1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,600
Back in the day, like before 2015, everyone just thought anyone who worked on
Bitcoin would just all get arrested or something.

2
00:00:06,600 --> 00:00:13,200
This idea requires you to be open-minded to the idea that someone would want to
leave the Bitcoin core software.

3
00:00:13,200 --> 00:00:17,200
But over time, people have been trained not to think of that as a good idea.

4
00:00:17,200 --> 00:00:21,500
You could make a whole career out of just being like a critic and not actually
making anything.

5
00:00:21,500 --> 00:00:31,800
Even though the correct side won the scaling war, there's no way you can overstate
how kind of traumatized the community was in general.

6
00:00:31,800 --> 00:00:34,700
And I think this is one of the worst things that has ever happened.

7
00:00:34,700 --> 00:00:37,500
The bigger thing, though, is just why have any rivals at all?

8
00:00:37,500 --> 00:00:41,900
Like, why tolerate having Ethereum as a number two alternative to Bitcoin?

9
00:00:41,900 --> 00:00:50,100
The whole design is designed around the sidechains being optional and not harming
anyone who's not using them.

10
00:00:50,100 --> 00:00:53,400
It was a better idea before, as good of an idea it is today.

11
00:00:53,400 --> 00:00:55,300
It would have been better to do it back then.

12
00:00:55,300 --> 00:01:05,200
Paul Sztorc is the founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs, as well as the author of BIP300/301 and a Drivechains advocate.

13
00:01:05,200 --> 00:01:09,300
In our conversation, we explored the history of Drivechains.

14
00:01:09,300 --> 00:01:14,000
We talked about the potential pros and cons of implementing them on Bitcoin.

15
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:19,700
And we discussed the work that Paul is doing at LayerTwo Labs to help scale Bitcoin.

16
00:01:19,700 --> 00:01:22,300
Paul has also been added to today's show splits.

17
00:01:22,300 --> 00:01:31,800
So if you enjoy this episode and if you learn something new, the best way you can
show your support for the show is by sending in sats over the Lightning Network.

18
00:01:31,800 --> 00:01:34,200
You can use any podcasting 2.0 app.

19
00:01:34,200 --> 00:01:35,800
There are dozens of them.

20
00:01:35,800 --> 00:01:38,000
But my favorite to use is Fountain.

21
00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:41,800
Before we get into today's show, just a quick message from our sponsors.

22
00:01:41,800 --> 00:01:43,900
Today's show is sponsored by Voltage.

23
00:01:43,900 --> 00:01:49,000
Voltage is the premier provider of Bitcoin and Lightning Node infrastructure.

24
00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:51,400
Today's show is also sponsored by Stackwork.

25
00:01:51,400 --> 00:02:01,100
Stackwork is a Lightning-powered transcription tool that takes the best of AIs and
humans to create better, faster, and less expensive transcripts.

26
00:02:01,100 --> 00:02:04,300
We'll have more from Voltage and Stackwork later in the show.

27
00:02:04,300 --> 00:02:05,900
Paul, welcome to the show.

28
00:02:05,900 --> 00:02:07,300
Thank you for taking the time.

29
00:02:07,300 --> 00:02:14,100
I have a lot of questions to ask you about Drivechains, about LayerTwo Labs, all
sorts of stuff I want to get into.

30
00:02:14,100 --> 00:02:17,200
But first, let's start with your background.

31
00:02:17,200 --> 00:02:21,600
Tell me a little bit about how you first discovered Bitcoin.

32
00:02:21,600 --> 00:02:27,700
I first discovered it that someone wrote that article about Silk Road, I think, in
Wired.

33
00:02:27,700 --> 00:02:34,300
They wrote that article in, like, 2011, but I didn't read it until later, I think,
like 2012.

34
00:02:34,300 --> 00:02:40,800
And actually, believe it or not, I heard about Bitcoin before along with the Free
State Project was sending, like, emails about it.

35
00:02:40,800 --> 00:02:42,800
And I was like, this is so stupid.

36
00:02:42,800 --> 00:02:45,200
I thought the idea was horrible.

37
00:02:45,200 --> 00:02:47,900
And I honestly thought, like, these libertarians are so dumb.

38
00:02:47,900 --> 00:02:50,800
I was going to, like, unsubscribe from the mailing list because of this.

39
00:02:50,800 --> 00:02:52,500
And I was like, you can't just start your own currency.

40
00:02:52,500 --> 00:02:54,400
What about network effects?

41
00:02:54,400 --> 00:02:56,400
What about the instability?

42
00:02:56,400 --> 00:03:00,400
You know, like, if, like, someone starts a currency, then you have a copycat.

43
00:03:00,400 --> 00:03:05,100
What later became, like, live by the fork, die by the fork, and, you know, this
whole point.

44
00:03:05,100 --> 00:03:07,600
So I was like, this idea is stupid.

45
00:03:07,600 --> 00:03:08,900
Never get any traction.

46
00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:15,400
And then I read the Silk Road article and everything changed because I didn't
understand why they could.

47
00:03:15,400 --> 00:03:17,300
I was like, why don't they just use credit cards?

48
00:03:17,300 --> 00:03:26,000
And then it's like, oh, of course, because they have the real name and the billing
address of all these people engaging in illegal activity.

49
00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:33,200
So but then it was like, we already have, like, regular users who are drug addicts
who are actually using the whole system.

50
00:03:33,200 --> 00:03:36,600
So I was like, oh, A, it's finished.

51
00:03:36,600 --> 00:03:42,500
B, there's no way to, like, cheat the scheme because if someone's, you know, like a
drug addict,

52
00:03:42,500 --> 00:03:51,800
they're going to do whatever they can to get extra drugs for free out of the whole
cycle.

53
00:03:51,800 --> 00:03:53,300
And I was like, oh, it's all right.

54
00:03:53,300 --> 00:03:58,400
So I thought I was like, I went from thinking it's a terrible idea to like, oh, I'm
way too late.

55
00:03:58,400 --> 00:04:03,400
It's already being used by the layperson in the real world.

56
00:04:03,400 --> 00:04:05,100
So that was how I got into Bitcoin.

57
00:04:05,100 --> 00:04:11,100
I read that article and just immediately I just thought this would be used in every
illegal transaction in the world.

58
00:04:11,100 --> 00:04:16,300
And nothing really stops it from being used in every legal transaction in the world
as well.

59
00:04:16,300 --> 00:04:19,700
So it will just system D was like 10.

60
00:04:19,700 --> 00:04:33,000
It was the second largest economy in the world is like 10 trillion GDP of like all
the black gray market activity was was huge.

61
00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:34,600
So I knew that it was huge.

62
00:04:34,600 --> 00:04:36,400
I knew about like Hong Kong capital control.

63
00:04:36,400 --> 00:04:37,300
I knew about all this stuff.

64
00:04:37,300 --> 00:04:41,000
You know, I knew that there was a demand for this product.

65
00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:43,200
Like a lot of stuff is illegal gambling.

66
00:04:43,200 --> 00:04:46,100
They had like Black Thursday.

67
00:04:46,100 --> 00:04:46,400
Right.

68
00:04:46,400 --> 00:04:47,900
It only happened a couple years before.

69
00:04:47,900 --> 00:04:50,700
They just close everything and just take everyone's money.

70
00:04:50,700 --> 00:04:53,400
So so that got me started on all that.

71
00:04:53,400 --> 00:04:55,000
That's how I got into it.

72
00:04:55,000 --> 00:04:59,200
You know, and then the form and stuff and then you're like, oh, this is a real
project.

73
00:04:59,200 --> 00:05:01,800
You know, you test out the software.

74
00:05:01,800 --> 00:05:04,400
Went to Gavin's faucet.

75
00:05:04,400 --> 00:05:06,300
Yeah, coins.

76
00:05:06,300 --> 00:05:07,100
Nice.

77
00:05:07,100 --> 00:05:09,600
And then so so this is 2012.

78
00:05:09,600 --> 00:05:10,800
You're starting to learn about it.

79
00:05:10,800 --> 00:05:11,800
You discover it.

80
00:05:11,800 --> 00:05:15,500
And now fast forward to a decade later.

81
00:05:15,500 --> 00:05:17,500
You're starting LayerTwo Labs.

82
00:05:17,500 --> 00:05:31,700
Talk to me about that 10 year journey and the the the transition from learning about
it thinking you're too late to to now building this company trying to trying to
further improve scalability and features on

83
00:05:31,700 --> 00:05:32,100
Bitcoin.

84
00:05:32,100 --> 00:05:33,500
Sure.

85
00:05:33,500 --> 00:05:41,000
So 2012 the one thing that happened was the in trade collapsed.

86
00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:45,700
And this the intraday was my favorite website on the Internet, which is a prediction
markets website.

87
00:05:45,700 --> 00:05:51,300
And I was a very annoyed by this because it would be it was basically closed down by
the US government for no reason.

88
00:05:51,300 --> 00:05:59,400
And this is the institution that like I have like papers where there's like 15 or 16
Nobel Prize winners of the co-authors.

89
00:05:59,400 --> 00:06:01,600
And they they're all like in favor of this institution.

90
00:06:01,600 --> 00:06:07,800
I'm a huge believer in this institution and this website closed down and there was
another website like bid bet.

91
00:06:07,800 --> 00:06:11,300
That was like a Bitcoin type of a thing like that.

92
00:06:11,300 --> 00:06:13,000
But that also had to close.

93
00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:15,300
There was lots of failures of this thing.

94
00:06:15,300 --> 00:06:25,200
So I designed this this prediction market concept this blockchain prediction market
concept back in 2012 2013.

95
00:06:25,200 --> 00:06:26,600
And so I was interested in that.

96
00:06:26,600 --> 00:06:33,100
It's kind of like a little pet project like a little labor of love because I wanted
to have prediction markets in the world.

97
00:06:33,100 --> 00:06:45,700
But it was so bizarre that the project is so complicated that I knew there would be
no real way to actually use it with Bitcoin without some kind of like other new
idea.

98
00:06:45,700 --> 00:06:51,400
But that around that time, the idea of the sidechain was invented or pioneered by
people.

99
00:06:51,400 --> 00:06:59,100
Luke Dashjr. mentioned it in a Bitcoin Wizards IRC chat and Greg Maxwell mentioned
it.

100
00:06:59,100 --> 00:07:02,100
So they were talking about this sidechain idea.

101
00:07:02,100 --> 00:07:03,500
And I thought, oh, this idea is perfect.

102
00:07:03,500 --> 00:07:12,400
So I inadvertently became an expert on some things that would later be really
important, which are like, what could you use a blockchain for that is not Bitcoin
core?

103
00:07:12,400 --> 00:07:19,000
So there was there a Namecoin at the time, which was co-invented by Satoshi, which
is about the Internet name system.

104
00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:20,900
But that was kind of languishing.

105
00:07:20,900 --> 00:07:26,200
But I kind of always knew about Namecoin and it was always kind of confusing
because Namecoin had a separate coin.

106
00:07:26,200 --> 00:07:28,200
So the separate coin is always a bad thing.

107
00:07:28,200 --> 00:07:35,100
If you're in Bitcoin, you never wanted to do that because they would create these
rivalrous competing projects.

108
00:07:35,100 --> 00:07:36,900
So I got really into prediction markets.

109
00:07:36,900 --> 00:07:49,700
And it just as a this is a bizarre side effect of having done that is I became an
expert on things like the Oracle problem or like what you would use a blockchain for
or not for.

110
00:07:49,700 --> 00:08:02,200
Then in 2015, we had the scaling war started to get big because Mike Kern and Gavin
Andreessen were pushing Bitcoin XT to the eight megabyte hard fork.

111
00:08:02,200 --> 00:08:16,100
This caused. Let's say this discord in the community and we organized the scaling
Bitcoin conferences.

112
00:08:16,100 --> 00:08:23,500
And so the so the first one was in September in 2015 in Montreal.

113
00:08:23,500 --> 00:08:26,500
And I had been writing in 2015, like in May.

114
00:08:26,500 --> 00:08:29,600
I wrote a little. And in September, I wrote a little.

115
00:08:29,600 --> 00:08:36,000
And then I presented some of what I was talking about at that conference.

116
00:08:36,000 --> 00:08:44,800
And that was when I first started to notice the problems, which were that people
really hated each other and weren't even talking to each other.

117
00:08:44,800 --> 00:08:48,300
So there was no reasonable debate.

118
00:08:48,300 --> 00:08:51,200
Actually, in my view, everyone was just trying to say, I'm right.

119
00:08:51,200 --> 00:08:56,200
And this is how to prove that I'm right. And they weren't actually interested in any
kind of win win situation.

120
00:08:56,200 --> 00:09:01,200
So I presented something I presented like we could basically are now called Fork
Futures.

121
00:09:01,200 --> 00:09:05,700
I said we can make this thing where we can say.

122
00:09:05,700 --> 00:09:12,000
Because the problem, as I saw it, was how to get the community to decide what to do,
like how to do like a governance type of a thing,

123
00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:19,400
whereas everyone else was just kind of trying to say, like, how can I get my own way
and just everyone else is wrong and I will just get what I want?

124
00:09:19,400 --> 00:09:22,400
And which is obviously a very childish way to look at the world.

125
00:09:22,400 --> 00:09:36,100
But I was I presented on we can have this way where we we we create this thing with
technology and you have two tradable assets or really four or actually eight,
believe it or not.

126
00:09:36,100 --> 00:09:38,400
But under the hood, it would look like two or four.

127
00:09:38,400 --> 00:09:46,900
And it would be like it would it would let you know what the Bitcoin price would be
in the large block future versus the small block future.

128
00:09:46,900 --> 00:09:53,600
And I would say then we can let the users, the investors, they can take sides before
we actually make a decision.

129
00:09:53,600 --> 00:10:04,200
And we'll say whichever one increases the price the most is just what the community
will will want to do, because they'll want to have Bitcoin be the highest price it
can possibly be.

130
00:10:04,200 --> 00:10:08,800
So this will solve all of our problems. It'll let it let us know what what people
want.

131
00:10:08,800 --> 00:10:15,100
It'll communicate that to everyone. And it will communicate that to everyone.

132
00:10:15,100 --> 00:10:25,200
And then it also just passively paves the way for exactly coordinating everyone's
response on the one most desirable thing.

133
00:10:25,200 --> 00:10:31,100
So this was like a pre fork prediction market. Yeah, it was.

134
00:10:31,100 --> 00:10:39,400
And so everyone hated this idea, and that was when I got nervous because that
because I was like.

135
00:10:39,400 --> 00:10:44,500
No matter how no matter how many times you get something right, it's only a matter
of time.

136
00:10:44,500 --> 00:10:50,900
If you don't have a good error correcting mechanism, it's only a matter of time
before you make a huge mistake.

137
00:10:50,900 --> 00:10:58,300
And so but it wasn't a big deal, but because because the correct side was the small
blocker side and they ended up winning anyway.

138
00:10:58,300 --> 00:11:03,900
But that was 2015. I presented this idea. Everyone was like, how dare you even.

139
00:11:03,900 --> 00:11:11,200
But if you go to either side, the small block side or the large block side, people
would say, obviously, we're the ones who are right.

140
00:11:11,200 --> 00:11:19,700
You know, how dare you even side with them for a moment, which suggested to me that
everyone was really on the wrong path a lot.

141
00:11:19,700 --> 00:11:25,900
Because, you see, it doesn't really matter if you're right in any particular
disagreement.

142
00:11:25,900 --> 00:11:30,000
And, of course, you know, as I predicted, it got nastier.

143
00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:37,400
The sides got nastier and nastier and they started hating each other more. So
Blockstream had done this paper in October 2014.

144
00:11:37,400 --> 00:11:40,100
This 10 year story is going to be really long at this rate.

145
00:11:40,100 --> 00:11:45,600
But Blockstream had done this paper in 2014 about sidechains.

146
00:11:45,600 --> 00:11:54,800
And I had finished, I had started working on the prediction markets project because
actually Roger Ver, I was working at Yale University and Roger Ver hired me.

147
00:11:54,800 --> 00:12:03,600
In November of 20, we're going even further back now, November of 2014, Blockstream
emailed me about because I was working on this sidechain project.

148
00:12:03,600 --> 00:12:05,600
And they're like, oh, this is great. We should have a partnership.

149
00:12:05,600 --> 00:12:08,200
We should do all this stuff. I have these emails with them.

150
00:12:08,200 --> 00:12:18,600
And then they were worried about prediction market regulation, even though they were
based out of Canada at the time where that's more legal.

151
00:12:18,600 --> 00:12:26,700
It was like everyone back in the day, like before 2015, everyone just thought all
the anyone who worked on Bitcoin would just all get arrested or something.

152
00:12:26,700 --> 00:12:30,300
So something really weird happened later in 2016 that changed everyone's mind.

153
00:12:30,300 --> 00:12:32,700
But before everyone thought we're all doomed.

154
00:12:32,700 --> 00:12:37,300
So they were like doing some kind of internal review or something.

155
00:12:37,300 --> 00:12:42,500
Then I happened to meet Roger Ver the next month in December 2014.

156
00:12:42,500 --> 00:12:48,800
And he just hired me on the spot because, you know, he's like, you know, Monopoly
champ, Mr. Moneybags.

157
00:12:48,800 --> 00:12:52,000
And he was like, you know, he's not going to wait for blah, blah, blah.

158
00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:57,400
He would have actually liked it more if the U.S. government hated it. So he would
have been more into it.

159
00:12:57,500 --> 00:13:06,400
And so in through 2015, this period I was describing before, I made this software,
which you can find now at BitcoinHiveMind.com.

160
00:13:06,400 --> 00:13:09,200
We even have a GUI. We have screenshots.

161
00:13:09,200 --> 00:13:11,800
So the prediction market software actually exists.

162
00:13:11,800 --> 00:13:15,000
And to this day, it is the superior peer to peer Oracle.

163
00:13:15,000 --> 00:13:18,000
Everyone else's Oracle technology is awful.

164
00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:26,100
And this is much better. It's much more complicated, but it's it stands a chance of
actually working at scale.

165
00:13:26,100 --> 00:13:33,200
That's my opinion. So in 2015, by the end of 2015, I had finished this software.

166
00:13:33,200 --> 00:13:35,300
And then I was like, how do I get the sidechain?

167
00:13:35,300 --> 00:13:39,900
I had to integrate it into Bitcoin sidechain world.

168
00:13:39,900 --> 00:13:45,700
So I've actually built all this software long before many of these other people who
showed up today.

169
00:13:45,700 --> 00:13:48,100
You know, we've got a lot of new people who showed up.

170
00:13:48,100 --> 00:13:50,700
I finished completely this software project.

171
00:13:50,700 --> 00:13:56,700
Like I finished all this was presenting it scaling Bitcoin long before many of these
people like have even shown up or whatever.

172
00:13:56,700 --> 00:14:00,100
But I finished this software and I was like, how do I bolt it into Bitcoin via
sidechain?

173
00:14:00,100 --> 00:14:05,600
So I had to read the paper for the first time because this Blockstream paper had
been thrown around a lot.

174
00:14:05,600 --> 00:14:10,800
But not a lot of people had actually read it. And I read it in 2015.

175
00:14:10,800 --> 00:14:14,300
And I just kind of thought that I could actually do better.

176
00:14:14,300 --> 00:14:22,500
What they had described in Appendix B was this convoluted thing with multiple
headers of the sidechain would be like in the transaction.

177
00:14:22,500 --> 00:14:31,300
The transaction would be like 800 kilobytes or something huge, excuse me, or just
this big, like it could be this huge transaction.

178
00:14:31,300 --> 00:14:36,000
It relied on like statistical luck to shrink the transaction.

179
00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:41,900
They had this skip list thing. And I was like, this is not really conceived the
right way.

180
00:14:41,900 --> 00:14:46,300
So that led me to develop Drivechain in November 2015.

181
00:14:46,300 --> 00:14:54,200
And I don't know if we can make the rest of this story shorter, but I wrote that
post in November 2015.

182
00:14:54,200 --> 00:14:57,400
And then in 2016, there was like feedback about it.

183
00:14:57,400 --> 00:15:03,500
So I made these two huge presentations called one was called sidechain
privatization.

184
00:15:03,500 --> 00:15:08,600
And the other one was called sidechain risks or something like that.

185
00:15:08,600 --> 00:15:13,100
You know, June 2016 and September 2016.

186
00:15:13,100 --> 00:15:20,500
And those ideas, the ideas in those presentations have never been understood by
anyone else.

187
00:15:20,500 --> 00:15:23,200
So I guess even the presentations are really good.

188
00:15:23,200 --> 00:15:25,500
And one of them is like four and a half hours long.

189
00:15:25,500 --> 00:15:29,000
And the other one is like five hours long. It's like hundreds of slides.

190
00:15:29,000 --> 00:15:34,400
It's an enormous topic. But no one, they were a failure at convincing people.

191
00:15:34,400 --> 00:15:38,400
Because to this day, I get questions that were answered in those.

192
00:15:39,200 --> 00:15:44,500
I get the same. To be honest with you, this is a super rambling answer now.

193
00:15:44,500 --> 00:15:49,700
But I think it's very interesting that people read the November 2015 Drivechain
post.

194
00:15:49,700 --> 00:15:58,400
If you read that post, you can see that I anticipate on day one, like as publishing
the idea,

195
00:15:58,400 --> 00:16:01,800
the questions that people will have and people today still ask the question.

196
00:16:01,800 --> 00:16:06,800
So it's just an idea that is just apparently it's very obvious to me,

197
00:16:06,800 --> 00:16:08,800
but it's not obvious to other people.

198
00:16:08,800 --> 00:16:13,000
But I guessed what questions they would have and answered them in 2015.

199
00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:16,600
And you get the same questions today.

200
00:16:16,600 --> 00:16:21,400
So that's a long buildup. So maybe you want to interrupt me and say...

201
00:16:21,400 --> 00:16:23,200
No, so this is interesting.

202
00:16:23,200 --> 00:16:25,000
Guide this journey somewhere.

203
00:16:25,000 --> 00:16:30,200
Yeah, so you introduced this idea in 2015 of a Drivechain.

204
00:16:30,200 --> 00:16:33,600
For listeners who aren't familiar, actually, can we just define what that is?

205
00:16:33,600 --> 00:16:35,000
Just a high level?

206
00:16:35,200 --> 00:16:39,400
At the time, it was just the title of a blog post I wrote about a type of two-way
peg

207
00:16:39,400 --> 00:16:44,600
because this was the phrase for this idea that it was always known that you could
have...

208
00:16:44,600 --> 00:16:49,800
we have Bitcoin Core and then you could release a version where the coins went one
way.

209
00:16:49,800 --> 00:16:54,000
So you would have maybe new features there that you could opt in and you'd say,

210
00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:57,400
oh, I have 13 Bitcoin. I'm going to send them over.

211
00:16:57,400 --> 00:17:02,000
They're basically deleted forever on the first version.

212
00:17:02,000 --> 00:17:06,000
It's like a one-way street, deleted forever on the first version,

213
00:17:06,000 --> 00:17:09,000
but you have 13 of the new coin and now you have the new feature

214
00:17:09,000 --> 00:17:13,600
and then you can hang out with all the people who have opted in to the new feature.

215
00:17:13,600 --> 00:17:16,600
But you see the problem with that is since it's a one-way street,

216
00:17:16,600 --> 00:17:20,400
everyone will be very reluctant to send money there.

217
00:17:20,400 --> 00:17:25,400
And de facto, it's going to basically be like either you convince a super...

218
00:17:25,400 --> 00:17:28,800
like a critical mass supermajority to like move over.

219
00:17:28,800 --> 00:17:30,800
Since it's a one-way street, either it's going to be like

220
00:17:30,800 --> 00:17:37,600
everyone is going to eventually have moved over, right, in de facto, or no one will.

221
00:17:37,600 --> 00:17:41,400
And even if the coins trade against each other on the market,

222
00:17:41,400 --> 00:17:43,800
there's nothing stop... in the one-way peg world,

223
00:17:43,800 --> 00:17:49,400
nothing stops the price from crashing 90% every day for an infinity number of days

224
00:17:49,400 --> 00:17:52,800
because there's no... you can always fall 90% from where you are.

225
00:17:52,800 --> 00:17:57,600
So the one-way peg carries with it a risk.

226
00:17:57,600 --> 00:18:01,600
You have to think about will other people want this software?

227
00:18:01,600 --> 00:18:05,600
Will other people want... will this have liquidity?

228
00:18:05,600 --> 00:18:10,200
Will other people want this feature or will they regret coming here?

229
00:18:10,200 --> 00:18:13,400
And that loses the experimental quality of it.

230
00:18:13,400 --> 00:18:18,800
Whereas... so the holy grail or the core desire was,

231
00:18:18,800 --> 00:18:22,000
well, what if we can move the coins over but then move them back?

232
00:18:22,000 --> 00:18:25,800
Then you lose very little by moving them over

233
00:18:25,800 --> 00:18:29,400
because if it goes wrong, you can try and move them back.

234
00:18:29,400 --> 00:18:36,800
And if you can... and then also you're very indifferent as to which network you get
paid on

235
00:18:36,800 --> 00:18:39,800
because maybe you prefer it all to be on one...

236
00:18:39,800 --> 00:18:42,400
maybe you have like many of these networks, five or six.

237
00:18:42,400 --> 00:18:44,400
Maybe you prefer network number three.

238
00:18:44,400 --> 00:18:48,600
But if there's a two-way peg among all of them,

239
00:18:48,600 --> 00:18:53,200
you can get paid on whatever one you want and just switch it out for the one that
you prefer.

