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Back in the day, back in 2017, everyone was saying, like, this is how we're going to
scale Bitcoin to 8 billion people.

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So the small blockers said Lightning Network and the large blockers said Bitcoin
Cash or whatever.

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They both had some small amount of success, but overall, both of them have failed
completely at this mission.

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The culture in Bitcoin has become deranged, as I call it, where there's a lot of
false stuff that's believed and there's a lot of, like, invested interests.

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There's Michael Saylor, who wants everything to be corporate Bitcoin, so he's not,
he doesn't want, like, privacy.

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He doesn't really want even features.

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He doesn't really want people to use the network.

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Truthcoin, BIP 300 did not make it into Bitcoin Core.

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Actually, nothing has made it into Bitcoin Core, which is part of the problem.

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They have to say, like, Monero is a scam or Ethereum is a scam.

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And then they have to say, Ordinals are a scam.

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And they just have to, you know, it just becomes like a very narrow world view.

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Like, we're on the Titanic and we're about to hit the iceberg and we need more life
rafts.

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Hi, welcome to XSRM Podcast, your home of decentralization.

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Today, I'm joined by Paul Sztorc, a well-known Bitcoin researcher, developer and
thinker.

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Paul, you're one of the more outspoken and independent voices in Bitcoin space since
2015.

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So welcome, Paul.

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And good to have you over.

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Yeah, thanks for having me.

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Awesome.

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So, look, I'm excited to get into drive chain, right?

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You've been behind that since 2014, 2015.

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And more importantly, I wanted to get into eCash, right?

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That's a new independent blockchain that you're going to be launching via HardFork
on Bitcoin.

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But let me start with some background, right?

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So let me ask you this question, right?

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How did a guy who was deep into prediction market and game theory ended up becoming
one of the most persistent voices pushing for Bitcoin scaling?

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I don't know, but I think if you have a background in economics, that maybe gives
you an edge because we have a lot of weird ideas and a lot of weird criticisms of
ideas.

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So you had, you know, in the block size war, there was like lightning network versus
large block.

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Now, I think game theory, you know, there was a guy, Tom Shelley, who is a great
game theorist.

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And supposedly, I didn't know this at the time, but supposedly he was also like a
master of the compromise.

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So like everyone would come into a room and there'd be this big problem and he'd be
like, there's a way of everyone getting what they want.

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And I think the drive chain is kind of like that, except that it's just been slow
going to give everyone what they want, because they'd rather, you know, the
lightning people wanted to try lightning and the large block people wanted to try
large block.

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And all of them have suffered horribly as a result of not listening to me.

35
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But that was their own decision.

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And supposedly they all represent, you know, some of these elite game theorist
people.

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They all respect consent as well, or they just say like, hey, you want X, Y, Z,
that's what you got.

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So I kind of think I'm actually weirdly similar to them, although I didn't plan it
out this way.

39
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But I'm kind of like, yeah, you guys, you guys don't want it now, then don't take
it.

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But I'll make my own thing.

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That is kind of like they wanted to do lightning.

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They wanted to. They were really big into that.

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I think that was a huge mistake for all of them.

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I think I know people who have lost billions of dollars or more just because they
didn't go with this idea and they went with their own idea.

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But that's that's their choice, I guess.

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Yeah, yeah, I think, oh, man, there's so much to unpack what you just discussed
there, right?

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Like this is perhaps your last 11 years of your struggle that you've been on or the
journey you've been on, perhaps, right?

48
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I have been on a struggle, like an intellectual struggle to like persuade people.

49
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But, you know, overall, it's been pretty easy.

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It's been easy street because the price of Bitcoin has gone up and up and up.

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So it's been it's been very easy to be a Bitcoiner.

52
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But, yeah, meanwhile, the whole time there's been these questions of scaling, these
questions, do we have product market fit?

53
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Like are all these other blockchains a complete scam?

54
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And meanwhile, we have darknet market adoption of Monero and we have, you know, we
have all this stuff that's not on Bitcoin.

55
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And the question is, is it also stable coins?

56
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That was originally a Bitcoin project.

57
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True. That was originally MasterCoin.

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That was it was a BTC only project.

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And then it became Omni.

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And then now it's on Ethereum and Tron.

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So, you know, like we have all these these projects and, you know, meanwhile, in the
Bitcoin community,

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people are saying Bitcoin, you know, is absolutely perfect the way it is.

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And we don't need those users anywhere or whatever.

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So, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, as I say, like there's so much to get into and and
sort of slice a little bit,

65
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because I think it touches upon your journey that you went through from 2015 all the
way to now.

66
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But let me quickly, I guess, do a little bit more introduction for people that are
new, perhaps.

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So you're the inventor of DriveChain, right?

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Which is Bit 301.

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You're also known for your early work on TruthCoin, right?

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So which is now called HiveMind, right?

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So this is the prediction market before PolyMarket by Shane.

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Yeah, never rename anything.

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That's my advice for listening.

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But it was TruthCoin.

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It was the thing is it was named TruthCoin was named.

76
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And then there was this was a period when there was not that many other crypto
projects.

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So it was like kind of.

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But then right after that, there were all these crypto projects that were like, you
know, FeatherCoin, TerraCoin.

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There's all these weird projects named Coin.

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So I thought I'd rename it to Bitcoin in the name.

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My advice to everyone out there, never rename anything.

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Just stick with whatever name you picked.

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People will figure it out.

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I hate the thing.

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But yeah, that project has now gone back to being called TruthCoin DC.

86
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And it's an L2 on it is an L2 DriveChain itself that people could try out if they
want now.

87
00:06:12,560 --> 00:06:16,920
So but yeah, this is circa 2018, 2019, right?

88
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The TruthCoin prediction market stuff is that's from 2012, 2013, and in fact, it
made it to the top of Hacker News in, I think, 20, maybe 2015 or May 24th.

89
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One of those years, it made it very high on Y Combinator Hacker News.

90
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And in fact, a lot of people said people had messaged me, you know, I don't want to
like drop a bunch of names and stuff.

91
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But many, many people, five or six different teams, this includes Shane from
Polymarket.

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They emailed me to say, oh, that I inspired what they were doing.

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And so that was very, very nice to have those those emails.

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Yeah. But yeah, I was into this for a long time because Intrade, there was a website
called Intrade that did prediction markets.

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That was like the OG Polymarket.

96
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And it was from like 2002 or maybe the year 2000 or something to like and then it
closed in 2012.

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And that's when I rolled up my sleeves to create TruthCoin.

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It was right after that in 2012.

99
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So that was a that was a long time ago.

100
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Yeah. That's another thing where I was saying we should do this on Bitcoin the whole
time.

101
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And then finally, Polymarket comes out.

102
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It's not exactly as decentralized or like as crypto flavored, you know, but it was
still like it was like, oh, then, you know, now then, of course, after 2024,
everyone was like, obviously, prediction markets are the biggest thing.

103
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Now you see it everywhere, everywhere.

104
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So, yeah, again, I was right.

105
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Another chapter in the Paul was right.

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The whole time book that's being being written by the universe.

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Two for two for Paul.

108
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But I think, you know, as you say, perhaps, you know, it's the I guess everyone
loves Bitcoin, at least in the crypto communities.

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Right. Or should love, at least from my perspective.

110
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But I think the only criticism people have had is the adoption.

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Right. You know, what does the adoption programs like and what is adoption in terms
of usability?

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Not just holding coins.

113
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Right. Because that could be considered as an option.

114
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So we'll get into that.

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But a third one I wanted to mention.

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Right. So I mentioned, obviously, your work on BIPs, your work on Truthcoin
prediction market.

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And the third one is your CEO of Layer 2 Labs.

118
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Right. Which is, again, sort of connects back to everything we're going to discuss
today.

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So that's that's great.

120
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So let's get into BIPs.

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Right. Let's start from the top.

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You've been on BIPs journey for a long time.

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So for for anyone who's new to BIPs, right, how do you describe BIP 300 and 301 to
someone who is perhaps very new to this?

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It's a rough time to even bother learning about it because there used to be the case
that all these soft forks were not controversial.

125
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And we did multiple per year.

126
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So I think in Q quarter four of 2015, we did three and there was no controversy
about any of this.

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Then the block size war happened.

128
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Segwit was like blockaded by miners, created this all this anger and acrimonious
tension and dislike, discord.

129
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So but before there were all these things called BIPs.

130
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And if you wanted to write so like one easy one is a BIP 39, which is that is how we
got the 12 word, you know, from having a wallet where you had to back it up
frequently.

131
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We had this wallet.dat, you had to back it up like many times because your wallet
would generate these new keys.

132
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Well, that's not entirely true.

133
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There was first there was a different BIP about the HD wallets, but then still there
was like this weird file you had to back up.

134
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But after BIP 39, that's where we got the 12 words and you just have the 12 words.

135
00:09:41,840 --> 00:09:47,240
And so BIP 39 said, like, this is, you know, the list of words and this is how it
works, et cetera, et cetera.

136
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So there used to be these things called BIPs.

137
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There still are, but it doesn't matter as much anymore.

138
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And and now even the only BIP that that's getting attention is like 110, which is
like you didn't follow the process at all and just kind of YOLO, just like just
burst onto the scene kind of maximum controversy way.

139
00:10:05,800 --> 00:10:14,800
So there used to be these things called BIPs that were like these little documents
that just let you know, like exactly when someone says drive chain, like exactly
what do they mean?

140
00:10:15,080 --> 00:10:19,560
It used to be a pretty good filter, too, because you couldn't just say such and such
word.

141
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You could just be like, what do you think about reusable payment codes?

142
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They had to be like a document that had like all the details.

143
00:10:24,360 --> 00:10:30,280
And they did a pretty good job of like rejecting stuff that just didn't have enough
detail.

144
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And that that filtered a lot of stuff out where people could just say, oh, what
about my idea that we do such and then it's like, well, listen, you have to write
down like the whole write down all the steps.

145
00:10:39,600 --> 00:10:41,080
And so then that used to be cool.

146
00:10:41,400 --> 00:10:43,360
Unfortunately, now it's awful.

147
00:10:43,360 --> 00:10:45,640
And even now, there's like this weird prestige.

148
00:10:45,640 --> 00:10:54,560
There's something I call the prestige economy where in Bitcoin culture, you can get
a lot of money and attention if you like write a BIP.

149
00:10:54,800 --> 00:10:59,000
This has been enormously distracting, I think, to those of us who just want to get
work done.

150
00:10:59,000 --> 00:11:02,800
So now everyone's like, oh, yeah, what do you think of my new BIP?

151
00:11:02,920 --> 00:11:05,080
Whatever. I don't want to name too many names.

152
00:11:05,080 --> 00:11:11,640
But you get the idea that now it's become like a stamp of of maybe esteem or quality
or something.

153
00:11:11,640 --> 00:11:16,120
So these BIPs, these are the ones, only a few of them were soft fork.

154
00:11:16,120 --> 00:11:18,400
Some just were informational or whatever.

155
00:11:18,920 --> 00:11:24,880
And but all the ones that were soft forks, you know, these were activated regularly.

156
00:11:25,280 --> 00:11:28,120
Now we've had no soft fork activation in sight.

157
00:11:28,520 --> 00:11:34,520
And so that's an enormous tragedy that we could discuss if you think people are
interested.

158
00:11:34,720 --> 00:11:47,280
Specifically, I guess, focus on the 300 and 301, which I think is a good way to
understand the journey you've been on before we get to discuss e-cash, right?

159
00:11:47,280 --> 00:11:54,360
So what are these two 300 and 301 BIPs that you've been sort of discussing for a
long time and are the author of those two?

160
00:11:56,320 --> 00:12:02,880
Right, in November of 2015, so more than 10 years ago, I wrote this blog post called
Drive Chain.

