0:46 Yo, what's up, everybody? 0:48 Good morning. 0:49 Chris, how's it going, man? 0:52 Adam, good morning. 0:54 Oh, bro, you've got your other account on, bro. 1:00 Are you on your phone right now, man? 1:02 Oh, there we go. 1:04 Oh, little hiccup, guys. 1:09 Yeah, dude, did you join the spaces on your computer, bro? 1:13 Yeah. 1:14 Yeah, what'd you do, man? 1:18 What we've done, guys, Jake's on vacation, or not, well, Jake's in Asia, kind of on a 1:25 business vacation trip, and so we're trying a new setup here. 1:28 Chris and I are, Chris has come on screen, rocking the on screen. 1:31 Chris, maybe just join through the actual thing, because yeah, you've joined the spaces 1:38 in the spaces, bro. 1:40 You're doing the double sound, bro. 1:44 Yeah, we should be good now. 1:46 So that should help. 1:47 How are we doing? 1:48 Yeah, man. 1:49 Welcome, brother. 1:50 You're here, bro. 1:51 Let's go. 1:52 You're on stage, man. 1:53 Let's go. 1:54 Good to be here, man. 1:55 This is an exciting one. 1:56 So yeah, some minor technical difficulties, but pretty excited for this show. 2:01 Yeah, and welcome on stage, Paul. 2:04 Paul, great to have you, man. 2:05 Thanks for joining us. 2:06 I really appreciate your time, and really excited to dive into DriveChange. 2:12 You're like the father of DriveChange, so love to just actually just jump right in, 2:19 and kind of, can you give us the- 2:21 Let's do it. 2:22 The quick recap of how DriveChange came into your mind, and how you've become this, 2:29 the kind of Drivechain advocate. 2:31 Give us the TLDR on the history of them. 2:36 Well, okay. 2:37 It's going to be a really L, so if it gets too L, then let me know. 2:44 Oh, come on. 2:45 You can wrap this up. 2:46 I'll do a short- 2:47 I can do a short- 2:48 I was interested in a specific type of smart contract, which is the prediction market originally, 2:55 and Blockstream coined this term in 2014 for a different blockchain that you can do whatever you want over there. 3:04 You send Bitcoin over there, you do whatever you want, and then people can send it back. 3:07 So basically, it's like an altcoin, but there's no coin. 3:10 There's only Bitcoin. 3:11 All the advantages of having a completely different- 3:14 So this is around the time when people were trying new things. 3:18 Ethereum had been proposed. 3:20 What would become BitShares, stuff like that had been proposed. 3:24 NXT, these are like old, but I think anyone around at the time kind of remembers them. 3:30 Of course, many of them went negative 99%, but Ethereum went on to become number two. 3:35 So that was the kind of thing people were experimenting with, this and that. 3:39 The sidechain was a way of doing that all on Bitcoin, built on top of Bitcoin. 3:46 And then I got more interested during the scaling war because it was my belief- 3:51 I disagreed with Blockstream. 3:53 Blockstream thought sidechains wouldn't help with scaling at all, but I completely disagreed. 3:58 I was working on the code myself, and I thought, actually, this is the only thing that will fix scaling 4:03 because it lets the large blockers and small blockers both get exactly what they want. 4:09 And so it's actually the only thing that will be a permanent solution to the block size dispute. 4:15 And in fact, it's the only thing that will be a permanent solution to really the idea of governance 4:20 or really any dispute where you have different people want to use the blockchain for different things. 4:25 We live in a world where there's so many altcoins. 4:29 This is sort of intimidating and frustrating to new people. 4:33 They think, oh, you know which coins are good. 4:36 Then people develop philosophies like Bitcoin maximalism and say, like, only one of them is legit, 4:44 and et cetera, et cetera. 4:46 But the sidechain just cuts through all of this by saying you can swap the software whenever you want. 4:51 21 million coins, infinite blockchains just traveling among the chain. 4:56 So that's the short arc of the story. 5:00 I first got into it, Blockstream coined this term, and then I was working on actual code. 5:06 They never shipped. 5:08 They shipped this thing, Liquid, which is just sort of like a multi-sig thing that doesn't have any. 5:14 There's no actual technology on L1. 5:16 It's just a multi-sig output on L1. 5:20 They never actually shipped their skip list idea, but I was working on the code. 5:24 And then the scaling more, I thought this is going to be really big. 5:27 The objections to it were all really terrible, so I just wasn't really persuaded by those. 5:33 I thought this idea will be big. 5:36 And then now with the failure of Lightning, mostly, it's finally that's kind of entering the Overton window. 5:42 So people are looking for something else, and they have rediscovered this. 5:48 Well, it's interesting. 5:49 Which they should because it works, yeah. 5:51 Well, I mean, well, there's so much to kind of dive into. 5:55 I mean, we could get into kind of what you think of Blockstream and the way they've done it, what you think of like Rootstock. 6:03 What do you think of those kind of early efforts to do something, I guess? 6:07 Well, you know, it's very complicated, and I'd hate for anything to be like, you know, whatever, quoted out of context or something like that. 6:15 But basically, you know, I do think that everyone really meant very well. 6:22 You know, Blockstream, they – I think they meant when – definitely when they were raising money and when they were talking to Reid Hoffman, 6:30 had this famous post, Why Invested in Blockstream. 6:34 If you read that, it all sounds great. 6:36 And I think that they wanted to work on this idea. 6:41 I think that the psychology of the Blockstream – excuse me – of the block size war, I think it really messed up both Roger Ver and the Blockstream. 6:51 The large blockers and the small blockers got a little polarized, and it became like a – 6:55 Yeah, maybe a little more – 6:56 Fox News. 6:57 Yeah. 6:58 It became like a Fox News versus MSNBC-like thing where the quality of the dialogue and the quality of the thoughts, I think, actually really plummeted. 7:09 So I think they were hung up on this idea that, you know, the large blockers can't get what they want, and so the sidechain can never be – 7:16 it can never even contain a block size increase, even as an optional L2. 7:20 To this day, I don't know why some of them had that view in the first place, let alone kept it for so long. 7:29 Although now, I think people have abandoned it. 7:33 It would be very interesting to get some of these people back, people who have just sort of vanished into the mists, Greg Maxwell, et cetera, and see if they still weirdly think that. 7:43 But then the thing to say about Blockstream that would be critical would be that they raised an enormous amount of money. 7:49 I mean, $210 million a few years ago, $55 million a year before that. 7:55 Long ago, they raised $21 million, which was the biggest raise I think anyone had done in the Bitcoin industry. 8:00 This was like 2014 or something. 8:02 I don't know exactly what the state of Coinbase was or these companies that have become super valuable later. 8:09 But they raised all this money and kept a lot of it in Bitcoin. 8:13 And so this would be like whatever – we're talking like $10 billion. 8:18 And they had like these superstar founders, Greg Maxwell, Adam Back, the inventor of SSL. 8:26 They had like all these people. 8:28 They had 40 engineers at one point. 8:30 You can still go on the archive, the Wayback Machine, and look at the team page and count up all the technical people. 8:38 Forty engineers, a huge amount of money. 8:41 And the weird thing is that they have sucked all the air out of the room on this sidechain idea. 8:46 They have named Liquid a sidechain when it clearly is not. 8:49 Liquid is the kind of thing that Bitcoiners would make fun of. 8:52 Fake like Ethereum L2s that are like multi-sig. 8:56 You're not a huge fan of federated sidechains or whatever they call it? 9:02 I am not. 9:04 I'm the champion of basically the exact opposite. 9:07 Although I don't think it's like the end of the world, but I find it annoying that they use all the same terminology. 9:13 It is under the hood. 9:15 It is just multi-sig. 9:17 So you are giving a group of people your money. 9:20 If you just swap the federation for one person, you see how bad that would be. 9:25 You know what I mean? 9:26 So it's just like I give all my Bitcoin to some guy and I hope that he gives it back. 9:31 Well, you know, like that is purely custodial. 9:34 That is totally anti. 9:36 The whole point of Bitcoin is to get away from meeting a trusted third party as an intermediary. 9:41 So then what they say is, well, instead of giving it to one guy, you're giving it to a bunch of keys like more than one person. 9:48 But it's really like that's not the same thing as trusting a decentralized process that has the miners can enter and exit at any time. 9:56 They're in a scheme that incentivizes them to be honest. 10:00 They're only paid in Bitcoin themselves. 10:03 And there's Bitcoin are locked for 100 blocks. 10:05 So they they can't be like completely screwing over the chain. 10:08 They need to they need the chain to make it another 100 blocks before they even get paid anything. 10:13 So that's a very, very different thing than just give the money to someone else. 10:19 And then, of course, in the case of Liquid, they say that they will refuse to explain who has the 15 keys or how the key ceremony was done. 10:30 And they say this is like for security reasons or something. 10:32 But basically, you have no idea. You have no way of knowing. 10:35 We call trust me, bro. In the crypto industry. 10:37 Yeah. Kind of saying like, how do you know it's not just all one guy who made 15 keys? 10:44 And they say we don't say we refuse to answer that question. 10:48 They'll say at first, you know, like it rests on the reputation of the 15 people. 10:54 But then they won't even say who those people are. 10:56 So that's that was one of the biggest, like, kind of eye openers for me. 11:01 I was like, OK, I don't know if even talking about this is a good use of time because this is so out to lunch. 