240
00:18:53,200 --> 00:18:55,600
You can get paid on network four.

241
00:18:55,600 --> 00:18:58,200
And then you can end up with coins on three.

242
00:18:58,200 --> 00:19:01,800
So that was obviously much better of a situation.

243
00:19:01,800 --> 00:19:06,800
That's very much like when you have $20 worth of cash and you put it into an ATM.

244
00:19:06,800 --> 00:19:11,200
And you lose $20 worth of cash but they give you $20 worth of a checking account.

245
00:19:11,200 --> 00:19:13,800
So the idea of exchanging at par.

246
00:19:13,800 --> 00:19:17,200
Right. And then you can go to another ATM and withdraw from your checking account.

247
00:19:17,200 --> 00:19:21,400
Precisely. Or you can pay a bill online and you... now you lose the checking.

248
00:19:21,600 --> 00:19:30,000
So that's key. The entire modern banking system, this idea of par is like essential.

249
00:19:30,000 --> 00:19:34,800
The idea that you can break... if you need to go to the laundromat, they have the
change machine.

250
00:19:34,800 --> 00:19:38,800
You put in $5 bill, you lose the $5 bill but you get a bunch of quarters

251
00:19:38,800 --> 00:19:42,600
because the laundromat machine only takes quarters.

252
00:19:42,600 --> 00:19:45,800
But it doesn't matter. If you have quarters left over, you can go back into the
bank,

253
00:19:45,800 --> 00:19:47,800
deposit them and get the checking account back.

254
00:19:47,800 --> 00:19:53,000
So you see that's key. It's part of the secret sauce that makes it all work.

255
00:19:53,000 --> 00:19:56,800
Right. And so you came up with this idea in 2015.

256
00:19:56,800 --> 00:20:01,800
And before this conversation, you shared a document with me

257
00:20:01,800 --> 00:20:07,400
that highlights a lot of the opinions of really prominent Bitcoiners on Drivechains.

258
00:20:07,400 --> 00:20:14,400
A lot of favorable opinions from folks like Fiat Jeff, Eric Wall, Adam Back,

259
00:20:14,400 --> 00:20:20,000
Nick Carter, Lalu from Lightning Labs, Pete Rizzo. I can go on and on here.

260
00:20:20,000 --> 00:20:23,400
There's a lot of people who have spoken out about this topic.

261
00:20:23,400 --> 00:20:26,800
You've been writing about and researching about for seven years.

262
00:20:26,800 --> 00:20:30,800
What has... why is the Bitcoin community hung up on this?

263
00:20:30,800 --> 00:20:35,400
Why hasn't this been implemented in the last seven years?

264
00:20:35,400 --> 00:20:39,800
Well, that's a good question. Part of it is... some of it is fundamental,

265
00:20:39,800 --> 00:20:44,400
which is to say this idea requires you to be open-minded to the idea

266
00:20:44,400 --> 00:20:47,800
that someone would want to leave the Bitcoin core software.

267
00:20:47,800 --> 00:20:51,800
But over time, people have been trained not to think of that as a good idea.

268
00:20:51,800 --> 00:20:54,200
And so this is because we've had all these scam...

269
00:20:54,200 --> 00:21:01,000
like 99% of the non-Bitcoin projects are very disreputable.

270
00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:04,800
So what the sidechain is basically saying is you can escape Bitcoin core.

271
00:21:04,800 --> 00:21:07,200
But if you're just a cheerleader for Bitcoin and you say,

272
00:21:07,200 --> 00:21:12,000
Bitcoin's great, Bitcoin's the best, you know, I heart Bitcoin,

273
00:21:12,000 --> 00:21:14,000
then this idea is kind of foreign to people.

274
00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:17,600
So I think that's what it is also is you need to have...

275
00:21:17,600 --> 00:21:20,800
you need to have an idea of where else you would go and why.

276
00:21:20,800 --> 00:21:26,000
So for example, one of the things that I used to say back when the community was
fighting

277
00:21:26,000 --> 00:21:28,800
is you could say you have large blocks or small blocks.

278
00:21:28,800 --> 00:21:32,000
So then this was an obvious answer to the large block people

279
00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:35,300
of what you would do with the sidechain.

280
00:21:35,300 --> 00:21:39,900
But you see, as soon as we have the scaling war and they fight and lose,

281
00:21:39,900 --> 00:21:47,100
now that sounds flaky because everyone learned that large blocks were bad.

282
00:21:47,100 --> 00:21:52,500
This ignores the night and day difference between large blocks on layer 1

283
00:21:52,500 --> 00:21:56,500
as mandatory for everyone and large blocks on an optional layer 2.

284
00:21:56,500 --> 00:21:57,900
This is a night and day difference.

285
00:21:57,900 --> 00:22:01,500
But most people don't understand that it is a difference at all.

286
00:22:01,500 --> 00:22:05,100
They just think large blocks equals bad.

287
00:22:05,100 --> 00:22:06,500
You know, I'm not supposed to say that.

288
00:22:06,500 --> 00:22:09,100
They have a little list of things they're supposed to say.

289
00:22:09,100 --> 00:22:10,100
So that's the other thing.

290
00:22:10,100 --> 00:22:12,900
You need a destination in mind with the sidechain.

291
00:22:12,900 --> 00:22:14,100
The sidechain says...

292
00:22:14,100 --> 00:22:18,100
See, because the sidechain view is very unusual.

293
00:22:18,100 --> 00:22:21,300
Everyone is saying, I'm in Bitcoin, Bitcoin's the coolest club,

294
00:22:21,300 --> 00:22:23,900
I love Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah.

295
00:22:23,900 --> 00:22:26,300
Whereas the sidechain view says something like,

296
00:22:26,300 --> 00:22:29,500
now we can finally break out of this prison.

297
00:22:29,500 --> 00:22:31,100
It's terrible here.

298
00:22:31,100 --> 00:22:35,100
We want to go somewhere else.

299
00:22:35,100 --> 00:22:37,900
We want, like, whatever.

300
00:22:37,900 --> 00:22:40,500
It looks like we really care about what Ethereum is doing

301
00:22:40,500 --> 00:22:42,300
or what these other things are doing.

302
00:22:42,300 --> 00:22:43,500
That's not really the point.

303
00:22:43,500 --> 00:22:46,100
The point is to just be able to do everything.

304
00:22:46,100 --> 00:22:50,100
And the point is to have competition among people who develop the software.

305
00:22:50,100 --> 00:22:56,300
So we have enormous competition in mining where people rise and fall constantly.

306
00:22:56,300 --> 00:23:00,300
And if someone uses leverage in mining,

307
00:23:00,300 --> 00:23:02,100
they're making a big bet.

308
00:23:02,100 --> 00:23:04,300
If they win, they'll out-compete you.

309
00:23:04,300 --> 00:23:06,300
And if they lose, they plunge into bankruptcy.

310
00:23:06,300 --> 00:23:10,300
And as we've seen, we're seeing that play out.

311
00:23:10,300 --> 00:23:14,300
So we want... competition is good for the customer.

312
00:23:14,300 --> 00:23:15,700
So we want competition.

313
00:23:15,700 --> 00:23:16,700
So that's what it's about.

314
00:23:16,700 --> 00:23:18,300
But most people are not creative.

315
00:23:18,300 --> 00:23:21,700
So they think Bitcoin Core is absolutely perfect.

316
00:23:21,700 --> 00:23:24,900
Because we've been trained to think of that because of the block size war

317
00:23:24,900 --> 00:23:27,100
and because of these terrible altcoins

318
00:23:27,300 --> 00:23:32,500
and because of many other scam projects that I agree that 99% of them are terrible.

319
00:23:32,500 --> 00:23:38,500
But 1% are actually either de facto excellent

320
00:23:38,500 --> 00:23:42,900
and we should just take what they have to offer for ourselves, such as Zcash.

321
00:23:42,900 --> 00:23:45,100
We should just take that.

322
00:23:45,100 --> 00:23:47,900
And again, so then this is another thing like Zcash.

323
00:23:47,900 --> 00:23:51,900
The technology is very different than Zcash the coin or the community

324
00:23:52,100 --> 00:23:59,100
or things like Zucco paying themselves the dev tax or other weird Zcash ideas.

325
00:23:59,100 --> 00:24:02,700
You have to separate the technology from the...

326
00:24:02,700 --> 00:24:04,100
But I think that's part of why.

327
00:24:04,100 --> 00:24:07,300
But the real reason has nothing to do with that.

328
00:24:07,300 --> 00:24:11,100
I think it's just a historical...

329
00:24:11,100 --> 00:24:14,300
I don't know what's the word, like a kind of bad luck.

330
00:24:14,300 --> 00:24:19,700
Because this idea involved hash rate.

331
00:24:19,700 --> 00:24:25,100
BIP300 involves basically the miners like counting with a little counter up to
13,000

332
00:24:25,100 --> 00:24:29,300
in the Coinbase transaction of nodes.

333
00:24:29,300 --> 00:24:31,900
So this idea came out in 2015.

334
00:24:31,900 --> 00:24:33,500
Like I said, November.

335
00:24:33,500 --> 00:24:36,300
December, I presented at it at Scaling 2,

336
00:24:36,300 --> 00:24:38,500
but it was not like a big formal presentation.

337
00:24:38,500 --> 00:24:41,900
It was just kind of like one of these like you could go up and just talk.

338
00:24:41,900 --> 00:24:43,900
And so I had like a...

339
00:24:43,900 --> 00:24:49,300
It wasn't like as pronounced of a talk in that thing.

340
00:24:49,300 --> 00:24:50,300
It was not even recorded.

341
00:24:50,300 --> 00:24:55,900
So you can't, I don't think you can look it up because they were over lunch.

342
00:24:55,900 --> 00:25:00,500
And at Scaling 2, everyone agreed.

343
00:25:00,539 --> 00:25:02,539
There was a big agreement on SegWit.

344
00:25:05,019 --> 00:25:08,419
And since it would also, the implementation design

345
00:25:08,419 --> 00:25:09,779
would also increase the block size.

346
00:25:09,779 --> 00:25:11,059
So it was a compromise.

347
00:25:12,979 --> 00:25:15,019
SegWit was the big thing after December.

348
00:25:15,019 --> 00:25:18,099
So I was like November, excuse me, November, 2015.

349
00:25:19,539 --> 00:25:23,579
I have like a weird idea that's just text on a page.

350
00:25:23,579 --> 00:25:28,459
December, big community attention and consensus

351
00:25:28,459 --> 00:25:30,019
around this thing that has like some,

352
00:25:30,019 --> 00:25:32,419
a lot of technical research, some code.

353
00:25:32,419 --> 00:25:34,179
It's a big upgrade for Lightning.

354
00:25:34,179 --> 00:25:35,939
Lightning was getting big in 2015.

355
00:25:37,499 --> 00:25:39,579
So that was the idea.

356
00:25:39,579 --> 00:25:40,659
I don't know if you remember this,

357
00:25:40,659 --> 00:25:42,699
but, or I don't know what you...

358
00:25:42,699 --> 00:25:44,259
I would've said it before my time.

359
00:25:44,259 --> 00:25:47,819
Yeah, so there was this kind of agreement.

360
00:25:47,819 --> 00:25:50,459
There was like a situation where people said things

361
00:25:50,459 --> 00:25:52,099
and maybe stuff was taken a little too seriously.

362
00:25:52,099 --> 00:25:54,579
But basically after Scaling 2, there was this concept

363
00:25:54,579 --> 00:25:56,899
that SegWit would be ready by April 1st

364
00:25:56,899 --> 00:25:58,459
of the next year, 2016.

365
00:25:59,939 --> 00:26:02,219
But it wasn't because software always takes longer

366
00:26:02,219 --> 00:26:03,059
than you think.

367
00:26:03,059 --> 00:26:04,539
So it wasn't even close.

368
00:26:04,539 --> 00:26:05,939
And there was a lot of disagreement

369
00:26:05,939 --> 00:26:07,059
in the community in 2016.

370
00:26:07,059 --> 00:26:08,979
And this is the only reason that Ethereum

371
00:26:08,979 --> 00:26:10,459
ever got big at all.

372
00:26:11,699 --> 00:26:13,379
So if we had had sidechains before,

373
00:26:13,379 --> 00:26:15,939
I don't think there would be any altcoins today.

374
00:26:15,939 --> 00:26:18,419
But now they had an opportunity to get big

375
00:26:18,419 --> 00:26:21,739
because 2016, people smelled blood.

376
00:26:22,379 --> 00:26:25,699
They said Bitcoin community doesn't have it all figured out.

377
00:26:26,859 --> 00:26:29,779
A lot of inviting in 2016.

378
00:26:29,779 --> 00:26:33,059
And then Scaling 3, the next conference,

379
00:26:33,059 --> 00:26:34,259
it wasn't until October.

380
00:26:34,259 --> 00:26:36,779
And SegWit wasn't shipped until after that.

381
00:26:38,139 --> 00:26:40,339
And believe it or not, the SegWit 3,

382
00:26:40,339 --> 00:26:43,699
the Scaling 3 itinerary, the schedule,

383
00:26:43,699 --> 00:26:47,619
had almost nothing in the program was about scalability.

384
00:26:47,619 --> 00:26:51,499
And in fact, like the whole first half of the first day

385
00:26:52,259 --> 00:26:53,299
was about privacy.

386
00:26:53,299 --> 00:26:55,219
And some of the people who came there

387
00:26:55,219 --> 00:26:59,539
to talk about scalability were actually annoyed,

388
00:26:59,539 --> 00:27:01,979
including many large blockers,

389
00:27:01,979 --> 00:27:04,699
including this one miner who left.

390
00:27:04,699 --> 00:27:06,539
They actually left the conference

391
00:27:06,539 --> 00:27:09,739
and went back to China to signal,

392
00:27:09,739 --> 00:27:11,699
to use like 9% of the hash rate to signal

393
00:27:11,699 --> 00:27:14,179
for Bitcoin Unlimited.

394
00:27:14,179 --> 00:27:15,979
And this meant that SegWit would not activate

395
00:27:15,979 --> 00:27:20,979
as a soft fork with the normal way of BIP-9, 95%.

396
00:27:21,939 --> 00:27:23,139
Hash rate.

397
00:27:23,139 --> 00:27:25,619
So this led to this SegWit blockade.

398
00:27:25,619 --> 00:27:29,379
This led to SegWit2x, this led to UASF.

399
00:27:29,379 --> 00:27:32,419
So this whole thing was a huge distraction

400
00:27:32,419 --> 00:27:34,059
and it created this polarity.

401
00:27:34,059 --> 00:27:35,539
This is where I finally get to the point,

402
00:27:35,539 --> 00:27:37,739
which is it created this miners are evil

403
00:27:37,739 --> 00:27:41,299
versus good developers framework that everyone,

404
00:27:42,419 --> 00:27:45,859
that only very recently people even kind of snapped out of.

405
00:27:45,859 --> 00:27:47,859
Only recently with like Marty Bent,

406
00:27:47,859 --> 00:27:50,339
great American mining, that was like,

407
00:27:50,339 --> 00:27:53,419
until then it was like the miners were evil

408
00:27:53,419 --> 00:27:55,539
and the fact that the large block side lost

409
00:27:55,539 --> 00:27:59,939
and the fact that UASF won meant that they were untouchable.

410
00:27:59,939 --> 00:28:02,179
And so this was terrible for my idea

411
00:28:02,179 --> 00:28:04,339
since it involved people thinking of the miners

412
00:28:04,339 --> 00:28:06,259
as like just reasonable people

413
00:28:06,259 --> 00:28:07,819
who want the price of Bitcoin to go up

414
00:28:07,819 --> 00:28:09,379
and who want transaction fees to go up

415
00:28:09,379 --> 00:28:12,379
and who are aligned with Bitcoin success.

416
00:28:12,379 --> 00:28:14,779
Instead, this event made everyone think of miners

417
00:28:14,779 --> 00:28:18,459
as dangerous people who need to be like controlled

418
00:28:20,339 --> 00:28:22,539
and so that is what happened.

419
00:28:22,539 --> 00:28:23,539
And this whole thing was,

420
00:28:23,539 --> 00:28:25,059
the whole scaling war with SegWit,

421
00:28:25,059 --> 00:28:26,619
no one was gonna activate anything new

422
00:28:26,619 --> 00:28:28,299
while SegWit was on the table

423
00:28:28,299 --> 00:28:32,619
and then SegWit finally activated by UASF.

424
00:28:32,619 --> 00:28:37,619
This was tremendously disruptive

425
00:28:37,619 --> 00:28:40,979
because even though the correct side won the scaling war,

426
00:28:42,739 --> 00:28:44,619
there's no way you can overstate

427
00:28:44,619 --> 00:28:48,139
how kind of traumatized the community was in general.

428
00:28:48,139 --> 00:28:50,059
And this was, I think this is one of the worst things

429
00:28:50,819 --> 00:28:53,019
that's ever happened to the Bitcoin communities

430
00:28:53,019 --> 00:28:55,099
fighting the scaling war at all.

431
00:28:55,099 --> 00:28:57,139
It almost would have been better to,

432
00:28:57,139 --> 00:28:58,219
I'm not sure it would have been better

433
00:28:58,219 --> 00:29:00,739
but to have people split off

434
00:29:00,739 --> 00:29:04,059
and have the Bitcoin cash people go out

435
00:29:06,219 --> 00:29:08,819
was terrible for a lot of reasons.

436
00:29:08,819 --> 00:29:09,979
But you see, this is not a thing

437
00:29:09,979 --> 00:29:11,339
that you'll hear a lot of people say

438
00:29:11,339 --> 00:29:13,179
because a lot of people say those people are losers,

439
00:29:13,179 --> 00:29:15,259
we're better off without them, whatever.

440
00:29:15,259 --> 00:29:17,539
But it was more, much worse,

441
00:29:18,059 --> 00:29:21,219
there's no way to really explain

442
00:29:21,219 --> 00:29:24,019
like how terrible things became.

443
00:29:24,019 --> 00:29:28,019
The community before was very fun and very open-minded

444
00:29:28,019 --> 00:29:30,379
and there was this meme like Bitcoin user not affected

445
00:29:30,379 --> 00:29:33,059
and people were just having a great time.

446
00:29:33,059 --> 00:29:35,779
Then after the scaling war,

447
00:29:35,779 --> 00:29:39,219
there was like a list of allowed opinions you could have.

448
00:29:39,219 --> 00:29:40,059
You had to say this,

449
00:29:40,059 --> 00:29:41,939
you had to be friends with the right people,

450
00:29:41,939 --> 00:29:45,179
you couldn't associate with the bad people.

451
00:29:45,179 --> 00:29:47,899
And we had various other sociopathic people

452
00:29:47,899 --> 00:29:52,899
who exploited this crisis to become more powerful

453
00:29:52,899 --> 00:29:55,379
and work their way up the ladder.

454
00:29:55,379 --> 00:30:00,299
So they were very good at making little memes and tweeting.

455
00:30:00,299 --> 00:30:02,379
And these people have no skill

456
00:30:02,379 --> 00:30:05,379
and they're actually parasites I think on Bitcoin

457
00:30:05,379 --> 00:30:08,299
but they became very popular

458
00:30:08,299 --> 00:30:11,179
because they were very skilled like demagogues,

459
00:30:11,179 --> 00:30:14,779
skilled rhetoric and they wormed their way up

460
00:30:15,379 --> 00:30:16,899
into the upper echelon.

461
00:30:16,899 --> 00:30:19,579
And this created this whole community of just like,

462
00:30:19,579 --> 00:30:23,379
this created like, there was toxicity before

463
00:30:23,379 --> 00:30:25,499
but it made way more sense.

464
00:30:25,499 --> 00:30:30,059
But this is sort of the kind of malignant toxicity

465
00:30:30,059 --> 00:30:33,179
that is just like ignorant and mean-spirited.

466
00:30:33,179 --> 00:30:35,299
So now if you were to go back,

467
00:30:35,299 --> 00:30:37,739
if you were to go back in time,

468
00:30:37,739 --> 00:30:40,219
back to 2015 and if you had your way,

469
00:30:41,059 --> 00:30:43,779
would your preferable outcome have been

470
00:30:43,779 --> 00:30:46,499
that anyone who didn't like the direction

471
00:30:46,499 --> 00:30:49,459
that Bitcoin was headed could opt into their own,

472
00:30:49,459 --> 00:30:51,659
could create their own kind of sidechain

473
00:30:51,659 --> 00:30:55,539
and have users decide whether or not they wanna opt in

474
00:30:55,539 --> 00:30:57,579
while leaving everyone else unaffected?

475
00:30:59,179 --> 00:31:00,979
Well at the time I had designed the idea

476
00:31:00,979 --> 00:31:02,619
but I had not produced any software

477
00:31:02,619 --> 00:31:04,859
because I just thought, well this idea is so good

478
00:31:04,859 --> 00:31:07,579
that someone else will just make the software.

479
00:31:07,579 --> 00:31:12,579
So it wasn't until later like, I think like January 2017

480
00:31:12,659 --> 00:31:14,859
or something, something around then,

481
00:31:14,859 --> 00:31:16,619
that was when I invented Blind Merged Mining.

482
00:31:16,619 --> 00:31:20,139
So then that was a blank piece of paper until then.

483
00:31:20,139 --> 00:31:21,699
And so then it wasn't until then

484
00:31:21,699 --> 00:31:25,739
that I kind of seriously started to try to produce

485
00:31:25,739 --> 00:31:28,419
the software and then after I produced the software,

486
00:31:28,419 --> 00:31:30,699
the BIP300 software, I was like, oh, there's no,

487
00:31:30,699 --> 00:31:33,019
we don't have sidechains, we need example sidechains

488
00:31:33,019 --> 00:31:34,219
so that you have something to send.

489
00:31:34,219 --> 00:31:37,539
It's like inventing one radio, you know?

490
00:31:37,539 --> 00:31:40,299
You need the second radio for people to understand

491
00:31:40,299 --> 00:31:41,699
what's going on.

492
00:31:41,899 --> 00:31:43,899
So I was like, it's this radio, it's this really cool thing

493
00:31:43,899 --> 00:31:48,619
it turns sound into electromagnetic waves

494
00:31:48,619 --> 00:31:50,059
but no one knows what's going on

495
00:31:50,059 --> 00:31:51,899
until you have the second radio and then, okay.

496
00:31:51,899 --> 00:31:52,739
So I was like, okay.

497
00:31:52,739 --> 00:31:55,639
So then I started doing that like in 2020.

498
00:31:57,659 --> 00:31:59,419
And of course I do lots of other things too.

499
00:31:59,419 --> 00:32:02,759
I haven't only been doing this but this is the main thing

500
00:32:02,759 --> 00:32:05,019
that I think people should pay attention to.

501
00:32:05,019 --> 00:32:05,859
Right.

502
00:32:05,859 --> 00:32:10,579
I usually, mostly I do nothing or I write on my blog,

503
00:32:10,579 --> 00:32:11,979
I write commentary on my blog,

504
00:32:11,979 --> 00:32:13,459
I write these enormous blog posts.

505
00:32:13,459 --> 00:32:16,539
So that was what I was like, mostly a writer.

506
00:32:16,539 --> 00:32:17,379
Yeah.

507
00:32:17,379 --> 00:32:18,459
I'm just like a fun Bitcoin presenter.

508
00:32:18,459 --> 00:32:20,499
Like I give lots of talks all around the world.

509
00:32:20,499 --> 00:32:23,139
Like so for example, in QCon in 2017,

510
00:32:23,139 --> 00:32:26,039
I gave a talk on the Oracle problem, which is again,

511
00:32:26,039 --> 00:32:28,339
what I was mostly interested in at the beginning,

512
00:32:28,339 --> 00:32:29,779
the prediction markets thing.

513
00:32:29,779 --> 00:32:31,679
It had nothing to do with any of this.

514
00:32:32,819 --> 00:32:36,979
So now in the last few years, have you noticed opinions

515
00:32:36,979 --> 00:32:39,899
shifting and changing at all on the topic of sidechains,

516
00:32:39,899 --> 00:32:40,939
Drivechains?

517
00:32:40,939 --> 00:32:43,179
What has that been like?

518
00:32:43,179 --> 00:32:46,619
Well, I've always had these predictions that,

519
00:32:46,619 --> 00:32:49,459
so the problem that Drivechain solves

520
00:32:49,459 --> 00:32:51,019
is this meta consensus problem.

521
00:32:51,019 --> 00:32:54,839
So it was like we have the blockchain makes consensus,

522
00:32:54,839 --> 00:32:57,679
everyone's software agrees on what happened,

523
00:32:57,679 --> 00:33:00,059
but it doesn't make consensus about consensus.

524
00:33:00,059 --> 00:33:01,639
So that was the block size debate.

525
00:33:01,639 --> 00:33:04,579
Like what should the blockchain be doing?

526
00:33:04,579 --> 00:33:06,559
Whatever it is, we can program it

527
00:33:06,559 --> 00:33:08,779
so that that's what the blockchain does.

528
00:33:09,339 --> 00:33:12,379
But it can't help us because people disagree.

529
00:33:13,939 --> 00:33:15,619
So like large blockers or small blockers

530
00:33:15,619 --> 00:33:16,579
is a perfect example.

531
00:33:16,579 --> 00:33:20,499
But also Vitalik who wanted turn complete scripts,

532
00:33:20,499 --> 00:33:23,899
he wanted some kind of state machine with Ethereum.

