0:00 Think about it. You got, you got five seconds to think about something to say. 0:04 It's block time. This is Michael Tidwell. 0:08 And this is Michael B. Casey. 0:10 And our blocks are? 0:11 Overrated. 0:13 There we go. And today we have Paul Sztorc. 0:18 No one knows. 0:19 Sztorc. 0:19 With storks. 0:21 Yeah, well it's storts, but it's really whatever you want. 0:25 I'm at this point. I'm over it. 0:28 I'm over it. 0:29 I think there's five different ways I said it initially. 0:32 Shorts, sporks, storts. 0:34 Yeah, well if you care, in Polish, the crescent shape is a different letter. 0:38 It's not the letter C. It's a completely different letter. 0:40 It's pronounced T-S, so it's storts. 0:44 Polish has more than 26 letters, and there's a different one for C, so. 0:48 Ah, so they're like base, like 32? 0:51 Something like, yeah, 32. 0:53 Okay, so, Paul, let's hear a little bit of a background of, 0:59 let's get to know who is Paul Sztorc. 1:02 Who is Paul? I don't know myself. 1:04 Maybe we'll all get to know. 1:06 I mean, so, my journey to Bitcoin intersects with this 1:10 prediction market stuff that I discovered when I was like 16 or 17 years old 1:16 on Robin Hanson's website, overcomingbias.com. 1:20 And it really did seem like Robin Hanson had, 1:23 and it still seems that way today, but it seemed at the time especially, 1:26 that he really had all the answers to all of life's big questions. 1:30 And he had this idea of the prediction market that could do a lot of heavy lifting, 1:37 solve a lot of really serious problems without a lot of kind of BS, 1:40 or just people who are just pretending to solve problems to look good, 1:42 and stuff like that. 1:44 And so I was really interested in prediction markets a long time ago. 1:47 And then I got, that was a totally separate kind of track of my life. 1:51 And then in school, I studied a lot of statistics and how to measure things. 1:55 And I majored in economics, among other things. 1:59 And you have to take a course in kind of statistical modeling, 2:03 which later, that's like a different track of my life. 2:06 But then while I was in graduate school, I got this email about Bitcoin. 2:11 And I thought, of course, I thought it was the stupidest thing in the world. 2:13 What year was this? 2:15 2011. 2:17 Also, what degrees were you pursuing? 2:19 And what do you have? 2:21 Yeah, I have a double major. 2:23 So I have two, I have a major, I have a Bachelor of Arts in econ, 2:27 a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, which I got at the same time. 2:30 So it wasn't that much more work. 2:31 And I minored in math and music. 2:35 And then I got in graduate school, I got a master's of science 2:38 in operations research, which is like a branch of applied math, 2:42 like business statistics or something. 2:45 And I also have an MBA in finance, believe it or not. 2:47 And then I went from there, after I worked in consulting for a little while, 2:52 like a year in two different operations and finance for health care IT. 2:57 After that, I joined as like a member of staff, the Yale Research Department, 3:03 specifically the economics department. 3:06 And I worked there kind of doing pretty serious research 3:09 for like two and a half years. 3:11 So where did you get your MBA? 3:12 Which you studied. 3:14 For the research. 3:16 What did you mean? 3:17 Was it Yale? 3:18 Yeah. 3:19 It was all econ, and it was all statistics. 3:21 Specific stuff was like a lot of, it was sort of very macro, actually. 3:27 It really had nothing to do with what Bitcoin, what Bitcoin is. 3:31 So you're like an expert on the Fed. 3:33 Well, the guy I worked for was actually chairman of the Boston Fed, 3:37 or a chairman of the Boston Fed. 3:40 And he was also the guy who inherited Paul Samuelson's famous econ textbook. 3:46 He is like the famous textbook guy. 3:49 And this guy, Bill Nordhaus, inherited. 3:52 He's actually a really, really super smart, super nice guy, 3:56 and huge, tremendous achievements, really. 4:00 So he's like kind of an awesome guy. 4:02 Cool. 4:02 So you heard about Bitcoin. 4:04 Yeah, I heard about it in 2011, and I thought it was incredibly stupid. 4:09 And then later on, it wasn't until the Wired Silk Road article came out. 4:14 And I was just imagining how desperate drug dealers 4:17 are to steal money or anything. 4:20 If you're really addicted, those are people who, if there's an easy way, 4:24 if there's a way to cheat the system, they'll 4:26 find it, because they need to get whatever, cocaine or whatever it is, 4:31 heroin. 4:32 So I was like, if this store is working for these type of people, 4:38 this thing must be rock solid if it's working for this type of. 4:42 It's like the sewer rat type of thing, like the bubble boy 4:45 versus the sewer rat type analogy, where you can try to wall something off 4:50 and make it good. 4:52 But you can just say, the sewer rat, man, you just throw everything at it. 4:56 And if it's still alive, then that thing's got to be tough. 4:59 So I was like, oh, I'm missing something. 5:01 So in other words, you heard about Bitcoin in 2011. 5:04 You thought it was dumb. 5:05 I thought it was so dumb. 5:07 But at what point did you start seeing, like, OK, 5:10 maybe there's some use cases? 5:12 It sounds like dark market use cases. 5:14 It was Silk Road. 5:15 OK, Silk Road, Wired is really what brought you on. 5:17 Yeah, the Wired article about Silk Road. 5:20 And I already had TOR, but it just was like an academic thing, 5:24 and I'd never really. 5:25 So I updated my TOR, and I visited Silk Road. 5:31 And really, it was like, something like 48 hours later, 5:36 I decided that Bitcoin would probably destroy 5:39 several of the world's major currencies over the next five years. 5:43 And I was browsing the Bitcoin talk, and it was just becoming clearer to me 5:48 that this was a real project. 5:50 And a lot of people here were really smart people. 5:52 And you look into the history of the cypherpunks, 5:55 and you look into the history of Chaum and these other people, 5:59 and I really got a sense that. 6:01 I read the white paper, but the white paper, it didn't make sense to me. 6:04 Now, it makes more sense to me than it ever did. 6:06 I feel like the more I learn about Bitcoin, the more the white paper 6:08 makes sense. 6:09 But at the time, the only thing about the white paper that 6:12 made sense to me immediately was Satoshi's issuance of the coins 6:16 via mining, because that was something that I was wondering about. 6:20 If you were going to create a currency, you have a big problem, which is like, 6:24 do you give it to yourself and your friends? 6:25 And if you don't, what happens to it? 6:27 Because it's got to be open source, right? 6:29 Because people are not going to trust it otherwise. 6:30 It's not really peer-to-peer unless it's open source, 6:33 because it's like, who's controlling the source? 6:35 You don't know what's inside, right? 6:36 You have no way of proving it's peer-to-peer. 6:38 But you have this other problem if it is peer-to-peer, which is, 6:41 what are you going to do with the fact that you're creating all this money? 6:46 And you can't just give it to yourself and your friends. 6:49 But if you don't do that, there's some power vacuum 6:52 where someone else might take the code and give it 6:54 to themselves and their friends. 6:56 And you have this really perplexing problem of how to issue the coins. 7:01 And that was the one thing that I read in the white paper. 7:03 And I was like, wow, this guy's legit. 7:07 And then I read at that point about how Satoshi mined a bunch of coins 7:10 that he didn't spend. 7:11 And that is another strong signal, right, 7:13 that this guy is not doing this as a get-rich-quick scheme. 7:17 He was at least willing to just run it totally altruistically for some time. 7:24 And so I was like, those were the things that really tipped the scales big time. 7:30 And then the other thing is that I tried to buy, summer 2012, 7:34 I tried to buy my first Bitcoin. 7:37 And it was so difficult. You don't really appreciate like, 7:42 I mean, I used BitInstant, or I tried to. 7:45 And I tried to buy like $60 worth. 7:47 And I almost barely couldn't do it because I just 7:50 assumed that, because I pay for everything with a credit card. 7:52 Because I'm like a white male. 7:53 I live in Connecticut. 7:54 I just like. 7:55 White male. 7:56 White male, Connecticut. 7:58 Exactly. 7:58 So the first thing I did, I got like graduate degrees. 8:01 So the first thing I did when I was like 16 was like open a checking account. 8:04 And I thought it was the coolest thing to like have all the money 8:06 and like the official computer, the official money computer. 8:09 The official banking blockchain? 8:11 Exactly. 8:12 That's decentralized, right? 8:14 I got it onto the checking account blockchain. 8:16 I got it into like my Quicken. 8:18 I was like into all that stuff when I was like 16. 8:20 I was like a total nerd, total finance nerd, that is. 8:23 Hey, Paul, you brought up Satoshi mining. 8:26 I think he has like a little less than a million, maybe like $800,000 8:30 or something. 8:31 Do you think Satoshi will ever start liquidating some of that out? 8:36 Or what do you think? 8:37 I'm just curious. 8:38 I don't think he will. 8:39 I don't think he'll ever do it. 8:40 But he might. 8:41 He'd have to reveal himself if he did that. 8:43 Well, maybe. 8:44 You might say he's waiting for strong fungibility. 8:47 Or you might say he's waiting for like Bitcoin 8:49 to like reach its equilibrium and just take over as much as it can. 8:52 And then he decides that it's grown enough. 8:56 And now it's safe to exit slowly. 8:58 But I think he just will never. 9:00 I think he just won't do it. 9:01 I think he just decided that it was like his gift to the world 9:04 and that he's not going to take advantage of the fact 9:07 that he happened to really by, you know, 9:10 it was not really by chance because he was totally not at all by chance. 9:14 It was by purpose. 9:15 But I think it's just like, I just, the kind of guy 9:19 I kind of feel like he is is the kind of person who would just say, 9:23 I mean, you know, he's probably mined a few under his real name 9:27 conditional on him still being alive. 9:29 And yeah, it's probably, he's probably got 1,000 or 10,000. 9:31 That's probably enough. 9:32 I mean, it's very altruistic of anyone 9:35 to own more than like 1,000 Bitcoins. 9:37 Because, you know, if you get, if Bitcoin succeeds, 9:41 you'll have like plenty of money. 9:43 It's really at this point, especially now 9:45 with all the progress that's been made, I mean, 9:48 you really only need, I think, like 100. 9:49 But, you know, I'll leave it up to people. 9:51 The reason I say it's altruistic is that you're... 9:53 Mike, I need to buy more Bitcoin. 9:55 Yeah, you're help supporting the network by not just selling, 10:00 by kind of, by undiversifying yourself and by over-investing 10:05 and by really levering up into Bitcoin and by owning, 10:08 you know, if you own like 100,000 Bitcoins, 10:10 you are like bearing the cross, so to speak. 10:13 Like Ver, Roger? 10:15 Probably, well known, that's for sure. 10:17 But probably something like that. 10:18 Yeah. 10:20 I asked Roger Ver how many Bitcoin he has 10:22 and he showed me all of his cold storage wallets. 10:25 He did, really? 10:27 No. 10:27 I was going to say, like, that would be really 10:30 out of character, kind of unwise of him. 10:34 So what do you think is more important 10:36 for the growth of the Bitcoin economy? 10:38 You know, holders or, you know, spenders trying to actually, 10:41 because if you're talking about Bitcoin, 10:43 is it like the store of value more important right now 10:46 or is it actual use as a medium of exchange? 10:49 Yeah, so money supposedly has these three attributes, 10:52 store of value, unit of account, medium of exchange. 10:55 And I think the definitions have like derailed substantially 10:58 but I'm willing to entertain your question anyway, 11:02 even though I'm going to go back to this. 11:03 So I think conditional on Bitcoin being spendable, 11:07 I mean, Bitcoin is going to compete 11:09 just like everything competes. 11:11 So, but conditional on it being used for, 11:15 or being usable for transactions, 11:19 the store of value aspect is more important 11:21 because you're only spending it. 11:23 If you spend the money, by definition, 11:26 half of those parties are losing the money immediately 11:28 so they don't care. 11:29 But the guy who's gaining the money, 11:32 he must now hope that he can discharge it later. 11:38 So the money, Richard Dawkins says that money 11:41 and Nick Szabo quotes him in his essay, Shelling Out. 11:46 He quotes him as saying that money is a token, 11:48 a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism. 11:52 So it's like you're repaying a favor 11:54 but it's a formal token that you're going to repay a favor. 11:57 But it's the point is it's delayed. 11:59 If someone does a favor for you 12:00 and you do a favor back immediately, it's not really money. 12:04 So it's like if you scratch someone's back 12:07 and then they scratch your back, 12:08 it's sort of like, you know, 12:09 there's some liquid trust that we have in the world. 12:11 Like if you go to a restaurant, you order a meal, 12:13 you get the meal, but you haven't paid 12:15 at the exact instant you get the food, right? 12:18 You wait until the end. 12:19 And theoretically, you could dine and dash and leave, right? 12:23 But most people don't. 12:24 And similarly, you often pay for things first 12:27 before you get them, doing it in reverse. 12:29 So if there's this little liquid amount of trust, 12:32 there's no real need for the institution of money. 12:35 But since there's delays, 12:37 this, so what I mean is by those three definitions, 12:41 in particular, the store of value was meant to say 12:44 that money could not rot. 12:46 It wasn't something like milk that would like, 12:50 you know, spoil or something like food. 12:54 It was a quality of the thing that it would persist. 12:58 So that's important. 13:00 Durability, right? 13:01 Yeah, it's like a checkbox more than anything else. 13:03 Is it durable? 13:04 Yes or no? 13:05 And so the answer is yes. 13:07 But it's hard for Bitcoin to be any more durable 13:09 than any other cryptocurrency, right? 13:11 Because it's just going to be, 13:15 like it's either durable, 13:16 either cryptocurrency is durable or it's not. 13:18 And you can't really get like more durable. 13:20 Like that doesn't, it doesn't really apply. 13:22 I mean, I don't think it's some vague thing 13:23 of like decentralization with the number of nodes, but. 13:25 You could say something like, 13:27 if we switch to an altcoin, 13:28 that would mean by definition, 13:30 they're all vulnerable to being switched on suddenly. 13:32 And so then they're all not durable, 13:34 but it's still kind of uniform, I think. 13:38 So here's my rough definition of money. 13:41 I'd like to hear what you think about it. 13:43 So I've always thought of money as a record 13:46 or an accounting record of the value 13:49 that society owes a person. 13:51 Yeah, something like that. 13:52 Large owes, that's how much money you have. 13:55 It's how much value or goods or services society owes you. 13:59 Well, it's not really society, right? 14:00 It's just the monetary network. 14:02 So like, euros are no good in the United States. 14:04 You can't spend them anywhere. 14:05 So it's like, if the United States, 14:08 if you consider like Canada a part of society, 14:11 which I mean, I would. 14:14 Yeah, it's true. 14:15 I mean, you have lots of different systems, but yeah. 14:18 Right, but yeah, I think that's generally, 14:20 I mean, so I mean, Richard Dawkins has that definition, 14:23 formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism. 14:25 And Nick Szabo has the big essay 14:27 about the origins of money, which is fascinating. 14:30 I mean, it's got a great detail in there. 14:32 But I think what money really is, is a meme. 14:35 It's like meme, you know? 14:36 Because like words are memes, right? 14:39 And people, Dan Dennett asks a really amusing question, 14:44 which is, do words exist? 14:46 And if they don't exist, then you have to wonder like, 14:49 what you and I are doing right now. 14:50 He actually does it much cleverer. 14:52 He puts it up on the PowerPoint, does do words exist? 14:55 And then he says, how many people agree with this? 14:57 And he makes them raise their hands and they clicks it off. 15:00 So it's blank. 15:01 And, you know, so it says, do words exist? 15:03 And he asked people to raise their hand 15:05 if they think that words exist. 