0:08 Welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces. Today is Friday, July 21st. 0:13 We are excited at LayerTwo Labs to have another weekly discussion of Drivechain. 0:21 Welcome to everyone who listens live as well as those who listen on demand after these recorded 0:26 spaces are done. You can hear our history of spaces on our Twitter feed. All of the spaces 0:33 are recorded and saved for those who want to listen after they're done. We enjoy all of our 0:43 visitors, all of our speakers. Thanks everyone who's interested in this project, whether you're 0:48 a critic or a fan, a newcomer, an enthusiast, an OG. Everyone's welcome to take part and learn 0:58 and study and explore Drivechain, a powerful upgrade for Bitcoin, 1:04 enabling greater extensibility, scaling, privacy, oracles, DNS, and a multitude of other potentially 1:12 extraordinarily valuable applications on Bitcoin for Bitcoiners by Bitcoiners. 1:20 Drivechain is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 300 and 301. 1:27 BIP300 is Hashrate Escrow. BIP301 is Blind Merged Mining. The authors of the BIPs are Paul 1:36 Sztorc and CryptAxe. Many people are credited in the BIPs with having contributed valuable ideas 1:45 Everyone's encouraged to read the BIPs to understand what this is all about. 1:50 Read the code, download the software available at layer2labs.com, 1:57 run it on your machine, and experience Drivechain testnet. 2:05 Bitcoin sidechains are an exciting and important part of the Bitcoin story. 2:09 Long ago, Satoshi himself talked about how merged-mined altcoins, such as BitDNS, 2:17 could contribute valuably to Bitcoin's economic security. He wrote that all the networks in the 2:24 world would share CPU power, increasing total strength. The vision for merged mining has been 2:34 around, therefore, since August of 2010. And with Bitcoin sidechains, it can be reinvigorated 2:43 and potentially accrue an enormous amount of value to Bitcoin's token and Bitcoin's block space. 2:50 When we say increase the value of the block space, what we're talking about 2:54 is increasing the total transaction fee rate. 2:57 The total transaction fee rate, meaning all of the Bitcoin fees would combine with the fees 3:04 on all of the sidechains and be paid almost entirely to the Bitcoin miners on layer 1, 3:11 boosting Bitcoin's security enormously. So, merged mining is a very important part of 3:17 the future success of Bitcoin. 3:19 As the subsidy is diminished over time, programmatically, we want to see the fees rise 3:26 greatly to strengthen Bitcoin, ensuring its survival and ensuring that we never need inflation. 3:34 And instead, Bitcoin is successful without any inflation, without ever having any monetary 3:40 policy changes. So, we want to see the fees rise greatly to strengthen Bitcoin, 3:48 having any monetary policy change. We wouldn't want ever to have more than 21 million Bitcoin. 3:54 Therefore, we must have a roadmap for economic security based on transaction fees in the future. 4:03 And there are many other ways to understand how drivechain strengthens Bitcoin, 4:08 enabling more uses, more demand, bringing more people into Bitcoin instead of competing networks. 4:18 The ideal state is for every blockchain in the world to have its native unit of account 4:24 be Bitcoin instead of altcoins. So, all of these applications being built on altcoins 4:31 should be built on Bitcoin sidechains instead. And that would strengthen Bitcoin immeasurably, 4:38 increasing the number of people who are using Bitcoin, increasing the political support for 4:43 Bitcoin, the social support for Bitcoin, and the strength of the Bitcoin network. 4:50 Making it as large as possible as fast as possible is so important. Welcome to the audience, 4:57 those who've joined. All are welcome to come on up to the stage. 5:03 We've had a lot of exciting tweets and other discourse lately. 5:14 Welcome, Austin, my colleague. How are you? 5:24 Welcome to the stage, Austin. 5:27 Give me one second. I got the technical issue here. 5:33 No problem. So, these spaces are once a week hosted by LayerTwo Labs. We aspire to be the 5:40 most exciting and important part of Bitcoin discourse at this moment. 5:45 Bitcoin's sidechain vision is long overdue for advancement. 5:54 As a result of the lack of sidechains, we have enormous growth in altcoins 6:00 and enormous confusion in the crypto space. Welcome to the stage, Paul. 6:04 Hello. 6:06 Hello. Happy Friday. 6:11 Paul, one of our potential speakers today is Kurt Wicker, the big blocker. He had said in a tweet 6:20 that he would like to debate or he agreed to a debate potentially. 6:25 Oh, good. Yeah. He's the Bitcoin. He's one of the unlimited block size. 6:30 Yes. Is he one of the philosophy professors? 6:36 I don't know. Probably not. 6:40 Let's see if we can... 6:42 Well, it's very interesting. I would say that this week probably marked a peak in drivechain 6:48 and BIP300 activity on Twitter. 6:56 Do all of them? 7:00 Perhaps. Yeah, which is a very good sign for the fact that the idea, having been around for so 7:09 many years, I think, is finally finding its time in the sun and we're getting that much closer to 7:17 activation. It's really a great sign. Throughout the years, I've heard many, many critiques of 7:27 drivechains, some more coherent than others, but I think the critiques are being whittled down 7:35 into now there's kind of very few honest and, quote unquote, sound critiques remaining. 7:44 It's a really good sign of things to come. I'm very excited. I think that this 7:51 forebodes massive price appreciation for Bitcoin, which is one thing I heard you 7:58 in all of the consequences of drivechain activation that you mentioned earlier, Henry. 8:04 I think the one thing you forgot is that this is, I believe, a technology that could 8:12 help us to see price levels, which we've never seen before, which a lot of people like to poo-poo, but of 8:19 of course, the most important metric for the health of the Bitcoin network is the price. 8:25 And we should never forget that. We really need to see massive, massive price appreciation and 8:34 that strengthens the security of the network. I would say it's the most important metric, no? 8:45 Absolutely. It's imperative that Bitcoin maintain its privacy, its market cap leadership. 8:52 That's very important. The narratives that are very powerful on a popular, broad level in the 8:59 world are being number one. Right now, Bitcoin is number one. It's the biggest and the strongest. 9:05 It's important Bitcoin maintain that by giving every potential user what he wants 9:11 and what she wants all the time. We can't be limited. We can be limited and narrow 9:17 and irrelevant and small, which is what Bitcoin without drivechain may become over time. 9:23 So I'm hoping that Kurt Walker Jr., who I believe is a BSV fan, I hope that he'll join the space 9:32 because he said he would in a tweet. He was very friendly and nice in some tweets saying he'd like 9:38 to join the space to debate large block versus small block with Paul. But in the meantime, we have 9:44 another one who I think has similar views. Crypto Voyager, who spoke last week, has a similar view. 9:50 Crypto Voyager, who spoke last week. Paul, would you like to just kind of get that 9:55 topic rolling? Does that sound good to you? Oh, sure. Well, I mean, a lot of people understand 10:02 that drivechain lets the large blockers get what they want. They can have the unlimited. 10:09 Because what drivechain is about is separating responsibilities. So it says, if you want these 10:12 large blocks and you want to take responsibility for them, you can have them. But I think it's 10:16 underappreciated is that it's really also for small blockism. It says, if you want small blocks, 10:25 you can keep the block size small and you won't be responsible for 10:31 stuff that happens on these other networks. Yes, well said. So that's what some of these 10:36 large blockers are still going for the whole all or nothing unlimited L1 block size. 10:46 So welcome to the stage, Crypto Voyager. Why don't you, as succinctly as you can, 10:51 present exactly your case for why, if I'm not mistaken, you believe large blocks on layer one 10:58 are better than the drivechain vision of small blocks on layer one with a large block sidechain. 11:04 Go ahead. Thanks for joining. Hi, everyone. Thanks for putting me up on stage. Hi, Paul. 11:11 I sadly missed you last week. I had a question and layer two that the host, our host wanted to 11:20 kind of like move it to this week and hopefully you can answer my question. 11:28 So basically, my viewpoint is I read the white paper, I read Satoshi's writing and in them, 11:35 Satoshi basically said, well, it is going to end up in data centers anyway. So it's not the 11:43 viewpoint of everybody having a node. It's just as I believe you used the derogatory word, 11:50 asinine, as everybody having an NTP server on Usenet. So that's one of the reasons why I see 11:59 Bitcoin as big blocks to work with. I have a point of order, if that is possible. Layer two, 12:08 when you say Bitcoin, when you say small block Bitcoin, I would recommend for you to use BTC, 12:15 the ticker symbol, so that we all know what exactly you're talking about. And I would also 12:21 then say if I use a big block Bitcoin, I would say BSV or BCH and Bitcoin protocol before 2017, 12:29 then we can agree on Bitcoin or whatever else. So my question, Paul, of last week was quite simple. 12:37 So the fear of the small block narrative is that if you don't have the whole copy, 12:49 somebody can do whatever they want and you will never find out because you cannot verify. 12:57 There are different holes. Let's say that that is the reasoning behind it. 13:06 My question on the BIP300, the way that I'm understanding it is, OK, fine, let's say I can 13:13 still have small blocks, but then I'm going to use layer two to have all the other world transactions 13:22 that are being used, blah, blah, blah, IoT devices, whatever, smart contracts, everything that moves 13:28 around there. Those transactions have to be saved, don't they? I presume then those transactions 13:38 also need a lot of storage space for that. So basically what will happen is that everything 13:46 done on layer two is also going to be centralized in data centers. Am I correct in that one? Am I 13:52 not correct in that one? And then I had another question on that one on layer two, for layer two 13:58 last week. If the reasoning is for BIP300 and everything on L2 is that the big blockers can 14:07 have all the big block funky stuff on layer two and the L1, the small blocker fundamentalist, 14:17 let's put it this way, can still have everything so everybody can have the cake and eat it too. 14:24 Am I not, if I'm a world poor person living on two dollars a day, for example, am I not being 14:31 forced economically to go into L2 since I cannot use L1 since, well, that's going to be a very 14:40 elitist club for banks and big governments and all those big guys that can pay the transaction fees 14:49 for that. That's my question. And then I have another one. So if... 14:54 Wait, one minute. You've spoken very well and I appreciate what you said. 15:00 It's okay, Henry. I've managed to grab a pen in time. So why don't you just ask 15:04 all the questions we got. Okay. Thanks, Paul. 15:09 Okay. And then I have another question. Sadly, I didn't have time this week to read up on your 15:15 blog post. I apologize for that one. The L2s, how do they, what exactly is the method for L2 15:28 to kind of like go to the L1 and say, okay, this is what has happened on L2. Is that just going to 15:34 be a hash of whatever has happened, a combined hash of whatever has happened on L2? And to top 15:42 that off, how often would that hash be? Every block or just once every full moon? What is the 15:49 timeframe on that one? That's basically my takes on that. If anything happens, I'll gladly raise 15:56 my hand and ask more questions. And I see that Kurt has joined at least the listeners. So bring 16:03 him up. That's from my side. Okay, great. So first of all, the point of order, I don't really... 16:10 I'm willing to say that he requested that we use BTC, BCH and BSV to be super clear after 2017. 16:20 And then before that, we have like kind of an ambiguous mix, which I think is fine for now. 16:25 Although I would certainly point out that which words we use is mostly not up to us. It is mostly 16:33 up to the audience. And this is something that I think a lot of people don't appreciate, especially 16:38 you can see it in certain social issues today, but people use, the audience uses words. So like 16:43 if you go to a Spanish speaking audience, you have to use Spanish. So most people think of 16:48 Bitcoin as being BTC. And I don't point that out to push back on what you said. I'm perfectly happy 16:55 to use, I will speak your language to you, but I'm just saying the audience mostly, you know, 17:00 like it's just people prefer words only mean one thing. And in particular, they like words to mean 17:07 on Tuesday, what they meant on Monday. And so that is why Bitcoin kept the BTC, kept the Bitcoin 17:14 label for most people. And we can get into that if you like. But the reason why Bitcoin is stayed 17:21 what it was and BCH was something new is because BCH inevitably introduces details that were not 17:27 present in the first Bitcoin, such as the August 1st, 2017 date, and the number eight, moving the 17:33 block size from one to eight megabytes. But nonetheless, I'm happy to meet that point of 17:38 order. So then the first thing you said is that Satoshi was clearly at one point, a large blocker. 17:43 He did compare, he did say that there would probably be big data centers, he clearly wrote SPV 17:51 with the, into the white paper with the idea that that is how most people would use the network. 17:57 And because he correctly perceived that most people would not run a node. And most people 18:02 would not do anything because most people are lazy. So he wrote SPV into the protocol so that 18:07 it'll be 4.4 megabytes every year of 80 byte block headers, which is a tiny amount, very, 18:13 very tiny amount of space such that by the time you download like a Bitcoin wallet to your phone 18:19 or computer, that Bitcoin wallet itself is going to be like whatever, like just like a couple 10, 18:24 20, 30, 40, 50 megabytes. So the whole blockchain for 10 years would be like the same size as that 18:30 which would be minuscule. So he clearly had that in mind at first. But there are some problems. 18:36 The big, you mentioned the Usenet analogy, which is a very good one. It's too good, in fact, 18:42 because the problem, what happened with Usenet, it's all the server parts got clogged down. People 18:47 like hosting giant pirated binary files there. It was impossible to, you know, Usenet still exists. 18:54 But that's an intriguing question is the extent to which Usenet was like a success. But most people 18:59 today have not even heard of it. I would be interested to, if people would start coming up 19:03 in the audience, if you mentioned whether or not you know what Usenet is, that would be 19:07 interesting. Because the Usenet is kind of, it kind of failed for that exact reason, the unlimited 19:14 cap on the, what you might call the full node cause, or whatever, you know, however you want 19:20 to run the analogy. So the key thing, the problem with the argument from Satoshi for the block size 19:26 is, I think it's a good argument in principle. A lot of people, you know, fight that, but I think 19:31 it's fine. But the real issue with it in its own merits is the fact that Satoshi himself was the 19:36 person who put the block size limit in. I don't remember exactly when, I think it was July 2010 19:42 or something. He himself wrote it into the protocol, and he obviously knew more than anyone 19:47 else. He is the leading expert, and he knew, obviously he was learning the whole time. 19:54 So with basically the most knowledgeable person at their most knowledgeable peak, 19:59 put the limit in, and he did describe how it might be removed when people asked, 20:04 but then he left the project, and he did not, like, before he could have been like, 20:09 oh this is really important that I change this. He could have. 20:12 Written that in, written the phased increase in, and then left, but he didn't do that. 20:18 So he left it the way he left it. You know, we have to assume that that was somewhat intentional. 20:22 So if you, that's not the primary reason to reject large blockers, of course, but that's just the first reason that you gave me. 20:30 So then on to the second thing was the point of order, and the third thing was that you were saying that small blockers, 20:37 they want to have a whole copy of the network so that they can verify that a block header, 20:45 or that blocks really are blocks and that they really are headers. So I think that's correct. 20:51 That is what small blockers want, and you then said that won't the L2s also require a lot of storage centers? 21:02 Well, ironically, this is partially true for Lightning with no L2, and I actually think L2 is a downgrade for Lightning, 21:11 because you lose the punishment aspect. I mean, it can be reintroduced in a convoluted way, I think. 21:18 But basically, the Lightning has a weird feature where the longer the channels stay open, the more memory you must. 21:27 So if you memorize all the old channel states, so it's just this growing list of things that you have to watch, 21:32 and in fact, it will fill up people's RAM and cause the node to crash, which is interesting, to say the least. 21:41 So that's kind of true, but it's not really true in the same way. It's because each person privately, 21:47 it's a difference between something that's collective and something private. 21:51 and people are overfishing from the lake, or they're polluting the lake, or they introduce invasive species. 21:58 It's just not as a good thing as if everyone has a little aquarium in their house, and they say, well, all right. 22:05 So that's why that's a very different thing. And then after that, you said everything. 22:13 So yeah, if we move everything to L2, then what about if you live on only $2 a day, I'm forced to move to L2. 22:21 Well, what we should do is we should give people a big menu of options, and we should say, listen, here's all your options. 22:29 You can either run small block node and pay higher fees, or you can run large block node and pay lower fees, 22:38 or you cannot run a node. You can chance it. We give people a huge menu of options. 22:43 And yeah, people will only be able to afford as much node as their income allows. 22:50 So it's true that if the L1 fees are high, people are forced out of that. 22:57 But it's also true that if the node costs are high, then people are forced out of that. 23:02 So I agree that both are bad. In general, we want everything to be cheap. 23:08 But like in that famous Rolling Stones song, usually not everything is infinitely low cost. 23:18 I think that's a direct to Lyric quote. And then you said something like, yes, okay. 23:23 Then you were like, basically, how does drivechain work? It's like, how does the L2 come back to L1? 23:27 You can't always get what you want. 23:35 Yeah. Thanks for that. Thanks for that, Henry. 23:37 So then the last part is, the last part, you said, basically, how does drivechain work? 23:43 Which is, you know, it's a fair question, but it just, my guess is a lot of people here probably already know something about how it works. 23:50 And we have, we do have a website. We have a whiteboard video. 23:55 So you have to separate two things. One is the merge mining, which Satoshi himself invented and predated. 24:03 It's intriguing that if you're interested in what Satoshi thought, he clearly thought that there would be many blockchains and that they would all pay different fees. 24:10 This is very clear when Namecoin is invented. 24:13 He has numerous comments of this kind, saying that you can use as much space as you want on the new chains while not paying for expensive space in Bitcoin's chain. 24:23 So again, this is Satoshi at his highest, most expert level. 24:27 He's just saying there'll be a bunch of blockchains and Bitcoins have higher fees, BTC, L1. 24:36 That's sort of what he's saying. So that's fascinating. 24:39 If you scroll, if you go to my security budget post and you scroll to the bottom, near the bottom, I have like a great screenshot. 24:53 Of all that, which is a bit DNS and generalizing Bitcoin thread. 24:59 And so that's a separate thing. For that, there is an extra hash every block, but that is not how the coins move from L2 back to L1. 25:08 They move from L2 to L1 by huge epochs. 25:11 It's kind of like this huge blocks that span three months of the sidechain activity, the L2 chain activity. 25:19 And they are all clapped under this umbrella. They're all contained with this one withdrawal proposal that is very rare. 25:28 But this is a, it has a little more nuance than that because most people will not use the slow withdrawal. 25:34 Slow withdrawal would just be for experts. People, you know, so I don't know if it's a good idea to go into all the details. 25:46 If you don't know, I don't know exactly what you are curious about or what you already know. 25:52 But in general, if you're okay with SPV level security, like you think miners would never do anything that would harm the underlying chain. 26:02 Then in that case, you have really nothing to lose by moving from L1 to L2. 26:08 And that is, in fact, how I designed it. That was the whole design criterion. 26:11 Because I looked, I was like, how can we try to make both groups of people happy, the large blockers, the small blockers? 