0:00 Thank you for your attention. 0:30 Transcribed by https://otter.ai 1:01 Oh my god, I don't like this. 1:05 This is a random Christmas music playlist. 1:11 This is good. I like this. 1:15 How about Jingle Bell Rock? 1:19 There we go. Classic. 1:21 Jingle Bell Rock 1:47 So we're supposed to be waiting for Sergio. 1:50 And I don't exactly remember the Argentina Daylight Savings Time situation. 1:56 But I'm sure it'll work itself out. 2:01 out. 2:10 Meanwhile, we got some beautiful music. 2:21 Jingle around my car. 2:25 Whose sleighing in the janglin' field. 2:29 That's the jingle bell ride. 2:33 Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell ride. 2:36 Jingle bell ride, jingle bell 2:40 [Music: Jingle Bell Rock] 2:59 of primes. We go riding in the one -post lane. 3:05 up, Jingle Heart, jingle booty. 3:08 Jingle and round the clock. 3:13 stand on the matals and let's jingle and be. 3:17 That's the Jingle 3:18 Wow, what great Christmas music. 3:32 Okay, Sergio, is this you? Are you Rootstock? 3:37 No. Probably not. 3:40 Oh, here he is. 3:46 Cool. Let me get more of this background music. 3:54 Nice. 3:58 Nice. Cool. 4:02 Can you hear me, Paul? 4:04 Yes, I hear you now. 4:05 Oh, great, great. 4:07 Excellent. 4:08 How are you doing? 4:09 I'm doing great. 4:10 Hey, congratulations on Argentina being now a Mecca of liberty and, you know, all the good things. 4:22 It's going to last a couple of months until he's out by a mob of French opposition. 4:32 I mean, he's doing the right thing. 4:34 It's smart to rip off the bandaid and try and just get as much done on day one as you can. 4:39 I suppose, but there will be suffering. 4:42 And so nobody's happy. 4:44 Like, everyone knows that it's necessary, but nobody's happy about it. 4:49 Right, right. 4:51 Yeah. 4:53 It's a difficult thing to, because, you know, it's a very easy thing for the government to just come in and say, we'll send everyone checks or we'll give everyone a job. 5:04 Yeah, nobody likes being in bankruptcy. 5:07 Like, everyone feels like somehow it's better to keep the checks going. 5:13 But we know what happens in the end. 5:16 Well, we Argentinians know very well what happens in the end. 5:19 Maybe in other countries it's yet to be seen. 5:22 Our people still doubt about what hyperinflation means. 5:26 But here in Argentina, we know that it ends with a total collapse of bank society and everything else. 5:33 And it's very painful. 5:36 There is a joke that I heard once when I was affiliated with a certain economics department back in the day. 5:43 And the joke was something like this. 5:45 It's a pity that we are an example of luxury. 6:00 You are a very unusual. 6:02 Yeah. 6:04 But hey, maybe we'll get some good. 6:12 I honestly think, see, if you want to pull off something like that where it's going to be difficult, you do need someone with a little bit of a personality, which that guy seems like he has, you know. 6:22 Yes, yes. 6:24 But it's very, there is a thin line between having personality and being kind of a clown. 6:32 So people are still in doubt of what side he is. 6:38 Right, right. 6:41 But the last thing that people lose, and this is very strange, like it's hope. 6:47 I have always been pessimistic about Argentina politics. 6:53 But it seems like people have endless hope, even in the worst possible situations. 7:00 And so let's try to use that hope to change for the better. 7:04 But, you know, hope can last very, very short periods if people start having nothing to eat or, yeah. 7:12 Yeah. 7:14 It's painful. 7:16 Well, yeah. 7:18 I mean, hopefully we'll get some Bitcoin. 7:22 We'll get a critical mass of Bitcoiners in there. 7:27 I was talking with one of the CEOs of a wallet that is very used in Argentina. 7:33 It's called Lemon Wallet. 7:35 And I think they have like 3 million or 3 or 5 million Argentinians using cryptocurrency or stablecoins and Bitcoin, like a mixture of them, which is quite a lot of users. 7:51 So it's very interesting. 7:53 I think like one of the main uses of sidechains, and this is probably something that we are going to touch in this space, is that financial inclusion is one of the most important use cases. 8:08 And this is interesting for me because when I joined this Bitcoin movement, I joined because of my background in security. 8:17 I have absolutely no good understanding of economics and no interest in social progress, like what happens with you on the bank. 8:31 But I came to realize that it's one of the main forces pushing for Bitcoin understanding and Bitcoin adoption. 8:42 It's a very powerful force, like being a bank and having no access to financial services is one of the main forces that you are going to reach out to Bitcoin and try to understand how it works. 8:58 Cool. Let's get into it then. 9:01 So I remember you as being one of the first people. I went to MIT, I think it was like 2016, the MIT Bitcoin conference, and you were like, oh yeah. 9:11 This was like right after I had published the November 2015 Drivechain post. 9:16 And you were like, oh yeah, this Drivechain thing is probably better then. 9:19 And I was like, what? I can't believe that someone said that. 9:23 I was like, wow. 9:25 This was back in the day. It was a long time ago. We were all still very starry eyed about lightning. 9:34 And you went on MIT and you said, I'm sorry, but I'm going to use Microsoft Windows to give this talk. 9:39 I hope that doesn't offend anyone. 9:41 Yeah, I'm not using Microsoft Windows anymore, but at that time I used to. 9:47 And because I had a previous medical equipment company and we used embedded Windows for our device. 9:56 So I was more at Windows. 9:59 But early in my life, when I was 18, I was a Linux kernel hacker, like adding security features into Linux kernel. 10:08 So I started with Linux, I ended up with Windows, and now I'm mostly a Mac OS user. 10:16 But I still value the Linux knowledge and all. 10:21 Okay, so yeah, what happened in 2015, I think, is that the Blockstream paper about sidechains made us all excited. 10:32 And suddenly, as you know, everything stopped. 10:35 There was a huge pause and we all got surprised that all this energy was kind of going nowhere. 10:47 Because these Blockstream researchers, they discovered that basically their solution didn't work. 10:55 Or at least it was not as decentralized as they thought it could be. 11:00 Basically because if miners can censor transactions, then they can censor any view of an existing sidechain. 11:09 Like they can censor any kind of fork, and they can choose whatever fork is the honest fork. 11:15 So when you presented your ideas of drivechain, I said, okay, this is theoretically the only way we are going to solve the problem. 11:36 For me, it was like a moment where I said, okay, so if this is an unsolvable problem, then the only solution would be drivechains. 11:47 And it happened that many years later, in a paper about interchange communication by Alexei Samyatin, you probably know him. 12:00 Yes, I do. Yeah, he's great. 12:02 He proved basically that there is an impossibility result, which is that there is no free lunch. 12:07 There is no possibility of fully decentralized communication between sidechains, between blockchains that are not synchronized. 12:17 By synchronized, I mean like one being the rollup of another and the underlying blockchain being able to settle these rollup transactions. 12:29 And we should explain that the cure is worse than the disease, because this is sort of making all this other stuff a mandatory part of the L1 consensus. 12:41 Well, I mean, that can be very good, but it's kind of like contrary to the sidechain idea of having these all be like separate projects that have their own life. 12:50 Yeah, if we remember this blockchain paper, the only possible way of building the sidechain was basically reusing the Bitcoin header, reusing the Bitcoin transaction outputs. 13:02 It was super tied to the Bitcoin blockchain format. 13:05 And so the possibilities for experimentation were expanded, but not really much. 13:12 Like you could not have an account based ledger or any other type of ledger that was not based on UTXOs and Bitcoin headers. 13:21 So, yeah, it was limited. And with drivechain, there is no such limitation. 13:27 So, yeah, so for me, the drivechain would be something like, but I remember having a conversation with you at that time and I said, this is not something you're going to be able to push forward without first having a real use case of millions of people onboarded and ready to switch to drivechain. 13:52 I'm still kind of on that side, like I built Roostock because of that. 13:59 And I, not only myself, but the group of founders of the Roostock projects were all in the idea that there were needs that need to be solved as soon as possible regarding financial inclusion. 14:14 And Bitcoin was going to be the anchor and the store of value for the future. 14:19 And so these solutions would need to be connected to Bitcoin, but Bitcoin would not change if there was not a huge use case ongoing for that. 14:30 And I hope that that happens, like Roostock is growing. 14:36 There's a lot of people using Roostock in Latin America and in many other parts of the world. 14:41 And I hope that someday everyone sees that we need drivechains and we need better support for sidechains because like all these communities expecting a better bet to be created. 14:58 Yeah, they're all very slowly coming around. 15:01 Yeah, well, I value your work on trying to port these Zcash sidechains and EVM sidechains into Bitcoin. 15:12 I would just encourage you to try to deploy them with imperfect technology of federations or whatever you can find and show that you have a huge community of users that wants to switch to drivechain. 15:31 Because I see your efforts in the community and your opponents are pretty much very stubborn. 15:40 I don't know. What do you think about that? 15:43 Yeah, I think you're probably right. 15:46 I think what we're going to do is, I mean, it's hard because the feature is the peg. 15:53 So to do it with a different thing would be, it wouldn't really be a proper test. 15:57 But I think we're going to make like a Cygnet version with some fake money. 16:02 And then we'll release that and then maybe even some other kind of test net networks that has all the features. 16:08 Because I do think that it's certainly too much to ask for a layperson to them to grasp all this theoretical stuff. 16:17 A story that I often tell is that when I first found Bitcoin, I really put a huge amount of time researching it. 16:25 And then I really still did not understand it at all until I got coins from Gavin's faucet and sent them to myself. 16:32 And so, for example, I didn't know how confirmations worked at all. 16:38 I thought you had to keep the software open and collect them. 16:40 I thought it was like BitTorrent or something where you had a seeding or something. 16:45 And I really didn't understand. 16:46 So most people will need to see the software. 16:50 Even then, that'd be too much for most people. 16:53 The critics, I think, they are in the unfortunate position of having committed too much. 17:00 They have dug themselves in too deep. 17:03 And now they kind of made a name for themselves. 17:06 And it's only – it's actually a very small number of people with any credibility. 17:11 It's like three people who – and then there's a lot of kind of people who just kind of assume that those three people are correct. 17:20 Which is why it doesn't offset the – most people now think that I am right. 17:27 And there's all kinds of whole host of other things. 17:30 Like there's really no alternative. 17:32 So I agree completely with what you were saying about the – this doesn't work. 17:35 I'm kind of an expectator of every single podcast that you participate with defending drivechains. 17:45 And generally with Peter Toll on the other side. 17:49 And I find it very hard like to be on the drivechain side. 17:55 Like it's – you bring a lot of economics reasons and just they're difficult for people. 18:02 It's simpler for people to think about, you know, oh, I cannot be a miner because if I have to run a hundred – I don't know why this hundred number comes. 18:11 Always come a hundred drivechains. 18:14 Like a hundred drivechains will populate, you know. 18:17 So it's very simple for them to see, okay. 18:24 But for me it's like – I try to think of it like bitcoiners don't mind what is happening on the drivechain side or sidechain side. 18:35 Like if there is a hundred and 99 of them are useless or they are, you know – 18:42 Bitcoiners, if they are not using them, they should not care. 18:46 And if miners are using third party node infrastructure providers, like bitcoiners that are not using them should not care. 18:56 And even if they – I mean even if you are using them and you care, you can push. 19:02 I mean market forces will push on those miners that instead of just querying one provider, they query five different providers. 19:11 And they do a majority, you know, voting. 19:14 And if all of them agree that the best block is a certain hash, then okay, that's the real best block. 19:23 Yeah, it's really no different than any other mining innovation. 19:28 Like if you find a new block, you run a full node and then blocks come in. 19:32 And then someone tells you, did you know that this block was mined with hydroelectric power? 19:38 And you are like, wow, amazing. That's amazing. 19:41 And then they tell you, actually, we were kidding. It was mined with coal power. 19:44 And then you are like, oh, okay. And then you are like, actually, it was hydroelectric. 19:50 It's like you don't know. You only do the proof of work. 19:53 This is what Peter doesn't understand. 19:54 It's the difference between the proof of work versus the actual work. 19:57 And he also just doesn't buy the idea that the miners compete, which is weird. 20:02 I'm sure he thinks that he does, but he doesn't really. 20:06 So it's kind of a bizarre scenario to be in. 20:12 Everything that he thinks is wrong, basically, like the miners don't need to run. 20:17 The hundred nodes or any nodes, they can defer to a node run by the pool, the pools can defer to each other or to regular users of the sidechain who are not even miners. 20:26 But even if there was a requirement, it wouldn't matter. But I give another way that the miners compete. 20:32 I give a point for Peter Todd in this regard. I think that what we should have is like a layer of different solutions with different security tradeoffs. 20:45 And I agree that the Bitcoin network, like the Bitcoin node, should be as lightweight as possible, which probably you also agree, and that it should be very easy to mine. 20:55 And probably you don't agree on that. But I do agree that keeping Bitcoin lightweight for miners and for users has a value. 21:06 Well, I think that it is a misunderstanding of what we're keeping light. So we do want all the node costs to be low. 21:15 But if you want mining costs to be low or to always be mining, to always be profitable at certain scales, then what you're really arguing against is the upward difficulty adjustment. 21:26 But really, no one would seriously say, oh, I think that we should just set the minimum difficulty to one or to min diff or whatever it is. 21:36 I'm sure you know better than I. It's actually some other number. But if you just set it to the minimum level and then just do that forever, because that would be rejecting proof of work. 21:48 So that's the other weird thing is that all these people who think they're against drivechain, they're really against proof of work. They just don't realize. 21:55 Well, the argument would be that if there is a massive attack or catastrophic scenario where big mining pools break, and now we are in a 2011 state where everyone is running their own hardware at home or hidden below ground in shelters, then maybe running your own full node and mining, it's important. 