0:00 Okay, hello. Hi, everyone. 0:04 Here it is, Wednesday at 2 p.m. So, 0:09 I'm here to answer anyone's 0:14 questions or complaints. 0:18 Raise your hand and you can come up and complain or ask a question 0:23 or do whatever. 0:26 I'm going to invite a couple people to co-host just because sometimes my 0:30 phone will just crash and it will lose the space. So, 0:33 I'm just going to invite some people 0:35 to co-host just so that there is a 0:41 host in case my phone crashes. Okay, 0:46 we have the very 0:51 first person. Here we go. Yes, 0:56 we got a Justin. Hello. Hello. Hey, 1:01 I'll co-host if you need 1:07 a co-host. Yeah, I would like one because I think if my phone crashes, 1:10 the whole space 1:14 will go down, which is no good. But if you have a co-host, it will. 1:18 We have one. We got 1:21 someone accepted one. 1:26 So, yeah, of course, 1:32 I'll just 1:38 talk a little 1:44 bit about it. It's 1:50 like, first of all, about myself, you know, 1:53 I've been a Bitcoiner for a very long time, and I 1:57 was a Bitcoin maximalist for 15 years, basically until now. 2:00 But Bitcoin faces a lot of very 2:04 important problems that we have to address. And I think if we don't, 2:07 we may lose this 2:10 opportunity to make Bitcoin a success. 2:13 My view is that the root cause of all these problems is 2:16 that we have grown complacent because of a lack of competition. And the, 2:21 you know, like, we 2:26 have, we're in denial about an awful lot of things. But on one hand, 2:29 people preach this idea 2:31 that Bitcoin is perfect, and Bitcoin doesn't, it can't be improved. 2:34 And Bitcoin is, it's 2:37 already, you know, exactly what it needs to be. 2:39 And all we need to do is not break it. But then 2:42 on the other hand, we have all these problems, 2:43 like everyone's lying to themselves about the 2:45 Lightning Network, everyone's lying to themselves about what it means, 2:47 the darknet markets have 2:49 switched to Monero only, people are switching to stablecoins, 2:51 that was originally, all this was 2:54 originally a Bitcoin project, Zcash, etc. 2:57 All this stuff was originally Bitcoin projects. People 2:59 have been slowly leaving over 15 years. So we had one person request. 3:03 But I don't see them 3:07 anymore. And so this hard fork is actually a really good idea, 3:12 because it allows everyone to 3:17 get free money. 3:21 And it allows us to create a competitor to BTC that will hopefully help 3:24 BTC 3:28 perform better. And of course, 3:32 people had very strong feelings 3:37 about this, because of the Bitcoin 3:42 cash hard fork in 2017, I think. So I created this space to, you know, 3:46 let all the haters or 3:50 critics, you know, like, sure, let's, let's see what they have to say. 3:55 I'm not surprised that, you 3:59 know, lots of people are, you know, they want to hop on to my tweet, 4:03 they got 10 million views. And 4:06 they want to add like some little thing for themselves. 4:09 But then they don't actually want to 4:11 show up to the space to complain. It doesn't surprise me at all. 4:13 That's exactly what I was 4:15 expecting, of course. But sure, hey, 4:18 tell your friends tell you anyone who's a hater or anyone 4:21 who's curious. Tell them to come on in. 4:24 And they can talk about why they think this is a terrible 4:28 idea. I suppose I might as well talk about it. 4:31 No one's going to ask or request. I can talk about 4:33 the whole takes Toshi's coins concept, 4:37 which is by far the most talked about feature of this idea. 4:42 And it's, 4:43 it's people talk about it as if it's some kind of flaw or some kind of 4:45 shameful thing. 4:46 But that's nothing of the kind. I mean, it's, 4:48 it's actually an ingenious idea. 4:52 First, 4:54 I have to point out that there is a different version of this hard fork 4:56 that does 4:57 not have any reassignment of Satoshi's coins, 5:00 it doesn't have any hard fork. And that that version 5:02 is that's just what BIP300 is itself. 5:05 And that has existed for a very long time. 5:08 It was formalized in 2017 or something. So that's point number one. 5:12 But point number two is the 5:16 people who complain about the reassignment of Satoshi's coins, 5:19 they have to equivocate, 5:22 they want it both ways. They on one hand, they want to say, 5:26 this project solves an important 5:30 problem, and it's going to be valuable. 5:33 And so the coins will be valuable in this project is 5:37 really important. But on the other hand, they say, Oh, 5:40 this is a terrible project, 5:43 and it's useless, and it's not going to solve any problem. 5:44 So you have to agree, 5:46 we have to go back and forth, either this solves a problem, 5:48 or it doesn't. And if it does solve 5:50 a really big problem, 5:52 then you want to live in a world where the people who help solve a 5:54 problem, 5:57 make an enormous profit from that. That's what that's what we all want. 5:59 We all want 6:01 to live in a world where people profit from solving problems. Otherwise, 6:06 if it takes a lot of effort to solve a problem, and there's no profit, 6:08 then we're really relying 6:11 on people's altruism, 6:13 and not a lot of the important problems are going to be solved, 6:15 only very few of them. So that is, so that's, 6:20 it's a very good thing when you set up your society 6:24 where people who solve a big problem get a profit. And then, you know, 6:27 on the other hand, 6:29 some people just think this, this project is not important, 6:33 and it doesn't solve, 6:37 does not solve an important problem. And in which case, 6:40 why even bother complaining about it, 6:44 because it's just going to be some useless project that the coins won't 6:46 be worth anything. 6:49 Satoshi has exactly as many eCash as he had before, 6:51 in terms of US dollar value. 6:54 Okay, we got someone who is giving the thumbs down. 6:57 Why not come up on stage and 7:00 let everyone know what you have to say. 7:06 Or don't. Again, I'm not surprised. 7:11 Okay, so, yes, some questions. If you're allowing a pre-mine, 7:16 then why not allow the public to pre-mine 7:21 as well? I think that would be a good... 7:25 Not allowing a pre-mine. There's a pre-sale, to some extent, 7:28 but there's not a pre-mine. 7:35 Okay, so the coins that, Satoshi's coins, you're not pre-mining those? 7:38 Is that right? 7:41 That's right. I mean, I guess you could think of it that way, I suppose. 7:44 There is a public 7:47 pre-sale, but for various legal reasons, 7:50 I'm not sure that everyone can participate in it. 7:52 It depends on where you live. That's not my fault. 8:01 But yeah, of course, we're selling them now to people. 8:03 Everyone's getting the same price. 8:06 Okay, we have another person. It's not like, you know what I mean? 8:07 It's not like 8:10 some kind of cloak and dagger thing. Okay, another person has requested 8:13 Mr. Otto and Sante. 8:18 Yes, well, thanks for allowing me to speak. So, 8:22 we already implemented the 300 8:27 protocol back from 2015, and we are testing it. And nevertheless, 8:31 it wasn't adopted in the big 8:36 chain. It does what it's supposed to do. I mean, in our perspective, 8:40 it works, and we've tested it 8:45 with 300, 400 users. 8:47 It does the job with all the Drivechains and stuff. Well, 8:50 we also use the 8:53 OP_RETURN for some small things we do around the Drivechains, 8:57 of course, but it does work. I mean, 9:02 even though this Bitcoin fork, which is in August, won't work, 9:05 it will be a nice experiment for 9:08 everyone. I mean, we can learn from our mistakes and then correct them, 9:10 right? 9:13 Right. I'm sorry, 9:15 are you saying that you run an altcoin that has implemented BIP300? 9:16 Is that 9:17 what you're saying? No, we just forked Bitcoin, restarted it, 9:21 and also allowed your implementation 9:25 of the protocol to run, along with some others. Yeah, 9:28 but you said that it worked with 400 users. 9:31 I didn't understand what you meant by that. Like, 9:32 what are you referring to when you say it? 9:34 We have some drivechains. Yeah, but who's we? 9:40 It's not an auto incentive. It's just another project. 9:43 You will be hearing of it soon enough. 9:46 But we are testing it with our community, and it does work. I mean, 9:49 of course, it doesn't have the 9:54 adoption of the Bitcoin for the miners to collude and stuff like that, 9:57 but as a small 10:00 proof-of-work chain and with Drivechains, it does work. I mean, 10:03 it fits the profile. 10:06 It's just an experiment. Why not? Yeah, I agree, 10:10 and I think that even if the eCash hard fork 10:14 in August is a huge failure, 10:17 there are many ways in which it might overall be a success, because 10:20 just by attempting it, we can raise awareness of certain issues. 10:24 It might still cause BTC to 10:28 get into better shape, and even if it fails completely, 10:30 I think it will very 10:33 minimally inconvenience people. They just don't get free money. 10:35 So I think I agree that we should 10:39 be more proactive, and we should actually launch. 10:41 I think we should do lots more. 10:43 Instead of having new altcoins, 10:46 we should really do a lot of these semi-privatized hard forks, 10:49 because then you have a group of people who have an incentive to make a 10:52 high-quality project, 10:55 and meanwhile, 10:57 all Bitcoiners are just getting free money left and right. So I think 11:03 the problem is it affects narratives, 11:06 and it affects people's careers in the development 11:10 world, but I think those people are mostly the problem. Well, 11:13 the thing is that by forking it 11:16 and restarting it, you can relive what Satoshi lived. 11:19 So you will be the only one mining it, 11:23 call it a pre-mine or not. 11:25 You're the only one that believes in that project, 11:27 and others won't mine with you. That's not a pre-mine. 11:29 You are just alone. People don't 11:31 believe you. The second, you will learn so much. I mean, 11:35 the difficulty of adjusting only to 11:39 maximum forex up and down, also the OP_RETURN bug, 11:44 and everything else will be like reliving 11:49 2009-2013 history. With all the bugs, 11:53 some of them were never fixed by Satoshi, some of them 11:57 were fixed instantly. You will learn so much, 12:00 and you can adapt Bitcoin to anything you want. 12:03 That's the power of the open source, in my opinion. 12:06 And even though some of them are not 12:09 successful, the next ones will be for sure. Yeah, 12:13 a lot of people are very interested in 12:17 this project, 12:19 and a lot of people have been pushing for it for more than five years. 12:22 So 12:24 we've had an enormous amount of people be interested in this idea even 12:27 before it was 12:29 announced. And then it clearly struck a very large nerve and got lots of 12:33 conversation, 12:36 news articles, lots of people came up to me in Vegas to talk about it. 12:39 And numerous people 12:42 have asked how to mine it and how to start mining it on day one. 12:45 So I certainly don't 12:48 think it's accurate to say. And I don't think I'll be mining myself. 12:50 I'm not much of a miner. 12:53 Because I have a background in economics, 12:56 so it's a little too close to a perfectly competitive 13:01 industry for me to be interested in working there. But yeah, 13:05 I agree that we should do lots 13:08 of things even if they don't succeed, 13:11 even if something has a 5% chance of success. If we only 13:15 do things that are certain to succeed in the world, 13:17 then we're only going to do a very small 13:20 percentage of all the things that are worth doing. 13:22 So we should try all kinds of things, 13:25 even if they have a low chance of success. 13:28 That's how evolution built every living thing on this 13:33 planet. But sure, thanks. 13:36 So you are running a new project that is secret for now. 13:42 I won't call it a secret. 13:45 It's just a startup that's going to be into the public in a few 13:49 weeks, maybe. But it's okay. I mean, we learned so much about Bitcoin, 13:52 the little things. 13:56 We're not affecting Bitcoin by any means. Neither are we or you. 13:59 We are on the same team. 14:03 It's not about being wrong to the Bitcoin supporters or maxis. 14:07 It's just forking the code 14:11 and modifying to do experiments. Some of them are good. 14:15 Some of them are not so good. But we must 14:18 move. I mean, 14:21 I don't know how many people out of this crowd know that Bitcoin was not 14:25 with a specific supply at the beginning. Well, 14:29 that was also a hard fork. Yes, let's call it 14:34 that way. I don't think it actually was necessarily a hard fork. 14:46 The code was there. It was in plain sight for everybody. 14:49 It was modified in 2014, I think, 14:52 by Peter, right? Yeah, BIP42, I think. 14:56 So things that people should know about Bitcoin, 15:00 because it's not just electronic cash. It's much, much more, 15:02 in my opinion. So 15:06 by using these side projects, 15:09 people can learn and be sure about the big boy. 15:13 And why not do some, I don't know, some add-ons on the big boy? 15:18 Okay, great. Thanks. Yes, 15:23 anyone else have any thoughts or complaints or... 15:29 Yeah, hello. 15:33 Hey. Hello. 15:36 Hey, Paul. 15:38 Yeah, I... Hey, can you hear me? 15:40 I can hear you. 15:42 Oh, great. Yeah, I don't know if a lot of people remember, 15:46 but back in 2014, 15:50 I think it was Peter Risen wanted to launch a chain state fork or so, 15:54 like an airdrop 15:58 of Ethereum. He called it like a Ethereum, with an A in front. 16:03 And he was going to give Ethereum to all Bitcoin holders. 16:12 But I was just wondering if you have any thoughts or comments to the 16:15 Bitcoin community. 16:18 What can they... 16:19 I didn't totally understand. I think you may have cut out a little bit. 16:21 I heard you say 16:24 the A Ethereum. 16:26 Yeah. 16:27 What did you say? Sorry. 16:29 Yeah, yeah. No, sorry if my connection's bad. I'll shut up. But yeah, 16:32 it was called A Ethereum. 16:35 I think it was Peter Risen on BitcoinTalkForums wanted to give Ethereum 16:39 to every Bitcoiner 16:43 in the same way that you are with eCash before Ethereum launched. 16:46 So it was kind of like, 16:48 I'm going to take their software, 16:50 but then I'm just going to reward it all to Bitcoiners 16:51 to try to sort of beat them. 16:56 Yeah, and I thought it was a great idea. And I'm just wondering, like, 16:59 do you have any speculations on whether or not eCash fails, 17:02 whether or not it gets, 17:04 you know, adoption? 17:07 But it'd be nice if Bitcoin adopted this kind of governance mechanism. 17:12 I was saying, you know, 17:14 let's not be so afraid of the hard fork if you're willing 17:16 to create a new community. So I just think it's kind of interesting. 17:18 And I wonder if 17:20 you've thought about what Bitcoin could learn from this experiment. 17:25 Yeah, I completely agree. 17:28 And I think that imagine how different the culture would have 17:31 been if instead of having all these altcoins, 17:34 there was just all hard forks and everything 17:36 was just going to Bitcoin holders. Now, of course, 17:38 when you do the pure hard fork, 17:41 that means that you can't give any extra profit to the people who, 17:44 you know, did the labor of 17:47 creating the fork idea, which is, again, 17:51 why this Satoshi's Coins idea is actually a brilliant idea. 17:55 And it perfectly cuts the difference between, on one hand, 17:58 rewarding all Bitcoin holders by 18:01 giving them free coins. And on the other hand, 18:02 it gives you like an incentive to create the 18:04 project in the first place. So, yeah, 18:06 I think that would have been really, really cool if that 18:09 had caught on. Back when Ethereum was created, people believed so much, 18:12 including me, everyone 18:16 just took it for granted that Bitcoin would just be doing smart 18:18 contracts. And we rolled our eyes 18:21 at Ethereum and we thought, well, you know, who cares, 18:24 because it's an open source project, 18:27 we're just going to absorb all the best ideas. 