161
00:12:03,320 --> 00:12:06,320
And it had all the details that you need, but it wasn't in BIP format.

162
00:12:06,840 --> 00:12:09,800
And in fact, it's actually very helpful when you have to write it in BIP format.

163
00:12:09,800 --> 00:12:13,800
It does help you like you got to clarify some things, you know, let people know
exactly what's going on.

164
00:12:14,320 --> 00:12:23,640
Now, as I was so first, I came up with this blog post and then this was right before
this was again, November 2015 was right before scaling Bitcoin, too.

165
00:12:23,640 --> 00:12:25,440
This is right before lightning got really big.

166
00:12:25,520 --> 00:12:28,320
So everyone's all gung ho about Segwit and lightning.

167
00:12:28,800 --> 00:12:31,680
So I was like, whatever, you know, fine, you know, fine.

168
00:12:32,680 --> 00:12:35,000
I was like, sure, I was kind of optimistic about it.

169
00:12:35,240 --> 00:12:42,760
So in 2016, I was kind of like in just, you know, low power mode with respect to
this whole drive chain thing.

170
00:12:43,400 --> 00:12:46,920
But I was still tinkering with my own software, you know, here and there.

171
00:12:46,920 --> 00:12:48,640
But everyone was very interested in Segwit.

172
00:12:48,640 --> 00:12:49,800
And so that was like how everything's going.

173
00:12:49,800 --> 00:12:53,400
People are the block size war was heating up every few months.

174
00:12:53,400 --> 00:12:54,600
It got even worse than before.

175
00:12:54,600 --> 00:12:56,200
People thought, oh, it's never been this bad.

176
00:12:56,440 --> 00:12:57,920
Then it would get worse and worse and worse.

177
00:12:58,200 --> 00:13:03,560
Just like a giant eruption of of mistrust and et cetera.

178
00:13:03,560 --> 00:13:15,120
So all this stuff's happening now, it's not until I don't remember at this point
exactly what month and year I actually wrote and got the first version of the bibs,
probably something like twenty seventeen or something.

179
00:13:15,120 --> 00:13:20,320
And then I revised them in February twenty eighteen.

180
00:13:20,640 --> 00:13:22,680
And then I revised them again after the accusive.

181
00:13:22,680 --> 00:13:25,520
So which we can talk about if people are interested.

182
00:13:25,520 --> 00:13:27,680
But so the point is, it's been many, many years.

183
00:13:27,680 --> 00:13:29,080
So occasionally I revise them.

184
00:13:29,080 --> 00:13:33,120
And, you know, I hope that I get a little bit better at writing each few years, too.

185
00:13:33,120 --> 00:13:35,560
So when I rewrite them, I think, oh, man, this is like too long.

186
00:13:35,560 --> 00:13:36,280
This is terrible.

187
00:13:36,480 --> 00:13:38,520
I make it like much shorter, better.

188
00:13:38,760 --> 00:13:40,880
So I try to get that happening.

189
00:13:40,960 --> 00:13:42,680
But the reason I bring this up is because.

190
00:13:44,040 --> 00:13:57,160
I was tossing around this idea, circulating this idea, people were discussing it in
twenty sixteen, I put out these videos about drive chain, which was not two bits at
this time, it was just a word with a lot of ideas and people were interested in
this.

191
00:13:57,680 --> 00:14:02,120
I got some feedback at scaling Bitcoin three years in Milan, October twenty sixteen.

192
00:14:02,120 --> 00:14:04,800
I presented on scaling side chains in twenty sixteen.

193
00:14:05,360 --> 00:14:13,720
And so people were interested in this idea of miners being obligated to run the
nodes because this has happened with name coin, which have been merged mind.

194
00:14:14,760 --> 00:14:20,120
So I invented this thing called blind merge mining in January twenty seventeen.

195
00:14:20,640 --> 00:14:23,320
And I put out a little post about this invention.

196
00:14:23,640 --> 00:14:30,640
And then while I was writing the BIPs, I realized, you know, I'd actually you can
make them much shorter if you just split it into two.

197
00:14:30,760 --> 00:14:32,000
It's much easier to read.

198
00:14:32,200 --> 00:14:36,680
And luckily that I did, because if three or one ended up, that's called blind merge
mining.

199
00:14:37,160 --> 00:14:41,080
And that ended up being used in other weird ideas, such as.

200
00:14:42,200 --> 00:14:46,680
When Supertest that and Ruben Thompson, they invented like space chains.

201
00:14:47,760 --> 00:14:49,240
These are like blind merge mind.

202
00:14:49,840 --> 00:14:58,680
And even the guy, this guy ZMN on the mailing list, he invented this thing like Sean
side chain headers on main chain.

203
00:14:59,120 --> 00:15:01,280
And that was like used by merge mining.

204
00:15:01,360 --> 00:15:04,680
So blind merge mining ended up being not very controversial.

205
00:15:05,120 --> 00:15:09,880
And it's pretty it is a way of separating the issues because the issues are kind of
confusing to people, you know.

206
00:15:10,080 --> 00:15:14,760
So with the side chain L2 idea, you have two things that you have to consider.

207
00:15:15,120 --> 00:15:17,960
One is depositing coins and withdrawing them.

208
00:15:17,960 --> 00:15:18,960
That's BIP 300.

209
00:15:19,880 --> 00:15:23,320
And then the second kind is how does the side chain find blocks?

210
00:15:23,400 --> 00:15:27,640
You know, if it's a separate chain, that's merge mining or in this case, blind merge
mining.

211
00:15:28,440 --> 00:15:32,240
And so then that kind of that's how they came to be two different BIPs.

212
00:15:32,280 --> 00:15:34,400
It's kind of really the same idea, but they can.

213
00:15:34,680 --> 00:15:37,880
It is possible to blind merge mine anything, including an altcoin.

214
00:15:38,120 --> 00:15:43,920
So you could have name coin could switch to be blind merge mine instead of regular
merge mine if they wanted to.

215
00:15:44,320 --> 00:15:53,360
And you can, in fact, just as you can toggle blind merge mining on and off for
different chains, you could still use BIP 300 for something that is not merge mined.

216
00:15:53,760 --> 00:15:55,280
I wouldn't, but you could.

217
00:15:55,640 --> 00:15:57,160
So it's possible.

218
00:15:57,160 --> 00:16:01,080
So it kind of and that does make it easier to read because they both get shorter.

219
00:16:02,120 --> 00:16:03,600
I mean, 301 was cool, right?

220
00:16:03,600 --> 00:16:08,320
Like it was I think it was additional way for miners to earn additional income,
right?

221
00:16:08,320 --> 00:16:10,120
That's how at least I got to know, right?

222
00:16:10,280 --> 00:16:18,640
Well, I think I got to give the credit to Satoshi who invented merge mining itself
because merge mining is a magical invention.

223
00:16:18,640 --> 00:16:19,760
And I think that it's crazy.

224
00:16:19,760 --> 00:16:21,560
The fact that merge mining is even possible.

225
00:16:21,680 --> 00:16:30,320
So Satoshi invented several different things, but one of them is the soft fork
upgrade, which the fact that that's even possible blows my mind completely because
it's amazing.

226
00:16:30,680 --> 00:16:40,480
And the other thing is he also invented merge mining, which allows miners to mine an
unlimited number of chains without doing any extra thermodynamic work.

227
00:16:40,480 --> 00:16:50,160
They just need like the node software to be, which is not very significant,
especially when you consider that these chains could all have unlimited transaction
fee revenues.

228
00:16:50,160 --> 00:17:02,640
You know, we have something like Ethereum has 10 times the transaction fee revenue
of BTC, and these could all just be merge mined and the same miners could just
collect all this money, free money for doing no extra work.

229
00:17:02,640 --> 00:17:04,840
So that's that's pretty sorceress.

230
00:17:04,840 --> 00:17:05,960
You know, that's pretty amazing.

231
00:17:06,480 --> 00:17:15,200
Lined part, it's very technical, and I'm not sure to what extent anyone will care
because I think regular merge mining works mostly just fine.

232
00:17:15,360 --> 00:17:21,840
But for regular merge mining, you have to run a node of all of the stuff that you
merge mining.

233
00:17:21,840 --> 00:17:25,120
So, for example, Namecoin was the first altcoin.

234
00:17:25,120 --> 00:17:26,680
It was co-invented by Satoshi.

235
00:17:26,680 --> 00:17:29,360
We have been merge mining it ever since 2011.

236
00:17:29,360 --> 00:17:34,120
Now, Namecoin is a much, much, much smaller project than Bitcoin, obviously.

237
00:17:34,120 --> 00:17:35,360
Bitcoin is a huge project.

238
00:17:35,360 --> 00:17:39,120
Namecoin is an obscure project, and the block rewards were different also.

239
00:17:39,120 --> 00:17:44,920
So like, I don't remember the exact numbers because it's been many, many years and
I've been giving the speech for like 15 years.

240
00:17:45,040 --> 00:17:53,360
But it was something like at the time, a Bitcoin block was worth like $5,000 per
block and a Namecoin block was worth like $5 per block.

241
00:17:53,760 --> 00:17:55,880
So it's like $5,000 versus $5.

242
00:17:56,120 --> 00:18:03,680
But in order to do merge mining and take advantage of the free $5 per block, you had
to run the Namecoin node.

243
00:18:04,120 --> 00:18:08,920
And then like the Namecoin node, like if it crashed or it had bugs, then it would
like screw up your setup.

244
00:18:08,920 --> 00:18:10,480
And so it ended up not being free.

245
00:18:10,880 --> 00:18:18,560
With blind merge mining, it just switches it around so that the miners can just
focus on including transactions in BTC only.

246
00:18:19,040 --> 00:18:30,400
And there will be like other people who run the node, the L2 node or the altcoin
node, and they will just send a weird type of transaction on L1 to the miners.

247
00:18:30,400 --> 00:18:40,360
And by just by the miners doing what they would already do and mining the most
profitable transactions, they will automatically merge mine and they automatically
get all the money.

248
00:18:41,400 --> 00:18:43,960
So that was kind of a neat idea.

249
00:18:43,960 --> 00:18:49,960
So it's blind because the miners can get all the free merge mining revenue without
even seeing.

250
00:18:49,960 --> 00:18:52,280
They don't even have to see what it is they're mining or do anything.

251
00:18:52,280 --> 00:18:53,080
They're not responsible.

252
00:18:53,920 --> 00:18:55,320
So that was what that was.

253
00:18:55,320 --> 00:18:55,600
Right.

254
00:18:56,000 --> 00:19:01,040
The concept of blind merge mining was what perhaps led to Plan B for you.

255
00:19:01,360 --> 00:19:04,400
No, I think it's Bitcoin 300 that got the pushback.

256
00:19:04,720 --> 00:19:09,280
There were one or two people who complained about 301, but they all ended up
changing their mind.

257
00:19:09,800 --> 00:19:11,200
They ended up agreeing with me.

258
00:19:11,800 --> 00:19:15,680
We hunted them all down and they said, you know what, actually, this is great.

259
00:19:16,160 --> 00:19:20,720
So but it was really Bitcoin 300 that for some reason became controversial in 2023.

260
00:19:21,120 --> 00:19:27,320
I think it was because the timing was Luke Dash Junior had opened like a work in
progress pull request.

261
00:19:27,320 --> 00:19:32,640
It was literally just like it wasn't very serious at all.

262
00:19:32,640 --> 00:19:36,080
But I just said, as if we were going to do this, how would we do it?

263
00:19:36,080 --> 00:19:37,160
Like one of these ways.

264
00:19:37,640 --> 00:19:39,680
And this, for some reason, triggered a bunch of people.

265
00:19:40,720 --> 00:19:47,280
I still don't know why, because, again, it's a completely harmless, opt in,
ignorable soft fork.

