0:27 Here we are for another weekly 0:30 to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're 0:37 going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, 0:44 and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to 0:51 the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going 0:58 to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then 1:05 we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A 1:12 session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move 1:17 on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're 1:25 going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, 1:32 and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to 1:39 the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going 1:46 to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then 1:53 we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A 2:00 session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move 2:05 on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're 2:12 going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, 2:19 and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to 2:26 the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going 2:33 to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then 2:41 we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A 2:46 session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move 2:51 on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're 2:56 going to move on to the Q&A session, and then we're going to move on to the Q&A session, 3:01 a reason to believe that Bitcoin can become more adopted in the 3:07 future by LayerTwo or in various things. 3:13 I've been trying to understand what Drivechain is and I have to be honest, I don't 3:16 really get it and I was just wondering if you could maybe give a simple explanation of 3:20 it. 3:22 I think what we're trying to do is make test software so 3:28 that you can just see it with your own eyes. 3:32 basically, what would happen, you can actually download this now if you're going to 3:35 drivechain.info slash releases, but you probably shouldn't download 3:39 random software from the internet and run it on your computer, but what you would see 3:44 if you did is you open up Bitcoin and you have like a window where there would be normally 3:48 your Bitcoin node or your Bitcoin wallet, and then you could open a different piece 3:53 of software, completely different piece of software, and send your coins over there, 3:58 and it's a different network, so that network would be like something like Zcash where you 4:02 would have a reusable Z address, and in Zcash the amount, the sender, the receiver, and 4:09 the amount are all private, and that's because they made different software with different 4:14 trade-offs, and so then over there you could send and receive money, and then that's like 4:22 an L2 network that's its own L1 blockchain. 4:26 Isn't that like a bridge though? 4:28 It is like a bridge, yes. 4:31 Doesn't it have the security vulnerabilities of a bridge? 4:34 It has some security, it has some loss of security, and that's what the trade-off is, 4:41 you want the feature, and it degrades security, but the only way the bridge fails is if more 4:49 than 75% of the hash rate intentionally does a mis-withdrawal over three to six months 4:58 in view of everyone, so it's the idea that they can only really break the bridge if they 5:04 are intentionally going to destroy the feature, and so the miners have like a carrot at the 5:10 end of keeping the bridge operating, if they keep the bridge operating then they get all 5:17 the transaction fees on all of the different networks, which is probably going to be like 5:24 500 to 1,000 times more revenue than they're going to get on the L1 Bitcoin chain, so it's 5:30 kind of a big carrot. 5:32 Okay, that sounds interesting, so you've been developing this for a number of years now 5:38 and it's in production online or it's still theoretical or somewhere in between? 5:44 I'd say somewhere in between, like we have test software that you can download and run 5:49 now, so it does exist. 5:52 We sort of have a pull request to Bitcoin Core, although that takes time, and I would 6:03 say it's very, very close to production. 6:07 We have actual software that people can run. 6:09 Most of the work is actually done on the sidechain itself, so the BIP300 part on Bitcoin 6:17 Core is very small and it's just this counter that counts up to 13,000 really. 6:23 It's kind of like a cross-chain confirmation. 6:28 So why are some Bitcoiners so adamantly against it? 6:31 I don't really understand the opposition to it. 6:34 Well, if you figure it out, you can tell me, but I think if I had to explain it, I would 6:39 say that this idea is actually very mainstream, so it's sort of like I've been working on 6:43 it on and off for a number of years, but I do other things, like I have my blog and 6:48 I've had other things going on, but the idea is actually, this is what Blockstream raised 6:55 money to create back in 2014, 2015, so the idea is very old and it used to be popular, 7:03 but what I think happened was, I can give you a long story if you like, but the short 7:08 version is that there's like a sour grapes phenomenon, I think, going on where we haven't 7:14 for a while, like when Ethereum first came out, it was like very, very, very low quality 7:20 project, like it was full of like pre-mine, it had shady accounting, it was completely 7:27 unfinished in 2015, and so it didn't even exist, it had no use cases, it had nothing 7:32 going on, so we called it like a piece of junk, just like basically everything, and 7:40 so everyone hated all these projects, all of them were bad, like 2013, 2014, 2015, and 7:48 then we had the scaling war in 2016, and then we had Bitcoin Cash fork off in 2017, and 7:56 so Bitcoin was kind of the king for a while, and now what I think has happened from 2017 8:01 to 2023 has been that the other projects have evolved into like a little niche, where 8:07 they actually are decent at one thing or the other, and as a result, the old attitude of 8:15 just dismissing these projects, you had to like double down more and more and more, and 8:20 I think that there was a lot of rational reasons for hating them in the past, but now they 8:26 have slowly transformed into just irrational, right, right, denials, inheriting the old 8:33 talking points, and so now people want to say like there is, we would, there is no reason 8:38 to want zk-snark level privacy, or EVM, there's just no, see before everyone cheered, Roadstock 8:46 raised money in 2015, we're like we'll just copy Ethereum onto Bitcoin, and everyone, 8:50 this was very popular, but now people want to keep that Ethereum away from a consenting 8:56 Bitcoin user who might want to use it, you know, and the idea that we should just have 9:01 21 million coins spread among all these different pieces of software, but there's a slightly 9:06 more story involved, just like there's a long story involving lots of weird culture, that, 9:11 but I think it's irrational, because it's ignorable on L1, all BIP300 is doing is using 9:18 an unused op-nop, five to count to 13,000, which has already been done, you know, it's 9:24 the previous op-nop, it's the check lock time verifier's op-nop too, and so it's the same 9:30 thing, it's been done forever, and it's totally optional, and it's totally reversible also, 9:34 so I don't, so from a non-technical standpoint, because I am not, I am not technical, I don't, 9:42 I'm not trying to be, or don't, I feel if I can't understand it, then the masses can't 9:47 understand it, so from a mass adoption standpoint, what do you see Drivechain, if it's to be 9:52 successful, and what do you see as its competitors? 9:57 Well, I think, non-technically, I think first people have to decide, like, this idea used 10:04 to be good, but sometimes people today will say, well, why don't we just have altcoins, 10:08 because it's like a purer form of competition, they're all completely different coins, it 10:13 would be like a Friedrich Hayek thing, so ironically, if you're against the sidechain 10:18 vision, you kind of have to be pro-altcoin, because you say, well, there's a market, and 10:24 different, everything competes, and then this is the best of all possible worlds, so I kind 10:28 of don't really believe that, because I always think of something like USB-A, or like the 10:33 QWERTY keyboard, or whatever, I just think the future is just one coin, that enables 10:39 you to do everything, but it would be 21 million coin, because no one really wants, if you 10:44 introduce an altcoin, you're really kind of like introducing inflation, you know, you're 10:48 splitting the pie. 10:50 Well, when you have a ton of fragmentation, and user experience diminishes, because of 10:55 that, I'm concerned about the fragmentation of everything being on different competing 10:59 altcoins, or different layer twos on top of Ethereum, I'm still grappling to see a vision 11:05 that, every vision I come across has flaws in it, I haven't seen anything that, it just 11:11 seems early, from that respect. 11:14 Well, I definitely think it's a very complicated industry, that's for sure, I think the way 11:20 forward for drivechain would be that people understand, they start to learn a little bit 11:25 more about it, I think the really smart technical minds in Bitcoin are, they have a lot of hands-on 11:34 experience with lightning, so in one sense, they don't want to move away from that, but 11:38 in another sense, they have so much experience with it, that they're starting to become interested 11:44 in looking for something else, which… 11:47 So much bad experience. 11:51 Yeah, that's what I think. 11:53 Yeah, I'm seeing too much bad experience on it, I can't, it seems to be tainted with 12:00 problems. 12:03 Yeah, it was very interesting, it was kind of a, it was a very revolutionary idea in 12:08 2015, and it is a very interesting idea, I think one attribute of it that has attracted 12:17 people's attention is how it is a very technical project, so like, very, very smart technical 12:22 people can like, spend a lot of time unpacking it and tweaking it around, and so I think 12:27 they like the, they like the idea that they can get like, you know, there's a lot of 12:32 engineering work to be done. 12:35 Yeah, my perspective on that is that, that just leads to centralization, because 99% 12:41 of the masses aren't interested in doing that, therefore it has to go through centralized 12:45 parties, therefore, what's the point? 12:47 I mean, there's a point, it's a hybrid solution, but, and I'm not saying that wouldn't 12:52 work, but I just don't see, I don't want to parrot what I've learned about Lightning, 12:57 but I pretty much dismissed it at this stage, and I'm looking for alternate scenarios that 13:01 would help Bitcoin reach its vision through a sidechain or a layer two, or through Bitcoin 13:06 itself, and I still see it as, so I, is Drivechain, is Lightning what you, do you consider 13:13 Lightning to be your competitor? 13:15 Well, that's an interesting question, I mean, I think it depends on the context, but I wrote 13:19 an essay called Thunder, you know, on truthcon.info, so if you, you can search for that, and I 13:26 do a big comparison, and I do think, I think that, like, in people's minds, they would 13:35 be seen as a competitor, sometimes, it's not necessarily a competitor at all, because in 13:40 fact, you could have, you could, people could and would create a Drivechain that has some 13:46 features that would make Lightning better, for example, this 118, and you print out APO, 13:52 and you could do, the other thing is you could have Lightning channels open on sidechain, 13:57 and the major advantage of Lightning is the payment speed, and so, but I think inevitably 14:03 people would compare them, you know what I mean, it's kind of like, is, does Visa compete 14:08 with Cash, it's kind of like, well, at the end of the day, kind of, you know, right, 14:12 because if Visa works everywhere all the time perfectly, then you kind of don't really 14:15 want to carry Cash around, but if, but if the place, you know, there's a big advantage 14:21 to having Cash, or, then you, so, so I kind of think they, they all will compete, which 14:26 is, this is part of the reason why it's not universally loved, I think, is because there 14:32 has been a huge amount of time, technical people, they spend a lot of time, like, learning 14:37 like a code base or something, then they really want that one to, that to pay off 14:42 in their career, and we have lots of VCs funding Lightning, and of course, we went through 14:45 a period of time in Bitcoin's history when Lightning was, like, the savior, and it could 14:50 do no wrong, and especially after the 2017 Bitcoin Cash BTC split, then that created 14:59 this attitude where the Bitcoin Cash people were always criticizing Lightning, so that 15:04 created an atmosphere in BTC where if you criticized Lightning, you resembled a Bitcoin 15:09 Cash trader and a Bitcoin Cash supporter, so, so people avoided doing that, and then, 15:15 you know, that kind of, like, one thing led to another, and then it just became this sacred 15:20 cow. 15:22 Yeah, not, not, not to a guy like me who came in two, three years ago and started trying 15:28 to figure this stuff out, it doesn't look like a sacred cow, but that's not why I called. 15:33 I, I'm just trying to understand drivechain to see, you know, what, what can I look forward 15:40 to that might bring Bitcoin to a more mainstream and a more, more mass adoption, and, and a 15:47 winner-take-all, I mean, to become the winner-take-all platform, I, I, it's just, it's hard to envision 15:54 right now, and so I just kind of keep tabs on it, and I, that's why I called, so. 15:58 I worked on it because that's the point of it is, it's not really just scaling, it's 16:03 like anyone, we have all these people who constantly disagree over what the protocol 16:08 should or shouldn't contain, and the PIV300 is itself an example of that, where if we 16:13 had it, though, none of this would really be, it would be greatly, like, 99% reduced 16:18 because someone would always have the option of unilaterally releasing the new, their new 16:25 project as a drivechain instead of trying to get… 16:29 So would this, would all those, would all those releases on top of drivechain be composable, 16:35 a good user experience, like, without bridging between them, like the concept of ZK proofs 16:42 on Ethereum? 16:44 Well, I think you would still, you, if you could write a piece of software that used, 16:50 like, two or three sidechains at once, and then if the user had them all installed, then 16:54 that piece, that software application would… 16:57 Ah, yeah. 16:58 It would… 16:59 If the user had, if the, you, you'll ask me if the user had them all installed. 17:03 I, it… 17:04 Yeah, yeah. 17:05 Yeah, yeah. 17:06 But the, the thing to keep in mind is, if, if the user is not going to be running a full 17:13 node, like, this is a separate issue. 17:15 So I'm saying, like, a service could exist that uses all of the features. 17:20 But my vision is, personally, is that they would be kind of topical. 17:24 So there would be, like, the privacy sidechain, and there would be, like, the payment sidechain. 17:29 But I don't know if that, you know, the cool thing about this is it's very open, 17:34 and, you know, no, I can't stop anyone from releasing a sidechain a certain way. 17:38 So if they think that it's better to have them all in one big network for the convenience 17:44 of the user… 17:46 So are they… 17:47 …then I can't stop them, and if they think the reverse, then I can't stop them either. 17:50 Are they as functional and Turing-complete as a smart contract on Ethereum? 17:55 Yeah. 17:56 In fact, we have cloned the latest version of an Ethereum full node as a sidechain already. 18:01 Wow. 18:03 And you can see there's a video. 18:05 I'm now online, and we turn it on, and we send Bitcoin to it, and it shows up over there. 18:09 And we even can connect this node to the whole Ethereum infrastructure. 18:13 They have this site, Remix, Remix.Ethereum.org. 18:17 And you just point the – you point that front end to the, you know, your own IP address, 18:23 and it just – it doesn't even realize that it's a clone of it. 18:27 It doesn't even realize it's a sidechain of Bitcoin. 18:29 It just thinks it's talking to Ethereum. 18:30 So all this stuff would work, you know, like on day one. 18:33 And it would all settle on the Bitcoin layer one as a settlement layer. 18:37 Yeah, right. 18:38 That's correct. 18:39 Isn't that the holy grail of Bitcoin's future vision? 18:41 I know. 18:42 Yeah, that's what I thought. 18:43 That's what I thought. 18:44 Well, you know, we have a lot of people. 18:46 If you go to layer2labs.com slash friends, you see that most of the, like, OG elite, 18:52 many are there. 18:54 And so – but I think it's – what has happened is, like, people, you know, like 19:00 a lot of people will say, like, there is nothing useful on any other network. 19:05 So they've been trained to believe that nothing good ever happened on Ethereum. 19:10 That's religious dogma nonsense. 19:12 Yes, it is. 19:14 That's just people in denial, you know, protecting their bags. 19:20 That's just annoying. 19:22 That's the most annoying thing about the Bitcoin community as far as I'm concerned. 19:26 And I'm a Bitcoiner. 19:27 I am a Bitcoiner and an Ethereum holder. 19:31 And they both have pros and cons, but it's really tiresome to hear all this bashing that 19:37 comes from an emotional standpoint. 19:39 It's just old. 19:40 It's just nonproductive. 19:42 Yeah, I completely agree. 19:44 I mean, it's really weird because you think if they really hated Ethereum, they would, 19:48 like, do something about it, like what I did. 19:51 Right. 19:53 Yeah, that's why I'm calling you. 19:55 It's a lot harder to do that than, it's a lot easier just to retweet some nonsense. 20:00 I mean, it seems like you get it more than most people, so. 20:04 Well, yeah, because I read all these talking points and then I've engaged with a lot of 20:09 these people and found that there was. 20:11 They didn't really have a rationale behind it, and I've gone through a lot of conversations like that to try to. 20:17 So anyway, that's. I appreciate your feedback. I think we just got disconnected, did we? 20:23 Yeah, we did. No, I'm still here. Oh, you're still there. OK. 20:27 Well, anyway, I don't want to take up any more of your time. I'm going to continue to follow you and see how this goes. 20:34 OK, cool. Great. Well, thanks for your attention. OK. 20:41 OK, cool. I thought I saw a stoic unicorn come up, but then I guess he is back down. 21:12 I'm going to repeat what I said about Shinobi's article, if no one wants to come up. 21:21 Hello, can you hear me? 21:23 Yes, hello. 21:25 Sorry, I was having technical difficulties. 21:30 I guess I'm just I'd be interested in hearing more about like the economic. 21:40 The economics between the sidechain and the main chain and like how that works out. 21:48 I know you said that like the sidechain miners pay the main chain miners. 21:56 So like they would essentially be fronting main chain Bitcoin. 22:02 Is that correct? And then they would receive the sidechain Bitcoin. 22:06 Or can you just maybe expound on that a little bit more? 22:11 I'm really interested in hearing like or being able to clearly picture how that all works. 22:20 I think you're referring to a blind merge mining, which is BIP301. 22:25 And in that scenario that was designed to address the problem of what if a sidechain full node is really, really, really expensive to run? 22:35 And the miner does not want to run it. 22:37 And so the idea behind that is the sidechain is very, very cheap. 22:41 Then it's kind of a moot point. It doesn't really matter. 22:43 So whether they run it or not, no one really cares, including them, because it's cheap. 22:49 And this is the classical version of merge mining has been invented by Satoshi. 22:53 And we use it every day, all the time. 22:56 It has been in continuous use since like 2010 or 2011. 23:01 I think it was invented in 2010. It's been in continuous use since 2011. 23:05 So classical merge mining is very old and not controversial as far as I'm aware. 23:14 But I invented this other kind, which I think is what you're referring to. 23:19 That is designed for a scenario where the sidechain node is really, really expensive to run. 23:25 And so the thought behind that is what if there are all these users out there who are running the sidechain node? 23:33 All of those users are also running a main chain node by definition. 23:38 So they have coins on both networks, and they're already running a node. 23:44 So the idea is can a miner just team up with that person because that's a perfect person. 23:49 And so – sorry, I got a phone call. 23:54 Okay. 23:55 So the idea is can a miner team up with that person in a trustless way that is totally like private and doesn't involve anyone stabbing each other in the back? 24:09 So the idea there is the layer two sidechain node person, they build the next block paying the fees to themselves. 24:20 They pay the L2 coins. This is what you were talking about, I think. 24:24 And what they do is on L1, they pay the L1 miners. 24:29 They make a special transaction, this BIP301 transaction on L1 main chain. 24:34 And they say, make this block, this hash or something, make this the next L2 block. 24:43 I'll pay you the L1 coins today. 24:46 You get L01 coins, and I'll pay myself the L2 coins on L2. 24:54 And so the idea is whatever this rate, exchange rate works out to be, it should just be like – because you have a competitive environment where all the L2 sidechain nodes are just bid against each other. 25:04 And only one of these bids can be included. 25:08 But I want to stress that the BIP301 is optional, and it is designed mainly to apply in a situation where people do not want to run the sidechain node because they're expensive for some reason. 25:25 Okay. So I think that helps clarify or solidify some things in my head. 25:32 So then I guess for when they're withdrawing coins from L2 to L1, that whole voting process, how does that work? 25:47 Is there competition between different people to get their coins withdrawn? 25:56 But I'll explain it. The way it works is it's kind of like a boarding an airplane or a train. 26:05 Like one little capsule is going from L2 to L1. 26:11 It's being pulled down from L2 down to L1. 26:16 It's being pulled down once per three months. 26:20 Best case scenario, or even slower. 26:24 But on L2, there is competition because it's kind of like there's an airport or a train station or whatever you want to call it. 26:32 Let's call it a train station. 26:33 And on L2, you're living in the L2 planet or continent or whatever. 26:39 And over there, you say, I want to withdraw. 26:43 And there you set what you – you pay the L2 transaction fee just like every message on L2 pays that fee. 26:50 But then you pay also – you say, what will my L1 main chain fee be for this withdrawal? 26:57 Because unfortunately, since it is a cross-chain transaction, it must be – it must be – pay two transaction fees. 27:08 So what we do is we have the sidechain sort people in line in the – when they're going to get on the ferry or the train or the airplane or the spaceship or whatever metaphor you want to use. 27:19 When they're in line at the train station, it's – the sidechain sorts them based on the L1 fee. 27:25 And each output is the same. 27:27 It's like it's the same 43 bytes or whatever. 