18:30 It was totally taken for granted back in 2015, 18:32 back in 2014. I mean, 18:35 everyone thought sidechains were around the corner. There was a tweet. 18:38 So Blockstream had just come out. And Gavin Andreessen had tweeted like, 18:41 if this amazing 18:44 company offers you a job, you take it. Brian Armstrong had the tweet, 18:47 like, the altcoins are 18:51 just a distraction. Ripple, Litecoin are a distraction. 18:54 The way is Bitcoin and sidechains. 18:57 Everyone believed Trace Mayer had a tweet. 19:00 When the sidechains whitepaper came out, 19:02 all the altcoin markets crashed. He had like a snarky screenshot. 19:07 Everyone took it for granted that we would have these L2 chains and that 19:09 there would not be any 19:11 difference technologically between Bitcoin and Ethereum. 19:13 So that might have been why people 19:16 were overconfident. 19:17 I don't think anyone realized we'd be living in a world where all the 19:19 chains 19:20 were so different and they had all these niches. 19:24 And there'd be like a Solana niche for meme coins 19:27 or something. Anyway, that's a great comment. OK, 19:31 now we have someone else. Mr. Mimetic Money. 19:35 Hello. Hey, Paul, thanks for taking my question. 19:38 I'll be real brief and then step down to take 19:41 the answer. 19:43 But you were mentioning earlier in this chat here that if this hard fork 19:45 works and 19:47 you get a really good competitor to Bitcoin, 19:50 that ultimately strengthens Bitcoin. So I just wanted 19:53 your thoughts in that world where let's say sidechains become successful 19:56 enough to host all 19:59 the experimentation applications, the transactions you're talking about. 20:03 What stops Bitcoin itself 20:06 from just being the settlement layer beneath a larger ecosystem in that 20:08 world? Like, is that 20:10 what you want? Yeah, that makes sense. But that's what BIP300 is. 20:13 And the Bitcoin community, it's 20:16 not just about activating BIP300. 20:19 We have a lot of like weird cultural problems that I think 20:23 might be impossible to fix, 20:26 but maybe a competitor could could fix them because 20:30 really like we live in a world where I think there's a couple smoking 20:32 guns. So one of the 20:34 smoking guns would be OP_CAT, which is OP_CAT. It does basically nothing. 20:37 It was in the original 20:39 Satoshi client and it was removed in a kind of panicked emergency 20:43 situation. It just takes X and 20:46 Y and returns XY next to each other. 20:50 It had this financial support like backing from 20:54 Starkware. It enables all these weird Merkle tree things. 20:56 So OP_CAT is this super, super, super, 20:59 it's like you designed a science experiment to have the least 21:02 controversial beneficial soft fork. 21:08 But we're not doing that. So the question is why? 21:10 And I think the answer is 21:14 the cultural and it's in everyone's brain and it's the size of the 21:16 community is too big and 21:18 people can't talk to each other anymore. Like, you know what I mean? 21:20 None of these people know 21:22 what OP_CAT, who knows what OP_CAT is? 21:26 Does Michael Saylor know what OP_CAT is? Does BlackRock know 21:29 what OP_CAT is? Does Bitmain know what OP_CAT is? I don't, you know, like, 21:33 I would guess that none 21:37 of these people know what it is, even though in the technical community, 21:39 it's the simpler 21:41 far simpler thing. So in an abstract sense, it's hard to talk about. 21:46 I think that if people could 21:51 see it in the wild, then it would be easier to talk about. 21:55 My hope is that someone will do 21:58 something possibly including this hard fork, 22:02 but someone will do something that makes the technical 22:06 community just say, okay, listen, we've had enough of this. 22:08 We've had enough of making 22:10 we've had enough of making all these irrational decisions. 22:12 And we're just going to merge like 16 22:14 soft forks and the next version of Bitcoin or the miners just say, 22:17 we've also had enough of this. 22:22 And we know we have researched x, y and z. 22:24 And we know this is good for the price of 22:27 Bitcoin for the price of ASICs. And we're just going to do it. 22:31 I can also see people just 22:34 thinking, well, 22:37 it's actually too difficult to fix BTC culture and then just silently 22:40 jumping ship. So the question was, why can't BTC just do all this? 22:44 But the answer is, 22:50 there is no good reason why BTC can't do it. And yet paradoxically, 22:54 I hope this explanation is not 22:58 too bizarre. But paradoxically, because there's no good reason, 23:00 it means there's some hidden force 23:03 just wrecking it all that maybe we can't overcome. 23:08 Appreciate your answer, Paul. Thanks. 23:12 Yeah, thank you. Yes, Mr. Justin. 23:18 Hello. Welcome back to the stage. 23:24 Yeah, where did you, are you publicly announcing the pre-sale price? 23:31 Well, how did you determine that price? 23:35 The issue with this is a lot of the ICO stuff and 23:38 like other public promotions, like it's very scammy. 23:41 And there are laws about solicitation. 23:44 And it's like on one side, 23:47 it's like insider dealing and then on the other side solicitation. 23:51 So it's like you're screwed no matter what you do. 23:53 But I think on the whole, 23:57 it's better to avoid talking about it because it just pollutes the 23:58 space, 24:02 like the space in abstract. It makes it seem like, 24:04 because then people just can't stop 24:07 shilling their investments and it's annoying for everyone. 24:09 It's like when people come to 24:11 your front door and they try to sell you whatever. 24:14 And so I think I try to de-emphasize it because I 24:18 don't really want it to be about that. 24:19 I really want it to be about the ideas. 24:22 But I will, people can DM me about it if they want. And yeah, 24:25 I'm trying to keep it to like 24:28 people that I've had like a multi-year relationship with, 24:29 which would include us, 24:31 Justin, because we met you at many Bitcoin conferences ago in person. 24:35 But I would prefer 24:38 it to be like people who have been in the industry a long time, 24:41 people who have known 24:43 me for a long time, 24:45 people who are like very wealthy and can afford to lose the money. 24:47 But yeah, the price is pretty low, I think. 24:49 I kind of looked at where's Bitcoin Cash, 24:52 where's like Bitcoin SV, 24:55 these Bitcoin SV being like a disastrous outcome. And I kind of like 24:59 put it near Bitcoin SV basically. 25:01 So I think everyone who invests will get a good deal. 25:05 Certainly that's my hope. 25:09 And so I certainly hope to be able to bring people a positive ROI 25:13 by just pricing the coins very low. 25:15 But I really try to avoid talking about it because 25:17 it's really, it is a distraction, I think. And yeah, of course, 25:21 at the end of the day, 25:24 just eyeball it. But it has been, 25:26 it was already two-thirds sold out before we announced. That's 25:29 part of the reason why I announced is so many people had found out, 25:31 people were already telling 25:33 each other. So I thought everyone, 25:37 a lot of people already know or something like that. 25:41 So that's kind of why I announced actually, 25:44 because I already knew that I didn't need that to 25:49 complete the project. And again, the project is not, 25:52 the fundraising accomplishes several 25:54 things at once. 25:57 One thing is you need to have a team of people who can trust each other. 26:02 It's a little bit like why people do hazing. 26:05 You have to clear a bar where people feel like they 26:08 can trust each other going into the fork. 26:10 You want to have people who have skin in the game 26:12 before the fork actually happens. 26:15 The people who know how to explain what's happening in advance. 26:18 I just think that if you don't do those things, 26:21 the hard fork is not viable. Because if you think, 26:24 but what if you just snap your fingers and hard fork today, 26:27 very few people even know about that. 26:29 So they may be transacting in Bitcoin. There may be replay issues. 26:32 There may be all this other 26:34 stuff that'd be transacting in Bitcoin, 26:37 and they don't even know that there's a hard fork. 26:39 And it would take them time to research it and make an informed decision 26:42 on do they actually 26:45 want to invest in it or sell it or buy it or ignore it. 26:50 So those factors led to my announcement, 26:54 which I realized has many layers. 26:58 And someone's frustrated by that and confused, then I think that 27:02 is fair. But, you know, 27:03 it's like I had to weigh a lot of different issues against each other. 27:05 So 27:08 that's kind of what I was thinking about that. 27:10 Yeah, well, 27:15 I think the replay protection is 27:21 already implemented right in the hard 27:26 fork. 27:32 It's not like a bug or whatever. So I don't think replay will be 27:40 a thing. But what happened, 27:42 I don't know if you remember the Bitcoin gold fork, 27:45 what happened is for the people that held Bitcoin were able to also 27:50 claim the new Bitcoin gold. 27:56 And the thing that happened is for them to derive the new address from 28:00 the new fork, 28:04 they had no software to do that. 28:09 And a very big hack happened that when one user posted a 28:17 software that was deriving the new Bitcoin gold address from the old 28:21 mnemonic or private key. 28:25 And by using a Google Analytics cookie, they stole also the Bitcoin. 28:30 So I think as a piece 28:34 of advice for the people that are not so techies to provide the software 28:38 embedded that will derive 28:43 and can be run locally. Yeah, 28:46 I would agree. But let me clarify that 28:50 the for the replay protection, like to split the coins, 28:54 you have to do a new thing using 28:59 our software or like a splitter that's derived from our software. 29:01 And we're going to publish 29:03 all of that well in advance. But if you just make a BTC transaction, 29:06 it will be replayed 29:10 on the eCash network. So that's different from how Bitcoin Cash. 29:14 What Bitcoin Cash did is they 29:19 basically said, 29:22 we will make it so that everything splits instantaneously. But as 29:25 Jameson Lopp rightly pointed out, he said, 29:29 this is basically an admission that you're not the real 29:33 Bitcoin, 29:36 which is kind of funny for Bitcoin Cash to have Bitcoin in the name. But 29:38 there's a lot of nuances to it all. But yeah, 29:41 I would study the replay protection very carefully 29:45 before making a decision or just do nothing until you figure out what 29:48 other people are 29:52 complaining about, if anything. Yeah, I have a related question. 29:57 So let's say theoretically, 30:03 someone has Bitcoin in a wallet that has a complicated pathway. 30:06 For example, 30:10 Wasabi Wallet. It's known to have kind of a hard... 30:16 You can pull out using the recovery website, 30:24 walletsrecovery.org. 30:27 You can pull out various like the SegWit version zero coins 30:31 in Electrum or in Sparrow. But the other pathways, 30:34 it's just too complicated. 30:38 What would you say for those people? 30:40 And this would probably be something good to put in the 30:43 FAQ as well. 30:46 Do you recommend just transferring each UTXO one by one into a new UTXO 30:50 in Sparrow? 30:53 What's the most secure way of splitting off their eCash? 31:02 Well, if you download our software and then spend the eCash, 31:04 there'll be like a little checkbox 31:07 that is checked by default that's like split the coins and it will do it 31:09 for you. Now, of course, 31:12 this involves importing your private key, 31:14 like the real private key for both coins. So 31:18 you really shouldn't do that. That would be an insane thing to do. 31:23 But the flip side of that coin is there's no way we can help you split 31:26 the coins 31:30 without knowing the private key. So it's kind of like an impasse. 31:33 But what every normal person 31:35 should do is they should maybe like download the splitter tool or the 31:38 software, but don't run it 31:40 and just wait for like one or two weeks. And by then, you know, 31:44 you'll either 31:48 see people complaining online or you won't. But yeah, 31:51 I think the right thing is to... 31:55 I think someone will probably, 31:58 it might be us or it might be someone else, but 32:01 we may try to publish a standalone splitter that's like a really, 32:04 really, really small piece 32:06 of software. 32:08 So it's very easy for people to kind of check through the source code or 32:10 have the AI 32:12 read the source code. And it will just, 32:16 that would be the bare bones type of a thing. 32:21 But yeah, our software will do it. Our wallet, you know, 32:22 will do it automatically. 32:25 But yeah, you have to import your real private key, which is, 32:27 that's an insane thing to do 32:29 under any circumstance. But yeah, that's what you have to do. But, 32:33 you know, again, I don't, 32:37 I'm not saying everyone should do that on day one immediately. 32:39 That would be a very foolish decision. 32:42 So just plan it out and then wait and then just, you know, 32:44 wait for a little while. 32:48 And when you get more comfortable with it, then do it. 32:52 Well, 32:55 the people would do it because they want to mine from the first block. 32:59 Well, you can mine without, you know, 33:02 you can mine without splitting your coins, of course. 33:04 Exactly. But you have to derive your eCash address, right? 33:09 Well, again, the L1 is going to be exactly the same as Bitcoin Core, 33:13 just with like the name changed and like a few other things changed. So 33:19 that should all be like very easy for people to get going. 33:29 I wouldn't worry about that. 33:31 And you also use the SIGHASH fork ID that Bitcoin Cash used for forking 33:34 it? 33:37 I don't. We're not using that, no. 33:41 Okay. 33:48 I wanted to see if I can encourage some more adversarial people up here. 33:54 So, Paul, like you pointed to this tension where as Bitcoin fees, 33:59 transaction fees are 34:03 obviously needed in the long run on Bitcoin. As fees rise, 34:07 it'll be hard to settle L2s. 34:12 So it'll kind of make it so the punishment, transaction, 34:15 I forget what it's called exactly, 34:18 in Lightning, won't be able to be broadcasted. 34:22 On the other hand, fees are very low. 34:24 You're going to need a big block size or something 34:26 to pay miners. 34:30 And that's that's bad for many reasons that a lot of us know about. 34:34 So, yeah, like what is the, I mean, 34:38 I see this whole experiment as a way to be empirical 34:41 about this and kind of make Bitcoiners and everybody confront this 34:45 potential problem. 34:49 And Drivechains is a kind of solution. 34:52 You're going to have high fee paying settlement 34:56 transactions that don't need to crowd out. 34:58 So you're going to have a lot of people that 35:02 don't need to crowd out so many L1 transactions. 35:04 They could still be low fee. 35:07 But, yeah, 35:09 any like thoughts on that or what's the what's like the Bitcoiner 35:12 response who's very sanguine about this potential problem? 35:16 How do we settle L2s? 35:18 I think it's interesting that both two groups of people thought that the 35:20 L1 fee rates would 35:23 be high. So first you had like Roger Vertype and they were saying, well, 35:29 because they had experienced it themselves. So they said, oh, well, 35:31 I experienced all these 35:33 high fees when the fees go back up to $10 per transaction, 35:36 $20 per transaction, $50 per 35:39 transaction. They were like, when that happens, 35:41 they'll just be a mass exodus. It'll be so 35:44 embarrassing. 35:46 Everyone will leave BTC and they'll come to Bitcoin Cash or whatever. 35:50 So that was the thinking behind the large blockers. 35:53 They expected L1 fees to go up and 35:56 they're always waiting for, you know, waiting for Godot, like that play, 35:59 you know, and they're 36:02 just thinking one day this will happen and it will be a big success for 36:04 us. 36:05 Now, the second group of people were like the Dan Held type people. 