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All righty, all righty.

I'm tweeting it out right now.

Live with Paul Sztorc, Sztorc is the correct pronunciation, yeah.

Here we go.

Here we go.

Wait.

Hold on.

Hold on, Paul.

Let me properly tweet this out.

Here we go.

Here we go.

But then here we wait.

And then here we go again.

It is tweeted.

It's out there.

Yeah.

If you can retweet it on your end, that'd be great.

Okay.

Let's see it.

Sztorc.

Yeah.

I heard you mention it on a recent...

You don't have to do like...

It's not too much of a...

The SC is pretty normal, Sztorc.

Okay.

Okay.

Sztorc.

No, but the Polish, because I know, like, Żywiec, right?

Yeah.

It's exactly the same ending, or Dobranoc, which is good night.

Dobranoc.

Yeah.

I know some Polish.

So that ends in the same ROC.

ROC is basically the same.

Same thing.

I've been to Poland many times.

Beautiful place.

Really?

Mm-hmm.

All right.

I've actually never been.

I had a couple opportunities to go, and I didn't take any.

Really?

I got the closest I got.

Now I'm more surprised than you are.

Yeah.

You're a...

I'd really like to go.

I'm half Polish.

Yeah.

Okay.

I don't see it yet, so hopefully I got it.

Hopefully it'll come soon.

You know, every now and then I think, what's Elon doing to this site?

You know?

Yeah.

No, yeah.

You should definitely go.

We just had MoneroCon in Warsaw.

Yeah.

I wasn't there, unfortunately.

Okay, but yeah, you tagged me TruthCoin though, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Is that not your...

It is.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

I didn't see it.

Maybe I have to see.

Well, I'm sure we'll see it.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm sure we'll see it.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't blame you though.

I blame the...

I mean, it could be...

The duct tape they're using to hold this website together.

We can't complain though, right?

I mean, I guess we can.

It's great.

Well, you know...

That's a good point.

It's kind of like...

You should just be able to see it streaming though on X, no?

You don't see the MoneroTalk?

If I just go to MoneroTalk.

Search MoneroTalk.

Yeah.

Are we censored to that degree where you can't even find a stream?

It's interesting.

It might be worth looking into.

Yeah.

I think MoneroTalk and the Monero...

Our Monero accounts have been a victim of...

No, no, no.

You didn't...

You just did my name.

You didn't do...

No, I added TruthCoin though at the end.

I did though.

Oh, shit.

Really?

Okay.

I think you forgot.

I tried to.

All right.

I'll repost it now.

We did it.

You're going to get people riveting three minutes of technical support or whatever.

It's all right.

We're waiting for everybody to roll on in.

We got 40 live viewers.

Guys, like and share.

Hopefully it's not as difficult for you guys to find the stream as it is for us.

Yeah, I was watching the notification.

I tried to put in the add TruthCoin, I swear, at the end.

I don't know.

What the hell, man?

I really, really...

Huh.

X.

We got to blame it on X.

Blame it on Elon.

There's a lot of weird...

X does some pretty weird stuff sometimes.

You just think, what?

Yeah.

The thing where you go to click on...

It loads the tweets in and then you go to click on one and it loads a bunch of them.

It is just hard to be upset about it though, right?

Talk about first world...

It's amazing what's happening on X.

The access we have versus five, 10 years ago.

Everybody's there.

All the latest news.

The space...

Spaces are...

I love spaces, right?

This idea that everybody can just be talking live to each other.

We all know.

I mean, you and I do at least.

I don't know.

I'm not sure how we could maybe explain this to people who are super young, but yeah, when

the internet was just anonymous people, and this still happens, of course, but people

just talking over text and you can't see the other person's emotional reaction and they're

not like...

And the text is just hanging there forever.

People get into the flame wars and stuff.

But when you go into spaces, it's kind of like, oh, this is a real person.

I'm responsible for how I sound and in front of this audience.

So people conduct themselves much better.

Oh, yeah.

Night and day.

There's so much more nuance there.

And then obviously in person is even better, right?

That's ideal.

We got to get you to Monero Topia, man.

I would love to get you.

I think I tried to get you the last time when I had you on the show.

The last couple of them have been in Mexico City.

It's an amazing conference.

As long as it's in the winter.

Yes.

Usually, yeah.

It's always beautiful and warm down in Mexico City.

Vlad is with us, man.

Our culture, regardless.

Not sure who he's referring to, but nice to see Vlad.

I know Vlad, I'm sure he's had you on his show a couple of times, right?

That's right.

So, yeah, maybe we could break Vlad's record.

What was the longest show with you?

Probably like 12 hours or something.

Yeah, we're not doing that here.

We don't do that here.

We have a decently long show.

Probably an hour and a half is like a long show.

Try to keep it to an hour.

Sometimes we have like a crazy long show, but Vlad, I respect Vlad for his super long

form.

Longer isn't always better.

Yeah, no.

I think, though, there is definitely something to it that he's picked up on, which is that

the new podcast format, kind of like Trump was kind of like maybe the first podcast president

or something, you know, whatever you want to call it, because you had the first radio

president, then you had the first social media, probably the Ron Paul revolution, like all

that stuff.

Then you had Obama on Facebook, and then you kind of had Trump on Twitter.

Trump 1 was kind of like the first Twitter president in a way, but then there was a podcast

president.

Conway didn't go on Joe Rogan or whatever, but the long form, you know, there's just

a limit to how long you can like cumulatively bullshit someone.

So yeah, so I think that's what Vlad has kind of picked up on.

If you go like six hours, like they can't, you know, you can't just...

And if you know that you could go for six hours, you're not going to tell some lie early

on because you're going to think this is going to get unraveled over, you know, they will

look at it.

It's like the court, the court process is super slow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's so much to talk about, honestly, if you're, you know, super nerdy like we are

and actually really into this stuff, right?

So it's like, it's not forced.

I respect Manero talk too.

Thanks Vlad.

Thank you, man.

I appreciate that.

But yeah, we have Paul on today.

Somebody said I had to get you on to talk about, obviously, you got the side chains.

I was just checking, looking back in the archives, I had you on like two years ago and we were

obviously talking about the side chains and how you're theorizing them and the Bitcoin

community was never really accepting of the idea.

But I think at that time, I don't think you were even proposing to actually go make it

live essentially on your own.

I think that was before you had...

That's right.

Right.

And so maybe you could, I guess, first give a quick first intro of yourself.

Maybe not everyone on Manero talk knows who you are.

And then if you could tell us the general concept of side chains and what's happened

essentially since I had you on last time in terms of, now it looks like you're actually

going to try to go live with a fork of Bitcoin that's running side chains.

Basically, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist for like 15 years.

And I first met Riccardo Spogni, I met him at Sochi Roundtable 2 in person.

And he was like, oh, he's like, oh, I read your blog.

Because at the time, my blog was like super, super critical of like most things.

I was like, all these ideas suck.

So I was like, oh, I was like, oh, my God, am I going to get beat up or something now?

He was super, super nice.

He's like, yeah, I agree with everything that you said.

And so I've known him for a long time.

I don't remember when that was, but that must have been like 2014 or 2015 or something like

that.

So that was how long I was aware of Manero.

And of course, I was a huge fan of Bitcoin Uncensored.

And Manero basically had one of the few interviews to basically run the gauntlet and survive

the Bitcoin Uncensored interview.

And so I always had like kind of a positive opinion of Manero.

And then eventually, you know, as probably you guys know, it came to pass that.

So because I originally had heard about Bitcoin from the Silk Road article about like buying

drugs online.

And even though I wasn't interested in buying any drugs online, I was kind of like, what's

this all about?

Like, why can't they use the credit?

This is how little I understood about everything at the time.

I was like, why can't they just use a credit card like everyone else?

So it didn't really make sense to me.

But I was like, this is intriguing.

And in particular, I kind of was thinking, if people are buying hard drugs with this,

someone who's addicted to drugs, they would, you know, it must be ironclad.

You know what I mean?

It must be perfect, because they would obviously be trying to just grab any extra drugs they

could get, since that's their like mission in life when you become a drug addict.

So I was like, this whole thing must have been like totally worked out already.

And like when no one was paying attention, there's this whole TOR mark.

So that's that was kind of how I got first Bitcoin like came on my radar at all.

And then, of course, it came to pass that Manero, all these sites became Manero only.

Also it seemed kind of like I just look at the blink of an eye, because again, I was

not a regular customer, so to speak, of these of these sites.

But I was like taking a very serious interest in like tracking this down and say, like,

how does this work exactly?

And then it seemed to me like you just blinked and they were all not only were they accepting

Manero, but they were like Manero only.

And I was like, huh.

And so that was very intriguing to me.

And over time, it does seem like Manero people are like really putting in the hard work to

like actually build something slow and targeting the real heart and soul.

Because, of course, I hate to make this so long winded, but I think it's very, very

important. The Bitcoin Uncensored podcast, you know, it had like a lot of like rock

solid beliefs, some of which some of these were like if.

How should we say this? It's like if we compete with, you know, if we only compete for

the like white market.

The kind of everything that Venmo can do, then we're going to get roped into competing

with Venmo and we'll lose because all this blockchain stuff, the proof of work and the

signatures and all the stuff doesn't really do anything.

You know, we have to have this overhead.

We have to have the one megabyte block size limit.