22:24 Right. If there is a nuclear war. 22:25 Yes, of course. But remember, a BIP300 doesn't affect that at all, because you don't need to run, you know, about blind merge mining. 22:32 And even without blind merge mining in the protocol, they don't need to, like you just still just run Bitcoin Core and then you have your hasher and you point it at a pool and no one is willing to argue against playing pools save the small miners. 22:47 So it's pools that bail the small miner out. 22:49 Otherwise, the small mining would be impossible and they would be dead. 22:53 But so the pools are always going to exist. 22:55 And this is another thing Peter doesn't understand is that the pools add up to 100 percent and they have to be a certain percent size. 23:02 So there's if every pool is behaving perfectly, then there will be an infinite barrier to entry. 23:08 You won't be able to get in because they're all doing everything. 23:10 No, none of the existing pools is making a mistake. 23:13 But if the pool is doing something weird, like censoring transactions that pay fees, then they will, you know, then that's the opportunity for the new pool to. 23:22 Yes, to jump in. 23:23 But if there is none, then there's no there's nothing going wrong so that you cannot. 23:29 But I think we kind of want. 23:30 So I think he has he has sketched out an idea that he thinks that he he has. 23:37 And he's sort of clutching onto it, this idea that should be very easy for someone to start a new. 23:45 Start mining. 23:46 But the difficulty goes up, total miner costs go up and and mining becomes viable or non-viable at different scales. 23:56 That has nothing to do with this is just the difficulty adjustment. 23:58 You know what I mean? Like whether or not you need a block erupt or an S-19 or an S-9. 24:04 This depends on other things. 24:05 The market price has nothing to do with the 300. 24:08 Yeah. And there's nothing to do with running nodes. 24:10 You don't need to run the software nodes of the sidechains. 24:13 So he thinks that you do, but you don't. 24:15 Well, but it's all irrelevant anyway. 24:17 So basically, he coinflates like running a Bitcoin node with running anything else. 24:23 And I think he shouldn't talk about sidechain nodes at all, because he if he is not interested in sidechain nodes. 24:30 Well, he doesn't have nothing to say about sidechain nodes. 24:34 So that's that's the thing. 24:35 Like Bitcoin can be the most decentralized network and sidechains could be whatever they have to be. 24:43 Each one of them like centralized or decentralized or whatever. 24:47 And that's the whole idea. 24:48 Like you give the market the possibility to compete into trying to find the best possible sidechain technology. 24:54 And so hardcore Bitcoiners should not care about that. 25:00 But I have an argument. 25:01 And before this space, I wrote some points of some argument that's generally not discussed, which is the future of Bitcoin without 25:15 drivechains. And let me, if I have a few minutes, read this or talk about this point. 25:22 Like it's impossible to correctly assess the benefits of drivechains without understanding the future of Bitcoin without sidechains and 25:29 drivechains. Right. So we have to imagine, right, what would be the future. 25:33 And the Bitcoin network will will become a payment network between big enterprises, large Bitcoin holders and maybe financial 25:41 institutions if we cannot bring it back to the people. 25:46 Right. It will be very expensive to transact on Bitcoin and the price continues to rise and more companies have Bitcoin treasuries. 25:55 It's going to be impossible for the normal user or the unbanked or you and me, basically. 26:00 So we will be totally excluded from on-chain layer and we'll be like the pariah of Bitcoin, like having Bitcoin locked forever because it 26:09 will require more fees to spend them back, the value that we hold. 26:13 OK, so there is no way around that without a block size increase. 26:17 And that will probably never happen because we've experienced the deadlock of the discussion of block size increases and the block 26:27 size wars. And this precedent is like kind of a ghost that is going around over and over. 26:34 So the whole vision for Bitcoin, I think, was to be a peer-to-peer electronic money for the people and not also a new sort of value for 26:44 the wealthy, like it should be for the people. 26:47 And the people are the ones that have bootstrapped Bitcoin and have gave Bitcoin value, like so all kind. 26:55 We all agree that the current Bitcoin technology is heading towards being a sort of value. 27:00 That's OK. We are happy because we have accumulated a little bit of Bitcoin. 27:04 So we are happy with that. 27:05 But in the long run, any technology that serves only the rich will be taken down because it will be completely destroyed by the people that are 27:16 forcibly excluded from it. 27:18 OK, so we should not forget that the people is that has given Bitcoin value. 27:25 And if people are excluded from the Bitcoin network, then Bitcoin value would go to zero. 27:30 Like it will be a niche for certain banks and suddenly they will replace it by something else, as they always do, because they will have 27:38 control. So if Bitcoin is going to be used by 0.1 percent of the population, then the remaining population will not just sit calmly and enjoy 27:48 being poor. People do not enjoy being poor. 27:50 So they will execute the 0.1 percent of the super healthy and they will move on with their fiat currency or whatever they have at hand. 27:59 So at this point, having these two of kind of this future that can be can become real very soon, so I think our duty is to experiment and try to find a 28:13 solution for normal people like you and me so that we can still benefit from Bitcoin, hold and use Bitcoin as censorship resistant technology as 28:24 possible. And it's our duty to protect from the fiat collapse. 28:29 And this is what most Bitcoiners think that is coming, a completely fiat collapse. 28:37 And so we, for our families, for our communities, we want them to be able to access Bitcoin before that happens. 28:44 So obviously, no sidechain technology will be as secure and decentralized as Bitcoin and because any sidechain will be based on the Bitcoin miners to 28:54 work. So by definition, it will be less centralized, less decentralized than Bitcoin. 29:01 But the important thing is that people understand the tradeoffs of every layer two, including lightning, which most people do not understand that they are 29:09 making a pure assumption about transaction censorship, right? 29:14 So they take informed decisions and if they have more options, then the better. 29:21 OK, so my last point is like the alternative of confining the billion remaining users to this failing fiat system is frightening and it's a condemnation for 29:35 them to keep being poor or become poor. 29:39 So the alternate future where altcoins proliferate without a clear store of value, while altcoins are much more centralized than trade chains can ever be, it's a 29:51 future of basically crypto inflation and cycles of fraud and all kind of things that will let us back to the fiat system. 30:00 There should be a store of value for these ecosystems to flourish. 30:08 If not, then we will go back to the worst incarnation of fiat, which is basically CBDCs, right? 30:17 So I think it's our duty to push for sidechains and let people experiment. 30:23 So even if drivechains might not be perfect technology, and I think we can do a lot to improve sidechains and drivechains, the perfect is enemy of the good. 30:32 And drivechains will evolve, they will become better. 30:36 And just waiting for this perfection to magically appear when there are hard mathematical impossibility results that prove that it's not going to happen, like we need to make some 30:47 compromise, then just waiting does not help. 30:50 So I think that to be like the ones that drive this future where everyone has access to Bitcoin is our responsibility. 30:58 So that's why we should push for drivechains. 31:03 And with all this I've said, I think I can become a politician now because it sounded like big speech to me, at least. 31:11 Sounded good. 31:13 I liked it. 31:15 I mean, one thing I'd like to emphasize about, you know, this is just me rambling, but you're like, when I first proposed this idea, I just kind of thought it was like one idea among many, like drivechain, whatever, lightning, state chains. 31:28 Now, what has happened over the last eight years is I've actually, I'm really, really pessimistic about every other idea. 31:35 I think they've all shown themselves to be much, much worse. 31:39 And they are really terrible. 31:41 Like we had Anthony Riard last week and he is very polite and, you know, he was like in a good mood, but the actual content was like, he was saying, well, I don't think lightning works. 31:56 And it has all these sort of list unsolvable problems, you know, flood and loot, onboarding, et cetera, complexity, privacy is terrible. 32:04 And then he would even say stuff like, we would ask him like some pretty simple things and he would be like, well, you know, they never want, VCs, they never want someone who's going to invalidate their investment thesis or so. 32:16 So it seemed like, but even with something like ARK, what I'm kind of thinking of now is that you don't want to have a big mismatch between the L2 fees paid to someone versus the L1 fees. 32:30 You know what I mean? 32:31 Like if maybe at all, there's like an ARK super node or there's a bunch of lightning LSPs, the actual, you know, there's like whatever, like a trillion transactions on earth a year, you know, give or take. 32:45 And, you know, you get, you take 10 cents from that, from each and that's a hundred billion dollars, 100 billion a year in revenue. 32:56 And it just really can't be like 99.9 billion goes to an ARK super node and then, you know, the last one thousandth goes to the L1 Bitcoin miners. 33:09 Like that just, that is like unfixably broken. 33:14 That's it will never work. 33:15 Yeah. 33:15 So it would be like a disaster. 33:17 For me, sidechains, like there is no black and white definition of sidechains. 33:22 And so for me, sidechain means basically Bitcoin alignment, like being able to transfer Bitcoin back and forth from the Bitcoin network to the sidechain and assuming that the sidechain does not have a token that competes with Bitcoin in becoming a store of value. 33:38 Right. So it's about alignment. 33:40 And so alignment means that you have to pay back, you have to bring value back to the Bitcoin network. 33:47 So one way to align that is with merge mining and more with blind merge mining. 33:55 So you have full alignment of this, giving back to the security budget of the L1 while you secure this L2. 34:05 So that way you only can have the real protection that miners are giving you by running and supporting the drivechain. 34:17 If a drivechain is basically just another token thing, then there is actually no security at all by the drivechain. 34:26 There is just no hard, I mean, you can have obviously the fees that they would be able to get if they keep using the drivechain. 34:39 But they still are, I think they are still Bitcoiners and they want to grow their Bitcoin value and not other tokens value. 34:48 So I think that the alignment is very important. 34:57 Absolutely. Peter, so yeah, blind merge mining, which is a tiny little improvement I made to regular merge mining, just invented by Satoshi. 35:07 And you have been tinkering with it yourself. 35:10 Yes. 35:11 And I just bring this up because Peter, he really couldn't figure out why I had separated BIP300 and BIP301. 35:18 Even though I thought it was pretty straightforward because, of course, merge mining can be used for something that is not a sidechain. 35:24 So it would be used for an altcoin such as Namecoin. 35:26 So I thought that was, but also because I thought, I was hoping that people would make different versions and possibly improve upon it. 35:35 And especially the block time thing in mine is stuck. 35:39 But I think you were tinkering with it. 35:41 Yeah. So first of all, I think that coinflating, like putting these two ideas together was a mistake. 35:47 Like you can fully push for blind merge mining without even thinking about drivechains and the opposite. 35:54 Like two very different ideas. 35:56 The fact that there is an overlap for me, it's kind of a secondary thing. 36:02 But because there is this argument that you need to run a node to be able to participate in the drivechain, a sidechain node. 36:12 But blind merge mining makes you not run a sidechain node. 36:17 So this is just confusing. 36:19 Correct. Yeah, that's not really the reason why. 36:21 Yeah, they're two separate things. 36:22 Yeah, it is confusing. 36:23 Well, that's partly why I separated them. 36:24 But then now, you know, you get criticized for everything you do. 36:29 So for me, it's very important that any sidechain, not only this based on drivechain, but any sidechain, including Woodstock, 36:38 it's able to be blind merge mined because the MEV problem is, for me, it's real. 36:46 Like we've seen the problem, what happens in other networks like Ethereum, where you have the centralized exchanges. 36:54 There is a lot of MEV that can be taken and sandwiched attacks and for running back, running and all. 37:01 And I think that maybe you know more than me about that. 37:05 But for the mining markets, to be fair, there should be no, I mean, no patents, no hidden algorithms, like no, I don't know, secret way of finding MEV opportunities. 37:22 Like if they are, and these are really secrets, then it's a super strong centralizing force. 37:33 You're 100% right. 37:34 And I fully agree with you. 37:36 But having discussed this topic for so long, there is even a rebuttal to that, which is that Liquid is basically a fully centralized version with respect to the transaction fee revenue, because all the revenue just goes to Blockstream. 37:51 So there's a wallet controlled by Blockstream. 37:54 So in that case, there's nothing the miners can do, no matter how much effort they put in to take back the edge that Blockstream gets for free. 38:04 And so it's kind of like an infinite MEV situation, which I find ironic. 38:10 That doesn't, of course, it doesn't necessarily invalidate anyone's argument, but it's the same people who cheer on Liquid will quibble about MEV being honest. 38:22 If there are two separate revenue models that have no connection, let's say, as you generally mentioned, like mining and selling T-shirts or mining and cooking cookies with the excess heat that miners produce, like the second is very different from the first. 38:43 Like creating mining pool T-shirts and mining has very little to do, there is no operation overlap between the two, while creating cookies out of excess heat does have an overlap with the mining operation. 38:57 And if there is a huge overlap between MEV extraction and the mining operation, then I think we have a problem because it's not just like anyone can do it. 39:08 No, there is an incentive to integrate vertically in that particular case. 39:15 So for me, solving MEV, it's very important for sidechains and drivechains. 39:19 And so what I was working is like, I know your proposal for, even if I don't like much the B301, because generally I think you could have done a better job writing those BIPs. 39:32 I do love the idea, but I was thinking more about, you know, the BIP, that's the, the, the Blindmerge Mining Proposal in BIP301 basically is tied to the Bitcoin block rate. 39:46 And we've seen for all other networks, including Rootstock, that people expect much higher block rates. 39:52 People expect almost instant confirmation for everyday use and everyday defy uses for payments for anything, almost. 