0:01 Alright, we are live and joined by the ghost of Paul Sztorc. 0:06 Yeah, I'm here. Let's do that. 0:09 We'll give it a minute for people to sync up. 0:14 So I just posted the thing on Twitter if you want to share it on there. 0:25 Yeah, I don't see it. Did you tag me? Let me see. 0:27 I did. 0:29 Where is it? 0:30 You can also just post it yourself. 0:44 Livestream technology is getting better and better. 0:47 It is getting a lot better. 0:48 Yeah, I was trying to figure out OBS, which is like the software that people use. 0:54 My computer couldn't handle it. 0:55 So my wife suggested this platform we're using here, StreamYard, and it's so easy. 1:00 I'm so impressed. 1:01 If this goes well, man, I'm like, I'm sold. 1:06 Yeah, well, I mean, it was pretty crazy when I was doing the debate with Kraywitz 1:10 because it actually was a lot more difficult than I thought, 1:13 and I realized that my expectations for it being easy were like kind of passively on this sort of slope 1:19 of it just getting easier and easier and easier. 1:22 Yeah. 1:23 And so I was like, why isn't it just like super easy now? 1:25 But, yeah, I remember for years there was the joke that this would be like the last thing that mankind invented. 1:31 Yeah, right. 1:32 Because it was like audio video stuff was so bad. 1:35 Yeah. 1:36 It was just so terrible forever, and it never worked. 1:41 And now with Zoom, it's so ubiquitous that it's kind of – it could never have reached that point unless it worked a little bit. 1:48 Yeah. 1:49 And now it kind of works. It kind of works now. 1:51 Well, you know, there's parallels here with Bitcoin. 1:54 How big blocks can we handle? 1:56 Aren't there always? Aren't there always parallels? 1:58 All right. So, hey, why don't we – 2:00 Expectations about the future? 2:03 Yeah. Why don't we jump in? 2:05 First of all, thanks for joining me, Paul. 2:07 For people that don't know, Paul and I were scheduled to debate about a year ago now, 2:13 and we were going to talk about BTC versus BCH on the Hotep Jesus YouTube channel, and everything was going good. 2:23 I was preparing. It sounds like you were prepared for it. 2:25 Yeah, I was prepared. 2:27 At the last minute, we had some BCH – some self-appointed guardians of the BCH community decide that I was not a good enough representative of BCH 2:37 because I was critical of some things going on. I spoke too highly of BSV, and so they de-platformed me. 2:43 Yeah, I went on Twitter moments before, and everyone was like, if you put Paul against Steve, Steve's going to get crushed. 2:52 Everyone in BCH was saying all these nice things about me. 2:54 I had just watched – I was like, what am I going to do? 2:57 Because I didn't really know who you were that much, begging your pardon. 3:01 But I was like, who is this person? 3:03 So I only found that – I think it was when the numpties thing was just starting, and you had some three-and-a-half-hour thing with those other jokers. 3:12 And I was like, okay. 3:15 So I watched that twice. 3:17 So I invested like seven hours into preparing. 3:20 Wow. 3:21 And then they were like, Vin Armani at the last second. 3:24 You can almost see how completely thrown I am because it was Vin Armani with the Free Ross shirt. 3:32 Shout-out to the Free Ross campaign. 3:35 But also – yeah, I was just thinking like, okay, how did this happen? 3:41 Because I kind of even vaguely remember the TV show that Vin Armani was on, and you should all – everyone should look that up if you aren't already aware. 3:50 But I just couldn't – I was like, how could this – how did my life turn out this way? 3:54 I'm talking to Vin Armani. 3:56 Vin Armani was being super nice to me before the debate. 3:59 Hotep Jesus was being super nice. 4:01 I was like, how did this – 4:03 What happened to him? 4:05 He's like an African-American thought leader from the Joe Rogan podcast. 4:09 I was like, how is this even happening? 4:11 And I was just like so completely thrown. 4:13 Well, I was excited by it because I thought – I think it's a good sign that people like Hotep are really trying to dig into Bitcoin. 4:19 I watched some of his stuff after I saw him posting about Bitcoin. 4:22 I was like, all right, this dude is really trying to sort things out. 4:24 So I was really excited to talk with you in particular. 4:26 And then – so first question for you. 4:29 When My Replacement said that there's nobody in Bitcoin Cash who wants blocks that are going to be a gigabyte in size – 4:37 I already knew you were going to say that. 4:39 Did you – 4:40 Yeah, I didn't know what to do with that. 4:42 Did you know going into it that that was like laughably wrong or did you think – 4:48 No, I looked up – because he said specifically that anyone who says that is attacking a strongman, which is like accusing someone of improper discussion etiquette or something. 5:00 But I remember explicitly numerous people talking about that as though it were possible, and I remember seeing it on like an infographic on the official ABC roadmap or something. 5:10 So I was – if you rewatch the debate, you'll see that I'm completely thrown by that. 5:14 And in particular, when he says it's a strongman, that puts me in a weird position because now I have to figure out like is that true or is it a bluff or is it some kind of trick? 5:27 And yeah, I was completely thrown by that. 5:30 But obviously many people take that view that no matter what the demand is in BCH, the block size would be upped in order to accommodate it. 5:42 So that was like – that didn't preclude blocks of any size as I remember. 5:48 And I remember specifically this like one terabyte. 5:51 There's like an infographic. 5:53 Anyone can find this. 5:54 But I didn't know if I was like – I was like I'm pretty sure I didn't misremember that because that's a kind of very easy thing to remember, right? 6:01 Roadmap, the block size, one terabyte kind of like the Holy Grail, finding the Holy Grail or something. 6:08 Mission accomplished like George Bush with the mission accomplished banner. 6:12 And yeah, so I'm completely – I didn't know what to do with that. 6:16 And then that was when I started to figure out like what's going to happen in the BCH community as I debate then because will people even consider any of this conversation legitimate? 6:27 That was confusing. 6:28 I was confused by that. 6:29 Well, that was very confusing. 6:31 And I don't exactly know why that was the metric he got hung up on. 6:36 As you say, if you go to the Bitcoin ABC website, which was until recently the dominant implementation of BCH, it has on their infographic scaling to one terabyte blocks. 6:47 So the representative of BCH was off by a factor of a thousandfold. 6:52 And there was actually one part – 6:53 But he's a strong man as well. 6:55 So he's like anyone who says that is deceiving and is – 6:58 No, no. 6:59 It gets even better than that. 7:00 So here's the height of irony and then we can start our proper conversation. 7:03 Height of irony is part of the justification given for the deplatforming is because I was a secret BSV shill. 7:10 But in that debate, Vin says only those crazy BSV people want blocks that are a gigabyte in size. 7:17 And I'm thinking, dude, that is a great pitch for BSV. 7:21 Like you're accidentally shilling for BSV because that's very consistent with the big block philosophy. 7:27 You just have big blocks as large as they need to be. 7:29 So I just thought that was the height of irony. 7:32 It was a pretty good conversation with Vin. 7:35 It wasn't so much of a debate, of course, which is better. 7:40 But, yeah, that was one thing in particular where I was like I don't even know like – 7:45 I don't even know like is this like a joke or it's just – anything goes at this point. 7:52 See, that's the kind of – this is the problem you have though to maybe lean into the conversation, 7:57 which is that this is a problem when you have this hard – you blasé about the hard fork, 8:03 which is that everything starts to become – everything goes from being nailed down to being up free for all. 8:10 Everything is up for grabs. 8:11 So that's part of the problem. 8:13 Yeah, well, I think that actually the other people in the big block Bitcoin world I think are pretty consistent about having arbitrarily large blocks 8:26 or blocks like the way back in like 2013 or 2014 or something, there was a great wiki article written on scaling, 8:35 and it was back of the envelope calculations with something like 600 megabyte blocks, 8:40 and you could have effectively global size roughly, give or take. 8:44 Maybe that's wrong. 8:45 Let's say that's wrong by, I don't know, twofold. 8:47 Maybe it's twice. 8:48 What was the figure? 8:50 It was 600 megabyte blocks. 8:52 Yeah, I think you need about – for the whole world, 8:55 you need about eight gigabytes or something. 8:57 Well, it depends on how many transactions per day you're putting on there. 9:00 It does. 9:01 It does. 9:02 Yeah, but let's say it's in that range. 9:04 Okay, we'll give it an order of magnitude range. 9:06 That is still, I think, pretty consistent in the big block Bitcoin world that getting in that range is just explicitly part of the roadmap. 9:19 Of the people I've spoken with in big block Bitcoin until that point, the point of that conversation, 9:24 I think Venn was in a minority of one there. 9:27 I think it's pretty explicit. 9:29 So I don't think actually there was a big difference in philosophy. 9:32 Though since then, ironically, I think we have seen the emergence of something like a mid-block position. 9:37 You have the small blockers in BTC, you've got the crazy big blockers in BSV, 9:41 and then the people who are trying to be reasonable like Venn who are the mid-blockers, 9:45 like the worst of both positions in my opinion. 9:47 Yeah, the mid-blockers have been there from both a game theory and a marketing point of view. 9:56 I guess they're related in the idea of positioning. 10:00 They're screwed because they don't have a simple message anymore, whereas the small block people can say protects your node, 10:08 protects the network, tragedy of the commons. 10:13 Right, right. 10:14 So no free lunch. 10:16 And then the large block people can say all that is wrong. 10:21 Cheap transactions, abundance, and prosperity, and progress for everyone. 10:26 And then the middle people, they have to argue this weird nuanced Goldilocks point. 10:31 No one has been able to do it kind of successfully in my point of view. 10:37 I just think in terms of just marketing and explaining it to people in a cozy way. 10:44 Then it's like millions of other questions about which block size is right. 10:49 How do we know that? 10:50 How do we measure all the inputs? 10:53 How do we know that we measured them correctly? 10:55 How do we prove to everyone else that the measurement is right? 10:58 And there's an implicit governance problem here too. 11:02 Because in BSV, the philosophy is, look, we're going to try to lock everything down as much as we can, open into protocol, let the miners decide. 11:10 And BCH, they at least started being sort of anti-authoritarian. 11:14 That we're not going to have this central group of developers say, this is what the block should be. 11:18 And they shouldn't be larger than this. 11:20 But now with the mid-block position, you're right back in that circumstance where you're trusting that there's going to be some central enlightened developer committee that will shepherd the project through the shadow of doubt, right? 11:31 Yeah, exactly. 11:32 Good luck with that. 11:33 Yeah, so you're right. 11:34 Both of the small block and the large block can both say the status quo prevails. 11:39 The small blocks can just say what is what it is and the fees will be high. 11:44 And people will use credit. 11:47 They'll use lightning. 11:48 They'll use liquid. 11:49 They'll use all these other things. 11:51 And they'll only net it out later. 11:54 It'll be like the Bank of International Settlements or something like that. 11:57 Right. 11:58 Or the gold. 12:00 That gold thing they do like once a day in London, isn't it? 12:03 Goldfix or something? 12:04 Yeah. 12:05 Yeah, yeah. 12:06 And they just one phone call a day or something. 12:09 So I want to sort of start here with an observation. 12:12 I just want to say one more thing, though, is that you're completely right about governance is the perfect word for it. 12:17 It even reminds me of the idea of the centripetal governor on the train, the weird machine that is cast to keep it at the exact velocity. 12:28 Because, as you say, now you need this complicated thing that measures the block size and then changes it in some way. 12:37 And that is a totally different animal than just doing nothing. 12:41 Yeah, it's a technical problem and it's a political problem. 12:43 Because then you just have actual you're right back to square one. 12:47 In my opinion, one of the problems I see with BTC is the governance structure. 12:53 And it just seems like if you're a mid block here, you really haven't solved that problem. 12:56 The way to try to solve that problem is open up the protocol, try to lock it down as much as you can. 13:01 And then hopefully you're not going to have governance problems. 13:03 But what I kind of want to start is just an observation here. 13:07 So it seems to me in BTC. 13:10 Correct me if I'm wrong and just I guess your analysis of it. 13:14 It seems to be that there's a culture of stagnation now where BTC developers and the supporters and the mini shills online have kind of concluded that there's no more innovation that's necessary. 13:30 That it's good as it is. 13:33 High fees are totally fine. 13:36 And or they say we just have to trust the biggest brain individuals to solve these technical problems. 13:43 And we're just going to buy the coin, hold it without thinking. 13:47 And that's definitely the right decision. 13:49 And I look at that and I go, OK, that's a problem. 13:51 There aren't particularly many thinking people that I see in BTC. 13:54 There's maybe a handful or maybe one. 13:58 So that's my observation. 13:59 I see more innovation and more development on the big block bitcoins. 14:03 What do you think about that? 14:04 Do you see the same thing? 14:05 Yeah, not really. 14:06 I think, well, it's weird because, to be honest with you, having been I've been like reading. 14:13 I've been observing the space for a really long time since at least 2011 when I was sort of reading. 14:23 And at this point, there's been accelerating progress in so many directions where it's very difficult to even stay on top of what everyone is doing. 14:31 In BTC even. 14:33 And then let alone like also in BCH and BSV and then stuff going on in Ethereum and stuff going on in Monero and Zcash. 14:42 There's been like an explosion. 14:43 And even if you do this 24-7, I don't even know the latest stuff that's in Lightning or other things. 14:51 So a lot of stuff. 14:53 But I agree with you that as far as the layer one protocol, there has been. 15:00 First of all, it was obviously this attitude that there's a purity contamination frame that what we have is pure and perfect. 15:09 And it's got us this far. 15:11 So we don't want to contaminate it by letting any bad things in, which is horrible because it's anathema to antifragility. 15:19 And it's necessarily unsustainable. 15:21 So that's a problem. 15:23 But the other thing is not only is there an attitude, but you can see it. 15:28 You can actually see it pretty clearly if you just look at when there were protocol upgrades. 15:33 So there used to be protocol upgrades like a few times a year, especially sometimes there were like three or four at once. 15:40 And the last one was SegWit, which was technically released in like October 2016. 15:47 And it wasn't activated until August 1st, 2017. 15:52 But since then, there's been no protocol upgrades. 15:55 People have even been afraid to even talk about PTSD from the last upgrade. 16:02 But that's quite a length of time. 16:04 So BTC protocols had no consensus level upgrades since SegWit. 16:11 And before that, I don't even remember. 16:13 I think it was stuff that was – I think it must have been December 2015 or something like that. 16:19 So that would have been a long time ago, a long time with only one protocol change versus – think about this. 16:26 BCH and BSV, they haven't even lived independently that long. 16:30 So BTC has been much more static than BSV, which is supposed to be the lockdown protocol in a way. 16:36 That matters for the equilibrium long-run case, but I just – BTC is there. 16:41 The protocol is static. 16:43 So let me ask you. 16:44 They're trying to upgrade. 16:46 There's a new – there is a new protocol upgrade that you probably know about, the taproot. 16:53 How long that could take years. 16:55 Who knows how long that could take? 16:56 So I want to clarify. 16:58 When I say I see stagnation, I'm talking – I guess I'm packing into that the relative importance of the projects that are being worked on. 17:08 So from my opinion, I also have been observing this for about 2011. 