Hello, and we're back. And we're back.
There was some problem there. Sorry about that. Can you hear me now?
Yes, now I can hear you. I don't know what it would be.
Yeah, we were talking about Zcash and Monero. It seems like Zcash has some very smart people
there and Monero has a strong community. It would be great if the whole privacy community
in the blockchain world could come together on one project. Maybe the Zcash sidechain
would be that project. It would have the best of all worlds. What do you think about that
idea?
Yes, so my personal take is that, yeah, sure, this Zcash stuff is very interesting. And
I think full membership on all set with this non-trusted setup kind of stuff is very, very
interesting. But I personally think that we should keep as much off-chain as possible.
So I very much like these approaches where we are optimistically trying to keep the state
of some blockchains that are highly replicated and easily surveilled. So that is why I'm
more interested in the Bitcoin clone sidechains, where you just add more cheaper Bitcoin block
space and you have the same contractual capability and you can do stuff like the Ark layer 2
Lightning on top of them. I am more interested in that. Maybe I'm a bit of a boomer about
Bitcoin, but I kind of like the approach it takes. I'm more interested in it. I'm more
intrigued by it than altcoins and what they are trying differently. But I'm not against
them pursuing these alternative approaches. They should feel free to do so. And that's kind of how I
see it and why I'm saying I'm more interested in Thunder and stuff like that. Because they're just
more sensible to me to be very, very economic with block space. And it's good if it's there. It's
good if it's there when you really need it, when you have to settle disputes. But optimistically,
we can keep a lot of the stuff off-chain. And I kind of like that line of approach.
Welcome, Paul. Paul is joining the stage. Hi, Paul. We were chatting about Zcash and privacy
drivechains.
Oh, cool. Great. Happy Monday, everyone.
Hello.
I saw you're a posted Bitcoin dev. I hope you get an answer. I think it's quite likely that you are
correct. Because it's the type of thing that probably no one... Well, you know, just like, the
more time I spend in Bitcoin, the more you realize that no one actually reads anything. That's all
just Twitter-based scholarship.
Right. It would be very nice if someone like, you know, AG Towns or someone like that would, you
know, give me a thumbs up. Like, yeah, you are on to something. It's probably right. That would
help. But I think I'm probably right. I have spent some time on it. I have managed to discuss it
with Jeremy Rubin. And he also said stuff that makes me think I am right about this. And it's kind
of funny because, you know, everyone was talking about it, like it's a fact that you can implement
Ark with APO. And everyone just took it, you know, someone somewhere once said that APO can emulate
CTV and everyone just took that as cash money and run with it. And it turns out it's not exactly
true.
So yes, Zcash is... I think Zcash is a good example because it's something that... It's a situation
where there's a lot of R&D done in an altcoin, but it has many other wacky distracting features such as
having the attacks. It's also something where people will say... Sometimes people will say, well, we
will scale in some way. And I say, well, it's not just about scale. It's about also privacy. I mean, I
would also hope, I don't know if this is true, but I would hope that people would look to the Zcash
thing and they would say, well, it's very difficult to be pro-privacy in this industry. And so anyone
who is pro-privacy is... That is like a signal that they are very legit. But who knows?
We were talking about how did Monero actually manage to attract a stronger network effect, seemingly?
Like they have a more devoted crowd, a stronger crowd. They are more popular in the darknet markets
and among the more rebel types, you know, the more further state types.
I mean, all I'm saying is that I was in the industry for a really long time.
Ricardo, who is not the creator... A lot of people think he's the creator of Monero, but that's not true.
But a lot of people... He went on Bitcoin Uncensored, which almost everyone else refused to do.
And they grilled him, but he basically said, well, what are we supposed to do if we want this thing?
What are we going to do, wait for sidechains? And they were like, yes. And he's like, well,
it's like, call me back when there are sidechains, which is honestly,
you know, was the right decision because that was back in 2015.
So I think they started this thing and it was actually going nowhere for a really long time, but
Ricardo, he did do a lot of different things. For example, they banned discussion of the price,
which I think was key because by doing that, they kicked out all the people who were there for
the wrong reasons. And that is how they at least got this one use case shipped of like, what you
might call private something. And then I think it was just kind of a little bit of a self-reinforcing
circle after that, because everyone else was just pumping things. And they said, any discussion of
the price is like you get banned from the subreddit, you're banned from everything. And then they had
like, they had that joke, you know, don't buy Monero. You remember that joke? Like, and they did
the Bitcoin sign guy. It's the same joke, but I would honestly, they were so clever about it that
I would fall for it every time. And they photoshopped it so that someone photoshopped it from buy Bitcoin
to buy Litecoin. And everyone was like, this is so stupid. We hate this person. And then the Monero
people replied to that. And you're like, oh, no, it's going to be Monero. And then it's like,
Ricardo's face on the Bitcoin sign guy's head. And then it's don't buy Monero. And then you're like,
ah, get me every time. So I think.
As I remember, and I could be wrong, but this is how I remember it.
As you said, Monero was really not going anywhere. They had a very hardcore crowd, but
they had no real life adoption or any. The speculators were kept at arm's length.
And then when it turned out that Bitcoin is not going to have, you know,
significant block size increase or not going to go down apart with additional block size increases
in the future, that's when Monero started to go up. A lot of people were suddenly looking for
alternatives when that became clear. And that's when Monero started to go. And
the moment they listed it from major exchanges, that whole momentum seemingly got just killed,
obliterated. And they had basically skipped an entire cycle where it didn't really appreciate
compared to Bitcoin. It was in a long stat field or something. At least this is how I remember that
this just shows that basically a lot of the price action was probably still from speculators,
no matter what they tried. So people are going to speculate on everything. That's just human nature.
So that's how we live. Yeah. Another question talking about alternatives. Can some of you
guys give some comments on these three coins? First, just the new, you know, the upgrade of
Litecoin with MumbleBimble, for example, and then on Secret Network and ROSE, because they both
all three are also related to, you know, putting security and anonymity in the transactions. Thanks.
