1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,000
I think this one might be a little bit spicy. Ladies and gents, please, if you can
settle down now because we've got something very spicy for you.

2
00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:24,000
We have Peter Todd defending against Paul Sztorc and the latest attack on Bitcoin.

3
00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:34,000
We have the Grand Emperor of Tabcomp himself, Michael Tidwell, refereeing this
fight.

4
00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:44,000
Peter Todd.

5
00:00:44,000 --> 00:01:02,000
I want a clean fight.

6
00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:12,000
Verbal only. No physical. No strong manning. No overly steel manning. No manning.

7
00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:24,000
You know what I mean.

8
00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:34,000
You might be wondering what I'm doing up here. I'm just going to blow my whistle if
there's a deadlock in the conversation, which I feel like happens a lot of times
with Drivechain conversations.

9
00:01:34,000 --> 00:01:44,000
I'm going to blow this whistle, which means we're screwing up and we have to figure
it out. I represent a neutral referee.

10
00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:54,000
You're representing time. That's not neutral. We all die.

11
00:01:54,000 --> 00:02:06,000
What is Drivechain? The idea basically is to take the unused OPNAT5 and use it to
count to 13,000.

12
00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:12,000
If you can successfully count to 13,000, the transaction goes through, and if it
can, then it doesn't.

13
00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:24,000
It turns out that in my view, this is the optimal SPV proof, and it allows Bitcoin
to travel to other pieces of software, other blockchains, which solves most of our
problems.

14
00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:38,000
Please count it. There's an integer in the code, and the miners can move the counter
up once per block if they wish, or they can ignore it, or they can do other things
about it.

15
00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:48,000
Hey, I'm sorry. Real quick. In order for us to really know the result of this
debate, if you don't really care about Drivechain, like you don't really have a
strong opinion, keep your hand down,

16
00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:54,000
but if you have a really strong opinion in favor of Drivechain and you don't care
about doxing yourself, can you raise your hand?

17
00:02:54,000 --> 00:03:06,000
Okay, so we've got about five. If you are highly against Drivechain, can you raise
your hand?

18
00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:19,000
So at the end of this debate, we're going to do a vote again, and I like that it's
fairly even,

19
00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:30,000
and we're going to see whose heart, you know, if Peter's won your heart or Paul's
won your heart, okay?

20
00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:36,000
All right. Let's go. And if you become even more confused, there's a third option.

21
00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:41,000
And then the third option is you can raise your hand if you still don't care.

22
00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:48,000
Okay, continue. Sorry. We're counting to 13,000.

23
00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:53,000
All right. So we're counting to 13,000. That's what? Three months?

24
00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:57,000
It's supposed to be at 13,150, and it's supposed to be three months worth of blocks.

25
00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:02,000
Okay. And when do we stop counting?

26
00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:05,000
26,000 blocks, and it turns out it dies.

27
00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:13,000
Okay. So who decides what this count means?

28
00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:22,000
The scripting server will throw an error if you try to withdraw from the coins that
are locked behind this op-nop.

29
00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:28,000
So if the counter reaches 13,000, you can withdraw the coins, and if it doesn't, you
cannot.

30
00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:32,000
So I guess, I don't know, the Bitcoin block validity rules.

31
00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:36,000
Okay. So I think, like, maybe we can go and explain this in a different way.

32
00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:43,000
So let's start with a goal here. You have, like, Bitcoin Hivemind as an example,
right?

33
00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:44,000
I do.

34
00:04:44,000 --> 00:04:49,000
Well, long story short, Bitcoin Hivemind, roughly speaking, has a set of rules.

35
00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:54,000
It's not in Bitcoin right now. We'll probably never get into Bitcoin because we
arbitrarily hate it.

36
00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:56,000
No, it's also because –

37
00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:02,000
I'm not sincere in distracting the audience.

38
00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:06,000
But that's one point of all. First one of 300.

39
00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:09,000
And just so you know, it's –

40
00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:13,000
As a person, he knows because he actually did me the favor of reviewing it back in
2015,

41
00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:19,000
and Bitcoin Hivemind has all kinds of bizarre experimental state and things that it
would never come to Bitcoin by itself.

42
00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:21,000
So as a side change, it's sort of a –

43
00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:23,000
All right. So we agree on that part.

44
00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:25,000
But you still want to go try.

45
00:05:25,000 --> 00:05:30,000
I think it solves other problems as well, but that was how I first got interested in
this topic.

46
00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:35,000
Okay. And the important thing here is, from the point of view of Bitcoin,

47
00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:39,000
that you want to denominate the stuff in Bitcoin Hivemind in Bitcoin.

48
00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:43,000
It's not merely the denomination. It's like, you know, if you go to an ATM,

49
00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:47,000
you wouldn't say, like, the check income is denominated in dollars.

50
00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:49,000
You put a $20 bill in, it goes up by $20.

51
00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:52,000
It really is an abstract dollar.

52
00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:57,000
Same way that the Lightning Network is denominated in BTC.

53
00:05:57,000 --> 00:05:58,000
It really is renewable.

54
00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:03,000
When you move coins into the Lightning Network, you get the one-to-one thing, so to
speak,

55
00:06:03,000 --> 00:06:05,000
and then you withdraw them again.

56
00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:07,000
With risk, of course, as we all know.

57
00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:09,000
Or we put our money into the fiat bank account.

58
00:06:09,000 --> 00:06:11,000
We might get broke both ways.

59
00:06:11,000 --> 00:06:13,000
Yes. There is new risk.

60
00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:18,000
It would be a neat trick if you could do the sidechains and they had the exact same
security as L1,

61
00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:22,000
but I think we both agree that in that case, no, we wouldn't have this problem.

62
00:06:22,000 --> 00:06:24,000
We wouldn't have any problems.

63
00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:26,000
That would be nice, but it's not possible.

64
00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:27,000
You have to sacrifice something.

65
00:06:27,000 --> 00:06:33,000
And the goal, the design criterion for Bitcoin Hivemind is that the sacrifice is
totally borne

66
00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:35,000
by whoever chooses to put the coins in.

67
00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:41,000
And people who do not want to participate do not even notice what is happening.

68
00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:42,000
That is the goal.

69
00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:46,000
Well, I mean, it's always good to think of things that could go wrong.

70
00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:50,000
So what's an example where I could go put my money into Bitcoin Hivemind,

71
00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:55,000
and even though I won all the Hivemind bets or whatever it is, I still lose all my
money.

72
00:06:55,000 --> 00:06:56,000
How could that happen?

73
00:06:56,000 --> 00:06:59,000
Well, you could lose money by the rules of the sidechain, of course,

74
00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:00,000
if you place a bet and lose.

75
00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:02,000
So you could lose within the protocol rules.

76
00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:03,000
Obviously.

77
00:07:03,000 --> 00:07:05,000
Unless I'm a good better, so we'll do it that way.

78
00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:06,000
So you win, yes.

79
00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:07,000
Yes.

80
00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:12,000
Well, I think it's well known that the main risk of Drivechains, the BIP300,

81
00:07:13,000 --> 00:07:15,000
is that the miners are the ones setting the destination,

82
00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:18,000
and the miners are the ones setting the output.

83
00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:21,000
They're the ones counting the $13,000.

84
00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:25,000
And so they are the ones who can set the withdrawal destination,

85
00:07:25,000 --> 00:07:32,000
and they can take all the coins in this layer 2, which is the main drawback.

86
00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:35,000
But I have a lot of arguments for why they probably would not.

87
00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:37,000
If they do, they would have left back where they were.

88
00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:39,000
So it's a term metric, right?

89
00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:41,000
That actually describes what it is.

90
00:07:41,000 --> 00:07:48,000
And I'll point out that so Blockstream, Integate, MergeLine, SideChainSync,

91
00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:52,000
they might have been the first people to introduce the idea of HashRedesco.

92
00:07:52,000 --> 00:07:55,000
I got it from them.

93
00:07:55,000 --> 00:07:58,000
I got the SPV proof idea from them, and I just thought,

94
00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:02,000
I don't know why I thought HashRedesco was a better name for the Bitcoin.

95
00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:04,000
How do you use SPV proofs?

96
00:08:04,000 --> 00:08:09,000
Well, as you know, I kind of use that phrase in kind of a slightly more abstract way

97
00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:14,000
than they used it because in Blockstream's October 2014 paper,

98
00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:18,000
what they had in mind was literally you would take on the sidechain

99
00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:23,000
like a bunch of headers there and put them into an L1 transaction.

100
00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:28,000
You'd see like kind of a glimpse of the headers of this different blockchain.

101
00:08:28,000 --> 00:08:30,000
And that was their version of an SPV proof.

102
00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:32,000
But I have a slightly different version,

103
00:08:32,000 --> 00:08:34,000
where, as you know, I have the work kind of flipped around.

104
00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:36,000
I just assume that everything will be MergeLined.

105
00:08:36,000 --> 00:08:38,000
I assume the set of miners is the same.

106
00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:44,000
I assume that what they're doing when they move the –

107
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:47,000
since it's the same group of people, I assume that when they move the counter up

108
00:08:47,000 --> 00:08:53,000
from like 12,999 to 13,000 that they are, in effect,

109
00:08:53,000 --> 00:09:00,000
putting the work of finding that block into the withdrawal that they stand behind.

110
00:09:00,000 --> 00:09:07,000
So it's the same group of people, but I mean BIP301 talks about like blind
MergeLining.

111
00:09:07,000 --> 00:09:09,000
I mean how does this separate?

112
00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:13,000
Well, I think – I'm totally happy to talk about blind MergeLining,

113
00:09:13,000 --> 00:09:17,000
but I do worry that it gets a little – like blind MergeLining is sort of optional,

114
00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:23,000
and it's like you cannot possibly really even enforce sidechain to use blind
MergeLining.

115
00:09:23,000 --> 00:09:26,000
I think everyone would use blind MergeLining.

116
00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:29,000
I mean I think it's actually not only easier to BIP,

117
00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:33,000
but it's also the natural equilibrium outcome of any MergeLining

118
00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:35,000
because the miners don't want to pay any costs.

119
00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:37,000
They want as little hassle as possible.

120
00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:42,000
So the best thing of all would be for them to not run any sidechain node

121
00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:46,000
and then just partner with someone who is, and BIP301 makes this trustless.

122
00:09:46,000 --> 00:09:50,000
And so I think that blind MergeLining is a cool idea,

123
00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:55,000
but it's kind of like a cherry on top or it's kind of like an extra thing.

124
00:09:55,000 --> 00:09:59,000
And I'm happy to talk about it, but it does seem to me that people are struggling an
awful lot

125
00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:01,000
with accounting for $13,000.

126
00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:04,000
Hey, we have people leaving because they're bored.

127
00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:08,000
You've got to stop putting these long responses.

128
00:10:08,000 --> 00:10:12,000
So, all right, so we mentioned blind MergeLining.

129
00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:16,000
So you're saying that this is trustless for the miner,

130
00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:20,000
but the thing that kind of surprises me when I was looking at BIP301,

131
00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:22,000
I don't see any relation to BIP300.

132
00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:27,000
I mean, how does this blind MergeLining thing relate to the hashrate escrow?

133
00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:30,000
You are correct. It's orthogonal.

134
00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:34,000
You could have blind MergeLining of an altcoin that's not the hashrate escrow,

135
00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:40,000
and you could also have a BIP300 sidechain that does not use blind MergeLining.

