0:00 This is going to be a good one. 0:06 My name is Paul Behringer. 0:07 Welcome back into TechPath. 0:08 What we're going to try to do is line up what's happening within the ecosystem of Bitcoin. 0:13 Obviously, Bitcoin is flying right now with some news, albeit the fake news on ETF. 0:20 But at the same time, we'll see a lot happening from the macro perspective, and you know that's 0:23 kind of what we cover here on the channel a lot. 0:26 But we wanted to dive into the complexities of what's happening inside Bitcoin as a platform. 0:32 And I think that's the thing that a lot of people lose track of, is can Bitcoin be used 0:36 for payments? 0:37 And if so, what would you use? 0:39 I want to go to a clip that shows our guest today talking at the Bitcoin conference to 0:45 some of the developers within the Lightning Network to kind of frame it in the sense of 0:49 whether or not Lightning could be used. 0:51 And if you look at this conversation, he pretty much destroys the issue of what Lightning 0:56 is standing for. 0:57 And this is why I think it's important. 0:58 So let's go to this first clip. 1:00 They said that if they could get a 1% or 5% boost to revenue by adopting Drivechains, 1:08 they would do it in a second. 1:09 But the problem is... 1:10 It won't be 1%. 1:11 It would be 10x, 100x, or even 1,000x. 1:12 Hang on. 1:13 Let's be clear, though. 1:14 There's a misconception there. 1:15 It's straightforward. 1:16 I asked you what the problem with this idea was. 1:19 You just said that you mixed up L1 and L2, and you said that I don't like miners having 1:23 control over the L2 withdrawals, even though they already have control over the Lightning 1:27 Network justice transaction. 1:28 So it's exactly the same thing. 1:29 Well, again... 1:30 Now we're on this weird odyssey on, like, miner costs. 1:35 merge mining the sidechain is essentially free. 1:38 Hang on. 1:39 They don't even need their own node. 1:40 They can just... 1:41 Because that's just categorically false. 1:42 No, they get 51% hash rate can censor the justice transaction. 1:46 The problem with Lightning, though, of course, is that even the proponents don't expect 8 1:50 billion people to be able to use it, whereas with this, they could, and so that's a pretty 1:53 big difference. 1:54 No. 1:55 The tech people don't agree with you on that. 1:56 Yeah. 1:57 This is a silly discussion. 1:58 Go read the blog post I just posted. 1:59 You may not care about a certain thing, like the EVM or something, but other people care 2:04 about it. 2:05 And you may not care about large blocks. 2:06 This isn't about what other people like. 2:08 It's about their ability to choose. 2:10 All right. 2:11 So, of course, that's Paul Sztorc, who is the CEO of LayerTwo Labs. 2:15 And welcome, Paul Sztorc, into the show today. 2:17 Great to have you back. 2:18 Hey. 2:19 Thanks for having me. 2:20 All right. 2:21 So, obviously, we showed a little bit from the Amsterdam Bitcoin Conference, your engagement 2:25 there with the Lightning teams and some of the developers out there, and this is some 2:29 of the things that we've kind of talked about here on the channel in general. 2:34 And when you look at what Lightning and what you're trying to do, Paul, with LayerTwo Labs 2:39 and sidechains, if you can kind of give our audience a breakdown of the inefficiencies 2:45 of Lightning versus an alternative, what would that be? 2:49 Yeah. 2:50 I mean, I like the Lightning Network, but what has happened was, because of the scaling 2:55 war, the Lightning Network is like an idea that has collided with the Bitcoin culture 3:01 and damaged it a lot. 3:04 Because people in Bitcoin are very insecure about Bitcoin's future, they need to tell 3:10 a story where Lightning is going to fix everything. 3:13 And it might be true someday, but the current idea, the current version of the idea is not. 3:19 It's just not the case. 3:21 So the Lightning idea is a good enough idea. 3:25 The key insight of the Lightning Network is, it's kind of like six degrees of Kevin Bacon 3:30 or whatever it is. 3:34 So it's like, maybe I have a channel with you and you have a channel with someone else. 3:38 And so then maybe I can pay them through you. 3:42 That's the idea of the Lightning Network. 