Oh, I've never heard of those last two, I think. But Litecoin certainly added MumbleWimble
extension blocks. One of the weird things about that is there's just so many actually
interesting facets of that, but I don't know if we have time for them all. But, you know,
one is that people say like Litecoin is a staging ground for Bitcoin because SegWit was activated
there first, but I don't actually agree with that. I think it's just there was no real opposition to
SegWit, so doing it on Litecoin was kind of meaningless. But yeah, there was this MumbleWimble
project and it's actually debatable whether or not MumbleWimble adds privacy because an adversary
can just log everything. And then the key feature of MumbleWimble is that the transaction cut
through can be deleted. You could delete it, but if everyone is listening
on the network, then it's too late. So yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of the privacy claims are
just like any other claim where it's a buzzword that people use.
Thank you. The other two coins, one is especially ROSE, and this is really about privacy
in these transactions. It's based on Cosmos, basically. You guys have never heard of that?
No. Okay. There's lots of things to hear of.
No problem. Hey, this is part of why BIP300 is so important, believe it or not. It's because
the idea that everyone should have to hear about and then be justified to. You invent something,
you have to explain it to everyone, you have to convince everyone that it's a good idea.
That's really not very viable, and nothing else in the world works that way. When it does work
that way, you have something where the king has to decide everything, or you have a dictator
everything, or you have a dictatorship. That doesn't really ever work. What if you wanted
to open a new restaurant, and you had to first go to the leader of the biggest restaurant in town,
which would be, of course, this weird Soviet soup kitchen place that everyone is getting their food,
and you go to them and you would say, excuse me, person, I want to open Subway sandwiches.
You have to explain everything to them, and you say, oh, it'll be like this, it'll be like that.
That world sucks compared to a world where someone can just launch a thing. I think that
this is good. The ideal situation is that so much new stuff is being invented that
almost no one has heard of anything. We've heard of basically zero percent.
20,000 is the number of altcoins right now, or something like that. I think I have maybe
have an idea about a dozen of them, what they do, and that's it. I'm not really interested in
anything, just Bitcoin stuff mainly. Very, very little time spent on maybe privacy coins and
nothing else. Even there, I just basically know something about Zcash and Monero, but that's it.
Another very interesting is Holochain. I don't know if you guys have heard about that.
They're really pioneering towards peer-to-peer, basically. It's a total 100 percent decentralized
network, which is also working as a storage layer. Maybe have a look at that as well.
I don't know anything about that, but I do know a little bit about the three. I think
the idea is a good idea. The storage concept, like the Filecoin SIA storage type concept,
I think is a cool idea because people have extra hard drive space. You're not using your
internet. It's 3 a.m. when you're asleep, you're not using your internet connection. I don't know
which version, which design will prevail, but I actually have always thought that that idea
was pretty decent. Exactly what is happening, if you think about the major cloud providers like
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, this is exactly what they're doing. But this is somehow, as well,
dictatorship. Somehow, the prominent powers in the market who really control your whole data,
because if you run all your jobs into a data center, into cloud, for example,
eventually, these companies have access to it, whether you like it or not. It's just the truth.
How do you really go about creating those environments where you're sure that they are
GDPR compliant, that they are private? That's the beauty of these networks, probably, I think.
Yeah, if you go to Amazon or whatever, they're going to guarantee not to lose your data. But
what does that really mean? They're just going to split it up into 10 different encrypted pieces
and put it in 10 different data centers. But you could also do that.
Yeah, of course they do. Yeah, I agree. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying it's the same thing.
So why be a middleman? Software eats the world, right? So why let them do that?
And cloud computing becomes more important? Yeah, who wants them to have access to all of your
photos and the emails you send to all the people, all your miscreants?
Yeah, so I'm not even interested in cloud storage that is not client-side encrypted.
The sad thing is that the whole power and a lot of the utility that cloud computing can give you
is just not really working with encrypted data. So the whole thing that they are trying to sell
us UX and stuff is just it gets completely disabled with client-side encryption. You can
only manipulate and interpret the data on the clients. And that means you can't actually use
the computers in the cloud. At least right now, this is where we are technologically.
Maybe in the future, someone will invent a way where you can just create a completely bongo
encrypted virtual architecture of yourself that nobody can decipher. And you can compile
applications that run on this. And anyone that looks at the memory, they just see encrypted
shit. But it's actually a tooling complete computer. Maybe we will get there someday.
And you can have private cloud computing, you know, maybe. But right now, it's absolutely
horrible. And I want none of that. Paul, when you reflect on the potential
for drivechain to absorb the privacy coin community to Bitcoin, what do you think will
be some of the interesting facets of that transition? If the privacy communities of
Zcash and Monero and others were to completely move to the Zcash drivechain on Bitcoin,
what would that look like, do you think?
Well, I think, to be honest with you, I think it might take a little while. People would have
to grow comfortable with this. But I think it would be driven. In general, my view of the side
chains conquering the world is that people see no future in the altcoin. So I think right now,
everyone who, if you work on Ethereum, or if you work on whatever, or if you live in that world,
you kind of are imagining the possibility of flippening or, or at least carving out some
kind of niche. But with sidechains, the niche is just not going to be there, really.
Maybe there'll be some kind of weird niche, super proof of stake niche or something. But
in general, the idea is that like, they lose hope. And so I would, the idea is that
out of, eventually, people would see, you know, like the writing on the wall with Monero. And
they said, listen, we are very good. We did the right thing by making this technology.
We did the right thing by caring about privacy. But just this is the future. The future is just
one coin with lots of different blockchains, lots of different software. And I think
that is, you know, that would be like that. So then I think it would probably, I mean,
I'm not sure, but privacy has a weird feature where sometimes it's like,
very subversive things get it first, or very kind of shameful things get it first.
And so it's not like a big, it's not a lot of fanfare when it switches over.
