0:00 If you prefer large block Bitcoin, and you switch to Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, you got the feature, 0:06 but you lose whatever 90% of your plus percent of your wealth against BTC. Sidechain prevents that 0:12 from happening. It says you will never be harmed as a result of trying the new software. And that's 0:17 how you have lots of different systems work without having the exchange rate appreciation 0:22 or depreciation, which people just don't like. They don't like volatility as it is, so you don't 0:26 want to add more. Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, sits at about 47% of the entire cryptocurrency 0:43 market, under half. And as far as usage that people are actually willing to pay for, it's 0:47 less than 10% of what Ethereum is. It's a fair point to say that virtually all the cryptocurrency 0:53 market exists because it does things that Bitcoin could not or decided not to do. A lot of Bitcoin's 1:00 hopes and dreams have been pinned on second layer solutions such as the Lightning Network, 1:04 but so far that hasn't really taken off in a really meaningful way, and even then doesn't 1:09 really do a lot of the things that other cryptocurrencies do so well. So is Bitcoin 1:14 going to be a shrinking part of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem over time? Maybe not. 1:19 Drivechains are an interesting technology that basically lets you build any kind of cryptocurrency 1:25 type chain on top of Bitcoin as a layer 2 and easily swap in and out between the main layer 1:31 and other ones. Basically, the value proposition would be to take all the cryptos out there, 1:36 do literally the same thing that they would do, tie the unit of account to Bitcoin so you don't 1:42 have to be speculating on a whole bunch of different assets, combine their security with 1:46 that of the main Bitcoin chain, and basically make it one big ecosystem. It allows Bitcoin to 1:51 become the only cryptocurrency anyone really needs, but at the same time allows Bitcoin to do all the 1:58 things that anyone else wants to do while people like me are using other cryptocurrencies. The idea 2:03 of Drivechains has been around for many years, but it recently got a resurgence in attention 2:09 thanks to Paul Sztorc, who I have the pleasure of speaking with right now, to go into a deep 2:14 dive of what are Drivechains, how do they work, why use them, etc. Hey, everyone. I have the 2:20 fantastic pleasure of speaking with the one and only Paul Sztorc. How's it going, man? 2:24 Hello. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being on. I definitely saw your name pop up a lot 2:31 in the whole Drivechain discussion, and that's one of those new things that have popped up. 2:36 I wouldn't say it's not necessarily new, but the attention is definitely growing and is new 2:42 around it. People have finally come around. Let's really hope so. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, 2:48 I think so. I just wanted to get really deep into the subject, 2:55 maybe not super deep technically, but the whole value proposition and everything, 3:00 and also the feasibility. Before we dive into all that stuff, do you want to just really quick say 3:06 who you are, what you do, etc.? Well, yes. I'm Paul Sztorc. I am the founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs, 3:14 which is focused on building the Bitcoin Layer 2 that is actually a real Layer 2, 3:21 which is a sidechain. We can talk a little bit about what exactly that means. 3:26 I've been in Bitcoin for a long time, and I published a lot of research on my blog, 3:33 Truthcoin.info, and one of the first things I published was a peer-to-peer prediction markets 3:41 idea for Bitcoin, but it's so exotic and weird that it could only be attached to Bitcoin by a 3:46 sidechain, and that is what got me into all this. Then I learned a lot about sidechains. 3:52 Since I had to actually work with the code and with the idea to make my own idea work, 3:57 I learned a lot about what most of what people say when they use that word is either false 4:06 or just irrelevant or misleading, and then I learned the true state of affairs was terrible, 4:12 but I also, I think, sort of fixed it back in 2015, November 2015, and I published this idea 4:20 and kind of been quietly advocating for it ever since, and now, just like I always predicted it 4:26 would, I thought it's only a matter of time before the idea makes it back because it just, it hits, 4:32 it solves a very real problem for people. It's actually solved several at once, so I just knew 4:38 it's only a matter of time before one of these problems just catches up with reality, and then 4:43 the idea is revived, and so that's sort of now what is happening. Yeah, for sure. So before we 4:50 dive into Drivechains specifically, in the, especially the Ethereum world, but also a 4:57 little bit the Bitcoin world and other worlds, there's a lot of kind of confusion over what is 5:02 an L2 and what is a sidechain and stuff. Right. So what do you, what would you consider to be an L2? 5:11 This could be an hour long just on this, so just for brevity, what would you consider to be an L2, 5:15 and what do you think is a sidechain? It's another case where I think, unfortunately, the word, 5:21 you know, has been ruined, so it's, because it puts me in a difficult position when I try to 5:25 explain it, where if I explain it, it may give a definition that's in conflict with what most other 5:31 people say, and then it's a kind of a, it's kind of a little bit of an ethical puzzle for me. Do I 5:37 tell you what I really believe, or do I try to speak the language that most people speak, 5:42 and how do I square this circle, so to speak? But I think the L2 is, what I would do is paint a 5:49 picture of the real world that you already live in first, where you have a checking account at a 5:54 bank, I mean, maybe not you personally, because you try to live off Bitcoin, which is the most admirable 5:59 thing, one of the most admirable things that you could do, but most people, they have a checking 6:03 account, or their business has a checking account, or their employer pays them with 6:06 something, like they pay them through, like, you know, direct deposit, so you have a checking 6:11 account, and your bank, they have an account themselves at the Fed in the United States, 6:17 and the Fed has an account at the Bank of International Settlements, so this is pyramid, 6:22 and then you're, if you have a credit card, the credit card has a, they have a checking account 6:27 at whatever, Chase Manhattan or something, you know, they have one, they have a, you have a Bank 6:32 of America checking account, so it's kind of like, but this, my definition that I'm giving 6:40 you is so different from what most people would say, so again, it puts me in kind of a tight spot, 6:45 but I think, like, you, the layer two is, like, there's the existing L1 network, 6:57 and then if you have, like, you have, like, an account on L1, you can make, like, a sub-network, 7:03 it's its own different thing, but what's up for grabs is all the money in that account, 7:08 so let's say I have four Bitcoin on BTC layer one, I have four Bitcoin and some UTXO, 7:16 I can split in the Lightning Network, a context of the Lightning Network, I make a new sub-network 7:20 that has only four Bitcoin in it, and in the Lightning Network, it's a channel that's divided 7:26 between me and you, me and someone else, two people, and that four Bitcoin is split, so the 7:32 way the Lightning Network works is that I take four of my Bitcoin, you take six of your Bitcoin, 7:36 and we make a ten, two of two multisig output, so there's ten Bitcoin in the Lightning Channel, 7:42 and it's split four six, but there we can, it's our own network, so we can update it however we like, 7:48 and that's what I think an L2 is. L2 is, like, you take some of the 21 million Bitcoin, 7:54 it's in a sub-network that can do its own thing, and the lamest, most, the lamest L2 is the 8:02 custodial L2, which is, like, you just have your money at Coinbase, yeah, or you have your money at 8:06 Striker or Swan, exactly, yes, right, or any custodial Lightning Wallet, they just have the 8:15 money there, and it's kind of like the sub-network is just one guy tells you, you know, one guy just 8:26 decides what happens there, and not much better than that is something like the Liquid Network, 8:31 where it's just 11 or 15 keys just decide what happens, and similarly in Ethereum L2, 8:39 many of these L2s, they have admin keys, they have, like, it's just a multi-sig where the people 8:44 can just change everything, absolutely everything on a whim or steal all the money, and in that 8:49 sense they are just as bad as the Liquid Network is on BTC, of course, of course, most people don't 8:55 see any of it that way, I have a very heterodox view, yeah, I mean, that is a very, I guess, 9:01 reality-based way of looking at it, not to try to pat you on the back or anything, but it is true as 9:07 long as you have that, but so one thing, the reason why the side, what is a sidechain question 9:12 comes about is because some people say that, for example, something like Polygon on Ethereum is 9:20 an L2, and there's a lot of argument that it might be a sidechain, or rather it might just be a 9:25 completely separate cryptocurrency altogether, and so I guess what separates a, like, something 9:31 like Litecoin, is Litecoin a sidechain, or is it its own? I say no, because to me, the sidechain, 9:39 to me, this term was, it came about when Bitcoin was, like, there was no Ethereum even existed when 9:45 this term first came about, and to me, the sidechain is a problem, is a solution to the problem 9:52 of altcoins, so it's all problem-centric, so it's kind of like a question, like, if I asked you 9:58 something, like, what is a fire extinguisher, and you said, well, it's, you know, it's to put out fires, 10:04 well, you could do a lot of other things with a fire extinguisher, like you prop open a door 10:07 or something, but you know what I mean, you could hit someone over the head with it, 10:12 and that's been done in movies, right, and so, but if you were to try to explain a fire 10:19 extinguisher without referring to putting out a fire, I mean, it's right there in the name, you know, 10:25 it's like smoke detector, it's right there in the name, it's a solution to a problem, of course, 10:32 you know, like, your house is on fire while you're asleep, and you need to wake up, or you're, 10:37 soon the carbon monoxide or whatever will kill you, and you'll be dead, like, you need to wake 10:42 up, like, you need to know about something, so, like, if you, just imagine trying to explain 10:50 what a fire extinguisher was without referring to fires or putting out fire, and so that, I think, 10:55 the sidechain, to me, is Bitcoin was invented, but then people started to say, well, what about 11:00 these other things, what about this other stuff, what about the zk-snarks, what about ring signatures, 11:05 what about, you know, like, all these people had all these intriguing ideas, most of which were bad, 11:11 but some of which were pretty interesting, it was a very creative place back then, as you may 11:15 remember, like, 2014, 2013, 2012, it was, like, a lot of stuff coming out, some of it bad, 11:24 but it was creative, there was a lot of growth, and so the sidechain allows you to just send 11:32 your coins to a completely new piece of software that has its