0:00 The fake custodial Lightning that has tricked everyone into being dishonest, if it's just 0:07 sitting in a multi-sig transaction, then those people can rug you. 0:10 And there's not enough bytes on L1 to onboard everyone. 0:13 It's network effects versus groupthink and being in a cult. 0:18 Why is it the case that you have to be really, really nice to everyone? 0:20 Can't the idea just be good? 0:21 Well, why can't we take the middle ground and just say it's emerging? 0:24 It's not perfect by any stretch. 0:26 It has issues. 0:27 It has bugs, but it's getting better all the time. 0:29 You can try it today. 0:31 You can actually use it. 0:32 The real scaling issue with Bitcoin right now is users and people. 0:35 It's very important to be thinking 100 years from now about what's going to be key. 0:39 How can Bitcoin actually be free to money for everybody in the world when Bitcoin's 0:42 issuance ends is something I think about a lot. 0:44 Or will it only be free to money for very, very wealthy individuals? 0:48 Paul, Alex, thank you both so much for coming on the show. 0:54 Paul, you've been being very controversial on Twitter recently, as normal actually, and 0:59 you and Alex got into a bit of a debate, so we're going to get into that in detail. 1:04 But I think probably the best place to start, so the listeners have full context of maybe 1:07 why you're saying the things you're saying, Paul, we should start with a bit of an introduction 1:11 about you and what you are working on. 1:14 Yes, I would be happy to. 1:16 Okay, so back in 2014, I started a blog, truthcoininfo.info. 1:22 That was basically a Bitcoin maximalist blog, although that term did not even exist back 1:26 then. 1:27 And in particular, I wrote this essay, Nothing is Cheaper Than Proof of Work. 1:31 So that was back in 2014. 1:32 Then in 2015, I created this Drivechain idea, and I presented the first three scaling Bitcoin 1:38 conferences, and I'm the author of BIP300/301. 1:43 And then now as of late 2022, I am the CEO and founder of LayerTwo Labs, which is like 1:51 a Bitcoin development company. 1:53 And so also, I have never really worked on or owned any coin other than Bitcoin. 2:00 So I consider myself to be like a total Bitcoin maximalist usually, although now I think that 2:07 is now that everyone has come around to that point of view, the time has come to jump ship. 2:12 And actually, it's the sun is setting on the Bitcoin maximum. 2:15 So this will be very weird, but I'll be now taking basically the opposite point of view 2:21 that I've had for 12 or so years. 2:25 You just being the contrarian. 2:26 Okay, Alex, everyone knows you, you just think it's the third time you've been on the show, 2:30 but just quickly give a bit of an intro to yourself. 2:32 Sure. 2:33 I came into Bitcoin from the human rights world. 2:36 We saw a lot of activists and dissidents, especially in difficult political climates 2:40 using it. 2:41 You know, starting 10 years ago, it got a lot more voluminous in the last five to six 2:47 years. 2:49 We started getting involved from a support perspective in terms of helping fund tools 2:55 to become more accessible for activists, become safer, more private. 3:00 We do a lot of funding of education, and we do a lot of funding of people, bringing people 3:04 together, bringing the builders together with the activists. 3:08 And we also do a lot of education about Bitcoin and why it matters for freedom around the 3:11 world at the Human Rights Foundation. 3:15 And it's become a pretty big program there separately. 3:19 I've written a lot about Bitcoin, both from a historical perspective, where is it stand 3:26 versus other currency systems? 3:28 How is it different? 3:30 As well as why are people around the world adopting it? 3:33 And I've traveled a lot, met a lot of people, talked to a lot of folks, you know, in countries 3:38 with a lot less financial privilege than me, and I've learned, you know, why they're turning 3:44 to this, you know, magical internet money. 3:47 Why are they doing it? 3:50 And yeah, we're very bullish on a world with a lot more Bitcoin users. 3:55 We think that'll be a very large gain for individual freedom globally. 4:00 So super, super interesting for us. 4:02 And of course, it's money that dictators can't stop. 4:04 And that's kind of the most important reason why we like it. 4:07 Absolutely. 4:08 Okay, so table set, let's get into the fun stuff. 4:12 So Paul, I think the best place to start would be if you kind of take it from your original 4:16 tweet that you and Alex kind of got into the debate about. 4:19 Explain your stance and what you meant in that tweet. 4:22 Oh, yeah. 4:23 First was Lynn's tweet, which is fine. 4:25 But of course, Lynn's not here, so it's unsupported. 4:27 But she's basically, there's an older quote from hers about, you know, Bitcoin is the 4:33 real deal and everything else is a knockoff. 4:36 And I think that this idea has a lot of merit, but we have been, Bitcoin has kind of been 4:44 falling behind the tech cutting edge and it's been stagnant. 4:48 And so I criticized this tweet of Lynn's, and then she said something really strange. 4:53 Like she said, that's an old quote, but that she still stands behind it. 4:56 And that counted as a reply for some reason. 4:58 But anyway, the point is, then Alex jumped in and said something about how I think that 5:02 people will, that like a shit coin will be adopted by 8 billion people. 5:09 What I really mean is that it's not, we can't take it for granted that Bitcoin will be the 5:13 winning coin until we really have that, until we really see like 4.1 billion people adopt 5:20 or until we really actually cross this threshold of, and even then we wouldn't necessarily 5:25 want that because we want to live in a world where everything improves a lot. 5:28 And so if we have this network effect cage around Bitcoin, then it will not improve as 5:34 much as it otherwise would be. 5:36 So maybe as Bitcoin investors, we would like that, but we want to live in a world, I mean, 5:41 just look at why things are so unsatisfying today. 5:44 You have cases of where the government is tyrannical or when you have some kind of 5:48 monopoly or there's perpetual competition, the network effects would just be a different 5:53 instantiation of that. 5:54 So the core of my idea is that there's these two forces, is that there's network effects 5:59 on one hand where the big get bigger. 6:02 And so Bitcoin has been doing better and better and better and better. 6:04 And all that's perfectly true. 6:05 And I 100% acknowledge that. 6:08 That's absolutely the case. 6:09 I'm a huge believer in network effects, but it's network effects versus groupthink and 6:16 being in a cult and being in denial about your own problems and lying to yourself and 6:21 others about imperfections in Bitcoin to the point where they become systemic and destroy 6:27 the project. So these are like an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. 6:33 So that's my that's like my frame of the situation. 6:37 And so network effects are very, very strong, but complacency and overconfidence are also 6:42 very, very strong. And you can look at all kinds of, you know, the fall of Rome or 6:47 whatever. There's this famous book, The Innovator's Dilemma, about why is it that 6:53 companies constantly go bankrupt? 6:55 Why don't they just react? 6:56 Many times the company knows exactly what's happening and they cannot react in time. 7:02 And it's just because companies too big and has too many moving pieces. 7:05 Just quickly before Alex responds to this, I just want to jump in and defend Lynn because 7:10 she's not here, because this was basically a tweet about the difference between Bitcoin 7:14 and crypto. And in Lynn's response to you after she points out that was like an old 7:19 quote that was taken out of context, she said that sort of empirically that gap has become 7:25 bigger, like Bitcoin has separated itself more and more from crypto over the years. 7:28 So is that something that you disagree with? 7:30 Because like that is what the market is saying. 7:32 I accept that it looks very much over the last, especially over the last. 7:38 So my view is that things have gotten since around 2019, things have gotten under the 7:42 surface worse, steadily worse for Bitcoin. 7:45 And I kind of didn't really complain about it until now, until recently. 7:51 But I admit that on the surface, it appears as though everything is going great. 7:57 But I see this as just more evidence of how perceptive I am or whatever. 8:01 I'm kind of smiling and winking at the audience here with this. 8:04 But it's kind of like, you know, whatever the Gandalf shows up and he's trying to warn 8:09 everyone, you know, there's this huge problem here. 8:11 And they're always saying like, you know, this guy is bringing trouble. 8:15 But actually, he's bringing the warning. 8:18 He's bringing the warning in time because it's much easier, of course, to prepare for a 8:22 problem and then preemptively address it versus kind of reply to it in some kind of 8:28 emergency. 8:30 So I admit completely that it mostly things have looked as though the network effect part 8:37 is just dominating. 8:39 I attribute this to the fact that it's very difficult to see all the scar tissue that 8:43 has accumulated in Bitcoin. 8:45 You have to, I think, be involved in these technical debates and these details that a 8:51 lot of people miss. 8:53 And also, Bitcoin has grown so much that a very high percentage of the people in the 8:59 community at any given time are now very new. 9:03 And that is not great for, you know, mass education because these people are brand new 9:10 and they don't. But it's also not in people's nature to like really deeply look into this 9:16 kind of minutia. So again, that's kind of a long answer. 9:18 But that's I think it's important to get at what I'm really trying to say. 9:23 And I would like it to be the case. 9:25 I think it would be great if Bitcoin is just this runaway train and it's destined for 9:31 success no matter what. 9:32 I think that would be great. 9:34 You know, that would obviously be fantastic. 9:36 But I think that we have to make sure that we aren't falling into the trap of wishful 9:46 thinking. If we really want to succeed, if we want Bitcoin to be useful for human rights, 9:50 then we have to we have to make sure that we are looking at it with good eyesight. 9:57 Alex, do you have anything to say there in response to that? 10:00 Yeah, I mean, look, I guess we're coming at it from a different point of view. 10:03 We're not necessarily thinking deeply about, you know, alternative ways of of doing 10:13 Bitcoin at it, you know, changing it so fundamentally and then thinking about what the 10:18 world might be. In that case, we're just using it and we're watching people use it, 10:22 learn about it. And, you know, from our perspective, what you say couldn't be further 10:26 from our experience because it's so much easier to use and so much more successful and 10:30 so much more widely proliferated and so much more liquid and so much more accepted and 10:35 so much more understood than it was in 2019. 10:37 Like, you know, when we started doing activist education in 2019, wallets were very hard 10:41 to use. The people who designed the wallets did not design them for people who were 10:46 newbies, you know, essentially as their as their in mind audience. 10:49 You had to immediately write down the seed phrase. 10:51 It's like the first thing you did when you downloaded the wallet. 10:54 And now today it's like, oh, my God, we have so many awesome wallets. 10:56 We have so many great wallets that have lightning, that have eCash, that have so many 10:59 great additions to them. 11:02 And then obviously just network effect. 11:04 Bitcoin is used by so many millions of people around the world. 11:07 It's accepted so many places. 11:09 It's being adopted by so many entities. 11:12 So from our perspective, things have become much, much easier. 11:17 So my question to you, Paul, would be, you know, going back to the thread. 11:22 So you said that Bitcoin's been falling behind. 11:25 Well, first, I would say, number one, what can you be specific? 11:29 Which protocols or monies or tokens or altcoins is it falling behind? 11:34 And B, so that's one thing. 11:36 And then the second thing is, you know, which floating, when I say floating token 11:46 shitcoin, what I meant is like, I don't know, Solana, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, like name 11:51 one. Which one is going to beat out Bitcoin? 11:54 Be specific about it, because, you know, let's hear it. 11:58 I mean, that's what I'm interested in. 11:59 I'm very curious. 12:02 In fact, I think that it's quite likely that what will happen again is a new hard 12:06 fork that is very, very similar to Bitcoin and simply just splits the community on 12:11 some of these dimensions of complacency versus, let's call it assertiveness or. 12:19 Like the Bitcoin cash fork. 12:22 Yeah, I think it will be a hard fork similar in that way. 12:25 And in fact, one of the reasons why I think. 12:28 That it will succeed is because the Bitcoin cash hard fork was so poorly done and it 12:35 was so poorly executed and it was such a bad idea that it has permanently discredited the 12:40 hard fork. So it is another example of having cast an illusion over the fundamental 12:45 reality that the hard fork is actually a pretty good institution where every Bitcoin or 12:50 just gets free money. 12:51 And if you can just ignore it and it goes to zero, it doesn't affect your life at all. 12:56 So we really should be encouraging more. 12:59 It does. It does damage the network effect and it does dilute the brand. 13:04 But of course, a lot of the things that, for example, Omri and Roger did, like naming it 13:10 Bitcoin Cash and Roger using Bitcoin.com, the domain to assert. 13:15 I don't think that those things will be repeated. 13:19 And I think that the institution of the hard fork needs to be celebrated for how it 13:23 reintroduces competition. 