0:00 Hey everybody, before we begin the show, I wanted to give a shout out to our friends 0:03 at PowerPool. PowerPool is a mining pool and is one of the most profitable for miners. 0:09 So if you have one miner at home, or a fleet of miners at scale, point your workers to 0:12 PowerPool to enjoy the best payouts. PowerPool supports a number of algorithms, SHA-256 for 0:18 Bitcoin, X11 for Dash, and others. And of course, we're focused, and we care about the 0:23 most, sCrypt for Litecoin, Dogecoin, and now Bellscoin, merged mining. Pointing your workers 0:28 to PowerPool is easy with its simple user interface, and the platform also has all 0:33 the reporting available that your operation needs. Typically, PowerPool extends a low 0:38 1% pool fee. However, if you register with the $84M link in the show notes, you will 0:43 lock in a sub-1% pool fee, which is excellent. Cheers, happy mining. 0:58 Hello, and welcome to the 84M podcast. We're on episode 40 tonight, and our guest is Paul 1:09 Sztorc. We're going to talk about Drivechain. So let me just give him an introduction, and 1:15 we'll dive right in. So Paul Sztorc is founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs. He is creator of Bitcoin 1:21 LiveMind, and he is a blogger at drivechain.info. He's also the author of BIP300/301, 1:28 which of course we're going to talk about tonight, and you can find him on X at Truthcoin. 1:34 Paul, welcome to the show. I know you don't like introductions, but we got to give you one. 1:38 Well, yeah, thanks for having me. I think that was a mistake to say. I mean, people do need to 1:42 know, like, who am I talking to here? And, you know, is this a friend or an enemy? So I try to 1:48 be a friend, you know. I just put out my little technology idea. We'll see if people like it or 1:54 not. Well, that's what we want to discuss. So I know last year at the Litecoin Summit, you gave 2:00 a presentation on Drivechains. I know you've gone to lengths discussing Drivechains. You've been 2:07 working on it for quite some time. Yeah, I would stop. I would quit if it ever made any sense to 2:13 quit. But the world just, you know, I just don't get it at all. Like, everyone seems to be, 2:18 the non-mined L2s in Bitcoin have no future, I think. And they are always reduced to, 2:26 you know, trust someone else, trust a federation with your keys or something. 2:30 And the Drivechain idea just looks great. You could scale to 8 billion people. 2:33 We have the Zcash privacy. We completed all the software. So Lightning is like this ongoing 2:39 developer make work program. It doesn't even work and all these people are jumping ship. 2:46 And yet, so, you know, it is bizarre to spend so much time on it. But it's not like 2:56 it has ever, like, it's not like where you and your friends start a band and you kind of think, 3:02 like, oh, maybe it'll catch on and year after year goes by. It's just kind of like the fundamentals 3:07 get better every year. So I don't know. It just seems pretty weird to me. 3:11 Well, I do request that you treat me like a four-year-old during this conversation, 3:15 because I think a lot of this is, again, we're here to listen and learn. So I'm one of the folks 3:22 that needs to learn about what you're doing. And I think it's interesting. Maybe we start by just 3:27 giving you kind of what is the brief statement on why you even thought of this, I want to say in 3:33 2015. What was the problem you saw with Bitcoin in 2015? And what does it look like in 2025? 3:40 Of course, we're going to talk mostly about Litecoin. 3:43 Of course. Well, yeah, with Litecoin, the angle is that I think Bitcoin is, you know, 3:48 making a lot of mistakes. And so this is, you know, I think that the time to compete is now. 3:55 And eternal glory is unlikely, but possible. And that's just, you know, investing is like that, 4:04 where, you know, the VC people will take 20 swings, go up to the bat and take 20 swings, 4:11 miss 19, and then walk away, you know, catrillionaires, because the one they had made a 4:17 huge amount. But I was originally interested in this. Originally, my interest in sidechains was 4:23 not like as this fundamental life-saving thing that would be make or break for Bitcoin at all. 4:32 At first, I was interested in prediction markets. And I came up with this extremely 4:36 complicated peer-to-peer oracle, which is still a pretty cool idea. It's less important now, 4:42 because more and more gambling has been legalized. There was like no legal gambling back when I 4:47 came. This was like 2012. Intrade had been closed down by, you know, the U.S. authorities and the 4:52 CFTC. Now you have like FanDuel and DraftKings, and you have Polymarket. So it's very different. 4:58 I still think there's a niche for the censorship-resistant peer-to-peer 5:04 oracle blockchain prediction market thing. I still think that's actually a really, 5:08 really, really good idea and definitely worth doing. And I hope to do it. But that was how 5:12 I got into it. And I was like, I designed this weird thing that I don't expect to be mainstream 5:19 without a lot of, you know, for many years of people seeing it work in the wild and stuff like 5:24 that. So it's a very weird thing. And the idea of the sidechain was out there already on Bitcoin 5:31 Talk, even though Blockstream hadn't written their paper yet. And so then they wrote their paper in 5:36 2014. And I worked on the prediction market thing and finished it. And then I was like, 5:42 now it's time to attach this to Bitcoin. And so then I looked up what Blockstream had done, 5:47 and it turns out they really hadn't done anything. So they had this weird skip list idea, 5:51 but it was all like, so I was like working up close with the details. And I just thought like, 5:59 you know, they were going about it the wrong way, way more complicated and for no benefit. And they 6:05 had a, you know, I can go down the list of how what I did differs from. And in the original 6:11 Drivechain post, they have like an FAQ at the bottom. One of the questions is, how is this 6:15 different from the Blockstream? Appendix B in their October 2014 paper, because there's a lot 6:23 of this. Like, I was very surprised when I zoomed into what they were doing. And I just thought, 6:29 well, I don't really know, like, if I should use this at all. 6:32 It turns out they also kind of abandoned everything they were doing. They never even, 6:36 the skip list thing never came to fruition. And they just did the federated sidechain liquid. 6:41 And that is just, they say, they claim that there's 15 keys held by different people. There's 6:48 no way of knowing if this is true. This is like a Zcash trusted setup. We have no way of knowing 6:51 if this is true. And then you just give them the coins, and then you just kind of hope that they 6:55 give the coins back. And then they have this other blockchain, but it's kind of a little bit of a 7:00 song and dance. But this is what happened with Bitcoin is, overall, everyone, because of the 7:09 block size war, people kind of compromised on their integrity a little bit each day. And then 7:16 now it's 10 years, it's been 10 years since 2015, and people just lie about everything. 7:21 Unfortunately, it's very sad. But that's just how it is. And people don't even know, like they do, 7:26 the primal to primal zap on Nostr, which does, that does not involve any lightning transactions 7:34 at all. Zero whatsoever. It doesn't even, it's not even really a Bitcoin transaction. 7:38 What are they calling it? Lightning? 7:40 But they call it lightning. Everyone thinks, oh, lightning is great. I just zapped my friend. 7:45 It has the lightning icon, and it's called zap. And this is just part of the ongoing derangement. 7:50 So unfortunately, this is my new, this is like my cross to bear now, is that Bitcoin has 7:56 accumulated all this scar tissue and all these mistakes. And I worry about the future of Bitcoin 8:02 if it cannot be honest with itself. But this is the opportunity for Litecoin. This is why we would 8:08 say, OK, before you might say something like, Bitcoin is too far ahead. This is the famous 8:14 Brian Armstrong tweet from back in the day. Bitcoin is too far ahead. We should just be 8:18 focused on Bitcoin and sidechains, he said. And network effects will carry the day. 8:24 And we need everyone to unite. But no, it's when, when you really see like these fundamental 8:31 mistakes that you are very grateful that there are some competitors out there. So yeah. 8:38 Sorry, long answer. 8:39 No, that's good. So Drivechain, your BEPs were in a response to Blockstream coming up with a 8:45 solution for scaling. And they ended up with Liquid, which is, which I have not used it. I 8:51 know it's more private. It is an L2. They're running it, but it's, it's a single chain, 8:55 is it not? It's not like, from what I'm learning about Drivechain, it's more like a Swiss Army 9:00 knife. 9:01 Yeah, you're totally hailing it. 9:04 It's annoying. This is like, one thing this has taught me, which is a little bit depressing, 9:08 is that, you know, so like that guy who's the Dilbert guy, Scott Adams, right? He claims to 9:14 be a hypnotist. But I think he, he just, but he even just saying that he's like a genius in a way, 9:20 because what, if you dig into what he's trying to say, people just attach so much information 9:27 to the, the name or the word, you know, the Patriot Act, whatever, you know, and you think 9:33 who would fall for that? But actually everyone falls for it. The Ministry of Truth, you know, 9:40 and people fall for it, you know, and so they call it a sidechain. 9:48 But as you say, the true sidechain idea is not like one piece of software. It is a general 9:54 technique that you would, you could just reuse. You could say we'd have the Ethereum Drivechain 9:58 or the Zcash Drivechain, or we would have the whatever, the Monero Drivechain. It would be like 10:06 a general technique. It's like saying that you're going to use like long division or something. 10:11 But then they say liquid is a sidechain. And one of the questions I would ask, even though you're 10:17 way ahead of me on this, when I would try to, you know, knock some sense into people, I would say, 10:23 well, what am I supposed to do? Let's say I want to use liquid or whatever the hell they're talking 10:27 about to make a Zcash sidechain on Bitcoin. What do I do? And then you just wait for people to 10:33 answer. And they realize there is no answer because the answer would be something like, 10:38 find 15 people again to be the multi-sig keyholder on L1. And then just kind of like 10:47 have them run Zcash in reg test mode and have them just process the deposits and withdrawals. 10:54 But you see that that answer is just completely equivalent to someone made a wallet and we're 11:00 just giving them all our money and we hope that we get it back. And the whole Zcash sidechain part 11:06 is not, you know, is no, it's not a fundamental part of the explanation of what's happening at 11:11 all. It's just, just give the money to, or just give the money to Visa or whatever, or just hope 11:17 that you get it back. Give the money to Coinbase. And you can see why that doesn't really have a 11:21 future because, well, there's so many paradoxes with it. It's like with liquid, you could ask 11:27 people, I've done this many times, you ask them, supporters of liquid, you know, there's really not 11:32 that many out there, but you can find them if you look. And you can say, well, okay, you like liquid. 11:39 Liquid is just these 15 people. Would you agree that the security of liquid rises or falls on 11:48 the reputation of these 15 keyholders? And of course they say yes, because that's true. And 11:55 then you just ask them, okay, who are, who are the 15 keyholders? Do they, do they respond to this? 12:01 No, I know, happen to know, just because of pure chance and fluke and being in the industry 12:08 for a while, I happen to know a few of them and I asked, so I know some of them, but it's not 12:13 publicly available information. And this is, you know, partly to maybe stop them from being 12:18 sued or harassed or whatever. So it partly makes sense, but it's also a paradox to say 12:24 this rises or falls on the reputation of these people. And then, and then there are anonymous 12:28 cypherpunk identities that no one knows who they are. And you just kind of think, well, you know, 12:33 it just speaks to how poorly thought out it is. I hate to put it in those terms, but it's just like 12:41 no one really cares about the substance. And that is, that is difficult. If you, if you think that 12:46 you have improved the substance a little bit, you just kind of think, ah, so, and then there's, 12:51 you know, it wasn't even open source for a while. And it's kind of still not, 12:54 there's like different components of it. And then what part is open source? The fundamentally, 12:59 it's not open source because you cannot change. No one can like, no, it's weird because they, 13:07 this is the hypnotism thing. Again, if I were to say out loud the sentence that goes like this, 13:11 it says, no one can download the liquid source code and then change it and then release their 13:15 own version. Okay. That's technically not true, but people would be missing the point if they 13:21 said that I could download some of the version that they say is what the real liquid is. 13:27 And then I could release my own version with my own 15 key holders, but I couldn't change like 13:32 the liquid, you know, network. It's not like where if I actually download, you know, Ubuntu 13:38 or something, I can change the font color or something if I want. So it's all just, and then 13:44 people say, oh, that doesn't matter or it doesn't, whatever, you know, it's like at a certain point, 13:48 you have to just like, for my own sanity, I have to just say, I can't talk to these people anymore. 13:53 I'm just going to release it the way I think it should be. And the only real way to make any sense 13:57 of it is to release the software and show people exactly what it is you're talking about, because 14:02 it's really hard to just do something like idea to idea. And most people are not set up for that, 14:10 which is just to say, you know, not everyone is a specialist in everything. So they're not going to, 14:15 if you go to somebody and you say, oh, I have an idea for a new, you know, a new type of roof. 14:19 And it's, you know, it lasted a trillion years. People don't know they are, everyone is a lay 14:24 person. We can only be a specialist in like one thing at a time. So. Right. I don't, I'd like to 14:30 have you elaborate a little bit more about the concern with federations, although that's not 14:34 really the topic of the discussion, but I think it's important because Drivechain is not, 14:39 is not a federation. Right. So just reiterate what a federation is. And they say, well, 14:44 people like Luke Dashjr., who, of course, he has, you know, many interesting opinions. I really 14:49 like Luke a lot, although he has his own bizarre way of arguing where like he can't lie, but he 14:55 just invents his own dictionary where everything has a different meaning to him. So you have to 14:59 like decode it. But yeah, he'll say like, oh, the Drivechain is the federation of the miners or 15:06 something, which, you know, this really misses the point, I think, about like what makes Bitcoin, 15:11 what made Bitcoin different than its predecessors that failed? Yeah. So Bitcoin had these 15:16 predecessors, Liberty Reserve, DigiCash. There were eGold, right? I'm kind of blanking on all 15:25 the names, but there were these, there were predecessors to Bitcoin. And they all failed 15:32 because they had one, like a server that was responsible for just one piece of the thing. 15:38 So, but usually the devil spend. And so if they seize the server, the whole thing's obliterated. 15:47 Bitcoin changed that around and said, you do not, everyone is an equal peer on the network. 15:57 And then the network state advances in a particular way. It's not like one person 16:02 gets to do it. Anyone can do it as long as they meet the proof of work. Right. 16:06 And the idea of miners as being, I mean, this is going to get kind of philosophical now, 16:10 and I don't know if I'm just, but this is how I honestly think about it is 16:15 the, there is no such thing as a fixed group of miners. Like that is a misconception. 16:22 There is a decentralized mining process that anyone can join or leave at any time. And if 16:26 enough people actually leave, it becomes slightly easier to join with the whole difficulty adjustment. 16:31 And so it's a dynamic membership. The fact that the membership, the fact that it is not a fixed 16:38 set of people, a fixed list, where if you like killed all 15 people, 16:42 it'd be like a godfather and you killed them all at the same day. Like you could, 16:49 you could destroy all the miners today and the Bitcoin network would actually survive. 16:54 You could even do something bizarre in theory. I mean, I don't want to get too theoretical, 16:58 but you could even do something where like every SHA-256 piece of equipment was destroyed. 17:04 And we had to like manually, it would be a trivial inconvenience. 17:08 Once people realized what had happened, that somehow we had magically destroyed, 17:12 you need like planetary level magic. And then the fix would be to like one time, 17:18 lower the difficulty, a special time, and the network would just be fine. 17:23 So this is what makes Bitcoin so special is that it does not 17:27 have this thing with the fixed list of admins. You see there'd be administrators or super peers. 17:34 Bitcoin has it all peer to peer, so everyone's equal. And that's what makes Bitcoin special. 17:39 And yeah, I find this depressing that when people say things like Drivechain is a federation of 17:44 miners, because the whole point of why Bitcoin succeeded was the miners part replaced the 17:51 federated part. And so I find that quite annoying. I think, have these people heard of Bitcoin? 17:59 You know, like this is the whole game changing part. And it's no different in the case of drive 18:05 chain is why Drivechain will probably work. These other things will probably not work is 18:12 with Drivechain, it's all unified behind the same. Users pay transaction fees. 18:17 The transaction fee can go to anyone. It's just part of the transaction itself. 18:22 The miners collect the transaction fees. The miners do the merge mining of all the different 18:26 chains. The miners are the ones who have a vested interest in keeping all the chains working. 18:33 And the miners can collect a geometrically increasing amount of transaction fees forever 18:40 by doing this. And again, when I say the miners, that is short for 18:46 the decentralized mining process. That's exactly what does not happen with Bitcoin mining is the 18:51 transaction like pays a fee to the arc super node or the LN routing node. The fee is just part of 18:57 the transaction. So you just have all this huge group of transactions and you know that anyone 19:01 could get those in the future. All the miners play the same game against each other to mine, 19:07 to do shots of six mining in Bitcoin's case. And so I don't know if, but then I dodged the 19:13 original question was, was something like, why is it not? I mean, federation is a fixed list of keys. 19:19 That's what I mean. So miners is an, we don't know the, I mean, probably there's a statistic. 19:24 We could probably look up how many miners are. We can at least look up the hash power, do the math. 19:29 It could be difficult, but it might be able to be, it might, you may be able to do it, but I mean, 19:33 you're talking about thousands or tens of thousands versus 15. People talk about the 19:39 pools. The pools are a red herring. You could compromise 100% of the pools and that would not 19:44 matter. You would, people would just make new pools. The pools are completely, it's depressing 19:49 how I feel like stuff was understood earlier in Bitcoin's history and now it is more superstitions 19:56 have crept in. And I want to talk about mining in a little bit. I've got for everybody watching, 20:01 I think this is the longest note pad or notes sheet that I've had for any episode. 20:06 And I do want to talk about miners, but I think once upon a time we were considering the miners, 20:11 kind of the backbone of the network and the heroes, you know, they're doing the, 20:13 they're doing all the work, you know, they're, they're allowing a network to exist for us to use 20:18 and we should celebrate them. Now we're concerned about maybe too much undue power given to miners. 20:22 But anyway, I'm going to pause on that and we'll move forward. We'll go back to it. But yeah, 20:27 I think the federated model, which it sounds like liquid, and again, I'm not saying anything 20:31 about liquid. This is not a show about liquid, but you're talking about, you need to trust to 20:36 a degree, 15 people with 15 aspects of the key for it to function, right? Kind of like, 20:43 what will happen if liquid is a big success and generates, and there's more and more and more coins 20:49 get locked to the liquid network. Is there going to be a commensurate increase in the amount of 20:55 money paid to these 15 people? It turns out the answer is no. On liquid, in fact, all the 21:00 transaction fees go to a wall controlled by Blockstream. This is hard-coded in. Now, of course, 21:07 you could say like that's, they could easily change that. I think it does, it's not a fundamental 21:16 gripe, but actually in a weird paradoxical way, focusing on who gets the transaction fee revenues 21:24 is a fundamental gripe, because actually, if anything is going to be a success, 21:29 there's going to be, if we're talking 8 billion users and people make three transactions a day, 21:34 now we're talking like trillions of transactions per year, and 10 cents per transaction, 21:38 this is hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And I've estimated that this number 21:42 doubles every 11 years or so. I've tried to just do some napkin math on that. 21:47 So actually, the fees question is important, even though in this particular case, it's kind of like 21:52 they could just change the fee to go somewhere else. Well, actually, the question is, there's 21:56 going to be a huge pile of money. And if you have a different system, that's not the miners get it 22:01 all, then you have to decide that people are going to be fighting over it. And the miners will be 22:07 fighting you for it. The miners will say, well, wait a minute, we mine L1, we control everything 22:12 that happens in L1, we control all the hash commitments for all the different L2s. The L1 22:16 controls all the L2s, like a lightning node. If you can't connect to a Bitcoin core node, 22:21 it won't even turn on. Same for Drivechain L2. If you cannot connect to Bitcoin core, 22:27 it just will have no idea like who has deposited to it, for example, so it just won't do anything. 22:33 And so the L1 miners are quite fundamental. And so actually, it does, they do have to get all 22:39 the transaction fees because every other answer just leads to kind of a nonsensical outcome, 22:44 which will never happen in the long run. And that's the incentive model beyond the 22:49 21 million cap or for Litecoins, 84 million cap, right? We're looking at fees to compensate for 22:54 security and everything else. So this all came up. So we nearly had you on last year, 23:01 you were doing a lot of interviews, it didn't happen. And then I think now's the time to bring 23:04 it up again. So I was watching, you made a tweet, I think last month, and then actually you got some 23:10 feedback from David Burkett and Charlie Lee. So you mentioned about kind of where you're at, 23:15 what Drivechains and what your team's done, and we'll talk more about that. And then David 23:20 basically said, hey, we don't have a signet, we might need to add one. And then Charlie's like, 23:24 yeah, go ahead and do it. So that was kind of a neat signal. And so I am interested to see 23:31 how Drivechains would work in the setting of Litecoin in terms of the, sorry, what'd you say? 23:41 I mean, go ahead. 