0:00 So, for those of you who watched my TabConf talk a few years ago, it was very light-hearted. 0:13 I'm going to try to keep this as light-hearted, and it should get very fun. 0:17 I'm going to try to talk to you for as little time as I can, and then we'll make this as 0:23 interactive as possible, do Q&A, but I guess it'll be a debate format or something, this 0:29 is what I've been told. 0:30 So, I'm going to try to keep this light, hopefully it stays light, I don't know how well I'll 0:35 be able to manage because this topic is a little more dense, but we're going to do our 0:38 best. 0:39 Yeah, so, Mev and Mewvel, and apparently some cats. 0:45 So, probably useful to do a little bit of background on Mev. 0:52 Mev is a concept that comes to us from Ethereum, boo, I know, how terrible, but they've been 0:57 struggling with this for a long time, and we should probably learn something from them 1:01 because they've spent a lot of time on it. 1:04 So what is Mev? 1:05 Mev is literally just all of the money that the miners make, every single penny. 1:09 It is a super broad concept, it includes all the transaction fees, it includes all the 1:14 money they can make from out-of-band fees, so things like Mempool Accelerator, it includes 1:19 money that they can make doing super advanced attacks, which we'll get into in a minute, 1:23 it includes money that they can make by reorging the blockchain and stealing people's money. 1:26 It's really, really broad, and in fact, so broad that it's basically a useless term, 1:31 so we should try to avoid using it. 1:34 Instead, I tried to coin this term called Mevel, that is how you pronounce it, Mevel, 1:40 not Mevel, I don't know why everyone decided it's Mevel, it's Mevel, it's evil, and it's 1:46 just Mev that's evil, so decentralizing Mev. 1:49 So the problem with Mev, from the Bitcoin perspective and kind of from the network's 1:53 perspective, not necessarily from the user's perspective, is that Mev can create strong 1:57 centralization. 1:59 So Mev in Ethereum is actually super complicated to capture, like to optimize the amount of 2:04 Mev you get, the amount of money you get, the amount of money you get for your blocks, 2:09 you have to hire the best engineers, so you can't just hire, you know, fine engineers 2:14 and pay them fine salaries, no, you have to hire the best engineers and attract the absolute 2:20 best talent, and spend millions of dollars a year, or tens of millions of dollars a year, 2:25 no matter how big a miner or a staker you are, even if you're a very small one, in order 2:28 to get the maximal revenue, you have to invest the same amount of money as the big players 2:34 in order to build the best block template. 2:38 So this is bad for centralization, all of a sudden your costs as a miner don't scale 2:43 with the size of your mining operation, so if you're a small miner, or a small staker 2:47 in Ethereum, you have to spend the same amount of money as the big guys, and that's really 2:51 bad, it means the big guys have a big advantage, and creates strong centralization pressure. 2:56 So in Bitcoin, we would call this evil, or Mevil. 3:01 And I know, you know, hiring top-notch engineers looks easy, because all the Bitcoin engineers 3:06 are these great guys, and like, they're all easily recruited, but I promise you it's actually 3:10 not easy, and it's also because Bitcoin is fascinating, and working for a for-profit 3:15 company attacking Bitcoin is like, less exciting, and so it's actually really hard to hire those 3:19 engineers. 3:20 Okay, so what does this actually look like in practice? 3:23 This very abstract, high-level nonsense, like alright, there's like this centralizing pressure 3:27 nonsense, like what does this actually mean? 3:29 In practice, not a majority, but a plurality of Mev and Ethereum is just what's called 3:34 sex-dex arbitrage. 3:36 So you have these centralized exchanges, Coinbase, Binance, whatever, you have decentralized 3:40 exchanges, Uniswap, there's a handful of them, doesn't really matter what they are, 3:45 and you're arbitraging, just straight-up arbitrage, classic price arbitrage, you're building a 3:49 block template, you want to take the price on the dex and trade it against the price 3:55 on the sex, and just, you make money on the margin. 4:00 Super easy to understand, not super complicated, actually really hard to do right, and to do 4:05 the best right, not just right, but the best, because you actually have to be a high-frequency 4:10 trading firm. 4:11 Because in Ethereum, you have fixed time windows for your blocks, you know exactly when the 4:14 time window for the block is up, down to the millisecond, so if you put your block-producing 4:19 machine in the right data center, you're going to have a slight marginal advantage, and it 4:24 has literally turned into, you have to be a high-frequency trader in order to make blocks 4:28 in Ethereum. 4:29 Great, that's not how we want it to be, but hey, that's how it is. 4:34 It's again maybe useful to point out that Mev here, again, is a useless term, Mev in 4:38 Ethereum, we use to refer, they use to refer to everyone getting harmed, so if a user gets 4:44 harmed and they have price slippage, because this Mev extraction process thing happens 4:52 and they get a worse price, this is a part of Mev, but it doesn't impact the system, 4:57 right? 4:58 So when we're talking about centralization, where we're talking about Meval, we're saying 5:02 the thing that matters is the centralization pressure from that. 5:05 If you have to be a high-frequency trader in order to be a miner, this is bad for mining 5:09 and Bitcoin the system, but we don't necessarily care about like, oh, user's got a worse price 5:14 execution on this decentralized exchange, that's not our problem. 5:17 That's the decentralized exchange's problem, that's the user's problem, that's not our 5:20 problem. 5:21 Okay, so that's the easy-to-understand Mev, that's the classic example, it's mid-double-digit 5:28 percentage of the total Mev extraction in Ethereum is just sex-to-sex arbitrage, and 5:33 specifically sex-to-sex arbitrage in the Ethereum-USDC pair or Ethereum-USDT pair. 5:39 But there's also a ton of other things, right, that's less than 50% or maybe right around 5:43 50%. 5:44 There's all kinds of fancy things you can do, you have all these crazy smart contracts, 5:47 you can do all kinds of attacks, right, if you can exploit a smart contract and steal 5:50 a bunch of money from it, maybe you use a flash loan, so you use a loan in Ethereum 5:55 that gives you infinite money, but then you have to repay that money within the same block, 6:01 and you can use that infinite money to make the price move over here, and then you can 6:04 go steal some money over here, and then, yeah, they do all kinds of crazy crap. 6:08 So that's all Mev, right, that's all stuff, if you're a miner and you want to get the 6:11 most money, you have to come up with all this crazy crap, and you have to be the best engineers 6:16 coming up with the craziest way to exploit all the stupid broken crap in order to be 6:21 competitive. 6:24 And without going to jail, which has become a problem recently, but they didn't think 6:28 it was going to be a problem. 6:29 Weird and funny how that works. 6:31 Okay, so whatever, that's what Mev is, that's what Mevil is, and that's the problems they 6:37 have with it. 6:38 What have they done about this, right? 6:40 So the Ethereum people aren't dumb, I know people like to think that they have no brain 6:44 power over there, but actually they have a lot of smart people over there, they're trying 6:47 to solve this stuff. 6:48 What have they come up with? 6:49 What have they actually built? 6:52 It's not great. 6:56 So they recognize this problem, a long time ago in fact, that this centralized block building, 7:01 like just running a node and building an efficient block template is not an easy problem, and 7:07 it doesn't scale. 7:08 It doesn't scale down to small miners, small stakers. 7:11 So what do we do? 7:12 They disaggregated that market, right? 7:13 So they said, okay, you can be a staker, but then someone else is going to actually select 7:17 the transactions that go in your block, and we're going to build this marketplace for 7:20 block templates. 