13:26 Competition would cure all these these hidden issues that I'm talking about. 13:32 And one reason why I doubt the network effect concept a little bit is that while it's true 13:38 that we have grown a lot, it is also true that when I talk to just normal people, lots and 13:45 lots of normal people who are very smart, they still have never really heard of Bitcoin or 13:50 they think there's no difference between Bitcoin and crypto and they've never used any of 13:53 this. And they just kind of think that our whole industry is a huge scam, which is 13:57 unfortunate, of course. 13:59 But I think it is the case that the network effect, you know, that hits really strong 14:05 when when you have like lots and lots of people really using it. 14:07 But when you live in a world where even in the first world, like in America, in educated 14:15 America, you have tech savvy young adults and they are still a huge percentage of them. 14:23 Just think the whole thing is that that's something that they've never used and they 14:26 don't understand. That is one reason to doubt and say it's also a little bit. 14:31 So to be to be clear, I mean, because you wrote in your thread that soon, in maybe two 14:35 to five years, it will be possible for anyone with a laptop to launch a new coin that has 14:39 strong privacy, scalability to eight billion people and cheaper L1 full note costs than 14:42 Bitcoin. So are you basically talking about a new L1 blockchain or are you saying that 14:50 basically someone's going to come up with a completely different way to envision Bitcoin 14:54 like increasing the block size limit, you know, ad infinitum like Bitcoin cash? 14:58 And then and we're going to go in that direction. 15:01 Can you just be clear which one which one do you think is more likely to happen? 15:04 Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because it's not so much that I think any 15:07 existing altcoin, I think actually in many ways the existing altcoins are some of the 15:14 bottom of the barrel. And also they have by just by virtue of existing for so long, 15:18 they've kind of like they've shot their shot or whatever. 15:21 And so now, right, similarly with Bitcoin cash, like it's kind of like that was that 15:26 ship has sort of sailed and it's not worth it to go back and rescue those people. 15:30 Instead, we will need to. 15:32 But when I say because I wrote down this bullet point about Bitcoin falling behind and 15:36 you remind me of what I wrote in the tweet. 15:39 Yeah, there is a there will be an open source tech stack. 15:43 I mean, it's already taking shape in my view, where like there are things where 15:51 Bitcoin has fallen behind. So you wouldn't say, for example, on the dimension of 15:54 privacy, you wouldn't say that anything we have in Bitcoin is comparable to what 15:59 exists in the Zcash altcoin or Monero or. 16:08 But it's like a kind of a. 16:11 eCash is. 16:13 What do you mean by that? 16:14 But eCash is. 16:25 But eCash is the federated model, which is the cop out, that's the cop out part. 16:33 Now, what do you mean? 16:36 Well, I think what Alex means there is that if this ends up happening on some like side 16:40 chain L2, then that's also going to be in a federated model. 16:43 So I guess my point is that like one is, well, that's what you say. 16:49 I mean, so so in in the ideal world, you have people who can self custody Bitcoin 16:56 and and then in the ideal world, you also want people to make tradeoffs to be able to 17:00 sacrifice some of that, be able to get other things. 17:03 Now, in your mind, you have a particular way of doing that, which I think is fine. 17:06 I'm not here to debate that. 17:08 But today there exist other ways for Bitcoin users to get that flexibility. 17:12 And one of them is through the wonderful Lightning Network to be able to tap into 17:16 other kinds of payment pools like Mint's to achieve really good privacy without 17:21 having to go to some floating token shitcoin to do it. 17:25 So, you know, I think what a lot of what you do is you underrate and underestimate 17:30 the current options that are out there, which are extremely strong to promote your 17:34 own agenda. I mean, there's there's this is very clear. 17:38 I mean, there's no way that you could say seriously that anyone who still shills 17:42 Lightning Network in twenty twenty five is is kind of an idiot. 17:47 That's not a credible argument. 17:49 That's what I'm reading. 17:51 I'm I'm reading it off your tweet. 17:52 It says anyone who still shills LN in twenty twenty five is kind of an idiot. 17:57 I agree that is. 17:59 Yes. That is OK. 18:02 So, well, I mean, now we've touched on like five hundred different things. 18:05 I mean, first of all, the Federal. 18:06 So let's wrap it up, but not to escape so we can go to lightning in a second. 18:09 But but so. 18:11 Where are we going here? 18:12 You want to be a federated mile first. 18:15 Because your whole argument, you're basically. 18:17 But hold on, hold on. But just to go back. 18:19 So you're basically saying it's not going to be an L1 blockchain that outcompetes 18:22 Bitcoin. It's actually going to be a hard fork and like hard work would be a new 18:27 L1 blockchain. 18:29 Yeah, I mean, but it's different than like Cardano. 18:32 You're basically saying it's not going to be one of the existing alt coins. 18:36 I really don't think it'll be Cardano. 18:38 Yes. Right. That's true. 18:40 OK, we can agree on that one. 18:41 So that it's going to be someone who introduces a big rule change to the to the 18:46 Bitcoin project and that there's a split in that. 18:48 Well, like I guess big in terms of how beneficial it would be, I suppose. 18:54 But big and being that it's a hard fork, like is my point. 18:58 I don't think the hard fork part it's the hard fork will be to split the community 19:02 there won't be the hard fork that does the tech enabling. 19:05 Everything that can be done with a hard fork can be done with the soft fork and 19:09 everything that can be done with a soft fork can actually be done without changing 19:12 Bitcoin's code. 19:14 So actually, this whole hard versus soft distinction no longer has any bearing 19:19 on anything. I think the hard fork is when you want if you want to split the 19:22 community intentionally, you can do it with the hard fork. 19:25 And that is that is the key is that the members of the community. 19:30 Because I think you if you grow and you you accept people into your community who 19:34 are anti-growth, then actually then this is will end up. 19:38 And just saying before we move forward to the lightning stuff, can you just can you 19:42 can you describe what will just just walk, walk, walk me through and walk us 19:48 through a potential scenario in the next five years where the Bitcoin project as 19:53 we know it ends and gets obsoleted by something else. 19:57 Can you just walk us through quickly how you envision that happening, please? 20:02 OK, my view is that all of the coins are vulnerable to like if one coin actually 20:09 makes it into something where it has lots of actual users, this is the best 20:16 marketing for the coin. 20:18 This is the best kind of adoption there is. 20:20 And so if a coin actually reaches real users, the other coins will be displaced. 20:26 The other coins will be displaced and they will, you know, go to zero, basically. 20:31 That's my point, because because of the network effect argument, basically. 20:34 So if one coin gets really big, it will muscle out the others. 20:38 So that's what I I think what I was getting at with my tweet is that this will 20:43 become easier and easier over time and eventually it will become so easy that 20:49 we'll be forced to reckon with the the the technical scar tissue of Bitcoin. 20:55 And then it may be at that point, it may be like an emergency situation, but I still 21:00 think it'll be the hard fork will win to preserve the UTXO set. 21:03 So everyone's investment will be will be safe. 21:05 But that's not really the question that interests me. 21:08 The question is, like, what is the end, the final technical configuration of of the 21:14 winning coin? 21:15 That's kind of like the thing that I'm interested in. 21:18 This episode is brought to you by Blockware. 21:20 Would you rather have one Bitcoin today or two in a few years from now? 21:23 Silly question. 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And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you 22:15 earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outperforms most high yield 22:19 savings accounts. 22:20 But what really sets River apart is their dedication to security. 22:24 You have peace of mind knowing that River has monthly proof of reserves and holds all 22:27 Bitcoin in multi-sig cold storage. 22:29 And with US-based phone support, you'll always have someone on hand ready to help. 22:33 To find out more about River and to open an account, head over to River.com forward slash 22:37 WBD and earn up to $100 in Bitcoin when you buy. 22:41 That's River.com forward slash WBD. 22:45 Just quickly on that, Paul, like what I don't understand is you said like in a couple 22:50 years, anyone can launch a coin with better privacy, better scalability, whatever. 22:53 Like people have been trying this for a decade at this point. 22:56 There's tens of thousands of other shit coins. 22:58 Like what is what do you see changing that means one of those will win? 23:02 Launching a coin. 23:03 I think a lot of this has been negative innovation. 23:05 So the coins have been distractions. 23:08 So these are people who just want money and they are not as interested. 23:12 And in fact, this repels the people who have genuine technical curiosity. 23:17 So the fact that people are launching coins is not necessarily what I'm interested in. 23:22 But the existence of, for example, the fact that there used to be this zero coin project and it made it into the Zcash Altcoin and they did a bunch of R&D. 23:31 And now there's like a rust crate for doing private transactions and having a reusable private address that hides the sender, the receiver and the amount. 23:42 The fact that that open source technology now exists, that type of thing is more what I'm talking about. 23:48 And there are many cases where an academic or someone will put out a new piece of the tech stack that has no coin behind it at all, because, of course, launching the coin is so undignified. 23:58 Could you just try to be specific and detail a little more? 24:02 Like how would this how would this unfold? 24:04 It's like entrepreneur A does X, then this happens, then this happens. 24:07 Like could you paint? 24:09 You must have thought about this a lot because you're interested in it. 24:12 Right. So walk us through how this would happen. 24:14 How does Bitcoin, you know, go to zero with the gear, like the privacy gear in Bitcoin having fallen behind unnecessarily? 24:24 So you think that that's going to be like a privacy coin is going to take over Bitcoin? 24:30 No, no, no, no, no. 24:31 Just the option. 24:32 You have the option, you have the L2 or you have the option to use this rust crate that hides the sender, the receiver and the amount. 24:38 And that some people will want that. 24:41 Why would that be any better than what we have now with eCash? 24:45 I don't understand. 24:46 Well, I thought I was going to explain that, but you moved on to like five or six different things. 24:50 The eCash model is federated and the federated model is just about the worst thing to ever happen in Bitcoin's history. 24:56 I think we've had we've had bad ideas before. 25:00 We've had we've had bad ideas before and we've had dishonest ideas and we've had ideas that spread dishonesty like the plague. 25:08 And but rarely do we have them all at once. 25:10 But the federated model is just about the worst thing to happen in Bitcoin's history, I think. 25:15 So it's interesting that you're so blasé about what it means. 25:18 The federated model basically says I'll give you all of my coins immediately and I have no recourse about you ever getting them back. 25:25 And you could take them tomorrow. 25:27 Whereas with Lightning and with Drivechain and with lots of other things, there's all these complicated time locks and ways of making it difficult to withdraw the coins in an improper way such that you have an economic guarantee that it's in their financial best interest, even for anonymous people to participate honestly in the scheme. 25:46 Whereas the federated model is just give all your coins to someone and just hope that you get them back. 25:52 And even the federated part is a huge lie because it says, well, instead of giving them to one person, we'll give them to a big group of people. 25:59 But there is absolutely no way for the layperson to tell that you really are giving it to 15, you know, nine of 15 or whatever people. 26:10 And it's not just one person who generated all one key and then 14 clones of themselves. 26:16 So the whole thing is just shot through with pure dishonesty and the whole thing is a huge waste of time. 26:22 And it's a perfect example of the scar tissue that I mentioned before about how this type of thing, this is not someone that you want in your community because they will ruin the community for everyone else. 26:32 They will move people's attention away from solving the real problems and more towards repeating the lie that the problem has been solved with something like eCash or any federated idea. 26:43 I can tell you, obviously, aren't looking at eCash very carefully because there's not a lot of people using federated eCash these days. 26:51 Cash is the dominant protocol and there's other ways that people have figured out how to avoid what you describe. 27:00 One of them is like the multi-nut payments and you should look into that. 27:06 This idea that you can make payments from any different once there's all different ways to reduce exposure to rugging. 