11:07 They open by saying like, oh, we have 15 people. 11:10 They're geographically distributed. They're reputable people. 11:13 And they say, who are they? Where, you know, what countries are they in? 11:18 They say they don't want us because, you know, they say they don't want people to like. 11:21 Sure. You know, hunt these people down and whatever. 11:23 But that's part that's just part of why the federated model and the multisig model is a bad model, because it has that issue. 11:30 So so I think the Blockstream, it's just very is a tremendous amount of of disappointment. 11:38 Low productivity, you could say, like because nothing has been produced. 11:41 A huge these superstar inputs went in all the money, time, whatever you could possibly want. 11:49 Huge amount of money, 40 engineers for many, many years. 11:52 They've been operating for, you know, 10 years now. 11:56 And, you know, what has come out of it? 11:58 I mean, literally, they have liquid is very little use. 12:03 I don't know. Like Green Wallet was something they acquired. 12:06 The Blockstream satellite is they they rent someone else's satellite TV channel. 12:10 And on one of the unused channels, they broadcast the blockchain, which is which is a cool idea. 12:14 But it is not. You know, I mean, like it is not. 12:17 They didn't like actually really, you know, they didn't really create anything there. 12:22 They're renting a satellite channel. Yeah, but it's a cool idea. 12:25 But it's a great idea. But it's not like these are. 12:28 They did not invent that. They did not produce what they said they would produce. 12:31 This is the side change is very important. 12:33 Sidechain being a solution to the problem of the Altcoin says over here we have Zcash and it has Z addresses and it hides the center of the receiver and the amount. 12:43 OK, could we have that on Bitcoin like that's the problem of the sidechain. 12:47 But they just kind of keep saying that it's all about liquid. 12:50 It's all about blocks, you know, elements or whatever these things. 12:54 So that's my Blockstream story. The RSK guys is a similar story where I think the RSK people, 13:00 they're always been very friendly to me and super, super Sergio is the first person. 13:04 Rootstock, is that what you say? Yes, yes, yes. 13:08 The Rootstock people, they have always been great and I think I always love talking to them. 13:12 And I think that but they also raised a lot of money like back in like 2015. 13:18 And they were going to be like the answer to Ethereum. 13:20 They were like, we are going to put. Whatever, everything Ethereum can do on BTC. 13:28 But that was again, that was back in 2015. 13:30 And I don't know what they've been doing the whole time, but just like for fun, like after we came out with the Drivechain like prototype a few years ago. 13:38 We created this thing, ETH side that you can download today if you want. 13:43 We have to create like a front end for it because Ethereum doesn't have a front end. 13:46 So so we made all this, which is just a clone of the latest version of an Ethereum node, just as, you know, Bitcoin L2 using Drivechain. 13:56 So like I did that again, like I kind of feel like that was what Rootstock was supposed to do. 14:01 And that I that was only one that's only one small, tiny part of what. 14:07 We do a LayerTwo Labs like that, I put like one guy on that for like two weeks to do that. 14:13 And then we made the front end and then we put it like we did some other things on it. 14:18 And it's certainly not. It's just like that's all it is, is just a version of the latest Ethereum full node as a Bitcoin L2 on our test network, which is like Bitcoin core. 14:32 But so I'm kind of just thinking, I don't know, like what are they doing down there at our at our Rootstock? 14:37 What are they doing over there? Blockstream? I don't know. 14:41 We actually had the Rootstock guys, a couple of or one of the co-founders and a couple of, you know, team members, community members on a few weeks ago just to dive in kind of like what we're doing with you. 14:53 And nice guys, just as you were just saying, seem completely legit to, you know, try and move stuff forward. 15:01 But when I kind of like pressed about like, hey, but what's the what's kind of a killer app on Rootstock? 15:08 And basically they were like, well, we have a we have a really good stable coin, you know, and I mean, stable coins have value, but not really if somebody is not if people aren't using it. 15:19 Right. If people aren't using the stable coin, what's the point of the stable coin was kind of where we landed on that. 15:27 And yeah, I think I think it's a perfectly fair question. 15:31 And I think, like, you know, many people that have done the USDT has been done on many networks. 15:38 So it's not like that. It's like that has to be invented. You know what I mean? Like the ordinals and all the stuff. 15:43 So if you want to issue an asset counterparty or I'm not saying that that. 15:48 Is that it's not a good thing, but. It's not a lot of novelty, I guess, maybe I might say. 15:54 So I guess one question here is, you know, both these two of these teams raise significant funds to try and bring their vision to light. 16:02 Right. They actually have brought their vision to light. It's just not a very bright vision. 16:07 Right. It's just kind of both of them are almost dead in the water. Right. 16:11 So looking back, would you have done something differently or would you have tried to raise funds back then to actually try to bring yours to light? 16:20 I absolutely would have done a lot of things differently. But, you know, this is the folly of regret. 16:25 That's a phrase. Right. That people have. And I don't know if you've ever seen. 16:28 I'm not a huge Star Trek guy at all, but I have seen only three episodes and one of them is called Tapestry. 16:36 And he goes back in time. It's kind of like it's a wonderful life or whatever. 16:41 He goes back in time and he regrets a decision. He goes back and changes it. 16:44 And then he finds that he goes back to the future and the future is even worse, way worse. 16:52 So I do think, you know, you've got to do whatever you don't know, like what would have happened if. 16:57 And you don't know, like if you could. But to just go with the spirit of the question, I would say that there was a moment in 2016 when the block size war was very, very heated. 17:11 And actually, so I don't want to, like, dox too many people, but let's just say extremely, extremely high status, small blocker people actually emailed extremely high status, large blocker people. 17:30 It was like 15 people cc'd and including me. And they said, instead of doing the stuff that you're doing, like extension block or SegWit2x, you should instead do Paul's Drivechain idea. 17:43 That will get you what you want. And yeah, I was kind of just like, oh, they will figure this out, that this is a good idea. 17:51 But if I could go back in time, I would have like seized on this a little bit more and been like making PowerPoint slides and trying to like make some kind of like proposal and like been right on top of it with like to just kind of like aggressively show the idea. 18:07 But I just kind of thought, I don't know, I didn't really realize like what was about to happen, like that the communities would like split forever and that they would like never reunite and that the small block BTC world would become extremely complacent and say, we don't want any new technology on BTC. 18:25 This is an attitude that persists to today where people say we don't need Bitcoin to be used as money. It doesn't matter what mining transaction fees are. You know, it doesn't matter that they're low from lack of usage. It doesn't matter that, you know, these other chains, Ethereum, Solana, are going to push the boundary on what levels of centralization are acceptable. 18:52 So that was certainly like a more of a critical time where I was like kind of just a little bit more passive and was like, oh, yeah, I have this blog post. But although that may not have helped because, you know, blog post is a blog post and then you write code and then who knows if it. 19:09 But I do definitely believe if people had agreed that both sides were unbelievably overconfident at that time, they both the large block people thought absolutely they thought SegWit2x was guaranteed to win. 19:23 So we signed all these companies to sign the 83 percent of the hash rate to sign. And so I tried to convince them. I spent a little bit more time when after SegWit2x came out, I did call a few people and I was like, this is a terrible idea. You shouldn't do this. You're not going to win. 19:41 And they were like, 83 percent of the miners are already running the SegWit2x software. And I was like, that doesn't make any difference. We have no way of knowing that it's completely the same software until the date, the split date in November. 19:57 And so I don't know, like and then when they split off, they just thought BCH would win. They were absolutely so both sides were. So, yeah, I guess that's one thing would be to. I think in retrospect, I kind of think it may be the whole thing was inevitable, though, because of just how strong everyone's feelings were. 20:17 Yeah, that there was no need to compromise. 20:20 It's really interesting, the idea of it's I mean, it's come up this past week because, you know, Cardano, we might laugh at it and stuff, but, you know, they got their governance kind of, I guess, protocol pass or whatever. 20:34 And Bitcoin's been like this. Bitcoin's been the lead in like, how do you govern this thing? Right. With distinctly warring factions. And, you know, I guess the kind of method has been to fork and to have these really, really vicious, really vicious tribes, which I mean, I guess in the reality, the small blockers won. 21:04 If the goal was number go up, that's the kind of way I currently look at it is number go up. They clearly won. Bitcoin's number has gone up. So they were right in that way. But we did lose in the process the idea of, you know, peer to peer digital cash, I guess we lost. 21:21 And somebody else kind of has to take up that moniker or some people say, oh, no, no, Bitcoin still is, you know, peer to peer digital cash. I'm just like, OK, wherever you used it last. Right. And so it's all it's crazy, that history. 