12:30 So this is a situation where there's five or so thousand coins. The coins circulate at an enormous rate. 12:38 So they have a high velocity and have a high turnover. 12:41 And they're paying lots and lots of transaction fees, maybe 10 cents each time, but many, many times. 12:48 And then this is a situation where the math is very clear that a chain like that would have a lot of security. 12:56 So you can see how even this – what I'm saying, 99.99% of all mining revenue is coming from these large transaction chains. 13:04 But not necessarily – there wouldn't necessarily even be one million coins on all of them total. 13:10 So out of the 21 million, there would only be – one twentieth would be on the transacting L2s because you have a situation where they turn over rapidly. 13:21 But yeah, it is possible. 13:25 But that's the thing. The good thing is all your coins start on L1. 13:29 So it's your choice if you want to venture onto the L2 or not. 13:32 The proper comparison is to say basically what the sidechain L2s are supposed to be is a replacement for altcoins. 13:42 So it's like if you have to use Monero or something to do a transaction, now instead you just have to go onto the privacy L2. 13:50 So yeah, could Monero collapse the altcoin? It could. 13:57 And could the Drivechain L2 collapse? Yeah, they could. 14:02 I appreciate the honesty. You didn't say, well, that's impossible. 14:06 We're going to see how the market reacts to this new reality. 14:10 But I think there's an elephant in the room and I need to backtrack because we haven't mentioned the name of this hard fork. 14:17 Yes. Unlike Bitcoin Cash, I picked a completely different name. 14:24 I think this is much better for everyone. 14:26 The name is eCash and the project is on eCash.com. 14:31 So it's a cool domain. 14:34 And again, I'm giving people advance warning. 14:36 Four months of advance warning, whereas Bitcoin Cash, you kind of got negative three months. 14:41 And we're also replaying all the transactions and it's a sustainable fix. 14:47 So Bitcoin Cash did one megabyte to eight megabytes. 14:51 But then it was kind of like unclear what would happen then. 14:54 They'd have to keep changing things. 14:57 Or if eight was the magic number, then maybe BTC could have just copied that eight. 15:03 At a later time. 15:05 And so those are some of the differences. 15:07 There's more about it. 15:09 Yeah, the name is eCash. 15:11 Okay, so in nine years, we went from Bcash to eCash. 15:16 Like the memes are going to write themselves. 15:19 Well, yeah, I suppose so. 15:22 I think you're the first big Bitcoin developer to hard fork since Samari. 15:28 So it's been nine years. 15:29 Nobody had the courage to say, okay, screw you guys. 15:33 I'm going to try this idea on my own. 15:35 Would you say that eCash, which I think is a name that carries a lot of history with it. 15:41 So it's a bold choice. 15:43 You own the .com domain. 15:45 There's also an altcoin that uses the name eCash. 15:49 There is, of course, David Chaum historic project. 15:52 There's also the custodial lightning thing, which people are using at Nostr. 15:58 Where was I going with this? 16:01 Oh, yeah, you're the first big developer since Samari to do something like this. 16:07 And the respectable part is that you're not trying to say that this is Bitcoin or this is the true Bitcoin or the real vision or Satoshi's vision or whatever that means. 16:17 You're just saying you're a developer who has been around for, as you said, 15 years or longer. 16:25 And you've been trying to get this idea across. 16:28 You even have a section on your website, which I think is interesting. 16:31 You say that in the event that Bitcoin activates BIP300, you're going to give up on eCash. 16:39 Which makes me wonder, is this like a ransom or a blackmail towards Bitcoin Core developers? 16:45 Well, I don't know about that. 16:49 I don't think so. 16:50 It could be. 16:51 It would be interesting to think about that. 16:54 But I think I've had this idea for a very long time. 17:03 And it's sort of like I think a lot of things in Bitcoin have been getting worse each year. 17:09 So, yeah, but it's interesting that everyone who has tried this idea has failed. 17:14 But I think so. 17:15 Like, for example, I think Bitcoin Cash actually failed at the hard fork. 17:21 By this idea and failed, do you mean hard forking or Drivechains? 17:24 Because it's an important distinction. 17:27 Yeah. 17:28 Everyone who has tried the hard fork has failed to overtake Bitcoin with it. 17:33 But I think really the hard fork isn't that bad at all. 17:36 It's just everyone gets free money. 17:39 And so. 17:42 Guys like Adam Bak will say that this is monetary inflation that gets added on top of the 21 million. 17:50 I think there's some part of that that's true, but there's an equal part that would say. 17:57 That if what people are saying is that, you know, you have to claim like is Bitcoin BTC, is it perfect? 18:07 You know, is it totally without any laws or anything? 18:14 There's nothing improvable about it. 18:17 If so, then there's no reason for any other going to exist. 18:22 And that's kind of what I was getting at on the site, which is to say, if BIP300 activates on BTC, it will be difficult for this project, you know, be difficult for eCash to even succeed. 18:33 But it would have to be a little bit more than that. 18:35 You know, I think merely activating BIP300 is not enough. 18:38 It would have to be like a big cultural revolution in BTC where people say. 18:44 Lightning was a mistake and it doesn't work and we should do more soft forks. 18:48 Soft fork is safe and. 18:54 So it would have to be like a huge. 18:56 Everyone have to come around to my way of thinking on a lot of different things for it to be possible. 19:01 Like so even like are we going to use Bitwindow as the front end to Bitcoin Core or, you know, are we going to use still the Bitcoin Core software? 19:12 And then even people today, they don't even use like the Bitcoin Core wallet. 19:16 It doesn't have, you know, BIP39. 19:18 It doesn't have like a 12 word backup. 19:20 So. 19:23 These are tiny details, but I'm just saying like just activating BIP300 is not enough. 19:27 Like the miners would have to understand like how to use BIP300 and they have to be excited about it. 19:33 And I don't think these things are going to happen anytime soon. 19:38 Unfortunately for Bitcoin, but fortunately for eCash. 19:44 Right, so the goal of this interview is to announce that you're launching eCash. 19:49 Is this also the moment when you exit Bitcoin or are you going to be around? 19:54 No, I mean, well, that's, I guess, up to other people if they still invite me to various parties or whatever. 19:59 But I don't think that people should necessarily sell their BTC in the hard fork. 20:05 You should mostly just keep both. 20:07 Most people should keep both coins in a hard fork. 20:13 Because it takes a lot of specialized knowledge. 20:17 You know, I think definitely, you know, the older project has a huge advantage out of the gate. 20:28 Yeah, I was thinking, are you like a Vitalik now? 20:31 Are you going to be hard to approach and you're only going to show up within your own cult? 20:35 Or would you be willing, if you get invited to Bitcoin events, to mingle, to talk about your experiences, to share some ideas? 20:45 Maybe tell people that they were wrong in their perception. 20:48 Because something that we did not mention, and I think it's important to say, is that eCash is going to be mined with SHA-256-A6. 20:58 Which means it's competing directly with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and BSV and whatever else for hash rate. 21:06 There will be miners that decide to mine this if it's more profitable. 21:10 And if there's a lot of activity on the layer twos, then it might just be they're going to be collecting more fees. 21:17 And the bigger question is, how are miners going to act? 21:22 Like, are they going to be honest because they make a very good income from this? 21:27 Or are they going to try to steal? 21:29 That's what Matt Corello has been saying for a long time, that this leads to MEV, that miners are going to steal. 21:36 Yeah, I don't think any of that is true, though. 21:38 I mean, you can look at the miners. 21:40 Yeah, but now you get to prove it. That's what I'm saying. 21:42 Right, yeah. 21:43 The miners have never really done anything bad in all of Bitcoin's history, to anyone. 21:50 Even to Bitcoin SV, which everyone hated. 21:55 You didn't even have SHA-256 miners attacking Bitcoin SV when they had like less than one twentieth or less than one percent, less than half a percent of the hash rate. 22:07 So, yeah, I don't know. 22:10 But I think it's good. It's, you know, Cypherpunk engineers job to be paranoid, I suppose. 22:17 I think the bigger problem is, like, where do we go from here in BTC world? 22:24 Like, there's no, there's very few users. 22:28 The transaction fees are low. 22:31 This is indicating that there's low demand. 22:36 A lot of the users, like the original, like, OG adopting kind of like dark market users have switched to Monero. 22:44 And then other people have switched to, like, people who want to just, like, play around and have fun. 22:49 They have switched to, like, Solana and even Ethereum. 22:55 So we have very, very low users. 22:57 The mining, there's no mining revenue. 23:00 The miners are all going bankrupt or pivoting to AI data centers. 23:07 A lot of stuff isn't even described as mining anymore. 23:11 The mining stage is now the energy stage, et cetera, et cetera. 23:15 We really can't do any good development in Bitcoin. 23:18 So even among developers, we can't get anything done. 23:23 So we can't even get, like, a completely optional opt-in, ignorable and reversible soft fork such as OP_CAT that was in the old client. 23:38 It's only 13 lines of code. 23:40 It was in the original Satoshi client for more than a year. 23:44 We can't even get that back in. 23:47 And no one seems to know why exactly. 23:50 It's prestigious to propose new big things, but no one can get anything practical done. 23:57 In practice, all of the lightning usage is custodial. 24:01 So it's all back to client server and you don't even have your own keys. 24:06 None of the channels are actually used. 24:09 I think even in the investing world, like, the price has been mostly flat over. 24:14 It has gone up over the last five or six years. 24:21 But it really hasn't. 24:24 I don't think, you know, just where do we go from here? 24:27 I don't think that, you know, Bitcoin will not continue to do, like, 10x, et cetera, 10x, et cetera. 24:31 So first of all, there's a ceiling in the price, which is that they can't go. 24:36 Even if you were to take over the whole world, it would hit maybe like $25 million per coin. 24:42 So that's pretty good. 24:44 But the problem is think about all the people who are going to do that. 24:47 Think about the last guy to adopt Bitcoin or the last billion people to adopt it. 24:53 That will be like, you know, it'll be going from $24 million per coin to $25 million per coin. 25:00 Those people cannot, you know, they're not going to get a big ROI at the end. 25:04 So that the final step has to just be people who are adopting it just to use it. 25:10 So if you don't have that piece, then the whole thing does become a Ponzi scheme. 25:16 Yeah, I think that's what you call the final rotation in your articles. 25:23 I get your point, and I think there's a lot of value in experimentation. 25:28 And I also don't understand quite why Drivechains were never tried. 25:34 You're in conversation with the Litecoin people. 25:38 At some point in 2022, it seemed like Drivechains were going to be the next soft fork for a few months. 25:44 It was like the talk that everyone was bringing to conferences, and then it sort of lost its steam. 25:51 I still don't understand why. 25:54 You even had at some point on your website a section where you had the opinions of core developers and whether or not they like BIP300. 26:05 And it was very hard to find disagreements even at the time. 26:11 Like maybe there are free people in the world who don't agree with this. 26:16 And it's a soft fork. It's not a hard fork. 26:19 It's weird that the same unanimity argument that was being used against Bitcoin XT by Teimos in 2014-15, 26:30 that you need everyone to agree, and if there's one person who objects, then it's not happening, is being used for soft forks. 26:40 It's very easy to find a person who disagrees. 26:45 Usually, if they don't know anything about what they're talking about, it's easy to find it. 26:51 So I think – yeah, I don't know. 26:55 So the issue is you have to do this pull request through Bitcoin Core, and then meanwhile, they're changing their software all the time. 27:05 So you kind of have this rebase problem, and you have to put a bunch of effort in, and then you become vulnerable 27:11 because you've put months of effort into the pull request to the latest version while they're changing the version. 