0:00 So the background may be a little bit biased in this debate, 0:05 but the organizer just decided to follow aesthetic reasons to choose. 0:12 Okay, it will not be just me. It will be me debating Paul, who is actually the creator of the Drivechains idea. 0:18 So it's not a solo talk. It's actually a debate. Okay. Okay. This is more neutral. Paul? 0:25 Yeah, I was gonna have to go against the two Giacomos there. 0:31 Yes, hello? Can everyone hear me or no? Yes, there we go. Okay. Yes, so, well, yeah, you know, I was checking into the hotel yesterday, 0:39 and they came up to me and they said, we want to add, Giacomo wants you to be on the stage with him. 0:43 So here I am, but I'm happy to introduce the concept. Drivechain is this concept that allows you to send coins to a different piece of software. 0:51 So it's about competition. And it has innumerable benefits, but two of the big ones would be scaling Bitcoin to planetary scale, like tomorrow, and the Zcash level privacy. 1:08 So I think, I mean, that's, you know, it can go on and on if you if you like, but it's a short. 1:13 Since it was originally being a talk about criticism on the idea, I will, I will tell you the story about how I changed from an early, like very enthusiastic Drivechain supporter into basically a Drivechain hater. 1:30 So originally, the idea of sidechain, as most of you probably know, is the idea that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, financially speaking, so you don't want to print new money and to do a new price discovery, and to find new liquidity depth in the market every time you want to change stuff from a technological point of view. 1:51 So the excuse for many shitcoins was that, I mean, we have to print money because we have to experiment with Zcash privacy, or we have to experiment with scalability tradeoffs and stuff like that. 2:03 And they printed money and they printed shitcoins. 2:05 So the idea of the sidechain was, let's experiment of technology without reinventing money. 2:11 So bringing Bitcoin back and forth. 2:13 And the problem was never how to bring Bitcoin in, was always how to bring Bitcoin out. 2:19 There is a lot of confusion about what a sidechain is, about merge mining, but that's not the key point, at least that's not the difficult point. 2:26 The difficult point is peg out, how to take this sidecoin and have Bitcoin back. 2:32 Because the entire idea of sidechain is that the main Bitcoin node should not be aware about what happens in the sidechain. 2:39 Otherwise, it's not really a sidechain, it's just a block increase, it's just a global consensus increase. 2:45 So my first approach to the idea was with the Blockstream paper. 2:50 The Blockstream paper, in order to take the money out, was using miners. 2:55 We already use miners as canonical ordering oracles. 3:00 So basically, we ask miners not if transactions are valid or not. 3:04 We know that already because we have our nodes. 3:06 We ask them only which valid transaction comes first or later. 3:12 So that's the only role of the miners. 3:14 If miners try to push an invalid transaction, we will just refuse it. 3:18 So it's not about validity, it's just about chronological ordering. 3:23 The idea of the initial sidechain paper was to reuse this oracle that we use already to peg out. 3:31 And we do that using SPV proofs, so basically compact proofs. 3:35 So there was this sort of idea to ask miners to peg out the coin. 3:42 So this proof was met with some skepticism because it's not a real proof. 3:48 Because the Bitcoin node will not be able to really tell if miners are telling the truth about this peg out. 3:55 So if the peg out request is following the entire sidechain consensus or not. 4:00 Because we don't know, because by definition, we don't run it. 4:02 So, so far, you agree? 4:04 Yes, but that is the whole point, is that some people don't want to run the additional... 4:08 Like Roger Ver wanted larger blocks, but other people did not. 4:11 So the whole point is that some people are validating them and some people are not. 4:15 And Roger Ver really would run the large block node. 4:18 It's just a question of what's happening on L1. 4:21 So we count the work and not the... 4:23 So it's the whole point of that, is that we can never know, we can never get a proof. 4:28 That is the whole point. 4:29 The proof would have been the mistake you were talking about before, of just making it mandatory for everyone. 4:33 Yeah, at least... 4:34 About differences between people. 4:35 If it's not a compact proof, at least. 4:37 Like in the original Satoshi idea, where you can have compact proof that everybody can validate, 4:43 but they are like CB resistant. 4:44 But since we don't have those kind of stuff, like a ZK proof to approve the entire sidechain history, 4:50 then the point that you make is that we have to be opt-in. 4:52 So whoever wants, they can care. 4:55 If they don't care, they can just ignore and just go along with the rest of the economy. 