23:42 Okay. I'm just looking over my laundry list here. So I'm just looking at Litecoin implementation 23:49 versus Bitcoin. Are there any, how would you describe the difference? 23:56 I don't think it's that different at all. I mean, I think the key thing is that the technical, 24:05 under the hood, BIP300 is not that complicated. It is just, it takes this extra opcode and it 24:11 basically counts to 13,000 over and over again. And it sounds weird, but that is all it does. 24:19 And it has this idea of like a cross-chain confirmation basically, where the miners just 24:23 choose which withdrawal kind of they want to build on. And it doesn't really cost anyone 24:28 anything. They just promote the, and the withdrawals are deliberately very slow 24:32 so that it's acknowledged that if the miners want the system to work, then it's very, very, 24:41 very, very unbelievably easy for them. It's like one hash has to be right every three to six months. 24:46 So it's very easy for everyone to keep everything in sync. And like, even with the CUSF activator, 24:52 you just run like a second piece of software next to the Bitcoin core client. The fundamental thing 24:58 is, it is a, 25:00 I didn't really realize this when I came up with it, 25:03 but really the fundamental thing is it is, 25:05 what you're doing is you're pitching like a vision 25:08 for 8 billion users. 25:12 And you're just pitching like basically the future 25:14 of the, like the next iteration of what it would look like. 25:20 If what, you know, what like cryptocurrency would look like. 25:23 I kind of didn't really think about it that way 25:25 when I was in, I was just trying to like come up 25:27 with something that would work to get the coins 25:28 to move back and forth. 25:30 But really that's the bizarre thing 25:31 because the miners today, I don't think they realize 25:34 like what's at stake at all. 25:36 Some of the smarter ones do, 25:37 but even there were presentations 25:39 at the most recent Las Vegas conference. 25:42 I'm not sure how well they were even received, 25:45 but like, I don't think miners realize like they, 25:48 if they do nothing, which they currently are doing 25:50 in Bitcoin, they're trying, they're sort of seeding ground 25:53 to like this new arc, covenants, Fediment, whatever. 25:57 And they will not get these transaction fees 26:01 until much later when they realize that, oh, they actually, 26:03 and so then there'll be a huge, huge conflict. 26:07 But they have really like no idea 26:10 that I think it doesn't even occur to them 26:11 that they could be getting a hundred times 26:15 or even 10,000 times the transaction fee revenue 26:18 that they could get from merge mining. 26:21 And that this is like, not only makes them more money, 26:26 but it's much better for Bitcoin 26:27 and produces this more harmonious state of affairs 26:30 where the miners have a relationship with the users 26:32 and everyone from the influencers to the software developer, 26:36 everyone's trying to get people to actually use 26:39 the software so that they pay transaction fee 26:43 and goes to miners and miners have a ton of money. 26:45 So the miners are not easily bribed or messed with. 26:51 They think they know that their bread and butter 26:53 is the user of the software. 26:55 So all that probably sounds uncontroversial 27:01 or just like worth trying, 27:02 but this is actually so far outside the Overton window 27:07 that I think most people can't even wrap their head 27:08 around it. 27:09 It's bizarre to say, but that's just been my experience. 27:12 I feel like in the early days though, 27:13 that was like one of the early considerations 27:15 was the miners are the backbone layer. 27:18 I mean, again, we weren't thinking of maybe about L1s 27:20 or sorry, L2s. 27:22 Yeah, there was no early on. 27:23 But Satoshi had a quote and he said, 27:27 I think in 20 years, he said this quote in 2010. 27:30 So he said, I think in 20 years, 27:32 he says, I'm certain that in 20 years, 27:34 there will either be a very large transaction volume 27:37 or no transaction volume. 27:39 And he said that in 2010, 20 years would be 2030. 27:42 So we're coming up on it. 27:44 Yeah. 27:45 He was thinking that at least. 27:48 So looking at kind of block times, 27:50 Bitcoin's 10 minute blocks, roughly speaking, 27:53 Litecoin 2.5 minute blocks 27:56 in terms of the time for confirmation, 27:57 then you have other Dogecoin one minute blocks. 28:02 How do those impact Drivechains 28:04 and I guess the functionality? 28:05 Are they all in tandem with layer one is my guess, 28:08 but I don't know. 28:09 Yes, okay. 28:10 So yeah, in Drivechain, 28:10 it is slightly better to have the faster block time, 28:15 I would say. 28:16 Mostly it doesn't matter, I think, 28:18 but is there like a sweet spot though, 28:20 between 10 and one minute or? 28:22 Yeah, I think the idea is with the benefit 28:27 of the having them infrequent. 28:29 So what Satoshi did is the 10 minutes. 28:33 Now that the block headers are only 4.4 megabytes per year. 28:39 And actually you can sync the proof of work of the chain 28:42 with just that. 28:44 So that's in the modern day, 28:47 4.4 megabytes per year is basically nothing. 28:53 So that's definitely a benefit. 28:57 The benefit of having the blocks more frequently 28:59 is that it's a little bit better user experience 29:03 for the user. 29:04 So my guess is that given that the internet speeds 29:09 and the hard drive costs and everything have come down, 29:14 that cutting it down is a little bit better. 29:20 Eventually you can make it much too short 29:22 and at which point you're not really binning 29:24 the transactions into blocks anymore 29:25 and then you lose the proof of work. 29:27 Ideally you have too many orphans and you're not. 29:30 The whole invention, Satoshi's whole invention was, 29:35 instead of us tracking each transaction, 29:37 which is not possible, 29:39 because the consensus will fork too much, 29:41 because of the speed of light 29:43 and like transaction happens in Hong Kong 29:45 and a different one happens in New York 29:47 because the attacker has planned it out that way 29:50 so that they're released at the same time. 29:53 So that's not possible, 29:54 but if instead you have a 10 minute block 29:56 and the block header is only 80 bytes, 29:59 it's good to get 80 bytes around the whole planet 30:01 in 10 minutes on average is very, very, very, very easy. 30:04 So this was kind of the whole invention. 30:07 And I would say that between 2.5 and 10 minutes 30:12 is not a significant difference, I think. 30:17 I think the temptation is certainly 30:20 to make them really, really short 30:21 so that it looks like people get immediate feedback 30:23 when they make the transaction. 30:25 I kind of think that's a mistake 30:27 because if you really think about it, 30:30 it has to be like nearly instant when you pay 30:36 or it doesn't matter at all. 30:37 Like people used to compare Bitcoin to like a credit card 30:40 where they could charge, 30:41 the merchant could do the charge back 30:43 or you could charge back the merchant 30:44 like 90 days later or 30 days later. 30:47 In some cases people would do that. 30:50 So that was the real apples to apples comparison 30:53 back in the early days of Bitcoin, 30:55 back when people cared about the fundamental comparisons 30:57 and things like that. 30:59 But now it's more easy, 31:03 it's possible to achieve like an instant payment 31:08 even when the transaction is unconfirmed. 31:12 And it's also the case that I think most people don't care 31:14 because in most cases it doesn't matter. 31:16 You buy something in person, the person's there 31:19 or if you buy like coffee, your face is on the camera, 31:23 the security camera and they can call the police 31:25 and have you arrested for shoplifting. 31:28 And of course most people aren't thieves 31:29 but that's not to say that they wouldn't become thieves 31:32 but I'm just saying like other types of things 31:35 that you could buy, they can easily cancel. 31:38 So you buy something on Amazon 31:40 and then you do a hacker move to like, 31:43 because the transaction didn't confirm, 31:45 so you double spend. 31:47 I mean, that's gonna happen within 10 minutes 31:51 or within 2.5 minutes. 31:52 So Amazon will just interpret that 31:55 as you canceling the order. 31:57 But there's an enormous percentage, 31:59 much more than 50% of economic activity 32:03 will not care at all about the block time 32:07 being 2.5 versus 10 minutes. 32:11 And then people might say, well, 32:12 if we get it down to one, 32:13 some people have pushed the envelope 32:16 where they have a one second block time. 32:19 And that is a mistake. 32:21 What you should do, if you really care about speed, 32:24 you should be within the slower block universe 32:27 and you should build some special, 32:28 there's plenty of actually special, 32:29 people have come up with interesting ideas 32:31 about you like float like a $200 bond 32:35 and then everything transaction you make, 32:38 you link to that. 32:39 And if anyone ever has evidence 32:41 that you have signed something twice, 32:43 because you have to sign something twice 32:44 so they can bring the evidence and destroy. 32:46 So now all payments less than $200. 32:49 Henceforth, you can credibly say 32:54 that you will not double spend. 32:57 And there's other types of things too, 32:58 people have suggested you buy gift cards, 33:02 you do bit refill or something. 33:04 So you have your Bitcoin at the beginning of the month, 33:07 you buy $200 Starbucks gift card or whatever. 33:11 And then you're in the Starbucks system. 33:14 So then they have the rapidly updated 33:17 gift card transaction each time. 33:19 And now everything's fine. 33:20 So there's many ways around this 33:22 without destroying the L1 via a block time 33:28 that is too fast. 33:30 Yeah, I think a good internet speed. 33:32 So the 2.5 is probably closer to the sweet spot now. 33:37 People have said stuff about like, 33:40 Satoshi was worried about undersea internet cables 33:43 being cut and stuff. 33:44 And this is how he got to 10 minutes. 33:45 It was originally 15 minutes in the code, 33:47 a little bit of trivia fact for you 33:49 that maybe a lot of people don't know. 33:50 You can go back and there's like a commented out line 33:54 where there's originally 15 minutes. 33:56 So he, the last minute made 10 minutes. 34:00 Yeah, I wanna say Charlie was at an MIT, 34:02 I have to find this video to prove this. 34:05 But I think at his MIT talk, 34:07 he mentioned that Satoshi had made it up. 34:10 So, and he thought 2.5 was more ideal. 34:13 So it's interesting. 34:14 I also think there's a media broadcast, 34:17 so you might not have the confirmation, 34:18 but you can see the transactions already kind of, 34:21 it registers immediately. 34:22 Zero conf transaction hits your wallet immediately. 34:25 Correct. 34:26 So you have to then say, 34:27 I've never seen a transaction fail personally. 34:30 I mean, it also depends completely on 34:33 the relationship you have with the person. 34:35 So again, if this is like your employer 34:40 and you work for them, 34:41 you get paid at the end of the month or twice, 34:44 15th and the 30th of every month. 34:48 Like what, they're gonna, 34:50 yeah. 34:51 You see what I mean? 34:52 It doesn't make any sense. 34:53 It's like, you just call them and say, 34:54 the payment didn't go through. 34:55 And then you're either gonna quit. 34:56 I mean, he's either planning to screw you 34:59 out of your last paycheck, 35:00 in which case you're screwed no matter what. 35:02 It makes nothing to do, 35:03 it hasn't, you know, Bitcoin or Litecoin, 35:04 it's nothing to do with it. 35:06 And so it's, you know, 35:07 if you know the person, 35:08 like there's a million, 35:09 there's a million reasons why it doesn't, 35:11 is misunderstood. 35:14 Your case for Drivechains as a security measure 35:18 for the adopting network, okay. 35:20 Or a benefit to miners. 35:22 We already talked about this a little bit, 35:24 just elaborate more on that one. 35:28 Well, you're referring to the fact that, 35:31 you know, the more monies the miners make, 35:33 the more money the miners must spend on mining. 35:36 And so there we have, 35:38 again, if we care about proof of work, 35:40 which we do, 35:41 we want the miners to spend a lot of money on mining. 35:44 But the miners cannot possibly spend any more money 35:47 than we pay them. 35:49 You know, otherwise they will go out of business. 35:51 So if the revenue is choked up, 35:57 then imagine a world where we only spend, 36:01 all of the transaction fee revenue on the whole chain 36:04 is 10 cents a year. 36:06 You know, this is like in physics, 36:07 to take an extreme case, 36:08 just to make an example, 36:10 even if it's a little absurd. 36:12 But you just say, 36:13 well, it's theoretically possible that the blocks, 36:15 the block subsidy runs down to zero. 36:18 All 21 million Bitcoins have been mined 36:20 or all 84 million Bitcoins have been mined. 36:22 And now everyone only pays like a, 36:26 so a lot of people pay zero sats per transaction 36:29 or they paid almost nothing. 36:30 And so it just adds up to 10 cents per year. 36:34 Well, you know, in this world, 36:36 Satoshi really shouldn't have bothered 36:38 to create proof of work 36:39 because what difference does it really make? 36:41 If you have miners out there spending, 36:45 you know, half of the network is spending 5 cents a year 36:48 and the other half is spending 4.9 cents a year 36:52 on shots of 56 mining. 36:54 Well, you know, this isn't, 36:55 that's not real. 36:56 Like it doesn't, 36:58 at that point we don't really have any proof of work. 37:00 So like the idea of like a government attacker 37:05 with a huge budget or, 37:08 you know, whatever Russian mafia, 37:09 just take your pick, 37:10 Chinese government, US NSA, whatever, 37:13 you know, just take your pick. 37:14 Whoever it is, 37:15 they're gonna be able to easily, 37:16 you wanna keep, 37:19 you know, they will easily be able to spend enough money 37:21 to like fork the network 10 trillion times or something 37:23 and just stop it from operating, 37:25 buying a trillion empty blocks in a row or whatever. 37:28 So we want the much healthier thing 37:32 and the much more possible thing 37:34 is to just try to continue to collect 37:36 more and more transaction fees 37:39 on not only the L1, 37:40 but all the L2s, 37:41 have them all be merged mine. 37:43 Miners collect them all 37:44 without doing any additional work. 37:47 And then they can just do more work 37:50 on the proof of work, 37:51 you know, the L1 hashing. 37:53 And this is a scenario 37:55 where the miners are getting very, very wealthy. 37:57 They're constantly expanding their operations. 38:00 They are pushing the boundaries 38:01 on efficient ASICs, cheap power. 38:05 They're scaling up and up and up. 38:06 And this is a world, 38:07 this is a completely different world 38:08 where you have the NSA meeting 38:11 about the Russian mafia meeting or whatever, 38:15 and they want to disrupt this thing. 38:16 And they say, 38:17 well, like, you know, 38:19 we don't have enough money, 38:21 you know, we don't have enough money to do that. 38:23 Where it's like, 38:24 or just maybe it's theoretically possible, 38:27 but there's a big difference 38:28 between Liberty Reserve 38:30 where they're paying all these people anyway, 38:33 and they seize a server somewhere. 38:35 Sometimes they just need to send an email, 38:36 a phone call. 38:37 And they say, 38:38 by the way, we are the government 38:39 and we will destroy everything 38:41 and imprison everyone 38:42 if you don't cooperate with us 38:45 and that's what they're doing 38:45 on the stuff for us right now. 38:47 So you have, 38:48 there's a big difference between that 38:49 and okay, we now need like a Manhattan project. 38:52 We need to build like, you know, 38:54 nuclear power plants 38:55 and build like a giant thing. 38:57 And we need to acquire all this ASIC chips 38:59 or somehow, you know, 39:03 seize them or something 39:05 and then keep them plugged in. 39:07 And then we're going to do 51% attack 39:09 on the Bitcoin network. 39:10 And we're going to hold down the attack button. 39:14 And we're kind of going to hope 39:15 that they don't change the algorithm 39:16 or something else. 39:17 It just makes it like, 39:19 it's a really a night and day difference between. 39:21 So we just want more and more transaction fees 39:23 is better for everyone. 39:24 And that's being more loyalty to the, 39:26 miners have more loyalty to the users. 39:28 The users are, 39:30 if we don't please the user in the long run, 39:33 someone else will 39:34 and the whole project will die. 39:36 So these are the many reasons 39:39 why we must focus on that. 39:41 Because it's network security, right? 39:42 And how would you say, 39:45 and you mentioned merge mining. 39:46 So obviously Litecoin is merge mine, right? 39:50 It's, it's sCrypt, not SHA-256, 39:52 but it's got Doge merge to it. 39:54 It's got Bell's coin, a bunch of- 39:55 Litecoin is the host. 39:57 It's the host. 39:58 Doge is the guest in this case. 40:00 Correct. 40:01 But together, miners benefit from it. 40:03 I say that you can still mine sCrypt at home. 40:06 I don't, I don't know if you can do that with Bitcoin 40:08 because I know they're extremely expensive 40:10 and it's like, you're taking fractions, 40:12 like you really have to be 40:13 professional grade mining for Bitcoin. 40:15 From what I'm seeing versus home mining 40:17 seems to be a far, far off possibility for most. 40:22 sCrypt through merge mining 40:23 and their ASICs aren't quite, 40:25 you know, they're different. 40:26 It's still possible to run at home, 40:29 although it's not as cheap, of course, 40:30 as it was once upon a time with Core, right? 40:32 Those, those days are long gone. 40:34 But how would you describe maybe sCrypt 40:37 that has merge mining 40:39 and that profit kind of model 40:40 for the miners to Drivechain? 40:44 I think merge mining is very difficult to understand 40:48 because it's so cool that people don't believe 40:50 that it's real. 40:51 I was on Nick Carter's podcast at some point 40:54 and I described it as, 40:56 it's like you have a train, 40:57 like a locomotive hauling a freight train, 41:00 hauling a bunch of coal or something. 41:03 And as you clip on more carts, 41:07 the train actually goes faster, 41:10 uses less energy. 41:12 And people just think, like, how is that possible? 41:14 And of course, I think if people do understand it, 41:18 then they get excited about it. 41:19 And they think, why don't we slow down? 41:21 We've got to maximize this, this thing. 41:23 Cause we got to like, somehow the universe has given us, 41:25 you know, we've got this, an opportunity to like, 41:28 you know, punch above our weight here. 41:30 And so actually the sCrypt part on L1 41:33 or the SHA-256D, double SHA-256 on Bitcoin, 41:38 that is actually not really relevant. 41:40 So the merge mining is something you do 41:43 on the other network 41:44 and you make it so that your chain 41:47 or your block header, 41:49 part of it resembles perfectly a Litecoin header 41:53 or a Bitcoin header. 41:54 So actually not only does the L1 blockchain, 41:57 the L1 miners know. 41:59 That's kind of confusing because there's L1 miners 42:01 and nodes, and then there's L2 miners and nodes. 42:05 And it's, so it's a little bit confusing. 42:06 Hopefully I'll try, I'm going to try to explain it. 42:09 But the L1, the L1 nodes have no idea 42:15 how many chains are being merge mined with them. 42:18 The L1 miners know because they're getting more money 42:20 for free. 42:21 Correct. 42:21 But the L1 nodes have no idea 42:23 and there's actually nothing you can do to prevent. 42:25 It's impossible to censor or stop. 42:29 It's impossible for like the L1 full nodes 42:33 to stop the merge mining. 42:34 Cause it actually happens somewhere else. 42:35 It's actually on the other network. 42:38 You know, it would be on the Doge node or whatever. 42:40 Right. 42:41 And the Doge node has just created basically 42:45 a blockchain header that in some ways part 42:50 a Litecoin header. 42:51 And so you actually, the miners actually mine that 42:53 and they find they hit both blocks at once 42:55 or it depends slightly on exactly how it works. 42:58 So I hope that made some sense as in terms of like 43:02 the script versus SHA256D and L1, it makes no difference. 43:06 The merge mining is a technique for secretly riding along. 43:09 You sneakily, you sneak up on the train 43:14 or like the skateboarders who grab the car or something. 43:16 But it has, that's where the analogy stops working 43:20 because not only in the real world you could, 43:23 you would notice if a skateboarder grabbed onto your car 43:27 and you would say, stop it. 43:28 And you would even notice like that your fuel efficiency 43:30 was a little bit lower and that the car didn't handle 43:33 as well. 43:34 But that's where the analogy breaks down. 43:36 You don't have any idea how many people, 43:38 there could be 10 trillion people merge mining 43:41 on your car and you cannot get rid of them. 43:45 And you have no idea that they're there. 43:46 And it does not impede the car in any way. 43:50 And in fact, you notice that your car is actually, 43:53 it doesn't need the oil changes or something. 43:56 I don't know what the analogy would be, 43:57 but the more money is coming in. 43:58 Somehow the car is driving you around easier than before. 44:02 You just be like, wow. 44:03 But it helps security 44:04 because there's more profit going to miners. 44:06 Even though, like you said, the doge node, 44:08 when you're only, hey, I want to send doge 44:10 versus a light node, they're not talking to each other. 44:13 They're one to another separate. 44:14 But at the mining level, at the script level, 44:17 S script level, they're connected in terms of mining. 44:21 It's interesting. 44:22 So Drivechains, you wouldn't, even though you, 44:25 and we'll talk about this Blind Merged Mining thing, 44:27 but you're not seeing it really relating 44:31 to current merge mining as we know it. 44:35 It's very different, the Drivechain mining. 44:38 Well, I came up with a variation of merge mining 44:41 called Blind Merged Mining. 44:42 And even though BIP300 44:45 is inexplicably controversial among some, 44:48 although you can explain some of it 44:49 as we could get into that later, 44:52 but BIP301, which is Blind Merged Mining, 44:56 there was only ever this one guy who didn't like it. 45:00 And then we eventually, he came on a few spaces 45:03 back in 2023, and I did the spaces. 45:05 And then after like two or three episodes 45:08 that were each like three hours long, 45:09 then he was like, I understand it better now. 45:12 And he liked it. 45:14 So BIP301, there's never really been any controversy about. 45:20 And in fact, it was used in Reuben Thompson's 45:22 like space chains, like these other projects 45:24 that actually kind of existed temporarily on Bitcoin. 45:26 They're very, very unambitious projects. 