Thank you for listening.

Have a great day.

Be well.

Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast.

This is season 17, episode 37 I think.

And we have Paul Sztorc for the 11th time on the show, which is a new record, and we're

gonna have the shortest conversation ever, because he only has like 30 minutes until

he has to go jump in another call.

It's really good to have you, Paul.

Thanks for having me.

How's life?

It's pretty good, I suppose.

It's been four months since you announced that you're gonna hard fork Bitcoin, and I

was one of the podcasters who enabled this.

And I was actually curious how this is going, because recently, and this was I think two

or three days ago, you announced that the rollout of the hard fork is gonna happen in

three phases, with an alpha happening this month in about two weeks.

Unironically two weeks, that's how long it's gonna take.

There's gonna be a beta next month, and then on October 31st, Halloween night, Bitcoin's

18th birthday, there's the mainnet launch.

How does this work?

Well, you know, I think like all the software is basically the L1 software, because the

L1 is the same as Bitcoin Core, so that's been ready, and the Bit300, 301 Enforcer,

all that stuff's ready.

So we were gonna launch everything in August, but for a wide variety of reasons, like one

is just that it's like the summer and people aren't paying enough pension, but then there's

also the cold card hack, and this LLM security stuff, everyone was distracted with 110.

And yet another reason is we want, so we basically just wanted to let people practice a few times

before the real super launch, because, you know, what we have to offer is, I think, pretty

transformative.

And so I think the more people learn about it, the better they'll like it.

So we wanted to make it, we had to slow it down a little bit and give people a few practice

runs.

And you can turn in, if you accumulate 1,000 of the practice coins, you can turn them in

for 10 real coins or 20 real coins with the beta.

So it's kind of like a little bit of the best of both worlds, so you get to practice, but

then there's also something that should theoretically have all the real world value and all the

real upside of the eventual coin that launches.

So it's kind of like a 1%, since it's 1,000 to 1, since it's 1,000 to 10, it's like a

1%, it's kind of like a 1% launch.

Is this a way to better test the software and also in order to get those coins on the

alpha and the beta version of the network, which are like successors to what you already

have with the dry net, I think, you're running that for testing, like, do people need to

claim with the real Bitcoin in order to get the coins on these e-cash alpha and beta networks?

Or is there another way to get access to coins?

Well, you do need the Bitcoin private key, but you don't necessarily need to type that

into our software.

You can split it off by broadcasting a certain type of transaction.

And there's this information, we have this repository, like the fast facts repository

on GitHub, and you can, there's lots of stuff in there, like how to mine, how to split off

the coins and how to do the replay protection the right way.

By default, there is no replay protection.

But if you do a certain thing, you split the coins off permanently.

I would imagine a lot of people would not necessarily be comfortable typing their private

key, their Bitcoin private key into something, moving the coins, especially very few people

will want to be the first through the door.

So I think it's probably not for most people.

But yeah, if you have a private key that only has like $100 worth of Bitcoin in it or something

you want to play around with this, that will automatically give you the e-cash.

Of course, the other way to get the e-cash is just the same way you would get Bitcoin,

which is to either mine it or buy it from someone or find people who have it.

So I think even though, because you asked about testing the software, you know, testing

the software is only actually a very small piece of it all because people have to test

all kinds of things.

So how am I going to mine this for real?

How would we exchange this for real?

You know, how does my wallet work with this?

So actually, merely testing the software to see if it works is a very small percentage

of all the things that need to be tested.

So this is an opportunity to test all those things.

So you're saying that you can use your SHA-256D miner to operate on the alpha and the beta

networks and claim e-cash, which later is going to get converted after the mainnet launch

100-to-1?

Yeah, basically, but there's a threshold of a thousand to stop there from being like just

too many conversions, you know, like you didn't want there to be like millions of conversions

or something.

So it's a thousand to ten.

So if you get a thousand or more, then it's 100-to-1, so it's 1%.

And the mining is SHA-256D, same as Bitcoin.

And although obviously the price will be nowhere near of this of this alpha network will be

nowhere near $100,000 per coin, the difficulty is also proportionally much, much lower.

So it should be very, very easy to mine.

So it should theoretically still be profitable to mine, even with old SHA-256D hardware that

would not be profitable on BTC.

Yeah, it's probably a good time to dust off your S9 or whatever.

But I was going to mention this because it's been a long struggle for you over the last

four months to figure out where you're going to set the difficulty on launch day.

And initially you said it's going to be one and then you realized, you know, maybe it's

a bad idea and you're not sure.

But now that you're going to have an alpha and a beta version of the network with real

miners is going to give you information about how many miners are going to be joining on

day one when you get the real mainnet launch on October 31st, which means you're going

to be able to adjust the difficulty better.

Is that a good way to understand it?

Yeah, I wouldn't say that it was a struggle.