136
00:10:40,000 --> 00:10:43,000
Okay, so we have this potential way of doing consensus,

137
00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:50,000
but it has nothing to do with who decides who actually gets state money out of the
sidechain.

138
00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:52,000
Well, there is a relationship.

139
00:10:52,000 --> 00:10:56,000
If you use blind MergeLining, then you have the same, you know,

140
00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:00,000
the layer one miners on BTC are the miners of the L2,

141
00:11:00,000 --> 00:11:05,000
so they are progressing the L2, so they know the real withdrawal,

142
00:11:05,000 --> 00:11:09,000
and they also set the L1 withdrawal, so they know everything.

143
00:11:09,000 --> 00:11:13,000
Now, to be clear, but then you also say, and I think I've heard you say this before,

144
00:11:13,000 --> 00:11:20,000
that some, you know, Drivechains don't affect Bitcoin mining necessarily.

145
00:11:20,000 --> 00:11:26,000
Okay, I think you're right to point that out because I think this is kind of like
maybe a miscommunication on my part,

146
00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:29,000
which is that you and I, we've been in Bitcoin for a long time.

147
00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:31,000
We've lived through, like, the invention.

148
00:11:31,000 --> 00:11:33,000
No one cares about our history.

149
00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:35,000
So, like, but it's like many things have happened.

150
00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:41,000
The miners have a list of things they have to do, like buy ASICs and cool the ASICs,

151
00:11:41,000 --> 00:11:42,000
and find cheap power.

152
00:11:42,000 --> 00:11:46,000
So they have a list of things they have to do, and they have money that they earn.

153
00:11:46,000 --> 00:11:49,000
And that list has been changing a lot over the last few years,

154
00:11:49,000 --> 00:11:54,000
and so it does change further with this, but to me it doesn't really seem to
register as any kind of normal chain.

155
00:11:54,000 --> 00:11:56,000
Well, all right, so let's be clear.

156
00:11:56,000 --> 00:12:00,000
So let's suppose Bitcoin pipeline gets implemented.

157
00:12:00,000 --> 00:12:04,000
Let's suppose, you know, it's quite popular, like half a billion dollars goes on
there.

158
00:12:05,000 --> 00:12:12,000
How is it that money would be withdrawn from the Bitcoin pipeline Drivechain without
the participation of miners?

159
00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:16,000
Because when I go look at BIP300, it seems like I need a majority of hash power to
sign off.

160
00:12:16,000 --> 00:12:22,000
Yeah, you do, and the miners don't need to – what the miners are going to do,

161
00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:26,000
the way that BIP300 works is the miners are the same people.

162
00:12:26,000 --> 00:12:32,000
So nothing is crossing from L2 to L1, but since the miners will run both, the miners
are like the conveyors.

163
00:12:32,000 --> 00:12:34,000
But to answer your question –

164
00:12:34,000 --> 00:12:40,000
So you said the miners are the same people, but we also have this Blind Merged Mining
idea.

165
00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:43,000
How does this fit?

166
00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:51,000
The relationship is that the miners can, the day-to-day of not running the sidechain
node,

167
00:12:51,000 --> 00:12:57,000
they don't have to run day-to-day, but if there's ever some kind of dispute or
problem, they could run the sidechain node.

168
00:12:57,000 --> 00:13:01,000
Blind Merged Mining means that L2 and L1 –

169
00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:07,000
So you said day-to-day, they don't have to run it, but if there's some dispute,

170
00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:11,000
yet if I want to withdraw money from the Bitcoin pipeline Drivechain,

171
00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:18,000
I have to in a six-month period get 50% of blocks to agree that the withdrawal
should happen.

172
00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:22,000
I mean, how does this compute with they don't day-to-day have to run the software?

173
00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:30,000
The way they would know with absolute certainty what the true withdrawal hash is,

174
00:13:30,000 --> 00:13:34,000
because this is just one hash every three months, is to run the sidechain full node,

175
00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:41,000
and that will tell them, okay, for Q3, this is the hash, this is the one withdrawal
that's valid for this three-month period.

176
00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:45,000
But they can also learn it in any other way, so they can run the sidechain in SPV
mode,

177
00:13:45,000 --> 00:13:49,000
or they could just call a friend who's running the node and get it from them.

178
00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:53,000
So they have the best of both worlds.

179
00:13:53,000 --> 00:13:55,000
No, they have the best of both worlds.

180
00:13:55,000 --> 00:14:00,000
So they have the option to achieve absolute certainty by running the node
themselves,

181
00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:03,000
even if they haven't been running one at all for years.

182
00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:06,000
They can say, well, it's finally happened, there's finally a dispute.

183
00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:10,000
They could then run the node, and because of the way sidechains work,

184
00:14:10,000 --> 00:14:15,000
the node may have UTXO commitments or things that may not need us all, but it's
history.

185
00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:20,000
But the point is, to obtain absolute certainty, they would run the node, but they
don't need to.

186
00:14:20,000 --> 00:14:24,000
They can learn about it the same way anyone learns about anything.

187
00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:27,000
They could just guess, or they could hear about it from someone else.

188
00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:32,000
So you want to – so in my example, say, half a million dollars stored in a pipeline
chain,

189
00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:37,000
obviously someone could go create a withdrawal proposal that just steals all the
money.

190
00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:38,000
Correct.

191
00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:42,000
And you're expecting this to be based on people potentially just guessing?

192
00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:46,000
No, I don't. I think it's based on self-interest.

193
00:14:46,000 --> 00:14:52,000
The security model of GOOG 300 is that the miners are collecting transaction fees
from all these chains

194
00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:56,000
in return for basically not doing really any additional work.

195
00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:02,000
And so it's a relationship where – it's a relationship of fear and greed on both
sides.

196
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:06,000
So we, as the user, we would fear that the miner would steal from us,

197
00:15:06,000 --> 00:15:09,000
and we would greedily want the new feature.

198
00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:12,000
But the miner side, it actually looks the same way.

199
00:15:12,000 --> 00:15:17,000
The miners are thinking, are we going to make – we want all this transaction fee
revenue,

200
00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:22,000
and they think if we don't get this money, we will go out of business

201
00:15:22,000 --> 00:15:26,000
and we will instead of being a profitable business, we'll be an unprofitable
business.

202
00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:30,000
And their fear is that they won't be able to entice anyone.

203
00:15:30,000 --> 00:15:32,000
Well, so let's be clear here.

204
00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:37,000
So in this – I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but basically the wage-Drivechain's
proposals right now

205
00:15:37,000 --> 00:15:40,000
can have up to 256 Drivechains.

206
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:41,000
That's correct.

207
00:15:41,000 --> 00:15:46,000
Now you can imagine a future where fee revenue through line-merge mining

208
00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:48,000
is spread across 256 Drivechains.

209
00:15:48,000 --> 00:15:56,000
Do you expect me as a miner to like nearly every day try to research yet another
proposal

210
00:15:56,000 --> 00:15:58,000
to go figure out whether or not this is a fraud attempt or not?

211
00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:00,000
I mean, this sounds like a lot of work.

212
00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:03,000
No, it's designed to be the reverse because it's the sidechain node

213
00:16:03,000 --> 00:16:07,000
that automatically generates only one true withdrawal every three months.

214
00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:10,000
So it's only 32 bytes every three months.

215
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:14,000
I don't really think there will be 256 sidechains, so there might be.

216
00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:19,000
And, of course, there could be more because miners could solve for 1,500 A, B, C, D,

217
00:16:19,000 --> 00:16:20,000
and they could just put –

218
00:16:20,000 --> 00:16:24,000
Well, to be clear, I mean, when you say one true withdrawal every three months

219
00:16:24,000 --> 00:16:31,000
over all the sidechains out there, that means quite frequently if I'm going to be a
miner

220
00:16:31,000 --> 00:16:37,000
and it's not potentially allowed theft, I need to go figure out for yet another
piece of software

221
00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:38,000
what on earth is going on.

222
00:16:38,000 --> 00:16:41,000
It's true, but I don't see a problem with that at all.

223
00:16:41,000 --> 00:16:49,000
I think it's the enticement of the fees that encourages miners to support the hashrate escrow

224
00:16:49,000 --> 00:16:52,000
or the sidechain as I would see it.

225
00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:55,000
All right, so there's this enticement of fees.

226
00:16:55,000 --> 00:16:59,000
But, again, we're still creating an enormous amount of work.

227
00:16:59,000 --> 00:17:01,000
And, I mean, let's give a slightly different example.

228
00:17:01,000 --> 00:17:04,000
Let's suppose that we get Strategy V2 working.

229
00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:11,000
And, as we know, Strategy V2 is meant to allow someone like myself writing however
many terahash worth

230
00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:14,000
of mining on a small scale to actually produce blocks.

231
00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:19,000
I might be earning, say, $100 a month producing blocks.

232
00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:23,000
Yeah, but what Strategy V2 does is it allows you to propose the block.

233
00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:25,000
The pool can still override it.

234
00:17:25,000 --> 00:17:29,000
So I think Strategy V2 is great, but I think it doesn't do anyone near enough.

235
00:17:29,000 --> 00:17:33,000
I also don't think it's a big problem because the pools, in general pools,

236
00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:36,000
they have so little agency that to me they almost don't exist.

237
00:17:36,000 --> 00:17:39,000
Wait, wait, wait. You're saying pools don't have agency?

238
00:17:39,000 --> 00:17:45,000
Yeah, I think in this example they're the ones who basically gatekeep whether or not
money gets sold.

239
00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:51,000
Well, the reason why I don't agree with that is because it's so slow that it's not
as though –

240
00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:56,000
sometimes people say, well, why don't you just have a multisig with the four biggest
pools?

241
00:17:56,000 --> 00:17:57,000
Isn't that the same thing?

242
00:17:57,000 --> 00:18:02,000
But no, the four biggest pools are going to have this key and just withdraw at 3
a.m.

243
00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:08,000
and take the money before any of their own clients realize what is happening.

244
00:18:08,000 --> 00:18:14,000
So the pools only exist if they are benefiting financially their customers.

245
00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:16,000
The customers will say, hey, I'll do it again.

246
00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:20,000
When you say it's so slow, remember,

247
00:18:20,000 --> 00:18:24,000
it may be slow for an individual direction, yet there may be many of these things we
have to worry about.

248
00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:25,000
That's not slow.

249
00:18:25,000 --> 00:18:30,000
I have to do much work every couple of days to quote, unquote, honestly mine
Bitcoin.

250
00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:37,000
I think even in a situation where the sidechain software has huge blocks and is very
difficult to run

251
00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:40,000
and you must catch up months' worth of history,

252
00:18:40,000 --> 00:18:48,000
it really just doesn't take three months to sink – it doesn't take three to six
months to sink a blockchain.

253
00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:52,000
I feel like you're setting this up for a haymaker.

254
00:18:52,000 --> 00:18:58,000
I just want to make sure we do a health check.

255
00:18:58,000 --> 00:19:02,000
The people who are following along here,

256
00:19:02,000 --> 00:19:11,000
has anyone changed their mind about any of the discussions so far after listening to
the conversation so far?

257
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:13,000
Okay.

258
00:19:13,000 --> 00:19:15,000
We have one person.

259
00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:23,000
I do feel like we're setting up the premise for an epic tale like we're doing a
prelog,

260
00:19:23,000 --> 00:19:30,000
but I would say if you could try to get a little bit more pointed, if that's okay.

261
00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:39,000
I think what we're leading up to pretty quickly is I think we seem to both agree on
the fact that with Drivechains,

262
00:19:39,000 --> 00:19:44,000
if they work the way you expect them to, we're adding a hell of a lot of overhead
for miners.