21:36 But one thing is like for me, like obviously you've seen this whole history. You had this idea way back then and you've kind of still stuck with it, which is kind of incredible to me, because, you know, if it hadn't really been implemented already or really kind of people had taken it on, a lot of people would have just, you know, dropped it. 21:55 Well, it's actually, you know, I completely agree with you in a world where it is just a popularity contest. You wouldn't drop it. But it's actually the reason I stick with it is because the facts, the facts are with it. No one else has proposed anything that is remotely likely to work at all. 22:25 Let alone as good as this. And considering the simplicity and the risk reward and everything, it's just the best idea. It's like a million times better than lightning. It's better than having unlimited one blocks. 22:38 It is better than covenants. It is just better. All these people, people are such phonies is one thing that I have learned. And I don't you know, I one thing that is disappointing is how many people will take the look at something that someone clearly spent something like CTV. 22:55 Jeremy Rubin was spent month clearly spent like at least three months working on CTV before he produced like a short document, you know, and a short write up of what it is. And yeah, lots of people are really comfortable just taking a glance at the document. 23:12 Won't even spend five minutes thinking about it before they write the tweet that says, oh, you know, this idea sucks or whatever. Plenty of people are clearly, you know, plenty of Peter Todd clearly does this many times where he'll just imagine what he thinks Jeremy Rubin will have come up with, for example. 23:32 And so it's just he imagines a version of it in his own head without even looking at what the real idea is, you know, and then he's just as Jeremy Rubin is the type of guy who would trick himself into thinking that this would be a good idea, even though it's a bad idea. 23:48 And so then he'll write the tweet, having spent zero time actually reading the actual idea. So this is like, and many, many of these people, the more, the more respected they are, the more like, the more they are actual phonies. So 24:06 Well, you've realized the current state of social media and the current state of blockchain technology in a way. 24:13 I bet it's probably the same in every industry. I'm not sure, but I bet if you go high enough in like chemistry, there's other people who are like, oh yeah, this is all fake or whatever. 24:24 For sure. 24:25 Is my guess. I mean, I knew, so I talked to some one guy I knew who did like renovated houses and he, that's all he'll talk about. He's like, oh, most people are frauds. Most people do it the wrong way. Most people are lying about everything, etc, etc. So 24:37 I go to the more positive on that, which is, and especially we see it hyper in crypto, which is bag protection. People are doing what they think is necessary to protect their bags, whatever that may be. And everybody's got their own kind of unique bag bias. Right. And 24:58 are automatically kind of, without even thinking about it, working in ways to, in theory, protect that bag bias, even though they may be wrong about things. Right. They may think, whatever, big block, small block, oh, big block bag, bad. Right. And it's simply a, you know, bag bias or protection mechanism that humans do. So I give it a softer view, but 25:19 it's interesting that you say that. I mean, it's certainly completely plausible and definitely does happen. Although when the, when the blockchain forked into BTC and BCH, everyone's an equal bag, bag holder in theory. Although there's a lot to say about that, too, because in practice that was bad. 25:39 It splits the network, right. And it splits the network effect. And, you know, that weakens that network effect, which is definitely a negative, no doubt. Loses momentum. Both sides. 25:53 Yeah, I'm all about the network effect. I mean, you asked me, though, about like, why do I stick with the idea? And I'm just wondering, like, is, are there any ideas that you, you are particularly excited about and you think are super great? 26:05 In blockchain? 26:07 Yeah. 26:09 Bro. 26:11 Yeah, I think. 26:13 I mean, because this is kind of my point that. All right, we'll go on. Yes. 26:18 Well, I mean, at the core, the core of crypto has always been, to me, peer-to-peer digital cash. That is the one that, you know, attracted me originally. Secondarily, the thing that really attracted me was smart contracts. I thought that was incredible. That's the thing that really got me into crypto, like in, as far as like getting a wallet, getting some Ethereum, playing around with it. Like, that was the thing that actually got me really excited. 26:47 But peer-to-peer. 26:48 So for peer-to-peer digital cash, like what specifically, like, what's the, what's the actual, like, the game plan, you know, like switch to Bitcoin cash or campaign for hard fork to larger block size and BTC or, you know, what's the specific idea? 27:05 So for me, I mean, I'm just talking personally, and this is just my own skewed bag bias craziness. No, I think Bitcoin is a lost cause for peer-to-peer digital cash. I don't think it's going to happen on Bitcoin. I think the incentives are too strong in the other way. 27:20 And actually what we've seen is, you know, those kind of currencies, which were cryptos that have worked for digital cash. They don't have number go up technology in them. The number go up technology of Bitcoin is so strong that it doesn't matter the peer-to-peer digital cash. 27:42 So my thought process is, and you know, you see this with Litecoiners, and I think it's a mistake from the Litecoiner perspective. They keep talking about, oh, how the price of Litecoin is going to go up when we have mainstream adoption or we have Litecoin available, you know, at every merchant on earth, right? 27:58 That's the wrong strategy from my narrative perspective, which it shouldn't be that. It shouldn't be number go up. It should just be, look, this is a great plate. This is where you can buy and sell and use peer-to-peer digital cash. It's not about number go up. 28:13 Unfortunately, all of crypto has been kind of corrupted by this idea of number go up. And in my mind, the way I frame it for myself, and when I talk to Bitcoiners, I ask this question, which is, hey, if Bitcoin was stuck at, you know, $10,000 per Bitcoin forever, would you exchange that for peer-to-peer digital cash that takes money out of the hands of government, puts it in an individual's hands? 28:39 And to a man, when I talk to hardcore Bitcoiners, like the Bitcoin maxis, they immediately go into, well, that's not the way it works. It's going to, of course, go to a trillion dollars of Bitcoin. I'm like, but that's not the question. The question is a thought process of would you give up your vast wealth to have a peer-to-peer digital cash system that impacts the entire world and takes money out of the hands of government? 29:02 And the maxis, it turns out, they don't care about that. They want to be… 29:07 Yeah, but I'm just curious about, yeah, I completely understand what you're saying. I'm just curious about, you think, you know, the way to go is to encourage people to use Litecoin in everyday transactions? 29:23 I'm not particularly concerned about Litecoin being the coin. My brain actually goes to something much more down the line that's maybe hard to see right now, which is we have hundreds, dozens, thousands, maybe an infinite number of coins, and people use what they want to use. 29:47 I look at it as… 29:48 Yes, of course. 29:49 I look at it as… 29:50 Of course. But the only reason I ask is because the Drivechain vision is very similar to that. It says we have maybe 100,000 different pieces of software, or more likely, probably like maybe 30 or so. 30:05 But the point is, you have the option to introduce a new piece of software at any time. 30:10 Yep. 30:12 However, it's all just one currency unit that those all share. 30:20 So this has an advantage over, you know, because this is what was sometimes called altcoin pluralism, like Eric Voorhees was big into this back in the day that, you know, competition is good, Friedrich Hayek, you know, currency competition, the currencies will compete. 30:37 And, you know, I was very critical of him at the time, but the evidence so far has crushed my point of view compared to his so far. 30:48 Because, you know, it's true that I always thought like, oh, sidechains will just be this thing and we won't really need altcoins. 30:55 But the reality, the dark reality is that the sidechain technology has been slow to come into existence and be adopted and even be understood or accepted by anyone. 31:10 And meanwhile, it's so easy to launch an altcoin. 31:13 This, of course, made many, many scams. 31:16 But it also meant that, you know, you could just launch, you know, whatever, Monero or something. 31:22 And so it would actually be there. 31:24 So that's that's a very this is a lot of points scored by by the altcoin pluralist, such as Eric and yourself, presumably, because it just means you have you have all this stuff. 31:34 Otherwise, it would have been nothing if we were to have if we had all just said, oh, we're just going to wait. 31:38 We're just going to carefully wait until for sidechains on Bitcoin, which is like what I thought everyone would do and should do this in 2014. 31:45 That was like what I thought. But I was completely wrong about that, I think. 31:52 But it would have been better if more people were interested in. 31:56 I think it would have been better for everyone, large blockers and small blockers, if instead of splitting, they had cooperated on like a win win thing, but they both didn't want to do that. 32:07 That's my. That's my little story, but that's why I asked you about like, what do you like? 32:12 Because so because people say, why do you stick with the Drivechain idea, which is what you had asked me. 32:17 And I was like, well, actually, the Drivechain still sounds much better to me than altcoin pluralism, because with altcoin pluralism, we have all these people releasing new coins. 