0:00 What is up, you beautiful people? Welcome back to the Built on Bitcoin podcast, where we cover 0:06 all the innovation happening inside the Bitcoin ecosystem. I'm your host, Jacob Brown, 0:12 but you'll see me on the interwebs as jakeblockchain. And today, I have Paul Sztorc on 0:20 the podcast. If you're not familiar with Paul, check him out on Twitter at Truthcoin. But he is 0:26 the creator of BIP300/301, which is a Bitcoin improvement proposal that allows Bitcoin 0:34 to have sidechains that don't affect and ruin the base layer. So you can get different things like 0:41 Ethereum-like sidechains or Monero functionality for privacy as attachments, but it doesn't ruin 0:49 the beauty of the base layer. So the base layer would still be the conservative money layer that 0:55 it is. And then you can push your coins out into sidechains as you wish is the idea. So we cover a 1:02 lot. We cover what fascinates him about Bitcoin. We cover what is BIP300, what are the reservations 1:09 people have, talk through some of that, talk about the current state of Bitcoin maximalism, 1:14 is it good or bad, and a bunch of other topics. So I love this conversation, super interesting. 1:21 This is also the first official podcast in my new direction, moving away from just being 1:26 stacks focused and going to Bitcoin innovation proper. So starting with Paul, but you're going 1:31 to see everything from Lightning to RSK to more stacks and beyond. Before we jump in, 1:38 just a quick word from our sponsor. We all know Bitcoin is for the innovators, 1:44 the revolutionaries, and the builders looking to build a better world for themselves and for 1:49 the next generation. We also know the saying, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. 1:54 The next best time is right now. The same thing applies to building on Bitcoin. If you want to 2:00 come build with the most active developer community, building new use cases for Bitcoin, then it's time 2:06 you make the leap to learning Clarity. Clarity is the stack's smart contract programming layer, 2:11 which enables us to work on DeFi, smart contracts, and so much more, all built with the safety and 2:17 security that comes with Bitcoin. Start today by going to start.stacks.org. Start.stacks.org 2:24 has a five-step journey that will take you from complete stacks novice to teaching you Clarity, 2:30 all the way to finding a job with a web three stack startup. Don't wait another month, year, 2:36 or decade waiting to get involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Start building on Bitcoin today. 2:41 Go to start.stacks.org to start learning and building today. So without further ado, 2:48 let's cue my amazing segue music and jump in this podcast with Paul Sztorc. 2:54 Welcome to Built on Bitcoin. 3:09 Paul, how are you doing today, my man? I'm doing good. How are you? I am. I'm very good. I'm excited 3:16 for this conversation. Up to this point, just for some context for you and people listening further, 3:23 I've been a Stacks podcast up to this point, and now I'm expanding into Bitcoin proper over the 3:29 day. You are number one. Fuck that Stacks podcast. This is over. That's right. Bitcoin's the thing. 3:36 That's in the past now. So you're the inaugural first guest of the Built on Bitcoin, focusing 3:45 on Bitcoin innovation and all of its facets. So that's kind of my niche. That's right. I feel 3:51 good. I feel really good. And yeah, you were interesting because as I've been going through 3:57 my journey, you kind of see like fringe-ish things around Bitcoin that either don't get the love they 4:03 deserve. And as a Stacks person, you definitely feel that too. As a Stacks person, everyone 4:08 in Bitcoin has been very welcoming and supportive. 100%. Yeah. Bitcoin maxes are just like really 4:15 nice Walmart greeters. That's really easy for me to believe. Yeah. So yeah, you felt like a natural 4:23 to transition to this. There's a lot to talk about. And before we jump into any specifics 4:29 of what you've been building and Bitcoin maximalism, because it's the hot topic right now, 4:34 I'd love to hear how, not how you got into Bitcoin, but what fascinates you about Bitcoin? 4:40 Well, I think really like it's an abstraction that you can own. So it's kind of like people 4:47 can own like google.com, like they own the name, but money itself is already pretty 4:53 fascinating, right? It's like this persuasive force. Like you can just like announce, 4:58 oh, I'll give a million dollars if someone can bring me a shirt or whatever, like a tray, 5:04 a banana, people will do it. Like it's like this magnetic field that you can cast on people to 5:10 get them to change what they do with their lives. Like people go to work every day for money and 5:16 they toil away. So money is pretty fascinating as is. And so I guess this whole point is now 5:22 called the digital scarcity idea. This idea that you have all the benefits of something 5:26 that's digital. You can copy and paste it and send it around the world. You can back it up 5:30 in the cloud. So digital stuff is great, but it's a digital thing that you can own. And that's 5:38 pretty cool. More directly though, I did get into Bitcoin by reading the Silk Road article 5:45 long ago. And I was like, oh, regular people are using this online to buy drugs. And so I was like, 5:51 it's only a matter of time before it conquers the entire dark part of the economy, which I 5:56 studied economics. So I knew that it was actually like $10 trillion a year, like huge second largest 6:01 economy in the world was the entire black market of the world. And I was like, once it does that, 6:07 it will just start gobbling up these smaller and smaller nations that have these terrible 6:12 banking, central banking, monetary policy governments. And it would just gobble them up. 6:18 And then I just thought, I don't see why it would ever stop. It would just take over the entire 6:22 planet. So I was like, it was like part selfish also, because I was like, the potential is there. 6:26 This will just, it'll be like the internet and it'll just crush everything. So what's 6:29 not fascinating about that? I mean, that's pretty fascinating, objectively, I would think. 6:34 I would say so. It's also interesting because money is an interesting, 6:41 it does give you a lot of power. You can capture labor in some sense, and then you can also 6:47 get things done on the other side. But you also, in your definition, you expanded it to more than 6:53 just money. And you went to digital scarcity, which is, that's a nuance that I think, coming 7:01 from more of a Stacks Web 3-ish view, a lot of Bitcoiners don't seem to hold. They don't see the 7:08 value in NFTs or really securing these tokens on the blockchain for anything besides money. 7:14 Yeah. Well, but the NFT is like, who's, because it's clearly the losing side of the argument, 7:21 right? If you think about it, the NFTs, it's clearly working with regular people. Are they 7:28 a good investment? I mean, almost certainly the answer is no, but people like, I can give you a 7:34 lot of examples. So we have stuff like Pokemon cards, baseball cards, et cetera. But I had a 7:42 friend who would, he would go to the movies and he would put the, he'd save the ticket stub of the 7:46 movie. And he had this big wall in his bedroom growing up. And he filled them up with the movie 7:55 ticket stubs, which is like, he collected the ticket stub. It was like a proof that he had 8:02 seen the movie and it told you about his life. And it was like a thing in the room. And this 8:08 is a completely normal person. This was not like a technology, early adopter, 8:14 whatever, like entrepreneur, scientist type person. This was like a very normal person. 