0:00 What up, Vigilantes? It is my pleasure to be here with you today with the one and only 0:14 Paul Sztorc. And yeah, Paul, how's it going? What are you up to these days? 0:20 It's going good. How are you? 0:22 I'm doing great. Actually, I'm pretty happy with what you're up to these days. And so 0:28 I think it's time for you to tell the world what's up, what's going on. 0:32 Yeah, you're referring to my hard fork of Bitcoin. 0:35 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So wait, so you're hard forking Bitcoin? What does that 0:41 mean? What are you doing? 0:43 Yeah, I mean, it's funny because in 2017, everyone knew about this, but maybe people 0:50 don't know about it anymore. But yeah, it's very easy. Anyone can do this where you 0:54 publish a new version of Bitcoin and then on a certain date, any BTC you own just splits 1:00 into two coins, the original BTC and then a new coin. 1:05 So that's what's going to happen this August. 1:09 Awesome. Well, congratulations. 1:11 You know, I was having a conversation about this with someone not too long ago, and he 1:16 said something very keen in our conversation, and I honestly don't want to paraphrase 1:22 him because I guess I have no choice. 1:24 He said something on the lines of if people really cared about Bitcoin, they'd be hard 1:30 forking it all the time. 1:33 And I'm like, you know what? You're right, man. 1:36 It's true because the hard fork just gives everyone free money. 1:39 And so the question is, why is it so controversial and why don't we do it all the 1:44 time? And I think it just has to do with historically what happened with Bitcoin. 1:49 Cash was the first hard fork. 1:51 It used the Bitcoin name. 1:53 And then there was a lot about like Roger Veer owned Bitcoin.com and he was promoting 1:58 Bitcoin Cash as the real Bitcoin. 2:01 So I don't know if that, to what extent that contributed. 2:03 But for whatever reason, this idea in the past has been very, very, very unpopular. 2:09 And even today, when people are making fun of Luke or whatever, Luke Dashjr. 2:13 and they say his BIP110 isn't going to go anywhere, they say have fun, you know, hard 2:18 fork, leave the network or whatever. 2:20 Because you kind of get cast out of the community because you're starting a competing 2:25 community. I think all of this is related to a couple easily fixable problems with the 2:30 hard fork. One, you just don't get caught up on the name, make your own brand, your own 2:37 name. So the name for this project is eCash, eCash.com. 2:42 So I'm happy about that. 2:44 And another issue with the, you know, I think it has a lot of stigma at first because it 2:51 tries to hit the ground running on day one. 2:54 But on day one, everyone has equal ownership in each. 2:58 So you kind of had a big disadvantage on day one. 3:01 But I've tried to fix that by just making sure on day one, when this launches, it has a 3:05 bunch of cool stuff ready to go. 3:07 It's been tested for a long time. 3:09 So we wanted to figure it out like after the fork date. 3:12 So this is technology that you guys have been working on for like over a decade now, over 3:19 10 years. Can you tell us about this technology and how is this, how does this mutate 3:26 Bitcoin? What does this mutate Bitcoin into? 3:30 Right. Yeah, this technology is called Drivechain and it is more than, it was November 3:37 2015 when I first published it. 3:40 You know, it's just kicked around as like an idea for a while and then did a little bit of 3:45 work on it here and there and kind of picked it up, set it back down for a while. 3:50 I just really thought, OK, maybe the Lightning Network will work out or maybe even one of 3:57 the other altcoins will show some promise. 4:01 Or Bitcoin Cash or another Bitcoin hard fork might do well and might show it like light 4:07 the way, so to speak, and we could have all these people trying different things and we 4:12 would be able to see for ourselves if any of them worked. 4:15 But actually, really, it's been a bigger disaster than I could have anticipated and 4:20 including Lightning Network and including Bitcoin Core and just make so many bizarre 4:24 decisions. So I think this one idea, the Drivechain idea, since it creates competition 4:33 among L2s, it really solves a lot of important problems at once, in particular, the 4:40 problem of what to do if the developers, you know, make a mistake or they're just lazy or 4:44 they just do anything wrong. 4:47 So you can always escape to an L2. 4:49 So how is an L2 different with eCash than with Bitcoin as it exists now? 4:58 Yeah, unfortunately, with Bitcoin as it exists now, the main L2 is the Lightning Network. 5:05 And it's more not only does the Lightning Network not work, but it kind of, you know, 5:14 Lightning not work. 5:15 That's what that should be called. 5:16 But it's like it also sucks all the oxygen out of the room where it just makes it so you 5:24 can't even talk about different types of L2s. 5:26 Even all the L2s that are being discussed, none of them are merged mine. 5:30 That's a big difference between mine are very much just like a normal blockchain that 5:35 happens to be like an optional L2 block space. 5:40 And the ones that are favored in the BTC Bitcoin community are like, you know, this 5:47 weird Lightning Network, ARK, Liquid. 5:50 These are things where the transaction fees are collected by like a private party, 5:55 Lightning service provider, the ARK Supernode, or like a wallet controlled by Blockstream. 6:01 All of those, I think, are complete non-starters and they're not going to work. 6:07 And we even mostly see them not working. 6:10 And even I gave this debate at TabConf a few months ago, and I debated an entire room of 6:16 people about the Lightning Network. 6:17 And many of them just came up on stage to say that they mostly agreed with what I had 6:21 to say. So I don't even consider myself to be an expert on Lightning. 6:25 But. All right, all the Maxis watching this are probably like, well, we're just going to 6:30 dump your coin. 6:32 It's just going to be another shit coin and Bitcoin will continue on being as it is. 6:39 What do you say to that? 6:40 Because that's that's that's like the knee jerk sentiment that I expect them to have. 6:45 It's definitely an appropriate thing to think like if you've only heard about the idea for 6:51 like 10 or 15 seconds. 6:54 That's part of why I'm giving people like four months advance notice, because I think we 6:58 want to draw a wedge between the people who actually look into things and the people who 7:02 just do a knee jerk reaction. 7:04 This is also, I think, part of the problem with the doing the pure hard fork anyway, is 7:10 that if you think about it, a pure hard fork like where I just say I'm tomorrow or a hard 7:17 fork today or tomorrow with no advance notice and no advance work or preparation, that's 7:25 kind of asking everyone to make a knee jerk reaction like really soon without having 7:29 enough time to think about it. 7:31 But yeah, I think this is an appropriate thing to think like immediately. 