Hello, and welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces.
Today is Monday, March 20th, 2023.
This is Henry at LayerTwo Labs.
I'm thrilled to have this conversation with all of you today,
those listening live on Twitter,
as well as those who listen on demand later.
Drivechain is picking up steam every day.
We are seven years into this epic quest
for peer-to-peer sidechains on Bitcoin.
The inspiration for Drivechain is so fascinating.
Drivechain would enable greater extensibility for Bitcoin.
It would enable other protocols to be built
on top of Bitcoin in a way that would internalize
to Bitcoin the value created on those other protocols.
So instead of a new protocol being an altcoin,
which competes existentially
for monetary premium against Bitcoin,
the other blockchain would be a merged-mined sidechain
of Bitcoin with a miner-controlled two-way peg,
meaning that demand for the token of the sidechain
is demand for Bitcoin,
and fees paid on the sidechain
are fees paid to Bitcoin miners.
So what Drivechain's all about is enabling Bitcoin
to be a multi-chain system
in which there is a base layer
where BTC is the native asset,
and then there are a multitude of sidechains
where synthetic Bitcoin is the asset,
the primary asset,
and all of the demand for the sidechain token
is indirectly demand for Bitcoin.
So the vision, in its most optimistic sense,
is a vision that all of the altcoins
could be instead sidechains of Bitcoin,
and this vision would have Bitcoin
without competition as an L1,
and this vision, in its most optimistic sense,
would include an extraordinary high amount of fees
paid to the Bitcoin miners forever from fees,
and a huge market cap for Bitcoin,
and imagine if all the altcoin users were Bitcoiners,
were using Bitcoin as their layer one
to support their sidechain,
then they would all be supporting Bitcoin
politically and socially and economically,
and the whole crypto community would be united on Bitcoin.
That's the Drivechain vision,
and I think if Drivechain were adopted,
then some degree of that vision would be realized,
maybe 5%, maybe 95%.
We don't know unless we try it.
So there has been for many years now in Bitcoin,
since 2015, an ongoing interesting debate
about the merits of Drivechain, the pros and cons.
There definitely have been major misunderstandings
about Drivechain, and that has led to a lot of confusion
and dissent, skepticism, and criticism,
all of which has been thoroughly discussed and debunked,
I think, in the Drivechain literature,
which is at drivechain.info and elsewhere.
Drivechain.info is a great resource for Drivechain.
Another great one is Fiatjaf's website,
which is fiatjaf.com, and then you click on Bitcoin,
and then click on Drivechain, and then you'll see his essay.
Fiatjaf is the creator of Nostr,
and one of Drivechain's most vocal supporters.
He has written tweets like,
if we don't adopt Drivechain,
then all the work of thousands for the last 13 years
will have been in vain,
which implies Bitcoin might fail without Drivechain,
which is a view I personally sympathize with.
I think it's critical for Bitcoin to maintain
its market cap dominance and grow that dominance
and not allow its competitors to have a larger value,
to have a larger user base,
to have a larger economic presence,
to have a larger network effect.
All of those things are important
with respect to maintaining Bitcoin's narrative
of monetization,
its narrative of becoming the world's money,
becoming the platform for the world's blockchain activity.
So one of the ideas that we should relinquish
is this notion that blockchain is only good for money.
Instead, we should adopt Satoshi's view,
which is that blockchain can do a multitude of things,
and the market should decide,
and developers should have an open mind
about what the market may want,
and developers for Bitcoin should design,
should ensure that Bitcoin is designed in a way
that allows for people to do what they want with it.
Because if we're judgmental and officious and puritanical
about what Bitcoin should be and how it should be,
then other protocols will have a more permissive,
flexible design, and they will accrue value
because users will have to go to them for what they want.
So I think that the more capitalistic free market approach
is to have Bitcoin include extensibility
so that its higher layers can be used
in whatever way people want to use them,
and that way people don't have to leave Bitcoin
to do the things they want to do.
And what do they want to do?
