0:00 The podcast is produced by the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines. 0:30 The podcast is produced by the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines. 1:00 The podcast is produced by the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines. 1:30 Hello, there, and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. 1:33 This is Season 16, Episode 52, which might as well be Episode 300. 1:38 There's some chatter or music in the background, Paul. 1:41 I don't know exactly what's happening. 1:43 This is your thing, I thought. 1:46 Oh, you're listening to the stream. Okay. 1:48 But there's feedback. 1:52 That's what happens when you invite someone who actually tunes in and listens to the show. 1:57 He also wants to listen to himself. 1:59 Hello, welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. 2:01 This is Season 16. 2:03 Yeah, exactly. 2:05 And I gotta say, Paul, this is your second time this season joining the show. 2:10 And the first time around you spoke about Roger Ver's situation 2:14 and why you want to throw your hat in the ring and defend him 2:18 and talk about what Bitcoin used to be like in 2013 and 2014. 2:23 Now you've been hard at work. 2:25 We've had this ongoing war on Bitcoin. 2:28 It's like a civil war between Bitcoin Core v30, which increased the size of Upperturn, 2:34 and the nuts people who seem to have lost their mind. 2:39 I was going to ask, what do you think about all that? 2:43 But you've said it already. 2:45 It's very annoying to the point where I don't want to participate in this. 2:54 I agree. It's boring. It's so stupid. 2:56 I can't believe how it's dragged on for this long. 2:59 And I saw some tweets from Nick Szabo today. 3:03 He has joined the idiot team. 3:07 Yeah, but it's so obvious, right? 3:09 Because you look at his profile, you look him up on whatever search engine you use, 3:14 and you're going to see, okay, this guy works for Samson Mouse Company, which is Gen 3. 3:19 I know. 3:21 He's the quote-unquote chief scientist. 3:24 I don't know why a company that tries to onboard nation-states' Bitcoin needs a chief scientist. 3:30 They're not building anything. 3:33 Well, yeah, I think it's not— 3:38 Maybe it'll be a great company in the future, but it's like, you know, 3:44 the lowest bottom of the barrel. 3:47 I mean, I don't know. Like, whatever. Are we going to turn this into a gossip hour? 3:50 Yeah, Samson did all kinds of crazy stuff. 3:52 He was, like, CEO of some other company while he was chief strategy officer at Blockstream, 3:57 and there was all kinds of, like, mysterious double-dealing and whatever. 4:03 But who even cares about that? 4:05 That's the core V30 of Bitcoin startup. 4:12 Whatever. Like, who cares? 4:14 It's a silly issue. The whole thing is a silly issue. 4:17 Yeah, but all of these lawyers are basically joining right now, saying, 4:20 well, you should be concerned. What if someone does this? 4:23 Like, you're going to be legally—whatever. 4:27 Well, you know, back in the day, we had Bitcoin Uncensored, and people would just laugh all this off. 4:31 Like, remember, Josh went on stage at, like, University of Miami or something. 4:36 There's this huge room of people, and they were like, 4:42 what about AML, like, anti-money laundering laws for Bitcoin? 4:48 This was, like, in 2015 or something. 4:52 And Josh goes, well, Bitcoin doesn't do AML. It does ML. 4:59 And everyone laughed. 5:02 You have the room to laugh. 5:03 And then Chris, an American banker, you know, he told everyone he was—before he did this Q&A, 5:08 he said, I just have to let everyone know that—and he said this, and it wasn't even true, 5:12 but he's told everyone that he was a registered sex offender. 5:18 That's not even true. 5:20 So we used to have more of a sense of humor, is my point. 5:24 And we used to just be like, well, this is inherently subversive. 5:28 This is—Eric Voskow has this about his axiom of resistance, which is, like, resistance money. 5:35 This idea that if it's white, if it's 100 percent, if we ignore the black market and the gray market, 5:44 we ignore cash, we ignore privacy, we ignore user, and we just go—we focus completely on where people are going to have, 5:50 like—they could use WeChat Pay or Venmo or Zelle. 5:56 Then Bitcoin doesn't really have a comparative advantage in the proof-of-work blockchain structure. 6:00 It doesn't really do anything. 6:01 So people used to accept all this. 6:03 Now we've gone down the suit coin or Michael Saylor route, the ETF route, and now people have to care about— 6:10 and everyone wants to carve out. 6:12 All the lawyers want their pound of flesh, and they say, what about such-and-such regulation that I helped write or whatever? 6:19 So it's a sad consequence of—it's also inherently—there's a media dimension to it, which is, like, no one wants— 6:28 some things are harder to defend. 6:30 Like, if you defend—this happened with Ron Paul and the drug legalization, where Ron Paul fought for legalization of marijuana, 6:38 which was—it's now legal in many places, or it's just not—either formally decriminalized or it's not enforced in the United States. 6:52 But it used to be possession of—just mere possession of marijuana for your own personal use, you would be thrown in prison. 7:02 And if you—three times, you could be in prison for a long time. 7:05 I don't know how long, but years and years. 7:10 I don't know. 7:11 If someone were to look it up, you'd be shocked of what is now considered to be not a crime at all. 7:17 And in fact, there was a Canadian snowboarder who lost his Olympic medal or something because he had been smoking marijuana. 7:26 But this was only a few years before it became legal in the United States. 7:32 And what I'm trying to get, though, is that Ron Paul fought for this issue that now we all accept. 7:39 But at the time, everyone would be like, oh, who are your supporters? 7:44 Oh, a bunch of pothead idiots. 7:46 So if you try to defend something—this was similarly done with gay marriage, where people would make fun—this is back—it's kind of unthinkable now. 7:55 But it was—everyone who's old enough in America remembers that 2020 versus 2010 was a very different story. 8:04 And anyone who supported gay rights would be made fun of. 8:09 And they'd say, oh, those people must be gay or whatever. 8:11 So that would be—that would be— 8:13 So this is a type of—I bring this up because the type of argument in Bitcoin that is like, oh, you want to be pro-freedom, pro-sovereignty, 8:22 it kind of makes you look like you're doing something shady, money laundering, tax evasion, whatever, even if you're not at all. 8:30 But on the other hand, there's a dimension of are we being gullible or are we being—like, why do some countries have freedom and others don't? 8:42 Partly it's because the laws and institutions are written a certain way, but it's also partly because the people have a certain attitude towards the government. 8:52 In the United States, there's a different attitude towards the government than in Russia, where people have been. 8:58 And you experienced some of this firsthand, where the people in a communist country are afraid of making fun of the government, 9:06 whereas in a more liberal country, it is more common to have, whatever, The Daily Show or something, people making fun of the president. 9:17 There was an old Soviet joke. None of this has anything—I should explain that. 9:20 I'm like a little sick and Vlad is like jet lagged, so I don't think—we're going to try to keep this one just like short and fun. 9:26 We won't really be able to do the demo. 9:29 Now I'm really rambling on, but because the demo has like, you know, you got to sync the blockchain for 10 minutes or whatever. 9:35 But anyone who wants, please go. You'd be helping out a lot. 9:39 Go to LayerTwoLabs.com slash download and check it out. 9:44 It should theoretically work. We're currently at the—let me give a little speech about the software. 9:50 We're currently kind of at the click button UX, which is a good UX. 9:55 So you don't necessarily need—for the lovely Linux users who are the best, we have a copy and paste thing for you to put in the terminal to install. 10:08 But after that, you should just be clicking buttons. 10:11 You may need to click some restart, refresh buttons. 10:15 You may need to like close it and reopen. 10:18 But mostly that's where we are. 10:20 And if you find anything unexpected, stuff doesn't look good. 10:24 We're trying to make it so that it's always responsive. 10:27 It always tells you when something's loading or whatever. 10:30 And we are currently—our second point is we're currently at the node runner level. 10:35 So we don't have like SPV, like an easy phone app that like looks very slick. 10:42 That's intentional for now based on priorities. 10:46 So you currently have to sync the whole chain. 10:50 And so you—it just takes like a little while. 10:53 Now we have two networks that are very different. 10:57 One is the Signet, which is we just sign a block every 60 seconds. 11:03 Much easier to test. 11:05 Much easier to sync. 11:08 It should sync in like, I don't know, 10 minutes or so. 11:10 Depends on your internet connection. 11:13 And the other one is I think we're calling it Forknet now. 11:18 This is actual—takes all real 930,000 blocks from Bitcoin that are full of transactions. 11:25 And then forks into our network. 11:28 And then it will try to replay all the transactions that are really on the real. 11:32 So even after the fork point, it should be full. 11:35 That, of course, takes much longer because we sync with Bitcoin Core and not with Eric Bosco's superior LitBitcoin. 11:44 So that's the opening of my speech. 11:47 I got more speech than I'll say, but does this make sense so far? 11:51 It does. 11:52 And also one for the record to include the fact that you had one of the best tweets about these flame wars, about filters and censorship. 12:01 When you said that you can turn every transaction into a JPEG. 12:05 Yeah. 12:06 You can just copy the text of the transaction, like the ID, the hash, whatever it is that you want. 12:12 You go to a website which turns text into images and you get beautiful JPEGs. 12:17 Right. 12:18 It's literally the transactions are encoded in the Bitcoin blockchain as serialized hex. 12:25 But it's a property of all information. 12:28 I mean, first of all, the hex translates directly to JPEG, and that's what I did. 12:33 You just lay out the hex in six byte chunks and the JPEG automatically will interpret that as those are red, green, blue values. 12:43 And so every Bitcoin transaction is kind of like a Mysticno Pokemon where it's like a weird rectangle. 12:51 But yeah, the whole thing is quite silly. 12:56 I want to explain, though, a little bit more about our software, which it would be cool to do. 13:01 I think every live software demo is a big mistake because people have different setups and it's boring, I think, to wait for certain things. 13:10 And I just think it's not. 13:13 Maybe we'll put out like a video. 13:15 One thing I do like is when you put out like a little video, you can just say, this is what you're supposed to see. 13:20 It's nice and fast. 13:22 That's, you know, totally important parts. 13:26 The software that we download is called Bit Window. 13:30 And I would like to explain a couple of things. 13:32 I do a lot of things differently that are just way better than what other people are doing. 13:36 So first of all, I have Bit Window versus something like Bitcoin Knots. 13:40 And then I have the BIP300 Activator versus like a pull request to Bitcoin Core. 13:44 So if I could just ask you to imagine Bit Window is like the thing that you would look at. 13:51 It's like a thing you open. 13:54 And Bit Window will download other stuff. 13:57 Sometimes it will be stuff that's behind the scenes. 14:02 And sometimes it will be other stuff for you to look at. 14:06 But Bit Window is like where you start out. 14:12 And it's a little bit like a Steam game launcher. 14:16 It downloads things for you and does whatever you want. 14:19 And this is it will have one of the things it will download is actual Bitcoin Core. 14:23 We have actually patched it for, you know, but the patches do not. 14:28 They're not like they're just for our convenience and they are not fundamental. 