533
00:33:23,899 --> 00:33:27,539
Vitalik was a writer, he was a founder of Bitcoin Magazine

534
00:33:27,539 --> 00:33:31,019
and a writer for Bitcoin Magazine, he was a big Bitcoiner.

535
00:33:31,019 --> 00:33:32,859
All these people are huge Bitcoiners, of course.

536
00:33:32,859 --> 00:33:35,299
You know, Roger Ver was a very popular Bitcoiner.

537
00:33:35,299 --> 00:33:39,099
So almost all the people who left to do successful,

538
00:33:39,099 --> 00:33:42,099
Zcash, that was like a Matthew Green zero coin thing

539
00:33:42,099 --> 00:33:46,139
or whatever that was like, all that was Bitcoin stuff,

540
00:33:46,139 --> 00:33:48,019
it was all Bitcoin stuff.

541
00:33:48,019 --> 00:33:50,539
So everyone was 100% aligned in Bitcoin.

542
00:33:52,179 --> 00:33:56,219
But then this topic came up of how,

543
00:33:56,219 --> 00:33:58,399
what if we have a new feature

544
00:33:58,399 --> 00:34:01,419
and not everyone wants to upgrade?

545
00:34:01,419 --> 00:34:02,259
What do we do?

546
00:34:03,259 --> 00:34:05,779
And this was a vexing problem.

547
00:34:05,779 --> 00:34:07,019
And a lot of people decided,

548
00:34:07,019 --> 00:34:09,859
so Monero is a perfect example.

549
00:34:09,859 --> 00:34:11,459
The Monero people decided, listen,

550
00:34:11,459 --> 00:34:14,379
I'm not gonna wait for Bitcoin to do ring signatures.

551
00:34:14,379 --> 00:34:16,699
That turned out to be very smart

552
00:34:16,699 --> 00:34:19,619
because now it's like whatever, eight years later

553
00:34:19,619 --> 00:34:20,859
and we don't have them.

554
00:34:20,859 --> 00:34:23,939
But Monero exists and now Monero has real users.

555
00:34:23,939 --> 00:34:26,479
So they thought, a lot of this is,

556
00:34:28,479 --> 00:34:30,479
99% of the altcoins are scams,

557
00:34:30,479 --> 00:34:32,279
but some are created by people

558
00:34:32,279 --> 00:34:34,279
with a genuine creative spark

559
00:34:34,279 --> 00:34:35,839
and they just want something.

560
00:34:37,039 --> 00:34:38,879
They just think something's better.

561
00:34:38,879 --> 00:34:40,919
And if it was available to them on Bitcoin,

562
00:34:40,919 --> 00:34:41,759
they would have taken that risk.

563
00:34:41,759 --> 00:34:43,399
Yeah, they would never have made the altcoin

564
00:34:43,399 --> 00:34:44,239
in the first place.

565
00:34:44,239 --> 00:34:46,639
So the real tragedy is that we didn't just do it

566
00:34:46,639 --> 00:34:48,679
like a year or we didn't like come to this concept

567
00:34:48,679 --> 00:34:50,159
like a year earlier,

568
00:34:50,159 --> 00:34:52,479
or that like, if I could go back in time,

569
00:34:52,479 --> 00:34:55,519
I think I would go straight to all the large blockers

570
00:34:55,519 --> 00:34:58,999
and I would say, I would explain to them in detail

571
00:34:58,999 --> 00:35:02,519
what is about to happen and why they're about to lose

572
00:35:02,519 --> 00:35:04,599
over the next two or three years

573
00:35:04,599 --> 00:35:06,759
and why they can't possibly win,

574
00:35:06,759 --> 00:35:09,439
which is something that I kind of suspected always

575
00:35:09,439 --> 00:35:11,879
in real time, but now since I'm a time traveler,

576
00:35:11,879 --> 00:35:14,199
I'll know exactly what happens on every date

577
00:35:14,199 --> 00:35:15,719
and stuff like that.

578
00:35:15,719 --> 00:35:17,159
But I'll be able to sketch this out

579
00:35:17,159 --> 00:35:20,559
and then they'll see that I'm more and more correct

580
00:35:20,559 --> 00:35:22,719
and my status over there would rise.

581
00:35:22,719 --> 00:35:24,699
And then I would always be telling them,

582
00:35:24,699 --> 00:35:26,359
this is what you should do instead.

583
00:35:26,359 --> 00:35:30,039
You have optional large blocks and it won't affect,

584
00:35:30,039 --> 00:35:31,719
those people still have their small blocks

585
00:35:31,719 --> 00:35:33,239
and you'll have your large blocks

586
00:35:33,239 --> 00:35:34,559
and you'll have the only disadvantage

587
00:35:34,559 --> 00:35:37,239
is you'll be in SPV mode, which is what you,

588
00:35:37,239 --> 00:35:38,739
that's what they wanted anyway.

589
00:35:38,739 --> 00:35:40,279
They wanted everyone to have SPV mode,

590
00:35:40,279 --> 00:35:41,319
but I'll say this is perfect.

591
00:35:41,319 --> 00:35:43,719
You guys get large blocks in SPV mode.

592
00:35:43,719 --> 00:35:47,359
They get small blocks in full node mode.

593
00:35:47,359 --> 00:35:49,039
Everyone gets what they want.

594
00:35:49,039 --> 00:35:50,439
Don't do anything else.

595
00:35:51,279 --> 00:35:54,759
And so then that would probably have helped.

596
00:35:54,759 --> 00:35:56,159
And if you'd started early enough,

597
00:35:56,799 --> 00:35:59,439
you could also have gotten ahead of the whole Ethereum thing

598
00:35:59,439 --> 00:36:00,679
I think I would have ignored.

599
00:36:00,679 --> 00:36:03,679
Part of it was I thought the community was also interested

600
00:36:03,679 --> 00:36:07,919
in this task of keeping everyone together

601
00:36:07,919 --> 00:36:11,439
and making the project growing the tent forever.

602
00:36:11,439 --> 00:36:13,959
But again, part of the scaling war

603
00:36:13,959 --> 00:36:17,359
was people could make a whole career

604
00:36:17,359 --> 00:36:20,599
out of just being a jerk, being like a toxic person

605
00:36:20,599 --> 00:36:22,579
and kicking people while they're down

606
00:36:22,579 --> 00:36:24,479
and making fun of,

607
00:36:25,119 --> 00:36:27,719
you could make a whole career out of just being a critic

608
00:36:27,719 --> 00:36:29,799
and not actually making anything.

609
00:36:29,799 --> 00:36:34,799
You can make a whole career out of just arguing a side well.

610
00:36:37,519 --> 00:36:39,919
And that was, so that was what I noticed

611
00:36:39,919 --> 00:36:41,599
when I said in 2015 at scaling one,

612
00:36:41,599 --> 00:36:42,959
I started to notice that.

613
00:36:42,959 --> 00:36:47,679
I was like, no one wants a win-win thing.

614
00:36:47,679 --> 00:36:49,399
They just want to do this thing.

615
00:36:49,399 --> 00:36:52,279
And then if you were blessed by the right people,

616
00:36:52,279 --> 00:36:55,399
you could raise money and you could get like,

617
00:36:55,399 --> 00:36:57,559
you could, everyone wanted to buy a lot of Bitcoin

618
00:36:57,559 --> 00:36:58,399
at that time too.

619
00:36:58,399 --> 00:37:00,599
So if you could go to VCs and raise like $5 million,

620
00:37:00,599 --> 00:37:02,799
now it's like you're buying tons of Bitcoin.

621
00:37:03,679 --> 00:37:05,759
So this was like very attractive.

622
00:37:05,759 --> 00:37:08,519
No one wanted to cross any of the companies

623
00:37:08,519 --> 00:37:09,359
that had raised money,

624
00:37:09,359 --> 00:37:12,719
especially Blockstream was enormously prestigious.

625
00:37:12,719 --> 00:37:14,239
Gavin Andreessen tweeted,

626
00:37:15,439 --> 00:37:17,119
I don't even know if you know who the Gavin Andreessen,

627
00:37:17,119 --> 00:37:18,399
you know who Gavin Andreessen is, right?

628
00:37:18,399 --> 00:37:19,239
I do, yeah.

629
00:37:19,239 --> 00:37:21,719
Yeah, seems like a big guy, so obviously.

630
00:37:21,719 --> 00:37:23,399
And he was like, he tweeted something like,

631
00:37:23,399 --> 00:37:25,599
if this amazing company offers you a job,

632
00:37:25,599 --> 00:37:26,759
take it or something.

633
00:37:26,759 --> 00:37:28,559
And they had all this money.

634
00:37:28,559 --> 00:37:31,199
They had all these prestigious people working there.

635
00:37:32,119 --> 00:37:34,599
So I kind of just thought it would all work itself out.

636
00:37:35,759 --> 00:37:39,319
And so the reality played out very weirdly.

637
00:37:39,319 --> 00:37:42,319
So like 2016, we had problems in the community,

638
00:37:42,319 --> 00:37:45,559
but we also, that was the origin of blockchain, not Bitcoin,

639
00:37:45,559 --> 00:37:49,879
which is this insane distraction that IBM blockchain.

640
00:37:50,079 --> 00:37:51,679
This also made people think,

641
00:37:53,199 --> 00:37:56,759
this made people think like anyone who uses a blockchain,

642
00:37:56,759 --> 00:37:58,039
who uses the word blockchain

643
00:37:58,039 --> 00:38:00,839
or just talking about blockchain technology

644
00:38:00,839 --> 00:38:04,119
is a complete fool and is the dumbest person in the room.

645
00:38:04,119 --> 00:38:05,759
So this was also bad for sidechains

646
00:38:05,759 --> 00:38:09,159
because the 2016 nonsense in the industry

647
00:38:09,159 --> 00:38:10,719
that trained people to think,

648
00:38:10,719 --> 00:38:12,439
okay, Bitcoin is the real thing

649
00:38:12,439 --> 00:38:13,399
and all this blockchain stuff

650
00:38:13,399 --> 00:38:15,519
is just a bunch of complete nonsense,

651
00:38:15,519 --> 00:38:18,479
which basically again, like 99,

652
00:38:18,479 --> 00:38:23,479
in that case, like 99.99% of that was complete nonsense.

653
00:38:23,559 --> 00:38:26,559
But this trained people to just say,

654
00:38:26,559 --> 00:38:28,079
it's Bitcoin, not blockchain.

655
00:38:29,119 --> 00:38:30,319
That was the origin of all that.

656
00:38:30,319 --> 00:38:32,239
So again, the toxicity had to ramp up

657
00:38:32,239 --> 00:38:37,239
to fight off all of this invading junk, but it wasn't-

658
00:38:37,599 --> 00:38:39,639
Sidechains got caught in the crossfire there, right?

659
00:38:39,639 --> 00:38:40,599
Exactly, right.

660
00:38:40,599 --> 00:38:43,159
And then everyone hated the miners from the scaling war.

661
00:38:43,159 --> 00:38:44,999
So there was like kind of nothing to do.

662
00:38:45,039 --> 00:38:47,479
And after winning,

663
00:38:47,479 --> 00:38:49,679
this is a problem that we still have today

664
00:38:49,679 --> 00:38:51,519
and it's deepened, I think only.

665
00:38:52,359 --> 00:38:55,199
After winning the block size war,

666
00:38:55,199 --> 00:38:58,199
the small block side has become very complacent

667
00:38:58,199 --> 00:38:59,239
and overconfident.

668
00:38:59,239 --> 00:39:01,719
They just think now it's just,

669
00:39:01,719 --> 00:39:03,919
this proves that all we have to do is nothing.

670
00:39:03,919 --> 00:39:07,879
And all we have to do is fight off the bad invading ideas

671
00:39:08,799 --> 00:39:10,679
that are, we keep it pure.

672
00:39:10,679 --> 00:39:12,639
We fight off what would the good,

673
00:39:12,639 --> 00:39:14,599
what it trained people to think is the good thing we did

674
00:39:15,239 --> 00:39:17,679
was we fought off the large block hard fork

675
00:39:17,679 --> 00:39:19,399
and that's why the price went up.

676
00:39:19,399 --> 00:39:22,079
And all we have to do is keep fighting away

677
00:39:22,079 --> 00:39:24,119
all change with xenophobic

678
00:39:24,119 --> 00:39:27,519
and anything that changes the protocol at all,

679
00:39:27,519 --> 00:39:29,199
we have to fight it off.

680
00:39:30,599 --> 00:39:31,799
And that's why the price went up.

681
00:39:31,799 --> 00:39:33,639
And as long as we keep doing that, it will just go up

682
00:39:33,639 --> 00:39:36,719
and then it'll eventually be whatever, $20 million a coin

683
00:39:36,719 --> 00:39:38,759
and we'll have hyper-Bitcoinization.

684
00:39:38,759 --> 00:39:41,439
So that's what people were trained to think

685
00:39:41,439 --> 00:39:43,639
as a result of the scaling war,

686
00:39:43,639 --> 00:39:46,359
which again, it was like,

687
00:39:46,359 --> 00:39:48,719
the only thing worse than losing,

688
00:39:48,719 --> 00:39:49,799
the only thing worse than winning

689
00:39:49,799 --> 00:39:50,999
would have been losing again.

690
00:39:50,999 --> 00:39:51,839
I don't know.

691
00:39:51,839 --> 00:39:53,279
I have to come up with a clever phrase,

692
00:39:53,279 --> 00:39:56,919
but just the fact that we had this scaling war

693
00:39:56,919 --> 00:39:58,719
was horrible.

694
00:39:58,719 --> 00:40:03,719
And it trained people to think that Bitcoin

695
00:40:08,519 --> 00:40:09,359
should not be changed.

696
00:40:09,359 --> 00:40:11,959
So people had to do kind of like a 1984 double think also

697
00:40:11,959 --> 00:40:16,959
because the large block change was bad.

698
00:40:17,839 --> 00:40:18,839
We fought it off.

699
00:40:18,839 --> 00:40:21,399
But we did SegWit, which was a large block.

700
00:40:21,399 --> 00:40:23,399
It was a block size increase.

701
00:40:23,399 --> 00:40:26,799
So in 2017, we fought off SegWit2x,

702
00:40:26,799 --> 00:40:31,719
but we activated SegWit, which was a block.

703
00:40:31,719 --> 00:40:34,199
So there was this kind of like 1984 double think

704
00:40:34,199 --> 00:40:38,399
where people started to get more tribal

705
00:40:39,399 --> 00:40:41,599
and careers were ruined.

706
00:40:42,359 --> 00:40:43,399
And careers were made.

707
00:40:43,399 --> 00:40:47,479
Like I said, huge amounts of money were won and lost.

708
00:40:47,479 --> 00:40:50,399
And the Bitcoin cash, all those people went over there

709
00:40:50,399 --> 00:40:51,239
and they...

710
00:40:52,279 --> 00:40:53,119
Yeah.

711
00:40:53,119 --> 00:40:53,959
First everyone's making money,

712
00:40:53,959 --> 00:40:55,399
then people are losing money.

713
00:40:55,399 --> 00:40:56,239
So it's hard.

714
00:40:56,239 --> 00:40:59,119
And then what happened, it was like all blur after that,

715
00:40:59,119 --> 00:41:00,999
but I can give you more details.

716
00:41:00,999 --> 00:41:02,879
But that's kind of what the setting of the stage.

717
00:41:02,879 --> 00:41:05,199
This is probably like total information overload.

718
00:41:05,199 --> 00:41:06,679
I hope you're enjoying the show so far.

719
00:41:06,679 --> 00:41:09,359
Just a quick message from our sponsor, Voltage.

720
00:41:09,399 --> 00:41:11,879
Voltage empowers engineers to integrate Bitcoin

721
00:41:11,879 --> 00:41:14,999
and lightning network payments into their business stack

722
00:41:14,999 --> 00:41:17,239
with an enterprise grade experience.

723
00:41:17,239 --> 00:41:19,999
The team at Voltage is building the complete tool set

724
00:41:19,999 --> 00:41:22,639
so that you can do more than simply spin up nodes,

725
00:41:22,639 --> 00:41:25,799
but also understand and interpret your nodes data.

726
00:41:25,799 --> 00:41:28,719
Their new product Surge gives engineers the capability

727
00:41:28,719 --> 00:41:32,279
to quickly solve problems and optimize operations.

728
00:41:32,279 --> 00:41:35,839
With node insights and visibility through time series data,

729
00:41:35,839 --> 00:41:38,239
you get dynamic and complex insights

730
00:41:38,239 --> 00:41:39,679
never available before.

731
00:41:39,679 --> 00:41:43,079
You can get complete control with insanely fast onboarding,

732
00:41:43,079 --> 00:41:45,039
advanced client side encryption

733
00:41:45,039 --> 00:41:47,199
and zero management infrastructure,

734
00:41:47,199 --> 00:41:51,439
making backups, networking and upgrades simple.

735
00:41:51,439 --> 00:41:54,759
Get a free seven day trial today at voltage.cloud.

736
00:41:54,759 --> 00:41:56,639
I just wanna make sure I understand

737
00:41:56,639 --> 00:41:58,119
where you're coming from here.

738
00:41:58,119 --> 00:42:01,599
Is it that you think in that block size war,

739
00:42:01,599 --> 00:42:05,759
Bitcoiners were so focused on attacking the other sides

740
00:42:05,759 --> 00:42:08,159
that they've kind of shied away

741
00:42:08,159 --> 00:42:10,799
from working on new innovations

742
00:42:10,799 --> 00:42:15,359
and working on new features and functionalities to Bitcoin

743
00:42:15,359 --> 00:42:16,559
and rather they've taken the approach

744
00:42:16,559 --> 00:42:19,359
of just defeat everything else?

745
00:42:19,359 --> 00:42:23,039
Well, if I had to put on my little, you know,

746
00:42:23,039 --> 00:42:25,319
like, I don't know, hat and just guess,

747
00:42:26,279 --> 00:42:29,119
I think the real problem was that the community

748
00:42:29,119 --> 00:42:31,999
was so full of like libertarians and stuff,

749
00:42:31,999 --> 00:42:32,839
which is great.

750
00:42:32,839 --> 00:42:34,439
Like I identify as basically libertarian,

751
00:42:34,439 --> 00:42:35,519
most Bitcoiners do.

752
00:42:36,239 --> 00:42:39,439
But people didn't believe in any kind of governance,

753
00:42:39,439 --> 00:42:41,119
compromise, leadership,

754
00:42:41,119 --> 00:42:42,799
because the centralization was bad too.

755
00:42:42,799 --> 00:42:44,799
So no one had the authority.

756
00:42:44,799 --> 00:42:47,479
So there was kind of a power vacuum kind of,

757
00:42:47,479 --> 00:42:49,759
and why do I bring this up?

758
00:42:49,759 --> 00:42:53,359
It's because what happened was you had two groups of people

759
00:42:53,359 --> 00:42:55,439
and the community was growing.

760
00:42:55,439 --> 00:42:58,959
And then it was mostly this technical disagreement

761
00:42:58,959 --> 00:43:00,319
about the block size.

762
00:43:01,399 --> 00:43:03,759
And the small block size was correct.

763
00:43:04,719 --> 00:43:06,199
It was not worth the hard fork

764
00:43:06,199 --> 00:43:09,719
to get a measly eight X improvement.

765
00:43:09,719 --> 00:43:11,519
You gotta get, we need to get,

766
00:43:11,519 --> 00:43:12,799
if you did the math and stuff,

767
00:43:12,799 --> 00:43:14,839
we needed to get like, you know,

768
00:43:14,839 --> 00:43:16,839
we need like a 10,000 X improvement.

769
00:43:16,839 --> 00:43:18,879
So that eight X isn't even gonna cut it.

770
00:43:20,319 --> 00:43:22,799
But you had very different people.

771
00:43:22,799 --> 00:43:26,439
So for example, one thing that I had never considered,

772
00:43:26,439 --> 00:43:29,759
I went to an event, it was like a private event,

773
00:43:31,359 --> 00:43:33,079
and we had some Bitcoin core developers there.

774
00:43:33,399 --> 00:43:34,999
And we had some people there from other companies

775
00:43:34,999 --> 00:43:37,599
like Coinbase, Coinbase CEO was there,

776
00:43:38,959 --> 00:43:41,319
CEO of Blockchain.info was there,

777
00:43:41,319 --> 00:43:43,079
people were there from BitPay.

778
00:43:44,519 --> 00:43:45,359
And we were, you know,

779
00:43:45,359 --> 00:43:47,839
we had these little breakout groups and we had lunch.

780
00:43:47,839 --> 00:43:49,199
And someone said something

781
00:43:49,199 --> 00:43:51,039
that I had never really thought of before.

782
00:43:51,039 --> 00:43:53,679
And there was someone from BitPay said,

783
00:43:53,679 --> 00:43:57,639
when the blocks get full, our customer service,

784
00:43:58,599 --> 00:44:01,359
the calls to customer service go up by,

785
00:44:01,359 --> 00:44:02,439
they said something like,

786
00:44:02,799 --> 00:44:07,199
they said something like 20 to 80 times as many as normal.

787
00:44:09,239 --> 00:44:12,439
And I just never viewed it through that lens, you know,

788
00:44:12,439 --> 00:44:14,439
because a lot of the technical people view it

789
00:44:14,439 --> 00:44:18,319
through the lens of just like, what can the system support?

790
00:44:19,639 --> 00:44:21,519
And it was kind of like obvious that this,

791
00:44:21,519 --> 00:44:22,919
if you're a technical, it's kind of obvious

792
00:44:22,919 --> 00:44:25,599
that the small blocker side was better.

793
00:44:25,599 --> 00:44:27,799
But I just, you know, in your head,

794
00:44:27,799 --> 00:44:28,719
you're kind of just thinking like,

795
00:44:28,719 --> 00:44:30,879
why do these people care so much about

796
00:44:31,759 --> 00:44:33,759
increasing the block size like quickly?

797
00:44:33,759 --> 00:44:34,879
Like they wanted to like,

798
00:44:34,879 --> 00:44:36,439
there was like you could plot on a graph,

799
00:44:36,439 --> 00:44:38,679
the blocks getting filled up.

800
00:44:38,679 --> 00:44:40,359
And of course it was noisy graph,

801
00:44:40,359 --> 00:44:41,719
but they really wanted to move it up

802
00:44:41,719 --> 00:44:44,639
so that the blocks were never full.

803
00:44:44,639 --> 00:44:47,759
But you know, some of the other people who are more abstract

804
00:44:47,759 --> 00:44:51,039
and more, you know, just technical people,

805
00:44:51,039 --> 00:44:51,879
you're kind of thinking like,

806
00:44:51,879 --> 00:44:54,439
well, the blocks like could always be full all the time.

807
00:44:54,439 --> 00:44:55,879
Like, you know, like that's,

808
00:44:55,879 --> 00:44:58,319
it seems like a weird thing to try and,

809
00:44:58,359 --> 00:45:02,359
to try and be impelled by this directive

810
00:45:02,359 --> 00:45:03,599
that they should never be full.

811
00:45:03,599 --> 00:45:04,839
Because it kind of, you feel like, you know,

812
00:45:04,839 --> 00:45:06,399
someone can always cheaply fill them up.

813
00:45:06,399 --> 00:45:07,919
So then it kind of feels like,

814
00:45:07,919 --> 00:45:09,519
I even made a post about this

815
00:45:09,519 --> 00:45:12,839
where I had a graph of the US debt ceiling.

816
00:45:12,839 --> 00:45:16,519
It's like every time we get near the ceiling,

817
00:45:16,519 --> 00:45:17,559
we raise the debt limit.

818
00:45:17,559 --> 00:45:20,839
So the debt limit doesn't really exist in practice.

819
00:45:20,839 --> 00:45:21,679
Yeah.

820
00:45:21,679 --> 00:45:23,399
So I made a post comparing that to that.

821
00:45:23,399 --> 00:45:24,239
And I was like,

822
00:45:26,039 --> 00:45:27,959
so to most abstract people,

823
00:45:28,599 --> 00:45:30,119
that was a complete non-starter.

824
00:45:30,119 --> 00:45:30,959
Yeah.

825
00:45:30,959 --> 00:45:31,879
But I never really understood.

826
00:45:31,879 --> 00:45:32,959
I was like, what is the motive?

827
00:45:32,959 --> 00:45:36,439
What is like the motivation behind this?

828
00:45:36,439 --> 00:45:37,279
And so it's yeah, yeah.

829
00:45:37,279 --> 00:45:38,439
Like, you know, if the blocks are full

830
00:45:38,439 --> 00:45:41,359
and people are trying to use BitPay or something

831
00:45:41,359 --> 00:45:42,599
and they think they're doing the right thing.

832
00:45:42,599 --> 00:45:44,639
They're like, okay, I'm part of the future.

833
00:45:44,639 --> 00:45:45,839
I joined the Bitcoin community.

834
00:45:45,839 --> 00:45:46,679
I got my Bitcoin.

835
00:45:46,679 --> 00:45:48,399
Now I'm going to spend it at a store.

836
00:45:48,399 --> 00:45:51,039
BitPay let you spend Bitcoin at like any store.

837
00:45:51,039 --> 00:45:53,119
And the merchant would get cash the next day.

838
00:45:53,119 --> 00:45:54,799
So it was like this amazing deal.

839
00:45:54,799 --> 00:45:56,359
It was way better for everyone.

840
00:45:57,359 --> 00:46:00,759
BitPay was a very famous company at the time.

841
00:46:00,759 --> 00:46:03,279
So everyone was like, people are doing the right thing.

