Welcome to Drivechain Twitter Spaces. Today is Friday, June 16th. We are delighted to have
another conversation about this exciting upgrade for Bitcoin. Welcome to those who've joined in
the audience. Everyone is welcome to raise your hand and come on up to the stage. If you have a
question or a comment about Drivechain, come on up to the stage, raise your hand in the app,
and share with us your thoughts on this exciting upgrade for Bitcoin. Drivechain
is an idea to bring peer-to-peer sidechains to Bitcoin, sidechains that are more decentralized,
more permissionless than the sidechains we have today. Right now on Bitcoin,
all the sidechains are federated with a 15-party multisig controlling the pegout from the sidechain.
But with Drivechain, the sidechains can be more decentralized, more permissionless,
more peer-to-peer, superior, stronger, more reliable, better, more like Bitcoin.
And this would strengthen Bitcoin immeasurably, we believe. We believe it would make Bitcoin
have a multitude of interesting innovations built on top of it. There could be a sidechain for
privacy using Zcash technology. There could be a sidechain for scaling called Thunder with large
blocks. There could be a sidechain called HiveMind that uses a peer-to-peer oracle network
to enable human beings to make predictions on the future without any limit on what kinds of
things they might bet on. And this could even improve society in many ways. And there have
been many people who are excited about HiveMind in particular, such as Fiatjaf, the creator of
Nostr, has written on Twitter that he would like to see Drivechain adopted mainly because he's
excited about HiveMind. But Drivechain also is exciting to many people such as Adam Back
and others because of the scaling solution that it can bring to Bitcoin
with large blocks on the sidechain. Welcome to our first guest.
Thanks for joining. Hey, how are you? I'm very well. I think this is your first time speaking
up here. I see that you're interested in Zcash. What interests you today about
sidechains and Drivechain? Honestly, I just was looking for Bitcoin mining groups and I just
joined, I believe it's your Telegram group, Drivechain talk and I just saw the link to the
spaces. So I figured I'd come in and listen. I got to hop on a call here in about five minutes.
I've been dealing more with miners and I've been dealing more with bulk buyers.
So I'm really just trying to sharpen my sword on these conversations. I'm also dealing with
a group that wants to buy a mining operation in Montana. They want to do a real estate play,
data play slash Bitcoin mining play. So I'm really just I've always been in the space of
crypto since 2016. Big proponent of Zcash and zero knowledge proofs because one of the roadblocks to
these large transactions is who's going to show each other first, right? Who's going to get naked
first? Who's going to show proof of funds first? And there's a big stalemate that occurs when
people are showing, you know, north of $30 million in a wallet. Nobody wants to show a
public key or a public ledger. So the light bulb is kind of going off in my head, right? Only 5%
of the world is using crypto right now. Once the masses come on, once institutions come on,
once offshore wealth and the trillions comes on, these entities are going to need encryption.
They're going to demand privacy. A lot of deals are getting
shelved because no one wants to show their public key or public address. So
just how the Internet evolved from HTTP to HTTPS, you know, the Internet was just computer programmers
kind of analogy to us right now, right? We're kind of just the crypto guys who love it. But
when the masses come on, they're going to require encryption. They're going to require privacy.
And I think the masses don't even realize, you know, most people think Bitcoin is a private
thing. Most people think it is. But now with chain analysis, our common intelligence,
Nancy and AI, addressable. Addressable just linked 17 million Twitter accounts to their
real life wallets. So things are getting pretty real. And I'm just
looking to learn as much as possible that that makes sense.
About privacy in particular? Privacy, yes. Bitcoin mining as well.
By no means am I against Bitcoin. I just am starting to look at it like the prototype
and the beta test run. And I'm starting to see conversations come into play.
I'm having trouble getting certain deals done because people don't want to show proof of
funds with a with a public wallet. So it's like, OK, the problem solver in me is like,
well, how can we use zero knowledge proofs? Right. How can I get these guys to prove they
have what they say they have without revealing what they have to a third party? In this case,
not just a third party, but it could be any party right in the world. So when we have this
conversation of turning cryptocurrency into digital money that everyone can use,
how can we if people are at a stalemate in these conversations where they don't want to
get naked in the room, you know, to the world? Yeah, we have to all get naked. Everyone has
to be naked in the same room. That's the only way it will work. Right. And then people,
and people, not everyone is a nudist. So, you know, for us, it's cool, right? I got to take
this call, guys. I'll be I'll be right back. I'm sorry. But for us, it's a great day. Nice meeting
you right now. I'll be back a little bit. Great meeting you guys. I'm going to follow you. Cool.
All right. Interesting. It seems there's only a few people here for today. Maybe it's just such a
beautiful summer solstice Friday. Who wants to be on a Twitter space? Summer Fridays. That's where
I used to work. Oh, someone is waving. We should move them up. I used to work at a place that had
it was a white collar office job, but it had, you know, summer Fridays, which was like, you can
either leave at noon or you can take every other Friday off in the summer. That was in New York
City. Summer Fridays, they called it. Did shiny cake or shiny whatever cakes want to
wave to come up? Or are they just waving? Maybe they're just waving to wave.
Welcome to the stage. Shiny cakes. Hello. Nice to meet you. Hi.
Hello. I would like to ask. I mean, I'm not sure if it's the right place for this kind of question,
but how do you see what drivechain benefit from maybe some kind of forks? I don't know,
some kind of forks, like copying drivechain. How could it affect the drivechain community as its
own? Well, but when you say other forks, you mean like different cryptocurrencies that aren't
Bitcoin because the project is designed for Bitcoin. But of course, there actually is a
funny one, which I kind of like because it doesn't take itself very seriously. I have no involvement
personally whatsoever. But there is a guy who had made a coin, which I think is called Sky Doge,
which is if you're going to do something, then do it like that. Give it a funny name.
So I think I would like the idea to get out there and be used and tested. I believe in the idea. I
think this segment activated on Litecoin before it was on Bitcoin. I think that that drivechain
is going to help Bitcoin realize its goal of changing the world and that it will play a
hugely central or important role in doing that. And I think, yeah, it should. I think the technique
should be used the same way that Wi-Fi is used everywhere or long division is used by students or
something. So I think that that's I think that's a good thing. Certainly what I would not prefer
is for Bitcoin to never, ever activate BIP301, never activate drivechain and then have some
other currency do a drivechain like thing and then be succeeding against Bitcoin on that basis.
But I would have to think that, of course, in such a scenario, it would just be obvious to everyone
that that is not the time to activate BIP300. Does that answer your question or no?
Yes, definitely. But it's also interesting how it will also affect the reach, I mean, that people
get to know to BIP300 or 301 if other projects like this succeed. I mean, it seems like you make
it very step by step and you don't want to push it too far, but they have already the opportunity
to launch it somehow and to do this kind and make this kind of experience how it would work on
mainnet. And I think it could be maybe also interesting for you to see your product already
some kind of working. And it's very exciting what's going on. And also I'm asking myself if it
also if this kind of development which is being done there also is like a value for you, for your
kind of community, if they solve some, for example, some kind of bugs, if it's also maybe a value for
you. I think it is honestly a good idea. I mean, you know, for a very long time, you know, I
identify as a Bitcoin maximalist and I've been in the Bitcoin community for a very long time,
so long I don't even want to say how long. But, you know, for a while every other project was
really just completely terrible and it was just so undignified and shameful to be a part of any
other project. But lately, the maximalism is more of like out of, you know, like fear and
coercion of what is like peer pressure where people mean things people will say about, which is not a
very good reason. So to, you know, be Bitcoin only. So even though I am personally Bitcoin only, I am
actually kind of getting tired of the XY attitude and I actually think that it would be more
people should just do whatever they want and have fun and not just do this for its own sake.
So I think it's good. It's healthy for the project to get more attention. Attention is very scarce,
as you say. It's very difficult to get attention for things. Attention is a scarce resource. So
if people like something, then that is a way of proving that demoing that it works. And, you know,
that is. I like that, so I actually think that that's a good thing. People can't really have it
both ways, of course, you know, like Bitcoin claims, of course, you know, I've been a member
of the technical Bitcoin community for a long time, but, you know, Bitcoin claims like it has
there used to be this joke about like the varsity team versus like the JV team or the freshman team
or something where it's like Bitcoin claims to have the best tech, the best developers,
everyone else isn't serious. And then they say, if you want to do something experimental,
then you have to launch, you know, fork off and launch your own project. And then, of course,
if you do that third thing, fork off, then everyone agrees that they hate you, which
obviously is kind of like, you know, these are overlapping criteria that don't really make any
sense. So I think it's great for people to experiment with the idea. I think it's good.
Again, Litecoin did SegWit before Bitcoin. A lot of people say that helped SegWit get
activated on Bitcoin. I don't know if it did, but people say that.
Nice, nice. And just one more question regarding scalability. I mean,
it hasn't been tested like for on mainnet yet. And I don't know if you already did some kind
of stress tests, but I'm wondering how it would compete to other products which are at the moment
out there in terms also of it's a typical thing what people ask, but also like a transaction
speed. I was talking to MLG, like the developer of SkyDoge, and he was telling me that it would
be the opportunity to run maybe Lightning or something like that on top. But I'm just asking
myself if this wouldn't be too much, like it could maybe make it too complicated. I'm not like
a coder or something like this. I really would like to know what you think about it.