27:19 And then if they don't – it's just like you have basically a hierarchy where some people are responsible for merging the changes, 27:31 and they kind of run things however they want to run them. 27:34 And Bitcoin Core is run in a way that stuff has to not be controversial. 27:41 So that's what they've decided. 27:44 I think that's ultimately itself going to be a very controversial decision because it's just not – 27:51 an organization that never does anything controversial is probably doomed, and that's kind of my point. 27:58 But a lot of people sort of seem to like this type of thing. 28:01 They seem to like the gridlock, but I think that's just because they have no idea what they are missing out on. 28:07 And they also don't understand how competitive the software world can be. 28:18 No, but they dismiss the software part outright. 28:21 They say it's only about the store of value thing, or it's about the community, and it's about the immaculate conception. 28:29 And they're going to find something that Bitcoin has and something else cannot. 28:34 But I think we have been talking about stuff that is important, but at the same time not the most controversial. 28:42 At least not yet. 28:43 Like, you're hard-working. 28:45 Maybe some people will disagree with the approach, but if I was in your position, I would have done this like five years ago or something. 28:51 Because, you know, it gets frustrating after a while. 28:58 But before we get to the most controversial part, I gotta ask you two things. 29:03 The first one is, do you see eCash as being like the chain that welcomes the builders? 29:10 Because I think my job as a podcaster is to interview a lot of builders. 29:15 And if you just go through the backlog or the catalog of my work, you're going to realize that I interview a lot of frustrated guys. 29:24 Who are like, just this one software, please, just let me get to work. 29:28 And do you think that these guys can come build on eCash? 29:33 Yeah, there are many stories. 29:36 In fact, just about all of the big altcoins, there's a story where the person tried to do it on Bitcoin for years. 29:44 So obviously for Ethereum, that was the case. 29:47 Vitalik, he was an employee of eWork, he helped create Bitcoin Magazine. 29:52 He was like a Bitcoiner. 29:54 He tried to do Ethereum on Bitcoin. 29:56 He still is, I interviewed him last year, he said he still uses Bitcoin. 29:59 So it's not like just because he started something else, he... 30:03 But I'm saying even the Ethereum idea itself, he tried to do on Bitcoin first. 30:10 And same thing for when they tried to start Namecoin. 30:15 Same thing for when David Vork's project, SiaCoin, same thing for... 30:25 I'm pretty sure just about every successful altcoin, obviously Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver, and the other large blockers campaigned relentlessly to get the large block size that they wanted. 30:39 So they tried to do the thing on BTC, but then they could not, is my point. 30:47 So this gives people exactly what they need, which is the opportunity just gets out of the way. 30:53 And it says you can have total autonomy over your own project, and it will use real Bitcoin. 30:58 And you are accountable to the actual users. 31:03 Because if you do a good job of pleasing the users and they pay a lot of transaction fees, then the chain will be a success. 31:12 So I think that they will, yes. 31:13 And I think people actually, whenever anyone does any kind of altcoin, a lot of the people who become altcoiners do it with a kind of sense of resignation. 31:23 And they're very upset about what they were forced to do. 31:29 I was going to mention the fact that the previous time when you were on the show, I told you that almost everyone in Bitcoin was wrong about Ethereum. 31:39 And you told me that everyone expected Ethereum to roll the dice and get a dice from 1 to 5, but they rolled a 6. 31:47 And I think the reason why they rolled a 6 is not because Ethereum was so excellent, because they did have their early issues. 31:54 And to be honest, it was not much better than, let's say, what was the other big one that was competing against it and was proof of stake. 32:05 I'm going to remember it later. 32:07 So maybe it wasn't better than MasterCoin or Counterparty out of the gate. 32:11 BitShares, maybe? 32:13 Yeah, that was also around that time. 32:15 MXT. 32:17 BitShares. 32:19 And... 32:21 Huh. 32:23 Anyway, maybe it wasn't the best implementation of Bitcoin 2.0, because that's what it was called at the time. 32:31 But it was the block size wars that propped it up, essentially. 32:36 Because some people gave up on Bitcoin around the time in 2017. 32:41 And they said, wait up, just give me a second, I can build the same thing on Ethereum and just add some extra layers of complexity on top of it. 32:50 Which maybe is not the most elegant way to do it, but it captures the imagination of builders. 32:56 I think if it wasn't for the block size wars, Ethereum would not be the second biggest chain. 33:01 So it was also the context of when it was around and what was happening that propped it and brought it to the second place to make it like, I guess it's like the 10% of the crypto market coin today. 33:15 Which is kind of huge. 33:18 And I also think that in some respects you are late with launching eCash. 33:26 Because you've had this idea for a decade, and you've refined it, you've polished it, and you've hoped all this time that Bitcoin is going to care. 33:35 But I think it's also the right time, because once again, I don't think I've seen so many frustrated developers in any industry ever. 33:46 You can basically attract all of this energy and all of this creativity that was supposed to be happening on Bitcoin. 33:53 And get them to build on eCash so that they can prove their tech. 33:57 Maybe Bitcoin will care, maybe that Bitcoin will not care. 34:00 But we're going to see how this plays out. 34:02 But it's good to have these sandboxes where people can just build without worrying or asking for permission. 34:10 Yeah, we're in a very curious situation where a developer wants to write some software, and a user wants to use the software. 34:21 And they're willing to pay a transaction fee for that software, to use the software per transaction. 34:31 And a different miner is willing to collect that transaction fee and mine that transaction. 34:39 So all these people want something, but we're not having it. 34:47 So that's the bizarre situation that we're in in BTC. 34:53 And instead, not only developers are frustrated, but what is the usage, the on-chain usage of BTC? 35:04 And the miners are not staying loyal to BTC. 35:08 They're jumping ship to AI data centers. 35:11 So you can look at Marathon. 35:16 Marathon removed all references to Bitcoin from their webpage two years ago. 35:22 The miner magazines changed to EnergyMag. 35:25 Everything is just changing to energy. 35:27 At the Bitcoin conference, the mining stage has changed to the energy stage. 35:36 It's like, where do we go from here? 35:38 A lot of people think, oh, what we need is to just have more treasury companies, get more people to buy Bitcoin. 35:47 But how does that even help anything? 35:49 Everyone who buys Bitcoin, someone else had to sell it to them. 35:52 So I don't think that's going to help. 35:59 I also noticed that Michael Saylor has been buying large chunks of Bitcoin lately. 36:04 But the market doesn't care anymore and hasn't cared in maybe a year or longer. 36:10 I'm bad with keeping track of time. 36:13 But whenever he buys, he creates a larger point of failure. 36:17 Because eventually his stretch or whatever, STRC Ponzi is going to implode. 36:23 And he's going to have to sell Bitcoin to covered losses, to payback investors or whatever. 36:29 And it's going to be bad for the market. 36:33 So we have to understand it's a terrible point of failure. 36:38 Which makes me ask, since everyone is able to claim their coins one-to-one on the eCash chain. 36:45 Aren't you concerned that this is going to be basically something that happens within the first week? 36:51 That Saylor and BlackRock and all of these institutions are going to claim their eCash and dump it on the market to buy more Bitcoin? 36:59 Well, I think they certainly can if they want. 37:04 I don't really see that as a big problem. 37:07 If you think about it, there's no – why should anyone – first of all, who are they selling it to? 37:16 If they're selling it, someone else is buying it. 37:19 So maybe at a very low price. 37:21 But it's a good thing. 37:24 In general, network effects are very strong and you want it to be a popularity contest. 37:28 And you don't want a lot of people to think, oh, this project isn't very good. 37:35 But each of these people is going to have to sit down and really think about how can they get more money by keeping the eCash or by selling it. 37:45 And if they sell it, they'll sell it to someone who thinks the reverse. 37:48 And I think this project is not going to win by being continuously more popular than Bitcoin at all points in time. 37:58 I don't think that's happening. 38:00 But what this project offers is a way to get all – get more users transacting and to get more transaction fees collected. 38:13 And then ultimately get much more mining revenues and more proof of work, ultimately obtaining a huge share or maybe even 99 percent of the cash revenue. 38:28 And so in that way, this would be the only sustainable project in the long run. 38:35 Do you think that you're opening up the floodgates? 38:38 Because I tweeted this that basically Bitcoin is valuable right now or so valuable because you have all of these tribes, small communities that live inside of their own echo chambers. 38:50 You have the libertarians and cypherpunks who are happy to transact without asking for permission. 38:56 You have the Austrian economists who care about the 21 million limit and the scarcity. 39:02 You have the institutions that really like the idea that they can collateralize Bitcoin to borrow dollars against it. 39:09 Also the DeFi people. 39:11 You have the ordinals people who are putting their art on the blockchain because the block space is also scarce. 39:18 You have the BitVM people who are finding hacky ways to put stuff on Bitcoin that nobody really asked for but at the same time is interesting. 39:30 You have a lot of these small tribes and I think that the value of Bitcoin is the sum of all of these parts. 39:40 And when you have small parts exiting and deciding that they want to create their own chain as is your case. 39:45 Maybe that there are currently Bitcoin investors who are hoping that Bitcoin is going to get BIP300. 39:52 They're going to be listening to this interview or another one or reading what's on the eCash website which is eCash.com. 39:59 They're going to say well it seems like this is not going to happen anymore. 40:03 And they're going to lose faith in the project. 40:06 And that's going to drive some users to maybe leave Bitcoin to try eCash. 40:11 Or maybe it's going to make some people sell. 40:13 I'm not giving financial advice I'm just saying hypothetically this can happen. 40:18 And if you're opening up the floodgates by hard forking it's possible that other subsets are also going to hard fork. 40:28 And do the same and just see what the market thinks how valuable this is. 40:33 My prediction for this year is that Bitcoin is going to have at least two hard forks from what I see. 40:39 I think your hard fork is like the builder's one of the people who have been wanting to bring value to Bitcoin but they could not. 40:47 And you just want to prove that your ideas are good. 40:51 Because there's only so many years in our lifetime that we're healthy and productive and young and energetic and want to change the world. 40:58 And sometimes the longer you wait the worse it gets. 41:02 And there's also the puritans who are very deranged about the ordinals and they want to create like a pure version of Bitcoin. 41:11 And they have their own mining pool they have their own node client. 41:14 I think it's just a matter of time until the Bitcoin nuts people are going to hard fork. 41:19 And they're going to see what the market thinks about this idea of a pure chain. 41:25 Where they have gatekeepers for what kind of transactions you can include. 41:31 I'm not sure if this is a question. No it is a question. 41:35 Do you think that you're opening the floodgates for more hard forks? 41:42 I think the hard fork is actually a pretty good idea overall. 41:45 Like if you compare it to an altcoin. 41:47 Altcoin is like you're asserting this whole new idea. 41:52 But no one is credited. 41:56 With the hard fork every Bitcoiner who owns like 0.003 Bitcoin. 42:00 Now they're in this new thing. 42:03 So I think the hard fork is actually a stronger competitor. 42:05 And even though Bitcoin Cash made a lot of mistakes. 42:08 When it really debuted in November 2017. 