266
00:19:47,280 --> 00:19:48,600
And it gives us all these benefits.

267
00:19:49,680 --> 00:19:52,320
But and people were sort of triggered by it somehow.

268
00:19:52,800 --> 00:19:53,480
That's crazy.

269
00:19:53,480 --> 00:19:54,040
That's crazy.

270
00:19:54,400 --> 00:20:00,680
So, you know, initial plan was to get this soft fork 301, 300, 301 on Bitcoin.

271
00:20:00,680 --> 00:20:01,000
Right.

272
00:20:01,160 --> 00:20:04,360
At some stage, obviously, you pivoted to Plan B.

273
00:20:04,960 --> 00:20:16,400
Was it a recent thing, obviously, in early in the year you sort of announced or is
it been on the sort of journey that, hey, look, if this doesn't happen, I have to,
you know, plan for Plan B somehow?

274
00:20:17,680 --> 00:20:23,360
No, I had the plan for Plan B a long time ago, but I was hoping that we would need
it.

275
00:20:24,720 --> 00:20:27,040
And I kind of thought maybe like, why would we need it?

276
00:20:27,040 --> 00:20:28,240
Because this is just a good idea.

277
00:20:28,240 --> 00:20:30,000
Everyone makes more money and et cetera.

278
00:20:30,000 --> 00:20:31,560
But unfortunately, we do need it.

279
00:20:32,560 --> 00:20:46,200
And the reason we need it is because, for some reason, the culture in Bitcoin has
become deranged, as I call it, where there's a lot of false stuff that's believed
and there's a lot of like invested interests.

280
00:20:46,200 --> 00:20:54,400
You know, there's a lot of people who have already sunk a lot of time and effort
into Lightning and they don't want to admit that it's a bad idea.

281
00:20:54,520 --> 00:21:02,880
Or they've sunk time into some other company that's going to be embarrassed or even
as many Bitcoiners are actually altcoiners, they own some altcoins.

282
00:21:03,200 --> 00:21:06,480
There's a lot of strange people, people selling a book, selling a podcast.

283
00:21:06,480 --> 00:21:07,840
They sell like a way of life.

284
00:21:08,480 --> 00:21:13,200
You know, there's like these lifestyle people who are selling like carnivore
maximalism.

285
00:21:13,200 --> 00:21:16,600
Or there's Michael Saylor who wants everything to be corporate Bitcoin.

286
00:21:16,600 --> 00:21:19,080
So he's not he doesn't want like privacy.

287
00:21:19,320 --> 00:21:20,680
He doesn't really want even features.

288
00:21:20,680 --> 00:21:29,960
He doesn't really want people to use the network or the proof of work or the blocks
because all of that stuff was designed for a world where you have this cypherpunk
anonymity.

289
00:21:30,240 --> 00:21:38,640
And if you have everything with a legal team and everything with a mailing address
and you have a stock ticker, he doesn't want any of that.

290
00:21:38,640 --> 00:21:39,520
That's crazy.

291
00:21:39,520 --> 00:21:44,960
Yeah, I think I wanted to one thing I forgot to mention that you have been a
critique of Lightning Network, right?

292
00:21:44,960 --> 00:21:46,080
Due to many things.

293
00:21:46,080 --> 00:21:46,480
Yeah.

294
00:21:46,480 --> 00:21:50,680
One of the one in route and liquidity, capital efficiency, pretty much all the
reason.

295
00:21:51,600 --> 00:21:57,280
So can I quickly ask you what's been the biggest pushback from the Bitcoin core
around these drive chains?

296
00:21:57,280 --> 00:21:57,480
Right.

297
00:21:57,480 --> 00:22:00,800
You said three or three hundred was the biggest reason.

298
00:22:00,800 --> 00:22:05,480
What was the what were the actual like reasons and how do you debate on these
topics?

299
00:22:05,480 --> 00:22:11,560
Like, is it through, you know, like wherever all these chats happen these days when
you're having the debates?

300
00:22:11,680 --> 00:22:14,280
Yeah, there used to be a Bitcoin dev mailing list.

301
00:22:14,280 --> 00:22:16,000
Now I think it's not good at all.

302
00:22:16,400 --> 00:22:18,480
It used to be a very good mailing list.

303
00:22:18,800 --> 00:22:19,640
Now I don't even know.

304
00:22:19,640 --> 00:22:21,480
Like, I don't even read it anymore.

305
00:22:21,480 --> 00:22:24,040
I used to read and write to it.

306
00:22:24,920 --> 00:22:26,880
We had some critics, you know.

307
00:22:28,040 --> 00:22:33,040
We did a series of Twitter spaces in twenty twenty three, twenty four, and we
invited people to.

308
00:22:34,120 --> 00:22:38,840
People would write articles at Bitcoin magazine and we would like reply, so there's
a lot of stuff on Twitter.

309
00:22:39,840 --> 00:22:47,280
And that we had some critics, like one or two critics, we would pay like we paid
Peter Todd to type up his critique.

310
00:22:48,160 --> 00:22:51,000
His critique turned out to be like very, very, very wrong.

311
00:22:51,000 --> 00:22:58,760
And in fact, he even after we paid him to write it, he sort of let slip that he
didn't realize that software for it exists.

312
00:22:58,760 --> 00:23:03,960
So he made a comment on stage at Baltic County Badger where he was like, no one's
ever written software for this.

313
00:23:04,400 --> 00:23:12,760
But the software with the graphical user interface and with the working cash side
chain that had been out for, you know, two and a half years or something.

314
00:23:12,920 --> 00:23:17,360
And if you go to the drive chain, that info, it's like right at the top, like
download or whatever.

315
00:23:17,360 --> 00:23:19,280
So like he had never like visited the site.

316
00:23:19,520 --> 00:23:24,400
So we had a lot of critics that were they were very low quality.

317
00:23:25,040 --> 00:23:33,640
One other criticism that's big is that Adam Back told me to look up Ava Chow.

318
00:23:34,440 --> 00:23:41,480
In person, because he said, oh, Ava Chow knows a lot about how things get merged,
you know, in into Bitcoin Core.

319
00:23:42,080 --> 00:23:50,400
And Ava told me that if any the official policy is that if anything is
controversial, they just won't touch it and they won't even reject it.

320
00:23:50,400 --> 00:23:52,560
They'll just sort of ignore it until it goes away.

321
00:23:53,680 --> 00:23:58,520
And so that's kind of and they said basically something has to be completely
non-controversial for them to do it.

322
00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:04,800
And you can see that that's kind of a very silly policy because and that's why
nothing has gotten done, because it's very easy to manufacture it.

323
00:24:05,880 --> 00:24:08,080
Isn't it counterproductive?

324
00:24:08,080 --> 00:24:11,760
Like controversy means there is something there that needs to be discussed.

325
00:24:11,760 --> 00:24:25,320
In fact, if we only do the non-controversial things, we're only going to do a very,
very small percentage of controversy is a hint that you are actually exactly taking
something out and putting something new in.

326
00:24:25,440 --> 00:24:32,280
So it means that people are there's actual stakes and there's actual drama and
something's going to change for the user in a good way.

327
00:24:32,720 --> 00:24:36,480
So, yeah, I mean, it happens when there is a controversy.

328
00:24:36,480 --> 00:24:37,680
Right. That's what I believe.

329
00:24:37,680 --> 00:24:39,720
Right. Change cannot happen without controversy.

330
00:24:40,520 --> 00:24:42,040
And but people need to understand.

331
00:24:42,040 --> 00:24:43,200
We're not a believer.

332
00:24:43,640 --> 00:24:46,680
I think consensus among humans is a disaster.

333
00:24:46,760 --> 00:24:53,120
So we have the consensus software and Bitcoin, where the blockchain is agreed upon
down to the last byte.

334
00:24:53,640 --> 00:24:58,480
But I am not a believer at all in consensus among humans.

335
00:24:58,480 --> 00:25:00,520
I think we want you want to have different.

336
00:25:00,881 --> 00:25:11,881
Groups that have advocacy and have leadership and someone says, this is what we
believe and then we're going to win, we win, you know, whatever the election or
whatever it is, and then we implement our ideas and then if the ideas are bad, we're
proven wrong.

337
00:25:11,881 --> 00:25:25,881
And so you actually have people responsible for things and you imagine like a CEO or
the director of a movie or whatever, someone says, listen, I'm in charge of this
movie and if it's good, then I get the credit or most of the credit.

338
00:25:25,881 --> 00:25:41,881
And if it's bad, then I get most of the blame. So that's what works is having
accountability and responsibility. That's what works. And when you have when you
force 100 percent of the room to agree, that usually ends up being a total disaster.

339
00:25:41,881 --> 00:25:59,881
So you get art that's designed by committee. So you end up in North Korea or
something. It just doesn't work at all. You don't want anything like that. I'm a
huge believer that that will kill the project. I think it kind of is killing the
project, which is leading me to the e-cash plan B.

340
00:25:59,881 --> 00:26:23,881
So just quickly though, when the pushback or this criticism was happening, were they
actually focused on the technical part? So it was more of the fundamental that
Bitcoin has to be money because that's the conservative side of perhaps the people
that are focused on that side. There wasn't any debate on the technology front?

341
00:26:23,881 --> 00:26:43,881
I don't think that any, looking back on it, I don't think any of them really
understood it at all. And I don't even think it's that complicated, but you could
look at Peter Todd was like the number one critic. He had never visited the site. He
didn't even know that the software was out. And when he wrote his critique, I did
like a line by line reply to it and like this huge image because it was like every
single sentence and paragraph in it was wrong.

342
00:26:43,881 --> 00:27:07,881
So I wrote like a thing where I said, you know, this is exactly where I had like a
basically a running commentary of the whole thing. And the whole thing is just full
to the brim of mistakes. And even often the giant is contradicting himself in two
very important parts of the argument. So even he's not like agreeing with himself,
he doesn't seem to realize this.

343
00:27:07,881 --> 00:27:37,841
So I was very disappointed in the technical critique. A lot of people were, again,
they got confused about like the economics of it. Like they, they confused. This is
going to sound really crazy, but okay. So like this guy, Alex B, he thought MEV was
equal to whenever miners collect more money. So that was like wrong, but that was
also bizarre because it was like the whole point of the merge mine part was that the
miners would get more money and that this would align incentives and stuff.

344
00:27:37,881 --> 00:27:52,881
But they didn't even realize that blind merge mining like already separated the
proposer, the builder anyway. So there's a lot of stuff that they just didn't
understand at all. And like, again, Peter Todd thought that mining centralization
occurred whenever mining costs increased.

345
00:27:52,881 --> 00:28:21,881
But then I asked him on stage at TabConf of like, every time the difficulty adjusts
up, that increases, that's the number one thing that increases miners costs. So he
and he ducked, he avoided answering the question. And he even stared forward like
for a couple seconds, like he was thinking, like it had never occurred to him or
something. So I'm not sure like what to make of it, but that's part of why, you
know, the plan, because we also had a lot of supporters because we had
layer2labs.com slash friends.

346
00:28:21,881 --> 00:28:48,881
We had this big list of supporters who are like the crème de la crème, like the top
people. We got like Adam Back, we got Fiat Joff, we got like all these people, Rene
Picard, Arthur Master Lightning, Robin Linus. So we have all these really, really,
really great people who are all supporters. And then we have like two critics who
like have no idea what's going on. And then we have a child saying, if anything's
slightly controversial, we won't move. So you can see how I'm just thinking, well,
this, you know, it's not me, it's them.

347
00:28:48,881 --> 00:28:52,881
You know, they have the screwed up culture and that's the situation.