27:30 So they all take up the same space on L1, and so it just sorts them on their fee, sorts them on their fee rate, same difference. 27:38 So in the airport or in the train station, they're constantly being sorted. 27:42 And then the new capsule opens up, and then we load as many people on as will fit, and then we launch it back to – it's pulled back to L1 slowly. 27:53 So there is competition, but then everyone is moving in a big group, and this group is this withdrawal capsule. 28:02 And this is the thing that is once every three months, and it is defined by the withdrawal hash, which is – it's basically the TXID of that – of the transaction that would pay all those people out. 28:15 So when that's finally pulled down to L1, then you include in L1 the transaction that withdraws all that. 28:23 Does that make any sense? 28:28 Yeah, so then – so there's basically one capsule every three months, and that capsule can contain multiple people like the top bidders of – 28:39 Yeah, I think it's like 20,000 or 25,000, something like that. 28:44 So it's a lot of people. 28:46 If you don't make the capsule, all you have to do – it's quite – it tolerates a lot of stress because if the line is crowded and you really want to get out, you can either bump your L1 fee. 29:00 You say, I'll pay a higher-than-normal L1 fee, so I move up in line because you see it coming. 29:07 It's once every three months, so you know where you are in line. You know when the next one is going to come. 29:11 You know if you're getting on or not. 29:13 So if you're not getting on, you either bid up the L1 fee, but another thing you can do is you can just cut a deal with someone who's further ahead of you in line. 29:22 So maybe they're withdrawing six coins and you're withdrawing two coins. 29:27 You can go to them and you can say, listen, I'll give you my two L2 coins right now. 29:34 You can change your six to an eight. 29:36 You do that, and if you pay me on L1, like 1.99 – if you pay me on L1 1.99 coins, then I will give you my two L2 coins, and then they can just withdraw eight. 29:49 So this is – my view is that the only people who will actually take the capsule will be like professionally patient withdrawer people. 29:57 Most regular users probably won't use it. 30:01 So with the whole voting process, like if the capsule is constantly changing, what's like the static item that you're voting on or like the – 30:15 Yes, let me explain that, which is that because the capsule is not changing. 30:19 What's changing is the line leading up to the next capsule. 30:22 It's like if you're getting on an amusement park ride or something, that part is changing on L2. 30:28 Then the next empty capsule pulls up, and it just loads everyone on, and then it's off. 30:36 So the capsule itself doesn't change once it's launched, and it's always the same for everyone. 30:43 The sidechain procedurally and algorithmically calculates exactly what it should be. 30:49 So it – the capsule itself doesn't change. 30:54 So the sidechain will like quote-unquote launch the capsule, and then that capsule is voted on for three months. 31:03 Right, and the vote is also a kind of like – it's sort of true that you can just vote. 31:11 They vote arbitrarily as miners, but it's not really like – there's only one option in the real world. 31:18 There's just the one hash, and you upvote that one hash. 31:22 But someone could attempt – a fraudulent person could attempt to – they'll claim some other capsule is real, 31:32 and they'll invent a whole fake story about what it is. 31:36 But it's not like a vote where you have two people, like you have two candidates or whatever. 31:41 Like there is no – there's one that's going to happen automatically and that everyone will approve of if everything works fine. 31:49 There's only ever a second choice if at least one person is doing something that is objectively dishonest. 31:55 So there should always be only one. 31:57 Of course, since L1 – we want to build L1 so that it ignores L2, for that only reason, that is the sole and absolute reason, 32:08 for that reason it can tolerate – L1 can tolerate like whatever, like 12,000 different withdrawal attempts per sidechain, 32:14 like per three months or something, because it has to be robust to people trying to attack it. 32:21 So when you attack the sidechain, you say there's a different capsule that pays all the money to you, 32:26 and you try to get everyone to upvote that. 32:28 But I just wanted to try to make it clear that it's not a vote in the sense of democracy, 32:34 where there's like two competing visions for like a country or something. 32:43 There's always one that is objectively correct, and then if there's more than one, like two or three, 32:48 then something bad is happening, and something bad is happening. 32:52 And that's why it's better to actually maybe sometimes delay and figure it out later, hence the 76 threshold. 33:00 But yeah, that's how it works. 33:02 Yeah, so it's less of a vote and more of like a consistent attestation over time. 33:08 That's correct. Exactly. 33:10 I think of it kind of like how when you build on the next Bitcoin block, that's a confirmation. 33:15 It's a vote kind of the same way that the miner votes on which block to extend. 33:21 So it's not like really a vote. 33:23 There is one objectively correct answer that the software would tell you if you ran it. 33:29 But we have to be robust to the fact that people will try to interfere with it. 33:35 Okay, so I think in my mind where I was kind of getting confused was like the fees. 33:42 So BIP300 has one method of paying fees to miners, and then BIP301 has a different method of paying fees to miners. 33:51 Is that correct? 33:52 Yes, they're very, very different. 33:54 BIP300 is only the deposits and withdrawals. 33:59 So it has nothing to do with actually the fees paid on L2, the withdrawal being the only exception. 34:06 Because the withdrawal has to actually end up on L1 also. 34:10 So the withdrawal has to pay a fee because it will end up on L1. 34:13 It has to pay two fees because when the person says on L2, on the sidechain when they say, I want to withdraw, that is a message on L2. 34:23 So everything on L2 needs the L2 fee, but what they're saying is I want to withdraw to L1. 34:28 Well, their best case scenario is that they get what they want, and then on L1 the message is included, but then they have to pay. 34:36 They have to contribute for a little fee. 34:39 Otherwise, I have to worry about that it would never be included on L1. 34:43 So 301, the blind merge mining, is a different thing. 34:47 What that does is that allows the Layer-1 Bitcoin miners to collect all the L2 transaction fees, even ones that are not deposits or withdrawals. 34:56 So if you're just using the sidechain, then all that money flows to mine. 35:01 But they are, of course, related because the reason why the miners would support the withdrawals, which is the only thing that they have to do, they have to do this tiny amount of work. 35:10 But if they do it honorably, then the carrot is waiting for them. 35:15 But, again, 301 is blind. 35:26 There's a difference between that was invented by Satoshi. 35:33 Okay, so then when we hear the, yeah, so BIP300 is just like standard transaction fees. 35:41 It's not a novel way of paying miners. 35:45 You are muted, though. 35:47 FYI. 35:48 Can you hear me now? 35:50 Oh, yeah, I can hear you now. 35:52 No, sorry, my computer glitched out again. 35:55 So BIP300, the transaction fees, it's pretty standard. 35:59 Like, you have to pay a fee if you want a transaction on the main chain. 36:04 So when people are talking about, like, miner centralization, are they more referring to the mechanism in BIP300 or the mechanism in BIP301? 36:15 Or do you know? 36:17 I think when people use that phrase, they're referring to this idea that the node, the sidechain node cost is not free. 36:27 And so even though it may be arbitrarily small, I think this is a concern troll, and I don't think it's really real, but this is what people say. 36:36 They say, oh, the miners feel pressured to run all the sidechain software, and this is a fixed cost. 36:46 So it discourages miners of a certain scale. 36:51 But I think that's ridiculous. 36:52 As I've already told you, the 301 means that the miners don't need to run the full node if it's too expensive. 36:58 And the idea that, you know, an ASIC could cost thousands of dollars already or at least hundreds of dollars. 37:08 I find it implausible that any piece of software could even cost a similar amount because regular users must be running it in order for there to be a sidechain network. 37:20 And then if the sidechain becomes too expensive, the whole network will just die off anyway. 37:24 So to me, it doesn't really make any sense at all. 37:31 I think they're thinking of something maybe like Solana, where the node is so, so difficult to run. 37:36 But in that case, you either do blind merge mining literally or you do it in some other way. 37:42 Or you don't do it at all. 37:43 None of it matters because it's like either it's paying so much in fees that you don't mind running it or it doesn't pay the fees. 37:50 But you then someone you have like the Solana Corporation just runs it all and gives everyone access. 37:57 And is that a permission? 38:00 Yes. But that's exactly what Liquid does. 38:02 Liquid is just like a fully centralized network. 38:08 On Liquid, all the transaction fees are collected by a wallet controlled by Blockstream. 38:13 So it's kind of like if you have Liquid and then you add to that, Liquid decides to donate some of their money to miners sometimes. 38:21 Then you end up with Solana, basically. 38:24 So the whole thing, I think, is just I don't think it's a real complaint. 38:29 But as far as I can best tell, that is what they mean. 38:33 They're worried about like a Solana node or something. 38:36 Yeah, because whenever I try and think about it, it just seems like the cost is the same whether you're a miner or you're solely a sidechain miner. 38:44 Like the cost to me seems to be the same. 38:48 But that's all the questions I had. 38:52 Thank you so much for your time. 38:54 It really helped me clarify some things. 38:58 Cool. Great. Thanks for your question. 39:01 OK, now I have a JP100 with a hand and you're on mute. 39:09 Don't forget. Yes. 39:13 Hello, everyone. Paul, nice to hear your voice again here. 39:17 So I can I could rattle off a dozen like really granular, you know, in the weeds, techie questions that I definitely want to hear your opinion on. 39:26 But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to take the opposite approach. 39:29 I've got like two like incredibly high level things. 39:32 So you've been at this for what, five or six years now? 39:37 When did you start this? 39:39 Well, I wrote this blog post in November 2015. 39:43 And even before that, I was working on this prediction market sidechain. 39:47 So I was always thinking about how do I tie this weird idea to Bitcoin? 39:52 So I've been working on it for a while, but we haven't like been like full time. 39:57 It's been in a various state of of interest. 40:01 And, you know, it's kind of like I've been doing a lot of things. 40:04 But, yeah, the blog post 2015 and then maybe like 20 January 2017, I wrote the blind merge mining post. 40:12 And then I would say maybe like. 40:15 Twenty nineteen through present is like kind of like full times, like four years, something like that, I don't know, maybe three years. 40:23 I don't know how to do the accounting on and off. 40:27 So all right, before I even ask the question, so the part this has been partially implemented on Ethereum, right? 40:33 I keep hearing that. So the prediction market aspect that you touched on the predecessor. 40:38 So, yeah. So so what what did that manifest on the ETH side exactly? 40:47 Well, the prediction market thing I had, I published this paper back in, I think it was January 2014. 40:57 Called Truthcoin, which is why my Twitter handle is that because, you know, no one can spell my last name. 41:03 And so I thought altcoins weren't even really that big back when I named the project. 41:09 So there was kind of a weird name, which I ended up with the Truthcoin Twitter handle. 41:13 And then from that, a couple of different teams wanted to implement it, including one person who is very familiar with Bitcoin, wanted to do the C++ sort of version, which became Bitcoin Hivemind. 41:25 And then there was other there were other people and two of them ended up as ETH projects. 41:32 And this is ancient history. So I can tell you all about it if you want. 41:35 But it's Augur and Knosis were the two. 41:39 And I can I can tell you all about that, all about whatever you want to know. 41:44 But it's from a long time ago. 41:48 So so the Hivemind is on the BTC side, but is there anything like still today on the ETH side that implements it? 41:54 Well, I don't know. I would say probably like Chainlink moved in more in the direction of that type of thing, even though I don't I think, you know, I think all the people working on ETH did not follow the instructions I gave in the Truthcoin white paper and they deviated from it to their detriment. 42:17 So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. 42:20 And I think we'll bring I'll bring the version that I think is the absolute best to BTC via BIP300 is the is would be one of a hope of mine. 42:34 And then everyone will see what everyone what they should have done instead. 42:38 I got you. OK, so so that that was the the actual question I've got now. 42:43 Now, this is almost like the the abortion controversy, right? 42:48 This is so polarizing. 42:50 This is incredible. 42:51 So in your opinion, the people that are so adamantly against you that have as deep an understanding of the technology as yourself or even more, you know, hardcore core devs. 43:05 Right. Many of them are dead set against this. 43:08 This is this thing is kryptonite. 43:11 Absolute absolute kryptonite. 43:13 So what, in your opinion, why is this so incredibly polarizing when nobody's on the fence? 43:21 Yeah, it's it calls out for explanation. 43:24 I completely agree. But, you know, I have to tell you. 43:28 The part of the explanation is I think that they're not as I mean, they're very familiar with Bitcoin itself. 43:33 But Peter Todd, we started criticizing him earlier this summer on Twitter. 43:40 And I said Bitcoin would be if Peter didn't make this comment in 2014, we would be a thousand X ahead of where we are now. 43:48 So I was I was kind of bringing the heat and I was getting a lot of attention. 43:52 And then we you know, my company, LayerTwo Labs, we hired him literally. 43:58 We went back and forth and we said, OK, we'll hire you to produce a critique of the idea. 44:04 Which he still hasn't done, like produce in writing, like what is the problem with this idea? 44:07 Write it down in one document, you know, with four corners so that has a beginning, a middle and an end. 44:14 And then we do a debate on Stefan Levera's podcast. 44:18 So that was months ago and he still hasn't produced this document. 44:23 But someone else, a completely different person, asked at Tabcom for us to do this debate. 44:30 And like the day before, you can look at his look at you can look at Peter Todd's Twitter and, you know, Peter Todd is certainly someone who understands Bitcoin very, very well. 44:42 But he's tweeting out things like he's saying, well, maybe I don't understand how it works. 44:46 I'll have to ask Paul on stage. 44:49 So I think what I think a lot of them actually don't they just haven't looked into it. 44:54 It's not that they can't understand it. 44:57 They kind of just choose not to. 44:59 And the reason why I think this is, is because they're imagining a future where miners, there were someone releases, you know, because it'd be heterogeneity amongst sidechains. 45:10 So what they're thinking is it's like it's a food court with lots of restaurants. 45:16 Someone will open a restaurant and it's part of my idea that the restaurants are allowed to fail. 45:22 I'm not in the what they want is no restaurant ever fails. 45:25 They want to all be perfectly secure. 45:27 But I say there should be a tolerance for experimentation. 45:33 Someone should try a bad idea. 45:34 You know, like we have all these different Web pages and not every Web page is success. 45:38 Not every YouTube channel is a success. 45:40 You know, sometimes a television show gets canceled, but it's because we allow anyone to try that we have the opportunity to have, you know, big cult classic or whatever. 45:54 So I'm thinking like anyone can open their own restaurant. 45:57 They're thinking if any restaurant, if a miner's ever, if a sidechain fails and then no one can determine who the owner of the coins is or the sidechain doesn't generate any fees. 46:08 So the miners just take the coins for some reason. 46:12 They, you know, because they want coins then down the line, then they think, oh, we're going to be blamed for that. 46:18 We're going to be blamed for that. 46:19 But I this is the shift. 46:21 The paradigm shift is that the technical people feel responsible. 46:25 And it's not just that they feel responsible out of the goodness of their heart, though, if they if they feel responsible, they can claim responsibility for Bitcoin success as their own. 46:36 They say this is because of us. 46:37 We and our steadfast protection of the Bitcoin network and we guarded the network. 46:46 And now then when it goes up and up and up, that was because of us and our indispensable role. 46:53 So that's kind of the story that I would spin is that this turns that upside down. 46:59 So that's why certain technical elite like the idea and why many other people who are slightly less technical like the idea. 47:09 Yeah, I don't think it has to do with I actually think the technical understanding is a little inverted where it's kind of like, isn't there a wooden montane or someone say a man cannot stare directly at the sun or at death? 47:20 It's kind of like maybe that's putting it too dramatic. 47:23 But so I think, yeah, the possibility of coins being lost, they don't want to be blamed for that. 47:28 They don't want to be. 47:30 This is part of it. 47:31 I can tell I can spin you the long story that I spin for people also, which is that there's a lot of bad luck. 47:36 Like this idea came out in 2015. 47:39 It was like literally days before scaling to scaling to SegWit was presented. 47:44 Everyone wanted to do SegWit. 47:46 Everyone, everyone in the world, even large blockers, because it had the block size increase compromise to four megabytes. 47:51 So there was it was all about SegWit SegWit was promised April 1st, 2016, but it wasn't ready until the hackathon after. 47:59 Scaling three, which was October, October, something 2016, October 10th or something. 48:04 So and then what happened before that was because of scaling three miners were annoyed. 48:11 So they left to block the signal Bitcoin unlimited, which blocked SegWit. 48:16 So there was this miners versus developers thing that went for all of 2017. 48:21 So the last thing that anyone wanted to do is give miners any role at all, even a nominal opt in role for consenting adults that no one wanted to touch this because the miners were the enemy. 48:33 Then Bitcoin Cash split off and Bitcoin Cash would have been the first users of drivechain in a way, in a way, both small blockers and large blockers would have been the first users because the small blockers would have been like, thank heavens. 48:48 Those people are no longer pushing for the block size increase on L1. 48:52 And the large blockers would have said, thank heavens, we finally got our block size increase, even though it's on L2. 48:57 We don't care because we like SPV mode anyway, so we don't even run nodes, so we don't even notice. 49:03 So those those would have been the big users. 49:05 So they split off and then I think there's more bad luck, but the short story is that this sour grapes thing I was saying before where I think it's kind of like everyone went their own way and then the Bitcoin way became, okay, Bitcoin is the thing that doesn't change. 49:22 Bitcoin is the reliable bank that's been here for thousands of years and no one really wants to fight that narrative. 49:27 And then new people who have joined and they've made that narrative like their entire identity. 49:31 They've made it part of their book. 49:33 They made it part of their whatever school. 49:38 So that's that's some of what I think the explanation is. 49:42 I don't think any of it has to do with the technical features at all. 49:45 And in fact, I firmly believe that the technical people, the technical elite that are not in favor of it, haven't haven't looked into it at all, partially because so much stuff happens in this industry that it's very difficult to even look at something. 50:01 So a lot of people will have a thought that is, if it's controversial at all, it's probably doomed. 50:08 So anything controversial, I'm not even going to look into because I think that it would be a misallocation of my time. 50:16 That's probably what a lot of them think. 50:18 And then there are, of course, people who they've invested a lot of time in lightning or they have stock options in a company that they think would, if there's too much of a paradigm shift, they would lose control of the story maybe and they wouldn't do as well. 50:35 So those are some of the weird reasons that I think that's my thought. 50:40 I don't know if I need help. 50:41 Some of that makes some sense to you. 50:43 Right now, that's that's great. 50:44 That's great. 50:45 But I don't want to dwell on the past. 50:46 But the the reality is, is that it's quickly becoming evident that by the end of the decade, that the system will be crippled by its own success. 50:56 There's everyone's coming to that realization. 50:59 I mean, I think that's what's bringing this, you know, making this rise up to the top again. 51:04 Right. 51:04 I mean, would you agree with that? 51:07 Well, I think there's a lot of things in general. 51:10 It's like more stuff is invented all the time. 51:12 We have more users. 51:14 I think, again, people become more familiar with the lightning network and they think like it's not, you know, it's a lot of it is custodial lightning. 51:21 So it's not going the way that it's going the way that unfortunately to the, you know, many of the large blockers predicted it would go to some extent, not to a complete extent. 51:35 But people don't like that. 51:37 So sure. 51:38 I mean, with Armstrong bringing up a node, the channel. 51:42 Yeah, it's kind of funny. 51:43 You know, it's actually hilarious about that. 51:45 Brian Armstrong is well known for jumping on an idea right when it's about to crash into the ocean. 51:53 And so I kind of honestly chuckled to myself when I saw that he was doing that. 51:59 I thought it's a bad luck. 52:01 Brian used to be a meme, actually, where it's just like he would do something and then it would just fall into a death spiral right afterwards. 52:11 So I kind of actually laughed to myself when I saw it, which is honestly what I was thinking. 