But I would think that in general, people would want to really have it vetted, too,
because you just imagine someone who really cares about privacy, they probably have a big stake in the outcome of whatever they're trying to do.
So that could probably be like three major reasons why someone is, you know, becoming very privacy focused.
The first is pretty obvious. I mean, if they are doing illegal stuff, then they want their privacy.
So criminals probably love physical cash. I would imagine that they just absolutely love physical cash.
But where they can't use physical cash, they want something, you know, very private.
But and of course, the other part is people want to be ungovernable.
So of course, the government wants to control people, but people don't want the government to control them.
And again, of course, criminals also don't want the government to control them.
But there are a lot of people who are not criminals.
They just simply don't want the government to control them.
They want to be ungovernable.
And of course, the line blurs a little bit because these people basically cherry pick the laws that they are, you know, observing or keeping themselves.
So they could be in a strict sense considered criminals because they won't, you know, uphold the laws that they find unjust.
They don't agree with that. They pick and choose based on their own moral imperatives.
And if you really want to be very lenient, then criminals are basically just doing exactly this.
So the line kind of can blur in some cases.
But yeah, people want to be ungovernable.
And that is the part where I have some doubt about, because you can absolutely imagine that if Bitcoin keeps valuing and, you know, the cost to create a new altcoin or to clone an altcoin is basically zero.
And the potential upside to sell your stuff when you get it early and cheap is huge.
And there is an entire industry built on this that tries to, you know, hype up obscure new shitcoins and just dump them and move on and create the next.
So people will eventually grow tired of this.
And we can foresee that as a lot of Bitcoin maximalists have been created by this simple phenomenon that, you know, holding altcoins is just very, very drug prone experience.
And we can foresee that people would prefer, you know, holding one thing from one monetary layer that actually keeps appreciating.
And they would just stop this experimentation.
There is this line of reasoning that I think most sidechain advocates follow, that this makes sense.
But the ungovernable part is actually like that's a counterforce, I think, because when you put everything, you know, when you put everything on one horse and that horse gets its leg broken,
then you all lose.
And so basically, a lot of people, I think, in Monero, the way they talk about Bitcoin and what Bitcoin is doing and where it's heading and stuff like that,
it tells me that they deeply mistrust how, you know, how ungovernable Bitcoin will be in the future.
So they simply don't agree with that Bitcoin will be ungovernable.
And that's why they will be reluctant, you know, to subservient their consensus to Bitcoin, because that basically in their head is just giving up power to the man, to the state, if you like, giving up power and decreasing the ungovernability.
So there is this line that first, I think, Bitcoin needs to prove that it can indeed remain ungovernable.
And only then will a lot of these hardcore people, you know, consider actually using a sidechain instead of, you know, a consensus where they have more independence and more of this magical power of will and imagination,
where no matter how an attacker comes at them, they can just change the rule, right?
So it's almost like a giant monster is coming for you, but you can just wish it away.
This is kind of how these software projects work if the community can reach consensus.
And the larger the community, the larger, the less this works well.
And this is a reason for, you know, that works against this theory that everyone will just immediately prefer a Bitcoin sidechain that does the same technologically, I think.
So, Paul, what do you think about that?
Do you think that something like Drivechain will inevitably be adopted by a coin that has a robust community and then that coin would swallow up all of the others?
Or do you think the social issues that Moon Settler described would inhibit that total victory by one network effect?
Well, I think what he was saying was that people are buying Monero because they rightly perceived in 2016 as partly as a result of the scaling war.
They kind of thought, well, not only is, you know, there's a difference between having everything figured out and being on the path to world domination.
But if there's a significant split internally, then that means that either one side is wrong or perhaps both sides are wrong.
Because there's apparently enough criticism internally of each side to mount this huge split.
And I think that the split is... that triggered people to say, well, you know, if someone ever actually figures this out, we'll come back.
But right now, they have not figured it out.
Yeah, sure. But then the rhetoric actually evolved if you look at, you know, the talking points.
So a lot of the things that they are saying are not just... of course, the baseline criticism is that Bitcoin is too traceable.
And therefore, since Bitcoin is too traceable, it will naturally become permissioned for the end users, even if they can't actually squeeze the miners, if they can't stronger the miners into compliance.
But they actually, on the other hand, are that convinced that that will come.
Like, Bitcoiners are generally pretty confident in that no state will be able to, you know, just whip the miners into compliance and force censorship, black or white listing or whatever,
travel rule enforcement on the miners.
That is a general view in the Bitcoin community that that is just not going to happen.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that most of the Monero people are just taking it, you know, as a fact that this will happen.
And they think that their consensus mechanism is actually more robust and more superior against this kind of government overreach or strong arming techniques.
So that's another way to put more concretely that what I was talking about, that they actually want, you know, they actually want to be ungovernable.
And there are more facets to that than just on-chain privacy.
There are actually, it's a multifaceted issue, and they have become very indoctrinated and very practiced in preaching their points.
And basically, I think even if Bitcoin adopted on layer one ring signatures and confidential transactions as an option, even then a lot of these hardcore Monero people would find the excuses not to, you know, abandon their own network and come back to Bitcoin.
But to continue as they have been doing and basically compete with Bitcoin everywhere they can.
That is how I kind of perceive their attitude.
All right. Very well said.
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We meet every Monday and Friday to talk about how sidechains can revolutionize innovation on Bitcoin, bringing all of the technology of altcoins to Bitcoin sidechains, potentially eliminating all of the enthusiasm that exists for altcoins, bringing their users economic activity to Bitcoin instead, strengthening Bitcoin.
Yeah, one more thing I would like to mention, I don't know, did we talk about, you know, a little bit about ARK and the limitations last time?
I don't remember.
Yeah, we did.
A lot of you in particular are interested in the dust limit for stuff coming back.
I was wondering if anyone would ever calculate the exact size of the ARK redemption transaction in bytes.
That's certainly something that people want to know to see what multiple that is of a normal transaction, which is if a normal fee rate is $5, then how much does it cost to, you know, like in the uncooperative clothes, uncooperative clothes.
