0:00 We do need a new coin in order to move forward. We've come very far, but I don't think we can go 0:06 much further from where we are. Should we just do nothing? Or should Bitcoin have more competition? 0:11 Paul, welcome to Bitcoin Rails. This is the second time you've been on Bitcoin 0:16 Rails. I'm very excited to have you here. Very excited to be here. 0:19 On this very special day, Paul, you dropped some insane news today. By the time this comes out, 0:26 you will have just dropped some insane news. I feel like I have a very special secret alpha 0:32 right now, although some people... You do. 0:35 Okay, so we're going to spill the beans right now, obviously. By the time people are seeing 0:39 this, the public will know, several people in private already know that you are planning to 0:46 fork Bitcoin. That's right. 0:48 Okay. Let's just back up for a second and give some context on this interesting news. 0:57 The purpose of this is to create a fork of Bitcoin that executes Drivechains, 1:02 specifically BIP300, BIP301. Is that accurate? 1:07 I think that is accurate. 1:08 Okay. You are, of course, the author of BIP300, BIP301, and the CEO of LayerTwo Labs, which is... 1:14 LayerTwo Labs primarily exists for the purpose of creating technologies that will ultimately 1:19 use Drivechains in BIP300/301. Is that fair? 1:23 All that is fair. That's true. 1:24 Okay. I was not expecting this to happen. I remember it was a couple months ago that I 1:31 heard whispers of this from your private investors, who we'll get into, sharing secretly, 1:38 FYI, Paul's going to fork, Paul's going to fork. 1:42 Well, yeah, I think Benjamin Franklin, he said, three people can keep a secret if two are dead. 1:50 But whatever, people are excited. 1:53 I think I remember I was telling you also, I was saying like, was it this person? Was it 1:56 this person? Was it this person? Whatever. And then you were like, no, no, no. 1:59 It wasn't any of those people. It was completely other people. No, 2:01 I think there were at least 40 people whispering about the fork at 2:04 Eat Denver that I was aware of. I know there was some number. 2:07 It is what it is. 2:09 It is what it is. But anyway, but this was surprising. Everyone was gleeful with, 2:14 I don't know exactly the emotion that I would describe it. Shock? Surprise? 2:19 There was some sort of element of something. 2:22 Okay. I didn't know any of that. I didn't go to Eat Denver this year, 2:25 but it's a nice school event. 2:29 I was a little surprised to hear, but I was curious. Maybe we should back up and tell the story. 2:32 Yes, it is surprising. Okay. Yes, we probably should. But yeah, I think there's a lot of 2:37 reasons why it would be surprising to people. One is that all the previous hard forks have failed, 2:42 and it's also like launching an altcoin or a shitcoin. 2:46 Basically. 2:47 Yes. 2:48 You are launching a shitcoin. 2:50 Yeah. But this is the thing is at the end of the day, I was a Bitcoin maximalist for like 15 years 2:58 or so, but we do need a new coin in order to move forward, I think. 3:04 We need a new coin. 3:06 Right. 3:07 So let's start there. Why do we need a new coin? Why is Bitcoin as it currently exists, 3:11 in your opinion, not working? 3:13 Well, we've come very far, but I don't think we can go much further from where we are. 3:18 And for a variety of reasons, it's very hard to get the exchange rate to go up from here. 3:24 It's very hard to get more users from here. It's very hard to do development from here. 3:28 It's very hard to get more mining revenue from here. 3:30 Because? 3:32 Well, it's hard to know exactly what would be the number one cause, 3:37 but really the culture in Bitcoin is, I think, kind of just like trapped in this kind of 3:44 de-sell mind virus, you know, like instead of people pushing for growth and usage, 3:52 but we have a situation where everyone is kind of just complacent and overconfident, I think. 3:57 Like there's like Bitcoin is inevitable mantra narrative? 4:00 Yes, exactly right. But you were just at Opnext. And so it was like, but see, even at Opnext, 4:04 it wasn't really, just from what you were telling me, and I didn't go there, but it was like, 4:11 people want to talk about the fashionable thing, the quantum thing, which is the fad. 4:16 But it's like, was there a lot about like, you know, actual development or new soft forks or? 4:24 Well, quantum related soft forks were a very big topic at Opnext this year. 4:28 Of course, it's easy. Like, this is the thing is these things are flash in the pan. Like, 4:32 it's very easy. They introduce a, right? Maybe you disagree. 4:37 Well, I think, okay, what I meant by that is like, you introduce something like 4:42 CTV or TxHash, you get a lot of attention. 4:47 Immediately, right? 4:47 That's what I'm talking about. But then how does anyone close the deal and get whereas the, 4:52 you know, whereas OP_CTV, like activation client. 4:56 No one has closed the deal since Tapper. 4:58 Right. And this is part of the problem, which is that this is one of the many 5:02 things that we could get into. I don't know. There's like a million threads to all of this, 5:07 but the soft fork is really like a completely risk-free, opt-in, reversible, 5:14 ignorable thing. And yet it has, it can bring us all these benefits. 5:20 And so the idea that, well, you know, we should be doing like two a week or something, 5:23 but instead we're doing zero, you know, year after year and we can't do them. And it's because 5:27 it just, it's become political football and anyone who sticks their neck out, you know. 5:34 I mean, it's the implication here that basically the soft forking process is broken such that now 5:38 hard forks are the only way to actually like actuate movement forward. 5:44 It's an irony that the soft fork was invented because the hard fork was too difficult. 5:49 But now the soft fork is so difficult that it's, I don't know if that's, there may be a, 5:54 there may be an irony to that. I think in general, we've reached the point where 5:59 I think a new competitor would at least be able to change the conversation or, 6:07 I think people out there really deserve a conversation on, you know, how Bitcoin should 6:12 make progress. And this is just an alternative and everyone gets free money. And so that's what 6:18 the hard fork is. It's funny how the amount of social stigma and like weird, irrational fear 6:28 and hatred of the hard fork is because every Bitcoiner just gets free money in return for 6:34 doing nothing. You could sell these coins and buy more BTC. But I think from past experience, 6:41 we can guess that a lot of people will complain. Fair enough. Okay. 6:47 Maybe even that's not true. Let's contextualize this almost certainly going to be controversial 6:54 hard fork move of yours with just like helping people understand a little bit like what drive 6:58 chains is, why Drivechains in the first place. When did you initially propose Bith300, Bith301? 7:05 Well, I proposed Drivechain in November 2015 and it was a long blog post. 7:11 And it had a different name then? It was just called Drivechain. 7:14 It was still called Drivechain. But that was before I had formalized it in the BIP repository, 7:20 which wasn't until a few later. So it actually just mostly lived as just kind of a blog post 7:24 because I was primarily interested in prediction markets back then. And I wanted to bring 7:28 prediction markets to Bitcoin back in 2015, like long as it's been 10 years before, you know, 7:35 Polymarket and stuff got big in the 2024 election. So I was really interested in that. 7:40 And a lot of other people were like, oh, how do we bring more privacy or more 7:44 scalability or even different block size to Bitcoin? This was 10 years ago. Blockstream 7:51 the company had started about they were going to do the sidechains idea, which they sort of never 7:57 finished really. But I was looking at what they had done because I'd worked on prediction markets. 8:03 I was like, how do we attach this to Bitcoin? And I wrote this post Drivechain about how to do the 8:08 deposits withdrawals from Bitcoin to other blockchain software. 8:13 Well, I mean, would you kind of give a quick TLDR on like how Drivechains like at its core guts 8:19 kind of works and what it does different than other sidechain proposals? 8:24 Mine are always governed by the mining process. So we don't have like special keys or like the 8:33 thing that a lot of people do. Have you seen that meme? There's a meme where the nice young 8:40 lady is talking to the camera and then like the whoever it is, like the husband or someone is 8:44 like at the door and he's saying, be honest, you know, she's like, oh, well, we were middle class. 8:48 And yeah, she's like, what car did your dad have? You seen this meme? No, it's a meme. It's a 8:53 where it's kind of like, what is the like the Victoria Beckham meme? Like that meme? Like, 8:57 oh, he drove a like, what's the fancy car? She's saying like that she grew up like 9:03 and then like the dad drove like a Porsche or something. 9:05 But this is this is Victoria Beckham. Victoria Beckham said this in real life. 9:09 And then everyone made fun of her. 9:11 And then so there's a meme and it's like, well, we have a fully decentralized L2 9:14 and then the guy's poking his head and he's like, he's like, what secures the funds on L1? 9:20 He's poking his head and she's like, and then at the end, she says a multi-sig. 9:23 Right, right, right, right, right. 9:24 So I don't have any of that. It's the mining process fully decentralized. 9:28 OK, fully trust does require obviously the software proposal, but but we're trying to 9:33 move away from federated multi-sig bridges. Right. The problem with the federation is it's 9:39 it's very similar to just giving all of your money to one guy and hoping that they give it back. 9:44 And it's just really the multi-sig is just one guy like times seven or something. 9:49 Right, right. 9:49 So it's not really that new or interesting. And it's kind of disappointing in the sense 9:55 that the whole point of Bitcoin itself was to get away from having your money like with someone, 10:00 someone else. 10:01 But you also think that this Drivechains proposal, BIP300, BIP301, 10:05 like you talked about miner incentives and miner alignment and all of these other kind of factors 10:09 that I think fundamentally make it a different proposal than something like maybe OP_CTV or 10:13 these sort of covenants enabling opcodes that purportedly create trustless bridging opportunities. 10:19 I think that that's a very good question. I think that 10:23 BIP300 is sort of simpler in many ways, but also a little bit more ambitious. 10:29 Like even it's hard to say because new stuff is invented all the time. 10:33 But I think even with something like CTV, the bridging part is not totally clear. 10:40 Whereas with BIP300, like it's designed as the bridge, like that's the whole purpose the whole 10:46 time. It's all about depositing, withdrawing to the other chains. Whereas with the other stuff, 10:54 it's like you have to do some kind of complicated extra structure. 10:58 So I don't know, I guess it's I suppose it's for the audience to decide how 11:02 complicated they think something is. But really BIP300, the idea is you would have 11:08 competition among the different developer groups. 11:11 So this is kind of like really important because the block size war was really about 11:17 some people didn't like what the Bitcoin core developers were doing. 11:21 Then what they immediately did is they eventually, not immediately, but eventually created Bitcoin 11:25 cash. And then they had their own other developer expert problems because that was invaded by like 11:31 CSW. And then also they had problems with Armory. And so they forked more times. 11:38 Uh, that was the stuff that was really dramatic in getting all the attention. 