52:16 When I read that and I think he's kind of like he's been dragging his feet on that the whole time. 52:20 I mean, I have two thoughts on that, too. 52:21 Like I'm of two minds. 52:22 Like on one hand, if I were running an exchange, I would not update the tech stack at all ever because you're like going to get hacked or destroyed. 52:29 And it doesn't matter what some people do. 52:31 You don't know what their peer review system is like. 52:35 So I can see it's rational not not to touch that at all. 52:37 But I also think he, Brian Armstrong, probably doesn't even want Bitcoin to succeed at this point because people were very, very mean to him, to say the least. 52:47 And so he's probably just like, whatever, I'm just going to make billions of dollars with my exchange. 52:51 And maybe even he's just trolling people with this lightning thing. 52:55 I don't even know. I have no idea. 52:56 Could could be anyway, but I don't think like it's going to move the needle. 53:01 It ironically, if it does, it'll just show that the how much power the exchanges have. 53:05 It'll just be like three exchanges could probably because the whole lightning network only has like five thousand coins, not even on it. 53:10 So it's like two hundredths of a percent. 53:14 So it's very small. So if exchange can just has like if we get like three exchanges that each have like three thousand Bitcoin and it's, you know, then they'll go up nine thousand coins to like triple the size, double the size or whatever the lightning network. 53:27 So so that would be kind of like. 53:31 The lightning network, it would be like it's very different than people thought when they was proposed, it was like six degrees of seven bacon kind of idea. 53:42 Right. OK, so so there's two of the things that one is the political aspect, which I don't even want to get into the whole. 53:50 Did B.C. having a bullseye in his back and tether, God forbid, gets attacked politically, regulatory wise, but I don't I don't I don't even want to go down that rabbit hole. 54:01 What what I just want to touch on finally is, OK, currently today, right between what is it, Marathon and Ant? 54:07 It's like fifty three percent of the ashray today. 54:10 Right. So in your three hundred world, if they adopted that, would that not represent. 54:17 Total control of fees and would they not be, would that not be a cartel right there? 54:25 Well, my view is it's foundry and pooled by four or five percent, maybe four percent, but it doesn't matter. 54:35 But my view is that the people look at that pie chart, this pie chart, is that a phenomenon? 54:42 I don't remember. It's called like looking for your keys under a lamp post or whatever. 54:46 It's like this data is there. 54:48 They voluntarily reported pools help small miners. 54:54 Evade a disadvantage they would otherwise have, which is that the variance. 54:59 So pools are good for small miners, and that's why they exist and they compete with each other on brand, which is why they announced to the world that they exist and why we know about them. 55:11 And then this data shows up in the world and then people think, you know, you're you're you're making men pooled out space and you want to provide people with useful data. 55:21 So you think, of course, I'll make a pie. 55:22 I'll make a pie chart with. 55:25 The hash rate, and I'm one second while you while you're saying that, also touch on explain why. 55:33 OK, while you while you're describing that, just also touch on what they call the dark pools. 55:38 They're saying that they have like off the book pools that are even make that make them even bigger than they appear to be. 55:43 Yeah, I can explain that, I think also. 55:46 So the reason I bring that up is that that that preamble, I'm telling you that the only reason that pie chart exists is like because of those factors. 55:55 And what I'm trying to say is the pie chart doesn't really mean what people it's not like it's like in like succession or whatever, where it's like you own 50 percent and you can like whatever fire people from the board and 56:07 take over this. 56:09 The pie chart is very misleading, like extremely misleading. 56:12 It it doesn't really mean anything and just exists because it's a logical thing to do if you're making a site about Bitcoin. 56:20 But so why do I say that the reality is the pools really don't have very much agency, especially over the long term. 56:29 Over the short term, maybe they can do quite a bit, but if the pool is not doing what is in the financial best interests of the although it's funny, you know, F2 pool today on ambiguous. 56:43 But but if the pool does not do what's in the best interests of its members. 56:50 The members will switch to a different pool. 56:53 So so it's a principal agent problem where every miner who joins a pool, they're thinking, I can point my hash rate at any pool that I want or I could even start my own pool if I wish. 57:06 So they're thinking, you know, what's this pool going to do for me? 57:10 They're going to reduce my variance. 57:12 OK, great. And then they're going to charge me fees. 57:14 So they want the fees to be low. 57:15 They want the variance to be reduced. 57:18 So the pools don't really have as much agency as people think, like they can't like just decide things over the long run, absolutely not in the short run, you know, maybe. 57:28 But so it's not a cartel at all because it's not a cartel anymore, but they but they can put themselves ahead of the line when they're when they're choosing from the men pool. 57:38 Right. Obviously, no, because the men pool is in one sense is unique to each person. 57:44 In another sense, it's common to everyone. 57:46 So there's a men pool that's out there and it has all the transactions and they they the every everyone's node. 57:53 Even if you even if you use like Electron, it will tell you it will say this is the men pool and this is how deep each transaction is in the men pool. 58:02 It's a sorting like what I was mentioning before about sorting in a line at the train station. 58:08 So the men pool is really the same for everyone. 58:10 And, you know, that's not literally the case because it's also a sense in which it's unique for each person. 58:16 But the point is that every unconfirmed transaction that you know about can be sorted into a line based on the fee. 58:25 And so everyone's trying to make the the next block. 58:28 And if you have it's what you can do if you have 50 percent is you can orphan the rival blocks. 58:34 But this that's a strategically unstable and it doesn't work because it's too extreme. 58:40 It means no one who's not in the cartel, as you put it, none of the rival miners can earn any money. 58:47 And as a result, it's just too unstable because those people will partner. 58:51 They'll still go with the ample and they'll say, we'll give you anything to leave the foundry coalition and join the rest of us. 58:57 We'll give you ninety nine percent. 59:00 But then foundries cut out and foundries getting zero. 59:02 So then so the whole thing just becomes like a kind of a pointless cost imposed by the miners on themselves and everyone. 59:13 So it doesn't really work. 59:14 So the only thing they can do really doesn't really work. 59:17 Everyone, if you have 10 percent of the hash rate, you will find roughly 10 percent of the blocks. 59:22 It doesn't matter if it's 90 percent versus 10 percent. 59:28 It splits very evenly. 59:30 So but didn't you say, oh, yeah, the dark pools. 59:34 Yeah, sometimes what miners do is they they know each other's phone number. 59:38 And in fact, I think even as early as 2015, according to the information that I was told by credible sources, they have like they have like a shared mempool and they have like different servers and have ways to communicate with each other very quickly and including including spying on each other. 59:57 Which is a but none of these things actually do anything bad. 1:00:00 They actually just help the connectivity of the network, really. 1:00:02 So so what these things do is it doesn't matter. 1:00:06 Like, it doesn't matter if if every miner has an incentive to do the same thing. 1:00:11 It doesn't matter if 100 percent of them are core are coordinated by that incentive. 1:00:17 Or by the you know, by a coordinator who's telling them what to do. 1:00:24 I don't know, I don't know if that last point made sense, but hopefully, no, it does. It does. 1:00:27 So you're saying if one can cut the line, they all can cut the line and they could all do that. 1:00:32 So and at the end of the day, it would just be it's like they're trying to get on 1:00:38 a boat or a ferry or something, and they're all cutting each other in line by the time 1:00:42 by the time they all get on on the ferry because they're cutting each other all the time. 1:00:48 It's mostly the same as if they had just gotten on in an orderly fashion, 1:00:52 except for the ferry took so long to leave that, you know, 1:00:57 two ferries could have gone by then or something. So they're just not really going to do it. 1:01:04 It's my opinion. Of course, you know, anything can happen. But we have we haven't really. 1:01:08 An interesting thing is we don't really see any of the stuff. This is like people in like 1:01:13 academic armchair stuff would predict this about Bitcoin in its early days. They'd say 1:01:17 the hash rate would oscillate or the hash rate would stall out or they would be constant. 1:01:21 There'd be no there's no incentive to propagate blocks. There's like selfish mining. 1:01:25 So people said this, this, this and that and blah, blah, blah. And none of it has really 1:01:29 actually happened. So that and all that stuff is those are like the most extreme scenarios that 1:01:37 academics could think up. But really, I think this metaphor of just a group of people waiting 1:01:43 in line is the best because you know what I mean? Like if you if you you could try to cut in line, 1:01:47 but if the group loses the if they lose the the social norms of the line, then how does anyone 1:01:55 know that they'll ever get, you know, that they'll ever get on the ferry or whatever? 1:02:00 So it just doesn't I think it just doesn't converge to anything. 1:02:03 Okay, I'll leave you with just one point. In fact, maybe I'll put it in this. 1:02:10 Bill Bennett from Barefoot did a podcast with Natalie, what's her name? 1:02:17 Recently, and he brought up some really interesting statistics about 1:02:23 how the layer one chain is going to basically be exhausted with the limited number of transactions 1:02:31 by as I alluded to it earlier, when I said it's going to be crippled by its own success. 1:02:37 But you know, by the end of the decade, and mostly I got it from the math that that Bill 1:02:41 Bennett did. And he I found this this interview fascinating. And I I'll put it up there. I think 1:02:48 it's a it's time well spent listening to what he said. Cool. I'm not familiar with it. But it 1:02:53 sounds interesting. And yeah, I think everyone who studied Bitcoin agrees with well with one 1:02:58 notable exception of the large block the L1 large blocker group. But those people not 1:03:04 withstanding most people want to agree that Bitcoin should scale in layers as they say, 1:03:11 so they will then the L1 chain will only be some used for settlement or it'll be used like it'll 1:03:19 be like the Bank of International Settlements or like the Fed or it'll be like a clearinghouse. 1:03:23 And regular person will be on a different layer that we use a you know, something else. 1:03:28 But now we have lots of hands. And I don't remember who was first, but I think it was 1:03:33 body. But I don't know. Does anyone remember? I don't know. Sorry, if you want. I think Jay, 1:03:38 I think you were third. I'm not sure if that's right. I hope it 1:03:40 is actually crypto is ahead of me. And then and then it was me and then Jane 1:03:44 will do crypto body and then Jay will do that. 1:03:50 Hi, thanks. I'll be quick. Just a few things. So I'm a big fan of essentially what you're 1:03:58 getting at here is like a unified chain protocol. And this is a step above any CCIPs out there. I 1:04:06 think it would redefine CCIPs cross chain interoperability protocols for those that 1:04:11 aren't aware of what those are. But there are some points to be made. I'm just the more I 1:04:16 learn about drivechains and the more I read your bit and come to a better understanding of it. 1:04:22 I do have concerns about the meme pool. And although there is a protocol for, 1:04:29 you know, for the line essentially to be cut off at the end for those who that are not bidding 1:04:36 the most. How do we prevent and increase that line as more adoption and more integration with 1:04:47 other chains before the inevitable adoption and integration with other chains occurs with Bitcoin? 1:04:55 How do we keep the reduction of the congestion going? How do we keep 1:05:03 Bitcoin as a network moving and prevents events like we saw this last week where, you know, 1:05:11 we had 500,000 transactions that were delayed. And, you know, it's costing, 1:05:17 you know, everybody in the line is paying more and more and more and more. So the guy at the 1:05:20 end of the line is trying to, you know, come to the front and, you know, it's just costing an 1:05:26 enormous amount of money and you're going to end up paying a full Bitcoin to send a Bitcoin, you 1:05:30 know, kind of thing. So how do we prevent that? And I don't want to get into it here because 1:05:39 sometimes, you know, Bitcoin folks, you know, they don't enjoy discussing other technologies, 1:05:45 which is kind of absurd to me. But the reality is classical computation is 1:05:53 facing a large threat. And we're seeing blockchains now that have first block candidates 1:05:59 that are quantum computed blocks. These candidates are real. They're there. I won't mention the 1:06:07 blockchain that it's on. But how do you see Bitcoin integrating with quantum chains essentially? 1:06:19 And do you think Bitcoin will survive in a multi-chain world? You know, we have a multi-chain 1:06:25 theory is not just about how blockchains built on classical computers will integrate, interact 1:06:32 with each other. It's about how the next iteration of computing will build blockchains and 1:06:41 write encryption. And will blockchains even really exist? So 5150 attacks are something I 1:06:48 like to focus on. And some, you know, we've seen simulations where 256 bit encryption, where 1:06:56 SHA-256 has been broken and 5150 attacks were successfully deployed. And, you know, addresses 1:07:05 were, wallets were sending, you know, Bitcoin, well, the simulated Bitcoin rather to a specific 1:07:18 address essentially. So maybe you can touch on that. Maybe you can't. Essentially, I'm just 1:07:22 concerned about speed essentially and cost. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for your question. I wrote 1:07:33 an essay that, as I mentioned before, called The Thunder. And I tried to talk about scaling 1:07:39 by sidechains in this essay, which is, if you go to truthcoin.info or you just search 1:07:45 truthcoin thunder, truthcoin is the name of my blog. There's no coin, but I kind of like, 1:07:51 the blog is only for my own benefit. So I never intended it to be big, although it is 1:07:56 kind of popular among certain people. But anyway, you can find this essay and I write all about 1:08:01 how I would think we would meet the throughput, you know, transaction needs of everyone on the 1:08:09 planet Earth, you know, tomorrow using this idea, which I think is, people don't like it because 1:08:16 it involves expensive nodes and the, you know, it involves BIP300 and involves slightly more 1:08:22 active participation. But my view is that right now, we're not giving 8 billion people in the 1:08:33 world any way of actually using Bitcoin tomorrow that is not custodial. So we should just keep 1:08:40 moving in the direction that we can move. And we should always be improving that, but we should 1:08:46 So you should probably read that essay if you want a full description of exactly my point of 1:08:53 view and exactly what I think should happen. And I think, you know, money is in like a big, 1:08:58 it's inherently hierarchical in my view. So you have like a bank of international 1:09:02 settlements on top and you have the different central banks of the world 1:09:08 and been slightly beneath that. And then in the Fed, in the United States, the Federal Reserve, 1:09:15 we have all the member banks, you know, which would include many small banks, 1:09:18 but also includes like Bank of America, Chase, whatever. So Wells Fargo. So then, 1:09:25 and then you have a, you know, credit card company has an account at Chase and then you have 1:09:31 cash and you have IOUs, you have Venmo, all those people have an account at, 1:09:37 you know, at Wells Fargo or whatever. I think it is absurd that we don't 1:09:42 talk about technology and other chains. And it's kind of, I asked myself in what other scenario 1:09:48 would that be rational? You know what I mean? Like if you were running 1:09:53 Walmart, wouldn't you talk about what Target is doing? Like, wouldn't that be mostly what 1:09:57 you would talk about? But it speaks to how people in Bitcoin have this view that is entirely based 1:10:03 on like a meme. It's entirely based on attention and awareness. And that unfortunately I think 1:10:09 is related to the immersion of the cult, which is thinks that it's completely like they literally 1:10:15 believe in a way that Bitcoin is like an NFT or something where it's just, if it exists in people's 1:10:20 minds, if it exists as like a photograph or a word, that's the only existence that it has. 1:10:26 So I think it's kind of, in a way it is a lack of faith in Bitcoin. But yeah, the quantum thing is 1:10:33 very interesting because I always heard people say that that's really far off. And then I heard 1:10:38 after years of research, there was like four qubits. And I thought it was like people said, 1:10:42 yeah, it's going to take another 20 years to get to like 12 qubits. 1:10:44 No, it's been here for the last three years, Paul. I mean, IBM specifically, you usually have 1:10:50 to contact kind of one of their engineers directly or kind of really look on the internet. But three 1:10:56 years ago, they did the simulation that I was referencing. And I was referencing their work, 1:11:00 their quantum team's work. And SHA-256 was obliterated and they successfully 1:11:07 deployed a 5150 on their simulated Bitcoin network. 1:11:13 Yeah, I heard it was getting up to like hundreds or something. And I was like, wow, 1:11:17 that's really big. So yeah, the quantum algorithms do exist. And I think obviously, 1:11:24 if something was really broken, it would be a no brainer. Who would be pushing against 1:11:29 switching the quantum resistant algorithms? But I think they're very inefficient in terms of how 1:11:34 much, you know, like I think the signature is like 8000 bytes or something. I think something 1:11:39 like that, which is big, way worse than 64. So it'd be 100 times bigger. That would be unfortunate. 1:11:48 But yeah, I think that, you know, it's just a simple matter of if the quantum technology goes 1:11:55 there, then everything will have to switch. And it will just be, but I mean, that would be too bad, 1:12:00 because I know it would be much more expensive to run. But it might also stimulate, I mean, 1:12:05 everyone would have to do it. So it might stimulate, you know, more R&D in like bigger hard drives. 1:12:11 I kind of think hard drives have kind of stopped getting bigger, because now they're actually so 1:12:15 big that even a regular person using a PC like doesn't, you know, you don't really even fill 1:12:20 them up. It doesn't matter how many selfies you take. People get like a one terabyte, 1:12:24 three terabyte drive, it really is too big. So maybe there would be just more advancements. And 1:12:29 I'm not sure. But I think that everyone would have to do it. And we would have to help out, 1:12:35 we would feel bad about Bitcoin being harder to run on a relative basis. But we would be, 1:12:39 we could feel good about having quantum computers that would maybe like, I don't know, 1:12:44 solve other problems for mankind. Yeah, I think it's difficult to, sorry, I mean, it is absurd, 1:12:50 because especially this concept of quantum resistance, it's just such a, it's such a funny 1:12:56 concept. And you're right, I think a lot of Bitcoin maximalists and these, you know, these, 1:13:02 these even core devs on Bitcoin, they're not actual cryptographers, they're not actual 1:13:07 mathematicians. And they'll tell you they're not. And they'll tell you not to talk about S-coins 1:13:10 or other technology, which is obscene, which is why we're seeing such small amounts of innovation 1:13:17 on Bitcoin, and blockchain in general. But this idea of quantum resistant classical computers, 1:13:24 quantum resistant software that's predicated on classical computation, there's no such thing as 1:13:31 quantum resistant systems, unless those systems are coded with quantum computer code. And they're 1:13:40 housed on quantum computers or a computer that can process small amounts. Well, it would have to be 1:13:46 an enormous amount of really large computers to process quantum computations at scale and be 1:13:51 secure. But, um, yeah, I agree with you that the word absurd is, is just scratching the surface 1:14:00 when it comes to how we should define, you know, the these core devs and, you know, most of the 1:14:07 focus on blockchain, it's, it's not secure and calling Bitcoin or any other blockchain quantum 1:14:14 resistant or any technology quantum resistant, because you have some protocol from NIST, just 1:14:19 because NIST is telling you that, hey, this, this, this, this integration will make your system 1:14:26 quantum resistant. Well, like I said, it's classical computer, it's classical computation, 1:14:32 it's not quantum resistant. And I thank you and I applaud you for even engaging, because a lot of 1:14:40 people don't, and you're right, it's out of fear, it's out of ignorance, it's out of just, it's out 1:14:47 of the fear of attacking quantum computation and understanding it and understanding these quantum 1:14:53 bits and understanding how to code them and understanding the, the computational engineering 1:14:58 behind what it takes to build this and sustain even a single qubit. So yeah, awesome. 1:15:07 Hey, well, hey, thanks for your question. Thank you. 1:15:12 Okay, I guess Badi was second, right? 