0:00 Anyway, here we are. I hope it'll be another great space. 0:03 A lot of news of the week. 0:06 I made a tiny list. 0:13 We'll wait for our esteemed guest, Mr. Anthony Riard. 0:20 I'm not exactly sure how French that is pronounced. 0:25 So we'll see. We'll get it from the horse's mouth. 0:55 We're going to have a legend, Blaise Pascal. 1:12 He's going to probably try to bet against us on whether or not God exists. 1:22 No, I'm just kidding. He won't do that. 1:24 But in a past life, I was a statistician. 1:29 And, of course, my memory is a little hazy on this, 1:34 but I think he sort of invented probability or something. 1:38 Anyway, very important guy in the world of probability of one kind or another. 1:46 So we'll talk about lightning. 1:48 I mean, lightning is a very important thing for us to talk about, 1:50 because I'm not exactly sure how we Bitcoiners should handle it as a topic, 2:03 because it does seem to be sucking all the air out of the room. 2:11 Oh, hello. Welcome. Welcome. 2:13 It usually takes people when they become a speaker. 2:21 They're like on a delay and then they get undelayed. 2:30 And then you are muted also. Keep that in mind. 2:37 OK, do you hear me well? Yes. 2:40 Yes. OK, cool. Perfect. 2:45 Oh, so you're super, super French. 2:47 So it's really pronounced very differently than I am. 2:53 Anthony Riard, something like that. 2:56 No, no, no. In French, it would be Antoine Riard. 2:59 But I'm fine. 3:01 Antoine. 3:02 Yes. 3:04 Yeah, if at any time you don't understand, ask me to repeat. 3:08 I'm used to, so no big deal. 3:11 French has the best Ocarina of Time randomizer speedrunners. 3:16 I'm not sure if you are aware of that. 3:19 I don't know why that is. 3:21 The colliders, like the physical colliders, like undergrounds. 3:25 That's what you're mentioning. 3:34 No, the people who play video games and race to complete the fastest. 3:42 Oh, yeah. I'm less of a video game guy. 3:47 OK, well, in any event. 3:49 So my thoughts on the Lightning Network are like, 3:53 what exactly has it become? 3:56 Like, I was very supportive of it in 2015. 4:00 And I even wrote, anyone can look this up. 4:02 I had this peer-to-peer Oracle thing. 4:04 And I thought, oh, this would be great. 4:06 We'll have this Lightning Network for that. 4:08 And I wrote a Lightning. 4:09 Back in 2015, long ago, I was like, OK, 4:12 I'll write like a version of the Lightning Network for this project. 4:16 I was very enthusiastic about it back then. 4:18 Then I kind of didn't really pay that much attention to it for a while. 4:22 And then there's one story I've told before that I'll try to quickly say again. 4:27 But I was at, I think I was at Anarchapulco, 4:30 where there were many Bitcoiners. 4:32 This was before it was a fully large block thing. 4:35 It wasn't that long. 4:36 It was maybe like, it kind of like went in waves. 4:43 No, it was after that, because what had happened was, 4:45 it had gone like full large block, 4:47 and then it had kind of like retreated back to just being like very neutral on crypto. 4:52 And there was a lot of just like crazy stuff. 4:53 So I like Monero there. 4:55 There was a lot of just like anti-state people were there. 4:59 And a bunch of people, I think it was Wallet of Satoshi. 5:05 Or maybe it was Blue Wallet. 5:06 I can't remember. 5:07 I think it was Wallet of Satoshi though. 5:09 I should really get my story straight. 5:10 But the point of the story is this, 5:11 that people were going around and they were like, 5:13 Lightning is amazing. 5:14 It's great. 5:15 It has no fees. 5:16 They said no fees. 5:17 None. 5:18 I was like, what? 5:19 And they said it has no fees, and it's like super fast, and it works great. 5:24 And then they peer pressured me into downloading the app. 5:28 Everyone was like, you've got to download this app. 5:30 And I was like, should I really do this? 5:31 Download this app to my phone? 5:33 And I was like, without looking into it. 5:35 And I was like, whatever. 5:36 I'm having a good time. 5:37 So I downloaded the app, and then they sent me Bitcoin. 5:41 And then I said something like, oh, but I didn't open the channel to anyone. 5:44 And then they were like, what? 5:47 And then I was like, is it Lightning? 5:51 Or is it Custodial? 5:54 And then there's sort of like this room full of people, 5:58 or this crowd of maybe like 10 or 12 people. 6:03 It was clear they had no idea what I was talking about. 6:07 And that was the first moment when I was like, 6:11 I don't know where this road is going to lead because, 6:17 and you see this now where people, you know, 6:19 use the word Lightning to refer to something that is just a client server 6:23 type thing. 6:26 Anyway, fast forward to now, 6:28 where I kind of think that it is like become almost a menace to Bitcoin 6:36 even where, I don't know, you know, 6:39 but I do think like people are just so stuck on it. 6:42 You even have people like Tadge Dreja who are just kind of trying to say 6:46 like, we can like do many, many other different things at once. 6:52 Yeah. 6:53 I don't know. 6:54 What do you think? 6:55 Yeah. 6:56 I think we should go back in time. 6:58 And like, if you're like very OG, 7:01 like you might remember about something called the BitcoinJ, 7:04 like the Bitcoin Java library. 7:06 I do remember it. 7:07 Yes. 7:08 Yes. 7:09 So it was a great one. 7:10 It's been used by a lot of like early service in the Bitcoin space, 7:15 being like user-friendly wallets. 7:17 And I think like around 2012 or 2013, 7:21 they had like some kind of implementation of micro payment channels. 7:24 And it was like very rudimentary or very basic payment channel. 7:32 It was one way. 7:34 Yes. 7:36 Yeah. 7:37 And it was like, you know, 7:39 there was not like infinite lifetime channel, 7:42 in the sense of it was expiring after like, I don't know, 7:45 like some one week or a month or something like this. 7:49 And like, so they were at this. 7:52 And back around 2013, 2014, 7:56 no one was really interested in this, 7:58 like in that kind of like very simple, 8:01 very basic payment channel technology. 8:04 And I mean, 8:08 like micro payment channel, 8:09 like stays to sleep in like in the corner of the Bitcoin story. 8:12 And like in 2015, 8:14 we start to have like Lightning, 8:15 like you were seeing. 8:16 And Lightning was just like an order of magnitude in terms of payment channels 8:21 kind of technology. 8:22 In between, 8:23 there was like some interesting ideas, 8:25 if I remember correctly, 8:26 like I've done Spark or like where everyone does have a payment channel 8:31 with some trusted parties. 8:32 And first parties doing like the cross payments across all the users of 8:37 the app. 8:38 And 2015, 8:41 we have like Lightning papers published for the first time, 8:45 if I get the date correctly. 8:47 And, you know, 8:49 like suddenly you have like this network of payment channel, 8:54 trustless, 8:55 multi-op payments with HTLC and all that kind of things. 8:59 And like people are excited. 9:01 I think like every time, 9:04 the first time you read the Lightning papers, 9:06 it's really brilliant from like a distributed systems perspective. 9:11 But like 2016, 9:17 2017, 9:18 people were like working on the implementations and 18, 9:21 we started to have like first mainnet usage of Lightning. 9:25 And then like we started to encounter a lot of like low level and users 9:32 issues. 9:33 Like you say, 9:35 like one of the fundamental issues people started to realize is like all 9:40 the liquidity kind of, 9:41 you know, 9:42 all the liquidity kind of management you have to do on Lightning to keep 9:46 your chain balanced when you, 9:48 or to have like inbound or outbound liquidity in function of which way 9:52 you're trying to do payments in the network or like being connected to 9:56 some kind of like always online Lightning, 10:01 Lightning peers or companies to get access to the current networks and not 10:06 being too far from like other people. 10:09 So that's more like users kind of issues. 10:12 And on the other end, 10:13 we started to have like a lot of like more security and robustness issues in 10:17 terms of key measurements, 10:19 in terms of, 10:20 you know, 10:21 how Lightning is like integrating with the base layers, 10:24 like how your transactions are relayed on the base layer of Bitcoin and all 10:30 this is not necessarily like secure and robust. 10:33 So, 10:35 so the thing is like, 10:37 Lightning is like, 10:39 you know, 10:40 it sounds like we have like this, 10:43 we're trying to build a rocket to go to the moon, 10:46 but we have like, 10:48 we have done things which is like brilliant, 10:51 but sounds like very complex. 10:53 And like, 10:54 instead of something which has been like, 10:56 instead of some development cycles where people could have used micropayment 11:01 channels or people could have used like, 11:04 and we would have learned a lot as a community in terms of second layers 11:09 designs, 11:10 in terms of second layers operations and all that kind of things. 11:13 So you were asking me like, 11:17 where we stand, 11:18 where is my sentiments on where we stand right now in terms of Bitcoin 11:22 second layers? 11:23 Well, 11:24 I think we are, 11:25 we start to be like more in this phase of, 11:27 you know, 11:29 there is no silver bullet in engineering. 11:31 There is no, 11:33 there is no, 11:35 there is no perfect systems and every one of them does have like some kind of 11:40 limitations and people start to be like far more aware about like limitations 11:45 now. 11:46 So that's, 11:47 in my sentiment, 11:48 that's where we stand right now. 11:55 Right. 11:56 I think of course what people are pretty interested in is the email that you 12:04 wrote. 12:05 And I am going to just give you my understanding of it, 12:08 which should probably have spent more time making sure that it's right, 12:13 but it goes something like this. 12:14 The idea behind lightning is there's the hash chat and there's the hash 12:17 pathway, 12:19 which is that the payment goes through. 12:21 And then there's the timeout, 12:22 which is that something has gone wrong and we need to hit control Z and undo 12:27 everything. 12:28 So the idea is that the hash when the timeout, 12:34 you know, 12:35 up until a certain point you use the hash and then after that you use the 12:39 timeout. 12:40 However, 12:41 the flaw that you have pointed out is that someone can just wait for the 12:47 timeout. 12:48 And at that point they can either, 12:50 they can cause either of the two to happen at will by just increasing the fee 12:56 with some kind of like any kind of thing. 12:58 It doesn't even matter. 12:59 It could be child pays for a parent. 13:00 It could be anything. 13:01 It could just be them paying it in some kind of multi-input thing. 13:05 So they have total control over whether the hash, 13:09 it seems as though it's one or the other, 13:12 but they have total control over which happens. 13:16 And since the lightning network has made these people sitting in the middle, 13:19 that is brutal for the intermediary who can be like surrounded and like they 13:25 can do the hash, 13:26 pulling the money away from them and the time lock pulling the refund away. 13:30 And they lose someone who's just sitting in the middle. 13:33 We'll just lose all of their money basically. 13:37 And it's very, 13:38 it's quite a rational attack. 13:40 Yes. 13:41 You do have an upper bound on like, 13:43 you know, 13:44 when you do open the channel, 13:46 you're negotiating policy barriers with your contemporaries. 13:49 And one of them is like max HTTP in flight. 13:52 And there is like, 13:57 some implementations are very conservative because I think it's like 20 or 10% of the 14:04 channel capacity. 14:05 But like some of them, 14:06 it's like 100%. 14:07 So yes, 14:09 in practice, 14:11 in the worst case, 14:13 depending on your implementation defaults, 14:14 you might lose all your money. 14:16 Yeah. 14:19 Yes. 14:20 And this is the poor, 14:21 innocent third party who is not even buying or selling anything. 14:24 They're just routing the payments, 14:25 which is sort of rough. 14:26 And then even if the in-flight amount is low, 14:30 the channels are themselves kind of like a scarce resource, 14:34 you know, 14:35 because you have to go back to L1 if you want to edit them. 14:37 And so you're stuck with these channels with people. 14:40 So you kind of really don't want to have the relationship sour for lack of a 14:46 better word. 14:47 You don't want it to just be like, 14:48 you're kind of hoping the channel will work out when you make it. 14:51 And then if it doesn't work out, 14:53 if the people are just determined to be very mean to you, 14:57 you have to uncooperative close. 14:59 And then when you uncooperative close, 15:01 it's your money that is locked for the two weeks or the whatever it is. 15:05 And they get the money immediately. 15:07 It sort of adds insult to injury. 15:08 Yeah. 15:10 Which is kind of rough. 15:11 Yeah. 15:12 That's one of the most like, 15:14 I think you're like underwriting one of the most, 15:18 one of the worst issue of lightning from a lightning routing 15:25 perspective, which is like, 15:28 you know, 15:29 how do you know that this random guy opening a channel with you is going to 15:33 be like, you know, 15:35 use not even like doing security attacks, 15:38 but even like being, 15:40 do a lot of payments or like use your liquidity in a way, 15:44 which is like interesting to you compared to the more global market in a 15:50 sense of, you know, 15:52 like how can you ensure that the scarce liquidity you are occupying is 15:57 like, I'll get it. 15:59 I'll get it on part on enterprise, 16:01 which are going to warranty you, 16:03 or at least like at least yell to you a high rate of fees of option 16:11 fees. 16:14 And these options, 16:15 the routing fees have to be higher than like on shape fees in the worst 16:19 case. 16:20 In the worst case, 16:21 if you have to fast close. 16:27 Yes. 16:28 You know, 16:29 one thing that, 16:30 you know, 16:31 a friend of mine, 16:34 you know, 16:35 creative Nostra sort of not like the literal creator, 16:38 but the big, 16:39 but anyway, 16:40 he is his he pointed out to me for the first time that if people just 16:45 disagree over what the fee rate is, 16:47 there will be uncooperative close because they won't, 16:50 the channel won't be able to agree on what to do. 16:55 So they just, 16:56 they just bite the bullet and immediately uncooperative close, 16:59 which seems like that. 17:01 That sounds like a very troublesome detail to get up, 17:06 but I think that's not really the important thing. 17:08 I think though, 17:09 maybe because I think you pointed this out and then the reaction I thought 17:14 was very disappointing where there was a lot of like cope and even select 17:18 Peter Todd, 17:19 for example, 17:20 Peter Todd is sort of a rival of mine, 17:24 but, 17:25 but he, 17:26 he started to say like, 17:27 well, 17:28 this doesn't matter because you can like, 17:30 just be careful about who you open a channel with or something. 17:33 And I thought that was a very disappointing answer. 17:35 That is like very anti-cypher point to kind of like anti the point of the 17:39 lightning network. 17:40 Why have all these HTLCs? 17:41 Why have all this stuff at all? 17:42 If you're going to be like, 17:43 take that attitude. 17:45 I mean, 17:46 yeah, 17:47 I, 17:48 you are sure. 17:49 Uh, 17:52 some way it goes from cement and sense of, 17:54 we have done like this whole, 17:55 like, 17:56 uh, 17:57 we're spread the words of designing this whole, 17:59 like decentralized network of main channels. 18:01 Like, 18:02 uh, 18:03 and what, 18:04 like implantation are quite complex, 18:05 a sense of, 18:06 uh, 18:07 you know, 18:08 you need to meet her over the, 18:09 all the blocks, 18:10 uh, 18:11 when there is like, 18:12 when there is like some, 18:13 uh, 18:14 transactions, 18:15 including someone of what, 18:16 like when you're opening a channels, 18:18 you need to meet her on the funding transactions. 18:20 There is no, 18:21 we are, 18:22 uh, 18:23 you need to meet her. 18:24 There is no non-cooperative or like revocate close by your contemporary. 18:28 If there is one of them, 18:30 you should be able to finish this, 18:32 uh, 18:33 relocate stays in the timely patients for doing. 18:36 So you need to keep like, 18:38 you need to keep him emptying values. 18:40 You need to keep key keys on a hot server. 18:43 You need to be on like 24 hours, 18:45 24 hours, 18:46 seven days on seven days. 18:47 We have put like these crazy amount of engineering at the end of the day, 18:50 say, 18:51 Hey, 18:52 the worst case, 18:53 like, 18:54 let's just assume you open. 18:55 This is, 18:56 as you trust your parties, 18:57 all that, 18:58 just assume like open chairs with people in your like web of friends or like 19:03 social sites, 19:04 your calls. 19:05 And like, 19:06 but we are completely moving away from like, 19:08 like you were seeing a cyber print kind of it was. 19:10 Yeah. 19:11 And then you did kind of a very, 19:14 very, 19:15 you did certainly one of the most interesting things anyone has ever done. 19:18 Uh, 19:19 you probably should have been on the most influential, 19:22 uh, 19:23 crypto list instead of me, 19:25 maybe, 19:26 I mean, 19:27 but maybe not that. 19:28 I don't know how interesting it, 19:29 but what you did is you said that you were going to basically sort of step 19:31 back from working on lightning. 19:33 You sort of leave the, 19:34 because to me, 19:35 I think this is kind of a tangential issue, 19:38 but there does seem to be like this. 19:40 There's this kind of cult, 19:42 like psycho drama. 19:44 That's like happening in Bitcoin where I think there are these different 19:48 people. 19:49 And some of them are just like the marketing department or, 19:53 or if you prefer, 19:54 you could call it like a kind of weird death cult, 19:56 which is kind of also what I kind of think that it is. 19:59 But what I'm getting at is you have these, 20:01 you have these people who are like the, 20:03 uh, 20:04 the priests and like the sort of enforcers. 20:07 And they are just like monitoring for any kind of nonconformity. 20:13 And to have someone who is a technical person, 20:16 a developer leave is honestly like a, 20:20 a shocking thing. 20:23 I think to people, 20:24 it's very, 20:25 very unusual. 20:26 And some might say inspiring, 20:28 some might say like, 20:29 just like some other word, 20:30 I don't know, 20:31 but I'm not sure. 20:32 That's not really what I'm trying to convey. 20:34 What I'm trying to convey is it's very, 20:35 it's very notable and unusual that, 20:37 and it's like, 20:38 it's you, 20:39 you've broken from the herd to some extent. 20:41 What a lot of people do is they just stay in lightning. 20:44 They, 20:45 they farm up their cred and then they can go to like a VC and start 20:50 like a lightning startup or something. 20:53 And you have done a very completely different thing. 20:55 Seemingly to no direct benefit to you. 20:58 And it does make it, 21:00 it gives you an enormous amount of credibility in some way. 21:03 And I just think, 21:04 and then, 21:05 um, 21:06 my, 21:07 uh, 21:08 my friend messaged you about coming on the show. 21:10 And I was like, 21:11 well, 21:12 this is great. 21:13 This guy's, 21:14 this has got to be one of the most interesting people in Bitcoin. 21:16 And that's just, 21:17 so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that. 21:20 And what that last part of the email where you say that, 21:23 well, 21:24 you're sort of stepping back from lightning development or however you 21:28 would prefer to phrase it. 21:30 Yeah. 21:31 Uh, 21:32 well, 21:33 thanks for your work, 21:34 uh, 21:35 for your words. 21:36 Uh, 21:37 yeah, 21:38 well, 21:39 I mean, 21:40 like my peers working on Andy, 21:42 a clear call lightning, 21:44 uh, 21:45 LDK. 21:46 I, 21:47 I respect those people. 21:48 They are like technically competence. 21:50 Uh, 21:51 they do have a sense of dedication. 21:53 Uh, 21:54 they're working hard on it. 21:55 Uh, 21:56 but you know, 21:58 on the other end, 21:59 like, 22:00 I mean, 22:01 like it's not the first, 22:02 uh, 22:03 major security. 22:04 I found on lightning and it's, 22:08 it sounds like we do have, 22:09 like, 22:10 you know, 22:11 all the shoes we challenge. 22:12 I mean, 22:13 we do have issues with food and loop and then pool congestions. 22:16 And we do have issue is eclipse and time duration attacks. 22:20 And we have all those being attacks, 22:22 uh, 22:23 where we're trying to fix him. 22:25 You can go right now. 22:26 And we do have like key measurement is very hard on lighting. 22:30 And because like, 22:31 he like that kind of intermediary between cold and art wallet. 22:35 And we have also like, 22:37 uh, 22:38 all the critical graphing that people have tried to talk like this year, 22:42 uh, 22:43 more on the main needs, 22:44 but that we were aware of, 22:46 like, 22:47 are years ago. 22:48 And you know, 22:49 at some point you're like, 22:50 um, 22:51 that's where like, 22:53 here's a PPR. 22:54 I might be there from other developers. 22:56 Where are we doing the work of like trying to have like these peer to 23:02 peer cipher print kind of network. 23:04 And like, 23:05 why are we working so hard? 23:07 You know, 23:08 why are we working? 23:09 Like, 23:10 uh, 23:11 I think I've been working on liking since five years now, 23:13 like since 2018. 23:15 And you are like, 23:16 why are we working so hard? 23:18 Why are we all like spending nights, 23:20 reading cards and are showing like, 23:21 so to our words, 23:22 users can like deploy smoothly in like, 23:25 uh, 23:27 you know, like people phones are secure and they can do experiment with it and 23:32 they can run liking us and go to sleep at night with other phones being like 23:35 still in the middle, you know, in the middle of the nights. 