0:00 Okay, we are recording. I am with Paul. Paul, how are you, my friend? 0:04 I'm good. How are you? 0:06 I mean, well, I guess friend is a bit of an overstatement, right? 0:10 I mean, I think we sat beside each other on a bus at Bruce's event, 0:14 if I'm not mistaking. That was like the extent of our relationship, right? 0:18 Yeah, maybe. 0:20 I feel like you're a friend because people talk about you all the time. 0:23 I think that Bitcoin is actually kind of, it's like a very traumatic war. And everyone is like 0:29 going through all this. It's a tremendously alienating thing. Because many of your friends 0:36 and family don't get it. And they have never gotten it. And they definitely didn't get it 0:41 back in whenever when you explained it to them. And now they don't really know how to think of 0:46 you. And no one really knows what you're going through, except for the other Bitcoiners. 0:50 So I do think that there is a kind of Bitcoin PTSD or Bitcoin gang or something 0:57 that binds us all together. 1:00 Okay, well, yeah, I can get down with that one. Because I do have a tendency of starting with 1:04 that. And I just feel like, yeah, even I mean, you, I have known for years, but even people like 1:09 I'll meet someone just like last week, and they'll tell me about their Bitcoin project, 1:13 and how they're building a, you know, self custody wallet with lightning and this and that, I'll be 1:17 like, like brothers from different mothers, let's go, let's do this. So okay, you wanted to switch 1:24 it up today, right? Normally, I start with people's story. But I guess we're gonna kind of 1:28 do the reciprocal of that today. So we're gonna start with my last question first. So it doesn't 1:33 matter what your name is, who you are, what your story is to start with. Let's start first with 1:38 what is a asymmetrical truth? What is some truth that you hold the most other Bitcoiners or people 1:45 in Bitcoin would disagree with you on? Yeah, well, see, I think people should get they should 1:50 get, they should be able to get to know me first, and then they decide whether or not they care 1:54 about the story. But I have so the one that is, it's tangentially related to Bitcoin. But in 2:02 general, the answer that question of just in with respect to everything is that probably a lot of 2:09 the people you love will die because election gambling is frowned upon in American culture. 2:16 So that is this weird screwball belief that I have. 2:22 Well, you got to rewind and you got you got to hit me with that one again. You got to hit me 2:26 with that. Wait, wait, hold on. Wait, what? Say that again. I kind of I kind of caught it. 2:31 Yeah, so it's so I'm a big believer in this prediction markets concept. But the excitement 2:37 that most Bitcoiners and libertarians have for it only scratches the surface of the tremendous 2:44 potential this institution has to just fix. I don't really want to say fix everything, 2:51 but it can fix a certain type of problem, which is the who watches the watchman problem. So like 2:56 you can imagine a pyramid in your mind where like the CEO is at the top or the Congress people are 3:01 at the top. Or the editor in chief, if you're from academia, like I'm from academia, the editor in 3:06 chief of some journals at the top, and then there's senior academic academics with prestige, 3:10 and then it filters down. And at the bottom, you have research assistants, or you have like, 3:15 whatever, staff, janitors, whatever, all these other people, and this produces some outcomes. 3:22 And the people, when you have subordinates, you have a lot of control over them, you monitor them. 3:28 If you're happy with their work, you promote them or reward them. But if you're not happy, 3:35 you can you can fire them and people don't want to be fired. So they work hard. They work hard 3:40 enough, they at least there's some feedback for laziness, they get kicked out if they're too lazy. 3:44 But what about the people at the top? What keeps them accountable? 3:49 And the answer right now is not very much. I mean, this, the CEO is accountable to the stock price, 3:54 but it's very, very difficult. The CEOs, they're working every day, they're 24 seven, 3:59 you know, their brain is inside the company. And they've touching everything, everything that 4:05 the company is they have a hand in. And how can you possibly even understand begin to understand 4:11 like second guess their choice, like they can you can say, well, the stock price would have been 4:15 higher, the stock price of Tesla would have been higher if Elon Musk did this or didn't do this, 4:18 or whatever. You have no idea. The board of directors is theoretically in charge of the CEO, 4:23 they can fire the CEO. But they you know, those are some people that meet like four times a year. 4:28 What are they going to do? They'd have no idea if they have no idea if Elon Musk is doing the 4:35 right thing or not. Often the chairman of the board is the CEO's friends. This is a million 4:41 times worse in the because a corporation is ultimately accountable to bankruptcy to sales 4:45 and to bankruptcy. So the corporation doesn't do well, the company eventually goes out of business. 4:52 You know, but in in political world, it's even worse because, you know, the best you can hope 4:57 for is a change of party leadership from, you know, Republican to Democrat in the United States. 5:04 And it's much worse in Europe when there's like, they have a proportional representation where you 5:09 can barely ever get anything changed. We hold on, but I want to go back to your first sentence 5:14 of this of what we just said, which was what you said something along the line. Yeah, 5:18 repeat what you said. And like, I want to figure that out. 5:21 Many of the people you love will die because because economic growth and medical research 5:27 and such and such will be what it is. Even things like, you know, mental health or whatever. 5:31 Everything will just be better. The prediction market institution has the ability to 5:39 completely reform the way these people at the top are held accountable to to some kind of, 5:46 you know, tangible result. And so the potential for improvement is almost unlimited. I mean, 5:53 the things that the U.S. government currently does that holds back economic growth. I mean, 5:59 free trade is just one thing. Free trade would be like free. And someone has calculated that the 6:04 return on investment for that or the gains of trade from that would be like something like 6:10 an 11 million percent ROI. I can look to find this study, but it's like it's it's a silly thing. 6:16 The benefits would be extreme. The cost is nothing. That's just one thing, you know, many. 6:23 But the the kind of laziness and the kind of political games that people play, 6:28 both within the corporation and in civic political life. That's all something that 6:37 you could really stamp out almost completely with this one institution that we would have had 6:42 naturally by itself. It's very old. It's as old as the hills. There was there's you can track 6:47 people would bet on who would be elected pope since like the thirteen hundreds, twelve hundred 6:53 A.D. There's all this. And of course, in the UK, they bet on everything just for fun. But the U.S. 6:59 is this super important, super Puritan place, and it hates gambling and it hates the CFTC has 7:08 written despite, you know, there's been like multiple papers by there's like a one called 7:12 the Power of Prediction Markets. It's signed by like 30 people, including multiple Nobel Prize 7:17 winners arguing for deregulation of this institution. But it's regulated just out of 7:22 existence. You can't you are not allowed to even do this took forever to get like the special 7:25 exemption in this one universities that people could bet like five hundred dollars maximum per 7:30 person, which is not enough. All of it could be all this stuff could be fixed. So even things like 7:36 Fed policy or whatever, whatever you want to do, you could do it better with a prediction market. 7:41 How? And we would have had it. Why? Why? How does a prediction market fix all of this? 7:47 There's because the potential is untapped. So most people have only heard of like this one thing 7:51 where it's like you win the dollar if Donald Trump is reelected, you win or you win a different 7:58 dollar if Joe Biden is elected. And you have these two things. And one of those two is going to be 8:05 elected. So they trade in the marketplace and they trade maybe the Donald Trump shares were 30 cents 8:12 on the dollar and the Biden shares were 70 percent, 70 cents on the dollar. This, you know, 8:17 this would indicate that Trump has a 30 percent chance of winning. Biden has a 70 percent chance 8:21 of winning. And so that's what people are used to. They just they're. Well, even that people have a 8:27 big problem concluding that this represents some kind of objective knowledge and that if it were 8:36 if if people knew somehow that Biden would win, they would all sell the Trump shares for 30 cents 8:44 because they they're imminently worth zero. They buy the Biden shares for 70 cents. They're 8:48 imminently worth one dollar. So they get a huge ROI in a few days, 70 cents to one dollar. 8:56 But this this idea, the idea of just aggregating all the information on one topic, 9:03 like even something like what will the global average surface temperature be next year, 9:08 as reported by this NASA satellite, like if you wanted to do a global warming texting 9:12 global warming is this abstract nebulous thing, whereas you can make it concrete with some 9:17 measurement. You say here's a satellite. It's going to measure this thing now. 9:25 Maybe you don't care about the satellite or maybe you don't care about 9:29 how NASA calculates surface temperature abnormality. But you see, then the conversation 9:34 can at least make progress. You can say, well, I have a problem with this satellite. Fine. 9:37 What about this other satellite? Or what about 20 satellites? Why average them together? 9:41 Or what about some other thing we'll do? You know, we'll take the National Weather Service 9:45 from every country or whatever. You can the conversation will make progress. 9:50 But most disputes really aren't about anything. They're just about, you know, 9:53 who gets respect from whom. And there this this is petty kind of monkey politics 10:00 from the Stone Age that we can't shake off. But in many other domains, 10:04 we just shake it off. Like when you're trying to install plumbing in your house or accomplish any 10:11 normal task, you just say, well, does it work yet? And you just keep changing it until it works. But 10:16 we haven't been able to shake this all this politicking off. So but this is just narrowly 10:22 with one dimension. You just say, OK, I'm just going to measure what is the surface 10:25 temperature going to be next year or five years from now or 10 years from now? You can say this 10:29 is going to pay one cent for every surface temperature abnormality in the year 2030 or 10:36 something. And then, you know, you have to calculate time value of money a little bit. 10:41 It's a little confusing and opportunity costs if you had invested in the stock market. But 10:45 basically, if that number starts going up all of a sudden, it means that people think that the 10:49 earth is going to the global surface temperature is going to be warmer. So it kind of just ends 10:54 this dispute. But if it plummets or stays the same, people think it won't be much warmer. And 11:04 so the problem isn't as big of a deal. Now, the issue, though, is this is just with one dimension. 