7:21 Sadly, in Ethereum, the marketplace is for full block templates, right? 7:24 So it's not just like, here's some transactions I want you to include in your block, no, it's 7:29 here's an entire block, here's all the transactions that are in it, and all the transactions that 7:33 aren't in it, and I'm going to give you those transactions, and you must include exactly 7:36 those transactions and nothing more, and that's your block. 7:40 This is kind of in part because Ethereum has this global state, right? 7:44 They don't have UTXOs, they have addresses, and any smart contract can impact the global 7:48 state, and this can cause any other random smart contract to fail, and you can't do analysis 7:52 of this, right? 7:53 This is just a global state, and you might run one transaction, you know, include one 7:56 transaction, and it might cause some other transaction to fail, and you can't, you can't 8:00 in a kind of theoretical computer science way, determine this ad hoc. 8:04 You have to actually simulate it, you have to do a ton of actually advanced computer 8:08 science to figure out which transactions are going to interact with each other, and how 8:11 are they going to interact, and what is this going to cause my ability to include different 8:15 transactions. 8:18 So okay, they have this whole thing built around full templates, that kind of sucks, 8:23 but these templates are worth a lot more than naive block building, and in fact, more 8:27 so every day, because this system exists, and because this has become a part of Ethereum, 8:32 it has now gotten so bad that many systems in Ethereum that are being built today don't 8:36 even use the public mempool, there's barely even a public mempool anymore, it just doesn't 8:39 exist, there's just these private mempools, you relay your transaction directly to one 8:43 of these people participating in this marketplace, one of these literal high frequency traders, 8:47 they include your transaction for you, it's great, it's super permissioned, and you just, 8:51 you know, contact your friendly high frequency trader, and you send them all your transactions, 8:56 and they include it in your blocks, and it's great, yeah, you don't need any decentralization 9:01 here. 9:02 So anyway, sadly, so that's not the worst of it, right, there's in fact only a few of 9:09 these marketplaces on top, right, so there's not just a few of these entities that can 9:12 include the transactions, but there's a few of these marketplaces, there's only like two, 9:15 three I think of them, and they do affect censorship on top, right, so in order to 9:23 get a good return, you know, if you're a staker and you want to get a good return on your 9:26 block template, you have to participate in one of these three, four marketplaces, and 9:31 those marketplaces are censored, and by the way, if those marketplaces decide they don't 9:34 like you, suddenly you can't build good block templates, and you're not going to make very 9:37 much money being a staker, how terrible. 9:42 And then yeah, I also talked about, it's not just these marketplaces that are centralized, 9:47 it's just the players, you know, all this theoretical MEV stuff where it's going to 9:50 become centralizing, no, it actually is very centralizing, there are only like a small 9:55 handful, you know, less than five firms that can competitively build a block template in 10:00 Ethereum, right, if you want to get the most money for your block in Ethereum, you have 10:04 to buy a block template, or you have to sell your block template to one of these three 10:10 or four companies, and that's it, anybody else trying to do it, their block templates 10:13 are going to be worth a little less, not always a lot less, but a little less, so this job 10:19 of hiring the best, and not just good, but the best engineers, turns out to be very centralizing, 10:24 and we can see this in practice, and a few people can actually do it. 10:28 Okay, so that's Ethereum, Ethereum is terrible, we all hate Ethereum, great, they screwed 10:33 everything up, it's terrible, and what does this actually mean for us, you know, who cares 10:37 about Ethereum? Okay, so it turns out it's actually worse for us, okay, I'll get to that, 10:49 but first I just want to highlight, you know, centralization is why we're here, I hope everyone 10:55 kind of understands that intuitively, right, that if we end up in that same spot where 10:59 there's three or four companies that select all the transactions that go in the chain, 11:04 and three or four companies on top of that, that select all the people who are allowed 11:08 to mine competitively, then like, this is kind of useless, we should just kind of like, 11:13 why are we using Bitcoin, we should probably use Fedcoin, because like, if the US government 11:17 can decide who gets to put their transactions on the blockchain, that's, you know, what 11:21 was the point? So just, hopefully that's kind of intuitive to everyone, but okay, yeah, 11:27 so it's actually worse for us, so in Ethereum, they have this whole staking thing, right, 11:32 so if you're a staker, you put some Ethereum up, you have no operational costs, no OPEX, 11:39 which has other problems, but you have no OPEX as a staker, right, so if you are a staker 11:45 and you mine these like, less than super profitable block templates, they're like, okay, mediocre 11:50 block templates, maybe you don't make very much money from them, but whatever, that's 11:53 okay, like, you're just getting less money, you know, you're getting a lower interest 11:56 rate on your Ethereum, but like, you're not really losing money. In proof of work, no, 12:01 you're screwed, you're going out of business, right, because in proof of work, you have 12:04 the same OPEX as everybody else, roughly, you know, you've got to pay your power bill 12:08 at the end of the month. If you are making 10, 20, 30, 40% less than your competition, 12:14 you're going out of business. There's no, there's no like, oh, you can keep going, and 12:18 like, some people can still keep going, like in Ethereum, we see this as a long tail of 12:21 small stakers that do build their own block templates. You just can't have that in a proof 12:26 of work system, it won't work. Okay, so that's terrible, but maybe, maybe, maybe we can solve 12:33 this another way, right, so Ethereum has this like, this global state I talked about, it's 12:36 terrible, you know, they have to sell whole block templates, but Bitcoin's better, right, 12:40 we have this UTXO system, we have, we can look at a transaction, we can say, okay, it 12:45 spends these UTXOs, and this one is unrelated, and they don't interact, and we can build 12:49 a different market. So I think a useful way to conceptualize some of this MEV stuff is 12:54 it's really the marketplace for block space, right, so it is, how are we structuring the 12:59 marketplace for block space, and Ethereum has these decentralized marketplaces that 13:03 only sell whole block templates, Bitcoin still has this public mempool thing, there's some 13:08 private mempools starting to crop up, they're not, they don't really have enough money in 13:13 them, like there's not enough demand for them to be super relevant, but maybe they will 13:17 be in the future, maybe some of this MEV stuff will come to pass, but what is it, what should 13:21 this marketplace look like? And so you can, in Bitcoin, because we don't have this global 13:27 state, you can really still visualize it as individual order books per UTXO, right, so 13:31 I have a transaction that spends this UTXO, and I'm going to bid a certain amount for 13:36 that, and we could actually have different order books, we could say I'm going to outbid 13:39 you to spend that UTXO, but, you know, this other transaction spending some unrelated 13:44 UTXOs, bid separately, right, so we could have different order books, so we could actually, 13:48 we could build something that's much better, we could say, okay, the miners are going to 13:52 actually clear this order book, the miners are going to, they're going to still include 13:58 their own transactions, both from the public mempools and some private mempools and some 14:01 whatever else, and we'll still have some decentralization, we'll still have censorship resistance, right, 14:06 because they can pull from the public mempool, and we can have these private mempools that 14:11 have different properties. So that's great, you know, if Bitcoin is all about this per 14:18 UTXO model, and all the state is encapsulated in this UTXO model, then we can have a better 14:24 marketplace than Ethereum. We can still have this crazy MEV marketplace thing, but we can 14:28 have a better one that's not, doesn't introduce the censorship failures that we see on Ethereum. 