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This is everyone, this is the great Robin Linus who invented BitVM.

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So, you may have seen BitVM on maybe a PowerPoint slide, or someone's pitch deck or
something.

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And, I mean, you know, I'm not going to say that all those slides are fake,

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and that this guy is one million times more relevant than everything that those
people ever do in their entire lives,

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but it's something like that.

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So, BitVM from last October or something like that, or September.

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And I created this other thing, BIP300. It's also great.

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But we're going to be up here talking about whatever you guys want us to talk about.

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We got roped into doing this. What do you think we should talk about?

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Well, thank you for the favor, guys.

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My name is Michael B. Casey. I am Director of Engineering for Marathon,

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and I architected a sidechain platform to try to bring some of the Drivechain stuff
to fruition after all these years.

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And, you know, of course, we always want to leverage.

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I'm not out there like everybody else, claiming we've got it working,

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but I want to leverage, if possible, BitVM for a more decentralized pegging
mechanism or whatever else it could offer.

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And basically what this panel is about, you know, to finish introductions, we have
Robin Linus.

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Do you want to give a quick introduction to yourself? Because Paul gave you a little
bit of one.

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Yeah, I came up with the idea of BitVM, and I'm working on that.

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I'm implementing it with my team, and I'm also a big fan of sidechains in general.

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I'm a big fan of the work that Paul is doing.

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Maybe I should even add that BitVM is more or less just a workaround to enable
something like BIP300 without a soft fork.

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So it's essentially just a way to get around the activation drama.

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Do you think that's possible in the near term? That's intriguing.

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Oh, yeah, sure. I don't see any big obstacles from the technical side for BitVM in
particular,

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because now we have implemented that SNARK verifier in a huge Bitcoin script.

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And that script is 3 gigabytes, which is, of course, huge.

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But with BitVM, too, we can chunk it up into smaller chunks.

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And as long as it's smaller than 4 gigabytes, we can probably run it on the main
chain, actually.

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And we brought it down to 3 gigabytes, which means that it will probably work.

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Maybe something super surprising comes up, but currently it looks very good.

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Cool. Well, when can we expect it to ship?

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Yeah, good question. I was stupid and said four weeks just this morning.

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Oh, no.

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I hope my team didn't hear that. I don't know if they agree with that.

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But, yeah, that's kind of like the time frame.

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It is looking pretty good. We are almost finished, I would say.

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And I think it's quite realistic to ship the first prototype within the next four
weeks.

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So for those watching who actually aren't familiar with BitVM,

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I don't know who on the planet wouldn't be at this point.

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If you want to give just a brief high-level description.

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Yeah, that is complicated.

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But I think from the most high level, the most important thing that I care about or
that BitVM cares about

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is both throughput and privacy.

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Those are the most important things.

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Because I think Bitcoin should be used as currency.

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Bitcoin should be used for payments.

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And for that it has to be cheap and private.

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And so we have to scale it and we have to make it private.

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And doing that on the main layer is complicated, in particular the privacy part,

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because we would have to change a lot about the main layer to make Bitcoin actually
really private.

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And so what BitVM does is that it helps us to build bridges.

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Essentially, BIP300 is also a bridge.

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So just so it's not a roll-up-centric use case for the virtual machine, just to be
clear about that, right?

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Yeah, roll-up is one use case.

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In general, it's about bridges to side systems, whatever those side systems are,

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like sidechains, roll-ups, ZK coins is another protocol that I'm working on.

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So it solves the Bitcoin is dumb problem.

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Yeah, that is what the bridge solves.

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Bridging Bitcoin to other systems that can be way more expressive

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and that can do all kinds of things that the main layer cannot do.

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Well, thank you very much.

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So Paul here, Paul has created probably more sidechains, at least in theory,

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than anybody else on the planet.

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So how many would you say that you have actually set up?

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Is it about quantity?

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Like if I make enough sidechains, then one of them will be activated on Bitcoin.

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So far, right?

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I have made quite a few, and some are clones of altcoins, which I think is clever.

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So we have a clone of the latest version of Zcash for privacy,

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and we have a clone of the latest version of Ethereum.

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And I have designed and built many sidechains,

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and I think the sidechain is definitely the way that Bitcoin will scale

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and achieve all these features that people want their money to have.

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And in particular, anything that someone builds anywhere,

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someone builds something into an altcoin or something else,

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they have written the code, so it is theoretically possible.

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And so why don't we just take whatever they do.

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I don't know.

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Did you have something specific that you wanted to know about the difference?

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No, no.

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I mean, it is just like I know you have quoted many times saying

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the entire reason you went on this mission to create Drivechains

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is because you wanted to implement Hivemind, and it was impossible.

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Yeah, the prediction markets, yes.

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I was interested in one specific thing.

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However, the sidechain idea is much bigger than merely the prediction markets idea.

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Prediction markets happens to be an interest of mine,

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and I have this website, bitcoinhivemind.com,

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and you can read to your heart's content about all that.

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But really, sidechains, I think, are going to be necessary for Bitcoin's future

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because we can't really live in a world where there is not enough scale

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or where there is some other system that is actually meeting everyone's needs

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for payments and for privacy.

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So we don't want rival systems.

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Scale is a very important point.

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Yeah.

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Network effects are very important when it comes to money.

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So most people prefer to use the money that their friends are using,

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and if something hits a scale ceiling and something else does not,

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I do think that the thing that is limited will eventually be replaced.

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So, Paul, how would you optimize a sidechain for scale, if that was your goal?

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Yeah, I think I have written a post about this,

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and I have produced the software also.

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And I think you can push the, you know, there was this big block size war in the
past.

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I'm familiar.

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It was very, very famous.

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Yeah.

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And it's actually not that, we're very, very close.

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If you can do things like shrink the size of transactions, which is not that hard,

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and then increase the block size by maybe two orders of magnitude,

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so it's not quite unlimited, but it's not quite, instead of one megabyte,

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we do something like eight megabytes that slowly grows to 80 and 80,

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or 800 over like 10, 15 years.

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And then the other thing you can do is you have 10, you can have multiple
sidechains.

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You have 10 that are sort of geographically distributed.

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So you have some for Europe, some for East Asia, some for the United States,

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some for like South America.

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Because most of the people will be transacting with people who are, you know, it
will clump up.

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So I think actually if you do those things,

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it's actually possible to process all the transactions in the world

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using this sort of team of sidechains in a triangle.

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And I have written a bunch of posts about that.

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So if you go to this one website, Truthcoin.info, which is my blog,

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I have a website, all the world's transactions,

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and I have another one called Thunder, which is like a joke.

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Do you have anything to add?

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What would you want to see in sidechains of Bitcoin?

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I want to see Bitcoin being used as the money of mankind.

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I think we should all use Bitcoin all the time

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instead of that fucking government money that is ripping us all off.

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I think fiat is really, it's a scam, it's a form of cancer,

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and we have to cure ourselves from it with Bitcoin.

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So what do you consider actually really a sidechain?

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I have my own definition.

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But what makes a sidechain actually just not a complete scam to you?

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I think it should have Bitcoin as its native currency.

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That is the most distinguishing feature.

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The other thing is it should probably have a consensus mechanism

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that is anchored into Bitcoin as well.

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By anchored do you mean specifically like merge mining?

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That is one option.

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What other options?

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There is another option that is basically Bitcoin-backed proof-of-stake

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where you stake Bitcoin in the main chain to become a sidechain validator.

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I find that kind of interesting in comparison to other proof-of-stake systems

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because other proof-of-stake systems, they try to secure themselves with themselves,

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which is a bit absurd.

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And here you have an external thing.

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You anchor the proof-of-stake into Bitcoin's proof-of-work,

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and this is how you resolve that absurdity of classical proof-of-stake.

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Yeah, but the problem that I see with that is

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that does nothing to benefit the layer 1 miners.

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And to me, that eventually leads to rotten incentives for securing main chain.

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Absolutely.

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I think that's a very valid concern

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that the miner incentives are getting reduced over time

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by these layer 2s that do not use or that do not pay the miners.

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And that's one of the reasons why I like BIP300 so much

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that it actually takes into account the miner incentives

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and pays the miners for the work that they are doing.

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Now, Robin, last year when we met at this conference,

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you weren't talking about BitVM at all.

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You were talking about ZeroSync.

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So what role do technologies like UtrexO and ZeroSync play

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in making Bitcoin and sidechains more wieldy?

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Yes.

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ZeroSync was about applying snarks to the main chain

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and essentially compressing the main chain

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in a way that you can verify it on a phone or so,

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or in general on weaker devices and weaker networks.

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So full node on a phone, people.

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I don't want to underlay the importance of what you just said.

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So fully verifiable.

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You can verify the validity of any transaction from your phone directly.

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We have not implemented that yet.

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The thing that we have implemented is more or less like an SPV client,

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which is the basic version of it.

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Proof systems have improved a lot in these two years,

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and if we would start it from scratch now,

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it would be much easier to implement a full chain state proof now

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that actually can run a complete full node on any phone.

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I think, to come back to your question,

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if we had something like that,

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we could probably also increase the block size with less risk.

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That would be obviously a good thing for miners

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because then we could have more transactions on the main layer

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and more network effects.

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So it's another way to decentralize

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because there's less burden on nodes.

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Well, yeah, and the same thing could be done for sidechains, too.