8:19 And so that's just a normal thing. It's a completely normal human thing to do. 8:24 And so that's the people who are arguing against NFTs are just not going to win because 8:28 the idea of collecting things, it's like any play, any game is like most games are 8:34 even like a regular, like a Mario game, you're walking around collecting coins and things, 8:38 or like either like this farm simulator games or you're collecting wins in a different game, 8:46 like a Starcraft or something. So I think that's, and everyone's going to be brought around to that 8:53 point of view. I think the maximalism thing is not even about that. It's just 8:57 the view that everything else is a scam. And then people just regurgitate it in every case 9:02 where they think it might possibly apply, even in cases where it obviously wouldn't, 9:07 it wouldn't apply. And even like how Finney and Satoshi, how Finney and Satoshi also, 9:12 both of them introduced the idea of that, like a crypto trading card. You must be familiar with 9:18 the how Finney met from the nineties where he's, he, he was like making that metaphor. So, 9:26 so really everyone does. It's one of the, just, it's just a case of the runaway train of the 9:30 toxic maximalism. Yeah. Yeah. The collectible example seems that one's pretty easy to 9:37 understand. I think that the one that's more eyeopening to me is that once you have these 9:46 kinds of protocol standards attached to this, you can do different things besides just kind of 9:51 like store it in your little box and whatever. And I get kind of the maxi point of view of like 10:00 decentralization rules all, because as you go off that spectrum, you're going more towards 10:05 a database. So it doesn't make sense to have a blockchain for things that don't matter 10:10 or trivial in their perspective. But I think I see that as a spectrum in my perspective, 10:14 like you have the most centralized, which should be money. And then you have databases 10:18 that are even the like unlimited block size, a block blockchain with an unlimited block size 10:26 would probably be superior to a database that has unlimited read, write potential anyway. 10:33 So even in the extreme case, a blockchain would be superior. And in what way, just, 10:41 just briefly, like what, why? First of all, what do you lose basically? Because if it's 10:45 the centralized database, then someone is just going to pay and they're going to have their own 10:51 optimized high performance software, hardware. And, but if it's a huge unlimited block size 11:01 thing, then blockchain, then maybe you have a more convoluted 11:05 serialization of the data, a more convoluted software that may be orders of magnitude slower, 11:12 but it doesn't matter because the, if someone has the, if someone has an interest in running the, 11:17 the, like the SQL server or whatever it is, the database, then they can run, you know, 11:22 these days with the hardware, what it is, and with even software and what it is, 11:26 and with optimizations, someone can just run the, the huge node. Okay. So a huge blockchain 11:35 with one node is very similar to the, to SQL server at this point, because I don't believe 11:42 that the performance hit and something that would be very niche, like selling Bruce Springsteen 11:47 tickets or selling movie theater tickets. You know what I mean? Like the, that is not going 11:51 to, there's not going to be like a significant performance difference between the two. 11:57 And so first of all, you lose basically nothing, but you gain quite a bit because you really do 12:02 have the, the, not your keys, not your coins situation. And they do your, what your property 12:07 really can't be taken from you absent the 51% attack. Okay. Interesting. You gain a lot. 12:18 You still can use SPV validation, no matter what the block size is. So, so people gain quite a bit. 12:24 The real question there is like authentication. Like if people want to authenticate with keys, 12:29 because as we know, people lose their keys and it's not today, we have the forgot your password 12:36 email link, which I think someone should invent like a parallel version of that. 12:41 We could do that where you have like a one of two multi-sig. And one of them is to start with some 12:46 guy. And this would be totally inadequate for serious people, but for regular grandma user, 12:53 like you say, a spectrum, that'd be fine. I like that. I said, it's, it's so funny hearing 13:00 you because it just seems so practical in the way that you're suggesting things. And 13:05 before we go into BIP300, I want to touch on the current kind of maximalism news that's been 13:12 having its heyday in the past week. And it seems to me like the big debate, I know you've been 13:18 under a rock that the, the big debate to me seems to be about a part of it's fighting over 13:25 intellectual debates, but it seems like, well, one thing that happened, I'll tell you is like, 13:36 they used to be like super smart people producing a lot of great ideas. And then those ideas have 13:42 filtered downstream to like what I'm going to say, the second class. And now a lot of the first 13:48 class people, like I'm talking about I guess I'm talking about like Udi and maybe like he was the 13:54 originator of many great ideas, as you may know. And then he flips and now he's fighting against 14:00 his former students. So it's kind of like whatever Darth Vader fighting Obi-Wan Kenobi or something. 14:06 And and that's basically how it's going down because there's too much stasis now in Bitcoin. 14:12 So the people who are smart and generating new ideas have nothing to do. And there's a big 14:19 superstructure about like whether or not that's a good thing. 14:24 And but it's assuredly a bad thing. Yeah, I think the smart people leave is the worst thing. 14:32 Totally. And one of the things that seems to be it kind of gets focused on Udi's doing it about 14:41 what's the actual best way to attract new Bitcoiners. And that seems to be lost on the 14:47 Maxis where it's like you either get it or you're an idiot. And they're not really speaking to the 14:51 person who's newer. It was this was this is an amiss. But in the past, there were people 14:58 in the past, there were no genuine competitors to Bitcoin at all. So it really was the case that 15:03 anyone who studied it long enough would learn that. Now, smart people in the past knew that. 15:09 So you had some interesting characters, including like the Nakamoto Institute guys, 15:14 including like Daniel Krajewicz and these other people who have since like kind of gone crazy. 15:19 But then there was also this character Merchant Popescu, whom a lot of people have imitated. 15:24 And he was like, he was this guy who was just 100 million percent convinced that 15:30 Bitcoin would crush everything in its path and that it would never be it would be the 15:37 unmoved mover like no one would be able to change it. And so he was like an ardent small blocker. 15:46 He maintained his own version. He thought that Bitcoin should stop upgrading. He was the original 15:52 ossification guy. And he goes way, way back, years and years. And now people are trying to 15:58 imitate him. Also, Nassim Taleb used to do this as well, where he would just bully people 16:03 on Twitter. And that was the gimmick. It was like for engagement. It was like, 16:07 it doesn't really matter whether or not it was like a Jenna Maroney type of a thing from 30 Rock 16:12 or something where it's like, it doesn't matter if any of this is true or not. It's just for 16:15 publicity, you know, like a kind of a weirdo thing like that. So people started to imitate that. 16:20 But since those people were never smart enough to figure it out why it worked in the first place, 16:25 they now just completely they keep regurgitating it. But I don't know if you had a more specific 16:30 question about. Well, I think it kind of dovetails into maybe how the catalyst for BIP300 came about, 16:41 but. No, it actually didn't at all, because I came up with the idea behind BIP300 16:49 long ago, because I had this prediction market idea like a really long time ago, like 10 years 16:55 ago. And I was like, going to try to figure out if I could get it to work first. And I got it to 17:01 work, but it involved all these things that were so alien to Bitcoin that I knew you could never 17:08 really add it to Bitcoin like in a soft fork or something. It would be like so bizarre if you did, 17:13 like it would just be weird. So the idea of the sidechain was like kind of being invented at that 17:19 time. But I had in parallel, I just had an idea and I just said, listen, I'll make a whole, 17:25 I like kind of independently invented a couple of things where I said, like, I have this other 17:28 blockchain over here, and we'll just have this person, this oracle, very similar to what 17:35 Blockstream eventually called the federated sidechain, which is a terrible phrase bordering 17:40 on fraud. But I had a very similar idea before then, long before, this was even before Segler 17:45 was a thing. And the idea was it would watch as people deposited coins, it would send them to the 17:50 oracle, the oracle would credit them, you could write the software to credit them over on the 17:55 sidechain. So it was a very much a layer two type of a thing. And then when people wanted coins back, 18:00 this oracle would sign the withdrawals. So I kind of punted everything to the oracle. 