0:00 He gave this talk about Lightning being broken a year and a half ago, 0:04 but then, like, mostly people just, they treat it in a very weird way. 0:08 They treat it like a very academic way. 0:11 They say, aha, it's broken. 0:12 And they almost say, good, because now we can give more talks about it, you know? 0:16 But they don't, like, no one really would, like, say, you know, 0:20 it would be like if you were on a ship in the middle of the ocean, 0:22 and someone said, this ship is sinking. 0:25 And people are like, aha, well. 0:27 And then, next, we'll schedule the next conference, you know? 0:32 It's kind of like, it's not really what you would do if you really thought it was broken, 0:37 but it is what you would do if you wanted to, like, 0:41 the whole thing is just about impressing other academics. 0:44 That's what it's become. 0:46 And it's not practical. 0:48 And that issue we were talking about previously about Monero, like, being, like, 0:53 caring about the user actually getting something out of it. 0:55 And the darknet markets is partly the key to that insight, is that, you know, 1:00 people actually use it to accomplish a purpose. 1:04 And that would be, like, the CEO who does not care about the stock price. 1:10 They care about the actual product. 1:14 Monero Talk is sponsored by Cake Wallet, 1:17 a trustless, open-source wallet that gives you the keys to your crypto. 1:21 Invoice, donate, and trade your Monero with peace of mind, peace of cake. 1:26 And by StealthyX, an instant exchange where privacy is a top concern. 1:31 Go to stealthyx.io to instantly exchange between Monero and 450-plus assets 1:37 without having to create an account or register and with no limits, 1:41 making StealthyX a simple way to purchase Monero with crypto anonymously. 1:48 Monero Talk is also made possible from contributions by viewers and listeners like you. 1:53 And supporting us is easier than ever by typing in monerotalk.crypto 1:57 in your Monero.com or Cake Wallet send address field to send us a tip. 2:03 This week on Monero Talk. 2:06 Douglas Duman interviews Paul Sztorc, an OG Bitcoiner and dev, 2:10 and the inventor of Bitcoin Drivechains. 2:13 The two discuss topics including Bitcoin stagnation, 2:16 the potential of Monero to be the world's digital cash protocol, 2:20 issues with lightning network adoption, Drivechains as a scaling solution, 2:24 why Bitcoin has not adopted them, and the possibility of Monero to do so. 2:29 They also discuss Monero's superior privacy technology and utility for payments, 2:34 and the need for cryptocurrencies to provide actual utility beyond being a means of speculation. 2:40 Monero Talk starts now. 2:47 All right, Paul, what's going on? How's it going? 2:50 Thanks for having me on. 2:53 I know in the background you're ordering food right now with Monero, which is amazing. 2:58 I'm just kidding. 3:00 I wish I would if I could. 3:03 That would be great. Uber eats Monero. 3:07 How about just crypto adoption in general? 3:10 Do you feel like you're able to use it for things? 3:15 Well, as you may know, I've been a little critical, 3:19 sometimes in private among my friends and sometimes publicly on Twitter in front of the whole world, 3:25 saying that we don't do enough. 3:28 We don't focus enough on the user. 3:30 We are like a CEO that only talks about the stock price every day, 3:34 but they don't actually go in to the office to say, 3:38 why aren't people buying? Why don't people like the product? 3:41 What are we spending too much money on? 3:44 We don't do things enough. 3:48 And in that way, Monero is superior than even 90% of the legit, 3:57 of which 99% of all cryptocurrencies are complete and total garbage. 4:03 But even among the upper echelon of real ones, Monero is in a top percentile, 4:09 so it deserves our respect on that basis. 4:13 That means a lot coming from you. 4:14 And yeah, I totally agree. It is bizarre. 4:16 That's like rule number one. 4:17 If you're running a company, especially a tech company, 4:20 it's understanding your customer and their needs and what they're actually using it for 4:24 and then designing towards that end goal. 4:29 And I think what you've been expressing of late and sounding the alarms on in Bitcoin land 4:36 is that they're just not doing that, right? 4:39 Right. 4:41 And the weird thing is it is intentional choice. 4:44 It's not even that anything is going wrong, except the most important thing, which is the culture. 4:51 But it's like we could decide that we can. 4:57 It's very troubling because I think what really is the bottleneck 5:00 is that people would have to admit to ourselves that we care about competing. 5:05 And instead, Bitcoin tries to maintain this sort of like rule number one. 5:10 Our victory is preordained, manifest destiny, et cetera. 5:15 And so since it's a given that we will win and that it'll be $15 million a coin, 5:22 a hyper Bitcoinization, then to bring it from that abstract world down to the details 5:28 is like you really have to own up to being a serious, whatever, seriously delusional frame of mind. 5:37 So it's kind of like the business owner is losing money or some severe drug addict or something 5:42 where it's kind of a big pill to swallow, I guess, 5:47 which is a big problem because, of course, if you have a big problem and you... 5:53 The only thing worse than having a big problem is having a big problem and being in denial about it. 5:59 It's like the ultimate form of hubris, right? 6:02 Obviously, all these things you're saying, they mean a lot because it's coming from you. 6:09 I think we failed to get your background. 6:11 I mean, you're not just like some guy who got into crypto yesterday. 6:15 You've been around from the early days. 6:17 That's true. 6:18 Contributing to Bitcoin. 6:20 You have a very high-level understanding. 6:22 Can you give the audience some insight into who exactly you are 6:25 and why they should even be listening to your opinion and your takes? 6:30 Well, you know... 6:33 I mean that in the best way because you're like... 6:36 I have been around for a very long time and I have been actively involved. 6:39 So, for example, there were these scaling Bitcoin conferences that were very big. 6:43 That was like the beginning of the scaling war in 2015 6:48 and everyone was going to meet and kind of talk. 6:52 So, I was there for all of those. 6:55 One, two, and three. 6:56 I was on the program committee for the fourth. 6:58 But then they started to suck. 7:00 So, then I got off that sinking ship at the perfect moment. 7:05 So, I think that's a short way. 7:06 I have presented like building on Bitcoin, breaking Bitcoin. 7:11 I go around the world to go to people's Bitcoin Wednesday event. 7:16 So, I've been to quite a few. 7:17 I've been invited to quite a few extremely technical... 7:21 I'm always invited to TabConf. 7:23 In fact, I keynoted twice. 7:28 So, TabConf is a big technical Bitcoin conference if you didn't know. 7:32 And are you a dev as well? 7:34 Have you contributed to Bitcoin? 7:36 Well, I have not. 7:37 Nothing that I have invented or coded has been merged yet, 7:41 although it's hovering around. 7:43 It's hovering in near-Earth orbit. 7:47 It's ironic. 7:48 One thing, I invented this thing called deniability. 7:50 It's not especially amazing or interesting. 7:53 It's a very old idea, but me and a collaborator produced this. 7:58 It's basically just a GUI that just schedules sending money to yourself at random times. 8:03 And this is so that you can go out. 8:05 You go out to the mall and your face is on a security camera 8:09 and you are shaking hands with a friend. 8:12 And then meanwhile, your money is moving around. 8:15 Like you've pre-signed the transactions, but they go out at random times. 8:18 So, then it looks like someone else has that money. 8:20 It's just called deniability because you say, 8:22 I don't own any Bitcoin anymore. 8:24 And then it looks like since you send it to yourself, 8:26 it looks exactly like you've sent it to someone else. 8:28 It looks like other people have it. 8:31 And it's very simple. 8:32 And you can see this is a very – there's no controversy about this. 8:35 You could easily have something else. 8:40 You could write a program to do this that doesn't have to be in, 8:44 but it's just better if it's in the graphical user interface of Bitcoin Core full node. 8:50 There's a pull request for that. 8:51 And it's exactly the kind of thing that they would not merge though. 8:57 They don't want to merge anything useful or practical. 9:00 And they especially don't want to take responsibility for the user experience. 9:03 They want to drop the GUI completely. 9:05 They've wanted to do that for a long time 9:07 and just make it like an industrial piece of high-performance software 9:11 and have other people write the wallet, which is fine. 9:14 But this is the kind of thing that they're not interested in. 9:18 And I have these two BIPs, of course. 9:19 This is the greatest piece of Bitcoin technology ever created, 9:24 but it's so good that it's just too much to chew on. 9:30 But BIP300/301, 9:33 which allow you to basically send Bitcoins to and from other pieces of software, 9:39 including something that could be an exact clone of Monero. 9:42 Drivechains. 9:43 Drivechains. 9:44 Yeah, Drivechains. 9:45 Now you developed Drivechains? 9:46 You developed that BIP? 9:48 Yes, I invented this. 9:49 I wrote the BIP. 9:52 I formed an organization called LayerTwo Labs, 9:55 the founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs. 9:57 You can go to LayerTwoLabs.com, 9:58 and you can see little pictures and infographics, 10:00 and we have a video on what BIP300 does, 10:03 and you can download our test software. 10:08 Usually I put it out on releases.drivechain.info first, 10:12 and then we put it out on LayerTwo Labs later. 10:14 We have a new version coming out soon. 10:18 I've seen you more recently than ever, 10:21 but I know Drivechains has been around for a long time. 10:24 Yeah, November 2015. 10:25 Wow. 10:26 Yeah. 10:27 It had very bad timing because it was around the same time as SegWit. 10:33 It's slightly older than SegWit even, 10:34 but SegWit was like the thing that the community decided to go for in Scaling 2, 10:41 which was December 2015. 10:44 I was all for doing SegWit. 10:47 It seemed like most other people were. 10:50 It was this kind of compromised block size increase, 10:53 so it placated the large blockers in addition to supercharging lightning 10:57 and making lightning basically possible in the modern form. 11:02 But yeah, I think history would have gone much, much, much better for Bitcoin 11:07 if instead we had gone for BIP300 Drivechain type idea 11:12 because what ended up happening in Bitcoin was a total disaster, I think, 11:15 as a result with SegWit where it didn't give the large blockers what they wanted. 