3:43 And I think, unfortunately, it's probably not going to work out for a couple of different 3:48 reasons. 3:49 But the bigger issue is that the Lightning Network is like this meme that has collided 3:53 with the Bitcoin community and everyone just, people just start talking about it and unfortunately 3:58 they stop being honest with themselves. 4:00 It's out of my own concern for them that I started speaking up sort of against it. 4:06 They're suffering, I think, psychologically, many of them. 4:10 It's not quite as bad as something like Theranos or whatever, but it is like there's this big 4:13 difference between what the marketing people say, the people on Twitter who don't use Lightning. 4:19 They say a certain thing and then they're in the back room trying to make this blood 4:24 machine work. 4:26 The Lightning Network history here over time, all the way back to 2021, you can kind of 4:31 see it's a bit of a stale platform in the sense that we haven't seen a lot of growth 4:36 within it. 4:38 Obviously, some news here recently with some security concerns. 4:41 Can you kind of explain the security concerns that were revealed by some of the developers 4:46 in the market? 4:47 Yes, I will explain that. 4:48 But first, I liked your graph and I wanted to point out something. 4:51 The most important thing about the graph is something that hides in plain sight, which 4:55 is that at maximum, it's only 5,000 coins, basically. 5:00 And there's 19 million coins. 5:02 So this is like 0.02% or something. 5:06 So it's very small. 5:09 And then people try to make arguments about, oh, well, maybe there's a coin in there that 5:13 turns over like millions of times a month, blah, blah, blah, you know, that's a bunch 5:17 of... 5:19 So now to your second point, there was recently a vulnerability in Lightning. 5:26 It can be fixed. 5:27 But in order to fix it, the people, the current problematic people in Bitcoin, the bad people 5:35 and the bad guys, they have to admit that they were wrong about something else. 5:40 So it's unclear when these two malicious, we have saving Lightning and then we have 5:44 admitting that we still need more soft fork opcodes. 5:48 The vulnerability is that when the thing times out, it's still possible to use either of 5:57 the two paths. 5:58 So one person pulls the payment from you and the other person uses the timeout. 6:03 And now the person in the middle is left having routed a payment, but they get nothing. 6:08 I tried to get this idea popularized in like 2019, the idea of channel risk, that who you 6:14 open the channel with makes a big deal. 6:16 But yeah, I think this is not a great bug. 6:19 I wouldn't be routing any payments for anyone else personally until the bug is fixed. 6:27 And looking at that, yeah, I want to go to, because payments are a big part of this. 6:31 I want to go to this next clip right here on Bitcoin payment potentials. 6:35 Listen in. 6:36 What do you think, Rene? 6:37 Like, do you think that we can get to a point where even like the first attempt that someone 6:41 makes it, that tries to make a payment should work? 6:46 So I think that will hardly be possible without severely changing the protocol. 6:50 So this is the way how the protocol is designed. 6:53 So payment failures, or at least the failures of attempts are built into the protocol. 6:59 The question is, what can we do about this? 7:01 Do we have like suggestions on that? 7:04 What you could do is you could basically say, well, if I have enough liquidity, let's do 7:08 five of them concurrently, and let's hope that statistically at least one arrives. 7:12 But then the question is, if we do it in the current protocol, if two arrives, somebody 7:16 could claim two payments, and then you would overpay. 7:19 You don't want to do that. 7:22 So these were some of the challenges that were represented at the conference there. 7:26 Just as a kind of a callback to this is, we've talked about this before around, you know, 7:33 transactions and the speed of transactions that are needed. 7:36 Visa recently did a big test. 7:38 One of the things they put in their big report, and we've showed this multiple times. 7:42 If you guys want to go back and check some of our videos on the Visa payment systems, 7:46 check that out. 7:47 But one thing they highlight here is Bitcoin may take up 60 minutes for six additional 7:50 blocks to be created. 