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Make them lighter, more realty,

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and then you could spread them across.

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You've got multiple clients running on a single phone.

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For sidechains, if you don't have BIP300,

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it is actually a necessity that you prove the entire sidechain.

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No, that's true. Yeah, okay.

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Yeah.

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That makes sense.

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Because you cannot actually check what the state of the sidechain is

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when you're doing a pegout, when you bridge back to the main layer.

201
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Well, for bridging, yes.

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But you could handle that with also SPV, correct?

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Sorry?

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Couldn't you handle that with SPV?

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You can handle that with SPV to some degree.

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If you would just have an SPV proof,

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you'd create an incentive for miners to mine invalid SPV proofs,

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just like a pegout that just didn't happen on the sidechain,

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but gives the money to you.

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Well, yeah.

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You need it in order to mine, but not to transact, right?

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I mean, it depends on what the pegout mechanism is.

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If there is a dispute, it's possible to dispute.

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Well, I'm talking about for just sidechain transactions on the sidechain,

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not for pegouts.

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I mean, the original sidechain paper by Blockstream had that idea, right?

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Yeah.

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That you use SPV proofs,

219
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and they discarded that idea because of that toxic incentive

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that a miner would just have to mine like some five blocks or so,

221
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including one transaction that was just made up out of nowhere,

222
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that doesn't have any history,

223
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and it just gives the money to the attacker.

224
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And essentially it means you can steal from the bridge if you have enough mining
power.

225
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And that is an issue.

226
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And that is an issue that can be solved with SNARKs.

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That's also why on the Adura platform we actually use a dual mechanism.

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So it's not 100% informed, just only on proof of work.

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There's also a federation consensus component that does reorg protection

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and also validates via full nodes.

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That's basically the same conclusion that Liquid came to, right?

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Yeah.

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Well, I mean, it's tradeoffs, unfortunately.

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That's the best thing going.

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That's why I'm hoping we can get there with better solutions like BitPM.

236
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I honestly don't like that we have to run a federation.

237
00:14:09,800 --> 00:14:13,800
It's just the best possible path now in order to get stuff shipped.

238
00:14:13,800 --> 00:14:14,800
So, yeah.

239
00:14:14,800 --> 00:14:18,800
It totally makes sense if you just want to go fast and ship something.

240
00:14:18,800 --> 00:14:20,800
It's the best we have so far, and it works.

241
00:14:20,800 --> 00:14:22,800
Back to the operative question of the talk.

242
00:14:22,800 --> 00:14:23,800
What should we ship?

243
00:14:23,800 --> 00:14:24,800
What makes sense?

244
00:14:24,800 --> 00:14:28,800
What does Bitcoin need, right?

245
00:14:28,800 --> 00:14:31,800
Maybe you want to talk about it.

246
00:14:31,800 --> 00:14:33,800
I mean, I'm kind of repeating myself a little bit, though.

247
00:14:33,800 --> 00:14:37,800
But, I mean, I have shipped a lot of stuff that I think people need.

248
00:14:37,800 --> 00:14:41,800
If you go to LayerTwoLabs.com slash download, you can check it all out with plain
money.

249
00:14:41,800 --> 00:14:43,800
Yeah, which one of them should we do next?

250
00:14:43,800 --> 00:14:45,800
We could talk about this.

251
00:14:45,800 --> 00:14:51,800
Yeah, this is also this thing that I also came up with called the CUSF, the Core
Untouched Soft Fork.

252
00:14:51,800 --> 00:14:54,800
See, this is the thing is that the miners have not –

253
00:14:54,800 --> 00:15:01,800
the soft fork is this great thing that has basically no downsides and innumerable
upsides.

254
00:15:01,800 --> 00:15:03,800
But for some reason, we have stopped doing it.

255
00:15:03,800 --> 00:15:08,800
And so I've made it slightly easier to do, I guess is what I would say.

256
00:15:08,800 --> 00:15:14,800
I mean, before, you'd have to do a pull request in GitHub to Bitcoin Core and have
it merged,

257
00:15:14,800 --> 00:15:16,800
which is like – could take years.

258
00:15:16,800 --> 00:15:19,800
But instead, you can do the soft fork via its own little application.

259
00:15:19,800 --> 00:15:22,800
It just rides along.

260
00:15:22,800 --> 00:15:24,800
So I think that's a good idea.

261
00:15:24,800 --> 00:15:31,800
I have shipped that also on this site, 5300cusf.com, C-U-S-F.

262
00:15:31,800 --> 00:15:37,800
And then the sidechains that I think we need are these ones that I mentioned earlier
in the day about scale,

263
00:15:37,800 --> 00:15:47,800
scale, privacy, being able to mimic other chains that people like, such as Ethereum,
assets, names.

264
00:15:47,800 --> 00:15:49,800
I think all of that's important.

265
00:15:49,800 --> 00:15:51,800
And I've shipped a lot of that already.

266
00:15:51,800 --> 00:15:54,800
You can just try it for yourself.

267
00:15:54,800 --> 00:15:58,800
So, Robin, I have a question just in general.

268
00:15:58,800 --> 00:16:00,800
What would you say are the defining characteristics?

269
00:16:00,800 --> 00:16:07,800
Everybody tends to lump all the VM stuff together, between like OP_CAT and Cat VM
versus what's going on with BitVM.

270
00:16:07,800 --> 00:16:20,800
I mean, I've been a big proponent of Cat until the Taproot Wizard started pushing it
so hard.

271
00:16:20,800 --> 00:16:23,800
I just don't trust these guys.

272
00:16:23,800 --> 00:16:25,800
I don't see them as Bitcoiners.

273
00:16:25,800 --> 00:16:35,800
I see them as like shitcoiners who are selling worthless tokens to people and like
promoting spam, like audio notes and stuff like that.

274
00:16:35,800 --> 00:16:41,800
And I see that as like the opposite of the stuff that I am interested in.

275
00:16:41,800 --> 00:16:46,800
I don't think it gets us anywhere closer to beating the dollar.

276
00:16:47,800 --> 00:16:49,800
So I got very skeptical of Cat.

277
00:16:49,800 --> 00:16:57,800
But on the other hand, there are lots of people who are definitely legit, who are
pushing for Cat now.

278
00:16:57,800 --> 00:17:03,800
And it's a complicated topic.

279
00:17:03,800 --> 00:17:05,800
I see a lot of potential in Cat.

280
00:17:05,800 --> 00:17:07,800
I see all the things that we can do with Cat.

281
00:17:07,800 --> 00:17:10,800
But I also see ways to abuse it.

282
00:17:11,800 --> 00:17:19,800
And we have seen how the audio notes people have been abusing essentially Taproot to
spam the chain.

283
00:17:19,800 --> 00:17:21,800
I mean, as a miner, you probably like the fees.

284
00:17:21,800 --> 00:17:24,800
What happened with SegWit and Taproot is just so ironic to me.

285
00:17:24,800 --> 00:17:29,800
Because SegWit, none of this ordinal stuff would exist if it were not for the SegWit
discount.

286
00:17:29,800 --> 00:17:31,800
At all. Period.

287
00:17:32,800 --> 00:17:40,800
And also for Taproot allowing you to inscribe 4 megabytes of data into the chain,
right?

288
00:17:40,800 --> 00:17:43,800
Yeah, again, unintended consequences. Very important.

289
00:17:45,800 --> 00:17:51,800
My take on Eric and Udi, I think everyone has different skills or whatever.

290
00:17:51,800 --> 00:17:59,800
I think they kind of like for some reason just took a guess that OP_CAT would be like
the next easiest soft fork to do.

291
00:18:00,800 --> 00:18:02,800
And so they kind of just got ahead of it.

292
00:18:02,800 --> 00:18:06,800
I don't think they really even know or care that much about it.

293
00:18:06,800 --> 00:18:08,800
How do you feel about OP_CAT, Paul?

294
00:18:08,800 --> 00:18:12,800
I think the more important thing is that we have lost the ability to do the soft
fork.

295
00:18:12,800 --> 00:18:16,800
And so there's all these, like, you could refactor 10,000 lines of code and no one
will care.

296
00:18:16,800 --> 00:18:19,800
Or you could write tests on GitHub.

297
00:18:19,800 --> 00:18:21,800
Or you could do something else.

298
00:18:21,800 --> 00:18:27,800
You could do like, so like the Mac Corral's inflation bug was introduced as a result
of a refactor.

299
00:18:27,800 --> 00:18:29,800
There was really not a lot of discussion.

300
00:18:29,800 --> 00:18:36,800
You can delete main.cpp from a C++ project and then put in the GitHub commit, this
is real,

301
00:18:36,800 --> 00:18:41,800
the lyrics to I Can Show You the World from Disney's Aladdin.

302
00:18:41,800 --> 00:18:43,800
You can do all that weird stuff.

303
00:18:43,800 --> 00:18:46,800
And you can accidentally cause inflation bug.

304
00:18:46,800 --> 00:18:50,800
Or in the case of the level DB, the Berkeley DB, level DB,

305
00:18:50,800 --> 00:18:54,800
you can cause the chain to actually crash and go down for like five hours.

306
00:18:54,800 --> 00:18:56,800
Which is the only time that Bitcoin has ever gone down.

307
00:18:56,800 --> 00:19:00,800
So there's many, many changes that are totally unscrutinized.