11:10 And when you change this from one dimension to several dimensions, you solve a lot of problems. 11:14 So a lot of people will say something like, sure, we won't have a lot of the global surface 11:20 temperature abnormality in the future will be low. The problem will be solved. But that's only 11:25 because we'll do something about it. We'll pass whatever the carbon plan or whatever it is. 11:33 So it doesn't actually solve any problems. Or people will say stuff like, sure, Hillary Clinton 11:38 is trading this. People said this to me four years ago. They say Hillary Clinton is trading 11:42 really high. That's just because, you know, she's so evil and sorceress that she's going to win. 11:47 And there's nothing we can do about it. It doesn't say anything about whether or not who should win 11:52 or something like that. But you can break this up. This is my mission to try to bring this to 11:59 the world. Instead of having yes and no, which is just two questions, there's just one question, 12:07 like basically, will the Republican win, yes or no? And having Trump be 30 cents and Biden be 70 12:14 cents, you can break it up into lots of other things. You can say, will the unemployment rate 12:20 be low? Will we have a good economy? Just to make it super oversimplified, it's like, will the 12:25 Republican win? Will the economy be good? You have four states. One pays if the Republican wins, 12:32 and the economy is good. One pays if the Republican wins, and the economy is bad. 12:36 One pays if the Democrat wins, and the economy is good. One pays if the Democrat wins, 12:40 and the economy is bad. And from there, you can do all kinds of additions, subtraction, 12:44 multiplication. You get everything you got before, but you get also this relationship. 12:48 If the numbers clump up on a line, all the Republican winning economy good numbers over 12:56 there, and the economy bad Republican losing numbers, if they clump up on a line, it shows 13:03 that they are related statistically. It gives you advice. It says, if I vote Republican, 13:08 the economy will be better, or vice versa. So if we do this climate plan, 13:13 the temperature will be different. If we do this business maneuver, the stock price will go up. If 13:19 Tesla discontinues the Cybertruck, or doubles down on the Cybertruck, or whatever it is. 13:26 Paul, I have a question. 13:31 Now, with that, you hold the leader accountable. That's the point. 13:34 The leader should be as accountable as Uber drivers, where you get rated five stars every 13:38 time. You get constant feedback. They should be working really hard, and they should be 13:45 punished for inefficiency, the same way as everyone else should. When you go to work, 13:49 you should be giving it your all. You should be improving every day, and it should be difficult. 13:54 But then when you go home, you should get a lot of money also, and we should all live in 13:57 a rich economy full of awesome stuff that everyone wants that's cheap and high quality. 14:03 Is this about prediction markets? It's about predicting the future, which is obviously 14:16 interesting and fascinating. My first question is, why is this seen as gambling, or why is it 14:27 illegal in some countries? That's my first question. You're not hurting anyone. 14:36 Anyone who's libertarian has been trying that for a long time. It's like, if it neither breaks my 14:43 arm, nor picks my pocket, or something. This is the struggle of all people over time, I think, 14:53 against tyranny, collectivism. There must have been something that happened, 15:00 or something went wrong. I'm just trying to think, how do they conflate? 15:04 There's a long history. As I said, there is a long history of actually doing the betting. 15:11 People have been betting on who will win the life of the pope, and all these other things, 15:17 for hundreds of years. People do bet today even, right? I don't bet, 15:22 but people go on websites all the time. There's been a long trend. A long time ago, 15:28 life insurance was seen as immoral. That was seen as betting that your spouse would die. 15:34 It was seen as very irresponsible. It interfered with the church. This was back in the day when 15:39 America lived in a little farm church community. If your spouse died, the church community would 15:46 take care of you. It was suspicious. It competed with the other institutions of the day. 15:54 It is kind of weird, right? There's even a kind of trope of the gold digger spouse killing the 16:02 person for the life insurance money, or something. The guy takes out a life insurance policy, 16:08 big life insurance policy, and then he disappears in a boating accident, or something. 16:14 It used to be considered immoral, but now it's not at all. If you have a family, 16:23 it's considered quite bizarre to go without life insurance. It's flipped completely. 16:28 All kinds of stuff. The stock market used to be seen as gambling. There used to be a phrase, 16:33 gentlemen don't trade puts, which is truly absurd. This was about the Chicago Board of 16:38 Options. Chicago was in the middle of all these farms. These people did all this banking 16:44 in America with the Mississippi River and blah, blah, blah. There was all the seasonal variation. 16:51 There was all this risk. They got big into insurance. They got big into trading futures 16:59 for crops and things. This is why Chicago got big. I don't know exactly when this would be, 17:05 gilded era, late 1850 to 1900, I guess. I don't remember the exact dates. 17:12 Chicago started all this stuff up, became this big financial center. 17:18 There was this phrase that you weren't supposed to trade puts. Put is when you bet a call option 17:23 makes money if the thing goes up in price. A put option makes money if the thing goes down. Put is 17:28 kind of insurance. There was this stigma. It was seen as wrong, even though it's laughable if you 17:33 think about it for two seconds. Think about it in international forex. What if you're trading 17:40 the British pounds per yen rates, but you live in America? It's like, which one is even a put 17:46 and which one is even a call? It's like absolutely no difference. That's my point. That's my next 17:51 question. Futures and all that stuff, isn't that betting on the future to some extent? Yes. 17:57 Then why is that allowed, but then you're not allowed? Every action you take has some sort of 18:04 if you walk to the post office, you're betting that the post office will be open when you get 18:08 there. Where's that line? I'm not going to lie. I've always stayed away from gambling or even 18:15 betting on these types of things because in my brain, I couldn't figure out where are you allowed? 18:25 It just doesn't make any sense to me. It's so funny. People are allowed to play games. 18:30 Game's bad. The issue is, well, there's a big difference. If you go to a casino, 18:36 the odds are fixed and they're against, they're not in your favor. Something's up because 18:42 everything is a negative expected value. That's cool. Why is anyone there? 18:47 Wait, lottery. A lottery. In the United States, the state rents a lottery. 18:52 What is going on right now? It's just a mistake is what I'm saying. It's no different than 18:57 with the life insurance and with the stock market. Stock market is important. Life insurance is 19:03 important because you should be able to provide for your family if you die. It shouldn't depend 19:10 on how popular you are with your friends. That's uncivilized and barbaric. Plus, what's the guy who 19:17 gets there first? He hasn't had an opportunity to get standing in the community, but his actuarial 19:23 risk is the same. Why should he suffer in a world with no life insurance? Similarly, 19:29 capital markets, if you have a great business idea, should you have to work as a waiter or 19:36 whatever for 30 years and save up all the money to finally start that idea? Meanwhile, down the 19:41 street, there's some rich retired person who wants a better return and they're betting on 19:45 to turn their money into more money. Why can't the two of you just link up? They can be the 19:50 investor in your business. You can start it tomorrow. That's the point of having free capital 19:57 markets. When you can short, when you can bet on things going down, that is healthy. Part of the 20:15 problem with the US housing market is you cannot short it. When the prices go up, everyone starts 20:20 buying and they'll become house flippers. There's no way to short. Once you think there's a bubble, 20:28 this is before all that stuff that Michael Burry mortgage-backed security stuff. 20:34 You can't short someone in your neighbor's house. You can't even take out homeowner's insurance. 20:40 You have to have what they call an insurable interest. You can't bet that the houses around 20:46 you will go down in price. If you could, it probably would pop the bubble before it really 20:52 got going. If you can short things, it's bubble suppression technology. It smooths out all these 21:02 cycles. What stops them from becoming really euphoric is when they become super irrational 21:06 and then they start to do a lot of damage because then they have that extra momentum to just go 21:11 crazy and then super crash back down. The whole thing has been absurd. What we should just have 21:20 is liberalism. People are allowed to just do whatever they want as long as it doesn't harm 21:27 a third party, which this absolutely does not. What I'm trying to impress on people is that 21:39 your life will be so much better eventually. I don't know if it'll take a hundred years, 21:43 but eventually it will reach something like this. Of course, they're going to look back and 21:47 they're going to say, look at these stupid debates that these people would do. What a joke this was. 21:52 30 seconds for your health care policy and 60 seconds on whatever national defense. In the 21:59 future, people will just publish a lot of stuff. It'll be evaluated by experts the same way hedge 22:04 funds evaluate companies. They'll just battle it out in the markets on who will have the best 22:12 GDP growth, who will have the best unemployment rate, who will have the fewest deaths in the 22:17 country, or who will have the longest life expectancy or education or anything else you 22:22 can measure. They'll just battle it out in these markets. The voters will show up on election day. 22:27 They'll check, see everyone's numbers. It'll be like a menu, getting a menu in a restaurant. You 22:33 don't have to know anything about how they make the whatever it is, the tiramisu. They just see, 22:38 this is exactly what you'll get. This is the cost. This is exactly how much money the government 22:42 will spend. Then they'll just go in and they'll still get to choose one party over another, 22:49 but they'll have all this great information. If anyone does, this is super irrational. 