We should have started a clothing line that makes shirts and hats, uncooperative clothes.
So I just saw a lot of people recently, you know, having the doubts expressed along these lines.
So so mainly the liquidity criticism was very loud.
So people were trying to figure out how much liquidity is going to have to be available in access for the service provider.
That was something that people ran away with.
And the other stuff was this, how can you actually say that it is non-custodial when you may not be able to economically enforce your property rights on chain because you are below the dust limit.
So everyone has a different idea about how much Bitcoin on-chain fees will be.
Roughly, we have now about 10 million active Bitcoiners, I believe, at tops.
I don't know how much the exact amount is.
Somewhere probably between 5 and 10 million people who actually hold UTXOs and do lightning stuff.
And most of that is, you know, inert and core storage.
And with this, we have the blocks absolutely full.
Huge backlog is present.
So in a future where hundreds of millions of people want to have access to the Bitcoin network and want to have self-custody,
I don't think we can talk about $5 fees for transactions or $50.
That just doesn't seem realistic to me.
I'm thinking more along the lines of thousands of dollars for a transaction on-chain or maybe tens of thousands if Bitcoin really gets adopted and appreciates in the future.
So this whole thing about, you know, having to, not only you are splitting up.
So let's say you hold $50,000 on Bitcoin and the on-chain fees are just $5,000, $10,000 on average.
And you are actually splitting up that $50,000 to like 10 virtual UTXOs.
And each of them takes multiple transactions to push on-chain, like let's say three on average.
So when you are in a situation like that, you are just going to burn all your money trying to do that.
That is pretty obvious to me.
And that is why I think we are not completely done yet figuring this thing out.
Of course, I can't actually predict what fees people will pay, how much demand will be there for the Bitcoin box space.
We can only speculate on, if someone is a bullish Bitcoin or a Bitcoin maximalist, then he probably imagines that Bitcoin is going to gain prestige and going to gain dominance and going to gain demand for the block space and grow the user base.
And I think we are already pushing the limits of what Bitcoin can actually do, how many people Bitcoin can house.
So we are probably at peak self-sovereign adoption if nothing changes.
And this is where sidechains need to be part of the discussion because they kind of give you the ability to arbitrarily expand the available block space.
But also without increasing the global burden for everyone.
And this partitioning effect is a huge thing and can totally change the game as we know it currently.
My personal view is that the fees on layer one will actually be low.
The average fee won't be low because there will be these BIP301 accounting transactions.
There will be like 10 or 12 of those that pay enormous fee, so the average will be high, but almost no one will pay the average.
The median fee will be low because I just don't see people being willing to actually pay a high fee.
When the fees go up, people complain and they try to batch or they try to do whatever.
They'll try to wriggle out of the fee, including by going custodial, which is like the bar tab batching type idea.
But I do think that still the problem of high fees is relevant to ARK because there can be a kind of bank run where everything's operating normally and no one is doing the uncooperative close.
And then a couple people do it and this causes a congestion to increase.
And then there's a problem because you have to do it within four weeks, right?
So some people think, well, just to be safe, I'll close.
And then when you do that, the fees go up even more.
And then more stuff is near the dust limit.
So people say it can trigger this big cascade of people trying to settle.
And of course, lightning can make it all worse because as we discussed, when nodes disagree on the fee rate on lightning, then they will force close.
So that can add to the chaos.
And ARK has this special property that is allergic to malleability, transaction ID malleability.
It really depends on not being malleable.
That means basically in layman terms that you cannot fee bump these ARK settlement transaction tree stuff.
So you can't fee bump the connectors.
You can't fee bump the VTX.
So as you try to push them on chain.
And you can't fee bump how you want to continue from that.
Maybe if you have something more complex done with the ASP.
So either the ASP locks in a lot in advance, tries to guess what is the fee rate going to be,
like multiplies that with two and locks that in two.
But then he can seriously get hurt if someone is, as you said, for fun or whatever reason just unrolling these transactions that will cost a lot.
So ideally, you would want the person that is pushing these transactions on chain to pay the fee for it because you want to keep people cooperating.
But in case of ARK, because of this four week sweep, it's not so clear cut.
Because we don't want a situation where anyone can just cause the other harm without him being harmed.
We want everyone to get hurt when cooperation stops.
But it's very hard to do it well in advance, lock these things in weeks in advance when you can't predict the fee rate.
So that seems to be a key thing to ARK, to fine tune it and to make it work optimally,
even in the best assumptions and circumstances, is to have a good estimate what the fee rate the next day will be,
and the next week and two weeks after.
If you can't do that, there will be a lot of problems probably.
With the low value VTXs, the high value VTXs will probably be fine.
Medium Satoshi VTXs hopefully will be completely fine.
Paul, is the Thunder scaling sidechain in any way a fundamental necessity for the survival for Bitcoin more than other kinds of sidechains?
Or would you say that Thunder is just one example of the many ways that Bitcoin mainchain doesn't offer all of the features that some people would want,
and therefore we need a sidechain to meet those people's demands?
Well, I think that actually it is, because I think at the end of the day, the system...
Like, what people are doing today with Bitcoin is they're saying something like...
It's like we're designing a radio, and they're saying right now the radio can only do 8 kilobytes per second.
Or something like that. And they're saying, well, we're going to keep improving it, and we'll get it up to 200 kilobytes a second, and then we'll get it up to 205 kilobytes.
But I kind of don't see it that way. I think we already have Venmo, we already have WeChat Pay, we already have all this stuff, Zelle, whatever, PayPal.
So the network effects of money are so strong that once something wins, it'll be very hard to dislodge it.
There'll be people who talk about the immaculate conception of Bitcoin, but for whatever wins, it'll be impossible to dislodge, like the QWERTY keyboard.
It just can't be dislodged. So basically, whoever gets to the largest scale first without dying will just win. Everything else will just be pets.com, and we'll be gone.