36:08 And they were saying, 36:11 you know, very confidently in writing, they were saying, you know, 36:14 because an international 36:17 wire transfer is $75, 36:20 the L1 fee rates will eventually be somewhere around there. 36:23 And both of those groups were wrong because, you know, 36:25 the equilibrium is just people don't 36:27 like paying a high L1 fee. And so they just stopped doing it. 36:30 They just won't pay. And 36:33 especially as the payments world becomes more competitive, you know, 36:36 in the past, you had 36:39 to send wire transfer. Now you have Venmo. This was like, you know, 36:41 there was a time 36:43 before Venmo had been invented. There was a time before WeChat Pay. 36:45 There was a time 36:48 before Zelle. There was a time before all this stuff was invented. 36:51 And the equilibrium cost 36:55 for normal fiat payment is now like very low. 36:59 There was a time before credit cards were invented. 37:02 So what I'm getting at is the fee rates, 37:08 I don't think they can be very high, even in a 37:13 Drivechain world. The L2 fee rate would be like $0.10, 37:16 which I think is like lower, 37:19 like between $0.01 and $0.10. 37:21 The reason why I don't think it'd go much lower is because, 37:23 you know, once it's down to $0.10, 37:25 you don't actually save that much money by making it that 37:27 much lower. You know what I mean? You're only saving like $0.10. 37:29 So you're saving like $0.09 37:31 if you go from $0.10 to $0.01. 37:33 And most people are not going to care about saving $0.09. 37:36 So I think the L2 equilibrium fee would be like something around $0.10 37:39 per transaction. 37:43 The L1 fee will be like higher. 37:47 My guess is it could be like $1 or $2 or maybe $3 per transaction. 37:53 But yeah, that's what I think the equilibrium is. Now, 37:55 as you pointed out at the beginning of your 37:58 question, Lightning kind of wants to have it both ways. And either way, 38:01 it doesn't work. 38:04 So either Lightning says, well, L1 fee rates will be super high, 38:07 but people will only have to, 38:10 like on their 15th birthday, their dad, their father will give them, 38:13 they'll buy them a car, 38:16 and they'll say, and we opened your, here's your Lightning channel. 38:18 And they'll pay like a $200 fee 38:21 or a $75 fee. 38:23 They open this channel and then they'll never need to close or rebalance 38:24 the 38:26 channel or it will be very rare. 38:30 But as I pointed out many times on the Bitcoin Dev mailing list 38:33 in my article, Lightning Limitations, 38:36 and I pointed it out at the TabConf Lightning debate, 38:41 none of this works at all because when the fee rate is that high, 38:44 it's called the justice 38:46 transaction, by the way, it has a very silly name. 38:50 And the justice transaction, it requires so many 38:54 bytes to write to the chain that it's almost as big as what an L1, 38:56 regular L1 transaction is anyway. 39:00 If it's, that's what it is, 39:02 then you cannot process Lightning payments lower than that amount. 39:05 But then the flip side of the Catch-22 is that the L1 fee rates are so 39:09 low that you don't need the Lightning network because the L1 works just 39:12 fine. 39:16 Lightning network has all these extra problems about needing a hot 39:19 wallet, needing liquidity, you know, a long list, 39:22 long giant list of problems. 39:25 In practice, 39:29 what happened is that everyone just defected to either custodial BTC, 39:33 aka like banking, 39:37 or they just left crypto and went back to fiat and they use, 39:41 but now the big thing now is, is of course, temporarily we had Litecoin, 39:44 it's Sergey from Bitrefill, he presented all this data. 39:49 But then now everyone switched to stables, stable coins. 39:52 So you can ask if Sergey from Bitrefill, 39:56 Bitrefill is like a real company that has actual customers and the 39:59 people buy gift cards with Bitcoin. 40:03 Bitcoin dominated, I think, I think until 2021, 40:07 Bitcoin was by far number one for internet commerce. 40:12 But now it's stable coins and Litecoin, if you can believe that. 40:17 And so this just speaks to what I'm trying to say about, you know, 40:21 the average normal user, they want the low fees. 40:26 So Dan Held was wrong. 40:30 Roger Ver was sort of right, but he was, well, 40:34 it's like why switch to Bitcoin Cash when you could just switch to 40:37 Solana or you could switch to Tron or anything else. 40:41 So, so anyway, 40:45 those are some of my thoughts on the fees and why the fee picture is 40:49 totally bleak without merge mined L2s. 40:53 But if you do have merge mined L2s, then everything's fine. 40:57 And that's the issue. 40:58 But it's just one of the many cultural derangements of BTC that people 41:01 either don't grasp this, or they just kind of, 41:04 they think intellectually that's true. 41:07 And then they just kind of shrug and move on. 41:09 There's many things in Bitcoin where we just shrug and we just move on, 41:12 like darknet markets going to Monero only. 41:15 We just think, ah, you know, it's not a big deal. 41:18 And and then same with these fee rates. 41:22 You just think, oh, I guess everything's fine. 41:25 Even though the low fee rates means that we don't have a lot of fee 41:29 paying users and we don't have a lot of customers. 41:33 No one has ever, you know, worked out the end game, 41:36 or people say it can be a store value. 41:41 We don't need transact, we don't need to transact. 41:43 This is just a ticker that we buy. 41:47 That might work, 41:50 but it only works in a situation where there is not a second 41:53 cryptocurrency that is going to be used in payments forever. 41:55 That also has a fixed supply of 21 million. 41:58 So that's the issue is like if if we don't race ahead as far as we as 42:03 fast as we possibly can, if we don't try to compete with all of us, 42:07 we got to compete like at the Olympic level. 42:11 We got to be waking up at five forty five a.m. 42:14 and training every day, because if someone else out there is, 42:19 that just means that the project is in danger of being replaced. 42:23 And I just think that's that's the basic disagreement is, you know, 42:28 do we can we be complacent or can we just coast? 42:34 OK, we have someone else. 42:35 Let's see someone else's requested. 42:38 Let me see. OK, here we go. 42:39 Add a speaker. There we go. 42:41 OK, Lord Doyle. 42:45 Meowla dot fun. 42:47 Yes. Hello, welcome to the stage. 42:50 Hello, Paul, thanks for having me, can you hear me? 42:54 I can hear you, yes. 42:56 So my question today is about Solana, I guess. 43:01 Because you probably know that Solana has thousands of people ready to 43:05 embark. 43:08 So my question is simple because I don't have I don't want to take much 43:11 of your time. 43:13 How do you plan to integrate the eCash Solana with your eCash? 43:19 OK, there's no promises here. 43:20 I don't want to promise anything. 43:21 I want to keep this deliberately kind of vague, you know, 43:23 I don't want to get. 43:25 But here's what I was thinking was it would be fun as like a little 43:28 promo to raise awareness and just have a little bit of fun, you know, 43:31 hopefully in a harmless fun level. 43:35 Maybe like a hundred coins, maybe a thousand coins, I don't know, 43:38 just like a small amount and just say, OK, 43:42 we'll give these to like the top owners or something like that so you 43:46 can swap the the meme token that I have nothing to do with and I didn't 43:49 create, although, you know, people have wired me into it, 43:53 but and I would not have created it in my own free will. 43:57 But I know that my I understand, you know, 44:00 based on what I know about how Solana economy works or something, 44:03 people just do if you don't get involved, 44:06 people just do it anyway or impersonate you or they're just so I was 44:09 like, OK, I probably, again, 44:12 I had to weigh different issues here and I thought, OK, 44:15 how can we how can we get something out of this? 44:18 How can we make it kind of a little bit of fun and exciting? 44:20 And I was thinking like, yeah, OK, some of the the presale coins, 44:23 we could give them away, possibly, 44:26 possibly we could give them away to people who own, you know, 44:29 the top owners of the the meme coin and the meme coin with the 44:32 understanding being that these meme coins are frivolous, you know, 44:35 kind of games, 44:38 but trying to have trying to give it some substance and have some a 44:41 little bit of fun with it. 44:44 So that's what that's probably all I'm going to say about that, because, 44:48 of course, you know, 44:51 these people are hanging on to your every word and then like 44:55 screenshotting everything you say and clipping it and stuff. 44:58 But I thought we could domesticate some of the the energy and we can 45:04 raise awareness. And then I do want the hope if this project succeeds, 45:09 it will have succeeded because all the altcoin communities make a little 45:14 decision where they say, OK, listen, 45:19 we've had a lot of fun here over in whatever, for example, Monero. 45:25 OK, so the Monero people have changed the game and they I respect what 45:28 they've accomplished. 45:32 But it's difficult to be low ranking is, you know, 45:34 there's number one on coin market cap and then there's like, you know, 45:36 number thirty six or something. 45:39 And same for Solana. It's like Solana is like, OK, 45:42 if you really don't care about how expensive the full note is, 45:45 then you can push the envelope, which is great. 45:48 That's that's a good thing. But if this project succeeds, 45:51 it'll be because all these people kind of run a little calculation and 45:53 they think, OK, wait a minute. 45:56 We can do everything that we're doing right now. 46:00 And we can but we can do it as L2 of. 46:04 The same we can all be in the same coin, 46:07 and then the hope is that enough people jump ship and they just unite 46:10 unites all these people, 46:13 so I'm hoping that the altcoin people can reunite. 46:17 All behind one coin, that's that's the idea, like that's the success. 46:22 That's the success. What would be the word? I don't know. 46:25 That's the you know, that's victory road, so to speak. 46:29 Like that would be how we make this project the number one 46:33 cryptocurrency would be if all these people decide, OK, listen, 46:36 we've this has been great, 46:39 but I don't like being ranked one hundred and twenty five. 46:43 I've got this great idea and I know it's really good. 46:46 And so then you just move the software over. 46:48 Move try to move the community over and then you have a community where 46:52 everyone can get what they want, but they're all participant. 46:56 They're all sharing the same twenty one million coins. 46:58 They're not making new coins. 47:00 So that's the that's the idea. And so, yeah, 47:04 but thanks for your question. 47:09 Thank you, Paul. Yeah, one more one more thing. 47:14 I also believe that through the meme coin, 47:17 you can get a lot of people to endorse and jump ship to the really cash, 47:20 you know. 47:23 So it's a great way to market it because you have like maybe over 10,000 47:27 people daily trading on Solana. 47:32 So it gets a lot of attention. Thank you. 47:43 OK, well, I think if I could interject, 47:49 I think what I was trying to do here, 47:54 he's not trying to market it. 47:59 He's trying to. In a roundabout way, force Bitcoin developers to say, 48:05 OK, let's start discussing how to make some real changes, 48:11 how to help Bitcoin scale to billions of people. 48:18 And if that doesn't come true, well, 48:20 then eCash will become the number one. 48:23 But if it and if if that does become true, well, 48:26 then Bitcoin will scale to a billion billion people. 48:29 Yeah, this is exactly right. But the thing is, 48:32 I don't think it will work as a kind of forcing. 48:36 Function unless, you know, 48:40 the eCash has to compete with all of its strength, 48:44 and that includes having good marketing and promotion. 48:49 So I think it's actually related. It all overlaps, I think, 48:52 because you want the competitor to be really strong in every way that it 48:55 can be. 48:58 But, yeah, I mean, 49:01 I think the goal is ultimately to shift society towards a superior, 49:04 better technology. 49:07 And you can't do that if you, you know, if you build the technology, 49:11 but it never it never shows up to the arena, 49:15 then it might as well not exist, I think. 49:19 So, well, 49:21 certainly we're not getting there with Bitcoin Core rejecting OP_CAT. 49:24 So that's you can see how that's totally dead end. 49:28 OK, 49:30 I always have a terrible problem with this thing because the interface 49:32 is terrible. 49:33 It says requested one. But if you click on that, 49:35 then it just doesn't show up at all. 49:37 And you have to click on the person's name. 49:39 But whatever I'm getting used to. 49:41 OK, we have a Jerry some Jerry something. 49:45 Hello. 49:49 Oh, and then when people get brought up on the stage like it cuts, 49:51 it moves them like 20. 49:53 That's like a 20 second lag and then it catches them up. 49:55 And then so they're always like. 49:58 Discombobulated. 50:00 But hopefully he shows up. 50:02 So. 50:04 Hit accept. 50:15 OK. 50:22 Or maybe not, I don't know. 50:24 Let me see what happened to him. 50:28 I don't know. 50:30 Maybe he left. 50:32 I'm not sure. 50:33 Or the space is just going to crash like I don't know the spaces. 50:36 I think it's kind of janky. 50:37 The software, honestly. 50:38 I think Clubhouse works a little better. 50:40 No offense. 50:42 But. 50:44 I don't know what happened to that person, 50:46 but maybe they will leave and come back. 50:50 I tried to add him up. 50:57 It looks like he keeps trying to request. 51:00 Oh, OK, let me see. 51:02 Let me scroll down. 51:03 Right. 51:04 OK. 51:07 OK. 51:10 I'm manually invited someone with the same. 51:13 Profile picture. 51:15 I don't know. 51:16 You know, this software is really weird. 51:19 Hello. 51:20 Hey, man. 51:21 Hey, everyone. 51:23 Paul, I love. 51:25 I love what you're doing with the hard fork and the. 51:28 The. 51:29 The. 51:30 The. 51:31 I love what you're doing with the hard fork and the Bitcoin funny. 51:35 I had. 51:37 I don't know. 51:38 Can I be heard? 51:39 I don't know if it can be heard at all. 51:40 I know. 51:41 I hear you. 51:42 Yes. 51:43 Yeah. 51:44 Oh, cool, man. 51:45 I've been looking into it and stuff. 51:47 And, you know, I had the idea a while back. 51:50 I actually DM'd you about it about a week ago. 51:53 I think it was maybe a little bit longer. 51:56 I tried to send you a video of what I did. 51:58 I was trying to recreate the time chain that Satoshi had at the B1 at 52:02 the very beginning. 52:07 I did it on Solana on the test net. 52:11 And the way I implemented it was a proof of time. 52:17 Not just proof of work, but proof of time concept in it. 52:22 And I used a mint of the coin on the test net, 52:27 21 million tokens on Solana. 52:32 I created a vault program for it and I made it to where you could only 52:37 mint using a mobile. 52:42 And it was hard capped per day as well to play out over the period of 52:48 two years. 52:54 But again, like I said, I had it done and I did it a few months back. 53:00 And I have a video and stuff of it. 53:02 And I tried to send it to you, but the DMs wouldn't let me. 53:06 It just let me send you a message about it. 53:09 I will check. 53:11 Twitter has changed everything around, which is partially good. 53:14 But yeah, often I feel really bad because if I open my messages, 53:18 you have to go to an obscure corner where it says requests or something. 53:22 And then I see all these people who have tried to message me over the 53:24 years. 53:27 And then you're like, oh. 53:28 Because it really hides them. 53:30 And so sorry about that if I didn't see your message. 