0:01 Okay, now what you should know is that when I play the video, you're going to be muted. 0:06 Okay, let's do it. 0:08 And the moment when you start talking, I'm going to pause the video so you can comment, okay? 0:14 Okay. 0:18 The next on the name, I've got John Carvalho to welcome to the stage. 0:22 You guys know who John is as well, so please round of applause for John. 0:26 Sergay is next up. 0:27 Sergay, please, would you take your seat at the panel? 0:31 And last but by no means least, my fellow countryman, Ben Ark, ladies and gentlemen. 0:36 Thank you. 0:39 Did we set the time? 0:51 Hello, hello. 0:52 Hi, gentlemen. 0:53 Hi, gentlemen. 0:54 Hello. 0:55 Thank you for joining me this afternoon. 0:57 I was just told the topic is controversial opinions. 1:02 Unpopular. 1:03 Unpopular opinions. 1:04 So, where should we begin? 1:09 May I suggest something? 1:10 Please. 1:11 Last year, there was Paul Sztorc here, and so one of us will rage quit Bitcoin before a year. 1:17 So, I think we should understand who, actually. 1:21 Okay, Paul. 1:22 So, you're going to rage quit Bitcoin by the end of the year. 1:25 That's the prediction. 1:26 Because I didn't go to Baltic Honey Badger, because I had to go to TapConf instead. 1:30 No. 1:31 I thought they were on the same day. 1:32 Because you're going to… 1:33 Yeah, but that's exactly what he said. 1:35 He said he's not here, so therefore he's going to rage quit. 1:37 Yeah. 1:38 I mean… 1:39 Because I didn't know that. 1:40 What I didn't know is that Baltic Honey Badger is always the first weekend. 1:45 I never kind of put this in my head. 1:48 I never kind of put this together. 1:50 It's always the first weekend in September or something. 1:53 Anyway, let's continue watching. 1:55 Musical chairs game. 1:57 Somebody will rage quit here. 1:59 Musical chairs. 2:01 Is ordinals and inscriptions a dangerous place to start in an unpopular opinion panel? 2:06 They're dead already, right? 2:08 Now we hate Drivechains. 2:12 Drivechains to start. 2:15 Okay, who would like to take that? 2:17 I would love to hear your unpopular opinion about Drivechains. 2:21 Drivechains are shit coins. 2:27 But that's popular, John. 2:33 Do you want to comment on this? 2:35 Well, I mean, like, I don't know. 2:37 I know how big that room is. 2:40 So, you got one guy to clap? 2:43 It's not about the claps. 2:44 It's about what he, what John Carvalho said that Drivechains. 2:48 Yeah, but I mean, John Carvalho has this belief that the peg won't hold, which is based on his inability to, like, he, there's an analogy of like an ATM. 3:00 So the ATM will always give you, if you put $20 in, it will give you $20 credit to your checking account. 3:10 Or it will take $20 out and give you a $20 bill. 3:13 Now sometimes it might charge fees and, you know, there's usually the way it works is like there's a network of ATMs that you're, that don't charge you fees. 3:22 But if you go outside or if you have to use the one in a foreign country or something, it charges you more. 3:28 And then what I also stress is that most people will not use the ATM. 3:33 They will not use the BIP300 rail because it is slow and it is designed not to be used for laypeople. 3:41 It is a special thing that is supposed to be used by whoever is willing to be patient for three months, which is not going to be the end user. 3:52 And so what I'm saying is you could be out, you go out into the, you know, you go to a, you're going to concert or something, you go to whatever, you're going to Taylor Swift's concert. 4:00 And you get some cash out of the ATM and then you, someone, you meet someone in the audience who says, oh, I don't kind of, I don't have any cash. 4:10 I'll Venmo you, but I need, I want some cash. 4:14 And you may not, you may not charge them, you know, you might give it to them at an even thing, but you also might charge them. 4:21 You might say, listen, I'll give you $60 worth of cash, but I want $61. 4:28 Venmo or whatever, but that's a good thing. 4:30 All that just makes it so that everyone can get different, can do the conversions at different. 4:37 They can do the conversions at different speeds and with whoever they want on their own terms. 4:44 I don't think, I think Jankov is unwittingly contributing to the misunderstanding of what, you know, like the shit coins on Bitcoin thing by saying this, but I, but this is what he said on Twitter. 4:56 I think John also, like, it's like most of his career, similar to Peter Todd, where it's like the career is based around being contrarian and you get attention that way. 5:05 And you get, you know, Peter Todd gets flown around the world and people put him up in different hotels and stuff. 5:10 And I don't think, but it's like, he's on this thing and you see them sort of both laughing about this, but it's like, they, this is like before Peter Todd's tweet saying that he may not actually understand the idea fully. 5:24 So this is like pre him admitting that, and yet this whole time I paid him months ago to write this, to write this explanation of what is wrong with the idea. 5:37 And he's still, to this day, has not done that. 5:42 So. 5:43 I do that. 5:44 You paid him to discredit himself because you knew he would not come. 5:48 Okay. 5:49 I'm being conspirational. 5:51 Yeah. 5:52 Well, I mean, I think it's, well, what does it say? 5:54 If you, if someone says they believe something and I say, okay, why don't you write down what you believe? 6:01 And he says, I'm busy. 6:02 And then he picked that the number he charged us. 6:06 We didn't fight it at all. 6:08 Okay. 6:09 He said, I will write it if you pay me this amount. 6:12 And we said, okay, we'll pay you half now. 6:14 And then half after you finish. 6:15 There's a completely standard terms for that kind of thing. 6:19 But I mean, yeah, I mean, Drivechain, they're not, you know that they are not though, right, Vlad? 6:24 Right. 6:25 We don't need to explain why. 6:26 Do we need, do you think we should explain for the audience? 6:29 Of course. 6:30 Why they're not? 6:31 Why are Drivechains not shit coins? 6:33 But you know, will you explain it or no? 6:38 I can explain it. 6:39 Yes, I think you should. 6:40 Basically the mantra or the motto of the whole movement of peg sidechains is to have the features of shit coins without the shit coin itself and have Bitcoin that's being locked on the base layer and this being issued on the second layer or the sidechain, call it whatever. 6:56 And you're going to have that amount of liquidity being used on every sidechain. 7:02 So you don't really have shit coins. 7:04 You have Bitcoin, which is being used on a different layer, just like LBTC. 7:09 Exactly. 7:10 It's non-liquid. 7:12 And I guess it's unfair to compare it to Lightning. 7:15 I think it's exactly fair. 7:16 I think it's exactly the same. 7:18 You lock, you spend, you have the funding transaction on L1, which is the 202 multisignature output, and then it shows up in the L2. 7:28 It shows up in the Lightning network. 7:30 It's exactly the same. 7:32 But I guess there's also the uncertainty and the assumption that people are going to be using these sidechains to issue their own shit coins. 7:40 You can already do that on Lightning also. 7:43 So again, it's exactly the same. 7:45 That's what Tero is and what RGB is. 7:48 But in the lack of a block space limitation, because these sidechains might have a larger block size, faster block times, and whatever, you can open the floodgates for a lot of spam. 7:59 But I guess it's all fair as long as they pay fees and the miners… 8:03 Yeah, L2 also. 8:05 Open timestamps also could have an unlimited amount of spam. 8:09 Peter Todd's project. 8:11 But L1 doesn't see it. 8:13 So that's why we have to stay laser focused on cost of running an L1 node, and everything else does not matter. 8:22 Okay, Paul. 8:23 New rule with the video. 8:24 So far, I stopped it twice, and it was my own initiative. 8:27 From now on, I'm going to let it play, and you tell me when to stop. 8:31 Okay, fine. 8:35 Now with Paul. 8:38 Drivechains, the whole point of them is to not be shit coins. 8:41 Although if they become a shit coin, then that's probably because they failed. 8:45 Can we define Drivechain for the audience members that may not know what that is? 8:49 Well, they are paying me to go write a blog post on this, which may be a little delayed. 8:53 But the definition basically is that you go and have two BIPs, BIP300/301. 9:01 BIP300 says that you go have a special type of transaction output, which miners can vote to decide where the money goes. 9:08 Obviously, you'd want to go put your money into that. 9:10 And then the second BIP, BIP301, says that you have some kind of way of what basically is like voting on the blockchain by paying this special type of output to be spent. 9:25 And that special type of output basically creates a thing that can only be done once per block. 9:30 So that if you or I try to do the same bid, but in different ways, only one of us is going to wind up paying. 9:39 And then as for the Drivechain thing, just fill in the details. It's really easy. 9:45 I think I partially understood that. 9:47 Yeah, it's a hard block to write. 9:48 So it's a shit coin. 9:49 So it isn't a flushed out idea. No one's written source code that actually does the whole thing. 9:54 Gotcha. Giacomo, you always have colorful opinions. 9:58 Well, I... 10:00 Okay, you raised your hand. 10:02 Yeah, you were muted. You have muted me, so... 10:05 No, it's what Jitsi does. 10:08 Okay, so I'll raise the hand then next time, because I clicked that button. 10:12 Okay, so yeah. 10:17 So Peter's description was not that accurate, but it was okay. 10:21 Miners don't literally vote. 10:24 There's an SPV proof. 10:25 So it's literally exactly like confirmations. 10:28 So it's the same way that whether or not you are in the longest chain and whether or not your transaction gets confirmed. 10:36 The same sense that that is a vote is the sense in which bid 300 is a vote, miners vote. 10:44 It's only the work. 10:45 It's only the 13,000 confirmations that gates whether or not the transaction goes through or not. 10:49 And this is, of course, slightly more different than that. 10:51 I think it was interesting that, again, he did that joke, and you didn't really hear anyone laugh, 10:56 because people were genuinely very interested in what a Drivechain is, 10:59 and they think it's probably more to it than something where miners just have all the coins, which, of course, there is. 11:11 So we could get into that, but I don't know how long. 11:13 How long? About how long is this? 11:17 32 minutes, and we are only three minutes in. 11:21 But, yeah, I think he was describing the details, but he didn't explain what the point of it is, 11:26 which is that you have freedom to go to a different piece of software. 11:33 So it's developers compete, and the end user wins. 11:38 But that was okay. 11:40 I mean, he didn't understand 301 really that much. 11:43 There is a bid and stuff. 11:44 But I think this is a kind of funny video that people will play in the future. 11:56 I'd love to hear more. 11:58 This is Breedlove, right, and he's moderating, and I'd love to know if he got something out of that explanation. 12:08 No, it's funny, because Breedlove wanted to start with ordinal inscriptions, 12:12 and he was cut short, and then he was out of his depth, and he was like, 12:15 so what's a Drivechain? Can anyone explain that? 12:18 I think he seemed genuinely curious, which I think is the most we can ask of anyone who doesn't already know something. 12:28 You want me to keep playing? 12:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 12:32 You're going to be muted, but you know what to do. 12:35 I agree with people. 12:36 The original purpose was not to create shitcoins. 12:40 So, the original idea was many shitcoins are created because people are trying to experiment with new ideas, 12:46 new architecture, new trade-offs between privacy, scalability, and decentralization. 12:50 So, we want to experiment. 12:52 Unfortunately, changing Bitcoin is hard, so we are forced to print money. 12:56 We would like not to, but we are forced because we want to experiment with technology. 13:01 So, the idea of the sidechains by blockchain people originally was, actually, 13:06 you don't need to print money in order to experiment. 13:09 You can create another infrastructure that will just reuse the same money. 13:13 So, we can basically go to peg Bitcoin to this other system and then back. 13:21 So, you can bootstrap new technology without bootstrapping new money. 13:26 The problem is that there is no way to go back. 13:28 You can easily go one way. 13:30 Like, for example, you burn one Bitcoin and you get a sidecoin. 13:33 That's one way. 13:34 But how do you go back? 13:36 The point is that the actual Bitcoin system is not aware of the side system. 13:41 And if it was, that would be very bad because in that case, 13:45 everything bad that happens to the side system will directly influence Bitcoin consensus. 