Hello, hello.
And I have a new phone, so hopefully it won't crash, as often happens, but brand new.
I try to make them last a little while, you know, I try to make them last as long as I
can before replacing them, because it just seems wasteful.
But now I got a new one, and it looks like the app is running a little better, so hopefully
it won't keep crashing and kicking me out.
This is a common trend that, you know, the hardware improves and the software developers
are lazy.
They don't fix, you know, memory issues anymore, because no one has to optimize anything.
The hardware is so good.
Anyway, hopefully we'll get some cool people, we'll get some, I see some great friendly
faces in the audience, maybe we'll get some haters, I don't know.
I hope everyone liked our video that we made.
It's a hilarious video of Peter, apparently Peter Todd, who has been this big skeptic
of Mergemind sidechains for a really, really long time.
The issue is, though, that he doesn't really know anything about them at all.
It's just surprising.
I'm as surprised as you, but in particular, he hasn't looked into my project at all, into
the point where he didn't even realize we had made a fully functional Zcash sidechain
with the GUI two and a half years ago, and made a video about it two and a half years
ago.
And he thought that this idea is just some kind of vaporware, which is really something
because most of the ideas that people talk about really are complete vaporware, such
as, you know, well, I don't even, you know, there's no real status of Ark, there's no
real status of like, surf chains or these other things are just in a very, very incomplete
state.
But that's very, very different from the state of drivechain, where we have a lot of stuff
that people can use right now, where if you go to the drivechain.info slash releases page,
you can download stuff there.
And it has a GUI and it works with play money, of course, play money for now.
But there you go.
So hopefully someone, if you have any thoughts, come on up and leave a question or comment.
Otherwise it'll just be me rambling slowly about nothing, which I'm sure no one wants
to hear.
We have someone in the audience with negative one IQ.
And I got to tell you, as someone who was a professional statistician, I'm pretty sure
that that is possible because it's normed to a mean of average of 100 and standard deviation
of 15.
So if you're low enough, then it will eventually become negative.
So I don't know what the z-score on that is.
I mean, I guess we do know that it is 100 over 15 plus a little.
And so I think the population would have to be several quadrillion people at least.
And then that would be the lowest score of them all.
But someone should look that up.
Fire up a z-calculator.
It probably won't even work.
If you fire up a z-score calculator online and try to plug that in, it probably will
just crash.
But not because it's negative, just because it's really, really far.
Yes, hello.
I'm glad that we put the video in the...
I don't know what to interpret.
I don't know how to interpret that type of thing.
He's been saying all this stuff for years.
He's saying merge mine sidechains were Greg Maxwell's biggest mistake, for example.
And yet he has really no ability to back any of that up.
It's just him saying things like he prefers that miners' costs be shaped a certain way.
And even on that absurd criterion, he's not correct.
So even if that made any sense, which it doesn't, he wouldn't even be right.
Because either the full node costs have to be very low.
He's talking about the fact that miners may be pressured into running a node for transaction
fees.
But that costs nothing, basically.
Nodes cannot be expensive, because if they are, the network just shuts off.
Or if they are, then the miners are enticed.
They will just partner with the full node, and that is what blind merge mining is.
It doesn't even matter if BIP301 is used or not.
It's just this technique.
BIP301 makes it trustless to cooperate with a node.
But there's no sense in which once you do 100,000 hashes, you move from needing one
node to needing two nodes.
You just have the one node somewhere in your setup, and that one node will work for all
the hashing machines plugged into your operation.
And that's why it doesn't matter what the full node cost is to miners.
To users, it matters enormously.
But again, this is the whole point of sidechains, is that this full node cost must be kept down
But some people don't want it to be the absolute minimum.
So again, it's crucial that the full node cost be kept down.
You know, Peter and I agree about that.
But some people want to pay a little bit more.
And so they use whichever sidechains they like, and they don't turn any new sidechains
on.
And if there's many sidechains, then you're not moving this number up non-consensually.
You consent to move it up.
So this is really missing the whole point.
It's like the difference between eating as much food as you like and being force-fed
to death, which is being force-fed to death would be the large block version.
One mandatory L1 large block.
And then drivechain is eating as much food as you want and no more.
And then the small block version is having only the, you only get as much food as the,
you know, as the smallest people wanting, you know, whatever the smallest amount ordered.
You don't sit down to eat and someone orders a salad only.
Now everyone says to eat salad.
But why do it like that when people could just have whatever they like?
You know what they did on the Ordinal show?
They play music while they're waiting for like the space to fill up and like waiting
for people to come up on stage.
That's like a neat idea like that.
Maybe we should do that.
Otherwise it would be really boring if no one comes up and talks.
We could do that.
Let's see.
The Ordinal show, they have like a really like R&B type of a thing.
I don't really think that's the drivechain music.
It should be like 8-bit.
I don't know.
How are you, Paul?
It's amazing how you handle all this, you know.
It's amazing how you strongly and politely doing all this, you know, criticism.
And it's very impressive.
I mean, it's very nice to see that.
I don't really get a lot of it.
I think maybe it should be a little more assertive where it's kind of like, how can it be that
like these people don't really know anything about the project and they're saying like
they don't like it, but they don't know anything, though.
So it's like a little bit more assertive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like these people don't really know anything about the project and they're saying like
they don't like it, but they don't know anything, though.
So it's like they literally haven't even glanced at like website.
To say they've done the bare minimum is like even that is an overstatement.
So I don't I don't really get it.
I think we should just play this video over and over again like every day.
I think it's pretty funny.
Yeah, we need to.
Yeah, it's like it's looking like I mean, I recognize that none of them like has like
something that, you know, kind of like it's an interesting technological or, you know,
like a blockchain issue that drivechain kind of do not do not cover.
It's so perfect that I think you don't have even a proper sparring partner, you know,
to kind of debate pro or against the bizarre thing is he's not even really qualified to debate.
So that's a weird situation to be in.
Yeah, and you know what, I think what you did is very good, like for from historical
standpoint and for people who are coming in spaces to I mean, not spaces like Twitter space,
but in Bitcoin and all this, you know, like cryptographic related blockchains and stuff like to to see actually
who is knowledgeable and who is not related to to the technology they promote or, you know,
related to something to Bitcoin, which it's you know, I think I think you are the most knowledgeable person.
Here from from all of them, you know, like I know I know you other other people who are probably not,
you know, like publicly speaking or something like that.
Yeah, I know some knowledgeable people, but I'm saying from all this drama, you know, no no other person.
I mean, also your your team and Henry and and Austin and Crypto X, you know, you're all I mean, we learn a lot.
We all learn a lot from in general.
Plus with with drivechains. Yeah.
Cool. What do you think is the biggest misconception out there?
You know, because I've been doing this for a while, so I kind of know, like my own experience.
But. What do you think other people should know, but they don't?
Should know, but they don't. Maybe, you know what I I realize that, like the critics, they go all the time.
Oh, drivechain will change Bitcoin. I see that as a kind of like because drivechain, in fact, or in reality, do not change anything.
Just ask to be included in the in the mining.
So everything goes, you know, like using the Bitcoin blockchain.
And right. You know, I think I think that kind of phrasing, like I think need to be a little bit more kind of a better phrase.
So people kind of I think that's the biggest kind of what I see from all this, you know,
critiques that they're saying, oh, we don't want change on Bitcoin.
We don't want change on Bitcoin. But I think. But I think.
Sorry, I think that like many people like who are not from that kind, you know, are very positive about drivechains.
And I was speaking the last space and with Crypto X and.
I was saying that drivechains probably will open the opportunities for kind of business related sidechains like,
you know, like private sidechains, which, you know, we disagree with with centralization.
But from some business standpoint, you have sensitive data that need to be, you know, like publicly shown,
like accounting or maybe a supply chain and stuff like that.
So it's I always look more on a from a blockchain adoption, not from a token or coin adoption.
Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right that people see it as like a change or something, which it's so vague and abstract.
And of course, what it really is, is it's something that won't affect you at all if you're not using it.
So in that sense, it's not a change at all. If people who are using it could be a change.
So it's kind of saying, like, we use electricity for lights and I've invented like a radio or something.
And it's like, oh, you don't have to plug in the radio. You can keep using your lights, you know?
Yeah. But people do think, oh, this is my precious, precious Bitcoin.
We can't change it. But I don't know why that idea is.
That idea seems to be punching above its weight, which is to say that.
The idea that we have to prevent Bitcoin from changing.
And we have to regard things as changes, even if they're not.
It seems just like really, really deeply ingrained in people.
They just don't get it.
I think that affects, in my opinion, all these books that are coming, you know, Bitcoin books and stuff like that.
Because I see that the White Paper, the Satoshi White Paper, or Satoshi itself, it's like isolated from all that.
And it's a completely different kind of narrative only around BTC and nothing about the blockchain.
But I think coming from there, I don't know, I see that as a kind of maybe a cause of all this.
Yeah, I agree. I think it's sort of like people.
Well, I always blame the scaling war because the scaling war was won by.
It was what really happened was the side that hard forked shot themselves in the head and were killed instantly by themselves.
And so the lesson was like change Bitcoin and you'll be destroyed kind of a thing.
But I don't think people really realize, like.
All of the nuances of that situation, like, for example, I always say the large blocker side, large blocks on L1 is always a terrible idea and it was never going to win, I think, because.
So even if that had been done as a soft fork.
It would have been like a 10 X greater chance of winning, but it probably.
Would still have lost because it's hard to say, I think the hard fork is a huge disadvantage and I think there's no reason to do L1 large blocks because you can do them on L2.
And so it's a complicated mix of reasons.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, OK, we say, you know, I'm more for a small block and then you upgrade or add on stuff like, you know, drivechains and et cetera, et cetera.
But like. I was thinking also like, OK, they say, oh, we don't want change, but.
Let's see why they're in the space like there is so much like L2s that, you know, include headers in the block in the Bitcoin blockchain through mining and stuff like that.
Why they don't talk about that?
That's kind of. You know, my question coming from all the, you know, looking wider, the whole Bitcoin ecosystem, you know.
So that's that's one kind of why they are against drivechain and say we don't want change, but here they accept all other stuff, you know, which is much.
They are centralized. I don't say for me, drivechain is decentralized and native to Bitcoin.
Yeah, of course. One of the purposes of drivechain is to decentralize development, which is to say something is decentralized.
It's like it's sort of like YouTube where someone can you can have a video that does really, really well, like.
Gangnam style or something, and then someone can can come out with a new video that's that also does well, maybe for a completely different reason.
Doesn't make any difference, you know, but the point is a video, a new video can come from anywhere, can come from someone who's brand new.
And that's what decentralization is sort of supposed to be like, like a new node can come from anywhere.
Someone is brand new with no pre-existing reputation of any kind. They show up and they can contribute their thing.
That's certainly not the case now with Bitcoin development.
I don't think that anyone who is new who showed up would even be able to understand the environment they're in.
It takes someone like you have to be like, you have to be like super, super smart.
Like you have to be as smart as like the as Barack, the Ark guy.
You have to be like super smart. You have to invent something from scratch that uses Blockstream's liquid.
That's like super, super good. Then you have to join Blockstream.
Then you have to break lightning a couple of times for fun.
And then you have to invent Ark. Like that's what it takes for you to like.
Yeah, that's what it takes to make it. It's like it's like other than that, if you can't pull that
off, then. I don't know, you can then you can you can join Bitcoin Core and you can do code review
and you can add tests. To Bitcoin Core and you can maybe like change a matrix factorization so
that it shaves off a tiny five milliseconds. And then you're a Bitcoin developer.
But you see, that's very different than someone releasing a new video that gets more views than
Gangnam Style on YouTube. It's like a very different thing. We want the kind of competition.
You know, it's not really competition unless someone is crying tears of despair and they lose
their job and their whole industry is destroyed. That is like that's real competition and other
competition. Like, you know what I mean? Because like everyone can be forced into like becoming
like a lightning developer, but it's kind of like. You know, it's not that serious. That's
like if you say, oh, we have the BBC allows competition. We want to see who can who can
write the best story on, you know, baby seals at the zoo playing with this beach ball. And
whoever writes the best story will run. But it has to be exactly about that.
And you're like, OK, well, that's, you know, that's not really the same thing.
Yeah. If anyone else wants to come up, please come up and share a question or comment.
Or go on Twitter and tell all the haters to show up. They definitely won't. Sometimes they do. I
honestly liked it when whatever Mr. Hoddle came in, that was I thought that was great that his
phone died. But that was one of the best. That was a good recording. And I'm not only saying
that because he admitted that I was right about everything we disagreed about mostly. So.
But no, that was fun. We're having a good time there.
No, we haven't all commenced. Hey, Paul, what's up? Hey, I'm
I'm familiar with Henry. I don't know if Henry's here right now. Me and him used to talk on
Clubhouse with a bunch of the Bitcoiners. Hey, so I have a question for you.
What? So so I know that you're building or you're trying to build drivechain. I know it's
obviously difficult. What? So what drivechains would you specifically want to see? Or what would
you like? What would you find interesting to see? Like what what drivechains would you
would be useful for people? Because me personally, I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist, but
I have Bitcoin and like I would like to see more utility to Bitcoin, obviously. So
obviously I'm supporting what you guys are doing. I think it's awesome. You guys are trying you've
You guys are trying you've been trying to do this for years. So.
But yeah, what drivechains would you like to see?
Well, I personally got involved with this because I had a very, very complex idea
called that I called Truthcoin back in the day, which was about prediction markets. And you can
now today you can go to Bitcoinhivemind.com and you can watch a little 20 minute video of me
explain what it's for. And I for a lot. And but the idea is so weird that I knew that there was
no way it could possibly come to Bitcoin other than as a sidechain. So that was what got me
involved in the first place. And at the time, I would never have even thought that I would even
be working on sidechains. What I thought was, I'll invent this. I wrote this Truthcoin paper.
It's a long story, but I just thought I'll just write this idea and then someone else
will do all the work. I scammed myself in classic Bitcoin fashion, because now I'm doing all the
work also. But at the time, it looked like Blockstream was going to do all the sidechains
work and then other people would do the. So I'm interested in this prediction market thing,
which is how I first got into it. But that's a very unique kind of high risk, high reward
kind of thing. When I got involved with sidechains, there was during the block size dispute
was heating up. And there was a view at the time that sidechains could never be used for scaling
because this O and squared thing with the blockchain and also because of the supposed
impossibility of fraud proofs. But I investigated this and I found that actually fraud proofs are
completely possible and very easy, in fact. They're already on optimism.
They're already on optimism. Yeah, it's very easy to do. All the things that people think
you can't do are very easy to do with. I don't know why. So I think that was just a folk belief.
And so I wrote about that in my blog and I'm not surprised that
other people also figured out because it's a very important thing. And the idea of that
it's optional scaling by a large by a team of like 10 large block sidechains.
That is a very, very different idea than just naive L1 large block ism.
For a wide variety of reasons, like some of these I presented and scaling three
in Milan, October 2016. And some I wrote about in my post Thunder. But now one of the things that
has happened to me as someone who has been a technical researcher and commentator in the space
for all these years, years and years and years, it just really seems like actually all the other
scaling things that aren't the large block sidechain, a team of 10 large block sidechains or
something similar to that. They really, really seem like they have huge disadvantages. I mean,
the preoccupation with being able to come always back to L1 in under any circumstances,
even if it's with a giant, like this weird Merkle tree transaction that takes up a huge amount of
space, or like a forced channel factory close, which you have to do if anyone is unresponsive,
which is huge, it's like 20 times at least the size of a normal Bitcoin transaction.
When L1 fee rates are high or even volatile, I think it just like it really just that idea just
doesn't work at all. And people just defect into custodial lightning. And I just think that's,
that's really just giving up. And so I actually have gone from thinking that the large block
sidechain is a kind of fringe idea to thinking that probably almost all Bitcoin users will be
using that every day just because payments is easy. People want cheap payments. Payments is
like, you know, every day when you buy things, you're using payments all the time, whereas how
often do people use like, you know, smart contracts or even prediction markets or even name registrations
or things. So my one answer is I have my fringe prediction market project, BitcoinHiveMind.com.
But I really think the scaling idea is totally overlooked. And what has actually happened is
the stigma of the block size war has closed people's minds to it. They don't see it for what
it is, which is a completely new idea. We could call it which you should maybe have just a
completely different name. Probably it would be better if someone just renamed it instead of large
block BIP300 sidechain. If people instead renamed it to something like, you know, something instead
of like ARK or LN would just come up with a completely new name. But I don't know if people
would get it. But if you go to truthcoin.info, my thunder post, I did give it a name, but I don't
know if it's not going to sell. So. So, Paul, don't you think that they're, I mean, I'm sure that you've
been focusing or mentioned also the Zcash sidechain that we also built, which I think, again,
people try really hard. You have Matt O'Dell and you have people that try Samurai, Wasabi.
They try so hard to build these little mixers for people, which they're just not as good as having
one Zcash sidechain that everyone uses. It's always mixing everyone's things. Sender, receiver,
the amount are all hidden. The nice folks at Zcash did all this work to make the technology
is improved. It's a thousand times better than what it was back when I first heard about it in,
you know, 2012 or 2013 or whatever, when Matthew Green published Zerocoin. So yeah, scalability,
privacy are the big two. And then I personally am interested in this prediction market thing.
Those are some of my answers. Cool. Yeah. I mean, don't you think that there's some,
do you think that there's some value with, I'm sure you've been following the rollups and the
proto-dank sharding and the idea of taking a lot of the work and putting, taking it off chain in
the form of blobs and then sending a proof back and then making that go fast. Like there is some
value. Do you think that there is some value to doing a lot of the heavy lifting off chain and
then bringing the proof back on chain or what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think you're 100%
correct. But partly that is what BIP300 does in a very loose way, because with BIP300 says the
stuff is on an L2 chain that's not on L1 and nothing comes back except it's not a proof,
but it is just, it is more of a conjecture and refutation. As I say, it says, we assert that
this happens and then it waits for like a challenge. But in a way that's exactly what BIP300
does in a very, very general way. It's the most general version of that, where it just says,
you can do whatever you want. We won't ask any questions. The only thing that needs to happen is
this hash of the withdrawals needs to come back. And of course you need to pay, in merge mining,
you must pay the L1 miners so that they have a financial incentive to process, you know,
support the sidechain and process the withdrawals the honorable way. So I see BIP300 as a very
extreme form of that. And certainly the fact that we don't, the fact that we have only done
mainly Lightning as the L2 that we have focused on, I think in retrospect will be viewed as
an enormous mistake in the Bitcoin history. It will be seen as probably like a dark age,
middle ages or something. And I think that will be, when we do finally have the Renaissance,
when there is like just people building whatever they want, this will be looked at with regret.
And so we should be doing all kinds of different L2 things. We currently don't. And one cool thing
about the drivechain idea is you could try, it's a lot of the stuff that you could have the EVM,
BIP300 chain, and it could have Ethereum roll-ups on that. And then when people,
or you have L2 chain, you know, you have a chain with BIP118, you try that, or you have a BIP119
chain, you have ARK on that. And then people would, they would be using it with Bitcoin.
And then there would be, it would strengthen, I think the case for like activating,
it would both strengthen and weaken the case. But I think it would, you would say, well,
we could do this on L1. After all, we've been doing it on L2 with real money that we would
have 119 on L2 this whole time and nothing bad has happened because of 119. We've had ARK,
ARK is the L3 on L2. So why not have ARK the L2 on L1 Bitcoin that has BIP119 on L1?
