0:00 What up, Vigilantes? 0:14 So today, I have the pleasure of introducing you guys to my favorite BTC Bitcoiner. 0:23 And yeah, you really rock, Paul. 0:27 The reason why is because I got a phone call in 2013-2014. 0:33 I was working with the BitAngels Network, and I was putting together a venture capital 0:37 fund for Bitcoin. 0:40 And I got this phone call from this guy that I know he would like to remain anonymous, 0:45 but he's a BTC maximalist now, and I highly respect this person to this day. 0:53 He's incredible. 0:55 There's this company called Blockstream, and they're looking for funding, and they are 1:01 promising this thing called sidechains. 1:05 And so I had to go on a business trip, and when I got back the next week, they told me, 1:10 oh, they're fully funded. 1:11 And I'm like, wait, wait a minute. 1:14 This was weird for the first time in Bitcoin history that I saw a company get fully funded 1:20 right away. 1:22 And so I researched a little bit more of it, and I was very hopeful for what Blockstream 1:29 at the time was promising, which was sidechains. 1:34 Unfortunately, what ended up happening was that Blockstream really didn't deliver on 1:42 the sidechains that they promised. 1:45 But someone, Mr. Paul Sztorc here, in September 24th, 2018, released Drivechain. 1:53 So congratulations on your two-year anniversary coming up, by the way. 1:58 Thank you. 1:59 Yeah, it's gotten a lot better over the last two years. 2:02 So two years of a lot of progress. 2:06 So could you please explain to everyone what a sidechain is, and maybe your version of 2:12 this story that I just told, and where we're at now? 2:16 Yes. 2:17 Well, unfortunately, there's a challenge, because there's a kind of slow battle over 2:20 what the word means. 2:22 But the definition I use is the same as had been used by Blockstream in the past, in 2014, 2:31 2015, and that most people had agreed on, which is that a sidechain is a kind of response 2:35 to the altcoin. 2:37 So a sidechain is an altcoin, but there's no tokens. 2:40 There's no coins there. 2:41 You have to send BTC from the mainchain over to the sidechain. 2:46 And the sidechains can be these completely different pieces of software that can have 2:50 their own GitHub repository, their own dev team, and you can do any kind of crazy thing 2:55 that you can do on an altcoin on a sidechain. 2:58 But it doesn't create any new coins or disturb the 21 million coin limit for Bitcoin. 3:04 At the time, there was, of course, you know, back when Blockstream was created in 2014, 3:10 there was only one Bitcoin, and there wasn't even this concept of having. 3:14 So sidechains are this response to, you know, what do we do if we don't like the protocol 3:21 rules? 3:22 What if something like Ethereum or BitShares or whatever counterparty is not a great example? 3:28 But there were a lot of creative ideas at the time. 3:30 And the thing was, well, with the sidechains thing, it'll just be slam dunk for Bitcoin, 3:34 which will steal all this technology, and the investor won't have to worry about altcoins. 3:41 Now, that obviously didn't happen at all. 3:44 Hence the modern philosophy of worrying about them a lot and pretending, unconvincingly, 3:53 not to be worried about them. 3:55 So okay, so let's get down to it, because I love Bitcoin, and I took this very serious. 4:03 And a lot of us took this very serious, because we understand the value of having this experimental 4:09 hijacking approach to discovering what's best for everyone, and all of a sudden, we were 4:16 just pushed to the side. 4:18 And if you disagreed with what became dogma as the small blocker approach to scaling via 4:24 a second layer, you were the anathema, and that's wrong, and you can't even bring up 4:32 anything that goes against the status quo in Bitcoin. 4:35 And that was very upsetting. 4:36 And the whole time I'm scratching my head, and I'm like, wait a minute, but is this not 4:40 what Blockstream promised? 4:42 Is this not what we all wanted here? 4:46 We wanted to have an experimental approach to figuring out what was best for Bitcoin. 4:53 And that was really the pull that really drove me to become even more of a BTC maximalist 5:00 at the time, which was, wow, there's going to be these amazing sidechains that will allow 5:06 me to experiment, and the market will determine best what sidechain provides value. 5:12 And so- 5:13 Yeah, that's what I thought as well. 5:16 And so at the time, I mean, at the time, you were working on another project, right? 5:19 Before Drivechains, right? 5:20 Yeah. 5:21 Well, maybe we should talk about that, because I had absolutely no intention of ever doing 5:27 any of this with Drivechain at all. 5:29 So what set me on this path was that I was interested in something else, the prediction 5:33 market concept and the Futarki concept. 5:37 And that kind of overlapped with my interest in Bitcoin, because there's people who do 5:43 this type of prediction market betting that I'm interested in often have a lot of problems 5:50 the same way that online poker had problems. 5:52 So it kind of overlapped with Bitcoin. 5:54 But with prediction markets, you needed a way to arbitrate the outcome. 5:59 And it was kind of like a more like an exchange, like a Mt. Gox thing, where people just put 6:03 their money somewhere, and then that person would just decide who won, and it was kind 6:07 of this weird thing. 6:08 So I was like, well, you know, we could do something crazy with Bitcoin. 6:13 You know, this was before people even used the word blockchain, like for anything. 6:16 This was like 2013, 2014, like, this was before the blockchain without Bitcoin meme even had 6:21 started. 6:22 So I was thinking like Bitcoin and Namecoin. 6:23 And I was like, I could do something like Namecoin, except it would resolve these, what 6:29 happened in the world. 6:30 And then we could have prediction markets on Bitcoin, and that would be cool. 6:33 But the problem was, it's such a, the modifications to Bitcoin are so extreme and bizarre that 6:38 you can't like, there was no way of ever arguing that it could be like soft forked into BTC 6:44 that would like could never happen. 6:46 So along came the sidechain idea, or I think it was called the bilateral peg or something 6:53 in December 2013. 6:55 And then over 2014, as I was kind of finishing what I was doing, they were kind of ramping 7:01 up the sidechain idea. 7:02 And I was like, oh, perfect. 7:03 So I thought I'll work on this, and they'll work on that, and we'll be finished at the 7:07 exact same time, and it'll be great. 7:09 And so in around 2016, mid 2016, I had actually finished the prediction markets project, which 7:15 was called Truthcoin at the time. 7:18 That was again, the Truthcoin name was before even, there were many eras, as people who 7:23 have been in the space for a long time will remember, there was this era when everything 7:26 was like named coin, like whatever, TerraCoin, and whatever, AuroraCoin, that was like before 7:31 the blocks, the block blockchain without Bitcoin era. 7:35 And that was itself before this fork era that we're now in. 7:41 So this was even before that, when I picked Truthcoin, I thought it would be like Namecoin, 7:44 and it wouldn't be a big deal. 7:45 Then it was like this altcoin thing that people thought it was. 7:49 So now that project has a website called BitcoinHiveMind.com. 7:53 And there's lots of great information there. 7:56 And you can see that the screenshots from the software, because we finished this, we 7:59 didn't, you know, we didn't like, this software is never finished, but we finished the, like 8:04 first release of the software, a long time ago, 2016. 8:08 Yeah, so for, okay, so this is very interesting, guys. 8:11 Way before any DeFi, this is still to this day, it's way beyond anything that currently 8:16 exists, in my opinion, but it's like, sort of languishing, it's in a weird limbo state. 8:21 I don't know if you realize this, but, and this is, this goes on to what I'm gonna say. 8:26 So Augur is based on... 8:28 Right, there was, I wrote this paper, Truthcoin was the title of this paper that I wrote about 8:34 how to do this. 8:36 And there were a few people who are interested in pursuing the technology more seriously. 8:43 And what happened was, this was again, this was like before, it's hard to impress upon 8:47 people how different things were. 8:49 At the time, I was like, I was like, very excited about the idea of other people doing 8:55 all the work and me kind of not just saying, I wrote this paper. 9:00 Good luck to the world, you know, I'm so happy you like my idea. 9:05 And so I wasn't really this, it's completely different than what it like is now where someone 9:08 like writes a paper and then the ICO and collect like million, tens of millions of dollars 9:13 like immediately. 9:14 And then they're like a kind of king, they're like a Dan Lamb or Vitalik Buterin, like king 9:18 of a fiefdom or something. 9:20 This is completely different than that. 9:21 I was like, you guys do it. 9:23 And then if you know, you guys want to like, do all this work and deal with possibly deal 9:29 with regulators or deal with what country you want to live in, and then good luck to 9:33 you, you know. 9:35 You were on the board of Augur, right? 9:37 Yeah, well, they, they were, they were one of the people who are taking this very seriously. 9:42 A lot of people actually took up the head of a forum a long time ago that I still have 9:46 forum.Truthcoin.info. 9:47 You can still look it up. 9:51 And you can see, oh, there's like all this old stuff from like 2014, 2015. 9:54 And people, different people kind of interested in the idea. 9:59 And they were one but they, Vitalik kind of captured them. 10:02 He went in, he said, oh, we have to do it on Ethereum. 10:04 And I thought that was a terrible idea. 10:06 There was a different person who is doing it more in the Bitcoin way with, you know, 10:11 like a variant of fork of Bitcoin C++. 10:14 So I thought that was going to be way better. 10:16 I thought obviously that Blockstream would deliver the sidechains link. 10:20 And then it was in November 2015, I was kind of like feeling like that there I was because 10:27 I was watching the progress carefully because I was like, I'm going to have to integrate 10:30 with whatever Blockstream's sidechains thing is. 10:32 But they weren't making any progress at all. 10:35 So I wrote this blog post about Drivechain in November 2015 while I was not working on 10:40 it, while I was just still working on Bitcoin Hivemind and the prediction market stuff. 10:45 So that was November 2015. 10:47 And then it was like basically mid-2016. 10:52 We kind of finished a lot of the, because I had kind of now sort of teamed up or sort 10:57 of endorsed this Bitcoin version. 11:00 So that was kind of like had reached its first version in 2016. 11:05 And so then I started this conversation about Drivechain, about like what to do. 11:08 Like what do I do now? 11:10 Because it's done. 11:11 It's, of course, and again, it's not like finished, finished, but it was like ready 11:14 for someone to do something with it. 11:17 So I was like, what to do? 11:21 And then in 2016, I was like, let's have a big conversation. 11:24 I put these big YouTube videos on about Drivechain, and one of them is like five and a half hours 11:30 long and it's in like four parts. 11:31 The other one's in five parts and it's like four hours long. 11:35 So these big, they're all just about like theory of sidechains and about what should 11:39 people be worried about and isn't Drivechain actually a lot better than the Blockstream 11:45 skip list? 11:46 And they haven't, no one has worked on it. 11:48 And then Blockstream was going the other direction. 11:50 They were going hardcore into this federation, which they had always maintained was a kind 11:56 of fake Band-Aid temporary thing. 12:00 And in fact, one thing I would find interesting is if someone, a lot of people at Blockstream 12:06 have sort of since weaseled into the position that liquid is a sidechain by the original 12:12 definition. 12:13 But one person who has never done that, to my knowledge, would be Greg Maxwell, who always 12:19 insisted that the federated thing was this kind of temporary patch. 12:25 And so I would find it very interesting if someone could ask for his opinion on this. 12:30 I think to his credit, he has always refused to say that liquid is like a real sidechain. 