348
00:28:53,881 --> 00:29:17,881
Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, just thinking very broadly, right? Like Taproot did
happen in 2021, right? And that led to obviously Ordinals and the sort of the growth
that at least the adoption perhaps Bitcoin has seen on a different path, not as
money, but drive chain didn't catch the attention. They didn't really care about
drive chain, though it would have led to, you know, smart contracts, privacy and
other things, but they didn't connect.

349
00:29:17,881 --> 00:29:46,881
And they would have been out of the way on their own L2 and they would have been off
the L2. The problem is the culture. The culture is very deranged. So even in what
you just said, you can see anyone listening who takes out a piece of paper and just
writes it down slowly will figure out like, they say that we only want Bitcoin used
as money, but we don't want it to be used as Ordinals. This is something that some
of them say. But then how can they complain? Like they say, we don't, you're not
supposed to use it to transact, you know, you're just supposed to buy it and hold
it.

350
00:29:46,881 --> 00:30:00,881
But then it's like, OK, how can you complain that other people are now actually
transacting on the network? Like that's what the network was built for people to buy
and sell Bitcoin and use it to buy things just because those things are also on the
chain.

351
00:30:00,881 --> 00:30:25,881
So they kind of say, well, hey, we think Bitcoin is used a certain way, but then
there's all these people who are fee paying users. They're actually using the
network, actually paying miners and stuff. They're actually responsible for the
transaction fee volumes, actually responsible for Bitcoin transactions existing that
didn't exist before. And people basically what the equivalent of payment processors,
like people accepting Bitcoin.

352
00:30:25,881 --> 00:30:33,881
In the Ordinals case, these are like all vertically integrated, so it's a little bit
weird. But there's just a lot of stuff that they think like they just think.

353
00:30:34,881 --> 00:30:46,881
They think we never wanted those fee. They think Bitcoin is perfect, but then they
complain, wait a minute, we're under attack from Ordinals. So it's like, oh, so I
guess it's not that perfect. I guess it's so easy to attack by just a bunch of
people having fun.

354
00:30:47,881 --> 00:30:59,881
And then they say Lightning works. Ordinals spiked the fee rates and basically
Ordinals revealed that Lightning doesn't work because the chain got a little bit of
use. It tanked everything.

355
00:31:00,881 --> 00:31:18,881
There's a lot of different weird little threads where they're trying to say, we
never wanted privacy anyway. We never wanted sidechains anyway. All this stuff is
the opposite of what people said before. They said, well, Bitcoin is open source.
Eventually, if anyone has a good idea, we'll just add that idea.

356
00:31:18,881 --> 00:31:34,881
But now people are saying, they're in this really weird headspace where they have to
say, all the Monero transaction volume is fake. And they have to say Monero is a
scam or Ethereum is a scam.

357
00:31:34,881 --> 00:31:58,881
And then they have to say Ordinals are a scam. And it just becomes a very narrow
worldview and life becomes very burdensome. Because they just think everything is an
attack. Bitcoin is already perfect. All these other people building and actually
paying for other things. It's hard to even follow what's wrong with these people,
but it's a long list.

358
00:31:59,881 --> 00:32:11,881
Perhaps you don't know their agendas. Of course, what people put out is just what
they put out. But you don't know what's happening in the backrooms. This is how I
say things. Let's move forward.

359
00:32:11,881 --> 00:32:36,881
Now you have to implement the plan B. So you're on the plan B timeline now. And
you're going to be obviously doing this hard folk now with eCash coming up in August
this year. So have you had major support from any side of the fractional Bitcoin?
The conservative sound money side or the pragmatic or adoption scaling side? Have
they come out in support of eCash?

360
00:32:37,881 --> 00:33:01,881
Well, some people have. And again, we have many supporters of BIP300 itself. So
since this is like the BIP300 hard fork also, some of that would transfer over.
Obviously not all of it. So we did have a long list of the BIP300 supporters. And we
do have many people who have been supportive and who have been helping us.

361
00:33:01,881 --> 00:33:29,881
I wouldn't do this if I thought it wouldn't collect some supporters. I wanted to
mention something about, it's true that BIP300 did not make it into Bitcoin Core.
But actually nothing has made it into Bitcoin Core, which is part of the problem.
You had Opcat, you had Opctv. You had lots of different people trying completely
different techniques for getting their soft fork activated.

362
00:33:31,881 --> 00:33:51,881
And so far, 100% of them have failed. And that's because it's actually the process
that's broken and it's not any of the ideas. And then this is actually part of the
derangement is that people think, oh, you know what, these all failed because they
failed to get merged into Bitcoin because they weren't good enough. And what the
world really needs is my idea.

363
00:33:51,881 --> 00:34:18,881
They have a new BIP, TxHash, or LNHance or something, and then they try that. And
these have all been tried many times. Each time it wastes a whole other year because
people spend a whole year trying to get their BIP through and then none of them have
gotten through. And then this is almost spontaneous, like the exception that proves
the rule, because it's going to probably crash or burn. But that's the most
interesting way of trying.

364
00:34:19,881 --> 00:34:45,881
So there's that to consider. And then the support that I'm counting on is that it's
not just about support on day one. It's about all technical people. I am very
familiar with the technical community and the technical people, they like to build.
They build for fun and for free. And these are the best people also. Sometimes if
you hire people, you get the wrong kind of person to show up.

365
00:34:45,881 --> 00:35:08,881
But many of these genius, maverick genius type people, they love to just build
stuff. And so what they just don't like is not being able to turn it on. And that's
what DriveChain allows them to do. Whatever they want to do, they can either go onto
an L2 that supports it, or they can just make their own L2 from scratch. That's
however the way they want it to be.

366
00:35:08,881 --> 00:35:24,881
And so then they do this, they can get users to use it and pay a transaction fee,
and then the miners automatically mine the fee. So you have developers developing,
you have users using and paying the transaction fee, and then miners mining and
paying.

367
00:35:24,881 --> 00:35:53,881
And so that's where it has a potential to really have a geometric takeoff. And a lot
of the market demand is indicated by all this transaction activity on altcoins, on
Ethereum, on Solana. All that stuff, the idea is those could all just be Bitcoin
projects. Or in this case, E-cash projects, because Bitcoin won't add it, but it
should. If Bitcoin added PIP 300, it would probably just be fine.

368
00:35:53,881 --> 00:36:12,881
And again, all the soft forks, the op-nop, the opcode soft forks, those are all
opt-in, ignorable, and reversible. So how could they even have any risk is a
question I ask very often. But then people think, ah, we don't want to take any
risk, we don't want to break Bitcoin.

369
00:36:12,881 --> 00:36:24,881
And I'm just saying, how could this possibly contribute to breaking it in any way
whatsoever? And then they don't have an answer, but this is part of how deranged the
culture is. So that's the problem.

370
00:36:42,881 --> 00:36:57,881
What's the problem from your perspective of Lightning Network? What Lightning hasn't
been able to do so far?

371
00:37:12,881 --> 00:37:23,881
And then they move the goalposts and they say, well, it counts as success if we have
a few users that are happy every day or something. So that's kind of where they are.

372
00:37:43,881 --> 00:37:56,881
One versus everyone battle, where people could come up and the moderators and stuff
are sorting people in. And yeah, basically, all these people who are elite Lightning
devs and elite technical people, they all ended up basically agreeing with me at the
end.

373
00:37:57,881 --> 00:38:13,881
We had Taj Draja for 10 minutes and myself. We were the only two on the stage. Taj
Draja is the inventor of the Lightning Network and he basically agreed with me also.
Of course, there were some people, not everyone agreed, but more than half did agree
and people can watch it for themselves and see.

374
00:38:14,881 --> 00:38:30,881
So it's kind of like the Lightning Network is overpromised and people say it was the
way to scale to 8 billion people and then it acquired a kind of brand of being
sophisticated or being the future.

375
00:38:31,881 --> 00:38:46,881
And so everyone wanted to invest in the Lightning company. They could raise a lot of
money. It became prestigious to write. If you wanted to talk about Lightning, you
could be featured on the mailing list or in Optech newsletters.

376
00:38:47,881 --> 00:38:54,881
You could get a career out of working in Lightning. So a lot of people just don't
want to admit that it's basically not going to work.

377
00:38:55,881 --> 00:39:10,881
Also, Lightning is so complicated and broken that if you're an intellectual or
you're a researcher or you're a developer, you can always just write a paper or have
a little presentation about how it's broken, but this is how I fix it.

378
00:39:11,881 --> 00:39:19,881
But then they don't say there's all these fundamental issues or you're just playing
whack-a-mole with 10,000 issues that you can never get them all.

379
00:39:20,881 --> 00:39:28,881
And so, yeah, I think the whole thing is a big waste of time and that was what I
argued in the debate and people should watch it for themselves.

380
00:39:29,881 --> 00:39:40,881
The fact that that's even possible for me, I don't spend that much time thinking
about Lightning, but the fact that it's even possible to do something like that
where you go to the main stage of TabConf and you debate the whole room, they mostly
agree with you.

381
00:39:41,881 --> 00:39:50,881
Basically, the thesis, the title of the talk was that all the time spent on
Lightning is a waste. So that was the title.

382
00:39:51,881 --> 00:40:01,881
Was there anything specific that you thought Lightning isn't doing? Of course,
adoption is one thing. Of course, the channels, opening and closing of channels,
there are liquidity problems.

383
00:40:02,881 --> 00:40:14,881
I mean, if you're a genuine, you are aware of these issues, right? And it's hard to
solve these issues, right? But is anything specific that stood out to you that, hey,
it's not going to scale as they've promised it?

384
00:40:15,881 --> 00:40:28,881
Well, I'm glad you brought that up because really what comes to mind is that with
Lightning, everyone is just lying to themselves about how it works and what it's
doing.

385
00:40:29,881 --> 00:40:36,881
One example is that on Nostar, they have this zap, the primal-to-primal zap, where
people are using custodial Lightning.

386
00:40:36,881 --> 00:40:44,881
And they have a Lightning icon, and then it appears to be a Lightning transaction,
even though it is not a Lightning transaction in any way whatsoever.

387
00:40:44,881 --> 00:40:49,881
This is just not true. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Many, many, many things.

388
00:40:50,881 --> 00:41:00,881
They have the Lightning icon, or they have a Lightning name, but there's actually no
Lightning transaction taking place. So it's like you get into a self-driving car,
like you get into a Tesla or a Waymo.

389
00:41:00,881 --> 00:41:04,881
There's no liquidity there? I mean, it should work if the channels are open, right?

390
00:41:05,881 --> 00:41:13,881
When you download the custodial Lightning to your phone, and then someone sends you,
this happened to me at an Acapulco one year.

391
00:41:13,881 --> 00:41:20,881
People were like, oh, this wallet is so great. You download the wallet to your
phone, and then the guy next to you will send you four Satoshis, and you get it.

392
00:41:20,881 --> 00:41:26,881
Now, I never opened a channel. To open a channel, it requires the L1 transaction fee
to be paid.

393
00:41:26,881 --> 00:41:33,881
So there is no channels being opened at all. So that's a very good question that you
ask, like, why? Shouldn't it work if the channel is open?

394
00:41:33,881 --> 00:41:41,881
Yeah, but none of these have open channels. So then they say that this is custodial
Lightning, but really it's just nothing.

395
00:41:41,881 --> 00:41:49,881
It's just you have an account with them. They say you have four Satoshis. You don't
actually have four Satoshis on the Lightning network or on L1.

396
00:41:49,881 --> 00:41:57,881
The whole thing is fake, unfortunately. So that's what you learn. If you dive into
Lightning, you'll just find that the whole thing is fake, actually, unfortunately.

397
00:41:57,881 --> 00:42:05,881
And then the annoying thing is there's some parts of it that are real, and then
people point to those and say, oh, look, I used it, and it was real, and I had a
channel open.