So I think that's all, I think it's all related. And if people say, see, I think either way it
works out favorably because you say, well, maybe it's working out just fine as an ARK is working
just fine as an L3 of this L2. Well, therefore we don't need to bother L1 with it. And it seems
because everything's working out just fine. Whereas it also works the other way, where if
you say, well, we really, really, really need 119 on L1 as quickly as possible. Okay, well,
now it's still a good thing that you have it on L2. Everyone can see exactly what it does and how
it works. Software is already being written for it. It has actual users. So now there's much less
bike shedding. There's much less concern trolling. You just have it on, you already have it existing.
And so now you just say, okay, this is exactly what we're going to do on L1. We're going to do
exactly what we have done on L2 on L1. So I think either way, it's better.
Gotcha. Yeah. It's just so crazy to me that Bitcoin doesn't have any of these things
yet. To me, to me, it just seems insane. Yeah, we have this weird culture that Bitcoin is already
perfect. And so it's also like the part of the history, like Ethereum had a very, very scammy
history. It was very shady at first. It was poorly thought out and it was like all done with like
Ethereum. They raised money even before it existed. So most of the ETH went to the early
contributors. It was like this mostly pre-mined altcoin. And it mostly had no use cases at all.
And it attracted this den of thieves thing. And I think a lot of Bitcoiners formed an opinion
about it back then in 2015, or even earlier, 2014, because January 2014 was like the announcement.
And so they formed an opinion of it back then. And then for a while, you could climb the Bitcoin
technical totem pole by criticizing Ethereum. And so people would do that like, you know,
to like for clout, including me, I also did it, you know, and many of my critiques were very good.
So that's the thing is Ethereum really had all these problems. And it really was very experimental.
And it was wet concrete. But I think, you know, over time, things change, you know,
like it's been a really long time, you know, nine years have passed since 2014. So
a lot can happen in a year. And that is, I think the story is just that,
like, what is someone supposed to do? Like, if you're a researcher, and you're going to try to
do something, and maybe you are a busybody, and you are, you have no talent, and there are many
such people. So like, you're, let's say you're a researcher at an Ivy League university, and you,
you work on protocols, and you want to publish like a Bitcoin thing,
you publish a Bitcoin thing, and everyone hates it. And then you publish another thing,
and they hate that. And then you think, well, whatever. And then there's Ethereum. So they
publish a thing, and they all love it. Now, again, this is poor quality control for the idea,
because a lot of these ideas really did suck. But it just speaks to the fact that, you know,
given enough time, and enough evolutionary pressure, you know, of course, most mutations
cause an organism to die and their children to die. But it's the few successful ones that have,
you know, created all the life on planet Earth. So that we see today.
I think, I think that everybody, I was just gonna say, like, I think that everybody has,
like, in 2017, 2018, I think that, I think it was pretty reasonable to say that, like, yeah,
there was no value on Ethereum, right? Like, there was, like, I mean, people were literally selling
time machines, like, like, actually, like, they were actually selling time machines on the
blockchain, right? But now, like, you fast forward to 2023. And like, now we're talking about, like,
I mean, there's like, a lot of people that are like, bringing, like, trying to bring in real
world assets, like makers having tokenized treasuries. And like, there's a lot of like,
you know, real things happening now, in my opinion. And I would just, I would just like to
see and there and there's still obviously, like scams, of course, right? Like, yeah, like, that's
not gonna, that's not gonna go away. But I think that some of the the use cases, I'd like to see
that on, you know, Bitcoin, which has, you know, certain properties that Ethereum doesn't have,
right? The world changes, right? That's how it works.
Well, I think there's also the concept of a spectrum of decentralization and and a niche.
And by that, I mean, people will say, like Bitcoiners will say, well, Ethereum's centralized,
you know, their level that critique at Ethereum. And it is centralized compared to BTC.
And in many profound ways, it is, but it's kind of like, what if you compared Ethereum to,
like, you know, Visa, something that has a mailing address and an HQ and a CEO that you can arrest.
And like, something that you could just they could just pass a law like banning,
just ban, like, a thing, you know, you're passing a law banning TikTok or something, you know, it's
like, if you if you had like a big, imagine you had like a piece of graph paper, or something.
Or it was like, you had it as a football field, you know, and it's 100 yards, or it's like a
percentage point or something where you're saying, the most decentralized thing in the world would be
like a really, really small block version of Bitcoin, that was, you know, in white, widely
distributed already or something. So that's like as decentralized as you could get. And then fully
centralized would just be like any, anything that was like WeChat pay or something fully incorporated
and client server, absolutely, in an absolute sense. And it's kind of like, you know, where
would Ethereum fall? And where would Bitcoin and Ethereum fall on that? I think like, you know,
Bitcoin would be like on like, the five yard line, and maybe Ethereum would be like on the 12 yard
line or something like that. So it's like, it's a significant difference. But Ethereum was very,
through luck or through strategy. Ethereum just kind of decided, listen, we're not we know that
we won't if we try to be as decentralized as Bitcoin, we'll lose. So they said, we'll just be
more centralized, and we'll try to reap all the advantages of that that we can.
And you know, a lot of people don't care, of course. And there's also other ways in which
you can push the envelope if you're willing to make changes. So they have a strategy that
involves that. And that strategy by itself is not enough to defeat Bitcoin or even come close. And
I think a lot of Ethereum's design is terrible. And I still think it's kind of funny that because
of the halting problem, you have to pay fees, even if your transaction doesn't go through.
It's like, you know, the worst. It's like, you know, it's terrible in many ways. But you know,
just with enough growth and enough time and enough just being allowed to exist. That would be a lot.
That's enough for it's enough to eventually become popular enough to challenge Bitcoin. And I don't
understand we have taken a very, we've taken the wrong attitude towards that. I'm just trying to
say that it's the same Ethereum that was in 2015. And we just feel sorry for anyone who
falls for it. But really, it's just something that has made it very different trade offs.
In Ethereum, you still have like,
people's private keys controlling their coins. There's no, you don't necessarily when you join
Ethereum and you make a new ETH address, you don't have to type in like your name,
your your address, your social security number. So it's not true that it's if you had to sort them
into buckets of centralized and decentralized. And as long as like, you know, Chase is in that
group, or WeChat pays in that group, or Visa is in that group, then Ethereum is sorted into the
decentralized bucket. And it's just, it's just it's a, it's different trade offs, and it's
trade offs that we wouldn't make. But so I'm trying to say is there's a spectrum. And so the
idea is, are we as Bitcoiners going to immediately forfeit those users, the users who prefer that
location on the spectrum? Why and why do that when with sidechains, we could just occupy
every single space on the spectrum? You know, we can just allow people that should go in
and sacrifice some decentralization while still using 21 million bitcoins.
So yeah, I don't really understand why we do it this way. And back in 2015, there was
RSK Rootstock was created with the whole purpose of just replicating Ethereum on Bitcoin. And that
was, that was too loud. Cheers. Everyone was for that back then. So. So it's I don't know
why things are so different now. But I think it's a mistake. Hello, Mr. Ethan. We have a giant purple
E. Okay. Um, I've, like, I've been trying to understand the way that that that BIP300
proposes that you would be able to transfer the control of a Bitcoin, you know, with a gated
redemption. But like, if I if I was to transfer my Bitcoin through a BIP300, like block,
and on something that like, let's say had had turned complete scripting. And then I and I paid
someone with that, that like turn complete bitcoins, sidechain, then I would still be able
to induce a redemption back to main chain. Correct? No, this is exactly what I I sacrifice.
This is the this is the big trade off I make. So I sacrifice that. And but in return, you get
like absurd amounts of benefits. And in my view is that the sacrifice is actually very small if
you marginally think about it. But but what happens with BIP300 is you pay the coins to
something that only miners can unlock. But the miners themselves can only unlock it in a very,
very, very difficult way that involves a lot of them cooperating over a long period of time
over something they pre agreed to do. So it's, it's, it's the whole the whole point of BIP300
is to make it very difficult for miners to take these the coins or send them to any direction
other than the direction that the sidechain wants them to go. So I don't know if I'm explaining it
very well. But Oh, but you cannot, you cannot unilaterally withdraw to L1, I sacrifice that.
And because I don't know when you joined, but I was saying that's actually trying to support that
and service that is I think, really killing lightning network and even something like arc,
where because it's, you're very vulnerable to L1 fees changing and you're like, the whole
point of supporting that is this huge, huge draw that actually ends up making it kind of not really
work. And at the end of the day, the miners can actually steal from those things anyway, by just
since they can censor the justice transaction in ln. So since they can already do that, I'm kind
of sacrificing something that's already basically been sacrificed. This is my point of view. But of
course, my point of view is a very fringe point of view that most people don't totally agree with
yet. But nonetheless, I think it's right. So is this making any sense so far? No. Yeah, I mean,
you know, I, I was thinking that, you know, it would take, like, it was my understanding that
you would you could very easily transfer any of your Bitcoin to a sidechain. But that mean you
could take it back, but it would only it would take 90 days. What you do what happened what it
literally is happening on L1 is the coins are spent into something that only the miners can
unspend via this long 90 day thing. But the issue is the design or the intent, how you would take
it back would be you put the coins in on the sidechain, you would do whatever the sidechain is
doing that makes it a BIP300 is like a BIP300 library, you would initiate the withdrawal over
there. The sidechain would add you to the list of people. This is like people getting in line to
get on a train or something. Okay, you're at you're added on this is on L2 L1's not seeing any
of this. And then when it's time for the next train to leave, because there's only one globally
for the whole sidechain. But it's next to leave it loads up like 20,000 passengers, yourself
included, it loads you into the one transaction that's going to pay everyone out, which is like a
big fan out coin join style type of thing, which is like, it's going to pay this one txid that's
going to pay everyone out. So it's the sidechain will do that. And the sidechain software is
automatically doing that. And this is all identical for everyone is on L2. And when the sidechain
does that, it will calculate the txid that does that. And that is this critical hash that has to
take three to six months, whether that's included on L1 Coinbase, that is what gets upvoted,
or cross chain confirmed, or whatever you want to call it for three to six months. And when that
when that goes through, then that can be included on L1, and then you get paid out.
So it's not really ever anything that you do unilaterally to get the money back. It is
always the miners who put this thing in L1. And the design is just supposed to be
the miners have no it's because it's pigeonholed into one thing every three months,
that it's just too awkward, for lack of a better word, for miners to put a hash in there that is
not the single hash that is reported by the sidechain for that three month period. So there's
only one sidechain reported by sidechain for everyone. One hash one withdrawal hash for like
January, February, March. It's just there. And then there's only one there's only space for one
withdrawal on L1. You know, and you can try different hashes and try to get them up. But
ultimately, only one will be able to get the 13,000 votes. So that's the the idea is that
the miners initiate the withdrawal. And the withdrawal is defined by a hash, the sidechain
has determined what that hash should be already. And those hashes, are they either match or they
don't? If they don't, the sidechain is dead, probably. And possibly the whole drivechain
idea is dead also. But if they match, then everything works perfectly fine. And there is no
there's no need to support you have like, total freedom to do whatever you want with the coins.
I see. So that that that means that the sidechain, in theory could also that I mean,
depending on how it's run, could deny they could they could deny you the right to redeem them back?
Yes, if the sidechain is very badly designed, like one example is what if the sidechain is so badly
designed that the software never runs or is never even produced, then no one will ever know what
this hash is supposed to be, or who has tried to withdraw, and no one will know the fate of these
coins. And then, and then another thing is, of course, they could program something so that on L2,
this could be like a very centralized sidechain, there's like an admin key that can take people's
coins. If there is such a thing, they take the coin, your coins, and then they initiate the
withdrawal to their L1 address. And then they join the line with your coins, but the sidechain
will calculate for everyone, they'll say, here's the next people getting on the bus, or getting on
the train. And then you will be, you will have really no recourse in that particular situation.
But this is, of course, the this is desirable, because you're the one you start on L1 with
your coins, and then it's kind of like choosing to go to a hotel or something. You know, you start in
your own house on L1. And the sidechain developers, they have to convince you, no deposit to this
sidechain, it's going to be great. If they don't, you just don't do it. Or maybe you put $20 in and
you experiment when you say this is going pretty well. And then you put more, more money, they
accumulate reputation, but it's the it's the fact that the sidechain developer will be blamed.
That is the key, because that is how we have competition among different chains, which is
exactly what we want. Yeah, all right. That actually that actually makes a lot more sense to
me. I appreciate it. Sure thing. Thanks for your question. Okay. Tryptonomics. Yes. Hello.
I remember you from last week, I think, or a week before.
Yeah, I'm sorry. What did you say in that last part? Did you say SOL?
SOL?
Yeah, anyway. Hello. So yeah, this new this hashing method once every three months and then the
matching of it and reducing the potentiality of tokens being redirected and essentially reducing
theft. That's great. So I was thinking how I remember colored coins. And if this is off topic,
I'll move on. But I think when NFTs are so popular because they're just popular and people don't
understand why they're popular. And then some people actually understand the benefits of them
if they could actually be used in the real world. But in terms of on-chain, colored coins were
interesting because they just colored a portion of Bitcoin to represent the real world asset on
chain. And so we had well, you know, we had that area on chain that was essentially highlighted
to represent the real world assets on chain and designate the NFT. And so with drivechains,
essentially, drivechains are doing the same thing, but with this new matching
methodology. Is that right? That you were just describing?
I would say actually ordinals are very similar to colored coins. What happens with
drivechains, you really just spend them into a script so that the coins themselves are they
are highlighted, as you say, but there's a specific like UTXO that is just the UTXO that is in,
is paid to OPNOP5 or, you know, whatever. And that those are all the coins that are in sidechain slot
number three or something. So if there's like 30,000 coins in there, they are in that. But
they are protected by this opcode. So you could think of that as kind of a highlighted thing,
but it really is, if you try to withdraw those coins, like without going through the 13,000
ACK counter thing, then you will not, then they will invalidate the block. So,
so it's a little different than colored coins, which had no, had no, had no teeth. It had no
purchase on the L1 block validity rules at all. But it's sort of simple to steal.
Well, yeah, there was just like the, it wasn't like, with colored coins, it was not the case
that if you, for example, mixed a red coin with a blue coin, it would like be an invalid transaction.
Sure. L1 would just do that. And then you'd be like, whoops, I destroyed the coins. Which is
kind of funny thing about Ordinal is it's kind of solved that problem, but it also had other
problems. But it's kind of like the coins, they have a, there's a particular way of reordering
them. So you can always get the color back was my understanding, but apparently now they
have changed that because of something else. So. Okay. It's similar.
Yeah. But, but NFTs on, on Bitcoin via drivechains.
One, in terms of theft, it's, it's, it's a lot more difficult to, to,
to initiate theft and redirect the wallet addresses and the tokens. But how about actually
writing an NFT to a real world asset and representing that via Bitcoin on a drive
chain? Is it going to be less or more difficult via a drivechain? Like if we want to represent
whatever that is. My vision for the right way to do this is to make, I think we don't really
want this to be on the L1 chain, even though it already is, of course, because of colored coins,
BRC20, et cetera, Ordinal's inscriptions, RGB, et cetera. So I think we don't want it to be
on L1 and we should build it. And since it's already possible on every single chain,
it's already possible. You know what I mean? Like if you, we built the large block sidechain for
scaling or the Zcash sidechain, you could have Ordinal's over there, you know, and so people can,
they can already do it on any chain. So my thought is people really like doing this.
They're not going to stop anytime soon. We'll build them their own chain just for this, where
Bitcoin is always the money unit and Bitcoin always pays the transaction fees. We'll domesticate all
of this, you know, this weird activity. And we'll put all these in a little zoo and we'll make a nice
piece of software where people can click a button and they can upload an image. They can put their
Pepe or their funny image in, their ape or whatever they want to put in there. And this is
called BitAssets. And we have a version of that that we've already made, but it's kind of clunky.
So I was going to just make a chain where you, you send BTC back and forth. So the BTC would be
how you register a new asset. You pay like a tiny amount, you pay like a normal transaction fee,
you know, to create, you know, a crypto coin or whatever, whatever you want to make
or something or shares of GE or representatives of a certain bond or a token that represents
ownership in a club or concert tickets, you know, Taylor Swift tickets or something or Super Bowl
tickets. And so you make those things and over there and people buy and sell them with BTC.
And it's all like, you have like a DEX over there and you have all, you do all that stuff over there.
Then people can take BTC from that L2 back to L1 if they don't want to dwell on the BitAssets
sidechain. And that's my, that's kind of like how I think it would work. So we'd have this sidechain
that just does all that topical sidechains and one for, you know, basically NFTs, BitAssets,
whatever you want to call it, colored coins. But during the blind merge mining process,
wouldn't it just kind of clone the NFTs on that blockchain anyway? Like, and sometimes
the native token on an altcoin, on an altchain is not an ERC20, for instance, it's an ERC721.
So, wouldn't Bitcoin just, wouldn't the NFT just be denominated in Bitcoin anyway,
via blind merge mining in that instance? Well, blind merge mining is how you find
the next block. And so it's also optional. And so you can, I think everyone will use it though,
but I think that it's sort of optional. And the separation of miner from sidechain node is
even optional if you're using BIP301, it could be the same person. And it will, as far as long
as the node is very cheap, it won't make any difference. So, no one will actually use it
unless the node becomes expensive, the separation idea. So it won't change that, those types of
things about it. And as for being 721 versus ERC20, that's why I think we should just build
a special purpose chain that already has it all predefined. And I think that then it will be
standardized forever. And I think the chain itself, at the chain level, it should support
a lot of these things. State and which ones are for sale, for how much, which ones are being
auctioned off, have liquidity. So that's what I think. I think that's the way to go. But even if
you don't go that way, we should keep in mind that people will probably obtain this idea in various
other formats because it's just such a popular idea anyway. It's just like you said, colored
coins and whatnot. Okay. I mean, that would increase the fees as well, right? There's an
Layer 2 designated specifically for the purposes of NFTs. So let's say we want to transfer a
portfolio with ERC20s, for instance. Sorry, I'm using so much Ethereum, but ERC20s and ERC721s,
we have to pay the miners double or yeah, you have to pay the miners double to process.
Yeah, but I don't really understand why do you bring that up though? Because
anything you transfer, you have to pay a blockchain transaction fee for.
Yeah, I was just thinking maybe there's a way to, if you have a portfolio that you want to transfer, if you can do it all in a single transaction, even though the tokens are separate contracts.
Well, probably in the BitAssets spec that I wrote a long time ago, that spec, they're all just outputs. They're all just like their own UTXOs, kind of.
So you just select them all and then you pay them out. And actually, it all just works.
Easier said than done, but it all just works automatically because it's tracking output type. The database is tracking the output type.
And so that was a design I had. I don't know if anyone who knows what design would be popular among developers and users and things, but that's kind of designed and built with that.
And so in that way, they would all be the same, but the overhead that you save is not that much because the overhead of a given transaction is not that much in a Bitcoin UTXO-style transaction.
It's really just the inputs are most of the transactions, the inputs.
All right. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Thank you.
Cool. Great. Well, this space, you know, is only possible because of people coming up and asking questions.
So feel free to come up. Mike in space, come up. Haven't heard from Mike in space in so long.
Come up and tell us about Ordinal's drama. Or don't. You know, whatever he's up to.
May I request Skydoge to come up as they've adopted BIP300 already?
You have the crazy altcoin that has adopted BIP300.