1:15:16 Hey, thanks for giving me the opportunity to ask some questions. I definitely like to pull, pull 1:15:22 back a little bit to drivechains and maybe ask something that's a few, I wouldn't call them 1:15:27 technical, you know, because I'm like an advanced blood, definitely not dev level. So my first 1:15:32 question would be that, given the three month timeline, where you'd have basically 25,000 1:15:37 transactions that could peg back into Bitcoin every three months, which seems a bit slow. 1:15:43 Do you think or what do you think about the potential for people to try and form bridges 1:15:47 anyways? Because, I mean, you know, we see atomic swaps with other chains, we see bridges 1:15:52 and Ethereum getting more like, at least more secure than they used to be. Do you think that 1:15:57 potential exists with drivechains? You know, people will do the atomic swaps. I think that's 1:16:04 correct. Or even that, or they will go further and they will just straight up use Coinbase or 1:16:08 whatever, you know, like they'll just deposit L2 coins, trade, and then withdraw. And they don't 1:16:14 even, you know, they'll use like a custodial swap. But if you don't want to use, do that, 1:16:21 then you can use the same HTLCs that power the Lightning Network, you would just make a, 1:16:27 you know, you say, I'll pay, A pays B, two sidechain coins conditional on magic R being 1:16:33 revealed. And then you see the same thing, use the same hash H of R on L1. So it's just two 1:16:40 transactions. One of the two parties knows both of the Rs, since it's the same R. And they either 1:16:47 reveal R and the both of the trades go through or they don't reveal R and the time lock expires and 1:16:53 the funds are returned. So people will do that. All the people, most people will do that. Most 1:16:59 people will not use the slow thing. I think you're right. I made it three months because people kept 1:17:03 complaining about my, I was originally two weeks and I had in mind five and six hours, which is 1:17:09 how long it took for us to fix the inflation bug. And that also led to a 2015 downgrade botched 1:17:16 BIP-66 activation. So those were emergencies that happened like in literally in like the middle of 1:17:22 the night and they were still fixed in five or six hours. And some of them involved like writing 1:17:28 code or releasing new versions or getting people to change what their computer was doing. So I was 1:17:33 thinking five, six hours, that's the time to beat. And I made it two weeks and I thought no one will 1:17:38 ever complain about this, but people kept complaining about miners can steal. So I made it 1:17:43 three months. And I have to tell you, I have second guessed it more and more because it seems like 1:17:48 people still complain about miners can steal. They don't, they don't seem to really understand 1:17:52 the relationship between the amount of time and the unlikelihood of that happening. So I think 1:17:59 maybe I was wrong to make it longer because the critics who were saying that clearly 1:18:05 misunderstand that aspect of it, I think. But nonetheless, it doesn't really matter 1:18:10 because most people will swap out instantly. They'll bridge out using something else. 1:18:14 They're free to invent any number of things to swap L1 coins for L2 coins. The sidechain is 1:18:20 always aware of everything that happens on L1, so it should be very easy to build a plethora of ways of 1:18:27 switching the coins. So, excuse me one second, excuse me, I'm sorry, isn't three months if no one 1:18:33 objects and if there is a controversy, isn't it six months? Only 51% of the hash rate 1:18:41 support the withdrawal and the other 49% are indifferent or just not 1:18:47 paying attention. That is six months. So it's three, so it used to be two to four weeks. 1:18:55 Yeah, I'd be interested if any of the people objecting to that timeline, to any timeline, 1:19:00 could produce a statistical analysis that shows the likelihood of, you know, a negative adverse 1:19:06 event happening. Because I mean, you know, there's always the potential that we could reorg, say, 10 1:19:11 blocks, but like what's the real odds that we're going to reorg 10 blocks? It's just so incredibly 1:19:16 low that it's probably never going to happen unless there's some kind of crazy tail risk event. 1:19:21 Okay, so yeah, I mean, I think that that makes sense that yeah, people will form bridges, but 1:19:26 probably people will just use exchanges anyways, unfortunately, which has been the trend for this, 1:19:31 basically the entire crypto experiment. So my next question then is, why wouldn't, why wouldn't... 1:19:42 But I was just saying, like, it was hours and then it changed it from hours to weeks, 1:19:46 I moved it up two notches, and then I moved it from weeks to months. And that's, that's kind of 1:19:51 like what I was thinking, because the point is, it's just a really long time. Anyway, sorry to 1:19:56 drop off like that. Please continue whatever you were, you're saying that 1:20:00 we don't really have big reorgs now anyway, so... 1:20:04 Yeah, yeah, I was mostly getting at the critics, like if a critic doesn't produce some kind of analysis, a statistical analysis, which shows the likelihood of an adverse event, and it's like, okay, are you, are you criticizing from a place of knowledge? Are you just criticizing from a place of ignorance or because you just don't like something or because someone else told you not to like it? Anyways, that's kind of get almost getting off the rails there. My next question would be about, so okay, if we accept that people are probably just going to use bridges, and or exchanges, unfortunately, which seems to be the trend where people 1:20:34 tend to use exchanges more than anything. Why wouldn't we be able to do something like a sovereign rollup using inscription data for like the data availability layer? 1:20:43 What would be, what would be other than the blind merge mining, what would be the difference between a drivechain and the way that you envision it versus something like a sovereign rollup? 1:20:52 Because I think, you know, the bridge ecosystem is getting pretty decent in Ethereum, for example, where they do these rollups. 1:20:59 What are your thoughts on that? Like, are there significant differences there? I've kind of been asking this question, I can't really find a good answer to it. So you're probably the guy to answer it. 1:21:08 Okay, well, if I remember my vocab correctly, the sovereign rollup is just using the, the blockchain is like a parking lot for data. So the sovereign rollup is not the good one. 1:21:20 So sovereign rollup does kind of doesn't mean anything. It's just like a, it's like a taproot inscription, or like an operatron or something. It just says, we've dumped the data. 1:21:28 It keeps the data availability for the sidechain, like, because nodes need data availability. So it connects that data availability directly to Bitcoin. 1:21:37 It's saying the Ethereum rollups need the data to be somewhere. So they park the Ethereum data on Bitcoin. It's kind of like, this is exactly what we probably don't want. 1:21:47 Because now there's, Ethereum is using our blockchain. I mean, they pay for it. But it's, it's the opposite of what I had in mind, which is that you would have, 1:22:00 we are, Bitcoiners would go to it, would conjure up something new, instead of using L1 BTC block space, conjure up a new blockchain, go over there, and it would be magic Ethereum layer two blockchain, and then come back. 1:22:12 This is like the, the altcoin Ethereum is invading the BTC blockchain. 1:22:18 Okay, that makes sense. Finally, I've been asking so many people this on Twitter, and no one could tell me that. No, that makes sense. You're trying to not waste Bitcoin block space, even if it's just inscription block space. 1:22:30 Right. So the rollups, they have different meanings. And the meaning is very significant. So the sovereign one, I think, should honestly be renamed, if I understand it correctly, which I, 1:22:42 you do, you do. 1:22:44 So it's like, it should really be renamed, because it's not, it doesn't really, that, you know, what people think of with the rollup idea is something like, we have a special temporary, a block, we conjure a block, it's very sidechain, like we conjure a block somewhere, and everything in there is wet concrete. 1:23:02 And then at the end, we can compress that down, we roll it up, and put the compressed thing in ETH. And as long as not enough, as long as enough people cooperate, then we get away with it. And if they don't, then we only get away with a little of it. And so, so it's a neat compression thing. 1:23:21 The, this idea is slightly different than that, because I have in mind, I have compression in mind. That's true. That's the scaling sidechain idea. But I have a little bit more on my plate than just that, because I also have like disagreement in mind, I have like, someone wants to rewrite the whole blockchain from scratch in Rust, or they want to write it in JavaScript, or they want to do something, they have to invent their own thing that no one else can even wrap their head around, like some weird, 1:23:51 you know, autistic genius stereotype, and they come up with their own thing, and no one can figure out what it is. And it's just kind of like, they create it, and then the miners just kind of shrug, and they say, I don't know, we'll give it a try, I guess we can always shut it off later. And then it ends up being like this huge thing. So I have a kind of more of a creativity idea in mind, in addition to the compression. 1:24:18 That's like my philosophy, like design criterion for this project. 1:24:24 Okay, I think so. If I think mostly, if I understood what you're saying is that you're not, you're not using so much of the block space, you're really just connecting back to the Bitcoin blockchain as minimally as necessary to, to prevent it from becoming basically an altcoin, because every coin on there is connected back to Bitcoin. And you're really using up a very small amount of block space to make that peg back in and out of L1 to L2. 1:24:50 Just for just so sovereign roll ups, so called are basically they make the data availability for the sidechain, you know, like a nodes, a whole sidechain with a bunch of different nodes, you could set it up in different ways. 1:25:03 Yeah, the the sovereign roll ups, quote, unquote, are a data availability. That's the compression. It's like the data that you need to reconstruct the node. 1:25:10 The optimistic roll ups, basically, they operate kind of like lightning, where it's like, okay, they submit something on chain, if no one submits a proof to the contrary, within X amount of time, then everyone regards that as being, you know, the source of truth. 1:25:24 And then validity roll ups are actually what I think one another way that Bitcoin needs to scale is validity roll ups, which you actually like, you can't post on chain, the transaction wouldn't be accepted, unless the unless it's actually a valid roll up of all the transactions. 1:25:40 It's like a cryptographic way of doing that, which is more complex that the math is kind of moon math. But I guess it's getting more and more accepted. So anyways, those are the kind of like the different roll ups. 1:25:50 So I thought sovereign roll ups would make a lot of sense with inscriptions, but it would take some block space. So I think, oh, you know, one small question, how would we account for transaction like future transaction fees, you know, if future transaction fees shoot up to say $100, or something like a lot of Bitcoin or say, could you end up getting stuck kind of in, in a drivechain, or would the alternative ways of getting out like, like bridges and or exchanges? 1:26:17 Would that be able to perhaps facilitate exiting the drivechain, if he shot up in the future? 1:26:23 I think it's worse, I think if they shoot up, like if the L1 fee rate shoots up very much, then, like, let's say it's, let's say you have $50 on the L2, and the L1 fee rate shoots up to $100, you know, whatever per transaction, you in, you don't ever want to leave. 1:26:45 So it's, it's actually drivechain is probably the best in that scenario. Because in most of the time, you have some kind of like, in like enlightening you, you've got the coins are locked to one multisig output, or they're locked to, like, you know, the channel factory, which is like a whatever 10 of 10, multisig output, or whatever it is. 1:27:12 And leaving would be just destroying all of your money. So like, by leaving, I mean, if you get pulled down from L2 to L1, this is now a disaster for the $50 is, is completely lost. 1:27:24 So you don't want that. And but the good news is, with drivechain, you don't actually have to go back ever, you can just stay on L2, which to me is very similar. It's an analogy to how most people do not have an account at the actual Federal Reserve or at the Bank of International Settlements. You just have an account at Wells Fargo or something. 1:27:48 And you never, and you never like when you're going to sleep at night, you don't think, Oh, no. Will I ever get my, you know, my federal reserves? You're like, you don't care. No one cares, because everyone's on the network that they care about. And so I think that that is a possible outcome. But yeah, if the L1 fee rates are very high, then most of lightning will not work. And I think even, well, Moon Settler is a, 1:28:19 in my opinion, the sort of an authority on this particular topic. And I guess maybe Alex Kravitz, they like this feepocalypse scenario. They're very interested in that. But they kind of think like, most things will not work if if slash when that happens. And but but I think all three of us would say the drivechain actually would continue to work in that scenario. 1:28:43 Because you can accumulate more and more coins, you can go from 50 to 51, 52, 53. And then maybe eventually, you could go to L1. But since it's because you're never forced to go back by like a channel close or something, you can hang out there. That's my thought. 1:29:01 Okay, yeah, I think a lot of I think pretty much all Bitcoiners would be amenable to that, that concept that yeah, you just stay in the L2. Why would you go back to L1? Unless you're doing some like, significant amount of funds. So yeah, I think that's all I had. Maybe I'll just kind of leave with a personal opinion on seeing the Bitcoin space in general is realizing that lightning is not this panacea of solutions. And that in fact, it might fail under high fees. We saw the kind of inkling of that back in March and April. 1:29:31 Maybe it was May, I can't I don't remember exactly now. But um, yeah, so I think there I think everyone is kind of feeling this sense of urgency that some kind of layer two does need to be developed. And maybe we should be pursuing multiple layer twos at the same time, maybe pursuing one layer two over the past six years wasn't the best solution. Maybe we should have gone multiple paths. And, you know, that way, we'd find the ones that work faster than iterating once every six years. So anyways, thanks for your time and have a good one. 1:29:56 Cool, thank you. All right, Jay, thanks for your patience. 1:30:03 Hey, Paul, how are you? 1:30:06 I'm doing pretty well, I think. 1:30:08 Yeah, I want to keep this really high level. So someone talked about polarizing on the real technical side. So I want to just give some insight as to why I think it's so polarizing. And then maybe compare it to something like Rootstock. And then like, ask you a question that's kind of leading and see if if I'm on the same page yet. How does that sound? 1:30:33 Let's do it. 1:30:34 it. right. So I think the reason why it's so polarizing 1:30:40 is that a lot of people from the real low -level practical side 1:30:46 understood Drivechains as something more substantial. 1:30:49 When I say more substantial, 1:31:03 You know, my old arguments and a lot of those arguments kind of hold. And, you know, so so now that now that from my perspective, you know, drivechain is not trying to do what other so called sidechains like the word sidechain is like, necessarily use POW to secure sidechain. 1:31:27 However, this nuance really doesn't, you know, doesn't flow to like the general public. So everyone's thinking, oh, drivechain does everything when really, it doesn't. And so my question is, and this will see if we're on the same page. 1:31:44 Okay, well, I don't I don't really know, because I'm not actually sure what I'm very familiar with classical merge mining. 1:32:15 And then I don't know, I think Rootstock did something else slightly, where they, but I'm not sure about that, because they have like this other thing. And I never know how much the HSM are involved or so unfortunately, I don't exactly know they have some kind of like, extra thing. 1:32:31 And why merge mining is designed to be a situation where instead of thermodynamic energy, you pay with L1 coins. And other than that, it's supposed to be mostly the same, although, as you and I know, there are slightly subtle differences. 1:32:53 And there's even some advantages, tiny advantages, and some tiny disadvantages that I don't think are that important. 1:33:01 Exactly. So the this, you know, the other sidechains, when people say sidechain, and they say merge mining sidechain, what they're saying is that we have some miners, some shanty 56 miners, and I'm trying not to try and stay high level some, some Bitcoin miners that actually run the sidechain and insert into their Bitcoin block, you know, the hash of the state of the sidechain. 1:33:24 And what that does is that kind of secures the sidechain with POW, you know, in a sense, right? You're explicitly and you know, that opens up these kind of worms. And you're, you know, that's why that's what the issue is. And you're explicitly saying no, no, no, that's not what drivechain does, because you don't need the miners to fork to reorg the sidechain. 1:33:49 So there's a difference in intent, whether it's not a difference, maybe it's the same physical action that's happening on the sidechain, but the intent is different. And I think that's really important as to why it doesn't affect the main chain. And that's kind of like, why I'm kind of now agnostic to drivechains, because, you know, it, it's kind of like, okay, now we have all these sidechains, and how are we going to secure them, and now we're using, you know, a different way of doing it. 1:34:16 And it just doesn't just come for free, like it would, you know, in, in a merge mine. And that's like, I just was, I got on stage with someone mentioned polarizing, and I think that's where it's coming from. 1:34:30 Really? That's interesting. Yeah, you're right. I kind of forgot about that, that you can reorg the sidechain independently of the main chain. But isn't that also kind of true in Namecoin? Can't you say I will mine a Namecoin block with merge mining? I'll mine if we're on Bitcoin block 500,000 and Namecoin block like 3000. 1:34:53 Can't I mine 500,001 and a block that would be like Namecoin like 2900B or something? I think you still could. I don't know. If anyone... 1:35:05 I think it would be on the Namecoin side, it would be a considered, you just would have forked off and we would have ignored you. I think, I don't remember Namecoin exactly. But that was the idea is that no, everyone's like consensus is that blocks already done and you can't reorg unless the main chains reorg. Like explicitly, you know, like the social consensus is, hey, the only way to fork Namecoin is to fork the main chain. So that's how we get the security. Like, that's the theoretical, like, that's where I was coming from. 1:35:35 Is that really true for like everything counterparty, Omni, etc. related, where there is no other way to reorg it other than to reorg? 1:35:45 Exactly. 1:35:47 That's an interesting question. I just assumed that it was, that you could also, but I don't, because what I'm thinking of in my head, I'm remembering that Wikipedia article on the Wikipedia Bitcoin.it, where it's like the Namecoin sidechain, the Namecoin altcoins header is like this 200 byte thing that contains a Bitcoin header. 1:36:09 And you could contain, you could put any, maybe, I don't know, I'll have to look, I'll look into that. I'll research that. I think that's an interesting question. 1:36:17 I just assumed that you could reorg Namecoin independently of Bitcoin because you find 500,001. And because one reason is that I know for a fact, this is something that I found to be highly amusing. 1:36:35 During the split between Bitcoin Cash and BTC, the hash rate oscillated with some, sometimes it was like a relative peak in BTC and sometimes a relative peak BCH and it would kind of go back and forth. 1:36:48 So we had like a situation where many BTC blocks were found at once, but then many BCH. 1:36:56 Well, when the BCH ones are being found, the BTC ones are not being found. And then every two weeks it would like be like switching back and forth, two weeks in quotes. 1:37:05 And I remember Namecoin is skimming the top blocks from each chain and it had the most proof of work during that period. 1:37:14 And I thought that was the funniest thing ever because, in part because the large blockers were insisting that proof of work would determine what Bitcoin was. 1:37:22 And so that meant Namecoin was Bitcoin. 1:37:24 No, I thought it was. 1:37:26 So I don't know how that applies, but I think because it's only the header, so it doesn't even know what the state is, but I'm not sure. 1:37:34 I will look into it. 1:37:37 Anyway, cool. That would be interesting if the polarization resulted from people projecting what Namecoin does and what Rootstock planned to do in 2015 into the presence. 1:37:51 Yeah, I think a lot of this polarization stems from 2014 days, to be honest. 1:37:57 And back then there was actually, you know, let's even go further back. 1:38:00 Back then there was actually distributed hash rate and it's a whole other world now. 1:38:05 So anyway, thanks for doing this, guys. 1:38:09 Thank you. 1:38:10 Yeah, you're definitely right that there was a dream. 1:38:14 I think this is partly this is like this percent thing that I brought up to Peter on Twitter about when Bitcoin is really small and there's only 100 miners, maybe there's only 10 miners. 1:38:26 Everyone can have 10% of the hash rate. 1:38:29 But then once you have 101, once the network grows and you have 101 people mining, they can't all have 1% because of just the somehow percents work. 1:38:40 So so eventually the ratio of people mining, you know, to like if the network gets really, really big, then, you know, you don't maybe you don't feel quite as good. 1:38:53 You feel like these other people have so much such a high percentage. 1:38:58 But that's just a consequence of Bitcoin succeeding. 1:39:01 It's kind of ironic. 1:39:03 Anyway, I think Justin was the next to join and then JP, who has been here the whole time, raised his hand again. 1:39:11 So. 1:39:13 Justin. 1:39:14 Yeah. 1:39:17 Hey, nice to meet you. 1:39:19 I had a quick easy question. 1:39:22 Has the. 1:39:24 The transaction fee raised. 1:39:29 Or going lower or going higher over time as as a percentage of the transaction or, in other words, denominated in Satoshi's rather than dollars. 1:39:40 Has that because I've searched for such a chart and I have not been able to locate it. 1:39:46 Oh, I'm blanking on the name now, but there is a place that has it. 1:39:49 I think it's my gosh, I'm blanking on the name. 1:39:52 I was just looking at it. 1:39:53 Let me see if you see my little bit more relevant. 1:40:04 Rather than denominated in dollars, I'll try to find. 1:40:08 Oh, no, it's not in my bookmarks. 1:40:11 I have my Bitcoin bookmarks, but I don't have it. 1:40:13 It was like BTC info charts or something. 1:40:17 There's a place that has that exact graph. 1:40:18 And you can also try blockchain.info or blockchain.com as it is now called. 1:40:24 And they have charts somewhere. 1:40:26 And I think you could probably find that. 1:40:28 But I happen to know that that graph does exist. 1:40:31 And I even put it in a slide of mine at one point when I was, I think it was TabConf, February 2019 or something, right before COVID, I think. 