17:14 It was whenever Bitcoin was somewhere around a dollar, just under a dollar, I started to sort of pay attention to it and observing. 17:20 And from – in that long, relatively long time perspective, it seems like the promise of Bitcoin fell off the rails. 17:30 It used to be about magic internet money. 17:32 It used to be about digital cash. 17:34 And then maybe 2014, 2015, the philosophy started to change. 17:39 I think there was a bit of a takeover that happened. 17:41 So I see high fees as like an urgent, fundamental, essential problem that if it doesn't get fixed, it's effectively a worthless technology until it gets fixed. 17:52 It's not going to be digital cash. 17:54 So I guess when I say I see stagnation, it's that that problem really isn't being addressed. 18:00 Maybe there's other things that people are trying to build on top of it, but it doesn't solve the fundamental scaling problem. 18:05 Even the Lightning Network that was hyped beyond belief has, in my opinion, it's failed from the perspective of real-world usage. 18:15 Like it's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. 18:19 You've got to run your own node. 18:20 You're going to have small amounts. 18:22 It requires an on-chain transaction to even connect to a payment channel. 18:25 And if it costs $1,000 for an on-chain transaction, you're not going to even have a – you're not going to connect to the Lightning Network. 18:32 So I see that as a massive failure. 18:34 And I don't see the only – there's one project that I see that has the potential right now to fix BTC, and it's what you're working on, Drivechains or sidechains. 18:43 So that's the kind of stagnation that I'm talking about. 18:47 And would you agree that like without your project or without sidechains, there's really no attempt at solving the fundamental scaling problem because Lightning isn't going to do it? 18:58 Well, maybe. 19:00 It depends because I do definitely believe in the whole layers philosophy, and that's the way the world works. 19:10 It's also the way payments work, right? 19:13 People who know each other have like their own layer of like credit, and they say, okay, you bought the first round of drinks. 19:20 I will get the next round. 19:23 Then you have credit cards, and then you have a checking account, and then the banks, those clearinghouses of which the Fed is like a super clearinghouse. 19:32 And then there are – there's Bank of International Settlements as I said. 19:36 So the real world does have these kind of layers of specialization at a huge scale. 19:42 I don't think that's the best analogy though because you're still going to have layers and big block Bitcoin. 19:49 You're still going to have payment processors, and that's a type of a layer. 19:51 You're still going to have things built on top of layer one. 19:54 But if you're going the layered approach, it seems like you got to have the first layer capable of handling a bunch of data and interface with it that doesn't cost thousands and thousands of dollars. 20:07 Well, in a way – well, yeah. 20:09 Well, certainly if layer one fees get too high – I mean the fees are set by supply and demand. 20:13 So if there's no fee that someone isn't in some sense willing to pay the so-called consumer sovereignty. 20:21 So really the only problem could be is that the fees become high, and people just abandon the project. 20:31 And then fees would be low because the project would be – but they would be because the project had failed. 20:37 Well, I think we're sort of in that window right now. 20:39 We saw the 2017 fee spike, and you had a bunch of people leave. 20:43 You had anti-adoption from businesses. 20:45 So I don't think it's – I think the fees are less than they were now, but I think that's from reduced activity, but not because of a clear failure of BTC. 20:55 Well, it's true that obviously there was the 2017 run-up and then a collapse. 21:04 But near the Bitcoin 2019 conference, and that was only summer of last year, the fees rose again. 21:13 The price rose again. 21:17 So I don't know that it's the case. 21:21 So what I'm saying is I believe in the layers idea. 21:24 If you want to have layers, then actually layer one should be the one that is the least overhead if you want to build things up. 21:33 You want to have something so there's like a bunker where you have a radio and some bottled water and some canned food. 21:41 But you don't live down there because it's miserable. 21:43 That should be layer one. 21:45 It should be the safest, most resilient thing. 21:48 And then the more – the things that are more user-friendly but less secure, those should all be further up. 22:01 So actually I think it should be almost upside down. 22:04 You can't – in point of fact with Drivechain, you can't – you could put a large block sidechain on a small block main chain, and then you have the best of both worlds. 22:15 But if the layer one is huge blocks, you could put a small block sidechain on top of that, but it would be kind of pointless because the way Drivechain works is asymmetric. 22:26 So you need to run all the nodes, all the parent and grandparent nodes, so the small block person isn't getting the benefit of small blocks if it's in that architecture. 22:38 So it's better to have the small block be layer one. 22:43 I think there's another approach to be – to say if you have large blocks for layer one, you don't actually need small blocks on a sidechain. 22:53 Like what are the benefits that you're going to get from having the chain that has higher transactions? 22:59 I mean you can imagine some technological innovation. 23:01 But I mean like the – like BTC – like BSV makes sense, for example, as a sidechain of BTC. 23:09 But BTC in my opinion doesn't make sense of a sidechain of BSV. 23:12 Like if you already have the low – 23:13 Probably not. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. 23:15 I mean unless there's some kind of thing where – there's some kind of tradeoff where people don't want something. 23:23 Like maybe BSV doesn't want – they don't want SegWit, right, but BTC could have it. 23:28 But then it would really – it wouldn't be the small blocks sidechain. 23:30 It would be like the SegWit sidechain. 23:32 Right, right. Yeah. 23:33 So yeah, I would mostly agree. 23:35 So that seems – if we're talking about layers, in my opinion, that seems to make a stronger case for having big blocks closer to the base layer. 23:45 But I want to ask you about like – 23:49 People seem to have no – the large block people often see no benefit at all to having small blocks, whereas Drivechain just says anyone who wants anything, they can have it. 23:59 Well, I agree. I think that's important. 24:01 I'm not in the position to say that there are – there would never be any benefit from having small blocks. 24:06 I just don't have the intellectual capacity to understand what it would be if you're talking about small block Bitcoin when you already have big block Bitcoin. 24:14 Cost of spinning up a new node. 24:17 Node is difficult to spin up a new node. 24:20 The network needs nodes or it dies. 24:22 So it's an existential threat. 24:24 There's a point I made against Vin Armani that when you have a pacemaker, you don't necessarily go with the cheapest pacemaker because you need it to work. 24:33 Yeah, yeah. 24:35 You'd spend extra money on the pacemaker. 24:37 But for something else, if you're just buying a six-pack of Miller Lite or something, or something else that's frivolous and sort of replaceable. 24:48 Let's talk about nodes for a minute. 24:49 Actually, let's do a little detour into nodes because it seems to me from my understanding of the Bitcoin system that the role of full nodes is greatly overstated. 25:00 That actually they don't serve an essential security function of the network. 25:02 So I'm OK with the idea of people not running their own nodes. 25:07 I don't think that's necessary at all. 25:12 And I would go so far as to say I'm pretty confident Bitcoin wasn't even designed that way. 25:17 I think in Satoshi's design, it was pretty explicit that regular people are not going to be running their own nodes. 25:22 So do you have a take on that? 25:27 Yes, I think it's true that Satoshi didn't have in mind everyone running their own node. 25:32 But I don't think he had in mind it being impossible to run a node that would end the whole network. 25:37 So that's kind of an important thing. 25:42 If the block size is infinite and it's filled with, you know, infinite bytes of terabytes of random data. 25:47 Well, there's a few points on that. First of all, there are no actualized infinities. 25:52 Maybe we could talk about that. 25:57 Every atom in the known universe would be required to. 26:00 Yeah. So that's a situation that would never happen. 26:03 So the blocks are produced by. 26:06 Because you're saying that there's no tradeoff. 26:09 The block size has no effect. 26:12 I'm just saying, well, take the extreme case. 26:14 No, but that's not what I'm saying. 26:16 What I'm saying is that in system in the real world as is designed, it is not the case that large blocks that are going to be produced by majority of miners and accepted by a majority of miners are going to be a problem for the network. 26:31 Yeah. But you agree that there is a cost to higher blocks. 26:34 So you just think there's some other feedback loop will intercept it first. 26:39 There is a cost. It will be more expensive to connect to the network with larger blocks. 26:46 But that's I would see that's a feature, not a bug. 26:50 Really? 26:51 Yeah. Yeah. Like I don't I think that specialization is a good thing. 26:57 So I'm totally fine with the idea of the capacity of the network growing by the biggest entrepreneurs making more money because they're the only people that can afford that level of infrastructure. 27:13 Well, specialization is good. 27:15 But in general, the lower costs are, the better that is for everyone. 27:20 I mean, you could say the only people can afford to, I don't know, become a doctor or something. 27:26 Some anything that's an expensive project that would fit the analogy. 27:30 So it's good to have some people specialize and be doctors since it's so if it's expensive, then they have to invest a lot and then they get a high salary after they graduate from medical school or whatever. 27:43 But better, it would be just much everything would just be better if it was just possible for everyone to be a doctor. 27:49 It's kind of worked that way already with the Internet has deleted a lot of professions like or at least made them more competitive, like a realtor or something like that. 27:58 But now anyone can do or publishing. 28:01 It used to take to produce a show. It used to take like a whole crew of people. 28:05 Yeah, well, I just thought this podcast is cheaply just being more expensive and specialization. 28:12 Specialization is good, but we don't want you. 28:15 You're viewing costs in isolation. 28:17 So there are there are theoretical costs and then there are costs and their effect in the real world. 28:23 So something like proof of work is an interesting example here. 28:26 I think actually Bitcoin improves its security by proof of work difficulty being higher. 28:34 And the reason that it is more secure is precisely that the costs are higher. 28:39 So you're restricting the amount of people that can add blocks to the chain by having a high proof of work difficulty. 28:46 Well, the proof of work is just a mirror of the all the money spent on the senior age and the transaction fees and the state of mining hardware. 28:58 So it isn't actually like saying that the proof of work is high. 29:02 It's just saying that the price is high, basically, or that and or that transaction fees are really high. 29:08 Well, so if the proof of work is high, that means it costs a lot of money to add locks to the chain. 29:15 Yeah. And to attack the chief. 29:17 I'm saying that an increased cost in that circumstance in the real world is actually a good thing. 29:24 It's good to have a high cost because if you had really low cost, anybody blocks to the chain, it would be easier to attack. 29:30 I think I would agree. But again, it doesn't matter because it's not like that's something that that's not a parameter. 29:35 There's no degree of freedom like no one chooses that number. 29:39 That's just determined completely by the market price of Bitcoin. 29:44 And so there's no whether that number should be high or should be low. 29:49 It's now unless there's some dramatic redesign. 29:53 There's no point in talking about it because you can't do anything. 29:56 But there is definitely something valuable talking about it, because you can say it is a it is a good sign that the costs, the difficulty is high. 30:05 And I would say the same thing about large that they are very expensive to process. 30:11 I would say, oh, OK, that is actually a good sign in the same way. 30:15 I don't think so, really, because mining has what has several. 30:20 But namely, it has the difficulty adjustment. So if mining becomes too difficult. 30:27 Then miners drop out and it becomes easier. But that doesn't happen with nodes. 30:31 If they become too difficult to run, they may, in fact, become even harder to run a full node because you have to get the initial data from somewhere. 30:40 Yeah, but there's still the same. 30:43 Blocks are. Yeah. 30:45 Well, so if blocks are too big that the majority of the network can't handle them, there's a natural pressure. 30:50 And then somebody who's putting out the trillion megabyte block right now is going to get forked off the network. 30:55 So there's a natural balance. Maybe. 30:58 But I think that a trillion megabyte block, they're going to get forked off the network. 31:03 Well, they would. It may be more strategic if they want to take this route of burdening the network to push rivals off. 31:12 They probably wouldn't do it in one salient block. 31:15 They would just be constantly they were doing this a thousand blocks that are. 31:19 But it's not. It's not. 31:22 You have to have majority miners. 31:24 So the majority hash rate is what is going to determine what the actual chain is. 31:28 So if there's there's enough miners that are pushing out some size blocks, then that's the size blocks that the majority of miners can handle. 31:39 Right. If they couldn't handle it, if there's like a few isolated miners that start making blocks larger than the majority can handle, they will definitely get forked off. 31:49 Which means there's a natural balancing of the size of blocks that the miners are producing. 31:54 Well, I mean, if you're saying that there's some that's just aren't you sneaking in a block size limit in some, you know, some phantom way, you're saying that 51 percent hash rate will just determine the block size limit. 32:08 Yeah. Yeah. But you still think that you still think there should be a block size limit. 32:13 So there's a difference between saying there is an effective limit to the size of blocks that miners can produce and say that there is a protocol specification that says you are not going to produce a valid block as determined by the protocol if the size is too large. 32:28 I mean, there's definitely going to be a maximum block size in practice. Definitely. 32:32 Yeah. Well, yes, I agree with that, but I don't really see how it's relevant because, as I said, you could have people just pushing the envelope by making the blocks slightly larger. It's the integral of all the blocks over the whole time. 32:47 That's a problem. 32:48 Yeah. Well, I think there's no, as I said, you need someone needs the network needs to exist, first of all. So it is the case that people do need to be able to start up a new node in order for the network to exist at all. 33:05 Yeah. Well, the difference between the miners and the nodes. So if you... 33:11 The nodes need to exist. 33:13 Okay. And who are the people... 33:15 Otherwise... 33:16 Yeah. So play that out. Sorry. You said otherwise, what will happen? 33:19 Yeah. If you can't start a node, you have no way of knowing that the network is working, first of all, but also that you receive money for certain. 33:28 Well, that's not true. You can validate your own transactions with SPV. 33:32 Yeah. Well, you could. Yes. 33:34 So that one's not correct. 33:35 I guess you never know with certainty, but it's, this is the, it's like the strength of evidence. So... 33:49 Okay. 33:50 SPV gives you a lot, gives you strong evidence that your block has been included, your transaction has been included in the block. And you can guess, you can say, well, you know, I just don't think that people would go through the trouble of making a valid block header if the rules were wrong. 34:10 But you don't, you don't, if you run the full node, you see, even if you run a full node, you don't actually know that everything is fine because as far as you know, it will be reworked soon or something. All knowledge is conjectural. But the full node is the only way of looking at the network. 34:29 Okay. So there's a couple of points here. One is, let's say that in the, in the real world with a bunch of market participants, it needs to be possible to run a non-mining node. Okay. I would agree with that. I would just say that... 34:45 Yeah, and Satoshi wrote as well. 34:46 Sorry? 