Hello and welcome to Drivechain Talk. Today is March 16th. We're going to talk about Drivechain
as we always do. Everyone is welcome to come on up to the stage and share thoughts and comments,
questions about Drivechain. Drivechain is BIPS 300 and 301, a transformative
crypto-economic upgrade for Bitcoin, enabling peer-to-peer, two-way pegged
sidechains on Bitcoin, fulfilling the sidechain vision of a more ossified layer one and a more
extensible platform for Bitcoin to express the creativity and innovation its community is
capable of. Innovation for privacy, for scaling, for peer-to-peer oracles, for assets on blockchain,
and more, including DNS, Satoshi's own non-monetary
blockchain application that was discussed in the BitDNS thread
back in August of 2010, quite a long time ago in Bitcoin years.
Well, I'm Henry of LayerTwo Labs and this should be another great conversation. As we have people join,
we'll get questions and comments on Drivechain, sometimes critical and skeptical, sometimes
enthusiastic and impatient. Drivechain is an idea that's been around for about seven years.
It was first conceived in 2015 at a time when the sidechain vision for Bitcoin was
on the forefront of the imagination and expectations of the Bitcoin community.
Since then, there's been a fascinating and complicated evolution of ideas, which have led to
sidechains being put on the back burner a little bit. But now there's an opportunity with greater
understanding in the community and a greater sense of urgency among some.
For sidechains to once again be at the forefront of our thoughts and our efforts.
Sidechains are potentially an untapped opportunity for value creation and the acceleration
of Bitcoinization. This untapped opportunity could be enormous. We won't know unless we
enable peer-to-peer, two-way pegged sidechains, and then we'll find out.
Some people who are bullish on Drivechain imagine that in the far future, perhaps about 10 years
from now, maybe as much as half of the miner income could be coming from the fees collected
the fees collected from the merged mine sidechains.
This could be transformative for Bitcoin's network security and the mining industry.
So a lot of people's lives will be different if Drivechain is very successful.
And if Drivechain isn't adopted, the future course for Bitcoin's growth could be very
different than it otherwise would be. Since we can't run an experiment, we can't have
two possible worlds, one where we do Drivechain and one where we don't.
We have to use theory and imagination to understand the consequences of its adoption
or non-adoption. That is, if we do Drivechain, what will happen to Bitcoin? And if we don't
do Drivechain, what will happen to Bitcoin? We have to use theory and imagination to understand
that. And we draw on the data we have available and all the information we have from observing
other blockchains that are adopting more extensibility. Everyone who's joined is
welcome to raise their hand and come on up to the stage if you'd like, ask a question,
share a comment. I see some familiar faces in the audience. Please come on up and chat with me if
you'd like. That would be awesome. It's really great for me as a Drivechain enthusiast to hear
people's thoughts and opinions about it. As one becomes more and more familiar with the ideas of
the critics and skeptics and the best ways to answer them, one becomes a better Drivechain
thinker. So I always welcome the opportunity to hear from people, whether they're a fan or whether
they have a critical question. Welcome to the stage, Satoshi and Joyer. What's up, man? How's
it going? Hey, thanks for having me up. Thank God everything is good. How are you doing?
I'm great. I've got my cup of coffee and I'm ready to gear up for another hour and a half,
as usual, of Drivechain focused conversation. This is really my calling. I got into this
around a year and a half ago. And ever since then, it's just been more and more Drivechain.
And now I have the opportunity to even interact directly sometimes with my boss,
Paul Sztorc, and his collaborator, CryptAxe, and other people who are kind of fundamental in this
project. So I'm thrilled to spread that energy to other people because I genuinely feel this is an
enormous opportunity. This is a scientific-based movement to unlock value for Bitcoin. It's like
the biggest thing in the history of the world. I know that's crazy to say, but to me personally,
it's huge because there's a non-zero chance that this could be huge. This could be one of the most
important things in the history of crypto. This is an upgrade for Bitcoin, which if it is done,
and then if it is very successful, it could be massively important for the future course
of Bitcoin and the success of the entire Cypherpunk project. Because what happens here is,
let's say Bitcoin doesn't do Drivechain, and then Bitcoin is flipped by Ethereum,
and the whole crypto movement is fragmented into an ever-increasing amount of different
competing cryptocurrencies. There's no unity throughout the community. All the competing
cryptocurrencies compete for monetary premium and for political acceptance. So instead of a
unified voice, the whole movement of peer-to-peer digital asset networks are split up into fragments,
balkanized, and that means that they're all weakened with respect to their ability to,
as a unified community, promote their agenda for economic individualism and self-sovereignty and
monetary and high-quality money. But that's the bad future. The good future, as I see it,
is Drivechain is adopted, and then one by one, the altcoin users leave their altcoins, devaluing
them towards zero, and Bitcoin appreciates as people migrate into the Bitcoin sidechains that
are peer-to-peer because of Drivechain. And then the value of Bitcoin is rising, the user numbers
of Bitcoin is rising, and Bitcoin layer one is ossifying because the sidechains are peer-to-peer
and multitudinous and highly expressive, enabling fewer or no changes on layer one,
enabling Bitcoin's narratives to strengthen. And at the same time, Bitcoin's potential as
a platform for expressive new technology is increased. So it unifies the entire crypto
community, potentially. We could bring in all the altcoiners back to Bitcoin.
Those who left Bitcoin and those who've never been in Bitcoin could come back to Bitcoin entirely,
and then the entire crypto community would be on Bitcoin on a solid and reliable foundation
using layer twos, using sidechains. And then they're all sharing hash rate,
they're all paying to the same miners their fees. So it's a collaborative, synergistic,
mutually beneficial, capitalistic program. And the entire crypto community could then
support Bitcoin globally to facilitate the political and economic establishment of Bitcoinization.
And then we have success. We have instituted sound money and the sovereign individual,
expressive cypherpunk movement of cryptographically secured information and communication and
economic activity on the blockchain, on the internet. The whole thing is just so awesome.
So I think the drivechain really could be huge when conceived in that best case scenario.
And I think there's a chance of all that playing out that way. Some chance.
Yeah, I share the vision. But I have a few points from last time we were talking,
and I had some more time to think about. And I think that it's fair that there
is some criticism as far as economic incentive for concentration of hash rate
that could still be explored. What can be the negative downsides to
hash rate being concentrated? But also I wanted to bring up that somebody showed me this,
I sent you a DM as well, about a potential way to do drivechains without doing a soft fork.
I'm not sure I fully understand how the two-way peg works over here without doing the soft forks,
but I thought it'd be interesting to share that with you because maybe you would understand it
better.
That hand crank idea, I think, is from SuperTestNet, who is a drivechain supporter
and frequent guest here at drivechain Twitter spaces. We could ping him into the room.
I'll do that now.
Okay, yeah. He's also sometimes in the Ordinal's Discord in the VC,
but I haven't had a chance to really ask him about the details of that.
Yeah. Yeah, he's such a great speaker, especially when there isn't any background noise.
And maybe he'll join. I pinged him, so I hope he joins.
Cool.
SuperTestNet is awesome. He's really great. He so obviously has a very strong
very strong professional software engineer developer level understanding of how Bitcoin
works. And he personally creates software that interacts with or is closely related to Bitcoin,
like this hand crank drivechain imitation idea, which is really awesome.
