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

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

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

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.

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

He doesn't really want even features.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So welcome, Paul.

And good to have you over.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Awesome.

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

You've been behind that since 2014, 2015.

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

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

But let me start with some background, right?

So let me ask you this question, right?

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

But that was their own decision.

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

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

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

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

But I'll make my own thing.

That is kind of like they wanted to do lightning.

They wanted to. They were really big into that.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Like are all these other blockchains a complete scam?

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

And the question is, is it also stable coins?

That was originally a Bitcoin project.

True. That was originally MasterCoin.

That was it was a BTC only project.

And then it became Omni.

And then now it's on Ethereum and Tron.

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

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

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

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,

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

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

So you're the inventor of DriveChain, right?

Which is Bit 301.

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

So which is now called HiveMind, right?

So this is the prediction market before PolyMarket by Shane.

Yeah, never rename anything.

That's my advice for listening.

But it was TruthCoin.

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

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

So it was like kind of.

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

There's all these weird projects named Coin.

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

My advice to everyone out there, never rename anything.

Just stick with whatever name you picked.

People will figure it out.

I hate the thing.

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

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

So but yeah, this is circa 2018, 2019, right?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

That was like the OG Polymarket.

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

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

It was right after that in 2012.

So that was a that was a long time ago.

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

And then finally, Polymarket comes out.

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.

Now you see it everywhere, everywhere.

So, yeah, again, I was right.

Another chapter in the Paul was right.

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

Two for two for Paul.

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.

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

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

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

Not just holding coins.

Right. Because that could be considered as an option.

So we'll get into that.

But a third one I wanted to mention.

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

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

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

So that's that's great.

So let's get into BIPs.

Right. Let's start from the top.

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

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?

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.

And we did multiple per year.

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

Then the block size war happened.

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

So but before there were all these things called BIPs.

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.

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

Well, that's not entirely true.

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.

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

And so BIP 39 said, like, this is, you know, the list of words and this is how it works, et cetera, et cetera.

So there used to be these things called BIPs.

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

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.

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?

It used to be a pretty good filter, too, because you couldn't just say such and such word.

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

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

And they did a pretty good job of like rejecting stuff that just didn't have enough detail.

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.

And so then that used to be cool.

Unfortunately, now it's awful.

And even now, there's like this weird prestige.

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.

This has been enormously distracting, I think, to those of us who just want to get work done.

So now everyone's like, oh, yeah, what do you think of my new BIP?

Whatever. I don't want to name too many names.

But you get the idea that now it's become like a stamp of of maybe esteem or quality or something.

So these BIPs, these are the ones, only a few of them were soft fork.

Some just were informational or whatever.

And but all the ones that were soft forks, you know, these were activated regularly.

Now we've had no soft fork activation in sight.

And so that's an enormous tragedy that we could discuss if you think people are interested.

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?

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?

Right, in November of 2015, so more than 10 years ago, I wrote this blog post called Drive Chain.

And it had all the details that you need, but it wasn't in BIP format.

And in fact, it's actually very helpful when you have to write it in BIP format.

It does help you like you got to clarify some things, you know, let people know exactly what's going on.

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.

This is right before lightning got really big.

So everyone's all gung ho about Segwit and lightning.

So I was like, whatever, you know, fine, you know, fine.

I was like, sure, I was kind of optimistic about it.

So in 2016, I was kind of like in just, you know, low power mode with respect to this whole drive chain thing.

But I was still tinkering with my own software, you know, here and there.

But everyone was very interested in Segwit.

And so that was like how everything's going.

People are the block size war was heating up every few months.

It got even worse than before.

People thought, oh, it's never been this bad.

Then it would get worse and worse and worse.

Just like a giant eruption of of mistrust and et cetera.

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.

And then I revised them in February twenty eighteen.

And then I revised them again after the accusive.

So which we can talk about if people are interested.

But so the point is, it's been many, many years.

So occasionally I revise them.

And, you know, I hope that I get a little bit better at writing each few years, too.

So when I rewrite them, I think, oh, man, this is like too long.

This is terrible.

I make it like much shorter, better.

So I try to get that happening.

But the reason I bring this up is because.

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.

I got some feedback at scaling Bitcoin three years in Milan, October twenty sixteen.

I presented on scaling side chains in twenty sixteen.

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.

So I invented this thing called blind merge mining in January twenty seventeen.

And I put out a little post about this invention.

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.

It's much easier to read.

