Welcome to the Shitcoin.com show, everyone.

Today as always, I'm joined by Andreas Brecken, founder and CEO of Shitcoin.com, and today's

special guest, you might know him as the guy behind Drivechain, also a prominent Bitcoin

researcher in the space, Paul Sztorc.

Welcome, Paul.

Hey, thanks, guys.

Thanks for having me.

I'm so happy to be here.

Always good to have you back on the show.

You're a regular feature these days.

You definitely pop in from time to time to talk to us about current affairs.

Yeah, well, you guys are great.

I mean, I got to talk to someone.

Who am I going to talk to these days?

So I guess to kick it off, Paul, it'd be great to just get a bit of an update on, yeah, what's

the latest with Drivechain?

Where are things at?

Drivechain's going really well.

We put out a new version, so we have a version 30 of the test net is out.

People can check it out.

Go to drivechain.info.

We have a downloads page.

We have a guide with screenshots.

We've been trying to make it more and more user-friendly and whatnot.

So I hate to say that it's done, because that's kind of a curse.

But I do kind of feel like it is very, very close to being finished.

It's all just been bug fixes for the last few months.

And what I'd like to do next is have a couple good examples of sidechains.

So that would be the next thing.

Andreas, I was talking to you before about Zcash being, that would be kind of an interesting

one because of how ambitious it is technically, but it's also a code fork of Bitcoin, as is

our sidechain template.

So it should be possible to merge, should be doable, pretty doable thing.

I mean, ideally, it would just be copying and pasting a few things, wallet and transaction

validation and block that.

So ideally, but of course, who knows how hard it will be in practice.

But ideally, it would be very doable, but also something that is kind of very ambitious

because the cryptography is very alien in Zcash.

But also the third great thing about it is that it is actually kind of useful because

people do criticize Bitcoin's privacy dimension.

And in particular, there are things you can do, but some of them produce the so-called

toxic waste, which are these outputs that kind of, they know that they belong to you

and now what are you going to do with them?

You can't combine it with other things, become trapped.

So you could send them to this.

You can drive into the desert and take a lot of photos.

Well, what I mean is you can send these outputs to Zcash sidechain and kind of like a black

hole and fresh coins come out and then you can take them from the sidechain back to the

main chain.

So it would be, that's kind of a good mix of kind of something that is doable, useful

and kind of desirable.

If you had a Zcash sidechain, would you have both transparent addresses and shielded addresses

or would you just have the shielded?

I would, because first of all, I think in general, the philosophy should be that all

people should, the altcoiners ideas should just be copied kind of faithfully.

I don't think it's a good idea to go down this road of being like, well, you know, sure

Zcash is great, but let's just edit.

I don't like the way they did these Zk-SNARKs and then just start editing it so that it's

like some weird version of, it should just be whatever, every command line, ideally every

single command line argument or anything you do with the command line that you would do

on Zcash should just return the exact same thing on the sidechain.

Oh yeah, because otherwise you can't, yeah, and then you can reuse all software including

exchangeable implementations.

Yeah, absolutely, right.

So that's one reason.

The second reason is that I think it would be extraordinarily confusing to figure out

how to send money in, because when you go, if money goes in and out, our sidechain templates

already set up with Bitcoin addresses, whereas if you keep the transaction, the transparent

ones are just Bitcoin addresses with a different prefix or something as I understand it.

They are.

So that would be pretty, that would be pretty helpful to keep it, then the transfers in

and out could just be that part, could be the same.

And then I don't think it's a significant inconvenience.

I know, you know, I was shocked because I was just starting to do the research for this

and I was shocked that there's not a single, I don't think there's a single Zcash wallet

that supports the shielded addresses.

You have to run one of the two big clients, you have to run the Linux like node or you

have to run their Windows thing, their Windows like full node, in order to take advantage

of them at all, which I think is funny, I mean I'm sure there's some important reason

for that.

I happen to know, yes, it's too slow to create the mathematical proof required to

send shielded transactions on a phone.

But the phones, but I mean Zuko predicted this and I asked him about this over and over

the years, if phones would be able to do this and yeah, a few years ago he said they will

because the math is going to get quicker and the phones are going to get quicker and we're

already at the point where I'm pretty sure a phone can do it now.

So I remember reading news on a Zcash phone thing coming out that's shielded and I think

I heard that maybe last week.

