We're going to put out a splitting tool, and we're also going to do like a rehearsal, or like a dry run, we're going to do like a fork, like before the fork.

You can get it for ecash.com slash download. So we have lots and lots of stuff that you could see for yourself, and you get the fake coins, you can play around with it.

We're still kind of on schedule, and it's the end of August, so we kind of have two months still.

The exchange is the true owner of the coins. And so they will get all the coins.

Look, I think we've covered plenty on the Thunderfront. I wanted to discuss, you know, the Z side, I wanted to get into Truthcoin.

Well, Z side is based on the altcoin Zcash. So they did a huge amount of work on it.

They had a lot of PhDs, and they created all this technology for these Z addresses, that if you can share them freely and reuse them, in fact, it's safe to reuse them, unlike a Bitcoin, where you're not supposed to reuse addresses.

But with the Z addresses, you may, because they hide the sender, the receiver, and the amount, using advanced cryptography.

So you could just say, send, here's my Z address, and then if you sent me five Z coins, no one will know that they went to me, or to that address even.

And no one will know how many coins you sent. So it's different from Bitcoin.

The cryptography is much more ambitious, and it's much more complicated.

And in fact, famously, like two weeks ago or something, there was this bug in the thing that they found, which was a Z address.

It was interesting that they were the ones to find their own bug, and that it was not.

But one thing is, it's so private, people don't know.

Because it's so private.

So they don't know, maybe someone printed 10,000 extra coins, and then they will know.

And you wouldn't kind of know until it was too late.

Like, you'd say, oh, they went on Coinbase and they sold 800 million coins.

And then people would be like, oh, I guess there was an inflation bug.

Someone's stealing someone else's coin.

So they steal your coins and sell them on Coinbase using a bug.

It's not until later you realize, oh, my coins were...

Double spend or something, right?

Because that was the problem with the zero knowledge part of it, right?

I think it's still very new to take zero knowledge overall.

But I think, you know, we won't...

If we don't try things, if people then try them, we will never find the bug.

So bugs are a normal part of software, and they do happen.

And they happened in Bitcoin a few times, in fact.

So that's basically...

Z-side is basically just L2 that has the Z-address technology.

So if you really cared about privacy, you could use that.

Option.

Right, okay.

How far are you on that?

Are you just going to fork Zcash and bring it on to DriveChain?

Is that the plan?

The Zcash people were nice enough to tidy up their code into these nice things called Rust crates.

And so now it's very modular, which is very, very, very impressive from a...

Like readability, maintainability, whatever technical point.

But they made it very easy to just take the Orchard Rust crate off the shelf and plug it in.

Which is to their credit, but also some would say very impolite of me to just take maybe without asking.

You know, maybe...

See, here's the thing.

There's no guarantee that any of this stuff will be popular or even work or whatever.

So maybe way down the line, we could throw a Zcash appreciation party or something.

But for now, this is all just like square one getting off the ground.

So yeah, that's the actual detail, is that they already modularized it and they tidied it up.

And so it was quite easy to...

Now, remember, when we say fork, we're talking like sometimes there's code fork.

This is not what we're doing.

We're not doing either a fork or the blockchain fork.

We just take...

They just have the code and we just download it and move it over and plug it in.

It's actually quite a lot of...

Even despite the crate, it's quite a lot of work to get the wallet and stuff to understand what's happening and that you have more money now and stuff.

So it still was a little bit of work.

But mostly they did all this like PhD level cryptography for like years and years.

Yeah, I do appreciate all the work they've done.

So Truthcoin, I think, obviously, as you said, it's more of an experimental thing.

Then there is obviously BitAsset, BitName, Photon, right?

They're all...

Of course, all of them will be launched on day one.

But are you focused on one or two that you think will bring the adoption slash more people using those drivechains?

Well, I think a good option if you want people who actually care about the mission and they care about the Cypherpunk idea.

So I think the privacy one would help, Zside.

People would actually adopt for that.

And especially because it's a much stronger version of privacy than you can get in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like, you know, you just have like CoinJoin.

You have like these really bad options that are not that good.

Thunder is for scaling, but it only matters if the network is really, really popular.

So of course, if it's not, then it wouldn't matter until that point.

I do think BitNames, which is based on Namecoin that we discussed.

I think the whole name idea is like much, much better than people realize.

And part of it is like when you go on YouTube and stuff, people have to put...