4:59 Even if we had this magical ZK proof thing, people might still disagree over which ZK proof to use 5:06 or whether to use it at all. 5:07 And so I think ultimately the sidechain problem actually transcends the fraud-proof problem 5:12 or even these other problems, because the developers are always going to be making things, 5:17 they're always going to be inventing this or that. 5:19 And so the question is, the developer will be an expert in their thing, 5:23 like Barack is an expert in Ark or something. 5:27 And then there'll be a bunch of laypeople who are not going to be an expert in their thing, 5:31 and so there's always going to be a misunderstanding or some kind of knowledge gap. 5:37 And as a result, this is inevitable. 5:40 What is the developer supposed to do if they invent Ark or something? 5:44 They either have to do nothing, or they have to, as you were saying at the very beginning of your intro there, 5:51 which is that they have no choice but to launch a different coin just because they love the tech. 5:57 So, so far we basically agree. 5:59 And what happened after this criticism that this is not a proof, so this is not a real proof, the SPB proof, 6:05 so Blockstream went to a direction in which they accept that there is no provable way, 6:09 they accept that there is trust involved, 6:11 and so they say, at this point we might just as well trust a fixed federation of people that are reputable, 6:17 that have some reputation or risk, instead of trusting the miners, 6:21 because miners are already entrusted with another very critical job, 6:25 so instead of mixing up incentives, re-trusting the same oracle, 6:28 we create a new different oracle, which is the sidechain federation. 6:32 And Paul went to the other direction, and correct me if I'm wrong, 6:35 and just said, it's still useless to use this SPB proof, 6:40 just trust the miner, but removing this fake proof, this basically inconsequential proof, 6:47 and trust the miner directly by explicitly asking them to escrow this money. 6:52 That was very close. 6:54 What I said was, 51% hash rate can always censor anything they like from the L1 blockchain, 7:03 so the fact that Blockstream had this re-oracle proof or something, 7:06 I did think that was just pointless, because if 51% is against you, 7:10 that no one on L1 will ever see that, and so I thought it was pointless. 7:14 So both agreed that the SPB model original was a little bit pointless, 7:19 but Blockstream went to fix the federation with basically explicit signing, 7:24 and you went to direct miner escrow, which is basically BIP300 right now. 7:31 Yeah, I think so. Basically the miners do something that is... 7:35 The analogy I would make is between Liberty Reserve, which had failed, 7:40 which was the fixed key, being the admin, 7:45 and this is what many Ethereum L2s do, and many Ethereum projects, 7:48 where they cheat, and they use the federation, and they have this fixed set of people, 7:54 versus the decentralized mining process, where there's difficulty adjustment, 7:58 and people can drop ad whenever they want, and so there's this turnover, 8:01 and this need to constantly be maximizing the value of the coin, 8:06 maximizing the transaction fee usage, minimizing costs, etc. 8:11 So I think that was the difference between Bitcoin's success and the failure of Liberty Reserve, 8:16 and I think that that is the analogy I would draw between the federated model, 8:21 and the model that uses proof-of-work directly. 8:25 So initially I was a big fan of Paul's approach, 8:28 because my idea about federations is that they are fine unless there is heavy censorship attempts. 8:35 In that case, imagine somebody trying to censor one liquid federate in one jurisdiction, 8:42 the probability that the others will keep signing blocks after heavy consequences on one is kind of low, 8:48 because they don't have enough incentives. 8:51 With mining, you can easily have new people showing up, even anonymously, 8:56 even on tour, or hidden in China, like 30% of the hash rate right now may be hidden in China illegally. 9:03 With federations, that's harder, so for censorship, the trade-offs are in favour of Paul's idea. 9:09 And so it was a shield of dry chain before it was cool, admittedly, way before it was cool. 9:14 But then, what changed to me? So what was my conversion point? 9:19 First of all, I grew a little bit sceptical, if not sceptical, lukewarm, like not super enthusiastic, 9:27 about the idea of sidechain in general, for two reasons. 9:31 The first reason is that the original point was removing the technological excuse for shitcoins, 9:37 so if you can do this technology experiment on Bitcoin, you should not print new shitcoins. 9:44 But then, back then, it was kind of realistic as an idea. 9:48 But I think we just saw in the market that the main point of shitcoin is just gambling, 9:53 and the kind of pseudo-technical narrative you have to put on top has to be very, very light. 