14:33 They are one of the patches, by the way, that we did in our little patch was to get rid of the upper turn limit. 14:39 So we were ahead of all of that. 14:42 And I knew even last year the upper turn limit is irrational. 14:47 It's being circumvented by slipstream and it will just be removed because it doesn't do anything. 14:52 There's no reason for it to be there. 14:54 But, of course, then there's the controversy of this. 14:56 But we did that was one of the so I think the other things that I have patched are also like either stuff that's not important or another patch. 15:03 For example, this is totally irrelevant. 15:05 But the signet feature in Bitcoin, it has some kind of problem. 15:09 If you want to change the signet time from 10 minutes to something else. 15:12 So you need like a special patch for that. 15:15 There's no reason why a Bitcoin core will merge that at some point because it's trivial. 15:23 So that will be an upper turn category. I'm sure it'll be a whole conference, a whole summer of controversy about that. 15:29 But anyway. What I'm getting at is a bit window. It will download stuff. 15:34 We'll download Bitcoin core. It will download the BIP300 activator. 15:37 If you want, it will download whichever L2s you want. 15:41 We have a few of them, including the Zcash based privacy one and the thunder for scaling. 15:51 And it will download and launch those for you and those will open. 15:54 So the advantage of bit window versus knots is knots is its own thing. 16:01 Maintained by Luke and has its own like. It's like its own single piece of software, but by making it modular and having windows only like a cosmetic displaying thing. 16:12 So we don't touch Bitcoin core part. So, of course, it could still there's still a danger of you being told that you have received money when you haven't actually been. 16:22 Someone could hack, for example, bit window and say, oh, yeah, I sent you 200 Bitcoin. 16:28 Give me millions of dollars. And it would show up so. 16:33 But it's a very different thing, whereas, you know, we break it out into modular pieces, it's much better. 16:37 We just leave Bitcoin core where it is. We put it like in a little box and then the window lets us improve the user experience and add all kinds of stuff to it. 16:47 So we've added all kinds of things to it. There's like links to a faucet. 16:51 This idea of coin news, which I think is going to be a lot of fun. We have all kinds of cool tools in there. 16:56 We have a cash calculator. We have a block explorer. So we have tons of stuff in there. 17:01 And that's much more fun because you can be more flexible with this thing that is just a cosmetic front end. 17:07 And it's very easy for anyone to just fork a window release different version connects to the same Bitcoin core and you can change the colors or whatever you want to do. 17:16 So that's the whole bit window idea is much better than an alternative client. You have like an alternative front end. 17:23 And the second thing I have to explain is the activator is much better than waiting around for Bitcoin core to do a soft fork, which they will never do again. 17:33 A lot of people have thought that they will, but they don't. So it's taking too long. 17:38 And they you know, they just there is no way I think there's no known way to get a soft fork into Bitcoin. 17:48 If there is, we have a cat. Well, if there is a way, then I mean, I'd love to hear from someone who knows what is that way. 17:58 But I don't think there is a way anymore. So this is a way of doing the soft fork without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin. 18:06 So I think both of these things are kind of like a huge leap forward if you compare to what everyone else has been doing over the past year or so. 18:15 Like what what hasn't there been just tremendous stagnation and there's just been like nothing. Nothing has been happening. 18:23 I was going to mention this because we're so close to getting CTV, which admittedly could enable a lot of cool stuff. 18:31 And then suddenly the conversation changed to, well, we should never get any upgrade to Bitcoin until we fix the filters. 18:38 That was what happened with Luke's camp and the marketers that he hired. I think my camera got stopped by my cat. 18:50 Anyway, I was going to mention that Kyle Torpe is in the chat. He's one of the oldest journalists in the game. 19:00 He said, isn't Bitcoin going to die now, though? Seems serious. 19:07 I think it will eventually die if it if the complacency and stasis takes it so far. 19:14 I did I did write a post called The Derangements of Bitcoin. And I encourage everyone to check it out. 19:24 And I just have a giant list of like stupid things that we're doing. 19:31 And these are stupid things that everyone believes the opposite of. So the first one, number one on the list is lightning. 19:38 And it's still the biggest sacred cow of them all. And. 19:45 And but it's a terrible idea. And, you know, it's not when I say it's a terrible idea, I just mean it's time for people to stop working on it and move on. 19:53 It was a very good idea for its time. I still can't see you at all. So. Oh, there you are. 20:00 OK, got you back. Yeah, I've been told that at TabConf, which happened last week, you did this presentation about the Lightning Network. 20:11 And basically it had the largest attendance of all the presentations at the event. 20:19 We had the main stage and it was a packed room and the format was I would give it's an hour and I would give a 10 minute talk on why I think lightning is a waste of time. 20:31 And then 50 minutes for Michael Tidwell, the organizer, to pull up various people for a rotating panel on stage. 20:42 And where, you know, we could hear from here, the other side for 50, five, zero minutes. 20:48 So that's what I did. And the audience had all kinds of lightning, prominent lightning. 20:55 Developers, lightning, people working lightning companies, you know, Taz Dreiser was two rows in front of me. 21:04 So for the record, that's one of the co-authors of the lightning white paper. 21:09 Right. And so we had all these people there and, you know, I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the recording. 21:18 But a lot of people were just saying that they agreed with what I had to say or they agreed with most of it, except for one thing or. 21:28 So, of course, it'd be much better to post that when it when it was professionally recorded. 21:35 So hopefully we get the. 21:40 Like a mixed version because there's a lot of microphones and stuff, so. 21:44 I'm sure that's not that easy. And then, of course, you do a conference and then there's like a trillion videos. 21:50 So it takes a little while for them to. 21:53 Post them, I assume that's usually how it goes. 21:57 Usually that's how the live stream of Tabcom, I guess. 22:01 They sort of gave up on that. 22:04 One of them. Yeah, I think one of the stages is like if you care a lot about your privacy, it's like forbidden to film in there. 22:13 But I was on the main stage and the main stage was packed. 22:17 And yeah, I didn't really hear anyone say no one said like you're completely 100% wrong about everything you said. 22:24 What people would say was stuff like, well, lightning wasn't what we thought, but maybe it'll be interoperability later. 22:31 Whatever, like it's like. 22:34 So, but I replied to everything. So I do a solid 50 minute battle against the whole room. So I think it is entertaining. I landed a few jokes. 22:46 So. We'll see. 22:52 You also wrote an article which is called the Lightning Network Black Bill, and I think you sort of maintain it in the sense that whenever there is a horrible piece of news about something like users losing funds or one of these services failing miserably, you sort of add the link to your database. 23:13 I have been doing that. I kind of stopped a little recently, but there's a link to some other people who have compilations, including there's the telegram group. 23:22 Lightning is a key.me such lightning fantasy or something and it's called lightning's best moments. 23:27 And I don't maintain that one, but sometimes I send that one is just that is one where it's like a bulletin board where it's just a collection of. 23:37 You know, like whatever, like hundreds of like funny tweets or complaints or whatever, all these. 23:47 So yeah, that is what I did last week and that's I got sick from that trip, but it was a lot of fun. 23:55 It's also interesting that depending on who you're talking to, if you find yourself at some conference in Europe, which maybe finds itself in the bubble, like the core of the bubble, people are going to say, well, lightning works and it's so great. 24:09 Look at me. I'm paying with my Phoenix wallet or I have Zeus that's connected to my home node over Tor. 24:16 And if you point out to the many issued, they're going to say, well, it's a skill problem on your behalf. 24:21 Like you don't get how lightning works. And if you're smart, which you're not, obviously, because lightning is the most wonderful invention ever. 24:30 And the one true scaling solution and everything else is a shit coin, then you would know how to use it. 24:38 I only had 10 minutes in my talk, but I did hit on this point of, you know, the cult just they just love lightning and they won't hear a word against it and this, this is independent of how much they know about it. 24:52 So the people who have known nothing about it will show it. And also people, many of the haters of lightning also know nothing about it. 25:00 So, but it doesn't, it has nothing to do with the fact that the channels idea doesn't work because you need L1 bytes to open the channels and refresh the channels. 25:10 We don't have enough space and the HTLCs expand the size of what you would have to broadcast as L1. 25:18 And so this is just, it's not going to work, but then people try to move the goalposts and whatever, but it's better for people to watch the video because it's one thing. 25:27 Like imagine a situation where someone is telling you that lightning works, but then I'm in a huge room at TapConf, which is like the best technical conference. 25:38 I think, everyone's in the room and that's what, you know, that's how the conversation is there. 25:48 So the person that you'd be talking to, you know what I mean? 25:51 Like, if you talk to someone like Alex Gladstein, who I did the debate with or whatever, like Alex Gladstein doesn't even realize that he's like five or six tiers below Tash Dreyja. 26:01 And I'm like at the Tash Dreyja sort of tier, I mean, if I can be so bold as to say something like that, but maybe I'm one beneath. 26:11 But the point is like, you know what I mean? 26:13 Like the person who's telling you, oh, lightning's great. 26:15 I love lightning. 26:16 They, you know, they don't know what they're talking about. 26:21 Well, to be honest, Alex Gladstein is promoting Chami and eCash, which is something that's on Custodial Lightning. 26:29 They heard from someone who heard from Peter McCormack, who heard from Tash Dreyja, you know what I mean? 26:35 Like they're, they're like way outside the loop, the lightning shills. 26:41 They don't, you know, they're far away from the center. 26:45 But it's far deeper than this. 26:46 It's not just being a fan of something. 26:49 They actively give money to these projects with the Human Rights Foundation. 26:53 They do that conference every year in Oslo where they virtue signal about empowering the people living under authoritarian regimes. 27:03 Yes, I think this is a very important thing to emphasize, which is a lot of people think, oh, if we fund R&D, R&D is a good thing. 27:12 The real world, especially if you're young, you don't appreciate how ecological the world is. 27:18 And what do I mean by that? 27:19 It's not, the world's not additive. 27:22 In other words, you could say something like, well, we have a world where you can go on YouTube and watch whatever movie you want. 27:29 And then you add TikTok to teenagers' phone. 27:35 Additive would be like, it's just getting better and better. 27:39 But really, the TikTok will change, you know, the person's media diet, you know, permanently. 