0:00 Okay, here it goes. Okay, it's on. Okay, welcome. 0:08 So, you know, I usually do 0:11 videos on crazy stuff, 0:13 so now I'm going to talk to a sane person to get 0:17 information from him. 0:19 And this is going to be about 0:22 Paul Sztorc's 0:25 invention, Drivechains, and I pronounced that correctly, right? Yes. 0:30 Okay. 0:31 So, I'm still learning about Truthcoin. I'm still, I'm not caught up. 0:36 So, I basically know nothing about Drivechains. So, why don't you just start telling me 0:42 what is the point? Like, what are they for? Yeah, okay, that's great. So, 0:48 Blockstream had this, so I originally had this prediction markets project, which I'm still working on, but 0:54 progress on that outstripped. 0:57 That project was supposed to be a Bitcoin sidechain, but progress on 1:02 sidechains was a lot slower than progress on the prediction markets project. So, my project, I know, you know, 1:08 it's software's never finished, but I got my project to kind of a pretty good 1:12 state, like kind of a Bitcoin alpha 0.1 1:16 state, and then I looked around and then there was no sidechain technology. 1:20 So, I had to like go back and go down the stack, so to speak, and I was waiting for 1:26 other people to do the sidechain technology, but they really didn't. And so, I looked at 1:31 Blockstream white paper, and I'm pretty sure that almost no one has read that paper because it's very, a lot of people have glanced at 1:38 it, I think, but it's a very 1:40 dense paper. There's a lot in it, and it's hard to read. And then, so I kind of read it, and I thought about it, 1:46 and I thought about what it was really trying to do, and 1:50 I thought you could do something very similar that was a little simpler, because it's in the sort of game theoretic sense, 1:57 they're assuming, there's this idea of the SPV proof, which basically, 2:01 to gloss over a lot of things, just says that in the long run, you can trust the miners to be mining 2:09 the chain that's in their self-interest. So, that's glossing over a lot of stuff, 2:13 but I thought if you're gonna assume 51% of the miners are 2:17 on your side, then you can do a much simpler thing than what they were doing, 2:22 and so I turned my attention to that. And so, what Drivechain is supposed to be is 2:28 a kind of very simple incarnation of 2:31 sidechain. So, it's supposed to let you have all the freedom of 2:36 altcoins, 2:37 but you're still using the same 21 million bitcoins, and so that's sort of the goal. 2:43 There's other things, but that's basically the point, that's how the project came to be, and I published it in November 2015, 2:49 and you know, you get an ongoing review, 2:52 so 2:54 it's been iterating and responding to feedback, and then of course, in the process of building it, 2:59 you encounter all kinds of new questions that you have to solve. 3:03 So, I eventually presented it at ScaleMilan, or part of my strategy, I presented a strategy at ScaleMilan, which is that 3:09 we should have one chain be very decentralized, and have a very small block size, and be very 3:15 locked down, and very secure, and kind of you could run it over Tor, and all kinds of 3:21 very, very, very secure. It's kind of like a Mott & Bailey defense, you know, like 3:26 you've got this one thing that's like the castle, and you hide in there, 3:30 but then you've got this other thing that's, you've got these other chains, and some of them would be maybe, 3:35 you know, like a meadow, or like a really nice farmland, and you hang out there, because it's nicer, 3:40 but then if something bad happens, everyone just retreats to the castle, 3:44 and so the bad stuff goes away, and then when they leave, you go back out to where you wanted to be the whole time, 3:51 and so that's what I presented at ScaleMilan, and then I 3:55 wanted to, I got a little bit more feedback about that, so I invented this other thing called Blind Merged Mining, 4:00 which is a much, dry chain that relies on this weird kind of shaky assumption, but Blind Merged Mining is, I think, a pretty cool 4:08 piece of technology that just 4:10 doesn't really rely on weird assumptions, just very, very, very safe ones, and that allows, so like Namecoin, as you probably know, 4:18 it's merge mined with Bitcoin, such that it can absorb 4:21 hash rate from 4:23 Bitcoin without 4:26 it doesn't need its own miners, so it can just use Bitcoin, piggyback on Bitcoin's miners, and in fact, a very funny thing happened over the last week, which is that 4:34 Namecoin was absorbing hash rate from 4:37 Bitcoin Core, as well as Bitcoin Cash, and it ended up having more hash rate than either of them alone, 4:43 so that was a very funny thing that happened with Namecoin, but 4:47 Oh, wow, that is, that is great. 4:49 That is very funny. 4:51 It's one of the funniest things to have ever happened, I think, in Bitcoin, and so I hope other people got a laugh out of it. 4:58 Certainly, it's also funny because the hash rate is skyrocketing constantly, 5:03 so each, all the modern blocks 5:06 have such a tremendous amount of 5:09 proof of work that, if that, that doesn't need to hold up for a very long time, I haven't exactly done the math, but 5:14 Namecoin could have not only the most hash rate, but it could have the most 5:17 cumulative difficulty, because it only takes a few modern blocks that are 20 or 30 percent 5:22 more difficult to just kind of totally eclipse everything that was done in 5:27 2011, 2012, etc. So, 5:30 it could become the heaviest valid chain, which is very funny, but regular merge mining has two problems. One is that the miners have to run 5:38 software, they have to run the Namecoin software to assemble a valid block, 5:41 they build a Namecoin block that kind of, I'm glossing over the details, but they build a Namecoin block that kind of looks like 5:48 it's inside of a Bitcoin block, and then when they mine the Bitcoin block, they can mine both. 5:53 But in order to do that, they have to run the Namecoin software, and the Namecoin software is sometimes buggy, and it crashes, and then 5:58 if the miners lose uptime, 6:01 that's, 6:02 you know, that's a lot of work, but 6:04 it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of 6:10 fun, that's 6:11 hits their bottom line directly, which used to happen a lot, because Namecoin was just more buggy than Bitcoin. 