Thank you for joining us.
Oh my gosh, I can't see anything. Can anyone hear any of me? Did Elon Musk change the software again?
Hmm. I can see the things that I normally see, but I can't see any people.
Maybe I should leave and rejoin.
I don't know.
What is happening? It says $8, but I don't see anything at all.
Elon.
Okay, I'm gonna leave and rejoin.
Okay.
All right, we got Moon Settler.
He's been waiting all week for this.
I've been waiting all week for this. You've been waiting all week for this.
This is
as good as it gets. There's no Bitcoin signal
higher than this signal.
I was here in
Berlin, I still am, and I saw this replica of this giant dome that Hitler wanted to build.
Biggest dome ever made.
That's a perfect analogy for what this is. This is the biggest dome.
Although it's not a great analogy, because Hitler was never able to build that dome on account of
being distracted by losing the war and then dying. But other than that,
I mean, definitely made a lot of mistakes, but
very ambitious person.
All right, Moon Settler, are we doing this?
Yeah, maybe.
Yes.
So, before that,
there was like two things I wanted to say.
One was that
I actually would like to see
blind merge mining being used.
Basically, there are like half a dozen ways you could do it, so I'm confident that
in some form it will happen.
So, I'm kind of interested in the outcome of that
of that
I don't know how to say it, objection or whatever, but before we get into that, if
I'm not on a train this time, I'm in a quiet
luxury hotel room
that might have been on fire yesterday.
It's unclear.
The fire alarm went off. All the people being German, they all left, so I had to also leave.
I didn't see any fires, but
excellent fire alarm, I'll give them that.
Anyway, so we're doing this thing about whether or not
there is a marginal cost advantage
in non-linear in hash rate, that being our x variable.
Yeah, in hash rate share.
The growing hash rate share.
Yeah, so the original quote
that
that I tried to summarize the critiques of
drivechain from this angle
and this is all for those that don't know the context, this is all related to the
realization that since sidechains
reorg independently
for that reason, the main chain bid for a sidechain block
reference, let's say. So sidechain block reference,
when it gets bidded, then it's not atomic.
So the reward that the searcher or block assembler of the sidechain gets on the sidechain
is not atomically tied with his expense.
And that is why it has been theorized that
and I'm going to quote,
read the quote, so blind merge mining bid is inherently risky, growing pool size and not bidding in the main pool
risks the blind merge mining, thus it introduces different economy of scale and centralization dynamics.
So that's kind of what is being claimed about blind merge mining and
and
before we talk about that and why you think that is not true,
can we play a little game?
So we can, but I also have a game I wanted to play before we played it out, which is I wanted you to admit
six different things that would each make it completely irrelevant if this were even true or not.
That's exactly what I wanted. What can be done? So let's pretend it's true for just
argument's sake and what can be done exactly. Okay, this is interesting because this is a blind list backwards.
I was going from the most likely thing to the most worst case scenario thing, but now you're saying
let's just say the worst has happened
and we'll go, so we'll go through my list backwards, which is the last thing on my list
one, two, three, four,
five
is
if we have efficient pool hopping, then nothing matters because as long as you have a way of holding the pool to account
it doesn't matter. You just have
25% pools
or even you could have two 50% pools
and they would hop and I can explain why you would never have a 51% 49%
pool if you're interested. I explained it long ago in 2016
but I can explain it again.
But that's number five on my list is that as long as you have a way of monitoring the pool
shoving the work of running any node onto the pool
and monitoring them for misbehavior and then switching
then nothing matters at all. So because just whatever the pool does, it doesn't matter what the pool is doing.
So that's number five. So I was curious what your take, what is your take on that?
Yeah, so this is basically an argument on that even if pools like grow
to a size that is probably uncomfortable to most Bitcoiners who do not
Even if they don't have fixed costs
Even that you are saying even that would work just fine. Yeah, if there were two 50% pools
but they each of them had to behave
perfectly
because if they made any mistake
someone would switch pools or they would start a new pool. You know what I mean? You have some kind of automatic pool replacement
thing, which is quite easy to do. The only reason there hasn't been any creativity
innovation
entrepreneurship in this direction is because the pools are all very well behaved. They're already on a very short leash
but even if they weren't
you could have something where
there's two 50% pools and if as soon as an error is made an error would be
censoring a transaction
or doing some kind of reorg or whatever anything bad
As soon as that mistake was made if there would be the death of that pool and there would be a new
second pool
Temporarily one pool would have maybe 100% the next pool would spin up and then quickly get the other 50%
You could have and I've explained this in the past one such way would be
You blacklist any pool that ever makes a mistake and then you switch pools randomly
And then if you ever find a situation where 100% of the hashrate is in one pool, everyone just flips a coin
They they fork the pool and if everyone ran the identical piece of software like some kind of like optimal pool
Which I sometimes in my head I call it stratum v3. It's like a kind of joke
But if everyone ran the exact same software
It could do this could do all the pooling for us and it could all be optimized
Of course in practice there are many pools for many different reasons
Sometimes brand sometimes hash, you know ant pool marathon
sometimes
There's different pools because of the different paper last and shares people have different preferences on that type of thing
Right, that's my first thought
so last time
we mentioned that
There is a an incentive for increasing the pools, which is a lower variance and then you said there is a disincentive
Uh for pools to go too big, but you were breaking up around that part and they did not really catch
Well, that's unfortunate there's something called that was originally called the block withholding attack
Unfortunately, that phrase has been used for several different things
and also unfortunately google
is terrible now, it used to be great, of course, but
Now it's awful
But you can find the original which I think is by it all or you can search and find on truthcoin
You can find the miner equilibrium analysis miner threat model and equilibrium analysis and I cite it there and not only do I cite it
But I replicated their findings in the microsoft excel
For anyone cares, but the big it's there's a way of attacking a pool profitably
Where you join the pool?
And then you don't you submit when you find a share you submit that but when you find a block you do not
Do that and this actually is a more effective attack
When your enemy has a higher hash rate and you can in fact attack every pool at once
And it is the most effective of all
and i'm not sure if there's some kind of second order effect that
prevents this from happening or if it's just the usual story of just
No one wanting to start a dispute that has no. Yeah, I mean
Try trying to fuck with the pool that pays you
And custody is the funds until you get paid is kind of like
an interesting choice
Yes, but it's not um
What you do is you behave honorably and then it just looks always like you have bad luck
Because you are finding shares so they can tell that you're really doing the hashing but then you never submit the block
and this what this does is it
It it does a combined thing is by first of all, you're leeching the enemy pool of cash because other people are still submitting
shares
and then you are also
Uh, you are lowering the difficulty by discarding you're lowering the work
The the proof of work of the network decreases in the whole amount of the work that is
Sorry, I just stepped on something my pen, um, it decreases the proof of work of the whole network
Um decreases
You're knocking out the entire
You're punching above your weight when you when you discard the block
So it looks as though the whole network difficulty decreases
Actually, I shouldn't really not even talk about it because I can't quite fully remember it all because it was a very long time
ago when I made this spreadsheet, but
Spreadsheet is still there is my point. Just gotta but that's a big one
It's also the case of course that no one wants to become too big of a pool because it's actually too ominous
It's too unstable to have 51
Because the other 49 will get nervous
They think we're powerless so the 49 will be very eager to cut a deal
with two percent out of the 51
And no one really wants all this
deal cutting
It's not in anyone's interest
It costs basically nothing for a 60 person miner to pretend. He is a 320 person miner
So as far as i'm aware, it doesn't cost him anything
And as you know perfectly well
There are also other economies of scale in that the the share rate and the fees have to be set
a certain way given the size
And also it's just annoying to have to interact with more people
So and the as you said
when I was on the train
correctly
the
Gain from joining a pool
has diminishing returns
Um, and so I think this is why we have different size pools, but of course we never really know
We just know the pool self-report. It's just there they volunteer this information
But that's my number five on my list where if that
Happened then nothing would matter
And
Do you think we can go through the list but um, yeah, let's go
Okay
okay, well i'm going to now switch to go back in the list like an order because when I wrote it down it is like
It has like a temporal
Order somewhat. So the first thing on the list is that the node costs
They won't be that large anyway
for a variety of reasons
One is as I constantly repeat
Regular end user of the sidechain has to be able to run a node and they're a zero percent hasher
basically
So this is kind of a natural ceiling on the cost of the node
but the second sub bullet point is
Um, you know these miners they're spending like unbelievable amounts of money like, you know millions and millions of dollars
they're buying
Asics by the 40-foot marine
container
And they put them on an 18 wheeler
You know, it's like the amounts we're talking here
Are utterly enormous and I calculated even a one gigabyte node, which is
blown way into fantasy land of what
I think would even be
Would even possibly be you know producing block space that anyone could even consume
I've already calculated that as like being like whatever like a two
Two thousand and change to set up and then like a couple like four hundred dollars ish a month
Which is like very very very liberal assumptions. These calculations are in my
blog posts called
Thunder the large box sidechain. There's an appendix
at the bottom and probably honestly the costs are even lower if you properly adjust for inflation because I wrote that before the
covid bite inflation or whatever, so
I think honestly it's even cheaper. So
Uh, so the idea that something that we're talking like amortized
like
Fewer than ten thousand dollars total over like three years
Ten thousand dollars over three years versus
What anyone of a mining operation of any plausible? I mean, I looked up like what an s19 s9 s29, whatever
You know those things are selling for like four or five six thousand dollars
Just to buy one without even plugging it in
So it's kind of like the node cost just can't be that large
Just right off the bat like at all
I agree. I agree. The node cost is probably
Like only a sidechain is only useful if the node cost is affordable to the users or a large enough set of the users
I believe I think people imagine that the searchers costs will be several several magnitudes higher
Yes
Uh, well, I agree but again this searcher thing is I think the point in dispute because it seems like there's some like big
huge miscommunication
Persistently happening. So that's probably the meat of it
but then I have some other points i'm not even sure they matter since you agreed to the one in five and either any
one of them would
kind of tank the whole thing, but
But two is that if the costs are large
The miners will shirk the costs somehow. So even if there is no bip three or one
They will just if the cost somehow became so big that they were significant
Which I already don't think happened
But they would just do some kind of partnership like all the miners would partner with one node
Now I have to stress
Lest I'd be misunderstood
That i'm fully aware that that would be a terrible situation if there's only one node
But the point is it's terrible for
The users of the sidechain it does not affect the users of L1 or users of any other sidechain it's um
It's really just a decision the user makes how much decentralization they want
They have um
That choice and there's plenty of things they could use
WeChat pay venmo or whatever
So the number two point is that the miners are going to shirk the cost because they don't it's not literally the case
That one node will run out if a certain number of hashes
You know what? I mean? It's not like once you do 10 million hashes
per second
You need a second node
That's not the case. So it is theoretically possible for one single node somewhere to service 100
of the miners
Which is a BIP301 thing
Even if it's not happening with BIP301, it's the same type of thing
So it'd be like an infura thing maybe like some kind of subscription
Or they'd have some kind of like handshake
Deal or whatever it is and it's sort of a thing. Yeah
I believe I believe shinobi specifically was ranting about this. He believes this would be a very bad thing for bitcoin and
The miners dependence on such a super node would be very bad for bitcoin. He argues that
It leads directly to my third point though, which is very related to the second point
Which is that something like liquid that shinobi supports or presumably supports
That is an example of the node cost being infinite
Because no matter how much I pay i'll never be able to actually
join the liquid 15, you know sat there and run the
so people seem to have some kind of problem with
They don't they obviously don't care if the node costs are zero
But then they seem to care if the node costs rise, but then at some point
It does a u-turn because before it gets to infinity people stop caring
but uh the node cost
I I just read your articles about this the node cost was in relation to knowing that you got paid
So to to run a liquid node that tells you that you got paid
the cost of that is is
Barely anything because there are only two transactions happening in a liquid node
Well, I gotta tell you that's a very astute of you but in this context, I think we're referring to something slightly different than
what you were referring to is
Because in a way you don't know if whether or not you can withdraw
What in this context I think what it means is it's a mining technology that allows you to collect the transaction fee
So in liquid all the fees are collected by swatching basically
And so even though people may observe
That their transactions have been validated in liquid
They don't the miners cannot use that information to collect a fee. So we have a slightly different meaning in this case
Yeah, not not all nodes are medical. Yeah
So in this case of being a miner fee generation technology shinobi has to equivocate he tries to have it both ways
and in one sense he says
It's it's very bad
if
You know, and once when he just gets to the t-shirt argument, he flips it around he says that's different because t-shirts require
factories and people
and then he flips it back around when it comes to the liquid argument where he says
that
it's good because for some reason I don't both of them are incoherent in my point of view, but
the liquid I think I think he may have said something like when
The
The miners don't get paid, right?
like last time we talked the the
Tommy or the disagreement seems to be on the sidechain technologies on whether the miners should get paid or not get paid the fees
and and that basically seems to be in some people's head like a dividing line between
the sidechain
Economic activity being able to influence or distort the mining incentives whatsoever for some reason
So they assume if the miners don't get paid if the sidechain validators or whatever keep all the fees and all the MEV and everything
Then it obviously will like not affect the the layer one miners. I'm not sure about that, but that's kind of the
idea
You should be able to be sure about it because it's just one is just equal to the sum of the others
for example
I could start up my own liquid
And it could be identical to blockstream where I control these keys and I collect all the fees
And then after starting up my own liquid I could say that i'm going to randomly donate some of the money to the miners
And then it just becomes the exact same thing
Well, I could give all the money to the miners every 10 minutes, you know what I mean
then it just becomes the exact same thing so what so that's my point number three is that
There's no parallel complaint about liquid or really even about any other
Thing that makes money that could partner with miners that they
It's like again, they have no problem if it's completely separated no problem if it happens
Like in liquid no problem with the current L1 fees where it's completely
tightly bound up
It's all mandatorily linked
And then they seem to have
Only a problem in like weird
middle regions
I think there is
I think there is one more aspect to this whole thing like
A lot of the critics that are worried about these weird
Perverse or adverse effects are actually very bullish on drivechains
So they think people would use them a lot more there would be a lot more economic activity on them
Uh
Then then the current alternatives that are possible now, so that's what I noticed that
That they think they think drivechains would be much more successful than what I would be, you know
betting on
basically
Yeah, or even I will even what I would say in like the short term because of course like with anything
the only way it will actually work is
At first it will be created then
A bunch of people are going to send like 20 25
into the sidechain and they'll kind of test it out to be like the
The early explorer type people and then it'll get like a little bit of a reputation
for working and then
people will continue to
Push the envelope as far as it can be pushed. So certainly it at first it will not have
I think they are afraid of of some
Some most misunderstanding creating like a gold rush like frenzy kind of what we saw with
I don't know what example to say
Like inscriptions, right?
So you you get this this, uh, it's frenzy this craziness a lot of uneducated people overestimating
Um the security assumptions or whatever and being really careless and creating these is weird
Situations, I think that's kind of the idea the underlying fear or I don't know how to say that
So you seem to mostly agreed with numbers one two three and five on my list
The fourth one is pretty lame though. It just basically says
It says well, it's sort of hard to say it basically what i'm getting at in this last one is
There's a difference between the u.s
Dollar value of the it's it should be purchasing power equality
So basically if bib 301 works, then it also doesn't matter but that's
That's uh, if the u.s dollar value
Of the of the block is equal more or less equal to what is paid on L1 then
You can separate
Division
Division of labor and then um
My no miner is paying miners are free riding off of the existing
sidechain full nodes miners never need
to run a sidechain node and they
free ride off of the other people who are running nodes and therefore they're never affected by
What whatever the sidechain is doing including mev including searchers including whatever
Yeah, that's the ideal outcome right so so that would be
Uh, right
so
Now we should get into this thing
That I have apparently struggled to convey. Did you have an opportunity to look at my little pictures with the smiley faces?
or no
If not, I could probably find them we could probably put them
in the nest
I know I I looked at them, but I could not find them again
um
Okay, i'll find them now what the hell is happening
Okay, i'm gonna try to get him I know they're in my highlights and they go to tidwell's answer find them
Um, it's not easy to find everything
Let's see
Can you hear me now by the way because my headset needs some things yeah, I think we can hear you just fine
I think I can hear you
Okay, so if you put something in the nest then I I can't see it again
Okay, i'm getting it I found him now
I just have to because I found it on my laptop and i'm on my phone
I have to move them away. Here we go. Copy link. So
From what I remember by the way, it was something like, uh, something like, uh,
An assumption that
That uh the layer 2 sidechain fees
That mev would be expressed on the layer 2 sidechain fees and that's why it doesn't matter
that's what I remember, but
We will see
That's not an assumption. Okay. Hang on. I apologize that this has taken so long, but I think I figured it out
Here we go. Paste reply
Okay, I replied with it
Send now
Okay, I got it and I also have uh, let me see if you go into this and you find the quote
and there's one where I
Let's see where this thing is. Yeah, I see
Okay
Find this here
I'm trying to find i'm also going to post the one the the thread that has all the ones about mbv
All eight all three, I think sorry, there's four links actually
But while you glance at those
I will
Find this thing. Where is it?
Okay, here we go
Okay, almost
Okay
Okay
All right. Now i'm posting this other link that is like the
breaking off point
Where has all the mev links also
Um
That's a refresh
It's weird that it doesn't
It's weird if I listen live or make an infinite loop. I don't want to do that
I don't want any infinite loops around here. Okay, i'm going to reply to the post with this
Hopefully this will
work
All right. So these are for number eight. So hopefully you can see that now possibly but the key thing is these little images here
so I don't know if this is making any sense or not, but
The person the point i'm trying to say is the bmm searcher
They are the person who will bid up
on L1
There's nothing to do with what the L1 miner wants so they won't be affected
Yeah, uh and uh
So you see it's all completely something that happens in the sidechain world inside that little
uh
You know inside the little box the layer two rounded corners box
All right, so so in in the case right in in the ideal case where uh
where you have uh searchers that are not vertically integrated and have competition between each other
and uh, they are actually like, uh bidding in the map
It doesn't quite matter if they have to be competition because remember in the liquid case
There's just a monopolist to collect all the fees. Yeah
yeah, yeah, but what i'm trying to get at uh, I think the idea is that
if the searchers do not have
competition if there is a monopoly there then that monopoly will retain like every surplus value and
And only try to pay for like
You could bid the whole thing that's true
so they won't won't be the whole thing and and uh, and that incentivizes
Uh, maybe the better capitalized miners to actually go after it themselves. Oh, but that's
That's true. And it's very clever, but that contradicts the whole monopoly thing. So it's it's either a monopoly or it's not
right, right, right, so
It's a very dynamic game so these things like like shift and bounce off of each other these
assumptions or I don't know what to call them these these these states, uh of these networks because
immediately that the the
the miners get the sense that they are
they are
being uh withheld from
then
They they will become curious
Uh to to create an alternative or a competition to the search I believe
Well, okay, but um
in fact, they can completely screw that searcher over because uh
like we discussed the they kind of have the power to they kind of have the power to
to
You know reorder the sidechain box and take away the sidechain rewards and and include their own, uh hashes
And uh, whatever but I don't want to like rush ahead with all this, um, right because that's a separate thing
I think there's a different misconception. Yeah
Yeah, because my view on that even though we'll get to it is that
That is what I was talking about about the u.s. Dollar value is the same even if the coin amount is different
so like if there's if there's this is a chain where there's 50 of the blocks are
orphaned
The equilibrium bid value will fall
Like half but it'll be the same u.s. Dollar it'll be a fall for everyone since no one knows if they're going to be reorg
Main or side and so then it's the same u.s. Dollar value in the bid. That's 301. So that was
But that's a very complex point so we could get to that later
But you see in order to get to your point you have to you have to believe a lot of weird things
So first of all, yeah
The four or five things that you already said you agreed
We jettison those and then you have to have a monopoly. You have to have like a half monopoly
And then you also have to discard the fact that like right now the miners aren't collecting any of these fees
So that you might think the mev person is getting all the fees
But in our today world with no BIP300 301 at all or even in the hypothetical future
Arc world or whatever spider chain world
They're not getting any of the fees
so
There's no like parallel belief. You know what I mean?
Even if it's all custodial lightning
Like there's no parallel belief that says oh the miners feel cut out
So now they have an incentive to like become a custodial lightning node and take all the money
You know what? I mean? No one makes a parallel argument at all
They just kind of only trot it out for this bizarrely specific
Set of circumstances so they either think
I just wanted to say I was very frustrated with this four weeks because
I just couldn't get a clear picture of like the motivations and
and the
incentives and the actions of of how
some people imagine this to like
Like almost certainly lead to full vertical integration and larger pool dominance. So
I
I really struggled with this and I told a lot
with people in
dms and
And try to try to get like like like a sense of how this could possibly happen how this makes sense whatsoever
and
That's why I said that I I finally
Thought I I had something like like there was a plausible
uh
Scenario, uh painted that I could say. All right. All right. Let's see then what paul says about that
Well, sure and
But we I have to like if i'm really being a hundred percent honest with the audience
I know that all this is not none of this is really real. This is like
People critics of drivechain
They've moved the goalposts so many times already and now they're just searching for any possible thing that they could say
something and in shinobi's case, it doesn't even matter if the
If the costs are very large like
And when they're infinite with liquid or if they're small
With cheap drivechain or if they're they involve t-shirts
It just doesn't matter just try to come up with something to say
And that is the true
Explanation of why these complaints appear it is not because people are worried about
I don't think don't think he's trying to hide this. So he really really dislikes bandwidth mining
uh, and and he
He thinks that the the hash rate escrow actually makes it somehow worse
So somehow it would be more popular and powerful if it was combined with hash rate escrow. That's what he believes
You know so well that he otherwise he runs straight into the
the
the death now for his argument, which is that already
We do merge mining with namecoin and it's totally unpreventable and it was invented by satoshi and we've been doing it for 10 years
And we still do it every day. So
He knows that he has to come up with he can't just say merge mining is bad. He has to say
By me improving it i'm making it bad
He is trying to find uh
points of attack on it, but I
Don't think that's a huge problem for bitcoin and uh, it may be very inconvenient for you, but
Actually might on the long run actually like help. I don't know
well, of course, I mean like in one sense, this is a healthy peer review, but in another sense, it's not because
We should
Search whenever we have a theory we should try to find all the reasons. It might be false
But we should also find out search for all the reasons it might be true because those two things are actually the same thing
there's no way of
You know what? I mean? Like it either has purchased on the truth or falsehood or it's irrelevant. So yes, it's kind of
obviously
you know, I mean you could go down the list and you could say
well bitcoin
sure, it works, but
you could like I had an example about like, um
If the two different times like you could divide all the land in
You could divide all the land in a country up into the boroughs
But what are you going to do about the line between the two boroughs and you could say, okay
We'll put the boroughs on rivers and then you say well, what if what about when a boat?
crosses the line and
You could just keep like, you know splitting hairs and find it like focusing on
Extremely irrelevant things when it's really just does this theory
Do the work that we wanted to do but now let's turn to the uh, the case of the reorg whether or not the
Whether or not the legitimate hashers like the shot 256d people
If they have a huge advantage over the lbmm people and if that even matters at all
because I think that they don't I think
all that matters is
So before we get into that, um, can we play that little game that I I was uh,
Okay, sure
so so if we if if you take it like, uh, they're button and um,
And assume that when we somehow should try to solve this issue of um,
atomicity
um
Do you think there could be done something about that and um
More specifically I I see kind of like two possibilities for this immediately
one is
very simple and actually it would be like a sidechain consensus thing which says
Instead of you know being freely reorgable
You are saying that only only
Only bad
Invalid blocks can be reorg. Otherwise, they have to be reorg on L1
But of course this this is a fatal flaw that that you already mentioned
And I don't really know what to do with the block withholding attack
So yes
Block withholding is is would kill that idea
Right, you just put on the block
Yeah
Yeah, because if it's obviously like trolling if it's obviously a bad hash or it's a bad block
Then the sidechain nodes can safely ignore it and you don't have this whole weak, uh subjectivity problem
But the moment they can't tell if that hash so you would have to prove a negative basically and that's impossible
It's sort of the attacker just lands two blocks
One is valid one is invalid and it just withholds them both and you don't know which is which and you can't
build on either and
They just they just wait
It's really sad because it would actually maximize the value of the sidechain for the for the users because the value is in
in in large part in blockchains is in the
the immutability
immutability and uh, and uh the finality, uh of of these uh things and uh, if you
Know
Actually, which you can say do a counterparty did and say each basically each transaction is its own
It's like its own block or something like that
where
Then they're all in L1, but then you get no extra block space so that also kind of ruins it
Yeah, so so like I said, I I really like that first one but somehow would need to find
And probably has no clean and easy solution, uh to to try to deal with the block withholding attack because
Someone would actually need to so one way to deal with it
If it happens infrequently, then of course the sidechain could uh, like soft fork
uh that uh block is invalid, but
This is a huge problem and a very bad ux and if it happens frequently because someone is trolling with it
Then it will ruin everyone's day. So that's it. And the other way to do it would be to
uh
try to pay the miners on the sidechain and I
Faintly remember that shirobi suggested something like this that an spv proof would be presented to the miners that they got paid on the sidechain
or maybe some weird scheme where
the side
This is what he didn't understand is the u.s dollar value equality versus the coin
He was saying something like make it be required on L1
to show
The and this idea has lots of problems
But he's saying show the whole merkle path into L2 into the L2 coinbase on L1
So that you can prove that you're not being screwed over
but this idea has like a 10 000 disadvantages one is every L2 must be organized in the way that
Uh that L1 can understand which is already
Horrible, but the other thing is it doesn't account for any of the mev
Of course the uh the stuff that is about other value
In the sidechain block that's unrelated to payouts in the coinbase
So this is also terrible
but the most important reason of all is that he doesn't take they must float in fact because
A sidechain newly minted sidechain coins are not equal
They have their own block maturity and then they have to be withdrawn so they're not equal in value
To like just because the sidechain's coinbase has 109 btc
That does not mean that
You should pay
109 it may be much less
Objectively much less for everyone. So it has to float. It has to be like an auction system
And it has to be the little delta there
I have no one knows exactly what it is even
so
So I I think that just shows
That he didn't understand it
Because he was going further in the wrong direction
He's saying like we must prove but the true value of the sidechain block could be in excess of like 109
coins because there could have been
Theoretically, there could be any amount of mbv 3 000 coins worth of mbv
Yeah, so then it should really be 3 109 paid on L1 or 3 108
But that just shows you
This would only work if the mbv comes from like some layer 3 and it
Expressed as fees on layer 2 and then it could possibly work, but you are right
I did I think it's interesting to look at these starter exercises like a little side note that
All right, blind match mining has these these properties
The the user experience wise like the the finality
That that results in this that that they reorg rather easily they are basically secured by
the the
the fees paid on the on the
Yeah, and and uh, and uh on the miner side the blind merge mining side you have this property that
It seems to me that you just can't make
The the L1 bit and the add to payout atomic like it's not it doesn't seem
You see
the competition
Is the best way of
Of dealing with that because it automatically takes into account every single difference
You know what? I mean? It takes into account the inconvenience
Avoiding the L2 maturity period and then the withdrawal period
So it discounts the fees, but it would also automatically take it into account the mbv. So it's just automatically
Resetting everything and the miners benefit because just like with any competition
Not everyone is exactly an equal human being they may be equal, you know peers on the peer-to-peer network
But the individual people are different. So some are more confident
Or more patient they're more confident and be able to do the L2 to L1 withdrawal
They're more patient
For whatever reason because of their own circumstance
Uh, or they are better at getting mev those people will naturally bid the most
Though those people who are already running a sidechain node, maybe for some other reason
Maybe they have a website where they have a block explorer
They sell ads there. So they already have a node. They already do merchant whatever whatever it is
They already have the node. So to them the marginal cost of
The node is free
And they may be so they so the miners on L1 they'll automatically be getting the best the two best bids
In the whole world of which only take one
And this is a far superior
method of
aligning the incentives between the two
parties
this simple act of competition is does far more than any convoluted thing where you spv prove the
the actual number in the coinbase
You what you are saying is basically that you believe the market would price it
adequately
Like find find a way to price it again. It's not no market the dynamics are anyone
It's a simple auction, you know, everyone bids
The only one bid will win the miners will pick the highest bid
And those are very, you know, those are very straightforward ingredients, I think
You know what I mean so like what else could happen
Yeah, I I understand. Uh
What you are trying to say? I I think
I think it's not
It's not going through
I'm, pretty sure it's not going through
The the way you are saying it. I think a lot of people don't understand why
why this is necessarily happening and
And why wouldn't the miners try to play selfish games because for example, um, when you have
so let's say
Finding the the best mev is like
Really a high specialization high capital investment game. Let's say this is the assumption
So it's not sure it's even worth talking about if if close to the maximum fees can be extracted by simply running the sidechain
No, i'm not sure. It's the whole thing is worth discussing because
in that world
I'm pretty sure that that
These others
Imagined outcomes just just won't happen but
uh, if if you if you think that
Someone can indeed by just doing this whole thing best and putting a lot of money into it
and that can include like subsidizing it, so
if
people like
keep
Keep bidding and then keep getting reward and not getting rewards and then this in this game
It's entirely possible that someone better capitalized for a short period of time taking huge losses
They can win like a five-year period when they are the undisputed king of the hill and that's kind of another
Approach to this whole thing that the people might not just be interested in in their profit
Profitability for like the next block, but they might actually want to secure like a long period of very high profitability
For taking a temporary loss that that's also I believe part of the the field people are just very bad at uh, like
Describing this whole thing clearly, I think
Right, but would you fair to say is it fair for me to say that
I mean you believe me when I say that
They're
I mean like what do you think of
The situation now having listened to what I have to say
I
I honestly
Uh, like don't know for the reason that I don't know enough about what is going on at realm
like how
How copter intensive is finding mev there? What is the state of the competition and centralization there?
And and with the searchers and and stuff like that
I I don't understand that whole world and um that that kind of gets in the way of of trying to
Imagine this how it could play out in in the drivechain context
because uh
people are
Seem very
Very, you know set in their ways and and their base assumptions and that's another thing about drivechains
So people coming at it from
Assumptions basically on how people will behave
uh in the future
Uh or in general will come to entirely different conclusion if they look at the same rule set. That's another thing
um
So I I don't find what you are saying implausible, but I don't find what they are saying implausible either totally
Uh, well sure, but I mean didn't you just agree with me about
All five of those five
Things any of which would have made it
A moot point what the mev was
Uh
No, because I again lost my headset
So
Um, yes, I guess you would say maybe the first one
The node costs won't be large
Maybe the searcher cost will be large
Yeah, yeah
so so I I don't think the the the net net net node cost in that sense that
The node that everyone can run the node software
I don't think that will be expensive and I don't think that will be prohibitive in any way
I think a sidechain that is too expensive node is kind of a failure and kind of pointless, but that's my personal opinion
All right might as well
But I don't know how high the cost for math searchers can get because that entirely depends on what
Insane casinos people build on these sidechains
maybe alex can uh, if he is up for it, maybe he can
Uh tell us about what he sees because he's is much more
Worse than the ethersphere than than I am. I i'm generally not interested in defy and and stuff like this
and yeah, but did you not look at my
the uh
The pictures I sent about the searcher is the person who would bid and so then you have their weird
You have to have your weird quasi monopoly
scenario
You just need to you need there to be you see why wouldn't there be two searchers because the searchers are making money in
return for doing nothing
You know what? I mean?