12:37 And he had many video clips of him and quotes of him saying that it is just a kind of alternative 12:45 to the true, the real two-way peg, which would be this kind of process in the blockchain 12:52 for making the sidechains and sending coins to them and receiving from them. 12:56 So that is, it's kind of a weird situation to have landed myself in. 12:59 And then I presented about Drivechain or about sidechains at Scaling3 in September 20, excuse 13:07 me, October 2016. 13:10 And then I got some more feedback and kind of in 2017, it was kind of clear to me that 13:17 we could, like, it would probably be good to work on this because it seemed like no 13:23 one was working on the actual sidechains and they were probably going to be more important 13:26 than ever because the block size debate, which has always gotten crazier and crazier and 13:30 crazier was, of course, at that point, it's at its craziest point yet. 13:34 And so I was like, well, what I presented at Scaling3 was the idea of having the small 13:38 block main chain and having the large block sidechain and just having everyone get what 13:41 they want. 13:43 And so I was like, this is like a no-brainer idea, way better than having everyone continue 13:48 to fight forever because it's clear that there's not going to be like, there's no agreement 13:52 now anymore. 13:53 The first Scaling conferences, there was like a sort of agreement concept, but by Scaling3, 13:59 everyone just like hated each other and there was no good faith, anything, everything was 14:03 like going crazy. 14:04 So that's kind of how I got into that. 14:06 And then it just, I don't know, it just took a little bit longer than I thought to, you 14:10 know, kind of bang out the release and do the bips and do other stuff. 14:15 I made another video about like responding to criticism. 14:20 I had tons of stuff on drivechain.info is the site and there's just tons of stuff there 14:24 that is just slowly accumulated over the last, I think I made it in January, 2017. 14:29 So over the last three, almost four years, it has just accumulated all kinds of blog 14:36 posts, writings, links to big YouTube videos, presentations and responses. 14:45 It's like FAQs, there's stuff where I reply to peer review and there's just tons of stuff. 14:52 There's memes there, there's everything, anything you can want, dude. 14:56 I just love how ironic it is that this idea has been constantly in BTC been pushed to 15:03 the side, pushed to the side. 15:05 This idea of let's just figure out and let's figure out by experimenting in the market 15:10 and letting the market decide. 15:12 I mean, it seems as if you are very much open to different perspectives and it lends to 15:21 the creation of Drivechains, which is your version of sidechains and because Drivechains 15:27 allows us to experiment on the Bitcoin blockchain. 15:30 And so now my question to you is, is that going to be possible in BTC? 15:35 I mean, it seems like, is it going to be possible? 15:38 Well, enthusiasm has been very low for it, which is kind of interesting. 15:44 You get more enthusiasm from, you get more enthusiasm for what you're doing for BTC from 15:49 people outside BTC, which to me is mind boggling. 15:52 Well, I get some, I get a lot of secret support. 15:55 I do get a lot of secrets. 15:56 People message me and they say, I don't want to say anything, but it does seem like those 16:01 other guys who are criticizing you are wrong and they don't know what they're talking about. 16:07 And why wouldn't they want to say anything? 16:09 Why wouldn't they want to say anything? 16:10 Yeah, no, there is. 16:11 There's absolutely true that there is a kind of, there is a kind of what they call the 16:16 chilling effects or there is a, the culture in BTC has become very intolerant of dissent. 16:24 So it now demands that everything be sort of a certain way, which is greatly to its 16:30 detriment. 16:32 So yeah, people are afraid to, you know, what can, what can you do? 16:36 I think it's obvious that, I mean, a lot of places have a lot of money, it's like Blockstream 16:41 and Chaincode. 16:42 They have money, they have a lot of prestige. 16:43 People there get invited all around the world to talk, to, you know, to like do whatever 16:50 they want all the time. 16:51 There's no oversight really, that it really can't be fired. 16:55 I did write a post, one of the posts on drivechain.info is a post about why Drivechain is harder to 17:01 understand than other soft forks of Bitcoin, because it is different in a lot of ways. 17:09 I think that's a very charitable way of putting it. 17:14 The other thing to point out though, is that Drivechain, the security model is like very 17:17 different. 17:18 So it's possible that the sidechain will fail and all the money in it will be lost. 17:25 But my point of view is that that should just be up to the user when they, as long as the 17:30 user is fully informed, they, first of all, it's possible, but I think it's extremely 17:34 unlikely, but it is possible. 17:37 And the user can choose, like I was literally at, I was in, where was I, I was in Amsterdam 17:42 and I was talking to Peter Will of BTC, he's like a super smart, super nice guy, very important 17:50 in the BTC world. 17:52 He's like doing everything. 17:53 And I was talking, and I told him something that I've told many people where they were 17:57 like, well, you know, they've said stuff like, you know, I've heard all kinds of, I don't 18:02 want to put any comments in his mouth, but I've heard lots of comments from him and people 18:06 like him that are something like, you know, this idea is really good, but it's just too 18:09 experimental and weird for BTC. 18:12 Well, that's what it's supposed to be experimental. 18:15 Well, it's fully opt-in is the other thing. 18:17 So this is where this is going. 18:19 But people have even said something like some, some people, some who work for Blockstream 18:23 have said something like, if it were on BTC, I would use it, but I don't think it should 18:27 be like in BTC or it's too weird for BTC or something like that. 18:31 So that even makes even less sense. 18:33 But what I told him is something I've said many times. 18:36 I say, well, if someone owns BTC, you know, should they be allowed to sell the BTC for 18:43 fiat currency? 18:44 And of course, people say yes, because how can that not be the case? 18:48 I say, well, if someone owns BTC, shouldn't they be allowed to sell the BTC for an alt 18:54 coin? And again, yeah, of course, like you have to, it's your money, right? 18:58 You have to say that they're allowed. 19:00 With Drivechain, just asking people to be allowed to send their own BTC to like a weird 19:05 script, the Drivechain, like bizarre scripts and enter the Drivechain system. 19:11 And so I don't understand what the basis for that being prohibited, but you can sell your 19:18 BTC for an alt coin, but you can't put them in, you can't send them to this script. 19:23 That would be, you know, that would be the end of the world. 19:26 That would be no good. That would be too weird. 19:29 So how about for the listener right now, let's, if you could please explain what, how drive 19:38 chain works or how it would work on BTC. 19:42 Well, it does a very bold thing where instead of relying on proof, which is unfortunately 19:49 impossible, it relies on a kind of conjecture and refutation. 19:53 So the only way that the sidechain can fail is if this value, which is the hex value that 19:59 is printed in the GUI of the miner at the bottom of the ribbon where everyone can see 20:03 it, if that value doesn't match a value on the main chain for, which is just 32 bytes, 20:08 it's very short, humans can read it. 20:10 If that doesn't match for around three to six months and no one does anything about 20:18 it, then the coins can be withdrawn to different owners so they can be stolen basically. 20:23 But as long as they match, then you get all the benefits that you would like of moving 20:28 to the other pieces. So it's like it's very hard because I don't know like what people 20:33 are working with, like if they, what they know about how Bitcoin works already or what 20:38 they know about, you know, like how Liquid works or something else. 20:43 So it's very difficult to kind of explain. 20:46 But the good news is now that we have the software, the versions of the software released, 20:52 I'd say anyone who really wants to know what should probably just download the two pieces 20:56 of software. We have a testnet main chain and a test sidechain, and then you can send 21:02 coins back and forth. And then I think it's probably better if they just ask any questions 21:07 they have, because it's actually, it's weird, it's kind of a complicated thing, even 21:11 though it seems pretty simple to me. 21:13 The meat of it is that it's easy for the sidechain to be asymmetric in one direction. 21:20 So the sidechain has, in order to run a full node of the sidechain, you need a full 21:24 node of main chain Bitcoin. 21:26 So that way it can easily tell when coins are sent to it. 21:30 The only difficult thing over merge mining, it's very easy to get this blockchain to 21:34 advance, even though it doesn't have a block subsidy, it doesn't have the 6.25 coins. 21:39 So a lot of the things are actually very easy. 21:42 The only difficult thing is how, what happens when the coins come back from the sidechain 21:48 to the main chain? If you say, I got all these sidechain coins, I want to redeem them 21:50 from main chain coins at this one to one rate, then they're all grouped into a thing. 21:57 And this happens only once every three months. 21:58 So it's very rare. They're all grouped together. 22:02 And this one thing slowly kind of moves across. 22:04 It's like a train slowly moving from New York City to Los Angeles or something in full 22:09 view of everyone. And since it's all bundled together, everything is bundled in with like 22:15 the headers and all the hashes of all the transactions. 22:21 So this is all identified by this one ID, this hash ID, and the sidechain constructs 22:27 it to pay out who needs to be paid out in the main chain. 22:31 The main chain just copies this transaction in the ID. 22:35 And that's the only thing that the main chain sees, because the design criterion for side 22:39 chains is that it should be possible for anyone who doesn't like the sidechain to just 22:42 ignore it. So if you want to think like Luke Jr., he doesn't want any large blocks 22:48 anywhere. So you have to tell, you have to be able to tell him, look, we're going to make 22:53 a large block sidechain, but you will never be affected by it. 22:56 You'll never need to see what goes on there. 22:59 And so money is going to be paid into this little box. 23:02 All these coins will be going in to the sidechain from Luke Jr.'s point of view. 23:07 And then coins will be coming out and Luke Jr. 23:11 won't know why the coins are going where they're going, but he'll be able to check that they 23:15 follow the Drivechain rules, which are different from the rules of a large block side 23:20 chain. And so this is where it gets like kind of weird. 23:23 But basically, you want him to be able to be sleep soundly at night, knowing that he 23:30 never has to care about what happened on this large block sidechain. 23:33 The large block sidechain could be run by total morons. 23:36 And that is what allows that competition you mentioned before to take place very safely 23:41 because people are free to try out their weird ideas. 23:44 If the ideas are a success, they'll attract users. 23:47 If the ideas fail, they don't bring down BTC. 23:51 They just bring down the sidechain that they're on. 23:55 So I remember. 23:57 No, of course, of course. 23:58 I think I think what would help a little bit more is an explanation on how money is, how 24:04 Bitcoin, BTC or Bitcoin would be put into the, I think it would be a wallet, right? 24:13 It would go into, Bitcoin would go into a wallet. 24:15 Something like that. It's something like that. 24:16 There is actually for each sidechain that exists, there is a publicly known key pair 24:22 with a, excuse me, public and private key that's known to everyone. 24:27 So everyone knows the private key. 24:29 And but because the rules of the software, there's extra rules on anything spent from it. 24:34 So when you spend money, you're just depositing to this, you're sending it to this address, 24:39 basically. It's not a fixed address. 24:44 But you, the software knows where to send the coins. 24:47 So you're sending the coins to this place. 24:48 And then the trick is the coins can only be withdrawn if they do this weird ceremony, which 24:53 is the three month thing. 