0:01 Hello and welcome, everyone. 0:05 Happy Friday. 0:09 Today we have a very special guest, Pete Rizzo of Bitcoin Magazine. 0:14 We're thrilled to have you here, Pete. 0:18 Come on up when you're ready. 0:27 Welcome everyone to the room. 0:31 Hi, Pete. Are you there? 0:34 Hey, can you guys hear me? 0:36 Yes, we can. 0:39 Very cool. Yeah, excited to be here. I guess we'll wait for some people to roll in. 0:45 Sounds good. 0:47 Who's the host of these Friday sessions? 0:52 I'm Henry. I work for Paul at LayerTwo Labs. 0:56 Gotcha. 0:58 I saw you at the conference in Miami, but I don't think we got a chance to talk. 1:04 It was a fun booth. I was there. 1:07 Yeah, we had the pinatas, and it was a lot of fun. 1:13 So Paul is currently, I think, about to debate Peter Todd today at TabConf, so he won't be here. 1:22 However, his co-founder Austin, I think, will be able to be here for part of this chat. 1:28 Well, I've talked to Paul about this over the years, so I'm not sure if we've got some new stuff to say, but excited at any rate. 1:41 Awesome. I really loved that article of yours in Bitcoin Magazine a few months ago about maximalism. Very thoughtful and detailed. 1:52 Thanks. Yeah, definitely can get into that. I mean, I spend a lot of time trying to think about the various sociological ideas around Bitcoin. 2:02 I mean, certainly I think Paul and I have that in common. We share a certain interest in people observations. 2:07 And history of Bitcoin as well, since Paul was there for a lot of it. 2:16 Yeah, absolutely. It would be really great to hear your perspective today on Drivechain and how it's evolved over the years. 2:29 And what you just mentioned, the sociological dimension, such as the nature of the sidechain community in Bitcoin being one that sadly suffers from a high rate of attrition. 2:42 So many people really passionate about developing new technology, who might have stayed in Bitcoin if we had peer-to-peer sidechains of some sort, have moved to found or develop projects in Ethereum or elsewhere. 3:00 So that leaves the sidechain community in Bitcoin with a smaller number of advocates and people who would be advocating for it here have no incentive really to advocate it. 3:15 Once they've begun an Ethereum project, for example, and then it's now in their interest that we don't do Drivechain. 3:23 So there's all kinds of people who would actually be worse off if Drivechain were activated, specifically altcoiners, those who've left Bitcoin. 3:34 And then, of course, the exchanges who would like there to be lots of altcoin trading. So there's that sociological dimension. 3:44 Certainly one theory. But yeah, I mean, in terms of the history of sidechains, I'm happy to speak on that. 3:52 I'm sure many people here, it sounds like we're mostly going to be Drivechain supporters in the audience. 3:58 I will say for as much as I've talked to Paul over the years, I decided to try to come into this conversation a little bit more uneducated on the recent developments. 4:10 You know, just to kind of even test myself. But yeah, I mean, I imagine that I'm not sure if you guys saw this tweet, but I was mentioned in a kind of larger tweet thread by Mike Tidwell last week as having a sort of existing objection, I guess, or existing stance on Drivechain. 4:30 So happy to dive into that. You know, not sure where you guys have really started these things, these conversations before. This is my first one attending. So, you know, happy to jump in whenever you guys are ready. 4:42 I think we're ready now. So we usually have kind of like a very free form conversation. 4:47 Typically, Paul has a key role in the conversations. But since he's not here today, unusually, it'll be me. And then I hope Austin can. Oh, here he comes. Great. I think Austin's available for part of this chat. Hi, Austin. Thanks for joining. 5:08 Yeah. Hello. Thank you. Yeah, I was. I would like to hear, I guess, the the Rizzo objection. But also, I've always been very interested in kind of your analysis of the Bitcoin culture and what potential. 5:32 I remember you telling me, like, it must be more than two years ago now that you first saw maybe a forthcoming schism that you didn't know what the catalyst might be, but that the lines are already developing. 5:48 Yeah, that's a good one. Maybe I'll hop in there since that's a good genesis for the conversation. Yeah, I did write a piece for Forbes maybe about a year ago. It was one of my lesser read articles, but it was called Bitcoin After 2140. And it was about like the different types of Bitcoin maximalism. 6:06 I was really on this train toward the end of 2021. Because really, what I noticed was that and I think what we're seeing coming to fruition was that, you know, Bitcoin maximalism, you know, at least during the up market and the bull run was kind of seen as this, you know, kind of monolithic culture, right? 6:24 That was most of the altcoiners sort of viewed average Bitcoin maximalist as being, you know, pretty unsophisticated pro Bitcoin, and just kind of all having the same stance. And, you know, the more as I was trying to define Bitcoin maximalism, because that's, you know, essentially was the primary, like, lens of my writing for Forbes at that time was, you know, I was trying to nail down the definition. And the more that I tried to nail down the definition, the more elusive that it seemed. And essentially, I ended up coming up with this 6:54 you know, I guess, framework where essentially, I labeled that there were three types of maximalism. I'm not quite as convinced as that on that model. But I'm 100% sure at this point that I think there are three attitudes towards Bitcoin's like fee subsidy problem. And I like to start here because I think if people are out there advocating for Drivechains, or like, you know, they want to get this out in the community, I think it's important that they understand that like, it might take a while for people to even get to that point where they're like ready to, you know, 7:24 even interface with that, that idea. And I think there's some pretty, like, like clear reasons why. So when I was trying to figure out this, this schism, essentially what I would I, the way that I would phrase it now with like more hindsight is essentially, Bitcoin maximalism, you know, as it existed in like the 2021-2022 market, it really had two distinct flavors. And they were kind of combined at the time, this is like Unite's kind of the Nick and Udi and Erics and the, you know, the people that they 7:54 were friends with, like, you know, the Safedians and Piers and those people, right. So these people in the up market, like when things were going well, they were all friends. And then now they're not, they're just fighting all the time. So why is that? And I think the reason is that, you know, the Bitcoin maximals at that time really was like, a co-mingling of two things. So one was a group who thought that Satoshi invented Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin was the only instantiation of that invention, right? We didn't need other cryptocurrencies. You know, they were 8:24 Bitcoin only. But they believed that we need to improve Bitcoin or like unlock Satoshi's invention to its full potential. So that's, that's the group that I would put the Drivechains group and I would probably put the Ordinals people in there as well. The view is essentially Satoshi had an invention, that invention is alone enough to, you know, unlock everything that we can do with cryptocurrencies, we don't need, you know, the cryptocurrency ecosystem. But for all intents and purposes, like we the users need to improve and fulfill Satoshi's vision. So that's like, can 8:54 And the other camp was essentially saying, you know, Bitcoin is the only invention, we don't need other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin only. But we don't have to improve Satoshi's invention, he's already invented it. And because he's already invented it and exists as it is, there's no need to ever further improve upon it. And that's actually the schism. That is the current schism, I think that we're seeing playing out right now, which is essentially those two groups are realizing, and again, during 9:24 the upmarket when like El Salvador was happening, everybody was excited about the all time highs, these groups were kind of obscured. Like now that things are going negatively, and the price is down, these groups have realized that they have this disagreement. 9:37 And then I think you can get into the into that disagreement some more, like there is some like cultural, historic and like technical reasons for that. But essentially, you have these two camps, one that thinks we need to kind of fulfill Satoshi's vision. 9:51 Again, I would put the Drivechains kind of thesis as like, you know, in that camp. And then the other group that says, you know, leave it as is, you know, you could call this the laser eye version of it. 10:02 But yeah, the Forbes piece was essentially it went into that there was three different views of the long term security budget. 10:10 And that two of them were opposing. And I think that those two camps that I just described also have a different view on the on the fee market. So that's a component piece of 10:20 you know, these two ideologies, which I think are just starting to articulate themselves. And yeah, my view is that this is a healthy process. 10:29 You know, the nature of Bitcoin cycles is that, you know, during up markets, we tend to have an ideological monoculture, like we tend to have, you know, one way that we speak to external communities, and we tend to kind of minimize dissent. 10:45 And then during down markets that reverses, right. So you see periods where, like, you know, the community engages in dissent, because it needs to figure out, like, you know, key things about the ideology. 10:56 So I see that as like, pretty natural. And there was a conference in Texas, the Bitblock boom, I gave a keynote about this, which is essentially like, you know, I think that people should have a pretty open 11:07 mind about Bitcoin cultures, I think the people who come in, you know, and the most dangerous group, I think, is the people who have only been in one Bitcoin cycle, because they're sort of told Bitcoin is a certain way. 11:18 And they can't really envision Bitcoin being another way. But history of Bitcoin is that, you know, that view of Bitcoin has changed. And almost like every cycle, you know, there are there is a new 11:30 idea of what Bitcoin is, and that this is that this has actually just been the process. So the way that I would sum that up is like, the history of Bitcoin is the history of change, right? Like, Bitcoin has always changed, it's been changing. And we're evolving towards understanding Bitcoin more. 11:46 But yeah, we're currently at a at a impasse. And that impasse is basically, there are two groups within the Bitcoin only camp. Because otherwise, it's nonsensical, right? I was talking to somebody. 11:58 What I don't mean to interrupt you, but can you just briefly go back just for a second and describe what might be that third group, just so we see the whole picture? 12:08 Oh, right. Well, so that was like only like in regards to the fee market. So that's like a more specific sub argument. That's why I was sort of saying like, I think there's three attitudes towards the fee market, but then there's just two warring camps within Bitcoin right now. So one of them, you know, again, as I described, they want to improve Bitcoin, unlock the full 12:27 potential. And the other one is like, they want to keep it as is. The three views on the fee market, you know, I think are basically, I'll sum it up as this. So the people who want to keep Bitcoin as is, they think that Bitcoin, you know, is the invention. Their view is that the quote, security budget doesn't exist, that there is no such thing that there is, there is not a need for transaction fees to rise to a level where they replace 12:57 the subsidy. It is, in fact, two things that secure Bitcoin, one, the ability of the user to attach any arbitrary size fee to a transaction to bid, you know, on that transaction, and then the ability of any miner to permissionlessly join the network and then accept that fee. But that is the security model. So this has been defined by Pierre Richard's, you know, cost of counter censorship is what he calls it. That's, that's his view. I think Dylan Leclerc 13:26 expressed like a pretty similar view to that yesterday, where he kind of outlined this vision. I think they've done a really poor job of like, advocating for this, they haven't really written much about it. They seem to sort of believe it. You know, we can sort of get into like, that theory, but it's at least coherent, like it's, it's what that group believes, whether they know it or not, or can describe it. On the other side, I think like, you know, completely opposed to that camp, you know, I think you would have a group of 13:56 people, again, I'd probably say this is like the Drivechains view, that we the Bitcoin users need to proactively ensure that Bitcoin block space is used, we need to generate new use cases to generate fees, and that fees, that fee pressure needs to be high enough to secure Bitcoin. So, you know, that's a historical view that I would argue is like, been around for a long time, probably to like, since like 2013, 2014. The, you know, this is the historical crypto economics view that 14:25 Bitcoin, you know, is only as secure as it is, you know, crypto economically able to incentivize participants, there are potential future situations where that might break down. Paul, I think has done, you know, a pretty great job of like outlining this view. And, you know, you can go to Truthcoin and like read all this stuff about it. And I think to the extent that like this view is like more defined, it's much more defined. And then there's a third camp, which I would say like, is like the Bitcoin developer group, and they just think fees are going to be 14:55 high in the future. So their view is like, okay, well, you know, really, what we should be doing is trying to minimize the like on chain footprint of transactions. And so that's what we're going to do. We're just going to assume that fees will one day be high, and we're just going to build on top layers and not really assume that we need to do actively increase the fee market. So there's basically three views, one of them just like kind of assumes in the future, that the fee problem will be solved. One of them doesn't think they'll ever will be a fee 15:24 problem. And the last group is, you know, I guess, which I think is like describes the Drivechains group is basically we need to proactively boost the fee market and then work towards, you know, reaching some sort of subsidy equilibrium. So anyway, I hope that wasn't all that wasn't too messy. But that's my rough mental picture of the situation, if that's useful to anyone. 15:48 Isn't it quite interesting that two of the vocal supporters for the view that fees might not be high enough are Paul and Peter, Paul Sztorc and Peter Todd, who have totally different solutions, but on the question of whether fees need to be higher, they agree. So they both fit into the same one of those three categories you mentioned. Isn't that interesting? 