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We do need a new coin in order to move forward. We've come very far, but I don't
think we can go

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much further from where we are. Should we just do nothing? Or should Bitcoin have
more competition?

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Paul, welcome to Bitcoin Rails. This is the second time you've been on Bitcoin

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Rails. I'm very excited to have you here. Very excited to be here.

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On this very special day, Paul, you dropped some insane news today. By the time this
comes out,

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you will have just dropped some insane news. I feel like I have a very special
secret alpha

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right now, although some people... You do.

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Okay, so we're going to spill the beans right now, obviously. By the time people are
seeing

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this, the public will know, several people in private already know that you are
planning to

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fork Bitcoin. That's right.

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Okay. Let's just back up for a second and give some context on this interesting
news.

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The purpose of this is to create a fork of Bitcoin that executes Drivechains,

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specifically BIP300, BIP301. Is that accurate?

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I think that is accurate.

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Okay. You are, of course, the author of BIP300, BIP301, and the CEO of LayerTwo Labs, which is...

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LayerTwo Labs primarily exists for the purpose of creating technologies that will
ultimately

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use Drivechains in BIP300/301. Is that fair?

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All that is fair. That's true.

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Okay. I was not expecting this to happen. I remember it was a couple months ago that
I

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heard whispers of this from your private investors, who we'll get into, sharing
secretly,

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FYI, Paul's going to fork, Paul's going to fork.

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Well, yeah, I think Benjamin Franklin, he said, three people can keep a secret if
two are dead.

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But whatever, people are excited.

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I think I remember I was telling you also, I was saying like, was it this person?
Was it

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this person? Was it this person? Whatever. And then you were like, no, no, no.

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It wasn't any of those people. It was completely other people. No,

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I think there were at least 40 people whispering about the fork at

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Eat Denver that I was aware of. I know there was some number.

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It is what it is.

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It is what it is. But anyway, but this was surprising. Everyone was gleeful with,

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I don't know exactly the emotion that I would describe it. Shock? Surprise?

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There was some sort of element of something.

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Okay. I didn't know any of that. I didn't go to Eat Denver this year,

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but it's a nice school event.

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I was a little surprised to hear, but I was curious. Maybe we should back up and
tell the story.

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Yes, it is surprising. Okay. Yes, we probably should. But yeah, I think there's a
lot of

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reasons why it would be surprising to people. One is that all the previous hard
forks have failed,

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and it's also like launching an altcoin or a shitcoin.

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Basically.

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Yes.

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You are launching a shitcoin.

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Yeah. But this is the thing is at the end of the day, I was a Bitcoin maximalist for
like 15 years

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or so, but we do need a new coin in order to move forward, I think.

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We need a new coin.

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Right.

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So let's start there. Why do we need a new coin? Why is Bitcoin as it currently
exists,

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in your opinion, not working?

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Well, we've come very far, but I don't think we can go much further from where we
are.

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And for a variety of reasons, it's very hard to get the exchange rate to go up from
here.

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It's very hard to get more users from here. It's very hard to do development from
here.

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It's very hard to get more mining revenue from here.

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Because?

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Well, it's hard to know exactly what would be the number one cause,

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but really the culture in Bitcoin is, I think, kind of just like trapped in this
kind of

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de-sell mind virus, you know, like instead of people pushing for growth and usage,

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but we have a situation where everyone is kind of just complacent and overconfident,
I think.

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Like there's like Bitcoin is inevitable mantra narrative?

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Yes, exactly right. But you were just at Opnext. And so it was like, but see, even
at Opnext,

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it wasn't really, just from what you were telling me, and I didn't go there, but it
was like,

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people want to talk about the fashionable thing, the quantum thing, which is the
fad.

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But it's like, was there a lot about like, you know, actual development or new soft
forks or?

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Well, quantum related soft forks were a very big topic at Opnext this year.

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Of course, it's easy. Like, this is the thing is these things are flash in the pan.
Like,

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it's very easy. They introduce a, right? Maybe you disagree.

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Well, I think, okay, what I meant by that is like, you introduce something like

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CTV or TxHash, you get a lot of attention.

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Immediately, right?

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That's what I'm talking about. But then how does anyone close the deal and get
whereas the,

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you know, whereas OP_CTV, like activation client.

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No one has closed the deal since Tapper.

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Right. And this is part of the problem, which is that this is one of the many

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things that we could get into. I don't know. There's like a million threads to all
of this,

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but the soft fork is really like a completely risk-free, opt-in, reversible,

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ignorable thing. And yet it has, it can bring us all these benefits.

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And so the idea that, well, you know, we should be doing like two a week or
something,

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but instead we're doing zero, you know, year after year and we can't do them. And
it's because

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it just, it's become political football and anyone who sticks their neck out, you
know.

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I mean, it's the implication here that basically the soft forking process is broken
such that now

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hard forks are the only way to actually like actuate movement forward.

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It's an irony that the soft fork was invented because the hard fork was too
difficult.

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But now the soft fork is so difficult that it's, I don't know if that's, there may
be a,

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there may be an irony to that. I think in general, we've reached the point where

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I think a new competitor would at least be able to change the conversation or,

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I think people out there really deserve a conversation on, you know, how Bitcoin
should

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make progress. And this is just an alternative and everyone gets free money. And so
that's what

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the hard fork is. It's funny how the amount of social stigma and like weird,
irrational fear

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and hatred of the hard fork is because every Bitcoiner just gets free money in
return for

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doing nothing. You could sell these coins and buy more BTC. But I think from past
experience,

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we can guess that a lot of people will complain. Fair enough. Okay.

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Maybe even that's not true. Let's contextualize this almost certainly going to be
controversial

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hard fork move of yours with just like helping people understand a little bit like
what drive

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chains is, why Drivechains in the first place. When did you initially propose
Bith300, Bith301?

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Well, I proposed Drivechain in November 2015 and it was a long blog post.

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And it had a different name then? It was just called Drivechain.

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It was still called Drivechain. But that was before I had formalized it in the BIP
repository,

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which wasn't until a few later. So it actually just mostly lived as just kind of a
blog post

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because I was primarily interested in prediction markets back then. And I wanted to
bring

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prediction markets to Bitcoin back in 2015, like long as it's been 10 years before,
you know,

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Polymarket and stuff got big in the 2024 election. So I was really interested in
that.

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And a lot of other people were like, oh, how do we bring more privacy or more

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scalability or even different block size to Bitcoin? This was 10 years ago.
Blockstream

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the company had started about they were going to do the sidechains idea, which they
sort of never

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finished really. But I was looking at what they had done because I'd worked on
prediction markets.

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I was like, how do we attach this to Bitcoin? And I wrote this post Drivechain about
how to do the

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deposits withdrawals from Bitcoin to other blockchain software.

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Well, I mean, would you kind of give a quick TLDR on like how Drivechains like at
its core guts

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kind of works and what it does different than other sidechain proposals?

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Mine are always governed by the mining process. So we don't have like special keys
or like the

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thing that a lot of people do. Have you seen that meme? There's a meme where the
nice young

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lady is talking to the camera and then like the whoever it is, like the husband or
someone is

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like at the door and he's saying, be honest, you know, she's like, oh, well, we were
middle class.

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And yeah, she's like, what car did your dad have? You seen this meme? No, it's a
meme. It's a

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where it's kind of like, what is the like the Victoria Beckham meme? Like that meme?
Like,

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oh, he drove a like, what's the fancy car? She's saying like that she grew up like

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and then like the dad drove like a Porsche or something.

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But this is this is Victoria Beckham. Victoria Beckham said this in real life.

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And then everyone made fun of her.

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And then so there's a meme and it's like, well, we have a fully decentralized L2

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and then the guy's poking his head and he's like, he's like, what secures the funds
on L1?

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He's poking his head and she's like, and then at the end, she says a multi-sig.

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Right, right, right, right, right.

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So I don't have any of that. It's the mining process fully decentralized.

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OK, fully trust does require obviously the software proposal, but but we're trying
to

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move away from federated multi-sig bridges. Right. The problem with the federation
is it's

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it's very similar to just giving all of your money to one guy and hoping that they
give it back.

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And it's just really the multi-sig is just one guy like times seven or something.

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Right, right.

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So it's not really that new or interesting. And it's kind of disappointing in the
sense

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that the whole point of Bitcoin itself was to get away from having your money like
with someone,

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someone else.

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But you also think that this Drivechains proposal, BIP300, BIP301,

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like you talked about miner incentives and miner alignment and all of these other
kind of factors

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that I think fundamentally make it a different proposal than something like maybe
OP_CTV or

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these sort of covenants enabling opcodes that purportedly create trustless bridging
opportunities.

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I think that that's a very good question. I think that

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BIP300 is sort of simpler in many ways, but also a little bit more ambitious.

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Like even it's hard to say because new stuff is invented all the time.

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But I think even with something like CTV, the bridging part is not totally clear.

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Whereas with BIP300, like it's designed as the bridge, like that's the whole purpose
the whole

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time. It's all about depositing, withdrawing to the other chains. Whereas with the
other stuff,

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it's like you have to do some kind of complicated extra structure.

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So I don't know, I guess it's I suppose it's for the audience to decide how

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complicated they think something is. But really BIP300, the idea is you would have

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competition among the different developer groups.

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So this is kind of like really important because the block size war was really about

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some people didn't like what the Bitcoin core developers were doing.

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Then what they immediately did is they eventually, not immediately, but eventually
created Bitcoin

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cash. And then they had their own other developer expert problems because that was
invaded by like

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CSW. And then also they had problems with Armory. And so they forked more times.

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Uh, that was the stuff that was really dramatic in getting all the attention.

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Like you think quantum gets a lot of attention now, but of course the block size war
was this

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epic like confrontation. There was drama and there was like, you know, a lot of
money was

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being spent. A lot of people were very frustrated. And so that's kind of what I was
getting at with

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this. Whereas CTV and these other things are kind of like a little bit more, I don't
know,

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artisanal like clothes or something, but not that they're bad. I think we should, as
I mentioned

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the last time I was on this podcast, we should do all, we should just do all of
these because

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there's really no risk. That's a controversial claim in itself. But to me, it's
quite obvious

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that there's no risk. And this is also what drives me to do the hard fork in the
first place,

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where it's kind of like, what is it that people just don't get about all this? It's
all very

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simple, really, no offense. But just to kind of give some context about, you know,
BIP300,

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BIP301 and kind of why it's important. I mean, I think like some key kind of facets
about it

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relative to other software proposals that, you know, ostensibly enabled Bitcoin
Layer 2s are

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things like miner alignment. There's, you know, competition in terms of like,
there's only so

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many L2s that can be created in the, you know, fundamentally sort of need to be, I
guess, like

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approved by the miners. I don't know how you would describe that. Yeah, there's
these slots. In

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practice, there's really like an unlimited number of slots per se, but there's only
like, you know,

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00:13:00,560 --> 00:13:05,680
use one at a time. That's maybe not how I would best describe it, but you can only
activate one

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chain at a time. But the miners, it's kind of like they have like a storefront, or
they have

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like a shopping mall, and you want to move your store in. And, you know, the slots
are all not

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being used. So they'll give you a blank one or something. I think 256 is going to be
more than

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enough. I don't know. But if there's not, you can always have like BIP300, like two,
or you can have

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like sidechains of sidechains. So even though there's a limited number, I don't
think it will.

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The real thing, the real constraint on the sidechains is that they need transaction
activity,

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kind of like the storefront in a mall. You would need like, you know, customers. For
the miners to

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keep them alive. That's where the miner incentive really becomes like important. If
they're not

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being used, if they're not creating fees for the miners, they're going to die.
They're going to

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get replaced. Yes. Which, yeah. And in this weird situation, the miners are kind of
like the mall

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owner, and they get like 99.9. They get basically almost all of the profits from the
storefront,

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just because of the way merge mining works. Which I remember the last time we spoke
about this topic,

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and I'll link to our previous interview. One of the things that you said that might
feasibly just

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not work about all of these other L2s that have sort of been coming up over the past
couple of

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years is like, if the actual layer twos themselves and the sequencers that are, you
know, kind of

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generating the actual ecosystems of these L2s are not paying the miners in some way.
Yeah, there's

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going to end up being some sort of like war, right? Like if all the money ends up on
the L2,

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and the miners aren't getting fees, aren't getting paid, then, you know, the
settlement layer will

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00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:42,960
eventually kind of fight back. That's exactly right. And I presented on this topic
at, I think,

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maybe the first Opnext. One of the Opnexts. You can find it, I'm sure, online if
you're interested.

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And yeah, so it's interesting to me, you mentioned the other bridges and the other
L2s.

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This idea is so old that back in 2015, there were really no viable altcoins. This
was like

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00:15:02,240 --> 00:15:09,840
the beginning of Ethereum or something. So this sidechain idea was considered like,

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00:15:10,480 --> 00:15:15,280
we're not going to need Ethereum because we're just going to have, like, there
wasn't even a

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00:15:15,280 --> 00:15:20,240
phrase like EVM or whatever. None of that stuff existed back then. It was like, oh,
we don't need

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00:15:20,240 --> 00:15:24,640
any altcoins because it's all open source. We'll just bolt it onto Bitcoin. Then
people ran into

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this governance challenge of like, oh, what about the sometimes people don't
disagree, you know,

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00:15:29,440 --> 00:15:36,560
but with the block size, there was huge, huge disagreement. And so you ran into this
issue.

196
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And then so I was thinking about like this L2 idea, you know, this whole time and
then this

197
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whole like Bitcoin Season 2, Bitcoin Layer 2, this is like all this stuff kind of
happened later

198
00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:51,200
because there was really no such thing as conversation about different L2s. It was
all

199
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like Lightning Network because Lightning Network was old and that was what everyone
wanted to try.

200
00:15:56,480 --> 00:16:00,880
Another reason why we have to do the hard fork is that Lightning Network is
deranging the entire

201
00:16:01,440 --> 00:16:06,640
culture and has made everyone kind of lose their minds. People can look at my
TabConf

202
00:16:07,360 --> 00:16:12,720
debate, but you could see it's been put very clearly that the Lightning Network
cannot scale

203
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us to eight billion people, but BIP300 can. And so it's again, it's a no brainer,
but yeah.

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Do you think that not only BIP300, BIP301 in your proposals, but maybe some of these
other,

205
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you know, soft fork covenants enabling proposals have been dismissed

206
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large or not activated or not pushed forward sufficiently because of Lightning
Derangement

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00:16:31,520 --> 00:16:35,840
Syndrome and because people want to protect Lightning as like the L2? Like, is that
a factor

208
00:16:35,920 --> 00:16:40,480
in your opinion? I think all the, I don't know. We have to do our like armchair
psychologist

209
00:16:40,480 --> 00:16:45,200
like moment, right? Like, cause I don't know, but my guess is that all of the
derangements

210
00:16:45,200 --> 00:16:49,920
are related somehow because I think that actually you hit like streaks of things.
Like people hit

211
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like they hit like a golden age or they like everything's going well in your life.
Like

212
00:16:54,320 --> 00:17:00,000
things are going well and then you're in a good mood and so you're more forgiving of
that guy

213
00:17:00,080 --> 00:17:05,760
who cut you off or whatever it is, you know? So I think things go well together.
Like you're

214
00:17:05,760 --> 00:17:10,880
making more money at work so you can go on a nice vacation or you can like fix stuff
before it

215
00:17:10,880 --> 00:17:16,800
breaks. So I think things usually go well in an overlapping way. And then when
things go wrong,

216
00:17:16,800 --> 00:17:21,200
I think they also go wrong in an overlapping way. So I think that partially the
Lightning

217
00:17:21,200 --> 00:17:26,880
Derangement has made people less honest overall about Bitcoin's technical
limitations.

218
00:17:27,840 --> 00:17:34,240
And so I think that that has made people just want to not think about solving the
problem.