And even when I said one difficulty to one, I thought it was a little bit of like a hyperbole

because of an exaggeration, because like a single bit X could take you to like, I don't

know exactly what the number is, but it's something like one million difficulty because

it's logarithmic. So we just meant it would be very, very low.

Although you're right that we don't really know what number it should be.

So the question is, do you just kind of guess and do back of the envelope math or do you

do you just set it super low and just allow it to overshoot and then come back?

With this, we should have some idea of, you know, just a clearer picture.

It wouldn't necessarily clarify it totally, but it would be just it gives a very accurate

glimpse of like what the future price would be and the future hash rate also.

So both of those things are pretty useful.

Although it will still be an imperfect glimpse because, you know, it will involve this

conversion and involve thresholds and and who knows if it gets if the alpha and beta

will get a similar amount of attention as the.

The full launch, so I think it will be.

It will be a clearer glimpse, you know, it's like we're kind of fighting through the fog

or like with binoculars, we're like bringing it more into focus.

So we're going to just continue to do that.

I think everyone will benefit from having more information about where the launch is

going to land.

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of uncertainties, we're seeing how even the other fork

that's happening, and I don't want to waste any time talking about it, but they seem to

have a lot of struggles and they figure out as they go and you're much more organized in

this respect. It seems like you're planning ahead and you're thinking about everything.

And that's why you're going to have that's why you gave people so much time to prepare

and call to action, withdraw your coins from exchanges, accumulate as much Bitcoin as you

can so you can claim as much e-cash as you possibly can, and then withdraw from exchanges

because that's going to be the best way.

Yes, you should do that in general, because the network only recognizes like one owner of

the coin. So if you have coins on an exchange, then really they are the owner of the

of the coins. And but yes, it's a tough season.

It's a tough summer to recommend, you know, self-custody, cold storage or whatever.

Oh, don't use cold card.

OK, just don't use cold card.

You're better off using an iPhone with Electrum or whatever.

Yeah, that's true. If you really if you can put well, we don't want to like, but it's hard

to it takes a lot of time to describe what to recommend people do.

We should probably put out like a guide.

I could put out like a guide for like what I do.

But. But, yeah, I think it's it's still very important.

And if you are you have the private key, you're the real owner of the coins.

And if you're not, then someone else's.

So. So you don't do that.

I do think it's fascinating that one ten people, almost everything is different, where like

I was kind of like, oh, we don't have 50 percent hashrate support right now because

really not no soft fork does.

And no one none have activated, you know, only two have activated in the last 10 years

and. And none since twenty twenty one.

And so we were kind of like, oh, we know that we don't have 51 percent hashrate support,

so we do this hard fork.

But one ten was like, oh, we definitely have, you know, 100 percent of the hashrate

support. And really they had zero, probably probably less in a way because they but.

And then they were saying, you know, we won't need to hard fork, but then they had now

they are. And so then we planned it all out in advance to get like the right and right

name, the right domain name.

So it is very bizarre that they and now they have to, you know, as people can see, some

people are like lurking in their discord and stuff and they're just like struggling to

pick. The names are going to pick the which proof of work they say, you know, for all

these all these years, months and months, they've been saying we won't need to change

the proof of work, and then people have said, well, yeah, but won't you like if it

doesn't work and then they say, oh, it's not going to happen, then it's kind of like now

they're just picking and picking it all now like what to do.

So it's, you know, it's kind of an interesting train wreck to watch.

Yeah, I also want to talk about the drive chains that will be available at launch, because

I remember for a long time it was five and then it became seven and then I think now

it's 12 and possibly by the time we're getting near to the launch, it will be many more

because people come up with ideas and they get creative.

And as long as the miners are willing to collect fees from whatever it is that they want

to build, it's going to happen.

But before that, I want to announce the giveaway of this episode and Paul, you're going

to have to write down a number from one to one hundred and not reveal it until the end

when you have to go. It's going to be one hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin and you can

use that to claim e-cash in October, I guess, but you can also participate in the alpha

and the beta. It's given by Cake Wallet, which hopefully will support e-cash very soon.

And the other sponsors are Layer 2 Labs, which is building e-cash, go to e-cash.com and

check out what they're building, run the software, talk to the people in the telegram,

just realize what Bitcoin could have been if we got BIP 300.

That's kind of the whole point.

Sideshift, which is a place where you can swap.

Usually I recommend people to just swap stable coins for sound money.

I think they're going to support e-cash, if I'm not mistaken.

They seem to be very optimistic.

Andreas is possibly one of the smartest Bitcoiners out there, and he was able to

rationalize everything through the forks and realize who's wrong and who's right and

not think in terms of absolute right or wrong.

So, yeah, Sideshift, check them out.

Also, Brains Hashpower, which I think can be used to mine e-cash if you want.