11:21 It wasn't ready. 11:22 Someone threw out this date. 11:24 They said April 1st. 11:25 I don't know where this came from, but people thought, okay, we'll have SegWit. 11:28 This was December 2015, so this is like the new year is going to start. 11:32 It's like December 5th or something. 11:35 And people thought, yeah, we'll have SegWit ready by April 1st, 11:38 but then April 1st came and went and it wasn't ready, 11:41 which is totally understandable if you understand software, 11:44 but the whole environment was so contentious already 11:47 and then it ended up not being ready until the hackathon after Scaling 3, 11:53 which was October, like mid-October 2016, 11:56 so it ended up being this long period of time and it was this miserable slog 12:00 and it was just no one was getting what they wanted 12:02 and it led to the scaling war and the BCH split. 12:09 The unfortunate thing about that, many people, the prevailing view is that, 12:14 you know, small blockers, we defeated the large blockers 12:18 and now because we were victorious, like the price went up 12:21 and everything was great. 12:22 Right. 12:24 But that prevailing view misses the most important thing, 12:27 which is that in order to win, we all became like politicians 12:31 and we came with this us versus them tribal mentality 12:34 and that I think kills the goose that lays the golden egg, 12:38 which is in fact dead in Bitcoin, which is sort of like the… 12:43 The scaling war, the victory in 2017 caused a worse problem than it solved 12:50 because the problem that it caused was that it created this attitude 12:55 that Bitcoin is a finished project and it's already won 12:58 and that resisting change is the way to go. 13:02 That's when I left Bitcoin and for those reasons 13:05 because I was just like, I mean, that was my interpretation at the time. 13:09 Yeah. 13:10 I mean, Samson Mao didn't win you over with his, you know. 13:14 It came across as troubling to me. 13:20 So why are you, I feel like you're more vocal than ever right now on this. 13:26 Well, that's a good point. 13:30 I mean, a lot of it I felt for a really long time. 13:32 So like I felt in 2017 and I had said it also. 13:35 I said, well, is this the beginning of the end? 13:38 Because we won, but in order to win, like all the people, 13:44 the people who were against SegWit didn't know anything about it, 13:47 but the people who were for it, they didn't really know anything about it either. 13:50 They just knew the wrong people didn't want it, so we'll support it. 13:54 So it had become political. 13:56 I can define that in this context as when you have basically two groups 14:03 and you know what the other group doesn't want. 14:06 And so you just have this kind of spite-based social computation or something. 14:12 Most of the people I know who are Republican, 14:16 I think they don't really even care about, for example, 14:18 an issue like a global warming, but they know that it's coded as a left issue. 14:23 So they're going to buy a Ford F-150 and they're going to leave it on. 14:27 They're going to leave it under my Hummer and they're going to leave it idling, 14:30 you know, to own the libs or whatever, and vice versa. 14:33 I'm just saying this is a part of it. 14:35 And people have – there's a logic to it. 14:38 They have a thought that is like I know those people are wrong. 14:42 But I'm just talking about how this is very far from what someone would really do, 14:47 which is that NASA has these satellites that record the surface temperature every day 14:52 and anyone can look some information up about this. 14:55 But you don't have to have this – the people who shill global warming, 15:02 they also don't care about global warming either 15:04 because they don't care about like nuclear. 15:06 What they want is to like get more political influence, 15:10 vision of the anointed like Thomas Sowell type of thing. 15:13 So I'm just saying this is a type of thing where people don't really care about the thing. 15:17 They care about this other stuff, the social baggage. 15:22 And you could see that in 2017. 15:25 And more vocal about it now I think because honestly I really – 15:29 it's starting to get worried like lightning again. 15:32 I kind of always had problems with it, 15:34 but it's becoming clearer and clearer that everyone knows that it won't work, 15:40 but people are still afraid to say anything about it. 15:43 So I think you can see the culture has accumulated so much baggage. 15:50 Like there's so many things that people know are wrong but that they won't say. 15:55 And so that kind of makes me annoyed 15:57 and it makes me more willing to say those things because I know that by now, 16:00 as months and months go by, more and more people now are aware of those things. 16:05 So for example, NASA's go on and on and on and on. 16:08 Is it too much? 16:09 Go on and on and on. 16:10 Absolutely not. 16:11 There was a tab conf. 16:12 There was Matt Corallo, a leading, leading person, co-founder of Blockstream, 16:20 big lightning person. 16:22 He gave this talk about lightning being broken a year and a half ago, 16:27 but then like mostly people just – they treat it in a very weird way. 16:31 They treat it like a very academic way. 16:33 They say, aha, it's broken. 16:35 And they almost say good because now we can give more talks about it. 16:39 They don't like – no one really would like say – 16:43 it would be like if you were on a ship in the middle of the ocean 16:45 and someone said, this ship is sinking. 16:47 And people are like, aha, well. 16:49 And then next – we'll schedule the next conference. 16:55 It's kind of like – it's not really what you would do 16:58 if you really thought it was broken, 17:00 but it is what you would do if you wanted to like – 17:04 the whole thing is just about impressing other academics. 17:07 That's what it has become. 17:09 And it's not practical. 17:11 And that issue we were talking about previously about Monero 17:14 like caring about the user actually getting something out of it. 17:18 And the darknet markets is partly the key to that insight. 17:23 People actually use it to accomplish a purpose. 17:28 And that would be like the CEO who does not care about the stock price. 17:33 He doesn't care about the actual product. 17:37 I love that you're saying that. 17:39 I mean I couldn't agree with you more. 17:41 I mean so where do you see this going for Bitcoin? 17:46 I mean is it futile at this point? 17:50 Well, I have discussed – 17:52 It's like it's in this loop of – that it can't get out of 17:55 because of the fact that number go up is the bigger concern 18:00 and everybody's got their laser eyes on. 18:03 And as long as the price is going up, everything is fine. 18:07 Well, it's funny you mention that because – 18:09 okay, so we're trapped in this loop, 18:11 but we will get out of the loop at some point. 18:14 The question is just is it like a total death spiral crash landing, right? 18:18 Or is it something else? 18:20 But for example, one of the things that people told me all throughout last year 18:25 was they said institutions are coming, the ETF is coming. 18:29 People told me all that. 18:31 They said like a pension fund is going to be buying BTC. 18:35 And so they said it's – they sing this song about Bitcoin will be number one 18:42 and it's too far ahead. 18:44 They say it's all going to be Bitcoin and Ethereum. 18:47 Often they would also say that. 18:50 And so the – but we had the ETF and the price crashed on the news. 18:58 It's like when everyone thinks something will be good, it's often bad. 19:03 Everyone thinks something will be good for the price. 19:05 That's usually a sign that it will be bad for the price. 19:08 Still, no. 19:10 But I think the – we will get out of it in some way. 19:15 So either the price will crash 19:17 and that will stimulate a frustrated search for creative change. 19:24 Or some people think that the fees will go up. 19:29 My friend Alex Kravitz, he thinks eventually the L1 fees will be so high 19:34 that it will be so annoying for regular users. 19:38 They will demand a useful L2. 19:42 Other people say it will just go – it will be mostly custodial 19:45 and that that won't – that either will eventually – that it won't be a problem. 19:49 Some people say that. 19:50 Or they say eventually it will then go the same way as gold 19:54 where since people aren't actually using it at all, they will – 20:00 so yeah, but I think that what is the optimistic thing briefly 20:04 is to just say that it's all open source software 20:07 and it is hard to launch a new crypto coin. 20:12 But it's a lot easier to do that than like start a new nation 20:16 or start a new other currency, you know, like whatever. 20:19 Start like whatever, Liberty Reserve or something. 20:22 So as the public just understands crypto better, 20:29 as people get better at software development in general, 20:32 eventually there will be competitive pressure in the form of something new. 20:37 Something new will be launched that just doesn't suck 20:39 and that actually does care about the user and that will be – 20:43 now maybe you're going to tell me that that's Monero or something. 20:46 I don't know. 20:47 But I think that it will – I think the sidechain idea is – 20:52 that is a very important idea because people really disagree. 20:55 You need it to be all different shapes and sizes. 20:57 You want to have like privacy and then you also want to have like not – 21:01 you really want to have all the whole thing 21:03 and you want them to all be interoperable 21:05 because Monero has disadvantages with the brand 21:09 and like with getting liquidity on exchanges 21:12 by actually caring about the real use case of privacy, 21:15 you actually have some disadvantages. 21:18 So it would be nice to have – the sidechain idea lets you just have Monero 21:22 when you want it, ring signatures when you want it, 21:25 bulletproofs, whatever, when you want those, 21:27 and then you can also have something else, 21:29 something that looks UTXO, transparent UTXO. 21:34 Yeah, I mean it sounds like a great idea to me, 21:38 just like confidential transactions also sounded like a great idea 21:42 and some of these other things you're talking about, 21:44 they never get implemented. 21:46 Like we're saying, I think it's the number go up blinders 21:51 and people are more concerned about that than anything else 21:53 and it's like don't touch it. 21:55 Leave it be. 21:56 It's going up in value. 21:57 It's digital gold. 21:58 In fact, that's one of the qualities of it, that it never changes. 