Welcome to Drivechain, Drivechain Twitter Spaces.
I hope everyone's having a great day.
Samuel, I see you in the audience.
I loved your recent article in Bitcoin Magazine.
It was really great.
It was all about Drivechain and how Drivechain can be an amazing feature for Bitcoin.
If you'd like to come up and talk about it, you're welcome to, or you're welcome to also
just listen in the audience today.
In preparation for this Drivechain Twitter Spaces, there have been a bunch of tweets
that I shared.
Let me put those up in the nest, and then people can refer to them.
The first one, there it is.
Adam Back, he wrote just a few days ago that he is an innovation maximalist and altcoin
seniorage critic.
This is in a thread that begins with Blockstream's tweet featuring Adam Back and Paul Sztorc
talking about layer twos.
The next tweet under that Blockstream tweet was a tweet by a Zcash proponent, and Adam
then replied, innovation maximalist, altcoin seniorage critic.
I think that Dr. Back understands perfectly what Drivechain is all about, which is that
it is designed to eliminate altcoin seniorage while enabling all of the technological innovation
that altcoins have facilitated so far.
Once Drivechain is enabled, then all of that building can continue on Bitcoin in Drivechains
rather than in altcoins.
So Adam gets that very well.
So that is the first tweet for discussion today.
It's in the nest, so listeners can look up and see it right there in our Twitter Spaces.
One of Dr. Back's recent excellent tweets, he has so many, it was tough to choose, but
I selected that one for conversation.
If anybody wants to come up and talk about it, they're welcome to, or we can move on
to tweet number two.
All right, let's do it.
Tweet number two is by Fiatjaf.
And there it is.
It's now pasted in the nest.
This is Fiatjaf writing yesterday.
What Drivechain is not, it's not a tweak that weakens basic Bitcoin consensus rules.
It's not a tweak that increases the block size.
It's not a change that puts your coins at risk.
It's not a scheme that centralizes mining.
But what it is, what Drivechain is, is a way to give users the option to put their coins
under a hash rate escrow.
And that's what it's all about.
Letting people use synthetic Bitcoin on a separate blockchain that is merged mine with
Bitcoin, and when they're done, approximately 100% of their transaction fees have been paid
to Bitcoin miners, and they can get their original Bitcoin back on layer one.
So to use a word that Dr. Back likes, Drivechain is designed to increase Bitcoin's extensibility,
meaning the development and customization of technology on top of Bitcoin in a way that's
economically harmonious with Bitcoin.
I forgot to introduce myself today.
I try to always do that.
Speaking to you right now from LayerTwo Labs Twitter handle is Henry, Henry Magrum.
I am the lawyer at LayerTwo Labs, and I'm also the social media guy at the moment.
You know, at a startup, you got to wear multiple hats.
So this is Henry speaking, and everyone is welcome to come up if they'd like and chat.
Let's move on to tweet number three.
Tweet number three is from one of our audience members.
It is by Samuel, and he wrote, we are on the precipice of a new era, either economic freedom
or economic servitude.
Bitcoin is the only credible solution we have access to.
We must protect it at all costs.
We must succeed for the sake of our future and the futures of our children.
We need to take a closer look at BIP300.
And then he links to his article, which was really great, published yesterday by Bitcoin
Magazine titled, Why Drivechain is Our Best Chance to Secure Bitcoin into the Future.
All right.
So that's the third tweet for discussion.
Let's go on to tweet number four.
We're getting through them pretty fast.
Everyone's welcome to come up and chat if you'd like.
You can just raise your hand.
If you're having trouble coming up, give me like a thumbs up or something or a thumbs
down in the audience, and then I can invite you up if you're having any trouble
getting onto the stage.
The next tweet is from Alex Kravitz.
I've now posted it in the Nest.
He wrote, claiming Bitcoin is only for money is like demanding the Internet must only be
used for email, its original killer app, while social networks, Netflix, podcast, etc., all
work on a separate super Internet network.
That is exactly what's being argued now by pseudo-Maxis.
I agree entirely with that tweet.
What we've got is a bunch of people who think that Bitcoin should only be used for a certain
kind of money.
But you see, even if it were true that Bitcoin were only for money, there would still be
a question.
What kind of money?
Should it be very scalable?
Should it be very private?
How much decentralization should there be?
So what we need is people to understand that money is actually usually a layered system
where people can opt in to various exposures and features.
Even with gold, there was gold bars, there were gold coins.
And it wasn't like everyone just used the same size coin all the time.
And people could even like turn their gold into an artwork.
So it had that kind of malleability.
And similarly with Bitcoin, the drivechain vision is that there's like a digital gold
base layer that has high fees and high decentralization.
And then we have a layered system.
People can opt into sending some of their money into a much more flexible environment
for other kinds of experiences like more privacy, more scalability, greater expressivity.
And then if all those layers are using synthetic Bitcoin, then the whole thing is economically
aligned.
Welcome to the stage, Alex.
How's it going?
It's going good.