14:34 We still have some centralization concerns, but maybe, maybe we can live with that, I 14:39 don't know. Okay, well, sadly, yeah, client-side validation kind of fucks us, and no, I don't 14:46 mean the Jonas, Nick, and Robin Linus thing they were just talking about. I mean, okay, 14:50 I do mean that, I mean exactly that, but not their version. So you can imagine a client-side 14:56 validation system where, or roll-up system or whatever, where you have all of the same 15:01 global state, like you copy and paste the EVM, and all of a sudden we have global state 15:06 on the Bitcoin blockchain, and just by, you know, using data, we're going to like parse 15:11 the data out of the Bitcoin blockchain, and we're going to have the EVM, and now we're 15:14 going to have global state, and now we're fucked. Obviously, like the Jonas, Nick, and 15:19 the Robin Linus, the client-side shielded CSV thing, that doesn't have this problem. 15:24 It's not designed for expressivity, right? We don't have this case where we're trying 15:28 to build, you know, DEXs and all kinds of crazy stuff that might introduce MEV, so it's 15:33 just a transaction layer, it's probably not going to introduce this crazy, crazy MEV crap. 15:38 But that same concept, right, if we expand it, then suddenly we have literally EVM just 15:43 on the Bitcoin blockchain, and now we have the same problems. Maybe there's a world where 15:48 we can have this marketplace, you know, I talked about this is a marketplace, right? 15:53 We can structure the order book for our marketplace however we want. Maybe we can come up with 15:57 a way to structure the orders so that you don't have quite this problem. Maybe we can 16:02 come up with a way to say, like, okay, you know, the order book is actually aware of 16:06 this underlying CSV system that exists. Maybe we can do that, I don't know. This is all 16:13 very speculative, obviously. We really don't know where any of this stuff is going. And 16:19 it's important to, you know, I think people will always point out, and it is important 16:23 to highlight that MEV will always exist, like some amount of it. The question is just how 16:28 much of it, how much is a problem, right? We have it today, you know, people do, mempool 16:33 accelerator exists, almost no one uses it, but the mempool accelerator exists. We have 16:38 slipstream, raise your hand in the back. You know, we've got slipstream, you know, it exists. 16:45 Again, it's not very, it's not a big marketplace. Like, there's just not a lot of extra revenue 16:49 from that. So much, sufficiently little so that, you know, miners care about it, like 16:55 they kind of want it, but it's not like, oh, yeah, we got to have that or we're going to 16:58 go out of business next month because we're not going to make our power bill because our 17:01 competitors are making more money than us. We're not even close to that point, right? 17:05 So there is a continuum here between, like, something that exists and, like, isn't really 17:10 relevant to all of a sudden everything is super centralized and we just, like, start 17:14 throwing away the public mempool because, like, it's not really worth having anymore, 17:17 it's complicated, and fuck it, which is where Ethereum has ended up. So there's some continuum, 17:22 and I don't have an answer for, like, where we are or where we should be, but it's important 17:27 to recognize that there's a continuum here. All right, last question, and then we'll get 17:32 into the whole debate and Q&A thing, or last slide. So what does this actually mean for Bitcoin, 17:38 especially as we look towards the future? You know, we talked about the concerns, 17:42 but what does this mean? So, you know, expressivity always runs some risk, 17:48 but it carries some value, right? If we add super deep covenants, people might build these crazy 17:54 DEXs, which might introduce, you know, sex arbitrage, it might introduce, you know, 17:58 people might start building these crazy flashloan stuff and all kinds of crazy smart contracts that 18:05 get exploited. Like, that might happen, and those are useful, but it might also cause evil, right? 18:15 So there's a trade-off here, like, it might have a lot of value or it might end up screwing us. 18:22 So evaluating these proposals thus becomes very quickly a second order effect thing, right? 18:29 What kinds of systems will people actually build? Because most of the things people are talking 18:33 about building actually don't have MEVL problems. They have MEV problems, right? People are talking 18:37 about building roll-ups, where you have all of the MEV goes to a centralized counterparty who does 18:44 the sequencing. Well, that's not a MEVL problem. There's no concerns for centralizing mining. 18:49 You already have a centralized party. They're taking all of the miner extractable value of that 18:54 roll-up, and they're keeping it for themselves, and that's great. For Bitcoin, it's, you know, 19:00 fine for the users of that system, I guess. It has some other great properties. So people are 19:03 talking about building those things. So then you might say, well, okay, you know, people are just 19:08 going to build that, then none of this is going to come to pass, and then we don't have to worry 19:11 about it. But of course, it is also a big risk, right? If we end up there, if we end up where 19:16 Ethereum is, kind of what was the point? Why are we doing this Bitcoin thing? So we end up very 19:23 quickly getting into this, like, evaluating what people are actually going to build, not just what 19:27 they're talking about, but what people are going to build in 10 years, and how does this impact 19:30 Bitcoin, and this gets real fuzzy, and real terrible, and disgusting, and does not turn into 19:36 a fun conversation, but hey. Also, you know, I talked about fancy MEV marketplaces. It's probably 19:42 something we should be investigating more, probably something we should be looking into, 19:45 something we should probably start building. You know, these don't exist at all. There's a few 19:51 people trying to copy and paste Ethereum MEV extraction marketplaces onto Bitcoin, which would 19:57 be horrendous, for all the reasons I talked about. Like, we don't want that. So probably it's the 20:02 case that we should start thinking about how to build better MEV extraction marketplaces, 20:08 and better private mempools, and better order book for the more flexible and expressive order 20:14 book for the Bitcoin block space. I have some ideas. I don't like the ideas, but it might be 20:20 the best we can do, and it's probably something that should be researched more in the community. 