Yeah, no, it's an excellent question. I think it's one of our primary advantages, to be honest
with you. Out of every scaling thing that has ever been proposed, almost all of them will collapse.
They will actually stop functioning if the layer one fee rate is high or even just volatile. So
the Lightning Network channels will close if the two parties don't even agree on what the current
prevailing fee rate is. And of course, every time they close, they further clog the mempool with a
transaction that is much larger than just a normal regular on-chain Bitcoin transaction, because it's
the uncooperative close, which is very... So even everything, even ARK, all these weird ideas, they
all have this property that they are vulnerable to high layer one fees or even just volatile fees.
Lightning in particular cannot, you know, there's a big onboarding problem, which is kind of a
special flavor of that first problem. They rely on the layer one block space. But this scaling
via sidechains actually does not. It has important trade-offs. It has a security trade-off and it has
like transactions still require confirmations if they're just a large block sidechain. But if
there is lightning on the large block sidechain, then it then goes back to being instant.
So it's actually a pretty good situation because you can re-architect like a large block
optional layer two is completely a night and day difference from a mandatory layer one
large block. So you have large blocks on layer two, and then you can have many different block chains
for scaling that are geographically distributed. Some would be in like, you know, whatever, like
North America, Southeast Asia, whatever, Europe. So they would kind of naturally cluster up and
in that way you can achieve more or less unlimited amount of transacting. And in fact, we have done
a little bit of stress testing, which is extremely encouraging. Again, there's an important difference
between layer two block and layer one, which is the layer two block. You have the problem of
expensive nodes and a very difficult, a large blockchain that requires a lot of processing.
But the main attack vector for these nodes would be to shut the nodes off or disable the network.
In the case of an optional layer two, it really just means the whole network is on pause
until the attack ends, and then the network just comes, picks up right where it started. So it really
has no, it's very unlikely that actually anything bad can even happen to the, but it is an important
trade-off because the larger blocks means it's harder to run a node. It's harder to conceal the
physical location of the computer that is running the node. You know, nodes are more expensive,
fewer nodes possibly. Depends on supply and demand, of course. But scaling is actually pretty
big. As time goes on, the rival attempts to scale Bitcoin have looked worse and worse and worse.
And this particular way with BIP300, I think, just looks kind of better and better and better.
It just looks more and more reasonable. Most people are not going to care about this weird risk
that three to six months from now, miners will take all of your coins. You can have like a
checking account, savings account type of situation. Even for many transactions, people will not care
about the loss of decentralization because even though, like when you buy coffee, it's quite
different than when you buy, if you were going to do something very politically subversive or,
you know, even legal or whatever you want to call it, like if you're going to donate to Julian Assange.
That would require decentralization and privacy. But if you are going to just buy coffee,
then you don't. And so since many people make many transactions, there's, you know, maybe only,
even in the case of someone who is a political activist, like Cody Wilson or whatever,
more than half of their transactions will not really be like, most of them are not like
some kind of transaction where you would really need the full, fully robust decentralization
and censorship resistance of Bitcoin. So I think the scaling is very, we have a completely new
rewrite of the sidechain template in Rust and the performance is very good, but we haven't,
I don't know the latest benchmark, otherwise I would actually give it to you.
But we have, but the main problem is not even really the software performance. It is the,
do you actually want to download a blockchain that is, you know, of this certain size? Because
it's a thousand blocks a week. So if the blocks are a one gigabyte, which is, you know, that's
not going to happen anytime soon, but that would be one terabyte every week of new space, which is,
that's a lot of hard drive space and bandwidth usage. So, but that's, you know, even that though
I have, we have like benchmarked such a thing and just having 10 of those would more than cover the
entire transacting capacity of the world, cash, non-cash, basically everything. And even that
I've benchmarked is not really even costing that much money. It's affordable for hundreds of
millions of people, at least, even if that's a small percentage of the 8 billion people.
So I think that's actually, I think scalability is honestly the, at this point is looking like
the biggest advantage of BIP300. The other projects are, various flaws in them are being
kind of like unearthed, whereas this has like these two flaws that are kind of upfront and
obvious to everyone, but they kind of, they just don't look bad. One, another thing is that the,
supposedly the large block idea suffered from something, fraud proofs being impossible.
But now more and more people agree that fraud proofs actually are possible and I wrote about how to do them.
And so that objection is also gone. So actually that would make the large, that would make a light client,
that coupled with like U3XO and some other things, that would make a light client, which is only 4.4 megabytes per year,
more or less equal in security to a full node, as long as there are some full nodes that exist.
Thanks a lot. I mean, I have so many questions, but I don't want to take over the whole stream,
but for next time I will maybe notice some more and I'm happy to be here and it's really exciting to see what you're doing.
Okay, great. Well, there's only a few people here, so feel free to ask as many questions as you like.
Yeah, I think I will think about it well, because I don't want to destroy it.
We're having a very free form, open conversation. We do this every week and everyone is welcome to come up,
especially someone like you, ShinyCakes, who is informed and interested and has a good understanding of the inspiration for this project.
So feel free if you'd like to just share any comments or thoughts.
I'm also wondering how many devs are really capable at the moment, like really developing the project further.
I mean, for example, MLG, as I heard, is a long time in the community and he's really interested and it's really his passion.
For me, it seems very passionate and I'm not sure how many people are really able to do this, what he's doing right now for you.
Who did you say? I did a glitch, so I don't know when you gave the name.
Excuse me? I didn't understand.
You didn't say a person's name, he and I didn't hear the name.
From SkyDodge, the developer.
Oh, the SkyDodge guy. Yes, yes, yes.
That's such a great name, very funny name.
Yeah, I think part of the SkyDodge strategy is that we don't actually need, we have like a way of cloning the altcoin.
So you can either write something from scratch using like our template, which is great.
Like a lot of people like that because they're technical.
But also we can clone an altcoin and where it's like you just take this altcoin full node software and you like add this library
and you make a few modifications that you like deposit withdrawals and merge mining instead of whatever the mining and that's it.
And then you have turned the altcoin into a BIP300 sidechain.
And so, and that way we would, and that's uncopied as Zcash and Ethereum.
And so in that way, we don't need to have that too many people understand this whole process.
So it's pretty rare at the moment somehow.
Well, yeah, I think things go in fads.
I think that it certainly is rare right now.
But the point I was trying to make is this isn't something where the strategy relies on a lot of developers being interested.
It could really just be five or six developers total would be able to, because you copy any altcoin that people like that works.
You build anything from scratch that you want.
And then that's it.
Now you have a coin that can do everything that every other coin in the whole world can do.
So you have the developer communities, the entire crypto development community.
The strategy doesn't rely on being popular with developers in a way that lots and lots and lots of, certainly like every other L1 and Lightning Network and those other things do rely on that.
If they did not have the interest of the technical community, they would basically be dead.
Are you also a little bit scared that it could be maybe somehow misused, the tech?
That I mean, some people are just building like some kind of pump and dumps with it and that people get really hurt?
Or is it like a natural thing?
Yes. Well, you know, one thing is, this type of thing used to really bother me and I was very active in whatever you might call the Bitcoin Uncensored community in 2016.
And we did what we call the scam busting, doing the Lord's work and trying to get people to stop.
The older I get, though, actually, I really reflect on how few people we probably actually saved versus the enormous number of people who like, you know, would have bought into something like EOS or whatever, just because there's a Times Square ad for 24 hours.
So I kind of get the older I get. I also think a fool, his money are soon parted.
And I kind of like, I think it is wrong. Sometimes a lot of what these people do is not the right thing.
But I also think that I think the only real practical thing to do is it's like when we have forest fires and it burns out, like you have to actually let a few scams take people's money.
Because I just I would like to I would like to live in a world where these scams don't exist.
So the thing is sidechains actually help the scam problem a lot because they have no there's no way of making money by like pumping a coin via sidechain since it's just the one underlying coin that is shared by every piece of technology.
So it doesn't matter if you have this piece X technology X or technology not X. It's totally independent of whatever the technical choices made.
So no one can ever say like, oh, Bitcoin has this, but Ethereum has smart contracts and it's like everything just has everything.
And so that actually helps with that. I do think that something interesting has happened with the whole tokens ICO thing.
All of that was like even NFTs. All that was like a kind of a grift to make money.
But at the same time, I just don't believe that it was all I don't believe the project was illegitimate.
Like even though all the ICOs were terrible, the way I see it is if we like what the real enemy is how confused everyone was.
So if we could just put what my goal is to have there be a sidechain where all the transaction fees are paid in BTC and all the assets are trade other price pairs are traded against the BTC.
It is like a DEX centralized exchange and you can buy and sell these assets and create them.
And when you create the assets, you spend BTC to broadcast the message that creates these assets.
And I think if we did that, it would just be clear like Bitcoin is money.
These assets are other things like stocks, bonds or just membership coupons or raffle tickets or whatever they are, arcade tokens.
You do whatever you want over there. And again, like the only real way to protect people from being scammed is, I think, with knowledge.
I just think there is nothing else like there's people when they look at something, their brain needs to figure out what it is.
So if we just set it up the right way, then everyone will know, OK, this is like I'm buying stock in a corporation or this is like I'm getting arcade tokens.
And if people think about it like in that correct way, then there might be a few high profile scams at the beginning, despite everyone not wanting it to happen.