Yada, yada, yada, like long list of things, all the stuff with the decentralized design.

So it was kind of like, yeah, whether you like it or not, you're betting your chip like

half of your army is deployed in the dark or gray market area.

And so that was the thinking back in 2016, and I think that was 100 percent correct.

And so it was like Monero is like capturing this.

This gray market and, you know, this is how I would explain Bitcoin to people, too, I'd

say, well, Bitcoin could be used for all these illicit things.

Every country has these different laws, some of them completely different from each

other. You know, you had like Amsterdam where many of these drugs were legal and then

other countries are very illegal.

Different countries pass completely different laws, like at different times, different

activities are decriminalized, you know, first with something, you know, 20 years ago

would have been a felony or 100 years ago, punishable by death is considered a human

right in a short time.

So it's kind of like, listen, you know, law or whatever.

And then Bitcoin can be used for all these things.

It doesn't matter if you or your trading partner wanted to do something.

That is a gray market or black market, and then in addition to that, Bitcoin can do all

of the legal things, so just network effect.

So that's basically how that was like my story, and then I saw I was very interested to

see that Monero is like taking that over about the side chains, the side chains is a

very old idea.

You know, Blockstream had this paper in 2014 and the original, yeah, there was this big

speech from like Reid Hoffman and blah, blah, blah.

You know, there's all this fanfare a long time ago.

And it was like, yeah, how do you get experimentation when people disagree?

The blockchain can't disagree.

But like, you know, it's like should the blocks be large or small, block size or, you

know, should we have this some type of privacy, should we have these ring signatures or

should we not? Because one makes it harder to audit the supply and one gives you more

privacy. So.

So this idea was, can we just like let people, we can have a different piece of software,

but the same 21 million coins.

And yeah, this is a pretty important idea, in fact, my opinion was back in 2014, 2015

that this is the most important idea, the most important technology for BTC.

And I still hold that view.

It's not just like something I'd prefer.

You know, this is like a super, super important matter of life or death.

And it also like it does lots and lots of things.

Like it doesn't matter if you screw up the L1 or if the L1 gets captured, they start

releasing bad software or even if the L1 is lazy or they make any kind of mistake because

now you escape on these different L2s.

People launch new L2s, the L2s compete.

The L2s can push, they can safely push the envelope of what you might do like with like

a Solana chain or like some kind of super large BSV style chain.

You can, whereas that would be ridiculous to put all of your eggs in one basket on L1.

But as an optional L2, it's a completely, it's a matter of night and day.

You know, it's like these are just options on the menu now instead of being something

you're forced at gunpoint to buy, where it would be theft if it was like you had to buy

the filet mignon every, that's like BSV.

You have to pay for the filet mignon every night with a large block size.

But now once it becomes an option and once it becomes, so I thought this was a complete

game changer for everything and it would kill all the altcoins because you wouldn't need

any altcoins. And in fact, it would kill the altcoin narratives as well because people

would say, oh, this is my great altcoin that has such and such, you know, has the EVM,

Ethereum virtual machine.

And then it's like, well, it doesn't matter.

So that's, those are some of my, that's some of my speed.

Okay. Yeah, there's a lot there.

And so, so now, now you're going ahead and launching it, right?

Like you've been working on the idea for a long time.

You've been trying to convince people in the Monero community to adopt the idea on

Monero as we know it.

But that hasn't happened.

I haven't really focused on Monero people that much.

I'm sorry, not Monero, Bitcoin, on Bitcoin.

You've been trying to get it adopted.

Because my view is just that Bitcoin would adopt this thing and then all this innovation

that the altcoin people are doing.

Just another thing that's changed is that in the past you had Litecoin, which is like

copy and paste to Bitcoin.

So it was a lot more.

We did, we did talk last show about how it would be great to potentially implement this

on Monero. I don't know, I don't know what the Monero community's response would be.

But what are you doing, though?

You're basically forking Bitcoin.

Yeah, it's a new hard fork of Bitcoin.

So it's comparable to like Bitcoin Cash split off type of a thing.

And yeah, it's the goal is to just either, you know, set a good example of what BTC should

do or just increase the competitiveness.

Or if, you know, if BTC is really because my new view that, you know, I've I've had this

view for kind of a long time, but I've just kind of waited, you know, desperately hoping

that things would get better. But actually, my new view is that the problems in Bitcoin

are cultural and they cannot like easily be fixed, even if you had like great technology

or even if you had because it's just very hard to fix a culture because culture is like

this weird thing that like everyone's brain like keeps producing every day.

And so it's kind of just like, you know, the vibrations are off.

I think the Monero people have a better idea of that than most people that like BTC is

kind of like, well, it's like a very it's the number one project and it's very serious.

But then you've got like this treasury companies and you've got like no one raises hell

when privacy devs go to jail.

There is a little bit of hell, but not enough.

Should be like a number one.

Should be like a number one priority.

But then you have people like kind of gutting it.

So, yeah, not Vlad, Vlad says Paul is Satoshi.

You say ask Paul about Robin Hanson and the game theory of drive chains.

Well, I'm not sure about I didn't know if Robin Hanson knows that much about but, you

know, like there is an idea of the competition, you know, really flips things around.

So like if you have if you live in a world where you just have like one guy in charge of

everything, you go to him with your idea and you say, you know, we should do marine

signatures for privacy or whatever.

And they say no, but the idea is actually good.

Well, now you've got two problems.

One is they're not doing a good idea, but the second one is now this guy is politically

inconvenient for you.

To succeed because it will embarrass the decision maker, you know, the king or whatever.

So competition changes everything, though.

So now when you get to say, well, I'll go to this, I'll just go across the street to this

other side chain and they can implement this idea, we try them all.

And now, you know, it's a good thing that it's embarrassing for the people who are

everyone has to think about, hey, listen, I got to really think about how this idea is.

Objectively.

And so that changes everything.

OK.

So you're what is the plan in terms of getting this off the ground?

And I guess you had met, right?

Your theory has always been kind of one chain to rule them all.

Right. And that's the whole concept of side chains.

And then that's really going to replace the altcoin ecosystem.

But you are effectively creating an altcoin right now in theory.

Right. Or I guess the original Bitcoin will then be the altcoin and this becomes the one

and only. But overall, are you like how max maximalism or how maxi are you with regards

to that point? I mean, has that have you has that changed?

Do you think there will be a few protocols like base layer protocols or do you think

it will eventually be one chain to rule them all with side chains?

I think it's the difference between one chain to rule them all, one coin to rule them all.

One coin. Actually, side chains are different chains and I'm in favor.

And this is part of the beauty of it is that, yeah, in order to be future proof, you would

need lots of different competing software teams, people who like each other and have

different ideas about what's best.

And that's the essential ingredient, because, you know, we're never going to be at like

at the finish line of technology.

People always disagree. People always be inventing things.

And so that's that's a very important part of the like picture is that you have many

different chains. But I still think it would be one coin.

Like that's that's crazy to me.

Really? You think you still.

Let me ask you this. Why do you think it's so crazy?

Because it's not one coin now and like, I don't know, it's just, you know, there's

multiple languages in the world.

There's multiple religions in the world.

Right. You know, that concept, like, right.

Why would there be just one?

I don't know the exact figure, but if you can look at a chart of languages in the world

and something like every 10 years, something like 10 languages go permanently extinct or

something. So it's trending towards one language eventually.

And it's something language based is, you know, that has a lot of sunk cost already,

like every road sign and every law, you know, like the laws in Poland would be like

written in Polish and whatever the place and stuff like that.

So that's like a hard thing to there's a lot of staying power for a really small

staying power for a really small language, even though it's the smallest.

I think with money, it's like even the smallest, the smallest money, the smallest

coin is at a big disadvantage.

Most of the altcoins that are small, they just bleed out.

The small gets smaller and the big get bigger.

Even today, Bitcoin, BTC is, you know, it's more than four times bigger than Ethereum.

And it's Bitcoin is bigger still than everything else combined, still mostly even

today. So English is, you know, you can look at there was like the British Empire, but

there were many empires over the years.

You know, there was like whatever we can name them all.

But there are a lot of different empires.

In time of the Roman Empire, there were many more languages in time of the British

Empire. And then after World War Two, even in with the Internet and the connectivity.

So when people do like a business transaction between like Germany and France, the

contracts are usually like in English.

So English is taking over English when people when I visited Europe.

Sure, sure. I mean, to right.

But the fact is there are multiple languages, right?

Like, yes, maybe, you know, we could theorize as to eventually there might be one.

But the fact is, right now, there's multiple and there has been for as long as

mankind has existed.

Well, you asked me about what will happen.

I didn't say, yeah, you're asking about right now.

Do I think there is more than one cryptocurrency?

Of course, the answer is yes.

And but you understand that, of course, like this happened even in an age before mass

media and before the Internet.

You know, it was it didn't take long for people to have really strong accent

differentiation just because some people had different ways of speaking, like they

could have been 10, 20 miles away, but they they had different accents and certain

slang and stuff that could come and go.

So it's easy to believe that, you know, 8000 years ago, everyone would be speaking

like a slightly different language.

That's very, very, very, very, very easy to believe just because the speed at which

language travel around the world was different from the speed at which it would

travel like from generation to generation.

And so that's you know, it's very easy to imagine that there would be.

