahead with your question or comment. 2:43:19 Hey, hey, what's going on? Adam, long time. 2:43:22 Hi. 2:43:24 So, I have a few questions, three main questions. 2:43:30 Okay, maybe. 2:43:33 My first one is for Adam. We touched earlier on simplicity, and I'm actually a proponent of simplicity. I like the concept of it. Obviously, it's very complicated, so a lot of people still don't understand it, myself included, but it seems to make sense above the grade. 2:43:53 In terms of your perspective, and I've had debates about this, some proponents who do not like the concept of Drivechain do not like the concept of simplicity due to the fact that simplicity essentially allows what I've heard people say a free-for-all when it comes to Bitcoin. 2:44:12 So, my question for you would be, what would be your response to that in terms of simplicity opening the doors to limitless potential of what can be done with Bitcoin? 2:44:25 Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, if you want extensibility or you don't, but also that simplicity is, you know, it's still in the same model as Bitcoin scripts. 2:44:41 So, it's still UTXO-based, it still doesn't have states, transactions are behaving the mental the same, you know, if they're valid, once they stay valid, and so on, they don't become invalid afterwards. 2:44:58 So, it preserves Bitcoin script semantics at a high level, and it just makes it easier to implement new opcodes. 2:45:12 And of course, you know, opcodes are not going to get used or, you know, you won't accidentally receive a transaction that you don't understand because you have to generate the address, but you have to have a wallet that is aware of what your, you know, the spend conditions and what you're asking for. 2:45:31 So, effectively, you might have different use cases with wallets with more capabilities or something. So, it's still kind of opt-in. 2:45:43 That was a great question, Oflo. Since we're almost out of time, I wanted to move to the next speaker. But thank you for that really good question. Portland, please go. 2:45:53 Oh, thank you for having me up, first of all. And my second question is, in terms of finding consensus to get your software to propose software activator, have you considered alternatives such as maybe just forking Bitcoin or colluding directly with miners, and then having people that want to use your software, they can use it because it's technically a software, right? It's backwards compatible? 2:46:18 Yes, in fact, we sort of discussed this to some extent. I mean, we actually said, like, we were kind of talking hypothetically, like, should you just, because at first I thought about it, yes, because I thought I'd been thinking about this for a while, because I just think this is a, this is obviously a good idea that has basically zero risk, and the risk of not doing it is sort of high. And it's, the critics seem pointlessly deluded. 2:46:44 So yeah, I thought about a lot of things, including all those things. And we, the idea of maybe just go to the miners and just ask them to miner activated software, but we kind of, it's in the recording, I think, a little bit of what we discussed. 2:46:56 Yeah. Thank you. 2:46:58 All right. Oflo has another question. So we'll bring it back up. Thank you so much for your second question, Oflo. Go ahead. Oflo, the mic is yours for your additional question. 2:47:20 Awesome. Thank you. My other question is for Paul. And basically, there seems to be an alternative way that Drivechains could be activated. It's not really Drivechains. There is something called hand crank that was written up by testnet. 2:47:38 Have you looked into that? And why not create Drivechains on something such as liquid or on top of a space chain or hand crank like I was suggesting earlier? 2:47:53 Well, my view is that what BIP300 does is, what Drivechain does is significantly different from how space chain and hand crank, space chain and liquid work. 2:48:09 Liquid is like federated. The whole point of BIP300 is to ditch the federation. So to do it on top, it's kind of like having a car, maybe a little unfair to say, but it's like having a horse pull a Ford Model T or something. It's kind of like the whole point of the Model T is not to have the horse. 2:48:28 So as for space chains, the space chain was invented after Drivechain. And it's basically a reaction to the ability to steal the coins, which is like the so-called ability to steal a coin by just instead preemptively destroying all the coins. 2:48:44 So I think already every Drivechain is a space chain. Space chain doesn't have the key feature against, but that would be kind of like instead of having a horse pull a Model T, that would be like instead just getting rid of the horse and the engine so that it's just a cart with wheels. 