13:49 So, the idea of the original sidechain idea was, 13:53 miners, we already trust them for canonical ordering, 13:56 so we may as well just trust them also for going back. 14:01 So, we put this coin in a, let's say, no, code is not really enough. 14:06 We put them in a kind of output that miners, in a majority, 14:10 over time, can vote to unlock to a certain direction. 14:14 The problem is that miners are under no obligation to follow any kind of logic like this. 14:21 Like, for example, miners hold mine invalid transaction. 14:26 Okay, go. 14:27 Okay, that was pretty good. 14:31 At the beginning, he was a little misleading there when he said, 14:33 the original plan was not shitcoins on Bitcoin because it kind of made it seem like I had changed it 14:38 to a new plan that was shitcoins. 14:40 I think I'm just following the original plan. 14:43 It's interesting that he remembers there was a time when it was not an opcode, 14:49 and it was instead something else. 14:51 It was like an opcode-like thing that was, this was many years ago. 14:56 He went on Twitter, and then he was criticized by people because in the BIP there was no opcode. 15:01 So, people said, yo, you haven't even read this BIP. 15:05 Now, in a somewhat ironic way, he changed it since back to a BIP, to an opcode, 15:15 and now he kind of wanted to avoid saying that there, which is kind of funny to me. 15:21 Only funny to me. 15:22 But now he's getting into the meat of it. 15:25 He did a very good job of explaining mostly what the idea was, 15:29 but he's saying the miners have no reason at all to process the withdrawals honorably, 15:34 but that's not true. 15:36 They get the fees of the sidechain, and they get the value add of having a coin that can do everything 15:46 versus a coin that can do nothing. 15:48 And every coin that is sent, you have to be enticed. 15:52 It's kind of like a hotel. 15:54 The hotel manager can maybe do anything. 15:57 They could have you thrown out. 15:59 Security could throw you out. 16:01 Or they could call the police and have you thrown off. 16:06 So, the hotel manager is in charge of the hotel, but they have to entice you to come. 16:10 They have to say, come to this hotel. 16:12 And the user would say, really? 16:14 I like it at my own house. 16:15 Or they have to entice you to come to your restaurant. 16:19 They could poison the food or whatever, but they want customers. 16:24 So, they fight to attract people, and they're under no literal obligation, 16:32 but the whole scheme is set up so that it's all automated if it works perfectly. 16:37 But if something goes wrong, then it will be a nightmare for everyone involved. 16:43 I'm sure he's going to explain now why it is that he thinks the miners will miswithdraw the coins. 16:50 But even so, this is going to miss the point because it's the end user's decision 16:55 what security model they want to choose. 16:59 They choose for themselves and for their own money. 17:03 And I have a separate argument that I think, actually, 17:05 the Lightning Network is more vulnerable to miner theft. 17:08 This is just having the miners basically co-sign something that the sidechain software writes, 17:13 which is this one hash, in return for huge amounts of money. 17:17 So, they have to do basically nothing. 17:18 But let's hear what he has to say. 17:22 But we will just invalidate it, so they will lose money. 17:24 If they vote to just move money around a different way, we cannot invalidate that 17:29 because we are not even supposed to run the consensus of this other chain. 17:33 So, Blockstream partially abandoned this initial idea of miner-based stuff 17:38 and they moved to a fixed federation liquid. 17:41 And Postdoc took the idea and said, 17:44 since we are trusting miners already, let's just simplify it and trust them completely. 17:48 And I think that the original reason was not to have shitcoins. 17:52 But then they had to do heavy marketing. 17:55 And so now the new narrative is you have token. 17:59 So, I think the most shitcoinist thing of dry chains is the style. 18:03 They are using full-blown shitcoin style to promote something that is supposed to be avoiding shitcoin. 18:09 And if the soft fork will be attempted and fail, it will actually create a shitcoin. 18:14 So, it may be. 18:15 So, the Drivechain system is effectively a peg to Bitcoin, it sounds like. 18:20 It's meant to be, yes. 18:23 You raised your hand once. 18:24 Yes. 18:25 Well, I don't really know what to make of any of that. 18:27 Like, the marketing is in the style of an altcoin. 18:34 I don't really understand what that means. 18:36 He also implied that you have a token or something. 18:39 Yeah, I don't know what that means either. 18:44 Are you trying to sell the Drivechain token? 18:46 I don't know what that even is referring to. 18:49 There is no Drivechain token. 18:54 Do you want me to rewind that so we can listen to it? 18:56 If you think about it, like, what would it even... 18:58 So, yeah, I don't know. 19:00 I don't know this about the... 19:02 He's still saying, like, the original idea versus the new idea. 19:06 There is no such thing. 19:13 So, I don't know. 19:15 But let alone multiple. 19:16 Like, that seems to be what he's saying. 19:18 I don't know. 19:19 Maybe he's referring to Bitcoin Hivemind or something. 19:21 But again, that has nothing to do with... 19:25 That's a completely different thing. 19:28 That would already... 19:29 Even if it was... 19:30 Like, that's a completely different thing. 19:32 And that's required for the peer-to-peer oracle to work. 19:35 That's basically like staking a variable amount of coins. 19:40 But that's... 19:41 I don't even know. 19:42 I'm not sure who's listening at this point. 19:44 And if you are, you're kind of a hero. 19:46 Because it's been two and a half hours. 19:49 And we're not even done yet. 19:50 But Paul mentioned Hivemind. 19:53 And I guess that's your prediction market sidechain? 19:58 Yes. 20:02 That's all? 20:03 Yeah, but that's not like a token that is like... 20:10 Like, even if that project didn't exist, we would still be of crucial value for Bitcoin to do sidechains in order to survive. 20:18 In order to have privacy, scalability, etc. 20:22 So yeah, I don't know. 20:24 I don't even know what he's talking about. 20:28 Okay. 20:29 Well, let's go on. 20:31 And this came up in a recent conversation I had with the Twilight of Gold series, actually. 20:36 Luke Groman, he stated it as an economic law that all pegs break. 20:42 And if everything is falling in price against Bitcoin over the long run, isn't it inevitable that it would break? 20:47 Crypto doesn't necessarily mean that all pegs... 20:49 Like, you could hypothetically design things in crypto that are not breakable. 20:53 But the big problem is with Drivechains is... 20:56 So, you know, a close analogy is actually like SegWit. 20:59 When SegWit was introduced, SegWit meant that you'd have a whole bunch of coins with what, according to the previous rule, where anyone can spend outputs. 21:07 Well, why wasn't that previously insecure? 21:10 You know, why couldn't miners renege on that? 21:12 Well, because the entire world said, hey, we like these sacred rules. 21:15 We're going to run nodes that validate those rules. 21:18 Under that circumstance, where we're all validating these rules, SegWit's totally secure. 21:23 Because from the point of view of all the people in this room who run nodes, which I'm hoping is everyone, 21:29 they're not going to allow transactions that steal those coins. 21:33 Drivechain skips that part and says, hey, we can just have new rules, but we don't actually need to enforce them. 21:38 Like, you know, if miners go steal the money, I guess maybe everyone will go stop it or something like that. 21:44 But, you know, when you have like 200 Drivechains, that's a total mess when you start having thefts happen and people are, you know, advocating on Twitter. 21:52 No, we got to go run the UASF to go prevent, you know, this $100 million theft of Drivechain number 106 that no one really cares about. 22:02 Go on, Paul. 22:03 Well, I don't know. Like, I think Peter Todd should know better than to say some of those things. 22:08 So I don't know how to do them, but I think I'll try in order. 22:10 So SegWit, the new rules, they don't have to be enforced by the entire world and everyone in this room. 22:16 It's only enough, you know, enough of the people would be doing it so that breaking the rules would be too difficult from like a coordination point of view, game theory point of view. 22:28 You just have some people who are going to enforce SegWit rules. 22:30 So it has to be all the minors plus a critical mass of users, which can be very, very small. 22:35 It can be very small in the same way that if you have like Thanksgiving, well, maybe I shouldn't do analogies because people don't like them. 22:40 But like Thanksgiving dinner, like someone says, oh, let's have it here. 22:43 Everyone wants to be in the same network. 22:44 So it can be a small intransigent minority. 22:47 It doesn't have to be in the entire world. 22:51 Like we're all running the SegWit. 22:53 That's not the case. 22:54 But then at the end, it's very strange for him not to say that there is no, there is nothing to the BIP300 rules, because of course there is. 23:04 That's the counting the 13,000 part is there. 23:09 And that's the whole point. 23:10 If we didn't, if we didn't need to do that, then there would be no BIP300 and there'd be no conversation. 23:16 And then we would already have Drivechains. 23:18 They would be fully trusting minor because what BIP300 does is it puts the minors on a short leash for the deposits and withdrawals. 23:26 So if we did, we already have, we would already have Drivechains. 23:34 There'd be no BIP300 and there'd be no need for one. 23:37 He should know better than to say a lot of that was okay. 23:41 I mean, notice that he did say that the peg, he completely ignored what John Carvalho said about the peg not holding. 23:46 So he's clearly just disagrees with John Carvalho, but he knows that he's on the anti-Drivechain team. 23:54 So he doesn't want to like bring it up. 23:56 He's a member of Breedlove asked about it specifically. 23:59 And he said like, well, forget about what John said and listen to what I have to say. 24:04 But what he said was flatly incorrect in my opinion. 24:09 But now we're going to hear more about him saying that we're completely trusting the minors and there is no, there is nothing gating the withdrawals, which is false. 24:23 There's also someone in the chat. 24:26 His name is Sanisdoker or something. 24:29 Sanisdoker. 24:31 And he says he was referring to the root stock Drivechains token called RBTC. 24:36 It's technically a one-to-one peg, but I suppose it could de-peg. 24:43 That's what he had to add. 24:48 Like, I don't know what that means though. 24:51 Isn't that just Bitcoin on root stock? 24:53 So how is that a token? 24:56 You can't like sell that to other people and like use that to raise money. 25:00 Yeah. Anyway, let's keep watching this. 25:08 I mean, it's just created a gigantic mess for a system that really should be pretty boring. 25:14 I think the scary part is of the whole Drivechain debate is kind of reminded a lot of us how 25:22 miners can sneak stuff in. And the mining itself probably needs to be a bit more decentralized, 25:27 which is a good thing that they shed light on that. And then projects like Stratum V2, 25:31 which was Matt Crello's first initial criticism of Drivechains. And I think that's healthy and 25:36 good that that debate was had and it sheds light on that as an issue. Maybe to add a little more 25:43 nuance to my, you know, Drivechains or shit coins comment and with some context from what 25:47 your answers were. You raised your hand. Yeah, I know. I just want to say that whatever, like 25:53 everyone, Stratum V2 is just, you know, I'm happy to support Stratum V2. I think it doesn't even go 26:01 far enough, but I also think it's irrelevant. So it's irrelevant, but this is the thing that this 26:06 is what everyone's going to say. They're going to say after they realize how good this idea is, 26:10 they're going to be like, well, it needs Stratum V2 because everyone, you know, success has many 26:15 fathers, you may have heard. So they don't want to be like, okay, without me doing Stratum V2, 26:20 we would never have had safe Drivechains. I can explain that if you want, but we should 26:24 probably just keep going. I'm a bit confused because the intentions of Stratum V2 is to empower 26:30 every individual miner to vote and opt out from being co-opted into something that they don't like. 26:39 They already are, though. They absolutely are already. 26:44 How easy is it to switch mining pools? It's a drop of a hat. It costs nothing. 26:50 But you also had that case from, which mining pool was it? F2 pool? 26:56 F2 pool, yes, sure. 26:57 The one that collected a very large fee. 27:00 20 Bitcoin. 27:01 Exactly. And the owners of the pool decided to return it without any input from the actual 27:08 workers. 