Many languages from people who are, you know, people in Australia and people in

Yeah, no, I get the point. I get I totally get the point. But do you think that maybe so if there is this one one coin, right, eventually to rule them all, the the base layer protocol, do you think it needs to be fungible and private? The one that effectively wins? Or do you think something like Bitcoin is good enough? That's not really fungible?

I think privacy is an important feature for the system to have. I think I agree with the 2016 Bitcoin Uncensored argument that if we don't have like a subversive privacy, then we're actually holding like kind of an empty bag, really. Because it doesn't have that teeth, you know, like we could have. So if the system doesn't have privacy in it somewhere, you know, it's not going to be fungible.

To some extent, and it doesn't have the property rights, like the having a wallet that has private keys that only you generated the randomness. But I don't think the privacy, it's I don't think it's possible or necessary or desirable. Or as I said at first, even possible for the privacy to be everywhere, because you can always opt out of privacy, even if it's completely private.

You can always say, here, I'm going to make my private transaction, but I'm also going to register it in this public completely. I'm also going to tweet, for example, I just bought this with Monero. But if I tweet that out, I take a picture of it. So you can always opt out of privacy. And so that means just from a philosophical dimension.

The privacy is always optional, because you can always opt back in to the surveillance world. So there's no such thing as like a mandatory. To me, there's no such thing as like a mandatory privacy. So I don't think it's that important that we have layer one privacy or.

But from a fungibility standpoint, I get what you're saying, like you could always opt out of privacy, but effectively that default privacy is what gives you fungibility. Or do you think you could have fungibility without that?

I think the monies, the different cryptocurrencies and all the fiat currencies also, they're all in like a big tournament, like a Super Smash Brothers Melee or something, you know, and so they're all going to fight. And yeah, if one can offer more fungibility, it will have an edge over one that can't, where it's like, oh, yeah, like someone is trading.

Something where there's like just someone's trading antique clocks or something. And you're like, is this clock real? Are people going to really respect this pocket watch the same as the other pocket watch? And no one's going to want that stigma.

The fungibility would be key. My conception of it is that we have L1, which kind of resembles BTC. And then you can send the coins without talking to anyone else. This is just with the software. You send the coins to like a private L2. In our case, we have one that's based on Zside, the orchard crate from Zside.

Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting, but why wouldn't you, because you kind of just said it yourself, right? Like it's a Smash Brothers, you know, fight to the death, right? And one of the advantages is the fungible one will probably have an advantage over the others in the long run. So wouldn't you want this, you know, wouldn't you want the base layer to basically be in, I hate to say it, encrypted Bitcoin versus unencrypted Bitcoin?

If we could start over, maybe, but I think...

But you effectively are, right, you're, you are forking at this time. So couldn't you make changes like this if you wanted to?

I wish I could fork everyone's mind, you know, that would be good. But it's kind of like, you know, like what if we were designing a new language from scratch? English is actually kind of a terrible language. You know, they had like Esperanto and some of these languages that are very, very...

Monero is based on Esperanto.

Yeah, someone told me that. I forgot about that, but that's cool.

Yeah, the original name for Monero was actually Bit Monero. Bit Monero, so Bitcoin and Esperanto.

Yeah, that's neat. I didn't know that. And English is like this weird, I don't know if you're interested in such things, but English is, of course, it started as like Anglo-Saxon, ye olde English with be and vow and all this weird other stuff like that.

And then it got, the French invaded it, so the French Latin words got merged in. And then through the British Empire, like it just absorbed a bunch of words like in kind of like a chaotic way. And so English is actually like a horrendous language to learn. A lot of people understand that.

Exactly.

That like, you know, it's these poor people, like when people come from like, you get like baseball players from like Central America or something, like they can only speak Spanish and they try to learn English and they're like...

Polish is not that easy either, though. Polish is difficult for different reasons, though, I guess.

Polish sounds like just like non-tense language. Yeah, it just sounds like Dr. Seuss book or something to English people.

But wait, so let me fully understand, though, because from what I'm understanding from what you're saying is like ideally, yes, you would like Bitcoin base layer to be encrypted, but...

Bitcoin is a brand and everyone knows about it and lots of people have studied the software. And so every change you make to the BTC software is something that you have to be, you have to know is good. You have to implement it right. You have to explain it to everyone else and you have to be confident that they would be able to explain the change.

All of that is too much, too much what you might call baggage or it's just it's not possible. So every change ways is like multiplied by a million.

And that's like if we were going to try to start over with English, we could come up with a better language.

But everyone is already speaking English. Everyone is raising their kids to speak English because everyone's expecting other people will raise their kids to speak English because everyone expects this is going to be the language that of international business and the number one military of the world and of all the movies will be in English.

And so there's too much of a network effect with BTC software code. And so I think that we should take advantage of that. There's multiple different network effects that they all network effect in there, but they're completely different categories of thing.

So this is kind of like, oh, would we really want to redesign?

Whatever, Ubuntu.

So if anything, you would have to be that like Zcash or Monero ads, ad side chains. Right. And that's where we would see this competition play out.

Yeah. The door is still open for an altcoin to win. And it could definitely be like Monero or Litecoin or something like that, because if I'm right about the cultural damage in BTC, it's kind of like it will just accumulate.

It's kind of like an airplane that's been like taking off, but then now it's kind of like leveling out and going down. So it's only a matter of time before it crashes into the ground and all the passengers die in a fiery explosion, metaphorically speaking, of course.

But it's like the cultural problems in BTC are a situation where the people in BTC have taken the wrong ideas and they've become like a self-perpetuating virus.

And so they're just spreading like geometrically. So it's probably already I think it might already be too late to save BTC, but we're going to still try to also do that.

I'm curious. So which cryptos do you see as being contenders, at least in that area, that could, if it weren't Bitcoin and something else, were able to take over?

One of the reasons why I'm hard forking is that no one is doing it quite the way I would do it. So I'm saying this is my personal take on it.

So one of yours is a contender, right?

I would say this is what we should do. So for what I'm doing, the L1 is just a copy of Bitcoin Core. So I say, listen, there's nothing wrong with Bitcoin Core, the software, but the people behind Bitcoin Core are not that great.

And the culture and everything is all being driven into the ground. But like I said, I don't want to have to explain or justify any decision. So we'll do that.

And then there's the idea of these modular L2s. So that's kind of like my take on what would be the best. I think it's hard to say because we would want more information on what is tried and what fails.

So we'd want to figure out like why don't people like, for example, Monero. I'm not saying that people don't like it, but it's sort of like it's currently lower on the leaderboard. But the question is why?

It's going up right now. It's flying high right now.

Yeah. So it depends on the theory of why and if that theory is right. So that's kind of a non-answer. But it's like, the question is why is Monero down?

But I mean, people do like it. Like we said, it's the most used crypto on the dark market. So it's like literally the most loved.

Right. And I was going to say like people have said things like, well, OK, Monero is so it's so private that exchanges don't want to touch it like right now. So it has a disadvantage. It has an it appears to have has a there's an illusion that it's not as liquid.

But actually, this is just like a temporary thing once blah, blah, blah, swaps and stuff are figured out and then they will come. The floodgates will open. That could all be completely true.

I do think it is a very good sign. And then I thought it was hilarious when the Monero did like the Lord's work just by existing when there was the Michael Saylor interview with Peter McCormick.

I don't remember if that was I think that must have been was it after we were on or did we talk about it then? Because I just think it's so funny. And it's when he said, maybe you do need a Monero.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's like, yeah, the market will determine that. And then talk about it. So I think the key will be who I think the key, though, is who can grow the most. You know, it is about adoption.

And I think the Monero people are correct to bet on that each of the things will have their own little micro network effect.

Like, you know, once the once the darknet market, whatever you want to call it, like evil overlord type archetype hacker person, once they set it up with Monero, they're not going to want to take more time to look into some other new coin and be like, oh, it's this other coin and then add that one.

So there's a lot of things, you know, they have these set up costs. And so they that has some network effects. So if you deploy your troops to get the darknet part, and then this is what I was saying before about my original argument to people about why Bitcoin would be valuable.

They would say, well, hey, this thing is used by every criminal in the world. And you can also use it if you're not a criminal. And then it's like, well, that's that's a very strong. That is a very strong. That's a capturing the high ground or the, you know, the commanding heights, as they used to call it.

But so that's, that's a really good strategy, but it will be about growth. So if there's a way of getting, you know, the A16Z flavor growth and the coinbase exchange flavor growth and all the Michael Saylor.

Well, that's what Zcash is focusing on, right?

And then they're saying, like, the main message is like, oh, just don't break Bitcoin or whatever. It's like, you know, that's what these people think, like opt-in, op-nop, soft fork upgrade, where we've done many, many times and that's opt-in and reversible and ignorable. That's like what they think you could break Bitcoin with something like that.

It's a culture of fear. It's a culture of ignorance, superstition. You know, the hatred of the soft fork is like a superstitious, like being afraid of a black cat or something. And yeah, you see. So, yeah. How far can the culture go when you have this kind of this idiocy is running the show? And the same with Michael Saylor where, you know, today he was saying about like, oh, I never said anyone.

They're like in the dark ages over there.

And it's like, yeah, this is like Rasputin or whatever, where it's like, you know, this is like weird. These weird people have shown up and we're just going to follow everyone over a cliff if we don't. You know, the termites are spreading and they're eating the house and collapse and kill everyone.