If you don't have dedicated gears at home for mining, you can just go to hashpower.brains.com

with a double I and you are able to rent, hash, rate SHA-256D to mine e-cash and you

can do that. I think you can get like 10 Bit Axes or 1000 Bit Axes for very cheap, much

cheaper than actually buying hardware and waiting for it to get shipped to your door.

So it's very convenient.

I know that also the Nazis, you know, the BIP 110ers or whatever, have been using it

because Matthew Pratt or told them to, but they used it to fake like their support to

make it look like more miners are supporting their fork.

But in the case of e-cash, you can use it to actually get rewards, which is very cool.

So use Brains Hashpower.

And last but not least, there is Orange Rock, which is the place where you can trade

without KYC, without limits.

Hopefully they will support e-cash and you can even use leverage if you want.

OrangeRock.com, I don't recommend leverage.

Don't gamble your money, be smart.

But if you think you're smarter than me, do whatever.

OK, Paul, let's talk about the 12 beautiful drive chains that we have so far.

Well, the two types that I think would most interest people are Thunder, which is can

scale to 8 billion people, and that is the tests for that are available on GitHub.

So it sounds like kind of a crazy claim, but it's really not that because it's

basically a large block side chain where the performance is optimized.

And then the Z side, which was made by someone else, but we are very happy with it.

And it uses the Orchard crate from Rust, the one, you know, they fixed the bug in it,

the bug fixed, but uses Orchard from Zcash to Altcoin.

So you have the private Z addresses that hide the sender, the receiver and the amount.

Then we have one based on BitNames, excuse me, one based on Namecoin called BitNames.

And then we have one called BitAssets, which is kind of like for like your, it

would be for like stable coins, meme coins, you know, stuff that you issue, issuing

tokens. Then we have a few others that some are ones about prediction markets.

That was a big thing of mine.

One is about trading different L1 coins.

It's called CoinShift.

Some of the others made by other people are like, just like two different EVM flavors

that people are working on.

And there's one that is like kind of like an OpCat type of a thing.

So again, I don't know.

These are in various, some of these are in various stages of being completed or

bought. Then there's another one.

And it's, I can't remember, it's some kind of like post-EVM, like science project type

thing. So there's like about seven that we have done and about five that other people

have put out as, you know, either completed code or in the case of Zside or rough, kind

of rough draft. So there are quite a few now.

Well, that's interesting.

I think that the community first came up with Elements Plus, which is this idea that

they're going to take Blockstream's work, but make it better.

They already have OpCat on Elements and they added CTV and some other stuff and they

want to make it like the chain that is everything Bitcoiners wish they had to build

stuff today, but probably they're not going to get.

And I'm actually curious why.

Yeah, Blockstream worked really hard on this Elements thing and it had, for example,

OpCat, but it also had like different types of signatures that, you know, like it had

like you could do like these like multi-sig where it was like 12,000 out of 20,000 or

something like that. Maybe I'm exaggerating it, but they had all this cool stuff that

they built a long time ago and that was going to be like their first side chain.

No, we don't really see it in the wild today anywhere, but you could make it L2 drive

chain. So someone did.

And then the plus part was they added CTV and like something else.

So that's that's pretty cool.

And that's neat because it's like just an easy, completable project.

You just take Blockstream's stuff.

I actually got a funny question and I want to read it out loud, but I want to find

exactly who asked it, because I got to give credit for asking this good question.

The question is, how many Lightning implementations are going to be available at launch

on drive chains? But I got to give credit to the person.

So you can answer it and then I'll find.

Yeah, hopefully zero, but whatever.

They should all still work.

It's not like they because the L1 is exactly the same as Bitcoin Core.

So. It.

It's all the same as Bitcoin Core, but it's.

But, you know, Lightning is a failed idea, and you can see you got to go to the Telegram

Lightning's best moments, it's like I think it's t.me slash Lightning fantasy or something.

But yeah, Lightning has been a dead project for a long time.

People just don't realize it yet.

The evidence is overwhelming that it will not survive.

Well, yeah, but people still unfortunately, I'm going to have to go like really soon.

Oh, no. OK, so is there anything that you want to talk in 10 minutes or so?

You said you can stay until 15.

No, I don't think I can.

You have to go now.

No. Yeah.

OK, Paul, reveal your number.

And I chose the number 10.

You chose the number 10 and there's only one 77 in the chat.

I guess I can either give the price to 77 or just announce that nobody won.

I'm not sure how this is going to work, but this is much shorter and people joined

on a short notice. We announced this much earlier.

I'm sorry, everyone, I've ruined the giveaway.

It's you know, he's a busy man nowadays.

He's hard to get.

OK, so we have the announcement that we're going to have this free stage launch and

there's going to be more drive chains than we initially thought, and possibly there

will be many more by the time we get to October 31st.

Thank you very much, Paul.

I'll let you go do your daily.