7:52 And then if you look at the ones that were looked at, of course, Solana was selected 7:57 for their test at this point. 8:00 We don't know if Solana is going to be the one being chosen. 8:02 But that's the point, is that these kind of transaction speed issues that we're dealing 8:08 with are some of the biggest problems. 8:10 When you look at this, Paul, I mean, why didn't Visa just choose Lightning if Lightning was 8:16 already in the capacity of being able to do things? 8:20 I don't know what Visa's up to. 8:24 And the interblock time has always been – I'll come back to that in a second. 8:29 You had a Rene Picard on that video, and if everyone would listen to Rene Picard more, 8:36 that would be very good for Bitcoin, and very good for the Lightning Network, and very good 8:40 for society, because Rene is great. 8:44 And Rene wrote, he wrote Mastering Lightning, the book. 8:47 What's not helping at all is for people to mindlessly cheer on Lightning Network, and 8:50 just say everything is good. 8:51 And then if – and think about it, in most contexts, if anyone ever said anything bad 8:55 about the Lightning Network, they would be shouted down, and they would be criticized, 9:00 and they would get a social backlash. 9:04 The Lightning Network is ironically – it's a little bit to unpack, but sometimes the 9:08 Lightning Network is slow, or sometimes the payments fail. 9:11 People are obviously not going to like that. 9:13 When you pay with Visa, it does fail sometimes, but I think it's got to be like 1 in 200 9:18 for me or less. 9:20 Almost always when I pay, it works. 9:22 Sometimes they're like, wait a minute, we need to do it again, or something. 9:26 So that's kind of like what most people, I think, will tolerate. 9:29 As for Solana being faster, this is a trade-off that Solana has made at enormous cost, enormous 9:36 long-run cost. 9:38 So they're going to – that's going to be – they're going to have to pay that – repay 9:43 that with interest. 9:45 But a crucial thing to keep in mind, in the context of like my idea of the Drivechain, 9:50 and just the idea of competition among different chains, is that clearly the idea is popular 9:55 among some users. 9:58 So we should be able to make – it's not really about whether or not Solana is a good 10:03 idea or not. 10:04 It should really be about, for any idea, good or bad, it should be possible to make that 10:10 like a Bitcoin idea. 10:11 That's the sidechain idea. 10:12 We'll see if I ever prevail in my quest to convert every idea, good and bad, to a 10:20 Bitcoin project. 10:22 But because, weirdly, people then say, well, we don't like that idea, so we don't want 10:25 it to be – we don't want Bitcoin adoption. 10:28 So it's very bizarre. 10:29 I want to go over to a clip here. 10:31 This was by Michael Saylor in reference to streaming payments. 10:34 Listen to what he had to say. 10:35 Lightning is a chance for us to introduce some really compelling new enterprise applications. 10:42 Companies right now spend billions of dollars rewarding their employees. 10:46 What if we could give people instant employee rewards for filling out surveys, being at 10:51 the meeting, engaging? 10:53 Whatever email address you've been using for the past 20 years now is a lightning receiver 10:58 that flows into your lightning wallet. 11:01 When you show up to your Zoom, you get a Satoshi reward. 11:03 Then, of course, if you fill out a book review, Amazon can give you Satoshis. 11:09 And if you fill out a survey applying for an Amazon credit card, they can give you Satoshis. 11:14 And if you get approved, they can give you more Satoshis. 11:16 It's a way to gamify and make fun things. 11:20 And the thing that makes it all possible is microtransactions and streaming via the lightning 11:26 network. 11:27 My question to you, Paul, is that even possible right now within lightning? 11:31 I would say it's probably not possible right now. 11:34 Certainly, lightning already has an unsolvable onboarding problem where you can't have 11:39 8 billion people use it today. 11:41 In order to join the lightning network, you need a channel already open on L1. 