So I think that the idea of whether or not you can scale to all 8 billion people on the planet Earth is something that we should be a little bit more, I don't know if the word is compromising on or something, but because of the scaling war, people just kind of refuse to be open-minded.
At least concerned, right? So even if you don't want to say compromise, we should be more concerned about this.
And the idea should be more like, we can get 8 billion people with custodial, how do we improve on that?
So it should go the other way. It shouldn't be like the radio gets this far. We should say, okay, right now we can get 8 billion people with custodial, how do we improve on custodial while still keeping 8 billion people in the network?
And so it should go the opposite direction, really. So that's kind of what I think. I think like, okay, when you write to the Bitcoin.dev mailing list, it should be, here's how I get 8 billion people, and then here's what I sacrifice.
And whoever sacrifices the least should win. But it should be flipped, the question, I think.
Yeah, but also, there is some weird psychosis going on in Bitcoin circles, I believe.
So the way that people want to handle future changes, especially consensus forks, is somehow completely deranged.
Somehow, there is a misconception of the risks with changes to Bitcoin Core codebase that involve the consensus.
And people don't understand that those changes get the most eyes on. Those changes are the hardest, the most vetted.
So if anyone wants to slip in some nasty into Bitcoin Core, he will definitely not do a consensus fork. He will definitely not flag it as a consensus fork.
I can't quite hear him now. Oh, he's back. Yes, now we can hear you.
I hear him just fine.
Thank you.
All right, so I think people are too afraid of consensus changes.
And they are very, very comfortable with the 10,000 pull requests that get merged into core every year.
The Bitcoin codebase is getting completely reworked. People are changing almost every...
All right, please continue.
So I see this weird detachment or this weird psychosis where people are very afraid to change a single line of consensus code.
Even though, like I said, that will almost surely get all the core developers to really seriously look at that code and discuss it to death and run tests on it endlessly.
And all the additional code changes that very well could actually result in forks because that's just the nature of Bitcoin.
Replacing the database under Bitcoin can result in a hard forecast or anything like that.
And so a lot of things get changed in Bitcoin. A lot of the code gets changed, but nobody cares about that.
Everybody only cares about the stuff that people call forks.
And there seems to be some notion that something sinister could be slipped into Bitcoin with a fork and we should be very vigilant and fight against any such change.
And I actually don't understand where these people are getting these weird ideas. This is completely deranged.
And we have this situation and we are a bit stuck because as Bitcoin is right now, it's completely unscalable.
So this is a fact. So Bitcoin is completely unscalable as it is. It can only be scaled through custody.
And it's almost certainly guaranteeable that if you scale through custody, then this 21 million Bitcoin limit is just not going to hold in the future.
I think history just proves that the entire world will be hungry for Bitcoin and the liquidity and they will just find ways to work around it.
And if people can't insist on final settlement because it just doesn't work, then there is just no way in hell that we can hang on to that limit.
I didn't quite follow that last point about there being a relationship, in your view, between the supply of Bitcoin and its scalability.
Isn't the argument in favor of tail issuance mainly focused on security budget, low fees, not on scaling?
I think this has nothing to do with tail emission or the security budget. Think about it this way.
If everyone in the world, all the 8 billion people are basically having a custodial relationship with someone and never seeing or operating with on-chain Bitcoin ever,
not even with Lightning directly, they are all having custodial wallets and only the banks use Lightning to settle.
Banks and financial institutions settle on Lightning with each other.
In a world like that, all the Bitcoin is basically just paper Bitcoin.
And there is nothing stopping anyone from issuing the same Bitcoin to hundreds of people and lending out their real Bitcoin for years or whatever.
And basically the same thing that happened to gold, the same system can easily be replicated on Bitcoin.
And people have been talking about this, by the way, so I don't know how long, but this discussion was very hot since 2015 at least.
And it was a very important aspect, I think, of the Skizm and the Bcash fork.
That many people were convinced that if we do not scale Bitcoin on the main chain, at least to some degree,
then the end result will inevitably be a huge fractional reserve scam.
And we are just going to replicate the previous failings in history with it.
And I find this argument very compelling.
I don't know any reason why this shouldn't happen, because expense is expense.
People are saying gold is expensive to settle and hard to move.
Yeah, if Bitcoin is expensive to settle and hard to move, it's the same thing.
Yeah, he's talking about, Henry, what you would use as your Bitcoin wallet in the future.
It wouldn't be a full node, it would just be pointing to the custodial thing.
So what if they updated it and they just said, you don't own any Bitcoin anymore.
Or you own twice as much. They'd just make it up.
And there would be no one in the world who could just say…
The people who run a Bitcoin full node would be able to say, oh, that's not true.
But actually those people would be a tiny minority and no one would care about them at all.
I mean, the people that run the Bitcoin nodes would have no idea how much Bitcoin is credited to people worldwide.
They would have no idea. They could have suspicions about it.
Everyone could have a general feeling about it, that there is just too much Bitcoin denominated liquidity available in the world.
But no one could actually verify anything.
Any financial institution can just make numbers up about their reserves or whatever, or not even tell anyone.
I mean, I don't know what cash reserves my bank holds.
I don't know. If I ask them, they won't tell me.
I have no idea what is their financial situation.
Probably they report balance sheets to some state authority or something.
But I have no clue what their situation is.
Yeah, it's interesting that in the scaling war there was actually one of the disputed points was…
One thing that people both hit on was they said, how can we maximize the quantity of full nodes?
And the small block side said, if the node is too expensive, it's already really hard to do initial block download.
Running a node is really inconvenient.
We don't want the blocks to get bigger.
Every week there's a thousand new blocks.
So even if the block size is only 8 megabytes, that's 8 gigabytes every week piling on.
You have to stop the bleeding, so to speak.
But then the other side, I remember they're on the large block side.
They said, well listen, Bitcoin right now is really small.
We only have a few people in Bitcoin.
We need to go to the whole world and then maybe a much smaller percentage of people will be running nodes.