But then people, culture will evolve and people will learn and then it will finally at that point be in a place that everyone wanted to get to,
which is a place where there really is decentralized finance, where literally anyone anywhere in the world like that joke, no one on the Internet knows if you're a dog.
On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog. Anyone could really like issue, they could make crypto art or they could just give out tokens for things.
It's just like a club membership or issue stocks or bonds or whatever, just like in a kind of fully decentralized future.
And yeah, with this organized in a nice and tidy way, if you have BTC as the asset, that's money that pays the transaction fees, that is the asset that's used to conjure the assets and move them around.
I think that is by far the best, fastest, most effective, most sustainable way to actually protect people from all the scams.
Right now they scam because there's an opportunity to take advantage of people's ignorance.
So it's only by teaching people is the actual. This is my point of view, but maybe there are criminologists and legislators or whatever, people out there who may disagree.
If so, they're probably right.
OK, thanks.
Yeah, of course.
What's also exciting, I heard about the switchboard. I can imagine it. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm wondering how you think could look the drivechain in the future, maybe in five years or something like this, for example.
Please continue. Sorry.
If, for example, it really gets accepted, how would like the switchboard would look like? I mean, so it's a very futuristic kind of thing.
Yeah, the switchboard is really cool. I'm happy to hear that other people know about it. We were only calling it the switchboard for like a couple days.
And then I thought we would just rename it DriveNet to stop confusing people.
But the switchboard is kind of like this. It's supposed to be like a Steam games launcher thing where it's like it's this small thing you download.
It has a graphical user interface.
And then you open it and it will let you either just download the binaries and it will check the binaries for you or lets you go to GitHub.
It gives you the build instructions. It gives you the instructions how to build everything from source.
And then it will launch everything and it does all the RPC access and stuff for you.
So it's this nice user interface front end thing that just does a little launch of the little sidechain demons in the background and connect them for you.
And I think this is great because it's just clicking a button.
And very soon we had a very primitive version which someone just threw together.
But we just hired a front end person and they couldn't start until basically Monday.
So this is just their first week.
But already they have made it look very nice.
And so I think that we'll finally get to the point where it will be actually user friendly for people.
For a while it was only like Linux. It was only command line or whatever.
And then we had the GUI but the GUI you had to type in RPC passwords.
And then we had that down to clicking a random button and then restarting.
And now you don't even need to restart.
And now pretty soon it will just be clicking buttons and it will be every platform.
So we are finally getting to that stage.
And the switchboard thing is very nice.
The switchboard should be able to...
It should be a very, very small program with very few lines of code.
And you open it up and it just tells you about the health of all your different nodes.
The mainchain node, the sidechain nodes.
And it should be able to handle the deposits and withdrawals for you without you having to do anything complicated.
You just click a little button and it will do it there.
And this is a very excellent...
This is a big improvement because the sidechain developer,
they should only be focused on their unique thing.
So if you want a sidechain for like zk-SNARKs,
you should just write the zk-SNARK thing into the sidechain template
and you should not really have to worry about deposits and withdrawals,
BIP300, line merge mining or these other things.
So together if we have mainchain Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core,
you have mainchain Bitcoin Core, you have the launcher app.
The launcher app...
There's another thing that I actually hope the launcher app will be able to do
is help people run the correct node.
So you first launch the launcher app.
We haven't gotten to this point yet, but it should be like SPV at first.
SPV is only a small amount, 4.4 megabytes per year, which is nothing.
And so it should start with that
and then it can like gradually maybe become a full node.
Maybe it can become a full node like from 3.30 a.m. to 6.00 a.m.
when you're asleep or something like that.
We can maybe use this launcher idea to just constantly improve
the user experience is my hope.
But yeah, in general, the launcher is supposed to be this very small,
very minimal thing, helps you run the node, helps you see the nodes.
And it also helps make it so that the sidechain is totally modular.
And the person can just do...
We have specialists who are just...
We live in a world where we...
The goal is to live in a world where we have specialists
who just care about their specific sidechain type thing,
working on that.
And then especially the clones is also good
because we want the clone to have as many lines of code
identical to the altcoin as possible.
So we want it to be really, really similar.
So we really don't want there to be as much stuff in there
about deposits, withdrawals, whatever, RPC access,
any kinds of other confusing stuff,
including a graphical user interface.
You see, there has to be a graphical user interface somewhere
for deposits and withdrawals if everyone is going to use it.
But the question is, should that be in the Zcash sidechain?
Because the Zcash, the altcoin doesn't have a GUI
for deposits and withdrawals.
So the question was kind of like, where do we put that?
And so this launcher thing, I think, is a good idea.
It's a switchboard, which is basically, again,
like a Steam games launcher type idea.
So I'm actually very optimistic about this.
And actually, for some reason, in Bitcoin Core,
people don't, they live in a parallel,
they live in two, they're of two minds.
And in one sense, they don't care about the GUI at all.
And they think that caring about the GUI
is for a lesser breed of people.
And we should care about making it
a high-performance industrial, which I respect that opinion.
But on the other hand, they kind of admit
that the interface isn't very good.
And they are making a new one kind of from scratch
that is not using the old QT.
This explanation is just rambling on and on and on now.
But the point is, we should have more front-end competition.
And someone out there should be trying to say,
okay, what's the best user experience
we can possibly offer?
Which I really, I just disagree with.
The current approach is like, on day one,
you just ask someone to download like 600 gigabytes.
And most people will just be like, what?
And just kind of close the application
at that point and give up.
But we should try to give them, we should try to ramp them.
I'm fully in favor of ramping people up.
We should ask, just ask them right now.
On day zero, they're not running any full node at all.
So I say, well, let's just, we'll take what we can get.
We'll give them the FPV node for a little while.
We'll try to give them reasons to upgrade the full node.
So I think managing the front-end experience,
not only is it excellent for,
in the context of sidechains and BIP300,
but actually I think it's long overdue
that someone does that in general.
And there's stuff like Umbral and stuff
that tries to do that, but we also want to do it.
I met the same experience with downloading it.
I was thinking, I think three times it was like frozen,
but I just let continue it going on.
And then some when I got succeed,
but I was really in the first time when I installed it,
I was pretty scared, of course,
because it's like not a certified software from Apple yet.
But after it succeed and it went well,
then it was like a very interesting experience
to see it working.
But I'm also wondering if it could be for you interesting
in the future.
I'm just talking about the adoption from Bitcoin side.
If they want to integrate you, would be great, of course.
And I hope that will succeed some when,
but if not, you ever considered maybe
to do something by your own
or also in case of offloading speed,
it would be much faster for the entrance for people
if they don't have to load so many data like from Bitcoin.
Of course, Bitcoin would be great.
Yeah, I mean, of course,
when I first proposed this idea,
and Aragmus is here listening, I noticed,
when I first proposed this idea a long time ago,
he posted about it to our Bitcoin
and it made it to the top.
This was like November 2015.
And I do sometimes ask myself like,
oh, it has been, now it has been like almost,
it's been seven and a half years.
So will it be another seven and a half years?
Like when will this?
I do kind of think, I think,
look, I don't really want to do that,
but I do think that,
I think it hasn't really reached that point yet
because we have not opened a pull request,
but I have to write one email to Bitcoin dev
and then open a pull request.
And I think at that point,
like if we reach the point where I say literally
like there is nothing additional
that can possibly be done
in order to bring this project to Bitcoin,
I do think it would be okay to just experiment
on an altcoin actually.
If you actually go the full Bitcoin path
and then you just say,
here's the pull request,
like here's all the explanations.
It's kind of like,
at a certain point it would definitely become
like a take it or leave it.
I don't know when that point would be.
I actually have always regretted,
so like I had this prediction markets project
and I knew Ricardo Fluffy Pony
back in the ancient days of like 2015 or earlier.
And yeah, he launched,
I mean he didn't launch Monero,
but it came up after it went through
some trials and tribulations.
And he kind of took it up
and people were like, oh, he's an altcoiner,
but it didn't end up being that bad.
Similarly with Namecoin,
Namecoin is not really a super successful project per se,
but they at least have something
that they actually use
and they actually get to work on.
And so I actually think
in the absence of sidechain,
certainly if Bitcoin Core
is like not going to be pro sidechain,
it's actually anyone who wants Bitcoin to succeed
should launch their other projects
so that they can do the R&D.
Like I think that...
Bitcoin will probably benefit for the R&D that is done,
the ZK R&D that is being done by Ethereum and Zcash.
And I actually think that will benefit Bitcoin.
But yeah, I think for now,
I will try to take it to the pull requests.
And then after that,
I don't think anything can really be done.
I've already done quite a bit.
I've already done almost everything that could humanly,
possibly, anything that can be done
is mostly what I have already done.
But not the pull requests yet.
We have our own test software that we have cluttered it up
with a lot of just custom stuff
just for our own personal enjoyment, you know,
such as our write.
But it's not appropriate for pull requests to Bitcoin Core
and I just merge everything that we did,
which is also our software is a fork of Bitcoin 1699,
which is very old now.
They were coming up on version 25.
So, but yeah, the answer to your question is I think,
yes, eventually there would be once,
I think, yeah, after like the pull request
in like a couple months after that,
I would just be like, okay,
the idea is there if you want it.
Okay, interesting.
I will follow you.
Okay, great, cool.
Thank you.
Excellent questions.
Thank you so much, Shiny Cakes.
Welcome everyone who's joined.