842
00:46:03,279 --> 00:46:04,879
They're having a great time.

843
00:46:06,599 --> 00:46:07,799
Yeah.

844
00:46:07,799 --> 00:46:09,839
But then the blocks are full

845
00:46:09,839 --> 00:46:11,599
so the transaction just never goes through.

846
00:46:11,599 --> 00:46:12,639
And they're like, I don't understand.

847
00:46:12,639 --> 00:46:14,639
You know, like this doesn't happen when you use Venmo

848
00:46:14,639 --> 00:46:16,639
or when you use credit card.

849
00:46:16,639 --> 00:46:17,999
It's not like it just doesn't go through.

850
00:46:17,999 --> 00:46:19,999
If it doesn't go through, that means it's broken.

851
00:46:19,999 --> 00:46:21,039
And then they call

852
00:46:21,039 --> 00:46:23,199
and then the customer service gets overloaded.

853
00:46:23,199 --> 00:46:24,399
So I kind of just never,

854
00:46:24,399 --> 00:46:26,239
I was trying to like get an understanding

855
00:46:26,239 --> 00:46:28,999
of like, why do people care about this and that?

856
00:46:28,999 --> 00:46:31,479
And there was a lot of,

857
00:46:31,479 --> 00:46:33,919
this is a really hard way of answering your question,

858
00:46:33,919 --> 00:46:35,839
but it's just, I'm trying to reiterate

859
00:46:35,839 --> 00:46:39,599
that the community had grown large and diverse

860
00:46:39,599 --> 00:46:42,719
and people had become very different.

861
00:46:42,719 --> 00:46:44,959
They were on different paths in life.

862
00:46:44,959 --> 00:46:47,959
Like many of the elite technical people

863
00:46:49,039 --> 00:46:50,959
were very resentful of people like Roger

864
00:46:50,959 --> 00:46:53,279
because Roger was a non-technical person

865
00:46:53,279 --> 00:46:56,279
who invested a lot of money in Bitcoin

866
00:46:56,279 --> 00:46:59,759
and he owned huge amounts of Bitcoin.

867
00:46:59,759 --> 00:47:00,879
And the technical people

868
00:47:00,879 --> 00:47:02,439
didn't actually own that much Bitcoin.

869
00:47:02,439 --> 00:47:03,839
But then Roger would go over and say,

870
00:47:03,839 --> 00:47:04,959
well, you know, these people,

871
00:47:04,959 --> 00:47:08,839
sure, they say they know a lot according to them,

872
00:47:08,839 --> 00:47:11,239
but I am a stakeholder.

873
00:47:11,239 --> 00:47:12,599
I invested in all these companies.

874
00:47:12,599 --> 00:47:13,479
I invested in Bitcoin.

875
00:47:13,479 --> 00:47:16,839
I put my life's work, I put my name behind Bitcoin.

876
00:47:16,839 --> 00:47:20,359
So people had become very different.

877
00:47:20,359 --> 00:47:22,639
It was just cross Dunbar's number or something.

878
00:47:23,599 --> 00:47:25,439
And so people, and then people became,

879
00:47:25,439 --> 00:47:28,239
some people, not most, but at first,

880
00:47:28,239 --> 00:47:30,079
you know how it is on the internet.

881
00:47:30,079 --> 00:47:33,079
People started to take little snipes at each other.

882
00:47:34,159 --> 00:47:36,239
And that's why I say the lack of leadership

883
00:47:37,439 --> 00:47:39,839
because there was no one to be the adult in the room

884
00:47:39,839 --> 00:47:41,559
and say, stop doing that.

885
00:47:43,039 --> 00:47:45,039
Instead, it just went,

886
00:47:45,039 --> 00:47:48,119
they just got worse and worse and worse and worse.

887
00:47:48,119 --> 00:47:48,959
I see.

888
00:47:48,959 --> 00:47:50,199
Forever.

889
00:47:50,199 --> 00:47:54,679
So I think there's a large number of Bitcoiners today

890
00:47:54,679 --> 00:47:57,199
that would say, and you kind of alluded to this,

891
00:47:57,199 --> 00:47:59,079
that we don't need anything else.

892
00:47:59,079 --> 00:48:00,519
It's Bitcoin's fine.

893
00:48:00,519 --> 00:48:01,359
Yes, it's a prevailing view.

894
00:48:01,359 --> 00:48:03,119
We kind of forget everything else.

895
00:48:03,119 --> 00:48:04,599
Yeah.

896
00:48:04,599 --> 00:48:06,999
And I think you're making the case

897
00:48:06,999 --> 00:48:10,879
that we can also accommodate other people's needs

898
00:48:10,879 --> 00:48:14,599
or wishes or anyone who wants to do anything else

899
00:48:14,599 --> 00:48:17,719
under the Bitcoin umbrella, but on a sidechain.

900
00:48:17,719 --> 00:48:20,679
Can you talk to me about what the benefit

901
00:48:20,679 --> 00:48:24,959
to a Bitcoiner may be of having a sidechain

902
00:48:24,959 --> 00:48:26,639
that does incorporate,

903
00:48:26,639 --> 00:48:29,959
let's say the privacy features of Zcash

904
00:48:29,959 --> 00:48:33,079
or the Turing complete nature of Ethereum

905
00:48:33,079 --> 00:48:35,679
under the Bitcoin umbrella and as a sidechain

906
00:48:35,679 --> 00:48:37,999
rather than as a separate blockchain?

907
00:48:39,119 --> 00:48:41,879
Yes, that's the essential point that you've hit on,

908
00:48:41,879 --> 00:48:45,199
which is that this idea was designed,

909
00:48:47,839 --> 00:48:50,879
the idea of like, should we have this new feature or not?

910
00:48:50,879 --> 00:48:53,719
That's only rational if there's some kind of cost to you.

911
00:48:53,719 --> 00:48:55,799
So the whole point of sidechains is to say,

912
00:48:55,799 --> 00:48:58,159
if someone wants to do Turing complete

913
00:48:58,159 --> 00:49:00,479
or whatever stuff somewhere else,

914
00:49:00,479 --> 00:49:02,079
then there won't be any costs.

915
00:49:02,079 --> 00:49:05,319
I'll never suffer as a user of Bitcoin Core

916
00:49:05,319 --> 00:49:08,159
as a result of someone using the sidechain.

917
00:49:08,159 --> 00:49:11,199
So again, that's something if you go to the 2015 post,

918
00:49:11,199 --> 00:49:14,279
you see that's the whole design is designed

919
00:49:14,359 --> 00:49:17,959
around the sidechains being optional

920
00:49:17,959 --> 00:49:21,039
and not harming anyone who's not using them.

921
00:49:21,039 --> 00:49:21,879
So that's the whole,

922
00:49:21,879 --> 00:49:24,519
and there's a whole talk in the June 2016.

923
00:49:24,519 --> 00:49:27,679
So, but you're asking about the benefits.

924
00:49:27,679 --> 00:49:31,679
The benefits are, so like Zcash has a reusable,

925
00:49:31,679 --> 00:49:34,719
everyone gets one Z address that you can reuse

926
00:49:34,719 --> 00:49:38,999
and as many times as you like, there's no privacy leak.

927
00:49:38,999 --> 00:49:41,319
If you shield the coins, then the sender,

928
00:49:41,319 --> 00:49:43,559
the receiver and the amount are all hidden.

929
00:49:44,439 --> 00:49:47,399
So you post one reusable address.

930
00:49:47,399 --> 00:49:48,479
This is a constant problem.

931
00:49:48,479 --> 00:49:50,159
So first of all, like the privacy in Bitcoin

932
00:49:50,159 --> 00:49:51,999
leaves much to be desired,

933
00:49:51,999 --> 00:49:55,519
but just it's really tough to get a user-friendly privacy.

934
00:49:56,619 --> 00:49:59,279
That's what's really tough, but that's what Zcash has.

935
00:49:59,279 --> 00:50:00,999
It has, everyone gets this address.

936
00:50:00,999 --> 00:50:02,559
You get a static address.

937
00:50:02,559 --> 00:50:04,410
According to some of the research I've done,

938
00:50:04,410 --> 00:50:06,410
on just the darknet markets, you know, just for my own educational background
research,

939
00:50:10,810 --> 00:50:15,450
but they have this issue where someone will do phishing and they,

940
00:50:15,850 --> 00:50:19,130
you're tricked into going to a different site that mirrors the site.

941
00:50:19,830 --> 00:50:24,830
And then they have a fake deposit address and you deposit to the darknet market,

942
00:50:26,370 --> 00:50:30,330
but it actually goes to the scammer and then you message them and then they say

943
00:50:31,010 --> 00:50:35,010
you are on the wrong site or something.

944
00:50:35,650 --> 00:50:39,490
But in Zcash, the site, whatever it would be, Silk Road 2.0,

945
00:50:39,770 --> 00:50:42,730
they just have one static address that everyone knows.

946
00:50:42,930 --> 00:50:45,050
So they just have to get that message across one time.

947
00:50:45,610 --> 00:50:49,010
Then that problem will never happen again. And perfect privacy.

948
00:50:49,010 --> 00:50:51,730
So many of the darknet markets have gone Monero only.

949
00:50:51,770 --> 00:50:56,130
This is another thing that I was interested in researching because this was what

950
00:50:56,130 --> 00:50:58,210
led me to Bitcoin in the first place.

951
00:50:59,050 --> 00:51:01,690
And it would be, if there was a beginning of the end,

952
00:51:01,690 --> 00:51:02,890
it would look something like this,

953
00:51:02,890 --> 00:51:07,890
where Monero is because the darknet markets have real users and real people

954
00:51:08,530 --> 00:51:13,370
solving a real problem. They've gone only Monero,

955
00:51:13,410 --> 00:51:18,410
but then Monero is the ring signatures of Monero don't have as much privacy

956
00:51:20,690 --> 00:51:24,570
potential in steady state as Zcash does. Because once you're in the pool,

957
00:51:24,590 --> 00:51:27,010
you're mixing with everyone in the pool, the shielded pool.

958
00:51:27,010 --> 00:51:31,930
And so there's this pool that just grows and grows and grows more user

959
00:51:31,930 --> 00:51:32,770
friendly.

960
00:51:32,890 --> 00:51:35,450
I'm also thinking about the benefits though,

961
00:51:35,450 --> 00:51:39,370
to Bitcoiners who decide they don't want to participate in any of these new

962
00:51:39,370 --> 00:51:43,410
features. Like is it transaction fees accrued to miners? Is that correct?

963
00:51:43,410 --> 00:51:45,250
Yes, because of merge mining,

964
00:51:45,250 --> 00:51:50,010
the layer one miners get the transaction fees from all the networks.

965
00:51:50,370 --> 00:51:53,570
So by bundling everything under the Bitcoin umbrella,

966
00:51:54,050 --> 00:51:58,810
you are effectively growing the pool of transaction fees that Bitcoin miners

967
00:51:58,850 --> 00:52:02,730
get. Is that correct? Yes. Got it.

968
00:52:03,050 --> 00:52:05,850
I would say the primary benefit though, is that as a Bitcoiner,

969
00:52:05,850 --> 00:52:08,970
you don't have to worry about people campaigning to change.

970
00:52:08,970 --> 00:52:13,970
If you want to keep change out and the sidechains are the best thing for you to

971
00:52:14,730 --> 00:52:15,450
actually do,

972
00:52:15,450 --> 00:52:19,130
would you actually want to make this one last change because then you can always

973
00:52:19,130 --> 00:52:22,490
fight people off and they say, we really want this. And you can say, okay,

974
00:52:22,490 --> 00:52:23,890
great. Do it on the sidechain.

975
00:52:24,890 --> 00:52:28,370
And then you no longer have to worry about the hard fork like a Bitcoin cash or

976
00:52:28,370 --> 00:52:30,930
you no longer have to worry about an altcoin like Ethereum.

977
00:52:31,970 --> 00:52:36,970
Right. And so in a way, is it correct that you view this as,

978
00:52:37,650 --> 00:52:42,050
you know, that if we look at the total crypto market cap outside of Bitcoin,

979
00:52:42,050 --> 00:52:44,530
we're looking at hundreds of billions of dollars.

980
00:52:44,930 --> 00:52:49,930
Do you view this as a hundreds of billions of dollars lesson that Bitcoiners

981
00:52:50,690 --> 00:52:53,010
should be paying attention to that? Hey,

982
00:52:53,370 --> 00:52:57,410
there's all this capital and interest and you know,

983
00:52:57,770 --> 00:53:02,370
there's a whole group of people that many were once Bitcoiners, some were not,

984
00:53:02,610 --> 00:53:06,650
but there's a group there that could have been under the Bitcoin umbrella,

985
00:53:07,330 --> 00:53:12,330
could have been adding to the ecosystem and growing the pool of transaction fees

986
00:53:12,930 --> 00:53:14,010
for miners,

987
00:53:14,490 --> 00:53:19,490
but are now out and we now have to fight them because they're in a totally

988
00:53:19,490 --> 00:53:22,890
different ecosystem. Whereas we could have just let them do their own thing,

989
00:53:23,210 --> 00:53:26,450
not harm us on the Bitcoin main chain,

990
00:53:26,770 --> 00:53:31,770
but let them be kind of an affiliated sidechain that is entirely opt in and

991
00:53:33,130 --> 00:53:33,970
doesn't,

992
00:53:33,970 --> 00:53:38,970
doesn't touch or doesn't interfere with the main chains censorship resistance.

993
00:53:42,010 --> 00:53:46,450
Yes. Um, I think it's unfortunate.

994
00:53:46,450 --> 00:53:47,770
So like you can look at lots of different things.

995
00:53:47,770 --> 00:53:52,330
So you can look at the market cap is one thing that transaction fees is another

996
00:53:52,330 --> 00:53:56,930
thing. Transaction fees paid, you know, um, you can,

997
00:53:56,970 --> 00:54:00,050
those are like real customers who are,

998
00:54:00,210 --> 00:54:04,450
they lose money when they pay the transaction fees. And this is,

999
00:54:04,490 --> 00:54:08,130
this is some objective indicator of whether or not there's real customers there,

1000
00:54:08,770 --> 00:54:11,250
you know, because the transaction fees, you know, they could be fake,

1001
00:54:11,250 --> 00:54:13,650
but they probably aren't, you know, like,

1002
00:54:14,450 --> 00:54:19,450
and you can look at a graph of the Ethereum transaction fees priced as a dollar

1003
00:54:20,370 --> 00:54:24,010
total dollars versus Bitcoin total dollars.

1004
00:54:24,610 --> 00:54:28,330
And if you graph this, um, on a log scale,

1005
00:54:28,370 --> 00:54:33,370
you'll see that the Ethereum fees used to be one 1000th of BTC fees.

1006
00:54:34,210 --> 00:54:38,530
But this line has gone up on a straight line on this log scale where they're now

1007
00:54:38,530 --> 00:54:43,170
over a hundred times, 10 or a hundred times spending of the day. Uh,

1008
00:54:43,170 --> 00:54:47,330
on average has grown way past being equal and now much higher.

1009
00:54:47,330 --> 00:54:52,330
So they actually have more customers per se. Uh, you can argue about, um,

1010
00:54:52,370 --> 00:54:56,010
there's lots of, you know, qualifiers to that, but the, you,

1011
00:54:56,010 --> 00:54:58,170
you look at the trend and you just see that,

1012
00:54:58,210 --> 00:55:00,970
that all of those transaction fees would have been on Bitcoin and all those,

1013
00:55:01,210 --> 00:55:05,650
those are real users. It's an indication that there's real, real users.

1014
00:55:05,730 --> 00:55:08,570
And it's harder and harder to just dismiss that.

1015
00:55:08,610 --> 00:55:11,170
The bigger thing though is just why have any rivals at all?

1016
00:55:11,170 --> 00:55:15,570
Like why tolerate having Ethereum as a number two alternative to Bitcoin?

1017
00:55:15,610 --> 00:55:20,610
You know, why, why allow any story out there that might persuade people?

1018
00:55:21,850 --> 00:55:26,130
They say, Oh, Bitcoin is like this, but Ethereum has smart contracts.

1019
00:55:28,650 --> 00:55:33,370
It's all open source software. So why, why even allow, why not? And it's just,

1020
00:55:33,930 --> 00:55:38,570
it's more of that. It indicates something about Bitcoin. It's with Bitcoin.

1021
00:55:38,570 --> 00:55:41,770
You have to now it's no longer win-win with Bitcoin.

1022
00:55:41,770 --> 00:55:46,770
You have to choose to give up the Turing complete smart contracts or whatever.

1023
00:55:48,010 --> 00:55:50,330
You give up rich statefulness or,

1024
00:55:50,770 --> 00:55:55,330
and in exchange you get something really conservative and reliable,

1025
00:55:55,810 --> 00:55:57,810
but you could, but again, in the sidechain world,

1026
00:55:57,810 --> 00:56:00,930
you could have something that's even more reliable. And in fact,

1027
00:56:00,930 --> 00:56:02,970
I think you can even shrink the logical thing.

1028
00:56:02,970 --> 00:56:04,250
And I presented at scaling three,

1029
00:56:04,490 --> 00:56:08,530
you can shrink the layer one block size with sidechains because you have the

1030
00:56:08,530 --> 00:56:12,290
other, you have an infinity of block space on the, the layer twos.

1031
00:56:12,810 --> 00:56:16,210
So you can actually have something more conservative, more,

1032
00:56:16,210 --> 00:56:19,490
cause more sustainably conservative. Cause into the future,

1033
00:56:19,490 --> 00:56:23,690
you know that it will be less vulnerable to modification because there'll be no

1034
00:56:23,690 --> 00:56:26,690
one who wants to change the software.

1035
00:56:26,690 --> 00:56:28,730
So that'll be directed into the sidechain.

1036
00:56:28,730 --> 00:56:31,490
So you have something that's more conservative and you can also have the

1037
00:56:31,490 --> 00:56:34,330
Ethereum. And this used to be a mainstream view.

1038
00:56:34,330 --> 00:56:37,170
Like when RSK started in like 2015,

1039
00:56:37,490 --> 00:56:41,650
everyone thought they thought that was just the Bitcoin answer to Ethereum and

1040
00:56:41,970 --> 00:56:43,170
there just won't be an Ethereum.

1041
00:56:43,170 --> 00:56:48,170
But then all this stuff happened with the block size and in 2016.

1042
00:56:48,330 --> 00:56:51,010
And there was a couple of other stuff, things as well.

1043
00:56:51,010 --> 00:56:53,410
I can give you like a giant story about that.

1044
00:56:54,290 --> 00:56:57,770
I'm interested to hear more about RSK and it's, it's development.

1045
00:56:57,770 --> 00:57:02,770
Why do you think that did not become this Ethereum replacement or this will take

1046
00:57:03,890 --> 00:57:06,890
care of all of the Ethereum use cases? Why, why did that not happen?

1047
00:57:07,250 --> 00:57:11,010
To be honest with you, my guess is that Ethereum got big.

1048
00:57:11,250 --> 00:57:15,130
So Ethereum started and it was very small and it was terrible when it started.

1049
00:57:15,130 --> 00:57:19,210
It was like very kind of like fraudulently marketed.

1050
00:57:19,210 --> 00:57:22,690
And in 2015 it was like vaporware and they were like taking money from people.

1051
00:57:22,690 --> 00:57:26,970
It was very, probably like, I don't know, illegal, who knows, uh, you know,

1052
00:57:26,970 --> 00:57:31,970
in terms of like of it secretly being like a kind of security under the hood as

1053
00:57:32,130 --> 00:57:35,130
people have argued today. But like it didn't exist at all.

1054
00:57:35,130 --> 00:57:35,890
People were taking money,

1055
00:57:35,890 --> 00:57:39,170
people were working for free in exchange for like getting some Ethereum when it

1056
00:57:39,170 --> 00:57:41,850
launched. And there was like kind of weird stuff like that going on.

1057
00:57:42,090 --> 00:57:44,530
Whereas Satoshi just released it as a finished project.

1058
00:57:44,530 --> 00:57:47,410
And then like three days later it was like transacting with Hal Finney and it

1059
00:57:47,410 --> 00:57:50,130
worked perfectly and stuff. So that was a very big difference.

1060
00:57:51,410 --> 00:57:53,970
But when Ethereum was just an, a suggestion,

1061
00:57:55,850 --> 00:57:57,530
then the community was like, Oh,

1062
00:57:57,570 --> 00:58:00,370
how can we take this idea for ourselves when it was new?

1063
00:58:00,850 --> 00:58:05,610
But then in 2016 Ethereum started to get really big and this led to everyone

1064
00:58:05,610 --> 00:58:07,850
having the sour grapes. This is like I was saying,

1065
00:58:07,850 --> 00:58:10,250
the community became miserable. The community used to,

1066
00:58:10,250 --> 00:58:13,930
Bitcoin community used to be just very fun and there was no,

1067
00:58:14,930 --> 00:58:19,650
there was no like a thought police. Now they're everywhere.

1068
00:58:20,170 --> 00:58:23,330
Um, but the, and now you get canceled. Now you can get like,

1069
00:58:23,330 --> 00:58:27,730
you can get in Bitcoin, me too'd or something. But, uh, the,

1070
00:58:28,170 --> 00:58:32,570
you, it was like after 2016 it was like, we're in this miserable,

1071
00:58:32,610 --> 00:58:34,290
we're trying to figure things out with scaling.

1072
00:58:35,170 --> 00:58:37,250
We thought everything was going to go great,

1073
00:58:37,250 --> 00:58:39,890
but now we have these two communities that hate each other and they each,

1074
00:58:39,930 --> 00:58:44,610
they assumed that they would get their way for years and they built businesses.

1075
00:58:44,970 --> 00:58:48,810
They built personal brand. They have VC funding,

1076
00:58:48,850 --> 00:58:52,650
millions of dollars, all aligned with going one of the two ways,

1077
00:58:53,250 --> 00:58:55,730
small block, large block. And there's no agreement.

1078
00:58:56,730 --> 00:59:01,090
So in 2016 it was like agreement is hard. Uh,

1079
00:59:01,170 --> 00:59:05,090
everyone was worried about, um,

1080
00:59:05,130 --> 00:59:08,290
like doing the wrong thing. So then a theorem shows up.

1081
00:59:08,290 --> 00:59:11,210
And then I think what really happened was people were like, well,

1082
00:59:11,290 --> 00:59:15,730
it just became really, really common for people to say a theorem is a scam.

1083
00:59:15,730 --> 00:59:18,610
A theorem is stupid or whatever. We don't want that anyway.

1084
00:59:18,850 --> 00:59:21,690
And then as the theorem got bigger and bigger, it became more,

1085
00:59:21,690 --> 00:59:23,050
there's a cognitive dissonance.

1086
00:59:23,170 --> 00:59:26,650
It became more and more difficult for people to just do the most obviously

1087
00:59:26,650 --> 00:59:31,570
correct thing, which is to just steal. We should steal every idea,

1088
00:59:31,570 --> 00:59:36,170
you know, good, bad, or a fringe or rock solid.

1089
00:59:36,170 --> 00:59:38,210
We should just take all the ideas as long as they're,

1090
00:59:38,250 --> 00:59:43,250
as long as we have a way of trying them that doesn't hurt anyone else.

1091
00:59:43,370 --> 00:59:48,210
If you've got a user who wants to use something and you have a minor who wants

1092
00:59:48,210 --> 00:59:51,010
to mine the transaction developer who wants to make the software,

1093
00:59:51,010 --> 00:59:53,010
someone wants to pay the fee, someone wants to invest.

1094
00:59:53,450 --> 00:59:55,370
If you have all those people who want something,

1095
00:59:56,090 --> 00:59:59,250
it's going to be really hard to stop them from getting it. But yeah,

1096
00:59:59,890 --> 01:00:03,810
I think you make a really good point that you make about as long as it doesn't

1097
01:00:03,810 --> 01:00:07,810
hurt anyone else or as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else with what

1098
01:00:07,810 --> 01:00:09,130
they want out of Bitcoin.

1099
01:00:09,930 --> 01:00:14,090
And I want to hear because everything you've said to this point makes sense

1100
01:00:14,090 --> 01:00:17,450
about why Drivechains and why, you know,

1101
01:00:17,490 --> 01:00:22,010
opt in sidechains can be useful to Bitcoin without interfering with the base

1102
01:00:22,010 --> 01:00:22,850
layer.

1103
01:00:23,250 --> 01:00:28,250
What is the best argument that you've heard for why these should not be on

1104
01:00:28,330 --> 01:00:30,930
Bitcoin? Why Drivechain should not exist?

1105
01:00:31,250 --> 01:00:35,770
Well, I think that the, the best argument is a very, uh, it's very obscure.

1106
01:00:35,770 --> 01:00:37,450
No one actually says it. Instead people,

1107
01:00:37,450 --> 01:00:41,010
the arguments that are popular are the terrible arguments,

1108
01:00:41,050 --> 01:00:43,210
which are misconceptions.

1109
01:00:43,370 --> 01:00:45,610
Just that blockchains are bad and, and

1110
01:00:47,330 --> 01:00:51,330
one thing is that people don't like the, they don't like what's SPV mode,

1111
01:00:51,370 --> 01:00:54,170
which is the so-called miners can steal critique,

1112
01:00:54,850 --> 01:00:58,250
but it requires a hundred percent of the miners to spend three months

1113
01:00:58,290 --> 01:01:01,930
consecutively on saying that one hash equals some other hat. So again,

1114
01:01:02,130 --> 01:01:07,130
the I what's concerning to me is the whole idea was designed around certain

1115
01:01:07,570 --> 01:01:08,570
goals in mind.