But we'll be big.
We'll be a big hit and then lots of people will be involved.
They'll have all their money in it and they will run nodes.
And then the quantity of nodes will actually go up if the block size is greater.
So it's an intriguing case where both sides actually agreed on a metric.
There was so much disagreement, but it's just interesting that in this case there was kind of an agreement.
Where there was like, we both actually want this number to be its highest value.
But then it was kind of like, yeah, who knows?
It would have been interesting.
So what do you think about these recent developments on U3XO and 0SYNC4?
Have you been keeping tabs on that?
Well, yeah, so people really like this ZK-SNARK stuff.
And I have always hated it, honestly.
I've been suspicious of it.
Partly because it was clear that everyone is just BSing and no one actually knows how it works.
But until recently, now I think recently, the last five years has changed a lot.
So it went from being completely untenable to me to being kind of okay.
I actually, ZK proofs do not solve data availability in the slightest.
And so I wrote this thing about fraud proofs that I think is way better.
Because fraud proofs actually can solve data availability.
You can create a type of payment in like a lightning channel or in some other thing.
Some kind of non-thing that is not involving the full node.
Yeah, it triggers if some part of the block is empty.
And then you can see what the market price of that is.
And then you'll know if the market price of that is very low, like 0%.
Then you know that the block is there somewhere.
Yeah, so 0SYNC, the interesting thing about 0SYNC is it does not directly affect consensus.
It is not a ZK-SNARK or anything.
It just, they are basically trying to zero-knowledge prove the computational correctness of verifying Bitcoin,
you know, validating the entire blockchain.
And they figured out ways how this can be composed, how this can be parallelized,
how individuals, you know, chipping in their hash power voluntarily, node runners,
how could they just validate parts of blocks and this can be aggregated,
because the aggregation itself is a computation, you know.
So they figured out how you can do trees that are, you know, zero-knowledge provable sort of,
and how you can aggregate zero-knowledge proofs.
And this means, this kind of means that if you accept that this thing works,
this ZK magic thing works, at least with reasonable assurances or within reasonable assurances,
then basically the whole argument about Bitcoin blockchain bloat over long term just becomes completely mute,
because you can basically sync up in the future where these proofs are available
and then you can verify them on your client and it can sync up to the chain state
without even downloading the entire chain state.
You would know that this Merkle forest root is actually belonging to a valid chain state for that block height.
It would know that the proof of work is correct.
It would know everything, every calculation has been done in theory.
I don't know if this is really working.
By the way, I'm just assuming that they are not bullshitting us.
So you would be able to verify this eight kilobyte or something zero-knowledge proof
and then you could just assume a UTXO forest or some other UTXO aggregation.
Some people said that UTXO is not perfect because you cannot prove,
you cannot prove that when someone tells you that some UTXOs that you are interested in are included,
they can't prove that the opposite.
So they can't prove you that these are only the UTXOs that you own and there are no others.
So I don't know what is the name of that, but the point is there will be some structure
and you will only need to hold the roots and you will be able to run a full node from that
and you will be able to come online every few weeks and just get started with a new zero-knowledge proof
that some people prepared and basically the whole idea that people will keep terabytes or exabytes
or I don't know how much data on their full node, it just seems silly, like implausible.
I think initial block download will be gone in like a decade.
So like 99.9% of the people interacting with Bitcoin will not do IBD.
I am pretty convinced of this.
And this makes the entire argument in the block size world like insanely, insanely silly to me.
Well, it's interesting that you say that because that type of argument is exactly why I think the ZK proof stuff is a terrible idea.
I mean because, but let me kind of unpack it a little bit.
Because what I have to say is actually kind of nuanced.
But the first thing to point out is we already have that basically.
It's called SPV. Now it doesn't necessarily work.
But there's like, what would you say like, there's a saying that goes when you have a hammer,
when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
You know what I mean? And it's like you're holding a hammer and you have these ZK proofs
and they think, oh, what can we use these for?
Okay, we'll prove the chain state.
But there's never really been a real like dispute.
You know, like there's never really an actual dispute like about.
Now, I'm not saying that we should just, you know, we should just give up or whatever.
Like, but what I'm saying is SPV already can do like in 2009, we already only get the headers.
SPV does not actually prove correctness.
So SPV only proves that a certain amount of work was put into the creation of a Merkle tree
and in that Merkle tree, a transaction that you deem valid and to you is included.
So that is the only thing it can actually prove.
It cannot prove that there was not more Bitcoin minted in the Coinbase
than what you would, you know, find acceptable somewhere along the line or some other.
There was not a malicious spend.
It can prove none of these things.
But ZK proves in theory, if you can really like ZK prove these computations
and the aggregations are also reasonable.
But why do I say that anyway?
Because imagine what would it be like if you broke a rule?
You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't prove that all the rules have been followed.
But imagine what if you broke a rule in the world where we only have SPV?
Well, it has to be the case that like the entire network is fooled.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, it has to be that the majority of the hash power at least is colluding with that
or has been fooled because SPV really relies on that.
The majority of the hash power, the heaviest chain is not incentivized in fraud.
They are somehow kept honest.
So when someone with some insignificant amount like $10 that he receives in Bitcoin
would use SPV, he relies on that, you know, Coinbase and Binance and Michael Saylor
and every big author is running their full nodes and they are not taking any bullshit.
They are enforcing the rules.
What ZeroSync does is it says, okay, we remove the risk that the miners can collude
with everyone against full nodes.
Now, that's exactly what the fraud proofs thing that I described does.
Yeah.
Fraud proofs, again, are like, to me, very simple.
Whereas ZK-SNARK thing does not work with data availability
and it uses all this complicated stuff that no one can understand.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I think there could be like a sensible way to use this.
I believe that we can have.
Data availability, roll up data availability does not need to be forever.
It's not like the actual ledger updates, you know, it doesn't have to be available forever.
Even that may not be need to be available forever.
But let's say we want to keep.
But you understand what I'm saying.