263
00:19:44,000 --> 00:19:51,000
I mean the fact is that if I want to go be someone participating in a Stratafy 2
pool or something like that as a decentralized miner,

264
00:19:51,000 --> 00:19:56,000
I now have far more overhead that I'm meant to go and deal with.

265
00:19:56,000 --> 00:19:59,000
And if I fail to deal with that and a lot of other people fail to deal with that,

266
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:05,000
at best Drivechain coins will just get stuck and it won't be possible to go spend.

267
00:20:06,000 --> 00:20:07,000
I think that's correct.

268
00:20:07,000 --> 00:20:14,000
But the reason it doesn't worry me the slightest is because miners' overhead and
fixed costs have skyrocketed ever since Bitcoin has been created.

269
00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:21,000
Like I was saying, now they have to have ASICs, now they have to have immersion
cooling, now they have to have the natural gas credits, etc.

270
00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:26,000
And in fact, like I was saying, with leverage mining being the equilibrium outcome
for miners,

271
00:20:26,000 --> 00:20:31,000
it's like this is an open source software that anyone can run.

272
00:20:31,000 --> 00:20:34,000
They run the software and it costs them a lot.

273
00:20:34,000 --> 00:20:36,000
Are we sure Drivechains are going to be open source?

274
00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:39,000
I mean there's obviously nothing we can do to standardize it.

275
00:20:39,000 --> 00:20:40,000
That's true.

276
00:20:40,000 --> 00:20:41,000
How do you have closed source?

277
00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:45,000
Well it's funny, the amusing thing is of course Liquor is closed source in Africa.

278
00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:50,000
And of course you can have – well one example, a counterexample I would give has
become popular this week,

279
00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:58,000
which is the Riot's use of the Curtailment Credits, where you have basically the
government of Texas,

280
00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:02,000
or through a proxy of the government of Texas that is a non-profit.

281
00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:08,000
Look, the government of Texas can cash to miners, not to mine.

282
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:10,000
And not just to any miner.

283
00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:13,000
They only pay to the one they have a signed agreement with, Riot.

284
00:21:13,000 --> 00:21:20,000
But this is handled as a good thing, even though if you compare it to running
software,

285
00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:25,000
and especially with the blind verge mining as the equilibrium of them not even
running the software,

286
00:21:25,000 --> 00:21:29,000
you have all these other people who are actual users, who have already run the
software,

287
00:21:29,000 --> 00:21:34,000
and they just tell the miner what the hash of the next block is going to be.

288
00:21:34,000 --> 00:21:35,000
Exchange order.

289
00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:36,000
Twitter or something.

290
00:21:36,000 --> 00:21:37,000
Yeah.

291
00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:43,000
Whatever other scenario is handled as a very good thing, it's just a waste of time.

292
00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:49,000
Look, I think where you're really going with this, you expect this to be acceptable,

293
00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:52,000
because you think – you expect miners to log a bridge.

294
00:21:52,000 --> 00:21:53,000
Of course, I may disagree there.

295
00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:57,000
I may point out things like, well, I expect miners to run on things like solar
power,

296
00:21:57,000 --> 00:22:02,000
where I just go mine because I happen to have my house have a bit of extra energy.

297
00:22:02,000 --> 00:22:04,000
I mean, if we want Bitcoin to be –

298
00:22:04,000 --> 00:22:06,000
I don't agree with this very well.

299
00:22:06,000 --> 00:22:07,000
Hold on, hold on.

300
00:22:07,000 --> 00:22:08,000
Yeah.

301
00:22:08,000 --> 00:22:12,000
If we expect Bitcoin to end up with decentralized mining, that's the kind of thing
I'd expect to happen.

302
00:22:12,000 --> 00:22:17,000
Also, of course, to go say that something like, say, immersion pooling represents an
overhead.

303
00:22:18,000 --> 00:22:23,000
Again, I can't agree with that precisely because there are lots of people who do not
use that tech.

304
00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:26,000
I think we have very strong disagreements on economics here.

305
00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:27,000
I guess so.

306
00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:29,000
But, I mean, again, can you describe the disagreement?

307
00:22:29,000 --> 00:22:30,000
Because I'm not good at it.

308
00:22:30,000 --> 00:22:31,000
Okay.

309
00:22:31,000 --> 00:22:36,000
I think what you're saying is that it's not literally mandatory to use immersion
pooling.

310
00:22:36,000 --> 00:22:42,000
So how is it that I claim that it is a fixed cause of mining?

311
00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:44,000
Something like that, right?

312
00:22:44,000 --> 00:22:45,000
Yeah.

313
00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:48,000
Well, you know, of course, when we say mining, we're as technical people.

314
00:22:48,000 --> 00:22:53,000
What we're really talking about is the act of creating blocks, not the act of doing
hashing.

315
00:22:53,000 --> 00:22:58,000
Yeah, but as you know, I just – I say that the pools don't really have very much
agency.

316
00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:07,000
And if they construct blocks that are bad, the hashers will point their hash to a
different pool because, as we both know, it's very easy to point your hash to a
different pool.

317
00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:10,000
It's not as easy for someone who has a pool to –

318
00:23:10,000 --> 00:23:12,000
Because we can only use it around Bitcoin Core.

319
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:19,000
I mean, you're suggesting a future where you could have 200 different pieces of
software, and you need to know how to mine them, quote-unquote, honestly.

320
00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:28,000
Well, that's kind of – I mean, the – I don't know if I would refer to it that way
because we already have merge mining of things like Namecoin.

321
00:23:28,000 --> 00:23:33,000
Namecoin merge mining was invented by Satoshi in 2010, and now, as you know, you have
to run the Namecoin software.

322
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:35,000
To be clear, Namecoin is nearly worthless.

323
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:36,000
Yeah, right.

324
00:23:36,000 --> 00:23:37,000
We agree on that.

325
00:23:37,000 --> 00:23:40,000
Like, we're not talking about something that's economically relevant here.

326
00:23:40,000 --> 00:23:51,000
Yeah, but you would agree that even though it's worthless, it's – it demonstrates
that merge mining cannot be – classical merge mining cannot be stopped by L1.

327
00:23:51,000 --> 00:23:53,000
Look, it's economically worthless.

328
00:23:53,000 --> 00:23:55,000
It's not interestingly good to discuss.

329
00:23:55,000 --> 00:23:57,000
I think somebody else would agree more, too.

330
00:23:57,000 --> 00:23:58,000
Well, can we talk about ORAM, though?

331
00:23:58,000 --> 00:23:59,000
It's important.

332
00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:01,000
Well, I mean, again, we – I can't –

333
00:24:02,000 --> 00:24:07,000
It's a fixed cost of a huge – the fixed costs are basically zero for running
software, in my view.

334
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:18,000
It's like very cheap because of – even if you don't literally use line merge mining,
you don't – you – imagine that software is costing like $10 million a day.

335
00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:19,000
I –

336
00:24:19,000 --> 00:24:21,000
The miner is going to think like, well, wait a minute.

337
00:24:21,000 --> 00:24:23,000
How is it that I can collect these fees?

338
00:24:23,000 --> 00:24:35,000
To be clear, when you said line merge mining, we already established that it is not
relevant to the question of – the really fundamental question of protecting the
bitcoin on the direction.

339
00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:38,000
Yeah, we agree that – I think that's interchangeable.

340
00:24:38,000 --> 00:24:48,000
But as I also said earlier, not only is it a BIP and not only is it something that
helps miners and full nodes cooperate trustlessly and privately.

341
00:24:48,220 --> 00:24:53,220
Not only is it that, but I also think it's kind of just a description of the
equilibrium outcome of mining.

342
00:24:53,220 --> 00:25:02,220
Again, line merge mining is not relevant to this discussion of how is it that the
coins on the sidechain are protected.

343
00:25:02,220 --> 00:25:06,220
Okay, and I'll explain it without using line merge mining.

344
00:25:07,220 --> 00:25:08,220
Now, I also want to –

345
00:25:08,220 --> 00:25:18,220
I was saying if the node had cost a lot of money to run, a miner would be thinking,
well, I like collecting all these fees, but I don't like paying these costs.

346
00:25:18,220 --> 00:25:28,220
What can we do to not pay the costs? And then they will, you know, they'll turn off
the outsources to the pool or in the extreme case of this floating phrase that I'm
not going to say,

347
00:25:28,220 --> 00:25:34,220
they'll just call up someone who's already running the node because, of course,
remember, each of these could be a real blockchain network.

348
00:25:34,220 --> 00:25:37,220
They must have a bunch of actual full nodes that aren't mining at all.

349
00:25:37,220 --> 00:25:44,220
So if you have a full node and you have a bunch of actual end users, people are just
running like Zcash, sidechain, the software.

350
00:25:44,220 --> 00:25:48,220
These are like what you might call 0% miners.

351
00:25:48,220 --> 00:25:49,220
They are.

352
00:25:49,220 --> 00:25:50,220
Again –

353
00:25:50,220 --> 00:25:52,220
People are not mining at all and they still run the node, so they must exist.

354
00:25:52,220 --> 00:25:55,220
So the node cost really does have a very ceiling in practice.

355
00:25:55,220 --> 00:25:56,220
Again, we're talking about –

356
00:25:56,220 --> 00:25:57,220
We're talking about –

357
00:25:57,220 --> 00:26:00,220
We're having a $10 million a day node where people are –

358
00:26:01,220 --> 00:26:08,220
Again, we're talking about a situation here where this easily degrades to you go
call a friend and hope they go tell you something.

359
00:26:08,220 --> 00:26:10,220
But, anyway, I think it would be useful.

360
00:26:10,220 --> 00:26:11,220
I think we're on –

361
00:26:11,220 --> 00:26:12,220
Yes.

362
00:26:12,220 --> 00:26:17,220
This is crucial, though, because if it does degrade to that, it will only mean that
the sidechain –

363
00:26:17,220 --> 00:26:20,220
if the developers have done a bad job, then it will fail.

364
00:26:20,220 --> 00:26:22,220
So that's a good thing.

365
00:26:22,220 --> 00:26:25,220
We want there to be competing pieces of software.

366
00:26:25,220 --> 00:26:26,220
We want some of them to fail.

367
00:26:26,220 --> 00:26:28,220
We want people to try very experimental ideas.

368
00:26:29,220 --> 00:26:34,220
We do not want people to be trying things that are so safe that they have more
options.

369
00:26:34,220 --> 00:26:41,220
I think we're in a semantic deadlock right now where I think maybe just really
concisely phrase –

370
00:26:41,220 --> 00:26:53,220
Well, I thought it would be useful to move on to the Blind Merged Mining concept
because, of course, you also have this idea that –

371
00:26:53,220 --> 00:26:58,220
I mean, and again, I think we've established that there's issues with the hash rate
escrow.

372
00:26:58,220 --> 00:27:05,220
But secondly, you have this idea of Blind Merged Mining as a way of not having miners
involved in the day-to-day consensus.

373
00:27:05,220 --> 00:27:11,220
But a problem with it is when you go and say that you have, say, a three- to
six-month period.

374
00:27:11,220 --> 00:27:17,220
Now, let's suppose that, again, we have, say, a bottom line structure.

375
00:27:17,220 --> 00:27:20,220
There's non-trivial fees generated.

376
00:27:20,220 --> 00:27:30,220
Well, if I'm participating in the Blind Merged Mining process, someone is proposing
blocks to be mined.