22:02 But is there something else that's maybe going on? 22:06 Like is it basically controlled by a group of people that are determining this? 22:14 I think it's more of a USSR thing than – 22:17 well, I mean it's like a post-Stalin USSR thing. 22:21 Like it's not really a dictatorship, 22:23 but instead no one takes responsibility for doing the right thing. 22:28 So instead it just kind of is a bureaucracy. 22:31 It's a Kafka thing instead where a lot of the more senior people 22:37 made a lot of money in Bitcoin 22:39 and then they either retired literally or de facto. 22:44 Like they're just whatever, traveling the world. 22:47 And the new people are afraid to either contradict them or one-up them 22:52 because they kind of have a relative to where they were before, 22:55 which was they were total nobodies. 22:56 Now they're Bitcoin core developers. 22:59 And so now that's prestigious or whatever. 23:03 And so they don't want to like do anything that – 23:07 which will be the mistake, of course, because – 23:10 That's interesting. 23:11 I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of like bureaucracy. 23:15 I'm thinking is it like Blockstream that's controlling it 23:20 and they have an incentive? 23:22 They have very little formal control 23:25 and then they're always quick to jump on that. 23:27 And then they always follow that truth up with a total complete lie, 23:31 which is they insinuate that they have no soft control either, 23:35 which is completely and totally false. 23:37 They have an enormous amount of chilling effect like a little comment 23:41 or a negative email or something is a veto. 23:46 And the fact that they don't admit that 23:48 and that they don't admit that it is not only bad for Bitcoin 23:52 but bad for them also and just bad for everyone. 23:56 And the fact that they don't fix that is a great moral failure 24:00 of the whole Bitcoin community, mostly them though, 24:03 that you should really just admit that they – 24:06 or they should just – they have several options. 24:09 But what they currently do is not – 24:14 they say we don't really control that much, which is true. 24:17 There's another company, Chaincode Labs, that controls sort of more, 24:23 but they don't – but I wouldn't think of it in these terms. 24:28 I would say it's – the reason why – 24:34 many people do believe that their number one job is not to break Bitcoin. 24:42 So when that's your point of view, like let's say you're running a restaurant 24:48 and like maybe you changed the menu like every three years in the past 24:52 and maybe you had a fresh coat of paint every five years in the past. 24:56 But now it's your job not to break the restaurant. So now you just kind of look the other way on anything new. You're never going to do any like bold new thing that the actual owner would do. 25:05 The people in charge, you know, now of like merging pull requests and stuff, they do not have a lot of upside if something goes really well. 25:16 So like someone, Jeremy Rubin, can invent 119. If it's merged, he gets a lot of upside. But the people who merge it do not get the upside. 25:29 It seems like a story as old as time. 25:32 It is. It is. It exactly is. 25:34 And in technology, especially the technology space with competing technologies, you have something that comes along, it does very well, becomes this behemoth, and then it's just not able to pivot anymore. 25:45 Yeah. Have you read The Innovator's Dilemma, a famous book on this topic? 25:50 It's exactly that. It's like the graph of the hard drives or something, you know, like they get better and better at making the big hard, but no one wants that anymore because some other thing in the market will change. 26:00 So for now, the space has moved so quickly that even though it has been like, whatever, 15 years or so, it's a long time, but it's moved so quickly that there – it's still – I think people only just recently have started to really get restless for like second-guessing the whole, is Bitcoin a – 26:24 I think the other thing is it's very hard to understand Bitcoin. For some reason, it seems like hard drives or something is easier to understand, or even like reusable rockets or something. 26:34 Like the core ideas are easier to understand of just like how much hard drive space, the cost. 26:40 This is like – it's like so indirect where you want – it's about freedom of speech. 26:47 So I think this is harder for people to understand why an idea is good. 26:51 So, I mean, you're running around. You're sounding the alarms on this. 27:01 Yeah. 27:02 Do you think it's going to lead to a change? Do you think you get it to the point where people are like, all right, let's do it. Let's add Drivechains. I mean – 27:09 I think my short-term goal is just to try to – you have to break up the stigma a little bit whenever you do something like this where you know most people don't agree. 27:20 Like if I go on Twitter and all my Bitcoin friends and audience and whatever, and I say whatever, Bitcoin is doing the wrong thing. 27:28 You know that most people will not agree with that. They only want to hear about how everything's going great. 27:33 So you just have to get a couple people to say it, and then you can get more people to say it, and then there will be more people who are – 27:42 they're in some kind of position where they deserve – they're low on the totem pole, but they deserve to rise. 27:49 And they need – those people need objectively – those people need like a mission and a cause. 27:54 They need something to show their high merit. 27:58 And people such as yourself or like someone who's like more on the fringe of Bitcoin in an altcoin land. 28:06 Those people – so I think the short-term goal is to kind of just get the ideas out there and just say, listen, I'm not going to go along with this sinking ship. 28:16 And we need to care about the user. 28:20 So I think that you just get that out there at first. 28:25 And then I think we will try to put out – we're working on the software all the time, but it is getting to a point where I think lots of people can use it, like the Drivechain test software. 28:38 So we have like a test signet. 28:41 I think that will do a lot of the talking also because many, many projects in the space, they don't put anything out. 28:46 It's just vaporware. 28:48 Or stuff is very hard to describe or stuff is debatable like in person. 28:53 But then when the actual software is there, a lot of that becomes like a moot point because it's like here it is. 28:58 Here's the software. 29:00 So I think those are the short-term goals. 29:03 And long-term, I think something like Drivechain is inevitable, actually, I think. 29:12 I just don't know if it will be like Bitcoin adding it happily or begrudgingly or if something else will take over the space, which will eventually happen. 29:26 If we neglect the needs of the end user enough, it will eventually lead to the death of the project. 29:30 I think that is, to me, not only is that straightforward, I think to me it is almost like that's the thing we can be most certain of out of everything. 29:43 Yeah, I mean, the market is going to react, right? 29:47 If it's not doing what the market needs, they're going to go somewhere else. 29:50 It's, once again, a story as old as time. 29:54 A lot of people have contempt for the user and they think they can get away with that because they say store value is used. 30:01 Investing in it is, buying and owning the stock is being a customer of whatever, which is not true. 30:08 Or it's true in a very misleading sense. 30:11 But that will be really hard when there is something that like everyone, like a billion people in India use every day. 30:19 And then those people are not going to be listening when you go up to them and you say, oh, you should buy Bitcoin because it has a really high price. 30:27 And then they'll say, is it like thing that they use every day? 30:33 Is it like, let's say it's Monero just for fun. 30:36 Is it like Monero? 30:38 And they're like, yes, it's the thing that people use every day that will be money to them. 30:43 And everything else will not be money. 30:45 They are mutually exclusive. 30:46 So they're all locked in a battle royale. 30:50 Only one coin will emerge, I think. 30:54 I'm pretty confident. 30:56 Others may exist, but they'll exist in the same way that tokens on BTC or on Ethereum will exist. 31:04 They'll have a market cap that is one one hundred thousandth or that is more like something for fun. 31:12 Ithaca dollars or something. 31:13 So you do think it's going to be more of a one coin to rule them all. 31:19 One protocol. 31:21 I just think. 31:23 That makes sense, right? 31:25 Because you have this one protocol and then you have the Drivechains coming off of it that are doing all. 31:29 You have all the different blockchains, all the different protocols, but with just one coin, 21 million coins. 31:35 But like as many blockchains as are needed of all shapes and sizes. 31:39 I think what we've had is the demand for blockchains of all shapes and sizes, including a privacy shape. 31:47 That is what has led to the endurance of the altcoins. 31:51 So that's what people want is they want to customize the software, which is and they want to continue to improve and develop the software, make progress with the software. 32:01 That's why altcoins have hung around for as long as they have and why we have things like Solana, Aptos, these other things. 32:10 So I think that demand is real, but I don't think. 32:15 I just don't think people want to live in a world that has all these different altcoins at the end of the day. 32:20 It's not like you go to the supermarket and you take out banana coin and you buy some bananas and you take out tomato coins and you buy some tomatoes. 32:28 People just don't like that. 32:31 They find that annoying. 32:33 That would be like speaking a different language. 32:35 Every time you want to buy bananas, you have to speak whatever, like Haitian Creole or something. 32:40 Yeah, one protocol to rule them all certainly makes sense, especially when it comes to money. 32:45 It makes sense more than almost anything else. 32:48 The fear of losing the investment. 32:50 You don't want to stick with a very, very small. 32:52 If you're in like the lowest percentile of use, you would be afraid. 32:58 You'd say this could go to zero and no one would care because no one's using it. 33:02 Whereas if you say I'm holding the US dollar, you would say, oh, it would go to zero and who would care? 33:07 You'd be like, wait a minute. 