219
00:17:34,240 --> 00:17:38,560
And instead they're more interested in just proposing a really, really convoluted

220
00:17:39,120 --> 00:17:43,920
ARK supernode or... Well, they were heavily invested in it too. I mean, there's like
so

221
00:17:43,920 --> 00:17:48,800
much, I mean, that's sort of my take on it is that there's a lot of like lightning
bag holders

222
00:17:48,800 --> 00:17:53,600
weirdly. People have equity in lightning companies. Exactly. It's kind of like a
little bit of a

223
00:17:53,680 --> 00:17:59,760
shit coin in a way. Huge amount of VC money invested into lightning and a lot of
like

224
00:17:59,760 --> 00:18:04,720
real belief that this was the future and high levels of conviction that's hard to
actually

225
00:18:04,720 --> 00:18:11,600
backtrack on. Yeah. And of course a technical person, they may invest like a few
months or

226
00:18:11,600 --> 00:18:17,760
even years mastering something and then how valuable that is to their career depends
on

227
00:18:17,760 --> 00:18:23,520
whether or not that has a future or not. Do you think there are other reasons? I
mean,

228
00:18:23,520 --> 00:18:26,400
just to kind of, I think this is like a good, like nice little thing to just

229
00:18:28,560 --> 00:18:34,480
put a little touchpoint on. Why else do you think soft fork activations have become
so difficult

230
00:18:34,480 --> 00:18:40,000
to execute? I have to say, I really, I'm totally baffled by it, honestly, but it is
worth talking

231
00:18:40,000 --> 00:18:45,440
about. I think part of it is that I don't know how important this is, but I have a
total shot

232
00:18:45,440 --> 00:18:50,400
in the dark about like, there was a time you may remember when, okay, Michael Saylor
started to get

233
00:18:50,400 --> 00:18:57,360
big. No one had heard of him before 2020, which would make him like a newcomer in my
calendar,

234
00:18:57,360 --> 00:19:01,760
but he showed up and then he had this argument about like, there's a big difference
between

235
00:19:01,760 --> 00:19:06,160
Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is that Ethereum is going to be deemed a security. This
was like

236
00:19:06,160 --> 00:19:09,440
really important to him. And that was like, Ethereum changes all the time. It's got
people

237
00:19:09,440 --> 00:19:13,760
running it. So it's, maybe you don't even, you're kind of like laughing, but like,
this was kind of

238
00:19:13,760 --> 00:19:20,080
like this weird argument that we have to pitch Bitcoin as something that doesn't
change the

239
00:19:20,080 --> 00:19:25,520
ossification. The ossification became a feature not a bug. Ossification is broadly
seen as a feature

240
00:19:25,520 --> 00:19:31,200
not a bug. That part is old, but there was this new idea, like, because ossification
didn't mean

241
00:19:31,200 --> 00:19:36,240
no soft forks. Oh, really? Yeah, that's not the way I remember it. What do you think
ossification,

242
00:19:36,240 --> 00:19:41,920
because when I hear the word ossification, I think no soft forks. No code changes.
Ironically,

243
00:19:41,920 --> 00:19:47,200
I thought it meant no hard forks. The interesting thing is that the code is changing
all the time,

244
00:19:47,200 --> 00:19:52,160
even without the soft forks. Oh, interesting. So this is something that is very
straightforward.

245
00:19:52,160 --> 00:19:56,160
But there's really no such thing as no code upgrade. Like every piece of software
needs

246
00:19:56,160 --> 00:20:00,800
to be upgraded. But many people believe that. Many people believe that ossification
means that,

247
00:20:00,800 --> 00:20:08,320
I think. I think you're right. And even if you thought, even if you wanted no code
changes,

248
00:20:08,320 --> 00:20:12,960
it doesn't matter. Because just culturally, the way, there's this phrase like dev is
going to

249
00:20:12,960 --> 00:20:16,720
dev or something. I don't know if you've heard this, but it's like people can't help
themselves.

250
00:20:16,720 --> 00:20:22,560
They like to get their hands on the code and change it around. This is a desire.
It's like

251
00:20:22,560 --> 00:20:27,520
a human desire. This is like people do this for fun. So Bitcoin Core, they have
their weird culture

252
00:20:27,520 --> 00:20:32,000
and they have their weird, and they put out a version every six months or so. We
just had version

253
00:20:32,000 --> 00:20:37,280
31. And you can look online, you can look at on GitHub and see there's lots of
commits. There's

254
00:20:37,280 --> 00:20:41,200
lots of pull requests. But even the sound money people, the economics focused
people, they don't

255
00:20:41,200 --> 00:20:46,560
like that. To your point, who knows to what extent they're even aware that it's
happening?

256
00:20:46,560 --> 00:20:51,600
That it's happening. Do they even have any idea? And every now and then, a CVE,
critical

257
00:20:51,600 --> 00:20:56,880
vulnerability, would be introduced accidentally. Because devs deving?

258
00:20:56,880 --> 00:21:00,560
Yes. Devs deving themselves right into structural problems?

259
00:21:00,560 --> 00:21:05,440
I have an example I always use, although I always have to apologize to Matt Corallo
because I don't

260
00:21:05,440 --> 00:21:11,280
want to single him out. But it's a great example of, he tried to shave like six,
maybe six

261
00:21:11,280 --> 00:21:16,240
billionths of a second off of some multiplication or something, and he accidentally

262
00:21:16,240 --> 00:21:22,400
introduced an inflation bug that was caught by the Bitcoin Cash developer and
privately

263
00:21:22,400 --> 00:21:26,960
disclosed. And then they had to secretly fix it, or however it is. And this is how
these things go,

264
00:21:26,960 --> 00:21:32,080
though. And of course, that was neither a hard fork nor a soft fork in the sense of
something

265
00:21:32,080 --> 00:21:36,320
that is discussed widely because it all happened accidentally and in secret.

266
00:21:36,320 --> 00:21:37,280
It was just like a minor code change.

267
00:21:37,280 --> 00:21:41,520
It could not have actually been exploited in practice because so many people would
run old

268
00:21:41,520 --> 00:21:49,120
versions and no one would ever allow an inflation bug block to be in the chain. But
that's a

269
00:21:49,120 --> 00:21:56,400
perfect example of the code changes all the time. There was this thing, Heartbleed.
People can look

270
00:21:56,400 --> 00:22:01,920
up the dependencies change. When you build a house, even if you build a house from

271
00:22:01,920 --> 00:22:06,000
scratch, you don't build like the screws from scratch. You know what I mean? You
don't build

272
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:10,400
like the two by fours. That would literally take like a thousand years or something
if you had to

273
00:22:10,400 --> 00:22:15,040
do that. So you go to Home Depot and you get like lumber, you get insulation, you
get windows,

274
00:22:16,160 --> 00:22:18,800
and you get carpet or whatever. You know what I'm saying?

275
00:22:18,800 --> 00:22:23,760
So when you build Bitcoin, there's all these dependencies. Those are being updated
all the

276
00:22:23,760 --> 00:22:29,680
time. Sometimes those have flaws. So the ossification people, I think they just have

277
00:22:29,680 --> 00:22:34,240
not a single clue like even what they're even thinking about or talking about, which
I'm not

278
00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:36,160
even trying to knock them or anything. I'm just saying like...

279
00:22:36,160 --> 00:22:37,440
It's just misinformed.

280
00:22:37,440 --> 00:22:40,800
They just don't even like... It's hard to know what to even say to someone like
that.

281
00:22:40,800 --> 00:22:48,640
But the complete dis-ease or unease of being able to execute Softworks as a
community,

282
00:22:49,680 --> 00:22:52,480
I mean, any other like kind of thoughts about like what might be causing it?

283
00:22:52,480 --> 00:22:57,680
It's a very important topic. Someone should think more about it. I think in general,

284
00:22:58,160 --> 00:23:03,360
I was talking about all the derangements are related. I think it's easy for
something to

285
00:23:03,360 --> 00:23:10,640
evolve towards stasis, like a culture. And then when something is static, anyone who
sticks their

286
00:23:10,640 --> 00:23:15,920
neck out to do anything, because you don't know how downstream... Like if someone
said

287
00:23:15,920 --> 00:23:20,240
like you're on a desert island and everyone has a certain religion and a certain way
of farming

288
00:23:20,240 --> 00:23:26,480
or something. Even if someone has a new dance or a new joke, you don't necessarily
know.

289
00:23:26,800 --> 00:23:30,160
Maybe it'll cause the whole society to unravel. So I think people do become...

290
00:23:30,720 --> 00:23:31,280
But I don't know.

291
00:23:31,280 --> 00:23:34,720
Or are we just too big for like functional decentralized governance?

292
00:23:34,720 --> 00:23:37,600
I think that's also a part of it, which is that the bigger it gets...

293
00:23:37,600 --> 00:23:38,960
There's just too many voices.

294
00:23:38,960 --> 00:23:44,000
It's too hard to reach people. It's too hard to... So I think these are all related.

295
00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:47,120
Consensus gets harder the larger the group gets, ultimately.

296
00:23:47,120 --> 00:23:47,840
Right.

297
00:23:47,840 --> 00:23:55,200
Notably, it was easy. Satoshi himself did at least two hard forks in the first two
years of Bitcoin.

298
00:23:55,680 --> 00:24:02,720
He changed the longest chain to the heaviest chain and he introduced all the
op-nops.

299
00:24:02,720 --> 00:24:04,960
But you started to feel frustrated about this

300
00:24:05,600 --> 00:24:08,800
at the first time I ever met you, which was probably at least two years ago.

301
00:24:09,600 --> 00:24:11,680
You were feeling frustrated about this.

302
00:24:11,680 --> 00:24:14,880
Well, really the whole time. Because again, in my conception,

303
00:24:15,840 --> 00:24:19,600
all the soft forks have basically zero cost. I mean, of course, there is a cost
of...

304
00:24:21,360 --> 00:24:24,480
You're going to edit the software and there could be bugs and someone's going to
have...

305
00:24:24,480 --> 00:24:28,320
People have to maintain the software. So I can completely understand how Bitcoin
Core

306
00:24:28,320 --> 00:24:33,680
doesn't just want random people coming in there and rearranging their living room or
whatever

307
00:24:33,680 --> 00:24:36,400
and saying, like, I'll put all this code here or something.

308
00:24:36,400 --> 00:24:37,040
Sure.

309
00:24:37,040 --> 00:24:43,120
But really, the benefits of each of these... Many of these things have been
proposed,

310
00:24:43,120 --> 00:24:47,520
even whatever, op-vault or whatever, op-cat. It's really bizarre.

311
00:24:47,520 --> 00:24:50,560
The cost is really low. The benefit is very high.

312
00:24:51,025 --> 00:25:03,025
OK, but I remember. So I'm bringing this up because specifically when we met two
years ago, which was actually, I think, in Denver, maybe it was even three years
ago, I don't remember, but you had already started to think about, well, like, what
are my other options, right?

313
00:25:03,025 --> 00:25:06,025
No, I had thought about this even like in 2017 or something.

314
00:25:06,025 --> 00:25:08,025
Oh, even in 2017.

315
00:25:09,025 --> 00:25:23,025
The thing is, Bitcoin has done very, very well. And despite... There's always been
weird, irrational people in Bitcoin and like weirdo people, of course, which is
fine.

316
00:25:23,025 --> 00:25:44,025
But it was always an open question, even the scaling more like I was a small
blocker. So we won. But it was kind of like, is this really how we're going to, you
know, whenever there's a disagreement, it's just going to be... I think people took
from that the lesson that the more conservative side will always win, which has
created...

317
00:25:44,025 --> 00:25:47,025
It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy of that.

318
00:25:48,025 --> 00:26:10,025
And I wanted to mention one other ossification thing if I could quickly, which is
that there's an overlap between like the property rights, kind of like Austrian econ
people. They love like, you know, a contract is a contract, fixed supply, like they
don't want any of the rules changing. I think that's a very good thing. And I think
that's always been a part of Bitcoin.

319
00:26:11,025 --> 00:26:17,025
The software completely respects that by saying you don't have to upgrade. Your old
node will still do what it was doing before.

320
00:26:17,025 --> 00:26:21,025
Softworks, I remember you saying at one point, are quote, a gift from God.

321
00:26:21,025 --> 00:26:44,025
Yeah, it's the fact that it's even possible is astounding. And one of the main
drawbacks of a lot of these convoluted L2s that are not mined is that it's very hard
to upgrade them. The ZK-SNARK or even a BitVM, it will be very hard to upgrade them.
It's kind of like if there's a bug or if you want to make an upgrade, you have to do
like a completely new scheme, but that's not true for...

322
00:26:44,025 --> 00:27:01,025
So, I mean, I think what we can take away from this, and my understanding is you
would absolutely love to soft work, but that is just seeming socially and from a
governance perspective, not unlikely anytime soon. And so you're sort of taking
matters into your own hands. Two years ago, what was your original, because let's
talk about CUSF for a second.

323
00:27:01,025 --> 00:27:21,025
Yes.

324
00:27:21,025 --> 00:27:31,025
And then they began to tell my friend or whatever. But this is yet another example
of like reducing the cost of the soft fork even further. And yet still, we can't do
it.

325
00:27:31,025 --> 00:27:36,025
Meaning reducing the risks associated with it even further. Like you literally don't
even need to touch Bitcoin Core.

326
00:27:36,025 --> 00:27:38,025
Right. There's no pull request for them.

327
00:27:38,025 --> 00:27:39,025
Explain what CUSF is really.

328
00:27:39,025 --> 00:27:48,025
CUSF is a Core Untouched Soft Fork. So you have Bitcoin Core and then you have
basically like a second thing, which is like a second Bitcoin Core that adds the
soft fork.

329
00:27:48,025 --> 00:28:08,025
Similar to an Ordinals client for folks who know what that is, right? So it's like
you're not touching L1, but you're layering this sort of, I mean, Casey calls it
like sort of like a lens through which you can look at layer one and then you can
sort of make decisions about what transactions and how you want to execute them and
sort of, yeah, execute new software sort of on top. Is that fair?

330
00:28:08,025 --> 00:28:21,025
Yes, because now this is your own new thing. This is your own playpen. So you can
write it in Rust or you can do whatever you want. And you can put, you can add, you
can take op-nop-5 and use, make that be op-Drivechain or op-cat or op-ctv, whatever
you like.

331
00:28:21,025 --> 00:28:45,025
The only new part really is that you just have, you just tell your client, your new
client to kick back to Bitcoin Core and run invalidate block and declare the block
invalid if it breaks the new soft fork rule. This accomplishes exactly the same
thing as the soft fork upgrade would, but now Bitcoin Core is completely, not a
single line of code has changed in Bitcoin Core.

332
00:28:45,025 --> 00:29:06,025
And this sort of brings up, I think, an important point because I think the
Ordinal's example is very helpful for like sort of understanding how this works. But
meaningfully, you know, obviously Casey's Ordinal's client didn't have any real
implications for consensus. This would. So you actually need miners to run this,
which is the key distinction between something like Ordinal's and like a Drivechains
CUSF.

333
00:29:06,025 --> 00:29:22,025
That's exactly right. And so if you have more than 50% miners, then the soft fork
activates and can be safely used by everyone. And the miners will collect
transaction fees from these new transactions as well. If you have less than 51%,
then it's as if you did nothing and you didn't achieve anything.

334
00:29:22,025 --> 00:29:37,025
And you actually started to, so again, when we first met, you were like in the
process of building this CUSF kind of overlay software. And I believe you had
several conversations with miners about whether or not they might be willing to run
this. How did those conversations go?

335
00:29:37,025 --> 00:29:59,025
Well, it's weird because some of the miners are very like, the mining story is
another derangement, I think, because the miners have been like losing all this
money. And you see like even like the mining stage is renamed the energy stage, the
miner magazines renamed energy. So there's all these people, all the miners are
pivoting to like AI and like data centers and stuff. They're losing all this money.