And luckily that I did, because if three or one ended up, that's called blind merge mining.

And that ended up being used in other weird ideas, such as.

When Supertest that and Ruben Thompson, they invented like space chains.

These are like blind merge mind.

And even the guy, this guy ZMN on the mailing list, he invented this thing like Sean side chain headers on main chain.

And that was like used by merge mining.

So blind merge mining ended up being not very controversial.

And it's pretty it is a way of separating the issues because the issues are kind of confusing to people, you know.

So with the side chain L2 idea, you have two things that you have to consider.

One is depositing coins and withdrawing them.

That's BIP 300.

And then the second kind is how does the side chain find blocks?

You know, if it's a separate chain, that's merge mining or in this case, blind merge mining.

And so then that kind of that's how they came to be two different BIPs.

It's kind of really the same idea, but they can.

It is possible to blind merge mine anything, including an altcoin.

So you could have name coin could switch to be blind merge mine instead of regular merge mine if they wanted to.

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.

I wouldn't, but you could.

So it's possible.

So it kind of and that does make it easier to read because they both get shorter.

I mean, 301 was cool, right?

Like it was I think it was additional way for miners to earn additional income, right?

That's how at least I got to know, right?

Well, I think I got to give the credit to Satoshi who invented merge mining itself because merge mining is a magical invention.

And I think that it's crazy.

The fact that merge mining is even possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So that's that's pretty sorceress.

You know, that's pretty amazing.

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.

But for regular merge mining, you have to run a node of all of the stuff that you merge mining.

So, for example, Namecoin was the first altcoin.

It was co-invented by Satoshi.

We have been merge mining it ever since 2011.

Now, Namecoin is a much, much, much smaller project than Bitcoin, obviously.

Bitcoin is a huge project.

Namecoin is an obscure project, and the block rewards were different also.

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.

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.

So it's like $5,000 versus $5.

But in order to do merge mining and take advantage of the free $5 per block, you had to run the Namecoin node.

And then like the Namecoin node, like if it crashed or it had bugs, then it would like screw up your setup.

And so it ended up not being free.

With blind merge mining, it just switches it around so that the miners can just focus on including transactions in BTC only.

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.

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.

So that was kind of a neat idea.

So it's blind because the miners can get all the free merge mining revenue without even seeing.

They don't even have to see what it is they're mining or do anything.

They're not responsible.

So that was what that was.

Right.

The concept of blind merge mining was what perhaps led to Plan B for you.

No, I think it's Bitcoin 300 that got the pushback.

There were one or two people who complained about 301, but they all ended up changing their mind.

They ended up agreeing with me.

We hunted them all down and they said, you know what, actually, this is great.

So but it was really Bitcoin 300 that for some reason became controversial in 2023.

I think it was because the timing was Luke Dash Junior had opened like a work in progress pull request.

It was literally just like it wasn't very serious at all.

But I just said, as if we were going to do this, how would we do it?

Like one of these ways.

And this, for some reason, triggered a bunch of people.

I still don't know why, because, again, it's a completely harmless, opt in, ignorable soft fork.

And it gives us all these benefits.

But and people were sort of triggered by it somehow.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

So, you know, initial plan was to get this soft fork 301, 300, 301 on Bitcoin.

Right.

At some stage, obviously, you pivoted to Plan B.

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?

No, I had the plan for Plan B a long time ago, but I was hoping that we would need it.

And I kind of thought maybe like, why would we need it?

Because this is just a good idea.

Everyone makes more money and et cetera.

But unfortunately, we do need it.

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.

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.

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.

There's a lot of strange people, people selling a book, selling a podcast.

They sell like a way of life.

You know, there's like these lifestyle people who are selling like carnivore maximalism.

Or there's Michael Saylor who wants everything to be corporate Bitcoin.

So he's not he doesn't want like privacy.

He doesn't really want even features.

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.

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.

That's crazy.

Yeah, I think I wanted to one thing I forgot to mention that you have been a critique of Lightning Network, right?

Due to many things.

Yeah.

One of the one in route and liquidity, capital efficiency, pretty much all the reason.

So can I quickly ask you what's been the biggest pushback from the Bitcoin core around these drive chains?

Right.

You said three or three hundred was the biggest reason.

What was the what were the actual like reasons and how do you debate on these topics?

Like, is it through, you know, like wherever all these chats happen these days when you're having the debates?

Yeah, there used to be a Bitcoin dev mailing list.

Now I think it's not good at all.