27:47 And it would change the type of thing that they want to watch. 27:49 And everything is an ecology of like, it's like, you know, like a pond and there's a certain amount of algae and a certain amount of lily pads. 27:57 And there's a certain amount of, you know, whatever, mosquitoes, a certain amount of everything, frogs. 28:04 So it's all in a delicate interacting balance. 28:08 And even if you fund something, you say, I want to fund Bitcoin privacy, you could very well be making Bitcoin privacy worse. 28:15 Because maybe there's three ideas, A, B, and C. 28:19 C is actually the best idea, but A gets all the funding. 28:22 Well, this is actually discouraging to see. 28:25 And I think it's an interesting point that actually at the end of the day, no amount of money can defeat superior knowledge, actually. 28:36 You need to have an idea of what to do first. 28:39 And this whole VC world is trying very hard to take the best ideas in the world, hopefully, and mainstream them. 28:49 And it does that very imperfectly. 28:51 But it's the idea is something like, we have all these ideas in the world. 28:57 And how do we figure out which should get funding? 29:01 Well, you need the idea to be good. 29:03 You know what I mean? 29:03 If you fund a bad idea, like the, what is it called, the Maginot Line in France, they funded this idea. 29:11 Maybe you can explain it better than I can, but France basically dug a giant concrete trench between them and Germany and filled it with like machine guns and stuff to stop the German invasion. 29:23 But this didn't make any difference because Germany had the, you know, the Blitzkrieg, had planes that flew over and it invaded through the Netherlands and Belgium, et cetera. 29:37 So it ended up not mattering, but, you know, it could be an expensive project and you could fund it and you think I'm funding defense, but actually you're not funding anything. 29:47 You may be making defense worse. 29:48 It may have been better if you did nothing at all. 29:50 So the real world is a tricky place. 29:52 And yeah, of course. 29:55 I think a lot of the funding into Lightning has made Bitcoin worse unintentionally, but of course, as we have a famous phrase in English, maybe you also have it about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. 30:10 So like a good intention is worth not very much. 30:16 Yeah, I was going to ask you some questions. 30:18 There's someone in the chat who's asking about the Drivechains activation on Litecoin. 30:24 That was part of the conversation at one point. 30:26 They seem to want it much more this year than they did last year. 30:30 There seems to be more of a consensus, but is it going anywhere? 30:33 Is anything really happening? 30:36 That's a good point. 30:37 Let me explain what we have been doing. 30:39 So we have been progressively increasing the realism of our tests. 30:44 So at first we had just software that worked, which is already more than most people have. 30:50 And that's already more than Lightning can have for 8 billion people ever. 30:54 So but what I mean by that is we turn it on on our own computer. 31:00 You run it in reg test mode or something. 31:04 It's just you and it just works. 31:06 But then we progressed to having the Signet network is a common network that everyone can join and has coins and has a faucet. 31:16 The coins are all fake coins, don't have any value. 31:18 But what we now have is, as I mentioned, we have the Forknet, which is extremely realistic test of with lots and lots of transactions and the chaos of the real Bitcoin blocks and the real Bitcoin network. 31:33 And all these these blocks that are filled with. 31:38 Wacky scripts, operator and whatever. 31:41 So we that's currently where we are. 31:46 I think the next good test would be to use the activator. 31:52 To activate a BIP300 on test net for is my that's where I think the next. 32:00 Dot would be. 32:02 That would be a good test, and I think right after that, like coin would be the next stop. 32:10 I haven't put I didn't invent, as I've said many times, I didn't invent the 300 to make like like coin the success or help like coin, like defeat Bitcoin and take over as the super coin that has to do everything. 32:23 And so I wasn't that's not what I had in mind, so I don't I don't focus on that. 32:28 But nonetheless, I'm happy to help anyone who likes the idea and to do it. 32:34 And it should have been. 32:37 There is a like a little telegram chat where I have been trying to give instructions like coin doesn't use up not five for anything. 32:44 It also has ZMQ, so it should be able to do like all these things. 32:49 We just need to. 32:52 Line it up and turn it on and then see what breaks and then fix that and do that until it stops breaking, so unlike coin. 33:02 And so I think it's it's quite it's quite close and it has. 33:08 In the situation, like what people are, it's very different than what people are used to, so what you're used to is pull requests, debate, blah, blah, blah. 33:18 Speedy trial, maybe miners activate this a few months later. 33:24 With the activator, it's very different. 33:26 The activator is just does it work? 33:28 Yes, just 51 percent hash rate. 33:31 Run it. They can start or stop running at any time. 33:34 So this thing is a little bit more like you prepare, you prepare, you prepare and then. 33:40 Bang, it's just on. 33:42 So this is a little bit more of a surprise attack type of a situation, so I think it could it's definitely it's theoretically possible that someone could could post, you know, tomorrow and say. 33:56 I downloaded I looked at what Paul did with the 300 activator and window and I hacked on it with AI overnight and now we can activate it on like coin. 34:08 And then if the miners, the mining people who mine like going out to see. 34:17 They could run it that day and then it could just be activated within less than 24 hours, so that's theoretically possible. 34:23 So the bottleneck is it's a very different type of bottleneck than what people are used to, because it's a separate thing. 34:28 It doesn't interfere with what. 34:29 The pull requests and the review process of like going. 34:35 Or. 34:37 Anything else they're doing over there, the window extension block, et cetera. 34:46 Funny thought, but those coin is also merged mine with like coin and it's possible for those coins also activate the 300. 34:54 It is, and that would be much more memable. 34:59 You could actually get the attention of Elon Musk, who has been talking about this like four years ago, but in terms of on chain scaling, yes, side to doge. 35:12 Or doge car could be like a dog with its head out the window of the car, you know how they like to do that, I don't know, I think the first thing to activate Drivechains is actually a bit more memable. 35:25 Doge right through. 35:27 Although they use the pre 300 activator version, there was a fork of Bitcoin 1699. 35:35 And they basically like fork didn't like changed cosmetically the front, so but that was that old version has a special place in my heart, so to speak, because it was much. 35:47 It was just more fun to just hack on Bitcoin core, although I knew that no one would go for this, no one is going to want to download. 35:55 Like something where it's like Bitcoin core, and I just made like a long list of changes just for the fun of it, that looks very suspicious, it looks like a dozen people run Bitcoin not today. 36:05 That's my point is that those not people realize that not fans, the lay people, the customers, I don't think they realize what a bad idea that is. 36:16 It's not a good idea. 36:17 But you're right that maybe I could have had a market with extremely unsophisticated and foolish people. 36:27 But yeah, maybe no one would care about it being, you know, 1699. 36:31 And there's old security patches, CVS, and so forth. 36:34 So that I knew that I was like, never gonna push that as the serious thing. 36:40 But yeah, Skydoge, where I just did nothing. 36:43 Skydoge is an altcoin that launched with my idea, and they had fun with it. 36:48 That's what's important. 36:50 I did think about this today that basically, you could do the same as Luke Dashjr. 36:55 But you're much more ethical and more methodical in the way that the window is better than not, because Bitwindow, it downloads the real Bitcoin core. 37:05 And just kind of like keeps it in like a little box and like a little zone. 37:09 And but yet you have, you can do all this stuff. 37:11 And with Bitwindow, you could change if you wanted to change the relay policy, all that is silly. 37:14 Anyway, I can give you, I can give you like, my views on mining are completely different than everyone's, but they're way better. 37:27 So the whole neglect of pools is a mistake, because if you're not, first of all, you have to bite the bullet on do you want pools or not? 37:36 If you don't want pools, then there can only be like so many miners and they all have to be big. 37:41 So this is, that's a horrible idea. 37:43 The pools are what save the small miners and make it easy for it lower the barrier to entry, they increase the competition. 37:52 And the question is, now that you have these pools, what do you do? 37:55 Are you beholden to 15 pools? 37:57 Well, the answer is very easy. 37:58 You just watch the pools, you know, somebody monitoring the pools. 38:02 And if, you know, enough of them misbehave, you just launch a new pool, or you just have the other pools shape up as a result. 38:10 If 100% of the hash rate, if all the pools are doing something wrong, you just disconnect and start your own pool and you use the peer to peer network to advertise it. 38:22 And you will then attract the hashes because it's way easier to just point your hash at a different pool than it is to do the reverse where the pool wants to acquire like five extra hash worth of ASIC equipment and electrical. 38:41 That's way harder than for the someone who already has that to just point it at a different IP address on the internet. 38:48 It's night and day. 38:52 So, you know, there's no problem with there being pools and there's no problem with there being, you know, 15. 38:57 These are just mathematical. 38:59 These are just equations related to the variance. 39:04 And all that's nonsense. 39:05 Everyone complaining about pools, everyone pushing Stratum V2, everyone pushing Datum. 39:11 Those are all bad ideas. 39:13 They all make it worse. 39:14 It's good for the pools to, one reason why we need few pools is a requirement and it's superior is because the pools then can have a brand and the brand is like a hostage that you can execute. 39:28 You can say, do you better behave well, Luxor or whatever, Foundry, you know, or we'll pull the trigger and your brand will be dead. 39:37 But as long as you do the right thing, everyone will say, oh, yeah, you should use Foundry. 39:42 They're the biggest. 39:42 They're really good. 39:43 They have these features. 39:45 And now you can eke out your little fee. 39:48 So you charge a fee, tiny fee, which is what they all do, but they behave themselves and that is the deal. 39:55 And that's the game theory of the situation. 39:58 It's a perfect equilibrium and there's no reason for anyone to worry about it at all. 40:02 We don't want a situation that what Luke wants is actually the bad outcome. 40:06 He wants like a kind of a communist garden where no one is, no one is accountable. 40:15 So he wants more representation, but worse accountability. 40:18 The brand is accountable. 40:21 They say, oh, anything that threatens the brand, Mike Pollier at Foundry is going to be on top of it to kick it out. 40:29 So anything inaction, a bad action, laziness, complacency, anything that is bad about the pool, they will fix it because this is how they get their money by maintaining the brand. 40:46 But of course, you can't have a brand if there's like 10,000 miners. 40:53 So the whole thing is not, it's all nonsense. 40:55 Everyone's beliefs on mining are nonsense. 40:57 So what this also means though, that everyone's beliefs on the transaction relay are also nonsense, because if you actually live in the world that I would prefer where you have 15 pools, then everyone would just submit. 