24:54 Yeah, so there's so there's a. 24:57 So you guys made it as seamless as possible for the miners itself, to be able to incorporate Drivechains. The now there is a, you added a way if there is a, there's a lot of protecting of the miners and of the Drivechain. What do you call them? Channels that are open? Drivechain? What do you call them? 25:19 Oh, yeah, I mean, that's funny. We sort of call them slots. There's like 256 slots, an individual when you if you want to have a piece of software that you want, you can try to take slot number four, or so. And those are added, those are assigned kind of like soft forks with it's like a lot like BIP-9 activation, which is like how SegWit tried to be activated that one time when there was like BU hash rate versus SegWit. 25:48 And it was that kind of thing that was called BIP-9. Back in the day, that was a 95% miner signaling. And so we have like a GUI for this. But it's basically that same idea of assigning the to assigning a new piece of software to the slot. But that other than that, the main chain doesn't know what that software is doing. 26:09 So there's a lag of time that that is that was proposed. 26:39 Awesome. Um, yeah, I guess I don't want to get too technical here. I just I just know I know it's like, I think it's 26:51 Yeah, miners are protected. And there was a I think there was like a three month time span. 26:58 Yes. 27:00 Was that correct? 27:01 Yes. 27:02 Can you explain that? 27:04 So this is another source of misunderstanding, unfortunately, yes. So this is where I think it might be. It's kind of weird because a lot of this stuff is it's so the three month thing is for security purposes, but a regular user would almost certainly never need to actually do this. 27:22 So the people would walk this the coins across slowly would be like specialists that would be like people who own it would be like Eric Voorhees or Andreas Brecken or the people who run the exchanges. 27:32 And what that does is that that enforces this one to one peg. So you since this is the weakest part, it's the weakest part. Everything else is rock solid. Basically, there's only two there are two weaknesses in sidechain technology. 27:48 One is how do you know that the sidechain will even find any blocks because there's no block reward there. There's no like 50 new coins each time. 27:55 So you have to merge mining and just having default settings and having transaction fees on the sidechain will be enough. If that doesn't work, it's it bodes very poorly for Bitcoin itself. 28:09 When the subsidy runs down, it says it may warn us in advance of some new problem. But the big thing is that you cannot have people on the main chain care about what the sidechain is doing. 28:20 But given that on the sidechain money is changing hands, how do you know who the rightful owner is when it comes back? 28:28 So that's the weakest part. So since that was the weakest part, I forced it into this. It's kind of like letting someone out of prison through this giant series of gates that is very transparent. 28:39 And, you know, there's lots of cameras and there's there's like 13,150 gates and they have to slowly walk through each one. 28:48 So that there's no surprises with any way if something only gets through if basically there was unanimous consent that the hash reported by the sidechain and in the sidechain header and publicly announced as loudly as possible as tiny piece of information matches the 29:07 the conjectured one on the main chain. And that's that's what takes three months. But a regular user would never really need to do that. 29:14 They can just use any kind of atomic swap or they can use like, you know, side shift or they can use an exchange. 29:20 They would be able to swap sidechain coins for main chain coins and they would be basically at a one to one rate because of this alternative thing that, while slow, always credits you exactly. 29:32 However, many sidechains are being moved across 48 sidechains destroyed, 48 BTC now given to the new main chain owners. So that's always one to one. 29:44 How do you how do you plan on garnering support from miners? 29:50 Well, I mean, I think... 29:51 Is there an economic incentive for them to merge mine? 29:55 Yeah, well, I think there is. Yeah. 29:58 Drivechain is a new soft fork of BTC. So theoretically, it would have to be enforced by either miners or nodes or, you know, have to be UASF or BIP9 activated or something in order to work. 30:14 As to how, you know, I don't know why miners wouldn't like it, because part of what Drivechain does is it gives Bitcoin the property of every other cryptocurrency potentially. 30:29 So if you wanted to have Bitcoin do what Zcash does or even what Ethereum does or what Monero does, you could have it do that. 30:38 You would think that would make the price of Bitcoin go up. 30:40 But the other thing is that there is the way that Drivechain does merge mining. 30:45 It just automatically gives all miners all of the transaction fees paid on the main chain and all the sidechains. 30:52 And it gives them to all the miners in BTC on the main chain. 30:56 They don't even get – if the sidechain earns four sidechain coins, sidechain BTC in its block, that is paid to a different person who pays four BTC out on the main chain. 31:11 So it's all without them doing really any work. Miners don't have to run any sidechain nodes if they don't want to. 31:20 Probably the pools would, just so they can see what's going on. I mean, I don't know if that even matters. 31:26 But miners don't have to do any more work, and they just collect more – they collect all the transaction fees. 31:32 So it would seem to be free money for them. 31:35 And it would also try to put an end to all of this political squabbling that I think has dramatically set everything back, set Bitcoin back by years. 31:45 So how can we help you promote or help make this happen? 31:51 Because it seems like everyone that comes – all these technocrats that come into these chains and these open source developers, everyone thinks that they know what's best for the network. 32:04 And they want to impose that perspective on the rest. 32:07 And that ego is really the source of all these problems. 32:13 And my question is, well, what can we do? I have two questions for you. 32:17 What can we do to help you promote sidechains? 32:22 And why is it that they don't want to experiment with scaling? 32:30 Yeah, well, that's – it is interesting you bring that up about the – that most people have a point of view in Bitcoin that just goes something like, well, they think that they're right. 32:42 And so in particular, in the scaling debate, there was basically – there was a theory or whatever you want to call it for most people that the small block position was right and that everything else, the large block position was a kind of contaminant. 32:58 And you had to keep it far away from everyone. You had to be – that was the root of having it be designated as off topic on rBitcoin and on BitcoinTalk.org. 33:13 And so that is very different from what Drivechain is. Drivechain is sort of like saying no matter how bad this idea is, wouldn't you rather have it inside the BTC family? 33:28 Let's just – and then you can just cheer all the ideas on because if any of them were good, then it helps BTC. 33:36 So that's – it is a big difference. 33:40 I don't know. I think one – there are a lot of reasons why people aren't interested in experimenting. 33:46 One, I think it's just because there's been so much success already, and a lot of it is attributed to the maintaining the small block. 33:57 So a lot of people say, look, BTC is the number one coin. Stuff has been going great. 34:03 There are a lot of people out there who are just like ultra wealthy, and they want to put some of their money in BTC because they don't want their accounts to be frozen and things. 34:12 So a lot of people are happy to use it as a kind of super elitist bank that is not for payments, like a Swiss bank. 34:21 Just another Swiss bank. 34:23 The new meme is called it's a savings technology. I think that's so ridiculous. 34:29 I mean because if you save money, it's for two reasons. It's to get limited time offers, meaning that you're waiting for things that are going to be on sale at a limited time. 34:42 In other words, you have to be ready to divest right away. 34:46 As soon as the deal comes into the market, and the most liquid good is money. 34:51 So if you're going to have good money, you can't be having the possibility of being stuck in a mempool for hours or maybe even days. 35:00 And having giant transaction fees that you don't even know how much you're going to end up paying until you're at the mempool. 35:07 And so this whole idea of just having a savings technology really, to me, it's kind of trite. 35:13 It needs to be a good savings technology. It needs to also be easy to spend. That's my perspective. 35:21 Well, I think that if I can, I don't know to what extent I can. I'm very different from a lot of the BTC people. 35:27 But I think to the extent that I could speak for where their head is at, is I think they do think they have a lot of these people who are like. 35:36 Let's say you've got someone who's got $100 million and they say, you know what, I'd like to put $5 million in BTC. 35:44 And I'm going to do that with one transaction. And then that way, if anything bad happens to me, I know that I can always, I'll be okay. 35:52 Because I can flee the country that I'm in and I can get my BTC somewhere. 35:57 And then I'll at least have $5 million and that'll be great. 36:02 And I'll never have to go back to working a job or whatever. So those people just think, well, I just want this to be like a super secure bank. 36:09 I don't want anyone messing around with it or turning it into something else. 36:13 And we just want to go for that one customer. So it's kind of like only operating. It's like an airline that only sells first class seats. 36:22 Yeah, it doesn't even make sense because when you need it the most, you won't be able to take out your money when that rainy day comes. 36:31 You might have obstacles to take out that money. 36:33 They have in mind that it's just going to be like $5 million. Well, a lot of these people are, of course, people just chasing the price action. 36:39 So those people are, there's nothing saving those people. Those people will be misled into every weird idea until they lose any of the money that they accidentally make by being in BTC. 36:51 But a lot of the core users, well, we have people who are using it for stuff like online drug transactions, a capital flight, whatever, tax evasion. 37:02 So there is obviously that going on as far as use. But the investors, I think they have in mind like one $5 million transaction in and then sometime in the future, one $5 million transaction out. 37:18 They see it as a kind of like buying a bunker or something like that. I don't know. 37:22 Again, with Drivechain, it's like we should sell all the seats to everyone and we should have first class and business class and economy. 37:31 Everything else just has one chain where it's a one size fits all, where you just kind of hope that everyone should be in economy or whatever. I don't know. 37:41 But that's just kind of what I think the BTC point is. But I'm very different from many BTCers, so I don't know to what extent I'm representative of that. 37:51 So that's kind of, I think, why they're not so experimental minded. They're like, we're this kind of, I don't know if even conservative is the right word. 38:03 We're this kind of like, we've been here forever. We're like the bank that's been around for like 2,000 years in Switzerland or Italy or something. 38:12 And we're going to be here for 2,000 more years and some upstart is telling us to do this or that and we're just not going to listen to them. 38:20 So I think that's kind of what they think about. And part of it is just that if something works for a long time, people just think, oh, this is because we did that. 38:30 This is because we listened to whoever, XYZ person, and they must be right about everything, even about things like music and diet and everything. 38:45 I deserve to have earned all this money because of how great I am. And so then everyone just kind of becomes a crazy person. 38:53 But BTC has been number one the whole time, so it's hard to argue that. I think it would be easier if the price were down or if fees were up again. 39:03 I think eventually, if there was a lot of pain and misery on BTC, the search for new ideas would become more frantic at that point. 39:14 Yeah, it seems to me like you're waiting for them to… 39:18 We are still working on it and tinkering on it. So it's not as though it was finished and we're just like waiting around. 