398
00:42:05,881 --> 00:42:10,881
And it's like, yeah, okay, for like 500 people, it's real. But everyone else is
being lied to.

399
00:42:10,881 --> 00:42:17,881
There's a huge propaganda campaign involving the Lightning Bolt icon being
everywhere, tricking everyone.

400
00:42:17,881 --> 00:42:25,881
And then when people use the fake custodial Lightning, they download the app, and
then their friend sends them four Sats, and they get them immediately.

401
00:42:25,881 --> 00:42:31,881
Because, of course, the whole thing is done through the app, through client server.
None of this is actual Bitcoin transactions.

402
00:42:31,881 --> 00:42:41,881
So they think, oh, this Lightning thing works really, really well. It has a great
user experience. It works just as well as whatever, Venmo or WeChat Pay or
something.

403
00:42:41,881 --> 00:42:45,881
That's because that's basically what it is. It's not using the Lightning network at
all.

404
00:42:45,881 --> 00:42:57,881
It's a 100% centralized corporation thing. They just update the database entry, and
so you don't actually have any cypher property right to the Satoshi.

405
00:42:57,881 --> 00:43:03,881
But then all these people leave, and they think – they leave the room, or they just
think, wow, Lightning works so well.

406
00:43:03,881 --> 00:43:09,881
And then when someone like me says this whole thing is fake, they just think, oh,
that guy's a liar.

407
00:43:09,881 --> 00:43:19,881
I personally have had experience where I tried to open a channel in 2022 for a
business I was running back then.

408
00:43:19,881 --> 00:43:27,881
And it was impossible not just to open, but to find people, because you have to find
other channels. It was impossible to find those channels.

409
00:43:27,881 --> 00:43:37,881
Yeah, it doesn't work. All the people who try to do it the right way – this is a
perfect example of the cultural derangement of BTC, of which there are many
examples.

410
00:43:37,881 --> 00:43:47,881
But this Lightning is the crown jewel, maybe, or the perfect example, because when
people get really excited, and they fall for it, basically.

411
00:43:47,881 --> 00:43:52,881
Because they say, oh, everyone is supporting Lightning. You know, whatever,
Blockstream, and they work on Sea Lightning.

412
00:43:52,881 --> 00:43:57,881
Could it really all be fake? No, of course not. So people think this is going to be
– Lightning is going to be the future.

413
00:43:57,881 --> 00:44:04,881
So then they roll up their sleeves, and they try to get the actual knowledge of how
it works.

414
00:44:04,881 --> 00:44:10,881
And they say, oh, I want to learn. I want a real Lightning channel. And I don't want
to have custodial. They try it.

415
00:44:10,881 --> 00:44:18,881
This is a small minority of the population. Most people just want to conform, just
go on with whatever their friend is doing.

416
00:44:18,881 --> 00:44:26,881
Very few people actually want to check it out for real. So it's a small number of
smart people who try to open the channel.

417
00:44:26,881 --> 00:44:31,881
Then they're like, oh, man, this really isn't worth it at all. And then the channel
gets uncooperative, closed by someone.

418
00:44:32,881 --> 00:44:39,881
Or you disagree on fee rates, and then your software does the uncooperative close,
and then your money is stuck for two weeks.

419
00:44:39,881 --> 00:44:48,881
And then everyone is like, this is terrible. Which, unfortunately, it is terrible. I
mean, I hate to say that it's – I hate to be so negative on it.

420
00:44:48,881 --> 00:44:56,881
But the time has come for us to speak honestly about how unrealistic it is that
everyone will –

421
00:44:56,881 --> 00:45:01,881
And the other thing is like, okay, here's some other weird stuff about Lightning. I
mean, we can go on and on forever about Lightning.

422
00:45:01,881 --> 00:45:04,881
I want to talk cash, though, but yes, please. Let's wrap this up.

423
00:45:04,881 --> 00:45:13,881
Yeah. The whole point, the whole dispute in the block size debate was it was large
blockers versus Lightning kind of.

424
00:45:13,881 --> 00:45:21,881
And again, I was pro-Lightning for a really long time, like until 2022. Then I did
some napkin math, and I was like, oh, man, this is a hopeless situation.

425
00:45:22,881 --> 00:45:28,881
I published this Bitcoin debt mailing list, and then now over time, people have been
slow going, like over four years.

426
00:45:28,881 --> 00:45:36,881
Now everyone is starting to agree with me. This is another chapter in the book that
I was – me being right about everything, but it is what it is.

427
00:45:36,881 --> 00:45:45,881
So the Lightning – the debate was we don't want the large blocks because it's too
difficult to run a full node when the blocks are large.

428
00:45:45,881 --> 00:45:48,881
So when the blocks are small, it's easier to run a full node.

429
00:45:48,881 --> 00:45:59,881
Now, kind of the flaw in that is that every Lightning transaction, in order to use
the Lightning network the right way, you have to – you need a full L1 node yourself.

430
00:45:59,881 --> 00:46:06,881
And it turns out that this barrier is too much for basically every normal person to
jump anyway.

431
00:46:06,881 --> 00:46:14,881
So from their point of view, both of the nodes are equally expensive, which is like
– I don't want to say infinitely expensive, but they're past the threshold.

432
00:46:15,881 --> 00:46:21,881
So this whole rise in detritus, the whole point of it was to avoid a node that was
too expensive to run.

433
00:46:21,881 --> 00:46:29,881
But most people don't want to run the Lightning node or the L1 full node that every
single Lightning node would require.

434
00:46:29,881 --> 00:46:38,881
And Satoshi was right about SPV being what most people would have to use and that
the full nodes would be used by people who process a lot of incoming BTC
transactions.

435
00:46:38,881 --> 00:46:43,881
So that's just yet another – but there's a whole long list of stuff that doesn't
work with Lightning.

436
00:46:43,881 --> 00:46:46,881
You need the online hot wallet to receive money.

437
00:46:46,881 --> 00:46:48,881
We talked about liquidity.

438
00:46:48,881 --> 00:46:52,881
In the talk at TabConf, I mentioned there's a catch-22.

439
00:46:52,881 --> 00:46:58,881
There's a lose-lose situation where if L1 fee rates are low, you don't need the
Lightning network.

440
00:46:58,881 --> 00:47:01,881
And it has only disadvantages for no reason.

441
00:47:01,881 --> 00:47:06,881
If L1 fee rates are high, actually the HTLCs in the Lightning network don't work
because it's too expensive to enforce them.

442
00:47:06,881 --> 00:47:09,881
So it's a lose-lose situation.

443
00:47:09,881 --> 00:47:15,881
There's not enough block space to open channels for everyone on Earth or even a tiny
1%.

444
00:47:15,881 --> 00:47:21,881
And especially if these channels last one year, on average, there's nowhere near
enough space for people to use this.

445
00:47:21,881 --> 00:47:24,881
So the whole thing is a totally dead idea.

446
00:47:24,881 --> 00:47:28,881
Meanwhile, Internet speeds, computer speeds have improved.

447
00:47:28,881 --> 00:47:35,881
And so having the optional large block L2 has just become more and more and more and
more attractive over time.

448
00:47:35,881 --> 00:47:36,881
It's never been better.

449
00:47:36,881 --> 00:47:43,881
The ratio of drive chain superiority to Lightning gets better every year.

450
00:47:43,881 --> 00:47:46,881
And it's never been better than this year.

451
00:47:46,881 --> 00:47:50,881
All right. I think I'm happy to move to eCash.

452
00:47:50,881 --> 00:47:53,881
I think that's a good build-up to eCash.

453
00:47:53,881 --> 00:47:57,881
So why don't we perhaps discuss.

454
00:47:57,881 --> 00:48:01,881
So now Plan B is activated at some stage.

455
00:48:02,881 --> 00:48:06,881
Of course, it was planned a long time ago, but it's activated at some stage.

456
00:48:06,881 --> 00:48:08,881
So now eCash comes in picture.

457
00:48:08,881 --> 00:48:11,881
You keep Segwit. You keep Taproot.

458
00:48:11,881 --> 00:48:15,881
You do shrink block size by 10x or something.

459
00:48:15,881 --> 00:48:19,881
And then obviously this leads to activating of drive chains.

460
00:48:19,881 --> 00:48:24,881
So why don't you quickly take us through what the big technical plan is before.

461
00:48:24,881 --> 00:48:28,881
And then I'm keen to get into the rest of the details.

462
00:48:29,881 --> 00:48:34,881
The idea for L1 is to keep it very, very similar to Bitcoin Core or BTC.

463
00:48:34,881 --> 00:48:38,881
As similar as possible, both now and in the future.

464
00:48:38,881 --> 00:48:42,881
Because I don't want to be in the business of competing with Bitcoin Core even.

465
00:48:42,881 --> 00:48:47,881
And then many of the L2s, they should just be copies of whatever works that people
like.

466
00:48:47,881 --> 00:48:53,881
We built seven from scratch that I think are actually going to be super popular.

467
00:48:54,881 --> 00:49:02,881
In the past, we've built various ones that are just exact copies of existing
altcoins that people like.

468
00:49:02,881 --> 00:49:10,881
And so the idea is not so much that you're betting on me to run the project better.

469
00:49:10,881 --> 00:49:13,881
That's not how this is supposed to work.

470
00:49:13,881 --> 00:49:16,881
The idea is actually I'm just letting you.

471
00:49:16,881 --> 00:49:23,881
I'm saying, do you want to live in a world where it's either Bitcoin Core or
Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum?

472
00:49:23,881 --> 00:49:27,881
Or would you rather have a world where it's basically all the exact same software?

473
00:49:27,881 --> 00:49:32,881
But just one currency, same 21 million coins shared by all of these.

474
00:49:32,881 --> 00:49:38,881
And whenever someone wants to invent a new thing, like if they invent a new altcoin,
we can copy it over.

475
00:49:38,881 --> 00:49:44,881
Or if someone wants to launch their new thing, they don't have to go through the bit
process, which doesn't work anymore.

476
00:49:44,881 --> 00:49:46,881
They don't have to wait for software activation.

477
00:49:46,881 --> 00:49:51,881
They can just either be L2s that activate whatever software they want.

478
00:49:51,881 --> 00:49:54,881
The L2s are going to be competing for users and competing for developers.

479
00:49:54,881 --> 00:49:58,881
Or they can just make a brand new L2 that's encouraged.

480
00:49:59,704 --> 00:50:02,824
So the idea is more of just spontaneous order.

481
00:50:02,824 --> 00:50:08,984
It's like a Hayekian, libertarian thing where you have entrepreneurs and I'm just

482
00:50:08,984 --> 00:50:14,064
freeing them up to compete. And the whole thing is not going through me.

483
00:50:14,384 --> 00:50:22,944
The true capitalism. So you launched eCash in August this year at the block

484
00:50:23,224 --> 00:50:29,384
of 964,000. You said seven different drive chains, right?

485
00:50:29,384 --> 00:50:34,904
So what are these drive chains? I read Thunder, Zside, Truthcoin, obviously we

486
00:50:34,904 --> 00:50:40,704
talked about, CoinShift, BitNames, BitAssets, and Photon, right?

487
00:50:40,704 --> 00:50:41,304
These are seven?

488
00:50:41,304 --> 00:50:43,424
That's right.

489
00:50:43,664 --> 00:50:49,784
Thunder is just a very optimized, large block L2, so it's as efficient as

490
00:50:49,824 --> 00:50:56,224
possible from the software side. And we've made it really, really efficient.

491
00:50:56,224 --> 00:51:03,024
It can process 960 megabyte blocks very, very quickly. And we have tests that

492
00:51:03,024 --> 00:51:06,144
people can look up the exact tests run and they can see the exact numbers

493
00:51:06,144 --> 00:51:08,944
themselves, which I encourage people to do if they're interested.