26:16 And I said, the large blockers want something. They want the block size limit to go up. 26:21 And I said, is there anything that they're willing to sacrifice? 26:24 And then I found the thing, which is that they like SPV security. 26:29 And so that I just plugged the two into each other. I said, OK, great. You can have large blocks, but only at SPV security. 26:35 And then all L1 has to do is count up to 13,000. More or less. 26:41 So that's a lot of answers. But it was a lot of questions. So I don't know. I don't know if that helps. 26:45 Those were great questions. Let's move to our next speaker. And Crypto Voyager is welcome to come back. 26:51 But we right after the next segment of this space, the next segment will be a conversation between Paul and our invited guest, Kurt, who is a large blocker, if I understand correctly. 27:03 Kurt, why don't you take your time to make as much of an opening statement as you'd like? 27:07 But then after that, let's try, if we can, to have a kind of conversation back and forth with answers that are just maybe one minute or less in length. 27:19 But at first, why don't you take time to just respond to everything you've heard and introduce yourself, if you'd like. Thanks, Kurt. 27:25 I appreciate the invitation. And I apologize in advance if my microphone makes me sound lispy. 27:34 I have been told that on Spaces, my very modern iPhone microphone doesn't seem to make me sound perfect. 27:44 Sounds great. 27:45 Okay, good. Good news. So, hey, I'm Kurt. I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012 is when I got my first Bitcoin. 27:55 But I didn't really get into Bitcoin deeply until 2013. I've been mining for about 10 years. 28:02 I currently run a BSV pool and I fancy myself a Bitcoin historian and spend a lot of my time working on exactly that, the Bitcoin history that most people have decided to move on from. 28:18 I do think Satoshi was a big blocker. I think he was, especially in the 2010 to 2012 era, I think it actually kind of becomes unclear when Satoshi the moniker is the same as Satoshi the person. 28:35 And it's probably something we'll never know exactly when Satoshi made his full exit and exactly what the context of that was. 28:44 So I think in the 2010 to 2012 era, you know, when we start seeing like random emails, I think the very last communication from Satoshi is very clearly not written in his voice. 28:57 This is him commenting on like Bitcoin XT and some of these things where he says it just stuff that doesn't sound like it's written in his voice. 29:06 But again, that's it's open to speculation. We know Satoshi's various logins have been compromised. 29:13 We know that by 2014 that his GitHub repo is completely compromised. His email was compromised and all these things. 29:20 But what we don't know is when that compromise actually began. 29:24 And so it definitely calls into question some of the the late Satoshi era conversations about like the form and function and implementation stuff about Bitcoin. 29:35 I don't actually have any technical criticisms of the idea. 29:45 I think that layer two solutions are generally a good thing. 29:48 You know, I think sidechains are great. 29:52 I think they serve specific purposes that do things that are needed and generally do them well. 29:59 That being said, I'm a big blocker and prefer the simplicity of of doing everything at L1. 30:06 But that's mostly because I have like essentially zero fear about the problems of storing data over time. 30:13 I think these are problems that the economy has already solved. 30:16 You know, at Gorilla Pool, my mining pool, we're running like multiple Cassandra implementations. 30:22 We have Bitcoin sharded across all kinds of different things in order to extract and index data in very different ways and provide them back to the economy in ways that they want to use it. 30:34 So for me, I see like convergence of big compute, big data and, you know, basically everything we've learned from 20 years of trying to scale things like Twitter and Facebook and Google can be applied to to Bitcoin in very simple ways. 30:52 And the fear of Bitcoin ending up in big data centers strikes me as bizarre. 31:00 And then but but ultimately, I think that all of us should be like allies in way more things than we should be enemies, even if we disagree on some of the finer points. 31:12 It's you know, I think we agree on a lot more than we disagree on. 31:16 So, yeah, I'm kind of open to talk. 31:21 Henry, Henry and I, you know, talk occasionally on like public Twitter and like we'll agree on some and disagree on others. 31:31 But I appreciate the invite. And I'm here to kind of talk about talk about whatever. 31:36 And I should also point out that I think if we're talking about like toxic small blockers, I think they hate all of us in this in this room pretty universally. 31:44 So so at the very least, I think we could be allies on the fact that we're all disliked by by the worst of the worst of the Bitcoiners. 31:53 So. Thank you for those very nice comments, Paul, why don't we try to with the with this audience and with this speaker, why don't you give it take a shot at getting down to the fundamental key advantages and differences between the drivechain vision and the large block main chain vision? 32:14 OK, sure. Well, you know, let me explain it like this. 32:19 There's a. Everyone has role models growing up, but mine are very unusual. 32:25 One of mine was this game theorist, Tom Schelling, and he unfortunately he died. 32:31 What seems like recently to me, but was now I'm realizing like a long time ago, I think before Trump was elected. 32:40 But anyway, Tom Schelling is a game theorist and he is said to have had a gift for like compromise or something. 32:47 So the way I look at it is like this. It's like I'm playing a game and you have like a red team. 32:52 You show up, there's red team, blue team and the red team wants something and the blue team wants something. 32:58 And I think, how does everyone get what they want? And Tom Schelling and I, what we have in common is we don't actually care what the people want. 33:11 We just like to win. So whatever they want, if the people say, listen, I want the red team wants to have Chinese food. 33:21 Every single Friday for lunch and the blue team says that they need to have something else on my phone. 33:30 OK, they need to have something else. And so it's kind of like, well, what do we do? 33:36 Like, well, they need to have, you know, they need to have bread or something. 33:40 I'm just making this example up on the bread every Friday or whatever. 33:44 And it's like, well, the fortune cookies count as bread or something. 33:47 You know, is there Chinese food bread or something? 33:49 That's like, so it's kind of like I don't actually really even care about whether I know on a separate level about large block or small block. 33:56 But on a separate level, I do care because I happen to have researched Bitcoin in an enormous degree. 34:00 So you understand that like it's weird because you're right that it pushes the community in a certain direction to not have the large block experiment be run. 34:11 Because we have we would people would be learning about how to solve the problem of large blocks the whole time. 34:19 And there would be innovations in software. There'd be innovations in hardware. 34:25 It's kind of like when the Internet first came out, there was no way to find anything. 34:29 But then this this presented an opportunity for Google. 34:32 Google made a ton of money and Google now people could find things. 34:35 And then the Internet is being revolutionized all the time. 34:38 And so we do want to see what can the decentralized bottom up world of inventors come up with. 34:45 And by not doing the large block experiment, we did lose all of that knowledge and R&D, which we have only obtained indirectly through the other experiments on BCH and BSV. 34:56 And so they should be respected as such in that small way anyway. 35:02 So but really, though, the what you're really saying is like you're not playing by the rules, the whole the red team, blue team rules. 35:10 You know, these people say the people on the right of this call, the small blockers could be the red team and the large blockers could be the blue team. 35:18 The small block people say they say, listen, I want to be able to run a node. 35:22 I want to see everything that's going on. In particular, being able to see everything that is going on. 35:27 It makes me understand that these blocks really are that someone will always be able to serve the blockchain when it's when someone asks for it. 35:35 Because if that doesn't happen, then the chain is in danger of just the whole network is in danger of being destroyed. 35:41 Or in a couple of different ways that I could get into the technical details of. 35:46 But they say, I want to make sure that enough people have the actual all the block data. 35:52 Which is expensive because there's a thousand blocks every week. 35:55 And so if the block size is one megabyte, then it's a thousand thousand and eight megabytes every week. 36:02 So it's one gigabyte a week. That's for one megabyte. 36:05 So it's like this is an ongoing it's like trash is piling up, you know, in your house. 36:11 And so they say, I want someone I want to always be able to run the node and I want to be able to run my node over Tor. 36:17 I want to hide the physical location of my node. When you run a node, the IP addresses all connect to each other and things. 36:22 So it's it's Tor is very slow right now. 36:30 It would be nice if we had a different version of Tor. I wrote about this in September 2015. 36:34 If we had a different version of Tor where you could pay with Bitcoin, it'd be like nice to do. 36:39 Bitcoin is something of a chicken and egg problem, just like all technology. Right. 36:43 You build the first campfire and then with that you can melt tin and you build the first tin hammer and then you can build something out of stone. 36:52 And then you build an iron forge and then eventually build a blast furnace and you're building steel skyscrapers. 36:59 And then you build like whatever they used to make like, you know, like titanium and like the technology is always this kind of spiral thing. 37:07 But if we had we start with your basic Bitcoin and then you have some kind of Tor network or some kind of VPN that pays with Bitcoin, 37:15 then it would probably be easier for people to hide the physical location of larger nodes. 37:21 But you understand this is the interest of my red team, blue team thing or something like they say they want this thing. 37:26 And it's diametrically opposed to what you want. So it's kind of like it's whose ox is gored. 37:33 You know, it's like someone says they want this. Someone says they want that. 37:37 It's either you have to be arbitrary or you have to base it on some external principle or you have to try to give both groups what they want using something creative, which is what I tried to do. 37:49 So these people say they want running a node to be cheap. They want it to be easy to hide the physical location of the node. 37:55 They want to make sure that all the historical block data is there. So that's the that's what they want. 38:00 And what mostly the naive L1 large blockers did, which I'm not saying it's you necessarily, but but they mostly did because I lived through this period is they mostly just said, well, you know, you're stupid for wanting that. 38:14 And, you know, that just doesn't really I wouldn't I don't let them say that about the large blockers either. It's just like a you know, it's just the wrong thing to say. 38:22 So that's what they said. That's what both groups said about each other. 38:26 But, yeah, you understand that that is what the that they wanted all this stuff. And they seem to be they had real reasons for wanting things that they wanted. 38:35 And what sidechains do is they keep L1 small because you can do an optional large block on top of a mandatory small block. 38:43 But it's it's very ridiculous to do the reverse to have a mandatory large block L1 with a tiny small block on top of it. 38:52 I certainly agree that it's simpler because apparently drivechain is like one of the hardest ideas to understand in the world. This is news to me because under the hood, it's just a number. 39:03 A counter that goes up to 13,150. But apparently it's just the most mystifying idea on planet Earth and only a tiny, tiny portion of Bitcoiners can fully grasp it. 39:15 So you're certainly right that just doing it on L1 is simpler, but also what is also simpler is just not changing L1. So again, you run into the problem that it doesn't really resolve the dispute. 39:27 Yeah, I think, you know, to your point, I mean, you covered a lot of things like that's all that's a lot of things to to think about. 39:37 Like we're really distilling down like what is Bitcoin and then what is Bitcoin for and then who gets to decide what you know what what Bitcoin is for to a culture that isn't sure what it even wants to do with money in general and then everything else. 39:56 But, you know, you mentioned one of your one of your first predicate points was this discussion about not caring what the other side wants. 40:06 And I think that that's kind of an important principle to make is that like if Bitcoin. 40:12 If Bitcoin is intended to be a sound money that solves an alleged payments problem and an alleged, you know, various problems with money, then I think first thing that it needs to be is we need to define like what what a Bitcoin even is like and and what it's for and why that matters. 40:34 And I think Satoshi, in many regards, did it did an OK job of that, but but also, you know, wasn't a particularly good communicator in in that, you know, he used the word Bitcoin to define the network and the protocol and the database and the unit of account. 40:51 And so, like, I think Satoshi actually kind of kind of messed that up and that he made it kind of ambiguous what he was talking about in in a lot of situations. 41:03 But like this notion, this notion that everybody should run a node, I think this is one of the fundamental things where where we just break and a lot of it has to do with defining a node. 41:18 And your small blocker is going to say it's anybody anybody that can run, you know, a full copy of Bitcoin on their mom's computer like that's your node. 41:25 Right. And then your big blocker is going to say, well, your your node fundamentally must be able to build a block and write to the chain. 41:32 Otherwise, like why like why would I even bother wasting an RPC connection to your node unless there's some other reason for that to exist? 41:40 And, you know, so we're immediately creating a worldview schism right here where it's like, OK, we don't agree on the same definition for a word. 41:49 And it's a very basic building block word in the Bitcoin world. 41:52 And if we if we can't agree on it, like, obviously, this is this is why we had a massive schism and a war and all of these things. 41:59 But if if you break down, OK, well, what what is the purpose of your node like wanting to run your own node rather than some other thing basically being served that data? 42:13 And so I think you have to have a little bit of an engineering mind to think about what problem you're trying to solve. 42:21 You're saying that you cannot trust the other nodes on the network unless you validate the coins that you receive across the rest of the network. 42:32 And so this begs the question. 42:35 My first my first point is that why why were Merkle trees and Merkle proofs used in Bitcoin at all? 42:42 Because at a small scale and if everyone is going to be a Byzantine soldier, essentially make your own rules. 42:50 So Byzantine generals would be your major connected nodes that communicate with each other like they are solving the Byzantine generals problem and then giving orders to the soldiers. 43:00 But if you believe that you need to run your own node on your own system, what you're saying is that, OK, I will not even participate in a Byzantine generals system. 43:11 I am a Byzantine soldier and I'm only willing to trust myself. 43:14 It's actually maybe the better term would be a Byzantine mercenary might be a might be a better way to put this. 43:20 And so but the problem is, is that the entire concept of SPV and Merkle proofs and headers and all of these things. 43:30 It implies. 43:32 Because there's no other reason for it to exist or for them to exist as a system like this, it implies that certain nodes that should be able to build a block and then transmit the header and the Merkle proof to the rest of everybody else in the system. 43:51 And they should be able to validate that fingerprint and say, good, everything makes sense. 43:56 Hashes match. 43:57 Handshake happened. 43:58 Let's move forward. 44:01 The problem is that when you when you start to add endpoints in the network and lots of edges that aren't putting any value back toward the center of the network, you start having the problems that we've seen with BTC and that. 44:14 OK, like with ordinals, for example, like they're they're they're really struggling to keep indexes up and the indexes aren't even that big. 44:22 Like they're not a lot of data, but but we're seeing that people will come up with a novel use for the technology and the network is completely insufficient because it's it's been like you're ignoring the use of the cryptography that exists in the network and things like that. 44:39 And but if we're using it, if you think of it more of as a server client relationship where the trust is not about you not trusting anyone and validating everything yourself, it's more about trusting the technicality of the system because you can verify like unless you know SHA-256 is broken and all these other things, you can trust the Merkle proof of if the Merkle proof is given to you with the headers and the network has sufficient proof of work. 45:05 All your other chain tips and all your other I don't know, is there is there a chain tip over here that has 22 million coins on it and all of these other things just become noise like these are these are edge cases that essentially can't happen, like probabilistically they won't happen like yes, in theory they could happen, but probabilistically it just makes no sense. 45:25 And so I think if we let Bitcoin be Bitcoin in that we say that the center of the network, the true, the Byzantine generals, your dozen or so nodes that actually build all the blocks, if SHA-256 hasn't been backdoored and if Merkle proofs actually work and if Bitcoin, the system, a system of headers and blocks and the cryptography that exists in the network, if all of those things work and we can verify that those things work. 45:55 Then the client server system that big blockers propose Bitcoin should be engineered to work like, well, then that becomes a very obvious way for Bitcoin to work and then have it scale and then have the simplicity that comes with it, like that we all just have a very simple system that your wallet just needs to be able to validate a hash and then you're happy to move forward. 46:19 Everything works. But when you try to make the system that is arbitrarily distributed and then you keep putting people in a position where, well, running a version of software is like a vote and we have this sort of pseudo technocratic oligarchy of people that if you're capable of running a node, it is your citizenship as a Bitcoin, a real Bitcoin user, quote unquote. 46:42 You know, then you start having all these other problems where you need to start creating, you know, no offense, an arbitrary solution such as drivechain. 46:50 Again, I like the idea. I don't see any reason why drivechain can't be a solution on either system. 46:55 Like big block Bitcoin could also use drivechains well, but BTC has put itself in a position to where if it wants to do any of the really cool stuff that can happen with a Bitcoin system, that it needs to use something like drivechain arbitrarily. 47:11 It's kind of like saying, OK, we're only going to allow a certain amount of bandwidth and therefore here comes exponential complexity to do things that could be done much more simply if we just didn't have like a weird political opinion about who should be running a node or why. 47:28 OK, so I think the best point was that you made was about the fact that people use the word node to refer to different things. 47:38 So we're going to pick two new words or phrases or something, and I'm going to call mine an archival node. 47:46 That is a node that has the blockchain. And then if you don't come up with something, I'm going to call your thing an aspirational miner. But I don't know if you have a better word for your thing. 47:58 So, well, define them. Maybe I will agree. 48:02 You just said before that you said there are nodes that just have a blockchain but aren't mining, aren't doing anything. They just have a copy of everything. And then you said there are nodes where they have a reasonable expectation of finding a block in some arbitrarily short amount of time. 48:20 Isn't that what you said? 48:22 Yeah, sounds good. 48:24 So do you have a great name for that? 48:26 Oh, I would call that a node. 48:29 No, it has to be a new name. You have to play by the rules. I picked a new, I said archival node. 48:34 You can say something else. 48:36 OK, but why doesn't the white paper definition of a node get to be the starting point? 