336
00:29:59,025 --> 00:30:20,025
But the miners, like it's very hard to like understand. It doesn't make any sense.
Just like why doesn't Bitcoin Core do more soft forks? It doesn't make any sense.
Just like basically all this doesn't make any sense because all this stuff would be
good for the Bitcoin price, the Bitcoin brand. This would let like different groups
of people get what they want without hurting. So really none of it makes any sense.

337
00:30:20,025 --> 00:30:22,025
Was your pitch to miners, this is good for you?

338
00:30:23,025 --> 00:30:26,025
Yeah, absolutely. In particular, since I'm an advocate of the merge mine L2.

339
00:30:26,025 --> 00:30:28,025
merge mining is the pitch for miners.

340
00:30:28,025 --> 00:30:46,025
But even if I weren't, like they could do OP_CAT or CTV. Maybe they wouldn't collect
more merge mining transaction fees, but they could unilaterally do this soft fork,
which again, they could also just shut it off later at any time and deactivate the
soft fork. That may have some implications for anyone who used it.

341
00:30:46,025 --> 00:30:48,025
It would not be hard to turn this on and off.

342
00:30:49,025 --> 00:30:58,025
It's theoretically possible to just completely shut it off. All the miners could
turn it on and then they could all just say, well, we actually don't like this
anymore and just they could all just shut it off or 51% of them could shut it off.

343
00:30:58,025 --> 00:31:00,025
It's much easier to reverse than an actual soft fork.

344
00:31:00,025 --> 00:31:12,025
Exactly right. And so the question is, you know, why? But I think the miners are
just very, they have been trained to just be like on autopilot.

345
00:31:13,025 --> 00:31:25,025
And so even though it's interesting, like individually, a lot of them would be in
for it, in favor of it, but then they would want to know like what other miners
think.

346
00:31:25,025 --> 00:31:37,025
So I can plug my tiny little event on day two in Las Vegas. I have like a happy hour
event, like a room with an open bar, which is at 5pm on day two of the Vegas event.

347
00:31:37,025 --> 00:31:42,025
So maybe we'll all get everyone in the same room and it'll all make sense.

348
00:31:42,025 --> 00:31:54,025
The challenge with miners is that they really only want to put capital resources and
energy into making these sort of big, what they probably perceive as like friction
laden changes.

349
00:31:54,025 --> 00:31:58,025
If they know that all the other miners are going to run it and that it's going to be
successful.

350
00:31:58,025 --> 00:32:01,025
It's really not that much resources, though, because it's like free software.

351
00:32:02,025 --> 00:32:06,025
That they can shut off later, so it is, but it's really not that much.

352
00:32:06,025 --> 00:32:09,025
There are a lot of very, they might perceive it that way, though, is there.

353
00:32:09,025 --> 00:32:13,025
I mean, they are worried about there's a lot of conflicts of interest.

354
00:32:13,025 --> 00:32:22,025
I think I have to I want to reiterate that I honestly have no idea what's why this
is all happening, because to me, it's like everyone is just like lighting all their
money on fire for absolutely no reason.

355
00:32:22,025 --> 00:32:25,025
And it doesn't make any sense to me at all.

356
00:32:25,025 --> 00:32:30,025
And I think the crown jewel is that the hard fork is just giving everyone more free
money and people will complain about it.

357
00:32:30,025 --> 00:32:33,025
So that's the crown jewel of just like none of this makes any.

358
00:32:33,025 --> 00:32:34,025
None of it makes sense.

359
00:32:34,025 --> 00:32:38,025
So we're going to get someone in the comments section can explain to me, then that
would be great.

360
00:32:38,025 --> 00:32:39,025
Because I don't understand.

361
00:32:39,025 --> 00:32:41,025
This is a good segue into the hard fork.

362
00:32:41,025 --> 00:32:43,025
How did the hard fork really come up?

363
00:32:43,025 --> 00:32:50,025
Because I want to finish this point about them, because the question is, like, why,
if the miners were rational?

364
00:32:50,025 --> 00:33:01,025
Maybe I should put a different way, but if the miners were willing to just say, OK,
listen, we can we can cut the Gordian now we can we can activate some of these soft
forks.

365
00:33:01,025 --> 00:33:08,025
You know, we wouldn't need to do the hard fork, but they so that but in the mining
world, it works are way riskier for miners.

366
00:33:08,025 --> 00:33:10,025
Did you tell them that you were thinking about?

367
00:33:11,025 --> 00:33:15,025
Either it's a different it's this hard fork is the same hashing algorithm.

368
00:33:15,025 --> 00:33:17,025
No, I didn't tell any of them.

369
00:33:17,025 --> 00:33:21,025
OK, because that's way riskier for them.

370
00:33:21,025 --> 00:33:23,025
I mean, well, they have to choose which block.

371
00:33:23,025 --> 00:33:25,025
But actually, which is risky.

372
00:33:25,025 --> 00:33:26,025
I actually think it depends.

373
00:33:26,025 --> 00:33:31,025
So if you have a different hashing algorithm, then they can't mine it.

374
00:33:31,025 --> 00:33:32,025
Right.

375
00:33:32,025 --> 00:33:36,025
Because you got this ASIC chip that only does shot 256.

376
00:33:36,025 --> 00:33:39,025
And so if you switch it to something else, they can't mine it.

377
00:33:39,025 --> 00:33:44,025
But if it's you have to make a choice, they have to make a choice, which chain
they're going to mine.

378
00:33:44,025 --> 00:33:49,025
Then all they have to do is say, well, hey, this is the market price multiplied by
the block rule.

379
00:33:49,025 --> 00:33:55,025
This is like how much money I can earn U.S. dollar terms by mining this block over
here.

380
00:33:55,025 --> 00:33:59,025
And here's the cost, which is based on the difficulty over here.

381
00:33:59,025 --> 00:34:03,025
So they have one subtraction that they do and then they do a different subtraction.

382
00:34:03,025 --> 00:34:08,025
So even if the price is much, much lower, it's possible the difficulty over over
there.

383
00:34:08,025 --> 00:34:09,025
It's even lower.

384
00:34:09,025 --> 00:34:11,025
So then they kind of it's just like another option for them.

385
00:34:11,025 --> 00:34:15,025
So they like make the calculation and it's like a little bit.

386
00:34:15,025 --> 00:34:20,025
The soft fork is more of like we are imposing our.

387
00:34:20,025 --> 00:34:24,025
Soft fork on everyone, although that's not how I would describe it, but it's a
little bit more.

388
00:34:24,025 --> 00:34:26,025
The hard fork is more of like a choice thing.

389
00:34:26,025 --> 00:34:31,025
The reason the hard fork is disruptive, I think, is because you have a hold second
coin.

390
00:34:31,025 --> 00:34:33,025
It's going to be a different exchange rate.

391
00:34:33,025 --> 00:34:36,025
You're kind of telling people to leave Bitcoin in a way.

392
00:34:36,025 --> 00:34:38,025
Right. Although I would hold the coin.

393
00:34:39,025 --> 00:34:43,025
If you hold the wrong coin and it dumps, that's a big risk to normal people who
don't.

394
00:34:43,025 --> 00:34:49,025
If you're new to this and which is to say if you joined after Michael Saylor, then
you should just hold both.

395
00:34:49,025 --> 00:34:56,025
All one coin of each and be very suspicious of people who tell you to sell all of
one by the other.

396
00:34:56,025 --> 00:35:01,025
Although, of course, is those you own your coins and you do whatever you want with
them.

397
00:35:01,025 --> 00:35:05,025
All right, guys, taking a quick moment to thank my new sponsors of the show.

398
00:35:05,025 --> 00:35:11,025
First off, the one and only LayerTwo Labs pushing forward research and development of
Drivechains.

399
00:35:11,025 --> 00:35:17,025
Drivechains were first introduced as a soft fork proposal to Bitcoin, a.k.a. BIP300, BIP301.

400
00:35:17,025 --> 00:35:23,025
These BIPs essentially propose a bridging mechanism between Bitcoin and layer twos
that are incentive aligned with miners.

401
00:35:23,025 --> 00:35:27,025
And they've gotten a ton of attention over the last couple of years.

402
00:35:27,025 --> 00:35:31,025
If you're curious about how Drivechains could work in practice, though,

403
00:35:31,025 --> 00:35:35,025
check out LayerTwoLabs.com and download their alternative front end to Bitcoin Core.

404
00:35:35,025 --> 00:35:40,025
It lets you play with Drivechains and see how they actually work in real life.

405
00:35:40,025 --> 00:35:52,025
I'd also like to introduce Hashi, an alternative primitive to traditional L2s that
allows users to execute a wide range of Bitcoin DeFi activities without having to
trust a federated bridge.

406
00:35:52,025 --> 00:36:05,025
With Hashi, Bitcoin is controlled by an MPC wallet that requires a quorum of proof
of stake validators on the SUI network to execute Bitcoin transactions based on the
validity of smart contracts.

407
00:36:05,025 --> 00:36:13,025
At least a third of the staking power of the SUI validators network is required to
execute these MPC mint and redeem transactions,

408
00:36:13,025 --> 00:36:19,025
which is a substantive improvement in trust assumptions relative to other L2s or
sidechain bridges.

409
00:36:19,025 --> 00:36:26,025
Hashi's commercial team is also stacked, including a crew of former builders from
the crypto division of Meta.

410
00:36:26,025 --> 00:36:31,025
I think we're going to see a suite of super competitive Bitcoin DeFi products built
with this protocol,

411
00:36:31,025 --> 00:36:36,025
so definitely check out the Hashi page on sui.io if you're curious.

412
00:36:36,025 --> 00:36:39,025
Last but not least, shout out to Bitbox.

413
00:36:39,025 --> 00:36:45,025
Bitbox is one of the easiest and most simple to use Bitcoin hardware wallets on the
market right now.

414
00:36:45,025 --> 00:36:50,025
If you have friends or family members that you want to make sure stay safe and use
cold storage,

415
00:36:50,025 --> 00:36:56,025
but maybe they're not the most Bitcoin native people in the world, I highly
recommend checking out Bitbox.

416
00:36:56,025 --> 00:37:04,025
They're completely open source, no compromises on security, but they're also super
easy to use, really intuitive UX.

417
00:37:04,025 --> 00:37:10,025
Plus, you can use them with concierge multi-sig services like Unchained, which I'm
personally a big fan of.

418
00:37:10,025 --> 00:37:17,025
If you want to check out their hardware wallets, go to bitbox.swiss and use code
BITCOINRAILS to get a discount.

419
00:37:17,025 --> 00:37:19,025
All right, back to the show.

420
00:37:19,025 --> 00:37:20,025
So let's back up for a second.

421
00:37:20,025 --> 00:37:28,025
So how did you come to the conclusion, you know, you're selling this CUSF software
to miners with like some kind of, let's call it like,

422
00:37:28,025 --> 00:37:33,025
it sounds like sort of like a similar experience where it's like you're only getting
so far with that strategy.

423
00:37:33,025 --> 00:37:37,025
I don't get it because again, there's these conflicts of interest like the mining
pools.

424
00:37:38,025 --> 00:37:44,025
It's easier for them to be specialists and they're the ones who run the software and
they're the ones who assemble the transactions into a block.

425
00:37:44,025 --> 00:37:53,025
And then the other, the regular miner people, they're focused on getting like cheap
power, cheap cooling.

426
00:37:53,025 --> 00:37:55,025
To them, they're not really thinking about the tech that much.

427
00:37:55,025 --> 00:37:56,025
Many of them are not even Bitcoiners.

428
00:37:56,025 --> 00:37:57,025
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

429
00:37:57,025 --> 00:37:59,025
So they just think, see, this is any other mining thing.

430
00:37:59,025 --> 00:38:00,025
Right.

431
00:38:00,025 --> 00:38:05,025
Now it's even weirder because they haven't made this huge capital investment.

432
00:38:05,025 --> 00:38:10,025
But maybe the ASIC chip is a small percentage of that compared to like the cooling
and whatever.

433
00:38:10,025 --> 00:38:13,025
So now maybe they want to pivot to AI.

434
00:38:13,025 --> 00:38:21,025
The mining pools, they are terrified of losing because a mining pool mostly owns its
brand.

435
00:38:21,025 --> 00:38:22,025
That's its main asset.

436
00:38:22,025 --> 00:38:25,025
Yeah, they don't always lose users, basically.

437
00:38:25,025 --> 00:38:26,025
Right.

438
00:38:26,025 --> 00:38:34,025
The individual hashers, people with the ASIC chips, they may be invested like
millions of dollars.

439
00:38:34,025 --> 00:38:35,025
Right.

440
00:38:35,025 --> 00:38:41,025
And they can point their hash rate at a different pool, like at the drop of a hat.

441
00:38:41,025 --> 00:38:46,025
Oh, hard fork, so, so, so, so, so scary and risky for pools in particular, I would
imagine.

442
00:38:46,025 --> 00:38:48,025
Well, it's interesting.

443
00:38:48,025 --> 00:38:53,025
I'm still just trying to get at the idea of like, OK, the pools.

444
00:38:53,025 --> 00:38:57,025
They also like if the pools compete against other pools.

445
00:38:57,025 --> 00:38:58,025
Mm hmm.

446
00:38:58,025 --> 00:39:03,025
If something would save Bitcoin, they may not actually care because think about it.

447
00:39:03,025 --> 00:39:08,025
If maybe you're a pool and you're worried about, OK, I only have I have only got 10
percent of the market or something.

448
00:39:08,025 --> 00:39:09,025
Your your luck.

449
00:39:09,025 --> 00:39:10,025
So you have 5 percent.

450
00:39:10,025 --> 00:39:14,025
You're thinking, how do I get something on the other pool?

451
00:39:14,025 --> 00:39:15,025
But here's the thing.

452
00:39:15,025 --> 00:39:18,025
If I say, oh, 51 percent runs this, we all get it.

453
00:39:18,025 --> 00:39:23,025
Then there's no benefit to like there's no specific benefit to Foundry or whatever.

454
00:39:23,025 --> 00:39:25,025
Because you're not getting any more user there.

455
00:39:25,025 --> 00:39:27,025
You're you're not outperforming anyone.

456
00:39:27,025 --> 00:39:29,025
Same percentage or whatever it is.

457
00:39:29,025 --> 00:39:31,025
Yeah, it doesn't really matter.

458
00:39:31,025 --> 00:39:38,025
So there are other things you could do, because like you say, we're going to get a
51 percent coalition and we're going to stomp out the other minor.

459
00:39:38,025 --> 00:39:42,025
But this is very unstable for reasons I could explain.

460
00:39:42,025 --> 00:39:45,025
This is called the divide a dollar game in games theory.

461
00:39:45,025 --> 00:39:47,025
Whenever there's a pie chart, you can break out this.

462
00:39:47,025 --> 00:39:52,025
I'm not going to give up this question, which is like, what was the moment where you
were like, OK, I'm doing this now.

463
00:39:52,025 --> 00:39:53,025
We're going to hard work.

464
00:39:53,025 --> 00:39:54,025
We're doing it.

465
00:39:54,025 --> 00:39:55,025
Let's go.

466
00:39:55,025 --> 00:39:57,025
Well, it was a gradual process because.

467
00:39:57,025 --> 00:40:10,025
But really, I was I was concerned even as early as scaling one, which was in
September 2015, which is even before I came up with Drivechain, because I was really
worried, like, OK, this is how we're going to resolve this block size dispute.

468
00:40:10,025 --> 00:40:14,025
And it did seem like people were mostly just concerned with like, how can I one up
the other side?

469
00:40:14,025 --> 00:40:16,025
Or I already know that I'm right.