It's already, in 2010, it was already possible to mostly do what you describe as this thing
that would end like the block size debate and everything
where you just have your 80 byte headers.
You have the proof of work chain, which is 4.4 megabytes per year, which is nothing.
You get the whole, you get completely to the end.
You have a Merkle tree that proves that you're included in the thing,
and then you have UTXO commitments of whatever kind of which
one type of UTXO commitment, which I think is probably the best one,
because I think, you know, Ted is probably a genius.
I agree.
If you want to go with UTXO commitments, I would say that we commit to a UTXO route
because it's just more useful, more options are available to people and more flexibility
how it is used and what is getting verified and deferred, verified and whatever.
So, yeah, a lot of people say that
zero-sync proving these trees is actually better than commitments,
consensus-enforced commitments.
There is one problem with, you know, consensus-enforced commitments,
and that is that it is computationally intensive.
So, let's say if you want to, if you want, if you have to put into a valid block,
into a valid Bitcoin block, you have to put the last UTXO, last change state in this UTXO,
you know, tree format, the hash commitment to that for it to be valid.
That will be very useful.
That will be very useful to end users.
But what it will do to miners is they would have to spend a lot of time
when they receive a block to actually, you know,
create the new updated state of the UTXO tree and get the new route commitment.
And they can't really just start working on the block until they do that.
So, you introduce something here where a lot of problems can come
with, you know, the bloating of the UTXO set.
In the future, if someone really starts to spam the UTXO set,
and we are starting to keep some of it not in memory on statistical terms,
and this update can take a lot of time if someone strategically picks
inclusion of new transactions and stuff like that.
So, if it involves IOP operations and not just in memory,
then especially it's going to be expensive.
And you can actually, maybe in extreme circumstances,
deny miners' ability to work on a new block for minutes after receiving a block.
And that gives the one that assembled that block like a huge advantage,
actually, because he can immediately start working on it.
He knows exactly what he has done, even before he found, you know, his work.
And this whole thing is not so clear-cut in my mind,
how we could do this, you know, without screwing up the way Bitcoin mining works.
So, again, the fraud-proof idea that I can link...
I can post a link if you like.
I just replied to, because I don't know if I can...
I just replied to Robin Linus, who is doing a ZKP sidechains now, fake shirt.
I don't know how to send it into the thing.
I can copy it in here.
I don't know if I can move it in.
Can I do the thing?
I think you have to press share on the tweet
and then select that you share it with this piece, something like that.
Yeah, you want to put a tweet in the nest, you go to the tweet,
and at the bottom right of the tweet, you click that arrow that's pointing upwards.
And then from there, you select the very top option, which is the name of this spaces.
I shared it.
Perfect.
And then I replied it to my fraud-proof thing.
But so the fraud-proofs idea is exactly...
To me, it's equal to zero knowledge proofs, except everyone can understand them,
and they could be finished.
They would have been finished in like whatever, 2016, if people really cared.
But to me, people don't really care, because whatever we do in life...
Think about if you were to buy a chicken sandwich.
We don't really live in a world where you check every single thing about the chicken,
you check everything about the sauce, you check everything about the bread,
or else you're poisoned and die.
It's just, you know, I understand how that's better.
If we could audit everything, we should.
I like that.
I would like to be able to know everything about my chicken sandwich before I eat it.
But I think, you know, how practical is it really?
Because whatever thing is invented or theorized,
like just the world, a layperson is not a specialist.
So all the different people who are involved,
consuming or producing this good or shipping it around, it's just this huge project.
And so, basically, this seems to be like putting a whole lot of effort into...
Like, compare the amount of effort put into this thing.
It's just, it seems disproportionate.
So what I'm getting at is, we put a lot of effort into making sure that
miners don't cheat light clients via SPV mode.
But that problem could be solved by just telling those people,
just telling those people, hey, if you're worried about that,
run a full node instead of a light client.
So it's already a completely easy to solve problem.
And if someone is providing you, if you have like a,
with the equivalent of a lightning service provider or like a full node service provider,
if you had that and they did the bad job, you could switch.
You know, there could be like a subscription service.
I'm not actually advocating for any of this.
I'm just talking about how you ask about a thing.
ZK-proof sync, ZK-proof magic, whatever.
And the thing doesn't really improve on the existing world at all,
because the existing world is already kind of shaped like that.
And that thing isn't a real problem compared to like,
how do we get more people using Bitcoin?
How do we get more flexibility with Bitcoin upgrades?
How do we, how do we make Bitcoin more conservative to prevent social attacks?
Like there's a giant long list of things that are all way, way more important
than if there are people cheating SPV mode,
which already has like natural feedback loops.
If people cheat with that, they would.
So that's, this is kind of what bothers me about it is it does seem like
that it's addressing a completely fake problem in my point of view.
In a way that when people,
the regular lay person is not going to be able to understand
what these ZK-proofs do at all.
The way they could at least understand what a hash is or what a signature is,
a regular person would be able to understand that eventually.
So the biggest problem that we still didn't really figure out with the SPV mode, right,
is the privacy issue.
So a lot of Lite clients, Lite wallets are just horrible for privacy.
And even, even, you know, the, ironically,
like the most hardcore parts of the Bitcoin privacy crowd, the Samurai crowd,
if you, if you start a Samurai wallet, right, without, you know, doing anything else,
you just download and start using it.
You're basically giving them your, your ex-pubs.
And, and I'm not even sure.
That's a mistake. I agree.
But I think the, the privacy thing, you know,
you're referring to the fact that a Lite client must ask a full node for UTXOs, right?
Yeah.
But I think that's actually quite solvable.
And in fact, lots of people introduced various things,
remember like Neutrino and then like this little Bloom filter.
And then I think UTXO is part of that too,
because you just, you can set the software up to just ask like many, many decoy things,
you know, just ask like 5,000 at random,
including your real one.
So I think that that is also like a solve.
What we should really do is we should wait.