22:56 If any party is known, it has nothing to do with what they say. If it's known that if they are 23:01 elected, they will behave irrationally, their numbers will be worse before they even have the 23:08 opportunity to be elected. They'll know on election day to avoid whichever party that is. 23:14 Life would be totally different. You don't have any of this about, and then of course, 23:17 these people are all professional manipulators. They have all these psychologists they hire, 23:21 and these pollsters, the social media algorithms. They have all this stuff designed to get into 23:28 your brain with this emotional stuff about how you need to vote for this person. Otherwise, 23:37 it's the end of your culture. It's the end of the world. These people are coming, the poor people, 23:42 the immigrants or whatever, the Jews, they're coming to destroy society and you have to do 23:46 X, Y, Z. You have to vote for this party because it's the only one that will be compassionate to 23:58 this marginalized group. If you don't vote for this party, it's because you're racist or 24:05 homophobic or whatever. All of that is just because they're trying to buy election results 24:11 with advertising and polling. They do all this stuff. They know everyone down to, 24:18 they've got everything down to science. They know all the neighborhoods. They know who's 24:21 the single issue voter on gun control. They send them the gun control thing. 24:24 The neighbor gets a completely different thing. They get a thing about LGBT rights. 24:31 They know everything, the pollsters. We got everyone's credit card data. They got everything. 24:36 They're manipulating people into voting a certain way. As we know, one way is through logic and 24:46 reason, but that is expensive and not as reliable as all the cheap shots. You have all this stuff 24:53 about a father and son not talking to each other because one of them is a Trump supporter or 24:57 something. 24:58 All of that would go away in my fantasy world. This would be a boring thing. I don't know. It'd be like Crest versus Colgate. You go to CVS and you want to buy toothpaste. 25:09 Both of them are high-quality products, both at a good price. If you decide you're tired of one, you just switch to the other. 25:17 Since the free market is there, now it's like you're going to buy toothpaste and Crest is like $40,000 and gives you brain cancer immediately. 25:32 Colgate is like $55,000 and you die slowly of sepsis or something. 25:41 These are two horrible products and they don't improve, but if you just had this mechanism to punish the people who make it worse, then it would just get better over time as rapidly as possible. 25:54 That's my quirky thing and not a lot of people agree with me as you can imagine. 25:59 It's not supposed to be disagree. People don't know what to say to this. 26:07 Let's use an example. For example, when Trump came down the elevator, I'm not even American, so I can't really vote or anything. 26:17 When he came down the elevator, I think within two days I was like, this man is the future president of the United States. 26:25 I've met enough Americans to know that this man is the future American president and my dad literally stopped talking to me. 26:34 He did because he didn't believe that and I think one week he was like, this guy is going to beat him and now it's going to be that guy and one by one, they all fell off and then Trump won. 26:53 I'm just curious how you prevented that in your world. 26:58 It's a mixture of a lot of things. My diagnosis of why that happened to you and why it happens to everyone else is a mixture of things, but I think all of them would be solved, maybe not all of them. 27:10 We have an instinct to pick leaders and project ourselves into them, so if people have different leaders, then this is fine. 27:18 The issue is why does it matter? There's a lot of issues. Will he win? I had friends like that too. 27:23 I was at Bar Trivia with my friends and they said there's no way that Trump can win and I said, well, in the betting markets, he has like a 30% chance of winning, but people don't even know what to say to that because they're used to a certain script where you just think your guy is going to win. 27:38 You can't see it any other way. The idea of even putting percentage points on it is foreign to people, but people couldn't believe that he had 30% and then that was in 2016 and then he won. 27:51 A part of it would be self-awareness that you don't know everything and it's like why would you comment on – what if you wanted to comment on something like Tesla? 28:12 That's your right. You could say there's no way Tesla is going to sell more than 20,000 cars of this type in a certain month, but it's like who cares? Either that will happen or it won't. 28:27 People use politics as like a kind of stage so they can perform and show parts of themselves to their friends and allies. That's part of it, but I would strip all that away and I would make it this dry, boring thing. 28:44 It's like when you interview a CEO for a job, you don't necessarily need to interview them. If you somehow secretly knew that they would be the best, in my world, you can make your little trades so that if they're chosen and they do a good job, you make a ton of money. 29:09 But if they're not chosen, then you also make money or you get a refund, so you lose nothing. The only way you lose money is if they are chosen and they do badly. 29:21 You can set up these trades so the only way you lose money is if they are chosen to be the leader and they do a bad job. 29:29 Then you can just without even talking to them at all, just if you somehow knew God visits you in a dream and lets you in on a secret, you don't even need to campaign or anything. 29:45 It would just be less salient in the culture in general. That's one thing. 29:51 Another thing though is if you just have a percent, that's what I'm saying. You'd be saying, this guy's going to win. Your father would be saying, no, he won't. 30:01 But somewhere there would be some percentage value that's the same for both of you and neither of you really have any basis for disputing it. 30:09 Just like the Tesla car sales in a certain month figure. It's like there's a projection. You don't really know. You're not really a specialist. 30:20 A lot of people, they know what their friends think. Do they even know that only 10 or by some count 8 states matter because those are the only 8 swing states? 30:30 Do they know that there are only so many persuadable voters in those swing states? Do they know what those people want? 30:36 A lot of people, I have friends from Connecticut or friends in California. Those are both blue states. It doesn't matter what anyone in those states think at all to who's going to be elected president. 30:48 Many of those people can't even name the senators or representatives in their own state. 30:55 You're talking about a future where people's ideas and thoughts are measured over time. Have you ever heard of Ray Dalio? Have you ever heard of how he runs his hedge fund? 31:11 I actually interviewed him at Bridgewater. 31:15 Interesting. Because I read his book and it just strikes me as something that… 31:20 He gives it away to people who interview him. Not him personally. 31:24 Oh, the book? 31:25 They give it to you if you come there. 31:27 I bought it myself. I'm just saying it's like – I found a lot of what – so this whole idea of – what was that? He has this tool that he uses. I forget what it's called. 31:36 It's just radical criticism. They record everything and they just – everything is scrutinized. 31:43 Well, scrutinize – what I found really fascinating about it is he has this – literally this tool that in real time as he's hosting let's say a meeting with a hundred of his employees, they're able to give him – 31:55 You can say, this sucks. 31:57 This sucks. This is right. This is wrong or whatever, whatever. And in the back, this matrix-like system is tabulating Paul. 32:08 It'd be like if you're watching an NFL game and there's like a score and you see how much points they're likely to get and the guy throws an interception and the numbers just – 32:16 In real time. 32:17 Immediately. 32:18 Yeah. And he talks about this world where – I mean this company that he's built where he's essentially – like I said, you have a weight and it measures over time how accurate you are. 32:31 So if 9 out of 10 things you've always said is always like accurate, like you said this is going to have – Bitcoin price is going to go up and it does and you said this and this and this, they have like this way to actually kind of quantify this. 32:44 I think the markets improve on that. But this is a similar thing. He's obviously trying to hold himself accountable the same way I think every CEO should be held accountable, which is like all the time and for everything. 32:56 Everything. For every word, not just did I get it marginally right. 33:00 I'm not asking any more of them than they would ask for their own employees. So I don't want everyone to be like enslaved to this system where they have to work super hard. 33:11 We want to live in a world where when you go to work, you work hard and you try to be the best at what you do every day. That's what's best for everyone. 33:19 Yes. 33:20 Work is more fun I think. But even if it's not, even if that ends up being horrible, we would live in an economy where every single good and service would be such a high quality. 33:30 Think about it. It would be done by someone who not only them but all of their bosses up to the CEO is working as hard as possible to make it cheap and high quality for you. 33:42 Every single thing would be dirt cheap and just super great. 33:45 That's what we want. We want a world where when you're at work, you work, and then when you go home, you have the most fun in the world and you can take the best vacations. 33:54 People can have 12 weeks of vacation a year or whatever it is. 33:57 But when you're at work, you should be a killer. You should be the best at whatever it is you do. 34:05 But Ray Dalio's thing, that idea of past performance informing future results, that is called induction and that has haunted people who study this type of thing. 34:19 Epistemology like what is true, how do we know, what will happen in the future, what does it mean to know that you know what will happen in the future versus being deluded. 