Okay, here it goes. Okay, it's on. Okay, welcome.

So, you know, I usually do

videos on crazy stuff,

so now I'm going to talk to a sane person to get

information from him.

And this is going to be about

Paul Sztorc's

invention, Drivechains, and I pronounced that correctly, right? Yes.

Okay.

So, I'm still learning about Truthcoin. I'm still, I'm not caught up.

So, I basically know nothing about Drivechains. So, why don't you just start telling me

what is the point? Like, what are they for? Yeah, okay, that's great. So,

Blockstream had this, so I originally had this prediction markets project, which I'm still working on, but

progress on that outstripped.

That project was supposed to be a Bitcoin sidechain, but progress on

sidechains was a lot slower than progress on the prediction markets project. So, my project, I know, you know,

it's software's never finished, but I got my project to kind of a pretty good

state, like kind of a Bitcoin alpha 0.1

state, and then I looked around and then there was no sidechain technology.

So, I had to like go back and go down the stack, so to speak, and I was waiting for

other people to do the sidechain technology, but they really didn't. And so, I looked at

Blockstream white paper, and I'm pretty sure that almost no one has read that paper because it's very, a lot of people have glanced at

it, I think, but it's a very

dense paper. There's a lot in it, and it's hard to read. And then, so I kind of read it, and I thought about it,

and I thought about what it was really trying to do, and

I thought you could do something very similar that was a little simpler, because it's in the sort of game theoretic sense,

they're assuming, there's this idea of the SPV proof, which basically,

to gloss over a lot of things, just says that in the long run, you can trust the miners to be mining

the chain that's in their self-interest. So, that's glossing over a lot of stuff,

but I thought if you're gonna assume 51% of the miners are

on your side, then you can do a much simpler thing than what they were doing,

and so I turned my attention to that. And so, what Drivechain is supposed to be is

a kind of very simple incarnation of

sidechain. So, it's supposed to let you have all the freedom of

altcoins,

but you're still using the same 21 million bitcoins, and so that's sort of the goal.

There's other things, but that's basically the point, that's how the project came to be, and I published it in November 2015,

and you know, you get an ongoing review,

so

it's been iterating and responding to feedback, and then of course, in the process of building it,

you encounter all kinds of new questions that you have to solve.

So, I eventually presented it at ScaleMilan, or part of my strategy, I presented a strategy at ScaleMilan, which is that

we should have one chain be very decentralized, and have a very small block size, and be very

locked down, and very secure, and kind of you could run it over Tor, and all kinds of

very, very, very secure. It's kind of like a Mott & Bailey defense, you know, like

you've got this one thing that's like the castle, and you hide in there,

but then you've got this other thing that's, you've got these other chains, and some of them would be maybe,

you know, like a meadow, or like a really nice farmland, and you hang out there, because it's nicer,

but then if something bad happens, everyone just retreats to the castle,

and so the bad stuff goes away, and then when they leave, you go back out to where you wanted to be the whole time,

and so that's what I presented at ScaleMilan, and then I

wanted to, I got a little bit more feedback about that, so I invented this other thing called Blind Merged Mining,

which is a much, dry chain that relies on this weird kind of shaky assumption, but Blind Merged Mining is, I think, a pretty cool

piece of technology that just

doesn't really rely on weird assumptions, just very, very, very safe ones, and that allows, so like Namecoin, as you probably know,

it's merge mined with Bitcoin, such that it can absorb

hash rate from

Bitcoin without

it doesn't need its own miners, so it can just use Bitcoin, piggyback on Bitcoin's miners, and in fact, a very funny thing happened over the last week, which is that

Namecoin was absorbing hash rate from

Bitcoin Core, as well as Bitcoin Cash, and it ended up having more hash rate than either of them alone,

so that was a very funny thing that happened with Namecoin, but

Oh, wow, that is, that is great.

That is very funny.

It's one of the funniest things to have ever happened, I think, in Bitcoin, and so I hope other people got a laugh out of it.