16:13 I do think it's interesting. Yeah, but I think that Peter would be a bit more of like a light, he thinks something needs to be done. But that thing that he would accept is just like a light increase to the senior edge, right? So like, that's just a difference of, I don't know, it's like an alignment on directional view, but then a disagreement about the right solution, which I do think is interesting. But yeah, the real disagreement is like, I think the average Bitcoin developer, they're kind of in that, you know, we just assume fees will be high group. So we don't really care. 16:43 That was my, you know, and I went around talking to people about this, that was kind of what they said. Even like people like Andrew Polstrom, and those people, you know, sort of, you know, admitted that that was like the dominant view. And then really, the two groups that are opposed on the on the fee budget, security budget model are, you know, the sort of, again, I'm using broad classifications here that we can debate, like, I'd say the ordinals, Drivechains, people largely kind of united in this idea that like, we need to proactively boost the fee market in order to secure Bitcoin. 17:14 Thus, any activity that we take to do that is good. And then there's the other group that basically just says, Bitcoin works, it's fine. The security model will work as it currently does. You know, forever, it's like when we want to pay a transaction fee, and a miner will accept it, Bitcoin will be secured. That's that's their view. 17:33 But my real worry, I will tell you is that both of these views are essentially unfalsifiable. They're both belief systems at the at the core. And my question to both participants has been, how would you test like one of these scenarios? Because like, they're both plausible, right? Like, so as somebody who's a bit, you know, again, like, I'm not a deep weeds technical expert, I'm more of like a social humanities type person, right? 17:59 So I can tell you that these two groups exist. And I can define to you why I think they disagree with each other. And I think to the extent that I can draw a mental picture for you of why that disagreement exists, that's helpful, but then I can't mediate that disagreement. So I don't have any ability to say, okay, this group is right, and this other group is wrong. 18:19 Because like, on what basis would I do that? You know, what, on what ability do I have to do that? Because there is no current cryptocurrency system that doesn't have a subsidy and is secured only by user fees like that, that doesn't exist. Neither is there any cryptocurrency out there, and which, you know, you know, it could have failed, but then the user is sort of generated a free market, and that secured that system into the future. 18:46 So in both cases, like, the future scenario that the group is proposing, like, neither of them exist or have ever existed. So what can I say about it other than define the circumstance, and then you sort of have to agree on the timeline, right? Because like now, the problem is also, you know, 100 years off, right? Like, so if you're assuming a full subsidy to climb, obviously, I know that Paul argues that, you know, kind of the window where like the Bitcoin is attackable is a lot sooner, maybe within the next few epochs. 19:16 But then you have to sort of use on the line on like, you know, to what extent did they all agree on this? Does everyone within Bitcoin agree on the severity of the problem? So I've always sort of seen like, you know, maybe this can back up and, you know, into the Drivechains argument a bit more, like, you know, and this is what I think about when it comes to Drivechains, which is like, what would I have to do in order to convince somebody that Drivechains was logical, right? 19:38 And I think I've tried to do this to Paul in like side conversations, I just try to get, you know, across the immensity of like, where you need to get somebody. Because I think like, the problem is, if like, if you're going to go about advocating for Drivechains on the basis that it's like necessary for Bitcoin's security in the future, which again, I don't even necessarily think is the only way that you could do that, but that seems to be like what is currently happening, then you still need to get 20:08 the user or the end person, if you're giving this argument to believe a bunch of different things. You have to get them to believe that this other group that like, you know, has a plausible theory is wrong. And then you have to get them to believe that the urgency of the problem, like is high. And then you have to get them to believe that you're, you know, in the case of like Peter Todd versus Paul, your specific solution to it is like more correct than the others. And then even worse than that, with Drivechains, it's like you have to convince them that, 20:39 it's so imperative that we do this, that we change the blockchain today, or like in the in the near future, to the point that we're advocating for a consensus change. So like, you're in, you're into like four layers of complexity. And the primary motivation that you're using to get people to those, like levels of complexity, is largely like a negative sentiment. It's like a fear based incentive, you're saying like, okay, you should believe all these four things and want all these four things. Because if 21:08 you don't, like something bad might happen. And I think like, that's the thing where it's like the group that is saying we shouldn't change anything like the, you know, the Pierre sort of Dylan, cost of counterships, counter censorship model people, you know, where Bitcoin fees secure the blockchain and the ability of the user to do that. Like, they're not asking the end user to do anything, they're just asking the end user to just keep using Bitcoin as it currently is. So their ask is like a lot lower. So if I'm a consumer, a lot like walk 21:38 down the checkout aisle, and it's like, I look at the Drivechains, you know, can the Drivechains can says, you know, you sort of have to believe these four things in some order, with some degree of urgency. And then the other people are just saying, like, you know, don't worry about a status quo. So like, it's even like, it's even harder, because then you have to, they have to reject that solution. So again, like, even if Drivechains was, you know, the only way for us to go forward and solve these problems, my point, I guess, you 22:08 guys, as an interesting, like, example is like, you know, this is what the average, like, person on Twitter is like, kind of dealing with, right, they're, they're looking at multiple arguments, and then they're sort of weighing them. And again, I think the thing with Drivechains is like, the ask is very high. It's like, very, you're asking a lot of the end user, in order for them to accept a number of different, like, nuanced views on Bitcoin. And so like, well, even I, as someone who can articulate Paul's views, and I can, like, 22:38 sound out the reasoning of why he believes those four things, I still have to acknowledge that, like, you know, it's an idea within a marketplace of ideas that are competing, right. And like, those ideas may just be easier for people to accept. And I think that's probably the best description of the status quo is that, you know, and I think the conversation about Drivechains has been great in terms of like, you know, look, personally, I'm glad we're not talking about, you know, random macro financial stuff anymore. And I think that's been horrible. I mean, I'd rather be 23:07 talking about, you know, Bitcoin technicals and how it works and stuff like this. So I appreciate what, you know, you guys have the community has brought to the conversation. But I would say like, you know, maybe something we talked about is like your perception of it, because I just see the perception of changing people's mind on this issue. It's just like a high hurdle. 23:25 Yeah, that was very well said. The one thing you mentioned was that it seems sometimes that the fundamental case for Drivechain is the security budget problem, but that's not what we believe. So we don't think that the security budget problem is the primary case for Drivechain, the security budget problem is a symptom, or a subset of a more important, more fundamental issue. So the fundamental issue is that there will be, you know, there will be a 23:55 there will always be legitimate disagreements about what the blockchain should contain. And because there will always be legitimate disagreements about what the blockchain should contain, such as privacy technology, scaling technology, and other kinds of technology. The blockchain that wins in the very long run, will be the one that has a highly ossified layer one, and a multitude of 24:25 layer twos that offer opt in features. 24:30 Opt in features for the people who want them, instead of a blockchain, which judges people's values and preferences, and offers only one feature set. 24:42 So the Drivechain vision is that Bitcoin should become multi chain. And this multi chain design would have across all of the chains, a single monetary policy, and a single set of miners. So across the main chain and all of its sidechains, there's only one monetary policy, 21 million. And there's only one set of miners. 25:08 So by using Satoshi's merge mining, all of the sidechains and the main chain share the same hash rate. And by having all of these different blockchains share the resources of the hash rate and the monetary policy, network effect is achieved. 25:25 Network effect is extremely powerful in economics. So when you have multiple sets of users, all sharing the same monetary monetary policy and miners, that becomes a very powerful value proposition, where everyone is better off. 25:40 So in long term equilibrium, there isn't going to be a multitude of different blockchains. Instead, there will be one that absorbs all of the others, because it offers that set of options, and network effect and resource sharing. 26:01 So, for example, in long term equilibrium, and of course, there's no guarantee this will occur, but there's reason to think that in long term equilibrium, there isn't going to be a privacy blockchain, which is an independent altcoin. 26:15 In other words, Monero will eventually merge into Bitcoin, or some other blockchain. And the goal of Drivechain is to have Bitcoin be the base layer for everything. 26:29 So this is why the fee problem is not the fundamental case for Drivechain. And the worry, the concern about fees being too low is just a symptom of the fact that Bitcoin isn't offering every kind of blockchain user all of the features they might want. 26:45 So we don't have like a flourishing privacy sidechain for those who want that, or a flourishing large block sidechain for those who want, you know, very low fees and high throughput. 26:57 Some of those things. Yeah, go ahead. 26:59 I appreciate you outlining that, because I think it's a good articulation, I think of where you guys are at today. 27:05 Yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, in terms of getting the community to see a more positive vision for Drivechains, you know, in terms of, you know, as you outlined, kind of providing some of these features, I mean, again, it's sort of still comes at the cost of, you know, as the average Bitcoin user, right? 27:22 It's like, you still have to feel like, you know, a change we'd be making in Bitcoin, you know, was in the best interest of the security, right? 27:30 And I think this is where, you know, I'll say this, like, even as someone who spends a lot of my time, you know, researching and trying to understand Bitcoin, it would be, you'd still have to get me as a user to making a choice. 27:42 And that choice is essentially like, I believe that this model is so beneficial for Bitcoin, and that the risks are so low, that I'm willing to kind of support something like this. 27:54 But the issue would be, you know, again, it's like a risk reward, right? 27:57 I think the reward with Drivechains, you know, is like pretty well understood, right? 28:01 It's not going back to sidechains, as you said, it's sort of like uniting, you know, the miners, it's sort of uniting the network effect, it's, you know, all these other kind of coins that exist, or have existed, you know, can get assimilated into the Bitcoin network. 28:15 But I still have to then sort of as the end user be willing to do that, right? 28:20 I have to think that that risk outweighs the reward, or sorry, the reward outweighs the risk. 28:25 And the risk still is that, you know, it just fails or compromises the security of Bitcoin, right? 28:30 And then I think, so I think even if you get to the reward, like, right, you develop a reward proposition for arguing Drivechains, and you can articulate that very succinctly, and elevate that in a conversation. 28:42 You know, ultimately, as someone who's participated in consensus and like runs a node, you know, I have to, I have to think that this will actually be good for Bitcoin long term and have no negatives. 28:53 And so one example I'd like to bring for that, of like how challenging that is, is I think that, you know, people forget, like during the SegWit activation, where it's like SegWit was a very small change to Bitcoin. 29:03 But you still had sort of two emerging groups at that time that were counter signaling each other, right? 29:08 So there was, for people who don't know, there was like a big block and small block camp. 29:13 And they both have like different researchers and developers working for them. 29:17 And they were engaged in sort of like, you know, a year long memetic warfare where they were sort of writing papers and sort of making arguments and trying to debunk each other. 29:26 And, you know, some of that literature is lost, because we no longer care about it. 29:30 But there were people like Peter Risen and I can't remember the other guy's name who was with him, Andrew something or other, right? 29:38 And they like they were sort of engaged in a similar process, right, where they were putting forward proposals of why big blocks were the solution for Bitcoin, why SegWit didn't work or was even fundamentally broken. 29:49 So you have the situation where it's like even around SegWit, which is like a fairly minor change, you have this community process in which multiple groups were counter signaling each other. 29:59 And like for someone non technical, it became almost impossible to have like a nuanced opinion about like, what was the right course, right? 30:07 So then the default of the community was just inaction, right? 30:10 People didn't feel comfortable making a choice, even though there are plenty of vocal, you know, supporters of SegWit. 30:17 My personal view is that it actually took SegWit activating on another chain, but it was actually Litecoin's activation of SegWit that made it abundantly clear that like some of the FUD, you know, from the big block camp was FUD, right? 