53:33 Most of the people who have tried to swap proof of work for something 53:36 else have not succeeded. 53:40 But we need a world where people keep tinkering and experimenting. 53:46 And that's the world that we need. 53:49 And the smart thing to do is to try to harness all of that innovation. 53:53 And it's a really good thing, I think, 53:56 that there are so many people out there who want to spend their free 53:58 time learning and creating. 54:01 And I think that's great. 54:02 And it's like you never know what life experiences will lead someone to 54:06 create the next big thing. 54:09 So I think that's… 54:11 Absolutely. 54:12 And there's stuff there that I didn't know about. 54:15 Like, I mean, when I was diving into, earlier on this year, 54:20 when I was diving into the white paper and what the original vision was. 54:25 And I know they rolled out the white paper. 54:26 And I mean, to me, Bitcoin is beautiful, what they have done. 54:32 I'm guessing it's a team. 54:35 Don't know who they are, of course. 54:39 We have our speculations and who's behind it and stuff. 54:44 But I love the simplicity, but the complexity on top of it. 54:51 Bitcoin in itself. 54:54 It is a beautiful thing. 54:56 Like, when you look back on it, it is a work of art. 54:59 Like, 55:03 it's never been broken since it got to the point where there couldn't be 55:06 a 51% attack on the network. 55:09 I see it as a work of absolute beauty. 55:13 But I didn't know about yourself, Paul. 55:15 I knew nothing about you or anything until I stumbled upon that eCash 55:21 meme coin that had showed up in Solana. 55:26 And I like to play about a little bit, you know, from time to time. 55:30 And so, seeing that, 55:33 and then it just drew me back on to what I had been working on a few 55:36 months back, you know. 55:40 And yeah, 55:43 I would absolutely love for you to see the video at some point. 55:48 Just to check it out. 55:49 I know it's nothing special or anything. 55:53 It was fun to make. 55:57 It's a small side project. 55:59 I never did anything with it. 56:01 But I would love your input on it at some point, 56:04 whenever you get the time. 56:06 I know you're a busy fella. 56:09 Yeah. 56:10 Thank you. 56:12 I will try to check it out. 56:14 And, you know, it is fun to create things. 56:18 And there's like a story about someone is lost on a mountainside, 56:22 and they get a bunch of people together to look. 56:26 This is a metaphor for research. 56:28 So, some people, one team checks the north side of the mountain, 56:32 one checks the west, a different team checks the east, 56:35 and then another team checks the south. 56:38 And then they find the person in the south. 56:42 But then it doesn't mean that, like, 56:45 you wouldn't go back to the base camp and then say, oh, well, you know, 56:47 it was a waste of time to check the west side of the mountain or 56:49 whatever. 56:52 So, we want to live in a world where all these people are kind of, 56:55 you know, exploring things and trying things. 56:58 Even if they don't work, that doesn't mean they're not worth doing. 57:02 Because you don't know in advance, 57:05 which I think will later end up being the key to something important. 57:10 Okay, now, like, where are the haters, you know? 57:12 Where are the haters? 57:13 They're not here. 57:14 They're too cowardly to show their face, of course. 57:16 Right? 57:18 You've got haters, Paul? 57:20 I mean, that's a good thing, man. 57:22 You need that. 57:23 I completely agree. 57:24 No, 57:26 it's kind of like there's a set of all the things in the world that are 57:28 worth doing. 57:29 Like, you could rank everything from good to bad. 57:32 But then you could, you know, you could turn that ranking into, like, 57:36 a big square or something, and you could say a grid. 57:40 And you could say, well, some things are good, and they also sound good. 57:46 And, you know, you can make money doing them. 57:50 And they're very popular. 57:51 It's a good and popular, and then there's good and unpopular. 57:57 And very few people are going to be doing the good and unpopular things. 58:01 And, you know, those are the things you got to do. 58:04 Someone's got to do those. 58:05 So, I'm happy to do that. 58:07 And, you know, 58:09 I've known a lot of these people in the Bitcoin community for a long 58:11 time. 58:13 It's like that meme about, it's like the Rick and Morty episode. 58:15 He's like, your booze mean nothing. 58:17 I've seen what makes you cheer. 58:18 I've seen these same people cheer on, you know, the Lightning Network, 58:21 and they cheer on Taproot and whatever. 58:24 These people don't know anything, so it's like, whatever. 58:27 But, yeah, like, you know, here I am. 58:30 I made time. 58:31 I took two hours out of my very busy, now, 58:34 these last two or three weeks. 58:36 Usually it's not so busy, you know, 58:38 but these last two weeks have been pretty busy. 58:41 And, yeah, just here I am. 58:43 Yeah, message your friends. 58:44 Go find, we could, you know, we could link to the announcement tweet. 58:47 Although, probably everyone has seen it by now. 58:50 But, there are all these people in there who are complaining and saying, 58:54 oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, complaint. 58:57 You know, where are they? 59:00 Now, where are they now? 59:01 They can come, they can join, and they can, 59:04 some people I do block, and I think then 59:06 they can't join the space, so. 59:09 But I don't block people just because they disagree. 59:11 What I do is sometimes I block people if they're like, 59:14 okay, a lot of stuff's just obvious spam. 59:17 A lot of stuff's just obvious bots, 59:18 like promoting, like, products and things. 59:22 And then you have people who just, 59:24 like, if people just, like, 59:25 if you have, like, a serious text argument, 59:27 and then people just drop, like, a reaction GIF. 59:31 The thing is, a GIF, you know, 59:34 a GIF is like high-octane stimulus, you know? 59:37 It's like a really bright, 59:38 it's like you go into a library, 59:40 and someone's, like, shining a bright light 59:42 and making a bunch of, playing loud music there. 59:46 And it's kind of like, so I often block that. 59:48 I think, don't just put a GIF, 59:52 because you're not, it's not a fair fight. 59:53 Okay, wait, here we go. 59:54 We'll press, okay, I added, 59:56 I think I figured out how to do the speaker thing, 59:58 right, this time. 59:59 Okay, we got crypto something. 1:00:04 Crypto voice. 1:00:08 Let me see. 1:00:09 What is going on? 1:00:10 Is this, I don't know if I'm not doing this right. 1:00:13 Oh, Crypto Voyager. 1:00:14 Okay, there it is. 1:00:14 So he shows up, but then they go away. 1:00:16 Is this me doing something wrong here? 1:00:17 I don't think so. 1:00:19 No, you have to be more patient 1:00:21 until the speaker comes on up. 1:00:23 There we go. 1:00:25 I hear you. 1:00:26 Okay, okay. 1:00:27 Hi, Paul. 1:00:29 First of all, I wish you all the best, 1:00:31 because honestly, we need a little shake up. 1:00:34 So that's, so that's nice. 1:00:38 I do have some questions, 1:00:39 because I still don't understand the whole thing. 1:00:42 So we have, we have, with eCash, 1:00:46 we would have smaller blocks, 1:00:48 and then everything else would be a sidechain. 1:00:51 Now, my question is, 1:00:52 and it has been going on for a long time, 1:00:55 on BTC, the miner security, 1:00:57 so the funding of the mining equipment 1:01:01 is basically the block reward, which is diminishing. 1:01:08 How is the sustainability of eCash? 1:01:11 Or maybe, I just came in like 10 minutes ago, 1:01:13 so I don't know if you have talked about that 1:01:15 in the white paper that you guys published. 1:01:17 I didn't see anything of that. 1:01:19 So my question is the sustainability of the mining. 1:01:23 That's what, is it endogenous 1:01:26 of the transactions on the sidechains? 1:01:28 They pay for the miners? 1:01:30 Or is it exogenous saying, well, number will go up? 1:01:34 That's my only question. 1:01:36 No, it is. 1:01:37 One of the reasons why I became interested 1:01:40 in this project in the first place 1:01:41 is because it has to come from transaction fees. 1:01:44 And the block subsidy, it halves every four years, 1:01:49 but that means it drops by something like 95% 1:01:52 every 16 years. 1:01:54 And we've honestly just been bailed out. 1:01:56 Everyone has been misled. 1:01:57 Over the past 16 years of Bitcoin's history, 1:02:03 the price of Bitcoin has gone up literally like 99 million%. 1:02:06 That's not even a joke. 1:02:07 It's gone from like one cent to $100,000. 1:02:10 So it's gone up like literally, 1:02:12 we're talking like in the millions, 1:02:14 a hundred million, a hundred million percent range. 1:02:19 You know, it's got, 1:02:19 because to go from 10 cents to a hundred thousand 1:02:22 is one million X is 99 million percent ROI. 1:02:26 So we've had this totally freak event 1:02:30 that cannot happen in the future. 1:02:32 Even if Bitcoin takes over the whole world, 1:02:34 it cannot go up another 99 million percent. 1:02:37 It can only go up another like a hundred X. 1:02:40 We can only go up like 9,000%. 1:02:43 It's a pretty big difference between 9,000 and 99 million%. 1:02:46 So anyway, the idea of, 1:02:51 so yeah, I wrote an article called 1:02:53 Security Budget in the Long Run. 1:02:55 And then I wrote another article 1:02:56 about security budget and merge mining. 1:02:58 You can find all this on Truthcoin.info, 1:03:01 which is my Bitcoin blog. 1:03:05 And so yeah, it's much easier. 1:03:10 Like the high fees are unsustainable 1:03:13 because people get annoyed by the fee. 1:03:15 And then they think, well, I love Bitcoin, 1:03:17 but how can I avoid paying this fee? 1:03:19 They're not going to enjoy paying. 1:03:20 Like if the fee is $70 worth of purchasing power, 1:03:23 like if the fee, you can either send one Bitcoin transaction 1:03:26 or you can pay for dinner, dinner for two at a restaurant. 1:03:31 Like if that's the purchasing power level of the fee, 1:03:34 then that's, people are not going to like that. 1:03:36 They're going to prefer to have more dinners out 1:03:38 than pay the fee. 1:03:39 So it's much more sustainable to live in a world 1:03:41 where you have a high volume of transactions 1:03:44 that all pay a small fee. 1:03:46 And with the merge mine L2s, 1:03:47 you can kick all of these off L1. 1:03:49 You can keep the L1 node inexpensive 1:03:53 and you can keep the block size low on L1. 1:03:56 And you kick them to the L2. 1:03:58 So all these L2s are merge mined. 1:04:00 So the miners don't do any extra work, none whatsoever. 1:04:05 And yet they collect 100% of the fees. 1:04:09 So they get all the money on the L2 chain. 1:04:12 And this is an extremely important point 1:04:13 because I presented this at Opnext in 2024, 1:04:17 I think maybe November, I don't know. 1:04:20 But the point is, imagine a world where 1:04:25 something out there, you know, right now there's, 1:04:28 the whole planet earth has all these people 1:04:31 transacting on it. 1:04:32 Okay, they transact with Visa. 1:04:34 They transact with cash. 1:04:36 They use WeChat Pay. 1:04:37 They use something. 1:04:38 Okay. 1:04:40 Now imagine they all switch to like some Bitcoin L2. 1:04:44 Like imagine they all switch to Lightning. 1:04:46 That would never happen, but just imagine that it happened. 1:04:49 Then all the Lightning, the LSPs, 1:04:52 Lightning Service Provider or the big routing nodes 1:04:55 or just whoever it is. 1:04:57 For this part of the argument, 1:04:59 it doesn't even matter who it is. 1:05:00 The point is, it's just not the miners. 1:05:04 Some other people are making 10 cents 1:05:06 on 9 trillion transactions per year. 1:05:09 There's $900 billion per year. 1:05:11 This is a huge amount of money. 1:05:13 And yes, you have a hand up. 1:05:16 Please interrupt. 1:05:18 Yes. 1:05:19 No, no, I didn't want to interrupt. 1:05:21 That's why I put my hand up. 1:05:23 Okay, fine. 1:05:24 So it's merge mining. 1:05:25 The transaction fees of the sidechains 1:05:29 pay then for the L1 security. 1:05:32 That's nice and dandy. 1:05:33 You said there is no extra cost then associated with it. 1:05:40 The sidechains, all that data that gets moved 1:05:44 and slushed around in the, sorry for that word, 1:05:48 but basically slushed around on the sidechains, 1:05:51 where does that data then reside? 1:05:54 It's a very, very important question. 1:05:55 Now it's an ingenious question in fact, 1:05:56 because this is the problem with large blocks on L1. 1:06:02 And this is a problem with like Bitcoin SV, for example. 1:06:06 The issue is you have to separate different issues. 1:06:09 So there's the mining and then there's the nodes. 1:06:12 And actually what the large blocker L1 Bitcoin SV 1:06:16 type people got wrong is they also said, 1:06:19 well, just no one has to worry about paying this. 1:06:21 So someone does have to pay. 1:06:23 So the full node has a cost 1:06:26 and that is associated with all the data 1:06:28 that has to be shipped around. 1:06:30 And so because each blockchain has, 1:06:35 this is crucial to understand how the blockchain works, 1:06:38 which is that you need to be able to download 1:06:41 and validate all the blocks. 1:06:43 So someone has to send you the block data. 1:06:47 Then you have to store it on your hard drive. 1:06:49 Your CPU has to run through it all and validate it all. 1:06:52 And then you have to be willing to serve it back 1:06:54 to other people because it's a little bizarre 1:06:57 for you to expect to be able to get it from other people 1:07:00 if you're not willing to participate in giving it out. 1:07:04 So there's this total full node cost 1:07:07 and this full node cost has nothing to do with mining, 1:07:10 totally separate issue. 1:07:11 But the full node cost does increase 1:07:13 when the block size is higher 1:07:16 and it decreases when the block size is lower. 1:07:19 And the people who pay the full node costs 1:07:23 are people who have some kind of business 1:07:26 where they want, they need to know 1:07:29 if they are getting paid BTC. 1:07:30 So right now, it's all the people who are receiving BTC. 1:07:35 These are the people who get a benefit 1:07:37 from running a node. 1:07:39 Because the question is, if there's all these costs, 1:07:42 why is someone willing to pay? 1:07:43 So Kraken today, Coinbase today, 1:07:47 these people are running nodes 1:07:49 because people deposit crypto to them. 1:07:52 They're in a very adversarial, 1:07:55 they're in the business of providing liquidity. 1:07:56 So people send them stuff 1:07:58 and then they want to swap it 1:07:59 and then they want to withdraw. 1:08:00 The customers want to withdraw. 1:08:01 They want to withdraw their USD 1:08:03 or their whatever they bought. 1:08:06 So in the future, 1:08:10 whoever is receiving BTC, 1:08:12 they need to know, hey, am I actually, 1:08:14 do I actually, you know, 1:08:15 someone says they sent me seven BTC, 1:08:17 but did they actually do that? 1:08:19 Well, they need to run the full node. 1:08:21 So this is the full node cost is high. 1:08:24 It just happens to be the, 1:08:26 I see you have your hand up again 1:08:28 and I will get to you after I finish the sentence, 1:08:31 which is it happens to be the case now 1:08:35 that because bandwidth prices have fallen, 1:08:38 because hard drive prices have fallen, 1:08:41 stuff is very different now 1:08:42 than even it was in the block size wars in 2015. 1:08:44 That was 10 years ago. 1:08:46 So back then, the bottleneck was bandwidth, 1:08:49 but that's actually not even true anymore. 1:08:52 And we've published tests, you know, 1:08:54 where you can have very large blocks 1:08:56 and still run them on computers 1:08:59 that cost basically the same now 1:09:02 as a percentage of people's wage 1:09:04 as they did 10 years ago in the BTC world. 1:09:08 So actually this cost is a very small cost 1:09:12 and it's nothing. 