32:26 Many of the coins will be scams and many of the the projects that have an enormous amount of inconvenience due to the exchange rate fluctuations, none of which you have with. 32:39 You know, it's like you go to an ATM and you put you take twenty dollars out of your checking account and you get a twenty dollar bill or you go to the you go to the laundromat or whatever and you put in a five dollar bill. 32:50 So you get five dollars worth of quarters out of the change machine. 32:54 You know what I mean? So the altcoin pluralism is like you go to the ATM and you, you know, you withdraw twenty dollars from your checking account and you get like maybe some different amount of money. 33:03 Like seventeen dollars and eighty three cents or you get twenty five dollars or something, you know, like that's the that's the problem with altcoin pluralism. 33:10 Well, I think this is where where the idea of, you know, meme coins actually comes in, which is this. 33:17 It's ridiculous now. And I admit it's ridiculous. 33:21 But what people can actually judge with new, say, a meme coin is, is this in some way fair? Was this in some way fairly launched? Is there a big team allocation? Right. 33:34 Was it pre-mined by a bunch of people? Right. 33:37 And so in a way, you know, the user, the end user can has a much better idea of, am I going to get behind this coin because it's fair or not fair or whatever? 33:50 And we've gone through literally thousands of these now. 33:53 And, you know, our small group of crypto enthusiasts have gotten better at sniffing it out. 33:59 Not perfect, but better. And I actually feel like as a community and as then as a globe later, we're moving into this idea of a multi currency future where currencies have to compete. 34:10 And that competition by competition's nature will bring out winners and losers like what the what people actually want. 34:20 And maybe they want a dog token, you know, maybe they want Doge or maybe they want hard money of Bitcoin or maybe they don't want hard money of Bitcoin because they don't like that Satoshi has a million coins. 34:30 Right. It's like, yeah. 34:31 Or balls or neither. Right. Or some mix. 34:33 Exactly. 34:34 I'm glad that you brought that up. The competition point. That is definitely a regret of mine. 34:40 If I look back, I would have say if I could tell my younger self like something, I would just say competition. 34:47 Put all your chips on competition because competition is like it's kind of like error correction across people and across time. 34:55 So it's like if anything, everyone's doing the wrong thing, the competitor will do the right thing and they won't be outcompeted. 35:03 It's you get evolution that way. So in the context of Bitcoin, the the fact that Bitcoin had this big lead and it had network effects that insulated it from some competition, 35:17 which had some unhealthy effects of this complacency and overconfidence and just saying Bitcoin is already going to win. 35:25 And the idea of, you know, the old coins were terrible and I really never owned an old coin and never believed in any old coins. 35:35 But I would be a much worse place if there were not. 35:40 You know, these old coins are actually good because they do. 35:45 They let people have exactly as you said, they let people have their however they like, whatever your slice of pie is or whatever the phrase. 35:57 So this this attribute that we need to have the ability to launch a new coin to mop up any errors and at least learn, learn things about what the technology can do is very, very important. 36:15 And I think that that there's a regret that I think like in particular, the my view is that the competition will ultimately produce a situation where only one coin will survive, which is kind of a paradox. 36:30 But it's because the competitive environment will make it so that we will have an optimal coin. 36:39 At some point, there'll be like an optimal tech stack, like how people today, they just download to start like a Web server. 36:45 They know that they can go on whatever it is, you know, Linode or whatever and get Ubuntu, this Apache server or whatever. 36:54 There's just like the, you know, the lamp stack or whatever you just it would be like the stack. 37:00 And we'll reach a point eventually, you know, probably in three to five years where anyone on their laptop can just launch something that not only does it have a small block size and easy to run nodes, but it scales to the entire planet Earth. 37:19 And it has unbreakable privacy and it has the ability to issue assets, stocks and bonds, whatever. 37:28 So without competition, we would never reach that point. 37:31 And because of competition, whenever we do reach that point, the network effects will be all that remain and one coin will obliterate the others. 37:40 And this is a bizarre question there. 37:41 Why do you think that, though? 37:42 I mean, I understand coming from a kind of U.S. 37:46 Because it would be a finished project. 37:48 Yeah. 37:49 That's why the competition will reach the perfected state. 37:52 I mean, it won't be literally perfect, of course, but it's like what I was trying to say about how people like the Apache server, you know what I mean? 38:00 Like, OK, they're there. 38:05 I'm kind of glossing over a lot of the details, but I'm trying to say, like, it's like, you know, like the QWERTY keyboard. 38:12 Yeah. 38:13 It's it's not like it's like the QWERTY keyboard you get on Amazon for like twelve dollars. 38:18 It's like it's literally perfect. 38:20 You know what I mean? 38:21 It's not like the platonic ideal. 38:22 It's literally the exact opposite. 38:24 It's literally the worst keyboard you could possibly get. 38:27 That's a fact. 38:28 I've gone down that rabbit hole. 38:29 Trust me, I've gone down that rabbit hole. 38:31 It's whenever somebody says. 38:33 I'm familiar with this story because it's they did people were typing too quickly and it was jamming the keys. 38:40 So they put commonly used keys further away, which meant the home row on the keyboard as, you know, the semicolon and all this nonsense. 38:47 And, you know, it shouldn't be there. 38:49 The vowels are all weirdly separated. 38:52 So so but the point is, there's no need to innovate. 38:58 People have, of course, there's the keyboard that is split into two things for your hand, you know, and there's the touch screen keyboard was new. 39:04 So it won't literally be the end of innovation, but there will reach a point where the network effects because you see that you agree with me that the QWERTY keyboard has enormous network effects. 39:14 A million percent. 39:16 Your kids, if you're raising kids, they have to learn the QWERTY keyboard. 39:20 It's my perfect. 39:21 I use it all the time because it's one of these where when somebody like, oh, I don't know, whatever. 39:26 Cardano is going to win because Cardano's got the best tech. 39:28 I'm like, bro, best tech. 39:30 It doesn't matter. 39:31 Look down right now, bro, because you're really using the worst tech like that tech is 150 year old tech that is bad. 39:40 There are ones that are literally twice as efficient and you don't use it because you don't even know that it exists. 39:45 Right. 39:46 And so, yeah, it's it's one of the perfect examples of network effects winning. 39:51 Right. 39:52 It's literally the best example. 39:55 Super. 39:56 So I'm saying network effects are very strong. 39:57 And with money, they're very strong, because if you are on the wrong monetary thing, you have your wealth stored in something that may go to zero. 40:07 So it has a risk. 40:08 So you you divest slightly and then the risk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, geometrically increasing likelihood that the coin will fail. 40:18 Yeah. 40:19 So so there's so that will happen to like the smallest to be iterated deletion of the smallest coin. 40:24 You know what I mean? 40:25 So you start eventually a perfect tech stack. 40:29 Well, all these coins and among all the perfect ones or the among all the let's call them viable ones. 40:37 These are the ones that have the right scalability and privacy and other features that they're not. 40:46 They are not imperiled by the fact that they lack a feature that some people want. 40:51 So if there's some coins that are so this is Bitcoin is in this position now where there are some coins that. 40:58 Decline to improve or they decline to incline. 41:04 They're not motivated to please the end user, which is a bizarre state of affairs. 41:12 And so these people, I mean, these coins, these coins are kind of taking themselves out of the running. 41:18 But there will be many, many coins that. 41:21 You know that they that want to win, they're going for the number one spot. 41:26 They're very, very, very motivated to hit the number one spot. 41:29 And well, I think Bitcoin actually hits the number one goal of the end user, which is number go up. 41:36 Number go up is the buzz that is more important than fast transactions or being a big blog, any of that. 41:43 Well, now we're going on so many different threads that we but don't let me forget any threads. 41:47 But we can talk about this if you like, because the number go up thing. 41:51 And this is a multistage thing like the rockets reaching the moon. 41:56 You know, that was like stage one and then has to separate like the Starship Elon Musk's Starship. 42:04 Like it goes up and then the booster separates. 42:07 So there's stages. And to number go up early on, you can increase the price by just convincing other people that the price will go up. 42:17 So it can be purely speculative at first, even though it can be a lot of knowledgeable people. 42:24 Like in the early days, Bitcoin is very, very everyone involved was very knowledgeable. 42:28 The project, you know, the first user was Satoshi, the inventor. 42:32 The second user was how Finney, another coin inventor, a coinsmith guy who is a tech visionary and genius. 