39:25 We've been working on it the whole time. The original release was a prototype two years ago. It's still, in my opinion, it's unfinished. 39:36 So we have to finish it first, although it's very, very close to being completely finished, I think. 39:43 A lot of our work is not on the main chain. We wrote this other thing, a sidechain template. 39:48 So it'd be very easy to swap in new stuff, put in Zcash stuff, put in whatever you want, Namecoin stuff, put in large block, put in BCH, put in BSV stuff. 40:02 So we did a lot of work on that for a while because the way Drivechain works cannot really be understood by only looking at what it does on the main chain work of it. 40:16 Even though Drivechain is this idea for BTC, what it does on BTC would be very confusing. 40:23 It would be like if you built a radio, but you only built one of them. 40:27 It's doing a lot of stuff with the antenna, but without two radios, you really wouldn't get what was supposed to be happening at all. 40:35 If you gave it to someone who had never seen or heard of radio technology and you only gave them one radio, if you gave them two radios, any layperson would figure it out. 40:45 They'd be like, oh, this is cool. You can talk to someone from far away. That's awesome. 40:50 That's why we did a lot of work on making the sidechain template look flashy. 40:55 It was really important for me to make it explain what was going on because there were so many misconceptions in the BTC community about how Drivechain works. 41:06 Most people will criticize it, but they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. 41:11 They say stuff that's not even close to true. 41:14 I wanted it to be so that both pieces of software had a nice GUI that showed people just exactly what was happening every step of the way so that they would just know how it worked much better than the people who – 41:30 Giacomo Zucco, Peter Todd, and the other people who have criticized it. 41:34 Just any random user would just see that those people had no idea what they were talking about and still don't. 41:43 I like the analogy you used to use regarding Bitcoin being in different parties at the same time or different rooms. 41:51 Maybe you can allude to that. 41:53 Yes. 41:54 If the hot sidechains would allow you to do this experiment. 41:58 It's very similar to the point about everyone flying first class or everyone flying economy or having a plane where they're all mixed together. 42:06 The usual sense in which I do that metaphor of the party is the idea of a hard fork being problematic. 42:15 So if you ever throw a big party, sometimes people get – they clump in some room for some reason. 42:23 It's the kitchen because the refrigerator is there, or there's like a narrow hallway, but there's still enough space for all the people who are there. 42:29 It depends, but people clump in some area, and then new people will show up only to talk to those people. 42:35 And then they'll make little groups. 42:37 So it clumps up. 42:39 It clumps as a gravity. 42:41 You get little stuff, and then people attract other people. 42:44 So they're all in one room, and you can't easily just get people to say – you can't say, look, everyone, it's much better. 42:50 Why don't we all go to the other room? 42:52 Why don't we go to the living room? 42:53 Why don't we go to the patio outside? 42:55 You can't really do that. 42:57 You have to just let the party just do its thing. 43:00 So that's this metaphor of the hard fork being very difficult. 43:04 Hard fork is like someone just saying, you know, we're all going to the patio, 43:09 but then there has to be those few people who walk out first, and then basically other people don't join them. 43:15 So then they have to come back. 43:17 They have to eventually come back inside, and then they've embarrassed themselves. 43:22 So I think that's similar to the stigma and the sheer amount of work you have to do if you want to make the hard fork succeed. 43:31 So the hard fork is very difficult to make the hard fork succeed. 43:34 But with Drivechain, it's just saying everyone is at the same – everyone is sort of in the same room, 43:40 even though they – some people prefer to be in one room. 43:42 They can talk to people in a different room, or so everyone is in the same coin. 43:46 They don't have to leave to be – if you want to talk to someone on the patio, 43:49 you can just like use telekinesis or something. 43:52 That's kind of like – what Drivechain does is it undoes. 43:57 It says that you don't need to do hard forks if you want to make redesigns. 44:01 So if you want to increase the block size, if you want to add turn-complete scripting, 44:06 if you want to do whatever, ring signatures, you don't need to make everyone redo what their node is doing. 44:14 You just have this new zone, and then other people can go there if they like. 44:18 But they're still part of the same – so it kind of lets you try going out onto the porch, 44:23 but coming back without ever being embarrassed. 44:25 It's like secretly you're in both places at once or something. 44:29 Yeah, well, from my perspective, I was kicked out of the party, me and a bunch of people, 44:34 because yeah, we wanted to play a certain music in a room. 44:38 Yeah, exactly. 44:40 They told us, you just get out of the house. 44:42 So we're like, okay, I guess party at the next door. 44:46 And it seems like everyone that's next door having an awesome party may not be as big of a party. 44:52 Exactly. 44:53 Really wants you to come out and party with us. 44:56 Yeah, sure, of course. Who doesn't want the party to be bigger? 44:58 Yeah, so let's talk about the other parties. 45:01 So what do you think about the – let's go with the extreme example, the other party, 45:06 which is like they actually want to cross the street because – and that's BSV, right? 45:10 They want to cross the street, and they are throwing a party. 45:14 Yeah, they're making it weird, and they don't care who knows it. 45:17 They're having a lot of fun. 45:18 Of course, yeah. 45:20 So could you see like Drivechains being experimented on on BSV? 45:28 I think they would be more open to it actually. 45:30 Yeah, well, sort of why, but I'm not sure really that that's the case. 45:34 I mean one reason is that there's already a view that BSV can like do everything again. 45:41 So it's similar to what happened with BTC where they're just like we're right about everything, 45:48 and everyone else is wrong. 45:51 And if you take that point of view in life, you will eventually collide with something very painfully, 46:00 but who knows when. 46:02 But BSV has said like – so I was talking to Dan Krawitz who is an awesome guy, 46:08 but I told him stuff like well, you know, he was like BSV can do everything. 46:12 And I said well, what about small blocks? 46:14 Can it do small blocks? 46:16 And I was like oh, got you there. 46:17 And he's like well, we don't want those people. 46:20 Those people are the worst, and we don't like them. 46:24 So we don't want them in our party. 46:27 The Drivechain thing is sort of like everyone can find a place. 46:36 You can't just kick people out just because you don't like what they believe. 46:41 Man, I really want the party that you're proposing to happen. 46:45 Gosh. 46:46 Yeah, I know. 46:47 Yeah, me too. 46:49 Well, I mean, again, part of it though has been there hasn't – well, we've still been working on it the whole time. 46:54 So I don't like to bother people. 46:55 There's so much vaporware in the space. 46:58 Isn't it just horrible? 47:00 Horrible. 47:01 Horrible, yeah. 47:02 So it's like I'm not going to bother people until we have this software release. 47:06 So now we have some, but again, it's not perfect. 47:09 And then when you have one, obviously we're working on the next one. 47:14 So I'm always ashamed of the current release because we're working on these new things. 47:19 So I never want to like say oh, download this because it's like – 47:23 Paul, perfection is the enemy of good. 47:25 I know. 47:26 I mean, look, and like Ford said, if it were up to the engineers at the Ford company, cars would never leave the assembly line. 47:34 Yeah. 47:35 You're not – you had the opportunity to scam people with an ICO. 47:41 And you're one of the guys that actually had an actual claim to – 47:47 I know. 47:48 It was like a finished thing. 47:49 You actually could have done that. 47:51 Isn't that crazy? 47:52 It is pretty crazy. 47:54 Oh, and guess what? 47:55 Augur now classifies itself as DeFi. 47:58 So now Augur is taking the whole DeFi – 48:01 Of course. 48:02 Yeah. 48:03 I mean there's an irony though, which is that Augur did their crowd sale. 48:09 Well, they only got like – they got something like $3 or $4 million, a lot of which I think was just like recycled. 48:15 Like they had the ringers pay themselves through the crowd sale. 48:20 Who knows if that's the case or not, but that's how people were doing it back when it started. 48:24 They didn't actually get a lot of money, and actually it was so long ago that it's not really – 48:32 if you see how much BTC, if you price it in BTC or ETH, it actually hasn't actually gained in value I think. 48:41 It depends a lot on whether or not you use BTC or ETH or how you combine the two based on the ratio of the crowd sale. 48:47 But the point is anyone who just had BTC or ETH has done very well, but that obviously includes me. 48:54 So it hasn't really – what I'm trying to say is actually I wouldn't have profited by even doing the ICO, 49:02 because the money – or what I should say is the ICO wouldn't have added any value to anyone. 49:11 I could have just taken all this money and just left, and then that would have been like – 49:15 That would have been the end of you. 49:16 Millions of dollars of profit, however you want to call that. 49:20 But the projects have not actually achieved a return commensurate with the risk, 49:26 especially when asking people to donate their Bitcoin, the precious Bitcoin which was about to go up, 49:34 because that was a long time ago. 49:36 But yeah, I could have done a lot of things like that. 49:38 I still probably could. Who knows? 49:41 But that's not really the point of the project. 49:45 If you watch – I know you were there at Anarchapulco 2018 when I gave the talk on Futarki and Hivemind, 49:56 which is on the Bitcoin Hivemind site. 49:59 On the front page. So that's really what got me into all of this in the first place, and so doing an ICO would not have helped at all. 50:07 The ICO is actually extremely detrimental, in my opinion, to progress, actually, because people get a big distraction. 50:15 They have all the money, and then you attract really the wrong kind of people, and then there's a lot of pressure to just rush something out. 50:23 Whereas we have been taking our time. I certainly think you're right that I'm a little bit too much of a perfectionist. 50:30 But what I would say is that I am just interested in working on the idea, so that's an opportunity for you in the audience. 50:40 You can say, I'm not opposed to people borrowing the ideas. It's all open source code. 50:48 You can kind of keep an eye on it and just say, you can do your own thing. 50:56 You can shoot me a message and see if you want to be the – because there are definitely different types of people, right? 51:01 There's like the CEO type of person who is doing this. They're on this mission 24-7. 51:07 They get up in the morning. They make like a to-do list. They do this sort of thing. 51:11 Then there's people who are more like me and Dan Krawitz where we're like reading Lord of the Rings for some reason. 51:16 Our subconscious told us to, and we don't know why. 51:19 Somewhere in there is lurking a great idea that has blockchain ID somehow, and we've got our weird papers around. 51:26 And we're just like, and then we stay up until 5 a.m. writing a little piece of code, and then we just give up on it. 51:33 We're doing weird stuff, talking to people on podcasts, which is not productive. 51:40 So there are very different people, and I'm definitely more of the academic. 51:44 In academia, it's considered extremely normal for a project to be delayed by two or four years. It's very normal. 51:52 A CEO would never. It couldn't be delayed like a single day basically. 51:56 But in academia, if you're working on this paper, and you don't bother people until it's perfect, 52:03 and it never gets published until it's gone through all this peer review, and a lot of that peer review is even before peer review. 52:08 You send it around. You get memos from people. You get comments. You travel to conferences. 52:14 So it takes a very long time, and it's just supposed to be perfect. 