I recall when SuperTestNet wrote an article on Stacker News called common, or he called it like
a response to drivechain objections, or it was something very similar to that. In other words,
an article responding to frequent objections to drivechain. And Paul read it and said it
was excellent. So that's one data point on SuperTestNet's output.
Oh, nice. I found it. I'm going to have a read for that.
Cool.
But I want to ask you, do you see any downsides to miner concentration? And whether it be either
geographic or even like in a pool? Because it's commonly talked about that it's a bad idea for a
pool to own a lot of the hashrate or for a small amount of pools to own a lot of the hashrate.
Do you see a potential issue where there's an economic incentive for
concentration of hashrate due to drivechains?
No. I think that all of the people who talk about miner concentration or
miner centralization have an incoherent
framework of ideas with respect to that topic.
And since the beginning of Bitcoin, it was understood by Satoshi that—not to say he was
perfect. He makes mistakes just like everyone else. But I just referenced that it's been long
established in Bitcoin that the mining industry for Bitcoin would evolve over time.
The mining industry for Bitcoin would evolve over time. At one point, it was one CPU,
one vote, meaning like everyone had their own computer and everyone would mine if they wanted
to. And you could just click a button and you would start generating coins with your own machine,
your consumer hardware. But Satoshi knew that server farms would spring up and then
it wouldn't be economical to try to mine on your own computer anymore. You wouldn't have
sufficient hashrate and you wouldn't have as cheap electricity as the industrial players.
So Satoshi used that phrase server farms when talking about the future of Bitcoin mining.
And he was right. Today, we have companies that spend tens of millions of dollars to create
facilities that are dedicated to Bitcoin mining. The professionalization and specialization in the
industry is a natural result of the competitive market forces. When one miner—
It comes back down to that there's already economic incentive for the hashrate to be
concentrated because of just the nature of how it works. So to say that drivechains might
push that wouldn't make sense because naturally that's the inevitable future anyways. It has
nothing to do with even drivechains. That's basically the refute to that.
Yeah. The people who don't like drivechain because of the miner concentration issue,
what they really don't like is not sidechains specifically in my view. What they actually don't
like is merged mining generally, which is distinct from drivechain because merged mining already
exists on Bitcoin. Every month, around three Bitcoin are paid to the Bitcoin miners that are
merged mining Rootstock, for example, which is the largest of the merged mined sidechains and
probably is the largest merged mined blockchain. I say that because there are merged mined side
chains and there are merged mined altcoins. In fact, there were merged mined altcoins on Bitcoin
before there were merged mined sidechains, as I understand. I say as I understand because I'm a
lawyer and I try to be careful and I'm not a expert. I haven't devoted my entire life to
following Bitcoin from day one. So there are things that I could say something and then 10 years from
now, when I've learned more, I'll realize that it wasn't exactly right. So I try to be humble in the
way I articulate things. I just point that out. So BitDNS was the discussion, was the topic of
discussion for Satoshi and his contacts on the forum long ago in August 2010. And that was a
merged mined altcoin that later was called Namecoin. And it's existed for a long time and now
has, I think, quite small utilization. Its heyday was years ago. And for one reason or another,
DNS on blockchain hasn't yet been enormously successful with respect to Bitcoin.
And the one thing that has gained more adoption would be Rootstock, which is the project of Sergio
Demian Lerner and others. A lot of them, I think, are in South America who are interested in this
project. And it's awesome. It's an awesome project. We've had Gabriel Kerman. I think that was his
name, in here recently on the Drivechain Bitcoin talk Twitter spaces. And he mentioned that metric
about three Bitcoin per month in fees are paid to the Bitcoin miners who are merged mining RSK,
Rootstock. And about half of Bitcoin's hash rate is merged mining Rootstock. Because, you know,
why wouldn't you want a few extra Bitcoin a month? So if no one else merged mines Rootstock,
then you'd be the one getting three Bitcoin a month, which is pretty good.
So I guess there's like an economic equilibrium where the remaining half of the hash rate doesn't
feel like doing it. But the smarter people are like, yeah, I'll take that extra money,
even if it's like, you know, $10 extra a month for some miner that has, you know, 100 ASICs
running, you know, 100 S9s. Maybe they, you know, they spit up the Rootstock sidechain node
or if they're using a pool, they use a pool that does the Rootstock sidechain mining,
such as Brains, which is the pool of Slushpool. And
Brains has a great post on their website about merged mining and Rootstock specifically,
and why they merge mine Rootstock and why they don't merge mine other blockchains.
And so getting back to your question.
Merged mining has been around for a long time,
and there's already merged mining on Bitcoin,
and there has been every day on Bitcoin
merged mining for over a decade.
So that's a fact, I believe.
And the people who don't like merged mining will say it.
There are some Bitcoin intellectuals, all of whom I respect,
like, for example, Peter Todd,
who, if I'm not mistaken, writes tweets like, you know,
he wrote the tweet, Rootstock is,
or wrote the tweet, RSK is an attack on Bitcoin.
He wrote that.
He might've been joking.
You know, he jokes a lot, has a great sense of humor,
but I think he's serious, at least as so far as to say,
he thinks merged mining isn't good,
and he probably would agree with the idea
that Satoshi made an error when he endorsed merged mining
in those forum posts.
Paul Sztorc says, and I think correctly,
that Satoshi invented or discovered merged mining.
So, you know, from an academic crypto economic perspective,
you know, Satoshi is the inventor or discoverer
of the process of merged mining.
And then to get to the core of the issue,
Paul Sztorc's insight, which I agree with entirely,
is that the people who object to merged mining
because it creates a source of profit for miners,
and that source of profit, you know,
one could understand as a force
that drives greater concentration
or centralization of miners.
The reason why they object to that
can only be understood as an arbitrary
and irrational prejudice against software
that is productive.
And that those same people who object to merged mining
do not object to other sources of profit for miners
that are only available to large miners,
which inherently drives concentration in mining,
such as arrangements with power companies,
co-location at power facilities,
co-location at inexpensive energy sources,
such as falling water or geothermal,
or any number of 1,001 other things
that only a large professional miner can do.
If there's a source of profit
that only a large miner can exploit,
such as a cost savings of having a special arrangement
with a power company or locating in Norway
where it's cold and there's cheap energy and oil,
things like that, that's gonna increase their profits,
which because of the zero-sum nature
of competitive Bitcoin mining
will decrease the profitability of home miners
leading to their greater diminution, right?
Fewer home miners exist every time some professional miner
moves his facilities to a place that has cheaper energy,
more energy, you know,
every time that the bigger miners do something.
So the question to ask,
which I've seen Paul ask in, you know, this spaces,
this Twitter space to people who questioned merge mining is,
what is miner decentralization?
And what exactly is their definition of it?
And the other question is,
if a miner does something
that makes more profit for that miner, right?
If one miner does something that increases his profits
and that causes another miner to reduce operations
or go out of business,
is that an increase in miner centralization?
And if not, what is miner centralization?