27:09 Yes. Well, the owners of the pool should do whatever is in the best interest of their 27:18 members. They have no choice in the long run. But it's not necessarily clear that 27:26 it's hard to say what is in the best interest because 27:28 maybe, you don't know. It's hard to say. Maybe to behave in a dishonorable way would discredit the 27:35 pool in some other way. And so, it's the pool administrator's task to keep their customers. 27:45 And if they do that, it's their decision to make. It's their call. They do this 24-7, 365, 27:55 and they know they have a relationship with their members and clients, and they know the industry. 28:02 And if they made the wrong decision, then F2 pool will be destroyed soon because everyone will 28:09 leave. But if they made the right decision, then it will grow or whatever. So, that's just the 28:17 reality. It's like, to keep it couldn't be seen as dishonorable. And that could make it seem like 28:24 the pool is not acting in Bitcoin's best interest because it's clearly a mistake. And we want people 28:32 to have a positive experience when they use Bitcoin. So, in the grand scheme of things, 28:40 it could have reduced the net worth of the mining machines. It's theoretically possible. 28:46 But keeping it would have been not in the best financial interest. But in any way, 28:50 it's their call to make, and they suffer the consequences if they make a mistake or if they 28:54 do the right thing. Okay, should we continue? I don't see how Stratum v2 would have helped at 29:02 all. It would have been too late by the time. Stratum v2 helps with job selection, 29:07 maybe. Like, if you still have the 100 block maturity, 29:20 I would be interested to know if someone could write down an example with like a technical 29:24 example of how Stratum v2 would have changed that at all. I'd be very interested to read that. 29:31 What's the Stratum v2 do that just being able to leave the pool doesn't do? 29:37 Okay, let's continue. This is going to take about 100 hours at this rate. 29:43 Like, to break it down into like more abstract primitives, stability is not a quality of a thing, 29:49 it's a service. And so you can't, there's no atomic way to peg. And so when you have two 29:54 separate networks, like as Jaco mentioned, that are not aware of each other and shouldn't be aware 29:58 of each other, although I think Drivechain is not completely sound. Symmetrical, the drive 30:03 chain is aware of the main chain, but not the other way around. So the service of stability 30:07 is provided by the escrow of the miners. And so there's no real enforcement of stability of the 30:14 peg. And thus, you're either going to have an outcome, and they're both bad outcomes, 30:19 where you eventually you lose the peg, and it trend like counterparty, where it just kind of 30:23 trends to zero, or even worse, potentially is the sidechain. Now imagine say, let's say Roger 30:30 Ver was right. And we have the sidechain that is, you know, infinitely increasing or increasing 30:35 the demand of the users and block size, say that that becomes more popular than Bitcoin, 30:41 and more everybody moves their coins to the Drivechain. How does that express? What do we do about 30:46 that? Is that a problem? What if we had that spread over many Drivechains, and now we have 30:51 many Drivechains. So this stability as a service thing is a good way to look at it, because you 30:56 can't have an atomic peg, and you can't, nothing is stable, because you're just implying 31:02 countercurrencies. So thus they are shit coins, because you're converting your Bitcoin to the 31:07 side coin, right to the escrowed Bitcoin. And so thus, there's no peg of the value, 31:13 there's no transfer of value. Yeah, I guess just to be contrary with the group, 31:21 frankly, I don't have a strong... Go on, Paul. I mean, I don't know. I would love to know if anyone 31:28 can get anything out of that. I mean, I could give us, I think we could hire John to give the 31:33 same speech about ATMs and say, well, they never, you know, the stability as a service 31:41 of the ATM, and there's never any point where it's literally pegged. If he would use the software, 31:47 he would see if he deposits 13 coins or whatever, you get 13 coins come out the other side every 31:54 time. As Giacomo correctly said, it's aware in one direction. And then when you withdraw, 32:02 if you withdraw 15 coins and you have a main chain fee in there, but when you withdraw, 32:06 do you get exactly that many coins out? So it's not a service of the miners at all. The miners 32:13 bless the withdrawal transaction ID, the miners find blocks, but the protocol, just the software 32:22 just automatically credits you the same as when you take $20 out of an ATM, it takes $20 out of 32:27 your checking account. So I don't know what to say about that, but we'll see what Sergei has to say. 32:34 I don't have an opinion about Drivechains, but one of the things that I'm noticing with this 32:38 debate, and I've seen with many of the other things that we often argue over in the Bitcoin 32:45 spaces, there's always a fundamental debate between the trade-offs of whether or not to keep 32:55 Bitcoin more pure in some way in terms of decentralization or in terms of security and so on. 33:02 Oftentimes on the other side, the people that are arguing against the purity side are arguing 33:08 for some kind of benefits, some kind of use cases, some kind of people and so on. And we should, 33:17 I think, be aware that the idea that we should keep Bitcoin pure is a very logically consistent 33:26 opinion, but it is at tension with Bitcoin maximalism, because Bitcoin maximalism is the 33:33 idea that when it comes to internet money, Bitcoin is the be-all end-all. It's going to be everything 33:39 for everyone, right? And so there is tension here, because if we decide that we need to keep Bitcoin 33:46 pure, and for that reason we're willing to trade off the following things, that means that these 33:51 things can appear in other situations. Security, I think, is probably the best example. There's 33:57 often these trade-offs between security and utility scale, whatever, and very often things 34:05 require lesser amounts of security, and then we see them appear, other chains that are less secure, 34:11 but where that level of security is useful for certain things, certain things that certain 34:17 people want to do. So I think there's a certain tension there that we should be aware of. 34:25 I think it's fair when you think about people on Bitcoin Twitter that are, I guess, the midwit type 34:31 saying that argument, but you can see here, we have nuanced arguments, right? We have rational 34:36 arguments about what the risks are. It's not just about, oh, nothing new or nothing complex. 34:42 It's just, I don't need that, and what you're saying isn't true, so why are we doing this? 34:47 There is an inherent risk with the ideology of the maximalist in that Bitcoin is perfect 34:53 and then shouldn't progress, and it's not. It's a work in progress, and if we want this thing to 34:57 be the backbone of the future world's economy, which I do personally, I want everything to be 35:01 on Bitcoin. I want Bitcoin to, that's what everyone transacts value through, how are we going to do 35:06 that? How are we going to scale? There's a bunch of fundamental things in Lightning, for example, 35:10 which needs to be fixed in order to make it easy for people to run in a self-sovereign way, 35:14 but then how do we cater for the world? And then I suppose Drivechain, they were trying to say that, 35:21 look, if you have this system where we entrust miners as a federation, then you can have these 35:28 200 extra chains in which you can have this different type of economic commerce, and I think 35:35 when we had the block wars, we did decide that off-chain scaling was probably the way to go 35:41 rather than making the blocks bigger, and if we do need the whole world to be transacting using 35:46 Bitcoin, maybe that's not what you want. Maybe you're just like, no, I want just Bitcoin just 35:49 for us. Well, I think a problem with the idea that Drivechain scale is computers are a lot 35:55 cheaper than humans, and to the extent Drivechain scale, they scale in a way which has risks of 36:04 very ugly politics, because, you know, Drivechains will probably go fail, and in the process of 36:09 failing, people will go and use the backup option of arguing for things like user-activated 36:13 soft-forks to go fix that problem, and that's a really ugly, diverse device. 36:20 I knew this was coming. 36:24 Okay, so I mean, you know, the people sitting on one side seem to be a lot, you know, 36:32 they seem to, you know, I like them more than the people sitting in maybe the middle. 36:39 But yeah, I mean, of course, all that was great. Everyone was going pretty well. 36:43 Like, you know, people are different, transactions are different, not everyone 36:46 wants the same security model. Look, there's all this other stuff that's real, that has real users, 36:51 and Peter Todd is also correct that, in an ideal way, from the perspective of R&D only, 36:59 not from any other rational perspective, but I'm just saying, if you wanted to maximize R&D, 37:04 you would launch sidechains, and roughly half of them would fail, because you'd want to figure 37:08 out really quickly, like, how far can I push the envelope? So he's right that some would fail, 37:15 and now where he's wrong is he says that politics will affect L1. I mean, it may, but again, 37:23 my claim is that it will be much less than we're already affected by L1. In particular, he's very 37:29 wrong about this UASF thing. The UASF, again, if you fight the miners with the UASF, it is a hard 37:35 fork, because you're breaking the heaviest chain rule. So if it's users versus miners 37:41 in a UASF, then it is a hard fork from the user's point of view. 37:45 The miners cast the tie-breaking vote for every soft fork, and the soft fork needs only one of 37:51 the two groups. The UASF was a case where users made it clear that they only wanted to pay for 38:00 blocks that had the segment UASF. In that case, that's a good thing. The users are being empowered. 38:11 So again, people don't need to do anything. They don't need to care about the politics. They may 38:17 care about sympathy. But yeah, Drivechain is designed in many ways to evade the UASF style, 38:24 neutralize it, really, because it says you have three months of hash rate already committed to 38:29 something. So they seem really committed. And it's also saying there's no sense in which this 38:37 is an accident. There's no sense in which anyone's saying they're confused about what's going on. 38:42 It's a very slow thing, so that they're fully... It's very transparent. 38:52 So the security model of Drivechain is not based on UASF at all. It's based on this economics of 39:00 miner fees and the idea that miners want the coin to do well. You can see that with the 20 Bitcoin 39:09 giveaway thing, that miners sometimes say, OK, my short-term interests of this fee 39:14 do not outweigh the whole Bitcoin brand. So maybe they would... That's just proof to you 39:19 that theoretically it's possible, even if there's no fees. And the UASF idea is 39:30 it's designed to... Drivechain is designed to resist that by having the long delay and saying 39:38 that there's plenty of time before it would even happen. So there are these other events in 39:43 Bitcoin's history, the value overflow incident and this July 2015 39:53 database lock thing that happened. And so it's actually designed to 39:58 shed the effects of the UASF, the drama. It's designed to shed the drama as rapidly as possible. 40:08 But the thing is, of course, you could do UASF for any reason at any time. People could just decide 40:12 next Tuesday, we're going to do UASF for this. They could decide that they will do UASF to force 40:21 Drivechain to activate or to force it not to activate or to whatever. Force the miners to 40:26 steal, force the miners to be unable to steal, force nothing. So the UASF is just the users 40:31 getting what they want. And we should be... If they pull that off ever, we should be happy about 40:35 that. They will be able... Over the long run, they will always be able to pull that off 40:41 because they always get what they want, which is a good thing. But I think it's clear the whole... 