41:08 They either submit to the pool directly or they submit to some kind of like remailer, some Adam back remailer thing to like, so, cause they don't want to. 41:19 And they'll just say, I got this transaction from someone else and they'll give it to a third party. 41:24 And then that person will forward it to the mine. 41:25 The miners will double those up because each of those transactions is worth the fee revenue. 41:31 So the whole thing is absurd and everyone, you know, I just disagree with everyone that everyone is just as terrible ideas, no offense to them, but Luke's ideas are even worse than the core ideas. 41:44 So in this particular issue, everyone is slowly starting to realize that, I think. 41:49 And that's also why they have resorted to this emotional manipulation and essentially blackmail. 41:55 And essentially it's basically a coercive type argument. 41:58 Like we will associate you with these horrible words, you know, and concepts will associate with you or will imply that you, as I was saying with Ron Paul earlier with the use fighting for drug legalization. 42:13 We'll associate you with this unless you just drop the issue. 42:17 So they extract, they claim a special privilege and they extract it like at gunpoint and by force, maybe not literally. 42:24 But so, yeah, and then that's because they have terrible arguments and they know they're I think they know they are losing. 42:33 Remember, the tangible claim made by Luke was that. 42:37 V30 will come out and then Bitcoin will be destroyed, so. 42:42 Where, you know, as I said when I was interviewed by Pete Rizzo, like if there was a prediction market on that, we know that it would be like. 42:49 How likely is I mean, essentially, there is, because the market price of Bitcoin is the likelihood that it will be destroyed if you just divide it by what it was before a certain event was announced to see what I mean, we should be crashing like ninety nine percent towards zero dollars for a coin, but of course we're not so because it's nonsense, the whole thing's ridiculous, obviously. 43:11 Yeah, but where I was hinting at is that basically you also raised funding to start a company and build the project that you always wanted to, just like Luke, but the approaches that you have chosen are very different. 43:25 What he did was to surround himself with very toxic, but ultimately viral marketers. 43:34 Your approach was to just poke fun at Bitcoin Core and basically have memes on the LayerTwo Labs page. 43:42 But I would argue that they're pretty so sometimes they're borderline cringe, but most of the times they're tasteful. 43:51 And I do appreciate, especially, for example, when there was the script reading with the two Brazilian models of the conversation between Luke Dashjr and Pierre Rochard. 44:01 That was a masterpiece. 44:03 Yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed that. 44:05 I was thinking kind of like, well, everyone's taking themselves too seriously. 44:09 So how can we just like. 44:11 Shine a light on. 44:13 How silly this is, and I thought that would be. 44:16 That would be fun. 44:18 Our marketing guy is afraid to do anything else because. 44:26 He liked that one so much. 44:28 So I was like, we gotta do something else and he's like, no, I. 44:33 Can't try again unless. 44:36 I know it'll be good so. 44:39 That's a mistake, but whatever we'll get on that we'll get on that and do another funny thing very soon. 44:48 Yeah, but it's funny while Luke chooses desperation and kind of like, well, it's kind of weird. 44:54 I guess no one can tell from the outside. 44:56 Maybe it looks exactly the same. 44:57 It's kind of like just no one knows what to do. 44:59 And these are all like fake businesses or something. 45:01 I don't think that's the case. 45:03 Well, Luke is a very interesting guy because he is very smart. 45:08 He has a lot of knowledge. 45:10 He's an expert on Bitcoin. 45:13 I consider myself to also be an expert on Bitcoin liar. 45:17 And yeah, and then he has this certainty. 45:25 And yeah, well, this is what happens. 45:31 You know, a scientific worldview is like plagued with doubt all the time and the religious worldview, everything's just black and white. 45:38 And it's an easier way to live with certainty, right? 45:42 It's not doubt. 45:43 You always think that, you know, and there's an answer to everything. 45:47 And a lot of people prefer it. 45:49 A lot of people would rather just I mean, this does describe there are, you know. 45:56 It's hard to list them all, but like, you know, some people really want to follow a leader. 46:02 I talked to someone who back in the Barack Obama era when he was first running for office and. 46:09 My friend's mother, and she was like, I just really want to believe in him so much. 46:14 And I was like, OK. 46:16 So people don't want I think the burden of responsibility falls heavily on people, a lot of people, they don't want to be blamed. 46:22 They don't want to be responsible. 46:24 And and so they prefer to just outsource it to someone else. 46:28 So like a book or like an ideology, they don't want to figure it out themselves. 46:33 And I think this may be a very rational thing. 46:36 I mean, if you think about it, if you believe that something like IQ is real. 46:40 And then there's all these people who are like really, really smart and you are not quite 46:45 as smart as them. Well, maybe it is too difficult for you to actually decide. 46:50 Every issue that comes across the table, am I going to form my own opinion on this? 46:54 Maybe I'll just maybe I'll just pick someone and I'll just defer to them. 46:58 Well, you don't have to attack me like that, Paul. 47:02 Well, this is another phenomenon about what experts versus elites. 47:08 So the experts are the people who actually know, but the elites are who everyone listens to. 47:12 And the question is, why are these two groups of people so different all the time? 47:17 And often there is like this show and Bitcoin Uncensored, I think are both examples of 47:21 evading the elite world and going to the real expert world. 47:28 But most people want to have Bill Maher give, you know, he's a comedian in the United 47:32 States and has a TV show. 47:34 He's got to give his opinion on everything, even though there's no way he could be an 47:37 expert on. You know, Russia and Ukraine, Israel versus Hamas, there's no way he could be 47:45 an expert on all these things, but but people want to hear his take, and this is just 47:49 because. The world needs someone to, like. 47:54 Sort out. 47:57 All the reactions and things that communicate them, and I don't know, but, yeah, I 48:02 think. Don't have that much time today, but but if people would want to test the 48:10 software, that would help, and I think it's it should be it should work on all three 48:16 operating systems, although I have to renew the. 48:21 The Apple developer agreement, they always do this, then I have to sign in and do it, 48:25 but I'll take five seconds, but every now and then, for those of you who are into 48:28 software. You have to like. 48:33 Going to Apple and there's a giant list of things and you don't you don't read any of it 48:37 and you just click to do that, and I think Windows like window, you know, I used to I 48:41 really liked. Windows 98, I've heard that I heard recently that everyone is now 48:47 reinstalling Windows 7. 48:50 Which. I mean, God protect those people. 48:56 And because. 48:59 I have been so nice and stable, it was everything that XP was with some of the 49:04 graphics of Vista, but without the issues of Vista. 49:09 Yeah, I completely agree. 49:11 And so. And and then, you know, you did hear rumors like Windows 11 is going to 49:17 screenshot your computer every 10 seconds or something. 49:19 I think that was ended up being fake, but but yeah, it's just horrible. 49:23 I was a longtime Windows user. 49:25 I really like, you know, I like Ubuntu. 49:28 Ubuntu is very good on Linux and because I just like the idea that they are they're 49:35 handholding the. The visual experience, of course, some people really love their the 49:41 command line people, obviously they have their own like weird stuff, but a longtime 49:46 Ubuntu user for like whatever, more than 15 years or something. 49:51 I remember back when, well, I won't bore everyone, but Ubuntu was a lot harder to 49:56 use around like. 49:58 It was a lot harder to use around like around like 2012 to 2014, it started getting a lot easier and they would. 50:05 They started at least telling new people how to open the terminal, they had like the keyboard shortcuts, things show up. 50:10 But anyway, huge Windows user from, you know, the era of whatever Windows 95, whatever before. 50:18 3.1, did you use that? 50:20 I think, yeah, the earliest. The first computer I had that I actually used was a Macintosh Quadra 605. 50:30 So look that up. 50:32 And I could play, you could play games on it. You could play like my parents got me like Puck Puck Goes on the Parade. It's like a kid's game. I played Myst on it. I played a Super Maze Wars 3D. It's like a networking game where you're like a giant polygon and you like shoot at people. 50:50 And Diablo, I think, I don't remember. I guess maybe that wasn't Diablo 1, but there was like, I played like a Seventh Guest, which was like terrifying when you were a child. 51:03 These are all these games I played. I had a great time. 51:06 But I have to say that the Quadra 605 looks very slick. My first computer was an Oliveri that was running Windows 95. 51:16 I think it had like 166 megahertz Pentium 1 processor and 16 megabytes of RAM. 51:24 No sound card. Actually, back in the day, sound cards were sort of like the graphics cards of today. If you had proper sound, you needed to be a rich kid. 51:34 I completely agree. I remember this a lot where it was like, 51:39 this is the idea that there would even be something as a sound card. I remember when that like phased out at like 2008 or something, where it was like, even if you were doing like, you had like Sonic Acid Music Foundry, and 51:56 you had like all this stuff, like you could just do it on a normal computer. But I remember like, if you wanted like the MIDI cable to connect, you had to buy like $175 sound card. Everything was so expensive. 52:09 But yeah, so my first one, but yeah, long time user of all that was just the point is to say that Windows used to just be really fun to use. 52:16 Everything, even like the gray style, it was like really easy on the eyes, and it was really easy to tell like what you could click on. 52:24 And everything sucks now. I just can't stand it. It's horrible. So, and it's very bad for anyone who's trying to learn how a computer works. So that was 52:34 people in the past, they sort of, you know, did like a bite the bullet situation where they're like, we're going to force, we need the user to understand like how a file system works. 52:43 How like, like what, why there is a control panel and how to find it. The stuff would be breaking constantly in the computer, you'd have to go and fix it. 52:52 Now, a lot of stuff works. So they just try to hide it. They try to hide the file system now, which is infuriating. You don't know where your files are. When you're younger, you know, you had to take because you have hard drive crash, you lose all your files. 53:05 Luckily, I didn't have too many problems with that. But of course, everyone back then had some kind of, you're writing, you're writing the paper in Microsoft Word, and the computer would shut off, and then you'd have to turn it on. First of all, the computer would take like six minutes to turn on back then. Then you open it up and it'd be like, oh, like you lost like 53:26 like a page and a half because you didn't save yet I hit control s older people that was a reflex. Yeah. And there are even mean early do that all the time. I still do it too. Yeah, there was like memes about like Jesus saves, dot dot dot after every paragraph or something. They were like old memes, like the first memes keyboard cat. We're just talking about nothing now. But I mean, I'm just well under the weather. So we can't we can't do that. 53:56 Oh, it's fine. I gotta give a shout out to some people in the chat who are here. Yes. There's Tom Dwyer, who says we'll definitely listen to this podcast, but I can't hang out just wanted to say hey, hope to find the video of Paul's tab comp presentation to heart emoji. Yeah. There's also Winston Alexander, who says explain in layman's terms, the readers digest version of what is a Drivechain and why does Bitcoin need it? 54:27 The Drivechain is a solution to the problem of altcoins. So you either live in a world where Bitcoin core is the only software and the only chain, and it has to be infallible and perfect. And it somehow has to scale to 8 billion users. 