0:00 Welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces, hosted by LayerTwo Labs. 0:14 We are excited to have another conversation with you, our many fans and supporters, as 0:20 well as newcomers, critics, and members of the crypto and Bitcoin communities. 0:30 Today is Friday, August 18th, 2023. 0:35 We're going to have another awesome conversation about Drivechain. 0:38 Drivechain is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 300 and 301. 0:49 Welcome to the stage, Paul. 0:50 Happy Friday. 0:51 Hi, I can mostly just listen for the next 15 minutes, but then I'll be able to talk 1:00 as well. 1:01 All right, understood. 1:05 So everyone who is coming to the space, welcome. 1:11 Welcome to our many fans and listeners. 1:14 I see familiar faces joining the audience. 1:19 Everyone's welcome to raise your hand, come on up, ask a question, share a comment. 1:27 People can learn about Drivechain at layer2labs.com. 1:31 There is a wealth of information there. 1:34 Everyone is encouraged to download the testnet software, recently upgraded and improved very 1:41 significantly. 1:44 There's a lot of stuff you can learn by reading essays on Drivechain written by Fiatjaf, 1:50 SuperTestNet, John Light, Paul Sztorc, and many others. 1:59 I like to call it the Drivechain canon, the essays by those four people. 2:04 Everyone should read those essays. 2:06 If you're non-technical and participating in a testnet feels like a challenge to you, 2:12 you can read those essays and develop a strong understanding of the incredibly powerful economic 2:19 potential of Drivechain. 2:22 Drivechain leverages Bitcoin's monetary policy and miners for new networks, enabling innovation 2:31 and experimentation built on Bitcoin. 2:36 Drivechain would open up a renaissance of development on Bitcoin. 2:40 It would be potentially one of the best things ever in Bitcoin's history, transformative, 2:46 enormous value accrual potential to Bitcoin's blockchain. 2:52 We believe this is number-go-up technology like people have never seen before, potentially 2:58 huge value accrual to Bitcoin. 3:02 Just as important, value accrual to Bitcoin's block space, bringing fee revenue to the miners. 3:11 Despite the halvings, we think that Drivechain can boost fee revenue enormously, strengthening 3:17 Bitcoin's mining community, strengthening Bitcoin's economic security. 3:24 Yes, I think the better thing, though, is that this should be like a Q&A. 3:33 So if anyone with the audience should suggest a topic, it shouldn't just be a robotic reading 3:49 of Drivechain talking points. 3:53 So if anyone has something they want to talk about, then they should. 4:02 I think we could also go over events of the week, but I'll do that in a couple of minutes 4:12 when I get back to my house. 4:23 Thank you. 4:24 Thank you. 4:25 Thank you. 4:53 Thank you. 4:54 Thank you. 5:23 Thank you. 5:24 Thank you. 5:25 Thank you. 6:23 So, hey, guys, can you hear me? 6:43 Yeah, I can hear you. 6:49 Sure. 6:50 So I have a slightly technical question regarding the... 6:54 So there's 2.6 slots for Drivechains. 6:58 But I also know that you can do Drivechains in Drivechains. 7:03 But I'm trying to figure out exactly how that would work. 7:06 So we have a limited Drivechains, basically. 7:10 But I'm not sure exactly how that would work with the miners there. 7:13 So yeah, interesting to know about this. 7:18 Thank you. 7:19 Thank you. 7:49 Thank you. 7:50 Thank you. 8:18 I don't hear anything from Hampus. 8:31 No, I don't hear anything. 8:34 Hello? 8:35 Hello? 8:36 Yes. 8:37 Can you hear me? 8:38 It's definitely extremely buggy. 8:40 Okay. 8:41 I was just trying to be connected for a while or something. 8:47 I started to hear someone ask about 250 slots. 8:52 Okay. 8:53 I tried. 8:54 I said I could look, but maybe it didn't come through. 8:57 Let me try it again. 9:01 That's kind of weird. 9:02 Hopefully it works again. 9:04 See, now it says... 9:05 As soon as he started asking, he says connected. 9:08 I don't know. 9:09 I'm going to be home. 9:10 I'm going to be on my Wi-Fi soon. 9:11 So maybe I can be notified. 9:15 I don't know. 9:16 So you can hear it now? 9:19 Sometimes. 9:24 Hello? 9:25 I can hear something now. 9:30 Hello? 9:33 I'm hearing you. 9:36 I had a question regarding the 90% threshold. 9:41 Will it be changed after the fact, if nothing's getting approved? 9:46 Well, since I happen to have already pulled over to explain this, I think... 9:51 The thing is, any hash rate threshold is really a 51% threshold, 9:56 since they can always take the so-called nuclear option of orphaning anything that doesn't signal. 10:05 And so the... 10:12 It's always like not a... 10:17 It's always 51%. 10:18 It's the actual number always. 10:20 So I think that was based on... 10:23 Back in 2015, there was a BIP-9 signaling, which was 95%. 10:31 And so this is just a little lower. 10:34 I think it's a good idea for the miners to endorse the sidechain, so it sort of makes it more unreasonable. 10:43 Because people have to believe that the sidechain will work when they make the deposit. 10:52 Does this make any sense? 10:53 Like, they want to already... 10:56 They'll be worried about whether or not anyone actually cares about this sidechain. 10:59 So you want to kind of kick it off with like a vote of confidence. 11:03 There's no reason for miners not to add most sidechains. 11:07 I think we're slightly biased because of the... 11:14 I think we're slightly biased because of the world we live in today is very conservative. 11:19 But I don't think it would be like that once the idea is actually out there in people's heads. 11:26 My worry is just irrelevant. 11:28 Some people not actually caring about voting for the sidechains. 11:32 But if they don't care, then it's probably a bad sidechain. 11:36 Because the miners have an incentive. 11:38 They get more transaction fees for free, and they get more exchange rate price for free. 11:45 But I'm going to be like... 11:51 I'm going to be unavailable for like 15 minutes. 11:53 But then I'll be listening, though. 11:57 So maybe don't ask me a question. 12:03 I don't know what I'm saying. 12:04 I'm going back to my Wi-Fi at my house. 12:06 I'll be there soon. 12:32 I'll be there soon. 13:02 One point on that might be that miners currently should probably care about drivechains, but haven't tried to activate. 13:25 From my speaking to some people that publicly traded miners, this is not really a focus of theirs. 13:37 So that's why I was concerned. 13:55 Is anybody speaking? 14:21 Is anybody speaking or is my instance just buggy? 14:29 No, I'm speaking. 14:34 Yeah, the software's gotten really buggy. 14:36 I think you might see more of attention paid. 14:42 Well, one thing is it definitely seems that the amount of discussion around drivechain has really picked up recently. 14:49 We're probably like 100x over a year ago. 14:52 And of course, the halving is coming up and barring some big price rise. 14:58 And I think those historically have tended to happen with some gap afterwards, whatever it is, six or 12 months. 15:07 But either way, it's definitely going to put a major squeeze on miners. 15:14 And the mining industry is very different than it was four years ago. 15:19 There's a lot more publicly traded miners that are going to be thinking, I don't know, more short term and then have a much more shareholder minded point of view. 15:34 And so they very well may come to their realization much more quickly than we think that drivechains potentially can boost their revenues. 15:51 I think four years ago, there might have been, I'm not even sure if there were any publicly traded miners. 15:57 Do you know if any of these miners are currently running Lightning nodes to earn fees? 16:08 No, I don't know. 16:12 But I think that the revenue generated from Lightning nodes is pretty trivial right now, even for major routing hubs. 16:42 So if there's not a lot of conversation, I want to go back to that last question about the 10%, or I guess the 90%. 16:56 To me, it seems kind of like there could be 12% of people that are just kind of not miners that don't really want to invest in the question. 17:12 So they just say no, unless it's really over the top convincing. 17:16 It's like when somebody hands you a clipboard at the grocery store and says, you know, put this measure on the ballot and you're like, I don't know. 17:24 And they're like, well, what's the harm? You're just putting it on the ballot. 17:28 You're like, well, I don't know. I don't just sign off on everything. 17:32 So I think, I mean, there could be something around this. I don't know what the number would be, what the magic number is. 17:37 But this comes to mind as some possible concern. 17:42 I think that's definitely possible. I don't know. There's not any magic number. 17:48 People say 90 and 95% based on kind of the, I don't know, the standard that was discussed with the Speedy trial or with the SegWit activation and all that. 18:03 But I think if we get, you know, even if we get to 51%, that it would like it would technically be an activation because you can have 49% of mining or of hash indifferent. 18:20 And they would just kind of abstain from the process of upvoting the withdrawal transactions. 18:28 And the 51% is active and is upvoting, you know, the valid withdrawal transactions. 18:36 That should even though very much more slowly than designed, but that should kind of be enough for the network to have the peg outs functioning. 18:49 But obviously, you know, there's some politics to it as well, where if you get 90% of miners activating, it's a pretty powerful wave, politically speaking. 19:19 Could you just like expand on that a bit on how the 51% could actually activate a sidechain? 19:35 Well, no, that would be that would be through a soft fork. 19:39 But if you have 51% of hash power of miners representing or even or more specifically pools representing 51% of hash power. 19:52 Of hash rate, and they were to activate, well, the way that the withdrawal transactions work is it requires 51% of blocks to upvote or affirm the proposed withdrawal transactions within a six month period. 20:12 So if you were to have 100% of hash rate, and you assume a valid withdrawal transaction, then that would happen in three months because the transactions expire after six months, and they need 13,500 blocks or something that is the equivalent of three months worth of blocks. 20:38 So if you had 49%, and I should say miners can also abstain, or they could downvote the transaction, which would you know, the so so the way you put it is like the withdrawal transaction needs like a score it needs it needs 13,500 points. 20:56 So if a miner upvotes it or confirms it, it adds one point to the scoreboard, and the miners can abstain and add no points or they can actually downvote the transaction and and kind of take a point off. 21:12 So if you had 49% that were just indifferent, or abstaining from from from the 300 completely. So when they mine a block, they would they wouldn't be they wouldn't be adjusting the counter at all, they would just be ignoring these transactions, or at least ignoring the difference in these transactions. 21:39 The BIP300 scorekeeping functionality. And so it fit but a 50 plus 1% were were were moving the counter up, then in six months, you would get that 13,500 upvotes. 22:05 This is the same for the activation of the drivechain. I understand that's also the same way for drivechains currently in use to replace it. 22:16 Well, that's if they were to activate it almost like without any of the status quo political or activation mechanisms, because the way I understand it is that with with with speedy trial is that if 90% were to signal, then then they all would activate together. 22:42 But another possibility would be that, you know, you could just have, we had the CEO of Luxor say that he would signal a couple days ago. So let's just say that, you know, unbeknownst to like anybody, really, that he could just activate it himself. 23:01 I mean, I don't think you can do that now because the pull request hasn't been released, but I think it should be released shortly. 23:10 So let's say that that he activated it, or, you know, that that company activated it, that pool, and then you had foundry activated, then you had a, whatever it is, ant pool activated. 23:23 And I think that those three or, you know, add one or two smaller ones, and then you get to above 50%. And they they didn't, it wasn't this that they were signaling that they wanted to activate it, but they actually just went ahead and activated it without any sort of signaling, you know, for consensus process among the pools or whatever. 23:45 Well, because of like the nature of the soft, as we call like the softness of the soft fork, that is BIP300. The other pools don't even have to be aware of that. There's no like, there's no kind of burden on them at all. 24:06 So the pools that have activated it can proceed to, you know, do BIP300 and go for it. 24:17 Okay, that makes sense. Because the messages are already put onto. 24:24 So they could do that, like around 50%. But I will be a bit careful about like, someone could make an invalid spend from the peg out, like output, that will be valid for like full nodes that doesn't support BIP300. 24:43 So like, if you do it around 50, 51%, then those models will need to like, do a reorg or orphan the other side, like if there's an incorrect spend. So I think you want to have maybe like 70 or 80% hash power support, because around 51%, there could be a lot of ugly chain splits, like deep, deep splits between the chains. 25:11 Just because like, if you try to invalid, incorrect spend the peg out address, like those will be, as I said, they will be valid according to normal core nodes and the minority hash power, like those that doesn't support BIP300. 25:30 So, and you need to be cautious about doing it close to the 51% hash rate threshold. 25:37 That's a good point. Yeah, then you would have a very contentious episode there. 25:45 Yeah, it can be dangerous. But I do agree with your central point, though, that's like, you could do a miner activated salt fork, and you don't need to go to core, like the core development process to get drivechains. 25:59 So like, if mining pools want to support drivechains, they could do that and activate it themselves. And I mean, it benefits them. So it makes sense for them to do it because they get the mining fee from the blind managed mining. 26:16 So, but I will suggest that they need like a strong majority before they pursue this. 26:30 Yeah, it does seem something that would be attractive to miners in general. I mean, from their perspective, if you think of it like just from their like fully selfish perspective, the only downside, I suppose would be the, you know, the ire of 26:51 Like they need an SPV client for the sidechain, right, to the draftings. They don't necessarily need like a full node for the drivechain, but at least like some awareness of it, which will be pretty cheap to have, like it doesn't like, they have resources to have some SPV clients for quite a lot of sidechains. 27:12 So I don't think that should be a problem. And then like there will be miners doing the blind merged mining for the main chain miners. So they earn extra mining fee from the drivechains. So like it's one of the only layer twos that directly benefits like the main chain hash power, which is quite interesting. 27:32 So when I was discussing the indifference earlier, I was thinking in terms of not the whole thing, but like each individual chain that could be proposed. 27:43 So you I mean, it's easy to imagine like this, this whole thing gets activated. And so we say, okay, great, we have a large block sidechain. Okay, but then the large blockers come up and they propose 15 different large block sidechains. And then there's a main one. And then there's another one. And then everybody has their own version of the large block sidechain. And then, you know, number 18, the miners are like, is this one important? Do we care? Do we want to add it? 28:05 That's what I'm talking about the 90%. You know, most of the time, you don't, you might not have researched every sidechain proposal, which is going to come across. 28:11 want to add it? 28:13 That's what I'm talking about the 90%. 28:15 Most of time you don't... 28:17 You might not have 28:42 at which is like problem solution, is like there's like a thermostat, 28:47 like once it gets too hot, the air conditioning comes on. 28:53 know? So I'm thinking like once something becomes too much of a problem, 28:57 then something fixes the problem. 29:00 my idea, like my conception of it, I mean, is that you have a 29:06 sidechain that basically everyone wants, everyone includes 90 29:11 % of the hashrate, so they send it through. 29:15 then what does it look like if there's a sidechain that... 29:18 What could it possibly look like if there's a sidechain that 15 % or 11 % of the 29:24 hashrate doesn't want? 29:25 Like, what does that look 29:26 like. 29:27 You know what mean? 29:28 they get, they pay not, miners pay nothing and they get more free money. 29:34 So it has to be really bad to not get 90%. 29:37 I think people have to just really not care. 29:40 I'm saying it could look like a carbon copy of the one they just approved yesterday, 29:44 but with like political intervention, government. 29:47 know, but in a way, isn't it good to have it? 29:51 It's, it, it's because it's so easy for the miners to just add a sidechain. 29:56 We kind of don't want there to be too much... 29:59 we don't want there to be too much like... 30:02 attention wasted away, 30:07 what's the phrase? 30:11 Maybe if it's just the same as the one yesterday with a little parameter tweaked, 30:16 maybe no one actually needs it. 30:20 So I don't, that's just the number that I picked, you know, it's also I picked it 30:25 because of speedy trial kind of. 30:28 So I'm kind of like, what is the number? 30:31 It's supposed to kind of resemble that. 30:37 I don't really feel that strongly about it. 30:41 but I think, I think yeah you don't really want like all 256 slots to just 30:47 gonna be claimed in the second day or something which I mean that's not possible 30:52 you know what I mean I mean like there should be some pushback so 30:58 that's why I made it 90 % those are some of the 31:02 Does that make sense or no? Do you, like, agree or? 31:11 I guess even if they did all, if they did all get filled fast, then you would just move on to the six month 50% anyway, right? So, to replace it. 31:29 You're muted. If you're saying anything, didn't you just start talking? 31:35 Yeah, sorry. 31:38 Or maybe the app is bugging. 31:45 I mean, I can, I can hear both of you. 31:51 I think maybe everybody can hear you, maybe with the exception of Paul. 32:00 Is Mika talking? I can't hear him at all. Very weird. I hear Austin. 32:03 I wasn't talking, I stopped talking. 32:05 Okay, great. 32:06 Now I'm talking. Yeah, I mean, I agree that there's a number, and we don't know what that number is. 32:11 Yeah. 32:12 And I don't know if 90% is the best, but I think there is, there is probably, whatever number you put it, there's probably someone who can propose something which will be right about that level. 32:22 But that's true of every number, right? 32:26 I could probably pick a proposal that, you know, 84% of people would like, and 16% of people would not care about it. 32:33 Yeah, I agree. I mean, in a way, the number, in a weird way... 32:38 A statement about whether 90% is the best parameter or not is a sort of fud, I guess. 32:43 In a way, since the sidechains don't really have any cost to anyone other than taking out people's attention, which is everything that exists in the universe could have that cost. 32:57 But since the sidechains don't really have any cost, it really should be like, you know, it should just kind of be like 5% hash rate or something, you know, in some sense. 33:09 But I just thought, I think it's probably just wasting everyone's time. 33:16 I think it's better if the sidechain gets like a vote, a yes vote, like from the miners first. 33:23 Because then it's kind of just, I feel like users will be looking to, when it first activates, they'll be wondering, like, is this project going to succeed or not? 33:33 Does this have a future? 33:36 So you want to kick it off with something big? That was my thought. It could be an incorrect thought. 33:42 It's also like, you know, again, it's a speedy trial number. It was based on BIP-9 before, so I actually brought it – BIP-9 was 95%, so I brought it down to the speedy trial number. 33:53 So it's been moving down at a rate of about 5 percentage points every 5 or 6 years. 34:02 So maybe in 5 or 6 years, I would have moved it down, I don't know, to 80% or something. I don't know. 34:12 So, because BIP300… 34:15 Okay, do we have any, you know, do we have any skeptics or whatever? 34:21 We had Mr. Hoddle last week. That was great. But his phone lost power halfway through, but it was good while it lasted. 34:33 I'm using my mistake and I apologize. 34:35 I can hear you. I can hear you. I think everyone can hear you. 34:39 My guess. 34:41 Is George speaking? 34:43 Yes. 34:44 Oh my gosh, I can't hear him. I'm going to restart this app or something. I'm going to restart the app. 34:49 Sorry, I don't know what's going on. 34:58 Thank you for being a good sport. 35:08 Hello. 35:30 Okay, that's good. Sorry about that, everyone. 35:33 [Audio breakup; speech unclear] 35:52 like to go ahead and use a sidechain. 35:56 think you're the same page. 36:12 effect. can someone repeat it maybe? 36:15 I'm in the car, maybe my signal's not so great. 36:18 Okay, I hear you pretty well now. 36:21 Okay, just in regards to the 51 % actually being needed to activate, is that 36:27 because BIP300 has already put the six new messages 36:31 messages into the system, and then therefore 51 % of people can just go along with 36:37 it. 36:38 You mean... do the... 36:40 we've chose the inputs. 36:43 Do you mean to activate BIP300 overall? 36:48 No. To activate sidechain, 36:50 sidechain, BIP300 is already activated, it's already a thing. 36:55 And then, I'm just a bit confused on the 90 % versus actually needing 37:01 51%, and what that process of 51 % really is. 37:06 Is it because the message already exists, therefore they can just go along 37:10 and play the game anyway, of 927. 37:14 Well, maybe it would help if we just emphasize there's three different things. 37:19 There's the withdrawals, 37:22 in order of how frequent they are, there's activating BIP300 overall, which would only 37:27 happen once. Then there's 37:29 activating individual sidechains, would happen once to claim each of the 256 slots, 37:35 then maybe once again to reclaim a slot. 37:41 That's in the BIP300 rules. 37:44 And then finally, the slots all have sidechains, and then they have deposits and 37:48 withdrawals. 37:50 so they... 37:56 So those are three things that miners could signal for or have some input 38:02 in. And you're talking about the middle one, activating a sidechain. 38:08 you're saying? 38:09 is 90 % enforced or what is the question? 38:13 Just how 51 % can actually activate a sidechain if, because from 38:19 what I read, you need 90%, I'm a bit confused how it's in practice, actually 38:25 51%. Yes, I'll explain that. 38:27 that. what you do is you team up and you make your 51 % group 38:33 and what you say is you have the first block where you signal and then the 38:39 sidechain has the signaling score. 38:41 It actually keeps track of fails instead of but it doesn't matter. 38:44 Let's just say it's got a count up from 1 to 216 38:47 so to It's got to to whatever that is. 38:53 2016 is two weeks worth of blocks, and 90 % of that would be 38:58 2016 minus 201 or 202, depending on how you round. 39:04 So this part's clear so far, right? 39:07 got to count up to like 19 something. 39:10 Right? That's the 90%. 39:13 Okay, yeah. Before the two weeks, the 2016 blocks elapsed. 39:19 And then it times out. 39:21 So what they would do is they just, they find the first block and they have, they go 39:26 from 39:26 0 to 1, and they find the second block and they find, they go from 1 to 2, and then 39:31 maybe someone in the 49 group, they find a block. 39:35 They find the next block, and it doesn't have the vote, 39:41 so instead the score stays at 2. 39:44 It should have gone to 3, but it did not. 39:46 Well, what the 51 % group can do is they can say, I'm just going to orphan this block 39:51 and I'm going to mine a new version of the block where the score goes from 2 to 3 39:57 as it should. 39:59 And if push really comes to shove and the 49 % group tries 40:05 to compete against the 51 % group, eventually 40:09 the 49 % group will lose. 40:12 So it doesn't matter how many blocks they found. 40:15 the 51 % group will have the longer blockchain, and it'll eventually be longer 40:20 by any arbitrary amount of blocks, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever. 40:29 And so that will eventually 40:35 win. Does that make sense? 40:38 So they can do that over and over and over again, and it'll have 100%. 40:41 They'll get right to 19, about 19, whatever. 40:44 out of 19, whatever with, with 201 blocks of spare. 40:50 Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. 40:52 It sounds incredibly messy and like it might have some negative consequences. 40:58 Yeah. don't think it does make sense. 40:59 It is. Yeah, right. 41:01 why it's called the nuclear option because it's like, it's kind of, it is messy. 41:06 it's kind of like, if you're in this situation where they do that to someone, 41:13 the 49 % are so screwed, because they're not finding any 41:17 blocks that they may become desperate in their search and they can can pull people out 41:22 of the 51 coalition by offering them a lot because they're so different. 41:27 So it's kind of like it doesn't really work in but it's unknown. 41:33 So maybe the 90 needs to be reconsidered because to me, 90 sounds very difficult. 41:40 Well, I don't think I mean, again, it's kind of like you may be right. 41:44 You may be 100 percent correct about that. 41:46 But the way that I look at it is who are these miners that are not voting? 41:50 Yes. Like politically aligned public miners. 41:55 Yeah, but I think the I think the yeah, there's there's this sense and there's like there's this like West Minister. 42:04 Governance philosophy that says it should always be 50 percent. 42:08 You know, it should always be majority vote or whatever, which I kind of am sympathetic to. 42:12 But I think the the politic, the whole reason there is politics in Bitcoin at all is because of the lack of sidechains. 42:24 Now, we should never have even gone down this road. 42:28 There's no reason to really be on this road at all. 42:31 So if instead we had done in 2015, we had done a sidechains type thing, there would never have been a block size war. 42:39 There would never have been a SegWit blockade. None of that would have happened. 42:42 This would never even be in anyone's head. You know, no one would have ever even thought of this. 42:47 This idea that the idea of political miners would never have been an idea. 42:51 It would just never have happened. So maybe I'm wrong about that, but I just kind of think if there is sidechains, 42:57 all the politics will kind of go away because the politics is about what which which stuff should activate on Bitcoin. 43:06 But the way sidechains works, no one no one is ever harmed by a new feature, new option being added. 43:14 There would be some things maybe like if two people want to do this, 43:17 the two people each want to do a Namecoin sidechain and you don't want to have like two phone books. 43:21 And there's so there's some. There's cases where it would affect the sidechains themselves, the drama, 43:28 and so then they may make various appeals. 43:32 But it doesn't harm anyone, any L1 person if something activates or not. 43:39 Could a soft fork or multiple soft forks be done to change the 90 percent? 43:45 That sounds like it could be messier. 43:48 The 90 percent cannot be changed. 43:51 But as I kind of sort of explained to you is you could do something similar to BIP 148 where you could say it is mandatory. 44:01 To. To do the 90 percent signaling and you could do that with 51 percent. 44:08 So in a way, yes. I don't know, maybe you're right about that. 44:12 Maybe it should be, you know, one thing that I think also should be rethought. 44:16 The original the originally the withdrawals were only it was like two weeks of nothing at first, 44:23 then two weeks of voting and then two weeks later it would go after that. 44:27 So it's like six weeks total, but it's only two weeks of voting. 44:31 And I changed that to three months because it doesn't matter. 44:35 Because it makes it more because people complained about miners can steal. 44:38 But now, in hindsight, looking back, I just realized that those people probably had no idea what they were talking about at all. 44:45 Any more than many of the people do today. 44:48 So I thought maybe that actually is not maybe it shouldn't be that long. 44:53 But I really the logic of it is that the length of the withdrawal does not really matter because regular people will not use that. 45:00 They will just swap out. So. So, yeah, maybe you're right about that. 45:05 And, yeah, you maybe you're right about the activation. 45:08 I mean, all I can do is repeat what I said, which is that. 45:12 In the past, pre-SegWit, pre-scaling more, there was this 95 percent threshold. 45:21 There was a 95 percent threshold for activating soft forks that was met and there was no controversy or whatever. 45:27 And then there was a speedy trial with 90 percent. So that's where I'm coming from with that. 45:32 I mean, I don't know. I may be wrong. You may be. I don't know. 45:36 I think he just got disconnected also. Hopefully he heard what I said before it cut him out. 45:47 I think a six month or three month payout still makes sense to like it. 45:51 So it's a slow process and people can react. But rather have it like a quick thing. 46:04 I just did the thumbs up. I don't know. It doesn't show up on my screen, but maybe. 46:08 Did you see it? I don't know. Buggy app. 46:12 I didn't actually, but I trust you. 46:14 Let's see if it did. I don't know. I'm going to say it again. I don't know if it's working. 46:18 Yeah, no, I saw it. 46:20 I can't see it, but I can still throw it, I guess. 46:24 This is weird. Last two weeks, two or three weeks has been a little buggier than normal. 46:29 I wonder why that would be. You would think it would be the same app as before. 46:32 Are people sabotaging it? Probably not. 46:35 Anyway, hopefully it lets us have some people come up and talk. 46:43 All right, George, were you able to hear what I said? 46:46 I got about half of it. 46:50 I'm in the car. I'm a bit busy right now, to be honest. It's not the best time. 46:55 Yeah, I know. Don't get into a car accident because of privacy. I don't like that. 47:01 That's a bad thought. 47:04 Appreciate it. 47:05 I think I say that pre-SegWit, pre-block size war, there was 95% BIP-9 activation. 47:16 No one really complained about that. It worked just fine. 47:20 And then we had speedy trial, and it was 90%, and it worked just fine. 47:24 That's kind of where I get that number. 47:28 There's certainly no magical, objective reason for that. That's just kind of where I'm at. 47:38 I think really old softworks used 55% threshold or something like that. 47:45 And then there was a lot of fake signaling by the miners, so there was some deep chain splits going on. 47:53 So I think that's why they picked 95% threshold for BIP-9. 47:59 And I think that makes sense, having a higher threshold. 48:02 It was just an unfortunate situation with SegWit specifically, with the miners, 48:08 because afterwards with taproot and stuff, that has worked out well with speedy trial, I think. 48:14 But it seems like there's a lot of PTSD still going on by Bitcoiners and those that remember the block size wars. 48:22 For me, I look at it right now, and it doesn't look like miners are your enemy, really. 48:29 They are our servants, right? 48:31 So having a high threshold is great, and having a hash rate escrow makes sense, for me at least. 48:41 Yeah, I think it's unfortunate that people cannot imagine the time when there was no enemy kind of concept. 48:53 Everyone just worked together to make Bitcoin a success. 48:57 And the whole point of sidechains is that reasonable people can disagree about which features they want to run the node. 49:07 So there really shouldn't be any problems. 49:13 Yeah, I agree. 49:16 The opinion of miners has really been damaged since SegWit, unfortunately. 49:21 And people are stuck in their mindset, it seems like, and not seeing the landscape today and how it looks today. 49:29 Because it's not the same landscape that it was six or seven years ago. 49:37 Yeah, I agree. Unfortunately, the one from six or seven years ago also is misleading. 49:42 Because it's my view that whole thing mostly was just... 49:48 Like, the miners were convinced by some large blockers that... 49:56 It's kind of ambiguous how to say it, how to explain it the best, but they were sort of convinced that it would be good. 50:04 Like, they thought this block size increase was necessary. 50:09 So they had been convinced to become large blockers in various ways. 50:16 And so they kind of thought, we'll hold up SegWit activate. 50:20 It was like a kind of Mexican standoff, two people holding guns at each other. 50:25 And they said, we won't activate SegWit until this block size increase is merged or something like that. 50:36 So you see, the whole reason that people even worry about activation at all is because of this event. 50:42 And the whole reason that event happened is because there was no sidechains. 50:46 And the whole reason that even any of the animosity happened was because the existing governance process wasn't working for everyone. 50:57 But if you just have a process that works for everyone, then there won't be this political... 51:09 There's no point. It would just be politically losing out on fees, making other people inconvenienced, no benefit to yourself. 51:22 So that's my thought. 51:25 I got to leave. I'm just... I appreciate the answers. I'll be back next week with some better questions. 51:33 Okay, great. 51:34 So I have a question, a slightly technical one. But there is 256 slots for the drivechains. 51:42 But as far as I know, you can also have drivechains in drivechains. 51:47 So I'm trying to figure out how exactly that works out with the miners and stuff. 51:53 Yes, one of the sidechains would itself have BIP300 on it. 51:58 And it would be both a child of Bitcoin Core and a parent of its own 256. 52:05 And it would be kind of bizarre. It would definitely be a little inception-y and weird. 52:12 But I don't see any particular part where it would necessarily break down. 52:15 The idea would be... It does get kind of slightly worse each time. 52:21 Because to actually do the withdrawal, it would be another time period. 52:27 Like if that copied BIP300 exactly, it would be another three months to move from one to the... 52:33 One child, like the grandchild to the child, and then another three months to move from the child to the Bitcoin Core parent. 52:41 And this whole time, miners on L1 could empty the whole sidechain and steal everything there. 52:50 So it's exponentially slower, but it's the same risk, which is bad. 53:01 So it's bad for the user in that way. 53:04 But other than that, it works exactly the same. 53:07 But other than that, it works exactly the same. 53:10 It's just the sidechain is finding blocks. 53:15 The sidechain's blocks are moving up. 53:18 They're incrementing the... 53:22 The sidechain blocks increment the withdrawal of its own grandchild chains. 53:29 They could all be blind merge mined, in which case all the money is passed through one to the other. 53:34 It goes into the sidechain coinbase, and then it goes into the L1... 53:43 What we used to call the bribe transaction. 53:46 I guess now it's called the BMM request. 53:50 And so all the fees... 53:52 Other than that, it's the same, but it is weird. 53:55 The withdrawal is weird. 53:57 Right. Yeah, I hear you. 53:59 Maybe it's just better to use the slots and so on. 54:09 People would probably just... 54:11 If there were really the demand for this, then I would probably think that people would just soft fork BIP300 into Bitcoin Core again. 54:21 There'd be BIP300-A, BIP300-B. 54:24 I don't think... 54:26 That's another thing that I just think there would be nothing controversial about that at all. 54:30 This would be like zero controversy situation, because either there are still plenty of slots to either use or overwrite, 54:39 in which case no one would ever want to add it again. 54:42 They'd say, what's the point of adding BIP300 a second time? 54:45 There'd be literally no rational reason to do that. 54:48 Or we live in a world where all 256 slots have been claimed and they were all very, very popular and all the sidechains were very unique. 54:55 And someone has the 257th sidechain. 54:57 And so in that scenario, everything's working out really, really well. 55:03 Right? 55:05 It's working so well that it's not even controversial that this is a thing that has worked and that people like and that has already been tried. 55:13 So they would just add BIP300-B and add the 257th sidechain. 55:19 So it's another situation where there's just no controversy and there's no problems. 55:25 Everyone is just getting happier all the time. 55:29 Yeah, just add new slots and it shouldn't be controversial at that point. 55:34 But also, 256 slots is quite a lot of chains. 55:39 People always worry about that. 55:40 What about all the slots? 55:42 At this point, you're really scratching your head to think of what is the 16th viable sidechain going to be? 55:51 So I don't think … 25 is already giving us a whole 10x of buffer zone. 56:02 Yeah, and you can probably do some efficient designs on those chains as well and stuff. 56:07 In time, we'll be learning more about what makes a sidechain good. 56:11 So it should be accumulating. 56:14 So that's a hypothetical scenario where it's really, really successful. 56:21 Anyway. 56:25 So yes, coming up. 56:28 If you have a question or a comment. 56:37 Fiatjaf wrote a cool article. 56:42 Fiatjaf is such a big BIP300 shill that he literally thinks Bitcoin will be destroyed if we do not activate it. 56:54 I do think it says something weird about Bitcoin. 56:56 The idea is designed to help lots of people and harm nobody. 57:00 So you can see kind of how far the termites have spread and how long and well they've dined. 57:08 When an idea that has no downside and enormous upside is treated the same way as Layer 1 block size increase, 57:18 which is a clear example of a block size increase. 57:22 It's treated the same way as Layer 1 block size increase, 57:26 which is a clear tug of war with someone getting what they want and someone else not. 57:30 Yes, we have a Jack. 57:32 Hello. 57:33 Do you think that something like CoinNews is better suited for a mainchain application than a sidechain application? 57:40 And why do you think that those things would vary? 57:45 Yeah, I think they would vary, and I think CoinNews is better on the mainchain. 57:48 Because CoinNews is just about attention and like digital real estate. 57:56 It's like a billboard in a way. 57:58 And so what's the thing about a billboard is like you want to reach as many people as possible. 58:08 And so every sidechain user runs an L1 node, but not the other way around. 58:13 So there's always more L1 nodes than L2 nodes. 58:16 And the L1 node is, of course, that's the center. 58:19 You know, that's like the Times Square. 58:21 Times Square is named, I'm pretty sure, I'm not actually certain of this, 58:25 but I'm pretty sure that Times Square is named because the New York Times was printed there. 58:29 And that's how it just became. 58:32 It's like the central nervous system of America during the newspaper era, you know. 58:38 So, but the other thing is that CoinNews is not a soft fork or it's not anything. 58:43 It's just a cosmetic idea that literally affects no one, 58:47 and that could already be done today and cannot be stopped. 58:51 It's really a much better version of inscriptions, ordinals, 58:55 because a lot of people were doing that just for attention. 58:58 But that's exactly what this does. 59:00 This does in 220 bytes, you get the most attention out of everything in the block. 59:04 And without actually taking up a whole block. 59:07 And it's clear to me that this, the blockchain is actually more than just money. 59:13 It happens to be the greatest tool for money and banking in existence 59:21 and one of the greatest inventions of all time. 59:24 But it's just clear to me that it is also doing other things. 59:27 It's kind of like smoke signals, I think, 59:29 where it's this special kind of medium, 59:31 that everyone knows that everyone else can see it or has seen it. 59:38 But I think each chain will have its own CoinNews 59:41 and probably there will be sites or wallets that pull the CoinNews from everywhere. 59:53 And relay it. 59:56 Do you think that the main chain could be used to update sidechains through a similar mechanism? 1:00:04 Well, the reason why I actually invented CoinNews was I'd always had this kind of idea in my head in some form. 1:00:12 But I thought, how is it that the sidechains learn? 1:00:18 We're in the weird world where all of us are in bunkers and it's all underground. 1:00:22 In 1984, all of us are subversive cypherpunks. 1:00:27 Someone writes the sidechain into existence. 1:00:31 But now what are they supposed to do? Because they don't have any of the miners' phone numbers or anything. 1:00:35 Because no one has a phone number. 1:00:37 So I thought, what they could do is they could just write a message, like an op-return message, and just broadcast an unusually high fee. 1:00:46 A weird fee. 1:00:48 And in it they could say op-return and they could say, I have written a sidechain, learn about it here. 1:00:53 Maybe they have a little URL, maybe they have a little public key or something. 1:00:57 So I thought, that's how the person gets the news out that there is a new sidechain for the miners to look at individually and then activate. 1:01:09 So I thought, oh, that would be a neat idea. 1:01:11 And then I was like, actually, that idea is so good that everyone should just have it available to them. 1:01:19 Because it's about attention. 1:01:21 And the way CoinNews works is, of course, it's just like you can configure it in your own node to consume as much or as little of it as you like. 1:01:31 If you're the kind of person that wants to read a lot of news, you can get a lot. 1:01:34 If you're the kind of person that only wants the top five things per week or the top five things per day, you can configure it for that. 1:01:42 And so you just configure that and then people just bid up on whatever to get their message out. 1:01:49 And it really cannot be spam because you're getting exactly what you want. 1:01:55 You know what I mean? 1:01:56 Like you are getting – you want five messages per day, that's what you get. 1:02:00 You get the top five. 1:02:02 And those are the people who paid the most. 1:02:05 So it's not – they shouldn't really take it for granted. 1:02:08 Whatever it is, it's like a perfect supply and demand curve intersecting in attention. 1:02:13 Because someone has said, I want to give these five things my attention, whatever they are. 1:02:19 The person pays. 1:02:20 And the miners get more money. 1:02:22 So it's great. 1:02:23 It really works out for everyone very well because the advertiser or whoever it is, you have news, the cypherpunk hacker or whatever it is. 1:02:32 I honestly think this could be a really, really great idea, and it could actually win people over. 1:02:36 A lot of people think Bitcoin is totally useless, but this is pretty useful that the idea that if you wanted to get like some kind of heterodox news out, 1:02:44 because we have a lot of conformity in our modern day and age. 1:02:49 We have stuff about – if you wanted to get like a different COVID takeout, don't buy it, don't wear a mask, wear a mask, no wait, don't wear a mask, no wait, mandatory. 1:03:02 And then you're kind of just like whatever. 1:03:04 Yeah, I think a lot of people would love the ability to pay money to get their message out. 1:03:12 A lot of people would – the miners would love getting free money. 1:03:15 And the people watching, listening, or consuming this, the CoinNews, I think they would – I would rather get my news from that, honestly, than anything else. 1:03:27 Twitter is probably the best, but everything has got their thumb on the scale, manipulating the algorithm. 1:03:34 So I would rather – I would check that first thing in the morning, personally. 1:03:37 I would be a consumer, and I would also put out news, and so I love that idea. 1:03:43 And that's an idea that's 100% cosmetic. 1:03:45 It has nothing to do with the protocol at all. 1:03:49 It just is like an up-return rider, and it just depends on your full node needs to support it. 1:03:56 So that involves at least a few exchanges at all. 1:04:03 Also, I was wondering, Coinbase had, for example, a lot of influence during the SegWit2x politics. 1:04:13 You said today that there's a lot of malinvestment, you think, in the Bitcoin space. 1:04:18 Do you think that those companies are impacting Bitcoin politics today? 1:04:24 And do you think that relates to anything like Taro or those kind of proposals? 1:04:31 Yeah, I think it's all related, but unfortunately my view is – I don't know. 1:04:36 I'm just going to give you my opinion, but it's very nuanced and very weird. 1:04:39 So part of the malinvestment – Coinbase originally had the view that everything else – other altcoins are a distraction. 1:04:50 And so Brian Armstrong has a famous tweet that you may have seen that said, 1:04:55 Bitcoin is too far ahead, Litecoin, XRP, those things are just a distraction. 1:05:02 We should just focus only on Bitcoin and sidechains. 1:05:05 Because everyone does know that having a big united team is – this is network effects. 1:05:12 It's the size of the community squared. 1:05:16 So it's the amount of wealth that is interested in Bitcoin squared. 1:05:21 That is our score basically. 1:05:23 And so everyone knew. We don't want to split it off into many different teams. 1:05:28 But part of the malinvestment is that because of the block size war, 1:05:35 certain narratives were amped and certain were suppressed. 1:05:43 And also people drew various conclusions. 1:05:46 So Coinbase concluded that they had made a mistake about trusting Bitcoin to be responsive to their needs. 1:05:56 And they concluded that what they should do instead is support all these other things. 1:06:01 And this led to lots of shitcoining basically. 