34:47 It's in the white paper, and Satoshi has written about it as well. 34:50 Yeah, yeah. 34:51 Right, right. But he also said it's going to be businesses, businesses that have an incentive to validate other people's transactions, not your regular users. So I'm okay with the idea of the costs being high to businesses to run a node, because they have an incentive to, but only the people that have the incentive to run the node should be running the node, not your average user. 35:11 He said large payment processors, but I don't understand, doesn't that, so if I'm an individual and I start a business that's a sole proprietorship, now the logic is different now? Or if my, only when my business is very large? 35:24 I mean, it's a cost. 35:25 I mean, imagine if we're talking about getting access to the internet. So somebody says, what, you're saying I'm a business, now I have to pay more for internet? Well, yeah, I mean, that's the cost of doing business, right? 35:39 Well, not really. I mean, I've been billed for work and billed for work using my own home internet. But that's not really what I mean. I mean, why your distinction is that only businesses should run a node? There's really no difference between an individual and a business, really, I can start a business. 35:59 I mean, okay. 36:00 I don't see the difference. 36:04 Okay, so here's the principle. Those who have a economic incentive to run their own nodes, as determined by the market, should run nodes. Those who do not have a reason to run nodes should not be running nodes. It doesn't matter if it's a business or an individual or an academic researcher. 36:23 Don't you think that thing would be better if it were cheap? Roger Ver is trying to sell, he starts a Bitcoin store, the business. He wants to run a node to see if people are paying him so that he knows whether or not he can ship the goods. How is it any different if he does rogerver.com as an individual? 36:40 You're not in a position to say what a good cost of infrastructure should be. It just is what it is. Whatever the costs are, the individual is going to make the decision. Do I need to make a decision that I'm not going to use Bitcoin because it's a black box and I don't know what's going on in there. 36:58 I have multiple businesses that are running their own nodes on BSV, which pushed out multiple 300 megabyte blocks. In their judgment, they have made the decision. This actually makes sense for me to run. I'm still profiting. 37:13 Yes, but you understand that that's not very strong evidence at all. Because as I've said, there's a thousand new blocks every week. So they pile up and it becomes cumulatively more difficult. 37:24 How is this any different from any other infrastructure cost in existence? 37:28 I don't know. There's no guarantee. The Romans built a lot of infrastructure and it helped them for a little while and then the Roman civilization collapsed. So there's no guarantee of success. 37:45 But of course there's no guarantee. 37:47 You seem to be saying that there's this problem. You admit that the block size cannot be large. You think that miners will... 38:00 Wait, wait, wait. Paul, I never said the block size can't be large. 38:05 What about infinite? 38:07 Block size cannot be infinite. 38:09 Yeah, but you admitted that. But didn't we already discuss this? That you said that if the blocks were too large, it would become problematic for the network and something would happen about it. Really? 38:20 So there's a difference between theory and practice. When you'd say, could you have a theoretically large block that is a problem? Sure. 38:29 I'm saying in the real world, in practice, the blocks that are going to be produced by majority miners are not going to be a problem. They're not going to be a theoretical problem because nobody's going to produce an infinite size block. 38:41 The only reason you can know that, it's called off-path reasoning. The only reason you can know that is by considering what would happen if someone did do that. 38:48 And what would happen if somebody produced an infinite size block? They would get forked off the network. 38:53 No, I'm just saying if, no, I'm not literally saying, I'm just trying to establish the point that the large blocks aren't free. 39:01 Okay, if that's your point. 39:03 Do you think they're free? 39:05 I never said they're free. 39:07 Do you think they are or not? Well, because since now you've gone double back on this point a few times, so now I'm going to make you admit that they're not free before proceeding. 39:15 Do you think that it's free, like blocks are 10 gigabytes each or 100 gigabytes each, complete neutrality between those two blockchains? 39:23 I have never said they're free, Paul. 39:26 I would say explicitly. 39:28 Okay, so the answer is no. 39:30 Increase as the size of the block increases. 39:32 Right, exactly. Right. 39:35 Yeah. 39:36 Yes, so I'm saying there's no guarantee that if this cost isn't contained, there's no guarantee that Bitcoin succeeds as a result of being one value or the other value. 39:49 The cost does not have to be contained by a protocol specification. 39:53 The cost is naturally contained by the incentives that miners are facing. 39:57 Because if you produce a block that is larger than the majority of miners can handle, then you will be forked off the network and lose money. 40:03 Yes, but your justification for this theory is that, you know, we can't control it. 40:08 It's an infrastructure cost and we can't. 40:10 It is what it is. 40:12 I didn't say it. I think we don't have to control it. 40:16 The economic argument, the economic incentives are such that the miners cannot produce blocks that are larger than the majority can handle without getting forked off the network. 40:29 There doesn't need to be developer wisdom or a protocol level specification at all. 40:35 So that's your belief. 40:38 Yes. 40:40 And can I ask you about why you believe that? 40:42 Like, for example, already we live in a world where the miners don't. 40:46 I think most in July 2015, it was revealed in a very public way that miners don't even download or validate any blocks for at least a little while after they come in. 40:59 So the miners release a block header, which is 80 bytes, which contains nothing in the block at all, zero. 41:06 And they immediately start mining on that block to reduce their orphan rate. 41:11 So they mine on the next block without even reading the block that was just mined at all. 41:18 And that was July 2015. 41:20 And so there's no guarantee that anyone doing hashing. 41:25 There is some argument that they would go back because they have no other way to coordinate or something. 41:33 But in practice, they have already been mining on a kind of blind way. 41:40 So when you say the miners could handle, the miners are not really the ones interested in handling at all. 41:49 If there were no nodes at all, it would go off the rails completely. 41:52 I think you would agree with that. 41:54 So what is the question? 41:57 Well, your claim that this, I'm asking to justify your claim that miners would care if the blocks became large when they have no interest to do so. 42:12 Okay, so there are a few things here. 42:14 First of all, I don't think it's correct to say that all the miners, or to imply, and maybe you weren't implying this, but that all the miners are doing like SPV mining or mining on block headers. 42:23 Well, certainly at least 70 or 80 percent. 42:26 Was it that high? 42:27 July 2015. 42:29 In fact, one or two of them admitted to me in person that they have a shared mempool and they all have servers that connect to each other. 42:36 They probably have even more now. 42:38 They all SPV and spy mine at this point, I think. 42:41 If they didn't, they would be doing a bad job because they would be not giving their customers an advantage. 42:48 So I certainly think every pool should be SPV and spy mining. 42:51 I think those are good things, actually. 42:53 I agree with Sergio. 42:55 So there's two responses here. 42:58 One is to say, I don't think actually SPV mining is that big a deal. 43:05 But let's say that there are theoretical weaknesses that come from SPV mining, that you could have a situation in which there's a chain fork. 43:16 Now, my second claim would be the incentives are sufficiently strong in Bitcoin such that that behavior would be rewarded or punished, I should say, so harshly if it ever actually causes a problem. 43:27 Miners will learn and they won't do that. 43:30 If there's a significant risk of being orphaned, then their behavior is adjusted. 43:35 And I'll even be so generous as to say it could cause a problem. 43:38 Like we can imagine some kind of bad chain split, a couple of blocks, and oh, now you have a big reorg. 43:44 I just don't think that's the end of the world. 43:46 Yeah, it may not be the end of the world. 43:50 Yeah, I agree that it's definitely possible to say something like, first of all, I don't think, as I just said, SPV mining and spy mining, I think those are great. 44:01 But what they do mean is that the miners don't know what it is that they're mining. 44:05 So they have no idea if what they block their mining on contains an invalid transaction or not until some length of time in the future. 44:13 I think I also should mention that, I mean, I don't know, the conversation is wound in a kind of narrow trench where we were trying to discuss the why it is important for running a node to be cheap. 44:26 And I just dug into this is we've only hit the first spur of this claim, which is that if the network is, it doesn't exist, then well, if nodes become too difficult to run, the network will just collapse and die immediately. 44:41 So I just thought that would be like a very easy one to latch on to. 44:45 But there are other reasons. 44:47 If an asteroid hits, then Bitcoin will stop working. I would agree with that. 44:50 Well, that's true. 44:51 I just want to mention two other things first before I go back to the SPV spy mining thing, which is that, well, maybe I shouldn't, I don't know. 44:57 We have other things I think we can talk about rather than. 45:01 Go ahead. 45:03 Yeah, well, SPV and spy mining, it means that they don't know what's inside the block. 45:08 So if they mine, they could accidentally, it could be some time before they realize that one of the blocks is problematic. 45:16 And then how would they, first of all, how would they realize that a block is problematic? 45:23 Only by the running of the node. 45:25 So someone somewhere with a node would be the only one who could raise the alarm. 45:29 And so it is desirable to keep an eye on how expensive that alarm is. 45:34 How many nodes would it take to prove that there's just one? 45:38 Well, actually, that's actually not true. 45:40 But I think I have some ways of making it so that I wrote a giant essay on fraud proofs. 45:44 But some actually, sometimes, but yeah, with one full node, it depends on, they would just supply the entire block. 45:54 Everyone would check the whole block. 45:56 But it could be as easy as checking a transaction. 45:58 Let's say that it's one node. 46:00 So my point is to say that in the real world, it is always going to be the case that there will be at least one node running. 46:07 There will be at least one full node running. 46:09 Because there's lots and lots and lots of people who do have the incentive to run a full node. 46:15 Now, relative the amount of people that will be using Bitcoin, it's a very small amount of people who will be running a node. 46:21 But we're going to have significantly more than one full node running, regardless of how big the blocks are. 46:28 And keep in mind, if the blocks are massive, that implies there's a massive amount of economic transactions that are taking place. 46:34 I don't think it does, because you can just send a miner to just send transactions themselves all day and fill up the blocks. 46:42 So theory versus practice. 46:44 In practice, if you have terabyte blocks, which cost a lot to process, it is not the case that you're going to have a miner sending a terabyte worth of transactions to himself. 46:54 And if he is doing that, there's not going to be enough economic activity to justify it over the long run and he'll go bankrupt. 47:01 But I don't see why at all. 47:02 Think about this. 47:03 He can even pay himself the transaction fees because he can just keep the block a secret. 47:07 It doesn't cost him anything. 47:09 Why would he do that? 47:11 Just to fill up the blocks, to be obstreperous, to be a troublemaker. 47:16 So this is a business that's invested tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in mining equipment. 47:22 It could be the NSA or the Israeli government, hacker department or Russian hacker department. 47:28 Someone with some guy with a gun who goes into the mining facility or mining pool. 47:33 There's only seven or so big mining pools. 47:36 One claim is that miners might do this. 47:38 And I would say that's not going to happen because they're profit-seeking businesses. 47:42 The second possibility is that it's a malicious government. 47:46 Well, that's a different argument. 47:47 That's an interesting thing to evaluate. 47:50 Malicious governments definitely can pose a threat to all the Bitcoins. 47:54 Why don't they see it that way? 47:56 Now, the idea of malicious to filling up really big blocks, I don't buy that. 48:01 Why not? 48:02 It doesn't really cost anything. 48:04 I know. 48:05 So you're just making more profits for miners in that scenario. 48:09 No, as I just explained, the miner can make it so that only he earns his own transaction fees and it costs nothing. 48:15 So you're saying a majority of malicious... 48:18 No, it doesn't need to be a majority. 48:19 No. 48:20 No, one miner. 48:21 Anyone. 48:22 Anyone with anything. 48:24 All they do is they take a million... 48:26 They have a bunch of DTXOs. 48:28 They spend them all to private keys that they control. 48:31 And they keep all those transactions secret until they find a block. 48:35 They find a block and they pay themselves the transaction fees. 48:38 Yeah, so I think there is a... 48:40 I haven't even been thinking about it for like 30 seconds. 48:42 I'm sure there's more elaborate things. 48:44 Yeah, yeah. 48:46 They do have... 48:48 The essential component in any criticisms of the proof of work system in general, not just big or small block Bitcoin, is what happens when you have malicious actors. 48:59 Malicious states, I think in particular, is the strongest potential criticism. 49:04 I could say the same thing. For example, I could give a theoretical argument. 49:06 What happens if there's a majority of malicious nodes on the network that are easy to spin up and they don't actually refer the right blocks to people. 49:17 No, immediately though because of the way the Merkle root works. 49:21 Okay, so they try to... 49:23 They don't get banned off the network immediately. 49:27 In fact, even saying you have a block, I think... 49:31 I don't know this because it changes a lot. 49:32 But I think just saying that you have a block and then not providing the block just gets you banned for 24 hours. 49:39 No, I'm not saying... 49:41 So you can imagine the network splitting through a Sybil attack, right? 49:45 Where you have 50% of the node... 49:47 Okay, so I'm saying if the costs are cheap to run a node, then the risks increase for the Sybil attack in theory. 49:54 No. 49:56 No, because actually the attacker doesn't pay any marginal costs for the number of nodes. The attacker is just going to set up... No, the attacker is going to set up one node, and then they'll just clone it a million times. They have a fully trusted... 50:07 Yeah, but they just have a fully trusted... They're going to be lying. You understand? They're going to connect to everyone and they're going to say, I have this giant blockchain. But if anyone ever asks, it could just pipe back to the headquarters. 50:19 Yeah, what I'm saying is all of the other... 50:21 So they don't have to pay a marginal cost for their... Well, they do. They have to pay some marginal cost, but it doesn't make a difference whether it's a small block or a large block. There's no marginal marginal cost. 50:32 Okay, well, the point is to say... I'm not sure about that last one, but the point is to say that there are definitely theoretical... 50:40 The zombie nodes have the same cost, large block or small block. There's just zombies. 50:46 But there's still a cost of spinning them up, right? 50:49 Yeah, but it's the same with the blocks of small and large, contrary to your point. 50:53 Okay, so let's say that's correct. My point is actually to say there are theoretical problems, theoretical attacks that could happen in all Bitcoins. 51:04 And it is an open question how Bitcoin, any system of Bitcoin, could respond to state actors, malicious state actors. 51:13 So I think the scenario... 