11:42 Like you think quantum gets a lot of attention now, but of course the block size war was this 11:46 epic like confrontation. There was drama and there was like, you know, a lot of money was 11:51 being spent. A lot of people were very frustrated. And so that's kind of what I was getting at with 11:58 this. Whereas CTV and these other things are kind of like a little bit more, I don't know, 12:05 artisanal like clothes or something, but not that they're bad. I think we should, as I mentioned 12:10 the last time I was on this podcast, we should do all, we should just do all of these because 12:15 there's really no risk. That's a controversial claim in itself. But to me, it's quite obvious 12:20 that there's no risk. And this is also what drives me to do the hard fork in the first place, 12:24 where it's kind of like, what is it that people just don't get about all this? It's all very 12:28 simple, really, no offense. But just to kind of give some context about, you know, BIP300, 12:32 BIP301 and kind of why it's important. I mean, I think like some key kind of facets about it 12:36 relative to other software proposals that, you know, ostensibly enabled Bitcoin Layer 2s are 12:41 things like miner alignment. There's, you know, competition in terms of like, there's only so 12:46 many L2s that can be created in the, you know, fundamentally sort of need to be, I guess, like 12:51 approved by the miners. I don't know how you would describe that. Yeah, there's these slots. In 12:54 practice, there's really like an unlimited number of slots per se, but there's only like, you know, 13:00 use one at a time. That's maybe not how I would best describe it, but you can only activate one 13:05 chain at a time. But the miners, it's kind of like they have like a storefront, or they have 13:09 like a shopping mall, and you want to move your store in. And, you know, the slots are all not 13:14 being used. So they'll give you a blank one or something. I think 256 is going to be more than 13:20 enough. I don't know. But if there's not, you can always have like BIP300, like two, or you can have 13:28 like sidechains of sidechains. So even though there's a limited number, I don't think it will. 13:33 The real thing, the real constraint on the sidechains is that they need transaction activity, 13:40 kind of like the storefront in a mall. You would need like, you know, customers. For the miners to 13:44 keep them alive. That's where the miner incentive really becomes like important. If they're not 13:48 being used, if they're not creating fees for the miners, they're going to die. They're going to 13:51 get replaced. Yes. Which, yeah. And in this weird situation, the miners are kind of like the mall 13:56 owner, and they get like 99.9. They get basically almost all of the profits from the storefront, 14:02 just because of the way merge mining works. Which I remember the last time we spoke about this topic, 14:07 and I'll link to our previous interview. One of the things that you said that might feasibly just 14:11 not work about all of these other L2s that have sort of been coming up over the past couple of 14:16 years is like, if the actual layer twos themselves and the sequencers that are, you know, kind of 14:22 generating the actual ecosystems of these L2s are not paying the miners in some way. Yeah, there's 14:29 going to end up being some sort of like war, right? Like if all the money ends up on the L2, 14:33 and the miners aren't getting fees, aren't getting paid, then, you know, the settlement layer will 14:37 eventually kind of fight back. That's exactly right. And I presented on this topic at, I think, 14:42 maybe the first Opnext. One of the Opnexts. You can find it, I'm sure, online if you're interested. 14:50 And yeah, so it's interesting to me, you mentioned the other bridges and the other L2s. 14:57 This idea is so old that back in 2015, there were really no viable altcoins. This was like 15:02 the beginning of Ethereum or something. So this sidechain idea was considered like, 15:10 we're not going to need Ethereum because we're just going to have, like, there wasn't even a 15:15 phrase like EVM or whatever. None of that stuff existed back then. It was like, oh, we don't need 15:20 any altcoins because it's all open source. We'll just bolt it onto Bitcoin. Then people ran into 15:24 this governance challenge of like, oh, what about the sometimes people don't disagree, you know, 15:29 but with the block size, there was huge, huge disagreement. And so you ran into this issue. 15:36 And then so I was thinking about like this L2 idea, you know, this whole time and then this 15:42 whole like Bitcoin Season 2, Bitcoin Layer 2, this is like all this stuff kind of happened later 15:46 because there was really no such thing as conversation about different L2s. It was all 15:51 like Lightning Network because Lightning Network was old and that was what everyone wanted to try. 15:56 Another reason why we have to do the hard fork is that Lightning Network is deranging the entire 16:01 culture and has made everyone kind of lose their minds. People can look at my TabConf 16:07 debate, but you could see it's been put very clearly that the Lightning Network cannot scale 16:12 us to eight billion people, but BIP300 can. And so it's again, it's a no brainer, but yeah. 16:17 Do you think that not only BIP300, BIP301 in your proposals, but maybe some of these other, 16:23 you know, soft fork covenants enabling proposals have been dismissed 16:26 large or not activated or not pushed forward sufficiently because of Lightning Derangement 16:31 Syndrome and because people want to protect Lightning as like the L2? Like, is that a factor 16:35 in your opinion? I think all the, I don't know. We have to do our like armchair psychologist 16:40 like moment, right? Like, cause I don't know, but my guess is that all of the derangements 16:45 are related somehow because I think that actually you hit like streaks of things. Like people hit 16:49 like they hit like a golden age or they like everything's going well in your life. Like 16:54 things are going well and then you're in a good mood and so you're more forgiving of that guy 17:00 who cut you off or whatever it is, you know? So I think things go well together. Like you're 17:05 making more money at work so you can go on a nice vacation or you can like fix stuff before it 17:10 breaks. So I think things usually go well in an overlapping way. And then when things go wrong, 17:16 I think they also go wrong in an overlapping way. So I think that partially the Lightning 17:21 Derangement has made people less honest overall about Bitcoin's technical limitations. 17:27 And so I think that that has made people just want to not think about solving the problem. 17:34 And instead they're more interested in just proposing a really, really convoluted 17:39 ARK supernode or... Well, they were heavily invested in it too. I mean, there's like so 17:43 much, I mean, that's sort of my take on it is that there's a lot of like lightning bag holders 17:48 weirdly. People have equity in lightning companies. Exactly. It's kind of like a little bit of a 17:53 shit coin in a way. Huge amount of VC money invested into lightning and a lot of like 17:59 real belief that this was the future and high levels of conviction that's hard to actually 18:04 backtrack on. Yeah. And of course a technical person, they may invest like a few months or 18:11 even years mastering something and then how valuable that is to their career depends on 18:17 whether or not that has a future or not. Do you think there are other reasons? I mean, 18:23 just to kind of, I think this is like a good, like nice little thing to just 18:28 put a little touchpoint on. Why else do you think soft fork activations have become so difficult 18:34 to execute? I have to say, I really, I'm totally baffled by it, honestly, but it is worth talking 18:40 about. I think part of it is that I don't know how important this is, but I have a total shot 18:45 in the dark about like, there was a time you may remember when, okay, Michael Saylor started to get 18:50 big. No one had heard of him before 2020, which would make him like a newcomer in my calendar, 18:57 but he showed up and then he had this argument about like, there's a big difference between 19:01 Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is that Ethereum is going to be deemed a security. This was like 19:06 really important to him. And that was like, Ethereum changes all the time. It's got people 19:09 running it. So it's, maybe you don't even, you're kind of like laughing, but like, this was kind of 19:13 like this weird argument that we have to pitch Bitcoin as something that doesn't change the 19:20 ossification. The ossification became a feature not a bug. Ossification is broadly seen as a feature 19:25 not a bug. That part is old, but there was this new idea, like, because ossification didn't mean 19:31 no soft forks. Oh, really? Yeah, that's not the way I remember it. What do you think ossification, 19:36 because when I hear the word ossification, I think no soft forks. No code changes. Ironically, 19:41 I thought it meant no hard forks. The interesting thing is that the code is changing all the time, 19:47 even without the soft forks. Oh, interesting. So this is something that is very straightforward. 19:52 But there's really no such thing as no code upgrade. Like every piece of software needs 19:56 to be upgraded. But many people believe that. Many people believe that ossification means that, 20:00 I think. I think you're right. And even if you thought, even if you wanted no code changes, 20:08 it doesn't matter. Because just culturally, the way, there's this phrase like dev is going to 20:12 dev or something. I don't know if you've heard this, but it's like people can't help themselves. 20:16 They like to get their hands on the code and change it around. This is a desire. It's like 20:22 a human desire. This is like people do this for fun. So Bitcoin Core, they have their weird culture 20:27 and they have their weird, and they put out a version every six months or so. We just had version 20:32 31. And you can look online, you can look at on GitHub and see there's lots of commits. There's 20:37 lots of pull requests. But even the sound money people, the economics focused people, they don't 20:41 like that. To your point, who knows to what extent they're even aware that it's happening? 20:46 That it's happening. Do they even have any idea? And every now and then, a CVE, critical 20:51 vulnerability, would be introduced accidentally. Because devs deving? 20:56 Yes. Devs deving themselves right into structural problems? 21:00 I have an example I always use, although I always have to apologize to Matt Corallo because I don't 21:05 want to single him out. But it's a great example of, he tried to shave like six, maybe six 21:11 billionths of a second off of some multiplication or something, and he accidentally 21:16 introduced an inflation bug that was caught by the Bitcoin Cash developer and privately 21:22 disclosed. And then they had to secretly fix it, or however it is. And this is how these things go, 21:26 though. And of course, that was neither a hard fork nor a soft fork in the sense of something 21:32 that is discussed widely because it all happened accidentally and in secret. 21:36 It was just like a minor code change. 21:37 It could not have actually been exploited in practice because so many people would run old 21:41 versions and no one would ever allow an inflation bug block to be in the chain. But that's a 21:49 perfect example of the code changes all the time. There was this thing, Heartbleed. People can look 21:56 up the dependencies change. When you build a house, even if you build a house from 22:01 scratch, you don't build like the screws from scratch. You know what I mean? You don't build 22:06 like the two by fours. That would literally take like a thousand years or something if you had to 22:10 do that. So you go to Home Depot and you get like lumber, you get insulation, you get windows, 22:16 and you get carpet or whatever. You know what I'm saying? 22:18 So when you build Bitcoin, there's all these dependencies. Those are being updated all the 22:23 time. Sometimes those have flaws. So the ossification people, I think they just have 22:29 not a single clue like even what they're even thinking about or talking about, which I'm not 22:34 even trying to knock them or anything. I'm just saying like... 22:36 It's just misinformed. 