6:18 And also, it's funny, I've heard that from multiple reliable sources, that if the mining equipment 6:23 shuts down, there's so much power flowing 6:26 everywhere, that a lot of the hardware will just start to explode, if it's off, and it's not mining Bitcoins. 6:33 So, the energy is just, the energy gradient is just, will just build up, so they don't want this stuff to crash. 6:38 So, that's why, even though mining Namecoin is free, a lot of people would, 6:42 only, you only got like 60% 6:45 of the hash rate to merge mine Namecoin, because even though it's free revenue, it wasn't really free, because there's this buggy software. 6:51 Okay, so let's talk about what you just said, in terms of how 6:57 Drivechains are going to make it easier. 7:00 Yeah, so Blind Merged Mining, you don't, you can merge mine the 7:05 sidechain, without actually running 7:07 the software. So, what happens is, other people, the nodes over there, run the software, and I have an assumption that some of those people 7:16 who are running those nodes, also own regular Bitcoin, 7:19 which is a very safe assumption, because this model here is very asymmetric. 7:22 So, it's very much like a hierarchy, with Bitcoin core as the root, or whatever is the, you know, 7:28 there's a main chain, and that one is kind of the base layer, and then there's sidechains off of that. 7:34 But there's kind of a, there's an asymmetry. 7:37 So, there's like a hierarchy, where the one is sort of more important, 7:42 the Bitcoin core in this example. So, 7:46 what is, so what I assume, is that someone who's running Namecoin 7:51 node, also owns some 7:53 Bitcoin on Bitcoin core, and what I basically do, is I have them pay, they do a special transaction, where they say, 7:59 I'll pay the miner, 8:01 this amount, if they merge mine this Namecoin block. 8:05 And so, they, the person assembles the Namecoin block, and pays the Namecoin's 8:10 sidechain Bitcoin, they pay themselves those transaction fees, 8:14 and then they're all bidding competitively. 8:18 Any of the nodes who are interested in doing this, 8:21 will bid competitively, as long as there's more than two, which obviously there would be, because it's a blockchain 8:27 network. So, if there's only one, that's kind of pointless, but 8:31 you would, if, as long as there's a few, they would have this competitive bidding, and then 8:36 the, so the main chain Bitcoin miners would still get the transaction fees, 8:42 they, but they don't have to do like any of the work. So, it's, it was a, 8:46 because some people complain that, like you have like a, some kind of like YouTube sidechain, like an ESPN, 8:52 4k, super broadcasting sidechain, that's like really, really difficult, has high bandwidth requirements, so like 8:59 privacy implications, and they didn't want it to be a case where only large miners 9:06 could merge mine those. 9:08 So, the benefit of this is that the miners don't have to touch any of the software at all. They can just be passively receiving money. 9:17 So, the sidechain nodes can pay themselves epsilon, you see, like if there's 17 Bitcoin worth of transaction fees, 9:23 they can pay themselves 17, and then they can try to bid like 6.8, 6.9, 9:28 to try and get, they can try and get a little bit, but of course, the bulk of it will just go to the miners 9:32 anyway, and they don't have to worry about, 9:34 and so that part I think is kind of cool. 9:36 But yeah, the point of Drivechain is that you send, you're playing with Bitcoin, it's not, it's no longer Namecoin, 9:41 it's actual Bitcoin, 9:43 over on the other chain, you do whatever you want with it over there, and then you bring it back. 9:48 But yeah, the second benefit of Blind Merged Mining is that the miners get paid, 9:52 they don't get paid on the sidechain, they get paid immediately with the main chain. 9:57 Bitcoin that they know and love, so it's a little bit, it's a lot better, I think. 10:01 Oh, yeah, that is better. 10:03 I remember once I had this conversation with 10:08 with 10:09 Paul Snow, 10:10 and I was saying, I was telling him that like you don't, you shouldn't need to create a whole new investment product, 10:18 if you just want to 10:21 try to, you want to program new rules, and he's like, well, how are you going to pay the miners? And I was like, well, why, 10:29 why would they want to be paid in a 10:32 a 10:33 worse investment product anyway? They should be paid in Bitcoin, but 10:39 yeah, so now we can do that. 10:42 Right, so that's the goal of that part. At least that's what we will be able to do if you make this thing. 