1:40:41 But the story with pricing it in Satoshi's, I think, is a mistake. 1:40:50 And it has nothing to do with wanting the dollar to succeed or fail or wanting Bitcoin to succeed or fail. 1:40:56 It's just because it's like you could, the really ideal thing would be to price it into like in hamburgers or something, a purchasing power. 1:41:03 You know, how many, you know, how many bottles of water or something, you know? 1:41:07 Like it just wants to be a relatable unit. 1:41:10 And so I think the smart thing to do is to keep it priced in US dollars or price it in hamburgers, price it in something else. 1:41:19 Because what you really want to know is the purchasing power of like, what do I sacrifice? 1:41:24 What is the opportunity cost of obtaining like 220 bytes of L1 block space? 1:41:33 So my view is that we shouldn't do that. 1:41:34 But such a chart does exist. 1:41:37 I know that it does. 1:41:38 Paul, what you're saying is if the price of Bitcoin drops 99%, then fees are down 99%. 1:41:44 So if anyone complains about high fees, they're complaining that because Bitcoin price just went up a thousand percent. 1:41:49 So now my fees went up a thousand percent, but the fees haven't, nothing changed. 1:41:52 That's the problem like when you're pricing in dollars. 1:41:55 No, no, no. 1:41:58 Because if the price, if you want to price in, it's like if the, because if the Bitcoin price goes up by 100x, then the fees in Satoshis will tend to fall by 100x. 1:42:10 No, fees won't change. 1:42:13 There's a fee rate. 1:42:15 The fee rate could be anything. 1:42:16 It doesn't have to like be a certain number of Satoshi. 1:42:18 It could be one Satoshi per transaction. 1:42:20 So it can go below one Sat per Vbyte. 1:42:22 It can go to like any number it wants, and it can and it will, and for a while they were free. 1:42:27 So I think the, I think it's a confounding variable, the exchange rate. 1:42:35 What does happen is when the exchange rate is rising enormously, like when we're in the huge bubble time. 1:42:41 When it's a, you know, a laissez-les bon temps rouler, you know, where we're having a big party because we have ATH. 1:42:50 And when that's happening, no one cares about the fee because everyone's making so much money and everyone wants to get in. 1:42:57 So people are willing to pay fees during these unusual times. 1:43:00 These like, you know, which has happened like four or five times in Bitcoin's history. 1:43:08 It, that has happened, and so during those times no one cares about the fee. 1:43:16 And so, but yeah, I think what you see if you look at the fees is that they don't sustainably go above like one or two dollars per transaction. 1:43:29 They have occasionally been, for example, there was a different site. 1:43:34 And if you search, if you search my Twitter, if you search like from TruthCoin like a thousand dollars, you might find it. 1:43:41 But there is a site that explained, that chronicled the number of transactions that paid more than a certain fee in US dollar terms. 1:43:51 And many transactions paid more than a thousand dollars in fee at a certain point in Bitcoin's history. 1:43:59 And these, this is a long, it takes a little while to explain, but it involves a lot of consolidating inputs and things. 1:44:06 And so... 1:44:07 Notice those sites have to get historical price data, right? 1:44:11 And then match that to stats, and it's weird. 1:44:15 They do. 1:44:16 Yeah, but you wouldn't say like if I'm paying, let's say I'm paying, because a block space is different than a coin. 1:44:25 There's one megabyte, or four megabytes of block weight space every ten minutes. 1:44:33 So... 1:44:35 So why should how much, you know, the relative value of like a Ferrari versus a hamburger. 1:44:44 That's not going to change necessarily when, if we switch from US dollar to Bitcoin. 1:44:50 So why would the ratio of block space necessarily change by the exact same factor? 1:44:57 If you switch from, if we all switch from US dollar to BTC, or the whole world does. 1:45:05 It's not, you wouldn't, that changes the relative value of BTC, but it does not necessarily... 1:45:12 Well obviously in that scenario it would increase the demand for block space, but that's kind of a different thing. 1:45:17 If we switched over, but people made the same number, same quantity of Bitcoin transactions. 1:45:22 You know what I mean? 1:45:23 Like we have hyper-Bitcoinization, but the same number of L1 transactions versus the same number of Ferraris are produced each year and purchased. 1:45:32 So it's only the supply and demand for the transactions that would change the price of block space. 1:45:40 And it's the supply and demand for US dollar versus Bitcoin that would change that price. 1:45:47 And conceivably, I can see a future where, for example, in the news recently I saw Deutsche Bank is going to start allowing customers to store Bitcoin directly, natively at their banks. 1:46:04 Conceivably you can imagine a future where you buy your Bitcoin from somewhere. 1:46:12 It never actually touches the blockchain, but it's protected by the law. 1:46:18 And the law says that you now have a note, an actual convertible note. 1:46:25 It's at the bank. 1:46:26 Absolutely, I mean how Finney wrote about it. 1:46:28 You can store it, spend it, without even touching the blockchain. 1:46:32 Yeah, how Finney wrote about, he has a post on Bitcoin Talk that is called Bitcoin Banks, I believe. 1:46:38 He says, well, maybe Bitcoin is high-powered money and regular people won't even realize that they use Bitcoin. 1:46:45 So a lot of people have this idea in mind. 1:46:47 I think that's great. 1:46:48 You know, obviously, I think that's good. 1:46:50 If that happens, I'll obviously be a very happy Bitcoiner. 1:46:55 I think we should continue to build out, you know, tech so that regular people could use it if they wanted to. 1:47:02 But I think that would be great. 1:47:04 I would obviously be very happy about that outcome. 1:47:06 I'm kind of a little skeptic. 1:47:08 I mean, I think it was a good idea. 1:47:11 I don't think, back when Hal Finney wrote that, I don't think people imagined that there would be so many altcoins and so much competitive pressure. 1:47:20 And so many people pushing the envelope in every different direction to try to attract users. 1:47:30 But yeah, I'm going to remember what that site is in a second. 1:47:36 And then I'll tell you where you can find that graph. 1:47:38 And conceivably, you know, the flip side of that devil's advocate is that people in places where there's no strong banking laws 1:47:48 and little trust in the banks will just have to use either their own lightning or layer one. 1:48:01 It's not BitInfoCharts. That's not what I was thinking of. 1:48:03 But BitInfoCharts probably also has it. 1:48:06 I don't remember the one I was thinking of. 1:48:10 Thanks. I'll find it. 1:48:13 But I think BitInfoCharts probably does have it also, because it has a lot of charts. 1:48:18 Is it fork.lol? 1:48:21 No, fork.lol is good, but maybe it was fork.lol. 1:48:24 No, I'm thinking of the one with, it's like blue. 1:48:26 It's like white background with like blue charts and like light blue text. 1:48:30 Oh, well. 1:48:32 Anyway, yes, we have more hands. 1:48:34 Body. 1:48:36 I suppose. 1:48:38 Hey, I just had one question while Jay was talking. 1:48:40 So in Lightning, you can't really have a sovereign LN channel without a main chain transaction 1:48:46 because you need the ability to have a sovereign LN channel. 1:48:50 And you can't really have a sovereign LN channel without a main chain transaction. 1:48:55 In Lightning, you can't really have a sovereign LN channel without a main chain transaction 1:48:59 because you need the ability to settle on chain. 1:49:01 Could you hypothetically receive a drivechain coin directly 1:49:05 while retaining the ability to settle back onto main chain? 1:49:10 Yeah, it works very differently. 1:49:12 This is a big difference between drivechain and the Lightning Network. 1:49:16 In the Lightning Network, you have to start, someone has to start on L1. 1:49:20 Someone like your channel counterpart. 1:49:22 It's a multisig output that you own half of on L1. 1:49:26 And if you don't have that, you're not on the Lightning Network. 1:49:29 But in drivechain, it works differently. 1:49:33 You can just receive coins on L2 because no one, everyone has partial ownership of the same single UTXO. 1:49:40 It's like a shared UTXO covenant sort of. 1:49:44 And so there's this one UTXO on L1. 1:49:49 So what would happen in the extreme case would be a very wealthy person. 1:49:55 They would make one transaction on L1 to move the coins from L1 to L2. 1:50:03 They'd move like 10,000 coins over and then they onboard people over there. 1:50:08 And everyone's sharing the same UTXO on L1. 1:50:13 And it's true that when you sacrifice with this is that you cannot, 1:50:18 you don't have the ability to force yourself to get a refund on L1. 1:50:25 But you see that is exactly the thing that is actually a disadvantage. 1:50:29 Especially if the L1 fee rates rise. 1:50:32 But even when it's not, the upkeep and the overhead required to make that happen 1:50:38 actually make it unusable when the fee rates are too high. 1:50:42 And that means the whole thing is actually defeated when the fee rates are too high. 1:50:48 Versus with Drivechain, it actually doesn't matter. 1:50:50 Since it doesn't crucially rely on that and it relies on a different thing, 1:50:54 which is the fees, the merge mining fees and the slow withdrawal. 1:50:59 Since it relies on a completely different system, 1:51:01 it would not fall apart when the L1 fee rates rise or when there's any kind of L1 congestion. 1:51:09 So it's a big difference. It's very different. 1:51:15 It's funny because when I first came up with the idea, 1:51:17 I thought that was like a disadvantage. 1:51:19 And then I would meet with all these people, our technical people, 1:51:21 and they would say, you have to have what I think they call a unilateral exit. 1:51:24 You have to have a way if the sidechain stops for everyone to get their money out. 1:51:28 And I was like, OK, maybe I could do it like this. 1:51:31 But how do I know? 1:51:32 And then L1 isn't going to know, like, what is enforced? 1:51:35 Like, how does L1 know that this is what the unilateral exit should be? 1:51:40 But now I think that is a mistake. 1:51:42 And I think that actually what you should do is not do that 1:51:47 because trying to enforce that actually causes it to stop. 1:51:51 The whole thing just kind of stopped working is my guess. 1:51:55 It's actually better not to do that. 1:52:06 So I think... 1:52:09 Yes, we have a... 1:52:11 JP, you've re-raised your hand first, but we do have a new person. 1:52:16 SarahT... 1:52:18 So... 1:52:22 I guess, why don't we go with Sarah first. 1:52:24 Hi. 1:52:25 Hi. 1:52:26 I, like... 1:52:28 I don't know a lot about drivechains. 1:52:31 I'm fairly new to this. 1:52:33 Like, I'm not new to Bitcoin, but I'm new to the whole drivetrain thing. 1:52:38 And... 1:52:40 Theoretically, I'm for it. 1:52:42 I think if we could drag a bunch of the shitcoiners into the Bitcoin sphere, 1:52:47 that would be great for Bitcoin adoption. 1:52:50 However, my concern... 1:52:53 is how does this affect the base chain? 1:53:03 Like, specifically for me, 1:53:05 I don't necessarily need a whole bunch of functionality with my money. 1:53:08 I'm a pretty simple person. 1:53:11 And... 1:53:13 My concern is that if we start adding base drivechains, 1:53:17 it's going to drive up the fee cost 1:53:19 and create a bunch of congestion on the base layer. 1:53:25 And I guess my question is how... 1:53:27 How does drivechain mitigate that? 1:53:34 Yeah, it's designed to... 1:53:38 utterly minimize the impact on the base chain in many different ways. 1:53:43 So, for a start, 1:53:45 layer one is never going to look at any of the sidechain software 1:53:50 or any of the sidechain blocks or any of their transactions at all. 1:53:54 And in fact, BIP300 itself is an optional soft fork, 1:53:57 so you don't even actually need to upgrade your full node 1:54:02 to do anything at all, necessarily. 1:54:05 Even if you wanted to... 1:54:07 It depends on what wallet you would have. 1:54:09 It's theoretically possible to use the feature 1:54:11 even if you do not run a node that supports BIP300 or even any node. 1:54:15 So, on L1, it is just a counter that is counting to 13,000 over and over again, 1:54:21 which is these capsules that start off and move slowly from L2 to L1. 1:54:29 But of course, what really is just happening 1:54:31 is they're in an L1 coinbase, 1:54:33 and they move slowly from one L1 coinbase to finality, 1:54:38 and they can be included on the L1 blockchain. 1:54:43 So, you're only tracking the miners 1:54:49 who have decided to bless a certain withdrawal, 1:54:54 which is just one hash. 1:54:56 So, it's very, very, very, very, very small on L1. 1:55:00 And so, if you don't want any of the features, you don't have to use them. 1:55:03 And in fact, the L1 network doesn't and can't know anything about them at all. 1:55:08 It doesn't even perceive that they exist or know what they are. 1:55:13 It doesn't know, like, maybe how many slots... 1:55:15 There's 256 sidechain slots and how much money is in each of those. 1:55:19 And there's, like, the slots have little labels, but that's it. 1:55:23 So, there's... 1:55:25 So, from what I understand, there's going to be one L1 transaction per sidechain. 1:55:31 Is that one transaction per block? 1:55:34 Or is that one transaction, period? 1:55:38 Well, it's... 1:55:40 For the blind-merge mining, it is one transaction per block, 1:55:43 which is just, like, a few bytes, 1:55:45 which is about one... 1:55:48 not quite, maybe, like, one 100,000th the size of the block, 1:55:53 something like that. 1:55:54 So, very, very small. 1:55:56 Much less than, you know, a tenth of a percent. 1:56:00 Very, very, very small. 1:56:01 And that's for the merge mining. 1:56:03 And then for the withdrawal... 1:56:04 The H deposit is an L1 transaction. 1:56:08 But as we've discussed already, that could be one rich person total. 1:56:12 It could only be one deposit ever, maybe. 1:56:14 It depends. 1:56:15 Or anyone can deposit, but... 1:56:16 And then the withdrawals are one L1 Coinbase transaction to create the withdrawal. 1:56:24 And then one each block to adjust the vote, the vector of votes. 1:56:33 And those are both pretty small also. 1:56:35 And then at the end, the withdrawal is a real L1 transaction. 1:56:38 So, it adds up to, like, a few. 1:56:40 But it's a constant amount. 1:56:43 And so, it doesn't matter how much activity is happening on the sidechain. 1:56:46 It will never be... 1:56:47 It doesn't grow to L1 byte usage. 1:56:51 And it's one single, like, each... 1:56:56 To join the Lightning Network is one transaction each, though. 1:57:00 It will probably be smaller, even in the wildly popular drivechain future, 1:57:06 probably much smaller on-chain footprint than Lightning Network uses today on L1. 1:57:12 So, if I have... 1:57:14 Like, I have Lightning Fats that I didn't... 1:57:16 I don't have a channel open, but I received them through Lightning. 1:57:20 And through a custodial wallet, I can take those off-chain through an on-chain transaction, 1:57:26 take them on-chain into my own custody through an on-chain transaction. 1:57:34 And how does that work with drivechain? 1:57:40 It would work exactly the same way, except instead of a custodial wallet, 1:57:45 you would probably be able to have self-custody on L2. 1:57:50 And then it would be the same thing where you would want to withdraw. 1:57:55 You would either use the three-month system or you could, you know, 1:58:00 similar to what you're doing with the custodial wallet, you could say, 1:58:04 I'd like to be paid on L1. 1:58:06 Someone makes the L1 transaction. 1:58:09 And so, you don't have to use any of the new functionality that you don't want, 1:58:13 and the functionality moves to a different network. 1:58:16 So, even though it does increase fee revenue for miners, 1:58:20 it should not drive up fee rates on L1. 1:58:24 It's just like an accounting transaction, one single accounting transaction, 1:58:27 the Buy Merge Mining one, to move them over. 1:58:31 So, yeah. 1:58:33 Where is the incentive for drivechains to include an abnormally large transaction fee per block? 1:58:44 And where does the large transaction fees come from? 1:58:49 The L2 network, each user there, 1:58:51 so there's like 10 million users of some drivechain somewhere, 1:58:55 and they each pay whatever, 10 cents, 1:58:58 so that's a million dollars in a block on L2. 1:59:03 There is a million-dollar transaction fee paid to the L2 Coinbase, 1:59:09 of which that person, who is an L2 user, 1:59:15 that person will go on L1 and say, okay, I'll pay. 1:59:17 Here's a $995,000 transaction fee. 1:59:23 They pay that on L1. 1:59:24 So, that's just one transaction on L1 that has an abnormally high fee. 1:59:28 But it won't even really be abnormally high, because it would be happening every block. 1:59:33 So, it would be just a high fee. 1:59:34 Why would the L2, or why would the drivechain, or why would the sidechain operator, 1:59:38 pay that large transaction fee if they could get away with the smaller one? 1:59:43 Because they can't. 1:59:45 They're bidding on who's, they make the payment conditional on the L1 miner, 1:59:52 including kind of an anchor in L1 that finds the L2 block. 1:59:58 So, they only get their million dollars on L2. 2:00:03 If the miner includes their thing on L1, 2:00:06 the little cash code. 2:00:08 So, it's a competitive market where every single sidechain 2:00:12 full node would bid. 2:00:15 And so, they bid like 991,000, 991.2, 993,000. 2:00:21 So, they'd bid up, and all the bids would be guarded 2:00:24 for people who didn't win, and then whoever bid the most, 2:00:26 they would win. 2:00:27 They net a little $5,000 for themselves for free, 2:00:32 or for the inconvenience of collecting on L2 instead of L1. 2:00:37 The miner gets 995,000, the 10 million users 2:00:43 pay a 10 cent transaction fee. 2:00:46 The L2 coinbase collects it, 2:00:49 and then we move on to the next block. 2:00:52 So, what happens if a fair rope miner 2:00:56 who doesn't want drivechain decided not to include those 2:01:01 in their block, and what would happen to the sidechain 2:01:06 if that transaction was not included in every single block? 2:01:13 If they don't include it in a block, 2:01:15 it's as if a block just wasn't found, 2:01:17 even though it could have been. 2:01:18 So, it's like a missed opportunity 2:01:20 to find a sidechain block. 2:01:21 The sidechain just stays at whatever block height it was, 2:01:26 and the miners miss out on the fee. 2:01:29 And probably, it depends on the fee dynamics 2:01:31 of the sidechain, but you would imagine 2:01:32 that the fee pressure would continue to rise 2:01:36 on the sidechain, so that one million number would go up. 2:01:38 It is theoretically possible it could go up 2:01:40 to two million dollars, for example. 2:01:42 Or some other shape, I guess technically, 2:01:44 there could be nonlinearities, 2:01:46 so it could be any amount of money, really. 2:01:49 But it would probably go up, 2:01:51 and as the blocks are not found, 2:01:54 then it would just be, you would wait 2:01:57 until there was a miner who wanted 2:01:58 to collect two million dollars, 2:02:02 and then they would mine the block, 2:02:03 and then the sidechain would move to its next block. 2:02:10 So, then how is this gonna negatively affect Bitcoin? 2:02:14 There has to be a trade-off somewhere. 2:02:18 I don't really think there is. 2:02:19 I think it's just, the trade-off would be 2:02:22 that maybe this idea isn't popular, 2:02:24 and that I've wasted everyone's time by bringing it up. 2:02:27 But I don't see, I guess if you, 2:02:31 in a way, the trade-off is that the, 2:02:35 I mean, I really don't see any trade-off, 2:02:37 but if you wanted to just make one up, 2:02:38 you would say something like, 2:02:41 the miners play a slightly different role 2:02:45 than they did before. 2:02:47 But I don't actually think that's true, 2:02:48 because miners have always done various things, 2:02:52 like to help the network, 2:02:53 such as when the miners activated soft forks 2:02:58 in the past, and when they downgraded after a big fix, 2:03:01 and they just found that one guy sent too high a fee, 2:03:04 and they returned it to him. 2:03:05 So, they've always been doing this or that. 2:03:07 And they sponsor people, miners sponsor people, 2:03:10 like the brilliant and virtuous scholar Pierre Richard, 2:03:15 who knows everything. 2:03:17 They pay him for some reason, 2:03:18 and so they always do this or that. 2:03:24 And so, to me, it's not even, 2:03:26 it doesn't even register as a change. 2:03:27 I don't actually see any downside to attempting this, 2:03:30 especially given that we've tried so many other things 2:03:33 that haven't worked at all. 2:03:35 Yeah, and I, like ARK and Liquid, 2:03:39 and even Sentiments, I've kind of shied away from them, 2:03:42 just because of the custodial nature of what they are. 2:03:48 And- 2:03:49 Yeah, my view is that, 2:03:51 with drivetrain is slightly more miner custody, I suppose, 2:03:56 but my view is really that the miners, 2:03:58 at the end of the day, we all have miner custody anyway. 2:04:03 And actually, the long-run future of Bitcoin 2:04:06 is gonna be a fee-only blockchain. 2:04:09 And miners can already steal from the Lightning Network 2:04:12 by censoring the justice transaction. 2:04:15 So, miners can also hold various UTXOs hostage 2:04:19 or hold Liquid hostage. 2:04:20 So, to me, I don't even really see that 2:04:21 as a big difference. 2:04:22 I kind of think it's not good. 2:04:24 But I guess if we were trying to find it, 2:04:25 they'd say it encourages people to use this scheme 2:04:30 where the miners could theoretically steal from them. 2:04:33 But again, the miners are, you know, 2:04:35 like they can already mess up the... 2:04:38 Maybe, I guess, the downside would be that one day 2:04:41 someone would invent something even better, 2:04:46 ZK-SNARK sidechain or something. 2:04:48 I don't even think that would be better. 2:04:50 And even if it was, the miners can hold hostage 2:04:52 the ZK-proof part anyway and can't literally steal, 2:04:57 but they could hold something hostage 2:04:58 and like demand a cut. 2:05:01 Or one thing that miners could always do 2:05:02 is they could just say, 2:05:04 we're not going to honor any system 2:05:09 other than a drivechain-related system. 2:05:13 So, they would just censor everything. 2:05:14 Censor Lightning Network, censor Liquid, censor whatever. 2:05:20 And just say that, you know, 2:05:21 I don't think they would do any of that, 2:05:22 but I just think... 2:05:24 I don't really see a significant downside 2:05:27 to at least trying this 2:05:28 because the reduction in security 2:05:30 is only born by the user who chooses 2:05:34 to deposit to the drivechain. 2:05:40 So, it's like a totally consensual idea. 2:05:45 And it's kind of like, 2:05:45 if they think it's in their best interests, 2:05:48 who is anyone else to end in their way? 2:05:52 Well, I agree in theory, Bitcoin is for everyone 2:05:56 and Bitcoin was designed to be broken, basically. 2:06:00 It was designed for people to try to break Bitcoin. 