48:42 Well, the white paper definition of the node is, well, first of all, the answer to your question is because, as you just admitted, and you just pointed out, wisely so, there is a dispute over what the word should mean. 48:53 So, no matter how clear it may have been, if there's a dispute, then there should be. But one thing is that mine is archival node. It has the word node in it, so it's not actually going to be clear yet, unless, I can be the only one to take a new word if you want. 49:12 How about a data reading node versus a data writing node? 49:17 OK, reading node versus writing node. 49:21 The archival node does more than, no, but it also serves the data back. So, you could call it a server if you want. 49:30 Sure. 49:32 So, we have the data server, which is small blocker node, and then the large blocker node is going to be, what is it going to be? A block constructor? 49:47 Yeah, block building node. 49:50 OK, so we have data server, which is the archival node, the small block node, and then we have block constructor, which is the large blocker node. 50:02 So, what are the differences between these two things and what's the whole point? Well, you know, people want it to be cheap to run the data server. 50:10 The block constructors sort of already take care of themselves. That's true, because the miners are customers. In a sense, every block constructor is a data server, but not necessarily the reverse. 50:24 Correct. One is a superset of the other. 50:27 Right? So, the reason why people want the data servers, the small block node, the archival node, they want the data servers to be cheap is because it makes the blockchain sort of less dark in a way. 50:42 If you have this dark chain that you can't see, you can't see into it, you only get to see a glimpse. 50:48 They open a lighter in a dark cave, and they see the SPV, Merkle proof, and they see a small glimpse of a part of the cave, but they can't see the whole thing. 50:56 They want the whole cave to just be lit up so they can see the whole thing, and the problem with the dark chain is, as the years go by, fewer people know what's in the chain. 51:08 And then if it turns out one of the blocks can't be found, then it must be treated as invalid, because no one knows if something in it is valid or not. 51:16 Or some other dispute will happen where people will say, like, we don't know how to treat this missing data, some of the records are missing. 51:26 And then if it was later discovered there was inflation there, or someone's coins were spent, this would cause something like a constitutional crisis. 51:35 So this is kind of this edge case that you're talking about, but it's still, that is a plausible story. 51:43 I mean, you wouldn't want, you could take an extreme case, you could say, what if it were impossible for anyone to run the data server, then the data server node. 51:56 But in that case, it would be like, that would, you know, you can see how that would be bad, because no one would know what was going on. 52:04 And no one would know whether or not, which chain tip was the longest, really, because no one would know if any of them were really Bitcoin or something else. 52:12 And so that kind of just shows you there is something to be said for their logic, I say. 52:21 I would, I don't know, I still don't, I still look at it and say, well, like, okay, is SHA-256 untrustworthy, or is the Merkle proof untrustworthy? 52:35 Well, think about it like this, is the data, you just said every block constructor is a data server, but not the other way around. 52:42 But if it's impossible for anyone to become a data server, then it's also impossible for anyone to become a block constructor. 52:48 Well, I mean, anybody can attempt to, like, you have every right to attempt to build a block. 52:56 But I think, you know, again, like, the question is, if the hashes all match up, and I am on the chain tip with the greatest amount of proof of work, and there's no incongruency, 53:11 like, I've been given no warning that hashes don't match, then, like, why would anything better? 53:18 I mean, this is like 99.9999999, like, out to, you know, who knows how many decimal points trustworthy as is. 53:28 And I think to argue about that, like, you know, quadrillionth of a percentage point, where there's risk, I think is just a, I mean, outside of a computer science theoretical conversation, I think it is basically zero value. 53:46 Well, okay, like, is your position that the block constructor will make it will continue to make it cheap to be a data server out of their own self interest? 54:01 Well, I think if they fail to do that, there are other competitors in the system like this was this was a criticism. 54:07 Well, you just said that you have to bid on you have to you have no choice but to trust the latest tip. 54:16 Well, you have you have no reason not to the point is, is like, 54:20 because it's making the data servers more expensive. This new tip with the very large 800 gigabyte block. It's making you say, Well, this is the new tip, it's valid. It's in the new tip among the greatest provided, but it but it has a very large, it's a very large block, and it's me, the data server part expensive. 54:39 So it's the large, yes, it follows the rule of being on the longest, heaviest chain tip. But it, but it now is a little bit ambiguous as to when does it add too much to the cost of being a data server, as obviously, people will disagree with that the exact same way they disagree on what the block size limit should be. It's the exact same disagreement. 55:00 Yeah, but again, this is like, this feels like the kind of conversation where you have like an economic planner deciding what, you know, what should the limits of capitalism be like, this is much more of a solution that should be decided, frankly, by the economics of it. If I'm, if I'm a miner, or if I'm a, you know, I'm a block building participant in the network here, and I'm just have decided like, Okay, I'm just not going to keep up with this anymore. Like, I have every right to bow out. 55:28 But, but if the system loses value, because it, you know, it's, it's unuseful in some way, then, then, like, then people have every ability to, you know, perhaps break that, that tip into multiple, like orphan, or from the right. 55:46 So, but that's what that's exactly it, though, is that people will, they'll, instead of disagreeing. So, yeah, so it's like, either you're always going with the longest tip, or what you're saying is the miners will choose a different tip that they'll try to mine as they'll try to extend to orphan the one large block that is that was recent, right? That's what you're saying. 56:12 I mean, I've experienced this, like I have built on BSV, for example, I've built, you know, a seven gigabyte block. 56:19 Oh, no, I'm not disputing. I think it's completely possible. Right. So if people build a set, well, you know, everyone has their limit, though, in a way, because someone will say, well, seven gigabytes is too much. Some will say, well, we'll orphan that. Some people say it's, it's fine. So some will say this and that. So there'll be a disagreement about that. But what you're saying is, if there's a disagreement about the block that was just mined, you can try to go back and mine two blocks, hopefully, you can hope and hope enough other people will have 56:49 your own block size, your own private block size. Yeah. So it's kind of like everyone has their own block size limit. And you just you but you understand that finding two boxes, you know, much more than twice as hard as finding the next block, just because the statistical so you're at a you're at a you're biased, you're substantially biased towards just gritting your teeth and taking the most recent block. 57:15 Maybe, I mean, like, I have been an orphan before on on such a such a situation. So, but I think I think, too, again, like we're, we're making presumptions about like, what the purpose of that fight is, like, for me, I'm looking at it and saying, Okay, our, our competing mempools are probably, probably identical, or if they're not identical, they're, they're within a, you know, a statistical rounding error of the same basic data set. 57:43 And so to the user, it shouldn't make a difference. Like your your payment that went through is, again, 99.99999% likely to be valid anyways, regardless of the chain tip. So if the if the the block builders at the center of the network are debating about which chain tip it doesn't really matter who wins to the for the sake of the health of the network, if when it's all said and done, 58:10 but I don't think that's the case, though, is it right? Because think about it, what if I, what if the network disagrees as to whether or not they think maybe 700, you have a 700 megabyte coalition, and then you have like a 900 megabyte coalition, and I make a transaction, I'm just a regular guy trying to use Bitcoin. 58:27 And my transaction is in the eight, it's like in the 775th megabyte of the block that is found, which is what means it's in contention of being reorg'd out. 58:40 Well, why, why would it be in content? Why would your, you know, 58:44 not be in both mempools, that doesn't make any sense. 58:47 It will be it will be in both, but it will only make it into the blockchain in the one that is building 700 megabytes forever. If that's 51% of the hash rate, then that then I will, I will never make it in. And whereas in the 901, I'm in the I'm in the very next block. So now I, I my own node, since it doesn't have a block size limit at all, it thinks it has a confirmation, but really, it will never confirm. 59:14 Well, why? No, that doesn't make sense. There's no reason why that would never confirm. And if, if again, we're trusting the proof. 59:21 Because I'm in constantly, my fee rate is constantly in the eight, it puts it in like the lowest percentile of, of block health. So it's in the 800s. So this is where people, they've drawn the line in the sand. The miners have drawn the line and they say, we 700 megabytes is too much. We want that we need the data server costs, the archival node costs, the small block. 59:43 We need those costs down to at least 700 megabytes. That's our current limit. And then the activity network activity is very, is enormous. There's many transactions. And my won't make the cut. But someone out there minds the 900 megabyte block, the miners are going to reorder that one out, as you just said, a couple moments ago, they have, they can either bow out, or they can try to orphan the block. So they are, they will be orphaned, because 51% have 700 megabytes. 1:00:13 As their private limit. So I think I have a confirmation, but now it's going to get deconfirmed, and they will never get a confirmation. 1:00:20 But your, but your, your, your first predicate was that we are talking about a very normal user. If a very normal user has broadcast his transaction, either to, you know, maybe over an API, or maybe just broadcasting, you know, directly to Bitcoin over the peer to peer network. 1:00:38 Why would his transaction not be valid on all possible chains, given all? 1:00:44 It's valid, but it will never be confirmed. Because it doesn't pay enough fee. But I didn't know that when I made it. 1:00:50 Yeah, but Bitcoin is in constant churn. If it doesn't make it into the next block, it's still... 1:00:55 No, just assume that it's the same situation every time. Like, there's a certain amount of activity every 10 minutes. It's just a perfect, this is just for the sake of the example. There's a new transaction come in every 10 minutes. 1:01:06 Why would, why would somebody... 1:01:08 It's a simplifying assumption, because it doesn't make any difference. You have to clear out the irrelevant... 1:01:12 Well, of course it does. 1:01:13 Issues. 1:01:15 You're assuming that the people that are, you know, have the most invested in the value of the network would want a typical consumer to have a bad time. And that doesn't, like, that's an absurd presumption. 1:01:25 No, it is not. 1:01:27 Why is it not? 1:01:30 Because the premise is false. Listen, let's say I run a limousine company, and I want everyone to have a good time. And the person says, I want the limo to get me, to take me from LA to Chicago in two hours, or I'm going to have a bad time. 1:01:44 Well, I want them to have a good time, but I can't do, I can't make... 1:01:48 No, this is an incongruent... 1:01:52 Well, let's go back, we'll go back to it. It's an extremely simple situation. Very simple. Every 10 minutes, 900 megabytes worth of transactions are broadcast to the network. 1:02:05 We'll just assume this is the latent demand for using Bitcoin block space. 900 megabytes each time. 1:02:16 75% of the miners think that 900 blocks is too big. They think, in fact, they think 701 megabytes is too big. 700 megabytes is their personal limit. It's either that or lower or something. 1:02:27 But just to make it simpler, we'll just say 75% of them have it at 700. And the rest have it, it could be unlimited, but we'll just say it's, we'll say it's one gigabyte. 1:02:40 It doesn't make any difference. You know, it doesn't really make any difference. But, so let's just say it's 900 megabytes, just to make it simple. 1:02:47 They would hit it perfectly, but that's only 25% are willing to do that because, as you said, many points ago, we agreed that every block constructor is a data server, but not every data server is a block constructor. 1:03:02 And every block constructor must, they must run a node so that they can have a mempool and construct the blocks. And they can, you know, do all the other things that the block constructor node is doing. 1:03:15 So they say, and as you said before, they can, when you have, when the new block comes in, you can either bow out, which is to say quit the mining business and say, listen, this isn't for me. 1:03:27 I don't know what these data centers these guys have, but mine's not good enough. So it's having to hang up the old towel and bow out, or they can try to orphan the block. 1:03:37 Now, if it's 75%, 700 megabytes, 25%, 900 megabytes, just stands to reason there's going to be a once every four times they're going to mine the 900 megabyte block. 1:03:51 Now, let's just say this is day one of this scenario. It doesn't matter what day it is, but this is the scenario. I broadcast the transaction. My transaction is such that it pays a lower fee than most people's. 1:04:05 So there's 700 megabytes worth of transactions in front of me in line. And it's my lucky day, though. Today is the day the 25% miners, or this 10 minute period is the period in which the 900 megabyte miner, smaller, larger block group, Bitcoin SVV, or whatever, you know, they find the block and now I have a confirmation. 1:04:34 But it's actually not my lucky day because the 700 megabyte people will reorg it out now. But I have, I think I have a confirmation. And, you know, this guy Kurt on Twitter told me, 1:04:45 I can't hear Paul. Can others? 1:05:00 Yeah, Paul, Paul disappeared for me too. 1:05:02 I think Paul's me or what? 1:05:04 Yeah, he dropped off for me. 1:05:06 Paul, maybe you should disconnect and reconnect, perhaps. 1:05:11 In the meantime, Kurt, maybe it would be great if you could try to crystallize this conversation. Meaning, could you say, what do you think exactly and succinctly is the core claim of the small block drivechain view? 1:05:31 One day it will eventually be. 1:05:33 Is your view. 1:05:35 Oh, Paul, we missed you. 1:05:37 He's back. 1:05:40 Paul, you've been gone for a minute and a half, probably. 1:05:42 We missed you for the last minute. I was just hoping we could get you guys to try to agree on what exactly the core difference is and then move from there. 1:05:52 The core disagreement. 1:05:58 Okay, he's reconnecting. 1:06:00 Yeah, I'll give him. I don't want to speak if he's potentially can't hear me. 1:06:05 Okay, Paul, you're back. Go ahead. 1:06:11 Can we get a thumbs up or a hello from you? You're back. 1:06:22 All right, maybe he's still connecting. Yeah, no problem. 1:06:27 So I think to this. 1:06:33 Yes. 1:06:35 Okay. 1:06:40 Basically, the beginning of your last reply. Oh, really? I said an awful lot. 1:06:46 Yeah, you were gone for about a minute and a half, unfortunately. 1:06:49 So let me let me. 1:06:53 I would love to just comment on that. 1:06:55 Like, I think I think it's obvious where the conversation is going. 1:06:59 But so I've actually lived through precisely this situation. 1:07:03 There was a miner on BSV that had a very high minimum fee rate, which was higher than the cost of every transaction on the network. 1:07:13 And he had quite a bit of hash power. 1:07:15 He was 30 or 40 percent of the network for for a number of weeks. 1:07:21 But it was basically only mining blocks that had sometimes just one, sometimes, you know, three, four or five transactions in them. 1:07:27 So they were, you know, 200 and something kilobyte blocks, basically. 1:07:32 Now, for any other nodes in the network that had their mempool settings, like their policy settings were low, like they're only willing to hold maybe, you know, 10 gigabytes of data or something in there. 1:07:44 In their mempool, this started to cause some chaos as this this miner was building lots of blocks that didn't have a lot of data in them. 1:07:52 So people were waiting for confirms. 1:07:54 And depending on the settings of their wallets, it was saying, like, hey, you know, we're not sure where this transaction is. 1:08:00 It's in some kind of a transaction limbo. 1:08:02 Now, at my pool, at Gorilla Pool, we have I think we have a terabyte sized mempool right now for our policy settings. 1:08:11 So we're willing to receive and validate everything that comes in, whether or not we build a block. 1:08:15 And as a rule, we build three to five blocks a day. 1:08:21 So for us, you know, if you're a client of ours and you're using Gorilla Pool's APIs as an attestation of like, OK, this is this is in the network, it's awaiting a block or whatever. 1:08:31 We also relay everything out to the network as well. 1:08:34 But we're sort of serving as a like, hey, we're the biggest funnel. 1:08:39 So if you want to fling your stuff our direction, we'll make sure it gets served out to the rest of the network. 1:08:43 And if the rest of the network is doing precisely what you're saying, like only mining, you know, small, small blocks or whatever else, when we mine a block, it will be like that. 1:08:53 That will essentially reconcile everything that's been hanging out there. 1:08:56 But you also have all kinds of issues with like child pays for parent chains and some of these other things that are not actually fundamentally Bitcoin problems, but they are Bitcoin implementation problems. 1:09:08 But if if you don't have a child pays for parent limit that is absurdly small, I think in BTC, I don't even know if you're allowed to resend a transaction if its parent transaction hasn't been in a block yet. 1:09:22 But I believe in Bitcoin Cash, that chain is a few dozen transactions. 1:09:27 In BSV, it's thousands. 1:09:29 But it's now a policy setting, not a protocol setting in BSV. 1:09:34 So for us, it's I don't even know, I think we have like a 10,000 transaction limit or something like that. 1:09:40 It's some other very high number. 1:09:42 But the reason for that is if we have very high mempool policy limit and we have a very high child pays for parent chain limit, then your transaction can sit in our mempool potentially for days or weeks without making its way into a block. 1:09:57 But it is still valid and we're still making a commitment. 1:10:00 Our hash power, I see that as a signal of our commitment to put that into a block as soon as we're able. 1:10:08 And what that should do, and again, this is like human comms kind of thing, like I'm happy to send an email or have a phone call with the other nodes on the network to say, hey, guys, you know what network conditions are such that, you know, this other person that just wants to mine only very expensive transactions or only mine, like he's set himself a very low, you know, maximum block size. 1:10:33 Maybe it would make sense for us to, you know, for the sake of the users of the network to change our policy settings to be more in line with each other. 1:10:41 And so like this is just the way that this is the way that a free market economy adjusts to a variable. 1:10:48 And rather than saying like, well, this edge case could happen and therefore we need to set all kinds of swim lanes for how big the economy is allowed to get. 1:10:57 You basically just let the free market make decisions among people. 1:11:01 Like I have a healthy relationship with the other people that build blocks on the network because there's only a few of us to do that. 1:11:08 And it's the same thing in BTC. 1:11:10 There's really only I mean, there's like six pools that build 90 plus percent of the blocks in BTC. 1:11:17 And so if there was a situation where it's like, hey, the actual usability of the network is degrading. 1:11:24 Well, it's actually pretty trivial to say, hey, guys, can we all meet on a Zoom call and say, hey, if we were to change these one or two policy settings, it'll clear up this new variable that, you know, we weren't adjusted for. 1:11:37 And if everybody reasonably sees that as a profitable way to make the network more useful and more profitable than a that brings value to the user of the network, which in theory should bring value to the network as a whole, 1:11:49 which should then also bring that value to the capitalists who are at the top of that food chain and providing that service, building blocks, processing transactions, et cetera. 1:11:59 And so I see these kind of edge cases where, hey, I can't trust anybody and I have to validate my own transactions and all these other things as as basically a belief that humans are inflexible and that free market actors essentially won't act or can't act. 1:12:18 And I don't know which one's worse, frankly, but but that's my view on it, is that a truly free market, a truly competitive system could lead to greater cooperation at that level. 