15:07 And then he challenges all the people who say that words, 15:11 you know, of course no one is actually willing to say 15:13 that words don't exist. 15:13 Sounds like something I would do when I get retired. 15:16 Like I'll just do random shit like that. 15:18 Show people like that. 15:19 I mean, so the thing is, the crux of the matter though, 15:23 is that what are words made of if they exist? 15:26 Because you could write them down on paper 15:29 or you could pronounce them out loud 15:31 or you could type them into a computer, right? 15:34 And words aren't made out of any substrate. 15:37 They're not made out of like wood. 15:39 What? 15:40 They're patterns. 15:41 Yeah, they're made out of information. 15:42 Yeah. 15:43 Exactly. 15:44 So they're made out of information. 15:45 So something can exist even if it doesn't, 15:47 even if it's only information. 15:49 We are talking about, this conversation is gone 15:52 somewhere I did not expect. 15:54 Yeah, but that's my point about money. 15:55 You understand it's the point about money 15:57 is that people wonder what it is. 15:59 And then they're like, how can it exist? 16:01 It doesn't have to be gold, doesn't have to be tangible, 16:03 but something can exist even if it's only information, 16:05 which is kind of what you were saying. 16:07 So the thing is, what is money? 16:09 It's a meme, but it is kind of like a collective memory. 16:12 I agree with you about that, 16:14 that it's like someone owes someone a favor 16:16 and you kind of remember who it is. 16:20 This is why it's important. 16:21 It always sticks on people. 16:23 Money has to have all the qualities. 16:25 And one of the funny ones on there 16:26 is that money has to be recognizable. 16:28 And that one always seems kind of soft or flaky 16:31 or kind of psychological to people, right? 16:33 Good money is like, durable, fungible, divisible. 16:39 It's got a high value to weight ratio. 16:42 Exactly, portable, exactly. 16:43 And so, but it has to be recognizable as well. 16:47 And in fact, you could cast like a magic spell 16:49 on a $20 bill or something. 16:50 And just, so it's a totally valid $20 bill, 16:53 but people just don't recognize it for some reason. 16:57 But you wouldn't be able to use it as money anywhere. 16:58 Like an ATM wouldn't recognize it 17:00 and humans wouldn't recognize it. 17:01 It would cease to be money 17:03 for this purely psychological reason. 17:05 And that is because money is, 17:08 it is information in your head 17:10 that is like social information. 17:12 So like you have to remember, 17:14 it's the same as remembering 17:15 that someone did a favor for you. 17:17 If you gave the person amnesia and they couldn't remember, 17:19 losing the recognizability of money 17:21 is like a parallel to that, I think. 17:23 I've always referred to that, 17:24 that treat as verifiability, verifiable. 17:27 And so that has like a dual meaning of that, 17:30 being recognizable as its own thing. 17:31 And also, it's not counterfeited. 17:35 Yeah, sure. 17:35 That's another thing too. 17:36 Like a gold bar has lead in it. 17:39 Don't know. 17:40 Yeah, I think it's the same thing. 17:41 Yeah. 17:42 Okay, before we stop talking about what is money 17:44 and all this crap. 17:45 Yeah, but one more thing is someone could say, 17:48 you could give someone a gold bar 17:49 and they could say, I don't recognize this as money. 17:51 I don't agree that this is a gold bar 17:53 because I don't know if there's lead in there or not. 17:55 And so I think that's right. 17:55 Okay, now go back to your, sorry, I just wanted to say that. 17:58 You know what's funny, Paul? 17:59 That is actually the hard, 18:02 that's one of the hardest things to find out about gold 18:04 because lead and gold have almost the same density. 18:09 Well, and if you mix it with another one, 18:11 you could even create the same density volume ratio 18:13 if you got really. 18:14 Yeah. 18:15 No, you, I mean, I mean. 18:17 Something with a tungsten and lead, I think. 18:20 Because every tungsten and lead together. 18:22 And you have to, it's like an MRI machine, I think, 18:25 in order to tell. 18:26 So it's like, good luck finding, 18:27 or you need to cut into it, of course. 18:30 You're making me want to research the, 18:32 it's either tungsten or lead. 18:34 One has, one's like 19.3 grams per centimeter cubed 18:37 and the other one's like 19.25. 18:40 Well, I think it's a ratio. 18:42 It has to be an exact ratio 18:43 and then it gets the exact same density as gold. 18:47 Yeah, but that's incredibly hard 18:48 versus just filling it with lead or whatever 18:51 because it's almost the same. 18:52 But anyways. 18:52 Well, yeah, but I mean, that's really. 18:54 Talking about, talking about, let's talk about Bitcoin. 18:58 I don't want to talk about gold. 18:59 Let's do it. 19:01 Hey, Paul, real quick. 19:02 What is a blockchain? 19:04 Blocked, what is a blockchain? 19:06 That's, I was gonna say. 19:07 What's your definition of blockchain? 19:09 What's blockchain? 19:10 What's blockchain? 19:11 What's blockchain, Paul? 19:12 No, I've got, it's a, I've got a four word definition. 19:15 I'm competing for the shortest definition. 19:17 So it's the technology behind Bitcoin. 19:21 That's beautiful. 19:22 I want to steal that. 19:22 Yeah, it's the best, it's the best definition around. 19:26 Yeah, everyone struggles to define it. 19:28 No, I mean like, that's what it is. 19:29 That's, that's what started 19:30 the whole blockchain conversation. 19:32 No one can deny that. 19:34 That's, that's, that's, that's great. 19:35 And then people want to say, oh, whatever, other thing. 19:38 Okay, fine, fine. 19:39 You can say that if you want, 19:40 but what it is ultimately is the technology behind Bitcoin. 19:42 You can go into more detail if you want. 19:44 You can say. 19:45 My definition is the technology behind Hyperledger. 19:50 Yeah, which is what exactly? 19:52 Kafka, Apache Kafka. 19:54 Apache Kafka. 19:56 Great. 19:57 Totally, totally blockchain. 19:58 So did you read what Gavin wrote today, 20:01 his definition of Bitcoin? 20:03 Yeah, I did. 20:04 Well, you know, I like Gavin a lot. 20:06 And in particular, I love the stuff that he 20:09 writes on his blog a lot. 20:10 And just before this, he quotes me directly in my own blog 20:14 in a previous blog post of his. 20:15 So, and I thought that was great. 20:18 And I thought what he had to say there 20:19 was actually really, really valuable. 20:21 But I think today's post, I didn't really, 20:23 I didn't really get it, unfortunately, 20:25 because he allows certain things to be defined as Bitcoin 20:28 that are perhaps not Bitcoin. 20:29 So for example, if we changed Bitcoin, 20:32 such that every transaction required 20:35 a signature from one key, 20:38 we could do that with a soft fork. 20:39 We could say all the transactions are invalid 20:41 unless they're signed by, you know, 20:44 whatever, Marco Santori's key or something, 20:46 you know, or the Fed's key, right? 20:48 And then, but his definition would require 20:50 that we still call that Bitcoin, 20:52 but it would be very different from Bitcoin. 20:55 And even if we, this is the other thing, 20:57 it was like the empty blocks problem 20:58 that you could soft fork down to just empty blocks 21:01 where there's no transaction. 21:02 That's kind of trivial edge case, 21:04 but it would still be Bitcoin under his definition. 21:06 In parallel, his definition would say 21:09 that if all, if we had to change the proof of work 21:12 for any reason, for example, 21:13 that the Chinese government just commandeered 21:15 all the mining equipment, 21:17 we had to change the proof of work. 21:19 That the new thing, we'd have to say, 21:21 that's the end of Bitcoin. 21:23 Now we have like Bitcoin 2 or something, 21:26 but it would no longer be Bitcoin 21:28 according to his definition, 21:30 because it did not allow proof of work changes 21:33 under any circumstances. 21:35 Yeah. 21:35 So it should allow some things 21:38 and not allow some other things. 21:41 Yeah. 21:41 Well, I mean, so I definitely kind of agree 21:43 with your point on the second one. 21:44 The first one, I kind of get where he's coming from 21:46 because it's still Bitcoin. 21:47 It's just Bitcoin got really shitty 21:49 if one of those other things happens. 21:51 It's just like, well, you know, it's still Bitcoin, 21:53 but yeah, you're right. 21:55 That's one thing I kind of would draw the line on 21:57 is the hashing algorithm. 22:00 I mean, you never know. 22:03 Yeah. 22:03 Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. 22:06 Like I, it's hard to define, right? 22:10 But Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer eCash system 22:14 that was created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. 22:18 And I think, you know, 22:20 we actually did discuss this a little bit. 22:23 I think it has no definition precisely right now. 22:28 And I think one of the things we talked about 22:30 at Satoshi Roundtable was the idea of, 22:35 and this is related to sidechains as well, 22:36 which is interesting. 22:38 The idea of, we didn't quite phrase it in this terms, 22:41 but there's like the Linux kernel, you know, 22:43 and then there's like all the different stuff, 22:44 the different distributions, right? 22:46 Like you can have like Ubuntu is different 22:47 from the kernel, right? 22:48 So you have like the kernel, 22:50 but then you have the satellites around it 22:52 that are different. 22:54 Yeah, exactly. 22:55 So one of the things we talked about 22:58 was could we maybe make Bitcoin core 23:03 so we could polish it off 23:06 and then we could just say, 23:07 we freeze it and we say, 23:08 this is, we're not changing it anymore ever. 23:11 And then it has a precise definition 23:13 because software is just like, it's never done. 23:15 And when Satoshi released it, 23:17 it would have been unreasonable to expect it 23:19 to be like finished at that point. 23:20 But at one point- 23:22 That's a weird thought. 23:23 I've never really- 23:24 So the idea is- 23:25 Let's talk about Satoshi. 23:27 Let's jump right into Satoshi Roundtable 23:29 before we dive into this specific topic. 23:32 Can you give us a background 23:33 of what the Satoshi Roundtable is, first off? 23:36 It is Bruce Fenton's clever idea, 23:40 which is clever, I think, 23:41 to organize like a retreat 23:43 where people can speak in quasi-privacy, 23:47 but in like a nice place, 23:49 have it in a nice place. 23:50 And he makes it kind of expensive on purpose, 23:53 I think, to filter out people 23:54 who aren't serious about going. 23:56 So how much was the cost, first off? 23:58 Well, theoretically, the out-of-pocket cost is like, 24:01 I think it's like something like 2.3 grand or something. 24:05 So it's like $2,000, $2,500. 24:07 Not including airfare, but it includes food. 24:11 So like consensus, to put that in perspective, 24:13 is basically the same cost, 24:14 but it didn't include like a hotel, 24:16 and it did not include food, 24:17 and it did not include travel. 24:19 But it's invite-only, right? 24:20 Yeah, Satoshi Roundtable is invite-only, yes. 24:23 Okay, so why make it expensive on purpose? 24:26 That doesn't make sense. 24:28 Because you want it to be, 24:30 you want the people who go to be, 24:32 have committed something, I think. 24:34 But I mean, in practice, 24:35 almost everyone who goes has their employer pay, I think. 24:38 But it's the same problem, 24:40 because the employer can just say, 24:41 I'm not paying for that. 24:42 So this year, where was it? 24:44 It was in Cancun. 24:45 Nice, okay. 24:46 It was in a nice place. 24:47 Yeah, I'd never been to Cancun before, 24:48 so I enjoyed going. 24:50 So, and the secrecy is, 24:52 you're not allowed to say who went, 24:53 or what y'all talked about? 24:54 You're not allowed to say what, 24:56 you're not allowed to quote people. 24:58 A what, you're not allowed to quote people. 24:58 Okay, but you can talk about general things. 25:02 Yeah, you have to respect, 25:05 you have to respect the blindness of the, 25:08 of who said what, so you can't attribute anything to anyone. 25:13 But you can talk about whatever was said. 25:15 In fact, I think you can actually quote people directly, 25:17 but you just can't, you can't make it, 25:19 you can't reveal who said what. 25:20 That's the rule. 25:22 Okay, so let's talk about some interesting 25:25 conversations that went on. 25:26 It's the same rule as scaling Bitcoin, in theory, 25:28 but I don't know if that ever works in practice. 25:32 Okay, so what do you want to talk about? 25:36 How many days was it? 25:38 There was like an opening party Monday night, 25:41 which is just like a cocktail party. 25:43 Basically, it's not like a party party. 25:44 And then, there's a Tuesday and Wednesday, 25:48 where there's sessions, and then in the, 25:51 at the end, people can kind of do whatever they want, 25:53 which is mostly more sessions, 25:54 but some people did go like water skiing. 25:57 I didn't go. 25:58 I had a lot of work. 25:59 It was mostly work for me, but then, 26:03 so you have those two days, 26:04 and then what a lot of people do 26:05 is they stay the last day, Wednesday night. 26:07 So then Thursday, people leave at various times, 26:09 but you're still kind of there, 26:11 but nothing official on Thursday, so that's how that works. 26:13 And that's basically how it works. 26:14 So it's kind of like a two-day event. 26:16 Yeah, basically. 26:18 Okay, and did they have, at the cocktail party, 26:20 did they have a naked, a beautiful naked girl 26:23 on in-pool paint, like Miami? 26:25 Unfortunately, they did not aspire to the levels of, 26:30 I mean, I think just South Beach, right? 26:32 I think South Beach, they really know how to party there, 26:35 and they've received party technologies. 26:38 The homeless know how to party, too. 26:40 Yeah. 26:41 They do, as we discovered, as we discovered a lot. 26:45 Okay, so let's talk about Tuesday. 26:49 Like, what were some cool conversations? 26:52 I mean, I'm sure there's discussions about sidechains, 26:55 Drivechains, alt-right chains. 27:00 The alt-right, yes. 27:02 Well, there was a woman from, 27:04 there was a woman in attendance 27:06 who was a congresswoman from Wisconsin. 27:09 So she spoke a little bit about the administration. 27:13 That was quite funny, because as you, 27:15 she was talking about policy for this, policy for that, 27:18 and she was talking about, like, a blockchain caucus. 27:20 But as you might surmise, some people in the audience, 27:25 whom I cannot identify, 27:26 but some people are very, like, anti-state, 27:28 so they were quite surprised 27:30 that a congressperson would be there at all, 27:32 and some of their faces were amusing to watch 27:34 as the conversation wandered into, like, 27:37 what laws should we pass for Bitcoin and stuff like that. 27:40 That was very amusing to me. 27:43 Do you think that's important, first off? 27:44 Like, do you think there should be, 27:46 what's your opinion about laws and Bitcoin and whatnot? 27:49 State by state or country? 27:51 It's kind of, you know, the way Bitcoin is designed, 27:55 it's designed as peer-to-peer, 27:57 so it's supposed to push everything onto the user, 27:59 so the user is responsible for everything. 28:03 Their keys, the thefts, fraud, 28:06 what they spend their money on, 28:07 and each user is responsible for the laws that they follow. 28:10 And some of that is a little, 28:14 like, a lot of the original, I mean, 28:17 there are some things that only Bitcoin can do, 28:22 and some of those might be crime, 28:24 but the issue is really a bigger one 28:26 of transaction privacy being non-existent 28:29 in the modern world, 28:30 which is the cypherpunks mantra 28:32 about reclaiming it through cryptography. 28:35 So, but to answer your question, 28:36 it's like, the design goal of Bitcoin 28:39 is to push all that onto the user, 28:40 so people can pass laws if they want, 28:43 but the law will, I mean, you'll get to decide. 28:49 The policy won't be applied at the Bitcoin code level. 28:52 It will be at the individual level, so. 28:55 Shit, you know what we forgot to talk about 28:58 before we dove into Satoshi is Block, 29:01 because Block is the one that sponsored you 29:03 to go to this event, right? 29:05 Well, you know, I put in my expenses. 29:07 I don't know how much money I'm gonna get back, 29:09 but yeah, I think so, yes. 29:11 So, real quick before we jump into, 29:17 like what the Congresswoman said or whatever, 29:18 can you say, like, when did you join Block, 29:20 and did you have another Bitcoin company before that? 29:23 Sorry. 