And then the person will say,
well, of course, you know,
competition among miners is natural
and is not the definition of miner centralization,
but, you know,
and then they give some totally convoluted,
incoherent answer about miner centralization
and what they really ultimately,
if they're gonna be totally honest and straightforward,
what they would have to do is admit
that they don't like it,
that some miners compete better than other miners
and discover ways to make profit
and that that leads to specialization
and quote unquote centralization in mining.
Now, the history of Bitcoin shows
that the nodes are in charge, not the miners.
And there have been a number of examples in history
when certain disputes happened,
there's like five of them,
when like a major dispute of some sort happened
and the nodes won and the miners didn't.
At the same time,
there is a complex interplay of ideas
where one of the reasons to be interested in drivechain
today is the so-called security budget,
which has to do with the miner income
and has nothing to do with nodes.
So there are some complex ideas at play here
that I think a sophisticated analysis
would be needed to kind of delineate
so I think the answer to these concerns
is that there is a concept of centralization
or decentralization in Bitcoin,
but the drivechain view,
which I think is the Paul Sztorc,
a view that Paul Sztorc discovered
and then other drive chainers understand and agree with
is that the proper understanding of the word centralization
is one which refers to nodes and not mining
and that talking about centralization and mining is wrong
because the only coherent understanding of centralization
or decentralization in Bitcoin
is the one that we can find discovered,
laid out in Paul's post called Measuring Decentralization.
This is a 2015 post on truthcoin.info,
Measuring Decentralization
and in this post, it's pretty long,
I'll try to distill it
because that's kind of like my whole purpose now
as I see it is to kind of take Paul's ideas
that are written in like a 30 page essay
and put it down into like two sentences.
So Measuring Decentralization says
that as Bitcoin full nodes get cheaper,
Bitcoin decentralization increases.
So when we keep the block size small
or make it even smaller like Paul wants,
then it's cheaper to have a full node
because there's less data to download,
less data to transmit.
You can use a simpler internet connection
and a simpler computer.
Ideally, we'd have Bitcoin nodes on our phone.
Imagine how much more Bitcoin nodes there'd be
if everyone just had it on their phone.
And this has nothing to do with mining.
Mining involves getting machines to do hashing
whereas node running doesn't.
Right, but there's another thing
where miners are driven by profit
and they can point to whatever pool they want
and most likely they're gonna point to the pool
that gives them the most profit.
So if there's a pool that is running
all the drivechain full nodes
and is doing any kind of MEV work that is needed
between the different drivechains,
that pool would be the one that makes the most money
for the miners.
So it can also, just like theorizing,
it can also create where a certain pool
might have more hash rate because of that.
And that might not necessarily be a bad thing,
but people might look at that as it's bad for one pool
or a small amount of pools
to own the majority of the hash rate.
I'm thinking about your question.
It's a really great one.
So your question is not one that is
most fundamentally linked to drivechain specifically,
but I think it can be understood as a question
about Bitcoin generally, which is, is there a-
But drivechains can potentially add to this, right?
It would create more,
it would create more profit from sophisticated pools, right?
Whoever the pools are,
the ones that are more sophisticated,
the ones that might have better bandwidth,
better connectivity, better software engineers, right?
Those pools will essentially have more profitability.
And by introducing drivechains,
it might be where less pools are more sophisticated
and less pools can eventually have more hash rate.
As opposed to, yes, this is a normal thing
even without drivechains,
but with drivechains, it might add onto this.
Right.
I see what you're saying.
You're asking, is there a risk that Bitcoin over time
could exhibit so much specialization
within the mining industry
that there is only one player who is supremely efficient,
everyone else has been extinguished from the market
naturally or just eliminated from the market naturally?
Kind of like in any other market,
there could be like one restaurant that's so good in a town
that everyone just goes there for dinner
and they develop a second building
next to their first building
so that they can accommodate more people.
So they're like the sole provider.
I think it's called a monopsonist or a monopolist
where like they're the only, yeah, monopolist.
So they're the only producer of the good.
And it's a natural event
because government didn't force it to happen.
They didn't give that restaurant a license
to be the only restaurant in that town.
Instead, they naturally achieved the monopoly
by just out-competing everyone else
because they're so efficient and talented
and they have such a good product market approach.
So that's your question is would that happen
with greater likelihood if there is the added effect
of drivechain because there is a profit opportunity
to run the sidechain nodes
and that for if you're running them
and incurring that cost,
then there's more likely gonna be
that single player in the market.
That's what you're saying if I understand right.
I think that those kinds of theoretical concerns
are totally appropriate and intelligent.
However, a comprehensive view of everything at play
involves understanding the security budget problem
of not having drivechain
and how if we don't have these sidechains paying fees,
there might be a insufficiency
of miner income generally over time.
And then also if we don't have
these peer-to-peer sidechains,
then Bitcoin's users network effect and value
could all be much lower possibly
because other blockchains could accrue more users and value
because they're more extensible and expressive
and they have partitioned layer twos
while Bitcoin wouldn't hypothetically
and then they would eventually ossify their layer one
and then they would be the one blockchain
with the ossified layer one,
the unparalleled market cap position
and the design similar to drivechain
and then they would become what Satoshi kind of invented.
They would become like the blockchain
that extincts all the others
because of network effects of money,
only one, so this is one key insight
that drive chainers have that others don't.
A lot of Bitcoiners in my opinion
have just accepted and acquiesced to the notion
that we're going to always have altcoins
and Bitcoin will always have competition
and that that's just part of reality.
But that's not quite right.
We're living in the early era of blockchain
and the network effects have yet to fully work themselves
through the system and in the long run,
there'll just be one blockchain probably
as a result of network effects
and protocol competition by nature,
there will just be one,
which is the layer one for everything.
Kind of the way that there are certain technologies
that are at the foundation of the internet
that are like ubiquitous across the whole internet industry
and like almost every website is using them
and there were other variants that were proposed
but ultimately one just crushed all the others.
Kind of like how in the far future,
like in a thousand years from now,
humans probably will just have one language
for the whole planet because in a thousand years,
the network effect of the best language
will have probably extincted all the others
and it wouldn't necessarily be the best
because you could invent something which is better
but because it doesn't have any network effect,
it never catches on enough.
So something has to be much better
than the network effect leader in order to displace it.
So Bitcoin has a tiny market cap
and user base compared to the dollar.
However, Bitcoin is much better in some ways
and therefore Bitcoin is growing in adoption
even though it has a small network effect, right?
And that small network effect leads to disadvantages
compared to the dollar.
Like Bitcoin has a higher short-term volatility
of purchasing power and yet people like to have it
because its long run return is better from holding it
and it's more permissionless and it's non-inflationary.
So there's all kinds of experience and ideology
that are attractive in the Bitcoin experience
versus the dollar for some people, rightly so
because it serves the human need of not having money
that's being debased rapidly over long periods of time.
So I feel like the question here-
I think that this is all like-
Yeah, it's kind of like a non,
I'm kind of giving you like a non sequitur
because you asked a good question
and I just responded with like,
well, here are the other considerations,
but I also want to-
It's more about like,
well, here's like the pros and cons, right?
And sure, you can say that there's a bigger risk
of not adding drivechains.
And I definitely share the view of,
having smaller blocks is better
because of better decentralization
and a more amount of nodes.