40:44 The idea of separable zones is... That's the whole idea. And the idea is that if miners mine 40:54 on something that... See, well, I only let him finish his thought and then we'll reply to the 40:59 whole thing. But we'll see. Yes. The thing, whereas if you just want to go scale up, 41:07 if you just increase the block size, it means that everyone throws relatively cheap 41:11 computing hardware at the problem. And that's probably a much better outcome to get, say, 41:15 a 10X scaling than having ten more different Drivechains with different characteristics and 41:20 a whole ton of complexity and a whole bunch of Twitter wars. So we scale for so more people can 41:25 put ordinals on Bitcoin? I'd just say between the two of them, throwing computers at the problem 41:32 is just so much cheaper. I don't think the 10X scaling increase is something we should do anytime 41:38 soon. Hopefully, we figure out a way to never have to do it. But it's certainly more desirable 41:42 than an outcome where you've scaled by doing a whole bunch of Drivechains, which are critically 41:47 important to the world's commerce. So it's Peter Rage quitting. Peter is moving to BigCache the 41:51 next year. We'll find out. We spotted him. I was going to ask. No, but he's right in that 41:56 you can actually assess on-chain scaling. You can look at it and say... You can even do studies 42:02 and say how much it will... Okay, so first of all, I owe Giacomo a little bit of an apology there, 42:06 because I misunderstood. His original joke was that I had already Rage Quit, and that someone 42:11 on this year's stage would be next. And he's saying it's Peter. So I misunderstood his earlier joke. 42:21 So then Peter again... So like the way that the UASF... It's not really... 42:27 Since it breaks the heaviest chain rule, if you fight the miners, it's really a hard fork. 42:31 So it's not UASF. It's just a hard fork, which again, can be done at any time. And that's also 42:36 disruptive. But the way it's set up, it has no downsides. So either the users ban the miners' 42:47 theft transaction, and the miners fold, in which case nothing happens. The miners just lose, 42:52 and nothing happens. There's no reorg, there's no anything. Or the miners don't fold, 43:02 and they succeed with the theft, and then everyone who opted in only, they're on a 43:06 chain that has no hash rate on it. So it's also the case that nothing happens. They're 43:11 really on a hard fork. They've basically hard forked themselves onto a chain that has no blocks. 43:16 So either way, nothing happens at all. So it's actually... The idea of calling it a UASF, 43:22 similar to SegWit, where there's Twitter wars and there's hats, is completely 100% false. 43:28 It's very carefully set up so that it does not have any negative impact. And the... 43:36 I think... Let me see if I'm going to try to explain this here. 43:41 The... You should watch my soft fork panel with Jimmy Song and Jeremy Rubin. The soft fork has 43:53 had two different definitions that sometimes overlap, sometimes are irrelevant to each other, 43:58 and sometimes directly contradict each other. And those two definitions are tightening the 44:03 rules versus loosening. And then the other definition is, does everyone need to upgrade 44:08 or not? So those are the two. Did you change that? Have people not been able to see me the 44:18 whole time? Or what? I just wanted to enlarge the image so people can watch you while you explain. 44:25 The... So the idea of it being UASF, I already thought of that back in 2016, 44:31 and I designed it so that it would never have that property of the drama leaking one way. 44:39 It's like... But even if it did, I would consider that a success. I would say, oh, look, 44:43 the users of L1, they felt sorry for the users of L2 and they protected them. They chose to 44:51 protect them. Now, if you're on L1 and you want to ignore all of that, like I said, you either 44:55 ignore it and nothing happens, or you either ignore it and something other happens, or it 45:01 doesn't happen. But either way, you just end up... This is the magic of the soft fork, because you 45:05 end up on the longest chain. You end up with everyone. So it really has no downsides at all. 45:12 I don't know if this is the easiest... I don't know if I have a good way of making this clear, 45:16 or if I should write some kind of diagram or something about this. But it's designed, 45:21 even in the case of the UASF, where you think it's like a human sympathy thing, 45:25 where you think, of course, it can travel across chain in any direction. 45:28 But even in that case, the users of L1 who do not want to pay attention don't. And it's exactly for 45:35 that reason that Peter's point is upside down. It does respect the attention of humans on L1. 45:43 And so if he's saying that it won't be so bad to have more hardware requirements for nodes, 45:48 which again, the node hardware requirements are microscopic compared to the mining hardware, 45:54 which are tens of millions of dollars. The node hardware requirements are not that bad. And of 46:00 course, as technology improves, it does get easier every year. I wrote a post called The Thunder 46:06 as a little joke. And in an appendix, I estimated how much it would cost to have 46:11 one gigabyte nodes, which is, of course, absurdly... 46:16 You mean one gigabyte blocks, not nodes. 46:18 One gigabyte blocks, which is absurd and which we should never do. But I just thought, 46:23 what would that cost? On a sidechain, you can have UTXO commitments and throw out state. 46:32 Like as nine months go by, you can start throwing away stuff. 46:36 So in that case, you get all the benefits of ZK. It proves to be more transparent. 46:45 So it's actually not that much. It was like $2,000 up front and like $400 a month or something. 46:51 And that was a few years ago. 46:55 But anyway, yeah, the UASF thing, it's the opposite of what he says. It's designed so 47:01 that the drama does not travel from L2 to L1. There is no such thing as a UASF of this form. 47:08 It's a hard fork, just like every UASF is actually a hard fork because breaking the 47:15 longest chain rule is always a hard fork. The Drivechain is designed to measure the 47:21 miner's opinion very accurately three months in advance. And it is also designed to 47:30 deter. It's designed to rely on miners maximizing their own net worth, which is the security model. 47:39 So it's not. Nonetheless, it does give people, since it's so slow, it lets everyone at least 47:44 see what is happening and decide if they want to try to do something about it. If they try, 47:48 it doesn't affect the people who are paying attention. But I think he at least has the 47:54 But I think he at least has the criterion right that we should care only if it affects other people on L1. 48:01 But yeah, I would like to stress again that when he's saying this, this is before 48:06 he has written his tweet saying that he hasn't actually looked into the idea yet. 48:11 And you can kind of see that in that he doesn't really understand. He thinks it's like about 48:14 voting. He thinks it's like if 200 happen at once, that this is going to be some kind of burden. 48:20 But since they all take three months and each of them has to be a dispute, 48:24 the software will do it all automatically if they match. 48:28 So it's only it has to be 200 disputes and then you're three months. So we actually have a long 48:33 time. It's certainly interesting to hear you go through that thought process in real time, 48:40 because I realized that you were explaining a very simple concept, but it took you like five 48:45 minutes of running cycles. But basically, I think what they're referring to is the fact that miners 48:55 do they vote? Is this a correct term? They vote and they need 75% of the hash rate for 49:01 it's kind of like a certain Drivechain to get deployed. 49:04 Each block can move the score up. So they're really more like confirmation. 49:09 But I think of them as upvotes. I mean, I just think of it as like a Reddit thing when upvotes 49:13 because before Reddit sucked. In 2015, I was making this. 49:19 Okay. So 25% is the right proportion that I'm describing? 49:26 If 25% are against, they can veto. So it's like you downvote. So you need to get halfway to 26,000. 49:35 You need to get to 13,000. So you can upvote and downvote. So if you have 25% who are downvoting, 49:42 you need 75% upvoting to just barely make it in time. 49:46 Okay. So 25% of the hash rate can unlock the funds that some miners don't want to 49:53 release from a Drivechain. Is that correct? No, no. If they're 25, then they are blocking it. 49:59 They're trying to just stall. 50:01 So basically, if someone, let's say that I want to release the Vlad scammy sidechain, 50:11 and I want to do hex on the sidechain and scam the entire planet, 25% of miners can 50:18 decide to not let that happen, to not let the Drivechain get launched. 50:23 Is that correct? 50:26 The activation is slightly different, but let's just assume that we'll sweep that detail 50:30 away for the moment. We'll just say there's deposits and withdrawals. The coin, the BTC, 50:35 will travel slowly from sidechain to layer one mainchain. But the sidechain is going 50:44 to procedurally generate. It generates exactly what this hash should be. And then the miner's 50:49 job is to just copy that over. Their job is never to just make up some new thing, which 50:54 is what they would have to do. They'd make up some new hash that pays someone else. And 51:00 you can see why that would be very difficult, because they would have to then decide how 51:04 they came up with that, whereas the sidechain software is doing it all automatically. 51:09 So that's why it's always sort of indefensible to do anything other than that, because it's 51:15 like, where did that come from? 51:19 OK, well, you sip some water. I got to play another ad because I forgot about this. I'm 51:24 supposed to play ads. How am I going to make a donation if you're listening to this? If 51:31 they drop me or whatever. Anyway, I'm going to play this ad and then we go back. We're 51:35 at 14.26 in the video. So that's almost halfway into it. 51:40 Remember the paper wallet? Ah, yes. The good old days when you printed your Bitcoin private 51:47 key on an offline computer. It was so fun, but not really easy and totally not secure. 51:53 Today we have SadoDyme, a chip card that acts just like your good old paper wallet, but 51:58 with all the modern security features and top notch functionality. It turns your Bitcoin 52:03 into a bearer asset, which you can easily trade in person. Thanks to NFC, you can use 52:07 the SadoDyme card with your smartphone. Creating a new pair of Bitcoin keys takes just two 52:12 swipes. Check your balance in real time. Create multiple key pairs. Whenever you want, 52:17 you can reveal your Bitcoin wallet's private key with just a single click. The simple uncluttered 52:22 interface lets you quickly see if a key pair has been unsealed. Finally, the cold storage 52:27 you've been looking for. Available now on SadoDyme.io. 52:36 One prediction, Paul, I think all of this debate, all this discussion about scaling 52:42 Bitcoin is going to end up basically increasing the block size. I think that's going to be 52:47 the compromise that everyone makes. I'm not sure who's going to be happy with this, but 52:52 it seems like nobody wants to inflate the 21 million supply. It seems like people don't 52:59 want to wrap their heads around Drivechains. They think they're too complicated and they're 53:02 going to be like, oh, let's just turn one into two or four or whatever and move on. 53:10 I mean, you might be right about that. I don't know, because people will. 53:13 Yeah, that would be funny. You know, that would be very funny if people pivoted from 53:20 like they take the Peter Todd view and they say it's going to be 53:26 like something we understand, bigger blocks. Then now they'll say now the bandwidth speeds 53:32 and the hard drive costs are there. And that would be consistent with the whole like people 53:39 maintaining their control over. There's like a conspiracy theory about who controls the code. 53:46 So I guess I'd be kind of consistent with that conspiracy theory. 53:52 Yep. I mean, we've got a lot of video. We've got to get through the whole video. 53:56 Yeah. 54:00 The next on the name, I've got John Carvalho. 54:03 More importantly, look at it and say you can even do studies and say how much it will cost 54:08 the average person per year. You can actually assess it. You can't do that with Drivechains. 54:13 And more importantly, we need to like have a better understanding of what we mean when we 54:18 say scaling. Like there's scaling, like just making number go up of any concept that you 54:22 care about. And there's scaling of networks. Drivechains do not scale Bitcoin. They scale 54:27 the concept of blockchains. You know what I mean? Blockchains don't scale in themselves. 54:32 The end user needs to scale in the end in order to do network scaling. You need to increase the 54:37 capacity of the Bitcoin network. So it's not actually a form of scaling if you aren't increasing 54:41 the capacity for Bitcoin. Lightning network kind of is like a nice little hack because 54:46 it's like an alternative network, but it still uses Bitcoin transactions. 54:51 So there is a little bit of a compromise and say that it affects the intensive structure 54:55 of miners, for example, but it's still Bitcoin transactions. And so it still scales transactions. 