45:28 A space chain is kind of like a Drivechain, 45:30 but you send the coins 45:32 and then they're immediately obliterated. 45:34 So not only is there no, 45:35 there's no ATM machine like of the coins 45:37 going back and forth, but there's just one way 45:39 and then it's a black hole. 45:41 So I thought, well, that's not a great, 45:44 you know, that's not that great of an idea. 45:45 But the point is that this Blind Merged Mining thing, 45:51 that I don't think there's a big, 45:52 too much of a big controversy about it. 45:54 And in my view, it's very similar. 45:58 The end result is very similar, 46:00 but I can describe the differences if you like. 46:03 Yes, do it. 46:04 We've got time, as far as I know. 46:07 The original merge mining was, you would run like the, 46:11 okay, so like Namecoin was the first altcoin 46:14 and it was also the origin of merge mining. 46:15 So Toshi invented merge mining like in 2010. 46:18 Was it ever merge mined? 46:21 Yes, in fact, it is the slip from merge mining 46:23 and it is still, since 2011, 46:26 it has been continuously merge mined 46:28 with Bitcoin to this day. 46:30 And that was for DNS, decentralized DNS, correct? 46:32 That's right. 46:33 Like kind of like an ICANN or- 46:35 It was to replace ICANN. 46:37 Yeah, which is- 46:38 Or compete with. 46:39 Compete with. 46:40 Potential is there. 46:41 And this is part of the, you know, what might've been. 46:45 For some reason, this is the huge topic, 46:48 but it makes me sad. 46:50 Bitcoiners used to dream big 46:51 and we used to have like the vision of like technology, 46:56 just like devouring everything 46:58 and it'd all be open source, sovereignty to the user, 47:02 this free speech kind of Richard Stallman super era 47:05 was almost like the, that was almost the attitude. 47:08 And it was like, Bitcoin is only the beginning 47:11 and we're going to have like more contracts and et cetera. 47:14 You know, this was kind of vague. 47:16 It was kind of half-baked, 47:17 but it's interesting that Namecoin was so, 47:20 so quick off the, this is right in 2010. 47:24 Bitcoin is still very, very, very small 47:27 and yet people floated this idea. 47:30 And we can talk all about that if you want, 47:31 but the point of this story is just that 47:34 Satoshi invented merge mining to make it 47:36 so that the two networks would share hash power. 47:40 And it's a great invention. 47:41 And I think it will end up, you know, 47:43 like it's the future of the blockchain model is to have- 47:48 And with energy consumption too, right? 47:51 Energy consumption too, 47:52 because you're using the same amount of energy 47:54 to secure two different products, if you will. 47:56 Right, yeah, you reuse the proof of work 47:59 on all the merge mine. 48:00 The merge mine ones are along for the ride. 48:03 So they all have the, they all benefit 48:08 from being very, very difficult to rewrite. 48:10 Like the attacker would have to like rewrite the L1 48:13 to rewrite the L2 and now that's way harder. 48:15 So, okay, so the original merge mining was like, 48:20 the miners would switch from running the Bitcoin software 48:24 to running the Namecoin software. 48:26 The Namecoin software would construct a block that, 48:30 as I said before, it was like, 48:32 the Namecoin block was like, 48:34 it contained a Bitcoin block in it. 48:35 I'm not sure the best way to explain or elaborate on that. 48:40 It's kind of like if you had, 48:42 maybe I'll just make something up right now 48:43 and hopefully it'll work, 48:44 but it's kind of like if you're reading Lord of the Rings 48:47 and then in the middle of it, 48:47 there's like a Harry Potter chapter or something. 48:50 And that's like, Aragorn has a dream 48:52 but the whole text is there. 48:54 So this is the clever technique 48:56 is you found a Litecoin block or excuse me, 48:58 you found a Namecoin block 49:00 and then you've actually, 49:02 there's a Bitcoin block right in it. 49:03 So maybe if you really only cared 49:05 about the Harry Potter chapter or something, 49:07 or you cared like a hundred times more or whatever, 49:09 it doesn't make any difference. 49:11 Right, right. 49:12 You're gonna get both. 49:14 And there's some other differences too. 49:16 Like it's possible to find only a Namecoin block. 49:19 In Blind Merged Mining, it's not. 49:20 In Blind Merged Mining, you find the whole set 49:23 and you find, you must find L1 49:25 and then you've optionally find as many L2s as there are 49:29 and as there were in that 10 minute period. 49:32 But in regular vanilla merge mining, 49:36 you could theoretically just find the Namecoin block 49:38 by itself. 49:39 In fact, this is an aside, but it's very entertaining 49:45 which is that Namecoin, with vanilla merge mining, 49:49 something very unusual happened in 2017 49:51 when Bitcoin split from BTC and Bitcoin Cash, 49:55 which is that they did this kind of weird thing 49:57 where one had a high difficulty, 49:59 so miners switched to the other. 50:01 They rushed to the other and then. 50:03 Mined a lot of BCH blocks and then back to BTC, so there was like a kind of like a see-sawing interesting and what happened at that time was that Namecoin could skim the top of both each of the two networks and switch back and forth, and as a result, Namecoin had by far the highest hash rate out of any blockchain in existence at the time, because it is, and it because it was the highest hash rate in existence at the time, 50:30 because the hash rate. 50:32 So Namecoin would be paid out to BCH miners then too? 50:36 You would find a BCH block. 50:38 If you're paying careful attention, the miners would find the BCH block. 50:44 Since this is now easier, each case, I would love to explain it, I hope that people can 50:49 follow this. 50:50 You know, I hope it's not, I am very interested in this, so I hope that people can follow 50:52 it. 50:53 I find it fascinating, but I'm worried that people can get confused, but basically the 50:56 miners have the market price and the difficulty to worry about, and the difference is the 51:03 profit. 51:04 So the market price is like the revenue. 51:06 So if they get like 50 Bitcoin blocks back in the day, 50 Bitcoin blocks and a Bitcoin 51:10 is $1, they get $50, or whatever it is, you know. 51:15 But the point is, that's the revenue, and then the cost is the difficulty adjustments 51:19 moving around. 51:20 This is basically, you must hash this many times to find a block. 51:24 It goes up and up and up. 51:25 Now you need to hash a trillion times before you only need to hash a hundred times. 51:30 Well now your costs went up, you know, a billion, or whatever it is. 51:33 So these are the two factors, the market price and the difficulty. 51:39 And so if the, first of all, if the market price of the two coins was flipping around, 51:44 this would have happened all by itself. 51:46 But even in a situation where, for whatever reason, just because of bad luck, very few 51:57 blocks are found on one network, and its difficulty drops. 52:01 Well now, remember, it's the difference. 52:03 So it doesn't matter that the Bitcoin price could be up here, and the Bitcoin cash price 52:06 could be down here. 52:07 They could be in equilibrium, where each of their difficulties adjustments has brought 52:12 them into a total equilibrium. 52:15 But now one of them has a lower difficulty. 52:17 All the miners will switch over to the lower. 52:19 Now when they do that, the difficulty is about to get, in 2016 blocks in Bitcoin's case, 52:25 the difficulty is about to get a lot higher. 52:27 Now this is unprofitable. 52:29 So this weird thing happened. 52:32 When they hit the BCH block, they found the BCH block at a lower difficulty. 52:37 They could sell it for cash or whatever. 52:40 They also found a Litecoin. 52:41 Oh my God, I said the wrong thing. 52:43 It's okay. 52:44 They also found a Namecoin block. 52:49 But that's the case no matter which block they found. 52:51 They found the Namecoin block. 52:52 The Namecoin block doesn't really realize why. 52:54 It doesn't really know that half of its blocks are Bitcoin cash blocks. 52:59 As I tried to explain even earlier in the interview, it actually has no idea. 53:05 It doesn't hinge on anything that happens on the host network. 53:09 So I don't know if this made any sense. 53:10 I'm kind of going way far afield. 53:14 I'm explaining vanilla merge mining, I suppose. 53:16 So maybe that's helping people somehow. 53:19 Blind Merged Mining is slightly different. 53:21 Blind Merged Mining says, forget about the idea of if Namecoin had the Blind Merged Mining. 53:28 We would say, you can now never, because Blind Merged Mining is set up for this L1, L2 idea 53:35 a little bit more. 53:37 So in Blind Merged Mining, you can never find the L2 block by itself. 53:44 It comes with the L1 block. 53:45 It is tied to a specific L1 unalterably. 53:51 Now you can see why I didn't really care about that, because I was thinking Bitcoin Core 53:54 is going to be, you know, BTC is going to be the L1, and it's going to be around for, 53:58 you know, whatever, a thousand years. 54:02 So I thought that was an easy sacrifice to make. 54:06 And that's the main sacrifice. 54:07 You get two benefits as a result. 54:10 The two benefits are the miners do not need to run the L2 node, hence the name blind merge 54:16 mining. 54:17 They just keep running the L1 node, and they keep collecting whichever transactions pay 54:22 them the highest transaction fee, which is exactly what they were doing before. 54:28 So they don't have to do anything. 54:30 The second benefit is that they get paid in L1 coins. 54:33 They don't actually get paid in L2 coins. 54:36 So for example, in vanilla merge mining, you'd get paid, you know, 50 NMC, Namecoin. 54:43 And then this led to situations where the miners were kind of collecting, because eventually, 54:49 by 2015 or so, there were like 15 or 16 merge mine coins, and the people like Slush Pool 54:54 would automatically sell them for you, and you'd just like be accumulating these coins, 54:57 and you're kind of like, do I want these coins? 55:00 What do I do with these coins? 55:01 Like, is this just like a trick to... 55:04 And so people kind of didn't really want that. 55:08 So it's worth emphasizing about the running of the Namecoin node, about the blind part. 55:16 In the past, the Namecoin software had more bugs than, you know, there wasn't as many 55:24 eyes on it as the Bitcoin core software. 55:29 So if the Namecoin, you know, software application would crash, you might have to like start 55:38 it up, like maybe you catch it immediately and you just start it up, but this could be 55:42 6, 7, 8 seconds of time, you know? 55:46 I mean, who knows? 55:47 It could be like longer. 55:49 This could be disastrous. 55:50 First of all, as a miner, you have a situation where every 600 seconds in Bitcoin's case 55:58 is precious. 56:00 So if you lose 6 seconds, you've lost actually 1% of your revenue, you know? 56:06 But the other thing is the proof of work, the chips, they are supposed to be taking 56:12 in a large amount of energy. 56:16 So I think this has been fixed by now, but there were cases in the past where someone 56:20 ran a huge miner, the software crashed, they restarted it, but in the 7 or 8 seconds it 56:25 took to turn back on, all the ASIC chips were just sitting around and they were not 56:34 getting any instructions, but they were still being fed power. 56:36 And so all like, you know, the capacitors just filled up and that was like exploded 56:39 and caught fire or something. 56:41 So they can fix that now to just have them mine nothing, you know, so they don't explode. 56:46 But it did just speak to the idea that why run this risk of running, you know, why not 56:51 run Bitcoin Core or why not have the mining pool just do a Bitcoin Core and have everything 56:56 very tight. 56:57 So that was maybe a little bit, but that's the differences between vanilla merge mining 57:02 and Blind Merged Mining. 57:03 I could explain a little bit more about under the hood about how it works. 57:07 I'll just say one sentence though, which is basically what happens is someone else on 57:12 the L2, they assemble the block paying themselves the transaction fees in the Coinbase as if 57:19 they were a miner of this. 57:21 And what they do instead is they brought an L1, they make a special transaction. 57:25 They basically bribe the, they say, I will pay this amount in transaction fees, but only 57:31 if you put this particular hash code like in the Coinbase on L1. 57:37 So it's all about this one transaction that is either fill or kill, they have to put it 57:42 in or just discard it. 57:45 And this encourages many, many people to try this because you're running the L2 node anyway. 57:50 So you just say, well, I'll just try to make the block and the block is worth a hundred 57:54 dollars or it's worth $10,000. 57:56 I'll pay $9,500 and either they will accept, I'll pay $9,500 on L1, but I'll get the block, 58:09 I'll get the L2 block and I'll get $10,000. 58:12 They'll either accept or they just won't and I'll be left exactly, I'll be unharmed, I'll 58:16 be exactly as it was before. 58:18 So that's the broad stroke of how it's different. 58:21 I don't think there's been that much controversy, but it's quite possible to use BIP300 and 58:26 BIP301 independently. 58:28 So you could use the withdraw deposit part and have a completely different way of finding 58:34 blocks if you want it. 58:35 But I kind of, I think they work pretty well as a pair. 58:39 The whole idea is make the miners really happy about having these L2s because the L2s are 58:46 like a goose that lays the golden egg. 58:49 And so the Blind Merged Mining part, it just kind of keeps it very, very simple where they 58:52 just get more money. 58:53 They don't really have to do anything. 58:55 So that's, I think, a little bit of synergy. 58:59 In terms of interoperability and let's say Litecoin adds Drivechains tomorrow, it's 59:08 going to be on Litecoin and despite the other merge mine chains to Litecoin, would they 59:12 be affected at all by what Litecoin and the development and the community decided to do? 59:19 What do you mean? 59:20 Who would be affected? 59:21 Meaning, we already have a vanilla merge mining scheme. 59:24 Other things piggybacking off of Litecoin. 59:26 If Litecoin adopts Drivechains- 59:28 No, yeah. 59:29 Doge would not be affected by that at all, I don't think. 59:32 I mean, of course there's the indirect effect of like, what is the final destination of 59:37 this whole industry? 59:38 So in my view, the final destination is like one dominant coin, the small block L1 and 59:46 has all these different large block L2s of all shapes and sizes, huge amounts of transaction 59:52 fees are being paid, is a dominant force on the internet. 59:58 So that's kind of what I guess would be the case is that the winning coin will displace 1:00:03 the other coins. 1:00:06 And I've kind of always believed that, even from the early days, but the evidence kind 1:00:17 of comes and goes because sometimes it looks, as I said at the beginning, now it looks great 1:00:22 that there's more competitors because it looks like BTC will have accumulated all these weird 1:00:29 errors for no reason. 1:00:31 And so it's kind of like, I don't know, but I just, I don't think, like there's not, no 1:00:36 one is going to want to use the least popular proof of work coin. 1:00:42 And then that one will die. 1:00:43 And then there'll be another one that's the least popular and that one will die and I'll 1:00:46 just die. 1:00:47 It'll be like a party where there's like this stigmatized, you know, instead of being drawn, 1:00:53 you're being like drawn to like Times Square or something, you know, it's just, I just 1:00:56 think it's, it's like gravity is my guess, but maybe I'd be totally wrong about that. 1:01:01 I'm just trying to kind of envision how it works. 1:01:03 So we have already a merge mining scheme, granted Doge people don't have to care about 1:01:07 Litecoin, Litecoiners don't have to care about Dogecoin, et cetera. 1:01:11 But you know, the miners do. 1:01:13 So like, let's say the miners get a windfall through Drivechains on Litecoin, but they're 1:01:16 also going to get profit from, unless it's diminishing to zero because of what Litecoin 1:01:21 just did, which could happen, possibly we'll talk about that. 1:01:24 But I'm just, the merge mining as is, plus Litecoin adding a Drivechain, drawing more 1:01:29 energy to Litecoin itself because of the new functionality. 1:01:33 I'm just curious. 1:01:34 And I think there's limits to how many Drivechains you can add. 1:01:39 So like, what if we hit our limit and then all of the merge mine L1s at a Drivechains 1:01:46 that you have, like, is that a scaling feature? 1:01:48 I think the limit is misunderstood scaling scale because the limit is just because it 1:01:52 doesn't matter. 1:01:53 So you could have Drivechains of Drivechains and you can have L3, L4, whatever this giant 1:01:58 tree. 1:02:00 The limit in BIP300 is 256. 1:02:02 You could lateralize that though, right? 1:02:05 Let's say Litecoin did 250, Dogecoin did 250, Bell's coin did 250. 1:02:11 It sounds absurd, but I'm just exploring it. 1:02:13 Another thing you can do is you can just modify, you can just have download the BIP300 enforcer 1:02:20 and just change it. 1:02:21 Like one of the, like basically change the op code from like five to six or something. 1:02:26 You just have Drivechain one and then you have Drivechain two. 1:02:29 So you have another 256. 1:02:31 So you can do vertically or horizontally as much as you like. 1:02:35 So there is no count. 1:02:36 I stopped at 256 because that's what one byte counts to. 1:02:38 And so in the computer it saves space and time and everything. 1:02:42 I also, I can't really think of, I'm trying to think of like, what would the 25th or the 1:02:48 26th, and I can't think of one. 1:02:50 So I just think we're already overshooting it by an order of magnitude. 1:02:54 That's why I don't think there's really a limit. 1:02:57 So the limit is just to be parsimonious with the computer's resources, which is very polite 1:03:03 thing to do. 1:03:04 So then we'll depart from vanilla merge mining discussions, although I appreciate the elaborations 1:03:09 on these things, but we'll just talk about one chain in our context, Litecoin, adding 1:03:14 Drivechains. 1:03:15 What does it do to Litecoin? 1:03:16 What new features do we get and how does it work? 1:03:19 What does it look like in terms of the promise? 1:03:20 How do we actually integrate it and things like that? 1:03:23 So would Litecoin L1 adding Drivechains have any consequence on, let's say, other 1:03:35 smart contract systems such as the Litecoin computer, or there's a newer one called LitVM 1:03:42 now that we're learning about. 1:03:44 Would the L1 Litecoin having Drivechains affect interoperability, positive or negatively, 1:03:52 or would it make no difference? 1:03:54 I cannot think of any way, because again, what happens under the hood is you have like 1:03:59 an unused op-nop, like five or whatever, which is just like a code, and you just send coins 1:04:06 to that. 1:04:07 And the BIP300 part is just, when can you spend coins out of that? 1:04:13 And that's this three to six month lock thing. 1:04:15 But this is its own... 1:04:18 You see what I mean? 1:04:19 They are like ships passing in the night. 1:04:22 They're different UTXOs passing in the night or whatever. 1:04:26 And so I can't think of a way. 1:04:28 Well, of course, it's always theoretically possible that something could... 1:04:31 I'm not super familiar with those things you mentioned, but really, from the Fullnodes 1:04:38 point of view, it is putting money into a UTXO opcode and then unlocking it later based 1:04:46 on Litecoin miners hacking this little hash. 1:04:51 But these are very small ingredients. 1:04:54 Most of the actual work, including determining what counts as a deposit and the withdrawal 1:04:59 and which withdrawals are and sorting the withdrawals and putting the withdrawals in 1:05:02 a bundle and saying, this is the hash that you need to... 1:05:05 All that happens on the L2, which of course is the right way to do things, is to push 1:05:09 more of the effort onto the people who want the new feature, they have to... 1:05:15 When I say effort, I mean like millionths of a second of computer time. 1:05:22 I just mean the code part is over there on the L2. 1:05:25 So I don't think so. 1:05:28 Of course, again, there's always the indirect effects of who's project is popular. 1:05:37 But I have no idea. 1:05:38 I don't know about those other projects. 1:05:40 I'm not as familiar with those, but I don't think... 1:05:43 It's very, very, very... 1:05:44 The weird thing about the BIP300 is it is opt-in, ignorable, and reversible. 1:05:53 And this is one of the arrangements that has happened in BTC where people won't do any 1:05:57 soft forks now, even though the op-nop soft fork, in particular, and there are other kinds 1:06:04 of soft fork. 1:06:05 SegWit was this really weird soft fork and you could soft fork to decrease the block 1:06:08 size if you wanted to do something like that. 1:06:10 These are really weird soft forks. 1:06:12 But Satoshi put in the op-nops, the unused op codes, and he intended for them to be used 1:06:20 for script upgrade. 1:06:22 And we have already used them, like op-nop2 became check-lock-time-verify back in 2015. 1:06:28 And yet, for some reason, this is like a big political football over in BTC. 1:06:34 This is why I kind of get nervous about BTC because you just think we have, again, it's 1:06:39 like merge mining where we've been given this super weapon, this cornucopia machine, 1:06:47 and it can give us infinite of what we want, and we can also ignore it or reverse it. 1:06:54 And it's opt-in. 1:06:55 And you're just like, okay, why aren't we, you know, this should be paraded through the 1:07:00 streets as like a miracle. 1:07:02 But instead, everyone is running in fear of it and people don't want to propose soft fork. 1:07:07 So anyway, I bring that up just to say, these op-nop soft forks are very, very, very well 1:07:11 behaved. 1:07:12 That's part of why they're so great. 1:07:15 And it's part of Bitcoin's mistake that they, we are turning away this, you know, I don't 1:07:23 know how to describe it. 1:07:24 It's a godsend. 1:07:25 It's, you know, another goose that lays a golden egg thing. 1:07:29 And we are like just turning it away just because, because people complain, you know, 1:07:37 on Twitter or whatever, we're letting the terrorists win. 1:07:39 It's a, it's a huge mistake and history will see it for how absurd it is. 1:07:45 I think. 1:07:46 Anyway, it kind of long answer there. 1:07:48 Sorry about that. 1:07:49 Hopefully that makes some sense. 1:07:51 It does. 1:07:52 I think, I think we're working on it. 1:07:53 It's, it's a lot to unpack here and I'm trying to track with you as well. 1:07:58 And I want to follow a lot of the things that you say too, like what do you see happening 1:08:03 to Bitcoin? 1:08:04 Again, this isn't a Bitcoin podcast, but why is this happening? 1:08:08 It's of supreme relevance though. 1:08:10 Like of course, like if Bitcoin were perfect and unassailable, then it would be wrong to 1:08:16 pay any attention to Litecoin. 1:08:19 But of course we, we haven't quite, you could look at it like 8 billion users is a hundred 1:08:27 percent of the world and 200 trillion is like a hundred percent of the world's like broad 1:08:31 money or something. 1:08:32 I've tried to estimate this, you know, just like back of the envelope, plenty of people 1:08:35 have made such estimations. 