308
00:19:00,800 --> 00:19:04,800
And yet, if you want to reactivate OP_CAT, which is an opcode that is already,

309
00:19:04,800 --> 00:19:05,800
like, you know what I mean?

310
00:19:05,800 --> 00:19:07,800
We've moved very, very far away.

311
00:19:07,800 --> 00:19:10,800
We've been moving in the wrong direction culturally.

312
00:19:10,800 --> 00:19:16,800
So like the whole reason the soft fork was invented back in 2012 is because we
couldn't get everyone to upgrade.

313
00:19:16,800 --> 00:19:21,800
So the soft fork is this thing where it's like, we don't need, this is a clever
idea,

314
00:19:21,800 --> 00:19:23,800
where we don't need everyone to upgrade.

315
00:19:23,800 --> 00:19:27,800
Whoever wants to use the new feature upgrades, and then a 51% hash rate upgrades,

316
00:19:27,800 --> 00:19:29,800
and it's safe for everyone to use.

317
00:19:29,800 --> 00:19:31,800
Even people on the old network.

318
00:19:31,800 --> 00:19:39,800
So we've had this idea of kind of tolerating conservatism while also allowing people
to do what they want.

319
00:19:39,800 --> 00:19:44,800
This kind of like, I don't know what you would call it, but maybe like a liberalism,

320
00:19:44,800 --> 00:19:47,800
like a kind of live and let live thing.

321
00:19:47,800 --> 00:19:51,800
And now we can't even do that because it's like,

322
00:19:51,800 --> 00:19:55,800
So I think the bigger problem is just it's too hard to do any of these soft forks.

323
00:19:55,800 --> 00:20:00,800
We mentioned Utrex-O, you get a mobile phone, full node on a mobile phone,

324
00:20:00,800 --> 00:20:05,800
with the soft fork to have the Utrex-O commitment.

325
00:20:05,800 --> 00:20:10,800
We could do the commitment to remove the need for the, whatever they're called, you
know, the bridge.

326
00:20:10,800 --> 00:20:12,800
We're overusing that word.

327
00:20:12,800 --> 00:20:18,800
There's Relay, there's some kind of like secondary person that has to publish like a
huge,

328
00:20:18,800 --> 00:20:19,800
what do they call it?

329
00:20:19,800 --> 00:20:20,800
I don't know.

330
00:20:20,800 --> 00:20:23,800
Whatever it is, you could do the Utrex-O.

331
00:20:23,800 --> 00:20:29,800
You could do, just forget Utrex-O, just any kind of Utrex-O commitment you could put
into Coinbase.

332
00:20:29,800 --> 00:20:33,800
And this would have some utility, you know, to a lot of, to like many, many people

333
00:20:33,800 --> 00:20:35,800
because most people use SBB or something.

334
00:20:35,800 --> 00:20:40,800
You could say, well, but no one wants to even talk about doing any of that.

335
00:20:40,800 --> 00:20:44,800
And then you have what happened with CTV where Jeremy Rubin not only quit CTV,

336
00:20:44,800 --> 00:20:46,800
but he quit Bitcoin until very recently.

337
00:20:46,800 --> 00:20:47,800
Came back in multiple years.

338
00:20:47,800 --> 00:20:49,800
Now he would spend multiple years away from Bitcoin.

339
00:20:49,800 --> 00:20:50,800
He had to grow a beard.

340
00:20:50,800 --> 00:20:51,800
It happens.

341
00:20:51,800 --> 00:20:53,800
And he has shaved the beard, so now he's fully back, I guess.

342
00:20:53,800 --> 00:20:55,800
He still has that mustache, though.

343
00:20:55,800 --> 00:20:59,800
And APO was created as a lightning bit.

344
00:20:59,800 --> 00:21:00,800
It checks all the boxes, right?

345
00:21:00,800 --> 00:21:01,800
It's a lightning bit.

346
00:21:01,800 --> 00:21:03,800
It was made by the right people.

347
00:21:03,800 --> 00:21:04,800
It was on Signet.

348
00:21:04,800 --> 00:21:07,800
I mean, it was on Inquisition or whatever.

349
00:21:07,800 --> 00:21:08,800
So it did all these things.

350
00:21:08,800 --> 00:21:13,800
It's many, many years and they're not pushing it, I think, just because no one knows
how to do any soft fork

351
00:21:13,800 --> 00:21:16,800
and no one wants to touch the soft fork.

352
00:21:16,800 --> 00:21:18,800
So I think that, so you say, what do I think of OP_CAT?

353
00:21:18,800 --> 00:21:19,800
It doesn't matter.

354
00:21:19,800 --> 00:21:22,800
The soft fork category is the issue.

355
00:21:22,800 --> 00:21:23,800
It's the soft fork part.

356
00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:27,800
And that is why the CUSF idea, actually, I think, is the good idea.

357
00:21:27,800 --> 00:21:30,800
That is C-U-S-F.

358
00:21:32,800 --> 00:21:38,800
One thing that I'm concerned about is this general crackdown on crypto from
governments.

359
00:21:38,800 --> 00:21:42,800
I'm not sure exactly how it is here in the U.S.

360
00:21:42,800 --> 00:21:46,800
I think Elizabeth Warren is trying things.

361
00:21:47,800 --> 00:21:49,800
But in Europe, it's quite extreme.

362
00:21:49,800 --> 00:21:55,800
Like the EU Parliament is going quite crazy on crypto and seeing these things.

363
00:21:57,800 --> 00:22:01,800
I get a bit concerned about adding too much features to Bitcoin's script

364
00:22:01,800 --> 00:22:05,800
because one thing that could happen is that at some point,

365
00:22:05,800 --> 00:22:10,800
governments say that you cannot take your money from exchanges

366
00:22:10,800 --> 00:22:13,800
except for to addresses which are fully KYC'd.

367
00:22:13,800 --> 00:22:15,800
Yeah, that's very scary.

368
00:22:16,800 --> 00:22:20,800
If you can impose that restriction at the protocol level, that's very dangerous.

369
00:22:20,800 --> 00:22:26,800
And like perpetual KYC on the protocol level would be already almost possible with
OP_CAT.

370
00:22:26,800 --> 00:22:30,800
It's a definite concern. That could happen.

371
00:22:30,800 --> 00:22:35,800
A handful of opcodes that are currently debated would definitely enable

372
00:22:35,800 --> 00:22:38,800
essentially perpetual KYC on the base layer.

373
00:22:38,800 --> 00:22:40,800
So like CTV, that's not a concern with CTV.

374
00:22:40,800 --> 00:22:43,800
You can do that one time, but you couldn't do it recursively, right?

375
00:22:44,800 --> 00:22:47,800
You need more dynamics. CTV would be too static.

376
00:22:47,800 --> 00:22:51,800
But with OP_CAT, you could have like trees,

377
00:22:51,800 --> 00:22:54,800
Merkle trees of addresses that you are allowed to send to.

378
00:22:54,800 --> 00:22:58,800
And then let's say you have Opcheck from stack as well.

379
00:22:58,800 --> 00:23:03,800
Then the government could sign routes of Merkle trees of addresses

380
00:23:03,800 --> 00:23:05,800
which you are allowed to send to.

381
00:23:05,800 --> 00:23:10,800
And OP_CAT would give you enough covenant introspection to check which amounts you're
sending and everything.

382
00:23:10,800 --> 00:23:13,800
There's no risk of anything like this with BitVM, right?

383
00:23:13,800 --> 00:23:18,800
Well, BitVM in general cannot enable anything that is not possible already today.

384
00:23:24,800 --> 00:23:27,800
There are always ways to abuse things, right?

385
00:23:31,800 --> 00:23:35,800
In general, the entire community of bad people has not spent a year

386
00:23:35,800 --> 00:23:38,800
of trying to do the worst with BitVM possible.

387
00:23:39,800 --> 00:23:40,800
It just did not happen yet.

388
00:23:40,800 --> 00:23:44,800
So we don't know the worst thing that can happen with BitVM.

389
00:23:44,800 --> 00:23:46,800
And there's always unintended consequences.

390
00:23:46,800 --> 00:23:48,800
There are always unknown unknowns.

391
00:23:50,800 --> 00:23:54,800
I'm not sure what's the worst thing that BitVM can do,

392
00:23:54,800 --> 00:24:01,800
but I'm very certain that a particular set of opcodes could enable very bad things
on the main layer.

393
00:24:01,800 --> 00:24:07,800
And the other thing is many of the new users like Blackrock

394
00:24:07,800 --> 00:24:10,800
or the people with huge pockets,

395
00:24:10,800 --> 00:24:13,800
they would not care at all if the base layer would enforce KYC all the time.

396
00:24:13,800 --> 00:24:14,800
They would be happy about it.

397
00:24:14,800 --> 00:24:20,800
They think regulation is a great thing and they just want to have digital gold

398
00:24:20,800 --> 00:24:24,800
and they would not care if everything would be KYC all the time.

399
00:24:24,800 --> 00:24:25,800
They would be happy about it.

400
00:24:26,800 --> 00:24:35,800
Is there any hope now for just general Lightning as a scalability layer of Layer 1
Bitcoin?

401
00:24:39,800 --> 00:24:42,800
I don't really see Lightning working as a scalability solution for end users.

402
00:24:42,800 --> 00:24:47,800
And in particular, when fees are rising, and we hope that fees are rising to fix...