1:06:04 And so that's one element of it. 1:06:10 But another element of it is the rise of Lightning as like an uncriticizable thing. 1:06:17 So as a result of the scaling, Lightning went from being merely a good idea that obviously we should do, 1:06:23 and that we should obviously all support, and we should try to use, and we should cheer it on, 1:06:28 and we should spread the word. 1:06:30 But unfortunately, it transformed from that, which is what it really was, 1:06:35 into all of Bitcoin's hopes and dreams are pinned on this. 1:06:40 Since so many large blockers criticized Lightning, it made it look bad. 1:06:44 If anyone else criticized it or if anyone in the small blocker group criticized Lightning, 1:06:52 then large blocker people would screenshot that or quote that or something, 1:06:56 and they would say, aha, look at this. 1:06:58 So it quickly led to irrational views of Lightning being the greatest thing ever made 1:07:04 and also being uncriticizable. 1:07:06 And that led to VCs and other people giving money to Lightning people, 1:07:13 and then just kind of it became a runaway train of believing that you can still feel to this day. 1:07:19 I think it's very easy. 1:07:21 People feel uncomfortable criticizing Lightning, 1:07:24 which of course lets you know how bad of an idea it must really end up likely turning out. 1:07:31 Because whatever you can't criticize is the thing that's ultimately doomed. 1:07:37 And so that's kind of what happened. 1:07:42 It's hard to go into each thing has its own kind of weird story, 1:07:47 but basically even one narrative that changed. 1:07:51 So like the malinvestment, if I could make a list, I would say one thing is Coinbase. 1:07:55 Coinbase was started to help Bitcoin succeed. 1:07:59 But afterwards they just realized how much money they could make by just shit coining. 1:08:03 And Brian Armstrong and whatever, they had the scaling war was so disrespectful to them, 1:08:11 for better or for worse, and they just decided I can become a multibillionaire 1:08:17 or I can continue to deal with these people that really just don't like me at all. 1:08:23 This is Brian Armstrong's brain talking to himself. 1:08:28 So it's an easy decision eventually after years and years of dealing with that. 1:08:35 You had these people, BitPay, Coinbase. 1:08:37 When the blocks filled up, they would get more customer service, phone calls. 1:08:42 So people on the small blocker group, even though I was a small blocker 1:08:46 and the small blocker group was correct and the small blocker group won 1:08:49 and it should have won and it did win. 1:08:53 But in general, my other colleagues on the small blocker group, 1:08:57 they were very bad at having any kind of empathy for the large blockers. 1:09:00 They were just like, whatever, those people are evil. 1:09:04 Those people aren't sophisticated. 1:09:07 But the large blocker people had very clear inconvenience as a result of blocks being full. 1:09:13 Because, you know, let's say you're BitPay. 1:09:18 Someone wants to buy something in a store or online, whatever. 1:09:24 It doesn't matter. 1:09:25 They want to buy something and BitPay, the little QR code shows up. 1:09:28 The person sends the money. 1:09:32 Fee estimation was very bad back then. 1:09:34 But even if it was good, if the blocks are full, the blocks are full. 1:09:38 The person sends the money. 1:09:39 They do everything they're supposed to do. 1:09:41 The customer is doing everything right. 1:09:43 BitPay, you know, it's not confirmed. 1:09:45 So what is BitPay supposed to do? 1:09:46 BitPay is now in a bind, you know. 1:09:48 BitPay either has to say, okay, you've paid. 1:09:51 They tell the merchant, okay, that person has paid. 1:09:54 Give them the plane ticket or let them walk out of the store with the item, you know. 1:10:00 The merchant does everything they're supposed to do. 1:10:02 They integrate with BitPay. 1:10:04 Everyone is doing everything they're supposed to do, 1:10:06 but the payment is now in limbo or the payment has a really high fee. 1:10:11 What is BitPay supposed to do? 1:10:13 And then, like, it's not going through, so the person calls customer support. 1:10:16 So everyone is calling. 1:10:17 Whenever the blocks get full, everyone calls. 1:10:19 It goes from basically 0% of people calling customer support to like 100%. 1:10:25 So what is BitPay supposed to do in that situation? 1:10:28 And same for Coinbase, of course, 1:10:30 because Coinbase is a situation where lots and lots of people are using the real Bitcoin network. 1:10:35 You know what I mean? 1:10:36 Like they're not using custodial lightning. 1:10:38 They either want to get Bitcoin off the exchange or they have Bitcoin and they want to get – 1:10:43 they must – for Coinbase to credit someone with Bitcoin, 1:10:47 they have to really be using the Bitcoin network and really be sending the Bitcoin. 1:10:51 So these are companies that were really using Bitcoin. 1:10:55 And so that was why they were like, we're the real Bitcoiners. 1:10:58 These are just some weird nerd developers. 1:11:03 So that's kind of what happened. 1:11:05 So, yeah, the malinvestment was into shitcoining. 1:11:10 The malinvestment was into – I think lightning is overinvested. 1:11:17 Again, lightning is a good idea and we should all support it and we should all try it, 1:11:21 but it's not perceived honestly. 1:11:25 I think malinvestment was – a lot of the media companies or even the conferences 1:11:31 and things like that are just like products of the need for reassurance in the confusion of the block size debate 1:11:40 and the confusion as all the shitcoins show up and you need to reassure people that they're in the right place. 1:11:47 So you can see a lot of podcasts. 1:11:49 A lot of podcasts. 1:11:51 The podcasts, the books, the conferences, many people shitcoining 1:11:56 when instead they could have built a similar thing on Bitcoin 1:11:59 and they did build a similar thing on Bitcoin, but then they moved it. 1:12:02 That happened a lot. 1:12:04 So, yeah, I think a lot of the – this is of course a very – 1:12:13 I'm putting myself at enormous risk by saying something like this, 1:12:16 but I do think that yes, in two or three years it will be commonly believed that the 2017 to 20 – 1:12:28 maybe I guess I'll write it up to the present. 1:12:31 So 2017 to 2023 was like some kind of weird mistake and it was just repeating block size war talking points 1:12:43 and just complacency and just thinking that we've already won. 1:12:48 And so, yeah, I could easily be wrong about that, but that's what I think. 1:12:54 I mean a lot of it doesn't make any sense at all. 1:12:56 Like many of the use cases do not harm the digital gold use case in the slightest, 1:13:03 and in fact they make it better. 1:13:05 It's always better to have more people. 1:13:07 We want to always be a big tent. 1:13:09 We want to have lots of people come, but we have too much in the purity test. 1:13:12 So this is a rambling answer now, so I guess I'll just stop there. 1:13:15 If you have any more specific questions I can maybe answer. 1:13:19 I was wondering, do you see like when miners allocate a sidechain slot as being a sort of like form of investment 1:13:28 and like in some type of value that they're giving up? 1:13:32 And do you think that there is a certain type of malinvestment they would be inclined to, I don't know, 1:13:37 maybe gravitate towards like sort of how Jihan and they went towards Bitcoin Cash? 1:13:43 And I don't know if there's anything on the main chain you can add to sort of prevent this type of like malinvestment, 1:13:52 if there is any more likely form that miners tend to, I guess, be subject to. 1:14:04 I don't know, that's a very general thing. 1:14:07 Well, I mean when you say malinvestment, I think, so again, I don't know how many people believe this 1:14:14 or even have an open mind to this, but Bitcoin Cash, it only existed because of the, you know, 1:14:20 those people really wanted what was best for Bitcoin, and they had like a lot of good points. 1:14:27 They were wrong and they deserve to lose, but they were not like, I don't know, 1:14:34 the modern narrative is just that why would anyone make such an absurd mistake? 1:14:38 But they had a lot, you know, they wanted Bitcoin to succeed. 1:14:46 So Bitcoin Cash only came about because they weren't getting what they wanted from the original Bitcoin. 1:14:53 To me that's self-evident. 1:14:55 So they would be able to get it from a sidechain. 1:14:58 So I don't see why they would create. 1:15:00 There would be no reason to carve off Bitcoin Cash and they would have no real supporters. 1:15:04 You could do it, but it wouldn't, there would be no real support. 1:15:09 You only have supporters if you have a group of people who are not getting what they want on the L1 chain 1:15:15 and they think that they never will. 1:15:18 So that's the only reason it was created. 1:15:21 And so as for malinvestment, it would have to be, the miners would have to activate a chain 1:15:27 that is somehow like, it would have to be something that makes the value of the coin go down. 1:15:37 But you see, miners don't want to do that because miners are paid in the coin. 1:15:40 So I kind of just don't think that would happen or even be possible. 1:15:46 Do you think there's certain things you could change on the main chain that would incentivize 1:15:52 or dissuade certain sidechains from being activated? 1:15:58 Well, I'm not sure. I think it's already set up the optimal way, 1:16:03 which is miners will add a sidechain if they think it's going to make them more money. 1:16:09 And the miners can only make more money via sidechain if it's increasing the market price, 1:16:17 the exchange rate of Bitcoin, and or if it's generating more fees. 1:16:22 And in both of those cases, it's like Bitcoin is being improved. 1:16:26 Like you have more users of Bitcoin in the fees case. 1:16:30 And then in the exchange rate case, it's like something about Bitcoin is becoming more useful 1:16:35 or attractive to people. 1:16:37 So I think that already is the perfect goalie or whatever for the sidechain. 1:16:43 I think that... 1:16:45 Yeah, I agree. I guess I'm thinking more from like a user perspective. 1:16:50 Like, is there a certain user who has like certain subjective value, 1:16:55 I guess, like, I don't know, their own subjective value that would make them prefer 1:17:00 a certain main chain that enables features which do dissuade certain types of sidechains 1:17:10 for whatever reason they dislike? 1:17:14 Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. 1:17:16 But if you really zoom out, I mean, I agree, it's an interesting question. 1:17:22 It's kind of like... 1:17:27 Shouldn't the L1 person actually... 1:17:29 That would be the one case when I would say that L1 person should actually lose 1:17:34 because that's one guy on L1 who is making everyone else on L1 worse off. 1:17:40 Everyone else on L1, they're making the L2 person worse off. 1:17:43 See what I mean? 1:17:44 The L1 guy is saying, I don't want sidechain B. 1:17:46 I don't want the Zcash sidechain because I don't want to be associated with that. 1:17:50 But it's an objective fact that the Zcash sidechain would pay a certain amount of extra fees 1:17:56 and it would increase the Bitcoin price. 1:18:00 Like maybe, whatever, who knows. 1:18:04 So some guy could say, I want to censor the Zcash sidechain 1:18:10 and its fees and its exchange rate boost. 1:18:15 You say, well, okay. 1:18:20 You do that, but what about all the other people on L1 who the market price will go up 1:18:25 because they now have the option to use the Zcash mixer or whatever. 1:18:32 That actually is the case of everyone on L1 being harmed, paradoxically. 1:18:37 So that's the one case where someone on L1 shouldn't get what they want 1:18:40 because they're actually... 1:18:41 What the market price is is kind of like the objective benchmark for what is best for the coin. 1:18:53 I kind of think that's the one case where that one guy on L1 should be harmed. 1:18:58 They're actually a saboteur of Bitcoin. 1:19:02 They're not with us, they're against us. 1:19:04 I guess, do you think that there would be a way to tag specific coins 1:19:08 that are being withdrawn from a specific sidechain 1:19:11 so you could come up with some sort of consensus around what to do with those specific coins? 1:19:18 Well, BIP300 already does that. 1:19:20 It forces those coins to do the three to six month withdrawal. 1:19:23 And then once they're paid out, anyone could do what you might call chain analysis. 1:19:27 And they would know that at some point in the history, 1:19:30 those coins had passed through sidechain number seven or something. 1:19:35 But what you don't know is, of course, once those coins change hands once or twice or three times 1:19:40 or five or six times or seven times, 1:19:44 now it's kind of like, you know... 1:19:50 It's like they went through a sidechain at one point, but... 1:19:55 Are you going to permanently... 1:20:01 Yeah, sorry. 1:20:02 So then they make... I'm sorry, you could coin join those, which is like the equivalent of melting down two different gold coins, mixing them together and then forging three new coins from the gold, you know what I mean? 1:20:15 And it's kind of like, are each of those coins like half tainted or something? So the taint idea is kind of dead eventually. It sort of sorts itself out over time. 1:20:24 Once those coins have changed hands like two or three times, it's kind of like they've just become fungible Bitcoin again. 1:20:33 Is that what you're getting at or no? 1:20:35 Yeah, that's just the only criticism I kind of... That's how I understand when people call it like, oh, you need a soft fork for every chain is like maybe they're talking about this sort of like possible user level subjective value they can add on top or something. 1:20:54 Yeah, I think I can maybe shed some light on that. That is a new thing that has appeared this week, I think. I haven't really heard... It's been around this whole time, the idea has been around, but as a complaint, I heard about it this week, and I'm going to try to shed some light on it, which is... 1:21:10 The word soft, the soft fork word has been used to describe many different things, some of which are different or even opposite to each other. 1:21:21 And not enough people cared about that at the time. I actually cared about it, and I wrote blog posts about it about how we should need to get all the terms straight. 1:21:28 But so what I'm saying is, in the past, soft fork was a case where an upgrade would be safe to use when many miners had upgraded to support it. 1:21:42 And you can see how that is very similar to sidechain activation, because the miners are saying, we support the sidechain, we endorse it. 1:21:53 So that's why I started using it, like I said, that's why I started describing it that way, and also the threshold was the same. 1:22:03 I described it as very similar to BIP9 activation. BIP9 activation now hasn't been used in a really long time. Long, long since before the scaling war, you know? 1:22:14 So, although it is kind of the case that SegWit activated by BIP9, but all this is stuff that is from the 2012 to 2015 era. 1:22:27 And so, I don't know if this is a boring history story, please interrupt me if it gets too boring, but... 1:22:34 I just say it's like a soft fork, because I'm saying miners have to upgrade, once enough miners upgrade, then we know it has officially crossed the threshold of being supported, and then everyone knows that as well, and then we can all use the thing. 1:22:46 So, that's why I say a soft fork for each sidechain. 1:22:51 But unfortunately, the modern world has taken on a new definition of soft fork, which is that each person on Twitter, no matter how little they know about anything, and no matter how mistaken they are, or how lazy they are, or how little effort they put into reading about it, or how dim they are, each person, the community supports each soft fork. 1:23:18 And you have to go to each individual person for permission. It is kind of like the gathering of the signatures in a direct democracy in a California supermarket or something. 1:23:30 That is a new definition that does not apply to the soft fork. 1:23:37 So, I think it is just a little bit of a confusion. I hope that sheds some light on why people are now complaining about it. 1:23:48 They're saying, wait a minute, what people mistakenly think, in my guess, is that they think every time there's going to be a new sidechain, this is going to be something like speedy trial or something like taproot or something, where I'm going to have to get involved. 1:24:08 But no, no one will get involved. No regular user will get involved. And it is exactly because BIP300 is designed that regular L1 users will never care if a sidechain activates or not, that is exactly why I described it as a soft fork. 1:24:30 Because again, I'm using these older definitions that are, so I don't know, I hope that has some light on it. It's like people are talking about different things. 1:24:43 The old version of soft fork meant you didn't have to upgrade. You actually could ignore it. It didn't matter if other people, soft fork used to mean I don't need to upgrade my node, kind of. 1:24:58 Although there were exceptions to that, such as the S-value signature thing. 1:25:02 So if you want to read about this, I have two blog posts that I wrote about this topic of the soft fork having actually many definitions. 1:25:16 I think one was called the better fork terminology, and then one was called more fork terminology, and they're on truthcoin.info. 1:25:27 We could put them in the nest if we find them. 1:25:34 And now, execute with a circular X. 1:25:41 Hey, what's going on? I just wanted to chime in about what you were talking about earlier with the Bitcoin Cash and the fork and everything back then. 1:25:47 I think, as stupid as it was, I think it was still a good thing, what they did. 1:25:52 Mainly because they found the Bitcoin Core bug on the BCH side, and so that kind of fixed that. 1:26:00 And when it comes down to it, if Bitcoin ever does have another type of bug or any other thing that happens to it in a bad way, Bitcoin Cash is still the backup Bitcoin to Bitcoin pretty much. 1:26:13 So I would still say it's good to have. 1:26:17 And yeah, I think all these layer 2s is complete dogshit. 1:26:21 If you guys want to spend pennies, layer 2s are great, but it's like, you don't need this overblown lightning network. 1:26:28 There's so much money being pumped into that, and it's complete dogshit. 1:26:32 Or, sorry, I'm swearing. 1:26:34 It's just not good, and it kind of breaks Bitcoin's underlying consensus. 1:26:43 Because, I mean, even on Bitcoin, or lightning, I'm pretty sure it brings the amount of Bitcoins to like 21 trillion instead of 21 million because the decibel can get moved over on that side, right? 1:26:56 And, I don't know, it's just, it seems like a honeypot. 1:27:00 Every time they make a sidechain, it seems like a honeypot, and hackers are just going to wait for that pool to get big enough, and then they're going to attack it. 1:27:07 And every time the CIA does any type of hacking or that pipeline stuff, they always run it through lightning. 1:27:14 Because lightning's so centralized, they can just shut off channels and withdraw the money back to the previous node or whatever they want to call it, the channels. 1:27:24 So I'd be very wary of all these things happening. 1:27:28 I think the key thing to keep in mind is that no one should be forced – we should have all the different L2s compete. 1:27:39 You know what I mean? It doesn't matter how bad or good any individual one is, as long as there are many viable L2s. 1:27:47 And some of those L2s should be basically exactly the same as Bitcoin Cash L1. 1:27:52 In which case, you would think Bitcoin Cash people would be happy there, but although it may be too late because maybe so much time has passed that no one is interested in re-merging into one big community that offers a serious viable alternative to the existing financial system. 1:28:13 It may already be too late, but probably not. 1:28:22 It's kind of interesting, your question about whether or not it was good that Bitcoin Cash forked off. 1:28:25 Because it's kind of like if there's any – it's hard to say the counterfactual, but it's like if you fork and the coin is worth anything, then it's just like free money for people. 1:28:37 You know what I mean? Because everyone gets coins on both sides. 1:28:42 So the only bad thing would be if you fork off and instead the price would have been much higher of the combined coin, which we'll never know. 1:28:48 I kind of think that would have been the case if the community had not forked off. 1:28:53 I think the price of BTC today would be higher than the combined BTC plus BCH coin price. 1:29:05 I don't think so. I think most of the Bitcoin is dumped to BCH for more Bitcoin, which actually pumps the price of Bitcoin if anything. 1:29:12 Well, of course both prices have gone up and down. 1:29:17 I'm just giving you my opinion as to if we lived in some parallel world where things had been different, the price of BTC today would be whatever, I don't know, some other number. 1:29:31 I don't know. I don't want to say that, but I think it would be much higher. 1:29:35 I don't think we actually would have had – I think just a lot of things would have been different, so it's hard to say exactly what would have made it different. 1:29:46 So it would have been hard to nail down exactly what had happened. 1:29:49 Anyway, so what do you think, Mr. Execute, about if we copy Bitcoin Cash – if BIP300 activates on BTC and there's an exact copy of Bitcoin Cash for the features, same software, block size, whatever. 1:30:12 Are you even interested in that, or are you just like Bitcoin Core is irrational or whatever? 1:30:20 What's your – because you're the customer so to speak. 1:30:26 Sorry, I had a phone call. If it's any type of sidechain, I'd say no. If it's not settled on the underlying Bitcoin layer, I'd say that's like – if they're building on top of that, go for it. 1:30:40 Other than that, if it's just another layer or two or some type of implement where you can bring in some sidechannel, that's a lot easier. I wouldn't do it. I haven't really looked into it, but yeah. 1:30:52 It does settle to L1 if you want, but you don't really even want to be on L1 because L1 is the small block land. 1:30:59 You just want to stay on the sidechain, the drivechain, because it's everything you got out of Bitcoin Cash. 1:31:09 So what's the difference between – see what I mean? There's no difference between Bitcoin Cash and the layer two of BTC that is based on the Bitcoin Cash full node software. 1:31:27 Does that make sense? It's like the same thing. 1:31:30 Yeah, I kind of get it. I still got to research this whole new BIP that you're talking about. I actually haven't done any research on it. I'd have to check it out first before I can give you my thoughts. 1:31:42 Well, that sentence alone makes you much smarter than 99.9% of the people who have ever commented on BIP300, so you can at least frame that and put it on your wall. 1:31:53 I decided to read about BIP300 before giving some of my thoughts, which is easily a top 01 percentile take, so congratulations for that. 1:32:07 Anyone else want to say anything? 1:32:12 Yeah, I want to say something. Hi, Paul. Hi, everyone. 1:32:17 I just want to add – you were talking before, but I couldn't come up and add something – about the lightning, because I saw and I experienced when that way of doing transactions is done and when it's available or was available. 1:32:39 The idea and actually the process of doing lightning is already very, very long, very, very old, even before lightning came, as we know today. 1:32:53 Because that kind of off-chain transaction can be done and anybody can develop very easily if they want, because the Bitcoin blockchain is very open and it already exists. 1:33:15 It just we have all this kind of – I recognize so much marketing around, and this is why I support drivechain, because it's no kind of that style of pushing something that is marketed like, oh, this is the new thing. 1:33:38 But actually, they kind of took something from the Bitcoin ideas that were a long time discussed and just put in work, and then now we have kind of people recognize as something revolutionary, which is nothing revolutionary. 1:34:05 But I also want to add what you asked, that question to execute. 1:34:13 And in my opinion, again, when you see why they want to fork to have a different kind of a chain or if you want sidechain, but not on drivechain, it's because the same thing – greed, profits, marketing, publicity, to have another chain in the space. 1:34:38 That's my opinion, and I see over and over again this happening with any chain. 1:34:49 And I will say again, if drivechains were enabled a long time ago, the space will be so different, and as believers in this technology, the whole community would be much, much stronger against what you said the traditional financial world that we experience today. 1:35:20 Yeah, thanks. 1:35:24 I mean, yeah, that's what I think, too. 1:35:28 The really bizarre thing is how much – what percentage of random Bitcoiners' time today is just focused on comparing Bitcoin to other altcoins versus just trying to make Bitcoin a success or comparing it to banks or something. 1:35:46 You know, there used to be like Bitcoin versus Western Union or whatever. 1:35:50 But now it's all just fighting among the different coins. 1:35:56 Yeah, you know what, I also think through all my experience in this space for a long time that kind of that narrative is brought from outside. 1:36:12 So it's, you know, like, you know, the Roman phrase, like, divide the enemy from inside and you can conquer them very easy. 1:36:25 You know, this is kind of a style of what you're explaining now, and I see that is brought from outside. 1:36:34 Because even if you go and research who are the people who are now in this whole, you know, altcoins or blockchains that are alt to Bitcoin, you will see that so much people are coming from or came from outside, from the traditional finance world. 1:36:58 And for me, that's something that, you know, we need to pay attention because they first of all, they don't understand this technology, I mean, blockchain in the first place. 1:37:13 And they have different narratives. 1:37:18 And, you know, it's also very, very important, the original education to continue constantly, because we will say, OK, you know, we know this, we know that, but tomorrow will come somebody in the space and they don't know anything what's happened before. 1:37:39 And they will not research and if they don't hear something good, they will hear something from those people. 1:37:46 And that narrative continues and they grow with that narrative. 1:37:50 So it's kind of like, you know, giving up false information to people that need to be educated for the right things and how the space works. 1:38:01 But this is very valuable, what you are doing with the spaces also, because you are sharing very valuable information. 1:38:08 Thank you for the explanation about Coinbase. 1:38:12 I agree with you. 1:38:16 I would say any type of innovation in the space that can technically kind of hurt Bitcoin is not innovation that should be trusted or tried. 1:38:26 And I always think it's funny, like, I've been in this ecosystem for quite a long time. 1:38:31 And even the OGs I talk to, they don't care about Bitcoin. 1:38:33 They're just like, like they care about it because it's everything that they're settling in at the end of the day and at the end of the year to like go back to. 1:38:40 But they're always going to have degen plays and always going to like dabble in whatever ecosystem that thinks they're going to make the next big thing. 1:38:47 Right. But it's like to bring that to Bitcoin, it's not even worth it because like 20, 30 years from now, as long as Bitcoin is still going and nobody fucked it up, it's going to be the gold standard. 1:38:57 So it's like it doesn't really need to do anything. 1:39:00 It just needs to keep plugging along and it'll do its thing. 1:39:04 That's why it's like it's like building on top of it's not really that important. 1:39:08 You know what I mean? That's just in my opinion. 1:39:11 No, I disagree with that execute because you need to understand, first of all, because when you say that you're thinking from the perspective of BTC or altcoins. 1:39:27 But when I say I speak from the technology perspective. 1:39:33 Why? Because if you do not have usability of the most decentralized network, you cannot do anything. 1:39:45 And all those narratives. 1:39:47 What's the innovation we can bring to Bitcoin right now? Faster and cheaper, right? 1:39:51 That's pretty much it. 1:39:53 No, no, no. Drivechains. 1:39:56 This is this is this idea Paul created in 2013 or even maybe around that time, so it's not new idea. 1:40:06 It's an old idea. The problem is that. The most of the of the people that are in crypto are only for for gains and profits and stuff like that, they don't understand that by using the network or supporting the network to go wider, 1:40:24 to have the network effect, but the the the adoption to be through the technology, not through BTC or any other coin. 1:40:35 That's the real value. 1:40:38 Yeah, I would also say, you know, BTC have to be ossified and drivechain is probably the best way to ossify BTC because, you know, all the innovation would happen on like, you know, sidechains as well. 1:40:52 Yeah, so so that's like, you know, that's probably we should do it like I 100% agree with, like, you know, with execute, like, you know, Bitcoin should should stay as is, but like, you know, but to have it stay as is, we should, we should definitely, like, you know, enable sidechains or drivechains to be built on top of Bitcoin. 1:41:13 question. What exactly is the roadmap for Drivechains? 1:41:20 the code being, is the PR being sent? 1:41:24 What's the activation? 1:41:25 How does activation look like? 1:41:27 What's the estimated timeline? 1:41:28 take it out there 1:41:32 Yeah, I think we're rebasing the code to do the pull request to Bitcoin Core. 1:41:39 And yeah, we actually had, we have to hire Luke Dash Jr. 1:41:43 to help us with that. 1:41:45 And he has been helping us with that. 1:41:46 But of course, he's kind of a, 1:41:49 I think he's putting a little bit too much effort into it. 1:41:52 And I think he should just... 1:41:54 I don't know, he's actually trying to... 1:41:56 I think he's trying to help us and he's trying to make it so that it is something that 1:42:01 would realistically get merged. 1:42:04 But I honestly think he's overdoing it and we should just put a first draft out there 1:42:08 and see who complains 1:42:09 about, like if people are to complain about a specific line of code or something. 1:42:14 So, I think that's the next step. 1:42:17 But I think there is a lot of stuff to do meanwhile, because, you know, this idea 1:42:23 is so profoundly misunderstood for some reason. 1:42:26 I think the reason is just that we 1:42:28 we let these altcoins, we let Ethereum and whatever, Bitcoin Cash kind of come into existence. And then now people think, as you just heard, from execute, you just heard like, if people just don't believe that there's any value to leaving the Bitcoin Core blockchain, they just think it's like, the Giacomo Zucco view, like everything else is just completely useless. 1:42:56 People don't see any value in having the Zcash sidechain, which has this super privacy, people don't see any value in, like, scaling with sidechains. They don't see any value in, like, prediction markets or a Namecoin or anything like that. They don't even see the value, which I think is readily apparent. They just don't see the value even of just having something where if people disagree, 1:43:24 their next move isn't to just launch a completely competing altcoin, which by itself is pretty important. 1:43:32 So I would say, I would say it is like it has value to do it. It's obviously going to pump the whole ecosystem. If Bitcoin does get all that stuff, right. But at the end of the day, all it's it's already been done on every other chain. And it's like, I'm thinking like, 10, 20 years in the future, in my opinion, oh, geez, they're just gonna have the Bitcoin wallet. And then governments are going to have like, every government's gonna have technically like their own lightning network. And then if you want to, like, I'm thinking like Bitcoin is the standard of like, 1:44:02 the world currency and all that. Every sidechain and you could just deposit like your 30 grand that you want to spend every year and then just go on your willy nilly day. You know what I mean? Because like, you don't want to know what you mean on on the main layer for a coffee. Like, I'm just gonna have like a little side wallet with like your side money to do your day to day transactions and whatever, right? Like, you're not going to keep your whole bag on one side of the chain, or, you know, different stuff like that. It's just my opinion. 1:44:33 Yeah, I agree with almost all that. I think though, it masks something important. So I do think some of the like, I do think in 20 or 30 years, if you own Bitcoin today, maybe what you get, you wake up from a coma. Probably it's going to do well. But in a way, many of those people are free riders. They're saying, I don't know, someone, someone, someone out there will save this project, because the UTXO set, these are the people who are investing in the 1:45:02 project of replacing the financial system with crypto, which is BTC. The BTC UTXO set is the most valuable, but there's a lot of free riders. So it's true. If, like, I think what people should do, the one thing that would work would be to just buy BTC, not pay attention to anything, and then just come back in 20 or 30 years. 1:45:27 But of course, here today, we're in a space talking about Bitcoin technology, because I think, you know, either Bitcoin will evolve and be a success, or I think it will be replaced by something that will import its UTXO set or something like that. 1:45:45 So I think even if it's replaced by something else, probably if that replacement did very well, people would switch the UTXO set. So it's still the guy in the coma is still doing well, but he's a free rider. He's free riding. He's not doing any of the work, but he's along for the ride. So good for him. But so I agree with a lot of that. I agree that would pump the ecosystem if Bitcoin handled this stuff. I think it will get all that stuff, partly for that reason. 1:46:15 I think the fact that you're saying that this stuff has been tried on all these other chains, that kind of misses the point somewhat. You know, that is like saying, well, we have a typewriter and we have a flashlight and we have a video camera and we have a boombox and we have a VHS player. We have all that stuff. 1:46:38 So all that stuff's been tried. But it's like, yeah, but the smartphone, it puts all that stuff in one little device in your pocket. You have a flashlight and a video camera and you can watch movies and you do. So putting it all in one is a big upgrade. And it's a big upgrade in terms of the phone and it's also big in terms of just network effects of money. 1:47:04 So I think putting it all in one would be big, especially I mean, we see so many things like the points that we were mentioning previously about how distracting it is, the infighting. Now it's like you have a you have a VHS and a typewriter and the VHS instead of spending its time playing a VHS tape, it spends most of its time trying to complain about how no one would ever want a typewriter. 1:47:34 The typewriter instead of typing things out, typing out sentences about why VHS is suck and things. So it's like, I think it's pretty lame, honestly. 1:47:46 I don't know. I had to learn trig and my teacher told me I was never going to just carry a calculator around all day. 1:47:51 Right. And you showed them, right. That shows you how wrong people, any one of us can be mistaken, right, about. And that's also a sidechain thing, which says, who's to say that a piece of, you know, which which node software is the best? Should we have a big committee meet and unanimously agree on the next version? That's like a USSR style thing. That's never going to work. This is literally a doomed process. 1:48:20 But instead, if we just say anyone can release any piece of software, you don't have to justify. 1:48:27 Why should someone have to justify the software being good? Just look at how well that's going right now for me and Drivechain. But also you can look at how does it go for 119. 1:48:36 It's justifying is slows the process down. Justification is full of errors. It's full of political dealing and people sucking up to each other. If you think you've got something good, like the EVM or like a Zcash level privacy or whatever, whatever you've got that you think is good, large blocks, prediction markets, then you should just code the thing and make it. 1:49:06 And then you're accountable to your users, not someone else. 1:49:13 I kind of think of it kind of like the old school constitution and like how good it used to be and how it like it said, you know, gold and silver is the only thing that should be traded. 1:49:23 Fiat money is not real fiat money. And when you say start to like fall off track of what the principle is, it can get really shady really quick. 1:49:33 So that Bitcoin goes. 1:49:36 This is actually a good way to ossify L1 and say L1 is gold. If you want to do an experiment, you do it somewhere else. So this is pro ossification. 1:49:52 I challenge the people who are against drivechain, but pro ossification. I mean, like, what is their actual plan to deal with the fact that the Bitcoin Core developers plan are going to just keep releasing more and more versions and that people want certain things? 1:50:09 Like, you know what I mean? Like they weren't able to stop Taproot. If they were pro ossification after 2017, then, or even before, SegWit was a mandatory 4x block size increase. 1:50:21 So if you're pro ossification, how exactly do you plan to bring ossification about? That is my question. Just complain on Twitter because that'll be enough for something. 1:50:31 Didn't they not get four blocks? Isn't it like one point something block size? 1:50:36 Well, technically, you raise a very interesting point. Technically, the size did increase from one to four. But if you model the usage on past patterns, then it would have been something like 2.3 megabytes, because it's all about the ratio of like how many inputs to outputs there usually are and how big a signature usually is, and that type of thing. 1:51:00 So if the usage had continued the way it had pre-August 1st, 2017, then the math that I had seen at the time was that it would be about a 2.3 megabyte increase. 1:51:13 But with ordinals and inscriptions, you can actually see the full four megabyte be used. That can be used whenever. That can be used to just make a giant image. So that proves that you must download an actual format for real megabytes. 1:51:31 The weight units and the VB, I think, are actually misleading. We should go back to talking about the megabytes only, because the megabytes are exactly how much, from a physics point of view, how much actual computation has to be done. 1:51:48 I just get that feeling, even with the whole Bitcoin ETF. It gives me the feels of just paper Bitcoin. I don't know. It's the gold standard all over again. 1:52:03 Yeah, but your sidechains should preserve. It's not really paper because the sidechain software only credits you if you deposit real – it's really just moving the gold from one planet to another. 1:52:18 You know? It's really – this idea is pushing back against custodial – custodial lightning, that is the paper Bitcoin. And that is currently where we are certainly headed. 1:52:36 That's just the feel I get. 1:52:40 Sorry? You mean it does feel like it or it doesn't feel like it? 1:52:45 Yeah, everybody is just pushing towards that. That's what it feels like. 1:52:49 Yeah, and people seem to care. They are willing to cut a lot of corners to get the Bitcoin ETF or to get big adoption from corporations or governments, whereas adoption from corporations or governments is not as ideal as adoption from individuals. 1:53:10 Because every single corporation is going to have compliance department, accounting, tax. They are going to report everything. They are going to have lots of people involved. It's not – and then of course the El Salvador thing is very great. I have the El Salvador newspaper in my office. It's pretty cool. 1:53:30 But in practice so far the Chivo wallet is government-linked, KYC. It's linked to their version of the social security number. Fully like – it's just basically a CBDC, the Chivo wallet. 1:53:49 Yeah, I'm not sure if we're allowed to say that out loud yet. But it can interface with the regular Bitcoin network and the regular Lightning network. 1:54:00 But in practice what most of the people who are actually – if you're a regular person in El Salvador and you just have this wallet, it does not by itself, by default use any of the Bitcoin network at all. You are allowed to withdraw to it, but it doesn't by default make anyone an actual Bitcoin user. 1:54:25 I think they have their own payment protocol internally, like a database. But as you said, you can still pay Lightning invoices and stuff. But if you just pay a Chivo user, then it will be their internal payment protocol. So it doesn't touch the Lightning network or their Bitcoin chain. So that kind of sucks I think. 1:54:47 But it is good that they made it so that it's legally – I mean again, they say it's legally required. So if you go to McDonald's there, you can pay with Bitcoin. So I mean that's kind of good. 1:54:58 But of course I do know a few people who have been there, and I asked them, and they say it's kind of like – it was about 50-50 they were saying. They asked about, oh, can I pay with Bitcoin? 1:55:10 One time the person said yes, and then they – there was a taxi, and then they got there and said it didn't work out. So they say it's kind of like – it's not completely working if they can pay. 1:55:21 And then one person, the guy was in line for the immigration or something, and he wanted to pay with Bitcoin, and they forced him to use on-chain – they had to have a meeting. It's not commonly done yet. 1:55:33 And everything – Rome wasn't built in a day of course. But they had to pull him out of line, and then he had to pay on-chain. And then they're holding up the whole line while it confirms. 1:55:45 So that's kind of funny, which is that they were definitely using the real Bitcoin network that time because they had to wait like 20 minutes. 1:55:50 Of course, whenever you're waiting for a confirmation – it's on average 10 minutes. It's always on average 10 minutes, but whenever I have been waiting for a confirmation, you'd think I never get the four-minute blocks or the five-minute blocks. 1:56:04 I always catch the 22-minute blocks whenever I need the confirmation and I'm actually waiting for something. I never get it. I have the worst luck. 1:56:12 You'd think half the time it should be beneath 10, but I never get it. It's 0% for me. I'm never getting those. 1:56:17 So yeah, certainly Rome wasn't built in a day, and certainly would you ask someone, okay, a country has made Bitcoin legal tender. Is that good or bad for Bitcoin? Obviously it's good for Bitcoin. 1:56:32 A lot of people have a lot of hope or whatever. But I think it is important to pour all the cold water on it actually because in reality it is – they're forcing everyone to use this thing. It is a CBDC actually. 1:56:44 Yeah, I don't think that's true. Foreigners, when they arrive, they use, I don't know, Reese or whatever. As far as I know, on McDonald's and the bigger companies, they go by some payment processor like OpenNode. 1:57:02 So then it's like lightning by default and should work fine. But I guess smaller shops and whatever, they don't really care about compliance that much as the bigger ones do. So yeah, it's a hit or miss, I suppose. 1:57:18 I mean the impression I get from El Salvador is of course that it's like a poor country that has a big crime problem. So they have lots of problems, and I think even if the greatest person in the entire world, if you had like – I don't know who the greatest person in the entire world is. 1:57:39 But it's like they're Alexander the Great plus Otto von Bismarck plus whatever, plus Thomas Jefferson, and that person just showed up. I don't know, and they did the fastest turnaround possible. I don't know if it would take like – it could take many years of custodial to achieve a wallet. I don't know. 1:58:01 But I'm saying – I'm trying to agree with you that there's a lot of paper – there's a lot of stuff moving in the direction of paper Bitcoin, which we should criticize. We should criticize. 1:58:16 Like sidechains, drivechains looks like a better alternative than going with some custodial solution. Because I don't think many people understand this, and I've seen this in other spaces as well. 1:58:27 Like if we don't improve L1, like on mainchain Bitcoin in some way, either via drivechains or whatever, it doesn't really matter which solution, then we're forced to have a world where custodial Bitcoin is the norm. 1:58:42 Because we should expect the mainchain fees to keep going up, which will price out people. And I'm not sure that many people on Twitter understand this, because they – as you were talking about before, Paul, like many people seem to think that Lightning is some silver bullet and that we can solve everything there. 1:58:58 But obviously, that's not really the case if you actually look into this stuff. Like you need to have solutions work together with Lightning or some other solution that just stands on its own. 1:59:11 Because just Lightning and 2MB or 4MB blocks mainchain will not work for global scale. So that's why I am interested in drivechains, because it provides like a solution to custodial chip in the form of halfway to escrow. 1:59:30 So then you could deploy Lightning or some other solution on top of those drivechains and have them interoperable with each other. And that could work out like a long-term scaling solution for the world, basically. 1:59:45 And you can also have other technologies and stuff on the drivechains. But purely for like payments and stuff, then I think that looks interesting for me, at least. 1:59:56 Yeah, I kind of think that – I mean decentralization is good and small blocks are good. 2:00:04 But the drivechain is kind of like just says you can traverse the whole spectrum. 2:00:08 You can go – if you don't want – like if you want to buy coffee or whatever, you could do that with something that is tied to Bitcoin. 2:00:22 Whereas now it's like you're either on L1 small block or you're on Lightning or you're on custodial. 