27:12 But at the end of the day, no one's doing what you say. 27:15 Talk about dishonesty. 27:17 No one, especially the creators of both Fetamin and Cashew protocols would tell anybody to put all of their coins or even a significant amount of coins into a mint. 27:28 This is a technology for small spending. 27:32 I agree with that. 27:33 But I think they're all like that. 27:34 Even in my intended configuration, I think the L2 chains will never have more than like maybe 8, 9, 10, 20,000 coins each and there may be 10, 15. 27:47 Look, we have ARK potentially coming online. 27:54 The eCash that I looked into is 100% federated and that people can rug. 28:01 On L1, it's just a multi-sig output on L1. 28:04 So that's the only thing that matters. 28:06 Cashew is different. 28:07 Cashew is based on Lightning. 28:08 Lightning is also multi-sig on L1. 28:11 It's 2 of 2 multi-sig. 28:12 The Lightning channels are 2 of 2 multi-sig on L1. 28:14 So what matters is what the L1 stack can do. 28:17 The L1 stack is not doing these fancy things. 28:20 I think another issue of Scar Tissue is that the non-mined L2s, they don't pay their transaction fees to the L1 miners. 28:30 So they have this ticking time bomb problem where if they become successful, there will be conflict between the miners and the L2. 28:37 The miners will either want to vertically integrate and they'll start like Foundry LSP or Foundry ARK or whatever. 28:45 ARK is like the final nail in the coffin as to why Lightning Network is a failed idea. 28:52 That you could see all these people jump ship to ARK immediately. 28:55 First of all, ARK is just being born, so we don't know. 28:59 But ARK is clearly going to work because of Lightning. 29:02 They work together if you look at how it's going to function. 29:07 I mean, I totally disagree with that characterization. 29:09 It's not a characterization. 29:11 It's how it's going to work. 29:12 What do you mean? 29:13 You think you're going to just have on-chain and ARK and no Lightning? 29:18 I'll read from the creator of ARK when he made this ARK whiteboard video. 29:25 And this is kind of like the final nail in the coffin for Lightning. 29:28 Is that when he's trying to explain ARK, he opens his ARK masterclass video. 29:37 He opens it with this. 29:37 He says, well, this is this guy, Burak, who is the creator of ARK. 29:41 And he's a former Blockstream employee. 29:43 He crashed the Lightning Network twice for fun. 29:47 He, and this is for the audience, and he says, this is June 2023. 29:53 I've always been a big critic of Lightning. 29:55 I had severe objections, right? 29:57 From inbound liquidity to inbound receiving interactivity. 30:02 I wanted with ARK to address the inbound liquidity problem, 30:06 but I really couldn't find a cure for it. 30:08 I failed to see Lightning scaling. 30:11 So he's saying when his description of ARK that he has given up on, 30:15 he's wants like something that replaces it. 30:19 Well, that's obviously not. 30:21 That's not true, because if you talk to the ARK people today, 30:24 they view these things as compatible. 30:26 It's true that ARK does things Lightning can't do. 30:28 Absolutely. 30:30 But these are the way that ARK pulls. 30:34 I'm not missing the point. 30:36 My point is that Lightning is the central nervous system of the Bitcoin ecosystem 30:41 and different pools. 30:42 You can have all kinds of pools you want. 30:44 You can have sidechains. 30:45 You can have liquid. 30:46 You can have eCash, mints. 30:48 You can have exchanges. 30:50 They all speak Lightning to each other. 30:52 And this is really obvious to us because we actually use Bitcoin. 30:56 This is all what? 30:57 It's all just co-op, I think. 30:59 They will use whatever else you actually work. 31:01 Dude, you're demonstrating that you don't actually use these things. 31:05 Let me read you something from somebody in Nigeria. 31:07 I asked a couple of people I knew. 31:08 I'm like, how has Lightning changed your life? 31:10 OK? 31:11 We're going through a lot of different points. 31:13 Can I just explain? 31:15 No, no, no, no, no. 31:16 You just called what I said co-op. 31:18 So let me dismiss that. 31:20 Hi, Alex. 31:21 Off the top of my head, I'd say my favorite Lightning use case is 31:24 overcoming financial restrictions and fast cross-border remittance to solve emergencies. 31:28 To provide a backstory, my aunt back in the Philippines had a medical emergency. 31:32 My family was able to use Lightning to quickly send money to help out. 31:35 The other options were too slow. 31:37 As for helping overcome financial restrictions, it's helped me spend my money in other African 31:40 countries without having to worry about getting foreign currency. 31:44 That's just one. 31:45 I have so many stories people sent me about many different countries. 31:47 None of that has anything to do with what I'm talking about. 31:49 I mean, I'm very happy for that person. 31:50 It absolutely has to do with the point that you just made that it's not co-op and that 31:55 it's actually an incredible real world innovation. 31:59 I would love nothing more than for people to continue to have access to cheap and effective 32:06 instant payments. 32:07 And I think that's great. 32:08 And I think a problem with Lightning is that it's making that much harder for people. 32:12 But the person who I just talked about couldn't do this without Lightning. 32:17 I don't know how we could possibly proceed, but I'm going to try to go in reverse 32:21 chronological order with the most recent thing. 32:23 And then we'll eventually get back to the federated, which I don't think we have closed 32:27 the book on whether or not you have accepted that the Fed, what those protocols do depends 32:33 on where the money is on the L1 blockchain, which if it's just sitting in a multi-sig 32:37 transaction, then those people can rug you immediately. 32:40 And that is not an acceptable way to argue against whether or not Zcash has better privacy 32:47 is to just say, if you custody it completely with someone else, well, hey, look, if I just 32:51 gave it to Coinbase or whatever, they could also keep it private for me. 32:54 And then they could use SSL or something. 32:56 No, I'm not. 32:58 I would agree with you that federation is not something where you want to store your 33:02 Bitcoin. 33:03 It's a tradeoff that you're going to make to do something else privately. 33:07 Yeah, I would rather. 33:09 Well, I mean, so you have a couple different options right now. 33:13 One of them is to sell your Bitcoin for a shitcoin. 33:16 The other one is to use a mint. 33:18 The other one, there are many different things you can do. 33:20 When you say use a mint, you mean deposit to a multi-sig output on L1 where the money 33:24 is no longer yours? 33:26 No, because if you're depositing your Bitcoin to the Lightning Network and then going very 33:30 quickly in and out of Cashew to send a private transaction, you still have unilateral exit 33:36 through Lightning. 33:37 So you're only using Cashew while you're actually doing things like that. 33:39 If you deposit it to the Lightning Network on L1, then your money is in the Lightning 33:43 Network. 33:44 But you still have unilateral exit from the Lightning Network. 33:45 You could route through someone. 33:48 If you routed through someone who discarded the information, that would maybe help you 33:54 with privacy. 33:54 You'd have to deal with lots of these other problems with the Lightning Network. 33:57 I mean, I don't think the Lightning Network works at all. 33:59 No, you don't. 34:00 You don't think the Lightning Network works at all? 34:02 When I just told you about someone who was able to, like in numerous countries, have 34:06 it help them majorly in their day-to-day use case. 34:10 Well, that's not what I mean by work. 34:12 So can you imagine a second year I might have? 34:16 I'm open to it, I guess. 34:18 Yeah, sure. 34:19 Well, let's say eight billion people show up to a concert, and it's the way the concert 34:26 is set up. 34:27 It's too difficult to see the stage. 34:29 And then some people say, OK, here's what we're going to do. 34:31 We're going to go to the front, and we're going to stand on each other's shoulders or 34:34 something. 34:36 You could see how that is a ridiculous thing to say, but that's basically the lightning 34:40 argument. 34:40 Some people, like a few people near the front, will be able to get it to work. 34:45 But their usage of the L1 bytes will crowd out the other people. 34:50 You will not be able to get a significant critical mass. 34:54 You won't be—eight billion people won't be able to use it. 34:57 So the fact that one or two people use it once or twice, that doesn't— 35:01 That is such a mischaracterization. 35:04 OK, so first of all— 35:05 What's not a mischaracterization is that you can't get, like, eight billion people to 35:09 use the Lightning Network. 35:10 I've never said that, and I would totally agree with you. 35:12 Of course. 35:13 No, eight billion people are not going to use Lightning. 35:15 That's what I'm interested in, is if you can onboard eight billion happy users to it. 35:21 Yeah, the way lightning is going to take us to eight billion is lightning is the central 35:25 nervous system through which all these different mints and pools are going to talk to each 35:30 other, and at the bottom you have on-chain, and then they all talk to each other like 35:34 this, and they're intercompatible, and they all speak the language of lightning. 35:37 That's an accurate description of what's happening today. 35:39 That's what I think it's called. 35:42 But, I mean, it's— I'm just describing the architecture of the ecosystem. 35:45 So, for example, when I use, like— 35:46 Incredible, thank you. 35:49 Like, when I use— when I am transacting and buying things in the real world or on 35:54 the internet, where people actually give me stuff, so it's not just some testnet theory 35:58 thing, I have eCash, OK, on a wallet, and the merchant is receiving Bitcoin, not eCash. 36:05 This is how it works, as I'm sure you know, and I can just go around and spend privately. 36:11 They receive L1 transactions. 36:13 Not on e— not on cashew. 36:15 No. 36:15 No, they don't. 36:16 No, cashew does not even understand what L1 is. 36:19 I'm just asking about what you meant to say. 36:19 You said they receive Bitcoin, they don't receive lightning, so I didn't know what 36:22 you meant by that. 36:23 Lightning is Bitcoin, so they receive lightning. 36:27 Well, I don't— you're the one who— didn't you just say a moment ago, maybe I 36:29 misheard what you said, but you said they do not get lightning, they get Bitcoin. 36:32 So, that's why I asked, I have no idea. 36:34 Yeah, sorry, they don't receive eCash. 36:36 They don't receive a bearer instrument copy token thing. 36:39 They receive actual Bitcoin in the form of lightning. 36:41 Yeah, but again, I admit that it— I admit that it works at a small scale, but it does 36:47 not work at the required scale, which is the whole— the whole thing that I'm interested 36:50 in. 36:50 No, I'm not interested in it working at a small scale. 36:53 I'm like, you know, you've got to meet where the puck is going. 36:55 Okay, so let me— let me read you some— some— just some things that have happened 36:59 in lightning recently, and you can react to them. 37:00 Sure. 37:01 So, as far as lightning runs on a big scale. 37:03 Okay, so Block has a— has a routing node, C equals. 37:09 So, they just revealed that they make about 9.7% APR using this by providing lightning 37:16 services to people. 37:17 So, we're talking tens of millions of dollars here, and they're earning non-custodial 37:22 yield through lightning. 37:23 I think that's really interesting. 37:25 Bitrefill, which is a smaller company, not at the same scale as Block, of course, earns 37:29 3.5%. 37:31 So, this— this technology that you're saying is cope and is silly or whatever is 37:35 allowing businesses to earn interest on their Bitcoin without giving it up. 37:39 I think that's one really interesting thing. 37:41 Another area is the micro-economy. 37:43 So, Nostr has a micro-economy where people send each other zaps using the lightning network. 37:49 There have been 5 million zaps over the last couple years by people on Nostr interacting 37:55 with each other, tipping each other, buying things from each other. 37:58 A totally permissionless micro-economy, impossible without the lightning network, 38:02 completely impossible. 38:03 Exchange adoption. 38:04 You have Binance, the largest exchange in the world, uses lightning. 38:08 You have exchanges like Coinbase, uses lightning. 38:11 River uses lightning. 38:13 You have companies like Steak and Shake, which just today literally reported a massive increase 38:19 in its sales— I mean, you can trust it or not— based on people coming in and using 38:24 the lightning network. 38:25 Now, my favorite one— this is the last one I'll give you just so you can react— is 38:30 entire countries. 38:32 So, when I went to Costa Rica and Kenya, what happens there is you can use apps like Tando 38:38 and Bitcoin Jungle, and you can live in Bitcoin through the lightning network, and you can 38:42 pay any merchant in the country. 38:43 It's amazing. 38:44 So, what happens is the merchant receives M-Pesa or Sinpe, the mobile money. 38:49 They don't have to know what Bitcoin is at all or lightning. 38:51 They don't have to know what that stuff is at all. 38:53 You download this app, and you can actually use your Bitcoin, and it goes out in the form 38:58 of lightning, and the person receives the local fiat currency. 39:01 And you can buy anything in the country, essentially, in Kenya and Costa Rica because 39:06 of the lightning network. 39:08 These are not small-scale innovations is all I'm pushing back on. 39:12 This is not Coke. 39:12 This is really amazing. 39:14 When did you first get into the lightning network? 39:17 Well, I was able to start using it. 39:22 I found it very hard to use until the summer of 2021 when I went to El Salvador. 