42:12 It made it to the number two spot on coin market cap for one day. 42:18 That was the famous tweet about congrats on this seriously. 42:23 So for all the other altcoins that had ever been made. 42:26 Including Ethereum. 42:28 When Bitcoin Cash debuted it briefly made it to the number two spot. 42:33 So it was like BTC was a certain spot. 42:36 And then Bitcoin Cash was number two. 42:39 So actually I think the hard forks have a lot of viability. 42:43 And I think they're stronger. 42:45 The interesting thing about the hard fork is that it poses a conflict of interest. 42:49 Which is to say between the Bitcoin investor who would be pro hard fork. 42:55 But then all the people running the institutions will have to be against. 43:00 So this would be like Bitcoin Core. 43:03 The Bitcoin GitHub repository. 43:08 Maybe someone who runs like a media company in Bitcoin or something like that. 43:14 Because what you say with the hard fork is that. 43:17 What everyone is doing. 43:19 The developers. 43:21 The cultural leaders. 43:23 What everyone is doing is wrong. 43:26 And you give the investors free money. 43:29 So of course anyone who owns Bitcoin and has self custody of their Bitcoin. 43:33 They should just be pro hard fork. 43:35 Because you just get tons and tons of free coins. 43:38 On the off chance that one of them succeeds. 43:41 You do very well. 43:43 And in return for doing nothing. 43:45 So the investor has to put zero effort, zero risk, zero cost. 43:49 They get free money. 43:51 They get large upside. 43:53 So of course they should be pro hard fork. 43:55 So given that that's the case. 43:57 I think it's hard to explain why haven't we had more good hard forks. 44:02 Part of the reason is there's no upside to contributing to the hard fork before it happens. 44:08 I suppose. 44:10 But I think part of it is just that there's this conflict of interest between. 44:14 Because the hard fork does make it harder for like whoever's whatever it is. 44:22 Jimmy Song or whatever. 44:24 Someone's got to have a take and they could be wrong. 44:26 And so it's easy to just say well just dismiss all that. 44:30 It's also hard. 44:33 It's very hard for us for example whoever's leading Bitcoin Core. 44:37 Because they're saying well hey we were running the project. 44:40 And now it's like now there's a competitor. 44:44 So everyone prefers that not to have too much competition at work. 44:49 So I think all that's very interesting. 44:53 I think we hopefully we will have more hard forks. 44:56 I think they are good for they're a good way to have a conversation about the future of Bitcoin. 45:03 And we should not just blindly trust. 45:08 I really think that people have grown complacent. 45:14 Like there's just been no competition in Bitcoin. 45:19 So people have gotten very lazy. 45:23 I agree with this. 45:24 And you have like a Bible verse I think on the eCash website. 45:29 Which I'm sure is going to attract some Bitcoiners. 45:33 Because it seems like Christianity is popular in this community. 45:36 Which says that iron forges iron. 45:39 Yeah we pronounce it iron though. 45:42 But you know the metal iron sharpens iron. 45:46 Sharpens yeah. 45:48 So it's like competitors bring out the best in each other. 45:54 You need something real to sharpen something else. 45:57 I thought it was clever with the irony of like gold. 46:02 And yeah but that's a good one. 46:06 You know a couple good Bible quotes here and there. 46:09 So I throw them out sometimes. 46:12 You went to Sunday school. 46:15 I did. 46:18 I have a couple different copies of the Bible on my bookshelf. 46:22 I have one that's in original Hebrew and Greek. 46:27 Can you read that? 46:30 It has the translation beneath it. 46:33 Oh beautiful. 46:35 It is a really small font. 46:37 That's how I have the works of Aristotle like in parallel. 46:40 Or the original and the translation on the same page. 46:43 Anyway I diverged a bit too much. 46:48 I'm going to get to the most controversial part. 46:51 But before that drumroll. 46:53 I'm going to plug the sponsors. 46:55 Sideshift. 46:56 I hope they support eCash. 46:58 Brains Hashpower. 47:00 You can use that to mine eCash. 47:02 Orange Rock. 47:03 I hope they open the trading for eCash. 47:06 LayerTwo Labs. 47:07 They're building eCash. 47:08 I hope they build Drivechains too. 47:10 Cake Wallet. 47:11 I hope that they're going to support eCash too. 47:15 Those were my sponsor plugs for today. 47:19 Thanks to the sponsors for making this possible. 47:22 And of course they're biased. 47:24 But you should check them out. 47:25 They're cool. 47:26 They support Bitcoin with pretty good use cases. 47:31 Which maybe some orthodox people are not endorsing. 47:35 Orange Rock is actually a new sponsor. 47:37 They're from the Bitcoin.com news team. 47:41 And they built this interface for trading with privacy. 47:46 And having a lot of trading pairs inside of your app. 47:50 It's actually pretty cool. 47:51 I hope that they're going to support eCash. 47:54 Because I want to see competition. 47:57 Not because I'm an investor. 47:59 I couldn't care less at this point. 48:01 I'm not doing this for money. 48:03 I'm doing this because I care. 48:05 And I want to see Drivechains getting out there. 48:09 And proving what they can do. 48:11 And making Bitcoin. 48:13 Sometimes when you can't get the girl you want. 48:15 You have to get her best friend or whatever. 48:18 To make her jealous. 48:20 To prove what a good lover you can be. 48:22 And how you can take care of a girl. 48:24 It's kind of like this. 48:27 But anyway Paul. 48:28 Let's get to the most controversial part. 48:30 Which gives me the impression. 48:32 That there's like a 50% chance. 48:34 That this is going to flip Bitcoin. 48:36 And you want to take it into consideration. 48:38 Because there's the question. 48:41 Of what you do with Satoshi's coins. 48:43 And all the other hard forks so far. 48:45 They just didn't touch them. 48:47 But you decided to get half of Satoshi's coins. 48:50 And basically give Satoshi half of what he mined on eCash. 48:56 And of course you don't have to do this. 48:58 Because Satoshi created Bitcoin. 49:00 He has BTC. 49:02 But you were basically thinking. 49:04 Okay in the event that Satoshi comes back. 49:06 And wants to use this. 49:08 Or this becomes bigger than Bitcoin. 49:10 Satoshi can still claim some free coins. 49:13 As a tribute. 49:15 That he put a lot of work into this. 49:17 And laid the foundation of the project. 49:19 But 50% of the coins are on sale. 49:22 I actually bought a few of them. 49:24 Not a lot because I'm not super rich. 49:26 But I was happy to support the project. 49:29 The point I guess is to fund the development. 49:33 And bootstrap eCash. 49:36 And yeah. 49:38 I think this is the most controversial part. 49:40 And most people are going to be. 49:44 Confused to say the least. 49:46 They're going to be like. 49:47 Oh you're stealing from Satoshi or whatever. 49:49 But he did not create Zcash. 49:51 Not Zcash. eCash. 49:55 Yeah I certainly think this will be the most controversial part. 49:57 I think you know. 50:00 It's there's a lot of things to say though. About why it's a very good idea. But one is that we already have a version where there is no you know. There's no reassignment of Satoshi's coins. And that's the BIP300 idea on BTC. So you can. That's the idea. The free version of the idea is just sitting right there. But then the hard fork is a less desirable path. 50:27 So the hard fork takes a lot of work I think. Not only does it take a lot of. 50:31 Development work. But it also takes a lot of. You know you're starting a new project. 50:34 You have no network effect. So I think the hard fork is very difficult to pull off. 50:41 And now you have the question of. If you do a pure hard fork. 50:46 Where there's nothing in it. Or you could call it the creators. But it's really much more than 50:51 the creators as I'm going to explain. If you do a pure hard fork. Creates everyone one to one. 51:00 It's very difficult to get any. Like investment in the product. You have to do all of your work 51:06 after the moment of the fork. You know what I mean. Like you can't like invest in the project. 51:12 I'm not talking about financially. I'm talking about like you can't. 51:16 Why would you. Why would you pay any attention to the project. Or shill the project. 51:21 Or get excited about the project. It needs to be a way where you can profit off of the people who 51:26 are doubting the project. Disproportionately. In other words you have to be able to buy and sell it. 51:32 But how can you buy and sell it before. The fork. Because you can't. Because you have to credit 51:40 everyone at the time of the fork with the one to one coins. So. This is kind of maybe splitting 51:47 the difference between just like an altcoin where. Maybe the creators give themselves. 51:56 You know a disproportionate stake in the coin to kind of help it. Make sure that it's a success. 52:04 And then the pure hard fork idea. But yeah if people don't like this idea. And I myself 52:10 I'm not a huge fan of it. But the alternative is just to activate PIP 300 and BTC. But of course 52:19 I think that will probably never happen. So really if you're going to go through all the 52:22 trials and tribulations of the hard fork which is going to be very difficult. 52:26 You have to launch a new project. You have to have a new brand. You have to convert people. 52:32 You have to compete against BTC. That's basically what is needed. 52:40 Think about it. If you only do the pure fork. Everything after the fork. That's when you have 52:47 to like start saying okay I'm going to buy a bunch of coins and then I'm going to 52:55 talk with people about how great this is. I think the moment of the fork is a very important 53:00 point and you have to have all your ducks in a row. You want to have a lot of investment 53:04 pre-fork so that by the time it actually happens with normal people 53:09 there a lot of the stuff has been worked out. But yeah I'm sure this will be a very 53:15 controversial part of the project. But hey if people don't like it then they can just sell. 53:21 That's what I encourage you to do. We have to give it a slightly selfish angle. 53:27 Because we want it to be like a disproportionate benefit to beating the stigma basically. 53:38 Yeah I get that. To be honest if I was in your position I would take like 100% 53:43 of Satoshi's coins and just bootstrap and market the hell out of it. 53:49 Because the assumption as of lately is that we're going to end up freezing Satoshi's 53:55 coins in Bitcoin as per BIP361. Yeah I'd just like to randomly point out that I had this plan 54:03 was like many years old and it's just a weird coincidence that all this quantum stuff has been 54:09 talking about. But there's a lot of weird overlaps so for example these are like the coins that are 54:17 not paid to pubkey hash they're just paid to pubkey so the public key is there so it's not 54:22 obscured by hash. And it is kind of the case that Satoshi had this special miner that people 54:29 can read about the patoshi miner and he it was very fast and he had it wait five minutes in 54:36 between blocks so there is a weird bizarre sense in which he altruistically was running this miner 54:43 to keep the network moving with 10 minute blocks but he didn't wasn't as interested in 54:50 taking the coins for himself so there's a weird altruism dimension to it. 54:59 Yeah and now we're talking in Bitcoin about freezing the coins or 55:03 allowing the first quantum computer that actually works with the required qubits 55:10 to actually steal Satoshi's coins which means that possibly Google is going to dump a lot of 55:15 Bitcoin on the market in a few years. In my conception of the idea it was important that 55:21 if the project is a huge success like let's say the project were to surpass BTC and even 55:29 were to hit this 25 million dollar per coin ceiling after defeating all the fiat currencies 55:36 if it theoretically did that Satoshi's network worth would go up because even though 55:43 he would have half of the coins after you know in purchasing power the price the exchange rate 55:50 would be much higher than you know which is twice of I guess it's 75 000 today so 55:57 as long as the price of if the price of eCash were to beat 150k 56:03 his net worth is actually going up as a result of the project existing. 56:09 I wanted to have that angle in there. 56:13 Who knows when for as for quantum people would need to know the date at which a quantum computer 56:24 capable of breaking ECDSA becomes cheaply available to construct and operate. 