1:09:13 The full node costs for these large block L2s 1:09:17 is nothing compared to the transaction fee revenue. 1:09:20 And so I'll just, let me just recap a couple of things. 1:09:25 I wrote this article called All the World's Transactions. 1:09:28 That's on Truthcoin.info that you can read. 1:09:31 You can see what's the value of like 10 cents 1:09:34 into all these transactions in the world. 1:09:36 That's the mining revenue. 1:09:37 And then you can look at, 1:09:39 I did a performance contest with the software last summer. 1:09:45 And you can see for yourself, 1:09:46 I have the exact numbers and these exact tests 1:09:49 that you can run on GitHub using GitHub's computers. 1:09:52 And you can see how inexpensive the node is 1:09:56 that does this huge, like 960 megabyte blocks. 1:10:00 And if you had 14 of them, 1:10:04 this would be able to cover all of the transactions 1:10:07 in the world. 1:10:08 And so, yes, okay, now I'm done talking. 1:10:09 So please continue. 1:10:15 As I understand, with the sidechains, 1:10:19 I would be able to create my own sidechains 1:10:23 with all bells and whistles 1:10:25 and anchor it security-wise to the L1. 1:10:30 If my chain has all the bells and whistles 1:10:33 and I get on it the data and I don't know, 1:10:38 AI agents paying another AI agent and all that other stuff, 1:10:42 you said that people receiving BTC need to have a node. 1:10:46 Well, if my sidechain with all bells and whistles 1:10:50 has, well, petabytes of data sloshing around, 1:10:55 would every single customer of mine 1:10:58 or every single market participant 1:11:00 of my bells and whistles sidechain need to have a node? 1:11:05 And isn't that, the question is, 1:11:09 why would I have to store somebody else's data on my node? 1:11:14 That's my question. 1:11:14 I have to tell you that these questions, 1:11:17 which I think are pretty basic questions, 1:11:20 but for some reason, 1:11:21 there has been a lot of confusion about these questions. 1:11:24 And even throughout the block size war, 1:11:27 I personally felt that both the small blockers 1:11:32 and the large blockers never got around 1:11:34 to straightening this out. 1:11:37 So either, everyone listening should either be like, 1:11:39 oh, like Paul Stewart's genius or crank. 1:11:43 You know what I mean? 1:11:44 Because either there's something really weird about me 1:11:46 and I'm right, 1:11:48 or I'm just totally delusional about this. 1:11:51 But I think these questions are really, really important. 1:11:53 And I think all of them are very, 1:11:54 very easy to answer, honestly. 1:11:55 But for some reason, 1:11:57 there's been widespread confusion about this point, 1:11:59 because for example, 1:12:00 maybe this isn't interesting to people, 1:12:02 but it's interesting to me, 1:12:03 like why does everyone believe what they believe? 1:12:05 The Bitcoin SV people, 1:12:07 they want to say that they want to have it both ways. 1:12:10 And they want to say like, 1:12:12 oh, miners will provide all this data 1:12:14 because they're making so much money, 1:12:15 but then they say no one is forced to run it. 1:12:18 Anyway, let me just get to your actual question, 1:12:20 which was why are people being forced to run a full node? 1:12:26 And the answer is you're exactly right. 1:12:27 No one is ever forced to run a full node. 1:12:30 You could use your friend's full node. 1:12:33 And this is basically how SPV works. 1:12:35 It's basically how Electrum works. 1:12:38 However, so what everyone has to do is, 1:12:41 it's kind of like hiring security for an event, okay? 1:12:44 Everyone has to make their own cost benefit decision. 1:12:48 It's kind of like you have valuables like in your house. 1:12:51 Some of them you just leave on the table, you know? 1:12:55 Like I don't like to sit on my wallet, 1:12:56 so I just throw my wallet on, 1:12:57 or I leave it in my jacket pocket. 1:12:59 You just leave it on the hook near the door. 1:13:03 And then other stuff, maybe you have like a safe, 1:13:05 or maybe you have stuff like buried somewhere. 1:13:07 So each person decides, 1:13:10 okay, the full node will give me more confidence 1:13:14 that I have really received a transaction. 1:13:17 However, you're not required to do that. 1:13:20 And this, I think, you know, 1:13:21 like even Peter Todd and other people, 1:13:23 like they got really on this bizarre track 1:13:25 where they, for some reason, 1:13:28 they have all these rules in their head, 1:13:30 and Luke Dashjr. also, 1:13:31 about like when it's absolutely required 1:13:33 to run a node versus not required. 1:13:36 And it doesn't really make a lot of, 1:13:37 I think not if it doesn't make any sense. 1:13:39 So the full node helps you understand 1:13:41 if you've received coins, 1:13:44 but there's no sense in which it's mandatory. 1:13:47 There's a completely separate issue. 1:13:50 Yet another issue is if someone designs an L2 1:13:55 such that it is infinitely expensive, 1:13:57 it's so expensive, 1:13:58 or it's just maybe it's not infinitely expensive, 1:14:00 but it's so expensive that no one wants to run it. 1:14:04 Well, then the new L2 chain that, you know, 1:14:06 no one will know how to assemble the next block 1:14:12 and nothing, you know, 1:14:13 no transactions will ever go through, 1:14:15 or no one will know. 1:14:17 So no one will be able to get the block data 1:14:20 from someone else. 1:14:21 And so that chain will just kind of die off. 1:14:22 So in that sense, 1:14:23 it's kind of like you open a store 1:14:26 and you go to a strip mall or something, 1:14:28 and you open a store and you say, 1:14:30 I'm going to sell this store, 1:14:32 but the store has expenses that are so expensive 1:14:35 that the store can't continue to like, you know, 1:14:39 hire employees and stuff. 1:14:40 It runs, it goes bankrupt. 1:14:41 So the sidechain can go bankrupt 1:14:44 in the sense of being badly designed. 1:14:46 No one can get the full node software to work. 1:14:48 The full node software is too expensive. 1:14:49 It crashes people's computers. 1:14:52 And so the sidechain just kind of would die off 1:14:54 in that case. 1:14:56 Okay, so now I know that Justin put his hand up, 1:14:57 but I think let's just try to get CryptoVovo 1:15:03 to maybe finish a thought, 1:15:05 and then we'll go back to Justin, I think. 1:15:07 CryptoVoyagers is the name. 1:15:12 You said that sidechains might die. 1:15:16 That sounds like on a long enough term, 1:15:18 on a long enough timeline, 1:15:20 all sidechains will die. 1:15:22 And if I already know that the sidechain will die, 1:15:25 if it gets too, 1:15:27 if it has too many bells and whistles 1:15:29 and everybody would have to have a petabytes 1:15:32 and zettabytes of size nodes, 1:15:36 then they would, 1:15:38 why would I go into that sidechain 1:15:40 knowing that it will die because of popularity? 1:15:45 The answer is that you should not, 1:15:46 but the sidechain can L, 1:15:48 the L2 can have its own block size limit. 1:15:51 So there's no reason why it would have petabytes. 1:15:53 In fact, if you had one that was like a privacy specialist, 1:15:58 something like a zSide, 1:16:00 a Zcash sidechain, 1:16:03 in that context, 1:16:05 it wouldn't necessarily need a very large block size. 1:16:07 But I think there would be people 1:16:09 who want to push the envelope 1:16:10 like a Solana type sidechain, 1:16:12 where they just say, 1:16:12 well, let's see how far our Bitcoin SV sidechain. 1:16:15 But yeah, that's something that the user has to weigh. 1:16:21 I think all this is exactly how it should be. 1:16:23 Like all this is very healthy 1:16:24 because the user has to decide, 1:16:25 your coins start on L1. 1:16:28 No one can force you into any sidechain. 1:16:30 So they have to entice you over 1:16:32 and they have to say, listen, 1:16:33 if you come over here, 1:16:35 you have to download a whole second node 1:16:38 and it's going to be more expensive to run the node 1:16:41 and the sidechain might die. 1:16:43 But they have to entice you over 1:16:45 with some kind of feature, 1:16:46 like low fees or extra privacy 1:16:49 or some other feature, 1:16:51 like a prediction market sidechain 1:16:53 or the identity sidechain. 1:16:55 So it's kind of like, 1:16:56 why would you switch from BTC to Solana? 1:16:58 It's like, they have to, 1:17:00 well, okay, Solana has a more expensive node, 1:17:03 but it has other stuff that is popular with users. 1:17:07 And you don't have to move your life savings 1:17:09 over there permanently. 1:17:12 You just maybe move your pocket change over. 1:17:14 Maybe you earn a large salary, 1:17:18 but you only have your monthly expenses, 1:17:21 one month's total in the L2 chain, 1:17:24 but that's where most of your transacting is done. 1:17:26 That's where your boss pays you 1:17:28 and that's where you buy your groceries 1:17:30 and stuff like that. 1:17:30 So the chain might only have 5,000 coins, 1:17:33 but it could still do an enormous amount of turn. 1:17:36 The same five coins could turn over 1:17:40 thousands of times more than the L1 coins. 1:17:44 Now, I just think we should go to Justin. 1:17:50 Yeah, see, Yaniv's down there in the audience. 1:17:52 You may want to bring him up 1:17:53 or if he raises his hand, 1:17:55 he was in your lightning debate. 1:17:57 And then also, 1:18:02 yeah, is there like a daily payments, 1:18:05 like your daily transactions type of sidechain? 1:18:08 And then to address kind of the further questions 1:18:11 about the nuts and bolts of like, 1:18:14 where's the BitAssets, the NFT, the ordinals, 1:18:18 where's that data actually stored? 1:18:20 As far as I understand, 1:18:21 it'll be stored at the exchanges 1:18:23 or it'll be stored on the miners of the L2 sidechains, 1:18:28 just to kind of break it down in normie terms. 1:18:32 Is that? 1:18:33 No, the L2 nodes have the block data for the L2. 1:18:38 So it's not necessarily the miners. 1:18:40 And this is in fact, partly a problem. 1:18:42 This is partly like, 1:18:43 I think a lot of people 1:18:44 end up getting really confused about this 1:18:46 because miners, they are in the category of people 1:18:51 who do not necessarily need to run a node. 1:18:54 And in fact, the individual SHA-256 hasher people, 1:18:58 they just connect to like Foundry and then. 1:19:00 Foundry, you know, like they run a node. In theory, OK, 1:19:03 it was also suggested that actually Antpool, 1:19:06 Luxor and some other people, 1:19:09 there's like a website that shows the block, 1:19:12 the structure of the block while it's being mined. 1:19:16 It's thought that many of those people all use the same single node. 1:19:21 They're all just proxies, proxy pool. 1:19:24 And in theory, 100% of the miners, this is just in theory, 1:19:27 I'm just stressing this as an example, 1:19:31 but it's theoretically possible that every single pool would subscribe 1:19:35 to like, you know, some guy's node, like, you know, 1:19:38 Jeff from Wisconsin or something. 1:19:42 He has one node and that one node could run all the mine. 1:19:45 So each of the miners, again, 1:19:48 they have to make a cost benefit analysis where they say, 1:19:50 the node gives me more confidence that I'm really looking at the actual 1:19:53 Bitcoin blockchain. 1:19:57 And do I want to pay that cost? 1:20:02 Because a node costs a certain amount of computational resources, 1:20:05 so do I want to set up this node or do I, 1:20:08 am I unwilling to pay that cost? 1:20:13 And do I want to take the chance? 1:20:14 So I want to risk it and go without, but it'll be cheaper. 1:20:18 So each person has to decide. 1:20:21 I think the reason why it's so confusing is because no one actually has 1:20:23 to run a full node. 1:20:25 There's no literal requirement. 1:20:28 However, if no one's running a node, 1:20:31 then the network just basically stops existing. 1:20:35 So that's why if you work in Bitcoin development, 1:20:39 and this is what Eric Voskuhl does correctly with his project, 1:20:43 if you work on Bitcoin development, your mission in life, 1:20:47 your goal is to make the validation as fast, as cheap, as efficient, 1:20:51 as painless as possible. 1:20:55 Like, that's your, that's the job you're in. 1:20:57 Okay. 1:20:57 It's like you're like a cattle rancher. 1:21:00 You're in the job of selling meat. 1:21:03 You're in the job of raising animals and selling them as food. 1:21:09 And again, if you're like an agricultural farmer, 1:21:12 then you're selling corn or something. 1:21:14 That's the job. 1:21:16 The job is to sell as much corn as possible for maybe at the highest 1:21:20 price or lowest, but whatever, at the market price. 1:21:23 You're in the business of growing crops. 1:21:26 You know, if you work for a Ford motor company, 1:21:29 you're in the business of constructing, manufacturing cars. 1:21:32 And if the Bitcoin Core developers, 1:21:36 their mission should be make the node software as safe, reliable, cheap, 1:21:40 inexpensive, fast as possible. 1:21:44 Like that's the business they're in. 1:21:46 And so everyone should be focused on driving the cost down. 1:21:50 But of course, the cost of a full node is an optional cost, you know, 1:21:52 like at a philosophical level. 1:21:55 It's not like it's not like the full node is going to pull a gun on you 1:21:58 and say, like, you must run. 1:22:01 You must keep running me or something, you know, like the full node. 1:22:04 What does the full node do? 1:22:05 It lets you figure out if you're really being sent coins, because, 1:22:08 of course, everyone has an incentive to lie to you. 1:22:12 I hope that's obvious. 1:22:13 Someone will say, I go up to you. 1:22:14 Oh, yeah, I just sent you a thousand BTC. 1:22:17 Trust me. 1:22:18 Well, that's not a good situation because that invites lying. 1:22:23 And if we live in a world where the liars can get ahead and the honest 1:22:27 people suffer, then we're just living in a world that that penalizes. 1:22:34 Honesty, so we don't want that. 1:22:36 So that's that's what we want. 1:22:38 The full node costs to be as cheap as possible. 1:22:40 The Drivechain L2 idea basically says you can have a la carte plug ins. 1:22:45 You can say, OK, you run the L1 node, 1:22:48 but then you optionally run some of these other nodes. 1:22:50 There's like a whole set of them, like, you know, 20 or 30. 1:22:53 And you'd say, I want to run this this one and this one, 1:22:55 but not any of these. 1:22:59 And so that's the idea. 1:23:00 But, yeah, no one has to run a full node. 1:23:03 There's in a practical sense, Kraken and Coinbase, 1:23:06 these large exchanges, you know, practical sense, 1:23:09 they must run because their whole business is. 1:23:14 People sending me coins and then swapping the coins and then withdrawing 1:23:16 them. 1:23:20 OK, now we go back to Crypto Voyager. 1:23:26 Yeah, 1:23:29 Justin brought us Justin brought up something that that's that's that's 1:23:33 interesting and that that kind of like leads back to my to my question. 1:23:36 The NFTs, or better put, the data that I want to, well, 1:23:42 basically use that we already know because it's it's timestamp that it's 1:23:47 legitimate and everybody signed on that data. 1:23:54 That data is too expensive for L1. 1:23:57 It's too expensive for eCash. 1:23:59 It's even more. 1:24:00 It's going to be more expensive for eCash. 1:24:02 Sorry, sorry for eCash L1 because of the even smaller block sizes. 1:24:08 So that data has to be then on the L2s. 1:24:14 Now, let's if we go back 10 years, people said, oh, no, 1:24:18 we can do blockchains for land registry and all that other stuff. 1:24:23 So with my super duper bells and whistles sidechain, I now say, OK, 1:24:28 fine, let's let's do land registries and everything else. 1:24:34 And it works. 1:24:36 And 10 years down the road, land registry L2 goes bankrupt. 1:24:42 That I don't know, Paul, 1:24:46 that that that kind of like I got cold feet right now on the sidechains. 