If they keep a premium then that means someone else could do what they do
And charge less of a premium
They make a bid that is slightly higher. Yeah, so
Since anyone can bid in three or one there really can't be a monopoly
If one searcher has like a hundred million dollar and another searcher has like a five billion dollar to secure the next
and years of dominance
then
I think the assumption is that the one with the five million dollars will
uh will win he will be able to outbid the other and the other will
Be disgusted with no returns on his activity and capital investments and and and just give up and leave
That's kind of the assumption
and also the assumption
Anything that one searcher does another searcher could do and if it's if one of them
Requires 100 million dollars worth of capital then they pay opportunity costs equal to that
capital investment
and so if they
that's just as likely to be a disadvantage as it is to be an advantage if you didn't spend 100 million dollars on
Bitcoin or on whatever iBonds, but instead you spent it on this
Yeah, so basically the the better capitalized searcher can just spend 200 million dollars on
on
crowding the other one out of the market and the other assumption regarding this is
that if someone
uh
or like a either a miner that pretends to be like multiple pools because we established that you don't actually know how many uh,
how many pools are
but what portion of the hash rate is controlled by one person or
Or what pools are controlled by one person or one coalition or one cartel or whatever you want to say
so if a significant chunk of the hash rate actually
like tries to actively make
External searchers unprofitable then they have pretty good equipment
They are well positioned to do that as well. And again, this might absolutely not make sense
So I I can
This is like
This could be fun to talk about of course, but it's you know, yeah, I think
So it does does not yeah, I think I can add
Just quickly, um, but I don't know if it's that relevant. Uh, I think that there's some game theoretical for the
searchers where they can grief any other searcher and uh
Like if somebody's uh attempting to do mev they can say hey listen
You either join us or we will make sure you're we will
Outbid your mev and just give that money over to you know, the validators instead of us
This way everybody's forced to join one coalition of of mev. I think that something like that goes on on ethereum
I don't remember
Even that though is I think that that's plausible because I think first of all that's because of ethereum has a bad design
where you have to pay fees even for things that
Don't go through and I I don't see that
Having a future just because it's a terrible idea. This is for the user. So I think people will
eventually replicate the
Ethereum ideas that are good on their own sidechains that just don't have any gas fee
At all, but that's a complete separate point
Interestingly, even if that is the case that it's winner take all
It still doesn't necessarily mean that there's no competition. It just makes it more unstable
Because let's say you're the winner and you extract a huge premium
And you expect the premium every 12 seconds or whatever it is every day
Uh, so you're getting a lot of money this is like a magic money tree for you of like eight
Million dollars a day or whatever. I don't know. I'm just making it up
The thing is that you know
The laws of economics can still accommodate competition in that scenario because someone just they just need to go to a bank and say listen
I'll give you this this these people are making eight million
We can crowd them out and take all the eight million for ourselves
Will be the new number one and i'll give you the bank
Six million dollars a day and I only want two million dollars a day
And the bank says, oh, okay. Sure take all the money you need. Well, I think and then
It's not like i'm doing is they're making sure that nobody will profit unless they join them
And at their own detriment
So it's like if there's a hundred dollars to be made on mev and somebody else tries to compete
They will make sure that 99 of that or full the full hundred will instead go to validators
Unless people join that their pool and do math to be them and then they'll share the profits. So so it's like
Yeah, but that's not the point though
Yeah, that's well, yeah during the period in which the two compete
Maybe they're maybe neither of them get it
But that's the point is the point is you just have to outlast the other person
You see what I mean? It's just kind of an assumption that just says someone will be number one
So the point that's the point where you go to the bank you say listen we can outlast them you just give us
You don't you go to whatever goldman sachs and you tell them you guys don't have any good ideas around here
For investments, but i've got one for you calculate the interest rate
And then you go to them and you say this is the plan
And then they say okay, we'll fund it and then you're the number one guy so
there's no like
I that's true that this is like what you might call friction, but it's not you know, and I think even it's just
This is only because of uh
Badly designed ethereum
Stuff that this scenario even rises and right now that miners are not getting any of this transaction fee because BIP300 is itself censored
Yeah, so you're very correct
Very correctly said that the the game there when there is there is a competition and with
With such a reward that you might actually be the dominant searcher for the next four or five years
Possibly that's your goal that that is huge amount of money
You will be able to take short-term losses if you are well capitalized
If if you have a business plan for this or we have the funding for this and then
We have the funding for this and again, there is a part of the argument
I think it ties back to that that if someone controls a very significant chunk of the hash shape then
They have more control over the outcome and then they might be able to take
Short-term losses better on or smaller short-term losses for for trying to achieve this long-term dominance. I just wanted this to
to explain
How it could possibly
Get into that situation whatsoever that we are talking about like full vertical integration and
and and the large
Poor dominance
I'm trying my best to to argue for that a little bit or or make it plausible so that we can discuss it
You
Yeah, but basically at this point what it has assumed is it has saying assume that we
write something
Into existence that has this exact property that it rewards
the
larger hashers
That's kind of like well, okay
In that scenario then I guess it would
um, but
Then we are we are we are at the point I guess where you tell us why that is wrong
Uh, well, yeah, I don't think that that is
The
At this point it's sort of getting a little too
Um
Like we have gone like down this road of like
No one cares about scalability privacy
No one cares about smart contracts. They have a use
We're like this is like the thing. This is like the point where we say we divide the country into
Into zones and then what do we do with the you know, this is like extreme
Hunting down to like some some tiny detail that is cannot possibly have any relevance
Because just because if if someone has an
Advantage, this is the same thing as before is if you have an advantage because your hash rate is large
Then it could just this ends up being the two pools of 50
Scenario that already doesn't make any difference because of the pool hopping
Yeah, so the problem with this the problem with this all is
I don't think
Think
If you if you try to sell that
I don't think uh
People will be very receptive. So I I think the general I know I agree that that's that's horrible
Yeah, but that's also because
people believe a lot of false things right now and I don't know it's just like
I don't think that they because what they think is
It's it's very ironic that the people who worry about large pools are the same people who would say
in 2017
we proved to the world that
you know, like miners are
Uh
Subordinate to nodes or whatever
so
Right, so ironically they'd be sort of wrong both times
negatively like diagonally because
The reason that it doesn't matter if all the hash rate is in
two pools
is because the the only thing the pool can do is censor transaction or do some kind of reorg or some other
kind of mischief
and
That is exactly what won't happen if there is vigilance on the pools. So that's why the quantity of pools has never mattered
But but again, this is because this is the searching for your car keys under the lamp light or whatever issue where
The data on pools is available
The hash rate is estimable
So people can make a pie chart
so they just decided to make a pie chart and everyone is in their head everyone is thinking about like
A corporation, uh boardroom or like a succession or something
they're thinking that
You know once it's 51 percent or 50 percent then we're all doomed and so
unfortunately, even though these people know the talking points about
Miners not really having a lot of power
they
Don't really understand the talking points. So that's too bad
but I agree with you that it wouldn't be a persuasive if I said that type of thing, but
yeah, i'm not sure I mentioned because I wanted to say like two things at the beginning and
I think I only I said the the second one the first one just occurred to me is
Basically the way I came to look at the drivechain
situation
and all the restringing and worrying and
Debating if this is the best thing we could do or whatever
So I came to the conclusion that if it can't be demonstrated
That
It will harm
Or make the outcome worse for those people who do not explicitly opt in
Then I believe there is no moral ground for opposing it
That's kind of the conclusion I came to
And that is why I kind of focus on these things, you know, I try to to work. Uh around these these uh,
Yeah, I know but haven't I beaten you down yet? I mean we didn't we haven't we just exhausted it all now you can now fully
Sit back in your chair and you can sign off on this
Thumbs off. I am I am
I am satisfied with how this turned out. I will listen back make notes think about it
We can talk about something guys if you want
Okay, great
Okay, great flavor has his hand up at this exact time. So
Um, hey paul. I was just wondering if you could uh,
Speak a little bit to the article that came out yesterday in bitcoin magazine. Um, oh my gosh
I thought it was so bad. What was that? This is like some kind of i'm being drugged or something. Is this candid camera?
I just don't get it at all. It seemed like it really
um
Uh, well, you know, the whole thing is based on miners the those three authors
They I don't think they understand
What BIP300 asks miners to do
which is
Like I think that they think that they are supposed to be getting involved like this vote word. I think is unfortunate now
Because when I wrote BIP300 reddit was very big and I was just thinking upvote downvote
That's kind of what it really was, um, but instead I think
The idea of like miners voting on the fate of each sidechain is like they'll be petitioned people will
people will go to them and say
Vote for my withdrawal, please. Here's why
Then someone will say no vote for my withdrawal
That's not what happens at all in the slightest the software automatically computes
The single withdrawal for every single person
It's the same hash for everyone in the sidechain
in each three month
Epoch, and this is what actually does make me think we really should we have testnet software now, but we should probably have
we should probably activate BIP300 on some chain because
If we had it working in the wild people would at least know, you know, they would at least see
The basics of how it works, you know, and it's just not the same if people read the bib text
I think they just don't get it
But I don't know. This is a rambling answer. But yeah
I'm wondering like if you were to play the devil's advocate for for the argument about regulatory
pressure
imagine a hypothetical scenario where
one of these people is running a drivechain and
They're experiencing some kind of regulatory pressure. What what does that look like for them? And I think that
This question is misconceived
So this is the type of thing that makes me wish we had bitcoin uncensored back because they would have just laughed
I I this this type of thing came up
where someone said
Oh, they'll only do
With like white listed UTXOs they read the news and then they both just laughed and they said they'd have no idea what mining is
for
and then they practically just moved on to the next topic because
People in that era were very well educated on bitcoin. And so they knew better
which is
If bitcoin has to compete bitcoin, there's just a cold this does not has nothing to do with what anyone wants or prefers
about the law or about justice or about
Morality or power or whatever if bitcoin does not have
A a private angle a politically subversive
edge
It will go to zero and that's absolutely true
Um, and the reason why is if it fully competes
In on being compliant
It will lose to venmo wechat pay etc
Also the tech will lose the tech is also not as good
the tech
Because the tech used by wechat pay or whatever is just going to be some mysql database or something
and the blockchain technology is much more
It's much more awkward and it only works because it is existing in an environment
Where the entire engineering design for bitcoin is that it will have its own independent existence
Will have its own independent existence and that's why it won't go the way that liberty reserve went where there's one server
And it was also just shut off. So that's the entire story of bitcoin
is that
the
it will have achieved censorship resistance by
Shirking or even uh
denying
regulatory
Influence
so the regulatory influence is basically just those people are asking them to censor and
They either
conform
and they lose out on money and someone else gets the transaction fees or they
defy
but the argument that
Bitcoin must be compliant is just you know
It's kind of a dirty
trick because most people
refuse to be
Totally honest about about this because it sounds so shady
And so it's actually it's just a horrible thing. It's a very unbitcoin thing
It's basically the equivalent of you know, craig s writes suing people
because it forces people to kind of talk a little bit more openly about
Things that that most people are too cowardly to speak openly about or they want to be more evasive about
But just the logic of bitcoin is just that it's something that works in the darknet market use cases and all the lightnet
market use cases and that's why it will eventually take over via network effect
And that's the
That's the whole
premise of bitcoin
So the whole premise of bitcoin is that it will hit the darknet markets and that that is the edge it has over
WeChat pay or cbdc
And so the fact that that person doesn't know that and the fact that they highlighted in an article and the fact they critique me
In completely the wrong way. I mean this used to be the thing that would just get you laughed out of a bitcoin conversation
so
I think it
It should not be
Steel-manned at all. It should not be
Set aside lightly. It should be
thrust aside with
extreme force
It's a terrible thing to even bring up and it's uh, it's it just speaks to the person's total inability to comprehend bitcoin
And so you're saying not only would drivechains drivechains wouldn't
Increase attack vectors or create more regulatory pressure any more than there would be
Already and that if they did even if they did
You really wouldn't have an option but to try
in fact because
It's possible that something like the zcash sidechain might
um, but that would be a good thing in fact, this would be what would decentralize mining so to speak because
Uh some any miner with like a mailing address is like registered. They would not want to touch the fees
Excuse me, they would not want to touch the fees
From this thing and as a result, it would it would be the anti
Like registration effect would be the zcash sidechain and its economic activity. That's possible. I mean, sorry. I have to sneeze again
Ah my gosh, excuse me
anyway, um
so it's possible that
It wouldn't be drivechain itself. It would be you know, the fact that creativity had been unleashed and people could do subversive things
It's really zcash itself. That is the truly
Innovative and subversive
Direction that this would take
Is the zk-snark privacy technology?
Now that if if that happened, that would be a good thing
that guy talking about you know, if your senator is on the phone or something like
If the senator is on the phone with anyone influential in bitcoin
then
The coin, you know, it doesn't have a future
And again, this is not it has nothing to do with what anyone prefers this is a simple calculation
of
comparative advantage among the different
coins and payment networks because
If you think the network effect is all that matters
then
The us dollar is going to win easily. It's going to crush everything in its path
And bitcoin will lose
And if you think that only features matter then we'll have an altcoin universe because
people keep inventing new features
And we'll have multi-coin pluralism
Um, but that's not true network effects do matter so there's some mix
and in bitcoin's case the the edge that it has is in the
Privacy darknet market smart contracts, you know by smart contract. I mean something that the senator calls and the senator can't get
You know rewritten or whatever. That's what makes it smart, you know
That no one can it has nothing to do with the senator. No one can has its own independent existence
so the whole thing is like what was just horribly misconceived and just very disappointing and it honestly just speaks to
How far the community has fallen I think unfortunately
And so you're saying that it is it is possible maybe not likely but
It's a roadblock or it's like an impasse that the bitcoin is going to have to go through if it wants to become
What people say it should be?
uh
Yeah, I mean our options are we stay very niche and we don't really bother anyone
and
I think that's that leads to death that leads to uh
Being worth zero dollars per coin eventually
Or we get really big
I mean a lot of people wanted so certainly I think what the large blockers had in mind
Was a sort of uber like strategy
That you know as far as anyone knows it might have worked at this point. I don't know everyone people didn't like it at the time
but
What they had in mind was like we'll just get so big so quick
It will be too difficult for every government in the world to ban us all at the same time
And we'll just grow grow grow
And it would be like uber and like, you know draft kings and fan duel where it's technically illegal when it started
but then it just
captured the
The hearts and minds of the people
Which um, you know, I think that was certainly a viable
That was you know, that's certainly one strategy that might have worked
But we certainly didn't go in that direction
Uh
Anyway
um, yeah, I do think that it's kind of like
The
What exactly is their plan to
Only write software that is
Approved by the like us congress because then again it loses its independence
so this is why this is why I say these people are equal to
the
They're basically completely equivalent to the infinite size
large blocker L1 people in the block size war where they said
well the
Instead of hanging on to the properties of bitcoin and make it unique
And make it special and which make it valuable. We will sacrifice those
For some kind of like temporary quick fix quick convenience
So, yeah, I thought the regulatory angle was very bad and I thought the angle about
Miners don't want to get involved
All right, that was silly in so many ways. I think they just didn't understand at all how it worked and they also
they failed to put two and two together when they said stuff like
sure, maybe we'll get
much much much more revenue by doing this, but
on the other hand, we might have to do a little bit of work and it's like
Okay, how about you subtract, you know the revenue from the costs and then
And then decide
So I was disappointed by that
I'm wondering, uh, so then have you had conversations with miners? Uh, could you share anecdotes?
No, I have lots of um
Yeah, I have uh, i'm in
Chat rooms with miners. I have talked to miners
I talked to my zoom miners
So I think
Many of the miners, you know are
Uh, they don't you know want to
Get involved with something
Like this that is contentious just for the same reason that anyone wouldn't but also we have many miners who
Are supportive publicly some and we have
Uh, I think you know, I think it's a matter of time like, um have other
You know like meetings with miners lined up
So I think it is just I I'd only started talking to miners like in july 25th
And then a lot of this crazy stuff happened and then i've been very busy recently
um
and so
uh, i'm
I've been really busy talking because we've gotten a lot of attention ever since miners first found out about it
late july
july august
And then we had a kind of crazy september as we all know this idea
really went from being
Kind of a not that talked about but then in september it started to get very very talked about and so that's
That month has only just ended and now i'm here for
Bitcoin amsterdam and for other things. So so, uh, it's kind of just started but um
Yeah, it's very weird some of the miners who are
Uh against are very very close also like, uh, I don't want to like name everything but like
some of the miners want
Uh
To basically have sidechains, but they i'm not sure if they want to activate BIP300. So
Some of them are in like a weird
position of being kind of close
I don't know how much I can share or should say
but um
Do you think miners understand?
Right chains. Do you think they understand?
I think they don't understand them as well as you do moon settler, but I think that
they
I think what really happened was they were very surprised by the arguments against like for example, I did show them
the blockstream paper the mining centralization
three section 3.4 or 4.3
One of those
And in it, it basically just says that some miners have an advantage over other miners and they'll push the other miners out
and they they people couldn't believe that that was
That was the whole case against
Sidechains and why blockstream abandoned them and then I was showing them the math on
the fee revenues they could earn
which is
Much much more than they currently earn total
So and they had already gotten a taste of additional fee revenues from ordinals
So that was like those were like
Some things that were there like okay
And yeah, I think that weirdly what's on their mind is of course the having coming up
They're all thinking about that. You know, they're all thinking my revenue is going to get cut in half. So what should I do?
if anything
so I think that that
I think that this is uh, I think a lot of them think that probably
That would be around the time
to
They all have this uh, this uh survivalist mindset know that that they
They need to survive the worst case scenario in their
Business plans that that's what they are focusing on. I imagine pretty much right now
Yeah, I mean I think some of them if I had to guess also I think some of them are
Some of them would say something along the lines of
We miners have never done anything wrong and we have invested
We have all this money at stake. So
Why is it the case that people doubt?
Us which is a very good question, I think
This is all blown. This is all stuff from the scaling war that it's like
Taking out new and bizarre dimensions for no reason
yeah, I mean
the way I remember there were
some very
Very big boats made by the big bookers or people on the big booker camp
That I kind of suspect the loudest most obnoxious ones were the ones that ended up on bse
Not even bch. Um, so those people
said stuff like
you know
Miners will obviously come to us and you will go into that spiral and you have no say in it and you can
Screw your node and whatever so that that was the general sentiment
Around the time as I remember and uh, and uh, I think a lot of people got like
really
Angry and resentful about all that imagery
Well, yes, certainly we can go over
all the long many details of that history, but mainly involving
A bitcoin unlimited being signaled with nine percent after scaling three thus preventing SegWit from activating via bip nine
Which set off this whole miners versus developers?
War in 2017
and
You know how level-headed and and forgiving
The top developers are
Um, everyone is it all ended up happily ever after
So just to put a put a cap on what you were saying about, uh,
The article it's just that it's it's actually the concern about
regulatory pressure
Uh doesn't have that much merit and it's kind of missing the point
altogether
It may be a concern for certain miners who have made the mistake
Again, quite parallel to the large walker case where they they they may have set things up a certain way
Banking on
Banking on
Maybe they are set up for something. They can only get if they are registered, but that's their mistake other miners
Can and will put them out of business if they rely on that type of thing. So we want miners to compete
against the right people
in the right ways
for the right reasons
So that is what we want any kind of competition can can turn
ugly, you know what I mean like
Two people can be competing over a girl and it can be honorable or they could end up like killing each other or you know
What I mean, or you could compete in a business
You could open two bakeries across the street
And it can be an honorable competition
Or it can be horrible. You know what I mean? You have on one hand you have
Like whatever margaret thatcher and and then if the competition goes a different way you have like adolf hitler, you know, it's like
Both are examples of
People trying to like compete with like a vision. So the miners we want the miners to be
We don't want the miners to compete on who can
placate
some random
Government official of a completely random country. That's not what we want them to compete on. We in fact we want them to compete on
Putting as many transactions
Into the blocks they mine as possible
Including all the merged mine blocks
so
if
Somebody was asking you let's say there's somebody who's on the fence about drivechain and they're concerned about
The livelihood of their business in the event that they signal support for drivechain
I mean, what what could you tell them besides you know, this is what you signed up for you have to deal with it
What can you be more specific
As far as like if there's somebody worried about regulatory pressure like was put forward in that
That article but somebody was more favorable to you and they're asking for advice like well
How should I navigate, you know this situation if it's going to invite?
If i'm going to be, you know making more money and getting regulatory pressure. I mean, is there any way for people to navigate that?
More smartly miners. Yes
I thought I put that in my response to the article. I had like one sentence about so what you can do is with
Mining you don't need to run
the any sidechain node at all
So you don't have to run the z-side node or any nodes
You don't want you still collect the fee revenues. You're not
at a disadvantage now you have to
mine
the
The middleman transaction that connects them. So there's someone who's paying you
All the z-side
All the z-side
Money is coming in
And maybe that sidechain slot number six and maybe it pays
two bitcoin every 10 minutes
And you're getting the L1 transaction base, whatever 1.999
You have to mind that one but then you just I think what you would do is you would just organize a defense around
about around independence and decentralization and you just you would tell
Whoever it is or whatever and the senator calls and you'd say listen
If I if I don't mind this the only thing that's going to happen is
I'm, i'm going to lose out on two bitcoin
every 10 minutes
Someone else will mind the block 10 minutes later. So it won't achieve anything
And the only thing you're going to do is put me out of business
Eventually if I keep losing this to btc
so
I think that's just what you say and uh, that's the truth
um
I think you would also
If a business person could easily just say, oh, well i'm going to weigh the advantages I get
for being
compliant with whatever
the government of any whatever country because you know what I mean, we say we
Because framing it with the u.s congressperson makes it sound very different than if we say
go
president xi
in china
Said he would murder my entire family and make me disappear
If I didn't do such and such or whatever vladimir putin's government, so it's like someone somewhere
Tells you that they want you to do something
um
you know
You don't automatically it's not automatically a respectable thing
It sounds a lot more respectable when you say u.s congressperson, of course, but so whoever it is they say
You don't mind the z cash sidechain and then you just you have to weigh whatever advantages you get with your relationship with this person
against what you lose by
Complying that would be my advice I suppose
that
It's possible that the north american miners pretty much made up their mind
Especially the publicly traded company miners. They made up their mind about that. They will comply with whatever is thrown at them
And in that sense they they kind of might have the that feeling that they actually could in a drivechain, uh,
in a successful drivechain, but
become disadvantaged
Economically, I would say this would be a very honorable way to have drivechain like not activate. You know what I mean?
I would say actually
Paul came up with this idea
but because
The bitcoin miners wanted to stay compliant and they did not want to have any risk of a z cash sidechain
It didn't activate on bitcoin. I would just I would stand and sort of applaud in an ironic way because I would say
This just proves that you know
Clearly the fault wasn't mine
You know, it's just I would just say I would just get a big kick out of that
I
Don't know it would be very weird and the that entire article was
To me a disappointment. I I did not
expect to read that, uh, but uh
Just thinking about what their motivation could be they they might actually not want like a
foreign miners, uh
Miners in other countries other jurisdictions to have like more bucks per terahash that that is basically
Economically rational if they expect they would have to comply anyhow, no
Okay, rio
Oh, hey. Hey paul. Thanks for having me up. Um, great combo and such
Always learning. Um, I wanted to touch back on a couple of things that were brought up agree with you on the regulatory thing
Uh, I I think the next hash war
Is not a chain split. It's compliant hash non-compliant hash and it's uh,
Sovereign hash versus non-sovereign hash either explicit sovereign hash
Uh, like, you know volcanoes from el salvador in the dream world
Uh, or again sovereign hash and that texas hash is compliant
So it's as good as sovereign hash and that's the next hash war
So your points are taken if people are prepared for that or aware or in denial that it's an adversarial
Uh environment to the standard system when you're trying to make a competitive product like bitcoin again
Go back and read the white paper start over do not pass go do not collect any dollars
Just a public service announcement the the compliant hash
Is all of that is a complete waste that is useless proof of work
because if it's all coming from
congress anyway, then
It doesn't even matter none of the proof of all the proof of work stuff is a complete
Energy as I can so they will simply yes
subsidize it to say we'll
Make it economical for you to not include that because we'll give you the subsidy in a different way through energy subsidy
Which is only further proving that the sovereigns will bend the knee to the bitcoin and math will win in the end
So again, it's just a sign of a positive thing in the long run
But again, it is coming the next hash war is sovereign hash or compliant hash purposely not being economical and me to your point
Not doing what you would expect a truly selfish player to do and and that will be the next hash war which is why
Uh, a zero knowledge proof or a z chain sidechain thing is is certainly one of the use cases and one of the things
that would potentially push that hash war to a different level or
Or make it even more moot for them to attempt it
but then the regulatory pressures that are spoken of in the
Article, I think we need to look at wrapped btc is our only
Scaled example all due respect to lightning again wrapped bitcoin has more tbl
But you do look at a federated model and the pressure put there was put
But you know that wrapped btc contract on ethereum does not have locks unlike most stable coins
They only have regulatory pressure that can put on the externals of the claim outs
You can still put wrap btc into a ave and get eth back out
They have to have the compliant people track that through
They can't stop it in v2
Which is still can't be undeployed
Etc. So there's you know
Things that make it challenging you also think about dusting that's shown to be very adversarial to oh you want to stay compliant
Okay, well dust point zero zero zero one eth and like all these celebrities wallet
So you have to block all of them too if you want to stay compliant those type of things will also occur. So
leaning in and allowing that to occur to show the
futility
of compliance or to either
Because bitcoin change or others is beneficial in my view the concerns I do have is
That I I do think the critiques on miner
power struggles
and miner
and sidechain operator collusions
Are newly introduced and also point to potential regulatory?
As tack vectors. I still think it isolates to only affect those users on the sidechain, but I do think that
People saying sidechain bitcoin is just as good as layer one bitcoin
Which would I don't believe to be true and i'm not saying people are advocating that here
But would be a narrative that these sidechain people would be running if we enabled it
Could be dangerous if people don't understand
How they come back. I also think that people
We agreed to have taproot and SegWit which was lower cost vb block space. This is the antithesis
This is premium costed block space slot one slot two
It's a premium cost because only one person can occupy that slot one here
Uh, so, you know if we think about we can go one direction with taproot and have discounted block space reserved or created
Uh, what is the problem with going the other way for premium, especially I can understand the miners saying
You maybe not get my full money to increase my block instead of increasing block at standard rate block wars
Now I want to say, okay, let's do that. But let's have some reserved area. Now. That's a premium
Now you don't want to go that way you were willing to go the discount route
Why can't go the other route is a valid point, especially into a halving
The last point and then i'll love to hear any responses back is the bmms the node operators
They're going back and forth do become the dominant people that will need the withdrawals
They have a natural need to they take their revenue on the sidechain
They pay their costs on the L1 today will be the dominant people requesting the withdrawals that is centralized withdrawals
Versus potentially centralized pools template operators and the people running the nodes are probably the people also
Pushing the L2 chain and the new features this this
It does provide centralization and collusion issues. I don't think it's a fault of the protocol
It's a fault of humanity, but that's the whole point of not putting in protocols
That can't be manipulated by humanity, which is the bitcoin thing
So I you know i'm still on the fence on the whole 300
But that's just a few points i'd like to cut out and i'd love any you know on any of those points any
Rationales or further stuff so I can continue to learn
Okay, well, um
at the end like why do you say that it's centralized withdrawals if
The withdrawals are concentrated in one person
you know what I mean because
What the one person could it could actually be only one person withdrawing every three months, right?
But there could be
By turning it off and not piss off the rest of the ecosystem
so that one person
Is is a centralized person that has to bribe the miner to get out because they're the only one damaged if the miners
Decide not to do it for you
Oh, well, they're the only political victim
but you see that's also not really the case because
What the what in this scenario where there's only one person withdrawing?
I would imagine that there's many people who want to withdraw
But this one person is buying up all their L2 coins and they pay in L1 coins
With bmm and then they want to withdraw so they're collecting all the L2 coin bases
They buy up everyone's L2 coins. So as you say they have a giant pile of L2 coins
And then they withdraw but they are providing a service for all the they themselves have
Maybe have tens of thousands of customers. So if this person is screwed over
Then
They they won't be able to offer the service to anyone else. And so everyone else is indirectly
Getting screw over even if they don't literally withdraw
so the
the withdrawal thing is kind of like
the BIP300 part
the withdrawal is only half of the withdrawal picture because
There is also
It's really just who wants to do the slow with finance that person buying up
Everybody's L2s and then binance is the one taking those three withdrawals
It sees he's in control there
And then he has to basically bribe the miners to say let my withdrawals go through or let's otc make a deal
You can get them after I bridge them through here next but they don't need any particular bribe. They just use the BIP300
You know what? I mean? They pay
L2 transaction fee they pay the L1 transaction fee same as anyone else
They may want to put a hefty if they're the only one they managed to shrink it down to 43 bytes on L1
So they might say well instead of paying the prevailing
What I think is the prevailing 90th percentile fee of like four dollars and 50 cents since this one withdrawal is moving
10 000 coins
i'll pay
You know 500
dollar per
Uh, i'll pay what is the equivalent of right, you know $500 per 220
The miners love it. So I shouldn't describe it as a bribe. It is
aggregating and maximizing
You know the withdrawals pay a transaction fee on each
Because they're cross-chain they must pay the sidechain transaction fee to qualify as a withdrawal in the sidechain and then
when
the sidechain software
Constructs the withdrawal transaction automatically and hashes it. This is that hash that's so important
When that transaction is included in L1
Then it must pay a transaction fee also so it has to be included in
Spot as well. It can't just be anywhere now when it has to be in the slot spot, right?
And if somebody else wants to take that yes, the withdrawals are per slot
No, the withdrawals are per slot and the withdrawals are global they're globally unique for everyone so whatever the withdrawal is
Each three months is only one withdrawal and it may it could pay out up to like 20 000 people
but it
Just needs to make it into any block
But that is the point then a sidechain can be attacked by a person saying on L1
I will always pay the most to blank out that reserve slot one so that a real slot one can never get there now
Again have to perpetually pay but it's about this actually cannot happen
I'm happy to explain this because I think it's quite interesting, but this doesn't happen
What happens is that L2 is what constructs?