403
00:24:47,800 --> 00:24:49,800
Fees have to rise eventually.

404
00:24:49,800 --> 00:24:52,800
Otherwise, the miners will stop getting paid and the whole thing collapses.

405
00:24:53,800 --> 00:24:57,800
And if fees are rising, then Lightning will become worse and worse for end users.

406
00:24:58,800 --> 00:25:02,800
And to some point, it will not even be possible to enforce users' rights anymore

407
00:25:02,800 --> 00:25:06,800
because you have to be able to pay on-chain fees to enforce your channel's rights.

408
00:25:06,800 --> 00:25:09,800
Now whenever I hear anybody talk about Lightning, they talk about it as a settlement
layer.

409
00:25:09,800 --> 00:25:12,800
It's hilarious to me because seven years ago,

410
00:25:12,800 --> 00:25:14,800
that's the way everybody started talking about Bitcoin.

411
00:25:14,800 --> 00:25:16,800
They said, oh no, you'll use Lightning for payments.

412
00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:18,800
No, no, Bitcoin's a settlement layer now.

413
00:25:18,800 --> 00:25:21,800
So now we've come full circle and it's just settlement layers all the way down.

414
00:25:21,800 --> 00:25:22,800
Yeah, I don't like that either.

415
00:25:22,800 --> 00:25:23,800
I like Lightning in general.

416
00:25:23,800 --> 00:25:26,800
I think it's a great technology, but it does not work for payments for end users.

417
00:25:27,800 --> 00:25:29,800
Yeah, it's not a scaling apparatus.

418
00:25:29,800 --> 00:25:31,800
It does a lot of things really, really well,

419
00:25:31,800 --> 00:25:35,800
but scaling isn't one of them because of the fee problem.

420
00:25:36,800 --> 00:25:38,800
You want to add something?

421
00:25:38,800 --> 00:25:40,800
No, I agree completely with all of that.

422
00:25:40,800 --> 00:25:43,800
I'm not sure that I would care so much about the...

423
00:25:43,800 --> 00:25:44,800
I do actually think it's a...

424
00:25:44,800 --> 00:25:47,800
I agree that we shouldn't add too much expressivity to L1

425
00:25:48,800 --> 00:25:52,800
because it is possible to make really bizarre...

426
00:25:53,800 --> 00:25:55,800
But I think that problem would actually solve itself

427
00:25:55,800 --> 00:26:02,800
because it's quite possible to add functionality via soft fork,

428
00:26:02,800 --> 00:26:05,800
but it's also very easy for miners to chip away,

429
00:26:05,800 --> 00:26:07,800
like carving a marble statue or something.

430
00:26:07,800 --> 00:26:10,800
It's pretty easy to go back in and just start disabling things.

431
00:26:10,800 --> 00:26:12,800
So if something problematic arose,

432
00:26:13,800 --> 00:26:17,800
I do think it would be easier to just delete, you know what I mean?

433
00:26:17,800 --> 00:26:20,800
Like what Satoshi did when he removed OP_CAT.

434
00:26:20,800 --> 00:26:21,800
What's the hard fork?

435
00:26:21,800 --> 00:26:24,800
Well, that was only a hard fork, I think, as I understand it.

436
00:26:25,800 --> 00:26:28,800
It was because that was the same commit that he added the opnops,

437
00:26:28,800 --> 00:26:30,800
and the opnops are the hard fork.

438
00:26:30,800 --> 00:26:32,800
So I think he tore out a bunch of...

439
00:26:32,800 --> 00:26:33,800
He just said these are all banned,

440
00:26:33,800 --> 00:26:37,800
and then the opnops are all new, and they always succeed.

441
00:26:38,800 --> 00:26:41,800
That's what I remember, right?

442
00:26:41,800 --> 00:26:43,800
It's kind of a minutiae thing.

443
00:26:43,800 --> 00:26:44,800
Really?

444
00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:46,800
What do you mean by that?

445
00:26:47,800 --> 00:26:49,800
Well, it was certainly a hard fork

446
00:26:49,800 --> 00:26:53,800
because he disabled something that was possible before.

447
00:26:57,800 --> 00:26:59,800
So soft forks, I think Paul's right.

448
00:26:59,800 --> 00:27:01,800
With soft forks, you can restrict functionality.

449
00:27:01,800 --> 00:27:04,800
You can't expand functionality to prior nodes.

450
00:27:06,800 --> 00:27:08,800
You can soft fork anything out of existence,

451
00:27:08,800 --> 00:27:10,800
so you can't do that anymore.

452
00:27:11,800 --> 00:27:13,800
That's how it would work if it contains OP_CAT.

453
00:27:15,800 --> 00:27:17,800
Yeah, you're right.

454
00:27:18,800 --> 00:27:22,800
So it would be interesting to have an old consensus.

455
00:27:22,800 --> 00:27:23,800
We want it with OP_CAT still.

456
00:27:23,800 --> 00:27:26,800
The old version of OP_CAT, but it's not tap or the dangerous one.

457
00:27:26,800 --> 00:27:28,800
Oh yeah, there's a new...

458
00:27:28,800 --> 00:27:30,800
There was some details about that.

459
00:27:31,800 --> 00:27:35,800
It was a hard fork in the sense that it became incompatible.

460
00:27:35,800 --> 00:27:40,800
Like the version that was before that fork is not compatible.

461
00:27:41,800 --> 00:27:45,800
A soft fork is usually defined to be backwards compatible.

462
00:27:45,800 --> 00:27:47,800
That's what I meant.

463
00:27:47,800 --> 00:27:49,800
It's funny that I actually wrote a blog post

464
00:27:49,800 --> 00:27:51,800
about how the terminology is screwed up

465
00:27:51,800 --> 00:27:53,800
because there's actually three different dimensions

466
00:27:53,800 --> 00:27:55,800
to whether or not something is a hard or soft fork

467
00:27:55,800 --> 00:27:57,800
and people constantly switch between them.

468
00:27:57,800 --> 00:27:59,800
And there's backwards compatibility,

469
00:27:59,800 --> 00:28:01,800
and then there's whether or not it resolves itself

470
00:28:01,800 --> 00:28:03,800
without the user having to do anything,

471
00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:05,800
and then there's something else like whether or not

472
00:28:05,800 --> 00:28:07,800
it is restricting the user.

473
00:28:07,800 --> 00:28:09,800
But yeah, the terminology is actually terrible.

474
00:28:09,800 --> 00:28:13,800
But the point that I was trying to make is that

475
00:28:13,800 --> 00:28:15,800
if you add something terrible in,

476
00:28:15,800 --> 00:28:17,800
you can probably get rid of it pretty easily.

477
00:28:17,800 --> 00:28:19,800
So I wouldn't really be that worried

478
00:28:19,800 --> 00:28:23,800
about the unintended consequences of adding the functionality to L1

479
00:28:23,800 --> 00:28:27,800
because there are unintended consequences to just doing nothing.

480
00:28:27,800 --> 00:28:30,800
I do think we would probably both agree

481
00:28:30,800 --> 00:28:33,800
that we cannot just spend another ten years

482
00:28:33,800 --> 00:28:36,800
doing whatever it is that we've been doing for the last ten years.

483
00:28:36,800 --> 00:28:38,800
I think that is not good enough.

484
00:28:40,800 --> 00:28:45,800
So let's talk more about Core Untouched Soft Forks.

485
00:28:47,800 --> 00:28:49,800
Do you have a question or anything?

486
00:28:49,800 --> 00:28:52,800
Yeah, I can try to give you a devil's advocate there.

487
00:28:52,800 --> 00:28:53,800
Yeah, sure.

488
00:28:53,800 --> 00:28:54,800
Yeah, please.

489
00:28:54,800 --> 00:28:58,800
Okay, so do you want to give miners the power over the network now?

490
00:28:58,800 --> 00:29:01,800
Is it now like a miner democracy

491
00:29:01,800 --> 00:29:05,800
where it is decided by the people who have the most hash power?

492
00:29:06,800 --> 00:29:07,800
Yeah.

493
00:29:07,800 --> 00:29:09,800
The flip side of this is

494
00:29:09,800 --> 00:29:12,800
do people actually really believe in proof of work at all

495
00:29:12,800 --> 00:29:15,800
or is it just going to be some kind of communist bureau

496
00:29:15,800 --> 00:29:17,800
that decides everything that happens?

497
00:29:17,800 --> 00:29:22,800
But I think the miners have a special ability

498
00:29:22,800 --> 00:29:24,800
over the activation of a soft fork.

499
00:29:24,800 --> 00:29:26,800
And I think this has always been true.

500
00:29:26,800 --> 00:29:29,800
And CUSF doesn't really change it, I think.

501
00:29:29,800 --> 00:29:34,800
I think that it just states it more clearly, in fact.

502
00:29:34,800 --> 00:29:36,800
So this is just...

503
00:29:36,800 --> 00:29:40,800
There's a difference between when does something activate and how.

504
00:29:40,800 --> 00:29:43,800
And then it will only really be part of the protocol

505
00:29:43,800 --> 00:29:46,800
when lots of end users' nodes are enforcing it.

506
00:29:46,800 --> 00:29:49,800
So I think those things are not really that different about CUSF.

507
00:29:49,800 --> 00:29:54,800
The CUSF thing is just a very, very small idea

508
00:29:54,800 --> 00:29:59,800
that's just about in what order should things happen.