2:06:03 And I don't... 2:06:05 I guess my main concern is that 2:06:07 it'll congest the base chain 2:06:09 and it'll drive transaction speeds up prematurely. 2:06:15 Yeah, but it won't because the activity 2:06:18 is moved off of the L1 chain into a different chain. 2:06:22 So, you have one person deposit the coins at the beginning 2:06:25 and then after that, all the usage does not... 2:06:31 It doesn't happen on L1. 2:06:32 It's true that there's a few, as I said, 2:06:34 there's a few L1 transactions that must be made 2:06:38 to connect the tissue. 2:06:40 But this is a very small and constant amount. 2:06:43 It doesn't matter if the sidechain has a million users 2:06:45 or a billion users. 2:06:48 It's a constant amount of L1 overhead. 2:06:51 So, the L1 overhead per user is always shrinking. 2:06:56 So, then what, I guess, 2:06:59 what uses for drivechain are there 2:07:04 other than just transferring value 2:07:07 from one person to another? 2:07:10 What you can use is any... 2:07:13 You can write any software you want. 2:07:14 So, we have copied, for example, 2:07:18 Zcash and Ethereum already. 2:07:21 And so, Zcash gives you more private transactions 2:07:25 and Ethereum lets you do whatever it is 2:07:28 they're doing over there. 2:07:28 They seem to be having a lot of fun. 2:07:31 I don't always understand what they're doing, 2:07:33 but they seem to be doing a lot of something. 2:07:36 And I have some ideas myself 2:07:39 of my prediction market projects. 2:07:41 You can go to bitcoinhivemind.com and read about that. 2:07:45 I think Namecoin is a great idea. 2:07:47 That also was, Satoshi co-worked on 2:07:51 when he invented merge mining. 2:07:53 I think Namecoin is a great idea. 2:07:56 So, I think, actually, a lot of these ideas 2:07:57 have enormous potential, like really, really big. 2:08:01 Yeah, but what I... 2:08:02 But the point is, it's an open system. 2:08:04 It's an open system. 2:08:05 So, any piece of software that someone wants to write, 2:08:07 they could write. 2:08:08 Right, but at its core, money is just a tool 2:08:13 that humans use to equitably trade value with one another. 2:08:21 Yeah, I think Richard Dawkins clearly... 2:08:24 The need for more functionality than that. 2:08:27 Bitcoin already has all the functionality it needs. 2:08:33 Well, I think it's kind of like, as you said, 2:08:37 it could help adoption. 2:08:38 So, you don't want anyone to be turned away. 2:08:42 You know what I mean? 2:08:43 It's kind of like, you have a book, 2:08:44 like we have the Bible, the written Bible, 2:08:47 but then it's kind of like the printing press. 2:08:49 You say, well, we've already written that. 2:08:53 We already have every book that we need, the Bible. 2:08:56 And then Gutenberg is like, 2:08:57 well, we can print more Bibles this way. 2:09:01 And people are like, okay, that's good, I guess. 2:09:04 But that's kind of missing the point 2:09:05 because we don't know what it is that people will want 2:09:08 in the future. 2:09:10 Are these sidechains gonna use Bitcoin as their token 2:09:15 or are they gonna have... 2:09:17 No, they use Bitcoin for their transaction fees 2:09:20 and as the money. 2:09:22 They're gonna have different currencies. 2:09:25 They can make up whatever they want. 2:09:27 Yeah, well, you know, 2:09:28 like you go to the New York Stock Exchange 2:09:30 and the unit is the US dollar. 2:09:33 So then you can wrap Ethereum with Bitcoin. 2:09:37 Yeah, we wouldn't need any ETH. 2:09:40 There would be no Ether. 2:09:42 So we just create an Ether out of nothing 2:09:44 and call it a wrapped Ether. 2:09:47 Yeah, you would create like a Ethereum full node 2:09:51 and it uses the BTC, the coin only. 2:09:55 And what, I mean, why would I do that 2:09:57 rather than just use Ethereum? 2:10:00 Well, because you have to buy an altcoin. 2:10:02 It's kind of like why you would have a smartphone 2:10:05 instead of carrying around a digital camera 2:10:10 and a like a boombox or something, you know, 2:10:16 because in a television, you know, 2:10:18 because they all have a boombox. 2:10:20 You know, because in a television, you know, 2:10:24 because they all those things are in one device. 2:10:26 So it's much better. 2:10:31 So the sidechain fees, 2:10:35 like who gets them, whoever makes up the sidechain 2:10:38 or whoever makes up a new coin. 2:10:41 I mean, is that how that's gonna work? 2:10:43 Ultimately, the sidechain fees on L2 2:10:46 are paid to the sidechain L2 Coinbase transaction. 2:10:50 So whoever makes the L2 block will collect those. 2:10:55 But as I've said, with blind merge mining, 2:10:57 there can be a little bit of a specialization of labor 2:11:00 where one person is running a sidechain node 2:11:02 and they just build the sidechain block. 2:11:04 And then they pay on L1 with L1 coins. 2:11:07 They say, listen, I need you to put this hash in this spot 2:11:11 and don't ask any questions. 2:11:13 And then to the miner, they pay the miner $995,000. 2:11:18 And the miner says, okay, fine. 2:11:19 Because the miner is looking at all the bids 2:11:21 and they get the highest bid. 2:11:22 They say, okay, I hope you guys are having fun over there. 2:11:26 And they take the 995 L1 coins 2:11:29 and then the sidechain miner in quotes, 2:11:33 this is a sidechain full node. 2:11:36 It mines a block that collects a $1 million transaction fee, 2:11:40 which would be whatever, 2:11:41 a million being 10 cents per transaction in that block. 2:11:45 Does that make sense? 2:11:46 So it makes Bitcoin available to you, move USD? 2:11:52 Whatever. 2:11:53 Oh, no, I was just talking about- 2:11:54 No, I was just talking about- 2:11:55 Pricing the fee in USD. 2:11:56 So I don't do dollars. 2:11:57 I'm 100% Bitcoin. 2:12:01 Cool, I like that. 2:12:02 I don't know. 2:12:03 So when you say a transaction fee of dollars, 2:12:07 you mean in Satoshis, right? 2:12:11 Yeah, let's say there's, on the sidechain, 2:12:13 everyone pays one sat per transaction. 2:12:15 So there's gonna be a 10 Bitcoin transaction fee 2:12:18 associated with this one single transaction. 2:12:23 And on the sidechain, 2:12:25 you have 10 million transactions that each pay one Satoshi. 2:12:31 And then on the Coinbase on L2, 2:12:34 we'll pay whoever finds that block, 10 million sats. 2:12:41 That person wants to find the block 2:12:43 so they can get their 10 million sats. 2:12:46 They go to L1 and they pay 9,995,000 sats. 2:12:53 Which is a far cry from a million dollars. 2:12:57 Well, yeah. 2:12:58 I mean, we could redo it if you wanted to. 2:12:59 We could say it was, 2:13:00 well, we could say that it has each transaction pays, 2:13:05 well, we would just have to divide and then multiply, 2:13:07 and I'm not sure if that would help anyone understand. 2:13:10 But you could say it's a million, 2:13:11 it doesn't make any difference to me. 2:13:15 We could do it if you want. 2:13:17 But the point is that a lot of small people on L2 2:13:21 paying into one Bitcoinbase, 2:13:23 the whole block is defined by an event that happens in L1. 2:13:28 So someone on L1 pays the miners to make a transaction 2:13:36 that says, please mine my L2 block. 2:13:38 If you do, I'll give you these L1 coins. 2:13:41 And the miners say, okay, fine. 2:13:42 Please like mine my shit coins, please. 2:13:46 Like basically. 2:13:46 So then why do we need a, 2:13:50 why don't we just make it another L2? 2:13:54 Like Jackchain, Liquid, and ARK, I believe, 2:13:59 all are capable of operating without BIM 300 and 301. 2:14:04 Yeah, well, ARK means more shit coins to work 2:14:10 and be created in one chain. 2:14:13 What do you mean by shit coins? 2:14:15 Well, they haven't even come out yet, right? 2:14:19 I mean, whatever drivechain or whatever layer two 2:14:23 that comes up on the drivechain that you guys make, 2:14:29 that aren't they gonna have their own coin or whatever? 2:14:32 No, of course not. 2:14:33 The whole point is that they don't have their own coin. 2:14:36 They're gonna use Bitcoin as the main currency 2:14:39 for that drivechain, which makes sense. 2:14:43 But- 2:14:44 I was understanding that they're gonna be able to use all, 2:14:49 that's just another way for them to 2:14:52 just make their own payments. 2:14:56 Like have a totally separate shit coin. 2:15:00 To make just layer two work like a lightning shit coin. 2:15:03 I don't even know, there isn't one really. 2:15:07 Yeah, it's exactly like the Lightning Network 2:15:09 where you have coins on a different network, 2:15:11 but it's BTC. 2:15:12 Because for every coin that's on the Lightning Network, 2:15:15 there's a two of two multi-signature output on L1 2:15:17 that has those coins. 2:15:18 So when you put five BTC into the Lightning Network, 2:15:23 you lock the coins into a multi-sig on L1, 2:15:27 and then you've joined the Lightning Network 2:15:30 and it's five coins. 2:15:30 Okay. 2:15:32 And that's exactly how it would work in this case. 2:15:35 So just like Lightning has Taro or whatever, 2:15:41 whatever they're doing, you can have- 2:15:43 I would have to make an on-chain transaction 2:15:45 to join a sidechain? 2:15:49 No, that's actually one of the big differences 2:15:51 between Lightning and drivechain, 2:15:55 but someone has to. 2:15:57 So someone deposits, they make the L1 transaction 2:16:01 and it shows up on L2. 2:16:04 And over there, you can be onboarded to L2 2:16:08 all day and night. 2:16:10 The new people can join over there who haven't made an L1. 2:16:14 But someone has to move the L1 coins. 2:16:18 They have to become L2 coins, 2:16:19 which every coin starts on L1, of course. 2:16:22 All the 21 million coins start there. 2:16:26 But so Lightning has like Taro, 2:16:28 which is like assets on Lightning. 2:16:31 And similarly, someone could do assets on drivechain. 2:16:35 That would be the analogy. 2:16:37 But Lightning BTC is analogous to drivechain BTC. 2:16:44 So someone could come up with their own coin 2:16:47 to charge fees on their drivechain layer two. 2:16:52 Well, I think the fees and the money unit 2:16:55 would always be BTC. 2:16:57 But I suppose also that's theoretically possible. 2:16:59 There's a way. 2:17:01 I think it's theoretically possible on Taro 2:17:04 to charge like Taro assets as a fee, 2:17:08 but I don't know if anyone would care. 2:17:10 For the same reason that when you go to the supermarket, 2:17:13 you don't pay in like motor oil or something. 2:17:17 I don't think people would want to do that. 2:17:18 I think that brings us up to the point 2:17:20 where you guys were when I just joined the group 2:17:23 that I take my 100,000 sats, 2:17:28 I lock it into this drivechain on the L1, 2:17:32 and then I have L2 capabilities with those, 2:17:36 or I lock them into this drivechain on the L1. 2:17:39 And then it allows me to have access to the drivechain. 2:17:46 But what happens if that drivechain server, 2:17:48 because drive trains are going to be inherently centralized. 2:17:53 So what happens if that drivechain server crashes 2:17:57 and I want to get my Bitcoin out? 2:17:58 Well, there wouldn't really be a server. 2:18:01 I think there'd be like, 2:18:02 there'd be peer to peer like Bitcoin, 2:18:04 because every node will be an equal peer. 2:18:07 But there probably would not be, 2:18:09 they're probably more experimental and have, 2:18:13 they're probably more buggy. 2:18:15 They probably have a higher block size limit. 2:18:18 So they would probably be less reliable than L1. 2:18:23 So I agree with that. 2:18:24 But other than there'd be a lot like, 2:18:25 there'd be like something like a, whatever, 2:18:28 there'd be like Litecoin or something, 2:18:30 there'd be like a, whatever, Feathercoin, I don't know. 2:18:32 But except with BTC only, obviously. 2:18:36 So then how do I get my, 2:18:38 say whatever happens with the drivechain, 2:18:42 it goes bust, are my Bitcoin gone forever? 2:18:48 If you do anything, you deposit there. 2:18:51 If it reaches a state where none of the node software works 2:18:57 and no one can figure out 2:18:59 who is the rightful owner of the coins on L2, 2:19:01 then they would be probably lost, yes. 2:19:05 That would be too bad. 2:19:06 But you see, that's also true of any decision you make 2:19:11 to your L1 coins, you know what I mean? 2:19:12 Like if you deposit that to the Lightning Network, 2:19:16 you could also lose all of the coins. 2:19:18 And people have, 2:19:21 because their node, their Lightning node crashes 2:19:22 and then it turns back on and broadcasts an old state 2:19:25 and then they lose all of it. 2:19:27 But the recovery seed phrase did not, 2:19:31 does not, it does much less 2:19:33 to help you recover your Lightning funds 2:19:36 than a lot of people thought. 2:19:38 But that's, I think it's a good thing 2:19:40 because you're the rightful owner. 2:19:42 They have to entice you to come over there, 2:19:44 you know what I mean? 2:19:44 It's kind of like, you live in a house 2:19:46 and then there's hotels. 2:19:49 And you think, well, why should I go into this hotel? 2:19:53 I like where I live. 2:19:54 And the hotel owner is saying, 2:19:56 well, we have all these amenities. 2:19:58 We have a pool, we have security. 2:20:02 And you're like, okay, but it's because you don't, no one's forcing, it's not like a prison, you know what I mean? Like no one's forcing you to go there. 2:20:10 They have to entice you over. If they don't entice you, then you just don't go. 2:20:14 So is there a hard cap on the number of drivechains possible? Or if it's based on whoever pays the highest fee, correct? 2:20:25 The BIP allows for 256. 2:20:30 So if number 257 shows up and outbids one of the 256, does that work? 2:20:39 It sort of works like that where if one of the sidechains is so low in the fees that it pays, that it's very unpopular. 2:20:54 And all the slots are taken and someone now comes up with a new idea that everyone really thinks will be significantly more popular. 2:21:02 Then that would be bad news for the unpopular one because it would probably, what I would imagine might happen in that situation is they might say, listen, okay, we're closing this sidechain in like six months. 2:21:14 So everyone get out because we need the slot. 2:21:18 But the other thing they could do is just activate BIP300 again. They could BIP-300B and make 256 more slots or you could have a sidechain of a sidechain. 2:21:27 So in practice, there's no real limit and I don't think we'll get anywhere near 256. 2:21:33 There's just not that many different ideas, but I could be totally wrong about that. You never know. 2:21:37 There's 22,000 shit coins out there. There's plenty of ideas. 2:21:42 No, but if you think about it, most of those only represent different versions of the same idea, really. 2:21:47 Those are just like, you know what I mean? Like there's enormous overlap. 2:21:51 A lot of those are just gripping and venture capital funding. It's a way to fund a project, an ICO. 2:22:02 If your VC cuts you off, you can just do an ICO and get your next funding round. 2:22:13 Right, and so there could be offsets or stocks and bonds or something. 2:22:18 So yeah, you see what I mean? It's not like a real sidechain idea per se. 2:22:24 No, but if there was number 257 and it come in and outbid number 231, then number 231, if they're consistently outbid... 2:22:39 It doesn't really work like that. The slots are acquired and then the slots are dropped and added in a way that is very different from the deposits and withdrawals and the large mining. 2:22:55 So that's a separate thing. 2:22:58 How is it separate? Can you explain that to me? 2:23:02 It's just like a different thing where it's like you put in a Coinbase transaction on L1 that you want to claim slot 231. 2:23:10 And then if 90% of miners agree, then the slot is sort of turned on and it can receive deposits and withdrawals. 2:23:19 And then to reassign the slot, it takes like six months. It's a very long time. 2:23:24 So then every sidechain has to be voted upon by miners? It's just the one miner that included in the block? 2:23:30 No, no, no. It's 90% over two weeks. So anyone can propose the sidechain. They have to be a miner. 2:23:37 Any miner can propose it in one block, but then it needs to get act. 2:23:41 I'm talking about miners, not individual miners. 2:23:46 Well, it actually could be a solo miner. It's whoever finds a block. So it counts the 2016 blocks. 2:23:54 So yeah, the big people. 2:23:57 Nobody in a home. 2:24:01 Well, your odds of finding the block are proportional to your hash rate. 2:24:07 I did the math on this, guys, a while back. And with one single S9 miner, you are 360 times more likely to solo mine a block than you are to win the Powerball. 2:24:24 Oh, that's cool. People should do that instead. 2:24:31 30,000 miners. 30,000 S19s at 100 terahash estimated to win a block a day as far as the odds go. The day I did the math. 2:24:44 Yeah, but the idea is that all the miners collectively, they're trying to maximize their revenue. 2:24:51 So it's all about the same person in this point of view. 2:24:56 Because it's just saying they either want more transaction fee revenue from slot 231 or they don't. 2:25:05 So it shouldn't be like... 2:25:08 Well, yeah, of course people always disagree. 2:25:10 Anyway, I think we should go to... 2:25:13 I honestly think that if these transactions are thrown out there, the miners are going to be incentivized to mine them up because of the transaction fees. 2:25:25 That's just the incentive structure on the base layer for miners is to be greedy. 2:25:32 Okay, so I think we should go to JP and then Austin and then Mark. 2:25:36 Yeah, go ahead. 2:25:40 Okay, great. So, okay, first thing, you alluded to a transaction that got reversed. Were you referring to the recent PayPal fatfinger? 2:25:55 Yeah, the F2Pool fatfinger. It wasn't like reversed. 2:26:00 He like made a new transaction to graciously send the money back or whatever. 2:26:11 Okay, great. So yeah, I thought you were referring to that because I don't recall hearing of one of those like ever before. 2:26:20 It did happen. I think it happened. 2:26:24 It wasn't a miner. I don't remember what... I think it happened in 2015. 2:26:35 Ancient history. Okay, so my real question that I've been holding my breath for like forever for is... 2:26:42 Actually, who was it? 2:26:48 I'm sorry, whoever came in after me actually alluded to the question. 2:26:55 So the question of transferring value to the L2, right? 2:26:59 So with the sediment and liquid and lightning, right? So you're actually, like you say, using... 2:27:07 Effectively, I believe you're saying you're using the same mechanism that multi-sig uses, right? To put a restriction. 2:27:16 That's what they do. This is similar but not quite the same because it's gated by proof of work. 2:27:24 So if you're finding blocks, you're gaining the ability to sign, so to speak, but if you're not, then you're losing the ability to sign. 2:27:32 And so that's one way of looking at it. 2:27:35 If you read the... Literally reading the BIP is probably a very good way. 2:27:41 It always is, yeah. 2:27:43 Go to the RFC. 2:27:45 Exactly what's happening, yeah. 2:27:47 Go to the RFC. 2:27:49 Okay, so I get lost in the weeds on the concept of transferring the value to the sidechain, right? 2:27:58 So obviously, we know the Ethereum way and it's not that. 2:28:04 So you just said it's not really the multi-sig way either. 2:28:11 So it's a third thing. 2:28:13 So effectively, what prevents a double spend from happening, right? 2:28:19 So if the value is up on the drivechain, what's preventing you from double spending the same UTXO on the base chain simultaneously? 2:28:30 Right, so literally what's happening on L1 is this op-nop 5. 2:28:36 And when you spend Bitcoin to it, you unlock Bitcoin you have. 2:28:41 Those are your inputs. You select your input. 2:28:43 You send it into this op-nop 5. 2:28:46 Now, the op-nop 5 rule is that whenever anyone does that, they have to also... 2:28:51 It's free and instant to put more money in. 2:28:54 So you're always selecting the op-nop 5 when you put more money in. 2:28:57 If it already has free Bitcoin in there, then you want to put in 0.02. 2:29:01 You take that 3 and you take your 0.02 and you make it a 3.02. 2:29:05 And so the deposits are always going in. 2:29:08 That's allowed, no questions asked. 2:29:12 So you can always put more money in. 2:29:14 There's the deposit. 2:29:16 And then the withdrawals, you can only spend out if it is the case that this hash is on this pre-approved list of hashes. 2:29:28 And how do you get the hash on the list? 2:29:30 That is the capsule thing. 2:29:32 You put the hash of where you want to spend the money 3 months from now. 2:29:38 You put that in L1, in the L1 Coinbase. 2:29:41 Then miners slowly hack it. 2:29:45 They upload it or they have proof of work on it, gaining 1 26,000th of the signature power, basically, over time. 2:29:55 And then by the time 3 months has passed, they have 13,000 and change, so they have enough. 2:30:01 They have more than half, so they have enough to sign at that point. 2:30:04 They sign the previous transaction that had been put in the Coinbase. 2:30:08 So they have to declare where the money is going up front, and then they do all the work on it, and then it goes through. 2:30:14 And that's the only way to spend out of op-nop 5 if BIP300 activates. 2:30:20 If it doesn't activate, then yes. 2:30:23 I thought the Coinbase transaction is only one per block. 2:30:27 There is. First of all, my phone is frozen, so I'll probably accidentally crash soon. 2:30:32 But hopefully you can still hear me for now. 2:30:34 There's only one Coinbase transaction per block, but each Coinbase transaction can have many outputs. 2:30:43 I see. 2:30:44 After the fact, even after the block is created, yes. 2:30:48 So is there a Coinbase transaction created on the L2 that corresponds to the Coinbase transaction from the block on the L1? 2:31:05 That's a good question. What's happening is – can you hear me, first of all? 2:31:10 I can now. A moment ago, you faded away. 2:31:15 Okay, I got it back. 2:31:17 So an L1 Coinbase doesn't necessarily mean that – the L1 Coinbase for the merged mining – you have to keep the two things separate. 2:31:30 There's deposits and withdrawals, and then there's the merged mining. 2:31:34 In the deposits and withdrawals, there's not necessarily – 2:31:37 Okay, you're gone now, 100%. 2:31:48 Yeah, probably lost you. 2:31:58 Are you muted? 2:32:01 I think he just needs to probably be made a speaker again. 2:32:07 If you can hear me, Paul, try minimizing the spaces to the bottom of the screen. 2:32:15 Does that help? 2:32:16 Oh, nice. Okay, I'll do that. 2:32:19 Did that work? 2:32:20 Yeah. Okay, I'm back. Nice. Okay, it's a joke. 2:32:23 What I've found – real quick before we keep going – what I've found, Paul, is that if you minimize the spaces that you're talking on, 2:32:30 and then refresh the main feed of your Twitter, when you come back to the spaces, it generally restores the audio. 2:32:40 Okay, cool. Good to know. 2:32:42 Yeah, I don't know why – you know, that's funny, because I assumed that there was some kind of cache that's filling up from the space itself. 2:32:51 But now that you mention that, I think it's probably – what they do is they're loading more and more tweets or something, or whatever it is. 2:32:59 The engineer – unfortunately, this happens to me quite a bit. 2:33:02 If we speak for a while, it scratches, and maybe I need a new phone. 