It used to be a very good mailing list.

Now I don't even know.

Like, I don't even read it anymore.

I used to read and write to it.

We had some critics, you know.

We did a series of Twitter spaces in twenty twenty three, twenty four, and we invited people to.

People would write articles at Bitcoin magazine and we would like reply, so there's a lot of stuff on Twitter.

And that we had some critics, like one or two critics, we would pay like we paid Peter Todd to type up his critique.

His critique turned out to be like very, very, very wrong.

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.

So he made a comment on stage at Baltic County Badger where he was like, no one's ever written software for this.

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.

And if you go to the drive chain, that info, it's like right at the top, like download or whatever.

So like he had never like visited the site.

So we had a lot of critics that were they were very low quality.

One other criticism that's big is that Adam Back told me to look up Ava Chow.

In person, because he said, oh, Ava Chow knows a lot about how things get merged, you know, in into Bitcoin Core.

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.

They'll just sort of ignore it until it goes away.

And so that's kind of and they said basically something has to be completely non-controversial for them to do it.

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.

Isn't it counterproductive?

Like controversy means there is something there that needs to be discussed.

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.

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.

So, yeah, I mean, it happens when there is a controversy.

Right. That's what I believe.

Right. Change cannot happen without controversy.

And but people need to understand.

We're not a believer.

I think consensus among humans is a disaster.

So we have the consensus software and Bitcoin, where the blockchain is agreed upon down to the last byte.

But I am not a believer at all in consensus among humans.

I think we want you want to have different.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You know, they have the screwed up culture and that's the situation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What's the problem from your perspective of Lightning Network? What Lightning hasn't been able to do so far?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Basically, the thesis, the title of the talk was that all the time spent on Lightning is a waste. So that was the title.

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.

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?

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.

One example is that on Nostar, they have this zap, the primal-to-primal zap, where people are using custodial Lightning.

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.

This is just not true. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Many, many, many things.

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.

There's no liquidity there? I mean, it should work if the channels are open, right?

When you download the custodial Lightning to your phone, and then someone sends you, this happened to me at an Acapulco one year.

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.

Now, I never opened a channel. To open a channel, it requires the L1 transaction fee to be paid.

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?

Yeah, but none of these have open channels. So then they say that this is custodial Lightning, but really it's just nothing.

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.

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.

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.

And it's like, yeah, okay, for like 500 people, it's real. But everyone else is being lied to.

There's a huge propaganda campaign involving the Lightning Bolt icon being everywhere, tricking everyone.

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.

Because, of course, the whole thing is done through the app, through client server. None of this is actual Bitcoin transactions.

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.

That's because that's basically what it is. It's not using the Lightning network at all.

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.

But then all these people leave, and they think – they leave the room, or they just think, wow, Lightning works so well.

And then when someone like me says this whole thing is fake, they just think, oh, that guy's a liar.

I personally have had experience where I tried to open a channel in 2022 for a business I was running back then.

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.

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.

But this Lightning is the crown jewel, maybe, or the perfect example, because when people get really excited, and they fall for it, basically.

Because they say, oh, everyone is supporting Lightning. You know, whatever, Blockstream, and they work on Sea Lightning.

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.

So then they roll up their sleeves, and they try to get the actual knowledge of how it works.

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.

This is a small minority of the population. Most people just want to conform, just go on with whatever their friend is doing.

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.

Then they're like, oh, man, this really isn't worth it at all. And then the channel gets uncooperative, closed by someone.

Or you disagree on fee rates, and then your software does the uncooperative close, and then your money is stuck for two weeks.

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.

But the time has come for us to speak honestly about how unrealistic it is that everyone will –

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.

I want to talk cash, though, but yes, please. Let's wrap this up.

Yeah. The whole point, the whole dispute in the block size debate was it was large blockers versus Lightning kind of.

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.

I published this Bitcoin debt mailing list, and then now over time, people have been slow going, like over four years.

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.

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.

So when the blocks are small, it's easier to run a full node.

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.

And it turns out that this barrier is too much for basically every normal person to jump anyway.

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.

So this whole rise in detritus, the whole point of it was to avoid a node that was too expensive to run.

But most people don't want to run the Lightning node or the L1 full node that every single Lightning node would require.

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.

So that's just yet another – but there's a whole long list of stuff that doesn't work with Lightning.

You need the online hot wallet to receive money.

We talked about liquidity.

In the talk at TabConf, I mentioned there's a catch-22.