7:35 But if you look deeper. 7:39 You know, there are a lot of really severe problems with with Bitcoin and so like the 7:44 blocks are basically empty and the fees are very low. 7:48 So this speaks to very few users. 7:53 That miners are all going bankrupt or pivoting to AI and like that. 7:58 Many developers are very frustrated. 8:01 They can't get they either can't get stuff that they want. 8:06 They can't work on things that they want to work. 8:07 These are like super geniuses like Jeremy Rubin or whatever. 8:10 We can't even get something like OP_CAT. 8:12 It's 13 lines of code. 8:14 It was in the original client for years. 8:16 It doesn't really do anything. 8:18 Yet it has all these benefits. 8:20 It's an opt in, ignorable, reversible, soft fork. 8:25 There's literally not a single reason, you know, on earth that it wouldn't be just sale 8:30 right through the process. But the process doesn't let something like that in. 8:33 It doesn't let BIP300 in. 8:35 It doesn't let like and then you have this opera turn drama. 8:39 So the development scene is bad. 8:41 The user scene is bad. 8:42 The mining scene is bad. 8:43 Even the owners as an investment, it really hasn't even done that that well recently. 8:50 Michael Saylor himself, you can go to SaylorTracker.org, I think he's only up his 8:56 entire lifetime investment in Bitcoin. 8:58 He's only up like maybe like zero percent. 9:01 It depends on the day. Sometimes he's down. 9:02 Yeah, I've done better holding Monero since the Bitcoin civil war in 2017 than I have 9:10 if I would have just stayed Bitcoin Maxi and BTC. 9:13 So I think the biggest problem is that we've started lying to ourselves on a massive 9:18 scale and the Lightning Network is part of that. 9:22 It's a very easy to see part, especially because I did the debate, but you said you 9:27 would post in the comments below. 9:30 But there's a lot of other things where it's just like what the stuff that we do just 9:33 doesn't make any sense. 9:35 And I just know too much about it. 9:37 And I've been I've been a member of the community for like 15 years. 9:41 And, you know, I've been speaking at technical events and things, so it's not. 9:48 If there are problems and we are working to fix those problems and that's fine, but if 9:53 everyone is just this is part of the complacency that you you mentioned before, people 10:00 just think Bitcoin's indestructible. 10:02 So I'll just take free coins and sell to get more BTC. 10:05 I think if that's what you want to do, then I encourage you to do that. 10:08 And, you know, I you know, I really can't see how anyone can be, quote unquote, 10:15 dismissive of you because you are someone who's been very close to BTC, very close to 10:21 Bitcoin development. 10:23 And who's friends with everyone in the core team, I mean, you're you're very likable 10:30 person in Bitcoin and you've contributed a lot to the network. 10:35 So at the very least, I think that the Bitcoin community will have to take take you 10:43 serious. It's not that I personally don't see how they can just dismiss this hard fork 10:50 as as, you know, the Bitcoin cash fork was something that was. 10:57 Very contentious and yes, it was easy to get toxic over, but now we're talking about 11:04 something that has been that you did provide to the Bitcoin community as a Bitcoin 11:10 improvement proposal as a BIP, BIP300, BIP301. 11:14 And so let's talk about that. 11:17 Like how why why don't you just continue on in pursuing the adoption of BIP300 and BIP 11:23 301 within Bitcoin? 11:26 Well, it's difficult to know what where what else I could even do at this point, because 11:32 I wrote the BIPs and I replied to a lot of feedback and we even had like one of our chief 11:39 critics was Peter Todd. 11:40 And we even hired him to write a critique beating up the idea. 11:46 But basically everything in his critique was like factually wrong. 11:49 And I have a giant image of that where I post his thing and my thing and people can read 11:54 that and give it to you also if people are interested. 11:56 But a couple of things were that after he went on stage at Baltic Honey Badger and he 12:02 said that there was no code for this, which meant that he, which is a mistaken thing to 12:06 say, but more than just being a mistake, it meant that he had never visited drivechain.info 12:11 it says like download like at the top and big font. 12:14 So it meant that he had never visited the site. 12:16 It was very perplexing that he didn't realize it was two and a half years after we had his 12:20 Zcash privacy sidechain out that had a GUI and he's around. 12:25 He's the chief critic and he has no idea that the software exists. 12:30 And that was like baffling to me. 12:32 Also, his critiques, all the critiques are inane. 12:35 The critiques are just like miners might earn too much money or something. 12:38 It's like really bizarre. 12:40 So that's kind of weird. 12:42 But then in addition to writing the BIPs, we had people who were doing like draft pull 12:48 requests to Bitcoin Core. 12:50 And these were like met with all kinds of crazy like distractions, harassment, just 12:57 like irrelevant nonsense. 13:00 And then I invented this other thing, CUSF, the Core Untouched Soft Fork, which is a way 13:06 of doing soft forks without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin Core. 13:11 And there's like, so I just think that the culture in Bitcoin is really screwed up. 13:17 I think OpReturn, not OpReturn, excuse me, OP_CAT is kind of a smoking gun where just 13:25 people are just afraid of the idea of the software. 13:30 So a different example is Taproot. 13:33 Peter Weil, he was willing to work on Taproot, but he was just unwilling to discuss 13:39 activation. This is too emotionally traumatizing or whatever. 13:45 Some random guy had to do a speedy trial. 13:48 So I just think the whole community is really messed up. 13:50 It's not just BIP300. 13:52 It's like the lightning has infected everyone's mind. 13:58 People don't want to say, there's like a prestige economy around who can get their code 14:10 merged. So if you get your code merged, then you're like a important person and you can 14:15 get blah, blah, blah. 14:16 It's all just like a bunch of nonsense. 14:17 So even like you could take it to like miners themselves and say, this is in your own 14:21 financial interest. We're in a situation where the end miners who buy the ASICs, they 14:30 don't know anything. To them, Bitcoin mining is a lot like mining for silver or something 14:35 else. They just get cheap power. 14:36 They plug the stuff in. 14:38 They sell that for a fiat. 14:40 They're not even really Bitcoiners. 14:42 The pools, you know, they can't do anything that upgrades the network as a whole because 14:47 the pools, you know, let's say the pools compete against other pools. 14:53 So something that benefits them all, they're like, well, I can't get a leg up on. 14:57 So I think the whole community has become deranged in many ways. 15:02 But yeah, I think it would be too much work to fix at this point. 