2:33:05 I try not to buy a new phone too frequently, because I think that's just too decadent. 2:33:11 But anyway, the question was about, is every L1 Coinbase linked to an L2 Coinbase? 2:33:17 In the deposits and withdrawals, they actually have almost nothing to do with each other at all. 2:33:23 And each deposit is a regular L1 transaction that's not an L1 Coinbase. 2:33:31 Depending on how the sidechain is coded, they may put all the deposits in the L2 Coinbase, or they may put them some other place. 2:33:39 It doesn't really make any difference, even. 2:33:42 But for the L2 Coinbase, that is – I don't know if that is helping at all. 2:33:48 But the L2 Coinbase is – the main purpose of the L2 Coinbase is to collect the transaction fees paid on the L2, the on-chain L2 transactions. 2:33:59 That is what the L2 Coinbase is doing. 2:34:05 And effectively, at the end of the day, it's just a ledger, right? 2:34:08 I mean, obviously, everything stays on L1. 2:34:13 And L2 is really just a ledger, and it's just a matter of locking the value so that you can't double-spend. 2:34:20 I mean, at its most basic level, that's it, right? 2:34:23 Well, you could think of it like maybe you have a personal checking account and a business checking account. 2:34:30 Both of them are at Wells Fargo, hypothetically. 2:34:34 If Wells Fargo is the L1 – we don't want that, of course, but I'm just saying as an example. 2:34:39 Like, Wells Fargo – 2:34:40 No, don't use abstract analogies. 2:34:44 Okay. 2:34:45 Well, I'm just trying to say, like, on L1, there's maybe – it says 3,000 Bitcoin belong to this address, and 2 belong to this address. 2:34:54 And maybe the 2 Bitcoin you own that free and clear that's in your L1 Bitcoin wallet, and then the 3,000 is owned by the sidechain, basically, 2:35:05 where there's a bunch of different people own some of it, and the whole thing adds up to the 3,000 BTC. 2:35:16 Okay, so the bottom line is I need to read up on the number 5 op that you referred to. 2:35:22 Yeah, if you find it, then it'll tell you what – because it's a proposal to claim the unused op-nop 5 and use it for this. 2:35:30 Right now, it's being used for nothing. 2:35:32 We have all these op-nops that don't do anything, and so you can use them if you have an idea. 2:35:38 Okay, thank you. 2:35:40 Thank you. 2:35:41 Okay, Austin. 2:35:42 Hello. 2:35:46 If you want to say anything. 2:35:47 I saw that. 2:35:48 I think we both crashed. 2:35:50 Really weird. 2:35:51 I don't know. 2:35:52 App just isn't super great at this time for me, but you're on mute. 2:36:00 If you don't say anything, then we'll go to Mark, I think. 2:36:05 Oh, Paul, this is the first time talking. 2:36:07 Yeah. 2:36:08 Hello. 2:36:09 I'm a big supporter of the BIP300. 2:36:11 Yes, can you hear me, Paul? 2:36:12 Yes, I can hear you. 2:36:14 Okay, good. 2:36:15 I'm a supporter of your project. 2:36:17 I just think it's got some cool things to it that I heard potentially to each other without paying any cents, in theory. 2:36:29 Is that correct? 2:36:32 You cut out when you said in the whatever sense, so I missed the most important word. 2:36:37 We can send satoshis to each other without paying any cents? 2:36:42 Yes. 2:36:43 I think there was the potential for abundant block space that has different security to L1, but it would have lower fees. 2:36:51 And I think a lot of people will like that, especially people who are using custodial now. 2:36:55 That's basically what they're doing. 2:36:56 They're basically using an infinite block drivechain that has no transparency or control over at all. 2:37:05 And I like how it's opt-in. 2:37:07 And to be an opt-in, you need to what? 2:37:09 Be a two of three? 2:37:17 I can't really hear you. 2:37:19 Sorry. 2:37:20 You said to opt-in, you need what? 2:37:22 What do you need to do to partake in being a drivechain? 2:37:31 You just need to have a two of three multi-sig wallet, right? 2:37:37 No, no, no. 2:37:39 You don't. 2:37:40 You can just move the coins over. 2:37:42 You spend them to opt-not-five. 2:37:45 And when you spend them, you write an op-return, like this is where I want to go in the sidechain. 2:37:50 And the sidechain gives them to you over there. 2:37:53 All right. 2:37:55 Then let me stick with what's in the nest. 2:37:57 I put a tweet that this is going to provide a new source of miner profits. 2:38:03 Would you say that's a true statement? 2:38:05 Yes, I would. 2:38:07 Good. 2:38:08 So, this is going to eventually, I think it's not like myself as just an individual full node runner and a hodler. 2:38:16 I have no say in what goes down on this. 2:38:20 I think this is going to be between the big nodes, the big mining pools. 2:38:28 Would you say the mining pools are the ones that are going to get first dibs as to if they want to implement this technology? 2:38:37 Well, I think probably they may be the ones activating the 300, and they would be maybe the ones who activate the first sidechain. 2:38:46 And so, they would be to turn it on, but it would be created by a software developer, and then it would be used by regular users who want to use the feature. 2:38:56 So, I don't really know. 2:38:57 It's a matter of kind of philosophy as to who actually comes first in that story. 2:39:06 Right. 2:39:07 So, let me ask you. 2:39:08 I was told by Brian, or actually even Doxo, that this thing can go one of three ways. 2:39:15 It can go neutral, which is where Bitcoin stays the same. 2:39:18 It can go pro BIP300, which is that we get BIP300. 2:39:23 Or it could go anti BIP300. 2:39:28 Either of those pro or antis require still some kind of fork from neutral, which is just unaware of in terms of NOAA5 code, right? 2:39:38 Right. 2:39:39 I think I understand what you mean. 2:39:42 Yeah. 2:39:45 But then once BIP300 gets implemented, there's going to be room for interpretation for how to peg Bitcoin in and out. 2:39:54 I was asking Chad GPT. 2:39:55 It came up with at least seven different methods to get Bitcoins in and out. 2:39:59 I'm like, wow, Chad GPT. 2:40:01 How does he even know? 2:40:02 But… 2:40:03 Yeah. 2:40:05 How do you then curate and, you know, kind of police this system so that things from layer two don't bubble up on layer one? 2:40:13 Well, that's part of the design is so that that never happens. So, for example, there were previous ideas, such as the extension block, where it was unclear if drama on the extension block would affect the L1. 2:40:29 But every part of this has been designed so that when you opt into using the L2, you opt into the drama. And then when you opt out, you leave the drama behind. 2:40:41 I think it's certainly the case that even if there was drama, which I don't think there is, but even if there was, we already live in a world where actually we are affected by other things. 2:40:53 So, for example, I think if like an altcoin flip into BTC, that would really badly affect BTC. So, it's desirable to not be affected by BTC. 2:41:04 Let us talk. So, yeah, I think you've gamified the situation here. I think BIP300 is not a question of if, but more like when. It could be like eight years from now, but I think you're going to get BIP300. 2:41:24 And, you know, it's going to take a lot. We're early on Bitcoin and we're super early on BIP300. So, people are going to want it. But let me ask you, what do we need to do to prepare to get in early on this thing? 2:41:44 Well, I think, I mean, it depends on what you mean by getting early. But I think that, you know, like we have just like a weird problem in front of us where a lot of people don't understand the idea. 2:41:59 So, we want to make sure that we counter the FUD and we just let everyone know that it does not negatively affect L1 and is good for Bitcoin adoption. It's good for having everyone cooperate. It's good for creativity. It's good for miners. It's good for users. It's really good for developers who can try something out. 2:42:24 Yeah, like ARK, we have to wait. We have to wait forever for like something 119 or whatever. If we lived in a parallel world that had… 2:42:33 119, can that coexist with BIP300? 2:42:37 Yes, of course. 2:42:39 Yeah, that's what I thought. 119, I think of it as a CBDC, Paul. Let me ask you, it limits the way you can spend your Bitcoin. For example, it may be that, let's say you run a store that's Bitcoin only, but, you know, I might not be allowed to spend my Bitcoin at your Bitcoin only store with BIT119. Would you say that's a true statement? 2:43:04 I don't think I would really, because what happens is you're the owner right now and you have coins that do not have the covenant on them. So, in order for the covenant to be on them, you either have to send your own coins into the covenant forever, where they're cursed forever, or you have to receive these cursed coins from someone else. 2:43:25 So, all you have to do is when you say, send me the coins, you just have to say, no curse. I don't want to curse on my coins. So, I think even if it's theoretically possible, I don't think in practice it would happen because you would… it would be like if your employer tried to pay you in monopoly money or something. You know, you're like, I don't want this monopoly money. I'm only showing up to work if you pay me US dollar or, you know, Bitcoin or whatever. 2:43:52 So, I think it wouldn't actually happen. But I think that it's theoretically possible, but I don't think it's… I think it's kind of like overblown here. 2:44:00 Yeah. 2:44:03 Alright, interesting. Thank you for your thoughts. 2:44:06 My pleasure. 2:44:14 I yield the floor to anybody else who has questions. 2:44:22 Hello, G. We have G. 2:44:26 Hey, guys. Can anybody hear me? 2:44:28 Yeah, I can hear you now. 2:44:30 Awesome. Cheers. I met you last year in Riga, so it was great to get to know you. I have this question around the activation and this entire governance process. I'm rereading the Block Size Wars on the BitMEX blog, this entire book. 2:44:51 And I'm thinking, I would like to know, what do you think is the main lesson for the big blockers as to why they failed? And what do you think you have to do right this time to get broad enough consensus to push this change through? 2:45:15 Yeah, I'm not a… Yes, I was not a big blocker. And in fact, I favor shrinking the L1 block size. 2:45:26 But I do… I'm very interested in this topic a lot. And I think that what they did wrong was they made a hard fork for… ultimately, it was a very small deal, which was just like 2 megabyte hard fork. 2:45:43 And then it was basically 8 megabytes with Bitcoin Cash and or Bitcoin XT, kind of depends on where you draw the timeline. But I think, yeah, they made a big deal about this hard fork, but the hard fork was not a permanent solution to anything. 2:45:58 It was only like a temporary solution. Even if that worked, it would have only been a matter of time before the blocks became 8 megabytes. And as a result, you would have had the hard fork again, at which point, anyone who had stayed on BTC could just catch up. 2:46:14 So it was kind of like a big lose-lose situation. It's also the case that you can build a large block, optional large block, on top of a small L1 block, but you can't do the reverse. So it didn't even matter if you preferred large blocks or small blocks. It was kind of just irrational to switch L1 from small block to large block. 2:46:34 So I think those were the mistakes. I think the big mistake was going for the hard fork. The hard fork is a very, very, very strong. It's a very powerful tool, and it's very disruptive. And so you need a very good reason to use it, and probably you need lots of preparation and education beforehand. 2:46:57 And I don't know if that seemed powerful. What literally happened was there was a vote that was split. So there was failed attempts to persuade for block size increase. Then there was the mandatory SegWit block size increase from 1 to 4 megabytes. And that was being held up. That itself was a 2.3x block size increase. 2:47:26 So that was being held up to get SegWit2x, which just basically wanted another 2x on top of the 2x they were already getting. So it was very confusing. And then Amri Sache, he just like YOLOed Bitcoin Cash. He just made that out of nowhere. 2:47:40 Everyone kind of dismissed it from August 2017 until November 2017, when SegWit2x was finally called off and abandoned. And then there was switch. So I think there's a huge number. In fact, I've tweeted a table. I think if you search from Truthcoin, the BCH mistakes, I made a big green table, I think. 2:48:00 And you can find it on Twitter. You can read all about numerous mistakes they made, which I think is a long list. I don't want to go into lots of detail about that, I think. 2:48:13 I see. I see. Thanks a lot. Maybe a quick follow-up question would be that you've been pushing this now for quite a while. I think this summer it really picked up in terms of discussion. 2:48:29 So what do you see as the biggest challenge you have to overcome to make sure that this change actually pushes through? What is the thing you still haven't solved? Is it that the idea is still too complex, similar to how SegWit2x explanations were too complex in the beginning? Or is it something else? 2:48:55 I think that is the answer, which is that people just don't understand. I mean, still, we get people who join the space today and it's not a crime to be ignorant. Every ignorant person is innocent. 2:49:14 But people come today and they say they don't realize that there's not – they think it's like literally Zcash, like the coin on BTC. And the whole point is to completely eliminate that, not just from BTC, but from the rest of the universe. 2:49:33 So I think people just don't understand it, and we're going to try to build some software for people to use. They see with their own two eyes what it does, and also to convince everyone that activating it on L1 would not harm L1. 2:49:52 So we want to make whatever demonstration we can that people will believe. And I think that being ignored is sort of worse than having everyone talk about it, but 99% of people misunderstand it. 2:50:09 I remember when I was first learning about Bitcoin or even first learning about the Lightning Network, I had a very bad understanding of it for a while. And the IRC chat logs are out there for people to find. 2:50:23 When I was first learning about Lightning in early 2015 or something, and I had no idea that there were two different versions of the transaction, I had no idea about how it worked. So I think it's just new. 2:50:36 Part of it, I do think, is you have to understand a lot about how Bitcoin already works to understand why it's different from other things. 2:50:47 I think that's big. So we have stuff on our website. We have comments from supporters or people who have looked into the idea and like it. We have demo software. I think demo software would be big. So we're going to demo some use cases and things. 2:51:12 All right. Thanks, Paul. 2:51:14 Thank you. 2:51:17 Hello. Yes, Paul. It's me, Austin. 2:51:24 How are you, son? 2:51:26 Now I've spread it to a half-dozen others. 2:51:32 Moving forward. 2:51:33 Yeah. So I had an interesting conversation sometime this week, I think earlier this week, with somebody who really should know better. Somebody who's been in this industry at a high level for years. 2:51:47 And they said something to me to the effect of, oh, well, the reason that Paul's making this big push now is because he just wants to like release his shitcoin, implying, I believe, this talk about Hivemind. 2:52:06 And I had to reply, that's actually the exact opposite of the truth, because I don't know what it was now. I think it was seven years ago. I was telling him, you might as well release a shitcoin because it's going so slow. 2:52:21 And basically I was saying, he could have done this seven years ago and probably made, I mean, maybe literally a billion dollars. 2:52:29 So instead, all that time ago, when I was saying it maybe 90% in jest, but I remember you telling me six or seven years ago, oh, no, it's going to be much better on Bitcoin. 2:52:43 I don't want to make it a disposable project, I guess, to the tune of Augur. 2:52:53 And so maybe the broader community would benefit from hearing a bit about what is Hivemind, or originally called Truthcoin, what's the origin of it, how does it work, and why is it so powerful, and how did that lead you to trying to figure out how to actually make peer-to-peer sidechains happen? 2:53:19 Yeah, okay. I mean, that is also, I feel like if I would do it over, I would just have launched it maybe as an altcoin, kind of like what Monero did, because at least they got users or something, and I thought that Bitcoin would pursue the sidechain idea a little more. 2:53:37 But yeah, it's interesting that the project, Bitcoin Hivemind, that also has comments on the site, BitcoinHivemind.com, it has comments from Adam Back, Andrew Polstra, Peter Todd even. 2:53:51 Because I was determined to have it be reviewed by smart people, because I really believed it was a high-quality project, and I wanted it to stand apart. 2:54:00 But basically, this is my idea for a peer-to-peer oracle, and a prediction marketplace. 2:54:09 So this idea allows people to bet Bitcoin on any event that happens in the world. 2:54:15 But unlike previous ideas, like a discrete log contract, there's a third party, it's like a two or three multi-sig, and there's one person who just sets the outcome, and that person can just steal from everyone. 2:54:29 In a prediction market context. 2:54:32 So they can set the price to zero, and it should be one, and then buy, and then set the price to something else, or whatever. 2:54:39 So that doesn't really work. I instead had a completely decentralized process for calculating the outcome of real-world events. 2:54:50 And yeah, I believe that prediction markets are a very big deal, and in the past I joked that they're going to make the printing press look like a cartoon network. 2:55:01 Because what the prediction market can do is scale a conversation. 2:55:06 So normally the more people who talk about something, the harder it is to figure out what is going on. 2:55:12 But in the prediction market context, the more people who are trading, the more liquid the market is. 2:55:16 If you go to BitcoinHivemind.com, you can watch a 20-minute video. 2:55:21 I had an Acapulco, and I have slides, and I have it carefully scripted out, so it's a pretty decent explanation. 2:55:28 But the short version is you can bet on who is likely to become a leader, but also what would happen if they were the leader. 2:55:37 So you can bet on like, if we elected this person's CEO, what would happen to the share price? 2:55:45 And it's sort of like, if we put the Republican Party in power, what would happen to the unemployment rate? 2:55:53 And so for a wide variety of reasons, one is that the margin of victory is usually narrow in an election, and most people don't vote. 2:56:01 And if you ask them why they don't vote, they say they don't know who to vote for. 2:56:04 So for a wide variety of reasons, I think this would revolutionize elections, and it would make the public democratic process more like a Friedrich Hayek market process. 2:56:20 And I think that would be a pretty big deal, and maybe like double world GDP growth or something forever, and do a bunch of other things as well. 2:56:29 So one thing is that, like an example I often use is that Barack Obama ran on closing Guantanamo Bay, and then he was elected with a super majority in the House and Senate, and he controlled the Supreme Court. 2:56:44 And yet Guantanamo Bay is still open, so it must have been a lie. 2:56:49 And so if you could have had this market on it, like will Guantanamo Bay close crossed with will Barack Obama be elected? 2:56:58 And then all the shares that were trading on both of those, like yes, he will be elected, and no, Guantanamo Bay will not be closed. 2:57:08 Those would have had value, but the yes, yes ones would have been worth nothing. 2:57:11 So I don't know if I'm doing a great job of explaining it now, but yeah, I have a – yeah, like Hivemind or Truthcoin as it used to be called is I think a really good idea for the world and for Bitcoin. 2:57:27 And yeah, certainly if I could do it over, I would not have waited for sidechains probably at all. 2:57:32 So it is literally the exact opposite of whoever says that it's only because of my determination to add the project to Bitcoin as a non-chipcoin. 2:57:45 That is the whole reason why this project exists, so it's literally the exact opposite of whatever whoever would say that. 2:57:54 But yeah, I think that's a great project, and it's very, very popular among OGs and certain people like Fiatjaf, certain people who know about it. 2:58:04 They know about all the details of it. They're very interested in it. 2:58:08 We currently are rewriting it in Rust, so if you love Rust, this will exist. 2:58:16 Because the old version was like a fork of Bitcoin like 1099 or something from like a billion years ago, which was just like a demo testnet. 2:58:28 And so yeah, I think that's a pretty cool project. 2:58:33 If you went to bitcoinhivemind.com and watched the little video, you would see what the point of it is and why I think it's kind of much more important to work on that than anything else that exists on planet Earth. 2:58:48 I mean, it's certainly a complicated idea, and there's no guarantee that it would work, but we should certainly give it a try because I think it has a high likelihood of working, and the upside would be really, really big. 2:59:05 So that's my history with that project. 2:59:09 And yeah, I built the project in 2014. 2:59:14 I wrote this paper. I was interested. 2:59:16 Intrade had closed at the end of 2012, and then I thought maybe you could do some kind of Bitcoin version of this. 2:59:24 In 2013, I was working on the code, and then in early 2014, I published this paper. 2:59:30 And then I was just kind of waiting for some way to link it to Bitcoin. 2:59:34 And then in October 2014, Blockstream published their sidechains paper. 2:59:38 And then I was like, okay, interesting. 2:59:40 And then in 2015, I did more code, and then it became time to link the code to Bitcoin. 2:59:46 And I looked into what Blockstream had done, and what they had done was basically nothing. 2:59:50 So I realized that it was deficient. 2:59:54 And that's why in November 2015, I wrote the Drivechain blog post. 3:00:01 And then the rest is a long history of like weird scaling stuff, but also of Bitcoin just becoming a big success. 3:00:08 So I was kind of like, well, Bitcoin is doing really well, so maybe who cares? 3:00:14 And it's only recently that I have pushed harder for it, because it's clear to me that actually a lot of what everyone else is doing is not going to work, 3:00:23 like with the Lightning Network, and with just our decision to just ignore everything that's happening on altcoins has changed from being totally rational and justified, 3:00:35 which it was in 2015, and it has now changed and become totally irrational and like the biggest threat to killing Bitcoin and destroying this beautiful project. 3:00:46 So now I'm kind of a little bit more assertive. 3:00:51 Do you think it's solely the block size war that changed that? 3:01:08 Because as you recall, when Blockstream released their sidechains white paper, and they announced their big fundraise, 3:01:17 which I you know, people might remember it was at the time the largest fundraising announcement in the industry's history by by more than double. 