9:59 So removing the excuse that you don't need that shitcoin to experiment is changing nothing, 10:06 because the main market niche which is targeted by shitcoins is just gambling. 10:11 So they just want to see something going up and down on price, and they don't care for Zcash privacy. 10:16 For example, in Zcash, most of the initial transactions were not in the shielded pool, 10:22 were just TXs and not ZX pools. 10:25 So basically, you had zero privacy, and people didn't care, because the point was mostly speculating on the coin. 10:32 So I started to grow a little bit like, okay, even if we do all this effort to allow them to experiment with Bitcoin, 10:39 the point is that people, like 99% of the market right now, is not about experimenting. 10:44 That was just a joke. They are just about token fluctuation. 10:48 Yeah, but that last 1% is very important. 10:52 So this is a very weak argument against it. Even if there was no reason to be against... 10:59 Like, even if this had no effect on altcoins, we would still want to do it, 11:04 because in many ways, it's the only way of scaling Bitcoin and granting Bitcoin these new features. 11:10 But even in the case of the altcoins, you have a situation where, like I was saying with ARK or something, 11:16 where if someone invents something and they love the tech, in order to use the tech, 11:22 they must create an altcoin if there's no sidechains. 11:25 Well, they can just do a burn coin, like a one-way peg burn. 11:29 Yeah, but the one-way peg doesn't really get you... 11:34 Because the one-way peg, it has the ability to crash 99% every day forever. 11:39 Which is very honest. Like, if this is 1,000 times better than Bitcoin, then there will be market. 11:44 If it's not, you will just lose money, because you're just experimenting with your tech. 11:48 No, not at all, because what you could do is you could say the target market for this is like a million coins. 11:52 Like, in best-case scenario, in the entire planet Earth, this would need 1 million coins on this sidechain. 12:00 You could have 1 million coins move over there on the one-way peg on day one, and then they could crash 99%. 12:05 Someone could do the second project, the second clone of that project, and then do it again. 12:10 I think this is a very weak reason. We don't really care about what scammers want. 12:15 It has nothing to do with what people who are using Zcash want at all. 12:19 Like, not in the slightest. You know what I mean? Like, I don't really care. 12:23 I would use the Zcash tech as an end-user. 12:29 So it doesn't really make any difference how it got there, you know? 12:32 If it got there from the Zcash Foundation or from some guy who just typed it into existence. 12:37 So you will agree with me that the original, let's kill altcoin idea is probably not going to happen with the crashes? 12:43 I actually disagree, because I think it's really, like, the success of some of the fringe coins is what gives cover to the other 99%. 12:52 Okay, so without the Monero, you cannot have the Ethereum. 12:55 Right, because we can't really, we're trapped as Bitcoiners. 12:59 Now we have to say, okay, like you have it with your slide, where you say everything that's not Bitcoin is a scam. 13:06 But then you have to, then you're trapped into calling like Monero and like Namecoin a scam, 13:10 and other things where kind of like people are left scratching their head as to like whether or not, 13:15 how is it possible that Giacomo Zucco is calling stuff a scam, 13:18 when there's literally no way that he could possibly know, like, what is going to be invented next year, 13:24 or what, you know, what all the things that are in existence today. 13:27 So then people turn, they take the slide and they flip it around, and they say, look, this is how crazy Bitcoiners are. 13:32 They have this irrational view that can't possibly be true. 13:35 But why wasn't that kind of change of mind enabled already by Elements? 13:39 Like, everybody can run an Elements sidechain already, and create a Zcash element. 13:44 Nobody did, because there's no money to be made. 13:46 No, it's not, because I can't use, I can't go to Elements and take the Zcash altcoin code, 13:52 and like paste it in there, and get a Zcash sidechain out. 13:57 Well, you can. 13:59 I wish you could, but you can't. 14:01 And the other thing is, Elements is using the federated model. 14:05 This is separate completely, but the federated model you were talking about before, 14:09 the whole logic, as you were saying a moment ago, is that it relies on people's reputations. 14:14 And it relies on, like, these 15 people. 14:16 But no one knows who these 15 key holders are. 14:19 And in fact, there was a bug at one point, my friend James Prestwich found, 14:22 where it was like four block, anyone working at Blockstream could just empty the liquid. 