2:49:04 But the whole point, we're going like further in the wrong direction. Because the whole point is to be able to go back and forth with the coins. And then the hand crank thing I think is just a mistranslation or a misunderstanding or something where they say it's not a soft fork, but it's a group of miners agreeing to orphan blocks if something happens, which that actually is a soft fork, if you ask me. 2:49:30 So there's no – that would be like – what that would be is the equivalent of going to – of just going to have the miners and just going to ask them to just unilaterally activate the – switch their software over to software that I release and do it like that. 2:49:48 So it's basically just bad idea plus a lot of lack of self-awareness. So that idea just with less self-awareness I think is – that's my guess. 2:50:00 But that's interesting. I think people should look into that so that they themselves understand that if they really wanted to stop Drivechains, there's very little they could actually do about it. I'm primarily the person holding it up by not like doing any of these weird maneuvers that people have done. 2:50:20 Miners could just do it. The miners could just do Drivechain tomorrow and I would know what would be able to stop them, I think, including me. 2:50:27 I think all that's a little bit of convolution. 2:50:30 I think SuperTestNet agreed with that analysis regarding hand crank as a soft fork, if I'm not mistaken, I think. 2:50:37 Okay. Do we have a third question or do we have a question from someone else? 2:50:42 Yeah, Ophal, before your final question I just want to mention to everyone here that this is a weekly space. We meet every week on Friday, sometimes with an invited guest as we have today. 2:50:51 We're very lucky to have Adam here and sometimes just an open mic the whole time and no invited special speaker. 2:50:59 So follow LayerTwo Labs here on Twitter for more of these weekly Twitter spaces and you can also find important resources at LayerTwoLabs.com including the software you can download to run the Drivechain testnet and become more familiar with this incredibly powerful technology that can come to Bitcoin. 2:51:18 Ophal, go ahead with your next question, if you'd like. 2:51:22 Okay. This last question is borderline, more or less. 2:51:29 The main debating point, and you and I have talked about this, Paul, the main debating point that most people have towards Drivechains is MEV incentives with the Bitcoin miners. 2:51:42 Essentially, let's say a big block sidechain, essentially the miners would have to mine that or run a full node to validate that because of the profitability of that sidechain if it was highly profitable. 2:51:57 So my question to you, is it possible that you could at some point, even not now if you don't want to, but at some point, could you specifically touch on all the points why MEV will not be an issue specifically for Drivechains? 2:52:15 And if a big block sidechain was highly adopted? 2:52:19 Yes. So there was like last week, or two weeks ago, maybe I'm losing track of which week, but there's like an enormous in-depth discussion about this. 2:52:31 And I asked Alex B to write down an example over and over again, and he eventually did not. 2:52:39 And then he eventually started deleting his tweets and bringing this up. 2:52:44 But what it ended up meaning is that by MEV, what people just mean is whenever miners earn more money. 2:52:51 And so the definition has morphed enormously. 2:52:55 In Ethereum, what it meant was miners earning money by causing mischief with the chain, by swapping the orders of transactions. 2:53:05 So that is what I presumed people meant when they first talked about it. 2:53:10 Because we have like an Ethereum sidechain, so I thought, oh, this is what they're talking about. 2:53:14 They're saying that whatever, the MEV in the Ethereum world would affect player one, it would affect other people. 2:53:23 And so then all I have to do is point out that, of course, it won't. 2:53:28 Because what happens is just a transaction like that. 2:53:31 There may be MEV in the Ethereum land, Ethereum the altcoin or Ethereum the sidechain, but that affects them and they sign up for that. 2:53:39 That's actually what they want. They want to be in Ethereum land. 2:53:41 And it does not affect player one at all. 2:53:43 But what it ended up, what ended up meaning is either what either happened was that Alex B. and or Bob McAlrath. 2:53:52 And probably both. 2:53:54 But what they would probably happen was they started the argument not knowing how. 2:53:59 Blindridge mining worked or how to keep track of the differences between L1 and L2. 2:54:05 And then as the argument went on, they slowly retreated to a completely different argument where they wanted to just say they're trying to get their way out of the corner they had painted themselves into. 2:54:17 That was either what they did or either the whole time. 2:54:20 Whatever the case may be, what they mean by MEV is just that the miners earn more money. 