15:06 And it would be much easier to launch something new. 15:09 And at which point, I mean, I hate to say this, but at which point you could essentially 15:12 profit off of the irrationality of BTC because you'd be able to say, well, this is one 15:19 is very, very, very expensive and the other is very cheap. 15:22 And yet one is, you know, accumulating mistakes that it can't get rid of. 15:29 The other has opportunity to just move forward. 15:33 So do you think a lot of the big whales in Bitcoin, like Michael Saylor, do you think 15:39 they realize what's going on? 15:41 Like, I don't know. 15:43 I don't think so. 15:43 Do you? 15:45 You're asking me if I think I don't know. 15:48 I honestly, well, I'll tell you what, I'll give you my honest opinion since you're 15:54 asking. I think I don't think Saylor really understands what's going on. 15:58 And this was, in my opinion, very evident during the dispute between Core and Knotz. 16:08 Saylor, at the beginning, had a very unsure stance where he said, you know, don't touch 16:22 it. And then he kind of changed his tune and he went back and forth as to like, he 16:29 doesn't know, you know, it's almost like. 16:34 I don't think he would he would have an answer to the Core and Knotz situation. 16:40 Right. Which is a very, very, very easy one, I think. 16:43 And I think that is worrisome because he noticed he refuses to wear it. 16:47 Sorry to interrupt, but you're 100 percent right. 16:49 That he he'll he's blah, blah, blah. 16:52 Normally you can't get him to shut up. 16:54 You know, he's got an opinion on everything. 16:55 He's got a little metaphor for how everything is like when electricity wasn't vented or 16:59 whatever. But then as soon as it comes to this, should we change the OpReturn standardness 17:04 broadcast default value? 17:06 Then it's like, oh, no, we can't. 17:09 You know, I used to make a joke to people. 17:11 I would go to a Bitcoin meetup and say, hey, why don't we just ask Michael Saylor to tell 17:14 us what to do for OpReturn? 17:16 And then people would laugh because they know that he doesn't actually know anything 17:18 about it. Yeah, and that's and that's what's, in my opinion, very eye opening. 17:24 I think that like the biggest mistake that guys like us can make is in assuming that 17:30 what you and I see so logical and evident before us is what the masses or the overall 17:37 Bitcoin population will also see. 17:41 And from my experience and from the experience of many other Bitcoiners, we've come 17:46 to realize that. 17:49 The left side of the curve is very manipulatable, and so my question to you is, is 17:56 like, how will you address that, which is, in my opinion, what is most crucial here that 18:05 with just a couple of mantras, you can really hypnotize people and moving in a certain 18:09 direction and and and and conduce them to become toxic and closing their mind, their 18:17 ears to anything that actually. 18:21 Is helpful and fruitful for all of us, so how do you plan on tackling that left side of 18:27 the bell curve? 18:29 Well, I think when you start over the new project, it is an opportunity to like restart 18:35 the food chain, so to speak, where you would you go for the right part of the bell curve 18:40 first because they're more likely to grasp the nuance and the complexity of something 18:47 that's very new. This isn't so much a bet on that that eCash will be a huge success. 18:55 It's more of a hedge against BTC, just like collapsing into failure, which I think is 19:00 unfortunately, has some serious likelihood. 19:04 Now, there's just so much irrationality. 19:06 One of those things is that, you know, Michael Saylor, he doesn't know about up, you know, he 19:11 can prove us wrong at any time. 19:12 He can make a video proving that, you know, with his stance on up return. 19:16 But I think Michael Saylor is a big proponent of ossification, but he doesn't even realize 19:22 that like a soft fork is not actually a change to the protocol, leaves the old protocol where 19:27 it was. And so that is like that's getting the new thing and keeping the ossification. 19:35 This is a very, very rudimentary idea to me, but my guess is that he has not a clue. 19:41 You would have no clue. But even if I was standing right in front of him and I have had 19:45 the opportunity to talk to him a few times, but I think even if, you know, we just have no 19:49 idea about any of this stuff. 19:51 So what would be your your advice to the to the Bitcoin whale listening to this? 19:58 Like, what would you say to them? 20:01 Or what would be? I would say you have an opportunity to make if you have an opportunity 20:07 to make money that you didn't have before and this is how it would go, it would say just 20:12 think, you know, do you think this is worth your time to spend a little bit more time 20:16 looking into? Because if it is now, there will be an actual thing you can do. 20:22 There will be an actual, you know, you can buy some and sell one of the other and then 20:31 you can profit off of that decision. 20:32 So, you know, I'm not asking you to make any decisions now, but you can you can research 20:36 it and decide, you know, is is actually what I'm proposing with BIP300 Thunder L2, is that 20:46 actually much, much better than the Lightning Network? 20:48 The answer is yes, because you can onboard people directly to it. 20:51 There's no liquidity. 20:53 There's merge mining, passes all the transaction fee revenue to the L1 miners 20:58 automatically, can scale to 8 billion, onboard 8 billion people and process all the 21:03 transactions on Earth, which is something that the Lightning Network can't even come close to 21:08 doing. And you could say, what about the Z-side Privacy L2 that I propose? 21:15 You know, it's a million times better than CoinJoin, CoinJoin something where you have, you 21:22 know, five you and four other people, the four decoys in the anonymity set. 21:26 But with the, you know, Z-side is based off of the Zcash technology. 21:34 You have a reusable address that hides the sender, the receiver and the amount, it works with any 21:38 amount. You blend with everyone who's using the shielded pool, not just four people. 21:44 It's like it's like a million times better. 21:46 So just ask yourself, and then why aren't we doing soft forks in Bitcoin? 21:51 Is it an actual choice to, you know, ossify the network? 21:59 That's not true at all, because they changed every six months, they change stuff around all the 22:03 time. They release new version of Bitcoin all the time. 22:07 They refactor all the time, they do tests, they make all kinds of weird changes. 22:12 Some of the changes are, you know, they accidentally introduced inflation bug. 22:16 And so, like, it's not like, so why aren't we doing a soft fork? 22:23 Because they do this code changes. 22:24 They just don't want to do it. Is it for a real reason or is it because of totally irrational 22:29 political reasons? 22:32 What do you think will be your biggest pushback from the Bitcoin community? 