23:38 And it's more some point where I'm like, okay guys, uh, I appreciate you. 23:43 I appreciate the lagging community, but, uh, this is not trusty to me, you know? 23:48 Uh, and, uh, I, I fully understand like, you know, 23:54 people are, they do have like, uh, they do have incentives. Uh, 23:58 it's, it's very liking us, like reach this, uh, 24:04 mark where it's conventional wisdom. And if you like, uh, 24:11 if you're a VC or Bitcoin or more, 24:13 even more generous VC and you do invest in liking startups, it's, 24:17 you're not going to be fired by your LPs for doing this, uh, essence of you're, 24:21 you're just, you're buying EBM where you're, 24:24 no one has been fired by, uh, to buy EBM equities. Like, 24:28 like we say more markets, uh, more traditional markets. 24:33 And it sounds to me like we have reached like these points where, uh, you know, 24:37 some truth or like saying some, 24:39 like saying some truth or saying some technical statements that will cost a lot 24:45 of money for people like to like, uh, 24:48 invade the investment TVs or like write down their investments. 24:52 And so people are just like, well, I mean, well, 24:56 let's just say, okay, we might have security issues. Okay. It's not great, 25:01 but that's fine. We can deal with it. And let's just like, 25:05 take the bag of sheets and like give it to future generations, like five, 25:10 10, 15 years from now. And very sadly, 25:14 but we have seen this with internet already, 25:16 a sense of mass of security issues. What's, uh, 25:21 which are plugging internet today in terms of authentications, 25:23 in terms of user credentials, in terms of denial of service, 25:27 we're quite a dispute in the eighties and nineties. So, 25:32 yeah, like, uh, I mean, yeah. 25:36 It's quite, this is sort of like the, the, 25:38 the darkest side of like the capitalist corporate 25:44 model of like the company has direct firsthand knowledge of something, 25:50 uh, not working out. 25:52 And then they just decide to obscure that information and 25:57 markets are great. Uh, I mean, uh, we are overall, 26:02 yeah. Although the, the, like, uh, you know, I think we're lucky to, 26:07 I mean, most of people today are in the world are, well, it's not very true, 26:12 but if you're lucky to be born in a liberal democracy, 26:17 we's like, 26:21 I have a, 26:23 I have a vision that involves like Hayekian prediction markets, 26:26 like taking over the entire planet earth. So I'm, I'm very pro market, 26:30 but I'm just, I mean, a moment ago, you just said like, uh, 26:33 people worried about the invalidating, 26:36 the investment thesis might not want to 26:40 spread, speak honestly about what they believe, which I'm just saying, 26:44 that definitely is. That's a, 26:46 that's actually a problem that we don't have a competing. We don't have, 26:50 we should have real markets for goods or capital goods and for, 26:54 and we should also have prediction markets on what will work out. 26:56 And if we did, 26:57 then the prediction markets would have revealed the truth long ago, 27:00 which is like a, kind of a tangential point. 27:02 Yeah. And markets or markets for like, or like, 27:06 at least like divergent ideas or like, uh, 27:10 I have this culture about like constantly and very thoroughly about like, 27:15 keep questioning your investment. It is like, 27:18 it's very good to have an investment. Yeah. 27:20 It's very good every day to test it. And like, yeah. 27:24 Well, I think a lot of people will want, I mean, 27:26 there's a couple of different directions that we could take the conversation. 27:31 Um, but I think what a lot of people would wonder is they would say, well, 27:34 he's going to quit and then do what? 27:36 And did you have like something else in mind or were you just going to like, 27:39 take some time and kind of gather some thoughts? Like when you say, 27:44 we have this big long list of problems, you're just, 27:47 you don't really feel it's time. 27:51 Yes. Uh, 27:52 I do think we do have like a more like a general issue in Bitcoin 27:56 developments and infrastructures, uh, 27:59 providers is we are very low, uh, a small number of, 28:04 uh, I would say good reavers or like very adversarial mindset, 28:10 mindset, like you are crouching Peter Todd, which is like a very good one, uh, 28:14 incompetent one. Uh, but we do have like in my, 28:19 uh, in my test, 28:22 a too small crowd of like adversarial thinkers and people like very trying to 28:27 break because he stands for our own goods and keep our money safe at night. 28:32 And, uh, and the other end, 28:35 we do have like a lot of developers who just want to develop codes, 28:39 deploy it, develop more codes, add more codes, 28:43 more complexity in bitcoins. And we are, I'm like, we are, you know, it's, 28:48 it's an unstable balance. And at some point you're like, 28:51 you have like an increasing surface of cards and you have like an increasing, 28:55 uh, you have an increasing system, complex systems for like, 29:00 for like nearly constants or even decreasing numbers of address or thinkers and 29:05 people like doing the security maintenance and like working on the batch and fix 29:10 at night. So yes, uh, spending more time about how can we have like more security 29:15 talents working on Bitcoin and more like address or thinkers and like, yeah. 29:20 Yeah. Well that's, I mean, 29:22 I've actually suspected for a while that it's kind of becoming kind of like a 29:25 make work program because what, what do you want? If you're a developer, 29:30 you kind of want the problems to get worse and you want them to be something 29:34 that only an expert who's been working on the problem for years can solve. 29:39 So you kind of like wanted to be digging a huge hole that you want to be digging 29:44 it and then you're the expert on the whole and then blah, blah, blah. 29:47 But I was kind of thinking more about like what, what you personally, I mean, 29:50 you say that you in the, at the end of the email where you pointed this out, 29:54 you said that you were sort of going to 29:58 stop focusing on the lightning network. 30:00 And I was just wondering who in particular, 30:02 like do you actually have 30:07 something else that you are interested in or you just need to kind of look around 30:10 and. 30:11 So even I don't have, I don't have like any begins fun to do, but uh, 30:16 you know, I've, I've been working like, uh, 30:18 I've been working on liking and Bitcoin Core at the same time. 30:21 It's a sense of bouncing from like implementation, 30:24 mostly cross-lining back to Bitcoin Core, 30:26 bringing a lot of things back in terms of mempool design, transaction relay. 30:30 I'm still involved with like some peers in Bitcoin Core and like, 30:35 uh, yeah, I do. 30:39 But even Bitcoin Core, it's, uh, it's a lot of work. 30:43 Things are moving slowly. Uh, so yeah, 30:46 still like doing kind of, uh, 30:51 yeah. I mean, like, 30:54 I mean, Bitcoin Core is enough. 30:57 It's a very interesting system. It's a very interesting system, 31:01 but I've done quite the wrong sense of even into actually like, you're like, 31:05 okay, like I know every subsystems. Uh, so yeah, 31:09 it's more like taking a bit of time off and you have other things, uh, 31:13 to study in software engineering. Uh, you know, like machine, 31:17 machine learning is eating the word, uh, you know, and like, you're like, okay, 31:22 it's, it's a good time to like, Bitcoin is great. Uh, 31:25 when you're already like procrastinating on Bitcoins, 31:27 you can afford the time to look like zoom out and look on the others, 31:31 like evolving landscape, technical landscapes and like, okay. Like, uh, 31:36 you know, like you were seeing like some experts are like making a system more 31:41 and more complex, uh, to be sure to, uh, 31:44 get a job or like keeping baits to keep digging the hole. Uh, 31:48 I'm more like, I always been like more like, uh, 31:51 you want to keep system simple and like, uh, you know, 31:56 more learns different matters and different types of knowledge than browsers 32:02 keep digging the hole. John, sorry, questions. 32:05 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean like there's plenty of other things. So like, um, 32:09 a couple of things come to mind. Like if, um, yep. If we said, 32:13 if someone else who, who someone else made some complaints about whatever, 32:18 like a flood in loot or whatever, um, 32:21 I would imagine some people on Twitter would be like, Oh, you know, 32:24 it worked for me. Or they would say like, Oh, 32:26 just use Phoenix or something like that. 32:29 And I'm just wondering if you have a kind of a reaction to what, 32:31 this is like what you would hear on Twitter. You know, 32:34 it's not necessarily even what most people believe, but it's just like, 32:38 this would be the canned response. 32:42 Your question is like, 32:45 It's just in general, if you complain, 32:46 it doesn't have anything to do with like any particular lightning complaint. 32:51 It's just, if anyone has a failed routing or they just say they, 32:56 they can't get it to work, people just say, Oh, you know, 32:58 use Phoenix or something. 33:01 Uh, I mean, sometimes people are never sure if it's an issue with our wallets or 33:06 if it's an issue with the protocol. Uh, and like fluid and loot, 33:10 what you're quoting is an issue with a protocol. And that's not like, 33:14 I think Phoenix is one of the best lightning wallet on the market. 33:19 If you're like looking for something which is non custodial, 33:22 but they cannot solve like fluid and loot. Like, uh, 33:28 Yeah, of course. I mean, 33:30 my favorite is the downboarding problem in lightning, 33:33 which is like the least solvable of all. And like the most, 33:38 like sort of, uh, intimidating, you might say. 33:43 Okay. I got another thing. So Peter Todd, 33:44 you mentioned Peter Todd and Fiat Jaffa and I, 33:47 we were talking online and then I said that you can't use the lightning network 33:53 beneath the dust limit because it doesn't really use the HTLCs, 33:58 which I'm kind of like speaking a little bit. Um, you know, it's uh, 34:04 you have to compress it to fit into a tweet. But then Peter Todd, uh, 34:07 Peter Todd replied by like screenshotting a bunch of payments he had made on the 34:12 lightning network that were one single Satoshi and he just has a screenshot. 34:16 And I was like, okay, that's those didn't use the HTLCs. 34:21 And then Fiat Jaffa and I went on a podcast. Yeah. 34:24 He invited me on his podcast where I was like, there's no H. 34:28 And then he said there's no time lock either. 34:30 And so then we were just kind of baffled by why is Peter Todd replying to me 34:35 with a screenshot of one Satoshi payments that he has quote made over the 34:39 lightning network end quote. So I don't know. 34:42 That's just kind of like another thing that I think you have. 34:46 Like, so you're talking about the issue, 34:47 but one Satoshi payments on the Nike network, like correct. 34:51 Yeah. Like someone just forwards those like, kind of like for free, 34:55 just kind of like hoping that they will get, 34:57 they don't really use the security model of the lightning network. 35:02 And the time locks and things. 35:04 Yeah. That's a, that's even like when you're doing like one Satoshi, 35:08 like payments on the Nike network, 35:11 the URHC payment is not going to be ad as a tangible and as a tangible output 35:18 on the lightning transactions, because like, 35:22 because doing so will create an output, 35:25 which is like non-economic viable. 35:27 And these types of outputs are going to be rejected by Bitcoin core main pools 35:34 because it's under the DOS limits, 35:38 which is not the same for every types of scripted keys. 35:42 It's not the same for pay to tap roots. 35:45 It's not the same for pay to witness script hash. 35:47 It's not the same for pay to witness public key hash, 35:50 but there is like one which is fixed. 35:52 It's like an absolute amount of Satoshi. 35:57 And what does it mean? 35:59 It means like if you go on chain with these lightning transactions, 36:04 like, and you already reveal a pre-image to your counterparty, 36:09 they are not going to be able to claim this HTLC on chain. 36:12 So they are going to be at loss. 36:14 I mean, they might be in situations where they might get lost. 36:17 In practice, 36:18 we do have like mitigations deployed by only permutation to avoid this being a 36:23 vector of attack. 36:25 But like you're just like, 36:29 we're just like capping. 36:30 We just have introduced a cap, 36:33 which is like not the same for only permutations. 36:36 It's not even standard. 36:37 Like that's sad to say, 36:38 but these security mechanisms in protocol is not even standard between 36:41 permutations. 36:43 And 36:44 the 36:46 thing is like now if you're like, you know, 36:49 we are talking about like operating a big lightning routing apps, 36:52 like in, 36:53 if you're operating that types of lightning nodes and you have a lot of routing, 36:57 a lot of one Satoshi payments, 37:00 like you're quite exposed. 37:02 I mean, that's, that's, that's a security risk. 37:05 Like if you're not able to claim like one or 5% of your lightning 37:09 channels, which has been completed as, as dust. 37:14 Yeah. 37:15 Right. 37:16 Interesting. 37:17 I mean, I think one thing, 37:19 one topic that I think is of enormous importance, 37:23 like one thing I started to notice, 37:26 I mean, I told this story before also, 37:28 but it's like the difference between the lay people and the people working on 37:32 lightning. 37:34 So I first noticed it in San Francisco in 2019 and then 2019, 37:37 I think it was also that same thing when it was like San Francisco versus 37:42 people in Mexico. 37:43 But I think I also noticed it when like, 37:47 so like Matt Corallo gave a talk to tab comps ago and they're like, 37:52 the title was like lightning is broken. 37:54 And it was just like full of all this 37:58 information. 37:59 It's full of all this information, but then it's like, so at tab comp, 38:03 it's like, so there's like, 38:05 what regular people know think they know about the lightning network, 38:08 which is like, 38:09 and then there's even like the technical community. 38:10 It's like the lead lightning people are allowed to kind of take a negative 38:17 attitude sort of towards it. 38:18 But even then immediately downstream, it's like, 38:22 it's like it goes in one, 38:23 everyone pays attention and then they clap and then it's just, 38:26 everyone just keeps going out. 38:27 They just go about their year as if they hadn't seen it or they're even more. 38:34 They just, 38:34 they're all like, 38:35 enthralled by the allure of the lightning network or something. 38:38 And I, it's, so I don't know if you, I mean, like, 38:45 okay. Yes. 38:47 No, no, no. I mean, go to finish your point. I mean, 38:48 I was just going to say something like if you had on a scale of one to 10, 38:53 like the, the, you know, 38:55 Twitter or X is a understanding of the lightning network. 39:00 Like how similar is it to, to, to, you know, 39:03 understanding of the lightning network? 39:04 Like how similar is it to like someone like a Rene Picard or something? 39:11 I think it's like, uh, like, I mean, right. 39:14 It is a great like new future, but I do think, 39:19 I do think that the number of people were just an older part of lightning in 39:23 terms of, you know, 39:24 we have done change in all the major subsystem of landing plantations and 39:29 you have like written new part of the protocols or do 39:34 all areas of lightning are very small. Uh, 39:38 and it's, it's, it's small. Uh, 39:43 I think 10, 10 or 15 people, 39:46 I would say have very good understanding of lightning, but I don't think, 39:50 I don't think more. Uh, and you know, a sideways, like, um, 39:55 I remember Matt's talk in Tapcon one or two years ago and I was there and it's 40:02 like, you know, you're like, okay. At some point you are like, 40:06 in the lightning community, you are like, okay, we know all the issues. 40:10 Are we things to have like, uh, 40:12 lightning protocols technical debt under control or at least like, uh, you know, 40:16 being like, okay, now we have all the major issues and we just have to fix them. 40:22 And then you find like a new remedy or, 40:25 or you found like some kind of weird interactions between like the lightning 40:30 layers and the base layers. And you're like, okay, now we are like, 40:33 you are back to like two or three years ago or like, you're like, okay, 40:37 technical debt is like, 40:39 technical debt is increasing faster than we are like fixing issues. And that's, 40:43 that's, yeah, that's one kind of, I'm like, okay, uh, 40:47 I prefer to, uh, 40:49 take a step back from lightning and like work on something more conservative. 40:54 Yeah. 40:56 Well, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, 40:58 I just want to maybe mention one random story, which is that this was about, 41:04 um, just a little more than a year ago when I was, uh, 41:09 I did a little pitch deck for this company, LayerTwo Labs, 41:12 and I had a bunch of stuff, tons of stuff on there. And you know, 41:15 it was mostly great, but I had one slide that I had like a couple of slides 41:20 about like, you know, problems in Bitcoin or whatever, 41:22 just kind of motivate the whole thing, kick the thing off. 41:25 And one of them was about light lightning problems with lightning. Just one, 41:29 that's the only, 41:30 just one slide and just people just absolutely hated this slide and all kinds 41:35 of people tried to, 41:37 they put enormous pressure on me to just cut this slide from the people don't 41:42 want to hear any about anything about this. 41:44 And people like, you know, it's like negative or something. It's funny. 41:49 Cause it's like, 41:49 I think like the slide right before I had something about like taproot adoption 41:53 and I had like segment with the graph going up a lot. 41:56 And then taproot it was like 0.3 or 0.3% or something like some tiny thing. 42:01 And I was like, Oh, 42:02 we worked on this taproot thing that people aren't really using. 42:05 Cause it was before separate wizards and ordinals were like hacking it. 42:10 So, but I just, 42:12 I just really stuck out to me as this memory that just people really just did 42:16 not want to, 42:18 they had a very strong reaction to like, 42:21 just like any criticism of lightning or something like that. 42:24 I'm not exactly sure how to piece it together myself, but you know, 42:26 you really did get the impression that a lot of people had invested in the 42:30 lightning network, like not only financially, 42:33 but also like kind of spiritually and psychologically and that they didn't even 42:37 want to hear anything about. 42:40 Yeah. 42:41 And I wouldn't even imagine that my mostly had, 42:43 I had stuff on there that was just like quoting, like, you know, 42:47 people like Matt Corral or like experts I had, 42:49 like it wasn't even coming from me. 42:51 I had linked through the synonym spaces that John Carvalho had done. 42:56 I had like the math on the onboarding problem. Anyway, what do you have? 43:00 I don't know. I just thought that was a very curious thing. 43:03 Yeah. But you know, like, 43:06 I'm still like lightning as a, 43:08 I would say as a protocol paradigm and this whole idea about like, you know, 43:12 doing trustless or trust minimize of chain, 43:16 private contracts based on public UTXO in the blockchain and doing 43:21 these like with someone else, like, you know, 43:24 in Singapore or Chile or like South Korea, 43:28 like that you have never met before and being able like to do like financial 43:32 transaction with them. 43:33 That is still like a fascinating paradigm and very powerful paradigm. 43:37 But you know, when you study lightning for years, 43:41 like I've done and we're like, when you come back, 43:46 it's very interesting, but it might take 10 to 20 years to fix. 43:52 People don't like, don't like these, that kind of statements. 43:57 I'm lucky to be young in the sense of, I can say, Hey, 43:59 like I can wait 10 or 20 years for lightning to mature and all of this 44:04 off-chain paradigm to mature. But other people, they're like, 44:08 I mean, we have to deliver next semester or we have to, you know, 44:13 there is like quarter returns or like all that kind of things. 44:16 Or we do have help. 44:18 We are VC funded and LP of like our thinking on five or seven 44:23 years timelines, all that kind of things. So yeah, 44:25 people generally don't like, like you were seeing when you show up and say, 44:31 this is same as a lot of issues and drawbacks. 44:34 They might not like this statements. 44:43 Yeah, they certainly did not. Yeah. Well, we have Satoshi Enjoyers up here. 44:49 So I take some questions. Yeah. Let's see if anyone wants to come up, 44:54 just come up, feel free to come up. And here we are. 44:59 Cool. Hey, what's up guys. 45:02 I have some questions on a little bit about lightning from the experts. 45:07 And basically I have like this way I'm looking at it and I'm wondering if it's 45:10 correct. 45:11 So I was looking at lightning in a way where basically people would eventually 45:16 get priced out from the base layer and they would have their self 45:20 custody or non-custodial on lightning. 