30:31 It was actually like it demonstrated like once you had it live on some other chain, and people saw that that chain benefited economically, you know, the price of Litecoin like 4x after that. 30:42 There was like a solid economic case that the reward was higher than the risk. 30:47 So going back to like where I started at this, you know, in the thread of Mike Tidwell, you know, my view, I think, is that this point that, you know, as long as Drivechains, the, you know, sort of discussion is rooted in trying to convince me the user, you know, to believe, you know, something about this risk reward calculus. 31:06 It's gonna be hard for me to think anything unless there's something demonstrable, right? 31:11 I mean, I can sit here and listen to arguments for Drivechains and against Drivechains all day, but I'm not even technical enough to feel confident. 31:19 Like you ultimately have to convince me that I would risk Bitcoin's future in order to make this upgrade, right? 31:26 And that was the challenge around SegWit. 31:28 If you think that, I mean, I hear your argument that adding SegWit to Litecoin was instrumental in getting it in Bitcoin. 31:37 But SegWit, I mean, Litecoin also added like the Mimblewimble. 31:42 100%, and that's a great example of why that goes both ways, right? 31:46 It added Mimblewimble, and the market didn't react, and then the users didn't want it, right? 31:51 So there was actually an example where Litecoin has served that function on two levels, both in helping, you know, prove that one proposal was good. 32:00 And then, you know, and the other case showing that why there was no market demand for the other one. 32:06 So maybe we can just move the conversation like one degree. 32:10 And I was very interested in hearing your kind of historical take on the schisms forming in Bitcoin and all that. 32:19 But could you give us maybe the brief rundown as, you know, a lot of people in the Twitter space, probably, and in the community in general, only been around a few years. 32:31 Maybe a brief rundown from your perspective of kind of the upgrade or soft fork or BIP process and how it's involved. 32:44 Having like the first five or six years of Bitcoin, I think there were 16 or 17 soft forks. 32:51 And in the last six years, there's been two. 32:54 Maybe kind of from your understanding or historical perspective on how that happened and how that evolved. 33:02 Yeah, that's a great question. 33:03 So that's something I think about a lot. 33:05 There's a great Jameson Lopp article on this called, Has Bitcoin Ever Hard Forked? 33:09 That kind of goes into the specifics. 33:12 Yeah, I think that, look, Bitcoin's consensus and governance process is, you know, a very confusing and opaque thing. 33:22 And that's, I think, by design, right? 33:25 I think at some point in Bitcoin's history, it was decided that if there was ever any coordinated technical development process, and if that coordinated technical development process could be described, such as its functioning, you know, looked like some sort of organization, right? 33:46 You could say that upgrades happen in a certain way. 33:49 That was an attack vector for Bitcoin. 33:52 So we have ended up in this situation now. 33:54 And again, I think this is like another example of the schism between like the two groups in Bitcoin where, you know, there's a certain group that believes the current system is working. 34:03 They believe that right now what we have is, quote, crypto anarchy, right? 34:07 It's a group of people and software users who, you know, have to debate ideas. 34:12 Ultimately, they have to come to the near unanimous consensus that some idea, you know, is the right way to go. 34:19 And then even once they come to that consensus, it should be prohibitively difficult for them to make that change, even up to the point of that change being poorly defined. 34:30 So like an example would be people who are newer may remember the Taproot upgrade to Bitcoin in 2021. 34:36 You know, I watched that process very closely for a number of months. 34:40 You know, there was a number of proposals about how Taproot should activate, whether via historical models or something different. 34:47 Ultimately, you know, what was chosen was a one off activation model where miners were sort of asked within three months to kind of signal whether they wanted something. 34:57 And again, this was a completely unique model used for Taproot that was never used previously. 35:03 They did so and then the Taproot upgrade happened. 35:06 But, you know, that was a case where the entire Bitcoin technical community believed that this upgrade was positive. 35:14 They disagreed on how they should activate it. 35:18 And the user, I think at that point, was given a pretty direct ask. 35:21 Right. It was sort of help the developers activate something that they think is good, that they don't want to take responsibility for activating or they don't want to kind of form a process around for activating. 35:33 But I think you're sort of now getting into like, you know, what some people think is the broken part of Bitcoin, right? 35:41 The counter arguments is that this process where, you know, it is prohibitively difficult to change Bitcoin, you know, including that there's no process for doing so is a problem and that there should be a structured process for doing this. 35:57 Obviously, I know that the Drivechain position is, you know, we could make this one last change and we never have to deal with this process again, which, you know, I personally find, you know, pretty appealing having gone through the process. 36:09 But yeah, I mean, essentially, I would sum it up as saying, you know, Bitcoin has a history of upgrades. 36:17 Those upgrades tend to be, you know, pretty divisive, because when you make an upgrade to Bitcoin, you know, it's possible to do it in ways where some software users might be kicked off the network or told that a certain software is Bitcoin. 36:32 Bitcoin has generally kind of come to an upgrade process where, you know, we're able to do that with a high degree of confidence, right? 36:42 Like we're not imposing changes on anyone or rescinding anyone's rights to, you know, call whatever Bitcoin software they want Bitcoin. 36:51 But in order to have that attribute for Bitcoin, right, in order to avoid the sort of hard fork process that other other coins go through, the trade off is that our, you know, upgrade process is like very convoluted and very slow. 37:07 And, you know, deeply confusing, even the people who I argue have like a high degree of subject matter expertise about how that happens. 37:18 And prior to SegWit and the block size war, was there any sort of history of any semblance of controversy? And as far as you remember? 37:29 So I have a whole article about the upgrade for P2SH. It's called the battle for P2SH. 37:36 You know, it's basically a history of the first Bitcoin soft fork. And yeah, I mean, there was there was plenty of their division about it. 37:43 I mean, you know, up in Satoshi, it's true, like did move rather unilaterally to make software changes. 37:48 And then he sort of, you know, just carte blanche, like approved, you know, push them to the users, right. 37:55 So the way that I articulate this is essentially like Bitcoin inherited a problem from open source development. 38:02 And so if you read books like the Cathedral and the Bazaar about open source development, what you find is that, you know, within open source development culture, 38:10 there was really kind of only two governance models for those types of software projects. 38:16 There was one like the sort of benevolent dictator model. So this is like Linus Torvalds and Linux. 38:23 Like the software is named after the guy, the guy makes all the decisions. 38:26 And if he doesn't like something that you do, he just gets rid of you, right? 38:29 The benevolent dictator process. And then two is sort of like a more equitable system of that. 38:36 Like you can think of a project where, you know, there might be a, you know, loose maintainer. 38:42 But then, you know, a bunch of other portions of the software system are, you know, they are their own maintainers. 38:49 Right. So somebody might own might be like 10 or 12 different repositories of the software. 38:54 And then, you know, there's just a group of people who own it. Maybe they still kind of, you know, answer to this one guy. 39:00 But there's a division of governance that looks something like a constitutional monarchy. 39:04 Right. Like there's still some guy who can veto everybody. 39:08 But there's more kind of participants who own certain subsystems. 39:12 And so Bitcoin sort of inherits this problem where it's like under Satoshi, you know, we have a benevolent dictator, you know, whatever you think of his actions. 39:20 Like he took them alone and he justified them. And often cases like, you know, didn't even really write that much about them. 39:26 Even when he made fairly major changes, like instituting a block size. Right. 39:30 So he just sort of unilaterally made these changes. 39:33 You know, ultimately, Bitcoin had to then wrestle with, you know, solving, I think, what was its inherent contradiction here, 39:40 which is that, you know, could you have a non-government money that was essentially, you know, subject to some sort of developer dictator? 39:52 And so, you know, when Satoshi leaves and he hands it over to Gavin, I mean, Gavin Andreessen, who is the person who then led the software development for the next four or five years, 40:01 he operated as a benevolent dictator. 40:04 He thought or expected to make decisions for Bitcoin and then that those decisions would be, you know, sort of ratified or accepted by the users. 40:11 That was, you know, sort of his impression. The users sort of rebelled against that to some extent. 40:18 But again, I think it was to answer the fundamental question, which is like, you know, how do you govern a software project? 40:25 Because essentially you need to govern the project. The project needs some sort of management, right? 40:29 That is what being a maintainer is. So how do you have a non-government currency without recreating some sort of software governance, right? 40:38 So the people who have problems with Ethereum, I mean, it's pretty obvious their software development process resembles some sort of pseudo-government thing, right? 40:45 There's people with established positions. They have someone who's job it is to coordinate forks. 40:51 It's documented. There's different places that fund it. You know, it works at a reliable cadence. 40:58 So the question that is like, is Ethereum a non-government money really? 41:01 Or did it just sort of end up, you know, recreating governance in another way? 41:05 And it's like there maybe there's a digital money there, but it just has even worse than a government operated money. 41:13 And that there's no, you know, democratic social contract around, you know, enforcing who operates that. 41:20 So, yeah, my view is that the upgrade process has always been constrained. 41:25 I mean, you know, Gavin dealt with people who didn't want to do what he wanted to do. 41:30 Even the idea that, you know, some plurality of miners would upgrade Bitcoin was like pretty controversial when it happened. 41:37 It's just that they were controversial with like less people using Bitcoin, right? 41:40 There was only like a couple thousand people maybe at the time, but still most of the developers disagreed about the best way to upgrade Bitcoin. 41:48 Anyway, I'm not sure how much you want to get into that, but, you know, here we are. 41:53 Well, I find it very interesting. 41:56 And I think in the context of what we're talking about here, it's probably relevant. 42:02 But you can go ahead and discuss as deep as you as you're willing to. 42:09 I think, you know, it is interesting having you here as kind of probably the foremost expert on all these things from a high level. 42:19 Can I ask you to elaborate on what you said about you compared Bitcoin to Ethereum and fiat? 42:27 And it seemed like you were creating a continuum where Bitcoin is at one end and Ethereum is at one end and fiat money is in the middle. 42:38 I think that that's a... 42:41 Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I mean, my view is that... 42:44 Just to finish my question real quick. 42:48 I feel like drive chainers, Drivechain supporters see it differently than that, where Ethereum is from the view of the ordinary person not in crypto yet. 43:02 Ethereum is quite similar to Bitcoin, and that's important. 43:08 And therefore, it's important that Bitcoin have some of the narratives and the potential value accrual that will occur in Ethereum. 43:17 It would be better for Bitcoin to have Ethereum as a sidechain, to have those users, all that value, all those fees, narratives and technology. 43:26 So I think that's one of Paul's key ideas, is that it's a threat to Bitcoin, that there is something which has $200 billion of value and is a peer-to-peer digital ecosystem and it's growing. 43:41 If they have a killer app or two tomorrow, then they could flip Bitcoin and then there would be a loss to Bitcoin's primacy. 43:50 Its significance and its singular stature as the original and biggest and best and most important project in the space. 43:59 So that's one thing drive chainers have that the rest of the Bitcoin community doesn't have. 44:03 They have a dismissive perspective on the competitors, whereas we view them... 44:09 We have more of a pro-market view, which is the consumer is going to want a lot of things. 44:14 We should enable those to be happening on Bitcoin. 44:18 Yeah, look, I would say that if... I would say, I'm not sure I agree with everything you said there. 44:24 But I would say that if I do have a sympathy with the Drivechains group, it is that I do think that there are working use cases for cryptocurrency outside of Bitcoin currently that are not described by Bitcoin. 44:40 Right. So, you know, part of what I think has attracted me to try to understand the kind of people who are interested in things like Drivechains and ordinals is that... 44:49 Yeah, I mean, look, I do think that we're at the stage 15 years into this market where there are other markets outside of Bitcoin and the larger cryptocurrency sphere that have demonstrated market fit. 45:01 So a great example of that would be stable coins, like whatever you think of them. 45:05 It's currently true that like one of the major humanitarian use cases for cryptocurrencies, you know, is primarily settled on Tron. 45:13 Right. And to a lesser extent, Ethereum. So, you know, even just taking that one kind of example, it's like we have to acknowledge that there's something else, there's something valuable going on in the crypto space. 45:25 And then the debate is sort of like, well, what's valuable? Right. So now I think you're back into sort of, you know, these different groups that I outlined at the beginning, like with their different kind of philosophies on Bitcoin. 45:38 And I think it's certainly become like very heretical, like in Bitcoin today to acknowledge that there are other cryptocurrencies with valid use cases and other use cases that currently use other cryptocurrencies that are valid, but that could also use Bitcoin. 45:56 And so I appreciate that the Drivechains, you know, kind of push has put some necessary stress on that, because I do think that personally, like my view on Bitcoin maximalism is that, you know, if we are not trying to erase or remove these other cryptocurrencies from existence, then we allow them to exist. 