22:37 I honestly don't know, because you want to know what's funny is even I proposed, even proposing 22:42 the BIP300 soft fork, which is again, something that you do like, you know, it's not really 22:49 like, it's not something that like you would get you get paid to do. 22:54 Like I didn't when I was inventing Drivechain in 2015, like no one paid me to do that. 22:58 And Jeremy Rubin, I don't know. 22:59 I don't know how people like get paid and I can't speak for them per se. 23:03 But it was like, yeah, you do all this work to try to make Bitcoin better. 23:06 And then people, they accused, they said that BIP300 was like bringing shit coins to Bitcoin, 23:13 which is like literally absurd and is kind of the opposite of what it actually does. 23:18 Right. Which makes it so you don't need to have any shit coins in the whole world in order to do 23:23 these things with the same 21 million coins. 23:26 It destroys the shit coin, actually. 23:27 Right. Yeah, mine as well. 23:30 I mean, that's exactly what it does. 23:32 It says any altcoin, it says it removes the pretext for the existing completely because it says, 23:38 well, hey, oh, I really want to have a use ring signatures. 23:42 Then that's why I have this, you know, Monero coin per se. 23:46 And then it would be like, well, you could just have ring signatures on, you know, Bitcoin sidechain. 23:50 So it's totally like Armageddon to them. 23:54 But that was what it was called. 23:56 And then now some of this stuff with the OpReturn drama. 24:00 And with the Ordinal's drama, you know, that's when they have that one guy, Udi and Eric, they're 24:06 like dancing on stage and then you have the people like that one guy swearing at them and saying 24:10 they're going to they're ruining Bitcoin like for his grandchildren and they're going to destroy 24:15 society. And so now you just think like, oh, my God, like, you know, it's baffling. 24:22 So I don't know what I think we can confidently say, whatever the criticism is, it's going to be 24:28 wrong. OK, so look, let's for our audience now that they have an idea of what's happening, let's 24:35 step back and let's go after let's explain if you could please explain the dynamic, the game 24:42 theory of a sidechain of a Bitcoin with sidechains, eCash, how will explain sidechains? 24:51 How do they work? How do Drivechains, sidechains work? 24:57 Yeah, these are like. 24:59 Basically, these are just in L2, so you deposit, someone has to send coins from L1 to the L2, once they're there, it's kind of like exactly how it is with, you know, a Drivechain L2 is a lot like an altcoin, but it starts with zero coins. 25:17 Instead, they all share the same 21 million BTC or eCash in this case. 25:23 They would share the same 21 million BTC if BIP300 were active on the BTC network. 25:30 So anyway, someone can send coins there. 25:34 It's like one person could send coins to the L2 and then over there they could change hands an unlimited number of times and in an unlimited number of ways. 25:42 And then they can be sent back to the L1 withdrawing them from the L2 back to the L1. 25:51 That's a very simple version, but really, it's easier if people think of like, OK, altcoins, they're all very different. 25:59 They may be written in a different programming language, like some could be written in Rust, some could be written in, you know, in Go or whatever. 26:10 So you can kind of do whatever you want with the L2s and they're optional in the sense that if you run L1, you don't necessarily have to run any of the L2s. 26:22 And if you run an L2, you must run an L1 node. 26:26 So in that way, they're very similar to Lightning Network and other things. 26:32 Right on, right on. So your L1, I was looking on your website, is 400 kilobytes. 26:39 So it would make you it would make eCash the true small blocker blockchain. 26:45 Is that am I getting this right? 26:47 Yes, that is right. 26:49 I'm keeping the L1 basically exactly the same as Bitcoin Core, but I did make this one change to make it so that it has the small. 26:57 I think it's not quite sure, you know, but yeah, the idea is that that would be the small block project because it's actually overkill. 27:08 If you're going to have people transact on the L2s, you really don't need that much space on L1 because you have these L2 chains that have plenty of space. 27:17 The cool thing is, is that what you're proposing saves Bitcoin because it gives Bitcoin options. 27:24 It gets Bitcoin outside of this environment of developer capture. 27:31 And it allows for there to be innovation while also giving investors the opportunity to stay within a very small layer one that does exactly what the nots people would want. 27:47 You would want to have, which is nothing like very small block size, which is cool. 27:54 You know, if that's what they have, they have that option. 27:56 Yes, I'm a believer in giving people what they want. 27:59 Exactly. And the cool thing is, is that with the sidechains, you have that option. 28:05 And, you know, something very important to bring up in this conversation is the fact that when I was part of the BitAngels network and I got the pitch deck for Blockstream, this is what they promised. 28:17 They promised sidechains and they really never delivered these sidechains. 28:23 And you went out of your way to deliver these sidechains that they themselves had promised to the Bitcoin community. 28:29 And now that they're here, I mean, it's been how long since you've been trying to implement them since you got done with them? Like four years? 28:37 Well, you know, I worked on it on and off, but the idea was from 2015. 28:43 I kind of shopped the idea around a little before doing any code. 28:48 Then we wrote some code, but that was for Bitcoin Core version 1699. 28:53 And they never got around to rebasing it. 28:56 In 2023, it was kind of like, what would it be like if it was a pull request to Bitcoin Core? 29:02 By then, the community had already become completely deranged. 29:06 But you're 100% correct. 29:09 You can go back to an earlier era. 29:11 You and I remember it because we were there, but other people were not. 29:15 In 2013 through 2015, the sidechains idea was like this Holy Grail type of thing. 29:22 It was like this super big deal. 29:25 And remember even you had people like Brian Armstrong. 29:28 He was tweeting like Litecoin, Ripple, altcoins, these are all distraction. 29:33 And the real way is Bitcoin and sidechains. 29:36 Yep. 29:37 And then there was just like, remember Reid Hoffman? 29:40 He had this thing about why I invested in Blockstream. 29:45 It was all about it's too difficult. 29:48 If a developer wants to introduce a new idea, the temptation is for them to just create a new coin. 29:55 How can they experiment with a new idea while making sure that they don't mess up Bitcoin? 30:02 So all this stuff was like people were already way beyond the Michael Saylor comprehension of ossification. 30:08 Like back then. 30:09 Oh, 100%, dude. 30:10 But now people have kind of just forgotten about the idea. 30:13 Because I think it's a little too awkward to bring it up without asking Blockstream why they didn't finish it. 30:19 And they barely even tried, really. 