So how do you plan on rolling this out so it achieves the growth, the needed growth, right? Because, I mean, you're starting from essentially zero here. So how do you see that playing out?

I'd just like to reiterate, I think our chances of success are low, but it's still like, you know, worth doing. I saw a cool video about Elon said the odds of starting Tesla. He said something like, yeah, our odds of success are like less than 10%.

So I was like, well, that's the right attitude, because obviously if we succeed, we flip BTC and go to like whatever. So it's like a hundred million X positive and then it's like minus 100% if it's a complete failure.

So, you know, but it's a pretty good gamble.

Yeah. So it's like, and, you know, we got to get the message out and we have to. So, but yeah. So for starters, you don't want to like be turning people away. So this is the idea that the L1 will be the same as Bitcoin Core. People say, hey, are you going to just like screw up all this stuff that I like? And then they tell us, no, we're not going to delete anything that anyone likes.

So if you like your silly lightning or something, I hate all this stuff, but it'll still be there. Segwit and Taproot, whatever. It'll still be there. We'll keep it the same as Bitcoin Core now and forever. Then the same for the L2s. The L2s, like, you know, for the privacy L2, we just take the Zcash Orchard Crate. Turns out that was the one that had the catastrophic bug, you know.

But, you know, they fixed the bug. We also fixed it. So we copy it. So we're just marking everyone, you know, it's open source. And so that's the idea is, you know, and the issue is that these communities grow and then there's people agree for a while and they say, oh, we agree that privacy is good. But then they say, oh, should we keep it narrow? Should it be whatever, Zcash? Or should it be something else?

And then you have these situations where, you know, you have Bitcoin, then Ethereum shows up. But then there's like another Ethereum, you know, there's like Avalanche and then there's like Solana and then there's like whatever. So you kind of have like a live by the fork, die by the fork type of a thing.

So the idea of the sidechain is whatever you want, as long as someone can code it somewhere, as long as it exists, you know, you can have that as an optional L2. You can try to get users. Everyone has the same coin. So that's the first thing is you want to turn people away, you know, like that's what most every project currently does is turn people away.

I wouldn't say that about Monero specifically, but you see kind of what I mean, especially in BTC, the toxic culture is like, you know, we're scaring the customers away at the front door.

Big time. And that's part of a misguided attempt to protect the culture. Really, that's, I think that's really no different from, you know, what you might call like SJW recreational sadism, kind of. It's really the same thing. It's the same kind of sanctimonious like, oh, this is for the greater good. It's just an opportunity to like be a huge jerk to people.

But yeah, I was a maximalist for a long time. I just like to finally say that, again, that was because like in the situation with Litecoin, it was like Satoshi does all this work to create Bitcoin from nothing.

Then you copy and paste that, which takes five seconds, and you change the block time from 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes. And then you say this is a whole second thing. And it's like, not really, if you really think about it. So that was kind of the origin of the toxic maximalist.

Now, that world is a million miles from a world where it's like Monero has chosen to fight for privacy. And Bitcoin has just decided like we're just not going to do anything at all for 10 years. We're going to do Segwit and Taproot to support Lightning. And then we're going to lie to everyone and say that Taproot improves privacy.

I'm sure that must have been very annoying for Monero people. It was annoying for me to hear. I was like listening to this and I was like, oh, my God.

Our argument about the cooperative close looking like a normal transaction, like anyone cares about that at all. And like that's remotely comparable to like the privacy that Monero and ZK has.

So first, I want to turn to people away. We have a situation where all these people are interested. They're joined. They want to join a winning project. You have network effects. So people are thinking, which project is going to be number one? How can I join that project now? People want to buy something low.

So you have a lot of great ingredients. You know, the developers are always like coming up with stuff like for free. They just like to come up with stuff. You have a huge PhD like world now. You didn't have that before. A lot of stuff has already been built.

Like the ZKash Orchard Crate, the stuff that already exists. It didn't even exist before. It would have been impossible to do back in 2017 to say, oh, we're going to do a privacy. You'd have to invent it all yourself.

So that's a good start. And you have people who want to find diamond in the rough. So people who want to join. Then, you know, you have to kind of try to build like a kind of critical mass. You know, you have to do it in stages like the rocket, like the starship.

You have the booster and then you have the other. So you have to do it like, you know, stage by stage by stage. But yeah, I don't know if we'll succeed. But yeah, we're going to try. So first, you know.

Go ahead. Continue.

So like the first stage is like make sure the path is clear. And then the next stage is like launch successfully.

You want to have. So, you know, you want to make sure that. So for one thing that we're doing is the transactions on the BTC side are being replayed in the ZKash side.

So you have like you're tying for the transactions also in addition to having the same code. And they just try to staple in these other things that people want. You have this that the sidechain ideas is kind of like a ratchet or a flywheel where it's kind of like.

If you if the thing is making more transaction fees for miners, then why not do it? And so you have a situation where developers know what they should aim for. You know, let's make a great L2 that people will actually pay a transaction fee to use.

The user pays the fee, the miner collects the fee, and then everyone can go up happily.

It would not be possible to succeed if these other projects were not making huge mistakes. So like if BTC were run competently, it would be impossible to compete with it.

But luckily for I suppose, I think it's really unlucky actually. I would prefer it if we didn't have to do this, but it's being run in a terrible sense.

We have all these ideas that could be great. They're being just chased out of town and for no reason because they pose zero risk. They add a lot of benefit. And yeah, you have weird political stuff going on in Bitcoin Core and in the culture.

Do you foresee anybody that's like mining Bitcoin will now start mining?

I see the miners as followers. So if the price is high, to create the fork, the difficulty will be dropped down. So the miners will subtract. They'll say, what's the market price? And then what's the cost?

The market price times the coins per block. So basically you have the revenue of the block and the cost of the block. That's a weird way of putting it, but every miner will just subtract and then they'll mine.

So when the difficulty is very low, they could mine lots and lots of blocks for cheap. For like a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of their hash rate, they could mine many blocks, small amount of electricity.

So it doesn't matter as much that the blocks will be worth whatever it is, 1% of 1% or even less, 1 10,000 or 100,000. The block will be worth a lot less, but the cost will also be down.

And if that number is a big gap, some people will mine. It will then be up to the market to decide to some extent if the market price is very high or if it starts going up, there'll be more mining. If the market price is very low, then they will not be very much mining.

Is there a way to have a merge mine with Bitcoin?

There is, but I think it's all about the end game. And there's no reason for anyone to go out on a limb for this project unless it can actually win. And if it's merge mined, you won't be able to kill off BTC without killing this project also. So they won't really be competitors.

Do you know what I mean? You need a real competitor because it's a long shot, but it's like what if you go into the casino and you go to roulette and you put it on 17. And then they have the casino as a policy that says, well every time you win by hitting the number, the 35 to 1, you've got to give all the money back or you've got to donate it to charity or something.

Well, no one would even bother. So we need it to be a long shot that actually pays off. So if it's merge mined, that would help it survive at first, but that would rob it of the weapon it needs to kill BTC off in the end game.

And that's because BTC has this very, very low transaction volume because no one's using it. Partially because we run this huge campaign against the user and we say we don't want any people using it. So this is like the hatred of ordinals, the hatred of whatever, everything. So this is like everything we've done over the last 10 years is we're trying to drive the user away.

So the transaction fee volume is very small. And in my conception of BTC plus all these L2 merge mined chains, you have unlimited block size in the sense of adding all the different chains together. So even though at each time there's a finite block size, there's no actual, you can always add more, collect more fees.

So the idea is that with this chain there would be something like geometric increase in fees. So maybe it starts small, but it grows 10% every year because you just get more and more users every year, which is the same way like Gmail and all this other stuff would grow. You know, most normal things would grow that way.

And as long as you pull that off, it just means in the end game, eventually the transaction fee rate is growing by so much that even within a two week period, it will grow much more. It would be many multiples of the entire BTC fee rate. And that would suck all the miners over to this network and that would kill off the old BTC network.

But it can only do that if this network is really actually more popular. So that's very unlikely, but it's possible. And I don't know what else to do. Honestly, the question is, do we just like complain or do we just do nothing? Do we just cash out? I know a lot of Bitcoiners would just cash out. So the question is, what else should we do? Right? Just go all in on Monero, right? I suppose.

Yeah, do that. Welcome aboard.

Again, I respect completely the Monero software, the Monero idea, the Monero culture, the Monero user base. You know, the fact that any people can survive.

If you're going to go all in on something, you might as well be, you got to be in the top five.

Because despite its market cap compared to others, its utility is in the top five, I would say, top three.

I would agree with you there.

Yeah.

Because the real utility is who's actually paying the transaction fee, who's actually using the network to actually transact. So I would completely agree with you there.

The stable coins are probably beating everyone.

Right.

But then near the top would be Monero. I would completely agree. It's certainly beating, you know, I don't even know, Aptos or whatever, you know, whatever.

Right.

So no offense to that.

What is your Zcash take?

Well, OK, so here's the thing is when I made the Z, when I made the privacy L2, like it could have been like Monero based or Zcash based.

And I thought, well, Zcash was originally this fork of BTC, so it's like a little easier.

It was like Monero was like kind of like completely different from scratch.

So the Monero, the community and the privacy in practice is clearly better because you need something where, you know, you have a lot of like extra users that you're mixed in, like the anonymity set, as they call it.