33:09 Many, many, many, many extremely important people and the entire US armed forces, like lots of people would care. 33:16 Then you think, okay. 33:18 But if you're in a small one, you think, oh, this goes to zero. 33:21 Who will shed a tear for me in Feathercoin or whatever? 33:27 And to be clear, while you're one coin to rule them all, you don't think that Bitcoin has proven that it's 100% the winner at this point. 33:38 That's still up for debate. 33:40 Again, there's a big contrast. 33:42 Given its current situation. 33:43 It's a night and day contrast between, I say one coin to rule them all. 33:48 But I separate completely the asset from the technology stack. 33:54 I think they have very little to do with each other. 33:58 So it's really the UTXO set that Satoshi started. 34:02 He achieved a minimum viable amount of usefulness. 34:06 That's indisputed. 34:08 So the technology got us to square one. 34:11 And then from then on, it was just the Bitcoin UTXO set, which is like a binding social glue that held everyone together for a long era. 34:22 And then there's this, you know, as an open source technology, it was supposed to be the case that if people wanted to use Bitcoin a different way, such as Vitalik, with the Turing Complete scripts, they should have been allowed and encouraged to do so. 34:39 But instead, there was no sidechains back then, 2013, 2014. 34:46 And so the fact that Bitcoin, like Bitcoin right now, it does very well as being the oldest coin. 34:56 It is the one with the most key people. 34:59 It's the US dollar of crypto, you know, in terms of being just the biggest and therefore the most powerful network effect. 35:08 The tech stack is what you cannot. 35:15 The tech stack cannot. 35:19 Yeah, right now in its current form, the tech stack will not be is not the winning form for Bitcoin because it just can't it can't be used by only a small number of people could use it at all, even on the Lightning Network. 35:33 Right. And because of that, ultimately, it can lose its lead as being it's the UTXO set can can also end up failing in terms of its social contract, because at some point, people will just leave, leave the ship. 35:48 Yes. And of course, it can contain the wrong people. 35:50 So if the wrong people buy, they will drag it down. 35:55 The wrong people buy in. 35:57 So do you do you see other are you currently considering other protocols as perhaps being able to compete with Bitcoin for being the one protocol or you're not there yet? 36:11 Anyway, I you know, I was actually I was hoping that as a as an impartial like I was a small blocker, but I was hoping that what would happen would be that Bitcoin cash would be a good competitor. 36:28 And that would get BTC would sort of shape up a little bit. 36:31 So it's kind of like if you have a someone who's lazy and you want them to compete, then they have a rival. 36:38 You know what I mean? Maybe they take, you know, like in this scenario, the user is like a beautiful woman or something. 36:45 And then there's only one guy on the island. 36:47 But then the second guy will show up to fight, you know, for, you know, not maybe not each other, but they have to like. 36:53 They're both doing pull ups. 36:55 Exactly. Right. Exactly. 36:57 So but instead, what happened was Bitcoin cash, I think, was was not run very well. 37:03 Sorry. I mean, I've you know, I'm just as you think you guys think I'm mean to. 37:09 I mean, to Bitcoin or BTC or I mean to Monero, I mean, to everyone, I think Bitcoin cash made so many mistakes that that would have been more foreseeable and that were ongoing. 37:22 And I just but nonetheless, they are a competitor. 37:26 They are they are another another person. 37:29 But I think the so far it has been very weak is what I'm trying to say. 37:36 And so I hope that someone arrives who can compete better. 37:43 So far, it's been very weak. 37:44 You know, most of the stuff is just either complete scam or it's something like, you know, again, I hate to be so on, you know, so on the whatever you want to call it with this. 37:56 Maybe I could try to be more indirect about it. 37:59 Don't hold back, don't hold back. 38:00 A16Z owns like a huge chunk of that out of the gate and this other stuff like that is like their goal. 38:08 OK, think about their payoff matrix in their head, like. 38:14 A16Z, they want to lock in like a 10x or 20x and then get out. 38:19 So that's why that's why Solana was the way it was. 38:23 Now, it's something where it starts off. 38:27 They don't care a lot about the long run full node cost. 38:30 They want to just blast out a bunch of like parties, networking events, which is exactly what they did. 38:35 Marketing stuff, you know, and this is great. 38:38 And this is I would even say that this the scam phase is almost like a necessary bootloading, like a kind of it is a kind of stepping stone. 38:51 But, yeah, you can't you can't necessarily trust people who launch an altcoin. 38:55 But but Ricardo Spagni did a great job with Monero with the whole don't we this is the don't buy Monero. 39:00 He's the opposite of the CEO. 39:02 He's like, don't don't talk about the stock price. 39:05 It's just it just kicked all those people out of the culture, which is why it at least is got some respect from me. 39:14 I don't know what that's worth in the long run, in the grand scheme of things. 39:18 But but I know a lot of people felt that way. 39:21 The Bitcoin Uncensored crew kind of all felt that way, that they were like, this project is about the only one that is about something. 39:30 But Bitcoin Cash was about something, too. 39:32 But they but I thought they were not very they were about the large blocker version of Bitcoin. 39:36 And it would have been very good for the end user to have two people who are each each woke up every day to like development teams or other leadership teams or just communities. 39:48 They would wake up every day worrying about am I going to lose more people to. 39:54 The other, you know, you want two political parties that Shumpeterian battle, this epic battle, like like in whatever the whatever. 40:04 There's another word for it in the UK also. 40:06 But I don't we have Joseph Shumpeter in the US. 40:10 So like this kind of like struggle over the the people's opinion that that would be great. 40:16 But when instead, you know, is that making some sense? 40:20 Yeah, yeah. 40:22 Created in a furnace. Right. 40:24 I mean, do you think that we have like a great I mean, like Ethereum is clearly the competitor to BTC. 40:29 But Ethereum is very weird also. 40:31 Like, you know, it's kind of like they're trying so many things. 40:34 It's almost like it's not it doesn't it hasn't agreed to just nail itself down to like one idea. 40:40 It's kind of just saying we're going to keep changing things until we flip it. 40:45 Bitcoin, I guess, is kind of like the overall philosophy, which I think, you know, there's some merit to that as a strategy. 40:52 But I think it's just what Ethereum is also has a very shady origin. 40:58 People argue about to what extent does that matter? 41:01 I think now it matters as time goes on. 41:03 It matters less and less. 41:04 I think that's clear. 41:05 It used to matter an awful lot. 41:07 Yeah. 41:09 So how about how about Monero then? 41:11 Where do you put Monero? 41:12 Do you see it as a potential competitor to to be, you know, the global utility for for digital cash? 41:20 I do. 41:21 But I think the one size fits all thing is tough for anything to work. 41:26 The sidechain idea is the key idea for me because I'm so interested in the sidechain really supercharges the competition idea. 41:35 So I could be 300 type idea. 41:37 It says you can have everyone. 41:39 You're even more afraid because you you run sub chain number six, the Monero privacy chain. 41:45 But then next to you is. 41:47 Some of the Zcash chain, and this is all just with BTC and the user can just move at the drop of a hat and they don't lose any value. 41:54 There's no exchange rate risk. 41:55 So I want I want more competition. 41:59 I think, you know, Monero has this caring about privacy is an important strength. 42:05 And I would almost say that every instance where Monero suffers as a result, you could hold it up as saying like like exchanges and stuff. 42:13 And like you could say this is a real we don't do what other people want us to do. 42:19 We do what we want to do, take it or leave it. 42:23 And that is you know, that would be like, you know, that's I think that's actually very attractive in the metaphor of the island. 42:28 You know, it's like everyone is people are simping basically. 42:32 And Monero is just like this. 42:34 And look, this is what you get. 42:35 OK, you know, I'm just doing pull ups in the corner. 42:38 Right. The so the challenge. 42:44 I mean, definitely the darknet markets is a sign of hope and also a canary in the coal mine for BTC. 42:50 The fact that so many people drop that the that use case and that Monero clings on to it. 42:57 The challenge is, can you convert that? 43:02 That's like a wedge you jumped in. 43:05 And I think just the timing is difficult, like being an old altcoin. 43:11 Paradoxically, is this is where, you know, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I say such and such. 43:16 And then on Tuesday, Thursday, I say something else. 43:18 But it's like I think. 43:23 Being an old altcoin is kind of tough because the Bitcoin is such a center of gravity in the past that now it kind of looks like there's a bunch of people who like own a bunch of Monero and it's kind of like, I don't know, it'd be hard to. 43:40 That tail emission, which kind of. 43:43 Yeah, people care far too much about. 43:47 About that, but that I think that does. 43:51 People would always be thinking like, well, someone fork Monero and just delete the tail mission and then we'll have to compare. 43:56 I'm saying the tail emission, you know, plays into the well, there's always new coins coming out. Right. 44:01 So if you're showing up and being like, I don't want to be part of this project where it's owned, but, you know, there's a couple of guys that have old coins. 44:06 Yeah, which is the boat. 44:08 Yeah. 44:09 The idea of missing the boat. I think that's important. 44:11 You need more than there's a well-known result in game theory and in political science about an interest based coalition usually is not enough. 44:26 So, in other words, if everyone is in the coalition just because it happens to be better for them right now. 44:32 That usually that usually doesn't even that usually fails to even form. 44:37 And what do I mean by that? What am I talking about? 44:41 The coalition needs like moral glue to hold itself together. 