470
00:40:16,025 --> 00:40:18,025
And why am I even here talking to these other?

471
00:40:18,025 --> 00:40:21,025
And it did seem very immature the whole time.

472
00:40:21,025 --> 00:40:22,025
And so even.

473
00:40:22,025 --> 00:40:26,025
But of course, I thought I always thought someone would do sidechains.

474
00:40:26,025 --> 00:40:30,025
Maybe Blockstream would actually ship such a technology.

475
00:40:30,025 --> 00:40:31,025
I know it's funny.

476
00:40:31,025 --> 00:40:32,025
I never did.

477
00:40:32,025 --> 00:40:33,025
It is funny.

478
00:40:33,025 --> 00:40:34,025
I don't even mean to laugh.

479
00:40:34,025 --> 00:40:36,025
It's just the way you say it makes me laugh.

480
00:40:36,025 --> 00:40:38,025
I thought like, you know, I thought maybe I did see you on Twitter.

481
00:40:38,025 --> 00:40:39,025
Be like, do they do things?

482
00:40:39,025 --> 00:40:40,025
It's funny.

483
00:40:40,025 --> 00:40:42,025
Like, you know, OK, maybe the lightning network would work.

484
00:40:42,025 --> 00:40:46,025
Or maybe another thing is I was a huge skeptic of Bitcoin cash.

485
00:40:46,025 --> 00:40:52,025
But, you know, it was like maybe like, you know, someone would just like maybe that
would just work.

486
00:40:52,025 --> 00:41:03,025
And it would be like this would be the the configuration that works for eight
billion people, because I have a kind of quirky belief that we have to we have to
get to eight billion people.

487
00:41:03,025 --> 00:41:07,025
We have to get to 100 percent of the earth or like 100 percent of the Internet
users.

488
00:41:08,025 --> 00:41:10,025
We have to get to that eventually.

489
00:41:10,025 --> 00:41:16,025
So if we're not running towards that as fast as we can, we might just kill the whole
project.

490
00:41:16,025 --> 00:41:17,025
Can you share why?

491
00:41:17,025 --> 00:41:20,025
Because I don't necessarily think that all Bitcoiners even think that.

492
00:41:20,025 --> 00:41:21,025
I know.

493
00:41:21,025 --> 00:41:22,025
I think a lot of people don't.

494
00:41:22,025 --> 00:41:26,025
But it's to me, it's critical that eight billion people are using Bitcoin on chain.

495
00:41:26,025 --> 00:41:27,025
Right.

496
00:41:27,025 --> 00:41:29,025
Specifically, that that's really hard to say.

497
00:41:29,025 --> 00:41:34,025
It's not necessarily on chain, but I do think since we have the custodial way,
that's fair.

498
00:41:34,025 --> 00:41:35,025
Yes, right.

499
00:41:35,025 --> 00:41:37,025
They should be paying mining transaction fees.

500
00:41:37,025 --> 00:41:38,025
Why is that?

501
00:41:38,025 --> 00:41:40,025
Is that important because of the fee market?

502
00:41:40,025 --> 00:41:41,025
Is that the core?

503
00:41:41,025 --> 00:41:43,025
No, I really just see it as like.

504
00:41:45,025 --> 00:41:52,025
It's kind of like a capture the flag game or like a commanding heights, like in the
military, there's like this hill in the middle of the game.

505
00:41:52,025 --> 00:42:00,025
Everyone, you know, we all like spawn around the edge and there's a hill in the
middle because it's a strong network effects with money.

506
00:42:00,025 --> 00:42:06,025
I mean, if someone gets if someone out there gets to eight billion users with like
WeChat pay or something or Venmo.

507
00:42:06,025 --> 00:42:10,025
But you don't think network effects extend to like custodial solutions, for
instance.

508
00:42:10,025 --> 00:42:13,025
I mean, like everything has network effects.

509
00:42:13,025 --> 00:42:17,025
And also everything has a lot of some some anti network effects.

510
00:42:17,025 --> 00:42:20,025
The custodial solutions are having major network effects, arguably.

511
00:42:20,025 --> 00:42:22,025
Right. I mean, most people use custodial.

512
00:42:22,025 --> 00:42:24,025
Well, even for Bitcoin, I mean.

513
00:42:24,025 --> 00:42:26,025
Yes, that's absolutely right.

514
00:42:26,025 --> 00:42:38,025
So you think that then that people being able to use not even being able to, but
actually using Bitcoin in a self custodial way for payments is important for
ultimately Bitcoin's network effects over time?

515
00:42:38,025 --> 00:42:46,025
Let's just imagine that there was a parallel community that just didn't make this
mistake, but it's the same 21 million Bitcoin, the same same fixed supply.

516
00:42:46,025 --> 00:42:47,025
It's got keys.

517
00:42:47,025 --> 00:42:50,025
You know, you you have like a private key that controls your wallet.

518
00:42:50,025 --> 00:42:54,025
It's not like you log in with like an email and a password.

519
00:42:54,025 --> 00:43:02,025
So you have something that's just very similar to Bitcoin that's sprinting towards,
you know, it's trying to take capture the hill as quickly as possible.

520
00:43:02,025 --> 00:43:08,025
There's this idea in the military, like the commanding heights are like the thing.

521
00:43:08,025 --> 00:43:12,025
Once you if you take this, it will be too difficult for anyone.

522
00:43:12,025 --> 00:43:15,025
You know, it'll just lead to like a loss of life.

523
00:43:15,025 --> 00:43:24,025
Once you capture like the fortress or like, you know, you have the castle and if you
can capture it, then everyone else will just surrender.

524
00:43:24,025 --> 00:43:31,025
And so I'm imagining the castle like a number of users, like it's like it's like
three point nine billion users or something.

525
00:43:31,025 --> 00:43:36,025
Once you get to that, everyone will just say this is the future.

526
00:43:36,025 --> 00:43:39,025
And they want no one's going to care about, you know what I mean?

527
00:43:39,025 --> 00:43:42,025
Like, let's say hypothetically, for whatever reason, just pick anything.

528
00:43:42,025 --> 00:43:46,025
I want to pick something that probably no one would care about, like Dogecoin or
something.

529
00:43:46,025 --> 00:43:53,025
Imagine Dogecoin is actually really not in a joke way being used by three point nine
billion people.

530
00:43:53,025 --> 00:43:59,025
And they actually are like, oh, and when you go to the supermarket in India, you
know, people are paying with Dogecoin or something.

531
00:43:59,025 --> 00:44:00,025
No one's at that certain point.

532
00:44:00,025 --> 00:44:02,025
No one's going to care about like that.

533
00:44:03,025 --> 00:44:08,025
One used to be the number two coin or that that Monero was the first to add ring.

534
00:44:08,025 --> 00:44:09,025
No one's going to care about any of that.

535
00:44:09,025 --> 00:44:13,025
It's all just going to be a snowballing effect and everything else will go to zero.

536
00:44:13,025 --> 00:44:15,025
I think I'll be in some museum somewhere.

537
00:44:15,025 --> 00:44:16,025
I completely agree with you.

538
00:44:16,025 --> 00:44:19,025
And this is something actually Robin Linus and I talk about a lot.

539
00:44:19,025 --> 00:44:31,025
He's banging the drum on this, but I'm curious if you could summarize in a sentence
why it's important that let's call it three point nine or this sort of critical mass
of people be using Bitcoin specifically self-custodially and paying fees.

540
00:44:31,025 --> 00:44:38,025
Rather than, you know, three point nine billion, you know, kind of using exchanges
or custodians or whatever.

541
00:44:38,025 --> 00:44:42,025
We could skate by with the custodians, but it's just it's too easy.

542
00:44:42,025 --> 00:44:43,025
You know what I mean?

543
00:44:43,025 --> 00:44:44,025
It's like a crutch.

544
00:44:44,025 --> 00:44:50,025
And it's like I think it leads to like a very serious problem down the road.

545
00:44:50,025 --> 00:44:54,025
Like if you have a custodian, it means all the money's in one place.

546
00:44:54,025 --> 00:44:55,025
It could be hacked.

547
00:44:55,025 --> 00:44:56,025
It could be mismanaged.

548
00:44:56,025 --> 00:44:58,025
This is how you get FTX, Mt.

549
00:44:59,025 --> 00:45:01,025
And that's how you lose adoption ultimately.

550
00:45:01,025 --> 00:45:02,025
That's how network effects are reversed.

551
00:45:02,025 --> 00:45:03,025
People are not going to like that.

552
00:45:03,025 --> 00:45:14,025
And that is kind of like, you know, why even do any of this if we wanted to do like,
you know, if it's just going to be custodial and you just log in with your phone
number or your email and your password.

553
00:45:14,025 --> 00:45:15,025
What's the point?

554
00:45:15,025 --> 00:45:16,025
Well, you don't need proof of work.

555
00:45:16,025 --> 00:45:17,025
You don't need the blockchain.

556
00:45:17,025 --> 00:45:18,025
You don't need any of this stuff.

557
00:45:18,025 --> 00:45:27,025
So it's kind of like it's a depressing question to get in a way because it's kind of
like maybe we don't need any of this stuff.

558
00:45:27,025 --> 00:45:28,025
But then that begs the question.

559
00:45:28,025 --> 00:45:29,025
Oh, okay.

560
00:45:29,025 --> 00:45:31,025
But most users are doing it that way.

561
00:45:31,025 --> 00:45:32,025
People try to have a thing.

562
00:45:32,025 --> 00:45:36,025
I think this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where lightning doesn't work.

563
00:45:36,025 --> 00:45:42,025
And people don't want to say people they know that there's something real at the
core of Bitcoin.

564
00:45:42,025 --> 00:45:43,025
There is something good.

565
00:45:44,025 --> 00:45:48,025
And they don't want to say this sucks just because lightning doesn't work.

566
00:45:48,025 --> 00:45:51,025
And so then they're like, where does that leave them?

567
00:45:51,025 --> 00:45:55,025
They just say, well, I use lightning, but it's custodial lightning.

568
00:45:55,025 --> 00:45:56,025
But whatever.

569
00:45:56,025 --> 00:45:57,025
They make their peace with it somehow.

570
00:45:57,025 --> 00:46:00,025
Whereas if they had something.

571
00:46:00,025 --> 00:46:04,025
Non custodial that worked, they might go for that, I think.

572
00:46:05,025 --> 00:46:14,025
So you would defend that you think that the reason why Bitcoin has not been adopted,
essentially for the payments use case, right, is because the tech doesn't work?

573
00:46:14,025 --> 00:46:15,025
Yes.

574
00:46:15,025 --> 00:46:18,025
I think a lot of people say there's no demand.

575
00:46:18,025 --> 00:46:22,025
I think this is, again, like these things are all related.

576
00:46:22,025 --> 00:46:23,025
So it's very hard to figure out.

577
00:46:23,025 --> 00:46:25,025
Anyone could make a mistake, including me.

578
00:46:26,025 --> 00:46:31,025
But I think I remember what it was like in like 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015.

579
00:46:31,025 --> 00:46:34,025
There was like a geometric increase in adoption.

580
00:46:34,025 --> 00:46:36,025
And then we hit the scaling war.

581
00:46:36,025 --> 00:46:39,025
And I think the large blockers were wrong in the scaling war.

582
00:46:39,025 --> 00:46:45,025
And I've gone on many Bitcoin Cash podcasts and I've told them they're wrong to
their face and why.

583
00:46:45,025 --> 00:46:50,025
And I made giant lists of things they should do differently and whatever.

584
00:46:51,025 --> 00:46:54,025
So I think they were wrong.

585
00:46:54,025 --> 00:47:00,025
But nonetheless, I think it's a historical fact that there was huge adoption,
merchant adoption.

586
00:47:00,025 --> 00:47:05,025
And people were more positive about this pre-block size war.

587
00:47:05,025 --> 00:47:10,025
And then after the block size war, no one wanted to be like accused of being a large
blocker.

588
00:47:10,025 --> 00:47:14,025
So everyone sort of stopped talking about adoption.

589
00:47:14,025 --> 00:47:17,025
People would say, oh, you're like a Roger Ver or something.

590
00:47:17,025 --> 00:47:19,025
As if that was the worst thing in the world.

591
00:47:19,025 --> 00:47:20,025
Four letter word.

592
00:47:20,025 --> 00:47:25,025
And then it would be like, oh, but how are we going to buy coffee?

593
00:47:25,025 --> 00:47:27,025
And then people would make fun of you and stuff like that.

594
00:47:27,025 --> 00:47:30,025
All this stuff has a lot of nuance.

595
00:47:30,025 --> 00:47:37,025
But yeah, this is why if there are no users, it does become just like a Ponzi
scheme.

596
00:47:37,025 --> 00:47:40,025
It does become like a greater fool theory.

597
00:47:40,025 --> 00:47:41,025
Right? Doesn't it?

598
00:47:41,025 --> 00:47:45,025
I mean, because at the end of the day, if you think about it.

599
00:47:45,025 --> 00:47:49,025
Because it's not really executing on its purpose of being like permissionless money
at that point.

600
00:47:49,025 --> 00:47:52,025
I think there's a little more to it than that, which is like imagine out of it.

601
00:47:52,025 --> 00:47:55,025
Let's say we ranked all eight billion people in the world.

602
00:47:55,025 --> 00:48:01,025
And we pick like the last hundred people to adopt Bitcoin, like on the timeline.

603
00:48:01,025 --> 00:48:04,025
They can't get an ROI.

604
00:48:04,025 --> 00:48:06,025
You know what I mean?

605
00:48:06,025 --> 00:48:12,025
They have the normal ROI that you get from the fact that world GDP is growing and
the supply is fixed.

606
00:48:12,025 --> 00:48:13,025
But everyone gets that.

607
00:48:13,025 --> 00:48:18,025
And maybe the ratio of broad money to the ratio of GDP is that also is changing over
time.

608
00:48:18,025 --> 00:48:20,025
But every single person gets that.

609
00:48:20,025 --> 00:48:21,025
So, you see what I mean?

610
00:48:21,025 --> 00:48:26,025
The last guy to adopt Bitcoin, number eight billion and four or something.

611
00:48:26,025 --> 00:48:29,025
They can't get an ROI out of it.

612
00:48:29,025 --> 00:48:33,025
So, they had to adopt because everyone around them did and they need to use it for
payments.

613
00:48:33,025 --> 00:48:34,025
You know what I mean?

614
00:48:34,025 --> 00:48:36,025
So, we can kind of color these people.

615
00:48:36,025 --> 00:48:37,025
We can highlight them.

616
00:48:37,025 --> 00:48:39,025
These are the real users.

617
00:48:39,025 --> 00:48:41,025
They adopted only.

618
00:48:41,025 --> 00:48:43,025
They avoided investing.

619
00:48:43,025 --> 00:48:46,025
And they're only adopting to be a user.

620
00:48:46,025 --> 00:48:53,025
But you can flip it around and say, oh, what about like Hal Finney, like the first
user, but like the first adopter, really.

621
00:48:53,025 --> 00:48:55,025
Or the early investors in Bitcoin.

622
00:48:55,025 --> 00:49:01,025
The early people in Bitcoin, they would buy it thinking this will transform.

623
00:49:01,025 --> 00:49:03,025
I mean there were some people using it on Silk Road, of course.

624
00:49:03,025 --> 00:49:04,025
Of course.

625
00:49:04,025 --> 00:49:05,025
To buy illegal drugs.

626
00:49:05,025 --> 00:49:06,025
But, you know, and there's a lot.

627
00:49:06,025 --> 00:49:07,025
Clear market demand.

628
00:49:07,025 --> 00:49:12,025
There was ransomware and there was all this other weird stuff happening, which was,
you know, very interesting to see.

629
00:49:12,025 --> 00:49:17,025
And it was very interesting to see that it worked in a real world context of like
drug addicts could get this to work.