10:49 Yeah, well, yeah, so it's, we have a lot of, 10:52 there's a, you can go to drivechain.info, and we have a GitHub, and we've done a lot, but there will, 10:57 and there just will need to be a lot of 11:00 kind of review by other people, because 11:03 there's only so much that 11:05 me and this other guy, Patrick, we have been working on it, but there is only, you know, 11:09 you can only bring it to a certain point yourself, 11:12 and then you'll always be like blind to, you have the unknown unknowns, right? So, yeah, other people will have to 11:19 put in a little effort, I think, at this, at this point, but it's mostly finished, and in fact, I'm considering asking 11:26 Luke Dashjr. for the, to assign the BIP numbers, because it's basically, 11:30 we brought it as far as 11:32 I think 11:33 we could efficiently bring it, so that, 11:36 so we've got, we made it pretty far on both Drivechain and blind bridge mining, so I think that it's going to need, it's basically, 11:44 I don't want to say finished, because nothing is ever finished in the world of software, but it's like, it's pretty good. 11:49 There are just a bunch of issues, 11:51 if people want to go and help with the issues, 11:54 but this, the design is sort of stable, and the documentation is stable, so that's kind of neat. 11:59 What, what is the, the GitHub again? 12:02 Oh, I don't even, I think it's Drivechain-project, but if you go to drivechain.info, there's a little GitHub 12:08 icon in the sidebar, if you have a desktop, or if you have mobile, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom, 12:13 and you get the sidebar, and you just click it. I can actually, I know what it is right over here. 12:18 Yeah, it is called, yeah, it's github.com slash Drivechain-project. 12:24 You should be able to find it. 12:26 Okay, so, 12:29 so what is, so you, you said that there is an assumption. 12:33 Yes, there's a weird assumption. Yes. Okay, so here's the thing, is if, the way this works is, 12:38 there's only one way that it can work, because 12:42 if you, the goal is to get 12:44 a bunch of rules validated, 12:47 but without actually 12:48 validating them, because 12:50 you want 12:52 to create a new set of software rules, you know, have like a new blockchain, so to speak, 12:57 and, but you don't want to have Bitcoin Core do the work, so that's the, that's kind of this, this 13:04 paradox that you're stuck with, if you want to do a sidechains-like thing, right? 13:08 You want to let people go into a different zone, 13:10 where they 13:13 have new rules, 13:15 so maybe it's a larger block size, it could be, it could be anything, 13:19 but then when the payments come back, if there's some kind of dispute over, oh, that's not who owns that coin, 13:25 does, does A own it, or does B own it, then you have to have some way of resolving the dispute, so, 13:31 so that's the paradox, is that you don't, you don't, you can't actually check who, who owns it, A or B, 13:38 but you need to check something, 13:40 and so it's kind of an unalterable, you know, 13:45 this is kind of just a paradox, but it's a trade-off like anything else, so what I do is, I say, 13:50 I make it so that the sidechain has to report on exactly what it's doing, 13:56 at all times, and then when it wants 13:58 to transfer money out of the sidechain back to the mainchain, it has to do this very, very, very slowly, 14:05 and the reason that this is not inconvenient is because, meanwhile, people can do these atomic swaps back and forth, 14:11 so I don't think anyone would actually use this, it would be like an industrial 14:14 process, and it's possible that only the miners would actually do this, but 14:18 the, the point is this, when you want to send, so when you want to send money to the sidechain, from the mainchain to the 14:23 sidechain, it's very simple, because I assume that the sidechain is watching the mainchain, 14:28 and I obviously assume that the mainchain is working correctly, so that part is easy, 14:32 so going like, so there's only like one leg of the problem that is really hard, which is 14:37 having the money come back, 14:39 you know, you send the money into Factum sidechain, and then you do something with it, and then 14:44 you want to send the money back. Now, Bitcoin Core can't check the rules of the sidechain, because this breaks the, 14:50 this breaks the goal, the goal is to not, to avoid doing all that, 14:56 and just let other people do whatever they want, and not have it affect Bitcoin Core, 14:59 but at the same time, you want some guarantee, somehow, that this money is going to end up in the right place, 15:05 and so what I do is, I say all the 15:07 transactions coming back from a sidechain, 15:10 they're all batched up, 15:12 into one 15:14 transaction, and then that transaction is, you know, has an ID, it's hashed, and it's sort of frozen in place, 15:20 and then everyone gets to examine it for a very long period of time, and I suggest, this is a configurable parameter, 15:26 but I suggest like one month of it just sitting there, and then it's slowly act, 15:32 acknowledged or non-acknowledged, it's sort of like miners, like upvote it or downvote it, once per block, 15:38 and if it achieves enough upvotes 15:41 over another length of time, which I think should be like two months, 15:45 then the payment goes through in Bitcoin Core, and the sidechain's watching, so the sidechain knows 15:51 when Bitcoin Core is sending money to it, so then it can just credit people, 15:56 and it knows when the side domain withdrawal transfers, it knows when those have succeeded, 16:03 so then it knows to just destroy that money, to stop blocking it, and just destroy it, 16:07 it's because it got successfully transferred out, 16:10 so the, basically, to put a bottom line on it, the threat is that 16:15 miners can, 16:17 if you have these 16:20 things, let's say you have a Bitcoin Core, and then you have like a large block sidechain, 16:25 which is like something that