44:45 So it needs to be based on things that are a large number of people can agree with and understand over a long shifting time horizon where you say something like people get into the law. 44:57 They care about fairness. 44:59 They care about people being treated fairly, like the late justice lady with the blindfold and the scales. 45:04 And it's hard to it's hard to get everyone to agree. 45:08 You know, become if it's become like Hatfield versus McCoy very easily. 45:14 If you don't have like someone saying this is what we all all of us should do because it's hard enough. 45:22 There's going to be criminals and defectors and like, you know, like anarchists of the bad kind, violent anarchists. 45:29 There'll be people who just or just people who are low on the totem pole and they want to shake things up like a communist subversive communist to like just anything like the chaos climbers. 45:43 They're sometimes called ever since I think was in no opinion, wrote that post about the about like Peter Baelish from Game of Thrones. 45:51 The chaos is a ladder guy. 45:53 I missed that. 45:54 You have no idea what I'm talking about. 45:55 Like some people, they know they can't. 45:57 Their only chance to make it, you know, his only chance to take the Iron Throne is if he causes like a lot of mayhem indirectly. 46:04 And then that, you know, that. 46:07 So you always have those people. 46:10 So it's really hard to hold any coalition together. 46:12 And this stuff, this crypto blockchain stuff, you have to form like a community. 46:17 And so it's difficult when you have people who feel like they'll never be able to join. 46:22 They'll never feel like it's not fair. 46:24 And I think people would feel that way for an old for something like Monero. 46:29 Maybe you disagree. 46:30 They'll show up and they'll say Monero. 46:32 It was so obscure for. 46:33 So how could I possibly have found out about it until now? 46:36 I only heard about Bitcoin. 46:37 And now I found out this thing. 46:38 And now all the coins have been mined already. 46:40 I would almost say that people need to either do UTXO fork of Bitcoin and swap the technology in or start over completely from scratch. 46:50 Knowing that you could say now, I think there would be appetite for someone to say something like. 47:00 I'm number one coin. 47:01 Bitcoin is sort of failing us. 47:04 So there's time for a new thing. 47:05 Of course, when you launch that new thing and people want to. 47:09 I get the whole network of like that's that's like invalidating the concept of network effect. 47:13 But it's difficult. 47:15 I get what you're saying. 47:17 But like I said, I think there's a few things to think about there. 47:19 Right. Like Monero does have a tail emission, which so all the coins haven't been mined. 47:24 Right. There's always new coins that are going to be emitted, which I understand that. 47:28 But I think the other the other major point is just its utility. 47:33 Right. So you're looking at it from the or you're describing it from the mindset of an investment. 47:39 Right. People want to be part of this thing that they join, where if they join early enough, it turns into more money, which is literally what Bitcoin is. 47:47 The only thing it's pitched at at this point, which is becoming troubling, because even if that is the case, you can only TEDx so many more times. 47:55 Right. Like, you know, when you read this math on a blog post. 48:01 It's like, why are new people going to enter for for making a ton of money off of it if it's only going to 2x at some point? 48:07 Right. And when we arrive at that point. 48:11 But with Monero or just a digital cash, it's like people it's not even about what is the price? 48:19 Is it going to be worth more tomorrow? It's I need this thing to perform some function on the Internet. 48:25 And there's nothing else that allows me to do that. But this tool. 48:29 So I think I think it that will overcome this idea of, oh, wait, but it's an old thing. 48:36 Like, well, you're right. It's a mix. The weird thing, it is a mix and it's very difficult to untangle. 48:42 So like the QWERTY keyboard is not the optimal keyboard layout. 48:46 It's it's kind of absurd. But because people got used to it, the network effects won over in that case. 48:54 If you think network effects are the most, I think network effects are very important, as we've mentioned. 49:00 But they can't be totally important because if they were, if they were overwhelming, then the US dollar would just eventually become the currency of everything. 49:08 Which, you know, that is slowly happening in the fiat world. 49:11 But it's also the case that these fiat currencies are all, you know, slowly committing suicide or rapidly in some cases committing suicide. 49:20 And the other the other point, too, is it's it takes time to, you know, it's not just network effect, but it's also people gaining trust in this utility for the function that it's proposed to perform. 49:33 If if new XYZ coin comes out tomorrow, newfangled technology, it's even more private than Monero. 49:40 Yes, Monero has a network effect and it's also proven itself. 49:43 It has to be known to have that property. Yes. 49:46 Proven for those purposes. Right. 49:48 So, yeah, I think that's that's perfectly true. 49:51 I mean, I think the the the advice would be to focus completely on the end user experience and try to dial it up as much as possible. 50:00 Even to the point of like, you'd want all you just want a lot of the privacy use cases also is very big because there's a lot of stuff that people would prefer to be hidden and it's also differentiating because so few people will actually go for it. 50:14 I mean, people who do go so few suppliers, excuse me, suppliers of crypto. I mean, I'm talking about like Zcash, where it's great technology, but their their organization is sort of weird. And so it is an ambiguous state. 50:32 So so back to the Drivechains then. So like, you know, knowing that these these these altcoins have already blossomed, right, because of Bitcoin stagnating and not evolving. If Drivechains happened, you know, five years ago, three years ago, maybe it would have stymied some of that development. 50:54 But these these ships have already sailed and they're building their own network effects and they're building their own momentum. Does Drivechains adding it to this point at Bitcoin, is it potentially not as impactful as, as what you may think or originally thought it would be like all altcoins and then shift over or is there something? 51:18 I don't think that they would, but it's about the user. It's about the usage, the usage, as you were saying, just a moment ago, where you would now be able to use Bitcoin for the, you'd have a Bitcoin XMR address or something. And if you wanted to send Bitcoin in that format, you would be able to. And then probably as the, you know, the new darknet market, you know, it's not going to be able to do that. 51:48 They would probably like first they'd have support for both XMR. We'd start to, it would start to drift back slowly. I think most of the big reason why people use altcoins is because of their genuine love of novelty and even of technology. 52:04 So many of the people are, you have like a kind of a barbell where you have a lot of people, the DGN gambler people who are just flipping it and they don't, they couldn't care what it does, you know, like they couldn't care. In fact, if it does nothing, almost the better, like the NFT, like, you know what I mean? Like it's like the dumber it is, the better they want, they want, you know, whatever they want it to be like sheeb, you know, it's a gamble. 52:31 It's just, they're having fun and it is, it is literally entertainment is literally gambling. It's not like a gamble the way most people use the word where they say it's like a, they say, no, it's like literally they're going to the casino and having fun so that you have that on the one hand of the barbell. On the other hand, you have just the people just enjoy making things. They make, they enjoy making software. Like I don't believe that, you know, a lot of these, these are like someone is tinkering around with the software. 52:58 They think, why shouldn't this exist? They make it, maybe they give themselves a bunch of coins. But, you know, I think even that would not, those are like the ultra high turnover. Those are like the terrible coins. You pre-mine, you, the coins that actually make it into like the top 50, they have some kind of, some kind of angle, they have some kind of novelty to them. 53:26 And even something like NXT, which is ancient and it had a 100% pre-mine, but it was like the first thing to do a 100%, you know what I mean? Like it had, it had a genuine novel. So I think it's honestly represents human creativity to some extent, not as much as I would like, because what I would prefer is that everyone compete in launching sidechains. 53:46 They don't have the baggage of a new coin and they can just write whatever software they want. So I think actually the creativity has been clamped down. We have two huge forces that interact, open source software, allowing enormous creativity. And then we have the network effects of money and the fact that most altcoins are scams. That baggage is the network effects of suppressing the creativity. The network effects is in some sense a prison for someone who has a good idea, but they have no way of getting it. 54:15 Like if you have, what would you do if you had a great idea for improving Monero, but for some reason it's just not happening. Like you just can't convince whatever the right four or five people. Well, now the network effects has screwed the world. You know, it has, it makes it worse for the world because it can't, we can't, we can't get that idea into the world now. 54:36 Do you love coffee and Monero as much as we do? Consider making Gratuitous.org your daily cup. Pay with Monero for premium fresh beans. And if you like what you taste, send a digital cash tip directly to the Guatemalan farmers that made it possible. Proceeds help us grow this channel, Gratuitous and Monero. 55:06 Come build Drivechains for Monero, man. 55:37 So it's basically an integer that counts to 13,000. It's a little bit more than that, but this, the L1 part is simple and the L2 is the one that watches all these messages and interprets them. 55:49 So anyone who adds BIP300 to their L1, they should be able to just copy and paste our entire suite of sidechains that we have made and use them on. So if anyone adds BIP300 to Monero, which is the easy part, I'm saying, I want to stress this is like less than 1% of the total amount of software engineering that me and LayerTwo Labs has done. 56:14 If you add BIP300 to Monero, you can then copy and paste the sidechain. You can use, we made a fork of Zcash. We made a fork of Ethereum. It's just Ethereum just with the L1 coin. 56:27 Yeah, but adding a BIP to Monero, right? I mean, Monero is a completely different chain than Bitcoin, right? 