Come on up to the stage, raise your hand
if you'd like to chat with us on this delightful Friday
about sidechains, drivechain and the future of Bitcoin.
You can raise your hand in the app
and come on up to the stage.
We'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.
Paul, you mentioned the rebasing that's going on.
Is that work?
Are there decisions in that realm such as like,
could the code that's offered to Bitcoin Core
be reduced to the bare bones
of the drivechain architecture
in a way that would greatly reduce the amount of code
that's involved in the rebasing?
Yeah, the goal with the pull request
would be to make it as easy to review,
to be like a mixture of things.
Number one, it would have to work,
but number two, you would want it to be as easy
to review as possible and really as easy to revert later
or as easy to refactor later if it was like,
if it was like you could like merge the pull request
and then refactor it after it's merged too.
So yeah, there's a lot of these technical details.
Maybe, sorry if I'm just jumping in again.
Maybe also SkyDot, I don't want to show anything,
could be also an opportunity for you together
to work together somehow.
I mean, if you really do this kind of pull request somewhere,
maybe it could be also an opportunity.
It's still time to work together.
I mean, yeah, or not?
Oh yeah, maybe, sure, yeah.
Certainly there are a lot of people out there
who think that, there are a lot of,
many people think that, I think some people have to think
that BIP300 will be merged soon,
and then more people think that it will,
more than that, think it will never be merged.
And then much more than that is a huge group of people
will think something like, well, if this idea
is really good, then eventually it will be merged,
but not until everyone takes their sweet time.
So there are people out there who think
it will just never be merged.
There are some people out there who think
that nothing will ever be merged at all.
Nothing at all, like BIP300 nor anything else.
Does it make sense?
And for those people also?
Well, I think that'd be a big mistake.
I think Bitcoin is currently not ready to actually,
like if the entire financial system collapsed tomorrow,
would Bitcoin be able to just step in and replace it?
The answer is clearly no, in my opinion.
So while the answer to that question is no,
it is an unfinished project.
And do you understand why they decide not to integrate it?
Do you, can you also understand their point of view?
Well, I know what a lot of people,
I think a lot of people don't understand the idea.
So in that sense, I'm not capable
of understanding their point of view
since I already do understand it.
I have tasted the forbidden fruit
from the tree of knowledge.
But I think I know what,
so like a lot of people won't look into it at all
because their attention is scarce.
It has nothing to do with the idea.
They just think, I'm working on a lot of things.
People think, how can I rise on the totem pole in Bitcoin?
Or how do I stop myself from slipping down the totem pole?
And people think, oh, the way we do that
is to care about the approved things,
is to, you know, whatever, care about lightning,
or even take the Michael Saylor view
that everything is, the project's already worth 300 trillion
and it's already a finished project.
And so that's what,
that's where a lot of people are coming from.
So they haven't even read it, you know.
I don't know like if this is,
so like at Baltic Honey Badger last year,
Don Carvalho was supposed to do a debate with me,
which he did, and it was a perfectly good debate.
But the moments before going on the stage,
he asked me which one was,
what was the difference between BIP300 and BIP301?
He didn't know the names of the two BIPs.
And so that's like, you know,
the debate opponent doesn't know the names.
I mean, how important is, what's in a name, right?
But it's kind of like,
the critics don't really know.
They don't really know anything.
They haven't looked into it.
They just kind of think,
they just kind of think,
they associate it with complaining about Bitcoin.
Because if you like sidechains,
it's because you really want to leave Bitcoin Core.
You want to own Bitcoin, BTC,
but you want to leave the Bitcoin Core software
and go somewhere else.
So I think that's one of the many,
I wrote an article called
Why Drivechain is Hard to Understand.
And I give six reasons in there.
And I think that that's one of the six, so.
Welcome, Alex.
Thanks for joining.
Hi, Andrew. Hi, Paul.
Paul, what do you think about the idea
that there's a second civil war coming in Bitcoin?
In other words, we're in the time of peacetime Bitcoin,
but there will be a wartime Bitcoin
once one of the crises hits.
I completely agree with you.
I don't know which sense you're asking the question of,
will there be like a government versus Bitcoin war
or just inter-Bitcoin split, but I think both.
Well, I'm more interested in the civil war inside Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Yeah, it will happen again.
This is an interesting thing
because the main problem that BIP300 solves
is the, what I, you know, disputes,
is the block size war was a dispute.
And you can argue about technical this, technical that,
but at the end of the day, it was just,
some people are willing to pay more in fees,
but they don't want to pay as much for their node.
And other people are willing to pay more for their node,
but they're not willing to pay as much in fees.
And it was just a dispute between these two people.
And the resolution was to try
to give everyone what they want,
which is exactly what sidechains does.
And it's the same thing when you come with respect to,
like Zcash or something,
where you have a situation
where some people want the privacy,
but other people say,
well, this will interfere with our ability
to audit the 21 million coin limit.
And so it's really all about disputes.
And that is what BIP300 solves.
BIP300 doesn't necessarily solve any particular thing.
BIP300 says, hey, right now your alternative,
and you have this dispute is you can either one, give up,
not very satisfying, because who wants to lose?
Who wants to give up?
If you care about something, then, you know,
you care about it.
So you one, give up,
two, launch some kind of altcoin or fork,
hard fork or whatever.
And then three, just like continue to fight,
but unsuccessfully for your thing.
So BIP300 gives you an alternative to that.
And that's the problem that it solves.
And so in a way, as long as we don't have BIP300,
there will be more disputes and civil wars.
We already kind of see where one is going.
One, you know,
Michael Saylor's listed reasons
for caring about Bitcoin are that it will,
you know, he's convinced that it will eventually be
regulated into existence,
whereas other things will be regulated out of existence.
So he thinks he's pro regulation.
He is pro like, you know, tax, et cetera, compliance.
We don't really know like exactly what, you know,
which is not to say that he,
what I'm getting at is he is very different
from Amir Taki.
So there's going to be like an Amir Taki
versus Michael Saylor dimension.
And I think privacy will probably take on a big role
in this because you have like, again,
like a Matt O'Dell or people who like,
they use the phrase like no KYC Bitcoin a lot
versus people who are just determined to be compliant.
And they want to have their mining corporation do an IPO
and they have audited financial statements.
It's a very different world.
The exchanges may delist privacy coins.
The exchanges have the liquidity,
but the privacy supporting factions
would have what you might call a better end game
because the end game, if you don't have privacy,
is that you compete with Venmo,
which is going to be very difficult to do technologically
and user interface wise.
And the end game, if you take the privacy leg
is that you end up competing with the laws
of various nations, which also is difficult.
So I think that's already the split.
I mean, what do you think the split?
I think you have something in mind.
Do you think that is good?
I basically, I understand the difference
between Saylor maximalism
and hyper-Bitcoinization maximalism.
The hyper-Bitcoinization maxis are basically people
who believe this idea that either Bitcoin is going to zero
or it's going to be worth all the money in the world.
And it's like a total hyper-Bitcoinization of everything.
And there's no other currency remaining.
Saylor's position is more nuanced in that he says
that local fiats will survive for a very long time,
probably even forever.
And there will be regulation,
but Saylor is willing to settle
for Bitcoin being a reserve asset,
which is to say that, you know,
it sort of starts competing with US treasury bonds,
but it's like highly regulated
and mostly custodial at that point, right?
But when I'm talking about the civil war,
I'm actually talking about a different split.
I'm talking about a civil war that will be catalyzed
by some sort of a crisis.
And there's like probably three crisis scenarios
I can come up with.
One is what I call Fipocalypse, right?
Which is imagine fees going above $10 and staying there.
That basically disables a lightning network
and that eliminates the whole narrative
of Bitcoin for plebs altogether.
Because, you know, plebs in the global South
will abandon Bitcoin if it costs them 10% of their savings
to move their money on chain, right?
So that's the kind of crisis
that will create another civil war,
just like we saw in 19, I'm sorry, in 2017
with the Block Size War, right?
I mean, you remember the Block Size War,
the factions were, the SegWit faction
was trying to do the last soft fork
and then stop changing, right?
That was kind of the idea that as long as we
remove malleability and enable the lightning network
while at the same time, you know,
increasing the de facto block size
by introducing the bytes instead of bytes,
that should do, that should be the last soft fork.
And after that, we should not have to change Bitcoin again.
But it hasn't worked out, right?
Because now we know that the lightning network
is never gonna be adopted by the plebs.
It just cannot work in a non-custodial way
for millions of people, right?
And we saw that when the fees spiked in May
to above $10, we saw basically that, you know,
lightning network started to fray.
Like, for example, there's a statistic that on Nostr,
93% of all the zaps happened
from custodial lightning wallets.
And Nostr is, of course, where hardest,
hardcore hyper-Bitcoinizers, you know, hang out.
So even among them, there's 93% custodial lightning usage,
which, you know, basically it's the failure
of the lightning network to scale Bitcoin to the plebs.
It's also a, like, the word lightning
has kind of lost all of its meaning.
It's unclear, like, it's just a thing you say.
Oh, actually, it does mean something.
I kind of, I'm beginning to think
that I understand its meaning now more than I ever did before
and I think it means strike.
I think it means three or four giant providers like Strike
that just use wholesale lightning between continents
to move large amounts in private channels.
And that's the only thing that lightning's actually good for
is basically institutional lightning
with large hidden channels between institutional providers.