30:21 They had this skip list idea. 30:23 It was like an appendix B of their paper. 30:26 But then they never really got past appendix A where they said, well, temporarily we're going to just to get something out. 30:32 And even Greg Maxwell has videos about this where he's just like, well, until we finish the real two-way peg, we're just going to bandaid this thing together. 30:39 That's just a multi-sig. 30:41 And that became Liquid. 30:42 That became like their main product, the fake pre-sidechain multi-sig thing. 30:49 The type of thing that we would laugh at when Ethereum does it and they say this is a new thing. 30:53 And we just say, well, that's just giving a group of people your money. 30:58 Yeah. 30:59 Giving a group of keys your money. 31:01 So, yeah, it's baffling how people were smarter back then than they are now. 31:07 That's true. 31:08 And I think, you know, if I put on my conspiracy hat, which is my research hat on, I think that's part of the game, to be honest with you. 31:16 I think they want people dumb and they want people to forget what's possible with these technologies. 31:23 And I commend you, sir, for keeping them alive. 31:26 Because, look, we gave this path of scaling Bitcoin, I think, a very good go. 31:37 And I'm happy that, you know, you've introduced this in a time where the like you and I see the faults in BTC. 31:48 But the vast majority of people like the sailors of this world still think that it's like something that is perfect in design still. 31:58 And so they have not yet felt the consequences of this lack of understanding how to scale Bitcoin. 32:07 How have you have you encountered good support for this project since you started announcing this fork? 32:15 Well, you know, I have been keeping it a secret mostly. 32:19 OK, so this is one of the first times you actually are public about this. 32:23 Right. 32:24 Oh, wow. 32:25 OK, cool. 32:26 Well, thank you. 32:28 Pretty cool, Paul. 32:31 And how are you feeling about that? 32:32 How are you feeling about? 32:35 Well, people have been telling me that the secret, you know, I thought I was keeping it pretty well. 32:39 But people have been telling me that they already knew and whatever. 32:42 So, you know, and I think obviously, you know, by the time the fork happens, it has to be public. 32:49 So it's got to be. 32:51 What I'm worried about is that I may have waited too long. 32:53 I feel bad like because now I was waiting to see if like the Lightning Network would work out. 33:00 But now it totally doesn't work at all. 33:03 I know a lot of people still they really think that it does, but it definitely really doesn't. 33:08 That's the thing, man, is that it's a culture of delusion, you know. 33:12 Right. 33:13 BTC became a very weird. 33:19 It's the hijacking of the mind, really. 33:21 It's not just hijacking of Bitcoin, but it was the hijacking of the mind of the Bitcoiner. 33:26 And you just got a really weird culture, really weird way of thinking. 33:30 And it's just and, you know, if you I mean, my opinion, dude, this was fabricated by the likes of Epstein. 33:37 As you can see in the Epstein files, he was him and the like of those people were really involved in promoting what we saw in, you know, in the hijacking of Bitcoin. 33:48 And it's the weird culture that it is now. 33:52 Sorry, you were saying? 33:54 Yeah, I don't know what's going on, but it's whatever it is. 33:57 It doesn't it doesn't work very well. 33:58 So I think like Lightning is I hate to keep repeating that. 34:03 But I mean, for treasury companies, we could also say imagine like the like remember when Trace Mayer would do the January 3rd like proof of keys thing or something. 34:14 It would be like, take your Bitcoin off the exchange. 34:19 So you custody it with your own node. 34:22 But now we're pushing people. 34:25 Send don't even like, you know, send it to the Bitcoin, buy the Bitcoin ETF. 34:29 You know, you don't even have you're not even using a full node. 34:34 You don't technically have any Bitcoin you buy through the ETF. 34:38 And then even the treasury companies are like even one further where it's like, OK, now just give give the money to a company in exchange for stock. 34:46 They can print as much stock as they want at any time. 34:49 The centralized issuer of the shares. 34:53 I just you know, it's very strange because it's. 34:57 You know, in what in what earlier era of Bitcoin would that would that be, you know, anything other than like totally laughed at like it's like a Bitcoin. 35:06 It's like a we'll watch your Bitcoin for you. 35:08 And I'd be like, what? 35:09 Like, yeah, it's bizarre. 35:12 I don't know. And then even like, OK, during the block size war, it was like bit pay and the people wanted to buy coffee. 35:19 They were kind of on one side, large blocker side that lost. 35:23 And then the small blockers that were kind of like. 35:27 It's more important that everyone be able to run a node. 35:32 But it's like, you know. 35:35 Who who is out there even running a node and you don't even need a node if you have ETF Bitcoin. 35:41 The coffee purchasing bit pay type people. 35:47 Since they lost. 35:49 We in BTC, the winning small blockers. 35:52 Now, anyone who talks about like, oh, trying to get merchant adoption or or spending or transaction fee revenue for miners, that's considered like a bad thing. 36:02 You know, and then even, you know, plenty of people might consider trying to redefine it as credit or something. 36:09 And it's not it's no longer it's not even money or whatever. 36:13 Maybe it is, but I don't know. 36:15 But the point is. 36:18 Like, we have totally like transformed. 36:24 To some degree, it's healthy. 36:27 To refine your, you know, as you get product market fit or whatever. 36:31 But that's not what this is. 36:32 This is just like. 36:35 Hatred. 36:36 This is sour grapes is what it is. 36:38 It's like, oh, we couldn't have. 36:41 It's like before the idea was everyone, all this technology would be added to Bitcoin because it was all open source. 36:46 But now it's like we don't have good privacy in Bitcoin. 36:50 So you have to attack Monero as a shit coin. 36:54 You have to attack. 36:57 You know, Zcash. 36:58 And you have to say, you know what? 37:00 We never really wanted those zk-SNARKs anyway. 37:02 So that's what it is. 37:03 It's sour grapes. 37:05 And they just say, you know what? 37:06 We never wanted. 37:07 We never wanted scalability anyway. 37:09 We never wanted payments. 37:10 And it's like we just we never wanted anything. 37:12 We're just nothing now. 37:14 So we're just a popularity contest and we can see who can get. 37:19 Can we get someone else to buy? 37:21 Can we get El Salvador to buy or whatever? 37:25 So can we get someone else to buy and validate our. 37:29 Validate our cult. 37:31 And, yeah, I mean, I would rather have people like Roger Veer, Eric Voorhees, Peter Thiel, who bought a bunch of Bitcoin and sold. 37:41 Because he thought it wasn't private enough. 