22:37 They just don't even like... It's hard to know what to even say to someone like that. 22:40 But the complete dis-ease or unease of being able to execute Softworks as a community, 22:49 I mean, any other like kind of thoughts about like what might be causing it? 22:52 It's a very important topic. Someone should think more about it. I think in general, 22:58 I was talking about all the derangements are related. I think it's easy for something to 23:03 evolve towards stasis, like a culture. And then when something is static, anyone who sticks their 23:10 neck out to do anything, because you don't know how downstream... Like if someone said 23:15 like you're on a desert island and everyone has a certain religion and a certain way of farming 23:20 or something. Even if someone has a new dance or a new joke, you don't necessarily know. 23:26 Maybe it'll cause the whole society to unravel. So I think people do become... 23:30 But I don't know. 23:31 Or are we just too big for like functional decentralized governance? 23:34 I think that's also a part of it, which is that the bigger it gets... 23:37 There's just too many voices. 23:38 It's too hard to reach people. It's too hard to... So I think these are all related. 23:44 Consensus gets harder the larger the group gets, ultimately. 23:47 Right. 23:47 Notably, it was easy. Satoshi himself did at least two hard forks in the first two years of Bitcoin. 23:55 He changed the longest chain to the heaviest chain and he introduced all the op-nops. 24:02 But you started to feel frustrated about this 24:05 at the first time I ever met you, which was probably at least two years ago. 24:09 You were feeling frustrated about this. 24:11 Well, really the whole time. Because again, in my conception, 24:15 all the soft forks have basically zero cost. I mean, of course, there is a cost of... 24:21 You're going to edit the software and there could be bugs and someone's going to have... 24:24 People have to maintain the software. So I can completely understand how Bitcoin Core 24:28 doesn't just want random people coming in there and rearranging their living room or whatever 24:33 and saying, like, I'll put all this code here or something. 24:36 Sure. 24:37 But really, the benefits of each of these... Many of these things have been proposed, 24:43 even whatever, op-vault or whatever, op-cat. It's really bizarre. 24:47 The cost is really low. The benefit is very high. 24:51 OK, but I remember. So I'm bringing this up because specifically when we met two years ago, which was actually, I think, in Denver, maybe it was even three years ago, I don't remember, but you had already started to think about, well, like, what are my other options, right? 25:03 No, I had thought about this even like in 2017 or something. 25:06 Oh, even in 2017. 25:09 The thing is, Bitcoin has done very, very well. And despite... There's always been weird, irrational people in Bitcoin and like weirdo people, of course, which is fine. 25:23 But it was always an open question, even the scaling more like I was a small blocker. So we won. But it was kind of like, is this really how we're going to, you know, whenever there's a disagreement, it's just going to be... I think people took from that the lesson that the more conservative side will always win, which has created... 25:44 It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy of that. 25:48 And I wanted to mention one other ossification thing if I could quickly, which is that there's an overlap between like the property rights, kind of like Austrian econ people. They love like, you know, a contract is a contract, fixed supply, like they don't want any of the rules changing. I think that's a very good thing. And I think that's always been a part of Bitcoin. 26:11 The software completely respects that by saying you don't have to upgrade. Your old node will still do what it was doing before. 26:17 Softworks, I remember you saying at one point, are quote, a gift from God. 26:21 Yeah, it's the fact that it's even possible is astounding. And one of the main drawbacks of a lot of these convoluted L2s that are not mined is that it's very hard to upgrade them. The ZK-SNARK or even a BitVM, it will be very hard to upgrade them. It's kind of like if there's a bug or if you want to make an upgrade, you have to do like a completely new scheme, but that's not true for... 26:44 So, I mean, I think what we can take away from this, and my understanding is you would absolutely love to soft work, but that is just seeming socially and from a governance perspective, not unlikely anytime soon. And so you're sort of taking matters into your own hands. Two years ago, what was your original, because let's talk about CUSF for a second. 27:01 Yes. 27:21 And then they began to tell my friend or whatever. But this is yet another example of like reducing the cost of the soft fork even further. And yet still, we can't do it. 27:31 Meaning reducing the risks associated with it even further. Like you literally don't even need to touch Bitcoin Core. 27:36 Right. There's no pull request for them. 27:38 Explain what CUSF is really. 27:39 CUSF is a Core Untouched Soft Fork. So you have Bitcoin Core and then you have basically like a second thing, which is like a second Bitcoin Core that adds the soft fork. 27:48 Similar to an Ordinals client for folks who know what that is, right? So it's like you're not touching L1, but you're layering this sort of, I mean, Casey calls it like sort of like a lens through which you can look at layer one and then you can sort of make decisions about what transactions and how you want to execute them and sort of, yeah, execute new software sort of on top. Is that fair? 28:08 Yes, because now this is your own new thing. This is your own playpen. So you can write it in Rust or you can do whatever you want. And you can put, you can add, you can take op-nop-5 and use, make that be op-Drivechain or op-cat or op-ctv, whatever you like. 28:21 The only new part really is that you just have, you just tell your client, your new client to kick back to Bitcoin Core and run invalidate block and declare the block invalid if it breaks the new soft fork rule. This accomplishes exactly the same thing as the soft fork upgrade would, but now Bitcoin Core is completely, not a single line of code has changed in Bitcoin Core. 28:45 And this sort of brings up, I think, an important point because I think the Ordinal's example is very helpful for like sort of understanding how this works. But meaningfully, you know, obviously Casey's Ordinal's client didn't have any real implications for consensus. This would. So you actually need miners to run this, which is the key distinction between something like Ordinal's and like a Drivechains CUSF. 29:06 That's exactly right. And so if you have more than 50% miners, then the soft fork activates and can be safely used by everyone. And the miners will collect transaction fees from these new transactions as well. If you have less than 51%, then it's as if you did nothing and you didn't achieve anything. 29:22 And you actually started to, so again, when we first met, you were like in the process of building this CUSF kind of overlay software. And I believe you had several conversations with miners about whether or not they might be willing to run this. How did those conversations go? 29:37 Well, it's weird because some of the miners are very like, the mining story is another derangement, I think, because the miners have been like losing all this money. And you see like even like the mining stage is renamed the energy stage, the miner magazines renamed energy. So there's all these people, all the miners are pivoting to like AI and like data centers and stuff. They're losing all this money. 29:59 But the miners, like it's very hard to like understand. It doesn't make any sense. Just like why doesn't Bitcoin Core do more soft forks? It doesn't make any sense. Just like basically all this doesn't make any sense because all this stuff would be good for the Bitcoin price, the Bitcoin brand. This would let like different groups of people get what they want without hurting. So really none of it makes any sense. 30:20 Was your pitch to miners, this is good for you? 30:23 Yeah, absolutely. In particular, since I'm an advocate of the merge mine L2. 30:26 merge mining is the pitch for miners. 30:28 But even if I weren't, like they could do OP_CAT or CTV. Maybe they wouldn't collect more merge mining transaction fees, but they could unilaterally do this soft fork, which again, they could also just shut it off later at any time and deactivate the soft fork. That may have some implications for anyone who used it. 30:46 It would not be hard to turn this on and off. 30:49 It's theoretically possible to just completely shut it off. All the miners could turn it on and then they could all just say, well, we actually don't like this anymore and just they could all just shut it off or 51% of them could shut it off. 30:58 It's much easier to reverse than an actual soft fork. 31:00 Exactly right. And so the question is, you know, why? But I think the miners are just very, they have been trained to just be like on autopilot. 31:13 And so even though it's interesting, like individually, a lot of them would be in for it, in favor of it, but then they would want to know like what other miners think. 31:25 So I can plug my tiny little event on day two in Las Vegas. I have like a happy hour event, like a room with an open bar, which is at 5pm on day two of the Vegas event. 31:37 So maybe we'll all get everyone in the same room and it'll all make sense. 31:42 The challenge with miners is that they really only want to put capital resources and energy into making these sort of big, what they probably perceive as like friction laden changes. 31:54 If they know that all the other miners are going to run it and that it's going to be successful. 31:58 It's really not that much resources, though, because it's like free software. 32:02 That they can shut off later, so it is, but it's really not that much. 32:06 There are a lot of very, they might perceive it that way, though, is there. 32:09 I mean, they are worried about there's a lot of conflicts of interest. 32:13 I think I have to I want to reiterate that I honestly have no idea what's why this is all happening, because to me, it's like everyone is just like lighting all their money on fire for absolutely no reason. 32:22 And it doesn't make any sense to me at all. 32:25 And I think the crown jewel is that the hard fork is just giving everyone more free money and people will complain about it. 32:30 So that's the crown jewel of just like none of this makes any. 32:33 None of it makes sense. 32:34 So we're going to get someone in the comments section can explain to me, then that would be great. 32:38 Because I don't understand. 32:39 This is a good segue into the hard fork. 32:41 How did the hard fork really come up? 32:43 Because I want to finish this point about them, because the question is, like, why, if the miners were rational? 32:50 Maybe I should put a different way, but if the miners were willing to just say, OK, listen, we can we can cut the Gordian now we can we can activate some of these soft forks. 33:01 You know, we wouldn't need to do the hard fork, but they so that but in the mining world, it works are way riskier for miners. 33:08 Did you tell them that you were thinking about? 33:11 Either it's a different it's this hard fork is the same hashing algorithm. 33:15 No, I didn't tell any of them. 33:17 OK, because that's way riskier for them. 33:21 I mean, well, they have to choose which block. 33:23 But actually, which is risky. 33:25 I actually think it depends. 33:26 So if you have a different hashing algorithm, then they can't mine it. 33:31 Right. 33:32 Because you got this ASIC chip that only does shot 256. 33:36 And so if you switch it to something else, they can't mine it. 33:39 But if it's you have to make a choice, they have to make a choice, which chain they're going to mine. 33:44 Then all they have to do is say, well, hey, this is the market price multiplied by the block rule. 33:49 This is like how much money I can earn U.S. dollar terms by mining this block over here. 33:55 And here's the cost, which is based on the difficulty over here. 33:59 So they have one subtraction that they do and then they do a different subtraction. 