I mean, some people would say
that the whole heart and soul of Bitcoin
has been ripped out if you cannot, you know,
uncooperative close your channel with Strike,
but if it's a custodial channel,
then it never exists in layer one as a multiple output.
You know, we know this is like an empirical fact
that, you know, the hyper-Bitcoinizing maxis,
93% of their payments on Nostr are custodial lightning.
So they don't, they're not bothered
by keeping $10 or $20 inside their Strike apps
and paying zaps with those, right?
Like, in other words, so what?
Right, let lightning go all custodial, who cares?
The real problem is that if the fees go high,
which I expect to happen,
then it essentially takes us
to this third alternative for Bitcoin
because this whole idea that Bitcoin goes to zero
or becomes all the money in the world,
that's like a false dichotomy in my mind
because there's a third,
I mean, a fourth possible outcome.
The third outcome is that Bitcoin goes to a million dollars
but fixes nothing.
It just becomes like this sterile store of value asset,
kind of like gold, where even big institutions and banks
will have one or 2% of their balance sheet in Bitcoin,
but so what?
It will fix nothing.
And in that world, right,
with the 50 or $100 fees on base chain
and Bitcoin being worth a million dollars,
it's only available to whales and institutions, right?
So the plebs are completely eliminated from Bitcoin
in that kind of scenario.
And that would be a civil war.
That would be kind of a pleb uprising at that point, right?
I agree, especially because in a situation
where it's all open source software
and anyone can just launch something,
we've already seen how many people will launch an altcoin
even like for no reason.
So the idea, if there was actual,
real demand from actual customers for something,
well, you bet that that thing would be launched.
Well, but there is real demand from global south plebs
to have Bitcoin.
However, once the fees go above $10 and stay there,
all those tens of millions of global south plebs
will be rugged essentially
because they will be forced to either exit Bitcoin
because they can never afford fees again.
They don't have just enough savings, right?
Like essentially it's a rug.
Yeah, I mean, what you're saying is that
there'll be like a hard fork in there,
which you have acquired block.
No, no, I'm not, actually,
I'm not, I don't think there will be a hard fork.
I think Bitcoin will exit its peacetime mode,
which we're in right now
and it will enter like a different civil war mode.
And in this different civil war mode,
soft forks all of a sudden become not just possible,
but inevitable, like it changes the whole game.
Oh yeah, I think we would just go to the miners
and basically force the miners
to use a soft fork extension block.
Well, I think you won't need to go to miners.
I think under the conditions of the civil war
where like millions of labs are crying out
like scale Bitcoin now
because our savings are trapped on chain
and we can't move it.
I think that disables the whole sort of a cult of podcasters
who just keep chanting ossify now all day and night, right?
Because that's the kind of a crisis
where you cannot keep chanting ossify now
while millions of plebs are abandoning.
You're like your audience will leave, right?
Like in other words,
what I'm saying is that under those conditions,
it gives cover to people in the core
to merge pull requests that otherwise they wouldn't dare do
because otherwise they could always say,
well, I don't wanna lose my core prestige
and privileges to have other people review my code
if I merge something that's controversial, right?
But under the conditions of the civil war,
somebody will push the merge button
because that will be the only way to resolve the civil war.
Like some kind of scaling will have to be allowed, right?
And it's no longer,
it will not be a tenable position to stall it any longer.
In fact, it will be sort of the opposite, right?
It's sort of the bankruptcy of the ossifier cult
and kind of the moral bankruptcy of the ossifier cult.
Like, because even Saylor has a sort of a nuanced position.
He says that Bitcoin should never be changed
except when there is like a crisis or catastrophe.
Like sort of like an example he gives is that inflation bug.
But what do you call a situation
where tens of millions of plebs in the global South are wrong
because they can't move their savings anymore?
But to me, that sounds like a catastrophe.
All right, so some kind of change might be catalyzed.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think I would actually agree with you.
It's hard to know exactly because with the lightning question for me raises many questions
because it speaks to how far people are willing to go.
There's a saying that the biggest problem in any organization is the one that everyone is afraid to talk about.
And with lightning, it does seem like people are just kind of like really crossing their fingers
and hoping that this will work, you know, Thomas Edison light bulb style.
They're like, we'll just get to work later.
So lightning has to die in order for Bitcoin to survive.
Like the idea of lightning scaling Bitcoin is going to be the first victim of the apocalypse, right?
Because once the fees go high and lightning essentially is exposed as inappropriate for plebs,
and even if the lightning was not fee dependent, it would still be inappropriate for plebs
because no protocol has ever succeeded on the Internet where the retail users have to run their nodes.
Like that's never happened.
So this idea that people will be running their own lightning nodes online as a way to get cheaper fees to move Bitcoin around,
that was always going to fail anyways, but it will be shown to be like a terrible idea once the fees go high.
Like the illusion that lightning scales Bitcoin for the plebs must be destroyed before real change happens.
And I actually don't think that the maintainers in the core are opposed to changes.
I think they're just held hostage by the ossifier, you know, podcasters.
I think it's more of a kind of like, don't you dare merge anything that's controversial or else, right?
So it's sort of like last time, I think the good proof of this was what happened to CTV, right?
Because CTV was a very small change that from a technical perspective, everybody can see is safe and this strictly improves Bitcoin.
But there was the oldest outcry among the ossifier called on Twitter, you know, don't change Bitcoin no matter what.
And that provided like both cover and it essentially forced the veto by the maintainers in the core not merging and yet not saying why they're not merging.
I don't know if you remember, you know, Jeremy Rubin was complaining that there was like this wall of silence, right?
So the wall of silence basically means to me, I read the wall of silence as I would push the merge button, but that's the end of my core career.
So I'm not going to do it because there's just too much heat.
And I'm saying that under the conditions of the Civil War, the heat will be to merge as opposed to to prevent merging.
Because, you know, once you have millions of plebs.
Yeah, I think it was right.
I think there's another there's another way to retell that story, which is maybe even simpler, which is just that we had the block size war, the more conservative side loss.
Like so like SegWit2x was tried, but it was very hamfisted and very embarrassing and it didn't work at all.
And it ultimately failed completely and was withdrawn.
And then Bitcoin Cash was tried and it also basically failed completely.
So it was also withdrawn or more or less, you know, skirting over many details.
But that was basically what happened.
And so people took one look at that.
It's like the people who are now like, you know, like I fully support all gay rights, but it's like people today think like gay rights is about the rainbow flag.
And it was like before it was like about.
So there's like a cosmetic and like a fundamental.
So in this in the case of Bitcoin, the more conservative side won.
And so everyone just decided, oh, OK.
So being conservative is the way to preach the gospel of Bitcoin.
And they just decided that.
It's making sense.
What I'm saying is where I think people.
It's making total sense.
You can say that like Saylor is the leader of the don't change Bitcoin unless there is a catastrophe called.
And that's like he's he's nuanced about his hyper Bitcoinization idea.
Like he doesn't see hyper Bitcoinization, but he's also in the camp of don't make any changes.
Or, you know, because if you do, then you're messing with the definition of money, which you should never do.
The only problem logically with that is that Bitcoin is not money yet and probably will never become if it's left unchanged like it is.
Right, because it's on a trajectory to converge to this sterile, exotic store of value for whales and institutions where no pleb can afford to transact on chain.
And that's not what I call money.
That's not what anybody would call money.
The problem is that they're putting the carriage before the horse like they need to like money needs to be ossified.
But like it's clearly not money yet.
Right. And if you want it to become money, then you have to allow people to use it as more than just this volatile digital gold for institutions and whales.
Right. Because then it's it's like this is the outcome where Bitcoin does go to a million dollars, but it fixes nothing.
Right. That's like that's the death of the Bitcoin dream altogether, even though the price goes to a million dollars.
Yeah, well, I think what you're saying that I agree with is that someone should take out a stopwatch and we should measure how long it takes.
Like the lightning narrative, again, similarly to what I was just trying to say about how that one side wanted to change in the block size war and lost the winning side.
I always said like, OK, the lightning network, well, whatever.
Lightning network, lightning network, lightning network was like the big phrase, the big counter argument.
And the important sociological thing is to study.
Exactly what happens to that narrative, because that is the difference between how rational is everyone versus is this just the.
You know, is the Bitcoin community just as political as.
Name your thing, just as political as the Houses of Congress or whatever.
It's both right. There's a highly political sort of podcasters faction and they're basically chanting ossify now day and night.
And because they have to project this extremist religious view, because that's how they engagement farm on Twitter.
Right. Like they all have to have many, many subscribers on Twitter and elsewhere.
And the best way to engagement farm for that is to adopt the most extreme kind of theological positions and condemn in moralizing tones everything else.
So they're essentially using this kind of fiery preacher type kind of old routine.
And so it's like a self-reinforcing cult of if you want a large audience for your podcast, then you have to be extreme and you have to moralize about everything other than your faction being immoral and shit corners and everything else.
Right. But that whole cult falls apart once there is like a real crisis.
Like once the plebs cannot move their Bitcoin, they have to exit the cult.
They have to abandon it. Right. Because that essentially.
I completely agree. Right now, there's a simple cost benefit analysis because it's a cheap talk, as we say.
It's just like, well, they're on a podcast. You can just go along with it.
And I'm going along. And then if I don't, then I'm going to be kicked out of the Bitcoin community.
And then where would I go? Where would I go? You know, who would I turn to?
Would I join an altcoin community? Would I start my own thing? Those don't seem like they'll work.