1:12:30 And if we don't set up arbitrary swim lanes that we all just have decided, hey, we need to stay in these swim lanes, then the flexibility of an open protocol and a much more flexible protocol will allow individuals like individual economic actors to make better decisions on their feet than some economic planner could make just sitting at their computer and trying to pre-plan every possible edge case. 1:12:55 So that's that's kind of my overarching worldview and an example of us having gone through it. 1:13:01 Yeah, but you didn't actually answer the example that I wanted to talk about, which is that you have 50, 75 percent of the network has a 700 megabyte block size limit or equivalently, they have a minimum fee rate that comes out to that amount because the minimum fee rate and the block size are the same thing. 1:13:20 They're completely interchangeable. So they have 700 megabytes is 75 percent of the network and then 25 percent of the network is 900 megabytes. 1:13:29 And I broadcast a transaction that it pays a lower fee. 1:13:35 And it ends up past the 700 megabyte limit. 1:13:41 And so but this is what this is one of the four. 1:13:46 Luckily, one of the 25 percent, 900 megabyte miners mines the block. 1:13:53 Now, I have a confirmation, but the other 75 percent of the miners are going to actually reorg out this block because it does not meet their limit, which is what you said that before you said they can either bow out or they can try to orphan a block that imposes too much of a cost on the data servers. 1:14:15 Well, or or you can just wait until you are able to mine a block in that situation like you're I think your example presumes that the people that have the most invested in the infrastructure and the value of the system are going to just perpetually punish users over like a single line of code in their in their node policy limit. 1:14:35 And I just think that that's that just seems punitive at all. 1:14:40 You yourself said you have a block size limit somewhere, right? 1:14:44 It's one gigabyte or whatever. 1:14:46 Well, but it's a policy limit. 1:14:48 Like we we adjust it based on everything has seven has their limit. 1:14:54 Yes, but it's a it's a soft one. 1:14:57 Well, I mean, you could it could be larger or could be smaller, so that's not really the point. 1:15:04 Yeah, but if my for example, if my mempool makes for 100 megabyte blocks all day, there's not a reason to have a higher limit. 1:15:12 But if all of a sudden there's a billion transactions a day, like we may adjust our block size limit to like 10 gigs a block. 1:15:19 And that is a change that can happen literally every block like we can like this is just a sysadmin's job to to monitor the network and make that decision as a as a human who's running a business. 1:15:34 But that's not what I'm asking about. 1:15:37 But that's not what I'm asking about. 1:15:39 I'm saying everyone has a limit. 1:15:41 So what do you do when the transaction is in some people's limit, but not the other the other people? 1:15:46 They either bow out. 1:15:48 They either quit the network. 1:15:52 Or they orphan the block. 1:15:54 Right. 1:15:57 Oh, or they wait until they like until conditions change such that they mind the block with the transaction in it like you're assuming that there is a fullness of blocks that is kind of insurmountable. 1:16:11 But that's a presumption that I think everyone has their limit like would you buy in a block that's like 700 terabytes. 1:16:21 I mean, if it was profitable for me to do it. 1:16:23 I mean the network couldn't handle it right now but that's again that's that's an arbitrary that's an implementation thing that's like saying what I shoot a movie in 4k in 1986 and the answer is no but but but not because I wouldn't like to. 1:16:40 Well I mean that's all well and good but there is some limit the network you said what the network can handle there is there is some limit out there. 1:16:48 Yes, but but even so like you're still assuming. 1:16:52 So in that case the limit would be enforced if someone mined the 700 terabyte block it would be enforced by people orphaning the block. 1:17:00 Right, yes. 1:17:04 Yeah, presumably yeah. 1:17:07 Anyone who had one confirmation in that block they would get deconfirmed. 1:17:10 Well yeah they would be they would be on the other chain tip they would be on an orphan tip. 1:17:17 Right, that's all I'm saying. 1:17:19 Right, but those same transactions that are in there like so your presumption of that being. 1:17:26 You can know that with certainty that if I have a 700 terabyte block it's going to be a very long time before even half of those make it into any chain that has you know six confirmations or normal health or whatever. 1:17:44 No that presumes that that presumes that that network conditions are static and that's that is a. 1:17:51 I mean it'll be sometime by sometime I mean like it will be like weeks and months. 1:17:57 If there was if there was suddenly 700 terabytes worth of transactions then that would give me the ability to go raise whatever money necessary because I actually have an ability now to say this is exactly how many customers and value that I have. 1:18:16 Can we can we make an equity deal that allows me to upgrade my system such that I can serve this gigantic customer base that has just showed up and the solution then gets solved again by a free market actor deciding to compete as well as they can possibly compete. 1:18:33 And I mean this is a good thing like you are you are just talking about hey too many customers have showed up and. 1:18:40 No it doesn't make it doesn't necessarily equal more revenue at all it could be 700 terabytes worth of blocks and each of them is paying one satoshi. 1:18:52 Okay so you don't you don't value 700 terabytes worth of single satoshi transactions under any circumstances. 1:18:59 Literally multiply that out and see what kind of number that is I don't know. 1:19:05 That sounds like a lot of bitcoins. 1:19:08 There are people who will work for a lot of bitcoins. 1:19:11 Well you know that it could actually be 700 terabyte block that pays only one satoshi total it could just be one transaction that pays only one sat as a fee. 1:19:22 Okay in which case you have the right to simply ignore it if they're not paying you to do anything with it. 1:19:28 I'm only these extreme cases are just to illustrate the principle that 700 terabyte block doesn't necessarily mean that you will have your revenues will increase and not necessarily to the point where you instantaneously be able to raise capital in the wider market to buy all kinds of other stuff. 1:19:47 A 700 terabyte block you know it may that might rely on technology that hasn't even been invented. 1:19:53 Sorry it's like it's everyone has a limit. 1:19:57 What is the question is what to do when the limit is crossed. 1:20:00 That's the that's the question. 1:20:02 And I know I don't think that that's a conversation for for economic but like economic planning to me is like the dirtiest. 1:20:09 I think that's not a very good thing for you to say because the the actual economic if you're really saying let the market decide then you have to explain why the price of bitcoin SV is so much lower than all these other coins. 1:20:26 That's the market deciding that. 1:20:27 That you have done a bad job of managing. Well I mean we can talk we can we can define the market. But in a world where I don't want to go down that road because I think it's not it's you see it's a huge cop out really. I mean like is there somewhere in Goldman Sachs there's a you you you have decided that your presumptions can't be fought but my solutions are absurd and it's actually the opposite. 1:20:55 Your presumptions are absurd and my solutions are completely reasonable. 1:20:59 What's the presumption of mine is absurd. You're presuming that that all of these conditions are 1:21:04 static that mempools and the ability for anybody to pivot or the ability for people to make a 1:21:10 rational decision under pressure is like an impossibility. But that's not the case. Like we 1:21:15 are the most resilient species in reality. And if you have an economic incentive to act in such a 1:21:22 way that creates value for everyone and you get to benefit from that the solution like the problem 1:21:27 solves itself. And that's the beauty of an open system. And so listen the problem with that we 1:21:33 will eventually be able to like reach Mars and build stuff. But that's not that's a different 1:21:38 thing than saying if tomorrow someone demanded that I do that I would be able to do it because 1:21:44 I'd be able to raise capital or whatever. If someone said listen I'll give you you know there's 1:21:50 only a finite amount of resources at any one time. So over in the long run I think there is 1:21:54 basically an infinite amount of resources. But that has nothing to do with what we what we do 1:22:00 over the time frame of the next block or the next year. It's a completely separate issue. 1:22:07 Paul could we take a moment to just for the benefit of the audience could you explain what 1:22:13 you think Curt is saying succinctly in just a sentence or two and then explain why it's wrong 1:22:19 and then we'll hear him do the same for you. Yes I think what he's saying is something like 1:22:27 like you we all live in let me try to give it like a metaphor where it's like 1:22:39 well I'm struggling to think of a good metaphor. Let's just go concretely 1:22:43 concretely and literally what exactly is he saying about large blocks on main chain 1:22:47 in your view and why is it wrong? I think it's really incoherent more than wrong because he's 1:22:54 saying in one sense if there's a block that is too large that will be solved by it being orphaned 1:23:01 out or in the other sense he's saying it won't matter because no matter how expensive it is 1:23:07 to make a block we will always be able to do some build something later that makes that affordable. 1:23:18 Curt was that a fair summary? There's no such thing as a block that's too expensive 1:23:22 no matter how much it costs. Curt are you are you still speaking? Yep I'm here. Okay great 1:23:29 what did you think of that summary? What do you want to respond similarly like summarize what 1:23:34 you think Paul is saying and summarize exactly why it's wrong in just a couple sentences? 1:23:39 Yes so and it's it we don't even have to discuss Bitcoin's technicalities to get there like I've 1:23:46 been I've been an entrepreneur like I started my first business when I was 19 and everybody I know 1:23:52 that fails in business can't stop thinking about cost and risk and the people that succeed in 1:23:58 business are the people that figure out how to make an ROI out of anything and Bitcoin is an 1:24:03 experiment in perfect capitalism and if we do not let perfect capitalism make the decisions at 1:24:10 basically every level of the network then the imbalances that we're going to create by trying 1:24:15 to economically plan the way that the network is is used and how people are allowed to compete 1:24:21 then it's it's it's just going to continue to get more and more out of balance and we're going to 1:24:25 create technocratic solutions to problems that should be solved by by simple economic actors 1:24:32 making reasonable decisions with their own business. Paul do you think let me ask you this 1:24:39 do you think so you think that the the the regular like what what most people would call 1:24:46 the normal block size limit enforced by nodes you think that serves no purpose right that's my guess 1:24:56 uh correct not not no purpose I think it serves I think it's I think it serves an 1:25:02 an egotistical purpose it's it's very much like okay predicate I'm a former cybersecurity 1:25:09 professional I'm a pen tester like all kinds of these sorts of things I like very very cypher 1:25:16 punk solutions to things so what I think the purpose that it serves is for people to feel as 1:25:22 though they are self-sovereign and feel as though they are participating in a distributed system 1:25:27 and that their participation fundamentally makes them a special kind of person but I do not think 1:25:33 that it serves any kind of practical valuable uh at least not a net positive valuable contribution 1:25:41 to the network at all okay so what do you think you but you before you said each miner can 1:25:49 privately set their own fee rate or max block size which are the same thing of course so what 1:25:55 purpose do you think that serves for the ability to compete like competition is the cornerstone of 1:26:03 everything that makes human beings a special species yeah but it's so it's like the the 1:26:10 best miners are the ones who can have the make the largest blocks in your view they're the ones that 1:26:16 can create the most value or facilitate the creation of the most value it's like the larger 1:26:21 block is the best isp is is the company that allows the most people to do the most business 1:26:28 on the internet okay so to you the miners are all like little species and whoever can make the blocks 1:26:37 generate the most total fee revenue is like the winner like the antlers or whatever 1:26:44 and the goal is just the goal is to make the blocks as large as possible 1:26:50 no the goal is to make people aware that the system is capable of letting them create value 1:26:58 that cannot be created in any other way and if the network for the like what is the point of 1:27:04 the you said what's the point of the i said what is the point of each individual miners block size 1:27:09 and you said basically they compete over it so they compete to have the highest number 1:27:16 is that right or no um i mean they're competing they're competing to provide the most i mean it's 1:27:21 literally like why at&t versus comcast versus verizon like these are that's the same question 1:27:27 like why would somebody choose that as a business to go with one isp over another it's it's the 1:27:34 exact same thing like no at that level i'm just trying to figure out so you're saying it's the 1:27:40 blocks are which would they compete over who can get make the most money out of each block 1:27:48 that is part of the account i must make money by by building blocks but ultimately it's about 1:27:54 serving my customer it's focus on what the actual customer actually needs and you will be successful 1:28:01 over time even if you know during certain seasons you are not not making wealth maybe you're even 1:28:07 backsliding if you're actually giving the customer what he wants in order for him to make money 1:28:12 and you can profit from that activity then figuring out how to do that well is the most 1:28:16 valuable thing you can do with your time okay great so what how do you know that there aren't 1:28:21 a bunch of people who want who you want to provide value to the customer maybe there's a bunch of 1:28:26 customers who want the blocks to be smaller how do you know how do you know what the right how do 1:28:32 you know that do you know is that always not the case is that those people always misled 1:28:39 it's i mean that's a very different question that's like saying like 1:28:43 so if i'm a t-mobile customer am i sitting and thinking like well you know maybe i'm going to 1:28:48 switch to verizon because i prefer the version of 5g they've implemented like that's that's not 1:28:53 really the actual concern the actual concern is do i have the coverage and the bandwidth that i need 1:28:59 to run my business so to have that kind of a discussion it's the same thing like you don't 1:29:04 go to a website and the website says hey by the way we are proudly using my sequel and that's like 1:29:10 not a huge thing that's on that website like we're talking about a very technical thing that doesn't 1:29:16 really matter unless you know unless you have some kind of bandwidth constraint like what actually 1:29:21 matters is if i go to hop on my cell phone and make a a phone call and it doesn't work for some 1:29:27 reason and if it doesn't work or if it tells me like hey you need to pay a $12 toll to send this 1:29:32 text message i'm going to say what the hell is wrong with this network i am going to go to a 1:29:37 network that allows me to do business the way that i want to and this is a problem that will 1:29:42 it will be a problem at scale the answer to my question the answer to my question i ask you is 1:29:48 could it ever be the case that a customer would want to use a network where the block sizes are 1:29:52 smaller and you are saying that could never be the case not not at any kind of appreciable scale 1:29:59 absolutely not you're saying absolutely not yeah but but see the thing is aren't you now just 1:30:03 central planning no by no means well let me give you an example of someone who may maybe this they 1:30:12 want to do an ordinals marketplace and there it's like a b2b where they're going to sell these 1:30:20 ordinals to people who don't run any node but they want to be able to track all the ordinals that 1:30:26 exist because they want to see if someone is making like they want to know if there's really 1:30:30 unique ordinals like someone has an ordinal art collection and they want to know if someone 1:30:35 publishes a competing art collection and uh you know in order to use ordinals they actually must 1:30:42 run a node and now they uh they or they at least have to track so much of the network that they have 1:30:47 to see what what stuff what new stuff is being inscribed and now they their costs go up when 1:30:53 the blocks get bigger even though their revenues do not okay i mean maybe maybe i want to compete 1:31:04 maybe i want to compete with american express like if i want to start a competing credit card 1:31:09 company i need to do whatever necessary to raise that capital get the licensing and build the 1:31:14 infrastructure that i need and if i can't do that profitably i won't do it and nor should i 1:31:18 but that's the nature of a competitive system that's not pre-planning that's just reality 1:31:24 what you're saying the ordinals person is i was saying the ordinals person 1:31:28 would they they would prefer you to build the blocks smaller 1:31:32 aren't they a customer of yours they buy the block space 1:31:44 kurt did you hear the question yeah i i hear the question i'm i'm thinking about 1:31:50 i'm trying to frame the question in my head that's fine take your take your time 1:31:55 so we're talking about we're talking about very different things like the the ordinal 1:32:04 is not the creation of the of the node it is the creation of somebody else and if somebody 1:32:10 wants to send you an ordinal in a particular way then that's an agreement that happens between two 1:32:16 people but if you decide to send it over a network that doesn't want your business then that's a 1:32:21 problem of the seller to the purchaser and so they should switch networks to send the ordinal 1:32:26 if if the ordinal is the thing that is valuable then they should send it over a network where 1:32:31 like that is asking for their business the buyer and the seller both would prefer 1:32:37 it to be easier to figure out whether or not they have 1:32:41 one or an ordinal that's one of a kind or one that has been counterfeited mass-produced 1:32:47 so they both would prefer that you would build smaller blocks they say i wish these blocks were 1:32:52 smaller so i could just figure out where this ordinal lands in my collection so so you're 1:32:59 asking me if like as as an analogy like my grandma is not comfortable sending email or participating 1:33:07 in amazon she would rather fax a purchase order to another company's fax machine because faxing 1:33:14 is something that she is comfortable with like so we're talking about the fax network 1:33:20 versus the internet and whether somebody should comp like should an internet company 1:33:25 provide a fax service because they want grandma's business is that your question 1:33:30 no in this case the buyer and the seller both want this box to be smaller so it's a situation where 1:33:36 they would both prefer to fax and they don't want to go to like a whatever voip person and in that 1:33:45 way you're not maximizing the value or at least you're not it's not like a one-way ratchet 1:33:53 i well then they both need to be willing to pay whatever fee and wait for whatever time to to 1:33:59 use such a network i mean that's that's a decision that people make like i know people that really 1:34:06 really like ham radio but i also don't expect them to have more than a few hundred friends 1:34:10 around the globe yeah but you could say the exact same thing where i i know a couple people who are 1:34:15 large blockers but they don't have a lot of uptick with people because the network is too expensive to 1:34:22 serve and maintain may i ask a quick question um if you don't mind kurt would that be okay 1:34:30 that's fine with me okay i don't want to be a not neutral moderator so but i'll make it clear that 1:34:35 of course i agree with paul and i work for paul so with that said i just want to ask a question 1:34:40 isn't the burden of proof on those who want to make part of bitcoin's experience different 1:34:49 in a mandatory way so the small blocker view is that if we make the large blocks mandatory 1:34:54 meaning on layer one not on an optional opt-in sidechain then it's forcing everyone to agree 1:35:03 with that it's a good idea whereas if it's on a sidechain then it's optional so would you agree 1:35:08 at least that the burden of proof is on the large blocker view the view that we should have large 1:35:16 blocks beyond layer one do you