42:44 So as time goes on, the many things change, though, there's more and more lay people who are users who are buying the coin and you are buying it. 42:55 You know, there's the speculative route and the usage route. 42:57 So then you had people like, you know, the gentleman who bought the pizza, pizza in northern Florida. 43:06 So over time, the number is going up because mostly for a speculative reason. 43:14 However, in the second to last stage. 43:19 So I'm saying the stage, stage, stage, stage, stage, you're going to the moon. 43:22 You're almost at the moon. You've separated a few times. 43:25 You're orbiting the moon or whatever, you know, and you're at the very last stage. 43:30 The last stage cannot be one of convincing other people that the price will go up. 43:36 The only option for the final stage, the last link of the chain, the last, the final chapter of the book must be that people adopted it to use it every day. 43:52 And those people cannot get it because it's you basically have an implied likelihood. 43:58 You take the price, the hyper Bitcoinization price, you know, the price of just taking over. 44:03 You divide the current price into that, and that is basically the likelihood that it will happen. 44:09 So by the time it actually happens, there's no the number isn't going up anymore. 44:14 And by definition, but when it's a million to one and it goes from being 100 million to one to a million to one, it can go up 100x. 44:23 So early on, your best bet is and think of the relative costs and benefits of these things also, which are that it's very easy to just shill the coin and say this is going to be great compared to build out the user experience and get real adoption from real users. 44:36 Then you have to deal with all these messy, messy details that are necessarily like they're like part of the grimy physical world. 44:45 They have all these what you might call like these real world details you have to work out. 44:53 Whereas the other thing is just from far away, you just say, oh, it's going to be great. 44:57 Everything's going to be perfect. No details. 45:01 We're many times further away from use cases, our use, general use of Bitcoin. 45:08 We were many times more used in 2015 than we are today. 45:12 Right. I mean, it's like we've gone completely backwards. 45:16 So I don't know anybody. 45:17 Well, yes, I the cultural focus. 45:20 I agree with you. But when I was trying, we have a hand up also. 45:23 But I was just trying to say, you're saying it works for number go up. 45:27 But I'm saying, actually, number go up is either a Ponzi scheme or it ends up converting into actual usage. 45:37 So if it's a Ponzi scheme, it will only go up for a little while. 45:40 And then the more up it goes, the more at risk you are of being one of the people who, you know, should have sold cash out. 45:50 So actually, that whole situation is unstable. 45:53 So. So it does work for now, but it will have those people, the people who are buying it for number go up. 46:00 They either believe it is a Ponzi scheme or they believe that it will become something that is used by everyone. 46:10 So, yeah, that makes sense. I don't think I don't see a third option for that. 46:16 One question we have someone before we get to the hand. 46:20 One one question. One final question for me is right now. 46:24 So you were obviously speaking at the Litecoin conference. 46:28 Is is your goal now? Is is your like your focus with Drivechains? 46:32 Hey, let's try and experiment on a different chain to get some adoption. 46:38 And then maybe we try and bring it to Bitcoin. 46:40 And what's your current focus on on kind of bringing Drivechains forward? 46:45 Sure. The current technology we have shipped is a fork of the old Bitcoin version 16.99 and 16.99 is very old. 46:59 And we have a signet test net with that. 47:02 You can you can all download now or LayerTwo Labs dot com slash download and just check it out. 47:07 There's no activation client. So even if people wanted to activate Drivechain, there is no way for anyone to do so. 47:18 And so there's a lot to talk about with that. 47:21 But there is a new way of putting out an activation client that I call CUSF, C-U-S-F. 47:30 You go to BIP300CUSF.com and read about it. 47:34 This is much, much better way of activating the soft fork where it's on standalone piece of software. 47:41 And it does not involve a pull request to Bitcoin core or any modification to the Bitcoin core software at all. 47:48 And another interesting thing about it is it should be very, very easy for something like Litecoin or another coin, you know, whatever. 47:57 Any other altcoin Namecoin, et cetera. It should be very easy for them to activate it as well. 48:04 And just because it's its own software project, it's also better with, like, you know, maintenance, collaborating to fix bugs, et cetera. 48:14 So, Mike, the current focus is to try to switch from the old test net, which, you know, we created a while ago and we just reset periodically. 48:26 But it's based on old Bitcoin core software from, like, I don't even know, like 2018 or something. 48:34 And to switch it to this new thing is CUSF. 48:38 And that will always work with the latest version of Bitcoin core without modifying Bitcoin core at all. 48:45 So in that way, that will be the first time that the 300 could be activated, because with no activation client, there is nothing for people to use. 48:54 Even though the idea is there, the sidechains are there. We have built many sidechains already. 48:59 So my focus is on that and that should make it easier for any coin, including Bitcoin and Litecoin, to activate BIP300 for real and start using Drivechains. 49:13 We have produced a lot of these L2 Drivechains already. 49:19 You can go to, like, releases.drivechain.info or just get them from LayerTwoLabs.com slash download because the launcher has them there. 49:28 And so those already exist. The focus now is on this CUSF software. 49:35 So that is what I'm focused on now. 49:38 So what would be your ideal situation or ideal way forward? 49:43 Would it be to get, whatever, Litecoin to accept this and Litecoin to give it? 49:50 You know, the go-ahead, what would, obviously, I mean, I'm speaking out of turn, because I don't know about Bitcoin, but, you know, I don't know, I'm pretty sure Bitcoin's not moving forward with this, right? The core, Bitcoin core is probably, well, I think another advantage of CUSF is that the miners can activate it unilaterally and Bitcoin core cannot do anything to prevent software from activating since it's in its own project. 50:17 So that is another thing that may change the game completely because it will be like, in the paper, I have a phrase like the ordinalization of soft forks. 50:27 So that might be something that happens, although I don't know. I do have to support the miners. 50:35 Oh, you better get a good narrative going, bro, because that, I mean, you got to convince the miners. I've been, you know, I don't know if you know, but I've been working with Bell's Coin and stuff. 50:41 And to convince miners to do stuff like requires tremendous amount of, first, you got to have a really strong narrative. 50:47 They have to know what you're doing and why, and they have to have a big financial incentive to do it, right? 50:53 So we got them to kind of accept this V3, which allowed merge mining. 50:59 The reason they did that was because there's a huge financial incentive on the other side, right? 51:05 So what would be their incentive? 51:06 Yeah, well, Drivechain is merge mining also. 51:09 So that's, I do think that in the future, 99% plus of all mining revenues will come from merge mining and in particular merge mined Drivechain. 51:24 So I do think there is something in it for the miners. 51:26 I agree with you, though, that the miners like are not technical. 51:30 This is to their own detriment because I think they make less money than they would make if they were more actively involved. 51:37 I mean, one thing to point out is that, you know, scaling up the project means more transaction fees. 51:46 And so if you are in a situation where you can get a transaction, a situation where you can collect all the transaction fees in the entire planet Earth, that is worth like hundreds of billions of dollars per year because there's like 8 billion people on planet Earth. 52:02 And we make like a few transactions a day, 365 days a year. 52:06 And so that's an enormous amount of money. 52:11 So I think that is weird that miners don't. But of course, I think the miners are very. 52:19 Many of the Bitcoin miners are not technical at all, and they're just actually business people, people who run the mining pools and they don't. 52:29 They're like, you know, they don't know anything about software at all, let alone Bitcoin development. 52:36 So. That's one thing, but, yeah, I do think the ideal situation for me would probably be like. 52:47 We retool the demo so that there is the CUSF use of activation client. 52:54 And so then finally something exists where there's this would be the first day that action could possibly be taken. 53:03 We redo the demo that we have with that. 53:07 And people, the demo goes viral among miners or something. 53:12 They say, why don't we do this? And Bitcoin, we could have Zcash privacy, we could collect all these transaction fees. 53:17 We have, you know, all this stuff. 53:21 There's all these benefits for us. These. So we'll just why don't we just try it? 53:25 And then they are supposed to just do it. And then it attracts users. 53:30 And everyone looks back on, you know, no one I guess no one pays. 53:34 The ideal thing would be if I suppose no one pays any attention to. 53:39 The existing technical community, the existing developer community anymore, having having basically misled everyone with. 53:47 Lightning and even covenants and those other stuff that they are doing now, which is like, in my view, a kind of make work program. 53:56 Well, that's pretty scathing. Guys, we have on stage Inu or Smokes. 54:01 If you guys have a question, just raise your hand or just open your mic and. 54:06 And I don't really have questions. I'm just here to support. 54:09 I love all the spaces that you that you host. 54:12 And I think, you know, Bitcoin, usually people, Bitcoin holders, they tend to, you know, stay within their community and stuff like that, not look at other communities. 