630
00:49:17,025 --> 00:49:18,025
You know what I mean?

631
00:49:18,025 --> 00:49:20,025
Because you kind of think like, will this have product market fit?

632
00:49:20,025 --> 00:49:24,025
Oh, there's a bunch of like heroin addicts who use it like every week.

633
00:49:24,025 --> 00:49:28,025
And you're kind of like, oh, that is striking if you think about it.

634
00:49:28,025 --> 00:49:34,025
But the early adopters, they can buy hoping for a number go up.

635
00:49:34,025 --> 00:49:41,025
But at a certain point, these lines kind of must meet and must cross.

636
00:49:41,025 --> 00:49:45,025
Where all the later people, they are not getting an ROI.

637
00:49:45,025 --> 00:49:49,025
So you have to get the ROI first and then you need the last people to adopt.

638
00:49:49,025 --> 00:49:52,025
And if you can't pull that off, then there's no reason for the ROI to exist in the
first place.

639
00:49:52,025 --> 00:49:53,025
It does become.

640
00:49:53,596 --> 00:49:54,396
Just a Ponzi scheme, and it does become greater fool theory.

641
00:49:54,396 --> 00:49:56,396
OK, so this is your core why.

642
00:49:56,396 --> 00:50:01,396
Ultimately, I think, yeah, like we will die if we don't aggressively pursue growth.

643
00:50:01,396 --> 00:50:02,596
I think you're either growing or dying.

644
00:50:02,596 --> 00:50:05,196
OK, so so you so you make this decision.

645
00:50:05,196 --> 00:50:06,396
You're moving forward.

646
00:50:06,396 --> 00:50:07,796
You set up this website.

647
00:50:07,796 --> 00:50:09,796
I heard these rumblings at ETH Denver.

648
00:50:09,796 --> 00:50:15,196
Paul's going to fork like with almost this like smirk on the face of these people
giving me this intel.

649
00:50:15,196 --> 00:50:16,596
And everyone was very proud.

650
00:50:16,596 --> 00:50:21,196
Everyone who told me was very proud, like I have a secret to tell you, which is
great marketing for you.

651
00:50:21,196 --> 00:50:24,796
You did a very good little underground talking about it.

652
00:50:24,796 --> 00:50:26,196
I said, keep it secret.

653
00:50:26,196 --> 00:50:27,596
Great underground.

654
00:50:27,596 --> 00:50:29,196
I thought it was great underground marketing.

655
00:50:29,196 --> 00:50:33,596
Personally, it's like, wow, everyone feels special that they have a secret that, you
know, I think that does help.

656
00:50:33,596 --> 00:50:34,396
It does.

657
00:50:34,396 --> 00:50:35,196
It does.

658
00:50:35,196 --> 00:50:36,596
And you raise money out of this.

659
00:50:36,596 --> 00:50:38,196
OK, so let's talk about this.

660
00:50:38,196 --> 00:50:40,996
So so so notably, right?

661
00:50:40,996 --> 00:50:42,196
You is it?

662
00:50:42,196 --> 00:50:44,196
I mean, this is a very, very important thing.

663
00:50:44,996 --> 00:50:46,196
You is it?

664
00:50:46,196 --> 00:50:47,196
I mean, there is not.

665
00:50:47,196 --> 00:50:47,996
Is it pre mining?

666
00:50:47,996 --> 00:50:50,196
Like, how would you describe this is a very good.

667
00:50:50,196 --> 00:50:52,196
This will be a very controversial decision.

668
00:50:52,196 --> 00:50:59,596
This is critical, but it's very important to the logic of the project, which is
that, yeah, we're taking this is funny.

669
00:50:59,596 --> 00:51:03,796
I even this idea long predates the quantum drama.

670
00:51:03,796 --> 00:51:04,596
So this is nothing to do.

671
00:51:04,596 --> 00:51:06,596
It's just a weird coincidence that everyone's talking about.

672
00:51:06,596 --> 00:51:11,796
Oh, Satoshi's coins and they're they're they're not in paid to pub key hash.

673
00:51:11,796 --> 00:51:12,696
So they are vulnerable.

674
00:51:12,696 --> 00:51:14,096
They're extra vulnerable to quantum.

675
00:51:14,096 --> 00:51:15,096
It's a complete coincidence.

676
00:51:15,096 --> 00:51:17,996
But yeah, we're taking half, probably less than half.

677
00:51:17,996 --> 00:51:24,496
Half of Satoshi's Satoshi's coins in the hard fork and to seed the new group of.

678
00:51:24,496 --> 00:51:32,996
So it's five hundred thousand coins in total that you are basically siphoning off of
this fork to effectively pre-sell to investors.

679
00:51:32,996 --> 00:51:38,196
Yeah, there is a he has a stash of one point one ish million coins.

680
00:51:38,196 --> 00:51:40,196
And there's this thing that Potosi pattern.

681
00:51:40,196 --> 00:51:41,396
It's very interesting.

682
00:51:41,396 --> 00:51:43,996
Even when I was first looking into it, I was very skeptical.

683
00:51:43,996 --> 00:51:47,096
But actually, this research on this is fascinating.

684
00:51:47,096 --> 00:51:48,896
It's like it's different, extra non-slope.

685
00:51:48,896 --> 00:51:52,196
And he's shut the miner off every five minutes to give everyone else a chance to
mine.

686
00:51:52,196 --> 00:51:56,296
It's really interesting stuff that people could could look into if they want.

687
00:51:56,296 --> 00:51:58,796
Sergio Lerner, I think, did that research, right?

688
00:51:58,796 --> 00:52:01,296
And it's really good show and talked about it.

689
00:52:01,296 --> 00:52:02,296
I'll link to that as well.

690
00:52:02,296 --> 00:52:08,196
Not only is it really good, but it's some of the most interesting research I've ever
read, like on any topic.

691
00:52:08,196 --> 00:52:09,096
It's very bizarre.

692
00:52:09,096 --> 00:52:12,096
Like the methodology he used to figure all this stuff out.

693
00:52:12,096 --> 00:52:16,696
It's very like satisfying for the like Satoshi is Jesus people.

694
00:52:16,696 --> 00:52:22,196
I think like it's very like kind of mathematically like beautiful and like elegant.

695
00:52:22,196 --> 00:52:27,796
He's discovered this set of coins that have many, many overlapping quirks.

696
00:52:27,796 --> 00:52:31,396
But one of which is that none of them have ever been spent.

697
00:52:31,396 --> 00:52:34,896
So that's also like points to his.

698
00:52:34,896 --> 00:52:36,096
Okay, so the Potosi pattern.

699
00:52:36,096 --> 00:52:41,096
So we kind of know we have very strong reason to believe which coins were Satoshi's
coins.

700
00:52:41,096 --> 00:52:44,796
And in this fork, you are taking half of those essentially.

701
00:52:44,796 --> 00:52:46,796
And you're pre-selling them to investors.

702
00:52:46,796 --> 00:52:55,896
And you've now pre-sold in this sort of underground password-protected website that
I heard rumblings about at ETH Denver that everyone was so proud.

703
00:52:55,896 --> 00:52:57,096
Oh, I'll give you the password.

704
00:52:57,096 --> 00:52:57,696
Wink, wink.

705
00:52:57,696 --> 00:53:00,596
Like this was the underground alpha.

706
00:53:00,596 --> 00:53:02,896
It was not supposed to be a wink, wink.

707
00:53:02,896 --> 00:53:04,296
I mean it was great marketing for you, Paul.

708
00:53:04,296 --> 00:53:05,996
I mean, I thought that you did it on purpose.

709
00:53:05,996 --> 00:53:06,996
No, I definitely did not.

710
00:53:06,996 --> 00:53:07,896
But that's fine.

711
00:53:07,896 --> 00:53:09,196
I knew people would find out.

712
00:53:09,196 --> 00:53:10,096
It worked for you.

713
00:53:10,096 --> 00:53:12,996
Everyone, I had like several people come to me.

714
00:53:12,996 --> 00:53:13,596
Wink, wink.

715
00:53:13,596 --> 00:53:16,296
Oh my gosh, I have gossip for you.

716
00:53:16,296 --> 00:53:17,496
I have gossip for you.

717
00:53:17,496 --> 00:53:18,396
Paul's going to fork.

718
00:53:18,396 --> 00:53:19,196
And it's a secret.

719
00:53:19,196 --> 00:53:20,496
And you can't tell anyone.

720
00:53:20,496 --> 00:53:22,896
And here's this password-protected website.

721
00:53:22,896 --> 00:53:26,496
If you want to buy the pre-mined coins, go ahead.

722
00:53:26,496 --> 00:53:27,196
Well, there you go.

723
00:53:27,196 --> 00:53:32,296
Yeah, we're like currently we're like 300 something thousand.

724
00:53:32,296 --> 00:53:32,696
Yeah, yeah.

725
00:53:32,696 --> 00:53:35,396
I think that that's about where you're at as of I checked this morning.

726
00:53:35,496 --> 00:53:39,296
It was almost, not quite, but almost $300,000 worth.

727
00:53:39,296 --> 00:53:40,696
I haven't updated it in like a few.

728
00:53:40,696 --> 00:53:42,796
I say, I think I put the date on it when I update it.

729
00:53:42,796 --> 00:53:45,696
Oh no, wait, $300,000 or 300,000 coins.

730
00:53:45,696 --> 00:53:46,596
300,000 coins.

731
00:53:46,596 --> 00:53:47,696
It's 300,000 coins.

732
00:53:47,696 --> 00:53:49,196
Ish, a little bit more, yeah.

733
00:53:49,196 --> 00:53:50,196
Yeah, so and what is that?

734
00:53:50,196 --> 00:53:51,496
For what, how much were you selling them for?

735
00:53:51,496 --> 00:53:53,896
So you made like what, two and a half million dollars off of that?

736
00:53:53,896 --> 00:53:54,396
They were different.

737
00:53:54,396 --> 00:53:59,496
When I started, I did some even when I was starting LayerTwo Labs in December of
2022.

738
00:53:59,496 --> 00:54:00,296
Okay.

739
00:54:00,296 --> 00:54:01,596
Yeah, so what was the sale price?

740
00:54:01,596 --> 00:54:03,196
It was a single sale price for everyone.

741
00:54:03,196 --> 00:54:09,996
Yeah, it was, it's kind of complicated because it involves other, but basically it
was $21 a coin.

742
00:54:09,996 --> 00:54:10,496
Essentially.

743
00:54:10,496 --> 00:54:12,396
Back then and now it's like $30 a coin.

744
00:54:12,396 --> 00:54:14,596
Okay, so there's like tranches depending on.

745
00:54:14,596 --> 00:54:15,696
You got the tranche.

746
00:54:15,696 --> 00:54:19,696
You got the early investor discount and now it's $30.

747
00:54:19,696 --> 00:54:22,296
Is it open to the public now or are you going to remove the password?

748
00:54:22,296 --> 00:54:25,396
I think it cannot be because there's rules about that kind of thing.

749
00:54:25,396 --> 00:54:27,696
People don't like that, solicitation rules.

750
00:54:27,796 --> 00:54:33,496
So that was partially why I think like maybe people outside the U.S.

751
00:54:33,496 --> 00:54:35,996
can, but I may even have to close it down as of the announcement.

752
00:54:35,996 --> 00:54:37,496
I'm not exactly sure how.

753
00:54:37,496 --> 00:54:40,596
You had to password protect it for like because you can't tell.

754
00:54:40,596 --> 00:54:49,996
There are numerous overlapping legal, ethical, and strategic reasons for keeping it
more secret.

755
00:54:49,996 --> 00:54:55,796
I think though, like who knows to what extent, like all this stuff may have even
changed too.

756
00:54:55,896 --> 00:54:57,696
With the Trump administration also.

757
00:54:57,696 --> 00:55:00,996
I have no idea and I'm not really interested in that personally.

758
00:55:00,996 --> 00:55:06,296
I do think it does become kind of a seedy kind of thing.

759
00:55:06,296 --> 00:55:10,196
Sometimes when people are too easy to like push the coin on the public.

760
00:55:10,196 --> 00:55:16,196
So I do understand why some of our laws try to discourage that.

761
00:55:16,196 --> 00:55:18,596
Although it's also like very, because you have to look at it.

762
00:55:18,596 --> 00:55:19,996
There's a couple different ways of looking at it.

763
00:55:19,996 --> 00:55:24,196
Like one way is it will become a publicly tradable hard fork.

764
00:55:24,196 --> 00:55:31,896
Like at the moment it is, that's like kind of like the IPO in a way and that will be
like total like mayhem.

765
00:55:31,896 --> 00:55:32,296
You know what I mean?

766
00:55:32,296 --> 00:55:33,896
I'm talking about when the fork actually happens.

767
00:55:33,896 --> 00:55:35,396
When the fork actually happens.

768
00:55:35,396 --> 00:55:36,996
Shouldn't we ramp it up or something?

769
00:55:36,996 --> 00:55:37,696
Like, I don't know.

770
00:55:37,696 --> 00:55:38,896
There's a lot of thoughts on that.

771
00:55:38,896 --> 00:55:42,296
I'm not sure, but those are the answers to the question you asked.

772
00:55:42,296 --> 00:55:46,896
Well, I'm curious also like so, okay, but the sort of pre-mining thing.

773
00:55:46,896 --> 00:55:52,396
I think, do you think that that's equally controversial as the fork itself?

774
00:55:52,496 --> 00:55:52,796
Okay.

775
00:55:52,796 --> 00:55:53,296
Yeah.

776
00:55:53,296 --> 00:55:53,596
Okay.

777
00:55:53,596 --> 00:55:54,196
So here's the thing.

778
00:55:54,196 --> 00:55:56,396
And how do you make the decision to do the pre-mining?

779
00:55:56,396 --> 00:55:57,596
Is it just, I just want to raise money?

780
00:55:57,596 --> 00:56:02,296
No, this is not, but I can understand why people will hate this at first.

781
00:56:02,296 --> 00:56:09,296
And even when I first, someone suggested it to me a long time ago and I hated it
myself for like maybe like 30 to 60 days.

782
00:56:09,296 --> 00:56:10,896
You were like, no, I'm not going to pre-mine.

783
00:56:10,896 --> 00:56:13,196
It was kind of like, what do you do instead?

784
00:56:13,196 --> 00:56:15,796
Do the pure fork, right?

785
00:56:15,796 --> 00:56:21,396
But it has as many disadvantages that could, you know, I'll get into this and maybe
if you're interested.

786
00:56:21,496 --> 00:56:24,096
But there's like the pure, don't change anything at all.

787
00:56:24,096 --> 00:56:25,796
Some people said, just do the pre-mine.

788
00:56:25,796 --> 00:56:30,096
Some people said, switch the mining algorithm to something that only you know what
it's going to be.

789
00:56:30,096 --> 00:56:32,996
And then do the pure fork and try to mine like early on.

790
00:56:32,996 --> 00:56:34,996
You'll still get a few thousand blocks.

791
00:56:34,996 --> 00:56:35,596
Exactly.

792
00:56:35,896 --> 00:56:36,196
Right.

793
00:56:36,196 --> 00:56:39,496
So, you know, some people said 22 million coins instead of 21 million coins.

794
00:56:39,496 --> 00:56:39,896
You know what?

795
00:56:39,896 --> 00:56:40,696
Like stuff like that.

796
00:56:41,096 --> 00:56:43,796
Though all these things have a lot of disadvantages.

797
00:56:44,296 --> 00:56:50,396
Probably a lot of people will be saying, oh, why, why have any, why have any selfish
angle of it at all?

798
00:56:50,696 --> 00:56:52,096
But one reason why.

799
00:56:53,096 --> 00:56:58,196
I would imagine that's the clear criticism is like, why are you even taking money at
all?

800
00:56:58,196 --> 00:56:58,496
Yeah.