people are interested in these days, 16:28 so you have this sidechain that has, it doesn't matter, a 20 megabyte block size or something, 16:33 and there's a total of 16:35 2,000 bitcoins over there, or whatever, whatever the case may be, 16:40 this is like, we have about, I don't, I looked it up, but I can't remember, we have about 16:44 four and a half million, or five million, 16:47 or four, I think four and a half million bitcoins that have not been mined, 16:50 and so there's 16 million on Bitcoin Core, so there would be some on other, these other chains, 16:56 and the threat is that 16:58 miners would 16:59 create a transaction that pays all of the sidechain's money to themselves, and then they would broadcast it, 17:06 and then we would wait a month, and then they would all acknowledge it to themselves, 17:09 and then the withdrawal would go through, and they would get on the main chain, they would open the sidechain 17:14 account, and give themselves all of the money, so that's the threat, 17:19 and the only way I found to kind of defend against it 17:23 is to make sure that it's very 17:26 obvious in advance, and that it's very slow, and that it's very easy to check, 17:30 so it'd be very easy to check the attack, because the sidechain broadcasts what it's supposed to be, 17:36 what's supposed to be being withdrawn, as just a little hash, 17:40 and then 17:41 on mainchain Bitcoin, you can see what's being withdrawn, and that's a little hash, and you can just see if they match or not, 17:47 and of course, they're uniform numbers, and they're only 17:50 32 bytes long, or whatever, so they're very easy for a human being to see immediately that 17:56 the rules are not being followed, the kind of meta rules, 18:01 and it's very easy for miners to comply with the rules, because they themselves can check, because it's just a little hash, 18:08 and it's also very easy for miners to kind of pull this alarm and just say, 18:11 we're going to unacknowledge everything, 18:14 and they can downvote everything until they figure out what's going on, and just kind of slow the process down, 18:20 and say like, we don't know what's going on, but we'll figure it out later, 18:22 because something is up, 18:25 and so that is kind of all the stuff that I threw in the way, 18:29 but yeah, this is the major kind of empirical question. 18:33 I think if this doesn't work, though, I think nothing will work, because 18:37 I don't really see how it can get much better than this, like I guess you could 18:41 ramp the parameters up a lot, and you could say it's got to wait for two months, 18:44 and then it takes an entire year to be withdrawn, 18:48 and you can kind of hope that that doesn't matter, because again, people can already do these atomic swaps among the 18:54 two different chains, and you just, what you want is for people to do them at an exchange rate 18:58 that's very close to one, so that it's effectively the same 19:02 token, and then you want to do this basic accounting, which is very easy to do, 19:07 to make sure there's never any more than 21 19:10 bitcoins that 19:12 aren't permanently locked somewhere. 19:18 So a lot of that's easy, but yeah, I think if this doesn't work, then nothing will work, which would be kind of a shame, 19:23 but basically the security model is that 19:26 what would be implied if miners steal from the sidechain is that they have to do this 19:32 intentionally and kind of obviously, so what it would imply is that 19:37 the 19:39 price of bitcoin should go down, I think, so if the sidechain is popular, and if people like it, 19:44 then, and you know, they're losing all the, the sidechain is going to provide its own transaction fees, first of all, 19:50 but second of all, it's going to provide more utility for bitcoin, so 19:53 it 19:55 should be increasing the value of bitcoin, and so destroying it 19:58 should decrease the value of bitcoin, and it should also kind of put an end to the entire sidechain experiment, because they can say, well, 20:04 they're going to attack this one sidechain, 20:06 so they're probably going to attack them all, which means we can't have any now, and we can never have any in the future, 20:11 so that's kind of the, the, the consequence, or the, the threat, or the kind of the equilibrium, 20:19 the equilibrating force, is that 20:22 the idea is that if they were, if miners were to attack 20:25 a sidechain, 20:26 it would take a long time, 20:29 there's a lot of ways for it not working, and if it, even if it does work, 20:33 it should just harm the miners' bottom line, because investors should just 20:38 say, well, I guess we're stuck with only one chain, and only one development team 20:42 forever, instead of having, you know, kind of like freedom and permissionless innovation, 20:47 so 20:48 that is kind of the model. The other thing is, of course, I mean, I don't want to rely on this, but the other thing is 20:52 people might, 20:55 like, if they're, 20:56 once you're, maybe you're, this is a three-month thing, as I've been saying, 21:00 so if you're, like, two months into those three months, and it looks like the miners really are going to steal, 21:06 people could just hard code, 21:08 that's part of the reasons we're making it so slow, is that people might just say, 21:12 well, we're going to do the user-activated soft fork type thing, and we're just going to say, 21:17 we are not going to let this transaction in the block, and, you know, and then, you know, there's other things, too, like 21:24 if the miners really misbehave, then 21:27 people, you know, there's always the threat of the proof-of-work change and other