509
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:05,000
And so it is about right now there's like a pocket veto and there's just like no one
knows how to get the process started.

510
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:07,000
And no one knows who's responsible.

511
00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:09,000
Generally, it's just safer to do nothing, right?

512
00:30:09,000 --> 00:30:13,000
That's what it's viewed as. But I mean, if you do nothing for long enough, then
there's a problem.

513
00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:16,000
Then, you know, eventually you die, right?

514
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:19,000
But in the short run, it's always safer to do nothing, right?

515
00:30:19,000 --> 00:30:22,000
So that's, I think, what the default is.

516
00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:25,000
But exactly as you said, in the long run, if you do nothing, you will die.

517
00:30:26,000 --> 00:30:29,000
So I don't know if that answers it.

518
00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:34,000
The idea of giving more power to miners, it's like the miners are users.

519
00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:41,000
So with the soft fork, unless you upgrade to the new software, you cannot use the
new feature.

520
00:30:41,000 --> 00:30:43,000
That's pretty normal.

521
00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:49,000
But if the miners want to collect the transaction fee, they also need to be users of
the new feature.

522
00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:54,000
So it's just like people adopting software that they like.

523
00:30:56,000 --> 00:30:57,000
It's not like some kind of...

524
00:30:57,000 --> 00:31:03,000
They have no additional power over the protocol that was pre-CUSF, which is 99% of
it.

525
00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:14,000
So if I understand you correctly, miners just don't get much more power with the
CUSF in comparison to regular...

526
00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:18,000
I think it's a status quo. It's just a different way of describing it.

527
00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:21,000
I think it's just a different way of describing the status quo.

528
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:23,000
The miners could always be the ones who...

529
00:31:23,000 --> 00:31:28,000
They could be on GitHub releasing the next version of Bitcoin Core and then running
it, right?

530
00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:31,000
They could do that, but they just don't.

531
00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:34,000
But there's nothing fundamental about that, you know what I mean?

532
00:31:34,000 --> 00:31:37,000
That's like an ad hominem fallacy of the...

533
00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:46,000
Actually, I wanted to play devil's advocate, but you didn't mention a very important
point that I think you should add.

534
00:31:46,000 --> 00:31:51,000
A strong counter-argument is, should we give the core devs the full power?

535
00:31:53,000 --> 00:31:58,000
With the Communist Bureau, I was referring to them, so maybe it's a little too
subtle.

536
00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:04,000
But yeah, it's like someone is deciding, and right now they decide mostly what
impresses their friends.

537
00:32:04,000 --> 00:32:08,000
Really, though, that goes back to the definition of Bitcoin and continuity.

538
00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:11,000
And it's like the core devs, even the core devs that exist now,

539
00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:16,000
almost none of them are the same core devs that initially put SegWit through.

540
00:32:16,000 --> 00:32:18,000
I think there is a very bad incentive, actually.

541
00:32:20,000 --> 00:32:25,000
The miners have a very good incentive to keep the users happy and to generate
transaction fee revenue.

542
00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:29,000
They want... The more users, the more growth.

543
00:32:29,000 --> 00:32:31,000
These are real users who pay real money.

544
00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:36,000
We're going to need transaction fee revenue, because the block reward is going to
keep going down.

545
00:32:36,000 --> 00:32:41,000
It's a very good criterion to say, can we maximize the amount of money collected?

546
00:32:43,000 --> 00:32:47,000
And whereas in Bitcoin Core, I don't know, the incentive is something else.

547
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:50,000
The incentive is like, can you come up with something really complicated that's very
impressive,

548
00:32:50,000 --> 00:32:54,000
and then you get a grant or whatever, or you get something.

549
00:32:55,000 --> 00:32:57,000
And so I think that it is...

550
00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:01,000
So it's just like everything else, it all boils down to incentives.

551
00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:08,000
Maybe you could also say it takes away unwanted pressure from core devs,

552
00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:14,000
because I feel like many core devs don't want to be the rulers of the system, not at
all.

553
00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:17,000
It's more like they shy away from controversial ideas.

554
00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:19,000
Especially nowadays, I think.

555
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:24,000
Well, that's the impetus on them to not push it for any soft fork,

556
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:28,000
because then there's nothing controversial for them to have to deal with.

557
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:30,000
It kind of removes politics from core.

558
00:33:32,000 --> 00:33:34,000
But I mean, it removes politics...

559
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:39,000
As we mentioned before, the story with APO is like, this is one where...

560
00:33:39,000 --> 00:33:40,000
Built by them.

561
00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:43,000
Built by the insiders, basically.

562
00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:48,000
And the lightning thing, but they don't want to touch activation because they just
don't...

563
00:33:50,000 --> 00:33:52,000
Well, yeah, it wasn't built by...

564
00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:54,000
Maybe some people would be so...

565
00:33:55,000 --> 00:33:56,000
Can you tell us, is it?

566
00:33:57,000 --> 00:34:01,000
Well, yeah, I'm just saying it's like from Bitcoin core universe,

567
00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:04,000
from the Bitcoin dev mailing list, from the lightning universe.

568
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:06,000
But even that one is not...

569
00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:11,000
That one, they just coded it, and then it just sits there on a shelf, being not
activated.

570
00:34:16,000 --> 00:34:17,000
So...

571
00:34:17,000 --> 00:34:20,000
I see your point about they don't want the politics.

572
00:34:21,000 --> 00:34:24,000
Yeah, I'm just saying it might be good for them.

573
00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:30,000
It might be diminishing their role, but giving them the role that they actually
want.

574
00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:36,000
Well, sooner or later, decisions have to be made about what's going to be done.

575
00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:44,000
It's nice to work on projects for years that have minorly meaningful optimizations,

576
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:48,000
but eventually, either things are going to stay exactly the same they are now,

577
00:34:48,000 --> 00:34:50,000
or they're going to have to change, and they will be.

578
00:34:52,000 --> 00:34:56,000
I don't know, it's just getting to the point where I'm not seeing anybody asking

579
00:34:56,000 --> 00:34:59,000
and trying to actually take up these issues at my core level.

580
00:34:59,000 --> 00:35:01,000
They just kind of throw up their hands and say,

581
00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:03,000
oh, we'll decide when we have consensus.

582
00:35:03,000 --> 00:35:07,000
And we never reach consensus because nobody's tackling anything.

583
00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:08,000
I don't know.

584
00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:14,000
Here's one thing about CUSF, though, that probably the both of us like,

585
00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:15,000
but maybe you don't.

586
00:35:15,000 --> 00:35:19,000
It does push some of the responsibility onto the mining pool, such as Marathon.

587
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:23,000
So it's like, you guys can just decide now if you run the software or not.

588
00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:27,000
So now, you can just say, ah, there's no consensus or whatever,

589
00:35:27,000 --> 00:35:31,000
but now it's your decision to make, not yours personally.

590
00:35:33,000 --> 00:35:34,000
Marathons, maybe.

591
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:37,000
Well, there is something to be said to have somebody to appeal to,

592
00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:39,000
as we do in the current system.

593
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:41,000
Yeah.

594
00:35:42,000 --> 00:35:46,000
You know to whom your grievance should be addressed.

595
00:35:46,000 --> 00:35:49,000
That is an advantage of this, where it's like,

596
00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:54,000
you know that the answer is no until 51% pools say yes,

597
00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:56,000
so that you at least know where you are.

598
00:35:56,000 --> 00:35:57,000
I actually had an idea.

599
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:01,000
I published a little stupid Medium article way during the block size war,

600
00:36:01,000 --> 00:36:04,000
and I always wanted to see if it would work.

601
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:09,000
What if you created a wallet that tracked actual transactor sentiment

602
00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:14,000
as to whether they won or something by the amount of transaction they spent?

603
00:36:14,000 --> 00:36:17,000
So that way, the miners could tell how the people who are paying them fees

604
00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:21,000
actually think and feel, rather than Twitter.

605
00:36:22,000 --> 00:36:23,000
I don't know.

606
00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:25,000
As a miner, you could actually measure it, right?

607
00:36:25,000 --> 00:36:28,000
Because as a miner, you see how much of these fees you actually get yourself.

608
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:29,000
Right.

609
00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:33,000
It's distributed kind of randomly, but yeah.

610
00:36:33,000 --> 00:36:34,000
But that is the point.

611
00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:36,000
Because otherwise, the metric could be gamed.

612
00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:39,000
If another miner that has a lot of hash power would just game the metric

613
00:36:39,000 --> 00:36:42,000
by inserting transactions that pay themselves,

614
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:45,000
then you would never get that, and then you would not get that signal.

615
00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:49,000
But money that is paid to you is no lie.

616
00:36:49,000 --> 00:36:51,000
Nobody can lie about that.

617
00:36:51,000 --> 00:36:52,000
So that is a very high signal.

618
00:36:52,000 --> 00:36:53,000
Exactly.

619
00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:56,000
Because if you're only monitoring things you know that cannot be gamed.

620
00:36:56,000 --> 00:36:59,000
Unless people want to pay you money, in which case you don't care if it's gamed or
not.

621
00:36:59,000 --> 00:37:00,000
They're paying you money.

622
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:07,000
I think another interesting thing is that it's actually not possible for miners

623
00:37:07,000 --> 00:37:09,000
to activate arbitrary soft forks.