20:26 Okay, so that's all the discussions and background I wanted to give. Now we're going to do, I don't 20:33 know, half hour Q&A? I don't know how long we have, but a while. We have a while, and yeah, 20:40 and I think Tidwell wants to just go right into debate. Yeah, so first, can I just get a quick 20:46 round of applause for Matt here? So this is the second half, or the next, you know, two-thirds of 20:57 the conversation, and let me give you a little bit of context here. Literally everything that I 21:04 learned about in Bitcoin, all these changes, roughly half of them is like, oh, we can't do 21:09 that because MEV, or we can't do this because of MEV, or even like, we're talking about symphony 21:15 and simplicity earlier, like, oh, this may introduce MEV, and I was really, I'm really excited about 21:21 Drivechains, for instance, but every time I speak about it publicly, everyone's like, wait, MEV. 21:25 I'm like, well, shit, okay, this MEV thing sounds very scary. Who would be really good at it giving 21:31 a really good primer on it? I trust Matt to do a good job explaining that, giving us a primer to 21:37 work off of, but I don't like to just trust, I like to verify. So what I wanted to do here is, 21:44 if anyone wanted to have a semi-long-form discussion with Matt, it doesn't necessarily 21:49 have to be a debate, it could be Q&A as well, I would invite you to actually walk forward and sit 21:54 in this front row so you can come on stage, and if that makes you uncomfortable, you can also take 21:59 questions from the audience, but I would ask, if you do want to ask questions from the audience, 22:03 keep it to only one question and no follow-up questions. I really want this to be interactive 22:08 because I'm really tired of people talking about MEV, disagreeing, and silence. I want this to be 22:14 up here, and I want us to get the conversations and discussions out in the open. If that makes 22:19 you feel comfortable, I invite you on stage, and Matt is very reasonable, we can agree to disagree 22:26 at the end of the day, but I want us to at least have the conversation. So I appreciate if you want 22:31 to be involved, and we'll take, we have chairs up here for people to sit, and Matt, this is the next 22:37 half, so if we already have a few people, you can come up on stage, these three, yeah, you can come 22:44 up on stage, but I will ask you, after you've made some points and discussions, we'll rotate people. 22:50 Is that fair? Yeah, let's do it. And I don't think I need to moderate here, but 22:55 there are mics, I might moderate if need be, so mics next to your chair should work, you have to turn it on. 23:03 Testing, testing. Hello, hello, is this on? Okay, test, test, test. Okay, all right, do you want to just go down the line? 23:14 Go ahead. Yeah, no need for introductions, let's just keep it on topic here. 23:18 What about the fact that currently in Bitcoin, there are transactions that can be broadcast on 23:24 the broader network that can create problems, such as DOS blocks? I think that miners being 23:32 more centralized in that aspect actually protects the network somewhat, because their incentives 23:36 align better for the success of Bitcoin than, for example, a highly decentralized network where you 23:42 could have three to five percent of the network causing substantial issues until these consensus 23:48 problems have been resolved. Yeah, I mean, I think that's this total issue. I mean, that's the reality 23:52 we have today. I hope that's not the reality we end up with. I hope that's not the end state, right? 23:57 Absolutely. That's a problem, that's the reality we have today, but also 24:02 what we should be working on is fixing that and making it so that you can't cause those problems, 24:08 an individual miner can't cause those problems, an individual transactor can't cause those 24:13 problems, and then hopefully we can not worry about that in a decade or whenever we get there. 24:20 Thank you. It's hard to know where to begin, because it seems like the entire thing is 24:26 misconceived, but I think that, first of all, mining obviously is something where we have 24:33 evolution across time, because the difficulty adjustment is firing the underperformers, 24:37 so it's not like everyone should be able to mine. I mean, I hope you would agree with that, 24:41 because the whole point of mining is that it's only the people who have done the proof of work 24:47 who get to find blocks, and so the idea that just anyone can find blocks is the exact opposite of 24:53 proof of work in my opinion, so I guess that's like my first question, if you agree with that. 24:57 Yeah, so obviously there's... the structure of the proof of work market, obviously you're totally right, like, if you have less efficient hardware and a higher power cost, then you get fired, that's how the network works. 25:10 But the structure of that is, as much as possible, in order for decentralization to exist, as much as possible, it needs to be the case that your CapEx and OpEx, in fact, scale linearly with your size. 25:26 Well, I don't know about scale linearly with size, but I think that at least this is the relevant dimension, at least. But now it seems to me that MEV casts a distinction between hardware and software, that it seems to be arbitrary, first of all, and then the other thing is the software part is very easy to solve, in my opinion, so I have good news for everyone who's worried about MEV, if they want to listen, we can get to that part in a second. 25:53 Don't you think it's kind of arbitrary? I mean, what if someone said we have a new, we have ASIC boost, or we have a new type of cooling tower or something, and in fact you cannot spend, like, you can't spend like $4.50 on mining, right, because there's a minimum viable ASIC size, so there's all these various scale economies. 26:11 Sure, but I think once you get past a fairly low margin, today, it doesn't scale that well, right, if you, there are economies of disk scale as well as economies of scaling mining, right, so there are, you can have super cheap, very small scale power, or you can have a very large mining farm that has other economies of scale on cooling, on, you know, cheaper hardware, but also then you might pay a higher power bill because you don't, you're not using unused power or excess power or something like that. 26:42 But didn't you say just a moment ago about this, it has to be a perfectly linear scale, which is like, basically not going to happen. 26:47 No, of course it doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be as close as we can, in order for decentralization to be, to exist in a large way, it has to be as much as we can get it, and ideally it's in fact not linear, it's sub-linear, right, ideally as you get bigger, it costs more, now we can't actually, that's not real, and that can't happen, but like... 27:05 Partly linear, partly super linear parts of, you know, everything's just a big mix, in the real world everything's like a big mix, of course. 27:11 Right, but the point is that it has to be kind of sort of, as close as, you know, as low as we can get it, as close to linear as we can get it. 27:18 And the, you're right, obviously, there's nothing inherently unique about MEV, it's like a CapEx, right, an OpEx, it's just another cost, but I think it's a very substantial other cost, and we've seen in Ethereum that there are only, I mean there's really only like three companies that are able to do it competitively, and this is like a huge market, I mean they make a good bit of money, there's a lot of people competing. 27:46 I think Ethereum handles it very bad. Okay, I'm going to wrap up my third thing, and then I will let other people get a word in, or whatever, but as you probably know, since we discussed, we've had this conversation before, in October 2016, you and I, with Adam back, and this led to the publication in January 2017 when I published Blind Merged Mining, which, although Ethereum can't do this on their L1, I mean they probably can do it, it doesn't really make any difference, it's a sort of... 28:15 it doesn't really make any difference, it's so easy to make layers, but the whole Blind Merged Mining idea is basically that anything that's software, you can outsource the entire project to someone else who makes the block, they pay whatever the costs are, if they have to hire engineers, whatever, so either this project is losing money, or it's making money. 28:37 If it's losing money, then nothing matters, because people will just stop doing it eventually, and miners certainly don't want to buy into losing money, but if they make money, then since anyone can run this software, then you have just like a bidding market where people bid to put the L2, so the things that you mentioned about like roll-ups and things, they seem to be going way worse than... 29:01 So I don't know if you disagree that that is a solution to MEV, because the Blind Merged Mining transforms all of the L2's block value, both the transaction fees and anything else that anyone can cash in. 29:12 Blind Merged Mining is very, very similar to the marketplace that Ethereum has, where you're a staker, someone else is going to tell you what to put in your block, and they're going to pay you the optimal amount, and hopefully you get a good return on that. 29:26 I think the point of looking at Ethereum here is that they've built that, and it works great. It does, from an efficient market perspective, it actually works fairly well. There are only a few companies that can do it, but they are very competitive, but that results in strong centralization pressure. 