There's a lose-lose situation where if L1 fee rates are low, you don't need the Lightning network.

And it has only disadvantages for no reason.

If L1 fee rates are high, actually the HTLCs in the Lightning network don't work because it's too expensive to enforce them.

So it's a lose-lose situation.

There's not enough block space to open channels for everyone on Earth or even a tiny 1%.

And especially if these channels last one year, on average, there's nowhere near enough space for people to use this.

So the whole thing is a totally dead idea.

Meanwhile, Internet speeds, computer speeds have improved.

And so having the optional large block L2 has just become more and more and more and more attractive over time.

It's never been better.

The ratio of drive chain superiority to Lightning gets better every year.

And it's never been better than this year.

All right. I think I'm happy to move to eCash.

I think that's a good build-up to eCash.

So why don't we perhaps discuss.

So now Plan B is activated at some stage.

Of course, it was planned a long time ago, but it's activated at some stage.

So now eCash comes in picture.

You keep Segwit. You keep Taproot.

You do shrink block size by 10x or something.

And then obviously this leads to activating of drive chains.

So why don't you quickly take us through what the big technical plan is before.

And then I'm keen to get into the rest of the details.

The idea for L1 is to keep it very, very similar to Bitcoin Core or BTC.

As similar as possible, both now and in the future.

Because I don't want to be in the business of competing with Bitcoin Core even.

And then many of the L2s, they should just be copies of whatever works that people like.

We built seven from scratch that I think are actually going to be super popular.

In the past, we've built various ones that are just exact copies of existing altcoins that people like.

And so the idea is not so much that you're betting on me to run the project better.

That's not how this is supposed to work.

The idea is actually I'm just letting you.

I'm saying, do you want to live in a world where it's either Bitcoin Core or Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum?

Or would you rather have a world where it's basically all the exact same software?

But just one currency, same 21 million coins shared by all of these.

And whenever someone wants to invent a new thing, like if they invent a new altcoin, we can copy it over.

Or if someone wants to launch their new thing, they don't have to go through the bit process, which doesn't work anymore.

They don't have to wait for software activation.

They can just either be L2s that activate whatever software they want.

The L2s are going to be competing for users and competing for developers.

Or they can just make a brand new L2 that's encouraged.

So the idea is more of just spontaneous order.

It's like a Hayekian, libertarian thing where you have entrepreneurs and I'm just

freeing them up to compete. And the whole thing is not going through me.

The true capitalism. So you launched eCash in August this year at the block

of 964,000. You said seven different drive chains, right?

So what are these drive chains? I read Thunder, Zside, Truthcoin, obviously we

talked about, CoinShift, BitNames, BitAssets, and Photon, right?

These are seven?

That's right.

Thunder is just a very optimized, large block L2, so it's as efficient as

possible from the software side. And we've made it really, really efficient.

It can process 960 megabyte blocks very, very quickly. And we have tests that

people can look up the exact tests run and they can see the exact numbers

themselves, which I encourage people to do if they're interested.

But that's just one type. So the idea is we'd launch one of those.

And then as it got more and more used, we would learn about how to improve it

further, and eventually we'd launch a second one. And I have some back of the

envelope math where it says basically that if you had 14 of these, that would

be enough to process every single transaction in the world on earth.

And so that's the plan to scale up via that type of thing. And again, we'd have

one on day one, but of course that's not going to be full at all.

There's going to be plenty of events. So you have years or months at least to

actually learn from experience. Oh, exactly. What would be on the wish list

for the next one? And then that would be how you would just keep adding them.