46:18 And again, this is now we're talking about personally my personal view. I think that maximalism, you know, if it is to exist, you know, it has to then be geared in a way where it is actively competing against the other chains and then, you know, taking market share from them. 46:34 That's what I particularly thought was very exciting about, you know, the Ordinal's push earlier this year, the idea that, you know, someone could come up with an idea to permissionlessly serve a market on Bitcoin and then compete against an existing market on another cryptocurrency, you know, in order to do that. 46:52 Personally, I thought that was an exciting forward vision for Bitcoin and one that I, you know, would like to see more of personally. The debate, though, then is then what is the right technical construct for how these things should be developed? Because, you know, it is true that, you know, their Drivechains is a current proposal for this, but there was the sidechains proposal before that. 47:13 I think that you're going to see a reality going forward where there are more proposals for how to do things like sidechains that are not even Drivechains. Like there are, I think, a number of people who have since the Ordinal's, you know, protocol launched who are in like the Ethereum, DeFi sort of world who are now moving over to Bitcoin and then trying to figure out how to do these things because they now see that they are sort of built on sand and that they would like to move some of the things they're doing over to Bitcoin. 47:43 Right. I think ultimately everybody will converge on using Bitcoin. The question then is, you know, which, you know, how do we achieve that result? Does it happen naturally? Do we have to do something, you know, adversarial in order for that to happen? 47:59 So this is sort of where you get into like, we can both want the same thing, right? I can agree with you that there are some useful things happening within the larger cryptocurrency sphere. I can agree with you that I would like for those to occur on Bitcoin. I think that the end user would have a higher degree, you know, and a better product experience and, you know, just have a more secure experience if that was to be the case. 48:28 But then I would still have to agree with you that Drivechains are the best possible way to do that. And I would still have to then support whatever activation model you might propose for drivechains. So, you know, this is a good example, again, where it's like, I think I can agree with you on a couple levels, you know, that can be sort of high up and directional. 48:47 But then like now you still have to convince me to, you know, specifically support Drivechains as the specific solution to this. When I would just say like the like the long arc of Bitcoin is that, you know, there is no limit. So use one of Paul's favorite expressions. There's no limit on how good of an idea you can have. Right. So to use Paul's own words against him a little bit, it's, you know, maybe there isn't a limit on how good an idea that someone can have to put a sidechain on Bitcoin. 49:17 And that Drivechains isn't the best idea. And pushing for its activation now might not be the best idea, because that's always possible for someone to do that. So, you know, I don't know, I'd still have to then... 49:29 kind of weigh those positions, and then you'd have to put me in a position where it's like, I need to weigh those positions today, like, and I need to as a user, like make some decision now. Right. 49:38 I think there's only so many ways that you can force someone to a decision point, right? You can only use... this is like classic sales tactics, right? You can only use fear, or greed, or like, you have to sort of connect some emotion to it. 49:52 And that's why I said earlier that, you know, most of the time when I see the Drivechains conversation, I know that you guys want to put forward a vision of like unification and sort of, you know, bringing all this innovation to Bitcoin. 50:04 But like, a lot of times the conversation does rely on some sort of fear, right? Like you are kind of, you know, trying to destabilize my current view of Bitcoin, and get me to think that there's a possibility that, you know, even like the words that you just said about Bitcoin being a bad idea, you know, that's not going to happen. 50:22 Like supplant it as like, the number one cryptocurrency. Like, personally, I would, I don't feel like that would be a negative. I feel like my personal mental model of Bitcoin is strong enough to withstand it being the number two cryptocurrency. 50:36 But I see why it would be your benefit to describe it that way. You know, I just question like, how effective that would be. 50:44 So I don't know, we can get into like all sorts of things here. But I think that there's, you know, there's levels of which I think I agree with a lot of things that are being said, but then, you know, this and this is the real test of any Bitcoin consensus change is that you you have to get me to come to a decision making point. 51:01 And the only thing I can say to that is that, you know, above all, I think like, if there's something that unites all Bitcoin maximalists is that we want to maximally secure Bitcoin of the future, right? And I even lack the technical expertise to tell you that Drivechains, you know, wouldn't negatively impact Bitcoin in any way. 51:23 And so because I can't do that, how would I how would I ever make a decision there? And how could you ever get me to that point? I don't know, that was that would be the open question I would have. 51:32 I agree with everything you said. That was so interesting. 51:36 Except where you mentioned that the being number two might be okay. In your view, I feel like the problem with being number two in crypto is that network effect is very powerful in money. 51:53 So in economic theory, network effect is most prevalent in the market for money more than any other kind of market for any other good. 52:01 So if you're number two, then in long term equilibrium, you're going to not succeed, because people will go to the network that has the most users, because that's going to be the better money, strictly speaking. 52:16 So if you had, for example, if Satoshi had created two projects simultaneously, Bitcoin one and Bitcoin two, and if for some reason, Bitcoin and they were identical in every way, hypothetically, but if the first one had one more user than the second one, then in long term equilibrium, everyone would end up on the first one. 52:42 So this is just a hypothetical, unrealistic, and not realistic hypothetical. But my point is, it's not good to be number two. 52:51 So, of course, there's many other differences between, you know, the top two cryptos, many differences. 52:57 So it's, there's many variables and complexities, but it is not good to be number two, Bitcoin should aim to stay number one, and in fact, absorb and conquer all of the others, sending their tokens to zero by absorbing their technology, by copying their open source tech into Bitcoin sidechains, and then potentially, their users would migrate after Bitcoiners start to use those sidechains. 53:24 As a simple example, if we had a privacy sidechain, if 1%, just 1% of all Bitcoiners sent their Bitcoin to that privacy sidechain, that privacy sidechain would have $4 billion of market cap, which is bigger than Monero and Zcash combined. 53:43 And the network effect and security of that privacy sidechain might, because of its robust, you know, size, and potential fee revenue might be better in every way than the privacy altcoins. 54:00 Therefore, if the users migrate, if just some of the altcoin users migrate to the Bitcoin privacy sidechain, already, the balance is even further made, the imbalance where the Bitcoin sidechain is growing, providing value and fees to Bitcoin mainchain, and the altcoiners are shrinking, and as they shrink more and more, the flip, the seesaw rocks even further, and then the imbalance is even greater. 54:26 And eventually, the only people left holding the altcoin tokens who haven't sold are loyalists who don't care about utility, and simply are speculating to pump their bag, which is their right to do so, nothing wrong with that, but they're going to lose. 54:40 So that's the Drivechain theory. The optimistic case for Drivechain is that it absorbs the privacy users, all of them. And then this could happen with every other altcoin that has genuine utility, like the privacy altcoins, such as the Oracle focused blockchain users, and the large block blockchain users. 55:03 So those are all legitimate technologies, large blocks, oracles, privacy tech, they're legitimate on sidechains of Bitcoin, which means that Bitcoin mainchain would be able to be more conservative, more stable, more digital gold, because it would be the base layer to all of these experimental and innovative, totally optional venues for blockchain use. 55:26 And those uses would share Bitcoin's monetary policy and miners. So you get all of that. But the one thing we disagreed on in your beautiful statement was when you said it's okay to be number two, you don't want to be number two, right? You want to stay number one. And it's funny that you talked about things being sometimes too negative in Drivechain discourse, like, you know, security budget concern, or flipping concern. 55:53 But I sometimes hear the opposite. When we had Bob McElrath here, who I really enjoyed his his comments. One thing we you know, he sometimes disagrees with us is that he says, Oh, you guys shouldn't be talking about number go up. It's not the right kind of way to think about Bitcoin. This is a project for things other than just get rich quick. 56:15 So stop talking about NGU. That's offensive to, you know, in his view, to his, you know, values. So some people say that we shouldn't be so bullish on Drivechain as a mechanism for Bitcoin to accrue value and get more users. Instead, they would prefer what, you know, Lopp called like the puritanical approach, which is that this is about purity, you know, Bitcoin, not blockchain. 56:42 We don't want to, as Jimmy Song would say, we don't want to validate the shit coins by, you know, creating all these sidechains for all these different dubious experiments. So some people have kind of like, they condemn when we go positive, and then others would condemn when we go negative. So it's tough to 57:03 Well, because ultimately, you're, you know, you're proposing a change to Bitcoin, and you have to convince the body populace that it's the, you know, not not only, you know, good idea, but it's the best possible idea that they need to do it now. And yeah, you know, look, I think your description of like, you know, nobody ever said like the Drivechains, you know, model for the future, like doesn't sound good, right? I mean, the idea that we could, you know, get useful coins to migrate and accrue network effects. 57:32 You know, is great, right? I don't think anybody ever had a problem with that. I mean, I think, you know, personally, I think that, you know, the sidechains idea, you know, for Bitcoin, to me, that's the genesis of maximalism is maximalism doesn't really even start until, you know, the sidechains idea was born. 57:49 And I've always found it to be a pretty compelling theory. But you know, to your point, I mean, look, there's large, different sentiments about what could happen, right? Many people think that, you know, we could go through the whole process of putting these things on Bitcoin, and then they just still exist as altcoins, right? Like, there's the, you know, you're now you've just added more options to the market. And so ultimately, you know, because the end user can feel any number of ways about, you know, this future. 58:19 Um, you know, again, like, I would say, like, you know, it's kind of the onus is on you guys, though, right? Because you're the ones proposing the consensus change to Bitcoin, right? Like you're asking for a specific change? Well, maybe not yet, because there is there's no proposed code. But like, you know, that's, that's strongly the narrative direction, right? Is that like, you want the group of, you know, Bitcoin software users to change Bitcoin in this way. 58:43 Um, so yeah, I mean, look, I, to the extent that you guys have a challenge in sort of convincing people, I would say that that's largely a good thing. This is the system that's been engineered. This is like why it exists. And I imagine you're going to continue to find it challenging. Because, yes, it is true that at any point, people can just choose to feel however they want, and not support Drivechains. But you know, that was the case for pretty much every other Bitcoin upgrade that happened as well, right? There was never really, 59:13 you know, at the end of the day, it's like the Bitcoin users didn't have to adopt SegWit. There wasn't really anything, you know, that, you know, at least that we, you know, know today, it's like, you know, would Bitcoin have been, you know, destroyed if that didn't happen? Like, I would still be around, right, in some way. So again, I don't know, this is sort of where we are in the conversation. You know, I don't, I'm sympathetic to your, you know, you're feeling like you can't win with some people. But, you know, 59:44 that's the model for consensus upgrades right now. 59:48 Well said. Pete, we've been going for an hour now. I just want to thank you for the time you spent with us so far. And I hope that you'll have time in your in your busy schedule to come back again. When Paul's here right now, or at some point today, Paul is debating with Peter Todd, so he couldn't make it to today's space. But usually he's here, and it would have been awesome to hear you guys talk about Drivechain at length. 1:00:12 So if you're free to stay another half hour or hour, please do. And also, I'm sure you're busy. So, you know, let us know anytime you want to drop by. 1:00:21 Yeah, I'm happy to hang out and take questions, you know, or whatever, whatever you guys want. I mean, obviously, I have I have the time book that you guys allotted for. You know, I do think there's a lot to go into. You know, I think we've covered sort of high level how I look at the space. I think we've covered sort of my, you know, views towards Drivechains as a proposal. 1:00:41 You know, I think to the extent that hopefully that was valuable to you guys. I think I've tried to articulate from like, you know, a user acquisition standpoint. I mean, look, I mean, a consensus upgrade is like you're marketing something, right? And it's, you know, ultimately, you're going to have to get people to, you know, buy that marketing message, right? To get the change across. 1:01:00 So, you know, if I can be helpful in illustrating, like, you know, why I think that there's a number of steps to that. I'm like, what particular pain points I think you could address, right? I think like, you know, maybe that could be helpful. But, you know, right now, I do see it as like, you know, there are a number of steps to get people, you know, on board with something like Drivechains. 