34:31 That's not a great – prediction markets are actually better than that because with prediction markets, you know yourself. 34:36 So you say, I know I got 99 out of the last 100 things wrong, but I know exactly why every time I know why. 34:42 It was because of such and such. 34:45 But now the 100th time, I know that I'm going to get it right. 34:49 Now with prediction market world, you can mortgage your house. 34:52 You can do what people did with Bitcoin and just bet it all on that one thing because now you know that you're right. 34:57 Before, you weren't really sure. 34:58 Maybe you only bet $20 each time. 35:00 See, so you have a self – you can impose your own confidence. 35:04 You have your own self-assessment. 35:08 You self-select. 35:10 So you say, I don't know anything about if what frozen concentrated orange juice futures are going to do tomorrow. 35:17 I don't know anything about what Tesla is going to do tomorrow, really. 35:20 I mean, I have an opinion like every other person, but I don't know. 35:25 So why do I – I'm not going to bet on the share price, but I'm going to bet on something that I know about. 35:32 And if I somehow – if I know something that other people don't know, now I'm going to bet big. 35:38 But mostly, I just bet nothing. 35:40 So I don't know. 35:42 So I think that's an improvement over that scheme that you outlined where people are just solicited for opinions like at random, 35:49 and then they're assessed based on the performance, historical performance. 35:53 Paul, okay, wow. 35:56 We just did an hour-long introduction to the – or whatever. 36:02 My question normally only takes a few minutes, but this is super fascinating. 36:05 I think I'm going to start doing this more often. 36:06 Okay, but I have a question. 36:08 I don't even know where to go. 36:10 It's the thing that you agree that you believe that most people don't. 36:12 And in Bitcoin, it's going to be my project, Drivechain. 36:15 Can you talk about that a little bit? 36:17 Yeah. 36:18 Can you talk about Drivechain? 36:19 The origin of Drivechain is – because I have this other project, a prediction market project that was called TruthCoins. 36:24 That was called Bitcoin Hivemind. 36:26 You can go to BitcoinHiveMind.com and have a cool little video there about this futarky thing that's only 20 minutes. 36:31 They gave it at Acapulco 2019, I think, that people can watch if they want to hear more about whatever that was. 36:40 That was software that I wrote this paper about in 2014, early 2014. 36:47 And then I wanted – this is like a blockchain peer-to-peer Oracle software. 36:54 So it would figure out whether or not Trump won or not, and then it would pay out people the right way. 36:58 And it would also do all the market stuff. 37:00 And it would do all this multidimensional stuff that I wanted as well. 37:03 So it would do everything. 37:04 This is this design. 37:06 And so then I worked – it's a long story, but I produced the software in 2015 as its own kind of blockchain. 37:19 But I didn't want it to be an altcoin, and Blockstream was getting really big with the sidechains idea at the time. 37:24 So I thought Blockstream would come out with some kind of sidechains thing that I could use to bolt it onto Bitcoin. 37:32 This was a long time ago. 37:34 But then in late 2015, it became obvious that Blockstream had kind of given up on this original idea of the sidechain, which was this solution to the problem of altcoins. 37:44 There was all this stuff coming out, Ethereum, BitShares, you probably remember. 37:48 There was all this stuff like Counterparty that was sort of on Bitcoin, but it's on blockchains, weird other things. 37:53 So all this stuff was coming out. 37:56 And it wasn't all obviously super fraudulent. 38:01 In the ancient times, you had Bitcoin. 38:04 Then you had – the second blockchain actually was Namecoin, which is a great idea. 38:09 And it still is a good idea, but it hasn't quite found its – it would be better as a sidechain, first of all. 38:19 But second of all, it has some other complexities that it hasn't quite worked through yet. 38:25 With something like Namecoin, you could have one login for every single site, including sites that don't exist yet. 38:31 So Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, it would all just be the same account tied to the same name. 38:36 You could have age, so you wouldn't need to worry about being impersonated. 38:40 You wouldn't need to tell people, here's my Instagram, here's my whatever, like in a big multi-giant paragraph. 38:46 So that's a separate story. 38:48 What I really wanted to get at is Litecoin was the first truly offensive altcoin, where it was just this copy-paste. 38:55 Bitcoin does all this work to go from zero to this super cool thing. 38:59 And then Litecoin copies and pastes it, and it's like, yeah, look at me. I'm also great. 39:04 Yeah, it'll change three parameters or something like that. 39:07 Yeah, exactly. You have a block time. 39:10 Yeah, so that was like kind of offensively. 39:15 That was like, you know, it was not only kind of a stupid idea, but it was like just so brazen and sort of absurd. 39:27 And then there was a lot of like terrible altcoins after that. 39:30 But they started to get some that could have had some kind of plausibility to them. 39:35 And in fact, with Counterparty, we had stuff like Mastercoin and Counterparty early on. 39:43 They were kind of weird, but they were onto something, which later became the ICO. 39:51 And the ICO is terrible. 39:53 Like I think so far, basically every ICO has been like a total scam and a terrible idea. 39:58 But in principle, the idea of the ICO is it should be allowed and it should be on Bitcoin. 40:06 Because Bitcoin should just do anything the customer wants. 40:09 Bitcoin should be there ready to go. 40:13 It should also be ready to go if you want small blocks and you don't want junk in the blockchain. 40:19 So, you know, Bitcoin should be doing everything that everyone wants. 40:23 But including the people who want a very conservative version of Bitcoin. 40:28 So this is kind of where this is all going, which is the sidechains idea was people want different things. 40:34 We'll just let them all have their own software and they'll all be interoperable. 40:38 Same 21 million Bitcoins, but weird. 40:40 If you want their weird Dan Larimer project of the week, or if you want Ethereum, that was supposed to be RSK, Rootstock. 40:47 That started like in 2015. 40:49 So that was the point of that. 40:53 And so I had reached a point where I had finished Bitcoin Hivemind, the prediction markets project. 41:01 But there was no sidechains technology to bolt it into Bitcoin Core. 41:05 So I kind of threw out my own idea in November of 2015, which was Drivechain. 41:11 And then in 2016, I kind of like fleshed it out more. 41:17 Although the basic design hasn't changed, it's just like added more details and responded to more questions. 41:23 And then it slowly became clear that there was like this weird, there was a problem of belief, as you say, when you asked me about, you know, what's the thing you believe that other people don't. 41:37 There are all these strange beliefs about sidechains that actually would have prevented most of the people who were working at Blockstream at the time from ever even finishing the project of inventing sidechains. 41:54 So I kind of like had to do it myself. 41:56 And I also, with Drivechain, we built like the software that does these two BIPs, BIP300/301, that do the sidechain, that let Bitcoin Core send coins out to other pieces of software and get them back. 42:11 But we also built the sidechain template so that you could see, you know, you have an example of a sidechain. 42:20 And in fact, we've already tweaked that template to be like a kind of, you have like a large block version of Bitcoin and also a Zcash version. 42:32 So we're kind of testing all that right now. 42:35 But yeah, that's part of what I've been working on. 42:38 Hey, Paul, I'm really interested in some of that stuff you just said because I did interview David from MasterCoin recently. 42:44 I interviewed the RSK guys. 42:48 You know, I'm from Toronto, so I obviously know – I interviewed Anthony D'Orio, the founder of Ethereum. 42:52 So I know all these things really well. 42:54 But curious – okay, first of all, RSK, is that not a sidechain? 43:00 Well, yeah, this is the problem is the word has kind of gone crazy. 43:04 But did you see Sergio made a recent post and he said that – see, this is the thing. 43:13 When you get to the details, it's clear that it's aspiring to be a sidechain, but not yet a sidechain. 43:22 Right. 43:23 In Sergio's most recent post about the different two-way peg that he – the new two-way peg he had researched, 43:32 he says that still the long-term goal is to actually make – to put rootstock on Drivechain, 43:37 which is a sidechain secured completely by proof of work and by the mining process. 43:43 So it's still aspirational. 43:46 Do you understand what I'm trying to say? 43:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 43:48 But it's similar to what Blockstream had always said about the federated peg, that that was always supposed to be aspirational. 43:56 That was like, we slap this Band-Aid on, we'll just get this so we can get something going. 44:02 But the goal was always to make it lose its reliance on these third parties, custodians. 44:11 Okay, this is super interesting. 44:12 What is it about – first of all, just so people know because we didn't really do the intro, 44:18 but do you consider yourself like a Bitcoin core developer at one point, or are you, 44:23 or do you consider yourself more like – I guess, yeah. 44:26 I would definitely say like – sorry, I'm pouring myself some water. 44:30 It's all good. 44:31 I would say that I am a Bitcoin maximalist and a Bitcoin core contributor. 44:36 Certainly people have cited a lot of stuff I've written on my blog and passed it around, so for whatever that's worth. 44:45 Some of the other stuff on my blog is ignored and still is ripe for being stolen and passed around years later. 44:53 But I think that – I don't know. 44:57 I've been invited to speak at the scaling conferences. 45:00 I was on the program committee at one point. 45:03 Oh, okay. 45:04 I don't know. 45:05 Dude, so I have your blog open, okay? 45:07 And I was reading through it before our call. 45:09 So I got to ask you a couple of – for some TLDRs here. 45:12 So, okay, first one is – the first one, why proof of stake isn't cheaper and isn't better than proof of work, okay? 45:19 Can you talk to me about this? 45:21 Because, I mean, if you look through my interviews, I mean like three or four of them. 45:24 I'm like trying to figure this out by asking people. 45:27 I'm trying to figure it out myself because, you know, if you see – 45:29 Talk to me, man. 45:30 Talk to me. 45:31 If you check the comment section on – where I wrote the one that got really famous was nothing is cheaper than proof of work. 45:36 That was in 2015. 