Certainly, it's also funny because the hash rate is skyrocketing constantly,

so each, all the modern blocks

have such a tremendous amount of

proof of work that, if that, that doesn't need to hold up for a very long time, I haven't exactly done the math, but

Namecoin could have not only the most hash rate, but it could have the most

cumulative difficulty, because it only takes a few modern blocks that are 20 or 30 percent

more difficult to just kind of totally eclipse everything that was done in

2011, 2012, etc. So,

it could become the heaviest valid chain, which is very funny, but regular merge mining has two problems. One is that the miners have to run

software, they have to run the Namecoin software to assemble a valid block,

they build a Namecoin block that kind of, I'm glossing over the details, but they build a Namecoin block that kind of looks like

it's inside of a Bitcoin block, and then when they mine the Bitcoin block, they can mine both.

But in order to do that, they have to run the Namecoin software, and the Namecoin software is sometimes buggy, and it crashes, and then

if the miners lose uptime,

that's,

you know, that's a lot of work, but

it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a lot of

fun, that's

hits their bottom line directly, which used to happen a lot, because Namecoin was just more buggy than Bitcoin.

And also, it's funny, I've heard that from multiple reliable sources, that if the mining equipment

shuts down, there's so much power flowing

everywhere, that a lot of the hardware will just start to explode, if it's off, and it's not mining Bitcoins.

So, the energy is just, the energy gradient is just, will just build up, so they don't want this stuff to crash.

So, that's why, even though mining Namecoin is free, a lot of people would,

only, you only got like 60%

of the hash rate to merge mine Namecoin, because even though it's free revenue, it wasn't really free, because there's this buggy software.

Okay, so let's talk about what you just said, in terms of how

Drivechains are going to make it easier.

Yeah, so Blind Merged Mining, you don't, you can merge mine the

sidechain, without actually running

the software. So, what happens is, other people, the nodes over there, run the software, and I have an assumption that some of those people

who are running those nodes, also own regular Bitcoin,

which is a very safe assumption, because this model here is very asymmetric.

So, it's very much like a hierarchy, with Bitcoin core as the root, or whatever is the, you know,

there's a main chain, and that one is kind of the base layer, and then there's sidechains off of that.

But there's kind of a, there's an asymmetry.

So, there's like a hierarchy, where the one is sort of more important,

the Bitcoin core in this example. So,

what is, so what I assume, is that someone who's running Namecoin

node, also owns some

Bitcoin on Bitcoin core, and what I basically do, is I have them pay, they do a special transaction, where they say,

I'll pay the miner,

this amount, if they merge mine this Namecoin block.

And so, they, the person assembles the Namecoin block, and pays the Namecoin's

sidechain Bitcoin, they pay themselves those transaction fees,

and then they're all bidding competitively.

Any of the nodes who are interested in doing this,

will bid competitively, as long as there's more than two, which obviously there would be, because it's a blockchain

network. So, if there's only one, that's kind of pointless, but

you would, if, as long as there's a few, they would have this competitive bidding, and then

the, so the main chain Bitcoin miners would still get the transaction fees,

they, but they don't have to do like any of the work. So, it's, it was a,

because some people complain that, like you have like a, some kind of like YouTube sidechain, like an ESPN,

4k, super broadcasting sidechain, that's like really, really difficult, has high bandwidth requirements, so like

privacy implications, and they didn't want it to be a case where only large miners

could merge mine those.

So, the benefit of this is that the miners don't have to touch any of the software at all. They can just be passively receiving money.

So, the sidechain nodes can pay themselves epsilon, you see, like if there's 17 Bitcoin worth of transaction fees,

they can pay themselves 17, and then they can try to bid like 6.8, 6.9,

to try and get, they can try and get a little bit, but of course, the bulk of it will just go to the miners

anyway, and they don't have to worry about,

and so that part I think is kind of cool.

But yeah, the point of Drivechain is that you send, you're playing with Bitcoin, it's not, it's no longer Namecoin,

it's actual Bitcoin,

over on the other chain, you do whatever you want with it over there, and then you bring it back.

But yeah, the second benefit of Blind Merged Mining is that the miners get paid,

they don't get paid on the sidechain, they get paid immediately with the main chain.

Bitcoin that they know and love, so it's a little bit, it's a lot better, I think.

Oh, yeah, that is better.

I remember once I had this conversation with

with

Paul Snow,

and I was saying, I was telling him that like you don't, you shouldn't need to create a whole new investment product,

if you just want to

try to, you want to program new rules, and he's like, well, how are you going to pay the miners? And I was like, well, why,

why would they want to be paid in a

a

worse investment product anyway? They should be paid in Bitcoin, but

yeah, so now we can do that.