37:45 So I would rather have them than, you know, Michael Saylor. 37:51 OK, so what will a Zcash world look like? 37:55 Like we talked enough about the problems with Bitcoin. 37:59 Like even people that are hardcore like Maxis have problems with Bitcoin right now. 38:06 That's why I like this fork is so timely. 38:10 Because, again, no one's happy in Bitcoin, really. 38:13 It's like there's no parties happy. 38:16 The core devs have an idea of how to scale it. 38:19 There's another group that's completely against their idea, whatever. 38:23 We understand that culture very well. 38:27 We've talked about it enough. 38:29 How does an Zcash world look like? 38:32 How is it different? 38:35 Well, first of all, we have these L2s that all compete with each other. 38:39 So you probably get much better experience as a user because you have all the developers competing. 38:46 And that means that if any developer makes a mistake, they may lose market share, so to speak. 38:53 When I say market share, I mean there's only 21 million coins total and they can flow among the different L2s. 38:59 So if one is really useful and is really working hard to meet the user's needs, then it will do well. 39:06 You also have all these people who do these. 39:08 A lot of the people who have created an altcoin, they tried to do their idea on Bitcoin first, but they just couldn't for whatever reason. 39:18 So this is certainly true of Vitalik, who was a creator of Bitcoin Magazine originally. 39:24 Certainly true of the large blockers. 39:28 Certainly true of Namecoin. 39:31 Certainly true of David Vorek's project. 39:34 So now all those people could launch L2s as L2s on this. 39:40 I think they probably would because one of the things that a great developer wants is recognition for how impressive their idea is, the hack value of the idea. 39:49 And when you launch as an altcoin, everyone will just assume that you're doing it for the money. 39:55 But if you launch as a sidechain L2, you can't earn money doing that. 40:00 So actually it must be because you think the tech is better. 40:04 So if you're in it for the tech, that will help you. 40:07 I think the greater competition among L2s also keeps the L1 in check somewhat because it takes some of the heat off and the drama off L1. 40:20 Also where it's kind of like now, since everyone's going to get all their features anyway, it's not as much of a social... 40:32 There's nothing at stake. 40:35 There's not much at stake for L1. 40:37 But L1 could also ossify for the same reason, which is that it doesn't matter if it does because you can safely escape to the L2s. 40:45 Now in this world, all the L2s are merge-mined. 40:48 So it means that the mining revenues can grow geometrically forever because you have access to unlimited block space, unlimited transaction throughput. 40:57 So even if the fees are very low, $0.10 per transaction, you could eventually have billions of transactions. 41:03 I've estimated the transaction rate of Earth as like $9 trillion transactions per year. 41:10 So even if $0.10 per transaction is $900 billion per year, this number grows geometrically over time. 41:18 So you have all that. 41:20 I think it's very hard for altcoins to exist in a world where there's a successful sidechain-enabled coin because, again, what are they going to say? 41:29 Oh, my thing has this feature. 41:31 My thing has EVM or whatever. 41:33 That's not going to be good enough. 41:35 So it kind of resets the maximalist idea. 41:39 It plants it on firmer ground. 41:42 I think also a huge problem in Bitcoin was the block size limit, was scalability, because you had these times when the price would go up enormously. 41:52 And then the blocks would get full during that time because everyone's scrambling to sell. 41:56 Everyone's scrambling to buy also. 41:58 So there's a very high transaction demand. 42:01 And then as you did that, the fees would go up, $1, $3, $5, $15, maybe $20. 42:08 So during these times when Bitcoin's skyrocketing, that's when I would get a bunch of text messages from old friends and whatever, friends from high school and college or whatever. 42:20 And they'd be like, hey, you're really into that Bitcoin thing. 42:22 What's the deal with that? 42:24 And then I'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll send you some. 42:25 You try to send them like $25 worth of Bitcoin, but it's like getting eaten by the fee. 42:30 And it's really humiliating. 42:32 And so you have this what could have been a chain reaction of an atomic explosion of adoption. 42:38 But every single time it hits the block size limit, it stops because the block size limit is just too embarrassing. 42:47 So we wouldn't have that issue. 42:49 I would try to address the idea of like, you know, people show up and there's all these cryptocurrencies and it's baffling to people. 42:56 That's why they use the phrase crypto, because there's just too many. 42:59 They just say, OK. 43:01 But with this, you would really be able to say. 43:05 You know, you don't you don't need to keep researching all these different coins because thanks to the sidechain technology, there's no difference between. 43:14 Yeah. 43:16 And then I think also, you know, I'd really try to address a lot of some of the stuff that I've also been working on in addition to scalability and privacy. 43:24 Trying to add like, you know, prediction markets to as like an L2 and like identity and other like cool things on that where these would be services that people actually use. 43:37 So people would get an idea that all the. 43:41 You know, the blockchain actually does something important. 43:45 So the network does something and. 43:49 You wouldn't really have to try to get rid of this idea that this is all just. 43:53 You know, like a waste of time and it doesn't do anything useful. 43:55 But but, you know, when you have people logging in, you know, via the blockchain or when you have pretty uncensorable prediction markets on the blockchain, I think that. 44:05 Is a huge opportunity to. 44:07 So I also think that probably my own ideas are just the tip of the iceberg because these are just ideas that I have had. 44:15 And I'm just one person. 44:17 And in any other context, like if someone else had an idea for a cool blockchain thing. 44:25 Like it's hard to know what they would even do, like what would they even do? 44:30 And so the idea would never see the light of day because they can't bring it to Bitcoin. 44:33 They probably can't. 44:35 They launch as an altcoin. 44:36 I'm never going to hear about it because there's too many altcoins. 44:39 Yeah. 44:40 So I think there's probably a lot more ideas out there. 44:42 Oh, yeah, definitely. 44:44 And so, like, just to reiterate this for everyone watching, it's the same 21 million eCash that can move from sidechain to sidechain. 44:54 So it's like I like the analogy you use of the party. 44:58 If you want to explain it in that way, I think that would be good for people. 