18:06 This was like getting closer and closer to the solution all the time, because I was like, 18:10 the oracle was a key, you can have a key, a public private key, the oracle can understand what's 18:15 going on, even though the Bitcoin network can't. So I was like, we'll punt to the oracle. And then 18:20 I was like, the oracle is only going to sign if a certain number of blocks pass. That later became 18:26 like what was known as the SPV proof in the Blockstream lingo, or the whatever you want to 18:33 call it, dictionary, their definitions. And so I had that idea. And then I was like, what if you 18:41 could just do something where, you know, I was really stuck on this idea of like, if a certain 18:49 number of blocks pass, then you just kind of let it through. Because I knew that the way it would 18:55 work is that you could do an awful lot to make sure that the blockchain was either completely 19:01 100% valid, or like something had gone wrong. So you could do a lot of like error corrections, 19:06 like a big funnel. And you could say it's 100% right, or something somewhere has gone right. And 19:12 that would give people at least some incentive to keep it 100% right, since any deviation would 19:16 crash the whole thing. And so then I later on, I was like, okay, BIP300 was just, we'll do 19:23 a soft fork to Bitcoin, so that it can become aware, in some cases of this little score, this 19:29 little number that kicks up as blocks are added to the main chain Bitcoin. And if the score 19:35 reaches a certain amount, then a certain withdrawal is let through and that's BIP300. So I don't know 19:40 if that explanation is intelligible, but it really had nothing to do with, I had all of it kind of 19:45 worked out on bitcointalk.org, like in early 2014 or something. So it had nothing to do with 19:56 that. And there was no, even the block size war, which was getting worse every year. 20:02 It still wasn't, it had only been so many years, so it wasn't that bad. It was nowhere near as bad 20:07 as it would later become. Just for quick context, how bad, on like a scale from one to 10, how bad 20:14 is it right now compared to back then? The worst was probably, I think the worst was, it's hard to 20:23 say. I think it's got to be, would have to be that the worst was like 2017, 2018 with the actual 20:32 eruption into two blockchains. But Bitcoin cash very quickly lost, I would say in 2018. 20:42 So then I would say, and then 2019 and then COVID distracted everyone. 20:47 It just was like so psychologically important that it was, so I would say that that was the worst. 20:55 And then, but the crazy thing was for years it would get like 2012, it started to get bad. Then 21:01 2013, it was like 10 times worse. And then it got like 10 times worse every year. Like every year 21:05 people would say stuff like, there's no way it can get worse. There's no way it can get any more 21:10 contentious than it is now. But then there was like people being super, super mean. And then 21:19 there was like death threats, and there was like denial of service attacking, like a power plant 21:23 at one point. It was like completely, got very bad. And just like complete hatred, everyone. 21:31 To the degree, and this is the problem though, the toxicity today is partly a result of the side, 21:36 one side having won and one side having lost. Because the side that won, it was so emotional 21:42 and everything that it became overconfident and complacent. 21:47 That makes sense. Okay. So for context, did you start working on the kind of stuff that led to 21:54 200 in 2014? Or was this- Yes. It was an idea though. I never worked on the code until much 22:00 later because I was busy working on the actual prediction markets project, which I did mostly 22:05 through like 2015, 2016. Okay. And so yeah, now I want to, I'd love to get more into the weeds 22:12 about BIP300, but let's go over it one more time. What, in like a good summation, what is 22:19 BIP300 for those who don't understand it? Well, BIP300 is a very, very, very simple, 22:24 super simple, but very effective SPV proof. So the question is, what is SPV proof? SPV proof 22:31 is something that you can attach to a transaction that it hinges, it goes left versus right. It goes 22:38 left if a certain amount of work has endorsed, certain amount of hash rate has endorsed the 22:45 transaction and it goes right if it has not. So that's, so you can make, you build a transaction 22:51 so that these are the withdrawals from the sidechain. You build a transaction so that it relies 22:56 on that little lock. And then the transaction can be basically spent by the miners. But in this 23:03 case, the lock is three months worth of a hundred percent of the hash rate or six months of 51% 23:09 of the hash rate or anything in between. So it takes an enormous amount of hash rate, 23:14 enormous amount of time to open the box any certain way. And the question is, what's the 23:19 use of that? And the answer is the sidechains generate value for the miners. They generate 23:25 transaction fees and they make the coin more valuable, their existence, like just having a 23:29 Zcash sidechain around that lets people have privacy or just having the large block sidechains 23:35 around that gives them value, value to the Bitcoin miners. So collectively they, it's like a huge 23:46 multi-sig that's like a 13,150 out of 26,000, huge multi-sig, but you can only have one signature 23:52 per block. That's some way of explaining it. So this basically, it's the way of, 23:59 it's a way of re, if you don't think that there's going to be a 51% attack, then it's a way of 24:05 getting away with murder basically, because you can have this, you can have anything happen over 24:10 on the sidechain world and then main chain layer one world does not have to deal with any of that. 24:16 It can ignore all of that, but you can still get all the benefits. I don't know if that made any 24:20 sense. I should probably work on the elevator speech for that, I suppose. It would help for me. 24:26 I'm going to do my best to dance around though. So, so if this was enacted, the Bitcoin main 24:33 chain will be seeing transactions four times a year. The, yeah, the, but the withdrawal attempts 24:41 show up in the Coinbase first. So you can, anyone can attempt at any time, but per sidechain, 24:47 only one, it's like slowly running across a big field or slowly taking a train from like 24:54 New York to LA. That's going really, really slow. And three months later, 24:58 the withdrawal starts and it's finally three months later it docks in LA and 25:00 then it can be included in a block and go through as a regular LL1 transaction. 25:05 Okay. But so, so that's from kind of like the initiation to when it finalizes, 25:10 but is, is the initiation happening every Bitcoin block? So it's 10? 25:15 No, it's just whenever it's not, whenever anyone wants to, 25:20 a minor, anyone who finds any block can propose the withdrawal. 25:25 So you can, you can propose one whenever you like. 25:28 And in fact, you can propose them all the time, but within the side, 25:31 like sidechain number four or something, 25:33 only one out of all that have been proposed can, 25:36 can move one step closer to the finish line. 25:40 And is there a deadline? 