40:01 People do prefer instant confirmation or near instant confirmation. 40:05 So that is a huge blocker. 40:07 Like, I know that you've, you've been playing with an EVM drivechain compatible sidechain, but it probably won't work as you expect, because people are so much used to instant feedback from, from blockchains. 40:23 Not, not the case with Zedcash. 40:25 A Zedcash drivechain would probably do work because people may accept that for super private transactions, they can wait 10 minutes, right? 40:34 Right, exactly. Yes. And the version we have is tied to the Bitcoin block time. 40:41 Yeah. So, so my proposal where I, I have a document I have not published yet, so maybe it's not good to, to, to, I should publish first, but the idea is of the, the Bitchain is creating a sidechain that only works for bidding. 40:56 Like, it has a lot of limitation that makes very ineffective for anything else. I mean, apart from bidding for, for sidechain blocks, like, it would be a blockchain having like 30 seconds block time, same as Rootstock, maybe a little bit less, like 20 seconds block time, because we know that mining pools are efficient enough to update their blocks, their templates at that frequency. 41:22 And it would probably have the same format as a Bitcoin blockchain, just to make it very digestible for Bitcoin miners to, to, to use. And, and, and it will be like, maybe it's at the beginning, it would be like federated, but with a dynamic setting where it assigns keys, basically to the major, to the major, let's say 20 miners. 41:48 So they are kind of in control of this, this bidding. But the important thing is that the amount of funds that this bidding chain need to have on chain is very limited. Like, you don't need to have $100 million. You may be, you only need to have enough funds to pay for the next block, because afterwards, you can, you can swap against Bitcoin, or you can move, peg in, peg out. 42:14 So basically, you only need the funds that are enough for bid for the next, let's say, one hour of blocks. And that's all. So, 42:23 Yeah, this is like a little bit of a cash. 42:25 Yeah. 42:25 Sort of like a, it's like a buffer. 42:27 So the incentive to steal for the miners to, to become, you know, if they have a majority of, of stake in the control of signatures to steal that small amount of money is negligible. Like, they wouldn't break their own business, which will be perfect, because they will collect the biddings from every potential sidechain, including drivechains. So it would be completely stupid, right? 42:55 And then you could put like, a lot of effort, like doing pruning, pruning all blocks, pruning, you could even prune the UTXO set, like making UTXO disappear after one year. So it could be so much lightweight. 43:10 Yes, absolutely. 43:11 Because you just need it for the bidding process. And by doing so, you... 43:15 I think every drivechain, just not to interrupt you there, just I think every single drivechain can, should have, could have a UTXO commitment. And then after a year, you could delete because you're already in a situation where six months of catastrophe will destroy the chain. So why not use the UTXO commitment and restore from there? Anyway, you were saying, so we have this buffer, we have this cash, miners are not going to steal from it. 43:39 Yes. 43:39 It's going to be very lightweight, very high performance, very efficient. And this is what organizes the interblock time of the other chains that are on top of it. So it's really like, this is like L2. And then these blockchains are like L3. And then if they have a lightning network, then we've made it to L4. They're called the marketing department. L4, Sergio chain. 44:02 Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that this change should, I don't think it should be the breach for other layers. I think that other types of blockchains or sidechains can be breached. But this is just for coordination of the block bidding mechanism. I think it's a great, great idea. And I've computed the amount of resources you would need in terms of like memory, bandwidth, and it's just a small percentage of what Bitcoin already consumes. 44:31 Like, it's like, I was mentioning, like having 20 sidechains at the same time, it was like 20% of the, it was kind of a 20% block increase, like compared to the Bitcoin block. So yeah, so it was not important in the sense like it was, if you consider that a block... 44:53 Even at the fast block time? How fast was the block time get because of that? Well, instead of 600 seconds, it would be how much? What is the time? 45:02 With the time of the block of the bitchain? 45:05 Well, what I'm saying, what increase in speed of the drivechains do you get in return for the 20% increase in? 45:16 Well, you can go to 20 seconds, up to 20 seconds block. And below that, you have the problem that mining pools do not update their workers so often. So if you press them, like, if you incentivize them to do that, they might get less efficient in Bitcoin, actually in Bitcoin mining. 45:44 And so, so the consequence... 45:46 That's not the efficient point, certainly. And then the other thing is like, there's like human attention is like this, it's like extremely very sensitive to like, any lag. So like, the first second, everything matters a ton. And then there is a rule of thumb that I heard the creator of Myst say or something like they needed to be two seconds of the computer freezing at most. So then it's two seconds. 46:11 And then if you're going to wait more than two seconds, I personally, I think like two seconds, 30 seconds, two seconds, 20 seconds, there's not much of a difference. I'm already waiting more than two seconds. I'm moving my attention to something else. So I feel like you don't get any benefit anyway. So that's, that's pretty good for a 20% increase in cost. That's very good. 46:30 So I think that's a, that's a, would be a good... And then if we, if we make this, this BitChain a drivechain itself, then it would be perfect because we wouldn't need, you know, this dynamic multisig of miners based on their hash rate, which was something that I thought would be the mechanism to implement it. 46:53 Yeah. I mean, a similar idea is just that, a similar category of idea. I mean, that sounds like a great idea. I look forward to reading the paper because the interblock time, I mean, that was true for the Ethereum sidechain, we just sort of rescaled the parameters to like 10 minutes. And we were just kind of like, I don't know if anyone, if everyone will hate this or whatever. I mean, we're just going to test it internally and play with it. But, but that would be, that is a difference. And I get questions about that. There's only some of the few good questions that I get are about 47:23 does it have to have a 10 minute block time? And then I give us some answer about the sidechain can do whatever they want, but I don't have a very specific thing to show people. But I just wanted to give an idea of something in another category of like, using drivechain to build something else. That is like the idea that just if you had the mining pools, if they do pay per share, then paying them out every 10 minutes is very difficult. 47:52 As it is now, but if they could just use the L2 chain, the payment chain, then it's very easy. You just, it's a payment like any other payment, you know, it's like buying anything. 48:02 One of the things that I designed many years ago for Rootstock is a decentralized mining pool. Like it works, it was based on something called SmartPool, which was a paper someone made, I don't remember who. 48:17 And I actually improve it and make it work on Rootstock. So basically, you could do everything like proving that you mine a number of shares and getting paid and everything on top of Rootstock. 48:31 And the problem with any decentralized mining pool, and this is a very deep problem that Bitcoin has, and people should fix this, but it seems nobody's working on that, is that there is this block withholding attack on mining pools that basically prevents, it requires a centralized system to statistically detect if workers are 49:01 cheating by withholding blocks. And there are a couple of... 49:04 Yeah, very, very few people know about this. It's very, very widely known. And in fact, I bring it up to miners and they say, oh, that's not profitable. And I say, and then I don't know what to say, because sometimes I just say, oh, like, even though I know that I did the math myself, and I have like a funny little Excel spreadsheet that I did in 2017 that I posted on my blog in a mining... 49:28 But this is a fascinating, this is a fascinating attack. And I know it happens in practice too, because some people who are top, the head of a mining pool, they will sometimes direct miners to change their hash to like different ports or different something to try to like sniff out like what's happening and who's impersonating someone else. Anyway, it's a fascinating topic. 49:54 See, so, so yeah, for me, yeah, we were talking about the block rates and financial inclusion requires high block rates. That's, that's for sure. So, so, well, maybe, but I mean, I think people should have the option. What I'm, my point of view is the developers, they should be able to have a blank canvas. And if they want something, they should be able to get it. And that's between them and the user. 50:22 I don't want to try to top down design the whole thing, like too much. But I think that in general, you know, how do most people buy? I mean, if you buy things on Amazon, they have, then you don't need, you don't need a fast interblock time, you know, because they can cancel the order. If you buy something in a store, it's shoplifting, like they have you on camera, maybe they can just call the police. 50:44 Well, there is a very old proposal by Emi Gunzirer, which is called Bitcoin NG, which the idea is quite simple. Basically, you choose, you choose a leader based on proof of work. And then you just stream blocks to the network until the next proof of work leader is chosen. So basically, 51:06 that's a good idea. It does have an out of band fee problem, though, because you have to split the fee. So I kind of thought it was not great. It's okay. Well, it's a good try. You know him. 51:18 There are some other drawbacks, especially related to MEV and oracles. Like, if you are going to create many blocks, and you know you're going to create many blocks in advance, then sometimes you can manipulate oracles, because you can just buy in a block, and then sandwich something and then sell in the following block, because you have full control of all the blocks in a certain time span. So it has some problems, especially when connected with DeFi. 51:46 But it's a potential solution. And one of the things I learned in the last five years is that the enormous amount of research that was triggered by altcoins, essentially by Ethereum, the amount of research work done on zero-knowledge, like SNARKs and STARKS, and fully homomorphic encryption, 52:15 and multiparty computation, and witness encryption, and everything that has matured on the latest years, it's because people realized how fascinating it is to be free to build on top of a financial platform. 52:34 Absolutely. 52:35 And we wouldn't have seen this advance. 52:40 Yes, we would. It would have all been on Bitcoin. 52:44 Yeah, another thing. 52:45 If it was 2015, it would have been different. It would have all been on Bitcoin. 52:49 One of the arguments, I think Peter's third argument, is that people are chasing money, easy money with tokens and ICOs. But I disagree with that. If we had this technology, any Bitcoin developer, any open source Bitcoin developer would be thrilled to be able to implement privacy preserving technology like Zcash on top of Bitcoin. You don't have to give him money, he will do it for pleasure. 53:18 You're absolutely 100% correct. I mean, what they try to do is they don't like, they know that they can't go down the road of saying that Bitcoin Core has some kind of flaw, or is in any way imperfect. 53:32 So they have to say this is perfect and they have to delegitimize any other design or any other tinkering, any other invention. They have to say, okay, like whatever, we never wanted Zk-SNARKs anyway. As soon as Zcash comes out, they have to say Zk-SNARKs are bad, you know, because it's a shitcoin. 53:54 So this is why it's really killing the Bitcoin project not to have sidechains. And it's been, it has been terrible to behold, even though Bitcoin has been enormously successful over the last eight years, we are also kind of getting worse in a large number of ways. 54:13 Well, I still have hope that one of these new silly opcodes that maybe it's for softworking to be too, like CAT or any simple thing, basically allows you to do full dragchains without anyone noticing. 54:29 Like, for instance, BitBM is capable of doing a lot of things, even if it is super restricted, and you don't have Zcash, any prevout, which would simplify it enormously, and you don't have CheckSig from stack, which would make it so much secure and shorten the challenge transactions. 54:53 Like, even with BitBM, you can build so much things that I think that at the end, we will manage to get dragchains working without any help from the community. 55:07 And at that point... 55:08 It's certainly inevitable. No, it absolutely is inevitable. Yeah. 55:12 So at that point, you know, core developers would maybe would say, okay, let's make it easy because it's already mainstream and everyone is using and it's so complex that maybe it's easier to just do it, right? 55:25 Support it officially. Yeah, maybe. 55:27 I have another argument for specific for hashrate scrolls and not, I mean, I always try to separate hashrate scrolls from dragchain, because I think that dragchain is more your proposal, while hashrate scrolls is more like the concept, right? 55:43 I don't know if you agree with that, but I try to separate that. 55:47 And I was super interested in hashrate scrolls at the beginning also because Rootstock is a federated sidechain. 55:55 We know a lot of improvements like the Popay, with HSMs that are tamper-proof, key extraction is impossible. 56:02 It's an autonomous system. 56:04 But yet people distrust because they cannot fully verify who are the ones that are running these devices or the root of trust for the hardware attestation. 56:16 It's very hard to make them believe that the firmware is running on devices and it's signed by the root of trust and everything is good because they cannot see the code. 56:28 I mean, they can see the code, but they cannot validate the legitimacy of the people participating, right? 56:37 So for me, hashrate scrolls is a new layer of protection on top of any federation. 56:44 Federations have shown in practice that they can be super secure. 56:49 Like, for instance, Liquid Federation or Rootstock Federation, or I think BitGo, RAP-BTC thing, like multisig. 56:57 It's secure. It has not been broken. 56:59 We never had a security incident in particular part of the Rootstock pack, for instance. 57:07 So we know that we can make them super secure, but we cannot make them open and people still distrust because they cannot fully verify it. 57:17 So my proposal for hashrate scroll back in 2015, or by the same time you proposed the drivechain, was to add an opcode. 57:28 In my case, it was called contact knowledge that allows you to combine a federation with a hashrate scroll so that you could do a lot of interesting stuff. 57:40 Like, for instance, you can do, like, one of the main problems of federations is that, you know, you can, there is a risk that government sees the equipment, like sees the HSMs or sometimes sensor things. 57:53 So the sidechain cannot keep going. It's just blocked forever because there is no way to withdraw the funds. 58:01 So one potential use for a mixture of federation and hashrate scroll is that indicates that the hashrate, that the federation stops working. 