45:39 And in the comment section, like people show up – Jake Kwan, Vlad Zamfir. 45:42 And I thought that I had convinced them that proof of stake is not cheaper than proof of work. 45:50 Okay. 45:51 Talk to me why it isn't cheaper because, I mean, that sounds super counterintuitive because the narrative is not that. 45:56 I changed the intuition because, okay, each block has a certain block reward. 46:00 So let's just – what you have to do is temporarily, for the sake of argument and simplicity, in fact, 46:05 abstract away from the idea that Bitcoin has 21 million coins and Ethereum has some other thing. 46:10 Just imagine they all have 21 million coins and they're all 50 coins for four years and then it gets halved 46:16 because that's a whole separate thing that has nothing to do with the point that I'm about to make at all. 46:22 But it's confusing. 46:23 It would be misleading to you if you get distracted by that detail. 46:26 Okay. 46:27 I'm with you. 46:28 And by Bitcoin and Ethereum, I really just mean like Bitcoin with proof of work and Bitcoin with proof of stake. 46:33 Maybe that's easier. 46:34 I don't know why. 46:35 You know, because Ethereum people are so crazy about proof of stake. 46:38 So you have – in each case, you have whatever it is, a certain amount of coins coming in every block. 46:47 So right now it's 6.25. 46:50 But let's just say – because it's easier with 50. 46:52 And, you know, let's say there's one Bitcoin worth of fees because there usually is. 46:57 So let's say there's 51 Bitcoin every block. 47:00 This is totally – this has nothing to do with the meat of the argument at all. 47:03 This is just for simplicity. 47:04 Just say every single block has 51 coins going to the miners. 47:08 I'm with you 100% so far. 47:10 You know, these coins, let's make it even simpler and say the exchange rate never changes. 47:15 And it's always – let's just say it's always $10 per Bitcoin, you know. 47:20 Okay. 47:21 I'm with you. 47:22 What a horrible thought. 47:23 Well, it's a science project. 47:24 These are the fixed variables. 47:26 Okay. 47:27 Go ahead. 47:28 Anyone can join $510, right? 47:33 So every block is worth $510. 47:36 And who gets the block? 47:38 Anyone can get it because anyone can join the mining process at any time. 47:42 And even if they can't, anyone could join whatever it was that shortlisted them at some point, you know. 47:48 It's an open process. 47:52 It's not like something where there are only 12 federal board of governors for the Federal Reserve and it's capped at 12. 48:02 You can't get more. 48:03 You can't get 13. 48:05 So the blocks are worth $510 every block, every 10 minutes. 48:11 So what I say in the post is that this is a lot like a guy going up on the stage and auctioning off a briefcase with $510 in it. 48:19 He says, I'm going to sell this to the highest bidder. 48:24 Anyone can bid. 48:26 Here it is. 48:27 It's $510. 48:29 So what do you think it's going to go for at the end of the day? 48:35 It's going to go for like $509, you know. 48:39 We're going to bid. 48:41 No one's going to bid $510. 48:43 Certainly no one's going to bid $520. 48:46 Right? 48:47 I see what you're saying. 48:48 It has nothing to do with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake. 48:50 That's how valuable the blocks are. 48:52 So whatever the system is, people are going to fight over that until they can get the – it's the money coming in that is the problem. 49:02 It's not the structure of proof-of-work, proof-of-stake. 49:07 It's the money coming in. 49:09 The money coming in. 49:10 That's the same in both scenarios. 49:12 So it would be the same as proof-of-stake. 49:14 Proof-of-stake, you have to pledge coins. 49:17 You have to lock up these coins. 49:19 That has a cost. 49:21 That's money that's not spent in the economy or invested in the economy. 49:26 But worse than that, it's misleading because in proof-of-work, this money that's spent on electricity or whatever, on stuff, it's easy for a human being to think about. 49:39 Imagine in their mind a giant waterfall with giant turbines and Bitcoin mining equipment humming really loudly, little lights and things. 49:47 But with Ethereum, it would just be staked. 49:50 And so much more money would be lost. 49:55 Much more money would be staked than burned because it would be like the interest. So if the interest rate is like 5%, you burn $5 in proof-of-work world, you'd lock up $100 in the proof-of-stake world, 20 times as much. 50:06 And in fact, a lot of people aren't using their coins for anything. But far from that being a sign of efficiency, all that means is that even more money would be locked up. 50:18 All that money would be locked up and then some because that's the equivalent of free energy somewhere in the proof-of-work world. So what would happen if there's a giant waterfall with free energy? 50:37 So you said, what would happen if a waterfall had free energy? 50:40 In the proof-of-work world, you just burn all that energy. So it's free, but because it's so cheap, you burn it. So this is equivalent to, in the proof-of-stake world, money that people aren't using for anything. 50:52 Well sure, they'll stake it in proof-of-stake, but this just means more money is staked. So the amount of money that would be staked in the proof-of-stake world would be enormous. It would be an absurd amount of money. 51:04 It would be much more than is spent in proof-of-work. It wouldn't be destroyed, but it would be staked. So whatever you could have used it to invest in something, you would not be able to. 51:16 I see that. I see that point. Is that the main argument? So that those funds could have been used for something else? 51:25 It's not just the staked funds though. I have no idea. It depends on the details of proof-of-stake. It's like if you're offline, you can be slashed. So it's like will people compete on denial of service attacking each other or will they compete on building software or hardware that stops them from being denial of service attacked? 51:43 The real problem is the money coming in. If that much money is coming in, that means you have a big incentive to collect the money and to be the only one collecting that money. You want to kick everyone else off. 51:57 That means you have an incentive to do all this stuff. It's a huge amount of money. Think about how much the numbers actually are in Bitcoin. How much is it? It's like seven or eight Bitcoin, $20,000 a coin. 52:11 It's like hundreds of millions of dollars per week, billions of dollars per year. So that's all yours if you can just knock everyone else on the network off. Or if you can just give yourself a 1% advantage, it's like $100 million. 52:38 So whatever it is, people will be looking for a way, and that is the real reason. But this is just one example that I just want to show that locking up money does have some cost. 52:51 The fact that you can't deploy money in the economy, that is a cost. Probably more so than just some stupid waterfall that you're going to run a little bit more water through the turbines than over the top. 53:07 But I don't know. The point is the role of the economist isn't to actually chart it all out. It's just this equilibrium thing. There's a certain amount of money that's coming in. So that's how much money will be wasted, wasted in quotes. 53:22 See, that's $510 comes in. The auctioneer auctions it off. The person pays $509, $509 wasted. It shouldn't be different in proof of stake. 53:34 Everyone's attempting to convince me that it will be different. I haven't been convinced, hence these posts. So that's why it won't be cheaper. As far as it not being better, there are a lot of problems with proof of stake. 53:49 At a certain point, people have just stopped arguing. I think, though, in a way, the results speak for themselves, though, because proof of stake has been just three months away in Ethereum since 2015. 54:02 In fact, I remember at Certia Roundtable 3, what would that have been? Like 2017, I think. 54:11 We were in a big group. This guy was talking about the greatness of proof of stake and the greatness of Ethereum. He was so convinced, he literally offered to buy me a ticket to fly to Paris in April for this proof of stake unveiling. 54:39 This was in late January. He was so convinced. He was like, and you can watch as we turn on proof of stake. 54:45 He was just brimming with confidence, and I told him, well, I've been hearing this for a long time. I've been hearing this for years. For years, people have said, it's three months away. 54:57 All of those people have been just as confident as you, and don't you realize that? 55:01 He said, yes, I realize that I sound exactly like those other people, but this time it's for real. 55:08 That was April 2017, but still no proof of stake, right? 55:12 I kind of even lost track, to be honest. Ethereum 2.0 was unveiled, right? 55:20 Yeah, but isn't that just a coupon? It doesn't do anything. It's just a coupon for when Ethereum 2.0 comes out, you can claim it. 55:28 Interesting. So they've got nothing to do with proof of stake? They haven't even gotten closer? 55:33 They get closer every time. I don't know. 55:36 What is it fundamentally that why they're not able to solve this problem? 55:40 I don't know. I think they may be making progress towards solving it. I just think the results speak for themselves. 55:45 Is it a worthy problem to solve? 55:47 It's not cheaper. That's my point. The whole point was it was cheaper. 55:50 I'm supposed to avoid this cost, but the cost is not a function of the fact that it's burning energy. 55:57 The cost is a shadow of really what's happening, which is the problem that the blocks are valuable. 56:04 Because they're valuable, people fight over them, and that fighting is the wasted energy. 56:10 And the good idea from Satoshi was to not only make it so that fighting contributed to something, 56:19 which in this case is denial of service prevention. 56:23 When you get a block header, you can check immediately. 56:25 SPV mode also that millions of people use today. 56:29 You can check all the block headers in like half a second. 56:32 This is four megabytes per year. You can check that you're on the highest work chain. 56:36 But when you get a new header, you can check the header instantly. 56:40 Take the hash. The hash has the right number of zeros, the right value. 56:44 You can check immediately. You just check 80 bytes. 56:47 Then you know whether or not the person is a valid peer, if they're a good guy. 56:53 So not only does it do that, but for them to make it cumulative proof of work. 56:58 Now every new link in the chain makes the entire chain more secure. 57:01 That was a good idea. There's no real reason to, you know. 57:05 I think the other thing is people were concerned about the 51% attack, so there was a hope. 57:09 Like back in 2010 or something, if you go ancient Bitcoin talk post-hunting, 57:16 you can find some stuff about proof of stake. 57:19 People thought, oh, this will be great. 