25:42 Yeah, there's a deadline. 25:44 Yes, because they're separate. 25:46 Okay. So there's a, 25:48 I saw one video where you were giving examples of like Bit Zcash, Bit Monero. 25:52 You can do it. 25:53 So you could fork, yeah. So you could fork stacks, remove the token. 25:57 These would all be individual depending on the, 26:00 the type of token that you're looking for. 26:02 So you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, 26:04 you can fork a lot of different types of tokens. 26:06 You can fork a lot of different types of tokens. 26:08 You can fork stacks, remove the token. 26:10 These would all be individual depending on the activity of the network or 26:14 interest in the network. 26:16 Yeah. The, the, 26:17 the key revolution of sidechains or a BIP300 or however you want to think 26:21 about it is I would say is one of responsibility. 26:25 So right now. 26:30 The there is, we have a, we have a weird situation where there's, 26:33 no one is responsible. 26:34 What I'm getting at is each sidechain kind of like has its own little CEO, 26:38 the benevolent dictator developer who runs the project, 26:41 but that person is accountable to the actual users. 26:47 Because if no one sends any coins there, 26:50 then there's no coins on the network. 26:52 So the network may exist, but there's no one there. 26:54 So it's like opening a store and that has no customers. 26:58 But what you don't want, 27:00 you don't want developers to be accountable to other developers. 27:05 That is a huge mistake. 27:07 Is that obvious why that would be like having, 27:09 it'd be like having the, 27:11 that would be having Tim cook be accountable to whatever, 27:15 like, I don't know, Jamie diamond or whatever, 27:19 the guy from Amazon, the house, that guy's name, I'm blanking on his name. 27:22 Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Jeff Bezos. So like, 27:27 that would be like Tim cook being accountable to Jeff Bezos, 27:30 but that's outrageous. 27:32 Tim cook is accountable to the apple shareholders and the apple apple 27:36 customers. Okay. 27:38 So give a, 27:39 now you shouldn't give a one piece of, you know, 27:43 you shouldn't care one bit about, 27:46 except as in terms of if Amazon is going to be competing with him for the 27:50 customers, but he should only care. 27:52 The focus has to be on the customers, but we have, 27:55 we have like a USSR developer, a weirdo committee thing, 28:00 which is horrible. It's hard to say. 28:02 It's hard to understate how bad night and day it would be. 28:05 If we had little, 28:08 little different CEOs that had people where people have total accountability 28:12 and total control over the blockchain, their blockchain. 28:15 So they can say, I think the block size should be exactly this. 28:18 And I'm accountable to if people like that, 28:21 I'm going to tell a story. And if people like that, 28:24 they'll come and if I'm wrong, then they'll leave. Or if I'm wrong, 28:27 then the network will get, 28:28 we'll get hacked and everyone will lose their coins or the miners will drop 28:32 it because they won't be able to figure out they'll, 28:35 they'll decide it's not good for Bitcoin. 28:36 So that's the other thing is if this network isn't, 28:38 isn't contributing to the value of Bitcoin and to the transaction fees, 28:43 then it will, it'll just get dropped. 28:46 They'll just stop supporting it. 28:48 And that's a good thing because this keeps everyone aligned, 28:52 which is exactly what we want. 28:54 And we don't want a situation where basically whatever it is, 28:59 like Tim Cook can tell Jeff Bezos that he can't do something or vice versa. 29:03 We want them to actually to hate each other. 29:05 It's actually much better if they hate each other and they constantly 29:09 frustrate each other because each is working harder and harder to please the 29:13 customer. You know what I mean? Then you have someone else, 29:16 someone else, the yeah. What are those people? The Walton, 29:20 the Walmart people. 29:22 So we want to have, we ought to have all that. 29:26 We want to have all those people who hate each other. Instead of today, 29:30 we have a thing where everyone has to agree with everything and everyone has 29:36 to reach a consensus. 29:39 The truth can't be found by consensus. 29:42 You have to have advocacy like we have in the, 29:44 like a defendant and a prosecutor and you have to have, 29:49 you have to have a confrontation. 29:52 Okay. So in, in this, 29:55 it can never be found by consensus consensus is good for a blockchain, 29:59 but it's very bad for humans. 30:01 Consensus is like North Korea or like 1984 and it is a nightmare world. 30:05 Okay. So in this example, 30:08 the, the, 30:09 the users that Bezos and Tim Cook are fighting for are BTC owners. 30:14 Yeah. 30:15 You keep your coins on layer one where it's going to be really, 30:18 really conservative and really safe and a very ossified small block size. 30:22 You keep your coins there and then you have the option to go to any side 30:27 chain or none whenever you want and possibly never. 30:31 And God bless you. If you pick now, they have to entice you over. 30:34 They say, listen, send the coins to sidechain. 30:37 Number three, it's got a Zcash mixer or whatever. 30:41 You know what I mean? So people say, okay, listen, 30:44 with 5% of my coins, 30:47 I'm going to give it a try or with $5 a minuscule portion, 30:51 I'll give it a try. 30:52 And then they decide if they get more comfortable with it, 30:55 they give it more of a try. 30:56 The same way you would try out a new restaurant or anything. 30:58 See, can you imagine how absurd it would be? 31:00 If two people opened a restaurant and both of them were accountable to like 31:03 whatever. 31:04 The restaurant, 31:05 which is like five streets away or something and everything had to go 31:08 through that one person. 31:09 That would be absurd, 31:10 but that's what we have except copied and pasted and stamped out into 31:13 every. 31:14 All the old coins. 31:15 Every chain is. 31:16 A kind of a totem pole. 31:18 It's like, 31:19 I don't know if you've ever heard of a totem pole, 31:21 but it's like a, 31:22 it's like a, 31:27 It's like a chain that is a kind of a totalitarian. 31:31 Chain. 31:32 And this is a kind of, 31:33 we don't have anything that celebrates the descent, 31:35 which is the sidechain dream. 31:39 So if you're. 31:41 I want to make this practical for people and myself. 31:43 If you, 31:44 if you fork Manero, 31:45 let's say, 31:46 and then we put it as a bit Manero. 31:48 And I start to move my BTC over there. 31:50 What does that look like practically? 31:54 So I just, 31:55 I, 31:56 I move it over. 31:57 What's sitting on, 31:58 on bit Manero now. 32:00 Bit Manero is a, 32:01 would be a modified version of Manero where they never, 32:04 the blocks never meant any new coins at all. 32:07 So the only coins that are created to show up with deposits. 32:12 And also I invent this other thing, 32:14 Blind Merged Mining, 32:15 which I think you're crazy if you don't use either merge mining or a 32:18 regular Blind Merged Mining. 32:20 And there's really no controversy. 32:21 I think most, 32:22 almost everyone agrees with me that. 32:25 merge mining and Blind Merged Mining are most of the same thing is mostly 32:28 there's no, 32:29 the controversies about BIP300 and people not understanding it at all, 32:32 which we can get to, 32:33 but, 32:34 and all the misunderstandings of BIP300, 32:36 I interpret it. 32:37 I preemptively anticipated in the November, 32:41 2015 post. 32:42 And so they're all actually in there, 32:44 but no one has read the post. 32:46 So they don't realize that I was seven years ahead of them even today. 32:50 So the, 32:51 but to go back to the question, 32:53 you have this thing. 32:54 There's no new coins. 32:55 It is much more like a, 32:57 like a lightning node or very much a layer two where it's the software is 33:01 there watching each Bitcoin block. 