624
00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:13,000
Let's say the miners wanted to activate a soft fork

625
00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:16,000
that increases the block reward or something.

626
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:19,000
Then users would resist that a lot.

627
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:24,000
So the incentives for miners are aligned to activate soft forks

628
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:26,000
only if users actually support it.

629
00:37:26,000 --> 00:37:32,000
They have very low incentive to try to push a soft fork against the user's will.

630
00:37:32,000 --> 00:37:38,000
And I feel like in that regard, the incentives are quite well aligned with CUSF.

631
00:37:38,000 --> 00:37:39,000
Thank you guys.

632
00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:40,000
It's been a wonderful panel,

633
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:43,000
but I think we should try to take some questions from the audience if possible.

634
00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:44,000
Oh yeah, sure.

635
00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:45,000
Ask any questions.

636
00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:48,000
Don't be shy.

637
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:49,000
Ask a question.

638
00:37:51,000 --> 00:37:52,000
If you want.

639
00:37:54,000 --> 00:37:55,000
Okay, thanks.

640
00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:58,000
Nobody was expecting, well, maybe nobody,

641
00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:02,000
but the whole Ordinals improvement to DRC-20 is part of that.

642
00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:08,000
And I'm detecting the feeling that the core community is not going to want to see

643
00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:10,000
something go off the rails again.

644
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:12,000
There's an obvious question about that.

645
00:38:12,000 --> 00:38:16,000
Couldn't we see like two or three years of ossification here

646
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:18,000
before a new BIP really got approved?

647
00:38:18,000 --> 00:38:23,000
I actually think that Ordinals is a negative consequence of ossification.

648
00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:28,000
So it's actually if we had had normal progression in development

649
00:38:28,000 --> 00:38:31,000
and also normal developer community that actually cared about

650
00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:37,000
what the end users who pay a fee, those are the real customers.

651
00:38:37,000 --> 00:38:41,000
If the developer community actually cared about those people,

652
00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:45,000
they would have long ago built something or promoted something that worked for them.

653
00:38:45,000 --> 00:38:48,000
And we could have solved all the earlier problems.

654
00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:50,000
So like Counterparty was like a very early version of this.

655
00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:53,000
Everything that was on an altcoin was originally on Bitcoin,

656
00:38:53,000 --> 00:38:56,000
like years ago in like 2011, 2012.

657
00:38:56,000 --> 00:38:59,000
So like all this stuff, Ordinals, Runes,

658
00:38:59,000 --> 00:39:02,000
it's like almost an offshoot of ERC-20 on Ethereum,

659
00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:05,000
but that was an offshoot of Counterparty and colored coins

660
00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:09,000
and all this other stuff that's ancient on Bitcoin itself.

661
00:39:09,000 --> 00:39:11,000
But what happened was in Bitcoin,

662
00:39:11,000 --> 00:39:15,000
the developers have a lot of contempt for the user.

663
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:17,000
They have a lot of hatred for the user,

664
00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:19,000
and they don't want to build something that the user likes.

665
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:23,000
And so Counterparty and these other things were suppressed,

666
00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:26,000
partially for good reasons, because they did have negative...

667
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:29,000
But the point is if you actually put engineering effort

668
00:39:29,000 --> 00:39:33,000
and human creativity into that,

669
00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:35,000
you could address what didn't work

670
00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:38,000
while still giving the end user what they did want.

671
00:39:38,000 --> 00:39:40,000
And so if we had done that,

672
00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:42,000
there would never have been an Ethereum in the first place,

673
00:39:42,000 --> 00:39:45,000
and there would never be any Runes or Ordinals on L1 either,

674
00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:48,000
because everyone would already have gotten what they wanted 10 years ago.

675
00:39:48,000 --> 00:39:51,000
But instead, we have this weird other thing.

676
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:53,000
So I kind of don't think it works that way.

677
00:39:53,000 --> 00:39:56,000
And I do think Ordinals and Runes, again,

678
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:59,000
this is another thing where it's like

679
00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:01,000
you can't get the thing that you want directly,

680
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:03,000
so you get it very indirectly

681
00:40:03,000 --> 00:40:09,000
at a way that is interfering with L1's normal operation.

682
00:40:09,000 --> 00:40:12,000
So I have a very different view on that.

683
00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:16,000
I don't know if you share that view or not.

684
00:40:16,000 --> 00:40:19,000
Yeah, I totally agree that Ordinals is a symptom

685
00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:22,000
of mainchain fees being too low,

686
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:26,000
and that is a symptom of the system not being useful enough,

687
00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:30,000
and that is a symptom of the system not being scalable enough.

688
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:33,000
So in that regard, I totally agree.

689
00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:39,000
I think it's a distraction.

690
00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:42,000
It kind of distracts the Bitcoin community

691
00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:45,000
from the actual core goal that we should have,

692
00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:49,000
which is establishing Bitcoin as a currency worldwide.

693
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:53,000
But yeah, maybe in hindsight,

694
00:40:53,000 --> 00:40:56,000
it was a good thing to shift the overtone window,

695
00:40:56,000 --> 00:40:59,000
to change the discussion in different directions

696
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:02,000
and make people think about other things.

697
00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:06,000
I agree that it is.

698
00:41:06,000 --> 00:41:09,000
The whole topic kind of is a distraction.

699
00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:12,000
The one good thing that came out of it

700
00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:15,000
was that there was so much ossification,

701
00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:18,000
and then Ordinals and Runes were like someone doing something new

702
00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:21,000
and something fun, and people actually liked that.

703
00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:23,000
So weirdly...

704
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:27,000
Anyway, feel free to ask anything else.

705
00:41:29,000 --> 00:41:31,000
Ask a question, everyone.

706
00:41:31,000 --> 00:41:34,000
Some critics of Bitcoin under its chain

707
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:37,000
say that it's caused deep reworks,

708
00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:40,000
and the miners are stealing the sidechain

709
00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:43,000
and using it as an opportunity for merchants to prevent that.

710
00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:45,000
Is that a deep rework?

711
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:47,000
Yeah, that's just like incorrect,

712
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:50,000
and it's kind of like a weird thing that people think about that.

713
00:41:50,000 --> 00:41:53,000
But what would actually happen in the timeline of events

714
00:41:53,000 --> 00:41:55,000
is like miners preemptively declare

715
00:41:55,000 --> 00:41:58,000
that they will destroy the BIP300 sidechain,

716
00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:00,000
and then users preemptively declare

717
00:42:00,000 --> 00:42:05,000
that they will not allow that transaction in the block in the future.

718
00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:07,000
So nothing has happened for many months.

719
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:10,000
Like three months later, there will be the moment of truth

720
00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:13,000
when the transaction tries to make it into the block.

721
00:42:13,000 --> 00:42:16,000
At this point, anyone who has voluntarily,

722
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:18,000
who is already a user of BIP300,

723
00:42:18,000 --> 00:42:22,000
who has voluntarily decided to UASF the transaction,

724
00:42:22,000 --> 00:42:25,000
this is already like a much smaller percentage then.

725
00:42:25,000 --> 00:42:28,000
Everyone who is just ignoring it completely

726
00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:31,000
and going about their lives, nothing will happen to them.

727
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:35,000
But these people, if they were using BIP300 sidechain,

728
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:37,000
and they tried to do the UASF,

729
00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:40,000
and the miners tried to destroy the chain,

730
00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:43,000
and the miners are successful

731
00:42:43,000 --> 00:42:46,000
in attracting 51% hash rate to their cause,

732
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:48,000
and they're not deterred at all by the fact

733
00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:50,000
that they will lose the entire stream

734
00:42:50,000 --> 00:42:52,000
of transaction fee revenues and blah, blah, blah,

735
00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:54,000
no one stops them.

736
00:42:54,000 --> 00:42:56,000
If all of those things happen,

737
00:42:56,000 --> 00:42:58,000
what will happen is the people who do the UASF

738
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:01,000
will just be stuck in a chain that never finds a block again

739
00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:03,000
until they give up.

740
00:43:03,000 --> 00:43:06,000
So there will never be a reorg ever under any circumstances.

741
00:43:06,000 --> 00:43:09,000
And the only thing that will happen is that people who have chosen to...

742
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:12,000
The other thing I would mention is that actually the UASF

743
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:15,000
is a contradiction because despite the name,

744
00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:19,000
it must either be a hard fork or it must be driven by miners.

745
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:24,000
So if you have a situation where the user has minority hash rate,

746
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:28,000
they are then breaking the heaviest valid chain rule,

747
00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:32,000
which is in principle no different than breaking the 21 million coin limit

748
00:43:32,000 --> 00:43:34,000
or the block size limit.

749
00:43:34,000 --> 00:43:38,000
So they're breaking the heaviest valid chain rule in one specific way.

750
00:43:38,000 --> 00:43:41,000
It also has the same property as a hard fork

751
00:43:41,000 --> 00:43:44,000
in that only the people who have done this activity

752
00:43:44,000 --> 00:43:46,000
will find themselves on the new network.

753
00:43:46,000 --> 00:43:48,000
Everyone who's doing nothing,

754
00:43:48,000 --> 00:43:50,000
which is going to be 99% of the people,

755
00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:52,000
will just be doing nothing and ignoring all of this.

756
00:43:52,000 --> 00:43:55,000
All of those people will find themselves on whatever the heaviest chain is.