57:21 It's immune to the 51% attack and it doesn't waste any electricity. 57:25 Like this is the best idea ever. 57:27 But I think a lot of the stuff about the 51% attack is also just a lack of confidence in Bitcoin. 57:36 And maybe even in like freedom or something or whatever you want to call it as well. 57:39 Because it's designed to be a process to keep everyone in line. 57:44 And the whole 51% attack thing is like solving the wrong problem. 57:51 The 51% attack assumes that you somehow know what's true in advance. 57:56 And you can just, it's only a matter of convincing the other people that your way is the best. 58:02 But the 51, the hash rate thing, the heaviest chain rule, 58:07 that is a method for resolving disputes when like different parts of the world find blocks at different times 58:14 or disagree over what should be in a block. 58:16 Or some people say that block is censoring me and other people say, no, it's not. 58:19 And people say, you know, you suck or whatever. 58:22 So it's a process for like finding the truth. 58:26 Whereas I think a lot of people just think in their mind, they think, well, what if this happened? 58:31 That's not what I want. How can I get everyone to do what I want? 58:34 So it's kind of an anti-liberty thing to even worry about the 51% attack. 58:38 But to some small extent, not to a big extent. 58:42 But this was all the stuff that was driving people towards proof of stake in the past. 58:45 But I think it absolutely is not – if you're smart enough to work on something like this, you should do something else. 58:51 Especially if there's merge mining, you get all of Bitcoin's hash rate for free. 58:58 Hey, one more thing. Why smart contracts are bad for Bitcoin? 59:03 Curious if you can kind of help give the TLDR on that one. 59:11 I apologize. I should have read it before, but I'm definitely going to read it after this. 59:14 But again, my kind of layman's whatever term in terms of what I thought it was, was that – what were the big criticisms? 59:22 One was it was an attack factor potentially. I think it would bloat the block sizes or something. 59:29 I mean, there was a couple of different things that, I don't know, that were said to me back in the day before Ethereum became – 59:36 because I literally talked to Vitalik and he was like, look, we're going to do smart contracts on our own blockchain. 59:41 And Bitcoin core developers will never allow it. And that was kind of their thing, right? 59:48 So I'm curious why you're saying why smart contracts are bad for Bitcoin. 59:52 But then is that eventually getting to the point that something like Drivechain or sidechains should be used? 59:58 Well, it's a question of – yeah, people should be able to try out their own thing. 1:00:03 It's kind of annoying because with Drivechain, it's kind of just like the free market. 1:00:06 And it just says these pieces of software should compete. 1:00:08 And it shouldn't matter my opinion on what should or shouldn't be done. 1:00:13 So you see what I mean? If I were an entrepreneur, I would implicitly have a lot of theories about how a business should be run. 1:00:20 There's no getting around it. 1:00:22 So I say, I think you should open on time. I think you should have a customer service number or whatever. 1:00:29 I think you should sell goods that are really expensive on purpose so that only rich people buy them and it becomes trendy. 1:00:35 You can have all these theories when you start a business. 1:00:38 That's different from saying – but Drivechain is like saying there shouldn't be a monopoly. 1:00:44 It shouldn't just be Bitcoin Core or the desolate wasteland of competing with Bitcoin Core, starting your own altcoin or whatever. 1:00:54 So that's a different thing. It depends. 1:00:58 I think oracles are good, but smart contracts are kind of a sad imitation of oracles. 1:01:08 Oracles are the real smart contracts. That's a really important blog post. 1:01:13 Some smart contracts are set up so that they interfere with other smart contracts. 1:01:20 It's not good for it to be general purpose actually because that eliminates classes of activity that are possible. 1:01:27 So it's kind of like if you had a world where anyone could steal your name or your brand. 1:01:39 Sorry, a little bit of background noise there. 1:01:42 That was me at my side. 1:01:44 Some people are having fun. 1:01:46 Okay, what was I saying? 1:01:49 So imagine that – so in the past, cattle ranchers – the word brand in business, it actually comes from branding. 1:01:58 I don't know if it's cattle or whatever, but it's branding livestock. 1:02:02 It would literally brand them with a literal brand because then they'd go out and graze and then you'd have to get them back. 1:02:09 So you'd let them out into the world where there was some part of it that was uncontrolled. 1:02:16 They'd go up to graze in the pasture and then they'd get them back. 1:02:20 And then you had to make sure that you only took back the ones that were yours. 1:02:24 So there were all these rules about you can't take – someone owns a certain brand, like a certain piece of information. 1:02:30 Because you couldn't steal – you couldn't say, oh, this is my brand. 1:02:34 There had to be some kind of – if there was a dispute, oh, this brand is mine, this one is mine. 1:02:39 So you had to go and register them somewhere. 1:02:42 So in that world, if you couldn't do the brand registration technology, then it would be impossible to have property rights over cattle in that particular way. 1:02:52 Sometimes if there's too much freedom, it only means that complexity isn't possible. 1:03:00 So there's a limit to how much whatever free enterprise you can even have. 1:03:07 I mean one thing that's caught I think a lot of people's attention is have you heard of – what is it called? 1:03:13 Oh my god, Uniswap? 1:03:15 Yes. 1:03:16 Have you heard of these guys? 1:03:17 I don't know about them. 1:03:19 Well, I guess what I'm getting at though is that – so UnoCoin, the company I started in 2013, 2012, were like a centralized exchange. 1:03:30 I'm not going to lie, I've thought really deeply about building a decentralized exchange. 1:03:36 And you know what I mean? 1:03:38 I shared with you before our call about this whole notion of what happened in India. 1:03:42 I won't go into it, but I mean yeah, I think about how can the world function without a centralized entity a lot. 1:03:51 And so Uniswap to me kind of – I mean they're doing more volume than I don't know on some days, more than Coinbase, more than Binance. 1:03:59 So this project like Ethereum that I've been super critical of, many have been critical of in my eyes. 1:04:06 ICOs, yeah, I get it, super scammy, try to stay away from as much of it as possible. 1:04:11 But something like Uniswap where they're just enabling peer-to-peer trades seems like a legitimate kind of cause. 1:04:21 And I guess where I'm going with this is that I know some people have kind of forked it to build it on RSK. 1:04:27 But I wonder, what's kind of held me back is that it would be kind of weird to build a Bitcoin decentralized exchange on top of Ethereum, 1:04:36 given that I'm a Bitcoiner as well and I see all these holes in it. 1:04:40 So how does one address that problem? 1:04:43 I thought this was supposed to be about freedom. 1:04:45 What happened to Bitcoin user not affected? 1:04:47 What happened to just doing whatever you want? 1:04:52 But now you have to conform to this weird culture. 1:04:55 There is a delusion I think that – I mean it is mostly true that the altcoin technology is just terrible and it's not even worth copying and stealing. 1:05:09 But that's not completely true. 1:05:12 I mean, as I was saying, one of the things, MasterCoin and Counterparty, right? 1:05:17 I know both, yeah. 1:05:19 They were total scams, but they were ahead. 1:05:21 That would have been on Bitcoin if there was some kind of parallel future where that could have been healthily integrated into Bitcoin. 1:05:28 That was all on Bitcoin first. 1:05:30 Now, the other thing though is that what are now I guess the non-fungible tokens or whatever you want to call them, the NFTs. 1:05:35 The stuff that's just funny like the Spells of Genesis. 1:05:38 Remember Rare Pepe? 1:05:40 Like all this weird screwball stuff and CryptoKitties on Ethereum. 1:05:47 So people like that kind of stuff. 1:05:51 That's just like digital art. 1:05:53 That's like fun. 1:05:55 That's like a pure internet thing. 1:05:57 That's like you think of like keyboard cap or you think of like whatever, like early YouTube videos. 1:06:02 People are just having fun. 1:06:03 Marquee tags in HTML. 1:06:06 It's just like people having fun on the internet. 1:06:14 So there's all this stuff that was tried. 1:06:17 A lot of it was bad, but some of it is good. 1:06:22 I think increasingly there's just this delusion in Bitcoin that all the other stuff and all the other coins can be ignored. 1:06:31 And there's a lot of great stuff like I like David Vorek's SIA project. 1:06:37 You just type in 12 words and it can regenerate your hard drive. 1:06:41 It's like that storage idea, the bit hard drive idea. 1:06:44 So it's like pay people to store all your files and get them all back from the blockchain. 1:06:51 And then there's like the Zcash stuff. 1:06:54 The Monero Zcash stuff, like other stuff for people who want to mix their coins so that they don't have to just do. 1:06:58 Right now you're like stuck with CoinJoin or like Whirlpool. 1:07:04 You CoinJoin with like five people. 1:07:06 You have to pay a transaction fee every time, layer one transaction fee. 1:07:09 You could be easily sybilled. 1:07:12 You have to pay the Whirlpool fee if you use Samurai. 1:07:18 Whirlpool. 1:07:21 That's great. I mean everyone knows that you're doing it. 1:07:24 Everyone can see it on the blockchain. 1:07:26 That's CoinJoin. 1:07:29 Stuff like what Monero and Zcash are doing is better than that. 1:07:34 People talk about liquidity. 1:07:37 They say not a lot of people are using XYZ so it's worse. 1:07:41 But the technique is either better or worse and then you get all the users. 1:07:46 If it was all smooth, they would get the users and they would get the liquidity problem. 1:07:52 That's a chicken and egg problem. 1:07:54 So there's other great stuff. 1:07:59 Yeah, a lot of the stuff. 1:08:01 I was just talking with my other friend. 1:08:04 I was saying with enough trial and error, Ethereum will eventually create good stuff, unfortunately. 1:08:14 And that's true of anything with trial and error. 1:08:16 And he said there was not enough trial and error. 1:08:18 But eventually what I brought up was that evolution created human beings. 1:08:22 And everything that we built, symphonies and everything, 1:08:25 just from trial and error on some little molecules. 1:08:29 So trial and error is very strong. 1:08:32 And people in Bitcoin, this kind of cult has taken over Bitcoin. 1:08:41 It just says it's preordained for victory. 