54:43 But right now we have a world of Bitcoin core, you have ETH, you have Solana, you have base, you have all this stuff. And some of it is very fringe. 54:52 And it won't work. Some of it is 54:55 pushing the envelope on when a full node costs. 54:59 And in that way, it is much worse. But you have all these other ideas, you know, the Zcash privacy, Ethereum EVM. So you have all this creativity, all this innovation. And the question is, do you want that to be outside the Bitcoin world? And so it's always creating an altcoin or a threat to Bitcoin? Or do you just want to have it all as these L2s that compete? 55:55 I think your video is frozen and your audio too. Just a second. It might be an OBS kind of issue. 56:07 Let's try again. Make some small changes to this and then. 56:14 Okay, you're back. 56:16 I'm back. Okay. I could hear you the whole time. So I don't think it was in that world. 56:20 Me too. But it was an OBS bug, I think. 56:22 Okay. What was the last thing you think anyone heard? 56:24 So you're talking about the altcoins. And the fact that, yeah, it was basically the beginning of your speech about Drivechains. 56:36 Oh, okay. 56:39 Okay, well, there's a few different ways of looking at it. One is why have an altcoin like Zcash, where it has this privacy technology, when you can have just an L2 that does exactly that with no altcoin part. 56:57 It's just you send Bitcoin there and now you have privacy. 56:59 A different way of looking at it is that it's a version of the Lightning Network that actually works. 57:04 So if you've been sold that the Lightning Network is good, which most people believe, including the Drivechain skeptics, then if you think that that's a good idea, well, this is just a version of that that actually works. 57:21 We had an actual test over the summer and we had a script that simulates something like 50% of what I project to be the transaction volume of the earth in the year 2030, which is we're talking trillions of transactions per year. 57:38 And we simulated that rate of having something like 14 or 15 L2s each do 15 blocks of 960 megabytes worth of transactions. 57:48 And we have a script that actually makes all these transactions and has the blocks connect and validate and so forth. 57:56 And it's very preliminary, but we were able to do that this summer. 58:03 So this is something that doesn't hit this scaling ceiling. 58:05 And scaling is very important in software. 58:07 If something just can't get past the scale ceiling, then it will stop working as soon as it hits that number of users. 58:13 And that's exactly what happened with Lightning. 58:15 Once the ordinal users showed up of L1, it crowded out Lightning, caused Lightning to suck. 58:21 So these are different ways of looking at it. 58:23 It's a version of the Lightning Network that actually works if you've been drinking the Lightning Kool-Aid. 58:30 Another way is just like, what do we do about innovation? 58:34 People come up with new ideas all the time. 58:36 There was a time before anyone had heard of Bitcoin. 58:40 So it's possible to go from zero Bitcoin ideas to one. 58:44 We can now go from zero to one on some even better idea. 58:48 If we have a Drivechain L2, this just becomes an L2 and it just adds to Bitcoin's strength. 58:54 But if we don't, then those people will launch an altcoin. 58:59 I think it's a matter of life or death. 59:01 I think reaching 8 billion users or having a credible path or a credible orientation towards that is a matter of life or death. 59:15 I think it's also worth mentioning that your proposal compared to all the other L2s is the only one that pays the miners guaranteed for every transaction. 59:26 In the case of ZK Rollups, they just embed data. 59:28 They use Bitcoin as a data availability layer and they're going to fill the blocks with ZK proofs. 59:34 But they don't pay the miners for every transaction that happens on their layer. 59:38 In the case of Drivechains, the miners are collecting fees for everything, 59:42 which guarantees a more healthy and sustainable hash rate for Bitcoin. 59:49 Yeah, that's exactly right. 59:51 I gave a talk in November of last year on this topic about the non-mined L2s I think have no future. 59:57 And I wrote an op-ed in Blockspace that they published yesterday about this. 1:00:05 You have to imagine a situation where something else out there does is what everyone transacts on. 1:00:11 So they have Bitcoin transactions on some other L2 or maybe it's Visa or maybe it's whatever. 1:00:18 They're making a huge amount of money. 1:00:20 It's just $0.10 on every transaction. 1:00:22 I was saying $9 trillion, I think, in 2022. 1:00:26 So I have some tiny study on that, like a little bit of math. 1:00:30 $9 trillion transactions a year, $0.10 is $900 billion a year. 1:00:34 It's a huge amount of money. 1:00:36 And it grows 6.2% a year, according to what I projected. 1:00:40 So if you have a situation where someone else is earning all this money and the L1 miners are not, that is unstable. 1:00:47 And it will lead to vertical integration, Lightning, Foundry, LSP. 1:00:51 They were going to do that, I think, but then they realized Lightning is a terrible idea. 1:00:55 So it's not even worth it. 1:00:57 So this is another thing about – so there are actually quite a few things. 1:01:01 We want to live in a world where the miners are loyal to the users. 1:01:07 And we have a healthy feedback loop where people are using the software, complaining about when it doesn't work and being happy when it works. 1:01:16 The miners are making tons of money from actual end users. 1:01:20 We don't want – when people pump the stock price – it's like you work at Theranos and you pump the stock price. 1:01:24 You're selling the stock price as your product. 1:01:28 But we don't want that. 1:01:30 That's like the market price of Bitcoin. 1:01:32 It's healthier if people pump the total transaction fees paid on all networks, L1 and L2. 1:01:38 So yeah, that's yet another reason. 1:01:43 There's actually quite a few reasons. 1:01:47 I mean, yeah, another reason still is that Drivechain is like this minimally – is an optional, opt-in, ignorable soft fork that repurposes OP_NOP5, which is not being used for anything, and which Satoshi put in. 1:02:03 He put in the OpNops specifically for this purpose so that people could use them later. 1:02:08 And it's kind of like a demonstration that Bitcoin isn't dead in a way among other things because it's like if something like this can't gain traction, then it's definitely time to radically rethink, I think, the future of Bitcoin. 1:02:28 This is my opinion because it's like literally no – it's literally asking almost nothing. 1:02:35 So it's kind of like a demo. 1:02:37 It's kind of like if you – maybe you are kind of like – you're thinking about going to a party, and someone like unbelievably famous, like a movie star, Tom Cruise, is trying to get into the party. 1:02:53 And he says he'll give everyone $1,000, and they're like, no, get out of here. 1:02:59 And then you show up to the party, and there's only like three people there. 1:03:01 And you're kind of like, oh my god, like I have to get out of here. 1:03:06 So I think there's actually a lot of things. 1:03:08 People should read my Derangements of Bitcoin post if they want to learn more about what I think and how I disagree with the prevailing wisdom often. 1:03:24 And we'll see how many of those things end up being totally vindicated and vindicated many times. 1:03:29 I've been in Bitcoin for a long time. 1:03:35 But yeah, that's a – it's a pretty big question to answer. 1:03:39 Do we have any more comments or questions or other thoughts? 1:03:43 Yeah, we have someone who keeps commenting in the chat, Krev23. 1:03:47 He's a regular on the show. 1:03:50 And he does say that layer 2s are a bad idea. 1:03:52 And he believes that if anything, there should be more altcoins and people should be free to choose whatever network they find most useful. 1:04:00 And it's all about competition, not – 1:04:04 I agree with that. 1:04:06 But I think I don't agree with all of that. 1:04:08 Competition is certainly – I did write a recent post about competition and the one true god. 1:04:14 And it's very important. 1:04:16 Competition is the secret sauce. 1:04:18 However, the altcoins actually represent a lack of competition because the altcoin is held back by the need to attract – 1:04:28 the altcoin is stigmatized by its break from the interoperable-like coin. 1:04:43 It's hard to explain, but I'm going to try to explain it because it's important. 1:04:49 And imagine a world where everyone speaks English and you want to invent a new language and you say it's better. 1:04:59 There's a huge cost to this. 1:05:03 You need to express a new idea in your new language. 1:05:05 There's a huge cost. 1:05:08 People have said – there are many things. 1:05:10 There's a certain Polish playwright where they say it's untranslatable. 1:05:12 You have to see it in Polish and you have to know Polish to understand it. 1:05:18 And people have said similar things about the Koran. 1:05:20 It has to be read in Arabic and you can't actually translate it. 1:05:24 Other things like that have been said. 1:05:26 So that's an idea of a situation where you need – it's all happening. 1:05:34 But for most people, you should just come up with your own new word. 1:05:37 You have to work within the English language. 1:05:39 Just pitch your new word. 1:05:41 Say something that's Kafkaesque or say something that's whatever. 1:05:43 Just come up with your new word and leave it at that and say I'm going to tweet you. 1:05:51 I'm going to Xerox a copy of the files or hand me a Kleenex. 1:05:57 And creating a whole new language makes it so that it's too hard for people to understand and engage with you communication-wise. 1:06:06 And it makes it so that you – even if you had a really good idea, it won't be expressed. 1:06:14 It is weighed down by the cost of switching. 1:06:16 So competition is the highest when people can easily switch. 1:06:20 It's kind of like say you're at a food court and they have a Chinese restaurant and they have a pizza restaurant. 1:06:24 And if you can just walk back and forth and they both – both those places take Visa maybe or they both take Bitcoin. 1:06:33 And they both take U.S. dollars. 1:06:35 They both speak English there. 1:06:37 And they're in the same food court. 1:06:39 Well, it's a different story than if you have a food court with all this stuff and then if you want to have Chinese food, you have to like run across a minefield in a war zone to get there. 1:06:51 That's increasing the cost of switching. 1:06:55 And that is bad for competition. 1:06:57 It could be really good Chinese food and people still wouldn't want to. 1:07:02 So the altcoins represent a regression. 1:07:04 They're going the wrong way and they are not – they are not – so I don't know. 1:07:12 If that person has a strong – did they reply to my rant just now? 1:07:16 They really think that. 1:07:18 I don't agree that this is not – this is a case where money has extremely strong network effects. 1:07:22 Software has strong network effects. 1:07:24 You're very likely to have all your money stolen from you by bad software. 1:07:29 So you want to – again, you want to have these brands, a brand of reliability such as Bitcoin Core more or less. 1:07:37 Bitcoin Core won't – it's unlikely that your funds will be stolen. 1:07:39 They're just very lazy. 1:07:41 So that's the downside of Bitcoin Core. 1:07:43 And they have a very high opinion of themselves, which is fine. 1:07:47 But it is not – so I don't know. 1:07:53 Is that person reacting to what I have to say? 1:07:56 But it's not – the L2 is where it's – you can switch. 