29:23 No, okay, so to complete the timeline, 29:26 so I was in consulting, and then I worked 29:29 in the Yale Econ Department in research, 29:32 and then Roger Ver hired me away. 29:36 So in 2014, early 2014, I published Truthcoin, 29:40 would become Bitcoin Hivemind, 29:44 and after kind of, you know, 29:48 polishing it up a little bit over the years, 29:51 I mean, it was really mostly done. 29:52 I did most of the work before, 29:53 and in 2014, I didn't really do a lot of work, 29:55 but I did go in, like, Let's Talk Bitcoin 29:57 and a couple other places. 30:00 What is Hivemind? 30:02 Well, Hivemind is what the peer-to-peer 30:04 Oracle prediction market that Truthcoin was originally, 30:07 so we can talk about that later, 30:09 but Roger hired me in 2015, January, 30:14 to work on that, which I did in collaboration 30:21 with some other people to kind of bring that up to speed, 30:24 and then in March of 2016, I joined Block, 30:30 so it was like, almost, I've been there almost a year, 30:34 and there are- 30:35 Which is you, Jeff Garzik, and who else? 30:39 There are, like, 16 people, but I can't- 30:41 Oh, okay. 30:42 Some of their names, some of them are, like, 30:43 not people we would know, 30:44 but Andreas Schildbach is there, 30:46 who does Bitcoin J, the Android wallet. 30:49 Yeah, he did the Android wallet, the Bitcoin wallet. 30:51 Yes. 30:52 Yeah. 30:52 And there are some other people, I mean, 30:55 but yeah, some of them are not, like, 30:57 so there's, like, a government guy, 30:58 there's, like, you know, there's, like, legal people, 31:01 so some of them are staff that are not Bitcoin famous, 31:04 so you wouldn't know them. 31:04 So is that what you do for, like, your livelihood, 31:06 is Block, or do you do, like, 31:07 other consulting things still on the side? 31:10 Do you do, like, all kinds of stuff? 31:11 What do you do? 31:12 No, I do the same stuff that I was doing before, 31:13 which is work on the, 31:15 I basically just, like, work on Bitcoin software, 31:18 Bitcoin research, Bitcoin software, so, 31:21 but what I've been doing at Block 31:22 is the Drivechain, two-way peg, 31:26 so that's what I've been doing for that, 31:29 and I've made a lot of progress in that. 31:30 And I guess we can talk about, maybe, 31:32 Drivechain and Hivemind throughout, like, the rest. 31:35 Okay. 31:36 Because that's a big, maybe, big topic, I don't know. 31:38 Oh, yeah, whatever you want to do, you can, we're just. 31:40 Real quick question about the whole Drivechain thing is, 31:43 are you dependent upon anything 31:46 for an actual implementation of Drivechains? 31:49 Yeah, you need a soft, 31:51 you don't need SegWit, you need a soft fork, though. 31:54 Or what, exactly? 31:56 To enforce the money. 31:59 So, sidechains, sidechains are actually easier 32:01 than people think. 32:02 The benefits are so high that people think 32:04 that there must be some correspondingly huge 32:07 technical breakthrough. 32:08 But, in reality, it's all the same. 32:10 It's just, you take an altcoin, 32:11 you just say, there's no money there, 32:13 and there's no Coinbase block subsidy, right? 32:17 So, we're not minting any coins over there. 32:19 You take the altcoin. 32:20 You understand, the altcoin is, like, 32:21 most of the work is already done. 32:22 You just need to do some accounting. 32:24 So, you say, there's no money over there, 32:26 and then people lock bitcoins on the main chain. 32:29 They effectively, you know, they take them out of the game. 32:31 They basically don't have them anymore. 32:33 No one does. 32:34 And then, when that happens, 32:36 you credit them on the sidechain. 32:39 And finally, when they destroy them on the sidechain, 32:42 or lock them on the sidechain, 32:43 you have to re-credit them on bitcoin. 32:45 So, almost all of that is really, really, really easy. 32:50 So, real quick about that. 32:52 That intermediary Drivechain 32:53 that will give bitcoin back to that user. 32:58 As far as that soft fork goes, how intrusive is that? 33:02 I don't know. 33:03 Can you talk a little bit more about? 33:04 Yeah. 33:05 Let me just switch my thought, though, 33:06 which is that almost everything is easy, 33:08 except for the crediting of the bitcoin. 33:11 Bitcoin has to know who to pay. 33:13 And the challenge is to do that 33:15 without requiring people to run the entire sidechain, 33:19 which would make it more like 33:21 a really, really complicated soft fork extension block, 33:26 or just an outright hard fork, 33:28 because you'd be adding all these resource requirements. 33:30 You'd be saying, you need to run all this stuff 33:33 in order to figure out if this one payment is right. 33:35 So, the trick is to do it 33:36 without really burdening anyone at all. 33:41 So, it's kind of a challenge, 33:42 but that is what the soft fork is for. 33:46 The rules on how to pay people correctly, 33:49 but not too correctly, so to speak. 33:52 They don't want, you know, without requiring. 33:54 So, we have this bridge that condenses 33:56 the entire operation of the chain 33:59 over a few months into just one transaction. 34:02 And you gotta get that one transaction right. 34:04 That's the soft fork. 34:06 But you don't have to get anything else right. 34:10 So, what happens if and when 34:12 Lightning Network gets implemented? 34:14 Does that take away the need 34:16 for like a lot of these alt coins? 34:19 What do you think? 34:20 As far as the- 34:21 No, I don't think so. 34:22 Lightning is awesome, of course. 34:24 And Lightning and sidechains work together. 34:26 And Lightning and alt coins work together, 34:28 because you can Lightning across sidechains, 34:30 and you can also Lightning across alt coins, 34:32 which is actually really cool, because- 34:34 Yeah. 34:35 Interesting. 34:36 Yeah, it's really, really neat. 34:38 So, they're trying to link up Zcash 34:41 with another one right now. 34:42 Ethereum. 34:43 Ethereum, that's right. 34:44 Zcash Ethereum. 34:47 Yeah. 34:48 Yeah, I mean, I think sidechains do a lot of things. 34:52 And if you go to drivechain.info, we can read them all. 34:54 So, why don't I just read them all? 34:57 I don't want to read them in the wrong order. 35:01 So, here we go. 35:02 So, number one, permissionless integration. 35:04 So, anyone can develop and run their own code 35:06 without facing the near impossible task 35:09 of also bootstrapping a new unit of money. 35:13 So, you see, if you've got a great idea, 35:14 you've got to compete with Bitcoin 35:16 as far as monetary network goes. 35:19 You're kind of screwed. 35:20 I mean, that's really hard. 35:21 But then- 35:23 Yes? 35:24 I was going to say, how does this stack up? 35:28 I'm thinking, like, maybe some kind of weird 35:29 Lightning network counterparty token. 35:32 I mean, is that kind of like what a Drivechain 35:34 would give you access to? 35:37 Or, sorry, to alt coins? 35:41 I don't know, maybe that was a weird question. 35:42 I don't understand your question at all. 35:43 You merged, you mixed three different things. 35:46 So, what's the- 35:46 I'm thinking, like, if you have the token idea 35:48 through counterparty, right? 35:50 Yes, yeah. 35:51 And then, the problem between counterparty, 35:56 like, you know, your counterparty tokens in Bitcoin 35:59 is you need to exchange. 36:01 Well, counterparty's proof of burn. 36:03 It's totally different. 36:05 No, I, yeah. 36:06 It's subtle. 36:08 Okay, I'm trying to get to your, 36:09 I'm trying to mine into your head 36:12 and get what you're trying to say out, 36:14 rip it out of your head. 36:15 I think you're saying something like 36:16 counterparty already has all the other tokens. 36:18 I'm just throwing a bunch of words at you. 36:20 I just want to see how you react. 36:21 You are throwing a bunch of words at me. 36:23 I agree with you there. 36:24 So, I have a question. 36:26 How would you distinguish Drivechains 36:28 from the definition of a Drivechain 36:31 from the normal definition of just a regular sidechain? 36:33 Okay, but you realize that we did actually start 36:35 on one thing, which was, what is a sidechain? 36:38 And then we switched to benefits of sidechains. 36:41 And then we switched to, 36:42 is Lightning Network plus counterparty 36:44 similar to what Drivechain gives you? 36:45 And now you just switched again to. 36:47 Oh, what's a blockchain? 36:49 Yeah, I know. 36:50 Okay, okay. 36:51 We are actually, we are branching off. 36:53 I feel bad just, I mean, I can handle it, 36:55 but I feel bad for your listeners. 36:56 I don't know what they're going to get out of this web. 37:02 So, I mean, I don't know where, 37:04 do we want to go in reverse? 37:05 Or I think let's just. 37:06 Let's keep going. 37:07 You're talking about the benefits of drive. 37:09 Okay, yeah, so first of all, 37:11 I'll just say a sidechain is like an alt chain, 37:14 but it doesn't have its own token. 37:16 So this is kind of related to what you were saying, 37:17 Mike Tidwell, you're both named Mike. 37:19 So I don't know if this is a joke of the podcast or not, 37:24 but I can't call one of you Mike, I'll just be confused. 37:27 But you, in order to, since there's no token, 37:31 the alt chain inherently, you deposit your Bitcoin there, 37:35 and then you use it there. 37:36 And then if you want to, you withdraw the Bitcoin back. 37:39 So that's what a sidechain is. 37:41 And so the total number of Bitcoin units 37:44 is fixed at 21 million. 37:45 So you don't have to worry about this new 37:47 unit of money thing, 37:48 which is the first point I brought up. 37:50 And the second point I brought up is the converse point, 37:52 which is that you not only do now not need to worry 37:56 about bootstrapping your own money, 37:57 but since you can't, it filters out a lot of scams 38:00 because you can't print your own money and get rich. 38:03 No matter how great your tech is, 38:05 you don't get anything for it at all. 38:07 The people who own their Bitcoin just get to use it, 38:09 which I actually think is a good thing. 38:10 So some people disagree about that, 38:12 but I think it's a great thing because I think, 38:14 you know, when people contribute to open source, 38:16 it's better for them to have a purer motivation. 38:21 And I think there'll always be people, 38:22 like a lot of people, businesses hire core devs, 38:25 not enough, but a lot of places hire core devs, 38:28 including Block and including Blockstream, 38:30 and including people like Roger Ver. 38:32 So people will, and MIT as well. 38:35 So there are people who will, 38:36 no, you were already four tangents in. 38:40 Write it down on a piece of paper 38:41 and we'll get back to it after the tangents. 38:44 So then Bitcoin eliminates competitors 38:48 because Bitcoin can just copy any code. 38:50 And then the other thing is that sidechains allow people, 38:53 or Drivechain, you know, specifically, 38:55 allows people to opt in to the software code 38:58 that they want to run. 38:59 So if they want to run like a larger block size, 39:03 or if they want to run Monero or weird zk-SNARK stuff, 39:06 they can, and it doesn't have to bother anyone else. 39:08 So that's a big deal because currently it's like a, 39:11 sort of a socialist, one size fits all thing 39:14 that we have to all agree on. 39:16 And that is rough, that's very difficult to do. 39:20 And finally allows faster testing. 39:22 So those are benefits of sidechains. 39:24 I don't know if we answered your question about, 39:25 is a counterparty plus lightning similar to a sidechain? 39:29 I don't know, maybe we'll get back to it. 39:30 I don't know. 39:31 That's a valid question, Paul. 39:32 You don't have to answer it. 39:33 Me either, and then. 39:35 It might be a trick question. 39:36 It might indeed, I don't know, it probably was. 39:38 So, it's certainly tricking me. 39:42 And then you were asking about, 39:43 what is the difference between Drivechain 39:45 and traditional sidechains? 39:48 So people like to call the Drivechain sidechains, 39:51 they like to just call them Drivechains, 39:53 even though that's not really what I had in mind. 39:55 But I think I'm just gonna allow it to happen 39:57 because they are actually quite different. 39:59 Blockstream originally planned this thing, 40:01 which is like with the skip list. 40:04 And the skip list was very interesting 40:06 because it kept track of the total work of both chains by, 40:09 and then it minimized that by, 40:10 but they kept track of the total work of both chains 40:12 by basically counting all the headers. 40:14 But that would be absurd 40:16 because that would mean each transaction right now, 40:19 the Bitcoin blockchain grows by, I can't remember, 40:21 but it's something like four megabytes per year 40:23 in the headers, headers only, 40:25 because the header is only 80 bytes, six headers per hour. 40:29 So we can multiply, I don't know, 40:31 maybe I could do it in my head, I don't know. 40:32 I'm not sure, I don't really wanna try, 40:34 but six per hour, 24 per hour. 40:37 So it's like 120 something per day times 52, 40:44 sorry, times 300 days. 40:47 So yeah, 365 days. 40:49 So yeah, it's basically like four megabytes. 40:51 So it's 80 bytes, about 4,000. 40:53 So it's like four megabytes per year that the headers grow. 40:57 But if you wanted to do that, you'd have to add, 40:59 that would be annoying because you think that right now, 41:01 the entire block can only fit one megabyte, right? 41:04 So you can't have a transaction 41:06 that contains four megabytes worth of headers. 41:08 So a Blockstream came up with, 41:10 in their paper is this innovative way of saying, 41:13 okay, actually you don't need all the headers, 41:15 you only need a very small amount of the headers. 41:19 But still they have a bunch of headers 41:21 dumped into their transaction to do the SPV proof. 41:25 And I don't do anything like that at all. 41:26 I do a totally different thing. 41:27 So, but so there's a different thing. 41:30 And in fact, they use those headers 41:33 to assert the work done on the sidechain. 41:35 And I actually use my headers to assert 41:37 that enough work has been done on the main chain, 41:42 the parent chain, 41:43 which is actually a really important difference 41:45 because you have these, 41:49 it sidechains open the door to a lot of complexity 41:54 and teamwork among different smart contracts 41:57 and different sidechains. 41:58 But they also open the door to like smart contracts 42:00 that are just deliberately designed 42:01 to attack one smart contract. 42:04 In particular, Gavin and others and myself 42:07 and Vitalik and everyone agree 42:08 that almost all the really cool smart contracts 42:11 require data from outside, 42:13 they require the Oracle problem. 42:15 And I did a whole bunch of writing 42:18 and a presentation on the fact 42:20 that the Oracle problem can't be solved 42:22 if you have like open, 42:23 totally open-ended smart contracts 42:25 because they're vulnerable to invasion 42:27 by other smart contracts that just skim on them. 42:30 And so there's no equilibrium 42:32 with like good smart contracts. 42:34 So it's important long story short 42:36 that the main chain be able to veto the sidechains. 42:42 So they shouldn't be able to veto individual transactions, 42:46 but on the level of category, like the theme, 42:50 if you say this is a smart contract, 42:53 or this is a sidechain for gambling, 42:54 or this is a sidechain for Namecoin, 42:58 it is important that the miners pick a portfolio 43:02 of stuff that they like. 43:03 And that's kind of really confusing. 43:05 So a metaphor I use to explain that 43:07 is that the CEO has to be able to fire employees. 43:10 So if you wanna have a big complex organization, 43:14 you can't just let anyone work there 43:18 because you'll get people who work there 43:19 who like copy each other's work or something like that, 43:22 which demotivates the other employees 43:24 or just makes them unwilling to work or something. 43:27 So if you hired people who are salesmen 43:29 and they were paid on commission 43:30 and the sales process was really involved, 43:33 one salesman does a lot of work, 43:35 but then another salesman shows up 43:36 and kind of steals the sale at the last minute, 43:39 you gotta be able to fire those people. 43:41 Okay, so how do you fire someone? 43:43 Can you talk about that? 43:43 Well, it's simple, the sidechain, 43:45 I just allow, it's the mainchain work. 43:49 And it ultimately doesn't matter 43:50 because it's using merge mining anyway, 43:51 and I can talk about that. 43:52 So the mainchain miners 43:53 and the sidechain miners are the same. 43:55 But the mainchain miners have to be able to basically, 43:58 they have to be the ones who destroy the sidechain. 44:01 So does that just mean you stop mining? 44:03 Is that how you fire that sidechain? 