11:45 You know, Michael Saylor, he has this skill I guess I wish I had. 11:50 Maybe I do. 11:51 Maybe I don't. 11:52 I don't know. 11:53 He's a great salesman. 11:54 He's got this great story. 11:55 He's got this great vision. 11:56 I think it was Milton Friedman who said there are idea manufacturers, and then there are 12:00 idea distributors, and wholesalers, and retailers, and consumers. 12:04 So the idea is, you know, he's like, he's good at, he can spin a great little story 12:11 there. 12:12 And, you know, a lot of, enough of it is true that it is, it sounds plausible and inspiring 12:16 enough, where it's true that you could do, you know, with cheaper payments, with micropayments, 12:23 you could do that kind of thing. 12:25 For example, lightning has another issue of being very sensitive to the L1 fee rate. 12:30 If the L1 transaction fee is 80 cents or whatever it is, something around where it is now, now 12:37 that the price is going up, it'll probably be higher. 12:40 So if it's 80 cents for like a 200 byte transaction, then basically you can't route anything significantly 12:47 less than the current L1 fee rate. 12:49 So if it's 80 cents, if Bitcoin L1, an L1, is 80 cents, then you really can't, you can't 12:56 route something less than 80 cents on the lightning network. 12:59 Well, people do. 13:00 Well, yeah. 13:01 You can't get into microtransactions. 13:02 That also would eliminate a lot of retail. 13:06 I want to go to another clip here. 13:07 This is Bitcoin University. 13:08 This is in reference to your Drivechains a little bit. 13:11 Listen to this. 13:12 Listen to this one. 13:15 This is Matthew Cratter from Bitcoin University. 13:18 Let's revisit this Drivechains discussion and 10 years from now would be my advice. 13:24 It's not appropriate for quote unquote friends of Bitcoin like Paul to advocate for a very 13:29 fast changes to Bitcoin and to try to pressure people who needs more tokens, who wants to 13:32 make it easy to issue ship coins on sidechains. 13:35 These are just things that I'm not interested in. 13:37 We have Bitcoin. 13:38 We have Bitcoin. 13:40 You are going to fail. 13:41 You are certainly going to fail. 13:43 Ugly Drivechain proponents can attempt to pressure, can attempt to apply pressure to 13:47 Bitcoin core devs to try to change the software to include Drivechains. 13:51 They won't do this because they know that full nodes like you and me will refuse to 13:56 run this changed software, any of this Drivechains nonsense. 14:00 And I have some advice to Paul Sztorc. 14:02 Why don't you go build your Drivechains on a low value network like Litecoin or Bcash? 14:08 BIP300/301 will never be approved. 14:12 I predict that Paul will rage quit like a little baby when he finally realizes that 14:16 he's not going to get his way and that he's not bigger than the Bitcoin network and that 14:21 he can't push through these changes. 14:23 Here's some advice for everyone. 14:25 If you ever want to offer a new BIP, don't be Paul. 14:28 All right. 14:29 So you responded to this on Twitter, lengthy and detailed response. 14:34 Because I'm rushing it through, of course. 14:36 So yeah. 14:37 Yeah. 14:38 In addition to being very, very rude, almost everything he said was completely false. 14:43 Schramed as though getting a BIP is some like favor that he's doing for me when in really 14:48 it's just the idea that's best for Bitcoin. 14:50 No, he doesn't. 14:51 It would never even occur to him that Bitcoin needs ideas. 14:55 What is the core argument between Drivechains and what their recommendation is right now 15:01 in such a case as the clip we just played? 15:05 Well, again, they think that they said we should revisit having adding a new soft fork 15:11 in 10 years. 15:12 But then Michael Saylor said in the previous clip that Lightning Network is the key to 15:19 all this great stuff. 15:20 But right before that, I just discussed that you have to have one or the other because 15:25 it is actually broken because of this new exploit. 15:28 So they'll need a new soft fork. 15:30 I think it kind of spoke for itself. 15:32 I was just listening to it again. 15:33 I was thinking, oh my gosh, does anyone. 15:35 And like if anyone did the tiniest amount of research, they would know that the ideas 15:39 from 2015, like long before Michael Saylor bought his first Bitcoin. 