And so that's really important. But the Z, it seemed to me like the Zcash altcoin people were very serious about like heads down, doing like a bunch of PhD, like what do you want to call it?

Like, like research to make it so that the actual technology would be super, super private.

So Monero was like you only have the nine decoys. And then for Zcash, you had the like you were in the same shielded pool as everyone else.

So it seemed like it was more impressive. And then a lot of the problems with Zcash were kind of like, you know, like the dev tax and all this weird stuff that you could just like include.

So that was easy to just like. So I thought that they were actually.

Initially, they had the trusted setup. That was also a big. Right. No, no.

They got rid of that eventually. But they got rid of that. Yeah.

So yes. So then what is your overall.

So how do you how do you compare, I guess, Zcash to Monero ultimately?

Well, obviously, in practice, you would use Monero to actually do something with that.

But I still think the Zcash people were I mean, didn't they almost light the way to some extent because Monero is now doing the whole chain proof idea or something.

Full chain ownership proofs. Yep.

And so that is, you know, an admission or I don't know if that's the right word, but it's kind of like, yeah, the technology can keep improving, become more private and, you know, more resource efficient and stuff like that.

So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think you guys are right to say that actually, you know, the tech doesn't doesn't matter as much.

We actually have this community of real people using Monero, which is growing.

That's like what I was talking about. It's like, yeah, that can grow 10 percent each year and everything else is splitting the vote.

You know, so here's my new product. Here's my other new product. Oh, this is 15.

Here's the new in 2027, the 15 new privacy products that all have 0.1 percent of the privacy market.

But then there's Monero that has like 48 percent and it just gets a little bit bigger each year.

Then it will win. I don't know if you have any other more specific question about about either of the two.

What do you think about the Zcash exploit that was found?

See, it's fun. You've got to do it because you have, you know, you've got to show and everything.

But it's like everyone's just using this as an excuse to just dunk on them, which is fine.

No, I didn't really see it. I didn't really see it that way, to be honest.

Because, you know, I think anybody could be susceptible to this, to what we're seeing with AI, where you're finding flaws in people's code.

I guess the main difference here is it's a flaw where it can't necessarily be proven that it wasn't exploited already in the past.

That's that's the issue.

Well, OK, this word proof, you know, the word proof is doing a lot of work in that sentence because there is some evidence that it was not,

which is that no one dumped the Zcash like there's not like you think.

Yeah, if someone found it, they would think it's only if I found this.

It's only a matter of time before someone else finds it.

Right. To be able to make secret shielded Zcash.

So what am I going to do? Just sell like a hundred bucks every week for like a year or am I just going to make a bunch and then just dump it all?

You know, like so that didn't happen.

So I think that is actually a pretty not it's not necessarily.

Like conclusive or whatever you want to call it, it's not like an open and shut case.

But that does make it seem like it wasn't exploited.

And also, but it was kind of like it was kind of hard to find.

So they had like a world renowned type class of code auditor using the cutting edge technology.

And they found it and they exposed it.

So, yeah, it's only a matter of time before I think a lot of us are going to find that.

Yeah, my reaction was, OK, let's run that.

Let's run that AI against Monero's code base like right now.

Judge not lest ye be judged, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Which Monero I heard, you know, people have been doing that.

SecOne did that recently.

I mean, I don't know to what level, but so so far a good sign.

But yeah, so I think we share an opinion there in terms of reaction to it.

So what other side chains will be launching with Zcash?

Zside is like launching when you launch it?

That's right.

You can try it now with fake Signet coins.

So try it out if you want.

People want to check it out.

So what other side chains will there be?

We have one that's optimized just for transaction throughput.

So it's kind of like a large block, like super fast.

That's for just raw scaling, but no special privacy.

That one's kind of like a Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV type of a thing or whatever.

What have you, you know?

I have one based on Namecoin.

I always thought Namecoin was this great idea, but Namecoin just kind of like also.

Maybe you are. Maybe you are, Satoshi.

Okay, Satoshi was a co-inventor of Namecoin.

I used to tell this like Bitcoin Magazine had a policy on who was allowed to speak at the big conference, like the Bitcoin Magazine conference.

And I was like, technically, guys, your policy would clearly prohibit Satoshi because he invented Namecoin.

He was a shill for Namecoin.

He invented merge mining.

He did all this stuff.

And so, yeah, this Namecoin idea is a really cool idea.

And it's related to all these problems that we have that are adjacent to privacy, like deplatforming and shadow banning that we were joking about.

Like you own, to some extent, you own the name Monero Talk, but not really because, you know, whatever.

Elon could take it from you.

So, of course, we have some competition among these different social media sites, but then sometimes we have collude, massive collusion.

And the idea that you could just own the name and you have this brand and that people always have a way of reaching you.

They always have a way of like downloading your Web page.

There was a way of emailing you encrypted email or sending you money or getting your BTC address, reusable Z address or whatever else the case may be.

I think that's a pretty big game changer also.

And I always thought that idea was totally underexplored.

And it was so cool when you read about in 2010, all these the OG Bitcoiners who were like hacking on Namecoin, like making this thing.

It kind of didn't really go anywhere, even though it reappears from time to time.

And like the Paynims from like they're so very close, not quite, but that was like a reusable thing that was close, very close to like a Namecoin type of a thing.

And then we had like the Ethereum ENS or whatever it was called.

And then they had like the money button, Bitcoin SV or a cash tag or whatever this was called.

So people keep kind of like reinventing it slightly.

And it's pretty cool.

And I think, you know, that's pretty neat.

And what makes you think it will succeed on eCash?

Like what will be the differentiator there?

I wrote an essay and then I about it's called Bit Names.

And I explain all this.

And then parts, I think part seven of the essay was more than five years old.

But I say this is called how to take on ICANN and win.

And there's ICANN is, of course, who does all the things, StreamYard.com or Google.com, ICANN.

They run this name thing.

When you go on GoDaddy or whatever and you buy the domain name, you kind of buy it from them.

Speaking very loosely, skipping over a lot of details.

But I have a plan.

It has nothing to do with eCash.

It has nothing to do – anyone could do this plan.

I just think this is a great plan.

Everyone should do it.

It's basically you hard fork the ICANN database and you say, okay, the software will resolve either thing, the two types of name either way.

So if you have Google.com, that's the ICANN world.

And then if you have Google.bit or Google.anarchy or something, it will be resolved the cypherpunk way.

But it will do either one.

And I basically say there's like a system that is like constantly synchronizing the ICANN stuff.

Because the idea is to respect people's property rights.

It's like these people bought Google.com.

They're not going to want to switch to some new thing.

They would hate that.

They would have to buy Google.com again.

That would never, ever work in a million years.

They would never do that.

So my idea is keep everyone's ICANN names the same permanently and also keep syncing it across.

But make it so that if you go to the BitNames server, the Namecoin server, it will serve either one.

And so now you've got everything you had before plus.

You know what I mean?

You've got this plus.

And now once you're in this new world, why would you pay with the other domains?

You've got to renew them every year.

Not only do you have to buy them, but you've got to pay whatever, $7 a year to renew them all.

Before they had Let's Encrypt and all that stuff.

People had to pay for SSL and all that stuff.

People don't really do that anymore.

But that was wild.

You had to pay like $5 a month to have HTTPS or something.

That was all crazy.

And so the idea is once you're in the thing, once you have everything you had before, now you can also have.

So this is now a huge upgrade for, like, for example, the darknet markets.

Because as you probably know, almost certainly know, the darknet markets have a big phishing problem.

Because it's just like this blah, blah, blah string of characters.

And then they say send these coins.

And so under my scheme, they could have whatever, Silkroad.Bit.

And they'd own that, and then you'd be able to send money to that also.

So you never get to send money to the wrong person.

You send it to Silkroad.Bit.

It goes to some address, but that's under the hood.

So, yeah, it's a pretty big upgrade for the private world, the dark world.

It's basically the same as when the internet switched from these IP addresses to actual domain names.

And obviously, for a regular person, that's a huge upgrade to the user experience.

But it's more than just the user experience.

People really get phished.

You can watch videos of people trying to scam other people, which is sometimes very entertaining.

But then they say, yeah, send this money to me at Kraken.

And you don't know.

Like the Bitcoin address is some garbled character.

The Monero address is some garbled character.

But under this scheme, it would be like send it to Kraken.Bit or something or Kraken.Coin or whatever.

I guess that's an ICANN one now.

So it would have to be something that's not an ICANN top-level domain.

So now you could send messages.

Like you could text or e-mail.

It's the same thing, whatever.

And you can then send money to the person.

So this is a big upgrade as far as the phishing angle where people are replacing the address.

They're attacking your clipboard.

They're doing all this crazy stuff.

So I think that, you know, again, there's no guarantee.

And I hate for this to be like the Paul's Wacky Ideas project.

That's really not what I'm trying to do.

I think the scaling and the Z side, I'm hoping that's like the bread and butter.

But then, you know, I also have all these other things.

And, again, it's not even like it's really my idea because, of course, Namecoin was other people's idea.

And I'm just saying, like, let's tune this up and let's send it out.

So it's going to have the scaling coin, Namecoin, Z side.

What else?

The problem with Namecoin was it was an altcoin.

And so people didn't know what to make of it.

They're like, I have to buy this other coin.

Are there going to be like a million other coins?