2:54:27 And so to them, a transaction on layer one that pays a high transaction fee is MEV. 2:54:31 And if transaction fees as a whole go up because of ordinals or whatever, that's MEV. 2:54:37 And if people just decide to write the miners a check, that's MEV. 2:54:42 If they decide to buy T-shirts from the miners, that's MEV. 2:54:45 If someone, you know, if the miner gets a job on the side, that's MEV. 2:54:51 If the miner is playing the violin in the subway station. 2:54:55 So it ends up just not meaning anything. 2:54:58 But there will be, by that definition, there will be enormous MEV because the whole point of having a whole, every blockchain design is based on collecting transaction fees to deter spam or denial of service or to sort people from being, you know, get out, get rid of Sybil attack and who should make it into a block if there's only a certain amount of space, if the blocks are finite, who should make it in and which transactions have been seen. So that all relies critically on MEV. 2:55:25 Crucially on transaction fees. And I intend the whole point of this design is for the miners to be making huge amounts of money, ideally from popular sidechains. 2:55:34 So that's like the, that's the idea. But what I really think happened was they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about whatsoever. 2:55:43 And they just thought they'd use the MEV word as a critique. And so I think that you can look at that and you can go and look into the historical tweets. 2:55:51 You can look at my Twitter account and you can look at the highlights. I think some of them will touch on it. 2:55:57 Or you can just search on Twitter and you can read this enormous debate that all ended up amounting to nothing because you would, of course, you would think they're talking about MEV on an Ethereum sidechain or Bitcoin having some kind of negative effect on one. 2:56:12 That's what you would think, which that never happens. But it ended up being that they were just talking about literally any time that miners earn more money. 2:56:22 I wonder if they, I didn't read all of those threads, but I was wondering if they meant that in the hypothetical situation that a sidechain got very centralized, that there would be some kind of secret information, right? 2:56:38 Like a stream of transactions that was not publicly available. So that, you know, a few servers would have an advantage, I wouldn't necessarily call that MEV, but... 2:56:53 Exactly. This is a situation where the people running the sidechain node have some advantage. So you could call that, that would be the MEV on the sidechain that is in the sidechain world. 2:57:04 But when they try to bid for a Blind Merged Mining, they could get up and then they're going to have to keep bidding because the person next to them knows that whatever the private order flow info or whatever it is, is worth... 2:57:17 The sidechain blocks fees are worth seven, and then there's two extra on top of that, seven Bitcoin plus two Bitcoin of call it EVMEV or something, or whatever you want to call it. 2:57:29 Well, I mean, maybe you can drive the example, but if the case is that, you know, somebody could make a Drivechain, right? It's permissionless, they can do crazy stuff. So they make a Drivechain where the wallet model is you send the transaction to a central server, and they collect the fees on it. And if you don't pay them a high fee, they won't process it, right? 2:57:58 And then they choose not to use, you know, Blind Merged Mining, and you don't know the transactions, and they just have an advantage in mining or something, right? Something like that, I think. 2:58:14 Well, you know, you see the problem with that is, of course, you can argue on LL one, or I can open, you know, Bitcoin bank, Paul's Bitcoin bank or something, it doesn't really have anything to do with Drivechain. It's like, in order to reach that point, you have to basically assume that there's no blockchain anymore anyway. So it's kind of like a proof by contradiction in a way. 2:58:31 Because I can already say, like, I can already say I collect, that's kind of similar to what liquid is, it's like you send to a multi-sig output on LL one, we have our own server, we do whatever we want over here, we collect the transaction fees on our thing. And then if you don't pay, we don't let you in, and then we don't give you your money back, whether or not you get your money back is up to us. So 2:58:53 I mean, vaguely, I mean, I wasn't thinking about it that way, but kind of. But I mean, I think they're thinking that, you know, that because it's supposed to be peer to peer, that then there's a barrier to mining it. But really, I do agree that that's not really a blockchain anymore. So I think they're kind of worried about a failure mode, right? 