45:24 But it seems like to me that doesn't really scale in a sense of because they 45:28 still have to open and close channels and that, 45:31 and they have to still do that on chain. So if they can afford on chain, 45:34 like there might be like a middle ground of people that can really have fully 45:38 non-custodial on lightning, but if they're really fully priced out of on chain, 45:43 then lightning becomes custodial to them. Do you think that? 45:47 Yeah. So you're saying like, you know, 45:49 we are talking about like one Satoshi payments right back. 45:51 We might have this issue about like trustless, 45:55 like amendments by the the bound might be like far too 45:59 high for a lot of people. And they might be priced out, priced out, 46:03 priced out of lightning itself. Like you're saying. Yes. 46:08 That's a big. 46:09 Right. So would that be, would that say then lightning would trend towards more 46:13 like institutional players that can, you know afford on chain, 46:17 but they would rather do high velocity on lightning and then just like, you know, 46:21 settle every once in a while. 46:23 Does that seem like where it would benefit basically? 46:26 So I do think as a Bitcoin community, 46:30 as a Bitcoin community, 46:31 I do think we have a lot of like design margin in terms of what some 46:36 consensus change, which could improve this, this issue, 46:39 a sense of new mechanisms, 46:43 more like delaying, 46:46 delaying the claim or like automatic aggregations of low value 46:50 payments that could improve, could improve on these fronts and like, 46:56 like maintaining some kind of make, 47:00 like maintaining lightning as a affordable systems for a lot of people in this 47:05 world. But that's a lot of work, low level work in Bitcoin consensus. 47:10 Yes. So, so just in short, 47:13 would it be fair to say that in a higher fee environment lightning doesn't really 47:17 solve the average user's non-custodial take? 47:23 With today Bitcoin consensus rules, 47:27 Bitcoin today is mempool and transactionally design and lightning today 47:32 state of lightning notations. That's going to be hard. Yes. 47:36 Okay. Great. Thanks. 47:40 I was also wondering another question if I may, 47:42 if you had a chance to look into Drivechains, BIP300/301, 47:47 and if you have, if you feel like you researched it enough, 47:49 what is your takes on it? What is like your general thoughts on it? 47:52 But if you haven't, that's okay too. 47:53 No, I understand sidechain, 47:56 but I understand the sidechain 2014 paper that like most of people have read 48:01 and like a bunch of like, but so, 48:06 I do think Drivechain and sidechain might share a lot of issues with lightning 48:12 or like there, there is like some of them, 48:15 there are some of them which are like, you know, 48:18 issues we do have about interactivity or being 24 hours, 48:22 seven days of yorks or like mempool fruiting. 48:27 I don't think anyone has done like a demonstration there, apart of Peter Todd, but they might, they might share some issues. 48:39 Okay. So if I was to say, what do you think would be the best way to scale in a non-custodial way for, you know, let's say millions or even, you know, hundreds of millions of users to use Bitcoin in a non-custodial way, what would be your best way? 48:54 Do you think, is there any specific op codes or any specific type of way that you think would be the best for you? 48:59 So I worked a while back, I worked on payment pools and like a bit of chain factories. 49:04 And I think Paul has written like some interesting blog posts, like one or two years ago, something like this. 49:10 I do, like, I do think like payment pools and payment channels are, are the most interesting way forward. 49:18 If you want to have like billion of users and those billion of users have multiple accounts or like option balance, Bitcoin balance, but it's, it's decades. 49:30 It's not, it's decades. 49:32 And it's like a lot of like change in Bitcoin consensus or like, I don't know, between like five or 10 software, like we had like outputs. 49:43 So, well, yeah, I was thinking that those probably would be difficult, like the coin pool and channel factories stuff. 49:53 I think that'd be very difficult to do because you seem to be, I wrote an article about this in detail and always the writing is more reliable then, but, but I really did write it with my own. 50:04 So let's see if I can remember that there was like a fundamental issue where either a majority of people can like evict someone. 50:11 So either you have like total, people have like total sovereignty where like you can't be evicted or you have the problem. 50:19 So you choose one or the other, you know what I mean? 50:21 Either no one can be evicted, but then someone like falls asleep and then they're not responding. 50:27 And now you have to drag the whole thing on chain and like refresh it, which is horrible. 50:32 Yeah, I think you're pointing the correct issue. 50:38 That's a liveliness of that type of systems. 50:41 Like let's imagine you go to the payment channels or payment pool with 1000 users. 50:46 If any of them like go offline, you cannot evict the states anymore. 50:52 So you might solve these issues with like smart governance where like you might like someone might be evicted or like partitions of the pool and like without its own like, you might kick out someone out of the pool without like the whole consensus of people with like pre-signed transactions. 51:18 Or you might have like sub-partitions of the pool in off-chain kind of subgroup of peoples. 51:25 But any solutions I know at some point you need to go on chains and like sub-segregate the pool or like re-aggregate the pool in function of liveliness participants. 51:40 In theory, it works. 51:41 And, you know, with smart cryptography like ZKProof or even with like empty curve based cryptography, you might do interesting things. 51:51 But I don't know the math, to be honest. 51:54 I don't know the math in the sense of what would be the average cost, on-chain fee cost of 10,000 payment pools users, that kind of questions. 52:04 Yeah, I think the channel factory of like 10 people is something like when you have to bring it on stage, it's much more than 10 times what it would have been if it was like 10 different L1, 2, 1 input, 2 output transactions. 52:22 So it's like, it's like very big to bring the channel on. 52:28 You have this issue if you have like 100 peoples trying to exist at the same time. 52:32 They might pay worst average, they might pay worst fee, like fee cost than if they would have like stayed in the pool or like have done like two of two payment channels. 52:48 So it's that's that's where like we don't have like, you know, people are like proposed a lot of like second layers ideas, a lot of second layers design. 52:57 But as of today, I don't think we know enough as a community on like how do you measure economic efficiency and like, yeah, economic efficiency of multiple channels. 53:18 What do you think you would say? Oh, you kind of cut out there. 53:23 Maybe. Yeah, I have to cut out. 53:28 We have five more minutes. 53:31 For me, you are cutting out a little bit. 53:34 Oh, I was. 53:36 OK, so I will say again, you know, people have talked about sidechain, people have talked about Drivechains, people have talked about federations and eCash. 53:47 People have talked about payment pools, payment channels. 53:51 What else? Statechains, what else? ARK, what else? Tumblebit, like years ago. 53:59 So we have like all those ideas and all to scale bitcoins. 54:04 But we don't know as a community how to measure and compare the economic efficiency of those constructions, like in terms of bandwidth, in terms of requirements on the end users, in terms of average on-chain fee cost, in terms of average options. 54:21 All that kind of metrics. 54:25 OK, we have a body up here also. 54:29 But first, I like to ask one random thing, which is like some people would say it doesn't actually matter. 54:34 Like those things you say, because it doesn't matter if people use bitcoin at all, because it's just going to be like a settlement bank or a bunch of other custodial stuff. 54:46 Or it'll only be for the very rich or it'll be for institutions or something. 54:49 I'm just wondering if you have a like some people say, well, it doesn't the same people who cheer lightning on, of course. 54:56 And they say, like, we love lightning. And then someone says, well, lightning has this problem. 55:01 And then they say, well, actually, it doesn't matter if anyone ever spends bitcoin because. 55:06 Yes, it's a settlement. 55:08 Yeah, I think we will we will always have that kind of like in sometimes conflict in like bitcoin use cases and stuff. 55:23 You know, like what might be great for lightning might be less great for vaults. 55:28 Ordinals or ordinals might like provoke that kind of like enforcing mempool cycles and like completely destroy key predictions of lightning corporate key force flows. 55:42 Or even like a natural force closure. 55:46 So it's it's and people might say, hey, we don't care. 55:51 Like you say, we don't care about like secondary use case because it's just a settlement layer. 55:55 You know, it's I don't have like strong opinions on like. 56:02 It's great if Bitcoin can work without lightning, if you do have like enough transaction fees from other use case to pay the miners. 56:12 But some more like lightning also like, you know, other payment systems, decentralized payment systems, stuff of lightning, like make the whole things like having like people using in real world economy. 56:25 In El Salvador, in Kenya, in Nigeria, a lot of developing countries that, you know, have more like real world economic traffic being relying on Bitcoin. 56:39 I think it's a good thing. It's making things stronger. 56:44 Well, I think we have a body and then. 56:49 Yes. 56:52 Hey, thanks for taking my question. 56:53 So in a one thing that I've sort of conceptualized and maybe I can correct me if I'm wrong. 57:00 One of the problems that Lightning Network has in the security model is that it's inherently an optimistic system. 57:06 So you depend on someone posting on chain to say, OK, here's here's the state of the closure. 57:12 And then you have this window of opportunity to contest that. 57:15 And obviously that that runs into problems in crowded block space. 57:19 So my question then is about BitVM. 57:20 That's kind of one of the latest things we've heard people, you know, a lot of excitement about. 57:25 But BitVM is inherently an optimistic system, just like Lightning Network. 57:29 So does it suffer from potentially the same kind of drawbacks and security complications as Lightning Network? 57:36 And just what are your thoughts on that? 57:38 Well, it's using time locks. 57:40 It's using time locks a lot. 57:42 And it's like share UTXO like Lightning. 57:43 So I think, yes, but I've not done like any advanced research work on this. 57:51 But intuitively, I think. 57:57 Cool, thanks. I think that was really my only question at the moment. 58:02 OK, Bitcoin zero zero zero zero zero is here. 58:06 Yeah, if you have like one last thoughts or if you want to digest the conversation, we have to go. 58:15 Hello. Hello, guys. 58:20 Yes. 58:22 I want to know what is the future of Bitcoin blockchain? 58:27 Sorry? 58:29 Well, that's kind of a vague maybe. 58:32 The future of Bitcoin. 58:33 The future of Bitcoin. 58:35 Hmm. 58:37 Probably we'll find another block 10 minutes from now. 58:41 And then we probably find another one around 10 minutes after that. 58:46 That's probability. 58:48 There's no certainty. 58:50 You know, that's one of the funny things about it. 58:52 I think I could never have done what Satoshi did because I would have just thinking in my head, even though I'm I was literally a professional statistician in academia. 59:00 But I would be thinking, oh, there's some likelihood that it will just go like eight hours without a block. 59:04 And that's that's only a matter of time before that happens. 59:07 And then I would just be like, then the project will just die or something. 59:12 I don't know. It's just like kind of a funny. 59:14 It's just like really just having the difficulty just to set it to the average like that. 59:19 He's just really, really confident that miners will continue to have a lot of noise and a lot of improvement over time. 59:26 I was just like such a bizarre equilibrium thing. 59:30 It's like playing it really close to the. 59:32 Yeah, yeah. 59:34 Just as they say. 59:36 No, like you say, like the 10 year average, like this design choice and Satoshi has made. 59:41 I'm like, you know, if we if we start to never found a block for 24 hours or 48 hours or like 72 hours or like a week, what we do. 59:51 I'm curious. 59:52 I mean, it's like it's probably things like very negligible and we're making the same types of assumptions. 1:00:00 We're designing crypto systems and cryptographic protocols. 1:00:04 But, yeah, it's underpinning the whole thing. 1:00:08 OK, well, great. 1:00:10 Well, if you can, if you have to go, then you have to go. 1:00:13 But this is a fantastic conversation. 1:00:17 Thanks very much. 1:00:18 Conversations. 1:00:20 Thanks for having me and my peer. 1:00:22 I see. 1:00:23 Cool. 1:00:26 Well, how about that? 1:00:28 What an interesting guy. 1:00:31 Of course, we can hang out here if people want to have any questions for me or just want to talk about anything. 1:00:37 One thing that I did do earlier this week was I published this giant image or I replied to Peter Todd's post. 1:00:43 So Peter Todd is like the number one hater of the Drivechain idea. 1:00:49 And in many ways, before even Drivechain existed, he was he sort of killed the. 1:00:55 I think I'm dying to know this. 1:00:57 This is one of the things I plan to ask him when we do the actual podcast on Stefan Levera's show, which I think is Tuesday. 1:01:06 But I'm just dying to know, like, what did Blockstream here that made them kind of like back off of this idea? 1:01:13 Because they really backed off on it in a major where they were full speed ahead and then they backed off. 1:01:18 And I don't know, I'm just dying to know exactly what that is. 1:01:22 We had Adam back on this on the space, I think, in the summer or not that long ago. 1:01:30 And that was a great conversation also. 1:01:35 And he was talking about, like, minor costs, but then he seemed to accept my explanation that that's not it doesn't make any sense. 1:01:41 So, yeah, Peter wrote this long article and it's a really terrible article. 1:01:46 And but there's no people who are like, why did you write it this way? 1:01:52 Replying in that one giant image, that is the only way that you could reply to it because it's so complex and all the different ways. 1:01:59 It was self-contradictory and just terrible. 1:02:03 And you just really didn't get a sense of like. 1:02:07 Like the part where there's eight different definitions of mining centralization. 1:02:13 None of which are consistent with each other. 1:02:15 Anyway, so that's that's one thing I'd like to show, which is. 1:02:20 I think that's great, because this is this is the absolute cutting edge of the debate on this topic, and he's the number one opponent. 1:02:29 And this is the best he could do after we paid him and then he'd spend months and months. 1:02:34 We heard him in like June on his own terms, he picked the amount of time he picked the amount of money. 1:02:41 And then it was only because he. 1:02:44 Was dragged onto for the tabcom debate and for the Amsterdam debate that I think he even like finished it at all. 1:02:52 I think he would just have never written it. And this is what he could come up with. 1:02:55 So anyway, if anyone has any other questions or things that we can talk about, we can talk about Ocean. 1:03:01 We can talk about all kinds of funny events. 1:03:03 I actually had a question on that on Ocean. 1:03:06 So I heard some people talk about like the game theory behind it. 1:03:10 And I'm sure that you might have a really good take. 1:03:12 So I heard I think Post Capone say that like he gave the example of last year or the year before. 1:03:19 There was a block space utilization was maybe like 30, 35 percent. 1:03:25 Let's just give that a number. Right. 1:03:27 So let's say block space was utilized 35 percent. 1:03:31 There was definitely empty blocks or half empty blocks, etc. 1:03:34 So what if they do not include certain type of transactions in their blocks? 1:03:41 So they create two different type of basically categories for people that are bidding on block space. 1:03:47 And all things the same, then eventually if they were to reach, let's say, 36 percent or 37 percent of hash rate, 1:03:55 then they would eventually reach a certain threshold where they have extra space in their blocks. 1:04:00 And because they have extra space in their blocks, there would be people that would realize that and pay less than current fee rates. 1:04:06 Because the way the estimation goes, people just pay current fee rates. 1:04:12 So like they might not really be losing until they reach a certain threshold. 1:04:17 OK. We have to slow down a little bit here. 1:04:20 Are you referring to the idea that they would divide the block into a zone that is like for normal transactions 1:04:26 and then like for ordinals, inscriptions or something like that? 1:04:29 And then they charge a different block weight? 1:04:32 No, I'm referring to let's say they just do not include certain transactions in their blocks completely. 1:04:38 Yeah. So, OK, if they do that, though, then what they're doing is normally like you can model it like this. 1:04:44 Let's say just for the sake of simplicity, this is inaccurate, but it's simplification, 1:04:50 that every block has like that every 10 minutes there's like, let's just say it's $2 worth of ordinals come in, 1:04:59 which would fill half the block. And the next in the mempool would be $1 worth of what you might call regular transactions. 1:05:10 And that happens every that's flowing in from the universe, you know, from the world every 10 minutes. 1:05:17 So what most people do is they just they take the ordinals first and then the regular transactions. 1:05:23 And then there's like a let's say there's a long backlog or whatever. 1:05:26 But the point is, everyone's getting $3 a block in this incredibly simplified model of the world. 1:05:32 If you pass on the ordinals, then you're going to get one. 1:05:34 You take the $1 of real and then you take whatever else you can rummage around and find. 1:05:41 Well, you know, it's not going to add up to $3. 1:05:44 And then what you've done is you've left the juicy $2 on the table for the next guy. 1:05:51 The next guy is going to get $4. The next guy who is not censoring the ordinal censoring, you know, 1:05:56 who use the word censoring, they've just we've decided to use that word to describe this phenomenon of just intentionally not taking the ordinals. 1:06:02 So it is a transfer of money from the pool that from ocean to the other pools. 1:06:11 So ironically, if you are the ideal thing, actually, for like foundry or someone big would be that ocean rises and becomes like a huge, you know, the ideal. 1:06:26 Actually, the ideal outcome would be for them to even be more than 50%. 1:06:28 But what certainly is ideal is if they're 49%. 1:06:32 If they're 49%, then they're mining and they can only get the dregs, you know, the lesser paying transactions. 1:06:44 And as a result, they cannot even hash very much. 1:06:47 So they're keeping the difficulty lower. 1:06:50 And they're leaving all the juicy stuff for foundry. 1:06:55 So economically, it is a transfer from ocean to the other pools. 1:07:01 I have no idea why. I think like a couple of people, Brad and some other people were trying to say that it transfers money to ocean. 1:07:11 And Alp and I sort of engaged with him sort of on Twitter to try to figure out what he was talking about. 1:07:18 But yeah, I don't think I think he'd like to admit it. 1:07:21 Yeah, there's this one phenomenon that happens is because most of the fee estimation is coming from Bitcoin Core or mempool.space, which is like basically the fee estimation is basically coming from both block space buyers. 1:07:34 So it seems like like they're really not missing out even like currently by just completely ignoring these transactions. 1:07:42 But that's only because of the fee estimation and like because people are paying the similar fee. 1:07:47 So it looks like they're really not missing out or possibly not at all. 1:07:50 I'm thinking of if there's a certain threshold, or once people start realizing there's actually two camps and I don't have to pay as much because, you know, these block producers will include me eventually anyways. 1:08:01 This is a very good point about fee estimation is currently my view is that fee estimation is actually irrational and broken. 1:08:09 And that is a game theoretic situation where what you do depends on what the other people do. 1:08:13 But in the in the you know what they call the the equilibrium or since John Forbes Nash was the guy who described it as an equilibrium. 1:08:25 Now it's called the Nash equilibrium, of course, which is like the what I'm saying is in the eventually there will be a rational fee estimation. 1:08:33 And what I think that would look like is you just take the total fees and you divide it by the total fees paid in the last block. 1:08:41 And you divide it by the blocks, the maximum blocks or whatever the whatever you think the average block size, the total size of the block is. 1:08:51 So the blocks half empty, you're adding a bunch of zeros in there. 1:08:55 Anyway, if you just do this simple division step. 1:09:00 It's kind of like block weight kind of messes this up, but block weight is also it also produced things like taproot ordinals for megabyte block that's discounted improperly. 1:09:12 So I think weight is a huge mistake. 1:09:14 There's another range that gets thrown in there because of like, you know, because of like, you know, these BRC 20 or, you know, ordinal mints that happen that are very, very high time preference because like you have to get in first versus first. 