34:03 So even if the price is much, much lower, it's possible the difficulty over over there. 34:08 It's even lower. 34:09 So then they kind of it's just like another option for them. 34:11 So they like make the calculation and it's like a little bit. 34:15 The soft fork is more of like we are imposing our. 34:20 Soft fork on everyone, although that's not how I would describe it, but it's a little bit more. 34:24 The hard fork is more of like a choice thing. 34:26 The reason the hard fork is disruptive, I think, is because you have a hold second coin. 34:31 It's going to be a different exchange rate. 34:33 You're kind of telling people to leave Bitcoin in a way. 34:36 Right. Although I would hold the coin. 34:39 If you hold the wrong coin and it dumps, that's a big risk to normal people who don't. 34:43 If you're new to this and which is to say if you joined after Michael Saylor, then you should just hold both. 34:49 All one coin of each and be very suspicious of people who tell you to sell all of one by the other. 34:56 Although, of course, is those you own your coins and you do whatever you want with them. 35:01 All right, guys, taking a quick moment to thank my new sponsors of the show. 35:05 First off, the one and only LayerTwo Labs pushing forward research and development of Drivechains. 35:11 Drivechains were first introduced as a soft fork proposal to Bitcoin, a.k.a. BIP300, BIP301. 35:17 These BIPs essentially propose a bridging mechanism between Bitcoin and layer twos that are incentive aligned with miners. 35:23 And they've gotten a ton of attention over the last couple of years. 35:27 If you're curious about how Drivechains could work in practice, though, 35:31 check out LayerTwoLabs.com and download their alternative front end to Bitcoin Core. 35:35 It lets you play with Drivechains and see how they actually work in real life. 35:40 I'd also like to introduce Hashi, an alternative primitive to traditional L2s that allows users to execute a wide range of Bitcoin DeFi activities without having to trust a federated bridge. 35:52 With Hashi, Bitcoin is controlled by an MPC wallet that requires a quorum of proof of stake validators on the SUI network to execute Bitcoin transactions based on the validity of smart contracts. 36:05 At least a third of the staking power of the SUI validators network is required to execute these MPC mint and redeem transactions, 36:13 which is a substantive improvement in trust assumptions relative to other L2s or sidechain bridges. 36:19 Hashi's commercial team is also stacked, including a crew of former builders from the crypto division of Meta. 36:26 I think we're going to see a suite of super competitive Bitcoin DeFi products built with this protocol, 36:31 so definitely check out the Hashi page on sui.io if you're curious. 36:36 Last but not least, shout out to Bitbox. 36:39 Bitbox is one of the easiest and most simple to use Bitcoin hardware wallets on the market right now. 36:45 If you have friends or family members that you want to make sure stay safe and use cold storage, 36:50 but maybe they're not the most Bitcoin native people in the world, I highly recommend checking out Bitbox. 36:56 They're completely open source, no compromises on security, but they're also super easy to use, really intuitive UX. 37:04 Plus, you can use them with concierge multi-sig services like Unchained, which I'm personally a big fan of. 37:10 If you want to check out their hardware wallets, go to bitbox.swiss and use code BITCOINRAILS to get a discount. 37:17 All right, back to the show. 37:19 So let's back up for a second. 37:20 So how did you come to the conclusion, you know, you're selling this CUSF software to miners with like some kind of, let's call it like, 37:28 it sounds like sort of like a similar experience where it's like you're only getting so far with that strategy. 37:33 I don't get it because again, there's these conflicts of interest like the mining pools. 37:38 It's easier for them to be specialists and they're the ones who run the software and they're the ones who assemble the transactions into a block. 37:44 And then the other, the regular miner people, they're focused on getting like cheap power, cheap cooling. 37:53 To them, they're not really thinking about the tech that much. 37:55 Many of them are not even Bitcoiners. 37:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 37:57 So they just think, see, this is any other mining thing. 37:59 Right. 38:00 Now it's even weirder because they haven't made this huge capital investment. 38:05 But maybe the ASIC chip is a small percentage of that compared to like the cooling and whatever. 38:10 So now maybe they want to pivot to AI. 38:13 The mining pools, they are terrified of losing because a mining pool mostly owns its brand. 38:21 That's its main asset. 38:22 Yeah, they don't always lose users, basically. 38:25 Right. 38:26 The individual hashers, people with the ASIC chips, they may be invested like millions of dollars. 38:34 Right. 38:35 And they can point their hash rate at a different pool, like at the drop of a hat. 38:41 Oh, hard fork, so, so, so, so, so scary and risky for pools in particular, I would imagine. 38:46 Well, it's interesting. 38:48 I'm still just trying to get at the idea of like, OK, the pools. 38:53 They also like if the pools compete against other pools. 38:57 Mm hmm. 38:58 If something would save Bitcoin, they may not actually care because think about it. 39:03 If maybe you're a pool and you're worried about, OK, I only have I have only got 10 percent of the market or something. 39:08 Your your luck. 39:09 So you have 5 percent. 39:10 You're thinking, how do I get something on the other pool? 39:14 But here's the thing. 39:15 If I say, oh, 51 percent runs this, we all get it. 39:18 Then there's no benefit to like there's no specific benefit to Foundry or whatever. 39:23 Because you're not getting any more user there. 39:25 You're you're not outperforming anyone. 39:27 Same percentage or whatever it is. 39:29 Yeah, it doesn't really matter. 39:31 So there are other things you could do, because like you say, we're going to get a 51 percent coalition and we're going to stomp out the other minor. 39:38 But this is very unstable for reasons I could explain. 39:42 This is called the divide a dollar game in games theory. 39:45 Whenever there's a pie chart, you can break out this. 39:47 I'm not going to give up this question, which is like, what was the moment where you were like, OK, I'm doing this now. 39:52 We're going to hard work. 39:53 We're doing it. 39:54 Let's go. 39:55 Well, it was a gradual process because. 39:57 But really, I was I was concerned even as early as scaling one, which was in September 2015, which is even before I came up with Drivechain, because I was really worried, like, OK, this is how we're going to resolve this block size dispute. 40:10 And it did seem like people were mostly just concerned with like, how can I one up the other side? 40:14 Or I already know that I'm right. 40:16 And why am I even here talking to these other? 40:18 And it did seem very immature the whole time. 40:21 And so even. 40:22 But of course, I thought I always thought someone would do sidechains. 40:26 Maybe Blockstream would actually ship such a technology. 40:30 I know it's funny. 40:31 I never did. 40:32 It is funny. 40:33 I don't even mean to laugh. 40:34 It's just the way you say it makes me laugh. 40:36 I thought like, you know, I thought maybe I did see you on Twitter. 40:38 Be like, do they do things? 40:39 It's funny. 40:40 Like, you know, OK, maybe the lightning network would work. 40:42 Or maybe another thing is I was a huge skeptic of Bitcoin cash. 40:46 But, you know, it was like maybe like, you know, someone would just like maybe that would just work. 40:52 And it would be like this would be the the configuration that works for eight billion people, because I have a kind of quirky belief that we have to we have to get to eight billion people. 41:03 We have to get to 100 percent of the earth or like 100 percent of the Internet users. 41:08 We have to get to that eventually. 41:10 So if we're not running towards that as fast as we can, we might just kill the whole project. 41:16 Can you share why? 41:17 Because I don't necessarily think that all Bitcoiners even think that. 41:20 I know. 41:21 I think a lot of people don't. 41:22 But it's to me, it's critical that eight billion people are using Bitcoin on chain. 41:26 Right. 41:27 Specifically, that that's really hard to say. 41:29 It's not necessarily on chain, but I do think since we have the custodial way, that's fair. 41:34 Yes, right. 41:35 They should be paying mining transaction fees. 41:37 Why is that? 41:38 Is that important because of the fee market? 41:40 Is that the core? 41:41 No, I really just see it as like. 41:45 It's kind of like a capture the flag game or like a commanding heights, like in the military, there's like this hill in the middle of the game. 41:52 Everyone, you know, we all like spawn around the edge and there's a hill in the middle because it's a strong network effects with money. 42:00 I mean, if someone gets if someone out there gets to eight billion users with like WeChat pay or something or Venmo. 42:06 But you don't think network effects extend to like custodial solutions, for instance. 42:10 I mean, like everything has network effects. 42:13 And also everything has a lot of some some anti network effects. 42:17 The custodial solutions are having major network effects, arguably. 42:20 Right. I mean, most people use custodial. 42:22 Well, even for Bitcoin, I mean. 42:24 Yes, that's absolutely right. 42:26 So you think that then that people being able to use not even being able to, but actually using Bitcoin in a self custodial way for payments is important for ultimately Bitcoin's network effects over time? 42:38 Let's just imagine that there was a parallel community that just didn't make this mistake, but it's the same 21 million Bitcoin, the same same fixed supply. 42:46 It's got keys. 42:47 You know, you you have like a private key that controls your wallet. 42:50 It's not like you log in with like an email and a password. 42:54 So you have something that's just very similar to Bitcoin that's sprinting towards, you know, it's trying to take capture the hill as quickly as possible. 43:02 There's this idea in the military, like the commanding heights are like the thing. 43:08 Once you if you take this, it will be too difficult for anyone. 43:12 You know, it'll just lead to like a loss of life. 43:15 Once you capture like the fortress or like, you know, you have the castle and if you can capture it, then everyone else will just surrender. 43:24 And so I'm imagining the castle like a number of users, like it's like it's like three point nine billion users or something. 43:31 Once you get to that, everyone will just say this is the future. 43:36 And they want no one's going to care about, you know what I mean? 43:39 Like, let's say hypothetically, for whatever reason, just pick anything. 43:42 I want to pick something that probably no one would care about, like Dogecoin or something. 43:46 Imagine Dogecoin is actually really not in a joke way being used by three point nine billion people. 43:53 And they actually are like, oh, and when you go to the supermarket in India, you know, people are paying with Dogecoin or something. 43:59 No one's at that certain point. 44:00 No one's going to care about like that. 44:03 One used to be the number two coin or that that Monero was the first to add ring. 44:08 No one's going to care about any of that. 44:09 It's all just going to be a snowballing effect and everything else will go to zero. 44:13 I think I'll be in some museum somewhere. 