This is a special archive recording of Paul Sztorc appearing on Bitcoin and Chill, hosted by Wicked on July 22, 2026, and recorded by Rexpaces on YouTube. Follow Wicked on X at w_s_bitcoin, and follow Rexpaces on YouTube at Rexpaces. Now, here's the conversation. It can be middlemen who try to skim pieces of it off and then their, you know, settlements or aggregate settlements on chain are still enough to secure the base layer. That's my opinion, at least. Well, I think like you could have middlemen and it might be fine. I'm just saying it's a good rule of thumb if because we want to be saying, okay, if middlemen are doing this, like, for example, OpVault competes to some extent with like a, with like a Casa or like a, some kind of like, like a Fireblocks or like a multi-sig type of a thing. Because if the network, if you can use the network to secure your money for you with OpVault, then you don't need, you have the cypherpunk way that's private and whatever. So it's kind of like fighting over market share. And so, yeah, ideally developers would be, don't want to roll their own crypto with OpVault. They would still trust Casa or Unchain, right? Because they want the, they want the hand-holding. They want the video call. Yeah, but I'm worried you're missing the point. I'm worried you're missing the point completely. Okay, let's go for it. It's like someone's selling guns and they say, this is my cool gun. And you can, this is a rifle and you can hit people from far away. And this is a shotgun. It doesn't take a lot of effort to learn how to use a shotgun compared to a sniper rifle or something. So you have all these guns, that's the self-sovereignty world. And you have safes and you have cool stuff that people use, water filters. And then there's a different world. People go to Disney World and the security and everything's taken care of for them. They go to maybe a hotel. Yeah, no guns at Disney World. And obvious rule, right? And so the question is just if, should we evolve the protocol to meet the needs of real people? Which include sometimes people need a gun and then you're saying, well, hey, listen, there's going to be some people want to go to Disney World. I'm saying like, you know, we want to, we need all the customers we can get. We need all the users we can get. We need all the adoption we can get. If we don't get as much, if someone else gets more users first, then that will be the winning crypto project. And if it's not possible to get a lot of people, you're ignoring the fact that many, many people really do buy guns, which is the Canadian truckers people who needed the Bitcoin. There's sometimes people need it and Donald Trump. So you kind of have it both ways and both ways are wrong, but you kind of have it both ways. You're trying to say on one hand, you're saying, well, people are stupid. They don't care about some sovereignty. This is not actually true for millions and millions of people. You know, Argentina's involved with hyperinflation, Canadian truckers, Trump family, Ukraine war, weird stuff going on, whatever's going on in China right now. People who experience hyperinflation don't necessarily care about self-sovereignty, which is actually proven by the fact that they're using stable coins or permissioned, you know, completely ruggable, not self-sovereign shit coins. I think it's not true to say, it's true that, you know, the backing of Tether by U.S. dollars is like a crucial link in the chain that is custodial. But think about it. Tether makes a huge amount of money, an enormous amount of money every quarter for doing very little work. And the whole reason is because people trust the brand. It's all about the brand. The brand is everything. So people believe... The brand is the dollar. No, Tether has said, we will redeem. You can redeem this for the dollar. And they fought to preserve that. So that's different from the U.S. dollar, although it's related because they exchange at par. In a way, Tether proves that the one-to-one peg is... Well, yeah, the dollar has very strong network effects. So the dollar will crush, it will grow and crush everything in its path if we let it. But it's the brand that's ruined by these terrible Bitcoin projects, which include Lightning, but not limited to it. What do you think about dollars coming to Bitcoin? You think that's good or bad? Well, can you clarify what you mean? Like, you're saying the fact that... Like dollar stable coins enabled by like RDB and Spark... It was already... All that was... This was all Bitcoin project to begin with, you know, because Omni... Tether was from Omni and that was from a MasterCoin and all... This was all Bitcoin only for like years. And then it was even Omni was Bitcoin only, but then they left because the block size and the fees and it's not just that. So with it coming back, do you think that would be good or bad for Bitcoin? If it were to gain majority market share? We want everything to be on Bitcoin in some part of the tech. Of course, I would imagine being on an L2 of Bitcoin, obviously. I think it'd be minted on the base layer in some way, but then probably shipped up and traded on L2s. I think they're right. We don't have enough block space on L1, obviously. Everyone knows that already. I mean, you can mint a trillion dollars of Tether, you know, and then trading it is another, you know, distributing it... Trading is everything. ...would be done on the L2. The thing is people say like, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how do you like the play? About like these little things. They say, well, Wallet of Satoshi, it's pretty good, but it's custodial. It's like, this is the heart and soul of the thing. Okay. It's like saying, this is our elevator or this is our escalator. It'll take you all the way to the top. But the problem is it's not working. So you have to, it's like saying someone, you tell someone in a wheelchair, they want to go to the top of, they want to go to the top of whatever, the Empire State Building or something. And you say, oh, some people are the Statue of Liberty and some people are walking up the stairs and they say, oh, we have an elevator. And it's just, it's a custodial elevator and they point to the staircase. And it's like, this is not like some tiny little detail. People say, oh, it's fine. It just doesn't scale. It's like, you know, it's like, oh, it's like someone forgot to either you order a hamburger and they just send you like an empty plate or a plate with ingredients on it or something. It's like someone forgot to cook all the food. It's everything, whether or not the user experience is good, whether or not the price is competitive, whether or not it scales, whether or not there is no, it's just like people say these things and they say, oh, it's really, really, really good. Lightning's fine. As long as the ordinals don't move the fee, L1 fee rate up, it's fine. As long as we don't try to onboard more than 50,000 people at once. It's fine. As long as both of you people are online. It's like, forget about it. Like, oh, this is all just garbage. It's fine. As long as you have a intermediary doing the swaps. Exactly. Yeah, that's fine. Coordinating the sharing of the UTXO underneath. So it's not, you know, uh, yeah, well, all this stuff, the custodial stuff has its own issues in addition to the rug ability is that, you know, it just, it leads to awkward questions about, you know, whatever. This is all like Vladimir Putin's money or something. So it's, um, and then it becomes like a honeypot. Like if it becomes really big, so tether, you know, they tether fought to protect their brand. And they, they grew through times when, you know, it was unclear if they could actually redeem. So you're saying like, um, you know, we minted on L1 and then transact it, whether the transacting is like part of an essential part of the whole thing. It doesn't matter if you mint. And then network effect is too important. Well, I mean the transacting, I think you would agree like base layer would be a terrible place to be having high velocity stable coin payments. I mean, that would be, that would not make sense. Of course. Yes. Yeah. So you want that to scale on second layers that are, second layers of sidechains that are tailor built for payments. I mean, you would agree with that. Now, Paul, I mean, have you used, have you used custodial lightning yourself? Have you slumped down to the, to the normie? Well, yeah, accidentally. Yes. No, I have used it like occasionally. Yeah. What'd you think? Was it pretty sweet? Yeah, but you know that it, yeah. And it's like, that's not the point. It's like when you think it's no different than using a credit card that has the word lightning written on it. It's an essential fraud. You're, you're still, you're still paying in sats. Now the merchant receives them, you know, that might be trusted, but, but sats are moving. HTLCs are getting. No, I don't actually, the thing is, I don't actually know, you know, you have no idea what a range with the merchant. They could, they could not be getting sats at all. Oh, that's true. Right. Yeah. There could be getting a swapped into USTC. They could just be getting something deposited to their checking account the next day. Yeah. Right. They could get anything. I mean, I guess the point is ultimately under the hood. If you're using a custodial lightning and you're paying an LN invoice, unless it's coming. No, all this is, I think this is all false. There's no, absolutely no guarantee that custodial because think about it like this. There's no, there's no way. I mean, how else? No, the essential character of lightning, the dominant, the dominant feature of lightning beyond anything else is the number one thing about lightning is the, that it constantly lies about what it is. So you have the primal to primals app that uses the lightning icon does not use any lightning transaction. So then you have a stacker news. You have the lightning. I'll actually wait. I'm out. I'm out. So Paul, you may have, you know, not been keeping up to date with primal, but they're using Spark now because they're not, they're no longer using custodial lightning. They're using trust. So I've, no, I've stopped paying attention to that. I'm happy to think I've stopped having this inflicted on my consciousness a while ago. But the thing is, it also doesn't matter because custodial format is the only way such a broken idea could even work. Because you can't onboard people unless they open channel the real way. The whole thing, it has to, it has to be, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like a child who sees a magician and he thinks that he sees the magician saw a woman in half. He says, Oh, cut a woman in half. And he goes back to his parents and tells them all about it. You, the parent already knows that it's custodial, custodial, but you know, they know that it's not real. They know what really happened. And so it says, Hey, I don't know if you know this, but they switched from using, it switched from using a mannequin to using two women in the box to deceive the, to, to do the magic trick. And it's like, it doesn't, none of that matters. The point is you can't cut people in half that way without, and lightning is just, that's what it is. Lightning is this idea that says we can, we can cut a human being in half, put them back together and everyone's being fooled by it constantly, except for the engineers who constantly come up to me in person and they whisper frightened words into my ear and say, you're right about everything. Blah, blah, blah, blah. All the people at tab conf at the debate last year, well, they all know that it's a dead end. And this is further online, underlined by the movement to the movement, the custodial lightning and the movement to arc is all just underlining the rejection of lightning that everyone is experiencing. Well, or it's highlighting the fact that it's that we even talk about it is preventing Bitcoin from highlighting the fact that lightning is ultimately just a bank to bank protocol. Real quick. Well, yeah. I mean, what difference does it make? Is there a point made to, to keep Bitcoin from scaling? So the price goes up. So when we get to that part of the market, Well, I think it will only go up if people believe that it has a future so it can, the price can go up before Bitcoin scales. As long as it's good. If you say, oh, I've invented this thing on Monday. Here it is. You show it to everyone. You can invest in it now. And if here it comes out Monday on Friday, it will scale to the world. Well, yeah, it could be worth a lot on Monday and it could be going up and up and up in value Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then it scales to the world. So it doesn't matter if it's Friday or 10 years from now, but people need to know, does it have a future where it actually will scale? And if it does not, then the price, if it does, the price should be really, really high today. And if it does not, then the price should be really, really low today because the final destination is zero. I guess then the question is, do people need to believe that it will scale noncustodially or are most people okay with it scaling custodially? And if that's the case, is that threat to its long-term survival? There should be a mix, but I think there's a certain level of custodial demand and there's a certain level of noncustodial demand. So as I said, there's the Canadian truckers and when everything's custodial, that encourages people, that encourages, for example, like you can't have debanking unless most of the world is custodial. But if like 20% of the world is self-sovereign and 80% or whatever, 50-50, then you have to treat your custodial customers a lot better. So there's a certain portion of demand in each category and Bitcoin should try to gobble all of it up. We shouldn't leave anything on the table. If we gobble anything up, it's a risk that someone else will take that market and then we will not be able to have the network effect. But I think there's an enormous custodial, there's an enormous noncustodial demand. So you're trying to say, oh, most normal people, how would you even know that? You know what I mean? Because most people don't even have the option and most people don't even understand and the software today is so bad, you know, relative to where it could be. Even Bitcoin rejects stuff like the 12-word feed. That was like one of the few things that the public was able to kind of wrap their heads around. And stuff like BIP-47, which would have gotten rid of the need for these absurd addresses. All this stuff is rejected by Bitcoin. We're kicking people and even the treasury companies. All the stuff is, all the gas is being pressed on custodial world and the brakes are being pressed on the noncustodial world. And then this is attributed to demand. I think that's very uncreative and not true. It's very inaccurate, I think. Sorry, the question is, how was BIP-47 rejected? Yeah, it wasn't Sam who was using BIP-47. It was in Bitcoin Core. In Bitcoin Core, it was proposed in 2014 and then Luke was like unanimously discouraged for implementation. So what? So you can still use BIP-47 without Bitcoin Core. I know, but it's a shame that we should be holding it up and cheering and saying this is the greatest and it should be everywhere. Instead, it's only in Samurai. I disagree. I think as long as other wallets and other third parties want to integrate things that Bitcoin Core has, that's a good thing. I mean, not enough people have implemented it to referendum on the health of the overall Bitcoin community. So the other thing, Paul, is like you can't, I mean, I think you're wanting for Core to be like a top-down, just like merge this thing because I think it's a good idea. But you really need to show that. Oh, it has to be a better idea. Everyone knows that. If it was such a great idea, then many more users would have adopted it and then maybe demanded Core merge it. No, the fact that Core didn't merge it proves how completely clueless they are in general. Because so many people are closeted BIP-47 users. But hold on, why didn't you compete against Bitcoin Core? Why didn't you make your own implementation? I am now. Now you're forking off. You're not creating your own, you're forking off the network. I'm saying why didn't you create your own implementation and done whatever policy you wanted to do? No, because it's very difficult the way, okay, first of all, you can't just make a new front end to Bitcoin because of the way that Qt is like woven into the C++. So it's just a weird quirk. It could have done what Notts did or you could have done what Eric is doing with LitBitcoin. You could have done it from scratch or you could have just forked Core and done whatever policy you wanted to do. Well, that is what I'm doing now. I had no idea they were so stupid. I'm talking about creating another implementation of a Bitcoin node. No, no, no. So there's many different implementations that... It could be either or. Yeah, it could be either or, but there's Bitcoin, there's Notts. By the way, there is a new front end fork that's pretty sleek. It's not on mainnet yet. I know, but the fact that it's taking until 2026, this just proves my point about how completely clueless these people are. You could have competed against those people that are clueless with your own implementation. I know, and now I am. No, you're creating a different freaking chain. You're not competing against Core. You're competing against Bitcoin now instead of just competing against Bitcoin Core. Well, it would be one thing if it was just bit 47, but it's actually everything. But you could have done everything that you wanted to do. You didn't need Bitcoin Core to do these things. This is what I was trying to tell you for fucking 12 years. You don't need Bitcoin Core. No, I disagree. I think Bitcoin Core has a de facto monopoly on the Bitcoin brand. But if you created these features that are wanted by the market, people would migrate away from Bitcoin Core to your implementation. I don't see, I don't think that, no, I disagree with that. Why? I just explained why. I think there's a Bitcoin Core has this brand. No one wants to run things other than Bitcoin Core. If there's, if you disagree by just one bite with, if you have almost the exact same chain and you're one bite off, then it will split the network. But people have a well-known post about this saying that he thinks the second implementation would be a menace to the network and shouldn't be built. The lib Bitcoin, you know, is further proof that Bitcoin Core is terrible at their jobs, I think. But the fact that people won't switch, you know, you can't switch to it. You're, you're locked in. It's like saying, why not make a new Microsoft Word or something, or why not make a different QWERTY keyboard or something like that? It's the network effect runs in the, it becomes a prison when it becomes Bitcoin Core. We haven't had, if we had, if Bitcoin Core wanted more competition, you know, there would have been ways to do that. But I don't think that they do to facilitate