They have to say, here's our YouTube, here's our Instagram, here's our whatever.

And some of them are kind of different from each other.

So you have to like say, oh, here's my...

And then you have impersonators.

You have accounts being shadow banned or just deactivated or closed down or even seized by the government.

And then you have stuff like when someone will call and trick a person and they'll say, oh, this is Coinbase support.

You know, whatever, log in.

And then they steal the Coinbase login and drain their...

So you think you're talking to Coinbase, but you're actually talking to...

So all of this would go away in a world that has either BitNames or Namecoin because each person...

You have like your logins, like the internet.

So you would just have like XXIM or whatever.

You just have XXIM.Bit or whatever you want it to be.

And then whenever people want to interact with you over Instagram, over Telegram, if they wanted to send you money,

it would just be completely based off of the one name.

And that's the utopian vision.

The other thing is like, well, right now, if you want to have your own site, you want to XXIM.com.

You have to go, you have to buy it and then you have to pay every year.

Whereas kind of like in the blockchain world, you, of course, you pay a transaction fee, but you don't really have to renew it every year.

Like you own it, assuming you own your Bitcoin.

And then like this hasn't happened in a while, thanks to the people at Let's Encrypt and other places.

But it used to be the case that if you wanted to have like HTTPS, like if you want to have encryption,

which was like basically mandatory, you had to pay like an extra $5 like a month.

Like back in the day, this is a long time ago.

It's like 10, 15 years ago.

But even that was kind of strange because if you could prove you own the name cryptographically,

then why can't you just prove everything cryptography?

So the point is the name thing I think could be really big.

And I think we do live in a world with lots of spam.

We live in a world with lots of...

It's more practical, right?

It seems it's more practical and it's got more usability to normal people.

Yeah, I think in particular, anyone who gets too much spam,

like I think there could be a story where celebrities actually adopt it.

I know it sounds crazy because normally they are not like nerdy types.

But they have to deal with a lot of like stalkers and they want to have a relationship with their fans.

See, because there's the intermediaries too.

So if you're really, really big, you're like Taylor Swift or something,

you're always kind of worrying about like Ticketmaster or YouTube.

They're in between you and your fans and they're taking money.

And also YouTube can pull the plug on you at any time.

So they are kind of thinking like,

can I have some way of directly connecting with like...

And people have like mailing lists and stuff.

But these are kind of like not that great because no one checks their email.

So you could have a different thing where you could pay like $2,000 to message Taylor Swift or whatever.

And some people would do that. Not a lot of people would.

But the whole point is it's a supply and demand situation where then Taylor Swift would be able to read some of these messages.

There wouldn't be too many messages.

There would be a few you could read and maybe reply to them.

And so we each have this thing where the spam is mediated by payment.

And then when we're talking, someone could be like,

oh, you owe me $20 for the pizza.

You just send it right in the thing.

You don't have to like, oh...

And then like all kinds of terrible stuff I think happens now that we'll just roll our eyes at in the future.

Like it's very common. I don't know about you,

but sometimes I get like an email where someone will say,

pay this bill or something.

So then you have to open the email.

Then you have to click the link.

Then when you get to the link, it's like you have the username and password.

You have to log in and you're like, I don't remember what my username and password is for this obscure thing.

You got to figure out, oh, do I have...

How many Etsy accounts did I have anyway?

And then you're like, okay.

Then you log in.

Then you have to pay the bill.

You have to type in like your name, your address.

This is taking like, you know, a long time.

It's literally taking like five to 10 minutes, maybe more,

just to do it if you were fully on board with just...

So instead, why?

Because think about it.

If they're sending you email,

it's already cryptographically to some extent,

like you logged in to read the email.

They sent it from their email.

So to some extent, you already have like a cryptographic tunnel between you.

Why not just send...

You just reply to the email.

It was like, send $20.

And it would just go across.

So all that stuff, I think, is definitely possible.

And that would appeal to like elites in society.

And then once they like it, once the elites like it,

it will rapidly filter down.

So I think that that could happen.

I'm not sure about that.

For BitAssets, it's like you just have USDT.

You have just a version of USDT there.

That like takes care of itself.

Because people love stable coins.

It's a huge product market fit situation.

So that's like a BitAss.

Is it going to be the bridge version of USDT?

Or are you going to have the actual...

What is the right word I'm looking for?

The real USDT that's like from Tether?

You mean like that's backed by Tether?