This thing that will pay out
on L1 so the way it works is
There's basically each withdrawal is kind of as if there was some kind of like train or spaceship leaving a planet or train leaving
a train station
And the train takes three months to go from wherever it is, you know, new york to la
And uh
And everyone else is the next train can't leave until the first one is finished going so
the
Because you can only pull the train L1 is like pulling the train closer each time
We have this bucket metaphor if you watch the whiteboard video on uh on layer2labs.com
They're being pulled to L1
Like the spaceship is being pulled in like a tractor beam into the the next planet or something
And
You can only pull one at a time so they pull when they're done pulling the one over
The on L2 the L2 loads the next people onto the train
Ah, they can't buy they can't buy up all the tickets on the train all at once each car each they can
They'd have to buy all the let me
Very close. Yes
So what you do is when you when you want to make a withdrawal on L2
you're on you're in the L2 world and you make the what you you click you set the
Sidechain transaction fee as always
Because every side every L2 message in the sidechain needs to pay that fee
And then you also set your L1 fee
And each withdrawal is going to be an output on L1 that takes 43 vbytes
So they're all exactly the same
Size because you just pay out to your L1 address, whatever it is
And so you you you click on L2 you say I want to withdraw and what that does is your money basically then visits the
Train station it goes instead of being on the planet and doing whatever it's doing over there circulating
Being used it goes to the uh, you know, the spaceport or the train station or whatever you want to call it
And then it waits in line based on which how high its L1 fee
Is is being paid so there's 20 000 places in line and it waits in line
Places in line and in order for someone to buy all those up they have to they have to buy basically all 20 000 tickets
But then their work isn't done
Because they have to pay the same fee right for all those and then if anyone outbids that rate
so it's a factor of 20 000 advantage to the
So if anyone outbids that then they cut in line. So the first it's like first class or something. So
So you can always cut in line and you can always make a deal with anyone who has a ticket
So if you if you show up and the line is 25 000 people
It's 5 000 people out the door
You could go to someone you can find someone in the first 20 000
and say
Listen, you're withdrawing your this that person maybe is withdrawing. Let's say they pay a very high fee. They pay a whole one bitcoin
in main chain fee layer one fee
So they they're withdrawing
28 bitcoin, but they pay one bitcoin in fee and you want to withdraw your
0.5 btc
You tell them you cut a deal with them you say listen
Edit your withdrawal so that i'll give you my 0.5
And then you can withdraw
28.5 btc and pay one bitcoin in L1 fee. So you put
I'll give you my coins since you're already in line
And you pay me on L1 you pay me like 0.49 btc on L1 instantly
So then you don't even have to take the train
So you can cut a side deal with any of these people
They can charge you like a fee
But so you have two options you always you can either outbid them on L1 main chain fee and again
Or you can just swap out instantly at any time
you can just say
and but the swap out thing never hits the ceiling because
As people gather more coins, they just they merge them with a kind of coin join
Type thing on L2 and then they withdraw them. So, you know what I mean? Like I can't they could have like
50 million inputs on L2 and you merge them into one withdrawal of
58 btc
And then you have one space in line that is one for 58 going to bitcoin address one c7 j8, whatever
So I have to you just said you're just that one guy. I don't have to buy out
Three months I have to buy out constantly
So it's not once every three months. I have to buy out the train if I want to blank it and just
Right. That's the other thing is you have to keep doing it. You have to keep doing it the next block
once this train leaves
Well, it's the next train so you can wait three months if you successfully block out the whole withdrawal
So then if i'm if i'm a state, you don't have to do it for three months, but you have to do it again
Right. I'm a state-based attacker hating this the drivechain z chain and i'm saying
I'm buying all the tickets on the train every withdrawal so that you can't get off the sidechain to kill the zSide
Chain because i'm a state-based attacker
but again
I may have misexplained it in that point because you're not really buying
The tech what you are is you pay a certain L1 fee rate. So you say i'll pay
Yeah, you say that what they're doing is they'll say I withdraw at this rate, which is I say I pay
50 dollars
Per with 50 dollar L1 fee 20 000 instances of that and since 50 is the highest so far
you have you temporarily have all of the
Places in line number one through twenty thousand
But
If anyone pays 51
at any time before the train leaves
Then they jump to spot number one
And that guy can can that guy can single-handedly withdraw everyone else's coins, right?
Once he's got a spot in line, he can edit it. I see so it makes it
Have to burn a lot so then the person then you have to then the the bad guy has to decide
Okay, they just paid 51 so am I going to do 52 for all 20 000 spots
And now they think uh, you know now this then okay, so that's why I say it's a huge advantage. Yeah
Yeah, it's a 20 000 to one
To really stop it. So again unless you're talking about, you know, russia level sanctions where yeah
The government will burn money to ridiculous degrees north korea level sanctions
They're not going to bring that much pain to bear and take that much economic loss
Yeah, it's only a sovereign that could
Infinitely print and again that only helps bitcoin in the long run as we all know because the printer never stops
Okay. Okay. No, you got it. Just walking through the stuff and learning the mechanics. Thank you for all that. It's very helpful
Okay, so that's the withdrawal and then uh taproot SegWit
uh
It that temporarily made block space
Slightly more abundant because it was a mandatory block size increase that that additional size of the discount in cost as well
Right because it's temporary. It's it's right
It could be temporary
It has nothing to do with
It has nothing to do with the feature it's just we made this extension block for witnesses
And so that is why it
Made those types of transactions cheaper
this the being in slot one versus slot two
You when you deposit you're on L1 so you could use a taproot, you know, you could spend from a taproot output
And go into slot one or slot two
It's completely unrelated
so
the
Uh, i'm not sure what you were trying to get out with that slot one
Is it right to believe each of the sidechain slots that can accept a hash that is representative of a merkle or a block?
Or whatever is necessary for validation on the sidechain that's receiving a hash in slot one
Is is it appropriate to treat that as a premium area of block space because people will pay higher
Than the other areas of the block because they want to be the person that wins all the fees on L2
So they're paying that one. No, I don't think so. I think so what happens is
When you pay when you deposit
There's each each sidechain slot
So like let's say we're talking about sidechain number five and sidechain number five is like the ethereum sidechain or whatever
And it has like 20 000 btc
Total that has been deposited into it
If that's the case
Then on L1 somewhere
There is a UTXO that is spent with like a BIP300 script op drivechain op not five
Script that has 20 000 btc
In it somewhere and when you deposit to it, you select that one. You select your own like let's say you have like a 5 btc
UTXO
And you spend it and you give yourself
three bitcoin and change
and you pay a transaction fee of
0.01
And so then you pay
1.99
Into the sidechain, so then it will be a new output that has
20 000
Whatever I said 20 000 1.99
And so
That's the L1 picture and then what it really is is the more abundant block space on L2
That is not as valuable. So I would say that actually you make a more abundant block space, but
it's less valuable so you have a
Lower demand by a much higher supply and as a result the block space would probably be cheap
For the end user agreed but from the L1 perspective of
The miner and the block space value to me, which is what i'm selling i'm selling block space be included in the block space
I'm a miner right i'll include you in my block space
I'm always going to take the extractable highest one. So people give me the most fees
But the the I can't have more than one
Block for the sidechain go in because I only have one slot slot five. I can't take two sidechain five blocks into one
Normally, I could take two inscriptions. I can take two transactions, right?
So because it is further scarce block space than others
It will demand a premium and that's what you're saying
You're just going to increase fees for the minus right in the very first part of that
You can't you can do two inscriptions, but you couldn't do something you can't you can't put two sidechain blocks
in the same
Layer one block, right? There's only one slot five only one
Hash is going to go in there. So that is by nature a more scarce area of my block on L1
Premium area. This is a slightly different thing. Yes, right
Yes, uh, but that's a slightly different thing. Okay, this is where you're right
Yes, but but let me explain that
It's because if there's a finite space for the merge mine hash
Which would be like whatever this certain 32 byte region
That is the thing that in BIP301 is auctioned off. So whatever let's say you have the evm chain is in slot five
Let's say that one pays
total transaction fees
Of a certain block that is eight
Btc and so in the layer two coinbase
Whoever created that block
They're getting eight btc
and in each transaction, you know, there's a
each transaction
Pays a small fee and it all sums up to eight btc. So you're following me so far the L2 block is worth eight btc
So what is happening now in blind merge mining is there's a middleman
Who constructs the block paying themselves the 8 btc?
and then in L1
They make a transaction that says they make a bid they say i'll pay 7.99
To anyone
It's up for grabs as long as
The special 32 byte region according to corresponding to a drivechain slot number five
Has this exact hash in it?
If that's the case, then you can take my 7.99
L1 btc
But if not, then you cannot include this transaction in a block
So you're right. It makes a premium only for those 32 bytes not for the rest of the block
So what you would really see on L1 is you would see
Some kind of normal distribution, you know by normal. I don't mean gaussian. I mean like some kind of as expected
Exactly
some some regularly shaped thing that would have been the case before there was any BIP300 or 301 and then there will be
over in the block interspersed
For each sidechain, there will be this huge
skyscraper like
Pins, you know these huge spikes
That one transaction will just pay
7.99
in fee
7.99 btc in total in fees
so some of these may pay more than the entire rest of the block in one single transaction, but this is not because
That person really wanted to get into L1. It's because they really wanted to set
the
The sidechain block contents and this is only if they use BIP301 if BIP301 is not used then this just won't happen
But if it is then you would see that and that is the sense in which they're scarce
And then your first thing was something about uh
Oh, yeah, the damage is isolated to the sidechain. Yes, if the whole point of sidechains as I see it
Is a proper accountability
proper blame
so
we have a situation where
If the sidechain developer does something stupid that attracts the wrong kind of attention
if the sidechain developer
Screws up and loses everyone's coins
They are blamed and I think
putting blame in the right spot
that is really the difference between you know, like capitalism and communism, you know, like like hell on earth and
prosperity
And or at least doing the best we can with what we have so
We don't want so this is what we want. You know, we we just want we just need the right people to get the right blame
That's the that's the key ingredient
so as you as you say, it's possible to design some kind of sidechain that like just draws the wrath of
Any number of people, you know, of course like for example, uh silk road. There was a senator was the
I think was it um, was it chuck schumer someone there's a documentary with amir taki and amir taki plays on his laptop
a video of chuck schumer saying
That he wants his website taken off
the internet
So by the way, that's how I learned about bitcoin from that. I mean too. Yeah, not from that documentary but from the silk road
like
like
drama
And he he has it and then what does he do satoshi enjoyer?
He pauses it and then he turns to the camera and he says
Do you remember?
um, I don't remember that but I remember he goes step by step and how to use silk road how to use tour, um,
how to get uh that there's this bitcoin currency literally step by step exactly like
how to use it and then that that drove me into
Um doing more research about it, of course
I remember he's a little uh hazy myself
but he says something along the lines of he looks at the camera and he just says that was a year and a half ago
And the site is still up
So, yeah, but yeah, I agree the whole point of sidechains is that uh people take their own risks
And they take they suffer the consequences be they good
or bad
Now, I think we had a a tryptonomic and a moonsettler hand
so
I just quickly would like to
Just one thing I want to say
Way way before someone mentioned that
Zcash sidechain might be such a breaking point. I totally don't think so. So in a in an ideal, uh,
successful ride chain
world if
DeFi
Comes and built on top of bitcoin. I think we will be talking about tens or hundreds of millions of dollars
in uh in revenue
fee
revenue for the miners, uh from that
I think that's what ethereum and the other stuff is showing us roughly
And that could grow to god knows what
over time but but that's kind of like a
Over the timeline that this can play out that that seems realistic to me
And for something like a zcash side, I would see like hundreds or thousands of dollars of fee revenue collected
so that's that's
That's such a non-issue that's a total non-issue the entire thing would probably boil down to to
uh DeFi and of course the entire point of DeFi is to avoid regulators and
regulators will be pretty uh prissy about that and
That that is much more likely to be the breaking point in my opinion
Um
Make sense should we do tryptonomic?
Sure, hi, uh, by the way, the term is bow the knee not bends the knee
Uh, anyway, uh, so I have an answer to the question you had last week
on
quantum error correction and like
decoherence, I actually was on a space this week and
Charles hodgkinson's was on and
I got to speak with him for a little while and he brought up the same
issues, however, I found the answer is
found when
The entanglements of the when whatever particles are being entangled
um
as long some particles are heavier than others and so
if
You're doing calculations on with whatever qubits you have assuming that they're stable
um
The entanglement is a lot more stable when the particles are less dense and they're they're not as heavy. So
that helps with
you know quantum error correction and
decoherence as well as like, uh
gate errors and so
ibm for instance went from you know, one qubit to 50 qubit chip to
Now there's they have a a qubit chip a chip
with more than 1 000 qubits
and so these
entanglements are are very stable and so
Um, we have a thousand qubits that can be used
but did we get an answer to the question about
It only affects the signatures and not hashes though
So
Sure because I mean even if even even if a cubic, um, you know
Hashes it's a 256 bit hash it I mean
It would still be I guess the same number it wouldn't be calculated with bits, of course
But it would still be the same size of a number
So yeah
Well interesting
Wow, that's very cool
Yeah, I think it was much faster than I thought I mean
I know they were struggling to get two qubits and then they were struggling to get four
And then someone got six somewhere and then that was like that was all that had happened in like 10 years
No, that was that was decades ago. Um right now, I mean
It's outperforming moore's law. I mean more moore's law doesn't really apply here as as much but I mean
It was 50 and then 100 and even if you have a 50 qubit chip
And and you have these entanglements that are that are with with really dense, uh, really
uh
with particles that are less dense than
Other particles and like I said depends on the particles you use but if the particles aren't very dense
Then, you know 50 qubits can outperform
um a modern supercomputer assuming that you know, you've adjusted for
that, you know, you don't have any errors and there isn't errors with the gates and the hardware is there but ibm has a
You know an over 1 000
qubit chip
And so
you know for the era of one and two qubits and 50 that was
during uh, you know research and development and
Really trying to uh, you know configure the hardware as well. I mean the hardware is more than half of the problem
Because the the quantum mechanics are available everywhere they're essentially infinite it's just about
configuring a hardware environment around them to stabilize them and
um, or to help them remain stable depending on like what's what state of density the particles have so
Yeah, 1 000 qubits wow, it's a lot it's a lot it's interesting. Yes
What do you mean by density? Well, I don't know if we should maybe it's too much off topic really but but I thought i'm sorry
Don't think you normally use photons. And of course a photon has no
mass
It only has momentum
As i'm sure we all remember from
Whatever physics class we took or at least that's what I remember. Although these things are certainly
Contradictory to say the least
But uh, I don't know what you mean by dense. You mean like there are many photons like in one area. What does that mean?
Well
Well, it's a tricky subject anyway, maybe we should see if anyone has a
BIP300
Comment your question
Then maybe we can come back
Yeah, I couldn't actually hear you until now
Um, I think your question was like what how do you measure density and particles or something like that
Um
It refers to the like like
Like if you have a molecule how many particles are in that in that molecule or how many particles are in a certain
Yeah, it's a particle
Yeah, I don't really have the answer like I said, I don't have the answer all I know is that
All I know is that you can measure the density
The dense you can measure the density of uh
One particle versus another and some are
are essentially larger heavier in some way and so
Um, that's all I had there. I don't i'm not a i'm not exactly sure
how the quantum states are changed in ibm's quantum teams computers, but
um
whatever state
Their quantum computer whatever quantum states their computer is changing
Um, they ensure that those states are less dense than ours are as um,
or as uh
You know as least dense as possible
It also casts your calculations and processing of the yeah cool. All right. Thanks
Okay, thanks
Bit green aka a bitcoin penguin
Is on stage now. Hello
Got a question about um kind of incentivized trying a 51 percent attack
So usually you could only essentially times two your coins
um
on L1
but with drive change you could
Get a lot more than what you've got now
I suppose this is the same with lightning that you could get a lot more than you've got but
What's your view on incentivizing?
Doing a 51 percent attack. I know it's super hard because you're gonna have to do it for three months, but exactly
That's exactly it which is to say
the three month time period is supposed to
try to offset
the fact that
The attack is more profitable
so that's exactly it it
it is um
So with certain things like reorging L1 or holding UTXO hostage or emptying the lightning channel
It is actually very easy to
Do it sort of quickly
uh with this it's
Uh, the idea is that making it longer makes it much harder one one way in particular is that the miners will have to
Construct the transaction paying themselves the loot, you know the plunder
Uh, and then hash that and then put that hash in everyone will know immediately that the hash is wrong
And the what will happen in that scenario is
Over the next three months the hash rate can change like the hash distribution can change no one knows exactly who is
Who has joined the network who has left who is getting very lucky who's getting very unlucky
So that is one additional stumbling block
This is why to make it so long and of course with with 51 it's not three months. It's actually six months
You need a hundred percent
Cooperating can do it all in three months
But with 51 you barely eke it out
Over six months where the hash rate distribution might change even more
Uh, of course we have to keep in mind that even though the pools are stable this is slightly misleading because
The
Uh, the pools and their main asset is their brand which they
Which is also their main liability, which is if they screw anything up. They are screwed
And this hides what must be an enormous amount of dynamism
Under the hood, you know of the actual sha256
hashers
So they are the ones who ultimately will
Be responsible for executing this 51 percent attack and they have much more dynamism than the pools
So that's my my thought on that
Which is that the the length of time is and and not only the length of time
But also pigeonholing it all into one event that is globally observed and that is very easy to ascribe
Blame for because the sidechain node will tell everyone what the true withdrawal hash should be
And everyone will know on day one
That the 51 attack one is wrong. It's completely wrong and that it is
It has no relationship to the truth at all. It's not like some kind of mistake or fluke
So that is the idea behind since since they can take more coins. We have to make it harder and
We have to make it harder and
uh
That is part of the logic
The other part of the logic is of course that making it longer doesn't really inconvenience too many normal users
Now I think the key thing to always keep in mind with the 51 percent attack is what is the consequence going to be
in in the drivechain case the consequences they steal all the coins, but they have almost certainly destroyed the
transaction fee revenue from all the drivechains probably
And I have done some math on that
Uh, anyone can do it just go to cryptofees.info
Look up what the what ethereum is paying in fees each day. It's just a kind of
Empirical glimpse of today's data
And just taking that present value of that
And you'll and then divide that by the price of bitcoin and you'll see if we had drivechain today about how many coins
Could safely fit in there. We're a greedy miner
Would find it more
greedy to
Not steal via the 51 percent attack. So those are my thoughts
On that but that is the crucial question if the sidechain if the drivechain BIP300 chain is not
Generating fees or if it doesn't have some kind of plausible
Story about why it will generate fees
Then it will not be secure. That is the whole
basis of this idea
Unfortunately from ethereum we have you know, some like, you know just from
we have
We we see that it's at least possible
for something to generate fees that are so large they
They dwarf even bitcoin's fees
Anyway alex, hello nice to see you again
Is the feepocalypse?
When is the feepocalypse alex? Is it tomorrow?
Hi guys, uh
I'm still a proponent of the feepocalypse and on that front there's been a few new developments. There's basically two funded
Uh roll-up companies one of which is doing sovereign roll-ups on bitcoin and the other one is doing
With evm evm capability and the other one is doing some other kind of roll-up on bitcoin without evm maybe with stark net
But I wanted just to remark on something about because there's been a lot of talk about miner incentives and regulation
And today we have something that's probably more offensive than any sidechain could possibly be for example
If wiki leaks did its disclosures today, there would be no better place for them to disclose then
to inscribe a whole collection of leaks in
Hierarchical inscriptions which have the same
Censorship resistance and immutability as bitcoin itself, right?
and that would be more offensive than any kind of
You know small potatoes financial movements on a z sidechains
And then the question will be well should the miners censor?
those inscriptions, well, of course they cannot because
They're basically, you know
In other words
The arguments about some sidechain or drivechain being offensive and for miners being forced to censor it
are moot relative to the possibility of simply dumping
you know highly highly classified, you know alien disclosure stuff or abuses by the
You know u.s proxies around the world
You know black sites, whatever it is that got wiki leaks people into big trouble
Can trivially be embedded immutably into bitcoin blockchain for
pennies essentially today and that would be much more offensive to the powers that be than
You know a few thousand nerds
Trying to mix their coins on
z sidechains
Yeah, that's a very good point
And yeah, just you know, I do feel a lot of it is like concern trolling and none of it is really real
there was a famous case in early in bitcoin where people put
Hyperlinks to
the dreaded
cp
and then uh that people said that would be the end of bitcoin and then someone actually somehow put
some of it actually
on the blockchain somehow and then again people said
This is the end of bitcoin, but of course
Nothing happened at all. Um, because why would it and all data has to be interpreted. Anyway, you could
Every everything is encrypted when it's digital in some way, you know what I mean?
Like because you know if you have to know if it's a jpeg or a png
So, well, yeah
You know, there's been a couple of new developments in the world of inscriptions that are highly promising as far as amplifying the fee pressure
Recently
They introduced what they call recursive
recursiveness of inscriptions which is to say that
Inscriptions which is to say that
you can now have whole websites with hundreds of
Elements all referring to each other as separate inscriptions inscribed and you can essentially launch
You know websites inside inscriptions
Where a single, you know html inscription refers to others
so that they call that recursiveness where you basically can have content assembling itself from
referring to
also, you have um
a situation where there is like public good inscriptions, for example, like there's been over 50
Popular javascript libraries that got inscribed and those can now be embedded inside websites
That are published inside inscriptions
What's interesting about those websites is that one of those websites?
Has decentralized naming like their domain names cannot be taken down
And the websites themselves are uncensorable completely
And the best part for the creators of these websites is that they pay upfront one-time fee
And they get essentially eternal storage and uncensorability
of their content inside bitcoin blockchain, which
Internal hosting which basically blows away amazon or filecoin or all these other
Things because once you pay the fee once
Today
uh, especially with this recursivity like for example, the publishers of nfts used to
Now they can dynamically draw images in
You know, they used to publish collections of let's say 1 000
Modifications of a bear right the bear would be wearing this hat or that t-shirt
Right now because of recursivity all they need is to publish 10 or 20
Uh
Things and then start combining them in arbitrary ways. So that's like a 99
a price cut on publishing a collection of 1000 bear images and because of jevon's paradox what you're going to see is that
um, there's going to be much more usage because you know, they just added a thousand new lines to the
Highway where you can basically publish millions of pieces of of
rendered visible content while paying
You know only one tenth of one percent of the fees
So that's the recursivity
I like it. I mean, I love the creativity of it, you know, and I love the
It's like it just speaks to how when people get annoyed at something new. They really are very short-sighted
It's a whole new internet if you think about it
This is like a whole new layer on top of the internet because you can now have
Websites
With domain names that are decentralized, you know, they have these dot sats names and dot whatever
And these websites are published once and they can refer to shared javascript
Uh libraries that are published by somebody else's public goods as other inscriptions
and these are completely dynamic websites that will just appear and
Uh, you know blockchain explorers and and they will be interactive as well
Right, they're not just static brochure websites. They will you know, they will be able to embed games like you can go to these
uh ordinals
portals right now and play like hundreds of
Video games that are essentially published to bitcoin paid for once for twenty dollars or whatever and then they remain hosted forever
And completely uncensorable and there's nothing that china or us or anybody else can do, right?
So there's this explosion of of essentially
The cheapest publishing decentralized medium for websites that's because of recursivity
then there is this
Additional feature that was added called re-inscriptions
Which is basically an ability to publish multiple inscriptions on a single satoshi
which allows you to have
You know, you can now essentially hold bags of inscriptions on a single, you know satoshi and move them around
Wholesale, right? You can trade wholesale bags. You can stash wholesale bags
But and the third most important I think addition is what's what they call provenance or hierarchical inscriptions
Where basically now you have a capability to create an inscription that represents your identity
Let's call it id inscription, you know, so like I would create an alex kravitz inscription
Then underneath that I could create a hierarchical file system of all my creative work like I could say
Collections and then inside each collection. I would create
A bunch of collections that hierarchically trustlessly contain
inscriptions
And the best part is that the artist can now seal the collections by burning
Like the root inscription and therefore provably making it impossible to print any more of that particular collection
so you now have basically like
the best of all possible worlds nft
And file system storage. So for example, you can take
um
a whole library of source code
Or or a bunch of doc, you know, baby pictures that you want to back up
and completely trustlessly
Associated with your own identity inscription that only you can control and all those things will have
Perfect trustless uncensorable provenance to your identity inscription
Well, that's pretty neat. I think that's also hope part of like what I would hope to have achieved
With sidechains where we have already resurrected the Namecoin sidechain
and I think
Not that they compete
I think that this just speaks though to how annoying it is that
You know
People compare things to gold
which they should
but of course gold has many alternative uses and many of them were discovered, you know, like
Gold was first discovered and then it was made into jewelry. And and then later it was made
You know like hundreds of years later. It was made into coins
And then it was used in teeth and then it was used in electricity and then whatever
I don't know when the japanese used it for that roof
that they made that one time but
It's not all at the same time is my point
And of course, it's much better
if you have something that
Um has many different
Like fallback use cases that makes it much better as money because when you have something like that
Now that that is something where you could it's basically a store where you can only pay in gold
You know and you convert it into like a tooth filling
And so groat is probably an example of something. You could only spend btc there
And that that you know
None of bitcoin made any sense to me until that website was created. So
I think we should do everything we can to encourage austrians used to argue about this remainder theorem or whatever which
You know a commodity must have some kind of
Regression, sorry regression. Yeah, it's not
Why don't you refuse?
But you can say now that before like, uh, the one demonstrative use case was to pay fees to transfer bitcoin
And now you can pay a fee to publish
You know a thousand page website forever and never pay hosting again and then have that website be
Unsensible immutable and interactive at the same time
And that you need to use bitcoin to pay those fees, right?
The tragedy of this old. Yeah. No, I think all that's great. I mean the problem with the
regression theorem is that
It's it's designed to just critique
Government money and it doesn't really do that because it it says that you need to have the money used needs to have alternate employments
First something needs to be used for something else before it can be money
But that but that's never defined at all
So it could just be people acquiring just because they like they like to look at it
And it ignores the fact that the fiat currency also has
Yeah, it ignores the fact that money because credit is also money
Right
Pretends that money all money is a commodity of some kind
it must be a physical object or something which
but that would no reciprocity would make any sense like people being invited to a dinner party and then
I'll have you over for my birthday and then we'll go over to your house for your none of that would make any sense
if
I'll marry off my daughter to your son, you know in exchange for
You making me a high priest of the clan or whatever
Right, so unfortunately is not that mises is best even though it is mises is one of the greats
we all love von mises, but
that theorem
It has no content because he doesn't say what he means about in whatever has to be used for first
So it could just be anything it could just be that they like looking at it or in the the fiat case
It could just be that they like
Supporting the government or it could be that they like paying taxes or being able to pay taxes
You know, it's like none of it doesn't actually mean it it fails at its task, which is supposed to lead to
Sort things into what could be money and what could not it doesn't actually do that. So
but
Von mises if you're listening
I just wanted to add something that inscriptions do provide competition to potential drivechains like for example
um
the name chain drivechain
Yeah, I think that's the case people are gonna and the Namecoin is going to prefer that
Everyone use the same phone book so they will have strong network effects. So whoever whoever's name thing takes off first will probably
win
It's that
Sidechains while being more scalable than roll-ups or encrypt or inscriptions because they're not limited by the data availability of bitcoin, right?
At the same time they need to develop their own
They need to achieve their own
escape velocity in order to become
uh
secure enough to be to be trusted right whereas
Both inscriptions and sovereign roll-ups on bitcoin automatically inherit immutability and double spend resistance of bitcoin
Uh, and you know in this regime of low fees, right?
Which we're still in right now, although, you know, we haven't had a block
a mempool clearing in like since april 23rd, which is
Amazing in a bear market. Just wait till the bull market hits, right?
um
Once the basically I I see I see such compelling
That I think the Namecoin one will but you're right you're 100 correct the trade-off will be this it will be
Being on L1 has many advantages such as immortality
And
That's pretty cool. But the L1 has the same problem. It's always had which is the limited block space cannot support critical mass of
end users
It can support luxury users, right? And those are the ones that pay the fees, right?
So in other words, it's the fact that if bitcoin transactions go to fifty dollars per transaction
and bitcoin remains only for
Essentially whales and institutions that will not stop
Luxury inscribed wars
From inscribing all of their baby pictures for a couple hundred bucks and making the whole thing a legacy. That's true kids and grandkids, right?
so we
It's a kind of a judgment call I agree with you
and it's a judgment call and i'm certainly not saying that I
am
I don't so i'm not very confident. But if I just if you look around the world and you see
The wealthy people of the world they use the same iphone that
many of the
relatively poorer people have same
same iphone and it's just like walmart versus
you compare walmart to like
I don't know
Rolex, you know, but the but the poor people in india or whatever they get those androids for 10 to 20 dollars
The chinese android clones and they also get fifty to a hundred dollar older
iphone models
So there's like a trickle down effect that once the high end is full
Then there is a trickle down to lower levels that you see you see this exactly this waterfall kind of multi-level fountain effect
In ethereum world where ethereum is like a luxury evm chain
That people, you know people who are whales or institutions don't care about paying fifty dollars to invoke a smart contract
If they're moving a few million dollars worth of liquidity
But this high level of fees is what creates
high level of security double spend resistance and immutability that then allows
L2 ecosystem to
Flourish and then you can perform a million transactions for the same amount on some highly scalable ethereum L2
So you basically have like this hybrid situation where you'll have both
You'll have a luxury L1
With high fees, but then you'll have
L2s and l3s with like ridiculously cheap fees
But so it'll be it'll be the same outcome on bitcoin
I think you will have basically large institutions in whales
and luxury, you know baby photo pictures
and whatever
Luxury nfts inscribed on bitcoin and you know
The artists will pay a hundred dollars to inscribe a single nft if it will then sell for ten thousand
On a luxury market. I mean after all
Fine art market today is 27 trillion dollars. It's larger than gold
I can't see a reason why fine
Immortal digital object market, which is what inscriptions are
They're like the ultimate form of nfts, right?
Why that can't get to a few trillion dollars and become?
a driver
of incredible fee pressure
Okay, so what's the fee
No, no, no my apocalypse rests on the existence of the fee market, right
And you you should not disagree with the following statement that the fee market only begins
on the last day that the mempool clears
Prior to that time the fee market cannot be said to exist because there is no equilibrium between supply and demand
So maybe we are in the fee market regime now because the fee market the mempool has not cleared since
Since april 23rd and my hunch is it will never clear again because of all these new developments
But we are finally at that point
That ethereum was in in 2019 when their when their mempool stopped clearing too
Right. So we are now just entering the fee market the first real fee market
Uh, but that's not quite the point though, I I would say
I would say like
cost per transaction like us dollars per
220 bytes or something like that
But that's not very high right now, so it has to be like five times ten times what a credit card would
Charge in that equivalent situation, you know what I mean has to be like well
It has to be high now, but you know that it has a non-linear response to demand because absolutely. Yes
we know that's the key between the small empty blocks and
I would really say that actually it's not so much that the mempool doesn't clear. It's like
When there is
Less space or just the right amount
It kind of doesn't matter
But as soon as there is
Scarcity i'm saying like going back and looking at the charts of fees of you know
Since the launch of bitcoin until now, I think is meaningless. The only charts that are meaningful are the charts that begin
Hopefully april 23rd this year and when I talk about non-linear response
The way I think about it is roughly
All in you have about 100 gigabytes worth of block space produced by bitcoin per year
So you can now think about 100 gigabytes of immortal data storage space
Produced for all of the unknown unknown applications yet. I mean a single sovereign roll-up that's about to be launched, right?
Could create could easily fill up that much with data storage, right?
You have luxury ordinals you have conventional bitcoin transactions everything, right?
And when I say non-linear response, what i'm talking about is simply ongoing adoption of bitcoin and ongoing adoption of
Inscriptions, etc, etc are hitting this immovable wall of 100 gigabytes per year
And once that once it hits that wall
You will quickly have the separation of bitcoin into this luxury
L1 chain the same thing we already saw happen in ethereum, right?
Like once it hit the wall and the blocks and the mempool stopped clearing but adoption continued
This is when the feepocalypse already happened in ethereum. And this is why
Ethereum is now scaling through L2s and has enough fee revenue to pay the yield, etc, etc
So there's no escaping 100 gigabytes per year
And I honestly can back up that much of my own data
And and leave it all encrypted in there, you know
easily, right
Uh, I agree with that. I mean it may be isn't it?
