We have added a lot of L2s.

What these all have in common, that Drivechain does not have in common,

is that in Drivechain they're all merged mined,

governed by the decentralized mining process.

And that probably sounds like a small detail,

but I don't think there's any way for the other type of L2 to succeed at a large scale.

Paul, how are you?

I'm doing great.

Welcome to Mara Foundation TV.

It's so exciting to have you here.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, we're going to talk about the LayerTwo environment right now,

one of your favorite subjects.

You are a prominent authority on this subject,

the author of Drivechains and BIP 300, BIP 301,

which is sort of a proposed software solution

that enables L2 functionality on Bitcoin, which we'll get into.

But before we get into Drivechains,

let's just sort of like lay out the problem that Drivechains is trying to solve.

I think that's the best place for us to start.

Several L2s have sort of arisen,

especially in the last couple of years in Bitcoin.

Obviously, prior to that,

there was an enormous amount of talk about Lightning specifically as sort of the L2,

but now there's many possible other solutions, ARK, BIPVM, all of these things.

You have sort of like a pretty clear,

I would say like generalist critique of almost all of these possibilities.

Do you want to offer kind of what you think the challenge is with these L2 solutions?

Yes.

Okay, so BIP 300 and 301 in Drivechain, that's very old.

It's from 2015.

Back then, I really thought what we needed was a way to like,

okay, Ethereum was just coming out.

So it was people were talking like,

how can we just do whatever Ethereum is doing just on Bitcoin?

And there was also the block size war.

So it was like, how can we do,

how can we have like large blocks and small blocks like kind of coexist?

So that was what Drivechain was kind of like born into.

And since then, I think we've gone like in the wrong direction of just like,

so for example, when people say L2s today,

they mean basically the Lightning Network,

which was also big and starting around 2015.

And it was also starting as a result of the block size war.

But since then, we have added a lot of other L2s.

What these all have in common that Drivechain does not have in common

is that in Drivechain, they're all merge-mined,

governed by the decentralized mining process in BTC.

And that probably sounds like a small detail.

But actually, I think it just syncs the other.

I don't think there's any way for the other type of L2

to succeed like at a large scale,

which is the whole point of making it.

And then also in practice, the big L2 today is the Lightning Network.

And I just I'm convinced that the Lightning Network doesn't work.

And when I talk to Lightning engineers,

they kind of just shrug and they say,

yeah, it doesn't work.

And then they just kind of shrug and just kind of go on with what they're doing.

So I don't know.

I'm not sure exactly how to wrap my head around that.

But people can see the TabConf debate that I did a few months ago

against an entire room of Lightning support.

So yeah, the L2 space has me a little perplexed.

It's interesting because I don't know if you know this.

I know you didn't see the announcement yesterday,

but you should go and read it because I think you'll appreciate it.

One of sort of the stated goals specifically

for the R&D efforts of the Morrow Foundation

is supporting technologies that basically pay miners, right?

That makes sure that we have a functioning security budget

for as long as possible, you know, develop healthy fee markets.

I think merge mining would fall into that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I was like, see, to me, I thought that when I was first designing DriveChain,

I just took it for granted that we don't want there to be

like a tug of war between miners collecting the L1 fee

or collecting the L2 fee and some other person.

So this is the talk that I gave at OpNext.

I said, just imagine that the Lightning Network is a big success

and imagine that it's...

or just imagine that one type of L2 is a big success.

So just say it could be ARK or it could be whatever.

But, you know, we have 8 billion people on Earth.

People make more than one transaction per day.

So we're talking in the trillions of transactions.

And if you just say something like 10 cents per transaction

or one cent per transaction,

this is hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue.

And so I'm just saying this is a huge pile of revenue.

Do you want that?

If that doesn't go to the L1 miners and it goes to someone else,

and meanwhile, the L1 miners are just getting the dwindling block subsidy,

you know, the miners are then in a weird position

where they're kind of like,

should we like attack and destroy the L2s to like re...

like to alter the playing field?