So this is the origin of maximalism in a way.

It was like kind of like, oh, this would be worth it.

I have some others.

I have one thing that I was famous for a long time ago, even before sidechains.

I have a big interest in prediction markets.

So I was the original person saying we should put these prediction markets on Bitcoin.

I was saying that back in 2013 and 2012.

Really?

And so I was a huge proponent of this idea.

And you can read all about it.

So I had this idea for bringing them to Bitcoin where I think I'm like a top expert in the world.

Like, so I was really, really and even I was back in 2012.

So the whole time I've been, you know, we've kind of been like the prediction markets of making some headway, including in the last two years.

I've been going way up in notoriety and kind of recognizability.

So I have that project as well.

And then I have another one that's basically like it's kind of like in my head.

It's kind of like a tether, like a stable coin.

But really, you can do any assets.

You could do any kind of NFT, ordinal, whatever thing.

So I call it BitAssets.

But really, it would be for the stable coins because if you can't get that sweet, sweet stable.

How about like the programmability, like something that's programmable?

We had something called EthSide, which was Ethereum gas, but as a side chain.

But I personally lost interest in it.

And I just I don't find it that interesting because what do people actually do with the programmability?

They do, you know, basically tether stable coins.

They do the Ethereum name system.

They do the stuff that I was already actually interested in.

So I personally wasn't that interested.

But I'm sure that someone will bring that back because you got to have that EVM.

Everyone loves the EVM, except for me.

So I think.

Everybody loves the EVM.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah.

You can have Trump coin on there as a side chain.

Well, OK. To that point, there was Trump coin and Melania coin.

Those were Solana Pump.Fun meme coins.

This whole meme coin idea that was originally, you know, the Bitcoin.

You know, so like Tether was is Omni, but that was originally MasterCoin.

So all this stuff was originally people thought about.

This is the tragedy is that the Bitcoin is always super early.

So people are thinking, oh, how can you put stocks and bonds?

I can put collectibles. I can put like concert tickets on the blockchain.

And it was kind of like the technology wasn't there for that.

But what happened was, you know, the technology eventually got there

and then you couldn't do it on BTC, mostly for cultural reasons.

You notice when people finally do do it on BTC, they get run out of town.

The ordinals people. But they're also like this is the most culturally interesting.

The ordinals was like, you know, they had a lot of users and they had a lot of

like podcasts and like debates and like stage presence on like the conferences.

That was like a thing that people actually talked about.

And then the people actually started using the BTC blockchain.

You know, it caused fee rates on L1 to go up just a tiny smidge.

This immediately bricked all that lightning stuff because it's all a bunch of junk.

And actually, so it only works when you don't use it and you look at it too carefully.

You know, it's like a Wizard of Oz. He's like behind the curtain.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

So. These were all things where, you know, these were like real.

It's kind of like in one sense, it's like the Paul Swartz wacky ideas project.

But in other sense, it's like the obvious things that are not even invented by me,

that everyone it's already like been like market tested.

Like people are like willing to fight and die for ordinals on BTC.

And they're willing to pay these transaction fees and they're willing to pay.

They paid 13 Bitcoin for the Epic Sat ordinal.

So one Satoshi, it will pay 13.1 Bitcoin to buy a BTC for something.

So on another hand, the other way of looking at is it sounds really bizarre to me

because I feel like this all this stuff is being like it's like written in a neon sign.

You know, it's like saying people really like all this stuff.

Obviously, they love. So just because of the Trump joke, you know,

why isn't the Trump coin, you know, ridiculous, though it is.

Why isn't it on BTC and why is it on Solana?

You know, why is this harder not to go too far off track?

Do you have any insight into like BitTensor?

Curious, like, would you write obviously AI, right?

Decentralized AI is one of these kind of big ideas right now in crypto.

Is that something that could potentially be a side chain?

I don't know that much about it, but I'm also certain of this.

I think if I'm right, I have no idea if I am or not.

Of course, anyone could be wrong about anything, including me.

But if I'm right, then this is probably all the tip of the iceberg.

Like all this stuff about bit names and stuff, you know, stuff that's like 15 years old.

And you finally it was, you know, trying to come alive.

And you just give it a tiny little bit of tiny little bit of, you know,

you just give it a little bit and it creates this.

So there's probably a bunch of stuff that would be on the cutting edge now.

Because I remember when I was first getting into Bitcoin and I was talking about prediction markets and stuff.

And I would like write to all these people who were like very prestigious at the time.

And they would be kind of like, yeah, like you could tell they didn't really understand it.

And I was that was kind of a little discouraging and not that discouraging.

But it was like a little bit like, oh, these are these top minds in Bitcoin.

Just because they have this this topic that's a little weird, they don't like know anything about it at all.

So they're not like as excited about it.

Probably there's like a hundred of those out now where someone out there is really they've been really into their thing for like since they were 12.

And they've been working on it since they were 22.

They've been working on it for 10 years.

And it's so alien.

That someone like me who's I'm stuck in the past because I'm talking about bit names.

I'm talking about Namecoin from 15 years ago.

So I think there is a tip of the iceberg issue.

And the problem with innovation is like you don't know what counts as an innovation.

It's inherently unpredictable.

You can't predict what will be an innovation.

You know what I mean.

Like if you go back 10,000 years and you say, you know what, in 1400 years someone's going to invent the wheel.

Like it doesn't make any sense.

You just invented today.

So it can't be predicted.

And that's a huge mistake we're making in BTC is we're just saying, well, it's already perfect and whatever.

So that's why I think we're doomed in BTC.

When is it going to launch?

In late August.

Oh, wow.

That's soon.

Okay.

And so when it does launch like as a user, what would my experience be?

Let's say I want to like from day one I'm like I want to forget Zcash.

I want to use now Zside.

That's going to be my new way to transact privately.

What would that look like for a user?

Well, with these L2s, you know, you can onboard people directly to the L2.

So it's kind of the same as using the altcoin.

It depends.

If your question is like, okay, they have some L1 BTC that is copied into eCash on the day of the split, then they could deposit it to the Zside by just like pressing a button and making a transaction.

But the cool thing about these L2s is that, you know, they're basically like altcoins in the sense that they're different pieces of software and you could just send people to them even if they have no account.

They could have no zero coins on L1.

And you can just say, oh, you can just, you know, you can buy some from a friend or you can acquire them.

However, you would have acquired the Zcash altcoin.

You could just acquire the Zside.

This would be whatever eCash as L2 of eCash L1.

You're going to need to get wallets and stuff to adopt these things, right?

That's right.

So what does that look like on day one?

Well, we have our own wallets that we have already.

So we have desktop wallets.

We also have a mobile wallet that I think we're going to improve enormously.

But we have like a skeleton of one.

And I think, you know, there's plenty of time between now and August for that.

Obviously, we're focused first on the core node infrastructure like the backend and stuff like that.

But I'd like to stress that the L1 is the same as Bitcoin Core.

So we have like the BDK wallet that like everyone uses for that.

So if all you want to do is send and receive the L1 coins, which I'm sure a lot of people will be doing initially, you know, that's just the same as it is in Bitcoin Core.

There's a million people have implemented Bitcoin wallets, including us.

But that is not a difficult integration.

And then we also have wallets.

You know, every node, when you do a full node, it sort of has to contain a wallet.

Otherwise, you can't test it or do anything with it.

So we have those.

And then I just think it will be we will also have like way of I don't want to like go into too much, but we'll be like building a lot of stuff.

But you can look at what we already have.

You know, if you go to layer2labs.com, download or whatever, you can try out the software.

So, yeah, we will have all this stuff out.

And then I think you're all be open source.

You have that open source wallet because otherwise it was just steel.

So I think, you know, in the age of we are talking to some people about having integrated in their wallet.

I think we will do that so that all that's coming.

But I really think it won't be a huge issue.

You know what I mean? Like either there'll be like no demand and there'll be a moot point or there'll be some demand.

And then it's the question of what does it cost?

Since these are very similar to Bitcoin.

These are proof of work.

You know, I don't think it'll be really that difficult at all.

Yeah, I'm just trying to think, you know, from right.

It's you're basically starting from zero in a lot of ways.

I get that. I get that. You're right.

Now you're forking off a Bitcoin and it's an exact essentially exact replica on the layer one.

But, yeah, I'm just think usability in terms of, you know, getting people to actually use this and integrate it into existing wallets.

And, you know, using Z side in a way that you can currently use Monero or Z cash.

Right.

Yeah, we have like a front end for Z side and it has this thing melt cast that I so it's like easy to like shield the coins and stuff.

But, yeah, all that stuff is will be hard.

But, again, I don't see it as you're right to point out how big of a task it is to start from zero.

No, the way I see it, though, is like it's kind of like you're going up a ladder.

Like everyone's going up a ladder and then you have to get to the top of the you know, you're trying to get up to like, I don't know, the side of a mountain or something.

And some of the ladders don't go all the way to the top.

So do you the way it's blocked?

That's the way I see it.

I wouldn't do this if I like I wouldn't prefer to do this.

I was trying to get I was trying to basically I was saying the BTC ladder is almost at the top.

We just need to like do this one little thing.

But at the top, there's this big quarrel and everyone's saying stuff like we never want to shoot shoots in ladders.

People are saying we never wanted to reach the top.

And what about the what about the ladder?

We've lived on the ladder our whole lives.