So there's a lot of pressure to stay in. Pure pressure.
And the pressure to ossify is actually a derivative of this religious idea of immaculate conception.
Because you only ossify Bitcoin if you assume that it's already perfect in a sense.
And it will hyper-Bitcoinize the world if you just don't mess with it.
And so this is like a purely religious idea. And that has to be exposed as a failure.
Because if Lightning Network actually is exposed as a failure to scale Bitcoin for the plebs.
And also plebs can't move their coins in the global South. Right.
Then that exposes Bitcoin as flawed. Right. And that essentially rug pulls the cult.
Because the cult is based on the idea that Satoshi came.
You know, the alien came from a thousand years in the future and gave us this immaculate technology.
So all we have to do is just not change it. And then it will be all the money in the world.
That's sort of the apocalyptic vision of it.
Yeah. Well, of course, this is a type of belief where, like a lot of people said,
Bitcoin is number one. The number one coin is going to grow at a faster rate than any other.
Like, you know, the number three coin or the number five coin.
So therefore, let's fast forward. And number one will just take over everything.
People have also had the view that's like, if Bitcoin were to ever hard fork or change,
that would permanently discredit it. That would open the door to endless changes.
And then what would we have? An endless slippery slope into this chasm of defeat.
And so therefore, it will never happen.
The problem with belief, these are the type of beliefs that are like,
it's true until it's not style belief.
And then as soon as it's not, like as soon as you aren't number one,
now not only are you not number one, but you were wrong about something big before.
Kind of like, you know, like when people go through a bad breakup or something
where they have to like revisit the whole last couple months or weeks or whatever
and like re-figure out what really happened.
It was like, not only were you wrong about this,
but you thought it was going a completely different direction or something like that.
What I'm trying to say is that I agree with you that there are these sacred cows
that are all interlocking. And it's kind of like, this happens a lot in finance
where these little beliefs pile up.
Like for example, there was that 1987 crash or whatever,
where everyone had programmed their computers a certain way based on the stock market,
just never crashing 15% or whatever it was.
And so since everyone had their computer programmed that way,
it just like inevitably happened one day.
So what would the cascading failure of Bitcoin look like?
It would be like flippening followed by the apocalypse,
or the apocalypse followed by flippening.
I mean, I suspect the flippening will be rationalized away
because like the moment the flippening possibly happens,
let's say next year or two years from now,
then the new rationalization will be, well, Ethereum is just a big tech company,
you know, Apple is $3 trillion market cap, so what?
And Gensler is going to shut it down any day now.
So we don't need to worry about Ethereum flippening Bitcoin.
It's not necessarily one near flippening, but yeah,
I think like if the Bitcoin price is going down,
Ethereum price is going up and flippens BTC,
and then BTC starts going down the list,
like number one, number two, number three, number four,
I think absolutely that would be the –
that would be, you know, people would immediately –
that would immediately cause everyone to think,
okay, something we're doing is wrong and we need to rethink everything.
And they would then say which idea do we put on the –
you know, in the guillotine and just decapitate first.
And it would be the first and most important idea that would go
would be the idea that Bitcoin success is predetermined
and that it's in fact inevitable that Bitcoin succeed
if the price is going down and other things are going up.
So that would be one thing.
I think that – I kind of lament that –
any real competitor to Bitcoin to actually emerge on its own terms
with the exception of Bitcoin Cash, which did a terrible job
and it did, you know, mostly lots of things wrong.
It, you know, we could put them on a big list,
but the timing, the idea, the idea was not a good idea.
You know, larger layer one blocks is not a good idea
since you can do larger blocks on top of smaller blocks but not vice versa.
The timing, you know, just like the name,
everything was just not – the replay protection,
the fact that it launched during SegWit2x.
You could just like do a big list.
And so it actually would have been better for us to have like, you know,
a two-party system where we had like red Bitcoin, blue Bitcoin,
and then we would be more self-critical because as you have just said,
as it stands now, most of the stuff is just rationalized away.
Most of the internal criticism is rationalized away.
Whereas if we had two things that people both recognized as Bitcoin,
that would have been easier for stuff to break out
and one of those things would have merged CTV and BIP300 by now
and then that thing would have crashed.
Well, I think there's a new fact, which is appearance of something like ARK
and, you know, other protocols that promise to scale Bitcoin on layer 2
that are not Lightning.
So, for example, ARK raises the stakes because if there is an apocalypse
and like plebs are essentially eliminated from Bitcoin
and it's clear that Lightning is never going to bring them back,
that, you know, the outcry of scale Bitcoin now can be fixed by –
because ARK requires CTV and, you know, other protocols require CTV.
Well, why don't we merge CTV, you know,
if it can make layer 2 Bitcoin scaling affordable again for plebs, right?
As you say though, that is a psychologically difficult thing
because it forces people to confront the reality that it's possible
for a problem to show up, which is later fixed by a merge
and that means that we'll always be beholden in the view of these other people.
We'll be beholden to the software merger people or something.
But I agree with you 100%.
It's not that the maintainers at the core are the evil villains
that are vetoing all the useful soft boards.
I think they're more hostages to the Ossifier cult than the other way around.
Like once there's a real crisis, which is going to happen fairly soon,
maybe, you know, in the next bull market the fees will go high
or the flippening will happen.
One of those two things happens, right?
And the whole idea that Bitcoin is perfect and doesn't need to change
is exposed as not working.
At that point, right, there will be this wartime, civil wartime Bitcoin
where you could have two or three soft forks merged in, you know,
within a few months just as a kind of an emergency measure to save Bitcoin.
So it's like any soft fork that's been sufficiently small,
well-understood, and well-reviewed as a pull request
and sitting there for a long time.
In fact, like there's nothing stopping the CTV pull request
from being reopened and merged, right?
It's been reviewed to death and same is true about APO and others.
And the same would apply to BIP300 if it was a small kind of narrow change
that has gotten in the way of the civil war.
Yes, we are working on that.
We're working on it right now, yes.
We're working on the minimal pull request.
Of course, the problem with the pull request is, as you know,
they do age badly.
And in fact, I think even CTV would have to be like redone slightly,
slightly, you know.
You mean like because it would need to be rebased?
Is that the problem?
Basically, yes.
Yes.
I'm not – I think it would.
But that's not a big deal.
But – well, especially because like the ideas from like whatever,
the code, the ideas from like 2017 and the ideas from like 2019.
So, I don't know.
You've been – you blink and four years have passed.
It's actually – I don't know the exact dates.
What?
And APO is an idea from 2015, right?
Very old.
It's on the lightning white paper, yes.
A version of it is mentioned.
So, like –
March 2015, I think.
What can possibly stop somebody, one of the maintainers from hitting the
merge button on APO if it, quote-unquote, fixes the lightning network while also
enabling a whole bunch of things like maybe ARK and others under the civil war
conditions when you have basically this sudden complete 180-degree turnaround in
public opinion where everybody is screaming like Bitcoin is dying.
Save it now.
I mean we saw this kind of civil war in the Ethereum world, right?
Because the millions of plebs cried out in the Ethereum world of, you know,
scale Ethereum now.
We can't afford, you know, $50 protocol fees to execute a smart contract in
Ethereum, right?
And that focused their minds over there.
Why wouldn't it focus their minds here?
Well, yeah.
I mean I completely agree with you about – this is a good story which is that
people would – they could say with some justification.
They could say, well, we're already number one.
There is no crisis.
So why do we need to do anything?
And that, you know, there's some logic to that.
But I think ARK is key because ARK is a thing where it's technically
sophisticated.
It's done by someone who is like associated with Blockstream who is to have,
you know, like enough clout.
And Barack, creator, he really doesn't like the lightning network.
He doesn't like it at all.
He thinks it's not good.
So because the meta, you know, the cultural meta for the longest time has
just been the tech elite thinks lightning is good.
They kind of convinced the VCs that lightning is good.
The problem is they convinced Saylor and Saylor is the biggest influencer,
right?
Like Saylor has to abandon his belief that lightning scales Bitcoin.
And then, you know, we already saw beginnings of that because Saylor was all
excited about Ordinals creating higher fee pressure.
So there's like one more step for him to abandon the belief that lightning is
the scaling future of Bitcoin.
Once he abandons that belief and starts talking about like we need ARK now,
otherwise, you know, Bitcoin is in danger.
Yeah, but see, here's the thing.
I mean, I 100% agree with you.
This is what I'm trying to bring up is won't this be like a watershed?
I mean, maybe for people who are new, they won't care as much.
But for anyone who joined in like the 2017 to 2021 class, I think those people
will just, they will be done with Saylor like forever, don't you think?
They'll think like Saylor was like this guy full lightning and now he's just at
the drop of a hat.
He's going to switch to ARK.
No, I think Saylor will have a conversion experience when he sees high sustained
fees and he realizes, which will be obvious to everyone, that this basically.
Kills Bitcoin's dream of fixing anything, even if Bitcoin goes to a million dollars, it just becomes institutional and will sterile store value asset because nobody else can transact with it, right?
So Saylor will have a conversion experience. I mean, I don't think he's a fool.
But don't you think that will open the floodgates is what I'm saying. Then everyone will say, okay, now we can finally question things. Before we could not question the lightning network, nor any of the secret cows, but now we can finally question things.