So I share that.
And I share the view of drivechains in general too.
But as somebody that wants to like drivechains
and be able to tell others about it,
I need to think of every possible criticism as well.
So the criticism is like,
the one that I just stated,
we need to be able to like acknowledge that criticism
or maybe even refute it
aside from giving like pros and cons to drivechains.
Because I can definitely agree, right?
But I still need to understand
how maybe this is not even a good criticism
or how this criticism can fall apart, right?
Because it still seems like a possible criticism
for drivechains because of incentivizing miners
to be in a small amount of pools because of that.
Yeah, I wanna point you to another post.
So one post on truthcoin.info
is the measuring decentralization post.
The one titled measuring decentralization from 2015,
which Paul discussed with Nick Carter
when he appeared on Nick Carter's podcast
on January 31st of 2022,
which is when I discovered Paul Sztorc
was in that podcast episode on that day.
And that was a great post.
Another post though,
that's more relevant to this exact discussion
that you're raising,
which is such an important one that you're raising
is his post from January 28th, 2017.
And the title of that post
is The Mirage of Miner Centralization.
The Mirage of Miner Centralization.
And the opening paragraph,
I'll just read these two sentences,
says, miner centralization is hard to define.
I present three unsatisfactory definitions
and discover a satisfying fourth along the way.
Mostly it is just confusing.
So that's the opening paragraph.
So I read this post.
It's pretty long.
It's like, it's around like 10 or 15 pages,
I would say, of reading.
It's very complicated.
He goes through what other thinkers have said
about the concept of centralization with respect to miners.
And I think the main takeaway that I would say
from this post is that everyone who's really concerned
about how merged mining might increase centralization
or concentration in mining
and how blind merged mining and drivechain
might further exacerbate that effect,
they're all basically wrong in that concern,
either because the damage that would arise is inevitable
to already accrue to Bitcoin
because of the unavoidable nature of merged mining,
or that the benefits of merged mining
as a solution to Bitcoin's other potential problems
is so much greater than this concern.
So that's another response.
Or that the supremacy of nodes over miners
is another reason that this whole concern is not right.
So I think that's kind of like the attitude
that one can have that leads to appreciation of drivechain.
But I would also just note
that these concepts are extremely complicated,
and that a lot of people who talk about them
talk about it like it's so simple.
Like, oh, drivechain's no good
because it'll just make us have bigger miners
and fewer home miners.
Like, any kind of...
sort of pithy tweet on this topic seldom is, like, truly coherent with respect to what would be, like, a comprehensive framework of ideas that address these topics, because there are so many complicated concerns at hand.
Like, first of all, very few people express a coherent definition of centralization in Bitcoin, whereas Paul has proposed one, which is, as full nodes get cheaper, Bitcoin's decentralization increases because people can validate that they've been paid Bitcoin more locally.
So it is literally, physically, geographically decentralized in the sense that when I want to know that I've been paid Bitcoin, I can use my full node to validate that. I don't have to go to someone else in some other place and ask them to help me verify.
So that's the sense of decentralization that Paul defines, which completely excludes mining from the considerations. So mining has nothing to do with it. It's all about how cheap is it to have a full node. So when someone else is like, well, miners are more centralized in Bitcoin, like they're using the word centralization in a way that Paul rejects emphatically, categorically.
And then he does in this other post in 2017, allow for centralization to be understood in terms of like the minimum viable mining operation. That's his sense of centralization, which almost no one articulates it that way.
And he also prefers to say concentration, I think, instead of centralization. So it's, there's a new vocabulary, this whole field is only 10 or 13 years old. So the vocabulary, the framework of ideas is highly inchoate and varied among thinkers. So that's why there's so much confusion around these topics.
And if you look at the Blockstream white paper, where the brilliant people at Blockstream, you know, criticized drivechain on page two, I think that they don't even mention this topic explicitly.
They refer to the incentive structure of drivechain, the fact that the code wasn't immediately available for deployment on, you know, in 2020. And not like decentralization at all. So it wasn't even raised in that albeit short description of drivechain. So I think it's an interesting topic. It's certainly a valid question.
I feel like if Paul were here, he would say that everyone who's thinking, who thinks these things simply hasn't taken the time to read his posts on them to understand his perspective, his perspective on it. So if you're interested in miner concentration on centralization, just check out that post called The Mirage of Miner Centralization, which is on truthcoin.info.
If you go to truthcoin.info and then click on archive at the top, you'll see all of his posts. This is quite a few weekends worth of reading. And I'm still myself working my way through these. But there's a lot of gems in here like that post.
Yeah, I haven't had the chance to actually read everything. And he probably answers a lot of it there. But I have watched all his videos on sidechain prioritization and sidechain risks and on drivechains. So I thought I had like at least somewhat of an understanding.
And I feel like I understand a little bit of what he means by the mining centralization and why he just doesn't use that term and how to define it through other ways. But maybe I will start reading more and it might answer a lot more things there.
Hey, welcome to the stage, Mr. Graphics of Design's NFT Creativity One.
What's up? Thank you for the space. I know we're talking about Bitcoin. OK, I have a question.
I have a question. OK, if somebody like go ahead, like drop like, you know, they actually for your wallet, is that like a I mean, a hack or like it's just like they just airdropping you an NFT?
Let's just continue with the drivechain conversation. But thanks for your question.
So Satoshi, Satoshi Enjoyer, tell me, have you had a chance to get excited about other BIPs or is this your first time as a Bitcoin or as a crypto person getting excited about something like in that space?
I'm not as much like as technical and I'm not that good at like reading technical specs. I'm not a developer. And in general, I learn a lot better through videos.
So I really appreciated that Paul made all those videos, even from years ago, five years ago, six years ago. I see those videos that are like, you know, you can see like they're hours long and there's really not that many views there.
And he even talks about, you know, maybe some people prefer videos. Maybe that's why they don't know anything about this. So I really appreciate that he put the time to make them.
I wish that one of his videos that was cut short, he didn't get a chance to explain the blind merge mining. Maybe he'll make one later because I'm just not as good with reading it. Maybe it's easier to multitask and watch or like to review it, like go back, you know, things like that.
As far as just general different Bitcoin stuff, I mean, I've loved Bitcoin since I've learned about it, like in 2013, 2014. I mean, I'm not as technical, so I just followed development as best as I could.
I wasn't like extremely excited about any kind of BIPs because, I don't know, maybe SegWit was great, though I didn't fully understand its implications. I just understood that it's all right, more features that can be built upon, you know, Taproot, great, you know, people can have a single address that can actually be a multi-sig, you know, things like that, that I can understand on a higher level.
But, you know, I don't understand like deeper. But I think that drivechain is amazing, you know, like it feels like it could be way more impactful than any previous BIPs, for sure, because it can, you know, it can unlock the door for infinite amount of ideas.
I hope that does that answer your question.
Yeah, totally. This is my first go around at Bitcoin Improving Proposals. I got interested in drivechain from that Nick Carter podcast with Paul a year and a few months ago. And then at one point I read all the BIPs that are on the GitHub page for the Bitcoin Improving Proposals.
