Okay, hello. Hi, everyone. Here it is, Wednesday at 2 p.m. So, I'm here to answer anyone's questions or complaints. Raise your hand and you can come up and complain or ask a question or do whatever. I'm going to invite a couple people to co-host just because sometimes my phone will just crash and it will lose the space. So, I'm just going to invite some people to co-host just so that there is a host in case my phone crashes. Okay, we have the very first person. Here we go. Yes, we got a Justin. Hello. Hello. Hey, I'll co-host if you need a co-host. Yeah, I would like one because I think if my phone crashes, the whole space will go down, which is no good. But if you have a co-host, it will. We have one. We got someone accepted one. So, yeah, of course, I'll just talk a little bit about it. It's like, first of all, about myself, you know, I've been a Bitcoiner for a very long time, and I was a Bitcoin maximalist for 15 years, basically until now. But Bitcoin faces a lot of very important problems that we have to address. And I think if we don't, we may lose this opportunity to make Bitcoin a success. My view is that the root cause of all these problems is that we have grown complacent because of a lack of competition. And the, you know, like, we have, we're in denial about an awful lot of things. But on one hand, people preach this idea that Bitcoin is perfect, and Bitcoin doesn't, it can't be improved. And Bitcoin is, it's already, you know, exactly what it needs to be. And all we need to do is not break it. But then on the other hand, we have all these problems, like everyone's lying to themselves about the Lightning Network, everyone's lying to themselves about what it means, the darknet markets have switched to Monero only, people are switching to stablecoins, that was originally, all this was originally a Bitcoin project, Zcash, etc. All this stuff was originally Bitcoin projects. People have been slowly leaving over 15 years. So we had one person request. But I don't see them anymore. And so this hard fork is actually a really good idea, because it allows everyone to get free money. And it allows us to create a competitor to BTC that will hopefully help BTC perform better. And of course, people had very strong feelings about this, because of the Bitcoin cash hard fork in 2017, I think. So I created this space to, you know, let all the haters or critics, you know, like, sure, let's, let's see what they have to say. I'm not surprised that, you know, lots of people are, you know, they want to hop on to my tweet, they got 10 million views. And they want to add like some little thing for themselves. But then they don't actually want to show up to the space to complain. It doesn't surprise me at all. That's exactly what I was expecting, of course. But sure, hey, tell your friends tell you anyone who's a hater or anyone who's curious. Tell them to come on in. And they can talk about why they think this is a terrible idea. I suppose I might as well talk about it. No one's going to ask or request. I can talk about the whole takes Toshi's coins concept, which is by far the most talked about feature of this idea. And it's, it's people talk about it as if it's some kind of flaw or some kind of shameful thing. But that's nothing of the kind. I mean, it's, it's actually an ingenious idea. First, I have to point out that there is a different version of this hard fork that does not have any reassignment of Satoshi's coins, it doesn't have any hard fork. And that that version is that's just what BIP300 is itself. And that has existed for a very long time. It was formalized in 2017 or something. So that's point number one. But point number two is the people who complain about the reassignment of Satoshi's coins, they have to equivocate, they want it both ways. They on one hand, they want to say, this project solves an important problem, and it's going to be valuable. And so the coins will be valuable in this project is really important. But on the other hand, they say, Oh, this is a terrible project, and it's useless, and it's not going to solve any problem. So you have to agree, we have to go back and forth, either this solves a problem, or it doesn't. And if it does solve a really big problem, then you want to live in a world where the people who help solve a problem, make an enormous profit from that. That's what that's what we all want. We all want to live in a world where people profit from solving problems. Otherwise, if it takes a lot of effort to solve a problem, and there's no profit, then we're really relying on people's altruism, and not a lot of the important problems are going to be solved, only very few of them. So that is, so that's, it's a very good thing when you set up your society where people who solve a big problem get a profit. And then, you know, on the other hand, some people just think this, this project is not important, and it doesn't solve, does not solve an important problem. And in which case, why even bother complaining about it, because it's just going to be some useless project that the coins won't be worth anything. Satoshi has exactly as many eCash as he had before, in terms of US dollar value. Okay, we got someone who is giving the thumbs down. Why not come up on stage and let everyone know what you have to say. Or don't. Again, I'm not surprised. Okay, so, yes, some questions. If you're allowing a pre-mine, then why not allow the public to pre-mine as well? I think that would be a good... Not allowing a pre-mine. There's a pre-sale, to some extent, but there's not a pre-mine. Okay, so the coins that, Satoshi's coins, you're not pre-mining those? Is that right? That's right. I mean, I guess you could think of it that way, I suppose. There is a public pre-sale, but for various legal reasons, I'm not sure that everyone can participate in it. It depends on where you live. That's not my fault. But yeah, of course, we're selling them now to people. Everyone's getting the same price. Okay, we have another person. It's not like, you know what I mean? It's not like some kind of cloak and dagger thing. Okay, another person has requested Mr. Otto and Sante. Yes, well, thanks for allowing me to speak. So, we already implemented the 300 protocol back from 2015, and we are testing it. And nevertheless, it wasn't adopted in the big chain. It does what it's supposed to do. I mean, in our perspective, it works, and we've tested it with 300, 400 users. It does the job with all the Drivechains and stuff. Well, we also use the OP_RETURN for some small things we do around the Drivechains, of course, but it does work. I mean, even though this Bitcoin fork, which is in August, won't work, it will be a nice experiment for everyone. I mean, we can learn from our mistakes and then correct them, right? Right. I'm sorry, are you saying that you run an altcoin that has implemented BIP300? Is that what you're saying? No, we just forked Bitcoin, restarted it, and also allowed your implementation of the protocol to run, along with some others. Yeah, but you said that it worked with 400 users. I didn't understand what you meant by that. Like, what are you referring to when you say it? We have some drivechains. Yeah, but who's we? It's not an auto incentive. It's just another project. You will be hearing of it soon enough. But we are testing it with our community, and it does work. I mean, of course, it doesn't have the adoption of the Bitcoin for the miners to collude and stuff like that, but as a small proof-of-work chain and with Drivechains, it does work. I mean, it fits the profile. It's just an experiment. Why not? Yeah, I agree, and I think that even if the eCash hard fork in August is a huge failure, there are many ways in which it might overall be a success, because just by attempting it, we can raise awareness of certain issues. It might still cause BTC to get into better shape, and even if it fails completely, I think it will very minimally inconvenience people. They just don't get free money. So I think I agree that we should be more proactive, and we should actually launch. I think we should do lots more. Instead of having new altcoins, we should really do a lot of these semi-privatized hard forks, because then you have a group of people who have an incentive to make a high-quality project, and meanwhile, all Bitcoiners are just getting free money left and right. So I think the problem is it affects narratives, and it affects people's careers in the development world, but I think those people are mostly the problem. Well, the thing is that by forking it and restarting it, you can relive what Satoshi lived. So you will be the only one mining it, call it a pre-mine or not. You're the only one that believes in that project, and others won't mine with you. That's not a pre-mine. You are just alone. People don't believe you. The second, you will learn so much. I mean, the difficulty of adjusting only to maximum forex up and down, also the OP_RETURN bug, and everything else will be like reliving 2009-2013 history. With all the bugs, some of them were never fixed by Satoshi, some of them were fixed instantly. You will learn so much, and you can adapt Bitcoin to anything you want. That's the power of the open source, in my opinion. And even though some of them are not successful, the next ones will be for sure. Yeah, a lot of people are very interested in this project, and a lot of people have been pushing for it for more than five years. So we've had an enormous amount of people be interested in this idea even before it was announced. And then it clearly struck a very large nerve and got lots of conversation, news articles, lots of people came up to me in Vegas to talk about it. And numerous people have asked how to mine it and how to start mining it on day one. So I certainly don't think it's accurate to say. And I don't think I'll be mining myself. I'm not much of a miner. Because I have a background in economics, so it's a little too close to a perfectly competitive industry for me to be interested in working there. But yeah, I agree that we should do lots of things even if they don't succeed, even if something has a 5% chance of success. If we only do things that are certain to succeed in the world, then we're only going to do a very small percentage of all the things that are worth doing. So we should try all kinds of things, even if they have a low chance of success. That's how evolution built every living thing on this planet. But sure, thanks. So you are running a new project that is secret for now. I won't call it a secret. It's just a startup that's going to be into the public in a few weeks, maybe. But it's okay. I mean, we learned so much about Bitcoin, the little things. We're not affecting Bitcoin by any means. Neither are we or you. We are on the same team. It's not about being wrong to the Bitcoin supporters or maxis. It's just forking the code and modifying to do experiments. Some of them are good. Some of them are not so good. But we must move. I mean, I don't know how many people out of this crowd know that Bitcoin was not with a specific supply at the beginning. Well, that was also a hard fork. Yes, let's call it that way. I don't think it actually was necessarily a hard fork. The code was there. It was in plain sight for everybody. It was modified in 2014, I think, by Peter, right? Yeah, BIP42, I think. So things that people should know about Bitcoin, because it's not just electronic cash. It's much, much more, in my opinion. So by using these side projects, people can learn and be sure about the big boy. And why not do some, I don't know, some add-ons on the big boy? Okay, great. Thanks. Yes, anyone else have any thoughts or complaints or... Yeah, hello. Hey. Hello. Hey, Paul. Yeah, I... Hey, can you hear me? I can hear you. Oh, great. Yeah, I don't know if a lot of people remember, but back in 2014, I think it was Peter Risen wanted to launch a chain state fork or so, like an airdrop of Ethereum. He called it like a Ethereum, with an A in front. And he was going to give Ethereum to all Bitcoin holders. But I was just wondering if you have any thoughts or comments to the Bitcoin community. What can they... I didn't totally understand. I think you may have cut out a little bit. I heard you say the A Ethereum. Yeah. What did you say? Sorry. Yeah, yeah. No, sorry if my connection's bad. I'll shut up. But yeah, it was called A Ethereum. I think it was Peter Risen on BitcoinTalkForums wanted to give Ethereum to every Bitcoiner in the same way that you are with eCash before Ethereum launched. So it was kind of like, I'm going to take their software, but then I'm just going to reward it all to Bitcoiners to try to sort of beat them. Yeah, and I thought it was a great idea. And I'm just wondering, like, do you have any speculations on whether or not eCash fails, whether or not it gets, you know, adoption? But it'd be nice if Bitcoin adopted this kind of governance mechanism. I was saying, you know, let's not be so afraid of the hard fork if you're willing to create a new community. So I just think it's kind of interesting. And I wonder if you've thought about what Bitcoin could learn from this experiment. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that imagine how different the culture would have been if instead of having all these altcoins, there was just all hard forks and everything was just going to Bitcoin holders. Now, of course, when you do the pure hard fork, that means that you can't give any extra profit to the people who, you know, did the labor of creating the fork idea, which is, again, why this Satoshi's Coins idea is actually a brilliant idea. And it perfectly cuts the difference between, on one hand, rewarding all Bitcoin holders by giving them free coins. And on the other hand, it gives you like an incentive to create the project in the first place. So, yeah, I think that would have been really, really cool if that had caught on. Back when Ethereum was created, people believed so much, including me, everyone just took it for granted that Bitcoin would just be doing smart contracts. And we rolled our eyes at Ethereum and we thought, well, you know, who cares, because it's an open source project, we're just going to absorb all the best ideas. It was totally taken for granted back in 2015, back in 2014. I mean, everyone thought sidechains were around the corner. There was a tweet. So Blockstream had just come out. And Gavin Andreessen had tweeted like, if this amazing company offers you a job, you take it. Brian Armstrong had the tweet, like, the altcoins are just a distraction. Ripple, Litecoin are a distraction. The way is Bitcoin and sidechains. Everyone believed Trace Mayer had a tweet. When the sidechains whitepaper came out, all the altcoin markets crashed. He had like a snarky screenshot. Everyone took it for granted that we would have these L2 chains and that there would not be any difference technologically between Bitcoin and Ethereum. So that might have been why people were overconfident. I don't think anyone realized we'd be living in a world where all the chains were so different and they had all these niches. And there'd be like a Solana niche for meme coins or something. Anyway, that's a great comment. OK, now we have someone else. Mr. Mimetic Money. Hello. Hey, Paul, thanks for taking my question. I'll be real brief and then step down to take the answer. But you were mentioning earlier in this chat here that if this hard fork works and you get a really good competitor to Bitcoin, that ultimately strengthens Bitcoin. So I just wanted your thoughts in that world where let's say sidechains become successful enough to host all the experimentation applications, the transactions you're talking about. What stops Bitcoin itself from just being the settlement layer beneath a larger ecosystem in that world? Like, is that what you want? Yeah, that makes sense. But that's what BIP300 is. And the Bitcoin community, it's not just about activating BIP300. We have a lot of like weird cultural problems that I think might be impossible to fix, but maybe a competitor could could fix them because really like we live in a world where I think there's a couple smoking guns. So one of the smoking guns would be OP_CAT, which is OP_CAT. It does basically nothing. It was in the original Satoshi client and it was removed in a kind of panicked emergency situation. It just takes X and Y and returns XY next to each other. It had this financial support like backing from Starkware. It enables all these weird Merkle tree things. So OP_CAT is this super, super, super, it's like you designed a science experiment to have the least controversial beneficial soft fork. But we're not doing that. So the question is why? And I think the answer is the cultural and it's in everyone's brain and it's the size of the community is too big and people can't talk to each other anymore. Like, you know what I mean? None of these people know what OP_CAT, who knows what OP_CAT is? Does Michael Saylor know what OP_CAT is? Does BlackRock know what OP_CAT is? Does Bitmain know what OP_CAT is? I don't, you know, like, I would guess that none of these people know what it is, even though in the technical community, it's the simpler far simpler thing. So in an abstract sense, it's hard to talk about. I think that if people could see it in the wild, then it would be easier to talk about. My hope is that someone will do something possibly including this hard fork, but someone will do something that makes the technical community just say, okay, listen, we've had enough of this. We've had enough of making we've had enough of making all these irrational decisions. And we're just going to merge like 16 soft forks and the next version of Bitcoin or the miners just say, we've also had enough of this. And we know we have researched x, y and z. And we know this is good for the price of Bitcoin for the price of ASICs. And we're just going to do it. I can also see people just thinking, well, it's actually too difficult to fix BTC culture and then just silently jumping ship. So the question was, why can't BTC just do all this? But the answer is, there is no good reason why BTC can't do it. And yet paradoxically, I hope this explanation is not too bizarre. But paradoxically, because there's no good reason, it means there's some hidden force just wrecking it all that maybe we can't overcome. Appreciate your answer, Paul. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Yes, Mr. Justin. Hello. Welcome back to the stage. Yeah, where did you, are you publicly announcing the pre-sale price? Well, how did you determine that price? The issue with this is a lot of the ICO stuff and like other public promotions, like it's very scammy. And there are laws about solicitation. And it's like on one side, it's like insider dealing and then on the other side solicitation. So it's like you're screwed no matter what you do. But I think on the whole, it's better to avoid talking about it because it just pollutes the space, like the space in abstract. It makes it seem like, because then people just can't stop shilling their investments and it's annoying for everyone. It's like when people come to your front door and they try to sell you whatever. And so I think I try to de-emphasize it because I don't really want it to be about that. I really want it to be about the ideas. But I will, people can DM me about it if they want. And yeah, I'm trying to keep it to like people that I've had like a multi-year relationship with, which would include us, Justin, because we met you at many Bitcoin conferences ago in person. But I would prefer it to be like people who have been in the industry a long time, people who have known me for a long time, people who are like very wealthy and can afford to lose the money. But yeah, the price is pretty low, I think. I kind of looked at where's Bitcoin Cash, where's like Bitcoin SV, these Bitcoin SV being like a disastrous outcome. And I kind of like put it near Bitcoin SV basically. So I think everyone who invests will get a good deal. Certainly that's my hope. And so I certainly hope to be able to bring people a positive ROI by just pricing the coins very low. But I really try to avoid talking about it because it's really, it is a distraction, I think. And yeah, of course, at the end of the day, just eyeball it. But it has been, it was already two-thirds sold out before we announced. That's part of the reason why I announced is so many people had found out, people were already telling each other. So I thought everyone, a lot of people already know or something like that. So that's kind of why I announced actually, because I already knew that I didn't need that to complete the project. And again, the project is not, the fundraising accomplishes several things at once. One thing is you need to have a team of people who can trust each other. It's a little bit like why people do hazing. You have to clear a bar where people feel like they can trust each other going into the fork. You want to have people who have skin in the game before the fork actually happens. The people who know how to explain what's happening in advance. I just think that if you don't do those things, the hard fork is not viable. Because if you think, but what if you just snap your fingers and hard fork today, very few people even know about that. So they may be transacting in Bitcoin. There may be replay issues. There may be all this other stuff that'd be transacting in Bitcoin, and they don't even know that there's a hard fork. And it would take them time to research it and make an informed decision on do they actually want to invest in it or sell it or buy it or ignore it. So those factors led to my announcement, which I realized has many layers. And someone's frustrated by that and confused, then I think that is fair. But, you know, it's like I had to weigh a lot of different issues against each other. So that's kind of what I was thinking about that. Yeah, well, I think the replay protection is already implemented right in the hard fork. It's not like a bug or whatever. So I don't think replay will be a thing. But what happened, I don't know if you remember the Bitcoin gold fork, what happened is for the people that held Bitcoin were able to also claim the new Bitcoin gold. And the thing that happened is for them to derive the new address from the new fork, they had no software to do that. And a very big hack happened that when one user posted a software that was deriving the new Bitcoin gold address from the old mnemonic or private key. And by using a Google Analytics cookie, they stole also the Bitcoin. So I think as a piece of advice for the people that are not so techies to provide the software embedded that will derive and can be run locally. Yeah, I would agree. But let me clarify that the for the replay protection, like to split the coins, you have to do a new thing using our software or like a splitter that's derived from our software. And we're going to publish all of that well in advance. But if you just make a BTC transaction, it will be replayed on the eCash network. So that's different from how Bitcoin Cash. What Bitcoin Cash did is they basically said, we will make it so that everything splits instantaneously. But as Jameson Lopp rightly pointed out, he said, this is basically an admission that you're not the real Bitcoin, which is kind of funny for Bitcoin Cash to have Bitcoin in the name. But there's a lot of nuances to it all. But yeah, I would study the replay protection very carefully before making a decision or just do nothing until you figure out what other people are complaining about, if anything. Yeah, I have a related question. So let's say theoretically, someone has Bitcoin in a wallet that has a complicated pathway. For example, Wasabi Wallet. It's known to have kind of a hard... You can pull out using the recovery website, walletsrecovery.org. You can pull out various like the SegWit version zero coins in Electrum or in Sparrow. But the other pathways, it's just too complicated. What would you say for those people? And this would probably be something good to put in the FAQ as well. Do you recommend just transferring each UTXO one by one into a new UTXO in Sparrow? What's the most secure way of splitting off their eCash? Well, if you download our software and then spend the eCash, there'll be like a little checkbox that is checked by default that's like split the coins and it will do it for you. Now, of course, this involves importing your private key, like the real private key for both coins. So you really shouldn't do that. That would be an insane thing to do. But the flip side of that coin is there's no way we can help you split the coins without knowing the private key. So it's kind of like an impasse. But what every normal person should do is they should maybe like download the splitter tool or the software, but don't run it and just wait for like one or two weeks. And by then, you know, you'll either see people complaining online or you won't. But yeah, I think the right thing is to... I think someone will probably, it might be us or it might be someone else, but we may try to publish a standalone splitter that's like a really, really, really small piece of software. So it's very easy for people to kind of check through the source code or have the AI read the source code. And it will just, that would be the bare bones type of a thing. But yeah, our software will do it. Our wallet, you know, will do it automatically. But yeah, you have to import your real private key, which is, that's an insane thing to do under any circumstance. But yeah, that's what you have to do. But, you know, again, I don't, I'm not saying everyone should do that on day one immediately. That would be a very foolish decision. So just plan it out and then wait and then just, you know, wait for a little while. And when you get more comfortable with it, then do it. Well, the people would do it because they want to mine from the first block. Well, you can mine without, you know, you can mine without splitting your coins, of course. Exactly. But you have to derive your eCash address, right? Well, again, the L1 is going to be exactly the same as Bitcoin Core, just with like the name changed and like a few other things changed. So that should all be like very easy for people to get going. I wouldn't worry about that. And you also use the SIGHASH fork ID that Bitcoin Cash used for forking it? I don't. We're not using that, no. Okay. I wanted to see if I can encourage some more adversarial people up here. So, Paul, like you pointed to this tension where as Bitcoin fees, transaction fees are obviously needed in the long run on Bitcoin. As fees rise, it'll be hard to settle L2s. So it'll kind of make it so the punishment, transaction, I forget what it's called exactly, in Lightning, won't be able to be broadcasted. On the other hand, fees are very low. You're going to need a big block size or something to pay miners. And that's that's bad for many reasons that a lot of us know about. So, yeah, like what is the, I mean, I see this whole experiment as a way to be empirical about this and kind of make Bitcoiners and everybody confront this potential problem. And Drivechains is a kind of solution. You're going to have high fee paying settlement transactions that don't need to crowd out. So you're going to have a lot of people that don't need to crowd out so many L1 transactions. They could still be low fee. But, yeah, any like thoughts on that or what's the what's like the Bitcoiner response who's very sanguine about this potential problem? How do we settle