1008 blocks per week
52 weeks per year. So it is 52 000 ish
Uh blocks per year, so if you use the whole four megabytes
You can actually get the whole four megabytes to get to 200 gigabytes
But because of because the financial transactions do not use
They're not discounted if you assume the mix between financial and non-financial transactions in some kind of equilibrium you have to divide by two
Right because financial transactions only use 50 like if all transactions were financial
The actual block space would peak at 50 gigabytes per year
So i'm just assuming some kind of equilibrium between financial and non-financial transactions at 100 gigabytes per year
because if every transaction was
You know an inscription, oh by the way another interesting development is because of this recursivity
You can now inscribe a terabyte size inscription
in multiple transactions
That assembles itself from four megabyte pieces
So there's actually not even a four megabyte limit anymore. You can actually put a terabyte size
Well, I mean that'll take a few years. Well, that was obviously any of us who remember the days of winrar
That would be intuitive already
Exactly but but now it's like it's going to be on all these inscription, uh, you know, uh
Explorers where you basically, you know, you have a little button in there called upload inscription
And it used to be that that button would say
Uh, well only upload up to 400 kilobytes because the others are non-standard
But now these explorers have basically agreements with with pools that allow them to upload
four megabyte
Inscriptions and pay out of band
But the latest development is I want to upload a gigabyte size file
And okay, no problem. We'll chop it up and we'll use recursion
to reassemble the file
dynamically
You know from whatever 200
Subinscriptions that are all referred to by a parent inscription as parts. So it's a multi-part world, too
Okay moonsettler and rio have had their hands up for a while
Just a comment a little bit about oh, go ahead you first
I'll save this
Okay, okay, um, i'm just gonna say
a couple of things
Hypothetically SegWit that is not perpetual and immutable. It is allowed to be pruned
Will that ever really happen in practice? Probably not at this point given the popularity of inscriptions, but I do
Just want to clarify SegWit data is not
officially
Part of the bitcoin requirement for nodes to hold they are entitled to prune it. We could have assumed value
This is why SegWit was a soft fork in practice that is
Almost never done and probably given the value of holding it. But when we say these are perpetual
And the data on the inscriptions that is under the presumption
That they will not be pruning that becomes very very popular or even if it is perpetual
It may load slower than one would think because there's only certain nodes that maintain SegWit witness data from
Two decades ago and aren't pruning
I doubt because of technology improvements that that would ever be a concern for storage
But if we are the old school small blockers that want extreme decentralization and nodes a pruned node is easier to run than a non-pruned node
Just putting it out there love recursions
on inscriptions
love code
base and storage and
Witness data as a use case and a fee utility. I myself have put javascript
html that renders dynamic svgs on an inscription
That's my pfp on chain pepe
Just a pixel pepe where you can turn on and off laser eyes or bubble gum
And you can change the colors all on an inscription like the gentleman saying with the code there a dynamic
piece of art where you can change the traits or change the colors like a
Nft people do when you think about a trait based nft
very much there with recursion enabling that
all all all positive to what the
The gentleman said but the other thing I just want to talk about is the centralization of the indexer and the sequencer on ordinals
When we talk about immutable permissionless and unsensible with regard to the website
I think that's a little out of ourselves if I may critique giving the centralization of the sequencer index
Not that I don't love ordinals and what's happening there
But I just want to make sure we try to be as complete with what isn't isn't fully trustless fully decentralized and as hard as bitcoin
If I could if I could respond
that the reason why it's not an issue as far as prunability of SegWit data is because
We're talking about data availability not data storage
So the fact that uh an inscription when published will be propagated and made available
That's kind of what the best you can hope for and there will always be nodes that are archiving every node every block
Especially like you said because we're talking about 200 gigabytes of data per year
uh linearly increasing when we now have like, you know, uh
A tiny flash cards that can store, you know, 4 to 16 terabytes
So that's not going to be an issue. There's always going to be hundreds of archival nodes
That will just feed you every block even if 99 of nodes
Uh prune all the blocks or just the SegWit data
The other thing about centralization of indexes, there is no barrier to entry right into that business. Anybody can launch
an indexer website
And just like you have hundreds of block explorers you'll have
Or you can run your own node right you can simply run your own bitcoin node and see all the artwork
so so
I mean the fact that certain
Indexers are popular. I don't see as a sort of like an inherent centralization pressure because
It is though. I don't like casey's arbitrary block height. I run my own independent indexers now my pointers go differently
So do you build on casey's ecosystem of ordinal recursions or mine if I run an independent?
I don't like it
Right, it's like forking and and bitcoin right you will you will have incompatibility but at the same time
there's like huge pressure to
to reach consensus on the protocol
and I think casey's case's protocol will probably
Uh win out because casey's at this point casey's like satoshi in the early years and he hasn't quit the project yet
But he probably will
Uh in a year or two, right like once the protocol stabilizes
Um the ordinal's protocol with all these, you know, three mega features, which is one is recursiveness
Recursiveness of inscriptions and I think even a bigger one is this whole
provenance or nestedness
Of inscriptions because i'm actually tempted to create my own identity for the first time on bitcoin
and have that identity actually be
like the root of my all of my
stuff that I want
Because that's the first time that you can publish something in a completely, you know
Immutable immortal uncensorable way and then have it all provenance back to you trustlessly, right?
Yeah, I agree
Hierarchical aspects and the recursion is definitely the case and I agree it requires
the social consensus to a single protocol
in terms of curse numbers
And and how to handle the reinscriptions that's probably likely been made and I do hope everything you
Said comes comes to pass. I also agree. I think it will but I just
pointed out the the critiques
We're just in like the year 2009
We're just in the year 2009 or 2010
Once casey quits and you know and leaves the project fatherless
Which probably will happen once the protocol stabilizes at that point you can say well, you know ossification started to set in for inscriptions, right?
Yeah, you make
Because
It's true that you could
I guess it would always be cat and mouse like it'd be like stamps would just be where it would go
I guess it's it's interesting how whether or not it's really immortal
It sort of is
Publication, right? Yeah. Sorry
Go ahead
Yeah, I wanted us and you kind of answered my second question, which was about
What what do you guys think about the possibility that bitcoiners in response will go to like a pruning network?
just to like
Be able to use the bitcoin block space for financial transactions and like completely demolish any notion of of
Of
permanence
For exogenous data storage and in theory with this zero sync
development and
and heavy pruning
you could like really really reduce the
The significance and the number of the fully archiving nodes enough that
basically is not
Really winning out against cloud storage, uh for the redundancy and data availability you get
for the price impact the economic
Monsanto i'm not worried about it because remember bitcoin today has a single honest peer assumption where somebody needs to give you the heaviest chain
even if 99% of your peers are sponsored by
Chinese communist party. So this archival of data is the same thing. You need to find one
Archiving node that's actually not pruning and once you have found a peer
Well in the future, right once you such once you found one archiving peer
That peer does not
you know the data that comes from that peer does not need to be trusted right and then you can
Recreate the archive locally by running your own node. So the same kind of people have to that's my point
People don't have to but as long as some people will
The data is immortal still right because you you would simply need to find a single archiving peer
Just like today you need to find a single honest peer that gives you the heaviest chain. It's the same kind of assumption
With zero sync you don't actually have to because uh, you are just getting zero knowledge proofs of uh first the header chain
as soon as
But I know you don't have to but if it costs you less than a dollar to archive everything because you know
10 years from now entire bitcoin blockchain will cost one penny to store
uh, you know on non-volatile storage, you will have plenty of these archiving column, you know, and it's true that
The zero sync does let you shortcut but you cannot
Not everyone can use zero sync. There has to be someone who stores
Right
And uh, and that would that that could be reduced to like uh miners uh large
uh financial nodes and uh
and uh
Block explorer providers
Yeah, i'm not saying i'm not saying there is a possibility that it goes away i'm saying that the current level of
replication of the bitcoin blockchain the current
uh perception of of
complete permissionlessness and immutability
might might be on purpose given up just for that, uh, you know, the bitcoin users can actually
Like use the block space. This would be like one direction. It can go the other direction
Uh, it can go is is like really creating less desirable block spaces
Just for their endness so so that they are not unique not single
so any sidechain type thing
Must by default be less desirable for the luxury use case and and the financial transactions can be more competitive there, I guess
and
and
I I really really hated this idea before to be honest, but
actually
it might be possible that
That to further restrict and discourage this sort of use the the bitcoin users might actually agree on a block size reduction
On the main chain. So the what do you think about that?
Uh, I think the time of everything will has ended there will be nothing everything will be contentious from now on I think
Well also reducing the block size essentially kills
all the lightning style L2s including arc and lightning etc, because those depend on
Ability to appeal to the chain inexpensively, right? So reducing the block size essentially, you know kills
all all non-custodial lightning and it probably destroys arc and other coin pools and other protocols that
Still need to use a lot
Yeah, so that will not go over easy
but um, imagine the precedent of somebody essentially stealing, you know, wiki leaks like treasure trove of
Of highly embarrassing information and publishing it
under
you know
High provenance root as a giant collection of data into inscriptions, right?
Anonymously today that would be more infuriating to the u.s. Government, but because the government will be helpless about it
This will not be pursued or publicized right?
Because they will pretend, you know, like it hasn't happened. Like for example, there's plenty of highly offensive inscriptions to
Chinese government today
But they're not trying to censor bitcoin blocks through the great firewall of china as far as I know
Does china block ipfs today and the firewall blocks ipfs?
Interplanetary file storage
Ipfs is a failure because well, yeah, we're blocking. It's not even worth blocking
Okay, because yeah, you can't get a standard we have to have an explorer this that
Well, it's not that it's just that it's not incentive compatible
Essentially, it's prone to spam if you run your own node
Then your node will be overrun with child porn from other people
And you get more benefit for running a node
so there is like more incentive compatible like even even um,
even uh file coin is not truly incentive compatible because it doesn't guarantee like
eternal retrievability like
There was this other I forgot what it's called. Uh
Yeah, you have to write i'm pinning it's not there's no incentive to keep it perpetual similar to an archive
with
Very strong points. How can you how can you compete today with paying ten dollars worth of bitcoin?
And then having a website hosted forever like that's not that's nothing competes with that
Right and hosted forever in one place that we know that hundred years from now will still be
Available hosted forever if casey wins and I believe casey's protocol becomes a decentralized standard
But but but yeah
I mean like i'm more sure that that my website published in inscriptions today will be around
Then i'm sure that google will be around 100 years from now. I'll tell you the truth. That's fair
A better bet that that will figure this out and get to a consensus on ordinals in the next two years
Or then google will be well, I mean what's strong? What's the controversy?
What's the controversy there the the cursed inscription numbers I thought casey
Yeah on renumbering right like so that's already off the table
But anybody that already did a previous anybody that already did a previous cursed
Inscription recursion is cut off. He basically said you shouldn't have done cursed inscriptions before
I told you the block height where i'm going to honor cursed inscriptions
Some people are going to put an indexer that doesn't if they went cursed inscriptions before will it probably die out
As a as a side competitor and there will be this
One indexer like, you know, yes a large fraction of satoshi's bitcoins are sending
to
No longer standard addresses, right?
That's kind of like a historical artifact, but nobody cares about it now, you know
Exactly. So we have to forego the data that was put in cursed inscriptions prior to the
Recognization of cursed inscriptions at stated block height casey is about to announce
so
But then yeah, then the data any data from that point forward including cursed once they're recognized would meet your standard so
Uh, I I think we're gonna get where you're saying. I'm just saying it's not without I mean
This is like such a miner such a miner controversy, right compared to the stuff that no that's not controversial like
recursion and provenance, uh nesting and
You know the uh inscriptions
I mean all that stuff is like hugely like the fact when he launched inscriptions
I'm like i'm not doing anything with putting my data in there until provenance nesting is there because
I do want to you know
create a single inscription that then I can
Leave the private key for to my kids and then it's like
Right. Yeah
It's like your definitive artist signature if you're doing an art use case opposed to a data use case
It is very cool
Highly underestimated use case of provenance is that the artist?
Can burn the root inscription?
and provably
Terminate any possibility of anybody including himself adding to that collection, right?
It's like motley cruel guaranteeing. This is the last tour. We're signing
That's okay, I think
You could do that with any programming language
If van gogh no longer needs to die in order for his paintings to become valuable. He can just provably
Terminate his ability to add to that style of paintings
Right because the artist can just burn that root description and one thousand I mean you can
Apes will be will become possible to add. I mean you could just
Anything can be made unspendable, but that's fine. I mean, this is very interesting, but we should
see if anyone wants
Anyone else in the audience wants to bring us slightly more
More
Anything slightly more on topic per se I do think that's fascinating though
In the meantime one more question about this. Is there any chance like any chance whatsoever?
You think alex that this could go to like another blockchain?
Instead of bitcoin mainchain even a sidechain or like an altcoin. So like why why don't inscribers?
Prefer like vcash which just uh because
Well, they're adoptive block size
There's zero chance of that. I would I would I would not I mean if you're hoping for that, you know abandon all hope
Who hope for that?
and the reason for that is precisely what makes bitcoin so
You know so hard to change
in combination with this highly highly desirable protocol that was developed by casey which
Creates true immutable digital artifacts, right?
And they both have to go together in order to make inscriptions
As attractive as they are because every any other sidechain or even if you take casey's protocol and you launch it on a sidechain of bitcoin
The fact that sidechain, you know, if it's a drivechain, its survival is not really guaranteed
So it's like the everybody wants to be in one place
So there's zero chance that this will go anywhere else that's my short answer basically
The one proper competitor is doge and all's but again, you'd have to believe that dogecoin is going to be perpetual as much as bitcoin
So no, it's not it's not zero. I get
I understand why you would say zero, but I think
That's not right because
You have network you have network effects and you have the ability to customize
The new location chain in new ways
and you have unlimited
uh block space so
So those three are those are very powerful ingredients. I'm not saying that there's not a lot of truth
You're forgetting you're forgetting the veblen good dynamic, right?
Like the fact that these inscriptions will be expensive the fact that it will cost
You know a thousand dollars to put a monkey in there in a year or two
That will make that monkey more valuable it's kind of like a proof of work for rich people
The fact that there's no cheap way to mint them is is a is what makes them attractive
The fact that you would pay in a one dollar fee or one cent fee on polygon
You know, the whole veblen good dynamic is incredibly strong with with luxury ordinals and luxury inscriptions. This is underestimated
Yeah, I think it's underestimated but I also think it's overestimated
Because
what you're saying is that there is
I think we're just in early days and the only thing that people think that this could be used for
Is some kind of like frivolous
Digital art thing and I think that actually there will be many more
Things that are useful, um that are not like that. I mean so like, you know something like rolex
Is not worth as much as walmart it's like, you know, like the whole brand is worth like one
Thousand as much
Or more. It's true that you might have a bigger nft market on polygon in in aggregate
but my my only claim is that
You will have a big enough
inscription market on bitcoin
To to catalyze the apocalypse and by if apocalypse, I mean fees going to ten or twenty dollars
per financial transaction and staying there permanently and the reason that's apocalypse is because that essentially neutralizes
Non-custodial lightning or arc and it sort of immobilizes global south bitcoin savings as they stand today, right?
Because somebody in nigeria who has the dust. Yeah
Right, yeah, so somebody in nigeria who has five hundred dollars worth of bitcoin savings will not want to pay fifty dollar fee to move them
So you essentially you this is the point at which bitcoin
L1 becomes whales and institutions only and I guarantee you that this time next year
You know the the laser eyed priest will just tell the faithful just buy some blackrock etf to get exposure
and don't worry about
you know multi-sig setups and you know worrying about
Right, that will be that will be I mean i'm predicting
That'll be very bad
But that will be for bitcoin the official but it will
But you know what else it would be, uh, you know phenomenal for our big 300
of course, which would be the last lifeboat leaving the titanic in that scenario basically because
The L1 well, I mean and all the existing L2s
The feep apocalypse is good for all L2s, right including drivechains because the apocalypse causes the plebs to
To rebel against the priests of laser eye cult and the plebs will scrape scale bitcoin now, right?
Which will force some kind of L2 scaling which is not available in bitcoin today because there's no trust minimized
Way to move bitcoin to any kind of L2 right now
so both drivechains roll-ups sovereign or
or
Or non-sovereign the uh, what do they call the the the roll-ups with the with the bridge, right?
all kinds of
Yeah, not optimistic but uh
The other kind of provable validity roll-ups zk a validity roll-up. So validity roll-ups sovereign roll-ups
Uh
drivechains
Spider chain, right?
like you guys have heard the spider chain is out there now and
all kinds of L2s will finally be free because you know
There will be a common soft fork. There will be all these soft forks because the priests will be shown to be bankrupt in there
you know in their ideology of
Claiming that bitcoin is for the global south billions while the fees of perma high at 20 to 50 bucks
I
Would just count that the global south currently works in the us dollar with 40 wire fees
Which is a travesty and does lock them out and why a majority of the global south don't have access to it
But I will say that the the current use case does not provide them a better alternative
Than 40 transactions. That's the problem bitcoins
Try not to solve trying to solve not be the same as your point is extremely well taken one other thing though
Uh, I will say I do think paul made a spectacular point providence luxury good fully granted
If I believe script hash
And script mining and dogecoin is not going anywhere and I just want to have a permissionless website where I want to put javascript packages
Doginals is a legitimate threat to ordinals from a recursion standpoint because it is copyable and they don't have the controversy of kc
that's that I only think that's for the use case of technical immutable websites and javascript open source publishing
And I don't need it to be prominent
I functionally need it in combination with the doge being lower fees to do that
I do think there is a challenge to inscriptions utility use case by doginals
as ridiculous as of course a shitcoin is
but
If i'm a programmer and i'm like we said in nigeria and I want to make my immutable website
I'm, not putting it on inscriptions. I'm putting it on doginals as crazy as it sounds right because of what you speak of
of the cost prohibitiveness
I
Mean yeah, the cost is of course a double-edged sword
It's a double-edged sword, but those journals will I don't see them being any more over threat than than bitcoin
Satoshi vision is to bitcoin, right? You can have an unlimited amount of block space out there
But you know, you can have 10 million copies of the mona lisa, but they're not mona lisa
It's it's the same story all over again, right? Yeah, the prominence and luxury cases is there it's only about
decentralized permissionless storage that
people will claim
And my claim is actually weaker than it may appear because i'm not claiming that the market for luxury
Ordinals will be trillions of dollars. All i'm claiming is that it will be large enough
To raise the fees to 10 20 for financial transactions and keep them there forever
So essentially it's large enough to to cause a
Fipocalypse of the plebs and the uprising to scale bitcoin. That's that my only claim is that i'm not claiming that
The market will be the largest market in the world
so
I think it's a very strong claim. Yeah, I would agree you think there's going to be
three to four hundred thousand
Of those created every year
on
24-7 365
Well, you didn't watch that right you saw sats the brc 20s where it just didn't stop and they minted 21 quadrillion
Sat well, there's 38 million
Inscriptions already right since january. All right, and just remember
Once once you once you overflow 100 gigabytes per year
The fee response is non-linear
Like in other words the fees will spike exponentially once the demand exceeds 100 gigabytes per year
That's the block space available I can tell you that somebody will want to put a movie in there
at five gigabytes
It's not that expensive today and given recursive recursion
You can you know assemble it from parts
So why not back up valuable hollywood movies in there or corporate documents or whales?
Why not use like on our dogecoin where you have the space and it costs you?
A fraction of that if you're looking for eternal storage because of the same reason because of the same reason that people don't use
You know people if the only place where eternity can be found is bitcoin. It's not in
bitcoin
We hope uh, but I think to alex's point
as he says if it switches
if
the dynamics could switch to something that looks a little bit more like
Instead of what it looks like now when the blocks are near empty
and we pay
Whatever it is
You know a 20 cents per bitcoin transaction for 220 bytes
um
They could switch to something like what is the average income of
an upper middle class
resident of the united states like
percentage of that because if it switches to some kind of
signaling or attention-based
economy
Thing where people are just bidding against themselves
It could plausibly, you know take on a completely different form
and
You know
So they could be the feepocalypse
For example right now there is no tool out there that will allow you to upload the file system into inscriptions
Even though the protocol supports it as far as I know. No indexer has a button that says pick a folder
And hierarchically upload all of its contents
But the protocol already supports that right?
So it's just a question of some ui is popping up and people are like, oh, wait a second. It will cost me 500
To put my will and all the related, you know addendums and all the corporate documentation. That's super valuable
encrypted
As a as a kind of a giant zip archive or a bunch of folders and then I can hand the keys
That are backed up on on steel or paper to my heirs
And then I can decrypt this data. There's just no tool to do that. But the protocol supports it, right? You can see
that
You know all the all the wealthy individuals in the world are competing for 100 gigabytes per year worth of this block space, right?
You can see how high the fees can go, right
Yeah, encrypted backups will be one thing that bitcoiners might actually consider doing
I mean
I would want to put my encrypted will in there and then take the decryption keys on steel and hand it
To my you know attorney or to my heirs. I guess i'd have to understand why you think that
people would pay
a premium when they're able to get the same function for
A thousand it's not the same function. It's absolutely because there's
Because if you're saying there's going to be
What you're saying is there's ample we'll see whoever story alex's poor gentleman has a litecoin right in his name
But alex you do think that
We agree alex that bitcoin is sort of an immortality thing, but do you if you actually head to beth?
Like we time travel 10 years into the future
Do you think litecoin is like just like?
completely no
Because all old chains don't go away. They just become zombified, right? Like I mean, well, that's sort of what he's saying
But i'll let him make his point is there will be sufficient demand for forever storage
And if you have the ability to but only but only at that one Schelling point, right?
There has to be like for example
There's plenty of places in new york city where you can tell people to meet
But there's only one place they can figure out to meet with each other without coordinating. That's the grand central station, right?
So bitcoin is a Schelling point
For immortality, right? Like the fact that you could meet in new york, you know at the statue of liberty for example, or other well-known landmarks
Actually, this experiment has been conducted, right?
You know give give a hundred students an assignment
To meet each other without ever coordinating a single message in new york city
And 50 of them or more will show up at the clock. Of course
It was tom shelling himself who did the experiment and in the actual data is in his book the strategy of conflict
Which is one of my favorite bitcoin is such a shell
It's not litecoin
It's it's it's not litecoin. I mean litecoin will not be gone. I'm not claiming that litecoin data will be inaccessible
I'm, just it's just obscure. It's just like
But don't what do you think you're going to be you're going to see a front like a business is going to come to you
And say hey, i'm I have a way I can store your data
Forever will help you encrypt the keys blah blah. You're not even as a customer
You're not going to know what you're getting put up, you know
You're not going to know is it on bitcoin or is it on litecoin?
You're just going to pay a fee and someone's going to handle it for you, right?
You know a lot of things because I mean you see, you know
No, no because this is valuable data you people burning their nfts that they paid up, you know 10 000 for an ethereum
To teleport them to inscriptions, right?
People are burning their ethereum nfts today to teleport them. You're talking about people in the crypto
You just told me there's like
This is the whale sphere
This is not even a this is a whale sphere, right? This is a whale crypto sphere
Like what i'm saying is that 1 000 crypto whales is enough to get the great perma high fees
It's the one percent of the one percent like you don't even need
The crypto people or regular normies doing this
You just need
Like michael saylor said that he would like to store valuable corporate documents in inscriptions
I mean he realizes the use case. He hasn't done it yet, but
Wait till he comes out a few months from now and says oh we put you know
Encrypted versions or clear text versions of our legal, you know corporate formation documents and
you know our
Reports that we file with the government or whatever it is. That's valuable in there and people will start doing it, right?
corporates
whales
It's i'm talking about one person like this is a market for
He said there's gonna be how many billions of transactions backed up
I'm saying i'm saying that there's only 100 gigabytes worth of block space per year, right?
And you can you can have a thousand transactions occupying it or you can have 10 million transactions occupying it
But this this is like a hard
Unbreachable limit that once you fill up 100 gigabytes per year
this is exactly for the same reason that bitcoin itself is valuable because it's like
escalating adoption meets immovable scarcity
this is escalating adoption that
will also meet immovable scarcity and that's the
What's the tipping point in your opinion of where?
uh, the cost gets to be
So great that people go, okay, is there any other option?
Oh
It we already saw this process before this this exact what what we're theorizing has happened in a large ecosystem called ethereum
And the tipping point was that for six months
Ethereum blocks were full
And people would have to pay 10 or 20 dollars per transfer
Just to move ether around or your c20s. And then what happened was that the prices did not fall to zero but L2s appeared
And once L2s appeared that put a ceiling
on
Cost on L1, but the cost never goes down. It's like
This restaurant is no good because it's always crowded kind of effect, right?
So the same dynamics will play out like once you have ten dollars
Per transaction fees or twenty dollars per transaction fees that don't go down
This is what I call the fipocalypse and then we'll be scaled bitcoin now uprising and then L2s will appear but L2s
Might be arc it might be covenants, but L2s will not give you the same functionality as L1 in regards to ordinals, right?
Correct, but but but for most for but it will be better
You know, if we had validity roll-ups, you would have the same security guarantees for your actual bitcoin
So global south plebs could store their savings on a validity roll-up
with the same exact security guarantee that that l1s but they would pay one one penny or
Five cents to move the savings over there and once in their lifetime, they would move it
back to L1
Yeah, this is the weird realization that the transactional logs don't actually need to be kept forever. They don't need to have the same
Uh
Finality as some alternate use cases. It's very very weird, but
Uh, basically what people want is that the ledger to be immutable
But spent UTXOs are not really a big concern for anyone that uses bitcoin as money
All right, well I guess what i'm getting is, you know, maybe i'm a light corner, right but
You're saying is once ordinal fees
Get to be ten to twenty dollars on bitcoin
excess
uh demand spills over to another chain that is capable of providing the same level of
Security the same functionality until their fees get to be ten or twenty dollars and then on to a third
well, not the same but
Like if you want the same security, you need validity roll-ups essentially
But you can scale computation on a validity roll-up, but you cannot scale data, right?
Right
So it will be imagine
Like the visualization I have in mind is this multi-level water fountain where the highest level is like L1
Once that bucket is full then it starts overflowing to the next level
And that's exactly what we saw in ethereum
For example
All the ethereum L2s right now are executing six acts of transactions of ethereum itself
So there's like six scaling of ethereum on its own L2s
but they're launching an L2 right now called layer n which promises a million transactions per second and
500 millisecond finality
Without losing security guarantees of ethereum, for example
So there will be like this infinite amount of block space on L2s and l3s
But this highly desirable weblin good
block space
so, I mean central banks or you know, i'm assuming i'm also assuming institutional institute full institutionalization like
i'm assuming that it will not be controversial five ten years from now for
Eurodollar banks to hold bitcoin on their balance sheet, right and when they settle with each other once a day
They don't mind paying a thousand dollar per transaction fee because they're settling a billion dollars worth of bitcoin
so whales institutions and luxury ordinals, that's
That's the only things that can fit into this hundred gigabytes per year everything else has to overflow into this other buckets
If the roll-ups are just as good why why bother?
Why pay the fee if this roll-up is just as secure?
Because roll-ups can
Roll-ups have
immutability and double spend guarantees of the L1
but
Roll-ups are just like a different neighborhood, right?
I mean you can say that there's some neighborhoods in texas have no crime and you know, they have low taxes
But for some reason people want to live in hamptons not not in the middle of plano, texas
Yeah, this is just a commodity this is just block space right it's just transactions
It's just people want to be where other people are right?
Like if i'm if i'm leaving something to my heirs or corporate like if if all corporations and wealthy individuals use
Bitcoin for this kind of valuable document backup
then there is like
It becomes sort of like a country club. You want to use what other people of your and there's like 100
There's like millions of insurance companies. There's i'm in a town with eight country clubs
And i'm living a small rust city. I mean, it's not people are diverse and what they're looking for
And what why do you pay a thousand to ten thousand neighborhoods?
What's that?
Well, because it's not it's not it's not just about data backup. Like what about putting, you know deeds on a blockchain, right?
You know, yeah
You know chains of ownership and I I agree with you there can be demand for this long term
Uh forever what i'll call forever chains
and you may not think
script mining with
frankly script mining with dogecoin having unending block rewards is
Maybe more suitable because it has that tail emission
Or something like monero that has a forever tail emission may have some more
reality of being
Sustainable bitcoin has a tail emission in another commodity. It's called block space
There's a hundred gigabytes of it produced forever every year. Well, yeah, so that's the television dogecoin dogecoin has
10 times that right? No, but like no, I know but like so, you know bsv as well, but i'm saying like
Uh
Bitcoin is like beverly hills or you know, or bel-air and other chains are like other neighborhoods basically
Yeah, fair enough, I mean I I guess that's the
that's a lot to pin your
Uh pin your hopes, but the thing is again, my claim is is is weak. I'm not claiming trillion dollar size markets here
I'm claiming
Just enough fee pressure to catalyze a fee apocalypse. Yeah, I hope and that's not even much. I frankly hope there is like I think fees
Full blocks are
critical to any chain, you know
I certainly would love to see
I don't like paul's old arguments about you know fees being insufficient because
They all reflect pre-fee market era, which hopefully the fee market did actually begin on april 23rd a week ago. It came
within 20 or 30 blocks of clearing
But it didn't it started rising again. So I guess we still have that fee market
Hopeful, you know that started on april 23rd, but a week ago it looked like the blocks were going to clear again
But then the fee started rising again
Well, you know that my argument which of course may be wrong. Of course, it's very much a scientific
Argument, so it's very falsifiable. In fact, I literally give the
challenge
In the post the blog post I say I don't remember exactly what I said, but I said something like
Point to a two-month period where the bitcoin price isn't
rising where the fees were above two dollars and
And increased or something like that but um
The argument was based on the fact that people don't enjoy paying high fees every time it's not just like, you know
so you have a very
You have a view
But wealthy people enjoy paying high fees
That's that's the dublin. Yeah, you have a different this is your thing
so so but this is what i'm saying is if that's what i'm saying before is if you're right, then the fees will rise to like
some percentage of the
the average wealthy person's
Annual income or something. Don't you think you're also basing? No, I think
Wealth is based in a system that
Has people that where the wealth distribution is so bizarre in a fiat system
like that it's not gonna
exist in a bitcoin system
Just random
Everyone I just gotta tell you I could be worse because there's a the only book that you ever need to read
about
I mean i'm joking, of course
Read all the books you want
Every book you can get your hands on but the only one on equal inequality that's any good is called the great leveler
And I don't know if anyone here has read it, but it's fantastic
but the summary is
there are
If left left to left to ourselves inequality increases geometrically that's the norm but every now and then
Something really horrible happens like famine war catastrophe disease
And then it knocks everyone back down to the same spot and zero
And then it starts to become unequal all over again, but I highly recommend this book
I
Guys had his hand. I mean everything we're speculating about so has already happened, you know, so go ahead
So people could send them mad max basically
And then mad max you said
Yeah
Well, why it's not mad max. I think it's a huge
Yeah, it's not
i'm saying
That is the only thing that has ever caused equality
But that it won't necessarily happen. In fact quite the reverse if
bitcoin protects us from some kind of apocalypse then
normal apocalypse not fee apocalypse
Not to be confused
And if it protects us from that then it will just increase the geometric growth
I think the wealth inequality was kind of a tangent
Anyway, it was just saying what alex is saying is there's only 100 gigabytes of space
The population is huge. It has a certain number of like rich people
Something like that
Yeah
and also, I mean once once once we've hit the like right now, we're at equilibrium because
The the mempool is not clearing. So there's actually a valid price in the market for block space
Now imagine that this valid what happens to this valid price once
Gradually adoption escalates by 2x every year or a year and a half in bitcoin world
Simply due to gradual inertia of escalating adoption, right?
The price doesn't go up 2x might go up 8x or 16x, right? That's a non-linear response
Same same as scarcity of bitcoin itself, right? Bitcoin itself is highly scarce 21 million units
Once adoption keeps doubling every year and a half or two
There's a non-linear response in price. It's exactly the same. By the way, if you believe this was
This was my expectations of the entire ordinals inscription luxury good whatever inscribing thing
So that was my baseline assumption. That's what I expected to happen just from people adopting bitcoin
That's yeah, that that would be enough to raise the fees inscriptions just brought it up
Two or three years and said like the fees would go to
Yeah, of course i'm just saying that people do seem my experience has been
Since you brought my article, which is fine
Of course, obviously it's fair game
But i'm just saying my experience has been
People don't like paying these fees. So when the fees go up people complain and then they don't just complain they stop
Transacting in bitcoin. Sometimes they move to an altcoin. Sometimes they try to batch
Sometimes they just quit altogether and they say this crypto thing is stupid
And but whatever it is
But that's the equilibrium in the multi-level fountain, right?