45:02 It really helped me understand it. 45:04 Well, yeah, when I talk about the party, that was in the context of criticizing Bitcoin Cash, I think, about in a party, most people want to be in whatever room the other people are in. 45:18 And even if it gets kind of cramped in there or if there's like not enough food or whatever, there's something unpleasant about that area. 45:27 You know, you really can't throw in many parties. 45:30 You really can't. 45:31 It's very sometimes you can get up and you can say, everyone, let's all go to this other room. 45:37 But usually you can't. 45:39 And usually the party just has organically it has certain rooms that for whatever reason, these become the rooms that people end up talking in. 45:50 And then it changes depending on how many people are at the party to some extent. 45:54 But yeah, I was doing this to mention how difficult it is to coordinate the switch from one room to the next, even under best case scenario. 46:06 No, I was referring to the analogy you give in regards to sidechains. 46:10 That sidechain is like a party. 46:12 Everyone congregates in the layer one room and they can easily switch from sidechain to sidechain, from room to room of this house. 46:21 Yeah, the sidechain is supposed to make it easier by making it easier to switch because first of all, you don't have the risk of loss. 46:28 So it's not like in an altcoin you might lose all of your money. 46:31 The exchange rate may change or you may lose some of your money. 46:35 But also the possibility that you might gain money, that's also not great because that invites all of the pump people who distract everything. 46:46 And so it's hard to get reliable information from the different competing altcoins because they all say this is the coolest altcoin in the whole world. 46:57 And so since it's a one-to-one peg, you risk less by going over there. 47:05 And since they can't pump one, they cannot pump the sidechain world without also pumping the L1 coin and all the other altcoins because it's the same 21 million coins. 47:18 That means that the ideas they add, they have to actually be good for pumping the whole system. 47:23 So they all have to cooperate. 47:25 And so the idea is as long as it's easier for you to leave and go to a different L2, as long as it's easier for people to start a brand new L2, this increases – it lowers the cost of doing so and it increases the level of competition that the developers themselves face. 47:48 And that keeps the developers more honest. 47:51 Right on, right on. 47:53 So I'm going to ask you a question. 47:56 I think it's a little controversial. 47:58 It's in regards to Satoshi Coins. 48:01 So I read on your website that you are going to be selling the Satoshi Coins. 48:07 Please explain what's going on here or some of the Satoshi Coins. 48:12 What's going on? 48:14 Yeah, this is bound to be controversial. 48:16 But I think it's a smart idea because what you have to keep in mind is that we have a completely free way of doing the project now, which doesn't involve any coins. 48:31 That's BIP300. 48:33 So if you just want to just activate BIP300, you can. 48:36 So you give this technology to Bitcoin already. 48:38 Yeah, but that's the problem is they're not taking it. 48:40 And it's not because it's not a good idea. 48:42 But I mean, that's the other thing I would bring up. 48:45 Either you think this is a good idea, you think BIP300 is a good idea, or you think it's not. 48:51 And you think everything that I've been saying is really, really useful or it's not. 48:55 If you think everything I've been saying is a bad idea, then just whatever. 49:00 I'm just going to hard fork. 49:01 There's going to be another bad idea altcoin out there. 49:03 You can take it and just sell it for more BTC. 49:07 So you're welcome for that. 49:08 So this is still good for you, even if this is the worst idea in the world. 49:13 But if you think this is a good idea, then you have to ask yourself, why is it not coming to BTC? 49:18 Especially because it involves less overall hassle for developers and potentially much more mining revenue for miners. 49:29 And yeah, I don't know exactly why it's not. 49:33 If anyone can figure it out, they can maybe let me know. 49:35 But I think what we have to keep in mind is that pulling off a successful hard fork is going to be very difficult and it will involve a lot of effort. 49:48 I think it's much better to put more effort before the time of the fork, so aka now. 49:54 But if you do the exact pure hard fork, then everyone can kind of free ride. 50:00 And you're in a situation where you cannot disproportionately reward anyone or motivate any behavior or do anything before the fork, because the fork point everyone gets one-to-one coins equally. 50:10 But I think that's not a good system. We want to mix in a little bit of the selfish angle of dolled coins. Not too much, only a tiny, tiny, tiny bit, but we want to mix in just a little bit. 50:24 Because that gives people an incentive to create a good hard fork in the first place. So I kind of just split the difference. 50:33 And it's well known that Satoshi probably has lots of coins, but he has these 1.1 million coins that he mined with a special miner that he kind of altruistically ran. 50:45 And he had it pausing every five minutes to give other people a chance to mine, and it would turn on and mine to keep the network kind of running at a certain rate. 50:54 And so he had this altruistically mined thing, and so Sergio Damon Lerner identified this pattern. 51:02 And it's not to say that he doesn't deserve all those coins. Certainly he deserves all those coins. We're not taking any of his BTC. Remember, that's not even possible. 51:13 So this is just the hard fork spinoff altcoin, or if you call it hard fork, saving Bitcoin. 51:20 But if I'm right, then – and I could easily be wrong about everything that I'm saying – but if I'm right, then eCash will surpass BTC, and it will slowly obliterate all the fiat currencies. 51:33 So it would be worth much more than $150,000 per coin, if I'm right, which I have to stress again, which I may not be. 51:43 But that would cause Satoshi's net worth to go up from here, because right now he would have 1.1 million coins at $75,000 a coin. 51:52 But if the price more than doubles – if the eCash price ends up more than double that – and all that will mean is that I was right about how vulnerable BTC was to replacement by a superior candidate. 52:04 So we actually kind of bailed him out in my opinion. But yeah, I'm sure that a lot of people will see this as very controversial. 52:12 It's a very hard thing to get – again, knee-jerk, it sounds very bad. But if you go for a walk and think about it, you have to say, well, what are the alternatives? 52:23 Like one alternative is to just do hard fork and then try to install some capitalism afterwards. 52:35 At this point, though, the clock is already running. So I can talk more about that possibility. 52:40 But then the other possibilities are like have 22 million coins and give a million to – or try to figure out what the mining algorithm will be in it first and then get some ASICs and then not announce it and then try to mine a lot of coins. 