I am torn because in part,
I think people should just pursue technology for its own sake.
But really, I do think that we should wait for the user to complain
before we solve a problem.
You know what I mean?
So like the ZK thing, it's like, it's not,
that shouldn't really be on people's radar.
Like we have these other problems and then people say,
we can make this towering Tesseract thing of enormous,
like cutting edge technology.
And people are like, what does it do?
And they said, well, you no longer will be scammed on SPV mode.
And it's like, well, that has never happened to anyone ever.
Yeah.
I kind of agree that probably the biggest pain point
that people will start complaining about will be the fees.
And the second is, seems to be this thing that,
you know, people have with running their own Lightning wallet
or doing some other cooperative stuff is,
you know, how do they receive offline?
So we completely bongored that part of Bitcoin
where you could just, you know, share an address with someone
and they can send that at your ledger, at their ledger.
And you can just scan for it and receive it.
And nothing really can go wrong.
So it's not like if you don't claim it in two weeks,
then it's really gone.
If you don't look at it for a month, it will still be there.
And these things just kind of changed.
And we are assuming that people will be fine with it.
I don't think people will be fine with it.
And we already see that, you know,
Wallet of Satoshi is hugely popular
because it basically solves these problems.
So people don't have to dig around with channel management.
They don't need to incur on-chain fees.
If they can, you know, buy Bitcoin on an exchange
and just, you know, withdraw over Lightning,
then they can withdraw to Wallet of Satoshi
where they can receive offline.
They can play with ZOPs.
The fees are low.
I imagine Wallet of Satoshi is especially low.
And the whole thing is just convenient.
And this seems like a huge pull for the users.
And it doesn't seem to bother them
that the provider sees everything that they are doing,
literally, and they are fully exposed
and they are fully in custody
because the UX is just so damn good for them.
So, Moon Settler, you're concerned,
if I understood correctly,
about the possibility of high fees in the future,
encouraging users to use custodial Bitcoin.
Yeah.
But it's interesting how the drivechain community,
many people, for example, Paul, I think,
you know, has a view that fees might stay low.
So you and he might have different expectations
about the future of fees on mainchain.
Yeah, I don't say they will be high, necessarily.
Ideally, in a high adoption feature,
they should be high
because it is a very, very limited resource.
But it can also just be very unstable.
Like, so it can be like one sub per view by one quarter
and 9,000 sub per view by the next quarter
when some mania hits or whatever.
So, yeah, I don't know.
When some mania hits or whatever.
So it can just be very unstable and hard to plan for.
I don't foresee low fees,
really affordable low fees forever
in a future where Bitcoin is valuable and adopted.
I think that can only happen
if it's completely marginalized and forgotten
because this highly replicated block space alone has value.
So we can see that people are figuring out
what to do with it.
There will very likely be a baseline demand for it.
And I find it much more likely that, you know, the fees.
Yeah, I think the fees will be higher on L1 than L2,
but not that high
because people will be able to do the efficient broadcast,
efficient news thing in various other ways.
They'll evolve to do them in the most space efficient way.
And so even L1, it's just people don't want to pay.
So I don't think, but yeah,
I think L1 could definitely be unstable also.
I think that's the case.
Sorry, I can't speak anymore,
but I will stay here maybe through an emoji or something,
but I'm off from speaking.
Okay.
Thank you very much as always.
Please come back again very soon, Moon Settler.
Welcome to the stage.
So I didn't understand.
What's the topic?
We're talking about drivechain.
That's Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 300 and 301.
That's our topic.
Let's talk about the halving.
All right.
Well, the halving is coming in 2024,
approximately in March.
April, April.
3.125 Bitcoin per block in Coinbase.
And it'll be interesting to see if that,
if the Bitcoin price has moved since then,
or if the miner revenue will be approximately cut in half
due to the halving.
What do you think about it?
Bitcoin law.
What do you think about the halving?
Bullish.
One minute and I will respond.
One minute.
I'm a little bit busy.
Okay.
Well, it's not necessarily bullish
because Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin Cash have the same halving.
Every so many blocks, every four years,
there's a halving there.
And surely you're not also equally bullish on them.
Yeah, that didn't work.
Yeah, lots of things have those.
Yeah.
I mean, there's many things in the world are scarce,
but do not command value.
Like Ethereum.
Well, Ethereum does command some value.
Does it not?
It commands half the value of Bitcoin.
Yeah, but one day it can go up like,
it can go like what happened to Terra Luna.
It has infinite supply
and it doesn't have a maximum supply like Bitcoin.
It has 21 million.
And there is no proof of work like Bitcoin.
And other than that,
other than that,
I think Ethereum is just a shit coin.
I think it's like Cardano.
Cardano, I'm actually more bullish on Cardano than Ethereum,
even though I'm a maximalist.
All right.
Thank you very much for your comments.
And we appreciate you being here.
It's great to have lots of people come on up.
We welcome everyone else who might have a question.
Join the stage and share your thought or your question if you have one.
But you can also just share a comment.
This is Drivechain Twitter Spaces.
We meet every Monday and Friday to discuss
how sidechains can tremendously strengthen Bitcoin
and potentially enable Bitcoin to absorb all of the value,
the users and technology of every altcoin, potentially.
And it also has the potential to boost Bitcoin's fees
so that Bitcoin miners can make many millions of dollars per day
from transaction fees instead of the usual, which is...
You're kind of cutting it out.
I don't know if you have the best connection per se.
But maybe that's fine.
I'm not the host, but if anyone wants to come up,
then raise your hand using the hand button.
Yeah, if you'd like to come on up, raise your hand,
and we'll let you up, ask a question, share a comment.
Am I coming through now?
Okay, well, maybe no one wants to talk about anything,
in which case I have lots to do.
All right, well, we could...
Someone pick...
We could adjourn until Monday, until Friday.
Okay, well, maybe no one wants to talk about anything.
In which case, I have lots to do.
All right, well, we could adjourn until Friday.
Speak again Friday.
Sounds
All right.