58:11 You can have a time log where the hashrate scroll takes control, basically, of that funds and can continue pushing for the sidechain without any problem. 58:24 Or you can do a dynamic setting where you need, let's say, 90% of the functionaries from the federation to sign or 90% of the miners to sign or any, you know, balance, any, I mean, you can put weight on the signatures and weight on the votes, let's say, by the hashrate, by the hashrate scroll, 58:48 so that in any case of any of the system failing, you can have the other as a failsafe, as a backup system. And that brings openness. Anyone can participate and still be part of the securing of the funds. 59:03 And it also brings a failsafe system where currently what we have in Liquid and in Roostock, it's a time log where after a certain time, there is a second federation, generally smaller, that takes all control of the funds and can bring back them, bring them back to a new federation. 59:25 But obviously, no one wants that. No one wants that to happen. It's a last resort thing. But in the case of a hashrate scroll, you can have that live and very tangible that there is a security model that has several layers. 59:39 And this idea of having several security layers, which is in computer security, is called defense in debt. It's basically what protects you from your own flaws, from your own mistakes, from your own bugs. So it's, for me, only that particular use case, like, forget about the drivechain, but giving more security to the existing federated sidechains pays for everything, pays for all the work. 1:00:09 Thank you. 1:00:14 Hello. 1:00:27 Hello. 1:00:36 Yes, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Can you hear me? 1:00:51 I heard defense in depth and then I crashed. Oh, so sorry. Okay. I was wrapping up that 1:00:59 just that particular use case, like having a second layer of security on top of federated 1:01:05 sidechain, it's enough for, should be enough for Bitcoiners to be fully engaged and fully 1:01:11 supportive of this. Like, for me, it's a no brainer. Having a second layer of defense 1:01:18 against attacks or blocks in the federated sidechains. 1:01:24 Well, unfortunately, we have too much communism in Bitcoin, where it's like, it has to be 1:01:30 one size fits all. Everyone has to, like, agree or whatever. It won't, like, we can't 1:01:40 have, it should be, if you want to have this certain type of thing, that should be between 1:01:44 you and your users. It shouldn't really be, you know, we should really get, you know, 1:01:49 it's funny, there's an idea, there's a way of, you mentioned before, a way of hacking 1:01:55 together BIP300 without convincing anyone, without changing Bitcoin Core. And, you know, 1:02:01 there is actually an idea. It goes like this. You build a different piece of software that's 1:02:10 like a BIP300 patch, but it's its own application. And it does not touch Bitcoin Core 1:02:16 directly at all. But then you have a, so you have that thing, you have like BIP300 1:02:20 watcher thing or whatever you want to call it. And then the miners run a third piece of 1:02:25 software, which is this tiny piece of software that just runs both. And the only thing it 1:02:30 does is it will call invalidate block on Bitcoin Core if the patch tells it to. 1:02:39 Well, well, the problem is not how you run these components, like if they are separated or 1:02:44 embedded, I think that's not the problem. The moment you invalidate blocks, that's a 1:02:49 soft fork. And I mean, if the community has not kind of approved that, that invalidation 1:02:57 becomes a sin by the community, an attack. So I think it's not how... 1:03:05 Yeah, but think about this, though. If you get 51% of people to run that, then they will 1:03:09 never really see that it has happened. 1:03:14 Well, but it's still happening. 1:03:17 I know, but they will never see that it's happening. 1:03:19 Yeah, I'm not, I don't think that's the way to proceed. I mean, going directly to talk with the 1:03:26 miners and trying to convince them to, for me, it's not the way, right? 1:03:33 But to... 1:03:35 Well, I have not, you know, yeah, exactly. For the last eight years, I have really not done 1:03:38 that. So it's weird that some people think that I am, but I obviously have not. 1:03:43 I take one of the ideas that you don't need to soft fork anything into Bitcoin to bring 1:03:49 interesting infrastructure to miners. 1:03:52 Like, for instance, like the whole BitChain project can be deployed to miners within 1:03:59 Rootstock. Like, they can have, like, we build it, we package it with Rootstock node, and 1:04:06 in the next network upgrade, one year from now or six months from now or whatever, they get 1:04:11 BitChain for free. And that BitChain will be running and they will be able to connect to it 1:04:16 and use it. 1:04:17 So there is a channel because miners are already mining, more than 50% of the miners are 1:04:24 already mining Rootstock. 1:04:26 So I'm not advocating at all for using this channel to soft fork anything into Bitcoin. 1:04:32 I want to be super clear on that. 1:04:35 I'm saying that we have a channel to deploy software that can help, you know, for instance, 1:04:40 doing blank merge mining and obviously without interfering with Bitcoin. 1:04:47 So for the benefit of the miners. 1:04:49 So that's an interesting possibility. 1:04:56 Yeah, so you go to the miners and you get, I mean, you have convinced more than half of the 1:05:00 miners to run, to merge mine Rootstock. 1:05:02 So that is... 1:05:06 Well, the nice thing is that I didn't have to convince anyone. 1:05:11 Like, I don't remember having spoken to any miner ever, like maybe in 2013, but not after 1:05:19 that. So they basically, the ones that are mining Rootstock, they see the long term value. 1:05:25 And now that it has many, many uses, they see, obviously, the immediate revenue they get. 1:05:33 Right. But I don't have to convince them. 1:05:37 I think that they realize by themselves they are rational after all. 1:05:42 So they see the potential. 1:05:48 Well, that's good. I wanted to emphasize something about like going back, like, should we 1:05:57 stay on the cutting edge or should we go back? 1:05:59 Because a lot of people tell me, oh, I should go back. 1:06:01 I should, I should present these ideas to the community in like a different way and like be 1:06:06 nicer to people and be more persuasive. 1:06:09 And it's kind of like you could do that or you could build the, you know, on the cutting 1:06:14 edge, you could build more, you know, do you go back and tell like you live on an island 1:06:20 and you find a path through the jungle, you know, the jungle of the forest of mystery. 1:06:25 And it's like you go back and tell people, but if they're not, if they don't get it, then 1:06:31 you have to go, you go further out and you continue to explore and you do the, you do 1:06:37 the cool, you build, you know, the whatever, the, well, you build a decentralized mining 1:06:44 pool sidechain or you build immediate payout pool decentralization sidechain or you just 1:06:52 Satoshi didn't ask permission to anyone to create Bitcoin. 1:06:55 Yes, right. 1:06:56 He, he, I always thought that Bitcoin is kind of anomaly, like something that should not 1:07:03 happen, should not have happened. 1:07:05 Like it's just like governments were too, too worried about anything, something else that 1:07:11 they didn't see it coming. 1:07:13 And so when they saw it coming, it was too late. 1:07:17 And so it's just slipped, you know, slept below the surface without anyone noticing. 1:07:24 And when and then it was a big thing. 1:07:26 Right. So I think that this is the idea. 1:07:30 Like you build stuff, make people believe in that and make people use it. 1:07:35 And one day it just, it's just part of our everyday lives. 1:07:41 So, so I think that, yeah, I understand that your, your project with drivechains is so 1:07:51 much based on the idea that drivechains should be thought for, that it's difficult to 1:07:56 think about deploying the infrastructure without having the bridge. 1:08:01 Right. But maybe you find a way to create it with BitBM. 1:08:06 That would be the. 1:08:08 Well, yes, but I think in a way that's almost that's like I find that also weird because 1:08:14 it's kind of like that is the non-consensual BIP300, but, you know, whatever. 1:08:21 Like, I don't know. I think I have changed my mind back and forth on this. 1:08:25 BitBM is part of the Bitcoin standard protocol. 1:08:29 Yes, it's there. 1:08:30 Like maybe not. 1:08:31 But counting to 13,000 is also already part of the Bitcoin protocol. 1:08:36 Right. Yeah. 1:08:37 So. I think somebody will find a way to do it. 1:08:42 Yeah. OK, so. 1:08:47 Yeah. So I mean, certainly, I mean, the benefits are very large. 1:08:52 I mean, we're really what what else is even happening in Bitcoin that is actually going 1:08:59 well other than the stuff that the same people who hate drivechain like don't like. 1:09:06 I think that technologically rollups over Bitcoin is something that we will see things 1:09:15 interesting. The point is that rollups also need bridges to be really Bitcoin aligned. 1:09:20 They need to work. 1:09:21 Right. So the problem is still there. 1:09:23 But it's interesting. 1:09:25 BitBM is super interesting. 1:09:27 I've been working on a project using BitBM too early, but I think this is this is 1:09:34 something that will bring new new ideas. 1:09:38 I hope that in the future Rusto can use also BitBM to be more secure or more decentralized, 1:09:45 I would say. And but yeah, I mean, there are a lot of improvements on top of in Bitcoin 1:09:54 that are just meaner things like important stuff. 1:09:58 But from the point of view of the use cases, it does not change anything. 1:10:02 Now we have encrypted peer-to-peer communication. 1:10:04 Well, that's great. That's something that we are all been waiting for. 1:10:08 But it doesn't really change the use case. 1:10:10 It doesn't really affect the end user. 1:10:13 And the end user that needs the ones DeFi will still go to the DeFi blockchains. 1:10:19 There's no no no expansion in the use case of Bitcoin, which is something that the 1:10:27 BitBM can do. 1:10:28 So so I think there is the the the the hot stuff is there. 1:10:36 Right. Paul, I know you love having like eight eight hours podcast, but but I'm more 1:10:52 like I have like one hour podcast for me. 1:10:57 I understand. So if we have another topic to discuss, if not, then I think it's good 1:11:09 for people to to rest a little bit and myself included. 1:11:16 Yeah. No, I mean, I don't know. 1:11:22 Well, you can you can you can stay stay. 1:11:25 There is very interesting people in this in this. 1:11:29 Yes, of course. We'll call them up if they want to press. 1:11:32 You have Vlad that is that is here with Vlad's great. 1:11:38 We love Vlad. He is the greatest hair, best hair on Bitcoin. 1:11:46 So we have Austin here. 1:11:48 Hello. Yes, thank you. 1:11:49 Hello. Yes, big fan. 1:11:51 I have a question for Mr. Sergio. 1:11:55 So if like, let's just say by whatever means or path forward that drivechain is 1:12:00 activated, what would do you think? 1:12:05 Obviously, you're not in control of it completely, but what would happen in the 1:12:09 Rootstock ecosystem? 1:12:11 And do you see Rootstock transitioning to a drivechain? 1:12:18 OK, the Rootstock blockchain was designed to transition to something like a drive 1:12:26 chain, like I was discussing yesterday, I think, in Twitter, why we had merge mining 1:12:34 and for consensus and a federated pay and not simply having a federation like 1:12:41 Liquid that does both. 1:12:43 And I explained that one of the main arguments is that we didn't want to give too 1:12:48 much power to a group that will be benefiting directly from transaction fees and will 1:12:54 have enormous incentive to keep being the benefit of those fees. 1:12:59 Right. So we split this problem in two. 1:13:02 We created this federated pay and we gave the Bitcoin miners the consensus of a 1:13:09 protocol. And this now is like a two chamber kind of control on the network. 1:13:16 I would say that these two groups do not overlap much. 1:13:21 So basically what that allows us, because the pegnatories, the functionaries that run 1:13:29 the HSM devices, they do not get paid much for their role. 1:13:35 They just do it because they contribute to the network. 1:13:37 But it's not that they are being rich because of that, so that we can very easily, 1:13:44 if the community agrees, replace that with something else. 1:13:48 And we wouldn't be having a long term, infinite debate about something like who's 1:13:56 going to lose more money or who's going to win more money. 1:14:00 Like everyone is prepared for the moment that we will need to replace the POPEG with 1:14:07 something better. My personal opinion is that we should not fully replace the POPEG. 1:14:12 We should, for a long time, let's say a year, we should have both systems in place, 1:14:19 like working in tandem, like you need both approvals or both acknowledge of withdrawal 1:14:27 and then like dynamically moving away from the POPEG and moving more towards the 1:14:34 hash rates. So that's my view, because I don't think that very sharp changes, like 1:14:41 very imminent, how would you say, very sudden changes on the something that is as 1:14:48 critical as the POPEG would be a good idea. 1:14:50 Like there is a lot of money, like four thousand bitcoins in the POPEG and so that 1:14:56 are community money and we should not play with that. 1:15:01 So, so I think that, yes, the answer is probably the BlueStock community will be super 1:15:08 interested in being a drivechain. 1:15:11 But on the other side, they will prefer to either wait for some other project to do it 1:15:17 first or to do it in a gradual way where they can have both both security models, even if 1:15:23 that implies a little bit more of censorship, right? 1:15:27 Because now you have two potential groups that can kind of censor the withdrawal 1:15:32 transactions. But I think it's a price that you should pay to move from one one model to 1:15:38 the other. 1:15:46 Very good. I had some more questions, but I see that there's more people up here, so it's 1:15:51 probably better to let them talk. 1:15:53 Yes, we got Cordy, we've got The Crypto Show. 1:15:59 Hello. 1:16:01 Oh, hey, guys. 1:16:03 Well, I want to use blockchain, drivechain for identity, right? 1:16:08 What potential do you see where identity solutions and drivechain mixed with BlueStock? 1:16:15 I think that the digital identity thing will be big. 1:16:18 I don't know what form it will take. 1:16:20 But Namecoin was on the right track. 1:16:24 It is better to have to give people an identity, a human readable identity that they own, 1:16:30 like a domain, except the domain would do everything. 1:16:33 It'd be like everyone has a home page. 1:16:35 Everyone has a it's like everyone's PGP key. 1:16:38 It's everyone's stealth address. 1:16:39 You can send and receive messages or files or video, video chat with people because you 1:16:45 have their key. 1:16:46 And then being being human readable is I think that's very important. 1:16:51 A lot of people have tried to just to sort of cut that corner, like the Microsoft did 1:16:57 people, decentralized identity people. 1:17:00 But I think that is a mistake. 1:17:01 You really need to be able to say like, this is like, you know, whatever it is, Ron Paul 1:17:06 2020 or something, it needs it needs to be human readable. 1:17:10 And just think about, like, you know, the anxiety over Bitcoin.com and Bitcoin.org being 1:17:14 owned by people with different interests. 1:17:17 Like it matters a lot. 1:17:18 And once you have the domain, then you have everything. 1:17:20 It could be the same once you have the name. 1:17:23 It's your name on Facebook. 