1:08:37 So it's kind of like if we got to 50% then the, you would, you would have crossed kind 1:08:42 of the finish line because network effects and stuff, you can't beat something if it 1:08:46 has 4.001 billion daily users, well then, you know, it's kind of, you got to hang up 1:08:53 the towel. 1:08:54 You got to say, this is just like a science experiment or something like this is not going 1:08:56 to be. 1:08:57 It's like trying to say that you want Esperanto to take over English, you know, and you say, 1:09:03 oh, everyone's going to really be, everyone's going to be speaking, you know, Swahili or 1:09:07 something. 1:09:08 And it's kind of like, that's not going to happen. 1:09:09 Like people are speaking English, it's too late. 1:09:12 When they do the, when the people in France and Spain do a business deal, the contracts 1:09:16 are in English. 1:09:18 In China, the people are, it's like, okay. 1:09:20 So just as an example, so do we have, does Bitcoin have 4 billion users? 1:09:27 No. 1:09:28 Would it be, does Bitcoin have a 100 trillion market cap, which would be like half, making 1:09:34 it halfway? 1:09:35 No. 1:09:36 So it's still early days. 1:09:37 We're still, you know, Bitcoin has come so far, but we're still like 1% or 0.1% of, of 1:09:45 the territory has been claimed. 1:09:47 You know, it's like a big football field or something, or some kind of battle simulation. 1:09:52 And only like 1% has been claimed. 1:09:55 The rest is like 99% fiat. 1:09:59 So that's, you say it's not a Bitcoin pod, the only reason I bring that up is because 1:10:04 to say, well, actually it's, it's early days and Bitcoin is, has this huge lead. 1:10:09 And I do worry that it has become totally complacent. 1:10:12 And it now has this belief that it is just indestructible. 1:10:16 That's what I was getting at. 1:10:17 And so it just thinks that it can't, it can't be destroyed at this, at this point. 1:10:24 And one of the things that I try to say, it's again, to knock some sense into people, I 1:10:28 say, well, you know what, if Bitcoin is unstoppable, that would be great. 1:10:32 You know, I, you know, you won't hear me complaining. 1:10:35 That would be phenomenal. 1:10:37 You know, and if it does, then you don't have to worry about Drivechain or anything else. 1:10:41 You don't have to worry about lightning. 1:10:42 You don't have to worry about whatever. 1:10:45 Hey, you know, where it's just a, it's just a straight shot from here to, from, to, from 1:10:53 0.1% to 100% or 51 or whatever. 1:10:56 My point about the 51% is that if you get to 51, you really are going to get to a hundred, 1:11:02 you know, it's like, you've reached the tipping point, it's like Rome destroying Carthage 1:11:07 or something. 1:11:08 It's like, that's it. 1:11:09 It's over. 1:11:10 You know, it's not, it's not going your way anymore and it's, it's over. 1:11:14 So if you get to 51, you will get to a hundred, I think. 1:11:16 If something goes from being created in 2009 and then goes to 101 trillion, why, it's not 1:11:22 going to stop it. 1:11:23 Like it's not going to get to like 105 trillion and then stop. 1:11:25 It's going to obliterate everything in its path. 1:11:28 So that'll be the end of that. 1:11:31 So that's why I bring that up, but it's, this is what people think. 1:11:34 They think we basically have already reached that point. 1:11:38 So even if we had reached the market cap, that could also be a mistake, right? 1:11:44 People could be under a misapprehension. 1:11:46 This has happened all throughout financial history and business history where the bigger 1:11:52 they are, the harder they fall. 1:11:54 People would say, oh, how can, you know, how can, how can we compete with Kmart? 1:11:58 How can we compete with Sears? 1:12:01 How can we compete with Macy's? 1:12:03 And you know, now they say, how can we compete with Amazon? 1:12:06 Right. 1:12:08 Yeah. 1:12:09 Just wait. 1:12:10 So it's over and over again. 1:12:11 These things get obliterated. 1:12:13 People thought, who's going to, at one point I remember Milton Friedman made a joke about 1:12:17 Kmart, people worried about Kmart buying Sears and then it was like, Sears would buy Kmart. 1:12:23 It was like they had to flip the, I don't remember the exact wording of the joke, but 1:12:26 anyway, I bring all that up just to say that Bitcoin has become complacent because it's 1:12:33 in the lead, but it is not in the lead enough. 1:12:36 And I think enough complacency will destroy anything. 1:12:38 And you can look at the unsinkable Titanic, you can look at the fall of Rome and they 1:12:42 say, they say, well, Rome, the Visigoths are at the gate and they say, well, Rome stood 1:12:47 for a thousand years. 1:12:48 You can't, you know, you can't sack this city, right? 1:12:52 We have never been sacked. 1:12:54 And the Visigoths are like, you know, we don't, we don't care. 1:12:58 We're just going to, we're just going to kill everyone and take everything. 1:13:02 So it's because, it's because of the lead too. 1:13:05 That's the tragedy is it's because it had stood for a thousand years that everyone just 1:13:10 assumed that it could not be, and then that led to it being sacked. 1:13:13 So that's, I certainly see this happening in Bitcoin where people, the culture of truth 1:13:21 has declined. 1:13:23 People don't care as much about talking about the real ideas. 1:13:26 They don't care as much about, like if what they say is even real, like the primal lightning, 1:13:36 primal to primal lightning, custodial lightning, and people don't even care about the difference 1:13:39 between custodial lightning and real lightning, even though the difference is night and day 1:13:43 between actually having Bitcoin and not having any Bitcoin at all. 1:13:48 So it's a pretty big difference. 1:13:50 And so I can go through, I have like, I'm actually planning on writing a post of just 1:13:56 derangements in Bitcoin, like weird deranged things. 1:14:01 And it's a list is getting pretty long. 1:14:03 And unfortunately, I think they each take a little bit of time to unpack, but they're just 1:14:08 our emphasis on the lightning network. 1:14:10 Some of them are, I haven't been like big, medium and large, but there's all kinds of 1:14:13 bizarre derangements in Bitcoin. 1:14:18 The idea that Stratum V2 has anything to do with mining, the idea that BTC Pay Server has 1:14:24 anything to do with BitPay. 1:14:25 There's just all these weird ideas that have floated around. 1:14:28 People don't care. 1:14:29 One, though, that I will emphasize is that I think to get, you have like a Ponzi track 1:14:37 and then you have like a user track, you know, and the Ponzi track is like you shill the 1:14:43 project. 1:14:44 You do like a Michael Saylor and you just shill the project and you just say. 1:14:50 This is the point you get your talking points really well rehearsed. 1:14:55 You shill the project and the goal is to sell it to someone else. 1:15:00 Neither of you are using the. 1:15:03 Neither of you are using the the neither of you are using the project. 1:15:05 Now, what I want to emphasize about this is the game theory of this. 1:15:09 I really studied real game theory, you know, like a, you know, a real university. 1:15:14 But people like to use it as a little but there's the game theory of this. 1:15:18 In the final stage, you will eventually run. 1:15:22 The market cap will hit the ceiling, the 200 trillion ceiling. 1:15:26 This is an uncomfortable fact that a lot of people would prefer to just not 1:15:29 acknowledge, they just think, oh, can't just go to infinity or whatever, you know, 1:15:32 and then one F because I have one billionth of one Bitcoin. 1:15:36 I can just buy, you know, the continent of North America or something. 1:15:40 So but it's actually no, that's not the case. 1:15:41 You can only have the extra special appreciation while the world is shifting 1:15:46 from a world that is zero percent, one percent Bitcoin to a world that is 100 1:15:51 percent. Once you hit 100 percent, then any appreciation, the money will be some 1:15:56 other weird thing that's happening that has nothing to do with why it's had 1:15:59 Bitcoin and crypto has had these 10,000 X return. 1:16:02 So at the end, you hit the ceiling and there's no one left to flip. 1:16:08 So this is where the Ponzi part, if it were only a Ponzi, it would certainly 1:16:12 collapse because you cannot it's now impossible to sell this. 1:16:17 It is an asset that can only go down or stay the same. 1:16:20 So you can know the talking points that got it to where it is will no longer work. 1:16:26 Now, if you this is the final stage, then what happens in the second to last stage 1:16:31 is, of course, that people looking to that would see, well, this this this logic 1:16:37 is about to collapse. And so maybe it'll collapse now, maybe it collapses all the 1:16:40 way through. But really, the second to last stage is important because the second 1:16:44 to last stage. Of adoption, this is when you would have to switch from saying, 1:16:50 OK, we're no longer a Ponzi, we're actually going to acquire eight billion 1:16:54 users. So I don't know, that was probably not making a lot of sense until I finally 1:16:58 got to this, my point, which is you can do Ponzi, Ponzi, Ponzi, Ponzi all the way to 1:17:04 the end and then diagonally. 1:17:06 To the users, and it will still work because it's kind of like you own shares in a 1:17:12 tech company, there's no users, but then finally you get the users and then everyone 1:17:17 can cash out their shares. 1:17:19 And now it's a stable world. 1:17:22 Where you have a billion users and the users are paying customers, it's like, you 1:17:27 know, they're paying for like a Netflix subscription or something. 1:17:31 So you can delay that. 1:17:35 All the way until the end, if you want it, that's that that is theoretically and 1:17:41 economically possible. 1:17:43 So the question is, is that what we're doing, you know, because it's sort of maybe it 1:17:50 is, maybe it's not. 1:17:52 Of course, Saylor et al. 1:17:56 seem to de-emphasize the actual users. 1:17:58 And of course, Custodial Lightning is not that is not acquiring eight billion users. 1:18:02 That is just papering everything over. 1:18:05 The people are really using, you know, their Visa credit card or something to pay. 1:18:09 They're not actually using the the idea. 1:18:13 And to just wrap this finally up and say, well, my point, you know, sort of actually 1:18:18 is, is that at the end of the day, the eight billion user part is that is the life or 1:18:23 death. You can you can delay it, but you have to pull it off at some point. 1:18:29 So but in Bitcoin, this is now seen as a, you know, like another thing to point out 1:18:35 about this is it's not only is it very difficult. 1:18:40 Not only is it so essential, but it's also very difficult. 1:18:42 It's very easy to just go on stage and give your little talk and have AI image slides 1:18:48 or whatever and just have your, you know, your talking points. 1:18:53 You can see how it's like from very far away, it's very vague and it's very abstract. 1:18:59 But then actually building software that works for eight billion people is really, 1:19:03 really hard. I compare it to like Theranos sometimes like the marketing team at 1:19:08 Theranos and they're all so happy. 1:19:09 And then the product people are working on this blood machine and it doesn't work and 1:19:14 they're all miserable. And that one guy took his own life. 1:19:17 That one Stanford professor who worked there. 1:19:21 So you see, it's so tempting to just be the show. 1:19:24 But, you know, that's so I've rambled a little bit there. 1:19:27 But these are some of the I bring that derangement up in particular. 1:19:30 That's one of the big ones. 1:19:32 Is that so we don't have to get the eight billion users and it's true that we don't 1:19:37 have to get them right now, but we we are on the hook 1:19:42 for delivering that. If we don't, then it will completely fall apart, especially if 1:19:46 some other coin does it. So this is where the Litecoin, the Litecoin angle should just 1:19:50 be like, oh, this is great. 1:19:51 Bitcoin is totally collapsing into the this complacency. 1:19:56 And this is the opportunity to to actually put in the hard 1:20:01 work, get the real users, do the difficult work of 1:20:07 like banging the software into the right shape for the product market fit. 1:20:13 And but yeah, it will be, of course, it will be very difficult to beat the network 1:20:17 effects of Bitcoin. 1:20:19 But these network effects are also what is making Bitcoin so complacent. 1:20:22 Yeah, I think it's a kind of a lethal arrogance. 1:20:24 And this is actually so I have some community questions at the end. 1:20:28 And this is sort of one of them is it's been pointed out about the mempool being 1:20:34 more empty than normal, mostly empty 1:20:38 in the setting of an all time high or essentially an all time high. 1:20:41 So what does this look like to you? 1:20:43 It's actually quite bizarre. 1:20:45 I think I don't think about it the way that most other people do. 1:20:50 But even so, I end up with the same conclusion of that. 1:20:53 It's really weird because I used to I wrote this long post security budget, too, 1:20:58 which is about merge mining. 1:20:59 I wrote a security budget in the long run, like back in 2019. 1:21:02 And then I wrote in 2021. 1:21:04 But one thing that I pointed out, people said, oh, fees will pay for security. 1:21:08 The fees keep going up and up and up. 1:21:10 One thing that I pointed out is that, first of all, 1:21:13 the fees went up for a misleading reason in the past, 1:21:16 which is how the software was coded. 1:21:18 So when the price of Bitcoin went from like one cent to ten cents 1:21:23 or one or ten cents to one dollar, it looks like the fees are going up 1:21:27 by a factor of 10. 1:21:28 But really, they're going up from like a microscopic amount 1:21:30 that no one would ever care about to different 10x. 1:21:34 But these are all beneath. 1:21:36 They're all like beneath ten cents. 1:21:38 The whole the total fee. 1:21:39 So I was like, none of that counts at all. 1:21:41 So that does not count as really going up. 1:21:43 This is an artifact. 1:21:44 But the second thing I pointed out was. 1:21:48 The fees go, the fees go up when you have these crazy bubbles 1:21:51 and everyone is everyone gets really, really, really into Bitcoin. 1:21:55 You know, and so the fees would go up from like nothing to like 1:21:59 twenty dollars per transaction. 1:22:02 And this is partly because these are euphoric moments 1:22:05 where Bitcoin is going up 10x or more. 1:22:09 There was time I remember when it went from, you know, 1:22:11 thirty two dollars to like two hundred fifty dollars and crashed. 1:22:15 And I remember when it went, you know, and what in the end of 2017, 1:22:20 it went to like nineteen thousand dollars in the car. 1:22:22 But it's going from like eight hundred dollars. 1:22:25 So it is going up. 1:22:27 Everyone's just thinking, oh, I'm going to be rich. 1:22:29 No one's caring about people are selling their coins 1:22:32 and they think I'm going to make a huge amount of money. 1:22:35 They don't care about the twenty dollar fee. 1:22:37 People buying the coins, they don't care. 1:22:41 So normally you would see this 1:22:44 this association of when the price goes way up, the fees 1:22:49 go way up and in an annoying way, because it it makes people think. 1:22:54 People that I've had some disagreements with and debates 1:22:56 that people can look up and listen to in the past. 1:23:00 Dan held and these other people are perfectly nice people, of course, 1:23:03 but they say something like 1:23:05 that they plot like a trend, the trend is like zero zero zero 1:23:10 punctuated by like four or five episodes where the price is skyrocketing. 1:23:15 And then, oh, the fees were five dollars for like a month here 1:23:18 or the fees were ten dollars. 1:23:20 Oh, the fees were like. 1:23:21 And these are all again, this is exactly the kind of thing 1:23:24 that cannot happen once you hit 200 trillion. 1:23:28 This will never happen again. 1:23:29 We'll never have the euphoric, you know, speculator fee bump. 1:23:34 And that is completely temporary. 1:23:37 And I had the Sisyphus guy rolling the boulder. 1:23:39 I was like, OK, the fees go up, but they they don't. 1:23:42 These aren't real. 1:23:43 These are not people like using the network to like buy food. 1:23:47 This is a completely different type of thing. 1:23:48 So now not even that is happening. 1:23:51 So that's why it's weird to me. 1:23:52 Other people will just point out that, hey, no one's using Bitcoin. 1:23:56 We've lost our way because we don't care about users. 1:23:57 All that's perfectly true. 1:24:00 It's hard to say, like, because even still. 1:24:04 2000, you can think about like whatever, 1:24:06 two thousand twenty five hundred transactions per block. 1:24:11 For 10 minutes, and that's actually kind of a lot, you know, really. 1:24:17 So. You still have a lot of you. 1:24:21 It's hard for me to really say like how where are the usage numbers, 1:24:24 but you can look at other people like you can look at bit refill 1:24:27 or you can look at like a pork fest. 1:24:29 They just had something where they said who has cash was the number one. 1:24:33 It's like 60 percent. 1:24:35 So they they published that. 1:24:37 And then you can see, oh, where's where does Bitcoin rank? 1:24:43 You know, year after year, and it's like the bit 1:24:45 refill data is very reliable, I think. 1:24:50 What about the pay data? 1:24:52 I think it pays. 1:24:53 Well, yeah, it pays another one of the derangements. 1:24:56 So like we had this great thing where you can do it and rebrand it yet to let pay. 1:24:59 I'm wondering why it's been 18. 1:25:01 My. Yeah, that's a good point. 1:25:05 Bit pay, I thought, was the the most important 1:25:08 when I first like was getting into Bitcoin. 1:25:11 And my friend and I, we went to New York City and went to the Javits Center 1:25:14 and they had the bit and I like I shook. 1:25:18 Mr. Galipi's hand, Tony Galipi's hand, 1:25:21 and I was like, this is the most important company in Bitcoin. 1:25:25 So I was either very naive or or something. 1:25:28 But I just couldn't believe that. 1:25:30 I was like, they they cracked the code completely. 1:25:32 You know, you can go into your favorite store, your restaurant. 1:25:38 Then you can say, oh, you know, 1:25:41 you should accept Bitcoin now, nor pre bit pay. 1:25:45 This was so psychologically traumatizing, so stigmatizing. 1:25:49 It has to be basically like I would never do it. 1:25:53 I my friend tried to do it. 1:25:55 But of course, this is the most awkward conversation 1:25:58 you'll have in your entire life. 1:26:00 I don't know if anybody bothers anymore. 1:26:02 It's kind of sad. Yes, we tried. 1:26:04 Yeah. But with bit pay, it's smooth. 1:26:07 The whole thing over like ninety nine point nine percent 1:26:10 because you could go to the merchant and say, oh, you should say Bitcoin. 1:26:13 I know it sounds pretty weird. 1:26:15 But you go to this website, BitPay, and they will give you cash, 1:26:18 US dollar cash the next day. 1:26:21 And they're doing a promo. 1:26:22 I was to say, I don't know. 1:26:23 They did this promo many times. 1:26:25 I just told everyone that they were doing this promo. 1:26:27 I don't I don't know why they still are sort of a stop. 1:26:29 But the promo is something like first million dollars of transaction fee 1:26:33 processing is free. 1:26:34 And you get cash the next day and they do customer service 1:26:37 and they have all the software you need. 1:26:39 You don't pay any fee, none, zero. 1:26:42 People couldn't believe this. 1:26:43 Oh, I get cash the next day. 1:26:45 And so this was like the the thing to. 1:26:50 To Orangeville people. 1:26:52 And I was like, this is what you know, this is amazing. 1:26:55 And now how who could say no to that? 1:26:57 You know, like, of course, the 1:26:59 you have to invest a little bit of time. 1:27:01 But if you have crazy Bitcoiners who are in your area 1:27:04 and you just put out the little bit pay sticker. 1:27:07 And so I just thought, yeah, I thought BitPay was just like. 1:27:11 Part of the like the victory coalition, 1:27:16 and I just thought this is. 1:27:18 Like just going to dominate everything. 1:27:20 Of course, there is many historical and other details 1:27:25 kind of interfered with that. 1:27:27 But yeah, BitPay. 1:27:31 BitPay was like, again, this is like it's much more rational, 1:27:35 it's like a it's like a scientist who cares about empirical tests 1:27:38 versus one who's just kind of ivory tower theorizing. 1:27:43 The one who cares about empirical tests, 1:27:44 that kind of keeps you a little more honest, you know. 1:27:47 So when you have BitPay and you have real customers, you have real users, 1:27:52 you have real people who call customer support, complain when something breaks. 1:27:57 This just keeps everyone more honest. 1:27:59 This is all just very more reliable. 1:28:00 This is like. So, yeah. 1:28:02 So if you're about to tell me that BitPay is more skyrocketing, 1:28:06 I check in from time to time. 1:28:09 And I know that Litecoin is very popular on like BitRefill and stuff. 1:28:12 So I check in from time to time. 1:28:13 But yeah, that would be a very, very good sign. 1:28:15 If Litecoin payments on BitPay are geometrically increasing, 1:28:19 that would be especially if they are, you know, eclipsing BTC. 1:28:24 This would be a good sign. 1:28:26 Yeah, the last 18 plus months, it's been number one. 1:28:30 And it narrowed the last month. 1:28:34 Pretty much neck and neck, but that was about the only time it it broke the trend. 1:28:39 So it's impressive. Yeah. 1:28:41 It's another interesting thing about BitPay is that it can be. 1:28:44 People used to use this phrase and it was a stupid phrase, but like 1:28:48 blockchain agnostic or whatever, it can just take anything in 1:28:52 and pay them out with cash. 1:28:54 So now the merchant, whatever the merchant, can just accept whatever they want. 1:28:58 You know, Cardano or something, you know, it's like it makes no difference. 1:29:02 So that. 1:29:05 That is also that's good for everyone. 1:29:08 In particular, though, that is good, that is even better 1:29:10 for whichever coin is the number one coin, 1:29:14 because now they're all equal on some other thing. 1:29:17 And so then it just magnifies the relevance of whatever they're not equal on. 1:29:23 But yeah, I mean, it's going to be users at the end of the day will be, 1:29:28 you know, how it shakes out, I think. 1:29:30 Yep. Back to Drivechains. 1:29:32 Eighty four million is the total supply of Litecoin. 1:29:35 If Drivechains are added to Litecoin, how explain to all of us 1:29:40 how that will not be in jeopardy? 1:29:43 There will be no inflation introduced. 1:29:45 If you if you think about it, there's already the Litecoin node 1:29:49 already will reject the transaction that just counterfeits Litecoin. 1:29:55 So in Drivechain, you just on L1, you send some of the Litecoin 1:29:58 that already exists to the OP_NOP5 script. 1:30:01 And then sometimes the script unlocks and sends it back 1:30:05 to pay the script hash or something else. 1:30:08 So even though on the L2, 1:30:12 there is a second blockchain 1:30:15 and that blockchain is programmed to watch for the deposits on L1. 1:30:20 Again, where the depositor just is locked in the script on L1. 1:30:24 There's no sense in which it is. 1:30:26 The coins physically leave L1 and go to L2. 1:30:30 That's kind of like not possible or whatever. 1:30:34 But that's in the abstract sense, that's what happens. 