1:01:21 And, you know, I still personally feel like, you know, I again, like to push for like, you know, personally, where I'm at on this is like, you know, I think that it would be prudent for the Drivechains community to activate Drivechains on some other chain, because I think that demonstrating that this has utility and market fit, and that there aren't negatives to it, conclusively, is probably the only way that you're going to be able to convince enough people 1:01:52 that this makes sense. Because as I think I've said, like, you know, again, like in a box, like I'm not even myself, it's like, I'm not enough of a technical expert to tell you that this won't have any negative repercussions. And I think you're going to find that most Bitcoin users, unless they feel, you know, 100% convinced that something's not going to negatively affect Bitcoin, it's gonna be very hard for them to feel comfortable doing anything. And yeah, you know, the activation route for Drivechains, if there is going to be one that 1:02:21 exists, like, you know, it's, I personally don't think that it's going to be you guys circulating this conversation, everybody thinking about it critically, and then coming back with, you know, a unanimous consensus that this should happen. I just I don't think that's a logical, you know, a road right in the case of tap for them. And there was like an eight year old proposal that like, you know, was finally everybody was so exhausted arguing about it, there was no more dissent, right? That's how it was activated. So 1:02:51 you know, I don't know, it's, I think it's gonna be a long road either way. But I just think that, like, you know, I'd probably encourage you guys to work towards positive incentive. Or maybe, maybe I wouldn't say positive, like proof based, like, you know, methods of convincing people, right? Because it's, it's one thing to talk theoretics, and it's another thing to see something live somewhere and see that it works. And it's like, it becomes very obvious that something functions that way. And that's why I 1:03:21 brought up the SegWit example, because it was an example where, you know, there was debate, there was all this theoretics, but like, at the end of the day, it was very easy to see that like, SegWit, like, you know, activated on Litecoin, the Litecoin price went up. And everybody was very happy with that, over in Litecoin land, and the Bitcoiners were, you know, mostly upset about it, right. So there's very, that's a very powerful argument that like, isn't theoretical. And, you know, it's my personal belief that a large, you 1:03:51 know, reason that that that SegWit ultimately activated, you know, was because of that, I mean, people forget that the timeline is, you know, SegWit activated on Litecoin before UASF was even a thing, right, that you're talking about, like, March 2007, UASF wasn't even around until April and May. You know, there was a good bit of time there where, you know, things were at a gridlock. And, you know, ultimately, there needed to be some sort of demonstration of the tech 1:04:20 right. I mean, again, I can't, I don't know how you're gonna convince people to make a change to Bitcoin, unless you can demonstrate that there isn't the negatives, especially when right now, it's like, you know, you go on Twitter. And every time there's a post, you know, there's a bunch of other people commenting technical concerns, right? It's like, I'm not enough of an expert to falsify those claims. So, you know, I don't know how that you're going to sway my opinion there. 1:04:44 Let's focus then on the less technical, more sociological thing that you mentioned at the very earliest part of this conversation. So if, and then we'll go to questions. And thanks to those who've joined. Thank you very much. We'll get to your questions very soon. You mentioned at the very beginning, some sociological stuff about Drivechain. And when I mentioned the attrition within Bitcoin's sidechain community, you didn't seem to 1:05:13 really know what you mean by that. What do you mean by that? 1:05:16 Sure. Yeah, thanks for asking. So this is something Paul's talked about, where the people who are technical, as well as just fans of Bitcoin, who like sidechains, those are inherently the kinds of people who have a less negative attitude towards altcoins as a category, because these are people who are interested in experimentation and innovation. 1:05:42 And therefore, the Bitcoin sidechain community suffers from a high rate of attrition. People who would have been in Bitcoin and advocated for better sidechains have, many of them, simply gotten frustrated with the pace and the low prospect of better sidechains coming, and therefore they left to develop and contribute to altcoins. 1:06:10 That's the theory that I'm suggesting. That's what I mean when I say attrition. So what do you think about that? That people who like innovation and experimentation, which is a certain kind of person, some people aren't so into innovation and experimentation, they enjoy tradition and simplicity and conservatism. 1:06:28 But the kind of person who likes innovation and experimentation is a natural fit to advocate for better sidechains on Bitcoin. Those people, many of them, have left and built in the altcoin space, in some cases with great success, like Ethereum. 1:06:45 So what are your thoughts on that? They would be here, if only Bitcoin existed, they would be here pushing for Drivechain activation. But instead, they're in Ethereum, where they don't benefit at all from Bitcoin activating drivechain. And in fact, of course, you would understand our view, which is that if Bitcoin activates Drivechain, that would be a major threat to Ethereum's narratives. 1:07:09 Oh, boy. Yeah. Let me see, where do I start with that? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that there's nothing preventing people from building on other cryptocurrencies from participating in Bitcoin's consensus. So that's kind of a weird thing to throw out there. 1:07:28 I think that the idea that I mean, again, like, you know, the idea that we can have all the people who are working on other cryptocurrencies, furthering Bitcoin is still a great idea. But you're still, you're still dealing with the fundamental tension point, which is that there has to be an acknowledgement that there are things outside of Bitcoin that have value, like in order for the in order for anyone to think that Drivechains is a good idea. 1:07:55 They first have to think that something happening outside of Bitcoin is working or that it has value. And so the problem with that is that the culture has spent most of the last three or four years attempting to invalidate that. So the large majority of Bitcoin culture has been focused on this idea, you know, you can call it sort of the immaculate conception theory of Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is, you know, the only blockchain that's going to occur long term monetary value. 1:08:24 Anyway, without making any changes, that is already better than all these other things. And then, you know, to the extent that, you know, some people believe this, that eventually all that innovation will come to Bitcoin anyway, they'll just need to figure out a way to do it. And a great example of that would be, you know, from the detractor standpoint, you know, somebody figured out how to put NFTs on Bitcoin with ordinals. 1:08:48 And, you know, the market for those ordinals has still gone down, and still trended negatively in the direction of that market anyway. So again, if I was a steel man, like an argument from the perspective of someone who didn't want Bitcoin to change that they thought, you know, the Bitcoin that Satoshi invented was perfect forever. 1:09:10 How I would invalidate or argue to invalidate what you just said was I would I would point out to you that when somebody did finally figure out a way to bring NFTs to Bitcoin's base layer and finally had the ingenuity to do that, the market collapsed anyway, thus proving that it was perhaps foolish to do so originally. So I mean, again, I think you still sort of end up having to fight a larger battle. 1:09:35 So like, you know, if there was an argument that, you know, cryptocurrencies outside of Bitcoin have utility, well, then now you have to go convince the culture that that's true. But then the culture has spent the last three years convincing itself that it's not true. So you sort of have a larger battle there. And then it's like, well, to what extent does that move the needle on Drivechains? Now you're just sort of, you know, you're in a whole other subject of argumentation. 1:10:00 Which means that like, again, there's something that people have to think inherently in order for them to think the Drivechains is the right solution for that. But then if a natural and sort of like objective view on like how that conversation has developed would be like, it was very unlikely for people to get to that point, because they've spent the last three years invalidating that. To your point, I guess, you know, your argument is that people have left Bitcoin, you know, who would who would take that view. 1:10:24 But I don't really I don't understand how that changes the conversation. I mean, again, like, you know, Udi had Vitalik on his faces talking about Bitcoin stuff. I mean, it's not like these people disappeared. And it's not like just because you build stuff for them to build on Bitcoin, they're just going to come running back. I mean, they have vested incentives to continue their current projects. I mean, I don't know. I mean, do you think that like, even if Drivechains activated, there wouldn't be some fairly long period like where most of the other altcoins were still active? 1:10:54 I mean, that just seems that would seem shocking to me. I would say like, you know, I would probably expect anywhere from like five to 10 years or at least these things were overlapping. 1:11:04 Yeah, I agree. That's your point about vested interest just now. That's exactly my point. That was what I'm trying to say about the attrition. So the point is simply that one thing to have in mind about the Drivechain movement is that some of the people who would have been advocating for it now, as you say, have a vested interest because they chose to leave and chose to try to build a competitor, some other project with different features. 1:11:31 And therefore they have a vested interest, as you say. So they're not going to spend time trying to promote something here that would enable more competition against their project. Like if you built Chainlink, then you're not going to try to have Paul's Hivemind launched. 1:11:48 Yeah, and you saw that with Ordinals, right? With Ordinals, there was some lower level projects that were built on Ethereum that flipped over to Bitcoin because they saw the initial, you know, advantage of diversifying to a new market. But in a large part, like most of the entrenched incumbents are still long ETH, they're still long Solana, and they're still, you know, trapped within the social mindset of their communities where, you know, they can't diversify the other direction. 1:12:12 So like, even though someone came up with some solution that accommodated them on Bitcoin, there's still an inherent cultural motivation for them to not make that move, even though potentially they could have had an economic incentive to change. 1:12:26 So like, I feel like that's just like a perfect example of, you know, what you're talking about, where it's like, even if you launch the Drivechain technologies, it's like, you know, these things are still going to be around, and there's still going to be, you know, these vested interests on the other side who like, you know, could use this stuff, but just won't for whatever reason, right? So that just makes the argument even more difficult. 1:12:45 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's the founders, and then there's the users who might be more indifferent and just want the best value. So they might come over, and then the founder were just left without the users in theory. But we have, we've had some great people join the stage. I see some familiar faces. Let's just enable like anyone on stage. If you have questions, go right ahead with your questions. 1:13:09 I've got some comments and some questions here. I mean, I think generally, the problem isn't that specifically about Drivechains or consensus. It's about the fact that in order to make a change in Bitcoin, you have to get approval from a very small, very specific group of people to enable that change. 1:13:28 And ultimately, the reality is that it's not necessarily specifically about Drivechains or sidechains. It's about the ability to innovate on top of Bitcoin and essentially make it free to do whatever you want to do with this massive... 1:13:45 Well, I mean, the word innovation is like a very loaded term, right? Like, it doesn't really have any specific definition. And, you know, I appreciate your frustrations with the development process. I mean, it's just emphatically not true that a small group of people, you know, determine what happens with Bitcoin. It's a fairly, I would agree with you that it's an opaque process. But, you know, what we're looking for, what that group is looking for, is that there isn't any vocal dissent against the idea. 1:14:12 So they're not looking for some small group of people to be for the idea. I think this is vastly misinterpreted. It's like they're actually looking for there to be a large plurality of people who aren't against it. This was actually the argument, you know, back in the day when... 1:14:31 You know, Bitcoin was trying to upgrade with SegWit. It was, you know, that there was never an interest in merging anything that was contentious, right? 1:14:39 So that a lot of these proposals were never even discussed because they were contentious. So I think, you know, this is like a misinterpretation thing here. 1:14:46 But, you know, the Bitcoin development culture largely has a long term view. They want to have Bitcoin operate for hundreds of years. 1:14:53 So therefore, to them, anything that is contentious in terms of a, you know, proposed upgrade is like a non-starter. 1:15:00 So what they're looking for, and a great example where you can tell this is true, and I would actually encourage you to look at this with like a fresh perspective, is that look what happened with CTV, right? 1:15:09 So with BIP-119, Jeremy Rubin came out and he did a couple things. He, one, proposed, you know, a model for, you know, how we could have, you know, custody of solutions on Bitcoin via covenants, right? 1:15:25 Like so there's a specific technical change to Bitcoin that he proposed. And then he proposed like a governance change on top of that, where he was like publishing all the different softwares for the users to run directly, you know, in terms of like so they could activate it. 1:15:38 The users wanted to activate it, they could. So what was rejected when Jeremy did this was not CTV. What was rejected was his, you know, weird governance proposal thing around it. 1:15:51 And what you'll find now is that the conversation about CTV is still continuing, the conversations about covenants still continued. 