things, so I, my personal opinion is that the miners are more 21:33 docile, and other people don't have that opinion, but I think they're just normal people trying to make a 21:39 living, 21:40 and I think that sidechains will increase the value of 21:43 Bitcoin, and then eventually it'll reach a point where 21:47 mining can only stay profitable if they never attack any sidechain, with the exception of, like, weird side, 21:52 it is, I think it is possible to build, like, weird sidechains that try to harass 21:56 other chains, like a chain that only pays you if you, like, 22:00 fork a chain or something like that, and so I want miners to attack those and just, and clean them out, 22:05 in fact, I have a giant presentation on this that I called sidechain privatization, 22:09 which is sort of like, I want miners to kind of, like, own and curate the portfolio 22:15 of sidechains, just so that no one ever bothers. See, what I don't like, I really don't like, 22:19 kind of, the Ethereum idea that you can just run whatever you want, and they can't stop you, 22:24 because I think that you will end up with some guy coding in secret some weird thing, 22:29 and he'll code it, and then he'll put it out, and then they won't, it'll be like cat and mouse, 22:33 you won't be able to stop it, or something like that, so I want this thing that I call categorical control, 22:38 and I want the miners to be able to say, this category of smart contract 22:43 we don't like, and we're getting rid of it, we're filtering it out. 22:46 Yeah. 22:47 Well, yeah, I'm kind of, 22:50 I kind of think it's silly how paranoid people can be about the miners, too, because, you know, the miners are sort of, 22:57 they are subject to forces that are beyond their control, which is 23:02 the value of Bitcoin, 23:04 and if they try to 23:07 act maliciously, 23:09 they harm the value of Bitcoin, 23:12 and, you know, that harms the value of their equipment, 23:17 so I think that there's some pretty strong constraints that 23:21 will tend to keep them honest, so everything you said sounds reasonable to me. 23:27 Right, and so that's really all the bad news, the good news is that you can do now, the good news is pretty good, 23:32 I think, so I think, 23:33 even if you're a very pessimistic person, 23:36 the good news is that you can now just create whatever weird 23:40 experiment you want, so you can do, you can do like an Ethereum sidechain, although I don't think it will, it's a good idea, but 23:46 you can do that, you can do a weird proof of stake, 23:49 if you're not, if you don't want to do the Blind Merged Mining part, the first part, 23:54 Drivechain, the hashrate escrows, you can do like whatever weird stuff you want, proof of elapsed time, 23:59 you can do all this weird hyperledger stuff, you can do like an R3 thing, 24:03 you can do like whatever weird stuff you want, you can put Bitcoin into this account that is only 24:07 withdrawable if, after a very, very slow time, and so you have basically totally arbitrary 24:15 control over what kind of weird chain you want, you can make all the mistakes that you want with all the 24:20 terrible developer talent that you want, right, and so like what's better than that, this is, so it totally turns the 24:28 the tables, I think, on the entire way that we do things in Bitcoin right now, which is that, right now we have a kind of, 24:35 we have like a kind of, I'm not really sure what to call it, it's like a USSR Ministry of Science or something, 24:41 we have it all like going through, like a hegemony, yeah, we have a, yeah, we have exactly, we have like a hegemony, and 24:49 yeah, I love mistakes, this is kind of like a common theme in arguments that I have with people, is that 24:57 you know, they, well, there's just a lot of concern trolling that goes around in Bitcoin, and I always say, so, just, you know, just do it and see what happens. 25:04 Yeah, there's, I think, I've noticed, haven't you noticed, I'm sure you have, there's like a very much like an anti-Hayek kind of streak running through the entire philosophy of Bitcoin right now, which is very funny, because Hayek was all about just like, just try whatever, something will fix it somehow, the anti-fragility, you know, and so I think, you know, there's a lot of concern trolling that goes around in Bitcoin, and I always say, so, just, you know, just do it and see what happens. 25:14 Yeah. 25:44 So, but I have another point about the miners, which is that I think I've noticed a kind 25:56 of, I've noticed a kind of separation in philosophies that, and some of them cover different aspects 26:04 of Bitcoin. 26:05 I think Bitcoin is a really big complicated thing. 26:07 And I think there is like a kind of difference between like a cryptographer point of view 26:12 and then there's like a economics game theorists point of view. 26:18 And there's kind of, it's basically about how much they value independence. 26:24 And the cryptographers, I think they want total independence in a strict like science 26:30 statistical sense. 26:31 Like they want to build a safe that cannot be opened unless you have the password. 26:38 Even if you have a computer the size of the sun or whatever other weird stuff, right? 26:42 They want to say that this is totally ironclad, like there's an absolutely nothing anyone 26:45 can do. 26:46 It's completely unbreakable encryption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 26:50 But the, the other extreme is that you kind of, it's sort of more of the economics thing 26:55 where it's like, well, I'm going to go down the street and I'm going to buy some lunch. 