1:30:37 I mean, think about it. 1:30:38 Like what if I told you like you go to an ATM and you withdraw a $20 bill? 1:30:44 Like there's no sense in which like a $20 1:30:48 object has like transferred like from your checking account 1:30:52 into the real world, you know what I mean? 1:30:55 That's like not really what happened. 1:30:56 But what did happen is $20 was sealed in the vault of the ATM. 1:31:01 And now it's out there for you to use. 1:31:04 And you had a number in your checking account, you subtract 20. 1:31:09 So, you know, the coins, the coins are not physical objects. 1:31:13 They don't really leave L1 and go to L2. 1:31:15 But that is what happens anyway. 1:31:17 That is actually the explanation, the true explanation of what is that. 1:31:21 But so but on L1, the coins go into the script and then they come back out. 1:31:26 The L1 doesn't see what happens on the L2. 1:31:28 You could it's theoretically possible to program L2 in a really terrible way. 1:31:31 And it like has inflation over there. 1:31:34 And then what would happen is that that L2 people would withdraw from it 1:31:37 and they would because only only the first few people will get their money. 1:31:40 You know what I mean? 1:31:41 Like if you have a counterfeit $20 bills, but there's only in the checking account. 1:31:46 This I don't know if this analogy makes any sense, 1:31:48 but there's only the checking account world only has $80 left. 1:31:50 And so everyone's going to run quickly to try and get and everyone else will get them. 1:31:55 So that won't happen in practice. 1:31:58 But the L2, you know, the coins move from the L1 to the L2. 1:32:03 So especially if you are if you're going to be someone who never uses any of these L2s, 1:32:07 which is the situation you're in right now, when they don't exist, the Drivechain L2s. 1:32:11 Right. And certainly you don't have to worry at all about any inflation. 1:32:15 I think really the risk is way, way worse 1:32:19 that you have like these custodial L2s or these like federated L2s 1:32:23 where it's a complete black box and you don't really know like what they, 1:32:28 you know, like the having people do custodial lightning primal like that is 1:32:32 this is almost like the worst because the money just goes to this organization 1:32:37 and they just say that they're going to give you 1:32:40 Bitcoin back, whereas the Drivechain L2, everything's open source, everything's 1:32:43 mine, everything is on its own peer to peer network that everyone can see at all times. 1:32:48 And of course, if anything, if there's any inflation, 1:32:51 it will automatically destroy that network. 1:32:53 And then the people, the developers who created that software, 1:32:56 their reputation will suffer and the people will just, 1:33:01 you know, fix that bug and release a new version later. 1:33:05 It may harm people who have ventured onto that L2. 1:33:09 No one should be using any of this. 1:33:11 You should never put your life savings onto this cell, too. 1:33:14 And it could be the perfect idea and anything could have a bug. 1:33:18 And so all that is very important to keep in mind. 1:33:21 But yeah, I really, really wouldn't worry about that. 1:33:23 The L1 node, the Litecoin node will already reject anything that 1:33:28 creates more than 84 million. 1:33:30 I assume the code is the same as Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has many checks. 1:33:35 Like check out the script is right. 1:33:37 Check that transaction fee adds up, whatever. 1:33:40 One of the checks is that no, no UTXO can ever 1:33:45 have or transfer more than 21 million coins. 1:33:51 If everything else in the blockchain is working perfectly, 1:33:53 that will that could never possibly be triggered. 1:33:55 Of course, there was one bug one time when it was free. 1:33:57 But yeah, I mean, yeah, I just I think really think that no one should worry 1:34:00 about that among the list of things to worry about. 1:34:02 That would be near the bottom. 1:34:03 What you really want to worry about is 1:34:05 will Litecoin grow enough to be viable in a world 1:34:13 where you have all this open source competition and, 1:34:16 you know, this is a network effect winner take all situation. 1:34:21 So you got to worry about that with like 80 percent of your worrying 1:34:25 should go to that and it really will not. 1:34:29 But again, all the soft forks are often reversible and ignore. 1:34:32 This is just part of the soft fork is magic thing. 1:34:35 It doesn't touch any other part of the protocol and it's you can just ignore it. 1:34:39 So this is just part of fear of the soft fork is really misplaced. 1:34:43 The soft fork is very, very, very safe. 1:34:45 I know that it's complicated and people 1:34:48 it makes people nervous, the idea of maybe changing the protocol. 1:34:51 The soft the soft fork doesn't change the protocol, though. 1:34:54 It actually leaves the old protocol exactly where it is permanently. 1:34:57 So it's it's it does do something new. 1:35:01 But actually, the word change is not quite the best word. 1:35:04 It is new, but it is actually leaves the old thing exactly as it was. 1:35:08 So anyway, that's kind of a rambling answer. 1:35:10 But I really wouldn't worry about that at all. 1:35:11 Yeah, we do consider it. 1:35:13 And I mean, I know even when we activated 1:35:16 the Mimble extension blocks for optional confidential transactions, 1:35:20 they that was into consideration with this 1:35:23 somehow introduced inflation, pegging into pegging out. 1:35:26 Do you think this is good? 1:35:27 I mean, it's not. It's not. 1:35:29 But we want to keep the principles you want users to be 1:35:33 to care about, to understand and care about the issues. 1:35:37 So I'm kind of two minds about it, because I think that this is the end game. 1:35:41 You have to have users who run a node and who actually understand 1:35:44 what what what the node sort of is doing and why 1:35:49 why things are the way they are and why the supply is fixed. 1:35:52 And so that is absolutely the case. 1:35:57 The other side of it would be. 1:36:01 How is the user? 1:36:03 How how much expertise does the user have? 1:36:06 Because this is a very they're not going to be listening to the extremely, 1:36:09 extremely easy question. 1:36:11 Yeah. Like about to answer it like this. 1:36:13 There's many questions of various levels of difficulty. 1:36:15 And like, obviously, I would know back in 2015 1:36:21 when I sat down to design it, that it would be a complete nonstarter 1:36:24 if it ever interfered with the fixed supply of Bitcoin in any possible way. 1:36:29 And so it is good. 1:36:31 But this is like a very, very, very, very easy question. 1:36:34 And I'm not trying to get around it or whatever. 1:36:37 I'm just saying that actually this is part of the derangement of Bitcoin 1:36:41 of like the overall just paranoia with the soft forks. 1:36:45 So I wouldn't I would hate to see it happening everywhere. 1:36:49 And maybe I would just push back on it just a tiny bit like the 1:36:56 I'm trying really trying to help because I see this in Bitcoin, you know, whereas 1:37:01 we we used to do soft fork on average, 1:37:05 on average, to a year. 1:37:09 But now it's been it's been four years 1:37:14 since November 2021 and then 2017. So. 1:37:19 We don't do them anymore, and the soft fork is great. 1:37:22 Instead, I think I wish people would study the soft fork. 1:37:25 And if they read my CUSF paper, if you have BIP300CUSF.com, read the 1:37:31 the paper, I have a digression. 1:37:32 I have a it's not that long. 1:37:35 And I describe the soft fork. 1:37:37 And yeah, because what we need is people who 1:37:41 it's good to care about keeping the limit where it is. 1:37:44 But more even more expertise is needed than that. 1:37:48 We need to get everyone leveled up like way up. 1:37:51 We need people to be thinking, OK, obviously, the soft fork 1:37:54 will not affect the coin limit because the soft fork doesn't affect 1:37:58 any part of the protocol other than the OPNAP five, which was preordained 1:38:03 as something that will always pass in the script interpreter 1:38:08 so that it could actually be used for a new. 1:38:10 So we need to like level people up just a little bit more. 1:38:13 Like, I wish people cared more about why the soft fork is so cool. 1:38:18 And soft fork versus hard fork and et cetera. 1:38:21 It's a BIP nine was the soft fork. 1:38:23 BIP nine refers to a way of signaling the timing of the soft fork activation. 1:38:29 OK, so that was the historically associated with the soft fork timing. 1:38:35 And I thought there was nothing wrong with it at all. 1:38:37 But what happened was it was used in SegWit and SegWit was this huge disaster. 1:38:41 Politically, this led to reform this. 1:38:44 They reformed a part of it that wasn't really that. 1:38:49 Important, but cosmetically, it looked 1:38:52 it looked like the miner signaling part was what. 1:38:55 Was wrong, but that's not. 1:38:58 So they they have a. 1:39:00 Bip aid and speedy trial, these things came later. 1:39:04 But we can tell what we do now is we have total paralysis. 1:39:06 We don't do anything. 1:39:07 So, yeah, and we can. 1:39:08 So when you introduce Drivechain, you didn't have the CUSF, correct? 1:39:13 That's right. 1:39:14 That's been something you've accommodated due to this. 1:39:17 Oh, it's undue, undue fear. 1:39:19 And that's the Core Untouched Soft Fork, correct? 1:39:21 That's right. 1:39:22 So maybe we can talk about that. 1:39:24 And I do appreciate you touching 1:39:27 the limit and how these softwares really don't threaten them at all. 1:39:30 But yeah, let's talk about why you introduced 1:39:33 the concept of Core Untouched Soft Fork. 1:39:37 Yeah, it is weird. 1:39:40 Back in 2015, I thought I'll just put out this blog post 1:39:44 and everyone was working and nobody's relatively low effort 1:39:47 and everyone will just love the idea and then they will just 1:39:50 they will just make it into a release to Bitcoin. 1:39:54 And then as time went on, 1:39:58 I became more concerned that, you know, lightning is not working. 1:40:02 And so I put a little bit more. 1:40:03 I was I had like a tinker, like my own version of the software 1:40:06 was kind of tinkering with. 1:40:08 Just kind of learn more about Drivechain myself by actually creating it and kind of seeing like, you know, making sure what what actually happens and how does everything work in detail with the actual code? 1:40:18 And as I mentioned before, most of the work is done in the L2s. So doing the L1 part was not that much work, but you have to make an L2 and then, you know, it's kind of like, let's make a graphical user interface for the L2. 1:40:33 Let's put the L2 out and see if other people use it. So the journey has been for me just assuming that everyone else will do the other work to me, kind of almost as you can tell now, getting a little nervous as to like if Bitcoin will blow its huge lead and like not not work out because of people's refusal to face these engineering challenges. 1:41:01 That we must face to get to the 8 billion users at some point. And at this point now, people just culturally losing interest and even like pursuing that goal or just turning the whole thing into a Ponzi scheme or whatever. 1:41:15 So I wasn't happy about that. Bitcoin Core, it's very political about, you know, who they they don't like triage the software and decide like this is the most important thing that we need. 1:41:28 We will then do it. That would be the rational thing to do. But instead, they it's kind of like they have like a little hippie garden type of thing. And they each work on what interests them. 1:41:42 And you're supposed to water other people's plants when they're on vacation and then they'll water your place. First, did you review? And then they'll review your thing. And, you know, that's great. But and sometimes it is interesting to see what what what the other people are up to and whether people's ideas are. 1:42:03 But that's one problem. The second problem is we haven't done any soft forks, as I mentioned already. So there's no you don't even know what the process is. There's no like do this, then do this and do this. You are under arrest. You have been indicted. You are arraigned or whatever you are. 1:42:23 You have been convicted, you are found guilty and now you've been sentenced and now you're incarcerated. So they figured out the Jewish Jewish people in 2000 BC or whatever. They kind of invented this due process idea or something. I think someone told me that. I don't know if that's true, but I assume it is. 1:42:39 Like about you, you need to know like where you are in the process. Otherwise, it's unjust. And you have like these, you know, a dictator, just someone goes into the black bag and they're gone, you know, and no one knows what happened to them. And Hitler would do the one day trial. Did you shoot the person, you know? 1:43:00 So it's really easy to get away with a cover up if you're just going to kill everyone. Like, you know, the. 1:43:07 The witnesses were unavailable for comments, right? So like you have. 1:43:12 In contrast, so that's kind of like where we are within Bitcoin development, where you don't know like what no one knows what's going on and there's no accountability, partly by design, because first of all, everyone thought the government would come in and like arrest everyone for a long time, like in 2013. 1:43:29 Right. 1:43:30 It's commonly believed that you would suffer enormously as a result of working on Bitcoin development. 1:43:38 But then Craig also CSW, he also, I think, exacerbated this one, at least one notch because he decided to sue everyone, everyone whose name he could find was publicly associated with. 1:43:53 Yeah, which is a disgraceful thing to do. 1:43:56 Unsportsmanlike and contrary to the progress of mankind, et cetera, and just very mean spirited thing to do. 1:44:05 And so they have built it so that there's no accountability. 1:44:09 So you can't, you know, say this person's responsible. 1:44:13 As a result, you know, it's become a design by committee like thing where nothing happens. 1:44:20 If anything controversial happens, they just, you know, quietly drop the conversation. 1:44:27 This has happened many, many times. 1:44:29 Again, this is a mistake that Litecoin should try very, very hard to not repeat. 1:44:35 This is not worth it at all. 1:44:36 You should just have people provisionally or conditionally or temporarily have some type of authority and accountability where someone says, listen, OK, this is the person who's going to be in charge for the next three months or however you want to do it. 1:44:55 There's many, many ways of doing it. 1:44:57 And it doesn't mean this person's a dictator or whatever, the king or something. 1:45:00 But it just means this is the person you would blame if you would say, well, wait a minute. 1:45:05 We were supposed to have the MimbleWimble extension block by now. 1:45:08 Why? Where is it? 1:45:10 And then at least someone would wake up in the morning. 1:45:14 The alarm clock would go off and 9 a.m. the workday would start. 1:45:18 And they would say, you know what? 1:45:20 Today I'm actually responsible for doing something. 1:45:23 Whereas instead it just meanders on. 1:45:25 So speaking of meandering on, my answer has meandered again as it often does. 1:45:28 We are getting closer to your question. 1:45:31 Yeah, I think this is interesting. 1:45:33 I mean, we did that with MimbleWimble. 1:45:35 It did take a few years. 1:45:37 But David Burkett and he's the one I might be preaching to the choir, but he's the one that actually commented on your post. 1:45:42 He was the lead developer from that from Grin and everything. 1:45:45 So we do have some structure under the foundation's umbrella with crowdfunding that we do have more of a structured approach. 1:45:50 I can't speak authoritatively on it. 1:45:52 I'm not in those positions. 1:45:54 And I don't know what the Bitcoin development team looks like. 1:45:56 But we have some of that top down to a degree, even with Charlie. 1:46:02 For now, at least. 1:46:04 So I think this is. 1:46:08 We're talking about QC. 1:46:12 I defuse these two things in a short way. 1:46:14 I hope I hope I can do it. 1:46:16 But the two ideas are the soft fork is harmless and everyone should love it. 1:46:20 And everyone should know that. 1:46:23 So too bad for them. 1:46:25 But the second idea is, you know, Bitcoin core. 1:46:28 It is sort of dysfunctional and committee like. 1:46:32 And this is very slow. 1:46:34 You know, they don't want people to come in. 1:46:37 It's like someone coming into your house and rearranging your furniture or whatever. 1:46:41 So these are the two ideas. 1:46:43 And where they mix is this QC idea, which is. 1:46:47 I told you that the soft fork is, you know, many of them. 1:46:52 It's debatable what is a soft fork or not. 1:46:56 But basically, in my view, just especially these up, not soft works. 1:47:01 They're all opt in, reversible and ignorable. 1:47:04 So in my head, why wouldn't why wouldn't everyone be in favor of trying them all the time? 1:47:10 Let's be and in fact, let's push the envelope on how experimental they are. 1:47:13 But of course, other people, they don't live in my head. 1:47:16 They just live with whatever they, you know, they so they think. 1:47:20 Soft fork, it sounds like a risk. 1:47:23 For some reason, it's it's been turned into a risk, even though it's not. 1:47:26 So I thought for a while I tried to convince people. 1:47:29 It was like fighting the good fight of trying to just explain to people. 1:47:34 Well, listen, you know, the way the soft fork works is. 1:47:37 It just takes a block that. 1:47:40 Old nodes would find. 1:47:42 Valid and. 1:47:44 Invalidates it. 1:47:46 So the old nodes. 1:47:48 You know, it's like, but when I started doing this, I realized it just didn't work and it didn't persuade anyone. 1:47:54 No one cared. 1:47:56 You touch the code. 1:47:58 It looks like you are up to something. 1:48:00 So I thought, well, you know what? 1:48:01 Honestly, it's possible to do this with a second application that just runs right next to. 1:48:09 The first one. 1:48:11 The code, excuse me, the node, the Litecoin node. 1:48:17 And Bitcoin node, it already has an RPC call called invalidate block. 1:48:22 And that is what the soft fork would do, is it would say if someone tries to use BIP300, but they don't use it the right way. 1:48:28 Block is invalid. 1:48:30 Whereas if it so you can only try to use BIP300 and use it the correct way, so that's that's what the software accomplishes. 1:48:37 But I tried to explain this to people and it's hard to explain. 1:48:41 So the more interesting thing is you can activate. 1:48:44 BIP300. 1:48:46 By without changing the binary code without changing the soft without touching. 1:48:52 The, you know, Bitcoin core or, you know, Litecoin node core, you know, Bitcoin core software. 1:49:00 And just run this this second thing right next to it. 1:49:04 And then people would say stuff like, you know, what if what if you stop running that part? 1:49:11 Then it just deactivated. 1:49:13 So so this is kind of like my way of it. 1:49:16 It's the CUSF idea is partly my way of trying to, again, wake people up to how great the soft fork is said. 1:49:23 Listen, this is that's what I mean. 1:49:25 So you'd still prefer a soft fork? 1:49:27 I think over the years under the hood, it is kind of inefficient because the activator has to have like a copy of all the blocks and scan them a second time. 1:49:38 It has some like cash and everything. 1:49:40 But so it's kind of like almost twice as much work. 1:49:43 Not quite, but the CUSF for the computer for CUSF, not a true fork. 1:49:50 Like I'm not like a traditional thing where you just go in to like coin core and you just edit and you say, OK, I'm not five previously did nothing. 1:49:58 And it would always pass the script interpreter. 1:50:01 Now it will fail if conditions. 1:50:05 And then that's but that's all software. 1:50:06 So in my head, I was trying to say, listen, this is all software is. 1:50:10 This is you take up not five. 1:50:12 And sometimes the script interpreter will fail and it will make the block invalid. 1:50:16 And no one will ever do that because the worst thing ever is to have the invalid as to mine a block that is invalid. 1:50:22 You could have had money and said you have nothing. 1:50:25 So that's. 1:50:27 That's fine. 1:50:29 And then all the previous versions of the software continue to work. 1:50:33 So I was like, you know, I was trying to tell people, oh, of course, BIP300. 1:50:37 You know, I can't I can't do any of these. 1:50:39 It can't do anything bad. 1:50:41 I can't do anything that you couldn't already have experienced. 1:50:44 Like you could what it was already possible before with the software you have today. 1:50:51 You know, so but instead, I was like, well, actually, this is proving very difficult to it hasn't persuade people. 1:51:00 And so the you can just do it in a separate software application. 1:51:04 It has many other benefits. 1:51:07 One is you do not you avoid what's called rebase hell, which is the the official version of the software is changing all the time. 1:51:16 And so if your changes happen to overlap with any of theirs and it's you think maybe that what didn't wasn't didn't I just say how modular it was. 1:51:24 But actually, the truth is, one of the things that software developers like to do is like to refactor the code. 1:51:31 And it's kind of important also. 1:51:33 But refactors basically just take code that's working just fine. 1:51:36 Split it into like smaller pieces. 1:51:38 This in terms of the number of lines of code touched is very high, even though it doesn't really change anything. 1:51:46 So it's very likely that something you've done will get overwritten. 1:51:52 And then you'll have to go back. 1:51:54 You have to do more work. 1:51:56 Go back and update your thing and you have to keep updating it forever. 1:52:02 And this is just like kind of a drag because it's not fun and you don't get anything for it at all. 1:52:08 And what all the thing the only thing you get is now my client is a patch that client or whatever is viable again for now. 1:52:17 But then they when they release their new version, they dunk you right back in. 1:52:23 And that's why it's called rebase hell, where you just have to keep doing it and you're not getting anywhere. 1:52:27 So you avoid that. 1:52:29 Another thing is you can write it in whatever language you want. 1:52:31 You don't have to write it in like a Bitcoin core C++. 1:52:34 So you're talking about, again, the node for Drivechain with the enforcer thing you would run right next to Bitcoin core. 1:52:42 And then together it does what it would have done if there were a soft fork. 1:52:49 Yeah, if there was a new version of Bitcoin core that like officially supported Drivechain. 1:52:54 So there are many a fringe. 1:52:56 Another benefit is actually I think it's a benefit that you can shut it off. 1:52:59 I have a I there's like some people in the Bitcoin community have a an extremely interesting opinion. 1:53:09 And so in the interest of total fairness and transparency, I going to try to share it. 1:53:17 And then I have an opinion that's apparently very different than Luke Junior's. 1:53:22 So I've talked with Luke many times a year or three. 1:53:26 I've talked to him like on signal. 1:53:28 I talked to him in person. 1:53:30 I've tried to figure out what is going on in his head. 1:53:32 And but to me, the soft works, they really are modular and you can turn them on and off if you if you really want to. 1:53:39 You just have to reverse the fork, correct? 1:53:41 You want to change this line and then you run another. 