Yeah, I saw this comical list, it was like all these Zcash wallets and there was like

feature comparison and then if you looked at like shielded addresses it was like no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, they're all no, every single one of them and I was like what?

You know, that was kind of funny.

Another sidechain, I've been looking a bit the last few days on a project called

Handshake, which is I guess some kind of, it's a reinvention of Namecoin, but the team

over at Purse.io and their friends at a startup called Namebase have been working on this

project for a long time.

So there's one thing we already know, it should not have a token, it should not have

mining.

I mean, that goes without saying.

It happens to have both.

Well, Namecoin had them as well, which is funny.

Namecoin of course had merge mining, they had an option for merge mining.

I love the idea, I've always wanted like a Namecoin sidechain concept because the core

idea is really good.

Especially if you think of like Silk Road and the origins of Bitcoin, Onion on the Tor

network and how that's, one can only hope that that's part of the future of the internet,

it's just more people using Tor hidden services and like some way of getting it really fast

and then that would be like a new, that's like an important thing.

But in particular you just think of like this, problems that we have, like Silk Road or Darknet

Market, Tor addresses are weird, but also you have stuff like people impersonating Elon

Musk and Vitalik to like do these Twitter scams where people send these affinity scams.

The fact that I have to have all these different accounts at Telegram, I have the same, you

know, I have like a Reddit name, then I have a Twitter name and then I have a name on Telegram

and it's like, shouldn't it be possible for me to just send the thing and have it all

totally integrated.

And if I want and if I don't want them to be integrated, can't I just make a second

or a third or it should be like Bitcoin addresses where I just, I can make more if I need them.

And so I should just have a name and the name should just work on everything and I shouldn't,

you know.

There's other problems like logging in are terrible, everyone should use a password manager

that has one really difficult login and then it does the stuff for you, but this could

work like that.

Another obvious things about the way it works is the domain name, it doesn't, you know,

I think ICANN has done a phenomenal job of helping the internet grow into this awesome

thing, but obviously a lot of what they do doesn't work really well or is confusing.

Like why can't anything be a TLD at this point?

I mean, why even have, why even limit, why is anything, why are any of these limits like

still in place?

Shouldn't I be able to just do like Drivechain.bitcoin?

What I envisioned when I kind of tried to do an update of Namecoin on my blog, I was

envisaging a kind of like, you just have the name and then you just have some JSON and

you can just put whatever you want in there.

You can put everything, you can put a public key, you can put a Bitcoin address, you can

put a Bitcoin stealth address, you can put a website, you can put name servers, you can

put an IP address.

They're just describing Keybase now.

Yeah, but I think it should be, yeah, well that's the thing is I think it would be useful

in a kind of blockchain situation now because the blockchain is this consensus thing, you

could put it in a kind of Merkle tree or Radix tree and so everyone could just be like, it

could be very easy because it could just be like a name.

It's like a Merkle tree where stuff is sorted on, it's like there's a great image on Wikipedia

where it's sort of like, yeah, it's sort of like words that start with M, so there's like

an M branch and then there's words that start with M-U like murder and muck or something,

so it's like it's branched based on the name, so you know the position.

The alphabetical sorting.

Exactly, so there's a sorting element, so you can prove that there's no other.

Oh, but you can guess exactly where it's going to be.

And also you can say, if you're the only Andreas in the whole thing, then you'll know exactly

where you'll be in the thing, so you could send it nearby ones to say, this is Andreas

and then to the left of me is not some other Andreas and to the right of me is not some

other thing.

Right.

So it adds this alphabetical concept, whereas Merkle tree is kind of just random.

The other thing, though, is that what I have in mind is that it's just a name and a hash

and then it's up to you.

You can just say, look, here's my thing, my little business card, and you can see that

the hash matches, so now that it's not part of consensus, you can make it as big as you

want.

You can have anything.

It could have a photo.

It can have nested things.

It could have hash number two, so you could say, here's this, but you don't get my home

address until layer three and then not until layer four do you get my medical history or

whatever.

You could just have all this stuff in there if you wanted and you could change it.

So I think the core idea is great.

The big challenge, and I have a blog post about this, that it was like 99% done and

I just never finished publishing it, but the big problem is that if you want to do something

like this, and I know Handshake is really emphasizing domain names a lot, which I think

is fine.

I almost think that's thinking a little too small, though, but I think obviously that's

pretty big, nonetheless.