27:00 And I don't know what they're putting in that lunch, but I've eaten there for years and 27:04 it tastes okay to me. 27:06 And there's some process somewhere, there's some process that if they do something bad 27:09 at the lunch, someone else will like fix it or something that someone will get bad 27:15 press or the someone will call someone and complain or something will be in the media 27:21 or something like that and they'll just go out of business eventually and someone else 27:24 will take that spot because they won't be able to afford rent. 27:27 And so game theory is all about interdependence. 27:30 It's all about like everyone's pointing a gun, it's like a Mexican standoff. 27:34 A Mexican standoff is like game theorists approved. 27:37 It's like Apex because it's like perfectly balanced, you know, and yeah, I love it. 27:43 And then the, but the cryptographers are like, oh, what if, what if they go crazy and shoot 27:47 us? 27:48 That's kind of like the miners versus developers, I think. 27:49 There's the Mexican standoff and I'm fine with it. 27:52 I love it. 27:53 I think it's fine. 27:54 It's- 27:55 Oh, well, why don't we have a Mexican standoff sometime? 27:57 Well, when we get, when we get together in, in the, in February, we can, we can have a 28:03 Mexican standoff. 28:04 I think- 28:05 We can have one with ourselves or with, or with other, we, you and I, with other people. 28:11 I'm going to, I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell Bruce Fenton about that idea because 28:14 I think he'll, he'll like it. 28:16 That would, that would actually would be funny if you organize that as like a, an event. 28:20 You're like, okay, everyone over here. 28:22 I think that he would like that idea. 28:24 Sidewalkers, supporters of sidechains over there, some lightning network supporters over 28:27 there. 28:28 And then, then we all have super suckers or something, you know, and it's just like, 28:31 I don't know. 28:32 I don't know where that could go. 28:33 It could go a lot of ways though. 28:35 That's a very funny. 28:36 Yeah. 28:37 No, I mean, I, I always think that, yeah, to me, like, people will, people will act 28:43 to preserve the value of their investment, right? 28:47 And it's a little incongruent to start Bitcoin mining and then become a crazy person. 28:52 Yeah. 28:53 Yeah. 28:54 Well, I mean, that's kind of how I feel like, like what I'm doing now. 28:57 Like if, if, if I thought everything was going fine, I would not have started my YouTube 29:03 series. 29:04 I would have just, you know, done something unrelated to Bitcoin. 29:07 That's kind of what I was trying to say is that, and I think that I sent you and I said, 29:12 I had a lot of fun with it. 29:13 The, I have the power idea that there's this normal, like game theory grid, but I just 29:17 drew like a tangled line. 29:20 And I was like, yeah, the people have all these incentives to like, kind of interact 29:23 in horrible ways. 29:26 Because they think they can persuade people to do this. 29:29 So a lot of this stuff is crazy. 29:30 It's like all this Twitter stuff and all this kind of like, yeah, people get harassed 29:35 and you know, people get all kinds of threats and things. 29:38 And then people are, can feel compelled to make, start a YouTube series. 29:43 And all this stuff is kind of this big result of, of not having good interactions. 29:50 And it would be nicer if we just had a world where if you wanted to do something else, 29:54 you just did it. 29:55 And Bitcoin core is like the Linux kernel. 29:58 I would ideally, I don't think it should change. 30:00 I don't think that, I think Bitcoin core should really stop changing very much. 30:05 I think it's, it's too easy to change with a hard fork or soft fork or anything. 30:11 And I think we should establish a precedent where Bitcoin core doesn't change as much 30:15 and instead other weird things change. 30:18 All the layer two sidechains, lightning, all this other stuff should change a lot. 30:22 Businesses that use Bitcoin. 30:24 But I think we are, I think we have already demonstrated that so much about Bitcoin can 30:32 be changed with just a few people, just the developer vote or only the mining vote or 30:39 only something. 30:40 So I'm not happy about that. 30:42 And I don't like all this interaction. 30:45 It's not organized. 30:46 So I think it would be better. 30:47 This is part of the big upside. 30:50 So this is why I'm very passionate about the experiment, the sidechain experiment. 30:54 I think we should run it and we should see what happens. 30:57 And I think it's interesting, this dichotomy I mentioned before about a cryptographer versus 31:04 game theory is that a lot of people who are great cryptographers didn't believe in Bitcoin 31:10 and they didn't think it would work. 31:13 And they would say things like, well, the miners will just reorganize the chain and 31:19 take everyone's money. 31:21 And Greg Maxwell has that proof, he had like a mathematical proof that it wouldn't work. 31:25 I'm going to have to look that up now. 31:27 It's very interesting. 31:28 I think I haven't actually looked at it myself, but I think I can guess where he probably 31:34 the where Satoshi kind of cheated on his proof is that I'm pretty sure that Satoshi is printing 31:42 new money and giving it to people with these blocks, the 50 bitcoins per blocks, per block 31:47 in the first four years. 31:50 And the idea that those could have value, and this is something that I think you discussed 31:53 with Chris also recently, the idea that those could have value and that they could be fuel 31:58 for this machine. 