1:15:57 And it's actually trending where CTV is less controversial. This is a year and a half removed of him pushing on this, and that most people who were originally against it, because of how he was advocating for it. 1:16:10 You know, you saw this recently with Giacomo Zucco and Francis Pulio, you know, basically saying that they would support, you know, software activation of CTV, that they now view it as non-controversial, and therefore they support it. 1:16:22 So again, I think that some of those social signaling you're talking about is a little bit misinterpreted. It's like the Bitcoin development process right now is designed to basically just block anything that is seen as contentious. 1:16:33 And the CTV one is a great example of something that was very contentious, but is like slowly becoming non-contentious. And it actually might evolve all the way to the point where it's so non-contentious, it gets activated. 1:16:45 That might be the plausible reality that we're currently living in, and it could be that that's, well, one of the next upgrades. 1:16:53 I agree with that. I want to say… 1:16:57 Okay, but when you say what they are looking for, who specifically are you talking about, and how many people is that? 1:17:04 Yeah, but the governance of Bitcoin is just anybody who runs a node. I mean, like everybody who's an economic actor within Bitcoin. 1:17:11 Well, it's not true because if stock chains were enabled and anyone who runs a node can make a decision, they would be able to do that, right? But you can't get the proposal passed. 1:17:20 Who's talking right now? I don't see. Who's talking? 1:17:22 It's Randy from Ordinal's Wallet. 1:17:24 Randy, I don't agree with you either because I think that what you're missing is if the majority of Bitcoin users do want a proposal… 1:17:32 … that you have to get… 1:17:34 … without any consent from… 1:17:36 … the development proposal to pass in order for nodes to vote on this thing, correct? 1:17:39 Completely not. If the majority of users run the node, you don't need any approval from the core devs at all. 100%. 1:17:46 Yeah, that's the confusing part. I don't understand how the Ordinal's people are arguing that you need… 1:17:51 Yeah, it's not Ordinal's people. It's just this belief that they have against core devs controlling everything. 1:17:57 Well, I'm just saying that what I've said about this is Casey's greatest contribution with Ordinal's is that he didn't ask anybody for permission. 1:18:05 That was actually what was good about the Ordinal's proposal is that he didn't ask for anyone's permission… 1:18:10 … and that he didn't need that because of the way his proposal was designed. 1:18:16 I don't understand how that doesn't invalidate the point that you just made that a small group of people control things. 1:18:21 Because if they controlled things, then Casey would have had to go for them to approval, which he didn't. 1:18:25 And so how are we even still having this conversation? 1:18:27 Because it seems so overwhelmingly obvious that we exist at a time right now where, yeah, maybe it does take 10 years for somebody to figure out how to put NFTs on Bitcoin without making consensus change. 1:18:38 But lo and behold, here we are, and someone did that. It just means that there's a sufficiently high bar for someone doing that. 1:18:46 And then even if he does that, then the market maybe doesn't necessarily have to care about that. 1:18:51 I mean, I'm really positive on Ordinal's. 1:18:54 I mean, the other example is also from SegWit activation, that the node software was not from Core. 1:18:59 It was just from a random dev that was anonymous that everybody started to run for a user activated. 1:19:04 And that's another proof that activation for even consensus changes doesn't have to come from Core at all. 1:19:11 So I agree with that 100%. 1:19:13 I don't even think that Core wants it. I mean, one of the problems is that Core doesn't want any activation attempts to come from them. 1:19:19 Yeah, that's true. 1:19:21 That point is just completely false. 1:19:25 But I want to say something from what we talked about previously. 1:19:29 I think that it's really nice how you categorize to basically gain a user or not gain a user. 1:19:36 You have to basically convince them of all these points that you pointed out. 1:19:39 And then you'll see, all right, well, this is going to be a lot harder to convince them on all of these points. 1:19:43 So you have to find what can you convince them on. 1:19:45 And you mentioned that the rewards for Drivechain is like greatly known and things like this. 1:19:51 And I think that that is actually not correct because of what you guys talked about after that. 1:19:56 The general, well, from my experience, the majority of Bitcoin users, they look at any other chain or any other coin as being completely valueless. 1:20:06 And there's no value at all from anything else. 1:20:08 And I think because, like you mentioned, the culture has conditioned them to believe that after a period of time. 1:20:15 Now that is their belief. 1:20:17 So anything like they don't see any kind of reward from Drivechain. 1:20:21 So I think that the reward for Drivechain. 1:20:24 Yeah, that's sort of why I said, like, to me, that seems like a bigger problem because you have. 1:20:30 So in marketing, like, you know, this means like you have upstream problems. 1:20:35 So, for example, like, I don't know, like the SegWit, right? 1:20:39 Like that came to market. 1:20:40 They had to convince people to, like, use this thing and to not walk different places. 1:20:44 Right. So you always have like, or like, you know, the iPhone, right? 1:20:48 Like it comes out, you have to get rid of your landline. 1:20:50 There's all sorts of different things with, like, user adoption or it's like there could be some higher level argument that you have to make. 1:20:56 And it's like, you know, the thing I see with Drivechain is like, yes, the culture has to broadly believe that these other chains have value and that they can bring value to Bitcoin. 1:21:06 And because that's so antithetical to all of the recent conversation around Bitcoin, I don't know how you achieve that. 1:21:13 Right. And that's why I said, because I don't think that that's achievable. 1:21:17 I think you have to demonstrate you have to demonstrate it. 1:21:20 There has to be some showcase that that's possible. 1:21:23 Yeah, well, I think because I think. 1:21:25 Hold on, let me just say one thing. 1:21:28 So like S2F, stock to flow is like a great example of this. 1:21:32 I want to introduce this argument to you guys because no one fucking understood stock to flow. 1:21:36 It was a completely stupid theory. 1:21:37 Like everybody thought that it was good for their bags. 1:21:40 And so they thought very positively of it. 1:21:43 Right. Like, so I think like the Bitcoin, the average Bitcoin user is actually it's actually incredibly easy to convince them that an idea is good. 1:21:52 If they think it's good for their bags. 1:21:54 Like most Bitcoin users currently are convinced that like the SEC should intervene and like block people from using altcoins because it's good for their bags. 1:22:01 It's actually very easy to convince someone in Bitcoin of something. 1:22:05 If you can convince them it's good for Bitcoin's long term price. 1:22:09 And I would say that like, you know, stock to flow is just an example because it's so ridiculous. 1:22:13 Like, you know, it was always a very ridiculous model. 1:22:16 Paul's initial criticism, I think, of stock to flow is something like, you know, to even critique this, you know, like it would be actually like lowering himself or it wouldn't be worth it to even critique this. 1:22:27 It's like so stupid. Right. But the impact on the culture was still broadly. 1:22:31 Most people supported it because it was seen as good for Bitcoin's price. 1:22:34 So there is this. I'm just introducing this paradox because I want you to understand this because I think it's obvious the more I think about it. 1:22:41 It's like most people, if they're given an example of something that's good for Bitcoin, even like El Salvador, it's like we convinced ourselves that a government, you know, basically pushing Bitcoin adoption was good. 1:22:53 Right. Like the culture convinced itself of that because like El Salvador brought a lot of attention and positive narratives to Bitcoin. 1:23:00 So the culture is really easily able to convince itself that things that are good for, you know, their bags are good for Bitcoin. 1:23:09 And I think that that's generally very true. So then the question is, though, is like, how do you demonstrate that? 1:23:14 Right. Because and I think this is the tension point is that, you know, people don't currently think that, you know, these other cryptocurrencies move. 1:23:22 They either don't think that these other cryptocurrencies will actually come to Bitcoin. 1:23:25 They don't think those founders will give up their projects, those users will give up on their projects or they just don't think they think they're worthless. 1:23:31 And it's like that's the larger problem. But if people thought that that was true, then I think it would be very easy for them to think that Drivechain was good because, again, like the average user, you know, anyway. 1:23:42 Yeah, I agree with you 100% that the majority is just looking that if it's beneficial for their bags, then it's the easiest conversation to have. 1:23:52 So two things on that. One is I think that the majority believe that there's no value at all in any other coins. 1:23:58 And I think that that's a much easier conversation to have because you can you can clearly see demand for other networks. 1:24:03 You can see that, like, for example, the fee demand on other networks is higher than on Bitcoin. 1:24:07 So you can see that there's more demand on those other networks. 1:24:10 So you can see that if there's more demand for those other networks, even a minority of some of that demand coming over to Bitcoin will pump your bags of Bitcoin. 1:24:18 So I think that's that's a much easier approach. 1:24:21 But then I think you're dealing with like, you know, again, like that argument, I say it's like even if you were to develop a very sophisticated, let's just say you came out with a Drivechains to flow model. 1:24:31 Let's just let's take a DTF2F model, right? Drivechains to flow. 1:24:35 There was some sort of stupid chart that says like, OK, here's here's how much drive. 1:24:41 If all these chains came over to Bitcoin, all their fee revenues coming to Bitcoin, here's the Drivechains to flow model. 1:24:47 And then you predict it out like X number of chains like, you know, equals this much value. 1:24:51 I don't think that'll work because there's no. 1:24:53 No, no, I'm just I'm strawmanning. I'm strawmanning something. 1:24:56 Sure. 1:24:57 I think even if you did that, you would still then have to convince people because you're advocating for a consensus change that it was safe. 1:25:03 Right. 1:25:04 So like you like stock to flow didn't require anyone to think that it was safe. 1:25:08 Yeah. 1:25:09 Like it was just an idea that existed. 1:25:10 Yeah. 1:25:11 But there wasn't any issue. 1:25:12 I think the current issue is that they don't see any positive from it. 1:25:15 So because they don't see any positive from it, then any potential negative is just like, well, there's no positive. 1:25:20 Look at all the potential. 1:25:21 Well, that's why my argument is that you have to go and demonstrate. 1:25:24 You have to demonstrate the potential positive. 1:25:26 But the argument of doing it on another chain, I don't think is too strong. 1:25:31 But the reason why is because for money to be like a good property of money, you want the sale ability, right? 1:25:37 The highest sale ability. 1:25:38 So if you do create this on another chain, like, for example, on a Litecoin, I don't think, first of all, there's no 100% that there'll even be demand for Drivechains, even if it's on Bitcoin. 1:25:49 It's all hypothetical. 1:25:50 Even if Drivechains was activated, like maybe there's no demand for it and maybe nobody wants it. 1:25:55 Right. 1:25:56 So how much more so would that link over to if you were to activate it on another chain? 1:26:01 Less demand, I believe, would be for it on a Litecoin. 1:26:05 I think you're pointing out what the inherent risk is of activating on another chain and why the reward of it is strong. 1:26:12 Because if you activate on another chain and it works, then it's pretty obvious and it's unfalsifiable that your viewpoint is correct. 1:26:19 But then you have to be willing to take the step of doing that. 1:26:23 And this is like my worry a bit about like the Drivechain stuff where it's like, sometimes I worry it's like, you know, are the proponents of this or are we so convinced that like you want to be right about this that you're not going to take the risk? 1:26:35 Right. Because if you really thought you were going to be able to, it's sort of like, you know, I almost see people like, okay, like, let's maybe take this model where it's like, you know, if you thought you had a great product idea within a company and the company didn't want to launch it, you know, and then you also don't go and start your own startup. 1:26:52 Then what's the company going to do about it? Like you're just, you're still working your day job, but you haven't gone and started that startup you were talking about. So how serious are you about the startup? You know, it's like if you were that serious about it and you thought it was going to work. 1:27:05 What I'm thinking is if it's activated on another chain and there's just no volume for it, then that would be like a great against it and be like, oh, you see what nobody wants. 1:27:14 Yes, because then you've done something real and it either has to exist or it doesn't. And that's my worry is that like, that's one of the reasons. 1:27:21 But if there's no demand for it on Litecoin, doesn't mean that there will be no demand for it on Bitcoin, right? 1:27:26 I mean, how do you know? Why would you say that? 1:27:29 The reason why is because more people will be incentivized to use Bitcoin for its like base money properties of the most salability, the most liquid, the highest market cap. 1:27:38 So if somebody was creating things on Ethereum or another chain, they would have at least some incentive to move over to Bitcoin. 1:27:45 Even if we talked about all their incentives to not because, you know, they have their own token or they already have their own community, so they don't want to switch over. 1:27:53 But they still have at least a little bit of an incentive to switch over because of Bitcoin's properties. 1:27:57 But they have less of those incentives to switch over or even test out things on Litecoin because there's less less market cap, less liquidity, less network effect. 1:28:05 So there's less reason for them to. 1:28:08 Why did that work for SegWit then and why would it not work for Drivechain? 1:28:13 So I think for SegWit, it was more about. 1:28:15 So it would work for Drivechain if you're trying to prove any potential negatives that are they're not true. 1:28:21 Right. If you want to show that, all right, Drivechain is safe, if then you can launch it on Litecoin. 1:28:26 And I think for that reason, SegWit on Litecoin was successful to show that there's no negatives from it. 1:28:34 Yes, I agree. Why would it be bad? 1:28:37 Like the biggest I feel like the biggest schism, like you're saying, is that Bitcoiners do not see any value from anything other than Bitcoin. 