They want to have blockchain-based,
peer-to-peer-inspired arrangements
for all kinds of applications,
like larger blocks for scaling,
complex code for privacy,
and perhaps name service,
and Oracle networks,
and other interesting applications.
In other words, the cypherpunk dream
of technology-based society,
moving more commerce and human activity to the blockchain,
and is one way to give people more options
that are more reliable and powerful
in the realm of technology, communication, and commerce.
So Bitcoin should enable all of that
and let the market decide.
So Drivechain's all about enabling a multitude
of sidechains on Bitcoin that are peer-to-peer,
miner control pegs.
It would be an interesting step forward for Bitcoin,
and perhaps something that would strengthen
Bitcoin's community in many ways at this moment.
Everyone is welcome to come on up and chat if you'd like.
We have these spaces twice a week on Mondays
and on Thursdays at 9.30 a.m. West Coast time.
I'm in Los Angeles, and it's my pleasure
to be a part of LayerTwo Labs and host these conversations.
I used to host them as a volunteer.
So I just did it as a volunteer,
and I found my way as a result of that to this company,
which is one of the parties
that is highly focused on Drivechains
and making Bitcoin more expressive, more interesting,
having more developers in Bitcoin,
not losing development and users to altcoins.
In case people are interested in just a summary
of what Drivechain's all about,
let me give my personal take.
Drivechain's about increasing the extensibility of Bitcoin,
increasing the things that people can build on Bitcoin.
It's all about innovation for Bitcoin,
and there are a bunch of interesting
secondary possible results from that.
So number one, what we know for sure
is that Drivechain is designed
to enable a miner control two-way peg
and blind merge mining.
So to put it in plain English,
Drivechain enables enhanced facilities
for Bitcoin sidechains.
Drivechain enables enhanced facilities
for Bitcoin sidechains.
It gives people more options
for how they wanna have their sidechain on Bitcoin.
But the profound economic consequences of that,
in my view, would be potentially
layer one ossification being achieved,
or at least, to put it more mildly,
a higher degree of potential ossification
might be achieved as a result of Drivechain,
because when you increase extensibility,
when you increase the extensibility of Bitcoin,
you therefore reduce the pressure
that the community experiences on an ongoing basis
to upgrade Bitcoin on layer one,
because you don't need to change layer one as much
if you can do more things on layer two.
So that is what ossification of layer one is all about,
and Drivechain would strengthen
Bitcoin's layer one ossification.
It wouldn't guarantee it for 1,000 years,
but it would strengthen it
in the view of Drivechain proponents.
Drivechain would also potentially increase the fee revenue
that layer one miners receive.
This is the security budget problem of Bitcoin,
that the fees are low, generally speaking,
in the view of some analysts, including me,
and Drivechain would aim to increase them,
which would solve the security budget problem.
Of course, one might point out,
well, Henry, the fees are going up lately
because of ordinals and inscriptions,
but I think that is not going to be a permanent feature
of Bitcoin's fee market,
and I think in a year from now,
we'll see fees back down to a dollar a transaction
and back down to half a million dollars a day in fees,
not much more.
Right now, we might be over a million dollars a day in fees,
but over the last five years, during many periods,
the fees weren't very high.
There's occasional spikes.
The whole fee market conversation is so interesting.
It is not the only inspiration for Drivechain, of course,
and back when Drivechain was conceived,
no one was even talking about the security budget problem.
Using the word security budget,
that term came into being in 2018
with a blog post by Jordan McKinney,
who naturally has become an Ethereum-focused developer
because of the security budget problem and other issues.
A lot of Bitcoiners have left Bitcoin
to create in the altcoin space
because of the lack of Drivechain, in my opinion.
So that's another inspiration for Drivechain.
It's all about keeping the Bitcoin community together
and avoiding hard forks and avoiding attrition.
So hard forks are a form of attrition,
but there can also simply be attrition
in the form of just total departure from Bitcoin
and building in a more expressive platform like Ethereum.
So what Bitcoin would do is enable expressive platforms
like Ethereum as sidechains.