44:05 Yeah, so I mean, in practice, it would never come to this, 44:07 but the miners can assert anything they want 44:10 when they withdraw from the sidechain. 44:11 So they can just steal all the money. 44:14 So what they would do is they'd say, fix the code, 44:18 the code is really misbehaving, 44:21 or we'll just, or else, 44:23 and the or else is that they'll steal, 44:25 but it would never actually come to that 44:26 because no one would do that 44:27 because no one would even deposit. 44:28 I mean, so many things would have to go wrong 44:29 just to even get to that point. 44:30 But you need to have this threat at the end of the road 44:34 in order to enforce all of that retroactively. 44:37 So talk about the incentive structure of all this, 44:39 actually, that's the most interesting to me. 44:43 Yeah, well, it is interesting, I think. 44:45 The sidechains are kind of secured by popularity, I think. 44:49 So it's like if you want, it's like a business, right? 44:52 A business is secured by popularity in a way. 44:54 If the customers like it, 44:56 they shop there and they spend money there. 45:00 And so it's very kind of a classically econ type thing, 45:04 but it's the sidechains have all these transaction fees. 45:08 Can't companies, wait, hold on, back to that analogy. 45:10 Can't companies not be popular and still be profitable 45:13 because people just need them? 45:14 So- 45:15 Well, it's the same thing, I don't think it's the same. 45:18 I define it the same way. 45:19 So if people hate the sidechain, but they still need it, 45:21 then I define that as popularity. 45:24 But whatever that is, whatever that is. 45:26 So the sidechain is used and it generates transaction fees. 45:31 But another thing it does is it makes Bitcoin more valuable. 45:35 And as a group, 45:37 the sidechains make Bitcoin more valuable in theory, 45:39 because you can have like, 45:40 people want like a Mimblewimble sidechain. 45:42 They want like a Rootstock sidechain, 45:47 or at least people think they do. 45:48 I don't really think they do, 45:49 but people want like a gambling sidechain. 45:51 People want playgrounds. 45:53 Name, yeah, right, Namecoin. 45:54 People want the freedom. 45:55 If something happens to the current dev community, 45:57 they want to be able to opt out 45:59 or opt into something else. 46:01 They want larger blocks in general. 46:03 They want, there's actually a big, 46:05 I made like a big little list 46:06 and I was actually impressed with how long it actually got. 46:08 Let's talk about the list, 46:09 because so far all I've heard is transactions. 46:12 I have a quick question. 46:14 How long does it take, 46:15 how long do you have coins locked between, 46:18 from the main chain to a Drivechain and vice versa? 46:21 What's the delay? 46:22 Yeah, so when it's going to the Drivechain, it's short. 46:26 It's like six or 10 blocks. 46:28 It doesn't really matter, but it's short because you just, 46:31 and it doesn't actually matter if there's a reorg, 46:33 because the way the merge mining works in particular, 46:37 in this case, even if it reorgs, everything will be fine. 46:40 But what the reorg would do is it would like, 46:42 it would, every reorg of the main chain 46:44 would force the sidechain to also reorg. 46:47 So you just kind of want like a little buffer there 46:49 just to be safe. 46:51 So that's fast. 46:52 And then coming back, it's very, very slow. 46:54 It's like two to three months, 46:56 because there's no reason, believe it or not, 46:58 there's no reason to make it fast. 47:00 And so, but there's every reason. 47:02 And then you end up with exchanges, right? 47:05 There probably would be a floating price, 47:07 but the price would not co-vary with the, 47:10 this is a really important part that like some people 47:13 who may be named Eric Voorhees, 47:15 like refuse to understand and like constantly- 47:19 That's one of our best sponsors, Mike. 47:20 Okay, well, sorry to hear that. 47:23 Well, there's a few different things. 47:26 The price will not co-vary with, 47:29 um, the price will not co-vary 47:32 with the monetary aspects of the currency, 47:35 like how many people are using it as money, 47:37 and it will not co-vary with the features. 47:39 It only co-varies with the time preference. 47:42 So it will not co-vary at all. 47:44 It'll just be, what? 47:46 Co-vary? 47:47 Yeah, co-variance. 47:48 Something that varies with- 47:49 I'm actually retarded. 47:51 What does that mean? 47:51 Something that varies with something else. 47:53 Oh, okay. 47:55 Like height and weight co-vary. 47:57 Yeah. 47:59 I wasn't planning on learning things today. 48:00 Wait, wait, wait, wait. 48:00 So say that one more time, though. 48:02 Sorry, I got a little distracted. 48:04 So the price will be a function of the inconvenience 48:08 of sending the money back, 48:09 but it won't be a function of anything else. 48:11 And it may also be a function of like the risk, 48:13 but hopefully the risk will be zero, but you never know. 48:16 Well, just to me, it sounds like it's more convenient 48:18 from a time standpoint. 48:18 So if you want to hop in and out, I mean- 48:21 The interesting thing, if you want an interest rate, 48:23 if you want to earn an interest rate, 48:25 what you could do is you could say, 48:27 okay, I've got a bunch of main chain Bitcoin. 48:28 I'll swap you for them if you've got sidechains. 48:32 So you've got four Bitcoin 48:33 and someone else has got 4.1 Bitcoin on the Drivechain. 48:38 And you say, okay, we'll swap. 48:39 You do the atomic swap where you lock it 48:41 based on the hash of R. 48:42 And then someone reveals R and they both go through. 48:46 So you've swapped four on the main 48:49 for 4.1 on the Drivechain, the sidechain. 48:53 Would that be the fee? 48:55 Yeah, the 1.1 would be your fee personally. 48:58 So there would be market competition for this. 49:00 And so then you would say, I'll bring it back 49:02 and it'll take two or three months. 49:04 You'd bring it back and your money would be locked up. 49:08 You had four main chain Bitcoin, 49:10 but now instead you just got like an IOU 49:12 that's worth 4.1 Bitcoin in two or three months. 49:15 So you earned like a little interest rate there. 49:17 So there would be, in my opinion, 49:18 there would be like investment banker types 49:20 that would facilitate this service. 49:22 And it would be a lot like a bank or a checking account 49:26 where there would be someone there. 49:28 If you wanted to have it instantly, you could. 49:29 It would just cost you. 49:30 And it would cost you almost nothing 49:32 because this would be, 49:33 anyone with Bitcoin could provide this service. 49:35 So it'd be very competitive. 49:36 There's no barrier to entry. 49:37 So anyone can jump in and provide this service. 49:40 I'm still a little bit confused on the incentives. 49:41 What's stopping people from just saying, 49:43 oh, there's all this money on a sidechain. 49:46 We can just take it. 49:47 Yeah, the miners can assert anything they want 49:50 about the destination of that money. 49:52 So how's that going to give me any confidence 49:54 putting money into a sidechain? 49:56 What they have to do is it all condenses 49:59 into one transaction that is sort of in stasis for. 50:03 That is sort of in stasis for two to three months. 50:04 So let's call it, it doesn't matter, two months, but I think it would probably be closer to three months because they keep making it longer and longer the more I think about it. 50:11 So it's looking more like three months. 50:13 So the sidechain will be broadcasting, you know, basically a hash, not basically. 50:18 It will be broadcasting one hash that is, you know, a human can read. 50:22 It's not, of course, it's a bunch of random garbage text, but it's short. 50:26 The point is, it's the point is the information bandwidth is really, really small and it will be broadcasting this thing. 50:33 And if no one does anything, the software will automatically do the transfer the right way. 50:38 So what the miners have to do is they have to do the wrong thing, at which point the alarm will immediately go off that these things don't match. 50:46 Right. And that's do the wrong thing consistently for like three months. 50:49 So everyone will hear about this the day after. 50:52 OK, so the miners are sending the money the wrong way. 50:57 And the way it works is it's just as easy to attack the sidechain for all of the money as it is for one transaction or a little bit. 51:03 And in fact, if it's easy, it's exactly the same amount of effort. 51:07 It is an effort. 51:08 So it's one effort per sidechain. 51:10 But, you know, it's no stealing from a huge sidechain that has a lot of money, a very popular one, which is why I brought up popularity before. 51:19 Stealing from a popular one is exactly the same as stealing from an unpopular one. 51:22 So what it does is it threatens the entire sidechain experiment. 51:27 So that's really the security model. 51:29 And, you know, it's not airtight, but Bitcoin really isn't either. 51:35 So if you're willing to assume that miners are going to persistently misbehave for like three months to steal money, miners can already do that. 51:42 They can already deposit to an exchange and then rewrite the chain if they have 51%. 51:48 Well, when you say miners, are you just talking about one miner or are you talking about 51% of the hash rate? 51:53 We're talking about 51%, yes. 51:54 In fact, the way it's coded is a little even more conservative than that, because it's a configurable parameter per sidechain. 52:00 But kind of the default will be you can like upvote or downvote, basically one vote per block. 52:07 So you're accumulating these votes over three months. 52:09 So the mine, OK, so it's a block size type thing where the mine is similar. 52:14 There's like a little there's like a little counter and it can either go up or down and you can actually miners can downvote. 52:20 So just the way the math works and you can even set it to require 70% or something like that. 52:25 So if it requires 70% and you get 10 people voting against you, then you're really screwed. 52:30 You need at least 81% in order to force something false in there. 52:35 But of course, the tradeoff is that if you do 70%, then anyone can just lock the money in there forever. 52:41 You know, if they've only got whatever it is, 30%. 52:44 So, Paul, can I ask you a question about attack vector? 52:46 Yeah, so if they only have 16%, excuse me, because they have 16 against. 52:50 So let's say miners start colluding and for one week they start doing malintent upon the sidechain. 53:00 Because what it sounds like to me, you have to do something for like three months or two months before that sidechain essentially gets fired. 53:07 Well, that is one way of thinking about it. That's not what I had in mind, which is that they've got to do something for three months. 53:14 If the withdrawals take three months and they go wherever the miners say. 53:19 Okay, so what I'm thinking is when people try to exit from the sidechain or Drivechain, I'm so confused now, but let's just say it's in the sidechain. 53:30 And these miners for like two weeks or whatever, three weeks, whatever, have been malintenting that we're going to get rid of the sidechain. 53:39 Now, the fees that these people have to pay to get out of the sidechain are going to be huge to the point where when the miners get that money, then they say, oh, we're just kidding. 53:48 And then they can buy back in real cheap. I'm wondering if there's any kind of malicious, where you can scare people out of the sidechain and steal their money. 53:56 Yeah, if the miners steal from the sidechain, then the sidechain coins would probably immediately be worthless because people would think, oh, no. 54:06 But it's the peg, right? 54:08 Yeah, but in the case that you suggested, the peg has basically stopped working. It's no longer a peg. It's just a one-way. 54:14 No, what I'm saying is the peg is still working. They're just scaring people out to pay a huge transaction fee to be prioritized out of there. 54:20 Well, you could scare people. The miners could attack the sidechain. 54:24 Temporarily. 54:26 And then they could wait for the fire sale. 54:28 The miners could show up and say, look, we're attacking the sidechain, but if you give us your mainchain money, we'll pay you in mainchain for $0.30 on the dollar or something crazy like that. 54:42 So yeah, something like that could happen. 54:44 There's going to be movies about this. No. 54:46 No, maybe. I don't know. 54:48 Because I think attacking the sidechain is just – I think either it will happen. If it does happen, then the coins are worthless. 54:58 But I just think it won't happen because what it would mean is the end of the sidechain experiment. 55:04 And I think miners want – I think the thing that motivates miners the most is that the Bitcoin exchange rate increases. 55:11 That's just my guess. 55:13 But they are motivated by transaction fees, of course. 55:15 But if the Bitcoin price decreases or even fails to increase, that has a direct impact on their ability to purchase a given amount of electricity. 55:27 So that thing hits them for 100%. 55:31 The exchange rate hits 100% of their earnings. 55:34 They're earning in Bitcoin. 55:36 If transaction fees can go down by 10%, that's basically the same as if the exchange rate goes down by 10%. 55:43 Yeah. I mean you don't want to disenfranchise too many people because then you'll lose value. 55:47 But do you think SegWit is going to be activated through a soft fork? 55:52 Yes. 55:54 You do? 55:56 Well, it's defined as a soft fork now. 55:58 So conditional on it activating, it will currently be a – do you think it will be a hard fork before it activates? 56:03 I'm saying do you think we'll hit the 95% or whatever percent threshold in order to activate SegWit? 56:08 You can actually activate it with a 0% threshold or a 5% threshold or whatever. 56:13 A soft fork, yeah. But I mean as defined right now. 56:17 Yeah, I agree with you. 56:19 Custom and privacy – or I guess politeness we could say. 56:25 Custom and politeness dictate that we give everyone a chance to decline, which is the 95%. 56:33 Thresholds for upgrading. 56:35 So will it hit the 95% threshold? Well, not anytime soon, but I think eventually, yes. 56:41 So will that be like a key indicator to let you know like, okay, Drivechains have a chance of actually getting soft forked in? 56:48 I think I have a chance of doing it before SegWit. 56:51 Really? Okay. 56:52 I'm not relying on SegWit's transaction malleability effects. 56:55 Right, I'm not. It would be nice to have though. It would be a shame because you can lightning across chains. 57:00 I'm sorry. Is the code already written to implement this? 57:04 Yeah, you can go to drivechain.info and you can see – we're actually making – we have two. 57:08 So I haven't done the Blind Merged Mining at all. 57:11 So I think I might as well just ship the whole thing together because it's kind of tightly integrated. 57:17 So I haven't done that at all, which I don't know how long. It might take a month or something. 57:20 So you're one of the devs on this? 57:22 No, not really. I mean I do the dev stuff. 57:25 I will do it like academically or like I'll plan it out and I'll do like proof of concept or something. 57:30 But I won't do it in C++. 57:32 So the guy, Patrick Cryptax, he is the guy who does the C++, like the real deving. 57:39 Does he work for Block? 57:40 I just do the academic deving. 57:42 I think Block is going to – I strongly feel that Block is going to hire him really soon. 57:46 He actually works – Roger Ver hired him to work on Hivemind, but I just – I mean – so it doesn't matter. 57:54 That's what I was trying to express to you before is that I do the same thing that I was doing before. 57:58 It's just kind of like a different – people have different reasons for associating with different people 58:03 and different things they hope to get out of that and things. 58:05 But it doesn't really matter I think. 58:07 So if you – when you launch your Drivechain reference implementation, what is the first Drivechain going to be? 58:13 Well, I think it will be one for just – that's just with – I mean sort of what I'm conjecturing is that 58:19 it will be one that's just BIP 101, which is Gavin's BIP, eight megabytes, doubling every year, very aggressive. 58:25 But that's of course the hard limit. 58:27 Miners can set a soft limit. 58:29 And I think that one – 58:30 It doesn't matter, right? 58:31 Right. 58:32 So that's how – exactly. 