1:17:26 It's your name on Instagram. 1:17:27 It's your name on Twitter. 1:17:28 It's your name on whatever, an Oster. 1:17:31 And so this restores competition. 1:17:35 It means that all these people are now competing for the same domain. 1:17:38 It means that all these people are now competing for you. 1:17:41 TikTok is competing for you. 1:17:42 It flips the whole script. 1:17:44 It fixes spam. 1:17:45 It fixes email. 1:17:46 Since you can now email, you can now send a message to the person. 1:17:49 So I think it's huge. 1:17:50 I think it's just enormous. 1:17:51 I wrote a post about it called BitNames. 1:17:53 If you search truthcoin.info BitNames, you can read. 1:17:57 I published a bunch of thoughts in detail on what to do. 1:18:00 Yes, definitely check that. 1:18:03 I also think that if Web3 is really materialized someday, 1:18:10 Web3 is based on kind of decentralized storage 1:18:13 where the web pages are somewhere you don't know, 1:18:16 but you can access them by some kind of an ID 1:18:23 that brings you the page. 1:18:25 And you cannot do that with a hash 1:18:27 because, of course, nobody would understand 1:18:29 or could be able to distinguish a hash from another hash. 1:18:33 But if you have an ID that identifies the site, 1:18:38 let's say Uniswap, 1:18:40 and then you just immediately get the full web page experience 1:18:47 from decentralized networks that is fully secure 1:18:50 because that name maps to a hash 1:18:53 with maps to a thousand pages that are loaded. 1:18:58 And then you basically get the experience of Web3. 1:19:02 So that's also important. 1:19:04 In the case of Rootstock, we have the RNS system, 1:19:07 which is basically kind of a naming system 1:19:10 where you can store your PGB private keys. 1:19:12 You can store your Bitcoin addresses if you wish. 1:19:16 And obviously I would suggest using 1:19:20 some kind of a steal address system on top of that. 1:19:25 But we already have that system on top of Rootstock. 1:19:30 Yes, and that's one of my favorite projects in crypto, RNS. 1:19:35 I loved it so much that I went out 1:19:37 and created something else on Rootstock, 1:19:39 which is similar to RNS for my team. 1:19:42 Because I believe it's the most important tool in blockchain, 1:19:45 the ability to connect your Rootstock identity 1:19:48 to Bitcoin or the other interoperable chains. 1:19:52 Yeah, there's not only this off-chain connection of addresses, 1:19:56 but I was waiting more projects, 1:19:58 more ideas related to the on-chain connection 1:20:01 between Rootstock and Bitcoin. 1:20:04 Like from Rootstock, you have a Bitcoin oracle 1:20:06 where you can query any block 1:20:08 and you can prove that certain transactions happen. 1:20:11 You can see, you can prove that there is certain payment. 1:20:15 So there are many use cases that could be helped 1:20:20 by having that Bitcoin oracle in consensus inside the sidechain. 1:20:26 And I would love to see more ideas regarding that. 1:20:31 Yes, and Paul, there's one thing I'm very bullish on is gaming. I would love to connect identity to gaming and definitely use Drivechain for that. But we're also limited to a lot of ideas when it comes to just websites. We always think about websites and identity, but I don't believe these domains are going to be used for website hosting. I think that's not what we, it's like, how do you think outside the box besides just hosting websites for these domains, right? Just a username. 1:20:59 The name is more than the domain, but it would be like, you know, if you log into Call of Duty or whatever, it's like you don't need to have like an email and a password. You just, it just pings the name. It pings your name on the blockchain. And then the same as everyone, every airplane, every flight, every whatever. And it's just you. And then if you want to make it, you make a second identity, you have a whole second everything. You have a second Instagram, it helps you screw it up. So like Satoshi, he would automatically have like an Instagram. 1:21:27 And he's got his regular ID, and then he's got his second ID or his third ID. And so we'd all have our alt accounts, you know, our anon accounts. And then we'd be Trinity, you'd be Neo, and then you'd be Mr. Anderson, you know. 1:21:46 That's the ultimate use case for Bitcoin. It's this identity that you can use across multiple apps, like signing with Google, signing with Facebook, you sign in with your name. That's leveraging Bitcoin security. And that's it. 1:21:58 People have already done it. I mean, Namecoin is very old. And then there was like Web3 login. I've seen it on the internet. I have once or twice. So it's out there. Okay, now let's we should go to someone else. I think maybe Crypto Show. 1:22:14 Hey, Paul. It's Danny. I'm looking forward to seeing you in Acapulco. I hope to have your presentation. 1:22:24 Yeah, I'm excited. 1:22:25 Yeah, I think I've asked you a couple of times in messaging. I was wanting to have like a sidechain or drivechain for DragonX, which is a Z2Z privacy coin just to be able to add whatever features and have this merge-mined. Like, can we do this? 1:22:44 Well, I don't know exactly what you mean. 1:22:48 But I don't know. 1:22:49 Can we, you know, fork BIP300 and BIP301 into our chain? 1:22:57 Well, that depends on how similar it is to Bitcoin Core. 1:23:02 It's a Zcash fork. So I mean, it comes from Bitcoin. 1:23:08 Yeah, I think that's like Bitcoin 12 or something. But that, I don't know, that may be easy. Maybe. I mean, I'm not sure. But in principle, you certainly can. You can certainly just like, go through the writing of the BIP and re-implement, which is some work. But yeah, maybe. I'm not sure. 1:23:33 Yeah, I mean, it would be nice to be able to do anything, send NFTs or whatever, whatever you want to do that is not as private as the main transaction. And especially if it's merge mine, you know, just whoever the miners are, send out these sidechain coins so that people can do whatever they want with them. 1:23:57 Yeah, absolutely. 1:23:59 Well, I just want to say goodbye because it was a pleasure. 1:24:06 Excellent. Hey, thanks for stopping by. 1:24:08 Yeah, it was a pleasure. See you soon. Bye bye. And thanks, everyone. 1:24:12 Great. See you. 1:24:13 Awesome. 1:24:14 Thanks, Sergio. See you later. 1:24:16 All right. OK, man. Well, I'll let the next person speak or whatever. I'm looking forward to seeing you in February. If anybody else is coming and want to save money, use the coupon code CryptoTent. 1:24:30 Cool. Yeah, yeah. In Acapulco I've been a few different times. It's a lot of fun. And it's great to get to Mexico in February. Yeah, that's great. Depending on what part of the US you're in. If you're in Miami, I guess it's not that big of a difference. Anyway, we have a bald C909. 1:24:52 Hi. I was wondering what do you think how it would impact your life if you would decide, for example, to do an own drivechain fork just to make your product more visible? 1:25:07 Because I think it's already showed a lot of times. It's said that there are very high qualified developers like you normally should be paid in just a different kind of league for their work because it's really the top league of developers. 1:25:24 And I'm just wondering myself why it's not accepted in the community to fork something if people are educated that it's a fork where people are developing a code and they can experience and just make an experience on something what has been developed. 1:25:43 Well, I think it's actually a very good suggestion and it makes a lot of sense. But I think the explanation is that there was a time when everyone assumed that sidechains would take over. And so the fork, there was no need to fork because we'll have sidechains and then we'll just have everything as a sidechain. 1:26:05 And then at a certain point we had an inflection point and we flipped from sidechains are inevitable. We flipped away from that and we flipped instead into something like Bitcoin is already perfect and everything else is a shitcoin. 1:26:21 So we just kind of flipped like on the same day. And that is also why it's difficult to. But yeah, I think that is a good idea because I think that. Well, one reason why is that it might be good as a fork is it might be a good insurance policy on if BTC has lots of problems culturally and those might actually. 1:26:47 It's unlikely, but that's by far the Achilles heel of the project and that might be good to have competition and a little bit of excitement. So, yeah, I don't know. 1:27:00 So, yeah, I don't know. And it's hard to complain. And that's another thing is, you know, Bitcoin has done very well over the years, you know, since in the eight years, since 2015, since the drivechain post came out and then all the time that I've been around Bitcoin, it has done, you know, it has been the greatest performing asset in the history of capitalism. 1:27:19 It has like changed the world, even in its infant state that it's currently trapped in. So could things be 10,000 times better? I think so, yes. So I think it's a good, definitely a good suggestion. I think it should not be so stigmatized. But of course, you see that it is. It would be like leaving. So you're betraying the community and leaving. 1:27:44 So you have also some kind of a feeling that other developers are looking down to you because you're considering this as an option. Can you understand them if they do so? 1:28:04 They, it's kind of like this, this is an inherently a political technology because it is based on network effects and about who else is in it. 1:28:14 So it is, this is a community-based thing. 1:28:19 So, it's kind of like, you know, you're teleported back in time and you live in whatever, ancient Germany or whatever. 1:28:32 And you try to, you know, you try to explain to the, you explain, you teach everyone about fire and you teach them about, you know, clean drinking water. And then you try to teach them about some things like a democracy or the rule of law. And they're just kind of like, they're just not ready for it yet. 1:28:51 And it's like, you know, I mean, to some extent, you just wait. To another extent, you keep trying. But it's kind of like, it is limited by the beliefs that most people have and the way that those beliefs are formed, like the media that people get. 1:29:07 We have, you know, the big, the biggest, one of the biggest media outlets would be like what Bitcoin did, where the whole premise of the show is that Peter McCormick is like, not technical, and he sort of pretends to be much dumber than he really is. And so that is, and you know, like one of the big people, Michael Saylor is very big, but he's sort of very new. 1:29:29 So, so this is like the reality of the thing and it will competing. But yeah, I think it's a, I think it's a perfectly normal idea to think about. It's, it would have to be like very, you want to prepare everything. 1:29:49 And you don't want to, you don't want to have like any, you want it to be like a completed plan before you were to announce such a thing. But I don't think that people should. 1:30:03 It's a huge step, I can imagine. I mean, would you be scared of it? 1:30:08 Like Ocean, like, for example, well, I wouldn't really say that, but I think like Ocean is like, you know, you launch and then you only have one launch and then you're hitting champagne against a miner and the champagne doesn't break. And then you've only found two blocks. Have they found a third block? Has anyone checked? 1:30:25 If eventually we'll have to like recompute the hash rate, because it's only been two blocks in like 20 days or something. So, so we'll go to Ocean XYZ dashboard and see, see if we've got that third block yet. He's counting all the, all the old blocks from his, from his ancient pool from that, that stopped in like 2017. 1:30:48 He's counting all those as blocks, but you have to scroll down and you see how many blocks found after 2017. Someone can check. But, but yeah, the launches, you get a lot of attention. 1:31:01 Yeah. And you deserve this attention. 1:31:03 Right. And you don't normally get it back. 1:31:06 Yeah. 1:31:08 Right. 1:31:10 Yeah. I hope you make the right decision. 1:31:13 Me too. 1:31:18 Okay, Vlad, Moonsettler, you guys want to come up? No? 1:31:26 We can hang out and, or we can end the space. 1:31:30 My app is glitchy as always. I just don't understand what is with this app. I just, it always freezes. And then I can, I can still see and hear everyone, but I just, this app is not great for me. I don't know why. 1:31:49 Hi, I just wanted to congratulate you for the conversation. It was very informative for me. 1:31:56 I was, so just for the record, this is sort of a shameless plug, but I'm going to launch the 15th season of Bitcoin Takeover podcast, which has Sergio on it. 1:32:06 And he did mention that bit, I don't know what he calls it, but that bit sidechain that he wants to launch permissionlessly. 1:32:15 And it's super interesting that he wants to do all of this stuff and not have to go through the BIP process. 1:32:22 And it's also admirable, Paul, that you're still wrestling with this. I didn't have time to listen to your debate with Peter Todd from yesterday on the Stefan Levera podcast. 1:32:33 But I honestly don't expect much from it because I know, I've watched Peter Todd debating you at Tabcom, and then there was another one that was on YouTube, which I watched. 1:32:46 So I don't expect that one to suddenly be better. And congratulations for pursuing this because honestly, I keep asking people, so what do you think about BIP300? 1:32:58 And they say, oh, it's terrible because it changes the mining incentives. And I tell them after this, so can you explain how? 1:33:07 And their response is usually, yeah, I didn't have enough time to look into it, so I'm not going to extend this conversation. 1:33:16 So it's a bit unfortunate. I think we have this fixed idea of what Bitcoin is and how it should work. 1:33:23 And we are stuck in a mental state where we can't really think beyond that. 1:33:28 I'm happy that stuff like rollups and BitVM have become possible, and it proves that we have moved past a paradigm where Bitcoin is only one thing and can only do this type of transactions. 1:33:42 I think in the next couple of years, we're going to see a lot of cool stuff coming specifically to Bitcoin. 1:33:49 But we also need to scale this, so we're going to need to have a serious conversation about what we want Bitcoin to be. 1:33:56 I think Sergio had a very presidential moment on this space where he spoke about how the small users, the poor people basically, are the ones that elevated Bitcoin and gave it legitimacy in the financial world. 1:34:11 And now we have big institutions. We have the Michael Saylors and the BlackRocks who are very happy with what it is, but never wanted to improve further because they figured out, okay, I can store my value with this. 1:34:24 And I don't need it for anything else. 1:34:27 I don't know. Congratulations for this, because I hope that everyone who has been listening has had some significant takeaways that at least if they're not convinced or sold on the idea, at least they have some new food for thought. 1:34:43 And maybe that they're also going to try the Cygnet version of BIP300. 1:34:48 Yeah, hey, thanks. Yeah, I think the Cygnet version will be good because so far we have only done the reg test, which puts everyone in their own universe, which is not a great test. 1:35:01 Whereas the Cygnet, there will be like, you can send coins to someone else, send coins to your friends, and it'll be much more realistic. 1:35:09 And it should be better user experience, since we'll just have the server just find the blocks. It'll be a very good test. 1:35:20 And of course, it won't really be a test of a blockchain thing because it won't be an altcoin, but it's the next step. 1:35:37 So I'm excited about that. And good luck with season. Is it too late for me to record a thing? I keep forgetting. I have to do it. I have to find a good, you know, it's like, it's like, there's no good background. I had to find like a good spot to do like a clever. 