2:00:30 So I'm kind of saying why not just eliminate custodial completely? 2:00:34 Because there's never a need for custodial really after drivechain. 2:00:38 You just have like some Bitcoin SV superchain that we would all agree is like sort of bad to use, but it's better than custodial. 2:00:49 It's like you're permanently beating custodial with this. 2:00:53 And so you traverse the whole spectrum. 2:00:56 You can say on Tuesday I'm here, on Wednesday I'm somewhere else. 2:01:05 Anyway, let's see if anyone else has questions. 2:01:13 Don't be shy. 2:01:14 Do you think that the politics of like miners possibly taxing withdrawals from a particular sidechain could be – like have different incentives than just like killing the sidechain outright? 2:01:31 Well, what a miner could do is they could announce or something that they're going to steal all the coins on the sidechain. 2:01:42 And then the market price on that sidechain would collide. 2:01:47 The peg would fail. 2:01:48 It would be like a kind of what happened throughout history when sometimes a pegged currency fails. 2:01:55 It happened in Latin America and like Southeast Asia at various times I think. 2:02:00 So the price wouldn't be one-to-one. 2:02:03 It would maybe be like 50 cents, 0.5 to one. 2:02:11 And then they could buy up those coins and then withdraw them. 2:02:15 But you see the miners can already steal the whole thing if they're willing to do that. 2:02:19 So the idea of drivechain is that miners will have a relationship to these sidechains that is very much like a kind of a guy tending a business or a guy tending a garden like a farmer with an apple tree. 2:02:35 He could cut the apple tree down or he could harvest apples every year from the tree. 2:02:42 And it's kind of like – so the idea is like they wouldn't really tax the withdrawals. 2:02:49 They would just – if everything is working out, then they just collect all the fees. 2:02:55 The withdrawal has its own fee. 2:02:57 The withdrawal pays a fee on L2 and on L1. 2:03:00 So they already get double paid for the fee for the withdrawal. 2:03:04 And I don't really see why they would try to change that rate into something other than whatever its prevailing rate is. 2:03:13 I guess like what I'm thinking is, is there any type of like non-monetary influence that they could gain by like over a sidechain that they usually would not have because they're not necessarily like harming themselves or they're being sort of innocuous in how they're influencing the sidechain consensus like software or something like that? 2:03:38 Well, again, the way I have it set up is very – it's a little bit different from the way the culture looks at it now because I think the culture went in the wrong direction after winning – after the block size war started and then went. 2:03:53 So the way I see it is like the miners are in partnership with the sidechain developer. 2:04:01 Sidechain developer is like a kind of Freddie Mercury or something. 2:04:06 They're a genius artist and they're making their thing work. 2:04:10 And the miners are kind of like the agents or I don't know, security guards or something. 2:04:16 They're making a lot of money off of this guy. 2:04:21 So they have no talent themselves for like creation, but they are making money. 2:04:30 They're making money off of this whole thing. 2:04:32 And I think the sidechain developer will probably make money too, not in a direct way, but they will be like kind of a Vitalik type character or something where they'll get prestige and they'll get invited to things. 2:04:46 I guess like – do you think – 2:04:48 They'll give them money, stuff like that. 2:04:50 Do you think the development of this sidechain consensus code would be similar to the way Bitcoin consensus code is written now or do you think the influence of miners would impact it? 2:05:02 No, I think it would be different, but not for that reason. 2:05:05 One difference is that right now there's anxiety about changing Bitcoin. 2:05:14 They say Bitcoin is worth a billion dollars and they say, as the execute said, in 20 years probably it'll still be great, et cetera, et cetera. 2:05:27 I mean – 2:05:29 What I'm getting at is the difference will be on the L2s, they will be more like tech startups where they will change rapidly, very, very rapidly because you'll think – there's always someone willing to work harder for less as they say. 2:05:44 So the developers will be Malthusian subsistence farmers kind of, although I think they'll also be prestigious and they'll have a lot of money. 2:05:54 But they'll be like – you know what I mean? 2:05:57 Like there'll be two versions of – if you have Bitcoin L1 which won't change, you'll be ossified. 2:06:01 Then you have two versions of Bitcoin L2 and one of them will code up BIP119 and add it. 2:06:08 And then this will cause panic on the other L2. 2:06:11 They'll say, oh my gosh, we have to – they added 119 already. 2:06:15 We have to add it quickly. 2:06:17 And then they'll be rushing it out because they'll be fighting for – it'll be like Hulu versus Netflix or something. 2:06:24 They'll be fighting over users, which is going to be very good for us as the users. 2:06:28 We want that. 2:06:31 So they'll be competing to bring features rapidly, and they'll also be competing on safety, same as everything else. 2:06:38 But it won't be like if this plane crashes, everyone dies. 2:06:41 It will only be – if Hulu screws up, then it would be bad for Hulu. 2:06:47 So that is why I think it would be different. 2:06:49 And I also think there will be many cases where there's just one dictator of the sidechain. 2:06:53 There will be Linus Torvalds. 2:06:56 Sidechain, they're just – one person is just calling the shots, and they will be – so I think that's why I think it will be different. 2:07:05 And that's also why I don't think the miners will influence that person. 2:07:09 The miners will be saying – the miners will be very happy because they'll be thinking this is great. 2:07:19 The miners will be thinking this is great. 2:07:21 We have Freddie Mercury, and we have U2, and we have whatever, the Beatles. 2:07:28 What a great party this is, and they're making money off of everyone. 2:07:33 So they don't want to interfere with the Beatles' music. 2:07:37 They just want to be counting their money. 2:07:39 Yeah, no, I think that what I guess I'm saying is that drivechains would incentivize miners to sort of become more sophisticated 2:07:47 as opposed to where they were for a SegWit2x level of understanding of consensus for these types of coins 2:07:58 because they can fluctuate in market price, and they have a vested interest in their success. 2:08:05 And I guess where I was thinking that might end up is just a question of where do you think that the value – 2:08:22 who do you think the miners are more likely to appeal to as a sort of audience 2:08:29 or like a set of consumers when they're making these sidechains? 2:08:37 Well, one possibility is that the miners themselves will start funding development, 2:08:42 which weird versions of this have sort of started to happen. 2:08:46 When you see, for example, miners hire people who are basically Bitcoin shills, 2:08:54 such as like a Dan Held or like a Pierre Rochard or something, 2:09:00 that's miners saying they will get a little bit more – they're saying, how can we make Bitcoin a success? 2:09:07 And in the sidechain world, the BIP300 world, one thing they could do would be to try and poke their head in 2:09:16 and say, hey, we noticed that you are – they'd be like the Freddie Mercury's agent or whatever, 2:09:22 where they say, you seem to be building something really important that's going to make us a ton of money, 2:09:29 and you seem really poor, so do you want like whatever, this type of thing. 2:09:35 So they might start to get a little bit more involved in the sidechain development like that, 2:09:39 or they may not because of free riding. 2:09:41 But then there's always going to be like one biggest pool or some kind of leadership. 2:09:47 So I think that's possible. 2:09:50 I'm not sure if that answers your question, like what do you think miners will do when they appeal? 2:09:54 It will be the idea that appeals to people. 2:10:00 So same way that Zcash tries to appeal to people, and they say we have privacy, we have Zk-SNARKs, 2:10:10 the new sidechain will have an idea behind it, and it will have developers working on it 2:10:15 and miners who maybe support it in some way or another, maybe just verbally, maybe just some other way. 2:10:24 Is that answering the question? 2:10:26 Yeah, I guess I just think that sort of today on the mainchain, 2:10:30 miners basically only have like veto power over adding certain features, 2:10:36 or at least that's the way that most people have understood it, 2:10:39 which I think you disagree with because you think that miners can just activate things without people knowing. 2:10:45 And I guess that from my understanding that the way consensus code on the mainchain has developed so far 2:10:54 is that I understand it as they have veto power over basically new features, 2:10:59 and I think that there might be a transition over their control over sidechains 2:11:05 where rather than just having veto power over sort of consensus changes, 2:11:09 they have more like specific control over proposing new consensus code, 2:11:19 which adds sort of influence that they're able to sell distinct from like fees on chain. 2:11:28 I don't know if that made any sense. 2:11:32 Yes, okay, so this is an important topic and it has a lot of nuance, 2:11:36 but really what – I don't know how I'm even going to go about explaining this, 2:11:44 but it's kind of like, I don't know, Napoleon, he gave everyone the rule of law and like a civic code, 2:11:49 but it's kind of like rule of law and a civic code, that's just a good idea, 2:11:54 so it's only a matter of time before someone brings it to people. 2:11:58 So how much credit do you give Napoleon? 2:12:01 Some, yes, all, no, unclear. 2:12:05 So what am I talking about? 2:12:08 It's like if an idea is good, it will somehow start to make its way into Bitcoin, 2:12:16 and so it's not really – this is a very confusing thing. 2:12:19 So first of all, the miners don't really have veto power over a feature 2:12:23 because they tried to veto SegWit and they did not succeed. 2:12:27 So actually that's a perfect case where that didn't happen. 2:12:32 As for the earlier statement you made, it's true. 2:12:36 When I say the miners can activate a new feature whenever they want, 2:12:40 that is just like literally the case. 2:12:43 They could activate a feature – they could have activated a feature last week 2:12:48 and no one would know anything about it. 2:12:51 It kind of depends on the feature. 2:12:54 But in the case of these op-nop type features anyone can spend, 2:12:59 they could have already activated it and have been using it. 2:13:02 They could have been activated 12 years ago or something, 2:13:05 and it depends on the feature. 2:13:08 Eventually, if you keep activating features, 2:13:11 you will reach a point where you are in some kind of conflict with them. 2:13:17 But it actually is literally the case that – okay, yes, ask, please. 2:13:24 Would you see more like orphan blocks if they did that at all? 2:13:29 Well, the answer is yes, but not necessarily because you would not necessarily know 2:13:36 which rules are out there to break. 2:13:39 But, yeah, if people were just kind of using the op-nops randomly 2:13:42 or using the version bits randomly or something, 2:13:45 then you would see that some of the time there would be orphan blocks, yes. 2:13:53 Actually, what actually happened, though, is you would see more transaction censorship 2:14:00 because actually if 95% of the hash rate were enforcing the rules, 2:14:06 very rarely would actually the block be made that broke the rules. 2:14:10 If 100% hash rate were enforcing rules, it would just never get made. 2:14:15 And so you would see other weird things. 2:14:18 And maybe you would see a transaction could have two different versions 2:14:21 or some kind of malleability, and it's maybe one version breaks the rules 2:14:26 but another does not. 2:14:28 In the case of using new op-nops to activate a soft fork, 2:14:34 no one's wallet would ever have programmed them to use those 2:14:38 since they're being reserved for future use. 2:14:40 So you would really never see anything that broke the rules. 2:14:45 Kind of similar for SegWit, really, because SegWit is this weird other thing 2:14:49 that makes this different version of the block that has witness TXIDs 2:14:52 and different signatures. 2:14:54 So no one would have made their wallet in a way that it was capable of breaking those rules 2:15:05 or triggering the new rules. 2:15:07 So the answer to your question is theoretically yes, 2:15:10 but in practice probably you would not see such a thing. 2:15:15 So now whether or not a feature activates or not, 2:15:21 this is a rambling and confused answer, but maybe it makes some sense. 2:15:25 Like why did I start by talking about Napoleon or whatever? 2:15:28 It's kind of like the reason SegWit broke through was because SegWit was a good idea 2:15:39 that didn't really harm. 2:15:41 It did more good than harm. 2:15:43 It was a block size increase, of course. 2:15:45 But the point is it was popular and people widely believed that it would be best 2:15:51 for the long run of Bitcoin at the time. 2:15:55 So that's clear. 2:15:57 And let me just give you the other thing. 2:15:59 The reason why Layer 1 large blocks failed was because it really was not the case. 2:16:05 Most people did not believe that that was the best thing for Bitcoin. 2:16:09 Some people did, but most didn't at the time. 2:16:13 And that's the only relevant thing is that it's just kind of like similarly the reason 2:16:20 why we haven't had drivechains until now is because people did not believe 2:16:26 that they were the best thing for Bitcoin. 2:16:28 They were incorrect. 2:16:30 They just didn't know anything about them, most people. 2:16:33 But I'm not saying the system works perfectly and it's always a meritocracy 2:16:38 and it always lets the best idea through. 2:16:40 That's not what I think, and that's not the case. 2:16:42 But what I'm trying to say is that whether or not a soft fork activates, 2:16:50 the miners can either ram it through if it's a good idea all by themselves, 2:16:55 or if the miners are making some kind of mistake, the mistake can be forced 2:16:59 out of them eventually. 2:17:03 Is this making any sense what I'm trying to say? 2:17:06 I was going to specify exactly, I guess, my question originally 2:17:12 and then add one comment to what you said. 2:17:15 Originally, I guess, a more specific question would be, 2:17:18 do you think that miners activating software on a sidechain could be done 2:17:25 in the same way they do on the main chain where nobody knows about it? 2:17:28 Do you think that them doing it on the sidechain behaves any differently? 2:17:32 And then my comment would just be that you said that miners can ram through 2:17:37 changes on the main chain, but you said that SegWit proved that they 2:17:42 don't have that ability, or maybe I'm misunderstood. 2:17:45 No, no, no. 2:17:46 I said SegWit proves that they don't have the ability to veto. 2:17:49 You said they have a veto. 2:17:51 Right, yeah. 2:17:52 But they tried to veto SegWit, but they didn't succeed. 2:17:55 If they were smart, I actually wrote a blog post about this called 2:17:58 The UASF Contradiction, and maybe you can read it 2:18:03 and maybe you'll get something out of it. 2:18:04 But what I said was all they have to do, if they really want, 2:18:08 if they wanted to beat the UASF, all they would have had to do was wait for the 2:18:17 UASF to trigger, signal for SegWit, and then censor every SegWit message 2:18:21 from the blockchain permanently. 2:18:25 But this is where the nuance steps back in. 2:18:28 At that point, they are leaving a bunch of transaction fees on the table 2:18:31 for no reason. 2:18:32 But they could still do it. 2:18:34 SegWit would never, there would no transaction that's spent to a SegWit 2:18:39 output would ever make it into the blockchain. 2:18:42 And so you would never even know if any SegWit rules had been broken because 2:18:46 it would never even get to that point. 2:18:48 So that was theoretically possible. 2:18:50 Of course, again, the nuance, this is why I brought up the thing about Napoleon. 2:18:54 What was I talking about? 2:18:55 Does this make any sense at all? 2:18:56 But what I'm saying is whether or not the idea is good or not has kind of 2:19:00 objective quality, which is to say, once you've reached this point, 2:19:04 now the miners are just turning down transaction fees. 2:19:07 It's clear that people want this thing. 2:19:10 And so it just sort of makes you look bad. 2:19:15 So that was the second part. 2:19:17 And then the first part of what you asked was, 2:19:19 can the miners influence SoftWorks on the sidechain? 2:19:22 The sidechain doesn't need, the sidechain can upgrade via SoftWork just by 2:19:28 releasing a new version and having people run it. 2:19:33 And the blind merge miners are the, so it has to do with the merge mining. 2:19:39 On the sidechain, the people who are constructing the next sidechain block are 2:19:45 not necessarily the same group of people as the mainchain miners. 2:19:49 So it's if those people build a block with the new version, 2:19:53 then the sidechain will upgrade via SoftWork. 2:19:56 If you have something similar where you could say something like BIB9, ancient BIB9, to me, BIB9 is the normal thing, but to everyone else, BIB9 is an ancient thing that has never been seen. 2:20:09 But you could do something on the sidechain where you say a new version of the software, you use CoinNews and you say a new version of the software has been released and people discuss. 2:20:22 And then the new version of the software could say something like, we will enforce these rules, but only after having 30 days of 90% blocks being made with the new version of the software. 2:20:35 So everyone upgrade. 2:20:37 And if the people on the sidechain upgrade, then eventually so many people will have upgraded that new blocks will be built. 2:20:44 The blocks, the sidechain block can themselves have a version number. The sidechain blocks can upgrade via SoftFork in that way. 2:20:53 And so the sidechain miners, because of blind merge mining, will be some subset of the nodes. 2:21:01 They will not necessarily be the same thing as the L1 miners. 2:21:05 That is if people even care about any of this at all. 2:21:08 It may be the case that the sidechain never needs to upgrade or something else happens. 2:21:15 It could be that the, I don't know, maybe it's too in the weeds to keep talking about it. 2:21:22 You know, that answered my question. 2:21:23 I think your analogy for Napoleon is pretty much what I was going for, because I was trying to get at, I guess, the criticisms people make of the United States sidechain or something like that, which is kind of very vague. 2:21:39 Yeah, it's kind of like the way I see it is human beings, actually, they enjoy solving problems. 2:21:50 So it's like the problem of how to upgrade. 2:21:53 Someone's going to only write the upgrade to the sidechain if they think it's best for the sidechain. 2:21:59 People can certainly be confused about what is in their own best interest, but it's kind of like slowly the good idea will get out there, because it's all open source, it's on the internet, whatever. 2:22:12 It's a matter of kind of, it could be a long delay, but the good idea will get out and then everyone will understand why they should upgrade on the sidechain. 2:22:25 Yeah, I guess I see it as basically a good thing that even if you do have this world where countries have their own sidechains, then you still have the main chain where basically the international community of miners can prevent certain, I don't know, 1984 or whatever style software updates on the sidechain from going in or something like that. 2:22:54 Well, the good thing about the sidechain is, of course, is people would leave if it's not, the one-to-one peg lets people leave if the sidechain isn't working for them anymore. 2:23:08 So even without using the BIP300 withdrawal, you could still like HTLC swap or you could swap out or if the sidechain is badly run, people will leave and they may even leave at, they may even pay 10% to get out as quickly as possible. 2:23:24 But that only affects the people who went to that sidechain, so it's a very ideal situation. 2:23:31 You say you're on this chain and then it becomes dystopian North Korea chain and now you think this sucks and then the price crashes and they're only giving you 50 cents on the dollar for that, the market is, because it's just everyone wants to leave or you can't possibly leave quickly enough or something like that. 2:23:50 But the good news is, I think even in that situation, the peg would probably hold because the miners themselves can always buy the coin, the L1 miners can always buy the coins and then walk them back to L1. 2:24:06 So the miners will just be like thrilled that North Korea fucked up, there's a bad sidechain, the users leave and go to different sidechains, maybe people spin up a new sidechain on that occasion and then the coins are just pulled out of that one sidechain and it just dies. 2:24:28 So it's actually, it's a pretty ideal situation. 2:24:32 Do you think that the security budget of the sidechain could be calculated? 2:24:38 Yeah, I think it's exactly equal to the fees paid on the sidechain. 2:24:43 It may be a little bit more because if the sidechain does something super great and it boosts the price for everyone, like if the Zcash sidechain provides this mixer for everyone to use, then miners gain more value of the coins they get on every sidechain. 2:24:59 The whole Bitcoin price exchange rate is up. 2:25:04 They get all that extra if the Zcash sidechain just makes an orderly progression of the blocks. 2:25:11 You know what I mean? Like if they just find one block after another and there's no reorgs on the Zcash sidechain. 2:25:16 Then the miners kind of want to eventually – if there's a problem, the L1 miners might say, wait a minute, we're supposed to be making all this extra money. 2:25:27 They may poke their head into the Zcash sidechain and say, why are there stale blocks? Why are there orphan blocks? 2:25:35 And they might just – they have an enormous amount of strength over the sidechain so they can straighten that out. 2:25:44 It's kind of in a good way. It's like they have – whatever, Vladimir Putin or Darth Vader, you send them down to the sidechain and say, let's get this back on schedule or something. 2:25:55 That's if the sidechain is very beneficial for Bitcoin. 2:25:59 That's an interesting scenario where it's like the presence of the Zcash mixer is good for everyone. 2:26:07 So it becomes a good thing, and then it starts to get taken away if the sidechain has bad forward progression because you're asking about security budget. 2:26:17 Or you're asking about reorging or losing the confirmations. 2:26:22 So if that started to happen on the sidechain, the miners are like, wait a minute, wait a minute, we liked this thing the way it was. 2:26:29 We like the Zcash sidechain. We want all these trains to be running on time. 2:26:34 They can go in there and force that to happen, basically. 2:26:37 So in that case, the security budget would actually be much more than merely the fees of the sidechain. 2:26:43 I guess that's what I meant by miners are incentivized to become more sophisticated when I was talking about that. 2:26:48 Yeah, I think that is. Miners have more of an ability to increase their revenues. 2:26:58 I think this is the only big change. 2:27:06 There's really fundamentally no change because miners have always been maximizing their profits. 2:27:13 And the way that they do that, that has itself always changed. 2:27:18 It didn't involve natural gas flaring. It didn't involve immersion cooling for a while until it did. 2:27:24 It didn't involve ASICs until it did. It didn't involve stranded power like these demand management contracts until it did. 2:27:32 So mining has always transformed. 2:27:36 And so the fact that mining is continuing to transform, that's exactly the same as it was before. 2:27:42 But I would say that this is the main new transformation would be the miners are only people who cut costs as much as they possibly can. 2:27:52 And in the BIP300 world, they would be getting a lot of money from the sidechains if they're successful. 2:28:00 And so now the miners actually, they wear yet another hat or something and they say, 2:28:09 I'm a miner, I want to make sure, like, what can we do to get the usage up? 2:28:14 What can we do to get the transaction fees up? What can we do to get more people using sidechain number three? 2:28:21 What can we do to get more people, you know, they might take out an ad for the Zcash sidechain or something. 2:28:26 That's a silly example, but you kind of get what I'm trying to say. 2:28:31 Yeah. 2:28:32 And you get why that is. That is the kind of thing that would be sort of a change. 2:28:37 Because before miners would not. 2:28:41 Miners are just cutting costs, but now they're also maximizing revenues for maximizing usage of Bitcoin. 2:28:48 So they're a little bit more active in shilling Bitcoin. 2:28:54 I think it's better because, you know, before people were saying, oh, what if the U.S. government bought all this mining hardware? 2:29:02 Like, how do you pick which chain if it's not the longest? 2:29:05 I think this maybe gives those type of people a way of deciding like, well, miners can now kind of compete based on how sophisticated they are, 2:29:15 which by like a market process will probably never be like a nation state or something like that. 2:29:20 Yeah, I think. Well, one interesting thing is if the government embarks on a project to buy all the mining hardware, then it. 2:29:32 This is a weird you're in a weird situation where if the like, so what I'm trying to say is it's in a certain point you. 2:29:45 You gain a lot of money by keeping your hardware secret, like if, like, let's say the government plans to confiscate all the mining hardware. 2:29:55 Now, the best miners are not only the ones that get the cheapest power, but the best miners also the ones that hide, hide the physical location of their hardware the best. 2:30:07 But then if miners just want to, I mean, if miners want to buy everything up, if they spend the security budget, they, you know, they can. 2:30:13 They can buy everything up. They just build a parallel mining, but they will cost them. 2:30:20 One hundred percent of the security budget, like the people say security budget isn't real. I don't understand. 2:30:26 I think there must be some kind of mistranslation with that, because to me, the security budget is just the total amount of money we pay to miners. 2:30:35 The total amount of money we pay to miners. 2:30:38 And that is obviously real. 2:30:40 And that is also obviously equal to the total amount of money that miners spend on hashing. 2:30:45 And that is also equal to, in the long run, the total amount of money spent on fees in the whole blockchain. 2:30:51 So, so all those are just the same number. 2:30:55 So it's obvious that that number is pretty important and pretty real. 2:30:58 But for some reason, a lot of people just say that it's not real. 2:31:01 They say there is no such thing as security budget. 2:31:03 I have no idea what those people mean. 2:31:07 Yeah, I think the problem with like people who say like we need ossification or stuff like that, and then are against drivechains, or even. 2:31:16 Yeah, like, I don't know, there's probably a number of things wrong. 2:31:20 But like, immediately, if you add this sort of like way of miners maximizing revenue as a change, then you kind of dissuade any people from trying to attack the network because they don't really know what the security budget is. 2:31:41 It's much more difficult. 2:31:43 Well, we definitely want it to be high. 2:31:46 That also dissuades like if it's like, you know, and then we also the more Bitcoin is used, you flip more and more people were kind of like zombies in a way, you know what I mean? 2:31:57 Where it's like, you kill a regular human, but then they join the zombie team, you know what I mean? 2:32:03 If we flip people from fiat into Bitcoin, now instead of contributing to the attacking team, now they're on the defending team. 2:32:13 So the more usage is very, very good. 2:32:16 More fees, more people in the group, more network effect, more popularity, like more people who are just victims. 2:32:24 So we want Bitcoin to be big. 2:32:27 But some people, I think for some reason, but I think the rational thing is to want it to be big. 2:32:34 Yeah, I mean, I think that just it maybe helps certain like smaller forks like a Bitcoin Cash. 2:32:42 Like basically right now, they're pretty much have no chance of, in my opinion, like coming back from something because there is no like there's no mechanism of having miners benefit from maximizing revenue through like their own sophistication. 2:33:00 So if you do have a mechanism like this, it at least gives them an ability to say that, well, we might not have as much hash power and electricity, you know, dollar worth, but we have more maximizing revenue value. 2:33:23 We have a shiny C, a dog with a tie and a hat. 2:33:29 Hello. 2:33:31 Hello. 2:33:32 Shiny cakes. Hi. 2:33:36 Hello, hello. 2:33:37 Hi, Paul. 2:33:38 Welcome. 2:33:39 I'm just wondering what are the pros and the cons for you to interact in this Bitcoin maximalism like that you go these procedures like it has right now, for example, with the drivechain. 2:33:55 Did it take so long that everything has to discuss that everything is theoretical? 2:34:00 And what is against the free market for you? 2:34:03 And what is a pro? 2:34:04 I mean, what is the pros and cons? 2:34:06 What is your standing point in this kind of thing? 2:34:09 Why not just launch a product and go for it and see how it develops and how it forms? 2:34:15 What's why? 2:34:16 Why it should be Bitcoin only? 2:34:18 I mean, isn't the whole space some kind of the whole thing? 2:34:22 Why should we go so slowly always? 2:34:26 I don't know. 2:34:27 I don't get the point. 2:34:28 What's why you hold so long on this kind of thing? 2:34:32 And are you sometimes maybe even scared that you maybe even miss your own product because somebody else do it? 2:34:38 Just wondering what's your point on this? 2:34:43 Yes, of course. 2:34:44 Yes. 2:34:45 Well, the process is very slow. 2:34:49 And I think the word consensus is misused. 2:34:54 Like so Bitcoin Core is consensus software because every node agrees down to the last byte. 2:35:01 And so we have this idea of consensus. 2:35:05 That's every every node agree. 2:35:08 But I don't think that I don't think it's good for humans to have consensus. 2:35:14 Humans disagree. 2:35:15 And that's a good thing. 2:35:17 And I think that the process is very bad, actually. 2:35:22 And I think you can see why. 2:35:24 It's just if any idea has any novelty or or even if an idea would make someone look bad by succeeding, then that person can veto and hold the whole thing up. 2:35:35 There really should be. 2:35:37 There should be some kind of I don't know. 2:35:40 I don't want to say election. 2:35:41 But there should be something where someone is a leader and then that leader should be vulnerable to replacement. 2:35:47 That is a good form of governance. 2:35:51 What we currently have instead is everyone denies that someone is in charge because we don't want that person to, like, get arrested or something. 2:35:57 So I'm talking about the people on GitHub, Bitcoin Bitcoin. 2:36:01 So the process is designed around no one taking responsibility. 2:36:05 And that is why the technical decisions are made with consensus. 2:36:10 It is not to make the best decisions or even to make decisions that don't have errors because decisions with bugs or with unexpected features or with mistakes doesn't make it through anyway. 2:36:26 So even trying to be conservative, we don't even do that. 2:36:29 But the reason why it is the way it is, is because no one wants to take responsibility for the software because that would make it look like they. 2:36:39 You know, have some kind of authority over the software. 2:36:43 And we don't want anyone misunderstanding that such as, you know, government. 2:36:49 Or even like a very wealthy assassin or something like a crazy, like some kind of mafia organization or something. 2:36:57 So the right thing to do as far as governance would be to for Bitcoin to explicitly explain that everything must be everything. 2:37:05 Nothing can harm old nodes. So everything must be a soft fork classically or whatever you want to call it. 2:37:12 And that have that one rule and then have the new versions driven by one person. 2:37:17 And then to have that person be subject to some kind of process where they can be fired and that the best governance. 2:37:25 But we don't have that and we're not ever going to have that. 2:37:27 So the really nice thing would be if we just had drivechain in Bitcoin, then it wouldn't matter how slow or screwed up L1 development was. 2:37:36 We would just leave L1 where it is and then do it on the other chains. 2:37:41 The second part of your question is why not just launch an altcoin or whatever or fork or something? 2:37:48 Well, that idea has occurred to me a couple of times, but I think the one reason why that's not a good idea is because the success of an altcoin, 2:37:59 the success of anything with network effects, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, Craigslist, 2:38:10 the success of those things depends on its inherent features. 2:38:14 One, just like everything else, but also its success depends on which other people join the network. 2:38:23 And the problem with forking off to make a new network is other people may then fork off that network and you don't have any of the loyal people. 2:38:34 So you need to have loyal people. 2:38:36 And so what you would need to do is, well, it's kind of difficult to explain, 2:38:42 but you would need to fork off in a way that could never be forked off again, which is, I think, possible, but difficult. 2:38:52 And so it's like the one thing, like, so the large blockers, I think, ruined their own case because they forked off to do large block version. 2:39:05 The version didn't work. 2:39:08 Now there's no one – there's no political movement in L1 that is just – that would have either been critical of Lightning or just pushing large block sidechain 2:39:20 or just pushing merchant adoption and these other things that that group used to push. 2:39:25 So now, because that group forked off, Bitcoin is further away from large blocks. 2:39:33 And again, I want to stress that large blocks on L1 is a mistake and it should have lost. 2:39:37 So they did lose. 2:39:38 But just also other things that their group emphasized, such as the medium of exchange, merchant adoption, actual people using Bitcoin, 2:39:49 those things are all further away in BTC because those people split off. 2:39:57 Now they are very far from where they were in 2017 versus – so let alone where they would have been if those people had stayed and kept advocating for them. 2:40:06 So splitting off has backfired and had the opposite effect. So if you're pro-drivechain, it does not necessarily follow that you launch a drivechain altcoin and then that will help drivechain because all the evidence for that is in reverse, I think. 2:40:25 We just – everyone gets sour grapes. So it's just because of network effects. It's because it has nothing to do – it has to do with what other people want. 2:40:35 And so that's why I'm here and here doing this space and not launching the – we kind of need to all talk first and then we need a giant group of people. 2:40:48 If anything like that would even have a chance of succeeding – by the time we get a large group of people, we'll probably just activate it on Bitcoin Core. 2:40:56 But I don't know. 2:40:58 Isn't the free market some kind of a consensus? Isn't even life making about false? Isn't it even sometimes the right feeling to make false, to feel alive? 2:41:09 Well, I do think you're right that if you take the efficient markets hypothesis so – like the way I do. I take it very seriously. 2:41:18 But if you take it too seriously, then you just never do anything. Like Freddie Mercury would just say, well, I'm not going to write any new music because – what's the point? 2:41:30 Well, I mean music is not something that has network effects, so I should retract that. That didn't really make any sense. I retract what I said. 2:41:36 But I think the – like didn't I just give you an example with Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV where someone tried the market and nothing – what result did it really have? 2:41:52 So that was the market path, right? Yes or no? I mean what do you think? 2:41:58 Yes. I mean it's – but it's also hard to say if it would be applied on the same, like on drivechain because it's so individual also. 2:42:10 Yes, it is hard to see if it would be the same. I agree. It's also the case that drivechain kind of gives you everything. 2:42:17 So it's kind of – it could be the last fork of any kind, hard fork, soft fork, whatever. New altcoin would be the last new altcoin. 2:42:26 So I think that is the case. There's a lot of truth to that, but I think that it's like – well, there's a game in game theory called Boxing Opera, which is sometimes called Battle of the Sexes. 2:42:47 And maybe you're familiar with it. I don't know. It's like if each of the players choose something, if they choose differently, they both get the lowest score of zero. 2:43:04 And this is like two people going on a date. The guy wants to go see a boxing match and the girl wants to go to the opera. 2:43:12 But if they end up in the wrong spot, they get zero because they were supposed to go there together. 2:43:19 But if they go boxing, the guy is happier than the girl. The guy gets five points. The girl gets one point. 2:43:28 And it's the reverse if they go to the opera. The girl gets the five points and the guy gets the one point. 2:43:33 So I guess what I'm saying is right now I'm not getting what I want, but I'm not getting zero points either. 2:43:42 I'm getting actually a lot of whatever, which is to be in the biggest team with everyone else. 2:43:48 And that's what most other people want too. So that's kind of me trying to articulate what I'm saying. 2:43:55 But I think that it's definitely the case that – I mean I can see it happening where drivechain gets really big. 2:44:06 Everyone understands correctly that it has no downside and enormous upside. 2:44:11 And eventually a high enough – so many people believe this, and such a small minority does not believe it, 2:44:19 that I can see the ability to like whatever, launch an altcoin or a hard fork would then be like the right thing to do. 2:44:28 So I don't know. That may be very soon, but probably not because I think it depends on – it's kind of hard to say. 2:44:36 It depends on how the awareness is. 2:44:40 What is your opinion about the pull request? Do you have already a feeling how it will be? 2:44:45 Yeah, I think if the pull request is just like flatly denied, then I think that would be a good occasion to do something else. 2:44:57 Because I think the – or just say like they have passed on this idea like permanently. 2:45:04 But I think the pull request – we're still working on it, so we haven't done it yet. 2:45:08 But yeah, I think the pull request would be – that would be a pretty good moment to just say either the Bitcoin community has just decided that even an idea that has no downside and enormous upside, they just don't want anything. 2:45:23 Even an idea that's like packaged up and given away for free. 2:45:27 The Bitcoin community just does not want anything. It does not want 119. It does not want – it just will not – it just decided that it just won't do anything. 2:45:38 Then I think that would be maybe an occasion to like run a demo, run like the demo coin or something, and just kind of see if – that would point to it being very bleak. 2:45:52 For any new – just anything. 2:45:55 But I don't know. That's sort of my thought. 2:45:59 Okay. Is there already a timeline? I mean Hampus has a question. Sorry, just this question. 2:46:06 Is there a timeline? Like I don't know. As soon as the pull request is done, I think I will probably do a little bit like some last minute education and then just throw it in there and see what – 2:46:19 I think a lot of people would be surprised if there was a pull request, but I personally think the pull request is like for people talking about details of the code. 2:46:30 So if you want to comment on the pull request, you should already just say – take it for the sake of argument that the idea is good. 2:46:37 So is the pull request about BIP300 and BIP301? 2:46:41 Yes. 2:46:42 Okay. So I would like to suggest then that maybe you know about this already, but instead of going with the blind merge binding BIT3001, you should probably look into Ruben Somsen's like space chain covenants via blind merge bind construction, which uses like SIGHASH. 2:47:04 That requires APO though. 2:47:06 Yeah, that will require APO, yes. 2:47:09 So I mean I'm fine with that, but you're saying BIP301 has already been coded and it's already in the example sidechains, and then APO is yet another soft fork to mix in. 2:47:21 Yeah, I would suggest soft forking that and instead go with that construction because it's more like – that will also benefit like lightning and space chains among other things, and it's a pretty generic solution for these things. So that's just a suggestion. 2:47:40 Yeah, but I think the pull request should be very modular, don't you? Each pull request should be like the 118 pull request, the 119 pull request, right? 2:47:51 Yeah, it depends. Like if this is a pull request about the soft fork, yeah, I suppose there could be multiple pull requests then, yeah. But like there will be like – I suppose there will be one soft fork like versioning BIT proposal for the actual like deployment activation. 2:48:08 Yeah, I mean I don't have any problem with APO at all. I think CTV, APO, whatever upvault should all already be in Bitcoin Core, as should BIP300 and BIP301. 2:48:20 I think people have a weird attitude where if an idea is a soft fork, people just don't think about it, whereas if instead they just didn't have that attitude, they would just say they would work on it more and it would be done faster or something. 2:48:36 But yeah, I don't know if that's a great idea. I think Ruben Sampson's version of Blind March Mining also requires you to make like this huge tree of pre-signed transactions or something. 2:48:49 Yeah, that is true for the space chain construction at least. I'm not sure exactly how it would work for like drivechains. I suppose it will be the same, yeah. But I'm not sure about that. That's a very good point actually. Like if it will require a pre-computed list of transactions, then it might not be the optimal solution. 2:49:14 I don't think that's better. 2:49:16 Sorry, what? You think that's better? 2:49:18 No, I said I don't think that is better because that's an annoying step. 2:49:22 That's definitely annoying for drivechains for sure. It's kind of like a bummer for the space chains because I don't think you can… I'm not sure you can do it another way. I haven't figured out the list, but yeah. 2:49:33 So that's true. If it needs a pre-computed list of transactions for drivechains, it will not be… I would agree that it wouldn't be optimal for that. 2:49:45 We already have a bunch of software that we have been using that uses the normal blind merge mining. Not that that's like… I'm not really married to blind merge mining, but it also does seem like with one exception, no one really complains about blind merge mining. 2:50:03 And that one guy who complains, who's a very interesting character, and he fully supports BIP300, but the problem with BIP301 is something along the lines of it may create these large transaction fees on L1 that miners fight over. 2:50:21 But that is kind of a weird thing to complain about since that could already happen at any time, and also the blind merge mining is the idea is that the fees would be trickling in in a continuous drip and they would not be like a weird fluke fee. 2:50:37 So that guy is an interesting point of view, but really no one has really complained about blind merge mining. I think part of the reason is that it's very difficult to complain about it since regular merge mining already exists. 2:50:49 But for whatever the reason may be, very few people complain about it. 2:50:53 I've seen some complaints about MEV and stuff, but there's some weird contradiction going on because as far as I can tell, if you do blind merge mining with space chains, that will basically be equivalent to doing blind merge mining with drivechains. 2:51:12 So if you're okay with space chains, then you really should be okay with drivechains, at least as far as blind merge mining goes. 2:51:22 So I've seen some weird contradictions going on there and stuff, and I don't personally think MEV is a problem, but some people do, and then they should be okay with drivechains and space chains BMM. 2:51:34 They can't just pick and choose there. 2:51:36 Yeah, a lot of people are just, you know, it's like motivated reasoning. They just want to come up with something negative to say. 2:51:45 Like the security, like the problem incentives should be the same as far as I can tell between BMM on the drivechain and the space chain. 2:51:54 Yeah, when people say MEV, it's just like, what they end up meaning is layer one transaction fees will go up. That's what they end up meaning. 2:52:04 So it's like, whatever. Like, I think they're just trying to stick, they're trying to staple something that is like bad sounding onto the idea. So it's the whole thing is dishonest, I think. 2:52:16 I think this Bitcoin rooster came up first and then had their hand. Yes, is that the case or no? I hope so. 2:52:24 I think so. I just had a question about the peg out process. Like, would the dust limit be the same? Like, could a small user always opt to peg out of a sidechain or? 2:52:38 What was the question? If you're trying to withdraw and you want to withdraw a tiny amount, like below the dust limit on L1? 2:52:46 Like, is the dust limit for withdrawing the same as L1? Or if you were in a sidechain, is there a limit? 2:52:54 question if you're trying to withdraw and you want to withdraw a tiny amount, like 2:52:56 below the dust limit on L1? 2:53:00 Is the dust limit for withdrawing the same as L1? 