377
00:27:30,220 --> 00:27:39,220
Assuming there's someone paying me, but if I'm then paying miners fees to try to
convince them to blind merge mine that,

378
00:27:39,220 --> 00:27:45,220
I don't get access to those fees for at least another three months, assuming
everything goes perfectly.

379
00:27:45,220 --> 00:27:52,220
So now I have an enormous chunk of money tied up on the promise that maybe in the
future Drivechains will get working.

380
00:27:52,220 --> 00:27:57,220
I mean, this actually sounds a bit centralized because how many people by their
decisions will do this?

381
00:27:57,220 --> 00:28:02,220
Well, I think it's – I don't think it has any differential effect on any particular
person.

382
00:28:02,220 --> 00:28:09,220
So it's no matter who is – no matter who collects the L2 Coinbase fees, whoever does
that,

383
00:28:09,220 --> 00:28:14,220
it doesn't matter if they are L1 miners or they are people using Blind Merged Mining,

384
00:28:14,220 --> 00:28:19,220
or a poor guy or a rich guy or somebody in Japan or somebody in Europe, it doesn't
matter.

385
00:28:19,220 --> 00:28:24,220
No matter what, those are coins that have the block maturity period on L2,

386
00:28:24,220 --> 00:28:29,220
which is 100 blocks still in our examples, and then it has to wait for three months
to get out.

387
00:28:29,220 --> 00:28:36,220
So that's – it's the same disadvantage for everyone, and so it doesn't affect anyone
differently.

388
00:28:36,220 --> 00:28:42,220
But let's just be clear on one thing. With Blind Merged Mining, there is a
backdooring way,

389
00:28:42,220 --> 00:28:49,220
in that miners do not need to be blinded. If miners are not blinded to the blind
merge mining,

390
00:28:49,220 --> 00:28:55,220
there is not this problem with the cost of holding money.

391
00:28:55,220 --> 00:29:03,220
You do not need to have this enormous, say, 1,000 bitcoin reserve to deal with the
fact you get paid three months, six months into the future.

392
00:29:03,220 --> 00:29:08,220
But again, this is not – well, you're right about that, but to me it is actually a
pro, not a con,

393
00:29:08,220 --> 00:29:10,220
because what it means is to the miners –

394
00:29:10,220 --> 00:29:12,220
Is it a pro or a con? You said both.

395
00:29:12,220 --> 00:29:14,220
It's a pro and not a con.

396
00:29:14,220 --> 00:29:15,220
Not a con.

397
00:29:15,220 --> 00:29:20,220
So it's good because the miners will always be willing to buy the sidechain coins at
99 cents on the dollar

398
00:29:20,220 --> 00:29:24,220
because to them they're equal and they can market back over the system.

399
00:29:24,220 --> 00:29:30,220
So to me it is actually a good thing. It means that not only are they worth 99 cents
on the dollar for miners,

400
00:29:30,220 --> 00:29:35,220
they're worth 99 cents on the dollar for everyone because there's this open market.

401
00:29:35,220 --> 00:29:43,220
Of course, there's still this problem that you have all this money going to be tied
up with this call-a-friend kind of consensus.

402
00:29:43,220 --> 00:29:46,220
Yeah, but again, it doesn't really lie in a call-a-friend.

403
00:29:46,220 --> 00:29:53,220
It's just as – you can imagine a world where I force, at some point, everyone to run
the sidechain now.

404
00:29:53,220 --> 00:29:55,220
This is like, you know, Luke Dasher in the world.

405
00:29:55,220 --> 00:29:59,220
So it's a massively increased block size, effectively, but worse.

406
00:29:59,220 --> 00:30:02,220
It's like 200 different pieces of software.

407
00:30:02,220 --> 00:30:06,220
Because the reason what the block size was about was what the LMO now must do.

408
00:30:06,220 --> 00:30:12,220
So this is no more block size increase than would be Namcoin or Litecoin or OpenTax
did.

409
00:30:12,220 --> 00:30:17,220
So you don't think it's critical that mining be something that anyone can easily get
into?

410
00:30:17,220 --> 00:30:24,220
Well, just think about that chip as basically completely stale because it's because
of proof of work

411
00:30:24,220 --> 00:30:29,220
that because of the upward difficulty adjustments that it costs so much money to
mine.

412
00:30:29,220 --> 00:30:36,220
That's not a statement that's true, though, because with $1,000 worth of hashing
equipment,

413
00:30:36,220 --> 00:30:43,220
my percentage relative to my percentage of hashing power has not changed.

414
00:30:43,220 --> 00:30:51,220
It used to be back when I was mining maybe 2012, 2013, you could run P2 pool and you
could go make money.

415
00:30:51,220 --> 00:30:57,220
And provided we go and fix those technical problems with P2 pool, we can get the
exact same place again.

416
00:30:57,220 --> 00:31:01,220
Except, of course, we add, you know, things like Drivechains,

417
00:31:01,220 --> 00:31:04,220
which suddenly makes it totally infeasible for me to easily run P2 pool.

418
00:31:04,220 --> 00:31:05,220
Now, I think this is a mistake.

419
00:31:05,220 --> 00:31:14,220
Like, having huge amounts of fees come from Drivechains and come from merge mining,
online merge mining,

420
00:31:14,220 --> 00:31:16,220
that is what would re-decentralize mining.

421
00:31:17,220 --> 00:31:21,220
Why do you de-centralize mining if it becomes much more difficult to run the pool?

422
00:31:21,220 --> 00:31:28,220
Because, as I've said, I don't see running the software as something that could ever
cost a significant amount of money,

423
00:31:28,220 --> 00:31:35,220
whereas something like the Riot Curtailment Credits is something that is not
feasible for, like, one random guy to do.

424
00:31:35,220 --> 00:31:37,220
Although, it would be an interesting exercise to find out if it is,

425
00:31:37,220 --> 00:31:41,220
if some random guy can just call up the government of Texas and say,

426
00:31:41,220 --> 00:31:43,220
I have one S9 and I want to lock it up.

427
00:31:44,220 --> 00:31:49,220
I mean, if you realize, in that specific example, that is exactly what is being
proposed in automated systems,

428
00:31:49,220 --> 00:31:51,220
where you can go turn off loads and change the money.

429
00:31:51,220 --> 00:31:54,220
I mean, this is something that is being proposed.

430
00:31:54,220 --> 00:31:56,220
Yeah, I don't understand.

431
00:31:56,220 --> 00:31:59,220
I don't understand enough about what the scale of it is.

432
00:31:59,220 --> 00:32:01,220
You have to sign a legal document.

433
00:32:01,220 --> 00:32:05,220
The scale is relative to the amount of power you're using.

434
00:32:05,220 --> 00:32:07,220
I mean, again, this is a linear thing.

435
00:32:08,220 --> 00:32:10,220
This is actually superior, though,

436
00:32:10,220 --> 00:32:14,220
because running the node is a very small cost that can be reduced to zero.

437
00:32:15,220 --> 00:32:19,220
So, again, you say running potentially, like, 200 different sidechains.

438
00:32:19,220 --> 00:32:20,220
Well, it could be more.

439
00:32:20,220 --> 00:32:22,220
If you say 200, it could be any number,

440
00:32:22,220 --> 00:32:25,220
because they could add sidechains off sidechains, or they could have...

441
00:32:27,220 --> 00:32:32,220
To be clear, we're talking about your bid-miss-proposal, not some even more complex,
I should say, thing.

442
00:32:32,220 --> 00:32:33,220
Yeah, sure.

443
00:32:33,220 --> 00:32:34,220
I know it's 250.

444
00:32:34,220 --> 00:32:35,220
Say 200, roughly.

445
00:32:35,220 --> 00:32:37,220
Yeah, but miners have a list of things they have to do.

446
00:32:37,220 --> 00:32:40,220
I mean, would you say that buying an ASIC is a box-sized increase?

447
00:32:40,220 --> 00:32:44,220
No, because buying an ASIC is something that's low overhead.

448
00:32:44,220 --> 00:32:47,220
Like, it's not a fixed overhead, no matter how much I go buying.

449
00:32:47,220 --> 00:32:48,220
It's a very...

450
00:32:48,220 --> 00:32:49,220
No, exactly what it is.

451
00:32:49,220 --> 00:32:50,220
It's a fixed...

452
00:32:50,220 --> 00:32:54,220
Buying an ASIC is a fixed cost, and then the electricity is the vertical cost.

453
00:32:54,220 --> 00:32:56,220
I can't agree that it's as significant.

454
00:32:56,220 --> 00:32:58,220
It's not in the same way that now I have to...

455
00:32:58,220 --> 00:33:00,220
Do you really think that there's going to be...

456
00:33:00,220 --> 00:33:02,220
Do you think there's any software that anyone could write down,

457
00:33:02,220 --> 00:33:06,220
how much do you think it's going to cost, like, thousands and thousands of dollars?

458
00:33:06,220 --> 00:33:08,220
How much do you think this software is going to cost?

459
00:33:08,220 --> 00:33:10,220
Yeah, yeah, bare minimum is quite low to get in.

460
00:33:10,220 --> 00:33:14,220
This is why so many people are using space eaters and stuff like this.

461
00:33:14,220 --> 00:33:19,220
Yeah, but I don't really think there's going to be any software that's going to cost
as much as Duke.

462
00:33:19,220 --> 00:33:23,220
For anyone to create a statistically significant-sized model...

463
00:33:23,220 --> 00:33:31,220
For me to install a piece of software that takes 30 minutes with my billable hour
rate is a lot of money.

464
00:33:31,220 --> 00:33:33,220
I mean, that's how this stuff works.

465
00:33:33,220 --> 00:33:35,220
It's a huge over budget.

466
00:33:35,220 --> 00:33:37,220
I mean, that's just reality.

467
00:33:37,220 --> 00:33:39,220
Like, people's time is very expensive.

468
00:33:39,220 --> 00:33:41,220
Yeah, but it's not really the point.

469
00:33:41,220 --> 00:33:45,220
It's like, miners have a whole list of things they're required to do.

470
00:33:45,220 --> 00:33:49,220
Well, okay, you were happy making that list a lot longer.

471
00:33:49,220 --> 00:33:51,220
Do you agree on that?

472
00:33:51,220 --> 00:33:57,220
I think I made the list longer, and I made the revenue side much bigger.

473
00:33:57,220 --> 00:34:02,220
I think it's actually possible that there will be 10,000 times more fees eventually.

474
00:34:02,220 --> 00:34:06,220
That's not a guarantee, but I think there will be huge amounts of fees.

475
00:34:08,220 --> 00:34:11,220
All right, guys, look, we've got 10 minutes left.

476
00:34:11,220 --> 00:34:14,220
We're entering the final round.

477
00:34:14,220 --> 00:34:20,220
I think the audience is more gassed than us up here.

478
00:34:21,220 --> 00:34:25,220
I need y'all to hit your hard-hitting final points.

479
00:34:25,220 --> 00:34:29,220
Peter, maybe you can drive some of this conversation.

480
00:34:29,220 --> 00:34:33,220
I think it's just that miners may have spent more money.

481
00:34:33,220 --> 00:34:39,220
Yeah, so let me give another example, something I'm worried about, given we've kind
of already been in circles here.

482
00:34:39,220 --> 00:34:43,220
Of course, I personally am being sued by Craig Wright for two different lawsuits,

483
00:34:43,220 --> 00:34:47,220
one of which is to go and seize a whole bunch of money and give it to him.