own blockchain, so it's altcoins 11:36 without the coin, so it's just like you say, Monero, but with Bitcoin, or Ethereum, but with 11:41 Bitcoin, so you have the EVM, you have everything you have on Ethereum, but there's no ETH, 11:46 there's no ETH, there's only BTC, and that's what it is to me, is this universal altcoin simulator 11:56 for Bitcoin, but, I don't know, then the term has now been ruined by everyone else. Of course, 12:01 well, I mean, that seems like a fair enough definition, and I guess the difference between a, 12:07 say, Bitcoin sidechain, in theory, and something like Litecoin, is that, first off, your units that 12:14 you're playing with, the units of money, are denominated in Bitcoin, so that if you care about 12:19 the scarcity and value and stuff of Bitcoin, you don't have to give that up, necessarily, 12:24 and then the other might be, you can always redeem them for actual Bitcoin on the main Bitcoin 12:31 blockchain, and I guess with those, do you think that would be an accurate way of, kind of, 12:36 the two main things that would separate a sidechain from a completely different 12:41 chain, as far as the value proposition? Yeah, like, with a sidechain, you introduce a new 12:47 dimension of competition, so the sidechains are rivalrous, none can exist while the other lives, 12:55 you know, so they're in conflict, they're fighting a war against each other, and so 13:02 that's bad, and it also, it doesn't really help you get the new feature, so, for example, 13:09 you, if you preferred large block Bitcoin, and you switch to Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, 13:18 you got the feature, but you lose, whatever, 90% of your, plus percent of your wealth against BTC, 13:25 so the sidechain, it prevents that from happening, it says you will never be harmed 13:29 as a result of trying the new software, because it's a one-to-one exchange, 13:35 one-to-one exchange there and back, so no one will ever be harmed, the only real way to make, 13:41 the only real way to make sure that no one is harmed when you interoperate is to make sure that 13:46 no one gains either, you know what I mean, you can't have, like, a one-to-one peg in one direction 13:50 and a ten-to-one in the other direction, it has to be just one-to-one, it's symmetric, 13:54 and this is just you saying that four quarters equals a dollar, and a dollar equals a hundred 14:00 pennies, you say, yeah, I can always interoperate these different media, you know, you go to the 14:09 ATM, you withdraw $20, your checking account bounce goes down by $20, you get one $20 bill, 14:15 you put the $20 bill in, so it all adds up, it's all kept, it's all exchanges at par, 14:21 one-to-one, and that's how you have lots of different systems work without having the exchange 14:27 rate appreciation or depreciation, which is, which people just don't like, they don't like 14:33 volatility as it is, so you don't add more, yeah, you want the competition to be on the feature only, 14:41 you don't want it to be a function of other things, like when the exchange rate is a function 14:44 of many things, just as such as like recognizability, or just association, like the 14:51 network effect, you want someone to say, okay, even though this is a tiny network, that's not that 14:57 popular, that no one has heard of, you can still use it for the feature, and you are left no worse 15:03 off than you were before, so it sort of sterilizes the competition, yeah, it's like, 15:12 you know, you have a USB port, ports on your computer, and you buy USB 15:19 appliance, like, you know, webcam or something, you don't want it to compete on the port, 15:24 you only want it to compete on what you want to compete on, if you have to switch too many things, 15:31 it stops being viable, like if you have, what if you have a car that has four wheels, and it 15:37 runs on the road, but it needs a different kind of fuel than exists in America, well, 15:42 then you have to build a whole new fuel network, so Elon Musk kind of did this with the supercharger 15:46 network, but it's very difficult to do this kind of thing, like this is a big job, you got to pay, 15:51 you got to build a car and the supercharger network, and the only way it was viable was because 15:55 he sold like luxury cars in a few places first, you have to slowly build this new network up, 16:02 the network means that you're affected by what other people do, and so if you go somewhere, 16:10 and you know, you go to the laundromat, it only takes quarters, 16:13 and you have a hundred dollar bill, then you don't have any money, 16:18 and so you want to be able to switch back, and switching back and forth just means that 16:23 you, it kind of like means that it's still Bitcoin everywhere, even though it takes a different form, 16:33 and that's Bitcoin, just like 25 cents to one dollar. 16:38 Yeah, so we're talking about Drivechains, so what exactly is a Drivechain, and kind of how does it 16:44 work? Well, it's a piece of software, it's kind of a lot like an altcoin, but it has a couple 16:51 modifications, so there's no, it doesn't release, it doesn't mint any coins, it's a merge mined with 16:57 Bitcoin, just like Namecoin is, and merge mining was invented by Satoshi, we can get into that, it's 17:03 kind of an interesting topic all by itself, and then when you, it has a feature where it looks, 17:11 this software looks to Bitcoin core, it looks around for Bitcoin core full node, so every side 17:16 chain full node is a Bitcoin core full node, but not the reverse, you can run Bitcoin core without 17:22 running the sidechain, and it's the sidechain software, it looks to Bitcoin core, and it 17:28 notices when coins have been deposited into it, so when that happens, it credits you on the sidechain, 17:36 so if you have five L1 coins, you deposit them into the sidechain on L1, then the sidechain 17:43 will notice, and it will print the five coins, so to speak, it's really just moving them across, but it 17:49 conjures the five new sidechain coins over there, if you want to move them out of the L1 17:56 scripts, where they're essentially, you know, they're essentially dead coins, 17:59 it's as if they're taken out of the game, because no, they can only be spent, if they are spent, 18:04 then they are removed from that, so you're going to move them back from sidechain to main chain, you 18:07 destroy the sidechain coins in a special way, and then pays out on L1, 18:13 and then, so this is the coin is moving across networks, literally under the hood, it is like 18:18 going into like a lock box, and then kind of coming out, or being whatever, but that doesn't 18:22 really matter, because while the coin is in the L1 script, it cannot be given to anyone else 18:28 without destroying it on the sidechain coin, so it has literally moved across, the same way that 18:34 you still have a dollar, when you have four quarters versus one dollar bill, it's 18:41 it's still one bitcoin. Yeah, and it's kind of like, it's almost like minting 18:49 an IOU, or a balance, or something. Well, in a way, it's true that, it is true that the side 18:57 chain coins will not necessarily, there's some risk, always in using any system, including the 19:02 lightning network, including whatever, including cash, like you may, it depends on which way you 19:07 think about it, as upside down, or right side up, but it's sort of like, you might always be able 19:11 to go, it could always be the case that you think you can go to the ATM and get cash out, 19:16 but then you can't. This would be the failure of the peg, but if the peg is working, then that the 19:22 idea is that the dollar has literally moved from cash into a checking account, or has literally 19:28 moved from a checking account into a brokerage account, or a money market account, or something, 19:32 the dollar is literally moving around. Yeah, I put, you will say, I put, I put $20 into my 19:38 checking account. Yeah, and so, when you do that, you take $20, like a paper piece of $20, 19:45 and you give it to the bank, it's still there, but then the bank mints digital tokens representing 19:51 $20, and if you close your account, they destroy some of your checking account, 19:58 and then they give you back the cash. Yeah, and so, we're talking about nodes and things like 20:04 that, as far as block producing and running the actual, the actual network. So, is it a, 20:14 this is where it gets a little, like, I guess, nuanced, right? So, if it's merged mined, right, 20:20 it's mined together with Bitcoin. Yes. Not necessarily every Bitcoin, so every Bitcoin 20:26 miner contributes to its security, I would suppose, but as far as being a block producer, 20:32 and collecting fees for transactions, and all that, what entity does that? 20:39 Well, it's, it's kind of like, it's really the same as with regular Bitcoin, where the, 20:45 but there's this thing, the way merge mining works is, it has incentives to reach this sort 20:50 of equilibrium, and I have this other idea called Blind Merged Mining, which just kind of 20:56 keeps everything nice and tidy in that equilibrium state, and it's just better for everyone. So, 21:01 it's where the miners don't pay any of the node costs. So, I'm not sure really how to 21:05 answer your question, but the, it's, it's like the sidechain network runs its own nodes. So, 21:11 anyone who wants a wallet, or a full node wallet, you know, like that is a fully validating wallet, 21:16 they would need a node, the same way on Bitcoin. And so, they, they have a mempool, 21:24 they collect new transactions, and they know where, you know, if those are going to fall 21:30 into the next block or not. And then, in a Blind Merged Mining, what happens is, 21:37 the node will kind of work with the, it will connect to a layer one miner, and it will say, 21:43 I have this block, the sidechain block, it's worth like $50 or something, I'll pay you $49 on L1, 21:50 but just merge mine this block with me, and I'll get the $50 on L2. 21:59 In broad strokes, that is how it works. Yeah. And that's because the miners don't want to pay, 22:04 miners will minimize their costs always. So, they will eventually, if there's a bunch of 22:09 people running nodes, and they don't want to, I mean, it's completely plausible that miners, 22:13 while the full node costs are low, or even forever, the miners may just run all the nodes, 22:20 in which case it'll be exactly the same as it is with Namecoin. Yeah, so, miners don't necessarily 22:27 have to run nodes, but that would be a logical conclusion if this is successful. They want 22:33 the merge mining revenues from the sidechains, then Blind Merged Mining lets them get those without 22:38 doing any of the node work. And they don't need to, because there's already a bunch of people 22:47 running nodes for their own reasons. But that's, I don't know if people will get lost on that. 22:54 That's not actually, see, Blind Merged Mining is not required for a sidechain, or I guess 23:01 Drivechain is sort of defined as having it, but I think the, I don't think, merge mining, I think, 23:08 is difficult to explain, and people don't really understand it. But the work done when people mine 23:16 in Bitcoin, like the SHA256D, the hashing, like all the electricity, and all the ASICs, 23:21 none of that has anything to do with the construction of the block or its validity. 