33:04 And the software we wrote, 33:05 it doesn't even do anything unless it can connect to a Bitcoin full node. 33:09 It won't even cause it doesn't know what time it is because of the merge 33:12 mining. 33:13 So it will use the Bitcoin blocks to figure out even what's happening. 33:18 And if you don't do, 33:19 you don't connect it, 33:20 it will just, 33:21 it will just sit there and it will refuse to do anything. 33:22 So when you deposit coins in, 33:24 we have a, 33:25 I can show you screenshots or something, 33:27 but in the regular main chain L1, 33:31 we built a little gooey graphical thing. 33:33 And you, 33:34 you make a, 33:35 you make a sidechain deposit to rest on the sidechain and you kind of 33:38 copy and paste it over. 33:39 And so you send them to this thing. 33:41 They leave your wallet on the layer one node, 33:45 but then as an, 33:48 as the next block is found on the sidechain, 33:50 or the, 33:51 really the blocks are all found as together as groups. 33:53 When that block is found, 33:54 then you get credited with the new coins over there. 33:57 So it's just like sending your coins from one wallet to another wallet, 34:00 except the other wallet is in the Bitmonero world. 34:02 And once you're in the Bitmonero world, 34:04 you can presumably use all the desirable features of Monero, 34:07 which would be like the ring signatures and the privacy, 34:09 et cetera. 34:10 And then when you want, 34:11 you can take them back the coins back. 34:13 Okay. 34:14 Got it. 34:18 Go back to any owner. 34:20 Is there, 34:21 so I want to start to touch on why people are so resistant. 34:24 That there's the first thing that comes to mind is yet. 34:28 Is there a tax surface of, 34:30 I send my BTC to Bitmonero or whatever, 34:34 some, 34:35 some sidechain it's faulty or does something foul. 34:40 How can Bitcoin disappear in this model where it goes to a sidechain? 34:45 It is something ridiculous. 34:46 And it never comes back. 34:47 What actually happened is the, 34:48 the side of the coins would reach a state. 34:51 They would go into a sidechain, 34:52 like number three, 34:53 which is a Monero sidechain or something. 34:55 And then no one would be able to actually tell who the layer one owners 35:00 are. 35:01 That's possible. 35:03 But the thing is, 35:04 I think that is part of the pushback, 35:06 even though it's not rational, 35:07 because the freedom to make mistakes is really the whole point. 35:12 The, 35:13 the person where we're by definition, 35:15 like I was saying, 35:16 we're giving the lead developer of that or the lead designer or whatever 35:21 you want to call them of that second chain. 35:24 We're giving them the freedom and responsibility that they need to, 35:28 to do whatever they want over there. 35:31 And so if they make a mistake, 35:34 that's, 35:35 you know, 35:36 that's on them. 35:37 That has nothing to do with the BIP300. 35:38 You know what I mean? 35:39 It's kind of like a, 35:40 an airport or like a teleporter lets you travel wherever you like. 35:43 And then someone says, 35:44 well, 35:45 what if I travel to Somalia and I get my head cut off or something? 35:47 It's like, 35:48 well, 35:49 that's not the airport's fault. 35:50 Like airport had nothing to do with that. 35:51 That was your decision. 35:52 And, 35:53 and it's denying us the opportunity to take the plane to an even cooler 35:57 place than we are now. 35:59 But I think you're right that that is part of the aversion because right 36:03 now the current group of Bitcoin core developers, 36:06 I think feel, 36:07 take responsibility and feel responsible for people not losing their coins. 36:11 And they think if they endorse this, 36:13 it's opening Pandora's box. 36:15 And then there'll be, 36:16 someone will send their coins to idiot chain number 78, 36:20 and then they'll complain about it and they'll feel they'll get blamed. 36:24 And then they won't get a cool tech job or something. 36:27 Cause they'll, 36:28 there will be a bad Google search results or something. 36:32 Got it. 36:34 That makes sense. 36:35 I mean, 36:36 that, 36:37 that seems to dovetail into why people are so focused on shit coins. 36:42 Like the ICO craze was obviously a bunch of scams. 36:44 Some things rose to the top and now Bitcoin core in some sense, 36:50 or the people in like the kind of like middle sphere now have adopted the 36:55 sense of like, 36:56 I have to be a defender, 36:58 a white knight in some sense. 36:59 Yeah. 37:00 I think a lot of it is also cognitive dissonance where they look and they 37:04 see whatever Charles Hoskinson, 37:06 we get billions of our Dan Larimer get billions of dollars. 37:09 And so their brain decides that their brain decides that there are, 37:15 there's just super, 37:16 super evil and that those people are super evil and they're just really, 37:19 really great. 37:20 And so not getting lots of money is the most important thing in the world. 37:24 It's more important than having $4 billion. 37:26 My, 37:27 my reputation as a non chip coiner is worth $4.1 billion or something. 37:32 So I think that it is just a psychological defect. 37:35 None of this would have happened if people took my advice and just back 37:39 sidechains from the beginning in like 2015. 37:41 So the lack of sidechains, 37:43 I think is the biggest setback in Bitcoin history. 37:45 There would never have been, 37:46 there probably would never have even been an Ethereum. 37:48 There probably would never have been even the blockchain without Bitcoin. 37:52 I don't think that would have happened because people would have been doing 37:55 productive things. 37:56 And so it would have been very obvious, 37:58 like what kind of stuff the blockchain is for and what it's not for. 38:03 So I think that the whole lack of sidechains is like by far the only 38:09 important thing that anyone should know about the history of Bitcoin in the 38:14 last seven years. 38:16 Got it. 38:19 You don't think, 38:21 because people talk about how Bitcoin Bitcoin is money. 38:25 Like that's, 38:26 it's stated goal. 38:27 It's all it's optimized for. 38:29 You don't think if you, 38:32 if it was adopted back then, 38:33 Bitcoin would change irreversibly. 38:36 I think that's another fear that people have is that once you bring it that 38:39 close to Bitcoin, 38:41 the narrative changes irreversibly forever. 38:44 Bring what close to Bitcoin? 38:47 The ability to attach sidechains in this easy fashion, 38:53 muddies the brand. 38:54 The narrative would have improved. 38:57 layer one would have been like, 38:58 this is the conservative zone where nothing changes. 39:02 And this is like the ultra conservative bank and all the other stuff would have 39:05 been optional stuff. 39:07 And they would have a, 39:08 people would go on stage and they would say like the, 39:11 the people who are today toxic, 39:13 this is if they would have jobs at all, 39:16 which is doubtful because the sidechain is also a firewall. 39:19 It protects the projects from each other. 39:22 So they have their own zone and we don't tell them what to do over on their 39:25 restaurant, 39:26 but they don't tell us what to do. 39:28 And then in layer one, 39:29 no one tells anyone what to do because basically nothing happens. 39:32 So the sidechains also firewall everything. 39:34 And so there's no need to have people try and prevent Bitcoin from changing 39:39 because it would already never change it. 39:41 The layer one would never change again. 39:43 So a lot of these people would be out of a job, 39:45 which is ironic because those people also criticize, 39:47 they say the only reason this altcoin person is shilling is because they want, 39:51 they want a job out of that. 39:52 So that's an irony, 39:53 but the, 39:55 those people, 39:56 if they still had jobs, 39:57 they would go up on stage and they would say, 39:58 listen, 39:59 Bitcoin's great. 40:00 We got this, 40:01 we got Bitcoin beach, 40:02 we got El Salvador. 40:03 And they'd say, 40:04 we got this, 40:05 we got this genius kid, 40:06 a Vitalik. 40:07 He's doing a smart contracts on Bitcoin, 40:09 which goes back to Nick Zabo. 40:11 They would like the whole tune would be different. 