2:53:05 Or if you are in a sidechain, can the sidechain restrict 2:53:09 pegging out? 2:53:15 So, person has a couple layers. 2:53:21 like, the sidechain developer is free to make any mistake they want. 2:53:25 They could write a sidechain that has terrible withdrawal software that never 2:53:30 works. so then, but we have created a, we have templates and default 2:53:35 software that, 2:53:40 and what that does is that will allocate like a fixed amount of space for the 2:53:45 withdrawal, which is like, I think it's like 20 2:53:48 ,000 or 30,000 or 40,000, something like that, 20,000 -ish withdrawals that 2:53:54 each use 43 or so bytes or whatever it is, think, B bytes, 2:54:02 something like that. 2:54:04 been actually a long time since I was in 2:54:08 The but it's something like that where you have the withdrawal transaction could pay 2:54:13 out to 20,000 different people and as a result it will never use up for example 2:54:19 the entire it won't you it won't you can see how it would be a disaster if the 2:54:24 withdrawal transaction was bigger 2:54:26 bigger than the block size limit. 2:54:27 So the block size limit is on L1, is whatever, megabyte in one way and four megabytes 2:54:32 in a different way. 2:54:34 If the withdrawal transaction is bigger than that, it will never be able to be included 2:54:37 in L1. So the L2 sidechain is programmed to construct 2:54:42 algorithmically and procedurally, 2:54:44 does that automatically 2:54:49 and it will make you pay a fee when you want to withdraw and it makes 2:54:55 you allocate part of the withdrawal as an L1 transaction fee. 2:55:00 So when you do the Withdraw on L1, 2:55:03 each of those things in that list of like 20 or 30,000, each of the, each in that list is paying an L1 fee also, and so, how does that answer your question, well, if they want to, it's actually L2, where you initiate the withdrawal, so if you want to withdraw something that is below the dust limit, 2:55:30 that is also, that is allowed, because just like you are allowed to make a Bitcoin transaction on L1, L1 Bitcoin transaction that pays below the dust limit, in fact, you can actually make a zero-valued output, that's what the upper returns are, but you can make a zero-valued upper return, and unless this has changed, I'm pretty sure those are all spendable, 2:55:55 and they actually cannot be pruned, because they, they are a valid output just like anything else, even though the coin value is zero, so that's allowed on L1, and that's also allowed in the form of a withdrawal, it's obviously a bad idea to withdraw something below the dust limit, because you will basically never be able to spend it on anything that you actually want to buy. 2:56:22 Yeah, no, I'm just, I'm just more curious about like how tyrannical a sidechain can be on its users, like can they, you know, restrict withdrawals, and then, like, I'm not sure completely how the process works of withdrawing, so if you have to initiate it on L2, does that mean that like, you know, you as a user potentially can't get out of it, but, 2:56:49 I mean, you as a manager of L2 can? 2:56:57 Well, it would be possible in the extreme case for someone to write a sidechain where 2:57:01 all the withdrawals have to go through some individual, some tyrant. 2:57:07 And that would be weird, I don't really 2:57:19 Because on L2, you kind of say, I have these coins, I select eight coins, and I want to withdraw three, so you have three, and you basically, you send three of the coins to a kind of like a, like a train station or something. 2:57:34 That's when you initiate it on L2, and then the L2 blockchain, it looks at every, everyone who has sent coins to the train station, and it sorts those people on their mainchain fee, so they have like carrying the mainchain fee with them, the withdrawals, each withdrawal has like a little pocket, and they have their mainchain fee, and each mainchain takes up the same amount of space, same amount of bytes, so you just sort it on that. 2:58:00 And it sorts it on that, and what it does is it sorts them there at the train station, and then when the next train is ready to leave, it opens up the doors of the train, and it loads in all the people it can fit, and then closes the doors of the train, and then it sends the train on its way. 2:58:16 And that's actually a slight oversimplification. 2:58:43 And then the train, in its ghostly form, kind of appears in L1, and the train slowly starts to move conceptually from one planet to the other planet, or whatever, this is a metaphor. 2:58:57 So that's kind of what happens as the upvotes accumulate on L1 for this train, it eventually is pulled from the sidechain planet to L1, and then it lets the people disembark at the very end. 2:59:14 So that's kind of what happens, and I guess you were asking how tyrannical can they be, the most tyrannical thing of all is to release terrible software so that the withdrawal process never works, and you can never figure out who's supposed to be on this train or not, and then you'll never know what to do, like no one will know which withdrawals are real or not. 2:59:42 And so at that point, the coins are just in limbo, and the miners can just take them, and whether or not that would even be considered taking them is ambiguous, because the true owner is unknown, so it's kind of abandoned property. 2:59:56 So the sidechain I think could be pretty tyrannical if it wishes, but of course, users have to choose to send money over there in the first place, so in a way it's kind of a good thing. It's kind of like how the manager of the Four Seasons, or the manager of a night hotel. 3:00:12 They're the tyrant of the hotel, 3:00:14 but you have to choose to stay there, 3:00:16 so it's kind of a good thing in a way. 3:00:24 But the sidechain should be automatically 3:00:26 doing the withdrawals. 3:00:27 It's not like the sidechain automatically 3:00:30 groups the withdrawals, so each individual user 3:00:33 goes to the train station, 3:00:36 and then the sidechain is watching. 3:00:39 It sees when the last train docked on L1, 3:00:43 and then it knows to release the next train, 3:00:46 and that's what it does. 3:00:47 So that part is totally automatic. 3:00:52 I mean, it should be. 3:00:53 Of course, you could screw it up. 3:00:54 So anyway, ShinyCakes, you were going to say something. 3:00:58 Yes, I was wondering if the scenario happens 3:01:02 that you launch, for example, like a demo coin, 3:01:05 or you would go out like a layer one, 3:01:09 would you do exactly the same? 3:01:11 Would you just fork Bitcoin, 3:01:12 or what would be your approach as a layer one then? 3:01:20 Oh, well, you know, I think right now 3:01:23 we're just focusing on spreading the idea, 3:01:28 but I think it would probably be, 3:01:30 the good thing would be to do the hard fork, 3:01:32 because in that way, every Bitcoin user is indifferent, 3:01:36 and it would probably also be good to keep SHA-256-D 3:01:39 so that every miner is indifferent also. 3:01:42 That makes it so that if you launch something, 3:01:45 no one in Bitcoin is really harmed 3:01:48 if it were to succeed and do very well. 3:01:51 You see what I mean? 3:01:52 Because it's the same set of owners 3:01:53 and the same set of miners. 3:01:56 So that is probably... 3:01:59 Just by a snapshot, for example, 3:02:00 or if they take the tech then later on, 3:02:05 how would it be then? 3:02:10 I think it would just be like literal hard fork, 3:02:12 like you would have. 3:02:13 I mean, probably a snapshot is better than a hard fork 3:02:15 because hard fork has all this block history, 3:02:18 but on the other hand, 3:02:19 you would want all the block explorers 3:02:20 and stuff to be consistent. 3:02:22 So maybe hard fork is better. 3:02:25 I don't know. 3:02:26 Probably. 3:02:27 Okay, so in general, you are happy with the ideals 3:02:30 and you don't scare that a scenario 3:02:33 like this happens again that could take, 3:02:36 what could change the world getting stuck 3:02:38 because of such infrastructure? 3:02:44 Well, I think what has happened has been pretty bad. 3:02:47 Yes, I do think so. 3:02:49 I think that Bitcoin should probably have taken over 3:02:52 the entire world by now and it did not yet. 3:02:55 So I really think it's in particular, 3:03:00 the scaling war being fought from what you might call, 3:03:05 I mean, it depends on exactly when you think it began. 3:03:07 I guess I would say, I think it began at scaling three. 3:03:11 So that would be October, 2016, 3:03:14 until maybe I'll call it like a year 3:03:16 after Bitcoin Cash was 3:03:21 affirmed as the thing. 3:03:23 So I'd say November, 2018. 3:03:25 So I think from October, 2016 to November, 2018, 3:03:33 we fought the scaling war and won. 3:03:35 And then since then there has been just basically 3:03:41 a lot of stasis, complacency, overconfidence, 3:03:46 hatred of anything new or even just creative. 3:03:50 And you see that in 1.19, 3:03:53 over-emphasis on lightning, 3:03:57 over-emphasis on developers can never do anything wrong 3:04:03 and we have to do whatever developers say 3:04:07 because if we lose them, we will lose everything. 3:04:11 Also, there was the period where everyone 3:04:13 just started hating the miners for no reason. 3:04:15 Well, I mean, for some reason, 3:04:16 but the miners, because they held up SegWit for a while, 3:04:22 but the hate was kind of disproportionate 3:04:24 and it even persisted long after. 3:04:26 Like everyone hated Jihan Wu, so they say, 3:04:29 but Jihan Wu was eventually just forced out of Bitmain. 3:04:32 But still people hate, still the hate remains. 3:04:36 So yeah, I think it has sucked kind of since then. 3:04:43 Everything has, things have been very slow. 3:04:45 What really happened between now and then 3:04:48 was like some, like the COVID lockdowns 3:04:51 and COVID inflation. 3:04:52 So that was great for our Bitcoin 3:04:54 in both senses of being huge amount of inflation 3:04:58 and huge amount of money printing 3:05:00 and huge amount of just like government tyranny. 3:05:03 But even then you see that we totally failed. 3:05:05 I think we did not do a good job at all 3:05:07 of like the Canadian truckers example. 3:05:11 Bitcoin, the way it works with Bitcoin, 3:05:15 it should be possible for someone 3:05:17 to start some kind of cause, 3:05:20 some kind of political dissident somewhere 3:05:22 in Albania or something, anywhere. 3:05:25 They should have some kind of cause. 3:05:27 It should hit Twitter and we should all learn about it. 3:05:30 And that guy should be able to like something, 3:05:33 like write something on a piece of paper 3:05:35 and hold it up and take a picture of himself with it 3:05:38 or hold up a QR code or whatever. 3:05:41 And we should be able to just send that person money 3:05:44 that they know how to spend 3:05:47 and that we know goes to them. 3:05:48 And that we, it seems like a very, very, very easy task, 3:05:52 but we did not succeed with the Canadian truckers. 3:05:54 We did some kind of crazy convoluted other thing. 3:05:57 It took a really long time. 3:05:59 And then ultimately most of that money 3:06:00 was confiscated by the Canadian government 3:06:02 as I understand it. 3:06:04 So how could we screw something like that up so badly? 3:06:08 I don't know. 3:06:09 But whatever it is, until we fix that, 3:06:11 we aren't doing very well. 3:06:13 So even, that was a big opportunity. 3:06:17 That would have been huge if we had our act together. 3:06:20 That would have been really big, you know? 3:06:23 How can that not be? 3:06:26 I mean like, I don't know, I just don't understand 3:06:29 what, how do we face ourselves in the mirror? 3:06:33 It's a complete failure. 3:06:37 So yeah, those people all should have had tons of Bitcoin, 3:06:40 especially as soon as the Canadian government 3:06:42 started talking about like, 3:06:43 we will freeze their bank accounts and stuff. 3:06:46 That was it. 3:06:47 Like we should have just flipped Canada 3:06:48 into like a Bitcoin country. 3:06:53 But instead, people are interested in, 3:06:56 yeah I mean you have people like, 3:06:58 certain people are working hard against that. 3:07:00 I don't think, so like I think Michael Saylor 3:07:02 is a very smart guy and I think he's very good for Bitcoin 3:07:04 and certainly who can doubt his earnestness 3:07:08 when he puts down such a huge percentage of his net worth. 3:07:15 But yeah, he's against like this subversive aspect 3:07:17 of Bitcoin, he's against the, 3:07:20 in a way he's against the self-sovereignty 3:07:22 because he's against privacy also. 3:07:24 He says it'll all be regulated, 3:07:25 it'll all be a US dollar stable coin or something. 3:07:30 So where does that leave us exactly? 3:07:33 I'm not sure. 3:07:34 But I think what I would say is that I'm pro-pluralism. 3:07:41 So we should be trying lots and lots of different things. 3:07:45 But would the people do better with the same code 3:07:49 if they start again from scratch? 3:07:52 I don't think so. 3:07:54 Well, what a lot of people say, 3:07:55 if you talk to technologists, 3:07:57 they'll say we should just rewrite everything in Rust 3:08:00 and just redo it. 3:08:02 That's fine, but like people said that too about, 3:08:06 many people said that about like LibBitcoin. 3:08:09 LibBitcoin is much cleaner. 3:08:10 They're right about that. 3:08:11 LibBitcoin is sort of much better. 3:08:14 But of course there was this recent news 3:08:16 that happened whatever, a week and a half ago, right? 3:08:22 The LibBitcoin randomness sources was not good. 3:08:29 Excuse me, I had to just sneeze there. 3:08:31 But the LibBitcoin, so this is the thing, 3:08:33 is you're not, having a standard that everyone, 3:08:37 that has been in use for a long time 3:08:39 and that everyone is familiar with, 3:08:42 and that a lot of people have looked at, 3:08:44 a lot of people have tried to break, 3:08:46 that itself is much better 3:08:48 than almost any improvement could be. 3:08:51 So writing the code from scratch, 3:08:52 I think is like the kiss of death, basically. 3:08:57 So, but I do think that they're ruining, 3:09:01 I think Bitcoin Core is, the code is getting worse. 3:09:04 It's getting more complicated to do things. 3:09:07 I hate descriptor wallets. 3:09:09 I hate basically everything, 3:09:12 like the frivolous refactoring and just, 3:09:14 it's like, I think it's much worse than it has been. 3:09:20 But still I say you have to, you have no choice, 3:09:22 but to use the latest version of Bitcoin Core really. 3:09:24 But this is another reason why I actually 3:09:26 am pro ossification. 3:09:27 I think most of the recent changes have been terrible. 3:09:30 I really hate the batch 32 and batch 32m address formats. 3:09:35 I think I don't like them at all. 3:09:38 So I really hate that they start with, 3:09:43 they all start with the same prefix. 3:09:45 That's like five letters long. 3:09:47 And that the version number kicks in 3:09:49 on something that is a letter. 3:09:51 It's not a number. 3:09:53 I honestly think that this is some kind of like 3:09:56 psychology experiment that I'm trapped in. 3:09:59 I don't understand why people do this, 3:10:01 make these decisions. 3:10:02 I think they're just awful. 3:10:04 But everyone's got an opinion. 3:10:07 So I think most of the changes have been bad, 3:10:09 but I still think you cannot, you can't leave. 3:10:12 As soon as you say, well, instead I'll use LibBitcoin 3:10:14 or I'll use something smaller. 3:10:17 That is when you get this terrible news, 3:10:19 like LibBitcoin had. 3:10:20 So that's not, any standard is good. 3:10:24 You know what I mean? 3:10:25 Like if everyone is using the same wifi standard, 3:10:29 maybe you have a standard that's better, 3:10:30 but it doesn't matter. 3:10:33 It's just like the, it's the boxing opera thing 3:10:36 all over again. 3:10:38 You have to weigh that consideration against 3:10:40 how much better the new feature is. 3:10:43 Because certainly a better feature is better, 3:10:47 but what's really good is going on a date 3:10:51 with someone and not being alone. 3:10:54 The whole point of the date is that you're there 3:10:55 with someone else. 3:10:57 Could you imagine that even drivechain go 3:11:00 into a direction where you think, okay, 3:11:03 where and which direction it's going? 3:11:05 I'm a little bit worried about. 3:11:08 Do you think this is really like a framework 3:11:12 where things like this couldn't happen? 3:11:18 What do you mean, an individual sidechain 3:11:20 or the drivechain idea itself? 3:11:22 The idea itself. 3:11:23 If you launch it just from scratch, 3:11:27 if there could be maybe some kind of scenario like this, 3:11:31 what we have right now here in Bitcoin, 3:11:33 where you get stuck, 3:11:34 could you imagine that it could also happen 3:11:36 somewhere there with the drivechain tech on top? 3:11:40 Well, drivechain is kind of like a completable project. 3:11:44 So it's kind of like SegWit, 3:11:45 where it's kind of like, it would just be finished. 3:11:48 Kind of just is finished. 3:11:50 So it's either finished or it's not, 3:11:52 which it is in that scenario. 3:11:56 So I can see myself saying, 3:11:57 well, with hindsight, 3:11:59 I would have changed something about BIP300. 3:12:04 But I guess not really, 3:12:05 because what we're talking about are two different things. 3:12:09 One is like the process on Bitcoin Core 3:12:14 being very bad, 3:12:17 but still much better than everything else. 3:12:20 Because other things are not viable. 3:12:23 And so that's one conversation, 3:12:28 but then a different conversation is just like, 3:12:31 could we come up with a still better idea? 3:12:36 Eventually someone will get the lightweight L1, 3:12:41 L1 using ZK proof cross-chain bridge to work. 3:12:48 And that works with every future sidechain, 3:12:52 and it doesn't matter what the sizes of that sidechain 3:12:54 or whatever, 3:12:55 they'll just always be the perfect peg. 3:12:59 And there'll be no bike-shedding 3:13:01 over what ZK prover algorithm to use, blah, blah, blah. 3:13:08 So maybe someday eventually we'll have that, 3:13:11 and then people will just not use BIP300 anymore, maybe. 3:13:14 But I kind of doubt it 3:13:15 because miners can already censor ZK proof knowledge, 3:13:20 they can already censor sidechain knowledge, 3:13:22 they can already do lots of things even in the ZK world. 3:13:26 So it's kind of like, 3:13:28 it's also the ZK world is impossible 3:13:31 for normal people to understand, 3:13:32 whereas the drivechain ACK system 3:13:35 is just an integer that counts up to 13,000. 3:13:39 So in those ways, it's just better. 3:13:45 But people could always come up with a better idea. 3:13:50 Do we have any other questions? 3:13:52 Not from my side. 3:13:53 Thank you very much. 3:13:54 And I will for sure listen maybe and repeat, 3:13:57 sometimes with the drivechain talks, 3:13:59 I need to hear them at least once or twice 3:14:02 to get everything, sometimes really a lot input. 3:14:08 Okay, cool, great. 3:14:10 Well, yeah, if anyone has any questions, 3:14:12 feel free to come up. 3:14:21 Hampus, what did you think about my, 3:14:25 I saw you gave a reaction to, 3:14:27 I was talking about why you can't leave or something. 3:14:32 I don't, sorry, I don't remember reactions, 3:14:36 but in general, I agree with what you're saying mostly, so. 3:14:43 Okay, well, this has been three hours and 15 minutes, 3:14:47 so maybe we should... 3:14:51 If no one has anything they wanna say. 3:14:54 Yeah, I might have some, 3:14:55 if you please ignore it, but we could take another time. 3:14:59 But I have some disagreements 3:15:02 regarding the soft forking stuff. 3:15:04 Like, if I remember correctly, 3:15:06 you said that drivechain or activation of drivechains 3:15:10 or whatever are similar to a soft fork. 3:15:14 But as far as, my view on that is that 3:15:17 like main chain full nodes, 3:15:20 they will have to activate BIP300, right? 3:15:23 So that means they will need to check 3:15:25 the drivechain messages for like acts, 3:15:29 for the peg outs and creations of new sidechains, whatever. 3:15:36 But they will not need to, of course, 3:15:39 validate the rules of the other chain. 3:15:43 They will only watch, they will follow the BIP300, 3:15:46 like BIP, basically, the specification. 3:15:49 So that's, for any creation of a sidechain, 3:15:52 that will be the requirements. 3:15:54 But if you look at, for example, 3:15:56 like a new OPI code, like OPNOP5, whatever, 3:16:01 that it will have a new meaning. 3:16:03 But then I think that's every full node, 3:16:06 or main chain full node, 3:16:08 should really interpret and follow the new, 3:16:12 like rules of that OPI code. 3:16:17 Do you disagree with that? 3:16:18 Or do you think like, 3:16:19 do you think that only the miners should interpret 3:16:22 the new like soft fork rules? 3:16:28 Does my question make sense or should I? 3:16:32 Yes, the question is about whether or not 3:16:36 miners can unilaterally activate BIP300. 3:16:39 It's a paradox that actually sort of only applies to, 3:16:43 oh, sorry. 3:16:44 Yeah, no, it's, it's, it is, 3:16:45 no, no, I'm sorry, we can't, sorry, 3:16:47 let's continue, I'll, I'll take it from here. 3:16:48 The one paradox that I wish people would understand better 3:16:52 is that what BIP300 does is keep the miners 3:16:57 on a short leash. 3:16:58 And this is, the miners constrain themselves with BIP300. 3:17:03 They say, if the coins are sent here, 3:17:05 then we miners can send them anywhere. 3:17:07 But we have to send them through this long hallway. 3:17:11 And that is good because this helps build the trust 3:17:16 between the miners and the users of the sidechain. 3:17:20 And so the miners are keeping themselves, 3:17:22 BIP300 keeps the miners on a short leash. 3:17:24 BIP300 is miners, is miners being handcuffed to some extent. 3:17:31 And that's why the system would work well enough 3:17:34 that users would actually pay transaction fees over there. 3:17:37 So it's kind of like BIP300 specifically 3:17:42 is a weird one for miners to activate by themselves. 3:17:52 That's kind of a weird quirk of BIP300 3:17:54 that wouldn't apply if the miners 3:17:56 just unilaterally activated something like 119. 3:18:00 So it's kind of just strange like that. 3:18:04 It's a strange situation. 3:18:06 But yeah, if only the miners do it 3:18:08 and no one else enforces it. 3:18:10 There's also, the question has a couple of nuances. 3:18:15 Because again, the old soft fork idea was 3:18:18 when the network is ready, the whole network updates. 3:18:20 And when is the network ready? 3:18:22 When miners have activated. 3:18:25 So the question of the miners could activate it at first, 3:18:30 enforce it for a while. 3:18:32 As this time period is passing of it being active, 3:18:35 miner only active, 3:18:37 a couple other full nodes activate to be in compliance, 3:18:42 like in synchronicity with the miners version of the nodes. 3:18:48 So in that case, 3:18:50 the, 3:18:53 it was activated by miners first, 3:18:55 but then a couple other nodes activated later. 3:18:59 There's no real way of knowing whether or not they have 3:19:02 because it's very hard to measure the node situation 3:19:08 unlike the mining situation where it's very easy to measure. 3:19:11 So what I'm trying to say is miners activated first, 3:19:14 but then maybe they're stuck with it. 3:19:17 They can't actually unilaterally unactivate it. 3:19:20 In the first five minutes, maybe they could, 3:19:23 but as time goes on, they don't know. 3:19:25 They have to worry who else has activated this 3:19:30 because they don't even really know. 3:19:31 There's not even a way for them to tell. 3:19:32 So it might be nobody, but it might be a lot of people. 3:19:35 It might be Coinbase. 3:19:36 And now you're a miner, you're kind of trapped. 3:19:39 So there's a little bit more nuance to it. 3:19:43 I think, 3:19:46 how to explain this? 3:19:49 Activation. 3:19:50 So can you repeat, you were saying, 3:19:53 can you repeat what you were saying? 3:19:55 Yeah, my question on this question was actually 3:19:58 about something else completely, 3:20:00 but I do enjoy the current, 3:20:04 but in general, I think that's, 3:20:09 my view on the whole thing regarding mining, a miner activated soft fork and a normal soft fork is that the miners can probably do it themselves, right? 3:20:20 It's totally possible to coordinate in some way. I'm mostly worried about the social fabric of things. It would be better if we could try to convince Shinobi and whatever and they will stop. 3:20:35 We invite these people to come to this space or to do a debate. 3:20:40 Yeah, I know, I know. 3:20:42 You know what I mean? 3:20:44 Yeah, I agree. 3:20:46 What else can I do other than that? 3:20:49 I fully agree. I'm just saying that it will be better to first try to convince people. And I think it's inevitable, like you said in a tweet, that as drivechains are one of the only L2s that directly benefit the miners themselves, 3:21:10 there is reason to believe that they will choose to activate drivechains eventually anyway. So, the coordination of that might be messy, but I think it's fully likely that it will happen. 3:21:25 I just wish that we somehow could get people on board eventually before we start another big war regarding forks or whatever like we had in 2017. So, yeah, that's just my general rambling about these things. 3:21:44 Yeah, I agree. That is, we're trying to do that. I think, yeah, we're trying to do these spaces. We put out info on the sites, layer2labs.com. We put out the demo software. So, all of that is good. So, yeah, I'm trying to do that. 3:22:12 I do think that a lot of these people are like, they're not in good faith. They just don't want to, like, they're not interested in the truth. They decided long ago that this idea was bad, and now they can't back down. 3:22:36 So, I'm not sure exactly what I should do. I think in that case, I'm kind of obligated to ignore those people and focus on everyone else. 3:22:50 Yeah, it's quite messy with some of the discussions going on, I've 3:22:55 definitely seen that. 3:22:57 like my view, just reading stuff is that, like I think 3:23:02 that the Drivechain proponents are winning in the discussions, at least 3:23:08 mostly. 3:23:10 I'm not sure that people really care about these long toxic 3:23:14 Twitter threads 3:23:17 stuff but yeah I mean one kind of funny thing to point out what kind of funny thing to 3:23:23 point out is everyone hated Bitmain so much like on Twitter like the most hated 3:23:29 but Antpool is still like the number two pool or whatever 3:23:33 So, it doesn't translate. So, you're like, how misleading is Twitter anyway? It must be pretty misleading, I think. 3:23:46 Yeah, probably that's true, too. Just a question to you. Let's say there's a generic soft fork like Bit119. Do you think that every main chain node needs to upgrade, or just like those who want to use Bit119? 3:24:05 No, I don't think so. I don't agree with that. I love Luke Dashjr and I actually love spending time in his head. I've had the opportunity to talk to him a lot online and in person. But I think his point of view on this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 3:24:22 So, what is your point of view regarding soft forks? 3:24:26 Again, I see it all as problem solution. So, like I'm driving down the road. I notice my car is drifting too far to the left. Okay, I turn the steering wheel a little to the right. And then, oh, a stop sign is coming. I press the stop. I press the brake. You know? Okay, it's time to go again. 3:24:45 I don't have this grand thing. So, to me, it's like in practice, how does it work? You do your Bitcoin research. You decide to run a node. You run a node. You do not touch that node again, because this node is your lifeline. It's telling you if you have money or not. 3:25:03 You don't even upgrade this node until you have to. So, you're going to skip like three, four, five upgrade cycles. You're going to upgrade it like once every three years, maybe. And when you do, maybe you don't even upgrade to the latest version. You say, you know what, I don't know if I trust the latest version yet. I'm going to pick a version that's like six, seven months old. 3:25:26 And in that way, not everyone can do this, of course, because this is kind of a little bit of free riding. But I say, don't upgrade unless it solves a problem for you. And if you do that, if you do as I suggest, then nothing bad will happen to you. 3:25:40 People say, you're immediately downgraded to SPV. This is so misleading as to essentially be a lie, I think. But this is what Luke said. I don't think Luke is a liar. Luke is a very honest person. But you know what I mean? What are they talking about? That's not actually the case. 3:25:57 Well, I do agree with Luke. I can explain my point of view. I see your point. There can be free riders, right? Because if the majority of hash power follows the new rules, then it should not be any problem. 3:26:19 But to try to illustrate my point of view or point is that, let's say there's a new OpenShack SIG, like OpenShack SIG 2 or whatever. And let's say that you get cookies if you use that OpenShack SIG 2 for your transactions. 3:26:37 So that means that a lot of users will start using this new OpenShack SIG 2 open code and make transactions with that. So if you stay behind on the old software, that means that you won't validate transactions anymore, at least the vast majority of them. 3:26:56 So in that case, I don't think it makes sense to stay on the old software because you're not really a full node anymore if you don't follow the rules of network. So that's how I see it. You're not a main chain full node in the same capacity as you were before if you don't follow all the new software. 3:27:20 And I suppose you're right that you can free ride and stuff. It's not a danger if the vast majority of the hash power and the full nodes in the network do follow the rules. But just on principle, I do think it looks like you're degraded to SPV-like security, if that makes sense. I'm not sure if my rambling makes sense. 3:27:44 But it depends if there are soft forks and then there are other soft forks. For example, the tighten the rules soft fork is a very good example, the OP-CHECK SIG example. And if you read the posts I wrote, I wrote those two posts about how the soft fork terminology is screwed up. 3:28:06 Is it a recent post? 3:28:08 Sorry? 3:28:09 Is it a recent post? 3:28:11 No, they're literally from 2017 or something. They're from forever. But they apply more now than they ever did. But I discussed a similar example where it's like did coins flow through an opcode that you didn't understand to you? And now if so, does that count as a confirmation or not? Because you don't know. 3:28:38 So that's a good example. 3:28:41 Let me give you a different example, though, which is when they had the soft fork, some transactions used the S-value. 3:28:51 We banned certain types of signature malleability because you could troll wallets, if I'm remembering it correctly. It's this big integer that's like modulus whatever, like 256 minus something. 3:29:09 So you could just keep adding to that and the transaction would stay valid. The signature would stay valid, but the transaction ID would change, and this was just trolling the network. 3:29:24 So you had a situation where there was a soft fork to ban that, but then I had an old Electrum wallet that only made the transactions with a value that happened to be like not in the valid range. 3:29:44 So to me, I was required to upgrade my Electrum wallet back then, this DERS value fork. 3:29:56 And that was not like... So what I'm trying to paint a picture is that the word soft fork is used to describe many different situations. And so what I'm trying to say is in some situations... 3:30:15 Yeah, but that's like a sensitive soft fork, right? Because you cannot use certain S-values. That's like a stricter force of attention. 3:30:28 Yes, and it's like, it would also be a soft fork if they said every transaction is now banned until you upgrade to this type of software. 3:30:37 It's like an evil variant of a soft fork. That's really scary. 3:30:40 So that is what I'm getting at. And in those posts, I describe different dimensions. 3:30:48 So let me take you back, if I may, on a boring story. But the original usage of the first time soft and hard fork, the distinction was made was by Gavin Andresen in 2012. 3:31:02 And he said, there's too many people running different versions of the code. And they said, a version that requires everyone to update is probably dead on arrival. 3:31:12 So we can never do that. We'll call that a hard change. That's what he said. 3:31:16 And he said, but if we do a change that does not require everyone to update, then we'll call that a soft change. 3:31:23 So that's the original meaning is actually a soft fork is one that does not require everyone to upgrade. 3:31:31 Now you see, this is just like completely incompatible with Luke Dashjr's version, which he says that you are not, unless you run a network, something that enforces every soft fork, you are not even running a Bitcoin Core node. 3:31:46 So he is like, they're just 180 degrees separated. 3:31:49 Yeah, I think it depends on usage of the soft fork and validating the rules of network, right? Because I still, I think I am on Luke's side, although I don't fully understand, I don't know his point of view. 3:32:04 But from my point of view, at least, it's not good if you see anyone can spend opcode that you don't understand, right? 3:32:13 So because then it can be an invalid spend of that one. 3:32:19 Yeah, I think you're 100% correct. One reason why you're certainly correct, and I presented about this exact topic at Building on Bitcoin in Lisbon, I think it was like June, July 2018 or something. 3:32:31 So I gave a talk on this exact topic, and one reason why you are especially correct, that you shouldn't, if you see opcodes that you don't understand, and you don't know the rules being enforced, that's bad. 3:32:44 One reason is that if two different people try to soft fork on opnop5, or opnop7 or whatever, but they use different rules, then that actually, one of them triggers a hard fork in practice. 3:32:59 Because they are just like one and the same thing. 3:33:05 So that's a case where soft fork plus soft fork equals hard fork, which is the whole point of soft fork is to not do the hard fork. 3:33:12 There's one thing, before I continue my story though, I mean, so you're completely right, and what I was saying in the 2018 talk is that what we should actually do is we should have a range of behavior where we know that it is unknown. 3:33:28 And actually sidechains are one of the few things that meet this criteria. 3:33:33 But the intriguing thing actually is the opnop, because you understand why with sidechains, as you say, I know that there's a sidechain in slot 9, I know that I don't know what the rules are, I know that a BitBoy 100 withdrawal has to do these criteria. 3:33:49 So the sidechain is actually a solution to this problem, and that's why I call it consensus and dissent. 3:33:55 The problem of dissent, like if people fight over opnop5, what do we do? 3:33:59 Like how do we know what happened? 3:34:01 But one intriguing thing is not only do sidechains do that, but the opnops themselves were put in there by Satoshi, and it was deliberately explained that they would be reserved for later use in that way. 3:34:19 So it's kind of weird, like you say, well, I don't know what opnop5 is, but actually when you downloaded whatever version of the software you did download, that version of the software came with like the understanding, the fully and unanimously agreed on understanding that these are the things that have not been used yet, so watch out for that. 3:34:45 It was kind of like, you see what I'm saying, it's not really like it was completely undefined, it was like saying, we reserve these for future use, so if they start being used, then you just conclude, oh, I'm living in the future now. 3:34:58 I think the SPV comparison comes from like, as you don't know the rules of the new, as you don't know the rules of the opnop5. 3:35:10 You do know that it was reserved for future use, though, and so you say, well, I guess I don't care. 3:35:15 Yeah, well, there's a risk that if there is an incorrect spend from the transaction that uses the opcode, you risk yourself going on a chain that is not valid, right? 3:35:35 If the hash power, one option is to try to cheat you, you could end up in a wrongful chain, so to say. So, that's why, from a principle standpoint, it looks similar to SPV to me. 3:35:53 As in SPV, you trust the hash power as well there, you don't really validate the transactions. 3:36:00 It's a very interesting philosophical conversation, but let me lay down some weird paradoxes for you to resolve, if this is your point of view, which is that every protocol that exists, any protocol that could have a full and an SPV version, it is an SPV version of something. 3:36:26 So, every protocol is an SPV protocol of something else, and a full protocol of itself. 3:36:35 SPV just means you're not checking all the rules. 3:36:39 So, for example, I could have a rule, I could get it together with the miners, and I could say, we're going to have this mandatory 8 terabyte extension block that we know is mandatory, but everyone else, we're just going to put the hash of it in the block, the blockchain. 3:36:55 You must have it, or the block is invalid, and I get 100% of the hash rate to upgrade, 100% of the hash rate plus me, I'm just myself. 3:37:07 And we secretly do this. 3:37:11 You have no – see, this is why I tried to say, before I return to this example, let me remind you that I tried to say there are different types of soft fork. 3:37:20 And this is what I presented on in Lisbon, where ones where you say, we are taking something that was reserved for future use, that is kind of a different kind of thing than the wrong S-value, the signature, and that is a different kind of thing from just censoring transactions, which is sort of a tightening the rules soft fork. 3:37:44 The S-value thing is a censorship soft fork. 3:37:48 Evil soft fork, precisely, right. 3:37:52 Okay, so returning to my thing about – because you say the principle of the matter is you don't want to be degraded to SPV. 3:38:01 But in my example, I'm making – I'm going from Bitcoin Core version 25 or 26. 3:38:10 I'm going to Bitcoin version 27, but it's secret. 3:38:14 You don't know that there's a new thing. 3:38:17 All the miners have upgraded to it. 3:38:19 Now you have been, quote, degraded to SPV, but you didn't even know that you were. 3:38:25 Yeah, I agree. 3:38:27 There can't be secret rules that miners enforce, right? 3:38:31 We cannot possibly know if they enforce certain rules themselves. 3:38:37 That is actually problematic, especially for censorship and stuff. 3:38:41 Well, it is kind of problematic, but what I'm actually going to argue is that it is completely and totally unavoidable in every possible way. 3:38:53 So now let's imagine a situation where once every 4,000 times, miners take – they become offended by a certain transaction, and they're determined to reorg it out of the blockchain. 3:39:08 So this is the miners' insult paradox. 3:39:14 I give you my first paradox, which is the mandatory 8-terabyte extension block that no one knows about, paradox one. 3:39:21 Then paradox two is occasionally, miners will become irrationally offended by a transaction that has too many 4s in the TXID, and they just decide, well, how could this have happened? 3:39:35 I hate this transaction, and they reorg the blockchain to get rid of it. 3:39:40 Well, in that case, every single human in the world that's not the miners is in SPV mode relative to that because there is a new rule that no one knows about. 3:39:54 It's just an onset of a psychology. 3:39:58 It's just something that could happen. 3:40:01 They could just decide they want to. 3:40:04 You could say, well, they won't reorg because reorg costs them money, but then you're just arguing for SPV mode the whole time. 3:40:11 Because then you're saying nothing will reorg, and everything will be fine, and blah, blah, blah. 3:40:15 So it's kind of like these are paradoxes that – to me, these paradoxes mean that Luke Desch, Jr. cannot be right. 3:40:25 But maybe not to you. But to me, they mean that something like we don't actually know – I have no way of knowing if I'm running a full node or not. 3:40:37 I take my best guess. 3:40:39 I agree. That is problematic. But I'm not sure – I see your point, of course, but I'm not sure why you would not choose to upgrade the core software to support the new opcodes to be more certain that you are following all the mentioned rules and thus are a full node. 3:41:04 Yes, you're right that you would if that was your goal. But remember, that isn't always people's goal. People are complex. So for example – 3:41:16 I would argue that you should run SPV then, right? I would argue that you should run SPV instead if you don't want to – that seems like the best option if you just want to – 3:41:25 Could you repeat what you said? 3:41:28 Sorry, I was just saying that if they don't want to follow certain rules, I don't see why you would follow any rules then. It makes more sense to just run an SPV client because that's much cheaper than validating the signatures and stuff. 3:41:45 So for me, it's either follow all the things or just follow nothing. I don't see why you would pick and choose which softworks you want to enforce. That does make sense to me at least. 3:42:02 First of all, you're absolutely right about that which is that in practice, none of this actually really matters because what people do instead is they don't run – they don't enforce – they don't go a la carte with the rules. 3:42:13 They basically say, do I want to upgrade to version 25 or not? And so version 25 comes with innumerable changes, one of which might be a new version 28 or whatever, version 27. 3:42:28 But I'll answer your fundamental question because you say, why wouldn't someone want to be on the absolute most synchronized version? 3:42:38 There are two important answers to that question, very important. One is philosophical and one is practical. 3:42:45 The practical one I already gave you at the very beginning of the story where I said what you should do is you upgrade to the node and you wait and you just run your node and you're not doing anything fancy. 3:42:55 You're just receiving payments and you don't want to touch your setup because every time you touch your setup, you're at risk of being hacked. 3:43:04 So people don't upgrade, and even back in 2012, that's how Gavin Andresen started all this. 3:43:10 It's where he said, listen, not everyone upgrades. A lot of people just don't upgrade, so it's probably too late. 3:43:17 If we were relying on everyone to upgrade, we're probably dead, so we can't do that anymore, but we want to continue to upgrade. 3:43:24 I was going to say that it makes sense for miners to upgrade. Those are the guys that really need to upgrade in a soft fork, right? 3:43:32 The majority of hash power needs to import the rules, otherwise you risk chain splits and stuff. 3:43:40 But you're right that a soft fork means that not everyone at once needs to be coordinated and up to the software. 3:43:48 Well, that's what it meant in the past, and that's what it sort of still means to me, but now it means... 3:43:52 Yeah, I agree with that. 3:43:54 Now, the second reason is, of course, if we decide that we must, come hell or high water, always upgrade to the latest version, kind of no matter what, like if that's the principle, 3:44:07 well, now we've handcuffed ourselves to the railroad tracks, so to speak, because it's only a matter of time before this is used against us, where we say... 3:44:18 I mean, according to Luke's point of view, he has various intriguing ways around this that I can try to regurgitate, if you're still interested. 3:44:30 You have to upgrade to the latest version. So what if the latest version is bad? What if the latest version just has a keylogger or is run by North Korea or something? 3:44:43 Now we have to upgrade to the latest version, no matter what, or we're in SPV and Bitcoin has failed. 3:44:52 So Luke has a weird... Luke's view about this is that you slowly expand the concept of what is or is not a full node to include the entire Bitcoin development process and the open source software development process and the entire community. 3:45:09 So he's kind of asking for kind of a lot, but that's kind of the road that he goes down, and maybe he'll show up and he can talk about this. I don't think he probably doesn't do SPV, because I bet he doesn't do... 3:45:24 What I see some people on Twitter and other places claim is that software doesn't concern them, right? 3:45:35 Because I don't see it that way. I see Bitcoin as a consensus system, right? So full nodes and networks should follow and enforce the rules. 3:45:42 And it's true that soft forks makes it possible to circumvent this, because you rely on the hash power maintaining a single chain, right? 3:45:53 And there's no split in half and stuff. But even if you don't use a soft fork, you still are affected by it indirectly. 3:46:08 You could introduce a soft fork that has some kind of bug in it that will split different nodes in half. 3:46:17 But you know that that actually is the advantage of the soft fork, is that in that particular case, if you split off, then it must be the case that your bug actually caused a hard fork and you are on the wrong side, the side that's going to lose. 3:46:32 And this is exactly what happened in July 2015. 3:46:35 Right. But what I'm saying is that it would still affect you, even if you don't necessarily run the soft fork. 3:46:42 You can go through all the actual examples. Take your op checksig example. 3:46:47 Yeah. 3:46:48 And the scenario would be something like, it's a new op code that started as anyone can spend. 3:46:58 And it turns out, though, we make it so that you can only spend if you do X, Y, and Z during a full moon or something. 3:47:06 We soft fork some new rules onto it. 3:47:09 And now, I'm a merchant running an old version, and someone spends, they have received money to this new op code, and they spend that money to me. 3:47:22 And to me, it looks like anyone can spend. 3:47:24 But actually, the rules are being broken. 3:47:27 This is a transaction that breaks the whatever. It's not spent during the quarter moon or whatever I just said. 3:47:38 So it's not going to work. 3:47:40 So if I receive this, you're not talking about the case where 95% of miners are enforcing this, because then obviously it will not get six confirmations. 3:47:57 Do you understand that? 3:47:59 I think that if miners are enforcing 95%, then there's no problem really with not upgrading, right? 3:48:09 Because the miners will ensure that there is only one chain, and a temporary split will be resolved very quickly, probably. 