494
00:51:09,144 --> 00:51:12,944
But that's just one type. So the idea is we'd launch one of those.

495
00:51:13,224 --> 00:51:19,464
And then as it got more and more used, we would learn about how to improve it

496
00:51:19,464 --> 00:51:23,784
further, and eventually we'd launch a second one. And I have some back of the

497
00:51:23,784 --> 00:51:29,464
envelope math where it says basically that if you had 14 of these, that would

498
00:51:29,464 --> 00:51:33,544
be enough to process every single transaction in the world on earth.

499
00:51:33,984 --> 00:51:41,224
And so that's the plan to scale up via that type of thing. And again, we'd have

500
00:51:41,224 --> 00:51:44,184
one on day one, but of course that's not going to be full at all.

501
00:51:44,384 --> 00:51:49,544
There's going to be plenty of events. So you have years or months at least to

502
00:51:49,544 --> 00:51:53,384
actually learn from experience. Oh, exactly. What would be on the wish list

503
00:51:53,384 --> 00:51:57,504
for the next one? And then that would be how you would just keep adding them.

504
00:51:57,584 --> 00:52:03,224
And then that's it. You have abundant, unlimited space. Z-side is basically it

505
00:52:03,224 --> 00:52:09,304
takes from the Zcash altcoin, it takes one of their rust crates and it gives

506
00:52:09,304 --> 00:52:14,544
people super strong privacy in the form of the Z addresses. So it hides the

507
00:52:14,544 --> 00:52:18,904
sender, the receiver, and the amount. This is the best privacy you can get. And

508
00:52:18,904 --> 00:52:22,464
it's phenomenal. And the Zcash people worked really, really hard and they had

509
00:52:22,464 --> 00:52:27,304
lots of PhDs and stuff. Researchers working really, really hard to get the

510
00:52:27,304 --> 00:52:33,304
Zk-SNARK privacy. And this is vastly superior to using CoinJoin, which is

511
00:52:33,304 --> 00:52:36,544
like what we do now in Bitcoin for privacy, which is just you mix with four

512
00:52:36,584 --> 00:52:40,464
people and you have to keep doing this and it's not that good. So this is way,

513
00:52:40,464 --> 00:52:46,544
way, way better than that. So those two I consider to be the core value

514
00:52:46,544 --> 00:52:50,984
proposition. We've worked on those a little bit more to make sure they are

515
00:52:51,464 --> 00:52:55,784
stable and user-friendly. Then we have some other ones that are a little bit

516
00:52:55,784 --> 00:53:00,264
more experimental. But you can try them all now and they all still work. They

517
00:53:00,264 --> 00:53:05,344
all work to some extent. So anyone can try them now with fake play money,

518
00:53:05,904 --> 00:53:13,384
testnet coins. So they work to some extent. It's already enough. Having

519
00:53:13,384 --> 00:53:17,904
privacy and planetary scale, that's pretty good. But we have bid names based

520
00:53:17,904 --> 00:53:22,224
on Namecoin to some extent. And it is this name thing. And I think that this

521
00:53:22,224 --> 00:53:27,064
could be really, really big. And I have written a big piece of writing about

522
00:53:27,064 --> 00:53:32,024
this. But the idea is that it's kind of like if you want to register... Well,

523
00:53:32,664 --> 00:53:38,104
whenever you do anything, the way the internet used to be... Well, okay, let's

524
00:53:38,104 --> 00:53:41,224
talk about this. If you have a YouTube channel, sometimes you have to say,

525
00:53:41,584 --> 00:53:45,184
oh, here's where we are on TikTok. Here's our Instagram screen name. Here's

526
00:53:45,184 --> 00:53:50,464
our X account. You have to say... You have all these things. And then each of

527
00:53:50,464 --> 00:53:55,264
them you can get de-platformed from. At the blink of an eye, they could just

528
00:53:55,504 --> 00:54:00,064
suspend your account or delete all of your stuff and you have to start over. I

529
00:54:00,984 --> 00:54:05,104
don't think people are happy with that configuration. And the government can

530
00:54:05,104 --> 00:54:09,064
seize domain names. They did sometimes back in... This hasn't happened very much

531
00:54:09,064 --> 00:54:14,704
recently. So the idea of this, which goes back to Satoshi's time, is that you can

532
00:54:14,704 --> 00:54:18,504
give people a property right to the human readable name. So you can get like

533
00:54:18,504 --> 00:54:25,104
XXIM.bit or XXIM.anarchy or something. Then you own it permanently. And then

534
00:54:25,104 --> 00:54:29,824
actually, it can do a lot of stuff for you. It can tell people how to send you

535
00:54:29,824 --> 00:54:34,104
money or how to send you messages or a chat. And it can also tell people like,

536
00:54:34,264 --> 00:54:38,784
this is how to find my Twitter. And this is how to find my YouTube. So it's kind

537
00:54:38,784 --> 00:54:43,624
of like flips the whole script around. And it says, you buy this name. You

538
00:54:43,624 --> 00:54:48,704
permanently own it. You can invest in this brand. They can never de-platform

539
00:54:48,704 --> 00:54:53,024
you. People can always reach you. They can always send you money. And so they

540
00:54:53,024 --> 00:54:58,384
can always reach your webpage. So you don't need anything else. I think that's

541
00:54:58,624 --> 00:55:02,864
a little bit of a long shot, but I think it has a lot of potential. And again, it

542
00:55:02,864 --> 00:55:08,024
was Satoshi himself. He co-invented Namecoin. It's the first altcoin. And a

543
00:55:08,024 --> 00:55:12,464
lot of smart people have been working on similar variants. I think it's worth

544
00:55:12,464 --> 00:55:12,944
trying.

545
00:55:13,624 --> 00:55:19,544
It makes sense, right? I'm going to say this, but I think a lot of altcoin

546
00:55:19,544 --> 00:55:23,784
communities get it because I think they've seen this develop through a lot

547
00:55:23,784 --> 00:55:26,824
more. On Ethereum, you have ENS, similar stuff.

548
00:55:26,864 --> 00:55:31,304
Exactly. A lot of people have followed a similar event. You're exactly right. So

549
00:55:31,304 --> 00:55:36,264
people know that having these addresses is terrible and you have to make a new

550
00:55:36,264 --> 00:55:41,184
address. And the whole thing's awful. It doesn't work at all. So the ENS is a

551
00:55:41,184 --> 00:55:42,184
perfect example of that.

552
00:55:42,464 --> 00:55:47,544
Yeah, exactly. So I think every chain almost has something similar to ENS. And

553
00:55:47,544 --> 00:55:51,984
I think in those communities, people are very actively using that and promoting

554
00:55:51,984 --> 00:55:55,224
it because it's so convenient. At the end of the day, it's all about convenience

555
00:55:55,264 --> 00:56:00,304
for the user. So I think really what I wanted to say is I feel that it's more

556
00:56:00,304 --> 00:56:02,344
Bitcoin hasn't embraced those things.

557
00:56:02,384 --> 00:56:06,104
I completely agree. And again, all this was invented in Bitcoin. This has

558
00:56:06,104 --> 00:56:11,024
happened many times where something is invented in the Bitcoin world and then it

559
00:56:11,024 --> 00:56:16,664
goes nowhere for like 10-15 years. And then, of course, the altcoin people do

560
00:56:16,664 --> 00:56:22,624
it. Even Bitcoin SV had, I think it was called cash tags or something. So a lot

561
00:56:22,624 --> 00:56:24,504
of people have done this idea and it's a great idea.

562
00:56:24,864 --> 00:56:29,504
Yeah, makes sense. So on the technical front, you are changing a couple of

563
00:56:29,504 --> 00:56:33,264
things, which I got to know. The first one is the block size. You're reducing

564
00:56:33,264 --> 00:56:39,224
a 10x and obviously difficulty adjustment. You're going to change those

565
00:56:39,224 --> 00:56:42,744
two things. So perhaps take us through difficulty adjustment. I get it, right?

566
00:56:42,824 --> 00:56:49,904
Well, I actually think that an L1 doesn't need that much block space if most of

567
00:56:49,904 --> 00:56:54,344
the transactions are on L2. So the smaller block size means that the project's

568
00:56:54,344 --> 00:56:59,984
more decentralized. It means that it's easier to run a full node. And the other

569
00:56:59,984 --> 00:57:06,024
thing is, since in the conception of drive chain, the L1 is mandatory for

570
00:57:06,024 --> 00:57:12,744
everyone, but the L2s are optional. So the mandatory piece should be less

571
00:57:12,744 --> 00:57:20,824
expensive. And this is just an equilibrium phase. The blocks in BTC

572
00:57:21,344 --> 00:57:25,424
aren't even that full. I actually had a lot of thoughts about doing this years

573
00:57:25,424 --> 00:57:28,744
and years ago. But now it turns out, I don't think it will even matter that

574
00:57:28,744 --> 00:57:33,704
much, whether you did it or not, because the blocks in BTC are not even full

575
00:57:33,704 --> 00:57:43,384
anyway. So they're not even 1MB or 4MB filled up because we've waged this

576
00:57:43,384 --> 00:57:48,904
crusade against users. So I was thinking, years ago when I planned this, I was

577
00:57:49,184 --> 00:57:52,464
thinking about how Bitcoin Cash had larger blocks and Bitcoin SV was like,

578
00:57:52,464 --> 00:57:55,584
well, actually, where are the larger blocks? And you could outflank from a

579
00:57:56,184 --> 00:58:01,424
positioning point of view. It's not even going to matter because very few people

580
00:58:01,424 --> 00:58:07,584
use BTC because we've waged this ideological crusade against the users of

581
00:58:07,584 --> 00:58:12,784
BTC. That's part of the problem. But yeah, that's part of the thinking behind

582
00:58:12,784 --> 00:58:13,064
that.

583
00:58:13,264 --> 00:58:18,864
Right. And what about the mining difficulty adjustment? I think that's a

584
00:58:19,024 --> 00:58:22,224
perhaps easy one, but it's good to touch upon that as well.

585
00:58:23,344 --> 00:58:27,064
Yeah, we need to do intentionally something to split the chain off. So you

586
00:58:27,064 --> 00:58:33,104
have to break a rule. And of course, at first, it will have a much lower market

587
00:58:33,104 --> 00:58:38,344
price, and it will have much fewer people involved. So the value of each

588
00:58:38,344 --> 00:58:43,984
block will be very small. And so the miners will mine if there's a difference

589
00:58:43,984 --> 00:58:49,504
between the market value of the block and then their cost. And of course,

590
00:58:49,504 --> 00:58:54,104
miners are not all identical. So they all have different costs, and maybe they

591
00:58:54,104 --> 00:58:56,824
all have different values for the coin as well. So it's a little bit of a

592
00:58:56,824 --> 00:59:01,624
distribution thing. But it's kind of like basically, on average, the block is

593
00:59:01,624 --> 00:59:05,544
worth so much, the cost is worth so much. So if you're going to mine a new thing

594
00:59:05,544 --> 00:59:08,464
where the value of the block is much, much lower, you have to put the

595
00:59:08,464 --> 00:59:10,904
difficulty lower as well.

596
00:59:11,184 --> 00:59:14,864
Makes sense. You want to drive more miners, right? And of course, the

597
00:59:14,864 --> 00:59:19,544
lowering of the difficulty adjustment helps to get anyone who has any hardware

598
00:59:19,544 --> 00:59:21,144
to start mining, right, essentially.