But I think Luke Dashjr. has maintained that page, if I'm not mistaken. And I read them all, I didn't detect among the ones that were written down that have not been included in Bitcoin yet, an indication that any of them have the kind of untapped value creation potential that drivechain does.
So I think this is a singular BIP. And it's also been around for a very long time. Maybe it's the longest standing BIP that is considered by any notable thinkers to be a candidate for inclusion, despite its long tenure as one under consideration.
It's an amazing, it's an amazing, you know, idea. I just think that, like, the reason why there isn't as much demand is because I don't think economically people that want to create an altcoin would rather do it on Bitcoin because of the limit.
They would rather just create their own coin, right? There's an economic incentive for them to do it, even though that protocol might not be sound. And even though that protocol might, you know, disappear in a few years or whatever or fail, like they still made their money and, you know, money is what drives them.
So they might not be as like, yeah, let's get this into drivechains on Bitcoin so we can build, because like they have a direct economic incentive for them to just build on a different, you know, on a different, completely different chain and make their own chain, right?
It's just very hard to get everybody to want this because it seems like the people that would want this are true Bitcoiners that aren't that interested in like other, you know, other technology.
And if they really were interested, they might just, you know, be part of that other, like, you know, other ecosystem as well. Right. And maybe it's also adding complexity to Bitcoin that they might not be as interested in.
Or I just feel like there's a lot of barriers to really get community consensus, developer consensus to want this. I want this. Right. As long as, obviously, as long as it's secure and all the game theory is talked about a lot with everybody that understands it better than me.
But it's just hard to see where everybody would have, you know, that agreement for it as much as I want it.
Yeah. There's an attrition rate within the community of Bitcoiners who are interested in sidechains. And that attrition rate is high because they grow impatient and then they leave to do their altcoin, to do their idea as an altcoin or as something on an altcoin.
Like, for example, Paul's, you know, biggest idea in Bitcoin is Hivemind, which is a peer-to-peer Oracle network that he envisions as a Bitcoin sidechain. And he wants to launch it only after a drivechain is adopted.
A lot of people who are like Paul would get impatient and then they would leave Bitcoin entirely to do their project on Ethereum or as a independent altcoin.
There's been years where the regulatory risks were not quite as high as they are now. And then the profit potential might be like you could make just, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars kind of overnight doing an ICO for a token, the ERC20 or whatnot.
And then you have developed your blockchain idea. And although it's not on Bitcoin, it's not, you know, perfect, it still is a peer-to-peer digital asset network with software that's innovative and exciting.
In other words, a new protocol. Every blockchain is a protocol. And you can build it on Ethereum or you can build it on a federated Bitcoin sidechain. And you can't right now build it on a peer-to-peer Bitcoin sidechain.
So that's what drivechain aims to fix. And a lot of people who want to do something new, you know, they go do an altcoin. So when they do that, their incentives become such that they probably are likely to stop advocating for drivechain.
And they in fact would like drivechain not to be adopted, because that would devalue their altcoin. Because if there is a good protocol out there that's different than Bitcoin, once drivechain is adopted, that protocol can be cloned into a drivechain.
And then the altcoin might devalue as its users migrate to the drivechain, which would increase Bitcoin's value concomitantly as the altcoin diminishes to zero in value.
Because there are two softwares that are competing. And one of them has Bitcoin's unit of account, which is the drivechain. And the other one has the altcoin's unit of account and the altcoin's security from fees.
And it's better for all the users to flow over to the better system, which is the drivechain. And then that leaves the altcoin founders and loyalists alone in a small community with a small value, small security.
So all these great thinkers who left Bitcoin, they kind of made a prediction on the future of Bitcoin. They predicted that people who stay patiently, like Paul and the drivechainers, that they won't get what they want, or they'll get it too late.
So the future is unwritten and uncertain. And there's a great drama that will be revealed, in my view. Will drivechain be adopted or not? And when will it be adopted? Soon enough or too late for Bitcoin?
And we don't know. So who will be vindicated? Will the people who are patient be vindicated? Or will the altcoiners who left and didn't wait for sidechains, will they be vindicated?
Even if you want to say drivechains are alive, they still have an economic incentive to just make their own coin. Even if it will fail, they'll still make the money. So it's still very hard, even if drivechains are currently alive and they can build on them.
Though, yeah, in the long term, if they wanted to build something that will last and that makes more sense, they would do it on Bitcoin. But most people don't care for that. They care to make money.
Right now, the rationale for altcoins legitimately can include that drivechains don't exist. So an altcoin founder can say to his founders and the intellectuals who interrogate him, he can say, right now, Bitcoin doesn't have peer-to-peer sidechains.
Therefore, it would be impossible to build my protocol as a peer-to-peer sidechain on Bitcoin. Bitcoin lacks extensibility. Therefore, I need to do an altcoin. And yes, incidentally, it causes a windfall because there's an ICO. But I need to do an altcoin.
I see. They start from the premise where they have to make an altcoin because there's no other way for them to do it.
If you read, as I'm sure you have, the Ethereum whitepaper, as I recently reread it, it becomes so clear that the lack of drivechain was the reason for that altcoin. And that's been the reason for every altcoin.
The Bitcoiners who say that all altcoins are founded for profit motive and if drivechain is introduced, that won't change, I think are wrong.
These altcoins, the ones that are serious, there are silly things like Dogecoin and Hex where it's all about just image and hype. It's more of a fashion or art event than it is a protocol for economic value creation through utilization.
Things like Ethereum are seriously trying to develop something that competes with Bitcoin.
And they understand that platforming a wide variety of applications in a permissive and permissionless manner with a high degree of extensibility is the way to try to defeat Bitcoin.
Because what Bitcoin does is the opposite. Bitcoin is all about like cypherpunk values, hard money, but it lacks all that fun bells and whistles stuff.
And some of the bells and whistles on Ethereum are legitimate ideas like peer-to-peer Oracle networks or other technology like domain name service.
So DNS, ENS, that's the one Satoshi thought was cool and he would have thought peer-to-peer oracles are cool too.
And there's other technologies that are cool and exciting and that tends to legitimize the entire other platform, even though maybe the majority of its economic activity is NFTs.
Which, by the way, one can't dismiss. I mean, art has been part of the human experience forever.
And there's no reason to say that all digital art is somehow a illogical or immoral activity.
Or to just hope that it goes away entirely.
So the establishment of drivechain would remove a large part of the rationale which is expressed by the Ethereum white paper.
Now, of course, Ethereum predated Bitcoin, predated drivechain rather.
It predated drivechain. It was 2014 Ethereum, 2015 drivechain.
But in theory, had drivechain been embraced by the Bitcoin community, altcoins like Ethereum and others would be deprived of the rationale that they cite primarily in their literature and discourse for their reason for being.
Which is that Bitcoin lacks extensibility and therefore we're doing a different protocol entirely independent from Bitcoin.
There's also this coping mechanism among Bitcoiners, which is as I see it, which is that Ethereum is a sidechain of Bitcoin, that everything's a sidechain of Bitcoin.
Like this is sophistry. It's not correct.
Like wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum, yes, it increases Bitcoin's value.
But that wrapped Bitcoin is necessarily federated.
It's not peer to peer.
It's a company that's issuing supposedly fully backed Bitcoin derivatives on Ethereum.