3:48:18 So your software may warn you, it may say, listen, I'm being spent something that uses one of the OPNAP5s. 3:48:27 So maybe I should wait for more confirmations. 3:48:30 But how many confirmations you wait is kind of up to you, and reorgs are always possible. 3:48:38 We don't want to do anything to encourage reorgs, of course. 3:48:41 We want to discourage reorgs. 3:48:44 But it's not like reorgs predate, reorgs certainly predate like OPNAP5 or whatever. 3:48:55 Those have always compound. 3:48:57 So you're not really saying that. 3:49:01 You're kind of saying something like, I don't know how I got these coins. 3:49:06 But the real failure mode is kind of to say, the failure mode is mostly the people who receive them to the new OP-CHECKSIG. 3:49:20 They're the ones taking the risk, because they could be in a situation where this rule is actually not enforced, 3:49:29 and then they're just going to straight up lose their coins, because they started as anyone can spend coins. 3:49:33 Well, the lost receiver will also risk it, even if they use OP-CHECKSIG1 or whatever. 3:49:42 The whole chain might break if there's a really bad situation. 3:49:46 Yes, but that's like the reorg case. 3:49:51 Yes, yeah. 3:49:53 But you see, that's kind of the point though, isn't it? 3:49:56 The old thinking was, if there is a split on how this rule is enforced, if it's a soft change, then if the miners are enforcing it, 3:50:15 then the blocks will only be found on the side, the longest chain will always be on the side that enforced the rules. 3:50:23 So this is kind of intriguing. 3:50:25 The original soft fork logic is really kind of very different from what people seem to have in mind today, 3:50:31 which is something like the UASF SegWit thing, where people think it's something the community does and the miners play no role. 3:50:44 But in the past, the miners played the absolutely essential role. 3:50:47 So, you know, that's fine, but I'm just saying that was how it was. 3:50:53 I think people in Yandron are very confused about soft forks and even hard forks, probably. 3:50:58 There is a lot of confusion out there. 3:51:01 An important thing to point out is that the many different versions of the soft fork are sometimes opposite of each other, actually. 3:51:10 Because the soft fork used to mean tighten the rules. 3:51:15 I mean, excuse me, the tighten the rules thing kind of came later. 3:51:19 The soft fork used to mean this is a chain split that will resolve itself without anyone doing anything. 3:51:25 And it's because the new opcode, the new chop checksig, you could either break the rules on an old node, 3:51:31 or you could enforce the rules with a new node. 3:51:36 And this is exactly the logic of what happened in July 2015, where you can only... 3:51:44 Since breaking the rules works on the old nodes and enforcing the rules works on the old nodes, that is why the old nodes have the biggest advantage. 3:51:53 So if you have the miners plus something that works on both networks, you'll always win. 3:51:59 Maybe this is a little rambly, but if you have something that works on both networks, 3:52:03 if it's backward and forward compatible, it's really forward compatible. 3:52:07 This is another thing that people don't really know. 3:52:09 The feature is forward compatible, which is a very rarely used term. 3:52:15 Forward compatible is when the feature will work on a piece of software that is in the past. 3:52:25 Backward compatible is the other way around. 3:52:30 This is another thing that everyone describes as backward compatible, but they really mean forward compatible. 3:52:35 But it doesn't matter because everyone knows what they're talking about. 3:52:39 Anyway, where I'm getting with this is it used to mean that if the miners were with a change that worked on either version, 3:52:47 the old nodes could safely use the new version. 3:52:53 Whereas if you had a change such as Bitcoin Cash block size increase, in that scenario, everyone must upgrade. 3:53:09 So no matter what the miners do, there will be two chains. 3:53:14 And everyone must, in order to recombine into one chain, which is of course the whole point of Satoshi software is to keep everyone on just one chain. 3:53:22 And in a sense, every altcoin is like a weird orphaned block of some kind in a vague abstract sense. 3:53:30 Because it's all consensus to deter double spending and to deter inflation. 3:53:35 So in the case of a layer one block size increase, everyone, in order to get back on the same network, 3:53:45 everyone must upgrade their software to change that one to an eight, or change that one to a 16, or whatever the number is. 3:53:55 So that was the old definition. 3:54:01 And then later on, people kind of came up with the tighten the rules, which I think I regard as a kind of rule of thumb. 3:54:08 Because actually the Evil Fork showed that that was not the case. 3:54:11 And the other things were also like the S value signature thing was technically, it shrank the S value soft fork, shrank the values of S that were allowed. 3:54:25 But it's not like I freely chose an S, there was a piece of software doing it. 3:54:29 So in that way, it was actually basically a hard fork, because it required me to do something. 3:54:35 It gets weird with the S value, right? 3:54:38 Because I would say it is the tightening of rules. 3:54:41 But as everyone needs to upgrade, it basically becomes a hard fork as well then, because as we talked about. 3:54:49 It's forcing, it's impelling, kind of like whipping the user, you must upgrade. 3:54:56 Yeah, so that becomes a hard fork in practice then, because you have to upgrade, right? 3:55:01 Yes, by the old definition. 3:55:02 Yes, but you see now that the old definition and the new definition are actually in conflict sometimes. 3:55:08 Yeah, I see it for myself. 3:55:10 If you were to activate BIP300 via soft fork secretly, and then a bunch of people run the user-resisted soft fork to ban all uses of whatever it is, opnap5, ban all BIP300 messages. 3:55:30 Then those people actually hard fork themselves if miners ignore those people. 3:55:39 But there's actually some nuance to it. 3:55:42 I'm going to try to explain it again. 3:55:44 BIP300 is good because you turn it on with a soft fork that is harmless to everyone else. 3:55:49 You can also turn it off with a second soft fork that is harmless to everyone else. 3:55:54 And both of these soft forks are actually soft forks in both the tightening the rules sense and in the, if a majority of miners do it, then it doesn't affect anyone else's sense. 3:56:06 So, because you have first BIP300 is activated, you take opnap5 or something, and you enforce it, you use the soft fork. 3:56:16 But then if for some reason people decide, oh, wait a minute, BIP300 was a mistake, we need to purge this forever. 3:56:24 The miners just say opnap5 is banned henceforth. 3:56:28 You tighten the rules again. 3:56:30 You soft fork it again. 3:56:32 And now this doesn't matter if you ran the pre-drivechain version, the post-drivechain version, the pre-anti-BIP300 version, or it doesn't matter which of the three regions of time that you're in. 3:56:46 Any of those, since if you run any of those nodes, they will just be all on the same network and they'll all see the same thing and they'll all just see no more opnap5. 3:56:56 Opnap5 will be gone and everything else will be 100% fine and completely and totally unaffected. 3:57:03 But what some people have in mind is they say if BIP300 is activated by miners, we will run a soft fork to tighten the rules, to fight the miners, to tighten the rules and eliminate opnap5. 3:57:22 We will say we refuse to allow opnap5 into any block. 3:57:29 If we do, it's invalid. 3:57:31 If we see that the transaction is invalid, that block is invalid. 3:57:36 Now what would actually happen in practice is the miners would try to figure out what's the economic value at stake, who are these people. 3:57:46 If it was Coinbase, that's different than if it's some guy. 3:57:49 But I'm just saying since you asked all these philosophical questions, we'll say imagine some people do run that software but the miners, in quotes, which is to say more than 50% of the miners or 100% of the miners. 3:58:04 The 100% of the miners do not. 3:58:07 So let's say BIP300 activates with classic miner activated soft fork. 3:58:11 That new thing, the user-resisted thing to ban opnap5, that is a soft fork in the tighten the rules sense. 3:58:23 But actually it is a hard fork because the only people joining those people in the old sense. 3:58:27 It's a hard fork in the old sense because only the people who run that, those people who run the user-resisted fork, they will eventually see an opnap5 mined in a Bitcoin block. 3:58:40 They will reject it as invalid. 3:58:43 They will be on their own network with their own little nub or whatever you want to call it, their own little tip. 3:58:51 And the other network will proceed without them because they'll say that's invalid. 3:58:57 But everyone else, everyone who ran an old version, everyone who is indifferent, all the miners, those people will be on that network. 3:59:06 So is this making sense? 3:59:07 Yeah, it does. 3:59:09 This is something I've also been thinking about because like UASF, whether it be in SegWit or BIP300, like if you are a minority group, you will make a chain split. 3:59:23 And that will be a permanent chain split because you will expect the hash power to keep going with BIP300. 3:59:29 So it effectively becomes a hard fork as well, even though, as you said, the user-resisted soft fork will be a tightening of rules or soft fork. 3:59:37 It becomes a hard fork because it creates a chain split where the majority hash power stays on the BIP300. 3:59:47 So the same thing could have happened with SegWit in 2017. 3:59:54 Like if the BIP-148 people would try to block the non-signaling blocks and stuff. 4:00:05 But in that case, we also had BIP-91, I think it was called, that also did censorship stuff to enforce the 95% threshold. 4:00:15 So yeah, I see what you're saying. 4:00:17 In some situations, soft forks become hard forks. 4:00:21 Or I like to call them chain splits, permanent chain splits. 4:00:25 They become it in practice. 4:00:28 Yes, by the old definition and the new definition, both the loosening the rules definition and a fork that does not resolve itself, only the hard fork is a chain split. 4:00:40 A soft fork is never a chain split, which gives it a very ironic name, since of course every other fork we see, a fork in the road, a culinary fork, those are always splitting things. 4:00:50 But a soft fork would never do that by the original definition. 4:00:55 Because you can't just go your own without the miners, right? So that's why it becomes weird, like a UASF thing. 4:01:07 There is a similar situation to Bitcoin Cash, where if you upgrade, then you are on the new network. If you do not, then you are not. So that would be just an interesting situation where they are the same. 4:01:24 I think you were saying whether or not it could have happened with SegWit. Yes, this is another important point, which is that as I told the story before, this is just me telling what I think happened. 4:01:40 But there was really no case against SegWit. It was just the miners were frustrated and they were going to withhold SegWit until they got the block size increase that they wanted, which was also not popular. 4:01:52 Because some people wanted it, but not very many, and also the block size increase itself was fraught with unanswered questions, like are we going to continue to do a hard fork every time the blocks fill up, or when will we stop increasing the block size? 4:02:10 None of these questions had really been answered. I think all of this stuff was the kiss of death for everyone who wanted the L1 block size increase. 4:02:22 If you wanted the L1 block size increase, what you had to do was propose one complete permanent schedule or something to do instead. You say this is what we'll do instead. 4:02:36 Instead, they were like, we want to hard fork to two megabytes now, and then with it presumably being the case that when the two megabyte blocks filled up, they would then want to hard fork again. 4:02:49 And all the reasons for doing so would just apply double, so they would probably get what they wanted. So that was why I think people didn't actually like the block size increase. 4:02:59 I don't think it was presented or thought out. 4:03:03 There was a couple of other proposals out there, like a 17% increase every year or something like that, and then there was some kind of dynamic schedule. 4:03:13 But I think all of them was pretty insanely aggressive. The only one I think, now in hindsight, was like Luke Dashjr. also had a proposal that will actually decrease the block size initially, and then over time it will actually go past one megabyte. 4:03:31 But that one was really, really unpopular back in 2017, and for good reason, because the opinion was different back then. But I think now in hindsight, his proposal actually looks like the best one of the bunch. 4:03:45 But yeah, none of the proposals got any traction, unfortunately. So we're stuck with this mindset of hating on block size increases, because I don't think they're bad. They're not necessarily bad, it's just a matter of how aggressive you are. 4:04:07 But I think what certainly was bad was the hard fork itself. I don't think people took seriously. This is a horrible problem to just inflict on the community that had never had stuck together the whole time. 4:04:18 To say, well, everyone's going to go off and gather firewood, and some of us are going to meet at point A, and some of us are going to meet at point B. And you're like, that's not a reasonable thing to say. So a hard fork is very expensive. 4:04:33 And people took Luke Dashjr's thing as a sort of insult, which of course it wasn't. And of course Luke was the only person to have any kind of principled take on what is the correct number. What should the block size be? 4:04:52 Back then, no one else really had anything, including me. I was saying basically at the time, the hard fork – this isn't worth – 2X is not worth the hard fork, because I think the hard fork is not good. 4:05:04 And as you heard me just say to that other guy, that other guy who came up here, Cakes or whatever, Shiny Cakes, the dog. And so the stage was just that actually people wanted SegWit. People had worked on it. 4:05:20 There was an enormous amount of thought put into SegWit. There was an enormous amount of excitement around Lightning. SegWit was being held up for no reason. The block size increase was not as popular as it was. 4:05:35 It had many legitimate supporters, but it was just not – it was not like in the same state. There was all this SegWit 2X. The SegWit 2X stuff was like – people thought SegWit 2X was still coming. 4:05:49 So there was a weird perplexing situation where miners signed that SegWit 2X document that everyone hates, which they sort of should in some extent, but the document says that they'll activate SegWit or whatever, which they did. 4:06:03 It just said SegWit then. So there was a lot of stories about that, but what I'm getting at and why I bring it up and why I react to it, because you brought it up, which is actually relevant to BIP300, which is to say – because we were talking about what could have happened with SegWit and why what happened did happen. 4:06:21 This is actually related to this Napoleon thing that I was saying before about the good idea is just the good idea, and it's kind of a matter of time. It's a matter of when, not if. 4:06:31 So where I'm going with all this rambling is people actually wanted SegWit, and they didn't want the large block increase in that way, like on August 1st or whatever. 4:06:43 And that's why the UASF could have gone the other way, but if you had stayed, you would really have been on the minority, because you would be – even if you were a miner and you decided, I will break with the UASF. 4:07:01 Well, so many people had run the – so many people were wearing the hats, and they had it in their thing, and so many people wanted to move forward from the controversy. 4:07:13 Remember, SegWit itself was a block size increase from 1 to 4 megabytes, so it was the 2.3 megabyte compromise. 4:07:23 So if you compare – if you had to compare them, like how popular was SegWit versus how popular was this 2 megabyte hard fork, it's very disproportionate. 4:07:32 But you see, this is relevant to the conversation we just had about BIP300 and whether or not it could be activated under a similar circumstance, because now you have to say, who would you be against if some people run the user-resisted soft fork? 4:07:48 It's the people who run the user-resisted fork versus everyone – the pro-drivechain people plus everyone who is indifferent, which is like 99% of the whole group. 4:08:04 Most people aren't indifferent, of course. So in that case, it's a lot easier to see why miners could activate BIP300 via soft fork and why the user-resisted soft fork would not work, because the user-resisted soft fork is not doing anything. 4:08:20 It's just mean-spirited. It's very similar to being against gay marriage or something, where it's like they're just stopping other people from using the feature, a feature that should make the coin more useful and generate more transaction fees and more users. 4:08:37 The people who are against drivechain – I don't think there's any case of anyone actually knowing anything about drivechain and being against it. It's just people repeat what they hear on Twitter or something. 4:08:52 But anyone can come up. Come on up and say whatever. 4:09:07 No? No one? 4:09:17 Henry, are you there? You're on mute. 4:09:20 Yes, I'm here. 4:09:22 Okay. 4:09:28 Anyone want to come up and say anything? No? No one? 4:09:37 The code is connecting. 4:09:51 We've gone for four hours. I want to mention that I have a hard stop at five, so we can go for one more hour if you want. 4:10:01 Okay, great. On the East Coast, it's already 5.10, but maybe you mean something else. 4:10:11 Oh, I meant 6. 4:10:18 Okay, yes, we have someone else. Dune Moon is here. 4:10:23 Dune Moon is here. He has his chakra open. 4:10:31 Yeah, sorry. Thanks for letting me up. Just a quick question. So, I admittedly haven't been following it too terribly closely, but you had made a comment about the demand for these features and that that would maybe drive – pardon the pun – this chain. 4:11:00 This change eventually, anyway, almost like as an inevitability. If that is the case, why is there such an urgency now? Why is it seeming like it's being portrayed as something super urgent to change and get activated now, as opposed to letting that natural demand kind of push the issue later? 4:11:25 Yes, well, I don't – that's an interesting question. It has some nuance. I mean, one thing to say is this idea is from November 2015, so in general, it's moved very slowly. 4:11:41 But that doesn't really answer what you're really saying, which is that now people are more anxious about it, I think, activating it quickly, which I agree with you about that. 4:11:54 And I think if I had to guess, I would say that it is actually – I think part of it is that the culture has stagnated for a little while, and people want – they're becoming frustrated with the old things, and they are more interested in – they want something new. 4:12:18 And this is the type of thing that would just like open the floodgates of novelty, because you could just have – you have the ETH sidechain, and then it's just kind of like you don't need to participate in the old slow Bitcoin Core development process. 4:12:40 But yeah, I don't know. I don't really think that it is – I think – I mean I think there's some truth to what you say. I mean my point of view is like I had this idea a while ago. 4:12:53 I put out stuff pointing out that the idea is good. I'm kind of proven right every year, and the critics become crazier and crazier, and they argue for weirder and weirder things. 4:13:09 Like they used to argue that people aren't in control of their own Bitcoin, and that someone – a security officer should be able to stop them from spending their Bitcoin to a certain script, which was like a weird idea. 4:13:23 And now the idea is something like it's bad when miners earn more revenues. So it's kind of like – I think now it's kind of just like played itself out, and it's kind of like why are we still waiting? 4:13:37 I don't really know – I don't really think there's an urgency per se, but I do think that every year the competing coins get – I mean namely Ethereum. 4:13:52 I think they continue to make progress, and it's only a matter – like for example Ethereum could decide that they are going to make a small block ossified L1 and then do various other kinds of things, roll-ups or whatever, things that are very drivechain like. 4:14:07 And then they could say we want – we have the L1 ossified. I mean Ethereum is now proof of stake, so it's pretty different. 4:14:17 But yeah, I don't know. What do you mean? Do you mean anything specific when you say urgency? 4:14:22 Well, I guess since you brought up Ethereum, I guess a lot of critics would point to the lack of utility that has been demonstrated so far in real terms. 4:14:35 And so if that utility hasn't really been realized on Ethereum really, like truly, then why the urgency in opening up something that could replicate that in some fashion on Bitcoin just yet when there's all kinds of possible hydrogenics that would come with that change as well, perhaps, right? 4:15:02 That we don't know the future. I know that you've thought it through very exhaustively and you're very, very, very certain, but the truth is we don't really know how this complex system will react to having this incremental new functionality. 4:15:19 People have brought up the miner incentives and all that jazz. So since we don't know the future, there is still a chance that despite your exhaustive thinking on it, it will cause something to go awry. 4:15:32 And without that actual real tangible benefit or urgency or demand that is tangible right there, that has maybe been demonstrated in some fashion, even in an incremental small way in these other coins we talk about, then why take that risk? 4:15:51 It seems like a foolhardy systemic risk to take for no reason at this juncture. 4:15:57 I completely disagree. I mean, first of all, the miner incentives thing isn't real. It just means that miners may get paid more money. But the more important thing is that we take the risk either way. 4:16:12 So if you have a risk of someone inventing something new that's better and it replaces Bitcoin, this is all open source software, then that will obviously affect Bitcoiners and they will obviously also affect mining incentives. 4:16:27 Because if Bitcoin goes to zero, then the miners are cut out. So they go to nothing. 4:16:34 So the risk is kind of there no matter what. And the BIP300, it could be turned on with a soft fork, as I mentioned, and then just turned off. So it actually also is no risk, even if it did hypothetically could do something bad, which it really can't. 4:16:52 So it's actually the reverse of the way I see it, because I think that the risk is basically zero and the upside is enormous. The upside is very big. 4:17:05 You say that you don't really see it, but it's like wrapped Bitcoin is basically this idea just on ETH and only a much worse version. But it has billions of dollars of mark five, six billions of dollars in market cap. Maybe not. I don't know what it has today. Four billion, maybe. 4:17:21 But that's one thing you have. The fees paid on Ethereum are 50 times what they are in Bitcoin, or at least they were recently. 4:17:30 You have people building these things that they would want to use. It's like the whole Filecoin, not Filecoin specifically, but the whole family of things, the storage, whatever, the large blocker people. 4:17:48 And all of this is ruined by Metcalfe's law because it's all the square of the number of users we want. If we had everything focused in one coin, it would be much, much better than having it spread over many altcoins. 4:18:04 So we have a situation where the upside is enormous. The upside is making every transaction in the world a Bitcoin transaction and taking over completely, which we can't do now. 4:18:19 I see the gains, the potential gains there. The upside is there potentially. It will build out at some point in ways that we're not even aware of right now. 4:18:31 I'm just talking about the current state of things on the altcoin land. You mentioned Filecoin. You mentioned some of these other projects. They haven't actually provided any real scaled utility. 4:18:51 They seem to just result in a pump and dump scheme, a failed project that can't scale, can't do the thing that was initially set out to do. It's a bunch of experimentation. And yeah, you're going to expect a vast majority of things to fail. 4:19:02 But beyond the ability to provide a Ponzi scheme, what utility are we trying to really emulate here so far? 4:19:15 Well, I mean, Zcash. What about Zcash? Zcash is an example where the organization is weird and it has a dev tax and everything. It has inflation. 4:19:24 But the core idea of having one reusable address that has unbeatable privacy, that is an idea that everyone in Bitcoin used to want. 4:19:36 I don't know. I think now maybe some people pretend like they never wanted it, but that's just lying to themselves. 4:19:42 So what do you think of privacy? Is privacy real? 4:19:46 Yeah, no, I'm saying there's definitely potential gain, like juice. There's juice there to squeeze for sure. 4:19:52 But is privacy just like a pump and dump scheme or something? What about the fact that Monero may be... 4:19:58 I haven't said that. 4:19:59 Well, you said everything. 4:20:00 Well, you mentioned Zcash. I mean, if you look at its history, it looks like, if you look at the chart, it looks like a sequence of pump and dumps as all the altcoins do. 4:20:10 But I don't understand why you don't get that that is because it is an altcoin. It is not a sidechain. 4:20:16 Well, that's a conjecture for sure. And that may or may not be true. 4:20:20 You can't pump a number sidechain. It's a one-to-one peg. 4:20:27 It can neither pump nor dump it. 4:20:29 No, I mean, like whether there would be the utility gain. You're saying that they haven't gained utility because they are a pump and dump or it's been tied up in that. 4:20:41 I'm saying like if they demonstrate the utility, then there would be like a more tangible cause and reason to be able to come over here and make this change on Bitcoin. 4:20:52 Yeah, but they already have software where you can download it and use it and you have a reusable Z address that is fixed. 4:21:00 You can just put it in your Twitter profile or whatever, put it, you know, do whatever you want with it. 4:21:05 But the point is people send coins so that you do not know the amount, the sender or the receiver. 4:21:12 Now, that is what many people in Bitcoin wish they could build on Bitcoin. 4:21:17 Yeah, that's very powerful. 4:21:20 The assumption is that these sidechains wouldn't exceed the value of Bitcoin in general. 4:21:31 Because it's like putting a $20 bill into an ATM and then saying, well, it's the assumption that it will never give you 30. 4:21:37 Yes, that is. It's not an assumption. It's programmed into the rules. 4:21:43 How so? 4:21:45 It's just literally what the software does. If you use the software and you click, you do 13.2 percent. 4:21:51 But yeah, you see, you select five Bitcoin and you deposit them into a sidechain. 4:21:56 You say, I want to pay two Bitcoin to this person, pay half a Bitcoin fee and I put 1.5 into sidechain number eight. 4:22:03 You do that on L1. Sidechain number eight will credit you 1.5 Bitcoin. 4:22:09 That's just what it does. Then if you want to withdraw, you get some Bitcoin over there. 4:22:13 You have 2.5. You say, I want to withdraw. I have these Bitcoin on L2. I want to withdraw. 4:22:20 You type in whatever. I want to send 2.5 to this mainchain address. It's the L1 address. 4:22:25 And you click the button and then that is what it does. 4:22:30 It does all that unilaterally without interacting with any other human being. 4:22:34 There's no other human being doing that. It's just you and the rules of the software. 4:22:43 Go ahead. 4:22:44 Did you have a question? 4:22:46 Oh, I was just going to say, that leads to the question. 4:22:50 You probably addressed it. The migration of mining power to preferentially go into the sidechains because of the higher rewards. 4:23:01 The miners don't go anywhere. The miners stay on L1 and it's the merge miners modification to the new piece of software that allows it to ride along for free. 4:23:19 The transaction selection that they include in blocks. Isn't there a MEV issue here? 4:23:27 No, not really. 4:23:29 Well, you say not really. So not really or you just don't think that it's important? 4:23:35 The real answer is no, there is not. But I sigh in despair because people just say there is on Twitter. But there is not at all. 4:23:44 When they say MEV, what they mean is miners are collecting more... 4:23:48 Is it a case of there's none that you can foresee? 4:23:51 No, it's literally not possible. 4:23:54 Okay. 4:23:55 And I asked many times, Alex B and these other people, I told them, write down an example with a pen and a piece of paper and you'll see that there is none. 4:24:04 And they have never done this, never taken me up on this challenge. 4:24:08 And then I did a podcast with Fiatjaf and he said two people messaged him or maybe he said one of them after the... 4:24:19 But at the podcast, he said at least one person had messaged him and said they tried to write it down, but then they realized that it would not be possible for there to be MEV. 4:24:30 What merge mining is doing is the sidechains block is worth a certain amount of money. 4:24:39 If there's MEV, it means they can reorganize transactions to extract extra money. 4:24:45 But the way it works in drivechain is that extra money just counts as part of the block because the miners are not even looking at the block. 4:24:52 So whoever is assembling the block just pays themselves all the transaction fees and all the fees due to MEV and no one else sees what they do. 4:25:01 So the block is worth whatever it is and then they just... layer one miners just get paid on L1. 4:25:07 So they don't even see the sidechain block. 4:25:09 They get paid all the transaction, all the value of the block. 4:25:12 They don't even see it. 4:25:14 So how's this? This is Namecoin. How's it like Namecoin plus? 4:25:18 Namecoin uses old merge mining. That's traditional merge mining. 4:25:22 Right. So it's different. 4:25:24 Okay. Yes. 4:25:27 Well, in this, the sidechain block, the world of the side... 4:25:33 I think blind merge mining is like the inevitable equilibrium outcome of all merge mining anyway. 4:25:41 So it doesn't even matter. There really is no difference. 4:25:44 But basically what blind merge mining is doing is it's saying the miner doesn't even want to pay the cost of running the sidechain node. 4:25:51 And there happen to be many sidechain nodes out there already that are just regular people who are using the blockchain. 4:26:01 Like the timestamp? 4:26:03 You can just team up with them since they already exist. 4:26:08 So it's like many people are running Bitcoin nodes today but not mining. 4:26:12 But a miner could team up with them. 4:26:14 This is the same thing where many people run the L2 nodes, the sidechain nodes. 4:26:19 The L1 miners just team up with them. 4:26:22 And they say, listen, I'm not running this node, but you already have a node. 4:26:27 So someone tell me what the block hash is supposed to be and how much fees I'm supposed to get. 4:26:36 And then they'll just mine the block. 4:26:38 So what the blind merge mining does is someone pays the miner on L1 the fee balance in return for the miner just mining the block without asking any questions. 4:26:50 So the miners don't look at the sidechain block. 4:26:53 They don't pay any sidechain node costs at all. 4:26:56 And they get all the fee. 4:26:58 And the reason is that BIP301 makes it so that only one bid, only one thing is valid for a sidechain block. 4:27:06 So they're all basically bidding up the different nodes of saying, I'll pay you this much. 4:27:12 I'll pay you $4. 4:27:13 I'll pay you $5. 4:27:14 I'll pay you 5 BTC. 4:27:15 I'll pay you 5.5 BTC. 4:27:16 I'll pay you 5.512 BTC. 4:27:19 And the miners will take whichever one pays them the most. 4:27:22 That is how the miners get all. 4:27:24 They just get all the money that they would have gotten otherwise. 4:27:29 And all those rewards are paid in Bitcoin or in L1? 4:27:32 L1. 4:27:33 They get paid in L1 and then they just say they include a hash. 4:27:36 So in that sense, it's no different than open timestamps or something or just opportunity. 4:27:42 So I guess this is a broad question. 4:27:44 You're obviously the spearhead of this push. 4:27:49 What's your motivation at this heart that is providing so much fire for you to stay with this and to see this through? 4:27:56 What is it you're trying to do? 4:27:58 I think the critics are so clueless that I just think there must be something wrong with the world. 4:28:04 Well, it can't be the critics that are driving you. 4:28:06 I mean, you obviously believe in this very, very strongly. 4:28:08 So critics aside, what is motivating you? 4:28:11 One thing that you want Bitcoin to be doing that it's not doing and that this will achieve. 4:28:18 I mean, so that's not really how – this was never a controversial idea in the past. 4:28:25 Only kind of like after the SegWit block size war did every soft fork become controversial. 4:28:31 So it's kind of like – but I'll give you a little bit of a timeline because it's very well known, which is that I was interested in prediction markets. 4:28:37 And I wrote my own experimental blockchain that is just very, very, very different from Bitcoin. 4:28:43 So I knew that attaching it to Bitcoin would require something weird. 4:28:47 And someone else tipped me off to this two-way peg idea, and I came up with a version of it a long time ago. 4:28:56 And then I kind of ignored it for a little while. 4:29:01 Well, I was working on my prediction market software, which was now called Bitcoin Hivemind, which used to be called Truthcoin. 4:29:10 And that is why my Twitter handle is Truthcoin, which is because my last name is very difficult to spell, and Truthcoin is not. 4:29:18 So that sort of happened. 4:29:22 And then I was trying to attach that to Bitcoin. 4:29:26 So I looked into Blockstream's research on sidechains, and I realized that they had not actually produced anything. 4:29:33 They had said they would produce something, but they had not. 4:29:36 So since I had to actually use it, I was confronted with this reality. 4:29:41 And so that was the original motivation. 4:29:44 But since then, it's just clear to me that this idea solves all of the very serious problems that Bitcoin faces. 4:29:53 So it just is like I didn't really plan it to be this way, but it just ended up being that it really is the best idea. 4:30:04 And actually, the other ideas that I used to support wholeheartedly, now I see them as being not good enough. 4:30:12 They're good, but they're not good enough. 4:30:14 And I didn't plan any of that to happen. 4:30:16 And, you know, none of this was controversial. 4:30:18 Back in 2015 or 2014, many people proposed many different ideas for, in particular, scaling Bitcoin. 4:30:29 And so lots and lots of ideas were proposed. 4:30:33 And this was one. 4:30:35 And this was not even this was a version of things that this was the extension block that had preexisted. 4:30:41 So my original motivation was this prediction market sidechain. 4:30:44 But now it's clear that this this is probably the only type of idea that can actually solve, for example, disagreement among people. 4:30:56 And that you want the Bitcoin tent to continue to grow. 4:31:01 We want everyone to be able to join because of network effects. 4:31:06 And so that's big. 4:31:09 But it happens to also be the only good scaling idea, which I didn't plan on happening at all. 4:31:13 I had no idea until maybe I would say a year and a half ago that it would be the only one that would actually probably work. 4:31:20 Other than maybe I could think of like one and a half other. 4:31:26 But I had no idea that that would be the case back when I first came up with it. 4:31:31 I also don't understand why is our privacy situation so bad? 4:31:34 We could have the Zcash privacy situation. 4:31:38 I don't see I think there's just lots of cope when people talk about the altcoins all being useless. 4:31:45 It's not true. 4:31:47 For example, darknet markets are Monero only now. 4:31:50 So and that's a case where there's no pump and dump because they everyone on both sides is buying and selling for fiat instantaneously. 4:31:58 So I see actually that having been in the Bitcoin community for a very long time. 4:32:06 I have actually seen it get more and more irrational and cult like. 4:32:11 And this idea would would break that back open and fix it would literally just fix every problem that we have. 4:32:17 I mean, what else will fix the security budget? Nothing. 4:32:20 What else will ossify layer one and allow us to shrink the L1 block? 4:32:23 How do we shrink the L1 block size and ossify layer one realistically without giving people a kind of pressure release valve and some other way to be robust? 4:32:33 Not only to do their own weird ideas, but also how do we stay robust to technological progress? 4:32:40 If we ossify L1, this is the only way there is also like Namecoin, which has enormous potential, but was sort of dropped completely. 4:32:51 Instead, we have said what we do is terrible. 4:32:55 I mean, I have my own prediction markets project, which a lot of people really like. 4:32:59 I have quotes on BitcoinHiveMind.com from big Bitcoiners about it. 4:33:04 So is this the right stage? Is this the right stage for this to happen? 4:33:08 Or I mean, at the adoption level that we're at and the kind of value profit Bitcoin is providing in various use cases, we're still relatively low adoption. 4:33:18 But it is still. It is still. 4:33:20 Well, I mean, you're thinking that this is like this. 4:33:24 This is what is necessary in order to propel adoption. 4:33:27 But all I see is that adoption is just on rails and it is continuing to thrive even through these bear markets. 4:33:34 But that we're going to kind of break through in this next cycle into more mainstream adoption. 4:33:42 And part of that is Bitcoin's like kind of unchanging nature. 4:33:47 And it's the value prop of it being the sound hardest money and it is not susceptible to change. 4:33:54 If we're now inviting all these other projects to start building and doing similar things, like they're going to attract some negative attention. 4:34:01 If you start building things on Bitcoin that are, I don't know, attracting us. 4:34:06 Could it attract us to see attention if some of these products migrate over to Bitcoin? 4:34:10 Does that start kind of muddying the waters for what the world at large image wise of seeing Bitcoin as? 4:34:15 I'm just saying it might not be the right stage for this to be happening right now. 4:34:19 Like it could if it's inevitable anyway. 4:34:22 And then we have this in our back pocket. 4:34:24 It does all the wonderful things that you say it's going to do. 4:34:28 Then it doesn't, by my estimation, it doesn't really need it right now. 4:34:33 We're not seeing adoption slow or fall off the S curve. 4:34:39 Well, I disagree. I think the adoption is like one one thousandth of where it should be. 4:34:44 I think we have failed. 4:34:46 I think we have failed to like I think the we haven't there's not enough competition in software development. 4:34:55 And so it has stagnated. And I think this attitude that Bitcoin will succeed no matter what is, you know, Greg Maxwell once said that that was the only thing that could kill Bitcoin. 4:35:05 And I think he's I think he is more right than most of us would prefer. 4:35:12 But, you know, I know. 4:35:16 But do you think that someone who came in here and, you know, you just you said, like, what is merge mining? 4:35:22 And you didn't know that, you know, you were awfully ignorant. 4:35:27 I'm just saying, how far is a community going to get if someone who knows literally nothing about something can just come in and say, I don't think this is the right time? 4:35:46 I think consciousness is a virtue, especially in Bitcoin. 4:35:51 So people, it would be even more reckless for people. 4:35:57 No, no, be even more reckless for people that don't know what you're saying or being ignorant to just sign up wholesale and say, yes, I believe you, Paul. 4:36:04 Let me just go in and jump on. 4:36:08 Right. Yeah, I don't I absolutely don't ask people to do that. 4:36:12 No, that's why it's gone. How do you think it made it from 2015 to 2023 without, you know. 4:36:17 No one, no one, you know, I remember going on your website a while back, you had like a mint, a mint system, you know, for creating equal denominations of coins that are perfectly fungible. 4:36:32 Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I have I have I think as others, I'm not like, you know, special, just a normal person in Bitcoin land here. 4:36:42 But, you know, people do follow. And if that demand presented itself, more people would jump in and really figure out what's going on with this and get all the nuts and bolts. 4:36:52 That's what I'm saying. But I don't think that a natural organic demand is there right now. It's like it seems a little bit forced. 4:36:59 But isn't it a chicken and egg problem, though? 4:37:01 Um, well, I mean, you can't use it. How can there be any demand? How can there be any demand at all if the feature is unavailable? 4:37:14 Right. I meant like as far as, oh, this needs to happen because it's an existential threat. Now, I laid out an argument. Bitcoin is just fine. 4:37:25 It doesn't seem to be showing any signs of the dire straits that you're talking about. 4:37:30 All I'm seeing is Ethereum, you know, kind of shooting itself in the foot by making all these alterations and changes to itself. 4:37:38 It was able to get all this attention from the SEC. 4:37:43 There's there's there. They didn't make a new high against Bitcoin. 4:37:48 So the aggregate market isn't valuing it. 4:37:50 I agree that I'm a huge critic of Ethereum and I don't think Ethereum is very good, but I don't think we should have any competitors at all. 4:37:57 We should just be number one. 4:37:59 And it should be 99% Bitcoin that does not exist. 4:38:04 I agree. I just like I guess I'm drawing attention to the urgency again. 4:38:09 Like, is this the right time? 4:38:10 Well, I mean, you're also saying like, why should more people build on Bitcoin? 4:38:15 Like, that would be bad. That's what you were saying before. 4:38:18 No, I'm not saying it's bad. 4:38:20 You said someone might build something on Bitcoin and there would be a VC thing. 4:38:23 Well, OK, right now. 4:38:26 I mean, we already have that kind of thing all the time. 4:38:29 It's actually worse now because if we can have something like, you know, Sam Bankman Freed is not even really Bitcoin. 4:38:37 And then we get we get so. 4:38:41 So, yeah, anyway, we have some people with their hands up. 4:38:43 Yeah. Yeah. 4:38:45 Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. 4:38:47 Thanks. 4:38:52 I guess. DJ, why don't you go since Hemp has already went before. 4:39:01 Thanks, Paul, for holding these spaces. 4:39:05 I've been listening to the last last couple of them, so appreciate all the effort you're putting into this. 4:39:11 I'm just curious. I wonder what if you know what Luke Dashjr. thinks of of drivechains. 4:39:22 I know he's been a big proponent of wanting to reduce block sizes down to 300k. 4:39:28 So I was just curious if you if you know what he said, because I can't find him on Twitter anymore. 4:39:35 He is on neutral and you can find him on Nostr. 4:39:39 And I saw him make a comment saying clarifying that he was neutral on it. 4:39:45 So is that all he said? 4:39:48 I think he should be able to go to drivechain that X, Y, Z or something. 4:39:52 One of those drivechains or drivechain. 4:39:54 I think drivechain that X, Y, Z. 4:39:58 I think the quote is there on this site, I think. 4:40:05 The other thing was. 4:40:08 So with assuming BIP300 gets merged in, then all these sidechains, they wouldn't be able to fund themselves through issuing some kind of new coin. 4:40:23 Is that right? 4:40:26 Well, not really, because you just deposit your BTC and then they show up over there. 4:40:33 On the sidechain, you could have multiple coins running at the same time. So you have a BTC there 4:40:38 and you could have other stuff. That would be kind of like having a stock market or something 4:40:43 or an art market in the case of NFTs or whatever. They're having that over there. 4:40:50 But you'd have BTC. BTC comes in and out as the one to one rate. 4:40:56 Okay. And then what would be some examples? I know you've touched on a few, but maybe just 4:41:03 by category, what would be some examples of what you would think would be early users of, 4:41:12 not early users, but early projects that would jump on to this capability, assuming it's brought live? 4:41:19 Well, I think Zcash, copying Zcash would be good for anyone who wants privacy, which is not 4:41:26 everyone, but I think it's a great option. And we should all have the option to use the Zcash 4:41:33 mode of Bitcoin. I think we should just copy, we already have software that copies the latest 4:41:40 Zcash, latest Ethereum full node also. So I think why not just copy, you copy the number one 4:41:47 competitor, then you're kind of like saying that no one is safe. So I think we should do that just 4:41:54 for the memes. And why not copy BCH and BSV also for the memes, but also because to just neutralize 4:42:04 the idea that large block scaling could be good for some people, which it certainly is for some 4:42:09 people. So we just take all that. I think Namecoin has enormous potential and can just completely 4:42:17 fix a lot of what happens on the internet. And it's a very big, I can go into detail on that 4:42:26 if you want, but I think that that idea is huge. And so she also thought it was big. 4:42:33 I have my own prediction markets idea that a lot, I like it. A lot of other people like it. 4:42:39 If you go to bitcoinhivemind.com, you can research it. 4:42:42 We actually have this already. 4:43:10 We have a version that has 119 already activated, 118 also. 4:43:17 Stuff like that makes sense to do on drivechains, not necessarily technology coming from other 4:43:23 chains, although that's also cool, but also just releasing all the different 4:43:27 software and stuff that we like Bitcoiners have developed. 