40:13 And it would all just be, 40:14 it would be including all this. 40:15 It would be, 40:16 there'd be no fighting over Jeremy Rubin. 40:17 There'd be no fighting over whatever, 40:19 trying to complete zk-SNARKs, 40:20 all that stuff. 40:22 Bitcorners wouldn't have to pretend that they're not impressed with zk-SNARKs 40:25 right now, 40:26 even though they were for until, 40:27 until Zcash, 40:28 they were very, 40:29 very impressed and excited about them. 40:30 And then until Zcash became a thing and then they, 40:32 now they hate them. 40:34 And then, 40:35 so the whole thing is all of it is just cope and none of that would have to 40:38 happen. 40:39 If we had sidechains, 40:40 the whole time, 40:41 but the question was, 40:42 if we had moved it in the past, 40:43 it would change the Bitcoin's narrative away from being money. 40:46 And I think no one would doubt that, 40:48 that the coin itself would be money at all. 40:50 They would say that, 40:51 but there's different pieces of software. 40:53 So you see, 40:54 just as there's different alt coins today, 40:56 there'll be different sidechains. 40:57 And they'd be very different. 40:58 It'd be as different as, 40:59 you know, 41:00 PowerPoint is from, 41:01 from Microsoft word. 41:02 It'd be as different as, 41:03 you know, 41:04 PowerPoint is from, 41:05 from Microsoft word. 41:06 And then someone would say like, 41:07 you know, 41:08 is Bitcoin money. 41:09 Of course it is. 41:10 The more, 41:11 the more things, 41:12 the more places where it's used. 41:13 It's like, 41:14 we use money in all kinds of ways. 41:15 You know, 41:16 we don't, 41:17 you buy a casino chips, 41:18 you buy money market. 41:19 Accounts, 41:20 you know, 41:21 it's your cash. 41:22 You have an ATM. 41:23 So it was like people invented an ATM is a good example. 41:25 Cause they exchange at par. 41:26 You put $20 in and you put $20 in, 41:28 and you put $20 in, 41:36 and you get $20 in your checking account. 41:38 Or you take $20 out of the checking account 41:40 and you get a $20 bill. 41:42 So that's like the sidechain, 41:43 the exchange at par, 41:44 a one-to-one value, 41:46 the so-called one-to-one pay. 41:50 So that's a very good example. 41:52 So then if someone could come along 41:54 and they say is a credit card money, 41:56 is a whatever, 41:57 is the checking account money. 41:59 And you'd see how silly those questions would be. 42:02 People are like, 42:03 why are you even asking? 42:04 No, that makes sense. 42:06 I can see how if this was adopted, 42:09 Bitcoin would be, 42:10 I can almost see hyper-Bitcoinization happening faster 42:13 because it's more, 42:14 you're closer to interoperability, 42:17 like this widespread. 42:18 Absolutely. 42:19 And of course, 42:20 most people have very different needs. 42:21 So people are very different. 42:22 Some people really need the Zcash sidechain 42:24 because they're like very, 42:26 very, very privacy-centered people 42:30 with who knows what they're up to. 42:32 But we know there's quite a few things 42:33 where people would prefer a greater privacy. 42:35 Some people don't need that at all. 42:37 And some people don't need decentralization 42:39 very much at all. 42:40 So like if you're just buying the coffee 42:42 or you're just, 42:44 people have different accounts too. 42:46 Like you have, 42:47 you have like the cash you walk around with 42:50 in your wallet. 42:51 You know that you might lose your wallet any day. 42:53 So you don't keep your life savings in your wallet. 42:56 You keep like whatever, 42:57 like a hundred bucks or something 42:59 in your wallet and cash. 43:01 And then you have different accounts. 43:03 So people have different needs. 43:05 Not every transaction needs, 43:07 but we want them all to be Bitcoin transactions. 43:09 So we don't want there to be a Venmo transaction 43:12 or a credit card transaction out there. 43:13 We want to, 43:14 we have to crush everything. 43:15 And if we have to make like a large block sidechain 43:17 to gobble up the Venmo transactions, 43:22 well, 43:23 let me ask you this. 43:24 This is an easy question. 43:25 Is it better that we have large block Bitcoin sidechain 43:29 that is less decentralized because it is, 43:32 has a larger block size and has more expensive full nodes. 43:36 And it also has the handicap that it is not the layer one, 43:41 but it's an optional layer two. 43:43 It's a BIP300 sidechain. 43:44 So it's, 43:45 it's subject to extra assumptions. 43:48 But it uses actual Bitcoin 43:53 and it has actual people with their keys. 43:55 Is that, 43:57 is that better for Bitcoin or is it better for that person to use Venmo and 44:01 to use the US dollar and to never use Bitcoin? 44:03 Like which of those is better for Bitcoin? 44:05 Yeah. 44:06 That's when you say it like that, 44:08 it seems like a no brainer. 44:11 I love. 44:12 So I want to, 44:13 I want to start. 44:14 Wow. 44:15 We're going, 44:16 I usually go for a half hour. 44:17 We're cruising for this interview. 44:18 So this is fine. 44:19 There's a lot to cover. 44:20 I got a couple more questions. 44:22 I once did a clubhouse interview for nine hours. 44:24 No, 44:25 what the hell? 44:26 It started at 9 PM and it went until 6 AM. 44:28 Talking about Bitcoin? 44:30 Yeah, 44:31 of course. 44:32 That's, 44:33 that's insane. 44:34 I'm curious now. 44:35 So if someone's bought in, 44:37 they like the idea of everything they just heard, 44:39 what is the biggest blockers to get, 44:42 to start to get the ball rolling on BIP300? 44:45 What has to change to get it over the line? 44:47 Well, 44:48 unfortunately I think the entire culture is in like in a bad place. 44:51 Honestly, 44:52 I see like people like Udi or whatever, 44:54 it's like kind of like the saviors as trying to bring it back to life. 44:58 This is kind of hard to express though, 45:00 because the, 45:02 the, 45:03 what happened was we won the block size war. 45:06 And as a result, 45:07 people concluded that not only, 45:09 which was an easy win, 45:11 but I could go into the details, 45:13 but the point is the more conservative side won. 45:16 And as a result, 45:17 it became very flaky to suggest any change to Bitcoin at all. 45:22 Also the miners took the other side and lost. 45:26 And so as a result, 45:27 BIP300, 45:28 which uses miners instead of a fixed group of keys or a fixed number of 45:32 people, 45:33 which people, 45:35 you know, 45:36 there's no way of knowing if who owns which keys in the real world. 45:40 So this is really just like basically giving your money to one guy in the 45:43 federated model. 45:45 But as far as anyone could tell, 45:46 but instead this is a process that involved the miners, 45:49 BIP300, 45:50 because the SPV proof is hash rate. 45:52 So as a result, 45:54 anything involving the miners became like, 45:56 just like too awkward for people to even talk about it. 45:59 It became very stigmatized. 46:00 And this has just continued for a while. 46:02 But after, 46:03 as the years roll by, 46:05 people are finally coming around on this issue. 46:08 So I, 46:09 what I used to tell people about BIP300 is, 46:11 you know, 46:13 just read about it, 46:15 learn about the issues. 46:17 I have a big like YouTube series and just, 46:21 you know, 46:22 like try and just talk, 46:23 talk about it with your friends, 46:25 bring it up and just, 46:26 just get the idea into the Overton window. 46:29 And I still think that that's really what is needed is for more people to 46:33 just like, 46:34 you can't wait for me to talk about it because the other thing is the 46:38 process for getting something through Bitcoin core is actually very 46:41 miserable. 46:42 And I don't see in particular why I should be responsible for doing it. 46:46 You know what I mean? 46:47 Like I invented this idea. 46:48 I wrote the code. 46:50 I wrote all these explanations and then people are like, 46:53 okay, 46:54 now all you have to do is, 46:55 all you have to do is hike to the top of Mount Everest and then like 46:58 cast a spell or something. 47:00 I'm like, 47:01 I don't know if someone else can hike to the top of Mount Everest. 