29:42 Okay, I'm almost done, I promise. I'm sorry. 29:44 With Blind Merged Mining, it is anyone can run the software, it captures all the transaction fee and the other benefits, and it's a case where the miner still builds the L1 block, they just say, I'm not looking at the L2 at all, I don't care, it's the blind part, and they just see someone will pay $80,000, someone will pay $81,000, someone will pay $81,000. 30:06 It's precisely that first part of the claim. It's that anyone can run the software, and they can capture all the benefits. 30:12 That's BIP301. 30:15 That's the question. Can they capture all of the benefits? 30:18 So anyone can do... 30:20 The claim is that, well, you can design a system where anyone can just run a piece of open source software, and they can capture all of the meth, they can capture all the benefits, they can get all of the value of creating the block template, right? 30:32 And I think that, in my view, Ethereum has shown us that if you have a sufficiently complicated system, now not true today in Bitcoin, right? 30:39 Basically, anyone can run Bitcoin Core, build a block template that's like 99.999% as good in capturing all the benefits. 30:46 But in Ethereum, you have to invest a lot of money on high quality engineers, on the best engineers, in order to actually capture all the benefits. 30:56 I guess one thing that I was confused about when you were talking with Paul is that I guess I understood blind emerge mining as basically being the only problem that I guess would be like potentially sufficiently complex, would ultimately just be like how much somebody is willing to pay to have it included. 31:14 So it doesn't seem like too complex. 31:16 Blind Merged Mining is very straightforward. 31:19 And if that other system, if that Drivechain is just kind of a transaction Drivechain, it doesn't have all of these like Ethereum smart contract deep complex thing that creates a lot of meth. 31:30 But why does that make any difference? 31:31 What? Sorry? 31:32 But why does it make any difference? 31:33 Well, because that creates a lot of meth, right? 31:36 No, because on L1, the miners just see it as – L1, all the miners see is a new L1 transaction coming in that says I'll pay $80,000 to have this hash included in the Coinbase. 31:48 I'll pay $81,000. I'll pay $81,007. 31:52 In principle, I agree with you that if you have a Drivechain-like system, if you've split that between L1 and L2, it's probably not super centralizing for the L1. 32:05 It's certainly less centralizing for the L1 than if you did these things on the L1. 32:09 So I think to some extent we agree there. 32:11 It's just kind of like a weird inscription. 32:13 I'd like to change the topic. Can we talk about block time? 32:17 Real quick, Paul. We're going to – you have to have other people fight your fights at this point. 32:22 We're going to bring you offstage. I love you, man. 32:27 He pulled me onstage. 32:29 Hey, I did say I agree. Now Paul can be happy and we can – 32:34 So one thing I didn't hear you address in your talk was the difference in block times between Ethereum and Bitcoin. 32:41 That's a great question. 32:42 The last time I checked, Ethereum had 12-second block times. 32:45 So isn't that 500 more times as much opportunity for MEV in each block? 32:51 I think it's just different MEV. 32:54 So I think this comes up all the time. I think this is a great topic. 32:57 So I think to some extent – so I think Ethereum – it's not just the block time. 33:02 It's also the block – the Bitcoin – when a block is found as random, in Ethereum it's very fixed. 33:09 So that changes the MEV marketplace very dramatically. 33:12 In Ethereum, it does create that fixed window. 33:16 Yes, the block time, but also the fixed window, the fact that like, okay, it is on this millisecond that I have to have my block at all of the other nodes and no later. 33:27 That makes the high-frequency trading dynamic of sex arbitrage much worse. 33:35 So you can – if you – you were literally a high-frequency trader at that point. 33:39 You have an exact fixed window, and you have to figure out when you have to meet that window buy and whatever. 33:45 So that makes it worse in principle in Ethereum, but I don't think that means that proof of work has no problems. 33:54 I think that – you're right. 33:56 I think that the general argument that I've heard many times – well, just one of the variants of the arguments that I've heard is that, well, people won't use a DEX on Bitcoin because the block times are so wide. 34:09 People just won't use it. 34:11 That it's – your slippage is going to be too high. 34:14 You're going to get such bad execution of your orders. 34:17 Why would you use a DEX on Bitcoin? 34:21 And as a corollary to that, if there exists a sequenced rollup – so if you have one of these rollups that's sequenced or basically it's like a pseudo. 34:32 You can think of it like a separate blockchain, but only kind of. 34:34 It's CSV. 34:35 But it has some kind of central one miner. 34:38 Like that miner gets to decide all the transactions in the block. 34:41 That means that those – that other system can kind of have a virtual block time much faster. 34:49 If that exists and there's a DEX on that, and then there's also a DEX on Bitcoin, your execution is just going to be way better on this centralized thing. 34:58 And your execution on Bitcoin is going to really suck. 35:00 So people are just not going to use the one on Bitcoin. 35:02 They're going to use the one on the centralized thing, and you're going to have great execution. 35:05 I think that's probably true. 35:07 And I think this gets back to kind of my point about evaluating these things very quickly gets into what will people use and what's like – what are people going to build and what are people going to use? 35:17 I think clearly if we had EVM on Bitcoin, if we had unlimited flexibility on Bitcoin, people would build a DEX on Bitcoin. 35:26 It would exist. 35:27 There's open question as to whether people would use it. 35:30 Would people prefer to use that over some rollup DEX or whatever? 35:34 And I don't know the answer. 35:36 I don't think it's as simple as saying your execution is going to be better. 35:39 Here, people can use that. 35:40 People go where there's liquidity. 35:42 Yeah, some people will prefer to use that, but maybe it ends up having some other censorship concerns that causes people to want to use the decentralized one. 35:51 I don't know. 35:52 Really quick, you said an alternative time passer. 35:55 What was that? 35:56 A sequencer. 35:58 Yeah, in rollup lingo, the entity that's selecting the transactions that goes in the block is the sequencer. 36:06 And you can have centralized ones. 36:08 You can have multi-sig ones. 36:09 You could even have no sequencer or like a virtual sequencer that's just the L1 miners. 36:14 And then they're involved in the marketplace. 36:18 So they can take the MEV, right? 36:21 They can capture that MEV directly. 36:22 They can say, okay, I'm selecting the transactions that go in the rollup, and there's all this MEV in the rollup, and I'm going to claim it for myself. 36:29 And then none of it kind of leaks to the L1. 36:32 And this is kind of what Paul was talking about a little bit. 36:34 Like you have this other chain, and there's some entity, there's some process by which someone else gets that MEV, and then it doesn't leak. 36:42 And in Paul's design, it does leak, but it doesn't cause centralization necessarily. 36:50 I'm interested in a very interesting debate. 36:52 I want to simplify the assumptions. 