484
00:34:48,220 --> 00:34:54,220
Obviously, a problem that you are adding is that now you have all of these coins,

485
00:34:54,220 --> 00:34:59,220
if Drivechains are successful, subject to death by miners.

486
00:34:59,220 --> 00:35:03,220
I mean, this does invite legal risks. Do you agree?

487
00:35:03,220 --> 00:35:04,220
No, I don't.

488
00:35:04,220 --> 00:35:05,220
Why not?

489
00:35:05,220 --> 00:35:08,220
Well, I mean, what are they going to do, exactly?

490
00:35:08,220 --> 00:35:15,220
They're going to say, we sue Foundry and force them to withdraw the tribal
reservable coins.

491
00:35:15,220 --> 00:35:19,220
Foundry and Anpol have a collectively majority passion for it.

492
00:35:19,220 --> 00:35:22,220
They absolutely can go and, you know, whatever goes.

493
00:35:22,220 --> 00:35:25,220
The only question is, because it's very simple,

494
00:35:25,220 --> 00:35:32,220
there's a simple question of, is it in the customer of Foundry, that Foundry's
clients,

495
00:35:32,220 --> 00:35:38,220
is it in their best interest to steal the coins?

496
00:35:38,220 --> 00:35:42,220
I mean, we can give them a split of it, then the government order is not required.

497
00:35:42,220 --> 00:35:44,220
We can obviously give them a split of it.

498
00:35:44,220 --> 00:35:49,220
I mean, after all, in the example where there's half a billion dollars in a
pipeline,

499
00:35:49,220 --> 00:35:54,220
we can certainly go and split that 50-50 with the people going in and helping out.

500
00:35:54,220 --> 00:35:56,220
Yeah, but if it's in their financial best interest,

501
00:35:56,220 --> 00:36:01,220
the government order or the lawsuit or whatever is superfluous,

502
00:36:01,220 --> 00:36:03,220
and if it's not in their best interest, then they'll start,

503
00:36:03,220 --> 00:36:07,220
they'll get one 13,000th of the way there, you know, at the end of day one,

504
00:36:07,220 --> 00:36:10,220
and then they'll have a group on every single mining report

505
00:36:11,220 --> 00:36:13,220
to something else.

506
00:36:13,220 --> 00:36:15,220
Let's give it a different example.

507
00:36:15,220 --> 00:36:18,220
What if we did this with a small transaction?

508
00:36:18,220 --> 00:36:23,220
Yeah, the ratio of what the miners think they'll be getting in fees

509
00:36:23,220 --> 00:36:28,220
versus the total number of coins in the Drivechain at any given moment,

510
00:36:28,220 --> 00:36:31,220
that is crucial. That's absolutely crucial.

511
00:36:31,220 --> 00:36:32,220
So you're absolutely right about that.

512
00:36:32,220 --> 00:36:35,220
But I see it as kind of like, you know, it's like a relationship.

513
00:36:35,220 --> 00:36:37,220
Like the miners, again, the miners are thinking,

514
00:36:37,220 --> 00:36:39,220
how am I going to get a bunch of fees out of this in the future?

515
00:36:39,220 --> 00:36:43,220
I want miners to be very greedy and to think,

516
00:36:43,220 --> 00:36:45,220
we need to get everyone using Bitcoin,

517
00:36:45,220 --> 00:36:48,220
and we need to get $0.50 from every transaction in the world,

518
00:36:48,220 --> 00:36:50,220
and they're thinking, like, oh, we're going to get a ton of money.

519
00:36:50,220 --> 00:36:52,220
So at first, it would be great for people.

520
00:36:52,220 --> 00:36:54,220
Let's be clear, this is the same argument to go make blocks bigger.

521
00:36:54,220 --> 00:36:56,220
You know, we can go make miners…

522
00:36:56,220 --> 00:36:59,220
It is a similarity in that way, but it's not a similarity in how long it costs,

523
00:36:59,220 --> 00:37:01,220
as you know. You know, the total…

524
00:37:01,220 --> 00:37:03,220
Well, I can agree with you, because it is very important

525
00:37:03,220 --> 00:37:06,220
that people be able to run Node to go and actually mine.

526
00:37:07,220 --> 00:37:09,220
That is how you can imagine how it would be similar.

527
00:37:09,220 --> 00:37:14,220
But you would agree that build 300 does not increase the L1 block size?

528
00:37:14,220 --> 00:37:16,220
No, I don't. I agree that…

529
00:37:16,220 --> 00:37:18,220
Hang on, hang on.

530
00:37:18,220 --> 00:37:20,220
There's a block size problem.

531
00:37:20,220 --> 00:37:24,220
Let me finish. I believe that in these types of failure modes,

532
00:37:24,220 --> 00:37:27,220
in practice it does, is to the extent that Drivechains work,

533
00:37:27,220 --> 00:37:31,220
and to the extent they don't work,

534
00:37:31,220 --> 00:37:34,220
of course, we've taken on a pile of risk

535
00:37:34,220 --> 00:37:36,220
for something that didn't work out.

536
00:37:36,220 --> 00:37:39,220
I mean, first, why are you doing this on Litecoin?

537
00:37:39,220 --> 00:37:42,220
Well, I don't really want Litecoin to succeed.

538
00:37:42,220 --> 00:37:44,220
I'm not that interested in Litecoin.

539
00:37:44,220 --> 00:37:46,220
But I wouldn't be opposed to people doing it on Litecoin.

540
00:37:46,220 --> 00:37:47,220
That's fine.

541
00:37:47,220 --> 00:37:48,220
Are you planning to do…

542
00:37:48,220 --> 00:37:50,220
Are you working with any other coins at all?

543
00:37:50,220 --> 00:37:54,220
No, but there is someone who launched a funny altcoin

544
00:37:54,220 --> 00:37:57,220
that is using build 300.

545
00:37:57,220 --> 00:37:58,220
What's the name of it?

546
00:37:58,220 --> 00:38:00,220
It's called Sky Doge, but I'm not…

547
00:38:01,220 --> 00:38:04,220
They're very funny, and they hang out in a telephone booth,

548
00:38:04,220 --> 00:38:07,220
and they have great gifs and stuff like that.

549
00:38:07,220 --> 00:38:11,220
Like a stealth bomber with a giant Doge face on it.

550
00:38:11,220 --> 00:38:14,220
The great thing about this is if they do launch,

551
00:38:14,220 --> 00:38:17,220
you can always just go with it and see if it works.

552
00:38:17,220 --> 00:38:19,220
I mean, there's certainly no rush frame in this.

553
00:38:19,220 --> 00:38:20,220
There's certainly no rush,

554
00:38:20,220 --> 00:38:22,220
and I find it to be quite a compliment

555
00:38:22,220 --> 00:38:25,220
for people to pay so much attention to my idea.

556
00:38:25,220 --> 00:38:26,220
And if people say something like,

557
00:38:26,220 --> 00:38:28,220
I don't have a hard time to think about it,

558
00:38:28,220 --> 00:38:29,220
I fully respect that.

559
00:38:29,220 --> 00:38:31,220
What I often find to be kind of ridiculous and annoying

560
00:38:31,220 --> 00:38:33,220
is people clearly haven't even read the bit.

561
00:38:33,220 --> 00:38:34,220
They don't know anything.

562
00:38:34,220 --> 00:38:35,220
They haven't been to drivechain.info,

563
00:38:35,220 --> 00:38:37,220
they haven't been to the FAQ,

564
00:38:37,220 --> 00:38:38,220
and then they start talking about it

565
00:38:38,220 --> 00:38:40,220
and say, oh, I don't like it or whatever.

566
00:38:40,220 --> 00:38:42,220
I want to ask a question.

567
00:38:42,220 --> 00:38:44,220
You mentioned why not Litecoin,

568
00:38:44,220 --> 00:38:47,220
but from what I understand,

569
00:38:47,220 --> 00:38:50,220
no altcoins necessarily want Drivechain necessarily.

570
00:38:50,220 --> 00:38:52,220
Not even Bitcoin Cash, not Litecoin.

571
00:38:52,220 --> 00:38:54,220
None of these coins necessarily want to just say,

572
00:38:54,220 --> 00:38:56,220
hey, bring Drivechain here.

573
00:38:56,220 --> 00:38:58,220
And then there's also the situation where Paul mentioned,

574
00:38:58,220 --> 00:39:00,220
hey, Sky Doge is using Drivechain,

575
00:39:00,220 --> 00:39:03,220
but we're talking about potentially networks

576
00:39:03,220 --> 00:39:08,220
that have no value anywhere compared to Bitcoin.

577
00:39:08,220 --> 00:39:12,220
So how could we potentially even have a,

578
00:39:12,220 --> 00:39:15,220
like even if we do deploy it on Litecoin or something

579
00:39:15,220 --> 00:39:21,220
and it doesn't get exploited or hacked for years,

580
00:39:21,220 --> 00:39:23,220
how does that even give us confidence

581
00:39:23,220 --> 00:39:25,220
that it would still be okay for Bitcoin?

582
00:39:25,220 --> 00:39:28,220
I mean, it's better than having zero confidence at all.

583
00:39:28,220 --> 00:39:31,220
I mean, we have a play money testnet,

584
00:39:31,220 --> 00:39:34,220
which I think that should be enough for some of the things.

585
00:39:34,220 --> 00:39:37,220
Well, I mean, everything you describe

586
00:39:37,220 --> 00:39:38,220
talks about financial incentives.

587
00:39:38,220 --> 00:39:40,220
You can't test this on the testnet.

588
00:39:40,220 --> 00:39:42,220
Well, that's also difficult to test on Litecoin,

589
00:39:42,220 --> 00:39:44,220
I think, for the same reason.

590
00:39:44,220 --> 00:39:46,220
Okay, minor activated software thoughts.

591
00:39:46,220 --> 00:39:48,220
I think we have to talk about

592
00:39:48,220 --> 00:39:49,220
whether or not it's a block size increase

593
00:39:49,220 --> 00:39:53,220
because I deliberately set out to ensure that it was not.

594
00:39:53,220 --> 00:39:56,220
So it's unfortunate to be misunderstood in that way.

595
00:39:56,220 --> 00:40:00,220
Your layer one node, when it runs with 300,

596
00:40:00,220 --> 00:40:04,220
it only looks at the L1 blockchain.

597
00:40:04,220 --> 00:40:05,220
It only looks at messages that are

598
00:40:05,220 --> 00:40:07,220
income-based transactions on L1.

599
00:40:07,220 --> 00:40:11,220
It does not need to look into the other blockchain.

600
00:40:11,220 --> 00:40:15,220
And the reason miners can steal is because of that.

601
00:40:15,220 --> 00:40:19,220
Real quick, explain why it's an abstract block size increase

602
00:40:19,220 --> 00:40:21,220
because maybe people are confused.

603
00:40:21,220 --> 00:40:23,220
You have to explain it because L1 literally is getting bigger.

604
00:40:23,220 --> 00:40:25,220
So why are you saying it's getting bigger?

605
00:40:25,220 --> 00:40:27,220
Explain that.

606
00:40:27,220 --> 00:40:29,220
We're talking in puzzles, I feel like.

607
00:40:29,220 --> 00:40:33,220
Because what happens is if I want to go participate in mining fully,

608
00:40:33,220 --> 00:40:36,220
if I am going to go and participate in any of this

609
00:40:36,220 --> 00:40:38,220
in such a way that works,

610
00:40:38,220 --> 00:40:41,220
the fact is I have to go and start

611
00:40:41,220 --> 00:40:44,220
either doing this whole call-a-friend business.