39:27 And back then, the Moon Wallet, which uses a submarine swap, so it's not kind of fallen 39:35 off in terms of a lightning wallet. 39:36 I still think it's a great on-chain wallet. 39:37 But at the time, it worked really well, and I was walking around El Salvador pretty blown 39:41 away by how well the lightning network worked. 39:43 Like, I was able to just basically fund my whole trip on it. 39:48 Of course, right? 39:49 The Moon Wallet, the submarine swap means that you make an on-chain transaction in order 39:54 to help the lightning. 39:57 So it's a bit of a, you know, it's kind of like every lightning transaction comes with 40:01 an on-chain transaction. 40:02 So it's a little bit of a... 40:03 Well, that's why I said, so now today you would use stuff like Phoenix, or you would 40:08 use Zeus, or soon, Wallet of Satoshi is coming back into the United States with a self-custodial 40:14 lightning wallet, which is pretty amazing news. 40:16 Showing the growth and thriving of the lightning network. 40:18 Listen, I can tell that you're very passionate about the lightning network, which is great. 40:22 And I'm just going to tell you my lightning story, okay? 40:24 And this is, I wrote, I took note, and to prepare for this, I wrote all this down. 40:29 And honestly, I cut a lot of it because it goes on and on. 40:32 And I'm going to skip some points. 40:33 But basically, I first heard about the lightning network in 2015. 40:36 And I was very excited about it. 40:38 But even back then, there were one or two things that were a little weird about it, 40:42 such as on Reddit, which were the huge discussion forum of the time. 40:47 Everyone had a strong opinion. 40:49 The large blockers all hated it. 40:50 Small blockers all loved it. 40:52 But the only video on YouTube, which was Tej Draja's SFBitDevs lecture explaining what 41:01 the lightning network is, that only had 320 views. 41:06 And at least four or five of those views were mine because I watched it a few times over 41:10 and over. 41:11 And I was like, why does everyone have such a strong opinion about this thing that only 41:15 has 300 views? 41:17 No one's watching the YouTube video. 41:19 And I was like, I don't know, maybe YouTube doesn't count. 41:21 I don't know what's going on with that. 41:22 But I really liked it so much that I had this thing, this peer-to-peer Oracle Bitcoin prediction 41:29 market thing that I'm still very passionate about. 41:32 But I rewrote the trading so that you could do trading on the lightning network. 41:38 So I had this completely new type of market scoring rule trade off-chain on the lightning 41:46 network. 41:47 And I wrote this idea. 41:49 And that was March 2016, five years before you were using Moon and wherever. 41:54 And then in April 2018, I wrote this big post about fraud proofs, solve this problem of 42:01 L1 fraud proof blocks, a problem that Eric Lombroso and Luke Dashjr. thought were kind 42:06 of like almost impossible to solve, which they're right. 42:09 It is impossible unless you have a different way of connecting to people to learn about, 42:13 which is in this case, the payment channels. 42:16 So I was originally very, very, very excited about it. 42:20 I'm just as excited as you are now. 42:23 But then I started encountering all these huge problems with it. 42:27 And these weird questions would pop up and people would have no. 42:30 So one of the things that happened was I went to an Arcapulco in 2019, where I saw wallet, 42:36 I think it was Blue Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi the first time. 42:40 And everyone was going around. 42:41 People were giving each other four sats or 10 sats or even one sat using the Lightning 42:47 Network. 42:47 And I was like, oh, that doesn't make any sense because you have to because I knew how it 42:50 worked. 42:51 You had to open channel first and fund the channel and you have to wait for it to confirm. 42:55 And I thought, oh, so I asked people, is it custodial? 42:58 Does it really use the Lightning Network? 43:01 None of the people there. 43:02 This is a huge group of people who are so excited to use the Lightning Network. 43:05 I was as excited as you were. 43:07 No one there had any idea what that even meant about custodial versus non-custodial. 43:12 And then year after year after year, you hear about people using Lightning Network and then 43:15 you ask them, oh, what wallet do you use? 43:17 They say Wallet of Satoshi. 43:18 As you and I know, and probably many people in the audience know, the custodial Lightning 43:23 does not use the Lightning. 43:25 There's no HTLCs. 43:26 There's no funding transaction. 43:28 There is no Bitcoin transaction. 43:29 It is just a database on their end. 43:32 So there's no use of Bitcoin. 43:34 There's no usage. 43:35 That's not true at all. 43:37 You use invoices or Lightning addresses. 43:40 But the invoices don't do anything. 43:40 So just to be clear for the audience. 43:44 OK. 43:44 So if I'm a master today, and... 43:46 I'll look through it for yourself and you can determine. 43:48 No, you should use the technology. 43:53 It's not possible to send someone four SATs on the Lightning Network when they have not 43:56 joined the Lightning Network yet. 43:58 I'm not arguing that. 43:58 What I'm arguing is the fact that even custodial Lightning uses Lightning. 44:02 So, for example, if I'm on Primal, or Paul's on Primal, paul.primal.net, OK, and that's 44:12 his Lightning address and it's custodial, I can send you money from my Albi Hub mobile 44:22 self-custodial Lightning wallet. 44:24 It works. 44:24 The money moves. 44:25 So the money goes to my custodian. 44:27 It doesn't go to me. 44:29 You are missing the point. 44:32 It goes to... 44:33 I think you have been misled. 44:36 I'm sorry to say this, but I think you've been misled by other... 44:39 I've not been misled. 44:40 I know exactly what's happening. 44:42 You're literally saying the Lightning Network doesn't actually carry the value to the custodial 44:47 holder of... 44:49 I'm a part of that, dude. 44:50 I understand what the word custodial means. 44:51 But it goes to... 44:52 It moves out of my wallet to someone else over the Lightning Network. 44:56 Not to me, though. 44:58 Not to the user. 44:59 Well, if you're using a self-custodial Albi Primal, you know, Nostra-powered account, 45:05 of course it does. 45:05 It goes right to you right away. 45:06 It works perfectly. 45:07 We're talking about the custodial Lightning right now. 45:11 Are we not? 45:12 Well, I was making a point. 45:13 Like, even custodial Lightning uses Lightning. 45:15 It's not like it uses on-chain Bitcoin or Monero or something. 45:18 It's possible that if every leg is custodial, then it does not use the Bitcoin Network or 45:22 the Lightning Network. 45:23 So it's only the non-custodial parts that use the Lightning Network. 45:26 Paul, it's coming from me, a self-custodial Lightning user. 45:30 This is not true at all, man. 45:32 Well, I mean, I think the audience will have to take some time and take a deep breath and 45:36 take out a pen and a piece of paper and try to work out for themselves if they think... 45:39 But what I'm trying to say is that... 45:42 One sec, one sec, one sec, one sec. 45:43 Paul, Paul, I don't think anyone here is arguing that custodial to custodial is somehow ending 45:50 up in a non-custodial wallet. 45:52 But what Alex's point is, if I'm sending... 45:54 Say I'm using Wallet of Satoshi, a custodial service, and I'm sending to Alex, who is on 45:58 Zeus or something, he is receiving Bitcoin at the other end of that transaction. 46:01 From Wallet of Satoshi, but you could use anything. 46:03 You could be using Visa. 46:05 You could be using Visa or any other thing. 46:07 But you couldn't be using Visa because... 46:10 How does a Visa payment get to Alex's Zeus wallet? 46:16 In order to pay him, you need to know about how he wants to receive the money. 46:19 So he'll say, I want to receive the money in my Lightning wallet. 46:22 Then you say, you have your own relationship with Wallet of Satoshi custodian, and you 46:27 can settle up however you like. 46:30 All right. 46:31 Well, Paul, here's where I think you... 46:33 Can I just... 46:34 I think that this is where I think using the stuff and interacting with people will... 46:38 I haven't even gotten to any of my critiques of Lightning, but we can talk about it. 46:42 That's okay. 46:42 We'll get there. 46:43 But here's the key thing. 46:44 You talk about Visa. 46:46 What's so cool, even about custodial Lightning, is it doesn't require ID. 46:49 So even if I'm a newbie on Nostr, and I'm at Alex at Primal, and you're at Paul at Primal, 46:54 the fact that we can permissionlessly share information without having to put in information 47:00 or have a Visa card, to your point, is quite beautiful. 47:03 When you're using Lightning, yes. 47:06 Well, I mean, this is an expedited congestion hour. 47:08 I'm getting run over by 10,000 points, and there's hardly enough time to refute them all. 47:12 I would just... 47:13 Well, I have to respond to this idea. 47:15 All right. 47:17 No, just to finish the point, they're going to journey, and eventually you'll learn how 47:21 to self-custody it, and then it works. 47:24 I agree with that. 47:25 I agree that we should ramp people up. 47:27 And it doesn't have to be self-custodial on day one. 47:30 I think that's a huge mistake, and that we should ramp people up. 47:33 I completely agree. 47:34 What I disagree with is that this is somehow evidence that Lightning Network works. 47:37 It's actually the exact opposite. 47:38 It's evidence that it does not work, and that it's a sham. 47:41 And that we're all lying to our community. 47:44 Okay. 47:44 So why don't we go back to you responding to all the things I just told you about how 47:47 Lightning's changing the world. 47:48 I'm trying. 47:49 I'm trying. 47:49 Go ahead. 47:50 I am trying. 47:51 There's a lot. 47:51 There's so many things. 47:52 You know, my pen is going to run out of ink, I think. 47:54 But what it interests you... 47:56 You brought up Nostr. 47:57 I don't know if it would interest you to know that Fiat Joff, co-creator of Nostr, 48:01 he was one of the first people to tell me... 48:03 He's on my little story of timeline of people who said, 48:05 Lightning Network should be burnt to the ground, 48:07 and it would be better if it had never been invented. 48:09 He's a huge creator. 48:10 That's a great point. 48:11 Yeah. 48:12 Yeah. 48:12 Great point. 48:12 And he cannot stop other people from joining Nostr and creating Zaps. 48:16 Because that was something that GD55 did. 48:19 The point is, this is someone that you respect because they like Nostr. 48:23 You said, Nostr is this great thing. 48:25 But I'm just saying, by the way, the creator of Nostr... 48:27 I'm trying to just paint a little bit of picture here that it might be possible that 48:32 there might be some flaws with... 48:35 So, one thing is... 48:37 And the other thing is, Taz Dreiser came on to what Bitcoin did. 48:40 And he gave this very sober account of the Lightning. 48:43 And he started talking about how there's lots of things that can't be said. 48:46 Everyone's like, Lightning is going to be the best thing ever. 48:48 And then he says, well, actually, the Lightning Network can't do that. 48:51 Referring to a long list of things. 48:55 You're quoting this stuff from forever ago. 48:57 Just on that point, Paul, because I can't let this slide. 48:59 You just said Fiat Joff said Lightning sucks or whatever. 49:02 Yeah. 49:02 Just now, while we were talking, here's Fiat Joff on Nostr. 49:07 I just sent him money over the Lightning Network. 49:09 OK, so he hasn't set up and he uses it all the time. 49:13 I know. 49:13 But why do you think that that's irrelevant at all? 49:15 I would like to get into your head. 49:16 I don't think that's notable. 49:18 You think it's more notable what he said years ago? 49:23 This is so funny. 49:24 But you're talking about something that happened in 2019. 49:27 Yeah, Lightning didn't function in 2019. 49:29 So, of course, people were frustrated. 49:30 I told you I couldn't even... 49:31 It was almost unworkable until 2021. 49:34 And even then, it only worked kind of in a weird way where it didn't really work properly. 49:39 It takes a long time for something like this so sophisticated to get up and running. 49:43 Like Fiat Joff has an opinion that no one should use Lightning. 49:47 He has looked into it and he's decided that he's put his reputation on the fact 49:52 that it's not going to work. 49:53 That's why I brought it up. 49:54 And yet he uses it all the time, every day. 50:00 No, he does not. 50:01 I mean, you should talk to him and ask him. 50:04 I think we should move on from the Fiat Joff thing. 50:10 But what we're talking about is something that Fiat Joff said a long time ago. 50:13 We don't have him here to tell us his opinion today. So let's move on from the Fiat Joff thing. 50:16 I'll tell you this, though. Fiat Joff, he co-runs a telegram group called Lightning's Best Moments, 50:22 where he just has endless screenshots, day after day, of Lightning Network not working 50:26 and in various embarrassing situations. I have an article where I document lots and lots of quotes 50:32 from people across time, which is called the LN Black Pill. So if you go to Truthcoin.info, 50:37 you can look it up. It's called the LN Black Pill. The first section is just quotes from Lightning developers 50:42 who say that the Lightning Network is not going to work. 50:46 Well, it worked just now. Me and a different... 50:49 I want you to understand what I'm saying, sir, about the fact that you have tapped a button. 50:55 I mean, you didn't even know that the... I'm talking about the real Lightning Network with HTLCs 51:01 versus custodial Lightning Network. 51:04 This isn't custodial. Neither Fiat Joff or I use custodial Lightning. 51:08 That was a self-custodial Albi hub product that I just used to make that payment. 51:13 I mean, so you say. But let me continue my story here for a second. 