And there's $4 billion of demand there.
I see that as an indication that drivechain's value would be in the billions, if not more.
Because we have $4 billion of Ethereum wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum.
So why think that we would have any less on drivechains when drivechains are peer to peer and WBTC is a completely federated multi-sig at one company.
So it's inferior, strictly speaking.
And also there's this totally surprising line of reasoning by some drivechain haters on Twitter, which is that, well, federated sidechains are better than miner controlled sidechains.
I would never trust my Bitcoin to the miners.
How are these people interested in Bitcoin if they don't trust the miners?
51% of Bitcoin miners can be deployed to steal from a drivechain. It would take six months and be public.
But if we assume that Bitcoin miners would be willing to steal from drivechains
over six months in a public manner, where 51% of the hash rate is needed,
then we must also be prepared to assume the same with respect to Bitcoin layer one.
So imagine if 51% of Bitcoin's hash rate were devoted for six months to trying to steal
from layer one. That would be a 13,500 block reorg. And it would be conducted in secret
as opposed to being conducted not in secret because drivechain theft is public by operation
of the nature of the setup. Like if you try to steal from a drivechain, everyone knows immediately
the minute it begins for six months. Whereas a reorg on layer one can be done without any
kind of announcement of that nature. So the theft is actually easier. And this is discussed
in greater detail in the drivechain FAQ. So if you go to drivechain.info and then click on FAQ,
at the very beginning, Paul addresses this. Even so, the critics of drivechain
talk endlessly about there being miner theft and that the drivechain could be stolen from.
This is in the Blockstream's liquid white paper. And of course, the other objection that drivechain
critics have is the opposite. So the critics can't even agree with each other because
half of them think that the miners will steal from the drivechain.
The other half say that the drivechains will cause undue concentration in the mining sector,
which of course is logically incompatible with the notion that the drivechains will be stolen
from. Because if they're stolen from, they're destroyed and there's no more fee revenue
from merge mining. But if they're not stolen from, then they're going to grow large and then
there would be the fee revenue. So the critics of drivechain, half of them think there'll be theft.
The other half think there won't be theft, but there'll be too much decentralization,
too much loss of decentralization of miners. So the critics can't even make up their mind
about what's going on. So it's all very complicated. I do, however, think that
the critics are smart and good people. I don't doubt that any of them are well-intentioned.
So I'm hopeful that the scientific community and Bitcoin will come around. People like Peter Todd
and Andrew Polstra and Greg Maxwell and Peter Weil, if those people, if those names I just
mentioned were all to come out and say, we've thought about it and we stand for drivechain,
we'd have a drivechain adoption in Bitcoin probably in no time at all, like in a year from
now. It would take about a year to prepare the code and to get everyone ready. But those names,
I think, hold one or more of the objections that we've discussed today, either the miner theft or
the miner centralization risk. Or there's the Jimmy Song objection, which he spoke to me in
a Twitter space on Christianity and Bitcoin about half a year ago, where I just happened to be.
And I asked him a question about drivechain. I asked him, do you still hold the view that you
held in 2018 when you interviewed Paul on your podcast where you said, Jimmy, that you said that
you think drivechain's great and you hope it's adopted soon. And he said, no, my view is now
the opposite, which is I'm against it entirely. And I asked why. And he said, because it would
cede too much to the old coiners. It would legitimize them. So unfortunately, that's
what we're dealing with today. I think that if I ever have the chance to talk to someone like
Greg Maxwell, I think he would say something probably like what's in the liquid white paper,
which is an academic objection like the ones you've asked about, centralization of miners
because of blind merge mining, increasing profits from merge mining. And the miners wouldn't be
blind. They would have to run the nodes to make the MEV. And therefore, there'd be only bigger
miners. And then Paul's objection to that, which is that, well, you're just objecting to one kind
of profit because it's based in software, but you don't object to the non-software based profits,
like better ASICs. If someone buys a $20,000 ASIC, they're going to outcompete the guy at
home with his five-year-old S9. So the S9 won't make any more money. It'll have to turn off.
So that centralization, just getting better ASICs because they have more efficiency.
And the other objection is the miner theft. And then there's the Jimmy Song objection,
which is that it just, because he's afraid that he, in my view, I assume, he's afraid that altcoins
will just grow and grow and grow. And if Bitcoin does drivechain, then that's Bitcoin admitting
that altcoins are doing something legitimate, which is that there are some technologies
like big blocks, peer-to-peer oracles, DNS, and Zcash, you know, ring signatures and
Z signatures and whatnot, like Monero. Those are the things that are the planned drivechains.
Those are the things that we expect to be on drivechains, right? Paul has a list of them.
If you go to drivechain.info and then click on drivechain projects, you can see like the six
or 10 planned drivechains, the drivechains that he expects to be created because each of these is
basically an altcoin, which really should be a Bitcoin sidechain and would be better if it's a
Bitcoin sidechain, better for the users, better for everyone. So there are, you could say from
that, that, you know, the drivechain view is that there are about six or 10 good altcoins and they
should be drivechains. And Jimmy Song doesn't want us to admit that, even though it's real.
It's true. And he probably knows it because if somebody wants to be extremely private
with their transactions, are they going to use Bitcoin or are they going to use Zcash or Monero
instead? The markets for... Yeah, I think he doesn't understand that adding drivechains is not
legitimizing altcoins. On the opposite, it's delegitimizing them because they can be done
better on Bitcoin. Exactly. It actually, it actually solves his issue that he has, right?
Exactly. It doesn't make it work. Yeah. So what would Andreas say? Because I know
Andreas got a lot of, you know, like, I guess, hate for writing that Mastering Ethereum book.
You know, a lot of Bitcoiners might have, like, kind of shunned him for that. And it seems like
he's just been, I don't know, I haven't followed too much. He might have been quiet for a while.
But I think Andreas would be very, very pro this type of drivechain model. I would love to hear
his takes. I can tell you what he said. I have it. I have these notes on what people have said about
drivechain. I'm looking for this document where I kept this. I can't find it at the moment.
That's OK. You can always DM me and I guess I'll do some research too and see if he's ever
talked about it publicly. So there's a tweet of his from the past or an article that I found once
where he said that sidechains are great. Sidechains increase the capabilities for Bitcoin.
So there's a tweet of his from like years ago, like 2016, where he said that.
And since then, there's been no comment. And he's never written about drivechain exactly
or specifically, I think, just from my memory. I don't think he's ever commented on it.
And I'm not sure. But I would agree that it would not be at all surprising if Andreas were to
take time to thoroughly study drivechain based on his interest in Ethereum. If you
wrote a whole book about how Ethereum works, probably he would come around to the idea that
at the very least, drivechain is a very interesting idea, which if the Bitcoin
community were to adopt it, there is a serious chance that it could become very successful
and helpful for Bitcoin in many ways by increasing the Bitcoin community's
capacity for innovation and experimentation in a way that internalizes to Bitcoin the value
of that innovation. That's a concept I got from Hasu, the Ethereum guy who rage quit Bitcoin
long ago. Actually, I shouldn't say rage quit. I haven't read the writings where he announced
that he was leaving. But he said at one point, I've sold all my Bitcoin. I'm in Ethereum now.