757
00:43:55,000 --> 00:43:58,000
So there will never really be a reorg.

758
00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:01,000
And if there is, it's just because people have decided

759
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:03,000
that they want to reorg for some reason.

760
00:44:03,000 --> 00:44:04,000
You know what I mean?

761
00:44:04,000 --> 00:44:06,000
Like they could always just decide,

762
00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:09,000
I don't like this block has the hex spells out a certain thing

763
00:44:09,000 --> 00:44:11,000
and now we want to reorg or something.

764
00:44:11,000 --> 00:44:12,000
It's not really...

765
00:44:12,000 --> 00:44:15,000
The other thing is that risk of reorg is always a part of Bitcoin anyway.

766
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:17,000
So it's in...

767
00:44:17,000 --> 00:44:20,000
There's no such thing as like being free of the risk of a reorg.

768
00:44:20,000 --> 00:44:24,000
So even in that case, it's not because of BIP300.

769
00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:27,000
To cement his argument,

770
00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:30,000
just to spice up the discussion a bit,

771
00:44:30,000 --> 00:44:36,000
it is definitely true that BIP300 would change the miners' incentives

772
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:41,000
in a sense that if 51% of the miners...

773
00:44:41,000 --> 00:44:44,000
60%? How much is it?

774
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:45,000
75.

775
00:44:45,000 --> 00:44:48,000
If 75% of the miners would collude

776
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:51,000
and decide to rob a sidechain,

777
00:44:51,000 --> 00:44:53,000
they could just do that.

778
00:44:53,000 --> 00:44:59,000
They could just vote to process an invalid pegout

779
00:44:59,000 --> 00:45:01,000
that gives the money to them,

780
00:45:01,000 --> 00:45:04,000
stealing all the money from the sidechain users.

781
00:45:04,000 --> 00:45:05,000
And that is true.

782
00:45:05,000 --> 00:45:08,000
But that would not change the layer 1 incentives, right?

783
00:45:08,000 --> 00:45:09,000
Right, exactly.

784
00:45:09,000 --> 00:45:12,000
So that is true that the sidechain can fail that way,

785
00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:15,000
but I see that as actually sort of a good thing in a way.

786
00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:18,000
The whole theory behind Drivechain is that

787
00:45:18,000 --> 00:45:21,000
the transaction fees from the sidechain

788
00:45:21,000 --> 00:45:25,000
will be more than enough to offset whatever can be stolen.

789
00:45:25,000 --> 00:45:28,000
And the reason why this is likely is because,

790
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:31,000
first of all, no one will use a sidechain that doesn't have that property.

791
00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:33,000
It's kind of like if you open a restaurant.

792
00:45:33,000 --> 00:45:35,000
Will the restaurant make enough money

793
00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:39,000
so that you don't rip out the copper wires and the piping or something like that?

794
00:45:39,000 --> 00:45:43,000
Start a restaurant and not every restaurant is going to succeed,

795
00:45:43,000 --> 00:45:44,000
and that's actually a good thing.

796
00:45:44,000 --> 00:45:48,000
That is how we make sure that the list of sidechains is only the good ones.

797
00:45:48,000 --> 00:45:50,000
And no one should use a sidechain at first.

798
00:45:50,000 --> 00:45:54,000
You should just wait and see if it is actually viable first.

799
00:45:54,000 --> 00:45:59,000
But the turnover and the stock and the flow are different things.

800
00:45:59,000 --> 00:46:02,000
So you could deposit like 2 Bitcoin to a sidechain,

801
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:05,000
and over there, there could be this huge turnover

802
00:46:05,000 --> 00:46:08,000
so that millions of people are using it.

803
00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:10,000
They each pay a tiny transaction fee,

804
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:17,000
and 1.5 out of that 2 Bitcoin ends up as transaction fees for the miners.

805
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:19,000
There's only 0.5 left.

806
00:46:19,000 --> 00:46:22,000
But you got an unbelievable amount of use out of it,

807
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:25,000
millions or trillions of people.

808
00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:27,000
Just maybe as a thought experiment,

809
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:32,000
I would bring up like you put two coins into a desert island

810
00:46:32,000 --> 00:46:34,000
that has two gold coins.

811
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:36,000
They can circulate like a million times.

812
00:46:36,000 --> 00:46:38,000
So the fact that there's only two coins on the island,

813
00:46:38,000 --> 00:46:40,000
it doesn't mean anything about the limitations.

814
00:46:40,000 --> 00:46:43,000
So the reason I bring that up is just to say

815
00:46:43,000 --> 00:46:46,000
the two coins, that's what the miners can steal and destroy.

816
00:46:46,000 --> 00:46:51,000
But what they have to gain is potentially much more than that.

817
00:46:53,000 --> 00:46:56,000
But essentially it's a change in the sense that you can say

818
00:46:56,000 --> 00:47:00,000
if someone has enough hash power, they can steal from the sidechain.

819
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:05,000
So there would also be an incentive to collude.

820
00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:06,000
Yeah.

821
00:47:07,000 --> 00:47:09,000
Well, I don't know about it. Maybe.

822
00:47:09,000 --> 00:47:12,000
If so, if they destroy all the sidechains,

823
00:47:12,000 --> 00:47:14,000
we'll just be back to where we were now.

824
00:47:14,000 --> 00:47:17,000
So again, it's kind of weird if that's considered a change.

825
00:47:17,000 --> 00:47:21,000
We'd be changed, just changed back to where we, the current status quo.

826
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:23,000
I think we have another question.

827
00:47:23,000 --> 00:47:24,000
Yes.

828
00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:25,000
Hey.

829
00:47:25,000 --> 00:47:28,000
It's been a long time.

830
00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:31,000
Excuse me.

831
00:47:32,000 --> 00:47:35,000
I'd like to hear your expert opinions

832
00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:39,000
on how it relates specifically to Drivechains

833
00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:41,000
and also VPN.

834
00:47:41,000 --> 00:47:42,000
Can you answer it?

835
00:47:42,000 --> 00:47:43,000
Yes.

836
00:47:43,000 --> 00:47:46,000
In case someone in the chat did not get to know us.

837
00:47:46,000 --> 00:47:54,000
Like, do you like how it relates to the work with VPN and Drivechains?

838
00:47:54,000 --> 00:47:56,000
I see you're wearing their hats.

839
00:47:56,000 --> 00:47:58,000
Are you in their team?

840
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:00,000
You're just a fan.

841
00:48:00,000 --> 00:48:01,000
Okay.

842
00:48:04,000 --> 00:48:07,000
I didn't have time to really look into it.

843
00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:08,000
In particular, BitcoinOS,

844
00:48:08,000 --> 00:48:11,000
I think they have not open sourced their code yet,

845
00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:18,000
which is hard to assess then for me as a developer.

846
00:48:18,000 --> 00:48:22,000
I mean, I know the people behind that.

847
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:25,000
I know they are doing interesting things.

848
00:48:26,000 --> 00:48:31,000
But I cannot say right away how good it is.

849
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:35,000
Of course, I'm super psyched that people are working on it,

850
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:38,000
that people are investing developer resources

851
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:42,000
into building BitVM kind of like things.

852
00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:43,000
That's cool to see.

853
00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:49,000
I'm, of course, very happy to see my child grow.

854
00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:51,000
But I would be careful with these things.

855
00:48:51,000 --> 00:48:53,000
Like, it's quite easy to announce something

856
00:48:53,000 --> 00:48:54,000
and it's really hard to build something

857
00:48:54,000 --> 00:48:58,000
that actually works in practice.

858
00:48:58,000 --> 00:49:01,000
The other thing is, as far as I know,

859
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:04,000
they are using the BitVM 1 model.

860
00:49:04,000 --> 00:49:05,000
zk-SNARKs.

861
00:49:05,000 --> 00:49:07,000
Yeah, zk-SNARKs.

862
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:10,000
But it's not true?

863
00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:11,000
Sorry?

864
00:49:11,000 --> 00:49:12,000
It's Google.

865
00:49:12,000 --> 00:49:13,000
Ah, okay.

866
00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:16,000
Yeah, they're using the BitVM 1 model.

867
00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:20,000
And that was the same model that we started out with.

868
00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:23,000
However, we came to the conclusion

869
00:49:23,000 --> 00:49:26,000
that it's quite hard to build efficient bridges with it.

870
00:49:26,000 --> 00:49:29,000
Like, to verify a snark is the one thing,

871
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:32,000
but the other thing is to actually use that snark in a bridge

872
00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:35,000
to bridge Bitcoin to other systems.

873
00:49:35,000 --> 00:49:40,000
And our conclusion was that BitVM 1 is a bit too complex,

874
00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:43,000
or BitVM 1 bridges in particular are a bit too complex.

875
00:49:43,000 --> 00:49:46,000
And that's why we went back to the drawing board

876
00:49:46,000 --> 00:49:47,000
and reconsidered everything

877
00:49:47,000 --> 00:49:50,000
and came up with a BitVM 2 design that we are working on right now.

878
00:49:50,000 --> 00:49:52,000
And that is definitely...

879
00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:54,000
Four weeks!

880
00:49:54,000 --> 00:49:56,000
...that we will hopefully release within the next few weeks,

881
00:49:56,000 --> 00:49:58,000
the first prototype version of it.