1:08:00 You have the same 0.01 Bitcoin and you can move it around. 1:08:04 That's like walking across the food court. 1:08:08 You can say, well, yesterday I had fast block times. 1:08:12 Today I want EVM. 1:08:14 Tomorrow I want ZK-SNARK privacy. 1:08:16 But you don't have to give up too much. 1:08:18 Now it's too much. 1:08:20 You give up. 1:08:22 You switch to an altcoin. 1:08:25 That's not good for anyone. 1:08:27 So I hope that's – my point of view is that I disagree with that person. 1:08:31 He did not directly address what you said, but he kept saying that he hasn't used Bitcoin since 2017. 1:08:37 And he believes Litecoin is a much better version of Bitcoin. 1:08:41 Anyway, I also have two major questions for you and also need to plug some sponsors, which includes LayerTwo Labs, because it's part of the deal. 1:08:54 So I'll tell you about the questions so I tease the audience and also give you some time to think. 1:09:00 And then I'll show the sponsors and then we get to the conversation. 1:09:04 The first question that I have for you is why did you choose Zcash for the fungibility sidechain? 1:09:10 The second question that I have for you is did you look into the DAGs, which are a completely different concept. 1:09:19 They're similar to blockchains, but they're optimized for scalability. 1:09:23 I think the best examples are Caspa and something that's called Quai. 1:09:27 And I did interview the people. 1:09:29 It's radically different from what I'm used to. 1:09:33 But I do think it's interesting and it sort of stands apart from the rest of the crowd, which is mainly just a clone or a fork of Bitcoin with certain optimizations. 1:09:46 These are complete rewrites, which I think are this generation's MimbleWimble, basically. 1:09:54 And before I let you answer these two questions, LayerTwo Labs. 1:09:58 Go to LayerTwoLabs.com slash download. 1:10:02 Get the software. 1:10:04 Try whatever sidechain you prefer. 1:10:06 Try the prediction market. 1:10:09 Try everything else that you find in there and join the Telegram chat, which is called Drivechain Talk, where people will happily send you some testnet coins. 1:10:17 So that you can send and basically join this community of people who talk about this exciting breakthrough in terms of scaling Bitcoin and making the mining revenue sustainable. 1:10:30 Also check out Sideshift, which coincidentally happens to be one of the financiers. 1:10:38 Is that a correct word? 1:10:40 Investors in LayerTwo Labs? 1:10:42 Related, yes. 1:10:44 Very nice guys. 1:10:46 If someone pays you in stablecoins or whatever, don't hold on to that. 1:10:50 First of all, because we're in a bull market. 1:10:53 Secondly, because they're censorship friendly and you never know when you receive something that's not going to be spendable in a few months. 1:11:01 You can swap it for BTC. 1:11:03 You can swap it for LTC. 1:11:05 You can swap it for whatever it is that you like or want, including the Trump token. 1:11:09 Unfortunately, they don't have Zcash, which I sort of like lately, but I think is in a very difficult situation from a regulatory point of view. 1:11:22 Anyway, Sideshift.ai. 1:11:24 Really cool, fast, good liquidity, low fees. 1:11:28 Not available in the US, unfortunately. 1:11:30 Once again, because of regulations. 1:11:32 But if you really want to use it, you'll find workarounds. 1:11:36 There's also Bitcoin.com news, which honestly has the best or at least the broadest coverage of topics that you can find. 1:11:47 If you're interested to see what's happening in other markets, which aren't necessarily even crypto. 1:11:51 They can be gold or other commodity markets. 1:11:55 They tend to cover that. 1:11:57 And I do like that they're less political than Bitcoin Magazine. 1:12:01 And they're also less centered around startups and VC funded stuff than Coindesk. 1:12:07 I think they strike sort of a balance in the middle. 1:12:11 And now they're orange. 1:12:14 Now, when you look at their website, it's not green anymore. 1:12:16 They don't say that Bitcoin is the slow one that has high fees and you should be using Bitcoin Cash. 1:12:20 They gave up on that gimmick. 1:12:24 They sort of followed the market trend. 1:12:26 And right now, Bitcoin.com is what many people wished it would be like eight years ago. 1:12:32 And also, noones.com, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace for the global south. 1:12:39 Do you know Ray Yousef, formerly of Paxful? 1:12:43 I do, yes. 1:12:45 He's like this WWE character who speaks about fighting the forces of evil and onboarding the lines of the global south and stuff like that. 1:12:55 Basically, if you're using his new exchange, which is called noones, which is N-O-O-N-E-S. 1:13:04 You're giving liquidity to some Nigerian or some Venezuelan or someone from the Middle East who really needs to use that to hustle and increase adoption. 1:13:14 And I think it's a nice concept. 1:13:16 What Ray Yousef calls it is that everyone gets a seat at the table and everyone eats. 1:13:20 And I love it. 1:13:22 It's really cool. 1:13:24 Check it out. 1:13:26 It's N-O-O-N-E-S.com. 1:13:28 And I'm done plugging sponsors in this episode. 1:13:30 Thank you very much for sitting through my ads. 1:13:33 And now, Paul, let's tackle the questions in whichever order you prefer. 1:13:37 Yeah, we don't have the prediction market L2, which is my highly ambitious design for a prediction market where everything, including the oracle, is decentral, peer-to-peer. 1:13:47 And there's no permanent identities. 1:13:52 This is my extremely ambitious project, which later became – it's very old, from 2012. 1:13:58 And it later became like ArgoGnosis and even was partially inspired by Polymarket and these other things that are famous today. 1:14:06 I was rewriting it in Rust, and it's not quite – that one is not quite user – it doesn't have like buttons that you can click. 1:14:17 So you cannot use that yet, although you can see – I'll send people to GitHub if they are interested in checking that out. 1:14:25 I got to mention that, Paul, because you are the prediction market OG. 1:14:29 You're the first one who pushed it in the context of Bitcoin. 1:14:33 That's right. 1:14:35 You're not the one who reaped basically the fruits of your labor. 1:14:37 So maybe we can come back next week when I'm less sick and I can tell you the long story about that. 1:14:46 But partly this is by design. 1:14:48 I knew that it would be hell, and I knew that like it's hell because you have to do the oracle. 1:14:56 You have to resolve the question somehow. 1:14:58 People are going to complain, like they did with Zelensky wearing a suit or whatever. 1:15:02 And then it's like all the fun of running a large exchange because everyone's money is like there in the system, so anyone can hack it and steal everyone's money. So not fun at all. 1:15:15 And then of course every regulator, everyone would hate it. I knew. When the FBI took Mr. Shane's phone, the founder of Polymarket, they raided his New York apartment and took his cell phone. 1:15:34 That was kind of like, I was like, oh, yeah, there you go. Welcome to prediction market. So he got raided, but then he got all of the credit. So as far as I'm concerned, that's like a fair trade or whatever. 1:15:51 I think who knows what would have happened. I would love to know. I have no idea, and I've avoided discussing this with anyone who I think might know. But maybe I should ask because I'm dying. I'm very curious to know what people think would have happened to Polymarket if Hamel had won. 1:16:08 I have no idea. Maybe it makes no difference, but also I think it could have made a huge difference. People could be in trouble, in prison, whatever. But I'm very curious to know that. 1:16:22 But yeah, I do know a lot about prediction markets. Some say the most, but we can go into that. And of course, huge credit to the great Robin Hanson, professor at George Mason University and the great economist. 1:16:46 And he's the real – he's prediction market OG, although he always disliked the blockchain until recently. So I tried to tell him this blockchain thing is going to be big prediction markets. He was skeptical more than 10 years ago. 1:17:11 But he's great. Yeah, if you can ever interview him, he is incredible. 1:17:16 If you could connect me to him, I would be honored. 1:17:19 Yeah, he's great. So these other questions about Zcash versus something else. The question is compared to what? So the answer would be Monero or whatever, I suppose. 1:17:32 Well, I sold my XMR and I said I'm not going to mention the name again, so I'll call it Romero. 1:17:39 Romero. 1:17:40 Romero. 1:17:41 Zcashulet. 1:17:43 Zerocash, that's where it started. 2014. It was supposed to be a soft fork on Bitcoin to improve the privacy. Never happened. Bitcoiners forgot about it. 1:17:56 Yeah, things stay the same. Things rhyme, but they stay the same. And then now we have the sour grapes. People say, oh, we never – Bitcoin never wanted that. 1:18:08 And you have Michael Saylor killing deals secretly and then lying about it. Lying by omission, certainly. Secretly killing projects to make Bitcoin more private, actively campaigning. 1:18:20 This all came out by – what's his name? Citadel Dispatch guy. Marty. Not Marty. Matt O'Dell. Sorry, Matt. Matt O'Dell. Do you know what I'm talking about? He blew the whistle on this. 1:18:34 He sort of mentioned it, but afterwards he seemed to agree with Michael Saylor on some issues. It's very strange. I don't know. 1:18:41 Maybe he just blew the whistle on it and he just kind of said, I'm just going to back off because it's not worth it. 1:18:48 But he also had no source for it, and I don't think there was anyone else who confirmed that. 1:18:52 No, I think it was corroborated. Jack Dorsey himself I think corroborated it and admitted that it was his ETF. Maybe not. People can look it up. Look it up, everyone. Ask Grok. 1:19:06 So basically the story is that some ETF was going to give a percentage of their profits to Bitcoin Core development, and supposedly Michael Saylor got involved and told them not to do it. 1:19:19 Yes, and he did this secretly without being proud of it. 1:19:25 But now he's proud of it. He goes on interviews and he says, well, you shouldn't give these people too much money because they come up with ideas that are actually bad. 1:19:35 Well, that's what I mean. That was at the time. So I think it would be helpful for everyone if, you know, why not just keep asking so that it can be as clear as possible exactly what everyone's position is. 1:19:44 But of course now by now it is more clear that Mr. Saylor's position is that privacy on Bitcoin is bad, but for different reasons because he doesn't want to like the taint. 1:19:54 This is the old guilt by association argument, which is very old. And it's just as wrong today as it was back then. 1:20:02 But there is a different thing, which when something like – now it's because we can't – it's too difficult to add ZK-SNARKs to Bitcoin. So now people say, well, we never wanted that anyway. 1:20:16 So this is a completely different type of mistake. 1:20:18 But it's not more difficult. If anything, they simplified the software. They made it more scalable. It was more of a… 1:20:25 You're absolutely right. The ZK-SNARK part has gotten better. It used to be incomprehensible and terrible, and now it's just a rust crate that you just add a line. 1:20:35 There's a little more to it than that, but now it has become commoditized and more. It's becoming standardized, so that's way better. 1:20:48 But it's become harder to do anything with Bitcoin. So now people say, well, we never wanted small contracts on Bitcoin. 1:20:54 But you and I can remember when, in 2015, the argument was just whatever Ethereum does, Bitcoin will just do because it's all open source and we're going to have a… 1:21:05 That's where the article about Bitcoin maximalism comes from. It was someone on Reddit who said this to Vitalik, and he got triggered and decided to write a blog post in which he called it Bitcoin maximalism. 