I think he said that on Twitter at some point. And he's also I've seen like he applauded when
other people have done the same. So he's one of the people who would say probably that Bitcoin
has like a doomed security budget. And he also probably would say like a lot of smart people
that it appears that Bitcoin is never going to do drivechain or if they do it, they'll do it
much too late. And therefore they've gone off to other other pastures.
So, yeah, like Antonopoulos and others. They think the drivechain is cool, but maybe they're
skeptical because there's too many people like Jimmy Song who are, in my opinion, you know,
he's a great, awesome, cool dude, but he's kind of like locked in to this toxic maxi ideology.
In fact, he has tweeted things like Ethereum is gaining market share to Bitcoin because
Bitcoin aren't being toxic enough. And in other words, like if we just tweet more
angry things about Ethereum being a shit coin, then we'll somehow drive it out of existence.
This is like a, it makes no sense. It's counterproductive because by dividing people
by nature, you are you're forcing people to pick sides. And by nature, the side will get stronger
because like just like if you take two wrestlers, right, when one wrestler starts to work hard,
the other wrestler is going to need to work just as hard to at least keep up. Right. So by working
hard against somebody, you're you're making the other person work harder, too. So I don't I think
that's counterproductive. Being toxic towards people is not a way to include them and bring
them to your camp. It's a way to divide them and make their camp potentially stronger.
Yeah. Like in the book Zero to One, Peter Thiel has this great insight about how like when
Microsoft was just beginning to lose some of its momentum and sort of innovative spirit.
That's when it began to be very focused on the competition and very focused on worrying about
others. So Bitcoiners who are toxic are defining themselves to the extent that they embrace the
toxic Bitcoin identity. They they're defying themselves in contradistinction, in contradistinction
to their competition. And that is exactly what Peter Thiel says is not a good sign.
You don't want a company that says we're not them. For example, like for me at LayerTwo Labs,
I feel that there is no other company in existence that is doing what we're doing.
We're trying to promote understanding of drivechain and we have no competition.
There's no one else that has like something quite similar to drivechain, but different.
And then we're different than they are, and we're worried that they're gaining attention and we're
not like we're all alone. This is like it's like Elon Musk is the only person that anyone can name
probably who's trying to go to Mars. Like I don't know of anyone else saying Bitcoin,
the world needs to go to Mars. We have to get humans on Mars, colonize Mars. That way,
if the Earth gets struck by an asteroid or runs out of resources, we can live on Mars and the
human race won't die. Like I haven't heard anyone else say that in my experience. I'm not like a
space enthusiast, but my point is that he has a singular mission in mind. He has a singular identity
as the Mars mission evangelist for humanity. So he's all alone in that way.
And I feel the same way about drivechain. This is a unique, very exciting thing,
which this is like the thing that can save Bitcoin from itself. And we have to educate people like
Jimmy Song and Peter Todd. I mean, they know much more than I do, but I feel that on economics,
on this specific topic of Bitcoin extensibility, security budget, innovation and creativity,
and L1 ossification, in every way, all those different key drivechain concepts, they don't
quite put it all together and understand how this is what can move Bitcoin forward.
They would prefer to continue with, in Jimmy Song's case, the toxicity, or in Peter Todd's
case, the preference for inflation rather than merge mining. And they don't quite put it all
together and see that it would be in their interest to just shift camp and be part of the
drivechain camp, which can truly save Bitcoin. And I would welcome any of them, if they ever
listen to this, to engage with us and to chat with us so that we can be educated and change our mind
or that they can learn maybe and change theirs. I feel like so many smart people have just left
Bitcoin and given up for reasons you point out, because, hey, if you leave Bitcoin and just let
it wither, then you make so much more money. Like, imagine you're Hasu, right? And in 20-whatever,
15, 17, I don't know when it happened, but he left Bitcoin, probably for all the reasons that
we're discussing today, because he has explicitly tweeted in favor of drivechain. He's written,
drivechain good. Bitcoin needs a way to internalize innovation on its own blockchain.
That's exactly almost a quote. It's from memory, but you can find it on Twitter easily. Just do an
advanced search for Hasu drivechain. You'll see it. So, you know, he said it. Plenty of other
altcoiners said it, like Evan Van Ness, the Ethereum maxi shill, who tweets every single day
on Twitter about how Ethereum is better than Bitcoin because Bitcoin needs inflation eventually.
I asked him on Twitter like a month ago, you know, what do you think of drivechain? He said
drivechain would be great for Bitcoin, but I would bet you that Bitcoin will never do it.
So he's like cynical. He's made up his mind that there are too many people with Jimmy Song's idea
about legitimizing altcoins as a bad thing. So like people have placed their bets like Hasu.
He's left Bitcoin. Evan's left Bitcoin. They don't think that Bitcoin will upgrade appropriately.
And then they're going to be part of the investment camp and the career
camp that is part of the school that's vindicated through the flippening.
And then they'll make money and look smart and win. So a lot of people are doing that.
And then there's people like Paul who've just remained in Bitcoin because they have this
identity of a Bitcoin or they have this identity that like just always be a Bitcoin. This is what
says to me in Cafe Bitcoin and Clubhouse, you know, where we chat almost every day,
you know, he says Bitcoin is the he didn't say the things I just said about identity.
He wouldn't put it in those words. I don't want to misquote him, but he did say to me and he
has said publicly on Cafe Bitcoin to the people who hang out there where I am often that Bitcoin
is the only project that matters and it'll always be that way. So some people just feel like Bitcoin
is it and always will be because they live during that. I feel that they have a bias because they
live during that era when Bitcoin was at 100 percent market cap. And then for years, I had
like 90 percent or 80 percent. So for a long time, Bitcoin was always number one. And there were some
periods where it would climb back up a little bit from 70 percent back to 80 percent. So they
thought that it would always be that way. And people in that mindset who have a loyalty,
who have an emotional attachment to certain ideas, they're often the last to see reality for what it
is. And therefore they let their emotions get ahead of their ideas, their intellect is unfortunately
limited in their perceptive ability because they're attached to the idea that Bitcoin is
perfect and great and first and best. And they don't see these concepts like it used to be a
maxi trope that any good idea Bitcoin would adopt. But that's not possible without something like
drivechain, right? How is Bitcoin ever going to adopt in a peer to peer manner? Zcash privacy or
big block Bitcoin level scalability? There was some thinking that, well, lightning will solve
everything. We'll do all of this on lightning. Yeah. How is that panning out? Is that really
the case? One of the things Paul often says is that the discourse in lightning is much bleaker
than what you hear from plebs. If you ask like a Bitcoiner, we'll just say, well, we'll build it
all on lightning. But then you ask one of the leading lightning developers, like one of the
top five people in the world who is running the technology division of a lightning company.
They won't talk like that. They'll talk about the limitations and difficulties of lightning.
Not they're not going to say, yeah, we'll build every single blockchain protocol can be built
on lightning. They're not going to say that. So lightning is not the panacea for these matters.
And the economic uptake of lightning certainly wouldn't indicate it is. So we need we need a
killer app. We need something that's huge for Bitcoin to save it. But of course, most maxis
don't have that thinking. They don't think that way. They don't think that we need a transformative
change. They think everything's fine in Bitcoin. We're doing just fine. We're number one still.