58:34 So I've worked for really, really hard on – I have a laser focus on one issue with the sidechains, 58:40 which is making sure that the chains do not negatively impact each other at all. 58:45 And I try to make them not impact each other at all. 58:48 But some of them – and in fact, sometimes for ecological reasons, they must. 58:54 And so I've tried – that's why I have – that's part of the reason why I have that thing I mentioned earlier 58:58 where the miners can kind of scope out ones that they don't like and get rid of them specifically 59:04 because they will affect each other even if one chain doesn't want to be affected by another one. 59:12 You can make a sidechain that's specifically designed to affect other sidechains. 59:16 So you don't want that. 59:18 So in order to do that – 59:19 That's rule number three or four, Mike. 59:22 You don't want that. 59:23 Yeah, you don't – four, I think. 59:25 It's four, yeah. 59:26 It's you're an idiot, I'm an idiot. 59:29 Markets are efficient. 59:30 You don't want that. 59:31 The cheapest pair of pants are the ones that cost you the lowest amount of money or something. 59:35 And then rule ten is meet me at the cribbage table. 59:39 Yeah, maybe. 59:41 And rule – the other rule number one is don't talk about Bitcoin Uncensored. 59:46 The first rule of Bitcoin Uncensored is pretend that it's a show about a bunch of racists 59:52 and don't tell any of the racists what to do. 59:55 Hey, hey, hey. 59:56 Are you trying to out Bitcoin Uncensored on what? 59:59 Tell everyone to give it one star. 1:00:02 It's the worst Bitcoin podcast. 1:00:04 It's the worst podcast of any type ever. 1:00:06 So we were talking about the chain. 1:00:10 So I'm laser focused on that. 1:00:12 And what I'm not focused as much on, I try to make the sidechains themselves secure 1:00:17 through this Blind Merged Mining and through the transfer back being appropriate. 1:00:22 But I'm really not as concerned about that at all. 1:00:25 And the reason is that people are free to take whatever risks they want with their own money. 1:00:29 When everyone bought Bitcoin, they knew it was like a crazy gamble. 1:00:33 And it could easily have not worked. 1:00:36 Greg Maxwell proved that distributed consensus was impossible before Bitcoin was invented 1:00:41 and kind of proved that it was possible. 1:00:44 So there was this kind of like Bitcoin relies on some incentive-based kind of shady substances. 1:00:52 And it's sort of like, okay, everyone's getting me on Telegram now. 1:00:56 That's very funny. 1:00:57 I got to mute all this. 1:00:59 All right. 1:01:00 Are they watching? 1:01:02 Hold on, Paul. 1:01:03 Blind Merged Mining? 1:01:04 Yes. 1:01:05 Is that going to be required or is that optional? 1:01:08 The thing about Blind Merged Mining is that you can become sighted again if you just run a full node. 1:01:14 So the way Blind Merged Mining works is that you can ask someone else. 1:01:18 The sidechain nodes pay themselves the transaction fees. 1:01:23 And then they bribe main chain miners to include the hash of that block. 1:01:31 So if Alan is on the sidechain, Alan's going to pay himself all the transaction fees for that block. 1:01:37 But the point is he's not going to mine the block because he's not a miner. 1:01:40 But with Blind Merged Mining, he bribes Bob the miner to include Alan's block in the Bitcoin main chain core base, thus mining it. 1:01:51 Okay. 1:01:52 So is that literally like you're bribing a pool of miners or how's that work? 1:01:56 Sort of. 1:01:57 It doesn't matter. 1:01:58 Yeah, it'll be a market again. 1:02:00 So the people on all the sidechains will be like, I'll pay for Bitcoin if you include this hash that pays me 3.9. 1:02:10 And someone else will say, I'll pay 4.1 Bitcoin if you include this different hash that pays me 4. 1:02:15 And someone else will say... 1:02:16 They used to bid. 1:02:18 It doesn't really... 1:02:20 They just broadcast these messages and flood them in theory, but I haven't coded any of this. 1:02:25 Who's going to persist the data of the sidechain? 1:02:27 Is it going to be dedicated... 1:02:28 People running the nodes. 1:02:29 So people run nodes just like Bitcoin. 1:02:32 Okay. 1:02:33 And it's actually going to be two different ledgers, like one for the sidechain, one for the main chain? 1:02:37 Yes, two different blockchains, two different databases. 1:02:42 Okay. 1:02:43 It'll be just like an altcoin, really. 1:02:45 It'll be very similar to an altcoin, but with this other stuff. 1:02:49 So Dan, to finish the Blind Merged Mining thought, if a miner doesn't want to be bribed, he can just run the sidechain node. 1:02:57 Calculate all the transaction fees, pay them to himself, and then mine the block. 1:03:01 So he can... 1:03:02 You can outsource something, or you can just hire that person to do it yourself, which is... 1:03:07 So they can undo the blindness whenever they want, which I expect most of them will actually do. 1:03:12 But I wanted to code this anyway. 1:03:14 And when they include it, they're also... 1:03:18 It's not like they're temporarily not securing Bitcoin. 1:03:21 They're just adding in one small transaction that represents that sidechain. 1:03:25 The miners choose which transactions to include anyway. 1:03:28 So they're just thinking that one is a priority because they get fees. 1:03:32 Wait, wait, wait. Say that again, Mike. 1:03:34 So the miners already choose which transactions to include in a block. 1:03:38 They're just being asked by the sidechain, here's a particularly profitable transaction if you include it into the block. 1:03:46 Yeah, and that's going to represent all the transactions of the sidechain, right? 1:03:50 Exactly. So the sidechain node would pay themselves all the transaction fees for all the messages on that chain. 1:03:58 And then they bribe the miner just a little bit less than that. 1:04:00 They keep a tiny slice for themselves. 1:04:02 And then the miner just sees this thing. 1:04:05 If you include this thing in a Coinbase, which is how merge mining works, basically. 1:04:11 If you include that thing, we'll pay you this amount of money. 1:04:15 As far as fees per kilobyte goes, the Coinbase thing that's going to be included is going to be very small. 1:04:21 It's just going to be one hash. So it's going to be small. 1:04:25 And it's probably going to be paying many orders of magnitude higher than that. 1:04:30 Yeah, I mean you can pay like four times the normal transaction fee or whatever. 1:04:34 Yeah. I think so, yes. 1:04:37 Okay, so essentially this is the incentive of the whole system. 1:04:42 Is that I'm always going to be profitable if you mine my transaction. 1:04:45 And I'm going to be so much more valuable as a whole ecosystem outside of the main chain, right? 1:04:50 Yeah, the security is that miners won't kill the goose that lays the golden egg. 1:04:56 Okay. 1:04:57 Sort of. 1:04:58 So would you argue that you can make a centralized database that does all this stuff with provable hashes back to the Bitcoin blockchain through something like Tirion? 1:05:07 Yes, Tirion uses the anchoring. 1:05:09 But you understand anchoring doesn't solve the double spend problem. 1:05:13 Because you can anchor two things at once. 1:05:14 Oh yeah, you'd have to trust the centralized database with all that stuff. 1:05:17 Right, but the blockchain technology does. 1:05:22 I mean blockchain is Kafka ledgers now. 1:05:26 Yeah, right now it's everything. 1:05:30 But like with Tirion you can say Hillary Clinton won and Donald Trump won. 1:05:35 And you can timestamp them both. 1:05:37 And no one can figure out. 1:05:38 You can just automate a bunch of software to just timestamp everything. 1:05:41 Every possible permutation of the ledger. 1:05:44 Oh, I think you're the first person that thought of that. 1:05:47 No, I'm definitely not. 1:05:50 Definitely not at all. 1:05:53 That was interesting. 1:05:54 I actually did learn a little bit about Drivechains. 1:05:57 That was cool. 1:05:58 Let's talk. 1:05:59 Hey, let's. 1:06:00 I mean, we're going on. 1:06:03 Let's talk about Satoshi Roundtable now. 1:06:05 Let's jump back to that. 1:06:06 Going back? 1:06:07 Okay. 1:06:08 Now we know everything about it. 1:06:09 I love this. 1:06:10 We don't really know about Hivemind yet, but no one cares I don't think. 1:06:13 Does anyone care? 1:06:14 Very non-linear blog post format. 1:06:17 Well, Andrew Polstra called it, quote, feasible. 1:06:21 Which was the greatest feedback. 1:06:22 Hivemind? 1:06:23 Yeah, and Roger Ver referred to it as possibly the most important project since Bitcoin itself. 1:06:28 Okay, we have to talk about it for at least five seconds. 1:06:32 Well, I mean, let's talk about Satoshi Roundtable first. 1:06:34 We'll leave it to the end. 1:06:35 We're getting really out of order. 1:06:36 See, he's getting with the program. 1:06:38 All right. 1:06:39 We already talked about it for a little bit, though. 1:06:42 I know. 1:06:43 Paul was jumping around everywhere. 1:06:45 He got off track there. 1:06:47 So yeah, Satoshi Roundtable. 1:06:49 So you said it was two days. 1:06:50 What was the most interesting interaction you had there? 1:06:54 That's a good question. 1:06:55 Let me think about it. 1:06:56 And who was it? 1:06:57 No, come on. 1:06:58 I can't say that. 1:06:59 Most interesting interaction. 1:07:03 Who made the biggest impression on you? 1:07:06 You can say that. 1:07:07 You don't have to say what they said. 1:07:10 I don't know. 1:07:11 You know, it's actually... 1:07:15 Was Satoshi there? 1:07:16 No one knows, right? 1:07:18 He may have been there. 1:07:20 I think that probably there was like, you know, I don't know. 1:07:28 I don't know if I can say who made the big... 1:07:30 I mean, it was great to talk with the people who were there. 1:07:32 And a lot of them were great. 1:07:33 I mean, Roger Ver and Dr. Beck were both there. 1:07:35 And they're both awesome. 1:07:37 So I was talking to both of them at various times. 1:07:39 And I thought that was the best. 1:07:41 I'll say that was just the best. 1:07:43 I talked to Peter Todd. 1:07:44 I ambushed him at dinner to talk about Blind Merged Mining. 1:07:48 So that was fun. 1:07:50 Did you learn anything particularly interesting while you were there? 1:07:54 Something you didn't know or realize? 1:07:57 Something that came about? 1:08:01 That's an interesting question. 1:08:02 I think... 1:08:04 Well, one thing is that Peter Todd, we were talking about Blind Merged Mining. 1:08:11 And apparently, it's public record that he has some... 1:08:16 He was sort of thinking along those lines. 1:08:18 Which is interesting because his idea of client-side validation kind of overlaps with what I'm aiming for. 1:08:24 Client-sidechains don't bother each other concept. 1:08:27 So it's interesting. 1:08:29 I think we might have traced out different sides of a circle or something on that. 1:08:34 But I think... 1:08:36 So I did learn a little bit from Peter Todd, of course. 1:08:39 Because he knows a lot. 1:08:41 And what was that the client does what exactly? 1:08:43 Client-side validation is Peter Todd's phrase. 1:08:46 He likes this other thing where miners just get paid transaction fees in Bitcoin. 1:08:51 And they have no idea what they are doing at all. 1:08:53 Which is ironic because it's very similar to what the sidechains... 1:08:57 Yeah, it's blind. 1:08:59 Like Blind Merged Mining. 1:09:01 So he had like a kind of a weird thing involving a bunch of... 1:09:04 I don't want to talk about it and screw it up. 1:09:06 But it's something involving... 1:09:07 He had, I think, a more complicated version of Blind Merged Mining. 1:09:11 And frankly, it might be better as far as I know. 1:09:14 But it's hidden in some obscure IRC log. 1:09:16 And he told me what to Google search to find it. 1:09:19 But I admit that I forgot. 1:09:22 I don't know. 1:09:24 At this point, I think I'm just going to stick with the thing that I understand. 1:09:28 Did anyone... 1:09:29 So I'm guessing you brought up Drivechains during the Satoshi roundtable? 1:09:33 I did bring it up, yes. 1:09:34 Well, I kind of brought it up early on. 1:09:36 And then I didn't say the first night. 1:09:39 And then I didn't really say anything. 1:09:41 So then later on... 1:09:42 What was the general feedback? 1:09:44 Yeah, well, then the end of day two, people more or less demanded that I mention it. 1:09:51 So then I mentioned it again. 1:09:53 But not to everyone. 1:09:56 Only to like... 1:09:57 Because there are different groups at Satoshi roundtable. 1:10:00 And so I was with the Bitcoin group. 1:10:01 I was with like... 1:10:02 There's these other groups. 1:10:04 The ICO kind of weirdo group, right? 1:10:08 And then there's like... 1:10:09 Some of the people are from doing these weird other projects. 1:10:13 Okay. 1:10:14 So this wasn't just one big roundtable. 1:10:16 There's different... 1:10:17 Of course. 1:10:18 Yeah, it was not. 1:10:19 How many people were there? 1:10:20 Was it like 50? 1:10:22 It was like 200. 1:10:23 Yeah. 1:10:24 In total, there was like... 1:10:25 Definitely more than 100. 1:10:26 I don't really remember. 1:10:27 But in the room that I was in, at the end of day two, talking about this idea. 1:10:32 There were maybe... 1:10:34 Someone must count them. 1:10:36 There's like maybe 20 people. 1:10:38 It was like four rows of four. 1:10:41 Square. 1:10:43 Okay. 1:10:44 So you're saying that the groups were like... 1:10:46 I mean, were there people there for like... 1:10:49 You said ICOs like Ethereum-based ICOs? 1:10:52 There was only like one or two Ethereum people, thankfully. 1:10:56 One of them did try to convince someone, who shall remain nameless, and myself, 1:11:03 that proof-of-stake was a good idea. 1:11:06 And we were like... 1:11:07 I was like, do you acknowledge that everyone has brought up proof-of-stake once per three months 1:11:13 since the beginning of 2010? 1:11:16 And every single 100% of them have been wrong and later admitted that I was stupid. 1:11:21 And he was like, yes, I do admit that. 1:11:23 And then I was like, but you still think that you've got proof-of-stake figured out this time? 1:11:27 And he said, yes. 1:11:28 And then he said, I should go to Paris, where Ethereum turns on the proof-of-stake. 1:11:33 I think it's this month, too, February. 1:11:35 Ethereum will activate the proof-of-stake. 1:11:39 And I was like, well, that sounds like a waste of my time because it's going to be stupid. 1:11:45 And he was like, whatever. 1:11:47 It's going to be great. 1:11:48 I think it will be an interesting experiment. 1:11:51 I can't wait to see what happens. 1:11:53 I'm so excited. 1:11:55 So I've mentioned this before, which is the only reason I bring it up now again. 1:11:59 But Vitalik could actually die as a result of this happening. 1:12:02 Because the weak subjectivity is like, his key is determining which chain is real. 1:12:08 And if someone wants to rewrite the chain, they need to get his key, 1:12:12 which means that his key is worth a lot. 1:12:15 The cost is costless simulation. 1:12:17 So you're saying there's centralization around proof-of-stake with his key? 1:12:21 Yeah. 1:12:22 Weak subjectivity is pure centralization. 1:12:27 What? 1:12:28 I'm so confused. 1:12:29 All right. 1:12:30 I didn't really want to talk about POS. 1:12:31 But jeez, you're saying that the Ethereum implementation of proof-of-stake 1:12:35 is going to rely on a multi-chain private key federation? 1:12:40 Yeah, absolutely. 1:12:41 Yes, it does. 1:12:42 That's what weak subjectivity means. 1:12:43 They're going to get subjectivity from someone's subjective point of view, 1:12:47 but going back for the last two years. 1:12:51 But what I'm not sure they understand is that it's easy to go make stuff. 1:12:57 You can go back two years in one day and then make a billion copies 1:13:03 that all look almost exactly the same. 1:13:05 So you can just drown the world in these copies that look exactly the same. 1:13:09 It's like what we were talking about with Hillary and Trump. 1:13:12 Yeah, costless simulation. 1:13:14 They're all exactly the same, but you only defraud one person. 1:13:18 You steal one guy's Bitcoin, one exchange or one anything. 1:13:21 It doesn't matter. 1:13:22 So they're all the same. 1:13:23 And then the only thing holding that back is that Vitalik's key will tell you 1:13:27 which one that you should trust. 1:13:30 Until someone shoots Vitalik in the head. 1:13:32 Until someone shoots Vitalik, right. 1:13:33 Guys, I don't want to talk. 1:13:36 This is the danger of centralization. 1:13:40 That's why we don't do that. 1:13:44 I don't want to reveal this. 1:13:47 I don't think people know that. 1:13:49 I don't think people believe it. 1:13:50 So I think Vitalik's safe. 1:13:52 I hope he's safe. 1:13:55 I don't know what to say about that. 1:13:57 Anything else? 1:13:58 What came at you like, bam! 1:14:00 Like, oh, wow, wasn't expecting that at Satoshi Roundtable. 