1:28:46 And I think that that's more important because if you can show them that there is potential value from something other than Bitcoin, then they would even be open to discussing, oh, OK, well, let's see. 1:28:55 Can this actually be beneficial for Bitcoin? 1:28:57 But I think that that's where the hard line stops because because the culture has been conditioned that there absolutely is no value in anything other than Bitcoin. 1:29:08 I think we agree about a lot of stuff. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what we disagree. 1:29:12 Yeah, I just I just wanted to point out that that's probably a better direction for our DriveChainers to show that, you know, that like there actually can be value that's not on Bitcoin. 1:29:22 And if we bring that over, then, you know, but but I think that's a very, very hard part. 1:29:26 But again, I mean, like my question, I was like, if Ordinals didn't convince them of that, then like was, you know, like what? 1:29:30 I think slowly more people came around to Ordinals. They started to see the fees go up. They started to see, well, it's really not that harmful. 1:29:36 They started to see more people running nodes. They started to see more more activity on the base layer. 1:29:41 Even if it's like, you know, buying and selling Ordinals, they're denominated in Bitcoin. 1:29:44 So that's that's good for Bitcoin because that makes the salability of Bitcoin higher. 1:29:47 I agree. I thought that was incredibly obvious. But then I spent three or four months watching people fight about it for no reason. 1:29:53 I think more people have come around. I mean, I've seen people that are like, you know, influencers or whatever, host spaces. 1:29:58 They were very, very against it originally, but then they became. 1:30:01 That's only because the price is down and when the price is up again for Ordinals, they'll be the same bullshit again. 1:30:06 It'll just all come back because ultimately those people just don't want people to make money. 1:30:09 That's that's the real objection. 1:30:11 There's a good faith to it, too, because a lot of majority of it is speculation of an asset that has no reason to have any value. 1:30:17 So they kind of want to protect people from it and, you know, take the higher moral high ground for that reason. 1:30:22 So I think that there's a good reason for them. 1:30:24 Well, but that's the other problem. And I think like this is and if I were to point out one more problem, because, again, I think the Drivechain, 1:30:30 you know, you have a lot of problems, but one of them is that I think a good number of people who adopted Bitcoin in 2021 and 2022, 1:30:39 they came here for number go up and then they stayed here to feel morally superior to the altcoiners. 1:30:45 And I actually really think this is a deep cultural problem in Bitcoin right now where, you know, you can't talk about other cryptocurrencies. 1:30:53 You can't talk about things that are happening on them in a positive light because the people who stayed here in Bitcoin, 1:31:00 they stayed because they wanted to feel better about themselves and other people than these other groups. 1:31:05 They have the ability to say, we're not them. We're morally better than these people. 1:31:10 And this is why you see the rise of like this kind of great Bitcoin moralism. 1:31:15 And I think like this, that moralism coupled with, you know, that just exaggerates the problem that we just discussed before, 1:31:21 because it's like, you know, if you talk about something like stable coins, like, I mean, it should be fairly obvious to convince somebody that, 1:31:26 like, you know, stable coins are a legitimate market, right, that they exist outside of Bitcoin. 1:31:31 And, you know, as a community, we're not really doing anything to address that problem, you know, 1:31:36 other than hopefully taproot assets will come out and maybe something will happen there. 1:31:41 But, you know, like there's a pretty I mean, it's pretty easy to look at the market cap of like Monero and Zcash and see these things like exist. 1:31:49 Right. Like there's there's pretty obvious reasons, you know, where people should be able to look at data and make inclusion, 1:31:54 but they don't because their emotional conclusion is, you know, not only do they not think cryptocurrencies are valuable, 1:31:59 but like their whole like identity around adopting Bitcoin is that they're against this other group. 1:32:05 You know, and I think like that's another like just as another like emotional complexity layer, 1:32:09 because I think that group is only getting more vocal. 1:32:12 And that was the group I think that was like particularly enraged around ordinals, 1:32:16 because to even talk about like doing something that another cryptocurrency was doing, 1:32:20 and that that might be good for Bitcoin was unpalatable to them. 1:32:23 So I don't know. Uphill battle. 1:32:25 Yeah, I agree with that. I think the easiest fight is to show them that there's a use case, 1:32:30 because that simplifies everything, because they obviously have a use case for Bitcoin. 1:32:35 And you're like, all right, well, there's a use case for Bitcoin, sure. 1:32:37 But what about this use case? A person has a legitimate use case and it cannot be done on Bitcoin. 1:32:41 Are you going to tell them not to use any other coin, but they still need to solve their use case, right? 1:32:45 That's why Bitcoin maximalism exists in like this, you know, kind of this weird dichotomy right now, 1:32:51 where it's like, this is why I said like, to me, it's like, if I think about the term Bitcoin maximalism, 1:32:56 it's sort of like, you can't have Bitcoin maximalism if your view is just that, you know, 1:33:02 Bitcoin exists as it is, and then all the other cryptocurrencies will go to zero over time. 1:33:07 It really doesn't make sense. 1:33:09 Bitcoin maximalism comes from this idea that we wanted to assimilate all the other features from other chains. 1:33:15 This was our cultural desire. There was a cultural desire within Bitcoin to do that. 1:33:21 And we wanted to be adversarial against this other group. 1:33:25 We wanted to be proactively adversarial in order to, you know, kind of take all this activity back on the Bitcoin. 1:33:33 You know, and I have sympathy for people who are around that. 1:33:35 I'm like, you know, I still feel sympathetic to that vision. 1:33:37 But, you know, for the people who don't, you know, I'm not sure what to say. 1:33:43 I agree, because you can see from, I assume you've been around for a long time, 1:33:47 on Bitcoin talk forums, there's a whole section called altcoins. 1:33:50 And they have always been discussed in Bitcoin discussions. 1:33:54 They weren't shunned upon. It was actually encouraged for you to learn about other coins, 1:33:58 learn about their protocol design. 1:34:00 If it's good, maybe it will be added to Bitcoin, but let them go and try it. 1:34:03 And learn about it and try it out yourself. 1:34:06 It was always encouraged, you know, back in the day. 1:34:08 Where nowadays it's discouraged to try anything out or definitely not even talk about anything. 1:34:13 But I still think that the simple use case is probably the easiest conversation. 1:34:16 Because if you can show somebody there's a use case. 1:34:19 Well, he can't use Bitcoin because it doesn't solve that use case. 1:34:22 Are you telling him not to use any other coin? 1:34:25 And then they can clearly see, all right, well, there is a use case for another coin. 1:34:29 And once that conversation can be opened, then you can see, all right, well, 1:34:32 if there is actually a use case for other coins, then all their previous beliefs are now shot down. 1:34:38 And now they might be open to, all right, Drivechains can have a benefit. 1:34:43 But I think that Drivechains can have a benefit is like the hardest thing 1:34:46 because they don't see any benefit to anything other than Bitcoin. 1:34:51 Yep, I think it's a tricky spot right now. 1:34:56 Does anybody have any other questions? 1:35:01 Yeah, I want to add some things that I think, like what you said, 1:35:10 like if we showed to those Bitcoiners that their banks will be pumped or stuff like that, 1:35:18 I think Drivechain is a perfect example of that. 1:35:23 And by the way, I want to say that I'm advocating for mass adoption of Bitcoin blockchain, 1:35:29 not using only BTC because if you have adoption of Bitcoin blockchain, 1:35:34 it's obvious that you have adoption of BTC. 1:35:39 And another thing is that I wanted to add about your conversation that you said 1:35:45 related to Drivechain launching on other chains. 1:35:51 I think it's not good, first of all, because no other chain is that much decentralized like Bitcoin. 1:35:58 And I think Drivechains are intended to be for Bitcoin because the idea is not from now. 1:36:04 It's very, very old. 1:36:06 And another thing I want to add about ordinals. 1:36:11 Without Taproot, Casey would not be able to do very easy. 1:36:17 But because of Taproot enabled protocol, then, yeah, the ordinals are possibly they came in existence. 1:36:29 But I want to say that Casey used a concept that is from 2012. 1:36:36 He didn't invent it. And this is on his livestream. 1:36:40 I'm not inventing anything. You can check on YouTube. 1:36:44 He used a concept that is from 2012, which means that the original Bitcoiners, 1:36:52 the original Bitcoin developers, they are open. 1:36:55 And I agree with Satoshi about what he said before. 1:37:00 And this culture of BTC and nothing else and mass adoption of BTC, in my opinion, is wrong. 1:37:11 Because, first of all, you need to rely on third parties to use BTC outside in the real world. 1:37:18 But if anybody outside in the real world uses the Bitcoin blockchain as their infrastructure, 1:37:24 and these sidechains can enable this, it's a very good thing because you will have so much transactional data, 1:37:34 so much on Drivechains, and then obviously they need to be validated on Bitcoin blockchain. 1:37:41 And another thing, also, I have experience with another kind of similar concept as Drivechains, 1:37:53 which are on another UTXO blockchain. 1:37:57 And they are attracting so much users, like so big players coming to them with 100 million users, with even more. 1:38:07 So, you know, people who want to learn about Drivechains, they can compare from other chains or other platforms. 1:38:16 And also, Drivechain is already on a Bitcoin testnet, so they can download the Drivechain version of Bitcoin Core, run a node. 1:38:25 If they want, they can develop a sidechain or copy any other blockchain and put it on the testnet, so they can see how it works. 1:38:37 Okay, Bitcoin, thank you. That was very interesting. Thank you. 1:38:41 Pete, did you have any comments on that? 1:38:44 Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would say about Casey is, like, yeah, I mean, the idea was from 2012, sort of. 1:38:52 But I mean, he was working on it, and I think he just found an old idea and then gave credit to it. 1:38:57 So I'm not sure that completely explains the creation of Ordinals, though I get where you're coming from. 1:39:04 But yeah, I don't know. I'm not really sure what to add to that, other than I think that, you know, again, like, to the extent that there is a Drivechain movement, right? 1:39:13 Like, what are we talking about? Like, to the extent that there is a movement within Bitcoin to activate Drivechains, 1:39:18 then that movement has to advocate for certain things. 1:39:21 It has to convince a large plurality of the Bitcoin community that, you know, overwhelmingly, it's for the benefit of the users that this gets activated. 1:39:32 And that there are no, that there are limited downsides, right? That's, those are kind of the two things that you would need to go about doing. 1:39:38 So I don't know. I think that person said that there were some examples of other things. I mean, you know, I don't know of any, I don't know that I've seen any other sidechains that are activated on UTXO side blockchains. 1:39:49 So, you know, again, I don't know, I think you have to figure out a way to convince people of that. Otherwise, you know, the status quo will be the status quo. And like, you know, the status quo is that Bitcoin has been going up in price for 15 years and steadily becoming more adopted and that we've mostly seen other altcoins trying to zero over time. 1:40:13 You know, that's, that's the status quo. Like, you're looking at like a 10,000 year view. So you also have to figure out how to generate some urgency around it. So yeah, happy to kick around, you know, thoughts on that. But I still think it's a high hurdle. 1:40:28 Well said. 1:40:30 Hi, John Seth. Thanks for being here. Do you have any questions for Pete? 1:40:36 Yo, John Seth. What's up, bud? 1:40:39 He fell asleep, I bet. 1:40:40 Yeah, I have that. I have that ability, the magical power I have. 1:40:46 Regarding, what are your thoughts on the following question? Some blockchains aim for a monolithic design, where there's just one blockchain. Other blockchains aim for a multi chain design, where there is a base layer. And then there's a number of layer twos that are optional. 1:41:10 And they have their own set of nodes. And they share resources with the base layer. They share the miners, they share the monetary policy. But they have different features. If Bitcoin were to have protocol development that orients Bitcoin toward the multi chain design, such as Drivechain activation, Bitcoin would be a more complex ecosystem. 1:41:41 But the base layer, you know, from the drive chainers view, the base layer would be actually simpler in the sense that it would be more ossified, it would be there, there would be less pressure to change it, there would be less arguing over how frequently and how it should change. 1:41:59 Because the extensibility enabled by the sidechains would be the outlet for the creativity and the experimentation that some people desire. 1:42:09 So what are your thoughts on the difference between Bitcoin being simpler and more monolithic, versus Bitcoin having this multi layer design, where the whole ecosystem is more diverse and complicated, but arguably, the base layer is actually strengthened, and its conservatism is enhanced through that multi layered design? What do you think about that? 1:42:34 I mean, it's a nice idea. I guess I would ask the question, though, if you saw a sidechain, you know, with some sort of experimental feature gain a significant amount of value, I mean, wouldn't that put pressure on Bitcoin to change the base layer to accommodate that? 1:42:49 Yeah, exactly. So that's a great point, which is that there's always going to be occasionally really good ideas that brilliant people have to change the base layer. And those changes perhaps should be made so that the world can have a better Bitcoin and the desires of consumers can be met. 1:43:11 So what Drivechain would do if it's very successful, if it's activated and very successful, the most optimistic view is that it would change the way that the base layer development occurs instead of deliberation, being the the sole or primary, like, activity that leads to the changes. 