2:59:21 But I mean, I think, as we were discussing earlier, it may not be possible to sort of, you know, provide assurance in a smart contract terms that some of the, you know, aggressive hypothetical centralizations can be like mathematically prevented, right? You know, if people sign up for stupid stuff. 2:59:44 Well, this is a very important point about like, like, again, this is opt in situation. So like, I have a story about credit, we never got back to the whole mining pool, breaking into the mining pool. So I have a little bit because it's a, so I have my story about credit is which I've told many times is that I used to I would go to this restaurant over and over again for takeout food because their food was delicious. And I went all the time I knew the owner and the owner's son who's the manager. 3:00:12 And one time I would always go late at night and wait for the close and I forgot my wallet one time because I hate when they have to wait, they close at 10 and I was getting there at 955. So I was rushing to get there. And of course, one time I forgot my wallet and obviously they let me leave with the food and they just pinned up the receipt. And then I paid the next time I was there because I come all the time. 3:00:36 But the food is fresh, and I'm hungry. So the food is going to go bad. And I am going to go hungry for no reason. And they're not going to collect the money like if you see what I mean, like if they if we wanted to be like what you might call the perfectly cryptographically mathematically secure universe. 3:00:54 You know, there would be like Peter Todd would be patrolling he'd shoot anyone who gave anyone anything on credit because it would it would encourage credit or something, you know, and so but that credit is something that helps two people, the buyer and seller, get what they want. 3:01:12 Because of their belief, credo being Latin for believe believing, I believe. So credit is not like, credit has problems. But it by itself is actually just a good thing. And the option to use the large block by chain is free option, you can say, well, maybe I would prefer I almost never use it. But then I forgot my wallet at my house. And now I have no choice. Well, it's better than nothing. 3:01:38 Which is what it would be if before if there was no credit possible, that food would have gone to waste. And so yeah, I think there is too much of an obsession on like the to stamp everything out at all costs mentality and like this is how far like this is the hoops you have to jump through. 3:01:58 In order to make it totally completely ironclad is like you need HTL sees that are enforced on l one, you need the l one fee rate to be so that the lightning dust isn't what it is, you need to have something like arc with lots of moving pieces and you need to have all the liquidity tied up into that's equal to the total payment volume. 3:02:22 He's doing an awful lot just to like, get really big, basically nothing. Because at the end of the day, 51% miners can still filter messages out. At the end of the day, you can still get eaten by the layer one fee going up. So that's my one thing. But then the idea of the minor costs, like, there's minor costs for the hashers, and then there's the pool costs. So we cleanly divided into two, we got to cleanly divided into off the bat, you just separate this universe. 3:02:53 The pools in the miners, no one has ever cared about the miners costs, and nor should there's a node costs, which we should care about. But that is only one thing on the list of miners costs. If you care about the miners costs, you should be in favor of removing the upward difficulty adjustments from from Bitcoin, and you should basically you're removing proof of work from Bitcoin at that point. 3:03:17 So if you care about how difficult it is to mine a block, you actually maybe you don't know it yet, but you you're against proof of work. And these people are all just be ignored in this, I think, the pools is slightly different story, where the, the question is, how can you break into a pool? 3:03:36 The thing with the pools is they have certain size that it's just based on statistical variance, and really nothing else. You know, like a pool below a certain size, one, just is never viable. And it's all for the same reason that it's all a minor below third sides is never viable. 3:03:53 Yeah, I mean, I think, unfortunately, it's not really viable to have more than 20, 30, 40 pools or something, because the variance is too bad below that. 3:04:23 So if you have a room full of 100 people, and they each have 1% of the hash rate, 101 person comes, there's no way that they can at least have, they can each have 1% of the hash rate, you know, it has to add up to 100%, basically. 3:04:40 So like, you're either hoping that Bitcoin stays so small that everyone involved can mine, because wouldn't it be great if everyone in Bitcoin could mine. But if everyone in Bitcoin mines, like, I mean, I guess you could say maybe there's something else that has different statistical properties that would just be better or something. 