And I have very, very funny GIFs.
Which chain is adopted BIP300 now?
Skydoge is an altcoin.
They adopt that altcoin.
And they hang out in the drivechain telegram.
Oh, now we have a Mobius strip.
It's a one dimensional shape, everyone.
Hello.
We can't hear you at all.
Oh, and it's not, of course, it's not a one dimensional shape. It's a one sided shape.
That's my mistake.
You can have a multidimensional one sided shape, right?
Absolutely.
There's only one side. It's a, you know, taupe or something.
Actually, Unahedron, right?
If I remember my obscure Greek versions of math terms.
I think Hedra, Hedra meant like a dodecahedron or that meant like multi, it's like 12 seated or something.
Hedra was seat, I think.
So that's just faced, multi-faced.
Anyway, Mobius, you are muted.
So, and we can't hear you. Can anyone hear him? I can't hear him.
No.
Well, you may need a new microphone.
Skydoge.
Maybe you go down and come back again. Maybe it's the app.
I think Skydoge speaks only the language of GIFs and references to N64 speed running.
Speed running.
Well, he's the strong and silent type.
Maybe to break the silence.
Maybe I can ask a question like regarding the side, the drivechain nodes.
Can you kind of like shortly explain what then?
I mean, like for people to understand, like, you know, what did the nodes, like how many sidechains can support one node?
Is it any incentive running the node and stuff like that?
You know, like just general, you know, about the nodes, because we all the time focus about this, you know,
ping pong going for the L1 and drivechains.
But, you know, I think nodes on the drivechain nodes are also important to be explained properly.
Well, do you mean L1 node that enforces BIP300 or do you mean a node of the sidechain?
No, no, node of the sidechain.
Is it when you run the drivechain node, is it only can support only one sidechain or it's a specific only for one sidechain?
Or you can run multiple sidechains on one node?
Any software application can call other software applications like, you know, and depend on them.
So it's kind of like how I really shouldn't give a weird example like this.
But I'm going to try to say like, you know, like in gaming, like everyone's running like Microsoft C++ redistributable or something.
Or like what is the other thing everyone has to run?
JavaScript runtime environment, you know.
So I don't know if that's that's not very relatable, I think.
But you could run a piece of software that loads two different sidechain nodes.
But other than that, it's it's one sidechain node per sidechain itself.
So, OK, yeah, you know, it's like the way it works is.
It's like, you know, it's like you it's like you sit down at a restaurant, an Italian restaurant and you get the bread for free.
That's like the L1 Bitcoin node.
Everyone gets the bread and then you order whatever you want.
So like some people want to order the lasagna or whatever.
And they order the lasagna and someone else orders only the soup.
So and then at the end, everyone, if you pay, if you bought lasagna, you pay for the lasagna.
And if you you pay in the form of running the node, you must run the node on your computer.
You must use the CPU and bandwidth resources.
So if you run like a Bitcoin SV node, it's going to cost a lot.
But then you get the lobster ravioli or whatever it is, you know, the filet mignon.
So and then people are like, Paul, how does this all work? It's amazing.
And I'm like, well, no, the people who are running the nodes, they're the really the ones paying.
All I am doing is having everyone sit at the same table.
And I say, if you didn't order the filet mignon, then you don't have to pay for it.
And then people say, Paul, this idea is so complicated.
It'll take 10 years for anyone to understand it.
And then I'm just like, OK, I guess.
So I don't know if that helps, but, yeah, it's like each sidechain is its own node.
I think it's plausible that someone will eventually release a piece of software that actually contains every node to be like the big thing.
But it'll always be possible to run Bitcoin Core only.
Yeah, like if let's say there is a Zcash sidechain, the node what I want to run will be only for the Zcash sidechain.
If I want to support other sidechain, I need to run another node.
You download that node and that node has its own blockchain.
So it's a new node, new blockchain, new blocks, new UTXO set.
Yeah.
And if you download our software, then you'll see it for yourself because the little launcher will open.
It'll ask you like which sidechain nodes do you want to download.
They're like downloading plugins a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's how it works.
The launcher is very nicely done and very nice UI.
And I downloaded also the full blockchain, which was very fine.
It was interesting like the test CPU mining of the test tokens or coins.
Yeah, that's fun, right?
Yeah.
Sure, why not?
It's fun.
I think it's great.
And I like doing that.
We have the big version, which is like kind of a more serious test, which has the full Bitcoin history and everything.
And then we have the play money.
The launcher just does play money, resets the blockchain for everyone.
So there's really no overhead.
You can just start clicking on things pretty quickly.
Although that one also that will find a block every second or every two seconds or so.
So if you just leave it on and come back the next day, it will just like have been adding so many blocks that it will.
I think it eventually has some kind of performance issue.
Yeah, it's a quick.
Yeah, I think I think the launcher when was the last week I think was not available to download the sidechains.
But I think now is. So I will.
New version is pretty nice.
Yeah.
And it has more stuff for Windows and Mac.
Normally, it's all Linux at first.
And then we, you know, we add the Windows stuff.
And then if people are in a really, really good mood, one Mac thing will get added.
But we're going to add more of that.
So we have to get all that stuff for like, you know, how the you know, they do it.
The CI and the GitHub actions and stuff.
We have to we have to once we get that done, then it should be permanently fixed.
So but that's just kind of a chore right now.
Yeah, the launcher is like, I mean, I download on Windows and it's like two, three minutes.
Just, you know, like download, open and run the node.
And, you know, it's very, very good.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people can can, you know, check themselves.
This is very, very few minutes of their time to to run.
Yeah.
Well, we have a flavor and we have Andres.
So welcome to the stage.
Nice to see you again.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right. So I don't it's not really a question, but I just wanted to comment.
I used to be against drivechains until fairly recently.
And I just recently saw the light.
So, yeah, just in case you feel this kind of.
Thank you. Thank you.
In case you feel this kind of promotion doesn't work.
Just so you know, you're convincing some people.
Hey, thanks. Well, you know, a lot of people are amazed.
They say, Paul, how do you do all this, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, the thing is, this has actually happened in Bitcoin a lot.
And in fact, one irony is that Peter Todd was once hated and he was this big, small blocker.
And he was hated by everyone.
And he looks like 2013.
And eventually everyone kind of like came over to his point of view, really.
So it's kind of funny, really.
And this type of thing has happened a lot.
And, you know, if people.
It's definitely like it doesn't really bother me at all when people say like if people say,
I heard about drivechain like two weeks ago.
It sounds risky.
It's like, well, they only heard about it two weeks ago.
So I heard about it eight and a half years ago.
So obviously it's a lot less risky to me.
Someone you've known for eight and a half years is.
Not, you know, you have a better understanding of that person than someone that you just met two weeks ago, so.
So it's kind of like whatever.
And, you know, Bitcoin has been doing very well on the whole for the last.
You know, eight, 10 years, so.
So it's just kind of easy to have to keep things in perspective.
And I think that, yeah, I think it's just great.
And just continue to have a new page about a FUD that I'm going to try to release today.
I hope.
The phone, brand new phone.
And I don't know, I think I'm ready to blame Elon.
He's firing too many people, Elon.
Only fire, only fire 65 percent.
Don't fire 70 percent, because I don't know why.
It seems to mostly be happening to me, though.
Notably, it doesn't happen to the LayerTwo Labs phone, which would crash the whole space.
So I don't know why this is happening, but it constantly happens.
Oh, well, anyway.
So, yeah, we have the FUD page, and I think just people just continue to talk about the idea.
And that it has these benefits, and it doesn't really have these risks.
And that Bitcoin, people should be free to use Bitcoin in whatever way they want.
It's not going to negatively affect anything that your L1 node is doing today.
So in that sense, it's really not a change at all, and people are not required to upgrade to BIP300.
Which should kind of be a clue that it is harmless, because your node will still be doing what it did before.
It's not like people can take your coins.
This is just a new option for people.
And, yeah, so I'm really happy to hear that.
So that's good.
So thanks for your comment.
I also heard that Elon's just firing robots now as well.
He's going after the robots too.
He doesn't want any AI.
Elon, get AI.
Can we get chap at GPT-4 to update my Twitter app or my X app?
Elon, you're going to need the app not to crash if you want it to become the everything payment supermedia app.
Anyway, hello. Mr. Flavor is here.
Hello.
Thanks for having me on.
So I saw earlier this week you had done a lengthy reply to Safety and Amus.
And a message of his was getting some traction.
And I was just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.
And if you would talk about your relationship with Safety.
Yeah, sure.
So Safety, you know, he was this guy long ago.
I mean, you see in the tweet I post, he wrote this.
Recently, he wrote this open letter against BIP300, which has nothing.
It has nothing at all to do with BIP300.
He just doesn't like me personally because I tweeted about not liking his book.
And he is a vindictive person, which is fine.
I mean, as a game theorist, vindictiveness has its advantages.
There's even a strategy.
It's even we have a name for it called Grim Trigger, where if someone betrays you, you never forgive them.
This is a game theorist approved.
In some contexts, it's improved when you really want someone to never betray you once.
But in the real world where that has a lot of dynamism, it doesn't work.
And this is what you are all about to experience as I explain this to you.
So he does this kind of thing very often where he said that thing about music after all art, including all music after 1971 is fiat and just terrible.
And Peter McCormack tried to say, well, what about like such and such?
And he's like, whatever you suck.
And then they got into like a little fight.
And you see, the Grim Trigger world is a very dangerous place where there's the slightest misunderstanding.
Everyone is shooting each other in the head and we all die.
So it's it's not applicable to every situation.
And certainly now when there's nuance and misunderstanding.
And so so he's just like, you know, he's like a certain this is a certain type of character.
And this is what he wants to be.
He wants to be this like high priest person where people give him respect.
And acknowledge him as like a like a some kind of a cultural figure.
And that is really what it is.
It has nothing to do with he doesn't actually know anything about the 300.
And most of the as you saw, most of his open letter.
And so he's blocked me.
So he just he writes this open letter.
But I have no way of seeing it until someone else screenshots it and sends it sends it to me.
And the bulk of it was just about him saying that he would not upgrade his node to support the 300.
But that doesn't make any difference because it's a soft fork.
It's only the hard fork that requires everyone to upgrade.
So so the entire thing was just pointless.
And he did have like, you know, some things to say about how he doesn't agree with the motivation section, which is which is fine.
But the motivation section is the same reason Blockstream was created.
So so you can read my reply.
But I think the more important thing is to just comment on like the nature of this person, which is he.
He you know, he has these strong opinions.
He's doing this kind of like edgelording kind of thing.
He's doing like trying to do like an esteem to lab thing.
He knows, you know, it's good.
Nassim Taleb pointed this out in in the Black Swan.
He said, what if I got into a fistfight with someone at a book signing?
He mentions this to his agent and the agents.
This is kind of like, well, that would be terrible.
But then he's like, oh, wait a minute, because it would be they realized it would be good for book sales.
So, you know, you're anti fragile.
You want any kind of controversy, anything that can give you attention, you know, like a Jenna Maroney character from 30 Rock.
It's like it doesn't matter as long as people are giving you attention.
And this is also also partially based on this guy, Mercha Popescu, who ran this trilemma blog.
And this guy was surely a genius.
But I think he was mistaken about something big, which is he thought.
Bitcoin never needs to change, and in particular, he thought Bitcoin doesn't need adoption because people will come come crawling.
And he is a patient zero of this idea, and he lived in a time when Bitcoin was doing very, very well.
And the competitors to it were all just would just complete garbage.
So he was right to be overconfident, and he was also right to want to preserve Bitcoin's properties.
Notably, I once asked this character Mercha Popescu on IRC about sidechains, and he said that he he gave the only smart answer that I had heard anyone give at that time, which he said.
I don't know, I have to learn more about them. So that's how smart that guy was.
He was the smartest guy around, because at the time there was no code and there was no anything.
This is like 2015 or 2014 or something.
So so this guy was a brilliant guy, Mercha Popescu, and he was very, very rude to people, but with utter brilliance and and style.
And he was and he's he's a crazy person, of course, but he's a genius.
And he like he once hacked a FetLife fetish website or some website like that and downloaded everyone, all the women's profiles and pictures and posted them somewhere.
There's quite a character and he's a brilliant guy.
And the point of I'm trying to make, though, is people think that if they're as rude as him, then they will also be as intelligent as.
As him, and they are wrong, they only managed to copy the the kind of rudeness, and they're also trying to do the you know, this idea of the edgelording and just a hot, really hot takes you get you get attention and you get relevance.
And so that's all that it is.
It has nothing to do with anything.
But, you know, my I'll give you my complete relationship with him is that long ago he asked me for help writing this article.
And my view is the article is a lot largely riffing off of things that I had already written.
I had written this essay of limits of blockchain tech, and then he wanted to write this paper about it.
And as you see in the reply, he emailed me about it.
And then he he couldn't thank me enough.
And he said, I hope to repay you fittingly one day.
And then like a year later, or whatever, on Twitter, he was asking me if someone someone asked about his book, and I said it wasn't very good.
And only three chapters of it were about Bitcoin.
And it was I had all this irrelevant junk stapled into it, which I believe and which I think is now a widely expected, widely like, shared point of view that he is commenting on all this stuff that doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin, really.
And so I was disappointed in and I think he's drunk this, this Kool Aid, this is this is like Rothbard Hanselman hop book, direction about the time preference and about democracy, the God that failed, and a lot of his material is basically just ripped off from that stuff, and none of that stuff is any good.
So it's kind of a rambling answer.
But that was why I didn't like his book, because I thought he's just copy pasting stuff that other people wrote, and it's not very good.
Taking stuff from Bitcoin, all the good parts were just good stuff taken from Bitcoin talk.
So I thought it was fine that someone wrote a book about Bitcoin.
But anyway, long story short, he, he objected to that comment on Twitter.
And I asked him about objective and like a dependent and independent variables.
And from this, he just assumed that I am some kind of weird positivist, who are the enemies of, I suppose, the Austrian school, even though I'm not at all.
I'm also an I'm a Karl Popper critical rationalist.
And so we are also enemies of the positivist.
Although we're often confused for positivist, as was this occasion.
And so then he just got into this thing.
And he said that, that all that is a bunch of junk.
And then he said that I worked for Block, which was true at the time.
Back in 2016, I worked for Jeff Garzik's startup, which has a lot to say about that, but it would take too long.
Or if you want to ask about it, I will maybe answer it, I guess.
But I said, well, you know, as far as I know, you also work for Block.
And that was a comment on logic, because I was saying, I don't know all the people that.
Are being given money by Block, the LLQ.
I don't know that. So isn't it irrelevant ad hominem?
So I was it was just a purely logical point.
But then he was like, so offended by this that he blocked me immediately.
And so then, as is my practice, when someone blocks me, I just block them back.
Just because I think blocking is so silly that I thought, OK, fine.
And then I think that's the whole thing is that people have, I think, tried to talk to him about this idea.
And they ask him about the idea and they go back and forth.
And it's all just about his reputation and his ego.
And he thinks that if this it's just it's this 300 is just collateral damage.
He just thinks that if I get more prestige in any way.
It would be bad for him. And so that's the whole that's the entire thing.
And so would it be bad for him? I ask.
Well, if you were to gain more prestige, you know, I honestly think of him as a very small fish to fry.
And I think I have much bigger fish to fry.
So I don't even like I don't even get it.
But I think that I think he does represent.
The I wrote an essay that I never published, but maybe it's really hard because I read a lot of things that I don't publish and I try to get it out.
But the one essay was about Austrian economics and I write about how helpful I found it to be.
And but also why I ultimately abandoned it.
And so the essay was called Austrian economics to join it, then leave.
And Brian Kaplan wrote a similar essay that exists and that you can find.
And but it's.
But maybe that would help. I don't know.
But I just think it is, you know, the Austrian econ is great because traditional econ has so many problems.
And so you think this sucks.
And then you feel like, oh, Austria, you know, this is good.
This is making progress.
But then you look around and you're like, this kind of also sucks if you really think about it.
So that's just my point of view.
And I always push the envelope.
So when I see someone who is.
Merely a few steps ahead of most people, which is what I think he is, I just think I don't care because I'm going I'm sprinting to the finish line as quickly as possible.
So I don't know. I mean, the sad truth is it probably this is probably unavoidable at this point because he's probably like talk so much trash, you know, by his own hand.
He is creating this whole.
You know, this whole narrative or this whole thing, so it's and I think this is it's not the only one.
Most of the people against BIP300, I think, are just people that at one point or another, I have called out for just being, you know.
Just mediocrities are just not impressive.
According to me, it doesn't mean that, you know, it doesn't mean that they're not worthy of being loved and that they shouldn't have their own, shouldn't be able to sell books or something.
But, you know, I have absurdly high standards.
So that's just my own opinion.
For your part, you don't really have any animosity towards him or others.
And you believe that his detracting from BIP300 is mostly politically motivated.
Right. Yeah, I think people don't.
It might reassure such people if they really had an idea of the fish that I'm really trying to fry.
And I think that if they went to BitcoinHiveMind.com and they watched the 20 minute video there, they would see that I find all of this this palace affair of Bitcoin development to be very, very small.
A very low on the it's a small issue and as far as things that I'm more interested in.
So I don't even, you know, and a lot of these people are not many people have made it their whole identity Bitcoin.
But I have most of my friends and family do not don't know anything about Bitcoin.
They're very funny. I was just talking to my cousin the other day.
He had no idea the difference. He said no idea that Bitcoin Cash was different from Bitcoin.
Even after sort of conversing with me for all these years, I thought that's the status of a normal a normal person who is.
In my family, you know, it was like, you know, an educated white collar professional, smart person.
They don't know. They don't even really know.
So, you know, I don't even really even like it's not.
I think that's part of the reason why I had the idea of BIP300 anyway and why I carried it this far, though, is because I really am so independent.
And I really do need the BIP300 part to work for this because I actually want the sidechains to work.
It isn't like a weird career stepping stone.
I don't know if any of them don't.
Miners don't even understand Bitcoin. They're not coders, they're not developers, they're not mathematicians.
And they'll tell you they're not. They're just these.
They're just kind of like brainwashing.
Yeah, I think a few people do.
And one surprising thing is even like, well, you know, often some time from time to time, even big supporters.
It's clear to me that they don't they don't totally understand it either.
I mean, BitCode, we love BitCode.
And he was just like saying he's run the software, which makes him an elite expert.
But he's asking about like, you know, does every can you have one piece of software run multiple nodes or something that I would think someone who had run the software would would know.
And sometimes even me and CryptEx, we have disagreements.
We have differences of we have a different idea of what it was, what it looks like or what it does.
And those are sometimes pretty funny.
The idea that we have been working on it and testing it for a while.
And that I think was recently happened in like.
Twenty twenty, I think it was after covid.
I think. But it was like that was just funny to me that after all this time, you would still.
So, yeah, people don't have a full understanding of things that they comment on.
They just look around. They see something.
They think this is mostly going well or they think this is a problem.
And then they start talking about that.
And I think that's perfectly fine.
But, yeah, like so this is exactly the case with the safety in where he's just saying like he just doesn't.
And it's like they hang out with it's it's very social as well.
So like there used to be this group, Nakamoto Institute, that had these really, really high quality essays very early on.
Twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, which I highly recommend people read.
But, of course, there was some drama with that.
Whereas Daniel Krajewicz is a brilliant guy, absolutely brilliant guy.
And he was sort of the leader.
Maybe and maybe.
But then a safety kind of replaced him.