882
00:49:58,000 --> 00:50:04,000
Let's get one more question.

883
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:08,000
My question was to Osbert.

884
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:12,000
Why don't you go directly to banks to get Bitcoin?

885
00:50:13,000 --> 00:50:18,000
No, that is...

886
00:50:18,000 --> 00:50:22,000
In a way, CUSF sort of is doing that, in a way.

887
00:50:22,000 --> 00:50:24,000
The miners, though, are like, you know,

888
00:50:24,000 --> 00:50:26,000
they're just committed to just, like, blah, blah, blah,

889
00:50:26,000 --> 00:50:28,000
saying, like, we'll look into it later, or whatever.

890
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:31,000
Even though it makes them hundreds of billions of dollars in the future.

891
00:50:31,000 --> 00:50:35,000
But I think that that is the healthier thing,

892
00:50:35,000 --> 00:50:37,000
because...

893
00:50:37,000 --> 00:50:40,000
But the miners are very interested in, like...

894
00:50:40,000 --> 00:50:42,000
They have, like, a focus on just getting cheap power.

895
00:50:42,000 --> 00:50:44,000
They're, like, very narrowly focused, I think.

896
00:50:44,000 --> 00:50:46,000
They're not really...

897
00:50:46,000 --> 00:50:48,000
These things are like a palace affair to them, or something.

898
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:50,000
It's like it's...

899
00:50:50,000 --> 00:50:52,000
Maybe you know, like...

900
00:50:52,000 --> 00:50:54,000
So, like, in a way, I...

901
00:50:54,000 --> 00:50:57,000
Okay, yeah. Do you have something else to say?

902
00:50:57,000 --> 00:50:59,000
Okay.

903
00:50:59,000 --> 00:51:02,000
One thing is, of course, they risk a chain split.

904
00:51:02,000 --> 00:51:06,000
Like, if somebody were to use a resisted soft fork,

905
00:51:06,000 --> 00:51:07,000
then the chain could split.

906
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:11,000
And in general, I think miners don't want to see

907
00:51:11,000 --> 00:51:14,000
any funny business in that direction.

908
00:51:14,000 --> 00:51:16,000
And that's why they're hesitant.

909
00:51:16,000 --> 00:51:18,000
You just say you want to enforce it

910
00:51:18,000 --> 00:51:20,000
until there's a super-majority hash rate.

911
00:51:20,000 --> 00:51:22,000
I mean, that's like a solvable problem, right?

912
00:51:22,000 --> 00:51:25,000
Then you will never get the actual split.

913
00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:27,000
Only the user-resisted...

914
00:51:27,000 --> 00:51:28,000
Again, that's like...

915
00:51:28,000 --> 00:51:29,000
Again, this is really...

916
00:51:29,000 --> 00:51:31,000
The UASF really is a hard fork,

917
00:51:31,000 --> 00:51:33,000
because you just put yourself on your own network

918
00:51:33,000 --> 00:51:35,000
with whoever else is running the new software with you.

919
00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:37,000
It's the threat of a hard fork.

920
00:51:37,000 --> 00:51:38,000
Yeah, yeah.

921
00:51:38,000 --> 00:51:42,000
So, I think that's a very, very, very, very empty threat.

922
00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:43,000
It's very silly.

923
00:51:43,000 --> 00:51:45,000
But maybe. I don't know.

924
00:51:45,000 --> 00:51:47,000
I think, in general, just a lot of people

925
00:51:47,000 --> 00:51:49,000
have to wrap their heads around a lot of things.

926
00:51:49,000 --> 00:51:51,000
I don't have an answer for you.

927
00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:53,000
I mean, I think the miners should do it,

928
00:51:53,000 --> 00:51:55,000
activate it unilaterally.

929
00:51:55,000 --> 00:51:58,000
They should activate all these soft forks unilaterally,

930
00:51:58,000 --> 00:52:01,000
which they can't do easily.

931
00:52:01,000 --> 00:52:03,000
Microphone.

932
00:52:03,000 --> 00:52:05,000
Oh, sorry, Eric.

933
00:52:05,000 --> 00:52:07,000
Yeah, because of the fact that

934
00:52:07,000 --> 00:52:09,000
consensus rules aren't enforced by

935
00:52:09,000 --> 00:52:11,000
node-runners and the economic acquisition network,

936
00:52:11,000 --> 00:52:14,000
the miners are going to be just trusting themselves

937
00:52:14,000 --> 00:52:15,000
to not kind of...

938
00:52:15,000 --> 00:52:17,000
Hey, we're going to kind of back out of this.

939
00:52:17,000 --> 00:52:18,000
Yeah.

940
00:52:18,000 --> 00:52:19,000
We might start not applying...

941
00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:21,000
But first of all, that's very likely to work.

942
00:52:21,000 --> 00:52:23,000
And second of all, it's not strictly true either,

943
00:52:23,000 --> 00:52:27,000
because as soon as someone else runs

944
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:29,000
the same software that's enforcing the rules,

945
00:52:29,000 --> 00:52:31,000
you have, like, all the miners plus one person,

946
00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:33,000
and you have...

947
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:35,000
The miners have no way of knowing

948
00:52:35,000 --> 00:52:37,000
the exact date and time that Coinbase

949
00:52:37,000 --> 00:52:39,000
or some exchange decides to actually run.

950
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:41,000
So it's actually...

951
00:52:41,000 --> 00:52:43,000
Even if it was only miners,

952
00:52:43,000 --> 00:52:45,000
it would still be likely to work,

953
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:47,000
because the miners have no real way

954
00:52:47,000 --> 00:52:49,000
to defect out of the coalition

955
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:51,000
without stabbing each other in the back

956
00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:53,000
an endless number of times.

957
00:52:53,000 --> 00:52:55,000
But then they also don't know

958
00:52:55,000 --> 00:52:57,000
who else is enforcing the new soft fork rules.

959
00:52:57,000 --> 00:52:59,000
So I don't actually...

960
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:01,000
I think that would...

961
00:53:01,000 --> 00:53:03,000
Even that, which is a very, very, very extreme

962
00:53:05,000 --> 00:53:07,000
way of activating the soft fork,

963
00:53:07,000 --> 00:53:09,000
I think that would work just fine, actually,

964
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:11,000
if you actually made me guess.

965
00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:15,000
Iago? Yeah, we got something?

966
00:53:15,000 --> 00:53:17,000
So this is pure hearsay.

967
00:53:17,000 --> 00:53:19,000
I just looked up, and so you guys

968
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:21,000
don't get any surprises.

969
00:53:21,000 --> 00:53:23,000
You have the...

970
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:25,000
He was asking about it.

971
00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:27,000
Hey, you have the hats.

972
00:53:27,000 --> 00:53:29,000
Just asking about the news.

973
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:45,000
I'm not saying to be careful

974
00:53:45,000 --> 00:53:47,000
about any BitVM things.

975
00:53:49,000 --> 00:53:51,000
I think I said explicitly

976
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:53,000
that I'm happy to see people building

977
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:55,000
BitVM-like things.

978
00:53:55,000 --> 00:53:57,000
I just said I'm careful about announcements

979
00:53:57,000 --> 00:53:59,000
when I don't see the code.

980
00:54:09,000 --> 00:54:11,000
We have a tech talk

981
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:13,000
on the open-source stage tomorrow.

982
00:54:13,000 --> 00:54:15,000
We also want to provide

983
00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:17,000
a deep dive into

984
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:19,000
growth. We were thinking about

985
00:54:19,000 --> 00:54:21,000
doing it at the Dare to Growth

986
00:54:21,000 --> 00:54:23,000
tomorrow night.

987
00:54:23,000 --> 00:54:25,000
Can you get this work out?

988
00:54:27,000 --> 00:54:29,000
I know the other announcement

989
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:31,000
from Rootstock.

990
00:54:33,000 --> 00:54:35,000
Also, full disclaimer,

991
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:37,000
I like the guys from Rootstock as well.

992
00:54:37,000 --> 00:54:39,000
I think they're doing interesting things.

993
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:41,000
They have committed

994
00:54:41,000 --> 00:54:43,000
interesting contributions

995
00:54:43,000 --> 00:54:45,000
to our code base as well.

996
00:54:47,000 --> 00:54:49,000
Unfortunately, I didn't have time

997
00:54:49,000 --> 00:54:51,000
to follow the announcement because I was traveling.

998
00:54:51,000 --> 00:54:53,000
What I saw was

999
00:54:53,000 --> 00:54:55,000
that they said they're ready.

1000
00:54:55,000 --> 00:54:57,000
There were a couple of questions.

1001
00:54:57,000 --> 00:54:59,000
They said they're ready

1002
00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:01,000
except for these two things

1003
00:55:01,000 --> 00:55:03,000
and some minor other things.

1004
00:55:07,000 --> 00:55:09,000
I see the marketing point of things,

1005
00:55:09,000 --> 00:55:11,000
but on the other hand,

1006
00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:13,000
I think

1007
00:55:13,000 --> 00:55:15,000
having things that

1008
00:55:15,000 --> 00:55:17,000
are useful to people in practice,

1009
00:55:17,000 --> 00:55:19,000
that is what we should be about.

1010
00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:21,000
Whoever does that

1011
00:55:21,000 --> 00:55:23,000
first should have

1012
00:55:23,000 --> 00:55:25,000
the glory and the honor.