In fact, there is a clone of Ethereum
in the Bitcoin testnet,
in the Bitcoin Drivechain testnet.
They have two clones.
One is of Zcash and the other is of Ethereum,
and people interested in details about that
should check it out and learn about it there.
You can download software.
You can run the node.
You can do all kinds of things
and join the Telegram group
where over 700 people have joined,
and there's active discussion every day.
Every day of the year,
people are chatting about Drivechain
on the Drivechain Telegram group.
It's free, it's public.
Join, learn, and listen, and participate.
You can go to the Telegram group
by going to drivechain.info
and then you click on Telegram,
and then it'll take you to the Telegram group.
You can use your name like I do,
or you can use a pseudonym like Satoshi did.
Either is fine.
You don't have to dox yourself that you're a DriveChainer.
Drivechain is a little bit controversial.
Some people in Bitcoin really don't like it.
Peter Todd doesn't like it.
Shinobi doesn't like it.
Many people do like it, though.
Many of the most notable Bitcoiners support Drivechain.
We've got Adam Back, we've got Fiatjaf,
and I personally made a list of a huge number of them,
like over 50 people who have tweeted
about Drivechain favorably to varying degrees of support.
We've got Adam Back saying on stage last year,
Drivechain, this is the founder and CEO of Blockstream,
co-founder and CEO.
Pretty cool, and arguably could have been more important
or useful than Taproot.
So that's a pretty good statement.
He also wrote props to Truthcoin and team
for implementing and validating Drivechain design.
So, wow, implementing and validating Drivechain design,
a pretty crystal clear note of support.
And then more recently,
he slightly increased the tone of his rhetoric.
I noted that.
He tweeted more recently,
we're probably going to need sidechains slash Drivechains
where we're going to onboard the next billion users soon.
So he's saying we need Drivechains soon.
Quite a statement.
So I look forward to seeing his rhetoric increase in nature.
Fiatjaf has written, Drivechain is our only hope.
We need Drivechain or all the work thousands
in the last 13 years will have been in vain.
So that is the creator of Nostr
who has endorsed Drivechain in those terms.
There also have been favorable comments
by people like Ruben Samson who wrote,
I would like to see Drivechains happen
and run it as an experiment and see how it goes.
Of course, with Ruben, I must be very respectful
to the context in which he said that quote.
And I don't want to be confusing anyone.
He has not stated that he supports Drivechain right now.
In the context of his whole statement, if you read it,
he basically is saying he thinks it's interesting
and he's not sure if it would work,
but he would like to see if the community supports it,
he would be very interested to see how it goes.
So he has what you could describe
as a neutral or favorable opinion.
I wouldn't call him a outright supporter
in the way that Fiatjaf or Adam Back
seem to be based on their statements.
And you can read a whole bunch of other people.
I've collected over 50 different people's tweets
and articles on Drivechain at the website,
drivechain.info forward slash friends.
So that's it, drivechain.info forward slash friends.
Some of the people in the audience here
will see their own statements in this list.
So anyone who tweets about Drivechain,
I'm gonna see it and I'm gonna put it on this list
if I like it.
So that's what happens.
And then, yeah, so just to kind of wrap up,
the summary, the way that you summarize Drivechain
says a lot about how you think about it
and what you think is at stake.
So some people would say Drivechain,
oh, it's not necessary, it's just no good, uninteresting,
but I see it profoundly important to Bitcoin
that Drivechain would increase Bitcoin extensibility,
meaning the ability to customize
and create on top of Bitcoin as a developer.
And that's what it's all about.
That's how Adam Back talks about it.
He just uses the word innovation and the word extensibility.
So it's all about making Bitcoin more interesting.
It's all about growing Bitcoin with high-tech new ideas
on these sidechains.
And the three or four consequences of doing that
that are so impactful potentially,
which I like to add to the discussion are,
once you get that innovation and extensibility,
what you will also get from Drivechain quite possibly is
layer one ossification, higher fees,
and migration of altcoin development
and users and value to Bitcoin,
meaning higher dominance for Bitcoin,
lower value for altcoins.