1:24:50 Well, what do you mean, though, 1:24:51 you're saying that the L2 data might be lost, 1:24:52 is that what you're saying? 1:24:54 Yes, the same thing happened, for example, in Ethereum. 1:24:58 So Ethereum was just a pointer to data on some centralized server. 1:25:05 So a lot of Ethereum NFTs, the payload is basically 404. 1:25:11 You still have a hash that points to to an IP address where it's 1:25:13 supposed to be. 1:25:15 But that IP address, well, the server behind that IP address is gone. 1:25:20 So so we can't we can't do that anymore. 1:25:25 We can't do that anymore for non-trivial stuff. 1:25:28 So whatever, moon cats or whatever, I don't care about those guys. 1:25:34 No, I mean, for example, land registries, 1:25:37 legal legal titles to to whatever. 1:25:40 Yeah. Evidence that something has been done. 1:25:42 We use we can use blockchains to timestamp that and to and to basically 1:25:47 account that that that the participants have signed on on on that thing 1:25:52 and that that data basically has has been created. 1:25:58 Yeah, we we we can pay a little bit more to store it. 1:26:03 And then we have the issue then. 1:26:05 Well, 1:26:07 the node provider where that service is is is stored also gets gets gets 1:26:09 a cut. 1:26:11 OK, well, the guy doesn't want to pay. 1:26:13 Doesn't matter. 1:26:16 We can the node provider can prune it according to the white paper. 1:26:19 However, 1:26:22 you as the owner of that data should have a copy of it where you can 1:26:26 then prove with the hash that it was part of the blockchain. 1:26:29 Yeah, 1:26:32 it's kind of like it's it's like a library without books where you can 1:26:36 prove that the book that you have on hand was part of that library. 1:26:40 OK. And with that, with with seven million people, 1:26:43 with seven million books, 1:26:46 you could recreate the library and everybody knows, yeah, OK, 1:26:49 that data was there and it hasn't been hasn't been tampered with. 1:26:52 So you might not be a full node. 1:26:54 You might only be somebody that has the possession of one single book, 1:26:57 but that book is proven on the block chain that it was part of the 1:27:01 library and hasn't been tampered with. 1:27:04 So so that removes the the necessity of of depending on the altruism of 1:27:09 the node provider that removes the necessity of well, 1:27:14 it doesn't remove the necessity of the library, 1:27:18 but it does remove the necessity of the node provider. 1:27:23 It doesn't remove the necessity of the L2 being alive, though, 1:27:26 that that's that's that's my question. 1:27:30 So so right now you're saying, yeah, well, 1:27:32 if I receive BTC and I receive them often enough, 1:27:35 I should run a full node. 1:27:38 But a full node in BTC means we have to also have the data of somebody 1:27:43 that is not that has nothing to do with us is not a customer is not a 1:27:48 provider. 1:27:53 He's living on the other far side of the world. 1:27:55 And not only that, that. 1:27:58 It can actually be pruned and people say, well, yeah, 1:28:01 but you have to run a full node. 1:28:05 Why do I have to run the data of some dude in Ouagadougou when I'm 1:28:09 somewhere in the Peruvian Andes? 1:28:14 Yeah, 1:28:16 that's those those are the issues that still haven't been cleared out. 1:28:19 And I understand. 1:28:21 I understand the viewpoint. 1:28:22 Let us make even smaller. 1:28:23 So so to discourage people to to to write on to the L1. 1:28:29 But people need to write somewhere. 1:28:31 So they're going to write on the L2. 1:28:33 And we're just pushing the issue to another layer. 1:28:37 And 10 minutes ago you said, well, yeah, 1:28:39 that's that's how we're doing it. 1:28:42 And if if if that layer is not 1:28:47 profitable enough, that layer, that layer could lack of a better term, 1:28:50 rock you, 1:28:54 which basically means, well, 1:28:57 I don't have any future security that that layer will exist. 1:29:00 The only kind of security that I have is that L1 will exist. 1:29:04 However, 1:29:08 my data is not is not valuable enough to spend seventy dollars per 1:29:12 transaction on it. 1:29:14 That's all I want. 1:29:16 I have to go to you. 1:29:19 OK, thanks. 1:29:20 So first of all, L1 is not guaranteed to exist. 1:29:24 I think no one is guaranteed existence. 1:29:26 And this is with the bitter comes the sweet. 1:29:28 You know, if the good comes to bad, which is to say, 1:29:32 if you were to say this data will always be here, 1:29:35 that's a good thing on one hand. 1:29:37 It's good for one person, but it's also a curse because it says 1:29:41 that someone out there is responsible for validating, 1:29:44 storing and serving. 1:29:47 The data from now until the end of time, 1:29:50 so it's everyone, you know, 1:29:52 everyone's one person's asset is another person's liability. 1:29:55 And in fact, we want there to be many layers 1:29:57 of different shapes and sizes to exactly combat this problem. 1:30:01 That is exactly the solution to the problem. 1:30:03 So you could break it into. 1:30:07 You know, you've got to separate issues again. 1:30:08 It's very hard and maybe it would be better to take out like a pen and a 1:30:10 piece 1:30:12 of paper, but it's not like so on one hand, you have the data itself. 1:30:16 So let's call it point one. 1:30:18 This is like the land registry. 1:30:20 OK, now then point two is you could timestamp the data. 1:30:25 OK, that's like a second. 1:30:30 Derivative form of this data and then three, 1:30:33 you have the full node concept where the data is stored and served 1:30:37 forever. 1:30:40 And it's also validated, in fact, 1:30:42 so you can actually overcome the double spend problem at this layer, 1:30:45 but not at the timestamping layer, because the timestamping layer, 1:30:48 you just have the receipt and you just say this data was submitted 1:30:51 before this time. 1:30:54 But you don't know if someone could have 1:30:56 submitted two contradictory pieces of data, for example. 1:31:01 I have the hash of it. 1:31:03 That's why I know that that data came first and that that data hasn't 1:31:05 been tampered 1:31:08 with or it does order, as I said, timestamps it. 1:31:11 But you don't know that someone can someone could say so you could say I 1:31:13 have 1:31:15 the hash and I have the Merkle branch and I have the receipt basically. 1:31:19 And I say that and it says, oh, 1:31:21 crypto voices owns, you know, excuse me, crypto Voyager. 1:31:25 Crypto Voyager owns 100 Main Street. 1:31:29 But you don't know anyone could go could suddenly, you know, 1:31:34 out of the blue, they could walk out, 1:31:37 walk up to the police station or something 1:31:39 and say, listen, I actually have an earlier timestamp 1:31:42 that says I own 100 Main Street 1:31:46 and I have a later one as well. 1:31:49 And so it does not solve the double spend problem. 1:31:51 So whatever the police decide to go with 1:31:53 the earlier one and say that yours was illegitimate or the later one, 1:31:56 yours was superseded. 1:31:58 It's only at the the third category. 1:32:02 Category one being the data itself. 1:32:05 You know, 100 Main Street owner land title. 1:32:09 Second layer being the timestamp, 1:32:12 only this third concept of the the full 1:32:15 node validated, stored, served and validated man, 1:32:19 which is another way of saying it's mandatory data that it must everyone 1:32:21 must 1:32:24 download process and then store and serve back to people. 1:32:30 This is mandatory data. 1:32:32 This is the only level that can mitigate the double spend problem. 1:32:38 And then you can have other weird layers, too, 1:32:39 like maybe there's like the header 1:32:41 chain, the L1 header chain that like runs through all the chains, 1:32:44 which is the where the proof of work is applied by the charge of six. 1:32:48 But we could go into other threads. 1:32:50 But what I would like to stress is right now, Bitcoin BTC, 1:32:56 this is again, 1:32:58 this is a problem with the Bitcoin SV people that they didn't 1:32:59 understand this BTC has a fixed 1:33:02 block size at the mandatory 1:33:06 data, the third category, the validated, stored, saved, served, 1:33:12 et cetera, mandatory that everyone must download and validate process. 1:33:18 This is a fixed block size of what was one megabyte and now four 1:33:21 megabytes. 1:33:25 However, it has an unlimited amount of space for timestamping data. 1:33:29 So you can do 1:33:32 you could just put take the hash and then you can have a hash of when 1:33:33 you have 1:33:35 Merkle root of other hashes is open timestamps. 1:33:38 There's several different projects. 1:33:40 This is like a lot of people back in the day. 1:33:41 This is a lot of people's like first Bitcoin project. 1:33:43 They would like write a paper or something. 1:33:46 They would take the SHA-256 hash, 1:33:49 you import it as a private key, and then maybe you send like one 1:33:53 Satoshi there and then send it back or something. 1:33:55 This is back in the day a long time ago. 1:33:57 So the the timestamping block size on BTC. 1:34:03 Is unlimited today, you could do that, you can if you want to just hash, 1:34:08 if you want to take the Lord of the Rings extended edition movie file, 1:34:13 you know, or a whole terabyte, eight terabyte hard drive. 1:34:17 And if you want to hash that, you can put the hash with other hashes 1:34:22 in a Merkle tree and it will end up just being 32 bytes 1:34:26 on L1. 1:34:28 And so you you can do you can fit an unlimited number of one 1:34:31 transaction. 1:34:34 Yes, right. 1:34:35 One transaction. I can I can do that 5000 times. 1:34:38 And I already filled the block. 1:34:41 Yeah, but I'm saying if you want to do 5000 land documents, 1:34:44 all you have to do is put those in a Merkle tree and then it's down. 1:34:47 It can always be shrunk over and over again to 32 bytes forever. 1:34:54 So no matter how much 1:34:56 then the smallest thing that you can do is a one transaction blockchain. 1:35:00 You have everything in the world. 1:35:02 Yeah, the one transaction. 1:35:05 This is the header chain, actually, 1:35:06 if you think about it, because each block, each header, 1:35:09 each 80 byte header in Bitcoin has the hash of the previous block. 1:35:12 So that's the one transaction. 1:35:15 In a way, in a sort of yeah, but if I 1:35:18 sorry to interrupt, but if I batch all those things, 1:35:22 yeah, and just make one single hash, I cannot work with it 1:35:26 because the whole hash chain is somewhere else. 1:35:31 So so I have the data anyway. 1:35:33 Yeah, I have to have hard disks and hard disk and data. 1:35:38 Anyway, I'm saying but that's what I'm saying is this is a good thing, 1:35:41 because this is what I'm saying with the bitter comes to sweet, 1:35:44 with the good comes the bad. 1:35:45 So. 1:35:47 With the L2s, you you can customize it and you can say. 1:35:54 Instead of it, because remember, 1:35:56 the L1 isn't guaranteed to exist either, 1:35:58 which is the last thing you had said, 1:36:01 you know, it could all go away, but you can say, OK, 1:36:04 we're forming a group with all these people. 1:36:08 And we think that together. 1:36:11 You know, the full node costs are low 1:36:13 enough and the value add of the transaction is high enough. 1:36:18 Where this group of people is likely to have a viable L2. 1:36:22 Now, there's no guarantee that you'll be correct when you do that, 1:36:25 but this is a lot better than just saying it all has to be mandatory 1:36:27 data, 1:36:30 which is the Bitcoin SV route, or it all has to be optional data, 1:36:34 which would be kind of like the BTC timestamp route. 1:36:38 With this, I'm letting I'm letting you 1:36:40 customize more, you know, in the interior. 1:36:44 And you can say, well, OK, listen, 1:36:46 we're going to have this big payments chain for all of Southeast Asia. 1:36:50 And it's you know, and this has a lot 1:36:52 of economic viability to it and you think, well, hey, 1:36:55 this this one is a healthy chain. 1:36:59 Produces huge revenues and the full node costs are very low. 1:37:04 So people think, OK, we can we'll put data in here. 1:37:09 That's I think that's perfectly fair. 1:37:12 And then there could be a different chain where 1:37:14 for whatever reason, it's just not popular and people get rid of it. 1:37:17 But if something's not popular, then that's a clue that it should just 1:37:20 be deleted from the world, that's just how the world works. 1:37:23 I think that's a good thing. 1:37:29 Somebody's requested, I think. 1:37:45 I don't see, but I see Justin's hand up so we could do Justin. 1:37:49 I've noticed that the little dots that blink up and down have stopped 1:37:51 doing 1:37:53 that, which usually happens before this app crashes. 1:37:55 So hopefully it won't crash, but it may. 1:37:59 Oh, no, that was just that I didn't have a question. 1:38:03 OK, now who tried to request? 1:38:05 I didn't see I don't see them. 1:38:08 But as I've already said, I do see it. 1:38:12 I don't understand why I don't see them sometimes. 1:38:15 I see them now. 1:38:16 I don't know why I don't see them. 1:38:18 I don't know why I don't see them. 1:38:20 I don't know why I don't see them sometimes. 1:38:22 OK, I see them now. 1:38:23 Rekt to Djinn. 1:38:25 I can't see him. 1:38:26 OK, we'll give him 20 seconds to. 1:38:29 Resynchronize. 1:38:40 Hey, can you guys hear me? 1:38:41 Yes. Hello. 1:38:42 Welcome. 1:38:44 Hi, Paul, thanks for having me on. 1:38:46 I know you addressed the Solana coin briefly earlier. 1:38:49 It sounded like you're still working out the details. 1:38:52 So I don't want to harp on it too much. 1:38:54 But there are about like a thousand of us 1:38:56 in the community quite interested in this. 1:38:58 And it's been like fun coming up. 1:39:00 But theories. 1:39:02 I actually made a post yesterday about how the meme coin holders might 1:39:05 be able to claim some of the real coins, 1:39:07 which I think would be fantastic for like the less connected or less 1:39:10 technical among us to try to get some kind of exposure to eCash before 1:39:13 it's even launched, 1:39:15 as well as being a great marketing opportunity for you among the Solana 1:39:18 community. 1:39:21 So I love the idea of you potentially following through with that. 1:39:24 The other thing is that the trading fees being redirected to you, 1:39:27 you're able to raise like, you know, 1:39:30 potentially six or seven figures through the meme coin for the project 1:39:33 without even selling any of it, if it does well, of course. 1:39:36 So anyway, but just to get to the question, 1:39:39 without revealing too much of your plans, 1:39:42 I was wondering if you could just confirm to everyone the correct meme 1:39:45 coin, since, you know, 1:39:47 people launch hundreds of these whenever there's a big news event like 1:39:50 your fork, 1:39:53 or will you just sort of let it play out and support the biggest one 1:39:55 that forms organically when the time comes? So, yeah, thanks. 1:39:58 Yeah, so I don't know how many there are, 1:40:04 but there was one that that seemed to be more active. So I don't know. 1:40:11 Let me see if I can, like, look up how to explain where it is. 1:40:17 I think it was like, I think this is what is it, the CTXQG or something? 1:40:23 Yeah, that's the one. I think that's the one, like, 1:40:26 most people are interested in right now. Well, at least that's the one, 1:40:29 you know, you join the community, I think. 1:40:53 But I do think that it I think it is a good idea. 1:40:56 And I think it's a great like, the like, 1:40:59 the pump.fun thing is clearly very popular with people. 1:41:02 And I think it is, it would be like a fun way to like, 1:41:04 I mentioned this before, someone had already asked, 1:41:07 I don't know if you were here, like, about an hour ago. 1:41:10 And I was talking about, like, 1:41:13 we could have something where like the top holders of the meme coin get 1:41:16 the actual eCash coin. 1:41:19 I kind of want to like, what I would prefer to do is like, 1:41:22 sit down and think about it carefully and then design something and then 1:41:26 make like a targeted, complete, like written announcement. 