He sort of left. He was more into large block ism, believe it or not.
And a safety and just kind of moved in.
And I can I can just from hearing about all of it from different people from far away,
I could take out a pipe and do armchair psychology about who has a daddy issues or whatever is going on with that.
But it's just like it's a group of people and they have, you know, they have beliefs about like there's like the Austin community is more.
The Austin community where the Nakamoto Institute was created is from UT Austin when they were all undergraduates.
Austin community has more of a focus on like property rights, Austrian econ.
And then there's like New York, which is like more finance and like devs.
And San Francisco is more like cryptography, you know, whatever, ring signatures, block stream, etc.
Until that fell apart.
A lot of the SF stuff moved to New York, I think, or to Austin just because of.
But there was also a big Miami group.
I was sort of more identified with the Miami group, which was like Bitcoin uncensored.
Who's actually using Bitcoin?
The Bitcoin users at the time were like dark net market people or people paying for on a back page.
They would pay for like, you know, prostitution ads.
So it was like this very seedy thing.
It was this very like.
It's like it's very subversive.
It's very like a mere talk.
He was more like that type of thing, like.
Dark, you know, so it's kind of like it's all very different.
People have their own little different communities, and so there's like a little wedge issues and.
And it's a lot about impressing your friends and such and such.
So I think, I mean, you know, none of that had anything to do with.
But 300, I think, I mean, he's even his comment about hating the motivation section.
Is that's what that was, what Pierre Richard said when he joined this space like three weeks ago or whatever.
So I bet even that is copy and pasted.
So when I think about safety and amuse, I really just do think of like a giant clipboard and everything is just taken from somewhere else.
Because it's also more defensible that way.
You just take something that someone else has, then, you know, they agree with you.
So so that's why I kind of just roll my eyes at him.
But again, I don't really, you know.
I don't even really like, you know, it's like that the meme.
Where I don't really think about him that often, although I have having watched that show when that he is lying about Don Draper is lying about that.
He is thinking about that guy the whole time.
So that meme is often misused.
Anyway, that's a bunch of I have to stay here with me.
Oh, great. He's right here. Yeah.
He's just wait one second.
Oh, OK.
That's a funny joke. But whatever.
You know, that reminds me of the thing is that's actually not great, though, to do, because it's that was a great bait and switch.
But that reminds me of a time and this is all related to drivechain in a way, because.
Scaling three in Milan.
Roger Ver had come and he had given out Bitcoin dot com stickers, but the polarization was already so great in the mistrust.
That even though Roger Ver was there and he was like giving out free stuff.
So people threw them in, like, the toilet and they were very mean about it all.
And of course. People disagree and people.
Do. But I did think that was kind of like I remember thinking like, OK.
Roger is a large blocker, but here he is, he's here at scaling Bitcoin three.
And, you know, he he could just he's got all this money.
He could like just do something else, throw parties or whatever.
And but, you know, he's like here and he's like giving people free stuff.
And they just kind of like kind of not really very.
It just kind of was like the point when the polarization.
Was reaching a level where it was kind of like becoming emotional, you know, and that was when I really started to get kind of worried for the first time.
And this was also because I think this was all related to the fact that Ethereum that year had gone from being like nothing.
I don't I don't remember the exact numbers, but it went from something like being like less than one percent of Bitcoin's market cap.
And it like erupted onto the scene with like consensus 2016.
I think it was. And it and it became it became very big, like much more than I think it may have even gotten to whatever, like 15 percent or something.
And so I think that you could feel the the emotions and the, you know, like the desperation almost or the frustration.
Like many people, these are the same people that critiqued Ethereum for so long and said it was garbage.
And it was garbage for so long, less than one percent.
And now it had just gone up like a thousand X or something.
So anyone who had invested, you know, if you had put twenty dollars in.
And you have twenty thousand dollars. So let alone if you had made a serious investment of, you know, five thousand dollars, you have five million dollars.
So so so I think the emotions are always a bad sign.
But anyways, Bitcoin is going to stand up.
I wanted to add something, you know, Paul, like like you're a person that you kind of realize the problem and you immediately try to find the solution, you know, like and that's kind of like also through that you kind of giving giving to the public education.
You know, I'm relating to what you were talking about that guy and his book.
But those people like write a book to make profits and this empty is no education is no kind of like, you know, even even they don't mention, I think, even the white paper of Bitcoin and Satoshi's paper.
And so like it's kind of like, you know, people people I think need to need to start realizing and differentiate, like make difference between between things that are more educational like and they can learn from you much more than all the Bitcoin books that are out today.
And I'm sure in that, you know, and there is many other people like Andreas and, you know, from the from the Bitcoin talk, you know, and and kind of like I think those books and those people are trying to create some some kind of fake narrative of Bitcoin is this and nothing else.
So, well, I'm glad you bring that up because I think you're right about that.
And I think it's it's weird because it actually ends up being the case that anyone who really does want to help improve Bitcoin actually ends up with those people as enemies, which is not good for Bitcoin or for Bitcoin users and investors.
And so I think you're right, though, that like the book, that was part of why I kind of was disappointed by the book, because the book, it's clear that safety and wanted to write the book, you know, like kind of not even for profit, but just for his own ego, which is sort of worse, because even profit, he would be at least accountable to book sales.
But he wrote he wrote the book so that he could make the joke about.
John Maynard Keynes being like a like a libertine hedonist or whatever, and that was the point of writing the book, and that was the point to complain about Miley Cyrus.
That was the whole point of writing the book.
See what I mean? Like it had nothing to do with actually teaching people about Bitcoin.
Yeah, and that was why I was like, well, whatever.
I'm just very sensitive to that kind of thing.
And I'm like, this guy is just whatever, you know, he's an unreliable ally of Bitcoin.
And, yeah, I think you're completely right to say nothing of these podcasts and stuff, which everyone is doing for the monetization.
Can you imagine who would do a podcast that they did not monetize?
That would be like Bitcoin uncensored. Everyone can find it.
Everyone can find it. I think we get the archive.
But, you know, like they all do it just for the for the cash.
So it's not they're not actually producing information and shipping it to you.
They are taking the lay of the land, figuring out what do people want to hear and giving them that.
And then they are reaching into your your wallet and taking out your money in a way which is they're taking your attention.
Their time and they're wasting your time and attention by telling you things that you would more easily learn in some other way.
And they take your time and attention. They get the advertising money goes to them.
So but I'm going to get the Bitcoin uncensored link and we'll we'll post it.
That's a real that's a real education. And I'm going to go get it right now.
There is another some some channels like I think Andreas is very, very good educator.
And his talk is very kind of, you know, talking about nodes, how to run, why to run, you know, many, many, many, many things.
And I found another another channel that that go deep in the kind of showing people about Bitcoin and what is possible to do.
You know, like with very little coding or stuff like that about nodes.
And but they don't remember the channel, the name.
I think if many more people, I think that if if more people are educated about the Bitcoin blockchain, I think more people will likely see drivechain as something positive.
That's my opinion.
Yeah, there's a little bit of a a there's like a I think they move.
There's a big nexus of things where it's like if you care about decentralization, you have to care about people running a node.
But in order for that, they have to care about they have to know how to find a node.
Like what is a node? Like, you know what I mean? Is Bitcoin Cash a node of Bitcoin BTC?
No. So but how do people know all that?
So it's kind of like a big project. People have to be lifted completely.
From one thing to the next. And they need they need to like completely leave the world of.
Like they need to kind of go. You need it's like if you can't learn how to like drive a car without you have to learn about how to refuel the car.
You have to learn about turn signals. You have to learn about.
Getting the oil changed, so so you kind of and if you can't, then you're just trapped and you have to use whatever Uber for everything or whatever.
So, yeah, you need to you need to get experience running the nodes or, you know, try different type of hardware for nodes like a different operating system.
So, like, yeah, I understand what what you mean.
Anyway, I posted the I have a few different, but I think this is a good one.
I posted the good Bitcoin uncensored link. So if you want to.
If you want a podcast that was never monetized and it's the best Bitcoin podcast ever, it's since ended, unfortunately.
But that's an example of and they did everything they could to not monetize it and destroy their own.
And that's what made it great. And that's why all the OGs love this podcast the most of all.
And but, you know, like the people doing this today, they are, you know, getting money for themselves, which is there.
You know, there's nothing wrong with that, but.
It's definitely.
It's divides their loyalty.
I think that but I mean, people would say the same thing about about me, they say, oh, I have something to gain.
From the 300, which is, of course.
Technically true, but not really.
It's not really that relevant in the big picture.
What I mostly get out of it is the same thing that you would get out of it is the ability to end all this madness of.
On one hand, we have altcoins.
On the other hand, we have the Bitcoin Core development process.
But instead, we could have something that's much better.
Yeah, but in your case, it's fair.
You know, in in their cases, you know, they don't give any education and they get everything.
They don't give any education and they get everything for them.
And that's kind of like a difference.
I certainly tried every time I gave any Bitcoin talk or wrote a post.
I tried to only write about something that most people disagreed with.
And I tried to always say something very new about it.
But whether or not I succeeded in that is up to the reader, of course.
But yeah.
Well, thanks for that point of view.
So I wonder if we have anyone else who wants to come up and say anything.
I put the link, it was called Bitcoin Uncensored.
And there's the link is now, I think, in the nest.
It was called BU.
BU was Bitcoin Uncensored.
And it's resistance.money slash BU.
There's one link.
I have some more and I have there's a torrent and a Dropbox folder.
And I don't know which is the most complete.
But that was the link that I.
I googled it to make sure that's what it was when I posted it.
So and it's it's old.
It ran from the end of 2015 to March 2017.
Then it split into various things.
Long story.
DeRose.
Chris DeRose did something.
DeRose Uncensored.
And then and Johnset did Johnset's World.
It's kind of weird that they split off and then did things named after themselves.
But that was, of course, the convention ever since Joe Rogan and whatever.
And now it's what Bitcoin did with Peter McCormick.
It's always with Peter McCormick.
And anyway, they did all that.
And.
And then they kind of both faded out.
And then Johnset has kind of faded in via the clubhouse direction.
And.
Chris is like traveling the world and doing other things.
May I may ask another question real quick and then I could step off.
Yeah, of course.
So are you can you maybe comment?
I know the keyword upsets a lot of people, but you've been really liberal in your thoughts on it.
So.
Can you maybe comment on the Coalition for Quantum Resistance by IBM that IBM is established with?
I forget the university, but.
Can you can you comment on that and their efforts?
I probably really can't because I mean, I can give you a made up comment, but it's like normally when we do these spaces, it's very fun for me in a way.
Because people ask questions about things that I've been thinking on, working on, doing like traveling and talking to people about nonstop for years and years and years.
And so I have like a really well-formed opinion and I kind of like know everyone else's opinion as well.
So I know like why mine is different than other people's or.
But with something like that, I don't really I don't think I have enough expertise really to give like a super cool opinion.
I can only tell you about how people's opinions in the Bitcoin community changed like over, you know, surrounding quantum.
And it's just I don't think I have anything really, really new to say.
It's just the same thing as always, which is that it will.
Quantum is going faster than a lot of people thought.
But there are quantum resistant algorithms, but they're not great.
Probably if we had the quantum break, you'd hear about it.
Probably first, you know, it would have maybe it would be in academia or maybe it would be in the military and then probably be a commercial break.
Like they would.
Hack the.
Hack Vanguard or something.
I don't know what they would hack, but they may it might be used against Bitcoin first as possible.
It's kind of unlikely, though, because.
Just the.
I think I personally think that if this type of thing happened.
They would have to be very, very strategic about it, have to be like in that game, the imitation game where they break it and then they can't reveal that they've broken it, you know, because otherwise Bitcoin would just hard fork immediately.
Or I would, you know, too.
So you have to be very clever about who you're going to steal from a little bit at a time.
Like when they.
They trick the Germans into thinking that they have not broken the enigma in that movie.
The enigma.
The Nazi World War Two encryption.
So I think they probably would.
I don't really have anything super new to say, but there is a way to change it.
But it's very inefficient in terms of bite size.
Of the signatures.
But.
Maybe I'm sure as as the problem looms closer, people will get better and better at making solutions to that, as was the case with.
When they had a ring signatures and then bulletproofs and stuff like that, so.
So people get very good at shrinking the.
The.
The size of this type of thing would be more efficient, quantum resistant algorithm, and then all of us will be able to benefit from living in a world that has quantum computing.
So that will at least offset.
However.
Bad.
We might feel about having to switch from, you know, ECDSA or whatever to.
To a quantum resistant algorithm.
So I don't really have anything new to say.
Yeah.
The normal thing people say.
Yeah, it's pretty normal.
I think, you know, there's there are very few that are in the discipline and actually working on these computers and actually changing quantum states to solve problems.
But I was talking with some quantum scientists and last night, actually.
And some of these folks came in that are trying to build something called Q chain, which is not built by quantum scientists.
And essentially, they're just copy and pasting stuff that NIST is posting.
And what NIST is posting is not going to make your classical computers quantum resistant.
So we were talking about like, you know, Bitcoin will hard fork in a quantum world onto quantum computers.
But the very act of doing that hard fork will completely erase all of the Bitcoin.
No, I don't think.
In my, the hard fork is very dangerous.
But I think.
In terms of stealing.
So 21 million can be can be mined immediately, essentially.
And then it's just going to allow for whoever is in control of the quantum computers.
Well, maybe.
I mean, you should check that.
I don't. You may be right. You sound like you might know more than I.
But I think the hash functions, it's the I think it's the asymmetric.
It's like the public private keys.
That is what is going to fall to quantum resistance to quantum computers first.
And we don't hard fork to quantum computers.
We would hard fork to add a new quantum resistant.
Like signature algorithm.
I think that's what it is.
I don't think it would help.
Sorry.
Well, I was just trying to say that this has SHA-256 is what is the hashing.
That's the proof of work.
So I don't think that would break.
Even with the world.
Yeah. Well, I think you would not mind.
You would not be able to mine everything.
At once, as you say.
But maybe not. I don't know.
Is it possible to switch to quantum miners and stuff like that?
That's what I'm saying.
You can't really be comprised of multiple miners with quantum computers.
It would take theoretically just a few qubits.
Right now, the notion that it's going to take 300 million qubits to factor out 256 bit encryption is nonsense.
The hash function is not encryption though.
Asymmetric.
To break the signatures, to break any area of cryptography on Bitcoin.
It's the signature, but I know it. I think not the hash.
This is my understanding. It may be incorrect.
But my understanding is the hash is totally unaffected by quantum computing.
But maybe I'm wrong about that.
I was thinking the same like you, Paul.
You're saying the keys will be affected for us.
The keys are closed and in fact it only takes 256 qubits.
Again, I don't know. This is not my area of expertise.
But I think you just have to count up to the space.
I don't know exactly how it works because we have...
See, one thing, there's many details.
One curious thing is that for completely historical reasons,
it's paid-to-pubkey hash.
And as a result, none of the public keys for early Bitcoin transactions are actually in the blockchain.
They're already hashed.
They're hashed, 256 hash, then RIPEMD.
There's only a 20-byte blob actually in the blockchain that has already been hashed twice.
So even with the quantum break, none of those would be broken either
because no one knows what the public key is.
The public key is not revealed until the transaction is spent.
At one point, you reveal the public key and the signature.
But for, ironically, for SegWit and Taproot,
it is not hashed because it's kind of a wasted 20 bytes.
Quantum computers don't measure data in bytes or terabytes.
That's how classical information is measured.
Quantum information changes quantum states, manipulating quantum states to solve problems.
And so that's why they're able to factor out through these hashes so quickly.
Hashes are not factoring numbers, whereas the...
Through the cryptography, actually.
So that's why if you have the public key,
you can probably get the private key with a quantum computer,
as long as it's big enough, which I think will probably happen eventually.
And that would be a neat trick.
But it won't be.
But I don't know.
Anything could happen.
But I think the hashes are different.
Because the hashes...
Think about it like this.
Every encryption thing is like, you pick a random number.
And then you have a way of deriving...
You pick a random number between 0 and 2 to the 256, which is a huge number.
And then you...
That's the private key.
And then from that you derive the public key.
And you can't go the other way.
But the private key is the one that is...
The public key is usually...
Has more...
Well, more of the same amount of space than the private key.
I don't know if this is a good way of explaining it.
But what I'm getting at is that you can hash like a 10 terabyte movie.
Like a hard drive, or like an 8 gigabyte movie, or like a giant hard drive.
You can hash those, and they always shrink down to the...
Whatever the size of the hash is.
So it's a 32 byte hash.
You can hash like 5 sentences, or you can hash an mp3 file, or you can hash a giant movie.
They all become...
They all get shrunk down.
And Bitcoin mining is hashing twice in a row.
With an 80 block header.
And so...
I'm not sure how it works, but...
Maybe someone will explain how it's possible to make...
I don't know.
But I don't think so.
Because what I'm saying is...
You have to be able to say...
You have to be able to say, this is the hash result.
And then from that, figure out, oh, it came from this...
It came from this 40 gigabyte DVD ISO image, or something.
So that's why I think it's probably just too different.
But I don't actually know.
But why don't you look into it, and then come back next week.
I think the hash rate should be all safe.
Yeah, but I'm just saying, a 256 bit number is enormous to a classical computer.
But anyway, when you're changing quantum states, it's not such a large feat.
And so I think it's interesting that IBM is now leading this coalition four years after it was alleged that their quantum team had successfully deployed a 5150 attack on a simulated Bitcoin network.
Well, yeah, that would be interesting.
Maybe you're right. Maybe they are doing it very slowly.
Because if that information was out, it would be hysteria everywhere.
Yeah, the smart thing would be to try to find one victim who can't complain, and not on the list of Satoshi's coins, and not on a whale list.
And then just take all their coins, and then just wait for them.
And they'll just think, oh, I got hacked, or whatever.
Anyway, we have Mobius. Mobius is back.
Okay, hopefully you guys can hear me.
Yes, we can hear you now.
Okay. Thank you, Paul, for this, for the space.
Full disclosure, I'm a newbie on this.
But if I understand correctly, the BIP300, you're trying to create sidechains, yes?
Yes.
And the issue is, I think you mentioned earlier in the conversation, is the size byte, you would like to change the size byte in Bitcoin mining procedure?
Oh, not really, no.
Well, I think it's one megabyte for the...
Oh, the block size limit.
Block size.
Well, you know, there's one thing, that was the original, I was originally interested in it because of prediction markets, but I became more, I was researching sidechains during the block size war.
And I think that is the first example where you have two people who really, really, really want different things. And so they would be a very good first customer.
But that's not the only reason. Even if it could not do that, we would still want it so that we could do extensibility and things like Zcash privacy.
So there is a change in the core coding of Bitcoin to allow for drivechains?
There's a backwards compatible soft fork. So everything that is currently done by a node, it will still do, but it will do one new thing also.
Gotcha. And how you do the, I'm thinking more of the financial side, an exchange rate between the sidechain, whatever that might be, and Bitcoin directly?
Well, it's a one-to-one rate, and that's on the sidechain side. So from the Bitcoin side, it doesn't, it only knows how to add and subtract coins, you know.
So it's just saying, take five coins from here, put them here.
So would you be able to...
And so it puts the coins in the UTXO, and then it's the sidechain that says, okay, wait, seven coins were sent to this, seven coins were deposited into this script.
So I need to credit seven coins on the sidechain. And then when people withdraw the coins, they say, okay, I need to destroy five coins here on the sidechain and then unlock five coins on L1.