The big problem is how do you respect these two sets of property rights simultaneously?

The ICANN, everyone already bought domains, so we already set this one system up, and

yet you want to have a new system and those people have to have a right to something.

So it's like how do you balance those two?

And personally, my opinion is that you should pick a moment in time and let everything that

ICANN has done, all the traditional domain.com, anything that ends in .com or anything ICANN

formatted that ends in .org or whatever, then it should always go to their thing.

They own all of that, and then if it's anything else, then it's a new thing.

So you could have like Google.anarchy and it would be like a completely different site

that could be run by anyone.

But if you do anything that already exists, .com.

So if someone registers example, 12345.com hypothetically in this new system and it hasn't

been registered in ICANN, then if someone then later registers it in ICANN, they should

be able to kind of claim it, because I think the ICANN one should always have a trump.

This should be like a layer two.

The new thing should be like a layer two on top of ICANN, where anything that ICANN just

doesn't resolve or didn't resolve as that wasn't a top-level domain as of March 10th,

2020, anything that didn't work there now gets kicked over to this thing.

But how does that work?

This is a question that's from me.

I don't understand if in the future ICANN decides to have .pol and .pol owns .pol.

I think that's why it's very important to pick a date for that and say, ICANN has kind

of teed this up a little bit by having TLDs.

So just by having them, you can say look, here's what they said and if they put it

in the future then forget them, because it can't be handcuffs to their decisions, then

you're screwed.

But you say look, because the whole point of this is only to make it certain that the

existing happy customers of ICANN are not unhappy in your new thing.

So you've got to keep everyone happy.

That's the game theorist's quest, to make sure everyone is happy, because unhappy people

will start a war or become a suicide bomber or something, you can't have that.

Yeah I already asked you what you thought of the way they were doing them.

Some of the tokenomics, as they call it these days on it, part of it is...

Yes, you have to refresh my memory a little bit because I know they, good developer, okay

you can do it, yes.

So if you have an account on GitHub that is older than a certain number of, I guess, years,

and you have at least X followers, I think it's like maybe 100.

I think it's only 15.

Okay, 15.

I mean having a follower on GitHub is like having a thousand on Twitter, because people

don't follow each other that much on GitHub.

If you have that, you'll get what is today, I think, like a couple of thousand dollars

worth of their token.

And the snapshot was already taken a while ago.

I thought there was also Hacker News, right?

Wasn't there something like Dominator or something?

Yeah, it is Hacker News.

I was just keeping it simple.

I had both.

So the reason they're doing it is because they want software developers with influence

over integrating something like Handshake in, say, a browser, they want them to be involuntary

bag holders.

So because these developers have the GitHub account, so they already have the Handshake,

they just haven't claimed it, but they can claim it in the future.

So yeah.

Well, it has properties similar to the hard fork in that way, where someone who wakes

up today from a coma that started before, they were fortunate enough to miss the events

of 2017 until today, and they wake up and now they're like, everyone tells them this

about BTC, BCH, BSV.

They have total indifference because they own equal amounts of all of them.

So this is the happiness kind of criterion that I was mentioning before.

They're kind of like, oh, okay, you know, I'm happy with whatever works.

In fact, I'm happy if everything works.

So they have a certain theory when they emphasize GitHub accounts, not even people, because

as you know, one person could plausibly have many accounts that get the thing.

So they have a theory that accounts are important to the success of the project.

So did they do anything about this ICANN question that I raised, like about grandfathering in

old names or something like that?

Or no, this is like a wholesale replacement?

There is something where I think it's the first top 100,000 on Alexa are reserved and

can be claimed.

Okay, that's a good idea.

So yeah, see, I'm more interested in that because, but I don't know, I could be wrong

about this, but I suspect like, it's just kind of confusing because it's kind of like,

it's kind of like what does an account mean?

So if you work really hard, but you have your one GitHub account, but then the guy

next to you in the cubicle, who he actually, for some reason, he has eight accounts that

qualify and then you're kind of like feeling resentful.

So now this is unhappiness.

I mean, everyone has to be happy, remember.

And it's like people, do people want the coin or do they want, what do they want?

Wouldn't you rather have, so you're ranked 100,001 on Alexa, you just lost your site,

and now it's like, it's sending a confusing message as well because if you're growing

your site and your site's growing very well, then you're doing great, but you missed the

cutoff and someone could register your name.