4:43:40 Yeah, we also have a idea for, I mean, we have already this idea of the BitAsset sidechain, 4:43:46 which is like anyone can go over there and mint new coins or mint new NFTs or something. 4:43:53 And you think, well, what is the good of that? Well, I think it is good because as long as you 4:43:59 sequester all that into like a little zoo, all those things will be compared to each other. 4:44:05 And then they won't really be compared with BTC. 4:44:08 And also, I just think the core idea is actually a pretty good idea. 4:44:15 It's not the worst. People like, you know, Hal Finney likes the crypto trading cards idea. 4:44:20 People like art. People like collectibles. They're going to do it anyway. 4:44:25 They're going to do it on Ethereum if we can't do it somewhere on Bitcoin. 4:44:30 And then that's just for NFTs. And then it's like for the other assets, 4:44:33 it's like you can have this stock bond market. You can have all kinds of things, 4:44:38 anything that is like a concert ticket or whatever, you could have them as tradable coins. 4:44:45 And that's not everyone is going to go for that, but I think some people would. 4:44:50 And definitely people are doing it regardless. A lot of people who have 4:44:56 a lot of years of experience in that industry, such as Bruce Fenton, 4:45:01 they are certain that that is going to be a huge use case. 4:45:06 So a lot of this software we have already built and you can already try to run yourself. 4:45:12 If you go to our site and download, you can try it out. We have versions of a lot of this. 4:45:18 Yeah, so I think those are a lot that that would be enough for people to get into at first. 4:45:39 Oh, Shinobi is here in the audience, I think. I can't always tell. 4:45:44 I can't always tell. Changes his name. Yes, come on up, Shinobi, say something. 4:45:53 Say whatever it is you want to say. 4:45:57 Or don't. But there he is. 4:46:02 Or alternatively, I could have invited him up and he will not come up, and then 4:46:09 I don't know what would be appropriate to conclude in that situation. 4:46:17 But while we're waiting for him to make up his mind, we've got another 14 minutes before 4:46:22 Henry has to go. And me too, of course. I've been going through this all day. 4:46:40 Anyone else want to say anything? Come up and say anything. 4:46:43 Or don't. 4:46:47 Just since nobody else is. Yes. Just one more question about the security budget you mentioned. 4:46:54 How you seem pretty definitive that the security budget is an issue, but that that also is kind 4:46:59 of an outstanding question. We don't know the future. We don't know what the future will be. 4:47:03 But we do know that the security budget is an issue, and we don't know when it's going to be. 4:47:08 The security budget is an issue, but that also is kind of an outstanding question. We don't know 4:47:12 the future. There's the case to be made that if it realizes its potential, and at that level, 4:47:20 to be the global reserve currency, and you take the number of transactions you can fit in the 4:47:25 block currently at that price, the fee structure is commensurate with what the payout is now. 4:47:34 So it'd be kind of somewhat constant, if you will, moving forward in time as Bitcoin appreciates, 4:47:40 and more higher, higher fee levels are accrued to the miners. What do you take 4:47:45 issue with with that scenario? A giant piece of writing explaining in detail why that 4:47:51 scenario and other scenarios is not going to happen. So. In a nutshell. Is there a nutshell? 4:47:59 Well, yes, there is, which is the transaction price is in opportunity costs. So the better 4:48:08 way to think about it is putting it in dollars. It is unrelated to the U.S. dollar exchange rate, 4:48:16 and that's exactly why you might as well put it in dollars. You could put it in sandwiches. 4:48:19 You could say how many five dollar sandwiches does it cost me when I make a layer one transaction, 4:48:28 which is the only thing that matters to Bitcoin. Well, I mean, actually, 4:48:33 Drivechain is the only exception where the only L2 that pays on L1 also. But we're talking on L1, 4:48:42 how many sandwiches, how many five dollar sandwiches do you give up in terms of value? 4:48:47 So you see, that doesn't make absolutely no difference with the exchange rate. 4:48:50 Is. None whatsoever. I don't know if you're doing the first GDP of the globe, 4:49:02 each Bitcoin is going to be a tremendous amount. Right. So let's say it's worth 4:49:07 50 million dollars. No longer five dollars. Yeah. The sandwich. OK, the sandwich is no longer 4:49:13 five dollars, but it's the amount of Bitcoin that is equal to one sandwich is what I'm saying. 4:49:21 Oh, well, I'm saying the sandwich is actually bigger. Sorry, I guess I misspoke. You actually 4:49:25 have like you're saying we have economic growth and now we have. Yeah, yeah. Well, 4:49:29 not just the growth, but what the percentage that Bitcoin represents is growing. Right. Like 4:49:34 as it grows, it is representing a larger and larger slice of that total pie. 4:49:40 But let's say that tomorrow, tomorrow, the GDP is unaffected and it is the same. Well, just 4:49:47 because it hasn't had time to as a result of Bitcoin adoption. So tomorrow, 4:49:52 all fiat currencies are replaced with BTC. It reaches its ceiling and it hits the ceiling 4:50:02 and it's worth the most amount it can be worth, which is probably, I don't know, 4:50:05 maybe like twenty five million dollars per coin. Yeah, probably no more dollars in this world 4:50:10 because dollars are gone. But whatever whatever you could have bought with twenty five million 4:50:15 dollars as a percent of GDP, like whatever stuff I could have bought with twenty five million 4:50:21 dollars, if I had twenty five million dollars, that's what you can buy with one Bitcoin in this 4:50:26 new world. Is that making sense so far? Well, let's let's take it this way. If you take all 4:50:30 the fiat currency in the world, like to rough orders of magnitude, we have thirty trillion, 4:50:33 let's say. All right. But in global GDP, you've got like nine hundred trillion. So now in a 4:50:39 Bitcoin world, Bitcoin is now kind of swapping out and becoming that thirty trillion. Obviously, 4:50:44 U.S. dollars don't exist anymore, but it's it's a fraction of the total, I guess, aggregate value 4:50:48 in the world. But it's going to you know, that ratio is still going to be there. And so in that 4:50:53 ratio, it's going to get larger and larger as we proceed in adoption, as it gets closer and closer 4:50:59 to that outcome. And when I'm saying fully adopted, I'm saying fully adopted tomorrow. 4:51:04 Everyone switches and we pay everyone. It's fully adopted. Yeah. The value of the mining 4:51:10 words would be immense. Yeah, that's because of the block subsidy. Of course, that would be huge. 4:51:15 So I'm talking about you're talking about the fees before the block subsidy is a problem that 4:51:20 every 16 years it goes down by ninety five percent, ninety four percent. So that's shrinking 4:51:27 rapidly. So I was talking about I was trying to illustrate to you that the fees are completely 4:51:33 the scenario is like a wire, right? That's where it kind of breaks out to be about the same, 4:51:38 that the transaction fees would kind of would rise to to about the same level as what a wire 4:51:42 is now, like fifteen, twenty, twenty five dollars equivalent thereof. And that layer, that layered 4:51:49 money model, like what? So you're you're you're kind of not throwing away that layered money model. 4:51:53 OK, let's not that's not fully the model is the layered money. OK, but what's what's wrong with 4:52:00 that version of it where you have transactions at the fifteen, twenty, twenty five dollar range, 4:52:06 like a commensurate with a wire? And is that still I mean, and that would provide the fee 4:52:12 revenue, the security budget would be I mean, if we think that today is OK, then that would be 4:52:17 that would be the same then at that level. Well, I don't think people will be willing to pay 4:52:25 high fees. They pay for wires now. I have a I have a document in the first security 4:52:31 budget article. I explain the total amount of even if Bitcoin I have this modeled out where 4:52:38 if Bitcoin reaches its highest value and you can see that the security budget, the block subsidy 4:52:45 have having that the subsidy every four years causes it to rapidly shrink as a percentage of 4:52:53 GDP. So I can get to that, so I mean, I don't know, I have actual numbers in that spreadsheet 4:53:00 and you could look at them if you really are that interested. But I think to answer your question 4:53:04 about I think people won't pay because of the presence of competitors. It would be like WeChat 4:53:09 pay charges zero. And well, we're saying this in an environment where Bitcoin has actually 4:53:16 taken that percentage of the pie. So if it is that big, it just it's going you know, it's kind 4:53:21 of like you can't say a competitor would step in. It's a completely different. No, no, no, 4:53:26 that was a completely different thing that I said, because you said as the exchange rate goes up, 4:53:30 the fees will go up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but they will. Because as it's getting that adoption, 4:53:38 like it is the dominant thing. As Bitcoin succeeds, then people will like Bitcoin more and then 4:53:46 they'll be willing to. Yes. Well, I'm kind of saying the exact same thing as you, except in 4:53:52 reverse. I'm saying the fees will go up, they won't like it very much and they will counter 4:53:57 adopt it, which is exactly what happens is the fees go up and people stop using it. They stop 4:54:01 liking it also. And then the fees go back down. And that's why the fees have never really risen 4:54:07 above 50 cents ish. They sometimes do. But in general, for a transaction, they really don't. 4:54:14 They sometimes do little periods, but then they come back down. Right. Okay. But like, 4:54:19 if you take a long term view, I thought I saw a chart that showed a general aggregate 4:54:23 tick up in fees over time. Section three of the article that you haven't read yet 4:54:29 is called the false view of an automatic upward trend in P and that is what that whole section 4:54:35 is about. Are you pulling a Jason Lowry on me? I think you're pulling a Jason Lowry on me. 4:54:40 Well, I mean, if you like. You haven't read my thesis. 4:54:45 Yeah, no, obviously that's one of the reasons why I'm here. I'm trying to learn more. 4:54:51 I'm giving away mine for free. It's fine. I don't, you know, not everyone has to read 4:54:59 everything that has ever been written before talking to someone in a conversation. I don't 4:55:03 believe that. I'm in this space, right? I'm trying to like get your take on things. 4:55:09 And my view is that a coin is very different from what I call a BL1TXN, the layer one Bitcoin 4:55:19 transaction. Those are different things. And they are as different from each other as gold is from 4:55:28 Visa's revenue in the last quarter or something. So they're just completely different things. 4:55:35 They have almost nothing to do with each other. And it's a mistake to think so. Like, 4:55:41 there's only 21 million coins and there's no real competitor to BTC, the coin. 4:55:48 But that's not the case for the transacting. Transacting is in a world where, in fact, 4:55:56 because wire transfer used to be $75 and the prices actually come down, most people, 4:56:06 what I'm trying to say is that in general, the cost of a transaction has plummeted over time. 4:56:12 You used to actually have to carry around coins. You can only transact with people near you. 4:56:17 But then credit cards came out and then, you know, like the Medici's like invented checks 4:56:24 and then credit cards came out. And now there's Venmo and each time the cost is very low. And 4:56:30 then with WeChat pay, the cost is actually negative because the government wants, of course, 4:56:34 to surveil everyone. So they'll be pushing that. They're pushing that on everyone. 4:56:40 So they are not going to be charging the like they're going to be keeping it, quote, free, 4:56:45 unquote. And so we just live in a world where everything around us is becoming cheaper all 4:56:51 the time in terms of labor time because of technological progress. So it's like, you know, 4:56:58 it's easier to get a sandwich. It's easier to get a suit today per labor hour. 4:57:04 Because everything we make is we just get better at making everything get better at getting 4:57:09 wool, uranium, whatever we want as a species. So people's expectations for what a transaction 4:57:19 should cost are falling and will continue to fall, especially all the software and stuff 4:57:24 is already being written. It's always getting better. Like, you know, a SQL database isn't 4:57:30 getting any worse. So. The which is what. WeChat pay or the CBDC is going to use. 4:57:41 So so it's like people's tolerance for paying high transaction fees, I think, 4:57:47 will only go down from where it is now. They'll think, why am I why would anyone use Bitcoin when 4:57:53 Venmo is free? Whereas we would never have had that problem before. I remember a time before 4:57:59 anyone had heard of Venmo. But when I had still heard of Bitcoin, I think I was like 2012 or 4:58:04 something, but no one had heard of there was no Venmo really. Someone is going to look this up 4:58:09 and say Venmo was created in whatever year. But I don't remember anyone in the world caring or 4:58:14 knowing anything about Venmo or WeChat pay. But until, you know, over the last 10 years, 4:58:21 that has changed. So I think people won't be willing to pay. And it will actually work the 4:58:30 other way around. If the fees go up, then we will get negative adoption and it will be 4:58:36 a very circular. It'll be like a chicken and egg will be sort of. 4:58:43 I don't think that the so yeah, I think I wrote this giant article about why I think the security 4:58:49 budget is a problem. And also, I only write an article in the first place if I disagree with 4:58:54 what most people think most of the time. So I write these articles and they have a certain title 4:59:00 and then people say, well, I don't agree with you. And I'm like, yes, I already knew that. But 4:59:04 that's why I wrote the article. And then I say, did you read the article? And they say no. And I 4:59:09 say, well, how is the conversation going to go? I already know. So but I don't expect everyone to 4:59:17 completely agree with the security budget thing. But I do think that there's no real reason to 4:59:22 suggest it will work on the path that it's on. There's no reason to suggest that it will work 4:59:27 because it like there's no evidence. There's no evidence to suggest that either because 4:59:37 the Bitcoin fees see part of what happens is the so-called trend is mostly an artifact of the way 4:59:44 fees were calculated back in the era when fees were like beneath one cent or beneath 10 cents 4:59:51 when it effectively makes no difference. So you have to screen all that out because no one cares 4:59:56 if Bitcoin is either the cheapest payment method or it's not. So if Bitcoin is the cheapest and it 5:00:03 goes from being one tenth of a cent to costing four cents, that is not really a 40x increase. 5:00:11 No one actually care. It was the cheapest thing before and is the cheapest thing after. 5:00:17 But then once it crosses the line of being significantly more expensive than a credit card 5:00:22 or significantly more expensive than Zelle or whatever, then people will care. So no one cared 5:00:28 before. So every time it goes into the caring region, what happens is it's only a matter of time. 5:00:34 A couple days and a couple cases a week where the fees fall back down. The only time the fees 5:00:42 have gone up and stayed up for any serious length of time, which is also temporary, 5:00:47 that has been when there is this enormous huge price bubbles where no one could even everyone's 5:00:55 getting so rich that no one could possibly care about the fee. And that's when we have $50 fees 5:01:00 sometimes. But then otherwise other times we don't. So if we live in a world where it's very easy to 5:01:05 send people money for free, I don't think people will pay $75 for Bitcoin transaction, which is the 5:01:11 world that we are headed towards. I don't know why anyone pays a wire transfer. The legacy 5:01:19 financial system is really screwed up. It's really scamming people out of this wire transfer. People 5:01:23 pay because they have no alternative. They pay Western Union. Henry, you can maybe just make 5:01:28 me the host or something if you have to go. Okay. 5:01:33 Okay, cool. Thanks. 5:01:45 Okay, I guess I'm a host now. Wait. Now I'm a host. Am I? 5:01:52 Yes. If I leave, it doesn't end the space. 5:01:56 It may. But I will have to go get my kids from school. So if I might lose reception at some 5:02:05 point. So if the space rugs, I apologize for that. And we'll pick up next week. 5:02:10 I don't know. Maybe if he leaves, it will crash the space. 5:02:15 If it does, then too bad. Then I guess we've given a lot of, I mean, we've gone for a long 5:02:20 time anyway. So why don't you, you could read my article if you want, Dune Moon, 5:02:24 or you could just not read it. You know, in which case that's fine also. 5:02:32 Yeah, well, no, I could read. It's kind of what I'm saying. Like, I know you're steeped in this. 5:02:39 There's a lot of people and there's a lot of people who are steeped in it, but you know, 5:02:42 on the critical side, and there's others like myself who are vaguely aware of the various 5:02:48 machinations going on in the Bitcoin space. And we come in and we pay more attention when 5:02:53 things come to a head. And so that's kind of where my statement was coming from with 5:02:58 the urgency that, you know, it felt like the urgency isn't really here for this right now 5:03:03 in this moment. It's not quite time. It's not as time yet, you know? 5:03:09 Maybe. Well, I kind of think it's kind of the other way around a little bit where it's kind of 5:03:14 like people only get, the idea will only get attention if people push for it. So if you never 5:03:22 push for it, then it will, no one will ever pay attention to it. But don't you think like, 5:03:28 I mean, this idea that like people come in and they quickly rush through a change, 5:03:33 I mean, that really cannot apply to something that has been around since 2015, right? I mean, 5:03:40 like, how is that even possible? Yeah, well, that's kind of my point. Like, I think most 5:03:47 Bitcoiners are aware that there is a thing called drivechain as a proposal. And, you know, it does 5:03:53 invade ideas about what it might do that are not too far off base, but they don't know all the 5:03:58 technical details or, you know, have the credence built up for the certainty that you have with 5:04:04 being so steeped in it for so long. But that doesn't mean that without an outside impetus, 5:04:14 right, as we get further along something, that they would then turn to it, right? They would 5:04:18 be able, just the knowledge that it's there, it's in the back pocket, and then they'll turn to it 5:04:23 when necessary to then, you know, it'll accelerate is what I'm saying. And the fact that it hasn't 5:04:30 accelerated, it speaks to this lack of demand and urgency for it in Bitcoin right now in this moment 5:04:36 of its evolution, and, you know, into the global reserve currency. 5:04:41 What would you mean, like, lack of? What do you mean by that? 5:04:48 Just that traction wise, I mean, it's not, like you said, 2015, right? If it was something that was 5:04:59 so obviously needed, and it was an urgency that can existential kind of like, oh, this is, 5:05:06 we're really going to shore this up, then I think you would see a bigger kind of like aggregate 5:05:11 emergent movement towards it. And that's not to say that it doesn't happen, or that it's not 5:05:17 correct. And all the things you're saying aren't correct. But it just feels like that aggregate 5:05:21 movement isn't happening because the environment in which, you know, the utility that this provides 5:05:27 isn't quite there yet, the environment for it isn't there yet. Like it needs, it's like I said, 5:05:32 but like, this is not quite it's time yet. I don't know. Like, it's just my own personal feeling. 5:05:41 But you know, it's time could be tomorrow or something. So I guess I kind of agree with you 5:05:46 that. But isn't that kind of? 5:05:50 Well, Bitcoin doesn't die tomorrow because Bitcoin 300 isn't adopted. 5:05:57 Well, yeah, Bitcoin is not going to die tomorrow because Bitcoin 300 is not adopted. But I think 5:06:01 that you're saying like not in the next week or the next month or the next year. 5:06:06 If it is near death? 5:06:09 Well, I mean, with what's at stake? And yeah, that's kind of the argument of a lot of people, 5:06:13 right? Like this is not just a normal project. 5:06:17 Why do you say, why do you frame it as though BIP300 is something that has a risk of harming BTC? 5:06:25 Everything has a risk. Any change has a risk of harming BTC. 5:06:29 It's a complex system that doesn't just involve the code. It involves all the people involved 5:06:33 and all the players. It's a massively complex system. I guess that's like a red flag, right? 5:06:38 From a systems thinking standpoint, when you have something that's so certain, so like over the top, 5:06:43 100% guarantee that there's all the bases are covered. I thought through every recourse, 5:06:47 this is a slam dunk, nothing bad, no second, third order effects could possibly be bad. 5:06:55 That's just a big red flag, right? And that's what puts off some people. 5:06:59 No, that's not what I was saying. I'm saying you treat the adopting it as a risk, but not 5:07:09 passing on it. When it's something like the guy who, the people behind Netflix, 5:07:14 they offered to sell to Blockbuster and Blockbuster turned them down. 5:07:20 They thought it was some kind of risk to their business model. Well, it ended up being a risk 5:07:26 because Blockbuster went completely out of business because of Netflix, basically. 5:07:31 So you say, blah, blah, blah. This is a red flag. What about the third, fourth order effects? 5:07:36 But it's really you who is totally 100% completely ignoring that whole dimension, 5:07:41 because whether or not it's not just adding something as a risk, every single thing is a 5:07:47 risk. And just because you say, I don't know anything about this, how is it the case that 5:07:51 deposited coins trickle down? Because I can't credit in coins. I know literally nothing about 5:07:56 anything. Yeah, you're right. You're right to point back to me that there's that possibility, 5:08:00 for sure. But it's not to say that your example that you gave is the rule that occurs. In the vast 5:08:07 majority of more cases, when a company decides to pivot because they see a new upstart doing 5:08:13 something and they don't want to get left behind, they end up doing it at their peril. They 5:08:16 misallocate and it hurts them. But the only way that is true, this is just a bunch of meta talk. 5:08:27 The only way to actually know which argument should actually have more bearing is to actually 5:08:34 explore the content of the idea. And I did explain to you that you can turn GIP300 on with a soft 5:08:39 fork. And then if there was some kind of problem with it, you can turn it off with a soft fork 5:08:43 also. And it'd be like as if it had never happened. So the risk is actually zero. 5:08:50 You got to be careful with zero. You got to be careful with zero. When I hear zero, 5:08:55 there's more red flags. Something's so certain. I don't know. I don't see how you could possibly... 5:09:01 What do you think it would do? Because we don't have the BIP now, which is the state that you 5:09:09 want us to stay in. And if we activate the BIP on OpNap 5 and then ban OpNap 5, we are in exactly 5:09:17 the same protocol, the exact same Bitcoin protocol. You say we, but this is like an aggregate kind of 5:09:25 ad hoc mixture of all kinds of different interests. There's no we really. It's just 5:09:31 everybody acting independently. And then there's the emergent behavior that comes out of that 5:09:35 complex system. I'm talking about everyone who runs... I'm talking about every Bitcoin node. 5:09:40 It would behave the same after the two soft forks as it did right today, before any. 5:09:47 It'd be exactly the same. So that's the state that you say you want us to remain in until... 5:09:55 Well, I'm just questioning the timing at this point, right? That maybe in time... And me 5:10:02 actually being on this space is maybe another point in your favor that, okay, it's maybe 5:10:08 starting to attract the attention of individuals such as myself who would otherwise be uninterested. 5:10:16 Yes. But do you think that... What have I said to you? I said, this is a red flag. 5:10:22 You are asleep at the wheel. There's no way that you could possibly know 5:10:27 everything that Ethereum, Zcash, and every other project and every other 15-year-old 5:10:33 MIT genius is coming up with in their spare time. There's no way that you could possibly know what 5:10:40 all those people are doing and that it wouldn't affect BTC and compete with it and displace it. 5:10:46 And so you are the one who is making all the risk for the rest of us. 5:10:51 Well, I don't know. What do you mean for the rest of you? No, we're all acting on our own. 5:10:56 Like in our own self-interest. And if I'm making a decision, I'm doing it for myself, right? 5:11:00 Your actions delay the arrival of whatever, Bith 300, whatever. 5:11:05 Perhaps, but I'm seeing something... It takes all of us, right? It takes all of us 5:11:11 to be acting and to cause this emergent... I mean, I agree with you, but I'm saying that 5:11:16 all I'm pointing out is that it's not really... 5:11:21 It's like we face many risks already and to just say... 5:11:32 That's, I guess, what I was referring to earlier, the urgency. I mean, it seems like 5:11:37 you're trying to paint a picture of more urgency right in this moment than there actually is. 5:11:41 Like I see there being... 5:11:45 I think that... I'm trying to paint a picture of... 5:11:56 If we're not going to... I think there is something that is kind of urgent, which is that a lot... 5:12:04 I guess the other space rugged, but I made this new one. 5:12:08 I don't know if we'll still get people. 5:12:11 Probably not, but I thought I would make it anyway. 5:12:14 See if people will come in 5:12:20 to continue the conversation. 5:12:25 Someone actually had requested, and I didn't notice, 5:12:29 to speak in the last one. 5:12:34 I think I can invite people. 5:12:36 Maybe I can remember. 5:13:03 Yeah, we did go for a while. 5:13:22 It is too bad that it got interrupted, 5:13:24 but we have gone for a while. 5:13:26 So if anyone wants to say anything, 5:13:31 then request to speak, 5:13:37 but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if, 5:13:42 it would not be the worst thing in the world if we did end it. 5:13:47 Oh, look, dude moon is back. 5:14:17 What was the last thing we said? 5:14:31 I don't even know. 5:14:32 I was saying there's a risk. 5:14:34 There's always risk. There's risk to inaction. 5:14:36 Let's see. 5:14:40 We had someone else who wants to speak. 5:14:42 Add. Yes. 5:14:47 So this is, I'm just saying you can't get out of it by saying, 5:14:51 wait, wait, wait, what about the rail? 5:14:53 We should be careful because that is also risky. 5:14:58 That is not a real, you know, 5:15:00 that's like not a real thought in my point of view. 5:15:04 Well, when you bring the time element, it can be 5:15:08 because if we aren't facing that, 5:15:11 that risk and urgency right now, 5:15:14 and maybe it ramps up over time, 5:15:17 then it can meet a point where then it makes sense 5:15:20 to seriously look at drive-sharing, right? 5:15:24 No, but I'm saying as a general principle, though, 5:15:27 I'm just saying if we, because you can imagine a situation 5:15:29 where you did face such a thing, 5:15:34 you know, such a situation where urgency wasn't, 5:15:38 like if someone bursts into the room and says, oh, my gosh, 5:15:40 it's like this whole city is burning down. 5:15:42 We need to run for our lives. 5:15:45 Well, in that case, you're actually happy 5:15:47 that the person is causing you to like panic or whatever, 5:15:52 you know? 5:15:53 I'm saying as a matter of principle, 5:15:55 it's not automatically the case. 5:15:57 The urgency has to co-vary with whether or not 5:15:59 there actually is an actual imminent problem, 5:16:05 which is very hard to know. 5:16:07 Anyway, Soshin Joyer, we'll go back to Doon Moon, of course, 5:16:11 but Soshin Joyer did raise his hand. 5:16:14 Back in the other room. 5:16:15 Hey, what's up, guys? 5:16:16 Thanks for bringing me up, 5:16:17 and thanks for continuing the space. 5:16:18 I just wanted to add to the conversation 5:16:21 about immediate demand and like aggregate demand 5:16:24 and like why, you know, potentially people might say 5:16:27 there hasn't been demand for so many years, you know, why now? 5:16:31 But like from another point of view, 5:16:33 I would say that there's actually a lot of demand 5:16:34 because you can say that people that might have had demand 5:16:37 for other type of protocols or other type of, 5:16:41 you know, protocol design, 5:16:42 they already go to other chains. 5:16:44 So you can see that like just from this point of view, 5:16:47 there's a lot of demand for an EVM style chain 5:16:50 because they just, they actually have a lot of users. 5:16:52 So you can actually say that in a way 5:16:53 that's actually demand for a drivechain that has EVM 5:16:57 or like a chain that has a lot, like a bigger block size. 5:17:00 Like there's definitely demand for that too. 5:17:01 So to say that over time, there might be aggregate demand. 5:17:05 You might also say that over time, 5:17:07 that demand is going to be very hard to upkeep 5:17:09 because those people will leave 5:17:10 and then their incentive to come back 5:17:12 is really not that strong anymore. 5:17:13 So that point of view of like why there's so many years 5:17:16 is not demand. 5:17:17 You can say that that demand actually leaves 5:17:19 and like there's no reason for it 5:17:21 to even want to look back anymore 5:17:22 because you solved their use case in a different protocol. 5:17:26 So I just wanted to give that point of view. 5:17:28 Yeah, I completely agree. 5:17:29 I think it would have been better to do it, 5:17:31 much better to do it back in 2015. 5:17:34 When someone, if someone has a thing, 5:17:36 like almost all the altcoiners, 5:17:38 there's many scammer altcoiners, 5:17:40 but there are many that are pure of heart actually. 5:17:43 And Vitalik was co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, 5:17:48 the company that does the Bitcoin events. 5:17:54 Vitalik was a co-founder and Roger was very sincere 5:17:59 in caring about Bitcoin. 5:18:00 A lot of these people are very sincere. 5:18:02 They try to do their thing on Bitcoin 5:18:04 and they leave, they can't. 5:18:06 And so, oh, hello. 5:18:11 So, hello. 5:18:16 Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Atomback. 5:18:18 Hello, just sort of pull up, keep going. 5:18:21 Okay, I was saying that in what we would have, 5:18:27 like I was repeating something that I said to you 5:18:29 in Amsterdam last year, where I said, 5:18:34 these people bubble up 5:18:35 and they want to do something in Bitcoin. 5:18:37 They want to do their, whatever their thing is, 5:18:40 Namecoin or whatever, Ethereum type of a thing. 5:18:44 And then they can't, and then they leave 5:18:47 and they start their own coin. 5:18:49 And now kind of like, they don't really want to come back 5:18:51 because the last thing they want to do 5:18:54 is after having been rejected by Bitcoin 5:18:57 and then making it starting from scratch 5:19:00 with their own altcoin and proving the use case out, 5:19:05 after they do that, then it's kind of an insult 5:19:09 to go back to BTC as a sidechain 5:19:13 and kind of lose what you worked hard to create 5:19:16 with your own two hands in the altcoin world. 5:19:19 And so, yes, that was something Satoshi and Joy 5:19:22 was kind of touching on. 5:19:24 Because Dune Moon was saying that possibly 5:19:28 there's not very much demand for this, 5:19:31 the idea of sidechains. 5:19:34 No, just right now, timing that, you know, 5:19:37 it isn't necessarily the existential change 5:19:39 that we need in this moment. 5:19:41 And we have it, we have the idea of it. 5:19:43 It's been fleshed out very well so far. 5:19:46 And we think that it's, you know, so well-covered 5:19:49 and all the third order effects are considered. 5:19:52 Okay, well, it can have its time. 5:19:55 It just doesn't seem like the aggregate, 5:19:56 you know, emergent horde is moving towards it. 5:19:59 And that might be, you know, kind of belying 5:20:01 and underlying truth that there isn't the urgent demand 5:20:05 for it right in this moment. 5:20:10 Well, I mean, I think there's other factors too, right? 5:20:15 Like there's some features required for Bitcoin. 5:20:21 Features required for Bitcoin to enable it, right? 5:20:23 Like a soft fork. 5:20:24 And so I think that's the first hurdle. 5:20:27 For end users, they get motivated to use something 5:20:33 when it's available and integrated 5:20:34 and there's hardware wallet support 5:20:36 and their exchange supports it 5:20:37 and all this kind of stuff, right? 5:20:38 Which is the first technology has to exist, I think, 5:20:43 in the life form with a soft fork. 5:20:45 I think that's the first hurdle is to figure out 5:20:50 what path is going to make them available in Bitcoin, 5:20:54 whether that's sort of finding a 5:21:00 poor man's drivechain kind of idea with using covenants 5:21:05 or some other technology that comes for other purposes. 5:21:10 By the way, I was just reading about, 5:21:16 what's it called? 5:21:16 Something on Rootstock, I think it's called like PAL. 5:21:20 PALPEG. 5:21:24 Kind of interesting, I didn't know about this before. 5:21:29 Yeah, I think I know a little about it. 5:21:31 It is basically, it's like half drivechain, 5:21:36 half federated, and then it automatically transforms 5:21:39 from one end to the other over time or something. 5:21:42 I think, or maybe that's something else. 5:21:44 They had something where there was a sort of policy 5:21:48 that was a mixture, right? 5:21:50 Like all processing blocks, but not the peg. 5:21:56 I think they have implemented something 5:21:57 where part of the threshold is 5:22:03 HSM signers, functionaries. 5:22:07 They call them functionaries, it's the same as Liquid does. 5:22:10 And part of it is merge mining with the idea, 5:22:13 and we had some, like, I've heard that discussed before, 5:22:16 but they actually went and implemented it. 5:22:18 It's kind of interesting because, you know, 5:22:20 they sort of harden each other a bit. 5:22:22 And if the miners go crazy, 5:22:24 even 100% of miners can't do something 5:22:26 because there are some functionaries, 5:22:27 and if the functionaries go crazy, 5:22:29 they don't have quite enough signatures to, you know, 5:22:33 take the coins, it gets the peg management policy 5:22:39 without some miner collusion or something, right? 5:22:42 But the PALPEG thing seems to be newer, 5:22:45 and that is basically two parts to it. 5:22:52 First part is the merge, 5:22:55 well, there are the functionaries of HSMs 5:22:59 that are signing blocks in a threshold, right? 5:23:01 And also sort of cosigning peg outs, right? 5:23:10 And of course the functionary code, you know, 5:23:14 looks at the unit stock sidechain, 5:23:18 but the PALPEG part is that they added 5:23:21 that the merge miners are going to, 5:23:26 I think they might actually deployed it. 5:23:27 So the merge miners look at the sidechain 5:23:33 and then they instruct the HSMs whether to sign or not 5:23:38 based on hash rate. 5:23:40 So they kind of artificially have the merge miners decide, 5:23:44 and then the, but the HSM functionary block signers 5:23:53 are still double checking it, right? 5:23:55 So they won't peg out unless the miners tell them to, 5:24:00 the merge miners, but they'll also reject 5:24:03 what the merge miners are saying 5:24:04 if it's not a valid peg out, 5:24:07 like they can't see any evidence 5:24:09 that this peg out is approved on chain. 5:24:12 So it's kind of interesting addition to the mechanism. 5:24:22 Yeah, they had this, I don't remember a lot of it, 5:24:25 but Sergio wrote this post about like, 5:24:28 it's very, very difficult to steal from it. 5:24:33 And, but it's more likely to like hang 5:24:36 or become like delayed, which is a good thing, I think. 5:24:42 Well, I mean, I haven't quite understand 5:24:44 the last part of it, but one thing that occurs 5:24:48 because some users were, you know, 5:24:51 jumping in and explaining the advantages of it. 5:24:54 And they were saying that the miners, 5:25:00 sorry, that the, yeah, that the miners would prevent a theft 5:25:05 if the functionaries went rogue and colluded 5:25:11 amongst themselves and tried to take the peg out, 5:25:15 you know, try to take the peg coins 5:25:18 without there being any peg out on the Rootstock sidechain. 5:25:21 And so they were saying, well, 5:25:24 the merge miners would stop them. 5:25:26 I was like, well, wait a minute, 5:25:27 how are the merge miners going to stop anything? 5:25:29 You know, these guys are just signing a valid transaction, 5:25:32 sending it to the main chain and it'll get mined. 5:25:34 Then I was like, wait a minute, 5:25:35 is there some kind of, you know, 5:25:37 miner-activated soft fork we don't know about 5:25:40 that they're actually rejecting invalid Rootstock peg outs, 5:25:47 you know, the proportion of miners which merge mine it, 5:25:49 which I think has been quite high at times. 5:25:53 But maybe they're just, 5:25:57 if they are a Rootstock merge miner, 5:26:00 they've added to the transaction validity test, 5:26:05 of any multisig that is a Rootstock peg out, 5:26:10 that it has to be a valid Rootstock peg out 5:26:12 according to the Rootstock sidechain, 5:26:15 or they're going to not add it to the mempool, 5:26:17 something like that, I'm guessing. 5:26:19 But it does mean that if there's enough miners, 5:26:22 just some miner who is not a Rootstock miner 5:26:26 could process it anyway, right? 5:26:28 The only way the Rootstock merge miners could stop it 5:26:31 is if they colluded to orphan the blocks of any miner 5:26:35 that makes a non, you know, 5:26:38 an invalid Rootstock peg out transaction, 5:26:41 which then becomes a consensus rule 5:26:43 and could cause a fork or something, right? 5:26:46 I'm curious how it actually works now. 5:26:50 We were talking about it earlier in the other space 5:26:52 about if miners secretly activate a soft fork rule, 5:26:57 and you don't even know that the rule exists, 5:27:00 how do you know that that's not happening all the time? 5:27:03 And in fact, you may remember, 5:27:04 I asked Matt Corral that exact question at scaling three. 5:27:09 I said, what if there was a mandatory extension block 5:27:11 that was eight terabytes or something, 5:27:14 but it was activated six months ago? 5:27:16 Paul, we talked about this in Miami recently, I remember. 5:27:19 And you'd find out as soon as somebody 5:27:21 tried to do something about it. 5:27:22 I mean, if you use drivechains, for example, 5:27:24 and you put some money into a drivechain, 5:27:26 and you were secretly running this fork, 5:27:29 unless literally 100% somehow knew about it, 5:27:31 but nobody else did, which is weird to think about, 5:27:34 but okay, hypothetically. 5:27:36 But in reality, somebody that's not a part of that group 5:27:38 is gonna know about it, 5:27:39 and they're gonna see the money there, 5:27:40 and they're gonna try to take it. 5:27:41 And the only way to stop them is gonna be to reorg, 5:27:43 and then it's gonna be obvious. 5:27:46 Well, it's 100%, it's like a hypothetical edge case 5:27:50 to make a kind of a philosophical point. 5:27:55 So it's saying like, if 100% of the miners 5:27:58 secretly had activated this, some kind of rule, 5:28:02 then it would really, there would be no blocks, 5:28:04 you know, there would really not be any blocks mined ever 5:28:07 that broke the rule. 5:28:08 And so maybe you would see transaction censorship. 5:28:12 Well, I need some transactions that didn't make sense. 5:28:15 Individual users would wonder 5:28:17 why there were a bunch of coins sitting around 5:28:19 without any normal signatures on them. 5:28:23 Yeah, or like if they use like opnop9 or something, 5:28:26 they would be like, what is that? 5:28:29 Well, I mean, you could do, 5:28:32 I mean, if it was a conspiracy, you could do, 5:28:38 you know, they could share a seed or a wallet. 5:28:45 And so, you know, they're actually anyone can spend, 5:28:47 but they just look like a signed transaction, right? 5:28:53 And then there's more. 5:28:57 Yeah, the one that I had, the magic, 5:29:00 the hidden terabyte extension block is like, 5:29:04 you only put the hash in up return, 5:29:06 but it's mandatory on layer one. 5:29:09 And it's also, it has many other rules 5:29:11 that are inside the extension block that are mandatory, 5:29:15 but no one knows about them. 5:29:16 And so then in that case, no one really can see 5:29:19 that something has happened, they just see an up return. 5:29:23 Yeah, in that case it's different, 5:29:24 a secret extension block 5:29:25 because you're not actually storing any Bitcoin anywhere. 5:29:29 Yes. 5:29:31 I mean, I think, 5:29:35 well, some Twitter threads about that during the week, 5:29:37 but you could make a similar argument 5:29:40 about other uses of Bitcoin finality, 5:29:46 like timestamping or something, you know, 5:29:50 there's open timestamps and finality wall, 5:29:54 and they put checksums into the main chain. 5:30:00 Now, of course they don't, you know, 5:30:03 try to reorganize the chain if they disagree about it, 5:30:06 but I think where it gets, 5:30:13 you know, if it's actually, 5:30:17 the part where it gets tricky is, 5:30:19 if there's hidden, 5:30:22 if the miner act is soft fork, 5:30:25 is, you know, creating forks, 5:30:27 like systematically orphaning certain things 5:30:30 based on rules you don't know about, right? 5:30:33 So that's not good. 5:30:34 Like, let's say the rules have bugs in, 5:30:37 and they, you know, mess the network up somehow, 5:30:39 and then cause it to stop progressing or to fork. 5:30:44 What we see, this is the point of the soft fork 5:30:47 is that the old nodes should be indifferent 5:30:50 to whether or not if the rules, 5:30:52 it should be indifferent to the bug, in a way. 5:30:54 Well, no, but I'm just saying like, 5:30:55 one of the reasons that you, 5:31:00 I mean, the normal upgrade approach for a soft fork, 5:31:04 I mean, you know, the miner act about a soft fork 5:31:07 is a kind of, you know, Bitcoin SV kind of concepts. 5:31:13 And where they're just saying, well, you know, 5:31:22 only the miners matter, only the miners run nodes, 5:31:25 trust what the miners say, right? 5:31:28 And so, but a normal soft fork, 5:31:33 the miners are just sort of helping coordinate transition, 5:31:38 and you could almost as easily use a flag day, right? 5:31:42 And so the procedure normally would be, 5:31:45 you know, get consensus for the soft fork upgrade, 5:31:49 then hopefully lots of high value nodes upgrade, 5:31:55 like exchange nodes, wallet nodes, and things like that. 5:31:58 And once there's like human coordination, 5:32:02 that that's happened, then the miner start the signaling type of 5:32:12 activation to arrive at a coordination point where the miners will also start enforcing that 5:32:19 consensus rule. But that means that already, so then, so from that point of view, you know, 5:32:25 because the point is that the miners are not enforcing the rules, the economic full nodes are, 5:32:31 and the miners are just there to order transactions, and they could literally, 5:32:34 you know, mine random numbers, but just the hash rate would go down. And if it was invalid, 5:32:39 we rejected by the nodes, right? So it's really the case that the miners are just there to order 5:32:44 transactions. And if you have a miner activated soft fork, it's kind of, it's not that people 5:32:51 don't know about it, they're not checking it, right? So they would not, and I think I could 5:32:58 get quite confused if there's a fork or something going on. Yeah. 5:33:06 Well, you know, actually, I mean, I don't really just, I don't really agree per se, 5:33:11 because, I mean, I think that this is a modern view of the soft fork that has emerged 5:33:17 ever since seclet blockade. But I, I tried to research back into the first usage of soft and 5:33:25 hard fork, and I found it. And it was Gavin Andrews in 2012. And he said, there are, he said, 5:33:32 there are soft changes and hard changes. And he said, there are some changes where we have to get 5:33:39 everyone to upgrade. But he said, that is basically, in 2012, he said, that is basically impossible 5:33:46 now. Yeah. And he said, a soft change is one where we only need a few people to change. So 5:33:53 intriguingly, this definition of the soft fork, this soft and hard changes later became soft and 5:34:00 hard fork when it became like a network split would be something we had to upgrade, like the 5:34:05 eight megabyte Bitcoin Cash hard fork. Yeah. Upgrade the software to be on the quote, right, 5:34:14 unquote, side of the chain. And then the soft fork is just one where as long as 50% or 51% 5:34:22 of the miners enforce the fork, you, everyone will be on the same side. So it really had nothing 5:34:30 to do with even, it was like, we can activate, but you see that this whole, this whole thing is 5:34:36 completely at odds with the idea of everyone agreeing on the soft fork. It says explicitly, 5:34:42 we will never get everyone to agree. And so it's an intriguing thing. But it shouldn't be 5:34:47 surprising because remember who started the contentious hard fork drama, right? 