1:09:25 You know, it throws like huge volatility in the fee estimation as well. 1:09:29 Right. Well, I think the fee estimation would be very easy to just say, well, you take the previous blocks fee outcome, and then you just use some kind of exponential smoothing or something that I would redo it completely. 1:09:41 I would jettison everything. 1:09:43 And the only thing that I would keep is we do people do examine the mempool and see, well, what would it take to make it into the next block? 1:09:51 And I think that's another thing is have you used a lot of software where it gives you like all these options like in the next block in two blocks, and then there's like all these other options. 1:10:00 And it's like, who cares about these other options? 1:10:02 You either care about, I'd like to get it in the block sometime this week, or you care. 1:10:08 Like, I really expect it to go through very soon, like as quickly as possible. 1:10:14 So I don't know why there's, but I'm just trying to zero in on your question about the, I think that the fee estimation will eventually be rational. 1:10:23 And then it will eventually be the same for everyone because it would just be an objective rule that, and it would just be literally like a formula that everyone knows and everyone will get the same answer. 1:10:37 So everyone will have the same fee estimation. 1:10:40 That is not only, that's rational for the end users, so they know that they don't overpay. 1:10:45 And that's also rational for every miner so that they know how to assemble the blocks to maximize their revenue. 1:10:55 So I just think that will happen. 1:10:57 And I don't know, like sort of just hasn't happened for a while. 1:10:59 I'm not sure if that helps at all with answering your question. 1:11:02 But eventually the fee estimation, I think, will work itself out. 1:11:06 It will be, well, you know, if you, it's kind of like, I mean, just imagine asking the miners to lose money and then saying, oh, but you're not including, you're including only the good transactions, not the bad ones. 1:11:23 And it's like, well, they're losing money. 1:11:25 So it's just kind of baffling, you know, like they're not going to, they shouldn't care and they won't care. 1:11:30 Yeah, the fee estimation will just become more optimized over time. 1:11:34 Right, I think so. 1:11:36 I have another question. 1:11:38 Okay, but we should, why don't we have a new person, RJ, so then we'll go in a line, I think. 1:11:46 Hey, can you guys hear me well? 1:11:49 Hello, yes. 1:11:51 Great. Hey, hello, everyone. 1:11:53 My best wishes, GM, GM. 1:11:55 Hey, Paul. 1:11:57 Love your work, man, especially on BIP 3001301. 1:12:02 Also, the way you present your ideas in your videos and presentations. 1:12:06 They have a good humor. 1:12:07 So kudos. 1:12:09 My question is on Drivechain. 1:12:11 I have been a student of Drivechain for a while now. 1:12:14 And when I imagine a world running on blockchains, Drivechains actually make sense to me. 1:12:20 And when I say imagine, I am an engineer. 1:12:22 Hence, it is very hard for me to imagine impractical stuff. 1:12:26 But Drivechain do make sense to me for a world running on blockchains. 1:12:29 Now, my question is on the currency peg between the mother chain, which is BTC and the child chains. 1:12:37 If I'm locking certain BTC on mother chain and take an example that right now BTC price is 45k, for example. 1:12:44 And after a period of time, the child chain out of utility community or because of some black swan event experience huge demand. 1:12:54 How will influence, how will it, you know, influence the peg? 1:12:59 If there is any such arrangement. 1:13:02 Yes. 1:13:04 And Paul, in your blogs, you rapidly knock off bad questions. 1:13:08 And I like that. 1:13:09 So you can do that to her. 1:13:11 But if you think the time is enough in this space. 1:13:14 I think it's a good question. 1:13:16 Yeah, this is a good question. 1:13:17 I think it gets one thing. 1:13:22 There's an important fact about the peg that I think is overlooked, which is that. 1:13:28 When you have the Blockstream originally had this, this idea of sidechains, it was kind of, I think, based on Namecoin where it was like, they called it symmetric and like, neither chain was kind of like above the other and they either one of them could just go away at any time and the other would continue, but that's not what I did. 1:13:46 I did the fully 100% asymmetric, which is more like the lightning network, whereas there's the lightning node. 1:13:53 The lightning node requires there to be. And as you said, there's like a child chain and like a mother chain. So the advantage of this is that in one direction, the peg is has the perfect attributes. It always works. It always works immediately. 1:14:08 And it always works one to one. And it's awesome. It has all the throughput that you have on L1, which is the max amount. And so the deposits, if the child chain is doing much better, then just more and more people will deposit. 1:14:29 And so the one to one peg really can never be. The ceiling is excellent. It's only the floor that can potentially collapse and not work. So if the sidechain is the reverse situation, the sidechain has some kind of problem and everyone wants to leave, then probably maybe not everyone will be able to get out. 1:14:52 Although even in that situation, people will be able to buy and sell on the chain. And then there should be one or two or like even as many as five or six thousand people over there who will buy up all the L2 coins and then try to walk them back. 1:15:10 So even in that case, the peg, even in the disaster scenario, the peg should still do sort of okay. But as for the sidechain becoming more popular, that is the direction in which we don't have to worry as much because imagine what it would be like if someone was paying on the free market. 1:15:29 You know, they thought that one side coin, you know, one of the L2 coins is worth 1.1 L1 coins. Well, someone can just do that trade and then move the 1.1 L1 coins in immediately and make them 1.1 L2 coins. So that's really not going to happen in that direction. It's going to be just fine. 1:15:54 But I think a lot of people miss that. This is kind of the part of the thing because it's the withdrawal is the biggest problem. The withdrawal will never be perfectly secure. It's not possible. And it's not possible without making a much worse mistake of infecting L1 with L2. 1:16:16 So the withdrawal is a problem. That's why the withdrawal is slow. The withdrawal is inconvenient. And that is why we hope that people will atomic swap back and forth and do it rarely. But the deposit is not a problem at all. The deposit always works. 1:16:31 So the deposit always works. And that's great because when you have a situation where people can instantly do the swaps, swap out L2 for L1 on the free market at any price, and you have the deposit being instant and one-to-one pegged, that's very, very helpful. 1:16:51 It just keeps all the problematic parts just bottled up in the one withdrawal zone where we can keep an eye on them, I guess. And so that would not be an issue. 1:17:07 What would happen in that case is just a higher total quantity of coins would flow into the sidechain. So out of the 19 million or 21 million BTC, just more of them would flow into the sidechain as it became more popular, I think. 1:17:28 Thanks, Paul. I would be honest, I would say that not a eureka moment, but definitely a good direction for me to learn more and get it clear. Thanks a lot. 1:17:43 Okay, great. Yeah, we'll have a new version coming out. I'm very excited about it. We've switched from RegTest to Cygnet, so everyone will be able to use PlayMoney to get together. So this will be a good test. 1:17:56 And before it was just you just test it out by yourself. But after this update, everyone will be on the same network as everyone else. And we'll all have Zcash sidechain coins, and we can send them to each other. And we can figure out if anything breaks or whatever, which I'm sure there are various bugs, you know, because even when we like clone, like clone Zcash, the bug is never like, like they have it all figured out in Zcash, but we have like something like linked to wrong or something. 1:18:26 It's usually like something kind of important to where it's like, there's no problem with, well, it's kind of a technical detail, but it's like, we'll, we'll find those bugs and kill them all. So we have new, new versions coming out. And then maybe I think that would make it much more clear when people actually use it. 1:18:48 I mean, when I first learned about Bitcoin, I read, I did a ton of reading and background research. And I kind of really thought that I understood it. And then when I actually used it, I realized that I, my previous understanding was wrong in very many ways. Just one example of many is that I had, I thought it was like BitTorrent, where you had to keep it open and collect six confirmations. So I had like collected six confirmations. 1:19:15 Then I closed the software and then I opened it like the next day or, and then it had like, like 150 confirmations. And I was like, why? I was like, how, where did these come from? I really didn't understand what I was talking about. So I think I'm optimistic that more people will understand it when they have the test software to use. 1:19:35 Okay, looking forward to it, Paul. 1:19:39 Okay, Satyajit Jayar, you had another question. 1:19:43 Yeah, I think Andreas also just came up. So if he has a question. 1:19:47 Oh, great. Hello. 1:19:49 All right. Hi, Paul. 1:19:52 So I was wondering, is there like a long term roadmap that you have or LayerTwo Labs has for activating sidechains? So I get that right now, you're having these kind of spaces. But is there a point where you start talking to miners? Or is there like a master plan for secret, secret evil master plan for eventually activating VIP 300? 1:20:15 Well, there definitely is a master plan. And definitely, you know, parts of it are secret. Just declaring it that way is kind of like, wouldn't that be funny if I just said like, I just said no. And then I just took the next question. I think the there certainly is a plan. I think, you know, one thing is that in one sense, I kind of understand where people are coming from. 1:20:45 Because they have this kind of like fear, even though it is very unfounded. 1:20:52 There's another sense though, in which so I have been talking to miners, for example. And one thing is that the miners are their own specialists. So so imagine someone who's like a chess prodigy. 1:21:02 You know, Thomas Sowell used to talk about this type of thing. You have someone who's like a chess prodigy, or someone who is there, they're very excellent at their narrow thing that they do. Right? Like, they're a great Olympic rower, or something. 1:21:22 Now, this this person already has this person has a lot of prestige. And they that what I'm getting at is a chess player who's a chess prodigy. No one challenges them on chess, but people don't really go to them and say, Oh, what do you think we should do about the situation in Gaza or whatever? You know what I mean? 1:21:41 And because and that's because the world is made up of specialists. So what I'm getting at is, what are you like, what the hell am I talking about that? The miners, some of the the mining pool, big mining pool people told me that they they asked their clients about taproot activation, they were like, what should we should we activate taproot? What should we do? Should we do speedy trial? 1:22:05 And all of their clients, the people who are members of the pool, the people who contribute, they point their hash rate at the pool. 1:22:15 All those people said the same thing, which is what is taproot? So, so they don't. So they don't know. That's the thing is their mercenaries, their job is to get cheap power. They're the chess prodigy. You know what I mean? 1:22:31 Their job is to get the cheap power, get the right machines, they're interested in like hash price, they're interested in like paper share, they're interested in all this stuff that has very, very little to do with actual Bitcoin development, or even Bitcoin usage or adoption. 1:22:50 And, you know, just kind of like the power company, they're going to be obsessed with things like, you know, watts, joules, whatever regulations, like environmental impact review for their hydroelectric dam or something. 1:23:06 So the world is full of these specialists. And, and so they don't really know. And also the people on Twitter, who tweet about these things. People who tweet about 119 don't know. I mean, we have many smoking guns, right? There's many. 1:23:23 118. It's non controversial. It's been around for a while. Everyone likes it. No one really dislikes it. It was coded by a prestigious person. And yet, years go by, no one wants to touch activation. Similar thing with 119. Except Jeremy Rubin decided, well, I don't want to just sit around, I'll try to activate it. Horrible reaction, and then he quits Bitcoin. 1:23:50 And there are other things as well, like just like kind of confusing things like about the public likes, the public loves BIP 39. But Bitcoin Core doesn't support it. Which is a pointless mistake. BIP 47. Many people like it. But Bitcoin Core doesn't support it. 1:24:10 So there's this weird mismatch. And the miners are sort of specialists. So anyways, I'm just trying to say like, I kind of understand where people are coming from. But yeah, I think the plan is to make the software excellent first. 1:24:29 And we have to have a very good, like version of the software where there's like a code diff, minimal code diff with Bitcoin Core before that question can even come up. So it's kind of on me really, because I have to make the, or we have to make the version that miners could actually run. 1:24:56 Before that, you know, could really actually be a topic that comes up. And so Luke had that request, but is incomplete. But that's a good start. And we wanted to see what other thoughts people had. So yeah, there is a plan. But it certainly has to get to the point where, like, because right now the test network is the fork of Bitcoin 16.99. So it's that's far too old. 1:25:26 There can't be that one. So you have to wait for me to, to finish the rebasing process, which is very slow. 1:25:38 So after that, unless you want to, hey, do you want to help? Do you know? Are you very good with C++ and Bitcoin Core? Do you want to do this? Help with the thankless task of rebasing all the anyone wants to, anyone wants to, wants a job doing that. It's a very difficult job, though. 1:25:56 And it is fraught with, it has to be done very carefully. So yeah, the answer, of course, is that yes, of course, there's a master plan. 1:26:09 Right. Okay. 1:26:13 Yeah, I was wondering, maybe in the future, miners will have like a consensus department if they want to optimize their revenues. 1:26:21 Yeah, it's a collective action problem where all of the miners benefit, if they upgrade. And then you see, if it was an individual benefit, then this would be, this would have been done long ago. You know what I mean? Because it would be like inventing a better ASIC. 1:26:38 So then I would just have gone right to the miners. And if 1% adopted the thing, they would have more money. So this is a collective action problem. But you know, that humanity has built ways to deal with such problems. But you know, they have conferences, they have media, people have meetings, people understand that something should be done for the collective good. 1:26:59 I think that the consensus thing, I actually wonder about the, I have a lot of weird thoughts on this, which hopefully, I don't bore you guys too much. But one is that there's this system called the Westminster system, which is basically the UK system of like, winner take all 51%. 1:27:23 And I kind of wonder if that is actually the optimal form of governance, because it's really just like minimizing the amount of, it's like if you get vetoed, we don't have time to get into all the details of this. But one thought that I would like to share is that maybe back in the day, if only because SegWit blockade was defeated by UASF, but it could also have been defeated by the miners themselves. 1:27:49 The miners could have just decided, like a few days or a few weeks into the blockade, which was one pool that was mining Bitcoin Unlimited with 9%, the miners could have took it upon themselves to just orphan all those blocks from that pool. 1:28:10 And then they would have just activated SegWit with the quote, 95%, unquote, threshold. And then there would never have been a UASF. And that would have been before the New York agreement, or SegWit2x, or Bitcoin Cash ever existed. 1:28:28 And if they had done that, we would be living in a very, very different world. And I just think that was kind of a missed opportunity. If we could go back in time and have that happen instead, that probably would have been a lot better in many ways. 1:28:44 So I can elaborate on that thought if anyone cares, but we do have new people who came up and want to ask maybe a question. So yes, there is a master plan. But nothing can happen at all until there is something for people to actually... 1:29:01 Professor Ian Shapiro, who's written a lot about the Westminster system. He has a saying in politics, you can't beat something with nothing. And that is, right now I have nothing because we don't have a version that it would be acceptable to even persuade miners to run. So we have nothing. 1:29:23 But we should still do the education and we have the test network. So we're doing that. But now we had a Philip Zach. Hello, if you had a question or comment. 1:29:35 Hi, Paul, thank you very much for letting me speak. I really appreciate it. Your name came up in conversation when I was at the Ocean Mining event. I did have a question for you on proof of work. I understand Bitcoin and where it is on its spectrum. 1:29:51 But after reading some of your articles on your truth page, do you still believe that there is some room for other algorithms in this space that there's still use case like SiaCoin and others? 1:30:06 Yeah, so I think I wrote this article. I wrote an article called – this was my big break back in the day. And I think December 2014, Adam Back linked to an article I wrote about this auction. It was called Long Live Proof of Work. 1:30:20 And then that turned into a bigger essay a few months after that called Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work. And the people really liked that essay a lot. But not everyone totally 100% understood it because the point of the essay was that proof of work and proof of stake are really just very, very similar to each other actually. 1:30:40 And that to some extent, they're all interchangeable and they will all be wasting effort and resources of some kind or another. And the nice thing about proof of work is that this rolls all of this up into one hash that anyone can easily verify. 1:30:57 So it's very easy, transparent, and it's very easy for everyone to see exactly how much work has been done. But it's kind of just – it's all going to be a competitive struggle over the next block because the blocks will be worth a certain amount. 1:31:10 Whatever it is, if the blocks have high inflation, high subsidy, high fees, if the network is successful, these blocks will be worth a lot. They have what you might call MEV now. Each block will be worth a ton, and it will be a competitive struggle over who owns the next block, the ownership and control of the next block. 1:31:32 And this will make – no matter what it is, if it's proof of work or proof of stake or proof of space and time or proof of whatever, it will basically – the struggle will happen, and it will just bring everything out. 1:31:49 The resources used in the struggle will basically be equal to the value of the block, and so – and hence the title. The title, which is a very good title, the best part of the essay maybe, Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work. That is the meaning, is that you can't improve on it. 1:32:07 But what people didn't maybe 100% understand is it meant that kind of like it's – you're also kind of limited in your ability to do worse than it also. It's kind of just like all this stuff is kind of just the same and to the point where you just shouldn't bother toying with it. 1:32:27 And so that's my answer to your question is that I still believe in that core, but definitely a lot of interesting stuff has happened since then. A lot of people have pushed the boundaries of proof of stake. 1:32:44 And what a lot of people do is they kind of cheat somewhat where they anchor things into Bitcoin proof of work, and they – or they skate around certain things that will – they perform very well in the short term, but they leave it open to catastrophic huge reorg or catastrophic black swan type event that proof of work would basically never have. 1:33:09 So instead of it being like a smooth, malleable thing of steel, it's kind of like this – it's funneled into like sections that are really tough but could be brittle and kind of break. 1:33:24 So I don't know. This is a very long and metaphorical answer. But am I getting kind of close to what you were asking about at all, which is like people have done these other things, proof of space and time. 1:33:34 So like proof of space and time is a good example where it – does it eat up a bunch of hard drives and destroy them? At first, the answer was yes. Then they changed it a little, so the answer is no. 1:33:46 But what will happen is eventually someone will be able to monetize unused hard drive resources, and then it will flip back or it will flip – like people tried to tie it. 1:34:01 Like at the time when I think Graham Cohen was sort of inventing that, it was still like 2014 or something, and people had not completed the shift from – people used hard disks and people didn't use solid state drives. 