1:35:52 If you do it before next week, it's not too late. But so far I have everything that I need. But it would be cool to have you too. 1:36:01 I'll do something wacky. I'll get like a big sign. I'll go. I'm not sure. I think it's something. So that'd be great. 1:36:11 And yeah, I think that the debate with Peter is, it's, I try to take it, I try, I sort of assume that you have read Peter's post, which is again, I don't really like apologize for because I think you can either go back and talk to the people who don't know or you can go at the cutting edge. 1:36:41 And so that's, it might be good or maybe people will just be confused by that. But I think it's Peter really just like is really not interested in, you know, he's not interested in putting it. 1:36:57 I think, you know, it was an interesting conversation, but I just find him to be sort of very lazy. He just doesn't really look into these things he's saying. 1:37:06 Yeah, I have come to the conclusion that Bitcoiners have their own incentive, regardless of their degree of intellectual honesty or technical understanding. And you have to pretty much follow that. And what is Peter Todd invested in or what does he really believe in? 1:37:22 You can see that he has been researching sidechains for, I think, longer than a decade. So maybe that he's a bit jealous on the fact that you have a competing proposal. But right now what he's pushing and it's basically his baby, it's RGB, which is a layer on top of the lightning network. 1:37:44 He likes lightning and he wants stuff to be built on top of lightning. Even though I think this year there has been a mass disillusionment with lightning network because it did not deliver on the marketing material because too much was promised in regards to it. 1:38:03 When in fact it was just supposed to be a cheap way to make multiple transactions with only a couple of on-chain transactions. I think that was one of the first ways in which it was promoted. No further expectations. 1:38:18 So you open a channel with someone, you can make a hundred payments at very low fees and then you close the channel. Essentially you made a hundred and two transactions but paid two on-chain transactions. That's a pretty good deal for yourself. 1:38:34 But it was promoted in ways that created unrealistic expectations and people realized how it works in a high-fee environment and they started looking into ARK, they started looking into roll-ups. But somehow Peter still believes that lightning is the answer and we're going to have layers built on top of lightning and he likes those. 1:38:57 I think he also has the majority of Bitcoin community backing him in this regard. But I just don't see it working unless lightning becomes super centralized and custodial. 1:39:11 And then it begs the question, what's the point anymore? And some people are going to say, yeah, but we have these eCash mints like Cashu, like Fedimint or whatever that give you privacy, even if it's custodial. But you can still get rugged. 1:39:27 Yeah, the thing is, the custodial thing, this is like what people used to say about why we can't increase the block size because then we'll end up competing with Visa. Visa will always have better user experience, it'll always be faster, it has a customer service phone number you can call. 1:39:48 And it's the same thing with lightning where it's like if people are not actually using lightning, they're actually using the technology and instead they use custodial. 1:39:59 If that happens, then again, we will be caught competing with Venmo or with whatever, WeChat Pay, and we won't be able to succeed against. 1:40:11 There'll be no way that you go a couple of years down that road and then there'll be a law or there'll be something, there'll be some kind of anti-competitive, clever business tactic employed by Venmo to whatever. 1:40:28 And so you have to compete on what Bitcoin is. 1:40:34 Core features are, which is the self-sovereignty. 1:40:39 If you lose that, then it's no different than being a large blocker who doesn't run a node. 1:40:45 It's much worse, in fact, because even the large blockers had like SPV mode they could fall back on. 1:40:50 But if we aren't using the self-sovereignty property, then we will lose on everything else, 1:40:58 speed, cost, because of course Venmo does everything quote free. 1:41:04 I mean, there's an effective fee under the hood, but the user doesn't see a fee. 1:41:10 So when regular people compare Bitcoin to Venmo, they just think, what? 1:41:19 It makes it a lot worse. 1:41:21 So we need to give people things that they can't get via the custodial route. 1:41:30 But yeah, I think you're right. 1:41:31 Yeah, Peter, he loves the RGB. 1:41:33 He tried to get this thing, the client-side validation to work, but he doesn't quite realize 1:41:40 that sidechains are client-side validation. 1:41:42 And it's very telling that he doesn't, the only thing he brings up is the miners, 1:41:47 because that's the main difference between RGB and drivechain, is that RGB has the flaw 1:41:54 that it does not pay the miners. 1:41:56 So Peter's trying to turn that flaw into like some kind of thing where it doesn't affect 1:42:04 miners, whereas to say it doesn't affect them by neglecting them and starving them of 1:42:11 the revenue that's rightfully theirs. 1:42:16 Yeah, I guess essentially the difference between you and Peter, if we disregard all the intricacies, 1:42:23 it's that you tend to believe that miners are benevolent and they follow their incentives, 1:42:30 while Peter is concerned that miners are evil inherently, and they want to hurt the network. 1:42:35 And he's concerned about mining centralization, and he's concerned about the fact that miners 1:42:41 are evil inherently, and he's concerned about centralization, he posts about foundry becoming 1:42:47 too big, and what he doesn't see, I guess, is that there's this renaissance of home mining, 1:42:56 and you have companies like CryptoCloaks that sell ASIC miners that basically function as 1:43:02 space heaters that pay you a little bit if you do pool mining, and it becomes sort of 1:43:10 $150-$200, you spin them up in your room, and then you have heating over the winter, 1:43:17 and you also mine Bitcoin. And this is going to create, I guess, even more use cases with people 1:43:23 figuring out, okay, during the summer, I can make this heat water or something, or boil water, 1:43:28 I don't know, it depends on how powerful it can be. So they're going to keep mining, 1:43:34 and perform this otherwise mundane task of providing basic utilities for their homes 1:43:44 with something that pays back to a certain degree. It's not going to make them rich, 1:43:49 but at the same time, it's more financially, how should I put it, it makes more sense from 1:43:56 a financial point of view than using something which makes you no money. And maybe that we're 1:44:02 going to build industries around this, and mining is going to become something very basic 1:44:07 in every household. I don't know, I feel like we're in a 2017-2018 moment, when people were 1:44:14 running nodes under Raspberry Pis, and they were super excited that they can do this. 1:44:19 And now it's starting with mining, and I don't know where this is going. The only drawback is 1:44:25 that we have to rely on devices created by Bitmain mostly, and what's miner, but that's a 1:44:33 smaller manufacturer. So we don't have too many chip makers, but maybe this is going to create 1:44:39 a market for this. And mining is going to become more common, which means that we're going to 1:44:45 decentralize it more. And who knows where this is going. But my point is that we shouldn't be 1:44:52 too pessimistic in regards to innovation, only because we see a bleak status quo with a few big 1:45:00 players. Yeah, and one of the miners never did anything wrong, but I think there's a bigger 1:45:08 issue. There's like two nefarious aspects to Peter's philosophy versus mine, which is that 1:45:18 he's, of course, appointing himself as the judge, jury, and executioner on what is mining 1:45:24 centralization. I've asked him for years, and I asked him in writing, and in a reply to his 1:45:32 post, and on the Stephan Levera podcast, I asked him to define this topic and how it is measured, 1:45:38 but he refuses to do so, and he gives eight, in fact, mutually contradicting definitions. 1:45:45 So he is the one who's in charge. So what he really means is that he is the king, 1:45:50 and everyone has to do whatever he says, and he's going to check on something and see if it affects 1:45:56 mining centralization or not. And of course, my idea is a perfect example, because it doesn't 1:46:01 even have the effect that he says that it does, in which the idea that miners must run nodes, 1:46:06 like the guy plugging in the space heater needs to run sidechain nodes, to have the similar level of 1:46:11 profitability is completely 100% false. It would be identical whether they do or not. 1:46:18 But the point is, he is the one who decides. So he is appointing himself basically the ruler. 1:46:25 But there's a second nefarious difference, I think, which is that Peter's way of dealing 1:46:32 with the miners is to try to handcuff them or beat them into submission or whip them into 1:46:43 obedience, whereas I have a completely different point of view. I say, well, we'll redesign it so 1:46:50 that everyone can get – we'll reimagine the equilibrium outcome so that everyone can get 1:46:56 what they want and everyone is happy getting what they want. The miners want there to be 1:47:01 a large block sidechain and a small block mainchain, and they want there to be a Zcash 1:47:06 sidechain. So my point of view is that the best way to deal with people is to help them get what 1:47:15 they want, whereas Peter's view is that we have to resist temptation and stop them from getting 1:47:24 what they want, which I think probably never works, in addition to being very ugly. 1:47:32 Yeah, but maybe this is a newbie question, but can't mining pools basically do the settings 1:47:40 and run the nodes for drivechains so that people, they just connect to that mining pool and that's 1:47:46 it, they don't have to think about it? Yeah, absolutely. You know that the space 1:47:51 mining people are not going to run even Bitcoin Core if it, you know, just to do the space here, 1:47:56 they're just going to plug it in and turn it on. So, but yes, you're 100% correct, of course. 1:48:03 But it's not, that's the thing is that Peter is wrong about some very, very simple things, 1:48:07 and that is why it's so difficult to refute. If it was complex, it would at least be like 1:48:11 an interesting dance, but instead I have to try to convince him that he's actually against proof 1:48:16 of work because he's against miner costs going up, so he's against any upward difficulty adjustment, 1:48:22 but he doesn't realize that he is. And as for his thing about whether or not you can defer to 1:48:26 someone else's node, I mean, he has it both ways. He says, on one hand, people defer to, 1:48:30 it's a fixed cost and it's split among many clients, and this encourages people to be, 1:48:38 to submit to the pool who's the only one paying the cost. And then on the other hand, he says 1:48:42 everyone must run the, everyone must pay the cost because he doesn't accept that the pool person 1:48:50 could just defer to someone else's node the exact same way the clients defer. But of course, the 1:48:55 deferring is always possible, and it's also always rational. So we have two, if you want to get into 1:49:01 the deep philosophy of it, or at least as deep as I think, this is the center of the onion. 1:49:07 As protocol designers, we have to care about making Bitcoin Core as cheap to run as possible. 1:49:12 That is the job. And then, and when, if you've made a sidechain, you want that to be as cheap 1:49:16 as possible. So we can never lose sight of that. But if you are a miner, you have to cut every 1:49:25 you have to be as efficient as possible. So you have to cut every cost that can be cut. 1:49:29 And in that case, you have to just run a rational calculation of, is there something else 1:49:34 other than running the node that gives me an equal or a comparable level of secure, 1:49:39 like maybe that 99.9% security, but maybe 99.7% isn't a comparable amount of confidence that I'm 1:49:49 looking at the real blockchain, but just has, you know, minus, you know, that costs like one 1:49:55 three thousandth, you know, the hassle of actually running the node. And so then this is where, you 1:50:02 know, and then Peter just starts, he doesn't realize this, but he starts to reject like 1:50:05 specialization of labor efficiency or whatever, because he's tied to this idea that as the 1:50:10 Bitcoin Core developer, we must make Bitcoin Core, like that's our product, you know what I mean? 1:50:16 Like we're the baker, we're baking bread, you know, and bread is the Bitcoin Core node, 1:50:24 and we want it to be cheap and tasty. But we don't, as a consumer, you don't need to eat 1:50:32 bread like every day, you know, like we don't, they maybe only want a little bit or they want 1:50:37 to get their, they want to buy a sandwich maybe, you know. So people don't always need, 1:50:43 that the miners, not every, if you actually took the set of human beings who count as miners, 1:50:49 who could be, I'd say it's a million people, it's just not the case that every one of those people 1:50:53 need to run a node. Some of them will be the space heater people, and they can defer, 1:50:59 and because there's other reasons to believe that they're looking at the right blockchain, 1:51:03 you know what I mean? Like the mining pools, they have like a stable reputation and brand 1:51:08 that's fragile that they don't want to lose. So if they do lose it, then there's negative 1:51:13 consequences for them. So when you connect to the pool, you just think, well, probably the pool 1:51:17 will figure it out. And you're probably right. I mean, you know that that will work almost all 1:51:24 of the time, not necessarily 100% of the time. But you know, running a full node doesn't work 1:51:29 100% of the time either, because sometimes you think you're running a full node, but then you 1:51:33 realize you have it misconfigured, or there's a bug in the node, or there's some kind of Bitcoin 1:51:38 core emergency. This has happened twice where people have to, anyone who's mining in 2015, 1:51:43 this happened, you have to like quickly upgrade or switch the node. So what you think running, 1:51:49 it's not that running the node magically achieves some kind of like categorically different phase 1:51:54 change, you're just climbing this percentage of how confident you are that you are looking at the 1:52:00 real blockchain. So the running a full node is, is it would make you very confident, but it 1:52:06 is not, there's nothing special about that. Like if you think about it like this, what if, 1:52:11 if you imagine you run it, you have a big warehouse full of miners, and you have a dashboard, 1:52:19 and then every now and then one of them fails, like they have a bunch of green lights, and one 1:52:22 of them turns red, you know, you have to walk down the aisle and pull the red one off and unplug it 1:52:28 and like replace it or something. You have a feedback loop, you have a process for replacing 1:52:35 the broken, you know, S19 or whatever. So this is a case where you're, I mean, it's like you, 1:52:45 you have imperfect knowledge of whether or not all the components are working perfectly. So 1:52:51 let's say one of the, instead of an ASIC, one of these components is just 1:52:55 your CPU that is running the Bitcoin full node. Well, I mean, it's not necessarily going to be 1:53:01 running perfectly all the time, like it might crash or something, or maybe you have a power 1:53:05 outage, you have to turn it back on, or some kind of database corruption happens or something. 