52:53 So either you have to take the point of view that no labor should be done to enrich the hard fork before it happens, in which case it's going to be under-provisioned. 53:09 Or you have to say, well, okay, we want to do something before. But if you say we're going to altruistically do it, then again, you won't get as much as if instead you would use capitalism and you'd said people who do more work will get more of a benefit. 53:25 And yeah, these are coins we are selling at a very low rate to people to give them skin in the game so that they're allies of the fork when it happens so that we can hit the ground running and have a really good debut. 53:39 That's the real announcement, the real debut of the fork. 53:42 How do you plan on educating people about sidechains with eCash, Drivechains with eCash and how they're beneficial? How do you plan on educating them for them to see the value in this the way that you see it now, not three years down the line, but now as this fork is upon us in August? 54:08 Well, you can download our software and it will have fake test coins on it. But I think that would give people a much clearer idea, even though that only shows us where we are now and it's not going to show the full vision of where things could be in three years, especially when other people get involved. 54:29 But even when I was learning about Bitcoin, it wasn't until I downloaded the software that I really understood more about how it worked. And so I think that is by far something that would increase people's understanding. 54:48 From very, very low to very high, very quickly. And they would see the true scope of how different my vision is versus Bitcoin Core. 54:59 And then keep in mind, if you download our software, which is LayerTwoLabs.com. If you download that software, it uses an unmodified version of Bitcoin Core as the engine. 55:10 So that's like the ossified core. We're going to change a single line of code in Bitcoin Core for the Cygnet test network. Obviously, we will on purpose to cause the fork and to decrease the block size and stuff like that. 55:26 But the test network software just downloads Bitcoin Core and then that's what it uses to find blocks and things. So that's how it knows what block height it is. 55:41 So again, these are fake coins. So you would see this is what's possible just with Bitcoin Core. It's unmodified. But it takes more than just an opcode. It takes just a total revolution in expectations. 55:56 And so I don't think we're likely to get that on BTC because everyone's been trained to just… Well, I don't really know. I don't really know why it's so bad. But you have your idea about Epstein Cabal. I'm more open-minded to that now. I don't know. I'm not a big conspiracy guy. 56:14 It's in the Epstein files. They're more than welcome to challenge the Epstein files. They're in the Epstein files. It's not me. It's in the Epstein files. I ain't saying shit. It's in the Epstein emails. Read them for yourself. He funded. 56:34 I mean you might be right as far as I know. I'm the one who doesn't have an answer. I have no idea why. Because to me it is like the whole community is just committing suicide for no reason. 56:44 We can out-compete them with peer-to-peer on-chain technology. But the way to out-compete them is by being united as an industry under a network where we respect each other's differences and yet we all have the ability to innovate in any way we can. 57:05 To be honest, to my audience, the solution that best brings all of these energies and transmutates this energy of death that we find in Bitcoin into life is this project with Paul Sztorc right here. 57:18 It inverts ossification into innovation and it's the bringing together of all altcoin innovation and all of the Bitcoin BTC energy transmutated into an environment where everyone has choice and choice is freedom. 57:42 And that is the motto that I want to leave in this conversation today that you're promoting choice in the Bitcoin ecosystem now known as eCash and that is the path forward for freedom. And that's why I champion what you're doing, Paul. Thank you for what you're doing. 58:01 Well, thank you. Some people really understand the whole totality of it and other people only understand 75% of it. They get hung up on one part of it. But you really do get it and this is what this is about. This is a conversation about the future. 58:17 So I think you're very modest in the way you present yourself and I think that's a lot. I think if anyone's going to fork Bitcoin, the best person is you because of the way you are. 58:26 But I really do think that this project is extremely important and valuable to all of us. There's nothing like it in crypto history. There probably will never be anything like this ever again because you'll never be able to copy this, guys. 58:45 Get this in your mind. The first one to do this, to implement sidechains effectively on a Bitcoin SHA-256 chain like what we will have with eCash will be the network that will give the entire world options, optionality. 59:04 And I think that you're about to change the course of crypto history. 59:34 So if there's an idea that everyone thinks is bad, that sort of increases your incentive to look into it yourself because you think, well, hey, a minute, if I do this, if I look into this and a couple other smart people look into it too, we can get in early and then we can slowly turn the tables on everyone once they figure out what's going on and once they figure out how many other people are involved so we can reach new levels of viability. 59:58 You know what's interesting, Paul? Bitcoin right now is like no idea is welcome. eCash is proposing a version of Bitcoin which is all ideas are welcome. 1:00:11 Right. 1:00:12 The choice is clear, guys, and it's clear to me because to have choice is to have freedom. Thank you, Paul, for your time. 1:00:21 Thank you. 1:00:22 Really appreciate you, man. Keep up the good fight. And yeah, I'm all for it. Before we leave, Paul, where can people find out more about this project? 1:00:33 Yeah, I would go to eCash.com and I would follow me on Twitter. I'm Truthcoin, T-R-U-T-H-C-O-I-N. I've had that for a while. It's titled Prediction Market Project, which I'm also bringing to eCash. But there will be a lot of other ways of getting the news, but those are the two to focus on for now. 1:00:58 Thank you so much for your time, Paul. 1:01:00 Thank you. 1:01:02 Now we are dealing with a possible world war. Some will say we are already in a world war. My condolences and prayers go out to everyone suffering under tyranny. It really sucks. I'm really sorry. 1:01:15 But it seems as if people are starting to wake up regarding crypto more and more each day. And so it's in the description right here to read where we give our secret sauce and what we teach our subscribers because things are just that bad. You know, everyone needs this information. People need to know about sound cryptocurrencies that are actually private by default and to know how to properly use crypto.