54:23 But I've realized that, like, we have a lot of Bitcoin people within the Bell's community, and it's almost like we're their little brother. 54:30 And they see potential in us because we do a lot of the things that they're doing, like OP_CAT and all that stuff. 54:36 So, you know, I'm just excited we can work together. 54:39 Appreciate that. Inu, what's up, man? 54:43 Yeah, I came in like a bit, not like since the beginning, but I was just wondering, like, why? 54:54 Why do you think like lightning is shit? And like, yeah, I mean, and also like, like, do you think lightning can ever. 55:06 You know, actually be used to buy coffee. 55:10 I mean, yeah. Well, OK, this is, of course, it's a completely fair question, obviously. 55:17 And this is definitely one of those cases where the word lightning, I think, probably means something different to me than maybe it means something slightly different. 55:29 You know, for everyone, it's like free speech or something where some people just always start talking about the First Amendment. 55:35 But then other people will say this is a more general thing that applies, you know, that whatever John Stuart Mill invented long before there was an America. 55:43 So lightning, I have written a piece called the Ellen Black Pill. 55:49 And if you search my blog, which is Truthcoin.info, just search on Google Truthcoin Ellen Black Pill. 55:57 And it's basically just a collection of quotes from people who work on the lightning network. 56:02 And I just think like anyone who reads this list will start to see like how it's just there's just an enormous difference between the way what the layperson thinks, 56:15 what someone would think if they went to like a Bitcoin conference or even a technical Bitcoin conference that is of high repute, like a Capcom or something. 56:24 You would go and you would see like there's a whole lightning day. 56:27 If you go to like, I don't remember which website, one of Michael Saylor's websites, there's like a whole Bitcoin section at the top. 56:33 And then there's like a tab. There's like a whole light lightning section. 56:37 It's like these are held up as though these are two comparable things. 56:41 You know, Bitcoin first, first the Bitcoin era and then the lightning era, you know. 56:48 And if you just read the quotes, the quotes are terrible. 56:54 I've also written two years earlier, I had written a piece called Lightning Limitations. 57:00 Lightning limitations is where I just do some basic math. 57:04 And I just explain how this idea is in the idea as explained in the, you know, the lightning white paper and that as implemented in the non-custodial lightning wallets basically cannot work. 57:18 Now, when the people who are lightning engineers, when they use the word lightning, they're thinking like, OK, sure, it doesn't work now, but we're going to have PTLCs soon. 57:29 Or we're going to have any perv out our CTV and then we'll we'll retool this stuff so that little things like ARC is lightning or whatever. 57:38 But if you talk to like Barack, creator of ARC, it'll be like right in moments into the masterclass whiteboard explainer video. 57:47 He's like, so, yeah, I think we all agree lightning doesn't work. 57:51 And I tried to fix the problems with lightning and I just came up with a completely different thing. 57:54 You know, it's called ARC. He's a CTV. So. 57:58 So to me, it's just become. 58:03 This horrible thing, like it's become like a kind of like Theranos to me, where you have all these smart people working there and raises more and more money. 58:13 And on the outside, it looks better and better and better. But on the inside, it is doesn't work. 58:19 And so people are afraid they're just not willing to talk of it's the most one of the biggest sacred cows of them all. 58:26 Yeah. And you can't say anything bad about it, but I'll give you a little you asked, why do I think it cannot work? 58:31 Also, if you go to my Twitter highlights at some point, I put I make a list of 10 things. 58:36 One would be enough, but I have 10 and and there are quite a few. 58:40 I mean, one of the things on the list is that in order to join the lightning network, you need first need a channel on L1. 58:47 So it does nothing to help onboarding at all. So there's no way to onboarding a billion people in the first place. 58:54 So that alone makes it so it doesn't work. Another reason why it cannot work is it does not work when the fees are high. 59:01 It's the agencies don't work, which is the whole thing's keeping it secure. 59:06 So either you live in a low fee world forever, in which case lightning is basically not needed. 59:13 Because the usage is low. This is just the demand curve. 59:17 It's just a point on the demand curve. And or the fees are high, in which case it doesn't work. 59:24 Another thing is that, you know, it's like the lightning does not pass the fees down to L1 Bitcoin miners. 59:33 But the miners can steal from the lightning network at any time by censoring the justice transactions. 59:38 So the long run strategic equilibrium is like the miners will have no loyalty to the other vertically integrate. 59:47 And the miners will become these LSPs or like Foundry LSP, where Foundry will give you your lightning channel. 59:57 Or the there'll be some conflict between something that does pay the fees to Foundry, such as merge mining, such as Drivechain. 1:00:07 And the conflict between that and, you know, the LSPs. 1:00:12 And then at that point, it will be a battle between the LSP and Foundry, except that the LSP will have no bullets and cannot possibly win. 1:00:22 They will be destroyed. So that and of course, the Foundry vertically integrates with the LSP. 1:00:29 Now, all of the stuff about the HTLCs and the channels, all of that is completely superfluous and does nothing. 1:00:37 So those are just three of the 10. You can look up the list if you want. 1:00:40 But anyone, any one of these would kill the project. And it's like, you know, don't know what to say. 1:00:47 It doesn't work. Very good, comprehensive list. I'll have a read sometime. 1:00:52 Would you consider it? Oh, go ahead. 1:00:55 Oh, yeah. But I also want to ask, because I have a mate and we were looking at lightning channels and whatnot together. 1:01:04 And he's deeper in lightning than me. But he was telling me that one of the main reasons why lightning doesn't really work is that people just fucking set fees. 1:01:17 So like if everyone just actually hosts like their own lightning nodes for free without taking fees, then and then that's the first thing. 1:01:27 And then the second thing is like if people who didn't want to host like nodes would just use what did they call it? 1:01:36 It's like a little mini bank, not lighthouses, but like it's like these, you know, like stuff like Moon and stuff like that, where it's like it's not there. 1:01:48 Like you don't actually have to open a channel. You just actually like it's just like a mini bank that they run. 1:01:54 Then there's a higher level of like centralization to it. 1:01:59 Yeah, you're basically giving your money to somebody else. I mean, right. 1:02:02 The way that a lot of these things work is either the other person has all of your money, in which case this is fine, but it's not lightning. 1:02:10 You understand like this is it may work, but it has there's not a single idea, you know, from lightning tech stack in a custodial wallet. 1:02:22 It's not even Bitcoin, because it's just a thing where it just says, I mean, they may receive the Bitcoin somehow and then they'll give you on your you contact their server and they'll say you have 10, you have 10 coins, you have 10 credits or whatever. 1:02:36 But the custodial stuff is and it's the way a lot of this stuff also works. 1:02:41 You know, the submarine swaps and whatever you make a lightning payment, it requires an on chain payment in order to work. 1:02:49 But everyone just kind of people are very quiet as to the extent of, you know, what you might call very quiet on what you might call like the fraudulent nature of much of this technology, which is why I compare it to Theranos, where it's like people just look the other way. 1:03:05 The money's coming in, you know, whatever. 1:03:08 Lightning Labs raised 70 million dollars, which is great. 1:03:10 Good for them, whatever. 1:03:11 I don't you know, I'm not saying that that is wrong. 1:03:15 And I do think we should. 1:03:18 It's good to have people working on lightning network and trying it. 1:03:21 We should try everything. 1:03:22 I'm very pluralist. 1:03:24 But people have been trained, you know, we're really no different than I worked at one point for someone who was a Federal Reserve chairman. 1:03:35 I have background in academic economics. 1:03:38 A lot of the stuff that people criticize, they criticize like traditional academic economics for they criticize the Fed for the Fed would do a lot of these things where, you know, everyone knows Milton Friedman wrote many times about how the Fed is biased towards doing complicated stuff about methodology, like they care a lot about some complicated statistical regression or something. 1:04:02 And they're not really interested in like big things that they could easily do. 1:04:06 Like, should they set up futures markets on what nominal GDP will be, you know, and will they hit their futures markets and will they hit their inflation target? 1:04:15 That's a very simple idea. 1:04:16 You can explain it like one day. 1:04:18 But because it would put the 12 people, the 12 board members, like kind of out of a job or it would render their decision making kind of pointless. 1:04:29 It's like saying, we'll have this, we'll have, we've invented this thing that does, you go into the CEO and you say, we've invented the optimal AI CEO. 1:04:37 It does everything the CEO should do except perfect. 