3:04:59 But the way I'm looking at it is how lucky we are that we have pools at all, because otherwise, there would really only be 20 people who could mine at all. And they would be, it would be like, just down to that list of 20 people. 3:05:14 So luckily, we have pools. And a pool is now I think of a pool, like you have like the immersion cooling, cooling the miners, the pool is like this weird technology that it de-variances the miner. 3:05:29 It makes it so that actually, what would normally be an economy of scale that would kill the miner instantaneously, is now something that they can almost completely ignore. But this is besides the point of what I was trying to say, which is that, for better or for worse, that you cannot have a pool that is smaller than like, whatever, 2%, or whatever it is 145. 3:05:52 The 145 hundredth figure is you're mining one, if there's 10 minute blocks, and you have 145 hundredth, you're mining, you're getting revenue about once every 31 days, which means sometimes you're going three or four months without any money coming in, which I just think most normal business parameters that would just not be feasible for most humans. 3:06:13 Like at that point, you're taking out some kind of other huge cost, or the risk is big, or you need some kind of weird insurance, or you're like self insuring or something. So there's like a minimum pool size that is from the variance already. 3:06:28 And so if you have 20 pools and each have 5%, then what you're really thinking about with this idea of can I break, you mentioned this phrase, like break in and become a new, break into the pool or break into the pool market, you actually need a very intriguing ingredient. 3:06:46 And that ingredient is you need one of the 20 pools to be making a mistake. If all 20 of them are absolutely perfect, sublime pool, then it's kind of as if you go to a restaurant every day, and they charge you tiny, one cent, and they give you the most amazing meal you've ever had in your entire life, and you have no problems going there. 3:07:08 So you go to the same restaurant every day, but it's the greatest restaurant in the universe. So it doesn't matter. 3:07:39 But then as soon as they start, if they start tampering or something, start making a mistake, or they orphan block, or they charge too much money, their fees are too high, then you can break in, then you open your own restaurant. 3:07:51 You say, I don't like this restaurant anymore. You say, well, you really need all 20 pools. You say, every restaurant in this town is doing things, so no one's washing their hands or something. 3:08:04 Everyone's doing something wrong, and you offer something. But I think something weird has happened with the way that the pools are inherently proportional. 3:08:12 Unlike mining, and definitely unlike running a full node where it's like your own cost of error correcting the chain has nothing to do with what other people do. 3:08:23 With mining, there's more dependence where you have to mine. In order to be a miner, you have to mine at a rate that is at a cost per hash that is competitive, or you're going out of business. 3:08:37 With the pools, it's directly proportional. You cannot create a new pool. If you create a new pool, you need to attract 5% of the hash, but they're not going to switch over to you without a reason. 3:08:48 That reason has to be the existing pools are making a mistake. So I think that this is a big concept, the idea that the costs should be split up into the node costs, which are very important, the actual mining hasher costs, which are totally unimportant and totally incidental. 3:09:08 And then the cost of actually starting a new mining pool, it inherently depends on whether or not the existing set of pools is making some kind of mistake. 3:09:19 Whereas it could be possible that we're in nirvana, everything's going perfectly, and it's also impossible to start a new mining pool because the existing set is so perfect. 3:09:29 So this is a weird – I've now split it into three different types of pools. 3:09:35 Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that – one of the things that decentralization provides is censorship resistance. 3:09:43 And there have been one or two pools that have talked about selective censorship and then backed off of it, but I think it's – I think there are a lot more miners than independent mining entities like individuals and small and large companies than there are pools. 3:10:09 So I think Stratum V2 helps quite a lot because it means that a miner can choose their own transactions and still benefit from the variance reduction, whereas today, artificially the pools are doing the transaction selection. So that's a sort of step forward. 