L2s? I think it's interesting that both two groups of people thought that the L1 fee rates would be high. So first you had like Roger Vertype and they were saying, well, because they had experienced it themselves. So they said, oh, well, I experienced all these high fees when the fees go back up to $10 per transaction, $20 per transaction, $50 per transaction. They were like, when that happens, they'll just be a mass exodus. It'll be so embarrassing. Everyone will leave BTC and they'll come to Bitcoin Cash or whatever. So that was the thinking behind the large blockers. They expected L1 fees to go up and they're always waiting for, you know, waiting for Godot, like that play, you know, and they're just thinking one day this will happen and it will be a big success for us. Now, the second group of people were like the Dan Held type people. And they were saying, you know, very confidently in writing, they were saying, you know, because an international wire transfer is $75, the L1 fee rates will eventually be somewhere around there. And both of those groups were wrong because, you know, the equilibrium is just people don't like paying a high L1 fee. And so they just stopped doing it. They just won't pay. And especially as the payments world becomes more competitive, you know, in the past, you had to send wire transfer. Now you have Venmo. This was like, you know, there was a time before Venmo had been invented. There was a time before WeChat Pay. There was a time before Zelle. There was a time before all this stuff was invented. And the equilibrium cost for normal fiat payment is now like very low. There was a time before credit cards were invented. So what I'm getting at is the fee rates, I don't think they can be very high, even in a Drivechain world. The L2 fee rate would be like $0.10, which I think is like lower, like between $0.01 and $0.10. The reason why I don't think it'd go much lower is because, you know, once it's down to $0.10, you don't actually save that much money by making it that much lower. You know what I mean? You're only saving like $0.10. So you're saving like $0.09 if you go from $0.10 to $0.01. And most people are not going to care about saving $0.09. So I think the L2 equilibrium fee would be like something around $0.10 per transaction. The L1 fee will be like higher. My guess is it could be like $1 or $2 or maybe $3 per transaction. But yeah, that's what I think the equilibrium is. Now, as you pointed out at the beginning of your question, Lightning kind of wants to have it both ways. And either way, it doesn't work. So either Lightning says, well, L1 fee rates will be super high, but people will only have to, like on their 15th birthday, their dad, their father will give them, they'll buy them a car, and they'll say, and we opened your, here's your Lightning channel. And they'll pay like a $200 fee or a $75 fee. They open this channel and then they'll never need to close or rebalance the channel or it will be very rare. But as I pointed out many times on the Bitcoin Dev mailing list in my article, Lightning Limitations, and I pointed it out at the TabConf Lightning debate, none of this works at all because when the fee rate is that high, it's called the justice transaction, by the way, it has a very silly name. And the justice transaction, it requires so many bytes to write to the chain that it's almost as big as what an L1, regular L1 transaction is anyway. If it's, that's what it is, then you cannot process Lightning payments lower than that amount. But then the flip side of the Catch-22 is that the L1 fee rates are so low that you don't need the Lightning network because the L1 works just fine. Lightning network has all these extra problems about needing a hot wallet, needing liquidity, you know, a long list, long giant list of problems. In practice, what happened is that everyone just defected to either custodial BTC, aka like banking, or they just left crypto and went back to fiat and they use, but now the big thing now is, is of course, temporarily we had Litecoin, it's Sergey from Bitrefill, he presented all this data. But then now everyone switched to stables, stable coins. So you can ask if Sergey from Bitrefill, Bitrefill is like a real company that has actual customers and the people buy gift cards with Bitcoin. Bitcoin dominated, I think, I think until 2021, Bitcoin was by far number one for internet commerce. But now it's stable coins and Litecoin, if you can believe that. And so this just speaks to what I'm trying to say about, you know, the average normal user, they want the low fees. So Dan Held was wrong. Roger Ver was sort of right, but he was, well, it's like why switch to Bitcoin Cash when you could just switch to Solana or you could switch to Tron or anything else. So, so anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the fees and why the fee picture is totally bleak without merge mined L2s. But if you do have merge mined L2s, then everything's fine. And that's the issue. But it's just one of the many cultural derangements of BTC that people either don't grasp this, or they just kind of, they think intellectually that's true. And then they just kind of shrug and move on. There's many things in Bitcoin where we just shrug and we just move on, like darknet markets going to Monero only. We just think, ah, you know, it's not a big deal. And and then same with these fee rates. You just think, oh, I guess everything's fine. Even though the low fee rates means that we don't have a lot of fee paying users and we don't have a lot of customers. No one has ever, you know, worked out the end game, or people say it can be a store value. We don't need transact, we don't need to transact. This is just a ticker that we buy. That might work, but it only works in a situation where there is not a second cryptocurrency that is going to be used in payments forever. That also has a fixed supply of 21 million. So that's the issue is like if if we don't race ahead as far as we as fast as we possibly can, if we don't try to compete with all of us, we got to compete like at the Olympic level. We got to be waking up at five forty five a.m. and training every day, because if someone else out there is, that just means that the project is in danger of being replaced. And I just think that's that's the basic disagreement is, you know, do we can we be complacent or can we just coast? OK, we have someone else. Let's see someone else's requested. Let me see. OK, here we go. Add a speaker. There we go. OK, Lord Doyle. Meowla dot fun. Yes. Hello, welcome to the stage. Hello, Paul, thanks for having me, can you hear me? I can hear you, yes. So my question today is about Solana, I guess. Because you probably know that Solana has thousands of people ready to embark. So my question is simple because I don't have I don't want to take much of your time. How do you plan to integrate the eCash Solana with your eCash? OK, there's no promises here. I don't want to promise anything. I want to keep this deliberately kind of vague, you know, I don't want to get. But here's what I was thinking was it would be fun as like a little promo to raise awareness and just have a little bit of fun, you know, hopefully in a harmless fun level. Maybe like a hundred coins, maybe a thousand coins, I don't know, just like a small amount and just say, OK, we'll give these to like the top owners or something like that so you can swap the the meme token that I have nothing to do with and I didn't create, although, you know, people have wired me into it, but and I would not have created it in my own free will. But I know that my I understand, you know, based on what I know about how Solana economy works or something, people just do if you don't get involved, people just do it anyway or impersonate you or they're just so I was like, OK, I probably, again, I had to weigh different issues here and I thought, OK, how can we how can we get something out of this? How can we make it kind of a little bit of fun and exciting? And I was thinking like, yeah, OK, some of the the presale coins, we could give them away, possibly, possibly we could give them away to people who own, you know, the top owners of the the meme coin and the meme coin with the understanding being that these meme coins are frivolous, you know, kind of games, but trying to have trying to give it some substance and have some a little bit of fun with it. So that's what that's probably all I'm going to say about that, because, of course, you know, these people are hanging on to your every word and then like screenshotting everything you say and clipping it and stuff. But I thought we could domesticate some of the the energy and we can raise awareness. And then I do want the hope if this project succeeds, it will have succeeded because all the altcoin communities make a little decision where they say, OK, listen, we've had a lot of fun here over in whatever, for example, Monero. OK, so the Monero people have changed the game and they I respect what they've accomplished. But it's difficult to be low ranking is, you know, there's number one on coin market cap and then there's like, you know, number thirty six or something. And same for Solana. It's like Solana is like, OK, if you really don't care about how expensive the full note is, then you can push the envelope, which is great. That's that's a good thing. But if this project succeeds, it'll be because all these people kind of run a little calculation and they think, OK, wait a minute. We can do everything that we're doing right now. And we can but we can do it as L2 of. The same we can all be in the same coin, and then the hope is that enough people jump ship and they just unite unites all these people, so I'm hoping that the altcoin people can reunite. All behind one coin, that's that's the idea, like that's the success. That's the success. What would be the word? I don't know. That's the you know, that's victory road, so to speak. Like that would be how we make this project the number one cryptocurrency would be if all these people decide, OK, listen, we've this has been great, but I don't like being ranked one hundred and twenty five. I've got this great idea and I know it's really good. And so then you just move the software over. Move try to move the community over and then you have a community where everyone can get what they want, but they're all participant. They're all sharing the same twenty one million coins. They're not making new coins. So that's the that's the idea. And so, yeah, but thanks for your question. Thank you, Paul. Yeah, one more one more thing. I also believe that through the meme coin, you can get a lot of people to endorse and jump ship to the really cash, you know. So it's a great way to market it because you have like maybe over 10,000 people daily trading on Solana. So it gets a lot of attention. Thank you. OK, well, I think if I could interject, I think what I was trying to do here, he's not trying to market it. He's trying to. In a roundabout way, force Bitcoin developers to say, OK, let's start discussing how to make some real changes, how to help Bitcoin scale to billions of people. And if that doesn't come true, well, then eCash will become the number one. But if it and if if that does become true, well, then Bitcoin will scale to a billion billion people. Yeah, this is exactly right. But the thing is, I don't think it will work as a kind of forcing. Function unless, you know, the eCash has to compete with all of its strength, and that includes having good marketing and promotion. So I think it's actually related. It all overlaps, I think, because you want the competitor to be really strong in every way that it can be. But, yeah, I mean, I think the goal is ultimately to shift society towards a superior, better technology. And you can't do that if you, you know, if you build the technology, but it never it never shows up to the arena, then it might as well not exist, I think. So, well, certainly we're not getting there with Bitcoin Core rejecting OP_CAT. So that's you can see how that's totally dead end. OK, I always have a terrible problem with this thing because the interface is terrible. It says requested one. But if you click on that, then it just doesn't show up at all. And you have to click on the person's name. But whatever I'm getting used to. OK, we have a Jerry some Jerry something. Hello. Oh, and then when people get brought up on the stage like it cuts, it moves them like 20. That's like a 20 second lag and then it catches them up. And then so they're always like. Discombobulated. But hopefully he shows up. So. Hit accept. OK. Or maybe not, I don't know. Let me see what happened to him. I don't know. Maybe he left. I'm not sure. Or the space is just going to crash like I don't know the spaces. I think it's kind of janky. The software, honestly. I think Clubhouse works a little better. No offense. But. I don't know what happened to that person, but maybe they will leave and come back. I tried to add him up. It looks like he keeps trying to request. Oh, OK, let me see. Let me scroll down. Right. OK. OK. I'm manually invited someone with the same. Profile picture. I don't know. You know, this software is really weird. Hello. Hey, man. Hey, everyone. Paul, I love. I love what you're doing with the hard fork and the. The. The. The. I love what you're doing with the hard fork and the Bitcoin funny. I had. I don't know. Can I be heard? I don't know if it can be heard at all. I know. I hear you. Yes. Yeah. Oh, cool, man. I've been looking into it and stuff. And, you know, I had the idea a while back. I actually DM'd you about it about a week ago. I think it was maybe a little bit longer. I tried to send you a video of what I did. I was trying to recreate the time chain that Satoshi had at the B1 at the very beginning. I did