agree with that because if it's if you agree with that it's very 1:35:23 it doesn't really matter though because in one sense there's the layer one the the layer one 1:35:28 fee ratio or the block size is mandatory and then the full node cost is mandatory so it's just 1:35:34 it's just two different mandatory things but in a way that's the point though kurt is that 1:35:40 people they they they have a mixture of what they want they want cheap L1 space and they want cheap 1:35:46 nodes so you have to strike a balance it's like if you're a restaurant and you charge a certain 1:35:52 amount for the hamburger and a certain amount for the fries or or whatever you like 1:35:58 i i don't know i mean at this point like i look at i look at the bitcoin experiment and i see it 1:36:09 you know as someone who's been involved for now almost 11 years like i look at it and i find it 1:36:14 to be a basically monumental failure like it has failed to disrupt almost anything that it has ever 1:36:21 purported that it could disrupt and we could have been doing anything else with our lives and instead 1:36:28 of instead of like actually making people's lives fundamentally better in a in a broad sense like 1:36:36 millions or billions of people whose lives have been affected for for the positive by this 1:36:42 technology we've instead spent an overwhelming majority of our time bickering about edge case 1:36:47 and i don't mean me and you but this is a this is a pretty good example about bickering about edge 1:36:52 cases where where we have what are you doing by the principle that uh you don't buy the principle 1:36:58 that the data server the archival node the small block node you don't buy the principle that it's 1:37:06 bad when that becomes more expensive no because again if why is it up to you then why is it up 1:37:14 isn't it isn't the each use doesn't don't people act and isn't the central planning bad and isn't 1:37:19 each customer sovereign and they can just decide whatever they prefer for themselves 1:37:24 well that's why bitcoin has been such a failure i mean look at look at the 1:37:31 i do believe that it has underperformed and i think actually if we had done things differently 1:37:37 it could have taken over the entire world by now but it's hard to kind of call it a failure is it 1:37:41 not i mean really it has been the best performing asset in the history of capitalism if you think 1:37:46 we could have taken over the world by now but but we are instead in a spaces full of like maybe 1:37:53 30 people discussing it like is ultimately a good thing like that is like i don't know man like i i 1:38:01 think about a relative basis but on an absolute basis i mean it could have done even better but 1:38:06 it has been one of the most transformative things to ever happen so gentlemen let's let's not um go 1:38:12 down this interesting topic that you you rightfully raise current which is the status of 1:38:17 the bitcoin movement as a whole let's focus still on the technical question of whether block size on 1:38:25 bitcoin main chain should be larger or smaller and what do you think about the idea that since 1:38:32 you advocate for an open market and for bitcoin to make the most number of people as happy as they 1:38:38 possibly can be bitcoin should be seeking the largest possible total addressable market wouldn't 1:38:44 that mean making large blocks optional not mandatory isn't that a free market approach 1:38:50 where people can opt in to them rather than quote-unquote centrally planning where everyone 1:38:56 is forced to choose large blocks because they're on main chain as you would have them isn't that a 1:39:02 fair description or do you disagree do you feel that your approach gives people what they want 1:39:09 even though it would exclude the preferences of people who want small blocks i i don't i don't 1:39:17 think it's a binary choice i mean i would argue that the the fact that you must function within 1:39:24 the swim lanes of a of a one to four megabyte block size limit on btc is is the arbitrary choice 1:39:31 that then creates all of these tangential things that don't necessarily need to exist like like i 1:39:38 said and in a big block big the way that bitcoin was originally implemented is that all of these 1:39:42 things were policy settings and then instead of you know oh hey we've got extra customers and 1:39:48 therefore we need to discuss like a hard fork path or a soft fork path or you know some technical 1:39:54 roadmaps is going to take us three to five years to implement instead the economic actors in the 1:39:59 system could just say hey guys uh everybody's lives would be better if we had a six megabyte 1:40:05 block size limit as a policy setting across the the network like that's just that's a couple of 1:40:10 phone calls away uh and maybe a couple of days to implement just so everybody can kind of get 1:40:15 on the same page and i think that that's that's the that's it's so much simpler it's so vastly 1:40:21 simpler uh that that i think the the consequences of of the other system like that like hey these 1:40:28 swim lanes are are absolute they are uh you know they can't ever be changed maybe um i mean it's 1:40:36 actually the limitation like you guys require a bip as if i recall BIP300 and 301 are like 1:40:43 five-year-old bips at this point and so your solution still to this day is not accepted 1:40:50 on the main chain regards to the fact that i think a it's a good idea b it solves a lot of 1:40:55 actual practical problems on on btc uh and and c you guys have been around long enough to show 1:41:02 that you're not just a fly by night guys that are trying to attack the system you actually really 1:41:06 care you would help implement it etc yes we we have a lot we have a lot in common in terms of 1:41:12 a shared understanding that bitcoin could be much better and very different than what it is today so 1:41:17 you you speak well on that but again to me and perhaps some others in the audience 1:41:23 who are small blockers there is a fundamental attraction to drivechain because it lets everyone 1:41:29 opt in to what they want and with regard to block size there's a logical there's a logical 1:41:35 understanding possible which is that if you have large blocks on layer one that is making them 1:41:41 mandatory whereas if they're small on layer one and large on a sidechain then that that is making 1:41:47 large blocks optional do you agree with that no both both are still functions of demand like the 1:41:56 fact that i have a large block size limit doesn't i mean like most of the blocks that i've mined 1:42:01 today have been quite small right for bsv anyways they've been like a few megabytes a piece because 1:42:07 there's just not that much action right now and so like all all of these things are really just 1:42:13 what do we do with demand and is there a way to make demand 1:42:17 an opportunity to make a return on investment and so yeah but the only important thing is when the 1:42:21 demand exceeds the limit and we would all agree that if the demand doesn't meet the limit it's 1:42:26 it's a moot point what the limit was it made no difference so we all completely 1:42:30 agree on that i think the whole point is just the case where the demand exceeds the limit 1:42:37 yeah but we want demand to exceed the limit so that we have the opportunity to take a step up 1:42:42 we do we want demand to be as high as possible yeah yeah but you don't but you don't buy the 1:42:48 fact that someone could want they could demand space in a smaller chain i mean the ordinals is a 1:42:55 pretty good example where it's relatively more scarce so that makes it more of a more of an 1:43:02 appeal of of inscribing there because you say my inscription is probably going to be around it's 1:43:07 it's going to ride along for free and all these all the archival nodes the data servers will serve 1:43:11 it forever do you buy this idea that the blockchain has to be stored forever and every single block 1:43:18 has to be served on on command uh no first of all pruning is great uh and secondly like at a certain 1:43:29 point like you can basically just consolidate blocks and replace them with a hash like if 1:43:35 you know every hundred years for example it's just like well you know like the the coin days 1:43:41 or whatever are such that you know nobody's nobody's coins are are valid or nobody's coins 1:43:47 could even conceivably move at this point we can just replace the hash and you have a single source 1:43:51 like if somebody pulls out a private key that is 200 years old and says hey i need you to calculate 1:43:57 this UTXO for me to make a spend like that's a paid service if somebody came to my business and 1:44:02 said hey can you calculate an ancient UTXO for me i'd say yeah sure for 500 bucks like no problem 1:44:10 so again it's an economic solution to what seems like a technical problem but it's not actually a 1:44:17 technical problem it's uh well it's a problem because if there is no like let's say that no one 1:44:26 um like let's say i think it is well let me explain it like this like 1:44:36 let's say the miners themselves don't even run uh you said if we said before that every block 1:44:42 constructor is also a data server but that's not necessarily the case you can actually mine 1:44:49 if you do not run a node in fact most bitcoin mining btc most btc mining is done where they 1:44:58 mine they quickly switch over quickly the spv or they spy mine and only later do they check to make 1:45:04 sure that they have an actual block uh maybe that that has been observed in the past i don't know 1:45:11 that that's necessarily the case you can't approve that it happens because first of all the miners 1:45:17 say that it happens but uh but second of all there's the there was a time in the past when 1:45:23 the orphan rate went up as the blocks got larger but then this the technique of spv mining was sort 1:45:28 of discussed and then that rate plummeted back down to zero and now the miners have a clever 1:45:35 thing all you have to do is take if you run a mining pool you have lots of hash pointed at you 1:45:42 all you have to do is take a tiny little bit and point it at your rival mining pools 1:45:47 and as soon as they switch their pool over to the next block you can do that as well 1:45:52 sure you you can okay and then that way you can mine without running a node at all 1:45:57 sure i mean you can you can decide to just not validate transactions even like that's 1:46:02 these are so so speaking as somebody who has been mining bitcoin various versions of it but btc for 1:46:09 for quite a long time before you know any of the the civil war stuff happened like yes you can make 1:46:15 those kinds of decisions but i personally have never made a decision to do something like that 1:46:22 because the risk reward is is too absurd like you're essentially you're essentially saying 1:46:29 like okay if i if i build a block and ultimately it is invalid but i decided to just jam it through 1:46:35 because i'm just interested in my in my subsidy i mean you're risking your reputation and that's 1:46:40 something you only get you only get once so i mean just as an economic actor myself i just 1:46:46 wouldn't risk it personally but that risk the exact probability of you getting caught 1:46:55 that is the cost of running a data server that's the thing that you just said no one should care 1:47:00 about so which is it can you repeat that on one hand you said i asked you should anyone care about 1:47:09 how much it costs to run a data server small block node and you said no one should care 1:47:15 but now you say i run a risk if i include an invalid transaction 1:47:19 but your your risk of being caught is exactly equal to so those are those are concerns so 1:47:25 you're pointing out concerns of two different groups of people like if i'm again if i'm trying 1:47:29 to start a telecom company i know there's no people there's no people in mind except for the 1:47:35 one person is the miner who's concerned about being caught the miner doesn't exist in a vacuum 1:47:41 the miner has all kinds of layers of incentives for his own behavior 1:47:47 you can't you can't take that away bitcoin is not yeah but this is one of them one of the incentives 1:47:52 is you will be caught by the node if nodes if they're cheap enough that some people are running 1:47:57 them enough other people are running them but if they're infinite costs then no one will catch you 1:48:02 that's an edge case you would call it of course but i'm just saying that you it is an edge case 1:48:08 it has never in almost 15 years of mining blocks it has never occurred so it is a it is an edge 1:48:14 case what has never occurred no one has ever mined a block that was actually invalid that 1:48:19 has occurred a few times nobody nobody has mined a block that is invalid and tried to 1:48:25 jam it across the network such that like in 2015 yes people have attempted to mine blocks that that 1:48:35 were not validated and had their invalid things discovered but they're they're not punished they 1:48:40 don't need to be punished by the system like the network itself like the technical part of the 1:48:45 network doesn't need to punish them this is something that occurs socially this is like 1:48:50 why some people don't buy budweiser or shop at target because of you know their company's 1:48:55 marketing policies for example like these are like these are these are things that are not 1:48:59 all technical or they're not all logistics or they're not all implementation like these are 1:49:04 these are complex economic systems and the way that an actor like that is punished is by the fact 1:49:09 that somebody may decide you know what i'm not going to hash with that pool anymore if they're 1:49:13 going to be like extremely irresponsible with their with their node like i can choose any 1:49:19 other node and therefore they know that they're being how do you know that they're being irresponsible 1:49:23 with their node unless you run a node 1:49:28 well because there's lots of other participants running the node like 1:49:32 here's the thing you have how do you know that there's lots of other 1:49:35 participants running the node if you don't know how expensive it is aren't they linked 1:49:43 again like this is supply and demand and economics 1:49:46 this is the more expensive something is if less people will do it right 1:49:53 again you're only thinking about cost if the rli of the thing creates an opportunity for somebody 1:49:59 else to create better value then no not fewer people will do it more people will do it until 1:50:04 it comes into equilibrium or the consumer benefits but guarantee how do i guarantee that i will get 1:50:11 any benefit at all by being someone who detects the error well nothing is guaranteed this is the 1:50:18 other problem with economic planning is that everybody wants there to be a guarantee but 1:50:22 everybody else is not guaranteed in real life guarantee that large blockism is the right idea 1:50:27 that's also not a guarantee well nothing is that that's the point that nothing is guaranteed like 1:50:33 every aspect of this conversation is about probabilities and the kind of world that we 1:50:38 want to live in and if we just really know and you're thinking about when you say on one hand 1:50:45 the data server costs don't matter but on the other hand you say i'm not going to jam something 1:50:50 in because the risk i'll get caught well the question is who do they matter to i'm talking 1:50:56 about them as as a function of the whole system like the the ability to run the full node should 1:51:02 not matter to your casual user of the system it only matters to a commercial to a commercial 1:51:14 you're saying that they should whether or not the block contains whether or not miners are 1:51:19 doing something wrong is something that should only be policed by commercial actors that's what 1:51:26 you're saying i'm saying that participation in the system presumes that it is a competitive 1:51:33 system the thing that secures bitcoin is competition among commercial actors like 1:51:39 this is actually a conversation that hal phinney has a question though aren't you evading my 1:51:46 question with that sentence what what is the question the question of miners doing something 1:51:54 wrong when you said jam it through because there's a risk i'll get caught and have negative 1:51:57 consequences you're saying that basically only other miners should police me as a miner or 1:52:03 you're saying commercial entities should be the ones who police do the policing i think your ability 1:52:09 to police should be relative to your overall infrastructural investment of the network 1:52:14 and the the flip side of that is your typical uasf which is akin to like a general strike 1:52:22 this is like should the mail room should the mail room go on strike to make sure that 1:52:26 the company that they work in is doing things the way they want it done and the answer is is that 1:52:32 well maybe but are they actually in a position to do it or are they simply like leveraging a piece 1:52:38 of power that is you know problematic to the economy as a whole like this is i mean you're 1:52:44 literally making the the argument of a union boss right now is that hey shouldn't every little 1:52:50 person be able to like cartelize the small people in order to hold like the bigger investors in the 1:52:57 system to account and it's like well no that's not really how the system was designed to work now can 1:53:02 that happen yes we call it a civil attack or we call that uh you know or i think my example about 1:53:09 it being a union general strike that's what it is and so i i do not think that's valuable i think 1:53:15 generally a union general strike against a productive system is ultimately a net negative 1:53:19 for the economy and the business as a whole so the question of should no it's kind of very abstract 1:53:25 and like are far away though and we're talking about such concrete details like do you believe 1:53:30 that there's such a thing as an error in a block you clearly do right that's not such a weird 1:53:34 question is it sure it they can happen because of the the probabilities of the system there could be 1:53:41 no there could be an error an error could be intentional construct an invalid transaction 1:53:46 there's a lot of ways to have an error in a block sure yeah the transaction fees may not even add up 1:53:51 someone might say i'm paying myself in this block the coinbase is paying me 1:53:58 two bitcoin but actually it only adds up to 1.9 bitcoin right so there's those so these are things 1:54:04 you would say are objectively errors in the block there are errors that proof of work solves 1:54:12 because proof of work solves the byzantine general's problem okay proof of work blah blah 1:54:16 blah but i'm we'll get to that maybe no not like proof of work blah blah blah i'm just talking 1:54:21 about they these are these errors are real they objectively exist and how do you detect 1:54:28 these errors not what other people do not what blah blah blah example who is you is it a is it 1:54:35 a individual guy is it a group or is a class i'm just one guy i'm looking at a block how do i know 1:54:40 if this block is has any errors in it you know because i only want good blocks you know i don't 1:54:46 want to like i go to the store and i want to buy some eggs you open it up and you say hey are these 1:54:54 either broken or not you know so how so i what's the cost of checking it you have to open up the 1:54:59 egg carton and look inside you're the guy saying that in order to make sure that your eggs are 1:55:03 healthy you must essentially raise chickens like that that's it like this is all i said 1:55:10 anti-industrialization argument you are saying that you fundamentally cannot trust the industrial 1:55:15 class and that you can only trust yourself or your community you're essentially you can only 1:55:20 trust yourself and i'm pro trusting anything that we have good explanations for believing 1:55:27 even if i haven't personally examined every detail of it so i could say i just don't believe that 1:55:33 that person would give me that that you know i go to the dentist and i just say you know what that's 1:55:38 what the dentist told me about brushing my teeth that's probably what i would tell someone if i 1:55:44 went to dental school and so even though i haven't personally gone to dental school i think so i'm 1:55:49 just talking about the eggs are broken it's objective fact whether or not there's a difference 1:55:53 between a broken egg and an unbroken egg and you just open the thing and you just look and i'm 1:55:59 saying there's the blocks could have flaws invalid transaction transaction that's like 1:56:07 garbled nonsense that doesn't even parse uh the block fees don't add up to the coinbase those are 1:56:15 all objective and we those checking for flaws has cost that's all right question your question 1:56:24 presumes that that no node that is providing proof of work to the network and has built a 1:56:31 block has caught this so you're assuming all actors are malicious except for you because 1:56:37 you're the one who decided to look i would just like to take a moment to psychologically 1:56:42 reset by pointing some crazy things out which is one uh drivechain would let people make 1:56:49 their own unlimited size block sidechain you could run this experiment there so i'm kind of 1:56:55 on your side and the only disadvantage is that a tiny downgrade of the coins to spv security 1:57:03 where you have to basically trust that six months worth of 51 percent hash rate is honest which i'm 1:57:09 pretty sure you are you are fully in for that level of