We'll go back. We'll do another.

We can do another small episode sometime in like a day or two.

Well, I guess we'll see.

We'll see.

Sometime in like a day or two.

Well, I maybe maybe I can just edit them and put them together as well.

OK, maybe that can work.

But also thanks to everyone who joined this one, because, you know, it matters.

Showing up is important and I appreciate it.

And what else?

Try the tech, because we all wish Bitcoin became better.

I look at Hadlonad and whatever, and not even he is like this toxic maximalist

anymore. But on the other hand, they're building something which is reducing what

Bitcoin can do. And this is about maximizing what Bitcoin can do, which was the

maximalist thesis all along.

So, yeah, check out the software and think about ways in which we can actually get

this technology to work for everyone without massive tradeoffs.

Because I don't think banks or federations or custodians are the future for scaling

and they shouldn't be and we shouldn't compromise on this stuff.

Paul left. He left me alone, as I expected.

Thank you guys for showing up once again.

This was the shortest poll source interview I've ever done.

And once again, thanks to the sponsors, Cake Wallet, I guess I will give the

giveaway to the guy.

Someone said it was too quick.

Someone wants to know if there will be a BIP 110 drive chain.

I can ask this from Paul.

I can just talk to you guys.

I guess you won row hit with your 77.

You're the winner. You can send me your address from Cake Wallet if you want to

claim the prize. Otherwise, I can just give it to someone else next time.

What was I saying before this?

Yeah, this was the shortest poll source interview ever.

We usually go for like two or three hours, but we made it happen much faster because

I think I really wanted to have this conversation about the launch and give people

an update about what's going on with this fork.

It's the summer forks.

It's going to be the autumn of forks right now because it seems like BIP 110 is

delaying their action.

They're going to do more stuff in September or whatever.

And Paul, with his BIP 300 fork, is going to extend until the 31st of October, which

is also the 18th birthday of Bitcoin's first announcement on the Cypherpunk

cryptography mailing list, which is Metzdaoud.

I've actually interviewed Perry Metzger on the show.

You can check out that interview to learn more about that first night when Bitcoin was

announced on that mailing list.

And that's also the date of the launch of eCash, which once again is going to give

everyone free coins that they can use, is going to give everyone the opportunity to

test this technology, which has been around and has been hyped for 10 plus years.

What's different compared to other L2s that have been created since, for example,

Rollups and Lightning and everything else, the difference is that all the transaction

fees go to the miners.

So it's something that truly maximizes the potential of proof of work.

And I've been excited about drivechains since 2018 or something when I first learned

about them, and I feel like if I didn't support any initiative that pushes this

forward, I would be like, you know, like a lame hypocrite who doesn't have any

conviction or courage to stand up for something that he believes in.

I really like Paul's work.

I wish him all the best.

I hope that a Bitcoin competitor is really going to push Bitcoin forward.

So if there's going to be a chain that actually takes real users, real hash rate,

real capital, and that it's a one to one copy of Bitcoin and that basically the same

holders hold the same amount of coins, I hope that this approach is actually going to

push Bitcoin to improve.

But if it doesn't, I wouldn't mind if we're going to be using eCash in the future as

opposed to Bitcoin. As long as the mission gets achieved and we have this truly

cypherpunk money.

So Rohit says that he wants the prize and he's going to claim it.

Yeah, quickest podcast ever.

You guys sort of missed out if you were not here, but I apologize for starting later.

Also, Paul didn't have the time.

He's a big time CEO now.

He's harder to get than Vitalik, I guess.

And he's on calls 8 to 10 hours a day and he sort of has to compromise sometimes.

I ended up with the shorter end of the stick with this.

Anyway, thank you all for joining.

I hope that you're going to do more research about eCash after watching this.

Don't waste too much time looking at BIP110 because these guys are sort of lost and

also not mentally well by the looks of it.

Just look forward to the kind of technology that is positive and tries to bring a

change into the world for the better, not one that says, well, this is holy and we

should reduce the ways in which you can use it and make it less usable for the

people. So, yeah.

I'm optimistic overall about a good future where we can take control and have our own

version of peer to peer electronic cash.

Maybe we're going to turn Bitcoin around to make that happen.

Maybe it will be something else.

I'm all here for the journey to figure out how this is going to work out.

And thank you very much, guys, for being part of this ride.

Once again, check out eCash.com for more information.

I'm sorry that Paul was not here to explain everything.

There are 12 drive chains that you can actually test today on what they call the

dry net, which is like a test net with real mining.

And they're also going to have the alpha and the beta version where you can mine,

you can claim your coins, you can test stuff, you can actually interact with

people, accumulate coins.

You're going to be able to get some real e-cash based on what you accumulate during

this experiment.

And thank you, guys.

I'll see you in the next one when hopefully I will have a much longer interview.

Bye.