1:14:04 Anything? 1:14:06 Some people were there and they were dramatic characters were there. 1:14:09 I can't reveal. 1:14:11 Someone said... 1:14:14 One million dollar! 1:14:16 Someone said, like, the market has rejected SegWit. 1:14:21 Which I thought was ridiculous. 1:14:23 Oh, yeah. 1:14:24 Can't even ask. 1:14:26 Hold on. 1:14:27 Why is that ridiculous? 1:14:29 I don't understand. 1:14:30 This individual gave a metaphor of like a car that was offered. 1:14:35 Like a General Motors car that people weren't buying. 1:14:38 But SegWit is opt-in. 1:14:41 So it's like a car that costs zero. 1:14:43 That does everything your old car did. 1:14:45 That you'd be given for free. 1:14:46 So it's not really a market question. 1:14:48 Okay. 1:14:49 In my opinion. 1:14:50 But that's something that someone said. 1:14:53 But I do agree that... 1:14:54 Sounds like something... 1:14:55 Miners have every right to withhold it. 1:14:59 Sorry, sounds like what? 1:15:01 Sounds like something Roger Ver might say. 1:15:03 Well, it may have been him or may not have been him. But whoever it was may have also publicly blogged about this analogy days afterwards. 1:15:10 I remember seeing this on Twitter. That's why I don't remember who... 1:15:14 You may be able to find this individual. 1:15:16 The blog, I think I read something by Falk Binch. 1:15:19 You may have read something like that. 1:15:21 Yeah. 1:15:23 But I think even though the market analogy is ridiculous, I think the miners do have every right to withhold SegWit. 1:15:30 That is exactly what they are there for. 1:15:33 Just to hold things out that they don't think should be in. 1:15:36 They are there to censor really more than anything else. 1:15:40 They censor double spends. They censor invalid transactions. 1:15:43 So they are there to filter stuff out. 1:15:46 And if they want to filter this thing out, they can filter it out. 1:15:48 That's what they're there for. 1:15:51 Was the Satoshi Roundtable a success? 1:15:54 I thought it was, but I had my own goals. 1:15:56 So I accomplished my own goals. 1:15:58 I don't think anyone else thought it was a success. 1:16:02 I don't know. I really don't know. 1:16:04 I like that it was a fun place. 1:16:07 You got to meet people that you never met before. 1:16:11 You had some fun. 1:16:13 So I had a lot of fun. 1:16:15 But I think a lot of people there... 1:16:17 The last Satoshi Roundtable, last year, there was a big scaling. 1:16:21 Like, we need to fix scaling here. 1:16:23 And then that kind of came back this time. 1:16:26 And I think a lot of those people were angry, and they left disappointed. 1:16:29 Yeah, because I remember Bruce Fenton talking about that, 1:16:33 saying that nothing really was accomplished with scaling or something. 1:16:37 It wasn't a good idea to try to force it. 1:16:39 I think that was a mistake. 1:16:41 I think that he should have bailed on that earlier. 1:16:43 But you never know what... 1:16:45 It might have worked. I would have been surprised if it did. 1:16:48 If it worked, I would have been the one who was mistaken about that. 1:16:51 But I wasn't mistaken. But you never know at the time. 1:16:54 But my point is that I think a lot of people came there 1:16:58 with the idea of getting SegWit activated or something, 1:17:02 or doing some other thing, 1:17:04 or killing SegWit, or getting support for whatever. 1:17:08 And I don't think any of that changed. 1:17:10 And it's interesting. There was only one, I think. 1:17:12 Oh, my God. I keep remembering. 1:17:14 I'm sorry to say I get all the miners' names confused. 1:17:17 But there was only one miner there, and I think it was F2Pool. 1:17:20 Oh, no. There was Alex Petrov from BitFury. 1:17:26 And he was there, but there was only one Chinese miner there. 1:17:29 And I think that guy's name was... 1:17:31 Chandler? 1:17:32 Like, no. Wang Fu or something. 1:17:35 I feel terrible. I can't remember the names. I don't want to say it. 1:17:37 But it started with a W. 1:17:38 They're Chinese names. I don't blame you. 1:17:40 I know. They're hard. 1:17:42 I hope that to them, all of our names sound the same. 1:17:47 It's only fair. 1:17:48 Yeah. 1:17:52 But I can't remember. 1:17:53 And I actually never met... 1:17:54 You say that with so much sincerity, I can't really make fun of you. 1:17:57 I'm in the clear because I never actually met this individual. 1:18:00 I was in a different room every single time just by pure luck, 1:18:03 not by any choice of mine. 1:18:04 But he happened to be in a different room every time. 1:18:06 I know at one point someone who may be identifiable 1:18:11 misidentified this individual as Jihan Wu, 1:18:15 which was supposedly very funny. 1:18:19 So that wasn't me, and I wasn't in the room when it happened. 1:18:22 Was that individual friendly or combative? 1:18:25 Well, this individual said, 1:18:26 well, why don't we ask Jihan Wu what he thinks? 1:18:29 It was someone else. 1:18:31 It was a different Chinese miner. 1:18:33 But I never met this guy, 1:18:34 so I don't know if I mispronounce his name. 1:18:36 It's hardly my fault because I don't know who he is. 1:18:39 But I think that was F2Pool. 1:18:42 There were some small miners there. 1:18:46 So there were some miners there, 1:18:47 but people wanted to talk to the big 70% Chinese coalition, 1:18:52 and they were not there. 1:18:54 And the only guy who was there was Chinese. 1:18:57 Someone referred to him as Jihan Wu incorrectly, 1:18:59 and then everyone in the room stared at him. 1:19:01 It's like, okay, we're going to talk about stuff we really want to do, 1:19:04 and you really need the miners' support with all this. 1:19:07 Particularly around now. 1:19:08 It would have been kind of appropriate given the recent few months. 1:19:13 So I think that was an aspect of it that was very salient, 1:19:15 that people wanted something out of it, 1:19:17 but they didn't get that thing out of it. 1:19:19 So I think those people were frustrated. 1:19:21 I was not, though. 1:19:22 I planned in advance for what I wanted to accomplish, 1:19:25 and I got what I wanted out of it. 1:19:27 So it was a success for me. 1:19:28 It was a big happy face. 1:19:30 So, I mean, to come back to this real quick. 1:19:33 So you say you think SIGWIT's going to pass. 1:19:35 So do you think that Core is going to lower? 1:19:39 Because Core has the self-imposed 95% threshold. 1:19:43 Do you think that's going to be exceeded, 1:19:45 or Core is going to back off on that 1:19:49 and implement activation with a lower threshold? 1:19:52 Well, in practice, it is 51%, of course, 1:19:55 because they can agree to orphan people 1:19:57 who don't fall in line, 1:19:59 and that is a very credible and dangerous threat 1:20:02 because it also involves anyone who gets away with that 1:20:04 with making more money. 1:20:05 But it sets a horrible precedent, 1:20:07 so that probably won't happen. 1:20:08 Even though the true threshold is 51%, 1:20:11 probably there won't be any funny business around that, 1:20:13 but there might be, which is why I bring that up. 1:20:17 But I think probably we will go at the very slow road to 95%, 1:20:23 or we'll either go all the way to 95%, 1:20:27 or we'll blitz, 1:20:29 and they'll just activate it with less than 50%. 1:20:33 So we'll either have whatever we've got now, 1:20:36 which is like 30% or something. 1:20:38 Like less than 25%. 1:20:40 The funny thing about SIGWIT 1:20:42 is it's actually been dropping by a couple of percentiles, 1:20:44 which is really strange. 1:20:47 So it might be a sub-50% blitz activation, 1:20:51 or we'll go all the way to 95%. 1:20:55 So in a situation where you start to do it below 50%, 1:20:59 does that mean you're going to fork the network? 1:21:03 What does that mean? 1:21:04 Yes, it's a flag day. 1:21:05 So you say after this day, 1:21:10 after this day we just activate the SIGWIT, 1:21:15 and if anyone finds an invalid SIGWIT block, 1:21:19 that's an invalid block according to us, 1:21:21 rejected by all the nodes. 1:21:23 Hey, Mike. 1:21:26 Yes. 1:21:27 You want to talk about Construct? 1:21:30 Yep, because I went to Construct. 1:21:32 We're going a little bit long on this interview. 1:21:34 No, no, I'm fine. I'm still good. 1:21:38 Let's talk about Construct, Paul. 1:21:41 Let's talk about it. 1:21:42 So there's a unicorn named Taylor there. 1:21:45 There was. I met him in person. 1:21:47 Taylor Gearing? 1:21:49 He was definitely a unicorn. 1:21:51 And he's an Ethereum guy, by the way. 1:21:54 He's big on POS. 1:21:55 Was he also at the 51 table? 1:21:58 I don't remember him. 1:21:59 Yeah, I was a little distracted by the unicorn. 1:22:01 This was not the guy I was thinking of 1:22:03 when I was talking about POS before. 1:22:04 It was a different guy. 1:22:05 Oh, I can't even say that, right? 1:22:07 Because it's negative information. 1:22:09 Oh, now we're narrowing it down. 1:22:11 Narrowing it down. 1:22:13 Six billion minus one. 1:22:15 Or 6.5 billion. 1:22:17 Taylor Gearing wasn't at Satoshi Roundtable, was he? 1:22:19 No. 1:22:20 I don't think the unicorn guy was at Satoshi Roundtable. 1:22:23 If he was, I didn't remember him. 1:22:25 Okay, so let's talk about takeaways from Construct. 1:22:28 And first, talk about where it was. 1:22:31 Who was there? 1:22:33 It was in SF. It was in San Francisco. 1:22:36 So I hadn't been to San Francisco in a while. 1:22:38 So it was nice to go back there. 1:22:41 I didn't pack a lot of warm winter stuff. 1:22:43 I had to go last minute. 1:22:45 So it was... 1:22:46 Oh, and luckily I brought my sweater with me, too. 1:22:49 The venue was very cold. 1:22:50 It was in this hangar. 1:22:52 Innovation hangar. 1:22:53 But it was like a big aircraft hangar. 1:22:55 But it clearly hadn't been used for aircraft 1:22:57 in like 50 years or something. 1:22:59 Apparently it used to be some museum for kids or something. 1:23:02 But it was cold there. 1:23:04 And it was very echoey. 1:23:05 It was a very bizarre venue idea. 1:23:07 Because they split it into four tracks, 1:23:09 they were all kind of in the same big room. 1:23:11 So there was a lot of echoing sound. 1:23:12 So it was kind of cold. 1:23:14 It was kind of difficult to hear some people some of the time. 1:23:16 Wait a minute. 1:23:17 So you'd literally be hearing like reverb from like another presentation? 1:23:20 You would indeed, yes. 1:23:22 Oh, geez. 1:23:24 I mean, Construct I feel like has a big name to be kind of like... 1:23:28 I don't know. 1:23:29 Well, I think this is the first Construct, isn't it? 1:23:31 Or maybe it's the second one. 1:23:32 I don't know. 1:23:33 But yeah, I agree. 1:23:34 CoinDesk is trying to be more... 1:23:35 They do Consensus as a big one. 1:23:37 Oh, I was thinking about Consensus, sorry. 1:23:39 Yeah, Consensus is a really big one. 1:23:40 So that one is in May. 1:23:42 And CoinDesk is trying to be this thing, this like curator of the conferences. 1:23:46 So I agree that it's kind of a little bit of a – 1:23:50 they were a little embarrassed with the venue I think. 1:23:54 Yeah. 1:23:55 By the way, we ended up interviewing Joneseth for like three hours. 1:24:02 After he hung up. 1:24:04 Oh, really? 1:24:05 Okay, good. 1:24:06 I hope it was a good interview. 1:24:07 Yeah, you can watch. 1:24:08 We were just chatting. 1:24:09 All right. 1:24:10 Okay. 1:24:11 We didn't really interview him. 1:24:12 We were just chatting about RAM stuff anyways. 1:24:15 Kind of like what we're doing. 1:24:18 Okay. 1:24:19 So what takeaways did you have from Construct? 1:24:23 Well, you know, believe it or not, that's an interesting question. 1:24:28 So I – you know, there was a lot of sidechain stuff there 1:24:32 and I was comparing it to my own stuff 1:24:34 and I thought my own stuff looked pretty good actually. 1:24:38 So I was happy about that. 1:24:41 What other – like RSK or – 1:24:43 Yeah, RSK was there and Blockstream was there. 1:24:47 And Blockstream is kind of going in a different direction. 1:24:49 They're going in the Federated Pig direction. 1:24:52 What do you think about that? 1:24:53 Really? 1:24:54 I don't like it, right? 1:24:55 I think it's – 1:24:56 That's weak sauce. 1:24:57 Did you tell Adam Back that you didn't like it? 1:25:01 I did. 1:25:02 I'm not really sure. 1:25:04 He agreed on some things. 1:25:06 He didn't agree on some other things. 1:25:07 But he did agree partially that it – 1:25:09 Adam Back is like really smart, right? 1:25:13 I think he's smart, yeah. 1:25:15 Have they said why they abandoned the two-way peg? 1:25:17 Because they were doing – 1:25:18 Well, you know, actually they did not. 1:25:20 But I have a guess, which is that – 1:25:22 you know, I mentioned before that Greg Maxwell proved 1:25:24 that distributed consensus was impossible right before Bitcoin. 1:25:28 Proved that it was in fact possible. 1:25:30 And I think they're just really uncomfortable over there with this whole incentive stuff. 1:25:37 So the cryptographer model is like 256-bit security 1:25:43 and you need a computer the size of the sun and totally unbreakable, 1:25:47 fuck the government, et cetera, type, like super security, right? 1:25:52 That's like what cryptographers normally live with. 1:25:55 But in the econ world, we have this other stuff about – 1:25:59 like we even have this phrase, the beneficence of the butcher, 1:26:02 which is a quote from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, 1:26:05 which is the invisible hand thing where he says it's not from the beneficence – 1:26:09 excuse me, the benevolence of the butcher. 1:26:13 And then he has a long – there are a lot of dots to that. 1:26:16 He says a lot of things. 1:26:18 He has a lot of rhymes. 1:26:19 But basically, long story short, 1:26:21 he's saying that the reason that you eat and the reason that you survive, 1:26:24 it's not because those people are being nice to you. 1:26:27 They want to make money. 1:26:30 And restaurants – just go to New York. 1:26:32 The restaurants fail all the time. 1:26:35 They're constantly going bankrupt. 1:26:37 But you can get any food you want in New York. 1:26:39 You can get dollar pizza that literally costs one US dollar. 1:26:42 You can go to fancy restaurants. 1:26:44 You can get Cuban food. You can get Italian food. 1:26:47 You can get anything you want. You can get Polish food. 1:26:49 It's all there, and it's all cheap. 1:26:52 You can pay basically as much for food as you want. 1:26:55 You can choose how much you want to spend, and you can spend it on almost anything. 1:26:59 And there is no 256-bit security there. 1:27:05 There's nothing guaranteeing that you will have food. 1:27:08 But it's precisely because there's no guarantee, in fact. 1:27:11 It's precisely with the threat of bankruptcy that there's so much variety 1:27:16 and so much technical efficiency and how much – there's a phrase. 1:27:19 In economics, the phrase technical efficiency refers to producing something 1:27:23 at the lowest cost possible. 1:27:25 It doesn't have anything to do with like technical programming. 1:27:28 So there's a phrase technical efficiency, which is producing stuff, 1:27:32 and allocative efficiency, which is making sure that stuff goes to whoever wants it the most. 1:27:37 So we have this stuff in econ, and you rely on food every day and water and electricity, 1:27:45 and these things are provided to you by businesses that compete. 1:27:49 And your cars and stuff, you could buy a car. 1:27:52 You can get an Uber versus Lyft. 1:27:55 Even the individual Ubers compete to have a higher rating. 1:27:58 So there's all this stuff that you're trusting a lot of people like with your lives most of the time. 1:28:04 They could poison your food or prepare it badly. 1:28:08 Anytime you go on a highway, people could just crash into you and kill you. 1:28:12 There's no like 256-bit computer the size of the sun barrier to you being killed, 1:28:19 and people do. 1:28:20 30,000 people do die on the highway every year, 1:28:24 but way more people drive on any given trip down the highway. 1:28:30 You're probably fine. 1:28:31 Same with like flying in an airplane. 1:28:33 There's no guarantee that the pilot, other than him wanting that to die himself or something. 1:28:39 So there's this softer – my point is there's this softer thing that we were talking about before 1:28:45 that they're probably not comfortable with. 1:28:48 They probably think that it's not appropriate for them to back something 1:28:52 that might end up costing people their Bitcoin. 1:28:55 But I have a totally opposite view. 1:28:57 I say you build it. 1:28:58 You make it as good as you can, and then if people feel that the risk is worth it, 1:29:03 if they want to go over to like a Monero sidechain, that's their decision. 