it on Solana on the test net. And the way I implemented it was a proof of time. Not just proof of work, but proof of time concept in it. And I used a mint of the coin on the test net, 21 million tokens on Solana. I created a vault program for it and I made it to where you could only mint using a mobile. And it was hard capped per day as well to play out over the period of two years. But again, like I said, I had it done and I did it a few months back. And I have a video and stuff of it. And I tried to send it to you, but the DMs wouldn't let me. It just let me send you a message about it. I will check. Twitter has changed everything around, which is partially good. But yeah, often I feel really bad because if I open my messages, you have to go to an obscure corner where it says requests or something. And then I see all these people who have tried to message me over the years. And then you're like, oh. Because it really hides them. And so sorry about that if I didn't see your message. Most of the people who have tried to swap proof of work for something else have not succeeded. But we need a world where people keep tinkering and experimenting. And that's the world that we need. And the smart thing to do is to try to harness all of that innovation. And it's a really good thing, I think, that there are so many people out there who want to spend their free time learning and creating. And I think that's great. And it's like you never know what life experiences will lead someone to create the next big thing. So I think that's… Absolutely. And there's stuff there that I didn't know about. Like, I mean, when I was diving into, earlier on this year, when I was diving into the white paper and what the original vision was. And I know they rolled out the white paper. And I mean, to me, Bitcoin is beautiful, what they have done. I'm guessing it's a team. Don't know who they are, of course. We have our speculations and who's behind it and stuff. But I love the simplicity, but the complexity on top of it. Bitcoin in itself. It is a beautiful thing. Like, when you look back on it, it is a work of art. Like, it's never been broken since it got to the point where there couldn't be a 51% attack on the network. I see it as a work of absolute beauty. But I didn't know about yourself, Paul. I knew nothing about you or anything until I stumbled upon that eCash meme coin that had showed up in Solana. And I like to play about a little bit, you know, from time to time. And so, seeing that, and then it just drew me back on to what I had been working on a few months back, you know. And yeah, I would absolutely love for you to see the video at some point. Just to check it out. I know it's nothing special or anything. It was fun to make. It's a small side project. I never did anything with it. But I would love your input on it at some point, whenever you get the time. I know you're a busy fella. Yeah. Thank you. I will try to check it out. And, you know, it is fun to create things. And there's like a story about someone is lost on a mountainside, and they get a bunch of people together to look. This is a metaphor for research. So, some people, one team checks the north side of the mountain, one checks the west, a different team checks the east, and then another team checks the south. And then they find the person in the south. But then it doesn't mean that, like, you wouldn't go back to the base camp and then say, oh, well, you know, it was a waste of time to check the west side of the mountain or whatever. So, we want to live in a world where all these people are kind of, you know, exploring things and trying things. Even if they don't work, that doesn't mean they're not worth doing. Because you don't know in advance, which I think will later end up being the key to something important. Okay, now, like, where are the haters, you know? Where are the haters? They're not here. They're too cowardly to show their face, of course. Right? You've got haters, Paul? I mean, that's a good thing, man. You need that. I completely agree. No, it's kind of like there's a set of all the things in the world that are worth doing. Like, you could rank everything from good to bad. But then you could, you know, you could turn that ranking into, like, a big square or something, and you could say a grid. And you could say, well, some things are good, and they also sound good. And, you know, you can make money doing them. And they're very popular. It's a good and popular, and then there's good and unpopular. And very few people are going to be doing the good and unpopular things. And, you know, those are the things you got to do. Someone's got to do those. So, I'm happy to do that. And, you know, I've known a lot of these people in the Bitcoin community for a long time. It's like that meme about, it's like the Rick and Morty episode. He's like, your booze mean nothing. I've seen what makes you cheer. I've seen these same people cheer on, you know, the Lightning Network, and they cheer on Taproot and whatever. These people don't know anything, so it's like, whatever. But, yeah, like, you know, here I am. I made time. I took two hours out of my very busy, now, these last two or three weeks. Usually it's not so busy, you know, but these last two weeks have been pretty busy. And, yeah, just here I am. Yeah, message your friends. Go find, we could, you know, we could link to the announcement tweet. Although, probably everyone has seen it by now. But, there are all these people in there who are complaining and saying, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, complaint. You know, where are they? Now, where are they now? They can come, they can join, and they can, some people I do block, and I think then they can't join the space, so. But I don't block people just because they disagree. What I do is sometimes I block people if they're like, okay, a lot of stuff's just obvious spam. A lot of stuff's just obvious bots, like promoting, like, products and things. And then you have people who just, like, if people just, like, if you have, like, a serious text argument, and then people just drop, like, a reaction GIF. The thing is, a GIF, you know, a GIF is like high-octane stimulus, you know? It's like a really bright, it's like you go into a library, and someone's, like, shining a bright light and making a bunch of, playing loud music there. And it's kind of like, so I often block that. I think, don't just put a GIF, because you're not, it's not a fair fight. Okay, wait, here we go. We'll press, okay, I added, I think I figured out how to do the speaker thing, right, this time. Okay, we got crypto something. Crypto voice. Let me see. What is going on? Is this, I don't know if I'm not doing this right. Oh, Crypto Voyager. Okay, there it is. So he shows up, but then they go away. Is this me doing something wrong here? I don't think so. No, you have to be more patient until the speaker comes on up. There we go. I hear you. Okay, okay. Hi, Paul. First of all, I wish you all the best, because honestly, we need a little shake up. So that's, so that's nice. I do have some questions, because I still don't understand the whole thing. So we have, we have, with eCash, we would have smaller blocks, and then everything else would be a sidechain. Now, my question is, and it has been going on for a long time, on BTC, the miner security, so the funding of the mining equipment is basically the block reward, which is diminishing. How is the sustainability of eCash? Or maybe, I just came in like 10 minutes ago, so I don't know if you have talked about that in the white paper that you guys published. I didn't see anything of that. So my question is the sustainability of the mining. That's what, is it endogenous of the transactions on the sidechains? They pay for the miners? Or is it exogenous saying, well, number will go up? That's my only question. No, it is. One of the reasons why I became interested in this project in the first place is because it has to come from transaction fees. And the block subsidy, it halves every four years, but that means it drops by something like 95% every 16 years. And we've honestly just been bailed out. Everyone has been misled. Over the past 16 years of Bitcoin's history, the price of Bitcoin has gone up literally like 99 million%. That's not even a joke. It's gone from like one cent to $100,000. So it's gone up like literally, we're talking like in the millions, a hundred million, a hundred million percent range. You know, it's got, because to go from 10 cents to a hundred thousand is one million X is 99 million percent ROI. So we've had this totally freak event that cannot happen in the future. Even if Bitcoin takes over the whole world, it cannot go up another 99 million percent. It can only go up another like a hundred X. We can only go up like 9,000%. It's a pretty big difference between 9,000 and 99 million%. So anyway, the idea of, so yeah, I wrote an article called Security Budget in the Long Run. And then I wrote another article about security budget and merge mining. You can find all this on Truthcoin.info, which is my Bitcoin blog. And so yeah, it's much easier. Like the high fees are unsustainable because people get annoyed by the fee. And then they think, well, I love Bitcoin, but how can I avoid paying this fee? They're not going to enjoy paying. Like if the fee is $70 worth of purchasing power, like if the fee, you can either send one Bitcoin transaction or you can pay for dinner, dinner for two at a restaurant. Like if that's the purchasing power level of the fee, then that's, people are not going to like that. They're going to prefer to have more dinners out than pay the fee. So it's much more sustainable to live in a world where you have a high volume of transactions that all pay a small fee. And with the merge mine L2s, you can kick all of these off L1. You can keep the L1 node inexpensive and you can keep the block size low on L1. And you kick them to the L2. So all these L2s are merge mined. So the miners don't do any extra work, none whatsoever. And yet they collect 100% of the fees. So they get all the money on the L2 chain. And this is an extremely important point because I presented this at Opnext in 2024, I think maybe November, I don't know. But the point is, imagine a world where something out there, you know, right now there's, the whole planet earth has all these people transacting on it. Okay, they transact with Visa. They transact with cash. They use WeChat Pay. They use something. Okay. Now imagine they all switch to like some Bitcoin L2. Like imagine they all switch to Lightning. That would never happen, but just imagine that it happened. Then all the Lightning, the LSPs, Lightning Service Provider or the big routing nodes or just whoever it is. For this part of the argument, it doesn't even matter who it is. The point is, it's just not the miners. Some other people are making 10 cents on 9 trillion transactions per year. There's $900 billion per year. This is a huge amount of money. And yes, you have a hand up. Please interrupt. Yes. No, no, I didn't want to interrupt. That's why I put my hand up. Okay, fine. So it's merge mining. The transaction fees of the sidechains pay then for the L1 security. That's nice and dandy. You said there is no extra cost then associated with it. The sidechains, all that data that gets moved and slushed around in the, sorry for that word, but basically slushed around on the sidechains, where does that data then reside? It's a very, very important question. Now it's an ingenious question in fact, because this is the problem with large blocks on L1. And this is a problem with like Bitcoin SV, for example. The issue is you have to separate different issues. So there's the mining and then there's the nodes. And actually what the large blocker L1 Bitcoin SV type people got wrong is they also said, well, just no one has to worry about paying this. So someone does have to pay. So the full node has a cost and that is associated with all the data that has to be shipped around. And so because each blockchain has, this is crucial to understand how the blockchain works, which is that you need to be able to download and validate all the blocks. So someone has to send you the block data. Then you have to store it on your hard drive. Your CPU has to run through it all and validate it all. And then you have to be willing to serve it back to other people because it's a little bizarre for you to expect to be able to get it from other people if you're not willing to participate in giving it out. So there's this total full node cost and this full node cost has nothing to do with mining, totally separate issue. But the full node cost does increase when the block size is higher and it decreases when the block size is lower. And the people who pay the full node costs are people who have some kind of business where they want, they need to know if they are getting paid BTC. So right now, it's all the people who are receiving BTC. These are the people who get a benefit from running a node. Because the question is, if there's all these costs, why is someone willing to pay? So Kraken today, Coinbase today, these people are running nodes because people deposit crypto to them. They're in a very adversarial, they're in the business of providing liquidity. So people send them stuff and then they want to swap it and then they want to withdraw. The customers want to withdraw. They want to withdraw their USD or their whatever they bought. So in the future, whoever is receiving BTC, they need to know, hey, am I actually, do I actually, you know, someone says they sent me seven BTC, but did they actually do that? Well, they need to run the full node. So this is the full node cost is high. It just happens to be the, I see you have your hand up again and I will get