1116
01:01:09,210 --> 01:01:14,210
So the Drivechain idea was designed so that full node would never need to care

1117
01:01:14,410 --> 01:01:18,050
about what the sidechain was doing because that's the only way you get this

1118
01:01:18,050 --> 01:01:21,530
feature that the zk-SNARK stuff doesn't,

1119
01:01:21,930 --> 01:01:24,650
doesn't negatively affect someone's Bitcoin full node.

1120
01:01:26,130 --> 01:01:30,810
So it was designed not to look at those things and it was designed,

1121
01:01:31,610 --> 01:01:34,570
um, it was designed. So the SPV,

1122
01:01:34,570 --> 01:01:39,570
the SPV validation or the SPV proof or BIP300 or whatever you want to call it,

1123
01:01:40,930 --> 01:01:45,490
that has the flaw that if you do enough work, you can prove,

1124
01:01:45,530 --> 01:01:49,450
you can argue anything. So you can say, if I do enough work, then I'm saying,

1125
01:01:50,410 --> 01:01:52,330
I own all the coins on the sidechain.

1126
01:01:52,410 --> 01:01:55,410
So pay them out to me on layer one to this address.

1127
01:01:55,410 --> 01:01:58,890
You can then steal the coins if you do enough work. But that's,

1128
01:01:58,930 --> 01:02:03,090
that's because of that is why I designed BIP300 the way I did,

1129
01:02:03,090 --> 01:02:05,050
which is why it takes this enormous amount of time.

1130
01:02:05,610 --> 01:02:09,450
It's all focused on one hash. There's only like four hashes per year.

1131
01:02:09,610 --> 01:02:11,250
It's very easy to see if they don't match.

1132
01:02:11,370 --> 01:02:16,370
It's very easy to introduce a new one to error correct the erroneous hash.

1133
01:02:17,650 --> 01:02:20,610
It's very easy for lots of hashes to compete without there being any kind of

1134
01:02:20,610 --> 01:02:24,130
like denial of service. It's very easy for a skeptical observer to wait.

1135
01:02:24,570 --> 01:02:27,930
They have to like, they can only advance the hash like one unit at a time.

1136
01:02:28,370 --> 01:02:32,530
So it's like someone walking from Los Angeles to New York city.

1137
01:02:32,770 --> 01:02:35,050
They have to like slowly walk and you can decide,

1138
01:02:35,050 --> 01:02:39,050
you can wait in Kansas city, Missouri, in the center of the country.

1139
01:02:39,570 --> 01:02:44,450
And you can just say, I'm on vacation. And then if someone, if someone,

1140
01:02:44,450 --> 01:02:48,290
if someone calls you in Utah and they say someone's coming,

1141
01:02:48,330 --> 01:02:51,410
then you have plenty of time to finish your vacation, come back in Kansas.

1142
01:02:51,410 --> 01:02:54,410
So you'll be waiting for them when they, when they arrive in Kansas city.

1143
01:02:54,410 --> 01:02:56,930
And then you can, you can shoot them down or you can do something about it.

1144
01:02:57,210 --> 01:02:59,570
So the whole thing is designed, the miners can steal critique.

1145
01:02:59,970 --> 01:03:03,050
The whole design is designed to address that.

1146
01:03:03,730 --> 01:03:07,770
Now with the most important issue with miners can steal is also that the

1147
01:03:07,770 --> 01:03:11,530
individual user is opting into the sidechain. So they get the new feature,

1148
01:03:12,010 --> 01:03:14,610
but they also have this new risk, but it only accrues to them.

1149
01:03:14,610 --> 01:03:18,250
It does not hurt anyone else. But so people keep repeating this idea as if,

1150
01:03:20,850 --> 01:03:25,210
because you're right. The only thing is, is if it harms someone on layer one,

1151
01:03:25,570 --> 01:03:29,090
this is another issue of those that people have retreated then to the second big

1152
01:03:29,090 --> 01:03:32,450
critique, which is that it affects miner incentives,

1153
01:03:33,330 --> 01:03:33,730
but you see,

1154
01:03:33,730 --> 01:03:37,930
they just keep it so vague that this is unmeetable criteria because literally

1155
01:03:37,930 --> 01:03:40,210
everything might affect mining incentives.

1156
01:03:40,210 --> 01:03:43,250
If you broadcast a transaction today versus not,

1157
01:03:43,530 --> 01:03:47,650
if someone invents a natural gas flaring, if there's perm,

1158
01:03:47,690 --> 01:03:52,690
they do the permits, like they get the they can get the tax

1159
01:03:52,690 --> 01:03:57,530
rebate for that affects mining. It's like everything. So, and again,

1160
01:03:57,570 --> 01:04:00,050
that is why in 2015 I designed it this way,

1161
01:04:00,490 --> 01:04:04,930
because when I sat down to design it, I thought, well, I'm the mining world.

1162
01:04:05,250 --> 01:04:08,450
Everything does enormous turn. Everything's constantly turning over over there.

1163
01:04:08,450 --> 01:04:11,290
You know, you some go from CPUs to a six,

1164
01:04:11,490 --> 01:04:14,330
they get them going to the hydroelectric dam.

1165
01:04:14,730 --> 01:04:18,010
This idea that you could get power that was free.

1166
01:04:18,410 --> 01:04:23,330
That was an innovation that the height of the dam is only using 60% of the,

1167
01:04:23,450 --> 01:04:26,690
and you can buy the 40% and relocate mining there.

1168
01:04:27,450 --> 01:04:32,290
And the idea that you could actually get energy for less than zero with all

1169
01:04:32,290 --> 01:04:35,690
these complicated demand management schemes, you know, or they have the, uh,

1170
01:04:35,730 --> 01:04:37,490
you may be familiar with some of this,

1171
01:04:37,490 --> 01:04:42,490
where they have a situation where the power company builds at scale,

1172
01:04:44,130 --> 01:04:49,130
they build to hit a certain optimum production of electricity amount,

1173
01:04:50,010 --> 01:04:55,010
but the, the intraday variation is very high.

1174
01:04:55,970 --> 01:05:00,970
And electricity is not yet our battery technology is very inefficient as humans

1175
01:05:03,490 --> 01:05:07,330
only in the last like 20 years as it even thanks to like cell phones and like

1176
01:05:07,330 --> 01:05:10,570
whatever, maybe Elon Musk or something, who knows. But you know,

1177
01:05:10,570 --> 01:05:11,810
like has it gotten okay.

1178
01:05:11,850 --> 01:05:16,610
But it's usually like huge percentage of the electricity is lost when you charge

1179
01:05:16,610 --> 01:05:19,130
a battery and then D chart, you know, discharge it.

1180
01:05:20,130 --> 01:05:24,730
So because of that, it's uh, you know, it's very, um,

1181
01:05:25,250 --> 01:05:29,170
they have to build it so that they have the peak and they have to,

1182
01:05:29,210 --> 01:05:31,290
they have to make sure that it's always available.

1183
01:05:31,290 --> 01:05:35,330
A certain amount is always available for like whatever hospitals and things. Uh,

1184
01:05:35,330 --> 01:05:40,330
so they have these schemes where they'll pay the miners to use the electricity

1185
01:05:40,810 --> 01:05:44,570
in a very controlled way cause that way they have it smoothed out and then they

1186
01:05:44,570 --> 01:05:48,770
can build at scale. There's some, there's some size of the power plant that is

1187
01:05:48,770 --> 01:05:52,610
like, you know, the lowest cost per kilowatt hour or something. Yeah.

1188
01:05:52,850 --> 01:05:57,850
So that's my point is I always knew in 2015 it was obvious that mining is a

1189
01:05:58,410 --> 01:06:02,490
creative world. It was also, this is another issue is that with, um,

1190
01:06:03,810 --> 01:06:05,690
I think this is a misunderstanding in,

1191
01:06:05,690 --> 01:06:07,770
even in the expert technical Bitcoin community,

1192
01:06:07,770 --> 01:06:11,610
which is that people always thought of mining as being a part of Bitcoin,

1193
01:06:12,090 --> 01:06:16,930
but really miners are outside of the amount.

1194
01:06:16,930 --> 01:06:18,570
Miners are customers of Bitcoin.

1195
01:06:18,570 --> 01:06:22,290
They run a full node to figure out if they're being paid and to figure out how

1196
01:06:22,290 --> 01:06:25,490
to add the transactions into blocks.

1197
01:06:25,810 --> 01:06:28,890
But they run a full node in the same way that they would.

1198
01:06:28,930 --> 01:06:32,890
They get power in the same way they have staff there.

1199
01:06:32,970 --> 01:06:36,410
It's actually upside down. The miners are customers of Bitcoin.

1200
01:06:36,770 --> 01:06:40,250
They are not part of Bitcoin. And this is again,

1201
01:06:40,250 --> 01:06:45,250
part of this was this scaling war and the paranoia about the miners can block

1202
01:06:45,330 --> 01:06:48,290
SegWit activation. Miners can do things that we don't like.

1203
01:06:48,970 --> 01:06:52,290
So we have to regard miners with paranoia and suspicion.

1204
01:06:52,650 --> 01:06:55,290
So those are the critiques that I normally get. And again,

1205
01:06:55,290 --> 01:07:00,290
it is disturbing because on day zero I designed it with exactly those in mind.

1206
01:07:00,330 --> 01:07:04,970
So in one sense, it's, it just means that, um,

1207
01:07:05,770 --> 01:07:08,970
everything's going to be fine because what other people are worried about is

1208
01:07:08,970 --> 01:07:12,330
what I designed it to, but it also means that there was a disconnect.

1209
01:07:12,330 --> 01:07:15,650
Or I think what it really means is just that people are so paranoid that they,

1210
01:07:15,690 --> 01:07:19,610
they don't have an open mind to that. I, I actually is built,

1211
01:07:19,650 --> 01:07:22,170
it's built up from the ground up with all,

1212
01:07:23,010 --> 01:07:26,970
with exactly those things in mind. I think I,

1213
01:07:28,290 --> 01:07:31,450
to be honest with you, I think there really is no good reason not to do it.

1214
01:07:31,570 --> 01:07:36,010
I have waited for a long time and the, the,

1215
01:07:36,010 --> 01:07:38,530
cause you asked the question, like what's the best argument for not doing it?

1216
01:07:38,530 --> 01:07:39,610
But I don't, uh,

1217
01:07:39,610 --> 01:07:43,810
I don't think there is one relative to the risk of not doing it because the risk

1218
01:07:43,810 --> 01:07:47,010
of not doing it is, I think, uh, existential.

1219
01:07:47,050 --> 01:07:51,890
It would mean that it's possible for something else to just get big somehow.

1220
01:07:52,610 --> 01:07:57,210
And then if something else becomes the global internet money,

1221
01:07:57,210 --> 01:07:59,650
then the Bitcoin, you know, we'll go to zero and it would have failed.

1222
01:07:59,650 --> 01:08:03,610
And I think that's, even though that's very, very, very unlikely, uh,

1223
01:08:03,610 --> 01:08:08,610
I just don't understand why, uh, I, I don't, uh,

1224
01:08:08,810 --> 01:08:12,570
there is no real reason as far as I'm concerned, uh, not to at least try it.

1225
01:08:12,570 --> 01:08:17,410
Another thing that people don't seem to understand is you activate this by a

1226
01:08:17,410 --> 01:08:19,770
soft fork. And if something goes wrong,

1227
01:08:19,770 --> 01:08:24,370
you can just do a second soft fork later, very easily. That just says,

1228
01:08:25,570 --> 01:08:29,010
it's a soft fork that says the following, the protocol was,

1229
01:08:29,050 --> 01:08:31,410
whatever the protocol was on Monday, it is on Tuesday,

1230
01:08:31,410 --> 01:08:36,410
but we will never allow any BIP300 messages into a block ever again.

1231
01:08:39,210 --> 01:08:42,050
And now all that does that just basically just shuts it off. So you add it,

1232
01:08:42,050 --> 01:08:46,050
you turn it, you add BIP300 and then you shut it off. And the only,

1233
01:08:46,090 --> 01:08:48,690
the only cost is that you can never again,

1234
01:08:48,690 --> 01:08:53,690
send a message that has BIP300 formatted, but that is, that is de minimis,

1235
01:08:54,290 --> 01:08:55,850
you know, that's nothing. So you could,

1236
01:08:56,090 --> 01:08:59,770
we could try the idea and then shut it off if something bad happens. But again,

1237
01:08:59,970 --> 01:09:02,490
the people who think something bad has happened, they just,

1238
01:09:02,490 --> 01:09:05,850
none of them have read the November, 2015 posts. If they did,

1239
01:09:05,850 --> 01:09:09,250
they would see that I anticipated what they would say already.

1240
01:09:09,290 --> 01:09:12,450
And they didn't certainly didn't watch those giant presentations I made in 2016,

1241
01:09:12,730 --> 01:09:17,730
which again, some of those go way beyond what even I think anyone today

1242
01:09:18,890 --> 01:09:21,450
understands. So the one in June, 2016,

1243
01:09:21,450 --> 01:09:25,170
I described why it's actually a good thing to have the miners be able to steal

1244
01:09:25,170 --> 01:09:30,170
because it's possible to design sidechains that actually attack other chains

1245
01:09:30,330 --> 01:09:35,330
or even that like they will pay if a certain chain reorgs or something.

1246
01:09:36,330 --> 01:09:41,330
So it's possible to have unfriendly sidechains that that disturb each other.

1247
01:09:43,770 --> 01:09:48,250
But the, but if, if the sidechains are somehow unblockable, perfect code,

1248
01:09:49,090 --> 01:09:52,610
which is what some people seem to want, which is also not possible,

1249
01:09:52,610 --> 01:09:56,890
but this is like a zk-SNARK rollup type thing where people want the unblockable

1250
01:09:57,570 --> 01:10:00,210
magic sidechain. First of all,

1251
01:10:00,210 --> 01:10:04,410
it's not possible because the miners can always just stop because get you on the,

1252
01:10:04,450 --> 01:10:06,010
what's called the data availability problem,

1253
01:10:06,010 --> 01:10:09,570
which is they can censor all the messages from that chain or they can censor the

1254
01:10:09,570 --> 01:10:13,250
zk-SNARK proof. So it's not, it's first of all, it's not possible.

1255
01:10:14,050 --> 01:10:16,490
The miners always decide what's in the blockchain or not.

1256
01:10:16,850 --> 01:10:20,970
So the magic uncensorable chain is not possible. But even if it were,

1257
01:10:20,970 --> 01:10:25,210
this would be a terrible thing because you would then have to try to get into the

1258
01:10:25,210 --> 01:10:28,410
business of going like message transaction by transaction to see if they were

1259
01:10:28,410 --> 01:10:30,370
causing chaos in this.

1260
01:10:30,650 --> 01:10:35,650
Whereas in the Drivechain model you have this thing that I called categorical

1261
01:10:36,210 --> 01:10:39,250
control, which is like you'd have like the Zcash sidechain

1262
01:10:40,490 --> 01:10:44,890
and the miners would add it. And then the, you,

1263
01:10:45,130 --> 01:10:49,290
since the miners can destroy a sidechain, which again is very difficult,

1264
01:10:49,290 --> 01:10:52,050
it takes six months or something, but since they can and to steal from it,

1265
01:10:52,930 --> 01:10:55,970
you push all the problems to the upper level,

1266
01:10:56,010 --> 01:10:58,970
which is exactly where they belong because now the sidechain developer,

1267
01:10:59,010 --> 01:11:04,010
they're the ones who have to convince the user that your funds will be safe

1268
01:11:04,650 --> 01:11:09,650
here because this software is well-designed and the miners are going to want,

1269
01:11:10,490 --> 01:11:13,930
they're going to want to keep this around because this software will be

1270
01:11:13,930 --> 01:11:17,010
increasing transaction fees. It will be increasing the price of Bitcoin.

1271
01:11:17,010 --> 01:11:19,890
It'd be increasing the utility of Bitcoin. It'd be helping Bitcoin.

1272
01:11:19,890 --> 01:11:21,810
It'd be essential to Bitcoin's mission, in fact,

1273
01:11:22,050 --> 01:11:24,410
to have the Zcash sidechain.

1274
01:11:25,170 --> 01:11:27,650
And so that pushes it all.

1275
01:11:27,690 --> 01:11:32,130
So you give them a blank canvas to paint on, but then you say,

1276
01:11:32,450 --> 01:11:36,170
listen, this had better be good because you are under the gun.

1277
01:11:36,930 --> 01:11:38,010
It's actually good to have this,

1278
01:11:38,090 --> 01:11:43,090
this is this threat there and say the miners can just take an attack,

1279
01:11:43,410 --> 01:11:46,410
the SPV proof or whatever. And so, and again,

1280
01:11:46,410 --> 01:11:50,050
that only affects people who've opted in. So again, it's all lined up perfectly.

1281
01:11:50,090 --> 01:11:53,530
That was, that's by design is to have it only affect the people who opted in.

1282
01:11:54,090 --> 01:11:58,450
That is what means that you have to induce people to opt in. They,

1283
01:11:58,450 --> 01:12:00,010
they look over and they say, well,

1284
01:12:00,290 --> 01:12:03,090
maybe I'll put $10 in there today and we'll see how it works.

1285
01:12:03,850 --> 01:12:05,690
And then that's how you get evolution.

1286
01:12:06,330 --> 01:12:08,370
Okay. That makes a lot more sense to me.

1287
01:12:08,370 --> 01:12:12,810
I think I have a much clearer picture of where this Drivechain idea is headed.

1288
01:12:13,090 --> 01:12:14,450
I hope listeners do as well.

1289
01:12:14,970 --> 01:12:18,970
I want to shift the conversation a little bit to the work you're doing on layer

1290
01:12:18,970 --> 01:12:21,610
two labs. And I just want to highlight,

1291
01:12:21,930 --> 01:12:25,490
I was reading through some of your material I saw on your Twitter page.

1292
01:12:25,890 --> 01:12:29,170
I want to read through some of the roadmap and some of the things you've

1293
01:12:29,170 --> 01:12:33,610
outlined and get your perspective on where this company is headed next. First,

1294
01:12:33,610 --> 01:12:37,170
I'm just going to read, read something from your Twitter. It says, you know,

1295
01:12:37,170 --> 01:12:39,690
first we're going to focus on the BIP300 sidechain.

1296
01:12:40,250 --> 01:12:42,810
We have six sidechain designs in development already,

1297
01:12:43,050 --> 01:12:47,650
including two which are exact clones of Ethereum and Zcash, but Bitcoin only.

1298
01:12:48,530 --> 01:12:50,970
These allow for immediate global scale,

1299
01:12:51,130 --> 01:12:55,290
easy to use impenetrable privacy and total protocol flexibility.

1300
01:12:55,890 --> 01:12:59,890
You go on to say, second, we plan to improve Bitcoin's UX.

1301
01:13:00,290 --> 01:13:04,770
It must be easy to use Bitcoin the right way with one's own node and keys.

1302
01:13:05,130 --> 01:13:09,290
This will require a revolution in UX and education revolution.

1303
01:13:09,290 --> 01:13:13,610
We aim to bring about nodes will be useful and easy to understand.

1304
01:13:14,170 --> 01:13:18,010
And then you say, third, we are working on a few high risk, high reward problems.

1305
01:13:18,290 --> 01:13:21,290
These include prediction markets and a resurrected Namecoin.

1306
01:13:21,690 --> 01:13:24,010
These services, if they are successful,

1307
01:13:24,050 --> 01:13:28,530
will revolutionize media and telecommunications just as Bitcoin

1308
01:13:28,530 --> 01:13:31,770
revolutionized banking. Now there's a lot of interesting ideas there.

1309
01:13:32,530 --> 01:13:35,970
Maybe we can take those one by one, the, those three elements.

1310
01:13:36,490 --> 01:13:41,410
I want to first hear about why you've decided to build these six side

1311
01:13:41,610 --> 01:13:45,570
chain designs. Why six to start? And what's the,

1312
01:13:45,610 --> 01:13:47,330
what's the roadmap for rolling these out?

1313
01:13:48,330 --> 01:13:50,610
Well, I gave you the timeline. Is that, remember there,

1314
01:13:50,850 --> 01:13:55,050
I did the BIP300 software and then I had, there was no second radio.

1315
01:13:55,450 --> 01:13:56,570
So we built one that was just a,

1316
01:13:56,570 --> 01:14:00,930
basically we had Bitcoin core with BIP300 and then I had Bitcoin core as a

1317
01:14:00,930 --> 01:14:04,570
sidechain with just like nothing happening. So that was the first.

1318
01:14:05,410 --> 01:14:06,450
And then, um,

1319
01:14:07,450 --> 01:14:11,490
some like one with a larger block size, it's easy to make.

1320
01:14:11,770 --> 01:14:14,970
And then, uh, I was like, though, I was like for this to really,

1321
01:14:14,970 --> 01:14:17,290
for people to really understand what's going on here,

1322
01:14:17,850 --> 01:14:20,810
we needed the Zcash sidechain because Zcash was, first of all,

1323
01:14:20,810 --> 01:14:23,450
it was a code fork of Bitcoin back in the day.

1324
01:14:23,450 --> 01:14:26,050
I forked like off of Bitcoin version 12 or something.

1325
01:14:27,530 --> 01:14:31,690
So that was kind of interesting is that the shared same code.

1326
01:14:31,730 --> 01:14:36,170
So it's a little easier, but, but I was like, you really need a new feature.

1327
01:14:36,290 --> 01:14:40,770
You know, something that people would actually use. And Zcash, you know,

1328
01:14:40,770 --> 01:14:44,730
it has this privacy feature as the impenetrable privacy. And it also has,

1329
01:14:45,130 --> 01:14:49,370
it built in it. I don't know how many other people have realized this yet,

1330
01:14:49,370 --> 01:14:52,930
but if you have the, the shielded pool thing,

1331
01:14:52,930 --> 01:14:57,290
you also have a perfect mixer and I, that was something I called melt cast.

1332
01:14:57,290 --> 01:15:00,250
And I wrote a post about that and I had a video about that. So I was like,

1333
01:15:00,250 --> 01:15:04,850
we need the Zcash sidechain. So in 2020 I did a little contest.

1334
01:15:05,494 --> 01:15:08,494
So in 2020, I did a little contest about like why I paid some money.

1335
01:15:08,494 --> 01:15:14,254
I think it was like five Bitcoin if to whoever had the best Zcash sidechain

1336
01:15:14,254 --> 01:15:16,814
and someone won the contest and that was great.

1337
01:15:17,654 --> 01:15:21,854
And so that's, we got that one.

1338
01:15:21,854 --> 01:15:29,234
I mean, then we hired that person and and then we have something interesting

1339
01:15:29,394 --> 01:15:34,674
I don't know exactly how I want to explain all this in different, but in parallel,

1340
01:15:34,674 --> 01:15:40,194
we had the, this idea of cloning altcoins where you want to copy the latest version

1341
01:15:40,194 --> 01:15:43,794
of the altcoin, make a couple of minimal changes, and then it becomes a sidechain.

1342
01:15:44,434 --> 01:15:47,794
So you just take the latest, you start with the latest version of the altcoin code.

1343
01:15:48,514 --> 01:15:51,394
You know, you go to like, whatever, Ethereum's GitHub.

1344
01:15:52,754 --> 01:15:57,794
And then in parallel, we had the, this sidechain template that I made that was like
Bitcoin core.

1345
01:15:57,794 --> 01:16:02,754
And it was like, it has all the logic for deposits and withdrawals,

1346
01:16:02,754 --> 01:16:04,034
the coins going back and forth.

1347
01:16:05,394 --> 01:16:06,434
And then we start with that.

1348
01:16:07,954 --> 01:16:10,754
That thing, someone made a joke version called train chain,

1349
01:16:10,754 --> 01:16:16,514
which is just Bitcoin core with all the photos replaced with pictures of trains

1350
01:16:16,514 --> 01:16:20,594
or pictures of me because I did this one video where I had a train metaphor

1351
01:16:20,594 --> 01:16:24,834
for the deposits and the withdrawals, like the train going from LA to New York City.

1352
01:16:24,834 --> 01:16:26,594
So someone did, made one that was a complete joke.

1353
01:16:27,714 --> 01:16:30,354
So then we had large block one, like I already mentioned.

1354
01:16:30,354 --> 01:16:34,354
And then we made a, we did make an NFT one because this was again, not too
difficult.

1355
01:16:34,354 --> 01:16:37,474
And actually I think this is underappreciated because we made a

1356
01:16:37,474 --> 01:16:39,314
chain where you can issue your own assets.

1357
01:16:39,314 --> 01:16:40,834
So this is very much like counterparty.

1358
01:16:41,394 --> 01:16:46,594
This whole, I call it NFT chain, but that's only because I tried that,

1359
01:16:46,594 --> 01:16:49,634
that concept got big and I needed a way of explaining it.

1360
01:16:49,634 --> 01:16:51,234
It might, it's really called bit assets.

1361
01:16:51,794 --> 01:16:53,554
And this idea is a good idea.

1362
01:16:53,554 --> 01:16:56,914
And it was a Bitcoin idea long before it was an Ethereum idea.

1363
01:16:56,914 --> 01:16:58,114
We had colored coins.

1364
01:16:58,114 --> 01:17:00,114
We had a master coin.

1365
01:17:00,754 --> 01:17:03,234
Master coin was, you know, it was a Bitcoin thing.