For example, suppose the Zcash users
were to completely migrate,
completely migrate from the Zcash altcoin
to the Zcash sidechain, hypothetically.
If they were to do that,
the value of the Zcash altcoin would approach zero
and the value of Bitcoin would be higher as a result.
There would be an increase in Bitcoin's value
and a complete devaluation of the altcoin.
The users would have left Zcash
and would have used a almost identical version of Zcash
as a Bitcoin sidechain.
And one of the benefits of this
is that the value of their token would be,
it would be a token which is a synthetic Bitcoin.
That's a phrase I use to describe
the native token on a Drivechain.
I don't think anyone else says it that way,
but a synthetic Bitcoin,
meaning it's redeemable for Bitcoin.
It trades at almost exactly Bitcoin's value all the time
and its fees are paid to Bitcoin's miners,
almost 100% of them.
And you're basically using
what could be described as like a Bitcoin economically,
even though technologically it is distinct from Bitcoin
in various interesting ways.
It has a different security model
and it has a different transaction fee market.
So there's a different block space,
but more or less the main benefit,
I think practically speaking is
someone who likes extreme privacy
and is using Zcash as a result of that
would quite possibly prefer to use Bitcoin.
As the unit of account, but with Zcash privacy. And that is the intent of the Zcash sidechain,
of the Zcash sidechain, the Drivechain called Zside. So it's very exciting. Maybe the whole
privacy community would get very into it. Because those are simply people who are,
as I understand, Bitcoiners who like strong privacy. They want the best possible privacy.
And getting extreme privacy with Bitcoin involves a user experience that
might be not as good as the user experience in Zcash. And Zcash is using the highest tech
privacy technology. So it'd be great for people to be able to use Bitcoin, but also Zcash at the
same time. And that's what the sidechains are all about. You're getting Bitcoin's economics
with the software of an altcoin. So that's what a Drivechain is. It's software that's
different than Bitcoin's layer one, but the unit of account trades one for one with Bitcoin. The
fees are paid to Bitcoin. So you're in the Bitcoin community, but you're doing something
different than Bitcoin layer one. So the vision of some Bitcoiners is that all you need is layer
one Bitcoin and lightning. That's it. We don't need any more soft forks, taproot. It's even
controversial whether that soft fork should have been done because now we have the wizards doing
their inscriptions and it's controversial. See, the DriveChainers see it the opposite way. The
DriveChainers want more things like that. They want more excitement, more demand for Bitcoin,
more building in Bitcoin, more interesting stuff in Bitcoin. Rather than having Ethereum have
200,000 different interesting projects, we should have all of that on Bitcoin.
Because what's going to happen eventually, if one is pessimistic about Bitcoin, is that
eventually there'll be a really interesting idea on blockchain. And if we don't have Drivechain,
then it's possible that that really interesting idea will only be possible to be built outside
of Bitcoin. So if you want to oppose Drivechain, if you want to oppose it, you have to be confident
that there will never be a good idea that can be built on a Drivechain.
And that can't be built on Bitcoin without Drivechain. So a person who's opposed to
Drivechain has to have that extreme confidence, or they would have to have confidence that
there are risks to Drivechain adoption that outweigh the benefits. We have some very cool
people in the audience. I recognize some of the names. If anyone would like to come up and chat,
they are welcome to. Hello, Mr. Lerner. Pleasure to have you in the audience. If
you're interested in coming up and chatting, you're welcome to, as is anyone else.
We have these spaces twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays, and they are intended for free form
conversation, open conversation about Drivechain, about BIPS 300 and 301.
Drivechain was conceived at first in 2015. The BIPS were authored by Paul Sztorc and CryptAxe.
And it's one of the most interesting ideas that I've ever encountered in my life. I think there's
a huge amount of potential for Drivechain to be transformative in the crypto space.
It could strengthen Bitcoin potentially enormously. Personally, I see it as an opportunity
to strengthen not only the security budget, but also the value of Bitcoin.