23:26 Yeah, it's all an anti-sybil mechanism. Yeah, it's all about meeting the difficulty requirement, 23:31 which is like a completely different thing. And so, all of that has nothing to do with, 23:38 like the merge mining, it's easy for miners to mine many, many different blockchains at once. 23:42 They just take this little block template or this little block header, which is 80 bytes or 200 23:47 bytes. It's a tiny, tiny piece of information. It's your full node that does all the work of 23:53 downloading every block and validating it, and validating the proof of work. 23:57 But the proof of work is, it's upside down. They don't actually, it doesn't cost miners anything 24:03 to mine many blockchains at once, which is very counterintuitive for people, but it is the case. 24:10 Yeah, and so, now that you, that's like the security mechanism. Who collects fees for, 24:19 how does the fee mechanism work for these transactions? 24:24 Layer 1 miners should get all the fees. So, it's really exactly the same as just regular mining, 24:30 where you pay on L2. Either the miner mines the block, mines both blocks at once, and they just 24:37 collect all the fees on L1 and all the fees on L2. That's how it works with Namecoin right now. 24:43 Or, with Blind Merged Mining, someone else, it's a specialization of labor, 24:50 someone else builds the sidechain block and pays themselves all the fees. But in order to make sure 24:55 that that block is mined, they go to the L1 miners and they say, put this little code in. 25:00 to the L1 block. And so, they kind of bid that up. And since it's very competitive, as long as at least two people bid, it should be like 99%. You know, 99% of the fees should be going to the Layer 1 miner. 25:19 Yeah, so what's the process for L2 fees going to L1 miners? So like, if I, let's say I get one Bitcoin on a Drivechain, and I send it a bunch of times, and then that Bitcoin is slightly diminished because I pay fees when I send it around. 25:40 Yes. 25:41 And those are L2 fees. But so, how does that end up on L1 in the miners pocket? 25:48 The total, if you look at the whole L2 block, which is look at one block at a time, then maybe that block is paid, let's call it, let's just call it three Bitcoin in total fees. There's 10,000 transactions in that block or something. There's 100,000 transactions each paid. Three one hundred thousandths of a BTC. 26:12 And so, the whole block is paying in its own Coinbase, three Bitcoin in fees. 26:19 So that's, that's just the next block is what it is. Now, what would happen is there'd be many different sidechain nodes, it's called A, B, C, D, E, F, or whatever. Each of them builds the block, paying themselves, the three Bitcoin. So A1 says, A is Coinbase says, pay three Bitcoin to A, and then include all these other transactions worth three. 26:45 And same for B, B says, pay the three Bitcoin to B, B is public key, and then include all this. So the all these blocks are all candidates for the next block, and they'll have different hash because they have a different Merkle root, because they have a different Coinbase. And they also may have slightly different details. But the point is, these are all blocks that contain the three Bitcoins worth of transaction. 27:16 Fees, and then they're each paying to A, paying to B, paying to C. So it's like the blockchain is that it reached its end, but then it has a bunch of options A, B, C, D, E, F, whatever. This is how it will continue. In Blind Merged Mining, the way a sidechain block meets the difficulty requirement is by having a special code in the parallel L1 block. 27:38 Okay, 28:09 there's a sidechain, like block hash, basically. 28:11 Mm hmm. 28:42 block and it has a little code in there, you have found a new sidechain block that meets the the difficulty requirement. But you still have to download that block and check to make sure it could be invalid, in which case you would say, not even a real sidechain block, you'd orphan that off, you'd go back, you'd say, instead of referring this block, it's not a real block that you refer to the previous block, and you would, you would orphan that block out. 29:05 And so it's not until that happens that it's not until you download the sidechain block that it becomes fully validated block and the blockchain advances to that state. If that makes any sense. 29:19 Yeah, it does. 29:21 So as long as you understand all that, then you should be able to understand that the sidechain block is worth three on L2. So if you look at it from a point of view, A, B, C, D, A would really prefer to have theirs be the code in L1, because they're going to get three Bitcoin if it is, if it's B's instead, then A gets nothing. 29:43 They built the block, but it doesn't, they built the block, but their software is just keeping track of the mempool. It's doing normal full node things, you know, yeah, it's not really doing anything interesting. So it, so it kind of builds this block the same way that every full node does a full node tracks the mempool, and it keeps track of what what the next block will probably be. 30:05 There's stuff like, there's like bloom filters and things, you know, like, was that like Xthin and things. So like, to try and make it so you don't have to download the whole block. So it's already doing all this anyway. But it's saying, listen, I would really prefer it to be my block, I get three Bitcoin if it's mine. And B is thinking that and C is also thinking that and D is thinking, I don't want it to be A, B, or C, I want it to be my block. 30:30 So the idea is these people go to L1, and they just start bidding to the miners, they say, listen, there's a special type of transaction in BIP301, my other BIP. And this transaction has the property that it's a lot like a bid, where the only the only one can be included in a block like per sidechain slot or whatever. So the logically the miners would only take the one that pays the bid that pays them the most money. 30:54 They're free to take whichever one they want. It can only take one. Once they take one, it, it banishes, it excludes all the others. Yeah. So this encourages you to submit bids all the time, submit many bids, submit as many bids as you want bid 2.8, 2.9, 2.99, 2.991, 2.992. You bid up, because only one of these is making it in. And then they take the one that pays the most. And that is how the miners get the coins on L1 without even running the sidechain node, if they would. 31:24 And so let's just imagine only one Bitcoin goes into this sidechain. So that one Bitcoin is locked up. And then the one Bitcoin worth of sidechain representation is minted. And say that those transactions on the Drivechain go back and forth and spend 10% of the of the entire one Bitcoin in fees over a certain period of time. 31:49 Now, would that mean that the locked up one Bitcoin on L1 that's representing this, does that mean that some of those get siphoned out to the miners in fees? 31:59 No, it does not. But that's a good question. Because what's happening is different L1 coins are in Blind Merged Mining. Because remember, the L2 coins are not traveling back to L1 in Blind Merged Mining. It's D, A, B, C, or D or E or something. They build the block and A has a public key over on L2. 32:23 And that is collecting the the the bona fide transaction fees of that block. So you see nothing is actually moving from L2 to L1 yet. 32:33 Yeah, it just it's earmarked. 33:04 That's people on L2 losing that money and then that money goes on L2 to like whatever A's public key on L2. So this is just a rearrangement of coins on L2. 33:20 So the whatever the same no coins have been withdrawn or deposited. But someone A was paid on L2. And then a different this is the whole point that it works is that the same A, it's the same person, the same individual, but not the same blockchain system. 33:38 This is actually how blind. This is the actual design principle of like the why does Blind Merged Mining work or why might it work? 33:47 It's the same A. A is running the L2 node and A is also running the L1 node and they also have L1 coins. So since it's the same person, it bridges the gap between the two networks because it's the same person. 34:04 They say, I will pay on L1 as long as I am paid on L2. So they are the magic bridge that communicates all this info. 34:15 Yeah. And so obviously Bitcoin has a 10 minute block interval. Every 10 minutes roughly blocks come through. Does that is that forcibly applied to all Drivechains? 34:28 By default, yes, but you can modify it if you are absolutely determined. But I don't know if I think the people who want that are just kind of a little confused about what they want. 34:40 But there's no denying that some people prefer the faster block times of Ethereum or even other networks. But I really just don't think like there's many situations where there's situations where like, well, what am I trying to say? 35:00 Like, it's like if you buy in many situations where it doesn't matter, like if you buy coffee, they have your face on the security camera. If you buy on Amazon, they will just cancel the order if it's so it's very rare that people. 35:15 You really want it to be instant or like even like if you pay 12 seconds is too long, like whatever Ethereum type thing. If you're paying in line at like a grocery store, 12 seconds is too long. So you either want to go instant or you want to go or it doesn't really matter. 35:37 So I don't think the block time is a solution. Some people say, oh, 10 minutes, it's inconvenient. But I don't know. I don't really see it that way. I think because you think about it like credit card is reversible for 30 days or 90 days even. 35:56 Yeah, it's pretty insane to think about. 35:59 It is. And so I think the 10 minute block time was chosen for a very good reason. 36:08 Yeah. And so that's kind of like the basics of how the whole merge mining system works or sorry, the whole Drivechain basic system works. So then basically you can create a different Bitcoin and like a different Bitcoin on top of Bitcoin with different characteristics. 36:29 So like the most simple one might be let's have a significantly larger block size so we can send lots of little trans lots of small cheap payments. And so the only it would otherwise be basically the Drivechain would be almost a copy of original Bitcoin, except now the Drivechain blocks would then be much smaller. I'm sorry, much larger. 36:55 Well, this is important because it highlights what why we would have sidechains or even alt coins at all, which is because there's a dispute over what the blockchain should contain. 37:06 And we want everyone to be we want everyone to be invited to our party. But we also don't want anyone to just be able to change the properties of the blockchain. So it's like, what do we do? This is the first like both historically was the first dispute, of course, the first big dispute in Bitcoin, like the block size war. 37:28 So the question is, what should we do? Should we, you know, do we change Bitcoin's block size from the one megabyte to something else? Or was that a change to make it from what it was to one megabyte? And the question is, what do we do? Some people prefer one way, other people prefer it another way. sidechains, let's have it both ways. That's the idea. 37:48 Yeah. And so basically, some people don't trust the, I guess, the centralization issues that are perceived or real of having a small of a large block, then they don't have to use the second layer at all. They can just use the main layer. But if people are kind of more comfortable with kind of fewer entities managing the Drivechain, then they can use that. Is that kind of how that breaks down? 38:19 Well, what did you mean if fewer entities? What does that mean? 38:24 Well, the whole block size argument thing, though, I mean, obviously, it's gone in a million different directions. But the biggest argument is bigger blocks will mean fewer entities can run nodes. Therefore, less centralization. 