14:28 So if I'm a Monero guy, I'm using Monero's confidential transaction, 14:32 and not liquid confidential transaction, 14:34 because the general censorship-resistant model may be less secure. 14:39 That's your... 14:40 Well, I think with Monero, they have more of a community that is committed to privacy. 14:47 So they say, we want this feature. 14:49 Like, where's the ring signature feature? 14:53 You want liquidity also with privacy. 14:56 So there's a small network effect there also. 14:58 But the Monero people, I mean, the Monero people, 15:01 that's a perfect case where it cannot possibly be for anything other than the feature. 15:05 Because you have people using it on darknet markets. 15:07 Darknet markets used to be Bitcoin only. 15:09 And then now many of them have switched to being Monero only. 15:12 Well, not many, basically two. 15:14 Most of them are also Monero. 15:15 I was, well, I mean, I was just looking into it just as, like, you know, 15:20 for my own, doing my own research, you know, of course. 15:23 But, you know, the ones I saw were Monero only. 15:26 So there was no, you couldn't even use BTC. 15:28 So this is not good because this is how Bitcoin made it from being, like, 15:33 a complete non-project to being something that had real value. 15:38 But the point is, someone is using it on a darknet market, 15:40 they can't possibly be pumping the coin because there's a buyer and seller. 15:44 And if you pump it in one direction, then it's a zero-sum game as to it. 15:48 So they must be using it for the feature. 15:50 My point is that if you have money printing, you can pay for a budget 15:54 that will go on darknet market forums to pump Monero, 15:57 unlike you can do with liquid coin or with the Drivechain coins. 16:02 So anyway, this is the first, you say, this is a weak argument. 16:05 It is because it's just saying that what you're saying is 16:09 there's no one would ever want to use the Monero ring signature on BIP300. 16:14 But you can't know that. 16:16 No, I'm just saying we were probably deluded to think 16:19 that would be more disruptive than it is. 16:20 But let's say, okay, this is a weak argument. 16:22 Let me move over to other arguments. 16:24 The other arguments, I don't like sidechains as a concept 16:27 so much as I used to do back in the days, 16:30 is that when you try to experiment with new models, 16:33 like Blockstream moved to a federation approach for pegout. 16:36 Then they realized why to use merge mining when the signers can just sign blocks. 16:40 And so they moved to sign a block. 16:42 And now people are just basically saying, 16:44 okay, why don't we use the same federation for a show me on mint 16:48 with blind signatures directly and you have FedE mint. 16:51 And now you have a lot of, so when you experiment, 16:54 you find out that the original design to have something very close to Bitcoin, 16:58 but which is not Bitcoin, is probably even too limited. 17:01 Right now we have a plethora of things that are not really sidechains. 17:04 Like an ARK provider is not really a sidechain. 17:07 It's just this kind of pool. 17:09 We have dark pools. 17:10 We have hierarchical channels with many people. 17:13 We have the hypothesis to have lightening factories. 17:16 The things that we can do to create local consensuses 17:19 where people can experiment outside of the global consensus 17:24 are so more rich than a copy of the main chain. 17:28 So this is the second reason I'm going a little bit less enthusiastic 17:32 about the general sidechain topic. 17:34 But now we get into the Drivechain specifically, if you wish. 17:37 Yeah, but again, like these other things are not, 17:41 they're just nowhere near as good at all. 17:43 So with the sidechain concept, you can rewrite whatever you like. 17:48 It doesn't even have to be in C++. 17:51 It could be in JavaScript or something. 17:53 You could rewrite something completely in Rust, as we have done, for example. 17:56 You can have any block size. 17:58 You can have any zk-SNARK thing. 18:00 The point of the sidechain is that you have disagreement among developers. 18:05 So the idea of the sidechain is there can be someone 18:08 who's like a 15-year-old at MIT or something, 18:11 and they have this brilliant idea, 18:13 and it's so brilliant that everyone in Bitcoin Core misunderstands it. 18:17 And in fact, maybe they even don't like it 18:19 because it puts everyone else to shame. 18:22 And the sidechain idea is that somehow this person's thing can still make it, 18:25 no matter how different it is. 18:27 It could be any amount of different. 18:29 It could still make it, and instead of launching it as an altcoin, 18:32 they could use Bitcoin, basically. 18:34 So that's the idea. It's a fringe idea with Bitcoin instead of with an altcoin. 18:38 And there's no limit to how many ideas someone could think of. 18:41 There's no arc. 18:43 We can't even do that now because it requires 119 or TxHash or something. 18:48 We can't even do that today. 