They've like they've become accustomed to just being only store value.

They forgot that the mission was always to like get all three eventually.

And it does become a Ponzi scheme.

If so, that's the idea is that this ladder does the Bitcoin ladder doesn't go all the way to the top and maybe the Monero one doesn't either.

If it does, I just I would like someone to get to the top.

So rather than all of us fail, because it's going to be pretty humiliating for all of us to get into this industry if we all fail.

Right. And it all just becomes WeChat pay or whatever at the end or whatever it is.

Because here's the other thing about network effects is the US dollar has also been crushing everyone in its path.

And even as of like 10 years ago, if you looked up like what for every Forex transaction, foreign exchange transaction, how many of them was the US dollar one of the two legs of the trade?

This was like 84 percent or something back then.

And still you have like, you know, you have basically like I don't think even that even the big one.

So you could say something, you could talk about how Zimbabwe obliterated their currency or you could talk about how certain like Central American countries flirted with epic disaster, Bolivia or something almost.

But but then think about all this to think about what's going to happen to Russia's currency.

That's what's going to happen to the euro.

You know, even that good, the healthy ones are on death's door, I think, actually.

And the Japanese, Japanese are in a demographic death, so are the Chinese.

And then it's kind of like, you know, what's going on in Brazil?

I don't know. And I had another example, but I forgot it.

But the point is, they're all pretty bad, honestly.

Right. Like what's what other than the US dollar?

So the US dollar is is crushing everything in its path.

And it will continue to grow.

I mean, think about this, this fact that we have stable coins.

The stable coins are, you know, they're basically not, you know, they're mostly in US dollars.

They're mostly not like, you know, they're not in.

Yeah, they're bigger than anything else.

And even there is this idea of the euro dollar.

This is a bizarre point that I don't know if a lot of people are familiar with this, but there is this like.

It's hard, kind of hard to describe, but it's basically like this is like banks that are not in the United States, in Europe, but they have actual dollars and it turns out they're like, this is really hard.

I'm going to get angry comments about this.

I explain this, but basically they're like in this shadow banking world where they're not regulated.

So these things, the euro dollar is like a super dollar.

In fact, it would sound like a worse version of the dollar, maybe.

But it was like, yeah, because if you're in Switzerland or if you're in France, why would the US law apply to you?

And then it's like, OK, so then these became like kind of like super.

So the dollar is crushing everything.

So if we do nothing, then the dollar will continue to grow, I think, because everything has network effects.

So I think that, of course, all these fiat currencies are committing suicide also.

And there's no plan.

The most bullish thing for crypto is that Elon tried to cut two trillion from the, this is a campaign promise, and it didn't come close.

They had to quit Doge.

So that's by far the most bullish news for crypto, I think, that the US dollar is also beyond saving.

So real big picture here.

I mean, where do you, how many years?

Where do you see?

What's kind of your time horizon?

It's a good question.

I think it's like you get two years, you have like one year, maybe two years to like really break it out, because otherwise the question would be why not just start over again?

I don't know what to do if it doesn't work.

If it doesn't work, I might think maybe we should just hard fork again.

But I might also think maybe we should just quit because this is the ceiling for crypto.

You know, like it's, it changed the world.

It's worth two trillion or maybe it'll be worth 10 trillion.

But it won't like, it'll just be some, you know, it'll be like paying with cash where people are kind of thinking, oh, he's probably not declaring all that.

Like when I pay for like, you know, whatever, a dry cleaning, I hate to throw my dry cleaning guy under the bus.

It's always you're thinking like, you're like, okay, like something's weird, but whatever, you know, who cares?

Because of course, we got to support private cash and privacy.

But yeah, you're kind of thinking like, whatever, you know, something's happening, but I don't care enough to think about it.

So it's all right.

You know what I mean?

Like, so yeah, like, if so, that might mean that we can't.

Because, but I think it's encouraging for me, for anyone to challenge BTC.

One of the big problems with Bitcoin Cash was that it was a very feeble competitor to BTC.

So it enabled BTC sucking more, hugely, I think.

And I was really disappointed.

You know, it's kind of like, you know, usually have like, like in a Dragon Ball Z, you've got, you got Goku versus Vegeta.

But it doesn't work if Vegeta is like super, super weak.

And then it's like, doesn't really work.

It's not like Goku versus Krillin, you know.

So it's it just sucks.

And, you know, and I hate to say this about the, you know, Bitcoin Cash people, because I know they tried, they put their heart into it.

But yeah, they had all kinds of implement, they had bad ideas and bad implementation.

And I hate to say it.

So it'd be great if Monero rises the leaderboard and has total dominance over the Darknet market.

I think that'd be a good thing.

And I think it's better if we don't split the vote.

Of course, my idea for not splitting the vote, because this is what everyone says, oh, if I talk to the Bitcoin Cash people, they're going to say, hey, why don't you go all in on Bitcoin Cash?

Forget those Monero people, right?

Everyone says, you know, just come over here to whatever, Solana.

So but the sidechain idea is a different thing.

It says everyone can get their tech, you can have, you can tie, you can get everyone's tech.

And so then the question, again, it's about the ladder, the rungs of the ladder.

It says, OK, this ladder, this ladder reaches the top.

So the question is, do you want to go all the way down, climb all the way back up?

You're going to look like an idiot at first.

But maybe you'll look like a genius in the end.

I don't know.

That's kind of been my life with Monero.

I've just told these things with the delay, and it's all marshmallow, right?

I'm pretty sure the Monero ladder keeps going up.

I don't know. We'll see, though.

OK, there's a problem.

I have one problem with Monero is the hard fork every six months.

I think that's...

Well, it's not every six months anymore, but yeah, it's still forks.

I mean, the next, the full chain membership proof fork will probably be, you know, it's not going to be the last fork, obviously.

But there won't be another one for quite some time.

Because you get a lot of advantages for doing that, which I think is fine.

But the disadvantage is everyone needs to know where to get the next future version.

It means that there's basically an admin key.

They can overwrite everything because they're going to publish the new version and you have to switch to it.

Yeah, Monero was forking a lot when it was trying to be ASIC resistant by way of just forking.

That's also a big mistake.

Yeah, it's a big mistake.

Yeah, but you know, it's definitely moved on from that with RandomX.

And now it's had RandomX for many years and it hasn't had a fork.

Let's have the ASICs.

In fact, you know what you should do, just to blow everyone's mind, is you should just make a shot to 56.

That would help you.

Yeah, I don't think the Bitcoin community is going to go for that.

I mean, even just for the fact that it's different than Bitcoin.

The fact that we have an ASIC resistant project that's relying on ASICs and a project that's relying on CPUs.

You don't think there's any...

I mean, the CPU is basically the ASIC of Monero.

I don't think it helps either way.

The better thing is to focus on the users, which Monero has done almost uniquely.

And Litecoin also, at least they care about transaction.

They care about real numbers, like real scientists.

They have a clipboard with real criteria.

So you guys are like real.

And then, you know, God only knows what some of these other projects are.

These are like, you know, a flash in the pan and we'll never see them again.

Whatever happened to, you know, I don't know, BitShares or all that stuff.

Whatever happened to NXT, you know, whatever happened to all these coins.

Actually, let me ask you, the name, eCash.

Are you definitely going with that name?

Yeah, we're going to eCash.com.

Okay.

So wasn't there...

There was an issue there where there's like an existing eCash?

Yeah, but it's like 175th or something.

So with all that you've just learned, like I think you're not in the top five.

You might as well be in...

So I was like, this is a positive finish.

I saw you on that guy's show.

I went on the guy's show and that guy was very upset.

And I actually had like a whole plan.

I had like a bunch of points written out that I was going to say.

And then I had like a plan for like something that might have worked.

I think he blew it up.

I had like a plan of like stuff that we might have, you know, here's like some options.

You know, and he just immediately was just like, you know, whatever, you suck.

We're going to kill you or whatever.

I had him on this show.

And yeah, he creeped me out.

I was like, yo, what is up with this guy?

He's probably going to now like attack the hell out of me.

And it's true.

He's a strange, strange fellow.

Yeah, he's got a pressure as well.

Yes, probably.

Yeah, he goes, he acts like he's like this super, you know, open-minded guy.

And then he flips out on you.

Then he's like, ask AI.

Well, for me, he was telling me like he has some means of raising like billions of dollars

for a fund that will then purchase Monero.

I'm like, all right, all right.

Let me know when that happens.

But yeah, I thought it was odd that he really flipped out on that.

I guess so.

He's a big traditional e-cash holder.

I don't know.

What is the truth?

I shouldn't say traditionally or maybe.

What is that e-cash?

What is that?

The reason that I didn't care, I also didn't care, is because it was really David Chaum

with the e-cash and even the Fediment people.

And there's also this terrible lightning project that also is the e-cash.

They all try to take the e-cash name.

I thought, well, like all the five or six other people have already like put in for

this name with their name.

How did you get e-cash.com?

Yeah, I just like cold messaged the person.

And then I cold messaged them with this like, I don't know, I had like nothing to do one

day and I was bored.

And I was like, naming is really hard.

You know, names are hard.

I think naming is like so hard.

Hard for me anyway.

Yeah.

If you're thinking, oh, what's it going to be?

It's got to be short.

It's got to be like something you can kind of spell.

You know, you don't want it to be like, I hate the misspelled names.

I think that's rough.