612
00:40:44,220 --> 00:40:45,220
Hey, let me explain.

613
00:40:45,220 --> 00:40:47,220
Doing this whole call-a-friend business

614
00:40:47,220 --> 00:40:49,220
to go and learn more about mining software

615
00:40:49,220 --> 00:40:51,220
or doing some other system

616
00:40:51,220 --> 00:40:54,220
to go and be able to mine Bitcoin in a way

617
00:40:54,220 --> 00:40:58,220
where the Drivechains work properly or don't get stolen.

618
00:40:58,220 --> 00:41:01,220
I mean, that is fundamentally why this is

619
00:41:01,220 --> 00:41:04,220
analogous to a block size increase.

620
00:41:04,220 --> 00:41:05,220
Well, L1 aren't too much worse,

621
00:41:05,220 --> 00:41:06,220
at least with a block size increase.

622
00:41:06,220 --> 00:41:09,220
You can go use software for a cheap hardware program.

623
00:41:09,220 --> 00:41:13,220
This is having to go through a whole lot of human labor at the problem,

624
00:41:13,220 --> 00:41:16,220
which is a very, very ugly thing to do.

625
00:41:16,220 --> 00:41:18,220
We want mining to be simple

626
00:41:18,220 --> 00:41:20,220
based on just writing some simple software

627
00:41:20,220 --> 00:41:22,220
that doesn't have to change very often.

628
00:41:22,220 --> 00:41:23,220
In much the same way,

629
00:41:23,220 --> 00:41:25,220
that is a dream of things like P2Pool.

630
00:41:25,220 --> 00:41:28,220
There is a dream of things like Stratum V2.

631
00:41:28,220 --> 00:41:31,220
Okay, but it is very hard to define.

632
00:41:31,220 --> 00:41:32,220
Wait, wait, wait.

633
00:41:32,220 --> 00:41:34,220
No, no, no, no.

634
00:41:34,220 --> 00:41:37,220
But you are defining L1 based on its functions.

635
00:41:37,220 --> 00:41:38,220
Agreed?

636
00:41:38,220 --> 00:41:42,220
You are defining L1 on what it should be doing,

637
00:41:42,220 --> 00:41:45,220
on its usefulness or whatever.

638
00:41:45,220 --> 00:41:47,220
Well, to keep in mind,

639
00:41:47,220 --> 00:41:49,220
because you are still abstracting.

640
00:41:49,220 --> 00:41:50,220
Hang on.

641
00:41:50,220 --> 00:41:51,220
During the block size debate,

642
00:41:51,220 --> 00:41:53,220
this argument was made in the exact same way,

643
00:41:53,220 --> 00:41:55,220
saying SPV is fine.

644
00:41:55,220 --> 00:41:58,220
You do not need to go and validate fully.

645
00:41:58,220 --> 00:42:01,220
And I think the problem fundamentally is

646
00:42:01,220 --> 00:42:04,220
what does it take to participate fully in Bitcoin?

647
00:42:04,220 --> 00:42:06,220
Part of participating fully in Bitcoin is mining.

648
00:42:06,220 --> 00:42:09,220
And you want to make mining a much more complex thing

649
00:42:09,220 --> 00:42:11,220
with a lot more overheads.

650
00:42:12,220 --> 00:42:15,220
It is not even in the right curtailment credits.

651
00:42:15,220 --> 00:42:17,220
I think it is much greater.

652
00:42:17,220 --> 00:42:19,220
And there are all kinds of things that miners do

653
00:42:19,220 --> 00:42:21,220
that we cannot stop them from doing.

654
00:42:21,220 --> 00:42:23,220
Like if you have a swimming pool,

655
00:42:23,220 --> 00:42:25,220
you can use the miner to heat your swimming pool.

656
00:42:25,220 --> 00:42:27,220
But if you are not rich enough to afford a swimming pool,

657
00:42:27,220 --> 00:42:28,220
then you cannot.

658
00:42:28,220 --> 00:42:31,220
And so there are many little cost curves you can draw.

659
00:42:31,220 --> 00:42:35,220
If miners decide to destroy and set all their money on fire,

660
00:42:35,220 --> 00:42:37,220
then it is a weird decision.

661
00:42:37,220 --> 00:42:40,220
And if they decide to forego earning some money,

662
00:42:40,220 --> 00:42:43,220
then there is no literal requirement at all

663
00:42:43,220 --> 00:42:45,220
to do any merge mining

664
00:42:45,220 --> 00:42:50,220
in order to run a fully validating L1 node.

665
00:42:50,220 --> 00:42:53,220
So the full node cost is the important thing.

666
00:42:53,220 --> 00:42:55,220
We do want that to be as low as possible.

667
00:42:55,220 --> 00:43:01,220
But miners, there is no sense in which we want mining to be cheap.

668
00:43:01,220 --> 00:43:04,220
Because every time the difficulty increases,

669
00:43:04,220 --> 00:43:07,220
it becomes more expensive to mine.

670
00:43:08,220 --> 00:43:13,220
If you are against mining becoming more expensive,

671
00:43:13,220 --> 00:43:15,220
then you are just against approval.

672
00:43:17,220 --> 00:43:20,220
You are talking around what I said here.

673
00:43:20,220 --> 00:43:21,220
Hang on.

674
00:43:21,220 --> 00:43:23,220
You are not talking about overhead here.

675
00:43:23,220 --> 00:43:26,220
When you go talk about mining becoming cheap and so on,

676
00:43:26,220 --> 00:43:29,220
you are talking about what it takes for you to hatch.

677
00:43:29,220 --> 00:43:32,220
I am saying what does it take to fully participate in mining?

678
00:43:32,220 --> 00:43:33,220
What does it take to run a pool?

679
00:43:33,220 --> 00:43:35,220
What does it take to solo mine?

680
00:43:36,220 --> 00:43:38,220
If you push this argument so far

681
00:43:38,220 --> 00:43:40,220
that you include a tiny piece of software

682
00:43:40,220 --> 00:43:42,220
must be amortized over cash,

683
00:43:42,220 --> 00:43:46,220
then it is not even possible to run Bitcoin Core in the end

684
00:43:46,220 --> 00:43:49,220
because the fixed cost is not literally zero.

685
00:43:53,220 --> 00:43:54,220
All right.

686
00:43:54,220 --> 00:43:56,220
Final thoughts, Carter?

687
00:43:56,220 --> 00:43:58,220
We are running out of time.

688
00:43:58,220 --> 00:44:00,220
They can run zero if they choose.

689
00:44:00,220 --> 00:44:02,220
They don't get the transaction fees.

690
00:44:02,220 --> 00:44:03,220
All right. We are running out of time.

691
00:44:03,220 --> 00:44:05,220
I need you to give your final thought.

692
00:44:07,220 --> 00:44:08,220
Your final thought.

693
00:44:08,220 --> 00:44:10,220
But you can't have your final thoughts at the same time.

694
00:44:11,220 --> 00:44:12,220
Yes, we can.

695
00:44:12,220 --> 00:44:13,220
Just talk over each other.

696
00:44:13,220 --> 00:44:14,220
It will be great.

697
00:44:14,220 --> 00:44:15,220
All right.

698
00:44:15,220 --> 00:44:17,220
Then we have a couple of questions from the audience as well.

699
00:44:17,220 --> 00:44:18,220
Okay.

700
00:44:18,220 --> 00:44:20,220
So Walton has got the mic.

701
00:44:20,220 --> 00:44:22,220
Does anybody have a question?

702
00:44:22,220 --> 00:44:23,220
Sorry, guys.

703
00:44:23,220 --> 00:44:25,220
You all are awesome.

704
00:44:25,220 --> 00:44:26,220
I am just getting my steps in.

705
00:44:26,220 --> 00:44:28,220
Other people have questions too.

706
00:44:30,220 --> 00:44:31,220
All right.

707
00:44:31,220 --> 00:44:33,220
This is a very interesting conversation.

708
00:44:33,220 --> 00:44:38,220
I sort of think about this in the framework of like fees, right?

709
00:44:38,220 --> 00:44:40,220
And I have always been worried about fees being too high,

710
00:44:40,220 --> 00:44:42,220
which is why I work on Lightning.

711
00:44:42,220 --> 00:44:44,220
But a lot of people that support drive train

712
00:44:44,220 --> 00:44:46,220
are very worried about fees being too low.

713
00:44:46,220 --> 00:44:49,220
And obviously, we don't want fees too high.

714
00:44:49,220 --> 00:44:50,220
Things aren't usable.

715
00:44:50,220 --> 00:44:51,220
We don't want fees too low.

716
00:44:51,220 --> 00:44:53,220
Then we have security issues.

717
00:44:53,220 --> 00:44:56,220
So is there some sort of metric that the both of you could agree on

718
00:44:56,220 --> 00:44:59,220
where if XYZ happens, indeed, fees are too low,

719
00:44:59,220 --> 00:45:01,220
and that's a concern, something should be done about it?

720
00:45:03,220 --> 00:45:07,220
Well, so I've made the point recently that between the different alternatives

721
00:45:07,220 --> 00:45:10,220
of, for instance, just doing a block size increase

722
00:45:10,220 --> 00:45:15,220
or doing a block size increase by having a Drivechain,

723
00:45:15,220 --> 00:45:17,220
which is meant to be essentially identical to Bitcoin,

724
00:45:17,220 --> 00:45:19,220
so you put Lightning channels and so on.

725
00:45:19,220 --> 00:45:21,220
Between those two things, it is far simpler,

726
00:45:21,220 --> 00:45:25,220
cheaper, and less overhead to just have the block size increase.

727
00:45:25,220 --> 00:45:26,220
There's a lot less risk.

728
00:45:26,220 --> 00:45:28,220
There's no coins being tied up that could be stolen.

729
00:45:28,220 --> 00:45:33,220
I mean, between the two, that's actually the thing that gets you something better.

730
00:45:33,220 --> 00:45:39,220
Of course, in general, I'm very confident we're not that worried about fees with
Lightning

731
00:45:39,220 --> 00:45:41,220
because we seem to be really good at scaling it.

732
00:45:41,220 --> 00:45:45,220
And this is like a 10-year timescale thing to worry about.

733
00:45:45,220 --> 00:45:47,220
Jim, can we also say something else?

734
00:45:47,220 --> 00:45:49,220
We've got a few more questions here.

735
00:45:49,220 --> 00:45:50,220
I don't know about the exact question,

736
00:45:50,220 --> 00:45:52,220
but you can search security budget,

737
00:45:52,220 --> 00:45:54,220
and you can find it.

738
00:45:55,220 --> 00:45:57,220
Lucky is in favor of a block size increase.

739
00:45:57,220 --> 00:45:59,220
He hates the Drivechain so much he's in favor.

740
00:45:59,220 --> 00:46:01,220
Block size increase is the NTR mission.

741
00:46:04,220 --> 00:46:07,220
So we have two people, like Walton said, answering questions.

742
00:46:07,220 --> 00:46:10,220
Keep it super short so we can get to everyone with questions.

743
00:46:11,220 --> 00:46:13,220
The main question I have is actually,

744
00:46:13,220 --> 00:46:18,220
a lot of this discussion has been framed in the sense of you saying,

745
00:46:18,220 --> 00:46:22,220
or you, Peter, saying that you're trying to advocate for miners

746
00:46:22,220 --> 00:46:25,220
and whether or not they would be able to bear the cost of even participating

747
00:46:25,220 --> 00:46:30,220
and that this should be grounds for not admitting a proposal.