56:33 We should have prediction markets on that so that people can learn exactly when that data is. 56:38 This is one of my many I don't think I should also say is you know I was on this prediction 56:43 markets beat since 2013 in bitcoin I was saying we got to have prediction markets on bitcoin 56:49 so this is just one of my many and so I you know I've predicted an awful lot of things 56:54 in bitcoin that I you know there were 10 or 15 years ago that I was the whole 100% correct about 57:01 I'm not saying that that means I'm going to be correct about eCash but it does mean that 57:05 I just think like you know I'm often very early and so I think that people should 57:14 think about that very carefully when I give them this free stuff. 57:20 Yeah so basically for clarification everyone is going to get one-to-one 57:25 eCash according to how much bitcoin they hold except for Satoshi who can only claim half of 57:31 who can only claim half of what he mined in bitcoin and Satoshi 57:38 can maybe it will probably be 1 million bch 1 million bsv 1 million xcc right he yeah and he's 57:46 never claimed any of that of course he's going to be able to claim 550k yeah and if we don't sell 57:53 them I'll probably just we probably just won't take them you know so it'll probably you'll 57:59 probably have more than half but who knows I mean we've been selling them so I guess it's useful 58:04 to have them on to raise money for development but it's also to give people skin in the game 58:10 at the time of the fork these are both very important because again my view is that the 58:15 the moment of the fork you want to have it's kind of bizarre because really my what I would 58:22 one way of explaining it would be to say I don't want to like sell people like a weird dream like 58:26 I hated the way the ICOs worked and even the way Ethereum worked because it did it raised for it 58:33 it would be totally unfinished and then they would do all this fundraising and then it would launch 58:39 and it it would still need a lot of work but with this I wanted to really have something mostly done 58:46 at the time of the fork so that's kind of difficult to pull off if 58:52 there's absolutely no way anyone can have a disproportionate benefit if it succeeds 58:57 wait so are you saying that you have been working towards the fork for a long time or 59:04 actually when was it that you decided to actually well I know I thought about it for many many years 59:09 I always thought like if Bitcoin like what's the alternative if um if Bitcoin makes some kind of 59:17 severe mistake it'll have to be hard fork and I you know even the scaling war I was very concerned 59:25 about both sides it seemed like both sides just wanted to win and not so even like back in 2015 59:32 I was kind of thinking about this I think this makes it a much more interesting story honestly 59:39 because I was like waiting patiently and meanwhile the Bitcoin has been doing very very well um 59:48 but now I've decided well I'm just not sure like how where do we go from here like are we really 59:53 going to get to like 200k and a million dollars per coin with just like treasury companies and 1:00:00 custodial lightning and everyone lying to each other that's another thing is the Bitcoin community 1:00:05 used to be very truth oriented but now it's completely it's very much uh not to put it mildly 1:00:15 put it mildly and you also get rewarded for larping or pretending that everything is fine 1:00:22 but anyway let me put on my Giacomo Zucco hat or whatever and he's gonna say wait a second this guy 1:00:30 has been farming engagement has been getting followers building his platform just so he can 1:00:37 launch an affinity scam because what you said can be framed in this way also like you you were always 1:00:44 thinking about doing the hard fork and the only reason why you hung out with Bitcoiners 1:00:51 up until this point was that you're gonna launch your own quote-unquote shit coin which is not 1:00:55 Bitcoin is any of this fair or would you say that your contributions to Bitcoin were not sincere 1:01:07 uh well I kind of think you could flip the question around and you could say if you were 1:01:10 really sincere like imagine someone's contributing to Bitcoin and they think this is the number one 1:01:15 idea that Bitcoin needs and it's very very low risk and it has enormous upside and then you 1:01:25 champion that idea for a while and then um you know like at a certain point you have to 1:01:32 do something uh you have like it because it's like really all the other ideas I think are just 1:01:36 really terrible I mean I it's I'm not saying that Drivechain is the best idea in the whole world 1:01:43 and that it could and that it's a sure thing or whatever I'm not saying any of that 1:01:47 but how is it even possible for me to do that lightning debate or whatever you know like so 1:01:54 um and then like the best idea we have now is a Bitcoin treasury company which is to say that you 1:02:00 should sell all your Bitcoin and get basically a some stock certificates that the creator can 1:02:11 the stock certificates and create you know add to the supply at any time it's um 1:02:17 so I don't know I just don't see a lot of other good ideas around 1:02:20 is the problem now the question is like was it just the whole time doing affinity scam 1:02:24 um uh like I don't know like the I would you know I think why would uh well okay that's what 1:02:37 people think I mean it's kind of suspicious that I'm giving away the free so like the free 1:02:43 CUSF version of BIP300 you know it's still like right there the whole time so I guess you kind 1:02:48 of have to equivocate on whether or not you think the idea is good or not you know what I mean like 1:02:53 is BIP300 a good idea if it is a good idea then um I was the one who was scammed 1:03:00 right because I have this good idea and you know it's not going anywhere but if you think the idea 1:03:07 is bad then you have nothing to worry about from the fork because the fork can't possibly succeed 1:03:11 it's just some bad idea uh there's also the conversation to be had about what happens 1:03:18 post fork and maybe that this makes this case stronger for a hard fork where people can play 1:03:24 with the coins that they claim for free because we have seen a lot of these well-funded projects 1:03:30 in bitcoin launching and then having almost no users now I don't want to knock on Citrea 1:03:36 because I think it's very interesting and I think they also do some useful stuff and their main 1:03:43 target is to get some liquidity that's currently in wrapped bitcoin on Ethereum so it's not 1:03:50 directly targeting you know the bitcoin pleb or whatever that's not the user who should consider 1:03:57 it but even under these circumstances it was not as successful after launch as expected and 1:04:04 that's not because the idea is not good it's not because the tech is not good there's also 1:04:09 the spider chain by botanics there's a bunch of these that are launching and are going to 1:04:15 be launching I think also Robin Linus's idea for a BitVM free with garbled circuits and 1:04:21 that's Liam Egan and they want to launch something that's called shielded client-side validation on 1:04:27 bitcoin that's also a good idea but if it launches and then nobody uses it or you get 10 users who 1:04:33 are enthusiastic about it then it's a disaster and I think bitcoin before having and you can 1:04:41 agree with me on this before having any technical issue or forking issue or developer crisis it has 1:04:48 a cultural problem where people are just in this stasis where they're afraid to do anything with 1:04:53 their coins they just want to keep them in cold storage and huddle and wait indefinitely but if 1:05:00 you want to prove that something like Drivechains is a good idea you need something with lower risk 1:05:05 and I think that the hard fork is the the right platform to launch this people can actually see 1:05:11 how the tech works if they want to lobby for it on bitcoin they can keep going and demand it from the 1:05:18 core developers or the miners who might activate it but it can also remain like an eCash thing 1:05:26 just to have the Drivechain and maybe we're gonna see how the market reacts to this the way in which 1:05:32 I was thinking about the soft fork for Drivechains was like and I think you also said that 1:05:38 after BIP300 bitcoin can ossify safely if it's going to be an altcoin that takes away all the 1:05:45 use cases of other altcoins it's like the altcoins who end all altcoins I don't know if it's I think 1:05:50 it's like a horrible parallel to the propaganda of the first world war which was calling it the 1:05:56 war to end all wars like the greatest of them all but there's a merit to this idea and we can see 1:06:04 how the market reacts and the bitcoin holders can test can actually use their bitcoin which they're 1:06:11 gonna claim as eCash one-to-one to see if they like the tech if it's useful to them if they can 1:06:17 build something now I think with clod or whatever it's easier than ever to build applications 1:06:23 on top of various blockchains there's like a very large library of open source projects that you can 1:06:29 fork and this can actually work specifically because it's a hard fork because the risk 1:06:37 is perceived as being lower people can have more fun and I think the biggest challenge that you're 1:06:44 facing is to get users to get them to care about the chain to get them to use it every day to engage 1:06:50 to want to build value to add something that is not there already 1:06:59 yeah I think there's something very different about 1:07:02 what I've been doing versus you know Citria or Botanix or whatever which is to say 1:07:09 oh I don't know maybe I could be wrong about this but I think the the core idea behind Drivechain 1:07:17 was that there are these people who disagree you know very passionately so there was it was not a 1:07:24 lot of indifference during the block size war you know there was a lot of passion there was really 1:07:29 really emotion and people were very uh they really cared about the outcome a lot so 1:07:37 there wasn't like this indifference and whereas I do think these these modern things these are 1:07:42 like nerd sniping and they are like very impressive technical toys and they are 1:07:49 I think those things would struggle to get users because the user is just going to think oh does 1:07:54 it work for my use case um yes or no and people are not even going to care they're not even going 1:08:04 to care about the tech you know like Monero they just know it's slightly more it's more 1:08:08 private than Bitcoin and then the darknet market requires them to use it so what I think this 1:08:16 would could go is something like the project launches a few investors see that you know bag 1:08:27 that you know bag holders they see that it has a potential to make it in the long run 1:08:34 and then you know okay so like what happened with with BTC is numerous times it would go 1:08:40 parabolic you know it would go like super super you know there'd be like a huge run up in the price 1:08:47 when this happened there would be lots and lots of people buying and selling BTC of course there's 1:08:55 lots of people selling because you can lock in you could sell one percent of your BTC hoard 1:09:01 at a very very high price a lot of people would do that and of course a lot of people 1:09:06 are buying because the price is going up and up and up everyone's thinking oh a new paradigm you 1:09:09 know but what would always happen is that of course in that case we would get killed by the 1:09:16 the fees and the block size limit would that would cut everyone off because eventually the 1:09:22 fees would be 10 15 20 50 per person and some people would say I'm gonna wait and then other 1:09:28 people would say this is the future of money and they would get a little confused and yeah 1:09:34 lightning network doesn't work but with this project the idea would be to launch some L2s 1:09:39 that have this potential to go parabolic when users discover them and they'd say well this is 1:09:45 the thing that I like to use and then I have an uninterrupted exponential growth 1:09:51 where it just you know it just keeps growing and growing and growing it becomes a big 1:09:55 event and with the shared hashing algorithm that would mean that eventually if the eCash 1:10:02 price accelerates enough you know the difficulty only adjusts in a very linear way 1:10:10 so if the market price is accelerating it would be starving BTC of hash rate and that would be like 1:10:18 the so but yeah with the question of getting users that is the that is of course the number one 1:10:26 priority but I think it's kind of like this project is a little more meta than that because 1:10:34 I'm saying that any developer who thinks that they've hit a use case they can launch the project 1:10:39 here and that's what you really want is you want a world where the developer could just 1:10:45 do their thing and then they have feedback from their real users 1:10:49 so yeah there's no guarantee that any of this will work at all but I think it does have the 1:10:53 potential to actually survive and win in a way that other stuff does not other stuff I you know 1:11:00 I don't really see the point of