Not only the economic value, but the political momentum of Bitcoin. Because right now,
one of the weakest things going on in Bitcoin is that about half of the entire crypto community
are people who are primarily not invested emotionally in Bitcoin. They're instead
interested in altcoins. So Bitcoin only has a fraction of the political and cultural support
and energy that it could. If the entire cypherpunk cryptocurrency movement were in Bitcoin,
it would be much better. But instead, the community is fractured where many people are in
Ethereum or other projects. And therefore, Bitcoin has fewer members in its community,
which limits its cultural support, its political support, its ability to stave off bad regulation.
It would be so helpful if all of these altcoiners were instead on Drivechains.
I'm very excited to see that there are some parts of the cryptocurrency community
that are trying to advocate for Drivechain, not only theoretically, but by actually building
Bitcoin sidechains. The greatest example of this is the Rootstock community, where
brilliant people have built a sidechain on Bitcoin that it seems to me is as close to a
Drivechain as possible. I'm excited to see people doing that, people building real things and truly
having actual economic activity on Bitcoin sidechains, which demonstrates the value of
sidechains to a great extent. There are tens of millions of dollars of value in Bitcoin sidechains,
including Rootstock specifically. And there are Bitcoin every month that are paid to
Bitcoin layer one miners through Rootstock merged mining. Merged mining is an idea that is so
important and is really underappreciated within the Bitcoin community because Satoshi himself said
back in August of 2010 in writing that merged mining could strengthen Bitcoin in the future.
He wrote explicitly that he viewed all the networks in the world would be merged mined
with Bitcoin. So Satoshi thought that every blockchain would be a merged mined Bitcoin
blockchain, that every single blockchain would be using Bitcoin as its layer one, so to speak.
It's too bad that that's not true. Ethereum is not merge-mined with Bitcoin. Dogecoin is not
merge-mined with Bitcoin. Numerous projects are not merge-mined with Bitcoin, but the greatest
of all the merged mined blockchains on Bitcoin is Rootstock. So people who want to see not just the
theoretical vision of Drivechain, but the actual efforts to build currently, I think should focus
on Rootstock as the project which is at the forefront of building on Bitcoin sidechains.
Another great project, of course, is Blockstream's Liquid, although it isn't merged mined. So I think
it's not quite as close to a Drivechain as Rootstock is because Rootstock has that merged
mining going on, which is an important part of the Drivechain vision. So Drivechain has
two features. One is the two-way peg and the other is merged mining. And Drivechain is two
different BIPs. The more important one, the main one, is BIP300, hashrate escrow,
miner-controlled two-way peg. And then the second one, the secondary one, is blind merged mining,
which enhances merged mining by enabling miners to have running of the sidechain node as an option
rather than mandatory. One of the unfortunate parts of the current state of Bitcoin discourse
is that merged mining is not universally applauded. Some Bitcoiners think that merged mining isn't
good, even though Satoshi said it's fine and great. And also, it's been around for 13 years.
It's been around since the beginning, or at least 10 years. There's been a whole decade
of merged mining, and never once has there been a major problem as a result of merged mining.
Or as far as I know, there's never been any problem. Bitcoin miners have received a humongous
amount of money. If you were to add up all of the income that Bitcoin miners have received
from merged mining other blockchains, it probably is north of $20 million or more.
And if we strengthen the facilities available to sidechains, maybe merged mining can be
an enormous amount of Bitcoin miners' income. Paul Sztorc has a view, if I recall from his blog
posts, that in the far future, like maybe 10 years after drivechain is adopted, we might see
the, we might see over half of all fee revenue coming from merged mining. So it's an opportunity
that's of great importance for people who understand the security budget problem.
The security budget problem was what inspired me at first to get into
drivechain. However, I've come to understand that it is not at all the most important reason to do
drivechain. And in fact, when drivechain was first conceived, the security budget problem wasn't even
known. The inspiration for drivechain was a different problem that's very much known in
Bitcoin, which is the problem of hard forks and the problem of a lack of extensibility.