15:45 So like the idea of it being rushed through is like and it doesn't even make any sense. 15:49 Yeah. 15:50 And I don't need to tell you that. 15:51 Obviously, he didn't like give me any kind of like opportunity to comment or he didn't 15:55 invite me on the show. 15:56 I would love to have a little conversation with him about what I did that Twitter reply. 16:03 And I don't know why. 16:04 I honestly don't know the people who put that together. 16:06 I have no idea what they were thinking because, you know, you go to LayerTwoLabs.com slash friends. 16:10 We have an enormous number of supporters. 16:12 We have like the creme de la creme. 16:13 Rene Picard is a big supporter on that list. 16:17 Adam Back, Fiat Joffe. 16:18 Yeah. 16:19 I don't know. 16:20 So you really think this is really just internal strife between the Bitcoin community trying 16:23 to get lightning off the ground, understanding its future opportunity, but not yet being 16:28 able to apply that technology to Bitcoin today. 16:32 And at the same time, we have this massive rush to what will be our next bull run and 16:37 most likely some pretty big institutional adoption. 16:40 Obviously, we've already seen what just a small hint and whiff of an ETF can do to the 16:45 market. 16:46 So a lot more people involved in the future. 16:48 So there's a lot at risk here, obviously, for both Bitcoiners and the future of what 16:53 the Lightning Network can reference. 16:56 Beyond that, you know, you look at some of the others. 16:58 I wanted to kind of go over to another tweet here, because in reference to Bips, you know, 17:02 why would you even bother with this? 17:04 I mean, why go this direction? 17:07 What's the, I guess, what's the long game if you're continuing to get pushback from 17:11 the Bitcoin community? 17:12 Well, yeah, the Bip process is, of course, is horrible. 17:15 And Jeremy Rubin quit over it when he did 1.19. 17:20 And it's, you know, he tried to advocate for his idea. 17:25 And again, people interpret it as there's a prestige economy among the Bitcoin developers. 17:30 And then years, but the key part of the story is years later, two years later, everyone 17:36 was saying this is the best, Bip 1.19 is the best, best Bip around and enables covenants 17:40 and it enables ARK and ARK is going to be what saves the Lightning Network. 17:47 So that just proves that the idea was good the whole time. 17:52 And everyone was, you know, a bullshitter basically. 17:55 Yeah. 17:56 So that's how it is. 17:57 What I didn't even know that people would talk about 1.19, knowing nothing about it one 18:00 way or the other. 18:01 I wish it weren't the case. 18:03 If I could do it over, I would just push the Bip anonymously. 18:06 And I would probably do the wrong thing. 18:07 I would suck up to people and tell them that their terrible ideas were very good and etc. 18:11 etc. 18:12 Because I had no idea that it'd be so blatantly corrupt, which is what it is. 18:15 Right. 18:16 Casey has this Ordinal's Bip that you want to discuss that. 18:20 Yeah. 18:21 His isn't running the same scenario. 18:22 It's the exact same scenario. 18:23 Yeah. 18:24 He says, what is the, you know, and he's absolutely 100 percent correct. 18:30 The Bips are in very different types. 18:33 And the informational Bip is the lightest. 18:36 And so then they're like, well, we can't do that. 18:38 But now, don't you see, like, this is the whole problem in the first place is that shouldn't 18:41 the ideas just compete on their merit? 18:43 You know, it's just like, OK, if it doesn't have the right prestige or legitimacy, just 18:50 explain what the problem is and then just say it's rejected. 18:53 Right now, you have to justify every decision you make to people who are not specialists 19:00 in the decision. 19:01 And that's what we don't have in Bitcoin. 19:03 In Bitcoin, it's all run like a USSR style and it sucks. 19:05 And it's the worst thing about Bitcoin, of course, that the process is very defective. 19:09 It's because it encouraged people to shill the Lightning Network. 19:14 Now they're going to have to walk all that back. 19:16 You know, all that stuff, unless they want to say the same thing about OpExpire. 19:21 I want to play a game with you that, you know, this is a tear maker. 