Gotcha. Is it fair to think as a staking, like a certain amount of Bitcoin goes to the sidechain and stays there as a collateral type of thing?
Well, I wouldn't, that last part is not quite it. So I think that that's very close. But it's really just deposits and withdrawals, depositing into an ATM and then taking money out or something like that.
Depositing, going to a casino and giving them cash, and then taking the chips back and redeeming it for cash. It's a little more like that.
So you wouldn't really say that you've staked. If you go to a casino and you give them $2,000 and they give you chips, you wouldn't really say, well, I staked my... You just kind of, you haven't really exchanged them. Then you exchange them back.
So the issue that I've been trying to conceptualize in my head is, okay, if it's an exchange for one-to-one and let's say the drivechain, whatever study case that might be, creates more wealth within that sidechain, sidechain, drivetrain.
How can you come back at this point? How would you be able to account for the extra tokens, I guess, that happen in the sidechain on the L2?
Well, you're saying something like the sidechain, someone deposits five Bitcoin and then the sidechain says there's eight Bitcoin there or something. That's what you're saying? Something like that?
Well, is those L2s will be, I don't know, some sort of a reward system if you do this or if you do that, there's more rewards that is distributed. Therefore, you end up with an imbalance of what I would call tokens and Bitcoin that was initially brought into this new L2.
Well, yeah, that would not be really viable. But let's just imagine that you program the sidechain badly and every third time you send someone money, it duplicates the coins or something.
Someone sends five coins over there and they send two coins to person A, two to B, then send them again, two to person C, and they duplicate. And now there's seven coins over there.
On L1, there's still only five coins in the VIV300 script. So, of course, on L1, you can never counterfeit any coins. So what happens is the sidechain only owns five coins, so to speak.
It cannot function as an inflation type of token. It has to be as a divisible type of token. Is that correct?
Right. Yeah. And what will happen is probably is everyone will try. It'll be exactly as if the casino people deposit. I don't know if it's a good analogy at all, but it'll be like a bank run type of a thing.
The first five people to deposit to withdraw from the sidechain will get one-to-one coins, and the last two people will get nothing. So that would probably kill the sidechain instantaneously, unless the sidechain could be programmed to somehow take that into account.
But if you're doing that, you would just do a bunch of other weird stuff. So I don't know why. I don't know what the point of that would be.
So you'd have to program. It would have to be something you'd program in advance. You'd say something like, every minute your coins are here, a percentage of them rots away, and it goes to something else.
So let me ask a different question then. So let's say you have multiple sidechains, and if they want to exchange – well, I guess at this point it's one-to-one like you're saying. Okay.
Okay. Thank you for your time, and sorry for being a little newbie on this. It's fascinating.
Yeah, it's fine. Great. Thanks for your interest.
Well, that's pretty good. So far we've done two hours, which is not bad. We have a pretty good group here.
I see a lot of people have stayed since it first opened, so that's great.
The negative one IQ guy is still here, so that's good. We have a wide representation.
Yep, so feel free to come up, ask your question or comment, because you know what will happen if no one comes up.
Then we will end the space, so we don't want to do that. We want the space to go for like 50 hours.
Maybe we should do something like at a baseball game, if there's too much dead time, they do funny little things and do little races and things.
We should have little games we play when stuff happens, when there's dead time.
I have a question, Paul.
Oh, great.
I've noticed over the years there's been a lot of sidechain alternatives or proposals.
There's SpaceChain and SurfChain, now recently SpiderChain proposed by Botanist Labs.
I wonder what's your opinion on these alternatives and do you think they will catch on eventually?
Yeah, I don't think it's good.
That's good, great question. I really do believe in pluralism, so I think that we should try everything.
The SpiderChain idea, though, is an example of how pluralism is failing, because the whole thing that people hold up is complicated and kind of weird.
It has some clever ideas. It has this first in, first out idea, which is kind of interesting.
But what people hold up about it is they say, this doesn't need a soft fork.
What they're really saying is we're committed to, now not only are we not going to ever do anything that's a hard fork, which I fully understand,
but we're not going to do anything that's a soft fork or even something that is a very soft fork, like something that is an almost ignorable soft fork.
It just shows you how far people are being pushed to not do something.
I see it as honestly a symptom of the disease that it even comes up at all.
We really should be more pluralist and we should do more things.
Some specific critiques of the idea are that it does have...
To me, it's all very clear and plain, which is that the Drivechain idea is very clear and plain,
because the miners are the ones who ultimately can veto any message we're making into the blockchain.
Every transaction has to be included.
Since the miners have power and responsibility, ownership and control, they all have to go together.
The miners are the ones who collect the fee. They're the ones who decide which transactions made it in time.
The miners get all the money. Since the miners are already getting the money, the new transaction fees,
it stands to reason that since they get paid in Bitcoin and since they have a 100 block maturity period and all that,
and since they are the least liquid investors in Bitcoin through the mining stuff,
they are the ones who are...
Since they're collecting all the transaction fees, they might as well do these deposit withdrawal things,
because even if you have ZK-SNARK or whatever.
To me, I have this very crisp vision of what to do.
Other people do this weird multi-sig thing where they say,
the way SpiderChains works is you stake some coins and you get some control over the pot.
If you have the earliest 75%, then you can rug the newest 25%.
Of course, they can steal from you.
This is what people don't get about L2s. Someone can always steal, because I get that critique myself.
I get the miners can steal critique, but I'm just trying to tell you why I don't buy the miners can steal critique,
because the miners can always steal, and the miners are the ones making all the money.
So I've never cared.
But instead of miners stealing, you have a situation where miners can steal and 75% of the oldest coins can steal.
It's just a very complicated and convoluted thing that involves the user.
All these federations, the user has to choose which federation am I depositing to.
I don't think people really like to do that.
I think that's kind of set up as a lot of work.
At best, it will lead to commercials for people or politician-type things or reputations.
That's also why I don't think FedEvent will do great, but I think we should try all these things.
I think the miners can always screw up.
Since the miners control L1, and they control which messages are filtered,
I have never really cared about the whole miners can steal thing, because the miners can always steal.
And so I don't even really care. I sacrifice something that I think is already dead.
And so the idea is that when people get away from that, they just make it so someone else can steal.
And it's usually someone else can steal and also the miners can also steal.
And you never know if the miners are also wearing two hats and there are these other people.
I don't really get it. And the fact that it doesn't need a soft fork, I think, is a bad thing.
It's just encouraging people to make these convoluted federation things.
It's because of an attitude like that that we can't have, for example, a UTXO commitment soft forked into Bitcoin.
And what we should do is just rip off this band-aid about this soft fork nonsense.
I disagree with it. So that's just my opinion about it. I don't know if that helps.
Since you touched on soft forks, do you think there will come a point when it will be impossible to activate any soft forks anymore?
And also, from what you said, do you think you can always soft fork again and again and again, but wouldn't the chain become over-encumbered in rules eventually?
Well, you can soft fork to add a rule that is less encumbering.
So, for example, you can soft fork add op drivechain, but then you make a new rule that says,
instead of enforcing op drivechain with op and op5, you just say op and op5 is banned permanently.
So now you have tightened the rules twice, but the effect is actually very, very easy to enforce.
Yeah, but then you lose an opcode, don't you? So you actually were run out of opcodes.
Well, you know, really, because you can say op and op9 is like, check the next two bytes, and that is the real number now.
And then when you get to 99, you can say, oh, if you use op99, check the next three bytes, and that is the real.
So you actually have an unlimited number, really.
All right, I get it. Do you think eventually it will be impossible to do any more soft forks?
I go back and forth on that. I think probably the answer is no, because I think where there's a will, there's a way, and the soft fork is just too easy to actually do.
It's if either users or miners or whatever, if anyone wants to do it.
The modern idea of the soft fork as being this horrible thing is just a weird fiction, in my view.
I think it only exists because of miners' guilt about participating in SegWit2x, which was a hard fork anyway.
It had nothing to do with soft fork, so it's completely unrelated guilt.
And I think that's the real reason behind it all, and I think so that's just irrational.
Eventually it will be replaced by a more rational idea, which is, does this make the miners more money?
Is it good for Bitcoin users?
Do the pros outweigh the cons?
And it's only because of SegWit2x.
I think if we lived in a parallel universe where the SegWit drama never happened, there would also not be soft fork drama.
I think also the soft fork, we had a big casualty in terms of languages.
In terms of language, because the word soft fork changed definition and it became defined.
It changed definition and the two definitions conflict with each other, which has led to enormous chaos.
And unfortunately, it's very difficult to undo.
But it would be nice if we could undo it.
The real definition of soft fork should be something that does not interfere with anything that a node is currently doing.
And that's kind of the older definition.
And when Peter Todd had a very clever thing about the evil fork, which was very clever.
But I think unwittingly, unintentionally, he was a part of this changing the definition of soft fork.
And I don't think he intended to do that at all.
I think it was actually happening.
For some reason, it was just happening subconsciously.
It had switched because it was all based on the block size limit.
So the idea of shrinking the block size being a soft fork, but increasing it being a hard fork, that was just too easy for people to understand.
And as a result, the loosening of the rules versus tightening of the rules definition took over.
But people didn't realize how different it was from the opt-in versus backwards compatible versus mandatory upgrade.
So that was different.
So I think unfortunately, the language got all screwed up.
And as a result, people's thoughts got all screwed up, which you can hardly blame anyone because the language is really, really important.
We're very, as many commentators have pointed out, the language is a very important thing.
So I'm not sure.
But what I really think is that probably if the soft fork makes the right case, because what I really think will happen is eventually someone will crack interoperability, which I think BIP300 will be the thing.
But if it's not, it will be something else.
And when that happens, the cult people will all be killed off anyway.
They will literally be killed off.
So what I'm getting at is this.
You have something like BIP300.
Now Bitcoiners have their EVM chain.
They have their large blockchain.
They have their Zcash privacy chain.
People can spin up a new Bitcoin drivechain whenever they want.
Well, now there's not as much of a need for people to go around, for Giacomo Zucco to go around and say everything that's not Bitcoin is a scam.
Because he's only calling Bitcoiners like participants in a scam.
And they're consenting adults and they choose to use a certain way.
So it just won't mean anything.
And the whole point of it all is to stop Bitcoin from changing into Ethereum, but that's already what BIP300 does.
It already stops that from happening by moving all Ethereum-like things to their own piece of software.
So I think once someone does that, the drama will all fall by like 99.99%.
So when the drama falls, it will be much easier for productive people to get things done.
And they'll just, a soft fork update will go back to being normal.
But I'm not sure about that.
It's possible that it will not.
Anyway, we had TheNate and Alex.
They had their hands up for a while.
So why don't we do TheNate.
Hello.
Hey, Paul. Thanks for bringing me up. Maybe you already answered this. I was late to the space.
And also, I'm kind of just like parroting a question I keep hearing in other places. I just haven't heard an answer to it yet.
I also just don't know a lot about drivechains. So maybe I'm asking a relative question.
But if Bitcoin needs drivechains, why not implement them on Litecoin and or Liquid?
And then if that brings more users to that, then maybe Bitcoin needs them.
But rather than, why not do that first, as opposed to pushing to put drivechains on Bitcoin now?
Yeah, we get that question a lot. And I think I always get the same answer, which is that I'm not opposed to that.
But I don't really want to help Litecoin. And doing it on Liquid is kind of a contradiction because Liquid is defederated.
So what are you going to do? The Federation could already do its own. The Federation kind of competes with BIP300.
But I think doing it on Litecoin could be a good idea. I think that could be in the cards.
If anyone from Litecoin would ever contact me and say, we want to do it, will you help us?
I would say yes, but I'm not really going to go out of the way to do it over there.
That's not like a big priority for me. Instead, we try to make, we already have testnet version.
If you if you go to drivechain.info slash releases, we have a play money version.
And I don't think that it would. See, the thing is, I don't really think I'm not sure what it would actually demonstrate other than the code doesn't have bugs.
So if you. But yeah, I think we have we are building tests.
So one thing that is interesting to point out is. If we build the sidechains themselves, which is what we're doing now, the sidechains can be used on anything that activates BIP300.
So if we build like Zcash sidechain, anyone who activates BIP300 can take advantage of it.
So in that way. The. Like that is where the focus should be.
And so that's what I spend my time on, but I'm not I'm just kind of like not really interested in Litecoin is like, you know, a shit coin.
But I think it's fine to or to even make a new coin.
It may even be better to do a hard fork so that and they have a chance that it does really well.
Bitcoiners don't lose out to Litecoin. But I think that it's also like.
The the goal is to help Bitcoin succeed.
And so we already have testnet software that is with play money.
And so I don't know what exactly that. But if anyway, if people from Litecoin want to do that, then I will.
Sort of help them.
Yeah, cool. I'm far too ignorant of like the broader scope of this to think much past that, but it seems like a fair answer. Thanks.
That's all I got.
Cool, thanks. Alex.
Hey, Paul, thank you for bringing me up. Quick question. It's been a while.
I haven't been in the space, but I was wondering how come we haven't seen so much smart contracts on Bitcoin type of approaches taking place,
given that I think that would help actually the space a lot. I'm curious to hear your take on that.
Sure. I actually think it's I think it's kind of a small thing.
It's partially historical where Ethereum was created and it used to this smart contract phrase is marketing type thing.
And everyone in Bitcoin hated it at the time, hated Ethereum back in 2014, 2015.
So it's become like a point of differentiation between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Where I would go out of I would say that people in Bitcoin go out of their way not to do it.
And in fact, you get you almost get shamed instead of praised.
You almost get shamed if you do it on Bitcoin, because it looks like you are the type of person who would be misled into thinking that Ethereum was was cool or whatever.
So people really, really don't don't like it.
And then people say stuff like, well, Bitcoin already has smart contracts.
Bitcoin has, you know, HTLCs, stuff like that.
I think that Ethereum started off, you know, is very unpopular in the Bitcoin community in 2014 and 2015.
And it sort of has always been that way. And it.
So the most of the stuff that Ethereum was doing for years was was objectively terrible.
And then only later did it slowly start to evolve into becoming useful to some people.
And I think a lot of people formed an opinion about Ethereum long ago that they never really updated.
And so they still just think that this is the same.
Like one of the first things Ethereum had was like a transparent Ponzi scheme.
Which was very funny, and it would like randomly, it was like cryptographically random and it would like pay out or something.
This was many years ago, but I think a lot of people still think of a lot of people in Bitcoin still think of.
It's really a shame because it just goes to show.
The effect of sour grapes, where if someone just plants a flag in the ground and they say we will be.
Smart contracts where Ethereum.
Then Bitcoin will go from saying that's a stupid idea.
And then they'll say no one ever wanted that.
And then say everyone.
There are many, many high profile Bitcoin people who say something.
It's very hard to actually translate it into a coherent thought.
But as best I can tell what these people are saying is something like.
Every single user of Ethereum is being deceived.
Or every single user of Ethereum is it's all illegitimate.
It's all a big show and they're just trying to pump their ETH bags or something.
And this whole thing about them having all these fees.
So it's just this weird cultural rift that this word was claimed by this phrase smart contracts.
It's claimed by Ethereum and then people in Bitcoin.
Your Bitcoin career will suffer if you fraternize with the enemy.
And it's very irrational.
But that's the reality is.
That's certainly what I lived through.
I don't know.
Maybe someone else has a very different experience.
But I think the other thing, of course, is most of the smart contract stuff really was low quality.
And it really was sort of scammy.
So then everyone, you know, a couple of bad apples spoil them.
One bad apple spoils the bunch or whatever.
So they just think this phrase is a dead phrase.
But, yeah, I think, you know, in the past there was Rootstock RSK,
which was just going to duplicate everything done on Ethereum, which still does.
That is like what they do.
You can go to their site and they duplicate what Ethereum does.
There's like a Rootstock version of whatever, Uniswap and all this stuff.
So that used to be met with cheers and applause back in the day.
But now it's kind of like it's much more that you have these people who say we don't want that on Bitcoin.
So it's very much a choice to some extent.
People say, get that out of here.
We don't want anyone.
It's like a weird.
It's a cultural war.
Someone called Bill O'Reilly.
Right.
Thank you for the answer.
I was always wondering.
I remember when we had this update.
I always anticipated that given we're rising the block size, fees are going to go lower.
So somebody's going to start doing that.
Never happened.
But, yeah, no, thank you for the answer.
And I hope we can kind of move past that, given the centralization that Ethereum has at the moment.
I think people should look on more decentralized kind of networks to build stuff.
I don't know.
Just my take.
Yeah, I'm disappointed that the main competitor to Bitcoin is something as disappointing as Ethereum.
Here.
Anyway, we had Justin or Alex.
I think you have them here.
OK, good.
Anyway, I don't know if that people could hear that, but I was saying that I think it's competition is good.
So it would be better for Bitcoin if we had more competitors.
And our main competitors are like Ethereum, which I think is really just not that great as a competitor.
You know, whatever.
What else?
What else is a competitor to Bitcoin like?
It's I would lament the fact that we don't have a second best.
Anyway, we have a Justin 75 IQ.
Oh, wait, no, we don't.
We had him, but we lost him.
76 is required.
No, I'm just kidding.
Anyway, we had him, but he seems to have glitched out or maybe he'll be back.
Now we have a pulse.
Sorry about that.
Pulse.
Pulse LN.
Oh, wait, we have Justin again.
Hello.
Oh, hey, Paul.
It was nice meeting you at Tabcon.
Yeah, we had some great conversation.
I also wanted to thank the guy who bought everyone dinner.
That was nice.
So my question was.
Yeah, that guy's great.
It wasn't me.
I have two questions.
The first one.
So now that I know what oracles are and prediction markets, how does your hive mind system identify spammers?
Like, are there super nodes that kind of check things?
Or.
Well, what do you mean?
By.
So, like, if there's a prediction going on for a certain election, for example, and everyone's betting on it, that that is what a prediction market is, correct?
Yes.
So any event, really?
I guess.
Where does that that truth come from?
Does it come from just Google?
Yes.
Well, you know, the white paper is about that and it's very long and it's like 50 pages long and there's like appendices and things.
OK.
It's like.
It's like 80.
But it's.
But it's.
I hate to say that, but I try to give you some idea of what I do is it's people making.
There is a distributed like sort of corporation, so to speak, that's on the blockchain where today you would we would say stake.
But really, I'm not sure what you basically people stake coins that get slashed if they misbehave, where misbehavior is very, very carefully defined.
So we have people buy in.
To basically the Oracle Corporation.
This Oracle Corporation, its job is to resolve, you know, give the truth for each market and it collects the the fees.
So they're the primary beneficiary.
They're making all this money.
The more people trade in the markets.
And so that's that's the.
Sort of layer one of the onion.
And so it's the corporation that resolves them all at a certain time.
So in like April 1st, so like you have the events, they have a time period associated with them.
So they say, like, we're betting on the election happens in November.
That would be Q4 of the year.
So after Q4 ends, there's a list of all the questions you're supposed to be able to answer now.
Because it's January 1st and you have to answer everything that happened in Q4 of the previous year.
And then so you're supposed to do that by April 1st.
So it's you have a really, really long time to resolve this.
And there's a reason why that doesn't matter, which I can happily explain.
But it'll get a little complicated and in the weeds.
And I don't know if there'll be a riot.
Since it has nothing to do with Drivechain per se, even though it is, it would be a Drivechain if we had BIP300 activated.
We would have it on Bitcoin, which would be great.