748
00:46:30,220 --> 00:46:40,220
Why is it that you believe that we can speak for them?

749
00:46:40,220 --> 00:46:45,220
Or that we should deny the opportunity to participate?

750
00:46:45,220 --> 00:46:51,220
See, I don't care about speaking for the miners necessarily today.

751
00:46:51,220 --> 00:46:53,220
Like if you were to talk about that,

752
00:46:53,220 --> 00:46:54,220
you would probably go and say,

753
00:46:54,220 --> 00:46:56,220
all right, Foundry USA and Anpool,

754
00:46:56,220 --> 00:46:58,220
they're obviously the most important miners out there.

755
00:46:58,220 --> 00:47:00,220
Let's go see what they say.

756
00:47:00,220 --> 00:47:02,220
That's not actually what I care about.

757
00:47:02,220 --> 00:47:04,220
I care about how can we go make a Bitcoin

758
00:47:04,220 --> 00:47:07,220
where miners in general can participate fully

759
00:47:07,220 --> 00:47:09,220
and have a very large number of them?

760
00:47:09,220 --> 00:47:10,220
Because after all, Bitcoin right now is a very…

761
00:47:10,220 --> 00:47:12,220
So why don't you set the difficulty to zero then?

762
00:47:12,220 --> 00:47:13,220
Yeah.

763
00:47:13,220 --> 00:47:14,220
Minimal difficulty.

764
00:47:14,220 --> 00:47:15,220
Bitcoin right now is a very…

765
00:47:15,220 --> 00:47:17,220
Why don't you make it very easy to mine?

766
00:47:17,220 --> 00:47:18,220
Hang on, listen.

767
00:47:18,220 --> 00:47:20,220
Bitcoin right now is fairly busted

768
00:47:20,220 --> 00:47:23,220
in that we've wound up with a lot of miner centralization.

769
00:47:23,220 --> 00:47:25,220
I certainly don't want to make the problem worse.

770
00:47:25,220 --> 00:47:27,220
How do you measure the miner centralization?

771
00:47:27,220 --> 00:47:30,220
I want to put 30 seconds on the clock

772
00:47:30,220 --> 00:47:32,220
and then we have 30 seconds to get to each question.

773
00:47:32,220 --> 00:47:34,220
Is it the number of pools or…

774
00:47:34,220 --> 00:47:36,220
Use your whistling, we're good.

775
00:47:36,220 --> 00:47:38,220
And then you've got a hint if you're over.

776
00:47:38,220 --> 00:47:40,220
Okay, so Paul, do you remember the question?

777
00:47:40,220 --> 00:47:42,220
Yeah, it's an excellent question

778
00:47:42,220 --> 00:47:44,220
because it's the why should we speak for the miners

779
00:47:44,220 --> 00:47:47,220
and also it speaks to a bigger principle of

780
00:47:47,220 --> 00:47:50,220
if Peter thinks the miners should do something

781
00:47:50,220 --> 00:47:52,220
and the miners think that they should do something,

782
00:47:52,220 --> 00:47:54,220
who do you think is going to ultimately win

783
00:47:54,220 --> 00:47:56,220
when the miners wake up at 9 a.m. tomorrow?

784
00:47:56,220 --> 00:47:58,220
It's probably them.

785
00:47:58,220 --> 00:48:01,220
But yeah, he's again skirting the…

786
00:48:01,220 --> 00:48:04,220
The reason to care about the long term is the node side

787
00:48:04,220 --> 00:48:07,220
and that is exactly what I have successfully firewalled off

788
00:48:07,220 --> 00:48:10,220
and that is what everyone should focus on across the room.

789
00:48:13,220 --> 00:48:15,220
Okay, so…

790
00:48:15,220 --> 00:48:16,220
Good.

791
00:48:16,220 --> 00:48:21,220
So my question is also for you, Peter, around like…

792
00:48:21,220 --> 00:48:24,220
It sounded on a similar vein.

793
00:48:24,220 --> 00:48:28,220
You said a lot of the conversation was around

794
00:48:28,220 --> 00:48:31,220
an individual being able to fully participate as a miner.

795
00:48:31,220 --> 00:48:34,220
Again, I heard the other side incorrectly.

796
00:48:34,220 --> 00:48:38,220
So I guess to like push on the opposite of that

797
00:48:38,220 --> 00:48:40,220
and try to understand what you mean is like

798
00:48:40,220 --> 00:48:44,220
what's bad about me half participating

799
00:48:44,220 --> 00:48:46,220
or just like turning my ladder on

800
00:48:46,220 --> 00:48:49,220
and not really investigating the software

801
00:48:49,220 --> 00:48:53,220
and just like letting the algorithm try to…

802
00:48:53,220 --> 00:48:54,220
Well, so…

803
00:48:54,220 --> 00:48:56,220
Thirty seconds left.

804
00:48:57,220 --> 00:49:00,220
The simple example of how of course you can participate in the leaks

805
00:49:00,220 --> 00:49:02,220
is you just point your hash card at the pool.

806
00:49:02,220 --> 00:49:06,220
What I want you to be able to do is participate in Bitcoin's consensus.

807
00:49:06,220 --> 00:49:09,220
That's an important thing so that we do not have

808
00:49:09,220 --> 00:49:11,220
a very small number of pools able to do things

809
00:49:11,220 --> 00:49:13,220
like sensor transactions,

810
00:49:13,220 --> 00:49:15,220
prevent other miners from getting in and so on.

811
00:49:15,220 --> 00:49:16,220
Push came to shove.

812
00:49:16,220 --> 00:49:18,220
Foundry and pool.

813
00:49:18,220 --> 00:49:19,220
In a lot of scenarios,

814
00:49:19,220 --> 00:49:21,220
they really could just push every other miner off the network

815
00:49:21,220 --> 00:49:23,220
and that's not what we want.

816
00:49:23,220 --> 00:49:24,220
All right.

817
00:49:24,220 --> 00:49:25,220
It was an excellent question.

818
00:49:25,220 --> 00:49:27,220
There's nothing wrong with half participating

819
00:49:27,220 --> 00:49:29,220
or quarter participating and doing whatever else you feel

820
00:49:29,220 --> 00:49:30,220
is the right thing to do.

821
00:49:30,220 --> 00:49:34,220
It correctly emphasized that the consensual option

822
00:49:34,220 --> 00:49:35,220
to increase the block size

823
00:49:35,220 --> 00:49:38,220
is completely different from a mandatory L1 block size

824
00:49:38,220 --> 00:49:40,220
that we're all stuck with.

825
00:49:40,220 --> 00:49:44,220
That's the difference between being forced to have food

826
00:49:44,220 --> 00:49:46,220
until you die and eating as much food as you want.

827
00:49:46,220 --> 00:49:48,220
That's the difference in consent.

828
00:49:48,220 --> 00:49:50,220
And I have other things to say,

829
00:49:50,220 --> 00:49:52,220
but I'm going to run out of time.

830
00:49:55,220 --> 00:49:57,220
Just to piggyback on that,

831
00:49:57,220 --> 00:50:00,220
if it's an opt-in bit, right?

832
00:50:00,220 --> 00:50:02,220
Miners aren't forced to use it.

833
00:50:02,220 --> 00:50:06,220
They would only use it if they were incentivized to.

834
00:50:06,220 --> 00:50:09,220
In this case, they really should use it

835
00:50:09,220 --> 00:50:10,220
because it's so miner-centric.

836
00:50:10,220 --> 00:50:13,220
We need lots of miners and some users to use it,

837
00:50:13,220 --> 00:50:15,220
or it's not going to make any sense

838
00:50:15,220 --> 00:50:17,220
because the bit was keeping miners on a short leash,

839
00:50:17,220 --> 00:50:20,220
and it's also the whole thing involves

840
00:50:20,220 --> 00:50:22,220
minor participation and miner incentives,

841
00:50:22,220 --> 00:50:24,220
so it doesn't really make sense

842
00:50:24,220 --> 00:50:27,220
unless we have a super majority of miners

843
00:50:27,220 --> 00:50:30,220
and some users active in it.

844
00:50:30,220 --> 00:50:32,220
All right.

845
00:50:32,220 --> 00:50:35,220
To be clear, I mean,

846
00:50:35,220 --> 00:50:37,220
the way that the bit bit right now has been set up

847
00:50:37,220 --> 00:50:41,220
is that unless you get majorities and minors participating in things,

848
00:50:41,220 --> 00:50:43,220
really bad things start to go happen.

849
00:50:43,220 --> 00:50:44,220
So from that point of view,

850
00:50:44,220 --> 00:50:46,220
it's certainly not a consensual opt-in.

851
00:50:46,220 --> 00:50:47,220
And the bigger issue, of course,

852
00:50:47,220 --> 00:50:50,220
is difficulty is difficulty, and it adjusts.

853
00:50:50,405 --> 00:50:58,405
If you are a miner who's much more profitable than me because of something, I'm kind
of forced to go do whatever you're doing, too. We don't want to do that.

854
00:50:59,405 --> 00:51:24,405
Yeah, so one thing that I'm always really curious about is that the reason why
companies like Foundry have gotten so big is because they can do things that aren't
even considered in Bitcoin's consensus game theory model.

855
00:51:24,405 --> 00:51:32,405
Like, for example, borrow a whole bunch of money and cut tons of deals for people,
get really good prices on transformers that nobody else can get even access to.

856
00:51:32,405 --> 00:51:40,405
Never mind that a lot of this stuff is in shortage, and that has nothing to do with
what kind of code anyone can run.

857
00:51:40,405 --> 00:51:51,405
Well, my answer to that is very simple. Direct change makes this problem worse.
There's no reason why we want to go make these problems worse rather than at least
keep the status quo and try to go make things better.

858
00:51:52,405 --> 00:52:01,405
And as you can imagine, I have the opposite view. I think this proves the fact that
such things occur and nothing bad has happened as a result.

859
00:52:01,405 --> 00:52:08,405
Like, the bad things that miners can do are, like, censor transactions or reorder
blockchain, but those things really don't happen at all.

860
00:52:08,405 --> 00:52:18,405
And the fact that we have all these weird things happening, such as what that
gentleman just described, and nothing bad happens in mining, that proves to me that
this whole phenomenon is not really an issue at all.

861
00:52:18,405 --> 00:52:25,405
And for direct change to make it maybe one millionth of a percent as worse as the
miners' total credits, it doesn't help at all.

862
00:52:29,405 --> 00:52:38,405
Why are Drivechains even relevant when we talk about things like FedEx, for example?

863
00:52:39,405 --> 00:52:50,405
I think that Lightning and FedEx are not comparable. So I think Drivechains solve a
lot of problems. We don't have enough time to really explain them all.

864
00:52:50,405 --> 00:53:00,405
But I would say number three and four on my list would be scalability and privacy.
So the scalability idea is just, what can we give 8 billion people tomorrow that
works?

865
00:53:00,405 --> 00:53:07,405
That has no onboarding problem and no other pain and failure problem and other
things like that.

866
00:53:12,405 --> 00:53:19,405
Well, you know, that 8 billion example, it's pretty clear that's a massive block
size increase and you get all these problems for running Drivechain nodes.

867
00:53:20,405 --> 00:53:30,405
You know, we have a timer for a reason here. More generally, my suspicion is
actually that the Drivechain use cases aren't actually that interesting.

868
00:53:30,405 --> 00:53:35,405
But, you know, giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying, hey, let's assume
this is successful, what does it look like?