Because this is an enormous amount of money.

This is far more money than, you know...

Today, I'm not sure what the total mining revenue for all miners was like last year,

but it's probably like a few billion dollars or something like that.

But I'm talking like way more than that every year,

growing with the usage of the network.

Because, of course, the population grows,

the world GDP grows,

people transact, wealthier people are doing more transactions.

So this was a huge number that would just like...

it would be doubling like every 11 years, huge amount of money.

And so, back in the beginning, I was like,

well, I take it for granted that...

Now, I take it for granted that, you know,

this would all be like a merge mining,

because Satoshi had already invented merge mining in 2011.

But the community went in a different direction,

and people were worried about like mining incentives or something.

I think this was all very convoluted and none of it was borne out.

And when you actually examine it, it turns out to be very, you know, confused.

But people at the time were like,

we just want the miners to be like a very simple thing.

We don't want them to like be interacting with a lot of people.

This was the view back then,

that they said the miners should just mine and not do anything.

I then invented something called blind merge mining.

Let's do that.

I don't know, like the whole thing is kind of a big mess, I think, actually.

Let's tear this into pieces,

because there's a few threads that we could go down here.

So, number one, I just want to kind of like highlight,

it sounds like what you're saying is,

if you have, you know, L2s that are actually adopted,

and there's tons of money being made via transaction fees for these L2s,

but there's no like clear partnership, essentially,

in some way between, you know,

the revenue being generated on the L2 and the L1 miners.

The game theory of that is like, you know,

like how does that ultimately play out?

Like at some point in, you know,

if the subsidy is declining over time,

the L1 miners are going to get pissed and, you know,

start threatening people and being like,

like, how does that ultimately play out from an incentives perspective?

That's exactly it.

And it's a shame to like frame it in such a adversarial way.

But really, like everyone will admit,

like if you talk to people, you know,

if you talk to people who design the Lightning Network

or support the Lightning Network,

they will say it's not designed for a situation

where your counterparty is a 51% hash rate coalition.

So they say you can't use the Lightning Network

if your opponent is someone with 51% of the hash rate.

There's also criticism that's leveled of drive chain.

But I think that's also unfair because when I do it,

I say, okay, it won't work if 51% of the miners are evil.

But then I immediately construct this argument

for why they'd be making so much money

from the merge mining fees that they,

the last thing they would ever want to do

is kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

With Lightning, they don't even go down that road.

They just kind of prefer to ignore it.

You never really hear anyone say,

well, how would Lightning Network work

in a world where 51% of the miners want to attack it?

And what I'm saying is maybe 100% of the miners

want to attack it.

You know, I mean, if it's a difference

between being deprived of like $900 billion per year,

net present value in the trillions of dollars,

if there's a difference between that,

being deprived of that and actually obtaining that,

then of course you were really setting the stage

for a big disaster.

This is the same for ARK.

And this is the same for a lot of the other,

like Liquid and a lot of the stuff,

the transaction fees are not paid to miners.

All of this was an intentional decision back in the day

to like avoid, I don't know,

like inconveniencing the miners

or maybe even just acknowledging them

as relevant parties.

But yeah, when push comes to shove,

like all of this stuff,

like everything with the Lightning Network,

the HTLCs, the channels, the justice transaction,

the whole idea that if someone tries to cheat you,

you can publish this thing

and take all of their money,

which is what keeps everyone enforcing the rules

on the L2 without touching the L1.

I mean, all that falls apart

if you have 51% hashrate against you.

Despite sort of like the details

of the different ways that this could play out,

it does seem like intuitively correct, right?

That ultimately if you have some sort of situation

where revenue is being generated in full

on a different layer, essentially,

and miners are not being adequately paid

for those transactions,

you're going to have a problem, right?

Like at the end of the day,

miners sort of are the authority on L1 settlement.

Like that's just not going to work.

Like that's going to,

something's going to happen

and that is not going to work.