I just wanted to clarify something because I saw a reaction to my tweet saying that basically
drivechains enable the super internet.
But I think the metaphor breaks down here a little bit because when it comes to network
protocols, TCPIP could carry any traffic on top.
And then you have, you know, on top of IP protocol, you have TCP protocol, on top of
TCP protocol, you have HTTP, on top of HTTP, you have HTML, and so on and so forth.
But all these things ultimately are data sent across the network.
The metaphor breaks down to Bitcoin because Bitcoin can be viewed in this context as more
of a first instance of a video game around digital scarcity.
But you can create other games, other gaming protocols.
So for example, not just being able to huddle Bitcoin, but to use it as collateral, right?
That's a different game that uses the same asset.
Or to use it as a reserve for a decentralized US dollar, for example, which is what the
world really needs, right?
And you know, the biggest decentralized US dollar maximalist out there is Mr. Gensler
because he's attacking custodial stable coins now, which will simply drive people to whatever
alternatives are available, right?
Well said.
Would you like to look through the tweets that I've shared in the nest, maybe scroll
back to them?
Considering how interesting your comments were last week, I would love to hear if you
have any perspective on some of these.
Do you see them?
Do you see Adam back in the nest?
Let me see if I can find this nest UI area.
I've never seen this before, but is this a thread underneath the...
No, it's when you're in the Twitter space.
You're in the Twitter space, you look at the title, right under the title there's a tweet
and you can scroll left or right to see the other one.
Okay.
So first of all, the problem in sidechain is going to change the trade-off, more lightning
optimization.
Okay.
I see it.
Yeah, that's from a thread he put out yesterday, he put out a long thread all about Bitcoin
layer twos and the future and the price of Bitcoin.
And near the end of the thread, he got pretty interesting where he talked about future development
and he wrote this tweet where he mentions drivechains.
So I like that.
Well, I mean, Adam has a lot of prestige and deservedly so, right?
But he's not omniscient about all the ideas floating around the Bitcoin space.
Like for example, it's clear to me that he, as well as other OG technical computer science
people are still oblivious to what's happened in validity rollups world, right?
In other words, their holy grail dream of having fully trust-minimized two-way peg with
the same security guarantees as Bitcoin itself has been realized, but they're misinformed
about it or ignorant about it, I don't know what, but basically that's, you know, like
Jameson Lobb, for example, even though he links to Bitcoin rollups.org report, he actually
didn't internalize the message of the report, which is, hello, Bitcoiners, you've been dreaming
about this since, you know, 2012, 2013, when the first talk of two-way pegs and sidechains
was brought up.
And, you know, there was some messages by Greg Maxwell saying that perhaps ZK Snarks
will allow us to verify execution of the other chain and therefore to allow the transfer
of coins back from the other chain to Bitcoin, and that would essentially propagate Bitcoin's
network effect to other domains, right?
So, you know, the fact that Adam is only now waking up to how important drivechains are
is basically because a lot of, he's in the camp, I think he's in the camp of people who
are just blindsided by the monetary uses of Bitcoin and think it'll be enough to, you
know, to take over the world and get to a hundred trillion dollar market cap.
Now, they may be right in the long run, right?
But that doesn't mean that we won't have a flippening or two, or even lappening as they
call it in the Ethereum world, in other words, who in the Ethereum market cap not just exceeds
Bitcoin's market cap, but it can exceed Bitcoin market cap two or three times over.
Now, I can already tell you what the cope will be by the SOV extremists, you know, that
claim that Bitcoin is nothing but a store of value like digital gold, right?
They will say, well, you know, Ethereum is just a giant tech platform and there will be
some truth in that, right?
But declaring that Ethereum is just a giant tech platform, even though it might be true
for now, does not preclude Ethereum from ossifying and becoming a protocol that has
rules, but no rules in the future.
Right. Would you agree with would you agree with the following very simple way of putting
it, that Ethereum is kind of like a layer two without a layer one and Bitcoin is kind
of like a layer one that hasn't yet developed fully.
It's layer two.
How do you mean that Ethereum doesn't have layer one?
Well, I mean it only in the following sense that they have like a history of like
changes and forks and there's more experimentation there.
So it's kind of like they don't have like it's like they don't have a set of drive.
It's like a set of drivechains without that ossified conservative digital gold
foundation. Right.
They just chose the kind of the opposite strategy for evolution.
Right. Which is as opposed to extreme conservatism, you know, they embody the Silicon
Valley ethos of, you know, move fast and break things.
And essentially that empowers, you know, I hate that cliche word empowers, but it empowers
all these 20 something hotshot coders from around the world to come into Ethereum and
do their ICOs, do their startups, get rich, do whatever the hell they're doing.
And basically that's eventually created kind of a snowball effect of its own.
And, you know, Ethereum started out as a as kind of a delusional fantasy of Vitalik.
And then later he was backed by scammers from Canada, you know, the consensus Joe
Lubin, et cetera. But in 2017-18 bull market, it was a platform that would spawn ICO
shit coins. But in the last few years, it's a platform that's spawning other platforms.