18:50 It's a perfect example of a lightning network we couldn't have had 18:53 without multisig or SegWit or checkLockTimeVerify, 18:56 checkSequenceVerify, whatever. 18:58 It must be interactive, so it would be very ugly. 19:00 So let's say that you convince me, not really, 19:02 but let's say you convince me about making sidechains great again. 19:07 Now I go to the two problems I see with specifically the BIP300, 301 campaigns. 19:13 The first one is that at this point, your original proposal 19:16 starts to be a little bit obsolete compared to other kinds of discussions. 19:20 For example, many people are discussing covenants. 19:24 We can do some kind of dry-chain-like behavior with covenants. 19:28 And, for example, people were discussing a few months ago 19:31 that you can use existing opcodes to force the signature 19:35 to be under a certain threshold of bits. 19:38 And if you do that, basically you create a proof-of-work escrow 19:42 that may or may not be reused by the same hashers 19:45 because there is some kind of difficulty. 19:48 But we have so many other, like compared to the state of research 19:52 when you came up with the idea, now we have so many other priorities 19:55 and things that may enable the same endpoint 19:58 that this may feel a little bit outdated, basically. 20:02 Would you not agree with that? 20:03 No, I completely disagree. 20:04 In fact, what I have seen since 2015 has been the technical community 20:08 slide further and further into basically self-denial 20:13 and just unbelievable amounts of dishonesty, I would almost say, actually. 20:19 So I think that I completely disagree. 20:22 The idea that you can do proof-of-work on one signature, 20:25 that that would replace what BIP300 does is untrue. 20:29 The idea that ARC or whatever, that all these things 20:32 give people unilateral exit from L2 to L1, 20:36 so they're all very sensitive to the L1 fee rate, 20:39 which is not true of BIP300. 20:41 BIP300, you can onboard people on L2 without changing any L1 bytes, 20:46 which is not true of anything else. 20:48 You can move coins over with one transaction and have them fan out 20:52 and then change hands and then recombine before coming back. 20:56 So these covenant things are mostly like nerd sniping. 21:00 They are like white papers only. 21:03 No one has put details out, 21:05 and they are very limited in what they can do, I think. 21:08 And the only thing that has increased is people's desperation 21:12 and their attempt to avoid the simple truth, 21:15 which is that all BIP300 does is count to 13,000, 21:19 and the idea that we would avoid doing that 21:22 because we don't want to do a soft fork is, I think, 21:25 just like that would be the beginning of the end for Bitcoin, honestly. 21:29 It's so silly. 21:31 This really lies perfectly in my last and actually the only aggressive argument. 21:36 Do you agree with anything I said? 21:38 Your first point, you already said it was a weak point, 21:40 that you don't think Zcash scammers would come over. 21:43 I agree with you, but it doesn't matter, 21:45 because I would prefer to have the Zcash feature. 21:49 The first point was weak in the sense that it should not stop the idea of dry chain. 21:53 It probably will not give us what we expected or hoped for, 21:56 but still, why not? 21:58 But I actually disagree also, as I said, 22:00 because when you bring all the creative people to Bitcoin, 22:03 or you have someone who creates something else, Zcash, 22:06 and then we just copy and paste it, which we have already done. 22:08 We already have the latest version of Zcash as a sidechain working today, 22:12 and we have the latest version of Ethereum full node, 22:15 just with Bitcoin only, working today. 22:17 We have a lot of this stuff working today, Namecoin, etc., on our testnet. 22:21 I guess this may open another... 22:23 If you have every real project on BTC, it really does undermine. 22:27 You can go back to using that slide where you say everything else is a scam, 22:30 because it will go back to being true, 22:32 but until then, you really can't say that, 22:36 because if the end user says they want something, 22:39 the end user says, I really, really, really want whatever it is, 22:42 Namecoin or EVM or whatever, DeFi, it doesn't matter. 22:46 It doesn't matter what they really want. 22:48 If they say they really want Solana, I mean, I don't care about Solana at all, 22:51 but if the end user really wants something, 22:54 they're going to get it from stupid Solana or something, 22:59 and not from BTC, and so then what you're saying is 23:02 the end user is wrong about what they want, 23:04 but that's just ridiculous, I think. 23:06 Yeah, I still think that the reason people didn't use, 23:09 for example, Element or other ideas, 23:11 or burn a coin in order to recreate Monero, 23:13 is a good indication that the only thing they really want, 23:16 as a community at least, is to shield a new coin, 23:18 to have financial gains. 