19:25 So we're going to tear some ideas here. 19:27 And I'm going to zoom in on this a little bit. 19:30 So some of our audience can say, but the first one we're going to show is BRC20 Ordinals. 19:34 And I'm going to give you, based on your expertise, you've been around in this industry for quite 19:38 a while, probably one of the longest reading devs out there, so very arbitrary, just for 19:47 fun only in terms of ideas. 19:49 But BRC20 Ordinals, where would you put that on the tier list, A through C, D being worst 19:56 idea, of course. 19:57 Of course, yeah. 19:59 I'm going to go with C, but I don't want anyone to be misled by that. 20:03 I think it's worth doing. 20:05 It's mostly harmless. 20:07 It does a lot of great things culturally for Bitcoin. 20:09 Those should be on their own sidechain anyway. 20:11 They shouldn't really be on L1, but I think it's a good idea. 20:14 And let's go to Runes. 20:16 I'm not as familiar with Runes. 20:17 I'm sorry to say, I'm very familiar with a lot of these other things, but Runes, I think 20:21 they're mostly the same as Ordinals. 20:23 So maybe we could leave it unranked. 20:24 Yeah, I'll leave it unranked right now. 20:26 Let's go to Liquid Network. 20:27 I think, again, we should do it, but I don't think anyone will like it. 20:32 And I think it has taken the air out of the room with sidechains and has misled a lot 20:35 of people. 20:36 I could give it a C tier also. 20:39 Rootstock? 20:40 These C tiers are like, you know, we should still do it. 20:42 Rootstock, we should do it. 20:43 I think they've had trouble executing. 20:47 I think Rootstock, we could give them a C tier. 20:52 BitVM? 20:53 I'm going to give that a B tier. 20:55 B tier. 20:57 I think one day we'll be doing some cool stuff with that. 21:00 Not anytime soon. 21:01 Obviously, Drivechains? 21:02 Drivechains, I've got to give it an A tier. 21:04 There's nothing wrong with it. 21:05 It solves every problem. 21:06 It has no risk. 21:07 We can easily undo it. 21:08 It's us counting the 13,000. 21:10 Get over it, people. 21:11 It's a great idea. 21:12 They're going to have to admit sooner or later. 21:15 SpiderChain? 21:16 SpiderChain. 21:17 You know, I've got to say, I think it could be good. 21:19 I think it's Liquid. 21:21 I gave it the Liquid C tier. 21:22 I think it could be great. 21:23 I think it could be great. 21:25 It could be a B tier, but I think it's a C tier for now. 21:28 Lightning Network, of course? 21:30 Well, I have to knock on Lightning Network because of the cultural damage it has done. 21:37 I think I would have, in the past, been B, but now I'm going to have to give a C tier. 21:43 I think it's the same as Liquid, really. 21:45 Then we'll go to RGB. 21:47 I think RGB is a lost cause. 21:49 Thorachain? 21:50 You know, it does seem to be ... I'd like to check and see how many people are still 21:53 using it. 21:55 Is it popular? 21:56 It's like a trustless swap. 21:57 It's like a decentralized Uniswap thing. 21:59 I don't know how much ... I don't know. 22:00 If people are using it, then I'm militantly pro. 22:04 But if they're not using it that much, then I think it ended up ... I would say B tier. 22:08 Interesting. 22:09 Okay. 22:10 I don't know, but this is conditional on the use. 22:12 If someone looks it up and it says no one's using it, then I would say, for whatever reason, 22:17 it didn't work out. 22:18 Stacks. 22:19 What about Stacks? 22:20 Stacks, you know, I think Stacks is a lot of self-deception. 22:23 I feel bad putting them in the only D tier, but I think that we've got to D tier it. 22:29 And then don't change Bitcoin. 22:31 Well, this is a sad one because there's a sense in which it's great and necessary, and 22:38 there's a complete sense in which it's a total lost cause. 22:40 I think in the context of what we've discussed and the way Michael Saylor would interpret 22:46 it, I would say lost cause. 22:47 Wow. 22:48 Okay. 22:49 There you go. 22:50 What do you think about other ideas? 22:52 You know, if you think about David Marcus with LightSpark, what are your thoughts on 22:56 other ideas that could make this list as well? 23:00 Other ideas that should be on the list? 23:02 Yeah. 23:03 Well, I think it's a pretty good list. 23:05 Not a bad list. 23:06 I got... 23:07 Well, there is a Rubin-Thompson had a state chain L2. 