Right. So you can no longer dismiss it as a mother of all scams.
It used to be that.
Right. But now you have things like Aave and things like Uniswap and Liquidity and you
have these protocols that have tens of billions of dollars in total locked value and
it's used by hedge funds and wealthy individuals across the world and so on and so
forth. So, you know, it's it's chosen the strategy of get fast big and then maybe
ossify later.
Right. Because, I mean, if you look at Vitalik's roadmap, the last portion of his
roadmap, which, you know, has merged at the top and then there is purge, scourge,
whatever, surge. The last one is the one where they rip out all the ugly technical
debt and do the final hard fork to simplify Ethereum, which presumably stabilizes the
bottom layer. So, yeah, I agree with your with your idea.
Yeah, I appreciate that collaboration of it.
Another person who has a view that Ethereum and Bitcoin are argue or are in some sense
converging on the same target is Lynn Alden, at least in my interpretation of her
statements, where she talked about how Bitcoin's changes over the years have been to
increase the block size with to increase scalability and that Ethereum has been trying
to come from the other direction toward like trying to harden with, for example, the fee
burning. So they're trying to approach that monetary that monetary quality of a feature
set and attributes for their protocol, whereas Bitcoin is trying to expand in the
direction of drivechain to expand in the direction of flexibility and extensibility.
So they're they're both these two projects are coming towards the same end goal, but they
have different they have different strengths like Ethereum, as you say, has that like that
economy of applications, but it lacks that layer that they want to get at the very end.
Yeah. And, you know, I wouldn't say that.
Let's say that, you know, around 2030, after all the hard forks, Ethereum does come to their
senses and they do decide to ossify.
I think that doesn't necessarily mean that they will be trusted as as money, right, because
they will need to develop a multi-year history of remaining unchanged.
This is something that Bitcoin has developed by now.
So basically, it's not enough to have rules with no rulers.
You also need a history of those rules not changing in a backwards and compatible way,
which Bitcoin has, although, you know, some might argue that SegWit was an evil force
that, you know, smuggled in rule changes despite.
So there was no option not to upgrade to SegWit, for example.
But, you know, these technicalities are lost on the masses anyways.
So, you know, Ethereum will not be credible as a reserve asset, but it doesn't need to be a
reserve asset because it has an income stream, right?
It has, you know, in the bear market these days, it has five million dollars in fees paid
per day. And, you know, God knows what the fee rate will be in the next bull market.
It might average a hundred million dollars a day.
And these fees are paid willingly by willing participants to do things that no other system
in the world allows them to do, like to get zero percent, you know, USD loans on their
ETH collateral using liquidity, right?
For example, no other.
And do it all in a decentralized way where there is no risk of, you know, a bank seizure,
etc. As you know, in the early days of Bitcoin, the joke was only put the money in the bank
that you're willing to lose, right?
So here, Ethereum.
I can't quite hear you, Alex.
Could someone in the audience give like a thumbs up if you can hear him?
I could hear. Can you guys hear me?
Yeah. I just figured this out.
Nice to meet you all. Alex, I can't hear you.
Can you hear me now? Are you there?
Yeah. Henry, are you there?
Samuel, welcome to the stage.
Thanks. Would you like to speak?
Yeah, I would.
Well, thanks for your nice comments on the article.
I hope that article is useful.
Samuel, can you hear me?
Hello? Can anybody hear me?
CryptAxe can hear me.
Well, I hope that article is useful.
You know, Alex brought up this.
Yeah, I can hear you too, Samuel.
I think Henry, the problem is on your end.
Yeah, it might be. Alex brought up this idea about how Ethereum doesn't have some sort
of doesn't have credible, you know, track record of money.
And even though I agree that's true, you know, the article is sort of for the masses
and the masses may not really understand the nuance that Alex, you brought up.
I think that.
But it's not the masses that decide this.
You see, it's the institutions and the governments, right?
Like the masses are basically just sheep following their leaders.
It's basically Fidelity deciding that Bitcoin is credible while Ethereum is not
credible. And it's, you know, the government of El Salvador deciding that Bitcoin is
credible and Ethereum is not, right?
Well, sure. That's true to a sense.
But, you know, I think that it's not so clear that this is like it seems to me like it
can go either way at this point or early enough that the masses can also like these
institutions can make a mistake.
I think that Fidelity, aren't they doing Ethereum as well?
Well, they might be. But you see, the thing is, I am I am very, you know, adversarially
minded when it comes to Ethereum and in general, right?
Like this is from the 90s, sort of my cypherpunk exposure in the 90s.
But I'm telling you that Ethereum is actually like Google stock or actually Google is
now gone. So what is Apple stock, right?
So it's basically like a security that has an income stream.
And a lot of people will want to own that the same way as a lot of people want to own
Apple shares. Right now, because the income that's being accrued to each shares, you
know, through burning and new issuance and, you know, the fees, that income is
essentially floating the value of Ethereum.
And, you know, Ethereum will have this whole, you know, ecosystem of layer twos, right?
If you go.