Merge mining, it sounds like back in the day

when you were first writing DriveChains,

people were talking about merge mining all the time.

Now you very rarely hear about merge mining,

but back then,

weren't like the original sidechains papers,

weren't they all kind of advocating

for merge mining originally

as a solution to this?

Well, this is what,

my understanding was that merge mining works

and it still is.

I think merge mining works very well.

It was invented by Satoshi in 2010

to help support Namecoin,

which was the first altcoin,

which has been merge mined with Bitcoin

ever since 2011 when they kind of shipped that.

There's an article by the BitMEX research guy

about merge mining that's very good

and you could see that it's very widespread

and it just kind of quietly happens

because this type of merge mining

has been used only for altcoins.

So the type of merge mining

that we've seen deployed

is like a very, very tame, very small,

you know, you could get like,

you're mining your Bitcoin block

that may give you three Bitcoin and change

in subsidy and maybe like a little bit more in fees.

So this is like, you know,

we're talking like $200,000 plus

and then you might also be able to get like,

you know, eight Namecoin,

which is worth like, you know,

like whatever, like $25 or something.

So it's kind of like, you know,

hundreds of thousands of dollars versus a few,

but there's still,

even despite that small amount,

still merge mining is very popular

and people do it,

but people don't talk about it.

I think it's because these are all altcoins.

There's no reason why we couldn't merge mine

Bitcoin L2s as well.

They have no altcoin.

You just have Bitcoin on an L2.

So that's what I advocate.

Is it also,

I hear this criticism of merge mining

on a regular basis that basically,

I think, you know,

potentially the narrative around them has changed

because they're so much easier to 51% attack

because there's just not as much hash rate

actually protecting these other networks

with merge mining.

What's sort of your point of view?

I think that has a couple different

like misunderstandings bundled up,

but it's true to some extent.

I think the real reason would be,

again, as I just said,

even with something like Namecoin,

there were time periods

I haven't looked recently,

but there were long time periods

where it had like 80% of the hash rate of Bitcoin

because it costs them basically nothing

to mine both blocks at once.

This is the genius of Satoshi's

merge mining invention

that he co-invented with someone else.

People can look this up on a great thread

called BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin.

It's a very neat,

it's kind of like a proto side chain thread,

and it's very interesting.

Everyone should read it, I think.

And so even then you had like 80%,

even though it's a tiny amount,

but it's the small amount

that really makes it vulnerable

because it says, well, listen,

we could just rewrite it

and what are we really losing?

So it all comes down to security budget,

I think, at the end of the day.

These small altcoins,

they're worth very little,

they have very little in transaction fee value,

and that's why they're not that significant.

But you can easily have L2s of Bitcoin

that pay much, much more

in transaction fee revenue,

and then it would be kind of debatable

which one has more of the miner's attention

because you could say maybe the L1

gives you the three Bitcoin in subsidy,

which will soon be 1.6 or so.

So maybe it'll be one,

and maybe let's just call it like one,

let's just call it two Bitcoin

and each L1 block.

But you could have,

theoretically, L2 blocks

that have any amount of money being paid

and you could have maybe something like

hundreds of thousands of transactions in there

that each pay like a small amount.

So it could come out to being like,

you know, 20 or 30 Bitcoin in the L2 block

and then the miners would be thinking,

well, okay, great, we love the L1 block

because without this L1 block,

you can't have the L2 block

because of course you need to be able to deposit

and withdraw and you need to do the merge mining,

L1 is the base.

So they would say,

well, we're very happy about this L1 block,

but really our bread and butter is the L2 block.

I think that kind of actually frightens people either way.

So on one hand, they say,

this won't be very popular

and it won't be very secure.

Then the other hand, they say,

well, wait a minute,

this is gonna be more popular than L1,

like that would maybe like change.

So yeah, there's a lot of complaining out there,

but I don't see a lot of like good,

I don't see a good,

other than my own vision

that I published about the merge mine L2,

I haven't seen anyone say like,

this is how we would get to 8 billion people

and how we would onboard 8 billion people

and do all the transactions on earth.