32:00 I think that's like the new game changer that he put in, that it wouldn't be possible unless 32:05 people were willing to, they were willing to pay money for these 50 bitcoins that were 32:12 created every 10 minutes at first. 32:16 And so I think in a weird way, it's funny because you think something is like a mathematical 32:20 proof, but it can be in practice, it can be overturned because governments manage the 32:29 currency so badly, because people want, it's very weird, Bitcoin is like a big thing that 32:35 it's got, it's plugged into every weird facet of the world. 32:41 Yeah. 32:42 Well, wait till you see my next video. 32:49 Okay, great. 32:50 I'm looking forward to it. 32:52 So can you go, let's go into some more details about how the Drivechain is going to work. 33:02 So do we have an address, a normal Bitcoin address, and that is the Drivechain? 33:10 Yeah. 33:11 So for user experience and laziness reasons, there currently is like an address that's 33:16 a little more like, you know, normally in Bitcoin, the addresses are not like accounts, 33:20 but in Drivechain they are. 33:23 So it's kind of complicated to explain, but that's basically it right now. 33:28 You can deposit Bitcoin to this, if you send it to this address, then anyone who's running 33:35 the sidechain software will know, they'll hear about it and they'll know. 33:40 It's either from over the network protocol, just by looking at the Bitcoin blocks, because 33:44 this is an asymmetric design where it's more like plugins, where I assume that everyone 33:50 is running Bitcoin core and then you can kind of like check a little box. 33:54 Do you want to also run this or that or nothing? 33:59 And so they kind of, they're aware of what's happening in Bitcoin core. 34:01 And so when you deposit to this little box, you get credited automatically. 34:06 So it's like when you send, you would send Bitcoin to the sidechain and that would be 34:11 one of your outputs is that you're putting the Bitcoin into the sidechain, but then you'd 34:15 have this some other thing. 34:18 And right now we have it as your basic kind of op return thing and you push another address 34:23 in there. 34:24 And then the sidechain watches that transaction and says, oh, that person deposited 14 Bitcoin 34:28 or whatever. 34:30 And then here's the op return. 34:31 And so we are going to credit that address over here with 14 that it was sort of, it 34:40 was sort of print, but it's not, they're going to be destroyed when they go back. 34:43 So it's just accounting, but yeah, it doesn't need to, since you have infinite flexibility 34:47 with the new piece of software, that is how that works. 34:51 And then once you're over there, you can do whatever you like, including open a payment 34:55 channel with people. 34:57 You can Lightning, you can use Lightning network within a chain, but also across multiple 35:03 chains as long as they have the same hash function, which they all will. 35:07 So that's kind of neat. 35:09 And also it's, I think it should be possible that it should be possible to charge more, 35:16 like someone should be able to send money over to sidechain, open a bunch of channels 35:21 there, and then charge more for that hub per like a variable costs, charge more per transaction. 35:28 In that hub, then maybe I'm maintaining Bitcoin core. 35:32 And then that way they would get kind of a return for putting the risk of putting their 35:38 money in this new thing. 35:40 And then people could Lightning through them. 35:42 If there's some, this is assuming that there's some weird smart contract that only the sidechain 35:46 can do. 35:47 That wouldn't really, I don't know if that would really work for payments because the 35:50 point of payments is that the merchant has to get, but maybe it would because if you 35:54 had like something like a bit pay or something that was on the sidechain then. 35:58 So it's kind of neat. 36:00 So there's a lot of flexibility. 36:01 So lots of stuff to figure out for like, you know, actual economic agents to figure out 36:08 how they are going to use it the best. 36:11 But I think the first in practice, the first thing I would like to do is have just a sidechain 36:16 that just has a larger block size, because I think people would really like that or that 36:20 people would be interested in using that. 36:23 And it also would be very, very, very easy. 36:26 You know what I would like to see? 36:27 I'd like to see a sidechain where you have to do proof of work to make every individual 36:33 transaction and that determines the bandwidth, not, not some arbitrary number because I think 36:41 that that was a design flaw that Satoshi put in into Bitcoin. 36:45 You should actually have to do, because that's what we do in, in BitMessage. 36:50 You have to do proof of work to send a message into the network at all. 36:55 And the whole point of proof of work is to prevent spam. 37:00 So but anyway. 37:02 Yeah, I know. 37:05 I like, well, that's funny you mentioned that because I like the idea of a, see BitMessage 37:10 I think does, yeah, I like BitMessage. 37:13 I would like to see, I would definitely like to see like an kind of email sidechain. 37:19 So you're talking about, you're talking about kind of two different things, but you're saying 37:21 like, is there a better way of doing proof of work, which is the transactions proof of 37:25 work, which is kind of neat. 37:29 I don't know. 37:30 I think you, there are, I think there was some like Dan Larimer tried to do something 37:34 like that, but he didn't do it very well or something. 37:36 And he called the transactions as proof of work or something in 2014. 