And then that's it. You have abundant, unlimited space. Z-side is basically it

takes from the Zcash altcoin, it takes one of their rust crates and it gives

people super strong privacy in the form of the Z addresses. So it hides the

sender, the receiver, and the amount. This is the best privacy you can get. And

it's phenomenal. And the Zcash people worked really, really hard and they had

lots of PhDs and stuff. Researchers working really, really hard to get the

Zk-SNARK privacy. And this is vastly superior to using CoinJoin, which is

like what we do now in Bitcoin for privacy, which is just you mix with four

people and you have to keep doing this and it's not that good. So this is way,

way, way better than that. So those two I consider to be the core value

proposition. We've worked on those a little bit more to make sure they are

stable and user-friendly. Then we have some other ones that are a little bit

more experimental. But you can try them all now and they all still work. They

all work to some extent. So anyone can try them now with fake play money,

testnet coins. So they work to some extent. It's already enough. Having

privacy and planetary scale, that's pretty good. But we have bid names based

on Namecoin to some extent. And it is this name thing. And I think that this

could be really, really big. And I have written a big piece of writing about

this. But the idea is that it's kind of like if you want to register... Well,

whenever you do anything, the way the internet used to be... Well, okay, let's

talk about this. If you have a YouTube channel, sometimes you have to say,

oh, here's where we are on TikTok. Here's our Instagram screen name. Here's

our X account. You have to say... You have all these things. And then each of

them you can get de-platformed from. At the blink of an eye, they could just

suspend your account or delete all of your stuff and you have to start over. I

don't think people are happy with that configuration. And the government can

seize domain names. They did sometimes back in... This hasn't happened very much

recently. So the idea of this, which goes back to Satoshi's time, is that you can

give people a property right to the human readable name. So you can get like

XXIM.bit or XXIM.anarchy or something. Then you own it permanently. And then

actually, it can do a lot of stuff for you. It can tell people how to send you

money or how to send you messages or a chat. And it can also tell people like,

this is how to find my Twitter. And this is how to find my YouTube. So it's kind

of like flips the whole script around. And it says, you buy this name. You

permanently own it. You can invest in this brand. They can never de-platform

you. People can always reach you. They can always send you money. And so they

can always reach your webpage. So you don't need anything else. I think that's

a little bit of a long shot, but I think it has a lot of potential. And again, it

was Satoshi himself. He co-invented Namecoin. It's the first altcoin. And a

lot of smart people have been working on similar variants. I think it's worth

trying.

It makes sense, right? I'm going to say this, but I think a lot of altcoin

communities get it because I think they've seen this develop through a lot

more. On Ethereum, you have ENS, similar stuff.

Exactly. A lot of people have followed a similar event. You're exactly right. So

people know that having these addresses is terrible and you have to make a new

address. And the whole thing's awful. It doesn't work at all. So the ENS is a

perfect example of that.

Yeah, exactly. So I think every chain almost has something similar to ENS. And

I think in those communities, people are very actively using that and promoting

it because it's so convenient. At the end of the day, it's all about convenience

for the user. So I think really what I wanted to say is I feel that it's more

Bitcoin hasn't embraced those things.

I completely agree. And again, all this was invented in Bitcoin. This has

happened many times where something is invented in the Bitcoin world and then it

goes nowhere for like 10-15 years. And then, of course, the altcoin people do

it. Even Bitcoin SV had, I think it was called cash tags or something. So a lot

of people have done this idea and it's a great idea.

Yeah, makes sense. So on the technical front, you are changing a couple of

things, which I got to know. The first one is the block size. You're reducing

a 10x and obviously difficulty adjustment. You're going to change those

two things. So perhaps take us through difficulty adjustment. I get it, right?

Well, I actually think that an L1 doesn't need that much block space if most of

the transactions are on L2. So the smaller block size means that the project's

more decentralized. It means that it's easier to run a full node. And the other

thing is, since in the conception of drive chain, the L1 is mandatory for

everyone, but the L2s are optional. So the mandatory piece should be less

expensive. And this is just an equilibrium phase. The blocks in BTC

aren't even that full. I actually had a lot of thoughts about doing this years

and years ago. But now it turns out, I don't think it will even matter that

much, whether you did it or not, because the blocks in BTC are not even full

anyway. So they're not even 1MB or 4MB filled up because we've waged this

crusade against users. So I was thinking, years ago when I planned this, I was

thinking about how Bitcoin Cash had larger blocks and Bitcoin SV was like,

well, actually, where are the larger blocks? And you could outflank from a

positioning point of view. It's not even going to matter because very few people

use BTC because we've waged this ideological crusade against the users of

BTC. That's part of the problem. But yeah, that's part of the thinking behind

that.

Right. And what about the mining difficulty adjustment? I think that's a

perhaps easy one, but it's good to touch upon that as well.

Yeah, we need to do intentionally something to split the chain off. So you

have to break a rule. And of course, at first, it will have a much lower market

price, and it will have much fewer people involved. So the value of each

block will be very small. And so the miners will mine if there's a difference

between the market value of the block and then their cost. And of course,

miners are not all identical. So they all have different costs, and maybe they

all have different values for the coin as well. So it's a little bit of a

distribution thing. But it's kind of like basically, on average, the block is

worth so much, the cost is worth so much. So if you're going to mine a new thing

where the value of the block is much, much lower, you have to put the

difficulty lower as well.