51:15 I think it's completely open, as if we know nothing about it. I think that's going a little far. 51:20 I think it was explicitly designed in the wake of the failures of Liberty Reserve and EGOLD and these other things. 51:29 That's specifically the problem that was solved. They said this thing was closed down. We're going to make it so that if it's closed down, someone else can get it. 51:37 All the nodes are equal, peer to peer. So really the problem with Liberty Reserve was that the cost of running the full node was infinite. 51:45 Because no one else could do it. There was no price that someone else could pay that would restore it. 51:50 So just as a side point, do you think that actually BTC is free from serious threats from state actors? Like the state actually can't do anything to stop BTC? 52:04 I don't think yet, but I think that's the aspiration. 52:08 I agree that's the aspiration, but I don't think we're there either. We can definitely come up with theoretical scenarios in which it's unclear how Bitcoin would respond. 52:19 I would just say with regards to the big block, small block distinction in the real world with profit seeking actors, I think that is not a big concern. 52:31 I don't think, oh, there's a flaw in the big block philosophy, which is what happens if you have a minority of miners that are state actors that are not profit driven, that are just raising the cost to the miners to run their own nodes. 52:47 And the more I think about that, the worse that sounds, right? Because the only reason that miners are running their nodes anyway, or mining at all, is because they can make a profit. 52:58 So if there's not actually enough economic activity on the network for them to justify running their own node, then they're not going to be running it anyways. 53:06 Then you're going to have like a dead chain or a chain that doesn't have a lot of economic growth on it. 53:11 I just don't think that holds much water at all. 53:16 Really, an attack that costs zero dollars and doesn't require a majority hash rate, you don't see how this totally undermines your position completely? 53:25 No, that doesn't undermine my position because you're specifying it has to be a minority, which means that... 53:31 It doesn't have to be. It could be any amount. It doesn't meet the majority requirement. 53:35 It doesn't have to be a minority, right? So if it's the case that the majority of miners have decided they're not making a profit because the costs of running their mining equipment is too high, that is a demonstration that there is not enough economic activity on that chain to justify running the mining equipment. 53:57 So that would just be a failure of the chain. 53:59 Yes. Right. Well, that's what I'm talking about. Yes. 54:02 But that's fine. I'm just saying economics takes care of it. 54:05 The point of the attack is to cause the chain to fail. 54:07 What would you say if I told you, what would you say if I was, if you were the CEO of Liberty Reserve or I were the CEO of Liberty, I don't know how, I don't know which way the analogy should run. 54:16 And someone was saying, oh, Liberty Reserve is going to be closed down by the Feds. 54:21 And someone said, well, you know, the only reason they're doing Liberty Reserve is so that they can make a profit. 54:27 And then what would you even say to someone like that? 54:30 Well, it doesn't matter because Liberty Reserve is going to get, Liberty Reserve is going to get closed down. 54:35 And these questions about profit are going to be, you know, you can answer them for prison. 54:40 So let's let's I don't I don't think that is correct. 54:45 Let's but let's talk about you. You gave an interview with Daniel Kravitz the other day that I thought was interesting. 54:49 And you mentioned two other things, though. 54:51 I mean, if you run a full node, you gain a lot of it. 54:54 Well, first of all, not one thing I have to mention is that if it takes more than 10 minutes for the blocks to propagate, then the network, that's the criterion for the network dying. 55:02 So because the interblock time is 10 minutes. 55:05 I'm not going to produce blocks that take more than 10 minutes to propagate to the network. 55:08 I just gave you an example. 55:10 No, I gave you an example. 55:14 Do you know, are you familiar with selfish mining? 55:16 Yeah. 55:17 Yeah. 55:18 So the advantage is to the miner who finds the block, they have the first one to have it. 55:22 OK. 55:24 That's it. 55:25 It's the other miners who are forked off if the block is large. 55:29 The miner who finds the mischievous block is forked on. 55:33 The block is determined by the majority of mining. 55:37 No, this is why I brought selfish mining is that the selfish mining tilts the balance away from the majority into like someone who's 35 or 33 percent of the hash rate because of the length of time it requires for them if they're not spy mining or SPV mining. 55:54 But the malicious miner can just decline to broadcast. 55:56 That's the whole point of selfish mining is that they all have their own broadcast strategy as well. 56:00 Fortunately, spy mining does take care of a lot of this because they're all spying on each other, so they can't even really selfish mine. 56:06 It's all really good. 56:07 They can just cut themselves off of the Internet. 56:11 It's an example of a theoretical problem that is not actually a real world problem. 56:14 There's been some interesting other criticisms of the whole idea of selfish mining as well. 56:18 I think Peter Rison's got some work on it. 56:20 Yeah, but his work is backwards. 56:22 No, but his work is backwards. 56:23 And I think he had to recant it, so you shouldn't cite it. 56:26 I don't know. 56:27 I haven't read it. 56:28 It's been a long time. 56:29 Because his work was about meeting the block. 56:33 His work ignored SPV and spy mining, which has made it the opposite of correct. 56:37 As you say, there is spy mining or there are other techniques, which I'm not surprised to hear about. 56:41 No, but you can't just say this is theoretical. 56:43 The whole thing is supposed to be theoretical. 56:44 What if we were guarding a castle and we had guards in the front and we had guards in the back and we had archers everywhere? 56:51 And the enemy always attacks in the front. 56:54 Say they never attack in the front. 56:56 They always attack in the back gate where there's fewer guards. 57:00 And then you say, well, we should move the archers from the front to the back. 57:03 And then someone says, well, we've never been attacked. 57:06 And someone says, we've never been attacked in the front, so we'll move the archers to the back. 57:10 We always get attacked in the back. 57:12 We're not going to have any archers in the front. 57:14 We're going to move them all to the back. 57:15 And someone says, well, then we'll be attacked in the front. 57:18 And then someone says, well, that's a theoretical thing. 57:20 That's never happened before. 57:21 I mean, this is like a funny conversation about security to just say, well, we haven't been shot and killed by the enemy yet. 57:29 I'm sure it's Nirvana for this world. 57:31 I'm very happy to talk theory. 57:33 Very, very happy to talk theory. 57:34 But let me give you another analogy, which I think would represent my own biases maybe more than your biases in this situation with Fortress. 57:42 So imagine that you've got the Fortress and you've got, you know, you can see the enemy in front of you. 57:48 Maybe you can see the enemy behind you. 57:50 And like, oh, that's good. 57:51 Yeah, let's definitely watch our tail. 57:53 And then somebody says, actually, guys, just so you know, there's helicopters. 57:58 And like, actually, theoretically, like with the helicopter. 58:01 No, no. 58:02 Theoretically, you see the way the laws of physics work is that you can fly this thing. 58:06 It does this and it goes. 58:07 We've got to protect that. 58:08 And then somebody and then he goes, no, actually, you don't understand. 58:11 There's drills. 58:12 So you can, like, drill under the Fortress and then you can go. 58:16 That type of that type of worrying about what is truly a potential threat in theory can often distract from real work that needs to be done. 58:26 It could be bike shedding. 58:27 Yes. I mean, after Mehmed II invented cannons, that was it for the Fortress. 58:33 So, yeah, so that was that was true, though. 58:35 So anyone who said, hey, there's these cannons should run away from Constantinople. 58:41 I think this is an interesting segue to like into more cultural, the subject of cultures and the different bitcoins, because what I've seen in BTC and now in BCH is a hyper focus on theoretical security. 58:56 Like we've got to make the system 100% bulletproof. 58:59 It's got to be. 59:01 As you know, if I can just interrupt yet again, I know I've been interrupting, but I feel like I mean, as you know, because from my work on Drivechain, 59:08 I think it's totally fair for people who want to run the large block. 59:12 I've always insisted that if people want to run the experiment, they should. 59:15 I think, though, that the people in the small black land who say that this isn't they claim injury and they say this is making my life more difficult. 59:24 I didn't sign up for this. I think they have a legitimate claim. 59:26 That's basically all I'm trying to say. 59:29 Yeah, so I think the the culture that promotes and encourages hyper security is not a an entrepreneurial culture. 59:38 I don't think that's the right approach. That's kind of one of the reasons I really like me is because they're saying, look, even if there's some problems, that's OK. 59:45 Well, we'll sort them out after we've already scaled and the biggest of problems, which in my opinion, I think in their opinion, is high transaction fees. 59:55 So so when you see the BTC, you you think this is a benefit of the culture or like where do you place it? 1:00:00 Do you think they're too focused on security or there's the right focus on security? 1:00:05 What do you think? Well, I think that you're right that. 1:00:12 In general. It's like, yeah, I don't I'm not a fan of pessimism. 1:00:19 So people say there's nothing we can do except keep the block size small forever. 1:00:23 That kind of thing, I think, is sort of silly. 1:00:26 And people have said stuff like that for thousands of years and they've never been right. 1:00:30 And people have said it used to be said that one famous example is that you need like Europium or something to make a red CRT television. 1:00:42 And so and there was not enough Europium. 1:00:44 They were like in the 1970s, they were like, what are we going to do when only a few people will be able to have color TVs? 1:00:51 And then this will be a difference between the classes. 1:00:54 And some people will live a life of luxury with a cathode ray tube, that TV that has red in it. 1:01:03 And other people have to make do with that. And this will be the end of the world. 1:01:08 You know, now we have everyone has extremely cheap plasma screens, the liquid crystal screens that are made of common elements. 1:01:17 There's not an atom of Europium in them. 1:01:20 And even if there was so much extra Europium has been found now that you could make, you know, something like 5000 CRT old style TVs for every single person on the planet Earth. 1:01:33 And so, yeah, people what people really meant is that they just didn't know enough about how to build. 1:01:38 It was also all that stuff is nonsense. 1:01:40 And people have always said, you know, there's always been like the Malthusian people. 1:01:43 And I hate the Malthusian people. 1:01:45 And and, you know, other people like what was the Ehrlich or Limits to Growth? 1:01:51 Those people, those people are like, you know, whatever. 1:01:54 So I agree with you that the definitely the most salient difference is interactive versus independent. 1:02:02 Or I would say I guess I could say dependent versus independent or whatever. 1:02:06 The point is the the small block people are like they want to build that. 1:02:10 It's like that. Maybe you've seen the infographic of the the it would take more energy that comes out of the sun or something to break your private key. 1:02:19 It's like a safe that can never be opened, that type of thing. 1:02:22 So they would be totally independent completely. 1:02:24 And then no matter what happens, no excuses. 1:02:27 You know, unbreakable, safe, safety deposit box, vault, that type of thing. 1:02:34 That's what they like. They like independent. 1:02:36 They like to stay not affected by it. 1:02:39 Bitcoin user not affected. You remember that? 1:02:41 Got to bring that back. Someone's got to bring that back. 1:02:43 That was a great meme. That was the best. That was the best Bitcoin meme. 1:02:46 Other than the wizard, maybe. But or maybe, yeah, Cosby coin was my favorite. 1:02:52 But that'll never, no, that'll never come back. 1:02:55 I mean, maybe it will. That'd be great. 1:02:57 Someone out there listening can bring that back. But the large block people are more like this reactive. 1:03:05 They're not independent at all. They like. 1:03:09 They like to say, well, just try this. 1:03:12 And then when we have the problems, we'll just twiddle the knobs and we'll fix it and then we'll just keep fixing it forever. 1:03:18 Certainly, that has to be the way that it goes. 1:03:21 Obviously, the BTC people are trying to push that onto other layers with with debatable, 1:03:29 with some success and some immense delay and some other failure or failure. 1:03:35 But so it's not as though the BTC camp totally issues that type of thing and sort of kicks it out. 1:03:42 But the but yeah, definitely you're right that the large block group is not so much into this whole set in stone type thing. 1:03:50 They're like, we'll just figure it out on the fly. And that is an advantage. 1:03:55 And but I worry that this conversation is totally misleading because, as you know, my from the debate with Krawitz, 1:04:02 my position is really not most of my position is just against the hard fork on principle and has nothing to do with any of this. 1:04:10 And in fact, I'm in favor of people trying all these experiments out anyway. 1:04:17 That's the whole work on Drivechain. So I don't even know where because I can say I can give back these arguments about why it is important for the no cost to be cheap, which I absolutely believe in. 1:04:29 The question, of course, is like how cheap I mean. I want to I want to just ask you one question on the culture while we're on it. 1:04:37 OK, so when we're making trying to make predictions about future growth, if we I think we both identify that there's a little bit more entrepreneurial spirit, 1:04:49 let's say in the big block camp versus a small block camp, they're OK with making mistakes and not everything being perfect. 1:04:59 I've become very pessimistic about BTC partially because of this reason where it looks really, really bad to me from the outside. 1:05:08 Like the the the idea that like I think it's entirely possible that blocks never grow from one megabyte. 1:05:18 I don't know if that's that will always be the case, but the fact that it's even on the table that you could literally have no layer one protocol growth seems to be a bad sign. 1:05:28 So in terms of like betting on which coin has a more bright future, I'm weighing my judgment pretty heavily with because of the cultural aspect. 1:05:40 And I say, OK, if it's a bad culture, the coin is not going to do very well. 1:05:45 If it's a good culture, it looks like it has more potential upside. 1:05:50 So that's why one of the reasons I'm more of a big blocker when you're when you're trying to weigh the future of the different coins. 1:05:59 How much stock do you put in the cultural aspect versus the other calculation you're making that makes you still more bullish on BSV or on BTC? 1:06:10 Well, as I said, to take the last part first, most of it is just about a rejection of the way the hard fork was used, which I regard as sort of frivolous and suicidal in the case of BCH and BSV almost. 1:06:25 But so that's a different thing altogether. 1:06:28 But with regard to the culture, I think you can understand how sometimes people like what if you went to the movie theater and the same the same movie was playing or the same style was playing every time. 1:06:39 Or you play the video game in the same style of video game was playing every time. 1:06:43 This is a weird example. But at one point I came into possession of the video game Breath of Fire 2, which has it starts immediately off with like death, religion, people being orphaned and having their memories erased. 1:06:56 And none of that stuff was in any like video game before. And it was just so shockingly different that it leaves this crazy impression on you. 1:07:03 So in art, people want variety and things. But think about like a bank, you know, or like so some places like a nightclub, you want variety. 1:07:13 But then there's other places kind of like a cheers type place where it's like the same every time, but especially like a bank where people want they don't want their bank to be like trying new experimental entrepreneurial things. 