1:29:07 It's almost going to be like cool because since the DAO happened, 1:29:11 I don't really feel like any big sidechain is just going to like blow up 1:29:15 and get really big here. 1:29:16 It's going to really stick out. 1:29:19 Yes, a very good point. 1:29:20 And I say fragile. 1:29:21 Every single airline crash makes all airplane flights that happen after it more safe 1:29:28 because everyone stops what they're doing. 1:29:30 They find the black box. 1:29:32 They figure out what made the plane crash, and they fix it. 1:29:36 And so I think the DAO, and I think it's even better if it happens on a sidechain. 1:29:42 Sidechain fails. 1:29:43 People will figure out like, okay, maybe instead of making it three months, 1:29:47 they'll make it like two years or something. 1:29:49 I don't know. 1:29:50 Or maybe they'll make it less. 1:29:51 I have no idea. 1:29:52 But whatever it is, it will improve, I think. 1:29:54 It will tend to improve over time. 1:29:56 We kind of dropped off from construct. 1:29:59 I just want to ask some general questions. 1:30:01 Sure. 1:30:04 First off, what kind of topics were really popular as far as on stage? 1:30:09 Like, for instance, did Bitcoin Unlimited even come up? 1:30:12 Did Ethereum guys have a large presence? 1:30:14 Did the Dash people come out? 1:30:16 Yeah, well, that's a good point. 1:30:18 So there were general tracks, and then there were four. 1:30:23 It split into four. 1:30:25 And normally it only splits into two, so that was slightly unusual. 1:30:28 But it split into four, and there was basically a Bitcoin track. 1:30:31 There was basically an Ethereum track. 1:30:33 There was basically an – believe it or not, there was an R3 track. 1:30:36 They're still coming to events, huh? 1:30:40 Yeah, there was like a Corda thing. 1:30:42 And then there was a fourth track. 1:30:44 I kind of like – I don't know if I can find the thing if I had it in this. 1:30:48 Somewhere I had the schedule. 1:30:50 I don't know where it is. 1:30:52 I can't even remember the fourth. 1:30:54 Well, I have some stuff to say about that, 1:30:55 which is that everyone wants to suck R3's dick because they've got a lot of money. 1:30:59 That's basically the long and short of it. 1:31:01 Is Peter Todd still working there? 1:31:03 Oh, no. 1:31:05 In fact, they stiffed him. 1:31:07 They didn't even pay him for the work that he did. 1:31:09 Oh, yeah, yeah. 1:31:10 Because of Mike Hearn. 1:31:11 Because Mike Hearn is basically – Mike Hearn was angry, and he – 1:31:15 that's just when you get – that's what happens if you're at R3. 1:31:19 You get Mike Hearn. 1:31:20 You don't get Peter Todd. 1:31:21 Wait, wait, wait. 1:31:22 Hold on. 1:31:23 Real quick, real quick, real quick. 1:31:24 What's going on with Mike Hearn? 1:31:26 R3 and Peter Todd and shit. 1:31:29 Oh, well, I mean it's clear. 1:31:30 I mean almost everything can be – has been said publicly, I think. 1:31:33 It's just I don't know if you know the story. 1:31:35 So the story is Peter Todd was hired to do some architecture planning type work for R3. 1:31:43 Then Mike Hearn failed to get XT, and he rage quit 1:31:48 and then published a post saying that Bitcoin was a failed experiment 1:31:52 and everyone – Bitcoin sucks and stuff. 1:31:54 And the price dropped like $540. 1:31:57 But before he did that, he told the R3 people that he was going to do this. 1:32:02 And so then Charlie Cooper with his amazing cufflinks and shirts 1:32:06 and his amazing Gordon Gekko haircut was at – what was it called? 1:32:11 I think it was a – what was it, a Brookings Group? 1:32:13 I think it was a Brookings Group big academic kind of roundtable about blockchain technology. 1:32:21 And then he presented to everyone about how blockchain, the technology, 1:32:24 could be separated from the currency Bitcoin. 1:32:27 And that Mike Hearn – they had hired Mike Hearn 1:32:31 and Mike Hearn said that Bitcoin was a failed experiment, 1:32:33 but the real thing was going to be blockchain. 1:32:35 So that is kind of like the R3 kickoff thing. 1:32:38 As you may know, and as anyone who reads the Bitcoin dev mailing list will know, 1:32:45 Mike Hearn and Peter Todd basically hate each other. 1:32:48 And Mike Hearn showed up at R3 and basically that is exactly the same moment 1:32:55 that Peter Todd stopped working for R3 and then they didn't pay him. 1:32:58 So I fill in the gaps, read between the lines. 1:33:02 So was Mike Hearn present at Construct if R3 – 1:33:06 No, I didn't see him there. No. 1:33:08 When's the last time Hearn has been seen publicly at one of these events? 1:33:11 That's a good point. I have not seen him publicly in a really long time. 1:33:14 I don't think he's coming out after he quit. 1:33:16 Yeah, that's it for us. 1:33:19 Yeah, well, maybe – is he still alive even? 1:33:23 Maybe, you never know. 1:33:26 Is that your favorite conspiracy, Paul, that Mike Hearn has done? 1:33:29 Yeah, that Mike Hearn was an actor hired by Peter Todd. 1:33:38 He was an actor hired by Peter Todd to test the security of Bitcoin. 1:33:42 And now Peter Todd got sick of paying his salary, so they disappeared him into R3. 1:33:49 They pranked R3 on the way out as if – yeah, so I don't know. 1:33:54 That's my theory. 1:33:56 Yeah, Peter R also hired by Peter Todd. 1:34:00 Peter Todd is just hiring everyone. 1:34:02 He's got a big bankroll. Peter Todd is Satoshi. 1:34:04 He's got a lot of money. He's hiring these people to pretend to be – 1:34:08 They really work for – everyone works for Peter Todd though. 1:34:11 They're all actors. 1:34:12 I'm already convinced. 1:34:14 He has a fine arts acting background. 1:34:19 Peter Todd has a degree in bachelors in – I think he has a master's in fine arts. 1:34:25 He has a bachelor's in fine arts if he does not have a – 1:34:29 Are you saying fine arts? 1:34:32 Fine arts, my friend. 1:34:34 Oh, okay. 1:34:36 Yeah, as a violin player, you should know about the fine arts degrees. 1:34:41 Well, Mr. Minor in music plays the piano. 1:34:45 I do, yeah. 1:34:47 I've got my keyboard over there. 1:34:50 Nice. 1:34:51 I was playing earlier today. 1:34:53 I was practicing. 1:34:54 You've got something crazy from Construct. 1:34:58 Construct, anything dramatic? 1:35:00 Well, it was really cold of course. 1:35:03 So no, I was going to try and – I was trying to go there because R3 is there, 1:35:07 and I think R3 – I think Coindesk is willing to sell influence, 1:35:13 and I think R3 is buying, and I think that's like the story there. 1:35:17 So I have no proof of any of that, but I think they basically – R3 has got a lot of money, 1:35:22 and so everyone is afraid to tell them that they suck, which they absolutely do. 1:35:26 What exactly do you think they're going to be buying? 1:35:28 They want like Coindesk to like feature them. 1:35:30 They want to feature their tech. 1:35:32 Because think about the way R3 works. 1:35:35 They get paid if they get subscribers, banks to subscribe. 1:35:40 And so they need to cast this illusion that they're on the cutting edge. 1:35:44 And I say illusion because, of course, they're not actually on the cutting edge. 1:35:47 Oh, there was a Hyperledger. 1:35:48 The fourth track was like a lot of Hyperledger stuff. 1:35:50 Hyperledger. 1:35:52 That's my favorite blockchain. 1:35:54 Yeah. 1:35:55 Proof of a legend at the time. 1:35:57 Has there been any news at all that anybody, just a little off topic here, about Ripple? 1:36:02 I haven't heard anything about Ripple. 1:36:04 I haven't heard from them in a while. 1:36:06 Yeah, there's still like number four or something. 1:36:08 Like where's the deal with that? 1:36:11 So the whole thing with Coindesk featuring Ripple – or sorry, CoinMarketCap. 1:36:18 I don't think – so the one thing is CoinMarketCap doesn't just feature blockchain ideas. 1:36:23 They feature cryptocurrencies. 1:36:26 Why is Ripple still – I mean how is Ripple still number three? 1:36:28 What's going on? 1:36:29 No one ever hears anything about it. 1:36:31 It has a lot of volume. 1:36:32 I mean I hear nothing about it doing anything. 1:36:35 Nobody's signed up. 1:36:36 No big banks. 1:36:37 So how is it – 1:36:38 It's a different course. 1:36:39 Maybe it actually has like wonderful technology and users that we just never hear about. 1:36:44 I doubt it though. 1:36:46 I don't know what their deal is. 1:36:47 But the point is – 1:36:48 Iterative consensus. 1:36:50 Weird shit. 1:36:52 Didn't even use a token until like blockchain ideas got popular. 1:36:56 Oh my god, yeah. 1:36:58 Well, Ripple used to be a totally different thing, and then it had an altcoin after that. 1:37:03 Wasn't that the guy who turned it up on Docs? 1:37:06 Yes, that is correct. 1:37:09 And Jed actually – so he had some great ideas once upon a time. 1:37:13 But in particular, Greg Maxwell, if you want some old drama. 1:37:17 Greg Maxwell was very annoyed that Ripple changed to something. 1:37:21 It used to be like a big consecutive loans, six degrees of separation type thing, like a credit thing, like a friendship credit graph of some kind. 1:37:33 And then they added this altcoin thing to it that you would burn fees on. 1:37:39 And Greg Maxwell was very angry that they did this without changing the name. 1:37:44 So he went back and changed all of his posts that recommended Ripple to say that he no longer recommended it. 1:37:50 On BitcoinTalk.org. 1:37:52 And then he posted about how that wasn't – his endorsement was not given to Ripple so that they could reuse it without his permission and whatever. 1:38:00 Oh, but then Peter Todd posted about how Ripple is de facto centralized because of the list that tells you who's on the list. 1:38:08 It's circular logic. There's a list that tells you who to check. 1:38:12 And he argues that – 1:38:14 List? 1:38:17 To find out who is on the list, you have to consult the list, and Peter Todd thereby proved that it was centralized. 1:38:23 And then Stellar copied Ripple, if you remember. 1:38:26 Yeah. 1:38:28 If you remember that. And then it exploded immediately. It just exploded. 1:38:33 So Ripple still has – they have infinite creation, right? 1:38:38 No, Ripple has whatever. It starts with whatever, a billion, and then it counts down as they're slowing down. 1:38:44 They have a distribution model where they're going to give away like 75% of the Ripple. They just haven't figured out exactly how yet. 1:38:50 Yeah. See, that kind of goes full circle. This is what I was really concerned about when I was reading Satoshi's white paper. 1:38:55 So it's actually very relevant. So it's actually very interesting I think. 1:38:59 But the point is that you can make a Ripple sidechain anyway. So you can just switch that over. 1:39:06 Hey Mike, do you want to finish up on HiveMine and wrap this up? We're going on like two hours. 1:39:12 Sure. Sure. Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit about HiveMine, Paul? 1:39:16 Well, I wrote it all down so that – frankly, to avoid the Vitalik problem of like being assassinated. 1:39:22 So it's all written down on BitcoinHiveMine.com. 1:39:25 P-O-L-V. Proof of Life of Vitalik. 1:39:28 Yeah. Proof of Living Friendship with Vitalik. That's what it should be. P-O-L-F-T-H-I-V-I-L-I-K. 1:39:38 Oh, yeah. 1:39:40 Proof of Living Friendship with Vitalik. So to avoid that, to avoid Proof of Living Friendship with Vitalik, I wrote it all down. 1:39:48 So you can read all about it on BitcoinHiveMine.com. 1:39:51 But the long story short is that it's a peer-to-peer oracle. 1:39:54 So you need to get some information. And I get it peer-to-peer. 1:39:58 So you need to get some information like what is the Bitcoin exchange rate or did Donald Trump win. 1:40:01 The 2016 election. And I get that peer-to-peer. And it will take a little while to explain exactly how I do that. 1:40:05 But the point is I do it without a third party. So it doesn't matter if the people who are currently deciding that are all assassinated or thrown in prison. 1:40:14 Or if their identities are hidden, the network will recover just like Bitcoin recovers. 1:40:19 And so there will be no way ultimately to stop the information from being… 1:40:25 So like just real high notes, what are the key differentiators from like Augur and how they determine… 1:40:32 So on the BitcoinHiveMine.com website, there is in fact a blog that has maybe six or so posts. 1:40:40 And one of those is The Case Against Augur. That's the title of the post. 1:40:44 And I described the long history. So I was talking before in 2014. I published the paper and I met the people who would later become Augur in about April of 2014. 1:40:54 And I was sort of helping them while I had my own other job. And I was helping a number of people. 1:40:59 This included – like one of them was Zach Hess. One of them was Augur people. 1:41:05 One of them was this guy from – this like Russian guy. And the other one was this – there was another guy. 1:41:11 Two Ethereum people, Casey Datrio, he was a pretty smart guy. 1:41:17 But so there were a bunch of people who liked the idea and they were kind of working on it. 1:41:21 So I published it in early – in January 2014. And I kind of published it. 1:41:27 I didn't really kind of circulated it around Bitcoin talk later. 1:41:30 Goren posted it. He was really helpful in getting the word out early on. 1:41:36 He posted it out like in February 1st or something. 1:41:40 And so then some people contacted me. We set up the forum and stuff. 1:41:45 People – and they were interested in it. And so one of those people was the Augur people. 1:41:50 But they were kind of annoying to deal with sort of. They were just a little – it was fine. 1:41:55 I was happy to help everyone, but I thought they were a little slow in doing it. 1:41:59 And so Vitalik kind of showed up and captured them. And he was like, oh, this is a great project. 1:42:04 He got them to move it to Ethereum and got them to do – plan to do an ICO. 1:42:09 And those were two things for me that I was like, that's like totally stupid. 1:42:13 Deal breaker. It will ruin – both of those would kill the project. 1:42:17 And in fact, Augur can't – it can't really operate on Ethereum for technical reasons that we could discuss. 1:42:22 But I mean one of them is the gas costs are outrageous. 1:42:25 Like you can't even do like a simple slot machine without it costing like huge amounts of money. 1:42:29 But another thing is that there's a more fundamental problem. 1:42:34 I mean there are many fundamental problems, but there is a fundamental problem with the design that makes it un – 1:42:40 which is kind of what I was talking about before with the sidechains, 1:42:43 someone building a sidechain specifically to attack another sidechain, 1:42:46 which is exactly what you are allowed to do on Ethereum, 1:42:50 which is one of the things that makes Ethereum ridiculous, one of the many things. 1:42:53 I mean there's a giant list. So there's a lot to say about that. 1:42:57 But basically Vitalik captured them and brought them to Ethereum, 1:43:00 and I just totally allowed that to happen. 1:43:03 And I kind of encouraged it in sort of moderately sneaky ways by like kind of pretending I didn't like it, 1:43:10 but not really pretending enough or something. 1:43:13 And so I kind of just like let that happen. 1:43:17 And then I tried to convince people not to invest in the crowd sale, but some people did anyway, 1:43:22 including Eric Voorhees, because Eric Voorhees loves to just destroy capital by making malinvestments, 1:43:29 because he thinks that anything that's invested in anything is legitimate capital, but that's obviously ridiculous. 1:43:37 Sorry, I was going to say, this is Augur, Tony. You're talking about Augur, right? 1:43:43 Yes, yes. 1:43:44 I was going to ask you about Tony Sokic, who gave a presentation at my meetup. 1:43:51 Right before he lost his mind. 1:43:56 Whoa, whoa. Hold on. Tony's a friend, man. 1:44:00 The event is to not be recalled. 1:44:04 Oh, really? Oh, well, I guess we're not recalling it then. 1:44:07 Yeah. 1:44:08 It definitely is not in Bitcoin Uncensored episode. Save me, Dr. 1:44:11 Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think it is now. 1:44:15 All right. 1:44:17 I feel bad. Marketing people did a pretty good job at Augur. They did a pretty good job. They really did. 1:44:22 They did too good a job because they marketed like a giant bubble. 1:44:26 There you go. We're promoting Tony and his endeavors. 1:44:31 Yeah, and a lot of people were just brainwashed by Vitalik. 1:44:34 There are only a few kind of malicious actors at Augur. 1:44:38 But it's just like what Bitcoin Uncensored guys say, where it's like people just don't know. 1:44:43 They don't know that they're running a scam. They really don't know. 1:44:46 They really have no idea, which is bizarre, but true nonetheless. 