And I have like tests on GitHub

that anyone can rerun

and just like click on

and they can see for themselves

that at least it's like an actual picture.

It's like one consistent picture

and I don't see that with the Lightning Network,

for example, at all.

I think it's now totally admitted by everyone

that you cannot onboard

more than like half percentage of the earth

to the Lightning Network,

even in an absurd best case scenario

that will never happen.

So, and even then,

like you have to roll this channels over,

you know, periodically.

So the question is,

how many people would ever be able to use it?

So I think that that's a non-starter.

I mean, we can definitely talk about

sort of like UX and,

you know, people's actual ability

to use these things.

We should dig into your presentation,

quote unquote,

lightning derangement syndrome in a moment,

but just to close the loop on the fees issue.

A lot of people also make this argument that,

you know, well, when we have L2,

and all these people are using these L2s,

there's going to be lightning channels

opening and closing all the time.

And that's how fees will be generated.

And miners will be so rich

and they'll be so happy

because of all the lightning channel fees

or, you know, picking out,

you know, an L2 that you,

that will have this, you know,

data availability on,

you know, or whatever.

Right. Exactly.

Do you think that that theory

has any credibility?

It only dents my argument,

like a small amount,

because what I'm saying

in the merge mine L2 world,

you pay an L1,

miners collect fees

when someone deposits to the L2,

when they use the L2,

and when they withdraw.

So they get,

the miners get paid the whole time.

And then what people say is,

well, hey, wait a minute

for the lightning network,

like when they open the channel,

they pay a fee.

And when they close the channel

or roll the channel over,

they pay a fee.

And of course,

but of course, in between,

when it's doing all the heavy lifting,

there's no fee paid to the L1 miners at all.

The whole point of lightning

is to try to make that ratio

as high as possible

and to hope desperately

that the channel open

and channel closed transactions

will leave enough block space

for everyone to use them,

and that everyone will be transacting

in the lightning network

with the channels that are already open.

So the whole point of these L2s

is to offload the trend

as much transacting as possible

into the L2.

So that's kind of the contradiction

of that point.

When I did the tab comp debate,

the lightning people

sort of the last refuge

was to go to this

like connecting tissue point

and saying there'll be all these L2s

that sort of use the lightning network.

But everyone has now admitted basically,

like the lightning network was pitched

as this is how we scale Bitcoin.

I think even the original presentation

and the lightning white paper

are like how do we scale

to billions of transactions?

How do we scale to the planet?

And so that's kind of

what it was originally pitched at.

And now people say,

well, hey, sure,

the lightning network can't do that,

but it doesn't technically do nothing either.

It still can do like these little things.

I think all of that

will ultimately be discarded

because the lightning model

has terrible UX

and you have to be online to receive,

you need to be online with a hot wallet

to receive money

and people don't want to run

the lightning node.

So very few people are doing that.

Most people use custodial lightning,

which is equivalent to saying

that you've given up on lightning.

In many ways, it's actually worse

because it's kind of like you've given up,

but you're kind of like still telling people

that you're using it,

but there's no lightning technology

in the custodial lightning.

When people offload to the LSPs,

the LSP does all the work,

but then they charge a fee

and they know everything you're doing.

So I think that it's time to hang up the hat

or whatever,

throw in the towel for the lightning network.

But of course, so many people

have invested so much time

and energy and money.

I guess I don't see that happening

anytime soon,

but I think that it's,

I don't see a future

for the lightning network.

So let's kind of move into

what it's been like for you

to be advocating for BIF-300, BIF-301

and or DriveChains, this new proposal.

So DriveChains, I mean,

you mentioned merge mining.

Do you want to kind of just give

like a quick TLDR

on sort of how DriveChains works?

I don't know what the shortest summary

of that is that you usually give

and kind of what you're really proposing

with the soft fork.

Right.