1:07:28 So it's the question of the culture being bad is that is itself a complicated one, because you can see how a lot of people are attracted to actually conservative culture. 1:07:40 And they say, well, you know what, those guys are just a bunch of, you know, Wall Street, coke addicts over there, BSV, and they're gonna blow this whole thing up, because they don't care. 1:07:51 And I'm going to be left with nothing, Brad. So I'm going to invest in BTC, where at least people there look like they, you know, like they, I don't know, like they, they have used the same account for the last 20 years and go to boredom classes or something. 1:08:08 Yeah, yeah. Great point. So I'm going to get some more water, but I'm still listening to you. 1:08:13 So there, this is one of the reasons why, of the big block bitcoins, I am currently more bullish on BSV, because there is, there is simultaneously more entrepreneurship that I see, but also a concern where it matters. 1:08:29 So, um, Yates has these hard forks every six months, I think that has been a disaster as revealed by the upcoming, what looks like a network split. And, um, but BSV, to their credit, the entrepreneurship is about building stuff on top of what they want to be a stable fundamental protocol, like a rock solid, stable fundamental. 1:08:51 But that's the BTC argument, isn't it? 1:08:54 It is, except that BTC doesn't, doesn't have the technology right now to justify locking down the base protocol, because no technology currently exists to have digital cash, the use case of digital cash on BTC, where it does on BSV. 1:09:13 If they just, if BTC and BSV really aren't that different, except for this one major protocol difference, which happens to be, I think, the most important protocol difference, which is the one that makes a big block Bitcoin usable as digital cash and BTC isn't there yet. 1:09:31 Now, if BTC had some substitute, it had some second layer that was built on it that actually worked, then I'd say, yeah, great. I like the conservative approach to the protocol, but I just feel like they haven't, they don't even, you don't want to lock down before you even have the protocol that can be used and can scale. 1:09:50 Hmm. Well, I mean, you, but isn't contained within that a kind of prediction that BTC will never create this knowledge that they need something else and then fix the problem. 1:10:05 It's really the same argument in favor of BSV back reapplied to the layer one BTC. It's just BTC has been in first place for a very long time. There's no real reason to, there's no, there's no big justification to, to, to motivate some big redesign. Right? 1:10:22 I think the reason that it's been in first place is largely because they're still running on the network effects that entrepreneurs built for them. I think the promise is that, well, at some future point, BTC will have changed such that you can use it like digital cash because you build a layer two on it or whatever. 1:10:43 Um, but I think, I think the word has not yet gotten out that, uh, for one that one of the two layer two solutions that has been promised to be the panacea has just failed. Like the lightning network is right now, not consumer ready. It's not, you can't. Now, if you're a technically person, that hasn't been for a long time. It has never been, but I, but still it aspires to be sort of ready. 1:11:10 Yeah. But, but, but think about the difference in that, right? You got one. So, so I think the momentum in BTC and a partial explanation for its number one position is because people are still clinging on to the idea that this is the group that is going to get us to the promised land. And yet they've failed spectacularly in one of the two potential methods to get us there so far. 1:11:29 Well, I don't know. Uh, it's certainly true. I mean, every, anyone who wants to make fun of lightning network, I think we'll find a lot of ammunition, especially with the all it's only 18 months away being spoken in like early 2015 or something like laughably. So this is waiting for Godot. It is like the, uh, it's like the proof of stake of Ethereum where it's like, uh, it's software takes a long time to be finished, but lightning has made a lot of consistent progress. It's very slow, but it's consistent. 1:11:57 Uh, I don't think lightning actually will really help for scale because it does nothing for onboarding. You need a layer one transaction. You need a layer, at least one probably almost certainly in practice to, um, layer one transactions to even get onto the lightning network once. And you probably need to get on it a few times and you probably, you know, you need to update the channel balance occasionally. So you probably need like, you know, a few layer one transactions to even use the lightning network. 1:12:24 And already, you know, I don't remember the exact math, but something like with the, with Bitcoin's current block size, it can't onboard. It couldn't even onboard 6 billion people on planet earth if it wanted to in like fewer than like 40 years or something absurd like that. So that's not happening. 1:12:41 Yeah. Um, every payment network has a free layer on top of it called credit. I mean, well, let's just get this out of the way. First of all, BTC is just one Drivechain away from having BSV on top of it. And then your entire argument crumples to pieces, but it may never get it. But there may reach a point where people realize that they actually, they do desire that it may be too late or something. 1:13:05 My whole argument with credit is that that would probably never happen because it could probably never be too late, because the people who own BTC would just, they would do a revolution against the current managers, for lack of a better word, the Vladimir Atomback type people would just be dismissed, no offense to them. And then they would just be, yeah, I'm just saying that it would have tested the small block theory to basically to exhaustion. 1:13:35 And then they would just say, Okay, we have the publicly available UTXO set, everyone has it, we don't have a hard fork, which is hard fork to this, and then it would be a big battle at that point going out. That was my whole conversation with Cray was, I'm sure you want to talk about, but even without Drivechain, and there's other things that were that were long predated, Drivechain that were Drivechain like, some of them sort of got somewhat developed the extension block idea, and other things that are, that are kind of like this, 1:14:05 where there's a BSV block somewhere, and you sort of timestamp it. And then you just net everything out and you and then all the nodes ignore everything that happens in that special zone. Or they try to my point of one of the that's a long time, it's very technical conversation that happened to know a lot about, but probably not in the audience would care at all. So but the point is, you're just like one of those away, or just one credit relationship. I hate the credit, the argument for credit, because it's, 1:14:35 it's a stupid argument that could work on anything. So it doesn't really mean anything in payments land. But the point I'm trying to make is that just one of those things replicates the entire BSV experience on BTC for like, 1:14:50 for free for nothing. So you're so you're kind of like throwing up your arms, all hope is lost. It's like right next to, okay, so I got to you just saying you figured it out before other people did, but once they figure it out, they'll just copy it. 1:15:02 So that last part, I like this is a central, essential disagreement, I think we'll have. So this is a position I used to hold back. So I wrote a book back in 2014, called What's the big deal about Bitcoin, it's like a basic introductory book. And in there, there's a little paragraph, where I essentially make the argument you just made that, well, if, if there are particular technological improvements that are clear, they will help BTC, then the devs will just incorporate them. 1:15:22 And once it's clear, now, I thought that was the case. But I no longer, I no longer think that's the case. Because if I were to look back on that error in my own reasoning, I would say, okay, that was a mistake of the theory for the practice, that it would be clear, in theory, that if there's a superior technology, it will eventually be incorporated into BTC. 1:15:52 But in practice, now you're, now you're dealing with humans who have ego problems, who have information asymmetries, who have lots of biases, who may have questionable relationships with how they get funding, like some of the, like some of the BTC devs, for example, I think are directly profiting from BTC's lack of scaling, because they're offering pseudo sidechain that they skim a little bit of money from. 1:16:16 So you have all kinds of, you have all kinds of real complexities, when you're dealing with the actual, you're talking about actual humans involved, that would, in their judgment, say, okay, now, we now know that the technology needs to be upgraded like this, and we're going to do it, or you're banking on the idea that there's going to be, despite the leadership saying, we're going to have, we're going to go status quo, you're saying there's going to be a rebellion. 1:16:46 Amongst some group of BTC proponents that would say, no, no, we have proof that extension blocks are the way to go, and we're going to do it. 1:16:53 Maybe we're starting it right now. I don't know. 1:16:55 I would love to see it. But I think in practice, because that's sort of happened. I mean, that's sort of what happened with the hard fork, is things got bad enough, where people said, look, we have to just rebel against leadership and do a hard fork. 1:17:07 They weren't that bad, though. Empirically, they, I mean, look at it, look at what happened. 1:17:11 No, I think, look at what happened. I mean, the network failed. You had anti-adoption for the first time. You had the cryptocurrency industry split to a thousand parts. I don't view that as a success. 1:17:22 Yeah, that was bad, but that was the, no, I agree. That's what I'm saying. Look what happened. It was a disaster. The hard fork was a disaster, and now it's hard forked again. It's hard forked a few times, in fact, and now it's going to, BCH is going to hard fork in a major way yet again. 1:17:38 Yeah, I know. I think hard forks are a last resort when leadership has demonstrated that it is not going to upgrade the way that it should. 1:17:49 So if that's correct, though, it seems like that, if your prediction, if part of the reason you're still favorable to BTC is you think that people would either rebel if the devs don't change plan or the devs who are currently in power will actually change their plan or will actually upgrade. 1:18:10 I think that's a very risky argument because we already have evidence that when they had an opportunity to increase the block size by a small amount and keep the cryptocurrency community unified around Bitcoin, and they failed. So I see actual humans… 1:18:26 How would they be unified, though? The small blockers wouldn't have felt unified? 1:18:32 I think they would not have. No, that's a fair point. 1:18:37 Thank you, because Dan Kravitz just said, he just steamrolled over that point and said those are unpersons and straight to the gulags with them. 1:18:47 It's a fair point. And I guess I would say this at the time. 1:18:53 OK, put it this way. There are relevant economic actors and there are non-relevant economic actors. 1:18:58 Sometimes people who are non-relevant economic actors have very loud voices on social media. 1:19:04 And maybe they push their way around a little bit when we saw the failure of SegWit2x and the failure to increase the block size. 1:19:12 So it seems to me that the relevant economic actors would have been unified around BTC had they just increased the block size. 1:19:20 Eight megabytes would have been reasonable, but even something like two megabytes, just to keep the BitPays happy, the Coinbase is happy, the early competent entrepreneurs that were all like lookalikes, we have to increase the block size. 1:19:31 So I see that as a failure of individual people's leadership that they allowed the BCH hard fork to happen and people to rally around alternative chains. 1:19:43 I see that as a failure of the actual individuals involved and that the same individuals that are still in BTC. 1:19:49 I agree with that, but my story is very different, which is weird, even though I mostly agree. 1:19:54 The failure was just the failure to think of the way, except ironically I don't even know if I should even bring all this stuff up because a lot of it is ancient history and I don't know if people would appreciate it. 1:20:05 One thing that was very public is that, see in my view the failure is that there must have been either some way of accommodating everyone. 1:20:18 Both large blockers and small blockers, which is my present day position that I have basically, that's like kind of the Drivechain angle, so a lot of it is designed around that theory. 1:20:35 Either it must be possible to accommodate everyone or it must be possible to prove that we can't accommodate everyone because of some contradiction or something. 1:20:45 That some law of physics makes it impossible for some reason, which I highly doubt. 1:20:50 Again, that's the limits to growth people. Those people are just not creative. They haven't thought it up yet. 1:20:57 So either you can please everyone or you cannot, but if you can't you should be able to prove that you can't and you should be able to prove that one group is better than the other. 1:21:08 One way of doing things is better than the other. It should be some way. 1:21:13 I proposed exactly this way in May 2015, a billion years ago, which is now called the Fork Futures idea. 1:21:24 Instead I gave it a terrible title. I called it the Win-Win Block Size Solution, and it's not even technically accurate because as I say, as I just told you, it really is just a win-lose, but convince everyone. 1:21:39 Losers to fold or something. Fork Futures is a much better phrase. I don't know who came up with that phrase, but I think it was me. It may have been me. I don't even know. 1:21:51 In the past, I bring this up because I was just watching this BCH video. I think I was watching it earlier today. It may have been recorded yesterday. 1:22:01 People critique the Fork Futures idea as having this Keynesian beauty contest problem, but I foresaw that back in May 2015, and I solved it. 1:22:11 Anyone who wants to read the solution, I find I'm a little dismayed sometimes when people from BCH don't know. 1:22:18 I have written two things about it, two big things about how to do the Fork Futures the right way such that you can compare a hypothetical future. 1:22:24 Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is it was a failure to do any of those things was the real failure. 1:22:31 You may be right, but I don't know that and the audience doesn't know that. You may be right about large blocks good, small blocks bad, right? 1:22:44 What I was talking about the failure of leadership in my story is that people just assumed that they were right, both groups. 1:22:56 I think every single person except for me and maybe two other people. 1:23:03 Go to Scaling Bitcoin 2015. 1:23:06 Oh, and then you have to tear out a couple people like Vlad Zamfir and some other crazy people who are just there to pitch some harebrained scheme. 1:23:16 No offense to them, but most of the people at Scaling Bitcoin won September 2015. 1:23:23 They just assumed. They were like, I'm right, and now I have to convince everyone that I'm right about large blocks versus small blocks. 1:23:29 And I'm a large blocker and I'm right, and what a joke that I even have to come in here and explain it to people. 1:23:36 That's like most people are like that, but instead my point of view and the leadership failure in my opinion was that no one figured out a way to build something that worked even if they were wrong, 1:23:50 which is exactly what Drivechain and Fork Futures both wanted to do. 1:23:54 No matter what I think about anything, what would have happened would have worked if those small blockers were right, and it also would have worked if the large blockers were right. 1:24:05 So that is the failure. 1:24:07 That's kind of a lot, but I also want to touch on the non-economically relevant people. 1:24:15 I also have a different view on that, which is, again, the same but different. 1:24:18 Well, let's come back to that because I want to respond to what you just said there about your perception of failure. 1:24:24 And then we're pushing an hour and a half here, so we should probably start winding it down, but I just want to respond to this idea. 1:24:31 So I agree it would have been far superior to have things like extension blocks, which I remember. 1:24:38 I thought that was a really cool idea. 1:24:40 I don't claim to be a technical person, and if I remember correctly, miners were signaling a significant percentage of them for a small amount of time for extension blocks, right? 1:24:48 And the second was ancient history. 