Drivechain would increase extensibility, enabling developers with new ideas to build on Bitcoin
sidechains instead of building on an altcoin, or instead of trying to fork Bitcoin, they could just
do something new on a sidechain, a peer-to-peer sidechain. Right now, every sidechain on Bitcoin,
as I understand, is federated. And the sidechains are trying as hard as they can to develop ideas
that make the federation as good as possible, as decentralized as possible. Some federations
have very cutting-edge ideas that include hash rate as a component in the design.
So they're doing everything they can to get close to drivechain. But drivechain would enable even
further degrees of decentralization, an even higher degree of decentralization to be achieved.
Because the most decentralized party on earth probably would be the Bitcoin mining industry.
It's a multitudinous, dynamic, enormously large economic operation that involves a huge number
of people all over the world. And having that party control the peg is the best arrangement
possible, far better than having a decentralized party. And that's what drivechain is all about.
Far better than having 15 signers that are individuals that are socially chosen
involved. So hash rate is something to leverage and rely on because of the economic design,
the self-interested, mutually distrusting nature of Bitcoin miners results in an emergent order
that is reliable and incentive compatible. So that's the exciting experiment of drivechain.
Once again, anyone who is in the audience who'd like to come up and chat is welcome to.
You can raise your hand and come on up and chat.
We have some familiar faces in the audience. Moon Settler, always great to see you here.
There have been a number of really great tweets on drivechain recently. One of the ones I enjoyed a
lot was a statement by Jameson Lopp. He wrote an article about Bitcoin development and ossification
recently. And I thought it was so great. Why don't we take a look at it?
So he said in his article, implementing drivechain or validity rollups would not only improve
overall network speed and capacity, but would also allow developers to test out various solutions in
a way that keeps the underlying base layer safe. So what Jameson Lopp is saying there,
in my view, is that drivechain or validity rollups would allow for ossification to a greater extent
on layer one, meaning less pressure to change layer one in order to allow people to do new things.
Or more precisely, what he's saying is that drivechain or validity rollups would enable
experimentation by developers on second layers in a partitioned manner,
meaning keeping the base layer safe. So he's actually talking there not about ossification.
He's focusing more on innovation and experimentation in a partitioned manner.
So that's one of the key concepts of drivechain is that the sidechains are partitioned, meaning
that if the sidechain fails, it doesn't harm the mainchain.
Just like if Ethereum were to fail, it wouldn't technologically impact Bitcoin,
generally speaking. So they're separate, they're partitioned. One of the problems,
of course, is that if developers have to do altcoins to do innovation and experimentation,
that's not good because they're not testnets, they're real money. So if you have an altcoin
that tests something and it turns out to be very good, and the test is very successful,
and then it grows a lot, then it starts to, unfortunately, diminish Bitcoin's network effect.
So it's much better for Bitcoiners to be able to run tests
within Bitcoin on sidechains than be forced to go do altcoins.
And because of Bitcoin's lack of extensibility, because of the lack of drivechain, there is a lot
of cultural confusion within the Bitcoin community, I think, where there are popular narratives
within Bitcoin that are just not right, unfortunately. Mainstream Bitcoin discourse
today, so-called toxic Bitcoin maximalism, includes a rejection of the idea that innovation
within blockchain is valuable and that there needs to be an end to altcoins, but
those same people don't support drivechain, generally. And therefore, I think they're
coping. I think they're saying, well, Bitcoin doesn't have extensibility, you can't build
Zcash on Bitcoin, you can't build Monero on Bitcoin, but those projects are no good,
they're not worth anything. When the truth is, it would be better for Bitcoin to enable
drivechain, and then those projects could be on Bitcoin, and we wouldn't have to criticize those
projects and denounce them. It's not good for the Bitcoin community to be focused on denouncing
altcoins. It would be much better for the Bitcoin community to be focused on enabling
innovation on Bitcoin so that developers don't have to go to altcoins. So one of the other
cultural mistakes within Bitcoin's community, one could argue, is a complete denial, a denial
of the value of any altcoin, even though there are clearly some altcoins that have value.
