0:00 Warning, the following content is not advisable for 2017 ICO cooks. 0:08 Welcome to Shitcoin TV. 0:09 Today, Andreas and I are joined by none other than Paul Sztorc, creator of Drivechain. 0:15 Welcome Paul. 0:16 Thank you. 0:17 Thank you guys for having me. 0:18 It's an honor. 0:19 It's great to finally have you on. 0:20 I know Andreas and I have been talking about it for a while, so it definitely is an honor 0:27 for us too. 0:29 Awesome. 0:30 So, I guess today, the main thing we really wanted to, I know this is an annoying phrase, 0:39 but pick your brains about Paul. 0:41 Okay. 0:42 Yes, we all have drinks. 0:43 It's funny. 0:44 We all have different colors too. 0:45 I just have water. 0:46 I mean, vodka. 0:47 I've got Red Bull. 0:48 It looks like berries. 0:49 Yeah. 0:50 I have a beautiful burgundy red wine. 0:51 It's alcohol glass. 0:52 I love it. 0:54 Aren't you doing a little challenge this Christmas, Andreas? 1:00 A festive challenge with the wines. 1:05 All right. 1:06 Forty bottles of burgundy. 1:09 Yeah. 1:10 And we're also watching 37 Christmas movies. 1:16 37 Christmas movies. 1:17 Oh, there we go. 1:18 Oh, look at that. 1:20 Happy holidays to everyone in the audience. 1:22 And Merry Christmas to all. 1:24 Yeah. 1:25 Happy non-denominational holidays to everyone. 1:28 Yes. 1:29 Well, with that, we can jump in. 1:32 So I guess today, the main thing we really want to talk about is an awesome project that 1:39 Paul is working on called Drivechain. 1:41 And I guess one phrase that I think really sums it up is, when you see it, you can't 1:46 unsee it. 1:47 So that's one thing I've been thinking about. 1:51 But yeah, that puts it in a very distinctive category. 1:56 No, I think as soon as you know that, that's it. 1:59 You go down a rabbit hole, right? 2:01 But Paul, I'd love to just kind of have your take on a little bit of a breakdown of just 2:08 what you think, how you would describe Drivechain and what it does. 2:12 Well, it tries to separate the investment Bitcoin, the token, you know, the money, tries 2:19 to separate it from any individual piece of software technology. 2:23 So Drivechain lets you send Bitcoin from some base chain, which would probably be Bitcoin 2:30 Core. 2:31 It lets you send that to a different piece of software, where it can change owners or 2:36 be used in some kind of smart contract or weird other thing. 2:40 Any weird, crazy idea that the developer has over there, and it can then be re-transplanted 2:48 to the original chain or to some different chain. 2:50 So it lets you send Bitcoin among completely different pieces of software. 2:54 And that's especially important these days because there is a lot of tremendous contention 3:00 and disputes over what exactly the software should be doing. 3:06 Most obviously the block size debate, but also stuff like Turing completeness and privacy 3:12 features, like should we have large ring signatures like Monero? 3:17 Should we have something like ZK-SNARKs, like Zcash has this very, very slow, kind of difficult 3:25 to compute system, but it's much more private. 3:30 And so there's all these trade-offs and people don't really know what to do about it really. 3:35 But that's kind of a long story. 3:37 So the short version is just, you can send Bitcoin to different pieces of software in 3:42 the back. 3:43 And I do think that it's important because we are seeing this explosive kind of shotgun 3:48 style innovation in blockchain space, where most of it's nonsense, but there's a market 3:55 demand for people trying out these different ideas. 3:57 And inside the nonsense, there are a few legitimate ideas. 4:03 I think definitely like the ERC20 token or the counterparty style token or something 4:08 like that, there's something real there amid mostly nonsense. 4:14 And certainly the block size debate is something that many people have taken a lot of different 4:20 stances on. 4:23 Some of which seem to be, at least more than one, seems to be rational. 4:26 I mean, you have at least Luke Jr. who wants it to be 350K, and then you have some people 4:31 who just go along with the crowd and they say one megabyte or 2.2 megabytes or whatever 4:37 it is now, the complicated block weight duality thing. 4:40 And then you have other people who want it to be higher, and then some people say it 4:44 should be extremely high or unlimited. 