55:02 Let me try to address Serge's point about maximalism and tension. I think it's a very 55:07 popular opinion that maximalists are asking to put every use cases on Bitcoin. And so the tensions 55:15 seems to emerge because, wait, you don't like shitcoins. But when we try to do shitcoin on 55:20 Bitcoin, you get defensive. You don't like changing Bitcoin as well. So you have to pick one, right? 55:25 You cannot say everything on Bitcoin, but not this on Bitcoin. But I think one fundamental 55:32 misunderstanding is that the original maximalist position was not really, 55:37 this should all go on Bitcoin or everything should go on Bitcoin. It was originally either 55:42 this use case that you're proposing, David, doesn't even make sense. So it's not necessary 55:46 that I want NFT on Bitcoin. Maybe I just think they're stupid and not interested in running 55:51 on my node. Or this thing, it's great, it's perfect, it's beautiful, but it should just run 55:57 on a database. So I remember one of the things I used to shield in 2017 was a great website. 56:02 It's still around. It's myblockchain.xyz. And it's a website where you can download software. 56:09 Your software is a blockchain. It's actually a fork of MySQL, but the tables are renamed into 56:15 blocks and records are renamed into transactions. And now you can run a blockchain. So sometimes 56:21 when people say, I want to do this, which doesn't require this decentralization or security, 56:27 my answer is usually not, do it on Bitcoin. But it's usually, that's OK, let's just open a 56:32 spreadsheet. Unless you have a specific reason not to do that. For example, do you want to do 56:37 something legal or partially or likely legal, as somebody would say, then maybe you have to 56:42 pretend you use a blockchain just as a shield against regulators. But if you're just doing 56:46 something like, I don't know, frogs, autographers of artists, just open up a spreadsheet. It's 56:54 enough. We don't want to change Bitcoin because we think your use case, not yours specifically, 56:59 is not even worth the effort to decentralize it because it's centralized anyway. Like 57:05 ICO projects where there is a marketing team, a network, a website with faces, just open it 57:13 in MySQL. Or compromise and use client-side validation techniques which scale indefinitely 57:19 and let you still have your database. So basically, unless you... But that's not like, it's not like... 57:27 No, actually, let's let Sergey, well, let's see what Sergey has to say. 57:32 But that's the case for every other cryptocurrency. Like there are things that are 57:38 reasonably decentralized, reasonably secure. Things like Litecoin, for example, that like 57:43 have been around since forever, live and thrive, work similarly like Bitcoin but make some 57:48 different trade-offs. And it seems that that seems to suit certain people and it's not 57:53 sort of declining or dying off or anything. It's sort of just doing its own thing. And 57:58 there are projects that matter where you know that you don't need a blockchain for that. 58:05 The answer does not really necessarily apply. But even Litecoin, you have assumed that you 58:11 have Bitcoin as a store of value because... Yeah, Litecoin wasn't great. I think the smarter 58:18 thing would be to say Zcash for privacy or you just say the scalability thing which links all the 58:24 wrongness of all the different answers. So like John Carvalho was saying, 58:29 well, we don't want... He said the USF thing because he thinks that it's USF. But again, 58:34 as I've already explained, that's not true and that's not possible. And then he's saying that 58:40 Lightning can scale Bitcoin because it uses Bitcoin transactions. 58:48 The reality though is that Lightning is probably not going to scale anything because it's probably 58:52 just going to be abandoned. Probably, I don't know, in five years we'll see. I'm not sure, 58:59 but at this rate, I don't think it will. The technical elite jumped ship last year, 59:05 partially on John's podcast. So he did Lightning limitations, synonym spaces, 59:11 and just play it if you want. If you think that Lightning has a bright future, just press play. 59:16 Just press play. And then I think we had... I think Ark was saying about the fundamental 59:24 limitations. He mentioned it. I think... Yeah. And then we have this idea about 59:33 Giacomo saying that he is infallible when it comes to determining if the end user's use case is 59:41 legit or not. And so there's no toleration of any kind of creativity or novelty. But even if there 59:51 was no novelty, still the scaling idea is key. It is when John Carvalho says it doesn't scale 1:00:02 Bitcoin. What I mean by that is that every single person on the planet Earth, like a week after 1:00:11 activating BIP300, could all obtain Bitcoin in a wallet that has... where the money is controlled 1:00:19 by keys, and where they sign transactions, and where they could... each of them could settle 1:00:26 to L1. I mean, they can't all settle at once. But each of them could, if everyone else doesn't 1:00:33 want to at that particular moment, or they could join forces with someone who is and move 1:00:38 interoperably among these. Now, more people could use Bitcoin in that way than could use 1:00:44 the Lightning Network. Because Lightning Network does nothing except onboarding. So 1:00:50 Giacomo misses the big use cases of just scaling Bitcoin and Zcash privacy. 1:00:59 There's a whole argument to be made about, like, what will human creativity invent 1:01:03 when it's free of these gatekeepers? But I think that was disappointing. 1:01:10 Him saying that... you know, that's what I used to believe back in 2015, 2016. 1:01:17 That the use case... no one will ever invent a good use case, and that it will be... it will all 1:01:24 just be databases or just people who are hopelessly deluded. But I don't believe that at all anymore. 1:01:33 I think that, in fact, the fact that we bet everything on Lightning proves how foolish it 1:01:39 was for us to presume that we know anything about what the end user will enjoy. So I think that... 1:01:50 Also, he is in direct conflict with, for example, Bruce Fenton. You mentioned the ICOs and, like, 1:01:57 the marketing team. Bruce Fenton, who has an enormous amount of experience in this area, 1:02:04 he says that even if there would be of enormous value, even if the company is itself centralized, 1:02:11 the process for issuing the corporation's shares and transferring them, he says, is 1:02:19 a terrible and would be much... and I agree with him, and it would be much improved if there was 1:02:27 just a way to transfer these bearer instruments around. It would... they would still be... the 1:02:32 redemption of them would still be centralized. But that's, again, something like... that's 1:02:35 something like Tether as an example of that, where Tether is centralized to redemption, 1:02:41 but it really doesn't seem to matter for most people. Most people don't need to redeem. 1:02:46 They still get an enormous amount of value from the service. People love USDT. 1:02:54 They really like it a lot. So I don't know, like... but the whole... the premise is that 1:03:04 Giacomo knows better than the inventor of something, and that it'll always be true. 1:03:10 What was true and what people thought was true in 20... just because IBM did... tried to do 1:03:15 blockchain, whatever, healthcare on the blockchain, and it was a joke in 2016, 1:03:20 then nothing... nothing useful will ever be invented, and there won't be any need to tweak 1:03:25 or change anything. And they're in response to new technology, new opportunities, new innovation, 1:03:33 new problems, new culture, new use case. So he's saying that it will just... we're going to bet 1:03:40 everything that no one will invent something cool ever again. Doesn't make any sense to me. 1:03:48 I don't know, Vlad, what do you think? 1:03:52 Well, I don't think it matters what I think. This is all about you watching this and reacting. 1:03:57 Okay. All right, let's keep going then. 1:04:02 So having Litecoin as a store of value, I mean, everybody's free, but come on. So you have 1:04:06 Bitcoin as a store of value. Now you want to transact very free and very cheap. So what you 1:04:11 need to do is a Bitcoin transaction to a centralized exchange, likely, if you don't swap with Litecoin, 1:04:16 to change it to Litecoin, to send it to your friend that eventually, or to the merchant, 1:04:20 that will have to send it back to an exchange, to send it on-chain to Bitcoin. So either you go 1:04:25 off-chain or maybe use Cashew or Fetimint, use a Chowmian Mint, something that doesn't even create 1:04:32 an old, new blockchain with a new form of money, with a slippage in price between in and out. 1:04:37 It's like, I want to do a swap with Monero to be more private. Okay, so I will do a Bitcoin 1:04:43 transaction, which is not very private, to some kind of market that could be even decentralized, 1:04:48 but the order book will be public, which will be a bottleneck in liquidity, so also in an 1:04:54 anonymity set. And then my merchant, eventually, if it doesn't want to lose money, will convert 1:04:59 back to Bitcoin. So maybe there is value in batching things, but most of these narratives, 1:05:05 they are not fighted off like, you should do that on Bitcoin. Most of the time it's, 1:05:11 you should not do that, in my opinion. Sure, in your opinion, but like, it's a big assumption, 1:05:17 what you describe, like there's plenty of people who, you know, live their life within the Monero 1:05:22 ecosystem or in the Litecoin ecosystem and don't, and there are services that serve them and so on. 1:05:28 So there are definitely, like indisputably, economies within. 1:05:32 They should be free. There are people that on TikTok, they pay girls to pretend to be 1:05:38 NPC video game characters. They pay a lot of money. They should be free to do that. I don't 1:05:42 want necessarily my system to enable them to do that. And I can criticize, I can say they're 1:05:47 stupid, but I will never initiate violence against them. So people should shitcoin and learn. 1:05:53 Anyway, Monero is an interesting thing where it does have a very interesting advantage over 1:05:59 Bitcoin for things that are maybe less than legal, which is it's very difficult to use 1:06:04 Monero in such a way that your privacy is terrible. You know, the low bar on Monero 1:06:09 is much higher than Bitcoin. Yeah, just due to how the software happens to go work. 1:06:13 Now, obviously you could go design a new Bitcoin payment standard where that was true too. 1:06:17 And you could imagine like, you know, lightning, triple secure, and that's the only thing like 1:06:22 dark markets would support. But that's just not how the ecosystems happen. So that's Monero's niche. 1:06:28 I think censorship resistance and privacy for anyone who wants it for whatever use case 1:06:34 they're using it for. And I think it's best placed on Bitcoin. We want the developers, 1:06:38 we want the users, we want Bitcoin to be the backbone of the world's economy in the future. 1:06:43 And just because we here use Bitcoin in a certain way, it doesn't mean that the rest of the world 1:06:49 and the future users of Bitcoin won't want to use it in a different way. Like, how do we make 1:06:52 that possible? Like, what proposals exist out there to make that possible without just suggesting 1:06:56 that they use a custodial service or using a federation which may get civil attacked? 1:07:01 So what Drivetrain posited with the, but I suppose the issue is really mining decentralization. 1:07:07 Like, they're offloading the idea of running all these separate federations, which can be 1:07:11 very troublesome. Federations are hard to run. Just, you know, ask anyone who has a federation 1:07:15 for any popular Bitcoin sidechain. You would offload that onto miners. But I'm not saying 1:07:22 it's a particularly good idea to do that, because you're empowering miners. But I'm just saying that 1:07:25 I can understand why it's a proposal. They're interested in trying to cater for all the world's 1:07:30 needs. Well, I should point out that the thing with Drivechains mining centralization is that 1:07:36 it's not so much like, oh, Drivechains would be okay if we could get mining. 1:07:41 Okay, I mean, I just wanted to, before whatever this is happens, all of that was pretty good, 1:07:48 wasn't it? A lot of people, like the Monero example is much better. Peter Todd admitted 1:07:54 that it was a niche. No one is even giving John the microphone, so he's not saying anything, 1:08:02 which is great. And yeah, privacy is important to people. Monero undisputably is real, 1:08:11 and there are services for that. And yeah, the idea is you shouldn't compare this to 1:08:17 L1 block space. You should say, what can we do, what can we give everyone in the world that they 1:08:21 would actually like, you know, that would actually work for them. So people do seem to 1:08:32 be getting it, I think. Did you see this live? No, unfortunately, I was outside. I was promoting 1:08:42 my magazine, but I watched this on live stream. Okay, can you tell me, did as many people attend 1:08:49 this year as last year? No, it was a smaller event, and it was a different, much smaller. 