1:24:50 Oh, my God. 1:24:52 I don't want to say the wrong person, but I don't want to not give credit. 1:24:56 Also, I think it was Johnson Lau or someone. 1:25:00 At some point, actually, there was an email on BitDev, I think January 2015, that summarized it, and the names are mentioned. 1:25:08 So Adam Back wrote a BitcoinDev email that someone should find. 1:25:15 I think I have it on Drivechain because I've linked to so much corroborating stories at this point somewhere, but Drivechain is now a giant library full of links to everything, so drivechain.info, the site. 1:25:26 But the point is there's this long history, but the point is it culminates in a thought by Adam Back, which was that maybe everyone can get what they want, which that was on the right track. 1:25:42 And then people thought, no, we can't have that because we know that we're right. 1:25:45 So everyone thinks, well, I'll find someone that works for both people. 1:25:49 And then in reality, both the groups hate you because you're disloyal to them and you're only loyal to the truth and the good idea. 1:25:55 So that never works. That's the first and most important lesson in philosophy is that they killed Socrates because they didn't like him. 1:26:01 But then what happened was that issue lay dormant for a while. 1:26:07 And then around much later, long after Scaling 2, like 2016 or something, it resurfaced and it was sort of associated with Purse.io and there was this other thing. 1:26:23 I don't know if you want more history from my vague memories. 1:26:27 The reaction was, again, how dare you? We're never going to let those people get what they want. 1:26:34 So that was like a giant mess. 1:26:36 So I'm glad you brought that up. 1:26:39 And they said, well, put SegWit in the extension block because it doesn't make any difference to us. 1:26:44 They were like, never. 1:26:46 Right. That did seem like a good idea. 1:26:48 I don't know. Maybe I was reading some of your work on it, but it seemed like it was a very reasonable position. 1:26:52 But this is the broader point I want to say, that I don't think most people are playing the rational game. 1:27:03 And I don't think like when you said it's a failure, you need to have proof that your solution is better or that this other solution isn't going to work. 1:27:15 I think that is a bar that cannot be reached because reality is too complex for proofs of such things. 1:27:20 And two, I think that also implies a certain level of thinking, of quality, of methodology, of reasoning that people would be able to recognize a proof if there was such a thing. 1:27:35 So can I just say that when I say proof, I just mean argument or demonstration? 1:27:40 Well, I mean, there's lots and lots of arguments. 1:27:44 When I mean argument, I don't mean a premise. I mean like some kind of thing that persuades people. 1:27:52 Well, so that's a second. So if you analyze the quality of the arguments, that's one thing. 1:27:58 If you analyze its effectiveness for persuasion, that's quite a different thing. 1:28:03 And so something that I've learned, Bitcoin has taught me a bit about people and society and groups. 1:28:10 I think relying on something like consensus or universal proof that we all submit to the truth and can recognize this is a superior versus an inferior argument, I think that's never, ever going to work. 1:28:24 So I actually like the approach that some of the big block Bitcoiners took that said, look, the time for debate is actually over. 1:28:33 It should have been over a few years ago, and now we've got to start building our own thing. 1:28:36 And I'm reminded of an interview that Mike Hearn gave in, I think it was 2015, where he was talking to somebody and he said, 1:28:44 what I wish Gavin would do is revoke the commit access of the small blockers and just push through the block size increase, 1:28:51 because this is how the system was designed. This is how it needs to scale. 1:28:54 And in hindsight now, I think I agree with Mike. 1:28:57 I think the idea that you're going to hold hands and reason through things is very naive. 1:29:01 And I think it's also a weakness because if you have bad actors, even a small amount of bad actors, they can forestall all progress. 1:29:09 I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that. 1:29:12 I think it's impossible. The truth cannot be found by consensus. 1:29:17 So I actually don't – that maybe misunderstood my point. 1:29:21 I don't think that – when I say you should be able to prove that there's no way, 1:29:25 I don't mean like prove to everyone in the world or whatever that would mean. 1:29:30 I don't even know what that would even mean. 1:29:32 I just mean if it's really the case – and furthermore, if it's the case that some people are just trolling and sabotaging the process, 1:29:39 doing like a Polish veto to just like hold out. 1:29:42 They're doing the – this is what's called an economic holdup problem that someone can just say, 1:29:46 well sure, this project is great and it will produce a million dollars of surplus, 1:29:49 but you need my vote in order to do it because you need every vote. 1:29:52 So I want $900,000 right now in cash. 1:29:56 So what do you mean by proof then? Do you mean proof or persuasion? 1:29:59 Well to me, I think that this is a giant – I don't want to go off on this tangent right now because it could be a disaster. 1:30:05 But I think the idea that proof is something special or irrefutable is a misconception driven by mathematicians' egos. 1:30:13 To me, a proof is no different than an argument. 1:30:16 So any proof could be mistaken. 1:30:19 So what's the point of calling it a proof? 1:30:22 Okay, so then what were you looking for when you were saying you were looking for some type of proof? 1:30:26 I mean there were arguments, right? 1:30:28 I said that – well as I presented in September 2015 about the Fork Futures idea, but people were not interested. 1:30:36 But that type of thing would – that is a switch that no individual small blocker or large blocker controls, 1:30:42 and it itself doesn't really know anything about small blockerism or large blockerism or whatever. 1:30:49 But nonetheless, it would tilt one way if small blocks would lead to a higher market price in the future, 1:30:55 and it would tilt another way if large blocks would lead to a higher market price in the future. 1:30:59 So that would be some demonstration that it would – but that's not the point of the earlier argument was to say. 1:31:07 Because remember that's me saying – I was saying before either everyone should be able to get what they want, 1:31:13 or it should be possible to prove that we can't have what we want. 1:31:18 So that part would be easier to say, look, basically some people want X and some people want not X. 1:31:25 That would have been I think easier to demonstrate, although that itself could also have been a mistaken thing. 1:31:29 People for a long time thought this either has to be – one thing is that people thought buildings either had to be made out of heavy building material. 1:31:42 It could either be strong or light, but now we have aluminum and stuff that's lightweight and strong. 1:31:49 Yeah, but you think there could be such a thing as proof that we can't all get what we want? 1:31:56 Well, I think it's theoretically possible that the laws of physics produce that unstoppable barrier, right. 1:32:05 But I actually don't – as you know, because of what I'm doing with Drivechain, 1:32:09 obviously I think that it is possible for people to get what they want. 1:32:12 But my point is that no matter what, there should have been something that could have been done. 1:32:16 So if it really wasn't possible, I was just trying to exhaust the whole space possibility. 1:32:20 So if it really wasn't possible for everyone to get what they want, Drivechain and Accenture blocks, 1:32:26 oh, that's a fraud and that can't work and nothing can work in fact. 1:32:31 And even other things like liquid simulator of a large block in a private consortium doesn't work for some reason. 1:32:39 It doesn't really make any sense to me. 1:32:41 But even if it couldn't work, then you could still – you should be able to do the four futures and say, 1:32:45 look, here's how we will determine what is better by this one metric. 1:32:51 But if that doesn't work, then there should have been some other way. 1:32:54 The point is if it actually makes a difference, if it's going to have some physical effect, 1:32:58 you should be able to – it's not – knowledge about that effect should be possible to create. 1:33:05 It's not like there's some – 1:33:07 Just a couple of things on that. 1:33:09 I do feel like we can't – there's a lot more here that we can discuss for sure. 1:33:12 But on the reliance on the four futures thing, I think that smells a bit of the efficient market hypothesis. 1:33:21 That I think too much weight – yeah. 1:33:24 I think there's too much weight that's put into the uniformity of the distribution of the information in people's minds 1:33:31 to think that people – that the prices would accurately reflect the real world probability of success. 1:33:40 No, the four futures determine the market price of the two coins. 1:33:44 Yeah, so – 1:33:46 So you can buy a fork future for – what happens is – well, in my scheme, it's a little more complicated. 1:33:52 But the basic idea is you have these two – you create these two tokens in pairs today, 1:33:57 and they should trade at whatever – say current Bitcoin price is $10,000, 1:34:02 and they should trade for $10,000. 1:34:05 It should be interchangeable, one Bitcoin for this pair of tokens. 1:34:09 And then after this fork happens, you can redeem the tokens of one kind for only the large block Bitcoin, 1:34:20 or the other tokens only for small block Bitcoin. 1:34:24 And in that way, you should know today exactly what the prices will be in the future. 1:34:28 And you can do this – that was one thing at first. 1:34:31 But obviously, long before May of 2015, I was thinking about this, 1:34:38 because I was like, this would be one-shot kill for the block size debate. 1:34:41 But I was like, this won't work because of this Keynesian beauty contest problem. 1:34:46 And also the problem of – there's a related problem of who gets the ticker and other status quo type things. 1:34:55 So there is a way, actually, of splitting it again. 1:34:58 And splitting it instead of into two tokens, into four tokens. 1:35:04 And some of the other tokens are redeemable. 1:35:07 You make like a grid, and some only are redeemable if certain things happen. 1:35:12 Like the coin is created at all, or the coin exists, or the coin gets the ticker. 1:35:17 And then no matter what happens, the right people who were right about things get paid. 1:35:21 But importantly, with all that's canceled out, and then you can add and divide the right prices, 1:35:28 and you can still get, here's the two prices for the two coins, that everything else being equal, 1:35:35 that only one is large blocker and one is small blocker, and then one number should be higher than the other. 1:35:41 And then I don't know why that wouldn't be convincing to people. 1:35:44 I would actually like to talk about that with you at some point, but I think that would draw us into the woods. 1:35:49 I see potential problems with that. 1:35:53 It's ripe for manipulation, but I don't think we should talk about that in my judgment right now. 1:36:00 I'm going to ask you one more question, and then we can wrap it up. 1:36:04 Which is, it seems that when you are banking on future technology as the rescuing of BTC, 1:36:14 that you are not only making a theoretical and a technical judgment, but you are making a social judgment. 1:36:20 This is the one where my beliefs have been flopped, and I now see the importance of social, 1:36:25 the importance of humans, like individual competence in humans actually matters to the development of Bitcoin. 1:36:31 And you would say that you're confident that the individuals in positions of power right now in BTC 1:36:36 are reasonable enough that they will incorporate something like sidechains, 1:36:44 and that there are enough rebels in BTC that if leadership fails to incorporate things like sidechains, 1:36:52 that they will hard fork away and create their better version of BTC. 1:36:57 Well, what I said in the debate with Craywitz, this goes against, we skipped the point about the cultural parasites I had written down, 1:37:03 but that's not what you wrote, you said something else, I was going to respond with cultural parasites. 1:37:08 But, yeah, the Twitter people who, yeah, well, it's important to just mention that there are a lot of people out there 1:37:15 who are cheerleaders for BTC, but they don't really own a lot of BTC, and they're actually not loyal to BTC at all. 1:37:21 They just want to sell steak dinners and books and things, and that's all a grift. 1:37:26 So, it's unfortunate that most people are not seeing that. 1:37:29 But, this cuts back to your point about social prediction, and what I said in the debate with Craywitz was that 1:37:36 if it were ever the case where the market caps were going to flip, like you wake up one day and BSV is the number one spot in BTC, 1:37:45 and at that point, once something flippens BTC, right, I would presume that probably everything else on CoinMarketCap 1:37:52 is crashing towards zero the next day because it's such a disruptive event. 1:37:55 Maybe not, but that's kind of my lay of the land. 1:37:59 But, my guess is that once that happens, that would dramatically change everyone's willingness to be a rebel versus a loyalist. 1:38:10 It makes perfect sense for most people to just say to themselves, I don't know what Paul is talking about. 1:38:17 I don't know what Steve is talking about. I don't know what Dan Craywitz is talking about. 1:38:20 BTC is number one. It's been doing fine. It's made me a lot of money. 1:38:22 I think that's a very reasonable point of view for people to just be like, it's fine. Everything's fine. 1:38:27 So, it's only when it isn't fine, then they'll get creative really quickly. 1:38:32 The search for new ideas will become frantic, and then they will just either copy the BSV ideas or whatever ideas, 1:38:41 or they'll copy the Drivechain ideas or whatever. So, I don't think it's a big… 1:38:45 I don't think you give much credit. 1:38:47 I'm not giving them any credit. I'm saying even if they're incompetent and they screw everything up. 1:38:52 Still, the process will recover. Different people will show up. 1:38:55 Well, that's the part I'm not sure. So, this is interesting. So, you think it's more likely… 1:38:59 I'm not giving them any credit at all. 1:39:01 You think it's more likely that, let's say, a failed BTC is going to spawn the right people rebelling in BTC 1:39:09 than those types of people already having left and formed their own coin. 1:39:15 If there are the rebellious spirits who maybe start to think small blocks aren't going to work, 1:39:21 and maybe Drivechain or lightning, none of these things are going to work, 1:39:25 why wouldn't they just trade in their BTC beforehand, get more BSV or BCH, and start working there? 1:39:36 Well, it's unclear, but I think there's something to be said for all these… 1:39:41 You have all these passive investors, these lay people, who I think have shown up and they bought into BTC. 1:39:48 And so, would you want to take all those people with you? 1:39:51 And so, would you want to take all those people with you, is the question. 1:39:52 How big is… How important is teamwork in having a big coalition? 1:39:57 I think BTC demonstrates that those people will show up when the time is right. 1:40:05 So, I don't think we have to focus on mindless investors that are throwing their money at meaningless ICO projects and have no idea what they're talking about. 1:40:13 I think if you actually build a valuable product, eventually they'll come on board. 1:40:20 Yeah, but you see, you can also take the logic one step further, which is that if people believe that BTC would copy or has the ability to intellectually appreciate and copy the new ideas, 1:40:33 they would say, why would they ever invest in BSV, BCH in the first place? 1:40:39 So, that logic can kind of keep going back and forth in a zigzag. 1:40:43 I didn't understand that part. So, if they see the value of the ideas, why wouldn't they just hop over to BSV? 1:40:52 One risk is that someone could make BSV squared. This has already happened. BSV is basically BCH squared or something. 1:40:59 It's the new feature split off function just applied again. So, there could be a risk that this just fans out into a nothingness. 1:41:10 Well, that's a theoretical risk, but when you actually look at the BSV community, they are very focused on the culture of not splitting, and that's something unique. 1:41:21 It's difficult, though. Anyone can join the BSV community and split tomorrow. I think it's not unique at all because when people split, when people first split, everything is fine because they're the underdog and the community is new and everyone's excited. 