further competing. It's kind of like saying, you know, you go to a restaurant, you're saying, why did they do this? You know, it has to reach a certain threshold before you say, you know, and I'm going to start my own restaurant. Then you have to worry, hey, if I start my own restaurant, maybe the first restaurant will suddenly shape up. Like maybe Bitcoin Core will start merge, they'll merge BIP47. So it's not so simple at all. No, but dude, but BIP47 wasn't a consensus change. You could have added BIP47 to your own implementation. That's not the issue. The issue is good ideas that they foolishly reject. So if they were that foolish, they would start losing dominance and there would be a different implementation. Yes, they will. That is what will happen. But it's not going to happen overnight. What? You're not making any sense. A minute ago, you said that they have a monopoly, no one will switch over. Now you're saying they will switch over. No, I'm saying they're going to kill off BTC probably. And then why would they kill off BTC? I don't think they're doing a better job than Bitcoin Core. Why couldn't that be you? No, that is me. This isn't a realistic kind of picture. Well, I don't know, maybe you just. I don't know what to tell you, they they do lots of stuff that's nonsensical, which includes extremely serious things, not doing the thought forward. I could understand the whole not, you know, you can't get your fork in. They're not listening to you. So you just go and fork it yourself and create a UTXO for it. That's fine. I could understand that part. But that's not what I think that Bitcoin is doing a bad job with Bitcoin. Yes. And you could like that. OK, you could have just had your own implementation, just like Luke is doing, just like there's many people out there that Bitcoin and Bitcoin. There's a lot of people that created their own implementations. Yeah, they didn't do as well as Bitcoin Corp., but maybe their ideas weren't good enough. Maybe you have the right ideas and you could have made Bitcoin better. But instead, you're forcing Bitcoin's UTXO set into a shitcoin and now you're going to compete against Bitcoin. I don't believe it's possible to compete against Bitcoin Corp. Without creating a new form. But it's possible to compete against Bitcoin? Yeah, that's the only way. Dude. All right. I don't know if that line of reasoning really makes much sense, Paul. There's a whole long list of crazy things Bitcoin Corp. has done. And the fact that you competed against them, you could have been an implementation and competed against them. And then the market would realize that they're idiots and you're smart. No, because the competition is multi-factor. So if the network split, then it becomes a popularity contest. There's a huge cost. But there would be but there wouldn't be a split. You would be adding things to like policy wise. I don't think you're familiar enough with the technical details. Sorry to say. But not not split the network, right? And Bitcoin didn't split the network. The claim that not is like significantly different from Bitcoin Corp. is based on. We know that it's a it's not. The point is that you're still in Bitcoin is different. So let me ask you this. Given that LibBitcoin, given that LibBitcoin syncs much faster and given that it doesn't do any assume valid shortcuts, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So given that LibBitcoin is basically better than Bitcoin Corp. in many, many ways, why haven't people adopted it? Let me ask you that question. Well, for one, it's not out yet. There's nothing to download. That's for one reason. But you see, this is like the second reason, I think for people that review. That's right. All right. The second factor. For people that are already synced to ChainTip, I don't think faster IDB times is like they care about that. They're ready. They're ready. They're ready on the chain. That's exactly right. They there's there are other factors other than quality that people care about. And one of them is, am I on the same Bitcoin network as everyone else? And that's why they have to stick with core, no matter how bad it is. There's some competition, but they're not the most widely, the most widely adopted Bitcoin notification today is zero to nine, not zero, three, one, two, 27, actually. Oh, 27, even further back. The most popular Bitcoin Corp version is like seven versions behind. Yeah, I know. I don't upgrade mine unless I want to. Are you worried? Are you worried that the version that you're running today is going to forego? There might be a consensus failure. It's Bitcoin Corp is the brand. It's the brand of Bitcoin Corp. And it's the fact that it's the same repo. It's the same keys. It's the same maintainers. It's the brand. But it's different. It's completely different maintainers. And now, like, I can't name you more than probably three or four developers that have contributed to Bitcoin Corp today. Yeah, but it's the it's the same project. It's the same project is the same brand. All right. Well, I guess the only way to disrupt the project is if ever. Let me ask you this. Do you think there's ever multi-factor competition? Like, do you think the best idea just always just comes out the next day and then it and then it replaces the I think I think Bitcoin needs to be good enough for it to continue doing what it's been doing. And I think that's why it's been where it is, and that's why shit coins don't have staying power. I think that's why shit coins are like, you know, they pump and dump. Bitcoin has it like that's the difference. I think it's just good enough. And what it does. So, Paul, if it's the brand like, you know, are you my biggest question here is like, you think that's that's the trivial thing to fork away? I don't see how the brand is the impossible thing to replicate. Yeah, it has a brand of reliability of years of reliability. So it can then suck horribly as an actual objective fact of the matter. But what you're saying, though, is that that's effective. What you have to replicate when you create the shit coin is you have to create a new brand that starts sort of from zero. I mean, from zero perceptually in many ways for most people. Exactly. So that's you don't see that as like an intractable uphill battle that others have fought and sort of the bodies are on the field, as it were. Will it be difficult? Yes. But I think it also is maxes out. It's nonlinear. So like, I think the way it works is people see, oh, has this been running for like six weeks, six, excuse me, like six months to a year? And then that's kind of good enough. So then I think you can tie after like two years. But that's something that you would never get. Bitcoin can never get that because no one wants to be the first through the door. You'll never have people. You never have the majority of the network trying it for six months because you'll never get how much Bitcoin is getting right now. I think it's getting more hate today than it got in 2015. Because Bitcoin Core is objectively terrible and they are lazy and complacent. And so this is a time for discussion. But I didn't hear it. I didn't catch that. What did you say? I didn't hear the last part. He said it's prime time to build your own client. That's exactly. No, that is what I'm doing. That is not a hard fork. No, but I don't think I don't think, again, you can't. I just like I don't know how I can be any more clear. You don't have a client. It's like you need it's like you need permission from the government. It's like you need a medallion or a license. And they'll only give you the license if you've been running. This is a metaphor for the brand. They only give it to you if you have been if most people have been if a huge, critical mass of people have been trusting you for six to 12 months. So that's the barrier to entry. And you can never afford that. You cannot. There's no way of obtaining that. So it's infinity cost. So you cannot release a new client. There's no such thing. You can just release a client that is comparable to Bitcoin Core. But you're saying you're in six to 12 months, you're going to gain. You're able to gain the trust if you just sort of fork it. Well, it will be slightly different because it'll be a different thing. But people will say, well, at least this this L1 node. Has been running over here with this other network for a while. Doesn't that overlook all the same other thing? You're the trusted third party here. You're the single developer here, man. Well, how is that? Yeah. Doesn't it go into you're overlooking all the other things that I think take even longer? There's no eCash now doesn't need any developers because the L1 is literally just a fork of Bitcoin. And it's literally just if you go on GitHub, it's even hasn't even been renamed to mean the to limit the number of lines of code. What what version is it forked off of? It will be always the latest version. So just you just keep clicking merge on the changes. So it's always going to rely on Bitcoin Core existing. Basically, it will always tie Bitcoin Core for as long as Bitcoin Core. So so the success of eCash is basically Bitcoin Core succeeding. The same is not. Oh, if it was a copy until Bitcoin Core updating. Yeah. Or Bitcoin Core just like goes away. Or there could always be other people who work. Then what are you going to do? And what happens if Bitcoin Core goes away? Then we just carry on. Then we'll just carry on and leave it exactly where it was. Can I can I ask a question? So you talked about the technical side. And let's assume let's just assume, you know, you're six to 12 months. Everyone technically now feels that the implementation, the code, what the system is by design is solid because you've you've run it for six to 12 months. That's one aspect, I think, of people sort of putting their faith in something is the technical architecture. But then isn't there and I guess this depends on what you think the value proposition of this fork is, isn't the other part of that like the monetary trust, the governance trust, the social trust, which seems like it would take. No, that seems like it would take five times as long, 10 times as long to build that sort of trust. I think some of it bleeds over where before when Bitcoin came out, no one had heard of any cryptocurrencies, and there were early on, there were lots and lots of debates that went for hours and days and weeks. People would debate things like, can something have any value at all if it's not a physical object? So people had long, long, long debates about all this minutia. And only a few people such as myself, I would tell people, I would say, hey, listen, numbers, words are intangible. Raise your hand. I do a demonstration where I'd say, raise your hand if you think words have no value. And, you know, it's like words are independent. So I go down the list. But the point is, a lot of stuff was confusing back then. Like people didn't know how addresses work. People didn't know how change worked. So lots of stuff was really, really confusing. Some of that would bleed over. Now everyone kind of understands that crypto is a thing and that it's kind of like slightly dark in that a lot of illegal people and scammers use it and that there's privacy advocates who use it. So so a lot of it would bleed over, I think. The the the relevant the only reason basically the eCash fork is basically a hedge against the failure of BTC. So if BTC succeeds, then I'll be just fine. I'll be very happy. But I just like, you know, I have my eyes open and everything is a lot. There's tons of terrible things going on in BTC that are not getting any better. A lot of them are getting worse. It's a good thing. The knots 110 people have at least shined a light on how terrible Bitcoin Core is. And Bitcoin Core gets worse every year because it hides behind this brand, this monopoly brand that it has. And that's the situation. What do you think? Can you or can you enumerate the top three things you think are wrong with Bitcoin Core that are not just like esoteric government or government? I think the one we could go on for many hours about is that they they treat the soft fork as though it's different from any other code change, which is absurd, because you can do with one line of code. You could destroy everything. And this happened a lot. And even when Matt Corral tried to do his tiny little speed up, he actually created an inflation bug, which is perfectly fine. I'm not trying to criticize that. I'm just pointing out that trying to speed up something by a few like millionths of a second can create an inflation bug, even though that's not a hard or soft. It wasn't intended to be a hard or soft fork. It was just something like anything else. The fact that you do 1% hashrate needs to run a soft fork before users can use it safely is just that's just a tiny detail. And there's nothing special about that. And we shouldn't have any of these debate. We should activate all the soft forks that have been proposed, all the ones that are up or up success based. So but then here's the thing is the official policy of Bitcoin Core is not to touch anything if it's controversial. So if. And one funny thing about that is that even though Ava Chao said that to me in person and then said it on online on Twitter, you have all kinds of people who would come up to me and say, oh, that's not true or whatever. Even though it's it's obviously true and they admit that it's true. But then you have people like Nick Jonas saying that I'm slandering people and putting words in people's mouths, it's all freely available on Twitter. So there's this whole bizarre. So but I'm rolling all these up. Yes, we're a top three. I'm rolling this all up into one thing, which is they refuse to do anything, quote, controversial, close quote. And where controversy is measured in some like by Twitter or something, basically, and you can see how they manufactured controversy over upper return. And just like they do over every soft fork. So that that whole thing is is one giant thing that's huge. I think it's hard to pick a second thing after that giant first thing. But there's a couple other things like Core does not encourage competition at all. So they don't encourage it, which there are many things they could do. These would be of totally different flavors. But one is if they just prioritize sidechains in the first place, then at least if people hate L1, they could escape to an L2 blockchain that they might actually like. So that would be one thing that would help. A second thing, I'm still trying to roll this all up into the second point. Because but they could have it could be some kind of like a team, B team, you know, red team, blue team or something like that, where there's at least like two halves that compete. And, you know, that are maybe like some kind of stakes. See, this is all related to the fact that they don't want anyone to, like, sue them or be put in jail or something, which I completely understand. But as a result, it means there's no accountability in the project. So these are huge systemic flaws that are like they're just crippling the project. We can go down like a number of specific things. Don't you think some of those things are almost inherent when you get to a certain level of adoption and seriousness? You know, when you when you start having a book called The Innovator's Dilemma that says that actually death is necessary in the economy, like you have to have companies going out of business because at a certain point, every organization becomes inefficient because you've got things were taken for granted in, you know, 1992 that aren't true in 2002. And I think there was the problem. There's a problem here, though, that this is a monetary network. I totally understand what you're saying. Creative destruction of capitalism, you know, the analogy there. But typically that's with like companies that are producing like, hey, man, I bought a cool new phone or I bought like a, you know, this device or something. Now there's another company making it. My switching cost is zero. It's not super scary. Like the idea that we would have like rapid creative destruction measured in the order of 15 years on entire monetary systems, I think, is a little bit beyond the pale and sort of only one, because most people don't accept most normal people do not accept that Bitcoin is money. So if you talk to like normal, even like people who participate in the culture, we're talking like CNN reporters or something like that. Those most of those people don't believe that they just think this is some weird investment thing. I think we have to say, we have to say, if I'm saying how much do we really lose? I'm saying how much do we, if we sacrifice a trillion dollars in market cap, but if you had a trillion dollars in market cap that just evaporated because the underlying company disappeared, all shareholders were hung out to dry. And you're like, Oh, don't worry. There's a new company in town. What you're saying is it's inconvenient where you're saying, you're saying correctly that it's inconvenient for people to keep switching monetary monetary basis. I mean, the equivalent, I'm saying we're really only have to do it once because if someone does a second apparently it was twice, right? Well, yeah. You mean one from Fiat to BTC and then once from BTC to ETF. That would be correct. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, Hey, everyone wants to be the only Highlander, right? I mean, I feel like that's kind of like a, like, I don't want to be the, I don't want to do the eCash fork at all. It, if, if Bitcoin Core didn't suck so much, I wouldn't do it. I was forced to do it. Man. I just look, I feel like it would eventually get to the same. It would get to the same thing. You, you'd, you'd feel it. If ETFs adopt the eCash fork, if everyone was putting just major skin in the game and like countries started buying it and stuff, it would eventually get to the point where it was, you know, it was pretty difficult to pass things without, you know, majority of super. I agree, but the L2, that's why it's built into the L2 ecosystem that you can launch a new L2 and the existing L2s can't stop you. So that's, that's the error correction is built in or the governance as you may be caught. I mean, I, it's an interesting theory. I just, I don't know, you know, so many people have built some error correction on the scale of Bitcoin Core, then it will, it'll be a black Swan where it will look stable for a while. It will be stable for a long while, and then there'll be a huge revolution. So you can't fight reality forever. There are a couple of things that maybe you could like the alphabet or the argue with big cash. Like it's their time will come to some extent. The big bloggers were right about a lot of things. So I'm much too smart to fall for the trap of just saying one side good, one side bad. Each of the two sides had some points that were good. Some points that were basically irrelevant or pointless distractions. And then they had some points that were terrible. And most people they have a crippling fear of being rejected by the, so they just tribe up and they joined the small blog, in this case, that small blocker tribe, but I'm already very, very, very, very popular and I have many friends. So when I come to the Bitcoin world, I don't need any more friends. And I just tell the truth out of my brain. And the truth is this, that the large blockers had many points that were good. Not enough to justify their horrible idea, which was the horrible idea, which was self-contradictory in many ways, because they said, well, we're going to uncap the L1 block size. But then you had Gavin Andreessen saying, nobody wants an uncapped L1 block size. And he said, oh, we'll make it eight megabytes with Bitcoin XT. And I said, we'll make it two megabytes with Bitcoin Classic. And then I said, blah, blah, blah. So they kind of didn't really know what they were doing. And they had a terrible plan and they had a terrible execution. And there's no reason to do large blocks on L1 if a bunch of people hate that idea, because you could faithfully do them on L2. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry. But despite all that, the large blockers had many ideas that were good. And one of them was, we have to get, you know, eventually it has to be possible for people to be buying coffee on somewhere in the Bitcoin stack the world over. Were they, you know, four billion? I got it. I'd have to push back. If people aren't using the chain, then it's cheap to use the chain for coffee. I don't know how that's a pushback against what I'm saying. OK, if the fees are, you know, if people think that the fees are too high. The fees, I don't understand why people, I feel like I've elaborated this point many times in my head. The fees are stuck at 10 cents per transaction. Now, you understand there's a difference between gallons on chain right now, the difference between miles and miles per gallon in your car. But you could buy coffee. And one is miles per gallon. The the whole network needs to be able to support people, need to believe that it is a network that would eventually support everyone using it. With stuff is like the, you know, the unit of account is BTC, let alone the medium of exchange store value, which is which are slightly easier. So if it's constrained as a medium of exchange, then people know it has no future. They preemptively know. So you're saying that because in the future, everyone, everybody knows that if we all go buy coffee today, it's going to get too expensive to buy coffee tomorrow, which is why we rather just not buy coffee today. Basically, yes. But people don't co-generate it that way. I don't I don't I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I think that. But I think most people don't believe that. Can I just say, I appreciate the sequence of thoughts. I just going to say that you don't have this. That's not they don't have this logical sequence of thoughts laid out like that. What normal people do is they do trial and error and then they adjust. And so a lot of people would get curious about Bitcoin and they would hear and we miss these huge adoption super cycles, which we've had like four or five or six where the price of Bitcoin is going up and up and up. And everyone's talking about us. And at that point, the fees become very high. It costs 10, 20 dollars to spend someone's BTC. And then people think, you know what, this thing doesn't really seem like it's totally figured out right now. So I'm just going to leave and I'm going to come back later when maybe they figure it out. And then when all those people leave, then everyone thinks, oh, that was weird. There was like a week, like two or three weeks ago, there was this day where everyone was talking about Bitcoin, but now they're not. And so I'm not going to talk about it either. So people are very social and all these thoughts are very contagious. So it's not that each individual person has like reasoned it out like Aristotle and they're saying, ah, therefore, and such and such, but they try it out and they say, you know what, this thing really hasn't been all figured out yet. And they are aware of that. And that fundamentally is because of large block related. But hold on, there's three events in Bitcoin's history when fees went up three. The first one was in 2017 when and and pool and my BTC, but hold on. But but since then, since the and pool and my BTC were mining empty blocks, they were mining empty blocks and Roger was spamming the chain. So the fees went up a lot. So you would think. Doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter if it's only the quantity of three doesn't make any difference. The point is, it would happen again. So there's been two. Oh, there was a huge adoption super cycle in BTC. It would happen again. So that's the issue is that there's no way this is this is so I just don't buy the entire argument. And it's not one that just you've made. People are upset that the medium of exchange is not here. We hear this all the time. And it has nothing to do with the time here now. It's that there's no way of attaining it. But I think there's several things we can do without forking Bitcoin. Some of these proposals are very good and open up things in orders of magnitude that would probably be fine. But now the technical possibility is not the issue either. For example, BIP300, my idea, you could do that on Bitcoin today without changing any lines. I realize I realize your proposal is one of many routes to that. But I'm saying that's not the issue. The issue is the social, the social. But what is the real social? That has nothing to do with Bitcoin, has nothing to do with Bitcoin Core or even really Bitcoin at any technical level. It's a social thing. It doesn't really matter what the source is. We can't we're trapped here. That's why that's why now it's everybody else. Are we playing Bitcoin Core? Are we playing people that are the social layer of Bitcoin Core? But it's not that it isn't that it comes down to this medium of exchange is going to follow the same pathway, maybe an magnitude or two. Faster than gold, it'll follow the same one as gold. It took gold, you know, just a measly 5000 years from discovery to the point where it was used as a degree. That timeline of gold has any relevance to. No, it doesn't. No, it isn't. Obviously. Wait, let me give you the caveat. Obviously, we're not in the age of, you know, having a horse circulate the message that, yeah, everyone there's this thing gold. So I would expect it to be faster. Yes. Or even having cars. Why the adoption of cars versus the adoption of horses? There's no reason. I understand. I understand. But we are 16 years in 16 years. And if anyone was on any sort of drug that made them feel as if they were going to flip the entire monetary system, not just from the advent of the technology that would do it, but to its broad, widespread adoption, where over 50 percent of all humans transact everything in their daily lives with it in 15 years. They mean, A, I want to know who they're buying their drugs from, because that's probably some good shit. And B, it might take literally five times that long. It could. I don't think it will. I think it's maybe on the order. We agree with you. I completely agree with you that the project of replacing fiat with a cryptocurrency. We'll take we should take longer than 15 years, so that's not happening. I don't think that's me. I think you're saying that the you don't know all the steps it will take to get there. Maybe it's an essential step that the the first currency experiences a lot of success, but becomes overconfident and then waste 10 years because we wasted 10 of the 16 years. Really? The 2009 through 2014 were way more productive than, you know, 2016 to 2026. I think it mostly been static. I don't think you're hearing me, though. I don't think it's anything to do with Bitcoin. I think it's everything external to Bitcoin. I think I think the hardest things that have to happen to get widespread. No, I hear you. There I can. We need to see the US dollar collapse there. I'll throw that out. I think that's the most probable step. So I don't know. Can you tell me how Bitcoin Core will will take in a PR or software that makes the US dollar collapse? Can you do that? Okay, well, of course, I could. I don't think I have to say I can't write a lot of code in Bitcoin and see had Vlad and PC. They had their hand up politely for we have to reward this politeness, I think, because they've been politely for like literally like 15 minutes or something. So I just have to throw that out there. Well, you know, I mean, I was just allowing the very passionate conversation to come to a pause there, but sure, I was going to jump up and and, you know, bring up this sort of marketing issue that your fork has. I mean, I'm pretty stoked on on cash you and these other implementations of eCash. I find the use of the term eCash for your fork very confusing, when clearly it should be called P-cash. But, you know, I'll put that aside because I think actually the conversation you guys are having about this medium of exchange thing, it's one of these really busted narratives. It's a bad meme. The whole meme about money having these different form factors as if it were water and it's going from ice to liquid to a gas, the money has to go from, you know, store value to medium of account to unit of exchange. It's a really, really broken meme. And it really gets lame when we start applying it to the real world. And when it gets when it gets applied to Bitcoin, it's particularly bad because you cannot separate medium of exchange and store value with Bitcoin every single time anybody receives or sends Bitcoin. It's a medium of exchange. I just had Bitcoin sent to me the other day from another continent, and it was an excellent medium of exchange. It's kind of like trying to separate trains and train tracks. It's just like a weird way in which it gets discussed and everyone's saying, oh, big problem. How the hell is it going to become a medium of exchange when it's like literally been one since inception? I just think it's frustrating. It has not been used by eight billion people since inception. So that's what we're talking about. That's a totally different topic. And that's not about whether it's a medium of exchange. Let me give you an example. TC, the Wright brothers flew a plane, right? Technically, that was a plane. Technically, it had a flight. Technically, it was in the air, right? All those things were box checked. Technically, well, plane, we got it. But, you know, it wasn't consumer air travel for quite some time that, you know, displaced a lot of other forms. And that's all we're talking about. You're right in the sense of like it is technically doing an exchange. Every peer to peer exchange on L1 is medium of exchange for many things. But when does it displace the majority? But Daniel, Daniel, the reason of me bringing that up is not just to nitpick. It's the fact that that meme of saying that it's these different phases and it's not there yet is being used to market forks to people and convince people that something drastic needs to change. When I agree, I agree with what you said, Daniel. I think it is actually multiple generations until you see a total widespread adoption of Bitcoin. And I'm totally fine with that. I'm at peace with the fact that I might not see it in my lifetime. That's OK. But even if that doesn't happen for Bitcoin to survive, all it really takes is just somebody to want it. And if somebody wants it, as long as they're taking it into self-custody and there's a transaction fee that's getting paid. So the reason for that transaction, if it was because of a store of value or if it was because someone's going to go and put it on exchange to buy JPEGs doesn't really matter. As long as that there's a fee that's being paid, that's in the end of the day for the network. That's all that matters. It doesn't care if you're using it as a store of value or using it as a medium exchange or a unit of account. All that matters is that there's big there's demand for Bitcoin and people are taking it into self-custody. Now, it matters very much how many people use Bitcoin, because if there is a parallel system that is similar enough, but more popular, then it will be very, very hard for Bitcoin to have a future, let alone survive. It will it will just be so you can imagine like if you had something where like Litecoin was used by eight billion people somehow. Well, I think and Bitcoin is what it is right now. I don't think we disagree. I don't think we agree. I think something has more demand than Bitcoin. Yeah, you're 100% right. We've seen millions of attempts, haven't we? Haven't we seen millions of attempts to do just that? I mean, your your line of reasoning, because the fees should have killed when their fees were high and it made a really bad experience for Bitcoin. Bitcoin should have died. Right. The fees disqualify the eight billion people event. No, no, no, no. I'm talking about you specifically said when people come onto the chain to pay for coffee and then they can't because the fees went up and it happened in three times in Bitcoin's history. You would think today there wouldn't be a Bitcoin already, like it would be done. Well, yeah, yeah, I don't I think everyone, well, everyone, maybe except Paul, agrees that that's not really what's holding back adoption. I asked he said Bitcoin Core. There's a lot of problems there that are holding back adoption. I don't agree at all. I think the problems are two things. Biggest ones is we need to see some of the collapse in the fiat monetary system that we've been long awaiting based on the fucking blank checks they're writing. And then number two, things like capital gains tax treatment. So what I want to know, Paul, is what can Bitcoin Core developers do? Let's say the remaining core developers. What line of code can they write to exempt it from tax, from cap gains and to make the US dollar system collapse? Like what line of what does that C code look like? Is it a statement? And then it goes and assassinates politicians in the code. How does it work? Because I think that's actually what's what's actually holding Bitcoin back. That's that's it. But first of all, there is an answer. If you if there was more privacy in Bitcoin, it would de facto. Limit the. Enforcement of the capital gains taxation. So is it possible like there's only really two vectors for adoption, one is number go up, we always get more moths to the fire when we're in a bull market. OK, and the other one is pain. So we saw even recently, you know, if you believe the reports that Iran was, you know, taking Bitcoin for safe passage through the straits or something like that. You know, people, countries, companies, entities, they they come across Bitcoin as a solution when they encounter enough friction or problem. You know, the truckers in Canada were using it when they didn't have other options. So it's basically you get pain out in the real world that forces you to look for a solution that Bitcoin offers, you know, possible, you know, aspects to to solve the problem or you get number go up, which always draws more moths to the fire. Like, basically, those are the two vectors of adoption, truly. And whatever activity all of these participants, including you, Paul and me, like any what anybody does is not necessarily consequential at all. Compared to those other two things, so we can spin our wheels, we can do a whole bunch of activity, but we're not we're not necessarily impacting something that has to basically happen organically through those other vectors. Yeah, I mean, it all comes down to the social it all comes down to the social the social aspect of when I talk to people, lay people that have literally they've heard of Bitcoin. They don't know deeply the technicals, but they kind of understand the basics. Oh, there's not going to be any more printed over a certain number. So it's different than cash because, you know, cash. I hope that is right. The person just says where nothing that we do matters. And Bitcoin success is guaranteed. No, it's not. Let me clarify. It's not up to any one person. It's the total collaborative impact of everything. But the main two vectors are still always the same. It's either number go up, attracting new investors and speculators, or it's the pain out in the world where you need this permissionless, sovereign money to overcome. You see, I know that isn't that what we're talking about, though. We're talking about that. That's partly what we're talking about when we talk about these different layer twos. But that's not what that's that's going to a level that the average person, the ninety five percent of people, right, like who don't hold Bitcoin. A lot of them know what Bitcoin is. When I talk to them, they say, I know what Bitcoin is. Yeah, I don't know. It's really volatile. I don't know if I can buy into that. I just trust the government, man. Like they will literally tell you this, especially people on the left. Oh, man, I trust the fiat monetary system. Oh, the stable dollar. Oh, nothing like, you know, El Salvador, not El Salvador, but like Venezuela or something will ever happen to us. We're white people in white people countries. That just doesn't happen here. What they need to have shaken to their fucking core is for the system to collapse. And it goes into the second thing that T.C. said. It goes into the fact that they need pain. It's the exact same shit that's happening with A.I. Dude, I've worked on these identity solutions forever and they're all great solutions. And there's awesome stuff that can solve things in our world, make everything more efficient. But the sad part is for 10 years, we try to sell people as incremental improvements or cost reductions. No one cared. A.I. came along and fucking destroyed trust on the Internet. And now, you know what people are doing? Running around with their fucking heads cut off, being like, how do I authenticate A.I. agents all this shit? And they're the exact same tech we built for last 10 years. They're like, give that to me. What did it take? Extreme pain, extreme pain. I agree. Pain is pain is a very good teacher. And it's very nothing you do. No forks of Bitcoin can deliver the extreme pain that is necessary. I hope for the total and systemic collapse of the dollar. You can't give us a nice airdrop, man. I don't know why we're against him giving us a nice airdrop. It doesn't matter about the collapse of fiat doesn't necessarily mean that BTC will succeed, because it could be a different cryptocurrency that succeeds. It could be a completely different one other than not having nothing to do with ECX or BTC. That's not true. True, true. But what I'm saying, but if we had 8 billion users, then it really could not be anything. The true line here, my point is what TC said is important because he said there's two things that drive it, right? Number go up. And then the other one being like, you know, you have a need, whether it's pain or something else extreme. I think we've kind of exhausted, not fully, but like to a