1:08:58 Was it a different venue? No, it was the same venue, and it felt more like a family reunion, 1:09:03 as opposed to a conference. Yeah, you know, the Miami conference was also smaller, so that, 1:09:09 I think the whole space is shrinking, because it was the post-COVID high of just the euphoria of 1:09:15 breaking free of COVID. No, it's more than that. It was the first year 1:09:21 during the bull market, and then the year after the bull market, and now it's two years into the 1:09:28 bear market, and people are tired, and they just want the number to go up for some reason, 1:09:33 and they don't want to spend too much. I did notice that the market dynamics are different 1:09:41 right now, and everyone complains that nobody's spending their Bitcoin, and all businesses are 1:09:46 downsizing. As far as I know, Bitcoin Magazine fired half of their staff last month. Yeah, 1:09:54 CoinDesk also. It's like this. I also noticed on my website that the number of searches, 1:10:01 I mean, 80% of my traffic on bitcointakeover.com is driven by search engines, and I noticed that 1:10:09 the amount of clicks is decreasing. I went from, I think during the bull market, I had 1:10:15 around 500 views a day on articles. Now I have about maybe less than 100. 1:10:25 It's like that. Also, the podcast is not doing so great, but if you're listening to this, I'm 1:10:30 really grateful. Me too. This is a good one. There's so many bad Bitcoin podcasts that are just 1:10:40 unlistenable. They're making more money than me. 1:10:47 Yeah, I just said, if you have something that's really, really generic and predictable, 1:10:52 that would do really well. It's kind of depressing when you think about it, and I don't want to 1:10:56 change the subject to be this about myself, but if I just did a podcast where I just said Bitcoin is 1:11:01 going to $1 million and talk about this every day and say it's invincible, it's unstoppable, 1:11:06 it's a rock, you cannot change it, you cannot move it, there's nothing you can do to it. Everyone 1:11:11 who tries to change Bitcoin is a scammer. We don't need anything. It's just perfect. 1:11:17 Satoshi was an alien. He was a time traveler. He was a genius. He was this and that. 1:11:23 I could make so much money if I did that. Also, if I had a British accent. 1:11:28 But I don't. I choose to follow this path, and it's hard. 1:11:33 No, it will pay off, Vlad. Don't worry. It's going to pay off. Trust me. 1:11:37 That's what I like to think, but, you know, then you look at... 1:11:41 Yeah, I know. Why are you taking advice from me? Okay, what are you looking at? 1:11:47 Never mind. Let's just continue watching. Nobody wants to hear me complain. 1:11:50 I was just curious, because I would have liked to know, what is the audience paying attention? 1:11:56 Do they laugh at anything? Are they really interested? Because this kicked off this panel, 1:12:02 and then there was one throwaway joke about ordinals, and then everyone felt compelled to 1:12:05 talk about this idea. Now it does seem like they got it out of their system. They're a little, 1:12:12 you know, they're whinging and complaining, and they're avenging, and now they're kind of like, 1:12:17 okay, wait a minute. On the criterion of what do we give the people who want ring signatures? 1:12:25 What do we give the people who want something to use tomorrow, or who are willing to change 1:12:32 the security trade-off? What do we give the people, the Ethereum people? They're like, we've 1:12:37 got nothing. Paul's idea is the only idea. So they're not quite saying that, but they're sort of, 1:12:44 you know, people sort of get it a little bit. So, but now we're going to hear Peter dump cold 1:12:51 water over everyone, or they'll try, I suppose. Maybe. Also, before I press play, I just want to 1:13:00 make this remark. Last year you were there on this exact panel about unpopular opinions, 1:13:06 but they did not talk about Drivechains as much as they did when you were not there. 1:13:11 Well, I remember that I changed it to Drivechain at some point. We talked about it the whole time, 1:13:16 and then I said, how much time do we have, right? And then they said, just keep going. The whole 1:13:20 audience was like, keep going. So then we did talk about it for a little bit. I don't know, 1:13:26 did you actually time it out? I would be interested to know how far we got it on last 1:13:30 year. Maybe it was like 25 minutes. I don't know. No, it was longer. But the whole panel was very 1:13:37 long last year, but I don't know how much, there was like a Drivechain section. So I don't know 1:13:43 if we compared them. I honestly don't know if we made it to half an hour. I don't, this seems like 1:13:48 it was more, you're right. Yes. Anyway, let's push on. Mining to be centralized is that having 1:13:57 things like Drivechains makes mining inherently more centralized because it makes it much more 1:14:02 complex. And once you start getting these failure modes, you cannot be a P2 pool miner in a drive 1:14:09 chains world so easily. That's your real issue. But I also kind of want to say, as much as you 1:14:16 talk about, well, lightning can't support this, lightning can't support that, we're probably 10 1:14:20 years away from lightning even beginning to hit these limits in terms of actual adoption. 10 1:14:26 years is a long time. For all I know, in five years we're going to invent lightning 2.0 and 1:14:32 we'll fix all these problems. I don't know, 2008 happened in the blink of an eye and it could 1:14:36 happen again. I don't want to be a scaremonger. And also for all the unbanked regions of the 1:14:40 world which want access to decent and stable money, you can laugh at that, but I think it's 1:14:45 important that they have access to it and how do we give them access to it and how do we give them 1:14:49 access to it now. I just don't see Bitcoin getting to that level of growth that quickly. 1:14:57 So if we're talking about mining, like, maybe 1:15:01 the fact that these Drivechains exist and we're relying upon those miners to not collude and then steal our money, maybe that is the thing which then adds, puts more energy into projects like Stratum V2. 1:15:13 All right guys, we ate up 23 minutes on Drivechains. Maybe we can try one more. 1:15:17 Can I make a quick summary, just that, like to summarize, you said we want this. There's no we. 1:15:22 The problem is that we all want different things and that will never stop being true. And so you only ever can expect the lowest common denominator out of Bitcoin. 1:15:30 I'm just talking about all the conflicting souls inside my brain. 1:15:34 And I think we need to start talking and communicating more clearly about the goal conflicts that we have, because even within this room, we have very different goals for Bitcoin that create these tensions. 1:15:50 And oftentimes I see people just talking past each other because this guy has this goal and this guy has that goal in their attention and then they argue. 1:15:59 Whereas in reality, it's like, yeah, this is my goal. This is my goal. OK, we could also be civil and find some kind of common ground because that's the only thing that's going to end up happening anyway. 1:16:09 This is the difference between rhetoric and dialectic, like often within that kind of maximus ideology. 1:16:14 Rhetoric is very important because it is something, it's a security mechanism for Bitcoin. 1:16:19 But we do not, the dialectic is good that we have, you know, different conflicting ideas, which then find synthesis and that's how you progress. 1:16:26 And if you just use rhetoric, you don't progress. So there's a balance to be had where, yes, absolutely. 1:16:31 I first heard the word drive chainer like a couple of days ago or yesterday on Twitter and I was like, am I a drive chainer? 1:16:37 Because I don't think it's an altogether terrible idea or parts of it aren't a terrible idea. 1:16:44 So let me go back to something you said earlier, which is probably also a source of contention that we can all talk about. 1:16:50 I think you said increasing the block size on Bitcoin would be a better idea than Drivechains. Did I hear you correctly? 1:16:57 Increasing the block size is a better idea than Drivechains for the purpose of increasing the block size. 1:17:04 OK, so does that take us into block size wars 2.0? 1:17:10 You're going to pay for this later on. 1:17:12 There is a version of Drivechains advocacy that says we're going to do this to go scale Bitcoin. 1:17:18 And what that advocacy really is, is we're going to do this so we can increase the block size to increasing the block size. 1:17:24 And that way of increasing the block size, allowing more transactions per second, it's far more technically complex and in particular, much more politically complex than just increasing the block size. 1:17:36 In a way, Peter's joke is a little bit like Paul Sztorc's move. 1:17:40 The Blockstream version of miner-based SPV, fraud-proof-based sidechain, was so complex and it trusted miners anyway. 1:17:50 So Paul said, let's just do something more obvious, which does the same thing, trusting miners. 1:17:54 And Peter says, OK, that will create basically a block size increase. 1:17:57 At this point, you could basically just increase the blocks. 1:18:01 So I think that it was Adam maybe today in another panel saying that eventually, in some years, the long tail, social long tail of the block size war will basically begin to evaporate. 1:18:14 And we will be able maybe to discuss block size limit again a little bit. 1:18:19 For example, some, most of the people disagree with the GigaMech of the block. 1:18:27 OK, now we're touching on very advanced and nuanced concepts, which is very good. 1:18:32 And in fact, so many went that I had to fix some notes. 1:18:36 But I think, OK, so Peter Todd is seriously saying that we won't have to worry about this for 10 years because we'll grow that slowly. 1:18:42 Like that, I think, is I don't agree with that at all. 1:18:46 I think that is that's a really weird thing to presume. 1:18:51 I think that Bitcoin has grown so quickly. 1:18:55 And I agree 2008 could happen at any moment. 1:18:59 I honestly think, you know, the long run fiscal situation of the United States government is also like, you know, we don't know where the line is, but at some point it will be will be hit. 1:19:10 And that would be a great day for Bitcoin. 1:19:15 I also think it's like until we show people that we actually could scale to eight billion people in some form, no one will take it seriously because they'll just think like, well, that that project will grow to its maximum size and then it will hit a wall. 1:19:33 And then everyone who involved, everyone involved, you have to switch the whole. 1:19:37 I think money is a lot like a language. 1:19:40 Personally, everyone's going to have to switch at like basically the same time. 1:19:45 That's part of why I think everyone's so preoccupied with the price. 1:19:48 But so I don't know. 1:19:49 I think that it's very weird. 1:19:51 And then for Peter Todd to say that it is a block size increase is untrue because, first of all, the proposal, there's a line of code that changes the block size. 1:20:00 And this line, this 500 does not change that line of code. 1:20:04 But also the idea of what the block size is, has nothing to do with what miners do. 1:20:12 Absolutely nothing whatsoever. 1:20:14 It's just the cost of running an L1 full node. 1:20:19 So if the miners need to do natural gas flaring credit, so the miners need to buy ASICs and they can't make it with FPGAs or CPU mining that they need to do. 1:20:30 But what miners do has nothing to do with the block size debate. 1:20:34 It was all about how difficult it would be to run a node, how difficult it would be to measure confirmations for yourself without relying on someone else. 1:20:41 The node is like the cell. 1:20:43 It's like a bacterial cell. 1:20:45 So if all the cells are killed, the node cell can regenerate just like the character cell from Dragon Ball Z. 1:20:55 OK. 1:20:56 Maybe these analogies are not very good. 1:20:58 But the point is, at one point, he goes down to one cell. 1:21:01 You know what I'm talking about, Vlad? 1:21:02 And then that's it. 1:21:04 Because each cell has the same DNA. 1:21:06 One node can regenerate the whole network if it shuts down. 1:21:10 So it's the cost of starting up the new node is the cost of the cell dividing. 1:21:14 That is the only thing that matters. 1:21:16 And what miners need to do, if we cared about that, we would just remove the difficulty adjustments from blocks. 1:21:21 And then Peter is going to say something about, like, what about the fixed cost of mining? 1:21:25 There really is no such thing because the miners are going to minimize their costs using whatever combination of fixed and variable costs they find appropriate for their time horizon. 