1:41:34 But then when the going gets tough, that is when it's truly tested for the first time. We haven't seen any of that yet in BSV. 1:41:43 You don't think there's something to be said that in BCH, you have two big block Bitcoins and one of them, the culture is an expectation of hard forks every six months and the other is that the protocol is set in stone. 1:41:54 You don't think that's relevant? You don't think that's going to last? 1:41:59 The BCH hard fork every six months is not intended to split the network in two every six months. I agree with you that it's frivolous and it's a bad idea. 1:42:13 Well, it depends because Monero does it to success as well as a couple of other places, SiaCoin, I think they also do it to some success because it is certainly much more convenient for software development to be able to hard fork every six months for what that's worth. 1:42:29 BSV supposedly already hard forked their block size from 128 megabytes, as someone told me on Twitter two days ago, to unlimited in February, which must be a hard fork. 1:42:43 At least by someone's admission. 1:42:46 The story is and the narrative they tell in BSV is that that was what they call the Genesis upgrade. And from that point, they were supposed to take off all of the artificial constraints on the protocol and then keep it in stone. 1:43:03 But don't you understand what I'm saying? It's only been seven months since the last hard fork and they say, well, everything's perfect. We nailed it. We nailed it this time. Well, maybe they did. I don't know. 1:43:12 But we have to wait until the going gets tough and see how many people really stick it out. And that is one of these core benefits of BSC. I think you would agree that there are people there who just they want to stay unified and they want to stay committed to. 1:43:29 They know it's not perfect, but they want to stay in one coin and not split off. And these splits are humiliating. 1:43:40 Yeah, the BSV people definitely oversell the degree to which they claim the protocol is locked down, like in this in this numpty show we're doing regularly. Criticize that a lot. Technically, I think you can lock the protocol down. 1:43:54 Of course it doesn't make any sense because anyone in the protocol could leave and that could be construed as a hard fork. 1:44:00 What matters is majority hash rate. When you're looking at the network is that which is the longest, the chain with the most accumulated proof of work. 1:44:09 I think I understand what you mean, but I just have to point out that, you know, BCH, that was a split from BTC and it didn't have a majority hash rate. And then BSV was a split from BCH and it doesn't have majority hash rate. So it's the whole thing is like a giant circus. 1:44:24 Nobody in BSV is going to make the argument that nobody will fork BSV. Of course, there's literally nothing. 1:44:32 Yeah, that's kind of what I mean, though, is that some of the community will leave. Eventually you have this. You're wrong to a problem. This is my prediction. I may be wrong. So this would be great because I could be proven wrong. Someone could cut this clip or whatever. 1:44:45 And even better, you could make prediction markets today on whether or not this will happen. You can make futures markets on if this happens and you can bet on it. And if the price is very different than what I expect, then I'd either have to be putting up my own money or I would have to change my mind, which I often do. 1:45:00 I am very loyal to the prediction market prices and I don't believe in any kind of manipulation. Those arguments are the same arguments people make against witchcraft and other kinds of stuff. That's just ignorance of what's going on. So I'm a big loyalist. So you can prove me wrong in the future or tomorrow by making good futures markets. 1:45:21 But the prediction is that eventually there'll be some kind of disagreement over something. One that we can see like a mile off. How can you miss it? Is this mysterious plan to assign CSW what someone thinks are Satoshi's million coins based on a court order from whatever, you know, Antigua or whatever the heck is going on. Like, who knows? 1:45:49 So that will show up and people will disagree about it and then there'll be a split. But it doesn't have to be that. It could be anything. 1:45:57 Well, that's actually, I think, the biggest one by far. If I have any criticism specifically, I'd be asking. 1:46:03 As soon as once we're in the future, this is the exact same logic as the limits to growth people, but in reverse. Soon as you get into the future, new problems will be foreseeable. They grow up like little weeds. 1:46:14 Yes, it is a problem to equate all forks the same. I mean, or all splits the same. I don't think it is a valid point even to point out that open source software can be forked. Like, yes, that is part of the dynamics. However, the claim is that it matters what type of culture you have and how open they are to the idea of splitting the network. 1:46:42 And the more protocol changes you're making, the more likely it is that there's going to be at some point some network split. So my point is to say it's actually very valuable, I think, because the culture actually matters. 1:46:56 I think it's very valuable to have as part of your founding ethos, even if it's mythological here, that we've locked down the protocol, we found the concoction that's going to work, it's not going to change, none of the apps that you build on this are ever going to be broken. 1:47:13 Whether or not that's literally true is an interesting question. But I think that is important from a cultural standpoint. And so that's why I think that's one of the reasons I think BSV has a better real world shot than BCH does, because BCH does not have that approach. 1:47:30 Their culture, the people leading the project, many of them at least, are like, well, we'll make the changes we have to make. We'll increase the block size when we think there's appropriate network activity. But it'll be a decision that we make when the time is right. I just see that as a problem because culture does matter. 1:47:47 I think culture does matter. It's the most important thing ever. The blockchain is even a kind of culture in a way because it's a piece of knowledge that causes people to behave similarly. So it is almost some culture. But I think the idea that because BCH, the problem isn't that BCH hard forks every six months, I think. 1:48:12 The problem is that it was born of hard fork. And the hard forkers, the dissenters, is a community of the disloyal. It's the town of thieves. 1:48:22 What would the alternative have been given the… 1:48:25 I agree with you. As you saw, when I was talking with Dan Kravitz, I used the Snowpiercer analogy, which is that the alternative is to just suck it up and live on the train until you think of a better plan. I said, don't leave the train without a plan. That was what I was trying to tell him. Don't just say it sucks here, I'm going to leave and then die immediately. 1:48:45 Well, first of all, the big block Bitcoin hasn't died. Second of all, they do have plans. But importantly… 1:48:51 But don't you think it's sad? The relative performance is sad. 1:48:54 Don't you think that if you're an entrepreneur who's actually using Bitcoin, you have to switch? Like if you are a payment processor or you are somebody like you're trying to do a Twitch or a StreamAnity, one of these things that use small… 1:49:11 If you stay on the train, you're dead. You must have an alternative. Yours.org was another one. So what do you do then? 1:49:18 Spoiler alert, they all die on the train anyway. But it doesn't mean it was a good idea to leave the train. 1:49:25 What's the alternative? From an entrepreneur who's using Bitcoin for low fee transactions, what do you do? And if you're stuck in BTC in 2016, 2017? 1:49:35 I think you do move, but I don't think that makes a difference to my argument. I want to reply to what you said, but we have actually now threaded it a little bit more. 1:49:44 Because I wanted to go back, because you were saying, I was saying it doesn't matter that it's a hard fork except it's six months and it's born of the hard fork. 1:49:52 And then you were saying, and we already mentioned this actually, we talked about this earlier where you said that the culture makes a difference of not making any changes. 1:50:01 But that's the BTC small block argument, is that you don't make the change. Keep it exactly as it was. 1:50:07 The BSV argument has an addendum. It's don't make any changes so long as the base protocol can scale such that you maintain low transaction fees. 1:50:16 I know, but that's the thing is everyone wants to say it's perfect except for this one thing and we'll just hard fork and then it'll be perfect. 1:50:23 That is not one thing. That is the founding technical parameter that in Satoshi's design was supposed to be grown. 1:50:34 I think that's sort of true, but I also think that it's not really, I think it's completely possible that it wouldn't be necessary to increase the block size at all from where it is. 1:50:51 Since that's possible, then why bother? 1:51:00 So to you, I haven't seen, what was it called? Snow? 1:51:03 Oh my God, no one has seen it. It's terrible. It's a perfect analogy. It really gives you guys a lot of credit. 1:51:08 That's the whole point of the analogy is to give you guys credit because the train is like a dictatorship run by like insane people. 1:51:15 But you have to stay on the train because the temperature outside is like negative 170 degrees because of a failed global warming experiment. 1:51:22 What was it called? Snow? 1:51:24 Snowpiercer. It's funny because Adam Beck has tweeted about Snowpiercer like 5,000 times, so I just assumed everyone had seen it. 1:51:31 I'm generally uncultured, I think it's a safe bet. So to use that analogy, there were lots of people on the train and maybe in theory they could have had a resolution of extension blocks. 1:51:50 But given the fact that – 1:51:52 Yeah, I agree with you. 1:51:54 Okay, I want to answer your question. 1:51:56 It's valuable to say actually they haven't died. 1:51:59 I agree, but you understand my point of view is that the hard fork is not – as far as I'm concerned, it's giving up and committing suicide immediately because you can always hard fork for a million times to do whatever you like, but it doesn't matter. 1:52:15 So the whole point of the blockchain is to keep everyone on the one blockchain. 1:52:18 So to answer your question, what people should have done is all those people, including the exchanges and everything, these people with a lot of money, they should have formed some kind of group. 1:52:32 They should have played with scaling Bitcoin and sent delegates or whatever. They should have negotiated, but they also should have formed their own group that is the group for large blocks, but it has to have – as an essential founding concept, it has to say whatever the small blockers want, we'll also give it to them as long as it's not totally off the rails. 1:53:00 But you understand what I mean about this before letting people get what they want. 1:53:04 Small blockers already know. Small blockers already had what they wanted, which was small blocks. 1:53:10 So their negotiating position was terrible, and their only option was the hard fork, which I thought was a terrible option. 1:53:16 And in practice, I think probably – I don't know if I'm right about this, but I would guess most BCH people would agree that actually hard forks aren't so great and that maybe it hasn't gone as well as they thought it might. 1:53:30 But what they could have done instead was say, do some kind of research position and research all of the ideas for how to – I'm glad you brought up SegWit2x because this will feed into it perfectly. 1:53:44 Search for ideas as to how to get what they want, which they thought was large blocks, but could probably have been something, a large extension block, or it could have been massaged into something else. 1:53:58 And then they could have gotten that. 1:54:00 And the big mystery with SegWit2x is why it was a hard fork at all because with 83 percent of the hash rate, it could have been a soft fork. 1:54:08 And then it would have been guaranteed to succeed, and there would have been basically nothing. 1:54:13 It's difficult to say because it actually becomes extremely complicated. 1:54:17 But my guess is that there would have been really nothing that the small blockers could have done about the soft fork SegWit2x extension block other than to themselves hard fork the network by trying to UASF block it or something. 1:54:32 But that would have put them on the minority non-status quo network. 1:54:36 So your recommendation is – 1:54:37 And then the whole situation would have been reversed. 1:54:40 They should have had a research committee? That's the solution? 1:54:43 Well, they failed to discover these other ideas. 1:54:45 Some of which were published on – as I mentioned before, I had them back on the damaged mailing list, these other ideas for getting what they want. 1:54:53 Every big blocker who was around at the time that I have spoken with was in favor of extension blocks, think it's a fine idea. 1:54:59 Even Roger Ver didn't jump onto BCH until SegWit2x failed. Nobody wanted that. 1:55:06 But this is the problem though, which is that they – that's the problem with SegWit2x is that it was a hard fork. 1:55:13 Okay, so what was the way then for people who needed big blocks immediately to have – or I should say people who needed low transaction fees immediately. 1:55:23 What were they supposed to do? 1:55:24 Well, it's not always possible with the laws of physics to construct something immediately. 1:55:29 It's no matter what knowledge or skills or wealth you obtain. 1:55:32 That's irrelevant. 1:55:33 You can't always get what you want immediately. 1:55:35 Okay, but BCH wasn't that. 1:55:38 Okay, so you have a business that is – wait, wait. 1:55:41 I'm sorry, Paul. 1:55:42 If you have a business that is based on the existence of Bitcoin having low transaction fees, you can either fork, use another coin, or die. 1:55:54 That's it. 1:55:55 Well, certainly if they – when you start a business, you plan for the future presumably. 1:56:00 And if you can't – if your plans don't work out, then you die. 1:56:03 So if they really couldn't foresee that they would have this problem years in advance, which in practice they did… 1:56:10 They foresaw it. 1:56:12 Absolutely, they should die. 1:56:14 Okay, so you think they should say, you know what? 1:56:17 Pure incompetence. 1:56:18 Better that I just – my business shuts down and I completely die than I risk forking myself off the network. 1:56:26 The real world didn't happen that way at all though. 1:56:29 In the real world, all those people, BitPay and whatever, they knew about the problem years in advance, and they engaged with discussions about the problem. 1:56:36 They did the research, and then they were steamrolled. 1:56:38 Well, they didn't – their research wasn't very good, was it? 1:56:42 What do you mean it wasn't good? It was perfectly fine. 1:56:45 I don't understand what you don't understand. 1:56:46 If they had just done one thing instead of another thing, there would have been no hard fork, and they would have won easily. 1:56:51 With 83% of the hash rate, there would have been no contest. 1:56:54 The businesses or the miners? 1:56:56 It doesn't make any difference because SegWit2x was a big consortium of all of them. 1:56:59 Yes, that is the only thing that matters. 1:57:01 What the miners did is the reason that SegWit2x failed. 1:57:05 It had nothing to do with the businesses. 1:57:07 The miners did not run the software, and so we didn't get SegWit2x. 1:57:11 No, are you listening to what I'm saying? 1:57:13 You're not listening to what I'm saying. 1:57:16 Okay, I'm missing something. 1:57:18 Yes, you are. 1:57:19 The SegWit2x could have been melted down as an idea, abandoned, but recast as a soft fork instead of a hard fork. 1:57:26 It would have had basically the same effect with a couple of – there would have been some changes about SPV wallets and things. 1:57:35 There would have been some differences, but you could have written software to make it look as though it was exactly the same proposal. 1:57:42 Okay. 1:57:43 As a soft fork instead of a hard fork. 1:57:45 Instead, they insisted it was a hard fork. 1:57:47 So that is why they needed permission. 1:57:50 Okay, so – 1:57:52 They didn't get permission, they lost. 1:57:54 Let me make it easy for you. 1:57:56 A soft fork wins every time. 1:57:58 With a hard fork, you could win, you could lose. 1:58:01 Okay, so – 1:58:02 But why would go with a hard fork? 1:58:04 In the world, the fact is that there's a lot of social dynamics. 1:58:10 And for businesses that have already agreed, okay, this is a plausible way to get to double our network capacity immediately. 1:58:18 We have near universal industry agreement. 