38:38 Yeah, more expensive to run a node. 38:40 Yeah. And so I suppose that would be fewer nodes for the Drivechain specifically. 38:48 Yes. In fact, again, every sidechain node, it must also be an L1 node. So it's impossible for there to be more L2 nodes than L1 nodes, no matter how cheap it is to run the L2 node. 39:00 Yeah. And so if you want to, if you basically, let's say there's 10,000 Bitcoin nodes, let's just throw that number out there. If there's 10,000 L1 nodes, and anyone can run one on a Raspberry Pi, everyone's happy with that. 39:14 But then if someone, if there's, let's say, only like 300 of a certain high scaling Drivechain, there's only 300 of those nodes, some people might be comfortable with that and just say, I'm going to use that Drivechain because it's fast and cheap. 39:31 And others might say, no, that's too centralized. I'm just going to stick with L1. Is that kind of the way the split kind of shakes out maybe in terms of what people want? 39:42 Yes, I think it's not only, people are very different, you know, they have very different circumstances. So like some people have faster internet, you know, some people have slower internet, some people are more, some people, it's easier for them to pay transaction fees. Other people, it's not. 39:58 Some people have to combine many inputs when they make a Bitcoin transaction and other people don't. And so there is like, people are very different and transactions are very different as well. Like not every transaction requires a large degree of centralization. 40:15 Some people, like if you're just buying coffee, then it doesn't really matter. But if you are trying, if you're on the run and you're fleeing North Korea or something, then it matters. 40:28 So the privacy also matters differently. If you're on the darknet market doing something shady, then the privacy matters a lot. Or if you're donating to like some kind of politically subversive cause, privacy matters a lot. But if you're just buying coffee, then it doesn't. Privacy is already foobar, so it doesn't matter. And it doesn't make any difference. So there's, people are very different types of people. 40:53 And just having different, these kinds of solutions let people choose one or choose the other possibly. 41:00 Yeah, well, like, of course, as the case may be, some may be better than others. 41:06 Like, you know, you have cash in your wallet for spending purposes, or, you know, you have a credit card, you use a wire transfer for some different things. So you use different things. 41:17 As the case may be, you don't always pay for everything with the one system, although maybe that will change with stuff like WeChat Pay and CBDC or something. I'm sure they're just trying to get all that to be universally standardized. 41:35 Yeah, now, one of the drawbacks of most, I guess, Layer 2 type solutions or the Layer 2 scaling approach, I guess, is that it becomes more difficult to sort of maintain the same security level and sustainability level on L1 if he's safe, if he's off. 41:58 Obviously, if Drivechains pay all that money to L1, then that's not necessarily a problem anymore, but it's kind of sustainable all around. 42:07 Now, when people have very specific, I guess, objections to using something like a Drivechain, they say they don't, and they run their nodes that are just Bitcoin nodes and not a Drivechain node, etc. 42:23 Is there ever a point where, completely ignoring the existence of Drivechains and trying to be in the L1 Bitcoin maxi world, is there ever a point where those kind of worlds necessarily collide in a way that some people might not want them to? 42:38 Like, if Drivechains are on Bitcoin, can Drivechain haters ignore them forever? 42:45 Well, I think so. 42:46 I think the question of ignore, of course, you have to be very precise about this definition, because, you know what I mean? 42:53 Like, can you ignore Michael Jackson forever or something or J.K. Rowling or something? 42:57 You know what I mean? 42:58 Like, in some sense, no. 42:59 Yeah. 43:01 In other sense, yes. 43:02 Like, Michael Jackson's not going to affect your life. 43:06 But it's kind of like, you have to narrowly take the task of running a fully validating L1 node, because that was the whole dispute of the block size. 43:16 It said, we don't want that to get more difficult. 43:19 And that thing does not require any sidechain software be run ever to be fully validating on L1 deposits and withdrawals. 43:32 It does the deposits and the withdrawals without looking at the sidechain software. 43:37 So the layer one full node is completely ignorant of. 43:43 And that's the whole point. 43:45 Now, it's kind of like, will individual people be like, what if you make a sidechain that's so popular that everyone in the entire world has heard of it and they all love it so much? 43:53 It's kind of like, I don't know. 43:57 Like, there's many other senses in which you could use English words like affected. 44:02 You know, affected by whatever. 44:07 Like, I don't care. 44:08 Because the point is running an L1 node is unharmed. 44:13 It does not become more expensive as a result of anything any sidechain does. 44:19 So that is the whole point. 44:21 And everything else is, unfortunately, very distracting and misleading. 44:27 Because people say like, oh, what about the miners will make a lot of money from these sidechains? 44:33 Or what about like, it doesn't matter. 44:38 None of that matters. 44:39 merge mining is mining. 44:41 It's just collecting money from people. 44:43 They already merged mine altcoins, already merged mine Namecoin. 44:49 It's good for miners to get more money. 44:51 Layer one nodes will reject a block, an L1 block, if it is mined and it doesn't follow the L1 rules. 44:58 So again, we're just staying very narrowly focused on the L1 protocol. 45:02 The L1 protocol is not affected by anything that a sidechain does. 45:07 It's theoretically possible that the protocol will be so good that all Bitcoin will be deposited on L1 into this sidechain. 45:13 But that's still following all the L1 rules. 45:17 Yeah. 45:18 And in that hypothetical situation, in a purely technical sense, it is still an L2. 45:27 But in a practical sense, it's almost like Bitcoin is just this now. 45:31 Become the new thing. 45:33 And of course, if that were the case, then luckily for everyone that I set things up this way, 45:42 because the only other way that something else could be that popular would imply that it, you know, 45:51 imagine if it were an altcoin that were so popular that Bitcoin has voluntarily abandoned the BTC protocol for this altcoin protocol. 46:00 In that scenario, BTC has collapsed and goes to zero and the L1 is dead. 46:04 Whereas in my scenario, you can always go back to the L1 whenever you want. 46:10 And so the L1 is always safe and immortal. 46:15 Yeah, for sure. 46:16 Now, one of the biggest challenges, I guess, of using multiple cryptocurrencies, 46:23 as well as an inherent, I guess, drawback of multiple layer scaling, 46:28 is the kind of user experience bifurcation, 46:32 where right now I can spend Bitcoin at any place that takes Bitcoin, 46:39 but I can't use Lightning in all those places because many of them are not set up for that. 46:43 Or I can use Bitcoin, I can use Dash, I can use Zcash, I can use Monero. 46:48 I can use a bunch at a few merchants, but then other ones are just like Bitcoin and Litecoin, say. 46:53 And so the overwhelming network effects of Bitcoin, 46:57 if you create a sidechain or a layer 2 or Lightning or whatever, 47:03 instantly it kind of splits the network effect a little bit and kind of does that. 47:09 Rather than if you just upgraded all of Bitcoin, for example, to have these properties, 47:14 then you wouldn't really have to start from zero with adoption necessarily. 47:20 I wouldn't say zero, but give a fresh adoption start for the Drivechain. 47:26 So do you think that that could be a barrier of adoption if, let's say, 47:30 there's fast, cheap and private Bitcoin on a Drivechain, 47:35 but then you can't use it anywhere because everywhere you want to use it only accepts L1 Bitcoin. 47:40 You have to plead with all these exchanges. 47:42 Please, can you just let me deposit this one? 47:44 Or go to this merchant and say, please, can you add this? 47:48 Well, yes, but I think the whole point of sidechains is to reduce that problem, basically. 47:53 Because think about it. 47:54 It's a little bit like when you go to a merchant. 47:57 Do they take Visa? Do they take MasterCard? 48:00 Or even in an extreme case, you're pleading with the laundromat and you say, 48:05 I don't have any quarters, but I have a $20 bill or something. 48:09 You know what I mean? 48:10 So the merchant has an incentive to be open to all methods of payment that are kind of reasonable. 48:17 That doesn't necessarily mean they'll accept Bitcoin, Lightning, anything else quickly. 48:26 But my guess is the one-to-one peg makes it easier. 48:31 So I think basically there'll be something like BitPay where you just go and they'll just do everything. 48:41 It'll accept Lightning, L2, whatever. 48:45 And it will just figure it out behind the scenes and give the merchant cash the next day. 48:51 The exchanges, you don't really need to beg the exchanges because you can buy the thing. 48:56 You buy the L1 and then using the software, you just convert it from L1 to L2 or back. 49:03 And so you always have a way. 49:06 You always have like infinite liquidity since you yourself can. 49:10 You don't need to find someone who will swap 14 L1 BTC to 14 L2 BTC. 49:16 You can do that all by yourself without anyone's help. 49:20 So I agree that the user experience. 49:23 Yeah, users obviously get more annoyed often when there are more choices. 49:29 This is partially why I think probably like Fetament probably won't work. 49:33 Because when you turn it on, you have to pick your group of people that can all steal from you. 49:39 People are just like, I don't want to pick anything. 49:42 Or just close the application. 49:44 So I think that people don't like choice. 49:49 And my guess is that it will be slightly annoying at first. 49:54 But probably for that reason, it will standardize around the payments chain or something. 49:59 You know what I mean? 50:00 Like they probably won't be paid in the Zcash sidechain, the merchants, because it just looks weird. 50:04 The Zcash sidechain, so many people use that privacy of their own homes, maybe on that market or something like that. 50:10 So I think you're right. But that is also why we won't just have like 7000 sidechains. We'll just only have like, whatever, 10 or 12 or something. 50:20 Yeah. Yeah. So what is the process like from, I guess, not from a technical perspective necessarily, but from a user experience perspective? 50:29 Of bridging to and off of a Drivechain. So like, let's just say I get paid in just regular old L1 Bitcoin, but I spend it. I need to live off of the stuff. 50:42 I need to buy my coffee with it. And so I can't be spending $2 per transaction on a $2 coffee. So I want to bridge to the Drivechain. 50:53 So I assume I push a button. 50:55 Yeah, you click a button. 