23:19 I think that without the trading aspect of Monero, 23:22 a Monero community will not exist, 23:24 and the Monero tech will not exist. 23:25 That's way more true for Ethereum, 23:27 but I think that's true for Monero as well, 23:29 because Monero people mostly don't use Lightning for privacy, 23:32 don't use CoinJoin for privacy, 23:34 don't use the other things that are already there in Bitcoin, 23:36 because the main drive, when you can print money, 23:40 everything about your incentive structure becomes about printing money. 23:43 So the people you select are the people that are going to pump the coin, 23:46 more than creative developers that want to use the standard. 23:49 But you're still missing the point completely. 23:51 There's many people, David Vorek wrote it in the white paper, 23:54 at the beginning, they said, 23:55 we are launching as an altcoin because we have no other choice, 23:57 we would wish to do it as a Bitcoin sidechain. 24:01 Jeremy Rantz said the exact same thing, 24:04 published remarks on Namecoin, 24:06 he said we would prefer to do it as a Bitcoin sidechain, 24:09 but we can't. 24:10 Ricardo said the same thing, 24:13 when he was interviewed by Bitcoin Uncensored, 24:15 he said, why are you making this altcoin over and over again, 24:19 and he just said over and over again, 24:20 what do you want me to do instead, 24:21 and eventually they had to admit that he was right. 24:23 And aren't we all better off than he did, in a way, 24:26 because now the Monero technology and bulletproofs, etc. 24:29 has come further. 24:30 And same thing for probably Zcash. 24:32 That came from Liquid. 24:33 Bulletproof came from Blockchain Research. 24:35 The guy from Stanford or whatever. 24:37 I don't remember his name. 24:39 Yeah, but confidential transactions are coming from... 24:41 Yeah, but you're saying that Blockstream is responsible 24:44 for all the Zk-SNARK research that came out of Zcash or something, 24:48 or Ethereum? 24:49 I don't think anyone would say that. 24:51 Well, some Ethereum... 24:52 And then again, 24:53 we can say that some of the current zero-sync success 24:56 is coming from Ethereum Research, right? 24:58 Well, we should ask them 25:00 if they think they would be where they are today 25:03 if it weren't for Zcash and Ethereum. 25:05 We ask Robin, and we say, 25:06 Robin, did you use Ethereum Research? 25:08 And he would say yes. 25:09 But my point would be, 25:10 Ethereum Research would not even exist 25:12 without the giant pre-mine of ETH scam sold to retail. 25:16 So that research was funded entirely by the shitcoin model. 25:20 With the sidechain, 25:21 Ethereum Foundation would have zero budget. 25:23 Well, in a way, then, we should be even happier. 25:25 I don't think that's true, first of all, 25:26 but if it was, 25:27 all it means is how clever are we Bitcoiners, 25:29 because we allowed Ethereum, 25:31 we gave it some leash. 25:33 We gave it a little bit of time to do the R&D, and then we copied and pasted, installed it, and then we sank the coin, that would be very clever of us, but I wish we were that clever. I don't think we are, though. 25:42 So if you succeeded with the Drivechain before, you would have... 25:45 There wouldn't have been so much stuff to copy, so I cleverly bided my time until now, lurking in the shadows. 25:52 Let me go more adversarial. This is my final... Basically, all my point was the one I'm going to make right now. 25:59 Okay, so the first two weren't even... You didn't even care about those. 26:02 I just wanted to waste your time. 26:03 Okay, now the last four minutes, everyone. Here it is. 26:05 So even if you convince me that we still have to use sidechains... 26:10 That's all the time we have. Sorry, I'm joking. 26:11 Five minutes. 26:12 That was a joke. 26:13 Okay. Even if you convince me we should use sidechains, and that your sidechain model is still somehow not up to date with all the other kind of ideas around, 26:26 my point would be that the current campaign to propose BIP300 and 300.1 is completely dishonest in narrative, 26:34 because it's based on basically four points. 26:36 The first one is, sky is falling unless... Well, we do the Italian version. Sorry. 26:41 Sky is falling if we don't do this. This is a typical Roger Ver kind of approach. 26:46 Bitcoin is dead, you say, because it's going to fail if you don't do my thing, 26:50 which is also basically the same logic of many of the big cash people. 26:55 I can explain that, but I don't know how much time I'm going to have. 26:57 You will manage it. 26:58 Okay, one, two... 26:59 The second would be, my solution, unlike the others, has no negative sides. 27:04 Everything has trade-offs, except for Drivechain. Zero negative. 27:08 Well, that's four. Let me get there. 27:10 Third one is, since we cannot... Things that exist, like lightning, they are imperfect. 27:16 So instead of fixing that, improving gradually, we should do something completely new. 27:23 We should basically start from something that doesn't exist right now, which is a Drivechain. 