1:08:43 And whatever it was, Satoshi's design is the absolute best. 1:08:50 And everything else is a corruption of the design. 1:08:52 And that is what prevents people from being interested in Drivechain. 1:08:58 Because Drivechain says, hey, what about you could have a big block sidechain? 1:09:01 And people say, big blocks suck. 1:09:03 How dare you even suggest that? 1:09:05 That's just the unpeople who do that. 1:09:10 But meanwhile, Roger Ver has a nice wallet that's low fees and it's good experience. 1:09:16 So the point of Drivechain is that, similar to prediction markets, 1:09:21 it's kind of a utopian thing. 1:09:23 In my brain, it's like in the Drivechain world, 1:09:27 none of the Bitcoiners hate Vitalik or something. 1:09:34 That's what I'm trying to say. 1:09:36 They're like, well, we have this weird guy, Vitalik, 1:09:38 but he's got this crazy Ethereum project that's kind of cool. 1:09:40 They're all shills for Ethereum, 1:09:42 because Ethereum uses the 21 million Bitcoin coin limit 1:09:44 and there's no second token. 1:09:46 There's no altcoin. 1:09:48 It would never have been invented like that. 1:09:50 You know what I mean? 1:09:52 People would mix their coins on Zcash. 1:09:54 They'd send their Bitcoin to Zcash as a sidechain. 1:09:58 Zcash wouldn't be its own coin. 1:10:00 They'd send it there and they'd mix the coins over there, 1:10:03 where they get super zk-SNARK mixing, 1:10:05 and then send them back. 1:10:07 Unilateral mixing with every single person in the Zcash pool, 1:10:10 with just two transactions, 1:10:12 instead of Whirlpool where you mix with four other people 1:10:16 and you have to do it every time, 1:10:18 over and over again. 1:10:20 There's all this other stuff. 1:10:24 David Vork's thing isn't its own altcoin, 1:10:27 it's with Bitcoin. 1:10:29 All these things are Bitcoin projects, 1:10:31 so everyone is on a team. 1:10:33 Everyone's actually supporting each other. 1:10:35 Everyone's shilling. 1:10:37 Like Pierre Rochard, Dan Held, 1:10:39 they would be shilling Ethereum. 1:10:42 It would be a topsy-turvy world. 1:10:45 And vice versa, 1:10:47 because demand for Ethereum would be going into Bitcoin. 1:10:50 The public right now, I think, 1:10:52 is baffled by crypto. 1:10:55 They're just like, 1:10:57 what is going on? 1:10:59 They don't know what to do. 1:11:01 They're like, I'm going to wait until they figure this out 1:11:03 before I invest. 1:11:04 It's not unified. 1:11:06 There's only one thing to buy. 1:11:08 There's lots of software to try out, 1:11:10 but there's only one unit, 1:11:12 the Bitcoin, 1:11:14 and there's only one lower thing to settle to. 1:11:17 There's one small block to settle to, 1:11:20 and then Roger Ver is using the large block sidechain, 1:11:23 and then no one has a problem with it, 1:11:25 the same way they have this vitriolic hatred of Bitcoin cash. 1:11:29 So the Drivechain world is like a totally different world, 1:11:32 very much like the prediction markets. 1:11:34 I just want to live in my head where everything is great. 1:11:37 Everything is great in here. 1:11:39 Well, 1:11:41 why isn't Drivechain... 1:11:43 Is Drivechain where you want it to be, 1:11:46 or are there still some things that the core developers need to do 1:11:49 to enable the full vision of it? 1:11:52 It is a soft fork, 1:11:54 so it's like SegWit where it has to be activated. 1:11:56 We haven't quite finished it. 1:11:58 I keep tinkering with it, 1:12:00 and I'm kind of lazy about it, 1:12:02 and I'm kind of a perfectionist about it. 1:12:04 It's a free software, 1:12:06 so anyone can download it and check it out. 1:12:08 It's great. 1:12:10 You go to drivechain.info, 1:12:12 and it's right there. 1:12:14 You can find the downloads page. 1:12:16 The link is right at the top. 1:12:18 Is it kind of like a Turing complete environment? 1:12:20 Is it like that? 1:12:22 Well, 1:12:24 Turing completeness is a phrase that has been beaten to death 1:12:26 by this community, 1:12:28 and I don't know if we should continue using it or not, 1:12:30 but you can send the coins to any piece of software. 1:12:33 So just passively, 1:12:35 it is universal. 1:12:37 It can simulate any altcoin, 1:12:39 and so since it can simulate Ethereum, 1:12:42 it has access to Turing complete scripts 1:12:46 or Turing complete anything. 1:12:50 Okay, 1:12:53 and yeah, 1:12:55 so the SegWit comment about how it needs to be soft fork, 1:12:57 so 1:13:00 is that something? 1:13:02 Is there hostility in doing that, 1:13:05 or is it kind of obvious now? 1:13:07 Are people like, 1:13:09 okay, well, 1:13:11 we would need to do this? 1:13:13 I honestly think people are baffled by it. 1:13:15 I think, 1:13:17 well, there's a lot of PTSD from the last soft fork. 1:13:19 You can see even with something like Taproot 1:13:21 that's very, 1:13:23 very popular among the elite developer communities, 1:13:25 it's like the slowest thing possible. 1:13:27 In fact, 1:13:29 I remember it was especially around table five, 1:13:30 I'm all confused, 1:13:32 but I think it was at least, 1:13:34 I think it was maybe at least 20, 1:13:36 it may have been 2018. 1:13:39 I think it was 2019 though. 1:13:41 I'm going to say, well, they said by the summer. 1:13:43 Someone there told me confidently 1:13:45 so by the summer it will be 1:13:47 activated by a bit nine, 1:13:50 but that was, they were wrong about that. 1:13:52 Obviously, we're blown way past summer 2019 1:13:54 and still nothing in sight 1:13:56 and still what people propose is 1:13:58 some of these proposals have an activation 1:14:00 timeline that is like three years long 1:14:02 or something ridiculous. 1:14:04 You've seen some of these, right? 1:14:06 We try a bit nine, 1:14:08 then it stalls 1:14:10 and then it activates by a bit eight 1:14:12 12 months after that. 1:14:14 It's like 2023 1:14:16 we'll have Taproot. 1:14:23 I'm not sure. 1:14:25 Maybe the protocol has become ossified 1:14:27 faster than anyone thought. 1:14:30 But really what I think it is 1:14:32 is just people are baffled by it. 1:14:34 When people do critique it, 1:14:36 it's clear that they have no idea 1:14:38 what it does or how it works, 1:14:40 which is why I've worked very hard 1:14:42 to help make the GUI better. 1:14:46 If you use the testnet software, 1:14:49 it should at least be possible. 1:14:51 Ideally, it'd be, I don't know, 1:14:53 I try to make it ideally in a certain way. 1:14:55 I think it's easier for people 1:14:57 to figure out exactly what's happening. 1:14:57 But that's for them to judge and not me. But certainly when you go and you make a deposit, you see the deposit to the sidechain. 1:15:03 When you make the withdrawal, you see it shows up in a little queue, it shows up in a little thing. 1:15:07 Those little boxes with question marks, you can click on them and then this explanation written by me will show up and explain what is going on. 1:15:19 I try to work on that. I continue to try present tense because that's what I'm working on is making this as a kind of demonstration. 1:15:29 I think then people will be in a better position to look at it. 1:15:39 I plan on making a little video, one of those little videos. 1:15:43 All the videos I currently make were to address expert audience. 1:15:48 Criticisms from Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell, whatever, people like that, Matt Corral or whatever. 1:15:58 That's the intended audience for stuff like that. 1:16:01 It's extremely theoretical and weird. 1:16:06 I have to make just the little bit. 1:16:09 You remember that video that Peter Todd made back in the day, the Keep Bitcoin Free? 1:16:13 It had the dorky little xylophone. 1:16:15 But it was a great video. 1:16:17 I don't think I saw it. You mentioned it. 1:16:20 I did. I saw it. It was an immensely controversial video. 1:16:23 It was a pretty good video. It's short. 1:16:25 Mine won't be as good as that. 1:16:27 But the point is I have to make a video for a more general audience. 1:16:33 Although it's funny, I remember seeing the video. 1:16:35 Because Peter Todd spoke, I think it was 2013. 1:16:39 I think it was in the Javits Center in New York City or something. 1:16:44 And every single person in the room, including me, was just baffled. 1:16:51 Just totally baffled. 1:16:52 Couldn't understand what he was even talking about with this block size debate. 1:16:55 I had no idea what he was talking about. 1:16:57 I don't think anyone had any idea. 1:16:59 This was a long time ago. 1:17:04 How can people help, though? 1:17:07 Like normal people. 1:17:09 Not normal people, but let's say some programmer dude is thinking. 1:17:12 In my case, like I said, I'm not going to lie. 1:17:16 I think a lot about building. 1:17:18 Whether it's P2P platforms. 1:17:22 Giving P2P better versions of local bitcoins. 1:17:26 Things like that. 1:17:28 I think it's like 0.5% of the world right now. 1:17:32 Maybe has bitcoin. 1:17:34 And banking can sometimes be a big challenge. 1:17:37 And so we've seen how that can be obviously devastating. 1:17:41 And so I think a lot about how do you make it so that. 1:17:46 Even in the face of tyranny, we're able to commerce between one another. 1:17:51 I think that is a very noble cause. 1:17:54 But I also don't like the idea of building highly. 1:17:59 Subversive technology on a server that sits in my house or something. 1:18:04 I'd rather think about building stuff like that on something like bitcoin. 1:18:13 But if the bitcoin community isn't welcoming of that. 1:18:17 And I can respect that too. 1:18:19 Because bitcoin wants to do one thing really well. 1:18:23 It always struck me as sidechains and Drivechain. 1:18:27 As a very technologically responsible way of fostering innovation. 1:18:32 And simultaneously preserving the core benefits of bitcoin. 1:18:38 When Drivechain really got going. 1:18:41 It was like 2016. 1:18:42 The block size debate was going crazy. 1:18:44 The price of ethereum was going crazy. 1:18:46 People in bitcoin were depressed. 1:18:49 This is what they called the long sideways or whatever. 1:18:51 From 2014 to 2017. 1:18:58 In particular what was absurd about it was. 1:19:01 Explicitly with all sidechains. 1:19:04 All sidechain designs. 1:19:06 Known to me. 1:19:09 That are not like some secret mandatory hard fork. 1:19:12 This is technical and weird. 1:19:15 Basically with sidechains you don't want the full node to be responsible for the sidechain. 1:19:20 So you have to ignore some stuff over there. 1:19:22 But you can't ignore everything. 1:19:23 Because then it just becomes an altcoin. 1:19:25 The middle ground was this SPV proof concept. 1:19:28 And so the sidechain only has SPV security. 1:19:33 But on it you can do whatever you want. 1:19:36 And it just became absurd. 1:19:38 Because the small block people hated SPV security. 1:19:42 They hated it. 1:19:43 And the large block people loved it. 1:19:46 They were just in love with it. 1:19:47 Every single time you brought up anything on twitter. 1:19:49 They'd say blah blah blah. 1:19:51 The longest chain will never contain that. 1:19:54 Because someone will raise the alarm. 