50:57 And then how long until I have those coins and then can use them? 51:01 That should be more or less instant, but it does take like one confirmation to like sort of move over. 51:07 But you see that every sidechain with merged mining, it's like the sidechain is connected to the sidechain blocks are connected in that one way to the main chain. 51:20 So it's kind of like if a main chain reorgs, you don't need to wait for like six confirmations. 51:25 I mean, like you could, but it's like if the main chain reorgs, the sidechain will also reorg. 51:33 So it's just like as if it never, it's just canceling. No one's really going to get their money stolen from you. 51:38 You're sending your money to yourself. It's as if you send the Bitcoin transaction to yourself and then there was a reorg. 51:44 But you know, it doesn't, it doesn't matter. 51:47 So you don't really need to wait six confirmations or any amount of confirmations. 51:51 The software will kind of only display it after like, I think like one or two confirmations total to just kind of like make it. 51:58 But the deposits are instant and they always work. 52:01 The withdrawals are not, are very, very slow, outrageously slow to discourage regular people from even using this system because only specialists should really do it. 52:12 But the withdrawals are very weird. 52:16 They are, you basically the only, they're all batched in like a little container, little bundle. 52:26 And only one bundle can make it every three to six months. 52:31 And that is very slow process. 52:34 And that is, so L1 synchronizes the state with L2, but L1 is never running a sidechain node. 52:42 So it doesn't know what's happening over there. 52:43 So we have to shrink this problem from a huge problem of all kinds of chaos, chaotic stuff is happening to just one. 52:52 We shrink all that to one hash and then the hash is miners. 52:55 It's a similar thing as Blind Merged Mining, where it's the same miner. 52:59 A miner is an individual on L1 and they look over at L2. 53:05 A human being looks over, not the software. 53:08 A human being looks over there and it says, the next hash for the next three months is this. 53:15 And they put it in L1 and then it synchronizes. 53:19 It slowly synchronizes up. 53:22 And then once it hits enough, three months of being identical hashes, more or less, that's skipping a detail or two. 53:31 But once it does that, then the giant withdrawal bundle pays everyone out. 53:36 The withdrawal bundle is, that is slow, but it's important to keep in mind that that is just the settlement. 53:43 So anyone on L1, if I have five L1 coins and you have five L2 coins, we can just do a little swap. 53:51 We do HTLC. 53:53 We do a little swap. 53:55 We do classic HTLC. 53:57 Or we just use something like a ShapeShift or Coinbase or whatever. 54:00 But we can also do a cryptographic swap where we say, I have five L1 coins. 54:08 I pay them to myself after two days. 54:10 I pay them to you if the hash is revealed, R is revealed, such as R hashes to H. 54:17 And then once I've done that, you do the same thing to me. 54:20 You pick the same R and the same H. 54:23 You don't know R, but you pick the same H. 54:26 You say, okay, I've got five L2 coins. 54:28 I pay them back to myself after two days. 54:31 I pay them to Paul if R is revealed, such as R hashes to H. 54:38 It's the same H. 54:40 So I reveal R and I claim your coins. 54:43 And then now you know R, you claim my coins. 54:46 So we do a cryptographic swap of the coins. 54:50 That's instant also, and that's also trustless. 54:53 So in that case, the L1 person would charge a fee because it's instant to go one way and you can do it yourself. 55:00 But you can't go back without someone's help. 55:02 So it's kind of like a revolving door on a subway. 55:07 It only turns one way and you can only move in the one direction easily. 55:11 To get out, you have to do the turnstile. 55:14 So what would happen in practice, I think, is that some rich people would extract a small yield by paying people out constantly. 55:24 They'd offer a service. 55:25 They'd be paying people out on L1. 55:27 They'd charge a little fee. 55:29 They'd pay people out constantly on L1. 55:31 They accumulate all kinds of L2 coins. 55:35 Right before the next withdrawal bundle, they would merge all these different outputs. 55:40 It could be like whatever. 55:43 2,000 coins maybe, probably not. 55:46 But 2,000 coins, they merge them all into one withdrawal. 55:51 When the withdrawal is processed, eventually, three months later, 2,000 coins are paid to one UTXO consolidated. 55:59 So it can consolidate the UTXOs on L2 and then pay that out on L1. 56:05 So they can actually withdraw an unlimited number of coins. 56:08 And it can do that. 56:11 This is why it's so slow because we really get to have our cake and eat it too. 56:14 It really doesn't matter how slow it is. 56:16 Everyone's going to use a parallel system that's instantaneous. 56:20 And so the slowness is great because it's free. 56:24 It's essentially free. 56:25 It involves other steps. 56:26 And the slower it is, it just makes it much easier for the sidechain to be policed without L1 having to do the effort of actually downloading every sidechain block and checking every sidechain message. 56:38 Because the whole thing is reduced to these rare check-ins, this rare state, which is a hash. 56:44 And then that's sorted on L1. 56:47 That's the idea. 56:48 So this idea may not work, but I certainly think we should try it. 56:53 It has many advantages because, of course, the sidechain vision is there shouldn't be any altcoins. 57:00 There shouldn't be any governance on L1. 57:02 Anyone who wants to just release a new piece of... 57:04 It shouldn't be any kind of block-sized debate. 57:07 Someone should just make a large block version. 57:11 And no talking. 57:12 You know what I mean? 57:13 Just make it. 57:14 If you get people to use it, right. 57:16 Miners should collect transaction fees from every chain. 57:19 So the miners should be pro-growth. 57:23 They shouldn't just be minimizing their costs and hashing. 57:25 They should also be trying to maximize usage of Bitcoin. 57:28 It should be like Roger Veering it. 57:30 It should be like going around. 57:31 They should vertically integrate with BitPay. 57:34 Try to get Amazon to take Bitcoin because it will increase their revenues. 57:39 So we want that. 57:40 We want instant global scale. 57:42 We want instant Zcash privacy. 57:43 We want all these weird experiments like storage, Filecoin, whatever, Ethereum. 57:49 We want all that to just be on Bitcoin. 57:51 So that's a division. 57:52 And so I think it's... 57:54 And there's also no real risk because you can just try this idea. 57:58 And then if it doesn't work for some reason, it can just be shut off easily. 58:04 So there's a huge upside and low risk. 58:08 But what I didn't count on was the tribalism and how far the toxicity and whatever had spread. 58:15 Which is that people think anything that allows an altcoiner to get what they want, it must be bad. 58:19 Yeah, of course. 58:20 Anything that suggests that Bitcoin Core is imperfect, it must be bad. 58:25 It must be saboteur from the large blocker world or something. 58:29 So that was the main flaw. 58:31 So hopefully this makes some sense. 58:33 Yeah, well that's the main... 58:34 I guess the main point is it's almost like riding around a governance problem. 58:38 But I guess before we get into that aspect, what is the process for implementing this on Bitcoin? 58:46 Let's just say I'm sold. 58:48 I want my fast, easy, not terrible lightning network type thing. 58:52 I want that on Bitcoin today. 58:54 And how do we get it done? 58:56 And what's the process for implementing a Drivechain? 59:00 And what are the roadblocks to actually implementing it? 59:04 Well, BIP300 is a soft fork and those used to be done frequently. 59:10 It used to be hard fork can never be done. 59:12 Soft fork can be done though. 59:14 And in fact, when I wrote this in November 2015, the next month, December 2015, we did like three soft forks in that one month. 59:24 And so that used to be... 59:26 Now with the cases, hard fork is impossible. 59:28 Soft fork is also impossible. 59:33 Basically. 59:34 But it's ironic because the soft fork is actually very easy. 59:38 And soft fork only requires 51% of miners and some users to enforce. 59:49 The ideal thing would be, of course, to have the Bitcoin community like widely support this and also popularize it and tell everyone about it. 59:58 Stuff like that. 59:59 So that would be ideal. 1:00:02 The minimum amount would be to just have a bunch of miners, 51% of miners. 1:00:08 Get enough pools to switch to the software that enforces the rule. 1:00:17 Activate. 1:00:18 And then that would be the bare minimum. 1:00:20 Yeah. 1:00:21 So let's just say you can get 55% of the hash rate, let's just say, to agree to implement this. 1:00:29 Let's say the other 45% isn't just not in favor of this. 1:00:35 They're very much not. 1:00:37 Militantly against. 1:00:39 They don't want to see anyone. 1:00:40 It's kind of like a gay marriage situation where it's kind of like... 1:00:44 Yeah, of course. 1:00:45 They're not getting gay married and they don't want to see any of them either. 1:00:48 It's kind of like... 1:00:49 It starts across the line of liberalism at some point. 1:00:52 Of course. 1:00:53 But we'll get into that. 1:00:55 It's like if op5 is used for the op5 thing. 1:01:00 They could run something that just says op5 can never be used in a transaction. 1:01:05 So what they would do is they'd say any block, any L1 block that has any Drivechain shaped message in it at all. 1:01:14 That just invalidates the block. 1:01:18 Weirdly, this is a lot like... 1:01:20 This is exactly like... 1:01:25 See, because the way the software normally works is you take something that's unused and you shrink it to the size that you want. 1:01:32 And that way only rule breaking is banned. 1:01:35 On the new people who have opted into the new op code or something. 1:01:40 But what the resistors would do is they would say anyone who uses this thing, that's banned. 1:01:47 And in so doing, they would put themselves on a different network. 1:01:51 Which ironically, even though this would be a soft fork from the tightening the rules perspective. 1:01:57 It's actually a hard fork from the older definition of only the people who have upgraded are on your network. 1:02:05 So this is quite... 1:02:06 This has blown... 1:02:07 I think Twitter doesn't know what to make of this. 1:02:09 Because the whole language around soft and hard forks was never actually standardized in a good way. 1:02:17 So if you like, I can go into this philosophical topic. 1:02:21 Or if you just want to ask more practical questions, I can try to answer those as well. 1:02:25 But the soft fork and hard fork has two definitions that are mostly the same. 1:02:31 But are in this case, actually the exact opposite. 1:02:35 Yeah, well, before I guess hitting in that thing. 1:02:38 So it seems like that does seem reminiscent of the whole user activated soft fork thing from back in the day, right? 1:02:45 But it's quite different though. 1:02:46 Because in that case, if you did nothing, you were on the UASF chain by default. 1:02:56 Because your software was interoperable. 1:03:00 The only thing UASF would reject would be if miners refused to signal. 1:03:06 Now, if the miners refused to signal and activate SegWit, if that happened, you would see that... 1:03:16 So what I'm saying is if you ran UASF and no miners ran the UASF. 1:03:23 And 51% not only didn't run the UASF, but they also broke the SegWit. 