1:21:33 And that's always been the case and that always will be the case. 1:21:37 The fixed cost of running these nodes is also basically zero anyway. 1:21:41 It costs nothing because the regular users have to run these nodes. 1:21:45 If the nodes are too expensive, the miners will all use Blind Merged Mining to shirk the cost. 1:21:50 So that cost is zero. 1:21:52 So the whole thing is just so gigantic. 1:21:54 Anyone who says that it is a block size increase is completely and totally false. 1:21:58 This is my attempt, honestly, to protect the block size limit and keep it small. 1:22:05 And so I completely and totally disagree with that 100 percent. 1:22:09 And then I wrote the word social, but I don't remember why. 1:22:14 Oh, I think he's – oh, because Giacomo is talking about the scars of the block size war. 1:22:20 But this is – but now you start to see – now they're really talking about it because now what they're kind of saying is – except for Peter Todd. 1:22:28 And who knows what John Carvalho is saying. 1:22:30 I really don't. 1:22:32 I think he's getting a little bit of like a Vinnie Gupta blah, blah, blah kind of vibe. 1:22:39 Like I don't even really know what he's talking about. 1:22:41 But what they're kind of saying now is we have no other good idea. 1:22:49 This idea is good, but a whole set of ideas can't even be discussed for an irrational social reason. 1:22:55 And so we need to wait until we're in a better mood. 1:23:00 And you see then how just irrational it is. 1:23:08 The idea that we would wait is I think a risk, a very big risk. 1:23:14 Why would we do that? 1:23:17 Well, I guess your proposal is too complex for most people to understand. 1:23:23 And they're going to be like – 1:23:25 It just counts to $13,000. 1:23:27 That's all it does on L1. 1:23:29 Most people never count it to more than $100,000 honestly. 1:23:33 Yeah. 1:23:36 Oh, well. 1:23:39 Maybe we can do something. 1:23:41 Maybe when I go to – I'll go to Bitcoin Amsterdam and I'll have like – we'll get like a BIP300 exhibit somehow. 1:23:51 It will just be a number. 1:23:52 It will be a giant wheel that spins to $13,000 and then spins back. 1:23:58 I don't know. 1:24:01 I mean they say this and this, but they don't even like – 1:24:04 So I hate to play this card because it is mean. 1:24:07 But again, Giacomo, he didn't know that it was changed back to an opcode a long time ago. 1:24:12 So he was like, well, it's not really an opcode. 1:24:14 But that means he hasn't opened – 1:24:16 I hate to play it because it really doesn't matter that much. 1:24:20 But he has not – you could prove that he has not opened the BIP text and just glanced at it to like refresh his memory. 1:24:27 Because it says right at the beginning, OpNot5. 1:24:32 So it's like – 1:24:38 Like what do you want me to do? 1:24:40 Even God needed a lump of clay when he created man, right? 1:24:45 So I can't literally do everything. 1:24:49 All right, now let's see what Giacomo has to say. 1:24:52 But some more nuanced takes about – 1:24:55 I remember Rosie Manningfield proposing elastic block size based on minimum fees. 1:25:01 There were some proposals that were not completely retarded. 1:25:04 So maybe some people will start discussing them again. 1:25:07 But the principle of not creating bad precedents, of organized minorities taking over the rules for everybody, 1:25:17 and the principle of keeping the network rules reliable, predictable, honest, backward-compatible, 1:25:24 that's really the point of the fork wars, even more the block size. 1:25:28 I think that many participants of the block size will not be opposed to – 1:25:32 actually, most of the people agreed to go to basically four megabytes with SegWit. 1:25:36 So most of the people were not really small blockers. 1:25:39 They were like, do not change Bitcoin, especially under the false pretense of some kind of emergency, 1:25:45 if we don't have the buy-in of all the economy for certain reasons, predictable times, 1:25:52 and after a lot of thinking and testing and discussing. 1:25:57 Of course, also – 1:25:58 Thank you. 1:26:00 You should not apply. That means I'm popular and I'm losing here. 1:26:03 Yeah, that was not unpopular. 1:26:05 I think I remember like, SegWit was basically 4x block size increase. 1:26:10 4x is not very big. 1:26:12 I mean, in a system like Bitcoin, you would expect to have safety margins. 1:26:17 You would expect the engineering to work still if the block size was like 10x bigger, 1:26:22 because you want to have a 10x safety margin on all this stuff. 1:26:25 I mean, this is like half a trillion dollars worth of value right now. 1:26:29 You want big safety margins on this. 1:26:32 The thing with Drivechains is you get that safety – like, look at this way. 1:26:36 Could you go and run your node with maybe a 10x bigger hard drive? 1:26:40 How much more would that really cost you versus now being distracted 1:26:44 by a whole bunch of bullshit political crap about doing new ASFs to go and save people's funds? 1:26:50 The latter occupies much more value in terms of your time, your attention, 1:26:55 than a slightly more expensive computer. 1:26:58 That's the real issue here. 1:27:00 And it's easier to hijack politically. 1:27:03 Much easier. 1:27:05 Well, again, I mean, it's designed so that people on layer one can't ignore it. 1:27:09 So he's right, it is the issue, but he doesn't seem to agree with me that I have solved it. 1:27:14 So if you don't want to pay attention to those new ASFs, then don't, 1:27:19 because absolutely nothing bad can happen to you as a result of ignoring them. 1:27:23 You don't have to participate in any of these. 1:27:25 The security model is based on fees, and it involves some of the sidechains failing. 1:27:33 So if it involves some of them failing, then how can it be that I require people to care about USFs to protect? 1:27:40 No, I'm requiring some of them to fail. 1:27:42 I give examples. 1:27:44 In the 2016 one, in the video, I give an example of how there's competing versions of a chain, 1:27:53 and it's actually in everyone's best interest for miners to kill the chain. 1:27:56 So I want the miners to kill the chain. 1:27:58 So I do not want the USF to succeed. 1:28:01 It's completely the opposite of the case. 1:28:03 So he's right about that being the issue, but I have already fixed the issue. 1:28:09 I have preemptively fixed it. 1:28:11 So it's – I don't know. 1:28:15 It's not the issue he thinks it is. 1:28:17 Anyone who's listening, you can ignore all of the – every Drivechain USF, just like you ignore everything else probably. 1:28:26 So – and, of course, as I said before, they're actually hard forks. 1:28:30 They're not even USF. 1:28:31 They're UHF. 1:28:33 Let me think of what else to say. 1:28:37 The – yeah, the goal is to ignore – well, let me see. 1:28:45 I wrote down some stuff. 1:28:46 So like I agree with Giacomo that the hard fork – the problem was really the hard fork, I thought, about – 1:28:57 I disagreed with large blockism because I thought it would be like the debt ceiling 1:29:03 where it would just raise all the time, and then what's the point? 1:29:06 But the issue is they had a terrible strategy, and the hard fork is too dangerous a tool. 1:29:16 So I just kind of thought like they didn't know what they were doing, and they did rush it. 1:29:21 And it's – yeah, it's interesting. 1:29:28 I mean it's kind of a catch-22 because they say we have to carefully discuss everything, 1:29:35 but then only recently have they carefully discussed it, 1:29:38 and I think it's only because certain miners said they were very interested in activating BIP300 1:29:44 that people are talking about it now. 1:29:46 So I think it's a little bit of a – we do suffer from a lack of an actual process 1:29:53 because it just means that it is something of a mob process. 1:30:02 But yeah, it's disappointing that Peter Todd believes that – 1:30:05 but it's interesting that he's riffing here, and then he read – 1:30:10 he clearly read some of the stuff I was tweeting in the run-up to TabConf while he was – 1:30:16 if I'm remembering correctly, there was some time in between. 1:30:19 It was a week off or something. 1:30:22 So he didn't say any of this about UASFs at all in the debate with me. 1:30:29 So I guess he – here he's saying that's the main issue here, 1:30:33 but then when the debate with me, he switched back. 1:30:36 He switched completely off of that and didn't bring it up one time, 1:30:41 and he didn't bring it up at all, and he switched to this miner fixed cost thing. 1:30:45 So he had abandoned the – what he says here is the crucial thing. 1:30:52 He – it's something he abandoned when he had the debate with me in person in Atlanta a week later. 1:30:57 So I don't know. 1:31:00 I mean I interpret that as him saying that he looked into it more, 1:31:03 and he realized that it is not based on UASFs. 1:31:06 It's based on fees, and that actually – he realized that I do want – 1:31:09 I want some of them to fail, which makes it really impossible to argue that it relies on UASFs 1:31:15 since it's like which UASF do I want, failure or success. 1:31:20 I say they rise or fall in their fees. 1:31:24 They're like restaurants. 1:31:26 The threat of going bankrupt is what keeps the quality high. 1:31:36 When shitcoiners debate weak subjectivity, 1:31:40 like even if your node doesn't know the right sequence of transaction, 1:31:46 if it's slow enough, it will just go on Twitter and make it out socially. 1:31:50 But that's actually the part which is easier to manipulate. 1:31:53 You can have any kind of gatekeeper of the social discussion, 1:31:56 can easily create a campaign in which you think if you read – 1:32:00 you know how the block size wars ended, 1:32:02 but if you read the Reddit during the peak of the block size wars, 1:32:06 everybody was a super giga mega big blocker. 1:32:09 It was just completely derailed. 1:32:11 So moving the consensus – 1:32:16 I disagree with that. 1:32:17 For me, it was always clear that the small blockers had it. 1:32:21 But it's interesting that he feels that way. 1:32:23 I would be interested in hearing more about – 1:32:27 I just definitely don't think of – 1:32:28 r slash bitcoin was controlled by Thamos, who was a small blocker, 1:32:36 or was very supportive. 1:32:39 So I don't know why he would even say that. 1:32:41 That's a very strange thing to say. 1:32:43 I don't think very many people would agree with him, 1:32:45 but maybe not. 1:32:46 But yeah, like discussion of block size increases and hard forks 1:32:51 was like purged from r slash bitcoin. 1:32:54 That was one of the things Roger Ver wouldn't stop complaining about. 1:32:57 He would complain about it all the time. 1:32:59 So I disagree with that. 1:33:00 And this idea that, again, it's social consensus. 1:33:04 This is only – if you're only on L1, none of this is affecting you. 1:33:08 It's only if you're on L2 that you have to worry about a hypothetical 1:33:11 persuasion of the miners to take the coins for some reason. 1:33:15 There is no sense in which the miners are convinced to send the coins 1:33:20 to a certain destination by humans. 1:33:24 If the sidechain software, which is committed to – 1:33:28 you commit to the actual software when you create. 1:33:34 When the sidechain takes slot seven or something, you commit to it. 1:33:39 That software, if you run it, it will tell you what the withdrawal hash is. 1:33:44 So there's no sense in which – I think there's this misconception 1:33:47 that the miners all meet and like they meet like in Vatican City 1:33:51 or something and they decide, okay, here's where all the coins should go. 1:33:55 But the sidechain software is what tells them. 1:33:57 It tells everyone. 1:33:59 It tells literally everyone who runs the software for free, 1:34:03 screams it. 1:34:04 It's in the header of every block. 1:34:05 It's at the ribbon in the bottom of the GUI. 1:34:07 It's everywhere. 1:34:08 They know where it should be. 1:34:10 If they want to do something else, they have to decide what that would be. 1:34:13 It has to be something that adds up to a transaction ID of a certain format 1:34:18 of something that will be withdrawn from the BIP300 UTXO. 1:34:23 So it's very weird if they – the persuaders really have a huge amount of work 1:34:30 cut out for them. 1:34:32 I don't know. 1:34:33 I think that this is, again, because Giacomo has not read the BIP. 1:34:51 Don't forget you're susceptible to legal too. 1:34:54 I mean right now I have two lawsuits against me from Craig Wright, 1:34:57 and one of them is to go recover his allegedly stolen coins. 1:35:03 And that is precisely the kind of legal action that you could expect 1:35:06 when you go have people losing coins on Drivechains that go fail 1:35:09 and you could easily have miners being sued. 1:35:11 Miners being sued. 1:35:14 You could, but, you know, like there's no sense in which – 1:35:20 like who are they going to sue? 1:35:21 Like a mining pool? 1:35:22 All of the mining pools? 1:35:24 One, you know, if you ever win, the mining pool can just dissolve. 1:35:28 This is the software we should build. 