large degree, the first cohort of people that attached to his first thing, which is number go up. Everyone who kind of cares about that and says, oh, this is like a kind of speculative black swan collapse asset and is deep into the economics and all that stuff. They kind of already know about Bitcoin and have either bought or they're like have a really nuanced position on it. Now we're working on the other ninety five percent of humanity. And when I talk to them, especially in these first world countries, euro, you know, USD, they look at the government and they say, I trust that it's just so stable. Oh, my God. Weird internet money. They still look at it that way because they have a trust in the structure until that structure is assaulted and fucks them over royally. They are not going to get off their ass. And so I think what what what shit coin, what feature do you think the market wants that you think Drivechain like provide? Like what's that? How does it collapse? The US dollar is missing. Who does it? Who does it assassinate? Does it like shoot bullets out of the blockchain? I'm just trying to understand. The only the only reason I ask you, I would before I might have said maybe like shielded transactions from Zcash, but no one gives a fuck about Zcash. Maybe Monero, but no one gives a fuck about Monero. So the privacy part, people really don't know that you guys are right, that no one actually wants this, any of this watching stuff. I don't think that's true. So but the idea is that you want to build something that people are going to want. But I mean, that that makes you know, you could have made that argument maybe 10 years ago when shit coins were still kind of popular. People were looking for the next thing. But today, I mean, no one cares. I think they don't care because we've done such a terrible job. No, they don't care because they don't trust the US dollar. They trust it. They need they need to be put in the frying pan and fucking boil the line. No one brought out any technology. I'm trying to see what which shit coin what what old coin any of that doesn't matter what, like actually the market wants like something that has sustaining power that we know that Bitcoin is missing this one thing. I mean, I don't know. Okay, well, it's hard to explain it all like that. But yeah, okay. Monero is something that is adoption I prefer this we have his version of z as a sidechain. I prefer this Monero has been going down in bitcoin terms for the last like 12 years But that's not relevant the we're talking about actual people transacting with it. So we've had like the darknet markets where the original use case for bitcoin transactions And now all these places that used to be bitcoin only they're now like all monero what matters is I understand you're on you're really on about these transactions, but At the end of the day, it's the demand that matters and bitcoin's getting the demand. That is the demand the transaction demand the transaction demand For the next for another 100 years that could take care of that No, i'm not talking about the transaction fees i'm talking about the users the actual usage You said what's this thing that people want so much so who's trained so like one example You're saying moneros has a lot of transactions, but like why do I care people are transacting today? Like what does that do for me? Like why do I why should I care about the one who said you you specifically asked what's name and altcoin where? That people actually use how much transactions are are they doing on monero? You can look it up. It doesn't matter the point the fact that the The exchange And then you can look at crypto fees.info you can look at crypto fees.info and they'll give you exact numbers Would it make it better for you? If I started like creating a bunch of transactions like dummy transactions on chain to make it look like there's a lot of like Uses happening If you paid a real transaction fee It would you would be a real user so that would make me feel slightly better A minor would benefit would benefit more right now from me buying a fuck ton of bitcoin and raising the value of bitcoin than paying like a small Lots and lots and lots of completely different things Okay, the fact that bitcoin will also be killed by a security budget has nothing to do with the fact that it also Let's talk about security budget. Let's okay. Let's I like this Paul you got a lot of How does a security budget so like you know, I think right now the security budget for like a long time So I think we should move on with you and I don't think we did I think a lot of people try to make it seem like there's a security budget that we have to worry about But I don't think anyone really articulated how bitcoin dies Like what is the budget that keeps bitcoin secure? Like no one has that number. No one told me Let's say it's four cents a year that we pay the miners It What then at that point the proof of work is just superfluous. It's a waste of time It's a transaction that I did two hundred thousand blocks ago Have anything to do with like being less secure if there's um, you know, because you can easily rewrite the chain How can you rewrite the chain that's already has it has all that work? I'm talking about it from now on is The total amount of money paid to miners over the whole year Is four cents for the whole year. So it's like one millionth of a cent per block. So you think pools are You think pools are going to go to their miners and be like listen guys Why are you like dancing around the issue? I'm just taking an extreme case to make it clear, right? I'm telling you that theoretical level make any sense at some theoretical level it does matter if the Total amount of money paid to miners is like one dollar. Do you acknowledge? I agree with you. There's more incentives. There's the income and profit And in fact over time those other incentives grow in importance I mean One of the incentives Over time one of the incentives to the attack incentives to attack bitcoin also grow in importance and they decrease in cost, right? So the idea is that you shouldn't be able to coordinate these things, right? Mining should be centralized to the point where you can't actually coordinate these things and it goes against the interest of the pool You know, we have to go one topic at a time This is boring because it doesn't happen for a long ass time Can we talk about something like like I I don't like how we moved on past the idea I know you guys like well, they you guys are moving Paul answer me this man. The majority of my family i've been in bitcoin 15 years since 2011 Majority of my family has watched me i've advocated to them a zillion times. They've seen the price go up. They like Still 15 years later. They're like, I don't know man. I don't know. It seems crazy That's not the same for the darknet market. I didn't know the darknet market everyone knew. Oh if I want to buy whatever Those people were technologically illiterate We have saturated You're saying the people who used who bought on on silk road were technically I mean, I was one of them and I think that was the most retarded thing we ever did. I don't understand They were able to get onion routing to work. They were able to get They had onion routing to work. They had no point control. They didn't know anything about the UTXO sets They don't know anything skip to the part Can we agree can we agree that we have roughly exhausted the over 80 percent of the cohorts of number go up diehards uh dark market operators and other Highly secondary people we have negative we went we were we had a 100 monopoly on darknet market And now we lost it. Yeah, we lost we lost we lost tens of people. Oh jesus tens of adoption people like my point is These cohorts are on the wrong way when we're talking about broad adoption and why it isn't here Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this Did you ever if there was something like you had email was invented but then all of a sudden it was like oh we're losing Why are we losing anyone why why didn't my grandfather, uh jump on email? Why did my grandfather jump on email? It was wait, wait, just like Hold on for a second. My grandfather email came out I think he had like 15 years of life left or something But he saw me using my dad using it everyone using it Didn't ever jump on had a computer used a fucking computer every day wouldn't do it I don't think the uh email core developers didn't put in the right cool email extension or fuck around Code to fuck with emails protocol that would convince him to use email. Guess what he had to do Yeah, we're not gonna get fucking we're not going to get every Person, but we're going we have to we should fight to get as many users as we should possibly get What if someone what if someone at google was just like, uh, you know email if we get more people to adopt Maybe two companies I'm not saying the technicals don't matter at all. I'm not saying that i'm saying Yeah, we can always do technically better we can scale better But i'm saying the actual damn here the damn that needs to break Is the fact that I can have my relatives who are not like programmers? Hear this for 15 fucking years and they still won't buy a dollar of bitcoin Why because they trust the government they don't trust bitcoin. It's a social problem Why because they look at it It's been kind of stable and only inflated at an average of like two and a half percent a year So that makes them happy and safe in their security blanket And what i'm saying is the thing that's going to send all those people running out of the burning theater is the fire And we unfortunately don't have one yet. So I think we need that I think it's nothing the bitcoin core can do. It's nothing your fork can do unfortunately But didn't you ignore I addressed this point already? Like let's say it's tomorrow the fiat currencies collapse They'll run for something and we need to be that's exactly how do you we want them? How do we guarantee that it's btc? Well, I don't think they're going to be running pretty much I don't think they're going to do that By building the best product that attracts that they it's easiest to use lowest cost has the best features, etc I Building I think it's gonna be hard to offset that brand though I think you're gonna run into some I mean that's a multi of course the brand is very very very important that's what i'm saying is when the bitcoin blocks fill up It hurts the brand so the large blockers were right about that Because people think oh this is costing me twenty dollars to send if I wanted to send my friend ten dollars worth of bitcoin Just to show them how it works You couldn't even do that at certain points, but we have meaningful capacity. We have meaningful capacity offloading to L2s I know that we need that we that's what we need to have but we don't have I think we will get recurse With ibit you think they have to worry about transaction fees, what are you talking about? We need real offloading to real L2s so that people actually learn the difference between bitcoin and custodial fiat Um, that's what we need And we need it so that and we need them to be merge mined so that the revenues go to L1 miners So that as they grow everyone is on the same team Everyone is uh, you know the the more money People pay the more money miners get Ever the miners stay loyal to the users and not to like weird other stuff like Whatever they're doing now optics or whatever. They're loyal to now Those that is what we need And that is what we don't have and that is what we for some reason We can't get even though it's served up on a silver platter mostly because people here who are saying Oh, everything's fine. We don't need to do anything So again, I hope you guys are right because that would mean that bitcoin will probably do really well regardless of what happens And I hope that that is the case, but I unfortunately I just think That you guys you guys barely no offense, but some of these points were litigated a long long time ago people barely know the difference between Stuff like dollar per unit and dollars basic unit people ask questions about like, oh, hey, what about this? You know stuff that figured out years and years and years ago And uh, you know A lot of these ideas are just terrible and I don't trust any of you guys when you say everything's going to be fine I just think that what you guys say is just mostly nonsense. I don't think it's gonna just gonna be fine I think that yeah, unless we have something that sends people for the exits Uh in a crazy catastrophic way, I think that's going to be the next Big lever of adoption. Imagine you're right and everyone imagine you're right. Everyone rushes into bitcoin because it's got the best brand So fiat collapses everyone rushes into bit what will happen then what will happen immediately? They're probably going to go to it If you really want to ask they're going to go towards apps like cash app and others that are roughly custodial And they are going and then the fiat regime that just collapsed. What will they do to cash out? We we don't know yet. They might try to attack them. It might be like the same golden. All this is weak You guys you guys deserve better thoughts than this. I feel bad. What do you know? I'm saying I hate to be I hate to be living in your brain because Paul please wait a second Wait a second here I'm trying to walk you through what's probable whether you have your fork involved or not. Okay, if something happens catastrophically to the current financial order People will run for the exits. They will probably whether it's your coin or another they're gonna go to a centralized solution Or they're gonna go to custodians. Why because that's human nature, right? Not because it's not the right coin or whatever the fuck. It's just that because it's where the off-ramps are yeah, that's where the offer all sorts of reasons why but has nothing to do with this particular token and it's Fucking nerd code that it's written with nothing about that. It's all humans. They don't know like you said you made a good point They don't know. Yes, the people are retarded paul. I agree with you and the guru are retarded. So Like that's my point is that's what's going to happen retarded things are going to happen Whether you have your smart paul coin or you have your what you would call dumb bitcoin It's all going to look kind of the same and I think at that point We're still going to have things like the covenant stuff We need that will open up orders of magnitude of L2 activity and we'll be able to support it if we need to But it's about the need and the need arrives when the pain starts in my opinion, maybe i'm wrong daniel if if if fiat kind of Obbles along long enough Such that that pain doesn't come soon enough Does bitcoin have problems if we've scaled too far? And there's virtually no on-chain activity. I don't think so personally I think it ends up just I think there's like a couple levels. I think there's one level would be replacing gold, right? and that's still achievable without the Catastrophic like, you know euro and usd all collapse and we're like in a new monetary order. Do we accept the one? That's only like a 20x or something. Yeah Yeah, I think I think the gold thing is where it sits until we have an extreme case And that's probably where it hovers right and then you need something That attacks the coin, you know Yeah, I think a million dollars a coin is going to be very sticky for a very long time you know once we Reach those but how much how much is the milk in that world like i'm paying 20 for a gallon of milk It's equivalent Equivalent 1 million to today's equivalent. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I don't know who knows but Anyways, I I can I can see that happening Paul was you had a response to Everything we said retarded No, I don't have anything nothing comes to mind Why don't you trust us anymore? Where do we steer you wrong? Bitcoin's working exactly perfectly right now Uh, like okay just a moment ago you said I don't remember exactly what it was it was before the space rug But I was like this guy seriously asking a question like this now in 2026. What was it? and I don't remember what it was But it's happened many times where you guys think like this is stuff people have thought about like 10 years ago I you even just a few moments ago You're like very confused as to whether or not I was talking about Transactions being adopted and you thought I was talking about security budget and I just think well the reason I thought that was Transact like transaction fees if there's people are transacting That's you know, but the point is you're not even grasping. You're not even following what i'm saying. So why would I? Trust that you when you say everything's gonna be fine. It's like A doctor And then it's like a four-year-old girl who doesn't know what cancer is trying to 10 years ago. I said bitcoin's gonna be fine and it's fine today That's all you just have to connect the dots, bro Just connect the dots gotta connect them. So i'm just saying But you thought bitcoin by this point was fucked right? Like you were convinced for a very long time that bitcoin would have been Talking about me No, no, i've been a supporter of bitcoin the whole time until now Right, but you wouldn't want to proactively worry for you paul. All right, so until now Doing it so much when it was literally becoming a monopolist cult And now i'm very concerned now. I still think it wasn't a cult in 2017. Now. It's a cult. You're not gonna You're not gonna die. It wasn't it was more the earlier version of bitcoin was more open to like discussing ideas Now I think by 2017, it's pretty much what we have today. I think it's the same crowd paul. Are you I agree Are you huddling your btc moving forward? Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yes At what I mean, but at a certain point you'd probably dump it if you thought it was really gonna die, right? Yeah, we need that We need to know like the price ratio and also the other information about like, you know So a lot a lot is up in there what what would make you dump your coins and leave permanently you think bpp Well, yeah if the price of btc is crashing against ecx is skyrocketing and it seems like uh, and for the right reasons like when people talk they say stuff like They like play old recordings of spaces and they say well I can't believe these people thought it didn't even matter if bitcoin got adopted and they did point and laugh and they say What a crazy group of of lunatics Mass adoption. I don't care. There's mass adoption Obviously, I care if bitcoin gets adopted by no people And then people would say like, oh, I don't it doesn't even matter if we how much money we pay the miners That doesn't even matter how much proof of work there is in bitcoin if people started saying stuff like that, like if they started saying like all the All these normal people look into it for the first time and they're like, oh, yeah. Paul is actually right about all this stuff and um I think another thing would be If btc just say that people don't understand even what they're talking about So, how are they going to grasp that paul is right about this? Paul's right? Well, because I think it's partly motivated reasoning, of course what paul's paul you're just recycling old memes These memes need to be upgraded. I love it. We all we all learn the memes when we're new you learn That the miners are going to be in trouble if the if the if they're not making there's not enough fees Mr. Hoddle just said he said like a few moments ago He said that it was true that if there was if it fell to a really low He said it on three different occasions. In fact, he said it in the other space as well So I said that's his opinion. I said what I said what what I said That if the proof the total proof of work, you know, the total it's my money The way in which you're talking about extremes is oversimplified. It doesn't take into account the real nature of the landscape today No, I said I said bitcoin could be over secured today and you wouldn't have any idea. That's what I said That's i'm not talking about today. I'm talking about the far future If the far future, this is why it's so difficult to talk to you guys. You don't even remember you you you said moments ago Five dollars total paid in transaction all every single transaction be added up for a year and it falls to some super low So I was saying again, I would keep repeating this if there's no demand for bitcoin bitcoin dies, so yes the value of youtube But that's not like I think everyone is aware. There's no demand for something. That's what he said t-speed He said if this if no money's being paid to the miners in bitcoin That's different than bitcoin demand if there's people still buying bitcoin. I'm telling you If people are buying if they're still in 130 years Okay, this is another thing you guys keep confusing and it's getting tiresome And people are still buying bitcoin if there's demand for bitcoin I'm talking about the coin. What are you talking? That's the value the value of the coin is the transaction. Okay? Okay, paul. Listen again if there's demand for oh my god, listen to me This is like i'm this is like if i've done something in the past life, you're not going to listen Yes, maybe I was like I don't need to listen. This is why you're forking out So if there's if there's people going on crack it and coinbase and they're still buying bitcoin on there But they're not transacting on chain. There's still demand for bitcoin. The value there is still there So what happens demand for bitcoin the coin you understand that there's a different thing businesses that sell you bitcoin the coin They We're on the same page like coinbase. We're not talking about that Does coinbase now have an incentive to mine? We're talking about does coinbase have an incentive to mine if there's still demand for bitcoin possibly Yes, but then they would they would be paying the transaction fee, right? That's exactly what we're trying to say there's demand for bitcoin, right? I agree with you what I passed version of you that said if there's no demand for bitcoin then it does now you're trying to Contribute mining fees and transactions You're talking about mining fees and transactions and i'm telling you there's demand for bitcoin bitcoin stays alive Even if there's little very little transaction fees coinbase, they will subsidize the mining. You will have companies subsidizing that shit As long as bitcoin isn't like visa is like a company There's no one out there using the visa card, there's no one out there using the visa card in stores, but you can buy the collectible Visa plastic card on ebay and you're saying there's still demand for visa. It's just you can mixing up the words It's just you mixing up the words. It's not a real argument It's just you mixing up two different corn UTXOs and people are going to these exchanges and continue buying Go back to tc. Can we just go back to tc and hear the meme? I want to hear the meme that i'm repeating supposedly i'm just uncritically repeating some meme I heard You're saying you're basically saying one person I'm saying there's no demand for bitcoin bitcoin dies and then you're saying two seconds later I said if there's no demand for transactions Yeah, i'm telling you there's no demand for bitcoin if people don't demand bitcoin, of course bitcoin dies There's no demand for it. Watch me a measurement an effective measurement of the Demand for bitcoin transactions is the total security budget amount So that's a great measurement of value of demand. I have a question for you Um, do you okay fine? Do you think your personality in particular has held back dip 300 from being adopted? I got it doesn't couldn't care less But no, I don't think so Because you think everything else has been held back as well Because of course I was much nicer about it in in 2015 2016 So actually, I don't think that's it was mostly a joke. I'll take it personally Yeah, no, I actually think i've been super nice about the whole thing right, um, and it's now it's just like Um, yeah, i'm very humble as well So I want to hear from tc this meme security budget Cash It's definitely mean but I I like wrote this giant article with like graphs and papers and stuff 29 2021 And you can say in that article Budget that keeps it secure Um, well, you know, it's kind of a silly question as you are very well aware It's kind of like well if we're trying to secure a nation How much money does the army need and it's like well, no one knows like the exact miners are not the army That's the meme you're talking about a a disparate distributed group of people competing against one another as if they're a unified organized top down It's obvious that it is a one issue So the fact that you guys blow it off is that this is exactly what i'm talking about why we're all screwed because it's One at least one dimension that people should at least discuss and have some kind of vague plan For getting to at some point stick around for long enough and you see The the reality actually play out multiple times and you see extreme situations resolve the way they do. Maybe you update your What do you mean about nation securing nations like miners secure the the transaction? So obviously if I had like, you know 100 million dollar transaction, I might want to wait more than two or three confirmations I might want to wait six confirmations or 10 confirmations to feel secure to feel secure. There's enough work But if it's 10 cents if it's 10 cents each block Then it's only bad very much waiting six blocks so 10 cents 10 cents, uh bitcoin There's no demand for bitcoin if it's um, if the block reward i'm thinking like there's 2000 Just say there's 2000 transactions in every block and each of them pays one cent per transaction So it's 20 is worth each But it's a good thing that we still have the substance for quite some time that is Okay, i'm glad that we agree that it is at some point it becomes an issue Did the block size limit get eliminated in this hypothetical situation? I don't know. Yeah, it doesn't matter We're shooting from the hip here man, this is how we do things sir. Hey, I got one for you If there's no more oxygen left, we all stop breathing and die I mean like to say like if there's no one transacting bitcoin in 120 years. Yeah, that's a problem But like how do you fucking know what's gonna happen in 120 years? And why are we fixing this right now? Why are we pretending that we're gonna fix this right now? We don't even know that this actually becomes an issue higher than never before in the fucking history of bitcoin besides two years ago Like the reward it's not about The security is not about the value of the block reward that secures the bitcoin blockchain has been going up It's not been going down It's not about like fixing it today it's like people have lost the Like the will to even like bother like discussing it like an any normal person. It's fucking retard I mean i'm all about you. I'm all about you forking bitcoins You think so said they're giving us an airdrop and like doing all that i'm i'm not against that But the idea is fucking retarded compared to us running out of oxygen on planet earth when it's a it's literally built in to the argument for bitcoin that That the transaction revenue will grow over time and satoshi has quotes about in 20 years Let's say 10 million dollars and each utix of values value much higher than it is today but there's you know, maybe in bitcoin terms the fees aren't as high as A 50 bitcoin block subsidy, but the value is much greater Does that still like secure bitcoin as long as bitcoin security budget? Not even like it's not even one of the top five Issue, even though it is I mean, I feel like we tackled the security budget. What's the other one? We tried to You know, it's adoption in general It says that if the if you have two cryptocurrencies and one is fighting tooth and nail to get as many users as you can Do you have an example of a cryptocurrency that god demand that people wanted That had staying powerly bitcoin because like well we get with the usdt on tron. That's dollars. Those are dollars That's usd. That's yes dollars are very popular before bitcoin. They're going to be popular for a very long time I'm, not I don't think dollars are going to die in our Anytime soon, right? Like we're going to see dollars relatively pretty strong. That's not a cryptocurrency. That's dollar. That's a digital dollar It could be Even need a fucking blockchain. It's just they use blockchain for arbitrage like to fool out. No, I don't think that's quite the case but one of the things people like about it is that it is It has some blockchain Maybe before when they thought there was some kind of censorship resistance because blockchain magic maybe it made sense But now too many funds have been frozen too many funds get seized. It's it's fiat man. It's it's it's a zell It's zell 2.0 world. Like it's a worldwide zell There's no blockchain. There's we'll give each other is making a lot of yield on those bonds, though Right exactly tether's making a huge amount of money, but I don't think that's that's not really like I don't think The there's no, you know You don't need to have it if we had an example already of one that was getting users Then that one would probably already be taking over The crypto world and so what i'm worried about is why would we rest where we have a big lead And why would we you know, it's like a tortoise in the hair situation Why would we just think that it's just some action by you or someone else that's missing when it's truly a chaotic and Unorganized organic growth and adoption story Like every other innovative technology that's ever come along The thing is this kind of already happened and let me speak here so I was um watching some roger ver videos because why not and I saw him talking about um Well, I wasn't there but it was like 2017 or 16 or something like that You had huge spikes of usage actual usage, you know, you had the steam, uh, you know The one you buy the games in uh was actually adopting bitcoin. You had a lot of companies like this actual companies that people use Yeah, yeah that they were actually adopting bitcoin but then one of the big reasons they stopped is because The the fees were becoming so high that it it didn't make sense anymore for it for them to accept They never they never stopped at bitcoin. They adopted bit pay Which was they were getting fiat and they're using a merchant processor to fucking get dollars Sure might be no, that's not might be that's what happened. It was a bit pay bit like using bit Still counts as bitcoin adoption. That's not adopting Come on That's beside the point if at least adds one Element of bitcoin it goes from being zero fiat. I guess one. I got news for you guys uh bit pay still exists and now we also have uh Square that made that even a bigger thing So great news bitcoin has more merchant adoptions today in that case than ever before Sure, but the thing is what happened or at least what this whole conversation i'm feeling fucking dumber and dumber man i'm supposed to be the dumb guy here Overlighting doesn't count So what seems to have happened is that uh, you had growing usage, but then it plateaued and stopped Because of the fees if we had uh Drivechains or Well any other good scaling solution We could have continued growing or at least uh, you know So how many merchants that's what I mean here cash app now What how many merchants are tied into bitcoin through cash app now or through square rather I don't know more or less. I don't know Many more So are we not scaling? Okay, so I mean if you consider Bitpay, you know like merchants tied into bitpay as scaling bitcoin in those prior years Then you should also consider the thing is it took way much square the thing It took way much time than it could And that's a bad thing because we were on a let's say microsoft. They said microsoft and l whatever So they were accepting bitcoin But then they stopped I don't think you can you but you can't put I mean you can't put the horse before the What is it the cart before the horse horse before the cart? Yeah. Yeah, whatever order it is You can't put the horse goes in front the horse goes in front so you can't put the cart before the horse There's no cart Is it a cart horse or a horse cart? I don't know man Yeah, but my main point here is that if we had uh working scaling solutions there in which uh, people wouldn't Wouldn't need to pay absurd You think they would have stuck around and that would have been more viral and it would have built. Yeah And built and yeah, no I mean not forever. Obviously not forever. Obviously, but more than anything. Oh, you're obviously right. Okay, wait, wait No, I I disagree So I I think I think bitcoin would have still gone through cycles and it's not just fees going up that caused people to leave It's crashing of price that caused people to leave which by the way coincided, right? I mean typically fees go up when things are crazy and then they crash When you know things crash and that's when people leave So you might say oh they left because the fees were high But you also you know, if you're actually paying attention, you might realize they left because the market crashed So, I mean you could you could say it both ways And I think the people that were buying computers or whatever from dell They were buying it because of like Speculation because when you buy something with bitcoin, you're not really buying it Like you probably believe in something on bitcoin Or if you don't believe it, it's like the dark net market kind of thing, you know There's some other motive. I think that the the amount of commerce that was happening on bitcoin in those early years is heavily overstated I mean it was probably less than It was tens of dollars of commerce I mean how many people really bought dell computers using bitcoin Hundreds at most thousands, you know, like maybe probably not Marcus I was almost the 11th employee at coinbase And I sold and I literally connected tighter direct As a merchant sitting in a closet in coinbase's first office, which was A an apartment on biloxi by fourth and king and so fully involved in that It was all like yeah, everyone was willing to kind of add it as a fun little gimmick It drove hardly any demand. Um, there was not very much volume It was sort of like and people didn't really understand the tax implications too early It was too early and I just want to throw cold water And so I know everyone's gonna fucking hate me because i'm bringing up the government Uh, I do this by the way, I avoid it because I just don't want fucking problems. I don't report that I bought bitcoin I don't want to spend it and incur fucking capital gains. I don't want to touch any of that shit I just accumulate it like smog the dragon And i'm waiting for bad things to happen to the government so I can spend it more freely Um or them to clear cap gains in the clarity act or something like that Why not because i'm deathly afraid but it is something where I just don't want to fuck with it And that's the vast majority like my aunts and uncles and everyone that's watched me and has this like social aversion to it If you tell them oh, well, don't worry there's an yeah, it's cap gains when you buy your fucking starbucks And technically you're gonna owe like seven cents cap gains on that and there's like a line item report But don't worry turbo tax is really good and they're gonna tell you to fuck yourself Repeatedly and that's actually what is causing people not to adopt it because that is a shit show And we have to clear up the shit show first and nothing bitcoin core can do I have not seen a line of code That will prevent my uncle from having to file cap gains tax on his fucking latte I have not seen how bitcoin core can do that. I am willing to be convinced. I agree That but you agree there's multiple hurdles. They have to be jumped So it's like if the software didn't wouldn't handle it Anyway, then it's kind of a mood point that it would also be have bad tax treatment So there's multiple hurdles. So it's not just like even if we clear both those hurdles, we might find out I'm surprised there's a third hurdle I would say in response to you and your claim that you know, these companies dropped bitcoin support because of fees I would actually say well, I would say they dropped it primarily because it was such low volume and usage It wasn't worth supporting right so like and and maybe that got killed even further by fees But prior to the fee spikes you probably had what? Ends dozens hundreds of people using it versus but it was millions of people using fiat also And it's the problem with you're supporting You're supporting this money. It also work for no reason basically, right? It's also confusing for people so people would call like customer service. They'd say I don't know. I don't have confirmation Such a small cohort of people who even want to buy computers using bitcoin, but this is the issue is we need to grow We want to take seriously and i'm not saying that it's a matter of life or death Tomorrow, but I am saying that if we we can't just say take an attitude that it doesn't matter at all Permanently for like 10 years the point The point is that during those early years it was too early Even if you had skilled perfectly and there wasn't any fee spikes It would have been too early and they probably would have just been like well, that was a fun experiment But we still are only getting a hundred orders, you know every month from bitcoin. Why are we supporting this shit? Why do you think they stopped nobody ordering it? The thing is if the software was good enough um, they could just have kept it there, you know, if It was good enough. I mean, it's it's just working You don't just I mean that's not it takes one human being to be assigned to to Update it and fuck around with it constantly like look one person looks a three hundred thousand dollar engineer They spend like 20 of their time on it. Yeah, you're committing 60 grand You better have fucking 60 grand sales If you don't guess what it's getting yanked period