51:18 Okay, go ahead. 51:19 I was originally very excited. And then Tadge did his interview on what Bitcoin did, 51:25 and he was like, actually, it's not that great. 51:29 And then I had some questions back and forth on the Bitcoin dev mailing list in 2022, in February. 51:36 And some people asked about, they asked some questions about BIP300. 51:39 And then they said, oh, what about this? And they compared it to Lightning. 51:44 So I redid the numbers with Lightning, and the onboarding situation is terrible with Lightning. 51:49 You cannot onboard. So this led to a long list of problems that I had with the Lightning Network. 51:55 And it led to an earlier post that I wrote called Lightning Limitations. 51:59 And then ever since writing that post, you get all these people have done like a panel or various... 52:05 And this is stuff that I've documented on this Ellen Blackbill video. 52:10 But another thing that later happened was someone who worked for a Lightning company, an engineer, 52:17 two of them, in fact, they messaged me. One of them was Mike Tidwell. 52:21 I don't want to say who the other one was. 52:23 But they messaged me and said, well, you know, I'm actually an engineer on Lightning. 52:27 And it wasn't until I read your post that I realized how Lightning actually works. 52:32 And I realized that you were right, that actually it's probably not going to work. 52:36 And then I went to present at MIT. I was invited to the MIT Bitcoin Expo. 52:43 And Rene Picard, the author of the book Mastering Lightning, he was there. 52:47 He saw my talk and he said, oh, this is great. What a great talk. 52:50 Then he was giving a talk. So he went to my talk. So I went to his talk. 52:54 His talk was about problems with the Lightning Network. It was an extremely sober talk. 52:59 And not only was the talk very dispiriting, but I had the opportunity to talk to him later in the hallway. 53:05 And he basically said that it's annoying for him because if he wants to talk about engineering problems with Lightning, 53:12 he often doesn't get invited to speak or he gets de-emphasized, he thought. 53:17 And I thought, well, this is terrible. What a terrible situation. 53:21 And then the final thing would be this thing with Barack, where he's someone who clearly understands. 53:26 He crashed the Lightning Network for fun twice. He clearly understands the Lightning Network. 53:30 He crashed one implementation of it. But sure, go on. 53:34 Yeah. And he created Arc. And he said that the motivation for creating Arc was that he was trying to fix problems with Lightning, 53:41 but he couldn't do it without creating a completely separate thing. 53:44 And then right after that, got a bunch of people to, as if, you know, it's kind of like in 1984 where they say we've always been at war with East Asia or whatever. 53:53 A bunch of people who have just been saying before Lightning is the best thing ever. They just switched to Arc. 53:58 So you may be right about every single thing that you could say ever. 54:02 And I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of people who are fans of Lightning on this show who I am not going to convince. 54:08 And I just have to say that, you know, God did not put me on this planet to be an incredibly persuasive person. 54:15 And I understand that and I accept that, you know, painful though it is to not always be persuasive. 54:21 But I think I have more fun just for me getting my own accurate picture of the world. 54:26 And I enjoy debate because I think it's fun to bounce ideas off people and stress test the ideas. 54:33 One of the best things you can do to an idea is throw it out there and say. 54:37 But I'm just telling you from my point of view, it looks like this whole thing is just a complete Theranos style scam that is just a waste of time. 54:44 One more thing, Danny, and then we move on. But like, OK, great. So all the things I read you and I didn't even mention the biggest one of all, 54:49 which is that this year imminently any day or week now, all the square readers in the United States, which is millions of units, will accept lightning payments. 54:57 So or eCash payments, which is one of the coolest part about eCash is that it speaks lightning. 55:02 So that means that anybody in the United States this summer will be able to go to their local coffee shop or whatever, assuming that, you know, your coffee shop has a square reader. 55:10 And you can use eCash to buy your coffee, which helps us fight surveillance capitalism. 55:13 So all these massive rollouts and upgrades done by finance, Coinbase Square, you know, if if lightning doesn't work, what what explains that to you? 55:22 Why do you think they're all adopting this thing that you think is a failure? 55:26 Can you can you shed more light on that? 55:28 Yeah, well, this whole thing is a huge group think it's exactly what I mentioned before. 55:32 This is a cultural contagious idea. 55:35 So, like, for example, the exchanges did not like adopt lightning because they really wanted to. 55:41 They dragged their feet because they think they know that it doesn't really help that much. 55:46 Now, after a huge amount of of cultural attention and R&D effort. 55:52 The Lightning Network has achieved enough of a level of quality that for some people they may want to. 55:58 Deposit or withdraw or move money among exchanges very quickly. 56:02 So but you can see it's because the technology is so bad that they drag their feet for so long on actually implementing the Lightning Network. 56:11 And I, you know, I'm not sure we don't know. 56:13 It's hard for us to figure out with the on chain transactions, you kind of see the fee. 56:18 And even then, you don't know, you know, what counts as real. 56:22 I certainly think the bit refill data, it would be the most reliable because I can't imagine. 56:28 Just the way their business model works, their data is probably accurate. 56:32 So I think that they they would know if you actually look at Serge's presentation. 56:39 He emphasizes that actually there's more Litecoin payments than Bitcoin Lightning payments. 56:44 But that's not to say that the reason why Lightning doesn't work is because I've actually investigated the details of how it works. 56:49 And there's not enough bytes on L1 to onboard everyone. 56:52 There's a huge risk as to who you open the channel with. 56:55 They can lock your funds for two weeks or even steal from you, depending on how they surround you in the channel. 57:00 There's a huge inbound liquidity problem, which is counterintuitive and has terrible user experience and it's expensive. 57:06 The HCLCs consume so many bytes that they cannot really make. 57:11 If the L1 fee rate is a certain amount, they did this. 57:14 You saw this with ordinals where they so they're sometimes the payments fail, the routing and the payment rate. 57:22 It has to be near zero to be viable, but instead it's very high. 57:27 The fake custodial Lightning that has tricked everyone into being dishonest and to just basically misrepresenting what the Lightning network is and what it does. 57:39 Basically, you know, the uptake is still pretty low. 57:42 The privacy is terrible, according to what this is the last time I looked into it. 57:46 So I looked into it and I saw, oh, yeah, again, I saw Lightning limitations. 57:50 I saw a panel and there was Matt Corallo and he said, you know. 57:55 That it's actually it's going to be difficult to get the privacy. 57:58 So I get my information from what I regard as the top experts, and I know that it takes a long time to filter down to the masses. 58:06 This episode is also brought to you by Iron, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. 58:13 Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. 58:15 They also provide cutting edge computing resources for AI, all backed by 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just your own silly mistakes, 59:05 you're fully protected by Anchor Watch. 59:07 Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55% and are available for individuals and commercial customers located in the U.S. 59:14 Speak to Anchor Watch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage over at anchorwatch.com. 59:20 That's anchorwatch.com. 59:22 You're going to cite Matt Corallo here? 59:26 As an expert on Lightning? 59:28 Yeah. 59:29 Yeah. 59:30 No, no, no. I mean, no, meaning to back up what you're saying about Lightning being a failure. 59:33 You're going to cite him on that? 59:34 Didn't I just tell you that he said in this talk that Lightning has a long way to go to be private or have any decent privacy? 59:42 That's what he said. 59:43 So I cite him as an expert on Lightning. 59:45 Yeah. 59:46 I mean, we should all be critical of Lightning, but he also works full time on Lightning as his job. 59:49 He gave a talk. 59:50 Did you attend TabConf ever? 59:52 I'm curious. 59:53 I don't remember seeing you there. 59:55 No, but my colleagues do. 59:57 Well, I'm aware. 59:58 We sponsor it every year. 59:59 It's a great conference. 1:00:00 I haven't been able to come. 1:00:01 Matt Corallo has given a talk every year called Lightning is Broken AF, and sometimes he changes the title and he says what I'm saying. 1:00:09 Yeah, he fixes it. 1:00:10 His job is to help make it better, and he does a great job of it. 1:00:12 Exactly. 1:00:14 And so Matt, I think, is brilliant, and he has been very critical of Lightning for a long time. 1:00:19 I just did a show with him in Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and he is the most bullish I've ever heard him on Lightning at the moment. 1:00:27 I want to get back to one really important key point, which is I think partially why you guys are talking past each other on this. 1:00:35 When you say that Lightning is not going to work, Paul, what do you mean by that precisely? 1:00:40 Because I don't think many people who are proponents of the Lightning Network are saying this is like the golden bullet to fix Bitcoin. 1:00:46 Right, that's what I mean. 1:00:47 It's going to scale to 8 billion people, but it can still be a very important tool in the stack of Bitcoin and not have failed. 1:00:53 Indeed, and I wrote that fraud proof thing, which would require payment channels. 1:00:58 So that would be one use for it that is not – I don't know if anyone will ever care about fraud proofs. 1:01:03 But yeah, I mean the golden bullet, and I think it is represented as the L2, and it is represented as having all these desirable qualities that it doesn't have. 1:01:15 And I do think it counters the culture of truth, which I see as necessary if any enterprise is going to succeed. 1:01:27 It has to be willing to be honest. 1:01:30 It's true that a lot of people can say, oh, I'm critical of the Lightning Network in a way that will let them collect a salary for another year. 1:01:39 But very few people are able to be honest with the Lightning Network and saying, we just shouldn't do this at all, which is my guess. 1:01:46 And one of the reasons why is the silver bullet thing hits two ideas at once, which is you scale to 8 billion people. 1:01:54 Not only does money have network effects, but any tech stack also has network effects. 1:02:01 So as a certain L2 becomes more popular, it will tend to displace the other L2s. 1:02:10 It's just like we don't live in a world where you use lots of different versions of Bluetooth or something. 1:02:17 It's just like eventually you standardize on the one that works. 1:02:21 Paul, have you ever used – do you have an NPUB, a Nostr? Have you ever used eCache? 1:02:26 I'm just curious. Have you actually tried these things that you're so critical of? 1:02:30 Didn't I actually tell you that I not only have I tried, but I wrote new Lightning technology into existence in 2016? 1:02:37 No, no, no. I'm not talking about – you're stuck in the past here. I'm talking about today. 1:02:40 Have you used eCache? Show me an eCache. Have you used Cashew or have you used Nostr? 1:02:46 And have you explored that at all or not? 1:02:49 Well, I don't use them anymore, but I have used them through 2022. 1:02:53 But my view is that it's a settled issue and that they don't work. 1:02:56 Cashew didn't exist in 2022. 1:02:58 But Cashew is federated eCache, is it not? 1:03:01 It's not. 1:03:03 Then what is it? 1:03:04 Anyway, let's actually get to something more interesting. 1:03:06 What is it? 1:03:07 Hold on. Let's say we have this feature where we have Drivechains. 1:03:11 You get your way. We have it. 1:03:13 How does an on-chain user pay – I'll make it this way. 1:03:17 Let's say I have Drivechain tokens. Let's say they're Paul tokens. 1:03:20 I've made my own – I've got Paul tokens, right? 1:03:22 Is this not BTC or is this an L2 Bitcoin or is this something else? 1:03:27 We'll call them BTC-denominated tokens that I've created as a Drivechain. 1:03:32 Yeah, when you deposit to the L2, you get something that over there would be BTC. 1:03:37 It's similar to the Lightning Network where it's like – it counts as BTC. 1:03:42 Right, so we'll call it Paul BTC instead of Paul BTC. 1:03:45 Okay, we'll call it the Paul Drivechain. 1:03:47 Yeah, so how does someone who's just got on-chain Bitcoin interact with you? 1:03:51 Like how do you – if they don't have Paul BTC, how does this work? 1:03:55 If I want – if you're saying I want to pay you or who wants – if you want to – 1:04:00 Yeah, if you've got Paul BTC and you want to pay an on-chain person 1:04:04 who doesn't know what your Drivechain is, yeah, how does that work? 1:04:07 The on-chain – the person, the recipient decides how they want to be paid. 1:04:11 So if they want L1 coins, you have to send them L1 coins. 1:04:15 So you have to – you basically have to cash out to the main chain in them. 1:04:19 Well, I think you can use HTLC to swap them, 1:04:23 but you would need to have someone take that bid. 1:04:26 But my idea is not that – my view is that 8 billion people can't fit on L1, 1:04:32 so it's pointless to try and design for – 1:04:35 what you have to do is design so that people are happy being on L2 1:04:38 because that's the only way that it will work anyway. 