27:26 Code exists. The Drivechain does not exist. 27:29 And the third one is basically that... Well, let's just go with these three. 27:33 We'll leave the fourth one for another debate. 27:36 Sky is falling. Let me tell you why I say that. 27:38 It's because I'm very familiar... This is this idea of the specialist versus the generalist, 27:42 which is, I know that this idea... Well, maybe I should skip to two, 27:45 because all it does is it takes unused op-nop5 and uses a count of 13,000. 27:50 So there's already a way to do that now without a soft fork. It would just suck. 27:55 And we could already just do this entire idea just by trusting the miners more. 27:59 We just handshake deal with them that they won't withdraw any of the coins early. 28:03 So we can already do this idea. The BIP300 idea is inevitable. 28:07 BIP300 is just the most efficient way. It's packaged up. 28:10 It's taking the unused op-nop5 and counting to 13,000. That really can't be bad. 28:15 If we do it and then it turns out bad somehow, we can just disable it the same way we turned it on. 28:21 And if we can't do that... 28:22 It would be a hard fork. 28:23 No, it's a soft fork. You just ban op-nop5 forever. 28:26 So then it's turned off the same way it was turned on. 28:29 And if we can't do that, then we can't stop miners from just turning op-nop5 on as op-Drivechain anyway. 28:34 So the whole thing is optional. You don't have to run BIP300, 28:38 even if you run an old node and you have no negative consequences if you don't even... 28:44 So to me, the reason why these are linked, because the reason why I say it has no downsides, 28:49 it has no downsides for the other people on L1. 28:52 The L2 people, of course, they have a trade-off. 28:55 But it's all about the L1 people. They have really no trade-off. 29:00 So the L2 people have the trade-off, but the L1 people don't. 29:03 And this whole separation that people are different is the whole point. 29:06 The L1, the first reason why you say, why do I say the sky is falling? 29:10 Because to me, the fact that this could even be controversial at all 29:15 speaks to how potentially doomed we are. 29:19 I actually think, I hope that I'm wrong, but I think there could be like a thousand ideas out there 29:23 that are like a really good idea, an arc, a CTV or something, 29:28 that would all make it as sidechains, but instead we will never hear about 29:32 or they'll never survive the process. 29:34 And I think that it contributes to people's decision 29:38 that they are going to look the other way. 29:40 Their third and final point was basically, 29:43 sure, maybe this idea is good for Bitcoin, 29:46 and it's good for all the people here in the audience. 29:48 But because of whatever, I don't feel great about things Paul says, 29:52 I'm just going to look the other way or whatever, 29:55 which is like some kind of absurd, corrupt favoritism of a kind. 29:59 I'm just going to say, well, the only thing that matters is whether or not it's a good idea, 30:03 and it's good for Bitcoin. So nothing else makes any difference. 30:05 Expand on that last point. 30:07 If something is harmless, but creates a precedent, for example, 30:11 to give miners direct control of funds, 30:14 to increase the political power of mining cartels, 30:17 or for example, if you say that the risk is opt-in, 30:20 so there is no negative for the L1 users, 30:23 but one negative would be that one Drivechain may actually be stolen by miners, 30:29 and if that happens, the users will be left between basically the hard place and the hammer. 30:36 The rock and the hard place? 30:37 Yeah, to choose between enforcing a censorship of this wrong withdrawal 30:43 that will require every user to either run the sidechain consensus 30:48 or to actually use weak subjectivity Ethereum style, 30:52 so just to use social networks. 30:54 This is just another example of why I feel dismayed 30:57 that the idea could even be controversial, 30:59 because the security model Drivechain is that the miners will prefer to take the fees, 31:03 and so if they steal, then they steal. 31:05 That's allowed and almost encouraged, 31:08 because they can have different sidechains that interfere with each other, 31:10 like two Namecoin sidechains at once, 31:12 so you actually want miners to shoot one of them in the head and get rid of them. 31:15 So they could do that, but even if they did, 31:18 even if they were pressured into doing this UASF, 31:21 the UASF is something that only affects the people who have chosen to opt-in. 31:25 Anyone who's just on vacation is okay. 31:27 No, it creates a precedent. 31:28 The only way people can coordinate to a UASF 31:31 is either running the node for the sidechain, 31:34 or asking, well, I agree. 31:36 Whether you do the UASF at all is opt-in, 31:38 and it also doesn't make any difference, 31:40 because if you try the UASF and you succeed, 31:42 then nothing bad happened to anyone, 31:44 because the miners backed down. 31:45 No, it did. It did. 31:46 And if you try the UASF and it didn't succeed, 31:48 then also nothing happened. 