Like people will go to the next level of the fountain, but that does not empty the bucket at the top
The pain has to get high enough which it did in ethereum, right and ethereum transactions went to ten dollars per transfer in 2019
and
They haven't gone to zero even though there's now all this
plentiful L2 space that can move
You know thousand times more transactions for some reason ethereum block space is not back to zero
It's the same the same is going to happen with bitcoin
well, I think it's
I think it's a fascinating open question. I mean, I think it's totally empirical which means that I really can see it
I can see it going any which way
It's very interesting that unlike most most bitcoin stuff is very theoretical but this I don't think this is this is really something where
I do think like
Anything could happen like we could wake up tomorrow and it could just start happening
but
It has to be something that requires this the digital governance
Right that to happen in a decentralized space, you know, because if i'm again like you bring up the will example
If I can go buy three usb drives and they cost me 15 bucks and I store it and pass them around
What's I don't i'm not sure what i'm gaining by putting it on on a bitcoin protocol
Well, I think there is a big difference between like total certainty and like high confidence
so I think that is
but
I guess i'd have to see from your average user why they would go pay
What you're gaining is that the devices that read your usb drives will change the standard of the interface in 5 10 20 years
Just like cds or cd-roms are hard to read these days
Whereas the data in the bitcoin block space will always be at the Schelling point and always readable
But no matter what happens to hardware
Well, i'll just put on pieces of paper, you know what i'm saying
Yeah, but pieces of paper can burn a lot. I just look at
I mean, this is like a classic laser
I i'm not accusing you of being a laser eye, but i'm saying like a classic laser eye rationalization goes something like this
Well, if this doesn't work for you, then just use x and next year x will be you know
Just get some exposure through blackrock and watch the ngu, you know
So that I mean so like there's always these excuses for but why can't you just use, you know taproot assets or why can't you?
just use
lightning with factories
And all of these post-factum rationalizations don't actually apply, right?
Because there's one place that I know that will be uncensorable and immortal, right? That's bitcoin
I think the use case is there but it's maybe not as
As
Use case is proving itself. The use case is proving itself since january because you've seen 38 million of them created
They essentially account for 50 to 70 percent of all transactions included in blocks
It's like it's like in that movie about the pirates, you know, look at me. I'm the captain now
So like the inscriptions look at me. I'm the bitcoin now, right?
That's because they they comprise
Of all the transactions, right?
It's only the block space if not the coins themselves. No, no actual transaction counts not just the block space but transaction counts
Well, to me
Guys there is a solution for for that
The for for some things you you can
You need to use encryption for some things you need to use a oracle
Which are more public, you know
inscribing data and by the way, we're I mean I and uh other people are we are doing exactly what you're talking now and
We are working on the client and um
Probably if we if we manage to
To make it quick enough. Uh, the protocol will be also as a drivechain
And I want to be on a testnet
also
but uh
if uh
if drivechain
Will not be enabled soon. Probably we will use a
Um bitcoin top root and uh, but we will not uh directly on ordinals
One thing that we don't have is the two-way peg, right?
That's the missing piece because if they had two-way peg that would be game over right basically for all other L2s. Yeah
But you know what ordinal say I already burned ordinals. It just sent to the legacy address
And uh, it's destroyed. I mean you can
You can destroy more, you know
Very easily. It's like you can destroy them. But just like it's just like burning bitcoin, right?
uh, no, I mean you can't you can't burn impossible to burn bitcoin at the moment, I don't know if
something happened in the future, but
Like I mean burning like destroying the this the the inscription
not the the sat is actually
only a
You know number of sat in the in the wallet
Right
Well the owner of that capability to do it, right
I think he was saying that it's a user interface
Makes it too easy to accidentally destroy
Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean the wallets don't support this stuff yet
So but the protocol is there so this is the year 2009 or early 2010 of of inscriptions. I mean
this time next year there will be
Like I expect inscription support and trezor actually
Sooner or later, right? And that's sort of that's the mainstreaming of inscriptions is when trezor and other hardware wallets start supporting them
People love these hardware wallets. I really don't but
I like your offline computer as a hardware wallet idea too
which is fine, you know, let's
Get an old iphone and you know, wipe it out and and disable wi-fi in it and stuff
And get the faraday cage as well and that's the real expense
No, it's like uh, the faraday cage is not that it's a faraday because the faraday cage
you can't easily open the phone and and unplug the
Bluetooth and the wi-fi thing whereas you can with a laptop
It's it sounds crazy, but it's really not trust me
There's plenty of videos online where you can watch someone you just take a knife
you open the laptop up and there's a little thing that says wi-fi on a little label and you just
Grab it with your fingers and unplug it and then you're then you're good to go. It's not enough
I mean someone can actually read uh your screen and your keyboard very easily. Uh from a
Slight distance
That's why you need it's also live in the mountains. No, i'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah
That the whole mountain man ideology is wacky right like sit in a bunker in the mountains. It's irrational because we have
We have many different risks and you have to weigh them each proportionally
And so the idea that they would people would care so much about this one particular risk
When and also for example, we have social animals with friends and family and societies, right?
Of course the people are rational what they would care about is activating BIP300 as quickly as possible that take that for granted obviously
By the way, the best way to activate BIP300 is to start uploading your file systems into inscriptions
There's no better
There's no need to lobby for it. You just need to start raising the fee level to ten dollars for a few months
Pleb pleb uprising will take care of the rest
Yeah, it will help. Yeah, I think you're probably right about that
That probably would help more but of course you have to remember from my point of view
I kind of think that they won't raise it won't go up
But I hope I think you're right. Didn't I agree with you when you first brought it up? I said that would be great for me
No, I mean it's a good outcome for all concern
It's just that you have this perfect substitutability idea that one block space is perfectly substitutable for another
And that's not true about neighborhoods like a piece of land in plano
Texas is not the same as piece of land in bel-air california
Right, so that doesn't work number one number two. The fee market only started a few months ago. So all the past
you know
Arguments about how high the fees were are just completely invalid because the fee market never existed
You know, why do you think that land's more valuable?
Because other valuable people and their properties are there, you know, ultimately it's the it's the
It's the country club effect, you know birds of feather flock together. That's at the end of the day
That's the social desire. Where do you do you buy your car insurance from some from where rich people buy car insurance?
No car insurance is that factor into your that's real estate does not like car insurance is a commodity
Those block space
Well guys, do you know?
Guys do you know that the biggest insurance settlement company is using a blockchain for their settlement?
Settlement
Who's that ethereum, I don't know
Lemonade no, no subnet subnet on avalanche, which is the the the same setup as a drivechain
Subnet something like that
And uh
and uh, it's it's secured by
by validator nodes on avalanche blockchain and actually
the main chain is uh
decentralized and it's UTXO based
uh
Chain and uh, you can create a
Special application blockchains they call but it's like a sidechain
Yeah, guys we interrupt this uh feepocalypse meandering conversation because we have a new person on the stage
Saul is on the stage. Hello
I
Didn't mean to interrupt the flow of the uh conversation
How's it going paul
Yes, it's kind of okay
no, I mean I was just going to chime in a little bit with the uh,
the inscription thing just to remind people that uh
They are printable
Um
Yeah, that prunability thing is a pretty critical question alex because
I'm, not sure myself exactly how
If they can put a box around and say these things don't affect the UTXO set and these things do
And if they can box it out
then it is
You would still
Is
Every inscription creates an unprunable UTXO when it's
inscribed
But the witness data, which is the data is optionally prunable by nodes and it has been for years
While inscriptions do create new fresh UTXOs if you look at the chart of UTXO growth
The UTXOs from the beginning of the year double dropper from 60 million to 120 million
All that growth is due to brc20 and other inscriptions those UTXOs are not prunable
They're part of the UTXO unspent transaction output set today, but their witness data
May be prunable
Well the UTXOs
in the context of forever storage of data is kind of moot don't you think I mean, it's really the
I mean the ordinal part the trackability part is one thing but like there's a lot of
data that you're referring to that
Does it necessarily need to be movable tradable trackable? It just needs to be there, right? So
So it's not really ordinals. It's just inscriptions in general
Yes, and that's all prunable
There is no new strong assumptions here because like we discussed before you came on stage
Bitcoin has a single honest peer assumption if you're running a node
One out of a hundred peers you connect to at least one has to give you the heaviest change
Whereas the other 99 can be controlled by the chinese communist party and you don't need to trust this honest peer
So the same kind of assumption
Occurs here as well that you need to be able to connect to one node
That will not prune the witness data
And you don't need to trust that peer because you can validate that data when you get it and then you can become the archival
node yourself
Yeah
But then how decentralized is it, you know, how decentralized is the actual data then if only
a fraction of nodes actually store
no, no, it's incredibly decentralized because
A single node on the internet
Is as decentralized as a thousand nodes on the internet as a million nodes
Because a single archival node
No, I see a single archival node, right? It's just like getting blocks from the from the blockstream satellite
It implies no trust the blocks between because blockstream blocks those blocks are self-validating data, right?
So a single supplier of that data
is enough
What I wanted to say is that
Under the default configuration with asunvalid you actually don't need to download
The SegWit extension data and I think someone maybe already made a change in
In core or they are planning a change where nodes will not even ask for it when they sync up because it's basically
completely
Irrelevant data if they don't want to validate it
Yeah, and in the future the snapshot
It's okay for vitalik to be running a node that that does give you the SegWit data
Because even even vitalik or the pope or the chinese communist party as long as there's one node
That's giving you this data. You can clone that node and become an archival node yourself without any trust
Yeah, i'm just saying bitcoin network could become a network in response to this sorting that that simply
Explicitly does not care about old witness data
And the nodes don't keep it and don't propagate it and in that case
It is going to be pretty hard in a peer-to-peer network
If the nodes don't propagate the old SegWit data
You're going to have a hard time to find that one archival node and that one archival node
is not going to be as
permissionless and as
Peer-to-peer experience because they they can basically close shop anytime they can
Charge you for that data or whatever. That's entirely not the same as right now is with bitcoin
Actually, it's very similar to to the day most nodes pruning their old blocks
And yet somehow you're able to sync from block zero, right?
What percentage of of bitcoin nodes do not prune their blocks today? Probably a small percentage because
When you install bitcoin core, right it has like
Keep last couple of hundred blocks, but prune all the others. I think it's been that way by default for a long time
and nobody can charge you for this data because
If if one copy of it gets out
You don't need to trust the seller and you can just start selling and undercutting them, right?
Paul will will understand that that the marginal cost of that data is zero because
It's self-certifying data and a single archival node will clone 100 more
Within a day. So there's there's nothing you can charge for this data
And this is not about data availability. This is about data persistence for the long run
Like why do you say it's not a data availability?
Because isn't it sort of about data ability, isn't it?
Why do you say no because data availability is a technical term that refers to proof of publication
It does not refer to eternal storage. There's like a different term for that
Data, well, I think proof of publication basically everyone needs
To sync the blockchain. They need to download all the block data at some point when they you know
I'm talking normally maybe people invent shortcuts or whatever
But the only way to know if the shortcuts like zero sync or whatever if the only way to know that those are working
Yeah is and someone will always
We can't have any part of the blockchain go missing
Or I think the entire project
We are in that regime. We have been in that regime for years
The that's kind of sounds like bad news, but the good news
Is a single node that's actually serving you the blocks
Can can be sufficient to receive the network without any trust
A hundred fold when I agree with that, of course, of course, I completely agree with that
Um, which is
This is
This assumption is not stronger than the underlying assumption that some peer will actually give you the heaviest chain
right that
Though I I was kind of worried that maybe one day they would not or something I don't know but uh,
Alex, I agree with you, but I don't think I don't think people would have the same desire to inscribe
Data on the blockchain if it was a few nodes
And most of them were not even responsive or very weight limited for old witness data
So if you had a situation like that compared to what is today, I don't think that would be the same among the same
enthusiasm for uh
Inscriptions, so i'm not sure about that whole thing. But but what you are saying
Does that something is that there is a lot of enthusiasm for running conventional bitcoin nodes today, right?
There's allegedly like 15 000 reachable ones and maybe a hundred thousand all together
And people do not seem to be worried that 99% of their peers are pruning blocks because it seems like every node that comes up
Is able to sync from block zero today
Like there's been no no no reported failures of oh my god. The certain section of blocks are just inaccessible
That's I I don't think i've heard anyone
I I think I think a much larger much larger percent of bitcoin nodes today are full archiving nodes
partly from ideological reasons and partly from some default reasons from
for these uh, these uh
uh ready-made
uh
pre-packaged
lightning home nodes
That basically run with uh with full archiving mode out of books
so why why would you have ideological inscribers doing the same thing or libraries or
You know, they can or escrow companies
So basically the same kind, you know, you could have guerrilla artist collectives that run a node
You could have libraries, you know, the institutions we call libraries today
Simply writing archival nodes because every book worth reading has been inscribed in bitcoin
And they can just let you click and download that book, right
Like, you know people haven't thought about backing up all the books worthwhile reading, you know into into inscriptions
And that's what project gutenberg
Would only dream of when it was launched 20 30 years ago, right?
But now you can actually launch a real project gutenberg where you actually take a thousand books from civilization from old time
And you just inscribe them in various file formats
And that becomes like an open library for the world
Why not?
The problem is there's no incentive. The only incentive is for miners to to uh validate the transactions
But after the the file the data is stored, there's no further incentive to keep it there at all currently
But there's no incentive to keep old blocks either and yet they don't seem to disappear, right?
What i'm saying is the same talking dynamics if we're talking in the context of forever
The thing is if you're talking in the context of forever or a very long time, I mean in five years
10 years even
there could be ways
roll-ups and whatnot where
Pruning a majority if not all of the witness data would be perfectly fine
It would be fine, but who would care about pruning in in the next 10 years two terabytes of data will be added to the bitcoin blockchain
But 10 years from now two terabytes of data will be less than one percent of your, you know, $9.99
USB stick
So who cares about all these optimizations like nobody cares about a million transistors here and there these days or even a billion transistors
Who would care about two terabytes of data?
When today it's like pennies
so
So does this whole thing that we talked about for the past? I don't know how many hours
Does it like validate small blockerism
Is there a block size that is optimal?
from the user's perspective
Like if blocks are larger or smaller or the situation would be better or worse
In this sense. Well, I think I think it just changes the timeline like for example if the SegWit soft fork never happened
We would be in fipocalypse a year or two ago already because there will be no forex
Block size increase
So SegWit pushed it off a few years and now appearance of you know inscriptions has brought it forward again
But this is just an immovable wall
Being hit by this gradual sort of tidal way of escalating adoption. It's just a question of when
The hippocalypse happens. It's not it doesn't matter if the blocks are
10 percent of what they are now or 10 times what they are now. It just changes the timeline. It doesn't change the final outcome
Yeah, but if the burden grows large enough that actually incentivizes people to get rid of it or work around it more
So in that sense also the pruning network may come into existence when people realize that it is the ledger that is the most important
And all transaction data can be under certain circumstances safely discarded and that can become like a safe practice is what I mean
Because it's counterintuitive when people assumed back then that larger block size would lead to lesser replication of the Bitcoin blockchain
And they assume that causes like lower decentralization. I'm not sure if they consider that this actually might discourage people from using it as a graffiti wall
So my question is, is there an equilibrium size you think?
Well, it's the size that we have to live with, right? Whether it's optimal, I don't know. I mean, in my mind, any kind of block size soft fork to decrease the block size would be madness
And it would be opposed by, you know, because it essentially disables non-custodial lightning and ARK and everything else
But that's only a matter of time, you are saying. So that's only a matter of time to disable on L2 because on L3 they can exist just fine
Yes, but the thing is, but it's kind of like the old saying, it has to get worse before it gets better
So it has to go to the FIPOCALYPSE in order for the chokehold of the laser-eyed priests and podcasters who, you know, engage farm on Twitter
With their doomerism about never changing, you know, basically the chorus that's chanting ossify, ossify, that has to be essentially exposed for just what they are, which is just a cult
And the plebs should lose confidence in them first, and then, you know, confidence and real L2s will be possible, I think
Because after the pleb uprising, nothing that stands in the way of scaling Bitcoin can survive, I think
Because, I mean, Bitcoin loses all rationale and purpose if it becomes a plaything of whales and black rock, right?
And don't you find it plausible that the pleb uprising would cause such a chaos that it's already very hard to get consensus on anything
Or for people to get a good understanding, or most Bitcoiners won't get a good understanding on any of the proposed changes today
And in the chaos, don't you find it plausible that this actually gets worse?
No, I think ossification is the de facto status quo now, a premature ossification, right?
But the uprising is all about overturning the status quo
It's about, we need Covenant soft fork to scale L2s
We need drivechain soft fork to allow drivechains
We need a WASM opcode to verify proofs, right?
To enable ZK rollups with WASM, for example
There is something I want to mention
I mean, I completely agree with basically what you're saying
But I just thought I'd bring this up, which is, you know, people like Roger Ver, for example
He has been waiting and hoping for fees to rise in L1
I think maybe I brought this up months ago, when you first started to talk about Feebuckle
He's been waiting, I assume
I mean, I don't know, Boris, but I'm guessing he's been sitting down
He has been waiting for many years because of the 4x block size increase by SegWit, right?
And he is thinking something like, he needs the fees to go up
He needs people to be unhappy with BTC
And then he's hoping to swoop in and that everyone will switch to Bitcoin Cash
You know, that sort of...
No, that's madness
People will switch to validity rollups and drivechains and ARK and, you know, better scaled Lightning
All those things remain within the network effect, right?
The moment you switch the asset, you're exiled to another planet, basically
Nobody wants to be exiled to another planet
Everybody wants to...
If you cannot stay in Beverly Hills, you want to stay in Brentwood or Westwood or coastal LA, right?
If you can't stay there, you have to be like a few hours drive away from LAX or something
The point is that you don't want to be exiled to another planet
You want to go to a rollup where you can move your Bitcoin trustlessly or drivechains, you know
Which is, you know, crypto-economically secure
Nobody wants to, like, abandon the asset
That's something
I agree, but I just thought I would toss it out there as, like...
I mean, it will be an uncertain time, don't you think?
Maybe it wouldn't be Bitcoin Cash, but maybe someone would try something
It's like Game of Thrones, you know
Chaos is a ladder, it's an opportunity for soft forks to get through
That's the way I see it
I see chaos of the pleb uprising as a way that nobody can say, well, we shouldn't change Bitcoin
Because by that time, the ossification course will be completely discredited, right?
Because they've been telling the plebs just keep stacking sats
But then, you know, plebs are like, wait a second
You want me to spend 10% of my savings to move them somewhere now?
Because the fees are 50 bucks
I'm talking about global soft plebs
I'm not talking about, you know, first world, you know, CryptoRati or whatever
It's a time of opportunity, basically
And the sooner it comes, the better
Like, for example, the guy that spoke recently, Bitcode
That they're doing some kind of indexer or something with inscriptions
You know, there's just, like, a huge amount of activity in there
And we're, like, weeks from somebody launching, based on the new recently committed standard for the Ordinals server
We're, like, weeks from launching ability to, you know, to, like, open the firehose of fee pressure
Like, all the collections will want to be inscribed with hierarchical Ordinals
You know, uncensorable, decentralized namespaces, websites, all of that is coming
Yeah, yeah
No, Alex, we are doing exactly client for inscribing, not indexer
Inscribing the important data
So, and if you allow people to inscribe, you know, first to inscribe their identity Ordinal
And then to inscribe a whole file system underneath
You know, like, my creativity Ordinal, my important document
Basically, just allow people to create their identity first
And then allow people to create a structure in there
And once they can own that Ordinal for the identity
Then they, essentially, the provenance of all the other digital artifacts is provable trustlessly back to them
You know, this is major, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly
By the way, basically
No, sorry
I just wanted to ask you, Alex, basically, things that I own
And that whole DID thing is basically getting one appended or how they say it
Well, I don't know if it will take off as an identity infrastructure
But, for example, if I was a heavy Nostr user
I would want my Nostr identity and my inscription identity to be the same thing
You can actually do it, right?
You can actually have a public key that has both your Nostr identity and your inscription identity at the same time
And you can have both of them secured by hardware wallet
With, right now, it's only like one or two wallets that don't burn your Ordinals
Like Sparrow or whatever
But once there's mainstream support a year or two from now
You know, now you're talking about, like, here's another use case for inscriptions
Imagine highly secure direct messages
Or just, you know, uncensored
Think of using Bitcoin blockchain as a Nostr relay
Right?
And that's a Nostr relay that you only pay once
And then the data stays there forever, right?
Yeah, but this totally does not scale, right?
No, but highly secure messages, highly secure valuable messages
It would be worth it, right?
If you want to send, like, if you want to communicate between secret agents
That are, like, around the world or whatever
With encrypted messages
That's, you know, that's like, spam bots do that
With Bitcoin blockchain
Nostr would just make it available to humans
Yeah
Honestly, that's
We can get back to that
But I will shut up about the other stuff
But I have something to say about that
I was just going to say
I don't think it makes sense for private highly encrypted messages
To be permanently on a ledger
You'd be better off using the mempool
And have a bfemoral
Well, I mean, I don't use Nostr
Go ahead, Monsadler
With this, just one
So, some people are expecting that there will be a cyber pandemic event
It is kind of telegraphed
That there will be something made up or real
And in that case, actually, we could see that
The Bitcoin network is weaponized
And as a defense measure
Might actually, they will put real effort into
Trying to filter out the Bitcoin protocol
As a national defense effort
What do you think about that?
This is just a side tale
I thought recently there was a merge of some encrypted communications
For peer-to-peer nodes
Maybe deep inspection firewalls
Like the Great Firewall of China can handle it
I don't know
No, I don't think you can do that with deep pocket inspection
But I think you have to use stateful inspection
And man-in-the-middle attacks to actually identify
But I think just general traffic shape analysis
And just identifying the node patterns and stuff
Will allow them to just drop those packets
And basically make the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network unable to function
I'm not sure if they have to go absolutely sure about it
What about using Tor?
Tor recently had an upgrade with Hashcash
I think Tor was unusable for about a year, a year and a half
Is it possible to communicate with nodes in North Korea over Tor or not today?
I don't know, honestly
Again, in a scenario where they are trying to cut off
The command and control capability of an adversarial superpower
Or a belligerent superpower from their infrastructure
Like stop from updating the bots
And stop from getting new instructions
In a situation like that, you might even see stuff like
Only HTTPS and DNS works
And nothing else really
Or it's very rate-limited and doesn't work between countries whatsoever
So it can get pretty wild, I think
It can, but people have been tunneling DNS traffic over HTTPS
And I suppose you could tunnel peer-to-peer traffic over HTTPS as well
Right
I'm curious, what's really going on?
I think the whole framing of drivechains is a little bit mistaken
In that it should not be marketed as a change to Bitcoin
Maybe the right audience is the miners
Yeah, I agree
Because nobody's talking about what these sovereign roll-ups are about to do
But they're about to have a much bigger MEV and offensive impact on Bitcoin
Than drivechains ever could
So this is kind of like a piece of software for the miners
To activate with a miner-activated soft fork
The only question is, what is the game theory on the stability of such a soft fork
If it has to be announced publicly
Because presumably somebody launches a drivechain
Which is advertised on the internet
And the claim implicitly is that the miners will reorg out blocks
That include transactions offending the BIP300
And URSF, User Rejection Soft Fork
I think would be very, very difficult to coordinate
And it would fail
I would love to see how this game theory would actually play out
So yeah, I 100% agree that
It's not me who's framing it as a change
It's the critics
The critics though, they're not real critics
Like Moon Settler is a real critic
But they're just like concern trolling
And they just want to kill the idea
And they don't know anything about the idea
Michael Saylor or someone told them that
Bitcoin has to be protected against change
Or it just evolved out of the SegWit2x momentum
And so there really are no critics of this idea
It's just using an opcode that counts to 13,000
It's not even really possible to criticize the idea
What do you think about the stability of a miner activated soft fork?
No, I think the miner activated soft fork will win instantly
And the users cannot resist it
If they do, they'll be breaking the...
Will it be stable or will it require continual policing of the cartel of the miners?
If the miners activate the soft fork
And then all that's necessary is a few other...
Anyone who's using BIP300
If they also run a node that speaks that language
That also enforces that
Which they would do because they just want the accounting
You'll have a challenge from a dissenting laser-eyed miner
So there will be a mining pool controlled by a laser-eyed ossifier priest
That will try to mine a block that includes an offending transaction
And then everybody will see that block
No, no, I know, but everybody will publicly see that block orphaned
And this is the essentially assassination of the prince in World War I
That's the starting point for the next war
The hot war to break out
The next war to break out of that block is like invading Poland or whatever
In 1939
Not really, because it's actually quite different in many, many ways
But even if it weren't, as you said before
No one wants to be exiled to a different planet
So I think...
And none of these laser-eyed people run nodes or do any mining
They're all just fake
It's just one guy with a Twitter bot farm, basically
They're farming engagement on Twitter to sell their podcast time, essentially
This is the whole nature of the laser-eyed cult
It's a bunch of people chanting ossify
As a way to cause outrage on Twitter
To engage farm audience for their podcasts
And these people will tell you a year from now
Just buy a Blackrock ETF and sleep well at night
Not worrying about multi-sig backups
But what I'm saying is...
The miner-activated soft fork should be marketed probably to the miners
Probably exclusively
But it's less stable than a regular soft fork, isn't it?
It's less stable, isn't it?
No, I don't think there's any difference
Because...
It's maybe unstable in the fact that it has...
Paul?
Are you there?
He's lagging, I think
While he's lagging, just want to say that miner activated soft fork is less stable than
a conventional soft fork, because conventional soft fork is, of course, is
enforced by nodes rejecting blocks, and the miner activity soft work has to maintain
the cartel of miners' orphaning blocks, which is continuous
sort of
It's to their benefit to do this
And their software will do this by default
Yes
Paul, are you back?
If you activate a soft fork, basically...
The miners have no choice but to do something
Because they have...
I believe they have two choices
They either enforce the rules themselves
Or if they really want to try to wiggle out from enforcing the rules
Then they have to reject all drivechain-related transactions from their mempool
Not to accidentally mine something that breaks the rules
Because at that point they would get orphaned
So they would need some mempool policy filter
At least, I believe, to...
You have to assume that one of the pools will be a laserite pool
And will intentionally mine a block as a challenge
To see if it gets orphaned or not
The activation means that the majority of them
85-90% enforces the rules
It is suicidal to try to challenge them
Unless it's a test
You're talking about a conventional BIP-9 soft fork
There's never been a miner-activated soft fork of this kind tried before
This is where none of the nodes have upgraded
But the miners have agreed to orphan blocks anyways
Yes, it's the same thing
You could do it with 55 or 60%
But the stability of the cartel is different
So the only difference is
That the miners could in theory stop enforcing the rules any day
That's the only difference in my view
So you have the same dynamics for activation
You have the same dynamics for enforcement
But the users can't really trust it
Because the miners can change their mind any day
If they are not enforcing the rules
So the users would have to wait for it to be merged into core
And be widely distributed
And then they can start relying on it in theory
Even if you're doing miner signaling for a miner-activated soft fork
Miners can lie or they can change their minds
And to what Alex was saying
Let's say that an economically significant portion of nodes start rejecting blocks that use whatever opcode it ends up being
Opnop5 or whatever, right?
A miner could say, alright, fine
I'm going to mine a block that bypasses the normal hashrate escrow counter
And just spends these anyone-can-spend coins
And at that point, the group of miners who want to enforce BIP300 have to actively reorg that block
So it's not just a matter of, like, they have to enforce the rules
They have to be able to reorg blocks out
It's pretty possibly happening
Every node that enforces the drivechain rules at that point
Automatically finds that block invalid
So it's not so much
Yes, but the problem is you have to assume the worst
Assume that no nodes have upgraded to drivechain because it hasn't been merged into core
But somebody created a fork of core and merged Luke Dashjr's patch into it
And then 60 or 70% of the miners are running that version
But that version also actively has to reorg offending blocks
And let's say that this reorg has actually happened
Which is proof to everybody
Because everybody can see this happening
This is proof that there is a cartel that's now enforcing drivechains
And this proof is highly offensive to the laser eyes
Who will then rally and start screaming
Sorry, I thought when we are talking about miners activating
Is that they have been signaling and they are enforcing
And that's pretty much already known to everyone
I think we were talking about a case where it's like
All in LayerTwo Labs go and talk to a bunch of miners
And say hey, why don't you guys just turn this on
And then in the extreme case
It's like the only people who are enforcing are the miners
And nobody else is enforcing
But that wouldn't really happen
Because what it would be
With the miner activated soft fork would be like
You release software that invalidates any block
That breaks the BIP300 rule
And then it only activates if like some threshold
Whatever, 75%
Of miners upgrade
In their whatever, if they signal in the
2000 block period or whatever it is
So if you did that
Then what would happen would be anyone who wanted to use
BIP300 like an end user who wanted whatever
Zcat sidechain, they would also be running it
Because the best way to just track all the deposits and withdrawals
Is just to straight up run the software
So it would start to accumulate users
But by the time that enough people
By the time there was any significant amount of money
In the chain there would be like some people
Running it and then of course
Well with the soft fork or even with the hard fork
The exchanges would play a pretty big role I would think
Because everyone cares so much about the liquidity
But I think
When some rogue pool that's not on board with drivechains
Decides to just take the coins
So they just decide to
The 75% will not build on that block
And then it will always be
That will trigger the outrage of the anti-drivechain crowd
To run and install URS clients
And the question is
What happens then
Because what that is is really a hard fork
Because they break the heaviest
You're asking people to do something where you're only on the chain that the upgraded people are on
You're going to break the heaviest chain
You're right that's a hard fork
And let's say that fails
However long term what is the stability of such a soft fork
When 99% of conventional nodes that are still running the unpatched core
Are not enforcing it
It seems like the miners have to keep coordinating
The cartel to stay active
They cannot have the center
So this is like the fragility of the cartel problem
It would be very difficult
To upgrade to the latest version of Bitcoin Core
Because Bitcoin Core might not have support for BIP300
And it would then maybe end the road of upgrades in that direction
They would have to
Yes
But in order to make it easy for them
You would have to have a tracking patch
That has no rebasing conflicts with core
You could just merge this patch on the side
And obtain the new version for miners
Because without that the cartel starts falling apart
As soon as the new core is released and some people upgrade and others don't
If you think about that though
Think about the fact that there are no soft forks anymore
And then you think maybe
It actually doesn't matter
Because Bitcoin Core is never going to ship anything
That actually makes any difference to anything
Jeremy Rubin was told by core maintainers
He was essentially told that if you want to do a soft fork
You should not do it within core now
You should just have alternative clients
Recently there was a submission about
Covenant tools that has three soft forks in one
And it's not clear
That the maintainers will merge it or not
If the ossification crowd is so strong
That no changes to consensus can get merged now
Without people losing all their privileges in core
Just being sort of silently shunned
Or losing their
Maintainer privileges or what have you
If no merging in the core is possible
Then somebody has to try what Jeremy Rubin didn't try
Which is to create this patch that can be tracking core
Without conflicts continuously
And then create core plus essentially
By the way
I was just going to say
I think that's what might be necessary for activation
But I think if a soft fork actually got activated
It would get merged into core
I think the thing that core maintainers are trying to
Get out of the business of doing
Is to get out of the business of
Neglecting the privacy
Or weighing in on consensus changes
But if the network has activated a consensus chain
Yeah, but they can plausibly argue
That if the nodes are not enforcing it
It's not a real soft fork
It's kind of like a censorship attack by the cartel
Yeah, so let's leave drivechains aside for a minute
But let's leave drivechains aside for a minute
network and nodes are enforcing it.