to you after I finish the sentence, which is it happens to be the case now that because bandwidth prices have fallen, because hard drive prices have fallen, stuff is very different now than even it was in the block size wars in 2015. That was 10 years ago. So back then, the bottleneck was bandwidth, but that's actually not even true anymore. And we've published tests, you know, where you can have very large blocks and still run them on computers that cost basically the same now as a percentage of people's wage as they did 10 years ago in the BTC world. So actually this cost is a very small cost and it's nothing. The full node costs for these large block L2s is nothing compared to the transaction fee revenue. And so I'll just, let me just recap a couple of things. I wrote this article called All the World's Transactions. That's on Truthcoin.info that you can read. You can see what's the value of like 10 cents into all these transactions in the world. That's the mining revenue. And then you can look at, I did a performance contest with the software last summer. And you can see for yourself, I have the exact numbers and these exact tests that you can run on GitHub using GitHub's computers. And you can see how inexpensive the node is that does this huge, like 960 megabyte blocks. And if you had 14 of them, this would be able to cover all of the transactions in the world. And so, yes, okay, now I'm done talking. So please continue. As I understand, with the sidechains, I would be able to create my own sidechains with all bells and whistles and anchor it security-wise to the L1. If my chain has all the bells and whistles and I get on it the data and I don't know, AI agents paying another AI agent and all that other stuff, you said that people receiving BTC need to have a node. Well, if my sidechain with all bells and whistles has, well, petabytes of data sloshing around, would every single customer of mine or every single market participant of my bells and whistles sidechain need to have a node? And isn't that, the question is, why would I have to store somebody else's data on my node? That's my question. I have to tell you that these questions, which I think are pretty basic questions, but for some reason, there has been a lot of confusion about these questions. And even throughout the block size war, I personally felt that both the small blockers and the large blockers never got around to straightening this out. So either, everyone listening should either be like, oh, like Paul Stewart's genius or crank. You know what I mean? Because either there's something really weird about me and I'm right, or I'm just totally delusional about this. But I think these questions are really, really important. And I think all of them are very, very easy to answer, honestly. But for some reason, there's been widespread confusion about this point, because for example, maybe this isn't interesting to people, but it's interesting to me, like why does everyone believe what they believe? The Bitcoin SV people, they want to say that they want to have it both ways. And they want to say like, oh, miners will provide all this data because they're making so much money, but then they say no one is forced to run it. Anyway, let me just get to your actual question, which was why are people being forced to run a full node? And the answer is you're exactly right. No one is ever forced to run a full node. You could use your friend's full node. And this is basically how SPV works. It's basically how Electrum works. However, so what everyone has to do is, it's kind of like hiring security for an event, okay? Everyone has to make their own cost benefit decision. It's kind of like you have valuables like in your house. Some of them you just leave on the table, you know? Like I don't like to sit on my wallet, so I just throw my wallet on, or I leave it in my jacket pocket. You just leave it on the hook near the door. And then other stuff, maybe you have like a safe, or maybe you have stuff like buried somewhere. So each person decides, okay, the full node will give me more confidence that I have really received a transaction. However, you're not required to do that. And this, I think, you know, like even Peter Todd and other people, like they got really on this bizarre track where they, for some reason, they have all these rules in their head, and Luke Dashjr. also, about like when it's absolutely required to run a node versus not required. And it doesn't really make a lot of, I think not if it doesn't make any sense. So the full node helps you understand if you've received coins, but there's no sense in which it's mandatory. There's a completely separate issue. Yet another issue is if someone designs an L2 such that it is infinitely expensive, it's so expensive, or it's just maybe it's not infinitely expensive, but it's so expensive that no one wants to run it. Well, then the new L2 chain that, you know, no one will know how to assemble the next block and nothing, you know, no transactions will ever go through, or no one will know. So no one will be able to get the block data from someone else. And so that chain will just kind of die off. So in that sense, it's kind of like you open a store and you go to a strip mall or something, and you open a store and you say, I'm going to sell this store, but the store has expenses that are so expensive that the store can't continue to like, you know, hire employees and stuff. It runs, it goes bankrupt. So the sidechain can go bankrupt in the sense of being badly designed. No one can get the full node software to work. The full node software is too expensive. It crashes people's computers. And so the sidechain just kind of would die off in that case. Okay, so now I know that Justin put his hand up, but I think let's just try to get CryptoVovo to maybe finish a thought, and then we'll go back to Justin, I think. CryptoVoyagers is the name. You said that sidechains might die. That sounds like on a long enough term, on a long enough timeline, all sidechains will die. And if I already know that the sidechain will die, if it gets too, if it has too many bells and whistles and everybody would have to have a petabytes and zettabytes of size nodes, then they would, why would I go into that sidechain knowing that it will die because of popularity? The answer is that you should not, but the sidechain can L, the L2 can have its own block size limit. So there's no reason why it would have petabytes. In fact, if you had one that was like a privacy specialist, something like a zSide, a Zcash sidechain, in that context, it wouldn't necessarily need a very large block size. But I think there would be people who want to push the envelope like a Solana type sidechain, where they just say, well, let's see how far our Bitcoin SV sidechain. But yeah, that's something that the user has to weigh. I think all this is exactly how it should be. Like all this is very healthy because the user has to decide, your coins start on L1. No one can force you into any sidechain. So they have to entice you over and they have to say, listen, if you come over here, you have to download a whole second node and it's going to be more expensive to run the node and the sidechain might die. But they have to entice you over with some kind of feature, like low fees or extra privacy or some other feature, like a prediction market sidechain or the identity sidechain. So it's kind of like, why would you switch from BTC to Solana? It's like, they have to, well, okay, Solana has a more expensive node, but it has other stuff that is popular with users. And you don't have to move your life savings over there permanently. You just maybe move your pocket change over. Maybe you earn a large salary, but you only have your monthly expenses, one month's total in the L2 chain, but that's where most of your transacting is done. That's where your boss pays you and that's where you buy your groceries and stuff like that. So the chain might only have 5,000 coins, but it could still do an enormous amount of turn. The same five coins could turn over thousands of times more than the L1 coins. Now, I just think we should go to Justin. Yeah, see, Yaniv's down there in the audience. You may want to bring him up or if he raises his hand, he was in your lightning debate. And then also, yeah, is there like a daily payments, like your daily transactions type of sidechain? And then to address kind of the further questions about the nuts and bolts of like, where's the BitAssets, the NFT, the ordinals, where's that data actually stored? As far as I understand, it'll be stored at the exchanges or it'll be stored on the miners of the L2 sidechains, just to kind of break it down in normie terms. Is that? No, the L2 nodes have the block data for the L2. So it's not necessarily the miners. And this is in fact, partly a problem. This is partly like, I think a lot of people end up getting really confused about this because miners, they are in the category of people who do not necessarily need to run a node. And in fact, the individual SHA-256 hasher people, they just connect to like Foundry and then. Foundry, you know, like they run a node. In theory, OK, it was also suggested that actually Antpool, Luxor and some other people, there's like a website that shows the block, the structure of the block while it's being mined. It's thought that many of those people all use the same single node. They're all just proxies, proxy pool. And in theory, 100% of the miners, this is just in theory, I'm just stressing this as an example, but it's theoretically possible that every single pool would subscribe to like, you know, some guy's node, like, you know, Jeff from Wisconsin or something. He has one node and that one node could run all the mine. So each of the miners, again, they have to make a cost benefit analysis where they say, the node gives me more confidence that I'm really looking at the actual Bitcoin blockchain. And do I want to pay that cost? Because a node costs a certain amount of computational resources, so do I want to set up this node or do I, am I unwilling to pay that cost? And do I want to take the chance? So I want to risk it and go without, but it'll be cheaper. So each person has to decide. I think the reason why it's so confusing is because no one actually has to run a full node. There's no literal requirement. However, if no one's running a node, then the network just basically stops existing. So that's why if you work in Bitcoin development, and this is what Eric Voskuhl does correctly with his project, if you work on Bitcoin development, your mission in life, your goal is to make the validation as fast, as cheap, as efficient, as painless as possible. Like, that's your, that's the job you're in. Okay. It's like you're like a cattle rancher. You're in the job of selling meat. You're in the job of raising animals and selling them as food. And again, if you're like an agricultural farmer, then you're selling corn or something. That's the job. The job is to sell as much corn as possible for maybe at the highest price or lowest, but whatever, at the market price. You're in the business of growing crops. You know, if you work for a Ford motor company, you're in the business of constructing, manufacturing cars. And if the Bitcoin Core developers, their mission should be make the node software as safe, reliable, cheap, inexpensive, fast as possible. Like that's the business they're in. And so everyone should be focused on driving the cost down. But of course, the cost of a full node is an optional cost, you know, like at a philosophical level. It's not like it's not like the full node is going to pull a gun on you and say, like, you must run. You must keep running me or something, you know, like the full node. What does the full node do? It lets you figure out if you're really being sent coins, because, of course, everyone has an incentive to lie to you. I hope that's obvious. Someone will say, I go up to you. Oh, yeah, I just sent you a thousand BTC. Trust me. Well, that's not a good situation because that invites lying. And if we live in a world where the liars can get ahead and the honest people suffer, then we're just living in a world that that penalizes. Honesty, so we don't want that. So that's that's what we want. The full node costs to be as cheap as possible. The Drivechain L2 idea basically says you can have a la carte plug ins. You can say, OK, you run the L1 node, but then you optionally run some of these other nodes. There's like a whole set of them, like, you know, 20 or 30. And you'd say, I want to run this this one and this one, but not any of these. And so that's the idea. But, yeah, no one has to run a full node. There's in a practical sense, Kraken and Coinbase, these large exchanges, you know, practical sense, they must run because their whole business is. People sending me coins and then swapping the coins and then withdrawing them. OK, now we go back to Crypto Voyager. Yeah, Justin brought us Justin brought up something that that's that's that's interesting and that that kind of like leads back to my to my question. The NFTs, or better put, the data that I want to, well, basically use that we already know because it's it's timestamp that it's legitimate and everybody signed on that data. That data is too expensive for L1. It's too expensive for eCash. It's even more. It's going to be more expensive for eCash. Sorry, sorry for eCash L1 because of the even smaller block sizes. So that data has to be then on the L2s. Now, let's if we go back 10 years, people said, oh, no, we can do blockchains for land registry and all that other stuff. So with my super duper bells and whistles sidechain, I now say, OK, fine, let's let's do land registries and everything else. And it works. And 10 years down the road, land registry