But what it does is you people buy into the corporation on April 1st.
Everyone is supposed to have submitted their stuff for what happened in Q4.
And this is on a rolling basis.
So, you know, by the time you make it to July 1st, you're supposed to have.
You're supposed to have finished answering everything that happened in Q1.
And so that's part of it.
The corporation means that you don't exit scam.
So as people get more and more, as the corporation accumulates its reputation for answering things honestly,
the sort of market cap of the corporation should go up.
So you gain money that way.
So instead of exit scamming, you just sell.
It's like if you grow a company to a certain size and then you sell.
So that's one facet of it.
But another facet of it is that I do a statistical trick called singular value decomposition.
And what happens with that is if everyone answers everything exactly the same,
then it doesn't trigger because there's total unanimity.
But if there's any disagreement at all, it calculates the multivariate average of what happened.
And then whoever deviated the most is slashed.
They lose like 20% of their holdings in the corporation.
And everyone else, the closer they were, the more deviant they were, the more they get punished up to that 20% maximum.
And their shares are redistributed to the other shareholders.
So if you are reporting on the truth, the ideal thing for you would be for like 49% of the other people around you to give the wrong answer.
And this is supposed to make these people a little more independent.
Because now you can't trust the other people you're voting with.
Because their best case scenario is to trick you into getting off the average.
And if you get off the average, and it's no good to be slightly off the average.
Because if everyone else is perfectly on the average and you are off by just one, one answer is off just a little,
then you're the person who is off by the most and you lose the maximum amount.
So that's also how I try to keep them independent a little bit.
And it's also the way you aggregate many, many, each shareholder in the corporation, so to speak.
Each of them votes on all the questions.
So those are some of the tips and techniques that I use for my decentralized peer-to-peer Oracle.
So we don't have time to get into all of it.
But I gave a talk, if you go on BitcoinHiveMind.com, I gave a QCon talk in March 2017, I think, called the Oracle Problem.
And I gave a little talk about that.
So that would be a good talk to watch if you are interested in that.
Okay. Yeah, that's, in my mind, if I was designing such a system, it would be, okay.
We have these spiders set up, and they're going to spider these URLs for the results.
And then the users are just kind of voting on the accuracy of that result.
The thing is, actually, that doesn't work.
And I explained why early on in the QCon talk.
Because the blockchain has to synchronize.
Someone has to be able to download the blockchain a year from now.
And they have to get the exact same result as you, but they will be visiting the URL at a different time.
And they won't know what it said in the past.
And so that doesn't work.
I wish it did.
But it's similar to drivechain, where I shrink the problem down, and then I have a human being convey it over.
Because what you do is you say, there's these links, this URL.
You say, this is what I'm betting on.
What will the global average service temperature be as reported by this satellite on this date?
And the people then checking it in that quarter.
And what they want is, what you do is, you make it so that the task is very easy to do.
But a human has to still transcribe it over.
So that part is, I don't have time to explain it.
But what you could do is you would have a situation where software automates the whole thing.
But a human just glances at it at the very end.
But it doesn't really work to tie it to the URL.
It needs to have the incentive to work.
Because the URL is aspirational.
The URL could always, you know, you could get a 404 on a random day.
And is the 404, is that the right answer for everyone?
Or is it like, OK, I need to come back tomorrow.
So you need effort.
You need people to want it to get a true answer.
Anyway, nice seeing you again.
Yeah, thanks.
You too.
Yeah, sure.
That was my only question.
Pulse LN, do you have a question?
No question from Pulse LN who is, you're muted if you have a question.
Nope, just a heart.
Just a symbol of eternal, unconditional love for all.
OK, that's good.
I like that.
So, yes, come up if you have something to say.
Or you'll be hearing me talk about...
Peer-to-peer oracle.
I know you don't want to hear about that. It's really boring.
That's nice. The boring stuff is always great stuff.
Because it's educational.
Well, you know, like I really believe that this prediction market thing is really big.
Like, it's a big idea.
And it's another thing where it's very similar to Bitcoin, where Bitcoin is just like a bank
that's just adding and subtracting numbers.
But it is really important because it's voluntarily...
It's like banking. It helps people cooperate.
And it just turns the world from a bunch of people who would all probably kill each other
into a world where everyone can cooperate, like the Mildred Friedman pencil thing.
But this prediction market thing is also it's really, really big because it's a very simple
idea. It just says you can buy and sell shares in Apple.
Well, why can't you buy and sell shares in who will be elected or in what combinations
of events would happen together?
And this really makes everyone on the planet Earth as intelligent as the smartest
person on Earth, if not more, because they're all combined.
It combines everyone and aggregates everyone's knowledge.
And then brought for free.
This is a really cool part. It's for free just by looking up the prices and staring at
them with your eyes. It broadcasts this information to everyone so everyone around can
look. You can all go to electionbettingodds.com right now.
Trump has been the front runner in the Republican Party ever since the site for as long
as the site has been up and for as long as it has had numbers for 2024.
But if you if you just participate in the regular world, this is kind of has this nebulous
quality to it. Like you kind of think, well, maybe anyone could run.
Maybe anyone could be the Republican nominee, but not if you live in prediction market
world and prediction market world, you know, even though you don't know anything about
like, I don't I don't participate in in any kind of Republican National Committee or
anything like that. I'm a registered voter, but I don't really do anything.
So but if you watch the prediction markets, you know that they they plan it out like as
soon as the one election ends, they're already planning it out.
And there are some sometimes people burst onto the scene.
Sometimes people catch a bad break and they get kicked out.
But on the whole, it's a very carefully managed process who gets to run.
And it's also very carefully managed who is likely to win.
In particular, the incumbent has an edge, so.
So it's very important that this is just one example among many of something where
what would normally be utterly mystifying to you, you can know, you can be more or less
certain that your knowledge on a given question matches what the most knowledgeable
people in the world believe, because, of course, if any of these prices are wrong in any
sense, some of them will be too low and then you can buy those.
And then if you're right about something being a good buy at seven cents or so.
You buy enough of things at seven cents, if you think if you have a portfolio of like
five thousand things, there's five thousand prediction markets, let's say there's a
million prediction markets in the world and you five thousand things that are there
should be 10 cents, but they're really they're really trading for seven cents.
You buy all these things and then large, large numbers is you're guaranteed to be
making a lot of money on that, because if you're really right, that 10 percent of
these things should be happening.
You buy five thousand, around five hundred will happen.
But you bought. For, you know, you bought for seven cents, something that had an
expected value of 10 cents, so you immediately.
Got a huge return there, so the prediction market thing is pretty big because it lets
you predict the future, it lets you establish the relationship between things that are
happening in the future, and that allows you to decide like, OK, you don't just say
who who is likely to win the election.
You say if the Republican Party won, if or if the Democratic Party won or if whatever
party wins, if the party wins, what will the unemployment rate be or what what other
things will happen? For example, Barack Obama ran on closing Guantanamo Bay.
He won the election and he also won a supermajority in the Senate by narrowly 60
people only. But he has supermajority in the Senate and he won the House and he had
the Supreme Court. And yet Guantanamo Bay stayed open the whole time he was there.
And he couldn't even get his Obamacare, this is part of the deficiency of the US
system, but because you really need you need a bigger majority than 60.
You need a big supermajority, really, because the founding fathers, they were very
smart and they knew that they mostly designed it to make it difficult for the
politicians to get anything done, which was pretty smart in many ways.
But anyway, my point is, if we had prediction markets, the Guantanamo Bay, it
doesn't matter how likely Obama was to win versus McCain or Romney, the contract
that would pay a dollar if Guantanamo Bay closed, the Guantanamo Bay payoff, you
know, Guantanamo Bay coin or whatever you want to call it, the thing that the
prediction market would would buy from you for a dollar or for one bitcoin, it
would be trading at zero because everyone knew that it wouldn't happen.
But not me, I kind of thought, oh, it probably would happen.
That's just one example among many.
But of course, yes, it makes it impossible to lie.
It makes it impossible for politicians and CEOs to misrepresent themselves to these
people who we have a situation where the CEO knows everything that's happening
every day, the president knows everything that's happening every day.
They have enormous expertise.
So how can a layperson ever hold these people accountable?
But the answer is that you don't, you have you just have a prediction market.
And you say, if we replace the CEO with this guy, what would happen to the share
price? And then it's other experts are betting on that.
It may even be the CEOs themselves, the person next in line, they might know, they
might say, I know if I was a CEO, I could move the stock price up.
They mortgage their house, they bet everything on this, they move the market
enough, and now they're installed the CEO and now they are going to lose everything
unless they actually move the share price up.
Or the market ignores their advice.
They are not made the CEO, and then they make a ton of money from the prediction
market when the share price fails to increase.
So it's a pretty important idea because it's really about like who watches the
watchmen and kind of like how does knowledge diffuse through society, which is
key because we have this Internet thing and we have we all speak English mostly and
we have fiber optic cable everywhere.
But still, we struggle to agree on things.
But that's what a prediction market would do, it would make everyone that's why I
renamed it to Bitcoin Hivemind.
So I think it's a pretty great idea, and this is a sidechain that we would have if
we activated BIP300, we would just have this tomorrow.
Although not quite tomorrow, because I'm a little bit of a perfectionist and I have a
great person collaborating with me who is rewriting it in Rust, so.
The perfectionism will screw it up, but we don't seem to be getting BIP300 within the
next month or two anyway, so.
So that's kind of the lay of the land with respect to that, but please visit my other
site, the BitcoinHivemind.com, and this is an issue that I feel strongly about.
This is my answer to like the Peter Thiel question where they say, what's something
that you believe that no one else, no one else agrees with you or no one else knows?
You know, what's something that everyone else should know, but they don't?
Mine is that our obscure, obscure U.S.
law and our weird cultural convention against gambling is like basically the worst
decision in all of human history and is responsible for enormous wide scale misery,
poverty, death, et cetera.
And just frustration and confusion and just miserableness overall is that if we had only
in the United States legalized gambling like they do in the UK and other places, we would
have achieved perfect nirvana and utopia, but we have not.
And so that's just a weird view that I have.
But yeah, check out my other site, BitcoinHivemind.com for information about that.
One thing I'm curious about, like when I'm gambling, I'll put like $5 on red and $3 on
black. Where I'm like narrowing my loss, will Hivemind have that?
Yeah, but you know, that's not really a reasonable thing to do.
Why not just put two on red?
I mean, you're kind of levering, you're de-levering.
Yeah, but you know, but yeah, it actually does do that.
And I actually have a big Excel spreadsheet where I give in details about that.
Did you know that if you buy an underlying, if you buy like a share of Apple, but you
partially finance that with borrowing, it's mathematically equivalent to buying a call
option. So a call option is just the underlying plus leverage.
So what you're doing there is you're de-leveraging.
But you could do that if you just added like cash to your portfolio or something.
But yeah, you can do that. You can buy, for example, you can have a prediction market
that says, will the Republican Party win the presidential election?
Yes or no? And then you can bet on yes and no.
But I have to tell you what it will do, what the software will do in that case is for
every time you buy, if you try to buy three shares of yes and two shares of no.
And the price, let's say the price of yes, let's say it's 50-50.
The market is 50-50 and you want to buy three shares of yes, three shares, two shares of
no. The market will just charge you two.
Let's just say it's Bitcoin, just to not think about it.
So let's say the markets are 50-50, 0.5 Bitcoin for yes, 0.5 Bitcoin for each share of
no, 0.5 shares for each.
It will just charge you two Bitcoin upfront and then it'll give you a full set.
So it'll give you one yes, one no, and it'll charge you one dollar, one Bitcoin, and
it'll give you one another one, one yes, one no, it'll charge you one Bitcoin and then
it will charge you 50 cents, sort of, depends on the liquidity of this market, which is
a parameter set by whoever created it.
Which we don't really have that much time to go into, probably, but it will then.
So you see what I mean, like the first two are kind of like you're buying something
where either the yes will pay off for one Bitcoin and the no will be zero or the no
will pay off for one Bitcoin and the yes will be zero.
But you're buying each of those for one Bitcoin, so like nothing is happening.
But yeah, you know that you are guaranteed to win, but you're also guaranteed to lose.
So because one of those two will be worth nothing.
So so you kind of are just holding a Bitcoin, but sure, you could do it.
Cool, great.
Prediction markets, I think it's I think it's another thing that people will not
really understand until they can use it.
They need to use it, which is why I really feel like it is a good application of
actually having a blockchain, because the intraday was closed down by the government
and all kinds of other stuff.
We have these weird laws and we have bizarre cultural conventions.
Hacks, frictions and other things, and so if it was just this place.
Well, you could just do it unmolested and people could just make money, then there
would be like a whole little industry would be like mining where there'd be this
whole little industry and the industry would be about finding the truth, making
money by making the good bets.
And it would be subsidized by people who wanted to know the truth.
And this is a long conversation, but.
I have a talk about this that I was never able to give because it ruined it.
And so I never gave this talk, but it's kind of a complicated topic, but.
But basically, my view is that this is a type of thing that people have to
experience first and then they'll get it.
And then after they get it, they'll be like, how did we ever live without this?
Which is kind of like.
You know, many things we do like accounting, you know, like.
Generally accepted accounting.
Like the idea that.
If you if everyone did their accounting differently and then one person said, OK,
listen, this is how we should do things, we need to.
We need to have a standardized.
Standardized accounting, we have the third party auditors come in, but that
would make it really look like you didn't trust your own organization.
So that would look kind of weird.
But the tables are turned if you fast forward to a world where everyone does
this, everyone does the accounting in a standardized way, and then you say, you
know, and I'm just going to invent my own accounting and I don't want any third
party auditors coming in.
Now, you see that that that's no good.
And so that I think that'll be a little bit how this is or like, you know, who
gives Brian Kaplan gives this example about like if you went back hundreds of
years and there was there was a monarchy and you said, you know, we should have a
democracy and people should vote.
Everyone would be like, what?
But after, after some of the kinks are sort of worked out, it seems more bizarre
for people to say, okay, you know what, we're all all of us are going to agree.
Everyone in this country is going to agree on one person who will be in
charge, and when that person dies, their children will take over.
Seems like that's, that doesn't really solve the problem of disagreement very
well, because people are going to disagree over that person is a lot and then they
are, it's, you're just going to be really, really hoping that the children of that
person turn out to be talented.
Well, anyway, I think, you know, this is the third hour, so maybe we should start
winding it down in case.
So if you have any, any questions or comments that you just really would really
feel really terrible if you weren't able to make, now is also a great time to come
up to the stage and ask your question.
Hey, Paul, you there?
Yeah.
Hey Paul, you there?
Yes.
Hello.
Hey, uh, I'm all at the whole, you know, like coins of shit coin comment slide,
but, uh, no, do you do these regularly?
Cause I, I, we talked about this in my spaces a couple of weeks ago and I
think I have a general understanding from the beginning, you know, if
you're winding things down,
yeah, we do it every Friday.
And you know, I think like coin, whatever, like I don't have a problem
with, um, again, like I'm not opposed to it at all.
It's just like, I'm not set.
And I also don't know like whatever the conventions are for
adding things to Litecoin.
So I don't even process, you know, as Bitcoin obviously.
Right.
It's that bad, huh?
Well, I mean, you know, it's, it's funny because one of the things about,
you know, Charlie and the Litecoin foundation, they don't have any
technical, uh, control undo control, but they certainly have a lot of
sway and, uh, he holds a lot of, he carries a lot of weight, right?
So sometimes it does make things easier when you have somebody who's kind of
respected as the guy who's trying to do his best for the longterm.
Like, I don't think anybody questions Charlie's motives about Litecoin.
So, um, that sometimes makes it easier, you know, in our conversations and kind
of within the community, cause I do a spaces every week, I initially was kind
of like, um, you know, the protocols are really designed to be resistant to, if
people don't want to use it, they don't have to use it.
Right.
That's the whole point of having the ability to fork or run your own
node and all that type of stuff.
So, um, I, at first was kind of like, yeah, I don't see what the harm is.
Um, I think the more I think about it, it does, it's very confusing from the
outside, you know, some of the, the timeframes of having to get X amount of
approvals for, was it three months to get your money from the sidechain
back to the, to the main chain.
And I know there's reasons for that, but I think, uh, for non-technical
people, it just sounds very.
It just sounds very complicated, I guess. Right. Um, and so I think I've always felt like Bitcoin
is the one that's that base layer and you want it to be as, uh, simple as possible.
And I'm a multi-coiner obviously. Right. So what's the harm in just using other chains
and keeping Bitcoin as pristine as possible. Um, and I kind of feel the same way about Litecoin.
I think, I think you have coins. Yeah, but you'd like that. This is the funny thing is that it's
kind of like, I think, I think that, I think that could be a good direction, but that's just not
what I thought. Um, so like, for example, if we're going to keep all the coins on changing and
pristine, then on what basis do people in Bitcoin, on what basis do they disparage other chains?
You know what I mean? Because, you know, like why can, why can Giacomo say everything that's
not Bitcoin is a scam. If we're going to say that everything's going to be frozen in time,
you know, it's going to be a picture, a snapshot. Uh, whereas for me, I just see no reason why
Bitcoin can't. So to me, it is like the, the cell phone thing where it's like 20 years later and all
these devices fit in your pocket or whatever, where they have like the digital camera, the boom box,
the video camera, the, like the tape recorder, the radio, and these are all now in one device.
So I think, um, but yeah, I think a lot of people do feel that way. And I think a lot of the critics
of BIP300 are actually people who just own altcoins. I'm not saying that's you, but I'm
saying that I think that is like, people think, oh no, like, uh, they don't, there's a lot of
vested interests all around. Right. So yeah, it's definitely very interesting.
Yeah. I mean, you know, if you had like, um, you know, the weird position where Litecoin is,
is that anything Bitcoin does like Taproot or Lightning or SegWit, you know, they're,
they're fairly interoperable. So it's like, it's not hard to take code from one and move it to the
other. And, uh, so yeah, we're a little bit, you could call us the test net or when Taproot was on
Bitcoin, that was Litecoin's test net technically. Right. So it's like, um, I feel like if it's
something that's good for Bitcoin, then it's maybe will ultimately be good for Litecoin.
Um, I don't know. I mean, it just feels very convoluted. And I also, and I'm not saying
that's your, that it is, I'm just saying from the outside, just the tech, the, the
web point of view, it sounds like a lot of running around to copy things that
I don't even know that we're sure there's a lot of value in yet.
You know, some of the sites, like I get, I think the fungibility thing is huge.
Privacy is something that, um, definitely needs to be addressed.
But as far as like, I don't, I mean, I don't know some of the smart contract stuff.
I don't know what we're seeing yet. Right. How much value has really accrued to the
coin itself in order to operate a smart contract?
Yeah, I agree. I personally am not interested in Ethereum really at all, but it was important
to me that we clone it. And one reason is because to me, this whole, if you go to cryptofees.info
and you just see that, and you could see it online, I've tweeted this graph.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
The fees paid and it went and went from like one, one thousandth
Ethereum being far much one thousandth Bitcoin's fees on a daily fees to being like 100 times
higher on like a logarithmic scale. And to me that just really looks like they have real
paying customers. And so I just, and they're the number two coin. So I just thought we'll clone it
and we'll just show everyone that no one is safe from being cloned. Right. But yeah, I agree with
you that I personally don't really, I don't really see the appeal, but I think it's also the right
thing is to, it's not the case that the customer is always right. Right. You know, but, but in
general, we shouldn't take an attitude. Uh, if these people want to, you know what I mean? Like
pushing for adoption is hard enough. And if you have people who want to adopt a certain thing,
and then you're going to just say, well, you know, get lost because I personally don't understand it.