They have more scalability, they have more privacy, fungibility,
they have projects that are focused on exciting and important ideas like oracles,
they have more expressiveness, there are more things that can be done.
So it's not good for a technologically inclined community to have an anti-innovation mindset,
where, you know, it's like imagine if the Ford Motor Company were to say,
we don't think anything that Chevy is building is right. None of those cars are good. Everyone
should just buy a Ford, no one should buy a Chevy, no one should buy an Audi, no one should buy a
Porsche, everyone should just buy Ford. Ford is the only good company because it was the first.
Ford had the first car, and therefore no one can ever invent cars again. The invention of cars is,
you know, this is kind of like what Bitcoiners think, like the invention of Bitcoin is like,
you know, the invention of digital scarcity is somehow a singular event
which can never be duplicated again. This whole Robert Breedlove style philosophy
that because Bitcoin was first, therefore it's the one and only forever. That is not quite right.
But if drivechain is adopted, if drivechain is adopted, then all of the hopes of such people
might be vindicated. He might actually get what he wants then. He might see
all of the altcoins diminish, maybe. It can't be promised, but it's possible.
Welcome to the stage, Moon Settler.
Moon Settler.
Delighted to have you join.
It looks like his connection might not be working. Sometimes these Twitter spaces have
had glitches where it's hard to let people on stage, so hopefully we won't have that today.
Unfortunately, it looks like it's hard for him to connect.
I was really hoping he would be able to connect. Moon Settler is one of the people who I've really
enjoyed having in these spaces. He always has a really good, sophisticated view on drivechain
and related topics.
In order to inspire this conversation, I'm going to put up a tweet in the nest from John Light.
It's the tweet that I read aloud from Jameson Lopp's article.
Well, we've been going for about 40 minutes now. I've talked the entire time.
My goal with these spaces is to have people join, listen, and learn and speak.
Sometimes we have a critic of drivechain on stage. Sometimes we have a critic of
drivechain on stage. Sometimes we have a critic of drivechain on stage.
I'm so excited to see what happens in this space. Whatever happens, I think I'll be happy.
I'm so excited to see what happens in this space. Whatever happens, I think I'll be happy.
Because in my view, if drivechain doesn't happen on Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin is going to have
problems, very serious ones. I think those problems already exist due to the lack of
drivechain. In my personal opinion, the drive chainers will be vindicated
in the future whether or not drivechain is adopted. If it's adopted, I think it'll be
successful. If it isn't adopted, I think that will be consequential.
I'm excited about the drama in this space. I'm curious to see what happens.
Will drivechain be adopted and what will happen as a result of its adoption or non-adoption?
I'm very excited to observe this space evolve in the future. The only part that's not so great is
how long it takes. It might take years for this to play out. It might take a decade to see what
happens. A person has to have very low time preference, as the Austrian economists like to
say. Low time preference to understand whether drivechain is going to achieve everything it's
designed to achieve. It'll take maybe a generation to find out the course of Bitcoin's future.
Will Bitcoin become the world's money or will it drift into a small and irrelevant
part of the economy? It looks like someone else just had trouble connecting.
The speaker named YOLO. Unfortunately, there might be a problem with Twitter spaces.
Going forward for the next space on Thursday, I'm going to try to fix this. I'll try signing out
on my phone from the account and logging back in. I'll try things like that in case that might fix
any glitch that's occurring. We've had problems in recent spaces with people joining. Once or
twice, someone couldn't join. This time, it looks like no one can join. There's some problem with
Twitter spaces. Elon Musk has fired a lot of the employees there. Maybe the person who runs the
Twitter spaces today is out sick. Maybe that's what's going on. I want to mention a few things
about drivechains development. We have a new Discord channel. The Discord. It's for a whole
bunch of different groups, including Rootstock, Liquid, and Drivechain and others. Stacks.
I believe it's called Second Layer. The number two, and then the letters ND, and then layer.
You can join it. There are people there chatting about all these different Bitcoin
second layer projects. It's been created as a community to bring together the whole second
layer community. Everyone interested in sidechains and layers for Bitcoin.