1:19:55 It's super easy to identify. 1:19:57 If a block is bad or if a transaction is bad. 1:20:00 They loved it. 1:20:02 They loved SPV. 1:20:04 So it was the perfect thing. 1:20:06 Because with sidechains. 1:20:08 The large block people could have their own SPV sidechain. 1:20:12 And it would never bother the mainchain at all. 1:20:14 The mainchain could stay a small block. 1:20:16 Do you know much about liquid? 1:20:19 Yes, I do. 1:20:20 Just thoughts. 1:20:21 Isn't that a sidechain? 1:20:23 So isn't it supposed to be or was it? 1:20:26 As I said, it's aspirational. 1:20:28 I have another post on Drivechain. 1:20:30 I can send it to you. 1:20:31 The Drivechain has its own blog. 1:20:32 And it says, is liquid a real sidechain? 1:20:34 Question mark. 1:20:35 Greg Maxwell weighs in. 1:20:36 And that one's short. 1:20:40 But liquid is like a custodial multi-signature wallet that holds BTC. 1:20:47 But it's also this other thing that has a federation of servers that has its own kind of like counterparty like thing. 1:20:56 Now, coins, bitcoins go in and they can come back out. 1:21:03 But when they come out, it's only because X number of people in the multi-signature agree that they can come out. 1:21:11 There's a little bit more to it than that. 1:21:14 But the reason that it's not what was originally envisioned is that it doesn't solve the problem of altcoins. 1:21:21 Can Roger Ver use liquid to create a large block version of Bitcoin Core? 1:21:29 Because he would have done that and send coins there. 1:21:32 And then Bitcoin.com would be shilling that thing. 1:21:36 No, but liquid is custodial. 1:21:39 It's the other thing too. 1:21:40 There's this group of people who own the coins. 1:21:42 And that's a list of names and addresses. 1:21:46 That's no different than the stuff that Bitcoiners used to laugh at. 1:21:52 Like when Dan Larimer and Vitalik, they would do stuff like that. 1:21:57 Well, they'd say, well, you know, like delegated proof of stake was like that. 1:22:00 That was like, well, a couple of people have servers, but it's not a big deal because the servers will only be used if XYZ happens. 1:22:10 That's just a quick hack that they threw together because they thought they would later do the real sidechain. 1:22:18 Or what Greg Maxwell says, the true two-way peg. 1:22:22 So there's a video. 1:22:24 He clearly refers to the true two-way peg in contrast to liquid. 1:22:30 Liquid is only this temporary sort of stopgap. 1:22:35 And you can see why. 1:22:37 How can I use liquid to make turn complete? 1:22:42 How can I use it to make Z address transactions like with ZK-SNARKs from Zcash? 1:22:47 How can I use it to do the prediction market thing that I want to do? 1:22:50 If I could, I would have just done that. 1:22:52 I wouldn't have needed to do it with Drivechain. 1:22:54 The only reason I bothered with Drivechain in the first place was because I was working on this prediction markets idea. 1:22:59 If I could use liquid for that, I would have done that. 1:23:02 Because you know that you can't use liquid for these other things. 1:23:07 And when you put it into liquid, it is owned by those other people. 1:23:11 It's no different than if you had Mt. Gox. 1:23:13 And Mt. Gox had a server that was secured with multiple SSH keys or something. 1:23:19 Hey Paul, have you looked at Solana at all? 1:23:21 I'm just curious if you've heard about these guys. 1:23:22 Yeah, but I can't quite remember it. 1:23:24 You have to refresh my memory. 1:23:25 I have looked at it. 1:23:27 They're out of, what's that chip, Qualcomm. 1:23:30 It's like, I don't know, a whole bunch of guys out of Qualcomm. 1:23:33 It's like proof of history, proof of, I don't even know. 1:23:37 But I have a question. 1:23:38 So given that problem statement that I was mentioning earlier is building decentralized applications, 1:23:44 let's say within the exchange space, whether it be fiat to crypto, whether it be crypto to crypto. 1:23:48 If someone were to embark on that today, what would be their path or optimal path towards building something? 1:23:58 You know what I mean? 1:23:59 Is it Ethereum then at the end of the day, just because of all these facts? 1:24:05 Yeah, I empathize with it. 1:24:07 I mean it's annoying because there has been, in the drive to safeguard Bitcoin Core from this corruption, 1:24:17 there has been a lot of suppression of creativity, you know. 1:24:20 So if you want to just try something that's considered fun on Ethereum but it's considered like a nasty attack in Bitcoin, 1:24:32 you're not supposed to try until you, you know, you're supposed to be an apprentice for seven years at Chaincode 1:24:39 and you're supposed to whip yourself and be a monk for 40 years. 1:24:44 And then only after meditating on the code and reciting Satoshi's white paper backwards at the full moon 1:24:50 can you like open a pull request that's not for like a unit test or something. 1:24:55 But so it's hard if you want to do something. 1:25:01 You know, one weird thing that I wanted to do in my head that I think is great that people should do is, 1:25:07 I might even try to do it myself or something. 1:25:10 I think there should be something in the GUI, the Bitcoin GUI for HTLCs 1:25:15 because you could do the coin swap thing just by yourself in the software. 1:25:22 You just need to make a little thing that says I send Bitcoin to this, it's locked to this hash 1:25:27 or it comes back to me after a certain amount of time. 1:25:31 And if you just built that, then all you need to do is have someone else, 1:25:35 Ethereum Litecoin, just kind of like copy it and put it into their GUI. 1:25:39 And then people could just meet like on Reddit or whatever, anywhere, IRC, whatever it is, 1:25:45 wherever it is people meet. 1:25:47 And they could just say I'll trade you five Litecoin for whatever, a tenth of a Bitcoin. 1:25:56 And then you could just do it in the software and you'd have a cool little GUI 1:26:00 and you'd lock it to the same hash. 1:26:02 So one person would go first and the other person would go second 1:26:06 and then you could just complete the trade. 1:26:09 You have basically shapeshift or sideshift or a lot of what maybe Coinbase does. 1:26:16 I have no idea the figures, but the point is you could do it on your own. 1:26:21 And then maybe that would be something you would go, Jeffrey Britt or whatever would say to Congress. 1:26:29 They'd say, okay, they already do this. 1:26:31 There's nothing, so that's why you have to allow shapeshift or whatever. 1:26:37 You know what I mean? 1:26:38 And then from there it's actually pretty close because if you have something like Tether, 1:26:42 and I'm very skeptical of Tether. 1:26:44 The whole time I've been wondering when is the Tether thing going to come to some kind of bad end. 1:26:49 But so far to them, they've done okay. 1:26:53 But the point is if you just have something like Tether. 1:26:56 Tether is Counterparty, right? 1:26:58 I think they've literally moved it onto everything. 1:27:02 It was on Counterparty via MasterCoin or something. 1:27:08 I think it was MasterCoin Protocol and then it's on Ethereum. 1:27:13 It's even on Bitcoin Cash, so it's kind of moved around, which is probably smart. 1:27:18 But it's on all those things at once. 1:27:20 And the issue is if something like that exists, or even if it's like Amazon gift cards or something, 1:27:29 just something that's cash-like, if you could just HTLC with that somehow. 1:27:36 If somehow you could get that to do HTLC, then you have the decentralized exchange. 1:27:40 And that's it. It's just another little tab in Bitcoin Core or in Electrum or whatever, 1:27:45 your own wallet that you make. 1:27:47 You're talking about a crypto-to-crypto still? 1:27:49 Or are you talking about the local Bitcoins? 1:27:52 For Tether, it would still be crypto-to-crypto if Tether was considered a crypto. 1:27:57 Right, right. I know what you mean. 1:27:59 But then, you see, it's just specialization. 1:28:01 So that's all from the comfort of your own home, possibly behind VPN or Tor or whatever. 1:28:10 That's great. And then all you need is that last link of converting US dollars to Tether. 1:28:18 And back. But some specialists could do that. 1:28:21 You see, if you would need it, as long as it were possible, you wouldn't necessarily need to do it. 1:28:29 You would just say, I'm going to keep this in Tether because it works for me. 1:28:33 And then only a specialist would have to actually swap them back and forth. 1:28:36 But I was saying with the Amazon gift cards, maybe you could make it even further. 1:28:41 We kind of just riffed on all these super, I'd say relevant, interesting, crazy ideas. 1:28:46 But we didn't really, I mean, we're kind of at the end of our time. 1:28:49 We didn't really cover any of your story. 1:28:53 But we did cover your projects a little bit. 1:28:55 I was going to say, dude, if you're down, I really enjoyed this conversation. 1:28:58 I'm not going to lie. It did make my brain hurt a little bit. 1:29:02 Just because you made me think. 1:29:03 Like, you know, if you had like a little processing meter on my brain, it was like it was at 90. 1:29:08 It was like red the whole time. 1:29:10 Normally, I'm a lot more like just like, OK, I got this because I got a formula. 1:29:13 But you took me out of that. It's all good. 1:29:15 I like that. I like that. 1:29:16 OK, so, dude, I was going to say, I'm down to do a follow up, you know, 1:29:20 and do more of a deep dive on your story, if you're even interested. 1:29:23 Yeah, sure. 1:29:24 I'm also down to do, you know, like a private meeting as well, 1:29:27 because I'd love to chat with you further about some of these ideas. 1:29:30 But where do people find out about you, you know, the great work you've been doing? 1:29:35 And like, is there like, is it Twitter? Is it like a, is there a website that you? 1:29:38 Yeah, I'm on Twitter. I'm Truthcoin on Twitter. T-R-U-T-H-C-O-I-N. 1:29:41 This is, my name is very difficult to spell. 1:29:43 But I think if you want to learn the sites, all the websites link to each other. 1:29:47 So I have Truthcoin.info is my blog, BitcoinHiveMind.com. 1:29:51 And Truthcoin is your ICO, right? 1:29:54 Yeah, it's just a blog. 1:29:57 It's a blog. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. 1:29:59 UnoCoin, we get that all the time, so it's OK. 1:30:01 And drivechain.info. 1:30:03 drivechain.info. OK, awesome. 1:30:05 They all link to each other, so you can find them. 1:30:07 Sweet. And then on Twitter, you're at Truthcoin, right? 1:30:11 That's right. 1:30:12 OK, OK, OK. Awesome, man. 1:30:15 Well, I know, like I said, yeah, if you want, we can do another follow-up some other time. 1:30:20 With that said, any last words, or should we bring this one to an end? 1:30:24 No, no last words for me. 1:30:26 No last words? 1:30:27 Only first words. 1:30:28 Wise words of wisdom? No? 1:30:30 All right, Paul, I think you've already hit us up with enough of those. 1:30:33 I'm going to kill this.