52:17 There's not supposed to be any errors, and that is a case of just perfect is slow. 52:24 So that's kind of a little bit more of my personality. I'm not completely, but I'm mostly that type of person. 52:30 So really quick, if you could give everyone just a quick background. 52:34 I didn't think it was necessary at the beginning of this because I'm a champion of proof of work, and your work proves itself. 52:40 So if you can give them a little bit of your academic background so that they understand where you're coming from with all this. 52:45 Yeah, well, I have undergraduate degrees in economics and psychology, and then I have a master's degree. 52:54 I have an MBA in finance, concentrated in finance, and have a master's of science in a branch of math called operations research. 53:04 And then I worked at the Yale University Department of Economics for two and a half years. 53:09 The guy I worked for, William Nordhaus, won the Nobel Prize in 2018, and he became president of the AEA while I was working for him, which is almost even – it's a pretty big honor as well. 53:23 In the econ community, it's a big deal. To the layperson, obviously, the Nobel Prize is a big deal. 53:29 But yeah, so I did that, and while I was there, I was sort of working on Bitcoin and Truthcoin, what became Bitcoin Hivemind, the prediction markets project. 53:41 So then after that, I started working on Bitcoin crypto full time. 53:48 Okay, so now I'm going to ask you a question that I have no other choice but to ask. 53:54 And given that we've seen this power struggle within Bitcoin's history, and the fact that you're trying to mediate this power struggle for control, my question is, is Bitcoin Byzantine fault tolerant? 54:17 Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think there is a – Byzantine fault tolerant, I think the answer would be yes. 54:27 But all this is pitched from an ancient game theory question, where there are these two generals on a hill, and they're trying to send messages to each other. 54:35 Bitcoin is actually pretty different from – people are really, really interested in this Byzantine generals problem ever since Bitcoin came around. 54:44 Let me follow up with one more question. 54:47 Okay, sure. 54:49 One more question. Doesn't it mean then that anyone that wants to control the Bitcoin protocol is an ipso facto malicious actor? A Byzantine general that wants to take over? 55:02 Yeah, I would say it depends on what they can do if they take over. But yeah, I would certainly say that – well, I would say that Bitcoin arose to solve a certain problem. 55:14 The problem was Liberty Reserve, Eagle, etc. being closed down. So they were like, okay, we'll make it so it's really, really hard to close down, because if you just close down some nodes, more nodes start up. 55:24 And even if you close down almost all of them, now as long as one node survives, and people would make sure that it did, they can regenerate the entire network. 55:34 Now the question is if you do that, how do you know that person is being honest about who owns what coins? 55:44 And then that's the hash linked list idea, and then how do you know that people won't tamper with that? That's the proof of work idea. 55:52 So right now the goal for Drivechains is to have a contest, a market driven contest over protocol development. 56:10 Well, okay, so that's interesting. I mean, there's a theory. The way Drivechain is set up is theoretically it should be the case that as long as the sidechain is adding value to Bitcoin, it should be secure. 56:24 So if the sidechain is popular, it should be secure. So that's kind of this risk that it won't be. 56:28 But I think that just means, the way I look at that is that the sidechains are like entrepreneurs. They have creators who want them to succeed, and if they do, then the creators get prestige, same as any other open source software. 56:44 And they may get money, and they probably would just eventually by way of being well regarded and getting grants and things, but who knows. 56:56 It could go however they like. They could do something like Amory is doing with their sidechain and say that they're going to collect some amount of the economic activity over there. 57:03 The whole point is they can do whatever they like, and if they succeed, then the project succeeds, and then if they fail, it fails. 57:13 But the threat of failure is exactly what enforces quality control. 57:21 So I would imagine that there wouldn't be very many sidechains because people would be afraid. They wouldn't succeed unless they were really needed. 57:28 So you have BTC, and then you would have something like a large block sidechain because there's a lot of people who wanted that. 57:34 You'd probably have like a privacy sidechain because there's a lot of people who wanted that. 57:38 But if people make a sidechain that's sort of frivolous, probably it wouldn't do well, and it would probably have the security slowly unwind and possibly collapse. 57:51 And so in that sense, it's kind of market driven. It's a lot like an entrepreneur. You need users. 57:58 You need blood pumping through this system in order for it to be alive. 58:04 Otherwise, it's a kind of niche chain, right? It sort of says, if this isn't good enough, then destroy it and make room for something new. 58:14 So what are you going to do, Paul? What are you going to do with, I mean, you, pardon me. 58:18 We're focused on finishing it, as I said. So I want to finish it first. 58:24 And then, obviously, I will reopen the conversation with BTC. 58:33 Although a lot of people in BTC, as I've mentioned, I've talked to a lot of these people many times over the years and ever. 58:41 And a lot of them think the idea is too experimental. So I don't know exactly what will happen then. 58:46 But I would like to finish it first because a lot of the conversation is dragged down by misunderstanding of what it does. 58:55 And if the software exists and it has a GUI and you can see what happens, a lot of those misunderstandings would be impossible. 59:04 But it's like with Bitcoin. I didn't really understand how Bitcoin worked at all until I used it. 59:09 I think a lot of people have that point of view. I had no idea what was going on. 59:12 When I first used Bitcoin, I thought it was like BitTorrent or something. It is like BitTorrent. 59:18 But I thought you had to like leave this window open to get the six required confirmations. 59:25 And so I left it open until I had six confirmations for my transaction. 59:29 And then I closed the window and then I like went to sleep or whatever. 59:33 And I opened it the next day and it has like, you know, whatever, 150 confirmations or something. 59:38 And you're like, what the heck? How did I get all these confirmations? 59:39 So I knew nothing about how it worked, even though I had researched it a lot, even before installing it on my computer. 59:46 It's not until you really use something that you actually understand anything about it. 59:51 So that's what I wanted to focus on is finishing it first. 59:56 I think it has extremely interesting and bizarre implications for like BSV and BCH. 1:00:02 Like if BTC adopted this and there was a BCH sidechain, like wouldn't that be like the worst thing? 1:00:09 Like one of the worst things that could possibly happen to BCH. 1:00:12 Like I would think, I would guess so, but I don't know. 1:00:16 It seems as though BTC isn't interested in even doing that. 1:00:20 But I don't know to what extent people are. 1:00:23 Wouldn't you say that would be more likely for, I think it would be more likely for Drivechains to be adopted by Bitcoin SV, by BSV. 1:00:34 And for something, I don't know. It just seems to me like they gravitate towards it. 1:00:39 Well, BSV likes when people do stuff on top of the protocol. 1:00:45 This is a software, this is a protocol change. 1:00:48 You could probably sort of massage it into a different form or something like that. 1:00:55 But you know, I don't know. 1:00:57 BSV has weird, its own weird hangups on sidechains because of, first of all because of Blockstream using the sidechain's word to describe the liquid multi-signature wallet. 1:01:09 So they're misdescribing, they're kind of like taking over the sidechain word to some extent. 1:01:15 No, no, no. I say we reclaim it because that is not a sidechain. 1:01:21 That is, I call liquid a multi-signature wallet. That's what I call it. 1:01:26 That is right. Yeah, well me too. 1:01:28 So we have that problem. 1:01:32 But then we also have like, you know, Craig S. Wright has made all these comments about sidechains like divide the hash power and stuff. 1:01:37 I don't even know what he's talking about and none of that's true of Drivechain at all. 1:01:42 But there have been, all I'm saying is I'm not sure that that's, you may be right or you may be wrong. 1:01:47 I don't know what BSV would want to use Drivechain for if it already has an unlimited block size. 1:01:52 It would instead want to use it for stuff like Zcash type stuff or like Namecoin type stuff. 1:01:59 It would then not really, because you wouldn't, no one on BSV would want to make like a small block sidechain. 1:02:05 Yeah, that wouldn't make sense. 1:02:07 That wouldn't make any sense. 1:02:09 So the better thing is to have the small block mainchain and then have progressively larger blocks on the higher level Drivechain scheme. 1:02:19 Or have lots of big block sidechains on one small block mainchain. 1:02:25 So that makes a little more sense, but I don't know. 1:02:28 What about Bitcoin Cash? 1:02:31 There's a lot of Bitcoin cashers that really like Drivechains as well. 1:02:36 Yeah, well they could. 1:02:38 That's a party that's happening next door. 1:02:40 It is. 1:02:42 I mean they could use you right now. 1:02:44 I know, yeah. 1:02:46 Well one thing that's funny, the one thing that Drivechain I don't think helps with is if you want one, 1:02:52 you wouldn't have like, you have like the mainchain which pays 0% to Omnistash and then the sidechain pays 8% to Omnistash. 1:03:01 I don't know if that would help resolve that particular dispute over what the blockchain's rules should be, 1:03:06 which is kind of ironic because in a way that proves just how silly the whole thing is. 1:03:10 But yeah, I don't know. 1:03:13 It's open source. 1:03:15 I'd be happy if anyone stole it. 1:03:18 A lot of the stuff that we do is just managing the databases and the GUI. 1:03:23 A lot of the stuff we do is on the sidechain template, most of the work. 1:03:27 That sidechain template, that's the same no matter what Drivechain is on. 1:03:32 You know what I mean? 1:03:34 All those sidechains could be the same software even though they'd be different networks. 1:03:38 Do you understand what I'm saying? 1:03:40 If someone forks the sidechain template to make Zcash the Drivechain, 1:03:44 then someone could take that software and they could put it on the BTC Drivechain world 1:03:49 and then if there's BSV Drivechain also, they can use the exact same software, it would be a different network. 1:03:54 That's so cool. 1:03:56 Most of our work is completely reusable with that modular piece over there. 1:04:00 As for the changes to the mainchain, on Bitcoin this is BIP300/301. 1:04:07 Those are the sidechains, that's Drivechain and Blind Merged Mining. 1:04:11 You'd have to remake those changes on BCH and BSV. 1:04:16 It's all open source, so anyone could do it. 1:04:19 But there have been a lot of extremely frivolous changes. 1:04:24 BCH is much more different. 1:04:25 BSV is closer to what BTC is right now, the code, than BCH is. 1:04:33 I'm not exactly sure why. 1:04:36 There's obviously a lot of guesses like BSV deleted a lot of crazy stuff that BCH did. 1:04:41 But for whatever reason, BSV is a lot closer. 1:04:45 There's been a lot of pointless style changes in BCH. 1:04:50 Stuff has moved down to different lines, different formatting. 1:04:56 Those types of things just make it very difficult for BCH to copy stuff that is invented for BTC for no reason. 1:05:05 Instead, it could be a lot easier. 1:05:07 But that being said, it is all open source. 1:05:10 It would be a lot of work. 1:05:13 I don't know how much work it would be, but the point is it wouldn't be zero amount of work. 1:05:17 So then I'd have to decide if I want to do it personally. 1:05:20 But it is open source. 1:05:22 Do you understand what I'm trying to say? 1:05:24 Yeah, of course. 1:05:26 If I were to port it, 300 and 301 would have to be ported from BTC to BCH. 1:05:31 That would take some amount of work. 1:05:33 I don't know if I should do it. 1:05:35 Obviously, I'd be happy to, and I'm sure Patrick Kryptax would also be happy to talk to someone who's doing that. 1:05:43 We may at some point do it. 1:05:45 I don't know. 1:05:47 That would be what they'd have to do. 1:05:49 Well, who knows what's going to happen with Bitcoin Cash now. 1:05:53 Right, exactly. 