801
00:56:58,896 --> 00:57:05,296
I think there are a lot of reasons why this idea, which at first I understand the
vibes are terrible.

802
00:57:05,296 --> 00:57:09,396
But it's actually, this is what's logically required.

803
00:57:09,396 --> 00:57:11,496
Not only a good idea, but logically required.

804
00:57:11,496 --> 00:57:18,996
So the first thing to say is, we have a completely different version that doesn't
take any coins or wasn't, you know,

805
00:57:18,996 --> 00:57:25,296
airdrop or half airdrop, you know, the coins in any different way where everyone
gets exactly what they want.

806
00:57:25,296 --> 00:57:29,096
And that's BIP300, you know, that's already the version that's free.

807
00:57:29,696 --> 00:57:31,796
So you can already just activate it and do it.

808
00:57:31,796 --> 00:57:34,596
You know, like that's the free version is already out there.

809
00:57:34,996 --> 00:57:36,696
And, you know, it's fully available.

810
00:57:36,696 --> 00:57:43,096
And you do say on your website, if BIP300, BIP301 were to be activated, you would
like shut this down.

811
00:57:43,496 --> 00:57:49,496
Yeah, it's not so much that I would even, I think that would have to happen because.

812
00:57:51,196 --> 00:57:59,496
That's the other funny thing is people are going to think like this is some kind of
like publicity stunt to activate BIP300, which is funny, but so no one will know
what to believe.

813
00:57:59,496 --> 00:58:01,796
But that's, I think, how you know that you're onto something big.

814
00:58:02,396 --> 00:58:05,996
But it's like, how could the hard fork really succeed?

815
00:58:06,896 --> 00:58:08,896
It feels like a political statement.

816
00:58:08,996 --> 00:58:22,296
Like there is a part of me that's like wants to ask you or has like thought
earnestly, like how serious is this in terms of like, how seriously are you trying
to outcompete Bitcoin versus just like make a political statement?

817
00:58:22,296 --> 00:58:27,796
I think you have to, to be viable, you have to try as hard as possible to compete.

818
00:58:28,996 --> 00:58:30,396
So I think it's required.

819
00:58:30,396 --> 00:58:32,296
But is your sort of take on this?

820
00:58:32,296 --> 00:58:44,296
Is that even if I don't overtake Bitcoin, you know, in like a like a meaningful
monetary way, I've still done something for the good of the world by making this
statement?

821
00:58:44,496 --> 00:58:50,796
There are numerous like kind of like fallback benefits, you might say, or something
like that, which is like one.

822
00:58:50,796 --> 00:58:51,796
Bailing forward.

823
00:58:51,796 --> 00:58:55,596
Yeah, people deserve just to have a conversation about this.

824
00:58:55,596 --> 00:58:57,496
Like is Bitcoin ossified?

825
00:58:57,496 --> 00:58:58,896
What should we actually do?

826
00:59:00,996 --> 00:59:02,296
Like, should we just do nothing?

827
00:59:02,296 --> 00:59:06,896
Or should and then like does should Bitcoin have more competition?

828
00:59:07,096 --> 00:59:11,696
It's like BIP300 itself sets up this arena of the L2s that all compete.

829
00:59:12,996 --> 00:59:17,496
But right now there aren't a lot of viable competitors to Bitcoin at all.

830
00:59:17,496 --> 00:59:18,196
Bitcoin itself.

831
00:59:18,196 --> 00:59:23,896
It's like Ethereum and then like some other, you know, there is Bitcoin Cash, but
it's like very small.

832
00:59:23,996 --> 00:59:31,696
And so when you don't have competition, it can, you know, the people get lazy and
they languish.

833
00:59:31,696 --> 00:59:38,096
Like all this stuff about op-return, like this is all like a bunch of like complete
nonsense that people have been talking about for like two years.

834
00:59:38,496 --> 00:59:45,496
You kind of allude to on your website that like Bitcoin Cash was sort of not as big
a failure as people think.

835
00:59:45,496 --> 00:59:46,296
That's true.

836
00:59:46,296 --> 00:59:47,696
I think that is the case.

837
00:59:47,996 --> 00:59:48,896
Explain that.

838
00:59:49,096 --> 00:59:50,196
I think a lot of people don't.

839
00:59:50,496 --> 00:59:58,796
First of all, I want to reiterate that Bitcoin Cash, I think, made an enormous
number of mistakes and was actually a bad idea from the beginning.

840
00:59:59,096 --> 01:00:03,796
But if I define that as there's Bitcoin Cash people, they were right about a lot of
things.

841
01:00:03,796 --> 01:00:08,996
They were right about like, should we really just bet everything on the Lightning
Network?

842
01:00:08,996 --> 01:00:10,096
So they were right about that.

843
01:00:10,096 --> 01:00:18,696
And they were like, you know, what do we do if the Bitcoin Core developers have a
conflict of interest with like, for example, the customer service department at

844
01:00:18,696 --> 01:00:22,296
BitPay, which gets all these calls when the blocks fill up.

845
01:00:22,796 --> 01:00:27,296
BitPay, they're really used, they're an actual user of the Bitcoin network, and then
people will call and complain.

846
01:00:27,696 --> 01:00:30,996
And so Bitcoin, so what do we do about this conflict of interest?

847
01:00:30,996 --> 01:00:33,196
So that was, they were right about a lot of things.

848
01:00:34,296 --> 01:00:36,896
They were right that more block space has some benefits.

849
01:00:37,196 --> 01:00:48,596
But if you really define Bitcoin Cash as like a hard fork in August 2017 to 8
megabytes, that idea is not very good.

850
01:00:49,296 --> 01:00:53,496
Because 8 megabytes is not enough space and you have to hard fork again.

851
01:00:53,996 --> 01:00:56,796
And it's like the timing was also weird.

852
01:00:56,796 --> 01:00:58,096
It was like not really announced.

853
01:00:58,096 --> 01:01:02,196
And for execution, I think execution was not good.

854
01:01:02,196 --> 01:01:06,896
I think it was a mistake to have the same name and fight over the name.

855
01:01:06,896 --> 01:01:16,796
I think I'm pretty sure there are many cases where like, for example, Bitcoin Cash
supporter Roger Ver or whatever, they would give like a long speech to like a room
and say, oh, Bitcoin Cash is the future.

856
01:01:17,796 --> 01:01:25,496
I bet a lot of people in that room just assume Cash is like another way of like,
Bitcoin Cash is like a way of talking about BTC or something.

857
01:01:25,496 --> 01:01:31,096
It's interesting, though, because this word Cash does crossover into your world.

858
01:01:31,096 --> 01:01:32,296
Yeah, I'm calling mine eCash.

859
01:01:32,296 --> 01:01:36,396
Right, so you're calling the asset of this fork eCash.

860
01:01:36,396 --> 01:01:37,396
And the website is, of course...

861
01:01:37,396 --> 01:01:39,396
It's important to have a different name, I think.

862
01:01:39,396 --> 01:01:40,396
I think that's better for everyone.

863
01:01:40,396 --> 01:01:43,896
So just not Bitcoin, but the Cash part is still important, clearly.

864
01:01:44,096 --> 01:01:46,596
The idea of Cash, I think Cash is a good...

865
01:01:46,596 --> 01:01:50,596
When people think of Cash, they think of like, oh, this is not...

866
01:01:50,596 --> 01:01:52,196
This is like a private transaction.

867
01:01:52,196 --> 01:01:53,596
This is a...

868
01:01:53,596 --> 01:01:54,596
And payments in general.

869
01:01:54,596 --> 01:01:55,596
Yeah, they think of payments.

870
01:01:55,596 --> 01:01:57,696
They think of, I got money in my wallet.

871
01:01:57,696 --> 01:01:59,496
If I just give it to...

872
01:01:59,496 --> 01:02:04,496
I can, you know, I could like tip the doorman or whatever to get into this building
or something.

873
01:02:04,496 --> 01:02:07,496
So I think it's a quite good...

874
01:02:07,496 --> 01:02:08,396
It's quite a good word.

875
01:02:08,396 --> 01:02:10,596
And of course, the Bitcoin Cash people focused on the word.

876
01:02:10,696 --> 01:02:11,996
Yeah, they used it for a reason.

877
01:02:11,996 --> 01:02:14,396
And it sounds like you're also using it for a reason.

878
01:02:14,396 --> 01:02:14,896
Sure.

879
01:02:14,896 --> 01:02:19,196
But you are intentionally dropping the word Bitcoin from the name of your fork
asset.

880
01:02:19,196 --> 01:02:20,196
I think that's the best for everyone.

881
01:02:20,196 --> 01:02:22,096
Is the fork itself just called eCash?

882
01:02:22,096 --> 01:02:22,596
I mean, is that...

883
01:02:22,596 --> 01:02:23,096
You're just...

884
01:02:23,096 --> 01:02:26,996
This protocol, this new protocol that is a fork of Bitcoin with 300, 301...

885
01:02:26,996 --> 01:02:28,996
Yeah, it's a GitHub code fork.

886
01:02:28,996 --> 01:02:29,596
It's a GitHub...

887
01:02:29,596 --> 01:02:36,696
But I just want to also say that I'm actually activating 300 and 301 with CUSF on
the new chain.

888
01:02:36,696 --> 01:02:37,896
So I'm not even touching...

889
01:02:37,896 --> 01:02:38,796
There's a couple changes.

890
01:02:38,796 --> 01:02:40,496
You're not editing Bitcoin Core at all.

891
01:02:40,496 --> 01:02:49,696
Yeah, there's a few changes to Bitcoin Core to rename it to eCash and to change the
seed IP addresses and things like that.

892
01:02:49,696 --> 01:02:50,696
And then you just...

893
01:02:50,696 --> 01:02:54,696
300, 301 or CUSF overlay on top of the fork.

894
01:02:54,696 --> 01:02:56,896
So what are the layer one changes that you're making?

895
01:02:56,896 --> 01:02:58,996
The minor layer one changes that you're making?

896
01:02:58,996 --> 01:03:00,896
Some are absolutely necessary.

897
01:03:00,896 --> 01:03:02,296
You got to change the name.

898
01:03:02,296 --> 01:03:03,996
You have to change the network magic.

899
01:03:03,996 --> 01:03:04,896
There's this thing to like...

900
01:03:04,896 --> 01:03:05,496
What's network magic?

901
01:03:05,496 --> 01:03:07,396
What does that mean?

902
01:03:07,396 --> 01:03:08,296
It's kind of like...

903
01:03:08,296 --> 01:03:08,996
It's hard to describe.

904
01:03:08,996 --> 01:03:09,996
It's just like on the Internet.

905
01:03:09,996 --> 01:03:11,696
It's kind of like when a message comes in.

906
01:03:11,696 --> 01:03:14,696
How do you know it's a Bitcoin message and not like...

907
01:03:14,696 --> 01:03:16,696
It's not like an Outlook email or something.

908
01:03:16,696 --> 01:03:17,196
Okay.

909
01:03:17,196 --> 01:03:18,896
So maybe I'll describe it, I guess.

910
01:03:18,896 --> 01:03:19,396
Okay.

911
01:03:19,396 --> 01:03:20,096
Pretty loosely.

912
01:03:20,096 --> 01:03:20,496
Okay.

913
01:03:20,496 --> 01:03:24,196
But it's just arbitrary bytes that like say...

914
01:03:24,196 --> 01:03:26,096
That help you identify what's going on.

915
01:03:26,096 --> 01:03:26,496
Okay.

916
01:03:26,496 --> 01:03:29,496
So you could not change that, but it would just be annoying.

917
01:03:29,496 --> 01:03:30,396
Okay, fair.

918
01:03:30,396 --> 01:03:31,596
Computers would not like it.

919
01:03:31,596 --> 01:03:37,296
And then also something I read on your website was that you're reducing block sizes
by about 10%.

920
01:03:37,296 --> 01:03:38,396
Oh, 90%.

921
01:03:38,396 --> 01:03:38,896
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

922
01:03:38,896 --> 01:03:39,396
90%.

923
01:03:39,396 --> 01:03:42,096
Instead of 4 megabytes, which is a de facto block size.

924
01:03:42,096 --> 01:03:43,296
And why is that?

925
01:03:43,296 --> 01:03:46,396
Just because you assume there will be fewer transactions in the early stages?

926
01:03:46,396 --> 01:03:49,396
Is the idea to increase block sizes over time?

927
01:03:49,396 --> 01:03:54,296
In fact, I may even phase the decrease in.

928
01:03:54,296 --> 01:03:58,296
It's to be strategic and say like this is actually the small block network.

929
01:03:58,296 --> 01:04:00,296
So I kind of got the idea from Bitcoin SV when they immediately outplayed.

930
01:04:00,296 --> 01:04:00,796
But why?

931
01:04:00,796 --> 01:04:03,296
What's the rationale for small block network?

932
01:04:03,296 --> 01:04:06,096
There are many benefits to having smaller blocks.

933
01:04:06,096 --> 01:04:07,096
So like the node...

934
01:04:07,096 --> 01:04:08,096
Auctions for fees.

935
01:04:08,096 --> 01:04:09,096
Nodes are cheaper.

936
01:04:09,096 --> 01:04:10,096
Nodes are cheaper.

937
01:04:10,096 --> 01:04:11,096
That's right, okay.

938
01:04:11,096 --> 01:04:14,096
Cheaper to sync and easier to hide the physical location of the node.

939
01:04:14,096 --> 01:04:15,096
Right.

940
01:04:15,096 --> 01:04:16,096
More competition for block space.

941
01:04:16,096 --> 01:04:17,096
So higher fees potentially.

942
01:04:17,096 --> 01:04:18,096
Yes, higher fee rates.

943
01:04:18,096 --> 01:04:20,096
Push people onto the L2s.

944
01:04:20,096 --> 01:04:21,096
This will be a great test to actually...

945
01:04:21,096 --> 01:04:23,096
Because a lot of people sort of contest or like...

946
01:04:23,096 --> 01:04:25,096
There's a lot of debate about whether or not blocks...

947
01:04:25,096 --> 01:04:28,096
How the impact of block size on fees in practice.

948
01:04:28,096 --> 01:04:30,096
So this will be interesting to see.

949
01:04:30,096 --> 01:04:31,096
Right.

950
01:04:31,096 --> 01:04:32,096
That's exactly right.

951
01:04:32,096 --> 01:04:33,096
Good test environment.

952
01:04:33,096 --> 01:04:34,096
Well, yeah.

953
01:04:34,096 --> 01:04:36,096
Some people want the backlog of fees.

954
01:04:36,096 --> 01:04:37,096
That was the famous...

955
01:04:37,096 --> 01:04:38,096
There was like...

956
01:04:38,096 --> 01:04:39,096
I don't know about famous.

957
01:04:39,096 --> 01:04:43,096
But there was like a Greg Maxwell popping the champagne email to the...

958
01:04:43,096 --> 01:04:45,096
He was happy that the fees...

959
01:04:45,096 --> 01:04:47,096
That there was a backlog of transactions.

960
01:04:47,096 --> 01:04:49,096
The backlog went away, of course.

961
01:04:49,096 --> 01:04:51,096
Because people stopped using Bitcoin Core.

962
01:04:51,096 --> 01:04:52,096
Right, right.

963
01:04:52,096 --> 01:04:56,096
So that was always like kind of my counter joke about like...

964
01:04:56,096 --> 01:04:58,096
Not that I was going to knock that particular comment.

965
01:04:58,096 --> 01:05:00,096
Because at the time, that was...

966
01:05:00,096 --> 01:05:01,096
But I was still thinking.

967
01:05:01,096 --> 01:05:02,096
I was like...

968
01:05:02,096 --> 01:05:07,096
I wondered did he ever put the champagne back in his refrigerator or whatever.

969
01:05:07,096 --> 01:05:09,096
Because ultimately, the fees are...