Now it gets annoying.

So those are the things, those are the areas that I really watch for because I don't want

those people to be unhappy.

I want everyone, I want it to just be smooth sailing, pure happiness in every direction.

Why was Trace so into something called Nimble Wimble Coin?

What is it?

I have no idea.

It doesn't make any sense.

Many people have commented on, in fact, you saw that, I can prove that I had no idea because

you can see that I will not really prove, but you saw that I quoted him on Twitter because

I thought he made a good point, but now to my dismay, I discover that who knows what

really motivated his point about coin joining kind of outs you as a kind of creepy person

and so you may not want to do it for that reason and I was like, that's right, you may

not want to do it for that reason, but now it seems as though his motivation for doing

that was just to make Nimble Wimble Coin look better, but yeah, this is a very confusing

kind of, it doesn't really make any sense because Trace is supposed to be the super

rich guy and Nimble, he didn't even shill Grin, right, which is like the kind of project.

Instead he shilled the coin that like kind of this weird pre-mine and so if he's really

like handing out these pieces of paper.

That is old school.

I give him credit for that.

Isn't that crazy?

It's like passing notes in school.

Passing notes in class, yeah.

Pass it on.

I can't remember if it said like pass it on or something on the note.

It doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense that he would do that and also it would have been so unlikely

to work because that was like Bitcoin maximalist conference.

So it shows this kind of total lapse of judgment that is very difficult to explain.

I don't have any explanation.

I mean maybe he's really much poorer than everyone thinks or maybe he's crazy.

He's like going senile or maybe he has been like having people kind of suck up to him

for so long that his self-criticism wires in his brain died out because they weren't

being used and he needs to regrow them.

It happens to people, right?

That's part of this.

It's a terrible thing about it.

If anyone who's like rich or famous or important is that you have to always wonder like, are

these people just sucking up to me?

Is there an angle?

So I don't know.

It doesn't make any sense why he would do that.

He kind of thought that he could get away with that.

Like it makes no sense.

I don't know.

And to not really get a lot of money because I don't think he could possibly have extracted.

Yeah, I don't think the shilling went too well.

And that's why in the discussion that ensued, we started thinking like, who is the actual

Bitcoin maximalist?

Even you have held Namecoin, haven't you?

I have.

Well, yeah, that's true.

For research purposes, I bought Zcash and then once I bought, I literally bought Ethereum

Classic after it split off at the very bottom and then I can't access it because I don't

understand how.

I tested it, I thought, but I never like did a complete round trip test.

So I bought like what it eventually would be because I bought it at like 25 cents or

whatever, the absolute lowest.

And when I did, I was like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life.

This is just a total donation because to mess with Ethereum and it ended up being worth

like some absurd amount of money.

But I have no, I tried to get it and I have saved the folder if anyone out there is listening

and they want to try and offer me 10% of my own money or whatever.

I have the folder that has the passwords and the key and the directory and I have no idea

what I did and it doesn't work.

When I type the stuff in, it just says like, please enter your password or it's just like,

I don't know.

I put all types of different things in there to try to figure out what happened.

So if anyone wants to give that a shot, you can.

I don't know what Ethereum Classic is worth these days.

The real question for me is what, you know, I wanted to tweet, I wanted to tweet because

I asked that other question, that thing that really blew up about if Bitcoin maximalism

was dead and that turned into a big Twitter event.

But I was saying like the only person, you know, there's only one person who can help

me, which is that, which is Vitalik Buterin, he's the one who can define it again.

He defined it once and I can ask him to define it again and then I will know what maximalism

is and who it still applies to.

Because I asked Luke Dasher and he said, no, I'm not a maximalist because sometimes I

take years and years of payment.

I know, that doesn't make any sense.

The original meaning I thought was pretty clear.

It was that, well you have to see this, what one thing I think is happening is that new

people are showing up and they don't know like the story.

The story is that Satoshi did all this work to do something that everyone thought was

like impossible, and he created Bitcoin from scratch.

And then kind of created Namecoin, which also was like, I do think that the technology idea

of Namecoin, or of a Namecoin.

It's a great idea and its day will come, probably soon.

And then you had Charlie Lee who copy-pasted the code, which took no effort whatsoever and he changed like two parameters.

And then you had Litecoin. So that is, he had every right to do that.