Backed by Tether, yeah.

That's a very good question.

But I think it doesn't actually matter.

Because think about it like this.

You could have your own thing.

Either Tether will like support BitAssets and integrate with it.

But if they don't, you can just have another USDT.

You have USDT-15 or something.

And then it's backed by USDT.

So you can kind of make it work no matter what happens.

Well, I guess it's more like whose asset it is really.

Because if you bridge it,

you need to obviously work with someone and bridge it.

And they have their own issues if you're bridging it.

If you're bringing from third party,

how do you bring it, blah, blah, blah.

So there are some considerations there perhaps.

But I do agree as a whole.

I think once it's there, it becomes a usable asset.

But how do you get there is perhaps a different question.

The prediction market thing is very ambitious as a piece of software.

And it sort of works now.

But it's so complicated that I shudder to think what bugs may be in there.

Because my standards are very, very high.

So this isn't just like poly market or whatever, first of all.

Because now the way this works is it's totally decentralized

for which questions are proposed.

And then the questions can combine to make markets of high dimension.

So you can say you bet on this and that.

Everything could be like a parlay of everything else to some extent.

And you can make a bet that says,

I'm only going to bet that if it's a cloudy day

and the Republican Party wins this election,

then GDP in the future will be.

So I have this absurdly ambitious.

In addition, you can bet on each of those things individually.

And it will all wash out and it will all sync up.

And then the resolution of the questions is also decentralized.

So I have like a whole.

That's what Truthcoin, the original paper from like 2013.

So I got my Twitter account name.

And so I got truthcoin.info, truthcoin.com.

That was what that was about is the decentralized Oracle problem.

So that's like its own complicated thing to explain how that works.

And so the whole thing is completely like decentralized.

So I'm going to try to make that a success.

But I don't know if I will succeed.

Although, again, I invented all this stuff like in 2013.

Kind of from scratch.

I was the original prediction market guy, in fact.

And a lot of these other projects were like way downstream

of what I had already done in 2012, 2013, 2014.

This is like all this prediction market stuff.

And then now we do see, you know, you see like Caoshi and Polymarket.

You can see like the brand of the prediction market has soared.

And I think that does validate.

It just yet further validates.

It says that I must be on to something because I'm like always early.

I'm always really early to these really great ideas.

So I'm going to try to make that a success.

I think there is a good niche.

The decentralized version can maybe ask questions that the like a Polymarket cannot.

And then even Polymarket, it does seem like there will be a, you know,

this is to say the pendulum swings back and forth where, OK,

they did really, really well until 2024.

But now people are asking questions about insider trading, regulation, etc.

And I think that they may actually be going through a period of harassment

by the government or something you might call regulation or I think,

which I think will be tough for them already.

I think maybe you need to like to have ways of figuring out like what country you're in,

even if you have a VPN.

I think it's like so it may be hard for them to do like bet on all the different things

that people may want to use prediction market for,

whereas the decentralized software wouldn't have any of those limitations.

So I think that that so I think that so yeah,

or maybe no one will ever use any of this stuff.

But that's the plan is to try those things.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know,

each of these things that you're doing on layer two and layer one.

I mean, you know, there are very complex things. Right.

I must say it's not, you know, each of these drive chains,

even though you have all these things in your mind,

I think eventually if they become successful, I mean, this is my take.

You might actually have to get guys to run it individually as individual product

because these are, you know, really serious products in itself. Right.

Each of them that you're mentioning. Right. So.

But yeah, I think kudos to you, obviously.

I mean, five million dollars isn't a lot.

I know.

I think because I prefer to be able to offer the lower you raise,

the more ROI you can get.

That's it's good to raise a little bit, you know, waste not right.

Like a tiny little bit. And so that's good.

I think, yeah, I'm baffled by what other people do.

Like when they, you know, like certain whatever blocks,

rumors raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

As far as I can tell, they don't produce anything.

And lightning labs like in the hundreds million dollar ballpark.

I do think at a certain point becomes a significant distraction

and it's very bad for productivity

because then people start squabbling over the treasury.

And so I think it's been if this succeeds,

there's no guarantee that any of this will succeed.

I would put this on the list of how we kept it successful,

which is that raising a small amount because you have to keep,

you have to kind of keep the team together and the investors

for like a few years.

You know what I mean? You have to keep everyone cooperative.

And I think they just wouldn't do that if you raise a hundred million dollars.