970
01:05:09,096 --> 01:05:10,096
The fee rates are now very, very low.

971
01:05:10,096 --> 01:05:12,096
We kind of got a little off of the...

972
01:05:12,096 --> 01:05:14,096
We could talk about whatever you think is interesting.

973
01:05:14,096 --> 01:05:16,096
But we got a little off of the Satoshi's coins.

974
01:05:16,096 --> 01:05:17,096
Oh, yeah.

975
01:05:17,096 --> 01:05:19,096
I mean, we can circle back to Satoshi's.

976
01:05:19,096 --> 01:05:22,096
I do want to circle back to some of the technical changes.

977
01:05:22,096 --> 01:05:23,096
There are a lot of threads to go on.

978
01:05:23,096 --> 01:05:24,096
There's a lot of threads to go on.

979
01:05:24,096 --> 01:05:25,096
But, yeah.

980
01:05:25,096 --> 01:05:27,096
But, I mean, just closing the loop on the threads.

981
01:05:27,096 --> 01:05:29,096
So basically, it is the block size.

982
01:05:29,096 --> 01:05:30,096
And then CUSF.

983
01:05:30,096 --> 01:05:33,096
The reason why you decided to do CUSF on top of...

984
01:05:33,096 --> 01:05:37,096
Basically, a very minorly touched Bitcoin Core fork.

985
01:05:37,096 --> 01:05:38,096
Right.

986
01:05:38,096 --> 01:05:39,096
What was the reason for that?

987
01:05:39,096 --> 01:05:40,096
As opposed to just literally just fork it.

988
01:05:40,096 --> 01:05:42,096
Like just fully doing the soft fork.

989
01:05:42,096 --> 01:05:44,096
Like Bitcoin Core with the BIP300 soft fork.

990
01:05:44,096 --> 01:05:45,096
It's a good question.

991
01:05:45,096 --> 01:05:47,096
There are actually a lot of benefits for each.

992
01:05:47,096 --> 01:05:51,096
I thought it would be better to like maintain the CUSF software.

993
01:05:52,096 --> 01:05:59,096
Actually, on the off chance that BTC still wants to activate BIP300 with it.

994
01:05:59,096 --> 01:06:01,096
At some point, like during the process.

995
01:06:01,096 --> 01:06:03,096
How would that be useful?

996
01:06:03,096 --> 01:06:04,096
Like why?

997
01:06:04,096 --> 01:06:05,096
Well, you see what I mean?

998
01:06:05,096 --> 01:06:08,096
Actually, I was building the CUSF version for BTC.

999
01:06:08,096 --> 01:06:09,096
Right.

1000
01:06:09,096 --> 01:06:12,096
And so, that's like my latest and greatest version.

1001
01:06:12,096 --> 01:06:14,096
So, I just thought, oh, we'll just keep it.

1002
01:06:14,096 --> 01:06:15,096
You'll just use it.

1003
01:06:15,096 --> 01:06:16,096
It's working.

1004
01:06:16,096 --> 01:06:17,096
This works.

1005
01:06:17,096 --> 01:06:18,096
Also, I think I read on your website.

1006
01:06:18,096 --> 01:06:20,096
I thought this was like a fair point.

1007
01:06:20,096 --> 01:06:26,096
What that means is if Bitcoin Core upgrades, you can easily upgrade your version as
well.

1008
01:06:26,096 --> 01:06:29,096
This is a huge mistake that, again, I thought Bitcoin Cash made.

1009
01:06:29,096 --> 01:06:30,096
And it's funny.

1010
01:06:30,096 --> 01:06:32,096
I don't know if it seems like I'm a large blocker.

1011
01:06:32,096 --> 01:06:35,096
I don't know how this is coming across at all to anyone.

1012
01:06:35,096 --> 01:06:39,096
But you can look up when I go on Bitcoin Cash podcast.

1013
01:06:39,096 --> 01:06:41,096
I say like, you guys made all these horrible mistakes.

1014
01:06:41,096 --> 01:06:43,096
And the project didn't make any sense.

1015
01:06:43,096 --> 01:06:47,096
But one of the things they did is once they had their own project.

1016
01:06:47,096 --> 01:06:49,096
They started just like renaming everything, changing everything.

1017
01:06:49,096 --> 01:06:52,096
They made something like 30,000 lines of code.

1018
01:06:52,096 --> 01:06:55,096
At one point, 50% of the lines of code they had changed.

1019
01:06:55,096 --> 01:06:58,096
And you think that was like a bad mistake?

1020
01:06:58,096 --> 01:06:59,096
They could have just changed.

1021
01:06:59,096 --> 01:07:01,096
What were the negative externalities of that?

1022
01:07:01,096 --> 01:07:03,096
Like why did that hurt them?

1023
01:07:03,096 --> 01:07:09,096
It's very hard to do like a code diff and see like when they make some other change.

1024
01:07:09,096 --> 01:07:15,096
You could say, okay, if you do a pull request, you say, okay, I'm going to add
Schnorr signatures to Bitcoin Cash.

1025
01:07:16,096 --> 01:07:23,096
That's already going to be really hard to like vet and like read through and make
sure that that is what it says it is.

1026
01:07:23,096 --> 01:07:26,096
But now you can't even compare it to like something else that works.

1027
01:07:26,096 --> 01:07:30,096
That like a millions of Bitcoin core of millions of people trying to attack it all
the time.

1028
01:07:30,096 --> 01:07:35,096
And, you know, like they could have just changed the one to an eight.

1029
01:07:35,096 --> 01:07:41,096
And then had like their little list of modular changes.

1030
01:07:41,096 --> 01:07:43,096
You know, the modularity is really good.

1031
01:07:43,096 --> 01:07:51,096
Another thing is when there are these critical vulnerabilities, sometimes they're
fixed secretly or even introduced secretly and then fixed secretly again.

1032
01:07:51,096 --> 01:08:02,096
So you don't know when you fork which stuff people are going to find was wrong with
Bitcoin core.

1033
01:08:02,096 --> 01:08:04,096
I mean, changes are always risky, right?

1034
01:08:04,096 --> 01:08:07,096
Like the more like bullshit you're doing with code, the worse it is.

1035
01:08:07,096 --> 01:08:09,096
Software code is so powerful.

1036
01:08:10,096 --> 01:08:11,096
Like you said with Matt Corallo.

1037
01:08:11,096 --> 01:08:12,096
The Matt Corallo example.

1038
01:08:12,096 --> 01:08:13,096
We're circling back now.

1039
01:08:13,096 --> 01:08:14,096
Exactly.

1040
01:08:14,096 --> 01:08:15,096
Right.

1041
01:08:15,096 --> 01:08:17,096
One line of code can take the whole thing.

1042
01:08:17,096 --> 01:08:19,096
And in fact, there were all these bugs.

1043
01:08:19,096 --> 01:08:21,096
There's this famous assert zero.

1044
01:08:21,096 --> 01:08:24,096
I don't know how famous any of this is.

1045
01:08:24,096 --> 01:08:25,096
It's famous to me.

1046
01:08:25,096 --> 01:08:26,096
I lived through it all.

1047
01:08:26,096 --> 01:08:30,096
And it was a lot of it was like a very like crazy wild to see.

1048
01:08:30,096 --> 01:08:36,096
But people who hated Bitcoin Cash started making different shirts that had like
different bugs on them.

1049
01:08:36,096 --> 01:08:39,096
There's like an assert zero bug that crashed Bitcoin Cash nodes.

1050
01:08:39,096 --> 01:08:42,096
So they made like assert zero t-shirts.

1051
01:08:42,096 --> 01:08:43,096
You can look all this up.

1052
01:08:43,096 --> 01:08:44,096
This all really happened.

1053
01:08:44,096 --> 01:08:45,096
That's funny.

1054
01:08:45,096 --> 01:08:46,096
Yeah.

1055
01:08:46,096 --> 01:08:47,096
Some of it is pretty funny.

1056
01:08:47,096 --> 01:08:48,096
OK.

1057
01:08:48,096 --> 01:08:49,096
All right.

1058
01:08:49,096 --> 01:08:50,096
So let's go back to this.

1059
01:08:50,096 --> 01:08:51,096
It was really fun to live through.

1060
01:08:51,096 --> 01:08:54,096
Although it was sad to see how angry some people got.

1061
01:08:54,096 --> 01:09:01,096
I was going to say it was also like you said, you know, remnants of some of the most
difficult times in Bitcoin's history, I think.

1062
01:09:01,096 --> 01:09:02,096
Right.

1063
01:09:02,096 --> 01:09:03,096
Yeah.

1064
01:09:03,096 --> 01:09:05,096
There was a lot of like negative emotion.

1065
01:09:05,096 --> 01:09:15,096
And even to this day, like people, people just hate the idea for some reason of the
hard fork, even though the hard fork for the Bitcoin owner, the investor.

1066
01:09:15,096 --> 01:09:19,096
Nothing could possibly be better because you just get free money and you get free
upside.

1067
01:09:19,096 --> 01:09:24,096
Like if all I'm saying, if everything I'm saying it turns out to be 100 percent
wrong and the hard fork goes to zero.

1068
01:09:24,096 --> 01:09:29,096
Because the addresses basically, like if you hold the keys to those addresses, you
just get these like coins.

1069
01:09:29,096 --> 01:09:31,096
One way of thinking about it.

1070
01:09:31,096 --> 01:09:32,096
Where does the free money come from?

1071
01:09:32,096 --> 01:09:34,096
One way of thinking about it is that you just launch an altcoin.

1072
01:09:34,096 --> 01:09:41,096
So you just imagine it's a new coin, but you kind of replay the full history of
Bitcoin with the same miners.

1073
01:09:41,096 --> 01:09:44,096
You just mine this new with the knowledge.

1074
01:09:44,096 --> 01:09:48,096
It's as if there's 900,000 blocks on that new network.

1075
01:09:48,096 --> 01:09:50,096
And you replay the whole thing.

1076
01:09:50,096 --> 01:09:56,096
And so then if you download that software and you right now you have seven Bitcoin,
you have 7.123 Bitcoin.

1077
01:09:56,096 --> 01:10:02,096
You download this new software, hypothetically eCash or Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV
or whatever.

1078
01:10:02,096 --> 01:10:03,096
Just go mine the free money.

1079
01:10:03,096 --> 01:10:04,096
No, no.

1080
01:10:04,096 --> 01:10:08,096
You will have, when you turn it on, you'll have 7.123 coins waiting for you there.

1081
01:10:08,096 --> 01:10:10,096
Now, what's the U.S. dollar value of those coins?

1082
01:10:10,096 --> 01:10:11,096
No one knows.

1083
01:10:11,096 --> 01:10:12,096
But that's what I'm saying.

1084
01:10:12,096 --> 01:10:14,096
If it's zero, then you're left exactly where you were before.

1085
01:10:14,096 --> 01:10:16,096
It's only up basically.

1086
01:10:16,096 --> 01:10:17,096
Yeah, exactly.

1087
01:10:17,096 --> 01:10:18,096
Right, right, right, right.

1088
01:10:18,096 --> 01:10:22,096
And then the question is, do you hold them or do you immediately sell them for
Bitcoin?

1089
01:10:22,096 --> 01:10:28,096
I mean, you also say on your website, notably, I do not recommend you sell your
Bitcoin.

1090
01:10:28,096 --> 01:10:29,096
Right.

1091
01:10:29,096 --> 01:10:30,096
That's exactly right.

1092
01:10:30,096 --> 01:10:32,096
And I assume that was very intentional.

1093
01:10:32,096 --> 01:10:35,096
Yeah, I don't think it would be.

1094
01:10:35,096 --> 01:10:42,096
There will be a lot of information produced as you get to the fork date and then it
forks.

1095
01:10:43,096 --> 01:10:46,096
And then there will be like, you know.

1096
01:10:46,096 --> 01:10:49,096
So that will be very important for people to.

1097
01:10:49,096 --> 01:11:01,096
And I would very strongly recommend, unless you're one of these like junky people,
like, you know, people who do the podcast, 40 hours of Bitcoin podcast per week type
thing, unless you're like a super, super specialist.

1098
01:11:01,096 --> 01:11:09,096
It would be very smart to just not, not, not touch either network and have only the.

1099
01:11:09,096 --> 01:11:10,096
Just hold the coins on both.

1100
01:11:10,096 --> 01:11:13,096
You know, you get upside either way.

1101
01:11:13,096 --> 01:11:14,096
But you the only way.

1102
01:11:14,096 --> 01:11:15,096
OK, so.

1103
01:11:15,096 --> 01:11:18,096
But the only way I was going to say, but you have to mine the coins essentially.

1104
01:11:18,096 --> 01:11:19,096
Once.

1105
01:11:19,096 --> 01:11:20,096
When?

1106
01:11:20,096 --> 01:11:21,096
At the moment of the fork.

1107
01:11:21,096 --> 01:11:24,096
Before then, it's identical history of the chain.

1108
01:11:24,096 --> 01:11:25,096
Oh, interesting.

1109
01:11:25,096 --> 01:11:26,096
Right.

1110
01:11:26,096 --> 01:11:27,096
OK.

1111
01:11:27,096 --> 01:11:28,096
Noted.

1112
01:11:28,096 --> 01:11:29,096
All right.

1113
01:11:29,096 --> 01:11:30,096
OK, so Satoshi's coins.

1114
01:11:30,096 --> 01:11:31,096
So, yeah.

1115
01:11:31,096 --> 01:11:32,096
So, I mean, how are you feeling?

1116
01:11:32,096 --> 01:11:37,096
OK, so you have this pre-mine, you have this fork, you have like all of the makings
of like a hyper villain.

1117
01:11:37,096 --> 01:11:38,096
Yeah.

1118
01:11:38,096 --> 01:11:40,096
So are you concerned about that?

1119
01:11:40,096 --> 01:11:41,096
I mean, like, how are you?

1120
01:11:41,096 --> 01:11:45,096
Are you worried about your reputation being lit on fire with this call?

1121
01:11:45,096 --> 01:11:46,096
Let's see.

1122
01:11:46,096 --> 01:11:47,096
Here's the thing.

1123
01:11:47,096 --> 01:11:48,096
Although many people.

1124
01:11:48,096 --> 01:11:52,096
It's true that I have many friends and admirers, you know, throughout Bitcoin.

1125
01:11:52,096 --> 01:11:53,096
That's true.

1126
01:11:53,096 --> 01:11:56,096
It's kind of like, what's the reputation even worth?

1127
01:11:56,096 --> 01:11:57,096
Like if you can't activate.

1128
01:11:57,096 --> 01:11:58,096
If you can't do things.

1129
01:11:58,096 --> 01:12:04,096
BIP300 or even I can't convince people to like activate any soft forks with CUSF.

1130
01:12:04,096 --> 01:12:05,096
I think.

1131
01:12:05,096 --> 01:12:07,096
It's like power to like be a speaker at the Bitcoin conference.

1132
01:12:07,096 --> 01:12:08,096
Right.

1133
01:12:08,096 --> 01:12:12,096
And it's like, I think all that stuff will start to die off, actually.

1134
01:12:12,096 --> 01:12:13,096
So I've been.

1135
01:12:13,096 --> 01:12:17,096
You mean like the soft power of like weird Bitcoin influencers?

1136
01:12:17,096 --> 01:12:18,096
I think that.

1137
01:12:18,096 --> 01:12:23,096
Well, you know, I've been Bitcoin has had many ups and downs over the years, mostly
ups.

1138
01:12:23,096 --> 01:12:28,096
But, you know, there have been many downs and there have been many like.

1139
01:12:29,096 --> 01:12:31,096
But if.

1140
01:12:31,096 --> 01:12:36,096
If we like mainstream Bitcoin as like this pet rock.

1141
01:12:36,096 --> 01:12:40,096
That you buy through ETF.