trust and probably like seven or eight 1:57:15 orders of magnitude higher so you're fully on board with this i'm just letting you right now 1:57:20 that you're not i'm giving you i'm giving you at BIP300 literally everything that you want and 1:57:25 more and not only that that we have a large block sidechain template written in uh in rust and it 1:57:32 actually has uh satoshi's fraud proofs that a friend of mine eric lombroso he tweeted that 1:57:38 were impossible and that he thought it was an unsolved problem left by satoshi but i solved 1:57:43 that on my blog and i have a way to actually compensate people for finding block flaws so i'm 1:57:49 like so far like i'm like uh you know your best friend i'm helping you out you don't even realize 1:57:56 you have no idea it's like that guy the mean with the guy with the soldier and he's beginning 1:58:00 their child with the sleep and they don't even know what to that i just wanted to say that okay 1:58:07 real quick paul let me respond i i i again i am pro drivechain i am pro BIP300 i'm like 1:58:14 that is not that is not the issue but i think what you're not understanding is that i am actually 1:58:20 your best friend the fact of the matter is is you are trying to implement BIP300 on a chain 1:58:26 that is under attack it has been under sybil attack for at least six years the people that 1:58:32 control it with the sybil attack do not like you they do not like your ideas and they don't want 1:58:38 them they have rejected you but you are making the argument that their governance style their 1:58:44 sybil attack is a net good for bitcoin even though it is rejecting your ideas and you as a person 1:58:51 and i'm here telling you that they don't want you let's let's guys let's uh i appreciate that 1:58:57 that's actually important though that's a slightly different this is a slightly different topic of 1:59:01 course right but uh but i agree that bitcoin governance is not good and i one thing that's bad 1:59:07 about it is the soft fork is treated differently than thousands of other pull requests that happen 1:59:13 all the time any of which could have a key logger or some kind of like agree right so it's a major 1:59:20 major problem yeah and it's also the case that it's true that the the idea is not the BIP300 1:59:27 idea is not as popular as worse ideas that are objectively worse because what's really happening 1:59:35 is they get they get ranked based on how controversial or how easily they are criticized 1:59:42 and so even though they're not weighted with like cost benefit ratio which is you know the way 1:59:48 everything should be done is that when the people merging stuff into bitcoin think about is well i 1:59:54 get blamed for this well i get criticized for this and so in that way it's stuff that's really 1:59:59 really convoluted or technically impressive uh you know such as taproot or whatever that is more 2:00:08 prioritized but so i just so that's good that we reset that there but let's just return to the 2:00:13 this fundamental question of whether or not it matters how easy it is to find 2:00:18 flaws with the block which of course it must matter yeah let's try to stick on that i really 2:00:24 appreciate the nice words in both directions that's an interesting topic but the topic that 2:00:32 we can't i mean we can talk about if that's really what the conversation is about is like why 2:00:39 am i still in the btc community even though it's taking forever to get this idea in 2:00:44 i uh i can talk about that if that is like because you never know sometimes you think 2:00:49 about x let's let's stay on the technical discussion let's stay on exactly the technical 2:00:55 question not metaphors not community history let's focus on the science not the history of 2:01:03 exactly what is the difference between having small blocks on main chain with a large block 2:01:08 sidechain versus large blocks on main chain so kurt like or paul why don't one of you just try to 2:01:18 like 2:01:19 move us forward on that exact question is the running the full node the cost of running the data server or the small blockers full node 2:01:27 which is different from the large blocker block constructor node the aspirational miner 2:01:37 it sounds like kurt's view paul is that if to try to help the conversation forward 2:01:42 further because you've both both spoken so well but i feel like we haven't yet 2:01:46 reached the ultimate point like it sounds like kurt is saying that the economic incentives 2:01:53 and a totally free market will eventually show in his view that large blocks are best on main chain 2:02:00 and and he thinks there is not a category of meaning what he's saying is something like this 2:02:07 he's saying something like the way the system works the only people who need to check the block 2:02:13 for flaws are recent miners or like people who are in the mining business because once it's checked 2:02:21 then it's it becomes buried and then it's probably fine and then so all that's needed is that the 2:02:27 it's like a kind of drill boring into the into a mountainside or something only the drill bit 2:02:35 the tip needs to work um well okay let me let me clarify actually to you know to henry's 2:02:44 question i want to clarify the point is that you know we're talking about the cost of running a 2:02:50 node being a net negative like if the cost is too high then it becomes too hard for an individual 2:02:56 to validate their own transactions or the transaction of the network but to flip that 2:03:01 the benefit is that the cost to sybil attack the network becomes exponentially more so right now 2:03:10 you have the ability to spin up a btc node for i don't even i mean we run one at our pool too it 2:03:16 probably costs us a hundred dollars a month or something to to keep a pretty highly connected 2:03:22 version of that online uh but in theory i could run it you know i could run this on on a you know 2:03:27 computer in the closet right but the problem is is that because of the problems of governance 2:03:33 which is a problem of the whole system that the cost to sybil attack is is very very low and this 2:03:40 is part of the reason why there are like you said two classes of of proposals in bitcoin you have 2:03:47 your typical pull request or you have a bip and like you know what uh people voting on whether 2:03:54 a bip should be included or excluded should be more than the cost of hey i don't know i can 2:03:59 download bitcoin core version you know 20.x and you know maybe that cost me 60 bucks and and a 2:04:07 week worth of time to sync the node and i i don't think that we can fundamentally trust tons of of 2:04:15 people that have a hundred dollar investment versus maybe trusting a dozen or a few dozen 2:04:21 people that have have invested millions hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of dollars 2:04:26 into being an infrastructural player in the network now i i've brought up some sort of 2:04:32 analogies talking a little bit about sort of left-wing politics versus like the industrial 2:04:38 uh system and you know full disclosure i would be much more likely to trust a highly invested 2:04:45 industrial capitalist than i would be to trust a group of people that have a strong opinion but no 2:04:51 real investment no skin in the game uh or very very very small skin in the game relative to the 2:04:57 system as a whole and and i think that truly is the fundamental uh thing here is that you know 2:05:03 paul paul is advocating that no the average user should have the ability to validate the the chain 2:05:10 themselves but the problem is it's not just validating the system that that has a cost on 2:05:15 the system of a whole because the version that they use to validate that system is seen by the 2:05:21 system as a whole as sort of a pseudo vote on what that system is supposed to look like but 2:05:27 somebody that only has a 60 investment in the synchronization of a node client shouldn't 2:05:32 really have a vote at all and so like that so it causes net problems and it's causing net problems 2:05:41 you okay well let me explain um so there's a lot of stuff there that i'd like to touch on but i 2:05:46 think the most important thing is that it's true that the community has objective so first of all 2:05:52 drivechain would solve all these problems like i think you understand that right like and it would 2:05:57 because once we have drivechain people would be able to just one single developer could just yolo 2:06:05 become ceo of their own new piece of software and then users can choose to deposit coins there 2:06:11 or even better one rich guy can with one transaction move a bunch of coins over there 2:06:18 start selling them or handing them out over there and now everyone is now we really have a lot of 2:06:21 competition among different uh different chains and the only thing that they all share is the 21 2:06:27 million coin limit which is ideal so now it's let's talk about the extent to which 2:06:34 cheap full nodes has backfired by stopping drivechain and large optional large blocks from 2:06:41 existing because that's a very important point it is absolutely the case that i think the community 2:06:49 you know is dysfunctional and made a mistake and my idea is and a very good example of that because 2:06:56 the idea literally has like zero risks and has enormous upside and yet just because it gives 2:07:00 just because it gives large blockers what they want i think and because it makes it look it makes 2:07:06 you it paints a picture of bitcoin core being imperfect it's not perfect the way it is mainly 2:07:12 those two reasons that is why it has been wrongly gotten less attention than other more pointless 2:07:19 things that no one really actually cared about or used or will use and um so it's true that 2:07:27 november 2015 the blog post came out what should have happened was people should have read it 2:07:34 shared it with their friends refocused on it completely this should have been the thing 2:07:39 everyone was talking about and working on and doing and then doing it as quickly as possible 2:07:45 and then all these problems would never have appeared and they would have all been solved 2:07:50 and that's what should have happened but it is not the case that if people were different 2:07:57 um it's not the it's like what i'm trying to say we yes it's true that BIP300 is an old idea but 2:08:04 i didn't start writing any code for it for a while i didn't have any like examples for a while the 2:08:10 text is from 2017 but or 2018 or something but i i've updated it a lot and it's um it is you know 2:08:20 i tinker with it the underlying design has not changed but like various details and how it's 2:08:25 explained or implemented i have been uh tinkering with those and to the to this i have not yet 2:08:33 actually made a pull request to bitcoin core now to my earlier point that really shouldn't matter 2:08:38 because really it should have just been people read the idea they understand the idea they share 2:08:42 the idea one of the things that should have happened was the large blockers should have 2:08:47 they should have read the drivechain idea and passed it around and said well we can get with 2:08:53 via soft fork we can get large blocks and then with instead of SegWit2x there could have been 2:09:00 like whatever drivechain 2x and it would have been an instantaneous victory for the miners 2:09:04 because as a soft fork with 83 percent of the hash power there would have been absolutely no 2:09:09 nothing anyone could have done other than stuff that would not work like hardcore cat and mouse 2:09:15 constantly releasing new versions that ban like the network magic prefix of drivechain that would 2:09:21 never actually sustainably work so so if that's one of the things that should have happened so 2:09:27 it's just as much a mistake of the large blockers who decided that the the best thing to do is just 2:09:33 uh do cause a network split the hard fork the network and um try to launch a competing project 2:09:41 now for what it's worth i i opposed i opposed splitting both times actually i i thought 2:09:48 saying we'll split and make a bitcoin cash was was a bad idea i think that's been proven out 2:09:54 to a degree uh and secondarily nobody nobody in bsv actually wanted bsv to exist as a separate 2:10:00 chain we all got you know stabbed in the back one night in november 2018 uh by the bitcoin cash 2:10:07 you know insiders so uh no i i would i would have fought for btc forever the problem is is you know 2:10:14 the the the army basically decided to leave and so uh just so you know i i basically degree i agree 2:10:22 with your assessment here right so this is a very important thing i think for people to because 2:10:28 there's like aren't there's like these very mainstream stories that are vastly oversimplified 2:10:34 that are just about like psycho 2x was like the people versus the corporations or something which 2:10:39 is all like yeah completely or completely unorthodox uh i have a completely different 2:10:45 version of history that just involves just people just making lots of weird mistakes for no just 2:10:49 accidentally or they're tricked or something temporarily but so the point is that it's true 2:10:56 that what many things could have happened to have have drivechain happen faster which did not but 2:11:05 you know i also have not yet i was still tinkering with and working on an actual pull request to 2:11:12 bitcoin core so i haven't actually made a pull request yet now you can say like well i mean what 2:11:17 do i have to do every literally everything around here that's not the whole picture but it's also 2:11:21 the case that you know we we tinker with it and we it would have been kind of pointless to activate 2:11:28 it if there were no sidechains built so i built some of that i mean when i wrote the blog post i 2:11:35 just thought well how they build the sidechains is up to them but that was maybe pushing it a 2:11:41 little bit so now we have example sidechains and we have templates so those are pretty new those 2:11:47 are not that old you know that maybe they're like you know more than a year or something but 2:11:53 you know software is slow so it's not exactly the case that um it's not exactly the case like a lot 2:12:03 of the delay is my own fault that's not the whole picture of course you know just the nuanced thing 2:12:10 i i remember the convert like i i thought drivechain was a good idea and thought it was an obvious 2:12:16 direction to go uh but you know i i have thought the same thing about all kinds of bitcoin ideas 2:12:22 that have ended up not being particularly popular so um but but no i and and i think to your point 2:12:30 uh you know the the things that happen the the meme about you know SegWit2x versus you know the 2:12:37 the no2x uasf movement all of that stuff like i think the fact of the matter is is that bitcoin 2:12:43 still to this day is extremely unprofessional it's mostly managed by amateurs and but the problem is 2:12:51 is that there's there's so much fiat value that's tangled up in it all that that nobody can nobody 2:12:56 can point it out nobody can say like hey guys we have built a really crappy system with with way 2:13:01 too many layers of of intertwined interdependencies but now we're too rich to rock the boat and so now 2:13:08 what so and those are very interesting thoughts it's cool that you're having a favorable attitude 2:13:17 towards drivechain but still there is the technical disagreement that exists between you two 2:13:23 on whether the main chain should have large or small blocks i think that would be the most 2:13:28 interesting thing for us to persist in focusing on in this conversation could we try to get any 2:13:35 well i mean in a way though it's like what what is it that creates the block size limit 2:13:40 is actually you know it's like you have um yeah what i'm trying to say is that it is the 2:13:49 conversation about the different people is to some extent the block size limit conversation 2:13:54 paul could you say could you articulate further what exactly is the category of circumstances where 2:14:02 large blocks on main chain would be harmful because it seems like kurt is saying the 2:14:09 non-validating nodes people with raspberry pies he kurt seems to be saying if i understand 2:14:13 correctly they have absolutely no real value and that in the long run people will realize 2:14:20 that there was no reason to provide cheap nodes to those people who aren't mining so can you say 2:14:27 concretely what is the realistic risk that people will suffer potentially in the future 2:14:33 if bitcoin were to have a much higher or unbounded block size 2:14:40 sure the the frame that i use is this error correction frame everyone has errors it doesn't 2:14:48 matter if you are a ceo of a corporation it doesn't matter if you're like an adam smith 2:14:53 tiny merchant it doesn't matter if you're a farmer it doesn't matter if you're playing 2:14:58 a video game doesn't matter what you're doing it doesn't matter if you're an artist 2:15:01 writing a symphony or something uh everything you do you look at it and you think well this 2:15:06 i could improve on this this could be better and the improvements are the detection and 2:15:12 elimination of error so error correction transcends questions of like economics psychology 2:15:20 you know possibly i don't know about physics but you know the point is this is very fundamental 2:15:25 this is a deep thing so if you're if you're running a small business you do error detection 2:15:29 if you're a politician and you're running for office you also do it it's not the same errors 2:15:33 necessarily because maybe you think oh this is going to make me look bad or i want this photo 2:15:38 up or they think this will make for less pollution or this is something people will vote for so 2:15:43 there's the error detection frame if you want to detect errors then it's important to you 2:15:49 it's important to you how much that costs if the the larger the blocks the more effort must be put 2:15:56 towards error detection and that just makes it harder to catch each individual error and that 2:16:04 that's less of a deterrent of the miners to ram through a block with an error or just be negligent 2:16:11 on what is in the block and whether or not it is an error including errors they have a direct 2:16:16 financial incentive of lying about the transaction fees um to try and pass that off 2:16:24 and i think that that is the right frame you can say something like well i think many eyes 2:16:31 on the problem means that we can afford a more faulty error detecting thing but that is 2:16:38 is false to say that there's no downside to the larger block the downside to the larger block is 2:16:44 error detection is more expensive so i i understand your point um but in response to that 2:16:54 so what we're actually talking about is can can we figure out the very best way to mitigate 2:17:03 error detection like is should that be you know a dozen different companies who have a massive 2:17:12 economic incentive to do that well or the flip side should that be accessible to anyone who wants 2:17:20 to participate in that now i understand why wanting to have the sort of populist view that 2:17:25 that we democratize the ability to detect errors sounds like the better idea the problem is is that 2:17:33 they have very little incentive to do that well and so most people like we see with you know when 2:17:41 when you know mac os tells you to update your operating system you probably just set it to 2:17:45 automatically do it and i think most people that run a bitcoin core node will probably do the same 2:17:50 thing in fact i think the numbers basically bear that out if you look at who's running what version 2:17:56 but secondarily making it too inexpensive making it that you can maybe it's 50 bucks maybe it's 2:18:02 100 bucks to participate in this means that if we take the possibility that a malicious actor 2:18:10 might get a bunch of hash power and force errors onto the network in a way that harms the network 2:18:15 and this is i'm not saying that that's impossible this is possible that same malicious actor may 2:18:21 take the may take a different route and say you know what but i can also take my same investment 2:18:27 and spin up 50 000 endpoints that validate things in in another way and make it look like 2:18:36 this is a social uprising and because it's very very hard for people to figure out 2:18:40 who is behind each ip address then it becomes easier for me to make a change to the network 2:18:46 that doesn't look like an obvious attack but it is instead a subversive attack that people are 2:18:53 led to believe was actually a populist uprising and this is what i'm describing is called a 2:18:59 attack um and it is i have argued for years that is precisely what has happened in btc and 2:19:07 i understand why you know there's a desire to keep this technical about the technical 2:19:13 if this than that and why we would want to do one thing or another but bitcoin is an economic system 2:19:19 and economics are fundamentally social and the reason that proof of work was added as as the 2:19:27 solution to the byzantine general's problem was because satoshi satoshi understood that there 2:19:32 isn't a perfect solution to anything but that your best bet is to to make the most competitive 2:19:39 version uh is is the most likely to be the most valuable now he could be wrong about that like 2:19:47 that's that's fine but if he's wrong about that then i would argue that the only conclusion you 2:19:53 could come to is that bitcoin is fundamentally a bad idea and i don't think anybody in here wants 2:19:59 to to say that bitcoin is