I don't know why the community put up with it at all, because I kind of regarded it as sort of insulting to Satoshi,

that you could automatically have like two categories of things, Bitcoin and Litecoin,

because one person did all this marginal effort to create it, it was immense.

And the marginal effort to create Litecoin was very de minimis, basically nothing.

So, what followed was mostly more like that, where people putting in basically no effort,

but being treated kind of in the same category as Bitcoin.

So this is kind of unfair, jumping in this category.

Then eventually you had stuff that had some use for something.

It was very confusing and weird, but you had stuff like Primecoin, where it would do something.

You know, and you're like, is this worth it? But probably not.

And then you had kind of a version 2.0 of that, where you had stuff that was more complicated at least.

So you had Counterparty, BitShares, Ethereum. That was like 2014, 2015, whatever.

So, the story is a lot of just stuff that was just total junk.

And then the new stuff, BitShares and Ethereum mainly, the new stuff was very, very poorly thought out.

And those people were not – they were really just changing all these things frivolously.

You know, I regarded it mostly as a matter of luck that Ethereum triumphed,

so that people just wanted kind of some alternative to Bitcoin.

Because they were a little worried about, I think, governance, scaling the block size debate.

But basically governance. They were like, who's making the decisions around here,

and what happens if there's a bad decision? We need a competitor.

And they were like, oh, this Vitalik thing, because Satoshi is anonymous, but Vitalik is right here.

And he's like – Satoshi sort of seemed old, because he would talk about Usenet sometimes.

So what is this guy, like 500 years old?

Hey, I talk about Usenet.

And so it was kind of this contrast. I regarded it as basically a matter of luck that it could have been anything.

So what I'm trying to say is mostly maximalism was just this point of view, this observation,

that everything else was just terrible, and that these people, they all had an agenda.

They were all just trying to make money.

That's why I need Vitalik to announce the definition on Twitter.

He's the only one who can help resolve this issue. I never thought I would say that.

But it's like the end of whatever, Back to the Future.

He says there's only one man who can help me.

Let the camera come to Vitalik now.

And he's the definer. He has the whatever. He has the Genesis definition.

So he must now define it as – because all I want to know is if BitRefill accepts Ethereum,

if it legitimizes it as a payment method, legitimizing it as money.

They probably will now that the Maxi has left BitRefill.

No, but they already do. That's the thing.

They even gave a thing about Lightning, and they said – because in the thing,

this is how this came on my radar even.

The guy, Sergey or someone was saying,

Lightning accounts is now up to about 5% of our revenue,

which is about as much as we do in Ethereum revenue.

And I was like, oh, what?

The place where John Carvalho works has been accepting Ethereum this whole time,

gaining revenue from it, and legitimizing it as money by accepting it as a payment.

So now people are trying to spin this around, and they say we're doing them.

It's actually a bad thing because we take it, and we sell it.

You know, I know. Isn't that crazy?

And they're saying, sure, we legitimize it as money, and we accept it.

But when we sell it, so we're like taking it out of the ecosystem or something.

We dump it or something.

It's like, what is going on?

That is not how anything works.

That is not consistent with the original maximalist idea where you would just be like,

of course I won't touch any of that because you wouldn't even think about it

because it's completely illegitimate.

It would be a thing that would get you laughed at.

You'd be disqualified.

You'd be laughed out of a conversation if you brought up –

Like what if we traveled back in time to like 2015,

and someone at Blockstream said, oh, we should do a data feed for our BitShares.

I mean like people would just be laughing.

That person would probably be fired.

Fair market there.

So, you know, but I'm not saying that anything that anyone is doing is wrong.

I would just like to know what the definition is anymore.

What is the definition?

I don't know.

That's why we need Vitalik.

Vitalik is the only one who can help.

He has to give us the measurement.

I publicly call upon him to define Bitcoin maximalism to a greater degree of specificity

than in the past.

What exactly does it mean?

The world needs to know.

I need to know.

We need to know.

We'll create a public campaign around this.

Don't worry.

Any definition is fine as long as it's consistent.

I'll take any definition.

And also before we go, guys, Ethereum Classic is actually $6.84.

So what did you buy that at?

25 cents?

25 cents.

I don't know if I should tell you how much I bought.

It was easy to get a lot of it at 25 cents.

If anyone would like to try out Vitalik also, we have your attention.