3:01:25 I think I think it was 21 million and the previous largest was BitPay had raised nine million. 3:01:33 So it was it was a very big deal. 3:01:36 And it was almost I remember the attitude was just like, oh, yeah, they have that. 3:01:39 They have, you know, the it wasn't really like there wasn't like animosity towards altcoins back then the way there is now. 3:01:47 But basically, people were like, oh, you know, they we have they have that altcoin problem solved. 3:01:54 And it was it was more of it was like fully embraced by everyone into Bitcoin. 3:01:59 And even the altcoin, I mean, even people like that were really into altcoins, everybody was just kind of thought, OK, well, that's how it's going to be. 3:02:08 Everything's going to be on Bitcoin. 3:02:10 Everybody people remember the famous Brian Armstrong tweet from like early 2015, where he's where because people were were inundating him with requests to list altcoins. 3:02:24 Actually, they weren't anything with requests to list altcoins. 3:02:27 They just wanted like coin. I think that was the only the only request that he was really getting. 3:02:32 And he wrote like a public response, which was that Bitcoin is too far ahead and everybody should focus on sidechains and Bitcoin can have all the functionality. 3:02:45 And I think I don't know why it's changed, I think I think it has something to do with like it was like Blockstream took all the air oxygen out of the room or they were like it was like their thing. 3:02:58 And then they kind of abandoned it, I think, is how I see it. 3:03:02 And so then everyone kind of just thinks like. 3:03:07 People don't know how to think about that, I think. 3:03:09 I don't know. But whatever it is, Blockstream, SPV proofs and drivechains, have there been other projects or attempts to release them? 3:03:21 There are many. Blockstream had this skip list idea that they never implemented, so they didn't even have this Appendix B thing and they never actually did it. 3:03:30 They just did a multisig output, which was liquid. 3:03:34 And at first they were very specific about this not being a real sidechain at all. 3:03:40 And they very explicitly said that this is a stopgap until the true Greg Maxwell says on video until the true two way peg can be brought to Bitcoin. 3:03:51 But then now this has all been this history has been rewritten or something that people start, you know, the liquid sidechain or whatever, which is a contradiction. 3:04:00 But but now people think of that as what sidechains are. 3:04:04 So then we get it from both ends, which people say, well, why do you need sidechains? 3:04:07 Because we already have them. So so I think they mangled the word horribly and to everyone's detriment. 3:04:14 Yeah. But, yeah, it was like a holy grail, universally popular. 3:04:25 You know, there was I think you maybe missed the beginning, Austin, but there was a guy who was new and was like, isn't this like this is like a great idea. 3:04:32 He seemed he was like it was like being back in 2015. 3:04:37 I remember the day that the white paper was released for the Blockstream sidechains. 3:04:44 It was either that day or the day that the fundraising was announced or something, which I think we're we're pretty close to each other, maybe even like one day apart. 3:04:55 The altcoin market, which, you know, had a lot of fan favorites back then, like Feathercoin and Peercoin, and maybe that was Aurora coin, although that might have been slightly before Aurora coin. 3:05:08 People might remember Aurora coin was this coin that was supposed to be airdropped to all the citizens of Iceland. 3:05:16 And it was the number two coin after Bitcoin for probably about a year. 3:05:21 Literally, it was number two for a very long time, months and months at least. 3:05:27 But now it's, you know, kind of just completely forgotten. 3:05:30 But I remember every altcoin dropped by like 30 percent that day because the market had just thought, oh, OK, this experiment's over. 3:05:43 Anyway, should we go to, I think, Flavor was Flavor first and then D3Code? 3:05:56 I think those altcoins were yours. 3:05:59 OK, well, let's do that then. 3:06:01 Oh, yeah, Sarah, Sarah Toshi. 3:06:06 Come on, bro, speak up. 3:06:07 I have one question regarding my earlier line of questioning. 3:06:18 And so in your own words, where does the opposition to BIP300 and 301 come from? 3:06:32 Well, I think it just comes from ignorance. 3:06:34 People don't understand it. 3:06:35 I think it's just like a weird idea has spread. 3:06:39 I think also the people in the technical community, people like credit. 3:06:43 The ideas all compete. 3:06:45 They like credit. 3:06:46 So they don't want. 3:06:48 It's almost the idea could be too good and then it would steal someone's thunder or something. 3:06:55 But I do think it is this is definitely a more experimental idea. 3:06:58 So I think what people have in mind is a future where one of the sidechains fails. 3:07:04 Maybe even miners just take the coins and then they think, whose idea was this? 3:07:09 Why didn't anyone stop this from happening or something? 3:07:12 So I think they have a kind of like they're like an FDA or something. 3:07:15 They have a kind of a very, very cautionary principle, even though it's the user themselves who 3:07:21 chooses to put the coins into this type of L2. 3:07:25 And what would be the difficulty of hacking a sidechain? 3:07:30 I assume there'd be less than actually hacking the L1. 3:07:36 And if a sidechain does get hacked. 3:07:40 That's going to have negative effects on a normie's perception of Bitcoin. 3:07:48 You know, if one sidechain gets hacked, it's not safe. 3:07:55 Stay away from it. 3:07:58 I think that is the case. 3:07:59 Unfortunately, but I would point out that it also we also get that even when like it has, you know, 3:08:05 when like FTX gets hacked and then people say, well, you know, Bitcoin, you know, you're just like 3:08:09 whatever, you know, if these people don't say anything, they're just I don't think anything we can do 3:08:14 will fix that. But I think you're right, though. 3:08:17 They will say, oh, there's Bitcoin in the Bitcoin, very risky, whatever. 3:08:22 Oh. 3:08:26 Anyway, let's do a D3 code. 3:08:32 Um, Paul, I'm just curious, what's your relationship like or is with Samson Mao or? 3:08:41 What is Samson? Samson Mao tried to get me to join Blockstream a lot, and I always said no, because I 3:08:48 thought everyone, the reason is very funny. 3:08:51 It's a very deeply ironic reason. 3:08:53 Now, I thought everyone, if you work for Blockstream, everyone thinks your ideas are so great, even if they 3:08:58 suck. So that was then that's what I told him. 3:09:01 And then I actually tweeted that in public. 3:09:02 So if you so if you search the tweets, I post my message with him where I say exactly that. 3:09:11 And that and then he blocked me at some point. 3:09:15 And so usually if someone blocks me, I just block them back because I just think, fine, this is what you want. 3:09:22 You got it. So I don't really know him that well. 3:09:28 I mean, I have seen him at various events and conferences, you know, so I know something about him. 3:09:33 And we did share we wrote that we even wrote some jokes together at one point when he had he is like a 3:09:41 comedian. He had this show, Magical Crypto. 3:09:45 I don't know if he remembers this, but this is like around consensus 2017 or 2016 or something like that. 3:09:50 One of those consent, maybe 20, probably consensus 2017, May in New York. 3:09:56 So I don't know him that well, but, yeah, he used to work for Blockstream and I know I know a bunch of other 3:10:03 stuff about about him. 3:10:04 And I also there's also many things that I guess about him, but that's that's the nature of the relationship as 3:10:10 far as I remember. 3:10:12 For sure. Yeah, I was just curious if you guys are somewhat friends and like bounce ideas back and stuff on back 3:10:20 to me. 3:10:23 I would not describe myself as friends with Samson Mao, per se. 3:10:31 At this time, but whatever. 3:10:35 I don't, you know, I have a very the interesting thing is I have a lot of friends who are not Bitcoiners in real 3:10:44 life, and I think this is a big strength of mine because I there's a lot of BS in this industry and I just say 3:10:51 whatever I don't put up with it. 3:10:53 So but a lot of other people do and they're more organized on Twitter, so good for them. 3:10:58 But I don't care. 3:11:02 So Flavor, should we go to you? 3:11:05 Hey, Paul, thanks for taking my question. 3:11:08 I just want to put aside all criticisms and reservations and just say in an absolute best case, radical success 3:11:16 scenario, what would drivechains do for Bitcoin? 3:11:23 I would say that we would have like the ability to scale to the entire world's transaction throughput, like within 3:11:30 one within one day, like in practice, like within a week, like word would just spread and everyone would be 3:11:37 onboard. We'd be onboarding people to L2 directly, like lots of people would send coins to the L2s, and then 3:11:44 people would be onboarded L2 to L2. 3:11:46 So we'd onboard the entire world to Bitcoin, like in a week, and everyone would have the Zcash sidechain privacy 3:11:53 mixer. And I would say the wildest best case scenario is that there's a bunch of really weird, like artistic 3:11:59 genius people who have been working on blockchains and their stuff would never survive, like the interaction 3:12:08 with the Bitcoin Core devs, who are not always the friendliest to new ideas. 3:12:15 And and also so I was saying like a bunch of like a 15 year old MIT genius artist person has some kind of crazy 3:12:24 blockchain that has these crazy features that the miners just shrug and they say, Okay, we'll just give it a try and slot 3:12:31 nine or something. And it turns out to be like really, really cool. We port, we clone the latest version of Ethereum and 3:12:39 all the stuff Ethereum just folds immediately and they just move all the contracts to the Bitcoin version of 3:12:43 Ethereum. And like, Bitcoin, you know, soars to 100% market dominance, and then it just soars to like 15-20 3:12:53 million dollars a coin and we just replace all fiat currencies. That would be like the, you know, that would be the 3:13:01 optimistic scenario. And it's like, we can ossify L1 if we do that, too. We have all this activity happening on the L2. So 3:13:08 we just we declare Bitcoin is a finished project. We hash the source code and we make t-shirts that just have the hash on it. 3:13:17 And we just say this is Bitcoin. And it's frozen in time. And L1 never changes again. And then we have just, you know, 3:13:26 perfect adoption of Bitcoin. And we also have people making cool new things like the prediction markets, my prediction 3:13:31 markets idea and the Namecoin idea, which could really change authentication on the internet. I think it's hard to 3:13:40 summarize that but I have written a post about it called BitNames. So if you search TruthCoin BitNames, you find my blog 3:13:46 probably. And that so you have a lot of examples of stuff like that. People actually using the coin to achieve self 3:13:54 sovereignty in terms of like, how you log in, how people contact you, what happens if you get deplatformed by Twitter or 3:14:01 whatever by X. So it's like all this cool stuff, people using Bitcoin, Bitcoin transaction fees for all this. This is like 3:14:11 media, attention, economy, like who should we elect, who people front bonds, people have approval reserves. So I think 3:14:20 that would be, that's the wildly optimistic scenario, I think. 3:14:26 All right, thanks for your answer. 3:14:29 Thank you. 3:14:42 Paul, would the change need to be made to Bitcoin Core itself? 3:14:48 Not necessarily. That is, in fact, with SegWit, and I think, I don't know, but I think with Speedy Trial also, I think 3:14:59 someone made a version that was almost identical. Certainly, it was the case that the SegWit UASF, that was not Bitcoin 3:15:09 Core. The UASF part was not in Bitcoin Core. And it was not even like, people in Bitcoin Core didn't agree with it. But it was, 3:15:20 there was a pressure from outside. You could say maybe it's proxies of Bitcoin Core, you know, everyone was always going to say 3:15:26 whatever their story is going to be. But that was one that was not Bitcoin Core. And then it ended up getting miners to fold 3:15:38 and agree to activate SegWit, which they did, before the UASF part would have kicked in. So there was at least a couple cases 3:15:46 where it didn't really happen that way. And there are a couple prominent people, including Francis Puyo, they say it should 3:15:52 never happen that way. You should always build, you should always release your own thing, build support for it, get people to 3:15:58 switch, and then Bitcoin Core, it will be their problem to merge compatibility with it. So some people say it should not, should 3:16:07 never go that way. Which is all that is very interesting. So but the literal requirement to activate a soft fork is something 3:16:15 like 51% of the miners plus a few critical users, like a critical minority, like probably like one or two exchanges and some 3:16:26 other people would be enough if you had also had 51%. And you had no like kind of militant opposition. But the soft fork is 3:16:36 very easy to activate. It was very unusual when SegWit didn't activate. And that was why everyone was so traumatized by it. And 3:16:44 that was why people waited so long to activate Taproot because they were so confused and traumatized by what had happened 3:16:49 before. What used to be such an easy thing, turned up, turned out to be very difficult. And that's why people overthink it 3:16:58 today. They can't just go back. They can't just go back to the way it was before SegWit. They have to really, really care about soft 3:17:09 forks or something. So they think, but mistakenly, in my view. 3:17:17 Okay, thank you. 3:17:17 Okay, this is fun. But I do think, I don't know if I can do eight hour spaces week after week after week. So it has been three hours and a 3:17:31 little. So I think that I'd like to say maybe we'll, maybe we'll give it another 12 minutes or we'll try to get last minute questions. And 3:17:42 then we'll wind it down, I think. So if you really, really want to ask a question, or you have a great comment, then come on up. 3:17:57 I have a question, Paul. If somebody is a support BIP300, and they think it's the best thing to help the Bitcoin number go up, what's the best 3:18:12 action for that person? 3:18:15 Well, we do have our, you could just tweet, I support drivechain BIP300 plus 301, which is like, and then we add a lot of those people, the 3:18:26 names to the layer two labs.com slash friends. So tweeting support is good. And countering the FUD is good. So we're going to have a page 3:18:36 soon, we're gonna have a short page that's just like, all the FUD, like FUD Q&A, which is just like the FUD, then the short answer. And then I'm 3:18:45 gonna write some longer things to like link to that page is gonna like link to like some longer anti FUD. So that's, that's good. I think 3:18:53 literally, one thing is, we have a lot of support from miners in private and some in public. But the only one who's willing to the only leader of a 3:19:06 mining pool that publicly has said, whatever that they support, that they will support activating BIP300 was Luxor. So I suppose you get 3:19:18 everyone that if you have a hash point that luck Luxor, I should say, because they're the only one who so far publicly said on Twitter that they're 3:19:26 pro BIP300 activation. So I guess that's another thing if you have hash rate. So I think countering the FUD on social media, and you know, 3:19:37 learning is good. I think it's really key to you could read the BIP. But if you just think I don't know what's going on in this document, then 3:19:45 downloading our software is good. Although we have a new version. So I'll try to update it really quickly. I always have new versions. And you've 3:19:52 got to drive to that info slash releases, you can download the software and play around with it yourself. And we're going to try to make that 3:20:01 better and better and better over time so that there's very good demo, software demo experience. And I think that's the best way to learn. And 3:20:10 that's also just a very reasonable thing to do. Because this is what you are sort of supporting. So you can get the opportunity to actually look at 3:20:21 it. And so I think those things help. And then I think one thing that actually helps me a lot is it's not good if people just randomly complain on 3:20:33 Twitter. I think it's much better if someone has some kind of critique, like what we did with Peter Todd, and we asked him to put it in a document. Then 3:20:44 they just like they never do. Or if they do, then it's actually better. Like Shinobi writes his criticism article, then it's much easier for me 3:20:52 because I just say, Okay, this is the whole thing. These are the points. So if you encounter critics, ask them to just like, write down exactly what it is 3:21:03 they mean, so that it's not just vague talking points. That is the vague talking points. I'm kind of like, this is just a waste of time to even talk about 3:21:13 this. Like, I don't know what's going on. So I don't know even I don't even know what this person means or what they think I mean. So it's better if 3:21:20 someone writes like, some kind of document like of any length, but just something that has like a beginning, a middle and an end, you know. So I think that 3:21:32 helps. 3:21:32 Sounds good, Paul. I'll make sure Saratoshi asks good questions next time. Sorry, Saratoshi. But yeah, Paul, nice to meet you, dude. I support your 3:21:48 project. I'm trying to get on board with it. I'm really curious where the OPT5 is. Is that in like the Coinbase itself? Where are we trying to make 3:22:00 this one little smidgen of a change? 3:22:06 The changes in the block validation rules. So it's in when the software runs, it downloads blocks, and it examines all those blocks carefully to make 3:22:14 sure that they are free of errors. And that is what we change from just saying OPT5 always works to OPT5 will sometimes cause the block to be invalid, 3:22:30 which is if you if you intentionally use OPT5 and you break the rules. And that is what once that is enforced by enough nodes, then those just become the 3:22:41 rules for everyone, even people who are not enforcing them, because it's just so many other people are that there's no realistic way of using OPT5 other than in this 3:22:51 this one declared way. And that is how software works. The opcodes themselves, you can search, I think you can search like Bitcoin script, and you'll get you 3:22:59 should get some kind of result that helps. Although Google, I feel really bad for the young people of today because for most of my life, Google has worked so 3:23:10 well. And I really feel like in the last two years, it's completely sucks now. And it just kills you the whole first page is garbage results. So I hope that 3:23:20 people can still find information if they're young. 3:23:24 Yeah, finding information is hard. So you're saying the the way it validates the blocks as they come in, we are looking for no OPT5. Normally, that'd be like a 3:23:37 discard, you said, but in this case, we're going to allow it to be accepted. 3:23:44 Slightly different than that. Normally, what happens is it's always allowed. So it's like a, it's like a slab of marble. You say the whole marble is here, and 3:23:53 then we're going to chip away, we're going to say it's sometimes invalid, if certain things happen. And then that's like you're chiseling away at the 3:23:59 marble, and then you have the Statue of David, or whatever is what remains. You do addition by subtraction. 3:24:07 And it's just like a fight field that we're allowing ourselves to put instructions in? Or is that what we're doing? 3:24:15 You should probably look up the Bitcoin script. Or you can go to like one thing you could do is you can go to my favorite block, it's for yoga.io, Y-O-G-H.io, and like 3:24:24 click in and find transactions, you can see all the opcodes. And so for example, every time you spend, if you spend like a transaction, like a pay to script hash, or pay like a normal 3:24:38 pay to pubkey hash transaction, it always has the same sequence of bytes in it. That's like opcube, opchecksig, whatever. So you actually see, one thing you 3:24:50 could do is I wrote a blog post called small transactions, which is unrelated, but I do explain the concept in there about every time there is a pay to pubkey hash 3:25:05 transaction, it wastes a bunch of redundant bytes and repeating the same instructions over and over again. But yeah, if you want to research some of this, I think you would 3:25:13 Yeah, I guess I have to because it's very interesting. Yeah, I mean, it looks like I've got a ton of reading up to do. We're barely scratching the surface. I appreciate the kind of direction there, at least to know where to look. 3:25:29 Yeah, cool. 3:25:31 Yeah, try to do the truth coin, search truth coin as small transactions. And then I think if you 3:25:37 read that, I have lots of links to other things. And then pictures, pictures of like, red squares around different opcodes. So then you can actually see real opcode in the wild if you on that post. 3:25:50 So yeah, this is very much interest me, because I'm trying to learn about this Bitcoin gossip protocol. And I guess these opcodes, would they be considered part of that protocol? 3:26:02 No, that's actually a different thing. But I mean, they're all related. But yeah, the gossip is like BitTorrent is like, how you figure out who is a peer. So this is like you show up, like you if you show up to, I don't know, you show up to college for your first day, and you have to figure out like, how are things done around it? Where is you know, where is my dorm? 3:26:29 Office is like figure out. So the gossip is kind of doing that you show up and the Bitcoin network, but you're like, 3:26:38 Okay, cool. 3:26:42 So in this protocol, we're taking a no op five. And is the instruction that we're going to put in that space going to be dynamic? Or is it going to be like, I mean, is it like a two byte? Is it a is it a static byte field or? 3:26:57 I think talking about that is not the op five is already interpreted by the script interpreter a certain way. And we, we tighten that a little bit. That's the marble, the slab of marble. And if you read BIP300, you view that is exactly what it does. Okay, that is the point of the text. 3:27:20 right. Sounds good. 3:27:22 Well, I'll yield the floor. 3:27:24 If anybody has any final questions, I gotta be respectful of your time. 3:27:27 know you got to run. 3:27:28 Thank you. 3:27:43 Okay, cool. Well, this has been fun. 3:27:46 This is what we would normally have counted as a really long space, but we did like a 3:27:50 few that were so long. 3:27:53 Now this is merely a three and a half hour one. 3:27:55 this is 3:27:56 like Lord of the Rings Extended Edition, first movie, now 3:28:01 a short space. 3:28:03 it was a good one. 3:28:05 So I'll see everyone next week. 3:28:10 And thanks for great space. 3:28:13 So I'll see everyone later.