1366
01:17:03,234 --> 01:17:06,754
And it sort of later became Tether, became Omni.

1367
01:17:06,754 --> 01:17:07,714
And then it became Tether.

1368
01:17:07,714 --> 01:17:09,714
But Tether was, you know, Tether was big.

1369
01:17:10,914 --> 01:17:11,874
Tether still is big.

1370
01:17:11,874 --> 01:17:14,434
So here's a Bitcoin idea.

1371
01:17:14,434 --> 01:17:17,954
And this, the bit asset sidechain is much better than the Ethereum,

1372
01:17:17,954 --> 01:17:22,674
all the Ethereum, ICO, NFT, et cetera, stuff, because we have the UTXO model.

1373
01:17:22,674 --> 01:17:27,474
And you can put the, if you make a new asset, you can put it in a multi-sig output,

1374
01:17:27,474 --> 01:17:30,354
or you can put it in a lightning channel or something and send it back and forth.

1375
01:17:30,354 --> 01:17:34,914
So it's kind of like a much, so we did.

1376
01:17:34,914 --> 01:17:37,234
So some people made like versions off of the template.

1377
01:17:37,234 --> 01:17:41,554
And then we cloned, once we got better at cloning things,

1378
01:17:42,434 --> 01:17:45,714
we upgrade, updated the clone to the latest clone of Zcash.

1379
01:17:45,714 --> 01:17:48,434
And then we redid the cloning technology to clone Ethereum,

1380
01:17:48,434 --> 01:17:51,874
because Ethereum is the number two competitor to Bitcoin.

1381
01:17:51,874 --> 01:17:59,154
It's more of just, it's, I think people misunderstand the, like my goal with this.

1382
01:17:59,154 --> 01:18:04,914
The goal is to just guarantee that no one is turned away.

1383
01:18:04,914 --> 01:18:06,754
We don't want to have any users turned away.

1384
01:18:07,394 --> 01:18:09,314
And I think instead, again, like I was saying,

1385
01:18:09,314 --> 01:18:11,954
people have been trained to think of Ethereum as a scam,

1386
01:18:11,954 --> 01:18:16,034
mostly because they, I think it's mostly sour grapes.

1387
01:18:16,034 --> 01:18:18,354
They just think we can't have that.

1388
01:18:18,354 --> 01:18:19,474
So it must suck.

1389
01:18:20,754 --> 01:18:22,354
But that's not reasonable.

1390
01:18:22,354 --> 01:18:25,474
What we want to say is we can have everything and there you go.

1391
01:18:25,474 --> 01:18:28,194
So that's just a better way of doing it.

1392
01:18:28,194 --> 01:18:28,674
Right.

1393
01:18:28,674 --> 01:18:34,834
And so now what are the technical challenges associated with implementing these
sidechains

1394
01:18:34,834 --> 01:18:37,234
and getting this live in production for people to use?

1395
01:18:37,634 --> 01:18:42,034
Well, I think right now you can already download it and test it out for yourself.

1396
01:18:42,034 --> 01:18:44,434
And we're going to try to make that easier and easier and easier.

1397
01:18:46,594 --> 01:18:47,634
Because that's the key.

1398
01:18:47,634 --> 01:18:49,554
And we did have, we have like a nice little

1399
01:18:50,674 --> 01:18:54,114
graphical user interface that kind of tries to explain what's happening.

1400
01:18:54,114 --> 01:18:58,274
So people, it's much easier for people to understand what BIP300 is doing.

1401
01:18:59,554 --> 01:19:03,714
Each piece of software, if they run the software, it's always the best way.

1402
01:19:04,034 --> 01:19:06,274
And then BIP300 needs to be activated as well?

1403
01:19:06,274 --> 01:19:07,634
Yes, it's a soft fork.

1404
01:19:07,634 --> 01:19:10,754
When I proposed this in 2015, this was not a big deal.

1405
01:19:11,634 --> 01:19:16,594
Because in 2015, we had done like, I think, three soft forks in the fourth quarter
alone,

1406
01:19:17,314 --> 01:19:19,074
the same time that I wrote it.

1407
01:19:19,074 --> 01:19:21,554
So the Bitcoin community used to do many soft forks.

1408
01:19:22,354 --> 01:19:26,274
We used to do at least like, we used to do like two a year for the first seven years

1409
01:19:26,274 --> 01:19:29,074
of Bitcoin's history.

1410
01:19:29,234 --> 01:19:35,314
Then with SegWit, SegWit and Taproot are the only two that have been in the last
seven years.

1411
01:19:35,314 --> 01:19:41,154
And SegWit took a long, like something like 26 months and, or something like that.

1412
01:19:41,154 --> 01:19:46,914
And Taproot took something like 46 months from when it was first, January 2018 was
like the

1413
01:19:46,914 --> 01:19:53,234
proposal and then has to be coded and activated until November 2021, right?

1414
01:19:53,554 --> 01:19:55,474
So it's been getting slower.

1415
01:19:55,474 --> 01:19:59,314
The soft fork has been a more and more arduous task.

1416
01:19:59,314 --> 01:20:03,074
But I think that's all the more reason to get this one in, because this one lets you

1417
01:20:03,634 --> 01:20:06,514
escape to other pieces of software, which can then rapidly develop.

1418
01:20:08,674 --> 01:20:14,194
You have one version that takes huge risks and adds all kinds of complicated,
whatever

1419
01:20:14,194 --> 01:20:14,914
you want to put there.

1420
01:20:14,914 --> 01:20:16,434
You can have Jeremy Rubin's thing.

1421
01:20:16,434 --> 01:20:18,514
You know, you'd have like two, you could have even two versions of it.

1422
01:20:18,514 --> 01:20:23,154
But I think that's all the more reason to get this one in, because this one lets you

1423
01:20:23,154 --> 01:20:24,434
have two competing versions.

1424
01:20:25,474 --> 01:20:31,394
So you'd have like layer one, and then you could have like new Bitcoin core, liberal

1425
01:20:31,394 --> 01:20:37,794
new Bitcoin core, conservative or something, you know, and they would, this is the
key

1426
01:20:37,794 --> 01:20:42,034
thing is that if you want, if you really want to have competition, because
competition is

1427
01:20:42,034 --> 01:20:43,394
always the best for the user.

1428
01:20:43,394 --> 01:20:50,994
That's the difference between like capitalism and communism and like tyranny and
like first

1429
01:20:50,994 --> 01:20:57,074
past the post democracy or something, is that the only one who can compete with, you

1430
01:20:57,074 --> 01:21:01,234
need, you need like to catch a thief, you need like another thief or whatever, you
know

1431
01:21:01,234 --> 01:21:01,554
what I mean?

1432
01:21:01,554 --> 01:21:08,914
Like you need, the only people who can realistically replace the democratic
administration

1433
01:21:08,914 --> 01:21:11,314
in the United States is the Republican administration.

1434
01:21:11,314 --> 01:21:16,434
And that's, that's too bad that the competition is only that far, but that's better
than

1435
01:21:16,434 --> 01:21:21,234
just having a tyranny of one, one permanent king or something like that.

1436
01:21:21,234 --> 01:21:26,834
And so the reason why I bring that up is because you, if you want to have
competition in the

1437
01:21:26,834 --> 01:21:35,234
Bitcoin software world, you have to have the two way peg because you don't want, you
want

1438
01:21:36,034 --> 01:21:40,194
there to be as little a cost as, we want to only have people compete on the code
itself,

1439
01:21:40,194 --> 01:21:45,154
the features and not on other things like who else is in the coalition, who else is

1440
01:21:45,154 --> 01:21:46,194
in the UTXO set.

1441
01:21:46,994 --> 01:21:50,034
And that is very, you know, that's the key.

1442
01:21:50,034 --> 01:21:53,474
So you want, it's all about helping the user.

1443
01:21:54,194 --> 01:21:58,274
And part of the reason is it, I think part of the reason why it's misunderstood is I

1444
01:21:58,274 --> 01:22:04,834
think because it actually does harm certain people in the Bitcoin community, such as
people

1445
01:22:04,834 --> 01:22:08,994
who they just tweet for a living and they don't actually do anything.

1446
01:22:08,994 --> 01:22:14,834
Or they, if they are very prestigious, if they have a high rank in the software

1447
01:22:16,994 --> 01:22:21,874
hierarchy, then I'm reducing that to perfect competition.

1448
01:22:21,874 --> 01:22:25,954
So it's always better to be in a monopolist guild than to have to compete.

1449
01:22:25,954 --> 01:22:27,554
You know, like the Uber drivers, they have to compete.

1450
01:22:27,554 --> 01:22:30,034
They have to get their five-star rating every single time.

1451
01:22:30,914 --> 01:22:32,994
What they do is the same as what other people do.

1452
01:22:33,554 --> 01:22:34,754
Users have options.

1453
01:22:34,834 --> 01:22:37,394
They can get a different driver.

1454
01:22:37,394 --> 01:22:39,154
They can use Lyft instead of Uber.

1455
01:22:39,154 --> 01:22:47,554
So the leverage is very low and everyone prefers to be a monopolist where the
customer can't

1456
01:22:47,554 --> 01:22:53,314
leave and they have to put up with the software no matter how people think it's too
slow or

1457
01:22:53,314 --> 01:22:59,154
too fast or too liberal or too conservative or the blocks are too big or too small.

1458
01:22:59,154 --> 01:23:02,914
The user just has to sit there and take it.

1459
01:23:02,914 --> 01:23:05,314
And that is the problem that sidechain solves.

1460
01:23:05,314 --> 01:23:06,754
So that's why it's so important.

1461
01:23:06,754 --> 01:23:12,114
And now, but that's, I think that's also why there may be, they may be unpopular
among

1462
01:23:12,114 --> 01:23:14,754
certain people because those people are doing the wrong thing.

1463
01:23:15,554 --> 01:23:15,874
Yeah.

1464
01:23:15,874 --> 01:23:25,874
And now it may also be that if I was building a protocol off of Bitcoin and now the
sidechain

1465
01:23:25,874 --> 01:23:32,194
comes up and everyone starts to use it and people are asking, you know, this
protocol

1466
01:23:32,194 --> 01:23:39,154
to move, migrate over to the sidechain instead as a sidechain, as a, as a
independent blockchain

1467
01:23:39,154 --> 01:23:43,234
operator, I'd say, I don't, I don't want to do that because I have this monopoly.

1468
01:23:43,234 --> 01:23:43,474
Right.

1469
01:23:43,474 --> 01:23:46,834
As you, as you mentioned, it's easier, it's safer to be in this monopoly.

1470
01:23:46,834 --> 01:23:52,914
So do you think that inhibits the adoption of sidechains?

1471
01:23:52,914 --> 01:23:58,354
If all these other projects already exist, you mentioned Zcash, Ethereum, all these
things.

1472
01:23:59,154 --> 01:24:04,834
What's their incentive then to port over to the sidechain where all of a sudden now

1473
01:24:04,834 --> 01:24:07,554
they have to compete directly on the merits of their code.

1474
01:24:07,554 --> 01:24:12,114
They don't have any other, they don't have any property that's theirs that they own

1475
01:24:12,114 --> 01:24:13,314
and they control anymore.

1476
01:24:13,874 --> 01:24:14,834
Yeah, you're absolutely right.

1477
01:24:14,834 --> 01:24:19,634
It was a much better idea in 2015 when I had it before these, all these things had a
bigger

1478
01:24:19,634 --> 01:24:20,354
foothold.

1479
01:24:20,354 --> 01:24:21,794
So it was actually a better idea.

1480
01:24:21,794 --> 01:24:28,674
And even though it's still, I think probably the most important idea in Bitcoin
today is

1481
01:24:28,674 --> 01:24:36,194
getting worse as those other places build, build out like a competitive moat or like

1482
01:24:36,194 --> 01:24:37,154
a resistance.

1483
01:24:37,954 --> 01:24:42,914
And in particular, you've highlighted a very important point that the sidechain
coalition

1484
01:24:42,914 --> 01:24:44,434
is losing people often.

1485
01:24:44,434 --> 01:24:49,314
So like people join, they show up and they say, okay, I love Bitcoin.

1486
01:24:49,314 --> 01:24:50,114
I love sidechains.

1487
01:24:50,114 --> 01:24:50,834
Sidechains are great.

1488
01:24:51,394 --> 01:24:53,394
BIP300, they have a BIP300 flag.

1489
01:24:54,114 --> 01:24:58,914
But then after a while they may get impatient because they may say, I want BIP300
because

1490
01:24:58,914 --> 01:25:00,674
I want whatever it is.

1491
01:25:00,674 --> 01:25:06,754
Like David Vork did that SIA project, which is like a bit hard drive thing, which is
a

1492
01:25:06,754 --> 01:25:08,034
very interesting project.

1493
01:25:08,034 --> 01:25:10,274
So you say, okay, sidechains are great.

1494
01:25:10,274 --> 01:25:13,394
But then you look around and you see, and I wanted the prediction markets thing.

1495
01:25:14,034 --> 01:25:17,394
So I could have said, instead of focusing on sidechains, I could have just launched

1496
01:25:17,394 --> 01:25:19,314
the prediction markets project as an altcoin.

1497
01:25:20,194 --> 01:25:22,354
And so I could have done that.

1498
01:25:22,354 --> 01:25:26,434
Now, as soon as you do that, now you're out of the sidechain coalition.

1499
01:25:26,434 --> 01:25:32,194
Now the last thing you want is after everyone like thumbs down your idea or waited
on it

1500
01:25:32,194 --> 01:25:33,634
or whatever, they stalled it out.

1501
01:25:34,674 --> 01:25:38,754
Now you went and you actually did your idea and you built your community from
scratch.

1502
01:25:39,954 --> 01:25:44,354
The kind of the last thing you want is to kind of like be stolen and taken back.

1503
01:25:44,354 --> 01:25:49,074
And you probably own a lot of the coin, you own a lot of whatever, you own a lot of
Zcash.

1504
01:25:49,154 --> 01:25:57,074
You built this thing after the Bitcoin community failed to take an interest in your
idea.

1505
01:25:57,074 --> 01:26:00,994
Then you prove that the idea would have been popular with some customers.

1506
01:26:02,274 --> 01:26:04,514
And now the last thing you want is for the sidechain.

1507
01:26:04,514 --> 01:26:06,834
So sometimes people don't see it that way.

1508
01:26:06,834 --> 01:26:07,954
Sometimes people do.

1509
01:26:07,954 --> 01:26:11,794
I think probably David Vork actually would see it that he would be excited to have
the

1510
01:26:11,794 --> 01:26:14,914
project come back as a Bitcoin sidechain, for example.

1511
01:26:15,394 --> 01:26:19,714
But, you know, like the Ethereum people, it's pretty clear that it's not the case,
right?

1512
01:26:19,714 --> 01:26:26,194
They would not want, they want Ethereum to just win and do the flipping over
Bitcoin.

1513
01:26:26,194 --> 01:26:31,714
So it would have been much better to try and do this stuff earlier before those
things

1514
01:26:31,714 --> 01:26:32,994
would get a foothold.

1515
01:26:32,994 --> 01:26:35,394
And if we did, we would live in a completely different world.

1516
01:26:35,394 --> 01:26:37,154
And all those people would still be Bitcoiners.

1517
01:26:37,154 --> 01:26:40,914
And you'd have even whoever is like a very toxic person.

1518
01:26:40,914 --> 01:26:48,114
Let's say you have a super toxic person presenting at Bitcoin Miami or something.

1519
01:26:48,114 --> 01:26:50,354
They would instead, they would have a different speech.

1520
01:26:50,354 --> 01:26:55,234
They would say something like all these projects, they would, first of all, the
target of their

1521
01:26:56,514 --> 01:27:01,634
ire, their hatred would be like something like Hex or something, you know, or they
would

1522
01:27:01,634 --> 01:27:03,234
say or Ripple or something.

1523
01:27:03,954 --> 01:27:07,314
Some other thing that was, they would say these projects are scams.

1524
01:27:07,314 --> 01:27:08,354
They're terrible.

1525
01:27:08,434 --> 01:27:12,594
And then they would say anyone who's serious does their project as a Bitcoin
sidechain.

1526
01:27:13,154 --> 01:27:20,034
Just look at this boy genius Vitalik Buterin who made the Turing Complete sidechain,
which

1527
01:27:20,034 --> 01:27:22,514
is now one of our biggest sidechains.

1528
01:27:22,514 --> 01:27:24,994
And there's no reason to have these.

1529
01:27:24,994 --> 01:27:30,914
So people who are today, the toxic people, they would be the same type of person,
but

1530
01:27:30,914 --> 01:27:32,114
they'd have a different script.

1531
01:27:32,114 --> 01:27:38,674
And the script would include thinking of all these people, Roger Ver, Vitalik, they
would

1532
01:27:38,674 --> 01:27:40,034
all just still be Bitcoiners.

1533
01:27:40,034 --> 01:27:40,994
They would never have left.

1534
01:27:41,874 --> 01:27:43,314
And so it would have been a better idea.

1535
01:27:43,314 --> 01:27:44,594
It was a better idea before.

1536
01:27:44,594 --> 01:27:45,954
As good of an idea it is today.

1537
01:27:46,514 --> 01:27:47,954
It would have been better to do it back then.

1538
01:27:48,674 --> 01:27:50,434
I hope you're enjoying the show so far.

1539
01:27:50,434 --> 01:27:52,674
Just a quick message from our sponsor, Stackwork.

1540
01:27:53,314 --> 01:27:58,674
Stackwork is a lightning-powered platform for generating high-quality transcripts of

1541
01:27:58,674 --> 01:28:00,514
all your audio or video content.

1542
01:28:01,074 --> 01:28:06,114
They combine AI engines and hundreds of human workers all over the world who are
paid over

1543
01:28:06,114 --> 01:28:09,234
the lightning network to assemble these transcripts.

1544
01:28:09,234 --> 01:28:14,754
And that's what lets Stackwork create better, faster, and less expensive
transcripts.

1545
01:28:15,394 --> 01:28:19,634
To see the results for yourself, you can check out my personal website where I host

1546
01:28:19,634 --> 01:28:21,874
transcripts for all my podcast episodes.

1547
01:28:22,594 --> 01:28:26,434
If you want to learn more about Stackwork, visit stackwork.com.

1548
01:28:26,434 --> 01:28:29,874
That is S-T-A-K-work.com.

1549
01:28:29,874 --> 01:28:35,474
Okay, I want to get into the second point that you made here for LayerTwo Labs.

1550
01:28:35,474 --> 01:28:38,994
It says, second, you plan to improve Bitcoin's UX.

1551
01:28:39,634 --> 01:28:41,074
That's kind of terrible, isn't it?

1552
01:28:41,074 --> 01:28:43,954
I mean, it's okay, but it's not the worst.

1553
01:28:44,914 --> 01:28:50,354
Well, so I want to hear more about what you mean by making nodes useful and easy to
understand.

1554
01:28:50,914 --> 01:28:56,194
You can already download our software and check some of that out.

1555
01:28:56,914 --> 01:29:03,394
One thing that's annoying is the node doesn't explain itself.

1556
01:29:04,274 --> 01:29:07,794
So one thing, we put a block explorer in the node, first of all.

1557
01:29:07,794 --> 01:29:09,874
So that's kind of a neat thing where now you can check.

1558
01:29:10,674 --> 01:29:16,194
Right now, if you want to check, if you just want to see the blockchain as a human,

1559
01:29:18,034 --> 01:29:19,634
you have to go on the internet.

1560
01:29:19,634 --> 01:29:24,834
And now when you do that, they know that if you go to whatever it is, the block
explorer,

1561
01:29:24,834 --> 01:29:28,514
blockchain.info, whatever, I don't know, I bring them up because they're so old,

1562
01:29:28,514 --> 01:29:32,674
but they're actually, you know, the block explorer is very nice.

1563
01:29:32,674 --> 01:29:36,114
And my favorite one, I got to show my favorite one, is this one, yog.io.

1564
01:29:36,834 --> 01:29:41,074
It explains what every single byte is doing in every transaction in every block.

1565
01:29:41,074 --> 01:29:42,754
It like highlights them with colors.

1566
01:29:42,754 --> 01:29:43,234
It's great.

1567
01:29:43,234 --> 01:29:45,874
We got to get that into our block explorer.

1568
01:29:45,874 --> 01:29:47,554
This color thing is really cool.

1569
01:29:48,274 --> 01:29:49,794
So check that out if you can.

1570
01:29:51,314 --> 01:29:51,814
Right.

1571
01:29:52,754 --> 01:29:54,194
And so you have to go there.

1572
01:29:54,194 --> 01:29:55,474
Now you contact their server.

1573
01:29:55,474 --> 01:29:56,594
They know your IP address.

1574
01:29:56,594 --> 01:29:58,594
They know which transactions you're looking at.

1575
01:29:58,594 --> 01:30:01,074
You're going over the internet, you know, you're going out in the open.

1576
01:30:01,074 --> 01:30:04,594
So this is not a big deal, but we put the block explorer in the software

1577
01:30:04,594 --> 01:30:06,354
so that you can see the blockchain.

1578
01:30:06,354 --> 01:30:09,954
And blockchain.info used to have this thing that they got rid of.

1579
01:30:09,954 --> 01:30:12,354
And then later they tried to put it back in.

1580
01:30:12,354 --> 01:30:15,154
But that I called, in my head, this is my nickname for it.

1581
01:30:15,154 --> 01:30:16,754
I call it the transaction fireplace.

1582
01:30:17,394 --> 01:30:18,594
But it's this cool thing.

1583
01:30:18,594 --> 01:30:19,954
It used to go on their site.

1584
01:30:19,954 --> 01:30:24,674
And as transactions came in, it would like scroll them through, I'd say.

1585
01:30:24,674 --> 01:30:25,954
And you could just watch.

1586
01:30:25,954 --> 01:30:27,314
You could just have it open in your thing.

1587
01:30:27,314 --> 01:30:30,034
And you could just watch people transacting on the Bitcoin network.

1588
01:30:30,034 --> 01:30:31,314
And then a new block would come in.

1589
01:30:31,314 --> 01:30:32,354
And it would do that.

1590
01:30:32,354 --> 01:30:33,394
So we put that in the node.

1591
01:30:33,394 --> 01:30:35,074
We put that back in because it's cool to see.

1592
01:30:35,074 --> 01:30:36,114
You have the node.

1593
01:30:36,114 --> 01:30:40,674
And you can see, oh, this is how much Bitcoin people are sending.

1594
01:30:40,674 --> 01:30:41,874
And this is the fee they're paying.

1595
01:30:41,874 --> 01:30:42,914
And you just have this little thing.

1596
01:30:42,914 --> 01:30:44,194
And you can just see things.

1597
01:30:44,914 --> 01:30:47,714
Another thing we did is this idea of the hash calculator.

1598
01:30:47,794 --> 01:30:50,514
If you're a technical person, you have to take these hashes.

1599
01:30:50,514 --> 01:30:54,274
Now, of course, if you're a real programmer, you're programming in the command line.

1600
01:30:54,274 --> 01:30:57,074
And you have databases and things.

1601
01:30:57,634 --> 01:31:00,754
But that is a little too much work.

1602
01:31:01,634 --> 01:31:04,994
That's like taking out the heavy artillery.

1603
01:31:04,994 --> 01:31:09,474
Sometimes you just want to see what is the hash of, you know, what if I type in a
word like Apple?

1604
01:31:09,474 --> 01:31:10,754
What is the hash?

1605
01:31:10,754 --> 01:31:16,034
Or if I paste something, I paste a raw transaction, the Bitcoin software says,

1606
01:31:16,194 --> 01:31:20,194
the Bitcoin software says, you're told all this stuff is happening.

1607
01:31:20,194 --> 01:31:25,794
Like you're told that Bitcoin has blocks that are made of a vector of transactions.

1608
01:31:25,794 --> 01:31:28,514
And that if you hash the transactions a certain way,

1609
01:31:28,514 --> 01:31:30,994
you get this hash Merkle root, which is in the block.

1610
01:31:30,994 --> 01:31:32,114
You're told all this stuff.

1611
01:31:32,114 --> 01:31:36,914
But a normal person has no way of understanding what any of it means, if anything.

1612
01:31:36,914 --> 01:31:38,674
So let's say you have the transaction.

1613
01:31:38,674 --> 01:31:39,794
You have the raw hex.

1614
01:31:40,674 --> 01:31:42,194
You have the transaction.

1615
01:31:42,194 --> 01:31:43,714
And you put it on your clipboard.

1616
01:31:44,434 --> 01:31:46,034
You'd want to just take the hash.

1617
01:31:46,034 --> 01:31:48,674
You take what is the hash of that to see that it matches the transaction ID.

1618
01:31:48,674 --> 01:31:50,194
You can see for yourself that it does.

1619
01:31:50,754 --> 01:31:54,274
You can kind of learn about Bitcoin in the privacy of your own computer.

1620
01:31:54,274 --> 01:31:56,434
So we have this hash calculator, which I really like.

1621
01:31:56,434 --> 01:31:57,634
And I am a big fan of this.

1622
01:31:57,634 --> 01:31:58,914
And this is nothing.

1623
01:31:58,914 --> 01:32:00,594
Now, I'm not going to win the Nobel Prize for this.

1624
01:32:00,594 --> 01:32:02,194
But it's just this thing.

1625
01:32:02,194 --> 01:32:02,914
You open it up.

1626
01:32:03,794 --> 01:32:06,034
And if you type, it gives you all the hashes.