1:43:32 Deliberation would be complemented by competition. So we would have a marketplace of development on the sidechains. And if one of them were to accrue substantial value, demonstrating stability and the satisfaction of demand, the consumer's demand, then that sidechain would be a candidate for, you know, as they say, bringing the tech down to the base layer. 1:43:59 So people who say, well, what if there is a Drivechain sidechain that's so successful that it threatens the base layer? Well, that would be not a threat. It would be a market signal that maybe the base layer should have that feature. And that way, the base layer can benefit and the system can benefit from that. 1:44:23 And not necessarily, maybe we could just have like a successful sidechain that, you know, the tech isn't brought down to the base layer. But the whole idea of what I'm trying to share is that there is this compelling idea that instead of deliberation, we have competition for development. 1:44:38 And this would enable market signals and market forces, which are so vital to the way that humanity progresses, to be operating within Bitcoin in a more manifest way. Does that make any sense at all, in your view? 1:44:55 I mean, explain ordinals then. Explain what market incentives drove Casey to launch ordinals and why in absence of market incentives for such a change, something happens. You know, that's kind of the problem, I think, with this idea, as well as the sidechains idea has aged. 1:45:14 You know, we have seen people, I mean, look, I think you're gonna see people figure out, try to figure out how to do more complicated things. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the result of having these conversations over the last couple months, there are just new proposals that come out about how we could even do other types of solutions like this that aren't even Drivechain. 1:45:39 So I don't know, man, I think that you got a nice, you put things out with a nice tempo, you got your stuff lined up. But I mean, again, it's like as the Bitcoin hodler, it's just like I have an immensity of ability to be patient and just ignore any change. 1:45:58 Like, you know, it's like, you have to create urgency in me to make a change. And that's just like such a high bar, you know, I don't know. I, it's a kind of a nice aspect of Bitcoin on some in some way, right, that you don't, there's no, you have to convince me to make a change and everyone else to make a change. So I don't know, like, it's gonna be tough. 1:46:22 You asked what drove, what inspired Casey to create Ordinals? So I haven't really looked into that. But was it perhaps the enormous, like, value and level of activity with regard to NFTs in the altcoin space? Maybe that inspired him to... 1:46:41 Right. But like, my point is that eventually, like, he built something that was compatible with Bitcoin's consensus rules to satisfy that. So, you know, again, he didn't need a consensus change in order to deliver what he wanted. And I think that, you know, are we so... 1:46:57 You're saying the market signal, just to understand your point, because I made a point about how it would be better. 1:47:02 I understand your point. 1:47:03 Okay. So between deliberation and competition, are you saying that the competition, like the value accrual... 1:47:13 What you're purporting is that that market signal has to be in some way linked to Bitcoin. Like, so again, the way that you constructed that argument was essentially like, you know, okay, like, in order for this market signal to be valid, you'd have this sidechain that would be kind of signaling that we want some sort of feature to Bitcoin. 1:47:28 But my point was that, like, if that was inherently true, then like, what explains something like ordinals, because in that case, there was just an existing market activity outside of Bitcoin, and then someone just designed something that worked within Bitcoin to enable that market activity on Bitcoin. 1:47:44 And therefore, he solved the problem. And all I posited was that, like, there might be other, like, you know, like, it took maybe 10 years for somebody to figure out how to do that. 1:47:56 So, you know, like, one of the things that Drivechains has to sort of convince people of is also that, like, you know, even if time goes on, like that, this is the best of all possible solutions for this, right? 1:48:07 Like, you'd have that, because, again, like, at the point that we activate a consensus change, and enable Drivechains, I mean, that code is then within Bitcoin forever. 1:48:16 So you then have to convince us that this is not even just a plausibly good idea, but it's like the best of all possible ideas. 1:48:23 And I think, like, one of the interesting things is that ordinals kind of, I think, like a bit undermines that claim, because I mean, essentially, it foreshadows a world where people don't need consensus changes for, you know, bringing that market activity to Bitcoin. 1:48:38 And those changes aren't needed even for those types of things. 1:48:43 So, I mean, look, maybe that's not possible in all cases. 1:48:45 I'm just saying that, you know, as I was listening to your specific example, I was struck by, you know, the fact that that has already happened, and that someone pushed a protocol live that, you know, satisfied the conditions that you were talking about without, you know, any of the consensus changes that we're currently discussing. 1:49:05 And I don't know, I think that's an interesting thing. 1:49:10 And I don't know that the market has really assimilated that yet, right? 1:49:16 I do think that there are going to be a large amount of people from the other cryptocurrency camps that, you know, saw that. 1:49:23 And I don't think that we have really seen the end of those people launching things on Bitcoin. 1:49:29 I think that, and I don't know, I wonder how that stands in contrast to what Drivechains offers. 1:49:36 And I'm very interested to see what we should be seeing in the next six to 12 months as, you know, I mean, there's just been such a huge uptick in proposals for Layer 2s, you know, since Ordinal's went live. 1:49:48 And I think you're just going to see some of these startups starting to trickle the market. 1:49:52 And I think they're going to, you know, some of the things that they're going to be proposing, I think, are going to look similar to Drivechains, right? 1:49:58 So, I don't know. I mean, I'm interested to see the conversation. 1:50:03 You know, I've always been a huge fan of Paul's. 1:50:06 You know, I guess if I was to say at some point in summation, I've always encouraged people to read Truthcoin and to engage with Paul's work. 1:50:13 I mean, I do think it's, you know, some of the best developed stuff in terms of if you're looking for a really, you know, holistic view of Bitcoin that is really iconoclastic and very detailed. 1:50:25 You know, it's a great resource, you know, but I can also think that and still not want to activate Drivechains today. 1:50:33 Well, maybe one difference between your philosophy and Paul's is that I think that within Paul's view, there's a sense of urgency. 1:50:42 So, you point to Ordinal's as something which, as you say, took many, you know, 10 years for something like that to happen. 1:50:50 That was your wording. 1:50:52 Well, I mean, I don't know. Like, there weren't NFTs on the base chain before that. 1:50:56 Well, all I mean to say is that in your view, you're saying, look, here's an example of someone doing something interesting and successful. 1:51:05 And he didn't have to, you know, go through the core development process and consensus process. 1:51:14 But I think that in Paul's view, maybe it would be better if there were like 25 things like as successful and new and interesting, serving 25 different kinds of consumers instead of just one. 1:51:29 And it would have been very good for them to be on Bitcoin seven years ago instead of now. 1:51:34 And if we get something like Ordinal's from time to time, that's not as good for Bitcoin and freedom as if we have Bitcoin platforming many more of those things much more rapidly because it has oriented its protocol development in the direction of experimentation and innovation on layer twos. 1:51:54 So, yes, Ordinal's was cool and exciting and it brought value and fee revenue and an excitement and fun to Bitcoin for a time and in the future. 1:52:05 But many more of those things much sooner would accelerate Bitcoinization and and like better humanity. 1:52:15 So it sounds like you're a very patient man. 1:52:18 And sometimes that's good in life. 1:52:21 Other times in life, it's better to be more ambitious. 1:52:26 Well, I mean, I'm saying the average Bitcoin user is patient. 1:52:30 And, you know, I'm just pointing out that the collective psyche right now is, you know, is very dismissive of claims of urgency. 1:52:39 I mean, that's, you know, that's just a fact. 1:52:43 What do you make of, on the one hand, what you said about like Paul's blog Truthcoin.info being a place of like, you know, valuable theory and holistic understanding of Bitcoin? 1:52:55 How do you how do you contrast that with like Samson Mao tweeting yesterday that like Bitcoin intellectuals, you know, and he like wrote it with like all caps, you know, in half of the characters. 1:53:06 In other words, like he's mocking, I think, like the Drivechain community saying that like we're just a bunch of like people with these like annoying theories. 1:53:14 Or like when Pierre Richard debated Paul, he was kind enough to come to our space a few weeks ago. 1:53:20 And he said like he referred to Paul's speech as like mumbo jumbo economics. 1:53:26 So what do you think, Pete, about like, do you think that there is complacence and a degree of like anti-intellectualism and in Bitcoin's like discourse today to some extent? 1:53:40 Like, or do you think that there's not and like we're all good and that that's just that's just like hoi polloi chattering and that the technical community isn't affected by those problems? 1:53:56 Well, I mean, there is a certain beauty and the right to ignorance. 1:54:00 And I do think that the extent that Bitcoin allows people the right to ignorance about their money and gives them a satisfied feeling that they'll be able to hold their value ignorantly for hundreds of years without participating in any consensus upgrades. 1:54:17 That that is probably a laudable thing on some levels. 1:54:22 But, you know, as a as someone who considers himself, you know, an intellectual, I do think it's, you know, sort of tempting to think that our solutions to things are valuable. 1:54:36 It's easy to fall into that trap. 1:54:38 Look, I don't know. I mean, I think that it would be nice to see a more higher level of conversation within Bitcoin. 1:54:47 I like that Drivechains has steered the conversation back towards things that are technical. 1:54:54 I think the average Bitcoin conversation has definitely suffered over the last few years. 1:54:58 But again, like this is another example where it's like I think I can agree with you at a couple of higher level points and then not think that that necessitates an urgent consensus change to Bitcoin in the way as you've described. 1:55:11 So, you know, I guess we can maybe conclude and just say, yeah, I mean, I share a lot of your frustrations with the community. 1:55:19 You know, I wish that the dialogue was better. 1:55:22 I understand the position of the people who think that, you know, the current dialogue is just Bitcoin's gotten bigger. 1:55:29 You can't expect everybody to be involved. 1:55:32 It's their prerogative to get involved. 1:55:34 And to the extent that you're proposing a change, you know, the onus is on you. 1:55:38 And, you know, look, I wrote in a piece for Forbes that, you know, the first tenant of Bitcoin maximalism was essentially, you know, this belief that we're building Bitcoin for the long term. 1:55:50 I actually do think that most Bitcoin maximalists are sort of united in that. 1:55:53 And that's that's sort of their number one thing. 1:55:55 Right. So, you know, it's probably better that there's some disdain for the people who are attempting to make changes. 1:56:06 I personally always thought that Bitcoin toxicity was a very valuable thing. 1:56:11 I mean, you certainly don't see within other cryptocurrency communities much of a respect for minority groups. 1:56:18 Like, in fact, they're sort of routinely forked off the chain and, you know, are, you know, basically just, you know, second class citizens to the, you know, majorities that sort of impose on them. 1:56:33 So, you know, I mean, it is certainly a nice feature that Bitcoin has some of these things. 1:56:38 We should think carefully about them. 1:56:40 You know, again, I don't have all the answers here, but it's been a fun conversation, man. 1:56:44 I hope maybe people got something out of it. 1:56:46 Thank you so much again. 1:56:48 This has been really great for the two hours of your time. 1:56:51 Thanks for being here. 1:56:52 I hope you'll come back when Paul's here sometime. 1:56:54 You mentioned Truthcoin.info. 1:56:57 That's a great place to read some essays in favor of Drivechain. 1:57:00 There's also a high quality long form criticism of Drivechain written by Shinobi. 1:57:05 I would encourage everyone to read that as well at Bitcoin Magazine. 1:57:08 And Pete, thank you for your excellent writing as well in Bitcoin Magazine. 1:57:14 And everyone who wants to learn more about Drivechain can go to LayerTwo Labs and download the testnet software, which has recently been enhanced. 1:57:23 And there's also a really good essay by Fiat Joffe, who I see in the audience. 1:57:28 Everyone can go to FiatJoffe.com and read his essay on Drivechain there. 1:57:33 Oh, Austin, you want to say some final words to Pete? 1:57:37 Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for your time. 1:57:41 I'm a big fan and I think what you're doing as far as cataloging and the history of Bitcoin or I don't know. 1:57:49 I don't know how you describe yourself, like Bitcoin sociologist or something like that. 1:57:55 I'm going with the story. 1:57:58 Well, thank you, Benny. I appreciate it. 1:58:01 You know, look, I think hopefully I gave you guys some insight into how I think about some of the ways people are thinking about Bitcoin. 1:58:08 You know, look, I appreciate the conversation, the energy. 1:58:12 You know, I think it's been great to see the passion from the community, but, you know, it's a high hurdle. 1:58:19 I'm sure to see what you guys do. 1:58:21 And, you know, I'll be waiting for the for the formal code to drop whenever that that might be. 1:58:30 Yeah, Luke Junior is working on that. 1:58:32 He's been contracted by LayerTwo Labs to rebase the code and do the pull request. 1:58:37 It was cool to see him do a draft recently of one of the bits. 1:58:41 So hopefully in the coming weeks or months, we'll get to see more of that progression. 1:58:47 Well, thanks again, Pete, for being here and thank you for listening. 1:58:50 These are recorded spaces. People can catch the beginning if you joined late in the recording. 1:58:55 The recordings are available of all of our Twitter spaces at LayerTwoLabs.com. 1:59:02 Bye, everyone. Happy Friday. 1:59:17 Bye.