1:34:18 And they really didn't – they hadn't switched from – even from desktop laptop to phones. But now everyone has got a phone, and so – and people use AWS. 1:34:30 So that was an attempt to try and – these are all these like attempts to try – it's like a whack-a-mole thing where people are trying to like make it something that it would be very difficult for an adversary to get 51% of. 1:34:44 But a lot of these things, they're only advantages for like a certain time, and then they switch to being disadvantages, and I kind of just think it's not – I really do stand by my overall position, which is that it's really not worth it to mess with – messing with the proof of work. 1:35:00 It doesn't really bring about some kind of big, sustainable, significant advantage. So I don't know if that's answering your question or not, but I hope it's – 1:35:12 I'll reiterate. Is proof of work other than Bitcoin still viable? Is there other algorithms out there that could or would have some kind of advantage or use case other than the Bitcoin network? 1:35:30 Oh, well, that's different than – the networks are different than the proof of work aspects. I mean, are you referring to like something that uses SHA-3 or like Litecoin uses a script or whatever? 1:35:45 Are you referring to that, or are you just referring to other blockchain designs? Because I think – 1:35:52 Other blockchain designs. 1:35:53 Yeah, there's certainly – 1:35:54 Is Bitcoin one-size-fits-all, or is there room for others? 1:35:58 No, no, no. It's certainly not the case. I mean, the sidechain thesis is that – is basically that the answer is no. And I think in particular, the block size dispute is only the tip of the iceberg. 1:36:13 It was only the first big dispute. But really, you see that people want to do lots of other things. I think SIA is a great project. So yeah, no, the whole point of sidechains is to copy the other blockchain designs and keep them all in one proof of work system and in one set of 21 million coins. 1:36:34 So there's no inflation, there's no counterfeiting, basically. And the – like, okay, so we have Monero, which Bitcoin led the way in darknet markets, but now Monero is on there. 1:36:50 The block size dispute – clearly, people are very sincere in what they wanted. Large blockers wanted large blocks, small blockers wanted small blocks. So it's just difficult for you to have a big group of people without some people disagreeing. 1:37:08 Ethereum, Turing Complete, Scripps. And even in Ethereum, of course, Ethereum also began a process that is ongoing of splitting themselves into other networks. 1:37:20 They have Solana, which just drops the – Solana is just – we will use trial and error and huge amounts of money of R&D to try and make a very, very, very big, high-throughput, high-performance node that – and we don't really care about the cost, although they have in fact gotten that cost down to something that is merely a few thousand dollars a year, which is a lot. 1:37:50 For the average person, but – this is the other thing, but this clever thing about Solana is, of course, it's a lot now, but everything is expensive when it first comes out. 1:38:02 The first car costs – the prototype for – the first Tesla sports car prototype costs millions and millions of dollars. And then the sports car itself could retail for whatever, a couple hundred thousand dollars. 1:38:18 And then when you produce it at scale – the first iPhone, the first prototype costs a fortune. 1:38:28 And then when you make it at scale, the price comes down. 1:38:31 So the Solana people have just decided to sacrifice decentralization and then hopefully 1:38:36 get it back later, but it is basically just Ethereum with larger blocks. 1:38:41 So then we have a whole universe of stuff, and we don't know who's going to invent what. 1:38:46 I think – and you know what's really bad for invention is to have this bureaucracy 1:38:51 in Bitcoin Core and a weird cult that rejects all change in the hopes of discrediting altcoins, 1:38:56 which is – all this is misguided and terrible. 1:38:59 So we don't even have a good way for people to invent new blockchains. 1:39:05 Sidechains is that way, which we don't have. 1:39:09 So you can see already that tons of people have tried to invent things, or they're very 1:39:14 close. 1:39:15 Tadge Dreyse did uTree XO, which would be much better if you had a soft fork, let alone 1:39:20 what you could do with a hard fork. 1:39:22 UTXO commitments and fraud proofs and other things. 1:39:26 And then you have a situation where – excuse me – you have a situation where people really 1:39:32 want OP_CAT, which is like a simple opcode, but it's going to take years to get. 1:39:40 And even stuff like – so we just heard from Riyadh, who was just here, and he said about 1:39:51 how he was very interested in coin pools, and he thought that this would take five or 1:39:54 six or even ten soft forks, and it would take just five or six or ten years or something. 1:39:59 I'm paraphrasing slightly. 1:40:01 So you have a lot of stuff where people with extremely deep technical knowledge, they would 1:40:05 like the ability to flexibly alter the software. 1:40:08 And just think about the other contexts of software, where it's like Microsoft, like 1:40:17 Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP. 1:40:24 It changes a lot. 1:40:26 So I think the one-size-fits-all is totally doomed. 1:40:29 I mean, it's a rambling answer, but the one-size-fits-all is a completely doomed thing, 1:40:34 because people will never disagree. 1:40:36 And I think what a lot of people believe, mistakenly, is that it's like that XKCD comic 1:40:44 where the person is like, there's 14 different standards, and it's like, okay, we just need 1:40:48 one that everyone will like, and then there's 15 different standards. 1:40:51 Everyone just thinks, well, if we could just get everyone onto my chain, then this chain 1:40:56 would be the one that is perfect. 1:41:02 I don't know. 1:41:02 That just doesn't really seem like it. 1:41:04 That won't work until—that might work if that was, for some reason, that chain was 1:41:09 the only one that could have sidechains itself. 1:41:12 And then in that way, it was the only one that would eventually be able to satisfy everyone's 1:41:17 mutually contradicting desires. 1:41:19 So I don't know. 1:41:20 It's a very long and rambling answer. 1:41:21 But yeah, I think ASEA is great. 1:41:23 It was, especially, it had a very interesting origin and development. 1:41:30 And it was getting to the point where you could stream video and back up an entire hard 1:41:35 drive to the cloud with 12 words. 1:41:39 So all that stuff is great. 1:41:41 Namecoin, I think, also could be excellent. 1:41:46 And even just the idea of moving the ordinals, the assets, and stuff onto a different chain 1:41:51 that has its own Uniswap and its own whatever, its own market maker, its own order book, 1:41:57 all of that would be great. 1:41:59 Prediction markets would be great. 1:42:00 And again, we don't even really see—there's no way for people to invent good things right 1:42:07 now. 1:42:08 The entire invention pipeline has been built around the rubric of just raising a ton of 1:42:16 money and then abandoning the project. 1:42:20 So all the forces of the world have teamed up to prevent competitive innovation in blockchains. 1:42:32 And nonetheless, we see a lot of innovation anyway, even though it's horribly tortured. 1:42:40 So I think the one-size-fits-all is doomed. 1:42:43 It will only survive in some kind of weird scenario where the QWERTY keyboard, like, 1:42:46 you know, something weird where it's like—I'm continuing to ramble here, but it's like part 1:42:54 of the problem is all of this stuff is so new that in any given year, more than half 1:43:00 of the people are brand new, and they've only been here for a year. 1:43:05 And that makes it very difficult for them to accumulate knowledge about what they should 1:43:13 want or what's a good idea. 1:43:15 And that will eventually fade. 1:43:17 It will be like the early days of the internet or the early days of pets.com or something, 1:43:23 early days of computers, the early days of computer games where it's all very indie. 1:43:29 And then eventually, it will become more standardized and around this common knowledge 1:43:35 of stuff. 1:43:38 And when that happens, it will be much easier to see where innovation is going. 1:43:45 Thank you very much for your response and your time. 1:43:47 I greatly appreciate it and look forward to reading more of your articles. 1:43:55 Okay, cool. 1:43:56 Hey, great. 1:43:56 Thanks. 1:43:57 Okay, Morgan, hello. 1:44:00 Hello. 1:44:01 So I have, like, two ideas I'd like to talk to you about, and maybe I'll try to find a 1:44:08 coherent question in there. 1:44:09 I am curious on if companies like Layer 2 or even Bitcoin Core is, I always look at 1:44:18 a BIP as kind of like a bill in Congress. 1:44:23 And I remember when Amir made the first BIP to say, this is how BIPs should be made. 1:44:29 And I'm curious if we have in the industry, like, a BIP lobbying effort, like, for example, 1:44:39 effort where, you know, we have lobbyists that go lobby bills to Congress for their 1:44:44 industry, and they basically bribe them and say, hey, I'll give you some money if you 1:44:48 support this bill. 1:44:50 They bring the bill up, they, you know, rally everyone to support the bill, and then someone 1:44:54 signs it and it becomes law. 1:44:56 So I always compared a BIP to that. 1:44:59 And I'm wondering if there's an effort to actually take up BIPs to miners and to node 1:45:07 operators and to these companies that could potentially push things like a user authenticated 1:45:14 software and things like that. 1:45:16 And if there's anyone actually putting like an incentive, like literally lobbying, like 1:45:21 bribe around BIPs. 1:45:24 So that's, that's like my first most important question. 1:45:28 And then I'd like to talk to you about what happened in the past with Segregated Witness, 1:45:33 since you brought up some of this game theory on what could have happened if miners acted 1:45:38 a different way. 1:45:39 And I'm curious on if that scenario could have played out, what would have happened 1:45:46 to the, if you could ponder this, what would happen to the transaction malleability and 1:45:52 the ASIC boost thing that Greg Maxwell found? 1:45:56 And what kind of world would we be in if some of that maybe was not discovered? 1:46:01 So those are kind of two different things, but I'm wondering on how in the future we 1:46:07 can pretty much push changes and how we can game theory if changes happens, what outcomes 1:46:15 would be there, you know? 1:46:18 Okay, yes. 1:46:19 Those are some very good questions. 1:46:22 They're very complicated. 1:46:24 I'm sorry. 1:46:27 No, they're great. 1:46:28 I like them a lot, but I'm just trying to figure out what to say. 1:46:30 So I think the, what I would say is that the BIP process, it was working just fine and 1:46:36 there was nothing controversial really about it. 1:46:38 And there was nothing like, until the, I think the BIP process was fine. 1:46:45 And then a failure somewhere else, there was a governance failure with respect to the block 1:46:49 size dispute. 1:46:51 And that spilled over and it destroyed a large number of things of which the BIP process 1:47:00 was only one casualty among many. 1:47:03 And we would be, you know, Bitcoin would be in a completely different place if it had 1:47:07 just been handled in a slightly different way. 1:47:11 And to be honest with you, you just have to look at the, look at research, what the agenda 1:47:19 was, like the schedule for scaling one and two and the dates, and then just look at scaling 1:47:25 three. 1:47:25 And you see that scaling three is when, I mean, I was there and scaling three went, 1:47:32 it went off. 1:47:33 That's where it went off the rails and people were upset and people wanted to redo the 1:47:38 conference. 1:47:38 In fact, this is a long story, but the view, my view is that the, you know, what we have 1:47:45 here is a failure to communicate. 1:47:48 But this block size thing was, wasn't good. 1:47:52 And bizarrely enough, the failure was actually, it was something else, I think, actually, 1:48:01 because the sidechain idea had already picked up steam as of 2013, and then Blockstream 1:48:07 being funded in 2014. 1:48:09 So I actually think it was the failure to deliver, so this is my own conjecture that 1:48:14 I'm, you know, I'm not a hundred percent certain about this, but whereas I am, I am 1:48:21 more certain of what I just said before. 1:48:22 But I think we had this thing and then no one, you know, Blockstream failed to deliver 1:48:29 sidechains. 1:48:30 And if we had sidechains, we would have large block version of Bitcoin, a small block version 1:48:35 of Bitcoin. 1:48:36 This all would have been sorted out by the engineers long before the lay people could 1:48:40 get their hands on it and turn it into like a political football. 1:48:44 And so my view is that the bit process was working just fine before it was inadvertently 1:48:48 destroyed by the scaling war and that the scaling war was mostly caused by failure to 1:48:53 invent or work on or just advocate, articulate a vision for sidechains. 1:49:00 And, you know, intriguingly, since I could tell you, you looked at the image I made with 1:49:07 responding to Peter Todd's article, I kind of say that he is the one, 1:49:14 maybe not, you know, intentionally, but he poured a lot of cold water on this sidechains 1:49:19 idea. 1:49:19 But I don't, you can't really blame him either because I kind of also blame, like, how could, 1:49:26 you know, like I say at the end, question nine or something, I say like, how, why did, 1:49:31 is this what he told, is this what Peter told Blockstream or is this what they, they also 1:49:36 agreed with? 1:49:38 And it's like, how could they, you know, sort of fall for this or believe this? 1:49:42 Because I just think it's actually, it's just not very, it's just very, it's not very engineering 1:49:49 type of a thing either. 1:49:50 It's just like this vague complaining and there's no like, it is the problem because 1:49:56 of the whatever, the rotation of gear three or something. 1:50:01 So, so that's kind of my view on it. 1:50:05 I don't know if that answers the first part of your question, but I think that it was 1:50:10 broken, it was broken by the scaling war and it will be fixed by sidechains anyway, which 1:50:15 will, was just to say, a lot of this stuff would get factored out into L2s, which will 1:50:21 compete. 1:50:22 So you'd have like, you will have like two different versions of like, you would have 1:50:27 like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV as sidechains and they would like be competing in a very 1:50:32 healthy way on features. 1:50:34 You know, they would be like shipping code and, you know, there'll be shipping wallets 1:50:40 and Jeremy Rubin would ship 119 chain and maybe that would be the one that has ARK and 1:50:48 Barak and they'd be hanging out over there and everyone would compete. 1:50:50 It would be like how, you know, LND and Eclair and whatever could be where it's kind of like 1:50:55 rival risks, which is healthy, but it's, but it's not like the toxicity of just like, 1:51:03 like the intercoin competition, which is just not as healthy because it's weighed down by 1:51:08 all this other stuff, marketing and whatever, network effects and you can't leave, you're 1:51:14 locked in. 1:51:15 So I'm not sure if that's a totally helping, but I can try to elaborate more on what I 1:51:19 think should happen instead. 1:51:21 But I think we're missing the bigger picture, which is that it was, it did work just fine 1:51:26 and it wasn't controversial. 1:51:28 After sidechains or just even after any kind of decision, like any kind of closure on this, 1:51:35 which we still don't have, Tadge Dreijer is 100% correct. 1:51:39 Tadge Dreijer, creator of Lightning Network, for those of you who don't know, he had an 1:51:43 earlier comment about, can we talk about, are we allowed to talk about the forbidden 1:51:50 scaling topics so yet or no? 1:51:53 And I think the answer is still no, unfortunately. 1:51:58 But, but, but once all we have closure on that, and one way would be sidechains, then 1:52:05 not only will the develop, there'll be a lot of healthy development and experimentation 1:52:09 on L2, but there won't be as much, people won't care as much about these trivial backward 1:52:15 compatible modifications to L1, partly because it won't matter as much if they happen or 1:52:23 not, because you'll have them on L2. 1:52:24 So, so for that exact reason, the drama will go away. 1:52:30 So that's, that's not really an answer to part one, but that's, that's all I got. 1:52:34 And now I already forgot what you said in the second part. 1:52:37 Well, really just the last little piece of that first question is, is there like an incentive 1:52:42 structure, like how people are getting paid to go lobby for certain bills to pass? 1:52:48 Is there evidence or is like, is the BIP getting pushed? 1:52:55 Is there a financial incentive around any of them in the way that like, you know, we 1:53:01 didn't need it, but maybe we need it now or something? 1:53:05 I actually think that's probably smart. 1:53:07 Like you could have like a Salesforce or something and commissioned sales team, because 1:53:13 they, they have to sell the idea and everyone's busy. 1:53:17 And this is now, it went from being a small industry to being a huge industry. 1:53:20 So if you're not going to be able to, you don't have specialist people who are going 1:53:24 to go around and, and explain the idea. 1:53:31 Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. 1:53:33 I think that's a good, I think that's probably a good idea. 1:53:38 People, they're fools. 1:53:41 I know, I know. 1:53:42 But like, you know, incentives have changed and there weren't lobbyists in 1780, but we 1:53:47 obviously have them now, you know? 1:53:49 Yeah. 1:53:49 And people don't really like, you know, of course, lobbyists is a sign of a disconnect 1:53:55 between the, the, the voter and the representative, which is some people interpret as sort of 1:54:03 like a friction. 1:54:05 But it is also hard because the voters are not informed, you know, something like whatever, 1:54:09 75% of the voters cannot name their, whatever representative Senator of which they are. 1:54:17 And maybe Bitcoin is not like best comparable to the U.S. 1:54:20 Congress. 1:54:21 Like we didn't have, you know, James Madison and we don't have amendments and we don't 1:54:25 have all of those things, but like, that's just a metaphor. 1:54:27 I try to understand it. 1:54:29 But my second thing was basically, since you understand some of the history and you kind 1:54:34 of pontificated this scenario in another multiverse of what would happen if the miners would have 1:54:39 orphaned blocks. 1:54:41 I'm curious on if something like that would have happened, what would have happened with 1:54:46 transaction malleability and the ASIC boost that Greg Maxwell found in the AntMiner chips? 1:54:53 Right. 1:54:53 Okay. 1:54:54 So first ASIC boost, my view is that even though Greg, I don't doubt that he reverse 1:55:03 engineered the chip and found the covert ASIC boost. 1:55:06 But what I do doubt is that it was being deployed on an enormous scale such that this affected 1:55:12 the block size decision. 1:55:15 Greg's story, I don't buy it. 1:55:19 You know, I think Greg is super smart, but I don't buy all his stories. 1:55:24 Sometimes he becomes very paranoid, in my humble opinion. 1:55:29 And so what he's trying to say is that no one really, Bitmain never really cared about, 1:55:36 like, they don't care about the block size debate. 1:55:39 They just wanted to maintain their advantage, their competitive advantage with ASIC boost. 1:55:45 And that is why they rejected SegWit. 1:55:49 But to me, it's clear that all the large blockers were very sincere. 1:55:54 They really wanted their large block thing. 1:55:56 And they were eyeing Bitmain activation of SegWit. 1:56:01 And because of the history of Bitcoin, SegWit is a very, very unusual soft fork, because 1:56:11 it happened to also be, it was really kind of a hard fork. 1:56:16 As I may have explained a few times, hard fork and soft fork, they have two different 1:56:21 definitions that sometimes are the same, sometimes are unrelated, and in some ways are exact 1:56:27 opposites of each other. 1:56:28 So, but in terms of loose, SegWit loosened the rules, because it was a four megabyte, 1:56:35 it was a block size increase. 1:56:37 So, but it was fully backward compatible. 1:56:42 So, this is a complicated point that I could re-explain if anyone's interested. 1:56:46 But the point is, from the point of view of the large blockers, they were told we can 1:56:52 never increase the block size, because that would be a hard fork. 1:56:55 Hard fork bad, hard fork bad, hard fork bad. 1:56:58 Block size limit is, it's like the speed of light. 1:57:01 We can't break it. 1:57:02 And then all of a sudden, at scaling two, you know, Peter Weil comes out and pulls this 1:57:09 rabbit out of a hat. 1:57:10 Really, it was sort of Luke Dashjr.'s idea, I think, at first. 1:57:13 But the point is, this idea shows up. 1:57:17 Oh, we can actually increase the block size with a soft fork. 1:57:22 The, so this is, it's like, it's just very confusing to the large blockers. 