One of the interesting projects in the space with regard to layers on Bitcoin is Stacks.
Stacks had an ICO and as a result has an altcoin.
It's a large project and it's been interesting to listen to their spaces and learn about it.
The lead designer there, Munib, has tweeted about drivechain only a few times. I've read all the
tweets that he's written about it. He never criticizes it. He just says that drivechain
is theoretical. I think he has an accurate view that drivechains are not currently possible on
Bitcoin. I think his project is an example of what happens when there are no drivechains possible.
When there are no drivechains possible, you end up with altcoins like Stacks.
If drivechain were adopted, then that project would probably
over time migrate toward a drivechain design. As a result, the STX token probably would lose value.
One could suggest that maybe Stacks doesn't have an incentive to advocate for drivechain.
Doesn't have an incentive to advocate for drivechain. Whereas in Rootstock, there isn't
an altcoin at the center of the project. There's nothing stopping them from advocating for drive
chain and therefore they do. I view Rootstock in comparison to Stacks. Rootstock is more aligned
with drivechain in my understanding. I think it's great that there are a bunch
of different projects out there that are all using Bitcoin in different ways. My personal
approach is to be friendly and civil and focus not so much on criticizing. Instead, it's good
to focus on building and providing a path forward and not trying to bring down and criticize and
and undermine what others are doing.
So that's the attitude we have at LayerTwo Labs and me personally is just an attitude of positivity,
of friendliness and intellectual community, you know, open dialogue.
Not at all toxic Bitcoin stuff. In fact, I think the maximalist, the identity of maximalism really
belongs to drivechain because drivechain is the idea that it would be possible perhaps to have
all the altcoin users come to Bitcoin, use sidechains and therefore the altcoins would go to zero.
Bitcoin would have a maximum market capitalization. In my opinion, the only coherent
understanding of Bitcoin maximalism is to say that Bitcoin's market cap should be 100%
of the crypto market cap and it's been going down for a long time. So I think that
the establishment is not succeeding and I think that we see the cracks forming. The cracks are
forming in the system. Something is needed. There's a change that's needed. The security
budget problem is ongoing. The altcoins are growing. The lack of ossification leads to
endless debates about soft forks. So those are all problems that result from the lack of drivechain.
So if we get drivechain, if we get extensibility, if we get miner control pegs,
then we get layer one ossification potentially. We get higher fees potentially and we get altcoin
users migrating to Bitcoin sidechains potentially. That's the drivechain vision as I understand it.
The innovation and extensibility results in higher fees, higher ossification and higher dominance.
A lot of people don't understand that whole justification for drivechain.
And instead they view drivechain primarily from the security budget angle or from the
angle of competing with altcoins. But actually the best justification for drivechain,
the most fundamental one, has to do with the fact that there's a lot of people who
don't understand that. The most fundamental one has to do with
increasing extensibility and innovation. All of the other things would flow. All of the
other good things would flow from higher extensibility and higher innovation on Bitcoin.
The other things that would flow from that are the ossification, the fees, and the dominance
of Bitcoin.
Well, we've been going for almost an hour now. And sadly, the few people who wanted to join
had technological issues. I think it's Twitter's fault probably. But I apologize on their behalf.
On Thursday, I think the issues might be fixed and we can talk about any ideas that you have.
In the meantime, please find me and others in the drivechain talk telegram group.
And if you have ideas on how these spaces can be run differently or better, please let me know.
I'm Henry. I can be found in drivechain talks telegram group or on Twitter.
And I look forward to seeing you all again. Thanks for being here.
Drivechain also has a Reddit that I post in. It's not very active right now,
but everyone's welcome to post there if they'd like. So if you go to reddit.com slash drive
chains, it's there. Today, I will post Jameson Lopp's article on there. And I've posted others
on there as well. There's a telegram group and then we also have drivechain.info. And you can
also check out layer2labs.com for information. There's a whole bunch of different websites and
places to go to learn about drivechain. Well, that's it for today. Thanks everyone for being
here. See you next time on Thursday.