1142
01:12:40,096 --> 01:12:46,096
And if it's like very easily defined as like a tame.

1143
01:12:46,096 --> 01:12:48,096
Thing.

1144
01:12:48,096 --> 01:12:51,096
And it's not subversive.

1145
01:12:51,096 --> 01:12:53,096
And it's just like a it's like a thing that you can buy.

1146
01:12:53,096 --> 01:12:56,096
And the reason why you would buy it is because there's nation state adoption.

1147
01:12:56,096 --> 01:12:58,096
Like El Salvador is buying it or whatever.

1148
01:12:58,096 --> 01:13:00,096
Serbia is buying it or something, you know.

1149
01:13:00,096 --> 01:13:01,096
Mm hmm.

1150
01:13:01,096 --> 01:13:03,096
If we're going to do all that, why have the Bitcoin conference?

1151
01:13:03,096 --> 01:13:04,096
You know what I mean?

1152
01:13:04,096 --> 01:13:06,096
It's like having a conference about like screwdrivers or something.

1153
01:13:06,096 --> 01:13:07,096
No, no, no.

1154
01:13:07,096 --> 01:13:10,096
I mean, like in a world where we just have hyper Bitcoin is Asian.

1155
01:13:10,096 --> 01:13:11,096
These things are very weird.

1156
01:13:11,096 --> 01:13:12,096
Right.

1157
01:13:12,096 --> 01:13:17,096
But even if it's not used like it's just.

1158
01:13:17,096 --> 01:13:24,096
So we need it to be a little bit more of like a scientific enterprise, more of like
a weird.

1159
01:13:25,096 --> 01:13:30,096
This have this weird mystery to it, I think, which it will if it keeps growing.

1160
01:13:30,096 --> 01:13:35,096
But if it's but if you know, if we six if some people in Bitcoin.

1161
01:13:35,096 --> 01:13:40,096
You know, if they succeed in kind of like defining it as just.

1162
01:13:40,096 --> 01:13:46,096
Some, you know, like a pet rock that you something that you buy and you just have
the ticker.

1163
01:13:46,096 --> 01:13:53,096
I think that will that's not as good as like, you know, so if you compare like Tesla
actually makes cars and SpaceX has to make the rocket.

1164
01:13:53,096 --> 01:13:56,096
There's a lot of like dynamism decisions are being made.

1165
01:13:56,096 --> 01:13:57,096
People are being hired.

1166
01:13:57,096 --> 01:13:59,096
People are being fired, you know.

1167
01:13:59,096 --> 01:14:05,096
So if we don't have that dynamism, then, yeah, I do really worry about.

1168
01:14:05,096 --> 01:14:08,096
So but you're asking, oh, am I worried about the reputation?

1169
01:14:08,096 --> 01:14:09,096
Like, I don't know.

1170
01:14:09,096 --> 01:14:14,096
It's kind of like there's that joke from Rick and Morty where he says that your
booze mean nothing.

1171
01:14:14,096 --> 01:14:15,096
I've seen what makes you cheer.

1172
01:14:15,096 --> 01:14:16,096
You know what I mean?

1173
01:14:16,096 --> 01:14:21,096
Like if you think the lightning you thought the lightning network is a good idea,
then I don't care about your opinion.

1174
01:14:21,096 --> 01:14:26,096
And if you thought if you joined after 2020, like then I don't care.

1175
01:14:26,096 --> 01:14:30,096
Like, you know about why would I care about someone's opinion like that?

1176
01:14:30,096 --> 01:14:33,096
Like they know like less than nothing.

1177
01:14:33,096 --> 01:14:36,096
So I think.

1178
01:14:36,096 --> 01:14:44,096
What is the like who is doing such a great job like out there that even.

1179
01:14:44,096 --> 01:14:50,096
Like I have an L2 that could scale to like the planet, the planet's transaction
throughput ratio.

1180
01:14:50,096 --> 01:14:51,096
I have like a plan for that.

1181
01:14:51,096 --> 01:14:53,096
I have the zk-SNARK.

1182
01:14:53,559 --> 01:15:20,559
Zcash sidechain, like a fully private L2, like I have all this stuff that's much
better than Coinjoin and much better than the lightning network. And so it's like,
I'm not saying that it's I'm not saying that like I should be in charge and run
everything. That's not what I'm saying. And in fact, as I've tried to explain, I
kind of just like patiently waited for 10 years for people to catch up. And this is
the last resort from your perspective. So I waited like this whole time.

1183
01:15:20,559 --> 01:15:40,559
Like for people to just catch on. And now you're fed up and you're like, this is my
only opportunity to like actually do something. I feel I owe the Bitcoin community
like an apology for not doing it back in like many years earlier, because it's kind
of like who knows how many weird things would have been. Like if we actually had
sidechains in 2015, I don't even think there would be an Ethereum.

1184
01:15:40,559 --> 01:16:08,559
If you going back, though, because like I could see right, like especially with the
pre-mine thing. Right. Like I can already hear the criticisms of like Paul's a
scammer. This is a scam. Like, that's fine. This is people will hate the Satoshi's
coins thing. You have to have the problem with the pure fork is that there's it's
like a heads. It's like a heads. I lose tails. I break even kind of situation. This
is where the defense is kind of like it's free money. Take it or leave it.

1185
01:16:08,559 --> 01:16:33,559
Right. Yeah. If you have any criticism of the project of any kind, then you can just
sell, get more BTC. And, you know, you're welcome for the BTC. Like, great. I think
it's easy to do a hard fork, but that's part of the problem with the hard fork is
that you could just do trillions of them. You needed there to be something special
about your hard fork. And the community is, is really the key.

1186
01:16:33,559 --> 01:17:01,559
There was there, there were previous hard forks or whatever you might want to call
them. Like, so for example, in Zcash, they had like a developer tax. Someone forked
to make it Z classic. They remove the dev tax. Now I have background economics. So I
was thinking, okay, it's going to be exact same software because like they kind of
more took my advice about just comment out that one line and keep everything else
the same.

1187
01:17:01,559 --> 01:17:30,559
It's going to be the same thing with no dev tax. Like this is a dev tax, like in the
mining, an ongoing like drain on everyone else's. And you would think it has to be
exactly equal to Zcash, but like better you would think, but that's not what
happened at all. And that's because the community. So I was kind of wrong about
that, that little toy, but I was just a curiosity of mine. I wasn't like super
interested in that.

1188
01:17:30,559 --> 01:17:38,559
But that's an example of something has this drawback, economic drawback, but yet it
has much higher market cap.

1189
01:17:38,559 --> 01:17:51,559
Well, and to your point, I mean, when I was getting my PhD and shit coining in the
ordinals, uh, days, the one thing I learned, right. Is that the whole point of a
pre-mine ultimately is to bootstrap initial adoption.

1190
01:17:52,559 --> 01:18:15,559
Let me also ask you about that. Like when you say like, you're talking about
ordinals as being like a shit coin thing, right? Sure. Like, I mean, crazy though,
because in the past shit coining really meant like, uh, this is another thing that's
changed over the years. Like in ancient days you had Bitcoin and then you had like
light coin light coin is like basically just Bitcoin with like the number changed.

1191
01:18:16,559 --> 01:18:38,559
Right. One number changed from like a 10 minute to a 2.5 minute basically. Right. So
you think of the amount of creative work that went to create Bitcoin the first time
and then you just copy and paste to get light coin. Right. That was seen as like
offensive to people. That was shit coinery at the time. Basically. And then you had
like people do a light coins, light coins, like feather coin. And it was like, when
does it end? And it was all kinds of silly stuff.

1192
01:18:39,559 --> 01:18:54,559
Which was like a 100% pre-mine right off immediately. Right. And then like figure it
out. And then like stuff like ripple and stuff. There's all this weird stuff going
on. So now we've reached the point where.

1193
01:18:55,559 --> 01:19:16,559
Something is an ordinal, which is like you minted on the Bitcoin blockchain by
paying a Bitcoin transaction fee and then maybe you sell it to someone else. Sure.
Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. Sure. I mean, this would have been like a Bitcoin
maximalist project like. Oh, 100%. Oh, well, I obviously have an enormous amount of
reverence for for ordinals as a project and several actual ordinals projects. But.

1194
01:19:16,559 --> 01:19:33,559
I also want to say that when a certain point there was there came a time when a
Bitcoin core developer, Luke Junior, did like a draft. This was in 2023. He did like
a draft. He's like kind of work in progress. What would it be like if we added BIP300?

1195
01:19:33,559 --> 01:19:47,559
300. It was like a very minimal like because, you know, on GitHub, you sometimes you
do like the pull request, like start the conversation and then it gets derailed by
crazy people. But, you know, like you could he was sort of saying like, what could
this be?

1196
01:19:48,559 --> 01:20:04,559
Then immediately there was all this, all this attention got paid to Drivechain the
idea. But then people said Drivechain is just shit coining. So this is the version
on BTC is called shit coining and even scamming, which is this is a completely free.

1197
01:20:04,559 --> 01:20:21,559
Thing, optional, opt in, reversible, ignorable, soft fork on Bitcoin, giving away
for free that it lets you like basically kill off the other the real shit coins. You
know, there's no reason for a theorem when you have the sidechain.

1198
01:20:21,559 --> 01:20:39,559
I agree. I agree.

1199
01:20:39,559 --> 01:21:08,559
So basically you're saying it has to do with intent. That's actually very difficult
to know a conception of the public good. Like are you saying the world will be
better off if which is very easy to fake? Paul, honestly. Yeah, sure. To be fair. So
it's hard to actually buy that definition. We can't really have like judgments of
like what is not shit.

1200
01:21:10,559 --> 01:21:26,559
But that doesn't particularly use that word in a more and not in a more holistic.
Yeah, I use it in like in like a lighthearted way. But yeah, but I don't want to
like completely like lose the plot here. So, okay. So, so Satoshi's coins, let's
just like finish there.

1201
01:21:26,559 --> 01:21:51,559
We'll keep we'll keep harping on it. There's a lot of reasons why it's actually a
good idea. But as I said, one is we already have the non Satoshi's coins. That's
what BIP300 is. So and then even that is already accused of being like shit coinery
or something. Somehow it doesn't make any sense at all. But so I think part of this
is that there is something, though, about like pre mining being particularly
triggering to people.

1202
01:21:51,559 --> 01:22:06,559
I think there's a I think it's people have rightly are very suspicious of anything
that's a little bit undeserved or too easy. Well, we're like unfair distribution
kind of buy. Yeah, I don't know about that. I've heard. I think you're right that
people say that. But of course, a person who's showing up today.

1203
01:22:06,559 --> 01:22:33,559
They don't care that like a theorem was like 80% pre mind or something. If you just
show up today, because it's like, well, it's like an IPO. It's like anything else.
As far as they're concerned, you know, Bitcoin is also like 90% pre mind or whatever
at this point, you know, 20 million out of 21 over 21. There's an argument pre mind.
Yeah, from and then it's like, what are you going to say like you because when you
were born, you weren't given like an equal share and every corporation in the world.

1204
01:22:33,559 --> 01:23:02,559
Right. So it's kind of like it is what it is. Right. I think the key is what what
does it take for a hard fork to survive at all? Because I think Bitcoin cash and
Bitcoin has to be really didn't they sort of didn't make it to some extent. Although
I think it's very encouraging for me that even though you can you can fail
completely, you could be like a complete Bitcoin SV and you can still be worth like
hundreds of millions of dollars. So I kind of think that's kind of an interesting
reason why maybe more people should should do it. And everyone all Bitcoin or just
get free coins.

1205
01:23:02,559 --> 01:23:06,559
Like you said, not as much of a failure maybe as people think. Right.

1206
01:23:07,559 --> 01:23:34,559
So even well, I didn't get to that point with Bitcoin cash, which was that it
actually opened at something like 15% and 15% of the BTC price. So hypothetically,
if Bitcoin were just to make it the math easy, if Bitcoin were $100,000 later this
year per coin, and this opens at 15 20%, it'll open at 15 $20,000 like now I'm not
saying that that is, you know, who knows.

1207
01:23:35,559 --> 01:23:49,559
But that would certainly be much, much higher than, you know, what it's what you
currently and also where you're currently pricing your your fork coins, your eCash,
you need the pure hard fork is a little bit too much.

1208
01:23:50,559 --> 01:24:02,559
There's not there's no incentive for people to pay attention to it now before it
happens, because you think, oh, you know, when you can't get any benefit for getting
involved earlier, you know what I mean?

1209
01:24:02,559 --> 01:24:17,559
Because everyone's going to get the same amount when you do the pure fork. So you
need to make it slightly impure. It's necessary. It actually ends up being kind of
like a communist situation where there's no upside to improving the project before
the fork.

1210
01:24:17,559 --> 01:24:35,559
You see what I mean? It causes an underinvestment in making the fork day a success.
So we need people who are going to like, help promote, explain, promote and develop
on the coin. I would prefer it if we get as much stuff done.

1211
01:24:36,559 --> 01:24:56,559
Actually, before the date of the fork, I think that's actually better in many ways.
And you have sort of I mean, I am now like, in your telegram chats, etc, with your
kind of fledgling, not even fledgling, kind of very active community at this point,
who I presume are a good portion of our early investors.

1212
01:24:57,559 --> 01:25:13,559
And that is, I mean, that is essentially kind of like where the bootstrapping of
this community in this ecosystem. I mean, it's very remnant of what I saw with some
ordinals projects. But like it is kind of that's the that's the strategy, I guess,
for potentially pushing this forward in terms of adoption.

1213
01:25:14,559 --> 01:25:36,559
I think the the hard fork is very difficult to pull off. So if you just ask, this is
just my opinion. But I think there's, there's too much of like, if you just launch
the hard fork, it kind of you're really putting way too much on like day one of the
fork, like maybe it will have some kind of stigma or something. And it will go into
like a kind of spiral, you know, spiral out.

1214
01:25:37,559 --> 01:25:48,559
And I think that's the key thing. If you can just avoid that, then you'll be the
project will land in a completely different place. In order to do that, you have to
have your ducks in a row, like before.

1215
01:25:49,559 --> 01:26:08,559
Of course, that makes sense. Okay, final, final question. So you're only pre mining
half of Satoshi's coins, but if you had done a little less, okay, it's just be
whatever sells. Okay, okay, it'll be a little. Oh, it's just whatever people want.
Because you have a hard deadline for the fork. When's the fork happening? There's a
countdown.

1216
01:26:09,559 --> 01:26:26,559
I don't think there is a countdown. I think it'll be August. And I haven't changed
the I don't anticipate changing the countdown. But I do see it as kind of like a,
you get to the airport and your flight is leaving at seven. And it's like, okay,
probably leave at seven. But if there's some reason to delay, then some kind of like
that. But I think

1217
01:26:27,559 --> 01:26:46,559
in case it doesn't. Yeah, I think I read exactly. I'm saying, please don't take this
as like a, you know, like, like, come hell or high water. Like, no, but yeah, I
think you basically do have to do it. And you want people to be coordinated on a
date. So but yeah, I think it'd be like, August, August. Yeah,

1218
01:26:46,559 --> 01:27:12,559
we'll be interesting to see what happens in August, Paul, I will be watching with my
popcorn. And we will see what happens over the next few months.

1219
01:27:12,559 --> 01:27:41,559
And just like really how screwed up a lot of things are in Bitcoin. And this is
because there has not been any competition for a really long time. You know, like
think about Bitcoin core, whatever, who would even be able to give any kind of like
oversight or accountability? Who would even know like if they are doing everything
wrong? Yeah. Fair. And so I think people I think there's, this is the time is right
to do something like this. So that's why I'm doing it. And so there it is.

1220
01:27:42,559 --> 01:27:48,559
Thanks for hanging on, Paul. I don't know if congratulations is the right word on
what you did today. We will see. We will see.