44:15 I completely agree with you. 44:16 And this is something actually Robin Linus and I talk about a lot. 44:19 He's banging the drum on this, but I'm curious if you could summarize in a sentence why it's important that let's call it three point nine or this sort of critical mass of people be using Bitcoin specifically self-custodially and paying fees. 44:31 Rather than, you know, three point nine billion, you know, kind of using exchanges or custodians or whatever. 44:38 We could skate by with the custodians, but it's just it's too easy. 44:42 You know what I mean? 44:43 It's like a crutch. 44:44 And it's like I think it leads to like a very serious problem down the road. 44:50 Like if you have a custodian, it means all the money's in one place. 44:54 It could be hacked. 44:55 It could be mismanaged. 44:56 This is how you get FTX, Mt. 44:59 And that's how you lose adoption ultimately. 45:01 That's how network effects are reversed. 45:02 People are not going to like that. 45:03 And that is kind of like, you know, why even do any of this if we wanted to do like, you know, if it's just going to be custodial and you just log in with your phone number or your email and your password. 45:14 What's the point? 45:15 Well, you don't need proof of work. 45:16 You don't need the blockchain. 45:17 You don't need any of this stuff. 45:18 So it's kind of like it's a depressing question to get in a way because it's kind of like maybe we don't need any of this stuff. 45:27 But then that begs the question. 45:28 Oh, okay. 45:29 But most users are doing it that way. 45:31 People try to have a thing. 45:32 I think this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where lightning doesn't work. 45:36 And people don't want to say people they know that there's something real at the core of Bitcoin. 45:42 There is something good. 45:44 And they don't want to say this sucks just because lightning doesn't work. 45:48 And so then they're like, where does that leave them? 45:51 They just say, well, I use lightning, but it's custodial lightning. 45:55 But whatever. 45:56 They make their peace with it somehow. 45:57 Whereas if they had something. 46:00 Non custodial that worked, they might go for that, I think. 46:05 So you would defend that you think that the reason why Bitcoin has not been adopted, essentially for the payments use case, right, is because the tech doesn't work? 46:14 Yes. 46:15 I think a lot of people say there's no demand. 46:18 I think this is, again, like these things are all related. 46:22 So it's very hard to figure out. 46:23 Anyone could make a mistake, including me. 46:26 But I think I remember what it was like in like 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. 46:31 There was like a geometric increase in adoption. 46:34 And then we hit the scaling war. 46:36 And I think the large blockers were wrong in the scaling war. 46:39 And I've gone on many Bitcoin Cash podcasts and I've told them they're wrong to their face and why. 46:45 And I made giant lists of things they should do differently and whatever. 46:51 So I think they were wrong. 46:54 But nonetheless, I think it's a historical fact that there was huge adoption, merchant adoption. 47:00 And people were more positive about this pre-block size war. 47:05 And then after the block size war, no one wanted to be like accused of being a large blocker. 47:10 So everyone sort of stopped talking about adoption. 47:14 People would say, oh, you're like a Roger Ver or something. 47:17 As if that was the worst thing in the world. 47:19 Four letter word. 47:20 And then it would be like, oh, but how are we going to buy coffee? 47:25 And then people would make fun of you and stuff like that. 47:27 All this stuff has a lot of nuance. 47:30 But yeah, this is why if there are no users, it does become just like a Ponzi scheme. 47:37 It does become like a greater fool theory. 47:40 Right? Doesn't it? 47:41 I mean, because at the end of the day, if you think about it. 47:45 Because it's not really executing on its purpose of being like permissionless money at that point. 47:49 I think there's a little more to it than that, which is like imagine out of it. 47:52 Let's say we ranked all eight billion people in the world. 47:55 And we pick like the last hundred people to adopt Bitcoin, like on the timeline. 48:01 They can't get an ROI. 48:04 You know what I mean? 48:06 They have the normal ROI that you get from the fact that world GDP is growing and the supply is fixed. 48:12 But everyone gets that. 48:13 And maybe the ratio of broad money to the ratio of GDP is that also is changing over time. 48:18 But every single person gets that. 48:20 So, you see what I mean? 48:21 The last guy to adopt Bitcoin, number eight billion and four or something. 48:26 They can't get an ROI out of it. 48:29 So, they had to adopt because everyone around them did and they need to use it for payments. 48:33 You know what I mean? 48:34 So, we can kind of color these people. 48:36 We can highlight them. 48:37 These are the real users. 48:39 They adopted only. 48:41 They avoided investing. 48:43 And they're only adopting to be a user. 48:46 But you can flip it around and say, oh, what about like Hal Finney, like the first user, but like the first adopter, really. 48:53 Or the early investors in Bitcoin. 48:55 The early people in Bitcoin, they would buy it thinking this will transform. 49:01 I mean there were some people using it on Silk Road, of course. 49:03 Of course. 49:04 To buy illegal drugs. 49:05 But, you know, and there's a lot. 49:06 Clear market demand. 49:07 There was ransomware and there was all this other weird stuff happening, which was, you know, very interesting to see. 49:12 And it was very interesting to see that it worked in a real world context of like drug addicts could get this to work. 49:17 You know what I mean? 49:18 Because you kind of think like, will this have product market fit? 49:20 Oh, there's a bunch of like heroin addicts who use it like every week. 49:24 And you're kind of like, oh, that is striking if you think about it. 49:28 But the early adopters, they can buy hoping for a number go up. 49:34 But at a certain point, these lines kind of must meet and must cross. 49:41 Where all the later people, they are not getting an ROI. 49:45 So you have to get the ROI first and then you need the last people to adopt. 49:49 And if you can't pull that off, then there's no reason for the ROI to exist in the first place. 49:52 It does become. 49:53 Just a Ponzi scheme, and it does become greater fool theory. 49:54 OK, so this is your core why. 49:56 Ultimately, I think, yeah, like we will die if we don't aggressively pursue growth. 50:01 I think you're either growing or dying. 50:02 OK, so so you so you make this decision. 50:05 You're moving forward. 50:06 You set up this website. 50:07 I heard these rumblings at ETH Denver. 50:09 Paul's going to fork like with almost this like smirk on the face of these people giving me this intel. 50:15 And everyone was very proud. 50:16 Everyone who told me was very proud, like I have a secret to tell you, which is great marketing for you. 50:21 You did a very good little underground talking about it. 50:24 I said, keep it secret. 50:26 Great underground. 50:27 I thought it was great underground marketing. 50:29 Personally, it's like, wow, everyone feels special that they have a secret that, you know, I think that does help. 50:33 It does. 50:34 It does. 50:35 And you raise money out of this. 50:36 OK, so let's talk about this. 50:38 So so so notably, right? 50:40 You is it? 50:42 I mean, this is a very, very important thing. 50:44 You is it? 50:46 I mean, there is not. 50:47 Is it pre mining? 50:47 Like, how would you describe this is a very good. 50:50 This will be a very controversial decision. 50:52 This is critical, but it's very important to the logic of the project, which is that, yeah, we're taking this is funny. 50:59 I even this idea long predates the quantum drama. 51:03 So this is nothing to do. 51:04 It's just a weird coincidence that everyone's talking about. 51:06 Oh, Satoshi's coins and they're they're they're not in paid to pub key hash. 51:11 So they are vulnerable. 51:12 They're extra vulnerable to quantum. 51:14 It's a complete coincidence. 51:15 But yeah, we're taking half, probably less than half. 51:17 Half of Satoshi's Satoshi's coins in the hard fork and to seed the new group of. 51:24 So it's five hundred thousand coins in total that you are basically siphoning off of this fork to effectively pre-sell to investors. 51:32 Yeah, there is a he has a stash of one point one ish million coins. 51:38 And there's this thing that Potosi pattern. 51:40 It's very interesting. 51:41 Even when I was first looking into it, I was very skeptical. 51:43 But actually, this research on this is fascinating. 51:47 It's like it's different, extra non-slope. 51:48 And he's shut the miner off every five minutes to give everyone else a chance to mine. 51:52 It's really interesting stuff that people could could look into if they want. 51:56 Sergio Lerner, I think, did that research, right? 51:58 And it's really good show and talked about it. 52:01 I'll link to that as well. 52:02 Not only is it really good, but it's some of the most interesting research I've ever read, like on any topic. 52:08 It's very bizarre. 52:09 Like the methodology he used to figure all this stuff out. 52:12 It's very like satisfying for the like Satoshi is Jesus people. 52:16 I think like it's very like kind of mathematically like beautiful and like elegant. 52:22 He's discovered this set of coins that have many, many overlapping quirks. 52:27 But one of which is that none of them have ever been spent. 52:31 So that's also like points to his. 52:34 Okay, so the Potosi pattern. 52:36 So we kind of know we have very strong reason to believe which coins were Satoshi's coins. 52:41 And in this fork, you are taking half of those essentially. 52:44 And you're pre-selling them to investors. 52:46 And you've now pre-sold in this sort of underground password-protected website that I heard rumblings about at ETH Denver that everyone was so proud. 52:55 Oh, I'll give you the password. 52:57 Wink, wink. 52:57 Like this was the underground alpha. 53:00 It was not supposed to be a wink, wink. 53:02 I mean it was great marketing for you, Paul. 53:04 I mean, I thought that you did it on purpose. 53:05 No, I definitely did not. 53:06 But that's fine. 53:07 I knew people would find out. 53:09 It worked for you. 53:10 Everyone, I had like several people come to me. 53:12 Wink, wink. 53:13 Oh my gosh, I have gossip for you. 53:16 I have gossip for you. 53:17 Paul's going to fork. 53:18 And it's a secret. 53:19 And you can't tell anyone. 53:20 And here's this password-protected website. 53:22 If you want to buy the pre-mined coins, go ahead. 53:26 Well, there you go. 53:27 Yeah, we're like currently we're like 300 something thousand. 53:32 Yeah, yeah. 53:32 I think that that's about where you're at as of I checked this morning. 53:35 It was almost, not quite, but almost $300,000 worth. 53:39 I haven't updated it in like a few. 53:40 I say, I think I put the date on it when I update it. 53:42 Oh no, wait, $300,000 or 300,000 coins. 53:45 300,000 coins. 53:46 It's 300,000 coins. 53:47 Ish, a little bit more, yeah. 53:49 Yeah, so and what is that? 53:50 For what, how much were you selling them for? 53:51 So you made like what, two and a half million dollars off of that? 53:53 They were different. 53:54 When I started, I did some even when I was starting LayerTwo Labs in December of 2022. 53:59 Okay. 54:00 Yeah, so what was the sale price? 54:01 It was a single sale price for everyone. 54:03 Yeah, it was, it's kind of complicated because it involves other, but basically it was $21 a coin. 54:09 Essentially. 54:10 Back then and now it's like $30 a coin. 54:12 Okay, so there's like tranches depending on. 54:14 You got the tranche. 54:15 You got the early investor discount and now it's $30. 54:19 Is it open to the public now or are you going to remove the password? 54:22 I think it cannot be because there's rules about that kind of thing. 54:25 People don't like that, solicitation rules. 54:27 So that was partially why I think like maybe people outside the U.S. 54:33 can, but I may even have to close it down as of the announcement. 54:35 I'm not exactly sure how. 54:37 You had to password protect it for like because you can't tell. 54:40 There are numerous overlapping legal, ethical, and strategic reasons for keeping it more secret. 