1:04:40 And the CEO is like, you know, oh my God, you know, this person has stumbled upon something that will, that will ruin us all or whatever, you know, so that they won't do any like simple thing that will work. 1:04:50 But then there's a cultural bias away from looking at things that everyone knows are true. 1:04:58 And that's why I assembled these quotes in the LN Black Belt. 1:05:00 It's like people know that the idea is not viable, but they just kind of pretend that it is. 1:05:08 We get back to this bag bias or, or aligned. 1:05:11 The ego is the heaviest bag of them all. 1:05:14 Oh, you got Bing, Bing. 1:05:17 What's up, smokes? 1:05:19 Oh yeah, I was going to say, it's kind of like almost like a yin and yang, slack, double edged sword. 1:05:24 Cause like the way I think of it, right. 1:05:26 Cause I used to like transact in Bitcoin. 1:05:29 So if you do have very high fees, it's like kind of like people won't spend it. 1:05:34 That could be a good or a bad thing because, you know, I guess people will hold that as a store of value, but then you also won't have transactions. 1:05:42 And, you know, it feels like Bitcoin, at least the community split in half between half wanting it to be a store of value and half wanting it to be like regular money and transactional. 1:05:52 But then when you do move over to like, you know, uh, systems that make it possible by lowering fees, such as like lightning. 1:05:59 Right. 1:06:00 Then it becomes centralized, which is the opposite of what you want crypto to be. 1:06:04 Right. 1:06:05 So you're like centralizing decentralized currency, but you're making it more accessible, but you do have centralized issues. 1:06:12 Like I was looking into it and like, I see it's easy for you to like, um, lose like your channel and get like robbed by going offline or something like your channel going offline. 1:06:22 Um, it's like, it says fraudulent channel closure, which just sounds like scary. 1:06:28 Um, and yeah, I don't think, I think the only way for people to use lightning would be to like have a centralized government or company basically open the channels and deal with that for people like they do in El Salvador. 1:06:41 Like I know their, uh, Chivo wallet is, I think is what it's called. 1:06:45 They use lightning, but it's like, it's done through. 1:06:48 The Chivo wallet is, uh, you know, an excellent example of, I, so I'm not going to second guess, uh, you know, uh, Mr. President, uh, uh, Bukele or I'm not sure how to pronounce his name exactly. 1:06:59 You don't want to question him. 1:07:01 In particular, he is in a very difficult position of having to deal with a lot of really, really poor people who are not very well educated and there's a lot of crime and it's a very small nation where there's a lot of capital flight. 1:07:14 There's a lot of brain drain and I, you know, he seems to be very popular and I'm, uh, I wish him all the best, et cetera. 1:07:22 Uh, that being said, now the other shoe has to fall. 1:07:25 Right. 1:07:26 So, um, the Chivo wallet is basically a CBDC where it is linked to their, their version of the social security number. 1:07:34 It is totally custodial where the government runs the whole thing. 1:07:38 Now that being the case, the, you can, from the Chivo wallet, you could make a payment to someone using the sovereign Bitcoin wallet. 1:07:52 Uh, and my understanding is that it will work, although I have not tested it, although I plan to go to El Salvador later sometime this year to check it out for myself with some friends. 1:08:03 We planned this trip, so I'm excited for that. 1:08:06 But, um, the, the Chivo wallet is not, you know, it is not really a, um, when people use that wallet, they are not using the Bitcoin network. 1:08:19 But it is interoperable with the Bitcoin network. 1:08:22 I think it's a thing that we talked about, Adam and I, the other day about JP Morgan and these big banks. 1:08:27 I think it's like one, take one number from here and put it on the other account. 1:08:31 You're not actually doing any actual transactions within the system, which is like I said, you're centralizing a decentralized platform, which is scary. 1:08:40 I mean, literally when we think about it in, uh, in Bitcoin today with, you know, runes or whatever, you know, the idea of, you know, uh, meme coins on top of, of Bitcoin and the highest kind of achievement is getting their meme, meme coin on a centralized exchange. 1:08:58 And how silly that is, but that's the reality of it today. 1:09:02 Right. 1:09:03 Um, yeah, that's what we want with Bells, which is like kind of ironic. 1:09:07 It's completely ironic and it goes, you know, against kind of the crypto ethos, but that's where, you know, crypto is right now. 1:09:14 Um, go ahead. 1:09:17 So I, I somehow assume that with this perspective, you probably don't like Michael Saylor, but, um, but these wallets and like the centralized exchanges and like the fully custodial quote unquote non blockchain type of, uh, you know, transactions. 1:09:37 Gateways, he kind of describes it as like a layer three or like layer two might be like more centralized slash hybrid on chain ish type of stuff. 1:09:50 And then layer three is just like, you know, highly performant databases where, you know, you're just kind of not really interacting with the blockchain, but you're sort of using the blockchains currency and having someone else like handle it for you. 1:10:04 Like, do you view this as like a viable type of future scaling or is this just kind of against crypto? 1:10:14 Absolutely. 1:10:15 This will have this, this will happen and it will be not only like necessary, but inevitable and sort of imperative also. 1:10:23 So that will happen, but that it will only, it only matters if layer one layers like one and two work. 1:10:30 So, uh, we may not even get to that point with Bitcoin. 1:10:34 Like if it's not popular enough, so everyone does this to some extent, even like you go to the bar and you have like a bar tab that is like a, you know, that's a layer above the credit card layer. 1:10:45 You, he doesn't charge the credit card until the end. 1:10:48 So everyone agrees scaling in layers is very good. 1:10:52 It's a credit card channel. 1:10:54 Yeah, sure. 1:10:55 A bartender channel. 1:10:57 Um, now, you know, so Michael Saylor, you know, he's just smart enough to count from layer one to layer two to layer three. 1:11:06 You know, he can come up with a great meme or a great buzzword, uh, which is great. 1:11:11 Good for him. 1:11:12 That's what he wants to do with his Bitcoin career or something. 1:11:15 But the, you know, like there's two areas at least where, I mean, he's, he's mistaken about a lot of things in my opinion. 1:11:23 One is he does not care enough about privacy. 1:11:27 And number two, he does not care enough about the long run. 1:11:30 Like mining transaction fees. 1:11:33 Um, so without, he, he has this story about how Bitcoin is like owning a part of Manhattan or something. 1:11:43 And, uh, you only own, you only own it if no one can take it away from you. 1:11:48 But without the privacy, it becomes much easier for people to take it. 1:11:52 You know, you have like a Kamala Harris proposing the unrealized capital gains. 1:11:58 And now they're taking your, you know, they're taking a break. 1:12:03 Inflate. 1:12:04 So that, you know, capital gains tax plus inflation equals, you know, plus the lack of privacy. 1:12:11 Those are the three ingredients that equals your wealth being confiscated. 1:12:17 So it's not, you're not owning real estate at all unless there's privacy. 1:12:22 Uh, I think one thing that Michael Saylor should reflect on is that there was another city, which was the wealthiest city in the entire world in 1960, I believe. 1:12:34 Uh, and do you know what that city was? 1:12:37 Caracas, Venezuela? 1:12:38 I don't know. 1:12:39 No, it was in the United States. 1:12:41 Oh, in the U.S. 1:12:43 It was, it was Detroit, Michigan. 1:12:46 Okay. 1:12:47 Yeah. 1:12:48 The wealthiest city in the world. 1:12:50 Uh, and, you know, Cleveland and all the rest, there was millionaires row, uh, Rockefeller, I think is buried in Cleveland or something. 1:12:57 So in this time period of like the fifties and sixties, um, the rust belt, that was the wealthiest Buffalo, New York, you know, these were the wealthiest cities in the entire world. 1:13:08 Niagara falls because of the generator. 1:13:11 That was the first place to have like electrified lights. 1:13:15 So these are cities, you know, now Detroit is, you know, among one of the poorest cities in the entire world. 1:13:22 So, uh, if Michael Saylor, it might, it can start as Detroit, it can start as owning part of Detroit, and then it can end as part of owning part of Detroit, you know? 1:13:31 Um, and so the privacy is important. 1:13:35 And also, you know, I think he's just one of these people that has not thought through the whole security budget thing. 1:13:39 And they just think the security budget people, they never, what they never do is they never write down what they exactly with numbers, exactly what they expect will happen. 1:13:50 Like there will be this number of transactions on L1. 1:13:53 There'll be this number of transactions and they will pay this fee. 1:13:56 And this will be multiplied out. 1:13:59 They always have like a complicated thing going on in their head where they just think, oh, the fees, the miners will make a ton of money because every transaction fee will be $5,000. 1:14:07 And everyone will be happy to pay $5,000 per transaction fee because when you open a channel, lightning channel, you can make a billion transactions. 1:14:14 And like when it's very unclear even what they mean, because it's so confused, because they haven't, they haven't figured it out for themselves. 1:14:22 They haven't gone into like a quiet room with a pen and a piece of paper and figured it out. 1:14:26 I mean, I obviously understand what you're saying, but do you think that's the type of thing that just solves itself when it becomes like a real problem? 1:14:34 Like you need a kind of a crisis to solve. 1:14:38 Like a lot of people believe that blockchain issues really get solved when there's crisis. 1:14:42 Right. So when you have a crisis, that's when, that's when. 1:14:45 Definitely when there's any issue affecting a lot of people that are trapped in a bureaucracy, the inability to solve the problem will create a crisis and that will stimulate the creative. 