Right, so that's the goal of that part. At least that's what we will be able to do if you make this thing.

Yeah, well, yeah, so it's, we have a lot of,

there's a, you can go to drivechain.info, and we have a GitHub, and we've done a lot, but there will,

and there just will need to be a lot of

kind of review by other people, because

there's only so much that

me and this other guy, Patrick, we have been working on it, but there is only, you know,

you can only bring it to a certain point yourself,

and then you'll always be like blind to, you have the unknown unknowns, right? So, yeah, other people will have to

put in a little effort, I think, at this, at this point, but it's mostly finished, and in fact, I'm considering asking

Luke Dashjr. for the, to assign the BIP numbers, because it's basically,

we brought it as far as

I think

we could efficiently bring it, so that,

so we've got, we made it pretty far on both Drivechain and blind bridge mining, so I think that it's going to need, it's basically,

I don't want to say finished, because nothing is ever finished in the world of software, but it's like, it's pretty good.

There are just a bunch of issues,

if people want to go and help with the issues,

but this, the design is sort of stable, and the documentation is stable, so that's kind of neat.

What, what is the, the GitHub again?

Oh, I don't even, I think it's Drivechain-project, but if you go to drivechain.info, there's a little GitHub

icon in the sidebar, if you have a desktop, or if you have mobile, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom,

and you get the sidebar, and you just click it. I can actually, I know what it is right over here.

Yeah, it is called, yeah, it's github.com slash Drivechain-project.

You should be able to find it.

Okay, so,

so what is, so you, you said that there is an assumption.

Yes, there's a weird assumption. Yes. Okay, so here's the thing, is if, the way this works is,

there's only one way that it can work, because

if you, the goal is to get

a bunch of rules validated,

but without actually

validating them, because

you want

to create a new set of software rules, you know, have like a new blockchain, so to speak,

and, but you don't want to have Bitcoin Core do the work, so that's the, that's kind of this, this

paradox that you're stuck with, if you want to do a sidechains-like thing, right?

You want to let people go into a different zone,

where they

have new rules,

so maybe it's a larger block size, it could be, it could be anything,

but then when the payments come back, if there's some kind of dispute over, oh, that's not who owns that coin,

does, does A own it, or does B own it, then you have to have some way of resolving the dispute, so,

so that's the paradox, is that you don't, you don't, you can't actually check who, who owns it, A or B,

but you need to check something,

and so it's kind of an unalterable, you know,

this is kind of just a paradox, but it's a trade-off like anything else, so what I do is, I say,

I make it so that the sidechain has to report on exactly what it's doing,

at all times, and then when it wants

to transfer money out of the sidechain back to the mainchain, it has to do this very, very, very slowly,

and the reason that this is not inconvenient is because, meanwhile, people can do these atomic swaps back and forth,

so I don't think anyone would actually use this, it would be like an industrial

process, and it's possible that only the miners would actually do this, but

the, the point is this, when you want to send, so when you want to send money to the sidechain, from the mainchain to the

sidechain, it's very simple, because I assume that the sidechain is watching the mainchain,

and I obviously assume that the mainchain is working correctly, so that part is easy,

so going like, so there's only like one leg of the problem that is really hard, which is

having the money come back,

you know, you send the money into Factum sidechain, and then you do something with it, and then

you want to send the money back. Now, Bitcoin Core can't check the rules of the sidechain, because this breaks the,

this breaks the goal, the goal is to not, to avoid doing all that,

and just let other people do whatever they want, and not have it affect Bitcoin Core,

but at the same time, you want some guarantee, somehow, that this money is going to end up in the right place,

and so what I do is, I say all the

transactions coming back from a sidechain,

they're all batched up,

into one

transaction, and then that transaction is, you know, has an ID, it's hashed, and it's sort of frozen in place,

and then everyone gets to examine it for a very long period of time, and I suggest, this is a configurable parameter,

but I suggest like one month of it just sitting there, and then it's slowly act,

acknowledged or non-acknowledged, it's sort of like miners, like upvote it or downvote it, once per block,