Makes sense. You want to drive more miners, right? And of course, the

lowering of the difficulty adjustment helps to get anyone who has any hardware

to start mining, right, essentially.

It cuts the cost because it's like Bitcoin is currently, I don't know the

number, but it must be like 800x a hash. So it's this huge amount. So the

question is, how many people are going to be mining this? Well, if it's not

800x a hash, then it's going to be really slow finding blocks. So you want

to chop it way, way, way, way, way down. I don't know exactly how far down. I

say I cut it to the minimum value, but honestly, I think instead, we're going

to do some kind of science project to figure out, some kind of investigation

to figure out exactly what do we think the value of the actual block will be

based on just talking to people, and how much hash rate do we think is going to

be mining, and we'll try to get that very close. But that is kind of a shot

in the dark. It will be hard to figure that out. We want it to be too low,

because if it's too low, it'll very quickly adjust upward. But if it's too

high, it will very slowly adjust downward. So we want to be too low. That

will be very tricky. But that will probably be the trickiest part of all.

But you know, I'm optimistic.

Right. Yes. You have to be optimistic when you're doing something like this.

And you know, I must say, there are people like yourself, right, that are so

passionate about developing and growing the chain further, Bitcoin further,

right? Eventually, I think they all hit, or at least a lot of people hit the

wall, right? And then they left and started a very successful coin.

This is a very common story that people try to make their project work in

Bitcoin, and they only started the altcoin with extreme reluctance as like

a last resort. So it's a very, very, very common story. And it's certainly

true of Ethereum or Vitalik. He was one of the founders of Bitcoin Magazine.

He's a writer for Bitcoin Magazine. He's the one third owner of Bitcoin

Magazine. He's a huge Bitcoiner. And he tried to do Ethereum on Bitcoin. And

it's certainly true of the whole block size war. Those people tried so hard to

get the larger block size on BTC. They tried everything they could think of,

you know, they fought tooth and nail to get it. And then they didn't succeed.

And then they created their rival project. As I've already explained about

Omni, MasterCoin, all that stuff. That was Tether, all that stuff. That was a

Bitcoin only project. And it just escaped into. So it's very, very, very

common that Bitcoin has just passed on. PolyMarket also was a prediction

markets where it was kind of like, well, Bitcoin either rejects or it's just too

slow to pick it up. And then it leaves a lot of economic activity for someone

else to take. And yeah, I think that's very common.

It's a very common story across the board, I think. But yes. So let me ask

you then a controversial side of eCash is the coin allocation. So essentially

what the plan is on eCash chain, not on Bitcoin, I just want to highlight because

I think people get confused. 500,000 of the 1.1 million points linked to

Patoshi's or Satoshi's wallet are going to be manually reassigned at launch for

early investors, developers and funders. So that's your plan to do that. 600,000

still going to his wallet, Patoshi's wallet known to be Satoshi's. So this

has obviously caused a lot of controversy within the community as a

theft narrative, as a social contract violation. A lot of people have very

strong opinion about it. What's your take on this?

It's true that they have a strong opinion, but I think if you kind of like

actually unpack it, it doesn't make any sense what they're saying. So a lot of

these people want to have it both ways where they say this is a terrible project

and it's going to be worth nothing. But then they also say, wait a minute, this

is going to be really valuable and you're depriving Satoshi of this incredible

amount of property that's rightfully his because this is going to be so, this

eCash is going to be so, so, so valuable. So they kind of want to have it both

ways. They also kind of masquerade, they pretend as if like, oh, if we change

that detail, then they would be more open minded or more support. But a lot of

these people would have hated it anyway. Yeah, exactly. It's all fake. So that's

I think what they don't like is that it's what an ingenious decision it is

because we're sacrificing the chess piece. We're saying a lot of these people

are not going to like it. It's going to be, we know it's going to be

controversial, but now there's like something in it for the early supporters.