But like, I see the writing on the wall. The fees are low. The old coins are growing.
In Paul's view, there are only two blockchains that are genuinely and seriously pursuing
the objective of global. Massive adoption, Bitcoin and Ethereum, those are the two projects
aiming for that 100 trillion dollar market cap, and only one of them will get there
because of the fact that protocols are inherently competitive for network effects,
only one will win and the other will be completely eliminated. It's like languages,
right? There's only going to be one dominant language in the world in the future.
In a thousand years from now, there aren't going to be 500 languages.
Unless you're in like the linguistics department of some school that studies
ancient languages. I'm not saying they'll be completely eliminated, but
there is that competition. Well, I've been talking your ear off this whole time.
In our last few minutes, why don't you share your thoughts? And also, I want to mention to
the person whose name is Body is no longer the something, Body Autonomizer. I don't know why
you've been unable to join the stage. Every time you've requested to join, I've clicked
approve, but it hasn't let you in. And that was recently the case in the past where I couldn't
get people on stage. Like in our last spaces, Paul was trying to join the stage and he couldn't get
on. So maybe Twitter is having a problem. Like right now, I'll click that you can speak.
It says he's a speaker. He should be able to speak.
Paul, why don't you try to speak?
Hey, it's on my side, guys. I'm driving and I have the maps on and every time
it switches to the maps, it'll cut the sound off. My mic's still on, but I can't hear what you guys
are saying. So that's my fault. So it's probably a little too late to bring up the things I wanted
to bring up. But, you know, on the whole maxi thing, I think they're kind of a necessary.
I don't know what you want to call it, but I don't think you're going to win any
hardcore Bitcoiners over anyway. But like the ones who are in between, if you're a noob,
you're going to take the side of like fundamentalism, you know, you're going to take the side
of the people who want to defend the castle. And I think that's like they see themselves as that.
That's their role is to defend the castle, which maybe is necessary, you know.
Can you guys hear me? Yeah. The noobs are going to do whatever the thought leaders say. So if
Peter Song says to followers in his next book, you know, drivechain is fascinating and awesome,
then that's what they'll say. Because that's how people like us, right? We're going to
that's what they'll say. Because that's how people are. They look to their experts,
those with high status, big followings, and they parrot what they think. Because that's just the
most efficient way to be a human thinker is to rely on experts rather than trying to do everything
yourself. Because, you know, then you like you go to the doctor, you go to the hospital, you do
what the doctor says. Take the medicine he recommends. Don't try to learn brain surgery
yourself. So yeah, good point. But are you trying to get off now? Because I wanted to talk about
one of one possible like state state game theory that hasn't really been brought up. All right.
Uh, so like I talked on here once before, and I was talking about how I like lightning.
I, I agree with you. I think it's got limitations just from running my own lightning node.
I know there's no way I'll ever be able to keep up with, you know, a high powered 100 channel node,
you know, making making a half a Bitcoin a day. You know, I struggle to make 100 sats a month.
So I think it kind of has that centralizing property. But I also it's like my security
blanket, you know, I know I'm never going to hide from some intelligence, intelligence agency with
my node, but I can hide from like incompetent IRS agents and lower level foods if I need to,
you know. So the, the attack, our thinking is, you know, once you get a privacy chain,
permissionlessly connected to the BTC time chain, then maybe that opens it up to a more
game theory types. They get state attack where the high level intelligence agencies are really
worried about this thing. It becomes more of a focus. Not that it's not a focus now,
but it becomes more of a focus than it has been before, because it has this new element where
before it was like a semi private way to transact permissionlessly. And all of a sudden,
they you've taken the ball out of their hands completely. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah, those are all thoughts. So, you know, it kind of opens it up to a new,
more focused attack by the state or more not attack, but you know, more,
it's going to bring more attention than it has in the past.
Well, those are all interesting thoughts. I mean, I personally don't have any desire to avoid
surveillance myself. However, and of course, you know, we should all absolutely pay all our taxes,
but for people who are political dissidents in other countries that unfortunately have a lot
For people who are political dissidents in other countries that unfortunately have a lot of
repression and statist, you know, excesses, like Russia, Iran, etc. People there benefit
greatly from anonymity and self sovereignty for their safety and their financial freedom.
So it's great for Bitcoin to adopt the absolute most extreme privacy possible
that can safely be done on layer one. And if there is privacy technology that shouldn't be
done on layer one because it's unstable, then the best course is for Bitcoin to have that on a layer
two. So a great example of this is what I just put in the nest here. So I put a tweet in the nest,
and this is Adam Back saying that he likes the Zcash sidechain, which is a drivechain created
by the drivechain developers. So he writes Zcash protocol is a bit risky for Bitcoin main chain,
but he likes it on a sidechain. He likes the drivechain version. He wrote, I would try and
use the drivechain version. So he totally understands that when you do it on a sidechain,
you're using Bitcoin and you're using Bitcoin in a partitioned manner where the experimental
software, if it were to fail, wouldn't harm the main chain. So this is giving Bitcoiners opt
in functionality. In the same way that people like to have lots of choices when they go to a store,
Bitcoiners should have lots of choices within Bitcoin's sidechains
for how they want to engage with technology, money, and blockchain.
Thanks everyone for being here today. We had a pretty cozy crowd of brilliant people. Thank you
for your questions. You've educated me a lot. The conversation has been good. I hope to see you all
next time on Monday. These are drivechain Twitter spaces that are recorded and available on the
LayerTwo Labs Twitter handle. We're working on doing a podcast where we'll put the spaces into
podcast format and also have interviews with drivechain advocates like Fiatjaf, the creator of
Nostr, and others. So we run every Monday and Thursday, 9.30am Pacific, and everyone's welcome
to speak and ask questions. If you're listening to this on demand later as a recorded space,
please know that you're welcome to come into the live rooms and ask your questions. We welcome
criticism and careful reasoning so that we all can become smarter people on these topics.
All right. Also, everyone's welcome to join the Telegram group and you can find the Telegram
group at drivechain.info if you click on Telegram, the link there. And there's also a very good
Discord. The Discord is called Second Layer. And the Second Layer Discord is a community for
people interested in second layers on Bitcoin. These second layers can include drivechain
as well as others like Rootstock and other ideas like Stacks and Blockstream's Liquid project.
And it's a great community for bringing together all the thinkers and users and advocates and
enthusiasts for that. So... Hey, Lairtu, can I just say that I also don't engage in illegal
activities or dodge the IRS. But, you know, as you said, mentioned, it's still an important
aspect of being able to transact. I thought you just said that you have lunch every weekend with
Kim Jong-un and you and you have trouble paying him back on Venmo because his account has been
blocked. Well, well, if he would just if he would tip better and I didn't have to leave a tip after
it's his day day, you know. You were saying that you have trouble setting the Venmo. So
and you're worried about privacy on Lightning being inferior. So you always use Zcash.
Even though it's an altcoin and you wish you didn't have to resort to altcoining.
Hey, good spaces, sir. Thank you. My pleasure. All right. See you all on Monday. Thanks again.
Please come again. Bring your friends. Bye, everybody. Later.