47:03 Like I'm, 47:04 this is a good idea, 47:06 but I don't, 47:09 but there's more to it than that. 47:11 The other bad news is that it may not even be possible anymore because the 47:15 entire Bitcoin development cycle has ossified already, 47:23 whether anyone wants to or not. 47:25 And it used to be, 47:26 there used to be many soft forks a year, 47:28 like a long time ago, 47:30 like 2015. 47:32 But now after, 47:33 since then there was only SegWit, 47:35 which took from like basically the end of 2015, 47:39 which was kind of like, 47:40 it was decided on via the scaling to conference. 47:47 Then they worked on it until scaling three, 47:49 which was not until October, 47:51 2016, 47:52 2016. 47:54 Excuse me. 47:55 And then it didn't activate until August, 47:58 2017, 47:59 as you know. 48:00 So that took a while since then there's only been taproot, 48:05 which was November, 48:06 2021. 48:07 So that's basically another five years. 48:11 And now people are not, 48:15 people are just not in the mood for this type of discussion. 48:18 Like even the taproot thing, 48:19 it was miserable to get people to even begin to talk about activation. 48:25 And so the whole thing has become a minefield. 48:29 And as a result, 48:31 I think it's just, 48:32 you can see it getting slower and slower each time. 48:34 So I don't know exactly what it will take, 48:37 but it may not even be possible, 48:39 which is kind of a shocking idea. 48:41 So it sounds like it definitely won't be possible. 48:44 People don't talk about it ever. 48:45 And no one knows about the idea or people know mistaken things about the 48:48 idea for a while. 48:49 The idea would give various criticisms, 48:50 but now the critics I think have been kind of shouted down and they are 48:55 now not speaking anymore or they have changed their tune. 48:59 So we finally won them over a lot of them, but still, 49:02 I think there are a lot of misunderstandings persist. 49:06 These are mostly related to the idea of responsibility that the user 49:12 should be. 49:13 You should be able to get on the airplane and go wherever you want, 49:15 even if it's an unsafe, 49:16 even if it's a place that some guy thinks is unsafe, 49:19 like Peter Todd thinks is unsafe. 49:21 Well, you can listen to him and decide for yourself. 49:23 He shouldn't be able to force you forcibly prohibit you from, 49:29 from choosing to go there, even after you read everything. 49:32 And certainly not, you know, 49:33 you have a hundred percent of your net worth and you want to put 0.1%, 49:37 you want to try something out. 49:40 You can see how that's much more reasonable. 49:43 And that is of course what people would do at first. 49:45 No one is going to just board all that. 49:48 I think another thing that's happened though, 49:50 is that the light as the lightning network gets big, 49:52 a certain counter-attack because the. 49:57 BIP300 was often criticized on the basis that 51% of the miners can steal the money over three to six months and in plain view of everyone, but with the lightning network, 51% of the hashrate can also steal money from a channel, like secretly and in private and without anyone knowing about it with far less recourse. 50:14 So that fact, the fact that the lightning network has exists and that isn't a problem, I think cuts against that whole evil miners explanation, which is, which has its origins from politically in the block size war and is not actually based on people's beliefs because of course, 51% of miners, if they were evil, they would steal the money. 50:42 Miners, if they were evil, they could make all kinds of havoc on the regular main chain as well. So the idea was never rational. It was always just that no one, the Bitcoin development community had a very contentious relationship with the miners because of the block size war. 51:01 So it sounds like there's three main groups in this kind of triangle. There's Bitcoin users proper, which we'll call like the culture. And then there's Bitcoin core that can submit and push through code. And then there's the miners. And so you're saying the biggest variable by far is the culture, which the core devs kind of follow. Do you think that's accurate? 51:26 I think the core devs are also victims of the culture in a way. But there's the idea, there's an idea that like Bitcoin is already perfect and doesn't need any more changes and its success is inevitable. That idea has become very popular, as you probably know. 51:42 So there's a lot of people who just say that the project is pointless because they say Bitcoin is already perfect. You just need to get on board. And no one needs any of these sidechains because 21 million is the thing and just number go up. And so we don't need anything. 52:01 There's a lot of strength in that argument, but I think it's just not good enough because in particular, one of the things sidechains do is they allow you to ossify layer one forever and to make that promise in a way that is credible. 52:18 Because before you just say, listen, we're never going to change it. But then we did change it because SegWit was a mandatory block size increase from one to four megabytes. So it was a soft fork in the sense of being backwards compatible, but it was a hard fork in the sense of loosening the rules. 52:36 Or what used to be called an evil fork, because there's a mandatory block size increase from one megabyte to four megabytes. And it also introduced a perverse incentive where transactions take up more space, but they're charged a lower fee. In particular, the P2SH SegWit, which were much bigger and charged much less. 52:58 So we already made it worse, basically. And then, of course, this new trend of we have more and more address formats. And then the batch 32 is broken. So we'd have batch 32M. And eventually, we're going to have one address format per person on the planet Earth. And it's like torture, I think. 53:17 So even if you're this conservative person who thinks that none of it should change, you've still already been betrayed. And you would want to look for something that would wall everything off, which sidechains would also do. SegWit 300 would also do. It'd be that one change you would make, and then you would never have to change anything again. And so that also would be great. 53:42 Hmm. Yeah, I find this super, super fascinating. I'm curious. So I like to end on kind of a forward looking high note. So in this scenario, I'm imagining BIP300 gets adopted. And let's look at three to five years out, which is like 70 in crypto time. What does Bitcoin look like, if that was the reality in five years? 54:10 Well, it depends. But I think the big thing would be the toxicity would be over, actually, because there would be no need for these people to block changes, because the sidechain world would already be blocking the changes, they would already be like, walled off. So there's no need for the defenders of Bitcoin. So they would already be defended perfectly. And so people would instead be building new things. 54:33 Another key thing would be like, you wouldn't have to, there would be less bureaucracy, because you wouldn't have to defend your idea to anyone except the customers. So you wouldn't have to explain like how it works or why it works. Someone could just have an idea. They would just make the sidechain. 54:50 I think, you know, the idea behind, I think we would, it's too late now to, there used to be a vision that sidechains would just kill off the competitors. But now I think we will have what's kind of like a two party system for a while, where we'll have like Bitcoin and ETH. 55:05 But I do think that all the other ones would be stomped out. I don't know why you would still have other coins. And they would be, there would be no, it would be, we'd have like a kind of a bid assets NFT thing, sidechain in the Bitcoin world, so that those would still live there, but they would live in a way where it was clear what their status was as they're not money, they're sort of second class citizens. 