you know I don't know I don't really see even the point of like 1:11:08 what's the point even like of arc because ultimately most of the lightning usage is 1:11:14 custodial and no one's going to want to have these channels be open like the whole thing 1:11:20 it really doesn't work at all so I don't know and you know even for other things for same for 1:11:28 you know botanics and whatever I mean I just kind of see the point 1:11:31 well I do see the point in experimentation but this is like being held hostage in an environment 1:11:39 that's hostile towards your idea and it's very hard to get users and of course you you are like 1:11:47 the robin hansen of bitcoin and maybe that a lot of people haven't read anything from robin hansen 1:11:54 but what's good to understand is that the way in which satoshi solved the double spending 1:12:00 problem is not computer science it's actually game theory it's this assumption that it's more 1:12:08 profitable to not double spend and to participate honestly in the system and you're just taking this 1:12:16 idea and pushing it further to see how it works how miners are going to behave 1:12:23 in this environment where they collect revenue from multiple chains and whether or not they're 1:12:28 going to be tempted to steal or make an honest living just farming from these sidechains 1:12:37 where was I going with this yeah game fury and robin hansen 1:12:41 check out elephant in the brain it's the book that you recommended yeah it's very good 1:12:45 um I think like it's well it's just hard to know what to make of it all because you know 1:12:53 to me BIP300 is just counting to 13 000 and it's an opt-in reversible ignorable 1:13:02 soft fork that you're no that doesn't even need to know that anything is happening 1:13:07 you just ignore it how could that even possibly be controversial to say nothing of like OP_CAT and 1:13:13 whatever OP_CTV like oh these are all these op op soft forks are just nothing so the very fact 1:13:21 that is controversial at all I think is very suspicious because the what I'm doing is opening 1:13:27 the door to open the door to l2 competition so I think only if you think your l2 really sucks would 1:13:33 you be against Drivechain so that's why I'm actually worried that there's much more corruption 1:13:39 than we thought 1:13:45 I know some people will say that you're late with this idea and that there's already some 1:13:50 interesting academic and also practical research into scaling on the base layer 1:13:55 without having extremely large blocks bloating or whatever and they're gonna point out to something 1:14:01 like caspa or mimblewimble or whatever do you see these becoming layer twos or do you think that 1:14:08 you can have an actual base layer that's better than what we inherit from satoshi 1:14:14 that you can integrate into eCash so that you're going to have even more efficient layer twos 1:14:23 well I don't think I think it's a smart thing to keep the l1 the same as bitcoin core because 1:14:29 there's so many tiny details you know bitcoin core has been attacked to death and even the 1:14:37 people running it now accidentally introduce cvs that they have to secretly fix so I don't think 1:14:43 it's a good idea to change l1 and again a soft fork doesn't really even change l1 that's part 1:14:48 of the why this is all a circus but um so I wouldn't want to change l1 too much if I did 1:14:56 I would just do more accusive soft forks that don't edit any of the code 1:15:00 of bitcoin l1 so we could do OP_CAT and whatever upctv I don't think you know it's possible that there's some other technology that is much better than what I've come up with that I don't I don't even pretend to be like a great technologist I just think 5300 is this thing that lets different people who disagree over what the full node should do just get their way and that's all that it is 1:15:27 I happen to have also produced like with thunder we have these tests and you can see that it can 1:15:32 process you know whatever 960 megabyte block I think you know you I have the exact benchmarks 1:15:39 you know published in our our contest that we ran and so very very quickly and these are just 1:15:46 on normal github run or computers that anyone can redo or test them for themselves so I don't really 1:15:52 need anything newer we already have what we have is already enough uh the world is has changed 1:15:59 since back in satoshi's day and back during the block size war in 2015 1:16:04 bandwidth was the bottleneck well actually bandwidth has increased so much relative to 1:16:12 transaction density of the world or transaction rate of the world 1:16:17 that it bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck anyway so I think this is another thing where 1:16:25 people forget that 10 years is a long time in the world of technology and in fact if we had the same 1:16:33 it would be very interesting if bitcoin had the same history like it's a it started in 2009 1:16:39 2009 january 3rd 2009 and let's say that somehow bitcoin was invented later in the internet's 1:16:47 history you know it's invented in 2019 10 years later and we're now six years in but it has 1:16:56 who knows I don't know how to keep everything else in apples to apples comparison but maybe it would 1:16:59 have like a let's just say it has a one megabyte block size even though I don't even know I don't 1:17:05 think that would make any sense but I think if we were at the current levels that we have 1:17:11 where you know like now you have like a call of duty update is like 28 gigabytes or something 1:17:16 then people routinely just they just start that you know and then they go grab something to eat 1:17:24 and then they go back in the to their xbox or something and so so I don't know what I'm not 1:17:31 sure what to make of how the block size or would have gone in a world where the hard drive and 1:17:38 bandwidth costs are very very low because we're all also much wealthier now so maybe internet costs 1:17:47 70 a month here but it also costs 70 a month back in like 2006 or something but 1:17:56 you know incomes have gone up and there's been inflation so 1:18:02 wait you pay 70 bucks for your internet well you know some people have deals where they can 1:18:08 get temporarily they can get 50 and it depends on how competitive your if your area is a monopoly 1:18:14 then you're kind of screwed what's your internet speed paul uh you know it's fine it's fine it's a 1:18:20 perfectly good speed i have two gigabits per second for 15 bucks oh really nice it's pretty 1:18:29 cheap don't you think i do think like romania has the third fastest internet infrastructure 1:18:36 in the world after japan and korea korea yeah yeah it's very heterogeneous here so there's 1:18:46 like some places they have multiple providers and but yeah no they get it's expensive too i think 1:18:57 yeah these again these are big differences so like back then it was only like it was 1:19:00 like roger veer in japan he had japan internet so he was a large blocker and then luke was in 1:19:06 like rural Luke Dashjr was in like rural florida so he had like these are also things that were 1:19:12 different there was no starlink i think there was also so don't quote me on this but i remember 1:19:21 hearing this from some dutch people that in the netherlands there is like the lowest speed 1:19:27 internet provider that still uses old dial-up infrastructure that they're selling for a very 1:19:33 high price compared to what that tech is really worth and vladimir vanderland is from the 1:19:38 netherlands so maybe that he was dealing with that reality when the block size wars were happening 1:19:44 even though he was pretty neutral on record possible but that's an interesting way of 1:19:51 framing it because you get to see different realities around the world and then you shape 1:19:58 your anyway i was all i was trying to say was that you asked about isn't it possible something better 1:20:03 would be but this is the thing is like i don't know if we even need any anything better but of 1:20:09 course that is possible but i was just thinking like okay we want to be able to let everyone 1:20:14 transact we want to be able to let other people do there should be some like insanely huge block 1:20:22 l2s that intentionally have a very expensive node and that very few people will run 1:20:31 just so that there can be weird stuff happening there 1:20:35 and there should be other stuff too like you know basically when you have a custodial lightning 1:20:39 it's basically an infinite uh infinite you would just call it like a centralized 1:20:47 l2 that has the node cost is infinite because you can't run the full node this is another thing 1:20:53 to maybe bring up is that it turns out most people find running a real lightning node to be 1:20:59 to be very very very difficult i can confirm that like i think i have a raspberry pi that 1:21:07 i used to use for an experiment i ran a lightning node for about two years 1:21:13 it was fun in the beginning we were opening channels with each other saying yeah this is 1:21:16 the future of payments whatever and then you have to deal with the reality that people force close 1:21:21 their channels and then you have to rebalance your channels and then you realize that you're 1:21:25 not routing anything and it's just like a full-time job after a while it's not fun right 1:21:34 so it's not very useful if you want to make a real apples to apples comparison you know you put on 1:21:40 your economics hat you have to say okay what's more expensive running a large block l2 node 1:21:51 where it does have higher you know hard disk and cpu usage and bandwidth requirements 1:22:01 yeah you but you just click a button and it just does all this work 1:22:06 how hard is that in comparison to running a lightning node which may have 1:22:10 smaller bandwidth smaller disk smaller cpu but it may be it may be like you have to invest money 1:22:17 you have to have liquidity you have to have actual funds there to open and close the channels 1:22:21 so the actual cost of running the lightning node in practice is probably more than running you know 1:22:27 whatever the bch node at scale or a bitcoin sv node even at scale i don't know about that but 1:22:33 i just think this is a so who are the real large blockers if you think about it well they're gonna 1:22:40 say you don't have to run your own node you can use something like phoenix which lets you open 1:22:45 your own channels at least and they're operating their own infrastructure but it becomes centralized 1:22:52 i think i'm responsible i think i'm responsible for paying one of the highest fees in the history 1:22:58 of lightning when i bought my car i used the lightning network on kraken and sending large 1:23:05 amounts made me pay like 50 fees on the lightning network and that's funny it's sort of laughable 1:23:12 i have screenshots of it just to remind myself that is laughable because i've used this centralized 1:23:18 service which allows me to open channels with them and they charge whatever fee they want so it's not 1:23:25 like i really have a choice i guess the choice that i had was to go back to onchain so i could 1:23:31 basically close my channels and withdraw my funds from lightning and pay just one dollar for the 1:23:36 onchain fee but i wanted to see what it's like to use kraken with lightning they banned my account 1:23:44 since then doesn't matter anymore thank you kraken they asked me for so here in europe they have some 1:23:52 aml requirements which are ridiculous like they ask you for payment statements going back five 1:23:56 years and i was like that's too bad that sounds like more of a europe thing than a kraken thing 1:24:02 but if i run into i just i heard that he they're starting like some kind of magic the gathering 1:24:07 tournament in las vegas so i'm gonna have some trading cards too i'll try to say 1:24:17 bring back lads but it does isn't that more like a europe thing isn't it like because sometimes we 1:24:21 americans we hear about what's going on in europe and we just think wow really like yeah you know 1:24:26 that you can you can have a violent revolution and overthrow your government like we did 1:24:30 i remember it's always allowed i was talking with super testnet and i i told him i think it was 1:24:36 exactly the car conversation he was like why didn't you pay it with cash and i was like 1:24:40 we can only pay cash up to 2000 euro he's like what yeah i remember i got a year and then it's 1:24:47 like that was when the the limits were like new or something this was around 2017 and then earlier 1:24:55 also i think maybe it's 20 it was like in italy and people were saying oh yeah you know you can 1:25:01 only take out so much from the atm oh it's the same here i think there's a daily limit of 600 1:25:07 they started doing that in the united states but i don't i don't remember i think it was 1:25:12 years afterwards now we're almost 10 years out of and i just