0:00 Welcome to Drivechain, Drivechain Twitter Spaces. 0:05 I hope everyone's having a great day. 0:07 Samuel, I see you in the audience. 0:10 I loved your recent article in Bitcoin Magazine. 0:14 It was really great. 0:16 It was all about Drivechain and how Drivechain can be an amazing feature for Bitcoin. 0:26 If you'd like to come up and talk about it, you're welcome to, or you're welcome to also 0:28 just listen in the audience today. 0:33 In preparation for this Drivechain Twitter Spaces, there have been a bunch of tweets 0:40 that I shared. 0:42 Let me put those up in the nest, and then people can refer to them. 0:58 The first one, there it is. 1:04 Adam Back, he wrote just a few days ago that he is an innovation maximalist and altcoin 1:11 seniorage critic. 1:13 This is in a thread that begins with Blockstream's tweet featuring Adam Back and Paul Sztorc 1:21 talking about layer twos. 1:25 The next tweet under that Blockstream tweet was a tweet by a Zcash proponent, and Adam 1:33 then replied, innovation maximalist, altcoin seniorage critic. 1:38 I think that Dr. Back understands perfectly what Drivechain is all about, which is that 1:47 it is designed to eliminate altcoin seniorage while enabling all of the technological innovation 1:58 that altcoins have facilitated so far. 2:03 Once Drivechain is enabled, then all of that building can continue on Bitcoin in Drivechains 2:14 rather than in altcoins. 2:18 So Adam gets that very well. 2:22 So that is the first tweet for discussion today. 2:25 It's in the nest, so listeners can look up and see it right there in our Twitter Spaces. 2:33 One of Dr. Back's recent excellent tweets, he has so many, it was tough to choose, but 2:39 I selected that one for conversation. 2:44 If anybody wants to come up and talk about it, they're welcome to, or we can move on 2:48 to tweet number two. 2:50 All right, let's do it. 2:56 Tweet number two is by Fiatjaf. 3:02 And there it is. 3:04 It's now pasted in the nest. 3:07 This is Fiatjaf writing yesterday. 3:11 What Drivechain is not, it's not a tweak that weakens basic Bitcoin consensus rules. 3:19 It's not a tweak that increases the block size. 3:24 It's not a change that puts your coins at risk. 3:29 It's not a scheme that centralizes mining. 3:32 But what it is, what Drivechain is, is a way to give users the option to put their coins 3:40 under a hash rate escrow. 3:43 And that's what it's all about. 3:45 Letting people use synthetic Bitcoin on a separate blockchain that is merged mine with 3:54 Bitcoin, and when they're done, approximately 100% of their transaction fees have been paid 4:01 to Bitcoin miners, and they can get their original Bitcoin back on layer one. 4:07 So to use a word that Dr. Back likes, Drivechain is designed to increase Bitcoin's extensibility, 4:17 meaning the development and customization of technology on top of Bitcoin in a way that's 4:23 economically harmonious with Bitcoin. 4:29 I forgot to introduce myself today. 4:31 I try to always do that. 4:33 Speaking to you right now from LayerTwo Labs Twitter handle is Henry, Henry Magrum. 4:38 I am the lawyer at LayerTwo Labs, and I'm also the social media guy at the moment. 4:47 You know, at a startup, you got to wear multiple hats. 4:49 So this is Henry speaking, and everyone is welcome to come up if they'd like and chat. 5:00 Let's move on to tweet number three. 5:06 Tweet number three is from one of our audience members. 5:12 It is by Samuel, and he wrote, we are on the precipice of a new era, either economic freedom 5:25 or economic servitude. 5:27 Bitcoin is the only credible solution we have access to. 5:32 We must protect it at all costs. 5:34 We must succeed for the sake of our future and the futures of our children. 5:40 We need to take a closer look at BIP300. 5:44 And then he links to his article, which was really great, published yesterday by Bitcoin 5:50 Magazine titled, Why Drivechain is Our Best Chance to Secure Bitcoin into the Future. 5:57 All right. 5:59 So that's the third tweet for discussion. 6:03 Let's go on to tweet number four. 6:06 We're getting through them pretty fast. 6:09 Everyone's welcome to come up and chat if you'd like. 6:13 You can just raise your hand. 6:16 If you're having trouble coming up, give me like a thumbs up or something or a thumbs 6:20 down in the audience, and then I can invite you up if you're having any trouble 6:32 getting onto the stage. 6:35 The next tweet is from Alex Kravitz. 6:41 I've now posted it in the Nest. 6:45 He wrote, claiming Bitcoin is only for money is like demanding the Internet must only be 6:59 used for email, its original killer app, while social networks, Netflix, podcast, etc., all 7:07 work on a separate super Internet network. 7:11 That is exactly what's being argued now by pseudo-Maxis. 