1:05:55 Unfortunately, they're a little distracted at the moment, right? 1:05:57 Yeah. 1:05:59 I mean, you are really the... 1:06:01 I see Drivechains as the real hope for BTC. 1:06:05 I know, that's how I feel too. 1:06:08 The two of us are the only ones who agree. 1:06:12 I just don't understand. 1:06:14 They have a manifest destiny. 1:06:15 They just think that everything is going great, and it will continue to go great forever. 1:06:20 In a way, they're right though, because think about it. 1:06:23 Even if they can just say that Drivechain sucks forever, and Drivechain is open source. 1:06:27 So then when they finally hit that moment where everyone has said, 1:06:31 we don't need to do anything, and everything sucks, Drivechain sucks, whatever. 1:06:36 They hit that moment where they're like, oh no, we really, really need this. 1:06:40 They can just take it, and then they'll only have been wrong for like 24 hours. 1:06:43 And then they'll be back on the path to success. 1:06:47 So in a way, they're right. 1:06:49 They just need to make BTC prestigious, and that will attract people to build technology on it. 1:06:55 But certainly, you eventually reach a point where the community becomes so irrational that it cannot succeed. 1:07:03 But I don't think the BTC has reached that point yet. 1:07:06 But who knows? 1:07:08 It's not moving in the right direction, but it's still pretty rational. 1:07:12 Throughout this whole conversation, and I've seen you emphasize the community a lot, 1:07:18 and the open source developers a lot. 1:07:20 Whereas I personally emphasize miners, and market drivers more. 1:07:27 I think that you're hoping that they will realize that, 1:07:33 oh my gosh, we need to figure something else out, because this is not working. 1:07:37 My hope for Drivechains is that the miners feel enough economic pressure 1:07:49 to move the open source developers and the community to actually accept Drivechains. 1:07:56 I always put the miner before the developers. 1:08:00 Well, you can. 1:08:01 I mean, it's funny that we could theoretically release a version of Drivechain that is like a UASF, 1:08:14 or a UASF that activates Drivechain on BTC, or a BIP-9 that activates Drivechain. 1:08:22 I could just call, I only know two people who are miners, but they're pretty big miners. 1:08:27 So I could just message them, and I could say, okay, Drivechain is done. 1:08:31 Why don't you just activate Drivechain before Schnorr, because who knows, 1:08:36 or taproot Schnorr, who knows when that is going to activate, but this is now ready. 1:08:42 And they could just do that, and they could just completely circumvent. 1:08:45 But I highly doubt that they would do that. 1:08:48 It could completely circumvent Bitcoin Core, and Vladimir, and all that other stuff. 1:08:52 I highly doubt that would happen, but it's completely possible. 1:08:58 That's theoretically possible. 1:09:00 Nothing stops that from happening. 1:09:02 Yeah, it's just, it seems like... 1:09:04 That would be weird. 1:09:06 It bothers me. 1:09:08 It really does bother me that there's so much emphasis on politics when there shouldn't be. 1:09:18 Yeah, there should just be a market-driven contest. 1:09:22 Where we all experiment, and what is most profitable is what extends the ledger eventually. 1:09:34 Yeah, well I think part of the weird problem of Drivechain is it's almost... 1:09:40 It's very different, and that makes it hard to explain. 1:09:44 But one of its disadvantages is that it gives the large blockers what they want. 1:09:49 And so the people in the small block BTC world are like, whoa, whoa, this must be bad somehow. 1:09:56 I mean the whole point of it is that it gives people what they want without harming the existing people. 1:10:03 So that's kind of like the whole point. 1:10:05 But a lot of people will just think this is a sneaky, sneaky way of getting the block size increase in. 1:10:10 Since the block size increase is evil and contaminant, we need to work extra hard to purge Drivechain from the lands. 1:10:19 So I think that is a weird kind of thing that has happened with it. 1:10:25 Because it gives the large blockers what they want, it would make Roger Vier happy. 1:10:30 We can't have that, you know. 1:10:32 I think that's kind of a lot of people's thought process, which is funny because the whole point is to make everyone happy. 1:10:39 If you try to make everyone happy, then you have these two groups of people and they both say, how dare you side with them. 1:10:44 And they just throw up their hands and they both walk out on you basically. 1:10:47 That's the challenge. 1:10:49 Wow. 1:10:51 So, okay. 1:10:53 So I assume you're keeping it close to the chest as to how you're actually going to implement or try to implement Drivechains on BTC, correct? 1:11:03 Or do you have an open plan? 1:11:05 I don't know about that. 1:11:07 I mean I have a lot of random ideas that would be kind of dangerous and sort of fun maybe. 1:11:11 But basically the main plan is pretty transparent. 1:11:16 As I just said, we're still just focused on finishing it. 1:11:19 And then I guess the next move is to reopen the conversation and say look, will you actually just try to use it before commenting on how it works or whatever. 1:11:34 Because here it is. 1:11:36 You can look at it. 1:11:37 And I would like to have some kind of thumbs up, thumbs down from the BTC community before figuring out what to do next. 1:11:52 Because I have thought about it. 1:11:54 If they get the thumbs up, then it's a thumbs up. 1:11:56 But if it's a thumbs down, then it will depend on why it was a thumbs down. 1:12:01 If it's a thumbs down for the absolute dumbest reasons possible, which is some of what has happened in the past, then I might do this or that. 1:12:12 Is there a date in mind? 1:12:15 Is there a long term you're done with it? 1:12:19 I wish everyone would like to know. 1:12:21 I would like to know myself personally. 1:12:23 I would say this though. 1:12:25 I think the sidechain template is on its very last version right now. 1:12:33 So when that version is out, it should be finished, which is a crazy thing to even say. 1:12:39 So it would be finished, finished. 1:12:40 And the BIP300-301 mainchain, that needs at least one more version of work. 1:12:50 And then that will be done. 1:12:52 So I think probably you could say that, I don't know if I'm cursing myself here, but probably by before November 1st, the whole Drivechain would be finished. 1:13:05 And at that point, I would probably edit the BIP300-301 to make sure that both are perfectly accurate. 1:13:13 And so that would be that. 1:13:17 And then it would be done. 1:13:19 And then I would have emailed, probably have sent some kind of email to BitDevs and maybe talked to some people I know, like in person or over the phone. 1:13:29 No, you're not cursing yourself at all. 1:13:33 We're giving you the vigilante blessing. 1:13:35 Yeah, okay. 1:13:37 To your point though, which is very interesting, which is about timing. 1:13:40 Who the heck knows? 1:13:42 Because look how long it took. 1:13:44 SegWit was October 2016 was when the software was released. 1:13:48 Then it wasn't activated until August 2017. 1:13:52 And since then, there's been no SoftFork upgrade. 1:13:56 And now the one that has been finished, Taproot. 1:14:02 I forget the exact month now because COVID is like one long day, right? 1:14:07 It's just like this one weird day that just goes on forever. 1:14:10 I don't remember when, but at some point they finished it this year. 1:14:13 And still, there's just this long conversation. 1:14:16 Even the conversation about how to begin activating it is still ongoing. 1:14:21 Some people think it could take years to even activate. 1:14:23 And then Drivechain would have to be, you would think it must be after that. 1:14:28 So one interesting question is, is BTC even able to do SoftFork upgrades anymore? 1:14:37 Like what evidence is there that they can? 1:14:41 We haven't done one since October 2017. 1:14:44 Excuse me, October 2016, the software was released and then activated in 2017. 1:14:48 That was a long time ago. 1:14:49 And even then, there was a long time between SegWit and the ones that were December 2015 or something. 1:14:57 So there used to be these SoftFork protocol upgrades like all the time. 1:15:01 But that hasn't been in the last four years. 1:15:03 Okay, so let's talk about, really quick, I just want to get your take on the Lightning Network. 1:15:12 What do you see happening? What's going on? What do you expect? 1:15:18 Well, I think the Lightning Network is a really good idea. It's been totally overhyped to the point where 1:15:25 it's not healthy for any of the people working on Lightning. 1:15:30 Because now they have these giant expectations hung over them, some of which are unmeetable criteria. 1:15:37 I call it an innovation funnel. Everything goes, the future of Bitcoin rests on Lightning working. 1:15:45 And that's just too much pressure. 1:15:47 The joke I make is that it's like a messiah type thing, the saviour. Lightning is the saviour, it will fix everything. 1:15:53 So Lightning is a great idea. There's been huge, immense progress. 1:15:58 A lot of stuff that I thought would be a big problem in the past has been totally fixed in a completely different way. 1:16:05 A lot of stuff is good. 1:16:07 There are some fundamental issues with the Lightning Network that, by design, mean it can't do everything. 1:16:15 One is that you need at least one Layer 1 transaction to onboard people to the Lightning Network. 1:16:21 And in practice, you probably need many more than one, but you need at least one. There's no getting around it. 1:16:28 And that means that Lightning doesn't really do anything for onboarding. 1:16:32 Because think about it, to onboard people to Layer 1, you need a one Layer 1 transaction. 1:16:36 So it's kind of the same thing. So it does not do onboarding at all. 1:16:39 That's like a big scaling problem with it. 1:16:42 As far as payments, Lightning is perfect when both people are online and connected to each other face to face. 1:16:48 So if you're buying something in a store, it's great, because instant, both of you are connected. 1:16:55 So that's great. You don't have to worry about confirmations at all. 1:16:59 It's very bad when one of the people is asleep, because in order to receive money, 1:17:05 you need to interact with them and sign a message with your private key. 1:17:09 So you can't receive money unless you have a live connection to them. 1:17:15 And everything's in like a hot wallet. It's very stressful. 1:17:19 There's probably no way, I don't know what fees the routing people will have to charge 1:17:25 in order to generate a return on the capital it's going to take to just facilitate liquidity. 1:17:34 So Lightning has a lot of problems. 1:17:36 I think it's better if it's not thought of as a scaling technology at all, which is very different. 1:17:41 My point of view is obviously very different from most people who think of it as the layer two, the scaling technology. 1:17:50 But it doesn't help with onboarding and it doesn't help with many different types of transactions. 1:17:54 So how can it, I don't, the people who originally designed it, I think, 1:17:59 you know, have some regrets on culturally where it has traveled from being like this good idea 1:18:08 and something that could help a lot. 1:18:11 You know, as I said, if you buy something in a store, in general, you don't want to have to wait for confirmation. 1:18:18 So probably, I mean, zero conf is pretty safe because most people aren't thieves, first of all. 1:18:24 But second of all, you buy something in a store, you know, they have security cameras. 1:18:28 They have probably, they have like the Mac address on your phone, you know. 1:18:31 So if you double spent it, they would just call the police and say, this person stole this stuff, you know. 1:18:40 So zero conf already, even on BSV, BCH is probably pretty safe. 1:18:46 And the whole point of the confirmations is that you vary them. 1:18:49 So if the purchase is big and you don't trust the person, you wait for, screw six confirmations, 1:18:56 wait for 20 confirmations, make them wait a whole day, 144 confirmations. 1:19:01 Right? 