56:34 Yes, but there are some smart people that I've known that were associated with Monero. They could read and understand the BIP, which is the actual BIP part is not that hard. 56:47 All this conversation about BIP300 is about these indirect effects, which is all just a bunch of either concern trolling or sour grapes or some other kind of nonsense. 56:55 Take it from me. It's just anything that counts to $13,000. The way it works is by offering miners fees on these chains. They say, listen, you're going to get eventually one or more of these sidechains is going to be generating fees, and that's why you should support the withdrawal system. 57:15 In a nutshell, that's the idea. The L1 part is easy to code, I think. 57:24 Yeah, I don't know. That might have even been proposed at some point in Monero. I mean, there's other layer two ideas that have been proposed. There's merge mining that's taking place with Monero or will take place. 57:37 Tari is being designed to merge mine with Monero. DarkFi has announced that they'll be merge mining with Monero. But just because something merge mines with it doesn't mean it's connected to it in a drivetrain like way, right? I mean, those are two separate concepts. 57:55 They are. They actually split them into two BIPs because I thought it would make it easier for people to understand. I'm not sure if I succeeded in that or not. But BIP301 is about a refinement to merge mining. BIP300 is the deposits and withdrawals. And these are two completely different things that unfortunately people get confused an awful lot. But merge mining was invented by Satoshi in 2010, and it has been in continuous use on Bitcoin ever since. 58:23 Namecoin was the first. Was Namecoin merge mining? 58:26 Namecoin was the first merge mined coin and the first altcoin also. 58:31 Yes. 58:33 Invented by Satoshi, the altcoiner. But what I'm trying to say is merge mining just means that when you find a block of one, you find a block of more, one or more other chains. That's very easy to do. In fact, it cannot even be stopped. 58:57 One counterintuitive property of merge mining is that it's the new coin that the miners point to and they make the new block in a way that part of that block is a valid block. So there's nothing that you can even do to stop merge mining. It's fascinating. 59:15 It's kind of an amazing piece of technology. And the fact that it's even possible is fascinating. And the fact that it is not only possible but unpreventable is also kind of just one of the great whimsical kind of concepts of Bitcoin. 59:31 Because it's kind of like you have a train and you clip on more coal and the train speeds up or something. It's bizarre. The miners don't do any additional work and they get all the fees on all the chains. 59:45 That already exists. I have a refinement of it, Blind Merged Mining, that basically makes it so the miners don't need to be the ones who run the software. A middleman can run the software and people bid over one transaction that is the block. 1:00:04 And so it's the entire sum of the transaction fees in the block just becomes one single L1 transaction. And that actually includes, takes care of all this MEV stuff also, because the middleman would just do all of that and you have competition. So the miners will never get cut out. 1:00:21 Yes. 1:00:51 It leads to a lot of malinvestment and a lot of wasted time and concentration, unfortunately. 1:00:58 The merge mining, I think, is fantastic. I'd love to see more of that on Monero, making Monero more profitable to mine. I mean, that's one of the, quote unquote, problems in Monero, right? It's not all that profitable to go mine. 1:01:12 I mean, if you can merge mine with a bunch of other projects where there's no skin off your back for doing it, it's like, it's a no brainer, right? I mean, so then back to that question. So why didn't Bitcoin Cash adopt DriveChange? 1:01:30 I don't know. I think they probably would if they, certainly people suggest it. I think, maybe I'm not correctly understanding. To me, it's very easy to just add Drivechain to something, I think. But I think a lot of people think that like the founder is the only one, like only Jeremy Rubin could add CTV 119 to something. 1:01:57 Like they really think like that's the case, even though all the time you get random 16 year old hacker person can just add X to Y. I don't know. I think maybe people don't want to do it. I'm not sure about that. 1:02:12 I think with the large blocker people, I think they really, it depends on what you think the problem is, you know, because if you think I have a problem, there's an infinite number of things you can do about that problem, right? 1:02:30 So I think the Bitcoin Cash people just thought, these tech people are a bunch of obstructionists. And as soon as we get rid of them, we'll get more merchant adoption, we'll get more people. Raising the block size with a hard fork, they would say is really not a big deal. So we can just do it again whenever we need to. Longest proof of work, proof of work will decide. 1:02:52 Even if it doesn't, the spinoff coins just give everyone free money. So it doesn't matter. And I think that that's what they think the problem was. They think the problem was having the obstructionists and sort of bad agents there. 1:03:06 I think maybe if I were them, if I were in charge of Bitcoin Cash, like it depends on what time period am I going to be put in. Like, if I'm going to be put in in 2017, I would have made a lot of changes in the past. I would have said, instead of just stealth launching in August, we'll give people like six months worth of notice. 1:03:30 We are hard forking into a new project. Here are the reasons why. Here's what we plan to do in the future. You know what I mean? Like you put out, you basically like you put out a resume, you're going to compete. You say, listen, I will split off from this person. And this is what we're all about. Instead of it was a little disorganized. If I'm put in charge of Bitcoin Cash today, then probably the first thing I would do would be add drive to move all the Bitcoin Cash stuff to its own chain. 1:03:56 Move, like downgrade or reshift, backwards shift, the L1 to be BTC and then shrink the block size. I'd say the smaller block size on L1, larger block size on Bitcoin Cash. I would add all the sidechains that I think are great, whatever, Zcash, Monero, etc. I'd add them in. 1:04:17 But I would do that. But you see, that's just me. That's just my view of what the optimal configuration is. So it doesn't really answer your question as to why they didn't do it. 1:04:26 Yeah, or Litecoin, right? I could see Litecoin doing it. They've added or did they add a confidential chain? 1:04:34 Yeah, they added a Mimblewimble extension block, these weird things. I think, yeah, I think Litecoin could do it. There is another more practical reason, though, which is that I never really, not until recently, like we had test software, but it was based on an old version. It was version 16. And Bitcoin is now on version 25, 26. 1:04:59 So I never really had something that was very easy to merge, even to BTC. And Bitcoin Cash diverged from it. So it wasn't like they could just click. I have test software. 1:05:13 But it, I never really, like, put out something that would be easy for people to just copy and paste. And this is, this is interesting, kind of, like, why did I never do that? I think it was really because I kind of thought people have to understand the idea first. 1:05:36 And then they can help write the software. Or what I really thought was, back when I wrote the post, I thought, I'll just put out this idea in English. I'll say, this is what should be done. And then someone who's more of a specialist in C++ or more of a specialist in Bitcoin Core, they will do it, they will implement it, whatever way they think is best. And that's, that'd be the better, that's to be the best of all the world. 1:05:59 I have this idea, this, this reasoning for why a counterintuitive idea will, is in fact, the best L2. So I kind of never did that. And even today, what I have is not, but very recent, very soon, I have something very special coming, which is the Core Untouched Soft Fork, CUSF. 1:06:23 And this will make it very, very easy for any L1 to add BIP300. Because what it does is it adds it in a way where the underlying L1 software is not modified at all. So you run the 51% hash rate, run a new program alongside latest version of Bitcoin Core. 1:06:46 And it's simply that once that gets going, it should actually be easy to swap out Bitcoin Core for even like Monero full node, and then just kind of see what breaks and then tune it up. And then it would then it will be very easy for anyone to add. It should be very easy for anyone to add. 1:07:07 I don't want to say very easy, but certain things will change because you have to scan the whole block the second. But other than that, it'll just be someone doing the work of taking the BIP300. It'll no longer be like right now, it's like a lock that's always morphing and a key that's always morphing. 1:07:33 They kind of like morph together all the time because Bitcoin Core is constantly changing, adding new, doing rebasing and also the junk in there. And so it's hard for the BIP300 pull request into Bitcoin Core to also be stable. 1:07:55 But when I do this Core Untouched Soft Fork idea, it will be independent now of the changes to the underlying L1. And also the amount of BIP300 part of that, that will also stop changing, it will be just the Bitcoin version of that. And so then it would be possible for someone to build a Monero version of that, and then you should just be able to plug it all together and then it should work. 1:08:19 So there's too many things changing. Another network effect prison is the community of GitHub maintainers or something. You have to deal with whatever changes are made or not made. 1:08:33 Would you ever be down to talk with devs in the Monero community about these kinds? 1:08:41 Yeah, of course. No, absolutely. 1:08:42 I think that would be exciting. Or maybe we could get you to attend a Monero conference and talk in person with people. 1:08:49 Oh, maybe. I mean, I don't know. I kind of got a lot on my plate. 