1:21:16 That's where the term comes from. It was embraced by people afterwards who said, well, it seems like we're maximalists now. 1:21:23 But it's just that that was the mentality at the time. It was one coin to rule them all. 1:21:31 Yes. So back to your question, though. The way Zcash was coded, this is back in 2020. 1:21:41 Originally, what happened was in 2020, I did a hackathon contest to make Zcash sidechain, which someone entered and won. 1:21:52 This was back in 2020, and this is because originally Zcash was a fork of Bitcoin Core. 1:21:58 I think it was a fork of like Bitcoin Core 12 or something, 0.12. 1:22:02 That's maybe completely wrong, but something like that. 1:22:05 And what we had, our Drivechain software, including both the L1 and the L2, those were both like forks of Bitcoin 1699. 1:22:14 It was an especially good version. 1:22:18 Maybe the modern versions are worse or whatever. 1:22:21 So back then, the code was more similar. It's a simple reason, but there's more reasons to it than that. 1:22:27 The big drawback to Zcash was that, well, first of all, the way Monero works is it has these ring signatures where it blinds you with like nine other people. 1:22:41 16. 1:22:43 16 now. Thanks. 1:22:46 I think it was small before. Maybe that's also completely wrong. I don't know. 1:22:49 But that's the point is it's – it was like you get – you have a – like what I call decoys. 1:22:56 You have like 15 decoys. It's like you go in and everyone's wearing – you see that movie – what's the bank robbery movie, Inside Job? 1:23:05 Everyone's wearing the same mask, and they make all the hostages wear the same jumpsuit and the mask. 1:23:15 And everyone's – the bank robbers are mixed in with them, and they don't know. 1:23:20 That's the point is in order to have privacy, privacy is inherently social, and you need to mix. 1:23:27 So you need to mix with the innocent people. 1:23:29 But I can argue that's not privacy. It's the deniability because it could be any one of these 16. 1:23:35 But real privacy means that you're not showing anything. 1:23:41 Well, okay. The problem with that is in order to make a transaction, you have to show something somewhere. 1:23:48 You have to show like the merchant that you paid them. 1:23:51 So it would be neat if you could have total universal privacy like even like whatever from God or from like physics or something. 1:24:01 But we have to – and especially the blockchain is going to have a record of every transaction. 1:24:05 So I think decoys are the best we can do. 1:24:09 In the Zcash world, everyone in the pool, everyone is in the decoy set because the sender, the receiver, and the amount are all hidden. 1:24:18 So no one knows which coins are moving where if it's you sending to yourself or whatever. 1:24:23 How many coins? 1:24:25 So Monero is just actually a little bit tamer. It's not quite as strong. 1:24:30 And the other thing was Monero was just a completely written from scratch thing. 1:24:33 Zcash was a fork of Bitcoin back in the time. 1:24:36 Now, there's yet another reason, which is now at this point, the L2s that we are using now, we do have some of the old style that we don't really use. 1:24:48 These are old style C++ forks of Bitcoin Core that – Bitcoin Core not as the L1 but as the L2 because why not? 1:24:57 I mean Bitcoin Core is a high-quality piece of software. 1:24:59 So that's how we used to do it. 1:25:01 But now we have a Rust-based L2s, and actually there's just a crate. 1:25:06 I don't know how many – how people are familiar with Rust, but Rust has these little modules. 1:25:11 And it's like going down to the store and buying – you go down to Home Depot and you could buy one hammer, one box of nails, one diamond-edge saw. 1:25:23 So you just take it off the shelf. 1:25:25 The Zcash – 1:25:28 Yeah, I understand. 1:25:30 And so it's superior privacy. 1:25:33 There's even more reasons on top of that. 1:25:35 With Zcash, there is an endlessly growing nullifier set. 1:25:39 I don't know if this is still true. 1:25:40 I assume it is. 1:25:41 It's true as of like last year when it was last time I was more closely looking at it, which is to say you pin on the built-in board. 1:25:51 This is like – these are the coins that I have deleted. 1:25:57 Like this is the UTXO I've spent. 1:25:59 Only – I think only the – it's hard. 1:26:01 This is stuff that's very hard to explain and to get right, but it's something like only the recipient actually knows that you burnt seven coins to give to them, 1:26:11 and everyone else just sees like the built-in board get more stuff pinned on it. 1:26:16 And so basically this list grows forever, and this is a drawback to Zcash, and it has these turnstile things where you have sprout, sapling, orchard, whatever. 1:26:28 They eventually move on to the next thing both because the technology improves but just because they also have to roll this nullifier set over. 1:26:36 This is ideal for the sidechain world because you can just spin up the next sidechain. 1:26:41 The nullifier set on that chain is now zero. 1:26:44 It's now nothing. 1:26:46 You can start over again. 1:26:47 So all the disadvantages – I guess I think like Zcash had the dev tax, and it also had this wacky proof-of-work stuff like the cuckoo cycles. 1:26:58 So all these weird things that Zcash did that I think are just like wacky mistakes, wacky proof-of-work algorithm, the dev tax, it's just very easy to just cuddle. 1:27:09 Yeah, but to their credit, over nine years, they did build interesting stuff. 1:27:13 They got rid of the trusted setup with Halo 2. 1:27:17 They also built the unified addresses, which honestly are interesting. 1:27:22 They also are working on something that's called Tachyon that's going to use oblivious synchronization to basically scale to billions of users. 1:27:30 They are building shielded assets, which also might be something interesting for people who are into Ethereum stuff. 1:27:39 And all of this can just get added to the sidechain or to the zero-cash soft fork if that ever happens. 1:27:48 Bitcoin can benefit from it. 1:27:50 And if you look at it through the right lens, it's sort of like a research lab for Bitcoin and also Ethereum. 1:27:57 You could not have ZK Rollups today without Zcash. 1:28:01 I'd like to clarify that my opinion is that research primarily, although not exclusively, but I think it's primarily – and I am like a – I'm like a very cynical person, and I'm an economist by training. 1:28:21 But I do think that R&D is mostly a creative endeavor. 1:28:28 It is someone who really wants something. 1:28:32 It's an individual who wants to will something into existence. 1:28:35 It's like George Lucas with the first Star Wars movie or something. 1:28:42 And so I don't know if – what happened with Bitcoin is not – I don't think the dev tax and the funding for Zcash – 1:28:55 I don't think that's the big – like the big driver. 1:29:00 What I think happened was, as you say, is Zerocoin – that was like whatever, like 2011 or 2012 or something. 1:29:07 So what really happens is people want to do it. 1:29:10 They want to do the R&D. 1:29:12 But on Bitcoin, they encounter an insurmountable barrier. 1:29:15 They can't do it. 1:29:17 And they're forced to do it in some other way. 1:29:20 And then all this other stuff leaks out. 1:29:23 The stuff leaks out, if you know what I mean. 1:29:28 You know what I mean? 1:29:30 You get like a wacky character who says, oh, we can sell this to A16Z for like a million dollars. 1:29:36 And you get Solana, and they get 12% to A16Z or whatever they did. 1:29:41 I don't even remember, and I don't even care. 1:29:43 The point is the money is mostly a distraction. 1:29:50 I think that's what I was trying to emphasize earlier. 1:29:52 The money, it gets in the way of invention and innovation. 1:29:59 I mean up to a point, because eventually you need like a team. 1:30:04 It's hard to do everything yourself. 1:30:07 But does that make any sense? 1:30:09 I don't really think this whole dev – like whatever. 1:30:11 This stuff would have been built on Bitcoin if we had Sidechain. 1:30:14 It would have been built for free probably faster and better. 1:30:19 I actually have a short clip from my interview with Zucco. 1:30:22 And he said that he was going to launch – because one of the people working on Zcash is Andrew Miller, 1:30:29 who is a co-author of the Sidechain's paper at Blockstream. 1:30:33 And he's also a university professor in Chicago or something. 1:30:38 But my point is that the plan for Zcash initially was to launch first as the Zerocash soft fork. 1:30:45 Then they said, well, we can do it as a Sidechain. 1:30:48 And it was actually Roger Veer who intervened and said, 1:30:51 well, you're not getting any information from the market if you just launch it as a Sidechain. 1:30:56 Just let the market speak. 1:30:58 Let's see if there's any demand for this, and then maybe we can have it on Bitcoin. 1:31:03 So sort of Roger is to blame for the fact that Zcash exists as an altcoin? 1:31:09 That's a very interesting parallel to what I did with Truthcoin, which is why I have the Truthcoin handle. 1:31:14 Because Truthcoin was supposed to be a – well, it was originally – 1:31:19 I originally just designed it without figuring out how to vault it into Bitcoin. 1:31:23 And then I was like, well, you definitely can't use an opcode for this. 1:31:27 So it has to be a Sidechain. 1:31:29 And then I just kind of waited for a Sidechain, or I got more involved with the Sidechain part of the stack, 1:31:34 which is why I care so much about it partially. 1:31:39 But yeah, like a lot of people have said, oh, if you had done – 1:31:42 people have suggested like, oh, you could have done Truthcoin, the altcoin. 1:31:47 I could have done in 2014. 1:31:52 And then that would be the Polymarket or whatever of today, but it would be an altcoin. 1:31:57 And so weirdly, I'm the biggest maximalist of them all. 1:32:01 I sacrificed quite a bit. 1:32:03 So according to some, like this is not necessarily how I would tell the story, but I think – 1:32:08 You and Sergio too, because Sergio Lerner claims that a lot of the altcoin ideas that he had ended up in altcoins, 1:32:15 but he never participated. 1:32:17 He chose to build that Sidechain, which didn't take off. 1:32:23 But I'm still hopeful that they will turn it around. 1:32:28 Right. 1:32:29 But you see the benefits and drawbacks of the approach, these different approaches. 1:32:35 So if you actually launch, you get to actually do something. 1:32:40 This is also for David Borek with like the SIA coin, like the Filecoin variant. 1:32:47 They also wanted to do it as a Bitcoin Sidechain. 1:32:50 But again, Blockstream sort of sucked all the air out of the room on this topic. 1:32:55 They raised all this money. 1:32:56 They raised more than – I think it was more than like 150,000 BTC. 1:33:02 It sounds incredible, but it was 55 million in 2015, 2014, 21 million in like early 2014. 1:33:14 So they raised all this money, and they themselves said they swapped like some amount. 1:33:21 We don't know. 1:33:22 Half for BTC. 1:33:24 I have no idea. 1:33:25 But they raised all this money, and then everyone said – remember, Gavin had this tweet. 1:33:31 If this amazing company offers you a job, take it. 1:33:35 So they were like the center of the Bitcoin world back in 2014, 2015. 1:33:43 But they did not deliver on their two-way peg idea. 1:33:47 But as a result of this delay, these other projects got started, and I think this gave legitimacy to the whole category of altcoins. 1:33:56 So really, the one failure of Blockstream I think created all the altcoins and set back all the R&D of the whole industry. 1:34:06 And there's trillions in malinvestment. 1:34:11 But of course, you could say maybe if they had never come up with the word of the sidechain, there wouldn't even be a category and things would have been even worse or some other type of thing. 1:34:23 But I think all that's eminently possible. 1:34:27 Yeah, the guy who was in the chat, just for the record, Krev23, he says that he would be happy to engage with you directly on his show that's called The D-Shift. 1:34:39 Maybe he can post a link or something. 1:34:44 I'm having a very busy week, and in fact, I'm going to have to go soon. 1:34:48 But maybe I can do like another 12 minutes. 