1:53:09 You have to like reset it, you know, like they all require a little bit of maintenance. 1:53:13 It would be kind of cool if you could have something that worked perfectly, 1:53:17 but then you never had to restart or that you never got confused. And so then imagine we replaced, 1:53:25 we had just replaced the S19 with a CPU that's running a node. Imagine if we replaced that CPU 1:53:31 with a connection to the node on, you know, at a mining pool, like maybe Foundry runs the one 1:53:41 Bitcoin node for everyone. Well, this is a kind of a similar thing, really, where the physical 1:53:47 location of the computation has changed, but it's still a component like any other where you are, 1:53:55 you rely on Foundry's node and you're somewhat vulnerable to some extent, not to a very large 1:54:03 extent, but you are vulnerable to, you don't know what if maybe Foundry is not even paying you. 1:54:10 They could say that, they could tell you that they're paying you and then not really be doing 1:54:14 that, or they could tell you that all kinds of things are happening on the Bitcoin blockchain 1:54:17 when they really aren't. They could tell you that there's been reorgs or something. 1:54:22 This is a highly implausible case that you rely on them for the only full node, 1:54:25 and you don't do any kind of SPV, you don't have any other full node ever. 1:54:28 But even in this extreme case, it's not fundamentally any different than anything 1:54:33 else the miner would do, where it's like, this is one of the components, you would have some 1:54:37 way of checking in, you know, like the light turning from red to green when the ASIC fails. 1:54:44 You have some way of checking in with Foundry to see, like, eventually you'll be paying for 1:54:48 electricity with this money. So eventually, do you understand what I'm trying to say is, 1:54:53 eventually the Foundry has been stealing from you, you have not been getting paid Bitcoin, 1:55:00 they've been keeping it, you think you're paying the power company and your bank stops paying them 1:55:09 because you aren't actually getting the Bitcoin, and eventually the power will shut off. 1:55:12 And so my point is, eventually you have some kind of thing where you would, 1:55:16 a feedback loop that would cause you to realize that the component had failed. 1:55:20 So even running the full node is not fundamentally any different than any other kind of thing that 1:55:26 the miner would do. And that's why nothing that Peter Todd says has any relevance to even the 1:55:34 debate at all. I think it's all just, as you say, it's all just him, like, preferring that RGB will 1:55:41 work. And the really unfortunate thing is that I think Bitcoin has suffered enormously because 1:55:48 just in 2015, for whatever reason, people just kind of decided to go with this different set 1:55:55 of ideas. Ironically, if Blockstream probably had never been created, or if certain people had 1:56:05 just left the community or, like, been hit by a bus or something, we might be in a completely 1:56:09 different place. Anyway, I hope that, so the answer to your question is yes, they can just, 1:56:17 they just plug in the thing and they're just deferring, they're deferring to a component 1:56:21 that's far away. But you see, that's no different than them relying on the people running the power 1:56:25 generators at the power company, really, you know, or the people who made them their food. 1:56:33 Yeah, that got pretty dark pretty quickly with the whole random 1:56:37 by a bus situation. I don't want to discuss that. But basically, what I want to say right now 1:56:44 is that people have figured out, I've interviewed SuperTestNet on my podcast, and I think by next 1:56:52 week, I'm going to publish like 10 episodes for binge listening. And SuperTestNet basically said 1:56:57 that he can now do drivechains without the need for a software, just using BitVM. But he also 1:57:06 mentioned that there are some trade-offs involved, because BIP300 grants you some protections from 1:57:12 getting rugged by the miners, whereas BitVM has some limitations in that regard. So maybe that 1:57:19 it's necessary for the market to follow this path, to do this permissionlessly with BitVM, 1:57:26 and prove that the miners are acting in good faith. Or else maybe it's necessary for the miners to 1:57:32 rug you, and then they're going to say, oh, so if we had BIP300 activated, this wouldn't have 1:57:38 happened. I don't know. But it seems like these market movements and the fact that we have 1:57:44 developers working on ideas and concepts without asking for permission is a net benefit. And the 1:57:52 longer we prolong soft forks, the more workarounds get discovered. And then people figure out, okay, 1:57:59 so maybe that this could have worked better if we did the soft fork, just like they do right now 1:58:05 with ARK, when they say, oh, it doesn't really work, it needs covenants. So it seems like they're 1:58:11 doing it on Liquid first, but Liquid has like five transactions per block, which is super 1:58:18 suboptimal for something which was released almost six years ago. Well, I see that it's almost like 1:58:28 we need to get back to doing the soft forks, because the soft forks are harmless, and they're 1:58:32 very powerful upgrade. And again, if people don't get what they want from the soft fork, 1:58:41 they will either get it from an altcoin, or they will get it from these hacky workarounds. 1:58:47 And I actually don't think it's a good idea for people to be inventing such hacky workarounds that 1:58:53 people are like, BitVM, what is the ratio of people who understand BitVM versus who are 1:58:59 bullshitting about it? It's like we've blown way past even the lightning network ratio, which was 1:59:03 very, very high in 2015, and didn't really improve that much. So we don't, the soft fork, this is all 1:59:16 just because the scaling trauma or whatever, it's kind of like the whole thing is irrational 1:59:23 and unreasonable. And we should really burn that down also. It's kind of my thought, like, 1:59:32 it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing that the Bitcoin community is so dysfunctional that an 1:59:37 opt-in soft fork to reassign op-nop, which is something we've done many times before, and that 1:59:42 Satoshi intended, literally intended to be happening, that is a very bad sign that we have 1:59:52 to do the workaround. And then what if these workarounds get too good? Then we'll be like 1:59:56 working around, people will start to come up with workarounds for everything. We'll work around the 1:59:59 21 million coin limit or something. Like, why are we doing this? And I think that it's just like, 2:00:09 are we really going to let the most mediocre people win or something? I don't know. But I 2:00:18 think that's a very good suggestion. I think that that may happen. I don't know. That's indeed the 2:00:26 idea. But I think it's almost bad. Like, you see what I mean? What I'm trying to say is we're 2:00:31 getting too good at, it's like we have a child who's misbehaving and we just, we're spoiling 2:00:36 them. We give every time they... 2:00:38 they throw a tantrum, we just give them what they want. And we say, okay, we won't do a soft fork. 2:00:43 Instead, we'll do unbelievably crazy workaround that's extremely confusing. 2:00:49 And it has, we're like zeroing out logic gates. And so it's not, it's the people who want to do 2:01:00 more soft forks are the good guys and everyone else is, you know, the bad guys. And we're letting 2:01:08 the bad guys win. It's not good. We're doing the wrong thing. 2:01:15 Well, I can understand the point that you should only do a soft fork if it's beneficial for a large 2:01:21 percentage of the users. And I can also understand that some guys thought that Taproot was going to 2:01:27 magically bring on-chain privacy and smaller fees and blah, blah, blah. And there was a lot of hype 2:01:34 around it, but it turned out that nobody really uses it except for the people inscribing originals. 2:01:43 And it proves also that the people who were shilling it had no idea what it was, you know. 2:01:48 You know perfectly well that that's the case. And for SegWit, people didn't know it was a block size 2:01:53 increase. And then you have 1.18. 1.18 is non-controversial and yet it doesn't go anywhere 2:02:00 because no one wants to touch activation. And then Jeremy pushed 1.19 and then he got the push 2:02:05 back and then he had to quit Bitcoin and it's only recently returned and now everyone loves 1.19. 2:02:12 So the idea, the beliefs about these things are unrelated to the content. 2:02:18 It's all, this is, you know, this is like kind of immoral and it has nothing to do with 2:02:27 what the actual technology does. You know what I mean? It'd be one thing if there were, 2:02:32 aha, good thing we turned down that bit, but turned out to be evil. But that has never happened. 2:02:39 Not that it couldn't happen, I'm just saying that people's beliefs have nothing to do with 2:02:43 the content of the idea. You know, in what other scenario would we do something like that? 2:02:48 Where it's like people are sending you fresh food or something. It's like Uber Eats and you're just 2:02:57 thinking like if it comes, the same exact sandwich comes from a different person or something. 2:03:05 This is evil. And so the, I think this stuff about like not doing it with the soft fork is not, 2:03:19 it's not good for us to pour effort into this direction. This is only making things worse, 2:03:25 actually. And look at how little people understood of Taproot, you know. 2:03:33 And look at how little they understand of, so this, I think that, 2:03:42 well, I guess what I'm trying to say is, 2:03:44 I'm not sure, I don't know how to phrase it, but the, we don't have like a rational process. 2:03:56 And if we don't, you know, like if we don't have any, if we don't, if there's never, 2:03:59 the BIPs are never moved through, then I don't see how anyone can complain that there's like 2:04:05 whatever Monero exists or something else that is a BIP 119 chain. Can you imagine if someone made 2:04:11 like a BIP VM, if someone made like a BIP VM altcoin, would that like kill the BIP VM idea 2:04:16 in Bitcoin? What would, I wonder what would, I wonder how that would be interpreted. That would 2:04:19 be kind of a funny thing. But I don't know. But you do have a BIP VM altcoin, which is the one 2:04:30 that came up with the virtual machine in the first place. That's true. I mean, I don't know 2:04:36 in the first place. That's true. That's a good point. Yeah, that is a good point. 2:04:46 But you did say something interesting there with the sandwich metaphor. 2:04:51 So are you saying that if Greg Maxwell and Peter DiWilly and Andrew Polstra, 2:04:57 and all the blockstream scientists proposed covenants, BIP 119, we would have activated it 2:05:05 by now? Well, Taproot was activated, even though no one knew what it was, 2:05:15 but it was proposed by Greg Maxwell. And I mean, the better question would be if they 2:05:25 had proposed something that was a terrible idea, would we have activated that? Like instead of 119, 2:05:34 I think the answer is sort of yes. And it sort of already is Taproot, where it's like the goal, 2:05:38 what are the goals of Taproot? Like to make it look, if there's a cooperative close, 2:05:42 it will look like a regular Bitcoin transaction. Like what else does it do other than that? 2:05:47 Tapscript. But it doesn't really matter, Tapscript. Not to me. So what else does it do? 2:05:54 Did I forget anything? 2:05:55 Multisigs, but I guess that's similar to channels. 2:06:03 multisig, yeah. Improvement to multisig. multisig really sucks, kind of. It's gone from suck to 2:06:13 still sucks, but that's true. So like those are the benefits of Taproot, and yet everyone is saying 2:06:21 Taproot is so great. Still, Taproot took a long time, 46 months between when it was proposed to 2:06:30 when it finally activated. It's very slow. It's a good question. I think that what happened was 2:06:43 activation was, there was no controversy behind it at all. Pre-Taproot, there was no controversy 2:06:52 SegWit. There was just, no one would have ever thought of this, of it being controversial. You 2:06:56 know what I mean? Like the previous soft forks were like, you know, paid to script hash, 2:07:00 but in that one was weirdly controversial. It was sort of botched, but it wasn't like, 2:07:05 you could just do it again, or you could just do something else. That was very similar. 2:07:10 So it was kind of good enough at the time. Plenty of people started to use 2:07:14 the script hash idea after that came out. So then like putting the block height in the coinbase, 2:07:25 no one would really complain about that. Check log time verify, no one would really complain. 2:07:31 So there was a period when they were not controversial at all, and then there was 2:07:34 the SegWit controversy, which was a completely unrelated thing. It was about 2:07:38 this two megabyte hard fork block size. It had nothing to do with SegWit really, 2:07:45 nothing to do with the SegWit activation. SegWit activation was then held up, and then 2:07:50 since then we've only had Taproot, which was kind of like the winners of SegWit, 2:07:57 the small block side winners, got their BIP and then not wanting to repeat SegWit, 2:08:06 the Taproot people just kind of rushed it through. As a result, 2:08:14 I think it was almost because the SegWit one was so contentious that the Taproot one was so 2:08:22 non-confrontational. So I'm not exactly sure what would happen in the scenario that you asked about, 2:08:34 but I do think that mining pools could fix the problem unilaterally by just declaring that they 2:08:45 expect to get soft fork proposals and they will evaluate them on their merits, on their ability 2:08:52 to increase bitcoin transaction fees and bitcoin price and bitcoin utility, and they will then, 2:09:00 in a good-natured and good-faith way, activate them as soon as is reasonable. If the mining 2:09:11 pools were to declare that, I think then that would have already fixed every problem in bitcoin, 2:09:18 because we would have lots of other stuff. We would have OP_VAULT, and we would have BIP300, 2:09:22 and none of this other stuff would matter about people arguing over 2:09:25 Bitcoin, or whatever. So nothing would matter. All the stuff would be every bitcoin developer, 2:09:33 every developer would be a bitcoin developer. Not only would we have BPM, but we'd have Ark 2:09:38 where you could turn it on and start using it and see if people care about the liquidity thing, 2:09:44 and we would see if people care about BIP300, if they care about the miners can steal risk. 2:09:51 So I think every problem in bitcoin would have been solved, would be solved if that 2:09:57 would happen. Today, they would only be the leaders of three mining pools. They would just 2:10:03 declare that they will ignore Twitter, and they will, for good and for bad, because in Taproot's 2:10:10 case, it was clearly oversold. So they have to say, we will look into, we will research 2:10:16 these ideas applied narrowly only to the criterion of, do we think this is going to help Bitcoin 2:10:26 succeed? And they will then, because if they do it like that, then Twitter will have to calculate 2:10:35 first, they'll have to first at least read the BIP, because my experience has been that no one 2:10:39 reads the BIP, and no one has any idea what it does, and people don't know about, they don't 2:10:44 know what 1.19 does, or 1.18, or they don't know what txhash does. It's all fake, so they need, 2:10:52 you need to have a rational filter at the end of the timeline for people to work back from. 2:10:57 They have to say, will this be implemented? Because they will then look silly if it doesn't. 2:11:07 So that's kind of my thought. I'm not sure that wasn't really the answer to your question about 2:11:12 if people proposed 1.19, would it be activated today? I kind of think the answer is yes. I mean, 2:11:17 I've heard, I've heard firsthand and from other people that the only reason 1.19 has not been 2:11:23 activated is because some people don't like Jeremy. And I've heard similar things, so they 2:11:28 say the only reason BIP300 is not activated is because some people don't like me personally. 