And then it's like, why aren't we all just on a beach somewhere?

Like, why aren't we, why are we doing it?

I think it's a balance, right?

It's a balance of having the right people, the right amount of people,

the right amount of productivity that needs to go into it.

Right. I think that's the balance that one has to find.

Right.

I mean, Satoshi raised no money and it has like a negative raise in a way.

He put all our time in.

So it's like there's kind of almost a correlation.

Like the more money you raise, the worse the project ends up being.

Almost. I mean, it's hard to say.

But yeah, you do hear about these projects.

Isn't like Aptos or what? I don't really remember any of this,

but like, don't they raise,

I heard someone raise like $250 million or something

and Stacks raised like $100 million.

And it's like, yeah,

it's almost like a guarantee that it won't go anywhere.

It's weird.

Obviously, hard folk is going to be here, right?

People are going to get their free coins.

And I'm sure a lot of people,

perhaps they're not talking to you,

but they're excited to get a new coin after nine years, right?

After Bitcoin Cash, that era in 2017.

So I wanted to get into, you know,

how do people claim this e-cash when it comes out in August?

Well, yeah.

The easiest way would be to download our software

and type in your private key.

But I would say that, of course,

people should hesitate to do that

because that's also what someone would say

if they were trying to steal your Bitcoin.

So what you should really do is

just kind of like, you know,

keep your eye on it and look around

and have a friend go first, you know,

with like a $200 private key.

And make sure that that works.

And don't take my word for it necessarily.

So that's what you should like, take your time.

And but don't, you know,

keep in mind if you do any transacting in BTC,

the transactions probably will be replayed.

So both the coins will be moving around

and they'll be kind of like synchronized.

So I would do that.

Yeah, I would like research the issues.

But yeah, our software,

we're going to put out a splitting tool

and we're also going to do like a few like a,

like what you might call like a rehearsal

or like a dry run.

We're going to do like a fork like before the fork

that is not like,

it's designed to just be replaced.

So but it will like let everyone figure out,

oh, this is what I,

so that to minimize the amount of regret people have.

We'll do that.

I think we may do that.

I might even want to do that.

It depends on how the schedule lines up.

But if we,

if we do that and it's clear that people are really confused,

we may want to like,

like even delay,

like not because we have to delay,

but maybe as an education thing.

I've always said if we do a delay,

we're so far,

we're still kind of on schedule and it's the end of August.

So we kind of have two months still.

But if I always say if we do a delay,

we'll do like one big delay

because I wouldn't want to be like,

oh, we'll push it back a week,

but like one delay will be a really big delay.

If it is,

it will just be based on like an education thing,

I think,

which might be an important reason to do.

But yeah,

we'll have the rehearsal fork.

We have the software that people can try now.

So you can go to ecash.com slash download.

Check it out.

With the L2L Signet coins,

they're fake coins.

So the you can just play around with them.

And I think that that would at least get you familiar with the,

you would know that you have the right software

and you would know that you have the right,

how to use the software.

So that those things would help.

That's for the non-custodial wallet, right?

What about the exchanges?

If people hold their Bitcoin on exchange,

will they be getting the airdrop or?

Well, I mean,

it's kind of up to them because the exchange,

from the point of view of the Bitcoin network,

the exchange is the true owner of the coins.

And so they will get all the coins.

I would certainly hope that they would give them to,

that's another thing is like in the time leading up to the fork,

we plan to like say, tell everyone how,

by the way, take your coins off the exchanges,

unless it's this list of exchanges that is,

that has said that they will credit you.

I'm hoping that it will be easy for them to credit

because the L1,

even if they don't support any of the L2s,

which I think could be wise,

from the point of view of the exchange,

the L1 is just like a slightly different version of Bitcoin core

with like a different name.

So it should be very easy for them to just like copy,

paste their Bitcoin core, like set up,

to have e-cash and then just say,

you know, okay, we'll credit everyone with.

So it should be easy for them to do.

There's no guarantee that they will do it,

but if minimizing the cost to them is a.

Yeah, but there's a challenge, no?

They have to support you.

They have to list that point

because by saying that they will give it to you,

because that's for some exchanges,

they charge projects.

You know, there's a cost to it.

Yes.

Here's an interesting thing that I didn't know until recently,

which is that, okay, so you're right.

This is another thing I think has changed over time,

which is like getting listed on the exchange,

getting listed.