1:19:03 But if it's a small purchase and you basically trust the person and your face is on their surveillance camera, 1:19:10 then zero conf is fine. 1:19:12 Yeah. 1:19:13 So you vary it with the, so, but Lightning, if you were worried and you wanted to buy something quickly 1:19:20 and the people are connected via the internet, then that's great because it will go through quickly 1:19:25 and it won't hit layer one. 1:19:28 So you won't have to pay any layer one fees. 1:19:31 So, yeah, I think, you know, Lightning has a right to exist. 1:19:35 To me, it's very similar to the large block concept where the people who say that this sucks 1:19:42 and we need to destroy it are wrong. 1:19:45 It's an experiment. 1:19:47 We should try, we should try everything. 1:19:49 Anything could have its little niche, right? 1:19:52 Maybe it sucks for what you thought it would be for. 1:19:55 But somewhere someone finds that it's the perfect, perfect thing for whatever, whatever it is. 1:20:04 So, Paul, do you necessarily need Drivechains, a sidechain? 1:20:08 Do you necessarily need a Drivechain in order to implement Bitcoin HiveMine? 1:20:14 I think so, because there needs to be a very specific type of, I'll call it a blockchain ecosystem 1:20:26 in order for the oracle that I designed in Truthcoin, which is now HiveMine, 1:20:32 in order for that oracle to work. 1:20:34 In other words, when, it's very easy for things to work at first, everyone. 1:20:40 Everyone out there is going to say, oh yeah, Chainlink does this, whatever. 1:20:43 What Truthcoin is designed for is when there's like hundreds of millions of dollars being waged by a lot of people 1:20:50 and then a lot of different other people, governments, armies, et cetera, 1:20:56 really wanting to affect the outcome. 1:21:00 So it's supposed to be extremely, it has to hold up under a lot of bribery and a lot of like duress. 1:21:10 So that's what it's designed to hold up under. 1:21:15 And it really would prefer to live in a world where it has a monopoly on all oracle type stuff, 1:21:27 like on blockchain oracle event stuff. 1:21:31 Other people can do other things, you know, move their money to an exchange, 1:21:35 use a third party, a trusted third party, arbitrator or whatever. 1:21:44 But if you want to do this type of thing, which is supposed to be this very stress resistant, 1:21:53 very tamper resistant, automatic peer to peer oracle, 1:21:58 that thing just prefers to be the only oracle around. 1:22:01 And it's just easier to do that in a world where one Bitcoin plus Drivechains is kind of like muscled everything out. 1:22:11 Everything else in the world, all the other altcoins are kind of in the background. 1:22:16 And anything else that would want to do Hivemind like stuff, that should be on the one Hivemind. 1:22:27 I'm just wondering if you could just build Bitcoin Hivemind on top of BSV. 1:22:35 Well, I don't know. Maybe you could. You could just launch it as its own altcoin, I suppose. 1:22:43 You still use BSV as the main unit of account. 1:22:47 Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know, because it's right now just it is the existing version just like basically is a kind of altcoin testnet fork of BTC. 1:23:02 The point was always to take that and turn it into whatever Blockstream sidechains thing that never existed. 1:23:08 So now that will be fitting that into the sidechain template that we wrote. 1:23:12 Once the sidechain template exists, once there's like the Hivemind Drivechain template thing, as I mentioned, 1:23:22 if that existed, then anyone who put Drivechain into their coin could then just clone that guy and have it in. 1:23:31 It'd be like plugins. It's like you write a plugin for this. 1:23:34 It's like having a plugin for Google Chrome versus a plugin for Mozilla Firefox. 1:23:38 It's like once the adblock plugin exists. 1:23:41 But as I just tried to explain to you, it prefers to be it just prefers to live in a world because I had when I designed all this, I kind of did. 1:23:51 You know, you have to make all these tradeoffs. 1:23:53 So I had it all. What I had in mind was the world where Bitcoin does all the money things. 1:23:59 And then all of the Oracle betting prediction market stuff happens in this piece of software. 1:24:07 And then all the name stuff happens in some Namecoin sidechain. 1:24:11 That's kind of like how I designed it all in my head. 1:24:14 So while other things work, maybe I don't know, you know, could you cut and paste code? 1:24:21 Sure. I don't know. Like, you know, maybe. 1:24:26 But to put it on BSV, there would need to be you could. 1:24:31 Oh, because what? 1:24:34 Think about it like this, like what the software does is a lot of stuff. 1:24:39 It's not just like embedding a message in the blockchain. 1:24:45 It has to keep track of questions that people have asked different markets to be able to create questions like, will Donald Trump win reelection in 2020? 1:24:56 So this is a big list of those. There's like a big list of all the markets where people are betting on all kinds of different events happening at once. 1:25:03 Trump being elected, yes or no, whatever. 1:25:06 Unemployment rate of the country being high or low. 1:25:09 At the same time, this is big like cubes and shapes and things. 1:25:12 So those are all that's another list of things. 1:25:17 Then there's every trade in those markets. 1:25:19 And then on top of that, there is all the stuff for the process for resolving the all those questions in the first stage. 1:25:30 Did Donald Trump actually get when later when the event is over in the real world in December of this year? 1:25:37 Did Donald Trump actually get reelected? 1:25:39 What was this and that? 1:25:41 And keeping track of everyone's answers for that and then doing all this big computation on them to find what it thinks is the real answers. 1:25:49 So that's a lot of steps. 1:25:52 So I wrote them all into one blockchain. 1:25:55 That's the Bitcoin Hivemind software that you can see. 1:25:58 It's theoretically like an altcoin right now. 1:26:01 I don't know how much work it would take to melt that down and put it into BSV. 1:26:08 I honestly have no idea. 1:26:10 I don't think I have a lot of other strategy to Drivechain first. 1:26:14 I asked because it seems like you're getting a lot of pushback from BTC. 1:26:19 I don't know, man. 1:26:23 It's just really upsetting that BTC has been so dogmatic in its approach to scaling. 1:26:32 I really wish they adopt what you guys are doing with Drivechains, which was what they proposed really with Blockstream. 1:26:42 Yeah, I know. It's very funny. 1:26:44 It's frustrating. 1:26:47 And right now from a fundamental perspective, I can't say I'm bullish on BTC. 1:26:52 I can't say that. 1:26:54 I can't say that. 1:26:55 I can't say that. 1:26:57 If you're going to become money for the world, you need to be able to scale. 1:27:03 I agree with that. 1:27:06 I don't think I ever had an opportunity to mention this on the debate with Kraywitz or when I talked to Steve Patterson yesterday. 1:27:15 But money really is scale if you think about it. 1:27:18 If you had a desert island and maybe there's only five people on the whole island. 1:27:26 And the people live there for like 200 years or something because they can live a really long time because it's an example. 1:27:32 They would invent a lot of stuff, right? 1:27:36 They would invent someone would get a fishing net. 1:27:38 They would get a fishing pole. 1:27:40 They would probably invent some kind of running water or aqueduct or something, right? 1:27:45 They would invent shelter. 1:27:46 They might even invent, who knows? 1:27:48 They could invent some kind of electricity or something if they had enough time with five people. 1:27:53 But I think they would never invent money because there's only five of them. 1:27:58 So it would never even really occur to them because they all know each other. 1:28:03 So money is what you get. 1:28:05 Money is what you get when there are all these people in the world that you don't know. 1:28:08 You don't remember what they do for you or anyone else. 1:28:10 So the whole thing, money is totally a scale problem. 1:28:16 Right. 1:28:18 Which I think is an important point. 1:28:20 And since it is the most liquid of goods, it should be the most open to growth. 1:28:28 And your Hayek approach to experimenting while not disturbing what they're doing on the first layer. 1:28:38 I'm not the first layer. 1:28:40 I'm the main chain, right? 1:28:42 Exactly, yeah. 1:28:44 Now, obviously, there's a caveat here that I want to mention. 1:28:50 Because let's say BTC does, and maybe I shouldn't mention this. 1:28:55 I don't know, but it's worth being open. 1:28:57 Let's say BTC says, yeah, Paul, let's do this. 1:29:01 This is awesome. 1:29:03 We have our own plan for what's best for the main chain. 1:29:05 Go ahead and make as many sidechains as you want. 1:29:09 And then everyone in the world just says, oh, awesome. 1:29:13 Just copy paste all of the most productive and profitable altcoins on Bitcoin itself. 1:29:21 And man, Bitcoin just grows, right? 1:29:24 BTC just grows exponentially. 1:29:26 And then in the process, we realize, wow, this sidechain performs better than the main chain. 1:29:33 Maybe this should be the main chain. 1:29:35 That could happen, correct? 1:29:37 Well, actually, well, I mean, technically, in Drivechain, that cannot happen. 1:29:42 But of course, culturally, it could happen, right? 1:29:44 People could just say. 1:29:46 But the way Drivechain works is, remember, there's the main chain that is keeping track. 1:29:50 And that's where all the coins, that's where the 21 million coins start. 1:29:53 And when they go into a sidechain, they're going into one little, like, key. 1:29:58 And they're being painted this weird script. 1:30:02 So they're going into an account on layer one. 1:30:06 So there could be these addresses on layer one that just hold, like, 10 million coins. 1:30:11 Because that's all the coins on the sidechain. 1:30:13 So there's no way in which the sidechain can, like, suddenly then have all the 21 million coins 1:30:20 and have, like, an account where all the main chain coins were or something like that. 1:30:24 That can never happen in a technical sense in Drivechain. 1:30:27 But of course, culturally, I mean, one thing that I try to bring up is that 1:30:32 we already live in a world with lots of different forms of money that exchange at par, 1:30:37 a one-to-one rate, which is a lot of what the sidechain concept is about. 1:30:41 You have $10 worth of cash, you put it in the ATM, 1:30:45 you end up with $10 more in your checking account. 1:30:48 And then if you try to send money to someone else, 1:30:51 you could wire money or you could get a cashier's check. 1:30:54 And then that money would be going in a completely different system. 1:30:59 It could go through Fedwire, in which case it goes to accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank. 1:31:04 So you have a bank at whatever, Wells Fargo in the United States. 1:31:07 But Wells Fargo has an account at the Fed. 1:31:11 And those are where all those reserves come from. 1:31:13 And then the U.S. Fed has an account at the Bank of International Settlements. 1:31:17 So there is this big hierarchy of this stuff. 1:31:21 But all of it could be measured in dollars. 1:31:24 But it's a different thing. 1:31:26 If I write I owe you, I owe someone $10 on a piece of paper, 1:31:32 they might think that's worth $10. 1:31:35 But if I have a cashier's check from Wells Fargo, 1:31:38 then a lot of people will just say, that's money. 1:31:40 And especially if I have a cashier's check from the Federal Reserve, 1:31:43 if that would even be possible, people would say, 1:31:46 well, in some sense, that's what a $10 bill is, 1:31:49 sort of a cashier's check from the Federal Reserve. 1:31:52 But everyone thinks that's money. 1:31:54 Well, I'll tell you what. 1:31:56 These things are all different. 1:31:58 I'll tell you what. 1:32:00 If BTC engages and adopts Drivechains, 1:32:03 I will be extremely bullish on BTC from a fundamental perspective. 1:32:08 Hands down, hands down. 1:32:10 You're welcome, hands down. 1:32:12 And I will be blasting it out the way I'm doing right now. 1:32:15 Because this is very valuable. 1:32:17 And it really sucks that... 1:32:19 I think it's really funny. 1:32:21 It's great for these people who are like, 1:32:23 if there are people out there who really love, you know, 1:32:26 BCH, BSV, Monero or something, 1:32:29 it's just really funny that this thing could, 1:32:32 you never know, but Drivechain could be like Armageddon 1:32:35 for the altcoin world. 1:32:37 Maybe not, but... 1:32:39 This is what we expected. 1:32:41 But it's like not... 1:32:43 And this is what's always been said, right? 1:32:45 It was always said in Bitcoin before it was BTC. 1:32:47 This was blockchain propaganda. 