1:08:53 I'm sure you do. And you're focused. So I just want to get it out there because I love the direction this conversation has gone and all these things we spoke about. And I think if people really want to get into the nitty gritty with the tech, there's tons of videos of you out there talking about drive trains. So I didn't really focus on that. 1:09:14 But if you can just kind of summarize, what is the main argument against Bitcoin core adding it? 1:09:22 No, they don't. They have such a poor understanding of it that I think it's not. I have Steelman. There's the two that are most popular, which is this miners can steal argument. And then there's this like it affects mining incentives. 1:09:38 But those arguments are so bad that they almost shouldn't be Steelman because they are actually – but those are the popular ones. 1:09:47 I thought it was like a node. I thought like Peter Todd was making a node argument. 1:09:52 Peter Todd fails to draw the all important distinction between the L1 node cost and the cost of L1 plus L2. It's desired that the people running the sidechain, they want to run more software. So they want more. 1:10:09 The problem is just that everyone doesn't want more. And if you just let anyone do anything, everyone is – the problem with Bitcoin SV, everyone must run the largest block size in effect or Solana. 1:10:26 Although from what I've heard, Solana has done a very good job of software engineering. And even though they have super large, super frequent blocks, they brought the cost down. 1:10:33 But everyone must do the biggest thing. So the whole sidechain idea is that everyone does the smallest thing and then people opt in to whatever else they want. 1:10:46 That's kind of like everyone is going out to eat at a restaurant. Bitcoin SV, it's like whatever food the most – whoever orders the most food, everyone has to order that and everyone has to eat all of it and pay for it. 1:11:02 I could tell you are very hungry, by the way. All your analogies involve food and restaurants. Sorry about that. 1:11:10 Everyone has to eat the most. And then with something like when you have a very small block L1 but no sidechains, it's like everyone can only have the least. 1:11:18 So if someone just orders soup and nothing else, everyone has to have that and pay for that. 1:11:23 And so Peter knows that with sidechains, you're allowed to go on to networks that have more expensive. You're allowed to order more food. You have the soup, but then you're allowed to order fish and chips or whatever. 1:11:38 But then he mistakenly complains, even though he should know better. He complains and says, well, that's bad because basically his version of the argument is something like if that's the type of thing most people have for dinner, then – it's weird because he draws it into the mining world. 1:12:01 He paradoxically believes in multiple self-contradictory wrong things. So even to steel man him almost gives him too much credit as well. 1:12:10 But he thinks something like in order to be competitive, miners will have to run the sidechain nodes, which means that each node is net giving more money to miners. 1:12:23 But he says that this has increased their costs, even though it increased their profits. If it increased their costs, they just do nothing. 1:12:29 They say like the optimal miner will shift to one who does all these chains and the node will be very expensive to run. 1:12:36 Like it'd be very expensive to run the Solana chain. He's totally uninterested in the fact that BIP301 means that the middleman could do that for you and then reduce the cost of that to zero. 1:12:47 He's also uninterested in the fact that the actual software costs are microscopic percentage of miners' total costs to the point where the whole conversation is inane. 1:13:00 But he also, on top of that, he believes the falsehood that it's impossible to defer. 1:13:06 He actually contradicts himself on his point as well, but he thinks in order to be a new miner, you have to run a node of the sidechain. So it's upfront cost. 1:13:15 That's not true, but it's also the case that you could defer to a pool that has existed for 30 years that just runs all the nodes. 1:13:24 He says that's bad, but he wants to have it all different ways at once. It's bad if they shirk the cost. It's bad if they have to pay the cost. It's bad if they don't have to pay the cost. 1:13:35 So it's all just a bunch of nonsense. What it really means is that he hasn't spent any time looking into the idea. 1:13:42 At Baltic Honey Badger in September, he said, no one's written code for this, even though the software had been out for... 1:13:50 The Zcash sidechain that we had made had been out for two and a half years at that point. 1:13:54 So he never visited drivechain.info. He knows basically nothing about the idea. 1:13:58 Before he went on to do the debate at TabConf, he tweeted out that he was like, well, I don't really know how this works, so I'll have to ask Paul some questions live on stage or something. 1:14:09 But that's the number one critic of the idea, hasn't visited the website and doesn't even know that the software exists. 1:14:18 So the whole thing has become kind of a travesty of what should happen because then downstream from him, a lot of people assume that he knows what he's talking about, which he doesn't at all. 1:14:32 Well, maybe this pushes you into putting Drivechains on Monero. 1:14:39 I mean, I certainly love to talk. If people want to do it, I will advise. I have a lot that I'm doing. 1:14:46 The whole point of inventing Drivechain was to make Bitcoin be able to do all the altcoin things so that we wouldn't need the altcoins. 1:14:54 So it's a little bit ironic. 1:14:57 But that being the case, like I said, competition is good. 1:15:02 So if we had Monero out there doing really, really well. 1:15:06 That would be one of the things that would stimulate BTC to say, why aren't we doing this? 1:15:11 We could do this thing. 1:15:13 And Drivechains would effectively solve, you know, you could interface with anything else, right? 1:15:22 So that would also kind of eliminate Lightning as well, right? 1:15:25 That would be the solution there as well, because now you would be using some sidechain for quick, easy, fast transactions. 1:15:33 Yeah, I think I've written a post called Thunder where I compare Lightning to what it would be like if you just had large block sidechains, 300 sidechains. 1:15:42 And I think that Lightning has enormous disadvantages that the large block sidechain doesn't have, especially because plenty of people are willing to run. 1:15:51 The node cost is really not even that high for all the transactions in the world. 1:15:57 It is high, but it is not, but it is like thousands, $2,000 a year or something. 1:16:04 For like a huge, a blockchain has huge numbers of blocks, like one gigabyte blocks, you know, which is we're nowhere near needing that kind of, there's nowhere near like that kind of capacity. 1:16:20 So there's about a trillion transactions, 1.1 trillion transactions on earth last year, and it grows by, it doubles every five or six years. 1:16:29 So if this were 10 cents worth of revenue, it'd be $110 billion in revenue for miners every year, and that number would double every five or six years. 1:16:42 Because there's an absolutely huge amount of money, but even that case, that is, we're talking for that kind of money, the node cost is like $2,000 a year. 1:16:51 So that, and this, and the bandwidth would be, it would be very difficult to hide. 1:16:54 So the privacy would be challenging, but you have like Zcash, you have Monero sidechain for that. 1:16:59 You have all these, you know, people would move in when they want to like mix the coins or whatever you want to call it. 1:17:04 For certain use cases, they would use a certain chain, but then for everyday payments, they would use the optimized, the chain that was just optimized for, you know what I'm trying to say, and optimized for just quick, easy usage, or even optimized for some transparency. 1:17:20 The key is that you have to, it has to be the program that allows people to convert freely from the private coin to the non-private. 1:17:29 It can't be like an exchange or something where it would be, but as long as you have the convertibility, they're really all of them. 1:17:36 They're all private privacy coins that have just chosen temporarily to be in a revealed state, and then they could go back at any time. 1:17:43 And that's already what every privacy, every privacy coin, you could post screenshots of your, of your wallet and say, I have this much Monero. 1:17:51 You could always reveal. 1:17:53 So, so you touched on it before, lightning, not really living up to its potential as well. 1:18:00 And now you're talking about sidechains, potentially a large block, big block sidechain could potentially do the job of LN, what LN is doing. 1:18:10 Can you just give us more insight there into your thoughts about LN? 1:18:13 Do you think LN is going to fail? 1:18:17 It has become like a Frankenstein's monster type of a thing where it, a lot of people like look the other way and they are just thought that it would be figured out later. 1:18:31 It's funny. 1:18:32 Lightning is very similar to what Ethereum in 2015 was like, where it was like, they had all these serious, serious problems. 1:18:38 And everyone was like, Vitalik has said he will fix it. 1:18:40 That was the answer. 1:18:43 I just think, well, most people don't use it. 1:18:46 They use custodial lightning, which is not lightning. 1:18:48 This is just something else that has been labeled lightning. 1:18:51 So when, but when, when you get to a point where people don't even care about that, it's kind of like, is it even worth it to explain to these people why they are wrong? 1:19:00 Since they, they're not even at square one. 1:19:02 They didn't realize they're not using lightning. 1:19:04 What do you see as being the main failings of lightning? 1:19:08 I think a problem with lightning is that you need a two of two multisig output on L1 just to join. 1:19:17 So you already need to broadcast a lot of stuff on L1 for every single person who joins. 1:19:22 You could say maybe they join, but then they don't need to touch L1 ever again, which is optimistic. 1:19:28 But so that, but that drawback is big because you need to get everyone in. 1:19:38 You know, everyone has to join at some point. 1:19:41 Or so the biggest scaling bottleneck is the most important one is the onboarding. 1:19:46 It actually doesn't matter. 1:19:48 It would actually be kind of nice if it was a, it'd be good for the project. 1:19:52 Hypothetically, if you could somehow, if it was some kind of like a roach motel where you, you can onboard everyone and then they can't transact, but they're on board, but they're too late. 1:20:02 They're already in the network or something, you know, that would be kind of like better from an adoption point of view, because you got 8 billion people in somehow. 