fundamentally a bad idea but that is the conclusion you're stuck with 2:20:04 and i wanted to say this earlier but but hal finney uh was a was a professional cryptographer 2:20:11 like he was he was very good at the math uh and there are some quotes from hal and there's some 2:20:16 quotes from guys like gavin uh and some of these people early on basically asking satoshi or or 2:20:23 maybe even just criticizing satoshi and saying you know i i wish that the cryptography was used 2:20:29 more for security rather than this basic competition that it's not you know that you 2:20:35 can't just create an exponential curve and say okay it's it's secure and the cryptography means 2:20:40 that once it's secure it's exponentially secure like satoshi decided to make it competitive that 2:20:45 like block reorgs are something that are fundamental to bitcoin that if somebody shows up 2:20:51 and reorgs your block with more hash power that we shouldn't necessarily see that as an attack 2:20:56 or a problem with bitcoin but maybe that should make us all take a moment and reconsider was i 2:21:02 reorg because i failed in some other way maybe i have failed to make the most value and perhaps 2:21:09 this person is here reorging my block because they're trying to provide more value to the 2:21:13 system than i am now i know this is getting very philosophical but again like this is money this 2:21:19 is economics and this is human interaction and to try to extract the philosophy out of it and put 2:21:25 it in a separate bucket i i think really is a detriment to thinking about bitcoin uh as a whole 2:21:31 bitcoin is is a system it is not various parts that just come together and they can be uh dragged 2:21:38 out and treated differently and so i think that that risk exists in all things like there are 2:21:43 small block risks and big block risks and there are there are attack vectors on all those things 2:21:50 and you know i i would like to think that that both paul and i could agree that like 2:21:55 hey we uh bitcoin is imperfect uh but but maybe the point of it is not for it to try to become 2:22:02 perfect we'll never make it perfect but the goal is for us to try to make it the most good so that 2:22:08 it can create more value than it consumes and i don't know that that's happened yet all i see is 2:22:15 money moving in like it has absorbed a lot of value but i have not seen it like there are some 2:22:20 exceptions but i have not seen it create a lot of value and i would argue that it probably hasn't 2:22:25 created a net value versus the amount of value that it's absorbed um but that's what excites me 2:22:30 i want to see it create more value than it than it absorbs and i think that only happens if we 2:22:35 truly let it be unbounded it has to be a competitive system at all levels and that's that's my take on 2:22:42 it well i'm kind of wondering myself like imagine that there were two versions of bitcoin released 2:22:50 at the very very beginning um because it's certainly not the case uh bch and bitcoin sv 2:23:00 like it's torture to not be number one because there's huge network effects 2:23:06 and uh and this huge stigma um so i'm wondering like if if you had an unlimited block size version 2:23:13 and a one megabyte version from the beginning that both started at exactly the same time 2:23:18 and like shared all the early resources uh i don't know exactly what would happen i my guess is that 2:23:26 people would like they would uh troll the large blockchain with huge blocks but some of those 2:23:32 would get just reorg'd out as you say and i don't know where it would then where actually uh it would 2:23:40 then land because it's just i'm not just not sure about i don't honestly know what would have 2:23:47 happened in that situation because they both have pretty big yeah well i think i i mean i can i can 2:23:54 give you my opinion i think i think the network was very poorly connected and unprofessional for 2:24:02 very long time i would argue that uh in all cases they still really are not you know they don't 2:24:07 compare to like google's cloud network systems or aws for example like they are not highly 2:24:14 professionalized systems even today but at the time i think bitcoin probably i think the practical 2:24:21 limit of the implementation was something like a 32 megabyte block but in reality it probably would 2:24:26 have never propagated because everybody was running them on you know 2008 internet with you 2:24:33 know their their dell computer and whatever else so i mean you you would have had latency problems 2:24:38 and all kinds of problems that uh we ended up discovering in bsv i remember you know the first 2:24:43 time we mined blocks that were 30 megabytes and then the first time we hit one that was over 500 2:24:48 and then the first one over a gig and like you know you see the like ah okay well you know it 2:24:53 took 12 minutes to get to the whole network you know like that kind of thing like those are those 2:24:58 are practical problems these are not concerns that don't exist but uh you know today you know we we 2:25:04 have days on the network where we'll have 50 million transactions so this is like concurrent 2:25:09 back-to-back four gigabyte blocks and because of the the growing pains that we've had we've figured 2:25:15 out okay here's how we can be better connected here's how we can validate things more simply 2:25:19 here's how we can build uh more efficient block templates here's how we can propagate things 2:25:23 better and and i think i mean that's what a free market should do a free market should figure out 2:25:28 solutions if the customers demand them and that's that's what i think bitcoin was designed to do 2:25:33 paul do you think that there would be like in the hypothetical world where there was no block size 2:25:41 don't you think like starts in 2009 now flash forward to 2023 are people in the twitter spaces 2:25:49 there talking about the biggest problem of the day which is how expensive it is to run a bitcoin node 2:25:56 and what if anything can desperately be done about it and people are just 2:26:01 they don't know what to do do you think like that parallel world 2:26:04 you know exists somewhere uh no i mean because if that was the conversation that would be happening 2:26:11 then then i would argue that it had already been a failure like bitcoin in my opinion if bitcoin 2:26:17 was just allowed to breathe if you know in 2015 when microsoft started accepting it for payments 2:26:24 and uh you know some of these companies i can't it wasn't magic the gathering it was like the 2:26:30 gathering it was like the second or third largest uh player card game was being tokenized using 2:26:36 counterparty protocol uh in 2015 or 16 like they were beta testing this in the bitcoin environment 2:26:42 and then the the OP_RETURN um reduction that was pushed by luke dash jr basically just updated the 2:26:49 node version and most people downloaded it and then bam counterparty didn't work anymore for 2:26:54 quite some time uh you know like so imagine if we were eight years down the road from that 2:27:00 and people have been playing uh pokemon and and magic and and you know whatever whatever the flesh 2:27:07 and blood playing all these games as tokens over bitcoin like there would be so much more uh 2:27:13 engineering going into scaling solutions over the last eight years and and from lots and lots of 2:27:19 other people that uh no i i think we would have i think we would be way past a lot of these uh 2:27:26 these conversations and and and truly it reminds me of a quote would there be a different one 2:27:30 wouldn't there be a different kind of people would be saying well you know this stuff works but now 2:27:34 it would not be a panacea it's it's just like you know today the telecom company's debating like 2:27:39 okay how are we going to implement 6g networks you know like this is this is a problem they're 2:27:44 having in their in their towers for sure could i ask a clarifying question to you paul 2:27:51 sure so in this conversation you've spoken about the error correction the error correction 2:27:58 mechanism which is enabled by small blocks on main chain but separately you've also written 2:28:06 and spoke about how sidechains and specifically making large blocks optional through sidechains 2:28:12 instead of having large blocks on main chain is giving people what they want in a capitalistic 2:28:17 way enabling large blocks to be optional instead of mandatory which of those two is the more 2:28:24 fundamental case for small blocks on main chain is it error correction or letting people opt in 2:28:31 which of those is the more fundamental it's actually the same thing though both are making it 2:28:35 cheaper so the error correction cheaper because right now the having small block L1 makes error 2:28:41 correction cheaper for those for that network and in the present state of affairs for btc 2:28:50 there is no large block option at all so there it doesn't exist so the whole thing is a giant 2:28:55 error that's not corrected at all so the cost is infinite so i bring it down from 2:29:01 infinite to something that is larger than the L1 cost but 2:29:04 it's still lower than infinity okay it's to the best of my simple understanding it's 2:29:12 the more fundamental would be making sure everyone gets what they want like in this conversation 2:29:16 you've you just asked kurt about like the possibility that if we had large blocks on 2:29:20 main chain from the start maybe people would be complaining about that that's sort of the 2:29:25 same thing as saying let's give everyone optional features not mandatory features people want to opt 2:29:32 in to all different kinds of blockchains so therefore you have to have large blocks as an 2:29:38 optional thing not layer one because layer there nobody would ever want to have a large block on 2:29:44 layer one if they prefer small blocks in general so it's it's all about optionality and just 2:29:51 having bitcoin be as large as possible by making everything optional is to the greatest extent 2:29:56 kurt isn't that fair like what do you think about that idea that let's just have it be optional i 2:30:01 mean paul articulated earlier in more technical terms well i think we already know though because 2:30:07 he said he was against the splits and he only went with them like out of sort of necessity 2:30:12 and so then and he's fully on board with spv level security in which drivechain only demands a smidge 2:30:21 really for the people who opt in so he would just be a happy user of this whole thing would 2:30:28 never have happened this whole problem would never have happened whoever might burn would 2:30:32 have launched bitcoin xt and then if people weren't happy with that someone else would have launched 2:30:37 some other thing maybe the maybe the hypothetical to ask kurt then if you're interested in answering 2:30:42 this one kurt and by the way thank you very much for the conversation we've had so far 2:30:47 and for how nicely and intelligently you've been sharing your ideas today even though we don't agree 2:30:52 with them entirely so what do you think heard about the idea that if bitcoin does drivechain 2:31:00 and a large block sidechain on is launched on bitcoin called thunder or something else that 2:31:06 someone else designs that's roughly similar do you feel that that would threaten the prospects of the 2:31:13 large block you know versions of bitcoin because ben i would like to know like do you think anyone 2:31:19 will come back if there were sidechains on btc will the like you think my question is kind of 2:31:27 like will the large blockers like ever just lose hope and come back if there's the btc option 2:31:34 because i don't know i honestly don't know it's it's interesting i mean we actually have a sort 2:31:39 of a proxy case in this regard like ordinal's tokens uh you know showed up pretty suddenly 2:31:46 at the beginning of this year and they're a implementation of actually one of the very first 2:31:50 things that made me interested in bitcoin was the colored coin concept and and that's basically what 2:31:56 ordinals is it's an implementation of a colored coin protocol and what we saw is bsv uh commercial 2:32:06 interest like people that were building applications on bsv people that had a lot of experience 2:32:10 implementing tokens on a on a bitcoin style network saying oh hey if this token protocol 2:32:17 is available and there's a ton of liquidity in btc i bet we could implement uh some of these 2:32:24 token ideas over there very very quickly and we saw uh the twitch team came and created the 2:32:29 ordinals wallet was gosh it probably took them three days or something from the announcement of 2:32:36 ordinals being live on btc the twitch team had the had the veracity and the nimble uh you know 2:32:43 nature of their company to to put something together like a functional wallet and and push 2:32:48 it out and say hey if you want to hold your ordinals here do it because we're going to build 2:32:52 a marketplace we're minting tools and and all these other things uh and then we saw uh what is 2:32:58 it ord swap is jack lu who is another bsv entrepreneur and then the uh what's the other 2:33:06 wallet that everybody uses that's the one with the the two gold uh gold triangles or blocks or 2:33:12 whatever is their logo but it's the the the browser extension wallet that everybody uses for ordinals 2:33:17 on btc is also uh the the group that created defy on bsv and so so we have seen people like 2:33:25 cut their teeth and really really deeply explore bitcoin in bsv where big ideas are welcome where 2:33:31 everybody says cool try to break it and if you break it we'll learn how to fix it we're going 2:33:35 to be ahead of the game and when that opportunity showed itself in btc uh you know we saw small 2:33:42 blockers doing the typical thing they do which is bicker about whether it's an attack or whether 2:33:47 they should change the protocol to stop it or whatever else but the bsv people jumped and said 2:33:51 oh cool uh i know how to make money here and they came and did that and so i think if there's a 2:33:57 lesson to learn there um and i've tweeted that i actually tweeted this a number of times if you 2:34:02 just search my name and the word ordinals you can see me saying like hey you know what if ordinals 2:34:08 tokens are successful on btc they actually start to make a very compelling reason for big blockers 2:34:13 to come back to the btc camp uh my most recent article that i wrote uh for coin geek is me 2:34:19 talking about ordinals nomads where these people who have come to bitcoin after the bitcoin civil 2:34:24 war they have no context for for the block size war and all the drama and toxicity and they just 2:34:30 see ordinals tokens and say oh cool i can build a dns pointer and make it an ordinal on the network 2:34:36 that's cool i'm gonna build this thing bitcoin's permissionless right and and and they're just 2:34:40 thinking like rational people uh and doing what they can on on bitcoin and so i think if 2:34:48 BIP300 were to uh show up or or some version like it some uh sidechain that gives lots of 2:34:55 big block opportunity to btc users i i think absolutely i think i think that brings compelling 2:35:02 value to btc and i think it undermines some of the unique value proposition of the big block 2:35:06 variations of bitcoin uh so no absolutely and and frankly i support it i i want to see 2:35:13 bitcoin succeed for reasons other than i'm shilling a token i want to see bitcoin succeed 2:35:18 because i want to live in a world where bitcoin is is a is a cornerstone of everything that i'm 2:35:24 doing because not about the bitcoin stuff it's about the spillover benefits of living in a world 2:35:30 that is freer and fairer and frankly more fun because bitcoin exists in it 2:35:38 so was your answer that was very interesting could you for those of us who need who benefit 2:35:43 from like a crystal clear succinct reply the question i think was do i'm not saying you 2:35:50 didn't answer it but could you just respond in maybe just one word if that's not too unfair 2:35:55 to request what if bitcoin does drivechain and a large block sidechain is launched on bitcoin 2:36:05 would that probably in your view would it probably absorb all of bsv and bch community members 2:36:14 into bitcoin to use that sidechain uh no i don't think it would be all i think it would 2:36:22 it would certainly be some like there will be people that will come because because it's a 2:36:27 compelling idea and i think they'll come play with it uh and that should ultimately bring and if it's 2:36:33 successful if if they create value i think that's the real thing it's not about the protocol itself 2:36:38 it's not the idea itself but if if economic actors show that they can create all kinds of 2:36:44 new value there that's the thing that will entice people over so um so it's a little bit predicate 2:36:50 but but i should clarify that i would be excited about such a thing if btc grew to look a lot more 2:36:59 like what i value about bitcoin well i i still see myself as very much a you know a bitcoiner in that 2:37:06 regard like if btc is coming my direction coming toward my ideas well then i would just be you 2:37:12 know i'm some kind of pig-headed jerk if i just reject it even though it actually conformed to 2:37:17 you know the ideas that i had for it yeah i mean that's the that's the golden truth of drive 2:37:23 chain is that it's not bitcoin changing to become more like you it's bitcoin enabling people like 2:37:29 you to get what you want without changing the main chain after drivechain there wouldn't be like you 2:37:35 can opt into the scaling sidechain or a privacy sidechain or a sidechain similar to ethereum 2:37:42 or a sidechain for things that have never existed on any blockchain so there's new ideas 2:37:49 that might come and it's all optional and everyone shares the base layer that's capitalism isn't it 2:37:55 when we're all sharing a foundational layer kind of like there's the constitution and then you can 2:38:00 choose which state you want to live in do you want to live in texas or vermont they have very 2:38:04 different cultures so everyone is sharing the constitution in america but not the particular 2:38:11 smaller opt-in locations with their various features and benefits and trade-offs i think 2:38:19 that sounds like a very nice what if and if it happens i would i would be net happy however i 2:38:27 think i think it is near next to impossible because as i said before i think btc is being governed 2:38:34 by a sybil attack that fundamentally does not want those things to happen and so i i agree sorry 2:38:42 that i cut out there i figured it out now that because i have my i have my chromecast and my 2:38:47 laptops all open and it's the router crashes and it knocks everything off for like five seconds so 2:38:54 so i'll have to fix that later but the but i have an interesting little story i mean i don't know 2:39:00 if you think it's interesting at all it's very short it's a little joke it's this joke about 2:39:03 politics where a guy you can tell any version of the joke you're supposed to change the joke 2:39:08 based on where the audience lives but the joke is something like this a guy shows up 2:39:13 in kansas city and he's trying to get to new york and uh yes he stops and asks for directions and 2:39:21 the person says where are you trying to go he says i'm trying to go to new york city 2:39:25 and the guy says well sonny i i wouldn't start from here 2:39:28 and the joke is about politics because in politics people are always like well what if we 2:39:34 could just do this instead it's only because of these people why can't we all just agree to change 2:39:39 it why can't we just agree to change this other thing and it's like well where you were you're 2:39:44 stuck with the you're stuck with the uh reality that you're dealt the social and political reality 2:39:51 that you're dealt and that is why i'm kind of over here pushing for this idea because i just think 2:39:58 it just it doesn't work it's just the network effects are just too strong to just uh use a 2:40:04 different network so that's that's kind of and this is also an advantage that btc had that 2:40:09 unfortunately discredits uh large blocks because even though i think large box on L1 is not the 2:40:15 right decision um there is a lot like most of the problems with bitcoin sv are not related to 2:40:23 and the block size they are related to live by the fork die by the fork and they're just related 2:40:30 to the fact that most people prefer a lot of people just prefer to team up people like being 2:40:35 a conformist they're like having a big tribe that's going to win they know that if the tribe 2:40:42 has to accommodate the tribe has to stamp out descent to some degree because otherwise there'll 2:40:49 be no line between the tribe i've i've been saying this publicly for years and people tell 2:40:57 me it's not actually happening btc bitcoin is freedom yeah so the question is like what to do 2:41:06 about it and i think the answer is not hard fork and make bitcoin cash while SegWit2x is happening 2:41:13 and then and then surprise get rid of SegWit2x and then change a bunch of many many lines of code 2:41:21 and then split again into bitcoin sv and bitcoin like it didn't seem like it was like that didn't 2:41:25 work well and and i've argued that it it was so so can it like it happened so conveniently that 2:41:31 how could it not have been uh at least partially like planned maliciously and and i think that 2:41:37 that's uh part of the problem here is that you know the simplicity of bitcoin and just letting 2:41:43 bitcoin be