7:14 I agree entirely with that tweet. 7:17 What we've got is a bunch of people who think that Bitcoin should only be used for a certain 7:23 kind of money. 7:26 But you see, even if it were true that Bitcoin were only for money, there would still be 7:31 a question. 7:34 What kind of money? 7:35 Should it be very scalable? 7:36 Should it be very private? 7:39 How much decentralization should there be? 7:41 So what we need is people to understand that money is actually usually a layered system 7:49 where people can opt in to various exposures and features. 7:56 Even with gold, there was gold bars, there were gold coins. 8:00 And it wasn't like everyone just used the same size coin all the time. 8:17 And people could even like turn their gold into an artwork. 8:21 So it had that kind of malleability. 8:25 And similarly with Bitcoin, the drivechain vision is that there's like a digital gold 8:30 base layer that has high fees and high decentralization. 8:37 And then we have a layered system. 8:38 People can opt into sending some of their money into a much more flexible environment 8:44 for other kinds of experiences like more privacy, more scalability, greater expressivity. 8:52 And then if all those layers are using synthetic Bitcoin, then the whole thing is economically 8:58 aligned. 8:59 Welcome to the stage, Alex. 9:00 How's it going? 9:01 It's going good. 9:02 I just wanted to clarify something because I saw a reaction to my tweet saying that basically 9:14 drivechains enable the super internet. 9:16 But I think the metaphor breaks down here a little bit because when it comes to network 9:20 protocols, TCPIP could carry any traffic on top. 9:24 And then you have, you know, on top of IP protocol, you have TCP protocol, on top of 9:29 TCP protocol, you have HTTP, on top of HTTP, you have HTML, and so on and so forth. 9:34 But all these things ultimately are data sent across the network. 9:38 The metaphor breaks down to Bitcoin because Bitcoin can be viewed in this context as more 9:47 of a first instance of a video game around digital scarcity. 9:53 But you can create other games, other gaming protocols. 9:57 So for example, not just being able to huddle Bitcoin, but to use it as collateral, right? 10:03 That's a different game that uses the same asset. 10:08 Or to use it as a reserve for a decentralized US dollar, for example, which is what the 10:15 world really needs, right? 10:17 And you know, the biggest decentralized US dollar maximalist out there is Mr. Gensler 10:23 because he's attacking custodial stable coins now, which will simply drive people to whatever 10:31 alternatives are available, right? 10:38 Well said. 10:39 Would you like to look through the tweets that I've shared in the nest, maybe scroll 10:44 back to them? 10:46 Considering how interesting your comments were last week, I would love to hear if you 10:51 have any perspective on some of these. 10:56 Do you see them? 10:57 Do you see Adam back in the nest? 10:58 Let me see if I can find this nest UI area. 11:02 I've never seen this before, but is this a thread underneath the... 11:07 No, it's when you're in the Twitter space. 11:10 You're in the Twitter space, you look at the title, right under the title there's a tweet 11:13 and you can scroll left or right to see the other one. 11:16 Okay. 11:17 So first of all, the problem in sidechain is going to change the trade-off, more lightning 11:23 optimization. 11:24 Okay. 11:25 I see it. 11:26 Yeah, that's from a thread he put out yesterday, he put out a long thread all about Bitcoin 11:36 layer twos and the future and the price of Bitcoin. 11:40 And near the end of the thread, he got pretty interesting where he talked about future development 11:45 and he wrote this tweet where he mentions drivechains. 11:49 So I like that. 11:51 Well, I mean, Adam has a lot of prestige and deservedly so, right? 11:59 But he's not omniscient about all the ideas floating around the Bitcoin space. 12:04 Like for example, it's clear to me that he, as well as other OG technical computer science 12:11 people are still oblivious to what's happened in validity rollups world, right? 12:17 In other words, their holy grail dream of having fully trust-minimized two-way peg with 12:27 the same security guarantees as Bitcoin itself has been realized, but they're misinformed 12:33 about it or ignorant about it, I don't know what, but basically that's, you know, like 12:38 Jameson Lobb, for example, even though he links to Bitcoin rollups.org report, he actually 12:46 didn't internalize the message of the report, which is, hello, Bitcoiners, you've been dreaming 12:51 about this since, you know, 2012, 2013, when the first talk of two-way pegs and sidechains 12:58 was brought up. 12:59 And, you know, there was some messages by Greg Maxwell saying that perhaps ZK Snarks 13:04 will allow us to verify execution of the other chain and therefore to allow the transfer 13:10 of coins back from the other chain to Bitcoin, and that would essentially propagate Bitcoin's 13:15 network effect to other domains, right? 