So now they kind of like, oh, wait a minute. Like they kind of like maybe they

want to change teams. They wish they'd been a supporter or something. But I

think that's all this is part of it. I think a lot of them are missing the

point, which is that like many rival projects gave nothing to Satoshi. So

like Solana gives nothing to any Bitcoiner, including Satoshi. And

there's like a 20% pre-mine for A16Z or whatever, which is perfectly fine. I'm

not saying that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying it's totally

inconsistent, the criticism. We want hard, Bitcoin, every Bitcoiner should

want more hard forks because we all get free money. It's great. We get free

money for doing nothing. And if there's a semi-privatized hard fork of this

style that I've invented, I mean, I think this invention will be copied. I

love, there'll be a lot of people launching forks like this because you

can raise a bunch of money and launch a fork like this. You raise it in

advance and you have, so if it's semi-privatized like this, this gives

people an incentive to launch, to make, create a fork that they think is good

and then launch. And this has many other benefits. If you launch, it's

ideal for everyone. It's ideal for the consumer, the end user. They want to

see a finished project when it launches. It's like if you go and you

want to buy an iPhone and then you buy it, but it's some assembly required

and you have to put it together. No, they want to see a nice little box. They

want everything to be done by the time they give it their attention, their

scarce attention, because we live in an age with TikTok and everything and

people don't have a lot of attention. So they want it to be a finished project

when they turn to it to consider it at the hard fork. So that

means it has to be really, really, really developed and finished before the

fork. You don't want it to be like Ethereum when it launches and

then it's completely unfinished and has to be finished over a period of six

years. And then you have a lot of wishful thinking and you have a lot of people

over-promising and then failing to meet those promises. So I think

that's a nightmare. So this is way better where we just work on it in advance.

We fundraise in advance. We finish it in advance. And by the time the fork

happens, it's actually launched. And I think it's just perfect. It's a

really wonderful idea. I'm not surprised that people have grabbed onto it,

but I think it actually ended up helping us a lot because people just couldn't

resist talking about it. So it got an unbelievable amount of media exposure

to this one idea. One other thing I'll mention is that I think it's kind of

funny if you just walk up to someone on the street and you tell them,

hey, there's this new fork. It's going to take Satoshi's coins. What do you

think? They're going to think, well, I don't like that. But they don't

understand everything else that's happened. So I think that's a

funny aspect of it. If you just walk up to people and say, hey,

do you think the government should raise your taxes? They're just going to say no.

But then if you go up to them and you say, hey, do you think the government

should build a park over here or improve the highways or improve the

schools? Then people just say yes. But it's like those are kind of like the

same thing. So you have to consider the whole bundle. It's like a package

deal. So there's a lot of funny stuff going on with that. But I think that's

fun. It's a fun... Yeah, I've gotten that question many, many times over the

last four years.

I bet. I guess it's a little bit of deviation from the social precedent

that's been set by a few points, right? By obviously Bitcoin Gold, SWE, I

think they all kept the one to one, right?

People are like trying to figure out what they think about it. But yeah, but

this is a big improvement because the pure fork means that everyone who

hated the idea and fought against it every step of the way and everyone who

worked hard to make it a success, that means those people are treated equally.

And then you're only going to live in a world where you rely on altruism and

you have to have an independently wealthy, altruistic person make the good

fork. And how many good forks are going to get made in that world? Far fewer.

So let's just privatize it a little bit. Some other obvious points, like

Xerces clearly abandoned these coins and he clearly would be just fine with

$600,000. Some of it is just you kind of think like, okay, yeah, we care

about property rights. Just because someone's rich, you shouldn't steal from

them. Obviously, everyone agrees with these things, but it's kind of like, I

do think it's funny that people have picked up on this one part. And it does

speak to, I think, just how uninspired people are. Are they really serious

about any of this? And of course the answer is no, because that's one of the

points I made, and you were nodding along, is about like, if we change this

detail, what, then all of a sudden these people would be like huge supporters?

Like, it's ridiculous, of course not. No, it's kind of like, whatever, the whole

thing's a farce. Why not just play it out?

No, totally. I think that's why I wanted to bring it out, because I felt

there's two sides to obviously every argument. But I felt like, hey,

just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it's actually a bad idea.

Getting $600,000 in e-cash that you didn't have before. So it's like, the whole

thing is kind of like, can you steal something that you just created

five seconds before? It's kind of like, the whole thing's kind of, but I think

it's fun. It's giving people a lot to think about. And I enjoy being

controversial to some small extent. I like the idea that I'm making people

think a little bit, so whatever.

I mean, I would have liked to see more. I saw a bit of that when I was doing

research, but I would have liked to see more of the technical debates, like what

type of application, drive chains, those type of things.

Yeah, but it's good for us to get any kind of, that was probably people who

wouldn't have talked about it at all, because talking about the technical

thing is really hard. You have to actually figure out what you're talking

about, and you might be wrong.