31:49 Paul, we had the coordination about consensus rule 31:51 that was not based on self-verification. 31:53 Coordination was being trusted. 31:55 So in order to know that I should censor this transaction 31:58 because it's not compliant to the BIP, 32:01 how can I know the sidechain state? 32:03 I ask the Truthcoin website blog, 32:05 or I run the entire sidechain consensus? 32:08 But I'm saying the fact that it's optional 32:11 precludes it from being problematic. 32:12 You don't have to go to the Truthcoin site. 32:14 You don't have to do anything. 32:15 You can just go to sleep. 32:17 You don't have to do a single thing. 32:18 But that's true for every Bitcoin debate. 32:20 We can just not run Bitcoin. 32:21 Whether the UASF succeeds or not, 32:23 your full node will do exactly the same thing. 32:25 You'll end up on the same chain as everyone else. 32:27 So this whole thing is in irrelevance. 32:29 But just to answer your question, 32:30 even if it were relevant, 32:32 this type of thing actually has happened all the time. 32:34 That happened with random emergencies 32:36 due to botched BIP16 activation or whatever, 32:41 and a value overflow bug or something like that. 32:44 So even in those cases, it still works. 32:46 But this is, again, a misunderstanding. 32:50 The L1 users do not need to care about this at all. 32:53 This is basically something that's like the Lightning Network 32:56 where one of the channel participants, 32:59 it's like a channel factory 33:01 where one of the participants is 51% of miners. 33:04 But if you're not using BIP300, 33:06 you can just ignore it completely. 33:07 You won't even realize that it's there. 33:09 You have no way of even knowing 33:10 whether or not it is being used or not. 33:12 You just have an indirect way of guessing 33:14 through all this other information. 33:15 You'd use Twitter or use Truthcoin website or something. 33:18 So if everybody, now we finish, 33:20 if, final question, 33:21 if everybody, except me, 33:23 will run the new code of BIP300, 33:25 so basically it will be overhelmed by economic consensus. 33:28 So there will be a giant sidechain, 33:31 that will be stolen. 33:33 You will campaign with me 33:34 not to do a change of consensus to censor it 33:37 because if you don't run the entire sidechain consensus, 33:40 you cannot choose unless you use social authorities. 33:44 The security model does not rely on any of this happening. 33:48 And you will campaign with me against that 33:50 because that would be a very bad precedent 33:51 to trust a blog to decide what to fork for, right? 33:54 Yeah, I think, 33:55 but in a way I want credit for it both ways 33:58 and I don't really apologize for that 33:59 because the thing is, 34:02 you're not, 34:03 it's like a natural disaster happens 34:06 and then people ask for donations. 34:07 You know what I mean? 34:08 You kind of want to complain either way. 34:10 You either want to say, 34:12 it's like if people feel sympathy 34:14 and they want to do something, 34:16 then they can try to do it. 34:17 Now imagine where they try and they fail. 34:21 They tried, they run the CUSF 34:23 and every 99 million percent of everyone tries 34:25 but they actually fail 34:26 and the miners extend one chain. 34:29 That's the chain that you're going to be on. 34:31 The people who have not done that, 34:32 they have basically hard forked. 34:34 They have said, 34:35 we reject the heaviest chain rule 34:37 and we have basically created a new thing 34:40 that would be new B-cash or whatever. 34:42 But they can already do that. 34:44 It has nothing to do with Drivechain though 34:46 because they can already do that. 34:47 So either miners decide 34:48 or people decide without knowing 34:50 if the consensus they're running is right or not. 34:52 So I agree that Drivechains are like a natural disaster 34:55 but I would not agree that's a good thing. 34:57 No, it's the sympathy that someone feels. 35:00 If they want to get involved 35:02 and do something, they can. 35:03 But they can't. 35:04 They can't run the consensus. 35:05 They can't know which one is right. 35:07 No, but they can know, 35:08 I don't know, 35:09 Okay, you're right. 35:11 Okay, so I was obviously right 35:14 and Paul was wrong 35:15 but I hope that was more to it during the debate. 35:19 Thank you. 35:23 Thank you Miami for the last three years 35:25 in this amazing city. 35:27 The whole world shut down 35:29 but Miami welcomed us with open arms. 35:33 We want to show Bitcoin to the whole world. 35:37 We are taking the conference on the road 35:40 to set the stage for Bitcoin in a new city. 35:57 Bitcoin 2024 is coming to Nashville in Tennessee 36:01 a city that is known as a music and freedom city. 36:04 Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville 36:06 from July 25th to 27th.