remember at the time when i was in 1:25:18 italy i was just thinking like what the heck like that's not true is it and i was trying to think 1:25:23 like will they and i was like i guess i never really tried to just like withdraw as much money 1:25:28 as possible from the atm so i had no idea but then they started adding that but it's i think 1:25:34 that's mostly just more i i was always attributing that in america it did seem like it was very 1:25:39 organically tracking the we have a cashless society now you know because credit cards were everywhere 1:25:47 you had tap to pay you know you had the qr code scanner with covid so i i thought it was tracking 1:25:53 a little bit more organically whereas in europe it really did seem like they were trying to 1:25:59 got cash that people wanted people wanted to use cash but they were like 1:26:03 powers that be were coming down coming down on the atm user that was the impression like i was 1:26:11 just thinking like what the heck and they're like yeah we can only withdraw like a thousand euros 1:26:16 like a month or something and i was like what i'm so confused i would have been like maybe like you 1:26:21 go to the but whatever who cares i care yeah but it's good for me when they were doing that well 1:26:29 that's the funny that was the joke that i told i was like oh this is wow europe's gonna be big 1:26:34 bitcoin is gonna be a big hit in europe i was like i hope they tighten them even more 1:26:39 you only get you only get 50 euros a year yeah but they're also regulating beyond rams like i 1:26:46 told you what happened with kraken they're just making it more difficult for people to use it 1:26:53 without giving a lot of silly papers and i just don't feel comfortable giving this information 1:27:00 because i know what's going to happen with the kyc data i think the largest 1:27:05 company that deals with kyc data in europe got hacked like a month ago they have the records of 1:27:12 tens of millions of people or hundreds it's very depressing when it's like yeah the french uh 1:27:20 there's like the hack and then they have everyone's like home address and everything that's 1:27:25 it's kind of miserable oh and then like of course i don't know what it was but somehow and then i 1:27:31 but somehow and then i just get endless like robocalls and stuff somehow somehow my phone 1:27:39 number is uh i assume in the thing and people always try and they you know they try various 1:27:45 scams they've been trying to hack me for years they haven't succeeded yet and sometimes you 1:27:53 know because they they're calling they have a good story and sometimes they you know often 1:27:56 they've been they hack other people that you know especially on telegram yeah yeah yeah you 1:28:03 gotta be safe out there it's very very dangerous i got a message from an old friend and he's like 1:28:09 hey we haven't talked in a while we gotta catch up you want to do a call like okay sure and then 1:28:14 they send me this microsoft teams link which is slightly like messed up if you look at it there's 1:28:21 like two scrambled letters really tough yeah no it's tough they're good they're very good zoom 1:28:25 link they do it they do it full time and then they're like oh they're you need an update or 1:28:31 whatever they do it they scam you join the call and then they say oh we cannot hear you can you 1:28:36 update your zoom or whatever and you're gonna feel embarrassed you're gonna click the link 1:28:41 if you're using windows you're more exposed to this so it's better to not use windows 1:28:46 don't store any coins on a windows machine 1:28:51 if you're using linux they're not competent enough i presume but i think they're north 1:28:58 korean hackers because when this happened to me last time i went to a search engine and i typed 1:29:04 king jong king jong on is that the name of the leader yeah i think right i searched for gay porn 1:29:14 involving him and of course there is there is the rule 34 on the internet there is 1:29:20 porn of everything and i just copied that picture and sent it to the person pretending to be my 1:29:25 friend and they instantly blocked me every all the messages that vanished in front of my eyes 1:29:31 and i was like okay those were north korean hackers because if it was my friend that's funny 1:29:37 the friend would just be like what is this about yeah exactly he would be like oh this is 1:29:41 funny that's good they blocked me instantly cut out all the communications i think it's 1:29:48 a good approach except that you know i had to store that on my computer for a few seconds 1:29:55 and now it's in my browsing history search for gay porn involving yeah all of the uh 1:30:01 just think what did all the cookies and everyone's gonna be you know 1:30:04 the algorithm is gonna start feeding you that once it catches on oh no i don't want to think 1:30:10 about that that's fair anyway coming back to eCash what would you say is like the bullish 1:30:17 case for it do you see this because okay it's possible that what i've discovered is only the 1:30:23 tip of the iceberg as far as the derangements of bitcoin as far as all the smart ideas out there 1:30:29 that you know that like you know think about these people like a super test net or whatever 1:30:36 you know there's no way forward for the ideas and maybe it's like you know others the stuff 1:30:41 that's in vogue right now treasury companies whatever lightning network maybe that's even 1:30:47 million times worse than i thought like you know the treasury companies are a great way 1:30:52 hypothetically i'm not accusing anyone of a fraud i gotta like have like a fake lawyer note that i 1:30:57 fake read or something but you know treasury companies are a great way to just move a bunch 1:31:03 of money from people into a crypto wallet and then you just take all the btc or whatever for 1:31:09 yourself and then you say oh we got hacked or it didn't work out meanwhile it's just embezzled the 1:31:16 money so it's possible that there's there's all the existing stuff in btc is so much worse 1:31:22 and it's all being propped together by like that's that's a possibility and that actually 1:31:28 the underlying bitcoin idea is so strong that just by just by just getting rid of that junk 1:31:34 it will just rock and everything will be the way it was like in 2012-2014 1:31:38 type era that would be just like huge optimism and that it's also possible that the 1:31:45 the block size debate was more about how to handle disagreement in the block sizes 1:31:52 and so it was like people naturally disagree but how do we handle the hard fork without splitting 1:31:57 the community and it's also possible that the only reason ethereum got big at all in 2016 was 1:32:03 because the btc community was failing to resolve the block size dispute all of that stuff would 1:32:11 indicate that if you had a coin where there you could be have disputes settled by different l2s 1:32:17 that compete if you had that um then that would be like a really really really good idea 1:32:26 and that would mean that this would just like leap into action uh it's also possible that many 1:32:31 investors are tired of both bitcoin maximalism but they're also tired of terrible altcoins 1:32:36 so i'm reminded of when they did the video the bitcoin it was i think it was maybe 2023 1:32:42 and the guy was like oh raise your hand if you own bitcoin and then he was like great 1:32:45 it sounds like raise your hand if you're on ethereum and the guy's like really oh at the 1:32:48 bitcoin conference because it's like 80 of the people also raised their hand so i wouldn't have 1:32:53 raised my hand in that situation but if you if most of the people in the in the wider audience 1:32:59 are actually just like curious about all the different coins now you say well here's a coin 1:33:05 that can do everything um that may you know attract people so yeah the bullish case would be 1:33:14 like that this just takes off and then and then we we start peeling off the rational people from 1:33:20 btc and we we amplify on btc like the lightning and the treasury company ossify people and we 1:33:28 just amplify them over there so the whole thing just becomes a lightning treasury project and 1:33:34 then it would just enter a death spiral it's already very difficult to be honest in the btc 1:33:41 community there's a war against the truth eCash holders or eCash users are going to be able to 1:33:50 claim their eCash one-to-one to the btc you don't even really have to say the word claim like it 1:33:55 will just it'll just be there waiting for you forever how will this play out so if you're 1:34:00 going to have the treasury companies doing something stupid what's going to happen to the eCash 1:34:08 well that if you don't own if you you need to own if you want to get the eCash like if you 1:34:14 have already custodied your btc with someone they will also have custody of the eCash 1:34:21 so that's already a decision that you might have made if you leave your money on an exchange or 1:34:25 you leave it with the etf they will get it and then you can either just you can sue them or you 1:34:32 can say i don't want that or you could withdraw to self-custody i think it would be a lot of chaos 1:34:41 but i i'm kind of looking forward to that part of it i think that that part will be a fun chaos 1:34:47 we need a little bit more like we gotta like you know we need to shake things up just a little bit 1:34:53 i don't know things where the way things are going is actually yeah are you trying to get 1:34:59 people to withdraw their bitcoins from exchanges paul i'm hoping the exchanges will just say like 1:35:05 we'll credit you will credit it to you i think that's not that hard because especially because 1:35:10 the l1 is the same as bitcoin core so it's not like their tech team will have to like 1:35:14 learn a whole new thing i think that's what's best um if they don't if they say that they're 1:35:22 not going to do that and you want the cash then you have to temporarily take it off 1:35:29 the exchange for the at the time of the fork and then you can put it right back on this is funny 1:35:35 because back in the day the advice was to never have any money on the exchange and if whenever 1:35:41 you wanted to use the exchange you would put your money on swap it and then pull it right back off 1:35:46 because they're all so now i guess uh that's reversed but this could be actually funny if 1:35:55 eCash turns out to be a much stronger incentive to withdraw your coins from exchanges than trace 1:36:01 mayor's proof of keys like yeah to actually see the bitcoin blockchain getting a lot of transactions 1:36:07 out of exchanges into people's wallets just because they want to claim their eCash 1:36:12 they have three months right right uh really four months because it's late august 1:36:18 so four more months um and i think uh yeah and that's very true like what do you get out of like 1:36:28 this is the revenge of the self-custody because the network only recognizes you if you have a 1:36:33 UTXO on the network so so yeah if you have someone else but this is the point that those 1:36:40 like a trace mayor and those of us who say not your keys not your coins this is a point that we 1:36:47 have often um made and what we say is like you don't actually own any bitcoin if you if someone 1:36:57 else has the keys they own the bitcoin you have some weird relationship with them you know what 1:37:01 i mean like if you ever you have your coins with kraken bracken has a giant pile of btc 1:37:08 you have a relationship with kraken same with the etf the etf as all the bitcoin you don't 1:37:13 actually own any bitcoin same with the treasury companies if you own micro strategy or strategy 1:37:21 uh you don't own any bitcoin you own you know they own the bitcoin you have some relationship 1:37:28 with them use the point that says they say they they might give you some money later as a result 1:37:33 i think this is like the biggest takeaway from this interview like withdraw your coins 1:37:41 into self-custody or at least practice it or get used to the idea that you might need to do it 1:37:47 because first of all if you're really good at it then they probably will just credit everyone and 1:37:51 they won't the ad tissue won't come up but they might you know everyone is different too they 1:37:57 might that would be wild but you can imagine maybe what if kraken does and coinbase doesn't 1:38:05 i'm not sure uh you know who knows you can also petition your exchange if you're so in love with 1:38:11 your custodian you can petition them to support eCash on day one so they can claim your coins 1:38:18 they can appear yeah certainly that's very validating that'd be very validating for eCash 1:38:23 to be immediately supported on the exchange yeah sometimes the exchange is trying to charge 1:38:28 money to get uh listed i don't think we'll have to do that at all for a wide variety of reasons 1:38:35 one of which is there's already the coin