If you're trying to run.

But the wild thing is, no matter what name you pick, there will be.

One thing was like, I was like, we have to get the .com.

It's non-negotiable because it's like, even with Bitcoin, there was originally,

there was like Bitcoin.org versus Bitcoin.com.

And there was like Bitcoin cash and all this other stuff.

That's the irony of it all.

But in every project, there's like impersonators and stuff.

And I was like, whatever it is, if .com is not available, just cross the name off the

list, like just forget about it.

So that was part of my thinking.

So then the person had like a little intake form.

I sent them this like polite, I put on my like economist hat because I'm like an economist,

you know, and like by training and also like whatever, at my heart and soul.

I don't know.

I forgot the idiom I was going to use, but whatever it was, an economist at heart, I

guess.

And so I sent them like this email that was like, it was like this convoluted thing.

It must have sounded crazy to them.

But I was like, so could we work something out where like I'm going to do this project

maybe.

And if it's worth like a huge amount of money, like I'll give you like 10% of that.

But if it's worth not that much, then I'll give the domain back to you or something.

I had like this complex thing worked out.

And then like they emailed me back and then went back and forth and they were going to

let it go for what I thought was an absurdly low amount.

Because I remember in 2021, it was like a few of these, it was like web cash and like

e-coin and like e-cash.

These are all for like $8 million or something.

And this person was listing it for like less than $200,000.

So I was like, oh, OK, great.

I had the $3 million from Layer 2 Labs.

So this is all the stuff.

I accomplished all this stuff with just the $3 million that we raised in 2022, including

getting the domain.

So now we just raised $5 million.

So I'm kind of a little bit optimistic about my overall competency.

I seem to be doing pretty well like on the actual tasks.

That doesn't, that's not enough to win, you know, as we both know.

But it's amazing you got e-cash.com.

I know, it's crazy, right?

I think it's bizarre.

And the really crazy thing is that they didn't, you know, I would have thought that the other

people would have at least recognized that by not, they could have messaged that person

the whole time and gotten it.

And so they have their little, they have like their weird domain.

Not only did I get e-cash.com, I got like e-cash.com.

I got all of them .net.

I got like a bunch of .orgs.

I got a bunch of like misspelled versions.

You know, I got like all these different variations because I was like, this is important.

Yeah.

And so they just have the e.cash.

And I think it's pretty weird that they never like, you could, all that stuff you could

have just, like a lot of those you could just buy for pretty cheap.

And then they never, they never messaged the guy at the .com.

And then I thought it was quite rude.

I'm sure I'm confident that most, most people agree that, you know, the guy right

out of the gate.

Because again, I had my list of things.

The other thing that I'm not sure we got across, but I mentioned it on Twitter was

that I had no idea.

I actually knew the Omri Sashay, but I had no idea that it was his project.

So while before it was announced, before it was announced, but after I got the domain,

I sent him like a polite message saying, oh, actually I have this domain.

You know, I had no idea that, that you were doing, you were doing e.cash.

And also because I Googled it when I was first getting it and I saw it was like 176.

So I was like, this is just some, you know, this is like some guy somewhere got this domain.

That's what I thought.

I thought like some guy got e.cash and they said, I can probably flip this for like $80,000

worth of some stupid coin.

Yeah.

So I thought it was like a bottom of the barrel, complete nothing coin.

And there would be zero users.

There'd be no one would even be on Twitter.

Right.

That was my honest thought.

Because I just thought, you know, like this is because the project, the market cap is

really, the market cap is like less than a hundred million dollars.

So like, I'm like sitting next to, sometimes I'm like having like breakfast with like Adam

Back or something.

Blockstream's raised $250 million in cash.

So I'm like, this is like, so I was like, whatever, you know, so it was kind of a funny

situation I think overall.

But yeah, I was, I messaged him before, before I had announced.

After you're not too late, never going back.

No.

But you know, he couldn't, he didn't say anything then.

He got the double check.

So he read it.

We had messaged before, not that often over the years.

Okay.

But so he could have said, oh, like, you know, that's so great that you could, would you

mind saving it for me and we'll work out something.

I'll buy it from you.

Then I would have probably switched to a different name.

So they did everything.

I did literally everything wrong.

And they could have even still at the thing, they didn't even have any kind of polite

acknowledgement that they missed horribly mismanaged this situation and they allowed

it.

Yeah.

I thought I was, I came away from that just thinking these guys are complete idiots and

whatever.

Yeah.

He was, he was really flipping out.

I don't even know what he can't.

Yeah.

I don't even know if like, yeah.

Yeah.

I'd never heard of it before.

Like, and I saw, I've heard of it.

I've heard of it on CoinMarketCap, but that I thought there's absolutely no way this is

even real, you know?

Yeah.

So that was what happened.

Yeah.

It's a great name though.

You gotta have a name that's easy to spell.

It's easy to, you know, type.

And yeah, I think you gotta have the .com because of course, especially think about how it is

in the cypherpunk world where, you know, everyone's wondering like, is this a scam site?

Like I'm trying to download Electrum or something, you know, I'm trying to download whatever.

And you try, see, this is when you're trying to download the latest version of Monero,

which you must do every six months.

So now it's really a big deal.

It's not every six months.

It's not every six months.

Not anymore.

Sorry.

I am talking like, you gotta remember, I'm like very OG, so I have all this ancient lore

that, but yeah.

And so I think Monero, I humbly suggest Monero prioritize not doing that because it centralizes

the project.

It gives you.

Yeah.

Like I said, it really, it's every couple of years that, you know, we have full chain

membership proofs after that.

I don't know.

I'm sure there'll be some quantum, quantum update.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah.

But beyond that, there should be.

It's funny, the quantum is what, I think that's kind of, because in BTC, everyone understands

the quantum will like, is bad because you can spend other people's coins.

So then that's the whole network will be dead.

There's no reason to own any coins if other people can spend it.

So it's the kind of the one thing where they can't say, oh, we're perfect.

So BTC is always like, we thought of everything.

We're perfect.

Then they're like, oh, by the way, the smartest minds are also here and they will release.

There will be an update.

That's like what Michael Saylor said.

It's funny when he's confronted with a real problem.

He says, you know, the market will decide that or, you know, there will be an update.

It's like what Vitalik used to say.

Well, with people that are listening in that are interested in e-cash and side chains and

want to be a part of the launch and the project, what should they do?

Well, we have e-cash.com and you can follow me on Twitter and, you know, hang out in Telegram.

It's weird because I had set it up because there's a lot of people joining and to spam.

But if you go on my Twitter, you can find like all the links, like all the YouTube and everything.

And there's a Telegram group.

It's a t.me slash DC insiders.

But that one takes you to where you have to pay like $1 in stars to get into the real group

because the group was very popular and there's bots and stuff.

And the stars was a really great idea that Telegram had that said, hey, you know,

because like $1 is not actually going to deter a serious person.

But the spam person actually kind of would because so that was kind of clever.

So we had to, you know, hang out with us in Telegram, hang out on Twitter,

hang out with us on YouTube, check out the site.

The site has like, you know, FAQ, like why do this?

We have like an AI that's like trained on all of my tweets or something.

It's kind of funny, but I think it could be passable.

So you can ask the AI these questions like whatever.

Why is Paul doing this?

This is a good idea.

And yeah, try the software.

Try the software out.

And we have a bug contest.

We just finished contest one.

Every two weeks, we give away $20,000.

So whoever finds the most bugs wins.

We have first, second, third place.

So we're very serious and we are sending money out to people.

And so yeah, we're doing lots of stuff.

And check it out.

Check out ecash.com.

Follow me on Twitter.

I'm truthquin on Twitter.

That was originally because Truthcoin was the Prediction Markets project.

That was the original name for the Bitcoin Prediction Markets.

That was long before there were all these coins, you know, Feathercoin and whatever.

You know, Terracoin.

So then I was like, this sucks for me because it looks like I'm running some stupid altcoin.

Big mistake.

Do you have truthcoin.com?

I'm sure you grabbed that one.

I did.

I got it long ago.

Someone else had it.

Some poor person, they had it and they got like hacked and lost like all their coins.

So then I bought it from them.

But yeah, truthcoin.com, truthcoin.org, truthcoin.info, I think.

Truthcoin.info is my big truthcoin site.

I changed the name.

This is what I learned about never change the name because it's not worth it.

You don't get anything.

I changed the prediction market things to bitcoinhivemind.com.

So I changed all that around.

But you know how it is.

So never change the name.

It's not worth it.

All right, Paul, man, thank you so much for joining me.

Greatly appreciate you jumping on whenever you can.

It's always a great conversation.

And I'm excited to see where this goes.

I'm interested.

I mean, I think the title of this is Will Zside Replace Monero and Zcash?

Well, yeah.

So that's obviously a clickbaity title.

Um, if it does, I hope that all the Monero people are like early, early, early in on the,

you know, because it'll just be a repeat, like Bitcoin, like super candle or whatever,

if I'm if I'm right.

But now or it could just be a giant disaster.

So but if it does, then I think that I hope that the Monero people because we will need

the Monero people are now the more serious community.

In terms of usage.

So yeah, no, it's it's always encouraging to hear you.

You're pro Monero take coming from you.

So I appreciate that.

But yeah, we can leave it here, man.

We'll be in touch.

I'm gonna go ahead and roll the credits.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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