1:53:43 There are a few different lines. 1:53:45 One thing is you could delete and you could just go back and say, I'm not five will always succeed. 1:53:50 And it'll just be someone's bad luck if they happen to be on the version. 1:53:54 Of the intermediate version and a prankster for no reason generates a BIP300 transaction that would break the rules if they were still being enforced. 1:54:05 This makes no sense for a lot of reasons. 1:54:06 One is because at this point you've deactivated the 300. 1:54:10 So all this all this money could just be stolen by anyone. 1:54:13 But even in that case, the only thing that would happen is that person's node would say that the block is invalid and they would be stuck. 1:54:22 They would never lose any money or really have any negative concept. 1:54:25 They would just be stuck sinking the chain until they either think you could say until they upgrade to the newest version. 1:54:31 But I don't like that because I hate forcing people to upgrade. 1:54:34 But it also works if they just go back or version to before. 1:54:38 So, you know, like to me, I don't really care about any of this. 1:54:41 But some people think this is really the end of the world. 1:54:43 Luke Junior has a if you investigate carefully, he has a weird belief that if anyone is if you need 80 percent of the network to be running the latest version. 1:54:52 And that people are even running previous versions. 1:54:54 Then this counts as it being SPV mode and that this means the network is not actually operating. 1:55:01 And, you know, it's very hard to understand because I don't agree with him. 1:55:04 For me, a paraphrase. But he thinks like he literally will say then Bitcoin is dead if this 80 percent threshold is not met. 1:55:11 And he doesn't care at all about old versions. 1:55:14 And I've tried to ask him all kinds of weird questions like how did what? 1:55:18 You know, it's not like when a new version is released, everyone instantly knows about that fact. 1:55:21 So what if someone they were if they release a new version in a cave for two years? 1:55:25 And I ask him all these other questions. 1:55:28 If everyone in India, they have no node and they turn on an SPV node. 1:55:32 Now we've blown the 80 percent number has gone really, really, you know, has gone to zero. 1:55:36 And but why? Why does that mean that Bitcoin is dead? 1:55:39 So I try to figure out a lot, you know, what he's talking about. 1:55:42 And I just completely 100 percent disagree with him at all. 1:55:45 And I think that this he's a very smart guy. 1:55:48 But this this whole thing about. 1:55:50 He doesn't agree with me, though, about the soft works being modular. 1:55:54 But see, this is the thing is now you have a lot to explain when CUSF comes out. 1:55:58 It's kind of like now it's its own thing. 1:56:00 You can turn it on and off if 51 percent hash rate is running it. 1:56:04 It will enforce the rules for that duration of time, which ideally would just be forever. 1:56:10 You know, it would just the same as all the other rules that Bitcoin enforces. 1:56:15 Or you could do something where you run it together for a while. 1:56:19 You test it and then shut it off and then turn it on permanently or you test it. 1:56:23 And then the Litecoin people merge something that makes it totally compatible. 1:56:27 And now you don't need the extra thing or people like the extra thing. 1:56:30 They keep it or there's like 40 or 50 extra things. 1:56:32 And they all just they're all just out there in the world. 1:56:34 And the miners meet and they decide, oh, what's going to maximize our. 1:56:37 Revenue, which will be highest Litecoin price and most fee paying, happy fee paying users, the miners. 1:56:46 So that is fine to me. 1:56:48 All this is this is the ideal situation. 1:56:51 But to other people, this is like some kind of mysterious problem that has to be. 1:56:55 So I don't know. I don't know. 1:56:57 Some people don't they really are glued to this idea that the soft forks need unanimous agreement among humans. 1:57:04 But that has never been true either. 1:57:06 That's the whole point. 1:57:08 The whole point of the software. 1:57:10 And I presented this at MIT. 1:57:12 The MIT Expo. 1:57:14 But it was at the university. 1:57:16 I didn't mean to imply that I was presenting it like whatever. 1:57:19 But there was that I was an invited speaker at the MIT Bitcoin Expo. 1:57:22 And I was invited to speak on this governance topic. 1:57:25 And my slides are on drivechain.info. 1:57:27 You can find them. 1:57:28 And I point out I go into the history of the soft fork, which in 2012 was named. 1:57:35 It was just discovered that you could do this. 1:57:38 And people what people realized was. 1:57:41 We are never going to get everyone to upgrade, you know, by a certain time. 1:57:46 So the mandatory upgrade is is dead. 1:57:49 So we have to do this instead. 1:57:51 So it's because you couldn't get everyone to upgrade that the soft fork thing was invented. 1:57:55 Where it was like, OK, whoever wants the new feature will upgrade. 1:57:59 The old people will just stay where they are. 1:58:03 And when 51 percent hash rate upgrades, then that would be. 1:58:08 And the BIP9 part was as a courtesy. 1:58:11 It intentionally suppressed the activation until it was like 95 percent. 1:58:16 And this was totally a courteous thing to stop anyone from being like wrong footed by this. 1:58:21 Because back then there was no controversy about any of this. 1:58:25 So it was just kind of like, when did the miners get around to activating? 1:58:29 Everyone liked all the soft forks. 1:58:32 Now, all this stuff is new in my point of view. 1:58:35 Newest really from 2017. 1:58:37 But to me, it's just a new derangement. 1:58:40 The fact that, you know, this this is controversial and that people think that you need to agree. 1:58:46 Of course, you don't because the old nodes aren't affected. 1:58:49 So there's no there's no victim. 1:58:51 So I don't even notice anything. 1:58:53 So maybe, you know, this is how it is. 1:58:55 So the CUSF enforcer is more like a bolt on if you want to go that route. 1:59:01 Yeah, it's kind of like downloading like a plug in or something, you know. 1:59:05 I make that example because this entire idea of ordinals and all that stuff kind of came. 1:59:11 It didn't touch core. It didn't do anything. 1:59:13 But it's very similar. You could run. 1:59:16 Ruslan etched them onto a block. 1:59:18 And so if you turn the indexers off, they're gone, but they're still there. 1:59:21 But you didn't have to change core. 1:59:24 So this is so anybody could really do this at any time. 1:59:27 Very, very, very similar. There was one significant difference. 1:59:30 I would want to see a soft fork personally, but maybe you could test it with this sort of bolt on first. 1:59:35 It's up to the community. I'm one man. 1:59:37 But it's interesting, though, that you've kind of have different avenues to accomplish the same end. 1:59:42 It's sort of out of necessity. 1:59:45 Unfortunately, it would be interesting if Bitcoin core were more run in a way where just the more new good ideas were aggressively pursued, which would be less conservative. 2:00:00 I don't know if that would actually be net better or not. 2:00:03 But yeah, you don't have a world where they're doing that. 2:00:07 So if you want to do anything new, you have to kind of fit it in this way. 2:00:09 The only difference between CUSF and the Ordinal thing is that the Ordinal thing will never kick back this invalidate block thing, which is significant. 2:00:18 So that is a significant difference. 2:00:22 But with that extra level of firepower, that is what allows you to move the coins, the actual coins around. 2:00:33 So the Ordinals cannot move. 2:00:35 You can't say something like, if you give me this Ordinal, then I'll give you seven Bitcoin or something. 2:00:39 But with the CUSF thing, you can. 2:00:42 That's why you can move the Litecoin based on whatever, CTV or any other soft fork you want to do, OpVault or something. 2:00:50 That's another thing Litecoin should consider is we have all these soft forks that are pretty good and pretty harmless. 2:00:58 We have an OP_CAT. 2:01:00 We have a CUSF for OP_CAT. 2:01:01 We made this first demo a long time ago because OP_CAT is only 13 or 14 lines of code. 2:01:09 So we have a CUSF activator for OP_CAT. 2:01:12 This is another mystery is that the OP_CAT people are shilling OP_CAT, but I told Udi and Eric this at the party in Nashville or something two conferences ago. 2:01:24 And you would think they would be more interested in it, but they're not. 2:01:28 So the question is, a lot of this soft fork thing is this prestige economy of just people trying to figure out who is influential, I think, for what reason. 2:01:41 And so all of this is irrational and absurd. 2:01:43 Everyone should just be saying, how can we get high fee-paying users? 2:01:49 How can we get the price to go up by making a more useful coin? 2:01:54 Yep, yep, yep. 2:01:56 Let's see. 2:01:58 The user activate, we talked about that one. 2:02:01 The MimbleWimble extension block, that obviously would have zero, there would be no impact on that with this core untouched. 2:02:07 And obviously, if you did a soft fork, it would integrate whatever exists. 2:02:11 You can already kind of tell, though, why I would say that that is the case. 2:02:15 Because think about it, you're just running those two things now, and then this other thing is being run. 2:02:20 And the thing will kick back and validate block under some conditions, but those conditions have literally nothing to do with the MimbleWimble extension block, which it may not even know. 2:02:34 It's very unlikely that the BIP300 activator knows that it is there. 2:02:39 But even if it does, then you just shut off the BIP300 activator, and then you're exactly back to where you started. 2:02:48 So I'm in favor of these modular and reversible soft forks. 2:02:53 A lot of people think this is some huge, huge whatever. 2:02:57 It's irreversible and forevermore. 2:02:59 Especially in a situation where you say, this is brand new, and we will test it this week. 2:03:04 And then it's like, okay, you tell everyone that you will shut it off at the end of the week. 2:03:10 And so everyone can test it out with $5. 2:03:12 They know they're going to lose this money. 2:03:15 Well, now in that case, now it's really, really like, who's the victim now? 2:03:22 It's really hard to find a victim in these. 2:03:24 You make these scenarios and you just think, who is the victim here? 2:03:29 No one, but you know, whatever. 2:03:31 Well, this is going backwards a few minutes, but talking about how things get done within Litecoin with Core. 2:03:38 Core is funded by the foundation. 2:03:40 I know developers are with the foundation as far as I can tell. 2:03:42 Now, again, Ordinals kind of came out of left field and no one could stop it. 2:03:46 So there's some of that that exists. 2:03:48 And we could do that, I guess, with Drivechains. 2:03:50 But we were able to accomplish with consent and everyone agreeing to, hey, let's add the memable extension block. 2:03:58 We did it successfully. 2:04:00 It was a gigantic upgrade and it's awesome. 2:04:02 So if the community were to signal, hey, we want Drivechains, they could be done. 2:04:06 So I do think it's something that we as a Litecoin community need to consider seriously. 2:04:10 I know you've already given us some attention again last year at the conference. 2:04:14 You're sitting on the show. 2:04:16 There were some tweets over the course of the last month. 2:04:19 Did you ever talk to Charlie about this or any developers in Litecoin? 2:04:23 Well, yeah, I met Charlie a few times. 2:04:26 I haven't really had a conversation with him. 2:04:28 I certainly would love to talk to him. 2:04:30 I think he's a great OG Bitcoiner. 2:04:34 And I saw him at the Nashville conference. 2:04:36 Important statement. 2:04:38 Very few people think about that. 2:04:40 OG Bitcoiner, yeah. 2:04:42 I would say so. 2:04:44 That's certainly the case. 2:04:46 It's also funny. 2:04:48 I have the ballet cards. 2:04:50 I also have some around here from his brother. 2:04:52 Yeah, yeah. 2:04:54 Except I'm a happy customer. 2:05:01 So yeah, Charlie's great. 2:05:03 I'd be happy to talk to him about this if that would help. 2:05:06 I think that... 2:05:08 I mean, it's ironic. So I did not create BIP300 so that Litecoin could be a success and destroy Bitcoin and take over. 2:05:12 So that's the truth. It's not what I had in mind. But I think at this point, the way the CUSF client works is that any L1 that is similar enough to Bitcoin should be able to use it. 2:05:31 And I think I started to radically rethink... Well, it's just it's not only me. Many people feel this way. Like my friend Moonsettler, who's on Twitter, who's quite an interesting guy. 2:05:45 If you just go into his Twitter now, you will find just enormous, like, you know, depressing rants about how Bitcoin is not, you know, when we need to try again and we need to try it. 2:06:02 So he's like, he's like even more of a... But I'm very pro competition is what I'm trying. And that's what Drivechain is really was really about. And I think that's also why it's not super popular among the developers, because the developers realize that they will have to compete. 2:06:21 And I think they kind of don't like that to some extent. So basically Drivechain is like you have your L1, but now anyone can do an L2. So now if you have Jeremy Rubin, he does CTV L2 or OP_CAT L2 or whatever. 2:06:37 Or you have someone does Zcash, someone does Monero sidechain, Monero Drivechain, someone does a Zcash type Drivechain, you know, competing on privacy. It will compete with, in a good way, it will compete with L1 Bitcoin, and it will compete with L1 Monero, the altcoin, and it will compete with MimbleWimble extension blocks. 2:07:02 And I think that is the Pandora's box. It's not that it will affect... You see what I mean? It's not that it will affect the 84 million coin limit. It's not that it will break the nodes. It's not that it will harm the network in any way, the computer. 2:07:23 But it may harm certain people's careers and aspirations because it's saying that, you know, this is all going to be open source software released for free. And now if you're not working as hard as you possibly can to please the user, someone, you know, any other person on the Internet could be shipping something tomorrow. 2:07:49 And so I think that's kind of like, in a way, it's so good. To me, that's part of what makes it such a good idea, is that good. We want to get rid of these corrupt, lazy developers who don't care about the user and they're just wasting everyone's time. 2:08:03 But you can see how politically it makes it slightly. Something that maybe requires a little more guile than I would ever have thought. You would think, like, the Bitcoin world making a lot of money, Bitcoin versus banks, etc. I would never have thought that. It was so... 2:08:18 But, you know, stuff happened with the scaling war and people formed various teams and cliques and things. But what I'm trying to say is that the... 2:08:30 What were we originally talking about? Oh, I don't even know. Charlie or something? But I would be happy to talk to anyone about this idea. And I did not... Yeah, okay. I did not make it. I did not invent it to help Litecoin destroy and defeat BTC. 2:08:44 But I certainly, at this point, I don't want to interfere with any competition. I think we need a lot of people competing really hard. That is what we definitely... We all need, everyone needs, and everyone deserves that. Everyone, everywhere. 2:09:04 And there's like that thing at the end of Pokemon Red. This is weird, the video game. But the guy, you have the rival character who hates you the whole game and he says, ah, my rival should be strong to keep me sharp. Yeah. So that's what we need. We need competition. 2:09:19 And so I'm really, really in favor of anyone taking this idea and running with it. So I'd be happy to talk to Charlie or whatever, or go to another Litecoin summit conference. Yeah, if it is, especially if it is near a Bitcoin event, I'm already going to. 2:09:41 But yeah, we all, everyone deserves, all the users, all the Bitcoin users and all of the crypto users and every user of the internet and the 8 billion people. We all deserve the best possible software that we can get. And so that's what we should have. 2:10:07 Noted. I'm going to go to Litecoin after Drivechains. Of course, hypothetical, but kind of hash out some things I have in terms of how this will work or what it may look like. So Drivechains would function within their own node environments. In other words, it's not Litecoin Core. It's going to be some sort of node for Drivechains itself. 2:10:28 The L2s, yeah. They each have their own. 2:10:30 They each. So if there's 256, which we established, that's the limit currently arbitrary, and it can be changed. Although I am really struggling to understand what would fill those. But again, that's not up to me. It's a collaborative event. 2:10:44 But if someone had, let's say, LDC, I'm making up conventions here, LDC XMR, so the Monero feature versus LDC NMC, which is the Namecoin feature, because we actually do want to decentralize ICANN or compete within a decentralized fashion. 2:11:01 They would just download an IDC XMR node, and then somebody else would download an IDC Namecoin node, or would they be within the same one? Or we're talking about this team has a concept. They're going to run one Drivechain. You're going to download their client because that's the feature you want. It's not like a universal client that supports them all, correct? 2:11:23 That's right. And in fact, that would basically not work because think about it. 2:11:29 Well, currently everything's in core. That's why I say that. We only know one environment. 2:11:34 We do have a thing right now. If you download our test software, which runs on Bitcoin Core, but with fake coins deliberately for testing. 2:11:45 And we have a little thing that we call the launcher, and it's kind of modeled on the Steam game launcher or something, where the launcher is just this tiny piece of software, and it will download Bitcoin Core, it will download the enforcer, and then you can click on which L2 do you want to download, download this or that. 2:12:08 And so that thing, the launcher, is kind of a unified thing. But of course, that's not what you asked. 2:12:15 The launcher is just a thing that basically downloads all the stuff and plugs them all together. 2:12:19 Each L2 has its own peer-to-peer network, and it has its own list of peers, and it downloads its own blockchain from those peers, and then everyone validates that. 2:12:35 So it's a new blockchain. So really, the derived chain L2s, they're very similar to altcoins, except they just don't have any altcoins. They just have coins sent to them from L1. 2:12:47 But other than that, they're really simple, because it's a new piece of software. It could be in any software language. It could have horrible mistakes and bugs and then just not work. 2:12:57 And you have to defer to the team and their expertise, of course, right? 2:13:00 And see or give up or whatever. And then that's exactly why people would be cautious at first. 2:13:08 But that's what we need. It's like a YouTube versus you have everything from one – all the television is broadcast from one station in the 1960s or whatever. 2:13:21 But then on YouTube, anyone can just do anything. So of course, yeah, you get a lot of low-quality – you get more low-quality weird stuff on there. 2:13:28 But of course, that's how freedom works. 2:13:35 In this case, the miners are probably unlikely – if something doesn't enhance the brand of the coin, they probably won't let it into the 256-slot world. 2:13:52 Although, if there's a lot of slots and someone says, I think this is a good idea, it's very likely that something can get a trial run, right? 2:14:02 Because it doesn't really cost the miners anything to – okay, you can take slot six for now. 2:14:08 Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, so basically at the miner side, all Drivechains are known and they're functioning and being mined actively with L1, right? These L2s. 2:14:18 It's not strictly required because of Blind Merged Mining, but it sort of is – 2:14:24 They're the participants by default. They're the ones running these alternate chains or L2s. 2:14:32 But to the user, they could use Litecoin Core alone for the rest of their days and never touch one of these, like I said, Monero version or Namecoin version built on top as an L2. 2:14:43 So to the miners, everything is known, perhaps in a blind fashion, but to the user, it's really up to their choice. That's pretty neat. 2:14:52 Exactly, yes. 2:14:54 Other than privacy, what are you foreseeing could be – I mean, I know there's like 20,000 tokens and coins and I don't care about the majority of them. 2:15:01 Privacy is compelling. We do have MWeb, but maybe we could have a stronger one like a Monero variety on Litecoin. 2:15:07 Yeah, we have already something that uses the Orchard Crate from the Zcash Altcoin. 2:15:15 So it gives the user a Z address that is reusable and it hides the sender, the receiver, the amount. 2:15:22 So we already have that. So if you download the Q7 Enforcer and hook it up to Litecoin, you should be able to just use – 2:15:29 the L2s shouldn't need any modification. The L2 on BTC should be the same as on Litecoin because it's actually talking to the Enforcer, the BIP300 Enforcer anyway. 2:15:41 So it shouldn't care at all. So we have that already. I think that's pretty neat. 2:15:46 Scale is the other important thing. 2:15:49 So since Litecoin has the faster block time, the blocks will not fill up as quickly. 2:15:58 So you don't need scale as much as Bitcoin will need it. You don't need L2 scale as much because you have more L1. 2:16:06 But none of the blockchains have – what's required to scale to 8 billion users is quite a bit. 2:16:15 As far as I've estimated, you would need about 14 of these L2s that I call Thunder as a kind of like a little lightning joke of mine. 2:16:26 But we have this software out. We have actually a contest right now where anyone who can improve the performance is pretty good. 2:16:32 It syncs like 160 megabyte blocks and like 10 of them in like 60 seconds or something. So that's like 1.6 gigabytes. 2:16:45 But we have a contest. If anyone can improve that, you can win money. We're giving out like $10,000 a week for the next six weeks. 2:16:52 So showing that, that's a contest that you can find on my blog. You can probably find it on my Twitter. 2:17:01 Yeah, I can put that in the show notes too. 2:17:04 If you have 14 of these chains that grow linearly like from – I don't know. I have the exact numbers. 2:17:12 But over five years, it passes like the 800 megabyte block size amount. 2:17:18 And that would scale to 8 billion people and it passes all the fees to the L1 miners automatically through merge mining. 2:17:30 So that's another cool thing that, again, we already have. 2:17:33 So these are things that we already have that you should just take. 2:17:37 I have a version of Namecoin that I call BitNames, which is – Namecoin is an altcoin. 2:17:44 So I actually love the Namecoin people. They're great. 2:17:47 But we didn't really want Bitcoin and then Namecoin. 2:17:52 We kind of – I prefer just what Namecoin is trying to do. 2:17:58 I think I tuned up one or two little things also. 2:18:01 But mainly, there's no second coin. It's just – you just pay with the original L1 coin. 2:18:07 So it'd be Litecoin in this case. 2:18:09 So we have that again already. 