and if it achieves enough upvotes

over another length of time, which I think should be like two months,

then the payment goes through in Bitcoin Core, and the sidechain's watching, so the sidechain knows

when Bitcoin Core is sending money to it, so then it can just credit people,

and it knows when the side domain withdrawal transfers, it knows when those have succeeded,

so then it knows to just destroy that money, to stop blocking it, and just destroy it,

it's because it got successfully transferred out,

so the, basically, to put a bottom line on it, the threat is that

miners can,

if you have these

things, let's say you have a Bitcoin Core, and then you have like a large block sidechain,

which is like something that people are interested in these days,

so you have this sidechain that has, it doesn't matter, a 20 megabyte block size or something,

and there's a total of

2,000 bitcoins over there, or whatever, whatever the case may be,

this is like, we have about, I don't, I looked it up, but I can't remember, we have about

four and a half million, or five million,

or four, I think four and a half million bitcoins that have not been mined,

and so there's 16 million on Bitcoin Core, so there would be some on other, these other chains,

and the threat is that

miners would

create a transaction that pays all of the sidechain's money to themselves, and then they would broadcast it,

and then we would wait a month, and then they would all acknowledge it to themselves,

and then the withdrawal would go through, and they would get on the main chain, they would open the sidechain

account, and give themselves all of the money, so that's the threat,

and the only way I found to kind of defend against it

is to make sure that it's very

obvious in advance, and that it's very slow, and that it's very easy to check,

so it'd be very easy to check the attack, because the sidechain broadcasts what it's supposed to be,

what's supposed to be being withdrawn, as just a little hash,

and then

on mainchain Bitcoin, you can see what's being withdrawn, and that's a little hash, and you can just see if they match or not,

and of course, they're uniform numbers, and they're only

32 bytes long, or whatever, so they're very easy for a human being to see immediately that

the rules are not being followed, the kind of meta rules,

and it's very easy for miners to comply with the rules, because they themselves can check, because it's just a little hash,

and it's also very easy for miners to kind of pull this alarm and just say,

we're going to unacknowledge everything,

and they can downvote everything until they figure out what's going on, and just kind of slow the process down,

and say like, we don't know what's going on, but we'll figure it out later,

because something is up,

and so that is kind of all the stuff that I threw in the way,

but yeah, this is the major kind of empirical question.

I think if this doesn't work, though, I think nothing will work, because

I don't really see how it can get much better than this, like I guess you could

ramp the parameters up a lot, and you could say it's got to wait for two months,

and then it takes an entire year to be withdrawn,

and you can kind of hope that that doesn't matter, because again, people can already do these atomic swaps among the

two different chains, and you just, what you want is for people to do them at an exchange rate

that's very close to one, so that it's effectively the same

token, and then you want to do this basic accounting, which is very easy to do,

to make sure there's never any more than 21

bitcoins that

aren't permanently locked somewhere.

So a lot of that's easy, but yeah, I think if this doesn't work, then nothing will work, which would be kind of a shame,

but basically the security model is that

what would be implied if miners steal from the sidechain is that they have to do this

intentionally and kind of obviously, so what it would imply is that

the

price of bitcoin should go down, I think, so if the sidechain is popular, and if people like it,

then, and you know, they're losing all the, the sidechain is going to provide its own transaction fees, first of all,

but second of all, it's going to provide more utility for bitcoin, so

it

should be increasing the value of bitcoin, and so destroying it

should decrease the value of bitcoin, and it should also kind of put an end to the entire sidechain experiment, because they can say, well,

they're going to attack this one sidechain,

so they're probably going to attack them all, which means we can't have any now, and we can never have any in the future,

so that's kind of the, the, the consequence, or the, the threat, or the kind of the equilibrium,

the equilibrating force, is that

the idea is that if they were, if miners were to attack

a sidechain,

it would take a long time,

there's a lot of ways for it not working, and if it, even if it does work,

it should just harm the miners' bottom line, because investors should just

say, well, I guess we're stuck with only one chain, and only one development team

forever, instead of having, you know, kind of like freedom and permissionless innovation,

so

that is kind of the model. The other thing is, of course, I mean, I don't want to rely on this, but the other thing is

people might,

like, if they're,

once you're, maybe you're, this is a three-month thing, as I've been saying,

so if you're, like, two months into those three months, and it looks like the miners really are going to steal,