1:04:44 Okay, I'm just trying to get at this because you seem to be trying to discredit Lightning 1:04:50 by saying that if you have a scenario where, like, only one half of it works, 1:04:53 that it's not working. 1:04:55 So I'm just curious, like, okay, in your future, 1:04:58 does this mean that, like, everybody has to be using – 1:05:01 like, are the different Drivechains interoperable? 1:05:03 Like, can Paul BTC work with Danny BTC without having to go on-chain? 1:05:08 Yes. 1:05:10 And there's – and let's say Paul BTC is denominated in BTC 1:05:16 and Danny's actually using USD tokens over here. 1:05:19 So you're saying these can be – 1:05:21 You would want – there would be someone who has an account on both, 1:05:24 and you would route through them. 1:05:26 They may charge a fee, but you could do this for them. 1:05:28 Fine, but how are those trust assumptions any different from someone who's got USD eCash 1:05:37 paying someone in BTC eCash settling over the Lightning Network? 1:05:43 Like, you're still trusting somebody in the middle to do the swap. 1:05:46 In my view, the Lightning Network doesn't work, 1:05:49 and the federated model is a joke and not real. 1:05:52 So that's my view. 1:05:54 In the Drivechain world, each transaction pays a transaction fee 1:05:58 that goes to the L1 miners, who are the only people who can crash the – 1:06:02 I'm just reminding the people in the audience. 1:06:04 Yeah, sure. 1:06:06 They're the only people who can crash the system and stop it from working. 1:06:10 And so the idea is that they'd be so happy with all these fees they would collect, 1:06:14 and estimate it in detail, what I think those fees would be, enormous, 1:06:18 and that the number of coins on each chain, as I mentioned before, 1:06:21 would be something like 5,000 to 15,000 on each chain, 10 to 15 chains. 1:06:28 And the chains would be kind of geographically distributed, would be my guess. 1:06:31 They'd be like North America, and they'd be like Europe, 1:06:34 and then they'd be like whatever, Southeast Asia or something. 1:06:37 And so you would tend to stay on your area, is my guess. 1:06:43 This is a total conjecture on my part. 1:06:45 But the idea is they're making so much money from these transaction fees 1:06:49 that they are very, very happy to keep the whole thing moving, 1:06:52 which if they just do nothing, the whole thing works perfectly. 1:06:55 They can intentionally attack and destroy, 1:06:58 but my view is that they would not want to do that. 1:07:01 And a key difference between Satoshi's invention of Bitcoin 1:07:06 is that the miners are not a federation. 1:07:10 There's a dynamically changing set of people who are anonymous. 1:07:15 So you're not relying on someone's brand or someone's reputation. 1:07:20 This is just new people can join or leave at any time. 1:07:24 And this is also the configuration that L1 uses, 1:07:27 so it's better to reuse that for the L2s. 1:07:30 So that's my Drivechain vision, so to speak. 1:07:34 I don't think that it's guaranteed to work, 1:07:36 but I do think relative to the attention Lightning gets, 1:07:40 it is totally mismatched, and that is another example. 1:07:43 I think just to be fair, I think it's a really interesting idea. 1:07:47 I mean, obviously it doesn't exist, but I mean, I think the idea is interesting. 1:07:51 It's kind of cool. We'll see. 1:07:54 You can download it on the LyricWeb.com slash download. 1:07:58 You can try the Signet. It's fake. It's Signet coins. 1:08:02 So would you expect your vision, if it works out, to be immediately successful? 1:08:07 I mean, or would you expect some sort of time period 1:08:09 where it's actually really hard to use at first, 1:08:11 and then all of a sudden you get more adoption, 1:08:13 and then over time it becomes more standardized and it becomes smoother? 1:08:17 Which route do you think yours would go? 1:08:19 Would it just be like overnight immediately works for everybody, 1:08:21 or would it take 5, 10, 15 years to settle into its role and to function? 1:08:28 I do think that there is more. 1:08:30 Relative to the Lightning Network, it is more where the work is up front, loaded. 1:08:35 Okay. 1:08:36 And then it would be like teleporting to the finish line. 1:08:40 I think that is more likely, whereas with Lightning, 1:08:42 one of the problems with Lightning is it just seems to require 1:08:44 this ongoing developer investment of time and energy and money, 1:08:48 and it's always like different attacks, flood and loot, whatever, 1:08:52 op expire, blah, blah, blah, this stuff is just going on and on and on, 1:08:56 whereas I don't have any of that. 1:08:58 But, of course, everything to improve the performance of the chain 1:09:04 and to improve the user experience that Rome wasn't built in a day, 1:09:08 obviously that would be the case. 1:09:09 But I do think there is more of it jumping to utility. 1:09:14 Got it. 1:09:15 Particularly you can onboard people directly to the L2, 1:09:18 and so you don't care as much about what the L1 fee rate is. 1:09:22 And so I think that was a problem with Lightning 1:09:24 when the Ordinal's phenomenon kind of even interfered with Lightning Network working, 1:09:29 whereas this would not have that issue. 1:09:32 Well, people are working on that. 1:09:34 I mean, there's like splicing, but I won't go there. 1:09:36 I think what I was going to say is what we could probably definitively agree on 1:09:38 is that the Lightning Bitcoin stack works in practice, not in theory, 1:09:49 and that you would say that Drivechains work in theory but not in practice 1:09:53 because they don't exist yet in reality. 1:09:55 And I think that that's kind of interesting, 1:09:57 and it highlights maybe the spaces we inhabit is that you're in theory 1:10:01 and I'm in practice and I'm using it and you're not. 1:10:04 And I think that's cool. 1:10:06 I think people that are in theory should work with people who work in practice 1:10:10 and they can work together to make something that's actually beneficial to someone. 1:10:15 But you've made it super clear throughout the conversation 1:10:17 that you haven't used a lot of these tools that you're criticizing, 1:10:20 which I don't really feel is fair. 1:10:22 Well, one I thought was a caching I thought was a federated eCash. 1:10:26 So if it's not that, then I would like to know what it is. 1:10:28 But what is it, though? What happens on L1? 1:10:33 You should go check out the documentation. 1:10:35 It's not federated eCash. It's custodial eCash. 1:10:41 I know, but eCash was already custodial, according to me. 1:10:45 It's Lightning native. It doesn't use on-chain transactions. 1:10:50 So let's say I have an on-chain UTXO and it's one Bitcoin and I want some eCash. 1:10:55 What do I do? 1:10:58 You have to deposit Lightning into the caching mint to get your caching tokens. 1:11:03 Well, first I open a Lightning channel. I join the Lightning network. 1:11:07 I open a channel with whatever. Let's say I open it with the mint or whatever. 1:11:10 Why not? Make it even easier, right? 1:11:12 So I open a Lightning channel with the mint. 1:11:15 Don't I already have the ability to pay people through them as a Lightning routing node? 1:11:20 What is the eCash part? 1:11:22 What's cool is you can go to boardwalk.cash or one of these eCash front-end mint things. 1:11:28 And you guys can all try it today. It takes two seconds. 1:11:30 If you go to boardwalk.cash or was it boardwalkcash.com? Let's see. 1:11:35 I think it's boardwalk.cash. 1:11:37 And you can go there or boardwalkcash.com. 1:11:41 And you can instantly generate eCash. 1:11:44 Instantly generate eCash. 1:11:46 And you add a mint and you deposit Lightning or Bitcoin. 1:11:50 I think you can also send it because it does a swap thing. 1:11:53 You can check it out right now. It's quite cool. 1:11:54 And then you can mess around with it and find out. 1:11:56 But I would encourage people to check this out. 1:11:58 What would you think of me if I made a new project called Lightning whatever? 1:12:03 I don't care. 1:12:04 Lightning desk or something. 1:12:06 And what I actually do is I just take people's money. 1:12:09 And then I have a little database. 1:12:12 And this thing is totally 100% custodial. 1:12:15 And then I can offer people a fast, instant payment experience. 1:12:23 And then I just tell everyone this is Lightning. 1:12:27 But it's fully custodial. 1:12:28 Great, but does it talk Lightning? 1:12:30 Will it pay out Paul at Primal.net? 1:12:34 Not only do I accept Bitcoin, but I also accept Bitcoin payments over the Lightning network. 1:12:38 But I'm just keeping all the money in a giant pile. 1:12:41 Maybe I pay you out, maybe I don't. 1:12:44 But then I say that this is a brand new Lightning technology. 1:12:47 What would you think of that? 1:12:48 And I put Lightning right in the name. 1:12:50 Lightning table. 1:12:54 What would you think of that? 1:12:55 You think this is bringing human rights to people in Kenya? 1:13:01 If it offered massive privacy improvements over Lightning, 1:13:04 I would consider it, I don't know, for small purchases. 1:13:07 I promise to keep everything private. 1:13:08 I won't tell anyone. 1:13:09 No, no, no. 1:13:10 Well, luckily, open source code, you don't have to trust anybody. 1:13:13 I mean, we can see and verify everything. 1:13:15 I mean, e-caches. 1:13:17 Well, I would only use it. 1:13:18 Yeah, but I'm telling you, I would only use it if it was open source 1:13:21 and I could inspect it and take a look and make sure that it, in fact, was very private. 1:13:24 Otherwise, I wouldn't use your mint. 1:13:26 Sorry. 1:13:27 I'm keeping it. 1:13:28 And I'm just promising not to tell everyone. 1:13:33 That's not, that would, no, I would not. 1:13:35 No, I wouldn't trust that. 1:13:36 No way. 1:13:37 So then, like, I don't know, that's what all this, that's what all this, 1:13:40 that's what federated e-caches mean. 1:13:41 No, Cashew is fully open source. 1:13:43 No, it's fully open source. 1:13:44 You can inspect the code for yourself. 1:13:46 I know, but what happens on L1 to get that? 1:13:50 I mean, look, dude, in a hundred years, I mean, 1:13:52 you really think people are all going to be on L1? 1:13:54 No, but I'm just, but when, I know when Drivechain, when you deposit to L1, 1:13:59 you get L2 coins, they reside in the BIP300 script. 1:14:01 So I know, I know what happens on L1 in that, in that scenario. 1:14:04 So I know, I know what the security model is. 1:14:07 For the custodial model, you just give your coins to someone else. 1:14:11 But I mean, hey, I don't know, maybe it's all, 1:14:13 maybe it's all like super, super, super smart. 1:14:15 And there's like a lot of ingenious stuff going on and it's not all a fraud. 1:14:18 I would say, well, 1:14:20 why can't we take the middle ground and just say it's emerging? 1:14:23 It's not perfect by any stretch. 1:14:24 It has issues, it has bugs, but it's getting better all the time. 1:14:27 What happens on L1 to me right now? 1:14:30 You can't use L1 on Cashew, just to be clear. 1:14:33 It doesn't work. You have to use Lightning. 1:14:35 Yeah, but how do I get, okay, so I have to, 1:14:38 I join the Lightning network and I'm connected to someone who is using Cashew 1:14:42 through the network of channels. 1:14:46 If you want to send Cashew, you send Lightning to a Cashew min, 1:14:50 and then you can send the eCash tokens either around in that min, 1:14:53 perfectly privately, or you can pay a Lightning invoice with them. 1:14:55 Right. 1:14:56 Yeah, so the idea is, 1:14:58 since it's only a few seconds that you have to, 1:15:01 since it's only a few seconds that you have to trust them in, it kind of doesn't matter as much. 1:15:04 Is that the idea? You can use it like that, or you can keep eCash. Well, hey, maybe it's the greatest thing. 1:15:09 My point is, you would never send more than you'd be willing to lose. It's only for small 1:15:14 amounts of money. This is for highly private spending. That's what eCash is for. 1:15:18 Yeah, maybe. I'm sure it's great. I'm sure it's the greatest thing ever. 1:15:21 Paul, do you think, potentially, you said before that you dismissed Lightning, essentially, 1:15:26 in 2022. That's like three years ago. There's been a lot of changes. Do you think you might be 1:15:30 dismissing something you don't fully understand now? Of course. We all don't understand anything 1:15:35 fully. I highly doubt how much you guys understand about a Drivechain or whatever. 1:15:43 Yeah, no, 100%. That's fair. We all have to live in a world where we have a very imperfect 1:15:49 understanding of everything that we do, and anyone could be wrong about anything, 1:15:53 including something they really feel very confidently about. We all just have to deal 1:15:57 with that. That's our curse as human beings. Some of the stuff is fundamental that I wrote 1:16:03 in the post about, you need L1 bytes to join the Lightning Network first. There's just not 1:16:10 enough bytes anywhere near enough to join. I do the math, the basic arithmetic in the post. 1:16:17 And, again, the fact that people are moving on to Arc, to me, I see it as confirmation. 