That was like a really, really big deal,

like really, really important.

I think it's fallen in importance

by like almost a factor of 100

or maybe more,

because now, like for example,

now if you just go on like whatever,

like you have like this,

because the swap changed now and these things,

you can, so like back when I was using an exchange.

So first of all, there was like exchanges.

They used to be like Mt. Gox.

It used to be a long period of time

where all these exchanges were going bankrupt.

And then they have the modern period,

like the Coinbase Kraken.

I don't know what I would call it,

the modern period, but it was like,

this is like from 2016.

So it hasn't changed much.

Yeah, it still happens.

And in fact, I'm absolutely certain

that these exchanges get hacked all the time

and they steal the money.

And then the corporation just pays people out

out of their profits.

They just don't tell anyone.

Just before, they would be like,

oh, we got hacked or something.

But the point is,

there was a period of time where you was like,

okay, you need to hold up your driver's license.

You need to take a photo.

You need to like take a photo

with the number there.

And you need to write,

this is only for use at Kraken

and hold up like your passport.

It used to have all this long process

with lots of paperwork.

And now you can just download

many different apps on your phone.

No ID, no nothing.

You download, you can swap $50,000, $200,000

with just the change now swap.

And they just do it.

It's fly by night.

And this is very common

in like Bitcoin.com wallet

and there's many mobile wallets

where the exchange thing

is just like some server somewhere.

And the front end,

I'm pretty sure like whatever,

like edge wallet, cake wallet,

like all these, like these are like,

so it's switched from being

long approval process involving your passport

and possibly getting rejected

and like logging in with your email.

It's switched from all that

to download this app

or if you already have the app,

if you already have like whatever,

you already have it.

And then just click like

buy or swap in the app.

And these, it will do huge amounts

basically instantly.

And of course it charges a fee.

But every exchange always charged a fee.

So I kind of think like this,

I know you're right to point out

that people would always,

they would be like, oh yeah,

if you want us to list the coin,

we charge $100,000 or whatever.

It is like a huge amount of money

or more and more sometimes.

And you have to go through our prime.

We maybe will reject you or something.

I think that that is not,

that's still important,

but I think it's actually like plummeted.

And now I think it actually

doesn't even matter that much.

And one other thing is that USDT,

I remember a time when USDT was not that big,

which was like three,

four years ago or something.

Because like when did it start

to get really, really big?

I don't remember.

It's always funny.

I think 2020 it really took off

post 2020 and really six years.

There were always the tether truthers

who are always, those are funny people,

you know, who say like this,

the whole industry is fake

and it's all tether.

That's just like propping up

the price of everything.

And this is funny.

Those people are,

the tether truthers.

So they've always been around.

Tether has been around.

Tether was originally a Bitcoin project.

It was originally Omnicoin

and then it was Mastercoin.

So it's this old Bitcoin project actually.

But it was not big.

I remember a time I went to Hong Kong

and it was like

everyone there was using USDT.

And they were just obsessed.

They were absolutely obsessed with it.

And I just thought this came out of nowhere.

And Tether is now like,

the top company per employee

in the world,

in all of human history.

They just have this giant stack of money

that they don't use.

They have invested 15% of it

in bonds or something.

They just have to keep the software running.

And they have 150 employees or something.

And no one even redeems.

And someone estimated that $7 billion

worth of USDT,

someone just lost it.

The users don't even have the private keys.

It's just gone.

It's not a model ever invented by anyone.

So the point is,

but the reason I bring this up is because

everyone can now move USDT around

on their phone already.

So they've already listed that.

It's too late.

It's been listed everywhere,

the USDT part.

And you can swap USDT

for a new coin pretty easily.

So it's almost like this has changed completely.

But yeah, I agree.

This used to be the first thing

on everyone's mind is

what kind of future will I have?

And so,

but I think that it's actually changed a lot.

I was myself surprised

when I looked into it.

I was like, wow, this actually matters

about 1% as much as it mattered,

or maybe even less,

maybe half a percent.

Does it matter in 2019 or something?

Yeah, I think the big ones

still are going to obviously,

you know, talk to you.

Obviously, they want to know the project.

As you say, it's sort of become

a commodity in a way.

There's a lot of exchanges will list you

right away from the get-go

because, you know, you're coming out

with all the hype and everything.

And then obviously the big ones will be there.

They probably have their own business strategy.

But either way, look, all the best

with everything.