1:32:49 We will just copy. 1:32:51 If anyone has a good idea, we'll just copy it. 1:32:53 So that's what's so funny about this. 1:32:56 It's like, you know, but whatever. 1:32:58 I think it's still not finished. 1:33:00 So when it's finished, then I'll be showing it more. 1:33:02 It's very close to being finished. 1:33:04 So anyone can now... 1:33:06 You can download what we already have, 1:33:08 and you can check it out. 1:33:10 And so that's the best way to learn exactly what it's doing 1:33:12 and how it might not work. 1:33:14 Well, thank you for your time. 1:33:16 I really enjoyed talking to you, Paul. 1:33:18 It was incredible. 1:33:20 Yeah. 1:33:22 And if for any reason BTC does not want to take you on, 1:33:26 well, know that I'm pretty sure 1:33:28 you could maybe do something in Bitcoin Cash or BSV 1:33:31 because those parties are happening right now. 1:33:35 And those parties are happening. 1:33:37 Those parties are happening. 1:33:39 Sometimes the smaller party is more fun. 1:33:41 Yeah, yeah. 1:33:43 Every party's got to start somewhere. 1:33:45 Exactly. 1:33:46 And gosh, I just wish... 1:33:48 I wish that Blockstream would have delivered on sidechains. 1:33:52 Yeah, me too. 1:33:54 None of this, probably nothing would have happened. 1:33:56 I've tried to trace back exactly, like, where did it go wrong? 1:33:58 And I have a lot of theories about that, 1:34:00 but maybe we could talk about them some other time. 1:34:02 Like, what was the one thing, like, 1:34:04 that set all this in a weird direction? 1:34:07 Well, give us a theory. 1:34:09 Give us a couple of theories before you... 1:34:11 Well, I have one theory. 1:34:13 It's that minor centralization concept, 1:34:14 which was... 1:34:16 There was the idea of node centralization, 1:34:18 which is, I think, was ultimately defined 1:34:22 the way I defined it, which was 1:34:24 if it's more expensive to run the full node, 1:34:27 then it's harder for people to join the network. 1:34:30 And that's a good measurement of how centralized the network is. 1:34:33 And it's better if it's cheap to spin up new nodes. 1:34:36 So that was this one idea that was sort of taking shape 1:34:40 right in the 2014, 2015 years. 1:34:44 Yeah. 1:34:46 But at Blockstream, there was this other idea, 1:34:48 minor centralization, 1:34:50 which I think has no actual definition, 1:34:52 but it has some... 1:34:54 But it sort of... 1:34:56 It sort of... 1:34:58 It has... 1:35:00 They evolved a kind of wrong definition 1:35:02 that was too close to the node centralization definition, 1:35:04 where it says, like, 1:35:06 if it's too difficult for miners to join the network, 1:35:07 then that would be bad. 1:35:09 And so we have to stop that from happening at all costs. 1:35:12 The problem with that, in addition to being kind of silly, 1:35:15 given that miners have to invest, like, millions and millions of dollars 1:35:18 into equipment to even, like, do any mining these days, 1:35:21 and that they dial out to the pool operator for the block. 1:35:27 They don't even, like, run any node software. 1:35:29 They just point the hardware at a pool. 1:35:33 So it doesn't... 1:35:35 In addition to not really making any sense, 1:35:37 the other side was that 1:35:39 if anything ever required the... 1:35:43 or even suggested that the miners might want to do... 1:35:47 run more software, 1:35:49 then that would be bad. 1:35:51 And you can see how that criterion just excludes everything. 1:35:53 It excludes, like, every sidechain. 1:35:55 It says there's nothing you can do now 1:35:57 because they think if it's possible to create some sidechain, 1:36:01 someone will make, like, a big, huge ESPN 4K sidechain 1:36:05 that uses a ton of data, 1:36:07 and then miners will feel pressured into running that data, 1:36:10 and then that would be bad for miner centralization, 1:36:12 which would be bad. 1:36:14 So I think that's kind of, like, that's a line. 1:36:16 I think it's, like, section 4.3 or something point three 1:36:20 in their original Blockstream paper. 1:36:23 And I think that is the line that is backwards. 1:36:27 If you just put a negative one in front of that, 1:36:29 then they would have eventually released something. 1:36:33 But instead they had this weird belief 1:36:35 that if ever, ever could possibly be the case that... 1:36:41 Well, just the idea of defining miner centralization at all 1:36:45 was a weird idea because mining is a process, 1:36:48 so it can't really have a... 1:36:50 It's very different than Bitcoin, 1:36:53 which is a network of nodes. 1:36:55 So the whole thing was misguided from beginning to end 1:36:59 in my point of view. 1:37:01 But that's this miner centralization idea. 1:37:03 You could somehow have deleted it from everyone's mind 1:37:06 or just prevented people from thinking about it ever. 1:37:10 Or maybe if I had defined node centralization 1:37:13 more clearly earlier, then who knows. 1:37:17 But that's one thought. 1:37:19 Because as long as they had that thought 1:37:21 and they published it in that paper, 1:37:23 then you can never do anything 1:37:25 because anything could result in the miners 1:37:28 running more software. 1:37:30 So if that's bad, then everything's bad. 1:37:33 So you and Steve Patterson 1:37:35 actually went really deep into this topic, 1:37:38 which was really good to hear. 1:37:42 But yeah, I think it's ridiculous 1:37:47 to fear decentralization. 1:37:51 I think it is because it just... 1:37:54 It doesn't even have a definition, I think. 1:37:57 It doesn't even make any sense 1:37:59 because when the difficulty increases, 1:38:01 that makes it harder for people to mine as well. 1:38:03 If that was the definition or the measure, 1:38:07 then why do people cheer when the difficulty goes up? 1:38:12 The whole thing is backwards. 1:38:14 It doesn't make any sense. 1:38:16 The 51% attack is mining, 1:38:19 and so is running the network normally. 1:38:22 So there's no reason why it should be easier 1:38:27 or harder in any sense. 1:38:29 It just would get harder. 1:38:30 It would get more difficult for both 1:38:34 the defenders and attackers, 1:38:36 or it would get harder. 1:38:38 It would just get easier for both or harder for both. 1:38:41 So it doesn't have any net effect on anything. 1:38:43 So that was weird. 1:38:45 I think another problematic side change 1:38:48 was the SPV proof. 1:38:50 SPV security became a kind of chess piece politically 1:38:55 with the block size debate. 1:38:57 And so then it became necessary to say 1:38:58 that SPV was evil, 1:39:01 and anything miners doing anything was evil. 1:39:05 And that, again, 1:39:07 when you have these weird beliefs, 1:39:09 it's hard to eventually produce anything 1:39:11 when these weird beliefs are in the way. 1:39:13 Yeah, I very much, 1:39:15 I find it very, 1:39:18 I find it like a breath of fresh air 1:39:21 to see all the SPV experimentations 1:39:24 happening in BSV right now. 1:39:26 And I think it's serving as an example 1:39:29 to BTC that, 1:39:32 I mean, they're proving it with their actual work. 1:39:35 Yeah, I think it's, 1:39:37 I love, I think it's great. 1:39:39 People, someone has to support small blocks 1:39:44 to make sure that the network doesn't die. 1:39:46 But all the people who say that large blocks, 1:39:50 all the stories people have about 1:39:52 large blocks being bad 1:39:53 and they're never going to work. 1:39:55 I think a lot of those stories are silly. 1:39:57 One example is that people wrote 1:39:59 that fraud proofs could never work. 1:40:01 And I wrote, 1:40:02 a paper on truthgoing.info about how they could work and every everything that was said about them being impossible was, was wrong, but they don't even care is the point. It's just like a, it's a talking point at this point, they just, they needed to be impossible. So, but instead, you should just say it's, it's incautious, you know, they should just keep the blocks small for a caution reason. I don't know, who knows. It's all crazy. 1:40:21 So, Paul, one last question. Aside from Bitcoin and its sibling chains, are there any other projects in crypto that you follow? 1:40:41 That's a good question. Let me see. Well, that includes a lot of stuff. So I think I'm most interested in, you know, the my own prediction markets thing, number one, and then secondarily, I'm interested in Drivechain, because I've been working on it. I like, there's a lot of stuff that I think. 1:41:06 Some things that I think I still think like stuff like Namecoin is, could be a lot better. And it could be, I mean, by better, I mean, like, deserves a lot more attention. And we shouldn't, we shouldn't have addresses anymore. You know, by now, we should have gotten rid of that. I don't know why we still have them. It's because I don't know, it's so I Namecoin I like, I like David Vorex thing. 1:41:34 See a coin or whatever is storage, like bit drive type concepts, storage type concepts. I don't know, I like Andreas's sideshift.ai project is great. It has great marketing. It's a fake AI. 1:41:50 Yeah, you can't tell anyone that's a fake AI. Come on, man. You're really the joke. 1:41:59 Let's see what else I like. I like the Unhashed podcast. It's pretty good. Like, I don't know, a lot of stuff. I can't say I like Mike in space. I'm one of the few people who still likes Mike in space. Everyone else in BTC is like, he's a witch, you know, he's a heretic. 1:42:15 I mean, that's, that's a thing. You know, you can't be so dogmatic. You want to be money for the world. But at the same time, you want to have a purity contest. Come on, man. 1:42:25 That's terrible. I know. It doesn't scale either because it doesn't new people don't think it's funny. Only the people inside think it's cool. New people think what the heck is going on. 1:42:38 That makes a lot of sense. Actually, I never thought about it that way. And yeah, that's it. You bring up a great point that that does not scale you. Yeah, that. Wow. 1:42:48 Most people just don't want to be treated like, you know, like garbage by insane culture police. So they'll just be like, forget it. 1:42:58 Yeah, as an anarchist with a scientific heart, I really don't like people that assume leadership positions. And people that don't want to be leaders, I think are the ones that should be the ones that we pay attention to the most. 1:43:17 There's a Karl Popper criterion that just says it should be as easy as possible to replace a bad leader. And so that's kind of where I'm at, too. As long as it's easy, they can't misbehave. As long as it's easy to replace the bad leader, they don't have a choice. They have to do the best thing. 1:43:32 So I think, I honestly think that how they treat you once you release Drivechains, how they treat you and how they treat the Drivechains project will be either, it's going to be the last chance in my mind for BTC to really like, for its culture to really show whether they are okay to grow, 1:43:59 or if they're just gonna be, you know, stuck in their ways. 1:44:04 Yeah, I kind of agree. I mean, one thing I have to emphasize is that even if Drivechain is the stupidest idea, and it just deletes your coins immediately, it's completely opt-in. So they should allow it because it's like, it's, I mean, it's obviously it's a question of like, code and, you know, is it screwing up maintenance of the software, but basically, it doesn't do anything except the Drivechain part. 1:44:30 So even if it were the dumbest idea in the world, and all it did was eat your coins immediately, they still don't really have any basis from denying the user the option to do it, to try it. And I think instead of just deleting your coins immediately, it would be like, I mean, one thing is that if you want a large block sidechain, and you're worried about sidechain security, sidechain security is much better than SPV security. 1:44:59 But many of the large blockers, especially at the time, still to this day, and as you were just mentioning, BCH, BSV, a lot of the large blockers don't mind SPV mode at all. So they already want large blocks, and they're willing to put up with SPV mode. 1:45:16 This is just large blocks with a better security model than SPV mode. So, so why would they want to block you guys from getting something even better and not leaving the 21 million BTC and going to different rivalrous coin. So it doesn't make any sense to me. It's crazy. Unfortunately, I have to go though. This has been really great. 1:45:39 No, I have to go as well. Yes. This is awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Paul. And yeah, let's let's thank you. Thanks for having me. Let's follow up. Yeah, we wish you best of luck. And thank you for being with us. Have a good one. All right. Take care. See you later.