bitcoin ultimately you know bitcoin can't lose if it's just allowed to be bitcoin 2:41:48 in my opinion but 2:41:50 that that doesn't work for all kinds of people and for all kinds of reasons and i i think that that's the real predicate for the whole bitcoin civil war like this is this is why they want us bickering 2:42:00 um you know because ultimately these things they matter to a degree but you know the the level at which we're we're debating them 2:42:10 you know it's just it's just not uh it's not conducive to to sussing out a serious victory uh serious victories happen as a as a product of actually disrupting the real economy 2:42:20 and we all all of us anybody listening or anybody involved like we all need to do better 2:42:27 yeah i agree i also like that you emphasized um you emphasize something that a lot of people don't 2:42:33 emphasize which is that bitcoin should be it should be more than just being a bank is good 2:42:38 enough and being a payment processor is good enough but we want to do more than the bare 2:42:44 minimum it should literally be impossible for these we have these otherwise smart 2:42:48 otherwise kind of contrarian people like i'm kind of like a bill maher fan or something but 2:42:53 they are certain that that bitcoin and and crypto it just it doesn't do anything they're just they'll 2:43:00 just make jokes about it and they just think this is totally pointless it's you know it's like beanie 2:43:05 babies or something except they're not cute it's it's completely pointless to them and that is a 2:43:11 mistake we if the community were different and if people if the right ideas were promoted more and 2:43:17 if the wrong people if we could get the wrong people off the stage um it would be impossible 2:43:24 for people for bill maher and other people to say stuff like that they would know they would 2:43:29 understand actually bitcoin does lots and lots of cool things um including stuff like the paymail 2:43:37 getting rid of spam messages domain name system prediction mark that are everything so there's 2:43:42 lots of stuff that it will do and in that we should focus on that that's that that's often 2:43:47 like some some people complain about that in the dry i get it from both sides of course in the 2:43:51 drivechain world so some people say bitcoin is uh bitcoin is enough bitcoin is digital gold or 2:43:57 whatever and i tell them i said well you know this is like you have gold in the real world 2:44:04 and gold is great but what if someone discovers that gold can can cure cancer and then also gold 2:44:12 you know can gold can actually uh you'd be used to a teleport across the universe isn't that better 2:44:19 for the value of gold and then you know they have to either admit that i'm right or 2:44:25 leave the space angrily which is what one person did sure but uh you know so it's like having the 2:44:32 having the thing be useful is always good for the thing and that means real like actual more 2:44:39 more value that is independent of what other people think because money is of course slightly 2:44:43 circular you have to you rely on what what do other people recognize as money okay that's what 2:44:50 i'll recognize as mine it's a lot like a language so i agree with you that that is a very neglected 2:44:55 topic yeah which is a mistake cool it sounds like we it sounds like there's a lot of agreement there 2:45:03 like you know the drivechain vision the bsv vision the ethereum vision all of those visions 2:45:12 allow for a very large multitude of different kinds of software on blockchain 2:45:17 all different kinds of features and value creation the question is which is the best 2:45:24 technical approach is it ethereum drivechain or bsv so i feel like ultimately you guys 2:45:34 to to come to the same place would need to eventually get down to the brass tacks the 2:45:40 the technical differences otherwise they'll just be this permanent schism this permanent 2:45:47 kind of agree though i mean we basically agree you're saying if the idea ever makes it over here 2:45:52 then they would people would probably give it a try um but he's also saying that there it's uh 2:46:01 it's a permanent it's permanent like a pocket veto or something so he kind of thinks it'll 2:46:08 never happen he thinks but also i mean to that i mean side like to take the concept 2:46:15 like this would be easier to implement on a a chain that was governed like bsv in that it 2:46:21 has a much more flexible like transaction like there is no concept of a transaction 2:46:27 template standard transaction so i mean you can construct a sidechain and bsv pretty trivially 2:46:34 and it's a little bit above my pay grade on how exactly that would be done but with open script 2:46:39 like the ability to to build in bitcoin script and also uh not having a standard transaction type 2:46:46 like you could implement something like drivechain on a network like bsv pretty trivially and 2:46:53 so the the version that i'm actually advocating for is a bit of a both end in that you get the 2:46:58 big block version of bitcoin with all of its benefits but you can also do weird experimental 2:47:04 like okay this one's all you know zk snarks and ring signatures and whatever uh and and then we 2:47:10 can settle that all to chain separately so so i'm i'm actually kind of advocating for for the idea 2:47:17 uh to to be a both and on a network that looks like bsv 2:47:23 yeah well i mean it is all open source and if people uh i'm not like i only have so much free 2:47:29 time but if people want to add it to their BIP300 to their coin then i will uh you know i'll 2:47:38 help advise people on doing that and then an interesting thing to point out is that all the 2:47:42 sidechains that we build like the uh we have a z cash with a clone of z cash with a clone of ethereum 2:47:49 those sidechains uh they are separate pieces of software so they're completely independent of what 2:47:54 the L1 chain is as long as the L1 chain has BIP300 or something like equivalent to it on there 2:48:02 the exact same sidechain basically could just be copied and pasted with like a new 2:48:08 whatever like a new network magic or something and then you can just reuse what we have already 2:48:13 built all the sidechain templates that we build can be used on any any bib 300 enabled L1 so and 2:48:19 we're going to continue to build we're going to be building those uh we're going to be pouring 2:48:24 lots and lots of smart people and money and attention at building those because the bib 300 2:48:29 part is actually very very simple almost all the work is done on the sidechain so i think 2:48:35 that it's certainly an idea that someone should try i think that would be uh something another 2:48:42 thing though that completely the opposite flip side to consider is that if 300 is a soft fork 2:48:48 and so in theory uh i don't know culturally this seems impossible at the moment but in theory 2:48:55 the bitcoin the btc miners could just activate it unilaterally they could just upgrade to 2:49:01 a version of bitcoin core that has BIP300 then they would run it and they could signal 2:49:07 they could use whatever bib 9 and they could they could activate it unilaterally and no one 2:49:12 would be able to stop them because it is a soft fork not a hard fork so um that so in that sense 2:49:19 it's much closer to btc than you think because you you would think like oh all you have to do 2:49:24 is convince the miners to stop being uh so meek i suppose uh which is again a consequence of the 2:49:33 the block size dispute and segue to x and all kinds of other stuff but in that sense is so 2:49:40 it's really much it's really much closer in both directions than maybe someone might first assume 2:49:47 they must they might think well this will never happen on bitcoin core and they might think it's 2:49:52 coded for bitcoin core but it can never happen anywhere else but with uh just the way it's set 2:49:58 up BIP300 is actually a very small it's less than one percent of the whole idea most of the 2:50:04 idea is implemented on the sidechain software the sidechains themselves and we have already built 2:50:11 all those and we've coded BIP300 and so it's actually quite easy for any coin litecoin or 2:50:17 whatever to add BIP300 in my opinion but again they can't really do that until i stop tinkering 2:50:25 with the bip and actually do the pull request so but i but we're going to do that very soon 2:50:31 gotta set the protocol in stone paul yes yes that's right all right gentlemen i really should 2:50:39 go i'd be happy to like do a closing back and forth or something but i'd like to be done in 2:50:45 the next 10 minutes if we can be kurt you've been great i think that we've we've had a really long 2:50:51 very high quality discussion with you please come again sometime thank you very much why don't we 2:50:58 allow both of our speakers to go if they'd like i'm sure they're busy it's a work day 2:51:03 so kurt or paul feel free to drop off at any time at this point let's consider the debate closed at 2:51:08 this point we can do a bit of open mic if you think that's a good idea paul or we can just 2:51:13 wrap for next week what do you think well let's see if people have anything they really really 2:51:18 want to say i think we've done kurt and i have done enough i think yes i think we basically 2:51:24 have covered it all yes i think that way anyway yeah this has been almost three hours of excellent 2:51:29 conversation if anybody wants to come up and make a succinct technical comment or question 2:51:36 or just about anything really anything you want raise your hand you're absolutely dying to say 2:51:42 anything let's see if i can help okay okay we have one request so far it's from our speaker from 2:51:52 before since he's the only requester i'll let him up thank you for joining again crypto voyager 2:51:59 share your comment or question but try to be brief thank you 2:52:05 both of you it was was amazing two hours i would i would love to to to listen more hours on on this 2:52:11 space so uh kurt if you could come next week this would be amazing uh for for everybody involved um 2:52:19 i have i have a question on on the incentive structure so so uh paul is still here that's good 2:52:25 um on this on the small on the small network if this is a disagreement let's say that somebody 2:52:32 that somebody does mine maliciously more coins than they're allowed to mine uh and and suddenly 2:52:38 there is more than 21 million what would happen on the small chain and what would happen on the 2:52:44 big chain uh well on L1 it's not possible the full nodes in force just as they do now 2:52:54 they every block checks the every block for every single what the small blocks people will 2:53:01 call node checks the uh what did we call them i already forgot data server you know we're always 2:53:07 all the full nodes check for any inflation and they mark the block invalid on L1 so that's 2:53:12 totally unaffected by drivechain what happens is someone releases drivechain that has bad code 2:53:18 or just a mistake or whatever or they intentionally mint more coins uh what will happen is over so 2:53:27 nothing will happen for a while but people what will actually happen in practice is there'll be 2:53:31 a bank run because the sidechain will be missing these coins that don't exist and then when people 2:53:38 try to withdraw the coins the sidechain constructor will look at the L1 like the L1 UTXO that has all 2:53:48 the sidechains going so let's say if seven will you have your hand up again now so do you want 2:53:52 to clarify something yeah yeah i'm not talking about genes i'm talking on L1 so so basically 2:53:58 the question that there was there was the first hour was to kurt how how can anybody then prove 2:54:05 that that the miner is not working maliciously and and the same question actually goes for the small 2:54:11 for the for btc and for bsv it's the same thing so the way that i understand it is that the incentive 2:54:17 is that every other single miner will just raise their hand and say yo dude you're actually working 2:54:24 against against me against the whole system and boot him out of the network that's that's what 2:54:30 should happen on L1 on the small block and on the big block uh side and and and what what i'm i'm 2:54:38 seeing is that okay fine but if i have a raspberry pi i can also raise my hand but do i have a voice 2:54:45 if i raise my hand with just a raspberry pi well you have something of a voice because the other 2:54:53 raspberry pi people may connect to you it's like um i think i don't know if this analogy will 2:55:01 totally hold up per se but whether or not like if you have a town full of people and only some of 2:55:07 them are security guards like miners but the other townsfolk can still gossip about oh i think that 2:55:14 that guy murdered someone or whatever so everyone can share information and the more nodes there are 2:55:22 the easier it is to download the block data because of bit torrent which i'm pretty sure is 2:55:27 where the name came from um so the more nodes you connect to the easier it is for you to actually get 2:55:34 the blockchain for yourself and so uh an interesting question is how do you know that raspberry pi 2:55:40 isn't plugged into an arbitrary percentage of mining power there's no real way to know like 2:55:46 every uh but yeah this is this is the core idea is it's pretty simple which is that if 2:55:53 there is some inflation something that breaks the rules then either the coinbase doesn't add up to 2:55:59 the fees or the block subsidy is just the wrong number and those are the only possibilities 2:56:07 or transaction spending money it doesn't have so those are all easily detectable so that is what 2:56:13 will happen and the the way just the way that i you know i don't know if this is optimal but i can 2:56:20 just give you an idea of like what actually happens the details are that the all the nodes 2:56:24 all peer the what the small block is called the nodes all peer they you download a list of 2:56:31 locations ip addresses where the other people are and you always start talking to them and they tell 2:56:35 you where their friends are and everyone tells everyone where other things are and then what 2:56:41 will happen is you stay connected with them until they break a rule if they break the 2:56:46 a block validity rule you disconnect from them and you say they're not real you don't 2:56:53 connect to them anymore but also you don't tell other people that they are node either which is 2:56:59 also kind of key because how do you join the community in the first place you have to connect 2:57:04 to the network yes and yes all right go ahead with your final question crypto voyager and then we'll 2:57:09 give a moment to our other speaker to ask a question before we run so so basically the whole 2:57:15 theory of the of the small that the miners could collude and that quest says well we won't collude 2:57:24 because there is no incentive for us to collude and what i'm thinking is well basically the small 2:57:30 blockers have the same problem if all miners in the world collude there is nothing that the raspberry 2:57:36 pies can do because they cannot they cannot build the block on top of a colluded block they don't 2:57:41 have the hash power for that no matter how much how much they scream against it yeah but an 2:57:48 interesting thing is that to them the there are there is an infinite number of ways a block can 2:57:52 be invalid right so you use it there are infinite variations on the block so if you say there's a 2:57:59 block and it has a 10 transactions 10 signatures whatever and one of the signatures you could 2:58:08 change that an arbitrary number of ways to make it wrong you could say this is a wrong number or you 2:58:12 could say transaction selects the UTXO it doesn't exist and so it's fundamentally kind of equivalent 2:58:20 to if if it's going to go wrong it can go wrong like it's there's like a kind of like a shelling 2:58:27 fence tom shelling there's like it's like a big difference between zero percent errors and then 2:58:32 some errors because if you open the door to some errors then sort of where does it end 2:58:37 why should some errors be allowed and not others and so to the raspberry pi network 2:58:43 it kind of looks as though these miners have just gone on strike and they will continue to give the 2:58:50 remaining miners a kind of monopoly on block production for as long as the other miners are 2:58:57 determined to not obey the rules so now there's also the case of like an exchange it's so many 2:59:04 people such as payment processors or the exchanges they have an enormous stake in the network being 2:59:10 free of error but they don't necessarily mind themselves and as a result they would like you 2:59:17 imagine like what if coinbase and kraken and whatever bit me whatever whoever would say 2:59:25 take your pick but say big exchanges they don't mark the block as valid because they're looking 2:59:31 for confirmations because they want to know when have their customers deposited to the exchange 2:59:36 which is obviously key to their business they they'll just say we don't count that as a 2:59:41 confirmation and then it's really it's not 75 versus 25 or 75 versus 0 it's really all of the 2:59:50 exchanges and uh the payment processors and regular users versus 75 of the miners and the network can 2:59:59 actually get by with only 25 of the miners just four times as slowly so i hope that is a decent 3:00:07 answer mr frog guy he he moved himself to the audience but that was very polite of him because 3:00:15 i did say this would be his final question because we're aiming to wrap up our last speaker 3:00:20 will be a familiar voice here thank you for joining us again satoshi enjoyer what's your 3:00:26 comment or question for the speakers hey guys um thank you so much for having these spaces and 3:00:30 bringing this conversation uh to the forefront i think that um even if drivechains is a bad 3:00:36 idea which i don't think it is i think it's a great idea i think it's really important to have 3:00:40 these um conversations and discussions and and i'm looking forward to uh hopefully having more 3:00:45 speakers especially people that are very against um drivechains for them to you know give their 3:00:50 talk and and and hopefully uh you know them to switch over and to realize that you know there's 3:00:56 really no reasons to be against it and hopefully even in the future to be on like bitcoin conferences 3:01:01 and having debates and hopefully it will continue to be very civil and you know just um everybody 3:01:06 sharing their ideas so yeah i just wanted to say thank you for all your work guys 3:01:11 that's very kind thank you yeah thanks a lot especially do you think if there are 3:01:17 people who are big critics they should show up here that's partly why we do this 3:01:20 so it's friday at one it's like an office hours so just if people want to if there's 3:01:27 the hater then send them over here yeah absolutely so if there is a significant 3:01:34 critic of drivechain who wants to have his or her voice heard there are two options at least 3:01:41 one is to come to these spaces and talk with paul and others the other is to reach out to layer two 3:01:48 labs to arrange a formal debate hosted by a neutral moderator so recently peter todd very excellently 3:01:58 agreed to such a debate it'll be hosted by stefan livera on his podcast a neutral moderator 3:02:07 so that paul and peter can discuss drivechain and everyone's welcome to visit here 3:02:15 so we host just to wrap up this space because we've been going for three hours thank you everyone 3:02:19 who's listened this is LayerTwo Labs twitter spaces and we meet every friday to talk about 3:02:26 drivechain so and make sure you uh have everyone bookmark for next week we we don't have it 100% 3:02:34 confirmed but um we're possibly going to have a very uh very well-known uh guest next week 3:02:42 um maybe we can announce it early early next week uh someone who everyone in here has has 3:02:50 heard of and probably most admire yeah that's very exciting we hope to have more invited guests 3:02:57 thank you so much kurt for being one of our first guest speakers at our spaces so LayerTwo Labs we 3:03:02 meet every friday on twitter spaces to talk there are many other ways you can engage go to layer 3:03:07 two labs.com to find links to our telegram group where anyone for free can join our telegram group 3:03:15 and discuss drivechain there are various sub-threads for example if you have downloaded 3:03:21 the drivechain software for our testnet from layer2labs.com you can download the software 3:03:27 and then discuss it in our technical discussion sub-thread we also have a very lively off-topic 3:03:34 thread for all kinds of debates and discussions and you can also get involved in other ways we 3:03:41 have a reddit we have other social media and all of it's available from layer2labs.com 3:03:47 there are also many important blog posts at truthcoin.info and drivechain.info and you can 3:03:54 find all those links starting from layer2labs.com so we hope you'll come back next week um later 3:04:01 today i'll post the link to our space next week and everyone's welcome to listen these are recorded 3:04:07 spaces you can listen to our prior spaces if you go to our twitter page and just scroll down you'll 3:04:13 see the prior weekly spaces that we've had okay i think that's time to wrap does that sound good 3:04:22 paul should we wrap up now just wanted to say thanks again i really appreciate the invite and 3:04:31 i really appreciated the conversation cool all right have a great friday and a great weekend 3:04:38 everyone thank you