That's a scenario where I could see that being upstreamed into core after activation.
That's what they said, at least that was my understanding.
That was the communication that if it's activated properly, then it will get merged
into core,
But by activated they mean if 80 % of nodes are actually upgraded to
that soft fork.
don't mean cell owners are censoring.
nodes are not measurable really.
we all know that you can't really have consensus with nodes.
if somehow the users managed to go or
coerce or plead the miners into activating it,
bit -proper signaling and whatever activation parameters, and it is the understanding
that it is now enforced on the network,
than they would include it.
That was my understanding.
I don't actually know what the maintainers think, but it seemed like that's what they
are saying.
Paul, why haven't we seen the cartel of miners activate LayerTwo Southpork yet?
Are they afraid of the laser -eyed priests and
all the controversy?
they're for their revenues to come up.
a good idea.
But remember that we have yet to actually ship anything
that could be activated.
We have our testnet software, which is slightly different from
Luke's pull request.
How is that doing?
Well that one didn't, Luke's pull request did not have activation logic and it was
it was not reviewed or tested by anyone except Rhindahl.
like two other people.
by the core essentially.
shown by the
core. Well, it would be better if we had a pull request that
lots of people had actually looked at and had given a thought on.
Of course, the main goal with the pull request was to take the logic of the
BIP300 text
and the code that we had already written and acknowledge the fact that Bitcoin Core
has certain, you know, customs and rules and things about, like, know, like about
whether or not certain letters are capitalized and, you know, stuff like that.
And also everyone thinks I have to be easy to maintain
such and such.
there's these little idiosyncrasies.
So let's try to respect that, something that would really fit in.
So it's not like there is no code, but it is like there is nothing that
perhaps would be totally up to the
caliber,
but we're working on that.
Although it would help if people would look at Luke's pull request and give a real
opinion on it as far as actual code.
So maybe we should just give up on waiting for people in Bitcoin Core to do it and try
to hire the most expensive freelance C++ people we can find
and just have them go through it or something like that.
don't know what specifically would be done, but we have yet to actually produce, and I
personally have actually delayed intentionally producing such a thing for as
long as possible because I thought I'm not exactly sure what would happen after I did
that, you know.
So I did kind of want to not do that.
have a desire to be nice.
You've been delaying things since 2015, right?
Yes, that's true.
got to try something new now.
Yeah,
well, you know,
think you're right.
have tried a couple new things.
I think that some people, some people take offense if you open a pull request before
there is technical consensus, whatever the that means.
those are called
draft pull requests, right?
That's why you could be marked as a draft.
Yeah, of course.
But then you saw that even in the pull request, saw, obviously, anyone who looks
through the comments can see plenty of people, including Peter Todd and whatever they
were saying, basically,
this poor question never been opened.
So. Yeah, Luke has basically said that he is not looking for concept X, right?
That's not the point.
He asked this and that was pretty much all he got.
My point is like, you gotta stop asking for permission because those silver and roll up
people and the dark net roll up people that are about to deploy their roll ups, they
don't bother asking for permission.
Asking for permission is essentially asking to be told no.
the
whatever arguments apply against drivechains apply tenfold against sovereign rollups.
offensive, you know, impact on the MEV, whatever the hell you came up with.
Let's just be clear.
You are talking about when you say sovereign rollups, mean people in Ethereum
dumping a bunch of ETH data, using BTC as a parking lot.
No, no. It's actually a brand new deployment of the EVM compatible chain
that, in Ethereum world, they have a very well -developed terminology for kinds of
rollups, and the sexiest rollups are either base
is
the Bitcoin is way to create a two -way peg.
The Bitcoin is is to The a create a The good The Bitcoin
of what the data means and whether it's valid or not is left completely to the nodes of
the rollup. So there's a company called Chainway, which is about to deploy in a few
weeks or months a sovereign rollup with all the Ethereum tooling and probably cloned
all the Ethereum protocols onto Bitcoin.
and it will probably have
a shit coin in there because the two -way peg now they made some noises about some kind
of interesting novel two -way peg design that's kind of the secret sauce that they're
withholding until later which may may not be trust minimized enough but my point is
that these roll -ups will all whatever
criticism applies against Drivechain applies more so to the rollups because rollups
actually operate right on the Bitcoin blockchain, right?
They embed the data inside Bitcoin transactions.
So therefore, MEV and every other concern, you know, is much more acute
with with sovereign rollups than it is with Drivechains,
Drivechains including offensive content, M -V, whatever, miner incentives completely
change if the rollup becomes popular.
whatever objections apply to DC apply to sovereign rollups 10 times 10
to 10 fold, but nobody talks about them because Bitcoin or the
laser I call this impotent to do anything about them.
And therefore it's not even a subject to discussion, right?
Well, I agree with you.
I mean, I have occasionally said.
by lobbying, you created a shelling point for the laser I called
to criticize you and coordinate with each other by finger pointing and
saying that, look, Paul Sztorc is the devil here, he's trying to kill Bitcoin by
introducing this change X.
So you're just feeding their engagement farming on Twitter by being a personification
of the devil
that they all need in order to rally the faithful, Whereas the real devil, quote
unquote, is the sovereign roll ups and ordinals that don't bother asking permission and
they don't get personified and they don't parade themselves in front of their laser
eyed priest cult and then they just do what they want.
And that's, I think what you should, that's the,
that's your end game is to do what needs to be done, I think, playing nice has only
made things worse for Drivechains and for Bitcoin.
Well, stay tuned, know, because there's always
time to break bad, right?
I think you hinted that you want to do something around the time of the having, which
is not too far away, April next year, because maybe there'll be some kind of cut in
revenue and the miners will all of sudden become highly incentivized to do something.
But if you're to do that, then
you have to provide a client and test nets like now in order to do something early next
year around the time of the halving or
Right.
Well, I got disconnected there.
Now I have a green person,
a green Block6 backup.
hope they... we have Ryan Dahl, of course.
So I hope everyone got their questions answered or whatever.
We have been going for a little while,
so maybe we should start to wrap it up.
If you need to ask questions, quick
Okay, I don't hear any
Well, I guess we should call it here then
So this has been a very fun one
Still no critics or whatever decided to show up?
Still no critics or whatever decided to show up?
I hear you. Sorry, I just wanted to say I crashed in the previous minutes and I hear you
I hear you. Sorry, I just wanted to say I crashed in the previous minutes and I hear you
I hear you. Sorry, I just wanted to say I crashed in the previous minutes and I hear you
Okay, great
About to talk and he got disconnected, so
Oh
Space is a complete shit show
I crashed like 4 or 5 times
I don't understand why
people crash and so I crash myself a lot.
don't know why.
will putting this shit like this, Alo fire, 90 % of the employees on Twitter is working
fine. mean, it's not working fine.
Still though, is kind of, for not firing 90%, I mean, that's,
For firing 90%, it is kind of remarkable
It's pretty good
But they still can't deploy Spaces thing onto iPads
Yeah, Spaces doesn't really work that well
Yeah, Spaces doesn't really work that well
Can you imagine, when else would you even be able to...
What if a train company fired 90% of the staff
What if a train company fired 90% of the staff
Or like, I don't know
Well, most of our employees were probably political commissars
Well, most of our employees were probably political commissars
Policing political correctness and wokeism on the network
Policing political correctness and wokeism on the network
Democracy was at risk, it was absolutely essential that we hire those people full time
Democracy was at risk, it was absolutely essential that we hire those people full time
Benefits, healthcare, and remove disinformation
That could harm our society
our society.
Because, as we all know, if you hear about it on Twitter, that means it must be true.
Somebody needs to start mirroring Twitter in
Somebody needs to start mirroring Twitter inscriptions
That way it will actually become immutable
That way it will actually become immutable
You need like a good bird pun for that
You need like a good bird pun for that
Creative people, get on it
Creative people, get on it
What's a bird inscription pun?
What's a bird inscription?
No, should should should mirror only the tweets that have like that were published by
people with like 10 million or more followers into inscriptions automatically and then
nobody can delete a tweet.
So you have like eternal, eternal X.
So the
Unkillable Bird. There you go, that's a freebie.
I mean, that's just another unknown application of inscriptions that, along with
using inscriptions as a relay for Nostr, which is kind of like my fantasy,
ultra -secure
and ouster messaging with eternal messages.
Now you're turning into a Bitcoin SV guy.
I'm the original OG like you, is like the unknown unknown uses of digital scarcity,
as opposed to like monetarist, thematics,
the laser -eyed cult.
Yeah, they're very weird in that they think demand can only like
flow one direction or something.
don't even really get it.
They're literally like saying like it's bad if gold was discovered to cure cancer and
allow us to
It would only be bad for
their engagement on podcasts because they have to create dietary restrictions
to the religion.
like you must not do a million things otherwise all
the faithful are outraged because nothing like outrage drives engagement on Twitter
and so ultimately you know like like the Berkshire Hathaway
guy says show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes and now we're seeing
outcomes
we have two new people who may hit it up here
here.
What's up guys?
So you said about making Twitter little sensible.
You guys are not right?
I hope so.
I have this idea for a sidechain that's because
Because I think that's just like I said, fearpocalypse to come and people try to
escalate Bitcoin in some way.
one thing that I hate on our studies is that
it gives RIP to the release.
And I think
The Lightning is all Custodial.
Everyone uses Wotaputoshi, uses Albi.
For now it's good, but if you want to have a medium user, how many users do
have? So if
noster scales to that point, need to have, I think, my opinion, best way should
be have a sidechain with
nodes,
sidechain with relay effects of noster together.
and the
incentives of the sidechain come to the relay.
So the relay can be paid to host the data and we could
make something like a fork of Monero or
pick up the code of the Monero
or another ZSNARK, another thing for
anonymity.
Anonymity because... Is that possible?
Some of it is.
I think the problem with IP is,
at the end of the day you have to accomplish two contradictory things.
Everyone has to able to find your computer to message you and you have to find other
people's computer to message them.
But also everyone wants the location of their computer to be hidden.
So it's is a bit of a contradiction and there's ways around it.
what I think the way to go is I wrote a called Bit Names.
you search for it, you find on my blog, Truthcoin Bit Names.
And I have this little section in there about social media.
And what I think you should do is you should have your name on a sidechain and you
should have a fallback.
There should be like a fallback Twitter
there that's very rarely used.
only use it if you get like shadow banned or canceled or something, or you get like
demonetized or whatever.
They just delete your account, you know, then you use it to tell everyone where your
new account is.
And so it's sort of you're only
using it when,
it's basically the layer one of your Twitter.
And then everything else is like a custodial cached L2, Twitter, it's more server
-based or something like that.
So that's what I think is the way to go.
I don't
about putting every single tweet on the blockchain if that is actually ultimately going
to because of just...
The thing is, don't want put every single Twitch on a blockchain.
once,
instead of using Lightning on Oster, using Sidechain.
The release of the monster could be monetized through this network.
So they will be sent to buy us to host data.
create new project.
And create a what
create a new do project.
do And what would like create a new project.
create
anything because then you really are storing.
That is the case where you have an unlimited amount of data available.
It's not like immortal the way L1, ordinal inscription data is, but
it's at least unlimited in size.
It can be everything.
Like you could just flip the entire reality
where everything hosted by AWS, everything hosted by Linode, everything hosted
by whatever, DigitalOcean, all of that could be flipped to
go into the decentralized protocol because
it's not the storage itself,
it's on the blockchain, it's just these periodic proofs so it has this log -in scaling.
So that's a kind of ambitious idea, but I think something like that could happen and I
think the name coin thing that would do your identity.
Your identity would be like your actual name everywhere.
So you
wouldn't just have like a screen name on Twitter, a screen name on YouTube, screen name
on whatever, Instagram.
So I think that's a good place to actually have some kind of like on blockchain
social media thing.
Although of course it would not actually work for Scanlon to every single message.
But
the few key messages registering, letting people know what your public key is
so that they can communicate with you, letting people know where to find you, like what
is your onion address or your ITP address or something.
I think that, something like that could work, I think.
I
is one problem.
Nostr has that that is probably more important than the long -term
data availability. that is just you don't have any guarantees that
if you send someone a message, they will receive it.
That's kind of
intriguingly the opposite of if you use anything on chain, any message there, everyone
knows that everyone receives it, which is quite a very intriguing different
situation. That's exactly the bargain that the Nostr did with the is that
it gave up shared state
with good consensus and that's how it gets its decentralization and censorship
resistance. the cost of that is that there is no data availability
in the sense that there's not even a single unified view on NOSR from anywhere.
Right. And like you said, there is no guarantee of persistence either.
But that's the bargain with the devil that Noster did.
delivery because...
I mean, if the Noster protocol simply documented and enibbed saying for high value
messages that you want to be guaranteed to have data availability and guaranteed to
have persistence, use this Relay
Zero, which doesn't use WebSockets like every other relay, but instead simply
creates an inscription that then other nodes can read.
That's the Relay Zero kind of fallback.
people would, you know, high priority messages that need that data availability
persistence. would
say important message, you know, checkbox on, and it would go into Bitcoin
inscriptions, and then you would get what what you're not getting from NOSR today,
which is availability and persistence.
So on the unified, Nostr would have
like a very
nice use case of completely
sidestepping the whole problem we have with
domains and web servers and stuff like that.
And there is a possibility for it to used like
such a network that is an alternative to these JSON API
cores basically. instead of having an application where you
have a hard -coded domain port
in the
application. Everyone can see what it is and they can hunt down your server
and arrest you running a Chomany eCash
Mint.
Instead of you would have an amp up in the application and the
communication
The problem is that you run into this, maybe you
would not need store the data forever, would need to store it for a period of
time, you would need it to be available for proving things in
these
back and forth protocols.
But you don't really need it be stored forever.
If it's stored for a month by relays or whatever, that would be completely fine.
But you actually do need assurances of delivery and
provability. Because that would make a lot of
these off -chain scaling solutions be able to this for
communication, but I don't think it actually works.
And when you try to put this sort of communication on a blockchain, I think that just
doesn't scale unless the blockchain is pruning in its
nature, maybe not even then.
don't know. basically, don't see kind of it solving that
particular use case.
I don't see anything really solving that.
I think we need to find like a middle ground between static
web pages on blockchains
And I
think,
well thank you, I think you have a similar situation in Bitcoin.
And if you know when Bitcoin
Core starts, has to have a bunch of seed IP addresses to find peers.
This is what's missing from Nostr, is the ability to bootstrap using some external
system. And a perfect way to bootstrap would be to have some kind of
channel in inscriptions where you could just say,
if the public key also happens to have an inscription under it on
Bitcoin, that's where you can go to bootstrap, right?
And this is the bootstrapping semantics are not defined in NOSR, but if they were, then
after you bootstrap through Bitcoin inscriptions, you could then continue the protocol
by communicating whatever relays you have shared with all your peers later.
So this is similar to how Bitcoin has to have a list of 8 or 16 IP addresses
to give you the seeds, which is not specified in Nozter, but if it was
through Bitcoin, that would solve your
problem, I think.
I'm not sure, I will let others talk.
For you to host the data, we can run our own relays, but
the problem is that everyone has to connect to my relay
to see my messages.
And I think they will, like you said, pick up a relay that's
sent to relay zero that retransmit to other relays, for example.
don't know. But the problem with that is that...
has to be a well -known place that everybody knows how to get to.
It shouldn't have an IP
IP address, right?
It should be like an implicit shelling point, which my candidate for that is Bitcoin
Inscriptions. That's the Relay Zero is whenever you start your Noster, Relay or Noster
client, go there and see what this is like the meta Noster.
This is the, is for bootstrapping only,
right
yeah but that's just for the message
because the noster came is just for text messages and that's most
important and it's right about people are trying to do decentralized
communication protocols that cannot be censored like there's all these attempts to do
multi -stage coordination on Noster or Noster marketplaces where people instead of going
to Dark Web and being subjected to exit scams by guys running these,
you know, nodes on tour, you can just have a
noster marketplace that occurs spontaneously.
But what's missing is that little piece of coordination out of band, which is where do
you go to find the set of relays that this marketplace uses?
Yeah, not just that, not just that, because you need pro -proofs.
If you want to
do this peer -to -peer marketplace, or you want to do so many cash mints and stuff like
that, that is highly reputation -based.
And that is the main incentive not to cheat, You lose your reputation, you lose your
business. So you need fraud proofs, and for fraud proofs, you actually do need to make
sure that you can
prove either the existence of something at a given time or the absence
of a reply in a given time.
the NoSIR relay network right now absolutely doesn't work for that.
Well, because like you said, it's because NoSIR does not provide any guarantees that
your recipient will
get the message, right?
But there is a way to ensure that every recipient who wants to get important messages
gets those important messages, is that to hard code the behavior into every Nostr
client that says when you start up along with your usual list of relays that
are configurable, always
check relay zero, is, you know, Bitcoin inscriptions.
If Bitcoin inscription is always checked,
then the messages can get there,
Then those messages will have contain fraud proofs, etc., right, for marketplaces, but
at least they will get there.
But all those messages would
be public issue.
It's not a good way to do it.
No, they could be encrypted, Encrypted to the public key of the recipient.
Yeah, are by default and also the DMs are encrypted.
So that's not a problem.
Yeah, but you can see who sent your book.
The thing is, I don't want to bring up like shit coins,
I have to.
Oddscy is doing really, really good as substitute
for YouTube, because YouTube is a shit.
Yesterday I... It's a good thing, yes.
I don't know you remember whatever it is.
What was it called?
shit coin?
A library, I think.
No, library, yeah.
I remember that from back in the day.
Those people were in New Haven around the same time I was.
Yeah, the OC is really great.
The people there are still not censored.
Yesterday I uploaded a visual on YouTube called Out of Shadows.
YouTube just said it was conspiracy theory,
harmful of violence.
The document just said that you shouldn't trust the information that you are getting.
yeah.
And on one side, people have even this community of 3D printed guns
and people are sharing.
There's a guy called
3D printed general.
YouTube channel was completely banned just because he put a video
of the history of 3D printed guns.
And a lot of things that people are being banned from YouTube.
I'd say, I don't know how it works.
I have
to look it up, I think it's uncensorable.
I don't know, but the channels can be taken down.
The only thing that I know is that it's working and people are not getting banned, and
that's free of speech there.
And way it mostly is now is not working
the proper way because people are not incentivized to host videos, you know?
We did have, let me see, we lost Mar as
a speaker,
but maybe he will come back.
But yes, I think this topic is certainly of interest, like what will digital
scarcity be used for, and in particular, why is the
communication backbone of the internet so bad?
because it does feel very heavy -handed like
the YouTube seems to be very, I mean,
I'm sure there's an interesting flip side to it, which is just that they want to
protect the advertising dollars.
And so they don't want anything on there.
They want to discourage anything that's just too weird, you know?
Like I don't know if, does anyone want videos
of, like, people getting killed and stuff?
on YouTube? probably not.
So my guess is that that's part of it.
of Russians being killed, but not videos of Ukrainians being killed in the war.
Yeah, so that's obviously a double standard, but of course,
I think every time there's a war, people always move very quickly to boost all the
good news on their side.
you know what mean?
You don't want people to despair.
It's like you said, there's an added dynamic, but there's also the deep state dynamic.
So Twitter
is abandoning all the advertising revenue in favor of $8 a month.
And I think they're successfully transitioning from advertiser -driven revenue to the
subscription revenue. Once they do that, then they're immune from
pressure from advertisers, but they're still the deep state with all the
witch hunts and stuff.
Elon Musk was on the spaces, excusing himself for the ADL, the last
week, man.
They are everywhere, you know, and he just said about that, nice that
you approved the ad
every new year on Twitter.
Before Elon bought Twitter, after he bought Twitter, they released
these Twitter files, literally saying that CIA and all these are
very surprising. I it mean, it wasn't
I mean it wasn't literally surprising, but it was surprising
I mean it wasn't literally surprising, but it was surprising
Of course, but I just meant that it was surprising that it was so like explicit
Of course, but I just meant that it was surprising that it was so like explicit
Like there's emails where they're just like, here's a list of accounts we need taken care of
Like there's emails where they're just like, here's a list of accounts we need taken care of
And they're like, okay, we're on it
And they're like, okay, we're on it
Now we have David Bailey is here
Now we have David Bailey is here
magazine giving you some beef I don't know
maybe I should be asking you ha ha I don't know it's I hear it's
run by here to run badly I I think that's true news.
that's definitely true news was well -run when Vitalik was running it, right?
Vitalik was... yeah, bring back Vitalik
Vitalik is the biggest friend Bitcoin now
Vitalik is the big friend of Ordinal's in their 4 Bitcoin now,
you know. Well, you know Well, yeah, we were discussing earlier, if you
watch the recording, we talk about the article, yesterday's article, or whatever,
whatever day it was.
Well, I thought there was some interesting elements to it.
I thought there was other parts that made no sense to me, but I
I will say one of the nice things about having a platform is when
you let people call both ways, I feel like you get more credibility for the
platform in general.
I'm glad to have a diversity of thought and opinion there.
Yeah, I think I actually also I definitely think it's much better
to have long form articles
as critique of drivechain, rather than like tweets or whatever.
think that it's actually a lot better.
Yeah. Even though one was great.
But yeah, that's much better because I don't know.
just think that it's just like...
More substantive conversations.
actually kind of
feels like it has a direction or something.
Going somewhere.
There's also kind of like more of a sense that it's a finished thought because like a
tweet is always too little, so everyone knows that there's not enough context, when
it's like
someone has a long -form thing,
their reputation is kind of on the line where they say, this is the best I can do with
all the, I had as much space as I needed and I laid out my whole thing and this was the
best I can do.
Have you tried? It's possible to go to GPT-4
Have you tried? It's possible to go to GPT-4
and tell it to create a court where there is a pro and a con side and a judge
and tell it to create a court where there is a pro and a con side and a judge
and then you can stage an argument for and against any issue
and have the judge decide on the merits at the end
and GPT-4 will run the whole process for you
That's amazing
I was loving GPT-3
Everyone's been telling me how good GPT-4 is
So this is kind of like when you save a dessert
for a really long time
I've been trying to build it up
I'm trying to remember what was life like before GPT-4
Even though I still use GPT-3
I still haven't really used GPT-4
Peter Schiff's son said it was the greatest thing
You can go right now on GPT-4 and say
Please form a coherent argument
for why all criticism of drivechain is reducible to concern
trolling and misunderstanding of what it does
and it will go scour the web and it will summarize
the whole argument in one page point by point for you
We should do that
and then I'll send it over
David, that'll be new
He just said he likes both sides
That will be my new article
written completely by GPT-4
and my amazing prompt
is the seed of creativity
AI supports drivechains
The strangest thing is that you get the best answers
if you conclude every prompt that you make
by the following sentence
Take a deep breath and think it step by step
If you say take a deep breath
and think it out step by step carefully
for some reason that just drastically improves the quality of the output
I'll tell you the reason
This is me being an armchair psychologist
I think the implication is
obviously our brain has many different modes of thinking
but there must be a big edge
to some of the ones that involve not taking a deep breath
which is why they must work better in some cases
probably not a case where you want a written textual reply
but they must work in some cases that are online
where people go back and forth quickly
or something else is happening
like it's virtue signaling or it's flirting or something
and so that must automatically
discount all those
but it must be something
because otherwise it would be
it can't be the case that that always improves everything
because that doesn't really make any sense
it's already trying to do the best thing
so you must be cluing it in that you want a certain flavor of response
which is like a more rational flavor
Anyway, that's my theory
It's crazy how you can go and tell it to create personas
like you can actually formulate a demand
that it create a persona of a well-informed proponent
and well-informed opponent
and you can have them read all the cons and pros on the internet
for one side or the other
and once those personas have been fully created
and indoctrinated
then you can have them lay out their best arguments
and then have a third persona of an impartial judge
who will summarize both sides and render an opinion
and people have done that on political issues
but this drivechain
you can just basically go dump that into a paragraph-long prompt
and you will get some amazing output
And then inscribe on the blockchain
or will it be forever?
Inscribe it
Nice, I like that
Well, we should do it
That would be great
You need a plugin
Plugins are possible on GPT-4
So you need an inscription plugin
Inscription plugin
Yeah, that's good
You can just say, inscribe this answer
like you have shared this answer
That's not as catchy though, Alex
That's too wordy
Let's check GPT-4 to shorten that
Bit drive
Quick question for you, Paul
So, we have our panel next week
and we have a lot of questions
and we have a lot of questions
and we have a lot of questions
So, we have our panel next week
Curious if you
I haven't listened to the debate that you did with Peter
at
TabConf
TabConf
I'm going to before our session
but what do you think are
the most interesting
the most interesting questions to ask
Peter
like probe Peter's position
and after the past couple months
of you taking fire from all directions
what do you think are the most sensitive
questions for you to answer
Well, I mean, I asked
Peter's belief is that if miners are persuaded to do anything
it's a block size increase
so I asked him, is buying an ASIC
a block size increase
but he didn't answer it
the audience had sort of moved on
even though that sounds ridiculous
that's certainly, I was thinking
how far does he really take this idea
that anything that a miner is persuaded to do
to force a miner $50 to like dance or something
is that a block size increase
so I don't know
he also, one thing that he should be
sort of asked about is
we paid him to write this written critique
of Drivechain but he still has not produced it
so this was like many months ago
three, four months ago, I don't know exactly how long
and he has all this time
to do all this other stuff and he's been saying
he says like in Luke's pull request, this is a terrible idea
and he's tweeted that merge mine sidechains are Greg Maxwell's
biggest mistake and so he's tweeted
for years about this idea being terrible
but he's not producing any of this
and in fact, not only has he not produced the report
but he started actually tweeting in public
before the debate that he didn't really know the idea
and he would have to ask me some questions
live on stage in order to understand the idea
so if you watch the debate, you see that
Tidwell is a little confused
because what he thinks Peter is doing
he thinks that Peter is asking me some kind of like Socratic
question to like
tee me up or some kind of haymaker or whatever as Tidwell put it
but really he was just asking me about the protocol
which also made it kind of bizarre for me because
I was like now I have to play two roles
one is I have to like helpfully explain the idea
to him in addition to doing like a debate
opponent type thing and then Tidwell said that he didn't
he didn't realize that
he hadn't seen those tweets until after the debate and he didn't
realize that Peter had basically
become unprepared
so all of these are kind of mysterious constellations of things
so like
this idea of because that was all he could end up saying
was that it was a block size increase
but it's not a block size increase at all
the only thing that's a block size increase is what our layer one node
is required to do in order to
measure confirmations
Peter Todd says that and you can see how bizarre
I find it when I have to even ask him a question
that is like is buying an ASIC
a block size increase
so and then he's also maybe complained about like
his time he's like it might take miners
some time to set up the sidechains or something
but it's kind of like it's really absurd
you know because the miners do all kinds of things
all the time
like it takes them all kinds of time to do everything
when they plug in all the miners
when they research a new cooling system
so it's really this bizarre paternalism
on the part of the miners
Peter's view is that we should take a big interest in
what miners do all the time
as for myself
I mean I think the idea is
has enormous potential and is basically
harmless and that's just my point of view
I think probably I was too
polite in advocating for it
and I just kind of shrug people critique it
and I would say some people say this some people say that
even though the critiques don't make any sense
I don't know what I would be asked
what would I be asked?
maybe someone here can suggest something
one topic I know I want to drill into
is I want to go into the most controversial
part of the proposal
the conversation in general
which is activation and
miner activated soft forks
that is the most controversial part
it doesn't really have anything to do with drivechain specifically
it's more just about our defective
culture after all these years
is unable to regard
like progress
or even just
it's unable to
we have this complacency that I think is a huge mistake
we just think everyone thinks the current version of bitcoin core
is perfect
and I think that's a huge risk
yeah and it's like there's no
there's no
process for advancing things
and so when you just take the only process
that's known and pursue it
the critique and attack is well
how dare you follow this process
it's harder to even follow
I mean it was very disappointing that Luke put out the pull request
and he said it was a draft in the title
which is the proper thing to say and he had no activation logic in it at all
and in it he said he only wanted
people to comment
he said it very explicitly
that he only wanted people to comment on the approach he was using
and not on whether or not the idea was desirable
he made it crystal clear
but then that pull request was immediately overrun
by basically vandalism
but more than that very few people
participated in
reviewing it honestly which is even worse
so what it speaks to is basically
kind of a corruption and a hypocrisy
in the process which is kind of like
partially working
it just speaks to basically that
there is the unwritten rules or whatever
and that would seem to indicate
that there's plenty of room for
people involved in the process to advance their own
agenda at the expense of Bitcoin
by the way what I saw in the pull request
was that it is using
or trying to use the
UTXO database
to hold the drivechain databases
so that it does not add additional
databases to the transaction validation context
was that something like that going on?
yes that's correct there's like a kind of
different index there's like a negative index of some kind
and that's something that Luke
did this
yeah he came up with that
I mean he would certainly know much better than I
he probably thought there would be some combination of
easier to review, easier to understand
yeah I mean it was one technical criticism
I met
in regards to the drivechain is that
it wants the transaction validation context
and we might not want to do that
and when I looked at the code that Luke was writing
that's what occurred to me that this seems to be a different approach
and I was however not sure when this happened
and where this happened first and that's why I was
so wait can you re-explain that
what exactly is the critique?
so the critique was that you are adding
additional databases to the transaction validation context
this is a very developer view of things
like the users don't
understand this probably by running a node
but for developers the context
when you call a function or whatever the size of that context
does matter
and in the maintainability and the possible
errors in the complexity of the code
in the scope of the changes that need to be made
so if you can keep that
small and minimal
and every alternative to drivechain
that would use covenants
or covenant like primitives to do this
without explicit databases
because there are ways to less efficiently do things like with something like the Merkleizer the things proposal or something like that
you just basically implement a hash rate as scroll counter and the walking back and forth logic in the script
and you can do the blind merge mining with the covenants and so we basically could do this in a very different way
and those would have this advantage that they are not actually adding additional databases to the transaction validation context
and you basically just have the UTXO set as a database for evaluating the transactions in a block
and from what I saw Luke actually rewrote the BIP300 logic in a way that he did something very similar some clever hack where he actually put the data in the same database
yes but it is a very miner point I mean like I think I mean I don't know really what to say like it's kind of like if you had an Excel spreadsheet and you had instead of adding two new tabs
he could keep it all in the first tab or something like that you know so it's not really like a
yeah it's totally a core developer fixation or whatever
yeah but it wasn't like a technical critique like it's like a you know it's like you build a car and then you something under the hood is moved somewhere else
also under the hood but that is the type of productive thing that should happen whenever anyone
you know tries to contribute to Bitcoin Core so that would be like a good thing but very few people even commented on any of that you know like that was what Luke asked for comments about but
so what do you make of this argument of BIP300 makes miners custodians
I don't make really anything of it because the miners are already custodians of everything and the only way to change that is to remove proof of work from Bitcoin
so the it's true that the miners have slightly more what you might call well I don't even really believe that so because the idea is the miners have a narrow task which is to copy paste this hash from the sidechain to L1 once every three months
and they really have the choice between like conforming to that or rejecting that and trying to steal all the coins for themselves but that's the very same choice that they face when they support the lightning network or when they support regular L1 Bitcoin UTXO moving around
so I think it also doesn't matter the logic of the custodian question is the same as the terrible logic of caring about what other people think third parties think about the Bitcoin network such as the senator type thing which I think is just terrible
it's a very low quality idea you know because if you care about if you if you have like if we split Bitcoin into like compliant a hash that was like compliant with let's say the government of Russia or something and one that was just independent
the compliant it once it's compliant it's all the proof of work is useless because it's just saying it's all coming from whatever it is Washington DC or whatever if that makes any sense
yep
who people who have some kind of opinion on what people should do.
my view is that hashers don't even have any agency and the mining pools don't have any
agency either so leaving the question of whether or they should support drivechain is
kind of like
or whether or not they should support any Drivechain, the one that has a lot of coins
in it or steal from it.