1627
01:32:06,034 --> 01:32:09,794
And every single time you type a keystroke, it changes the hash for you.

1628
01:32:09,794 --> 01:32:12,194
So you can now see, you see exactly what a hash is.

1629
01:32:12,834 --> 01:32:15,714
And you can view it different ways, binaries.

1630
01:32:15,714 --> 01:32:17,474
Most people struggle with this idea.

1631
01:32:18,114 --> 01:32:24,274
But if you just play with the hash calculator for seven seconds, you'll learn
exactly what a hash is.

1632
01:32:24,994 --> 01:32:25,954
And you'll never forget.

1633
01:32:25,954 --> 01:32:29,234
And you understand why the different hashing algorithms are different.

1634
01:32:29,234 --> 01:32:30,434
And we do all the ones for you.

1635
01:32:30,434 --> 01:32:32,754
We do double-shot 256D.

1636
01:32:32,754 --> 01:32:33,554
We do one-shot.

1637
01:32:34,754 --> 01:32:36,754
We have different little settings.

1638
01:32:36,754 --> 01:32:39,154
So these are things that we already have that you can already download.

1639
01:32:39,154 --> 01:32:40,754
And this is only the beginning.

1640
01:32:40,754 --> 01:32:42,994
I plan on doing lots of more stuff.

1641
01:32:43,954 --> 01:32:45,634
We have something called CoinNews.

1642
01:32:45,634 --> 01:32:47,234
This is a weird idea.

1643
01:32:47,234 --> 01:32:53,074
This is how I think the community has gone in the wrong direction.

1644
01:32:54,834 --> 01:33:03,234
But CoinNews is this fully cosmetic thing that has no change to the protocol.

1645
01:33:03,234 --> 01:33:04,834
There's no change to the blockchain.

1646
01:33:04,834 --> 01:33:07,554
It's just a user interface thing.

1647
01:33:07,554 --> 01:33:12,834
And it displays part of the blockchain in a certain way.

1648
01:33:14,594 --> 01:33:18,354
But I think this has the potential to be revolutionary.

1649
01:33:18,354 --> 01:33:23,714
And so what it does is, if you like, you can broadcast this CoinNews.

1650
01:33:23,714 --> 01:33:25,794
And then you pay a transaction fee.

1651
01:33:25,794 --> 01:33:31,394
And what it does is CoinNews will scan the entire Bitcoin blockchain

1652
01:33:31,394 --> 01:33:33,234
for anything that's formatted a certain way.

1653
01:33:34,194 --> 01:33:35,794
The CoinNews style.

1654
01:33:36,434 --> 01:33:41,474
And then they have a little prefix, which is like categories.

1655
01:33:41,474 --> 01:33:45,714
So we have US Weekly.

1656
01:33:46,514 --> 01:33:48,194
And we have Japan Weekly.

1657
01:33:48,194 --> 01:33:52,194
Because people who speak different languages, they don't want to collide with each
other.

1658
01:33:52,194 --> 01:33:54,274
So this is for everyone's mutual convenience.

1659
01:33:55,474 --> 01:34:01,474
And then once it sorts that out, and then the weekly ones last seven days.

1660
01:34:01,474 --> 01:34:02,994
And then you can have something else.

1661
01:34:03,954 --> 01:34:05,634
One day or less a month.

1662
01:34:05,634 --> 01:34:07,074
You can have that's configurable.

1663
01:34:07,954 --> 01:34:18,834
And once it sorts all these out, it displays the op return text in the human
readable ASCII.

1664
01:34:18,834 --> 01:34:21,474
And it sorts them by the transaction fee paid.

1665
01:34:22,594 --> 01:34:23,154
That's the key.

1666
01:34:23,954 --> 01:34:27,554
So if you want to get the news out there, you just outbid whoever is on the top.

1667
01:34:28,194 --> 01:34:29,154
And then you get this thing.

1668
01:34:29,154 --> 01:34:32,114
And then every Bitcoiner who's running the node can see the news.

1669
01:34:32,114 --> 01:34:34,354
And then everyone knows that everyone else saw it as well.

1670
01:34:34,354 --> 01:34:35,314
So this is enormous.

1671
01:34:35,314 --> 01:34:37,314
This is a game theoretic implication.

1672
01:34:37,314 --> 01:34:39,874
That it's what they call common knowledge.

1673
01:34:39,874 --> 01:34:42,674
Which is a technical term in the game theory world.

1674
01:34:42,674 --> 01:34:45,314
It doesn't mean what it means.

1675
01:34:45,314 --> 01:34:46,674
It means that you know something.

1676
01:34:47,634 --> 01:34:50,514
And you know that everyone else knows it as well.

1677
01:34:50,514 --> 01:34:52,034
And this is enormous significance.

1678
01:34:52,034 --> 01:34:53,714
Versus what's called mutual knowledge.

1679
01:34:53,714 --> 01:34:55,954
Which is like you know that you're a spy.

1680
01:34:56,754 --> 01:34:57,394
And they know.

1681
01:34:57,394 --> 01:35:01,874
Or it's like you know that your wife is cheating on you.

1682
01:35:01,874 --> 01:35:02,594
And she knows.

1683
01:35:02,594 --> 01:35:04,754
But you don't know that each other knows yet.

1684
01:35:05,314 --> 01:35:07,794
So this is like a dramatic situation.

1685
01:35:07,794 --> 01:35:10,514
But common knowledge is when everyone knows that everyone knows.

1686
01:35:10,514 --> 01:35:11,954
So often like a dictatorship.

1687
01:35:11,954 --> 01:35:13,554
Everyone will secretly hate the dictator.

1688
01:35:13,554 --> 01:35:15,954
But they don't know how much support there is.

1689
01:35:16,914 --> 01:35:17,874
So they just stay home.

1690
01:35:18,674 --> 01:35:20,034
But then there's an inflection point.

1691
01:35:20,034 --> 01:35:21,474
Something big will happen.

1692
01:35:21,474 --> 01:35:22,994
Like that one in Iran.

1693
01:35:22,994 --> 01:35:24,754
That one girl dying.

1694
01:35:24,754 --> 01:35:28,194
And everyone knows that this has crossed some kind of line.

1695
01:35:28,194 --> 01:35:29,314
This is so outrageous.

1696
01:35:29,314 --> 01:35:31,794
That they know that it upsets them.

1697
01:35:31,794 --> 01:35:35,954
And they know it's very likely to have upset a huge majority of people.

1698
01:35:35,954 --> 01:35:36,754
And then this is.

1699
01:35:36,754 --> 01:35:38,034
So this is enormous.

1700
01:35:38,034 --> 01:35:39,314
So this is called coin news.

1701
01:35:39,314 --> 01:35:39,874
It's a simple thing.

1702
01:35:39,874 --> 01:35:40,834
Doesn't change anything.

1703
01:35:40,834 --> 01:35:41,554
If you don't like it.

1704
01:35:41,554 --> 01:35:42,594
Then you don't.

1705
01:35:42,594 --> 01:35:43,474
You won't even see it.

1706
01:35:43,474 --> 01:35:44,994
If you don't run our software.

1707
01:35:44,994 --> 01:35:46,034
But we have like.

1708
01:35:46,034 --> 01:35:47,714
People like the operative term graffiti.

1709
01:35:47,714 --> 01:35:49,074
They like to put stuff in there.

1710
01:35:49,074 --> 01:35:50,834
So it's like this is just some.

1711
01:35:50,834 --> 01:35:52,914
These are some examples of things that we've already done.

1712
01:35:52,914 --> 01:35:54,434
But I plan to go even further than that.

1713
01:35:54,434 --> 01:35:56,834
We want to have it so that you can easily make a wallet.

1714
01:35:56,834 --> 01:35:58,514
Because right now you just click a button.

1715
01:35:58,514 --> 01:35:59,634
And it gives you a wallet.

1716
01:35:59,634 --> 01:36:02,834
But we know that from the Snowden leaks.

1717
01:36:03,714 --> 01:36:07,314
That many adversaries have compromised.

1718
01:36:07,314 --> 01:36:08,834
Like random number generation.

1719
01:36:08,834 --> 01:36:09,714
And things like that.

1720
01:36:09,714 --> 01:36:10,754
So we want to.

1721
01:36:10,754 --> 01:36:12,194
It's going to be very easy to just generate.

1722
01:36:12,194 --> 01:36:14,034
You shuffle a deck of cards or something.

1723
01:36:14,034 --> 01:36:16,754
And just type in 20 or 30.

1724
01:36:16,754 --> 01:36:18,114
You just fill out the cards.

1725
01:36:18,114 --> 01:36:20,034
You just type in 20 or 30 cards.

1726
01:36:20,034 --> 01:36:21,634
And again it'll be a situation.

1727
01:36:22,514 --> 01:36:24,754
We already have a version of this in our software.

1728
01:36:26,594 --> 01:36:27,154
Where you.

1729
01:36:27,154 --> 01:36:30,194
Every keystroke recalculates the wallet.

1730
01:36:30,194 --> 01:36:31,394
So you can also audit it.

1731
01:36:31,394 --> 01:36:31,954
You can call.

1732
01:36:31,954 --> 01:36:32,754
You can call up a friend.

1733
01:36:32,754 --> 01:36:34,754
Or you can have two computers next to each other.

1734
01:36:34,754 --> 01:36:36,274
You can type something in.

1735
01:36:36,274 --> 01:36:37,234
You know you type in apple.

1736
01:36:37,234 --> 01:36:39,394
Or you type fish 123 space.

1737
01:36:39,394 --> 01:36:41,234
And you can see that they behave the same way.

1738
01:36:42,194 --> 01:36:43,714
So now you know that it's working.

1739
01:36:43,714 --> 01:36:44,994
You know there's a connection.

1740
01:36:44,994 --> 01:36:47,234
Between the seed entropy that you type in.

1741
01:36:48,194 --> 01:36:49,474
And the wallet that comes out.

1742
01:36:50,354 --> 01:36:51,954
And of course it gives you the 12 words.

1743
01:36:51,954 --> 01:36:55,154
So that you don't need to memorize the cards.

1744
01:36:55,154 --> 01:36:58,114
It gives you the 12 words to restore the same wallet.

1745
01:36:58,114 --> 01:36:59,874
And the other thing is we have bit 47.

1746
01:36:59,874 --> 01:37:01,074
I can give you a huge list.

1747
01:37:01,074 --> 01:37:01,874
You know of like.

1748
01:37:01,874 --> 01:37:02,914
There's a huge.

1749
01:37:03,954 --> 01:37:07,794
The Canadian truckers I mentioned in the post.

1750
01:37:07,794 --> 01:37:10,114
And that was a big wake-up call.

1751
01:37:10,114 --> 01:37:13,714
Because that's like pure bitcoin.

1752
01:37:14,914 --> 01:37:16,754
That's like the direct center of bitcoin's.

1753
01:37:17,314 --> 01:37:19,554
Arisen detra or whatever reason for existing.

1754
01:37:19,554 --> 01:37:20,054
So.

1755
01:37:22,674 --> 01:37:24,674
Why did we screw that up so badly?

1756
01:37:24,674 --> 01:37:27,154
That none of those people got their money basically.

1757
01:37:27,154 --> 01:37:29,874
And the Canadian government like confiscated the funds.

1758
01:37:29,874 --> 01:37:31,714
And people didn't know how to send them money.

1759
01:37:31,714 --> 01:37:33,794
It should be very easy for people to post.

1760
01:37:34,674 --> 01:37:36,034
Because it confiscated addresses.

1761
01:37:36,034 --> 01:37:39,554
So bit 47 was this idea of people would just have these codes.

1762
01:37:40,114 --> 01:37:42,514
And you would just message them.

1763
01:37:44,114 --> 01:37:46,274
The first transaction of them would have a little message.

1764
01:37:47,234 --> 01:37:48,274
That would link the two of you.

1765
01:37:48,274 --> 01:37:51,474
And then you'd have an infinite number of disposable addresses.

1766
01:37:51,474 --> 01:37:52,834
That under the hood.

1767
01:37:52,834 --> 01:37:54,594
The software would take care of everything.

1768
01:37:55,874 --> 01:37:57,154
And they would get the money.

1769
01:37:57,154 --> 01:37:58,354
And it would be a new address.

1770
01:37:58,354 --> 01:37:59,154
And no one would know.

1771
01:38:00,114 --> 01:38:04,354
The only problem is it makes the first transaction like 20% larger.

1772
01:38:04,354 --> 01:38:05,234
And people.

1773
01:38:05,874 --> 01:38:07,874
Some people in the bitcoin community were like.

1774
01:38:07,874 --> 01:38:10,274
This is spamming the blockchain with non.

1775
01:38:12,354 --> 01:38:13,474
Transaction data.

1776
01:38:13,474 --> 01:38:15,794
And we have to filter all this out.

1777
01:38:15,794 --> 01:38:17,074
But I don't have that view at all.

1778
01:38:17,074 --> 01:38:18,194
I think we want everything.

1779
01:38:18,194 --> 01:38:19,874
We want block space demand to go up.

1780
01:38:19,874 --> 01:38:22,194
And we want everyone to be using it for everything.

1781
01:38:22,194 --> 01:38:24,114
And especially for something that makes it easy.

1782
01:38:24,834 --> 01:38:26,594
To privately send.

1783
01:38:26,594 --> 01:38:27,874
To do banking basically.

1784
01:38:27,874 --> 01:38:29,154
Which is what the whole point is.

1785
01:38:29,714 --> 01:38:31,874
So we dropped the ball on all that.

1786
01:38:32,594 --> 01:38:34,194
So those are just some.

1787
01:38:35,474 --> 01:38:37,074
And a lot of that stuff we have already.

1788
01:38:37,074 --> 01:38:38,194
You can download our software.

1789
01:38:38,194 --> 01:38:39,474
And you can see for yourself.

1790
01:38:39,474 --> 01:38:43,554
You can see for yourself what I'm kind of aiming for.

1791
01:38:43,554 --> 01:38:45,314
And then you can decide like.

1792
01:38:45,314 --> 01:38:47,234
Is this one thing that.

1793
01:38:48,194 --> 01:38:49,554
I hate to keep rambling on in here.

1794
01:38:49,554 --> 01:38:50,354
But as you can tell.

1795
01:38:50,354 --> 01:38:51,874
I'm kind of passionate about this issue.

1796
01:38:51,874 --> 01:38:55,634
Which is like the bitcoin core is going to change their.

1797
01:38:57,234 --> 01:38:58,754
The QT GUI.

1798
01:38:58,754 --> 01:39:00,114
Because it's not very good.

1799
01:39:00,114 --> 01:39:03,714
And it does nothing like wrong with it per se.

1800
01:39:03,714 --> 01:39:05,394
But like the transactions tab is like.

1801
01:39:06,754 --> 01:39:07,314
Terrible.

1802
01:39:07,314 --> 01:39:10,914
So when I was making the BIP300 software.

1803
01:39:10,914 --> 01:39:13,634
Just for my own use.

1804
01:39:13,634 --> 01:39:15,234
I would like start changing things.

1805
01:39:15,234 --> 01:39:16,274
And deleting things.

1806
01:39:16,274 --> 01:39:17,634
And moving things around.

1807
01:39:17,634 --> 01:39:18,354
And then I just like.

1808
01:39:18,354 --> 01:39:19,074
It's a lot better.

1809
01:39:19,074 --> 01:39:20,994
Like one thing that I came up with.

1810
01:39:21,634 --> 01:39:22,194
It's just again.

1811
01:39:22,194 --> 01:39:23,874
I'm not going to win the Nobel Prize for this.

1812
01:39:23,874 --> 01:39:25,874
But the sats.

1813
01:39:25,874 --> 01:39:27,074
It's eight digits.

1814
01:39:27,074 --> 01:39:28,434
So I put a comma.

1815
01:39:29,394 --> 01:39:29,954
The four.

1816
01:39:29,954 --> 01:39:30,754
It's four digits.

1817
01:39:30,754 --> 01:39:32,194
The decimal point.

1818
01:39:32,194 --> 01:39:34,034
Four digits and a comma.

1819
01:39:34,034 --> 01:39:35,074
And then four digits.

1820
01:39:35,794 --> 01:39:37,314
And that was great.

1821
01:39:37,314 --> 01:39:38,754
And then people would notice that.

1822
01:39:38,754 --> 01:39:39,314
And then they'd be like.

1823
01:39:39,314 --> 01:39:40,274
This is amazing.

1824
01:39:40,354 --> 01:39:40,754
And you know.

1825
01:39:40,754 --> 01:39:41,474
And I was just like.

1826
01:39:41,474 --> 01:39:42,994
Well okay.

1827
01:39:42,994 --> 01:39:43,954
Like I was kind of.

1828
01:39:43,954 --> 01:39:44,674
I have two minds.

1829
01:39:44,674 --> 01:39:45,394
About like should.

1830
01:39:45,394 --> 01:39:46,994
Should I keep putting time into this.

1831
01:39:46,994 --> 01:39:48,514
But I honestly think that.

1832
01:39:48,514 --> 01:39:49,474
I think that.

1833
01:39:49,474 --> 01:39:50,034
I think it's.

1834
01:39:51,154 --> 01:39:53,074
Right now people are impelled.

1835
01:39:53,074 --> 01:39:54,674
Or I double use that word.

1836
01:39:54,674 --> 01:39:56,914
But people are persuaded to use.

1837
01:39:57,554 --> 01:39:58,054
The.

1838
01:39:58,354 --> 01:39:59,074
A full node.

1839
01:39:59,074 --> 01:40:00,674
Out of a kind of guilt.

1840
01:40:00,674 --> 01:40:01,554
And shame.

1841
01:40:01,554 --> 01:40:03,074
That is our current strategy.

1842
01:40:03,074 --> 01:40:03,394
It's like.

1843
01:40:03,394 --> 01:40:04,914
Do you run a full node.

1844
01:40:04,984 --> 01:40:31,984
And if you don't. Then people make fun of you. But I don't think that's. I think
that's you know. The node should be. People should use the node. Because they think
the node is really cool. And they like. They like to see the block chain. They like
to see that their transactions are confirmed. They like to see. They like to see
what other people are seeing. This is a. So that's a. That's my big answer for that.
I think we've got a long way to go. Even though we've already done a lot. And I
think.

1845
01:40:31,984 --> 01:41:01,984
I think a lot of that will eventually be. Accepted as a. Best practices. Right. So
for example that wallet generation thing. Right now you just click a button. And
they say it's random. And when you may generate a wallet. You have no way of knowing
it all. I see. Now I want to get into the third component there. Some of the high
risk high reward problems you guys are working on at LayerTwo Labs. And you talk a
bit about. Prediction markets. Resurrecting Namecoin. And.

1846
01:41:01,984 --> 01:41:15,984
You mentioned that if these are successful. They'll revolutionize media and
telecommunications. Just as Bitcoin revolutionized banking. Now this is a very big
statement. Talk to me about how some of these projects are working.

1847
01:41:15,984 --> 01:41:27,984
I've already loaded up the prediction markets thing. Because I'd already done all
this work. So I can. That one's easier for me to. If you go to bitcoinhivemind.com
you can see all the stuff that I put. I have papers. I have a cool 20 minute
presentation.

1848
01:41:27,984 --> 01:41:41,984
Where I explain the potential. And the potential is that with prediction markets.
The prediction markets are a way of getting everyone to. Getting all society's
knowledge in one place. And then broadcasting it out to everyone. So.

1849
01:41:41,984 --> 01:41:57,984
If you think that something is. So for example. You can go to
electionbettingodds.com right now and see who's likely to win the Super Bowl. And
people bet. And there's a certain percentage. And you can also see. This is a very
enlightening task because.

1850
01:41:57,984 --> 01:42:13,984
On the various prediction market sites you can see who's likely to win the
presidency or the nomination. And if you look at this betting data. You'll see that
these decisions are being made long before they reach the public. Which is. It makes
sense if you think about it.

1851
01:42:13,984 --> 01:42:34,984
Like there's no way that you really just decide like two weeks before election day
or something within the primaries. I mean it must be a long career in the party. But
it's kind of just something you said clear to you like how early they start vetting
the list of who is seriously plausibly could win or something like that.

1852
01:42:35,984 --> 01:42:53,984
But the potential with prediction markets is these conditional prediction markets
where you can say. If this person is elected. What is the unemployment rate going to
be? What will the GDP be? What will the value of all the land in the world be? Or
within the country?

1853
01:42:54,984 --> 01:43:14,984
What will such and such. How much tax revenue will be collected? How much whatever.
So if you have that then you can compare the two people. This is exactly like the
fork futures idea. You can compare the two candidates or really in the case of the
United States the two parties. This is a better way of doing it. You just say you
have the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party.

1854
01:43:15,984 --> 01:43:37,984
And you can just say look here's what you're going to get if you the Democratic
candidate. The government is going to spend this much. The GDP is going to be this.
The unemployment rate is going to be this. Whatever you care about you just make
markets about it and then you have two columns basically before election day on what
will happen over the next four years if you pick one or the other.

1855
01:43:38,984 --> 01:44:02,984
And so this is huge because usually the margin of victory is very small. The races
are close. Huge numbers of people don't vote and then when you ask them why they
don't vote they say because they don't know how to tell which candidate would be
better. So you only need a very small number of people to. And again over time the
prediction markets will establish there because the way they work is if you think
any of the prices are wrong you can make money by doing the trade where it will be
right.

1856
01:44:02,984 --> 01:44:22,984
So over time they'll continue to correctly predict who will win like the Super Bowl
and who will win the Academy Awards and things like that. So over time it will gain
some credibility. I have like a million thoughts about prediction markets. So just
like an infinite amount of stuff over there.

1857
01:44:22,984 --> 01:44:24,984
We can save that for another episode.

1858
01:44:53,984 --> 01:45:20,984
You know like you need all this stuff. You got to type it in. Then they got to type
in the credit card blah blah blah. If in the world with the Namecoin sidechain it
would be something like you would just go and there's no more logging in either with
a username and password because there's everything would log in through the Namecoin sidechain in my in my dream world which is the only thing stopping it is you
know that the viewers like you getting psyched about it because.

1859
01:45:20,984 --> 01:45:35,984
So you go to any site and you just type in you have you own a name like I'm you I
whatever like I own Paul that bit or something. They don't have to end in that bit
but they started that Satoshi started that convention and I think it's good enough.

1860
01:45:35,984 --> 01:45:53,984
You know so so yeah I have I have Paul starts that bit or whatever and I go to
whatever it is Delta Airlines and you never log in anyway. You just type in Paul
starts that bit. They the little it sends a little notification to your phone or
whatever has the private key.

1861
01:45:54,984 --> 01:46:08,984
It just says it gives you a little pin number like 6 4 5 1 2 whatever. And then so
you never have to remember any password ever again. You just need your 12 words for
your Namecoin ID which could be like the same crypto ID for everything.

1862
01:46:08,984 --> 01:46:20,984
And then you type in the pen and you log in. You buy the ticket. When you go to the
airport they you can look up everything from your name. They can go to global entry
and look you up over there. They don't know you know you don't need to remember
anything.

1863
01:46:21,984 --> 01:46:30,984
And you know it's very similar to the ideas of TBD and slash tags when you talk
about the identity being tied to keys.

1864
01:46:31,984 --> 01:46:43,984
I think that a lot of people have a lot of people have glimpsed this idea over the
it's not again it's not like if this idea is old it's from 2010 like authentication
is something that people talk about a lot.

1865
01:46:44,984 --> 01:46:58,984
So I don't think that again like I have any particular monopoly on this idea. In
fact I'm sure people have some better kind of version of it but lots of people have
done it like the Microsoft did.

1866
01:46:59,984 --> 01:47:08,984
But that is that doesn't those aren't human readable as far as I remember. If
theorem theorem has like an E.N.S. theorem system or something. Bitcoin SV did
something like this.

1867
01:47:09,984 --> 01:47:20,984
So the key thing to focus on with that is the fact that so many independent people
give it their attention or try it. That's what makes it that's what proves it's such
a great idea.

1868
01:47:21,984 --> 01:47:25,984
People really want it. It's a good idea. People are interested in it. So we should
do it. And it's great.

1869
01:47:26,984 --> 01:47:35,984
You know another feature is you have this log in which again it's very different
than like log in through Facebook or something because you own the key. It's your
you actually own it forever.

1870
01:47:36,984 --> 01:47:46,984
Yeah. You have a situation where you own you have this screen name on Reddit but
then Instagram comes out or then tick tock comes out.

1871
01:47:47,984 --> 01:47:59,984
Well now you have to kind of go over there and make sure that you you reserve it in
the current system. But in the Namecoin system you always have your one identity is
your digital identity and they you don't even need to do anything.

1872
01:47:59,984 --> 01:48:11,984
As soon as you go over there they know how to query. They hit the Namecoin
blockchain and they they send the ping out to your device and you you decode the pin
or however you log whoever you want to log in.

1873
01:48:12,984 --> 01:48:18,984
Yeah. So it migrates across platforms and then you get full control as the key owner
of who you give the data to.

1874
01:48:18,984 --> 01:48:30,984
And you have the same name. So a funny example I give sometimes is this guy does a
chess YouTube and in the bottom he has to list all of the all of his screen names
and some they're mostly the same.

1875
01:48:31,984 --> 01:48:37,984
But sometimes they're not like I like his Facebook one is like a little different.
And then it's kind of like the fact that you have to list them all at all.

1876
01:48:38,984 --> 01:48:49,984
Mm hmm. That's the problem. You know. And then to let alone we can talk about like
deplatforming which is not possible now because you can always message someone on
the Namecoin blockchain.