1:03:34 They decided not to enforce the SegWit rules. 1:03:41 So all the people who have never upgraded, all the people running old versions, all the people who are indifferent, all the people who have taken no action. 1:03:47 They will end up on the miner chain, since the miner chain is indifferent. 1:03:51 Everyone who's not running the UASF is indifferent between the two. 1:03:55 And everyone who's indifferent between the SegWit rules will still follow the longest chain. 1:04:03 So they're with the miners. 1:04:06 So the UASF, everyone can be on either chain if you don't run it. 1:04:14 Maybe I'm not doing a very good job of explaining this. 1:04:16 I'm sure people are probably going to be real confused by this, unfortunately. 1:04:19 But the point of the UASF was that you are saying you want to force the miners to adopt SegWit. 1:04:31 And you will forge your own... 1:04:34 The UASF was honestly like... there was a hard fork by the old definition also. 1:04:42 So it's kind of hard to say. 1:04:44 Because what I'm getting at is the only situation when the UASF means anything is when the miners disagree with the users. 1:04:53 And in that case, only the people who have upgraded to the UASF are on that network. 1:05:00 So it's a lot like Bitcoin Cash in that way. 1:05:03 Very bizarre. 1:05:04 But I don't know if I'm doing a good job of explaining why that is. 1:05:09 Well, so the point that I guess I delayed a little bit in asking about how it's activated is... 1:05:16 It seems like it's kind of a governance route more than anything, the dry-chain approach. 1:05:25 Because to a certain extent, again, maybe I'm oversimplifying parts of it. 1:05:30 But it seems like the big thing is what should Bitcoin do and people can't necessarily agree or they don't want to change. 1:05:39 Or enough people don't want to change it. 1:05:41 And this kind of lets Bitcoin not change but still change at the same time. 1:05:45 It kind of routes around having to do the governance question. 1:05:50 Right. 1:05:51 In a way... 1:05:53 Well, let me just interrupt you because I think you're on the right track, absolutely. 1:05:57 Where it's kind of like we're stuck in prison on Bitcoin Core and we cannot leave. 1:06:03 And I'm saying I have tunneled a way out of this prison for everyone. 1:06:08 Anyone who wishes to leave and then come back at any time can now do so. 1:06:13 Now, if you think about it, it's the prison metaphor. 1:06:16 It's kind of like the last people that you should go to for permission to use the tunnel would be like the prison warden. 1:06:24 Of course. 1:06:25 Right, exactly. 1:06:26 So there's a sense in which BIP300 should not activate using any existing Bitcoin thing. 1:06:36 Because it subverts the original paradigm. 1:06:41 Because I'm saying people aren't happy with this software. 1:06:46 We're going to different software. 1:06:48 So it's kind of like in that way, it is like why would... 1:06:52 Of course, the people running this software will be offended or misunderstand or whatever. 1:06:57 Because they'll just think, why would anyone want to leave? 1:06:59 Isn't it perfect here? 1:07:00 Yeah. 1:07:01 So that's the issue. 1:07:03 Yeah. 1:07:05 Obviously, there's a clear, to some people's minds, at least. 1:07:12 I would say the world's, the enlightened world's minds, there's a clear kind of a pressure going on. 1:07:18 Where Bitcoin, there's changes that need to happen around Bitcoin. 1:07:25 And I guess the wrong way, one wrong way could be is by using other cryptocurrencies entirely. 1:07:31 From the Bitcoiner's standpoint. 1:07:32 Right. 1:07:33 That's not the right way of doing that. 1:07:35 From the maximalist, let's say, standpoint. 1:07:37 And then the other wrong way of doing things is by changing Bitcoin itself. 1:07:42 And that's viewed as also wrong. 1:07:45 And so this is a way that allows, that acknowledges that there are things that need to change. 1:07:52 But we can do that without moving from Bitcoin to something else. 1:07:56 Without moving on from Bitcoin completely. 1:07:58 And also without actually changing Bitcoin at its core. 1:08:02 And so it seems like, I guess, the most diplomatic solution, it seems like the win, win, win, win, win solution for a Bitcoin maximalist. 1:08:13 Except for the acknowledgement that something needs to be different than it is today. 1:08:19 And that seems to be the point of contention. 1:08:21 It's basically, the irony is that it's not even really that, I think. 1:08:25 Because you could run the old version, since it is a soft fork. 1:08:28 You could run the old version and not even enforce BIP300. 1:08:31 And then you wouldn't even notice. 1:08:33 As far as everyone knows, I activated BIP300 with the miners like six months ago. 1:08:38 And because it's impossible for you to notice whether or not it has been activated. 1:08:43 That proves that you aren't a victim. 1:08:46 Of course. 1:08:47 Because you have no, there's no empirical. 1:08:50 It's like, someone says, I don't want a robot making my hamburger. 1:08:54 And you have two kitchens. 1:08:56 One with a robot and one with a human. 1:08:58 And then the trays come out and you switch the trays. 1:09:01 And then you switch them back. 1:09:03 And then you say, well, I switched the trays. 1:09:05 Actually, a robot made this. 1:09:06 It's like, did you know that that was, they added women to orchestras. 1:09:10 They had them audition behind. 1:09:12 And they were like, did you know that was a gasp? 1:09:16 A woman playing the violin or something. 1:09:18 And they're like, oh my God, I can't believe it. 1:09:20 Or whatever. 1:09:21 Would you believe that? 1:09:22 Whatever. 1:09:23 Like a black man could be a car mechanic or something. 1:09:26 So it's like, it doesn't, if you can't tell, 1:09:29 then nothing bad is happening to you. 1:09:32 Of course. 1:09:33 So, but it's kind of like, I think more of what it is, 1:09:37 is that the people have been trained to think of Bitcoin Core 1:09:40 as the best software and everything else is a scam. 1:09:45 Because, of course, most of it is, most of the other stuff is a scam. 1:09:48 But it's, for a bad reason, is because of scaling war and stuff, 1:09:53 people have been trained to say that you just stay here. 1:09:58 You stay in Bitcoin Core. 1:10:01 You don't ask too many questions. 1:10:04 So now even in a case where to get all that other stuff, 1:10:07 nothing is happening to the L1 node. 1:10:09 Nothing is happening to the L1 protocol. 1:10:11 Like literally nothing. 1:10:14 Still people feel as though, like the way, 1:10:18 how do you rise on the totem pole in the Bitcoin culture? 1:10:22 It's by hating on everything. 1:10:24 Exactly. 1:10:25 It's like, it's no longer by getting merchant adoption. 1:10:28 It's no longer by even inventing something cool. 1:10:31 You can invent something cool and that is not a guarantee. 1:10:33 Like Jeremy Rubin did 1.19. 1:10:36 It's not, it doesn't really work like that anymore. 1:10:39 You get it cool, but you stay humble stacks hats. 1:10:42 That's one way. 1:10:43 If you just buy Bitcoin. 1:10:44 So that's, or you just say that you have. 1:10:47 You don't really, no one, who knows if you even have or not. 1:10:50 But you say that you have, 1:10:52 or you don't say that you are mysterious about it for, 1:10:55 so you don't get doxxed. 1:10:57 It's kind of like, so it's like that. 1:11:00 And then it's like, yeah, you're the toxicity. 1:11:02 And you just, you just be mean to everyone on Twitter. 1:11:06 So that, that is the whole culture has evolved towards that. 1:11:10 And you know, it's whatever it's safety and amuse, 1:11:12 it's Samson Mao. 1:11:14 Like neither safety nor Samson or a whole list of other people 1:11:19 we could name. 1:11:20 They, you know, they can't code. 1:11:23 They can't, they can't build anything. 1:11:25 They, but they do, they do some kind of cultural purpose. 1:11:30 They, they are around, they just, 1:11:33 they like enforce the root, the cultural rules of Bitcoin. 1:11:36 And they, they are kind of, they're kind of, 1:11:42 they're kind of meme or kind of, they're like, 1:11:48 they, they, they represent what should be imitated. 1:11:53 Yeah. 1:11:54 The, the, the cultural leaders more or less. 1:11:56 Right. 1:11:58 So how big, 1:12:00 where's that conversation at these days surrounding Drivechains? 1:12:06 I mean, obviously, first off, 1:12:07 how long has this conversation been going? 1:12:09 How many years? 1:12:10 And where is it today do you think? 1:12:13 Well, I think like in 2015 people liked it a lot more. 1:12:17 People really loved it. 1:12:18 And then some weird stuff happened. 1:12:20 So like, 1:12:21 it's 2015 November was right in between the two scaling conferences and it's 1:12:25 scaling to everyone wanted to do SegWit because it was a compromised block 1:12:29 size increase. 1:12:30 It was a mandatory block size increase. 1:12:32 So that was like, 1:12:36 this has all been like erased from history now, 1:12:38 but one of the pros of SegWit was that it met large blockers halfway. 1:12:42 There was this idea of we should compromise, 1:12:45 which was like, 1:12:46 that has been erased of course, 1:12:48 from history for better or for worse. 1:12:52 I think probably for worse, 1:12:53 we should at least tell the truth about what happened, 1:12:56 but it would also, 1:12:58 that was going to enable lightning. 1:12:59 And that was also supposedly that was going to be written. 1:13:01 Someone threw out a date, 1:13:02 like April 1st, 1:13:03 that'll be ready. 1:13:04 SegWit, 1:13:05 April 1st, 1:13:06 2016. 1:13:07 Then that didn't happen. 1:13:08 And then there was a lot of contention. 1:13:10 Ethereum was getting big. 1:13:11 So then now this puts people in, 1:13:15 this is my armchair psychology story, 1:13:18 which is that Ethereum starts to get big. 1:13:21 Now the sidechain narrative is in trouble because the sidechain narrative says 1:13:25 something like all these other chains, 1:13:28 all this other software is really cool and we're going to copy it and bring it 1:13:32 to Bitcoin. 1:13:33 But what people don't want to do is they don't want to admit that Ethereum is 1:13:39 cool because if you admit that, 1:13:40 then there might be a runaway snowball effect. 1:13:44 And then, 1:13:45 and then Ethereum will flip in BTC and then we'll have killed BTC. 1:13:49 So people want to stay far away from admitting that the other chain has value. 1:13:55 So that was bad for the sidechain narrative. 1:13:57 And then another terrible thing happened, 1:13:59 which was the blockade of SegWit created this miners versus, 1:14:04 this was late 2016 into 2017, 1:14:07 miners versus developers type of a thing. 1:14:10 So everyone, 1:14:11 everyone hated the miners in the BTC world. 1:14:14 So that was also terrible, 1:14:17 like not good because the BIP300 is like mining process based and it just says, 1:14:21 well, 1:14:22 miners will make all this money so they'll just keep this system on. 1:14:26 And then yet another bad thing happened, 1:14:28 which was in 2017 of course the community split. 1:14:32 And so again, 1:14:34 the sidechain idea is kind of like everyone can be happy. 1:14:39 Everyone can be happy. 1:14:40 Small blockers and large blockers can work together. 1:14:46 And so, 1:14:48 but then once they split, 1:14:49 it was kind of like, 1:14:50 first of all, 1:14:52 the small blockers are like, 1:14:53 why do we need to make large blockers happy? 