I mean, how many things that, that we personally experienced in our lives and we thought, you know,
and I probably, I don't think I really like that, or I don't know why anyone would like that.
And then later on in your life, you decide, you know what, I really like this.
Well, yeah, I mean, trust me, you know, being somebody who's on the, you know,
we're in the butt end of the, the maxi hate sometimes. Right. It's always been funny to me.
Like, it's the idea of like, well, I go to McDonald's and I like McDonald's, so there
should be no other restaurants in town. Right. Just like the craziest concept in the world to
each their own. Yeah. Yeah. And of course the one problem is if you say stuff like that,
McDonald's is all you need, you know, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core, what they really mean is like
Bitcoin Core released in, you know, Bitcoin Core version 23 or something.
Bitcoin Core of a certain year is all you need and all you will ever need.
They're saying something like we, I am omniscient and I know everything that has been invented in
the whole crypto space and everything that will be invented. Right. And it's kind of like,
no, you don't like it. That's not true. You know, of course they don't. I mean,
it was true in the past. I think it's like, Hey, the biggest problem to solve is this,
the fiat money issue. Right. And just by purely even offering a competitive alternative to fiat
currencies is a huge leap forward. And is that enough at that point to say we've leveled by at
least invalidating some fiat currencies and many of them eventually probably all of them.
And is that enough? And are we getting a little greedy too fast, too soon to not let that play
out? But I also understood, but that's where I go, well, if your proposals are ultimately fairly
harmless, then yeah. Who cares? Right. Is it again, if it's horrible, everyone just,
can't you just soft fork and remove it? Right. Everybody could just go back to the old version.
Yes, exactly. So I tell you that I, I actually completely agree with you mostly. I mean,
I hope that these people are right. The people who say Bitcoin success is inevitable and that
it will inevitably reach, you know, a hundred trillion dollar market cap. Like, you know,
that would be great. I hope those people are right. You know, good for them.
And I'm just not willing to bet everything on that because I'll tell you why. But first,
let me just reiterate that it's kind of like you, like every fiat currency is shooting itself in
the head, right? You know, like the, we have the unsustainable us fiscal situation that no one is
going to do anything about. The precedent has long been set that we will just monetize,
which we did recently with COVID. And we did it before with great financial crisis. And we did it
with COVID. And we did it before with great financial crisis. And we did it before with
middle Eastern wars. And we, we, every single time we do it,
and it just grows bigger and bigger in absolute terms. And as a percentage of GDP and everything's
so, and no one cares, it used to be a debate topic. The Republican debates used to get a
question. I haven't watched the recent ones. Maybe I'll do that later today. I used to do
that for fun. So maybe I'll watch them and I'll see, I'll play a little game with myself.
Do they ask the Republican candidates about like balancing the budget or the long run
fiscal health of the country? And they used to always do it, but now they almost never do it.
And so my bet that I'm going to make with myself is that they don't even mention it,
but maybe they do. I could be completely wrong. But the point is, you know, the political will
to do anything about that is like completely evaporated. And so then it's like, you know,
the Euro also sucks. China's in a demographic collapse and they lie. All their numbers are
lies. No offense to them. We love the Chinese work ethic, you know, China's great. And whatever,
you know, rags to riches story. I love that they have so many trains and things. And I, you know,
I cheer China on, but you know, whenever I go to China, no one wants, no one wants Chinese
currency. They all want USDT is my recent experience. So no one wants, no one wants
Chinese cash. There are, you know, like they all want one out Japan demographic collapse.
You're like, so like every fiat currency, like, what is it going to be Brazil? No,
the Russian ruble negative, infinite. No. So in the short term, it almost seems like
the inflation of the U S dollar is really being offset by adoption by more people,
you know, because all the other currencies are growing.
The older I get now you're absolutely right. The older I get, the more I think I used to
think, what are these people doing? But now when I get older, I think,
are they geniuses? Because do they know like exactly how far they can push the envelope and
just extract $7 trillion out of thin air? And like, there's no riot. There's no nothing like
people complain about inflation, but, but yeah. And then the dollar people love that people love
the product. That's the other weird thing. You have a, you have this cadre of libertarians in
the United States who hate inflation and they buy things like gold, real estate, Bitcoin.
We profit off of it all because if you, once you're aware of it, you just opt out to,
to a large extent, you opt out. You just say, I'm not holding any cash.
I'm investing in inflation things. You have to participate in a speculative environment,
which is the critics point out that that's bad. And they're right. But, but we have this cadre
of libertarians. And then you have all these people all around the world and they just,
they'll do anything to get their hands on dollars. They just love the product. And it's because
everyone else is so bad, you know, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, whatever. They're so
just terrible at it. And even in Italy, you know, Greece, France, they just,
they just terrible. It's like the Euro is the worst designed thing. It's so dumb. No offense,
if you worked on the Euro. I mean, the Euro, the whole point of the Euro is the German people feel
guilty about World War II. And that's like the entire thing. And that's because German guilt is
one of the most powerful forces in the universe. So, but it's just like, I, you know, it doesn't
even make any sense. So it's like, they do the same thing, right? They started out with a certain
number of countries. And the only way to maintain relevance is you have to have new adoption to
offset your inflation. So they, more and more. So that's why they need other countries and new
populations and why they're not afraid of immigration, frankly, either, either us or
Europe. It's like, we need more users to offset all this money. Yes. Actually, everyone is having
a demographic collapse, so to speak, but it's the US is, is not as much. And the US, the pro
immigration of the US, it's immigration is such a great scam, for lack of a better word. These
other countries, they raise and educate people. And then of those is a big sort, you know, is a
big sorting machine, the most intelligent, the most hardworking, and the ones who are the most
ambitious, and the most intrepid. They, they moved to the US when they're like 20. Or when they're
like 25 for the prime working, so they we pay none of the cost. They come here, immediately start
paying taxes. You know, it's, it's such a scam. I can't believe that we don't. I can't believe we
don't like roll out the red carpet for literally everyone in every direction. But obviously, that's
so I thought I'm just trying to say is I completely agree with you that it's like, everyone is
committing suicide, the fiat currencies, and should we just do absolutely nothing at all, that would
be like the steel man. But where I disagree is, I just have direct firsthand knowledge of how possible
it is to to like, clone a different coin. And we see all these people releasing the coins, you know,
you see Ethereum, you see people do, people just spin up a Solana, which has very low effort, you
know, you have one a 16 z partner, you spin it up. And so yeah, I kind of worry, within the crypto
domain, it's all open source, it's just very easy to spin something up. So I actually worry about the
competition, intra, intra crypto competition more. And I think we don't really have great competitors
to Bitcoin. I mean, luckily for us, but I think if we did, then I think like, why, why even why even
take that risk? And why even go to that? That point, but I just wanted to reiterate as strongly
as possible that I, I actually, I understand why people say that, because the fiat currencies are
just so badly run and whatever. And, but I do, part of this is that I think we have to actually
become Bitcoin has to actually become a currency with a payment system somewhere. That is not,
you know, it has to, you have to do like a full root and branch complete replacement, or you say,
we're going to replace the whole thing. Like right now we have Central Bank, Bank of
International Settlements, the Fed, we have Bank of, Chase Manhattan, we have Visa. The goal is
really to build out a whole stack that replaces that entire thing, where the whole thing is
replaced. So you have like small block L1, sidechains for payments, sidechains for anonymity,
you have other L2s, you have lightning, you have different wallets, you have SPV client,
you have like a whole, a whole big pyramid of stuff, features and things. And you have actual
use cases, you have stuff that you would buy, stuff you'd use the money for, which is like a
Namecoin and a prediction markets kind of come in that way for me, kind of, I think like fundamental
value. And I just think you really want to do that if you really want to compete seriously with
the fiat currency. Yeah. What you mentioned earlier is like, you know, why you don't think,
you know, it's going to go to a hundred trillion dollars or whatever, whatever the,
the, the moon shot is, right? I think we shouldn't just say, well, you know what happened.
Is that it's about, you know, the one of the limiting factors is obviously the level of
adoption, right? That you need the money is this kind of, it ultimately is a social layer to a
degree, right? You have to have enough people agreeing that that's the thing that they want
to use and they want to accept. And if you're limiting how many people are allowed to operate
on the platform or use the thing, right? Use the money. That's a restricting factor to adoption.
And so I do, I do agree with you, what these other platforms have done, have created interesting
things that require you to use Ethereum and Solana. And what I think a lot of people don't
understand in like 2017, the reason Bitcoin, in my opinion, was so, I mean, shot up so wildly
was because you had, in order to access altcoins, you had to buy Bitcoin. It was the only like
common link between all exchanges. So everybody settled into Bitcoin because that was the,
that was the universal money of, of the crypto space. And what happened in 2021 is
stable coins came along and Ethereum and Uniswap and Solana and all these ecosystems cropped up
where you could access all these, all this gambling, whatever you want to call it. You
could access all this new crypto without ever having to touch Bitcoin. And a lot of them never
did, which is like mind blowing, right? You have this massive explosion of users and they didn't
even, they didn't even bother to look at Bitcoin, right? So it's, it's weird. It's like you're,
you know, in the short term, I understand what you're saying. You got to bring people in.
And I think if it's in a harmless way, that's, and that's probably the only thing what's,
what's the risk. So like in your mind to be self-critiquing, what's the biggest risk of
these BIPs? Well, I mean, so the thing is, I knew all of that when I set out to create them.
So it's not like I created something independently of that. And now we're going to see if it has any
risks. I knew all that the whole point I thought we're going to, okay, we're going to open the
door to these sidechains. So I thought we have to design it in a way that it can never negatively
impact the people who aren't using it. So it was like design, it was all designed around that.
I think honestly, the biggest risk is something like I waste everyone's time with this idea and
it turns out being unpopular. I don't, there's no real way that it can do anything. Like there's
nothing that it does that we don't already do. You know, we already allow miners to collect
transaction fees. We already allow them to merge mine. We already allow something to,
we already allow people to sell their Bitcoin and buy Litecoin or buy Solana.
So this is just sending your Bitcoin to a script where you get like bit Solana and then you,
and then asking the miners to send it back, you know, just in a way that they probably will.
And so if it doesn't work, then we'll be back where we are. And it's op-nop5,
we just shut op-nop5 off. There, we have infinite op codes. So
there's really no, it's just designed not to have any risk.
It certainly has a one, a couple of things that might do is alter the trajectory of like
what people focus on. But that's true of anything, you know, that was certainly true of the Lightning
Network and Ethereum. They, you know, they changed all kinds of other stuff around.
I think it's, I think it's quite likely that, that something like this will eventually happen
anyway. And so I don't even see how it could be significantly different from this, given that,
as I was saying before, miners can always filter any messages, any message from L1 that they like.
Miners can, so miners can always kill any idea. I don't know, like what, what would people do?
Like maybe they come up with a zk-SNARK thing so that, but even still, that doesn't actually
help as much as people think it does at all. Well, because it's all about data availability,
really. So, so I don't know. I don't think it has, turning it on as an option for other people to use.
I think it has no risk. You know, it could always be a bug or something, but, but the way Bitcoin works, since it's a soft fork, you have all these people out there who won't upgrade.
So they'll never even enforce BIP300. So it's, to me, it is really is like something that you only run it if you are using it.
The miners are some of the users, and that is kind of the whole reason why we're being so open and sort of transparent about it, is because we all share the same miners.
So, so there's that sense in which it is shared, but I don't think, there are the people who would, big, big losers would probably be like altcoin people or people who are overinvested in some rival L2 concept or the kind of like a gatekeeper type person or something like that.
Have you talked to Charlie Lee about it? Like any time? I know you've been at EMAC.
I haven't talked to him in a very long time. I talked to Bobby Lee.
Yeah.
Six months ago or so.
He's not a Litecoiner.
He's a Bitcoiner for sure.
He's a cool, he's a cool little product.
Yeah, he's a nice guy too. I don't know. I mean, it's.
Yep, I don't know either.
You got cut off a little bit there.
Well, great. So, if anyone wants to say anything, then say it now.
I'm ordering some food to eat.
Hello.
Hello.
Can you guys hear me?
Yes, I think so.
Okay.
Are you worried at all about the replicator problem?
The replicators?
Replicators.
Yeah.
If the code is updated and something is not like faded.
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to there.
Problem with the replicators.
What does that mean?
I don't know.
faded 100%, maybe the problem with the replicators happen
again.
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to there.
problem with the replicators.
What does that mean?
I don't
know. This is taking unused op -not 5 and making the script
interpreter fail if you try to withdraw early before it's counting to 13,000.
And that's all it does and you could instead just make it fail instantly which would
disable op -not 5 forever.
in that sense
the damage it can do is very limited to...
five is disabled, so there's no replicating happening beneath the bank.
Replication, what you mean like coins being counterfeited?
I don't know what that means, but never heard of that, so
I don't think it is.
OK, no replicators problem here.
thanks. No replicators, yes.
That's good. That's good.
Yep, great.
Okay, well, this is pretty fun.
think it went pretty well.
None of those...
think of all the hate this idea was getting not that long ago, but we've done many
spaces since and where are they now?
don't know. they have moved on to maybe they still hate this idea and they're just
bored with repeating themselves.
But nice to meet you.
great. Hello. I actually just kind of wanted to ask, and I'm sorry if you've already
stated this before, but what do feel is your
biggest blocks or detriments for getting everybody to buy in?
My biggest blocks, my biggest detriment,
I think I'm not doing very well.
getting everybody to buy, like, getting the buy -in from the community on the BIP.
That's what I'm asking.
Well, I personally think, we have some supporters who are
miners, but again,
this is all trauma from SegWit2X, is all nonsensical.
If they should take slightly more of a leadership role, I'm
saying just move the knob a little bit.
If we could just get them to speak
up little bit more publicly, some have, but many have not.
if we could get to that, that would like a, we could do something where
a couple big pools speak out publicly in favor and they get their
hashrate increases perhaps.
And then that would just,
show more seriousness.
So that would move it along more quickly, I think.
Just for example, if we had more than 50 % hashrate signal support for the idea
reliably, And like, not just signal in the blockchain,
that
would
kind of rush things further, but
maybe they shouldn't be rushed.
That would move it along because then people would have to say, we'd have to again hear
the people say, why don't they like this idea?
What they end up saying is just the user may deposit funds and lose their money, which
is also true of literally everything, including Bitcoin itself and
the Lightning Network obviously.
So they say stuff like that or they say miners may make more money but of course.
If you boil down this whole mining incentives thing that's really what they mean.
Mine is going to be asked to do a few things,
process withdrawals, occasionally there's a dispute, run a
node, which probably not even happen.
And in return they get a huge amount of fee revenue and growing fee revenue.
So that would be like the thing that I think would speed it up the most, would be if
the
why is
because we have to say, are going to this idea, they could say something like, we want
this idea publicly and we would like people to say,
we have an open inquiry,
we would like people to explain to us why this idea is bad.
That would speed it up the most.
think it's a lot of, we have a lot of low skin in the game people who they're just
some guy with a Twitter account and they just say, they say such and
such. they, they, a lot of them have been saying, they've been critics for years.
we have, there's like the same three people who have been critics for a while and they
just say blah, blah, blah.
And people just say, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire.
They just sort of believe them or whatever.
so I think that would, that would
would help. That would be the fastest thing because we already have if you go to
LayerTwoLabs.com slash friends, we have an enormous amount of elite support.
We have some grassroots support.
We have support of all the different flavors.
They keep it to actually push it
it little bit further.
Sorry, I'm to mute myself.
I've just got like one, I've got a little bit of a response and then I yield my time
and thank you for that.
So I definitely fall into the latter group that I am a low skin in the game, Twitter
account holder, right?
That just kind of has been in Bitcoin for a long time.
the only reason why I personally and I don't have much
uh much knowledge to able to back it but I state that I I'm hesitant to have fear of
all sorts of changes because to me it always kind of seems to go back to the big block
small block argument where the reason why you're having this is because you
have a smaller group that stands to have great incentives and to gain greatly at the
detriment of everyone.
And it's usually masqueraded as one thing, but there's a small thing that will be
exploited. And it may or may not happen, it may or may not come to pass, but that is
the hesitancy that comes to my mind personally.
And I
think that many others, like within our ecosystem who are like me, who you would say
are low skinned in the gamers, feel that way.
And that is the resistance that happens.
I don't know how you will solve it.
Right now I'm observer, those are my thoughts.
like I
said, thank you for responding.
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, do you have a thought on what the, you know, what the
detriment will be?
if you allow people to just sell their Bitcoin to buy Solana, then
what's the difference between selling their Bitcoin and spending it into
a BIP300 script and then having a different piece of software they call BitSolan, I'll
just credit them.
It's a completely different network.
brings up a different point that you're kind of like, so
I guess I'm a bit of an idealist, Like I'm choosing
Bitcoin to opt out.
think many people are.
doing that, you're kind of deriving and you're not, that's not Bitcoin anymore.
That's just trying to do something to gain.
And you risk yourself at impermeable loss, trying to do something that's not Bitcoin,
even if it's on the Bitcoin chain.
that's outside
like Bitcoin, that's outside of Bitcoin, precisely.
Yeah, exactly. But that's the point though.
it is though.
the Solana, Altcoin, and the the Drivechain that would emulate Solana,
those are both off the Bitcoin blockchain.
It's only BIP300 that is on the Bitcoin blockchain.
the that's not even kind of the word where effort of what I was going with and what the
value of that was even
impermeable loss, so you go into this BIP300 chain that you've put in a Bitcoin worth
of it. Somebody does something, rugs it, something finds some way to destroy it or make
it like worthless.
And now your exit out of that is 5,000 or 500,000 satoshis, as opposed to 100 million.
Yes, that
again, that is someone who has chosen to take that
risk. That's no different than you sell your US dollars and bought Bitcoin or whatever
country you're from.
know what I mean?
you choose to buy Bitcoin.
That's what I've saying.
We're saying the same thing.
that. And
wasn't even what I was trying to address.
My original, I came up because I just kind of wanted to where you
and your team were on how you would convince us, the nameless mini who
actually opt forward, where would we see the actual selfless utility that yeah, we can
all
actually benefit from utilizing this and putting this up line and actually having the
clients all utilize it?
that's, and you've kind of, like I'm saying, I didn't even think about, well, how do we
drive into, you know, how can it be utilized for an altcoin purpose or for a derivative
purpose that, you know,
Well, I think the whole point of it is that it's optional.
it's kind of like what you might like is
not what other people might like.
And the people who want, if you want only to stay on L1, then
I think this also kind of helps you because what would happen, there would be no
scaling war. what we had in the scaling war was we had a lot of very sincere people who
wanted large blocks.
what you could say, well, we just won't let them get their way.
But then what happened?
What
What happened was Roger Ver took the Bitcoin.com domain name and split off
and he created Bitcoin Cash and he tried to represent it as the real Bitcoin.
And you know, like he didn't really succeed, but it's kind of like, is that what you
want do when instead they could have
just been people who use something else no different than if how someone today could
use liquid or could use PaytoScript hash or could use the Lightning Network.
would be Bitcoiners who use the Lightning Network and Bitcoiners who don't and would be
Bitcoiners who use the large block sidechain and Bitcoiners who don't and there would
be Bitcoiners who use the
Zcash privacy Bitcoin sidechain and those who don't.
the ability to resolve disputes over the block size and over,
know, privacy and the scale, I think, are pretty big.
has nothing to do with Solana is just an example of something that is a
idea that, no offense if you like Solana, but it's like a very
fringe idea where someone is likely to lose all their money.