Right. I mean, and if Saylor doesn't do it quickly, then other influencers like Saylor, like Peter McCormick and others, one of them will have conversion experience before the others once they see the failure of lightning to scale Bitcoin.
I mean, from my perspective, I don't know if you guys know about this, but in Ordinal's world, they released this beta, which created this additional fee pressure. But the key feature is still not implemented, which is hierarchical Ordinals, where you can have an Ordinal that owns other Ordinals, which allows you to put the whole file system of data in there and own it all recursively by a single Ordinal that represents your identity.
When that goes in, that enables whole NFT collections to go in, owned by one creator. What I'm trying to say is that that project could actually catalyze real crisis and change, because all you need is fees of $10 per transaction and higher staying for a few months.
And that basically means that the feepocalypse is upon us, and nobody can ignore the fact that lightning doesn't scale it for plebs, and regular plebs have no chance other than ARK. So something needs to be done.
Well, okay, let's talk about this, then. Let's talk about feepocalypse. I may be wrong, but I don't think that feepocalypse actually will happen, which is unfortunate for your point of view, because in your paradigm, the high fee sends a signal to everyone that they must sober up.
And in that way, it is healthy. But in my way, we just kind of limp along in denial forever, for a long time. Because what happens is, the fees fill up, and then people either, like demand goes down, like people either just stop transacting as much, or someone, they use Litecoin or something, or they use custodial lightning, which doesn't pay any fees, because it's not Bitcoin.
And so if we do this, then there will never actually be this sobering up signal, and it will just be this kind of like limping along. And I think that is what we've already had. And we've already had Peter McCormack interview Tadge Dreiser, and Tadge Dreiser wanted to only talk about uTreeXO.
And Peter McCormack was like, Oh, I thought this would be at the Lightning Network. And Tadge was like, Yeah, he like kind of basically said that. That was like 2019. And he was saying like, well, you know, he said, sort of what you're saying. He said, well, a world where everyone pays a small fee looks a lot more reasonable than a world where there's a couple people paying a really high fee.
He was saying all this stuff. And then, you know, he's saying like, you know, he didn't want it to be a pro lightning. What Bitcoin did interview. And that was 2019. Or if I remember correctly, maybe I misremember.
I disagree with your ideas about fees. And I've read your blog posts about them. I think there's a counterexample theory, which is Ethereum itself, for example.
Ethereum never really had a fee market until the last time its mempool cleared, which happened like in 2018 or 2019. And only the last time that the mempool in Bitcoin clears, that's the beginning of the fee market.
Because block space is a highly perishable commodity. And therefore, it has this race to the bottom dynamics for providers where if there is any available block space, it must be sold off for nothing. Otherwise, it goes unused.
So therefore, what happened in Ethereum is that once there was the last time when the mempool cleared in something like 2017, 2018, the fees assumed this plateau level, which was high. And that caused the spillover into scaling technologies on Ethereum.
They tried state channels, they tried sidechains, like the early version of QualPolygon, and eventually they sell on these roll-ups.
So your idea of people choosing to go elsewhere is true, but only after the fees. The spillover happens only in the full cup. In other words, there has to be a certain sustained high level of fees before the spillover happens.
And the spillover will happen in Bitcoin, but where that high level of fees is, we don't really know. But maybe we'll find out soon enough. Because last time I checked, the mempool cleared sometime in April.
The story you tell seems to support my view, which is that Ethereum had low fees, no one cared about scaling, then the fees went up, and then Ethereum viewed this as a problem to be solved, and they set to work.
They used their scarce time on this earth to do R&D, and they were like, we're gonna bring these fees down, and then also, let me just, and then I'll let you reply, but something else that happened undeniably was all the EVM clones, you know, whatever, Avalanche, Solana, Cardano, whatever.
I don't even know if these are EVM clones, I don't even care. Solana. But the point is, what, Binance Smart Chain? The point is, the high fees stimulated the search for alternatives, and then the fees did go back down, and the point of Ethereum is to, the fee rates go back down.
That's the thing is, they never went back down to clear the mempool, that's my point. So in other words, once the fees go high enough, right, it does stimulate search for alternatives, so all these Ethereum killer EVM clones appeared, and Binance Smart Chain, and then Ethereum has its own scaling things such as sidechains and rollups, but the fees never went down enough.
They never went low. In fact, like, transacting on Ethereum L1 has stayed fairly expensive, but those people who can't afford the expense, they now have this escape hatch. So it's kind of like, imagine that there's a super popular restaurant that is always full of people, but if it can't fit any more people, it has like a cheaper restaurant down the street, so it sends cheaper people down to it, but it stays full all the time anyway.
So the appearance of all the Ethereum clones actually refutes your idea that competition and fees will eventually cause fees to fall, because despite all the Ethereum killers creating all this 100 times more block space, they're all lost to Ethereum, because the network effects of Ethereum have proven strong enough to sustain the high fee pressure, despite Avalanche offering 100 times lower fees.
And all the same protocols copy pasted to Avalanche. That hasn't caused the Ethereum fees to fall, and I don't expect that once Bitcoin fees go high, that there will be any kind of spillover that will lower them again, right?
They can only go higher, from my perspective. Why? Because, well, simply there's like a fixed limit on block space, and even if ordinals were not there, even if inscriptions were not there, you would still see ongoing adoption by global self clubs transacting more and more, and just the number of payments per day, that long-term moving average of like 365-day moving average of payments per day is always gradually rising.
So eventually, the block space is exhausted and has a non-linear response in the cost per V-byte, right? So the fees would spike with or without ordinals. I think the ordinals just created a new use case that allows rich people to pay for luxury file storage in Bitcoin, which is now, you know, scouting out the clubs from the global south even more, and it just brought forward the whole hypocalypse, which would have happened in my mind.
It's a different the
the reason why I resist the high fees thing is I think
that the type of person who, it's a different type of person who uses it, this is my
conjecture. I have no idea.
But when just being involved in the Bitcoin community, people don't find the
idea of paying
for a transaction.
Paying more than $2 or $3, it does not – that is the most anyone has ever paid for a transfer of money, unless it's like a wire transfer, but most people aren't sending big wire transfers, are they?
Wire transfer is like how you buy a house or something weird like that, and so cash is check. But with Ethereum, it's a little bit more like – I would imagine the average person who uses Ethereum is actually wealthier than the average person who uses Bitcoin because the average Ethereum person is like a software developer, and they probably make more than $50,000 a year or whatever the U.S. average is.
I don't know. To me, it just feels like they can't really go that high, but I could easily be mistaken. It's intriguing to me that the exception that kind of proves the rule is really the ordinals where it says something like you have to do something sidechain-like or something Ethereum-like in order to get the Bitcoin fees up. I find that to be an interesting turn of events.
Well, you don't have to. It just brought forward additional fee pressure that would have appeared with organic adoption anyways. You're saying that you find it hard to believe that somebody would pay more than $3 to $5 to do a Bitcoin transaction. It just starts feeling expensive, but it's not expensive.
It's not expensive. We know this because there were periods when the average transaction was above $10 for weeks like in May last year, and then in bull markets, there's longer periods of time.
You've already read my article about the bull markets. We can kind of carve that out. It doesn't really count. I think, again, also when it's people's first time with Bitcoin, they embark on it as a kind of R&D project.
They say, I'm going to dedicate this weekend to learning about Bitcoin. They're already investing a lot. It's worth much more than everyone will pay $20 to $30 worth of transactions for the first time just because they're already investing and learning about this. They're investing their time and their spirit in learning about this. But yeah, I don't know. You might be right.
Also, I can tell you this, that if Saylor's theory is right that Bitcoin is good enough to become a store of value and go to a million dollars, even if you don't touch it, he should be careful what he wishes for because he might just get it.
Because as price of Bitcoin goes higher, existing holdings appreciate and people become much less fee sensitive. So therefore, hey, if you need to move $50,000 of Bitcoin to some other cold storage, you will pay $50. Who cares? Because you would care before when this $50,000 worth of Bitcoin was $5,000 worth of Bitcoin. That would have been pricey. But as the price goes up, fee sensitivity goes down.
Right.
So it's just a matter of…
wouldn't really, I wouldn't really, I would protest anyone who held that against me.
This is what I'm saying about the bull.
As you know in my article, I write this about the bull market.
say, listen, a lot of this is just there's a bull market and everyone thinks they're
going to get rich very soon.
So they say, I'll pay a $50 fee because
I think I'm about to make $800,000.
… by buying my one millionth of a Bitcoin. And so if that actually happens, then I would still say that it was really the bull market that did it and their actual demand for… I'm trying to talk about the equilibrium, final demand, sustainable demand for actual transacting with the block space.
That's like my kind of leading light. And if there's a – because I write an article, we cannot count on a bull market to just make everyone ultra, ultra, ultra wealthy forever. Eventually, it will just hit the line of the value of all the currency involved.
This bear market stopped clearing the mempool during the bear market, which is kind of a counterexample to this theory that only during the bull markets the mempool stops clearing. It's kind of the opposite.
That's true. But again, the ordinal thing is because – that's not because of demand for actually transacting. I agree with you. Certainly, it's demand for block space.
Right. It's just a novel demand for block space.
Saylor would say that wouldn't you want some important document like your will, like forever immortalizing Bitcoin blockchain? Wouldn't you pay $100 for it? Hey, why wouldn't people put 100 million wills there?
Some people would, and I actually support that. I think that's actually – I think that's fair game. I think that's fine. I think that we should not have tried to censor. People like to move that out, and they say it's spam.