DriveChain takes this existing idea

of merge mining

and the existing idea of the altcoin.

But it just says,

we can have an altcoin

that starts with zero coins on it

and you deposit BTC there

and then this other chain

that is its own blockchain.

So it's an L2,

but it's also a blockchain

as if it were Ethereum or whatever.

So it's L2s basically that are built

into the L1 protocol essentially.

Like you're giving the L1

at the soft fork level

the capacity to create L2s.

Is that fair?

Right. The L1 has to be aware

of a few things.

Like it has to know

like how many L2s there are

and like it has to have

like a number of them

so that it can keep track of

which deposits have been sent in.

But it's the L2 itself

that does all the work.

Each L2 node needs a Bitcoin full node.

It needs the whole L1 blockchain.

It watches for deposits

and then when it sees them,

it creates coins with the same owner.

It says, oh, I own these coins on L1.

The L2 credits them.

It says, now you have coins on this L2.

And then crucially,

there's also a way to get the coins back

without the L1 knowing too many details

about what's happening in the L2.

And that takes maybe a little while

to explain how to,

so we can skip that part.

We can skip that part, yeah.

But basically the L2s have

as much freedom as altcoins

where they can be written

in a different programming language.

They could be like,

they could have smart contracts

like Ethereum.

They could have any block size.

They could have ZK-SNARK, privacy.

The only thing they have to do

is merge mine, basically.

They technically don't need

to be merged mine.

But as I've already said,

I'm a huge advocate for merge mining.

I don't understand why people

are creating alternatives

to merge mining because merge mining,

I think it works just fine.

It was invented by Satoshi a long time ago.

It does, you know,

what you would have to do instead

is someone else would have to be saying

this is what the next block is.

Like you could have someone just say,

this is the next block,

but then you have recentralized

the whole thing.

So I think merge mining works great.

I think it automatically gives,

it pays the transaction fee revenue

to the L1 miners.

So the L1 miners have no

incentive misalignment with the...

So for DriveChain,

the idea is that

because of the merge mine revenues,

the miners would be happy

to facilitate this ecosystem of L2s.

And support like the trustless exchange

between L2s and L1s

and all of these other things that we need.

So you wrote this paper originally in 2015,

which was quite a long time ago,

over a decade ago,

but when did you get the actual BIP written?

When did you get a BIP number?

I think I drafted it in like 2017

and then finally,

like it got,

because you draft it first

and then they give you the BIP

after you get some feedback,

you get the BIP number.

I think that was February 2018,

but I don't remember.

So also, so not that much longer after.

And how's the process been for you

in terms of navigating

Bitcoin governance

and kind of moving through

the sort of political

Bitcoin improvement proposal process?

Yeah, I think that,

you know, I'm a huge fan of Bitcoin

and Bitcoin has done very well.

Even over,

if we just restrict ourselves

to that period of 2015 to present,

Bitcoin has done very well

and has changed the world.

I don't think that there really is

a BIP process anymore.

It's possible that maybe

there never really was one

because when we really started

to lean on it was during

the block size war,

which started like basically,

of course, it kind of always

been around to some extent,

but it really heated up in early 2015

with Bitcoin XT

and then the scaling Bitcoin conferences.

So really, that was when people

started to really lean on it.

And the BIP,

there's like multiple types of BIP.

So some of them are just informational.

Some of them are just like,

OK, this is how we're going to do

like the HD wallet.

So these are the paths

that I'm using or something.

So these are like non-controversial BIPs.

And then the soft forks

were like a different type.

And even there were many hard fork BIPs

during the block size war era.

Of course, none of them came to pass.

But what I'm trying to say is

like a lot of the stuff

that goes into the BIP process

never comes out.

And Segwit and Taproot

are the main exceptions.

But they went through,

like there were people

who were very influential pre-2015.

Like 2013, we would be talking about

like P2SH, pre-descript hash

and other things.

Those same people kind of did Segwit.

Segwit was kind of famously a giant,

like politically, it was a giant nightmare.