1:14:55 They're gone now. 1:14:57 And the large blockers are like, 1:14:58 why do we need to make small blockers happy? 1:15:00 We forked. 1:15:01 So the fork made it so that. 1:15:04 So the fork made it so that a compromise was no longer, you know, like needed or whatever, it was no longer, there's no market for that now. Because everyone thinks I'm going to fight and we're going to win. 1:15:19 And, you know, I would say like it certainly, you look at the market cap. 1:15:26 They did fight and the BTC side defeated the BCH side for a variety of reasons that we could get into some of which many of most, I would say most of which have nothing to do with the block size concept itself, even though I think they also lost on that concept. 1:15:45 I think that was also a bad idea because you can have optional large blocks on top of small L1 blocks, but you cannot do the reverse. 1:15:51 So it's an irrational thing to want when you could just get everything that you wanted without inconveniencing other people. 1:15:58 But so I think that's a long story, but I'm trying to paint a picture of like, this idea competed with SegWit, which was teed up as the right idea in December 2015. 1:16:12 And I only published this late. 1:16:14 It was like after Thanksgiving, I think. 1:16:15 So it was late November. 1:16:17 It was like right before Scaling 2. 1:16:20 So people were into SegWit, including me, because compromised block size increased, supercharges lightning. 1:16:26 So then it was sidechains to admit that we want sidechains validates other altcoins, namely Ethereum, which had gone from being like 1% of Bitcoin to like 30% of Bitcoin. 1:16:40 So it was like it like visually on coin market cap, like expanded or something, something like that. 1:16:48 2016, then this idea was harmed by the fact that it was like miner centric and people hated miners in 2017. 1:16:57 And then the split, again, it forces Bitcoiners to acknowledge the split made it look like those people didn't really care about what was best for the Bitcoin community or something. 1:17:10 They're like in it for themselves. 1:17:11 They made these coins. 1:17:13 They're lying about they're reusing the name Bitcoin or something like that. 1:17:16 Everyone just thought those other people are bad guys. 1:17:18 So we don't we'd actually don't it poisoned everything associated with each of the ideas. 1:17:24 Everyone was like, the last thing I want to do is make those people happy. 1:17:27 Yeah, of course. 1:17:28 It's so acrimonious, the split. 1:17:31 And then I think like after that, like Blockstream started to market like Liquid as like a real sidechain, even though it basically was not. 1:17:38 And so it was like now this idea is going to go up against Blockstream. 1:17:44 It's also going up against Lightning in a way. 1:17:46 Lightning is very big. 1:17:47 So it's had it's had horrendous luck, this idea. 1:17:52 It's and like each of those things was such a huge problem that I actually I'm not even sure that there would have been anything that I could possibly have done. 1:18:01 Yeah, of course, to beat that like stuff culturally. 1:18:06 So are you getting much support for this idea today as opposed to other points in the past? 1:18:14 Well, yeah, I think there was when it first came out, people really liked it. 1:18:17 And there was in fact, it was stickied on our Bitcoin from time to time. 1:18:21 It actually it lasted until the BCH split. 1:18:24 I think people were saying, like, we can actually have both. 1:18:28 And without we have a small block L1, a large block L2. 1:18:32 And then I think after the split, it was kind of like anyone to even push for a large block L2 in a safe way was would have just was too associated with like trying to get large blocks. 1:18:45 Like it's like, oh, why do you want large blocks so much? 1:18:47 What are you, one of them or something? 1:18:49 Yeah. So I think then it like it kind of fell into obscurity. 1:18:55 And then and then now over the last 12 months, it has come come back. 1:19:03 Yeah, it's so one thing is for sure, right, the culture of Bitcoin, as we mentioned, has the maximalist culture that seems to drive a lot of what happens and doesn't happen and the end of the day seems to be resistant to this for the time being. 1:19:19 Now, that being said, it's undeniable that other projects have eaten up bigger and bigger market share to a certain extent. 1:19:29 The adoption metrics that I look at is, for example, actual usage and the one of the best ways of finding that is through total fees generated. 1:19:39 And basically people are paying 10 times as much to use Ethereum than they are Bitcoin right now. 1:19:46 And so and then you're starting to see Ethereum things float into Bitcoin, whether it's the ordinals and things like that and BRC 20 tokens and things. 1:19:56 And obviously, I understand there might have been a little bit of a troll element to some of those things. 1:20:00 But still, those ideas pick up this way. 1:20:03 And over time, there's more and more pressure from the outside to come in. 1:20:08 And so at some point, if Bitcoin start to lose money or relatively lose money compared to other things, that's when all the maxi posturing starts to maybe crack a little bit. 1:20:23 Yeah, well, I mean, if, of course, like if Ethereum became close to hypothetically, if Ethereum went close to flippening BTC, I think this would people would hit the like, they would hit the eject, they would dump all of the old philosophy immediately. 1:20:40 And they would stimulate like a creative search for new ideas. 1:20:45 I think there's more the ordinals thing is a troll. 1:20:48 But there is also a fundamental connection, which is that, first of all, people actually like they actually do like the the idea of having digital assets and so did plenty of other people such as how Finney and etc. 1:21:00 Digital create baseball cards and stuff. 1:21:03 Yeah, so people have liked this idea. 1:21:05 And they've been trying it forever. 1:21:06 They tried it on Bitcoin, colored coins, counterparty, whatever, Omnico, whatever. 1:21:10 So yeah. 1:21:11 So the idea is very old and people like the idea and it's not going away. 1:21:16 But I think the deeper connection is actually that Ethereum likes to do new stuff and likes to experiment with things. 1:21:22 And it's just kind of like lets people do whatever. 1:21:24 It's not very judgmental. 1:21:26 And I think Bitcoin, of course, does sort of the opposite, where it tries to be very conservative. 1:21:32 But it Bitcoin could go too long without something new happening. 1:21:41 And people like, you know, they think of it as maybe it needs to it needs to continue to have like cultural relevance. 1:21:51 You know, it needs to be out there because it needs to be recognized as money in order to work. 1:21:57 So it needs to have like a culture. 1:21:59 And as a result, it has to have all this stuff, like all these podcasts, all this Twitter addiction. 1:22:05 You know, it needs to have all this stuff because you have to make sure you're when you're a Bitcoiner, you're like a paranoid. 1:22:11 You're paranoid of like Bitcoin being like ignored. 1:22:14 More attention it gets, the better. 1:22:16 And so it's it creates this huge attention economy, this huge attention food chain in Bitcoin. 1:22:27 And it just means that it just gets stuff gets old. 1:22:29 You know, it just gets old. 1:22:30 Nothing new has happened in a while. 1:22:31 So Ordinal is something new. 1:22:33 So it's a new drama. 1:22:35 Yeah. 1:22:36 Yeah. 1:22:37 So basically, it seems like something else I also did a show on before was the Bitcoin sustainability problem where you have halvening. 1:22:51 So inflation is going down and fee revenue is not going up. 1:22:56 And it seems to be there's a cap of how much people will pay for a single on-chain transaction. 1:23:01 And so basically, there needs to be some kind of a solution that makes it so that Bitcoin security ticking time bomb gets solved. 1:23:09 And so I guess it seems to be right now, things are OK. 1:23:16 Depends on who you're asking. 1:23:17 Right. 1:23:18 Right. 1:23:19 Yeah, for now. 1:23:20 OK. 1:23:21 But in a couple of years, there's the being overtaken by other projects or just losing security budget and actually diminishing. 1:23:30 Those two things are looming on the horizon. 1:23:33 And so at that point, when those become a real problem, like a present problem, then it seems like there will have to be a choice. 1:23:42 Either people will have to just abandon Bitcoin and go on to other projects completely, or they will have to make Bitcoin be able to absorb the usefulness of some of these other projects and become sustainable in its own tokenomics and stuff, in its own security model. 1:24:02 So it seems like if I were to break this down simply, it's like Bitcoin has a couple more years before it has to decide to either die or go with Drivechains or something more controversial. 1:24:15 But Drivechain seems to be the least controversial way of getting all these things done. 1:24:22 Yeah, I think so. 1:24:23 I think that people are really in denial about the security budget situation. 1:24:29 They don't seem to understand it at all. 1:24:31 In fact, it's already happening. 1:24:33 Like if I went to mining disrupt and miners were saying like, I don't think the Satoshi's design, I don't think it actually planned at all to have minor revenues be cut in half every four years. 1:24:52 What I mean by that is he thought the fee revenues would be going up the whole time. 1:24:57 He thought the mining. 1:24:58 So he just kind of thought it would kind of like it would be. 1:25:01 I think he thought it would be noisy. 1:25:06 But as you say, we have fixed L1 block size. 1:25:11 merge mining is not encouraged the way it should be, to say the least. 1:25:17 And people are willing to pay only so much for L1 transaction. 1:25:25 So this means that the fee picture is frozen at a tiny value. 1:25:32 It's very small in U.S. dollar terms. 1:25:36 So it's frozen at whatever it is, you know, like maybe like a million dollars a day or something. 1:25:40 But it's whatever it is, it's very small in comparison to the block subsidy, the new coins that are created. 1:25:48 And yeah, I think Satoshi had in mind one would be growing geometrically and noisily a lot. 1:25:57 And the other is having every four years. 1:26:00 And he thought like it goes up, it goes down. 1:26:03 But I don't think that he had in mind like just falling off a cliff. 1:26:10 And so anyway, like a lot of miners say that eventually they will be forced to or that they will push for. 1:26:17 He said there'll eventually be a split in the Bitcoin community where the miners will want to stop the having from taking place. 1:26:26 Eventually, they'll freeze it at some lower value, like maybe in eight years or so. 1:26:31 They'll just hard fork and they'll say it's not having again. 1:26:34 This is perpetual tail emission. 1:26:37 And even people like Peter Todd support this. 1:26:39 He would think it would be a fringe idea. 1:26:41 So he's doing that. 1:26:51 Yeah, I mean, it's either something radical like that, like changing the magical 21 million. 1:26:56 Or it's simply allowing for other things to be built. 1:27:02 Yeah, and there's really no reason not to do this. 1:27:04 Like people think that there is, they think this is, you know, whatever, a risk. 1:27:11 This is again, just like, you know, this is just prejudice. 