599
00:59:21,624 --> 00:59:25,144
It cuts the cost because it's like Bitcoin is currently, I don't know the

600
00:59:25,144 --> 00:59:29,344
number, but it must be like 800x a hash. So it's this huge amount. So the

601
00:59:29,344 --> 00:59:32,264
question is, how many people are going to be mining this? Well, if it's not

602
00:59:32,264 --> 00:59:37,544
800x a hash, then it's going to be really slow finding blocks. So you want

603
00:59:37,544 --> 00:59:42,184
to chop it way, way, way, way, way down. I don't know exactly how far down. I

604
00:59:42,184 --> 00:59:47,504
say I cut it to the minimum value, but honestly, I think instead, we're going

605
00:59:47,504 --> 00:59:51,344
to do some kind of science project to figure out, some kind of investigation

606
00:59:51,344 --> 00:59:58,224
to figure out exactly what do we think the value of the actual block will be

607
00:59:58,224 --> 01:00:04,584
based on just talking to people, and how much hash rate do we think is going to

608
01:00:04,584 --> 01:00:08,824
be mining, and we'll try to get that very close. But that is kind of a shot

609
01:00:08,824 --> 01:00:11,944
in the dark. It will be hard to figure that out. We want it to be too low,

610
01:00:12,144 --> 01:00:16,304
because if it's too low, it'll very quickly adjust upward. But if it's too

611
01:00:16,304 --> 01:00:22,784
high, it will very slowly adjust downward. So we want to be too low. That

612
01:00:22,784 --> 01:00:27,184
will be very tricky. But that will probably be the trickiest part of all.

613
01:00:28,744 --> 01:00:30,944
But you know, I'm optimistic.

614
01:00:31,424 --> 01:00:35,464
Right. Yes. You have to be optimistic when you're doing something like this.

615
01:00:35,824 --> 01:00:40,224
And you know, I must say, there are people like yourself, right, that are so

616
01:00:40,224 --> 01:00:45,584
passionate about developing and growing the chain further, Bitcoin further,

617
01:00:45,584 --> 01:00:48,864
right? Eventually, I think they all hit, or at least a lot of people hit the

618
01:00:48,864 --> 01:00:52,304
wall, right? And then they left and started a very successful coin.

619
01:00:52,384 --> 01:00:56,544
This is a very common story that people try to make their project work in

620
01:00:56,624 --> 01:01:00,904
Bitcoin, and they only started the altcoin with extreme reluctance as like

621
01:01:00,904 --> 01:01:04,424
a last resort. So it's a very, very, very common story. And it's certainly

622
01:01:04,424 --> 01:01:09,144
true of Ethereum or Vitalik. He was one of the founders of Bitcoin Magazine.

623
01:01:09,584 --> 01:01:12,504
He's a writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He's the one third owner of Bitcoin

624
01:01:12,504 --> 01:01:17,744
Magazine. He's a huge Bitcoiner. And he tried to do Ethereum on Bitcoin. And

625
01:01:17,744 --> 01:01:22,424
it's certainly true of the whole block size war. Those people tried so hard to

626
01:01:22,424 --> 01:01:26,904
get the larger block size on BTC. They tried everything they could think of,

627
01:01:26,944 --> 01:01:32,264
you know, they fought tooth and nail to get it. And then they didn't succeed.

628
01:01:32,264 --> 01:01:36,784
And then they created their rival project. As I've already explained about

629
01:01:36,784 --> 01:01:40,864
Omni, MasterCoin, all that stuff. That was Tether, all that stuff. That was a

630
01:01:40,864 --> 01:01:46,304
Bitcoin only project. And it just escaped into. So it's very, very, very

631
01:01:46,304 --> 01:01:52,664
common that Bitcoin has just passed on. PolyMarket also was a prediction

632
01:01:52,664 --> 01:01:56,344
markets where it was kind of like, well, Bitcoin either rejects or it's just too

633
01:01:56,344 --> 01:02:03,984
slow to pick it up. And then it leaves a lot of economic activity for someone

634
01:02:03,984 --> 01:02:07,264
else to take. And yeah, I think that's very common.

635
01:02:07,344 --> 01:02:11,944
It's a very common story across the board, I think. But yes. So let me ask

636
01:02:11,984 --> 01:02:18,704
you then a controversial side of eCash is the coin allocation. So essentially

637
01:02:18,704 --> 01:02:23,904
what the plan is on eCash chain, not on Bitcoin, I just want to highlight because

638
01:02:23,904 --> 01:02:28,584
I think people get confused. 500,000 of the 1.1 million points linked to

639
01:02:28,584 --> 01:02:33,584
Patoshi's or Satoshi's wallet are going to be manually reassigned at launch for

640
01:02:33,584 --> 01:02:38,584
early investors, developers and funders. So that's your plan to do that. 600,000

641
01:02:38,704 --> 01:02:44,104
still going to his wallet, Patoshi's wallet known to be Satoshi's. So this

642
01:02:44,104 --> 01:02:47,904
has obviously caused a lot of controversy within the community as a

643
01:02:47,904 --> 01:02:52,424
theft narrative, as a social contract violation. A lot of people have very

644
01:02:52,424 --> 01:02:55,384
strong opinion about it. What's your take on this?

645
01:02:56,064 --> 01:03:00,664
It's true that they have a strong opinion, but I think if you kind of like

646
01:03:00,664 --> 01:03:03,664
actually unpack it, it doesn't make any sense what they're saying. So a lot of

647
01:03:03,664 --> 01:03:07,344
these people want to have it both ways where they say this is a terrible project

648
01:03:07,384 --> 01:03:11,144
and it's going to be worth nothing. But then they also say, wait a minute, this

649
01:03:11,144 --> 01:03:14,224
is going to be really valuable and you're depriving Satoshi of this incredible

650
01:03:14,224 --> 01:03:16,984
amount of property that's rightfully his because this is going to be so, this

651
01:03:16,984 --> 01:03:20,304
eCash is going to be so, so, so valuable. So they kind of want to have it both

652
01:03:20,304 --> 01:03:27,384
ways. They also kind of masquerade, they pretend as if like, oh, if we change

653
01:03:27,384 --> 01:03:30,984
that detail, then they would be more open minded or more support. But a lot of

654
01:03:30,984 --> 01:03:35,024
these people would have hated it anyway. Yeah, exactly. It's all fake. So that's

655
01:03:35,184 --> 01:03:39,984
I think what they don't like is that it's what an ingenious decision it is

656
01:03:39,984 --> 01:03:43,864
because we're sacrificing the chess piece. We're saying a lot of these people

657
01:03:43,864 --> 01:03:45,584
are not going to like it. It's going to be, we know it's going to be

658
01:03:45,584 --> 01:03:50,064
controversial, but now there's like something in it for the early supporters.

659
01:03:50,464 --> 01:03:54,264
So now they kind of like, oh, wait a minute. Like they kind of like maybe they

660
01:03:54,264 --> 01:03:57,664
want to change teams. They wish they'd been a supporter or something. But I

661
01:03:57,664 --> 01:04:00,424
think that's all this is part of it. I think a lot of them are missing the

662
01:04:00,424 --> 01:04:06,864
point, which is that like many rival projects gave nothing to Satoshi. So

663
01:04:06,864 --> 01:04:11,464
like Solana gives nothing to any Bitcoiner, including Satoshi. And

664
01:04:11,464 --> 01:04:16,184
there's like a 20% pre-mine for A16Z or whatever, which is perfectly fine. I'm

665
01:04:16,184 --> 01:04:18,704
not saying that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying it's totally

666
01:04:18,704 --> 01:04:22,984
inconsistent, the criticism. We want hard, Bitcoin, every Bitcoiner should

667
01:04:22,984 --> 01:04:28,504
want more hard forks because we all get free money. It's great. We get free

668
01:04:28,544 --> 01:04:35,064
money for doing nothing. And if there's a semi-privatized hard fork of this

669
01:04:35,064 --> 01:04:39,104
style that I've invented, I mean, I think this invention will be copied. I

670
01:04:39,104 --> 01:04:41,744
love, there'll be a lot of people launching forks like this because you

671
01:04:41,744 --> 01:04:44,824
can raise a bunch of money and launch a fork like this. You raise it in

672
01:04:44,824 --> 01:04:50,544
advance and you have, so if it's semi-privatized like this, this gives

673
01:04:50,544 --> 01:04:54,624
people an incentive to launch, to make, create a fork that they think is good

674
01:04:54,664 --> 01:05:00,984
and then launch. And this has many other benefits. If you launch, it's

675
01:05:00,984 --> 01:05:07,264
ideal for everyone. It's ideal for the consumer, the end user. They want to

676
01:05:07,264 --> 01:05:12,184
see a finished project when it launches. It's like if you go and you

677
01:05:12,184 --> 01:05:15,704
want to buy an iPhone and then you buy it, but it's some assembly required

678
01:05:15,704 --> 01:05:19,024
and you have to put it together. No, they want to see a nice little box. They

679
01:05:19,024 --> 01:05:22,264
want everything to be done by the time they give it their attention, their

680
01:05:22,304 --> 01:05:26,704
scarce attention, because we live in an age with TikTok and everything and

681
01:05:26,704 --> 01:05:30,184
people don't have a lot of attention. So they want it to be a finished project

682
01:05:30,184 --> 01:05:33,824
when they turn to it to consider it at the hard fork. So that

683
01:05:33,824 --> 01:05:38,224
means it has to be really, really, really developed and finished before the

684
01:05:38,224 --> 01:05:41,704
fork. You don't want it to be like Ethereum when it launches and

685
01:05:41,704 --> 01:05:44,504
then it's completely unfinished and has to be finished over a period of six

686
01:05:44,504 --> 01:05:47,704
years. And then you have a lot of wishful thinking and you have a lot of people

687
01:05:47,704 --> 01:05:51,424
over-promising and then failing to meet those promises. So I think

688
01:05:51,424 --> 01:05:55,904
that's a nightmare. So this is way better where we just work on it in advance.

689
01:05:55,904 --> 01:05:59,024
We fundraise in advance. We finish it in advance. And by the time the fork

690
01:05:59,144 --> 01:06:04,264
happens, it's actually launched. And I think it's just perfect. It's a

691
01:06:04,264 --> 01:06:08,944
really wonderful idea. I'm not surprised that people have grabbed onto it,

692
01:06:08,944 --> 01:06:12,304
but I think it actually ended up helping us a lot because people just couldn't

693
01:06:12,304 --> 01:06:17,104
resist talking about it. So it got an unbelievable amount of media exposure

694
01:06:17,104 --> 01:06:21,784
to this one idea. One other thing I'll mention is that I think it's kind of

695
01:06:21,784 --> 01:06:24,784
funny if you just walk up to someone on the street and you tell them,

696
01:06:24,784 --> 01:06:27,704
hey, there's this new fork. It's going to take Satoshi's coins. What do you

697
01:06:27,704 --> 01:06:30,744
think? They're going to think, well, I don't like that. But they don't

698
01:06:30,744 --> 01:06:34,424
understand everything else that's happened. So I think that's a

699
01:06:34,424 --> 01:06:39,904
funny aspect of it. If you just walk up to people and say, hey,

700
01:06:39,904 --> 01:06:43,984
do you think the government should raise your taxes? They're just going to say no.

701
01:06:44,224 --> 01:06:46,384
But then if you go up to them and you say, hey, do you think the government

702
01:06:46,384 --> 01:06:49,424
should build a park over here or improve the highways or improve the

703
01:06:49,424 --> 01:06:52,544
schools? Then people just say yes. But it's like those are kind of like the

704
01:06:52,544 --> 01:06:57,224
same thing. So you have to consider the whole bundle. It's like a package

705
01:06:57,224 --> 01:07:01,264
deal. So there's a lot of funny stuff going on with that. But I think that's

706
01:07:01,264 --> 01:07:05,784
fun. It's a fun... Yeah, I've gotten that question many, many times over the

707
01:07:05,784 --> 01:07:06,504
last four years.