1:14:57 Search for solutions. I think that would discredit. This is related to a friend of mine, Alex Kay, creator of a Google autocomplete or whatever. He has the patent for it or something, but he, he believes he has this extremely complex, well, it's not that complicated, but he has kind of a funny theory about there will be the feepocalypse where the L1 fees will rise very high. And this will interfere with, you know, the non-financial side of things, but it's not going to be that simple. 1:15:23 You know, the non-custodial regular lightning will stop working also because it doesn't work when the fees are high or even when they're just volatile. And so the regular transactions won't work. Lightning won't work. Nothing will work. And this will discredit the high priests of BTC and the users will no longer have any kind of loyalty to them. 1:15:44 And then as a result, there will be like a kind of a turnover to more, all the old, all the old mistaken ideas will be discredited. So that's kind of like what you're saying. I think he may be, he may be right about that. There is a book, Hirschman, this guy wrote this book, famous. 1:16:07 This guy was a great sociologist and he did write a book that a lot of people found to be very good called Exit Voice and Loyalty, which is about the relative costs of different ways of solving an organization's problems. 1:16:25 So in, if you own, if you own shares of a corporation, it's very easy for you to just sell the shares and just buy. If you own Tesla and you say, I'm not, you know, I don't really like what Tesla is doing anymore. I think they've taken us this far, but it's not going anywhere from here. I think that such and such, I don't know, Ford, I'm just making this up, you know, Ford, they're there. Everyone's sleep. 1:16:51 Did we just lose him? 1:16:53 I think so. 1:16:54 Yeah, we might. 1:16:55 I think we just lost. 1:16:56 I can, I can babble on a little bit. I actually have a point. I agree with the thing that you guys were talking about where, like, if a major issues happen, like it will take us down like a black hole almost, but then, you know, a solution will come up. 1:17:13 This does happen often for me. 1:17:15 Yeah, you're back. You're back, Paul. 1:17:17 Okay, what did anyone hear what I said? 1:17:20 We heard the, and Smokes was just saying like, yeah, he was agreeing this kind of. 1:17:25 Yeah, I was going to say, I think if we do have the unrealized gains issue, which I think is just all political talk because, you know, there's big donors that will never let it happen on either side. 1:17:39 But if that does happen, I feel like it will create more cryptocurrency than bad because I feel like most people will remove their stuff from exchanges and say, you know, access deck, we're not paying that. 1:17:51 And, you know, they'll go off the grid. 1:17:54 Yeah, I think this is unrelated to what I was saying before, but I think that if in many ways, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would benefit enormously from disastrous economic policy. 1:18:08 You know, if they said we're going to print $10 trillion every year and if they said we're going to tax everyone at 99 percent, everything, the regular world would crash. 1:18:18 You know, Berkshire Hathaway would crash, but Bitcoin would probably rally and go up as a result of that. 1:18:25 So because everyone would realize, oh, the Bitcoiners aren't, they're not going to be paying the unrealized capital gains tax or any other taxes for that matter. 1:18:35 So that I think that's a real possibility. 1:18:38 They can arrest us, fuck it. 1:18:40 Let's jump to Dogfather real quick and wrap it up here because I know Paul, Paul, I appreciate you staying on longer for us here. 1:18:45 Dogfather, go ahead. 1:18:48 Yeah, really great discussion. 1:18:50 I mean, Paul, I like your takes very deep, even though I think this takes way longer than three to five years. 1:18:58 We always kind of like envision that everything is clear, we understand everything and the rest will also follow suit. 1:19:05 But I mean, it just takes generations maybe until we have these types of, you know, new equilibrium. 1:19:12 I just felt a bit triggered because Adam was mentioning, you know, runes and centralized exchanges. 1:19:17 I mean, you can make the same jokes about ETFs and Bitcoin, right? 1:19:21 Now everyone is celebrating. 1:19:23 Wow, ETFs and BlackRock. 1:19:25 These are not our friends. 1:19:26 No, typically they are not. 1:19:28 It's the same centralization issue. 1:19:30 But, you know, it was good for the price. 1:19:33 So people are celebrating that. 1:19:34 And I think I have a more balanced view. 1:19:38 I think if you want to onboard people to crypto in a hardcore way, like you do self custody with your cold storage, then we keep the same number of people. 1:19:49 Like, I don't know, 10,000, 100,000. 1:19:52 But the normies will never do that. 1:19:55 I mean, you know, they don't have the time. 1:19:57 They don't have the expertise. 1:19:58 They don't have, you know, they just don't like both of these things. 1:20:03 It's the same like in the stock market. 1:20:05 People don't actively trade stocks in big numbers. 1:20:09 They just give away a mandate to the BlackRocks and the like. 1:20:13 And it is the same in crypto, right? 1:20:15 So you hand over your money to an ETF. 1:20:18 If you want to have fun with meme coins, either you go on Solana. 1:20:22 And if you want to be on Bitcoin, it's quite a hassle right now. 1:20:25 But if it's on OKEx and Binance, you can play around with some pocket money. 1:20:29 That's where the millions are, right? 1:20:32 If you really want to onboard many people to crypto, it needs to be super easy. 1:20:37 And for these amounts of money, they don't care whether it's on their hardware wallet 1:20:42 or whether they lose 100 bucks or so. 1:20:44 It's just like gambling in Vegas. 1:20:47 I mean, it's not like what we do with our BTC stack, right? 1:20:52 So we need to be like a bit more humble that, let's say, regular people don't have 1:20:58 the same high standards in terms of decentralization and taking power away from the state 1:21:04 and having competition on the currency level and stuff like that. 1:21:08 This is like 1% of the population max discussion. 1:21:13 If you want to have a broader impact on society, we need to be a bit more like, 1:21:19 OK, maybe if people trade on the regulated exchange, which is kind of not as shady 1:21:25 like being on the Bahamas and trading with the customer's money. 1:21:30 For example, we have some exchanges here in Europe, which are highly regulated 1:21:35 and that are pretty safe. 1:21:38 I would say that for most people, those exchanges are fine if they don't invest too much money. 1:21:45 That's just my two cents here. 1:21:48 I definitely agree that not everyone wants to hear about monetary policy or whatever, 1:21:55 but I think we go back to the QWERTY keyboard. 1:21:58 I mean, most people don't want to hear about monetary policy, but most people do use 1:22:02 whatever money is nearby. 1:22:05 So if you live in Japan, you use yen. 1:22:08 And if you live in Europe, you use the euro, mostly, unless you're in Switzerland or whatever. 1:22:15 But the point is, the money has these strong network effects. 1:22:19 So actually, it's not necessary for everyone to understand everything that's going on for it 1:22:26 to potentially flip everyone. 1:22:30 Certainly, that's not going to happen overnight, though. 1:22:33 We're almost above in a day, right? 1:22:36 Yeah, it's really interesting. Great point, Dogfather, there. 1:22:40 I mean, I'm definitely of that same kind of mindset and belief that we're at the early stages here. 1:22:47 Most people are just simply not in a position, not prepared to even consider holding crypto 1:22:56 in any meaningful way. 1:22:58 I do think we're at the kind of beginning stages in that way. 1:23:01 And in that way, too, like, Paul, with what you're doing, it may even feel like, 1:23:06 oh, my God, we missed the boat or, you know, all these guys did stuff before 1:23:11 and, you know, Drivechains kind of missed that opportunity. 1:23:14 And in that sort of longer view, I think maybe you haven't missed anything. 1:23:18 Maybe it's still early days and you still have a real opportunity to kind of bring your vision to life. 1:23:26 And maybe it will be on Bitcoin. 1:23:28 Maybe it needs to happen first on Litecoin or Bell's coin or some other coin that kind of has a more open community to it. 1:23:35 I do think like, you know, BIP39, it's a much simpler idea, of course, 1:23:40 but that is an idea that is still not adopted on Bitcoin Core. 1:23:45 The Bitcoin Core wallet does not have BIP39, even though like BDK and almost every other, 1:23:53 even stuff like Electrum, which doesn't like BIP39, still supports it. 1:23:58 So I actually do think it's possible that BIP300 could be just on many, many altcoins, 1:24:08 like more than 200 or 300 altcoins before it's on BTC. 1:24:13 Although it is a very curious BIP where it is sort of the purpose of the BIP is to make the other coins obsolete. 1:24:23 But that's not necessarily that you can still have 300 altcoins do it just for fun. 1:24:28 It depends completely on if the transaction fee volume would support a healthy Drivechain. 1:24:36 Well, Paul, I really appreciate your time today. 1:24:39 Learned a lot. 1:24:40 I followed you and got a lot of info. 1:24:42 I watched a few of the videos you've put out there and I appreciated seeing you in Nashville. 1:24:50 And we'll definitely follow along. 1:24:51 Everybody follow Paul. 1:24:52 Give him a follow. 1:24:54 Really excited to see what can happen with Drivechains coming up in the future. 1:24:58 I've pinned our space tomorrow. 1:24:59 We're going to be talking some privacy tomorrow. 1:25:02 Everybody go set your reminder. 1:25:04 1130 a.m. Eastern tomorrow. 1:25:05 We're going to talk and dive into privacy with a privacy OG expert. 1:25:11 So really excited about that. 1:25:13 And until then, guys, we will see you next time. 1:25:18 Take care, guys. 1:25:20 Take it easy. 1:25:21 Thanks, Paul. 1:25:23 Thanks for having me. 1:25:30 Yeah. 1:25:32 I don't think space is on yet. 1:25:35 Paul, if.