L2 goes bankrupt. That I don't know, Paul, that that that kind of like I got cold feet right now on the sidechains. Well, what do you mean, though, you're saying that the L2 data might be lost, is that what you're saying? Yes, the same thing happened, for example, in Ethereum. So Ethereum was just a pointer to data on some centralized server. So a lot of Ethereum NFTs, the payload is basically 404. You still have a hash that points to to an IP address where it's supposed to be. But that IP address, well, the server behind that IP address is gone. So so we can't we can't do that anymore. We can't do that anymore for non-trivial stuff. So whatever, moon cats or whatever, I don't care about those guys. No, I mean, for example, land registries, legal legal titles to to whatever. Yeah. Evidence that something has been done. We use we can use blockchains to timestamp that and to and to basically account that that that the participants have signed on on on that thing and that that data basically has has been created. Yeah, we we we can pay a little bit more to store it. And then we have the issue then. Well, the node provider where that service is is is stored also gets gets gets a cut. OK, well, the guy doesn't want to pay. Doesn't matter. We can the node provider can prune it according to the white paper. However, you as the owner of that data should have a copy of it where you can then prove with the hash that it was part of the blockchain. Yeah, it's kind of like it's it's like a library without books where you can prove that the book that you have on hand was part of that library. OK. And with that, with with seven million people, with seven million books, you could recreate the library and everybody knows, yeah, OK, that data was there and it hasn't been hasn't been tampered with. So you might not be a full node. You might only be somebody that has the possession of one single book, but that book is proven on the block chain that it was part of the library and hasn't been tampered with. So so that removes the the necessity of of depending on the altruism of the node provider that removes the necessity of well, it doesn't remove the necessity of the library, but it does remove the necessity of the node provider. It doesn't remove the necessity of the L2 being alive, though, that that's that's that's my question. So so right now you're saying, yeah, well, if I receive BTC and I receive them often enough, I should run a full node. But a full node in BTC means we have to also have the data of somebody that is not that has nothing to do with us is not a customer is not a provider. He's living on the other far side of the world. And not only that, that. It can actually be pruned and people say, well, yeah, but you have to run a full node. Why do I have to run the data of some dude in Ouagadougou when I'm somewhere in the Peruvian Andes? Yeah, that's those those are the issues that still haven't been cleared out. And I understand. I understand the viewpoint. Let us make even smaller. So so to discourage people to to to write on to the L1. But people need to write somewhere. So they're going to write on the L2. And we're just pushing the issue to another layer. And 10 minutes ago you said, well, yeah, that's that's how we're doing it. And if if if that layer is not profitable enough, that layer, that layer could lack of a better term, rock you, which basically means, well, I don't have any future security that that layer will exist. The only kind of security that I have is that L1 will exist. However, my data is not is not valuable enough to spend seventy dollars per transaction on it. That's all I want. I have to go to you. OK, thanks. So first of all, L1 is not guaranteed to exist. I think no one is guaranteed existence. And this is with the bitter comes the sweet. You know, if the good comes to bad, which is to say, if you were to say this data will always be here, that's a good thing on one hand. It's good for one person, but it's also a curse because it says that someone out there is responsible for validating, storing and serving. The data from now until the end of time, so it's everyone, you know, everyone's one person's asset is another person's liability. And in fact, we want there to be many layers of different shapes and sizes to exactly combat this problem. That is exactly the solution to the problem. So you could break it into. You know, you've got to separate issues again. It's very hard and maybe it would be better to take out like a pen and a piece of paper, but it's not like so on one hand, you have the data itself. So let's call it point one. This is like the land registry. OK, now then point two is you could timestamp the data. OK, that's like a second. Derivative form of this data and then three, you have the full node concept where the data is stored and served forever. And it's also validated, in fact, so you can actually overcome the double spend problem at this layer, but not at the timestamping layer, because the timestamping layer, you just have the receipt and you just say this data was submitted before this time. But you don't know if someone could have submitted two contradictory pieces of data, for example. I have the hash of it. That's why I know that that data came first and that that data hasn't been tampered with or it does order, as I said, timestamps it. But you don't know that someone can someone could say so you could say I have the hash and I have the Merkle branch and I have the receipt basically. And I say that and it says, oh, crypto voices owns, you know, excuse me, crypto Voyager. Crypto Voyager owns 100 Main Street. But you don't know anyone could go could suddenly, you know, out of the blue, they could walk out, walk up to the police station or something and say, listen, I actually have an earlier timestamp that says I own 100 Main Street and I have a later one as well. And so it does not solve the double spend problem. So whatever the police decide to go with the earlier one and say that yours was illegitimate or the later one, yours was superseded. It's only at the the third category. Category one being the data itself. You know, 100 Main Street owner land title. Second layer being the timestamp, only this third concept of the the full node validated, stored, served and validated man, which is another way of saying it's mandatory data that it must everyone must download process and then store and serve back to people. This is mandatory data. This is the only level that can mitigate the double spend problem. And then you can have other weird layers, too, like maybe there's like the header chain, the L1 header chain that like runs through all the chains, which is the where the proof of work is applied by the charge of six. But we could go into other threads. But what I would like to stress is right now, Bitcoin BTC, this is again, this is a problem with the Bitcoin SV people that they didn't understand this BTC has a fixed block size at the mandatory data, the third category, the validated, stored, saved, served, et cetera, mandatory that everyone must download and validate process. This is a fixed block size of what was one megabyte and now four megabytes. However, it has an unlimited amount of space for timestamping data. So you can do you could just put take the hash and then you can have a hash of when you have Merkle root of other hashes is open timestamps. There's several different projects. This is like a lot of people back in the day. This is a lot of people's like first Bitcoin project. They would like write a paper or something. They would take the SHA-256 hash, you import it as a private key, and then maybe you send like one Satoshi there and then send it back or something. This is back in the day a long time ago. So the the timestamping block size on BTC. Is unlimited today, you could do that, you can if you want to just hash, if you want to take the Lord of the Rings extended edition movie file, you know, or a whole terabyte, eight terabyte hard drive. And if you want to hash that, you can put the hash with other hashes in a Merkle tree and it will end up just being 32 bytes on L1. And so you you can do you can fit an unlimited number of one transaction. Yes, right. One transaction. I can I can do that 5000 times. And I already filled the block. Yeah, but I'm saying if you want to do 5000 land documents, all you have to do is put those in a Merkle tree and then it's down. It can always be shrunk over and over again to 32 bytes forever. So no matter how much then the smallest thing that you can do is a one transaction blockchain. You have everything in the world. Yeah, the one transaction. This is the header chain, actually, if you think about it, because each block, each header, each 80 byte header in Bitcoin has the hash of the previous block. So that's the one transaction. In a way, in a sort of yeah, but if I sorry to interrupt, but if I batch all those things, yeah, and just make one single hash, I cannot work with it because the whole hash chain is somewhere else. So so I have the data anyway. Yeah, I have to have hard disks and hard disk and data. Anyway, I'm saying but that's what I'm saying is this is a good thing, because this is what I'm saying with the bitter comes to sweet, with the good comes the bad. So. With the L2s, you you can customize it and you can say. Instead of it, because remember, the L1 isn't guaranteed to exist either, which is the last thing you had said, you know, it could all go away, but you can say, OK, we're forming a group with all these people. And we think that together. You know, the full node costs are low enough and the value add of the transaction is high enough. Where this group of people is likely to have a viable L2. Now, there's no guarantee that you'll be correct when you do that, but this is a lot better than just saying it all has to be mandatory data, which is the Bitcoin SV route, or it all has to be optional data, which would be kind of like the BTC timestamp route. With this, I'm letting I'm letting you customize more, you know, in the interior. And you can say, well, OK, listen, we're going to have this big payments chain for all of Southeast Asia. And it's you know, and this has a lot of economic viability to it and you think, well, hey, this this one is a healthy chain. Produces huge revenues and the full node costs are very low. So people think, OK, we can we'll put data in here. That's I think that's perfectly fair. And then there could be a different chain where for whatever reason, it's just not popular and people get rid of it. But if something's not popular, then that's a clue that it should just be deleted from the world, that's just how the world works. I think that's a good thing. Somebody's requested, I think. I don't see, but I see Justin's hand up so we could do Justin. I've noticed that the little dots that blink up and down have stopped doing that, which usually happens before this app crashes. So hopefully it won't crash, but it may. Oh, no, that was just that I didn't have a question. OK, now who tried to request? I didn't see I don't see them. But as I've already said, I do see it. I don't understand why I don't see them sometimes. I see them now. I don't know why I don't see them. I don't know why I don't see them. I don't know why I don't see them sometimes. OK, I see them now. Rekt to Djinn. I can't see him. OK, we'll give him 20 seconds to. Resynchronize. Hey, can you guys hear me? Yes. Hello. Welcome. Hi, Paul, thanks for having me on. I know you addressed the Solana coin briefly earlier. It sounded like you're still working out the details. So I don't want to harp on it too much. But there are about like a thousand of us in the community quite interested in this. And it's been like fun coming up. But theories. I actually made a post yesterday about how the meme coin holders might be able to claim some of the real coins, which I think would be fantastic for like the less connected or less technical among us to try to get some kind of exposure to eCash before it's even launched, as well as being a great marketing opportunity for you among the Solana community. So I love the idea of you potentially following through with that. The other thing is that the trading fees being redirected to you, you're able to raise like, you know, potentially six or seven figures through the meme coin for the project without even selling any of it, if it does well, of course. So anyway, but just to get to the question, without revealing too much of your plans, I was wondering if you could just confirm to everyone the correct meme coin, since, you know, people launch hundreds of these whenever there's a big news event like your fork, or will you just sort of let it play out and support the biggest one that forms organically when the time comes? So, yeah, thanks. Yeah, so I don't know how many there are, but there was one that that seemed to be more active. So I don't know. Let me see if I can, like, look up how to explain where it is. I think it was like, I think this is what is it, the CTXQG or something? Yeah, that's the one. I think that's the one, like, most people are interested in right now. Well, at least that's the one, you know, you join the community, I think. But I do think that it I think it is a good idea. And I think it's a great like, the like, the pump.fun thing is clearly very popular with people. And I think it is, it would be like a fun way to like, I mentioned this before, someone had already asked, I don't know if you were here, like, about an hour ago. And I was talking about, like, we could have something where like the top holders of the meme coin get the actual eCash coin. I kind of want to like, what I would prefer to do is like, sit down and think about it carefully and then design something and then make like a