and it was too early and that's your point, right? You you can't and this is what i'm talking about with the fucking cart before the horse You can't do that because you actually need legitimate adoption right before you can actually support it So I think I think a lot of these companies jumped the gun They supported it too early thinking that there was enough bitcoiners to drive, you know real Commerce and there wasn't there just simply wasn't it had I mean and the and the fees exacerbated it during that hype cycle And then the crash afterwards exacerbated it even more And so they just dropped off like flies. That's it Weren't you guys saying it was bitpay that was actually processing those payments. It was coinbase bitpay. There's a few of them There was a few merchant processors that I worked with over the years. I I remember in at mozilla in 2012 I had brian and fred and then jesse in to compete for like accepting bitcoin donations in mozilla, for instance Um, so yeah, so isn't it their job to make it keep working? And not just a random engineer that has to be like they're doing. No No, I mean look you still have to have some integration. Sure. You can have a service provider that does This is not constant integration It shouldn't be like yeah, it probably needs some maintenance, but it shouldn't be too much, you know, that's the thing But then okay, so a lot of it was was the reality of all these things about tax filings I remember I remember we didn't actually there was a misfire when we were accepting bitcoin First because we had to do all these crazy weird tax treatments to it So they at first when I got an agreement on who was going to handle it then they were like, oh well, I don't know if we can touch it then it went to the lawyers and they fucked around with it and it was just like There's just so there was so much at that early time that prevented people from cleanly just accepting it I think there's a lot more fertile ground for it now but we've exhausted the five percent of the world who are just going to hold bitcoin because they see this sort of like Black swan asset that that we've exhausted that percentage now We have to move on to my uncle earl. You have to tell him you have to tell paul You know, maybe we get you on a little call or something and you can he's a lay person And you can just say like hey man, like what can I put into eCash? that's going to get you really excited and he's going to look at you and say bro, i've got like a Index mutual fund. Uh, I think it buys like toyota and I have no fucking idea what you're talking about I just think this is crazy internet money still because like I see it going all over the place and like Can you make it as stable as usd, please? And you're going to say god damn it I don't I don't have a pr for that yet. And then he's going to say well you let me know when you do And then uh, and then i'll jump right on That's that's what's going to happen Yeah, but I've said in the past in this in this space or whatever The other one that rugged is people there are many different people who adopt for different reasons So you have canadian truckers you have people in war-torn countries. You have people with uh hyperinflation Then you have privacy enthusiasts then you have people doing illegal stuff So you have all kinds of different people adopting some people will adopt Just because they want to get ahead of something new some people will adopt because the network they'll adopt later So once you have 80 of the population the last 20 is very easy In what you just said you just skipped that you made a huge leap there. Okay, let's say let's roll that I'm saying there's a whole process where each, you know, one stage leads to the the next actually Let's say that that cohort is number go uppers black market people Dissidents and like people in extreme hyperinflation countries. Let's just put them in a cohort I think they're kind of even a lot of people are in like medium inflation countries I don't think they even give a fuck. I mean you I I think you have to really you can't just slowly boil the toad We need like five percent on your I think we need to really hurt people I think people need to be hurt dramatically like we need to have but but but also there's another like actual like verifiable adoption happening that is actually passive like I think the example of square is tremendous because you've got millions of merchants out there with square point of sale systems That just had this feature turned on whether they wanted it or not We're just saying it's putting the car before the board but the point is when you compare that to Bitpay and these other companies that had to like build this thing grassroots and try to actually get people to sign on I think we're already at a very much further stage as far as adoption goes So I feel like all this hand wringing is not even acknowledging like where we are today versus just a few years ago Well, I think the other thing I mean a lot of what's holding bitcoin back or had held bitcoin back in the past is regulatory You know like a fear right? And so now that you have, you know, some Regulatory arbitrage with things like spark and you can't have users who download a trustodial lightning wallet That is kind of skirting regulations and able to pay You know people uh that paid merchants that are being enabled by lightning I mean the whole thing kind of kicks off when you start skirting the regulators, right? And I think that's ultimately what we're doing I don't want to figure out these these avenues to skirt the regulators, but things with ux that actually works for end users So like square and bitpay those as people because this is weird because this like this conversation goes in like a big circle Where it's kind of like square and bitpay those are much better than nothing But those are worse than real adoption. So I was i'm imagining real adoption I'm saying like okay, there's like some people who adopt it. They're tech enthusiasts They're the darknet market people Of them merchants nearby us and we tell them how to actually then and then you get your francis puyo And he builds a circular economy somehow directly with them, right? You know So There's a channel here in brazil of a guy that literally did this kind of thing, you know He went to people actual random people and teach them how to use bitcoin like kind of like roger very thing did probably um, but then um I once thought about oh, it could be cool to do something like that But then I started thinking like in today's bitcoin actually doing that sounds like really really painful because uh, I I have lived through like the the Argonauts craze of high fees and whatnot and I remember trying to do Uh, and like that that's uh, it's very easy. It's very easy today what wallet do I even say to them to use because like if I said Here's the thing so I mean you You can initially you send them to use a trust audio wallet like a spark wallet Right, and maybe the trade-offs are shitty If you are having a million dollars stored in that wallet But it's not a big deal if you have a few bucks worth of bitcoin stored there like who cares if a few bucks of bitcoin ends up getting rugged because Spark providers are coordinating and who's gonna who's gonna teach them to to do this Uh, you don't need to teach them anything That's the whole point the ux of spark is you download a wallet? You can literally start to receive bitcoin over lightning immediately with no inbound liquidity constraints Everything just works and you can pay Lightning But it is though because it's still paying atomic. So, you know, if you don't open a channel No, it is because Paul, I mean, I don't think you understand spark and that's okay But the whole point is that you are now in a state chain sharing a UTXO And then you're and then on the on the back end you're swapping your UTXOs atomically with htlc's pay lightning invoices So ultimately under the hood everything's still happening on bitcoin Right, you're still paying htlc's and paying ln invoices from your spark wallet and then On chain, you are sharing a UTXO with all the other spark users So, I mean everything's it's like it's not like it's like fugazi, right? I mean, it's real now whether it's trust trusted or trust minimized. No, of course not, right? There's trade-offs But for a an entry user for someone who just wants an easy ux and you're just trying to sell them on bitcoin You're saying hey look here is bitcoin. Here's a wallet where you can download you don't need to kyc You don't need to sign up for an account. You literally just fucking download this wallet. You can receive bitcoin immediately Both on chain and over lightning it comes It's a single unified balance and you can pay ln invoices If you're trying to buy thing buy a coffee at a square merchant, you can pay somebody who says hey pay me on chain Right, I mean like that's kind of that's kind of the point right it gets the toes wet. It's easy to download That's great. It's it's partially trustodial, right and I get it I'm, not i'm not trying to deny that it has that it doesn't have trade-offs But the ux is there and then you know, maybe they get interested. Maybe they actually start saving in bitcoin Maybe they start using it and then that's where they become more of a sovereign user and you know that hopefully at that point they would Take bitcoin they've earned or saved at a certain threshold on chain but but I think the ux in terms of onboarding people is is Getting much much better and it's almost even there already with these newer things like spark Right and and then I mean, you know, everyone has a fucking in america. So like most people you can just be like, oh, yeah Here's cash app like you didn't notice that little bitcoin symbol there. You can buy bitcoin on cash app, right? I've You know most of the friends i've onboarded into bitcoin Just started onboarding through cash app because they already had cash app Whenever we would go out and get like lunch together and they would pay the bill. I'd literally just send them sats on cash app And then they've built a little satoshi balance on cash app. They realize oh That's gone up in value And then I start orange filling them and say yeah, you should start saving in it Saving it and then maybe a year later. They say wait Like, you know This has gone up way more in value. Why is that and I say because bitcoin is valuable You should probably think about taking it in self-custody I mean, but you need to have these on ramps and I think a lot of the times most normies need easy accessible ux And that is mostly Available. I agree with all the custodians and through, you know, trust odial arrangements like spark I mean, I agree with all that the problem is when the problem is only so many people can jump Go ahead. The problem is only very few people can jump to the next stage and when they do then they're going to think well I guess this doesn't work. Well, I mean, I I think when they jump to the next stage I would hope that uh Well, I mean, I guess you're saying only so many people can do we activate covenants Jump to the To these the the non-custodial stage taking it on chain. Yeah, many people there is a very high amount I don't know the relative proportion, but there is a high amount of demand for sovereign transactions I mean, absolutely. I think all that demand is being met you know Right because we're uh, well, um, I don't think so. I mean I find that um It's okay, can I jump I disagree because right now when you look Oh, I I got a notification that someone who blocked me has joined as a speaker. Okay So if if you look at coin market cap today, you're gonna see that bitcoin is at 54 Dominance, which means that half of the market is in something else And when we're having these conversations we're ignoring that something else and we're assuming that it's just casinos and gambling and shit coins but the fact that matters right here is that ethereum for example has a hundred thousand bitcoin wrapped on it as Wbtc and it's larger than lightning larger than liquid larger than arc and spark and whatever There is under the sun and I don't hear anyone tweeting about it and virtue signaling about having made a payment with wbtc Or having used it, but there's a hundred thousand wbtc out there people use it for that fight They use it for a lot of use cases that bitcoin does not enable and if you change your perspective and you take a step back and you My my cat is going crazy right now, but if you change your perspective You're going to realize that okay, you can Regard everything else as a shit coin or you can think that there are sidechains with their own tokens And whatever we fail to do in terms of user experience in terms of scaling in terms of features You're gonna find it in At least the 20 altcoins that keep coming back every cycle. You can argue that of course, there's a lot of speculation They're not performing as well as bitcoin, even though I disagree for the past two years You can see that monero and Zcash have been performing much better than bitcoin If you zoom out even further, you're going to see that tron has been outperforming bitcoin Smaller valued shit coins will offer for bitcoin at a certain time frame. I mean that's been happening forever That certain time frame is longer than five years. I think you should reassess your assumptions, which one okay, but which which coin Had had this happen for five years Tron I think Tron with tether on it, right? I mean tron. I think we're talking about the future also I think it's a mistake to say like, you know what I mean? Like this is what they said about the fall of rome or the titanic they said They said rome has stood for a thousand years and you guys really think you're going to sack the city and then they eventually Detect the city. So I think i'd like to go back to wicked's point about all the darknet market demand being met And i'm sure this has changed a lot but a long time ago back when you can look up it was whenever us gdp was something like 15 17 trillion Someone tried to measure all the the dark like the gray market transactions of the world and a lot of these are dark or gray because Of just lack of banking infrastructure, but at that time it was the second largest economy in the world If you added up every country's informal It was 10 trillion and that made it the second largest now, obviously it's a lot has changed since then and there's a chinese communist party television Cameras everywhere watching us And everyone has mobile phones and stuff so I don't know exactly how those have changed but I think there actually is an enormous if you go all around the like I just read a story last week about I think it was like, um, I think it's maybe in northern africa or something. I'm not sure where but and parts of india People they because there's a a cultural norm where you're if you make a lot of money your family just Comes to you for a handout. Basically. Some people will pay they pay their employer 25 To like put their money into like a secret the money that the wage they earn into like a secret account so I think I think the We Governments all around the world are all pretty incompetent. So we've got a lot of incompetent governments We've got a lot of greedy governments. We've got a lot of corrupt governments. So I the u.s dollar is probably This is you know, it's hard to say because they're all so different but probably the u.s dollar Well, we oh he's not here anymore. Who's the guy talking? He was great Um, he's not here anymore though the uh, but the u.s dollar is probably the best run currency out of them all Here's the guy saying you gotta wait. Yeah, daniel a br or whatever um the and so he yeah, and probably the u.s dollar, you know will collapse but Uh, it might not because the u.s government the u.s society. We we our entrepreneurs are just so good We got like elon musk and stuff in america So we have like a fighting chance, but but of course like yeah, like what the russian ruble the euro the chinese Currency the like what in japan isn't like a democratic It's like they're all really bad I think I think you would agree that like it's more likely those other Fiat's from those other countries would collapse before the usd, right? Yeah, I would agree. Yes. Do you think while those currencies are collapsing? um those governments would Try to make a new currency adopt dollars or just adopt a cryptocurrency like bitcoin Or or I think adopt a gold-backed currency or something ridiculous like that when these fiat currencies collapse I think I think no one really knows because I think it's very different We could look you the people wrote books about fast past currency collapses um And of course normally what happens in the modern quote modern time like, you know after world war ii Normally, they would it would be like dollarization And people would adopt the dollar to some extent or they do some other desperate thing, you know But since we're now in this digital internet world, I think it's really really really confusing and I have no idea what might would they adopt usdt? Would they make their own but you would think if the fiat currency is collapsing that would come at a time when the Public has decided that they don't trust the government anymore. So I would think the government's attempt to coordinate That would probably not I would just say that would probably not work if they could do that Then they would do they would save their own system. So and I I have no idea like which one Don't ultimately go to the people And each country is very different, of course, you know You got to consider that countries are just of course very different cultures very different everything so so then do the people Do the people at that point adopt dollars or do they adopt? Yeah, that's that's definitely That's what usually happens. So that's what so that's why I was starting to bring that up But of course, um if they adopt a crypt if they wanted to adopt a cryptocurrency I don't know how they would decide Which one well, they do adopt. I don't know if they would be comfortable like probably pick the largest one with the most network effect Yeah, well, they might they might decide like I don't want to put our all of our my faith This is a complete and total speculation. I'm just totally making this up Then we can go to bitcoin anon who had his hand up for a long time Um, but this is i'm just totally this is totally made up on my part But I can see them saying hey, listen if we go to btc Um, then we'll be beholden to strike and square and then and then Whereas if we go to something like solana, they'll go to like a large block chain or something I know it sounds funny right but I can see it kind of weirdly happening. I don't think they'd be That no, I don't know or god forbid bsv or something. I'm just this is just totally theoretical here I realize that it's all just but they would want something they would they would weigh they would say Square versus You know a full node that costs forty thousand dollars a year to run or something and they would say well, maybe All right, we