3:10:26 Well, I mean, think about it like this because the pool can still – if you use Stratum V2, the pool can still trump the – I guess they'll say we don't do that. 3:10:37 So actually, Stratum V2 may make it worse, but I have an even different unification of this. 3:10:43 See, the reason why it may actually be worse with Stratum V2 is – the real reason is it's actually not affected at all because the mining pool can still veto the block. 3:10:52 You know what I mean? Maybe you propose – you do your own job selection, but it's actually the pool that determines which job is picked. 3:11:02 And if that were the reverse, it would be worse because the mining pool can connect their own – connect themselves as a tiny miner. 3:11:14 This is all besides the point though because – I can get into this weird theory if you want, but the actual – the important thing is that what the miners – the mistakes that the miners can make are censoring transactions that pay a fee. 3:11:30 So if they discriminate for some reason other than SATs per byte or SATs per V byte or whatever, that is the mistake that they would make, and that is the mistake that the mining pool would make that I mentioned before. 3:11:43 And it's actually – there's already a – we don't even need Stratum V2, although it may help with – Stratum V2 helps with lots of other things such as the encryption and authentication. 3:11:55 But there's already a way of proving the mistake, and all that is is to broadcast the censored transaction because it by itself is a very small thing that anyone can check – anyone with a full node can very easily check and see that it is a valid transaction that pays a fee that is high. 3:12:16 And then all they have to do is wait 20 minutes, and then they will know that for some reason there is a mistake, and they will also know exactly what to do about it, which is to start a new pool themselves that includes this very transaction that is censored. 3:12:31 So actually if you look at the full node as the cost of error-correcting the chain, the cost of detecting errors in the blockchain, you could then look at the mere presence of a censored transaction as part of the error-correcting path for fixing the pool situation. 3:12:53 And so really at the end of the day, there's already a built-in thing that fixes the pool error problem because broadcasting the transaction is exactly what the censored person is going to do and are upping the fee. 3:13:09 So the entire thing in my opinion has just been kind of a complete confusion, and partly basically what happened was the full node cost is very, very important to care about, and I think that the definition is like someone knocked over a glass of water and the ink spilled out into these other areas where it doesn't really belong. 3:13:33 The cost of running the full node is the important thing, and these other costs are just like some kind of paranoia or something until all the theory was worked out, which is sort of what I'm trying to say. 3:13:48 The fact that there's a fee-paying transaction, that's obviously not enough to make sure that it gets into a block, but if paying the fee is not enough, then what is going to be enough? 3:14:03 Because already we assume that the mining infrastructure wants to maximize its revenues, and the straightforward way to maximize the fee revenues is to include the fees that pay the most, to sort all the transactions by fee before. 3:14:18 So this is already what everyone wants to have happen. So I think the thing that would be best would be if there were just stuff in place to flag whenever a transaction was censored. 3:14:29 But that's what I'm trying to say is there already is that. That already is the fact that the people are going to broadcast this censored transaction and say, look, it pays a fee. 3:14:36 So it's like everything that people would have wanted already kind of exists, or I'm saying the system already works. 3:14:43 And as you were saying, no one was ever actually really able to get away with even doing any transaction censorship for any length of time because maybe they talked about it once or twice, but nothing actually happened because nothing really can happen. 3:14:59 Yeah. Well, I mean, I think ultimately what people care about is the censorship resistant characteristic is reinforced and there are a few different, I don't think there are some more technological directions which could get closer to it with privacy and two stage commitments and Strumpy2 and different things. 3:15:26 I do think privacy is actually the right direction to go. Exactly. Where it's like if you're worried about transaction censorship, then it would actually be a good deterrent. 3:15:35 If everything was so private that there was really just no basis for anyone censoring, then it really would be irrational to censor. 