4:47 And I think at least two of those perspectives are rational. 4:53 If we just pretend that we could go back in time and we had a Drivechain, then we could 4:59 have things like Ethereum and Monero and Zcash without pre-sales and ICOs and all these 5:09 tokens. 5:10 So we could all just be owning Bitcoin, but we could also have these experiments and you 5:15 could send your Bitcoin into the experiment to get the futures or not. 5:21 And if you don't, they wouldn't hurt you. 5:24 Right. 5:25 That's exactly it. 5:26 And in fact, I think, you know, it was very, anyone who's been around for a long time, 5:31 I think will remember the announcement of Rootstock. 5:37 That was around the same time that Ethereum first started to get a little, when I first 5:42 started to make it onto the front page of r slash Bitcoin on Reddit or something, Ethereum 5:49 was sort of starting to get talked about a long time ago, like 2015. 5:57 And then our Rootstock showed up and said, oh, we're just going to copy that. 5:59 And everyone thought, oh, great. 6:01 And of course, none of that panned out because that was, it may have been 2014, that was 6:06 like ancient history. 6:07 Nowadays, anyway. 6:08 And I mean, one thing is, one thing is you can say these, a lot of these tokens are pre-mines 6:15 or ICOs or scams, and they lead to all kinds of just unwanted outcomes for everyone. 6:24 But if you even ignore that, just the amount of fucking time we're using, juggling all 6:29 of these tokens, like what a joke. 6:33 ShapeShift is a business and Binance is a business that exists only because we can't, 6:40 because we just wouldn't have sidechains. 6:42 Binance wouldn't even exist. 6:45 Someone wrote me an email and they ended up seeing Eric Voorhees, actually. 6:51 They were in an email complaining about sidechains and they said, whatever. 6:55 And they said, I'm an investor in Facebook, not Facebook, oh my God, he may have been 6:59 in Facebook, but he's an investor in ShapeShift. 7:02 And they're like, my investment is going to be ruined. 7:04 You know, what are you doing about this, Eric? 7:07 And it's very funny. 7:08 But that was a long time ago. 7:11 But of course, Eric got the last laugh because very little progress was made on sidechains 7:18 in 2015, 2016. 7:22 And very much progress was made as far as chipcoin trading and demand for ShapeShift. 7:30 So I'm sure he did okay, even though we can only imagine the extent to which he's currently 7:37 cooperating with the U.S. 7:39 federal government. 7:44 Yeah, we don't know exactly. 7:47 When there's an exchange running an exchange that has no KYC and it suddenly has KYC, 7:55 it's like you could make a movie about it because you probably have your child in some 8:00 torture dungeon or something. 8:02 Yeah, I don't know, like, probably like they just Xeroxed it. 8:08 They probably have all these hard drives and like every corner of his house, they have 8:13 cameras like every, probably with all these emails and Google searches from ever. 8:21 And there you go. 8:23 That's Colorado, everyone. 8:25 You don't run your non-KY, leave the United States if you're going to do something like 8:30 that. It's kind of a kind of a no brainer. 8:33 Oh, certainly. And so, yeah, what I was saying before is I was thinking Ethereum would be 8:38 a sidechain, but it probably wouldn't because there's a lot of undesirable things about 8:43 sidechains, but it could have been. 8:46 So I'm not saying like we would have kept Ethereum as a sidechain because it's way too 8:51 complicated and complicated. 8:53 Yeah, Ethereum is it contains not only a technical idea, but it contains other things in 9:00 it as well. And the technical idea, I think, is almost one of the least important things 9:06 of it. One second thing that it contains is just the idea that there should be a 9:09 competitor to Bitcoin that does things differently. 9:12 And like reversing the Dow hack and just in general being extremely liberal and taking a 9:21 chance on all these weird ideas. 9:22 But also what Ethereum is, it's kind of a it's a giant, it attracts all these gullible 9:27 people and it's a nexus for gullibility. 9:33 And that's part of what how the ICO is kind of this multidimensional pyramid scheme of 9:39 this part of why the ICO crowd was drawn to Ethereum, because it was created by a sort 9:45 of a scammy ICO and then it gave birth to many scammy ICO children. 