All of this is just the mining pools will do whatever they think the hashers want them
to do because the hashers can switch mining pools at the drop of a hat
very easily and cheaply.
So the pools have to do what they think their clients do.
don't want them to do.
So the pools really have no agency.
They don't have any ability to like decide.
So they're not really custodians of anything because they can't, they're not, they
they temporarily run the show
is this
it's kind of like you said something like if you have you had a show if you were like whoever it is let's say you're Bill Maher or something in the in an instant the security guards are running Bill Maher show like in any given point in time but you know if you wanted to fire the security guards and replace
so how much agency does anyone really have and the hashes themselves they must do because of the difficulty adjustments they if they're not profitable if they're not in the upper half in terms of profitability they are fired and so they also have no agency so the whole idea about
I don't know you know the drivechain is a very simple offer to miners it offers them lots and lots and lots of fees in return it basically asks that they copy paste a hash
it's not really they they cannot do that but if they don't then they you know that's no different than just if they decide to stop supporting the lightning network or something moon settler yes hello
yeah it did it did occur to me when I read that article from the miners that they basically screwed the pooch if they have to worry about that already so they are overexposed oversized and positioned themselves badly jurisdictionally if that is a big concern but I didn't want to like really get into that with them
it's a very awkward thing to discuss I think would be a very good thing though if we had miner revenues that they wouldn't touch that would decentralize mining like this we mentioned before even though we think this would be very small but the Zcash drivechain if those were revenues that some kind of like KYC heavy miner if they couldn't touch those then that would actually be good because it would just melt that pool down
yeah and obviously they don't want that so they will argue about that as I mentioned that they don't actually want other miners to be more profitable and what I wanted to ask earlier from you is is it really true that the miners the hashers or the AC corners can just switch pools in this context like so what is going on in the United States
I like to call that thing Uncle Sodom for obvious reasons so I think they have this tendency where if ever 51% of the hash rate would be on American soil at one time they would just say that they now own the Bitcoin network and silly stuff like that it's just the nature of the beast
and in this case they can easily so if publicly traded miners are the majority of the hash there they can easily just mandate that they have to use offer compliant pools or something like that they can just make an executive order or whatever other regulation they can also try to use various subsidy tactics, tax exemptions or whatever for compliant miners
as you already know if that is economically detrimental then all it does is increase the ROI of non-compliant mining which means that if you are an enterprising person and you start mining in a different jurisdiction you will eventually be able to outcompete the other miners who will not only start to lose on a relative basis but because of the difficulty adjustment they will eventually go compliant
yeah in the ideal scenario where they leave money on the table it is if the government subsidy is significant enough for the opposite to happen for the hash rate to grow then that is very very bad for Bitcoin and I'm afraid it would cost almost nothing for the budget of the United States it would be like a joke so it's very weird for me when people boast about how nobody can do anything about Bitcoin
good question though I mean so like if it doesn't cost anything then what's really happening is not because remember the main bad thing that the miners would do would be to censor transactions so if the somehow the government is paying them more then what they're really doing is some kind of like complicated outbidding of the they're really like doing like an ordinals inscription thing they're outbidding the block but they're doing us the favor of not of not broadcasting their thing so it's kind of weirdly
but again they have to can only keep that up for as long as the people are unable to outbid them in terms of fees and it's only suppressed until the US government stops bribing them to not include these transactions and then all the transactions become up for grabs immediately
but let me ask answer your first question about how easy it is to switch pools which is to say it's very easy and they even admit that in article and on Twitter afterwards but we should make it even easier so one thing that I have been tinkering with recently is a piece of software that every like it's a plausible piece of software
where every single the goal would be to have every single miner run this software which is kind of like this big I mentioned it to you at the beginning Moon Settler what it does is it it's what it does is it organized it keeps track of who's in what pool
Oh can you guys hear me or I am frozen I can hear you I think Paul's Paul went out yeah I wanted to ask him that since he got his new phone did this Twitter got better but looks like not by much
this is big mining interfering in this Twitter space right now they're they're they're they're censoring and silencing Paul
you know I I will say like you know first off talking about anything mining is a little bit of a sensitive topic for me because a lot of miners are customers of mine that I do not want to I do not want to piss off my actual my actual customers and I also think you know in terms of selling drivechains and and advocating for it it is not going to be well received by miners
to say kind of like hey miners have gotten too big and really y'all need to be disrupted I think that that's going to be a sales pitch but that being said I do think it's true and I think that like if if let's just say hypothetically like Bitcoin mining was made illegal everywhere
I was like I started thinking this through the other day like what would happen and I honestly think that if we could get Bitcoin mining banned in every country Bitcoin would become much more robust like much stronger because the network wouldn't shut down you just drive all the activity underground on the mining side and from an end user perspective it's not like miners improve the user experience of Bitcoin
so the hash rate would just basically flow to the people that are best at hiding their activity which is kind of what we want like like compliant Bitcoin mining is really you know like quote legal Bitcoin mining is really a subsidy to those that do their mining out in public like out they do it out in where everyone knows what they're doing because that's the whole point of being compliant is that the
you don't have to worry about the authorities because you don't have to worry about the authorities you don't build that into your business model well one day we're gonna have to worry about the authorities one day Bitcoin mining is not going to be compliant when the government turns hostile against Bitcoin truly so like why wouldn't we want to start incentivizing the behavior of miners exactly what Paul was just saying it's like okay if there's all this extra revenue to be generated by
you know hiding your activity you're gonna get a lot more miners hiding their activity
so the only counter argument could be it is like
objectively not a nice thing and the very fiat thing to like change the rules
after people made their
business plans and investments, right?
to change the rules and change their profitability after they committed financially,
that's kind of like an asshole move.
I'm not overly sensitive to plight of US
miners, I have to say.
Yeah, it's definitely an asshole move.
I hear that and that's why miners also would not want to hear that message.
like, know, think we've, you know, it's
beleaguered point
that like home mining is not profitable.
And like you have to have like economies of scale.
like if Bitcoin mining, like nodes don't suffer from that same problem.
Anyone can run a node.
And like that's the value prop of
a node. what if by making
Bitcoin mining something that is
underground, you really return back to a dynamic where
the only kind of scale you can mine at is like from your home you know like now like now there's so few less institutional scale mining facilities that it actually can be profitable to mine at home I don't know I don't know just a thought
yeah sorry guys I got interrupted yet again by this crazy app that continues to crash but I was trying to say it's one software that everyone runs and then it it checks it can check for censored transactions and blame a pool so it's like a pool hopper software and since it's easy to see if a transaction is censored because if you if you've heard about a transaction for like 20 minutes
and it should have been in the made it into the blockchain you know if it had the highest fee but it didn't it misses like twice in a row or something then you can be pretty sure that something's sneaky going on so it can then ban they can figure out which pool is responsible and just everyone just disconnects from that pool
they join another pool and then you just have it so that this can keep happening forever and then as I mentioned you Moose Adler it's like if everyone ends up in one pool it just has everyone flip a coin or choose a random number and then it just splits them in randomly into new pools and software would be able to also create a new pool from scratch so it would also be able to do that so it'll be automated
and that is why the important thing with the pools is just how easy it is to switch and that can be made very very very easy the thing is we don't even really need to do any of that though because it's already so easy to do that I think the miners are already on a very short leash they have never when has any transaction really been censored
and when has there's when have have there been like you know reorganizations so that people can double spend like none of this stuff actually happens so so already they're on a very very very short leash and already it's very easy to switch pools I think it's interesting how stable the hash rate distribution is you know what I mean if you check it on one day you come back a month later it's still like foundry and pool whatever it's still Luxor with 3%
or something. So I find that to be kind of interesting.
But I can only assume that just because everyone's happy with where they are, and
there's nothing to disturb this equilibrium.
My theory about that, why we did not see like real campaigns
and stuff like
believe it's a big part that there is a huge coordination difficulty
that is basically unsolved for any such thing to happen.
the problem with that is actually reorg markets that solve this coordination
difficulty would cost basically almost nothing to set up.
when people start doing silly things where they try to build up
marketplaces for transactions and transaction acceleration outside the mempool,
they actually like basically are laying the foundations for for such a thing to happen and I don't see it not only I don't see it an unsolvable problem but I see it something that might actually just solve itself for those that want to pay for reorgs for whatever reason
and a lot of people can opportunistically jump on it by basically submitting double spend transactions to this mempool alternative and when there is a profitable set then it is offered to miners or any such thing
I kind of think this could emerge unless the mempool is so good that nobody even thinks about using alternatives I think that's kind of the direction that Bitcoin should go but it's not a popular idea right now for some reason
hey not to uh not to interrupt at all but Satoshi and Joyer did you get a
taproot wizard what is going on here
yeah he's out I guess he's not he's got a little icon look at that dude he got one damn dude
Udi what the fuck investor and Udi's thing I can't fucking get uh um I think I think my mic
is on oh I hear you did you get a taproot wizard yeah I just um just uh got one earlier today
really happy about that I think that the taproot wizards has been a monumental shift of like
Bitcoin culture brought a lot of uh like other people from other ecosystems back to Bitcoin and
more eyes on Bitcoin um I mean that's how I learned about ordinals and inscriptions obviously
I've been a Bitcoinist very very early on but uh I I think it's a good movement in general
you know I think that there's been a lot of like uh benefits to um the taproot wizards movement
well dude solid flex solid flex very jelly belly thank you thank you
yeah I'm super honored to to have one as silly as it seems just a pixel uh image but um I think
it it's it's more than just like you know just an NFT I think I really do think it's like it's
like a movement that hopefully will continue to do um good things for for Bitcoin I think
ordinals in general has onboarded a lot of people to to Bitcoin that were you know some people might
say for the wrong reasons or or whatever but these are people that have spun up nodes you know there's
been definitely thousands of nodes and at least hundreds um like that I've that I've held myself
in the order core there's definitely been people that are you know that been in other ecosystems
and now they're becoming Bitcoin maximalists and I've had plenty of conversations with people that
they're like wow everything else you know is uncomparable to Bitcoin and these are people
that didn't really touch Bitcoin but have been in the crypto ecosystem for you know over a year or
two years or whatever um so I think that's really good and just seeing people running full nodes
learning about UTXOs learning about self-custody and just seeing the benefits of you know Bitcoin
over other other you know other chains and just to see to understand why are Bitcoiners the way
they are why do they you know what do they value what is the culture of Bitcoin what are the values
of Bitcoin and like a lot of people are becoming more exposed to that I think that that that's a
benefit you know more people learning about Bitcoin is good for everybody that that are
Bitcoins uh Bitcoiners and no matter for what reason they use it and I think that that that
goes together with um like drivechains it shows that you know people can use Bitcoin for different
things but as long as we're all using the same thing we can all be under the same umbrella we
can all have like a common goal people that might use Bitcoin for something we don't like
you know that's okay because maybe other developers might help them out then and we don't have to
completely shun them out we can we can help them we can all be together and work towards a common
goal even if we have differences and we might want to use it in a different way so um yeah thanks uh
thanks for asking me I guess no we can't have any of that Bitcoin adoption people running nodes
people learning about what makes Bitcoin special no the Satoshi enjoyer what about
what about my podcast what about bro what about Bitcoin is my whole band and if we let people
find out about it it's going to not be cool anymore I think that like the podcast is you
know they're going to come crawling back they're going to one day when they'll be the only way
that they'll be able to buy food will be with Bitcoin and then Bitcoin will have saved like
there they definitely have a good to them right they definitely speak to a lot of people and
people resonate with it but not everybody there's going to be people that will not resonate with it
and you want them and you know what those people are the problem we need what we should do is we
need to melt those people down and pour them into a different cast that so that they're exactly like
the rest of us because that's what Bitcoin is about hey speaking about what Bitcoin's about
one last comment and I'll get out of here so I don't derail y'all's conversation um
but uh uh going back to Bitcoin miners being um uh compliant like I was also thinking about this
the other day on um like like what makes Bitcoin like more valuable and it kind of bothers me
that like we've allowed this narrative to take root that Bitcoin um is different or special
or Bitcoin is um like uh Bitcoin exists because you know we comply with the laws and so the
government like allows Bitcoin to exist and it it bothers me because yeah the unregistered
securities type yeah the whole point of Bitcoin is like like there's nothing the government can
fucking do about it like that's what makes Bitcoin valuable and powerful like like the
government's perception of Bitcoin even though they can cause a lot of pain is kind of irrelevant
like that's the point of it and so like in the power dynamic Bitcoin's more powerful than the
government like it like like Jesus that's a very moxie thing to say well I mean I guess what I'm
saying is like you've been to the will of Bitcoin Bitcoin doesn't bend to the will of some elected
politician and so from that perspective having them ban Bitcoin but it not fucking matter is
like a massive billboard that is displaying the power dynamic and so to allow them to like act
like oh they've blessed it to continue it's like you're like you're just some fucking old man who
shits in a diaper in Washington DC like you don't fucking matter like I don't know I just feel like
it's like Bitcoin becomes more powerful like more valuable when people come to appreciate that
its existence is independent entirely from the political system well of course I actually think
it's a little worse than that which is to say if we go down the road of saying that Bitcoin must
always be compliant with whatever Washington DC decides then the entire design is not going to
work the hall the proof of work is wasted the you know the data a database would be
more technically efficient and better easier to scale Venmo WeChat pay CBDCs they would all be
able to easily compete with Bitcoin in that dimension so unless Bitcoin has this kind of
subversive edge I think it will definitely go to zero well I feel like the government's going to
keep trying to like sanitize it's like subversive edge because the last thing the government wants
is to be shown to be powerless so it's like they'll figure out some contorted way to like
make it seem like these two things are like working in combination when in reality like
Bitcoin has no fucking clue what they're doing it doesn't fucking care their hanger-ons and the
sooner that we can have everyone else see that it's like just the the faster that we like I don't
know dissolve their power I I feel like this is a little bit out there but like I'm starting to
think that like we need to get Bitcoin mining banned you'll need to have vendor adoption for
any kind of like for anyone to kind of see what you're what you're proclaiming here because
if if you had the government's close off any fiat off and on ramps like peg in peg out so to speak
then then you that would have not a catastrophic effect because the network would continue but it
would it would certainly have an effect the only way that you make make everyone realize that
that governments have no effect on Bitcoin is to have a wider vendor adoption
yeah circular economy and and and uh and the most important thing is this centralized price
discovery for Bitcoin because so long it's it's uh the price is discovered on a few uh
centralized exchanges and and basically the the fiat wall street bro liquidity
is the main driver of Bitcoin price it reacts to the changes in available credit almost immediately
and the money the supply changes and doesn't really seem to care about anything else
these are very centrally controllable things so Bitcoin can hardly be free in in this uh setup
well I will what I will push back on with the the markets where these things trade
because we have examples of illicit goods that are banned basically universally and those markets
are massively liquid so like you know cocaine or fucking like hard drugs those are massively
liquid markets that are moving huge sums of money moving more money than Bitcoin's moving
and they're able to operate like just fine I mean you know like I I did not I did not say
I did not say that uh it would not be liquid without this I would say that it needs to it
needs to move off from this platform because these platforms have shown that they will bend over to
the regulators like almost immediately they will fold and they implemented this KSCM bullshit that
was pushed on them uh without much resistance they did not try to flee the jurisdiction they
did not try to uh I mean a few of them did try to ignore VPN users and and stuff like that but
even they got uh smacked down and and beaten into obedience and and somehow people seem to value
the large compliant uh semi-institutions and the whole thing basically went sideways there
in my view and now now the price discovery happens there and increasing beyond derivatives and
I I think what you are saying makes sense so um I was kind of hoping that Bitcoin gets banned in
the United States and especially mining I I kind of found it weird that the European Union was more
hardline on Bitcoin than the U.S. for up till now it was a bit weird and um I don't like this
situation that the miners are so much exposed to the U.S. uh legislators and um I too believe that
it would probably better long term if if Bitcoin was basically mining and the trading was banned
in the United States but uh that's not the world we live in one can hope one can dream that one day
we can be uh banned uh the you know I think Paul's point on the mining of like hey um uh compliance
is subsidizing one set of miners and it's and it's uh subsidizing one form of behavior and it's
basically taking away potential revenue from those that would mind in a non-compliant way
uh I think that that applies equally to fiat on-ramps as well like like the centralized exchanges
um that are compliant have have cannibalized the on-ramp market and taken business away
from what would be the non-compliant like peer-to-peer markets and I remember when I got
into Bitcoin like the peer-to-peer markets were were vibrant and now they basically all shut down
I mean there's an uh maybe there's a couple left but yeah it's it's um uh it's an interesting
kind of way to look at it of just like yeah I don't know it's interesting that speaks to my
point where if uh if fiat off-ramps and on-ramps were banned then all that we would have would be
uh illegal drugs and podcasts and whoever sells stickers uh with lightning on the internet
though we need to get more people you know selling crepes and and lattes um the reason
I came up here though was uh if I could bring it back to drivechains for a sec yeah sorry
sorry I just have a bit of a this is probably like quite beginner questions but I just want
to make sure that I'm grasping this correctly um when you have this uh the the miners who are all
like the word I think that has been used is kind of voting on a hash that they copied and pasted
it's it's not really uh voting so much as just making sure that there's like a
a sort of enough of a mass that agree um on this particular hash being what the drivechain
like the shitcoin enjoyers are saying um because it's it's it's supposed to operate more like a
protocol um yes it's not um I think I still stand by using the word vote even though I think it is
misleading I think it is actually the least misleading of all the words in context because
what it does it's supposed to highlight the fact that you are not when you run an L1 node you're
not required to run the L2 node so it could be anything and in that sense it's kind of arbitrary
what it is um and that is very important because it would be very very easy to design something
that works perfectly all the time and that miners could never steal from if we just made it mandatory
but the whole point of sidechains is that we're going to try to police a sidechain that we're not
looking at so we shrink it to this one arbitrary thing but then even though on L1 from L1's point
of view anything could go there any hash could go there any 32 byte hash could go there for this
three month period and if there were a disagreement or like a sort of a close vote that would that
would entirely be a side effect of the shitcoin um having some disagreement on their chain which
is sort of uh it's actually not possible I mean it actually is possible because it no matter how
well we've designed the sidechain template anyone could fork it and then just delete all the good
stuff and they could you could have it's theoretically possible to have a sidechain that
has no software and then no one knows what the withdrawal state is but it's theoretically possible
um that's so much free because again the goal with sidechains is to give people freedom
to try their own ideas and to also assign blame when the idea doesn't work blame the sidechain
developer don't blame like the bitcoin process or like the consensus or the people or the miners
it's all about nope you have your shot sidechain developer and if there's no bugs and if it's
popular then you've done well and the miners they also have their shot no one no one gets to say
no one gets to shirk the responsibility and say well what could I have done I was I'm only
David Bailey runner of a magazine what could I have done to fix this problem in bitcoin everyone
always has their opportunity to fix the problem and then they always get blamed if they don't do
it right so the so so but the what I'm trying to get is everyone is resisting the ideas because
you're the they don't want the accountability exactly I'm afraid that's probably the case
but um the what's happening is if you use our sidechain template there's no disagreement on
possible on the L2 the L2 will automatically calculate for everyone it's doing every single
thing when it does its sidechain node it tracks every sidechain block every sidechain transaction
and then as part of the BIB 300 rules it has carefully kept track of during this period
which withdrawals haven't been paid out yet it sources withdrawals based on the L1 fee
that they intended to pay if they make it through the gauntlet the 13 000 count and
and it will automatically calculate the one hash that is the hash for that sidechain for everyone
it's always it's the exact same and that is also the transaction id of the ultimate transaction
that would pay out on L1 that all those withdrawals so it's all the same hash and it's
exactly the same for everyone and it's procedurally calculated automatically and in fact then it's in
every single sidechain block and every single sidechain block header and it's in in our software
it shows up in a little ribbon in the bottom of the screen where everyone can look at it
for three months so that's that's the this is the technique is on L1 it's arbitrary
hash could be anything but on L2 it's it's the easiest thing to find in the entire world
you know you can't miss it and it's one hash it's the same for everyone and it's staring you in the
face all the time it's very easy to find okay so that's why it's so if if like some of the
opponent's arguments have been like about if there's a sort of split vote but that would
only occur if there was like some real maliciousness happening on the on the sidechain
where they were trying to go on it can never happen because it can only happen if what could
the only thing that could happen would be if you fork if you if the blockchain has some kind of
orphaned block situation or re-orging near the exact moment when the new epoch epoch is uh
is starting so when it's going to calculate it's going to switch it's been telling you this one
hash for january february march and now it's it's around april 1st and it's getting ready to click
over someone could do a last minute withdrawal just try and get jump jump the line to get on
the train in time you know before it leaves the station and if that block is like if there's
some weird blockchain split and it's re-orged out or something then that then it will change there
but there's actually never any point in time when it is not known because even if there is
even if that event happens there will always be one of the two chains that is long either longer
than the other or has the most recent block found so this everyone who runs a sidechain node will
see this exact same chain state and they will see the exact same hash and so i guess um the reason
that's why i hate to interrupt you but i just wanted to get in this last point about
that's why i began the answer by saying i stand by the word vote even though it's misleading
so maybe now you get a better idea of what i
meant by that which is what i meant was it's not really a vote at all a vote is like there's two groups of people and they each have their argument for like
why you should vote for them and they're kind of like vying for your support in this adversarial
situation but that's not what it is in the slightest however i still stand by it because
the most important thing to emphasize is that L1 is not required to do any of this i'm saying i
shrink the problem to just one hash and i sort of hope for the best and that's much better of
course then because otherwise we'd have to be responsible for every single sidechain message
every single sidechain block all the sidechain rules and dependencies and whatever else
and that would be uh that would not work at all because this is something that already is in L1
counting the 13 000 and checking if transaction id matches something else is already what it's done
so now i'll let you get back to asking whatever you're going to ask about no i think uh yeah i
better understand it and um yeah voting i don't know if that's the best word but confirmation
has already been used um it technically is a cross-chain confirmation of a kind in in the
sense that when a bitcoin miner builds a block when they try to find the next block they are
sort of voting on which block to extend just happens to be the case that in our situation
they almost always vote on the most recent block but of course they could try to go back and build
off some other block they just never do and that is really really similar to what is supposed to
be happening in BIP300 since everyone knows which hash should be upvoted but we cannot ever
you see the design has to be built around
the whole point of any like design is in this situation i think is like there are all these
things out there that are very big problems so you design it so that they don't become problems
and then i don't know if this explanation is making any sense moonsetter gave me the thumbs
up but it's kind of like the the whole point we the whole point that we extended the block
miners always find it in their interest to extend the latest block that's because the design is good
and it's only works because they could extend some other block and that's why for example the
block withhold withholding a block of ambiguous validity which is a problem we discussed earlier
which is a problem we discussed earlier in this space yeah that's how you beat that problem by
letting the miners extend any block so someone finds a block and they say they refuse to tell
you whether or not what's in the block or whether or not the block is valid you're not you're not
screwed you just go two blocks back and you just keep moving on and then you just orphan that block
so it's because the design is so good that the problem never comes up and similarly with bit
300 the goal is it's totally and completely unambiguous what the hash should be and that's
why it's not as big of a deal to let the miners put any hash there that they want because everyone
knows what it is and everyone knows that even if they don't know they could know and so if anyone
out there claims that's you know if anyone tries to claim some kind of dispute that person is
destroying their own reputation because it's going to be very very very easy
unbelievably easy for anyone to figure out what the true hash is and then they'll just wonder
why this person tried to tell them such a pointless and destructive lie anyone who runs a
sidechain node will know the real hash and that includes people who weren't running one before
listen to this dispute for five or six weeks and then just decide to run it on a random weekend
so anyone can it's that's why it's the way it is and the other other thing is even if there was
like controversy in in the in this voting process the entire thing in my understanding can't ever
come to a situation where where the layer one nodes experience the chain split by enforcing
drivechain rules so the most likely scenario if someone really uses on the wrong cache is that
the withdrawal just won't happen at least that's how I understand it and and the only only way that
a chain split could actually happen is if if the layer one nodes try to like
manually alter the outcome they would fork or or something like that
the drivechain rules themselves cannot cause and and that's a very important thing right so
yes it is it's very important that one of the things it does is it also prevents unexpected
miner related soft forks as a result of drama on the sidechain because the three month long
withdrawal is like a really really really slow measurement of the miners sentiment you know
what I mean like they're not going to carry it the full 13 000 you know votes or cross block
confirmations unless this is really what they are determined to do so by the time the withdrawal
actually happens there's no like ambiguity over what is supposed to be happening whereas of course
it's just much easier everyone what everyone can do is more easily just let the withdrawal
fail so that there's neither a theft nor a withdrawal and then the sidechain software
automatically it will automatically notice that it didn't fail it dumps everyone off the train
and back in line and reshuffles the line and it uh we have a program to wait as a sort of courtesy
since since something really weird happened it waits like I think like 200 blocks so that people
can decide if they want to get out of line or get more to get in line or something try to figure
out what's going on and then it will try again to load the train and it will just keep trying
because that's what it's supposed to do and again this is all about putting the blame
on the sidechain community the developers and the users of the sidechain if the sidechain is run
very well it will always be very easy to find very very very easy to find out which hash is real
as long as it's possible to run a node that's the cost and as long as the sidechain is generating
fees as long as it's generating useful activity for its members and for bitcoin as long as it's
increasing the price of bitcoin by offering a cool feature which is the zcash feature
as long as it's doing all of that then it will be something that the miners want to keep around
so no one there's no one who would be stopping the withdrawal process there's no one there's
absolutely no one in the whole system actually has any incentive whatsoever
to create a dispute over which hash is real
so given what you say about how the L1 is basically unaffected
am I correct in understanding that the reason that there still needs to be like kind of massive
buy-in on this is because if you don't have consensus across the board that drivechains
drivechains are happening if 300 and 301 are adopted then any any uh any transactions or
addresses created by uh drivechains are seen as everyone else who's not a drivechain enjoyer
as being anyone can spend well that's partially the case yes i'm afraid that it the true answer
involves a little bit of like history and uh just randomness and chaos i mean in terms of
the social element yeah the literal answer is that more than 51 percent of miners must must
be enforcing a soft fork and then as long as they are enforcing it plus the people using it
are enforcing it plus maybe like one or two other people like maybe like one coinbase
something you know coinbase the company then um no one will be able to do a withdrawal
early they all have to do the 13 000 counter and the point of that is keep the miners on a
short leash so it's kind of ironic that what BIP300 does is make it harder for miners to steal from
a drivechain and that is the whole point that is sort of why miners alone shouldn't activate it
it's because we could already do drivechain today with no soft fork by just doing like a
handshake deal with the miners where we just say okay miners let's just all do this now but the
miners would prefer to be able to prove that they can't do something you know what i mean like it's
uh it's kind of it's hard to you know i don't know if those are great metaphors but it's like
you know when people get together and they drink everyone lets their guard down it's kind of like a
disarmament the miners say listen if you send us these coins we'll be able to send them wherever
we want and then you're thinking well why would i do that that sounds crazy and the miners say well
listen we can send them wherever we want but we have to we have to first tell you exactly
where we're sending them and then we have to do this three month long dance
and so and during those three months who owns what hash or who's in what pool all that could
change a lot so it's going to be kind of hard for us to we're going to be sending it today to our
future selves three months from now which are not necessarily complete overlap and so that just
kind of makes it a little harder for us to take the coins and therefore it's sort of easier for
people to trust the miners who have handicapped themselves in this way that makes sense okay good
um just a final question and as to why you're not doing it in a super ordinate way like the
way ordinals are done sort of uh building up a a scaffolding outside of layer one i i assume
that's because in your in your view this uh this way is the the way to do it without introducing
any trust like the way you need to with liquid uh partly it's really because i was probably a little
too nice about the whole thing really which is i just well it's sort of like i invented this thing
and then it kind of felt like the community went like in the segway direction and i was kind of
like fine everyone's making money this whole time so i was just kind of like whatever and everyone
thought you know all the other the other thing that was happening was a lot of people who had
different ideas were shooting themselves in the foot and so all the other ideas sucked so
bitcoin was doing great the large blockers forked off and they would have been like good customers
of this project so that kind of stalled it all so the way in which they withheld SegWit created
this miners versus developers sort of drama so that was kind of just like this kind of
slowed it down i think and i was just kind of waiting around for you know like a better moment
i think but then what happened was recently i was kind of looking into more of what everyone
else was doing you know how are things going enlightening and whatever and i was like
oh this sucks actually so um i should better uh be a little do a little more advocacy
so that's a partly why um i think the the technical reason though is that you cannot
unilaterally do something like this uh the the op-nop five has to be redefined for everyone
at the same time or it just stays what it is so there is a tiny collective action problem where
like it would be nice if the first miners to switch over to doing this somehow got more money
than the miners to come later but i'm afraid that that is not i haven't figured out how to do that
yet so so right now no one wants to be like the people all want to just look around and wait
it's a shirking responsibility god bless them you know
yeah i get it um does this this doesn't interfere at all with op ctv or op vault like they're
completely unrelated in every way the uh the only relationship is actually that ctv
greatly improves the withdrawal from 20 000 to like 100 million or something so like the
withdrawal right now it's limited to one transaction since this is one hash as we've
already belabored this point so the miner is going to pay take this they're going to select
when the withdrawal ultimately goes through the transaction it'll select the UTXO that has all the
coins and pay it out to like this big list of like maybe like 20 000 people max but it can
never be more than the one megabyte block size limit since there's no witness discount in this
case and of course it shouldn't be anywhere near that because that's a little that's kind of cutting
it close and it's a little discourteous also so we made it like half that or something especially
since it's only one transaction every three months so it's not so bad to take up half of
a block and you know it can it can be at any block it can be at one that's in like three
three a.m in the morning or something once it crosses the 13 000 number i can keep going to
like 13 000 and one 13 000 and two and then it can still be included so but uh be that as it may it
can only pay out to those people but with ctv on layer one you could pay out to 20 000 ctv
outputs that could then each pay to whatever an unlimited number of uh not an unlimited but like a
it would be something like each of them would pay to up to maybe it's like 50 or 60 000 or something
so then it would go from 20 000 to uh 20 000 times 60 000 so that would actually be kind of
neat but i don't know how relevant that would be but that would be kind of a cool improvement
but they're real hard of your question yeah of course yeah yeah they're all unrelated all the
op vault op ctv op uh op drivechain are all unrelated and kind of orthogonal i don't think
well uh a quick question if the covenants are of soft 14 and it's possible to implement
a primitive drivechain without registration slots and with some inefficiency
there were uh ideas for how ctv or apo or other covenants enable kind of primitive
inefficient drivechains would you be willing to settle for that and well i don't know about settle
but i think we should maybe we would do that next but you see the thing is uh
to me that would just prove how extra pointless it was not to do the efficient version so i still
don't see i mean i understand it maybe it's just because i'm too autistic but i just think like you
know what i mean it's kind of like i'm building a screwdriver and people are saying well paul what
if we had this thing where we had like eight hammers in a row and then and then they each
toothpicks and then we could we could we could maybe get some screws and i would just be like