So that's why I use that.
use that as an example of a bad idea.
the whole point, you know, you see the whole point is that we should not be judgmental
with respect to,
you know what mean?
Like what if I went back in time and I
I told you, you could tell someone today, I don't think you should be allowed to spend
your own Bitcoin into a BIP300 script that uses Opnot5, even though you could do
that today. We don't have the full node to enforce this code written by Paul or
so the script interpreter fails.
So
you could say that to someone today, but I could go back in time and I could find the
moment when you first bought Bitcoin and I could say, you aren't allowed to invest your
own US dollars or whatever you have.
You aren't allowed to invest your own US dollars in Bitcoin.
I don't think you should have that option.
what would you say to me?
would say, well, too bad because I do whatever I want.
And that's kind of what this is as well.
The BIP300 part is not stapling any of the Solana stuff into the
L1 blockchain.
It's only getting 13,000 for an example of something that I got it
Okay, should we do Mihai?
Mihai, hello guys Yes
Hello, hi.
I have a couple of questions about Drivechain.
I was in a space with some other people having a debate back and
Excuse me. And I was a bit confused
on the explanation of what acting is and how does it
work. also the other bit of it all was the type of
security, what I've been told is basically each one
of users, they
can choose their own security models.
So what does it mean exactly?
These two questions.
If I made myself clear, if I didn't make myself clear, I do apologize.
No, I think it was clear.
first the ACK, the ACK thing is just counting.
It's
It's like a counter, but it's,
and it's very much like a cross -chain confirmation,
but critically, it only goes up once per block, but it can also stay the same
if no one moves it around, and it can also go down by once a block.
So this is the thing that counts to 13,000
,000. If the withdrawal can
accumulate enough of this count, like enough upvotes to get to a 13,000
score, then it will clear and the withdrawal will go through on
L1. But this is the only thing that happens on L1, deposits and withdrawals.
Everything else is happening on L2.
the idea of choosing your own security model, that is completely true,
but I can understand how it might confuse a lot of people because it means several
unrelated things, like at least three.
So one of the
things it means is you choose to deposit the coins into BIP300.
So in other words, you choose the Drivechain security model versus the LayerOne
security model versus the Lightning Network.
So you choose BIP300.
So that's a narrow sense in which, just like would choose whatever, pay to
Script hash, you would choose Liquid, Lightning, Statechains.
what people are really getting at is something else.
What they really are getting at is if you want to live
in a world where you have to run the large blockchain,
then you can.
So if you want to be Roger Vere and run large block Bitcoin, then you
can do that.
But if you want to run something else where you live in a Solana type world, and you
run a
new piece of software that's Bitcoin only, but it's a clone of Solana.
Then you do that.
so what they mean there is they're talking about the cost of running a full node.
And they're saying it's easy to run Bitcoin Core, which is a node that is easier to
run, versus a different node
which is very expensive to run, a node which may reveal your
physical location, maybe harder to run over Tor, know.
So maybe harder to run anonymously.
So what they really mean is this idea of the differential node cost.
This idea that the nodes all cost
different amounts.
if you want it, you should be able to buy it to some extent.
So if you want to run something that is like Zcash, a Zcash -like
thing, that thing
will have more privacy, but it will be harder to detect inflation bug,
so stuff like that.
So that's what they mean is anyone can run their own software.
You run whatever node you want to run.
You don't have to run the same node as everyone else.
See right now, you either run Bitcoin Core or you basically aren't running a node.
So it's all
or nothing.
when they - What's it gonna say?
Is it fair to say that this type of approach could increase the possibility
of people putting their asset at risk?
Because if anything goes wrong with any models that
anyone chooses, then you are basically on the
loss, isn't it?
Yeah, I think that is something that would happen.
What would happen is instead of people selling their Bitcoin, buying Ethereum, and then
getting rugged on Ethereum,
would be exactly the same story, instead there would be no Ethereum part.
take their Bitcoin, they'd move it into a bit Ethereum,
something that is, the software is almost identical to an Ethereum node, but there's
only Bitcoin there.
They move it to Rootstock
and then they move it in there, and then they would get rugged over there.
They would invest in, they would use DeFi, they would get rugged.
so then they would lose.
In that sense, there'd be more Bitcoin losses, but only because there's more Bitcoin
activity.
But in both cases, it's the users,
they've chosen that for themselves.
So the end result is the same, it's just more Bitcoin.
But I will argue that also in our situation, as it stands right
now, we also choose the security models.
It's also the user's choice.
But I will say that the approach is more
decentralized now than what the upgrade will assume to
bring, if anything.
Well, we already choose our own security model, But we have,
if we cannot choose to
use, like if we have four Bitcoin, we can't, we have to use them with the Bitcoin Core
security model. So we cannot switch them to like the Ethereum security model.
And that's what I think people are referring to when they say BIP300 allows you to
choose your own security model.
That is my best guess.
Why more decentralized i have a very specific metric of decentralization is being the cost of a spinning up a new full node.
I mean i think that it's a it's a it's an abstract term that has many different meanings and i think there's one sense in which.
You're more free in the altcoin world to just do whatever you want whereas bit three hundred constrains you in a few ways because you have to use the twenty one million bitcoin and you have to have access to layer one bitcoin core so you're constrained if you use a drivechain instead of an altcoin so altcoin gives you more freedom.
The problem is that you're stuck with an altcoin and then you have the same problem that for example you know like bitcoin cash and all these other people have had for you have you lose ninety nine percent of your.
Of the US dollar value of the coin is is decreased because it's just difficult having an altcoin is difficult it's like having several different things like you have you go into your house and you have different plug electrical plug sizes everywhere.
It's just better to have standardization different you know the recording keyboard and you have some other keyboard.
So complete different shape just doesn't really work maybe usba you know usb so those are some of my thoughts.
One more question and I'll see another hand up I do apologize the compression of the sorry one second I'm being distracted in the same time.
That's fine it happens to me all the time I guess we'll go to pseudonym next after this person gets there hopefully they get their final question and I guess we'll just go to pseudonym now and then he'll have time to hello pseudonym.
Hello pseudonym.
Hey hello how are you doing.
Very well can you hear me.
So hi Paul so it's a question for you I heard you say in the past that like miners would kind of only go for the largest fee that that's on the sidechain or the which block to include.
And my question is like how does a user of the sidechain like quantify the fan the finality of its transaction if it doesn't know whether the miner is validating what the the hash that they include on their block.
Yeah they will know this is yes this is a question about emerged mining which is different from deposits and withdrawals and this is also different from BIP300 because unrelated it's related to BIP301 which is the other part but BIP301 is is a little bit tamer because vanilla merge mining was already invented by Satoshi years ago and it's been in continuous use.
I lost you.
Yeah sorry about that so I will repeat that now about I'll just answer your question so the you don't the user doesn't need to know whether or not they're the user will measure finality with kind of a percentage of the total amount of money that they're going to withdraw.
The user will measure finality with confirmations so it's be exactly the same as with it won't be exactly the same but it's the same principle as with L1 where you broadcast the transaction be unconfirmed when a sidechain block is found is found with is found linked to an equivalent main chain block so they all have the same timestamp and then it moves on to the next block so you will still have confirmations and you can still have.
You could have reorgs or you could have and you would have people who have various levels of paranoia requiring yeah if you buy something from Amazon it doesn't really need confirmations because Amazon can always cancel the order but if you're buying something from bit refill if you buy like a gift card they kind of need to be a little more paranoid so they.
Because what I see is that the miner is not gonna like and on main chain like if a miner create an invalid block he won't get his block built on top so you will lose the reward but with the drivechain component of it if the next miner is not validating.
And you just think paying the highest fee I'm a bit I'm a bit confused like that do you expect most miner to validate the sidechain to or no I think well I think when the node the sidechain node cost is very low it would be a moot point because it'd be so cheap that it won't matter and probably at that point probably many will run both.
My view though is that the BIP301 it doesn't require the layer one miners to do any of that validation so because someone someone bids a high fee only the top bid is selected and then that finds the that finds like if you have a main chain block 700,000 and then sidechain block 501.
Even 700,001 and even maintenance sidechain block 502 you know they found is like a little pair from together and so there is no sense in which anyone is unclear about how many confirmations they have everyone knows how many they have it's all publicly available information.
So it's very I don't you seem to be trying to describe a situation where I would be on a sidechain and broadcast transaction and someone wouldn't know.
They wouldn't know like is this confirmed yet but you just wait you just wait for six confirmations or you wait for 10 confirmations or you wait for 100 confirmations you wait a whole day or you say you know what I'm I refuse to I mean I refuse to wait I'll take the risk I'll wait for one confirmation or even zero confirmations.
Yeah but do you basically wait as many confirmations as you need to know that there's at least one miner that validated the sidechain.
No that's not relevant because the nodes it's the sidechain full nodes that are that are validating the each block.
It's only thing that is what the what is the equivalent of the meeting the difficulty requirement in L2.
So on L1 you have to make sure that enough proof of work was done.
So on L1 you have the hashing you have 80 block headers they need to have a certain number of leading zeros in the bits which means the number has to be beneath a certain value.
So that's how it works in L1 to know whether or not the header has met the proof of work requirement.
So you have to make a little grid you can make a little grid and you draw the four grid of four things you say are we meeting the proof of work requirement.
And they say are we validating every validated the block.
Those are the columns and then the row would be you have L1 and L2.
So you have a little grid there.
So with L1 you the miners are doing the thermodynamic hashing on the 80 byte header.
That's if you meet the proof of work and then you download the whole block and validate it.
Make sure that it is following all the rules.
That's the same on L2.
Someone has on L2 the L2 nodes will be downloading the whole block and validating it.
So but that's separate from what does it mean that the next block has been found.
What does it mean that the next block has met the proof of work requirement.
And what does it mean is that is just if if there is a certain like link placed in L1 like a linking transaction like a little linking code.
And that that mere act by itself of like bidding for the bidding for inclusion and L1 and then being included in L1 having this one little transaction be included.
That thing that is what makes the sidechain header meet whatever with this thing that is equivalent to the proof of work.
But there is no thermodynamic work though.
In BIP301.
So I hope that wasn't too confusing and convoluted.
No it's just that let's say I'm a user and I'm transacting on a sidechain that has very little transaction activity.
And I'm transacting like a million dollar with like that requires finality.
Yeah a million dollar with a 3DP.
You would want to wait for many many confirmations in that scenario.
The sidechain is always the whole health of the whole drivechain thing is based on getting these fees.
So if it doesn't get that then it's probably not going to work.
But of course neither will probably nothing will work.
Everything requires some amount of popularity to work.
But but yeah that is the that is the concern.
But you can always mitigate that concern by just waiting for more confirmation.
So you can.
So that's.
That's basically my question is like how do you know how long to wait.
Because on Bitcoin it's kind of pretty clear it's the amount of electricity and that will spend 10 minutes.
Well I would say this is a kind of a mix because it's impossible with BIP301.
With BIP301 it may be cheap to read like it may cost nothing to reorg but it does still take 10 minutes per sidechain reorg.
So but with the but what you would do is the end the end the analogy would be to sum up the total amount of fees paid like the total coinbase amount.
Across all the blocks that have built on top of your block or including the one that you are in.
Because that's how much money other people will lose.
If it is reorg.
So those are the people who would want to stop it from reorging.
My personal point of view is that it would probably.
I mean what do you the scenario is something like.
It costs 10 cents to each sidechain block only pays 10 cents in fees.
So you waited for 300 but it's that's only 10 cents.
So that's if you wait for 300 blocks but it's only 30 dollars.
But you understand they don't they don't bid.
It's what it does not.
It's not as though someone can bid 31 dollars and reorg the whole sidechain.
You understand what they have to do is they have to they have to now bid.
11 cents for 301 blocks in a row 301 L1 blocks.
So they still can only do one 10 minute block per thing per.
It's one 10 minute block on L1 to find a new L2 block.
So each L2 block requires 10 minutes of time.
This is linked to the L1 block.
So you still have the time part.
But it doesn't really cost anything because to reorg you won't have.
It won't be very economically significant to do that reorg.
I don't know if this is making any sense.
I hope it's making some sense.
Not 100 percent but I think you can at least remove that.
The block subsidy on layer one increasing security and it's not as much on.
That's true.
Yes of course the sidechain has no block subsidy and it is a disadvantage.
Yeah and not many people like thinking like that.
They always assume this is a base of let's say two.
I don't know what was the reward.
That's a 3.25 Bitcoin worth of electricity wasted between each 10 minute.
And in that case you would have to monitor the sidechain activity to know.
Is my transaction too big for the security budget on that sidechain?
Right.
Yes.
It just seems hard to explain because people are used to a higher level of security on layer one.
Yes of course.
It's insane amount of security on layer one once you have one or two transformations.
Absolutely.
On the drivechain you have to weigh the weight of your transaction versus all the activities.
You do.
But you know the thing is we don't really have any like we don't have reorgs on L1.
And even these chains that have like even something like Bitcoin SV or something.
There really there have been a few 51 percent attacks but there really are not.
On a given day like you know what I mean like would you actually bet if someone makes a Bitcoin SV transaction.
You get kind of like and you are going to like buy insurance on it or sell insurance on it or something.
You're going to say like well what are the odds that it what are the odds that this is actually fine with just one confirmation.
In practice it kind of doesn't seem to be an issue now.
But you know if it is then people will wait for more confirmations and they will tend to only use.
Sidechains that have lots and lots of other users on them paying fees or this whole idea will collapse and not work.
But that's really true of everything you know.
It's a similar thing with sort of something similar is happening in lightning now I think where people are increasing.
The fees have been going up and up.
To compensate people for running nodes and things.
I thought I saw.
Didn't I see Alex Bosworth tweeting about that yesterday.
Thanks for my answer.
Keep thinking about it.
Keep thinking about it.
Thanks a lot.
Bye.
I do have another question about the compression rate of a few months in 32 kilobytes in comparison to what the layer one provides.
And the other question also I'm sorry I did just as I said from the conversation that I previously had in another space I was more confused more than anything.
I'm assuming that I'm paying some fees when I'm transacting over here.
When am I paying those fees to and how are them fees being set up.
Because on layer one I know why I'm paying those fees for example.
So actually exactly the same more or less.
What happens is there's a sidechain L2 has its own block space and people are trying to optimize their when you pay a fee there it goes to a coin based transaction on L2.
So whoever finds the L2 block the drivechain block.
So if you're in whatever some different sidechain you're trying to find the block and whoever finds it will pay themselves the transaction fees exactly like with Bitcoin.
The issue is as I just explained or tried to explain whether or not a sidechain block meets its proof of work requirement is defined by something that happens on L1.
If you use merge mining which I think everyone will.
So if since that's the case it's the L1 miners who really will.
They are the gatekeepers and they as a result they will extract ninety nine point nine nine percent of this this value.
So they will either it will either be them who has the L2 coin base key that gets paid the L2 coins or in the case of blind merge mining.
There is a possibility of specialization of labor where someone runs a sidechain node.
They pay themselves the coin base pay themselves the fee revenue to the coin base and in return for finding that block.
They they broadcast a message on L1 and they say please include this find this.
This is the block I want you to find.
It has this hash.
If you find it I will pay you on L1 this amount.
So ultimately all money goes to the miners and but how it gets there is depends on whether or not the miners want to run a sidechain node.
If they do then they can collect it over there.
If they don't then they can collect on L1.
But what literally happens on the drivechain is that it has its own blocks and it has its own fees and those fees are all paid to in the coin base transaction just like in Bitcoin.
It's paid in the first transaction and it is paid to whoever finds the block it can be paid to anyone.
So everyone pays them to themselves and they all compete to try to find the block.
So I hope that makes some sense.
Kinda.
I'm not sure if this will give the opportunity for any bad actor to give this set of rules to someone else and maybe get scammed.
You did explain this earlier through as I said choosing a certain model of security.
Well this this part is unrelated to what is happening on the chain.
You know what I mean.
Like this is just saying there's only a certain amount of block space no matter what happens on the.
Like even if the sidechain has no block size limit they will run out of RAM on their computer.
So there's some limit and that limit you know you have to gate who is in the block and who is not.
And.
Or I suppose you could try to just append every single transaction you could.
But if nothing pays any fee.
You see I have like an economic view of it basically where it's like there's a demand curve for this service for the block space.
And you.
You either get a few you either make a few sales at a high margin or you make many sales at a low margin.
You charge 10 cents per transaction and you have.
Lots of transactions.
Or you charge a ten dollars per transaction and you have very few.
Transactions.
So people who are assembling the next block they do that and they try to maximize their.
Revenues and then after they do that.
They.
That's how they that's how they build the proto block and then as I tried to explain what it is that finds the block is.
A payment made a code inserted in L1.
Coinbase by the miners.
So it is the L1 miners who really find all the blocks.
Even though they don't need to run a node to do so.
I don't need to run any node really but they definitely don't need to run the L2 node.
Unfortunately I have to go I do apologize.
Thank you very much for answering my questions.
There was the other question in regards to the compression rate of three months of data into 32 kilobytes.
And the reasoning behind that if this is transparent or not.
I'll go back to listener because I'm going to drive so thank you.
Okay great.
Yeah the.
All that's happening with that whole three months to 32 megabytes thing.
What that is referring to is.
What basically is going on there is the sidechain is keeping track of all of the outstanding activity.
Which is the three months of activity.
And it's going to summarize for L1.
The only parts of it that are relevant to L1 which is the people who want to withdraw.
And it is going to queue up all those withdraws.
And it will then make the L2 blockchain will construct.
The L2 blockchain will construct all by itself.
The transaction that would pay all those people out.
And the basically.
Some details aside.
The transaction ID of that transaction that is the 32 bytes.
So it is just saying.
This is the withdrawal.
That catches us up.
You know it says we've been running this sidechain for the last five years.
But we had a withdrawal six months ago.
We had a withdrawal three months ago.
And of everything that has happened between three months ago and today.
This is the withdrawal on L1.
That would.
That would catch us all up.
So.
So the L2 node can do that freely.
Every single person's L2 node every single person sidechain node.
Will calculate that and they will all get exactly the same answer.
And so that is the hash that must.
Traverse the BIP300.
Process.
In order to release the funds.
So yeah.
So this is cool.
We got some more questions and that was good.
That's always great.
And now this is a four hours.
So I think.
It's been going pretty well.
We've got some great names.
We have.
Boat face.
In the audience.
For those of you who don't know.
The US Army or the Navy, I suppose.
They allowed democracy to pick the name of their ship.
New ship and.
Just Google it for what happened.
It's.
Classic Internet voting.
We have a cool guy.
Oh, this guy Zulu.
He has a very cool.
It's a very dramatic image.
Anyway, come on up.
If you want to ask any questions.
Get myself a glass of water.
But.
No one has any questions.
The space will have to come to an end.
Let's see.
Hmm.
Doesn't seem to be anyone.
So maybe I don't know.
It's pretty good space.
Honestly.
Four hours is not bad.
So maybe we should end it there.
I think it was a pretty good space.
I don't know.
I think it was a pretty good space.
Well.
Cool.
OK.
Well, maybe we should end it there then.
So, hey, thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Have a good evening.
Bye bye.