1877
01:48:50,984 --> 01:48:55,984
So that's expensive. So again this is where people get confused because they say
like we're gonna put social media on the blockchain.

1878
01:48:56,984 --> 01:49:15,984
That's a terrible idea because just you know it's a completely different scale. But
as long as you have the ability as a last resort to use social media like features
in the blockchain context where everyone has the same view.

1879
01:49:16,984 --> 01:49:35,984
Everyone has validated nodes that process the same blocks. As long as you have that
threat they can't really deplatform you easily because if they kick you off of all
these things you can message everyone and say listen my new Twitter account is this
or like whatever or I have moved to whatever.

1880
01:49:35,984 --> 01:49:45,984
And then they can even have their software just automatically like re follow you or
something because they always know it's you because you have the same name you the
same public key the same private key.

1881
01:49:46,984 --> 01:49:51,984
So that you saw the software will always know that you're talking to the real Jordan
Peterson or whatever.

1882
01:49:52,984 --> 01:50:13,984
So the potential is enormous actually is enormous and you can see how this is a
revolution because it means that you could even have people who they are Internet
activists and no one knows their real identity and they have they have a reach and
they have the ability to like log into Twitter and they have the ability to like
make tech talk videos and no one actually knows who they are even.

1883
01:50:14,984 --> 01:50:32,984
And they can get out messages people spam is a big issue but spam was one of the
original use cases for Bitcoin where if you want an introduction to someone you can
send you send fifty dollars or whatever their software asks for and then they get
the message in the special paid message zone.

1884
01:50:33,984 --> 01:50:45,984
Yeah now that's a huge that's a revolution all by itself because sometimes you need
you want to be able if someone really needs to reach you you want them to be able to
reach you but you don't have you have to deal with spam.

1885
01:50:45,984 --> 01:50:47,984
So how do we deal with spam right now as we just give it all to Google.

1886
01:50:48,984 --> 01:50:49,984
Google does everything.

1887
01:50:49,984 --> 01:50:51,984
Google is reading through all of your email.

1888
01:50:52,984 --> 01:50:58,984
Every single username password thing has a forget your password link that just lets
your email reset the password.

1889
01:50:59,984 --> 01:51:06,984
So that's the second way in which Google just can impersonate you or anyone who gets
your email.

1890
01:51:06,984 --> 01:51:08,984
So and then how do they counter that.

1891
01:51:09,984 --> 01:51:15,984
Now when you log into your email they are tracking you for your own protection.

1892
01:51:15,984 --> 01:51:28,984
You know like if I if I'm traveling and I try to log in I'm on my desktop computer
at home and then I take my laptop and I go to the airport and then I fly to a
different country and then I haven't been using the laptop in a while.

1893
01:51:29,984 --> 01:51:34,984
I open the laptop I connect to the Wi-Fi and whatever Singapore and then I try to
log into my email.

1894
01:51:34,984 --> 01:51:37,984
Google will not allow me to log in because they think so.

1895
01:51:37,984 --> 01:51:40,984
And then they send me a message they say someone has your password.

1896
01:51:40,984 --> 01:51:41,984
You know it was me.

1897
01:51:41,984 --> 01:51:45,984
And then I type in the password the secondary password like the backup email.

1898
01:51:45,984 --> 01:51:51,984
I've had times when I'll do all the steps and they'll be like identify this blah
blah blah text.

1899
01:51:51,984 --> 01:51:52,984
They text my phone.

1900
01:51:53,984 --> 01:51:55,984
I had a phone at the time made by Google.

1901
01:51:56,984 --> 01:52:01,984
I would do all the steps and they would say we're not letting you into your email.

1902
01:52:01,984 --> 01:52:09,984
You know which is like in one way that's impressive how I'm sure it must be very
difficult for adversaries to break into my email.

1903
01:52:09,984 --> 01:52:11,984
But so that's nice in one way.

1904
01:52:11,984 --> 01:52:16,984
But you know like when you're trying to read your email it kind of sucks because now
your emails off.

1905
01:52:16,984 --> 01:52:17,984
Right.

1906
01:52:17,984 --> 01:52:21,984
And you're relying on Google rather than cryptographic keys that you own.

1907
01:52:21,984 --> 01:52:22,984
Exactly.

1908
01:52:22,984 --> 01:52:23,984
Maintain your identity.

1909
01:52:23,984 --> 01:52:26,984
And you could set your own paranoia level if you had more control.

1910
01:52:26,984 --> 01:52:29,984
You could say you know if you had more.

1911
01:52:29,984 --> 01:52:34,984
So this is why it would be it would be a revolution if we could get stuff like that
through.

1912
01:52:34,984 --> 01:52:37,984
I mean the prediction marketing alone is this.

1913
01:52:37,984 --> 01:52:40,984
We have people have a concern over what's persuadable.

1914
01:52:40,984 --> 01:52:44,984
So that's why people are focused on like what does Fox News say what does CNN say.

1915
01:52:45,984 --> 01:52:56,984
But if people got if the if the disputes over who to elect were resolved in this
market based way then we would be free to use television like for entertainment
only.

1916
01:52:56,984 --> 01:52:58,984
And it would be healthier for everyone.

1917
01:52:58,984 --> 01:53:00,984
You know so this is this is obviously.

1918
01:53:00,984 --> 01:53:04,984
But that's why I say these are very these are big long shot type things.

1919
01:53:04,984 --> 01:53:05,984
Yeah.

1920
01:53:05,984 --> 01:53:12,984
I want to finish off with one discussion real quick around lightning because this is
a lightning podcast.

1921
01:53:12,984 --> 01:53:27,984
And one of the people actually in the in the document you had sent me about
Drivechains and the favorable opinions of them was Lalu at Lightning Labs CTO who
said that smart contracts and lightning are complementary to one another.

1922
01:53:27,984 --> 01:53:33,984
I want to hear a little bit about how these are sidechains and lightning are
complementary to each other.

1923
01:53:34,984 --> 01:53:39,984
And I want to hear more about how these two technologies can work together to.

1924
01:53:39,984 --> 01:53:42,984
We've talked a lot about adding features to Bitcoin.

1925
01:53:42,984 --> 01:53:46,984
How can they help scaling Bitcoin throughput.

1926
01:53:46,984 --> 01:53:48,984
Well they're very different.

1927
01:53:48,984 --> 01:53:50,984
And so that's what helps them work together.

1928
01:53:50,984 --> 01:53:56,984
I think like in particular to onboard someone to the proper lightning network you
need to.

1929
01:53:56,984 --> 01:54:00,984
They need to open a channel on layer one which is a multi signature output on layer
one.

1930
01:54:00,984 --> 01:54:05,984
So you must broadcast messages on layer one in order to join the lightning network.

1931
01:54:05,984 --> 01:54:11,984
And that means the bottleneck for the lightning network will always be the
onboarding.

1932
01:54:11,984 --> 01:54:16,984
And every time you need to change it add remove alter a channel.

1933
01:54:16,984 --> 01:54:18,984
You need to broadcast to layer one.

1934
01:54:18,984 --> 01:54:21,984
So there's actually a kind of a tight relationship.

1935
01:54:21,984 --> 01:54:26,984
The channel construction and the layer one block size is a very tight relationship.

1936
01:54:26,984 --> 01:54:35,984
Although once you have the channels of course you have unlimited freedom to send
amongst the whole network of channels.

1937
01:54:35,984 --> 01:54:37,984
But I think.

1938
01:54:37,984 --> 01:54:39,984
So this is like a theoretical.

1939
01:54:39,984 --> 01:54:41,984
But I think that.

1940
01:54:41,984 --> 01:54:46,984
So one one interesting idea is that the lightning network can span different block
chains easily.

1941
01:54:46,984 --> 01:54:52,984
So you have if you have Alice and Bob and they are connected on lightning network on
layer one.

1942
01:54:52,984 --> 01:54:56,984
And they're also connected on sidechain number three or something.

1943
01:54:56,984 --> 01:54:58,984
You also have Alice and Bob.

1944
01:54:58,984 --> 01:55:00,984
Since it's the same Alice.

1945
01:55:00,984 --> 01:55:02,984
Or in the same Bob.

1946
01:55:02,984 --> 01:55:03,984
You know you really only need one.

1947
01:55:03,984 --> 01:55:05,984
So you have Carol and you have this big.

1948
01:55:05,984 --> 01:55:08,984
That payment can go through.

1949
01:55:08,984 --> 01:55:10,984
It can go across the chains actually.

1950
01:55:10,984 --> 01:55:11,984
This is the same person.

1951
01:55:11,984 --> 01:55:18,984
Alice loses five dollars here as long as she gets five dollars and ten cents there.

1952
01:55:18,984 --> 01:55:25,984
But I think the big area is the onboarding because with the sidechains you have an
unlimited layer two block space.

1953
01:55:25,984 --> 01:55:30,984
And that means you can easily open the channels as many channels as you want there.

1954
01:55:30,984 --> 01:55:33,984
Which means you can onboard people to the lightning network.

1955
01:55:34,984 --> 01:55:44,984
The chief advantage of the lightning network, as I see them, are like the immediate
speed and of the confirmation and the privacy of being off chain.

1956
01:55:44,984 --> 01:55:46,984
The sidechain is really the reverse of that.

1957
01:55:46,984 --> 01:55:50,984
A sidechain transaction probably slower because best case scenario.

1958
01:55:50,984 --> 01:55:56,984
Really, you have the merge mining 100 percent of the time and it's 10 minute block
times are the same.

1959
01:55:56,984 --> 01:56:02,984
So such things are slower and it has unlimited onboarding capacity.

1960
01:56:03,984 --> 01:56:06,984
Lightning network is faster and has a limited onboarding capacity.

1961
01:56:06,984 --> 01:56:08,984
So I think that's probably the good synergy.

1962
01:56:08,984 --> 01:56:17,984
But I think a second thing you'd want to point out is that the new features like any
prevails, you know, sick has no input, stuff like that.

1963
01:56:17,984 --> 01:56:21,984
If you want L2, these other new things that you might want to do.

1964
01:56:22,984 --> 01:56:35,984
The sidechain could just do them quickly and you could try them there and you
either experiment with them there and use them there or experiment with them there
as a demonstration of how to bring them safely to layer one more quickly.

1965
01:56:35,984 --> 01:56:42,984
I think really the bigger thing is both lightning and sidechains.

1966
01:56:42,984 --> 01:56:46,984
We want to get people to actually use the technology for something.

1967
01:56:46,984 --> 01:56:50,984
And it's just better if something is one size fits all.

1968
01:56:51,984 --> 01:56:54,984
It's better if something is useful in many contexts.

1969
01:56:54,984 --> 01:57:12,984
So, for example, you have a funny example I give is like Ross Albright is a
hypothetically he is he's running Silk Road from his apartment as a super strategic
Bitcoin guy.

1970
01:57:12,984 --> 01:57:16,984
But then he's going to go down the street and buy coffee.

1971
01:57:18,984 --> 01:57:21,984
There are very different Bitcoin transactions like one.

1972
01:57:21,984 --> 01:57:23,984
The privacy is really important.

1973
01:57:24,984 --> 01:57:26,984
The other is not so important.

1974
01:57:26,984 --> 01:57:34,984
And so you want it's actually the way I see it is it's much better if you have a
tool that can take many shapes.

1975
01:57:34,984 --> 01:57:36,984
So you say maybe I use lightning today.

1976
01:57:36,984 --> 01:57:38,984
Maybe I'll only use the large block sidechain today.

1977
01:57:38,984 --> 01:57:45,984
Maybe I use lightning on the large block sidechain Wednesday because the
transactions are actually all very different.

1978
01:57:45,984 --> 01:57:47,984
Transactions are really different.

1979
01:57:47,984 --> 01:57:51,984
I think people don't appreciate that.

1980
01:57:51,984 --> 01:57:58,984
Like if you send money like let's say you buy something online when you buy
something on Amazon.

1981
01:58:00,984 --> 01:58:03,984
They don't you know they're shipping your physical product.

1982
01:58:03,984 --> 01:58:09,984
So if you they can do zero conf on that doesn't have to be lightning per se.

1983
01:58:09,984 --> 01:58:10,984
Right.

1984
01:58:10,984 --> 01:58:17,984
Because if you if you cancel the transaction or it doesn't go through or you double
spend them or you replace by fee them.

1985
01:58:18,984 --> 01:58:22,984
They are they're just interpreted as the order being canceled and they just won't
ship you the thing.

1986
01:58:22,984 --> 01:58:25,984
So that but that's different than in the coffee situation.

1987
01:58:25,984 --> 01:58:28,984
You know when you buy coffee you're going to walk out with it.

1988
01:58:29,984 --> 01:58:34,984
People have different arguments about OK you're on the you're on the security
cameras at Starbucks.

1989
01:58:34,984 --> 01:58:36,984
So they'll they'll call the police and arrest.

1990
01:58:36,984 --> 01:58:39,984
But this is my point is it's all it's all a very different spectrum.

1991
01:58:39,984 --> 01:58:40,984
Yeah.

1992
01:58:40,984 --> 01:58:45,984
So I'm trying to say that's what I'm trying to paint this picture of like the
transactions are actually very very different.

1993
01:58:45,984 --> 01:58:50,984
And then you know if you buy something on dark net market it's you.

1994
01:58:50,984 --> 01:58:52,984
None of the people trust each other.

1995
01:58:52,984 --> 01:58:54,984
So it's a very different type of a thing.

1996
01:58:54,984 --> 01:58:57,984
But it may not need to be instant.

1997
01:58:58,984 --> 01:59:00,984
So you may that's the Zcash sidechain maybe.

1998
01:59:00,984 --> 01:59:06,984
But that's my point is it's like it's better for for each technology.

1999
01:59:06,984 --> 01:59:16,984
It's better to have a wide suite of complementary technologies because that we want
people to just be in the Bitcoin umbrella.

2000
01:59:16,984 --> 01:59:21,984
But yeah to give a concrete answer to your questions I think the onboarding is the
big Achilles heel of lightning.

2001
01:59:22,984 --> 01:59:25,984
But the sidechains could address it.

2002
01:59:25,984 --> 01:59:26,984
I see.

2003
01:59:26,984 --> 01:59:30,984
I don't know if I don't know if that will that will be what people like you know I
think.

2004
01:59:30,984 --> 01:59:32,984
But we'll see.

2005
01:59:33,984 --> 01:59:34,984
All right.

2006
01:59:34,984 --> 01:59:38,984
I want to finish this off with a segment I do at the end of every show.

2007
01:59:38,984 --> 01:59:39,984
It's called the lightning round.

2008
01:59:39,984 --> 01:59:43,984
And I got a few rapid fire questions for you just to finish this off.

2009
01:59:43,984 --> 01:59:44,984
OK cool.

2010
01:59:44,984 --> 01:59:45,984
First one.

2011
01:59:45,984 --> 01:59:48,984
Is there any book that has changed your view of the world.

2012
01:59:48,984 --> 01:59:49,984
Yes.

2013
01:59:49,984 --> 01:59:59,984
The beginning of infinity by David George which is the greatest nonfiction book ever
written followed closely by the elephant in the brain by Robin Hansen which is the
second greatest.

2014
01:59:59,984 --> 02:00:02,984
I was a fan of Robin Hansen from a very young age like 12.

2015
02:00:02,984 --> 02:00:04,984
I was reading his blog and everything.

2016
02:00:04,984 --> 02:00:14,984
So his book Elephant in the Brain is just like he put he put stapled together a
bunch of his you know his thoughts.

2017
02:00:14,984 --> 02:00:15,984
But it's a fantastic book.

2018
02:00:15,984 --> 02:00:16,984
Interesting.

2019
02:00:16,984 --> 02:00:17,984
Kevin Simler.

2020
02:00:17,984 --> 02:00:20,984
But the beginning of everyone should read the beginning of infinity by David George.

2021
02:00:20,984 --> 02:00:21,984
I will check it out.

2022
02:00:21,984 --> 02:00:23,984
Next question.

2023
02:00:23,984 --> 02:00:29,984
If you could only hold one asset for the next decade and it could not be Bitcoin
what asset would it be.

2024
02:00:29,984 --> 02:00:30,984
That's a good question.

2025
02:00:30,984 --> 02:00:32,984
It can't be Bitcoin magically.

2026
02:00:32,984 --> 02:00:36,984
They have to own something for how long.

2027
02:00:36,984 --> 02:00:37,984
10 years.

2028
02:00:37,984 --> 02:00:38,984
The next decade.

2029
02:00:38,984 --> 02:00:39,984
Yeah.

2030
02:00:40,984 --> 02:00:44,984
I think then you just go you know what the basics just go with the S&P 500.

2031
02:00:45,984 --> 02:00:46,984
Because it's also inflation proof.

2032
02:00:46,984 --> 02:00:52,984
I mean it's not it will be damaged by inflation but it also it's repriced.

2033
02:00:52,984 --> 02:00:53,984
So fair enough.

2034
02:00:53,984 --> 02:00:54,984
Classic.

2035
02:00:55,984 --> 02:01:00,984
What's one thing that you've changed your mind on about Bitcoin in the last year.

2036
02:01:01,984 --> 02:01:02,984
The last year.

2037
02:01:03,984 --> 02:01:04,984
That's a good question.

2038
02:01:05,984 --> 02:01:14,984
One thing you think because there's a lot of Bitcoin and it's also hard to tell when
did the last year.

2039
02:01:15,984 --> 02:01:17,984
Or more recently maybe it's a better way to put it.

2040
02:01:17,984 --> 02:01:19,984
What's something you've just changed your mind on.

2041
02:01:22,984 --> 02:01:24,984
Well one thing is I wrote this post.

2042
02:01:24,984 --> 02:01:28,984
I wrote this post about lightning in which I researched.

2043
02:01:29,984 --> 02:01:30,984
I found something.

2044
02:01:31,984 --> 02:01:36,984
It's not it's not great news but I was researching the channel factories and I found
a way to attack them for free.

2045
02:01:37,984 --> 02:01:42,984
And so then I had a I had a slightly more skeptical view of the channel factories.

2046
02:01:42,984 --> 02:01:45,984
And so that that is that does count.

2047
02:01:45,984 --> 02:01:46,984
But that's I wish that's not very good news.

2048
02:01:47,984 --> 02:01:48,984
That's very something else.

2049
02:01:48,984 --> 02:01:51,984
Well I appreciate the the honesty though.

2050
02:01:52,984 --> 02:01:58,984
And then finally anyone I already have I already formed so many positive opinions
about Bitcoin much more than a year ago.

2051
02:01:58,984 --> 02:01:59,984
Yeah.

2052
02:01:59,984 --> 02:02:11,984
I like asking that question because it's always nice to hear the opposing views and
things that are not necessarily the status quo or things that things that people the
narratives that people like to put out into the world.

2053
02:02:11,984 --> 02:02:12,984
It's a good question.

2054
02:02:13,984 --> 02:02:22,984
Finally one more question is who's one person in the Bitcoin or lightning ecosystem
that you'd like to give a shout out to for doing great work.

2055
02:02:26,984 --> 02:02:27,984
Let's see.

2056
02:02:27,984 --> 02:02:28,984
This is good because I don't want to.

2057
02:02:29,984 --> 02:02:30,984
Who's.

2058
02:02:33,984 --> 02:02:37,984
Because I want to give it to someone who really deserves it or something and I don't
want to give it to someone who doesn't need it.

2059
02:02:37,984 --> 02:02:42,984
So there's a lot of people who are doing great like but they don't really need the
shout out.

2060
02:02:43,984 --> 02:02:46,984
Like I would have done maybe Fiat Jaffa and I would have done a Tadge Dreyse.

2061
02:02:47,984 --> 02:02:49,984
But I think like they're already they're already getting a lot.

2062
02:02:50,984 --> 02:02:53,984
I feel like I don't understand why people don't like Tadge Dreyse's U3XO.

2063
02:02:55,984 --> 02:02:57,984
People just don't seem to be paying a lot of attention to it.

2064
02:02:59,984 --> 02:03:00,984
It's probably a good idea.

2065
02:03:01,984 --> 02:03:03,984
It's a full node on a mobile phone.

2066
02:03:04,984 --> 02:03:05,984
That's pretty cool.

2067
02:03:05,984 --> 02:03:06,984
That's worth.

2068
02:03:06,984 --> 02:03:07,984
That's worth looking at.

2069
02:03:09,984 --> 02:03:10,984
Oh yeah.

2070
02:03:10,984 --> 02:03:11,984
Those are good choices.

2071
02:03:12,984 --> 02:03:13,984
Who's good.

2072
02:03:14,984 --> 02:03:15,984
Maybe like a Mike in space.

2073
02:03:15,984 --> 02:03:16,984
I don't know.

2074
02:03:16,984 --> 02:03:17,984
We have a little more humor.

2075
02:03:18,984 --> 02:03:20,984
We need people not taking themselves so seriously.

2076
02:03:21,984 --> 02:03:22,984
Yeah.

2077
02:03:22,984 --> 02:03:23,984
Fair enough.

2078
02:03:23,984 --> 02:03:24,984
Michael Tidwell runs TabConf.

2079
02:03:24,984 --> 02:03:25,984
But again, like I don't know.

2080
02:03:25,984 --> 02:03:28,984
I don't want to give the shout out to someone who really who could really use it.

2081
02:03:30,984 --> 02:03:31,984
Yeah.

2082
02:03:31,984 --> 02:03:32,984
Well you've mentioned some good names there.

2083
02:03:32,984 --> 02:03:33,984
I shouted out a hundred people that I cheated.

2084
02:03:34,984 --> 02:03:35,984
No.

2085
02:03:35,984 --> 02:03:36,984
I appreciate it.

2086
02:03:36,984 --> 02:03:38,984
Thank you so much for taking the time today.

2087
02:03:38,984 --> 02:03:40,984
This has been an insightful conversation.

2088
02:03:41,984 --> 02:03:45,984
Where can people go to learn more about you and the work you're doing at LayerTwo Labs?

2089
02:03:46,984 --> 02:03:47,984
Well, we have LayerTwoLabs.com.

2090
02:03:48,984 --> 02:03:51,984
And I'm Truthcoin on Twitter.

2091
02:03:52,984 --> 02:03:53,984
Truthcoin, T-R-U-T-H.

2092
02:03:56,984 --> 02:03:57,984
Twitter is a pretty good place.

2093
02:03:57,984 --> 02:04:03,984
I think drivechain.info is really good for information about Drivechain, BIP300,
301.

2094
02:04:05,984 --> 02:04:06,984
Those are great.

2095
02:04:06,984 --> 02:04:09,984
And drivechain.info links to the blog, Truthcoin.info.

2096
02:04:09,984 --> 02:04:12,984
And it links to BitcoinHiveMind.com, the prediction markets site.

2097
02:04:12,984 --> 02:04:13,984
Perfect.

2098
02:04:13,984 --> 02:04:14,984
So they all link to each other.

2099
02:04:15,984 --> 02:04:16,984
So those are some good ways.

2100
02:04:17,984 --> 02:04:19,984
Well, thank you again for taking the time.

2101
02:04:19,984 --> 02:04:20,984
And I hope we can do it again soon.

2102
02:04:21,984 --> 02:04:22,984
Yeah.

2103
02:04:22,984 --> 02:04:23,984
Hey, thanks for having me.

2104
02:04:23,984 --> 02:04:24,984
All right.

2105
02:04:24,984 --> 02:04:25,984
All right.

2106
02:04:25,984 --> 02:04:30,984
In the last seven days, you guys sent in 186,257 sats.

2107
02:04:31,984 --> 02:04:35,984
That is one of the biggest numbers we've had on this show in a very long time.

2108
02:04:35,984 --> 02:04:38,984
So thank you to everyone who's been sending in sats.

2109
02:04:38,984 --> 02:04:47,984
As I mentioned last episode, half of the sats you guys sent in this week are going
to be going to John Carvalho's charity of choice, Bitcoin Smiles.

2110
02:04:48,984 --> 02:04:49,984
I mentioned that on the last episode.

2111
02:04:50,984 --> 02:04:54,984
We had 100,000 that came in from a Lightning address.

2112
02:04:54,984 --> 02:04:56,984
So I don't actually know who sent that in.

2113
02:04:56,984 --> 02:04:58,984
But thank you to whoever did.

2114
02:04:59,984 --> 02:05:02,984
Then we had another 86,000 that came in through the Fountain interface.

2115
02:05:02,984 --> 02:05:06,984
I can see usernames and we can run through the top five supporters real quick.

2116
02:05:07,984 --> 02:05:12,984
First up is NatGasImmersion, who sent in 35,088 sats.

2117
02:05:13,984 --> 02:05:18,984
Ion497 sent in 24,534 sats.

2118
02:05:19,984 --> 02:05:22,984
Bon sent in 9,898.

2119
02:05:23,984 --> 02:05:27,984
Blockchain Boog sent in 5,168.

2120
02:05:28,984 --> 02:05:33,984
And Rage underscore AF sent in 2,451 sats.

2121
02:05:34,984 --> 02:05:39,984
We also had one comment from Bon on episode 92 with John Carvalho.

2122
02:05:39,984 --> 02:05:43,984
Just gave me a smiley face emoji along with the 10,000 sats.

2123
02:05:44,984 --> 02:05:45,984
Thank you, Bon.

2124
02:05:45,984 --> 02:05:46,984
Thank you to everyone else.

2125
02:05:46,984 --> 02:05:50,984
And I cannot wait to see what you guys send in this week.