why are we not using the screwdriver that i have reason you expect reason and rational behavior
from a cult that's the main problem that's so but you know in general right like it's
uh yeah that's my big character flaw oh my gosh how will i ever how will i ever make it
through life but i think the other thing to mention though is that i just mentioned also
that you we could do BIP300 today with no soft fork is just like a handshake deal with the miners
but it would be it'd be a similar it'd be like an inverse case where nothing is enforced
by anyone that would be even less secure right but see you're saying something like
you're saying something like it's just as secure because it does the accounting
but it's more inefficient but i have the version that is totally efficient because
but but less secure and these these are all just weird versions of the same thing to me
but probably not to you
but yes it's what i settle for yeah i think you're right um what i would say is i would
not settle for that but i would probably just go to an intermediate step i mean the funnier
thing would be to do the first we'd do the handshake deal wait for a while have someone
steal the coins and then say it's only because we didn't have BIP300 that these coins were stolen
and then just blame that on the also i just want to point out because i guess i'm a little autistic
that when you say the whole uh benefit of drivechains is that L1 doesn't need to care about what's
going on in there while at the same time there's someone to blame technically validity roll-ups
even though the up you know zkr opcode or up zk verify opcode must be checked by every node on L1
what happens inside the checking is just proof checking there is no inspection of the state or
understanding of the rules or anything it's just like a dumb top to bottom proof checker that just
checks syntactic correctness of the proof without actually understanding anything that's going on
on the validity roll-up so one recent uh new innovation in how to bring validity roll-ups
to bitcoin was that um the problem with validity roll-ups is that uh there's like infinite amount
of bike shedding that you know arguing about what particular virtual machine to target with this
up code whether it should be you know stark or snark or this machine or that machine until
somebody just suggested to target you know wasm which is the web assembly language as the target
virtual machine because that's highly portable all languages compiled to it it's high performance it
already works in all the web browsers and then as long as the validity roll-up itself can can be
compiled to wasm which anything can be these days that solves the coordination problem of what
particular opcode to target it also retains that desirable property that you advertise for
drivechains of not needing to care about what happens on the L2 as far as blaming if something
goes wrong like who gets blamed today if something goes wrong on ethereum L2 like arbitrum or whatever
clearly it's the team that launched that
uh
roll-up that gets blamed right and if the roll-up is launched as some kind of satoshi style launch then well you know satoshi disappears and there's no one to blame uh so it's basically buyer beware all the way so if you know if you if you are not worried about lack of decentralization and roll-ups then send your coins there if you are don't send your coins there yes of course i mean i think that i wouldn't really even feel that bad if we fast forward 10 years into the future and
people don't use BIP300 but they use something that does functionally like the exact same thing
i would just think well of course i was right in 2015 and i was right the entire time and uh
all these people saying oh what about what about if we call a senator you will be validated one way
or the other either by roll-ups being or by covenants being soft 14 or by drivechains or
you know sooner or later a pleb you know pleb uprising because of the apocalypse will validate
your ideas i'm sure all i'm just saying that the interesting uh peculiar thing about roll-ups is that
any tom dick and harry can launch a roll-up on ethereum permissionlessly for a single app so
there's like app-centric roll-ups like for example you can have a decentralized exchange that becomes
a roll-up or for example the frax stable coin on ethereum is about to launch its own roll-up
just for that stable coin so you can see a world where there is like a million roll-ups all
leeching off of L1 and there's no need to have a few major ones yeah the really really upsetting
thing would be if the only thing which i could see this happening ethereum defeats bitcoin because of
the turn complete script and it's not even used it is not even actually used in terms of being like
turn complete it is just used for like the same thing that's already like that's already in the
roadmap like for example ethereum's roadmap says never do any computations on ethereum L1 anymore
move all computation to one of a million L2 roll-ups and ethereum L1 is nothing but settlement
and data availability but this is exactly what of course you know we bitcoiners would say
when we were comparing or contrasting bitcoin it's the biggest it's the biggest irony that ethereum
is becoming more bitcoin but they are going to be more like it that's what well that's what i'm
trying to say is that the disappointing thing would be if bitcoin decided it will because of
the ossification gang it will not like add this tiny thing which is BIP300 which is like counting
the 13 000 in like a reversible op code that you could just discard and you know like if so instead
bitcoin decides like it would be like an irony it's like you know what like ethereum is saying
we have this turn completeness but it was only ever used for this one thing the you know the
kravitz roll-up which ended up being the standardized roll-up that everyone uses you
know what i mean like maybe there's one or two flavors it's basically like it's going to be used
like a grand central train station which simply orders blobs of opaque data from a million other
roll-ups into a into a kind of canonical sequence and preserves immutability and you know double
spend resistance of the sequence of opaque blobs but there is one additional component which is
that these roll-ups want to tap into the liquidity of ethereum which they all get that two-way bridge
with no trust of moving not just ether but every token on ether to the roll-up and back with no
trust that's yeah but that's what i'm saying i'm saying is this tragedy would be ethereum
defeats bitcoin because they use turing completeness to basically add BIP300 only
ethereum and that's the only thing that ethereum during completeness is used for is like basically
like these you know asymmetric sidechains or roll-ups as they're now called and then bitcoin
could have could have decided at any time to just do that one thing but because
they didn't want to resemble ethereum
that just we just decided sort of not to for no real reason that would be like so weird
but that's not gonna stay right like i'm i'm very optimistic because uh of two two two basically
things which is i've already mentioned that if apocalypse with or without ordinals is unavoidable
simply because uh the the the the tidal wave of adoption is gonna hit the absolute scarcity
the absolute scarcity of blog space with with the ordinals is probably within 12 to 18 months
and once that happens the pleb uprising will sweep away the cult that's been chanting ossify
and engaged in and farmed the engagement on twitter that that's gonna all gonna be swept
away by the by the energy of the of the democratic crowd from below you know it's gonna be like a
color revolution basically i have a question for you alex because i also kind of see it where it's
inevitable where the people go up um you know ordinals or not um but i i'm sure you remember
like during ethereum's like there was a peak time where like uniswap transactions were like over
300 each for for sustainably for several weeks right for like at least a month that was their
right but you can see that like most of the you know um newcomers coming into the space they just
weren't even using ethereum right they were using like bsc and other chains um so i'm not sure if
like the pep no but i tried that when when i had to like collateralize my bitcoin in order not to
sell it not to pay taxes so i tried using other l1s like i tried using avalanche and other chains
and what i came to realize is that even though the transaction fees could be 100 times lower
on those other chains it was still dramatically cheaper to use ethereum simply because
liquidity was so much higher on ethereum that even though you're paying 20 to 50 transaction fee
you're actually getting a much significantly better price on swapping assets or doing any
kind of operation simply because that's where every all liquidity is right so there's actually
20 to 50 but when the cheese when the fees were like you know 300 plus just for a uniswap i'm
sure that's no but that's exactly what it means the same way it becomes unaffordable to 99 percent
of individuals but it remains affordable to the to the people who count which is namely whales and
institutions because they're the ones who actually provide the liquidity you think that the whales
will basically in short the whales will will sustain the the apocalypse on that's exactly
that's exactly what already happened on ethereum and that's exactly what's going to happen on
bitcoin i'm assuming that bitcoin gets fully institutionalized and you will have luxury
ordinals and you will have blackrock paying paypal settling bitcoin between euro dollar banks and
you know you will have like the average size of transaction in dollars will go to like a million
dollars and then the fees can go to a thousand dollars and nobody will care so in that scenario
like in the current um like in the current environment it looks like then most people
would just be using custodial bitcoin then and you know exactly what already because i know that
that all the podcasters and the laser ad priests have already been telling people to use custodial
lightning and lsps as long as they keep chanting you know we love bitcoin and bitcoin only right
they're told to use custodial lightning solutions i have no doubt that they will tell
their you know their bamboozled flock to go and use blackrock etf right they will say well you
can just buy bitcoin and not worry about multi-sig fragile but on the same at the same time you also
think that enough of these plebs are going to be like like we want to use fully a non-custodial
bitcoin and well the reason why right the reason why you will have enough of these plebs is because
like 50 million plebs have already bought in and they hold some bitcoin and once it becomes
unaffordable to use bitcoin L1 for these plebs that will be the outcry that we saw on ethereum
and this this constituency is about to get a rude awakening that they've been listening to
podcasters they've been essentially telling them that everything is fine bitcoin is perfect as is
you don't you don't need any covenant soft force or anything but when they see that they have to
pay fifty dollars or a hundred dollars to move you know five hundred dollars worth of savings in
nigeria right they they can tell that everything is not fine right and the feedback the the anger
from that will be overwhelming and the anger from that will essentially discredit every priest that's
been podcasting ossified chance you know 24 7 because this is already this is this is what
happened in ethereum is going to happen in bitcoin and there's there's already a way to fix all these
problems like for example simply enabling covenant soft fork enables arc scales lightning
enables primitive drivechains and you know i'm not even talking about you know drivechains proper
or validity roll-ups but it will all be up in the air once the chaos breaks out it will be like a
ladder you know yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't use the word right chains for what simple governance can
do that's not right let's just call them sidechains of some sort of space chains when that
they are closer to space chains than to drivechain but do they have the same semantics as
drivechains with counting etc you you can have stuff like that but you can't really have
like a true hash rate escrow and drivechain is the hash rate escrow plus the blind merge mining so
as far as i can tell there are only a few proposals or you need to make a tailor-made proposal
uh for for actually implementing the hash rate escrow with the covenant because ctv ap or vote
will not really do that if you can do something like tx hash plus opcast maybe can someone can
counting with that z-man had a proposal for how to turn in almost any covenant into a kind of uh
you know like primitive primitive counting of of like lambda expressions with you know the
count going to 13 000 yeah but but see doesn't everyone see this is again me being autistic of
course but doesn't it aren't people even listening to themselves like it's all just nonsense this is
all just like whether or not we can count to 13 000 that's why i did the right thing when i just
made it count to 13 000 explicitly this is all it needs to do it's like you suffer from a
philosopher's fallacy i call it which is expecting humans in general to exercise reason and rationality
when not even philosophers themselves exercise it right so basically philosophy can never work
because philosophy is not a solution to any problem it's just a symptom of the underlying
human condition and it doesn't actually solve anything right it's just symptom it's not a
solution right so you're expecting bitcoiners to be rational no don't do that that's like
a bad idea humans in general never mind cult indoctrinated ossifier chanting you know uh
basically peanut gallery plebs out there you know alex the um the scenario you laid out earlier
like you know you could kind of there was like a one week period where fees went high
during ordinals where you could kind of feel the fear setting in yeah because you know
lightning started falling apart you saw yeah this year right and then people started like uh
looking to their their their choice leaders for answers and i feel like that's part of the
reason the reaction was to ordinals was so negative so anti-ordinals like there's a
variety of reasons a part of it is because like they could demonize ordinals as the problem
no the real problem was that the priests were being seen to be helpless right yeah the emperor
had no clothes right so yes right now the priest can condemn you on twitter and they can character
assassinate paul and say he's the devil incarnate or whatever and it seems to be working in a sense
because you know whenever there is like a vote on twitter paul is like outvoted three to one
but when it comes to ordinals which is the priest themselves blast that taproot soft fork
and they're completely helpless they don't even know what's coming to them because like what
you've seen in ordinals and inscriptions is less than one percent of one percent of the fee pressure
i'm confident of this because i'm telling you that the flood of data that's coming like anybody like
i anybody can simply like you know start create a web page that allows people to upload folders
in there and that's going to create like gigabytes upon gigabytes of fee pressure by the way uh by
the way guys paul actually kind of performed worse than the devil if you are talking about paul's
he's like incompetent devil you know no i i mean i mean like 60 percent of bitcoin has voted that
they would consider activating the soft fork that the devil proposed and paul is usually
i think that it's also important to see that um like just ordinals aside completely aside
i feel like a lot of these the the nigerian plebs opening and closing lightning channels
and complaining that they can't i feel like they just did not understand that the fee market they
really just didn't understand the fee market or they believe that bitcoin will never be like you
know mass adopted because if it's mad those real nigerians are we talking about i mean i've heard
people that were saying that they can't open a lightning channel and i'm like well open it once
in a month and they're like well it's too much or it's too expensive well they're complaining
they bought the propaganda that was sold to them about learning networks so i think they just all
the scaling problems right yeah i feel like they just didn't understand how the fee market works
with with bitcoin adoption like the fees are going to go up you should understand that and
actually you should want that right like you desire bitcoin to be more used without ordinals
even like the fees should go yeah the fees are going to go the apocalypse is inevitable either
way the ordinals just brought it two three years so well it's gonna it's gonna be interesting when
the fees go astronomical just based on monetary transactions then the reaction is going to be to
demonize certain types of monetary transactions as being not as valuable of monetary transactions as
others like like that's like because what other they're gonna have the same existential crisis
it's gonna have to be this exact same emperor has no clothes scenario well i mean i can tell
you what narrative they'll bring along then they will basically say you shouldn't use L1 bitcoin
but instead sign up with uncle jim who's running your local Fedimint for your neighborhood or for
your for your you know surfing game and then transactions uncle jim's Fedimint will be on L1
right have you guys seen that cringe animation from blockstream where 40 million uh tps is uh
can happen on lightning right that's the lie that's the big lie in reality yeah in reality bitcoin
does like sweet tps uh on average and and lightning got like 0.1 that that is probably
closer to the reality of the situation but they are pushing this uh yeah i i'm wondering over here
because like it seems like a lot of us believe that the fees will go up even you know without
ordinals it's an inevitable thing but of course with ordinals even more but i believe poll has
like a different opinion where fees would not go up or they would go up to a certain amount
i mean i would love that if the fees went up that would be great your opinion my opinion is very
simple i'd love to try to explain it yet again which is that people don't like it when the fees
go up so when the fees go up they they change their behavior and so alex i don't know you seem
to have studied this on ethereum in detail but people have brought up to you that they go to
binance smart chain or they went to solana or whatever yeah no i'm saying that will definitely
occur but you know that's because ethereum but don't you think ethereum built ethereum built the
L2s to solve that problem right but this is a difference between ethereum and bitcoin though
which is that right now bitcoin is paralyzed no no hatred binance and ethereum L2 ecosystem which
is binance is a different planet with a different asset people don't want to leave ethereum
basically there is two flaws in your argument that fees can never go high the easier flaw is that
you've analyzed so-called fee market in the past where i claim it never existed until maybe april
23rd this year that's a simpler kind of fallacy which is to assume that the fee market has existed
at all and i claim that it just cannot be set to exist until the last day that the mempool clears
right that's a simpler objection the more complicated objection is that you argue for
kind of substitutability of block space it's kind of an idealization that doesn't hold in
the real world because listen you know the property values in beverly hills california
are skyrocketed to 20 million dollars per mansion but i don't see those people moving to plano texas
right so this is but there is some but there is some price at which they would
right like if it costs right infinite 9 million 999 trillion dollars absolutely right so yes
there's a kernel of truth in what you're saying as well but my model that reconciles both positions
is this this kind of picture of a multi-level fountain where the top level bucket fills up
and then it starts spilling over into the second and third levels after that and that's exactly
what we saw in ethereum and that's exactly what happened here you know it's not really relevant
that much but let me here's here's sorry one one last remark despite the fees being 100x smaller
on ethereum L2s i never operate on ethereum L2s precisely because all the prices and all
the liquidity is so much more favorable on ethereum proper that the fact that i can save
you know 19 on a 20 fee by going to avalanche is more than offset by me losing 500 because
the prices on a swap on avalanche are less favorable so even though some people for very
small amounts will go to these L2s there is like a captive audience for L1 where it simply makes
no financial sense to leave ethereum okay first of all let me just mention this is not really that
important at all but the my empirical which is only one part of seven the empirical research i
did on the fees in my article which is uh whatever a merge mining uh security budget to merge mining
whatever i'm sure people can find it but um that was in order to discredit the people who say
there's an automatic upward trend in in p and i think you and i agree that it doesn't really work
like that it's not like because what people will do is they'll draw some kind of graph and they'll
say oh fees have gone up and up and up and they will continue to go up and up and up but that's
not really uh that doesn't make any sense at all in any way you know what i mean like they go up
for a reason like it's not like um unless you're just considering inflation it's not like a price
of a carpet that goes up
and it's 10 cents and then it's 15 cents and then it's 20 cents and it's 25 cent like
that's not really what's happening here this is like a crazily dynamic so so i agree with you that
um but it doesn't really matter because the theoretical thing is is far more important and
the idea of the substitutability of the block space uh let me just throw a see this is i
introduced a new argument that you decided not to run with which is i said a moment ago
ethereum is the type of culture that would build in L2 to solve its problem but uh do you think
that's actually the case here in bitcoin because of course you could easily just have people say
um you know this is what bitcoin is supposed to be about we see in ethereum the culture only
developed after they had their apocalypse and i don't think that's the case i'm saying they would
ethereum bill would they would they would like move fast and break things the whole time no it's
true but the but but until they actually because i mean ethereum promised to scale in in 2015 16 17
18 but they had their apocalypse in 2019 and until 2019 there were all these research projects
that never amounted to anything i mean they considered sites sidechains they consider
state channels they considered uh plasma they considered lots of yes i remember that they had
their own version of lightning and their own version of lightning was like generalized lightning
because it was for arbitrary computations not just for financial transfers right they called
they called it uh state channels payment channels right so they tried all these things but none of
it got serious enough to be actually included in the proper ethereum or anything right until
everybody's feet got held to the fire when when their apocalypse happened and there wasn't because
ethereum has a socialistic kind of ethos so when they promised the world the world computer that
you know anybody in the world can use and all of a sudden only whales and institutions are using it
and everybody else is stuck with their ether that they cannot even send because it costs 10 dollars
so 15 20 dollars to send a hundred dollars worth of ether that was a real you know shock to the
system and only after that point they actually got serious about scaling and having tried everything
they settled on validity and optimistic roll-ups right but why do you think that we would in
bitcoin handle it the same way because you can easily see us saying that well it's supposed
the fees are supposed to be a hundred dollars well but you know as you were saying a moment
ago you would kick it over to maybe fetamint but you understand that fetamint is not really a
you can make all the rationalizations that you want but even fetamints have to use lightning
network for interoperability right you can always send people to the blockchain blackrock
kind of etf but the thing is you already have a captive audience of 50 million bitcoiners who
store some fats on L1 and those people will get frozen out so that's that's the revolutionary
force of the of the pleb uprising it's not trying to sell it to new plebs because you can send new
plebs to blackrock but you cannot by the time the uprising happens so you're talking about the dust
UTXO right it will be like this is the thruster captive you know like lumpen proletariat out there
i did not understand that that was such a key part of your argument but it's very interesting
i think you're certainly right about that one thing that is was interesting in the past was that
roger at some point tweeted a website where you could look up
if someone searches my twitter you can probably find it search for the term one thousand dollars
i think um because he i tweeted about it after he tweeted about it because i was fascinated by it
but he he he's documented you can search on this site through the bitcoin btc blockchain and find
how many people paid a transaction fee that was more than a thousand dollars um because it just
multiplies by the historical price for you oh yeah yeah and there were and there were very very
many and that must mean that there was a lot of people who had these inputs that were not
consolidated and as a result well exchanges will pay a thousand dollar transaction fee to consolidate
you know a hundred thousand UTXOs no problem right like where where are you but just the fact that
that is even possible like the fact that that you know you know the fact that it even happened
is like well what i'm saying is that you you basically have this kind of the the laserite
priests have sown the seeds of their own destruction because they've essentially evangelized
bitcoin to 50 million global south plebs and by the time the apocalypse hits it will probably be
100 million and those people are all going to become hostages of high fees right you can you
can tell them so much to go to the uncle jim's you know Fedimint or you can tell them to
they cannot buy the black rock etf their local banking system is hostile they have to do you
know back alley peer-to-peer transactions for cash but they can't transfer their bitcoin that's
already stuck and you will see this outcry which we kind of saw a preview of an ethereum
where 100 million global south plebs cry out you know there's like a disturbance in the force
you could feel it in may this year like people pointed out that when when transaction fees
peaked at twenty dollars per financial transfer for a few days and it was like above ten dollars
for like a week or two you could feel that like people who are running their own lightning nodes
all of a sudden had all their channels closed automatically and they couldn't reopen them and
they lost money and they couldn't send a punishment transaction because the amount of money in the
channel was less than the transaction fee this is how lightning dies this is how non-custodial
lightning dies and i'm all for you know bank of america and mitsubishi bank in japan settling
with lightning instantaneously and with instant finality billion dollar private fat pipes and not
caring about the fees but don't sell lightning as a solution to the plebs on their iphones because
lightning can never be that right so we you and i know this but this is just the hard facts of the
lightning design but of course the priests have sold lightning as the silver bullet solution to
scaling and that was just a lie i think there's also a difference where um uh doing a you know
complicated transactions on ethereum you require liquidity and you know several assets and things
like this where it's not as easy for you to just use a different layer or even a different chain
for that purpose but if you're just settling value it might be much easier to just use a different
chain right no well it's easier for you if you're moving a hundred dollars or less but if you're
moving a million dollars worth of bitcoin whether you pay ten dollars one dollar or a thousand
dollars makes no difference this is all around let's just say let's say i want to move um you
know a million dollars of bitcoin and the transaction fees on layer one bitcoin versus
the transaction fees on using wbcc on ethereum right and if it's cheaper on ethereum let's just
say then i would be incentivized to do it on ethereum maybe to a point unless i know but
but wbcc is a different planet right it's a custodial synthetic asset it's not bitcoin it's
and it's right never mind that it's sitting on the galaxy right right but for the majority of
plebs use cases right they might be okay with that well the majority of plebs have been told
to do the following they've been told to have a strike wallet that has like a hundred dollars
worth of usd stablecoin issued by strike and then they keep their savings that they stack into which
is uh in global south it's like a thousand bucks or less and in the middle income countries it's
like a thousand to ten thousand and high income countries is maybe more but that stash that's
sitting in savings that stash becomes a hostage of high fees and you know once the fees go high enough
they will hate moving that stash around and they have to move it around right because if they want
to sell or collateralize bitcoin or give it to their kids or whatever they have to do transactions
once the fees are perma high these people have become loom panthroletariat who've been duped by
the priests into storing their money in something that gets frozen into ice so you think one way or
another in the future we're going to get sidechains that have trustless swaps eventually
once this apocalypse happens and it you know catalyzes the pleb uprising you will essentially
have excitement in other words the reason why people in core core maintainers loathe to merge
any soft fork right now is because they will be condemned by the priest but once there's political
cover from the pleb uprising not merging a soft fork will be suicidal if it allows arc to get
launched you know you know what i mean if it allows scaling of lightning launching of arc
drivechain it will become very unpopular not to merge a non-controversial soft fork that's been
reviewed for 10 years like you know basically drivechains are coming up on 10 years you know
this is insane but i can't believe it that we're even like discussing this 10 years later what i'm
saying is it'll flip right now it's suicidal for core maintainers to merge something because
the ossifier chanters will have their skull on twitter but once the pleb uprising happens it
will be the opposite it will be suicidal to sit back and do nothing that's your point so the
political and like the social aspect would start to change yeah right because because people
underestimate politics because it's so structureless and diffuse inside core but core is
essentially a politics of prestige right there is like a hierarchy of prestigious devs that all
defer to other more prestigious devs until it you know that that thing terminates with g maxwell or
peter woolley or something but the point is that it's like a culture of fear based on lack of
information and and everybody holding their own belief about the prestige and right now in that
culture merging anything is suicidal because the priest and the laser eyes and and you know
sailor rights etc will will have your skull for this but once that whole thing the whole laser
right thing of don't touch bitcoin is shown to be bankrupt because it throws out 50 million
plebs in the global south once that whole ideology is bankrupt then the political environment will
change i think you're right i think you're very very right on this actually except for except
for one thing which is i don't think we need to wait for a play uprising of you know bitcoin users
in the global south then for fees to rise in that way um well you don't need to wait but you know
as i say it has to get worse before it gets better right because the cult is so strong
you essentially can't break the spell of the cult until it's shown to be completely bankrupt right
yeah it needs to get worse but but luckily it is so like the the fees are going up going up
no but it's not enough for fees to go up they have to break 10 to 20 dollars and then stay
there for a month or two i think that's a trigger that's a trigger point for for the
people that's a good goal for 2024 i think well i mean that would happen naturally in the bull
market but you know in the previous bull market the fees would spike high for a week or two
and then they would subside but this time it's like it's going to be a non-linear response
because in that bull market there will be you know inscription enjoyers you know dumping gigabytes of
data in there there will be financial transactions 10xing there'll be lightning activity you know
all of that i think i think yeah like the reason that you know in 2017 you had high fees for
in my opinion a more sustained period of time than in the last bull market and i think that's
because speculators were using bitcoin to move value between exchanges now now they use and now
they didn't yeah like exactly by the way but the nice thing is sorry but the nice thing is that
the speculators are back and they're back now in a bear market but they're not but they're
not moving value between exchanges using bitcoin right there you know but they're
moving all in all they're moving brc20s and they're moving like a bunch of stuff so the
speculators are back in a way that they were not in bitcoin for like what five six years
and now is the bear market but once a bull market starts the speculators are going to go crazy
oh yeah i mean that's inevitable you will definitely break a hundred dollar fee i mean
i can make a bet with anyone that in the next bull market you will have one day of hundred
dollar or higher fees there's also a few points i want to make that um one thing is i'm not an
expert on arc but from what i understand you still have to settle on chain uh like the shared UTXO
right so i'm not sure if that will definitely like help like no you don't have to you you don't have
to settle on chain with arc in the only the only case when you actually have to unroll an arc
pool transaction into the full ctv tree or whatever covenant is used the only the only time
is if the asp is trying to steal from the users if the users uh uh mobile clients or whatever
warn them that everybody accepts arc or lightning right but if you're still trying to send this to
somewhere that's not accepting arc or lightning you still have to settle on chain right i mean
you can you can send on lightning from arc and and and back so um okay great so and then just
one more point um as far as like all the other type of proposals for sidechains from what i've
seen and and maybe uh there's ones that i didn't look at or understand well um most of them do not
seem like they're they're they're giving the fees of the sidechain to the bitcoin miners on L1
is that correct yeah i think currently that's not a popular idea and i wanted to say i absolutely
love that you guys are making predictions on what will happen and nobody said that federated side
chains are going to uh get an uptake or get recommended we don't need to predict we don't
need to predict we have like 10 years of history and no one cares so there's no need to like make
predictions about federated sidechain i am but a fee apocalypse is is like putting a strong pressure
on this so i'm not sure it's the same situation exactly but but uh i i love the vibe
it's definitely an exciting time to be in bitcoin that's for sure i think it's a very bizarre
decision to not care about the fact that the fees don't go to miners which many people have have
taken up uh out of this weird misguided fear of not quote distorting mining incentives unquote
but that is a very bizarre thing to do because in order to enter sidechains i'm talking about
i'm talking about how people would maybe push for like arc or lightning or Fedimint
these things cut the miners out and and a federated sidechain they also cut the miners
out of course all of these things cut the miners out and even if you don't believe
in security budget i just find it strange that you would want to go blindly into something
where in order to get out and in you need the miners help but now they have no real reason
to help you and in fact they would love nothing more than to direct economic activity towards
something where they do collect the fees such as the merge-mined drivechain i wonder i don't know
if this is the case i have absolutely no idea whatsoever but i just tossed this out there for
your consideration if one day there will be a point where miners just say they will try to ban
transactions into and out of all the L2s that do not pay them to just kind of tilt people's
support into ones that do pay them
yeah this is a weird thing because uh like there is not enough block space
for people to be self-serving with the lightning use at a global scale already and
even even if you count solutions like arc they they take up a significant amount of block space
they pay fees to the miners at a pretty predictable rate by normal operation and they the esps also
have to maintain these lightning channels and these lightning channels need to be rebalanced
with splicing and whatever so at a sufficient scale i'm not sure uh that uh that uh the bitcoin
block size is anywhere near uh enough to support all these on on as a layer two so i kind of expect
that that a lot of this thing have to move to layer three on sidechains on on top of side
chains that have many advantages and cross-chain lightning is basically like pretty trivial to
implement and if people would not be worried about the uh the exchange rate risk with an
altcoin then it would be very easy to to uh hold your UTXOs on an altcoin chain and and still
interface with the lightning network that is also a pretty easy solution so
hey guys i got to bounce i just want to say uh enjoy the conversation uh paul look forward to
seeing you in amsterdam uh and uh we'll we'll try to have some fun catch y'all later enjoy
hey thanks for stopping by
perhaps we should wind it down it's been lots of fun um i can continue but i do think
but i do think we've been going for a while what do you guys think okay well let's have next week
actually next week i'll be in amsterdam doing the event so probably won't be here next week
no
a lot of people asked me uh before miami if i'm getting security
oh my god no people were ridiculous
but this does go to show how easily things get out of hand you know
say the least you know like where i'm talking about like people have certain ideas in mind
and the ideas spread and then they the idea sort of uh legitimize the dehumanization of people and
yeah like that crazy person you guys played at the beginning of your show like what is that
like what was that guy talking about and then people always think oh this is gonna hurt my
children's future because you're messing with my bitcoin you know like oh my god
yeah i wish there was less of that i wish people just like
that you know it's like hey listen i want bitcoin to be better just as much as you do right
yeah it's really you know like without actual knowledge who's to say it's not them them who's
ruining their own children's future like you know we're on the same team we want the same thing
we just have different ideas for what the best thing is right like hear me out i'll hear you
out let's all talk together let's be friends after let's give each other a handshake after
you know like oh my god alex we've got another one another one who believes in rationality
i think i think the most and i think the most like the vast majority of bitcoiners
yeah are kind of on the same page on those things but you've got people like you know
you've got people like saifedean i remember his his his tweets about how drivechains are
going to destroy his family's future in lebanon or something and like that's that's not that's
intentional like that is that's not like oh we we we all won uh
coin or not that's not it that's that's just pure politics yeah and you know some some of
these people are you know and of course many of these people are just such a horrible lie if they
just will lie about anything uh and it's it's not even you know like i don't know who's who lies
and who's saying the truth i'm just saying like it's not it's not it's it's unfortunately not
single person that you look at is has the same interests you know like some people are just here
to sell books and speaker slots you know they're not everyone is here to uh establish bitcoin's
future i think it's also part of it that they they talk among each other like not in public
they they talk about it among each other but uh reading the beep is not very popular among them
so they they kind of just just make shit up and they believe what each other is telling
anyways uh moonsetter are you a pro ctv person
i'm not particularly i'm very interested however in in in figuring out you know uh how things are
and uh and as i said before if it can if it cannot be demonstrated that it will hurt the
outcomes of those that don't opt in explicitly then i believe it is it does not stand on moral
opposite that that's my stance
all right guys it's late over here in europe so i'll probably go
but if you guys want to hang out then by all means hang out that's okay we'll we'll allow
you to end this yeah we'll be going on for like seven hours right it's been a nice space
really wow yeah i'm gonna like a lot of times i like to listen to these because i miss it i can't
like sit here for the whole seven hours yeah we put them on the website i think yeah we put
them on layer2labs.com someone make sure that they're all still going up on 2x speed and just
like you know blast through it real quick but yeah thanks for the spaces yeah all made possible
because we have great guests who come and ask a great question so thanks to all you guys as well
see you guys later i'll leave you guys if you all leave then i guess the space will end but
otherwise it will continue all right bye everyone bye good night later guys have a have a great
weekend