2:18:12 Then we have this thing called the BitAssets also, which is kind of like a Ordinal's counterparty type thing. 2:18:19 We have also a bunch of different chains that were in various stages of completion. 2:18:23 Like some of them were completed, but they ran with the old version, the pre-CUSF version, because actually CUSF is kind of new. 2:18:32 And so that was like – we had a version of Ethereum. 2:18:35 We had a couple of different interesting chains of that kind that we had already finished. 2:18:43 And then, of course, anyone could build your own new thing. 2:18:47 Or we already have. 2:18:48 And I have two new chains that are going to come out. 2:18:54 I don't know when. 2:18:56 And I don't want to say because I feel like that will sort of jinx it. 2:18:59 Software development is sort of difficult. 2:19:02 But I have two completely – one of them is, though, the prediction market Oracle Bitcoin high mine thing. 2:19:08 So I'll say that. 2:19:10 But I don't know when that's going to be done, but I'm working on restoring that. 2:19:13 That was something that I got – I had that working in 2015. 2:19:15 And then I was like, oh, now I have to connect it to Bitcoin. 2:19:19 And then that's how this whole saga began. 2:19:22 So those are some of the ones that I think would be big. 2:19:28 I mean, scale is a matter of life or death, I think. 2:19:31 And privacy, I kind of think, if you're in the blockchain world, you have taken a step in the cypherpunk direction. 2:19:42 It would be very easy to just have Venmo do everything. 2:19:49 But that's – it's not – I think there's – you'll hit a bunch of roadblocks with that. 2:19:55 Instead, we want to go the privacy user sovereignty direction that is much more reliable for the long run to go. 2:20:04 So those are things, half of which have already been built. 2:20:07 The others, I hope – I think – I do believe that LayerTwo Labs is the company that I run. 2:20:15 I do think that we are very productive. 2:20:19 Blockstream raised all this money to do the two-way bank in 2015. 2:20:24 Millions and millions of dollars, $21 million, then $55 million. 2:20:28 We just raised a little, $3 million, and I have some great people. 2:20:32 And, of course, my own heroic leadership. 2:20:36 No, I'm just kidding about that. 2:20:38 But what I mean is that we have produced a lot of great stuff, and we have produced stuff and then reproduced it. 2:20:44 Like the CUSF, we redid that. 2:20:46 But it's much better and more likely to be used by Bitcoin and other L1s. 2:20:53 So we've shipped a lot of stuff. 2:20:56 So actually, my point is I think we'll have shipped these other two. 2:20:58 Oh, my God. 2:21:00 This is what I said I wouldn't say because it would curse everything. 2:21:02 I could find something to knock on or something. 2:21:04 But I think we'll ship these other two before Litecoin could plausibly agree to activate. 2:21:10 Even if you speed-ran the whole thing in four weeks and said, we want to turn it on immediately. 2:21:18 I still think we probably have one or two more of these cool chains. 2:21:23 Yeah, one of them lets you swap other coins. 2:21:26 I don't want to spoil all the stuff, and I don't want to describe it too much because that'll curse the project. 2:21:34 But the point is I'm shipping more stuff now. 2:21:38 We had a bunch of stuff shipped before. 2:21:40 It ran on the pre-CUSF version of the software. 2:21:44 So we had a Zcash sidechain from like, whatever, 2021 or 2020. 2:21:48 I don't know, but a long time ago. 2:21:50 And so we had that. 2:21:52 That was ancient. 2:21:54 And now we have one that is more modern. 2:21:58 We probably have more. 2:22:00 So we're going to make some. 2:22:02 And I think this is the right L2. 2:22:04 This is the right style of L2. 2:22:06 The ones that don't pay, the miners, I don't think will work. 2:22:11 They seem to be much more complicated than the ARK Supernode or whatever. 2:22:17 People have a lot of trouble explaining in simple terms how that works. 2:22:22 A lot of people do not understand how Lightning works. 2:22:25 I've met many of the top people who think they understand how it works, and when I talk to them, they clearly do not. 2:22:33 Or they have a serious misapprehension about how it works. 2:22:38 So this is much simpler. 2:22:41 This is actually just saying, this is Satoshi's blockchain idea. 2:22:45 This is Satoshi's merge mining idea. 2:22:47 The only new part is the deposit withdrawal. 2:22:50 So to answer your question, I know these answers are so long, it's so terrible. 2:22:56 But you can download our PlayMoney software right now and see what we already have. 2:23:02 You already get that on. 2:23:04 Privacy, scale, these other things. 2:23:07 And we're going to ship some more things. 2:23:09 So that's a good question. 2:23:11 And I have it down. 2:23:13 And we sort of talked about YouTube already. 2:23:15 Anybody can add content. 2:23:17 Of course, there's going to be various degrees of skin in the game, and risk, and capital, and teams, and all this stuff. 2:23:22 But what is required to really, let's say I've got an idea, I want to launch a Drivechain. 2:23:27 Lightning can now accommodate this. 2:23:29 How does that work? 2:23:31 Do you use just software which communicates to the miners? 2:23:34 It's automated? 2:23:36 Because I think they have some say in whether or not it should be even executed. 2:23:39 So how does that work? 2:23:40 Yeah, there's a network message on L1 that kind of gates whether or not you get the slot or not. 2:23:50 And I program the software to just say no by default. 2:23:55 Which is smart, because otherwise the slots would just fill up. 2:24:00 So basically the miners have to agree to allow the slot. 2:24:05 They're kind of a little bit like someone who owns a mall, a shopping mall. 2:24:08 And then they lease the stores. 2:24:12 And we're talking about pools. 2:24:14 Yeah, correct. 2:24:16 So they're not getting any money if there's no slot. 2:24:20 So again, they would be very, I think, liberal with the slots. 2:24:29 But what actually would happen is first you would create the software. 2:24:35 So you'd have to, like, ideally you would fork an existing, you know, on GitHub with the code. 2:24:43 You would take the code and then just add what you think should be changed. 2:24:48 If you can't, you know, if you think you have a difference of opinion with someone or that it's just fundamentally a very different design. 2:24:57 So now you have your software. 2:25:00 And then you would make this argument to the miners that users, if you turn this on, we will have fee-paying users over here. 2:25:10 So the Drivechains rely on – but again, to me this is a benefit. 2:25:15 But the Drivechain idea relies on there being users paying the fees. 2:25:20 Otherwise, you can certainly not guarantee that it would work because maybe you have L2 Drivechain. 2:25:29 Someone puts 500 Bitcoin on there. 2:25:33 It generates zero fees, you know, for two or three years. 2:25:37 Well, then no one cares about keeping it around. 2:25:41 The miners would not care. 2:25:43 You know, maybe this would – the miners would take the coins in there or something. 2:25:47 I want to reemphasize, though, that miners don't just like take the coins like at 3 a.m. and they have to slowly get out over like three to six months. 2:25:56 And there's this hash gate and there's all this stuff happening. 2:25:59 But what I'm trying to say is that the – it does – the whole model is set up to work if there are happy fee-paying users. 2:26:10 So if there are not, that would just be a sign to me that the software shouldn't have been written. 2:26:17 And it's just – it shouldn't be – you know what I mean? 2:26:19 Like you have a shopping mall and then someone opens a store and they sell something that no one wants. 2:26:26 They sell vultures or something. 2:26:29 I don't know. 2:26:31 They don't make any money. 2:26:33 It's like, well, we should kick them out then. 2:26:35 So, again, I like that part of it. 2:26:37 But other people will find that mystifying. 2:26:39 The market system says it would be allowed to operate. 2:26:43 In other words, you have 256 slots. 2:26:45 You're the first one here. 2:26:46 Sure, come on board. 2:26:47 Let's try it. 2:26:48 But if there's 500 people going for 256, it's going to help the ante. 2:26:51 You're going to have to – you know, it's going to auto-calculate the whole way to prioritize the slots based on which one is functioning for the miners or not. 2:26:59 Right. 2:27:00 I think this is part of what is different, which is that, you know, there's no like literal requirement that miners do anything. 2:27:06 Because, of course, they could just do nothing and you'd just be right where you are now. 2:27:09 You could activate Drivechain but then just like never use it. 2:27:12 And that would be where you are now. 2:27:15 And it's not about, you know, violating the 84 million coin limit or these other things. 2:27:23 But it is about pitching. 2:27:25 This is exactly what it would look like to have 8 billion users. 2:27:28 It would look kind of like this. 2:27:30 And the mining pools would maybe agree that, you know, you get 51% or you get a critical amount to say, we're going to assign Thunder number 3 to slot 8 or something. 2:27:47 As I said, there need to be 14 to hit 8 billion people. 2:27:52 And then the pools would do that and the miners would be watching the pools to say, is the pool doing what's best for me? 2:28:02 The pool should be maximizing my return, my mining income. 2:28:09 Correct. 2:28:10 And so, in a weird way, oftentimes these hashers are the least informed. 2:28:18 They're specialists in getting cheap power and stuff. 2:28:21 So they don't even know a lot about what the pool is doing sometimes. 2:28:24 But then the pool could make their case. 2:28:26 They could say, we are signaling for this thing because we'll get more money. 2:28:32 And you should stop mining at this other pool. 2:28:34 Because what they're doing is they are just – they've grown complacent and lazy. 2:28:44 And they are saying that we don't need to do – there's no reason to do any of this. 2:28:50 But there is a reason because we'll make more money and it'll help increase Litecoin's chances of taking over in a big way. 2:28:57 And we'll have more users. 2:28:59 We'll have a bigger network effect. 2:29:01 We'll have more recognizability. 2:29:03 We'll have more media coverage or whatever. 2:29:05 Because we have more people. 2:29:07 Because we're going to grow. 2:29:09 Because we need to grow. 2:29:11 Because you're either going to grow or you're going to die. 2:29:13 So then the mining pool could make their case. 2:29:15 And to me, all of this is perfectly desirable. 2:29:17 Because everyone is now accountable. 2:29:19 So everyone is saying – but this is what a lot of people don't like, I think. 2:29:20 But if the mining pool is saying, oh, now I'm going to have to decide what my argument is going to be on different Drivechains. 2:29:27 And then they're going to think, oh, I don't like that. 2:29:29 But to me, the fact that someone wouldn't like that, that's because they are corrupt and you'd be better off without them. 2:29:35 You've got to get rid of these people. 2:29:37 You're never going to make it unless you can pump out some of these people. 2:29:42 You need to get them out of the system. 2:29:44 Because this is a desirable thing to have more competition. 2:29:51 It's kind of like when you're in a new class and you have a pass-fail versus 100 to 0 on the test. 2:29:59 What's best for the students is to have the competition be very blocky. 2:30:06 Pass-fail is great. 2:30:08 Now everyone just has to put in just enough work. 2:30:10 Maybe the teacher won't even fail you, but now I'm saying, as a mining pool, you can do even more to make money for your clients. 2:30:19 Well, then maybe they don't want to do that, because now they'd rather be lazy. 2:30:22 But this is the thing is, you've got to defeat the laziness and destroy it. 2:30:27 Otherwise, no one is going to make it anyway. 2:30:32 That's the only way to the top is to have a system where everyone can be rewarded for their hard work in making it happen. 2:30:41 That's what we need. This is exactly what we want. 2:30:44 But that was a good question, though, about what exactly has to happen. 2:30:47 The pools would signal. 2:30:50 If enough hash rate has signaled they get the slot, then users can deposit to the slot. 2:30:57 And the coins will show up over on the L2. 2:31:01 The L2 will wait patiently until it's assigned the slot. 2:31:05 Otherwise, you can't deposit any coins to it. 2:31:08 That would be a bad idea, because there would be no way of knowing. 2:31:12 Someone says the withdrawal should be this from the slot. 2:31:15 Someone says something else. 2:31:17 There'd be no way of even figuring out who. 2:31:19 Without the slot being assigned, there'll be no way of figuring out who. 2:31:22 Without the slot being assigned, there'll be no way of figuring out who you should even listen to about that. 2:31:27 So that wouldn't work. 2:31:30 But that's basically how it would work. 2:31:33 And you have kind of a set of things you've already developed within your team that could be picked up immediately. 2:31:41 Yeah, right. Exactly. 2:31:43 I even designed something called Bit Window that I'm actually very fond of, which is a front end for L1. 2:31:51 So it's just an L1. 2:31:53 It doesn't do the L2s, but it's L1, and it has a tab for the sidechains. 2:31:58 But the reason I bring it up is because it has this idea that I came up with called Coin News. 2:32:02 I invented it for exactly this reason you mentioned about, like, how do you get your message out to the miners? 2:32:07 What if you're Satoshi? Rate L2. 2:32:09 So I was like, what you'll do is you finish your software, and you write your little readme, you write your documentation. 2:32:19 You make your little website on the internet. 2:32:23 But now, how does anyone know about the website? 2:32:26 So I thought, what you do is you broadcast a transaction on L1 that has a conspicuously high fee. 2:32:32 So today in Bitcoin, this would only be like $2. 2:32:36 This idea sort of became like an inscription type thing, but the Bit Window will sort the messages. 2:32:43 If they pay a fee, an op return that pays, it will sort them based on the fee they paid. 2:32:52 So all you have to do is beat whatever is in the window, and then you take over. 2:32:57 It's like you get your headline in the paper. 2:33:00 And sometimes the people testing our software have a great sense of humor. 2:33:05 Because, of course, we don't validate what's put there, so they put all kinds of crazy stuff about weird jokes and other things. 2:33:11 But it's very funny. 2:33:12 And it's all play money. 2:33:14 It's all fake coins. 2:33:15 So it's not really doing a great job of – but, of course, in the real world, it would be real money. 2:33:22 So you'd say, oh, I'll put my real money. 2:33:24 Now I can get my message out. 2:33:25 Everyone will get it. 2:33:26 So you say, oh, new sidechain URL, and then contact whatever. 2:33:33 And then on your website, you have your PGP key. 2:33:36 You have your email. 2:33:37 You have your whatever. 2:33:38 So then you have your link to the telegram. 2:33:40 You have your link tree or whatever. 2:33:42 So that was how you would break the news in theory in a totally decentralized way. 2:33:48 Because that would be the challenge, right? 2:33:50 You'd have to – how do I contact someone else? 2:33:51 I think in practice it wouldn't be that much. 2:33:53 I enjoy building that part of it, which I did on purpose for that – for the Drivechain reason. 2:34:00 Even though I think that actually people will have a field day with Coin News and have a lot of fun with it. 2:34:05 And I built – you can have little topics so that you can have Japanese news and English news. 2:34:10 They won't interfere with each other because people can't read Japanese in the United States. 2:34:16 But I think in practice, there would probably be like a community of L2 developers and they're kind of like – 2:34:23 we'll probably – I'm not going to say they'll all know each other. 2:34:26 You could establish a new role in the community. 2:34:28 It's kind of like if you were going to make a new car company. 2:34:31 It's not like you would do that without poaching a bunch of people. 2:34:36 So probably people would know each other. 2:34:38 But in the hypothetical world where we enter the 1984 hellscape and they lay down the suppression field across everything 2:34:47 and you can only communicate with code, usually by a blockchain message, then it would still work with Coin News. 2:34:55 That's interesting. That's really interesting. 2:34:58 How do Drivechains align the economic incentives of Litecoin miners, developers, and users? 2:35:07 Did we sort of cover it a little bit? 2:35:09 Like we want – developers are going to ship software that the users like. 2:35:13 When we say that the users like, it better increase the market price of Litecoin or lead to transaction fees. 2:35:21 And I think that this is very tight. 2:35:24 This is very tightly defined, and I love the definition. 2:35:27 I think it's just perfect, and it's exactly what Satoshi wanted, I assume. 2:35:34 That's about keeping everything aligned. 2:35:40 The more people transact on the L2s, we have more happy users. 2:35:47 It's healthy for the developers also to have real feedback from the users in the form of if they're paying transaction fees or not. 2:35:55 Because, again, in Bitcoin it's kind of a little like a hippie sort of – you make a painting and then people say, ah, it's really good. 2:36:10 But that's different from – if you were to run a restaurant or a supermarket, there's going to be a mixture of things. 2:36:19 Some parts of the job you're really going to like, but then other parts you're not going to like at all. 2:36:28 But that's part of being a productive member of society is you either hire someone to do these things that you don't like. 2:36:39 Because you've got to put the whole thing together in something that makes profits. 2:36:44 Otherwise, the supermarket is going to close down, or the restaurant is going to close down. 2:36:48 Probably a restaurant is a better example because you can imagine someone really enjoys cooking. 2:36:52 But maybe they also really enjoy going out on Friday and Saturday night. 2:36:59 So now – oh, a dilemma. 2:37:01 But what you could do is you could train the other chefs to cook the thing the way you think it should be. 2:37:10 But you can see that – so the intrinsic motivation only gets people so far is what I'm trying to say. 2:37:15 So if we have this north star of make more transaction fees, that would – hey, maybe the miners – one thing that I always thought might happen down the road. 2:37:28 The miners might be making so much money. 2:37:30 If you think about how it scales eventually, where you can have a geometrically increasing number of transaction fees. 2:37:37 And already the miners in Bitcoin have made huge amounts of money, much more than a developer salary. 2:37:44 So you have your market rate, developer salaries fully loaded. 2:37:49 These can be from 100,000 to whatever, 400,000. 2:37:53 I don't know. I'm just making up – these are just made-up numbers here. 2:37:56 But you talk about bright young people versus experienced. 2:37:59 Some people can make obviously huge amounts of money in software development. 2:38:03 But what are the miners' profit margins and revenues? 2:38:11 And some of these numbers are just enormous, like huge amounts of money. 2:38:16 You can look on and see like what does Marathon have on its – how much cash they have on their balance sheet. 2:38:22 It's like hundreds of millions of dollars. 2:38:25 So the miners might end up hiring software developers or project managers or someone, again, to do the unnecessary unpleasant work. 2:38:36 So instead, we don't have a situation where each developer just does it for the intrinsic motivation. 2:38:43 Because the intrinsic motivation is excellent, but it doesn't really get you as far as something where you have an actual metric. 2:38:53 We used to say this is – we want to maximize this. 2:38:55 Maximize transaction fees. So that's the short answer. 2:38:58 Maximize transaction fees and just let that be the leading light. 2:39:03 Let that be the north star. 2:39:06 Where do you think the north star is now? 2:39:08 Ignore all these distractions. 2:39:11 I really – I hate to – I think people should always be open-minded and et cetera. 2:39:18 But oh my god, I really think Bitcoin has become – it's been distracted by these – the number go up. 2:39:25 So that's the north star. 2:39:27 But it's in – we do it in a – we don't do it in a good way. 2:39:30 We don't do it in like a serious way. 2:39:32 We don't do it in this – like let's sit down and say how do we make the absolute best software in the world? 2:39:38 How do we make the best money in the world? 2:39:40 What people instead do is they just say – 2:39:42 It's already the best. 2:39:45 We haven't changed it in a while, so let's not break it or whatever. 2:39:48 Yeah, if we change it, we might break it. 2:39:50 So then we'll lose everything. 2:39:52 If we change it, it's already a $2 trillion asset. 2:39:54 So we're going to destroy a $2 trillion asset if we change it. 2:39:59 So we don't really do it in a serious way. 2:40:01 We just – but it is important to – hey, marketing and recognizability, these are important. 2:40:08 So I don't want to completely knock all that. 2:40:11 What I do want to knock is we've had a 10-year cultural slide into just these weird derangements. 2:40:17 Gigantic, yeah. 2:40:18 And people have lost – people have basically slowly sacrificed their integrity. 2:40:22 One tiny little lie after another, and it has added up to just a very complacent group of people who think, yeah, it's already perfect. 2:40:33 If we move anything, we'll break it or something. 2:40:37 And yet Drivechains – I've heard you say this, and I'm just going to echo that – is actually Drivechains, if implemented, would actually allow core to ossify 2:40:48 because you're going to be playing around with everything else on a layer two. 2:40:53 The block size war or really like Bitcoin – if you think – like what is ossification? 2:40:58 It's not how ossified is Bitcoin if Litecoin replaced Bitcoin and Bitcoin went to zero. 2:41:05 How ossified is it then? 2:41:07 So people have a very, very naive view of ossification in terms of it's just saying, well, we just won't change it. 2:41:14 You know what I mean? 2:41:16 But the world doesn't work that way. 2:41:18 I mean I hate to be the guy who says something like that, but the world doesn't work that way at all. 2:41:22 I mean what if you just said – I mean like to take an extreme example but yet a still fundamentally correct example would be to say that in a few billion years, 2:41:33 the sun is going to just obliterate this planet. 2:41:35 So if you say we're just not going to change anything, what you really are saying is that all of – 100% of my descendants will be killed unnecessarily. 2:41:44 And then everything we've ever done will be erased from the universe. 2:41:48 Whereas instead we could become like a spacefaring civilization and conquer the stars, which is our destiny and et cetera. 2:41:56 And of course people would still have – they still have this video. 2:41:59 They still have all the stuff on the internet that people could copy into a hard drive or something. 2:42:04 So the reason I bring that up is not to make any kind of judgment about space travel. 2:42:10 I'm just saying if you want to keep everything the same, you actually have to work pretty hard because it's not that easy. 2:42:19 You can't stop aging. 