23:11 There are some other L2s that could be on here. 23:15 Yeah. 23:16 Those are good. 23:17 There's lots of good ideas out there. 23:18 We should try... 23:19 We should be more pluralist, and we should not try to police how it is that people use 23:25 Bitcoin that is a path of tyranny, and as long as someone is not interfering with someone 23:32 else's use case, and that's exactly what the L1 protocol already does. 23:35 So, this is why it's bizarre for someone to be against the soft fork. 23:40 You don't have to upgrade your node with a soft fork. 23:43 Your node does everything it was doing before, and it doesn't start doing anything new, and 23:49 it doesn't stop doing anything it was doing. 23:52 So the node... 23:53 The soft fork is already an institution that protects Bitcoin's properties. 23:57 The fact that you can upgrade via the soft fork, that's also something that Bitcoin has 24:01 done. 24:02 We did that 16 times in the first seven years of Bitcoin. 24:04 I want to play this last clip for you, and then get your opinion on it real quick in 24:07 reference to the importance of the halving. 24:10 Listen in. 24:11 Is the halving the main driver of the Bitcoin price? 24:14 In this cycle, no. 24:15 I think it's liquidity. 24:16 Yeah, I agree. 24:18 By definition, there's nothing on it that should impact price. 24:21 I think the halving is still bullish. 24:23 Let's do a show of hands in the audience. 24:26 So I agree with you. 24:28 It's a little bit like investing in a company where you know the annual report's coming 24:33 out. 24:34 You know what date it's coming out on. 24:36 We might learn something about competitors to this future monetary asset and the actions 24:44 those competitors might take. 24:46 You just don't know what actions they will or won't take until the event occurs. 24:52 The data points that we have in terms of halving, they're not enough to come to pretty much 24:57 any conclusion. 24:58 All right, so that question to you. 25:02 Is the halving as important as it has been in the past? 25:07 Well, you know, what the halving does is it makes like a little event and people can throw 25:13 parties and actually it's funny. 25:15 I kind of make fun of the halving, but I plan on throwing a little halving party myself 25:19 to invite some local Bitcoin friends. 25:22 So it's arbitrary, but maybe arbitrary things are important, you know, because it's an excuse 25:29 to whatever, meet the family or something. 25:32 The ETF also, I think people have expected it for a while. 25:36 There are surprises with the ETF where it's like no one knows, the poor Winklevoss twins 25:40 have been trying to get this ETF for like 10 years or whatever. 25:42 Yeah. 25:43 Like maybe even 12 years. 25:44 I don't know. 25:45 And there's always right around the corner and now BlackRock will probably get the job 25:49 done, but no one knows exactly when. 25:51 And so it's possible it's ETF related, but I think it has to be something that's a pretty 25:54 big surprise usually, or it's just the normal trajectory of people learning about Bitcoin. 25:59 Well, yeah. 26:00 And, you know, there are a lot of macro pressures, obviously. 26:01 We talk about that a lot on the show as well. 26:03 But I would agree with you. 26:04 I think the ETF between the two, I feel that ETF is probably going to have a little bit 26:09 more of an impact, at least in this particular cycle from an institutional. 26:12 Paul, it's always fun picking your brain. 26:15 I learn something every time we get a chance to talk and anyway, we appreciate you stopping 26:20 in today. 26:21 Thanks for coming in. 26:22 Hey, thanks for having me. 26:24 You bet. 26:25 All right. 26:26 If you guys tuned in, whether you're on the podcast side of things, jump over here to 26:29 the YouTube channel. 26:30 You'll get a chance to catch more content from us. 26:33 Make sure to subscribe. 26:34 If you're not in our Diamond Circle, which is our email list, it's our way to spread 26:37 more content out there. 26:38 We do a bunch of different podcasts, technical analysis, all that kind of stuff as well. 26:43 So all you have to do is click the link down below. 26:45 If you guys want to reach me out there on X, it's at paulbarron. 26:47 We'll catch you next time right here on Tech Bat.