1:16:23 They just want to quietly drop the issue. It's not moving on. I'm just telling you, 1:16:27 Arc is very exciting, and it's going to interoperate with Lightning. Arc pools 1:16:34 will be part of a connective tissue that includes other pool technology, other sidechains and 1:16:38 liquid. But it exists. We're going to be hearing it. You can try it today. You can actually use it. 1:16:44 I'm just a little burned out. But that could easily be me making a mistake. But I've heard 1:16:49 time and time again about, oh, once we get this and that, then it'll finally work. 1:16:54 Even from the very beginning, where they said in 2015, they said, I think we'll be ready in three 1:16:59 months. It's been three months away from being finished. It's a normal thing when you're a 1:17:06 software engineer to be very optimistic about. And, of course, we all rely on the optimism of 1:17:13 entrepreneurs and innovators. One thing that I would say, though, is that I think innovation is 1:17:18 not additive. It is ecological. So when something gets a lot of attention, I think it does tend to 1:17:26 discourage the people working on other things. So you have to really decide if you really think 1:17:31 Lightning is definitely the thing that's going to be the good thing. You have to know that when 1:17:36 you support it, you will be cursing everything else to move slower or that maybe people will 1:17:41 give up on it and that you may be hurting the project. No, because I can use these other 1:17:47 technologies and it doesn't hurt Lightning. It's fine. Let's use liquids. Liquids are interesting. 1:17:53 Fine. Let's check it out. It interoperates. I'm just feeding my belief that, and again, 1:17:58 anyone could be wrong about anything, but I really feel that it is ecological. It's an ecology. So 1:18:04 as you support one thing, it discourages all the other things, and even especially financial 1:18:09 support, and that can be very distracting to people. I consider myself to be very lucky. 1:18:13 I'm a Bitcoin OG, and so I can work on whatever I want, and I am immune somewhat to the needs of 1:18:21 a young, ambitious person will get sucked into Lightning. Just they'll show up and they'll see 1:18:26 all the cultural attention that it gets. And so all the people who love it so much and everyone 1:18:30 with a little Lightning in their Twitter handle and how much attention it gets on stage. And so 1:18:37 they'll say, oh, I want it. This is bad. You would say this is bad. Hold on. Hold on. Sabina 1:18:45 from Kenya saw Lightning, understood that it had promise, built an app in Kenya, and now anybody 1:18:51 can go to Kenya and use Lightning to make any payment in the country and live on a Bitcoin 1:18:55 standard. I'm sorry. That's just badass. I'm so impressed by her. That's incredible. But don't 1:19:00 you understand why I said that it was bad? No, obviously not. I don't get it. No, because if 1:19:06 there's something else... Why would you say what she's done is bad? I don't get it. I don't 1:19:09 understand. Well, she was misled. She was tragically misled by the people shilling Lightning, 1:19:15 because if there was a different thing that worked, that will work better in the long run. 1:19:19 She wasted her time doing this dead end. And instead, she would have maybe done the different 1:19:23 L2 that actually worked in the long run. And so she'd have a better project now. Whereas, 1:19:29 but for the deceptive actions of all the people shilling Lightning. So that's just my... I'm just 1:19:34 saying it is not additive. If you show up and you say, I'm going to give a million dollars to 1:19:40 someone who's working on Fediment, or a hundred million, that's going to... Anyone who's working 1:19:46 on... Then all these people, even someone working on something close like Liquid or something, 1:19:51 or something of a completely different design, Cashew. They're going to say, well, why didn't 1:19:57 I get a hundred million dollars? And that's human nature. So I'm just saying that it is not 1:20:02 additive. When you shill a technology, you need to... It's more important to have the right 1:20:08 knowledge of what is going to work than it is to donate money or attention or enthusiasm. 1:20:17 So that's just my point of view. Well, she didn't persist off any donations. I mean, 1:20:21 she built it herself, permissionlessly, because she wanted to. 1:20:25 I'm talking about the people initiating where they say, oh, Lightning is the future 1:20:31 and moving the culture. So she's downstream. She's a victim, in my view. 1:20:36 You say that, Paul, but I'm trying to be the moderate in the middle here, 1:20:43 but I'm tending to side with Alex. So I apologize if it seems like we're ganging up on you. 1:20:46 That's fine. 1:20:47 But you say that, but the projects in Bitcoin that are getting amongst the most funding now 1:20:53 are things like ZK Rollups and BitVM projects. So is that actually true? 1:20:57 Well, I think that would have been funded earlier if it were not for the distraction of Lightning. 1:21:03 But BitVM didn't exist until, I don't know, 2022? 1:21:05 I agree. But you know that... Okay, so Robin Linus, the creator of BitVM, he said that he only 1:21:10 did BitVM because there's no BIP300 and that the BitVM is a convoluted thing that 1:21:15 no one should ever do. He said this. He's recorded saying this. But I still think BitVM 1:21:21 is a cool thing that people should try. I did say earlier in this conversation that 1:21:25 all the non-mined L2s, this includes Rollups, BitVM, ARK, and Lightning, and Fetamon, 1:21:33 these all will have the issue that if they actually become popular among 8 billion people 1:21:37 and they're actually generating a 10 cents transaction fee for trillions of transactions, 1:21:44 which would be hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue, they will have the issue that 1:21:49 either the large miners will want to vertically integrate or they'll have some kind of conflict, 1:21:55 excuse me, tug-of-war conflict over who can get that money, at which point a lot of the security 1:22:02 model will go away. And that is one of the reasons why I've always thought the mined L2s, 1:22:08 such as the merge-mined Drivechain, why that is going to work. But I completely agree with you 1:22:15 that everyone has their own ideas about which technology will work. I don't even really want 1:22:22 this to be like the Drivechain commercial, like the Paul versus everyone commercial. I do think 1:22:29 we should try everything. I don't think that it would be accurate to describe us as saying 1:22:33 we try lots of different L2s. I think most people who have been around for the last 10 years 1:22:40 know that it has been the Lightning, the Fetamon, the ARK, the BitVM, the ARK, the Fetamon, 1:22:45 the Lightning Show, and Lightning has actually sucked all the air out of the room. 1:22:54 I worry about that personally. I think that was a mistake. That's just my point of view. 1:22:59 But then on that, you say that people like Alex and I, who are supporters of the Lightning 1:23:04 Network, have this perverse incentive because it's this groupthink thing that we need to keep 1:23:08 pushing. But to flip that back on you, Drivechains never got any real developer adoption. 1:23:15 It obviously has not made it into Bitcoin. Do you not have a similar but the flipped 1:23:20 perverse incentive where you want to attack Lightning Network because you never got drive 1:23:23 chains? Yes. Although there was no activation client until a few months ago. So even though 1:23:30 I had this idea, it really definitely was theory for many years. And I, of course, I was, again, 1:23:37 as I said, I was one of the many people who said, oh, the Lightning Network is definitely 1:23:41 going to be a great thing. So I kind of just let it just, even though the original idea of 1:23:46 Drivechain is from November 2015, I didn't really, you know, and we had a version that you could run, 1:23:53 but this was a fork of Bitcoin 1699, which is from like 2017. So this fork of this old version 1:24:00 of Bitcoin that just has like test coins. There was no pull request to Bitcoin Core. 1:24:08 And there was no activation client until earlier this year. It's true that, 1:24:15 you know, like so you can look at the LayerTwoLabs.com slash friends list. You can see we got 1:24:20 various endorsements from people who think that it is a good idea. I think there are other reasons 1:24:28 why there are other weaknesses of Drivechain that explain why it is slow. One is that it involves 1:24:37 the miners choosing to make more money by supporting the L2s, but this is a role that 1:24:42 they have never played. And in fact, they have been, the miners have been trained to be very 1:24:47 passive as a result of SegWit, block size war and other things. So I do agree. There used to be, 1:24:55 you know, in the Black Swan, the book, Nassim Taleb, he has, I think, or maybe it was Antifragile, 1:25:01 I don't remember, but there's a joke about conflict of interests, like, okay, don't you have a 1:25:05 conflict of interest? But then the Wall Street trader joke is that you say, no conflict, no 1:25:11 interest. Which is to say, if the other guy is not in the trade, you know, then I'm not interested 1:25:17 in hearing what he said. I only want to hear someone shill something that they believe. 1:25:21 So I think it kind of, the whole thing kind of cuts a lot of different ways, right? You know 1:25:25 what I mean? You think if someone, it's either hypocrisy or it's a conflict of interest or it's 1:25:29 something else. With the current environment now on the blockchain, like where it's just very low 1:25:35 fee environment, you know, low demand, relatively speaking, compared to like, you know, last year's 1:25:41 having, for example. Are you, I mean, why don't you think there's more urgency for miners to, 1:25:48 as you say, vertically integrate? Why do you feel like they're fine, you know, doing their work 1:25:53 as is? Why don't you feel like they're not pushing for your BIP or other similar things? 1:26:00 What explains, in your mind, their lack of urgency, despite a pretty, you know, pretty 1:26:08 environment that may indicate a future where they're not getting a lot of the action, 1:26:12 you know, they may only be getting a very small fee from a very small percentage of transactions. 1:26:18 Why no urgency from these people, if, you know, in your view, what explains it? 1:26:23 Well, I mean, at the Las Vegas conference, the CEO of Antpool came up to me and said 1:26:29 they had never heard of Drivechain before. So I don't know, maybe that's me doing a terrible 1:26:34 job of explaining it, or maybe they go through a lot of CEOs. I don't actually know what's going 1:26:38 on with that story. But I think there was no activation client. But they know what Lightning 1:26:43 is. They know what Lightning is, and they're not vertically integrating with Lightning. 1:26:47 I think this is a case of like this, the theory guy versus the practice guy, 1:26:51 because I am trained in economics, and I trained like equilibrium. So I'm trying to think of like, 1:26:56 the long run, my example was, here's the long run success story where you have 8 billion people, 1:27:03 and they all are happy users every day. So I'm just saying, let's just take that as the extreme 1:27:08 case. You know, this is like something I do in physics and stuff to make a point and say, 1:27:13 imagine that everything's a big success. And just take your pick, you know, Lightning or ARC or 1:27:19 whatever. It's a huge success, and everyone's using it all the time. Well, that thing is going 1:27:23 to be making hundreds of billions of dollars a year in fees. And actually, that will be the way 1:27:28 I estimated, I did some napkin math, but that it doubles every 11 years or so. So this is a huge 1:27:34 amount of money where you have all the transactions in the world, and you just take 10 cents from them 1:27:37 because more and more people transact all the time. People transact more as they get wealthier, 1:27:42 and GDP is growing, etc. So I was taking that example where you have a super successful L2 1:27:51 that makes a huge amount of money, and then on L1, they make what they're making now, which is 1:27:57 very, very little. I don't know about the miner, you know, sometimes you do hear about the miners 1:28:02 grumbling about, oh, we don't make enough money, and we want whatever, a tail emission or something. 1:28:07 So I don't actually really know why they would or would not. Well, I met a miner who told me that 1:28:16 he feels like Lightning Network is stealing from him. So I mean, I do appreciate that the sentiment 1:28:20 is there. I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah, but I've never heard that before, 1:28:24 and I've been around for a little while. So it seems like, I don't know if all the miners think 1:28:29 that way, but it was interesting to hear. That particular miner, as you probably know, 1:28:34 many of the miners are not really Bitcoiners, and some of them are just very by-the-numbers guys, 1:28:42 and they see this as no different than mining cobalt or whatever. Yeah, of course. 1:28:47 So many of the miners are very, very, very, very specialized to the point where they're not really 1:28:52 even ideologically aligned. No, a lot of them don't even stack Bitcoin. They just sell it immediately. 1:28:57 Right. But I think that person you were talking about is an ideological Bitcoiner who does look 1:29:04 into it. So you can see how some of the specialists, they're not going to know about what a 1:29:11 soft fork is, what BIPs are. They're not going to know about what L2s are. Many of the miners think 1:29:16 all the L2s steal from them. A lot of people don't even know about what merge mining is. 1:29:21 So I do think there is a lot of education that has to be done, but that is a case where 1:29:30 in the long run, eventually all the truths will be revealed to everyone, right? So that's the case 1:29:35 for going more into the theory world and thinking, well, what will it be like when everyone figures 1:29:41 everything out? Are things still going to be the way they are now, or are they going to be 1:29:45 slightly different? Okay. Well, I mean, look, all I would say is that there's a way to do this where 1:29:51 you could be more like, it's less zero sum. If you think about the ARK people, they're pushing 1:29:56 for their thing, which in the future would obviously be more effective with a major change 1:30:01 to Bitcoin, right? CTV, yeah. 1:30:03 Do it now. Yeah, you could do it now, but it's not quite as good as it could be, right? But 1:30:08 they've been very open-minded to think about how could a world that exists today, I mean, 1:30:17 whether you like lightning, the fact is it's pretty widely adopted and it exists. How could 1:30:22 that world help them get to where they want to go? And they've been super complimentary. 