37:40 But aside from that, I would like to see some kind of messaging sidechain or something. 37:45 And instead of doing the proof of work, you can do the actual, you can do the real thing, 37:50 like the post converted proof of work, which is that you can charge people Bitcoin to send 37:56 you money. 37:57 And I know 21 does this, but they're our company and I don't want them reading my email or 38:03 even knowing who I talk to. 38:06 So and plus, you know, their original idea was so bad, I don't know if I trust them doing 38:11 anything now. 38:12 It's just an absurd idea of putting a miner in like everything and like a light bulb. 38:20 Like was that real? 38:21 And then they changed it to like the 21, the Bitcoin computer. 38:28 And then I was like, yeah, a lot of people are having a lot of trouble. 38:31 They use like these hardware metaphors. 38:33 This is a very common thing in the whole like starting up a Bitcoin business. 38:39 A lot of people like don't like, you know, like, like Balaji, a regular computer is a 38:43 Bitcoin computer. 38:44 Like, like, what are you talking about? 38:47 So a lot of like weird stuff is going on. 38:50 People are figuring out how software works a second time. 38:54 Yes. 38:55 Well, it almost seems like most of the ideas in Bitcoin are like random, like randomly 39:00 generated. 39:01 Yeah. 39:02 It's very Hayekian. 39:03 Right. 39:04 They're just like, we don't know anything. 39:05 We have no theory. 39:06 Yeah. 39:07 It's a disappointingly Hayekian. 39:09 It's like we, this is a slime mold and we have no idea. 39:12 We'll just proceed in all directions at once. 39:15 And well, part of it is that this is a really interesting effect that a lot of people want 39:19 to, a lot of people are misled by the blockchain without Bitcoin meme. 39:25 And it got so much emperor's new clothes, like kind of credibility from everyone. 39:29 And then I remember it was 2016. 39:31 You had like Larry Summers talking about it and then the governor of Delaware was like 39:35 trying to make Delaware the blockchain state. 39:38 Isn't that crazy? 39:40 Well, nobody understands why Bitcoin is valuable. 39:43 Okay. 39:44 So there's no, it's just, it's like the blind leading the blind. 39:48 So you can just create all of these new blockchains and that have like almost no difference between 39:56 them and Bitcoin and they can make tons of money. 40:00 And so then there's tons of incentive to just paper over, to, you know, 40:04 That's what I'm saying is that who's like getting really like, why is it such, why is 40:09 it doing a slime mold thing? 40:11 I think the investors are just like, you know, institutional investors with us dollars just 40:15 like pouring money into these companies and they just, they think you can do anything 40:21 and they, they don't know, they don't know what they're doing and they're just like kind 40:25 of buying options or something. 40:26 And they're just like, they don't know. 40:29 There's no theory. 40:31 So that's a very bizarre thing that's happening. 40:34 Okay. 40:35 Well, do you have anything else to add? 40:37 Because I think we've pretty much gone over everything I wanted to learn. 40:41 Well, I'm not sure. 40:43 Well, yeah. 40:44 One thing I'll add is that this proposal has a very interesting interpersonal, Drivechain 40:50 is a very interesting interpersonal effect, I think, which is that it, it decreases the 40:56 relevance of being a Bitcoin expert because if you, it's not like the way we are now is 41:02 that there's only one Bitcoin, it's only like one Bitcoin television channel, the core channel. 41:12 And so if you're the producer of that channel or if you're one of the producers, then you're 41:16 a really important person and like having access to that person and like being their 41:21 friend and your money or whatever, that's like a big deal. 41:25 But if you change it all around so that anyone can create that, you make it more like YouTube 41:29 where anyone can create their own channel and anyone can listen to whatever channel 41:33 they want. 41:34 So instead of being like broadcast television through the airwaves, it's more like the internet. 41:39 Then it's not really important to be friends with that guy anymore, the original producer. 41:43 And maybe he's like a great advisor or maybe, maybe not, or maybe whatever, like maybe he 41:49 was good at certain things like trying to manage all these compromises, but now it's 41:54 different and this whole thing, you have the long tail and you have these niches and it 42:00 looks, maybe it looks different. 42:02 So I think- 42:03 Oh, you said niches. 42:04 For a moment I thought you said geishas and I was like, what is he talking about? 42:09 That would be cool too though. 42:10 Yeah. 42:11 That would also be, yeah, we can put that in, put images of that everywhere. 42:17 I think it's interesting that it kind of, I'm not sure how to say, like I'm not, people, 42:27 there's a Milton Friedman has like a big paragraph about why the free market has a bad press 42:33 and why, you know, there's like a lot of heat from intellectuals who don't like markets 42:38 because it means that they'll no longer be experts because you're free to try every dumb 42:42 idea. 42:44 And so it means that they're just, you know, so I am not sure exactly what will happen 42:51 as a result of that effect, but I think it is salient and I think people should watch 42:55 for it and be kind of pay some attention to it. 43:01 Okay. 43:02 Well, thanks a lot for joining me and here's to more future productive discussions. 43:10 Okay. 43:12 Okay. 43:13 I'll talk to you later. 43:14 All right. 43:15 Bye.