2:11:33 So I don't know if that's true, but 2:11:43 that's, I'd say with Jeremy's case, I don't know why all these people would lie about this. 2:11:48 Under very bizarre conditions, people told me that type of thing. So I don't know why that, 2:11:56 why that seemed accurate to me. I mean, especially the smoking gun, the proof is that 2:12:04 everyone hated it two years ago, and now they've all decided it's great this year 2:12:09 with Ark and everything. Now it's great. It's the same, it's been the same idea the whole time. So 2:12:14 what changed? That Jeremy quit? Well, why does that make any difference? The same idea. So that's 2:12:24 my thought on that. Yeah, but when you think about it, if you have this system of high priests 2:12:32 in place and what they say and what they think is considered to be authoritative and nobody else 2:12:38 reads the BIPs, that's super dangerous. All you have to do is compromise a handful of people. 2:12:44 And by compromise, I don't even mean that they need to cooperate. All they have to do is shut up. 2:12:50 And after some malicious proposal gets through by convincing either a majority of miners to run it 2:12:58 or convincing the plebs to update, I mean, that requires some cooperation from the people who 2:13:04 maintain the code. But assuming that you compromise a handful of people, you can basically do anything, 2:13:12 granted that the community does not actually read what's happening. So essentially what I'm saying 2:13:19 is that we buy Don't Trust Verify t-shirts and mugs and we take pride in being smarter than the 2:13:28 average person. But when something gets proposed, instead of reading the source material, we defer 2:13:34 to what somebody says about it and that somebody is a high priest in a high position and he's 2:13:41 supposed to give us the definitive opinion on what we should think about it. And the way that 2:13:47 you describe it right now, it's also very personal in the sense that if you're not likable and you're 2:13:55 not the kind of person who's part of a group or something and you don't have, I guess, they're 2:14:01 going to argue that it's a reputation system and you need to have had previous contributions to 2:14:07 the project and to have been involved to a certain degree to something else to earn the trust. And if 2:14:13 you haven't earned the trust, you're considered just a noisemaker and they're going to ignore 2:14:18 your proposal without actually looking into it. I don't know what the answer is, but basically it's 2:14:25 pretty dangerous and it's not a single point of failure, but it is a multiple point of failure 2:14:34 to which you can point out. And of course, everyone can be a core developer. Of course, 2:14:39 everyone can contribute and the community can reject certain contributions. It's part of the 2:14:44 decentralization process, but it doesn't happen often enough. And there is this, maybe Durgan 2:14:53 referred to it as a Lindy effect. The longer someone is trusted and keeps a good record, 2:15:00 the more trust that he's going to be going forward. So maybe there's this kind of system, 2:15:07 but then you get someone like Luke Dashjr. who speaks, but at the same time you have to stop and 2:15:14 ask him to define every word because what it means to him is not necessarily what it means to someone 2:15:21 else or to everyone else. And you run into ironic situations where he has lost 200 Bitcoin at the 2:15:30 beginning of the year. And then he became the creator of this mempool filter basically to run 2:15:37 on your node clients. And you're blindly trusting someone to write code for you when he clearly 2:15:45 wasn't capable of securing his own Bitcoin. And then you run his code without peer review. 2:15:52 And then you trust him with a mining pool that's highly ideological and makes no 2:15:59 economic sense because essentially Bitcoin is a game of incentives. And it's mostly greed 2:16:07 that drives actors to maximize their profits to get the most out of their activity. 2:16:12 And then you run into these ideological situations where they say, no, this is approved 2:16:19 and this is not. It's super arbitrary because you also have wallets like Samurai that have their 2:16:27 transactions filtered by mining pool, which is pretty insignificant. But I guess they had the 2:16:35 perfect marketing for this. And where I'm going is that we have a system of high priests that we 2:16:43 don't question too often. And maybe that your proposal is uncomfortable for them because if 2:16:53 anyone or maybe not anyone, but any entity that has a reputation in the game and can convince 2:16:59 the miners to deploy their sidechain, can basically take on an important role and manage 2:17:07 their own software and not rely on core too much anymore, maybe you're diminishing their 2:17:14 influence. And that's a problem. Well, yes, the problem for them, but it's actually 2:17:22 in that scenario, they are sort of corrupt and they are the problem 2:17:28 with Bitcoin for which kicking them out is the solution. 2:17:34 But, you know, it's possible. It's certainly the case that right now they have like, 2:17:40 they get a lot of prestige, you know, they get a lot of respect 2:17:45 being quote Bitcoin Core developer is like seen as a good thing instead of like sort of a job or 2:17:54 like a janitorial maintenance thing. So people derive a lot of prestige from it and they can 2:18:03 even get money, of course, as you can see. They get other things too, they get invite invitations 2:18:10 around the world. So yeah, it can certainly be fun. 2:18:16 Anyway, I don't know. You mentioned that the most active developers and the ones who write 2:18:20 the most code are also not the ones that speak most vocally on issues. They're also the most 2:18:27 neutral. But doesn't that follow from the theory, though, that there are certain people who don't 2:18:36 make waves? And in fact, it's implied that to people who would make it to the top, who are 2:18:43 actually interested in working on the code, they would be if they are motivated to do the right 2:18:50 thing for Bitcoin, they would be kind of like someone who they'd be like you, you're in the, 2:18:58 you're in like Nazi Germany, and you, you want to do what's best for Germany. So you just go along 2:19:03 with the Nazi party to like the minimal extent to like, because you know that you'll be you'll be 2:19:08 kicked out if you make too many waves. So you just kind of quietly conform to someone that's exactly 2:19:17 what we see. You know, because they really care about, they don't, they don't care about Spain, 2:19:23 they compare about Germany, but they can, they care about the cause. So that's why they don't, 2:19:29 they would be like, afraid of more than one of the, you know. And so you have the real workers 2:19:36 would be the people doing a lot of code. And then you have the talkers, the talker people who 2:19:42 job is to talk. I think it's unfair to compare them to the Catholic church that makes more sense. 2:19:54 Yeah, sure. Like, you know, they care about you, they care about the community. They're a member 2:19:59 of their little town. And so they're like being the priest, so they do whatever they have to do 2:20:05 to fit in. And then the being silent is a sign of a very specific type of participation. 2:20:14 Right? It's because you participate, you do the work, 2:20:18 but you don't, you don't like actively share like a creative idea 2:20:25 on the direction. So this implies that you are being very 2:20:32 submissive or afraid or that you just, it's a specific type of participation. 2:20:39 Anyway, I don't know if maybe other people want to come up and talk about something else. 2:20:45 We still have a bunch of people here who aren't bored for some reason. 2:20:49 I have one question, if it's okay. Great. It's just a completely different question. 2:20:56 I'm just wondering, I mean, Drivechain can fork anything and it's just maybe a lack of knowledge, 2:21:02 but how would it be if you tried, for example, to fork Avalanche? I'm just wondering, 2:21:11 can a subnet architecture also be integrated somehow into Drivechain? 2:21:18 Yes. So when you say fork, do you mean that because Drivechain puts, 2:21:24 you have BIP300 on L1 and then you have the Drivechains themselves that are on L2. 2:21:29 So which are you referring to there? Do you want an Avalanche Drivechain on Bitcoin? Are you saying 2:21:36 hard fork Avalanche, add BIP300 to that? I'm just wondering what is the maximum, 2:21:43 what could be possible? Well, I mean, yeah, that's possible. 2:21:49 That would be, and BIP300 is very small, I think. Most of the work is on the L2. 2:21:55 So most of the work we do is the sidechain templates. The BIP300 part is really very 2:22:00 simple. It's just counting the 13,000. It's really not doing anything. It's not a big deal. 2:22:05 And so you could add that to, you could fork Avalanche, add that. That would be funny to like, 2:22:13 just like, you know, to make it, because the goal, I think, if I'm understanding what you're 2:22:19 kind of driving at here is that it would be funny to do something that people don't, 2:22:23 they don't really know how to criticize it and just get something out there and just get some, 2:22:29 have some new users having fun and just kind of having fun with it and not being too boxed in. 2:22:37 And that would be kind of a funny idea. I mean, that is possible. Yes. I don't actually know 2:22:42 that much about Avalanche. There's this, I remember I looking into it when, 2:22:47 and I messaged Amrita Saira about it a while ago, like years ago. And it was something like, 2:22:54 you're flipping coins and then you're partitioning the network and then you have a network. But then 2:22:59 I asked him the security, what would today be called the security budget question in reverse. 2:23:04 It was very similar to my, nothing is cheaper than proof of work where I say, listen, if you 2:23:07 have all, if you have billions of fees coming in, then isn't there a strong incentive to Sybil 2:23:13 attack the network? And he kind of like was very evasive. And then he, he was, and then he event, 2:23:21 when I kept asking him about it and he said, well, hi Dashberry, spelling. Oh, there we go. 2:23:28 Great. Yes, Julian. Hello. I might be able to shed a little light on the Avalanche 2:23:34 trust issues. I think that the nodes sign messages and rank each other based on their 2:23:39 performance. So there's some sort of web of trust going on. Well, maybe of course, 2:23:48 but if it's the nodes who watches the watchmen situation where the nodes are mostly being 2:23:56 watched by other nodes, then you still can Sybil attack. 2:23:59 And then any node, any node, you can still in the middle of it or whatever, 2:24:05 pretend to be the whole network. I think like it must, there must be something to it because 2:24:09 it's been around for a little while and some people seem to like it. So I've seen it before 2:24:15 on the fees site. So at some point it was being used as an EVM competitors. There must be something 2:24:23 to it. Yeah, there must be something to it. Maybe for the fork, you could call it Bitcoin Cash. 2:24:31 It's my little troll. Yeah. Bitcoin Cash. Yeah. I'm sure that will be 2:24:34 uncontroversial. Yeah. We'll win a lot of new friends over with that. I'm sure that's, 2:24:41 see, this is the, this is the issue with it. Well, of course, names are always very difficult, 2:24:46 but Bitcoin Cash, that was always going to be really difficult because they were just married 2:24:50 to the idea that they, they were the real Bitcoin. You know, they had bitcoin.com and 2:24:56 this is what Bitcoin was supposed to be, which is tough because Bitcoin Cash had in it a certain 2:25:03 parameter, which is a block height corresponding to August 1st, 2017, a certain date and a certain 2:25:09 number, namely the number eight and two instances of novelty. And they tried to say, this is the 2:25:17 original Bitcoin, but it was, they were really the new thing because it was eight megabytes on 2:25:22 August 1st. And if you didn't have those parameters, you were, you were done for. 2:25:26 You would never connect to that network. And, uh, you know, I had a Thanksgiving recently this year. 2:25:34 I was talking to a cousin who was a smart guy. He's a lawyer and, 2:25:40 you know, good, good students, smart guy. And, uh, 2:25:45 I, I don't know how to, it just, crypto came up and then something Bitcoin Cash somehow came up 2:25:53 and he was like, Oh, I wouldn't even think that that he's like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. He's like, 2:25:58 I wouldn't even think that those are different things. And I think what he has to say that I 2:26:03 think that point of view is probably what most, most lay people think they probably don't. It 2:26:08 matters such a big deal to us, you know, in the industry, but people outside are just like, 2:26:15 what? And then people are like, what's the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum? 2:26:17 Like people don't know, they don't know the difference. So, uh, it's a tough name when you 2:26:24 have a name that it just seems like it's trying to trick people into not understanding that the 2:26:29 networks are different, but it's difficult. And then that of course became a convention 2:26:34 for all of these other soft forks that they were Bitcoin, gold, Bitcoin, diamond, whatever. 2:26:41 So this is a quite an, it's quite an intriguing, it's just interesting how it laid out. I mean, 2:26:47 I have also, I, to try to compare it to something I was like, okay, you have, you have Christianity 2:26:54 and then you have, or you have, you know, you have Sunni and Shiite, um, Islam, but you also 2:27:01 like in Christianity, you have like a Protestant and you have like Lutheran, Baptist. And I tried 2:27:06 to find, and I was like, oh, there is some time you have, you have Baptist and you have 2:27:11 Southern Baptist. So that's a case where it's split, but one had almost the same name, 2:27:19 but usually you don't, you know, usually you just get Lutheran or like, you know, 2:27:24 uh, Latter-day Saints or Episcopalian or something. You get like these totally different 2:27:29 words. So I think maybe that's a clue. On the other hand, maybe not. I don't know. I'm, 2:27:34 I'm really love to, you know, what is, I'm very open to what anyone, what does anyone think about 2:27:39 this whole, uh, should, should Bitcoin Cash have named, is that a dead name? I mean, I, I kind of 2:27:45 think that's very difficult because now you have to fight over the name and the ticker and then 2:27:51 someone's going to lose. It's probably the challenger to the status quo. And then it will 2:27:58 probably be stigmatizing and kind of humiliating, but maybe not. I don't know. These are just me 2:28:04 trying to figure it out. Okay, cool. Well, it doesn't seem like anyone is eager to say anything. 2:28:25 Last chance. Come on up, quick. 2:28:32 It seems like we don't have anybody. So, hey, thanks everyone for a great 2:28:36 space. See you next time. Find the recording on layer2labs.com with all the other recordings. 2:28:45 And, um, uh, thanks a lot. See everyone later. 2:28:54 Bye.