shift l2 that already lets you swap 1:38:40 btc for eCash but i the second one is that there will just be i i don't know it'll just 1:38:45 be chaos if they don't and especially with the transaction replay so so i anticipate that 1:38:52 some will so what is the claiming process like is it just like you just think you know that you 1:38:59 think the node you have to um yeah i guess there is a little bit of because when you think the 1:39:05 node it will have no idea what your private key is in the btc world but um if you use the private 1:39:13 key yeah and this is very important that i think a lot of people will not want to do this on day 1:39:18 one the smart thing to do if you're a normal person is to wait for a little while to see 1:39:25 you know because what i'm going to tell you oh yeah this isn't like a virus that will just 1:39:29 steal all your private keys but but yeah you need to use the private key from your btc world 1:39:37 in the new software do you have to sign the message from your wallet 1:39:43 well technically every transaction is a file 1:39:47 technically every transaction is a uh a message message you know so so yes 1:39:57 so you're gonna download the eCash client 1:40:01 so you're gonna download the eCash client which is yeah but it'll be again the l1 client it will be 1:40:06 it'll be hard for bugs to hide there but possibly possible but the the l1 client will basically just 1:40:12 be bitcoin core with small block size and one weird transaction that alters satoshi's coins 1:40:20 and some other things like having a different name and having a one-time all changing the 1:40:25 difficulty to its minimum value that's just to create the hard fork in the first place but other 1:40:30 than that there won't be any changes so man did paul this is why i like you so much and this is 1:40:37 why i trust that you're honest because you're such a bad marketer like i was trying to get you to say 1:40:42 something positive like how to claim and you're like i would wait maybe it's a bad idea maybe it's 1:40:48 a virus okay man well yeah a lot of people would say oh yeah put your uh private keys type your 1:40:55 private keys into this thing like that in 99 out of 100 cases that'd be a virus but yeah people can 1:41:00 just uh uh you know you would what you would want to just wait like a few days because 1:41:08 just think about it like everyone would notice like when the 1:41:16 when it had reached a point where you know what i mean like a if it were that type of scam it 1:41:22 wouldn't be able to last more than a few days 1:41:26 because someone would pull the trigger and take all that but you know that's what i'm trying to 1:41:30 say so no one person should wait before manipulating their private keys but yeah all you do is import 1:41:35 them and then your coins are just waiting for you over there and if you use them in our software 1:41:43 you can split them off so that they stop replaying 1:41:49 whereas if you send them somewhere in btc the eCash will probably also go there even after 1:41:55 the fork not necessarily but probably okay so in practical terms you export your wallet file 1:42:03 from bitcoin core and you import it into the cash client right right and the eCash client 1:42:08 just thinks it's the same chain history so it just says oh you also if you owned 7.123 1:42:15 coins in btc world you own 7.123 in eCash world 1:42:21 if you have a passphrase on your wallet will it ask for it 1:42:26 uh that depends on how they set it up but yeah you need to get the actual private keys 1:42:33 so probably does it work with electrum 1:42:41 i mean it should yes this is the same it's the same private key situation 1:42:48 because this idea that you need to withdraw your bitcoin is very vague you need to withdraw your 1:42:54 bitcoin into bitcoin core most likely to enjoy the full functionality of claiming your eCash 1:43:03 so yeah i mean i think electrum is very good and doesn't require you to 1:43:11 download the entire blockchain which is like 800 gigabytes 1:43:18 let me ask you something else if let's say that in the first week of eCash's existence 1:43:25 you're gonna see people inscribing ordinals and creating collections of nfts on eCash 1:43:32 they're willing to pay the price because in dollar terms it's not very expensive 1:43:37 what are you going to do about that are you going to encourage it no i'm incurring yeah i 1:43:41 encourage that all you all anyone who pays transaction fees is a real user so that's 1:43:47 good that's a sign of health but they can effectively deter other users from onboarding 1:43:54 layer twos i don't really don't think so because the the thunder chain has a lot of 1:44:02 space there and then there's a bit assets chain that is just for issuing stuff like that but isn't 1:44:08 there a peg in process where you need to get one transaction on the base layer well the yeah you 1:44:15 want on l1 then the l1 will be a little crowded at first and in fact one idea that i don't think 1:44:22 is not that um but basically the idea with the l1 is to have the equilibrium block size be small 1:44:29 so that i may have it shrink down i haven't you know this would be like kind of a last 1:44:34 minute change but a very simple one um may have it shrink down to its one tenth like 1:44:40 over a short period of time you know over a period instead of instantly um just because 1:44:47 it'll be crazy during the time of the split um but the goal is to have it just be in equilibrium 1:44:54 the more decentralized small block version um now the question is like if l1 is going to be crowded 1:45:03 but anyone can just send coins from l1 to l2 at any time and then you can onboard people 1:45:09 directly to the l2 even without even if they were never on l1 1:45:16 so it doesn't really bother me that much of how how crowded l1 is 1:45:20 i think it actually settled down in l1 um at some point 1:45:28 in your design for Drivechains on bitcoin you decided for 13 000 blocks as a number that 1:45:34 guarantees a reasonable amount of security 1:45:39 did you decide to stick to 13 000 for eCash because i recall you said that it could be 1:45:45 safe even with much less than that i did um it's true that originally it was two to four weeks 1:45:54 then i changed it to three to six months because people brought up 1:45:57 this concern about dishonest miners and um but yeah then they stepped they still kept complaining 1:46:06 about it so i think the it's possible they had no idea what they were complaining about really 1:46:11 but i i decided to keep it anyway okay so basically what you're gonna be running 1:46:18 in terms of BIP300 on eCash is exactly what can be activated off the shelf on bitcoin 1:46:26 with no modifications 1:46:30 yeah the l1 will be the same as bitcoin or and the the BIP300 part will be activated by the 1:46:39 Core Untouched Soft Fork by the activator that's also the same that will be exactly 1:46:43 the same way how you you would activate it on btc 1:46:47 now it's interesting because the Zcash team which also forked bitcoin but to start a new 1:46:52 blockchain they also made sure that they maintain compatibility one-to-one with bitcoin 1:46:58 and basically what they're building is the latest version of zero cash which was 1:47:03 the paper that was first proposed for bitcoin and they're still hoping that someday bitcoin 1:47:09 is going to pick it up they keep on improving it but it's still one-to-one compatible with 1:47:15 bitcoin if that ever becomes part of the conversation so you're taking the same approach 1:47:23 right well it's easier to just maintain one thing 1:47:29 and yeah i do think it's possible that 1:47:34 you know it's still possible that miners will just decide uh before yeah before i go i guess 1:47:40 i should i plug my i have an event i'm not going to talk about i'm certainly not going 1:47:43 to talk about this while on stage in las vegas because i'm in speaking in las vegas 1:47:50 so day three at 3 p.m uh but on day two i have a little thing in the Satoshi social room i have 1:47:57 like a little party the end of day two free drinks and it's from 5 p.m to 7 p.m it's possible 1:48:06 that i thought the 51 hashrate happy hour so it's possible that all the miners will just meet there 1:48:11 and just you know start to activate soft forks but as i mentioned earlier it would require more 1:48:16 than just activating the soft forks we have to have like an actual cultural revolution in btc 1:48:22 where people just admit that not only was lightning network not only does it not work but it was a 1:48:28 mistake and it was a mistake to shill it so hard and it was a mistake to like kind of cancel people 1:48:34 for telling the truth about how terrible it is and but that's exactly what we did with many other 1:48:41 things you know the soft fork process like all the like cool people have been kind of kicked out 1:48:47 and all the villains have just buried themselves in but i only have a little bit more time 1:48:55 yeah so i'm gonna make the most of it um do you think you're gonna be uninvited from events now 1:49:04 that you're basically the creator it's a good question but i think who even cares because at 1:49:08 this point all the events are kind of terrible and you know and like everyone's like running out 1:49:12 of money like everything has been done and what's the point of coming to an event if it's just about 1:49:18 the treasury companies or something you know what i mean or if it's just a lightning event 1:49:23 you know what so i don't know like what are the good events anymore 1:49:30 i've had fun in ethereum conferences to be honest because that's where you discover people 1:49:35 building without asking for permission and sometimes if michael steller succeeds in defining 1:49:41 bitcoin as like a very tame thing then there's no reason to have a conference you know there's 1:49:48 no reason for people to even talk about it there's no reason to have a conversation about it like no 1:49:51 one has a conversation about like two by fours or something you know what i mean you have a 1:49:56 conversation about like a great ethical dispute or like a new law or like a war or something or 1:50:04 business model something creative a new piece of art new piece of music that's what you'd have a 1:50:09 discussion about but if it's something's a settled issue and it's a boring one then there's no reason 1:50:15 to have any of this culture there's no reason to have any parties or any conferences or any magazines 1:50:22 or any tweets because there's nothing to talk about bitcoin is just a stock ticker 1:50:28 i have two more questions and i'll let you go one of them can be answered 1:50:32 quite quickly the other one could be another hour of conversation but it's your challenge to 1:50:38 basically answer in a short manner i'll start with the short one where can people 1:50:43 assuming that they became interested in eCash right now and they want to buy some coins where 1:50:49 can they do that i'm not sure that people will unless they are an accredited investor or they're 1:50:58 outside the us but yeah you should definitely follow me on twitter Truthcoin on twitter and 1:51:08 the website is eCash.com so i would stay glued to that for updates is it still 1:51:17 hidden under a password or is it public i'm going to have a most of it i'm going to have a lot of it 1:51:23 unhidden by the time the announcement is made okay now the second question just for the record 1:51:30 how much time do you have right now like a little bit okay right now you're the ceo of layer two 1:51:37 labs and you're launching an altcoin which is called eCash which is competing with bitcoin 1:51:43 i can argue that this is a centralized project and what will it take or at what point will you 1:51:50 decide that you can step down and the project can become truly decentralized 1:51:58 well that's a good question i think when whenever anything is created it has to start centralized 1:52:06 you know everyone like william shakespeare he invented different words so he was like the 1:52:10 inventor of the word like elbow and eyeball for example but then once they're in use there's not 1:52:18 so i actually think that we this the what the Drivechain idea does that no that no one else 1:52:23 has done before it actually does decentralized development because before everyone has their 1:52:29 their their dev team and someone has to decide what the next version of the full node software is 1:52:36 and if you dissent from that you kind of have to hard fork and do or start an altcoin and do your 1:52:41 own project and so really this is the first project to decentralize development and allow 1:52:48 different developers that that disagree with each other to mostly so i think that that 1:52:56 that's a very important point to keep in mind the and also reducing the block size that was my old 1:53:02 definition of node centralization that makes it easier to run a node that increases decentralization 1:53:07 i think my hope is that the