55:32 You pay for them with Bitcoin, you pay the transaction fee in Bitcoin. So we'd have all that, we'd have lots of different projects, there'd be lots of, it'd be possible for someone new, like a random 16 year old that no one has heard of before to just like, create a sidechain one day and they're just show up without talking to anyone, without going to VCs, without having a website. 55:54 They would just make the thing. And if users liked it, it could become big and that person could have a whole career. They could have a huge career, like just making a thing with no kind of all this other stuff that I think is mostly BS of like having to like start a company and whatever to make whatever it is, Polkadot or some crap. 56:16 So you wouldn't have that, you'd have much more of a focus on building. And then it would also, I think it would reunite a lot of different people. Like you had people who were just the kind of promoters, like a Roger Ver type of a person who would make billboards and things, like a marketing type person. Those kind of people would kind of come back. 56:39 Definitely, I think the toxicity would be the biggest difference and people would be constructing things. And developers would lose quite a bit of status as well, believe it or not, because they would be like competing television channels. Whereas today there's a total monopoly. 56:56 Each developer is like a tyrant, and they run the project, they rule with an iron fist, and no dissent is allowed. And some pretend to discuss, but it's just no different than the king talking with like four or five oligarchs. 57:15 You'd have real competition. So if you had someone makes a project, it would be really more like open source software where someone makes a project, and if you think one single line of code should be different than what it is, you can make a new sidechain. 57:31 I don't think that would happen very often, because I think the threat of it happening would be enough to keep everything focused on the end user. So it'd be like an Apple thing as well, where the user experience would start to improve. We'd probably have no addresses because anything really ugly and too techy. 57:49 The other thing is there'd be no, like, people wouldn't want to do anything like impress, technically impressive, just to impress other developers. They would just do stuff that works. And they would want to, it would all be focused on the user. So there probably would be no addresses. 58:06 I don't know exactly. Someone would invent something cool the same way the seed phrase was invented. They would invent other cool stuff for like UTXOs so that people could figure out things like fees. Probably every fee would probably go down because of horizontal scaling. So if fees got, if there was an idea and one blockchain number six, sidechain number six, that was really good. 58:26 You could just copy and paste sidechain number six and start a new one. You would need to raise the block size. You have basically an unlimited number of horizontal space and new block chains that are the same. So all the fees would be very low. The total amount of fees collected by the layer one miners would be high because they merge mining, they all go to the same group. 58:49 So those would be some pretty big changes. I think also people would reunite. It would be like, there wouldn't be the infighting. There's a very good essay by Guern called Tech Holy Wars. I think it's called Tech Holy Wars are Coordination Problems. It's very short. Everyone should read it. And it's excellent. And we would have, there would be no infighting. I think it would just be like Bitcoin and Ethereum and then nothing else. And both would be different takes on the same thing. 59:19 I would think because even Ethereum is now doing like sharding and ZK rollup type. They're also doing a very similar thing. So we'd have those two and it would all just be Bitcoin versus Ethereum in the crypto world and then crypto versus the banks and versus everything else versus ICANN versus Facebook and everything. So in the real world. So I think it'd be a lot better. 59:46 But unfortunately, I don't think it'll be here. I think it'll take still years. I mean, it would take a long time. I think this is all the cultures and is messed up and the developer priorities are also messed up. 59:57 Like it's not true that developers decided like they heard about this idea in 2015 or 2017 and they decided, you know what, let's change what we say is important away from taproot, which is a technically impressive thing, but which users don't want because we see you can look at the numbers and you can see that basically no one uses it. 1:00:21 We're going to change that to something that we know that some users want large block size. And we know that some of those users are OK with SPV validation. So even though we don't want it, even though we don't think it's a good idea, you know, like a parent listening to their child and the child says, I want to go to snowboarding school or whatever. 1:00:44 You can say, I wish they would just go to skiing school or whatever. Take French. But you say, you know what? 1:00:53 It's the wrong thing to do. Keep someone prisoner here and then say, well, make it possible for you to leave. 1:01:01 You know, we don't want you to leave. 1:01:04 We don't agree with the choices, but you say we respect you as the user, as the sovereign user. But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. 1:01:16 Yeah, I think it will. So it is slowly happening. People are slowly coming around to the 300, though. 1:01:22 I think maybe we have to get that meme going that 300 is really like pro user. 1:01:27 At every everyone else's expense, it's in that that is why that's it's a real justification. 1:01:35 Well, I hope I'm doing my small part to get the word out. 1:01:40 It seems like, you know, it's just you want to experiment and get the best ideas out there in the free market. 1:01:47 And so this it seems like a natural progression to try that out. 1:01:51 Well, this has been this has been fantastic for people that are curious about the 300 or want to follow you. 1:01:59 Where's the what's the best place to follow up? 1:02:00 Well, there is a drivechain.info, which I think I have BIP300.info also, but Drivechain is 300 plus 301. 1:02:08 And it's not a it's just easier to break them into two bits. 1:02:12 One thing is you could read the BIP. 1:02:15 A lot of people don't do that, but the people who do read the BIP quickly get over their anxieties because you see, it's just a little posted note with a number on it. 1:02:24 It just counts up to 13000, basically. 1:02:26 If you're a technical person, that is. 1:02:28 If you go to drivechain.info, I have actual software that you could download and run. 1:02:34 And that's a great way to learn about what's happening, because you can see it happen right in front of your very eyes with test coins that aren't real. 1:02:41 They don't abide. 1:02:43 And there's also a YouTube playlist where I put all the stuff about Drivechain. 1:02:48 So I'll put this in there, probably. 1:02:50 And so I have lots of stuff, presentations, interviews, panels and things over the years and debates. 1:02:57 And so, yeah, you can watch. 1:02:59 You can watch all of that. 1:03:01 And that's like over like 30 hours of stuff is there. 1:03:05 So that's the best thing. 1:03:07 If you want to learn more, is that Drivechain that info has a lot. 1:03:10 There's also a telegram group. 1:03:12 T dot me slash DC insiders. 1:03:15 That's a Washington, D.C. joke. 1:03:16 And those are the things that you can follow me on Twitter. 1:03:19 I'm Truthcoin on Twitter. 1:03:21 T R U T H C O I N. 1:03:23 Perfect. 1:03:25 And I will put all the goodies down below for easy access. 1:03:29 But, man, we covered a lot. 1:03:31 Paul, thank you so much for taking the time. 1:03:34 This is fantastic. 1:03:36 Go ahead. 1:03:37 My pleasure. 1:03:42 Welcome to built on Bitcoin. 1:03:44 I know that things don't always go your way. 1:03:48 But I'll be right here waiting. 1:03:51 I've been waiting now. 1:03:53 I've been trying to figure out a way to make it out. 1:03:55 Make it out. 1:03:57 Because I don't think about everything.