people could just hard code,

that's part of the reasons we're making it so slow, is that people might just say,

well, we're going to do the user-activated soft fork type thing, and we're just going to say,

we are not going to let this transaction in the block, and, you know, and then, you know, there's other things, too, like

if the miners really misbehave, then

people, you know, there's always the threat of the proof-of-work change and other things, so I, my personal opinion is that the miners are more

docile, and other people don't have that opinion, but I think they're just normal people trying to make a

living,

and I think that sidechains will increase the value of

Bitcoin, and then eventually it'll reach a point where

mining can only stay profitable if they never attack any sidechain, with the exception of, like, weird side,

it is, I think it is possible to build, like, weird sidechains that try to harass

other chains, like a chain that only pays you if you, like,

fork a chain or something like that, and so I want miners to attack those and just, and clean them out,

in fact, I have a giant presentation on this that I called sidechain privatization,

which is sort of like, I want miners to kind of, like, own and curate the portfolio

of sidechains, just so that no one ever bothers. See, what I don't like, I really don't like,

kind of, the Ethereum idea that you can just run whatever you want, and they can't stop you,

because I think that you will end up with some guy coding in secret some weird thing,

and he'll code it, and then he'll put it out, and then they won't, it'll be like cat and mouse,

you won't be able to stop it, or something like that, so I want this thing that I call categorical control,

and I want the miners to be able to say, this category of smart contract

we don't like, and we're getting rid of it, we're filtering it out.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I'm kind of,

I kind of think it's silly how paranoid people can be about the miners, too, because, you know, the miners are sort of,

they are subject to forces that are beyond their control, which is

the value of Bitcoin,

and if they try to

act maliciously,

they harm the value of Bitcoin,

and, you know, that harms the value of their equipment,

so I think that there's some pretty strong constraints that

will tend to keep them honest, so everything you said sounds reasonable to me.

Right, and so that's really all the bad news, the good news is that you can do now, the good news is pretty good,

I think, so I think,

even if you're a very pessimistic person,

the good news is that you can now just create whatever weird

experiment you want, so you can do, you can do like an Ethereum sidechain, although I don't think it will, it's a good idea, but

you can do that, you can do a weird proof of stake,

if you're not, if you don't want to do the Blind Merged Mining part, the first part,

Drivechain, the hashrate escrows, you can do like whatever weird stuff you want, proof of elapsed time,

you can do all this weird hyperledger stuff, you can do like an R3 thing,

you can do like whatever weird stuff you want, you can put Bitcoin into this account that is only

withdrawable if, after a very, very slow time, and so you have basically totally arbitrary

control over what kind of weird chain you want, you can make all the mistakes that you want with all the

terrible developer talent that you want, right, and so like what's better than that, this is, so it totally turns the

the tables, I think, on the entire way that we do things in Bitcoin right now, which is that, right now we have a kind of,

we have like a kind of, I'm not really sure what to call it, it's like a USSR Ministry of Science or something,

we have it all like going through, like a hegemony, yeah, we have a, yeah, we have exactly, we have like a hegemony, and

yeah, I love mistakes, this is kind of like a common theme in arguments that I have with people, is that

you know, they, well, there's just a lot of concern trolling that goes around in Bitcoin, and I always say, so, just, you know, just do it and see what happens.

Yeah, there's, I think, I've noticed, haven't you noticed, I'm sure you have, there's like a very much like an anti-Hayek kind of streak running through the entire philosophy of Bitcoin right now, which is very funny, because Hayek was all about just like, just try whatever, something will fix it somehow, the anti-fragility, you know, and so I think, you know, there's a lot of concern trolling that goes around in Bitcoin, and I always say, so, just, you know, just do it and see what happens.

Yeah.

So, but I have another point about the miners, which is that I think I've noticed a kind

of, I've noticed a kind of separation in philosophies that, and some of them cover different aspects

of Bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin is a really big complicated thing.

And I think there is like a kind of difference between like a cryptographer point of view

and then there's like a economics game theorists point of view.

And there's kind of, it's basically about how much they value independence.

And the cryptographers, I think they want total independence in a strict like science

statistical sense.

Like they want to build a safe that cannot be opened unless you have the password.