1:57:31 It makes it look like there's a group of people who can do whatever they want. 1:57:35 And then the technical people, and then we cannot do anything. 1:57:38 The, we, the large blockers, we never get our way. 1:57:42 They said that this was impossible, but now it's possible. 1:57:45 They wanted, Mike Kern wanted eight megabytes. 1:57:48 With Bitcoin XT. 1:57:50 Then they wanted this Bitcoin classic two megabyte hard fork. 1:57:56 And then they can't get, but they could get it if they get SegWit. 1:58:00 So the whole thing had become confusing. 1:58:03 And just the way all the different chess pieces had fallen. 1:58:05 And I think that I would just like to be clear with everyone that I'm not 100% certain that 1:58:11 my version is the right version of, but all I can do is just say, okay, we're going to 1:58:17 have, but all I can do is tell you my honest opinion of what happened. 1:58:20 The way it looks from my point of view. 1:58:23 And a historian can assemble all this later. 1:58:26 But from my point of view, it really looked like a bunch of chess pieces had fallen down. 1:58:29 It's kind of like you woke up and someone has a gun and someone has a shield. 1:58:34 And, and so the person grabs the gun and the person grabs the shield. 1:58:38 And the next thing you know, bullets are colliding with the shield. 1:58:41 You know what I mean? 1:58:41 It's just, it just sort of happened that the miners fell in with the large block group. 1:58:47 The small block people were the technical people that invented SegWit. 1:58:53 And BIP-9, it had always activated with 95% hash rate signal. 1:59:00 So they thought, oh, we have the large blockers thought, oh, we have this thing we can withhold 1:59:05 to get what we want. 1:59:07 So I'm kind of rambling again, and I apologize for that. 1:59:10 But it's kind of like the story is ASIC boost is so important, but there's really no reason 1:59:14 to, it's really not the ASIC boost. 1:59:18 One of the smoking guns is that when SegWit actually did activate, which was not that 1:59:25 long after this whole covert ASIC boost thing was discovered, you know, less than a year, 1:59:31 six months, maybe probably less than that. 1:59:33 Someone can look it up. 1:59:35 And maybe it was like, I don't know, like winter to August 1st or less. 1:59:43 So it wasn't that long. 1:59:46 SegWit activates. 1:59:47 This is supposedly going to brick all of the ASIC boost. 1:59:52 So the hash rate should at least fall by some amount, right? 1:59:58 It should be like whatever percent bit mains is and whatever percent they lose by not doing 2:00:03 ASIC boost, or maybe they had specialized chips that were relying on that. 2:00:07 So the hash rate should fall, but the hash rate doesn't fall at all. 2:00:09 It seems to be totally and completely unaffected. 2:00:12 Um, so I don't know. 2:00:15 I just don't buy the story that it had anything to do with covert ASIC boost. 2:00:19 I think they were just researching a lot of stuff. 2:00:21 There's the overt ASIC boost and covert only covert ASIC boost was affected by SegWit. 2:00:30 I don't think they were technical enough to even like uncover this, uh, or like really 2:00:36 understand how to exploit it. 2:00:38 So I don't know. 2:00:39 This is just my opinion that I think it was unrelated. 2:00:45 So I, I think that's like very valid. 2:00:48 My, my view from the whole situation, cause I, I got to talk with Eric Lambroso a lot 2:00:53 about what was happening when it was happening and he did some work there. 2:00:57 Um, I come from like a military intelligence house, so I'm not a statistician like you. 2:01:01 I think about all of the people trying to kill each other and the, the, you know, the 2:01:06 new world order stuff, you know, who's spying on who. 2:01:08 And I was very curious on who was funding the things. 2:01:12 I found the patents around all that stuff interesting and who was getting VC money and 2:01:17 who wasn't. 2:01:18 And so I wonder about the incentives a lot since, you know, we have fees, Coinbase, we 2:01:23 have, you know, replaced by fee. 2:01:25 Bitcoin's very like incentive structured. 2:01:27 So I wonder about the people incentives and who's getting incentivized and who's not. 2:01:33 And why are we not incentivizing? 2:01:35 If they're incentivizing, um, because if it's like chess and a game theory kind of 2:01:40 situation, um, why, if that, if that's why all that chaos happened, because people were 2:01:46 getting paid by other people to promote certain things, which is kind of what I thought was 2:01:50 happening back then. 2:01:52 Um, why are us engineering Bitcoin loving people not playing that incentives game? 2:01:59 And if we aren't, why aren't we, is it like a moral thing or is it, we just want to lose 2:02:05 because, you know, incentives always win over non incentives. 2:02:09 So I'm just wondering like BIPs and changes and promoting these technical ideas, if they're 2:02:15 not being funded, like how square and block is funding lightning and core developers, 2:02:20 they're like incentivizing a development this direction. 2:02:24 I'm wondering, are we missing an incentive route to incentivize things like BIP300 and 2:02:31 OP_CAT and all of the other stuff, you know? 2:02:36 Yeah. 2:02:36 It's kind of like a NATO, like what, uh, what Eisenhower said about if the free nations 2:02:41 don't stand together, they'll be destroyed at one by one. 2:02:45 I was the British guy who said the one by one line, but, um, but he was like one by 2:02:51 one, that was the evil stratagem or something of Hitler and, and Stalin in Eastern Europe. 2:02:58 So, yeah, like something like that. 2:03:00 I don't know the, such things are very, I think we're already very close. 2:03:07 Honestly, we just need to get this one. 2:03:09 We just need to escape and get like some critical amount of functionality. 2:03:14 And then it will all be more like ordinals where it's like, you can't stop people from 2:03:19 doing it and people complain, but it kind of won't matter because it's, it should all 2:03:24 be based on the fee. 2:03:25 It should not be based on. 2:03:27 You know, the color of your skin or your, what you had in mind for the transaction or what other stuff, the transaction is going to be a part of should just matter if it takes, takes up the fee. 2:03:37 And I think, I think we're very close to, um, but yeah, it's a very good question. 2:03:45 Um, well, that's all I wanted to ask, so I'll, I'll step down, but thanks for, you know, honoring that with me. 2:03:51 Yes. 2:03:52 What I, what I had in mind was that the, for 2017 was that the miners, the other, because there was more, it seemed to be like more than more than half the miners supported SegWit. 2:04:03 And there was only Bitmain and the other Bitmain people who were trying to withhold. 2:04:10 They're trying to block SegWit and it was unclear if they would have that maybe they were only a vocal minority. 2:04:16 So instead of what we, what you could have done is just said the majority out vote them minority and, um, and they would then have just activated SegWit and they would have just, these people would've just been sore losers. 2:04:33 You know, because it's like, does, does Jihan Wu's opinion represent all Bitcoin? 2:04:37 Well, if you have 95% hash rate threshold, then anyone with 6% can, it's really a 6%. 2:04:45 It's a rule of the 6%. 2:04:46 And so, but instead of that, if we did this UASF thing and we created this completely different thing, which is like a Twitter governance, which I think has been way worse, at least the miners have skin in the game. 2:04:59 So I think that would have been much better. 2:05:01 Anyway, now we have a Justin 75 IQ. 2:05:05 Yeah, I totally agree with you. 2:05:06 Like, can you hear me? 2:05:08 Yes, I can hear you. 2:05:09 Yes. 2:05:10 Okay. 2:05:11 Sorry. 2:05:12 Uh, we've got to get the personalities out and get the egos out and the politics and just focus on the ideas. 2:05:20 Do the ideas rise to the level of. 2:05:24 Yeah, I agree with that. 2:05:26 That would be the ideal thing. 2:05:28 Of course, everyone always says I am being objective, you know, when they're not. 2:05:34 Okay. Is this objectively a good idea? 2:05:40 Yeah. 2:05:41 Yeah, I agree with that. 2:05:43 That would be the ideal thing. 2:05:45 Of course, everyone always says I am being objective, you know, when they're not. 2:05:51 So. 2:05:52 It's a trickier thing, but I think this idea of having the miners having the threshold be 51%. 2:06:02 That was this Westminster thing. 2:06:05 That I was alluding to before, where it's kind of like. 2:06:11 You just. 2:06:13 You have a competitive struggle in there. 2:06:17 In a healthy way, because trying to get to 95. 2:06:22 I think has kind of messed this up a little bit. 2:06:26 And now it's become this battle over consensus. 2:06:30 I don't know. 2:06:31 I just think if I could choose, I would rather live in the world where. 2:06:36 If I could choose, I would rather live in the world where. 2:06:40 SegWit activated via miners. 2:06:43 Simply. 2:06:45 Activating it like an early. 2:06:47 It would be like spring. 2:06:49 2017. 2:06:51 And then what would have happened then. 2:06:53 Would have been there could not have possibly been a SegWit2x agreement. 2:06:57 And. 2:06:59 If there was going to be a Bitcoin cash. 2:07:04 It would have probably been later than August one, 2:07:08 because people would have tried out the extra two megabytes worth of two point. 2:07:13 The 1.3 megabytes of space that were added. 2:07:18 And. 2:07:21 And then they would have. 2:07:25 I don't know. 2:07:26 I just think the whole thing would have worked out a lot better. 2:07:30 Because you would be in a situation where people are competing on the. 2:07:35 On the right things for the right reasons. 2:07:38 And you have this big movement. 2:07:41 I think it was Joseph Schumpeter who said. 2:07:44 The. 2:07:46 The people can only express their opinion as a stampede or something. 2:07:50 So. 2:07:52 So if that's all you have, then you need to have at least fine-tuned things. 2:07:57 Stepping out in front of that to present people with like two options. 2:08:04 Anyway, I don't know if I'm going to be able to explain that very clearly. 2:08:08 But. 2:08:10 That's kind of my thought. 2:08:11 Well, I'm still going through the block size war and reading through it. 2:08:14 And it's. 2:08:16 It's really a fascinating book. 2:08:19 I think everyone should read it. 2:08:22 Who's interested in Bitcoin. 2:08:26 Certainly its importance cannot be understated. 2:08:29 It. 2:08:30 It determines today. 2:08:31 Like. 2:08:33 What can be spoken about and. 2:08:36 Which things. 2:08:38 Get how much funding and attention. 2:08:40 Which is. 2:08:42 Very irrational. 2:08:45 People still care so much. 2:08:47 Even you have someone like. 2:08:49 Who is. 2:08:51 One of the two inventors of the lightning network. 2:08:54 You think they'd be so prestigious. 2:08:56 Anything they say would be held. 2:08:59 On a throne or a pedestal. 2:09:03 And, but no, it's still, still. 2:09:06 He has to only test the waters and it's like, are we ever going to get out 2:09:09 from under this? 2:09:11 And just the. 2:09:13 So many people reacted in such a vicious and terrible way where they were 2:09:17 like. 2:09:18 Emotionally involved. 2:09:20 And then they were like, I'm going to get revenge on such and such. 2:09:23 And it's all very, very, very bad for making Bitcoin a success and defeat 2:09:27 the banks and take over the world. 2:09:30 It's just really, really terrible. 2:09:33 And almost everyone started directing all their firepower at other 2:09:36 Bitcoiners. 2:09:38 And it's, it's completely different. 2:09:40 It used to be a very, very fun atmosphere. 2:09:42 It was very loose. 2:09:43 It had really no political connotations either. 2:09:46 And Bitcoin, there wasn't like a right. 2:09:49 Thing necessarily just for what's that worth for what that's worth. 2:09:53 I tried to just bring that up because that is. 2:09:55 It just speaks to the totalitarian character of. 2:10:00 Like the cult that emerged from the winning. 2:10:05 Small blocker side. 2:10:09 I think to the book. 2:10:12 The book really showed the importance. 2:10:14 Oh, not when I'm at politics. 2:10:15 I didn't mean like, you know, left, right. 2:10:18 Vote this vote that just. 2:10:21 The politics of Bitcoin. 2:10:25 I think the point of the book is that if an idea is really. 2:10:32 The importance of really listening to people, I think is brought out in the 2:10:37 book. 2:10:38 That to kind of, to get people to actually. 2:10:41 Listen to you, like to me personally, I have to be a good listener. 2:10:46 To others. And that was something that you can see breaking down. 2:10:52 And then you see, you see people's true nature. 2:10:55 Like you see Roger Ver. 2:10:57 And. 2:10:59 Certainly he did a lot of great things for Bitcoin in the early days. 2:11:03 In promoting it. 2:11:05 But you see there is true nature. 2:11:08 Kind of come out and. 2:11:12 The overarching part of the book, I think, is that. 2:11:16 The. 2:11:18 It's not just. 2:11:20 Should an idea be. 2:11:22 Be good. 2:11:24 Or. 2:11:27 Technically fund. 2:11:29 You know, have good fundamentals, but is it. 2:11:32 Like a really, really good idea. 2:11:34 Is it. 2:11:36 Is it something that makes sense? 2:11:38 Like. 2:11:41 Something I'm curious about, because you know a lot about the early history of 2:11:44 Bitcoin. 2:11:47 No one can find. 2:11:49 Like. 2:11:50 Is there. 2:11:51 Any comment. 2:11:53 On Satoshi making that change or did he leave. 2:11:58 Like when he. 2:12:01 Specifically to source forge CVS. 2:12:04 Because I don't think we can find that. 2:12:06 That commit history anymore on source forge. 2:12:09 When he made the one megabyte. 2:12:11 Limit way back. 2:12:13 And obviously Satoshi is someone who. 2:12:15 He wouldn't just be rigid. 2:12:17 He would have changed. 2:12:19 He would have tested his ideas. 2:12:21 And made change changes as he went along. 2:12:26 I haven't looked into this. 2:12:28 In enormous detail. 2:12:29 And you can make like two columns and you can see like. 2:12:32 Satoshi was a small blocker. 2:12:34 So she was a large blocker. 2:12:36 He made many. 2:12:38 Comments that would indicate that he is a large block. 2:12:41 Obviously I hope I don't need to tell you all the small blockers are 2:12:44 convinced. 2:12:46 That Satoshi is a small blocker and all the large blockers are convinced 2:12:49 that. 2:12:50 So she's a, it's a large blocker. 2:12:52 So often you get nowhere by talking to these poor people, 2:12:55 but we can make columns. 2:12:57 And I, as I have. 2:12:59 And he has made many, many large blocker comments. 2:13:02 And he certainly seemed to be a large blocker. 2:13:04 At first. 2:13:07 The intriguing thing is that he is the one who himself inserted the. 2:13:12 The one megabyte block size limit. 2:13:15 And he wrote it's true that he, after he did that. 2:13:21 People asked him about it and he said, 2:13:23 he wrote about a way of phasing it out. 2:13:26 So of course it goes back and forth. 2:13:28 This is what I'm trying to tell you is it does. 2:13:29 It really does go back and forth. Like it's, it's right down the line. 2:13:32 And he, he explains, we could phase the limit out later. 2:13:36 But then what he does is he intentionally leaves the project. 2:13:40 And he does not give any, he doesn't, he doesn't like. 2:13:44 Add the phase out and then leave, 2:13:48 or he doesn't like leave a comment. I'll be sure to phase that out. 2:13:51 So it's totally ambiguous as to whether or not. 2:13:57 You can, you can interpret however you like, you can say. 2:14:00 He never wanted it to phase out. 2:14:02 And he was just telling people that to get rid of them, knowing that. 2:14:05 It would, the limit would stay. 2:14:07 Or you can say that he wanted to phase the limit out, 2:14:10 but he was like hit by a car or something before he could get to it. 2:14:15 Or you could say anything in between. 2:14:18 But it's a, but it's very, very, but there, 2:14:21 but there's quite a lot of evidence on, on the difference on, 2:14:24 on in both columns. 2:14:27 It's kind of just like the Bible in a way, you know, where you can, 2:14:31 if you want something on love, 2:14:33 you can go into the new Testament and find something on forgiveness and 2:14:38 love. And then if you want something on. 2:14:42 Justice and. 2:14:46 Sternly obeying rules. 2:14:48 And you can go into the old Testament and you can just kind of fish out of 2:14:51 that book, whatever you like, you know, and then as people do. 2:14:55 And it's people certainly also do with the Quran, et cetera. 2:14:58 So they just. 2:15:01 Unfortunately, it's not. 2:15:04 It's far from clear. 2:15:08 Very ambiguous. 2:15:10 He certainly seemed, he definitely was pro merge mining though. 2:15:14 And he thought that there would just be many blockchains. 2:15:16 That's what's very funny is his, 2:15:18 is one thing that he seems to take completely for granted is something 2:15:22 that later. 2:15:25 Everyone hates except for me. 2:15:30 Yeah. I'd like to block sizes. 2:15:32 Obviously in the early days, Satoshi. 2:15:36 He paid attention to the network. 2:15:39 Very closely. 2:15:42 And. 2:15:43 To the box sizes. 2:15:45 And in the, in the, isn't that correct? Like in the original. 2:15:49 Before he enacted the one megabyte limit. 2:15:53 He, and he really didn't tell anyone. He just kind of made the commit. 2:15:57 And then other people noticed it, but before he made that commit. 2:16:03 What were the block sizes? 2:16:07 Oh, they were never above. 2:16:10 They weren't, they weren't anywhere close to one megabyte. 2:16:12 So you did not have. 2:16:15 The I don't know. 2:16:17 It's an intriguing question as to why this is, but the block size is really, 2:16:20 they rose more or less. 2:16:23 Linearly. So they started very low and then they, you kind of grew. 2:16:27 The graph was just. 2:16:29 A diagonal line up. 2:16:32 And of course it had different spikes and noise. 2:16:36 But it was not, it's not like there were all these different block size. 2:16:39 It was like, you know, 2:16:40 One 10th of a megabyte. 2:16:43 Two 10th of a megabyte. 2:16:45 Kind of creeping up. 2:16:48 Was back in, that was back in 2010. 2:16:50 He added the limit in 2010 when it was still very small. 2:16:53 Interesting. 2:16:55 Was there some kind of limit. 2:16:57 I don't know if it's just my memory. I seem to remember some discussion. 2:17:01 But this was not. 2:17:04 There was a 32, I believe, megabyte limit in terms of how many. 2:17:09 The size of the message you could pass to the software to have it 2:17:13 interpret. 2:17:15 That as just a message. 2:17:17 I don't think that was even specific to blocks though. 2:17:19 I think that was just like kind of any message. 2:17:21 So again, it's a little muddy. 2:17:25 There was an implied limit that was, but you see, 2:17:28 there's a very big difference between an implied limit. 2:17:31 And a. 2:17:35 One that is hard coded into the validation rules. 2:17:38 The protocol. 2:17:41 The block can never be. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? 2:17:43 It's kind of like if there was no speed limit, 2:17:45 but no one had made a car that could go above. 2:17:48 A hundred miles an hour, you know, in 19, whatever. 2:17:51 50 or something. 2:17:54 It's like there was no speed limit, but there was. 2:17:57 Indirectly a speed limit. So. 2:18:00 And then later on. 2:18:03 It was like a unspoken sort of rule. 2:18:08 There would have been no reason to put in a, 2:18:11 when the limit was 32 megabytes and the actual blocks are. 2:18:15 We're literally. 2:18:17 You know, 2:18:21 Much thousands, a hundred times smaller than that. 2:18:26 That would not have been on anyone's mind. You know what I mean? 2:18:28 That'd be like having a speed limit of like 8,000 miles an hour or 2:18:32 something. You'd just be like, what? 2:18:35 So there was none. There was a period where there was, but. 2:18:38 That was the only limit. 2:18:40 And of course, intriguingly. 2:18:45 There would be other limits that would just cause the software to 2:18:48 crash. Of course, if you stress tested it. 2:18:52 There would eventually be something that just caused the software to 2:18:54 just like, you know, hit some kind of like. 2:18:57 Performance issue and crash. 2:18:59 And of course there is always the case that. 2:19:03 If the block takes more than 10 minutes to download. 2:19:08 That will destroy the network, basically. I mean, 2:19:10 if that happens repeatedly. 2:19:12 It will be. 2:19:16 It will be impossible for anyone to get it, 2:19:18 collect the blocks at a rate that is as fast as they are being 2:19:22 produced. And then it will. 2:19:25 Sort of not work out. 2:19:28 For the people who are trying to do that, but that you can see that. 2:19:32 You know, at the time they would propagate. And of course only a few. 2:19:38 Hundreds of a second at most. 2:19:40 Back then. 2:19:42 So versus 610 minutes to 600 seconds. So that's. 2:19:48 So again, it was, it was off by orders of magnitude. 2:19:52 Anyway, I thought we had someone up here before. Do we lose them? 2:19:55 I thought we had another person up. Maybe they are down now. 2:19:59 Okay. 2:20:00 They dropped. 2:20:01 They dropped back down. 2:20:02 Okay. 2:20:03 Well, 2:20:05 I'm. 2:20:08 I forgot what I was going to say. 2:20:19 Yeah. 2:20:21 Yeah. 2:20:22 So. 2:20:23 Yeah. 2:20:24 I guess just going back a little bit to your proposal. 2:20:27 So just one of the things that I. 2:20:31 Get a little bit confused is about the. 2:20:37 The main downsides of your proposal, I guess, 2:20:40 because everybody kind of gets, you know, 2:20:43 Rejecting about this. 2:20:45 This part is specifically. 2:20:54 And I would like to know if there is any other kind of a better way to 2:20:57 do this bag out thing. 