36:54 So if we look at Ethereum, which is very illustrative comparing to Bitcoin, I want to identify what are the key differences that make MEV worse or better on each system. 37:03 So it seems like there's a couple of things we're rounding on. 37:05 One of them is fixed-time blocks. 37:07 Like if you know when the block lands, that's really bad. 37:09 Another is global state, which we don't have on Bitcoin. 37:13 That makes it really bad. 37:14 Are there any other like fundamental things you can think of? 37:18 I think it's that. 37:19 But I think to a large extent, it ends up being cultural. 37:21 It ends up being what do people use Ethereum for. 37:24 And it makes this debate so abstract and so frustrating. 37:30 And I don't kind of like having that debate. 37:33 But that's why I want to narrow it down and get to some concrete stuff. 37:37 I think that really is a big part of it. 37:39 It's like how do people use the system, and how do people choose to use the system, and not just what abstract features does it have. 37:46 I think it matters a lot too. 37:47 Like if we had arbitrary things on Bitcoin, would people – 37:52 I think there's an open question of like, okay, we're going to build all this stuff on Bitcoin. 37:55 And like will people actually use it versus using Ethereum? 38:00 Like they might not want to use – they might want to continue to use Bitcoin to trade and use Bitcoin as a payment network and a savings network and store value and whatever. 38:09 And they might actually not care that much about having a DEX on Bitcoin. 38:13 I don't know. 38:14 So your question was that there – what is the issue with the global state and fixed block size that – 38:20 Well, specifically I want to narrow down the design features of a cryptocurrency that cause MEV to blow up and become big problems. 38:30 And I think there's two, and I want to know what the others are. 38:33 I mean that's pretty much the gist of it. 38:36 Like Matt was saying, the constraint of like the long block intervals and small block size is inherently like a natural defense mechanism against that for Bitcoin. 38:45 Like that's exactly my concern with Paul's proposal and two-way pegs in general. 38:51 I think like that problem bleeds very deeply into the base layer depending on what people build on second layers if you have an open peg and an open sequence system. 39:03 Like the big concern I have with Blind Merged Mining is this idea that miners don't have to care at all. 39:09 But that's inherently assuming that whoever is operating this thing is making profit, has profit left over after what they're paying to miners, which is implying there's an extra profit margin for miners to capture if they just engage in this themselves directly. 39:25 And given the nature of a peg like that, there is zero way to constrain the type of system that it's pegging into. 39:32 Like once you implement that peg, the nature of the system that it's going to link into is just whatever you want it to be. 39:39 And then depending on how you architect or design that, like you take the base layer, you have an Ethereum sidechain, then you have just open sequencer Ethereum rollups. 39:50 And that can just domino the whole way down to base layer miners. 39:54 Like you don't have a closed sequencer on a rollup defending the MEB, which leaks into the chain on the second layer, which then leaks down onto the first layer. 40:03 So I think – yeah, so I think to answer your question more concretely, I think the other – the reason I point out kind of how people use it is like, okay, flexibility is one. 40:11 It's like the overarching, the biggest top line difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is how much complexity can you fit on the chain. 40:20 That's the big thing, and it is possible that we will end up there with just – with client-side validation stuff, with the BRC20 people are working on some stuff in this direction. 40:32 Like it's possible that someone will assign client-side validation, and now we have all the complexity, and now we're stuck. 40:37 You just joined us. Go ahead. 40:40 I had a couple questions in different directions. 40:42 I mean, to that point, something like 50% of the network merge mines rootstock, a large percentage of the network also merge mines fractal. 40:51 You can – from a Bitcoin L1 perspective, you could imagine that being a rollup or like a CSV type system where you have a different set of consensus rules. 41:00 If L1 miners are ultimately able to sequence transactions in those other blockchains and choose the canonical ordering of the transactions to then merge mine into Bitcoin, then miners who are running the arbitrarily complex software to validate those blocks can earn more revenue per unit of hash than miners who are not. 41:20 So it sounds like the conditions for creating Meeble kind of already exist today with those kinds of systems. 41:28 Oh, absolutely, yeah. Those could absolutely cause Meeble. I think Paul would say you should do blind merge mine. You should – and I think this is right here, right? 41:36 I think that you can – as long as it is the second-layer system, like, yeah, you could build kind of the Ethereum marketplace where like the rootstock blocks are bid up by some third-party capturing the MEV, and then the L1 miners don't necessarily get caught up in it as much. 41:55 It still is – there's still centralization questions and like how that marketplace is structured and yada, yada, but I think you're right that like it could end up there or that separation might be big enough that we can fix it with bidding. 42:14 And like, okay, that would result in those systems being censored and being OFAC, whatever, but like maybe the L1 will survive. 42:22 I mean, maybe, but also if it lets the L1 miners deploy CapEx at a higher rate, then they accrue more hash power and they get bigger. 42:29 The other question I had for you is I think a dynamic that we're seeing play out is people trying to build these systems either on Bitcoin or on other blockchains are moving towards having some kind of permission sequencer or permission coordinator role. 42:46 You mentioned BRC20 stuff earlier, like in the Ordinal's marketplaces, I think the marketplaces are starting to learn that because we have 10-minute block times and because you can do things like RBF transactions where if you have a sequence of causally related transactions and then somebody pays a higher enough fee, you end up disrupting the trading experience for everybody who's downstream from that. 43:08 So marketplaces are starting to require that they co-sign it or that they somehow are involved in the transaction. 43:14 On the more roll-up-y side, what you're seeing is that it's very capital intensive to build a roll-up or an L2. 43:21 You've got to do wallet development, you've got to build all these different layers, and those companies don't want to leak that enterprise value to L1 miners. 43:29 They want to capture it all for themselves. 43:32 So I feel like the arc that we're seeing these meta protocols or these L2s I put in big air quotes on top of Bitcoin going is towards permission sequencing or authoritative sequencing while at the same time we have merge mining of arbitrary sidechains happening. 43:48 So I feel like we're already in a place where the worst possible thing could happen but isn't and the direction that everybody wants to be going is actually better. 43:57 But no one uses Rootstock. 43:59 Fair. 44:01 To your point, it matters how much people actually use these. 44:04 So I think you're right. We have this worst case possible right now but also you're totally right that the direction of people building roll-ups and stuff is towards centralized sequencers. 44:16 It is on Ethereum, it is here. 44:17 Yep. 44:18 And so maybe it's going to be totally fine and this is just totally not worth worrying about because everything is going to be centralized and this is going to be fine. 44:26 I don't know if I want to bet the farm on that one but I think it might be. 44:32 So we got one last – 44:34 If you want to make a final question or comment then – 44:37 When you were describing marketplaces that exist, I guess the one thing that it seemed to me was that if you select the MEV which you are going to have a marketplace for, you're kind of picking winners in that sense. 