Even if you have a computer the size of the sun or whatever other weird stuff, right?

They want to say that this is totally ironclad, like there's an absolutely nothing anyone

can do.

It's completely unbreakable encryption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the, the other extreme is that you kind of, it's sort of more of the economics thing

where it's like, well, I'm going to go down the street and I'm going to buy some lunch.

And I don't know what they're putting in that lunch, but I've eaten there for years and

it tastes okay to me.

And there's some process somewhere, there's some process that if they do something bad

at the lunch, someone else will like fix it or something that someone will get bad

press or the someone will call someone and complain or something will be in the media

or something like that and they'll just go out of business eventually and someone else

will take that spot because they won't be able to afford rent.

And so game theory is all about interdependence.

It's all about like everyone's pointing a gun, it's like a Mexican standoff.

A Mexican standoff is like game theorists approved.

It's like Apex because it's like perfectly balanced, you know, and yeah, I love it.

And then the, but the cryptographers are like, oh, what if, what if they go crazy and shoot

us?

That's kind of like the miners versus developers, I think.

There's the Mexican standoff and I'm fine with it.

I love it.

I think it's fine.

It's-

Oh, well, why don't we have a Mexican standoff sometime?

Well, when we get, when we get together in, in the, in February, we can, we can have a

Mexican standoff.

I think-

We can have one with ourselves or with, or with other, we, you and I, with other people.

I'm going to, I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell Bruce Fenton about that idea because

I think he'll, he'll like it.

That would, that would actually would be funny if you organize that as like a, an event.

You're like, okay, everyone over here.

I think that he would like that idea.

Sidewalkers, supporters of sidechains over there, some lightning network supporters over

there.

And then, then we all have super suckers or something, you know, and it's just like,

I don't know.

I don't know where that could go.

It could go a lot of ways though.

That's a very funny.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I, I always think that, yeah, to me, like, people will, people will act

to preserve the value of their investment, right?

And it's a little incongruent to start Bitcoin mining and then become a crazy person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's kind of how I feel like, like what I'm doing now.

Like if, if, if I thought everything was going fine, I would not have started my YouTube

series.

I would have just, you know, done something unrelated to Bitcoin.

That's kind of what I was trying to say is that, and I think that I sent you and I said,

I had a lot of fun with it.

The, I have the power idea that there's this normal, like game theory grid, but I just

drew like a tangled line.

And I was like, yeah, the people have all these incentives to like, kind of interact

in horrible ways.

Because they think they can persuade people to do this.

So a lot of this stuff is crazy.

It's like all this Twitter stuff and all this kind of like, yeah, people get harassed

and you know, people get all kinds of threats and things.

And then people are, can feel compelled to make, start a YouTube series.

And all this stuff is kind of this big result of, of not having good interactions.

And it would be nicer if we just had a world where if you wanted to do something else,

you just did it.

And Bitcoin core is like the Linux kernel.

I would ideally, I don't think it should change.

I don't think that, I think Bitcoin core should really stop changing very much.

I think it's, it's too easy to change with a hard fork or soft fork or anything.

And I think we should establish a precedent where Bitcoin core doesn't change as much

and instead other weird things change.

All the layer two sidechains, lightning, all this other stuff should change a lot.

Businesses that use Bitcoin.

But I think we are, I think we have already demonstrated that so much about Bitcoin can

be changed with just a few people, just the developer vote or only the mining vote or

only something.

So I'm not happy about that.

And I don't like all this interaction.

It's not organized.

So I think it would be better.

This is part of the big upside.

So this is why I'm very passionate about the experiment, the sidechain experiment.

I think we should run it and we should see what happens.

And I think it's interesting, this dichotomy I mentioned before about a cryptographer versus

game theory is that a lot of people who are great cryptographers didn't believe in Bitcoin

and they didn't think it would work.

And they would say things like, well, the miners will just reorganize the chain and

take everyone's money.

And Greg Maxwell has that proof, he had like a mathematical proof that it wouldn't work.

I'm going to have to look that up now.

It's very interesting.

I think I haven't actually looked at it myself, but I think I can guess where he probably

the where Satoshi kind of cheated on his proof is that I'm pretty sure that Satoshi is printing

new money and giving it to people with these blocks, the 50 bitcoins per blocks, per block

in the first four years.