13:21 So, you know, the fact that Adam is only now waking up to how important drivechains are 13:26 is basically because a lot of, he's in the camp, I think he's in the camp of people who 13:31 are just blindsided by the monetary uses of Bitcoin and think it'll be enough to, you 13:38 know, to take over the world and get to a hundred trillion dollar market cap. 13:42 Now, they may be right in the long run, right? 13:46 But that doesn't mean that we won't have a flippening or two, or even lappening as they 13:51 call it in the Ethereum world, in other words, who in the Ethereum market cap not just exceeds 13:54 Bitcoin's market cap, but it can exceed Bitcoin market cap two or three times over. 13:59 Now, I can already tell you what the cope will be by the SOV extremists, you know, that 14:05 claim that Bitcoin is nothing but a store of value like digital gold, right? 14:10 They will say, well, you know, Ethereum is just a giant tech platform and there will be 14:15 some truth in that, right? 14:17 But declaring that Ethereum is just a giant tech platform, even though it might be true 14:23 for now, does not preclude Ethereum from ossifying and becoming a protocol that has 14:30 rules, but no rules in the future. 14:32 Right. Would you agree with would you agree with the following very simple way of putting 14:36 it, that Ethereum is kind of like a layer two without a layer one and Bitcoin is kind 14:43 of like a layer one that hasn't yet developed fully. 14:47 It's layer two. 14:49 How do you mean that Ethereum doesn't have layer one? 14:53 Well, I mean it only in the following sense that they have like a history of like 15:00 changes and forks and there's more experimentation there. 15:05 So it's kind of like they don't have like it's like they don't have a set of drive. 15:10 It's like a set of drivechains without that ossified conservative digital gold 15:15 foundation. Right. 15:16 They just chose the kind of the opposite strategy for evolution. 15:23 Right. Which is as opposed to extreme conservatism, you know, they embody the Silicon 15:28 Valley ethos of, you know, move fast and break things. 15:32 And essentially that empowers, you know, I hate that cliche word empowers, but it empowers 15:37 all these 20 something hotshot coders from around the world to come into Ethereum and 15:44 do their ICOs, do their startups, get rich, do whatever the hell they're doing. 15:48 And basically that's eventually created kind of a snowball effect of its own. 15:53 And, you know, Ethereum started out as a as kind of a delusional fantasy of Vitalik. 15:59 And then later he was backed by scammers from Canada, you know, the consensus Joe 16:02 Lubin, et cetera. But in 2017-18 bull market, it was a platform that would spawn ICO 16:11 shit coins. But in the last few years, it's a platform that's spawning other platforms. 16:17 Right. So you can no longer dismiss it as a mother of all scams. 16:22 It used to be that. 16:23 Right. But now you have things like Aave and things like Uniswap and Liquidity and you 16:29 have these protocols that have tens of billions of dollars in total locked value and 16:33 it's used by hedge funds and wealthy individuals across the world and so on and so 16:38 forth. So, you know, it's it's chosen the strategy of get fast big and then maybe 16:48 ossify later. 16:49 Right. Because, I mean, if you look at Vitalik's roadmap, the last portion of his 16:54 roadmap, which, you know, has merged at the top and then there is purge, scourge, 16:59 whatever, surge. The last one is the one where they rip out all the ugly technical 17:06 debt and do the final hard fork to simplify Ethereum, which presumably stabilizes the 17:13 bottom layer. So, yeah, I agree with your with your idea. 17:17 Yeah, I appreciate that collaboration of it. 17:20 Another person who has a view that Ethereum and Bitcoin are argue or are in some sense 17:28 converging on the same target is Lynn Alden, at least in my interpretation of her 17:34 statements, where she talked about how Bitcoin's changes over the years have been to 17:42 increase the block size with to increase scalability and that Ethereum has been trying 17:52 to come from the other direction toward like trying to harden with, for example, the fee 17:58 burning. So they're trying to approach that monetary that monetary quality of a feature 18:08 set and attributes for their protocol, whereas Bitcoin is trying to expand in the 18:13 direction of drivechain to expand in the direction of flexibility and extensibility. 