2:20:59 Like the op code. 2:21:01 For example, like the previous hash block. 2:21:04 Or the previous transaction would help in any way. 2:21:07 In that sense. 2:21:09 Yeah. 2:21:10 That's my question. 2:21:11 For me, you cut out a little bit at the very beginning. 2:21:13 So, and you cut out right when you said something like, 2:21:16 and this is the part that people dislike, but you cut out. 2:21:20 So we're referring to the withdrawal, I assume, or the. 2:21:24 Peg out. I don't know. Could you repeat some of what you said? 2:21:27 I can't hear it. Hopefully. 2:21:29 Maybe it was just me. 2:21:32 Is that what you're talking about? 2:21:35 Oh, can you hear me? 2:21:37 Is that going to crash? 2:21:39 The stupid app. 2:21:43 Elon. 2:21:49 I don't hear anyone now. 2:21:52 Oh no. 2:21:54 Well, now I dropped back down again. 2:21:58 But I will try to answer this question anyway. 2:22:02 I think the question is, can, can Drivechain be improved? 2:22:06 Personally, I really don't think it can. 2:22:08 And my position is that the. 2:22:13 The people who don't like it really just there's something about it that 2:22:16 they just don't understand. And I, I wish that they did understand it. 2:22:19 And I feel like if they put. 2:22:22 More time into understanding how it worked today, they would, 2:22:26 they would like it because the withdrawal people think that. 2:22:32 They're trying to make it so that maybe miners cannot steal from the 2:22:37 withdrawal, but. 2:22:39 Self-interest. 2:22:41 And greed is a better ally than. 2:22:46 Most other things, you know, if you have, 2:22:48 If you have a situation where the miners want. 2:22:52 The chain to be a success. 2:22:55 Because they want those juicy, juicy transaction fees. 2:23:00 That is actually much better than even like a cryptographically secure 2:23:03 algorithm, because what that points to is that even if there's any, 2:23:07 the event of some kind of bug or some kind of unexpected thing. 2:23:12 That would point to the miners wanting to cooperate, to fix the issue. 2:23:16 Whereas if it's instead something like the Ethereum Dow hack, where. 2:23:21 They. 2:23:23 Where everyone is nature red and tooth and claw. 2:23:27 And it's like, you just steal the money and then you escape. 2:23:31 That is actually scarier that in that, 2:23:33 in that world you have to have everything coded perfectly. 2:23:36 So what people don't like is I think that there's some discretion. 2:23:41 The miners are your cooperative allies in mine. 2:23:45 And they want it to be a thing where. 2:23:48 No one is allied with no one or something like that. 2:23:50 I don't know. 2:23:52 But I think all that's just a big mistake. 2:23:56 The people who try to improve it. 2:23:59 They want to make it so that maybe 51% hash rate cannot steal from the. 2:24:05 The escrow, the sidechain. 2:24:08 However, they are going to fail because 51%. 2:24:14 And always. 2:24:15 Spencer messages from L1. 2:24:17 And it's just not worth it. 2:24:19 It's just really not worth it. 2:24:21 So, for example, the attack that. 2:24:25 Riyadh was explaining earlier. 2:24:29 In this very space. 2:24:31 That is something that what makes the attack interesting is that anyone can 2:24:36 do it and make money. 2:24:38 But if the miners just decided to. 2:24:41 They could have already done that attack. 2:24:43 They could have just said, we won't let anything be spent. 2:24:45 And then we will spend. 2:24:47 The hash pathway for half of these and the timelock pathway for half of 2:24:51 these. 2:24:52 They can already do that attack. 2:24:55 And make money just by poking their head in and paying some attention. 2:25:00 So the only interesting thing was that. 2:25:02 The attacker can now bribe the miners and cut them in on it. 2:25:05 And now the whole thing. 2:25:07 So everyone is relying on the miners to a very significant degree. 2:25:12 And it's just better to get the miners on your side. 2:25:15 And so I really don't think that it can be improved. 2:25:17 I mean, the other thing is the withdrawal is very slow, but. 2:25:22 It would be nice if it were faster, but. 2:25:25 It's also not that important because regular people will just swap out. 2:25:30 They will have. 2:25:31 It's kind of like how. 2:25:36 You know, it's like if you play chess and, you know, 2:25:39 you very rarely play to the checkmate, someone will resign, you know, 2:25:43 because they can't win. 2:25:45 So if you have the L2 coins, 2:25:46 it's just it's only a matter of time before you get them on L1. 2:25:49 The miners are indifferent between if 300 L2 coins and L1 coins. 2:25:56 So the miners are. 2:26:01 Going to buy them at 99 cents on the dollar, always. 2:26:06 It's exactly as I wrote in the original November 2015 post. 2:26:10 So everyone, I think it's very interesting. 2:26:12 People should go back and read, read the original November 2015 post. 2:26:16 It honestly thought of everything already. 2:26:20 And it's just people are just struggling to comprehend it for some reason 2:26:26 that I don't I don't fully understand. 2:26:29 But I don't think there's anything that would actually improve it a lot. 2:26:32 CTV would make it much easier so that instead of being able to withdraw to. 2:26:37 Fifteen thousand people or something like that, 2:26:41 you could withdraw to like whatever, tens of millions. 2:26:43 But that already isn't an issue because you can already aggregate on L2. 2:26:47 But that is one small improvement that. 2:26:52 That would happen and. 2:26:56 Yes. 2:27:00 I think I had to. 2:27:01 Yeah, I actually had to drop off and join again the call because I couldn't listen to you. 2:27:07 And I think I missed some part of what I was saying as well. 2:27:11 But part of my question was also like if some kind of method of code would improve the bag out process. 2:27:21 So, for example, just begging out with a transaction that has been seen in a specific block 2:27:30 or even like from a previous transaction hash or something like that, you know. 2:27:36 Yeah, that would not really improve it because already BIP300 requires people to put the TXID into the coinbase months in advance. 2:27:45 So you put it out already and then that is the only one. 2:27:49 It's only after it's in the coinbase and then it gets votes. 2:27:52 That is the only one that can be withdrawn later and included in a block. 2:27:57 And so it kind of already does that. 2:27:59 I really don't think there is a way to to improve upon the Drivechain design. 2:28:10 You know, maybe there is, but I just don't. 2:28:13 A lot of people just don't understand it. 2:28:17 And they what they think the improvement might be is something that is either pointless or. 2:28:28 Would actually break it, maybe, so I think that that's a very weird situation to be in, but I mean, you have to look at it from my point of view, you know, people should read the original November 2015 post and they also should look at the what the what what Peter Todd came up with, like in October of this year. 2:28:52 And really just how kind of terrible it is. 2:28:56 And it's so I don't know. 2:29:00 But yeah, everyone's got an opinion about Drivechain. 2:29:05 Yeah, plenty of people think it's about bringing shit coins to Bitcoin, even though it doesn't do that at all. 2:29:14 Was that your motivation to bring Bitcoin to everyone? 2:29:19 Well, yeah, I think that in the we're faced with the reality that people disagree enormously. 2:29:29 So what do how do we handle that? 2:29:33 Do we just say, oh, the winning team will will always be right. 2:29:39 Like what we have Greg Maxwell and he's never wrong. 2:29:43 Well, to me, that seems like a bad idea. 2:29:45 I think being wrong is a part of life. 2:29:49 It's a good part of life. 2:29:51 And it means that you are sprinting ahead to tackle the tough questions. 2:29:55 And it's very easy to never be wrong. 2:29:58 You just never say anything. 2:30:00 And that's worse. 2:30:02 And so I think betting on infallibility is a dead end to me. 2:30:08 And I think also just trying to stick your head in the sand and just say, oh, it doesn't matter that people disagree because. 2:30:16 But plenty of people say this type of thing where they say the status quo is the best. 2:30:20 So they say anyone proposing a change is bad, even if that change is a fully opt in, ignorable soft fork that can barely be regarded as a change. 2:30:32 But if people say something like the old is the best and that argument is sometimes called positivism and it has been. 2:30:44 It's been used time and again, and it's always wrong. 2:30:47 And it says that we should be using outhouses instead of plumbing and that we should just we should die. 2:30:55 Our teeth should kill us when we're twenty five, twenty six years old painfully. 2:31:00 And. 2:31:04 People try to make an analogy like TCP IP, but the analogy doesn't work because TCP IP already worked for it already solved the problem that it needed to solve, which was. 2:31:17 Connect every device in the world, eight billion devices. 2:31:22 And this does not yet, so. 2:31:28 So, yeah, that's my thought. 2:31:31 A body is back. Hello. 2:31:35 Hey, I you were talking a little bit earlier about SegWit and I'm a little bit behind, I guess, but, you know, you're talking about how it's weird that they were like, no, you can't raise the bar. 2:31:46 It's impossible. But let's raise it three megabytes right now. 2:31:50 And they never really acknowledge that. 2:31:53 I find it very interesting that what seems to be happening right here with the ordinal situation is a complete misincentive and mispricing of arbitrary blockchain storage. 2:32:03 And obviously, storage is one of the most precious resources. 2:32:06 And, for example, like Ethereum, not promoting Ethereum at the moment right now, but, you know, Ethereum prices arbitrary storage or they price storage is one of the highest compute resources. 2:32:17 It's one of the most expensive compute resources you can access on their network. 2:32:21 And so when they released SegWit and Taproot, they gave three times more space for arbitrary storage at like one quarter of the price of the base transaction data. 2:32:31 And it seems to me like a lot of the problems could be alleviated. 2:32:34 They can't be solved. You can always put arbitrary data into really any blockchain. 2:32:38 But it's a question of incentives and how easy can you do it? 2:32:41 How what's the cost of doing that? 2:32:44 It seems like it's maybe a foregone conclusion that they just won't be able to make any movement here because there's there's too many inscriptors at this moment. 2:32:52 But I don't know. What do you think about just in general, about the pricing of arbitrary storage and in a technical sense, the ability to reduce that problem? 2:33:01 Or maybe it's not really a problem. Maybe you don't see it as being a problem. 2:33:04 I don't know. I was just wondering if you could comment on those on that kind of line of thinking. 2:33:11 Sure, I'd be happy to. The distorted pricing was introduced. 2:33:17 People thought back in 2015, it was observed that you could do a you could do SegWit by putting the signatures into an extension, a mandatory extension block. 2:33:33 And you could have this extension block be 100 gigabytes. 2:33:38 And that would be pricing it at like one one hundred billionth or something. 2:33:42 And they set this constant as far as I'm aware. 2:33:47 You know, I was participating in technical discussion at the time, but who really even knows. 2:33:51 But I think it was something like this. The input is usually like 100 bytes because there's a 71 byte signature plus more stuff. 2:34:00 The input selecting the input is 32 bytes. 2:34:02 So it's like 115 something bytes is the each input. 2:34:07 And each output is only like whatever, like, you know, like 30, whatever, 40 bytes. 2:34:14 So it's roughly a four to one ratio. And when people make outputs, they were trying to deter output spam because it's like you make a bunch of outputs. 2:34:22 So it was like they were probably thinking of Satoshi Dice, which produced all these outputs that were dust or that were not used for. 2:34:31 They were used for notification. They were probably thinking a bit 47. 2:34:35 So they're thinking we don't want to store these UTXOs because we have to store them in memory. 2:34:40 So it is a great irony that they wanted to discourage. 2:34:43 They wanted to encourage people cleaning up the dust outputs. 2:34:51 By making it so that creating an output hit for the full amount, but an input was only cost one quarter. 2:35:01 So perhaps that makes hope that makes some sense, which is that that was the intent. 2:35:06 And I think it was the ratio of the size of an input to an output was around four. 2:35:10 But it was also the case that they had looked into the historical data and calculated that if they picked this factor of four, it would, if the past patterns continued, it would be effectively a block size increase from one megabyte to about 2.3. 2:35:28 And this was, you know, buying people some time, basically buying some time of getting the block size. 2:35:38 You know, it was like that if you could plot like the the size of the blocks and then you could plot the block size limit as a horizontal line at one megabyte. 2:35:48 And you could see we're going to like sort of like hitting the limit. 2:35:51 And they thought, OK, we can we can this will be a good compromise. 2:35:55 So that was how it that was how it originated. 2:35:57 And now you see that it has flipped around, as you rightly say. 2:36:03 It is used in a different way than it was intended, and now it is storing data that must be storing blocks. 2:36:12 The blocks must be served on demand. 2:36:14 So it's not it's not looked up in in RAM per se, but it's still something that whenever anyone if someone asks Luke Junior's node for a certain block, it either has to say that it doesn't have the block and then it will get disconnected from. 2:36:35 Or it has to serve the whole block, including the, you know, JPEGs. 2:36:41 So I think that they this is a little tiny experiment that was run in central planning that should just be unwound and we should just delete the we can go back and delete the discount and restore the original unadulterated one megabyte block size in all sincerity. 2:37:02 It's kind of what I would prefer at this point. 2:37:05 I think that it would this idea that it will. 2:37:10 I mean, who out there is like being like when people make a transaction, are they really thinking about, oh, I should clean up these? 2:37:20 I don't know. I don't think people really are responding to the incentive in that in that particular way. 2:37:26 And I kind of just think a byte is a byte. 2:37:28 The RAM, I think the RAM thing will fix itself also, because, you know, back in the day, I mean, there used to be a huge difference between RAM. 2:37:38 I mean, I remember when you had like a one megabyte RAM and then you could have like the ratio. 2:37:45 I mean, someone should plot that. I wonder about this. 2:37:48 Maybe I'm totally mistaken here. 2:37:51 But the. 2:37:54 It used to be that you'd have like you could have like a one. 2:38:00 Gigabyte or like a 100 gigabyte hard drive, like in the 2000s, you could have like a 100 gigabyte hard drive and you would have. 2:38:09 Like a very small amount of RAM. 2:38:12 And I want to like say I completely am wrong, but I'm saying the ratio has changed. 2:38:17 I think now you can get a super, super high performance computer. 2:38:20 It still only has like what, three terabytes in like the highest performing, but they can have like 64 gigabytes of RAM. 2:38:27 I can have a huge amount. 2:38:29 So I kind of think the ratio has caught up on the one side and it doesn't. 2:38:34 Who cares about, you know, and anything you store in RAM. 2:38:38 You can all store on. 2:38:41 You could flip them around, you know, you could, you know, you could. 2:38:44 You could hack the software and you could write caches and things to convert them all. 2:38:49 So it's like, I don't know who cares. 2:38:52 Now everyone has a three terabyte solid state drive. 2:38:56 It's like maybe not everyone, but some people. 2:38:58 Some people. 2:39:00 So that's my, does that give you any kind of, does that help answer your question at all? 2:39:06 Yeah, definitely. 2:39:08 I really just wanted to hear your thoughts on that. 2:39:10 And that's good. 2:39:12 That's good information on the background about like how they arrived at the numbers that they arrived at and what the problem they were trying to solve. 2:39:19 It's interesting to me that through this entire conversation, I just, I never, I hardly hear anybody discussing like the fundamental issue at the protocol level. 2:39:28 The problem has changed. 2:39:30 It's always like, well, we need to censor or we shouldn't censor. 2:39:32 We need to implement pools or, you know, Bitcoin, like this assumption that Bitcoin is not a designed network and that it's like economics. 2:39:40 It's pure economics itself. 2:39:42 You say, well, people can just pay for whatever they want. 2:39:44 And, you know, Bitcoin does what it wants. 2:39:46 It's like, it's not this separate entity. 2:39:48 It's not a separate thing that like, that has its own mind. 2:39:51 Like people set parameters into the network for specific purposes. 2:39:54 And if those aren't working as intended after the fact, then we need to go and change the network. 2:39:59 If you can't do that, like it's impossible to release any software, any protocol, any code that's going to get it right the first time, every time. 2:40:07 Like no matter how much modeling you want to put into it, the real world shows you things that you just didn't expect. 2:40:12 So to me, it's like Bitcoin needs the ability, if it's ever going to upgrade, it needs the ability to revisit the situation after the fact and say, okay, we kind of messed up some of these parameters. 2:40:22 We didn't, we didn't foresee this. 2:40:24 We didn't see the dynamics and the incentives. 2:40:26 And right now I just see very little of that happening as a conversation. 2:40:30 But yeah, that's really all I wanted to say about that. 2:40:33 I appreciate your ideas there. 2:40:35 Yeah. 2:40:38 And I mean, as you almost certainly can guess, people, this is another thing where it was like, in the SegWit era and previously, everyone would talk about like how this is a big experiment. 2:40:51 Don't put any more money in than you can afford to lose. 2:40:55 And then it kind of, it is the block size war. 2:40:57 I mean, I repeat this so much, but I just really believe that it's the case. 2:41:02 I beseech everyone, please, you know, hear my plea or whatever. 2:41:06 But it's like if the community split into the two camps and then, you know, and the camps got further and further apart and they started hating each other. 2:41:17 By scaling three, they had already started to hate each other a lot. 2:41:19 And then SegWit2x further drove this wedge and then Bitcoin Cash, they split off completely. 2:41:26 And it's because the community split that both of them decided to try to claim that they had all the answers. 2:41:33 So no one wanted to say, oh, we're still figuring it out. 2:41:39 This is an experiment. 2:41:41 Instead, they said, this is the total final solution. 2:41:45 This is perfection. 2:41:47 The Bitcoin Core latest version is perfect and can never be improved. 2:41:55 And anyone who talks about improving it is a troublemaker. 2:41:59 And all of this started, this was not the case before the block size war. 2:42:04 This is the toxicity, you know, there was no, there was some. 2:42:08 But the toxicity was very different back then because it was a completely different thing when you compare something like Bitcoin to like Litecoin, which is like a copy paste that has like no, at the time had really no purpose. 2:42:19 The great irony is that now Litecoin, you know, actually kind of looks like it is. 2:42:26 It's nice because Lightning is the is the extension block of Bitcoin. 2:42:31 It's the low fee version of Bitcoin. 2:42:33 This is ironic. 2:42:35 It's the horizontal scaling, as they say. 2:42:37 But but but the in the early days of Bitcoin, it was like Bitcoin. 2:42:42 Ninety nine percent. 2:42:44 Dominance index. 2:42:46 Everything else was a distraction. 2:42:48 Everything else was get rich quick scheme. 2:42:51 And so but it's only after the split that. 2:42:57 That. 2:42:59 People tried to say like Bitcoin is finished. 2:43:06 I don't know, it's it's rough. 2:43:09 It's too bad that an enormous amount of damage was caused, I think, by the way, that event was handled, as I said before, it it broke the process because you can see why. 2:43:21 Because now if you have if there is a BIP on the before when it's previously, the BIPs were like, well, add a BIP so that when the unused up to. 2:43:32 Which puts the current block time like on the stack and like fails if it doesn't equal something. 2:43:39 So that was like check lock time. 2:43:41 Verify is like, you know, that was a. 2:43:43 Oversimplification, but it's like a BIP would be like we will put the coinbase must the coinbase transaction must include the current block height. 2:43:56 And that was because if you didn't do that and the miner reused the address, you had two UTXOs that would have the exact same. 2:44:05 Hash and people just thought, well, that's kind of annoying. 2:44:08 So when the BIPs and then you had a BIP to add pay to script hash, you add multisig. 2:44:14 That's kind of a big change if you really think about it. 2:44:19 But back then, no one cared. 2:44:21 But then as soon as you have this block size dispute that makes everyone very, very angry. 2:44:27 Now, when someone puts a SegWit BIP on the table, SegWit is now it's a political football because it has a block. 