1:27:15 People don't, they don't understand the idea. 1:27:17 There really is no risk. 1:27:19 It's not, you know, it's just an integer counting to 13,000 under the hood. 1:27:24 merge mining has already been done. 1:27:26 It's been done for 10 years, 10, 12 years. 1:27:29 Yeah, we'll tend to really quick before we wrap up Steel Man, the critics on this. 1:27:36 What's the biggest critic? 1:27:38 What's the biggest criticism? 1:27:39 The critics say the big criticisms are false. 1:27:43 But I can give you them anyway. 1:27:44 And then there's the Steel Man. 1:27:45 My Steel Man would be like something different. 1:27:47 It would be like a different thing. 1:27:49 I don't want to say some things that are actually true. 1:27:54 But the biggest one is that it affects mining incentives. 1:27:59 But what people mean by this is if you actually ask, they are hopelessly confused and they don't know what they're talking about. 1:28:07 But the only way to salvage some meaning from it, which is again, they don't even know this. 1:28:12 But what they're referring to is they're saying we don't want minor revenues to go up. 1:28:17 But that's just like saying they want the security budget problem to be unsolved forever. 1:28:23 So if you could really truly Steel Man it somehow or something, I would say something like it changes the optimal minor from someone who only cares about hashing and minimizing their dollar per hash cost, minimizing their electricity cost. 1:28:45 It changes a minor from that and someone who only chooses the pool based on the pool charging low fees, the pool not doing 51% of tax, the pool doing what they want the pool to do, signaling for soft work they want to do. 1:29:08 So they do all this stuff. 1:29:09 They minimize their hash costs. 1:29:10 They do cooling. 1:29:11 They have to worry about security. 1:29:13 Sometimes they have to worry about regulation or mining. 1:29:16 Remember when mining was banned in China and then whatever. 1:29:19 So miners have this long list of things that they worry about, including they choose which pool to mine. 1:29:26 And that pool may do altcoin merge mining as slush pool did. 1:29:31 There's brains, as it is now called the oldest pool in existence. 1:29:36 We do altcoin merge mining. 1:29:38 It changes the optimal minor from that to someone who is that plus they care about which sidechains are active and that type of thing. 1:29:49 But that's not really a change because the list of things a minor has to care about has grown and shrunk and changed shape many times throughout the years and it will continue to do so. 1:30:03 So there's really no basis for. 1:30:06 In fact, merge mining is great because merge mining is effectively tons of new revenue for free. 1:30:12 So merge mining relatively helps the little guys. 1:30:15 It actually helps decentralized mining. 1:30:18 Of course. 1:30:19 Yeah. 1:30:20 So that's one. 1:30:21 And then the other one is that miners can steal all the coins in the sidechain. 1:30:24 But of course, that only impacts people who chosen to deposit coins on the sidechain. 1:30:29 And there's lots of the large blockers. 1:30:32 They were pro miner. 1:30:33 They were pro SPV mode at the time. 1:30:35 And this mode is one hash every three months level SPV, which is way more reliable than what large blockers were willingly signing up, signing up for 2015. 1:30:47 And not to mention all the other new features that people might get. 1:30:51 So but that only one that only affects people who have deposited coins. 1:30:56 People say all kinds of other stuff about like, oh, it gives miners more influence. 1:31:00 But that's not true. 1:31:01 Because if you don't deposit coins to the 300 script and you're just not using the feature, you're just not getting the gay marriage or whatever. 1:31:09 So it just doesn't affect you at all. 1:31:13 But I think like I'm trying to think of the other steel man like what I would just that's what's been that's what's said, but it's really not. 1:31:25 It's kind of nonsensical. 1:31:28 So I can give you like what I what I would worry about is blockchains with no that only rely on fees. 1:31:35 Maybe those don't work at all. 1:31:38 In which case this idea won't work. 1:31:39 And in which case Bitcoin also eventually when the fee when the having is so small, they will also stop working. 1:31:47 So we might as well learn it now. 1:31:49 We might as well learn about that flaw now. 1:31:54 Because so far there haven't been transaction fee only blockchains. 1:32:01 So maybe they just don't really work. 1:32:02 They could work. 1:32:03 Maybe they don't. 1:32:04 As a funny, there's one I know of, which is there's a cryptocurrency called the Maya protocol, which is a fork of Thor chain, which is a cross chain exchange mechanism. 1:32:16 In Maya launch, it has zero emission is only fees right now, which it is a very interesting dynamic of making the team hustle behind getting this used. 1:32:27 Yes, right. 1:32:28 That's what I that's what that's the hope for sidechains. 1:32:31 Is that no one makes a stupid scam pump and dump altcoin. 1:32:35 They only make a sidechain that they think people would actually generate usage and miners only activate once. 1:32:41 So I should really look into that. 1:32:43 That's I will write that down. 1:32:45 I'll check into that. 1:32:47 So, yeah, fees may not work. 1:32:49 Maybe the whole idea would just be so unpopular that I'll have taken up people's attention kind of for no reason. 1:32:56 Although there's plenty of evidence to suggest that's not true. 1:32:59 Like you see wrapped Bitcoin is like four or five billion dollars. 1:33:02 But wrapped Bitcoin is basically the same idea, just in reverse. 1:33:05 It's like Bitcoin on Ethereum. 1:33:07 Yeah. 1:33:08 So I'm going to take Bitcoin and make it more expensive to use. 1:33:12 Yeah. 1:33:13 So and then you have stuff like it's like wrapped. 1:33:15 Bitcoin is like 40, 50 times the size of the lightning network. 1:33:18 You have problems with the lightning network. 1:33:23 You have more. 1:33:25 You know, you look at CoinMarketCap. 1:33:29 You see all these other projects that aren't Bitcoin. 1:33:31 You look at the crypto fees. 1:33:33 More fees are paid on Ethereum than Bitcoin. 1:33:38 So there's a lot of like, you know, you look at the people who wanted large blocks or wanted privacy or something. 1:33:45 Almost all those people were Bitcoiners first and they tried to get the idea on Bitcoin. 1:33:50 But they just they thought it not to be possible. 1:33:54 So you look at all that and you think, well, it doesn't really add up to me. 1:33:58 I think it would be slightly popular if it were just if the education were there. 1:34:03 I think it would be popular. 1:34:06 Yeah. 1:34:07 So basically the argument might be it's not as good of a scaling solution as other ones out there. 1:34:15 And what you're doing is you're taking away attention and capital from things like lightning. 1:34:21 Yeah, but I think the interesting thing about that is I actually think it is better scaling. 1:34:27 And it's some people have like, you know, they have like stock options and companies that are related. 1:34:33 And I think that's actually the real headwind is that there's some nefariousness. 1:34:37 Some people's reputation will take a hit if this idea succeeds. 1:34:42 And I think that is actually part of why it's gone a little slow. 1:34:49 I don't think that like I think that lightning is very good. 1:34:55 But I think lightning will have a very weird niche that is smaller than this. 1:35:00 I think if this works the way I expect, it would be bigger. 1:35:05 It would be a bigger L2 than lightning. 1:35:08 Lightning is very small, of course. 1:35:10 It's only we could look it up. 1:35:11 But I think it's 0.025% of the coins in Bitcoin are in the lightning network or something. 1:35:17 So it's less than one tenth of a percent. 1:35:20 If I remember correctly. 1:35:21 We can look it up. 1:35:22 Let's look it up. 1:35:23 Look it up right now. 1:35:24 Yeah, I mean, it's definitely had some constraints. 1:35:28 I think one of the reasons why people like lightning is because it's relatively little removed from the main chain. 1:35:40 And that it's just a multi-sig. 1:35:42 You're in a multi-sig and then everything else happens. 1:35:46 Yeah, it's like it's hands off and it doesn't touch any other Bitcoin participant necessarily. 1:35:51 Although, of course, that's not precisely the case either. 1:35:54 Because. 1:35:58 Yeah, it's a 0.0247%. 1:36:01 So it's very small, but that's not quite the case either, because people like it has no active participation. 1:36:12 Whereas Drivechain has active participation of the L1 miners to authorize the withdrawal. 1:36:20 So I guess it's slightly different like that. 1:36:22 But I mean, like the L1 miners also. 1:36:25 The L1 miners are like in direct participation with Bitcoin itself in a very profound way, which is that they'll all go bankrupt if Bitcoin doesn't succeed. 1:36:34 And they'll make a huge amount of money if Bitcoin does succeed. 1:36:37 So they are already like. 1:36:39 It's not like they're. 1:36:42 People want like different things, right? 1:36:45 The ideal thing for them would be if the miners just quietly sat in the corner mining one block every 10 minutes. 1:36:56 But from the miners point of view, they have a gun pointed at their head. 1:36:59 They're like. 1:37:00 And that gun is crazy Bitcoiners. 1:37:03 Crazy Bitcoin Twitter and crazy Bitcoin developers who are like weird monks who don't care about profits. 1:37:13 Somehow. 1:37:14 So that is always sort of intention. 1:37:22 Yeah. 1:37:23 Well, it's been quite the fascinating discussion. 1:37:26 Hopefully it gets a lot more people thinking about this stuff. 1:37:29 Where do you want me to direct people to hear more about what you do as well as Drivechain, etc.? 1:37:37 It's chill o'clock. 1:37:39 We have a site, LayerTwoLabs.com, which has some cool stuff. 1:37:45 It has videos. 1:37:46 It has infographics. 1:37:48 It has some stuff. 1:37:49 It has recordings of the spaces. 1:37:51 Other stuff that I do. 1:37:54 And then there's drivechain.info. 1:37:56 That's a site I made myself. 1:37:58 And it's kind of like a gray matter site. 1:38:00 It's got all this stuff. 1:38:01 It's got all this research, diagrams, FAQ, that kind of thing. 1:38:08 So those are pretty good. 1:38:09 And then you can follow me on Twitter. 1:38:10 I'm Truthcoin on Twitter. 1:38:12 Or I have LayerTwo Labs on Twitter. 1:38:15 And I think you'd learn a lot if you just started with all that. 1:38:20 You'd get into enough trouble. 1:38:21 drivechain.info has a link to like a YouTube playlist that's like 30-something hours of stuff. 1:38:30 We have the software. 1:38:32 The best way to learn is to actually run the software. 1:38:35 Running the software is key. 1:38:38 Yeah, like most people on Twitter will confidently say things that are untrue just because that's the way Twitter is. 1:38:49 So I would just say take anything you hear on Twitter with a grain of salt. 1:38:58 I mean, when has Twitter ever been wrong about anything, right? 1:39:02 So I would say, yeah, if you read yourself and it is in conflict with something you heard on Twitter, what it was on Twitter is probably wrong. 1:39:11 Yeah, of course. 1:39:12 Don't trust verify is what they say. 1:39:14 Right. 1:39:15 Yeah. 1:39:16 Well, fantastic. 1:39:17 Thanks for joining us. 1:39:18 And I hope you have a good one. 1:39:20 And yeah, thanks for the discussion. 1:39:22 Hey, thanks for having me. 1:39:31 Transcription by CastingWords