9:50 And but there's so much more to it than that. 9:52 Ethereum is like it's it's like a projection of the desire for I mean, I think the idea 10:00 that it just should compete with Bitcoin and that it should be have a differentiated 10:04 product. This contains a lot of it that there's no leader in Bitcoin, but there's 10:08 Vitalik Buterin in Ethereum. 10:10 Bitcoin is sort of dirty and it doesn't play nice with anyone. 10:14 But Ethereum is like super friendly and you can do like a fun, nonjudgmental dance on 10:18 stage wearing like a costume. 10:21 And that's like considered OK and normal. 10:25 It's like so there's like every just the desire to just sort of be different. 10:31 That kind of captured Ethereum and it's but yeah, there's many, Ethereum is many 10:35 things and it's not merely people wanted to turn complete scripting language. 10:39 And anyone who thinks that that's all that it is. 10:43 Has never looked at never looked at like Ethereum.com or like the just met Ethereum 10:49 people because there's so much so much more packed into that train wreck that just a 10:55 little feature doesn't explain it. 10:58 I do remember that we used to have we used to have quirky memes and dances and 11:03 Christmas parties in Bitcoin before we all became, well, we're all enemies now. 11:11 But before that, we used to actually have a lot of fun. 11:13 A lot of people don't know this, but it used to be a bunch of fun, actual Christmas 11:17 parties where you could go and have a drink with Sipa. 11:21 What happened? 11:24 The block size debate happened and now we all hate each other outright or we just 11:28 resent each other. 11:30 And it's also kind of a reaction to all the Ethereum and other things as well, where 11:36 it's like, oh, if they're going to do something like that, we have to can't do 11:39 anything like that. 11:39 And we would look at Ethereum. 11:42 I remember I have a funny story, which is that when I first invented my other project, 11:48 which used to be called Truth Coins is now Bitcoin Hivemind. 11:52 There was actually kind of Blockstream wanted to form like a partnership to develop 11:58 that. And that was November 2014. 12:01 And then I just happened to meet Roger Ver in December, the next month, December 12:05 2014. And Roger was like, oh, yeah, you know, I'll fund it or whatever. 12:11 And Blockstream was like, oh, that's perfect. 12:13 Great. You know, they're all like everyone's like this. 12:15 They're all like everyone knew each other and they're all happy about this. 12:18 And Blockstream was worried about like regulatory questions. 12:21 So they were like going a little slow on it. 12:23 And they're like, oh, that's so great that Roger funded that. 12:26 So happy. 12:28 How time has changed. 12:32 I think a lot of people will notice that if you look at the early companies, you'll find 12:39 the investors, for example, as far as I know, Trace Mayer and Roger are both investors in 12:45 Kraken. And this is the early Bitcoin company. 12:50 The investors are on all kinds of sides and everything. 12:54 Right now, everyone used to be on the same side. 12:55 Of course, it's this all this. 12:57 In fact, I still kind of remember it that way. 13:00 So it's difficult for me to believe when I see the fights on Twitter. 13:04 I just think like, listen, this is real. 13:07 It doesn't seem real to me. 13:08 I'm just like, oh, this idea that they're the mortal enemies and they hate each other is 13:14 it feels real. 13:17 I do think, you know, certain people, I hesitate to name any names, but there are some 13:22 people who are like professional, they are professional climbers of the hierarchy and 13:29 they really made a career out of, they made a career out of kind of being a jerk on 13:36 Twitter and taking advantage of people's, I don't know, emotions. 13:42 I mean, I can absolutely save Gmax and Fondaze for you. 13:46 Don't worry. 13:47 Yeah, I was thinking of, I was thinking of that was one of the many names that you hit on 13:53 one. There are quite a few on different sides. 13:56 Oh, there's so many of us. 13:57 I mean, and they did kind of like they were like, oh, this would be a really easy way for 14:04 me to score points with super prestigious person. 14:08 And and even though I had, you know, even though there's no legitimate talent, they have 14:14 this one talent, which is. 14:17 The climbers.