And miners were like blockading it and stuff.

So it led to all this chaos.

And then ultimately,

Segwit was to support Lightning,

which I think Lightning is like a failure.

So I don't think that...

It was also supposed to be a compromised

block size increase, which it was.

In theory and in practice,

it's an increase from one megabyte

to four megabytes.

That did not placate the large blockers

because they wanted to still do Segwit2x

and then they wanted to do Bitcoin Cash.

And so the whole thing was all for naught, mostly.

So yeah, I kind of think Segwit

was kind of a giant mess.

And then Taproot was kind of like

a weird reflection of Segwit,

where it was kind of like the miners

felt bad about blockading Segwit.

Developers felt bad about everything

that happened with Segwit,

yet it's Peter Weil and other people

just saying they didn't want to

comment on activation.

So I think anything with software activation

is basically dead.

And we've had no software to activate since.

And how many other things that were BIPs

that weren't...

Like how many other things happened

that went through the BIP process

and actually resulted in anything?

Do you think...

I mean, it sounds like you have

some criticisms of the BIP process.

And I'm curious, is there a solve there?

Are there specific reforms

that you would like to see in the BIP process?

How do you think we could fix the BIP process?

Well, I think first we have to recognize

that maybe there is no such process,

but I think we could improve it

tangibly and easily

if you had something like due process for the...

So I've made this joke before

about like when you're in the legal system

in the US, in theory,

you kind of know like when you're...

They have to tell you you're under arrest.

You know, they have to tell you the charge.

They have to tell you like, okay.

And then when you're in court,

they have to tell you, you know,

you've been indicted.

Then they have to tell you

you've been found guilty.

Then they have to tell you

you've been sentenced and et cetera.

So at least it may not always work out perfectly.

Of course it doesn't.

But at least you know

where you are in the process.

Like just having a process

that's sort of like lined,

that's more clearly defined,

do you think would be the most useful step forward?

The government can't just throw people in jail

and then you have no idea what's happening.

You know, it's like that joke about...

I think Christopher Hitchens visited like communists, Czechoslovakia or something, and he was like attending a talk with like, it was like a Franz Kafka talk or something, or maybe it was in Germany, and then they arrested everyone there and he said, what's the charge? And they said, we don't have to tell you that, and he was like, well, now I have to write about Franz Kafka when I write about, you know, this event. Do you think that the BIP process will help?

Will have to be more formalized in order for us to sort of actuate into, you know, global reserve currency status and for this asset to be, to like get to the next level of adoption?

I mean, do you think that there's, you know, any part of the Bitcoin, existing Bitcoin governance process that might be limiting how great we can grow?

What I really think we should do, Mara R&D people and everyone who's maybe watching, but it's like, we really need to, the Bitcoin core developers, you know, they become very timid and they don't want, this is a result of many things.

One is they don't want to be arrested.

They don't want too much responsibility.

You know, they don't want to look what happened to the samurai devs and whatever.

The developer community doesn't want too much responsibility.

I'm talking like all these, the maintainers on GitHub, the big, you know.

The core developers.

Yeah.

People know who they are, but they don't, and like, they don't want to be sued by like Craig S. Wright sued them.

I think they make a little bit of a bigger deal out of that then, but it's not fun to be sued even by a crazy person who, who, so that's not fun.

And so they don't really even want attention.

And we've evolved to a situation where they don't want to do any, they want to, they don't want to stick their neck out in any way.

And that's very difficult to get anything done in that type of a situation.

So what really should happen is the mining pools should shoulder the burden of responsibility and they should drive the process instead.

Because really the mining pools are going to die off.

Like everyone else has like an out, right?

Like if you're a great developer, you can get a job where you have a lot of money.

And if the miners can pivot to like, um, AI data centers, even, even the ASIC chip manufacturers, they can like, you know, people have outs, but the mining pools, you know, uh, as revenue shrinks and all this stuff, they will just like collect less and less and less money.