could go to bitcoin anon now, I guess I think The people the people trying to escape those collapsing fiat currencies probably wouldn't care about running nodes And they would just be looking for whatever had them anyways bitcoin anonymous Yeah, this was for daniel, but he left the stage, but i'm sure that other people can answer it So this was great. Oh, you're back. No No, that's brian. Okay Um, so the whole economic node non-economic node thing i'm trying to understand the weight of them Come mandatory signaling I could imagine say someone like coinbase saying hey, we're shutting down Purchasing and selling temporarily you can't log in for a moment This is this is to protect our users at that point They stop being an economic node because there's no transactions going through them at that point Is that correct? Or is it just like if you're on the network and you have a node that typically has a lot of transactions You're still an economic node or does it have to be? transactions at the type at the time of mandatory signaling I think and if you ask me it's the incoming if you how much btc you're receiving Yeah, you you can solve the node for that So it's kind of like a whole picture thing where it's like how much how often Out of all the transacting that's that people are doing on L1 Where the because the bitcoin core is the L1 node So it's like you're using which people are so if every single transaction in the block is going to you Then you're you're very much economic. No, so I would kind of say that it diminishes it, you know to some extent For that but if it's only going to be one day out of 365 Because It'd probably be about an hour at most in my opinion Well, not even that but they they're the they're the nodes that process the spending of the bitcoin that sits at coinbase So even if they turned off their node During the like that specific block for like an hour They're still massively influential in what they decide to choose as the bitcoin network And continuing going forward even if their node goes offline for five blocks because I think it's like a that's what I tried to convey that it's kind of like a net present value situation where the expected future usage would Would count I think Well, it has to right? It's not like if you turned off if coinbase turned off their node Like with for six blocks right around this activation and then they turned it back on It's not like they no longer were an economic node. They were the entire time because they're the Process their UTXOs. Yeah because you can say you can imagine say okay, i'm gonna I start a bitcoin core and then I announce to the world I say Well, hey i'm about to i'm about to accept You know, i'm like a new version of bitpay or something I'm about to accept tons and tons of bitcoin transactions starting next week And I prefer this I think we should invalidate block on this or whatever that would still That would still count so it's not I would agree that it That the the measurement of how much economic influence you have includes the imminent So bitcoin anon, um, I mean one thing to realize is that all of these exchanges are You know prepared to deal with uh Shallow reorgs, right? So if you have like a block or two reorg They're they're Prepared to do this. They have you know protocols around this. That's why they require a certain amount of confirmations before they accept deposits And why they also tell their customers to wait a certain amount of confirmations for the withdrawals, right? And so any disruption that may happen in those first few blocks after mandatory signaling begins I think they're already prepared to handle the only way Where there's massive disruption in my opinion is if you have comparable hash rate between the two chains at the time of mandatory signaling like if you have 45 percent 55 percent that type of thing where it's much more likely that reorgs happen and You know, it's possible that a deeper reorg could happen even That's when you start getting problems and you would have these exchanges probably shut down uh their deposits and withdrawals and help things resolve themselves, but all that to say If the hash rate stays the way it is Or even if it were to pick up a notch, like let's say you get the 10 percent hash rate Signaling versus 90 percent not signaling. I don't think that that would necessarily Really Affect the day-to-day operations of these exchanges. I don't even think they would shut down their Deposits, they might increase the confirmation times a little bit, but they might I mean they might instead of six They're waiting for seven or something, you know it's like I don't think it would really make much of a difference and the reason why is because Even at 10 percent 90 percent which you know again, that would be a 10x increase in hash rate signaling But even at that rate Um, it is incredibly unlikely that you even get one reorg Right, you might get one or two at the very most And then the legacy chain is going to pull ahead and stay ahead forever And then there's no more disruption and that happens probably within an hour Right, and it's very clear at that point that once pulled ahead because you know You've gotten confirmation that the largest pools aren't single signaling They've already mined blocks, right? They've already expended energy But they aren't are there any other pools besides foundry that are letting uh miners signal um And ocean, obviously, I don't know Bitcoin anon, is there any that you know of there's probably some small ones. There's got to be some small ones No, i'm not hooked into that. I'm not i'm not following it Yeah, the only ones i've heard of is foundry and obviously ocean, but I think even foundry You know foundry is not even letting you signal they're letting you vote for the entire pool to signal and You know from what i've gathered It seems pretty unlikely that's going to happen So, you know if you are a miner and you think signaling is extremely important Your only option is really to go mine with ocean And mine a signaling template I guess what i'm trying to get to is is economic node in your mind a technical definition or a sociological Definition, it's an economic definition. It's literally just how much demand you as an entity are uh Are pulling into bitcoin so it's measured in a moment or a cumulative uh cumulative Probably well, I mean listen, I think No, no, it's not accumulating it's not accumulative means you're a hodler and you have all the UTXOs to dump you can only do that Once it's the future demand. It's well, it's both because right if you have both It's both if you have UTXOs that you can dump you can generate future demand, right? I can dump a hundred thousand bitcoin that I own now And then I can demand a thousand bitcoin a day for a hundred days moving forward, right? But if you're also on top of that A cash flow positive business that is generating 10 bitcoin a day in profits now you have 10 bitcoin a day in profit Indefinitely, you know and then accounting for the change in bitcoin's price But the point is like, you know, it's it's it's the accumulation or the attraction of bitcoin which matters When you're talking about a contentious chain split because that is the value you're grafting on either side And the value which is attracting the hash rate which is what defines bitcoin at the end of the day It seems like a measure of potential It's a measure of potential. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I think I agree with that It's a measure of potential which is based also on Um, well, sorry. No, it's a matter. It's more so a measure of kinetic But your kinetic energy can also be paid based upon how much potential energy you've built up in the past, right? If i've wrote if i've risen this ball up high enough Because I have a bunch of potential energy ie i've saved a lot of bitcoin now in a contentious chain split I can You know resolve that that potential energy into kinetic right, but also if i'm a very successful cash flow positive business, I have Constant kinetic energy coming in because I have constant demand and ongoing demand moving forward. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's good So this I mean so so I think I mean it's a mix right holders have a good amount of influence because they have a one-off You know transition from the potential to kinetic, but I think because they're rich Ultimately long term what really matters? No, not because they're rich because they already bought bitcoin I mean you could be rich you can't tell bitcoin if you're rich. You can only sell bitcoin if you already bought it Right. And well, I mean they're rich they're rich in bitcoin terms. Yeah, sure But I think ultimately what really matters in a chain split or a contentious fork is Whichever side has the most ongoing, you know, like Sustained demand right? I mean like okay, you know roger vera can split off and he can fuck with the Dynamics of supply and demand for so long because he already has a bunch of bitcoin He can sell one side buy the other side He can keep that going and probably counteract all the real Ongoing, you know perpetual demand on the other side, but it only lasts for so long and once he runs out What you're left with is the other side who has real adoption and real productive Users right who are demanding things ongoing and that's the side that wins in the end in my opinion It shouldn't be controversial man, this is something like I mean it makes sense, right you want to have the monetary network that has the most productive users Sustained forever people. Yeah people back this demand they went for the longest day and and miners are obviously going to follow that chain Because the token based upon all of that demand from those users is going to be what's going to be the most productive Obviously going to follow that chain because the token Based upon all of that demand from those users is going to be worth the most Thereby making the block rewards for those miners worth the most It's not that complicated. It's just a matter of you know you know, like think about the What goes into making a block reward valuable And it's it's the price and it's the fees and right now. Yeah, but it's hard for the and right now the fees are hard for the one It's hard for the 110 people to believe that though Well, okay, we don't have to like, you know go there but like I think you know, it's like the fees are nothing so Ultimately at this point in time, it's really the value of the token So if you as a cohort of users want to change bitcoin But you're not able to sustain a value of a token if you were to split off on your own in other words if the network ignored you And as a result you split off What type of value could you bring to the coin of your chain split? And would that be valuable enough? Would it be valuable enough to divert any of the hash rate or would it be value enough This software is so terrible. I can't even hear anyone now I may be talking over someone What is wrong with the people who made this software? I'm just going to complain. Maybe this is a sign for me to leave I can't hear anything You don't hear wicked People talking about me I see people laughing now Well, can I hear anything? Oh, do you use? I'm gonna leave and rejoin then probably leave again leave and rejoin leave and rejoin. Yeah Yeah leaves and come back so I can ask you why you have me blocked Oh interesting question brian Why would anyone block you? I wonder I don't know. We have each other blocked. I blocked him back Let's be nice and unblock each other Um bitcoin anon, uh follow-up any follow-up questions. I'll come back. I think he dropped All right, paul. You hear me now Probably not he doesn't hear anything. Oh, do you hear wicked? Can you hear me now paul paul be alert Sure Fly go call your boy in the phone We can hear you yes I can hear you loud and clear bro. No, I don't think so You can't hear us He can't hear me. So he responds. No, I can't hear you. I can't hear you That's um, no, that's good. I think I made sense He probably saw our mics were unmuted and then said no, I don't think so. That makes sense to me Uh, okay. Um Well anyways We I think we had moved on from discussing, you know, anything he was interested in anyways because it went on to a more of a back to before But that's something he should be he should be interested in right because like I mean We're working too. So we're getting two airdrops this season, right? We're this is the summer of air When we're getting in the room, we're not we're not when does ballpoint activate It's uh one month from now No, well, there's definitely gonna be an airdrop there's definitely gonna be two airdrops one might have value the other one most likely won't But there's definitely two airdrops No, no 110 if he lowers the difficulty low enough eventually incentivize the miners um But first before that what has to happen is that uh, when what is it first september to seventh september? I think something like that. No, it's gonna fork off in about probably on august 8th when mandatory signal begins Okay, what about paul's thing? What about paul what block height does your fork begin? Yeah, when is that fault point one that's near? Um, august 23rd Oh interesting, okay, so so we're getting two in one month. Fuck. Yeah, man Prior to yours probably about three weeks two to three weeks prior Sure, maybe maybe I missed in 2017 I think there's also a possibility that we're gonna see that scenario with SegWit2x and bitcoin cash playing out once again Which means that there is gonna be two forks, but in the end they both merge into one And I think that there's a non-zero possibility that the knots people are going to realize that They don't have a market. They don't have any future plan From core. Yeah, so they would just merge into That's Developer for eCash. He's helping paul. He helped paul do eCash I said b. He said b cash not eCash. No, no Paul paul hired luke to help him on Drivechains like he already hired him. Uh after he after he lost those coins Yeah, so I did so at this point luke. It will be very hireable after this fail. So oh, maybe Back on the market, I didn't think of that. No, I think we all know that Okay Who is this brian wants to be unblocked who wants to be unblocked brian brian I don't know. I mean, I don't know why I don't know man. I blocked you because you blocked me I almost normally I will only block someone if they Either for a good reason which or or if they usually when I block people's because they block me and I just think fine You're blocking me then i'll just block you back. I just think So there we go. I unblocked you you unblocked me if we decide to change minds, then we can yeah, we can There we go Look at that. We made some progress here. You see we're merging chains Okay, and I definitely agree with the wicked the mandatory signaling No one's going to signal because signaling that not signaling is first of all the easiest thing to do And second of all they no one really actually cares. Yeah, exactly And why would they go out on a limb so it will be august 8th and then it'll be august 9th that they decide to like I mean presumably they will just Well, they'll have to put out something that has either proof of work change The question is will they do it immediately or will they say like oh this is gonna happen I don't think that's gonna be the case. I think the whole point of this is a hijacked network I don't think the point of this is to create another altcoin. I think they want That's why the threshold was set at 55 They're trying to coerce the pools in america To to get that threshold and then they want to hijack the network. They don't want to split off. That's never the plan It's an interesting, uh theory, but I don't think so. I think it's normal to set the low the threshold near 51 really because Because otherwise you create toxic limbo, I mean I could elaborate on that everything But I I think if you look at how emotional they are, they seem very emotional. Don't they like we've we've heard like, you know Lots of like Build cohesion you need to be nicer to your future supporters. Yeah, that's your future You know, it's funny because we are very similar in that we both think that core is corrupt so we should be I know exactly There was udi was on there was udi on the call. He hated bitcoin core. You had the bit one tenor. Yeah, he they hate Um, you also had uh, um hunter hunter beast He doesn't like bitcoin core because they completely ignored him and and his fixed for quantum. Yeah, so like you had a Minority forks that we all hate bitcoin core So you should all band together and become like a fucking It would be better off with me I think I mean I just kind of blow my mind when you think of like all the people to lead a movement and then it's Luke Dashjr with this crazy post about eating pets and galileo was wrong to say the son Goes and it's like any Masturbation is a terrible sin arguably worse than murder and you're just like is this for real? Like is this like a fake? Controversy that we like every now and then people just put out like a as a test. They see will the will the bitcoin community. Oh, no, man He believes everything I know, you know, I know it too. Well when big one ten fails What we do is We tell luke to try building big one ten as a cusp And then we we have all the big one ten drama, but now on a cash Well, I mean, I don't know do we need are we how much drama are we going to need at that point It's probably isn't going to be There there's going to be no transactions so there's going to be no spam if there if I was Just if osha didn't exist, I would I would I would be with uh you paul and thinking that they would he would change the proof of work algorithm because that's something that he's Wanted to do for a while but because ocean exists and because that's his salary I just have such a hard time seeing him trying to fucking fire his own mind, you know I gotta tell you i'm not gonna I don't say this often but you know, mr. Hoddle. I think that's a really good That's a really good point. I hadn't considered that. I think you I think you could be onto something I just don't think it's possible for him to do that Yeah He's already future-proofing himself against that why do you think they're they they switch to running to that? I mean, they're running two pools now side by side. They're running a fucking uh, core pool and uh knots pool and when the knots pool Switches off. Yeah And then like he's just hedging his bets technically both are not spools one's just pip 110 enforcing Okay, you you know what I mean one that's in compliance or consensus whatever with the current main chain, you know Yeah, but one thing to bring up is that I saw one tweet Somewhere that gave me that some person had an idea. I don't remember exactly who it was or what was said but it was something like this um bringing this issue to like a Like bringing it out and bringing it to like a dramatic Event with like a deadline and like a clear objective is like the way of forcing luke out of ocean So that's what I heard something like that and I kind of that made