And the idea that those could have value, and this is something that I think you discussed

with Chris also recently, the idea that those could have value and that they could be fuel

for this machine.

I think that's like the new game changer that he put in, that it wouldn't be possible unless

people were willing to, they were willing to pay money for these 50 bitcoins that were

created every 10 minutes at first.

And so I think in a weird way, it's funny because you think something is like a mathematical

proof, but it can be in practice, it can be overturned because governments manage the

currency so badly, because people want, it's very weird, Bitcoin is like a big thing that

it's got, it's plugged into every weird facet of the world.

Yeah.

Well, wait till you see my next video.

Okay, great.

I'm looking forward to it.

So can you go, let's go into some more details about how the Drivechain is going to work.

So do we have an address, a normal Bitcoin address, and that is the Drivechain?

Yeah.

So for user experience and laziness reasons, there currently is like an address that's

a little more like, you know, normally in Bitcoin, the addresses are not like accounts,

but in Drivechain they are.

So it's kind of complicated to explain, but that's basically it right now.

You can deposit Bitcoin to this, if you send it to this address, then anyone who's running

the sidechain software will know, they'll hear about it and they'll know.

It's either from over the network protocol, just by looking at the Bitcoin blocks, because

this is an asymmetric design where it's more like plugins, where I assume that everyone

is running Bitcoin core and then you can kind of like check a little box.

Do you want to also run this or that or nothing?

And so they kind of, they're aware of what's happening in Bitcoin core.

And so when you deposit to this little box, you get credited automatically.

So it's like when you send, you would send Bitcoin to the sidechain and that would be

one of your outputs is that you're putting the Bitcoin into the sidechain, but then you'd

have this some other thing.

And right now we have it as your basic kind of op return thing and you push another address

in there.

And then the sidechain watches that transaction and says, oh, that person deposited 14 Bitcoin

or whatever.

And then here's the op return.

And so we are going to credit that address over here with 14 that it was sort of, it

was sort of print, but it's not, they're going to be destroyed when they go back.

So it's just accounting, but yeah, it doesn't need to, since you have infinite flexibility

with the new piece of software, that is how that works.

And then once you're over there, you can do whatever you like, including open a payment

channel with people.

You can Lightning, you can use Lightning network within a chain, but also across multiple

chains as long as they have the same hash function, which they all will.

So that's kind of neat.

And also it's, I think it should be possible that it should be possible to charge more,

like someone should be able to send money over to sidechain, open a bunch of channels

there, and then charge more for that hub per like a variable costs, charge more per transaction.

In that hub, then maybe I'm maintaining Bitcoin core.

And then that way they would get kind of a return for putting the risk of putting their

money in this new thing.

And then people could Lightning through them.

If there's some, this is assuming that there's some weird smart contract that only the sidechain

can do.

That wouldn't really, I don't know if that would really work for payments because the

point of payments is that the merchant has to get, but maybe it would because if you

had like something like a bit pay or something that was on the sidechain then.

So it's kind of neat.

So there's a lot of flexibility.

So lots of stuff to figure out for like, you know, actual economic agents to figure out

how they are going to use it the best.

But I think the first in practice, the first thing I would like to do is have just a sidechain

that just has a larger block size, because I think people would really like that or that

people would be interested in using that.

And it also would be very, very, very easy.

You know what I would like to see?

I'd like to see a sidechain where you have to do proof of work to make every individual

transaction and that determines the bandwidth, not, not some arbitrary number because I think

that that was a design flaw that Satoshi put in into Bitcoin.

You should actually have to do, because that's what we do in, in BitMessage.

You have to do proof of work to send a message into the network at all.

And the whole point of proof of work is to prevent spam.

So but anyway.

Yeah, I know.

I like, well, that's funny you mentioned that because I like the idea of a, see BitMessage

I think does, yeah, I like BitMessage.

I would like to see, I would definitely like to see like an kind of email sidechain.

So you're talking about, you're talking about kind of two different things, but you're saying

like, is there a better way of doing proof of work, which is the transactions proof of

work, which is kind of neat.

I don't know.

I think you, there are, I think there was some like Dan Larimer tried to do something

like that, but he didn't do it very well or something.