54:49 I think though, like who knows to what extent, like all this stuff may have even changed too. 54:55 With the Trump administration also. 54:57 I have no idea and I'm not really interested in that personally. 55:00 I do think it does become kind of a seedy kind of thing. 55:06 Sometimes when people are too easy to like push the coin on the public. 55:10 So I do understand why some of our laws try to discourage that. 55:16 Although it's also like very, because you have to look at it. 55:18 There's a couple different ways of looking at it. 55:19 Like one way is it will become a publicly tradable hard fork. 55:24 Like at the moment it is, that's like kind of like the IPO in a way and that will be like total like mayhem. 55:31 You know what I mean? 55:32 I'm talking about when the fork actually happens. 55:33 When the fork actually happens. 55:35 Shouldn't we ramp it up or something? 55:36 Like, I don't know. 55:37 There's a lot of thoughts on that. 55:38 I'm not sure, but those are the answers to the question you asked. 55:42 Well, I'm curious also like so, okay, but the sort of pre-mining thing. 55:46 I think, do you think that that's equally controversial as the fork itself? 55:52 Okay. 55:52 Yeah. 55:53 Okay. 55:53 So here's the thing. 55:54 And how do you make the decision to do the pre-mining? 55:56 Is it just, I just want to raise money? 55:57 No, this is not, but I can understand why people will hate this at first. 56:02 And even when I first, someone suggested it to me a long time ago and I hated it myself for like maybe like 30 to 60 days. 56:09 You were like, no, I'm not going to pre-mine. 56:10 It was kind of like, what do you do instead? 56:13 Do the pure fork, right? 56:15 But it has as many disadvantages that could, you know, I'll get into this and maybe if you're interested. 56:21 But there's like the pure, don't change anything at all. 56:24 Some people said, just do the pre-mine. 56:25 Some people said, switch the mining algorithm to something that only you know what it's going to be. 56:30 And then do the pure fork and try to mine like early on. 56:32 You'll still get a few thousand blocks. 56:34 Exactly. 56:35 Right. 56:36 So, you know, some people said 22 million coins instead of 21 million coins. 56:39 You know what? 56:39 Like stuff like that. 56:41 Though all these things have a lot of disadvantages. 56:44 Probably a lot of people will be saying, oh, why, why have any, why have any selfish angle of it at all? 56:50 But one reason why. 56:53 I would imagine that's the clear criticism is like, why are you even taking money at all? 56:58 Yeah. 56:58 I think there are a lot of reasons why this idea, which at first I understand the vibes are terrible. 57:05 But it's actually, this is what's logically required. 57:09 Not only a good idea, but logically required. 57:11 So the first thing to say is, we have a completely different version that doesn't take any coins or wasn't, you know, 57:18 airdrop or half airdrop, you know, the coins in any different way where everyone gets exactly what they want. 57:25 And that's BIP300, you know, that's already the version that's free. 57:29 So you can already just activate it and do it. 57:31 You know, like that's the free version is already out there. 57:34 And, you know, it's fully available. 57:36 And you do say on your website, if BIP300, BIP301 were to be activated, you would like shut this down. 57:43 Yeah, it's not so much that I would even, I think that would have to happen because. 57:51 That's the other funny thing is people are going to think like this is some kind of like publicity stunt to activate BIP300, which is funny, but so no one will know what to believe. 57:59 But that's, I think, how you know that you're onto something big. 58:02 But it's like, how could the hard fork really succeed? 58:06 It feels like a political statement. 58:08 Like there is a part of me that's like wants to ask you or has like thought earnestly, like how serious is this in terms of like, how seriously are you trying to outcompete Bitcoin versus just like make a political statement? 58:22 I think you have to, to be viable, you have to try as hard as possible to compete. 58:28 So I think it's required. 58:30 But is your sort of take on this? 58:32 Is that even if I don't overtake Bitcoin, you know, in like a like a meaningful monetary way, I've still done something for the good of the world by making this statement? 58:44 There are numerous like kind of like fallback benefits, you might say, or something like that, which is like one. 58:50 Bailing forward. 58:51 Yeah, people deserve just to have a conversation about this. 58:55 Like is Bitcoin ossified? 58:57 What should we actually do? 59:00 Like, should we just do nothing? 59:02 Or should and then like does should Bitcoin have more competition? 59:07 It's like BIP300 itself sets up this arena of the L2s that all compete. 59:12 But right now there aren't a lot of viable competitors to Bitcoin at all. 59:17 Bitcoin itself. 59:18 It's like Ethereum and then like some other, you know, there is Bitcoin Cash, but it's like very small. 59:23 And so when you don't have competition, it can, you know, the people get lazy and they languish. 59:31 Like all this stuff about op-return, like this is all like a bunch of like complete nonsense that people have been talking about for like two years. 59:38 You kind of allude to on your website that like Bitcoin Cash was sort of not as big a failure as people think. 59:45 That's true. 59:46 I think that is the case. 59:47 Explain that. 59:49 I think a lot of people don't. 59:50 First of all, I want to reiterate that Bitcoin Cash, I think, made an enormous number of mistakes and was actually a bad idea from the beginning. 59:59 But if I define that as there's Bitcoin Cash people, they were right about a lot of things. 1:00:03 They were right about like, should we really just bet everything on the Lightning Network? 1:00:08 So they were right about that. 1:00:10 And they were like, you know, what do we do if the Bitcoin Core developers have a conflict of interest with like, for example, the customer service department at 1:00:18 BitPay, which gets all these calls when the blocks fill up. 1:00:22 BitPay, they're really used, they're an actual user of the Bitcoin network, and then people will call and complain. 1:00:27 And so Bitcoin, so what do we do about this conflict of interest? 1:00:30 So that was, they were right about a lot of things. 1:00:34 They were right that more block space has some benefits. 1:00:37 But if you really define Bitcoin Cash as like a hard fork in August 2017 to 8 megabytes, that idea is not very good. 1:00:49 Because 8 megabytes is not enough space and you have to hard fork again. 1:00:53 And it's like the timing was also weird. 1:00:56 It was like not really announced. 1:00:58 And for execution, I think execution was not good. 1:01:02 I think it was a mistake to have the same name and fight over the name. 1:01:06 I think I'm pretty sure there are many cases where like, for example, Bitcoin Cash supporter Roger Ver or whatever, they would give like a long speech to like a room and say, oh, Bitcoin Cash is the future. 1:01:17 I bet a lot of people in that room just assume Cash is like another way of like, Bitcoin Cash is like a way of talking about BTC or something. 1:01:25 It's interesting, though, because this word Cash does crossover into your world. 1:01:31 Yeah, I'm calling mine eCash. 1:01:32 Right, so you're calling the asset of this fork eCash. 1:01:36 And the website is, of course... 1:01:37 It's important to have a different name, I think. 1:01:39 I think that's better for everyone. 1:01:40 So just not Bitcoin, but the Cash part is still important, clearly. 1:01:44 The idea of Cash, I think Cash is a good... 1:01:46 When people think of Cash, they think of like, oh, this is not... 1:01:50 This is like a private transaction. 1:01:52 This is a... 1:01:53 And payments in general. 1:01:54 Yeah, they think of payments. 1:01:55 They think of, I got money in my wallet. 1:01:57 If I just give it to... 1:01:59 I can, you know, I could like tip the doorman or whatever to get into this building or something. 1:02:04 So I think it's a quite good... 1:02:07 It's quite a good word. 1:02:08 And of course, the Bitcoin Cash people focused on the word. 1:02:10 Yeah, they used it for a reason. 1:02:11 And it sounds like you're also using it for a reason. 1:02:14 Sure. 1:02:14 But you are intentionally dropping the word Bitcoin from the name of your fork asset. 1:02:19 I think that's the best for everyone. 1:02:20 Is the fork itself just called eCash? 1:02:22 I mean, is that... 1:02:22 You're just... 1:02:23 This protocol, this new protocol that is a fork of Bitcoin with 300, 301... 1:02:26 Yeah, it's a GitHub code fork. 1:02:28 It's a GitHub... 1:02:29 But I just want to also say that I'm actually activating 300 and 301 with CUSF on the new chain. 1:02:36 So I'm not even touching... 1:02:37 There's a couple changes. 1:02:38 You're not editing Bitcoin Core at all. 1:02:40 Yeah, there's a few changes to Bitcoin Core to rename it to eCash and to change the seed IP addresses and things like that. 1:02:49 And then you just... 1:02:50 300, 301 or CUSF overlay on top of the fork. 1:02:54 So what are the layer one changes that you're making? 1:02:56 The minor layer one changes that you're making? 1:02:58 Some are absolutely necessary. 1:03:00 You got to change the name. 1:03:02 You have to change the network magic. 1:03:03 There's this thing to like... 1:03:04 What's network magic? 1:03:05 What does that mean? 1:03:07 It's kind of like... 1:03:08 It's hard to describe. 1:03:08 It's just like on the Internet. 1:03:09 It's kind of like when a message comes in. 1:03:11 How do you know it's a Bitcoin message and not like... 1:03:14 It's not like an Outlook email or something. 1:03:16 Okay. 1:03:17 So maybe I'll describe it, I guess. 1:03:18 Okay. 1:03:19 Pretty loosely. 1:03:20 Okay. 1:03:20 But it's just arbitrary bytes that like say... 1:03:24 That help you identify what's going on. 1:03:26 Okay. 1:03:26 So you could not change that, but it would just be annoying. 1:03:29 Okay, fair. 1:03:30 Computers would not like it. 1:03:31 And then also something I read on your website was that you're reducing block sizes by about 10%. 1:03:37 Oh, 90%. 1:03:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1:03:38 90%. 1:03:39 Instead of 4 megabytes, which is a de facto block size. 1:03:42 And why is that? 1:03:43 Just because you assume there will be fewer transactions in the early stages? 1:03:46 Is the idea to increase block sizes over time? 1:03:49 In fact, I may even phase the decrease in. 1:03:54 It's to be strategic and say like this is actually the small block network. 1:03:58 So I kind of got the idea from Bitcoin SV when they immediately outplayed. 1:04:00 But why? 1:04:00 What's the rationale for small block network? 1:04:03 There are many benefits to having smaller blocks. 1:04:06 So like the node... 1:04:07 Auctions for fees. 1:04:08 Nodes are cheaper. 1:04:09 Nodes are cheaper. 1:04:10 That's right, okay. 1:04:11 Cheaper to sync and easier to hide the physical location of the node. 1:04:14 Right. 1:04:15 More competition for block space. 1:04:16 So higher fees potentially. 1:04:17 Yes, higher fee rates. 1:04:18 Push people onto the L2s. 1:04:20 This will be a great test to actually... 1:04:21 Because a lot of people sort of contest or like... 1:04:23 There's a lot of debate about whether or not blocks... 1:04:25 How the impact of block size on fees in practice. 1:04:28 So this will be interesting to see. 1:04:30 Right. 1:04:31 That's exactly right. 1:04:32 Good test environment. 1:04:33 Well, yeah. 1:04:34 Some people want the backlog of fees. 1:04:36 That was the famous... 1:04:37 There was like... 1:04:38 I don't know about famous. 1:04:39 But there was like a Greg Maxwell popping the champagne email to the... 1:04:43 He was happy that the fees... 1:04:45 That there was a backlog of transactions. 1:04:47 The backlog went away, of course. 1:04:49 Because people stopped using Bitcoin Core. 1:04:51 Right, right. 