1:58:21 We have the majority of miners supporting it. 1:58:23 Why would you then think, oh, yes, there is a theoretical problem here, though, blah, blah, blah. 1:58:28 So now we're going to actually change our plan and go with putting extension blocks into a soft fork. 1:58:34 I mean, that's like – 1:58:35 I can think of a lot of reasons. 1:58:36 One reason is that it was very obvious to anyone paying attention to the culture that most people, most of the people in the technical community, 1:58:45 there was even that Wikipedia page, which I'm even on, of all the people against SegWit2x, which is a giant list of people. 1:58:52 But generally non-relevant economic actors, right? 1:58:57 Another thing – no, I don't think so at all, because some of the fanatics who support Bitcoin and technologists who work on Bitcoin may contribute greatly to its future success or failure. 1:59:10 So I don't think it's – 1:59:11 Wait, because they might be irrelevant economic actors because of their potential future contributions? 1:59:16 I'll give you an easy way of understanding it. 1:59:19 Anyone can – once a business model is known, anyone can recreate it, right? 1:59:25 What do you mean recreate it? 1:59:26 Like once you have BitPay, if BitPay – just everyone on BitPay is in the same bus and it's struck by a meteor, that's the end of BitPay. 1:59:34 But it's not like someone else would just pick up where they left off. 1:59:38 They start a new company. 1:59:39 No. 1:59:40 Sorry? 1:59:41 No. 1:59:42 No, I mean that's not how – 1:59:43 If they make money, then people would, yes. 1:59:46 It either makes money or it doesn't. 1:59:47 And at a very, very, very abstract level, I mean BitPay is an entity that has specific connections, has a specific relationship with banks. 1:59:57 Sure. Oh, I agree with that. 1:59:58 So you can't just pick up where they left off. 2:00:00 Oh, I agree that it would take some time. 2:00:03 And they might be incompetent in doing it. 2:00:05 They could be more competent, right? 2:00:08 They could be, sure. 2:00:09 So no, I would disagree that you just pick up where people left off. 2:00:15 Well, I don't say immediately, but I say that in general. 2:00:17 Or in the long run. 2:00:19 Really? You don't think so? 2:00:20 I have no idea. 2:00:21 Think of Mt. Gox and the first Bitcoin exchange. 2:00:24 And he's got – there's like millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of throughput. 2:00:30 Or Silk Road is an even better example where the profits alone were in the millions. 2:00:35 The revenue was like hundreds of millions of dollars, even back in 2012. 2:00:40 I guess maybe I don't understand what you're saying, pick up. 2:00:42 Are there other payment processors? 2:00:45 Yes, there are other payment processors. 2:00:47 No, I'm saying – let's say Silk Road exists. 2:00:49 Silk Road is shut down. 2:00:50 What happens? 2:00:51 There's more Silk Roads the next day. 2:00:52 Or not the next day, but the next six months. 2:00:55 Okay. 2:00:56 Yes, and then when these other ones are shut down, then new ones pop up. 2:01:00 Because it's an idea that makes money. 2:01:03 That's simple enough, right? 2:01:05 Yeah, so when there's a demand for something, usually entrepreneurs try to fill the demand. 2:01:10 Exactly right. 2:01:11 Especially if they know how, because they just saw a business doing it. 2:01:14 It's a little more complex than that, but okay. 2:01:18 It wasn't BitPay's fault that they were struck by a meteor. 2:01:20 And plus, once they are, all they have to do is email people and say, look, I want to start what BitPay was doing. 2:01:24 Can you give me some idea of what they were doing with you? 2:01:26 I'd like to have the same relationship with you. 2:01:28 They probably would find it much easier than starting from scratch. 2:01:32 So that's what I'm trying to say. 2:01:34 Do you understand that so far? 2:01:36 I understand it. 2:01:37 I think it's very low resolution, but continue. 2:01:40 You can't as easily replace a lot of the people who are extremely technical in Bitcoin because it requires a huge amount of investment. 2:01:49 Oh, I completely disagree with that. 2:01:50 No, I think the focus on technical expertise is a problem with cryptocurrency in general. 2:01:58 This is your opinion, but I'm just trying to give you an idea of why they should have been alerted. 2:02:03 It's on them. 2:02:04 If they really wanted to SegWit2x to succeed, they need to know all of the factors that would have led to success or failure. 2:02:10 Yes, and the agreement. 2:02:12 The fact that they didn't know is just more evidence. 2:02:15 Have you been talking to them, Paul? 2:02:17 They were quite aware of a lot of the problems with the technical community, the incredible myopia. 2:02:25 You're saying how they have known to do more research. 2:02:30 That's what you just said to me. 2:02:31 No, I'm not. 2:02:32 I'm saying I completely disagree that what was needed was more research. 2:02:36 I'm saying they needed to abandon the foolish anti-business people who thought themselves technically wise years earlier because it was set in. 2:02:44 The pattern was that these people are not who we want leading a project, and they're not going to scale it as we've seen. 2:02:52 Didn't you just tell me before that this problem showed up immediately, and there's no time to react to it, and it's either die or fork, and we have to decide in 43 seconds? 2:03:01 No, that was not how I framed it. 2:03:03 No, the problem was around for a long time. 2:03:06 Yes, it was. 2:03:07 It became very clear that the BTC people were not competent or they were not trustworthy. 2:03:13 They didn't understand business. 2:03:14 There was some bad mix of leadership qualities there where they had to eventually make the decision to pull the trigger and say, we have to fork because we don't have any other options. 2:03:23 It wasn't something that sprang up on them after a minute. 2:03:26 Again, no, but this is – well, that's what you were just telling me. 2:03:28 You were using this line against me that they can't do any prep work at all and that they have to, but it doesn't matter. 2:03:33 I never said I don't. 2:03:34 Yes, you absolutely did. 2:03:35 You said they have to something or die. 2:03:37 That was what you were saying, fork or die. 2:03:39 Yes, that's important. 2:03:41 If you have cancer and it's pancreatic cancer and somebody says you have two years, if you don't do anything, you're going to die. 2:03:48 That doesn't mean it's an immediate decision you're going to make. 2:03:50 Well, that's all I was trying to say is that two years is plenty of time for them to discover the anti-cancer treatment. 2:03:55 Yes, which is why they eventually had the hard fork. 2:03:58 No, they didn't die. 2:03:59 Why do you think – BCH is more accepted than any other cryptocurrency on planet Earth in terms of businesses. 2:04:06 It's not dead, nor is BSV. 2:04:09 It's underperformed as an investment, and it's going to be forked. 2:04:12 On one current metric, yes, the price is lower than BTC. 2:04:15 You can't say it's dead because the current market price is low. 2:04:20 I don't know. 2:04:21 I kind of think that I – well, I guess I can't, but that's kind of my personal opinion is that if – what should – by what justification do you give? 2:04:31 When these people are onboarded to BCH, they may as well be onboarded to every other cryptocurrency because most of them have much more in common than they – the difference between fiat and crypto is very different, vast difference. 2:04:47 But once you have crypto, it's like QR code, private key. 2:04:52 If BTC's fees – imagine somehow BTC tomorrow hard forked the block size to a trillion gigabytes or something, silly like that. 2:05:00 There's nothing stopping all those merchants from just adding BTC support. So how does merchant onboarding move the needle at all? 2:05:08 You have to onboard people to BCH in a way that they can only accept BCH. I mean if you figure out a way of doing that, then I'll join the BCH community. 2:05:18 Absolutely. 2:05:19 I mean that's not correct. So the value – part of the value of a currency comes from your belief in your ability to use it as a medium of exchange. 2:05:28 And one part of that calculation is where the currency is accepted. So if I don't – 2:05:33 I agree. 2:05:34 Yeah. So in a very straightforward way, that's where – 2:05:38 It's very superficial to just take a snapshot of today and say who accepts it today. Once the work has been done, anyone – like in the future, there might as well be some kind of – it'd be BitPay or the Jaxx wallet or something where they can accept any crypto. 2:05:55 And then there's no significant basis that doesn't discriminate between BCH and BTC. 2:06:01 I mean one would cost a lot to use and the other one would be cheap. 2:06:07 Maybe one has BCH mainnet and the other has BTC. One that can accept any of BTC layer 1, BTC, the BCH Drivechain on BTC, the Lightning Network, whatever. 2:06:18 And so then it won't – the cost – there's no argument for the cost being different or lower. 2:06:25 The one that is used as a medium of exchange is the one that is more likely to become something like a store of value in the long run. So that would be – 2:06:34 I don't buy into this. I think the medium of exchange, store of value, that whole thing is a big confusion. I don't even know at this point if I have the rhetorical skill to untangle everyone, everyone, everywhere in BTC, BCH. It's hopelessly confusing. 2:06:49 Okay. Well, we don't have to use those words. 2:06:51 If you could say method of payment, I would agree with you. 2:06:56 Okay. 2:06:57 Or I can use it onto a road or whatever. 2:07:01 Sure. Let's use that language. 2:07:03 Because no one else has used that phrase, so it's a virgin phrase. 2:07:07 Sure. I'm fine with that. So the cryptocurrencies that are more used as a method of payment are ones that are likely to have more value relative to other cryptocurrencies. 2:07:20 So an essential part of that is the fact that they are accepted. Now, it's not the only part. It's not, hey, this coin is accepted, but nobody uses it. 2:07:27 Well, that doesn't mean you have a valuable coin, but it's a necessary component to it. 2:07:32 But you do understand that no one is buying any cryptocurrency today based on the method of payment today. 2:07:40 Everyone imagines a future where it will be different. 2:07:43 Yeah. I wouldn't use the language of everybody. That's definitely incorrect. 2:07:47 But I think the majority of speculation in cryptocurrency is about expected future usage. 2:07:52 Yes, exactly. The game is about in the future, will everyone be accepting it in their store? 2:07:58 Yeah. So one metric that you would use to see are things trending the right direction for cryptocurrency is acceptance. 2:08:07 If it's a marathon, though, some guy can sprint out at front and that doesn't mean they'll win. 2:08:12 Of course. I mean, it could be that BTC has a change of leadership or they're struck on the road to Damascus and they increased the block size. 2:08:21 Like, of course, that is definitely a possibility. 2:08:23 But the point of bringing that up was actually just to say it is completely incorrect to say that BCH or BSV are dead. 2:08:30 They jumped off the thing. They're not dead by one particular metric. 2:08:34 They are valued less than BTC. 2:08:37 OK, that's fine. I was just being maybe a little exaggerated. 2:08:41 Now I can't even remember where that thread. Where did that thread come from? 2:08:44 Well, we were talking about a lot of things, but you've been very generous with your time. 2:08:49 We've now passed the two hour mark. I think this has been an awesome conversation. 2:08:53 Lots of other things that I feel like we could discuss, but we should probably wind it down. 2:08:58 Anything else you want to you want to mention or throw out there? 2:09:04 Well, I'd like to recapture the last thread and figure out where it was, but I don't know where it is now. 2:09:09 But I would like to emphasize more that the cultural parasite point that there are a lot of people in BTC who are. 2:09:17 They are. They're like war profiteers or something. 2:09:21 I don't know the right metaphor, but they are. 2:09:24 They kind of are. They're like the raven in an animal farm where they trick all the animals into being obedient slaves. 2:09:32 Yeah. And in return, Mr. Jones gives him bread or something. 2:09:36 And it's they're like, you know, the raven is like a priest or something where they tell these people, you're going to reach the promised land. 2:09:44 And everything. Yeah. And there's no reason. No. 2:09:47 Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But that doesn't mean that anything is wrong with BTC. 2:09:52 That just means those people are deluded. Yeah. 2:09:56 There's one other thing I have to say. Yeah, please. 2:09:58 That in all the years I've seen Bitcoin, there has been this persistent delusion. 2:10:05 People show up to Bitcoin and they think all Bitcoin needs is this one thing for me to be perfect. 2:10:10 And this is the John Seth meme. I just heard about Bitcoin and now I can fix it or something. 2:10:18 I can't remember the meme. It's terrible, but you can look it up. 2:10:21 I just heard about Bitcoin. And how does it go? 2:10:25 I'm going to fix it, I think. That's how it goes. It's like Birdman or something. 2:10:29 And this is a very dangerous and a very attractive delusion. 2:10:34 And it's possible that I'm under the delusion with Drivechain. 2:10:37 I've tried to be pretty chill about Drivechain. So actually, I hope that most people wouldn't be too upset about that angle. 2:10:45 But I do think that this is something that happens for some reason. 2:10:49 Bitcoin gets under people's skin and they think Bitcoin is so great and I want to be part of it because. 2:10:55 The raven told me so. 2:10:57 I want to feel this is different from the first cultural parasite point. 2:11:03 This is like people want to feel like they contributed to Bitcoin and then they feel like they Bitcoin is part of them and that there are some kind of crusading philosophy. 2:11:14 But it's more that it's like people need to have one of their ideas in Bitcoin. 2:11:18 They feel this compulsive need. And I worry that first of all, I worry that Drivechain is such a thing for myself. 2:11:25 But certainly I worry that everyone, most of what everyone says or does everywhere on Bitcoin is just this delusion. 2:11:33 And that actually Bitcoin doesn't need SegWit. It doesn't need a block size increase. 2:11:38 It doesn't need Satoshi's vision. It doesn't need anything. 2:11:42 And I think most of these things are delusion. 2:11:44 And the fact that some people got some of what they wanted some of the time and others didn't. 2:11:50 It's really this kind of drama that plays out that it's mostly cosmetic and has no relevance at all. 2:11:55 So I would just ask people to if I could get people out there to to think about something, I would like them to think about that. 2:12:02 Is all of this just a delusion, this delusion that you need? 2:12:07 Bitcoin couldn't possibly succeed without my great idea. 2:12:11 That for some reason, this just every single almost everyone who encounters Bitcoin feels the need to do this type of thing. 2:12:18 So that's one that's one little pet idea that I'm bouncing around. 2:12:23 Potentially all delusion. 2:12:26 One thought on that. I think you're actually right in your particular delusion. 2:12:30 I think it's important for people to recognize the feasibility of the coin. 2:12:34 If they're imagining something like a digital cash system and if you have small blocks, you're presented with a problem you must resolve, which is how do you scale or do you scale? 2:12:44 There's a there's another position here, which I think is a respectable position that, you know, you could be content with Bitcoin not scaling. 2:12:49 It's like it's the bunker coin and not everybody's going to be using it. 2:12:53 And that's OK. I think that's a I think that's a reasonable philosophy one could take. 2:12:57 But if you're trying to achieve something bigger than that, then you have to have you have to you're forced into some layer to theory. 2:13:06 And if you look at a lightning network, I think that's not going to be the thing that's going to bring scaling. 2:13:11 And so in my opinion, it looks like there's one good idea left other than a block size increase that could save Bitcoin. 2:13:18 And it's what you're working on. You're you're in a weird position, though, because this is actually mimicked in philosophy a lot. 2:13:25 You're in a weird position because it's probably wise to have the method of thinking, which where you go, OK, now, if I'm concluding my ideas are the ones that are necessary. 2:13:34 That's probably a mistake. Like that's a healthy methodology. 2:13:37 Same thing happens in philosophy when you go, you know, I think I actually solve this philosophical problem. 2:13:41 But you might have, you know, you might have. And, you know, in this case, I think it's important. 2:13:47 But that's I think that's a great note to end on. And maybe we'll be able to do this again. 2:13:50 I think there's a lot more we can do here. All right. Great. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks, Paul.