1:30:25 They've been working with lightning engineers. They've been working on lightning and ARK's 1:30:29 doing very well, I would say. I mean, it hasn't really hit yet, but I would say that people are 1:30:34 excited about it and it's coming. And look, if it works as well as they say it's going to work, 1:30:37 I think there's going to be real serious interest in the forks required in Bitcoin to make that 1:30:43 happen. So maybe you could just take a different approach where instead of like shitting all over 1:30:47 lightning all the time, you could be more open-minded and learn from it a little bit and 1:30:51 take that into your account. It may work better for you. If you're right and we need these things, 1:30:57 these Drivechains a hundred years from now, maybe that can help you get them done. That's 1:31:01 all I would say. That's all I would say. Well, I think you're right about that. I was at 1:31:04 whichever one is in Amsterdam, but it wasn't, I don't think it was, maybe it was building on 1:31:12 Bitcoin. I don't remember what year, but there was this whole bar full of people and everyone 1:31:16 there was like, oh, Paul, you should be nicer to people. But you see, I don't... 1:31:21 I mean, it works. It tends to work. I don't know. 1:31:23 Yeah. But again, I see it as kind of like something of a... 1:31:29 Never too late to change. Dude, you know, Drivechains might be valuable, might be critical in 1:31:33 40 years, but like, you know, they seem far off now. But I'm just saying, if you change the tack 1:31:38 and be more, it could work. It could work. I think the ARC thing, I interpret differently. 1:31:44 I think that there's this huge cultural momentum with Lightning and then the people want to 1:31:48 continue that. But I do think we should try all these different things. So I do think we should 1:31:54 do BidVM and whatever, all this other stuff. I am a pluralist. And again, anyone could be 1:32:01 mistaken about whatever. But this is part of why I am nervous about what originally started 1:32:07 this whole conversation, which is that not a lot of people think this way. We have a huge number 1:32:11 of people who think that Bitcoin is perfect the way it is. And it's this pristine thing that's 1:32:16 guaranteed to succeed. And then the people working on it up close, they care a lot more about 1:32:22 these details where they think, wow, if we had CTV, which is this tiny opcode that does almost nothing, 1:32:27 or BIP300, which is this opcode that counts to 13,000 over and over again. We could do all this 1:32:32 stuff. It used to be the case that Bitcoin was open source. So people thought, 1:32:37 if anyone has a good idea anywhere, we'll just merge it in. And then that changed in 2013 or so 1:32:44 to, well, if it's a soft fork, we'll do it. But if it's anything else, we won't. And then now, 1:32:50 even the soft forks, which are these completely opt-in, reversible, 1:32:57 ignorable opcode, Satoshi put in there for the purpose of being used for upgrades. Now, 1:33:02 we can't even use those. And so I worry about all this scar tissue as having accumulated. 1:33:11 Why is it the case that you have to be really, really nice to everyone? Can't your idea just be 1:33:14 good? Well, look, I sympathize with you that we shouldn't rest on our laurels and we shouldn't 1:33:20 think that Bitcoin's inevitable. But I guess my point to you would be that the real scaling issue 1:33:26 with Bitcoin right now is users and people. Bitcoin on-chain today, without any major edits, 1:33:32 could easily add another 100 million occasional on-chain users. But they're not there. And people 1:33:37 don't get it. And they've been fooled into all this crypto bullshit. And they've been swindled 1:33:41 and scammed by everything from WorldCoin to Solana, to Ether, whatever. So I'm just saying, 1:33:48 that's one way to attack the problem is just to work on education and accessibility. 1:33:53 I, at the same time, think it's very important to be thinking 100 years from now about what's 1:33:58 going to be key. How can Bitcoin actually be free to money for everybody in the world when Bitcoin's 1:34:02 issuance ends is something I think about a lot. Or will it only be free to money for very, very 1:34:07 wealthy individuals? I think about that a lot. So, I mean, what you're working on, I think, 1:34:11 is important. And you've admitted many times that maybe you're just not quite communicating it the 1:34:16 right way. All I'm saying is this is a long game, man. This is a 100-year thing. And being more 1:34:21 collaborative with other people can only help you. It can't hurt you. And maybe you'll see some stuff 1:34:27 in Xiaomi and eCash and the cash implementation that you're intrigued by. Or maybe you'll see 1:34:31 some stuff in Nostra that you're intrigued by. It couldn't hurt. I mean, you would definitely get 1:34:37 more people backing you if you were on Nostra talking about Drivechains. You would get zapped 1:34:42 all the time. You'd get real Bitcoin in the end on-chain. And you'd be able to get some freaking 1:34:47 zaps for your post instead of living on Elon's X thing where you can't even get Bitcoin natively. 1:34:53 So come to Nostra, and I'll boost you, man. I'll retweet you or repost you, rather. And let's go. 1:34:58 We can take it that way. That's all I would say. Well, thank you. And I'm happy, very happy to 1:35:03 hear you say that we shouldn't rest on our laurels. That's my main message. That's what I'm 1:35:08 trying to be all about. I do interpret the user thing. I think it's a little bit of a chicken and 1:35:14 egg problem where it's like, let me explain. This is something that I've experienced a lot as 1:35:20 someone who's been in Bitcoin for a while because I love Bitcoin. And then the price of Bitcoin goes 1:35:25 up. Then the friends come out of the woodwork, and they're like, oh, Bitcoin. So then, of course, 1:35:30 what you always want to do is you want to try to send them $10 worth of Bitcoin or something. 1:35:35 You can't send them too much. It's kind of weird. Because I didn't understand Bitcoin at all until 1:35:44 I used the software. I actually read a lot about it before downloading the software, which was a 1:35:49 complete waste of time. And that was a huge mistake. Because even after that, I used the 1:35:55 software, and then I thought the confirmations were kind of like, I don't know, like BitTorrent 1:36:00 seeding or something. And I was very confused. I closed the software, and I came back the next day, 1:36:04 and suddenly I had like 200 confirmations. And I was like, why did the confirmations keep going up? 1:36:08 I thought you had to collect them, like Super Mario or something. And I was so confused. And 1:36:13 only when I used the software did I really understand it. So people come out of the 1:36:17 woodwork and you're like, okay, you want to send them some coins, but then oftentimes you can't 1:36:26 because either the blocks are full, those fees are high. Even if there's a $5 fee, you send them $20, 1:36:32 they only get $15 then if they send it to someone. So I think that there is a lot of nonlinear, 1:36:43 there's a lot of feedback. So I think that if it could scale to 8 billion people in an 1:36:49 uninterrupted ramp, then that would help the usage go up. No, I can't do that. It's not going to do 1:36:55 that. You know that it can't do that. It's got to evolve. And everybody else knows that too, 1:37:02 I think. I mean, there's very few lightning entrepreneurs who are going to tell you 1:37:05 that everybody's going to use lightning for coffee in 50 years. And that's a mistake I made. 1:37:11 Uh, I thought that was the case. And then I've changed my mind based on evidence. Like, 1:37:15 I think now that lightning is going to be this central nervous system type network that exists 1:37:21 between what they didn't users use and, and, and the on chain and, and businesses and exchanges 1:37:27 and everything. And they're all going to speak to each other through this open monetary network. 1:37:32 That's lightning. Um, but five years ago, I didn't think that I, I, I, I wouldn't say I was fooled. 1:37:37 I just think that a lot of people didn't know what lightning could do. Cause we hadn't seen it 1:37:41 in action. We were very optimistic about it. And we thought it was just going to be like 1:37:44 digital cash for everything. Um, you know, it's possible to use it like that with some 1:37:49 serious limitations. Uh, like it works like that on Nostra today, but I think most people using 1:37:54 Nostra understand that it's not going to be like that in 10 years, we're probably going to use 1:37:57 something like eCash or maybe, maybe it's arc or maybe it's even Drivechains. But like, 1:38:02 I think you just gotta, you gotta evolve your opinions as you go. And I think what you're 1:38:06 describing this frustration with lightning that you have sounds a lot like 2019 to 2021 era. 1:38:12 And maybe you can update your priors and check out some of the tech that exists today. It's 1:38:16 really much better. I mean, it doesn't work all the time, but it's, it's pretty good, man. Anyway, 1:38:21 Danny. No, I think that's the key point though. I think it's like, cause I I'm with you, Alex, 1:38:25 when lightning was first kind of gaining any traction, I thought this was going to be the 1:38:29 thing that scale to everyone, but it also, but yes, in theory, but it also was hard to use. 1:38:33 It was so hard to use a hundred percent. And I, and I think now the people that are actually 1:38:38 working on lightning, they're not making those claims anymore. So I agree with Alex. I think 1:38:41 it'd be worth like revisiting this, but we we've gone, we've talked about kind of everything there. 1:38:46 Do you guys want to just close out with like a ending statement and we'll, we'll leave it there 1:38:50 for now. Okay. This has been a lot of fun. I didn't get to a lot of my points about why I think 1:38:56 the tech stack will eventually be super, super good, but we did have a great conversation about 1:39:00 lightning and, you know, I don't want to be mean to any of the people working on lightning, 1:39:04 but I do think that at a certain point you need like a cattle prod to like get people out of this, 1:39:10 like, you know, this weird malaise that they're in. So that's part of what is going on there. 1:39:16 And, um, so yeah, this is just me, um, sort of being honest about what I have seen. I gave the 1:39:22 little lightning story. So I think that people can track that and sort of see like where I'm coming 1:39:27 from. And, um, so that's kind of what I think. And I think that there is a huge amount of R and D 1:39:34 being done. I'd not on the alt coins themselves, which are often distractions and anti R and D, 1:39:41 but through various people, tinkering stuff is being invented all the time. And if Bitcoin is 1:39:49 slow to adopt that stuff, there will be an ever widening gap. And this is the gap of complacency 1:39:56 and groupthink and just being in a weird cult, um, complacency and groupthink versus 1:40:03 the power of the network effects, which mean that the number one guy is going to be further and 1:40:07 further in the lead. So that's basically what I'm all about. And that's what I was, uh, 1:40:13 trying to say. So, um, that's my point of view, I guess. Yeah. Well, look, I think the core part 1:40:21 of what you're doing, where you recognize that there's this limitation with Bitcoin for a world 1:40:26 that needs freedom money for everybody is extremely valid. And it's great that you've 1:40:30 been working on that. Very few other people have been in the same way as you. Um, and I'm not 1:40:35 talking about being mean. I mean, who cares? I mean, people have thick skin. It's more about 1:40:39 like just being, um, you know, less about, oh, that's all cope and more like, okay, well, there 1:40:45 might be some interesting things with that, but I don't think it does the job and therefore I'm 1:40:49 doing this and the arc people are doing the latter. And I think it's doing, it's, it's going 1:40:53 really well for them because they understand that there may even be a moment in time where the 1:40:57 things coexist. Like even if Drivechains in the end are the thing that everybody uses, uh, 1:41:01 there's going to be some kind of transitional period where there's both lightning and drive 1:41:05 chains, like clearly. So, um, you know, maybe think more on that. And I think that your, 1:41:12 uh, contributions to the space are, are widely recognized. And, you know, as you've pointed out, 1:41:18 people like talking to you about them. So, you know, I think talking to some of the people 1:41:22 working on the cutting edge lightning and eCash stuff, um, could only benefit, could only benefit 1:41:27 them benefit you. Um, so hopefully we can see more of that. Hopefully you get on Nostra. Um, 1:41:33 and we can, we can, we can maybe have a one day, maybe, maybe I'm paying you on, you know, 1:41:37 Drivechains over Nostra. Who knows? Um, I, I doubt Fiat job cares, as you say, he's good. 1:41:43 He's good either way. He's, uh, he's happy with, uh, however people pay each other. I'm, 1:41:48 I'm pretty sure. But anyway, um, thanks for Dan for us, for having us, Danny was, uh, good to 1:41:53 get through some of this practice theory stuff and, um, uh, great talking to you, Paul. I appreciate 1:41:58 your time. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Thank you guys. And, uh, Paul, you've got to get on Nostra 1:42:03 by the time I release this video and we'll make sure we boost you and get you some followers. 1:42:06 But, um, I really appreciate that. And, um, yeah, thank you for the time guys. 1:42:10 Yeah, you will actually, it's funny. You can shit all over lightning on Nostra and 1:42:13 people will zap you all day for it. It's perfect. It's ideal. It's ideal. 1:42:19 There you go. Thanks guys. Bye.