1:04:52 So that was always like kind of my counter joke about like... 1:04:56 Not that I was going to knock that particular comment. 1:04:58 Because at the time, that was... 1:05:00 But I was still thinking. 1:05:01 I was like... 1:05:02 I wondered did he ever put the champagne back in his refrigerator or whatever. 1:05:07 Because ultimately, the fees are... 1:05:09 The fee rates are now very, very low. 1:05:10 We kind of got a little off of the... 1:05:12 We could talk about whatever you think is interesting. 1:05:14 But we got a little off of the Satoshi's coins. 1:05:16 Oh, yeah. 1:05:17 I mean, we can circle back to Satoshi's. 1:05:19 I do want to circle back to some of the technical changes. 1:05:22 There are a lot of threads to go on. 1:05:23 There's a lot of threads to go on. 1:05:24 But, yeah. 1:05:25 But, I mean, just closing the loop on the threads. 1:05:27 So basically, it is the block size. 1:05:29 And then CUSF. 1:05:30 The reason why you decided to do CUSF on top of... 1:05:33 Basically, a very minorly touched Bitcoin Core fork. 1:05:37 Right. 1:05:38 What was the reason for that? 1:05:39 As opposed to just literally just fork it. 1:05:40 Like just fully doing the soft fork. 1:05:42 Like Bitcoin Core with the BIP300 soft fork. 1:05:44 It's a good question. 1:05:45 There are actually a lot of benefits for each. 1:05:47 I thought it would be better to like maintain the CUSF software. 1:05:52 Actually, on the off chance that BTC still wants to activate BIP300 with it. 1:05:59 At some point, like during the process. 1:06:01 How would that be useful? 1:06:03 Like why? 1:06:04 Well, you see what I mean? 1:06:05 Actually, I was building the CUSF version for BTC. 1:06:08 Right. 1:06:09 And so, that's like my latest and greatest version. 1:06:12 So, I just thought, oh, we'll just keep it. 1:06:14 You'll just use it. 1:06:15 It's working. 1:06:16 This works. 1:06:17 Also, I think I read on your website. 1:06:18 I thought this was like a fair point. 1:06:20 What that means is if Bitcoin Core upgrades, you can easily upgrade your version as well. 1:06:26 This is a huge mistake that, again, I thought Bitcoin Cash made. 1:06:29 And it's funny. 1:06:30 I don't know if it seems like I'm a large blocker. 1:06:32 I don't know how this is coming across at all to anyone. 1:06:35 But you can look up when I go on Bitcoin Cash podcast. 1:06:39 I say like, you guys made all these horrible mistakes. 1:06:41 And the project didn't make any sense. 1:06:43 But one of the things they did is once they had their own project. 1:06:47 They started just like renaming everything, changing everything. 1:06:49 They made something like 30,000 lines of code. 1:06:52 At one point, 50% of the lines of code they had changed. 1:06:55 And you think that was like a bad mistake? 1:06:58 They could have just changed. 1:06:59 What were the negative externalities of that? 1:07:01 Like why did that hurt them? 1:07:03 It's very hard to do like a code diff and see like when they make some other change. 1:07:09 You could say, okay, if you do a pull request, you say, okay, I'm going to add Schnorr signatures to Bitcoin Cash. 1:07:16 That's already going to be really hard to like vet and like read through and make sure that that is what it says it is. 1:07:23 But now you can't even compare it to like something else that works. 1:07:26 That like a millions of Bitcoin core of millions of people trying to attack it all the time. 1:07:30 And, you know, like they could have just changed the one to an eight. 1:07:35 And then had like their little list of modular changes. 1:07:41 You know, the modularity is really good. 1:07:43 Another thing is when there are these critical vulnerabilities, sometimes they're fixed secretly or even introduced secretly and then fixed secretly again. 1:07:51 So you don't know when you fork which stuff people are going to find was wrong with Bitcoin core. 1:08:02 I mean, changes are always risky, right? 1:08:04 Like the more like bullshit you're doing with code, the worse it is. 1:08:07 Software code is so powerful. 1:08:10 Like you said with Matt Corallo. 1:08:11 The Matt Corallo example. 1:08:12 We're circling back now. 1:08:13 Exactly. 1:08:14 Right. 1:08:15 One line of code can take the whole thing. 1:08:17 And in fact, there were all these bugs. 1:08:19 There's this famous assert zero. 1:08:21 I don't know how famous any of this is. 1:08:24 It's famous to me. 1:08:25 I lived through it all. 1:08:26 And it was a lot of it was like a very like crazy wild to see. 1:08:30 But people who hated Bitcoin Cash started making different shirts that had like different bugs on them. 1:08:36 There's like an assert zero bug that crashed Bitcoin Cash nodes. 1:08:39 So they made like assert zero t-shirts. 1:08:42 You can look all this up. 1:08:43 This all really happened. 1:08:44 That's funny. 1:08:45 Yeah. 1:08:46 Some of it is pretty funny. 1:08:47 OK. 1:08:48 All right. 1:08:49 So let's go back to this. 1:08:50 It was really fun to live through. 1:08:51 Although it was sad to see how angry some people got. 1:08:54 I was going to say it was also like you said, you know, remnants of some of the most difficult times in Bitcoin's history, I think. 1:09:01 Right. 1:09:02 Yeah. 1:09:03 There was a lot of like negative emotion. 1:09:05 And even to this day, like people, people just hate the idea for some reason of the hard fork, even though the hard fork for the Bitcoin owner, the investor. 1:09:15 Nothing could possibly be better because you just get free money and you get free upside. 1:09:19 Like if all I'm saying, if everything I'm saying it turns out to be 100 percent wrong and the hard fork goes to zero. 1:09:24 Because the addresses basically, like if you hold the keys to those addresses, you just get these like coins. 1:09:29 One way of thinking about it. 1:09:31 Where does the free money come from? 1:09:32 One way of thinking about it is that you just launch an altcoin. 1:09:34 So you just imagine it's a new coin, but you kind of replay the full history of Bitcoin with the same miners. 1:09:41 You just mine this new with the knowledge. 1:09:44 It's as if there's 900,000 blocks on that new network. 1:09:48 And you replay the whole thing. 1:09:50 And so then if you download that software and you right now you have seven Bitcoin, you have 7.123 Bitcoin. 1:09:56 You download this new software, hypothetically eCash or Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV or whatever. 1:10:02 Just go mine the free money. 1:10:03 No, no. 1:10:04 You will have, when you turn it on, you'll have 7.123 coins waiting for you there. 1:10:08 Now, what's the U.S. dollar value of those coins? 1:10:10 No one knows. 1:10:11 But that's what I'm saying. 1:10:12 If it's zero, then you're left exactly where you were before. 1:10:14 It's only up basically. 1:10:16 Yeah, exactly. 1:10:17 Right, right, right, right. 1:10:18 And then the question is, do you hold them or do you immediately sell them for Bitcoin? 1:10:22 I mean, you also say on your website, notably, I do not recommend you sell your Bitcoin. 1:10:28 Right. 1:10:29 That's exactly right. 1:10:30 And I assume that was very intentional. 1:10:32 Yeah, I don't think it would be. 1:10:35 There will be a lot of information produced as you get to the fork date and then it forks. 1:10:43 And then there will be like, you know. 1:10:46 So that will be very important for people to. 1:10:49 And I would very strongly recommend, unless you're one of these like junky people, like, you know, people who do the podcast, 40 hours of Bitcoin podcast per week type thing, unless you're like a super, super specialist. 1:11:01 It would be very smart to just not, not, not touch either network and have only the. 1:11:09 Just hold the coins on both. 1:11:10 You know, you get upside either way. 1:11:13 But you the only way. 1:11:14 OK, so. 1:11:15 But the only way I was going to say, but you have to mine the coins essentially. 1:11:18 Once. 1:11:19 When? 1:11:20 At the moment of the fork. 1:11:21 Before then, it's identical history of the chain. 1:11:24 Oh, interesting. 1:11:25 Right. 1:11:26 OK. 1:11:27 Noted. 1:11:28 All right. 1:11:29 OK, so Satoshi's coins. 1:11:30 So, yeah. 1:11:31 So, I mean, how are you feeling? 1:11:32 OK, so you have this pre-mine, you have this fork, you have like all of the makings of like a hyper villain. 1:11:37 Yeah. 1:11:38 So are you concerned about that? 1:11:40 I mean, like, how are you? 1:11:41 Are you worried about your reputation being lit on fire with this call? 1:11:45 Let's see. 1:11:46 Here's the thing. 1:11:47 Although many people. 1:11:48 It's true that I have many friends and admirers, you know, throughout Bitcoin. 1:11:52 That's true. 1:11:53 It's kind of like, what's the reputation even worth? 1:11:56 Like if you can't activate. 1:11:57 If you can't do things. 1:11:58 BIP300 or even I can't convince people to like activate any soft forks with CUSF. 1:12:04 I think. 1:12:05 It's like power to like be a speaker at the Bitcoin conference. 1:12:07 Right. 1:12:08 And it's like, I think all that stuff will start to die off, actually. 1:12:12 So I've been. 1:12:13 You mean like the soft power of like weird Bitcoin influencers? 1:12:17 I think that. 1:12:18 Well, you know, I've been Bitcoin has had many ups and downs over the years, mostly ups. 1:12:23 But, you know, there have been many downs and there have been many like. 1:12:29 But if. 1:12:31 If we like mainstream Bitcoin as like this pet rock. 1:12:36 That you buy through ETF. 1:12:40 And if it's like very easily defined as like a tame. 1:12:46 Thing. 1:12:48 And it's not subversive. 1:12:51 And it's just like a it's like a thing that you can buy. 1:12:53 And the reason why you would buy it is because there's nation state adoption. 1:12:56 Like El Salvador is buying it or whatever. 1:12:58 Serbia is buying it or something, you know. 1:13:00 Mm hmm. 1:13:01 If we're going to do all that, why have the Bitcoin conference? 1:13:03 You know what I mean? 1:13:04 It's like having a conference about like screwdrivers or something. 1:13:06 No, no, no. 1:13:07 I mean, like in a world where we just have hyper Bitcoin is Asian. 1:13:10 These things are very weird. 1:13:11 Right. 1:13:12 But even if it's not used like it's just. 1:13:17 So we need it to be a little bit more of like a scientific enterprise, more of like a weird. 1:13:25 This have this weird mystery to it, I think, which it will if it keeps growing. 1:13:30 But if it's but if you know, if we six if some people in Bitcoin. 1:13:35 You know, if they succeed in kind of like defining it as just. 1:13:40 Some, you know, like a pet rock that you something that you buy and you just have the ticker. 1:13:46 I think that will that's not as good as like, you know, so if you compare like Tesla actually makes cars and SpaceX has to make the rocket. 1:13:53 There's a lot of like dynamism decisions are being made. 1:13:56 People are being hired. 1:13:57 People are being fired, you know. 1:13:59 So if we don't have that dynamism, then, yeah, I do really worry about. 1:14:05 So but you're asking, oh, am I worried about the reputation? 1:14:08 Like, I don't know. 1:14:09 It's kind of like there's that joke from Rick and Morty where he says that your booze mean nothing. 1:14:14 I've seen what makes you cheer. 1:14:15 You know what I mean? 1:14:16 Like if you think the lightning you thought the lightning network is a good idea, then I don't care about your opinion. 1:14:21 And if you thought if you joined after 2020, like then I don't care. 1:14:26 Like, you know about why would I care about someone's opinion like that? 1:14:30 Like they know like less than nothing. 1:14:33 So I think. 1:14:36 What is the like who is doing such a great job like out there that even. 1:14:44 Like I have an L2 that could scale to like the planet, the planet's transaction throughput ratio. 1:14:50 I have like a plan for that. 1:14:51 I have the zk-SNARK. 