1:35:34 All the mining pools can, like, declare bankruptcy and just reform, 1:35:38 like with a click of a button. 1:35:40 But it's – I don't think, you know, you could sue, 1:35:46 but that's not how it would work because what would happen is there would be 1:35:51 a failure on the sidechain and there would be something like whatever, 1:35:55 the Dow, and there would be something over there. 1:35:57 But it would be according to Ethereum's rules, it would have the correct withdrawal. 1:36:01 And by the time you could even do this, the coins would have changed hands 1:36:07 and there would be new owners withdrawing them. 1:36:09 That's in the case where the miners are not stealing. 1:36:11 Maybe I'm not explaining this very well, but I'm saying if there's some kind of 1:36:13 hack or something confusing or something social or whatever, 1:36:17 it would be, like, too difficult. 1:36:20 It's only when – ironically, it's only because the Ethereum Dow hack 1:36:24 had this weird delay that it was even possible for them to try to stop it. 1:36:29 But if miners steal from the sidechain, in a sense, like the logic of BIP300 1:36:36 is that they should steal if the fees don't justify the chain. 1:36:41 So they are doing their job if they steal. 1:36:44 And the reason why they should not steal is because they want to maximize 1:36:47 the long-run transaction fee volume. 1:36:50 Everyone's afraid. 1:36:52 If you use Drivechain, you're afraid that your money will be stolen by miners. 1:36:58 But if you're a miner, you're afraid that no one will want to use the Drivechains 1:37:03 and you won't get the fee revenue. 1:37:05 So it's a mutual fear Mexican standoff. 1:37:10 That is how it works. 1:37:12 And, yeah, you can always be sued. 1:37:14 I mean, that would be great. 1:37:16 If lawsuits against miners would – that would decentralize mining. 1:37:19 I would be in favor of that because that's – what would be better 1:37:23 at decentralizing mining than that? 1:37:26 If we have enough of those, eventually we'll have mining pools 1:37:29 that are, like, completely open source and completely behind Tor or something. 1:37:34 That would be great, I think. 1:37:37 The fact that he uses Craig as Wright's frivolous lawsuit against him 1:37:43 as an example of why we should care about lawsuits is, I think, actually 1:37:48 180 degrees defeating the point. 1:37:51 He's just saying any idiot can sue any other idiot about anything. 1:37:54 So that's – who cares about that? 1:37:59 But it's true that – I guess it's a tiny nugget of truth in that it just 1:38:03 creates, like, salient days and salient, like, events. 1:38:07 Like this is the day of the withdrawal, kind of like the having. 1:38:14 So it creates, like, salient days. 1:38:16 And they can say on this day something else should have happened. 1:38:21 Isn't it ironic, though, that you were just telling me before that 1:38:25 Luke Dashjr. said the advantage of liquid is that you can sue 1:38:29 the people who withdraw. 1:38:31 Now it's a disadvantage because those people can be sued. 1:38:35 Blah, blah, blah. 1:38:37 You know, like, whatever, right? 1:38:39 You can't win. 1:38:40 That's the point. 1:38:45 Failed to go and mine the right side of that fork effectively. 1:38:50 You failed to prevent the theft happening. 1:38:52 You have a duty of care to go and, like, run this sidechain client 1:38:57 to go and validate those rules to make sure that forks didn't happen. 1:39:00 You know, you were being negligent by not running that code. 1:39:03 Oh, you're a small miner? 1:39:04 Oh, you just run, like, P2 pool or something? 1:39:06 Well, I mean, you're being very irresponsible here. 1:39:08 Why don't you go mine at a proper pool that can afford to go and 1:39:12 do its job? 1:39:13 Like, we don't want that. 1:39:14 So we all agree, basically, why we should have just put Peter 1:39:18 between Sergey and John. 1:39:22 Yeah, I want to address this P2 pool thing, because he brought it up 1:39:25 before and I didn't address it. 1:39:26 But Peter really wants everyone to use P2 pool, and he really doesn't 1:39:32 like the idea that there must be a loss of efficiency. 1:39:40 There are a lot of interesting ideas for changing the way people – but 1:39:43 for those of you who don't know, P2 pool was this neat idea where it 1:39:46 was a decentralized mining pool, and it had interesting properties, 1:39:51 such as when it found a block, the Coinbase paid out to, like, 1:39:56 a ton of people, because it paid everyone out, like, immediately. 1:40:01 So the Coinbase would be huge. I don't know how many outputs it had, but it was a lot. Thousands. 1:40:06 And that, of course, made it kind of inefficient, because the right thing – you know, the more efficient thing that involves some trust to do would be to just have an account with the pool in mind, and then your account goes up, and then cash out. 1:40:22 But, of course, that has the downside of requiring trust. Various people have mentioned different inventions and things over the years of trying to solve this problem, but the problem doesn't seem to really exist, because, like I said, the way the pool works is the miners can fire their pool, like, almost at any time. 1:40:44 They can point their hash at a completely different pool. They probably don't want to or whatever. They like their pool, but they have a relationship with their pool. But the pool cannot easily – you know, it's easy to start a new pool. It's not as easy to just spin up, like, a new mining facility that has 15 percent of the hash rate. 1:41:01 That would cost a fortune, and it's just like enormous organizational complexity, et cetera. So for Peter, it's really important that mining not have a lot of trust, but my point of view is that this is – you know, it's an admirable goal, but I think he just doesn't understand Bitcoin mining, because Bitcoin mining is a relentless push for efficiency every two weeks. 1:41:31 So every single stone that can be turned over and every single idea – the depths of every idea that can be plumbed and – so it's not just that they'll cut a couple corners to get a little bit of efficiency, and they'll cut – and P2Pool will be a victim. 1:41:52 It's like everything will be a victim. It's just in the name of efficiency. And so I don't – the P2Pool thing, just – to me, it just highlights the fact that Peter Todd doesn't understand mining. 1:42:06 I mean I hate to say – I hate to be so dismissive, but what he's saying is like – what he's really saying – I'm not sure if this will make sense or not, but he's saying something like this. 1:42:16 If I declare to the world tomorrow, I say I'll give every miner $10 a year if they join my pool. What Peter is saying is that like this will centralize mining, because I'm – everyone will be going through me, and I will be able to deny people the $10, and I will – but to my point of view is that it's all just like kind of missing the point, which is that miners need to – they don't want to censor, and they want to cut their profits. 1:42:45 And they want to cut their costs to the bare minimum, and so they will cut everything. And the point – and the important thing is that we run our Layer 1 full node to protect us against the miners' mistakes. 1:42:55 So it's my view that the nodes outrank the miners, but I don't think Peter Todd realizes that his view is the reverse. 1:43:05 But I guess it's for the audience to decide if they can make any sense of any of this. The miners may make mistakes, or they may do things that we don't like, but our nodes will protect us. 1:43:16 Our nodes enforce the difficulty adjustments. Our nodes check every block to make sure that it's valid, and the transactions – we don't want them to be censored, so we attach a little bribe. 1:43:32 But yeah, Peter is trying to make all these arguments that say – basically, the arguments are of the form if a miner is very, very inefficient, shouldn't we cut them like miner welfare or something? 1:43:43 Miner EBT card. And maybe they – because we want them to be using a P2 pool or something. 1:43:55 Because this problem of the concentration in powerful pools is really widespread, but I don't have that view at all. 1:44:02 And my view is that pools have no agency, and that if a pool makes a mistake and does something financially or economically irresponsible or even culturally irresponsible, that the clients of the pool will just leave. 1:44:17 So they have a huge amount of leverage. They can walk out at any time. 1:44:22 It's like they live in a country where they can press a teleport button and leave. No one really likes my analogies, but they can leave. 1:44:31 The pools are so vulnerable relative to the hashers, and they only exist because the variance reduction makes them very important. 1:44:44 And it makes it so that they have – their brand is the only thing they have. 1:44:48 And so everyone makes these pie charts. It's these darn pie charts, I tell you. 1:44:53 And it's because – just because the data is available, they decide, I'll make a pie chart. 1:44:59 And then everyone looks at the pie chart, and they think, oh my gosh, we don't like that. 1:45:02 Foundry has such a big slice. 1:45:05 And they say, how can we get rid of that? 1:45:08 My view is all of that is just a giant misinterpretation of what Bitcoin mining is and what pools do. 1:45:16 Pools make it easy for the small guy to mine because they get rid of the variance reduction. 1:45:21 Anyway, I don't know. He's saying we should care about – we'll sacrifice anything. 1:45:27 We'll sacrifice global scale. We'll sacrifice Zcash privacy just so that P2Pool can have an advantage that's not even real. 1:45:37 Because it's just as easily – the mining fixed costs are already zero, and they can already switch pools at the drop of a hat. 1:45:49 I mean P2Pool was interesting, but people don't use it. 1:45:55 I think we should build some more stuff. 1:45:58 I think Ben Ark has it right where it's like if there's a – and now that – if there's a problem, people will build the solution. 1:46:06 So what we should really do is wait for pools to start misbehaving, which currently they don't. 1:46:11 And then we should build stuff to make it very, very easy to just switch pools. 1:46:16 But I think everyone knows that that would come, and that's why pools have always been very well behaved. 1:46:21 It's too easy to leave the pool. 1:46:23 Anyway, this is a rambling answer now, but P2Pool is suggesting that existing pools are doing something wrong, but they really aren't. 1:46:31 And that's why people use them, because actually they don't do – they have yet to do anything inappropriate. 1:46:43 Jonan talked about zero confirmation and RBF. We messed up. 1:46:48 How about since we keep talking so much about the block size war, and there's been what, six years now, 1:46:56 it would be interesting to discuss the review and sort of in hindsight to see, you know, 1:47:01 which arguments were presented by each side and like hindsight bias. 1:47:08 Like there are a few that the big blockers got right. 1:47:13 I haven't changed my opinion on the subject, but some arguments ended up being true in retrospect. 1:47:20 The problem is they hung everything on a hard fork. That was the problem. 1:47:24 You couldn't have a conversation where we don't have any technology or any research 1:47:29 where we can confidently do a transfer of value during a hard fork. 1:47:33 Yeah, I'm not looking to redo the debate. 1:47:35 It's a good proposal, but we'll have to do it next time, guys, because time is up. 1:47:40 We were deciding back then to scale smart rather than just make blocks bigger, 1:47:46 and it sounds to me like some people just want to make blocks bigger now. 1:47:49 Unfortunately, we're not going to make our time slot any bigger, but we could vote for that maybe. 1:47:57 Guys, thank you so much for sharing your unpopular opinions. This was fun. 1:48:04 Thank you. 1:48:09 I don't think I would have rambled so much if I knew we were only moments from the end. 1:48:13 Well, I mean, I hope someone got something out of this, my reaction to the panel. 1:48:18 That's interesting that it ate up the entire panel, and I don't know. 1:48:26 I don't know if anything left to be said. 1:48:28 Is anyone still listening? Probably not, right? 1:48:30 Who would make it for—I mean, Bitcoin and Sensor routinely go six hours. 1:48:35 Everyone I know in Bitcoin listens to the whole thing every time, so I think—who knows? 1:48:42 Yeah, this was almost four hours long. 1:48:45 We're about to hit that mark, but it's certainly interesting the way that they poked fun at voting 1:48:51 and the fact that they became so loose when it comes to the idea of increasing the block size. 1:48:56 They're like, yeah, they see it as a compromise. 1:49:05 I mean, I wonder about that. 1:49:10 I do wonder about that. 1:49:11 So, I mean, Peter Todd, he considers it a block size increase if miners are persuaded to do it at all, 1:49:17 even the tiniest amount. 1:49:20 So to him, buying an ASIC is a block size increase, or is it? I don't know.