1:41:29 So that it's not as like, I don't know, 1:41:33 so that I have plenty of time to get it all right in the way that I want 1:41:36 it. But yeah, 1:41:40 that's basically I can confirm that that's something that has been on my 1:41:44 mind. 1:41:47 And I think there's, it would be a good idea. 1:41:49 And I'm pretty sure that we will be doing it. 1:41:52 So just have to work out the detail. 1:41:55 Yeah, awesome. No, that sounds great. I mean, 1:41:58 I'm not trying to get you to like commit to anything on the fly on the 1:42:01 space, or whatever. Obviously, 1:42:03 you'll have to flesh it out and then make an announcement. 1:42:06 But I do think it's like really interesting, 1:42:09 just the opportunity to like onboard so many people, because, you know, 1:42:11 like the people are actually using crypto day to day, 1:42:14 like are on Solana, you know, there's 1000s, 10s of 1000s, 1:42:17 hundreds of 1000s of people just trading on Solana, 1:42:19 gambling on meme coins. 1:42:22 There's a lot of culture and a lot of communities there. 1:42:26 So if you can sort of tap into that in a way, and, you know, 1:42:30 offer something interesting to those people, 1:42:35 then you could potentially be onboarding 1000s of people to eCash, 1:42:39 ready to go, you know, before you even launch your fork. And it's all, 1:42:43 it seems to be the most sort of active people in crypto are on Solana 1:42:47 right now. So yeah, that's why I thought that was interesting. 1:42:53 Yeah, I completely agree. I think that Bitcoin has said like, 1:42:56 we've evolved like a kind of contempt for the user, 1:42:59 which I think is tragic. And now we have sour grapes about it, too. 1:43:02 We say, oh, we never wanted those users, 1:43:04 or those users are bad people or something. But really, 1:43:07 all this stuff started on BTC. 1:43:10 There was all kinds of wacky stuff, you know, 1:43:14 like Tether was originally Omni was on BTC, 1:43:17 and that was originally MasterCoin. And so, but now we, 1:43:20 we pretend like we didn't care about that. But no, we want happy users. 1:43:24 That is, that is what we want. Okay, 1:43:27 we got more people now want to come up on stage. We have Sky Doge. 1:43:31 Hello. 1:43:41 You are muted. So I can't hear anything yet. 1:43:47 But we also have we have another 1:43:54 Paul here. Okay, it was Danny. 1:44:00 So I suppose we could go. 1:44:07 Oh, hey, yes. This is the other Paul. How are you, Paul? 1:44:10 I'm great. 1:44:12 Okay, so full disclosure. 1:44:17 I think I may have been getting I got a merge into your Truthcoin and 1:44:22 GitHub repo back in 2014. So I've been following your work for a while, 1:44:27 Paul. 1:44:32 Oh, great. 1:44:33 And yeah, I'm like, I haven't followed you recently. 1:44:37 But I used to love a lot of what you had to say. 1:44:40 But I'm kinda and I just joined like 10 minutes ago. 1:44:44 I'm trying to understand like, are you gonna hard fork Bitcoin? 1:44:48 Like what's going on? I've, I'm out of the loop. 1:44:51 So I'm trying to understand. 1:44:55 I guess in the nest, so to speak, but I have a pinned. 1:45:00 Let me try to get it. I'm not gonna try to add tweets to this. But yeah, 1:45:06 I have a cash calm and it's me and a kind of a large group of people. 1:45:11 And it will be in late August this year or scheduled for late August. 1:45:17 Okay, and I have to ask, like, what's the reasoning? I mean, 1:45:21 I know for a little while and correct me if I'm wrong. 1:45:24 I have a lot of but I'm going to publish a huge article. 1:45:28 There's a lot of right. Okay, but but yeah, please continue. 1:45:32 Yeah, I mean, I know for a while, 1:45:36 like you were trying to get some of the like, 1:45:41 originally Truthcoin and then was it Hivemind stuff like kind of 1:45:45 picked up and like, get interest behind that. 1:45:49 And then some other work I was following of yours, I was interested in. 1:45:53 But I guess, 1:45:56 did you get kind of fed up with not having your ideas taken seriously 1:46:00 enough? Or I'm not trying to put words into your mouth. 1:46:04 I'm trying to understand, like, the reason for a hard fork, 1:46:07 because generally a hard fork isn't the Bitcoin way, you know? So, yeah. 1:46:12 Right. So, okay, well, 1:46:15 it'll take a little while to explain because the answer involves 1:46:19 basically everything. But basically, we, 1:46:22 I really think that Bitcoin has a lot of problems right now. 1:46:25 And the root cause of these problems is a lack of competition. 1:46:29 And we have grown very complacent. 1:46:33 So, we have a lot of like irrational beliefs in the community. And, 1:46:37 you know, the wrong people get attention. 1:46:41 And the wrong projects get attention, 1:46:45 of which BIP300 Drivechain is just a tiny symptom. 1:46:49 But I think it's a big symptom, you know, in a way that I was like, 1:46:53 pushing prediction markets on BTC, that was like in 2013, 2014. 1:46:57 And then now they're like getting super big. But it was like, okay, 1:47:01 this could have been all this could have been on BTC the whole time. 1:47:06 Okay, a little bit of pushback, if you're cool with it, Paul. I mean, 1:47:10 you mentioned that there's not competition. Like, can you clarify that? 1:47:13 Because... 1:47:22 What's that? 1:47:24 That's Guy Dozier's microphone as feedback or something. I don't know. 1:47:32 Anyway, I've muted him for now. So I think the... Okay, 1:47:35 so when I say we don't have competition, like, there's no fear, 1:47:39 like people just talk about... 1:47:43 They'll just like say, like, Bitcoin is perfect. 1:47:46 Bitcoin can't be improved. Bitcoin is like immortal. You know, 1:47:50 these are like the ideas that take precedence in our community. 1:47:53 And we don't like, we don't, 1:47:56 we're not like rushing as fast as we can to like improve the user 1:48:00 experience or try to make things... 1:48:04 Well, can I push back once more? I mean, improve the user experience. 1:48:08 So for me, as someone who, by the way, 1:48:13 I totally consider myself a Bitcoin maxi, like as hardcore as they come. 1:48:18 To me, 1:48:22 the Bitcoin user experience that matters most is that it's money where 1:48:26 the rules can't be fucked with. Right? Like, to me, 1:48:30 it's important that if I fall into a coma, wake up 50 years from now, 1:48:33 I'm able to access my Bitcoin wallet, right? 1:48:37 And still be able to access my money and use it. 1:48:42 Like, that's the user experience that I care about. 1:48:46 I care about rules that can't be broken. 1:48:50 And so everything else cascades from that, right? At least for me. 1:48:54 And so if user experience is, oh, I can't pay for a coffee, 1:48:58 like what Roger Ver was talking about during the scaling wars. 1:49:03 I mean, fuck you. I don't care about you buying coffee. 1:49:06 I care about me being in a coma and waking up 50 years from now and 1:49:08 being able to use my money. Right? 1:49:11 I don't give a shit about your coffee. 1:49:14 I think the good and bad are a little bit more objective than that, 1:49:18 though. I don't know why Vlad keeps pumping his fist. 1:49:23 I'm gonna have to look away from my phone because it's starting to 1:49:27 become distracting. He's just pumping the fist over and over again. 1:49:31 I'm gonna have to just turn my phone to the side and not look at it. 1:49:36 So I agree that the so, okay, people draw a straight line from that. 1:49:40 I want Bitcoin to survive. 1:49:44 They want to draw a straight line from that to ossification. 1:49:47 But that's not the case. 1:49:51 So let's say you wake up in the future and you say, oh, 1:49:54 what's important to me is I fall into a coma and I wake up, 1:49:58 my money is still there. 1:50:01 But what if you wake up in the future and people have moved away from 1:50:04 8 billion people use something else. They use Solana. 1:50:08 And they don't use Bitcoin. Well, now you've lost all of your money. 1:50:12 So it's another case where with the bitter comes the sweet and with the 1:50:16 good comes the bad. You have to decide. 1:50:20 Once you decide something like I want to make it so that Bitcoin 1:50:24 survives as long as possible and preserves my property rights and keeps 1:50:28 me with my money. Once you decide that that's the thing that you want, 1:50:31 you still have all of your work ahead of you because you don't know what 1:50:35 it will take to make sure that that happens. 1:50:40 Paul, so I mean just a quick interjection. 1:50:43 Didn't that kind of get resolved with Ethereum, right? 1:50:46 Ethereum was trying to literally be the world computer or whatever 1:50:50 bullshit marketing they came up with and then pivoted from. 1:50:53 And we saw how that experiment went, right? 1:50:56 They were trying to promise essentially everything. 1:51:00 It's just one tiny experiment though among an infinity of possible 1:51:03 experiments, right? 1:51:06 True, but they kind of took it to the extreme in the sense of, oh, 1:51:09 it's fully Turing complete. 1:51:13 You can essentially do whatever the fuck you want including lose your 1:51:16 money because it's just dumb. 1:51:20 I was a huge hater of Ethereum myself. 1:51:23 I was a hater of every altcoin and most of them went towards zero, 1:51:26 but Ethereum was a big success. 1:51:29 So I kind of think if I'm being honest with myself, 1:51:32 when I look in the mirror, 1:51:35 I was kind of maybe wrong a little bit about Ethereum. 1:51:39 I mean, 1:51:41 I'm obviously butthurt that I didn't make a shitload of money buying 1:51:44 Ethereum when it was super cheap. 1:51:47 So if you go to cryptofees.info, Ethereum has more fees. 1:51:52 There are more people paying to use the transaction fee. 1:51:57 Total transaction fees paid on Ethereum is higher than BTC. 1:52:02 So there is some sense in which it has product market fit that BTC does 1:52:06 not. 1:52:12 I guess, but I would argue it has product market fit amongst idiots. 1:52:17 Well, I think we have to decide. I agree, 1:52:20 but there's a lot of idiots everywhere. 1:52:23 So I think it's very comforting to just say, I mean, 1:52:26 we could just go down the line and we could say all these people are 1:52:28 idiots. 1:52:32 So we could go say all the darknet markets that switch from being BTC 1:52:36 only. So like Peter McCormick, his story, I don't know if this is true, 1:52:40 but his story about how I got into Bitcoin is that his mother was dying 1:52:44 of cancer and he had to get illegal drugs to help her. 1:52:48 Now, I don't know if it's true, but it probably is. 1:52:51 But I also found out about Bitcoin from the Wired Silk Road article. 1:52:55 And then when, like today, 1:52:58 that person would be onboarded to Monero because all these things are 1:53:01 Monero only. 1:53:05 Now we have stable coins. Those are on Tron and Ethereum. And like, 1:53:10 you could go, okay, like when people do NFTs and stuff, 1:53:14 I got invited to this NFT gala. 1:53:20 Oh God. 1:53:21 I know, but my friend, it was really silly and I didn't buy anything. 1:53:25 But my friend was running it and he could get me like a VIP. 1:53:29 That happened to be in New York City at the time. So he went, 1:53:32 but all the stuff was in ETH. It was all priced in ETH. 1:53:37 When Trump does his meme coin, the Trump and Melania meme coin, 1:53:41 that's on Solana. You know what I mean? 1:53:44 So we could go down the line and we could just say all these people are 1:53:48 idiots, which is a very comforting thing to believe. Or we could say, 1:53:52 you know, maybe, okay, here's another thing to point out. 1:53:55 All these things, Zcash, David Vorexia project, 1:53:59 like a storage type project, like a Filecoin project. 1:54:03 We could go down the line, like many of them, what are some more? 1:54:07 Many of these projects, 1:54:10 these started as Bitcoin projects or they were people trying, okay, 1:54:14 Bitcoin Cash is a perfect example. 1:54:19 They didn't want to launch their own coin. They tried to do it on BTC. 1:54:22 They tried so hard. They fought tooth and nail. 1:54:25 Well, well, well, well. I mean, 1:54:29 there were the incentives that Bitmain had as well, right? 1:54:32 With all their covert mining ASIC bullshit. 1:54:36 Well, the ASICBoost thing, 1:54:38 I actually think you can prove that it had no effect, 1:54:41 but this is kind of a side topic. 1:54:43 Oh, really? Okay, okay. I'll take that. 1:54:46 The theory is that ASICBoost gave them like some huge edge, 1:54:49 a secret edge of like 20% or something. 1:54:53 And then SegWit would interfere with covert ASICBoost. 1:54:56 That was my understanding. 1:54:59 Here's the thing. You can look at a plot of Bitcoin hash rate, 1:55:03 and then you can find the exact date at which SegWit activates, 1:55:08 which is August 1st, 2017. 1:55:12 And there should be a huge downward drop at that point as all this 1:55:16 covert ASICBoost gets shut off. 1:55:19 But instead, there's basically nothing there. 1:55:22 So it's just a normal line, I think. 1:55:24 I don't think there's anything special about that line. 1:55:27 So, of course, there's a mini confounding variable, 1:55:29 but I think that kind of basically proves... 1:55:31 It also requires people to think that all the large blockers were 1:55:34 insincere when they said they wanted large blocks, 1:55:36 but I think that's not true. 1:55:39 No, I mean, I believe Roger Ver was sincere, but I also, like, 1:55:42 he wasn't technical is the problem. 1:55:45 He was like Bitcoin Jesus, 1:55:48 but had no technical understanding whatsoever in mind. 1:55:50 Well, I agree that he was light on technical skills. 1:55:53 I think if he knew more about technical skills, 1:55:56 they might have done the soft fork extension block, 1:55:58 and then they would have won the scaling war. 1:56:01 And see, that's the thing. If he had done a soft fork extension block, 1:56:04 mandatory eight megabyte extension block, 1:56:07 and then you wake up from a coma, 1:56:09 you could still access your coins on the old one megabyte block. 1:56:12 Does that count as preserving the property rights or does that violate 1:56:15 your rule? This is what I'm trying to say. 1:56:17 At the end of the day, I think it's just more objective than that. 1:56:20 There's just good ideas. 1:56:23 There's ideas that sell and that people want and that people pay. 1:56:26 You're paying customers for an idea that's good. 1:56:29 Some ideas are better than others, and some ideas are just bad ideas. 1:56:32 Okay, okay. I mean, the coma example, 1:56:36 I use it because it's the simplest way I've found to explain to people 1:56:40 why backwards compatibility is important. 1:56:45 And backwards compatibility kind of is an umbrella term that encompasses 1:56:50 hard forks and why hard forks are bad, right? 1:56:55 Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, as you may know, 1:56:58 I wrote the article against the hard fork, 1:57:01 and I am overall against the hard fork. 1:57:04 But in this case, 1:57:08 it's the right tool for the job because the problem is not in the code 1:57:12 or in the technology. The problem is the community. 1:57:16 The culture of Bitcoin has been invaded by irrational ideas, 1:57:21 and these ideas are spreading. 1:57:26 I don't know. We may already be too late to fix them in BTC, 1:57:29 but I think the root cause of the bad ideas in BTC is the lack of 1:57:32 competition. 1:57:35 I agree with you that Ethereum is a bad idea, and it's so weird, 1:57:38 and it's so different, and it's doing proof of stake, 1:57:41 and it's doing blah, blah, blah, everything. 1:57:45 Actually, it's a bad competitor. It's an unhealthy. 1:57:48 It's a feeble competitor. 1:57:50 And so as a result, it does not put pressure on. 1:57:54 It's like in Pokemon Red when Gary says, 1:57:58 my rival should be strong to keep me sharp. I remember that. 1:58:02 And it's like we need a good 1:58:06 competitor, but we don't have it. 1:58:10 I think the same thing with Bitcoin Cash. Honestly, it was handled. 