They make some good points, but ultimately at the end of the day, anyone could invent it.
I can see another use case that hasn't been tried that could have a huge source of demand. Imagine everybody is so excited about Nostr adoption. Imagine Nostr adoption has gone through the roof and tens of millions of people are using Nostr.
Why can't you use Bitcoin blockchain as a relay for encrypted Nostr messages that are super high value?
I agree.
So you can have encrypted messages.
I have a Namecoin kind of shaped idea that is along those lines, which is that you have a Namecoin sidechain that does the human readable names and also is the fallback if for some reason you get basically deplatformed. You can send one message to replatform yourself everywhere.
It's kind of like the real weakness of Nostr is that your data is kind of ephemeral. You never know if it will survive on these relays long term. But let's say you want to send out a message that's more important than average. Why don't you send that message also to the Bitcoin blockchain as kind of like the forever eternal storage in case your messages get deleted from all these relays?
I agree with all that.
So that's a use case that we're talking about, but nobody's tried. But it's clearly an attractive place to back up super important Nostr messages, right? As long as other Nostr clients sniff around among ordinals or inscriptions looking for Nostr clients, all of a sudden you might have more demand than for ordinals block space, right?
ordinal block space, right?
So you, by apocalypse, include all of stuff?
When I call the apocalypse, it's attaining the same state that happened to Ethereum in
in 19 or 18 right
other words, apocalypse is when the apocalypse happens by definition.
don't know what the level of fees will be, but I do know that the apocalypse is this
equilibrium state where the block where the mempool hasn't cleared for like a
year or more, and it's become clear that it will never clear again.
So then you will have this equilibrium level of fees that may be low or high, but the
point is that whatever it is, we will finally have the fee market that's clearing at a
fair price, and we will see, you know, what the
Like we know what the supply of block space is, but essentially that will immediately tell us that, hey, the fees will never average below, say, two, three, five, ten dollars, whatever it is. And it immediately cuts out a whole bunch of pleb use cases in the global south, right?
Yes. And as is now becoming common knowledge, it also puts a limit on the size of an HTLC or PTLC. Take your pick.
And it basically makes any Lightning-routed payment whose value is below the average fee essentially, you know, not trustless.
And then there's an intriguing aspect that the way Lightning is set up, the miners basically have sort of an incentive to uncooperative…
There is an interesting dynamic in ARK that might be relevant to the Fipocalypse in the future. And like we have Moonsetter here, maybe he'll come up to the stage and talk about it.
But from what I heard that ARK is also privileging higher payment amounts and lower payment amounts because in the environment of high fees, ARK is biased in favor of larger UTXOs versus smaller UTXOs.
So ARK might itself be insufficient to scale Bitcoin in a really high fee environment. Or, you know, in other words, like there will be no way for you to exit your ARK service provider if you only have like 20 or $30 worth of Bitcoin if the fees are $10 because the only way for you to exit unilaterally will be to lose half of your stash.
But the ARK service provider might allow you to exit through a Lightning payment to your own custodial Lightning wallet or something like this.
So ARK also has these dynamics where I think it's biased in favor of larger transacting amounts as opposed to smaller transacting amounts that might play a role in the Fipocalypse as well.
I think we're seeing Moonsetter do a thumb up on that. Maybe he'll speak about it on stage or something.
May I maybe ask why Alex, you support Drivechain? I saw it in your Twitter and I'm just curious how you came here and what's your kind of view?
Well, I guess I would encapsulate. I'm more of a Paul style maximalist where I don't believe that Bitcoin is perfect, but I do believe it should be used in every possible way, not just as a sterile store of value.
That's sort of like the original version of maximalism before it became sort of hijacked by the Ossifier's cult.
And I see that if Bitcoin doesn't change, then I see this third outcome as sort of my baseline scenario where it becomes institutional sterile store of value and only institutions can transact and Bitcoin fixes nothing.
It doesn't fix inflation. It doesn't give you sovereign property rights. There's actually nothing that it fixes, even if it does go to a million dollars.
In fact, going to a million dollars will make it more institutional and custodial in that scenario.
So the higher the price goes, the less Bitcoin fixes is the way it's designed right now, because there's more centralizing tendencies for it to pull up inside large custodians in both Lightning and on-chain.
And can you imagine that Drivechain really will have an impact and that people will be able to see the potential of it?
Drivechain is like one of these super safe, should never be controversial tweaks. I hope it will get enabled during the next civil war, which hopefully as soon as, as long as the fee pressure continues rising, the civil war is inevitable.
And I'm hopeful that it can, well, it can definitely scale Bitcoin for plebs in the global south if nothing else, right?
Because you can have, you can have, you know, thunder chains that allow very cheap transactions for small amounts, etc.
So me, Drivechain is something that will avoid the otherwise inevitable, in my mind, outcome of this institutional, sterile store of value, which fixes nothing.
Okay, interesting.
Excellent. This has been a great conversation so far. Paul, do you think we should continue or should we adjourn for next week?
I guess we could adjourn. Let's see if anyone has anything they want to say. Don't be shy.
Yeah, don't be shy.
It's only going to be recorded forever and probably AI will transcribe it eventually and then match it to your voice.
And then there will one day be a website where you can type in anyone's name and learn everything they ever said, including the dumbest thing.
Right, don't be shy.
Your enemies will find that and then they'll play it and they'll try to make your kids unpopular at school.
But, you know, just because there's an AI that will probably do that with like two clicks of a button in the future.
Don't let that stop you.
Don't let certain doom stop anyone from coming on up to the stage.
Share your question or comment, whether you're a fan or a critic of Drivechain or just an observer.
If you have a question or comment, come on up and speak.
We meet every Friday and everyone is welcome to come on up.
You know, Paul, there's one question I think some people are interested in.
They'd love to hear you.
You've answered this before, but could you explain if I were someone in the Bitcoin Cash or BSV community and I was wondering, what is the point of enabling small blocks so that people can validate layer one when most people will be using layer two a lot of the time?
What is the point of enabling everyone in the world to have a convenient Bitcoin note on their phone if it isn't validating their entire experience?
Can you explain that in simple terms for the large blockers who are curious about that kind of layered architecture of Bitcoin that's not familiar to them?
Sure.
The case for small blocks is that the small blocks is a cost.
That is, each person must pay his minimum cost in order to join the network.
In fact, I think a much better way of reframing everything is to merge the idea of a wallet and a node.
Because really what your wallet must do is it either must access a full node or it must talk to someone else who is a full node.
That's a detail, but basically to run a wallet, running a wallet is the cost of running a node in this small blocker conception.
And the only way of actually knowing whether or not you've been paid without asking someone else is to run the node.
And so the more expensive the nodes are, just the fewer, it's a fixed cost.
It's the entry fee into Bitcoin.
So some people say, well, the entry fee isn't that high.
Or they say, well, I don't really pay because my friend is in the club and he tells me about what's going on in there, whether or not I'm being paid.
And that's good enough for me.
And so I don't mind paying a higher full node cost.
I don't like the transaction fees being high.
And so really it's just kind of like who's custodial.
It's the custodial problem looked at from two different angles.
One angle is like, am I paying high fees to use the block space?
And the other is, where am I getting my information on whether or not my transaction is being included in a block?
Satoshi tried to – he has an enormously clever way of getting around this, which is the SPV mode.
But the SPV mode, what that does is it makes it so that it is very difficult for a full node to lie to a light client.
So this is very good.
So it's a huge upgrade on custodial because it costs almost nothing.
But the issue is you still need – someone out there has to be the full node.
If there's no full nodes, there's no network.
And it's kind of like asking if you open a restaurant but you're not buying any food.
You're not buying any ingredients.
Someone out there needs to make – someone needs to write the first version of the Bible before people can photocopy it.
And so there is a free rider problem.
There's 1,000 blocks every week.
So whatever the block size is, multiply that by 1,000 times every week.
So if there's 1 megabyte blocks and they're all full, it's another gigabyte every week, 52 weeks in a year, 52 gigabytes.
Adding to the pile and initial block download, you have to start from scratch when you restart.
So it's just a bigger and bigger – it's like that Futurama joke about global warming.
They need to put a bigger and bigger ice cube into the ocean every year.
Thus solving the problem once and for all.
Okay, so knowing that you've been paid is something that's achieved even though the transaction is on Thunder and the person only has a layer one node.
But you would say that they can know they've been paid.
Can you help me understand that further?
Well, Thunder is a different case than – Thunder would have the larger block.
So it would be more difficult to run full node of Thunder, but Thunder might also be more popular.
So there may be more nodes overall.
No one has ever – this is kind of an empirical question.
Hard to say.
Okay, thank you.
That was great.
All right.
I don't see anyone with their hand up.
There's a hand up button, but no one seems to be pressing it.
All right.
Thank you everyone who's listened, and hello to our listeners who follow along on demand in the recorded version.
Follow LayerTwo Labs for these spaces every Friday, and we're excited to see you all next week.
And you can find out more by going to layer2labs.com, as well as our Drivechain Talk Telegram group, our YouTube channel for LayerTwo Labs, and drivechain.info.
Lots of information there.
Download our software and run it for yourself to understand more.
And discuss Drivechain, which is BIP300 and BIP301 at your local Bitcoin meetup, and bring your questions and comments to our spaces.
Thanks for all who spoke.