44:54 If people have a specialty of like, oh, I know a lot about this type of MEV but there's no marketplace built out for it. 45:03 So I guess the solution that I see then is having highly modularized ways of marketing MEV which I see that as basically sidechains and having a secondary market on the coins themselves dependent on their likelihood of being able to peg back in at the original rate. 45:27 Yeah, certainly it's the case that the marketplace needs to be sufficiently flexible. 45:31 You're totally right that the marketplace has to be sufficiently flexible to capture the different kinds of MEV extraction that people want to do. 45:37 I think my point about raising marketplace design here is that we really want to build something that allows for separated order books. 45:47 So I think the Ethereum MEV marketplace problem in part is that they just have like, you bid – the only marketplace is for a full block and you must bid for a full block and that's the only type of order you can put or you can submit. 46:00 But you should be able to submit an order that is just like, I know how to do MEV extraction for this smart contract and I'm going to submit orders that only impact that smart contract and don't impact anything else. 46:10 And the miner should be able to take my order and somebody else who specializes in something else should be able to specialize in that. 46:15 And that would be great. 46:17 And I think with UTXOs we're potentially a little bit better able to do this. 46:22 And yeah, I mean if it's like sidechains or Drivechains or something where you can have different types of things on different chains, that's also a possible outcome. 46:31 But yeah, I think your point is well made that we have to have sufficiently complicated order types. 46:39 So we're on time. 46:41 But if everyone's okay with it and you're okay and everyone – we can go another 10, 15 if that's okay with everyone? 46:49 Okay. 46:50 All right. 46:51 So you have your panelists up here? 46:53 Yeah. 46:54 We also have – I am allowing people to come back on stage. 46:57 Like who would believe it? 46:59 Paul in Portland if they want. 47:01 But I just want to let you know if you are done, you can come up on stage on your own. 47:05 And we'll probably cap it at this in terms of panelists. 47:08 Everyone's queued up now. 47:09 Yeah, sounds good. 47:10 So make your final points. 47:12 Yeah. 47:13 So we had two new folks come up. 47:14 Yeah. 47:15 I have like one question. 47:16 It might be a new – I might be opening a can of worms. 47:20 So feel free to stop me. 47:22 But say I have an opcode proposal. 47:24 Like a lot of these layer 2s depend on some opcode, maybe OP_CAT or whatever. 47:29 How can I do the due diligence to make sure that I don't introduce me evil? 47:34 Or like how can I measure it? 47:36 You said it's like a social kind of question, right? 47:38 Like how do people use it, not what can they in theory use? 47:42 So is it even possible that I do due diligence? 47:46 How can I do it? 47:48 Yeah. 47:49 I mean, you're right. 47:50 It opens a can of worms. 47:51 But I think the answer is there is no answer. 47:53 I think there's just – it is to some extent undecidable. 47:58 And it ends up falling to the Bitcoin community of like do we want to – to use the phrase 48:05 from the last comment was do we want to bet the farm on this? 48:09 Like there's a lot of value in having recursive covenants and being able to build all this 48:13 cool stuff that everyone wants to build. 48:15 And there's also a lot of risk to it depending on how you think people are going to use it. 48:21 And it becomes a question – I mean, it's certainly not a question that I get to decide. 48:25 This is a question for the Bitcoin community, right? 48:27 Right. 48:28 So it's about being honest, about like looking for an evil. 48:32 If someone finds something, then trying to address that or changing a proposal or like 48:37 pointing out this is actually not an attack or something. 48:41 Yeah. 48:42 We shut it down. 48:43 But yeah, I don't like – I don't know. 48:45 I mean, I think certainly – yeah. 48:47 Yeah. 48:48 I mean like we were talking about kind of like the thing that these opcodes change is 48:52 not necessarily that we go from being able to have – from being at risk of having evil 48:57 to not – or from not having any risk to having risk, right? 49:01 There's some risk today. 49:02 The things that exist today are basically unused or at least not used in any sufficient 49:06 size that it matters. 49:08 Sorry. 49:11 But – and these other things that people are talking about adding opcodes that are 49:18 going to enable people to build more stuff and then like, okay, is that going to – some 49:23 people are going to build stuff with that and hopefully, that will get used. 49:25 Otherwise, why are we adding the opcode? 49:27 We should certainly not add an opcode if no one is going to use it. 49:29 Hopefully, it will get used. 49:30 But then what kinds of things are people going to build and that it – I don't have an 49:36 answer. 49:37 It's scary. 49:38 There are certain patterns that enable Meevil, right? 49:40 Like certain script patterns, certain introspections that are just very susceptible to Meevil and 49:45 you can try to avoid them. 49:47 And maybe even if you have those patterns, the people don't use it to create Meevil. 49:51 Yeah. 49:52 I think the other thing too is we can – we can also attack the other – you're totally 49:56 right. 49:58 It's scary. I don't have an answer. I think the only other thing is that we should also look at the problem for the other end and we should build the marketplace, right? 50:06 We should say this exists in some form. It exists today. It's very – it's tiny. So we should build the marketplace and see and then at least if we end up having a problem, 50:19 whether it's from client-side validation where there's no soft forks or whatever, whether we add full simplicity to Bitcoin and people build like a DEX and now we have all kinds of trading and all kinds of sex tax arbitrage and whatever, 50:33 at least we have a thing, some marketplace that creates some centralization within that ecosystem but maybe it's not as bad for the rest of us. 50:45 Maybe there's – the best ideas I have are centralized marketplaces like if you want to be a competitive miner, you have to be a part of some centralized marketplace but at least it's not exclusive like you have in Ethereum where you have to just be a part of that centralized marketplace 50:59 and you can't take that block template and add your own transactions to remove the filtering that they might have done. That's the best ideas I have there but at least that's something we should probably analyze and maybe build and then maybe we're in a better spot. I don't know. 51:16 Well, what's your thoughts on how the trust model of a system impacts whether it attracts users in the first place? Like you look at something like Rootstock, it's just a straight up federation and people have been very hesitant to opt in and really view that as something they would trust and then on the flip side of that, like client-side systems without a peg that's a trust model users would want to interact with, 51:44 then that is either a trusted system like Rootstock or something that's free-floating in value. So like the degree of harm that those types of systems versus a truly trustless peg could create in terms of the amoebal value that would generate. 51:59 Yeah, somebody brought up earlier kind of like what is the difference in Ethereum and Bitcoin and I tried to make the point kind of poorly that I think the ecosystem is different and the culture is different and I think that kind of gets to this point is that like people will build different things and I think people might build the same set of things on Bitcoin and Ethereum but the things that actually end up getting adopted might be different because the culture is different and that it might be the case and really might. 