2:42:21 You can't stop different business models coming in and out. 2:42:24 So this ossification thing is really, really, really, really poorly thought out. 2:42:28 And what it ends up meaning is nothing because the people who are pro-ossification, they don't even realize that Bitcoin Core puts out a new version every six months. 2:42:38 And they do that because they like – this is the intrinsic motivation going in a weird way where they do this refactoring and stuff. 2:42:45 So I wrote a whole article about this called Precedence Ossification. 2:42:49 It's a giant article that people can read all about how completely misguided this idea is and how we have something much better that we used in the past. 2:42:58 And now everyone is just – people don't understand what we had in the past, which was great. 2:43:04 And it still is great, which is this idea that the old node – if the nodes disagree, the old node wins. 2:43:12 And that is all you need and that's perfect. 2:43:14 And that's what we have. 2:43:15 And that's what every blockchain has. 2:43:17 Bitcoin would also – everything that activates with SoftOrk has that. 2:43:23 Two scenarios. 2:43:24 Okay. 2:43:25 It's – I'm going to sound like a bear. 2:43:28 You talked about activating this in four weeks. 2:43:30 I'm going to say it's 2027, giving us way too much time to consider this idea that's already been on the table for a while. 2:43:37 And Litecoin is running Drivechains. 2:43:39 It's on. 2:43:41 How do you see this impacting Litecoin and altcoins and even Bitcoin? 2:43:46 Drivechain – the idea of Drivechain was that it was the sidechain idea from Blockstream. 2:43:53 And this is what Brian Armstrong had his tweet about, about Bitcoin is too far ahead. 2:43:57 We don't need altcoins. 2:43:59 We just need a tech stack on Bitcoin that works and no one should do anything else because we should all just be united on this one thing. 2:44:10 So, I didn't – the idea of Drivechain is that it would make all of it – you'd only have one L1 that you would need and everything else – you wouldn't need another coin. 2:44:21 You would just have them as optional L2s. 2:44:24 So, you wouldn't need – you'd still have all this innovation. 2:44:28 You would still have privacy coin, but it would be the privacy L2 unlike coin. 2:44:35 And even ideally, there would be maybe two or three of them. 2:44:38 And ideally, they would all hate each other and have a rivalry. 2:44:41 They would be like Crest versus Colgate or they would be like whatever, Honda and Ford or whatever. 2:44:47 So, that is what I was thinking is that would help the one single coin dominate and take over. 2:44:57 Who knows what will happen? 2:44:59 This industry is so bizarre and unpredictable and everything. 2:45:03 I do think it's possible that – so, already the Darknet markets were an original Bitcoin user that we have lost to Monero. 2:45:14 And regular payments – I know on BitRefill, we've already lost Litecoin. 2:45:22 Bitcoin has already lost to Litecoin on just payments on BitRefill. 2:45:26 At least the last time I checked, which was like a few years ago, but there was a – the trend was terrible. 2:45:31 So, I just assume it's the same. 2:45:35 And so, we have already lost various – we've already lost customers basically. 2:45:40 So, the precedent is already there. 2:45:43 I think it's impossible to forecast what will happen to Litecoin without also forecasting like what will happen to like Bitcoin and even like other world events like what Trump's crypto policy will be. 2:46:03 Or if he – something rubs in the wrong way and he declares war on crypto. 2:46:10 Or if he – I don't know. 2:46:13 So, you kind of have to predict the whole thing. 2:46:16 And I would say that I really had to wrap my head around it. 2:46:21 The big variable will be if Bitcoin does this reformation basically and says, we need to focus on the details. 2:46:36 Like we need to focus on the 8 billion users and we need to focus – what does that – we need to take that seriously. 2:46:41 What does it look like? 2:46:42 We can either do that, which will be very difficult. 2:46:44 Or we can continue to keep it very vague and just say Bitcoin is hope, right? 2:46:50 And just say whatever and just a number go up. 2:46:54 And yeah, I don't know. 2:46:59 So, I think everything kind of hinges on that in my opinion. 2:47:02 I think the – if – the Overton window is pretty important. 2:47:10 If you could somehow like plant a flag in the ground and say like we are serious about growing to 8 billion people because to us it's – we understand correctly that it is a matter of life or death. 2:47:26 So, that is what we're going to do. 2:47:29 And everyone join us now even if you didn't join us in the past. 2:47:32 Join us now. 2:47:33 Anyone who can pull that off will – would pose I think a serious threat to Bitcoin in particular because a lot of people in Bitcoin feel that way. 2:47:48 So, if they – if you could peel them off, then Bitcoin would just be left to the crazies. 2:47:55 And it would just hasten the – you know, these purity tests and whatever, this death spiral, the toxicity death spiral. 2:48:06 So, I think that would be – those are the things to watch. 2:48:10 So, yeah, other than that, it's a really hard question to answer, isn't it? 2:48:15 I think so. 2:48:16 Fair enough. 2:48:17 Can we move on to some community questions and then we can land the plane? 2:48:21 You've already broke our episode I think for the world record at two hours and 48 minutes. 2:48:26 You may have been the most spoken podcaster in Bitcoin. 2:48:30 I don't know. 2:48:31 I'm getting the – I'm getting the vibe. 2:48:33 Oh, yeah. 2:48:34 I think so. 2:48:35 In terms of time spent. 2:48:37 I mean I think you did 8 or 10 or something with Vlad and you've been on Peter McCormick when he was doing it. 2:48:44 You've spoken quite a few words over the years. 2:48:48 And you are recording it though, right? 2:48:51 Yes, I am. 2:48:52 Because we took that one break. 2:48:55 Seems like a good idea to bring that up. 2:48:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2:48:58 But either way, we're good. 2:48:59 I'm just making sure we're not fatigued and we can finish with a few more questions. 2:49:03 Okay. 2:49:04 All right. 2:49:06 So, let's see. 2:49:07 What testing – and I'm not going to read this who submitted these. 2:49:10 But what testing has been done on BTC Signet? 2:49:14 What issues have been found? 2:49:16 And how are they fixed? 2:49:18 Well, the Signet is fake money. 2:49:21 So, this is a good first test. 2:49:23 The CUSF thing is new. 2:49:25 It's not like the old – we had an old version from like 2017, but it was not rebased. 2:49:30 And I kind of explained if you rebase, then you kind of have to keep doing it. 2:49:35 So, the CUSF thing is new. 2:49:37 I don't think – yeah. 2:49:40 It is possible to find like the – so, let me – an example of a bug would be like – 2:49:50 I think – it's hard to say what qualifies as like a bug or not. 2:49:55 But there was various optimizations without which software would maybe take too long to run. 2:50:01 So, we let it run and accumulate blocks. 2:50:05 The easy way out would be to just keep resetting the network. 2:50:08 But I think we've gone a long time without resetting it. 2:50:11 And we now have something like 200,000 L1 blocks because we do them every 60 seconds. 2:50:16 We do them more quickly because we started zero, first of all. 2:50:20 And it is a better user experience. 2:50:23 And this is not the intended – this is a test world. 2:50:26 So, you can shorten it even. 2:50:28 So, on our SIGNET, we have 60 second blocks. 2:50:31 And we have something like 200,000. 2:50:33 I mean I could go to – I think node.drivechain.info. 2:50:35 I had like a public mirror. 2:50:37 Anyone can check it out how many we actually have. 2:50:40 But eventually, as the blocks – the blockchain got longer, we had to optimize a few things here in batch. 2:50:48 Sending over like the headers, and we do them in groups of 2,000, which is similar to what Bitcoin Core does. 2:50:58 So, like for the enforcer, the BIP300 enforcer, we implemented that as well. 2:51:06 I think you can – if anyone really wants to know about these details, you can go – it's like a public repository on GitHub. 2:51:13 So, you can just go to the LayerTwoLabs.com. 2:51:15 Excuse me. 2:51:16 Go to github.com slash LayerTwo Labs. 2:51:20 And then you can see all the commits. 2:51:22 And you can see the pull requests. 2:51:25 You can see all the details. 2:51:26 You can see how the sausage is made, if you want. 2:51:30 It's probably a more productive way than trying to ramble out the answer. 2:51:34 It's a question of like a bug that people would understand, and I don't know. 2:51:39 Sure. 2:51:40 And I can look that in the show notes too. 2:51:42 Yeah, that's good. 2:51:43 How many devs are at layer 2, and who is funding your efforts? 2:51:48 Well, we raised some money in the end of 2022. 2:51:54 Mostly, really exclusively, this was people that I had known for a long time. 2:52:00 And they were like Bitcoin OG type people, so we did not take any VC money. 2:52:06 Although, I mean, I probably would have, but that's not the point. 2:52:10 The point is we had like a very difficult thing to explain, and so only a few people would even have understood it anyway. 2:52:15 These are mostly people who also were becoming skeptical of Lightning by that year, 2022. 2:52:26 That was like December 2022. 2:52:29 How many devs work there? 2:52:36 I'd say maybe eight. 2:52:38 I hope I didn't forget anyone. 2:52:41 Yeah, actually, you can go. 2:52:42 We have a team page now. 2:52:43 We didn't have one for a long time. 2:52:44 I don't know why, but on LayerTwoLabs.com, we have the team page now, so you can see that. 2:52:50 We have some. 2:52:52 Some are really, really good. 2:52:54 One person, my co-founder, was a Bitcoin Core developer and contributed to Bitcoin Core, I think, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, something like that. 2:53:08 Those were the versions of Bitcoin from like the year 2015 to 2016, so he's great. 2:53:18 You got some OGs, yeah. 2:53:20 We got a few. 2:53:22 How would Drivechains impact Litecoin's narrative? 2:53:26 Would it be more than or expand upon the idea of it's just digital silver? 2:53:32 I think the digital silver thing, I've never bought that narrative, just as a little bit of feedback as a potential narrative consumer, because the idea of silver was that it was 16 times more prevalent than gold, and so sometimes a gold coin was worth too much. 2:53:53 Gold is too rare. 2:53:56 But in a world where it's digital accounting and you have Arabic numerals and the computer is subtracting and everything is divisible to eight decimal points, and so I don't know. 2:54:05 The silver – I think the narrative for Litecoin that I always bought was something like, if anything bad happens to Bitcoin, there's another thing here, which even that narrative, I was not very convinced by. 2:54:20 But now I've experienced firsthand all these random deranging things in Bitcoin. 2:54:25 So now I see the narrative in a new light, and now I think, oh man, that is the narrative and that is the truth. 2:54:35 I would say that people are hungry for an alternative. 2:54:42 Not so much – I think part of what made Ethereum big was that it was just the opposition party. 2:54:55 So we have the one party – a democracy with one party does not – that doesn't work. 2:55:03 We don't want that. 2:55:04 And like whatever, no offense to China and Russia and these other places that have – 2:55:09 the Vladimir Putin party won every time. It's like, okay. And Mexico also had this – they had the – I think it was called PRI or something. 2:55:16 This one party won for like 85 years or something. I'm not exactly sure, but a long time. The other party finally won, and then it was revealed unbelievable amounts of corruption had taken place, and they're in league with the cartels. 2:55:32 I love the people of Mexico, of course, but don't send the cartel people. But this is like – the one party democracy doesn't work. 2:55:44 So you have Bitcoin and then finally people – I think Ethereum was – people were searching for – in the year 2014, 2015, people were kind of hungry for, okay, what's the plan B of this Bitcoin thing? 2:56:00 So I think that's like a really good thing to go and just say we're going to retake the opposition party from Ethereum because Ethereum is this weird science project. 2:56:09 We're going to copy the EVM, the EVM sidechain, and we're going to be pursuing real transactions with real users. 2:56:19 So I don't know. But I'm not – I don't pretend to be an expert in narratives, unfortunately. I can't – I don't think I can help anyone with that. 2:56:26 But I do think that this – I'll tell you, the silver to Bitcoin's gold, I never really bought it. I was like, I know that this is the thing you're supposed to say if you are a Litecoiner. 2:56:35 But it's kind of like MBTC or SATs. SATs are the silver. SATs are the silver to Bitcoin's gold, so not Litecoin. Litecoin is a different thing. 2:56:46 That's what Vitalik, I remember, said in one of his interviews about how MBTC was the silver to Bitcoin's gold, something like that. 2:56:54 I think Eric Voorhees, he said that also or something. I don't know if that's true, but I think so. 2:57:01 Here's another one. I think this is our last one. In one interview, you mentioned about the block time of Litecoin being a lie on the Bitcoin 10-minute block. Do you still think Litecoin is a lie? 2:57:14 I think I tried to explain it. I gave you a long, rambling answer about how the difference between 2.5 minutes and 10 minutes is not significant in the sense that it either has to be instant or it won't matter. 2:57:26 The real point of comparison is the 30-day chargeback or something. That's like, will you end up losing your money? 2:57:37 We already discussed about the zero-conf. It's either going to be instant or 60 seconds or 30 days. These are the only bins. 2:57:53 Bitcoin and Litecoin are both fast within 30 days. For one confirmation, they're both slower than one minute. 2:58:08 To get instant, it's possible to obtain the instant transaction using these other techniques. 2:58:20 Sometimes online, messages are not received in the same spirit that they're given, one of the many drawbacks of online communication. 2:58:38 It's true that I would not – again, the idea of Drivechain would be that Bitcoin would render Litecoin unnecessary and Monero unnecessary. 2:58:51 That's the idea, but they are not going for it quickly enough and they're not going for anything quickly enough. 2:59:01 Even this letter about the CTV checksick from Stack. It's not the quality of the soft fork, which I've already tried to explain is irrelevant anyway because they're all opt-in and ignorable, but whatever. 2:59:15 No one wants a low-quality thing on this. It's become a bureaucracy and they can't do anything and everyone's complacent, so there's no pressure. 2:59:27 The miners have abdicated their role just to make more money. They are very slowly getting into the idea of we need more transaction fees, but they really don't have the teeth. 2:59:41 A lot of people mine, even big miners, they mine at Foundry because it's a SOC report. 2:59:48 These are irrelevant reasons in the long run, so everyone's kind of trapped in there. 2:59:54 It really is the idea that we've all made a lot of money and this is a $2 trillion asset and we don't want to break it. 3:00:04 Again, with the bidder comes the sweet, so you have the network effect, you're the champion, you get all the attention, and yet it comes with all this paralyzing fear. 3:00:16 That's the game, I think. Will the fear win? Will the network effects win? The biggest will win. Just get bigger and just win. 3:00:28 Or will a groupthink and cult-like delusion win, which is also a very powerful force. These are two of the most powerful forces that there are. 3:00:44 Beyond this, I'll just repeat, the concept of Drivechains is possible for Litecoin. It has to be community-driven, of course, adopted by miners. 3:00:58 Then again, the CUSF, not necessarily so. Actually, no. The CUSF still does require miners. 3:01:06 It does. It does require 51%. 3:01:07 But it doesn't require core to be changed. It doesn't require the developers of Litecoin full node software. 3:01:15 We really do want something where everyone in the community understands why this is happening. 3:01:21 Correct. If we don't have that, you won't really get the users. It's kind of like, what's the point? 3:01:26 It shouldn't be a hidden feature. I think it should be a feature that people want and it's used immediately. 3:01:31 This is just a call to action to discover what Paul has been doing and what he's been working on. 3:01:37 I'm going to link all of the websites later to his Litecoin talk last year, etc. 3:01:42 After the show, if you want to send me anything, I'd be glad to plug it in. 3:01:46 Do research this. I think it's a really important topic. It's challenging to my views as well. 3:01:54 I think it's important. I appreciate you being here. 3:01:59 Before I close it down and say thank you, you're a very smart guy and I appreciate all the time you spent with us. 3:02:05 Is there anything you wanted to leave us with tonight or anything you wanted to say to our listeners? 3:02:11 Thanks for your interest in what I'm working on. 3:02:17 I do think we want a world where the best ideas make it out. 3:02:25 Unfortunately, network effects are kind of a prison for that sometimes. 3:02:30 You can imagine if Bitcoin were number one and then people didn't want to change it, there would be no hope for altcoin. 3:02:39 I'm not sure if that's true. 3:02:41 I've been working on this project. I'm just very happy to be a Bitcoiner. 3:02:46 Bitcoin has been great to me, but I really like having the good ideas be a success. 3:02:55 That is the number one priority and that's the only thing that will survive in the long run. 3:03:02 What I meant by saying that I'm just very happy to be a Bitcoiner, I mean this has been such a fun ride overall. 3:03:10 So it's been crazy and a lot of fun. 3:03:14 But if Lycon were to take this idea and really appreciate it, I think that would be a great compliment to me in a way. 3:03:25 But yeah, you shouldn't do it for that reason. You should look into it. 3:03:28 And I have all these arguments about it. I have many, many arguments about it. 3:03:32 The non-mined L2s are not going to work. Lightning is not really working out in Bitcoin and it has become an excuse. 3:03:41 And it has become a kind of refuge of people when they don't have the answer for 8 billion people. 3:03:48 They just say Litecoin will do it and then they say, oh, Covenants will improve. 3:03:53 So we've got to break up this group thing somehow. 3:03:55 It's bad for Bitcoin. It's bad for everyone. It's bad for Bitcoin's competitors. 3:04:01 It's bad for just everything. It's just not good. We can't have this. 3:04:07 So I think we need more healthy competition with Bitcoin actually. 3:04:13 So I think that thank you people of Litecoin for doing your part to help make that happen and we want even healthier competition. 3:04:22 I was really disappointed. One final thought is when Bitcoin Cash came around, I kind of thought, 3:04:30 oh, maybe we'll have two coins and there will be a big competitive force on each 3:04:42 and they will become maybe slightly different from each other, but they will keep each other in line. 3:04:48 I really didn't have that at all. Bitcoin Cash had not a great idea and not a great execution. 3:04:55 I don't want to be too critical, but basically the idea sucked. 3:05:02 The idea of L1 large blocks is not a good idea for a variety of reasons, 3:05:06 but one reason is you can put the optional large block on a small L1 block, but you can't do the reverse. 3:05:13 So it was a bad idea. Eight megabytes was not enough to scale to eight billion people anyway, 3:05:21 so there was only an 8x improvement and the timing was terrible and trying to take the name and use Bitcoin.com 3:05:28 and say Bitcoin Cash is a real Bitcoin and all that was confusing and off-putting to people. 3:05:32 Yeah, it was. 3:05:34 So that wasn't good and what happened was Bitcoin Cash went down in flames 3:05:40 and then everyone thought, oh, Bitcoin has no competitors. 3:05:44 And they thought, look what happened to the last competitor. It was terrible. 3:05:50 So, and as a result, this has created all this complacency, I think, part of it anyway. 3:05:57 And so we want, I would prefer it if we had someone, you know, nipping at the heels 3:06:05 or even better, like a real rival, like a real whatever, I don't know, I don't know about metaphor, 3:06:13 I could possibly go Goku and Vegeta or something, you know, whatever. 3:06:17 We like that one, yeah. We like Goku and Vegeta. 3:06:21 Yeah, so that's what's best for everyone. You don't want to live in a world where, 3:06:26 even if you were deciding for like, you know, your son or something, you know, a child, 3:06:32 the best thing is for them to have some rival, you know, to keep them focused. 3:06:39 You don't want them to just be competing on the wrong things. 3:06:43 We want people to compete on the right things. 3:06:46 So I realize these answers have been very rambling, but just trying to convey this. 3:06:53 This is a very important idea to me that the competition keeps everything on the up and up. 3:07:01 And I have witnessed firsthand this incredible derangement in Bitcoin because of the lack of competition 3:07:08 and everything has formed a monopolist guild and it's not good. 3:07:12 And this is exactly why I think the central banking and the existing banking industry became so, 3:07:22 you know, unable to meet the needs of its users. 3:07:26 Because there's no, who's going to, who can compete with the United States Federal Reserve? 3:07:32 Like basically no one. So it's not, it doesn't improve as much. 3:07:37 And that's just not a, it's not a good way to be. 3:07:40 But they're all federated. They're federated, right? 3:07:44 Yeah. 3:07:46 They've got a few branches. Yeah. I appreciate your time, Paul. 3:07:50 I feel that we could go beyond this and there's so much you have to say. 3:07:53 And, but we're going to call it a day at this one. 3:07:57 I appreciate your contributions again for your time here tonight, your thoughtfulness. 3:08:01 Where can people find you? 3:08:04 Well, yeah, I'm on, I'm on Twitter at Truthcoin, T-R-U-T-H-C-O-I-N. 3:08:12 And I'm on a telegram at, we have a group, a Drivechain group called DC Insiders. 3:08:18 It's a joke. T-E-DOT-ME-SLASH-DC-INSIDERS. 3:08:22 And you can join on telegram and come hang out there. 3:08:28 And it's drivechain.info, correct? 3:08:31 drivechain.info. That's right. 3:08:33 Okay. Very good. 3:08:35 Yeah. There's a lot of information. There's a YouTube playlist there. 3:08:37 There's tons of slides and talks and other things. 3:08:41 Oh, very cool. 3:08:43 I appreciate having a Bitcoiner on a Litecoin podcast. 3:08:45 Before, we've only had Charlie Lee and Vlad Kostya. 3:08:50 So we're going to add Paul Sztorc to the list. 3:08:52 If you've made it this far, congratulations. 3:08:54 We're with you. We're sitting here right in front of you. 3:08:56 So anyway, with that, thank you to all of our listeners. 3:08:59 Thanks for tuning in today. 3:09:01 Of course, you can find this episode and all other episodes at 84million.com slash podcast. 3:09:05 You can find us on X YouTube and wherever you stream your podcasts. 3:09:09 And again, once again, thank you, Paul, and have a good evening. 3:09:12 Thanks for coming on the show. 3:09:14 Hey, thanks for having me. 3:09:16 Yes, sir.