targeted, complete, like written announcement. So that it's not as like, I don't know, so that I have plenty of time to get it all right in the way that I want it. But yeah, that's basically I can confirm that that's something that has been on my mind. And I think there's, it would be a good idea. And I'm pretty sure that we will be doing it. So just have to work out the detail. Yeah, awesome. No, that sounds great. I mean, I'm not trying to get you to like commit to anything on the fly on the space, or whatever. Obviously, you'll have to flesh it out and then make an announcement. But I do think it's like really interesting, just the opportunity to like onboard so many people, because, you know, like the people are actually using crypto day to day, like are on Solana, you know, there's 1000s, 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people just trading on Solana, gambling on meme coins. There's a lot of culture and a lot of communities there. So if you can sort of tap into that in a way, and, you know, offer something interesting to those people, then you could potentially be onboarding 1000s of people to eCash, ready to go, you know, before you even launch your fork. And it's all, it seems to be the most sort of active people in crypto are on Solana right now. So yeah, that's why I thought that was interesting. Yeah, I completely agree. I think that Bitcoin has said like, we've evolved like a kind of contempt for the user, which I think is tragic. And now we have sour grapes about it, too. We say, oh, we never wanted those users, or those users are bad people or something. But really, all this stuff started on BTC. There was all kinds of wacky stuff, you know, like Tether was originally Omni was on BTC, and that was originally MasterCoin. And so, but now we, we pretend like we didn't care about that. But no, we want happy users. That is, that is what we want. Okay, we got more people now want to come up on stage. We have Sky Doge. Hello. You are muted. So I can't hear anything yet. But we also have we have another Paul here. Okay, it was Danny. So I suppose we could go. Oh, hey, yes. This is the other Paul. How are you, Paul? I'm great. Okay, so full disclosure. I think I may have been getting I got a merge into your Truthcoin and GitHub repo back in 2014. So I've been following your work for a while, Paul. Oh, great. And yeah, I'm like, I haven't followed you recently. But I used to love a lot of what you had to say. But I'm kinda and I just joined like 10 minutes ago. I'm trying to understand like, are you gonna hard fork Bitcoin? Like what's going on? I've, I'm out of the loop. So I'm trying to understand. I guess in the nest, so to speak, but I have a pinned. Let me try to get it. I'm not gonna try to add tweets to this. But yeah, I have a cash calm and it's me and a kind of a large group of people. And it will be in late August this year or scheduled for late August. Okay, and I have to ask, like, what's the reasoning? I mean, I know for a little while and correct me if I'm wrong. I have a lot of but I'm going to publish a huge article. There's a lot of right. Okay, but but yeah, please continue. Yeah, I mean, I know for a while, like you were trying to get some of the like, originally Truthcoin and then was it Hivemind stuff like kind of picked up and like, get interest behind that. And then some other work I was following of yours, I was interested in. But I guess, did you get kind of fed up with not having your ideas taken seriously enough? Or I'm not trying to put words into your mouth. I'm trying to understand, like, the reason for a hard fork, because generally a hard fork isn't the Bitcoin way, you know? So, yeah. Right. So, okay, well, it'll take a little while to explain because the answer involves basically everything. But basically, we, I really think that Bitcoin has a lot of problems right now. And the root cause of these problems is a lack of competition. And we have grown very complacent. So, we have a lot of like irrational beliefs in the community. And, you know, the wrong people get attention. And the wrong projects get attention, of which BIP300 Drivechain is just a tiny symptom. But I think it's a big symptom, you know, in a way that I was like, pushing prediction markets on BTC, that was like in 2013, 2014. And then now they're like getting super big. But it was like, okay, this could have been all this could have been on BTC the whole time. Okay, a little bit of pushback, if you're cool with it, Paul. I mean, you mentioned that there's not competition. Like, can you clarify that? Because... What's that? That's Guy Dozier's microphone as feedback or something. I don't know. Anyway, I've muted him for now. So I think the... Okay, so when I say we don't have competition, like, there's no fear, like people just talk about... They'll just like say, like, Bitcoin is perfect. Bitcoin can't be improved. Bitcoin is like immortal. You know, these are like the ideas that take precedence in our community. And we don't like, we don't, we're not like rushing as fast as we can to like improve the user experience or try to make things... Well, can I push back once more? I mean, improve the user experience. So for me, as someone who, by the way, I totally consider myself a Bitcoin maxi, like as hardcore as they come. To me, the Bitcoin user experience that matters most is that it's money where the rules can't be fucked with. Right? Like, to me, it's important that if I fall into a coma, wake up 50 years from now, I'm able to access my Bitcoin wallet, right? And still be able to access my money and use it. Like, that's the user experience that I care about. I care about rules that can't be broken. And so everything else cascades from that, right? At least for me. And so if user experience is, oh, I can't pay for a coffee, like what Roger Ver was talking about during the scaling wars. I mean, fuck you. I don't care about you buying coffee. I care about me being in a coma and waking up 50 years from now and being able to use my money. Right? I don't give a shit about your coffee. I think the good and bad are a little bit more objective than that, though. I don't know why Vlad keeps pumping his fist. I'm gonna have to look away from my phone because it's starting to become distracting. He's just pumping the fist over and over again. I'm gonna have to just turn my phone to the side and not look at it. So I agree that the so, okay, people draw a straight line from that. I want Bitcoin to survive. They want to draw a straight line from that to ossification. But that's not the case. So let's say you wake up in the future and you say, oh, what's important to me is I fall into a coma and I wake up, my money is still there. But what if you wake up in the future and people have moved away from 8 billion people use something else. They use Solana. And they don't use Bitcoin. Well, now you've lost all of your money. So it's another case where with the bitter comes the sweet and with the good comes the bad. You have to decide. Once you decide something like I want to make it so that Bitcoin survives as long as possible and preserves my property rights and keeps me with my money. Once you decide that that's the thing that you want, you still have all of your work ahead of you because you don't know what it will take to make sure that that happens. Paul, so I mean just a quick interjection. Didn't that kind of get resolved with Ethereum, right? Ethereum was trying to literally be the world computer or whatever bullshit marketing they came up with and then pivoted from. And we saw how that experiment went, right? They were trying to promise essentially everything. It's just one tiny experiment though among an infinity of possible experiments, right? True, but they kind of took it to the extreme in the sense of, oh, it's fully Turing complete. You can essentially do whatever the fuck you want including lose your money because it's just dumb. I was a huge hater of Ethereum myself. I was a hater of every altcoin and most of them went towards zero, but Ethereum was a big success. So I kind of think if I'm being honest with myself, when I look in the mirror, I was kind of maybe wrong a little bit about Ethereum. I mean, I'm obviously butthurt that I didn't make a shitload of money buying Ethereum when it was super cheap. So if you go to cryptofees.info, Ethereum has more fees. There are more people paying to use the transaction fee. Total transaction fees paid on Ethereum is higher than BTC. So there is some sense in which it has product market fit that BTC does not. I guess, but I would argue it has product market fit amongst idiots. Well, I think we have to decide. I agree, but there's a lot of idiots everywhere. So I think it's very comforting to just say, I mean, we could just go down the line and we could say all these people are idiots. So we could go say all the darknet markets that switch from being BTC only. So like Peter McCormick, his story, I don't know if this is true, but his story about how I got into Bitcoin is that his mother was dying of cancer and he had to get illegal drugs to help her. Now, I don't know if it's true, but it probably is. But I also found out about Bitcoin from the Wired Silk Road article. And then when, like today, that person would be onboarded to Monero because all these things are Monero only. Now we have stable coins. Those are on Tron and Ethereum. And like, you could go, okay, like when people do NFTs and stuff, I got invited to this NFT gala. Oh God. I know, but my friend, it was really silly and I didn't buy anything. But my friend was running it and he could get me like a VIP. That happened to be in New York City at the time. So he went, but all the stuff was in ETH. It was all priced in ETH. When Trump does his meme coin, the Trump and Melania meme coin, that's on Solana. You know what I mean? So we could go down the line and we could just say all these people are idiots, which is a very comforting thing to believe. Or we could say, you know, maybe, okay, here's another thing to point out. All these things, Zcash, David Vorexia project, like a storage type project, like a Filecoin project. We could go down the line, like many of them, what are some more? Many of these projects, these started as Bitcoin projects or they were people trying, okay, Bitcoin Cash is a perfect example. They didn't want to launch their own coin. They tried to do it on BTC. They tried so hard. They fought tooth and nail. Well, well, well, well. I mean, there were the incentives that Bitmain had as well, right? With all their covert mining ASIC bullshit. Well, the ASICBoost thing, I actually think you can prove that it had no effect, but this is kind of a side topic. Oh, really? Okay, okay. I'll take that. The theory is that ASICBoost gave them like some huge edge, a secret edge of like 20% or something. And then SegWit would interfere with covert ASICBoost. That was my understanding. Here's the thing. You can look at a plot of Bitcoin hash rate, and then you can find the exact date at which SegWit activates, which is August 1st, 2017. And there should be a huge downward drop at that point as all this covert ASICBoost gets shut off. But instead, there's basically nothing there. So it's just a normal line, I think. I don't think there's anything special about that line. So, of course, there's a mini confounding variable, but I think that kind of basically proves... It also requires people to think that all the large blockers were insincere when they said they wanted large blocks, but I think that's not true. No, I mean, I believe Roger Ver was sincere, but I also, like, he wasn't technical is the problem. He was like Bitcoin Jesus, but had no technical understanding whatsoever in mind. Well, I agree that he was light on technical skills. I think if he knew more about technical skills, they might have done the soft fork extension block, and then they would have won the scaling war. And see, that's the thing. If he had done a soft fork extension block, mandatory eight megabyte extension block, and then you wake up from a coma, you could still access your coins on the old one megabyte block. Does that count as preserving the property rights or does that violate your rule? This is what I'm trying to say. At the end of the day, I think it's just more objective than that. There's just good ideas. There's ideas that sell and that people want and that people pay. You're paying customers for an idea that's good. Some ideas are better than others, and some ideas are just bad ideas. Okay, okay. I mean, the coma example, I use it because it's the simplest way I've found to explain to people why backwards compatibility is important. And backwards compatibility kind of is an umbrella term that encompasses hard forks and why hard forks are bad, right? Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, as you may know, I wrote the article against the hard fork, and I am overall against the hard fork. But in this case, it's the right tool for the job because the problem is not in the code or in the technology. The problem is the community. The culture of Bitcoin has been invaded by irrational ideas, and these ideas are spreading. I don't know. We may already be too late to fix them in BTC, but I think the root cause of the bad ideas in BTC is the lack of competition. I agree with you that Ethereum is a bad idea, and it's so weird, and it's so different, and it's doing proof of stake, and it's doing blah, blah, blah, everything. Actually, it's a bad competitor. It's an unhealthy. It's a feeble competitor. And so as a result, it does not put pressure on. It's like in Pokemon Red when Gary says, my rival should be strong to keep me sharp. I remember that. And it's like we need a good competitor, but we don't have it. I think the same thing with Bitcoin Cash. Honestly, it was handled. The ideas were bad, and the execution was bad. And as a result, there wasn't a lot of there wasn't a big threat. It wasn't like BTC met, and they were like, okay, we're going to ship lightning in a month. We're all going to meet at this hacker house, and we're going to just lock ourselves in here with pizza. Instead, what happened after BCH split off, we kind of did one Taproot, saw a fork, and we've done nothing else. And this whole time, we've been basically just coasting, I think. And we're waiting for the U.S. dollar to commit suicide by bringing up stuff like that. Sorry that I kind of distracted from what I do want to know why. Should one hard fork Bitcoin? Obviously, my bias is towards no. But I'm curious, what's the purpose? Which of your many ideas? I've always thought you had pretty damn great ideas. I'm curious which of them or what incarnation or evolution of them you're hard forking for. Yeah, I think the merge mined L2s are very important. And I don't think that the rival L2s I don't think lightning or ARK or Fediment or whatever, I don't think these are going to work out. And I think the merge mined L2s are very easy to do, and they're very effective. And they happen to solve a bunch of other meta problems. So they themselves represent competition. So if the L1 software sucks, and all of the L2 software, all the different softwares, if they all suck, then with the merge mined L2s, you can just launch another one, and you can get users. And this does provide the necessary competition. But right now, we're kind of in a weird state where we just won't do there's lots of good ideas that we won't do, and then there's lots of bad ideas that spread. So I'm very concerned that it's like in the past, the community was much smaller, and you could just walk up to people and start talking to them. So we could have scaling Bitcoin, where the big investors, big business leaders, everyone fit in a small room, like a 200-person room. Yeah, I was in those rooms. Yeah. And so everyone could talk to each other more. But now, it's much harder, and that alters the type of idea that can spread, because now an idea has to jump all these hurdles. So I used the example of OP_CAT before, where it's a very simple idea. It was in the original client for two years. It's 13 lines of code. It is helpful to the Stark people and a few other people. It's a very basic operation, and it's kind of opt-in, harmless, and reversible. And yet, we can't do OP_CAT, and I think that's because the community is irrational. I don't think it has anything to do with OP_CAT. There were some solid technical reasons for why OP_CAT superficially appears. Like, yeah, why not just re-enable it, right? But then, who was it? Maybe it was Polstra? I forget who. There was a concern about stack size or something, but someone fixed that. Really? Okay. I don't know. One weird thing that was fixed. Okay. But here's the issue. I think it would be one thing if we made a conscious choice to reject… I'm sorry, guys. I'm going to have to go soon, but we'll definitely get to Wayne Vaughn, because it's four, but I'll go in a few minutes or so. But it would be one thing if everyone decided. We don't live in a world where everyone knows what OP_CAT is, and then they made a conscious decision to reject it because of reasons. We just kind of live in a weird bureaucracy where no one takes responsibility for the decision, and so people just kind of shrug, and if it just kind of dies in committee… I don't know, Paul. You have to be really deep in the weeds for a discussion like OP_CAT. It's not like, oh, let's put it to a democratic vote. I don't think that's how Bitcoin would survive. Right, but this is the problem. I agree with what I'm saying. It's the issue. It would be better if we had specialists, and then people made decisions, and then they took responsibility for those decisions, but we instead kind of have the worst of both worlds, I think. Anyway, I think we should go to Wayne, and then we'll have to wait until next week, but tell all the haters… I really wanted to know what you're doing, other than merge mining, I guess. Is that the TLDR, or what's the one sentence? If you go to eCash.com, there's a section called, like, why do this? So there it is for you. All right. Thanks, Paul. Thank you very much. Hey, Paul. How you doing, bud? I'm doing good. How are you? I'm doing great. Just chilling. I saw you had a space. I thought I'd jump in and say hi. I didn't hear much more than maybe the past six or seven minutes of the conversation, but I thought it would be interesting to kind of, like, talk about how we got here, because most people have come into Bitcoin in recent years. They weren't in it in the early days. They weren't around for the 2012 Cambrian explosion of Bitcoin forks, and so they're just sort of lacking the proper context. You know, from my perspective, a lot of these conversations, they go way too deep in the weeds on technical and political issues that happened five to ten years after sort of the important seed elements. You know, the way I look at it, the way I remember it is that, you know, we invented Bitcoin. People started mining Bitcoin. Some guys figured out how to mine Bitcoin with GPUs, and then everybody figured out that, oh, you can start doing this. And that's kind of when I got involved in Bitcoin, and I built myself a GPU miner. And then the difficulty of mining with Bitcoin with GPUs quickly scaled up to the point where it was marginally profitable based on the current price of Bitcoin and the current price of electricity. And around that time, Charlie Lee invented Litecoin, and he basically created a Bitcoin clone with a ten-minute block time and the ability to continue to run mining on GPUs. And the first explosion of Bitcoin forks, that first Cambrian explosion that happened around that time period, were people basically doing some iteration of that same thing. It was forking Bitcoin, making sure, changing the mining algorithm from SHA-256 to script or something else that could, in rare cases, that could run on GPUs. And we tried every permutation of block size and signature type and all sorts of things that you could think of based on the prevailing technology of the times. I mean, is that how you remember that era, Paul? Well, yeah, to some extent, yes. Although, of course, many of the variants were sort of very trivial. So you had lots of different categories. So Litecoin was just 99.99%, the same as Bitcoin, but with faster block time. Yeah, you're right. Most of it was trivial. Very few of them were substantial changes from regular Bitcoin. Many of the ones that were big changes were very bad projects. They ended up being unsuccessful, like AuroraCoin, NXT, BitShares, stuff like that. So those were most unsuccessful. So there were different categories. But yeah, to some extent, yes. But in my recollection, the big criticism that came up at the time was that, well, if everybody can fork Bitcoin and make their own version of Bitcoin, then what's the value of Bitcoin? And some people started working on that problem, and some of them created these meta protocols like Omni on top of Bitcoin. And Ethereum tried to create one coin that could do everything instead of having a specific coin for a specific function. And at first, they tried to do it on top of Bitcoin. I'm sort of shortcutting a lot of this for the sake of brevity. But they decided eventually to launch their own coin separately. And around that same point in time, there were many factions that were people try to make it sound like the early days of Bitcoin were all kumbaya. No, it was deeply political. There were many, many political factions, two of the largest being the folks that sort of centered around the MIT up in Boston and the folks that eventually founded Blockstream. Both good people. I don't have any I know everybody on both sides of that. But one of the major things that they were trying to do was saying, hey, you know what? Ethereum doesn't need to be a separate chain to do everything, and turning complete scripts that are loaded into the chain is kind of a dumb fundamental design. But we have this design to do something different called a sidechain. And what the sidechain allows you to do is and I'm speaking loosely here for the sake of conversation is to design a specialized version of Bitcoin that preserves the scarcity of the Bitcoin. So instead of launching a new chain that has bajillions numbers of coins and saying, hey, we can have diversity of behaviors that are derivative from the core Bitcoin chain without creating a bunch of new coins. And that sidechain project from Blockstream didn't end up how they originally anticipated. To be polite about it, it kind of was a bit of a failure, although they did salvage some technology out of it and develop it into a certain direction. But pretty much from that point in time, the idea of actually building something on top of Bitcoin and creating new features for Bitcoin was kind of verboten. It was taboo. People just didn't want to get it done. They wanted to advance cryptographic signatures. They wanted to make the chain slightly more efficient. They wanted to solve some of the problems like transaction malleability. That was a big one. But the idea that Bitcoin was going to continue to change really sort of died, and there was a I shouldn't say died. It was severely curtailed, and all the energy for that went someplace else. Now, some people would say, good riddance. Get all that shit off of our chain. Bitcoin should be pure, and it should only operate one way, and that's the only way that it should be from here until eternity with the exception of just keeping up with cryptography and the general progress of computation. And there are other people who said, hey, we're going to do these meta protocols. We're going to do these other things in this other world, and the fact that we can't do them on Bitcoin is really kind of sad. And when I look at your project, what you're doing right now, I look at it as like, you know what? We have an opportunity to go back and try some of those principles again. We can't get it on the regular Bitcoin chain. Maybe some people think that's a good thing. Some people think that's a bad thing. But an efficient way to do that is let the market decide. Split the chain. Go ahead and allow people to have this new technology. And if the people who say it's all bullshit are right, they're going to be able to sell their coins. They're going to be able to from the fork. They're going to be able to say, I told you so on X. They're going to watch 150,000 projects die, and they're going to laugh themselves into oblivion and just be able to say, I was right. I told you so. Ha ha ha. They'll be the new Peter Schiff's of Bitcoin. But maybe they're not completely right. Maybe there will be some lasting value. Maybe there's room to have a Bitcoin-oriented experiment ground where a laboratory, if you will, where people can try different things, and maybe some of those things can migrate over towards Bitcoin. And that's how I see the value in what you're doing. I don't think that there's much risk at this point with Bitcoin weaving its way and infiltrating the traditional financial system for people to have the same level of concerns of all those old forks for Bitcoin. Because there really was a time, call it from 2011 to 2014 perhaps, where people were legitimately saying, if I can just clone Bitcoin and look at all these Bitcoin forks, one of them is going to be the next Bitcoin. The first one never works out. Google wasn't the first search engine. One of these other things is going to be better, and it's going to succeed. I don't think that that risk exists nowadays. So I think that a lot of people are going to get really worked up about what you're trying to do over nothing. I think that there's going to be a big controversy online. But at the end of the day, I think what you're doing is small, has a small chance of success. And maybe can even create some things that will have some value to Bitcoin because now people who are interested in developing on Bitcoin can do it in a way that doesn't have to deal with the politics of the Bitcoin development community. So anyways, that's kind of how I see it without getting into any specific technical issues. And I feel like people talking about the block size wars and Bitcoin politics and everything, it kind of tends to muck it up. I really look at it as you trying to implement some very old ideas in a way that doesn't hurt Bitcoin. In fact, if you had been able to do this back in maybe 2012, I think that half of the shit coins that existed would have never existed. And there might be some innovations and some things that were tried. So in a sense, Blockstream has Liquid, which is like their, it's not really a fork of Bitcoin, but their Bitcoin derived technology. That's their sidechain technology for doing things. You're just making something else that's kind of like that. Yours happens to be public. I don't think that the existence of Liquid threatens Bitcoin. I don't think the existence of eCash or Zcash or a handful of other things that are related to Bitcoin threaten Bitcoin. It's not like crossing the streams and Ghostbusters. We're not going to destroy the universe. So everybody should just, you know, if you like it and you want to mess around with it, use it. If you don't, then don't do anything and just go on and live your life. OK, yeah, I completely agree. So thanks very much. I think that was a great comment. And I think it's a good one to end on because I said two to four and now it's four sixteen. And so but we'll be back next week. So thanks to everyone who came up on stage. And thanks very much. Join next time. And until then. Thank you, guys. Thank you.