1:14:53 Zcash sidechain, like a fully private L2, like I have all this stuff that's much better than Coinjoin and much better than the lightning network. And so it's like, I'm not saying that it's I'm not saying that like I should be in charge and run everything. That's not what I'm saying. And in fact, as I've tried to explain, I kind of just like patiently waited for 10 years for people to catch up. And this is the last resort from your perspective. So I waited like this whole time. 1:15:20 Like for people to just catch on. And now you're fed up and you're like, this is my only opportunity to like actually do something. I feel I owe the Bitcoin community like an apology for not doing it back in like many years earlier, because it's kind of like who knows how many weird things would have been. Like if we actually had sidechains in 2015, I don't even think there would be an Ethereum. 1:15:40 If you going back, though, because like I could see right, like especially with the pre-mine thing. Right. Like I can already hear the criticisms of like Paul's a scammer. This is a scam. Like, that's fine. This is people will hate the Satoshi's coins thing. You have to have the problem with the pure fork is that there's it's like a heads. It's like a heads. I lose tails. I break even kind of situation. This is where the defense is kind of like it's free money. Take it or leave it. 1:16:08 Right. Yeah. If you have any criticism of the project of any kind, then you can just sell, get more BTC. And, you know, you're welcome for the BTC. Like, great. I think it's easy to do a hard fork, but that's part of the problem with the hard fork is that you could just do trillions of them. You needed there to be something special about your hard fork. And the community is, is really the key. 1:16:33 There was there, there were previous hard forks or whatever you might want to call them. Like, so for example, in Zcash, they had like a developer tax. Someone forked to make it Z classic. They remove the dev tax. Now I have background economics. So I was thinking, okay, it's going to be exact same software because like they kind of more took my advice about just comment out that one line and keep everything else the same. 1:17:01 It's going to be the same thing with no dev tax. Like this is a dev tax, like in the mining, an ongoing like drain on everyone else's. And you would think it has to be exactly equal to Zcash, but like better you would think, but that's not what happened at all. And that's because the community. So I was kind of wrong about that, that little toy, but I was just a curiosity of mine. I wasn't like super interested in that. 1:17:30 But that's an example of something has this drawback, economic drawback, but yet it has much higher market cap. 1:17:38 Well, and to your point, I mean, when I was getting my PhD and shit coining in the ordinals, uh, days, the one thing I learned, right. Is that the whole point of a pre-mine ultimately is to bootstrap initial adoption. 1:17:52 Let me also ask you about that. Like when you say like, you're talking about ordinals as being like a shit coin thing, right? Sure. Like, I mean, crazy though, because in the past shit coining really meant like, uh, this is another thing that's changed over the years. Like in ancient days you had Bitcoin and then you had like light coin light coin is like basically just Bitcoin with like the number changed. 1:18:16 Right. One number changed from like a 10 minute to a 2.5 minute basically. Right. So you think of the amount of creative work that went to create Bitcoin the first time and then you just copy and paste to get light coin. Right. That was seen as like offensive to people. That was shit coinery at the time. Basically. And then you had like people do a light coins, light coins, like feather coin. And it was like, when does it end? And it was all kinds of silly stuff. 1:18:39 Which was like a 100% pre-mine right off immediately. Right. And then like figure it out. And then like stuff like ripple and stuff. There's all this weird stuff going on. So now we've reached the point where. 1:18:55 Something is an ordinal, which is like you minted on the Bitcoin blockchain by paying a Bitcoin transaction fee and then maybe you sell it to someone else. Sure. Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. Sure. I mean, this would have been like a Bitcoin maximalist project like. Oh, 100%. Oh, well, I obviously have an enormous amount of reverence for for ordinals as a project and several actual ordinals projects. But. 1:19:16 I also want to say that when a certain point there was there came a time when a Bitcoin core developer, Luke Junior, did like a draft. This was in 2023. He did like a draft. He's like kind of work in progress. What would it be like if we added BIP300? 1:19:33 300. It was like a very minimal like because, you know, on GitHub, you sometimes you do like the pull request, like start the conversation and then it gets derailed by crazy people. But, you know, like you could he was sort of saying like, what could this be? 1:19:48 Then immediately there was all this, all this attention got paid to Drivechain the idea. But then people said Drivechain is just shit coining. So this is the version on BTC is called shit coining and even scamming, which is this is a completely free. 1:20:04 Thing, optional, opt in, reversible, ignorable, soft fork on Bitcoin, giving away for free that it lets you like basically kill off the other the real shit coins. You know, there's no reason for a theorem when you have the sidechain. 1:20:21 I agree. I agree. 1:20:39 So basically you're saying it has to do with intent. That's actually very difficult to know a conception of the public good. Like are you saying the world will be better off if which is very easy to fake? Paul, honestly. Yeah, sure. To be fair. So it's hard to actually buy that definition. We can't really have like judgments of like what is not shit. 1:21:10 But that doesn't particularly use that word in a more and not in a more holistic. Yeah, I use it in like in like a lighthearted way. But yeah, but I don't want to like completely like lose the plot here. So, okay. So, so Satoshi's coins, let's just like finish there. 1:21:26 We'll keep we'll keep harping on it. There's a lot of reasons why it's actually a good idea. But as I said, one is we already have the non Satoshi's coins. That's what BIP300 is. So and then even that is already accused of being like shit coinery or something. Somehow it doesn't make any sense at all. But so I think part of this is that there is something, though, about like pre mining being particularly triggering to people. 1:21:51 I think there's a I think it's people have rightly are very suspicious of anything that's a little bit undeserved or too easy. Well, we're like unfair distribution kind of buy. Yeah, I don't know about that. I've heard. I think you're right that people say that. But of course, a person who's showing up today. 1:22:06 They don't care that like a theorem was like 80% pre mind or something. If you just show up today, because it's like, well, it's like an IPO. It's like anything else. As far as they're concerned, you know, Bitcoin is also like 90% pre mind or whatever at this point, you know, 20 million out of 21 over 21. There's an argument pre mind. Yeah, from and then it's like, what are you going to say like you because when you were born, you weren't given like an equal share and every corporation in the world. 1:22:33 Right. So it's kind of like it is what it is. Right. I think the key is what what does it take for a hard fork to survive at all? Because I think Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin has to be really didn't they sort of didn't make it to some extent. Although I think it's very encouraging for me that even though you can you can fail completely, you could be like a complete Bitcoin SV and you can still be worth like hundreds of millions of dollars. So I kind of think that's kind of an interesting reason why maybe more people should should do it. And everyone all Bitcoin or just get free coins. 1:23:02 Like you said, not as much of a failure maybe as people think. Right. 1:23:07 So even well, I didn't get to that point with Bitcoin cash, which was that it actually opened at something like 15% and 15% of the BTC price. So hypothetically, if Bitcoin were just to make it the math easy, if Bitcoin were $100,000 later this year per coin, and this opens at 15 20%, it'll open at 15 $20,000 like now I'm not saying that that is, you know, who knows. 1:23:35 But that would certainly be much, much higher than, you know, what it's what you currently and also where you're currently pricing your your fork coins, your eCash, you need the pure hard fork is a little bit too much. 1:23:50 There's not there's no incentive for people to pay attention to it now before it happens, because you think, oh, you know, when you can't get any benefit for getting involved earlier, you know what I mean? 1:24:02 Because everyone's going to get the same amount when you do the pure fork. So you need to make it slightly impure. It's necessary. It actually ends up being kind of like a communist situation where there's no upside to improving the project before the fork. 1:24:17 You see what I mean? It causes an underinvestment in making the fork day a success. So we need people who are going to like, help promote, explain, promote and develop on the coin. I would prefer it if we get as much stuff done. 1:24:36 Actually, before the date of the fork, I think that's actually better in many ways. And you have sort of I mean, I am now like, in your telegram chats, etc, with your kind of fledgling, not even fledgling, kind of very active community at this point, who I presume are a good portion of our early investors. 1:24:57 And that is, I mean, that is essentially kind of like where the bootstrapping of this community in this ecosystem. I mean, it's very remnant of what I saw with some ordinals projects. But like it is kind of that's the that's the strategy, I guess, for potentially pushing this forward in terms of adoption. 1:25:14 I think the the hard fork is very difficult to pull off. So if you just ask, this is just my opinion. But I think there's, there's too much of like, if you just launch the hard fork, it kind of you're really putting way too much on like day one of the fork, like maybe it will have some kind of stigma or something. And it will go into like a kind of spiral, you know, spiral out. 1:25:37 And I think that's the key thing. If you can just avoid that, then you'll be the project will land in a completely different place. In order to do that, you have to have your ducks in a row, like before. 1:25:49 Of course, that makes sense. Okay, final, final question. So you're only pre mining half of Satoshi's coins, but if you had done a little less, okay, it's just be whatever sells. Okay, okay, it'll be a little. Oh, it's just whatever people want. Because you have a hard deadline for the fork. When's the fork happening? There's a countdown. 1:26:09 I don't think there is a countdown. I think it'll be August. And I haven't changed the I don't anticipate changing the countdown. But I do see it as kind of like a, you get to the airport and your flight is leaving at seven. And it's like, okay, probably leave at seven. But if there's some reason to delay, then some kind of like that. But I think 1:26:27 in case it doesn't. Yeah, I think I read exactly. I'm saying, please don't take this as like a, you know, like, like, come hell or high water. Like, no, but yeah, I think you basically do have to do it. And you want people to be coordinated on a date. So but yeah, I think it'd be like, August, August. Yeah, 1:26:46 we'll be interesting to see what happens in August, Paul, I will be watching with my popcorn. And we will see what happens over the next few months. 1:27:12 And just like really how screwed up a lot of things are in Bitcoin. And this is because there has not been any competition for a really long time. You know, like think about Bitcoin core, whatever, who would even be able to give any kind of like oversight or accountability? Who would even know like if they are doing everything wrong? Yeah. Fair. And so I think people I think there's, this is the time is right to do something like this. So that's why I'm doing it. And so there it is. 1:27:42 Thanks for hanging on, Paul. I don't know if congratulations is the right word on what you did today. We will see. We will see.