And, um, if Bitcoin dies, it's not like you can just be like, oh, I'm going to be like, you can't even like be like, oh, I'm going to be like a litecoin pool or something.

Cause they already have their pools that they like.

So that the, the marathon, all the pools, Foundry, whatever, they should be specialists and they should look into everything.

And if necessary, they can communicate with their clients.

They should certainly do more of a ask for forgiveness, not permission thing, because of course there's a story that apparently happened with Foundry, with the Epic Sat.

I don't know if we have ever talked about this, you and I, but the, there's the Epic Sat.

The Ordinal Sat, ended up being worth, this is one Satoshi that ended up being worth 13 plus BTC.

Right.

So as you know, this is like Ordinal's craze.

Right.

So you could sell one Sat, which is basically worth nothing for 13 BTC, which is much more than the value of like, you know, multiple blocks.

Foundry emailed, suppose this is what I was told, Foundry emailed their clients saying, you know, this is, we will take steps to secure the Epic Sat.

The Ordinal Sat.

And they got, apparently they got like a bunch of angry emails back because people were thinking, oh, this has to do with like JPEGs on the blockchain inscriptions.

It had become controversial.

So they're like, why are you involving us in this shit?

Coinering basically.

Exactly.

That was of course a misunderstanding because Ordinal's and inscriptions were very conflated at the time.

It had nothing to do with JPEGs on the blockchain, but I think, which is also besides the point, but it ended up being mined by, I think it was via BTC.

That mined the Epic Sat.

So Foundry didn't mine it, even though they're the largest pool, they were statistically the most likely to mine it.

So the question is, like, what exactly happened there?

And are people at Foundry happy that they missed out on?

Because of course they buy, they mined it, got it for 13, sold it for 13 BTC and then distributed that to their clients.

Your broader point, though, it sounds like is that mining pools should be taking a greater hand in governance broadly.

And, you know, I don't know if it was you who said this to me or somebody else, but somebody made the suggestion.

It's like, oh, what if every mining pool basically had sort of like an elected representative whose job was to stay up to date on what's happening and sort of protocol development, etc.?

You know, you could have a situation where a mining pool is actually because I mean, right now, there's no incentive for them to do that.

They're not very involved in protocol governance, broadly speaking, but they could be.

And they should be.

I think it's they will miss out.

They actually stand to benefit or suffer if the price of BTC goes way down or if it goes way up, like that will affect how much money that the mining pools collect.

And then, you know, so the mining pools are also they are the ones who create they run the software that assembles the blocks.

So they really should be specialists and they should have knowledge about.

How to make blocks the most valuable way.

And so I think it's.

The epic sad story is a very depressing story of like knowledge, not, you know, we're not being governed by knowledge or being governed by like, I don't know, like optics or or spineless, the cowardice, maybe.

I don't know. But I think we should be in a world where the mining pools know more and care more.

And they and I think that that would be very easy for them to just have like one full time person or something or a whole team, you know, especially if we're going to have like marathon R&D like department.

Oh, we certainly do.

But it's not terribly common.

It's not, unfortunately.

It's weird. There are parts of it that are common because like the brains people are they put out like books and stuff and they are kind of recognized as sort of more egghead or something.

I hope that's not offensive to say or whatever, you know, but they're like the you have some people who have like put out research and stuff.

I do think that like, OK, so like Luxor was more like overtly pro ordinal and they're more pro soft fork, I think, where they were like, we will support.

So they're like, we will support BIP 300.

But they're also like, we love the ordinals that go into the parties because it's more transaction fee revenue.

Yeah, makes total sense.

So why don't more people do that?

I don't know. But hopefully they'll start.

Well, it's a good CTA, Paul.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

I'm excited.

We'll have to do more of a part two and here as the drive chains story unravels.

But yeah, thank you so much for coming on and kind of sharing a little bit about merge mining, which super interesting topic from our perspective.

So excited that we got to talk about it.

Thank you.

Great. Hey, thanks for having me.