And he called the transactions as proof of work or something in 2014.

But aside from that, I would like to see some kind of messaging sidechain or something.

And instead of doing the proof of work, you can do the actual, you can do the real thing,

like the post converted proof of work, which is that you can charge people Bitcoin to send

you money.

And I know 21 does this, but they're our company and I don't want them reading my email or

even knowing who I talk to.

So and plus, you know, their original idea was so bad, I don't know if I trust them doing

anything now.

It's just an absurd idea of putting a miner in like everything and like a light bulb.

Like was that real?

And then they changed it to like the 21, the Bitcoin computer.

And then I was like, yeah, a lot of people are having a lot of trouble.

They use like these hardware metaphors.

This is a very common thing in the whole like starting up a Bitcoin business.

A lot of people like don't like, you know, like, like Balaji, a regular computer is a

Bitcoin computer.

Like, like, what are you talking about?

So a lot of like weird stuff is going on.

People are figuring out how software works a second time.

Yes.

Well, it almost seems like most of the ideas in Bitcoin are like random, like randomly

generated.

Yeah.

It's very Hayekian.

Right.

They're just like, we don't know anything.

We have no theory.

Yeah.

It's a disappointingly Hayekian.

It's like we, this is a slime mold and we have no idea.

We'll just proceed in all directions at once.

And well, part of it is that this is a really interesting effect that a lot of people want

to, a lot of people are misled by the blockchain without Bitcoin meme.

And it got so much emperor's new clothes, like kind of credibility from everyone.

And then I remember it was 2016.

You had like Larry Summers talking about it and then the governor of Delaware was like

trying to make Delaware the blockchain state.

Isn't that crazy?

Well, nobody understands why Bitcoin is valuable.

Okay.

So there's no, it's just, it's like the blind leading the blind.

So you can just create all of these new blockchains and that have like almost no difference between

them and Bitcoin and they can make tons of money.

And so then there's tons of incentive to just paper over, to, you know,

That's what I'm saying is that who's like getting really like, why is it such, why is

it doing a slime mold thing?

I think the investors are just like, you know, institutional investors with us dollars just

like pouring money into these companies and they just, they think you can do anything

and they, they don't know, they don't know what they're doing and they're just like kind

of buying options or something.

And they're just like, they don't know.

There's no theory.

So that's a very bizarre thing that's happening.

Okay.

Well, do you have anything else to add?

Because I think we've pretty much gone over everything I wanted to learn.

Well, I'm not sure.

Well, yeah.

One thing I'll add is that this proposal has a very interesting interpersonal, Drivechain

is a very interesting interpersonal effect, I think, which is that it, it decreases the

relevance of being a Bitcoin expert because if you, it's not like the way we are now is

that there's only one Bitcoin, it's only like one Bitcoin television channel, the core channel.

And so if you're the producer of that channel or if you're one of the producers, then you're

a really important person and like having access to that person and like being their

friend and your money or whatever, that's like a big deal.

But if you change it all around so that anyone can create that, you make it more like YouTube

where anyone can create their own channel and anyone can listen to whatever channel

they want.

So instead of being like broadcast television through the airwaves, it's more like the internet.

Then it's not really important to be friends with that guy anymore, the original producer.

And maybe he's like a great advisor or maybe, maybe not, or maybe whatever, like maybe he

was good at certain things like trying to manage all these compromises, but now it's

different and this whole thing, you have the long tail and you have these niches and it

looks, maybe it looks different.

So I think-

Oh, you said niches.

For a moment I thought you said geishas and I was like, what is he talking about?

That would be cool too though.

Yeah.

That would also be, yeah, we can put that in, put images of that everywhere.

I think it's interesting that it kind of, I'm not sure how to say, like I'm not, people,

there's a Milton Friedman has like a big paragraph about why the free market has a bad press

and why, you know, there's like a lot of heat from intellectuals who don't like markets

because it means that they'll no longer be experts because you're free to try every dumb

idea.

And so it means that they're just, you know, so I am not sure exactly what will happen

as a result of that effect, but I think it is salient and I think people should watch

for it and be kind of pay some attention to it.

Okay.

Well, thanks a lot for joining me and here's to more future productive discussions.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll talk to you later.

All right.

Bye.