52:27 I'm speculating, I'm pretty far out on a ledge here but it might be the case that if you have a DEX in Bitcoin that people will prefer to use that DEX over a DEX on a roll-up because the DEX on Bitcoin is more decentralized and less trustful and whatever versus the one on the roll-up might be, you know, super, it's super trustful, super, you know, you're trusting some sequencer or whatever. 52:48 So that might be a big thing here that we have to think about or it might not matter at all. It might just be the economics is like it's a little better and like all the liquidity is going to go there because your execution is just a little better and no one's ever going to care. 53:04 Okay. My biggest criticism to your argument is that you're not making an economic argument. If you were making an economic argument you would say MEV is bad, it is something we can control over on the software side even though there are many minor competitive things that we cannot control and it's going to be this big 53:31 and the opportunity cost of saying we can't have any MEV, we need to shut down all these possibilities is we're going to lose these other possibilities. Would you characterize as the Ethereum way of life? 53:45 I would like to take you back to 2012 when Mike Hearn made I think the first what Bitcoin can be talk and it was really this era where, you know, we knew what Bitcoin should be and it needed to be the best, most capable money which included decentralization because if we lost the decentralization then we would become a political money. 54:14 But within that all of the other aspects of money, all of the other economic value that people bring to money was critical and we knew that and we knew that's why the price was going to go up and why we were going to put our own time and energy into it. 54:33 And when you aren't making an economic argument about MEV is this big, the opportunity cost is this big and we're going to trade this for this, then you sound like you just don't want the bad things to happen and you don't want change. 54:51 And yet in your argument you allow that there is change that you cannot stop, the L2 stuff, the client side stuff and this doesn't seem to bother you and that makes your argument weaker again. It's not that it doesn't bother you, it's that you recognize you don't have control over it. That's a better statement. 55:11 So that's the thing I want to focus on. If this was going to make sense and we were going to trade what Bitcoin can and should be for this problem, then we would need to know how big is this problem and how big is the thing we're giving up on. 55:34 And I submit to you that we actually have a market price for the value that we've walked away from and it is the market price of all the shit coins. When we give up on things that we could do better, we push people into worse solutions and we push them towards custodial solutions. 56:01 People are heading towards the ETFs and Coinbase because we're not doing a better job with software and better custody design options. 56:11 Yeah, so I think that's a good point. I think a few things. So you're totally right that we, the Bitcoin community, and I don't – I think maybe you're – my argument comes off as we must not do a CAD or covenants or whatever. 56:31 It's not an argument I want to make. I want to have a discussion about the problems here because I think that that discussion was basically completely nonexistent a year ago. 56:43 That risks of introducing MEV and now what I would call MEVL was nonexistent a year ago, and I think that that argument has to be had because you're right. We do need to – we, not me, the Bitcoin community – needs to make a decision about tradeoffs of what – about these tradeoffs. 57:06 And I think you kind of – you gave it away a little bit. You quoted Mike Hearn and you said Mike Hearn talked about we have to have all these things that money needs to have and also decentralization. 57:22 And I think my point is that if we do not have – if we end up with lots of MEVL, whether it's because of some soft fork or whether it's because of client-side validation, it doesn't matter. You're right. It could be any reason at all. If that happens, we lose decentralization, and I think that's basically true. 57:44 We already lost it. We're not one CPU, one vote. We were supposed to be. So there's stuff we can control and stuff we cannot control. And we need to use a serenity prayer and worry about the things we can control, and we need to not worry about stuff we can't control. And there's a lot of MEV that we cannot control. And you're saying we can control this much MEV and it's going to make or break us, and I disagree. 58:07 I think we, the Bitcoin community, can absolutely control – we can decide what we build. We can decide what – we can't control what some people build and choose to use. But the reality of what the feature set of the chain are does absolutely dictate to a large extent what ends up getting adoption and what ends up getting built. 58:35 Client-side validation is an example of something that can exist. I mean, Peter Todd wrote about client-side validation, what, 10 years or more than a decade ago? 58:44 But the – it hasn't been – it hasn't gotten any use because the practical tradeoffs of it – I mean you can only do a one-way peg, right? Like you can maybe build – maybe people are starting to figure out how to build a two-way peg? Unclear. 59:05 But the practical tradeoffs of it are just very high. And if we add a lot of features, maybe those tradeoffs go away and that does change things. And I think that is an analysis – you're right, I did not do a thorough analysis of that. That is absolutely analysis that needs to happen as we look to making changes. 59:23 We need to do that level of analysis, and I think you're totally right. My argument is woefully incomplete and is not a compelling argument that we shouldn't make changes to Bitcoin. But I think it is hopefully a compelling argument that we should do the type of analysis that you're talking about prior to deciding to make changes to Bitcoin because I think there's a lot of risk there. 59:46 I think we get stuck. 59:47 Pause for a moment. Just for a moment. We're over time. We're actually going into the next talk. I do think it would be respectful and interesting to just get ten seconds closing thoughts, but no more questions. This is not like a back and forth. You can give your closing thoughts, and then you're done. And I really appreciate you all. So after closing thoughts, we can do round of applause. Please hurry up and get off the stage. 1:00:13 I think that was my closing thought. I think this was a great point. I think I hopefully did not make an argument that we shouldn't make changes to Bitcoin. Some people have interpreted it that way. I'm sure that was not my intent. We need to do more analysis. 1:00:28 I have a closing thought, which is that, Matt, you are yourself the greatest source of evil, are you not? Because you are a centralized thing that we cannot – there's no competition for you. You're a monopoly on yourself. Apparently, miners have to go to you if they're mining high. 1:00:45 Ten seconds. 1:00:46 And you can bless or reject what they do. So that's my thought. 1:00:50 All right. More later. Go, go, go. 1:00:53 Okay. Ultimately, I believe miners will act rationally, collecting the highest amount of fees they possibly can in every single Bitcoin block. If that option is given to them in any way, even if it's through methods of Meeble, it will be utilized. 1:01:07 I think Matt's right. We just need to really analyze this problem a lot more deeply and really see, to the best degree we can, if improving the trustlessness of MEV generating systems is what's going to draw users or not, and whether that's an important factor. 1:01:25 It also seems to me that there's a lot of potential Meeble that we can get without changing Bitcoin, with client-side validation and things we don't know about. So we should do more research into this. 1:01:40 Everybody, please, round of applause for everyone that participated. 1:01:46 Matt, I really appreciate you putting that energy in. That means a lot to me because I think this is one of the more important topics that we silently disagree on, and thank you so much. I really do mean that.