1:34:54 Yeah, so do you have any thoughts on the whole concept of the DAG? 1:35:00 I don't think it's actually that much better, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I don't know. 1:35:06 It's a design which does not orphan blocks and minus about 10 blocks every second in parallel. 1:35:14 I think this is a misunderstanding of why the interblock time is long. 1:35:20 Because what it does, the 10-minute blocks means – and I think Satoshi had it as 15 minutes and changed it to 10 minutes at the last second or something. 1:35:29 You mean the 2008 version from November or something, which was sent to Ray Dillinger and Halfini? 1:35:35 I think so, yes. 1:35:37 And so the long block time is because the headers are only 80 bytes and it's very easy to get them around the world. 1:35:48 And so I think it makes it so SPV, the headers are only 4.4 megabytes per year, which is very, very small, especially back in 2008, 2009, January 2009. 1:36:00 And I think that's the reason. It's just based on cost of the node, bandwidth, hidden bandwidth, like a type of bandwidth that allows you to hide the physical location of your computer. 1:36:16 I think that's the reason to have small block size and small header size and slow interblock time for the L1. 1:36:28 The L2, you can do whatever you want. Like I said, we tested L2 with 960 megabyte blocks, whatever, like 1,000 times, three orders of magnitude larger. 1:36:43 And that is obviously a situation where it will be much harder to run the node, much harder to hide the physical location. 1:36:52 But I have laid out all these arguments in writing my blog about why that doesn't matter as much for the L2s. 1:36:58 The L2s can be can be different L2s in different countries and the L2s can pause for a while while the L1 only is working or some of the L2s and then they can just turn back on. 1:37:12 So a lot of that stuff doesn't matter as much, modern daily type of a thing. 1:37:17 So I don't know what problem it solves, because I have already demonstrated how to scale to 8 billion users with my own software. 1:37:30 And I think having a lot of headers, it makes SPV harder. 1:37:34 So maybe they have a different solution for that. But I think SPV is actually pretty crucial, because without SPV, you have to convince people to run a node, but most people won't. 1:37:43 So until you can convince, until someone can, until I meet someone who they can convince, they can tell everyone lightning is great. 1:37:52 And when that person, this is the third person, so A is me, B, I'm meeting someone, B can tell C that lightning is great. 1:38:00 And that person will download lightning, they'll have a full node with 800 gigabyte and like a two day sync time. 1:38:08 And then their lightning node will reference their own Bitcoin core full node. 1:38:14 When I meet that person, then I'll give up on SPV, but actually SPV is a phenomenal idea invented by Satoshi. 1:38:22 He knew that he would have to have a great user experience, and that is what he designed. 1:38:26 It's in the white paper. 1:38:27 It's in the white paper, and it's just fine. 1:38:29 But it wasn't until Mike Hearn came with his solution that it was actually practical. 1:38:35 Like Satoshi did not give us SPV, he just conceptualized it. 1:38:40 And SPV, you are a little bit of a free rider because you need someone else's full node. 1:38:47 But that's fine. 1:38:49 That's really not a big deal, especially because the question is compared to what? 1:38:55 And then people say, then what people end up with is custodial lightning when they try to answer that question. 1:39:02 So these are this is the foolish thing is that SPV is in this peak. 1:39:07 And on one side, everyone running a full node, which will never happen, especially new people are extremely poor people or whatever. 1:39:16 And then on the other side, just custodial. 1:39:20 For the user experience, so SPV strikes the perfect balance of being. 1:39:24 Extremely protective of your property rights and extremely useful in preventing people from lying to you about whether or not they have paid you. 1:39:34 Bitcoin is ninety nine point nine nine percent. 1:39:40 And also unbelievably convenient, four point four megabytes per year of block blockchain data and BTC. 1:39:49 So that is. Basically, nothing. 1:39:52 So I don't know the dag whatever. 1:39:54 I don't care, but maybe I could be wrong about that. 1:39:58 I did take a look at it, it seems interesting, it's very niche at this point, like there are not too many people who understand how that works, there are a bunch of enthusiasts who really love Casper, but because they got rich using it or because one of the founders has this Jesus like kind of following and people think he's he might be Satoshi or something, and that's why they basically worship the founder of Bitcoin, because he's the founder of Bitcoin. 1:40:25 The land that he walks on and stuff like this, like the interview that that I did with him was, I think, the second most popular that I had on the show after Vitalik and the chat was just blowing up with questions and people commenting. 1:40:41 So maybe it's organic, maybe it's just people who got rich, but the point is that it's pretty interesting and it's radically different from everything else that you see, which is just the spin on Satoshi's design. 1:40:55 Well, there hasn't been that much new stuff, I think that's for sure. 1:41:00 It's also why we refer to stuff that's not Bitcoin as altcoins, because most of them are just code based copies of Bitcoin with some added stuff like master nodes or proof of stake or whatever was considered to be interesting at some point. 1:41:19 And some of these coins persisted, that's another interesting perspective, like you still have Litecoin, which has been around since 2011, you still have Dogecoin, which has been around since like 2013, you still have Moreno, which has been around since 2014, you still have Zcash, which has been around since 2016, like they're still part of the conversation, you still have Dash, you still have... 1:41:49 Is there anything else? I don't know, but my point is that they did not die, they still have users, they're still accepted on exchanges, they're still accepted at payments processors, and it seems like indirectly they're scaling Bitcoin. 1:42:04 So, people who want to use a coin for payments, and they want to have the same user experience, minus some of the inefficiencies of using Bitcoin, which sometimes consists of high fees in times of high demand, or maybe they have to wait, because there is RBF, so they do have to wait for a confirmation, right now RBF is the default. 1:42:31 And for in-person payments, or whatever, they prefer to use one of these established altcoins, which you can argue are a version of Bitcoin. 1:42:41 You read the white paper, you look at what these offer... 1:42:44 Four more minutes, so if you have any other... I mean, if you don't, if you don't have any other lightning round questions, you know... 1:42:51 Okay, let me ask you this, what's a shitcoin, in your vision, in four minutes? 1:42:55 No, I don't know, I think it's like over for that dichotomy now, I think. 1:43:00 I mean, there used to be an idea that if Bitcoin, everything else is a distraction, which was true, because Bitcoin was like, again, it's like, it's better for everyone to be on one network, we can't have, all of the 8 billion people can't start their own altcoin, that defeats the whole point. 1:43:17 It's like a language, the more people who speak it, the more valuable it is to be able to speak it, as network effects, the number one is just going to be the number one forever. 1:43:28 And so all this other stuff, you know, these useless coins that are just copies, they don't achieve anything, and they detract, and they are a distraction, and even the creators don't believe in them. 1:43:37 But now, I don't think that's the case, there are many such things, but a lot of this stuff, we talked about some of it, people have an actual new idea, and they can't do it on Bitcoin Core, so what are they supposed to do, just nothing, and that's not going to happen, so I don't know, it doesn't mean anything anymore, I think. 1:43:55 Are you still optimistic for Bitcoin? Like, on Twitter, when you tweet, you seem kind of gloomy sometimes, but in person, you're very cheerful. 1:44:08 I think, like, oh, I wrote this post about the derangements of Bitcoin, and I think we will come to a point where either Bitcoin decides that it wants to be something that pleases new people who joined after 2020, and just reinforces cynical memes, 1:44:34 or if it wants to become something that's used by 8 billion people, and I think it will make a choice, and if it doesn't choose the 8 billion people, then I think it will probably, I think only one coin is going to make it anyway, is my view. 1:44:51 So, out of every crypto coin that has ever been invented, or ever will be invented, I think there will really only be one, they will be like, a little bit like how English has been taking over, English has taken over Canada and Europe, if people in Spain and Germany do like a business deal, the contracts are like in English, you can speak English, even though you're from Romania, so. 1:45:20 That, it's kind of like that type of thing, so there'll be one that is, like, the main one, and it will be the main one, like, on the internet, and worldwide, I think, but, you know, who knows. 1:45:35 Yeah, I just want to thank the 1,000 plus people who joined this livestream, and especially those who commented, you're super valuable, and I hope I was able to present your points of view in a way that actually portrays what you were trying to say, what else, if you enjoyed this interview, I think you should also listen to the one with Jay Berg, 1:45:58 because he had some similar, but also different points of view, he basically said that everyone is wrong in this filter debate, Jay Berg used to be a regular on Bitcoin Uncensored, and I guess you, Paul, are very familiar with him and his work? 1:46:18 Yes, a little bit. 1:46:20 And what else? 1:46:22 Okay, what else? 1:46:24 What else did I want to mention? Thank you, Paul, for your time, I know that you're sick, I'm jet-lagged, it wasn't maybe our best conversation so far. 1:46:32 Hopefully we can do another one. 1:46:34 I do want to do another one, and I do want to do, even if you're not a fan of it, a live demo, even if I do have to install the software, and you guide me through it. 1:46:43 Okay, we'll do it, and people should be able to download it now, so give it a try, and then sync the Signet chain, and try to, we have a faucet, there's a link to the faucet in BitWindows, this is the good thing about BitWindows, since we control it, we can put all kinds of helpful stuff in there. 1:47:05 And so that's, so yeah, give it a try, people, and join the telegram, t.me slash dcinsiders, it's a little joke of mine, Drivechain Insiders. 1:47:21 It may take you a little while, because there's a lot of spam, so it's a bot, but like, try to figure out if you're spam, before letting it post. 1:47:34 But, there you go. 1:47:40 There's a lot of high-signal stuff happening in there, and very smart people tuning in to talk, that's where I found Vitalik, he was commenting on something. 1:47:51 Yeah, he did hang out, he's been hanging out in there, he's been lurking in there. 1:47:57 Yeah, and then you actually had to turn off people from joining or something? 1:48:02 Oh yeah. 1:48:04 You restricted the group for a while, and you had to turn off your DMs, because people were spamming you? 1:48:10 Yes, well, you know, that's when the project is a very, when there's all kinds of serious people in there, everyone wants to hijack the network for, you know, for attention, to spam, or to scam people and stuff, so it's unfortunate, but it's just part of how it is. 1:48:31 But Telegram has very good anti-spam technology, I think, overall. 1:48:41 Lair2labs.com slash download, try the software today, or this weekend, it can be a very fun experiment. 1:48:47 Join the DC Insiders group on Telegram. 1:48:50 Thank you very much, Paul, and I hope we can schedule something so we can talk about more topics. 1:48:56 Alright, let's do it. Okay, see you later. 1:48:58 Bye. 1:49:00 Bye.