869
00:53:36,405 --> 00:53:40,405
I agree with that. So far, most of what we have built has not.

870
00:53:40,405 --> 00:53:43,405
We have another question about networks as well.

871
00:53:44,405 --> 00:53:49,405
Hello, yeah, my question is kind of similar. Let's say that Drivechain goes through.

872
00:53:49,405 --> 00:53:53,405
Can you step up a little bit? I think you're losing it.

873
00:53:53,405 --> 00:54:03,405
Let's say that the proposal goes through and that a Drivechain launches, it's super
successful, and all of the community goes there.

874
00:54:03,405 --> 00:54:07,405
How does that affect traditional class of people?

875
00:54:07,405 --> 00:54:09,405
Traditional what?

876
00:54:09,405 --> 00:54:10,405
The traditional class?

877
00:54:10,405 --> 00:54:13,405
Yeah, like how does that affect the network overall, right?

878
00:54:13,405 --> 00:54:18,405
Not at all. It just looks like money is going into a weird UTXO secure route and I'm
fine.

879
00:54:18,405 --> 00:54:24,405
But could that network, could that Drivechain have totally different rules and
totally different...

880
00:54:24,405 --> 00:54:25,405
Yeah.

881
00:54:25,405 --> 00:54:29,405
Would that effectively fork, kind of like fork Bitcoin in general?

882
00:54:29,405 --> 00:54:33,405
Like wouldn't that effectively fork Bitcoin if all the money floated around for some
reason?

883
00:54:33,405 --> 00:54:35,405
I don't know. Do you know anything?

884
00:54:35,405 --> 00:54:39,405
Yeah, I don't think. The money is going to this UTXO.

885
00:54:39,405 --> 00:54:44,405
It would be a different piece of software, but it's the same type of million coins.

886
00:54:44,405 --> 00:54:49,405
On L1, it just looks like 700,000 coins are in some UTXO.

887
00:54:49,405 --> 00:54:51,405
Okay, are we going to try to get one or two more questions?

888
00:54:51,405 --> 00:54:52,405
I think two more questions.

889
00:54:52,405 --> 00:54:54,405
We'll try to get two more questions.

890
00:54:56,405 --> 00:54:59,405
Alright, I'll give a very simple example of how it affects Bitcoin.

891
00:54:59,405 --> 00:55:03,405
Like I keep on saying, there's a lot of failure modes which cause problems with
Bitcoin.

892
00:55:03,405 --> 00:55:06,405
As an example being, you can go with legal threats.

893
00:55:06,405 --> 00:55:08,405
Go say, hey, let's go seize these coins.

894
00:55:08,405 --> 00:55:11,405
You know, and now you have problems with miners.

895
00:55:11,405 --> 00:55:13,405
You can't seize with 200% tax to make this work.

896
00:55:13,405 --> 00:55:15,405
I mean, there's just a lot of edge cases here.

897
00:55:15,405 --> 00:55:16,405
That's a problem.

898
00:55:16,405 --> 00:55:18,405
Let's take the new question.

899
00:55:18,405 --> 00:55:22,405
Yeah, so like you said, nothing impressive about Drivechains now,

900
00:55:22,405 --> 00:55:28,405
but there's a bunch of different alternatives for accomplishing similar things in
the future.

901
00:55:28,405 --> 00:55:34,405
So why, for example, Drivechains over something like a ZK rollup or just something
where

902
00:55:34,405 --> 00:55:39,405
who's the user of the Drivechain who would not be satisfied with one of these other
ones

903
00:55:39,405 --> 00:55:44,405
which would be less contentious and less subject to just specifically miners?

904
00:55:44,405 --> 00:55:51,405
Well, I think that part of the draw is that someone can launch a completely new
piece of software

905
00:55:51,405 --> 00:55:55,405
without permission from the existing Bitcoin community.

906
00:55:55,405 --> 00:56:00,405
And that means you don't have to justify whatever it is you're doing to a bunch of
people

907
00:56:00,405 --> 00:56:01,405
who haven't looked into it.

908
00:56:01,405 --> 00:56:05,405
And so I think that we would have had 1.19 on a sidechain by now.

909
00:56:05,405 --> 00:56:09,405
We would have had ZK swarm privacy on a sidechain by now.

910
00:56:09,405 --> 00:56:13,405
We would have had all that stuff years and years ago.

911
00:56:13,405 --> 00:56:16,405
And I don't have time to explore any more of that stuff years ago.

912
00:56:16,405 --> 00:56:19,405
And so then it would be just faster for us to focus on what it is we want to do.

913
00:56:19,405 --> 00:56:23,405
To be clear, I mean, when you say launch it without permission,

914
00:56:23,405 --> 00:56:27,405
you've rid the Drivechain in such a way that you need 90% of miners to go off.

915
00:56:27,405 --> 00:56:31,405
Hey, hey, hey, we're going to take one last question then also.

916
00:56:31,405 --> 00:56:34,405
No discussion between the two.

917
00:56:34,405 --> 00:56:36,405
Final questions.

918
00:56:37,405 --> 00:56:43,405
My question for Peter would be, would you agree that BIP301 is actually not that
contagious

919
00:56:43,405 --> 00:56:46,405
because we already have workarounds?

920
00:56:46,405 --> 00:56:51,405
Like when Thomson came up with the thing that it's basically the same thing as BIP301

921
00:56:51,405 --> 00:56:53,405
and we can already do it today?

922
00:56:53,405 --> 00:56:59,405
Also, we have merge mining and a couple of other consensus mechanisms that we can
provide from base chain.

923
00:56:59,405 --> 00:57:06,405
Well, I mean, the simple answer there is I think BIP301 by itself is just actually
not a very interesting thing.

924
00:57:06,405 --> 00:57:08,405
I mean, it doesn't actually achieve much.

925
00:57:08,405 --> 00:57:12,405
And, you know, there's certain technical things about it that I think are very
busted and broken.

926
00:57:12,405 --> 00:57:14,405
And I just don't think it's very relevant.

927
00:57:14,405 --> 00:57:17,405
The relevant discussion is what do Drivechains look like?

928
00:57:17,405 --> 00:57:19,405
And speak for the hashrate escrows.

929
00:57:20,405 --> 00:57:25,405
I would almost agree because I wrote BIP301 like just about January 2017 or
something.

930
00:57:25,405 --> 00:57:28,405
It's very old and a lot of new stuff has been invented by then.

931
00:57:28,405 --> 00:57:31,405
And I think if it's similar, then we're not doing it now.

932
00:57:31,405 --> 00:57:32,405
So why do it?

933
00:57:32,405 --> 00:57:33,405
Okay.

934
00:57:33,405 --> 00:57:35,405
All righty, all righty.

935
00:57:35,405 --> 00:57:38,405
Let's give a round of applause for the 20-odd minutes.

936
00:57:38,405 --> 00:57:39,405
Thank you.

937
00:57:39,405 --> 00:57:40,405
Thank you.

938
00:57:40,405 --> 00:57:41,405
Thank you.

939
00:57:41,405 --> 00:57:42,405
Thank you.

940
00:57:42,405 --> 00:57:43,405
Thank you.

941
00:57:43,405 --> 00:57:44,405
Thank you.

942
00:57:44,405 --> 00:57:45,405
Thank you.

943
00:57:45,405 --> 00:57:46,405
Thank you.

944
00:57:46,405 --> 00:57:47,405
Okay.

945
00:57:47,405 --> 00:57:49,405
So here's what we're going to do.

946
00:57:49,405 --> 00:57:57,405
If you are opinionated and you think Drivechain BIP300 or 301 is a good idea, can
you raise your hand?

947
00:57:57,405 --> 00:58:00,405
Wow.

948
00:58:00,405 --> 00:58:03,405
Is that 20, 25 people maybe?

949
00:58:03,405 --> 00:58:07,405
I count 21 people or 22 if they – okay.

950
00:58:07,405 --> 00:58:08,405
Sorry.

951
00:58:08,405 --> 00:58:09,405
The dog's here.

952
00:58:09,405 --> 00:58:10,405
So 22.

953
00:58:10,405 --> 00:58:11,405
Okay.

954
00:58:11,405 --> 00:58:13,405
Put your hands down, and you're not allowed to vote again.

955
00:58:13,405 --> 00:58:18,405
Raise your hands if you are anti or against BIP300 Drivechain.

956
00:58:18,405 --> 00:58:21,405
Yeah.

957
00:58:21,405 --> 00:58:23,405
That's like 40 at least, the ones that voted.

958
00:58:23,405 --> 00:58:26,405
I'm just an expert behind the curtain, so.

959
00:58:26,405 --> 00:58:27,405
Yeah.

960
00:58:27,405 --> 00:58:28,405
So roughly about 40.

961
00:58:28,405 --> 00:58:29,405
I'll see if that's enough.

962
00:58:29,405 --> 00:58:30,405
Okay.

963
00:58:30,405 --> 00:58:33,405
Now raise your hand if you still don't care if you're confused.

964
00:58:34,405 --> 00:58:36,405
So it's a roughly 35.

965
00:58:36,405 --> 00:58:37,405
Okay.

966
00:58:37,405 --> 00:58:40,405
So those are the stats, and I would say, Peter?

967
00:58:40,405 --> 00:58:42,405
Peter, give him a round of applause.

968
00:58:42,405 --> 00:58:43,405
So congratulations.

969
00:58:43,405 --> 00:58:45,405
I don't have any trophy or anything, but, you know.

970
00:58:45,405 --> 00:58:46,405
I'll just take the trophy.

971
00:58:46,405 --> 00:58:47,405
Thank you.

972
00:58:47,405 --> 00:58:48,405
Thank you.

973
00:58:48,405 --> 00:58:49,405
Thank you.

974
00:58:49,405 --> 00:58:50,405
Thank you.

975
00:58:50,405 --> 00:58:51,405
Thank you.

976
00:58:51,405 --> 00:58:52,405
Thank you.

977
00:58:52,405 --> 00:58:53,405
Thank you.

978
00:58:53,405 --> 00:58:54,405
Thank you.

979
00:58:54,405 --> 00:58:55,405
Thank you.

980
00:58:55,405 --> 00:58:56,405
Thank you.

981
00:58:56,405 --> 00:58:57,405
Thank you.

982
00:58:57,405 --> 00:58:58,405
Thank you.

983
00:58:58,405 --> 00:58:59,405
Thank you.

984
00:58:59,405 --> 00:59:00,405
Thank you.

985
00:59:00,405 --> 00:59:01,405
Thank you.

986
00:59:01,405 --> 00:59:02,405
Thank you.

987
00:59:03,405 --> 00:59:04,405
I'll just take that.

988
00:59:05,405 --> 00:59:06,405
And thank y'all so much for coming.

989
00:59:06,405 --> 00:59:08,405
Make sure to read up if you are interested.

990
00:59:08,405 --> 00:59:12,405
Make sure to read the book and do your own research and talk to these guys
afterwards.

991
00:59:12,405 --> 00:59:15,405
And let's hear it for this excellent referee, too.

992
00:59:15,405 --> 00:59:17,405
Give him a round of applause.

993
00:59:17,405 --> 00:59:18,405
Thank you.

994
00:59:18,405 --> 00:59:19,405
Thank you.

995
00:59:19,405 --> 00:59:20,405
Thank you.

996
00:59:20,405 --> 00:59:21,405
Thank you.

997
00:59:21,405 --> 00:59:22,380
Thank you.