1:20:10 I'm not suggesting that that's possible. 1:20:12 I'm just saying, trying to draw a contrast on this dimension of like, like not being able to onboard. 1:20:20 Well, that's, you know, it's like, other than that, Mrs. 1:20:23 Lincoln, how did you like the play? 1:20:27 Yeah, it's a critical, critical flaw. 1:20:29 I mean, is there any way to overcome it? 1:20:31 You think? 1:20:32 There are ways. 1:20:33 Ironically, it's BIB300 and CTV are the biggest ways of like onboarding people to Lightning with fewer L1 bytes, but they are the ones that are the most held up. 1:20:43 They're held up for years and years. 1:20:45 Both of them were in like a quasi published state since like 2018. 1:20:52 And so I don't know. 1:20:53 But I think there is something else, which is that not only do you need L1 bytes, but also your recourse involves touching L1. 1:21:05 Not so with BIB300. 1:21:07 You have like a market based recourse where you can sell the coins. 1:21:12 You can say, I can't get these coins back to L1, but does anyone want to buy them? 1:21:16 And you could sell them to people who would be able to get them to L1. 1:21:19 And then you would think maybe they probably sell for like 98 cents on the dollar or something. 1:21:23 And so the whole thing will probably still work out okay. 1:21:28 Because you can combine them on L2, fuse them and then have one guy bring like 100,000 coins back over. 1:21:35 So it's a little more loose. 1:21:38 And I just think that loose is good because being tight, like Lightning is too obsessed with being able to give people their coins back on L1, even if the fee situation doesn't make sense. 1:21:52 So the byte cost is a big issue. 1:21:58 You can't make it down to L1. 1:22:00 So the fact that Lightning guarantees you get your coins back on L1, that guarantee doesn't make sense. 1:22:05 If the payment is for $7 or $10 and the fees are $10, then it's useless. 1:22:12 So that is the core security model, but it does not survive in a high fee environment. 1:22:21 The HTLCs are useless. 1:22:24 Do you think there's also a potential issue with securing the main chain? 1:22:30 So as people move over to L1. 1:22:32 Yes. 1:22:33 The fees cannot be too mismatched without causing either conflict or vertical integration. 1:22:38 So if the miners, like I was saying before, $110 billion a year in revenue for miners if you get every transaction and they're all $0.10. 1:22:47 Which I think is, you know, that's napkin math, but I think that that's like, that's something, that's some number. 1:22:54 And that's $110 billion last year, and then it will have doubled to $220 billion in five years, 1:23:00 based on the current trend of just how many transactions there are on earth. 1:23:04 So in a world where instead of going to miners, that all goes to like LN Supernode or the ARK Supernode or whatever you want to call it, 1:23:12 on L2, the miners are only getting less than 1% of that. 1:23:19 The miners are going to say, well, we're going to write our own Lightning, start for our own ARK Supernode. 1:23:26 And when it's the miners doing it, the security model collapses completely. 1:23:31 All these covenants will fall apart, including Lightning, will fall apart if your counterparty is 51% hash rate. 1:23:39 So either they vertically integrate or there'll be some conflict because the miners will say, listen, you guys get all this money. 1:23:45 We are the ones, we mine with the channel open and the channel closed and the justice transaction. 1:23:50 So they'll say, we're going to hold these hostage, or we're going to just, you know, we won't, you know, we'll start up our own thing. 1:23:56 Either conflict or vertical integration. 1:23:59 The vertical integration, both are terrible in the same way. 1:24:02 The vertical integration, like I said, the whole model of the Lightning network is that you have the justice transaction, 1:24:07 you take it to L1 if someone cheats you. 1:24:10 If you can censor the justice, 51% hash rate can censor the justice transaction. 1:24:16 So they, at that point, the whole security model of Lightning is non-existent. 1:24:22 And all the coins are just given to the miners, which is ironic because that's where BIP300 starts. 1:24:29 But then we add a bunch of safety guardrails on top of that to make it work, which you wouldn't have in Lightning or Covenant. 1:24:36 So I think the fact that the fees mismatch, if all the fees are paid on the L2 and none of it filters down to the miners, 1:24:45 that makes it a huge disadvantage relative to Drivechain, where basically 100%, 99.99% of the, because people could bid. 1:24:57 As long as there's two people bidding, as long as one of them prefers having a little bit of money to having nothing, 1:25:01 it will basically just be the cost of doing the bid minus the whole value. 1:25:07 So it's like 99.99% of the value will go automatically to the miners on L1 in return for doing absolutely nothing. 1:25:14 They just mine the L1 transactions that pay the highest fee. 1:25:18 They do exactly what they normally would do. 1:25:20 So that is another big edge for my project. 1:25:24 So I think that my project is the best in that dimension also. 1:25:28 I think you're absolutely 100% correct that you have to think about the fee revenue is important. 1:25:36 Luckily, before Ordinals and before this new price run-up, I think many miners, Bitcoin miners, were on the verge of bankruptcy or in bankruptcy. 1:25:44 You could look up Marathon's cash balance sheet. 1:25:50 You could see it was 300 million, 200 million, 90 million. 1:25:55 You could see it's like, but then people, of course, the price is up now. 1:26:03 So the Ordinal stuff happened. 1:26:06 The Ordinal stuff screwed up lightning technology and it also screwed up the social fabric where all these people now hate each other. 1:26:15 Instead of everyone working together to make the project a success, fighting over the fees. 1:26:20 So I think that's a very important point. 1:26:22 What's your overall take on Ordinal? 1:26:25 Do you think they don't belong on Bitcoin or let the things play out the way they should? 1:26:31 More people don't take it for granted that whoever pays the most for the block space is the rightful owner. 1:26:38 So that is obvious to me. 1:26:41 And if you don't allow them to get what they want via op return or something in a tidy, organized way. 1:26:48 I don't even think there really should be standardness rules. 1:26:53 If you are standing in people's way, they're going to get what they want in some other way. 1:26:59 When did that ever work where they say, well, let them eat cake or something. 1:27:04 You either do something about people's problem. 1:27:08 What if a friend comes to you with a problem? 1:27:11 You say, listen, I don't want. 1:27:13 You could say, you could try to say, listen, I don't want to get involved with that. 1:27:17 But maybe all that happens is you just lost a friend. 1:27:20 It's like people don't want. 1:27:22 They're coming to you because they want. 1:27:25 You can't become part of the problem. 1:27:27 Then they'll just say, well, I don't like that anymore. 1:27:30 So the idea that we had this way, op return, and we had this other ways of people getting what they want. 1:27:37 The fact that that is breaking down is also bad in other ways. 1:27:43 I think in a sane world, there would just be specialized sidechain that we have made called the bid asset sidechain. 1:27:50 Where people issue coins and they just write whatever they have, whatever they want. 1:27:54 They have club, you and your golf league can make a coin and whatever. 1:27:58 You give it to your friends, Paul coin or whatever. 1:28:01 And so there would just be that and that activity would just be over there. 1:28:07 And then there, the fact that it generates fees would be correctly interpreted as making a sale to the customer, like doing what the user wants. 1:28:16 So we would be happy about it and it'd be giving revenue to miners. 1:28:19 You'd be using it. 1:28:21 There wouldn't be this tug of war over like, is it a good thing? 1:28:25 It would just be, yes, it is a good thing. 1:28:26 And part of this is why the strategy of trying to police what happens on the blockchain is doomed to failure. 1:28:34 And why it stimulates all the altcoins being created in the first place and why sidechains are a good idea. 1:28:39 So it's all the same topic, really. 1:28:41 Yep, yep. 1:28:43 Paul, thank you so much, man. 1:28:45 Thanks for being a trooper. 1:28:47 I know you're hungry on the outset. 1:28:49 See you hanging in. 1:28:51 This is amazing. 1:28:53 Really loved it. 1:28:54 Appreciate all the work, all the contributions you've made to the space and you taking the time to be on the show. 1:29:00 Thank you. 1:29:02 Thank you. 1:29:04 All right, man. 1:29:06 Anything you want to put out there? 1:29:08 Any last words? 1:29:10 I don't know. 1:29:11 Go to drivechain.info and actually run this test software. 1:29:14 If you want to comment and if you want to see how just, it's an interesting social experiment. 1:29:18 All these people commenting on Drivechain. 1:29:21 They have never run the software. 1:29:23 They've never visited drivechain.info. 1:29:25 So at least visit the site if you want to. 1:29:27 Read the FAQ. 1:29:29 If you're a true star, read the FAQ and then comment about it. 1:29:35 If some higher level devs are really interested in what we were discussing here and how possibly sidechains, Drivechains can be implemented on Monero. 1:29:45 What's the best way to engage in those conversations with you? 1:29:47 Join the telegram, t.me slash dcinsiders. 1:29:52 It's a joke. 1:29:56 And just hang out and discuss it there. 1:30:00 I would just wait probably till the end of January. 1:30:03 We finish this core and touch software. 1:30:05 Who knows? 1:30:06 Software always takes longer than you think. 1:30:08 But I would wait for that and then I'd get involved. 1:30:11 Very cool. 1:30:13 Paul, thank you so much, man. 1:30:15 Okay, thanks. 1:30:16 Cheers. 1:30:18 Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. 1:30:20 We release new episodes every week. 1:30:22 You can find and subscribe to our show on YouTube, Odyssey, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 1:30:30 Go to monerotalk.live to subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. 1:30:35 If you want to interact with us, guests, or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. 1:30:41 And please leave us a review on iTunes. 1:30:42 It helps people find the show and we are always happy to read them. 1:30:46 So thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.