2:44:34 Well, why four megabytes and not something else? 2:44:37 Why can Peter Weill increase the block size? 2:44:42 But whatever. 2:44:44 You know, Roger Ver can't. 2:44:48 I think Roger is a very nice guy, very polite, and he really cared about Bitcoin. 2:44:53 I think he he really overestimated. 2:45:00 Well, as you say, there became a time when it was very hard to get the impression that people were really listening to each other. 2:45:08 The listening is the key. 2:45:10 And the empathy, which was unfortunately, it was I remember it as being a very full tank. 2:45:20 In in 2015, but that tank ran out. 2:45:24 And I think you alluded to this in the book points this out that it just people's had a tank of gasoline that actually just ran out. 2:45:34 And for some people faster than others. 2:45:37 And then they just thought, well, these people aren't listening to me. 2:45:40 So why say anything? 2:45:43 But also they had like agreements that were behind closed doors with very few people to like in Hong Kong. 2:45:52 And but the Hong Kong one was that one was supposed to be like a compromise. 2:45:59 That one was a very intriguing case. 2:46:01 I don't know what the what the book I assume you're referring to Jonathan's book. 2:46:06 I don't know. I'm not sure what exactly what he says in there. 2:46:10 I think he's mostly great. 2:46:12 But but that one, the Hong Kong one was like you had a bunch of small blockers and large blockers meet and try to continue to talk to each other. 2:46:22 And it sort of backfired because it ended up being like, why are these people the anointed ones who can talk? 2:46:28 And then there was that silly little kerfuffle. 2:46:30 Is this in the book about is Adam Beck signing on behalf of Blockstream or just as an individual? 2:46:37 This became like a huge issue that went for like at least a week, two weeks maybe. 2:46:43 And it was like, does this represent Blockstream's opinion? 2:46:46 People really cared about Blockstream's opinion for some reason, which I always I always defended Blockstream and said, who cares? 2:46:53 Like, this is such a stupid thing to care about. 2:46:55 Can we just talk about if the idea is right or not? 2:46:57 But, yeah, people were convinced that, yeah, Blockstream was like funded by like the devil or whatever. 2:47:02 And and then people were obsessed. 2:47:06 There was, you know, I don't want to say racist per se, but people were you know, they were really annoyed that so much mining was in China. 2:47:14 This is a big issue for people, which I also said, this is so dumb. 2:47:19 Why do we care? Why are people talking about this? 2:47:22 It wasn't racist. 2:47:23 It wasn't racist. In my view, it was. 2:47:27 Yeah, it was like a CCP will destroy us. 2:47:30 It was like people were saying, oh, you're not listening to us because you are racist. 2:47:36 It wasn't like they were being racist and to the language. 2:47:40 Also, they had to go through an interpreter. 2:47:45 Right. And you know how well that goes. 2:47:48 I recommend this very often, but I'm going to recommend it again. 2:47:51 I'm pretty sure you can easily find scaling Bitcoin, too, which was in Hong Kong, unrelated to the Hong Kong agreement, which was like was like two months later or something. 2:48:01 But maybe it was April even. 2:48:05 But whatever it was, that was December. 2:48:08 You can get the minor panel and just watch, just click play and just watch. 2:48:13 And you'll you'll get a sense of how the miners were not like in my view. 2:48:18 They were not like these Machiavellian schemers. 2:48:21 They were just like very confused, very annoyed, very frustrated. 2:48:25 And they were just trying to figure out what to do. 2:48:28 And they were very annoyed and they just wanted to go back to making money, which is. 2:48:34 But the miners, if the miners cannot. 2:48:39 Outsource responsibility for their thoughts, it would be nice if you could do that. 2:48:45 It would be nice if you could do that. 2:48:46 But responsibility is the one thing that you just cannot outsource. 2:48:50 And they have to take responsibility for the soft forks, because if they upgrade, the soft fork happens. 2:48:57 And if they don't, then it really doesn't. 2:49:00 You can have the USF like force them to upgrade, but they still have to actually do it at the end of the day. 2:49:06 And it is, in fact, possible for every almost just almost every soft fork, every soft fork that is message based, like transaction based. 2:49:14 And a whole lot more besides. 2:49:16 Miners can always upgrade to a version that filters the soft fork out and then stops it from activating. 2:49:22 So they just tried to. 2:49:24 But, yeah, we're all still learning here. 2:49:27 I'm sure historians of the future will have a field day. 2:49:31 Picking all this apart and listening to this space, who knows, maybe. 2:49:36 Hello, greetings from the past. 2:49:38 If you are listening from 100 years from now. 2:49:40 And I think what do you think about the potential? 2:49:44 So, you know, going into the future here, it seems like in the present moment, we've seen a little bit of softening from some of the hardcore Bitcoin or maximalist types where they're a little bit more willing to admit some of the shortcomings of lightning network. 2:49:58 They're a little bit more open to the possibilities. 2:50:01 Do you foresee potentially or like how do you think the social landscape looks for Bitcoin going into the next couple of years? 2:50:07 Soon we have another bull market and fees. 2:50:10 I mean, I can't see any way that in the present state of things, fees don't hit 100, 200 dollars consistently for months on end. 2:50:17 Do you think that that will soften up like the ability of the Bitcoin community as a whole to embrace some kind of change that could be beneficial? 2:50:25 Or is in some ways, I think like we need a significant change. 2:50:29 There needs to be something big that happens. 2:50:31 It can't just be like tweaking our way, like tweaking a couple of things to making it work. 2:50:35 Like you really need a software that enables Drivechains and or CTV and or other cool things like maybe that we haven't thought of. 2:50:43 Do you think that's like reasonably possible in Bitcoin? 2:50:46 Like I know everything's in the realm of possibility, but with so many people having been so hardened, can people come out of that state in time so that Bitcoin can actually keep those shelling, those network effects shelling point kind of thing? 2:51:00 Well, I got it. 2:51:02 I had a question that also might answer that. 2:51:04 And that is perhaps with enough time, people will will forget about these current squabbles. 2:51:12 And it'll be. 2:51:14 They'll just. 2:51:15 Yeah, it'll be a new generation of. 2:51:17 I do hope that I mean, weirdly, though, you still see the echoes of it constantly. 2:51:22 And I think that when people are new, they do a good job of. 2:51:27 Like, you know, you show up and it's your first day of whatever college, I don't know, just making this up the first day of work. 2:51:33 You know, people are good at knowing they're new and they kind of like they look around and they get a grasp of like the cues of like the little norms and things. 2:51:41 So so I'm not. 2:51:43 That's a neat idea. 2:51:44 I wish that would happen. 2:51:45 I mean, you can kind of see it a little bit. 2:51:47 I do think there are some people who are new and they do seem much more just open minded and they're just like liberated from the chaos of this horrible event. 2:51:57 I think socially. 2:52:00 Like one thing is I think the cult will ultimately destroy itself. 2:52:04 I don't know how long it will take or what form. 2:52:07 But you see it today with, you know, it's like kind of like like woke and whatever SJW type stuff. 2:52:14 It goes far beyond what it you know, it had maybe at the very beginnings of its history, some useful knowledge. 2:52:24 And then it like most things, it goes too far and then it self-destructs. 2:52:29 And the only question is how long and what else will they take down with them? 2:52:34 And so I think that but that's just kind of true of just about everything. 2:52:39 That was also true of like like Ayn Rand accidentally started a cult around herself that sort of persisted even after she died. 2:52:47 And so things like this happen. 2:52:52 It's a well-known thing. 2:52:53 And then they eventually become so unreasonable. 2:52:56 Unfortunately, I say this with a with a regret that I think Austrian economics kind of is like that. 2:53:03 Or at least it was until Bitcoin came around where it was just determined to be niche and it just enjoyed being misunderstood and self-pity. 2:53:11 And it just stayed to stay small. 2:53:13 And one of the ways it stayed small was by violently ejecting people who didn't totally conform to the extreme format. 2:53:22 And then indirectly Bitcoin has breathed. 2:53:26 Some life into it, maybe even more life than it deserves, since the Austrians all hated Bitcoin when it first came out. I remember it. They're not going to, I'm not going to let them get away with this either. They're going to try. Everyone's trying to say, oh, Austrian economics, Bitcoin. Everyone hated it. Peter Schiff still hates it. People didn't like it. Bitcoin practically went mainstream before the Austrians. Then afterwards, Austrian economics tried to take credit for Bitcoin after they hated it. 2:53:53 For so long, though, Peter Schiff has even admitted that he should have bought more Bitcoin on the podcast. 2:54:05 So socially, the cult will destroy itself eventually, or it will just become irrelevant and mocked. 2:54:13 I don't know how long that'll take. The the good thing about high fees is they do represent a problem. 2:54:19 So you have high fees. If the fees are $100 per transaction consistently, then it does open the door for someone to say, well, what's what is it? I have a new idea. Oh, what is it? Oh, it's called Litecoin. Imagine that Litecoin had never been invented. 2:54:37 You say, well, okay, Litecoin, what is that? And then they say, well, it's like Bitcoin, but you don't have to pay the $100 fee. 2:54:46 And then the regular person is like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that saves $100 every time. 2:54:52 So this whole thing about it creates a problem, and then that just focuses everyone on solving the problem. 2:55:03 And you could say the same for just, you know, Litecoin is just an example. Anything that would do that would include, you know, like a Drivechain type thing. 2:55:14 It might include, it probably doesn't include the Lightning Network, but it might include ARK, it might include Bitcoin SV, etc., type things, you know, Bitcoin Cash type things. 2:55:25 Or just other L2s, state chains, whatever. So that's the good thing about the high fees. It's bad that they are a problem because problems are bad. 2:55:36 But at least it takes something that would be like a nebulous, arcane, abstract problem that we'd have to take in theory today. We're all like kind of theorists now. 2:55:48 Transform this theoretical problem into just a very tangible problem that you can just point at and say, this is the problem that I'm solving. 2:55:55 So that would help. 2:56:00 As anyone who listens, who's been listening for a while, there's this guy, Alex Kravitz, who shows up in our space sometimes, and he talks about the feepocalypse, and his view is that fees will continue to increase 2:56:16 for a while, and that this will eventually destroy the credibility of the current generation of like media personality, which he calls like the priests. 2:56:30 So like people will turn to whatever, like Peter McCormick for answers or something, and then they won't get the answers. And then they will, next time they'll pick up technical podcast hosts or something like that, where people will think, what do I do? 2:56:51 I've been dollar cost averaging, and I've been buying $200 of Bitcoin every month. And now each of these is a dust UTXO. So, you know what I mean? Like if the fees go to $200 a transaction, then all that person's money has been wiped out. 2:57:16 It will cost them $200 to spend each of those $200 inputs, or just about. 2:57:24 So yeah, social landscape, I don't know. Usually like when the price goes up, everyone just feels good. So they think, let the good times, let's say le bon temps rouler, it would have been nice for Riyad to hear my Creole attempt at French there. 2:57:45 But let the good times roll, baby. When we have number go up, everyone is very happy. So they're not in like a problem solving mood. 2:58:00 What would certainly stimulate a creative search for new ideas would be like Ethereum flip into BTC. But I don't think that's, that seems actually less likely to happen than ever, because Ethereum is being devoured by its own variants, such as Solana and these other things. And they may emerge from that stronger than ever, or they may not, I don't know. 2:58:25 Sounds like what we need then. We need fees, I say we need, but in order to encourage some kind of like impetus for a social shift in the landscape, we need fees to go up, the bull market to happen or whatever. 2:58:38 And then when the bear market comes, we need fees to still be really high. Maybe that's because Bitcoin is now valued over $100,000, you know, consistently, even at the bear market low, but, you know, everyone thinking, okay, I'll just wait it out. And I'll, I'll get my money back. You know, I'll get above the dust threshold. 2:58:54 People will still find themselves in problems, even in the bear market. And suddenly, you'll have like a double whammy reason for trying to like change your mental model to, you know, to have both the high fees and the bear market price hurt price, price pain happening. I don't know, that's just kind of like a whimsical speculation on my part. 2:59:14 Yeah, people shouldn't want to if there's no problem, then they shouldn't do anything. So if people need a problem to solve, you know, if there's no big problem, then no one should care. 2:59:28 One thing that I do think I have been thinking about recently is that Elon Musk said that he started Tesla in just in order to move the transition to electric vehicles forward by a few years. And by starting the company, he hoped just to kind of shock the big automakers into doing electric vehicles. But what happened instead? 2:59:57 I mean, they have he had succeeded in that. But now Tesla is worth unbelievably more, you know, then. So that is an interesting case of like, starting up something. It's like a demo of what to do instead, and then just accidentally taking over because I think certainly, we have a lot of like, 3:00:21 scar tissue in Bitcoin of like, all this like junk has accumulated. And it's just, I don't know, maybe it will be maybe it will be that something new is created that is provides a competitive, competitive threat, you know, that would be a real problem that would. 3:00:44 That's the type of thing that would. But then it could just be also that people just get over themselves. I don't know, like, you know, it's also like, the funny thing is, software activation is just at this point, like a few pools, upgrade their software. So, so it's actually on paper, it's not asking for very much. And only 3:01:14 the details are a big ask. So I don't know. It's a tough question. 3:01:21 Do you know what the pool like the people that run the pools with their current predilections are like, are they interested in forking? Are they kind of still agnostic? What are their like, do you have any visibility? 3:01:32 They mostly don't know a lot about these technical issues. And like, so like, for example, like, so you take a pool like like foundry didn't even exist. A few years ago, and foundry was like, we are going to too much mining is in China, we're gonna have a US pool. And then you think about it, these miners, if they want to go public, they 3:02:03 have to jump all these hoops, you know, jump all these hurdles, jump through all these hoops. And one of them is that they can't have money at, you know, like, you're a miner, like, say, you're a miner, you're whatever, you're a great American mining, you're whoever, you know, 3:02:20 foundry produces these, like, sock reports that show how much money everyone has, because the funds are all commingled. So there's this like commingling issue. When you have that happening, then there's something where it's like, for legal reasons, you want to have you want to know, like, who, who, where is my money right now? Who owns it? And who else owns it? Who else has a claim? 3:02:50 On it? So I do all this stuff. And they put all this stuff to be like compliant. And that's why foundry is KYC. And then so like, their priorities are completely different than like, they are in the same position today that the 2015 scaling to panel miners I mentioned before, are in where they don't really know what to do. And they know that people have strong opinions, but they don't know. 3:03:17 I think they mostly like they don't want to disturb anything. And so it won't be but I, the weird thing is before just before this bull market started, all the miners were probably set to lose. You know, they were losing like hundreds of millions of dollars a year, you can look up publicly the financial statements of for example, like marathon, which had like, I just browse through anyone can do this easily. 3:03:47 I just kind of browse through all this. And it's like they had like $300 million of cash on hand one year, and then there was 200 million and then it was like 91 million. And so the so and so the that's a situation where they're, they would want to find new ideas, you know. 3:04:14 So that's another type of thing. So it's like problems here and necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. 3:04:21 And so if everyone's making a ton of money, then and you know, I include myself in that, which is kind of like people say, Oh, Paul, you've been doing this for a long time. 3:04:32 You have this idea in 2015. Like, why has it taken so long? Or why do you still work on it? Or why do you and it's kind of like, well, Bitcoin has been doing great since 2015. 3:04:46 So I myself, I don't feel any kind of like urgency to like declare war over between hundred when it's like the greatest performing asset in the history of capitalism. 3:04:57 So it's kind of like, yeah, I kind of just like work on it in my spare time. In like 2018. It's like if things are things are kind of going just fine. 3:05:07 So it's, it's necessity is the mother of invention type of thing. But I do think that we will. 3:05:19 Yeah, this the social climate will will continue to change. And I think that I think the call is the big thing that is inevitable is that eventually the cult will just destroy itself. 3:05:28 The cult is the no true Bitcoin or cult. And it's, it's very annoying. And the idea that something that has network effects, it doesn't matter if people use it is false. 3:05:41 One intriguing thing is that the rise of stuff like the stable coins, USDT, and like, will they get obliterate? Will they get nuked from orbit by one regulator will just destroy tether? Is that going to happen? 3:06:06 Does tether have like, I bet they do some extremely sophisticated plan with involving like lots of like shadow banking and like euro dollars and like dollar equivalents to like make it impossible for people to like stop them from paying us dollars out to people who want them like that would be so cool if they did. 3:06:31 Doesn't matter. I don't know. But the USDT is one thing that seems to be getting more and more popular among actual users. People love they just love this USDT thing. 3:06:43 Regular people, if I go around the world, or even around the United States, it's kind of popular. It sounds crazy to us. But especially to people in different countries. They love the US dollar and the USDT is just like they just download an app and then they can just send and receive it immediately. So it's kind of like they get a huge number of they get a lot of benefits from this. 3:07:13 From this thing which they really like. They, they, you know, many of them live in a place where they're all their money can be seized or inflated away, you know, Argentina, Africa, whatever. So, so having USDT is a big upgrade. I don't know. 3:07:38 Not sure if that answers anyone's questions or why don't we we've been going for a little while so why don't we just put it in for last opportunity to ask a question. Come on up. 3:07:55 Ask a question. Don't ask a question. 3:07:59 Leave a comment. 3:08:03 Or don't. 3:08:08 Last chance. 3:08:13 I have a funny contest where I'm paying a tiny amount of money like $20 to anyone who can guess when it is that ocean will mind their third block, they've got to. 3:08:29 But it's funny people giving ocean so much attention complaining about it phrasing it. 3:08:36 And yet, only two blocks, which I kind of think like speaks to like do we want to have Twitter run the world or do we want or is there something to be said for proof of work as kind of giving us an objective view. 3:08:50 On one hand, Bitcoin or say, we don't want the miners to control Bitcoin, or whatever that means. 3:08:59 But on the other hand, people say like proof of work is the only reliable indicator of objective, you know, reality or something or objectivity. 3:09:13 So maybe there's a little bit of a contradiction. 3:09:16 But in any event, it seems like no one else wants to come up so thanks everyone for a great space. 3:09:23 As usual, so thanks very much. See everyone next week. 3:09:31 And we'll see Peter time next week right 3:09:34 I think on Stefan Lavera on Tuesday. 3:09:37 But it gets rescheduled a lot. So hopefully, what happened, see if he responds to any of my 10 questions that I put in the image. 3:09:48 Yeah, we'll see. 3:10:03 Okay.