5:34:54 Like Gavin was not, you know, was kind of a hierarchical mindset, benevolent dictator for life 5:35:01 kind of attitudes and centralized thinking, right? So that, but I mean, like procedurally, 5:35:07 in terms of the planning that went in, when people were coordinating with node operators 5:35:13 and figuring out, you know, is, is there enough deployment to encourage the miners to upgrade and 5:35:21 start signaling that that's literally how it works, right? And for the, for those reasons, 5:35:26 because if, if the miners activate and nobody else has, they can unactivate. And then you've got 5:35:32 like, you know, something weird, like a technical hard fork where not enough people are paying 5:35:38 attention to notice or something, you know, something where the consensus rules aren't 5:35:41 enforced by nodes or something, right? Which is like not providing the normal Bitcoin security 5:35:48 model anymore. So that's where, that's where it actually works, right? So it is, but it is a 5:35:54 curiosity that technically it's true that if the miners, you know, if a cabal of miners did a secret 5:36:02 miner reactivated soft fork, you wouldn't be able to detect it at all. Like they could have secret 5:36:07 keys shared between the cabals that you literally can't even see, you know, the checksums or their 5:36:12 extended data that they're sharing on the side or something, right? Well, yes. I mean, all I'm trying 5:36:23 to point out is that the soft fork as was, it was framed back in that year, which I'm not saying that 5:36:31 that should be whatever, who cares about that? But I'm just saying that, isn't it interesting? 5:36:37 I'm saying, isn't it interesting that it's actually sort of the opposite now? I'm just 5:36:41 so remarking on that. It's like a historical thing where it was considered a problem in 2012 that not 5:36:50 everyone would upgrade. Like there would, he's saying, he's saying, I take it for granted, 5:36:56 there is no consensus on anything among the humans. So what we can do is we have to release 5:37:03 a new version that's compatible. And then if there's ever a block mind that the old version 5:37:10 was totally miner centric. So it said, if we have a fork where someone breaks the rule and someone 5:37:17 follows the rule, as long as we have, you know, one active chain, one longest chain tip 5:37:25 is, you know, block 3000A and 3000B. 3000A follows the rule, 3000B breaks the rule. 5:37:33 The logic was as long as more miners have, are mining the, enforce the rule one, that one will 5:37:41 always win. Yeah. Since it will always have the longest chain and therefore the feature will be 5:37:45 safe despite the fact that many people will not be upgrading to enforce it. So I agree with you 5:37:53 in general, but I just think it's very curious the way the criterion has sort of flipped completely 5:37:58 and become, you must get the human, the criteria is almost the hard fork criterion because what 5:38:04 Gavin was saying back then, and I'm not saying whatever, whatever about Gavin, but I'm saying 5:38:08 that he's saying we can't get consensus. We can't get everyone to agree to upgrade to this. 5:38:14 If we could, we would do the hard fork or whatever, because as you know, he was, 5:38:18 he thought the cost of that was much lower than certainly I think the cost is insurmountable, 5:38:23 but it's kind of the same problem of hard forking and getting everyone to agree on the soft fork 5:38:28 are kind of very similar because they both require agreement. Well, I mean, I think the 5:38:32 problem with a hard fork, you know, even if there is like agreement to do a type of upgrade, 5:38:41 that's a hard fork. The problem is the coordination is really difficult because, 5:38:46 you know, there's lots of nodes that people won't get around to upgrading. 5:38:50 If you do a soft fork, you know, they kind of work in a degraded SPV security model, 5:38:56 but they don't get like forked off the network, all this money or get bamboozled, right? Whereas 5:39:02 with a hard fork, it would be a mess, right? And, you know, what you're saying about Gavin, 5:39:10 I think just nobody else agreed with Gavin. That's why, you know, eventually the hard fork, 5:39:16 you know, the big block drama became, you know, part of the public discussion and then led to this 5:39:23 succession of failed contentious hard forks. And, you know, in particular, I recall with one of 5:39:30 them, I'm not sure if it was Classic or one of the other ones, he was specifically arguing, 5:39:38 it's a kind of, it's a miner-centric view, right? So he's saying that a two megabyte hard fork 5:39:48 is fine. And it's not really a hard fork to clients because clients are SPV and they couldn't 5:39:54 tell the block size, you know, because they was looking at the headers and the Merkle, you know, 5:39:59 the validation that a SPV client would do wouldn't be able to tell the block size was over a megabyte 5:40:06 because it doesn't, you know, download the block generally, it's just verifying 5:40:13 some basic things, right? And so he seemed to view that as a feature that, you know, 5:40:17 miners could just change the rules. And as long as the SPV clients would be bamboozled, 5:40:22 that was great from his point of view. But everybody else thought that was horrendous 5:40:26 and was like, oh no, we need to find some tricks so that SPV clients can 5:40:33 check that then they're on the right chain. But actually, I think what tends to happen in the end 5:40:37 is that there are much fewer SPV clients, people using like different types of clients now, 5:40:43 or clients with SPVs cross-checking with another server and stuff like that, 5:40:49 and Electrum protocol, all that stuff. 5:40:54 I didn't know that. That's an interesting idea that the, it is kind of interesting in a way 5:40:59 that that would, it is a kind of advantage that the SPV people don't have to quote, 5:41:04 it's kind of a weird situation, but that's a very SPV centric. 5:41:08 Yeah, yeah. Well, but you see, like, that was his mindset. So, you know, 5:41:12 what you were saying, the rest of what you're saying about how he was describing 5:41:18 the coordination is more of the same, right? It's not like... 5:41:22 He's lamenting the inability to get all the coordination. 5:41:26 Yeah, I mean, it's just saying like, well, you know, 5:41:32 he's not worried about centralization at all. He never was, right? So, if we could simplify the 5:41:37 engineering talk by saying, well, the miners will decide. You guys can say SPV, 5:41:43 and the miners can just miner activate soft fork everything. You can upgrade if you want, 5:41:48 but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you have consensus or not, we'll do it. 5:41:54 These are all things that fit into hard fork drama, I would say. But I doubt, you know, 5:41:59 any of the other frequent contributors would have agreed with any of that when he said it. 5:42:10 So, I'm wondering if this is a proper way to look at it, if the miners can be thought of 5:42:15 as like paid security guards by the economic full nodes. So, if that's a good way to look at it, 5:42:23 that miners are really just like paid security guards to enforce certain rules 5:42:27 by the economic full nodes, then if the miners added on their own secret rules, 5:42:32 that the economic full nodes aren't really endorsing, then they can add those, they can 5:42:37 remove those, but they're not really being enforced by economic full nodes. So, they're kind of like 5:42:41 irrelevant. And if they added some kind of rules that, for example, were against the 5:42:49 economic full nodes, and then that chain became the longest weighted chain, I don't think that 5:42:53 would really matter either, because in the end, miners would eventually capitulate to whatever 5:42:58 the economic full nodes, their rules of consensus do, because miners will like, they might mine a 5:43:05 longer chain that's heavier. But if those Bitcoin are worthless to, you know, to the economic full 5:43:11 nodes, then eventually they would have to capitulate anyways. So, from that point of view, 5:43:15 the miners really don't have the power, it's the economic full nodes that have the power, 5:43:19 and the miners are just enforcing what the economic full nodes say. So, then if you have 5:43:26 some kind of, you know, miner activated soft fork of a drivechain, if the economic full nodes are 5:43:32 not enforcing it, then it's kind of useless. Is that a proper way to look at it? Well, I think 5:43:36 it's pretty close. But I think, you say, how do we know what it is that the economic nodes say? 5:43:42 Weirdly, the miners are kind of a part of like a weird media format where we learn what that was, 5:43:50 in some extent. But I think the security guard analogy, I use that one all the time, 5:43:55 I think that's very good. I think like, they are the security guards. The secret eight terabyte 5:44:01 extension block is like if the security guards may have machine guns and stuff, if they go off 5:44:06 in their own little closet, and they have like a poker game that has its own rules, 5:44:12 then yeah, probably it's pretty secure over there. A lot of other people don't know about it, 5:44:16 so they're not harmed by it, they don't. So, I think it's a pretty good analogy overall. 5:44:23 I do think BIP300 in particular is a very weird thing to have activate only by miners, 5:44:29 because the whole point of BIP300 is to constrain the miners, and to make it easier for the miners 5:44:35 and regular users to trust each other. So, it doesn't work as well if the miners are the only 5:44:41 ones. That analogy, I sometimes use like a dog holding its own leash. It's like, well, 5:44:47 I don't know what the point of that is. But it's also the case that, but we were bringing it up 5:44:55 for an important philosophical reason, which is this idea that you are, if you don't upgrade to be 5:45:01 enforcing the latest soft fork, then you are to quote degraded, unquote, degraded to SPV. 5:45:10 Yeah, I think that's generally the case, generically the case. 5:45:14 But the thing about that is, how do you know that you, like, are you degraded that way now, 5:45:23 like, from some other protocol, of which Bitcoin Core version 25 is only the SPV 5:45:30 version of something else? How do you actually know whether or not you've been degraded? And 5:45:34 if you can't know, then, well, is that real? I mean, I think the reason, you know, sometimes 5:45:42 miners use, like, hacked up variants of Bitcoin Core or with things bolted onto it, because they 5:45:50 are, you know, trying to optimize something or shortcut something or adding some weird feature 5:45:58 for, like, I don't know, paid site injection of transactions and stuff. There's a standard way 5:46:04 to do that. But, you know, for whatever reason, they modify it. And, like, they're typically not, 5:46:09 like, experienced Bitcoin developers, right? So occasionally stuff is, like, blown up because 5:46:18 there's some unreviewed code that's dodgy and conflicts with each other or something. And so, 5:46:24 you know, like, there's a bit 66 hard fork, which was miners doing kind of dodgy stuff, 5:46:31 just shortcut verification and things. But I think, like, one of the things I would worry about, 5:46:38 and there was discussion about this, because it's not quite clear what Rootstock has been 5:46:41 doing at different times, and there's merge mining going on, right? Whether there's actually 5:46:45 any kind of not very talked about, I mean, not like a secret cabal, but just nobody really 5:46:52 knows about it, if there is anything like that going on. So one of the main things I'll worry 5:46:58 about with that is kind of similar to the extension block idea, which is that that's 5:47:03 kind of an extension block that we don't know about. And the main risk that people don't like 5:47:07 about extension blocks is, well, whatever code is running in this extension block 5:47:12 could have accidental fork risk, you know? Like Bitcoin has had issues in the past where, 5:47:18 you know, nodes on 32-bit machines could interpret certain transactions as valid, 5:47:25 where 64-bit machines would consider them invalid. And then boom, you know, you can construct a magic 5:47:31 transaction and split the network in two, right? Divided by, you know, subdivided into 32 and 64 5:47:37 bit full nodes, for example, right? That actually, I mean, didn't turn into a fork because people 5:47:42 quietly fixed it, but that bug actually existed for a little while. And so, you know, and Bitcoin 5:47:48 has got very rigorous testing and careful review of consensus change, and even then you can make 5:47:54 mistakes between versions or between different platforms of the same thing. So the question is, 5:47:59 if somebody's, you know, put together a bunch of hidden extension block code, you're maybe more 5:48:04 worried about them, like, forking the chain, right? And creating a problem than them doing 5:48:12 something hidden, because you can't really tell if they're doing something hidden anyway. You just 5:48:16 don't want to screw things up. So that's why you want to know, like, what people are doing, 5:48:21 have a look at it, and, you know, have people review it first or something. 5:48:27 Well, I mean, so, but in that case, isn't there, there's a bunch of software that's running, 5:48:37 that does not know anything about the extension block. And so the new protocol would fork, 5:48:48 and the old nodes would be indifferent to which fork, so they would just follow the heaviest 5:48:53 rule. And it would be no different than, it'd be reorg, of course, reorg is itself bad, 5:48:58 but it wouldn't really be split, right? I mean, I suppose it's possible that it could, like, 5:49:08 and with stuff, like, appear to stop from the main chain's perspective, 5:49:15 or, you know, keep bouncing backwards and forwards, reorganizing itself, or I don't know, 5:49:22 like, it's kind of weird, right, that there are 5:49:25 trends, like, blocks in existence on two sides of the fork, based on some rule that you don't know 5:49:33 about, or it's gone haywire. Well, from that point of view, would you just see whichever chain, 5:49:41 I mean, because you don't know about any other rules that accept the rules you know about. 5:49:44 So according to the rules you know, you would just see whichever chain is the heaviest. 5:49:49 Even if you see there's, like, you know, potentially two chains going off, like, 5:49:52 you would just, whatever one is the heaviest, that would be your valid one, right? 5:49:55 Right, but I mean, let's say these are, you know, approximately equal hash rate, 5:50:01 and they're both growing longer, but, you know, the fork point is quite deep, then, 5:50:09 you know, that could have, you know, you could have sort of, I don't know, you'd be switching 5:50:15 backwards and forwards from these chains, like, all the time or something. 5:50:19 That's because the hash rate is split, not because it has anything to do with 5:50:24 why it's split in the first place. Right, but I mean, normally... 5:50:29 If it still happened today... I mean, what would that look like? 5:50:33 A really long... So they'd fight over, there'd be, like, 5:50:36 one really juicy, there'd be one really juicy transaction fee, and there are two people who 5:50:42 try to grab it, and then it would be split on who grabbed it. 5:50:47 Yeah, but I mean, maybe one pulling ahead, and then the other pulling ahead, 5:50:50 and still fighting over the same fork. I mean, normally, the chain resolves, 5:50:54 because miners give up when they see the longer chain, right? But here, they're, like, persistently 5:51:02 trying to go after the same thing again and again, right? So they'll pull ahead on... 5:51:05 They just insist that the other person is totally invalid. 5:51:08 Yeah, I mean, because that's what they're doing, because they've got some defect in 5:51:12 their consensus logic and their hidden extension block. But for the rest of us, 5:51:18 it would look odd, right? Because you're like, well, why don't they stop? Like, 5:51:22 that's clearly a longer chain. It's as if they can't see each other with blocks or something, 5:51:25 right? And they just keep mining these two parallel chains, and you keep flicking back 5:51:30 and forth between them. Depends on who's currently winning, right? 5:51:35 Well, I think that case, though, still is like, they have an incentive to... 5:51:41 Like, you see what I mean? It's a lot like the July 2015 thing, where one of them is going to 5:51:46 lose a ton of money because of the 100 block maturity rule or whatever. So some people are 5:51:52 losing a lot of money. And yeah, I guess it's kind of intriguing. That is a case where the miners 5:51:59 would prefer, if they're on the losing side, they would actually prefer that more nodes be 5:52:05 like, you know, I don't know, pulling the plug early. 5:52:09 But I don't think those miners know that they're messed up, though, right? Because they would just be, 5:52:17 you know, be like that 32 versus 64-bit previous bug. But things like that, 5:52:26 it's quite fragile. It's quite easy to make by accident if you do anything of any complexity, 5:52:31 and there's not enough independent review on it. Somebody just hacks a bunch of stuff up 5:52:39 and does this. Then, you know, I think something like that is more plausible to happen. 5:52:44 And you just get two different chains, and the nodes each are rejecting and ignoring the other 5:52:53 block. Because, you know, back at the fork point, there's a 32 versus 64-bit bug or something like 5:53:00 that, right? Well, of course, I mean, the miners never wanted to be in this scenario, 5:53:07 we could guess. And in July, the 2015 thing, they also didn't really know, right? Like, 5:53:14 they didn't know that they had... Well, I mean, they kind of triggered it because they were 5:53:18 spied mining, actually, right? So somebody spied mining something invalid, and they just kept going. 5:53:25 I guess in that case, though, the miners thought that they... That was an interesting case, because 5:53:31 the miners put themselves on their own invalid network that only contained them, 5:53:35 and everyone running a full node was not on it. Including some people who... 5:53:41 All the people who had actually updated 5:53:46 were not on that, because they knew the fork point was invalid. And so the difference in this 5:53:53 case would be the old nodes would be indifferent. I think what would happen would be, 5:54:03 since it would never be an exact tie, the old nodes, if you were on the slight minority, 5:54:11 you would notice that you would be getting... At a certain point, you would ask, you know, 5:54:17 you would like peer with the other full nodes. The other full nodes would say the longest chain 5:54:21 is some completely different chain. And then I think the nodes would throw alerts and stuff, 5:54:28 like orphans and things. Yeah, I think there were a few alert messages. 5:54:33 So they would get the alerts, at least, pretty soon. Yeah. Because at some point, 5:54:38 everyone, all the miners on the minority chain, they'd peer with someone, and they would say, 5:54:42 you're not on the longest chain at all. What are you guys crazy? And then, actually, 5:54:46 what would happen would be, wouldn't they request? Their mining node on the minority chain 5:54:51 would request, and they would think that the fork point block was invalid, and then they would ban 5:54:58 each other. Right? Yeah, maybe. Would they not? I think they... If people said you invalid blocks 5:55:07 too much, you'd ban them, yeah. But then you actually get an even more split network. 5:55:12 Yeah, it'd be very split in that case. And they would say, because they would say, 5:55:18 let's say you have like, it's split into like the top row and the bottom row, based on something in 5:55:22 an extension block. You're in the bottom row, and it's only 48%. You know, it's not as though the 5:55:28 hash rate is there or something. What would happen would be, they'd peer with someone, 5:55:33 say, oh no, you have a longer chain. They give that miner the top row. They check the very next 5:55:45 block in the top row. It would break the extension block rules. So then it would be, this peer passed 5:55:51 to me an invalid block. It would depend on if they custom coded it to deal with this scenario or not, 5:55:56 because then it would just be immediate, like 24 hour ban, I think. If someone says they have 5:56:01 a thing and they pass an invalid block. The minority chain, I think, would get itself banned 5:56:07 off the entire network immediately. And then, I don't know if that counts as the problem fixing 5:56:15 itself. That's the network of hidden extension block nodes, right? The general Bitcoin network 5:56:23 thinks they're all valid, but might disagree about the height of them with this. 5:56:30 Well, I don't think so. Well, maybe, because what I'm saying, well, in my hypothetical example, 5:56:35 they wouldn't drop the block as invalid though, because they don't know about the 5:56:38 defective extension block issue, right? Right. But what I'm suggesting is there's a mandatory 5:56:46 eight terabyte extension block in every block. And so that has some kind of hash or something. 5:56:51 That's some kind of hash code. And so that is what they hand over. They say, here's this block. 5:56:57 Unwittingly, they have no idea that they're going to hand over the hash code. 5:57:01 The miners will then look for the extension, the mandatory extension block, 5:57:07 but they either won't find it or it will be invalid. And then they want to have some kind 5:57:12 of custom way of getting this extension block amongst themselves. So they would do that. 5:57:17 They would check the extension block and then it would be invalid. And then they would say, 5:57:22 this block is invalid, right? And then they would ban it. 5:57:27 I mean, half of them would, I mean, if it was in two halves, then those halves extension block 5:57:36 miners would block each other on two halves of the network, right? Something like that. 5:57:42 I think they would. Yes. But then they will know, right? Because they'll be like... 5:57:48 But I mean, that's the normal behavior, right? So then they might just see the hash rate drop a bit. 5:57:59 Yes. It would not be a good thing though. 5:58:03 No. 5:58:03 But for average users, they would just still continue with the longest chain. And then the 5:58:10 only people really getting hurt is the miners that forked off with the less of a hash rate, 5:58:16 right? Those are the ones that would really get hurt. Because if you're broadcasting a 5:58:21 transaction, it would eventually reach both miners and it would eventually reach the miners 5:58:26 that do have more hash rate. So your transaction would get included anyways. 5:58:30 I mean, you'd have to hope desperately that it wasn't the case that someone tried to double 5:58:35 spend during this time, which you would hope that they would not. If that were the case, then yes. 5:58:43 I mean, it would be... 5:58:44 But otherwise, they would be unaffected, which would be very funny. The only people 5:58:47 who would be affected would be the 100 block maturity. 5:58:51 I mean, you would see... There'll be some confusing artifact that you'd be able to see 5:58:56 manually, right? Which is there would be somebody progressing another fork over there, 5:59:04 even though there's clearly more work chained up there. They're not converging, right? 5:59:09 It's kind of like there's a network split, you know? 5:59:16 Like they're selectively not seeing the blocks, but they're seeing the transactions or something. 5:59:24 Well, yeah, this is my other thought experiment, other than the mandatory 5:59:28 eight terabyte extension block is also, what if occasionally the miners enter an irrational 5:59:34 psychological state and they feel compelled to do a 10 block reorg? And this is just something 5:59:41 that happens. It's like, you know, when the crescent moon happens or something, they must do 5:59:47 it. And that is also kind of saying we have all been degraded to SPV of a kind of mystical, 5:59:55 unknowable full node. This is my pushing back slightly against this whole degraded SPV thing 6:00:01 is like, is that it's kind of like I agree with it. I agree with the details of it. But I think 6:00:10 like every what I'm saying is every protocol is SPV of some other protocol that we may not know. 6:00:19 So every protocol at all, you can label them all like Bitcoin Core 25, Bitcoin Core 22, 6:00:26 all of them are SPV of something and full of themselves. 6:00:31 But they're in fact, they're SPV of an infinite number of variations, 6:00:35 multiple variations of the protocol, right? So there's actually, we're always in SPV mode of an 6:00:40 infinite number of things. But I mean, if those things are not getting any hash rate, then it's 6:00:44 not really right. Because they're hypothetical things. But that's my question about mandatory 6:00:51 miner extension block or mandatory miner psychological desire to reorg. 6:01:00 Then this is putting the miners back in the driver's seat of the soft fork. 6:01:07 I don't think the mystical once in a year mandatory 10 block reorg works because 6:01:14 it could go against the incentives of the miners. Because like, what purpose, 6:01:19 what like economic gain do they have from doing that? 6:01:22 I think he's just saying they're irrational. They're crazy and they don't mind losing money. 6:01:29 But if you want to say that the miners act irrationally, wouldn't you say then like 6:01:33 Bitcoin would be broken in general then? 6:01:36 Well, I don't agree that. I'm just trying to take an edge case so that we can, you know what I mean? 6:01:41 Like when physicists say, well, what if it was a black hole that was spinning at rotating at the 6:01:46 speed of light, like what would happen? You know, I'm just trying to sketch out the edges 6:01:50 so that if we sketch out the edges, then we should have like the interior, a decent glimpse 6:01:55 of the interior. So this is what people are saying, which is that you must get consensus 6:02:01 among everyone in the world to enforce your soft fork. And then the miners upgrade to be 6:02:09 compatible with that. And if you don't do that, then it is harming the full nodes. 6:02:16 But I'm saying, if you can't really know that you've been harmed, 6:02:20 then is that a real sentence? You know, is it a real harm? Because you don't know. 6:02:25 I mean, I think the harm is... 6:02:27 If they don't know they've been harmed, then they haven't been harmed. It's irrelevant. 6:02:35 But you also don't get anything. It's also irrelevant for you because it's like if you 6:02:38 try to enforce anything meaningful, that's the only time it matters. 6:02:43 I mean, an example of... 6:02:46 An example of a kind of harm is, you know, miners started doing spy mining. I mean, 6:02:51 people know what that is. Like, to speed up the transition between when a new block arrives 6:03:00 to save the time of having to actually verify it before they build on top of it. They would just... 6:03:06 But do you think that's bad? I actually think that's a good thing. I think that's like an 6:03:09 invention. 6:03:10 Well, I mean, it's not great because they're not verifying blocks, right? 6:03:16 No, but remember, the full node... Each of our full nodes is supposed to validate the 6:03:22 block. And also, they have an incentive to get it. Like, what they're doing is they have a... 6:03:28 It's like they've invented a kind of thing that's like ASP Boost or something where 6:03:32 it instantly validates a block, but it has some failure rate or something. 6:03:37 It's like some special chip. 6:03:38 Yeah, I think it's just like their business decision. 6:03:42 Yeah, I agree. 6:03:43 It's a business decision of theirs, and if they want, they take it or they don't. 6:03:46 But I mean, I'm just saying it did have a cost, though, because like the BIP66 fork 6:03:51 was pretty dangerous. 6:03:52 Yes, but that only... But what happened with the BIP66 fork was everyone who was running 6:03:58 their own full node was completely unaffected. I guess if you ran an old node, ironically, 6:04:05 you may have been re-org'd. It depends. 6:04:09 I mean, people could have lost... 6:04:11 If those miners had done that on purpose, they could have profited from it. I mean, 6:04:15 they did it by accident because they didn't... 6:04:16 Someone did a double spend. I remember on Reddit, someone said they did a double spend 6:04:20 as a demonstration and then gave the money to whoever. 6:04:23 Yeah, so someone could lose, right? 6:04:27 But that's from a re-org, and actually, I think that is covered by the whole fact that 6:04:32 the miners who mined the longer chain and then had to go back, the longer invalid chain 6:04:38 under BIP66, those miners lost all the money that they would have... That was just a clear 6:04:44 mistake on their part. 6:04:45 Yeah. 6:04:47 So I kind of think it's still covered because the miners were not... This is actually, I 6:04:51 think, a kind of a deep part of what I'm saying, which is that... Well, I think we're both 6:04:57 saying in a way, which is the miners are trying to solve... The miners are trying to cost 6:05:04 minimize. They don't want the stale blocks. They don't want orphan blocks. So they want 6:05:09 the block to propagate as quickly as possible. They don't want to wait. They want to move 6:05:15 on to the next block. So the spy mine is a very good way of describing it because they're 6:05:20 saying, they have switched over and I'm going to switch also. But I think the lesson learned 6:05:27 from the BIP66 is actually that spy mining is really good, but it has this... But make 6:05:34 sure you have the full node validate the block. So it's like you switch over immediately, 6:05:40 but have someone somewhere validate the block in the next 15, 16 seconds and then go back 6:05:46 and kill the block if it's invalid. So I really see that as a victory of the nodes over the 6:05:51 miners yet again. 6:05:52 Well, I mean, I think they fixed their code afterwards because it cost them money and 6:05:59 they could see it was bad, right? 6:06:01 That's exactly the whole point is that it cost them money. Spy mining was saving them 6:06:06 money, earning them money, but it had this... Satoshi and Joy said it's a business decision 6:06:11 and cost benefit analysis. And now they said, this works really well. What can we do to 6:06:17 minimize this cost of spy mining? And I think that they did do that. 6:06:21 Well, I think what they do is that... I mean, they do the spy mining, they mine an empty 6:06:28 block, and then they validate the block in the meantime. If it turns out it wasn't valid, 6:06:35 they change. They start working against themselves or try to orphan their own block if they found 6:06:39 one. And they start mining transaction keys. They switch to a new block that they construct 6:06:49 from their pool. 6:06:53 Right. So that's why I say it's just that they're climbing the ladder of mining invention, 6:06:58 just making mining work better, I think, every time. 6:07:03 Yeah. And I still think that mining a block without verifying it is... 6:07:09 Yes, but actually, think about that though. You're really now... You're going ironically 6:07:13 back into the SV philosophy because you're saying... 6:07:17 Everyone will be trusting the miners. 6:07:19 No, I think what I'm saying is... 6:07:19 If no one trusts the miners, then the miners can mine whatever weird, invalid stuff they want. 6:07:24 But people... I mean, I guess the people that it hurts are the SPV users, actually. The full 6:07:33 nodes are probably not going to be affected, right? And it's probably going to be infrequent 6:07:42 because there has to be a transition or something going on for it to blow up. 6:07:47 But it's still... I mean, some people... It's an empty block as well, right? I think it has 6:07:53 to be, basically, or they run the risk of having a conflict with a transaction that's 6:07:57 in there that they don't know about. 6:08:00 Well, if you go full tilt spy mode, where you just take the exact get block template 6:08:05 from the... You pass it through completely, then I would think that's the cleverest way 6:08:10 to spy mine. Because you say, I connect... I'm a pool. I'm whoever I am. I'm whatever. 6:08:16 I'm whatever I am. I'm brains or something. I'm a pool. And I mostly... I have my own node, 6:08:23 but I also... I connect to the boundary. I connect to AntsPool. And if AntsPool switches over, 6:08:32 they switch over from one block to something else and they have the... Whatever it is. 6:08:37 I can get the HashMerkle root or something. Then I just... I try to copy their get block 6:08:43 template and I just try to swap out the combo destination. That would be the coolest thing 6:08:50 to do, is copy the whole thing. I don't know if that's possible. But you know what I mean? 6:08:54 Because you're thinking... AntsPool knows what the first block was, so they know what to do 6:08:59 in the next block. So I'll just copy them. And then 15 or 16 seconds later when you have 6:09:05 the real block... They maybe don't give you enough API to swap it. I mean, I presume start 6:09:09 on V2 does, because it's trying to help you choose your own block. But I think they just 6:09:16 give you a hash or something. Like here, mine this. And therefore you don't know enough to change the 6:09:25 address probably. You do need to know the Merkle path in order to modify. 6:09:35 So I guess you must get the Merkle path. They probably give the whole thing, but I don't actually know. 6:09:41 I think there was this idea called... I gave it a name. I called it hipster mining, where instead 6:09:47 of mining the empty block, the new block has come in. Instead of mining the empty block, 6:09:53 what you do is you... If the mempool is a certain depth, you go like eight megabytes deep and you 6:10:01 pull the lowest fees that you think it's very, very, very unlikely that any of these were in. 6:10:07 Yeah, I thought about that. 6:10:08 Very, very likely that it may be true. 6:10:10 Yeah. 6:10:11 This is like a funny idea. 6:10:12 And also, sometimes the miners have transaction accelerators. It's not a guarantee, but there 6:10:20 may be situations where they could have transactions that they're fairly sure were not broadcast or 6:10:26 something. 6:10:27 I think they would have a better success rate just mining empty, because if you're going to 6:10:32 end up finding a block of a transaction that was already included by mistake, it's just not worth 6:10:37 it. 6:10:37 It's a multiple situation. 6:10:38 So it would depend on the fees versus the block subsidy, right? 6:10:41 Exactly. 6:10:42 If the fees are really worth it, then you might. But if the block subsidy is way more, then... 6:10:46 You know what? You could mine these stupid inscription things, right? Because 6:10:54 those were done by... 6:10:56 Identified by one hand. 6:10:57 Yeah, but they were done by a miner agreement, right? So the miners were just charging them 6:11:02 and then they were... Because it wasn't a standard transaction rate. 6:11:08 Well, if you have your own private transactions that wouldn't propagate through the network, 6:11:14 then you could just add those at any time. 6:11:16 Yeah. But I'm thinking of those bigger scripters that filled the whole block. They were like 6:11:21 that anyway, because the miner itself was generating the transaction and asking the 6:11:27 user to prepay the fees, like it's a private agreement, right? So there's no transaction 6:11:33 replay risk. 6:11:40 Unless that user gave it to different mining pools, but they probably wouldn't. 6:11:45 But I'm saying that the miner itself, I think, might create a transaction. 6:11:52 They just give them a JERF and a JPEG or whatever. 6:11:54 Ah, I see, I see. Usually, I think they give them the raw transaction. 6:11:58 Okay, then they could mess with them, possibly, yeah. 6:12:06 Plus, don't they have to flag exactly which Satoshi is the ordinal or whatever? 6:12:12 That's all done on the ordindexer side. So it's just a raw transaction that's given to them, from what I understand. 6:12:20 Yeah. 6:12:22 Yeah, but so it's like this idea of being reduced to SPV, because you don't know about, you aren't enforcing the latest rule. I still philosophically, I do not wholeheartedly accept this. 6:12:42 Well, I mean, you could say if you accept the mainline view that economic full nodes are what defines consensus, and then if you are a soft fork or more behind that, then you are SPV to the global Bitcoin consensus rate. 6:13:05 And the miners are having to follow, generate blocks that are compatible with that, or they don't get paid. 6:13:14 Well, I'm not sure I buy all those completely, because I mean, think about it like this. If you were earlier talking about how SPV, they wouldn't even know what the block size was. So that's like an extreme, that's like what I think of as SPV. 6:13:27 Yeah, I just mean like degraded… 6:13:30 Yeah, but of course, we all know that like, if you would not be like, you know, you switch from Bitcoin Core version 30 to 31, it's not like the block size will have changed and you'll still be, those old nodes will still know the block size, they'll still know about whatever, the CDSA signatures and all the things will be checked except for the one new thing. 6:13:54 Yeah, I mean, I think the reason I would say you're SPV is because, you know, pick a soft fork like Schnorr signatures or, you know, one of the other things, but like, you know, to a node before the upgrade, it looks like an optro effectively, right? 6:14:21 And so, if you are accepting things that you think are optro as valid, then the miners could collude and like make you believe you've got a ton of money in invalid blocks and other people would just like calmly ignore them, right? 6:14:38 So, yeah, it is going to require burning hash rate to catch out some people, but it's plausible too, right? You know, you could have an exchange that accepts one confirmation, it doesn't upgrade their stuff very well, some exchanges are not very good at upgrading, and you could, you know, run enough hash rate to do it and then they would accept a phantom deposit which you, you know, convert to something else and take out. 6:15:05 I mean, SPV in that sense, right? And I think all SPVs are the same in the sense that, you know, it doesn't matter what it is, they would all be exploitable because you're going to accept something that was previously always true, right? So you would accept something as true that is not according to the economic majority, right? 6:15:33 Well, yes. It's funny because normally the victim would be the person whose money is being taken, but that's not what you're saying in this case. It's the person who… 6:15:44 is the who... 6:15:46 You know what I mean? 6:15:47 You would take it out of... 6:15:48 would just point at some big transaction and say, here's 1000 Bitcoin, some 6:15:53 exchange made some coins around with a Schnoorl short 6:16:06 you can 6:16:07 just 6:16:13 your exchange and they say, great, you've got one confirmation that you can trade, you 6:16:18 can trade it and take it out, right? 6:16:21 And so I think that would absolutely work, 6:16:26 The interesting thing about that is that though it does require the miners to then re-org, like it's basically similar to a re-org. 6:16:35 Well, I mean that transaction… 6:16:36 More than you would think. 6:16:37 That whole block would be invalid to the rest of the network. So you'd be intentionally making an invalid block to target for a large fake transfer some people who didn't upgrade where you can convert them to money. 6:16:51 But what I'm saying is all this does is it prevents miners from needing to take the step of having a bunch of money to double spend. 6:17:00 That's actually the only marginal value of the attack to the miners I think. I may be mistaken though because I think I've never thought of this possibility before. 6:17:10 But I think if the miners have a thousand BTC, they can deposit it at the exchange that uses one confirmation and then just re-org it out by just mining more blocks elsewhere, right? 6:17:23 Well, no, I mean I think the thing is you could… it's kind of like the Finney attack, right? 6:17:28 Which is that you could rent 1% of hash rate until you get lucky and you get your invalid block that uses a bogus opt-true to move a bunch of money you have or don't have. 6:17:44 And that you don't have and do a fake deposit. But if you've got a re-org, now you've got to be really sure that you're going to overtake the network. 6:17:55 You need to control comfortably more than 50% of the network, right? So it's a higher risk, more expensive thing. And you've got to have the money, right? 6:18:06 Well, I mean I guess. I guess I'm saying something like the miners want to defraud this exchange that… I'm saying how much of the attack hinges on the fact that the exchange is a one confirmation exchange? 6:18:22 Because the exchange is getting this money in, and it's clearly – they have some kind of cost benefit in mind when they say, well, we only require one confirmation. 6:18:33 Even though it's a big receipt. So I'm saying a parallel world where there is no soft fork confusion because that's what we're talking about. 6:18:45 It's like this soft fork degradation effect. In a parallel world, they could just have the 100. Instead of having 1,000 coins that are locked behind like an op-nop 7 that no one knows about, they are 1,000 coins that actually the miners themselves have the key. 6:19:05 It's like pay to pubkey hash and they actually have the signature for. So in that scenario, it's very, very similar. They spend 1,000. They find a block. 6:19:17 Everyone else in the world sees this block as valid, but they go back and they rewrite it, and they orphan the block. And it's a reorg attack in that case. 6:19:29 What I'm saying is you can translate this attack into a reorg attack, and the only difference is that the miners did not need to already have the 1,000 coins in their possession when they began the attack. 6:19:44 I think a reorg attack requires more hash rate though, right? 6:19:49 Well, in this – okay, so you're saying you have only 1% of the hash rate and you – yeah, I think maybe that could be the case. 6:20:02 I think it's also – you need to distinguish here rational actors of miners or irrational, because once you start introducing that miners will act irrationally, then I think that consensus of Bitcoin or rules of Bitcoin kind of break. 6:20:17 But if you're going to say that all miners will act rationally, then you have to provide economic game theory for them to actually do this, because you can say that them doing this will hurt the price of Bitcoin, hurt the price of their ASIC, so it's not a rational move for them to do. 6:20:31 Not to nip it too badly, but if miners start acting irrationally, I mean, miners are just service workers for the users who end up buying the coin they value, so users are going to pay for the coins that follow the rules that they want. 6:20:42 And if you're a miner mining some other client rules, then you're not getting paid by those people. 6:20:48 Well, this scenario is all following the rules of all nodes anyways, really, right? 6:20:54 I mean I guess it's – I mean it's sort of making invalid blocks, so the other nodes don't care. They ignore it, right? In order to catch out and upgrade. 6:21:09 It's kind of like a free eclipse attack on the exchange, because the exchange will process this block, and then it will just immediately get blown off the network. 6:21:21 But I'm still trying to figure out to what extent does it actually benefit from the fact that you… 6:21:26 I mean it's a lot cheaper, right? Because the natural – I mean everybody – no other miners will build on it. 6:21:35 So it's like a pretty much throwaway invalid block, and you could create one just by renting enough hash rate and waiting. 6:21:42 Like 1% per day should do it, and that is probably going to be cheaper and easier to achieve, because you can rent hash rate, no problem, right? 6:21:55 If you actually wanted to have very high assurance of being able to orphan a deposit, then you've got to muster like 50% of the hash rate, right? 6:22:07 But I guess you can construct other variants. 6:22:10 It's kind of silly in any way though, because if you think about it – well, sorry. 6:22:15 I was going to say you can probably repair it, your version, to be effective. 6:22:24 Which is you deposit. You try to orphan. If you fail, you withdraw again, right? 6:22:35 If you succeed, you withdraw. 6:22:40 And so you sort of – you don't lose because you just – if you fail to do your reorg, you just withdraw the coin again. 6:22:56 No, I mean of course it's going to – failing to do the reorg is going to cost you, because you're running hash rate. 6:23:02 So you might have to do 1% of the hash rate for a day until you manage to do one reorg, right? 6:23:10 I think you need a lot of hash rate in every case, because even in the case where you – from the point of view of the exchange's old node, it will see one block paying it. 6:23:25 But if you are not on the longest chain, that – I mean what I'm trying to say is the old exchange node, it's open-minded to the new nodes that actually enforce the rules. 6:23:38 Oh yeah. It won't believe it for very long, right? 6:23:42 Right. So actually you do need a – you need like 51% hash rate in a way or something. 6:23:48 Or you need an exchange that accepts one confirmation, which is why I used that example, right? 6:23:53 Yeah, which is why they don't really do that. 6:23:55 I mean some accept not very much, because it's sort of competitive. 6:24:01 Yeah. 6:24:02 But three is pretty different than one. 6:24:05 Yeah. 6:24:06 I think they probably cut it. Well, it's like it's the same thing as anything else. 6:24:12 But I mean you can – I mean the exchange is just an example of how somebody could create mischief and still with it, right? 6:24:19 There are scammers that would probably figure out a way to do something with it by persuading somebody to do something irreversible based on one confirmation, right? 6:24:33 But that's what I'm trying to say is, is it actually just a reorg attack? 6:24:38 Like if it's – does it just hinge on confirmation logic? 6:24:42 You see what I mean? If it hinges on confirmation logic – 6:24:45 I think it's the same, yeah. I think it's the same basically as any reorg, even without like older nodes. 6:24:50 Yeah, I think the logic goes the same over there. 6:24:53 Because if I could just pin it all on the reorg thing, then I'm back in business with saying that there is no degradation, because this is just like a fictional degradation that is unknowable, kind of, for what I'm thinking about. 6:25:09 See, because it's kind of like saying we will pay them, but then the old node – it's because the old node is indifferent that the old node will accept the longest chain that has a different conflicting history for that opt true. 6:25:27 So that is exactly why it actually goes back to the Gavin Andresen era definition where they are indifferent, and then they will be following the miners. 6:25:39 So it is FPV in that sense, but it's the idea of if the miners are – this is because the whole – the question kind of is going in a couple different circles and doubling back on itself. 6:25:52 Because the soft fork is saying you're indifferent between two rule sets, but you're never indifferent on whether or not you follow the longest chain. 6:26:02 So it's kind of by definition the soft fork is saying whichever majority hash rate pick is the longest chain. 