Let me ask you this wrap-up question, right? I've taken quite a bit of your

time, so let's wrap this up for this session. Love to have you back. But let

me ask you this thing, right? Where do you see e-cash in two years' time, right?

Do you think you'll follow the path of previous Bitcoin hard forks, with

amazing initial hype, and then fade it away somewhere? Or do you think it'll

become something more dynamic, thriving? What do you think will happen in two

years' time?

Well, I certainly hope it's a big success, but I think it's less than 50%

likely to succeed. So I just want to make that totally clear. This is something

of a long shot. I don't think it's that long, but it's certainly not guaranteed

to work, and it probably won't work. I don't really know why it won't work, but

it's just hard to make something, anything new, work at all. And so I'd just

like to clarify a few things, that I'm not selling my BTC. I see this as a very

important life, right? We're on the Titanic, and we're about to hit the

iceberg, and we need more life rafts. That's what this is. And maybe the

Titanic will just miss the iceberg, and we won't need the life rafts, and then

I'll look like a complete idiot, and everything will be fine. And that's what

I hope actually happens. I hope that that happens. That'd be great. But that

doesn't fit with all these stories we've been telling about how deranged everyone

is, everyone's lying about lightning. People don't even realize the extent to

which everything is screwed up, because they can't talk about it. So yeah, I

don't know. But I do think that the hard fork, yeah, the first day, and the first

month, and the first year, that's the big debut. And I think we've done a lot

of things that the previous, like the Bitcoin Cash didn't do. Even simple

things like we announced it in advance, whereas Bitcoin Cash, it was already

made, and then there was SegWit2x, and people, the large blockers were saying,

ignore Bitcoin Cash, because we got SegWit2x. And then later, like four

months later, they were like, oh, actually, we changed our mind for five

months, or whatever it was. So that's kind of weird. So I'm not doing that.

And we're not doing much other stuff, like we have it kind of finished.

So it should be ready on day one for people to start figuring out how they can

interface with it, and what they think of it. So who knows? But yeah, I think it's

more likely to fail than not. But of course, if it succeeds, if I'm right about even

half of the things that I'm claiming about how everyone wants side sheets,

everyone wants merge mine fees, the lightning doesn't work. If I'm right about even half of

these things, then it will slowly grow to dominate the whole, the entire crypto

industry. So it's kind of like less than 50% chance of success. But if it succeeds, it will

skyrocket into the top five, or even beyond. So that's kind of like the situation. And

I have no delusion about how difficult it will be, and unlikely. But on the other hand, I know

I've been a 24-7 member of the Bitcoin community for a very long time, like whatever, like 15

years or something. And yeah, I know just how screwed up everything is. It's very, very, very,

very screwed up. And we discussed only a few parts of it. But the culture is very deranged,

and we've got a lot of crazy people. And then we have just a lot of too many people who have

specialized, so they can't really even talk to each other. So you can't even talk,

technical people and miners and big stakeholders, they can't really even talk to each other anymore

because it's so big. And people have security details now, and people, they get too much email

spam, and they don't read it. And everyone's worried about what does everyone else think?

So I think it's poised for disruption, actually. I don't know if it'll be this project, and even if

this project is the maximum chance, I don't know if it will succeed. But yeah, there are an

enormous number of huge problems with BTC that everyone is in denial about, which is another

issue that people can't even talk about the problem. Because as you certainly know, if you're

just on social media at all, everyone just thinks, oh, everything's perfect at Bitcoin, and every

criticism is good. And the people, it doesn't matter if someone who is in Bitcoin for 15

years and is an elite technical commentator, someone who joined four months ago who

saw a YouTube video by someone, they'll think, oh yeah, of course, there is no security budget

problem or whatever. We don't need privacy at Bitcoin because we have treasury competence,

whatever. So that's kind of where we are. So yeah, I think I'm going to be optimistic.

But yeah, it is a difficult thing. It's a bit of a... It's kind of like you go to the roulette

wheel and you put it on the bottom third or something. Maybe you put it on... I'm thinking

we've got a 12% to 15% chance. But yeah, it's very asymmetric because what do we really lose

if it fails? It's kind of a little embarrassing. I already don't care about that. And it's like,

we're going to get a lot of attention on these ideas. So actually, we lose almost nothing. And

then we have this crazy upside. So I think it's quite a... And a hard fork after nine years,

right? Or roughly around nine years. So I think for a lot of people, it's exciting.