18:18 So they're they're both these two projects are coming towards the same end goal, but they 18:22 have different they have different strengths like Ethereum, as you say, has that like that 18:27 economy of applications, but it lacks that layer that they want to get at the very end. 18:31 Yeah. And, you know, I wouldn't say that. 18:34 Let's say that, you know, around 2030, after all the hard forks, Ethereum does come to their 18:39 senses and they do decide to ossify. 18:41 I think that doesn't necessarily mean that they will be trusted as as money, right, because 18:48 they will need to develop a multi-year history of remaining unchanged. 18:53 This is something that Bitcoin has developed by now. 18:56 So basically, it's not enough to have rules with no rulers. 19:01 You also need a history of those rules not changing in a backwards and compatible way, 19:06 which Bitcoin has, although, you know, some might argue that SegWit was an evil force 19:11 that, you know, smuggled in rule changes despite. 19:15 So there was no option not to upgrade to SegWit, for example. 19:17 But, you know, these technicalities are lost on the masses anyways. 19:20 So, you know, Ethereum will not be credible as a reserve asset, but it doesn't need to be a 19:27 reserve asset because it has an income stream, right? 19:29 It has, you know, in the bear market these days, it has five million dollars in fees paid 19:34 per day. And, you know, God knows what the fee rate will be in the next bull market. 19:37 It might average a hundred million dollars a day. 19:40 And these fees are paid willingly by willing participants to do things that no other system 19:47 in the world allows them to do, like to get zero percent, you know, USD loans on their 19:54 ETH collateral using liquidity, right? 19:56 For example, no other. 19:57 And do it all in a decentralized way where there is no risk of, you know, a bank seizure, 20:02 etc. As you know, in the early days of Bitcoin, the joke was only put the money in the bank 20:07 that you're willing to lose, right? 20:08 So here, Ethereum. 20:11 I can't quite hear you, Alex. 20:14 Could someone in the audience give like a thumbs up if you can hear him? 20:17 I could hear. Can you guys hear me? 20:20 Yeah. I just figured this out. 20:23 Nice to meet you all. Alex, I can't hear you. 20:25 Can you hear me now? Are you there? 20:26 Yeah. Henry, are you there? 20:33 Samuel, welcome to the stage. 20:36 Thanks. Would you like to speak? 20:38 Yeah, I would. 20:40 Well, thanks for your nice comments on the article. 20:44 I hope that article is useful. 20:46 Samuel, can you hear me? 20:48 Hello? Can anybody hear me? 20:51 CryptAxe can hear me. 20:55 Well, I hope that article is useful. 20:58 You know, Alex brought up this. 21:00 Yeah, I can hear you too, Samuel. 21:02 I think Henry, the problem is on your end. 21:05 Yeah, it might be. Alex brought up this idea about how Ethereum doesn't have some sort 21:10 of doesn't have credible, you know, track record of money. 21:13 And even though I agree that's true, you know, the article is sort of for the masses 21:18 and the masses may not really understand the nuance that Alex, you brought up. 21:24 I think that. 21:26 But it's not the masses that decide this. 21:28 You see, it's the institutions and the governments, right? 21:30 Like the masses are basically just sheep following their leaders. 21:34 It's basically Fidelity deciding that Bitcoin is credible while Ethereum is not 21:39 credible. And it's, you know, the government of El Salvador deciding that Bitcoin is 21:43 credible and Ethereum is not, right? 21:46 Well, sure. That's true to a sense. 21:49 But, you know, I think that it's not so clear that this is like it seems to me like it 21:55 can go either way at this point or early enough that the masses can also like these 22:00 institutions can make a mistake. 22:02 I think that Fidelity, aren't they doing Ethereum as well? 22:05 Well, they might be. But you see, the thing is, I am I am very, you know, adversarially 22:13 minded when it comes to Ethereum and in general, right? 22:15 Like this is from the 90s, sort of my cypherpunk exposure in the 90s. 22:20 But I'm telling you that Ethereum is actually like Google stock or actually Google is 22:25 now gone. So what is Apple stock, right? 22:27 So it's basically like a security that has an income stream. 22:31 And a lot of people will want to own that the same way as a lot of people want to own 22:35 Apple shares. Right now, because the income that's being accrued to each shares, you 22:41 know, through burning and new issuance and, you know, the fees, that income is 22:47 essentially floating the value of Ethereum. 22:51 And, you know, Ethereum will have this whole, you know, ecosystem of layer twos, right? 22:56 If you go.