1:58:13 The ideas were bad, and the execution was bad. 1:58:16 And as a result, there wasn't a lot of there wasn't a big threat. 1:58:19 It wasn't like BTC met, and they were like, okay, 1:58:21 we're going to ship lightning in a month. 1:58:23 We're all going to meet at this hacker house, 1:58:26 and we're going to just lock ourselves in here with pizza. 1:58:30 Instead, what happened after BCH split off, we kind of did one Taproot, 1:58:35 saw a fork, and we've done nothing else. 1:58:40 And this whole time, we've been basically just coasting, I think. 1:58:45 And we're waiting for the U.S. 1:58:47 dollar to commit suicide by bringing up stuff like that. 1:58:49 Sorry that I kind of distracted 1:58:53 from what I do want to know why. 1:59:00 Should one hard fork Bitcoin? Obviously, my bias is towards no. 1:59:05 But I'm curious, what's the purpose? Which of your many ideas? 1:59:10 I've always thought you had pretty damn great ideas. 1:59:15 I'm curious which of them or what incarnation or evolution of them 1:59:20 you're hard forking for. 1:59:25 Yeah, I think the merge mined L2s are very important. 1:59:28 And I don't think that the rival L2s 1:59:31 I don't think lightning or ARK or Fediment or whatever, 1:59:34 I don't think these are going to work out. 1:59:37 And I think the merge mined L2s are very easy to do, 1:59:40 and they're very effective. 1:59:43 And they happen to solve a bunch of other meta problems. 1:59:46 So they themselves represent competition. So if the L1 software sucks, 1:59:50 and all of the L2 software, all the different softwares, 1:59:54 if they all suck, then with the merge mined L2s, 1:59:58 you can just launch another one, and you can get users. 2:00:02 And this does provide the necessary competition. 2:00:06 But right now, we're kind of in a weird state where we just won't do 2:00:09 there's lots of good ideas that we won't do, 2:00:13 and then there's lots of bad ideas that spread. 2:00:16 So I'm very concerned that it's like in the past, 2:00:20 the community was much smaller, 2:00:23 and you could just walk up to people and start talking to them. 2:00:28 So we could have scaling Bitcoin, where the big investors, 2:00:31 big business leaders, everyone fit in a small room, 2:00:34 like a 200-person room. 2:00:37 Yeah, I was in those rooms. 2:00:40 Yeah. And so everyone could talk to each other more. But now, 2:00:44 it's much harder, and that alters the type of idea that can spread, 2:00:48 because now an idea has to jump all these hurdles. 2:00:53 So I used the example of OP_CAT before, where it's a very simple idea. 2:00:57 It was in the original client for two years. It's 13 lines of code. 2:01:02 It is helpful to the Stark people and a few other people. 2:01:06 It's a very basic operation, and it's kind of opt-in, harmless, 2:01:11 and reversible. 2:01:16 And yet, we can't do OP_CAT, 2:01:18 and I think that's because the community is irrational. 2:01:21 I don't think it has anything to do with OP_CAT. 2:01:46 There were some solid technical reasons for why OP_CAT superficially 2:01:51 appears. Like, yeah, why not just re-enable it, right? But then, 2:01:56 who was it? Maybe it was Polstra? I forget who. 2:02:02 There was a concern about stack size or something, 2:02:04 but someone fixed that. 2:02:07 Really? Okay. I don't know. 2:02:10 One weird thing that was fixed. 2:02:13 Okay. 2:02:14 But here's the issue. 2:02:19 I think it would be one thing if we made a conscious choice to reject… 2:02:26 I'm sorry, guys. I'm going to have to go soon, 2:02:29 but we'll definitely get to Wayne Vaughn, because it's four, 2:02:32 but I'll go in a few minutes or so. 2:02:35 But it would be one thing if everyone decided. 2:02:39 We don't live in a world where everyone knows what OP_CAT is, 2:02:43 and then they made a conscious decision to reject it because of reasons. 2:02:48 We just kind of live in a weird bureaucracy where no one takes 2:02:51 responsibility for the decision, and so people just kind of shrug, 2:02:54 and if it just kind of dies in committee… 2:02:59 I don't know, Paul. 2:03:03 You have to be really deep in the weeds for a discussion like OP_CAT. 2:03:08 It's not like, oh, let's put it to a democratic vote. 2:03:12 I don't think that's how Bitcoin would survive. 2:03:17 Right, but this is the problem. I agree with what I'm saying. 2:03:19 It's the issue. 2:03:23 It would be better if we had specialists, 2:03:27 and then people made decisions, 2:03:31 and then they took responsibility for those decisions, 2:03:35 but we instead kind of have the worst of both worlds, I think. 2:03:40 Anyway, I think we should go to Wayne, 2:03:44 and then we'll have to wait until next week, but tell all the haters… 2:03:48 I really wanted to know what you're doing, other than merge mining, 2:03:51 I guess. Is that the TLDR, or what's the one sentence? 2:03:55 If you go to eCash.com, there's a section called, like, why do this? 2:03:59 So there it is for you. 2:04:04 All right. Thanks, Paul. 2:04:05 Thank you very much. 2:04:10 Hey, Paul. How you doing, bud? 2:04:11 I'm doing good. How are you? 2:04:14 I'm doing great. Just chilling. I saw you had a space. 2:04:16 I thought I'd jump in and say hi. 2:04:19 I didn't hear much more than maybe the past six or seven minutes of the 2:04:23 conversation, but I thought it would be interesting to kind of, like, 2:04:28 talk about how we got here, 2:04:32 because most people have come into Bitcoin in recent years. 2:04:37 They weren't in it in the early days. 2:04:41 They weren't around for the 2012 Cambrian explosion of Bitcoin forks, 2:04:45 and so they're just sort of lacking the proper context. 2:04:49 You know, from my perspective, a lot of these conversations, 2:04:54 they go way too deep in the weeds on technical and political issues that 2:04:59 happened five to ten years after sort of the important seed elements. 2:05:04 You know, the way I look at it, the way I remember it is that, you know, 2:05:08 we invented Bitcoin. People started mining Bitcoin. 2:05:12 Some guys figured out how to mine Bitcoin with GPUs, 2:05:16 and then everybody figured out that, oh, you can start doing this. 2:05:21 And that's kind of when I got involved in Bitcoin, 2:05:25 and I built myself a GPU miner. 2:05:29 And then the difficulty of mining with Bitcoin with GPUs quickly scaled 2:05:33 up to the point where it was marginally profitable based on the current 2:05:37 price of Bitcoin and the current price of electricity. 2:05:41 And around that time, Charlie Lee invented Litecoin, 2:05:46 and he basically created a Bitcoin clone with a ten-minute block time 2:05:51 and the ability to continue to run mining on GPUs. 2:05:56 And the first explosion of Bitcoin forks, 2:05:59 that first Cambrian explosion that happened around that time period, 2:06:03 were people basically doing some iteration of that same thing. 2:06:07 It was forking Bitcoin, making sure, 2:06:11 changing the mining algorithm from SHA-256 to script or something else 2:06:15 that could, in rare cases, that could run on GPUs. 2:06:20 And we tried every permutation of block size and signature type and all 2:06:25 sorts of things that you could think of based on the prevailing 2:06:30 technology of the times. I mean, is that how you remember that era, 2:06:35 Paul? 2:06:41 Well, yeah, to some extent, yes. Although, of course, 2:06:45 many of the variants were sort of very trivial. 2:06:50 So you had lots of different categories. So Litecoin was just 99.99%, 2:06:55 the same as Bitcoin, but with faster block time. 2:07:00 Yeah, you're right. Most of it was trivial. 2:07:03 Very few of them were substantial changes from regular Bitcoin. 2:07:07 Many of the ones that were big changes were very bad projects. 2:07:11 They ended up being unsuccessful, like AuroraCoin, NXT, BitShares, 2:07:16 stuff like that. So those were most unsuccessful. 2:07:20 So there were different categories. But yeah, to some extent, yes. 2:07:25 But in my recollection, 2:07:28 the big criticism that came up at the time was that, well, 2:07:31 if everybody can fork Bitcoin and make their own version of Bitcoin, 2:07:34 then what's the value of Bitcoin? 2:07:38 And some people started working on that problem, 2:07:41 and some of them created these meta protocols like Omni on top of 2:07:45 Bitcoin. 2:07:49 And Ethereum tried to create one coin that could do everything instead 2:07:53 of having a specific coin for a specific function. 2:07:57 And at first, they tried to do it on top of Bitcoin. 2:08:00 I'm sort of shortcutting a lot of this for the sake of brevity. 2:08:04 But they decided eventually to launch their own coin separately. 2:08:08 And around that same point in time, there were many factions that were 2:08:11 people try to make it sound like the early days of Bitcoin were all 2:08:15 kumbaya. 2:08:19 No, it was deeply political. There were many, many political factions, 2:08:24 two of the largest being the folks that sort of centered around the MIT 2:08:29 up in Boston and the folks that eventually founded Blockstream. 2:08:34 Both good people. I don't have any 2:08:37 I know everybody on both sides of that. 2:08:40 But one of the major things that they were trying to do was saying, hey, 2:08:43 you know what? 2:08:46 Ethereum doesn't need to be a separate chain to do everything, 2:08:49 and turning complete scripts that are loaded into the chain is kind of a 2:08:52 dumb fundamental design. 2:08:56 But we have this design to do something different called a sidechain. 2:08:59 And what the sidechain allows you to do is 2:09:03 and I'm speaking loosely here for the sake of conversation 2:09:06 is to design a specialized version of Bitcoin that preserves the 2:09:10 scarcity of the Bitcoin. 2:09:14 So instead of launching a new chain that has bajillions numbers of coins 2:09:17 and saying, hey, 2:09:21 we can have diversity of behaviors that are derivative from the core 2:09:24 Bitcoin chain without creating a bunch of new coins. 2:09:28 And that sidechain project from Blockstream didn't end up how they 2:09:31 originally anticipated. To be polite about it, 2:09:34 it kind of was a bit of a failure, 2:09:38 although they did salvage some technology out of it and develop it into 2:09:41 a certain direction. 2:09:45 But pretty much from that point in time, 2:09:49 the idea of actually building something on top of Bitcoin and creating 2:09:53 new features for Bitcoin was kind of verboten. It was taboo. 2:09:57 People just didn't want to get it done. 2:10:02 They wanted to advance cryptographic signatures. 2:10:05 They wanted to make the chain slightly more efficient. 2:10:09 They wanted to solve some of the problems like transaction malleability. 2:10:12 That was a big one. 2:10:17 But the idea that Bitcoin was going to continue to change really sort of 2:10:21 died, and there was a I shouldn't say died. It was severely curtailed, 2:10:25 and all the energy for that went someplace else. 2:10:30 Now, some people would say, good riddance. 2:10:32 Get all that shit off of our chain. Bitcoin should be pure, 2:10:35 and it should only operate one way, 2:10:38 and that's the only way that it should be from here until eternity with 2:10:41 the exception of just keeping up with cryptography and the general 2:10:44 progress of computation. 2:10:47 And there are other people who said, hey, 2:10:50 we're going to do these meta protocols. 2:10:53 We're going to do these other things in this other world, 2:10:56 and the fact that we can't do them on Bitcoin is really kind of sad. 2:10:59 And when I look at your project, what you're doing right now, 2:11:02 I look at it as like, you know what? 2:11:05 We have an opportunity to go back and try some of those principles 2:11:08 again. 2:11:11 We can't get it on the regular Bitcoin chain. 2:11:13 Maybe some people think that's a good thing. 2:11:15 Some people think that's a bad thing. 2:11:17 But an efficient way to do that is let the market decide. 2:11:21 Split the chain. Go ahead and allow people to have this new technology. 2:11:26 And if the people who say it's all bullshit are right, 2:11:28 they're going to be able to sell their coins. 2:11:30 They're going to be able to from the fork. 2:11:33 They're going to be able to say, I told you so on X. 2:11:36 They're going to watch 150,000 projects die, 2:11:40 and they're going to laugh themselves into oblivion and just be able to 2:11:44 say, I was right. I told you so. Ha ha ha. 2:11:48 They'll be the new Peter Schiff's of Bitcoin. 2:11:50 But maybe they're not completely right. 2:11:53 Maybe there will be some lasting value. 2:11:56 Maybe there's room to have a Bitcoin-oriented experiment ground where 2:12:01 a laboratory, if you will, where people can try different things, 2:12:06 and maybe some of those things can migrate over towards Bitcoin. 2:12:12 And that's how I see the value in what you're doing. 2:12:16 I don't think that there's much risk at this point with Bitcoin weaving 2:12:21 its way and infiltrating the traditional financial system for people to 2:12:25 have the same level of concerns of all those old forks for Bitcoin. 2:12:30 Because there really was a time, call it from 2011 to 2014 perhaps, 2:12:34 where people were legitimately saying, 2:12:38 if I can just clone Bitcoin and look at all these Bitcoin forks, 2:12:42 one of them is going to be the next Bitcoin. 2:12:46 The first one never works out. Google wasn't the first search engine. 2:12:48 One of these other things is going to be better, 2:12:50 and it's going to succeed. 2:12:53 I don't think that that risk exists nowadays. 2:12:56 So I think that a lot of people are going to get really worked up about 2:12:59 what you're trying to do over nothing. 2:13:02 I think that there's going to be a big controversy online. 2:13:06 But at the end of the day, I think what you're doing is small, 2:13:10 has a small chance of success. 2:13:15 And maybe can even create some things that will have some value to 2:13:18 Bitcoin because now people who are interested in developing on Bitcoin 2:13:22 can do it in a way that doesn't have to deal with the politics of the 2:13:25 Bitcoin development community. 2:13:29 So anyways, 2:13:31 that's kind of how I see it without getting into any specific technical 2:13:33 issues. 2:13:36 And I feel like people talking about the block size wars and Bitcoin 2:13:39 politics and everything, it kind of tends to muck it up. 2:13:42 I really look at it as you trying to implement some very old ideas in a 2:13:48 way that doesn't hurt Bitcoin. 2:13:54 In fact, if you had been able to do this back in maybe 2012, 2:13:57 I think that half of the shit coins that existed would have never 2:14:00 existed. 2:14:04 And there might be some innovations and some things that were tried. 2:14:09 So in a sense, Blockstream has Liquid, which is like their, 2:14:14 it's not really a fork of Bitcoin, but their Bitcoin derived technology. 2:14:19 That's their sidechain technology for doing things. 2:14:22 You're just making something else that's kind of like that. 2:14:25 Yours happens to be public. 2:14:28 I don't think that the existence of Liquid threatens Bitcoin. 2:14:31 I don't think the existence of eCash or Zcash or a handful of other 2:14:35 things that are related to Bitcoin threaten Bitcoin. 2:14:39 It's not like crossing the streams and Ghostbusters. 2:14:41 We're not going to destroy the universe. 2:14:43 So everybody should just, you know, 2:14:45 if you like it and you want to mess around with it, use it. 2:14:48 If you don't, then don't do anything and just go on and live your life. 2:14:53 OK, yeah, I completely agree. So thanks very much. 2:14:56 I think that was a great comment. 2:14:59 And I think it's a good one to end on because I said two to four and now 2:15:02 it's four sixteen. 2:15:05 And so but we'll be back next week. 2:15:08 So thanks to everyone who came up on stage. 2:15:11 And thanks very much. Join next time. 2:15:15 And until then. Thank you, guys. 2:15:22 Thank you.