the BIP300 the CUSF activator i think that that is a very 1:53:15 completable project and so that thing can ossify so to speak and then with l1 being copy of bitcoin 1:53:24 core that also can kind of run basically on autopilot and then even our front end 1:53:31 graphical user interface i imagine a lot of work being done on that but it's since it's a separate 1:53:38 modular graphical user interface people could easily fork that at the drop of a hat and make 1:53:44 it make their own so i actually think it would be very very soon after the moment of the fork 1:53:51 that it will just i mean it may almost instantly become the most decentralized cryptocurrency 1:53:59 but yeah in order to bring it from not existing into the world in a viable way it doesn't require 1:54:08 someone to do something so yeah there's uh there's a transition period but yeah i think this is much 1:54:14 better than like i hated when like the ic people would do this stuff they get all this money in 1:54:18 advance then stuff would take a long time before the project was ready to launch so i didn't like 1:54:24 so i didn't like that at all 1:54:29 yeah can you disclose how large the team of developers is currently working on building 1:54:35 eCash and how many developers you can onboard and is incentivized to build let's say leaving 1:54:42 ethereum or Zcash or whatever to build on eCash well i think the big draw is that 1:54:48 why would you i think the big draw is that if in a world where everyone you know there's there's one 1:54:55 coin that can kind of do everything and then everything else is sort of fractured it's it's 1:55:01 like what has what maximizes the chance of building something that users will actually use 1:55:07 and it could easily someone could easily say oh ethereum already has these strong network effects 1:55:12 ethereum has this history of running it's the number two i would totally if someone were to 1:55:15 believe that i would say that makes a lot of sense and they should uh think that that's a 1:55:21 very logical thing to think but i also think it's kind of like you know btc is the number one 1:55:27 cryptocurrency community now we're going to have it's going to be btc but you can also do all these 1:55:34 things so why not just take all the ideas that actually work plug them in here i think the big 1:55:39 work plug them in here i think the big draw is not like hiring developers and getting them to 1:55:46 do cool projects we really want if a developer has an idea that they really like and they think 1:55:52 is good they want to stand out and get recognition for that and that's part of what this offers 1:55:59 so in addition to we are doing all that stuff we have full-time to go we have around nine 1:56:03 or so full-time developers um but just working on all different things 1:56:13 but i think if you it's like trying to make something happen that's just not going to 1:56:19 happen if you tried to like hire the most developers and say produce all the best 1:56:22 software what we're really looking for is like somewhere out there the the you know 15 year 1:56:30 old genius or whatever and they have this new project if they launch it as a new l2 sidechain 1:56:36 everyone will know that it's not a pump and dump oh that's a good point and so then this is their 1:56:43 way to actually sort themselves to the top of the list of people's attention and then if the 1:56:50 project's good it will attract users and we want to have people who we want to avoid the 1:56:56 we want to avoid like a kind of political world of uh like github pull request uh 1:57:06 political development 1:57:10 yeah just think of all these people like we mentioned before all the frustrated developers 1:57:13 so these are like when you have that creative idea you want to be able to exercise it 1:57:18 i completely agree and so then what if you're like working on like number 75 coin on coin market 1:57:26 cap you have a really really good idea you think it's really good but just commercially it's so 1:57:31 difficult to make okay so you're working on bitcoin sv which is like i don't even know where it is 1:57:37 on coin market cap but it's it's wherever it is it's on the second page or something and 1:57:44 it's wherever it is it's on the second page or something and um but you have a really good idea 1:57:52 well what do you do are you really gonna stick stay on on that or maybe you should try it depends 1:57:57 on if everyone else is trying as well but you should try um on a coin if other people are also 1:58:05 trying there so yeah i'm hoping that the hard fork is still as viable now as it was in 2017 1:58:11 when it became easily you know a leaderboard uh point i think it's culturally taboo but this 1:58:21 this is like an advantage of the project because you're breaking the conventional you're proving 1:58:29 that there's still some way of protesting basically against the policy of bitcoin core and the way 1:58:37 it's been managed you can compete and basically you can help each other if you remember there was 1:58:44 that moment in 2018 when a bitcoin cash developer was able to find an inflation bug in bitcoin core 1:58:52 and you can argue that this was a net benefit the fact that bitcoin cash was able to do that 1:58:58 or maybe you can argue that if there was the bitcoin cash developer still working on bitcoin 1:59:03 maybe that that would never happen there's no way of knowing it maybe it's counterfactual 1:59:10 but you're gonna have more developers working on the same codebase except that it has smaller blocks 1:59:15 but still there's more eyeballs and more actually smart people rocking with this codebase 1:59:25 and i i genuinely hope that it's going to be a worthy competitor if and i do believe that 1:59:34 eCash is more interesting than bitcoin cash if it's going to have the same market cap as 1:59:40 bitcoin cash right now bitcoin cash is at i'm actually looking so for the record you mentioned 1:59:47 bsv it's 110 in the ranking of coins on the second page of coin market cap bitcoin cash is 1:59:55 actually 13th in a world where and i i present this argument a lot in the world where bitcoin 2:00:01 is winning bitcoin cash would be also like below the top 100 ranking right now bitcoin cash is 2:00:09 bigger than monero at 8.9 billion dollars and the price per coin is 445 so there is a market for 2:00:20 this and i do believe that ultimately eCash is more useful because it has the Drivechains and 2:00:27 the developers can build a lot of really cool stuff at the same time bitcoin cash has more 2:00:34 of a network effect has been on the market for nine years now and is listed on payments 2:00:40 processors and exchanges and whatever so there's a lot of work to do on this front 2:00:46 but technologically and i like to think that i'm a technologist i'm not much of an austrian 2:00:53 economist i'm not much of maybe that i am a bit of a cypherpunk but i do like the idea of progressing 2:01:02 through technology and i reject the concept that one iteration that we had 17 years ago is going to 2:01:11 be permanently the one that will prevail and we should not touch it or update it or change it 2:01:17 i think it's software and it does need to change with the times and become better and while i agree 2:01:25 with the monetary policy i can also disagree with some design choices for the software 2:01:31 so i wish you all the luck in the world paul not just because once again i'm invested in this 2:01:36 project not with a lot but i still have skin in the game and i hope that 2:01:46 i guess the best case scenario for it is that it's gonna flip bitcoin if bitcoin is gonna fail 2:01:51 so miserably this can actually become the dominant currency if it's gonna be just as big as bitcoin 2:01:58 cash there's a lot of value in that and right um so that's kind of some important stuff to keep in 2:02:06 mind is that you know it would still be a success if it just forces us to have a conversation about 2:02:13 the derangements if it pushes bitcoin to improve like i presume you're not gonna sell your bitcoin 2:02:21 for eCash right right yeah i don't think people should necessarily do that so if you're gonna be 2:02:28 holding both coins and one of them is pushing the other to improve and gets more users more 2:02:33 developers more value overall i think it's a net benefit so if anything i see it as a hedge 2:02:41 kind of investment or inverse whatever you call it i'm not the investor type either i just get 2:02:50 excited about tech so yeah if you think this is a good idea let me know in the comments 2:02:58 let me know what you think let me know if there's anything that we might have missed 2:03:03 i know it's gonna be very controversial once everyone finds out and they're gonna discover 2:03:09 all the details one by one and i know because i had the same process like i was shocked at first 2:03:15 like wait a second the hard fork we don't do that anymore nobody's gonna support this and 2:03:22 you're gonna burn your reputation poll and nobody's gonna want to invite you to conferences anymore 2:03:27 and then i discovered the whole shad thing which is satoshi half airdrop which means that satoshi 2:03:34 only gets half of his coins while everyone gets one-to-one their bitcoin and eCash i mean that 2:03:42 that's also something that takes time to think and fully digest but it's very hard to bootstrap 2:03:48 something and when you think about it all the pure forks if anything were not very successful 2:03:55 in this space and it's the harsh reality like ethereum classic you can argue it was much fairer 2:04:01 than ethereum eth but it did not have the same dev team did not have the same funding it was just 2:04:10 a lot of virtue signaling that did not produce too much i i don't want to you know knock on them 2:04:17 i consider some of them to be friends of mine but it just was not as disruptive as ethereum 2:04:23 sometimes the fact that you have a lot of money to pay developers to do research and build stuff 2:04:29 there's a lot of value in that and the space progresses because of it and bitcoin benefited 2:04:36 indirectly from it from ethereum now we have some ideas that are coming back to bitcoin there are 2:04:42 some good ideas from ethereum which are existent in eCash on what you call it it's not each side 2:04:50 anymore i know each side was our clone of ethereum yeah so you gave up on that well i you know i 2:05:00 wasn't personally that interested in it so even though we made it you can still look up the old 2:05:06 version but i just didn't really but well i'm sure either someone will bring it back some evm 2:05:14 because it's so popular but i i wasn't that interested in i was what i was thinking was 2:05:19 let's what are the actual things that people use ethereum for you know that like the assets and 2:05:24 identity and can we just specialize on those but yeah well there's gonna have to be an evm 2:05:34 l2 but i was just thinking i don't really want it but that's the other 2:05:36 thing about this project is you know nothing is when people want to 2:05:43 like you know if people think you know that eCash should do this or should do something else 2:05:50 you know nothing's stopping you from also doing that but yeah we had one at some point called 2:05:57 eth side i personally lost interest in it because i don't really think anything that's happening on 2:06:02 ethereum is actually that interesting if you really think about it a lot of the stuff that 2:06:06 they work on is like trying to do scalability via optimistic roll-ups but that's very similar 2:06:16 but that's very similar to what Drivechain has been the whole time for the last 10 years so i 2:06:22 already think i i already think i've covered that whole thing and even the idea that you 2:06:27 could do whatever you want with ethereum it's like i'll just do a more specific version of that 2:06:35 with sidechain itself yeah so anyway i have to go though yeah yeah yeah the fact that i knew about 2:06:43 eth side is just proof that i've been following this project for a long time 2:06:48 i'm a big fan of it that's why i invested in it i i hope it succeeds check it out not financial 2:06:54 advice but give it like a few nights of thinking like huh what if this works what if it doesn't 2:07:03 there's risk involved but you never accomplish anything significant i'll be back for the 2:07:11 controversy we can do a long oh yeah once people start reacting to this we can do another episode 2:07:18 yeah i'm sure there'll be some some funny stuff to come out of it thank you very much paul thanks 2:07:23 for everyone listening to this thanks to the sponsors LayerTwo Labs obviously brains hash 2:07:29 power you can use it to actually mine eCash orange rock i hope they list the cash for trading 2:07:36 cake wallet i hope they list eCash for spv and site tip.ai i hope that they let people swap 2:07:44 anything into eCash thank you very much for listening i'll see you in the next one best of 2:07:50 luck paul thank you 2:08:06 you