708
01:07:07,624 --> 01:07:13,824
I bet. I guess it's a little bit of deviation from the social precedent

709
01:07:13,904 --> 01:07:19,664
that's been set by a few points, right? By obviously Bitcoin Gold, SWE, I

710
01:07:19,664 --> 01:07:22,104
think they all kept the one to one, right?

711
01:07:22,144 --> 01:07:25,344
People are like trying to figure out what they think about it. But yeah, but

712
01:07:25,344 --> 01:07:29,744
this is a big improvement because the pure fork means that everyone who

713
01:07:29,744 --> 01:07:33,744
hated the idea and fought against it every step of the way and everyone who

714
01:07:33,744 --> 01:07:37,384
worked hard to make it a success, that means those people are treated equally.

715
01:07:37,384 --> 01:07:41,024
And then you're only going to live in a world where you rely on altruism and

716
01:07:41,544 --> 01:07:45,264
you have to have an independently wealthy, altruistic person make the good

717
01:07:45,264 --> 01:07:49,464
fork. And how many good forks are going to get made in that world? Far fewer.

718
01:07:49,464 --> 01:07:53,664
So let's just privatize it a little bit. Some other obvious points, like

719
01:07:53,664 --> 01:07:57,624
Xerces clearly abandoned these coins and he clearly would be just fine with

720
01:07:57,624 --> 01:08:02,864
$600,000. Some of it is just you kind of think like, okay, yeah, we care

721
01:08:02,864 --> 01:08:07,104
about property rights. Just because someone's rich, you shouldn't steal from

722
01:08:07,104 --> 01:08:11,584
them. Obviously, everyone agrees with these things, but it's kind of like, I

723
01:08:11,584 --> 01:08:16,104
do think it's funny that people have picked up on this one part. And it does

724
01:08:16,104 --> 01:08:21,624
speak to, I think, just how uninspired people are. Are they really serious

725
01:08:21,624 --> 01:08:24,144
about any of this? And of course the answer is no, because that's one of the

726
01:08:24,144 --> 01:08:29,064
points I made, and you were nodding along, is about like, if we change this

727
01:08:29,064 --> 01:08:31,944
detail, what, then all of a sudden these people would be like huge supporters?

728
01:08:31,944 --> 01:08:35,064
Like, it's ridiculous, of course not. No, it's kind of like, whatever, the whole

729
01:08:35,064 --> 01:08:38,584
thing's a farce. Why not just play it out?

730
01:08:38,584 --> 01:08:43,384
No, totally. I think that's why I wanted to bring it out, because I felt

731
01:08:43,384 --> 01:08:48,264
there's two sides to obviously every argument. But I felt like, hey,

732
01:08:48,264 --> 01:08:51,944
just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it's actually a bad idea.

733
01:08:51,944 --> 01:08:56,264
Getting $600,000 in e-cash that you didn't have before. So it's like, the whole

734
01:08:56,264 --> 01:09:00,624
thing is kind of like, can you steal something that you just created

735
01:09:00,784 --> 01:09:05,504
five seconds before? It's kind of like, the whole thing's kind of, but I think

736
01:09:05,504 --> 01:09:10,864
it's fun. It's giving people a lot to think about. And I enjoy being

737
01:09:10,864 --> 01:09:15,184
controversial to some small extent. I like the idea that I'm making people

738
01:09:15,184 --> 01:09:18,544
think a little bit, so whatever.

739
01:09:18,544 --> 01:09:22,784
I mean, I would have liked to see more. I saw a bit of that when I was doing

740
01:09:22,784 --> 01:09:26,304
research, but I would have liked to see more of the technical debates, like what

741
01:09:26,304 --> 01:09:29,344
type of application, drive chains, those type of things.

742
01:09:29,664 --> 01:09:34,144
Yeah, but it's good for us to get any kind of, that was probably people who

743
01:09:34,144 --> 01:09:36,304
wouldn't have talked about it at all, because talking about the technical

744
01:09:36,304 --> 01:09:39,104
thing is really hard. You have to actually figure out what you're talking

745
01:09:39,104 --> 01:09:40,064
about, and you might be wrong.

746
01:09:40,624 --> 01:09:43,504
Let me ask you this wrap-up question, right? I've taken quite a bit of your

747
01:09:43,504 --> 01:09:47,424
time, so let's wrap this up for this session. Love to have you back. But let

748
01:09:47,424 --> 01:09:51,664
me ask you this thing, right? Where do you see e-cash in two years' time, right?

749
01:09:51,664 --> 01:09:56,144
Do you think you'll follow the path of previous Bitcoin hard forks, with

750
01:09:56,144 --> 01:10:01,184
amazing initial hype, and then fade it away somewhere? Or do you think it'll

751
01:10:01,184 --> 01:10:05,984
become something more dynamic, thriving? What do you think will happen in two

752
01:10:05,984 --> 01:10:06,544
years' time?

753
01:10:07,504 --> 01:10:11,504
Well, I certainly hope it's a big success, but I think it's less than 50%

754
01:10:12,784 --> 01:10:17,824
likely to succeed. So I just want to make that totally clear. This is something

755
01:10:17,824 --> 01:10:24,464
of a long shot. I don't think it's that long, but it's certainly not guaranteed

756
01:10:24,464 --> 01:10:29,264
to work, and it probably won't work. I don't really know why it won't work, but

757
01:10:29,264 --> 01:10:32,944
it's just hard to make something, anything new, work at all. And so I'd just

758
01:10:32,944 --> 01:10:39,504
like to clarify a few things, that I'm not selling my BTC. I see this as a very

759
01:10:39,504 --> 01:10:43,264
important life, right? We're on the Titanic, and we're about to hit the

760
01:10:43,264 --> 01:10:48,464
iceberg, and we need more life rafts. That's what this is. And maybe the

761
01:10:48,464 --> 01:10:52,064
Titanic will just miss the iceberg, and we won't need the life rafts, and then

762
01:10:52,064 --> 01:10:56,064
I'll look like a complete idiot, and everything will be fine. And that's what

763
01:10:56,064 --> 01:10:59,984
I hope actually happens. I hope that that happens. That'd be great. But that

764
01:10:59,984 --> 01:11:03,584
doesn't fit with all these stories we've been telling about how deranged everyone

765
01:11:03,584 --> 01:11:07,264
is, everyone's lying about lightning. People don't even realize the extent to

766
01:11:07,264 --> 01:11:12,224
which everything is screwed up, because they can't talk about it. So yeah, I

767
01:11:12,224 --> 01:11:17,184
don't know. But I do think that the hard fork, yeah, the first day, and the first

768
01:11:17,184 --> 01:11:23,744
month, and the first year, that's the big debut. And I think we've done a lot

769
01:11:23,744 --> 01:11:28,704
of things that the previous, like the Bitcoin Cash didn't do. Even simple

770
01:11:28,704 --> 01:11:32,224
things like we announced it in advance, whereas Bitcoin Cash, it was already

771
01:11:32,224 --> 01:11:35,984
made, and then there was SegWit2x, and people, the large blockers were saying,

772
01:11:35,984 --> 01:11:40,144
ignore Bitcoin Cash, because we got SegWit2x. And then later, like four

773
01:11:40,144 --> 01:11:43,184
months later, they were like, oh, actually, we changed our mind for five

774
01:11:43,984 --> 01:11:48,064
months, or whatever it was. So that's kind of weird. So I'm not doing that.

775
01:11:49,104 --> 01:11:52,144
And we're not doing much other stuff, like we have it kind of finished.

776
01:11:52,144 --> 01:11:58,224
So it should be ready on day one for people to start figuring out how they can

777
01:11:58,224 --> 01:12:02,864
interface with it, and what they think of it. So who knows? But yeah, I think it's

778
01:12:03,744 --> 01:12:08,784
more likely to fail than not. But of course, if it succeeds, if I'm right about even

779
01:12:08,784 --> 01:12:14,704
half of the things that I'm claiming about how everyone wants side sheets,

780
01:12:14,704 --> 01:12:19,104
everyone wants merge mine fees, the lightning doesn't work. If I'm right about even
half of

781
01:12:19,104 --> 01:12:23,664
these things, then it will slowly grow to dominate the whole, the entire crypto

782
01:12:23,664 --> 01:12:28,944
industry. So it's kind of like less than 50% chance of success. But if it succeeds,
it will

783
01:12:29,824 --> 01:12:37,184
skyrocket into the top five, or even beyond. So that's kind of like the situation.
And

784
01:12:37,744 --> 01:12:48,704
I have no delusion about how difficult it will be, and unlikely. But on the other
hand, I know

785
01:12:48,704 --> 01:12:55,264
I've been a 24-7 member of the Bitcoin community for a very long time, like
whatever, like 15

786
01:12:55,264 --> 01:13:01,024
years or something. And yeah, I know just how screwed up everything is. It's very,
very, very,

787
01:13:01,024 --> 01:13:07,424
very screwed up. And we discussed only a few parts of it. But the culture is very
deranged,

788
01:13:07,424 --> 01:13:10,704
and we've got a lot of crazy people. And then we have just a lot of too many people
who have

789
01:13:10,704 --> 01:13:13,824
specialized, so they can't really even talk to each other. So you can't even talk,

790
01:13:15,504 --> 01:13:19,504
technical people and miners and big stakeholders, they can't really even talk to
each other anymore

791
01:13:19,504 --> 01:13:24,224
because it's so big. And people have security details now, and people, they get too
much email

792
01:13:24,224 --> 01:13:28,384
spam, and they don't read it. And everyone's worried about what does everyone else
think?

793
01:13:28,384 --> 01:13:33,824
So I think it's poised for disruption, actually. I don't know if it'll be this
project, and even if

794
01:13:34,544 --> 01:13:38,864
this project is the maximum chance, I don't know if it will succeed. But yeah, there
are an

795
01:13:38,864 --> 01:13:45,744
enormous number of huge problems with BTC that everyone is in denial about, which is
another

796
01:13:45,744 --> 01:13:50,624
issue that people can't even talk about the problem. Because as you certainly know,
if you're

797
01:13:50,624 --> 01:13:55,744
just on social media at all, everyone just thinks, oh, everything's perfect at
Bitcoin, and every

798
01:13:55,744 --> 01:14:01,584
criticism is good. And the people, it doesn't matter if someone who is in Bitcoin
for 15

799
01:14:01,584 --> 01:14:08,064
years and is an elite technical commentator, someone who joined four months ago who

800
01:14:08,064 --> 01:14:12,864
saw a YouTube video by someone, they'll think, oh yeah, of course, there is no
security budget

801
01:14:12,864 --> 01:14:17,584
problem or whatever. We don't need privacy at Bitcoin because we have treasury
competence,

802
01:14:17,584 --> 01:14:24,784
whatever. So that's kind of where we are. So yeah, I think I'm going to be
optimistic.

803
01:14:25,904 --> 01:14:31,104
But yeah, it is a difficult thing. It's a bit of a... It's kind of like you go to
the roulette

804
01:14:31,104 --> 01:14:38,304
wheel and you put it on the bottom third or something. Maybe you put it on... I'm
thinking

805
01:14:38,304 --> 01:14:44,464
we've got a 12% to 15% chance. But yeah, it's very asymmetric because what do we
really lose

806
01:14:44,464 --> 01:14:51,504
if it fails? It's kind of a little embarrassing. I already don't care about that.
And it's like,

807
01:14:52,384 --> 01:14:58,224
we're going to get a lot of attention on these ideas. So actually, we lose almost
nothing. And

808
01:14:58,224 --> 01:15:06,304
then we have this crazy upside. So I think it's quite a... And a hard fork after
nine years,

809
01:15:06,304 --> 01:15:10,144
right? Or roughly around nine years. So I think for a lot of people, it's exciting.