1:44:51 So is Hivemind actively up and running and working? 1:44:55 Yeah, so we made so much progress on it that I switched to the sidechains. 1:44:59 Progress on Hivemind way outstripped progress on the underlying sidechains technology itself. 1:45:05 So since Blockstream basically stopped working on it, which is really annoying, 1:45:09 and it kind of put Sergio and I in a weird – because Sergio also planned on using it, the sidechains technology. 1:45:17 Sergio had Rootstock, if that wasn't clear. 1:45:19 Yeah. 1:45:21 And so we kind of had to work on it. 1:45:23 I mean I basically worked on it, and that's basically what I was doing. 1:45:26 I've been doing that for – been totally focused on that because it's taken on a new relevance 1:45:31 with its potential ability to resolve some of the scaling problems. 1:45:38 So I think it's like way more important for Bitcoin to have sidechains than it is for me to do my little project. 1:45:44 But I think my project is also awesome because it's like does a lot of really cool stuff. 1:45:50 One of the awesome things it does kind of in a Bitcoin uncensored vein is that it lets you short anything. 1:45:57 So currently you can invest in anything if you call up the CEO and offer them money. 1:46:03 Usually you can do it at some price. 1:46:06 But what this does is it lets you bet against something. 1:46:09 You can say Ethereum will have a price of zero five years from now. 1:46:12 You can bet on that. 1:46:14 So you can basically bet against Ethereum in the future. 1:46:16 And as long as there are arbitrageurs today who are willing to – it's kind of annoying 1:46:21 because this is all blown up by the fact that the exchanges are insolvent so often, 1:46:29 and I realize this is a complex tangent. 1:46:31 But long story short, you can short things even without the exchange enabling shorting. 1:46:37 So it can bring down today's Ethereum price even without the ability to actually short at a site. 1:46:45 So you can basically deflate any Ponzi scheme by just making a prediction market 1:46:50 that the scheme will collapse and betting against it. 1:46:53 Something very similar happened with PirateF40 where Matthew Wright offered to bet people that it wasn't a Ponzi. 1:47:01 Some people took him. 1:47:02 Yeah, I remember. 1:47:03 And I pointed out at the time that it was a very smart thing to do to invest with Pirate and bet. 1:47:11 Yeah, right. You could get free money by doing that. 1:47:14 And I think some people actually did that, which was unfortunate because the big lesson of everything, 1:47:21 of Finance 2008, Bitcoin, and all exchanges, which is that don't trust the third party, which was Matthew. 1:47:31 So the point is he ultimately didn't pay. 1:47:34 He bet people, but he ultimately didn't pay. 1:47:36 I don't know if he refunded their money, but he didn't double their money. 1:47:40 He didn't say, I'll bet. 1:47:41 He bet people that Pirate wasn't a scammer. 1:47:43 He turned out to be a scammer. 1:47:45 Then he didn't pay the bet. 1:47:47 Oops, so I advised people about this. 1:47:51 He only had the game. That's a smart contract. 1:47:55 Yeah, it would have been nice if it were a trustless smart contract, which it could have been with Hivemind. 1:48:02 But Hivemind can do a lot of cool things. 1:48:05 The whole point of Hivemind, and I kind of written some of this down, 1:48:08 but I really want to finish this. 1:48:09 One of the main things I have to write down. 1:48:11 I have to write down something why the prediction market price is always right, which it always is, 1:48:16 which is something that people find extraordinary. 1:48:18 But I brought it up when I was talking to Chris and Josh on the Election Day episode, 1:48:24 and it's a simple proof that it is always correct. 1:48:26 It's always the most optimally accurate. 1:48:28 So it's like a prediction market on what heads or tails, what a coin flip will be. 1:48:33 Will it be heads? 1:48:35 It might say 50%, so you have to decide if that's your definition of right or not. 1:48:41 But it is. It's the correct definition of right. 1:48:44 I mean, because you don't know. 1:48:45 When the coin is in the air, you don't know whether or not it's going to be heads or tails. 1:48:48 So the correct answer is to say that it's a 50% chance of being heads. 1:48:53 That is the right answer to that question. 1:48:56 But some people want it to be magically whatever the final result is somehow. 1:49:04 Some information that just doesn't exist, but all the information that does exist is aggregated in a liquid prediction market. 1:49:10 So I have to write that, but then I have to write my vision, the whole reason that I'm doing this project. 1:49:16 And there's a lot of intermediate goals that I'm accomplishing along the way, which are really important. 1:49:22 But the whole point of prediction markets really is to inform collective action decisions, 1:49:28 which is to say voting on congressmen, really, more than anything else. 1:49:36 But congressmen and presidents and voting on the CEO. 1:49:40 Well, voting on the board of directors, really. 1:49:42 So shareholders vote on the board of directors. 1:49:44 The board of directors picks the CEO. 1:49:46 The CEO picks the C-suite. 1:49:48 And then everyone else hires their subordinates down in a big pyramid. 1:49:52 How does the initial Oracle – all right, sorry. 1:49:55 But honestly, how does the initial Oracle group get selected for this? 1:50:00 Oh, that's a good question. 1:50:02 So yeah, I'm playing with a couple ideas for that because it's different from Bitcoin. 1:50:09 Bitcoin had this problem of how do you get rid of this money, which is like Ripple is struggling with it right now. 1:50:15 If Ripple were really valuable, all the Ripple people would be like – they would be vitalized, right? 1:50:20 They'd be killed because they have like the equivalent of like hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever worth of – 1:50:25 I mean you can't liquidate it. 1:50:27 I mean pretty much the reason why Ripple has such a high market cap is because so much of it is locked up and has some value. 1:50:33 That's what I mean. 1:50:34 So like if it had legitimate value, people would like – if it had like inherent value of some kind, 1:50:39 people would go to those people who have all of it and take – but this is a different problem. 1:50:44 It's not quite the same. 1:50:46 So it's more like a corporation is being created and you have to give away the initial shares, 1:50:52 and it doesn't matter – it really doesn't matter that you don't actually – 1:51:00 you could theoretically give them all to one person, but of course I'm not going to do that. 1:51:05 But the point is not so much that there are many different decision makers, 1:51:09 but the point is just that the network would regenerate if the decision makers are eliminated. 1:51:14 And you're talking about these are like vote coins that you're – 1:51:17 Yes. So I'm kind of playing with letting the miners have them because I think that's simple, 1:51:23 and that's a nice way of making sure that I – I don't want to like benefit too much, 1:51:28 and of course I wouldn't actually be – Roger funded the project, 1:51:30 so like any money that is raised would go to him. 1:51:35 But this would be something like an ICO, but it would be – 1:51:39 I would strip out all the things with the ICO that I hate, which are many. 1:51:42 And the most important is of course that the ICO – all the money is paid in advance, 1:51:47 and no one does any of the work. That's the thing I hate about it the most. 1:51:49 So I would wait until all the work is basically done, or at least enough of it is done, 1:51:53 like a Bitcoin comparable level. 1:51:55 And do you need a Drivechain for this to be implemented or no? 1:51:58 Yeah, I would need it – so the interesting thing is that one thing that I think confuses people, 1:52:03 which is unfortunate, is that this is a gift. 1:52:06 It's my gift to the Bitcoin community, and my and Roger's gifts, 1:52:10 because he paid the developers, the serious developers. 1:52:14 I was just doing the academic developing. 1:52:17 So it's a gift to the Bitcoin world in that if you want to use this in the markets, 1:52:22 you do that with Bitcoin, and you never need to interact with these vote coins at all. 1:52:26 So I think there's a big confusion about what they would represent and why they're necessary. 1:52:31 And a good metaphor is this like corporation type thing. 1:52:37 So you don't want to – sidechains prevent you from having to use a different currency in every store. 1:52:43 So you've got like US dollars, but then if you wanted to go to Walmart, 1:52:47 you might need to buy like Walmart dollars or something. 1:52:49 And then if you wanted to go to Dunkin' Donuts, you might need to go to Dunkin' Donut cash or something like that. 1:52:55 That's ridiculous, and that's what sidechains try to stop from happening. 1:52:58 You don't want to have Walmart bucks. 1:53:01 You don't want to have like whatever. 1:53:04 I don't know another – like Amazon.com dollars that float. 1:53:09 They're not US dollars. They have like a floating exchange rate. 1:53:11 You don't want to have something like that. That's ridiculous. 1:53:14 But what is happening in this case is that there are like owner-operators of something like a metaphorical corporation of some kind, 1:53:21 and that is a totally different dimension. 1:53:25 And those are like the people supplying a service. 1:53:27 They are like employees. 1:53:29 So the reason they – there's like a lot of details that I could go into. 1:53:35 But if you just want to shop at this store, you can do that with Bitcoin. 1:53:41 If you want to create a market, you can do that with Bitcoin. 1:53:45 If you want to bet in the markets, you can do that with Bitcoin. 1:53:49 You do Bitcoin for like all the stuff. 1:53:51 It's still Bitcoin, but there is this other thing to solve the Oracle problem, 1:53:56 which is that you need to give people an incentive to report accurately and to benefit as a result of the system becoming more or less reliable. 1:54:05 So there's the second thing. 1:54:08 So it almost – it doesn't really – I try to tell people that it doesn't really matter what happens with the Volcoins. 1:54:13 You mean like if someone would just buy them all up is what you're saying? 1:54:18 I think the one thing that I might just – or I might just hold many of them on Roger's behalf, or Roger might auction. 1:54:27 He might do like an ICO type thing, but it would be a lot of the stuff about ICOs that I hate we would remove, which is a lot of the stuff about ICOs. 1:54:37 So it would be like I hate calling it an ICO, but there's like no other phrase. 1:54:40 It wouldn't really matter though. 1:54:43 The point I'm trying to make is that the Volcoins themselves earn dividends sort of like a metaphorical stock. 1:54:49 They don't really earn dividends, but they earn a cut of the revenue. 1:54:53 They're compensated for reporting honestly. 1:54:56 Are you really – like maybe – I don't think of it this way. 1:55:00 What efficiency are you with Hivemind versus just a company that's trusted or whatever? 1:55:06 Is it really decentralized? 1:55:09 Yeah, there are a couple ways of talking about that. 1:55:12 So the first is that – I mean that's almost a conversation all in itself. 1:55:17 But I'm just going to briefly skip over a lot of the less important parts. 1:55:22 You don't want to have – if it's going to use Bitcoin, someone has to be owning the Bitcoin. 1:55:29 And if the oracle owns de facto controls that money where it goes. 1:55:35 So they can wait for something like Donald Trump to win, and then will Hillary win? 1:55:41 Price, the market price, assuming the markets are working temporarily, that price would be like near zero. 1:55:49 It would be like one cent or something for a security or a pseudo-crypto asset that pays $1 if Trump wins. 1:56:00 That should be worth about $1, but the one that pays $1 if Clinton wins, that one should be worth almost nothing. 1:56:08 But what the oracle can do if they control everything is they can buy however much money was bet on the market, 1:56:15 maybe $10 million or something. 1:56:18 They can bet $10 million on Clinton for almost nothing, and then turn the switch that says Clinton won instead of Trump, 1:56:26 and they can then withdraw the money. 1:56:28 So whoever the oracle is can withdraw all of the money out of the system if they're willing to report incorrectly, 1:56:37 and if the people who originally traded the money were hoping that they would report correctly. 1:56:43 So they can just flip every single thing and withdraw all the money. 1:56:46 So you don't want that to be – that's going to be very difficult to scale if you just do like a website. 1:56:52 So we have bets of Bitcoin. We have BitBet. We have Fairlay. We have BetMoose. We have these other ones. 1:56:59 But it's going to be very difficult to scale that, and I know almost all these people. 1:57:03 Almost all of them have been in contact with me at one point or another to talk about the oracle problem. 1:57:09 But it's going to be very hard to scale if it's just a website. 1:57:11 It would be very similar to a Bitcoin exchange where everything will be fine, 1:57:16 but then there will be the rogue employee, or it will be embezzlement, or it will be a hack or something. 1:57:20 Everything will be fine until it's not. 1:57:22 So in that sense, you don't want to just do like a website type model. 1:57:29 You do want that part to be as smart contract-ish as possible if you want it to scale. 1:57:35 Now the question is – there's another question of how to decentralize the oracle the right way, 1:57:42 or can we just rely on Google to do it or something. 1:57:46 There's a lot of – this is a big tour of technical stuff, but a lot of the answers here are like, 1:57:52 what happens if people connect, someone connects behind a gray firewall, someone connects at a different time. 1:57:58 It has to be consensus down to the last byte. 1:58:01 So there's all kinds of problems that are involved with that. 1:58:04 So it's a really long conversation. You might have to have me back on for a whole other hour to talk about this. 1:58:10 I'm thinking of multi-sig and bit-auth 2017 from Jason's presentation 1:58:15 and thinking how you could probably just use that as far as your decentralized oracle. 1:58:21 No, because the oracle is the third party in the multi-sig. 1:58:24 And you can just – the guy who's the third key can also become a trader at any time. 1:58:33 So anyone can become a trader at any time. 1:58:36 So he has an incentive to do something that's contrary to the duties of an oracle, 1:58:42 because there's financial incentive. 1:58:45 Yeah, the oracle has an opportunity cost of honesty in all cases. 1:58:49 So if they're going to be honest, they have to be giving up some money. 1:58:53 And that's why you need some crazy convoluted game theory thing. 1:58:56 And there's a white paper, and it's very long. 1:58:59 And that's why it's long, because the oracle has, in every single case, 1:59:04 a direct incentive to do the opposite of what you want them to do. 1:59:08 So it's a long conversation as to how I solve that problem or whatever. 1:59:12 And I don't think we – I'm not sure. I feel bad for your listeners. 1:59:15 We're approaching BU quality or quantity. 1:59:20 No, no, no. We strive to be way below BU quality. 1:59:25 This is just – I don't know. 1:59:27 We don't have any viewers, so we're good. 1:59:30 We have six viewers. 1:59:32 One actually just dropped off while we were talking about this. 1:59:36 Nice. 1:59:37 So keep the quality content up. 1:59:39 Oh, man. 1:59:42 Let's go for three next time. 1:59:47 I think we should probably wrap it up here a little bit. 1:59:51 Talking to you so long makes me feel like I'm back in college 1:59:55 listening to someone lecture me about something. 1:59:58 It's just like there's just so much. 2:00:00 You're just doing so much. 2:00:04 I do my best, I guess. 2:00:06 No, I still have a lot of reading to do, 2:00:08 because I want to be able to ask you some better questions. 2:00:12 I'm simply just not smart enough to ask you better questions. 2:00:15 Paul, I apologize. 2:00:16 No, come on, guys. Don't do that to yourselves. 2:00:20 Oh, you should see what else we do to ourselves. 2:00:24 Well, thank you so much, Paul, for being on Block Time. 2:00:27 I think the nonce has been found, Mike. 2:00:30 Yep, and our minds have been hired, I guess. 2:00:35 Thanks for propagating with us. 2:00:38 Yep, it's been a pleasure propagating transactions with you guys. 2:00:43 All right. 2:00:44 Later.