3:15:46 So, yeah, I think that would be the way to go. I think just having sidechains just has more block space for people to send coins to themselves, what we call the deniability, or you use the Zcash sidechain. 3:16:01 I actually think the whole thing would be improved in that direction, but I kind of already think that this is like the idea of being able to break in as a new mining pool. It doesn't necessarily like even if let's say there's only one pool, but it's absolutely perfect. 3:16:18 If there's one pool, but it's perfect, then maybe you can never break in because you're like, how can I break in? But on the other hand, it's a perfect pool and never censors. It always charges zero fees or something. It's just evolved to be the optimal thing. 3:16:34 I mean, hypothetically, with the current technology, that'd be a bit of a central point of failure there, right? I mean, if it misbehaved, I guess somebody would start another pool pretty quickly and people would switch to it. 3:16:44 Yeah, well, that's the point I'm saying. It's because of the misbehavior that the new pools appear. It's not as though you always need the ability to start a new pool. You only need it in a situation where the pool is not perfect. 3:16:57 The pool is perfect that it actually doesn't matter if you can start another pool and compete because they partly compete on their brand and stuff, which they must because the brand means they have something to lose. 3:17:08 They charge a fee that covaries with their reputation. The origin of the word brand, which is a fun little fact that a lot of people know but probably some people in the audience don't know, is the cattle brand because the cattle would go off into the wilderness to some extent, and they might mix. 3:17:27 So it's hard to tell which farmers are feeding their cattle well. They would literally brand the cattle, and then it was against the law to use someone else's brand. 3:17:38 So you had to enforce this suspension of freedom of speech in a very narrow sense, which is that you could not brand the cattle using someone else's brand. 3:17:49 But when you have a brand, it means you have something to lose. So you charge fees, and that is what allows good players to distinguish themselves from bad people. 3:18:04 So like when you go into CVS or something, you see Crest versus Colgate, and then you see something that you've never heard of before. You think, well, I don't really know what that is, so I will ignore that, and I will buy Crest because they're all basically the same cost. 3:18:19 But then maybe as time goes on, you get a little bit of a reputation or something. 3:18:24 Adam and Paul, we've been going for over three hours. Do you keep on going, or do you want to… 3:18:31 Maybe we should pause and pick it up for next time. 3:18:34 That sounds good. This has been an outstanding conversation. Thank you, Adam, so much for being here. 3:18:41 Yeah, thanks a lot. 3:18:43 Thanks for the discussion. 3:18:45 Yeah, we really appreciate you sharing your thoughts today on drivetrain and related matters. Austin, did you have something to say as well? 3:18:53 No, I just want to thank Adam back for joining. 3:18:58 Yeah, this has been a great conversation. We've had on stage, just for those who've joined in the middle, Austin Alexander, one of the co-founders of LayerTwo Labs, Paul Sztorc, one of the co-founders of LayerTwo Labs, and Cryptax, one of the co-authors of the BIP300/301, the drivetrain BIPs. So thank you, Dr. Beck. 3:19:20 Thank you, co-founder. There's four co-founders. 3:19:24 Yeah, there's four co-founders and two co-authors. Thank you, Dr. Beck, for being here today, and we'd love to have you back again soon. 3:19:35 So once again, these are weekly Friday Twitter spaces. Sometimes we go for six hours a year on Twitter. And you can find more information at LayerTwoLabs.com. Sorry, Vogue Blocker of Vogue Blackheart, we didn't get time for your questions, but I really appreciate you coming up. Please come next time. 3:19:54 And you can go to LayerTwoLabs.com to download the Drivechain software. Everyone can do that and get more involved in this important movement. We have over 700 members in our Telegram group where we discuss Drivechain all the time, and you can find a link to the Telegram group at LayerTwoLabs.com. 3:20:16 There are extensive essays and analyses at drivechain.info, if you're interested. You can read Paul's blog at Truthcoin.info, where he's written for many years about Bitcoin in extensive advanced essays. 3:20:34 So yeah, see you all next week for our next conversation here. Perhaps next week will be an open mic where anyone can come up instead of an invited guest, although we could have an invited guest, of course. Thanks again, Adam Beck, for being here, the CEO and co-founder of Blockstream. It was really great to have you here today. Thank you again. 3:20:54 Yeah, thank you. I'll see you guys next time, too. 3:20:57 Peace. 3:20:58 Thanks, everyone. 3:21:03 Bye.