6:26:13 And that is why I find it so curious that this definition has flipped around and has become something else. 6:26:21 Not that I'm – I don't complain about that. I actually think it's fine for definitions to change or whatever. I'm not trying to say the old definition can stand, but I am saying… 6:26:30 I'm arguing that that old definition was a Gavin fork of people's views that everybody else immediately rejected. 6:26:42 Well, I think Gavin had a lot of views that people rejected. I agree with that. But I think this was the old understanding that you couldn't get everyone to upgrade. 6:26:54 And so what you would do is you would release a new version where people were indifferent between following the rules or not. 6:27:02 And then it's exactly because of that fact that whichever chain the miners were on was the chain that everyone was on. 6:27:12 And if the miners then upgraded, then the whole network upgraded. And that was – and I think that wasn't just Gavin I think, but I don't know. 6:27:20 I'm not sure because I wasn't paying attention at the time. I wasn't using Bitcoin or reading IFC and stuff when some of these really old forks were done. 6:27:36 But you'd want to ask some of the developers that were active, like Luke Dashjr or Greg Maxwell and people like that, how did that upgrade happen in practice? 6:27:52 Because the concept that they would try to talk to people running economic nodes and make sure they upgraded before they would ask miners to upgrade and then figure out an activation schedule, that was around since at least 2013. 6:28:13 Because I've heard people talking about it, but it probably was around a few years before as well, right? And you're only talking about that kind of timeframe. When Gavin was talking about this, it was probably what, 2012 or something? 6:28:28 Yes. This idea of the soft and hard chain was 2012, and then it was October, I think, 2012 when someone made a big glossary. 6:28:39 Because I was just researching the history of this idea. But it's true that you're right that the soft fork miners were not seen necessarily as causing the soft fork to happen per se, so much as it was saying this is the date at which we now know that enough other people have supported. 6:29:05 It was kind of something like, when is the soft fork activated? Okay, when 95% BIP-9 or whatever. And there were like in 2013, Gavin YOLO'd one or two of those. I think was it Pagescript-Hash was just YOLO'd on a day or something? And that's why that's the one that is half broken or something. 6:29:28 something one of them has like the I mean that was the extra That was a lesson in how 6:29:33 not to reach technical consensus that whole saga. Yeah. 6:29:40 And then 6:29:41 we were stuck with that for a very long time. 6:29:43 servers still are because who uses Pay to Witness, Cryptash? 6:29:46 Maybe some people do, I'm sure people do, but I don't. 6:29:49 used the regular Cray Multistink. 6:29:53 So I don't 6:29:59 Which was the first soft fork Google searches jammed up with stupid contentious forks? 6:30:07 I know a typical one. BitMEX Research has a table that is, I don't think I fully agree, but it's very good. Find the BitMEX Research. 6:30:14 But I'm not looking for network split type forks. I mean soft fork upgrades. 6:30:20 The first planned soft fork was the block-hiding coinbase, I think. 6:30:25 Oh no, I think that's pretty late, I think. 6:30:28 Socially himself did a few. And in particular, my belief is that changing the longest chain to the heaviest chain is theoretically a hard fork. And it's also, the up-and-up is also theoretically a hard fork. 6:30:42 That is a for sure a hard fork. 6:30:45 People do not follow that chain. 6:30:48 And then when would it have become problematic for the first time? I don't know, but definitely a block. Maybe it is block-hiding. I don't think so. I thought that was a different topic. 6:31:02 BitMEX has a thing for a hard fork, though. 6:31:05 There's a cool table. And there was, I think, no duplicate transactions? When was that? I don't know, but I don't really remember. This is going to be funny. 6:31:14 Everyone look it up on BitMEX and then laugh at us if we try that. 6:31:20 Yeah, I have the article already. I'm going to read it now. 6:31:25 Maybe I'll try to find something on BitMEX research. History of soft forks or something. 6:31:30 Well, Satoshi disabled the upper-variant calls. 6:31:34 Oh yeah, that's it. 6:31:35 That will be a soft fork, though. 6:31:37 That is a hilarious mistake, right? It's like op fork the network. Oops. 6:31:44 If you just use it, you've spontaneously forked the network. 6:31:50 It's a very strange one, because it seems to imply that Satoshi... 6:32:01 wanted... Satoshi seems to have... I think he made a mistake. 6:32:06 But that part of it, I think he's thinking, oh, I can make it so that different versions... 6:32:12 Different versions will... It's kind of like a sidechain-y kind of weird idea, where we can have multiple interoperable versions somehow. 6:32:20 I think he didn't really quite think it through. Because it's like... 6:32:24 I mean, you're sure he wasn't just thinking, oh, let's make the version available on the stack in case someone wants to write a program using it. 6:32:31 Yeah, I guess that's probably what he thought. He probably thought, well... 6:32:36 I mean, he was really right, though, because he made all this stuff available and then he soft forked it all out. 6:32:41 He deleted it all. So he was right to do it. 6:32:44 And the one thing he missed, he didn't put the op nops. He didn't actually... 6:32:48 So it's kind of funny, he had to put the op nops later. 6:32:51 Kind of an interesting... Definitely an interesting... Definitely a brilliant guy. 6:32:57 But yeah, that's kind of a funny... Well, then there was that horrible bug with op equal or something. 6:33:05 I don't know about that one. 6:33:07 Apriton, maybe? Apriton called you to spend any... 6:33:11 Yeah, you could spend anyone else's money. 6:33:13 No. 6:33:14 That didn't work. 6:33:17 If I read the table correctly, that was the first soft fork to disable the OP_RETURN. 6:33:26 And what did OP_RETURN do? To just take any coin, basically? 6:33:32 It would just exit the script, as far as I understand. 6:33:36 It immediately... 6:33:38 Yeah, and if there's anything on the stack, it's true. 6:33:41 So... 6:33:44 I'm not actually certain, but I think it's the modern usage of OP_RETURN as something that you never... 6:33:51 I think it's like accidental. 6:33:55 Well, then you reuse the code for something else. 6:33:59 But the original purpose was to just exit the script. 6:34:03 So if you just push a 1 to the stack and just exit immediately, then you could spend any output. 6:34:11 But the new purpose is embedding data, I suppose. 6:34:16 Yeah. 6:34:21 Bitmex research said that it counted as soft fork when they disabled the 14 other... 6:34:29 They disabled OP_CAT and disabled other things. 6:34:35 The sigops limit... 6:34:41 From 2010, they say that's a soft fork. 6:34:44 And the 1MB block size limit, of course. 6:34:47 July 19th, 2010. 6:34:53 But these aren't real soft forks. These aren't really anything. 6:34:56 I'm sorry, I was going to guess this, but I didn't guess it. 6:35:00 Instead, I looked it up, and I wished I had. 6:35:01 The first soft fork that seems to be real is disabling any transaction having the same TXID. 6:35:09 With the two exceptions. 6:35:11 That one is like in 2012. 6:35:14 But it's not really an upgrade, but it's a real thing. 6:35:19 Oh, and this one, pay to script batch is April 2012. 6:35:23 And this is the... Was this the YOLO'd? This is the YOLO'd one. 6:35:28 But it's 55% hash threshold. 6:35:33 Which... I mean... 6:35:34 Yeah, exactly. There's no threshold for that one. 6:35:37 I'm trying to recall if it's... I think it also had some same speeds, if I'm not mistaken. 6:35:41 You are right. March 2013, it is BIP34. Require the coinbase to include the block height. 6:35:48 That is the first one to use the 95%, which I thought was... I think of as a normal soft fork. 6:35:53 Yeah. 6:35:55 Which no one else does now, but that's fine. 6:36:00 Well, I mean, some of the other ones, did they not have miner signaling, I'm guessing? 6:36:07 They did not. Well, pay to script batch had 55% miner signaling, but there was something very funny happened, 6:36:14 where they kept moving the date because not enough miners had upgraded. 6:36:18 So, it was a little... It was very ad hoc. 6:36:24 But then this 95% thing was supposed to be used by BIP66 and other things. 6:36:31 Check lock time verify, relative lock time, check sequence verify. 6:36:39 So, I guess, despite the hidden extension block for experiment, it's going to be bad not to do things that way. 6:36:56 You know, it's just like an experiment to explore the possibility and the security implications and stuff like that. 6:37:07 And maybe to use the argument, like, if you can't tell, then philosophically, should anybody care? 6:37:16 If disclosed things are done that way or something. 6:37:21 But presumably, the mainline way to do it is to, you know, 6:37:31 either find consensus for the drivechain codes to enable drivechains and other things like it, 6:37:41 or to figure out a way to implement a drivechain variant using some existing or new opcodes that are added for other purposes, 6:37:52 like covenants, we were saying, might be able to do it, right? 6:37:59 Well, yes. I mean, I also said this at Scionic 3, when we were in that group. 6:38:04 I was like, well, theoretically, if the software were released, 6:38:12 then there would be no way of stopping miners from doing either a drivechain or an extension block. 6:38:19 And so I was like, mulling that over also, like, what does that mean exactly? 6:38:24 Um, well, wasn't, I mean, 1.4.8 and all that stuff, wasn't that related to this kind of concept? 6:38:42 Like, a user-activated soft fork was actually a sort of veto of a miner unilateral action, right? 6:38:51 Do this or else you'll fork yourself off the network when you do that thing, kind of thing, right? 6:38:57 Because it was public, and people didn't agree with it. 6:39:02 Yeah, I agree that, well, in that case, the miners, I think the miners kind of knew that they weren't doing the right thing, actually. 6:39:09 I wonder if you agree with that or not. 6:39:11 But I think that they kind of, like, knew that they didn't really feel that SegWit was bad for Bitcoin, right? 6:39:17 They were just holding it hostage to try and get this other thing that someone told them they should want, that they believed. 6:39:24 It seemed like. 6:39:25 That's my interpretation. 6:39:27 You know what I mean? Like, it wasn't like they were thinking, if we put SegWit, 6:39:31 then how interesting would it have been if instead they had said something like, 6:39:35 SegWit is a block size increase from one to four megabytes, and we don't want to do that or something. 6:39:42 That would be... 6:39:43 Yeah. 6:39:44 But they didn't actually have a belief about the, you know, like, they had like a common, 6:39:52 they had a conception of the public good, you know what I mean? Like, what is best for Bitcoin? 6:39:57 And they thought, they didn't really think SegWit is bad for Bitcoin. 6:40:02 They thought, we can hold SegWit hostage, if we just hold SegWit hostage for a short time, 6:40:08 soon we'll have SegWit and the quote two megabytes block size increase or whatever. 6:40:14 Yeah, for some reason, I mean, I don't think originally they cared either way. 6:40:19 They just wanted Bitcoin developers to figure something out. 6:40:23 But for some reason, it became fixated on, you know, it had to be a hard fork. 6:40:32 Like, they would have taken a two megabyte hard fork or a two megabyte soft fork. 6:40:36 They really wanted the hard fork for no logical reason, right? 6:40:41 I don't know why. I've tried to figure that out. 6:40:44 I think it's utterly perplexing, and I have tried very hard to figure out why that is. 6:40:50 I think you and I have talked about it too before, which is that maybe it had something to do with 6:40:55 what you just said about Gavin was saying. 6:40:57 Like, maybe like the way BitPay or someone, one of these people has set up, 6:41:01 it's like their software would work. 6:41:02 But that doesn't really make any sense, right? 6:41:04 Because surely they just run the Bitcoin node and then they have like RPC access to it. 6:41:10 So I don't know. I find that perplexing. I find it very strange. 6:41:14 But I've been trying to figure that too. 6:41:16 Why did they care so much about it being a hard fork? 6:41:18 The thing, and especially why did miners care about it being a hard fork? 6:41:22 Where their power is reduced like minus 99.9%. 6:41:28 As I was just explaining, with the soft fork they have an enormous ability to actually affect or disrupt the thing. 6:41:37 With the hard fork, it doesn't make sense to me personally. I don't know why. 6:41:43 I've tried to figure it out for a long time. 6:41:45 I find it one of the greatest mysteries in all of Bitcoin. 6:41:48 Why did they do that? 6:41:50 I mean, I don't think they originally cared. 6:41:52 I think it was like, you know, various... 6:41:55 Because the people that were proposing the forks were portraying it that they had lots of users and that it was good for Bitcoin. 6:42:04 And so they lobbied the miners to make it so. 6:42:08 So I think the miners were kind of playing along with these other guys, 6:42:13 kind of business-led, let's pivot Bitcoin into a bit more centralized sort of micropayments kind of system. 6:42:26 And it was easier for them because they didn't have to upgrade software. 6:42:30 And you can see it afterwards. 6:42:32 The companies that upgraded to SegWit and even... 6:42:37 The people that wanted the big blocks were the last to use them by SegWit. 6:42:41 Let's put it that way, right? 6:42:44 Well, I find it, as I've mentioned a couple of times, 6:42:48 I find it absolutely fascinating that in December 2015 at Scaling 2, 6:42:53 the miners seemed clearly not to care at all one bit. 6:42:56 Anyone can go and watch the miner stage or whatever from Scaling 2, 6:43:02 and the miners clearly have, first of all, no idea of what any of the issues are or what they're talking about, 6:43:07 but they're very innocent in a way. 6:43:09 And they also are very annoyed that no one is telling them what to do. 6:43:11 Someone literally says at some point, 6:43:13 they said, can someone just tell us what to do? 6:43:16 Someone literally says that like exact sentence. 6:43:19 And so that is a very peculiar thing. 6:43:22 I've wondered about that a lot. 6:43:24 And I actually, I think the only explanation is that the people pushing for a hard fork 6:43:30 didn't really know the difference between, 6:43:32 didn't know all the differences between this hard and soft fork. 6:43:35 Because I think if they had a more fully informed choice, 6:43:38 they would have gone with the soft fork extension block or whatever that JJ was doing from Perth, right? 6:43:45 That was like their one-shot KO of just instantly winning the block size block, 6:43:50 which they never took. 6:43:51 Baffling. 6:43:52 It was a baffling decision. 6:43:54 Right. 6:43:55 One of the things that sort of rapidly changed their minds about the desirability of a hard fork, 6:44:01 some not long after that was Ethereum actually had one. 6:44:09 You know, the Dow rollback. 6:44:12 And they thought that was really scary and didn't want to see that happen in Bitcoin. 6:44:17 Yeah. 6:44:18 That was minus 60% of the Ethereum price in like a single day or something funny like that. 6:44:23 And then the thing they remember, 6:44:26 had that way of sort of fixing it with a soft fork. 6:44:29 But that also broke. 6:44:31 So they were going to drain the attacker's money. 6:44:33 But then that also led to a fork. 6:44:36 They had a fun 30 days of just kind of chaotic nonsense. 6:44:43 You know, that was fun. 6:44:44 Slocket. 6:44:45 Oh, man. 6:44:46 Slocket. 6:44:47 Slocket. 6:44:48 The rest of the day. 6:44:52 The Ethereum bike lock. 6:44:54 Just babbling in so many ways. 6:44:56 Yeah, that was fun. 6:44:58 That was a fun month or whatever that was. 6:45:01 That was really weird. 6:45:04 And I think that was the Ethereum peak in terms of like ETH BTC ratio or something. 6:45:10 Something like that. 6:45:11 I don't know if that... 6:45:12 No one told me that. 6:45:14 I remember though the peak was a while ago. 6:45:17 And then it has never... 6:45:19 I think the peak might have happened like a few months after that. 6:45:22 But like close to it. 6:45:24 They got over the slocket. 6:45:27 The Dow. 6:45:28 Yeah, because after that was like when the bull market started to come around. 6:45:32 And the whole ICO started to come around. 6:45:34 And I think that's when the peak happened. 6:45:36 You know, actually, I think even though I just laughed at that. 6:45:40 I'm now going to tell a very unscientific just-so story and pretend like I... 6:45:46 What I'm thinking, the narrative that I could throw out there is that... 6:45:49 Because one thing I've always believed is that the reason why it was Ethereum and not some of these other... 6:45:55 Like member bit shares and remember whatever, NXT or something. 6:45:59 So like why Ethereum? 6:46:01 Ethereum kind of distinguished itself as being different from Bitcoin in many ways. 6:46:07 So it's kind of like a product differentiation thing. 6:46:11 Or people are trying to figure out what is the different thing. 6:46:14 And so you could argue that by doing the Dow hard fork, they set themselves apart. 6:46:24 And they said we are willing to be more centralized, more move fast, break things. 6:46:28 They kind of drew the polarity, the polarization of the BTC versus ETH thing. 6:46:35 And thus they captured what you might call the... 6:46:39 They captured the stage for like the single opposition party. 6:46:42 Like the leader of the opposition to Bitcoin. 6:46:47 I don't know. I don't think so. 6:46:50 I think that them just being different enough like from bit shares and things like that. 6:46:55 Just like totally different protocol had the EVM expressibility. 6:46:58 Like that was enough for moving. 6:47:01 And then like the ICO boom like in 2017, 2016. 6:47:05 And I think that that was enough for like whatever user demand for it. 6:47:10 I don't think like the DAO actually had like a positive effect for users. 6:47:18 Anyway, throw that theory out there. 6:47:21 Or whatever. 6:47:24 But it is interesting the way Ethereum has done many things the exact opposite of the way Bitcoin has done them. 6:47:30 And I don't know. Does that add up to being the number two coin? 6:47:35 I think they just spent more on marketing. 6:47:38 Than anyone else at the time. 6:47:43 Right. 6:47:45 I remember Dash had a whole marketing budget in there. 6:47:48 It was like in their blockchain. 6:47:50 Like 15% of the block reward goes to marketing. 6:47:53 And that came out and I was like that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. 6:47:56 And then it completely started to work because they were sponsoring all that stuff. 6:47:59 And you see them everywhere. 6:48:01 And all these people are talking about them. 6:48:04 I agree with Adam. 6:48:06 The marketing that Ethereum took with like the Ethereum conferences and like onboarding a bunch of developers. 6:48:10 That was probably the main thing. 6:48:12 Yeah, I kind of agree with Adam. 6:48:14 The marketing. 6:48:16 And I think maybe if you want to say Dash had marketing too. 6:48:18 It just wasn't good. 6:48:20 Yeah, it wasn't developer focused I guess. 6:48:21 Yeah. 6:48:29 Anyway, so could you implement. 6:48:34 I was finding the conversation on Twitter interesting earlier in the week. 6:48:38 About the limits of language expressibility. 6:48:45 Because I think people have taken the idea that. 6:48:49 You could or should reject specific opcodes. 6:48:55 If certain things were possible to implement with them. 6:48:58 And I just thought it's like designing a CPU. 6:49:02 So that you can implement Pac-Man button or chess or something. 6:49:06 Imagine trying to think like that at the opcode level. 6:49:10 Any programming beyond a certain level of expressibility is going to become equivalent. 6:49:21 And able to just implement things in a different way. 6:49:24 So I think that's not a good way to think about things. 6:49:29 Well, I think there is a theoretically possible way that I did in fact present about in 2016. 6:49:36 Which is that. 6:49:38 The way drivechain works is it's like the miners are like. 6:49:42 The sidechains have like these. 6:49:45 They're like these big categories. 6:49:47 And it's like human managed. 6:49:49 You could have something where. 6:49:53 It's general purpose at the lowest level. 6:49:56 Which of course the BIP300 sidechain is like. 6:49:59 Just like any Turing complete. 6:50:01 Like you know what I mean. 6:50:02 Like it's like you just any piece of software. 6:50:03 So it has infinite expressibility. 6:50:06 But actually because the drop out of the sidechains is done by miners. 6:50:14 The miners might only add them by category. 6:50:19 Like they'd say you have to have a set of privacy sidechain. 6:50:22 Or you have to have a assets sidechain. 6:50:25 And then it might come back in. 6:50:28 And it might even be the case. 6:50:29 But if there's general purpose sidechain like an east sidechain. 6:50:32 They might one day. 6:50:35 Pull the plug on that. 6:50:37 And say because it's too general. 6:50:39 And it allows things that are bad. 6:50:41 You have to undo the generality. 6:50:43 And you only have to make a. 6:50:45 You have to make an NFT sidechain. 6:50:47 And. 6:50:49 And so that's just a theoretical possibility that I. 6:50:53 I don't know how practical that really is. 6:50:55 Because. 6:50:57 But you could the miners could. 6:50:59 If there is something. 6:51:00 Problematic behavior. 6:51:02 Then actually the. 6:51:03 You could pull the plug on it. 6:51:05 At the sidechain level. 6:51:07 Yeah. 6:51:08 And then the sidechains themselves would. 6:51:11 They would know that they would only actually be added by miners. 6:51:15 They would only be not killed. 6:51:18 If they were not general purpose. 6:51:22 So it's kind of weird. 6:51:23 You have a general purpose ingredients. 6:51:25 Which is just like whatever the software could theoretically do. 6:51:28 But then if the result is bad. 6:51:30 Like you're held accountable to the results. 6:51:32 They must do. 6:51:34 Well I think. 6:51:36 I hope people would be. 6:51:38 More like permissionless innovation mindset. 6:51:40 For. 6:51:42 For a sidechain. 6:51:43 But I mean. 6:51:44 The original context they were thinking about. 6:51:47 Expressibility limits. 6:51:49 It's like you know. 6:51:50 In the covenant recursive versus not. 6:51:52 And you know some people have given. 6:51:54 Fairly convincing arguments. 6:51:55 But it doesn't make that much difference to safety. 6:51:57 Because you can have really deep. 6:52:00 Pre committed. 6:52:02 Non recursive. 6:52:05 Covenants. But you know. Then they are thinking. Well if they if they don't like sidechains. And you tell them that. You know a covenant could make us. Could be used to implement a sidechain either. Then like well maybe we don't want covenants either. 6:52:21 So they're sort of using. Really dislike them. I mean don't you think sometimes these are just people on the mailing list. Or on or on Twitter. Who they just really want to. 6:52:33 Say an impressive thing. And whether or not. It's good for Bitcoin. It's secondary to their cause. 6:52:40 No I mean it was. 6:52:42 The recursive covenant thing. I thought this is a very impressive point. But then I was like you investigated more. And you're like wait a minute. 6:52:48 Yeah. 6:52:49 It only seems impressive. It's not really impressive actually. It's just. 6:52:52 I mean I think it's like the concept of. You know what opcodes. 6:53:01 Like volunteer developers on Bitcoin. Are going to typically be. You know self motivated to. 6:53:09 You know. 6:53:10 Yeah. 6:53:10 To work on. You know test code. Etcetera. Are things that. Somebody has a use case for. You know. So like lightning. 6:53:24 Doing what it does. And requiring originally. Was it CLTV or like one of the time based things. 6:53:32 As an opcode rather than as a hype flag. Was like motivation enough for people to want to do that. Right. 6:53:42 And so. But this conversation is almost the opposite. Right. That there was something that didn't want it. So then they were thinking about. 6:53:51 Like. 6:53:53 Not wanting something else. Or. You know. Trying to restrict covenants so that they. 6:54:01 They do the applications. They do. I mean it's not really about what it can do. But it's about what it can't do. Right. So we don't like this thing. So. 6:54:08 We'll try to figure out when to do covenants. That makes it impossible to do that. But I was trying to explain to them that. 6:54:14 You know people have found this out before in other languages. 6:54:16 The limits of computability are really counterintuitive. And people will think. It's not possible to do that. For some reason. 6:54:26 For years and years. And then somebody will show. You know. They'll tell somebody else. Oh yeah. You can do it. And you know. 6:54:32 They had a key insight. And they make a working example. And it flips everybody's view. It's like. Well you can do it. There's a trick to it. Right. 6:54:39 So. You know. Like. Can Bitcoin do covenants today? It turns out not quite. But really close. Right. If it. If OP_CAT hadn't been disabled. 6:54:49 Very early on. Maybe it would have had covenants. There's several. 6:54:53 Approaches that. Almost. But not quite work. And maybe it's even possible. Like with. 6:54:59 You know. Really creative abuse of like signatures and different things. Right. So. 6:55:04 I think it's just not a good. 6:55:07 Approach to worry about. And just try to make. You know. Useful opcodes that work well with other opcodes. And composably. 6:55:17 And. You know. Can enable a range of things when combined with other opcodes. Whatever you write. 6:55:23 Does anyone else want to. Say anything. A lot of people. Asked to speak. And I. Added a bunch of people. 6:55:32 Yeah. I could. Thanks for adding us. I mean. This is related a little bit to. The drivechain conversation. But more about. I guess I'm ethos of the cyberpunks. And you know. 6:55:43 I was curious about what you guys thought about how we can get more people running nodes effectively and being active participants. And the network. I mean. I think that there is this interesting movement of people that want to have a bigger voice. Want to be a part of it. And you know. There's some different ways that we can do that. 6:55:59 you guys thought about how we can get more people running nodes effectively and being 6:56:02 active participants in the network. 6:56:04 I mean, I think that there is this interesting movement of people that want to have a 6:56:09 bigger voice, want to be a part of it. 6:56:11 you know, there's some different ways people kind of get in the door through, if it is, 6:56:16 you know, on the payment side of things, financially, that's all wonderful. 6:56:20 You know, yeah, inscription is good and bad. 6:56:22 I mean, have brought people in through kind of creation of art or inscribing different 6:56:26 things like we even made like 6:56:29 I mean. I think that there is this interesting movement of people that want to have a bigger voice. Want to be a part of it. And you know. There's some different ways that we can do that. 6:56:36 I mean. I think that there is this interesting movement of people that want to have a bigger voice. Want to be a part of it. 6:56:43 I mean. Historically what helped was, I think, Lightning. The way it was implemented and needed to be online. And how it became quite popular to run Lightning. 6:56:57 And I also think the UASF and the contentious fork caused more people to realize that running a full node was a defensive measure. You know. Not your keys. Not your coins. But also not your full node. Maybe not on the right network. 6:57:06 And I also think the UASF and the contentious fork caused more people to realize that running a full node was a defensive measure. You know. Not your keys. Not your coins. But also not your full node. Maybe not on the right network. 6:57:16 So. I don't know. In terms of encouraging people to run nodes. I think the other thing that's helped is there are multiple companies making dedicated nodes that are easier to set up and maintain. You know. Not everybody has a Linux system administrator capability. Right? 6:57:38 Yeah. Totally. For me personally I have a Mac and being able to have an SSD just made it a lot easier. And I guess the incentive to do it too has been fascinating to see. I guess art really speaks to people. So people having the chance. 6:57:54 I guess kind of like you were saying Paul. Like the marketing side has been really fascinating. Kind of cool to see that like right or wrong like the ordinal side of things has been like a marketing kind of for a different population of people on the Bitcoin side who want to experiment with art and do other things and are now. Yeah. Even learning about doing stuff like running nodes and learning how to be badass cypherpunks. So I think it's just really interesting and pretty cool to see. 6:58:21 Yeah. I have some ideas. So yeah it's true that every lightning node must be must have access to a full node. And the same way actually every drivechain sidechain must need to have access to a full node as well. So that's kind of direct. But in general the block size limit is key because it keeps running a node cheap. 6:58:45 So you have to keep focus on it cheap because a thousand a thousand new blocks come in every week. And so even at the one megabyte level that's one gigabyte. And now we're at whatever we are. You know who knows exactly what it is but 2.5 gigabytes per week. So it piles up and it has to fight against the increasing Internet speeds and things. 6:59:09 I have some other thoughts though which are that I mean one thing we talked about in the other chat is this CoinNews idea which is neither or it's not a it's not a soft fork or a hard fork or anything it's just cosmetic in the node. 6:59:24 I mean I think the node should do some things for people. So the node it tells you whether or not you're on the right Bitcoin network. But the node should also like the node should have a block explorer. So like we have this in DriveNet. If you download it we actually have in the in the full node it has a block explorer and it has like hash calculator. 6:59:45 It has stuff that like lets you figure out whether or not your wallet is working. It has the BIP39 wordless stuff. It has tools in there that I think that I use personally. So if I use them then maybe someone else will find them useful maybe not I don't know. 7:00:05 So I think that we should the node should have a bunch of stuff that people use. And I also think that the node could be possibly I'm open minded to a radical re-envisioning of the node. I'm sure everyone's going to panic and say that this is me attacking Bitcoin yet again. 7:00:23 But I think you could like download one piece of software that's very small. That's not a full node but it's something. And then that thing could like upgrade to an SPV node and then upgrade to a full node. 7:00:39 Like upgrade to a highly pruned full node. And so what I'm getting at is if you go to people on day one and you say you need to download 600 gigabytes they'll be like okay thanks nice to meet you or whatever and they'll just be like whatever. 7:00:55 But we want to ramp up the commitment. There's a lot of people who run nothing. They run no node at all zero. So we want to see if we can get them in for like 50 megabytes and then can we get them in for this. 7:01:09 We can give them a tiny piece of software that does some cool stuff for them that they actually like. And then we can maybe ramp it up. And I think that's the best chance that we are going to get at actually getting these people to. 7:01:29 I'm kind of surprised that so many people do run full nodes at all given the severe ramp up. So I'm thinking like all these people with zero nodes how do we get them to something. Other people don't necessarily like this approach though because they say this will stop people from ever becoming a full node. But I say a lot of people will never become a full node if you ask them this way. So it's hard to say who's right about that. 7:01:55 Yeah I think so much of it goes back to incentive. It's like what is it. And for me and I think like running a node like there's a big identity component too. We've seen this we're trying to earnestly create a little community that cares about the Cypherpunk values. And it's been very cool for people like it means something to them to run a node to be an active participant. 7:02:17 And I think I'm down if you want to like experiment a little bit with you know I think another campaign I'd talk to some of the folks with the Bitcoin dev meetup was we were looking at doing like a lightning kind of campaign. We kind of got a number of people running nodes but like we were thinking about lightning. But if you want to experiment I think that could be super cool. Like we need to have a way to mix these communities like we're all here to improve and advance Bitcoin however we can. 7:02:46 There was blockchain.info before they spent billions of dollars on blockchain.com or whatever. But blockchain.com used to be called blockchain.info. And there used to be someone cool there. I don't know who they were. If you know who they were contact me. But they had this thing where I'm sure that some people remember it. 7:03:10 Like you could go there and like the most recent transactions would like scroll by in a kind of like little fireplace thing. And it would like just and it would pop up and you would see oh here's a transaction. And I think it had like vaguely like the location or something. It had like the amount the TXID. And it was like here's one from Atlanta Georgia. Here's one from whatever. Something like that. 7:03:34 And it was just really cool to see honestly. So I also put that in the DriveNet. Our software node also does that where if people broadcast transactions they just kind of show up. You can see them in like a little box. It's kind of like the troll box or something. You can see them show up. And it shows you how much money the transaction is for and the TXID and when it was. 7:03:56 So you kind of see you feel kind of connected to the community that way which is of course exactly literally what the full node does. But it's also kind of cool to have something to look at. And it was kind of cool to look at at first because you would think of back in those days Bitcoin was very small. So you were like is this project going to. Does anyone like this project. Is this a scam. Am I being scammed by Bitcoin. 7:04:21 And so you could see it and you'd be like oh yeah these other transactions are here. It was kind of a neat little thing. 7:04:27 I like that. Where is that. Where can I see that. 7:04:31 Well if you download our software you can sort of see it. Our software defaults to reg test mode for easier testing so nothing will really be seen there. I think hopefully I'm not sure if you can try to find on Google like an old blockchain.info like front page or someone screenshot of it because it was pretty neat and I liked it. And then they found at some point they got rid of it which is I think a huge mistake. 7:04:57 Yeah I remember. 7:04:59 Yeah I was wondering where that went. I like blockchain.info. 7:05:05 That's interesting. Adam are there any like pieces of art or anything else in like the cypherpunks movement that's kind of caught your eye that you think would be cool to highlight. 7:05:14 Well something I was talking about earlier on is the like the hash of a block. I mean this is backup right. So there was this project you know people are always comparing fingerprints or hashes of like public keys to make sure that they're sending transactions to the right place or that they're looking at the right person. 7:05:44 And this guy called Raf Levine on the cypherpunks list had the idea to make them more visually easy to compare. 7:05:55 Now of course you know if you so he had this algorithm for converting hash output into an image. And of course it's difficult because you want to make sure that you can't create hash collisions and that's the case for hash functions. 7:06:16 But when it goes through a transformation to an image you need to make sure that it's not like easy in terms of work to find another hash that looks almost the same even though it's quite different. 7:06:31 So that is the kind of the new trick is you need to think of some kind of visual algorithm to transform it into like you know a certain resolution snowflake like pattern. 7:06:42 You know if you look at a snowflake under a microscope they're all like different interesting symmetrical crystalline patterns. 7:06:48 So yeah so I was thinking about that and you could use one of those visualizers on the Bitcoin blocks because you know there's a huge amount of work that goes into making a Bitcoin block. 7:07:03 So it's a thing of kind of mathematical and thermodynamic beauty but you can't see it right. It's a conceptual thing. 7:07:11 But if you had these snowflake transforms you could actually look at them and they're unique and expensive to make. 7:07:20 We have to find some way to sort of preserve that information right. 7:07:23 The uniqueness of the block hash and visually how many leading zeros it had all in a way that makes the images also very hard to make you know to collide to make them look almost the same right. 7:07:39 That's super cool. 7:07:40 I wonder if we could integrate that somehow. 7:07:42 I hope you don't mind. 7:07:43 I'm just going to pin this thing. 7:07:44 We just made this you know we took the manifesto and basically made the color change with block height you know the font of the color. 7:07:52 I wonder if we could like if a next step could be. 7:07:56 I'm sorry I'm not. 7:07:57 My training is actually as a physician and I kind of love blockchain Bitcoin since like 2015 and just kind of gradually leveling up my technical ability so I'm not following all of it on the tech side. 7:08:08 But conceptually I love the idea of kind of maybe the next iteration of a manifesto or something could incorporate this snowflake somehow. 7:08:18 I don't know if we could take the hash of the block. 7:08:20 Maybe Elock could link it together somehow. 7:08:26 I don't know Adam if that makes any sense. 7:08:28 I mean there are services, presumably they're still around, where you can pay a miner to include a message in the extra non-space. 7:08:41 So like a kind of useless part of the block that takes space anyway. 7:08:48 And so it's kind of like a bit of permanent graffiti in the small part of the block to do with mining. 7:08:57 The counter when you do the mining. 7:09:00 But those are kind of cool. 7:09:03 It's not like inscription so it's not like a gif or something but there's a chunk of bytes in there which is where the miners iterate and keep changing it as they're mining. 7:09:16 Each attempt to mine will use a different one right. 7:09:19 So it doesn't really cost anything in terms of efficiency or space or block size to put a small message in there. 7:09:28 So there are services that let you do that. 7:09:31 So I was reading about your HashCast stamps. 7:09:34 Did anyone ever make a visual representation of those hashes? 7:09:39 No. 7:09:44 Some people try to collect them. 7:09:47 They throw quite a bit of compute power at them like multiple machines and graphics card. 7:09:55 You do implementations. 7:09:58 Even people doing that while you could Bitcoin mine. 7:10:01 Like they would have mined quite a lot of Bitcoin instead of that stamp. 7:10:04 But anyway I put them on a web page because I thought they were kind of interesting artifacts. 7:10:12 But there were people doing that in parallel with the time when Bitcoin mining was happening. 7:10:18 Curious. 7:10:20 Very cool. 7:10:21 Thanks for the chance to just talk and better understand this. 7:10:26 I've been trying to learn more about drivechains and follow up with you as well just about seeing what we might be able to do with our community. 7:10:34 But I appreciate the opportunity to learn. 7:10:37 Yeah. 7:10:38 I better clock off. 7:10:39 Getting late in Europe. 7:10:40 But you guys can keep going. 7:10:43 Bye. 7:10:45 So for the drivechain would that like take activation like soft works from like node runners that are drivechain like running the drivechain? 7:10:55 No, I guess. 7:10:59 Well, BIP300 activates on L1. 7:11:02 And that's the only thing that's on L1. 7:11:06 So the sidechain is its own thing. 7:11:10 And it has a. 7:11:12 Well, that's not quite true. 7:11:13 Maybe I didn't explain it. 7:11:14 What were you? 7:11:15 What do you actually want to ask about? 7:11:17 Well, like we were talking about, like, the difference between like miners and node runners. 7:11:21 And I was like, well, that's not quite true. 7:11:23 Maybe I didn't explain it. 7:11:24 What were you? 7:11:25 What do you actually want to ask about? 7:11:27 Well, like we were talking about, like, the difference between like miners and node runners. 7:11:32 So like, would you need to like soft fork into the drivechain? 7:11:37 Or could you just run that on everyone else's nodes? 7:11:41 Like, would they know the difference between like a drivechain transaction or what have you? 7:11:47 Well, I still don't really know what you are trying to ask about. 7:11:54 Do you mean that? 7:11:57 Like. 7:12:00 Drivechain itself is a BIP300 and it has yet to activate. 7:12:04 And then individual sidechains also activate on L1. 7:12:09 But the sidechains themselves don't live there. 7:12:12 They're like lightning nodes. 7:12:14 And so that's like, you know, LND versus C lightning or something. 7:12:20 So I guess my question is, do you need like a change to like nodes to be able to support the sidechain? 7:12:28 Like. 7:12:30 Oh, well, yeah. 7:12:31 Ideally, everyone. 7:12:33 Ideally, the 300 idea will get merged into like the next version of Bitcoin, which is supposed to be version 26. 7:12:44 And then. 7:12:47 And then everyone would upgrade to that, and that would include activation parameters for BIP300. 7:12:53 And it's not that everyone has to upgrade to that. 7:12:56 But, you know, this is the ideal situation. 7:12:59 So I suppose it. 7:13:03 But I'm not sure to what extent it actually requires most other people to upgrade. 7:13:08 I think it's ambiguous. 7:13:11 But, yeah, the more people who could. 7:13:15 It helps the idea if people are supportive of it. 7:13:20 So people. 7:13:22 I guess tweet about it. 7:13:23 We have a page where we have people on Twitter. 7:13:27 We have it's good if you combat the FUD. 7:13:32 And so if people say things that you can either. 7:13:39 Educate people or send them to this space where we we let anyone come up. 7:13:47 Even the haters. 7:13:52 So, yeah, we do that. 7:13:53 So. 7:13:55 So we. 7:13:58 So, you know, I think. 7:13:59 But in general, the idea is we don't want with BIP300. 7:14:03 We don't want to, like, force people to do something they don't want to do. 7:14:08 Instead, we want to just try to educate people and get them excited about. 7:14:15 But this is. 7:14:17 It is. 7:14:18 We just spent a bunch of time talking about whether or not a soft fork is actually a mandatory or optional. 7:14:23 Change. 7:14:25 I kind of still think it's an optional change to some extent. 7:14:29 We just spent two different spaces talking about that. 7:14:33 And many other people have completely different opinions about that. 7:14:36 And. 7:14:38 I had a back and I and Luke Cash Jr. 7:14:40 as many opinions. 7:14:42 But, yeah, in the sense that there are many new versions, new version of Bitcoin Core that comes out every once in a while. 7:14:48 So. 7:14:53 The ideal thing would be to for me to open this pull request to the next version of Bitcoin Core and then have a new version of Bitcoin Core. 7:15:03 The ideal thing would be to for me to open this pull request to the next version of Bitcoin Core and then have it be merged. 7:15:12 But I think there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem where people will probably they would hesitate to merge anything. 7:15:21 Unless they think there is a reason, unless there are people who want it, because just in the name of keeping the code as easy to manage as possible. 7:15:33 They will not want to merge anything. 7:15:37 Excuse me. 7:15:38 They will not want to merge anything unless there is demand for it. 7:15:44 Of course, there cannot literally be any demand for it until after it activates. 7:15:47 But you know what I mean? 7:15:48 Like they want to get an idea that they're actually doing something that people like. 7:15:53 So I don't know. 7:15:54 Maybe that answers your question. 7:15:55 What about like running that having people experiment with running the software before it's merged to core? 7:16:04 Yeah, we have that. 7:16:05 That's what I call a drive net. 7:16:07 You go to drivechain.info slash releases or I think layer2labs.com has. 7:16:14 I don't know if it has the latest version, but I will make sure that it does. 7:16:20 Make sure that it does. 7:16:22 But I have data drivechain.info slash releases. 7:16:27 And yeah, and we will try to make the version better all the time. 7:16:35 So you can run that and that's just with play money. 7:16:38 And it will, it'll, that's like a version of Bitcoin Core that has BIP300 in it. 7:16:43 And you can click on all the buttons and see for yourself and you can mine blocks as much as you want. 7:16:48 You have your own little play blockchain. 7:16:51 Also so rich. 7:16:52 But in every other way, exactly. 7:16:54 Yeah, exactly. 7:16:56 In every other way it's the same. 7:16:59 So you can click all the little buttons and things and see what happens. 7:17:03 So I think I also should end the space soon. 7:17:09 But if there are any pressing questions or comments, then feel free to ask. 7:17:18 I was going to say it's good to see Crown again. 7:17:19 I remember being in like Clubhouse, like spaces with them like way back in the day. 7:17:23 there are any pressing questions or comments, 7:17:27 then feel free to ask or speak 7:17:33 or whatever. As I say, good to see Crown again. 7:17:37 remember being in like 7:17:39 Clubhouse, spaces within like way back in the day. 7:17:50 Hey man, I'm just making chicken. 7:17:57 that doesn't really sound like anyone has anything else I say so 7:18:03 successful space that one can move on to the next cool space 7:18:08 and that's doing more than anything Thanks. 7:18:11 No, not at the moment. 7:18:12 I appreciate you having me up. 7:18:16 problem. I'll learn a little bit more at Drivechain, maybe have some more cogent 7:18:21 arguments. 7:18:24 Oh, okay, great. 7:18:25 Well, that's good. 7:18:28 Okay, well 7:18:29 cool. Well, thanks everyone. 7:18:32 See you later. 7:18:33 Bitcoin -ing.