me i'm not saying I believe that but i'm thinking Oh, that was an interesting idea that there's some kind of corporate drama and they want to get rid of luke because he's Not worth it. There is corporate drama. I mean i've confirmed that with some of the Board members in notion who you know might say that things are unclear in terms of what they're going to support um But whether that results in a resignation of luke or a firing of luke, I don't know I mean I think there will probably be a pivot in the way that they are marketing ocean like I don't think they're going to want to continue being the Spam fighting pool moving forward if this fork fails because you know, that's kind of a losing narrative So that so I think there will be a pivot and then whether or not luke Keeps working there or not is you know yet to be seen and mechanic for that matter too since he's been driving a lot of the marketing around ocean, maybe Maybe that's why they're they're deciding to split into two pools because they know that if they keep the core chain pool around uh, luke will just inevitably rage quit because he's supporting and working on pedo coin or c-sam coin or Whatever but I don't I don't necessarily know if I mean like I don't think luke is Is luke even doing very much for ocean anymore? I think jason's pretty much taken the reins in terms of the technical Like updates around the pool Software and so I I mean, I don't know if luke's doing much at this point to be honest This guy's worked all of this one time I think I think jason's doing most of the work now. So like if luke were to resign It's not a huge deal In my opinion and most of their hash rates not signaling so it's not like it's not like they're a pool That you know is putting luke up on a pedestal. Is there they're a pool that is largely You know being supported by Hashers or miners who don't really give a shit about people in 10 And then as a matter of fact if they were to drop that entire narrative And if luke would have resigned, you know might even drive further Support from other miners who maybe have been staying away because of luke's craziness I was trying to think Why was mr. Hoddle having such a great point and I was remembering that Luke, okay I've seen luke use this phrase so many times about changing the proof of work That was kind of like why I was in my head. So that's an interesting another thing. He seems like he actually He says that exact phrase Very often he says well, we need to he may have said it more than anyone else in the whole Bitcoin, uh Dialogue did that phrase start during the whole SegWit thing? No, this is the craziest part. This is the craziest part about it No, no, no, no, no, no, it wasn't no it would make sense in 2015 No, he started doing it after SegWit. So we he already knew about asic boost by that time by that time Covered asic boost was already a thing. Um He was still all about getting SegWit through like he was, you know championing through UASF It was after SegWit got activated after SegWit got activated in 2018 cobra came out with some kind of thing about a new hashing algorithm called proof of work x and luke retweeted that and adam was like We should adopt this because shot 256 is broken because of asic boost but by that time Everyone was already using asic boost. It was a it wasn't just a bitmain thing at that point So i'm like I don't like it didn't make any fucking sense to me why and why were you fighting for SegWit for so long when you thought that Asic boost was already like broke shot 256 So after SegWit was activated after everything like, you know, we already had Other miners starting like, you know, like the bitmain started selling miners against everybody like everything started like going back to normal At that point he was pitching about a a proof of work change in 2018 a year after SegWit. So that's not that he's he's fucking insane. He's just crazy Someone told me though. I I learned that he had Money invested in some kind of something with proof of work x I'm, not sure. I don't know the details about it. I don't even know anything about proof of work x like I know what you're talking about But apparently he had he was invested in it somehow And like that's why he wanted uh to do it, but I don't know. I don't know the details about that It's like it's like a research lab that has a patent on it or something like that. I know what you're talking about Really? All right, good because I don't know No, no, it's true. He has it's like It's like some research lab that has like a patent on some on like yeah I think I call it like proof of work x or some shit like that I'll see I can find it. But yeah, that's that was the hashing algorithm that cobra Bitcoin cobra the guy that runs bitcoin.org And luke jr were both shilling like crazy in 2018. Like they were it was It was big time To correct you but uh I was going when I went back to review all the 2017 content around the UASF Uh, jimmy, and I did discuss luke wanting to do a proof of work change uh while no, no, no, that was that was the case No, that was the case if we if bip 148 became the minority chain and they and at that point uh Chinese miners said they set away 100 million dollars to uh reorg the minority chain And then luke was basically like well if you do that, then that you know, we do a proof of work change Um, and at that point I was that was the nuclear option, right if the miners start wrecking your game You don't have a choice You don't have a choice. You have to so yeah at that point in that it made sense. Yeah It's the same playbook he's deploying now, mr. Hoddle. He's literally saying that if they do end up on a minority chain He's going to consider right but if that's yeah Minors on the main The main difference here is that you may end up on a minority chain But it's not like the majority is fucking with you in the same way that they literally said they might no one's trying To wipe it out. Yeah, no one's talking about wiping out the chain Yeah So so it's not even hostile in this case in this case. It's literally just ignoring like Chinese miners do not want they did not want a minority chain to exist I remember they had a whole article on that shit. They put like 100 million dollars aside and all this shit So then yeah at that point they were planning they were planning to wipe you out and then in today's world They're not even paying attention to you. And so It's a difference, right? The fact that luke is going to the nuclear option You know regardless I guess It's telling right? It's basically him admitting that he knows he's gonna lose so I don't know. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if he actually pulls the trigger this time or not Luke is always very black and white. So he's always like You know, that's when he says he liar or whatever and so To him the nuclear option is just like any other he doesn't live in this world that we the rest of us live in where there's like a proportional response, you know, like someone steps on your toe and you turn around and glare at them angrily or something luke just thinks like there's right and there's wrong and It's very bizarre, but you know, he's just like but like rosa park shouldn't have broken the law and should have stayed on the bus back of the bus Well, yeah, it was for her to break the law did he say that he did I don't even think that makes like the top you can look at his Not that i'm advising anyone do this, but you can go on reddit and you can find him And you can just read all his posts and Yeah, he's a very interesting guy and that's why I think it's very funny that and you know, it's also weird is that the 110 issue is It's like a terrible issue to pick Also out of like, you know, you could at least At least like OP_CAT would would do something, you know, like at least it would It's something that the the stark people wanted This is this op this this frivolous opportunity doesn't do anything. So it's so it's like Well, well paul so I mean, you know, one of the interesting things you probably haven't been listening to any of the spaces I've been running where we've been trying to piece out, you know, like what it is that vip 110 actually achieves. All right, and I think many of its supporters as well as luke and you know dathan and mechanic have Have admitted now that it does nothing to actually stop Or slow down spam, I think, you know, it's pretty clear that all the message bro All the spin was that? It's to send a message, right? Right. So so all the spam I said that it sends a message Right. It's it's trying to send a message all the spam that is trying to stop has already, you know bypassed Any sort of change and is ready to deploy that if need be So it doesn't actually stop any spam doesn't stop contiguous bites because you know, we they figured out ways around that as well um and now the the the narrative shift is Well, it's hardening bitcoin and in other ways, you know And in one way it's it's making it Less susceptible to poison block attacks. That's like one narrative that they're trying to push now hunter beast is pushing it You know and a few others um I don't know like so I think that that doesn't have much teeth. I don't even know where i'm going with this to be honest I mean it would be it's better to send a message with something that Is not an embarrassing self-contradiction That will probably especially not if you have to publicly vote and you're getting 0.5 and then there's no plan for the inevitable Um, like because you know, they're not going to get enough hash rate to find blocks I think everyone here probably agrees. I think they'll find a flu a few Yeah, but they could have to find 100 for those people to get paid Not only that will they get 100 will they get 101 Not only that so yes They have to find 100 before their miners get paid But then by the time they find 100 if that ever happens are those block rewards worth anything? That's the secondary question Right And I think the answer is pretty obviously no because as soon as well, yeah, not if it's told about bgc But as soon as any real market value forms around those coins, you know, i'll be the first in line to dump mine You know, well they have to find a new name and everything too, you know, I can tell you all from not that you need Any information on this particular topic? But you know if you're from first-hand experience There's like actually kind of a large number of details. You have to like work through even just to create A fork of bitcoin that's not even changing lines of code from bitcoin core. You need like the name Where's the what's the domain, you know, how do people find the github? Project like how do they know where the node software is or how do they tell it from imposters? I gotta I gotta say I have a question in terms of real quick time. Oh, yeah Are you in talks with exchanges already to like list your shit coin No, I was just doing it. Um, because I wanted to make sure it was in a nice box first So I was doing these things to dry run which is like if the fork happened like today, so we were like doing that like basically now so then I was going to Uh, my thought so I haven't quite done it yet, but I think the question of the month out though Yeah, I think the exchange thing is not as um relevant as It was in the recent past because Um in the past it was like a total king maker if you were on the exchange versus not but nowadays There is so much like with this swap provide like it's you can download an app to your phone Most wallets, that's true Crypto wall will swap I guess and the other thing is the key the key there is that you're getting enough blocks that atomic swaps Actually makes sense. Yeah, exactly, right It's actually so you're right that uh, you know You know how it is when you do a project things take longer than you thought So even though I planned for like lots and lots of buffer space I you know, it's like a little bit running out So yeah, I was a little on the exchange thing It is later than I would have thought but there are some other things like the L1 which is all you need to send and receive the coin like they don't have to mess with the Drivechains or the L2s Or even the bib 301 3 reinforcement. So the L1 is basically a copy of bitcoin core, you know So like basically everything is almost the same So I really wanted to put it in a nice box where I have like a Like a description of like port for your node I'm, assuming it's not eight three three three Yes What are you using? Um, you know, uh You can check I have to double check but yeah, we change like network magic and stuff like that the ports the seed node You got to change those things. Yeah, I think we might be using one eight three three three, but I don't want to say the wrong Um detailers, I mean we have like we added ten thousand to it or something talking about the cusf thing Not quite but uh is similar i'm just saying that for the exchange to add it it's not like they have to like do some weird Vetting thing or figure out like it's the oh, it's the same as the oldest btc Uh, so i'm not as worried and then another reason why i'm not that worried is actually it may sound bizarre But the rise of tether has kind of turned everything into an exchange like every single Telegram group chat is like an otc desk now. And so i'm not as worried So I deprioritized it slightly and then of course with regular project management stuff It's a slightly later than I thought but yeah, this is like the last 30 days or so but I also think it'd be pretty easy and you know, you want to There will be a few people who a few smaller ones definitely will and a few smaller wallets definitely will Um, so that's already locked up. And so I was kind of waiting to ramp it up Before I tried to call in those favors at Kraken or whatever, you know what I mean? I kind of wanted to like It's like inviting people to a party. You got to get like your You got to get your stuff ready first. You got to get your food your drinks You got to get your music or whatever then you got to get like your close friends who you think will come Then you invite some other people and then finally down the line you invite The marginal people and you think oh, it's a really good party. We got a lot of people coming We got plenty of got plenty of food. So I was kind of guys the big exchanges like last That's my thought process on it What is the equivalent of inviting the girls to your party Yeah, they would the girls would be like the the hot girl you like you would delay that right because you want to put the party together first Maybe get some fomo going Make sure you go. Yeah. Yeah, make sure it's like social capital like it's like everybody's gonna be there. Yeah Oh, yeah, do you throw parties often? I would say that I do. Yes, he's a popular guy man. He's got a lot of friends. Yeah, that's true Parties are a key ingredient parties are you know? I'll make it to one of your parties I've thrown a few parties where people had met at the party and later got married and had kids believe it or not, so There's uh, there's hope for everyone. I'm already married. So Okay, we gotta go to the fall parties Yep Now did we interrupt someone was saying something else? I forgot everybody Oh, no, no That was me. I was saying i'm kind of disappointed that not a single exchange Has actually stepped up and said hey, we are ready the moment, you know Luke flips, you know the proof of work change or something They'll be ready with a coin they may or may not have a name for it But i'm surprised no exchange has even taken it seriously to kind of get ready to sell the shit coin uh, I mean I agree with this funny the name Not not to interrupt but I just i'm on the same wavelength as you where I think it's fun. I'm like obsessed I'm, like worry about all these tiny little details and meanwhile, it seems like Luke is over there. Just like whatever i'm sure wicked and I are also like on the same page where it's like they I don't think they realize that they are forking off like august 8th They kind of a lot of them think maybe luke realizes this but like That it's august 8th, but a lot of them seem to think like That it's not They I it's hard to wrap your head around what's going on with them, but I don't think they realize that it's the the first mandatory signaling period that It's because you guys aren't thinking Straight up, honestly, it's because you guys aren't thinking with luke logic Like if you use luke logic, it makes perfect sense why he's not concerned about this stuff in his in luke logic world Uh, we are the ones that forked off like core is the one that's forking off So he's so he's like, oh, yeah, this is just it's just bitcoin Like it's not bit one zero coin or or holy bitcoin or whatever. It's just bitcoin like we're the fork but by the way back when uh, bitcoin cash, uh b cash broke off It wasn't clear what the ticker was going to be because they also didn't prepare I don't know if anyone remembers but many of the not many but some of the exchanges had the ticker bcc instead of bch for bcash But and those were the exchanges with bcc would make sense bitcoin cash But bcc was the ticker for bitconnect And the exchanges that had bitconnect on the exchange couldn't list bcc So they ended up listing bch and that's how it ended up being bch to begin with but there was no Consensus from their side what their ticker was going to be. I thought Decided that I thought tone I thought at the beginning when all that should happen in 2017 that the original plan Was to call uh, the legacy chain bitcoin classic or something like that and then call the new chain something else I don't know. It was gonna know that bitcoin classic was bitcoin core bitcoin classic was a whole other thing It was gonna be bitcoin and bitcoin core because again, just like luke They are taught that we were the one breaking the rules and you know for forking off somehow This is certainly a great time to revisit old block size war stories and I remember When around this when this happened, I went to some bitcoin meetup in in I think in miami And people were gathered or maybe it was uh, I don't remember where it doesn't matter the point is people were like, uh, they were really talking like a lot about like, oh, we're We got this exchange to guarantee Um that they would use the btc ticker for this Chain, I don't even remember who it was But I just remember it kind of makes it maybe a confusing story to tell so i'm sorry about that but it's the interesting thing about the story is that The people were so excited. I was like kind of walking up to these people It was at a party of some kind some kind of bitcoin event and you know And they were like huddled together and they were so excited that they got this exchange to get The ticker for one of the chains not the other so it was like people were really obsessed You know this stuff this naming stuff is very important to some people it's not I don't know how important it is Overall, but these people do fight over they had like a bitter fight over these uh, you know, of course, you remember the b cash versus bitcoin cash and so It's it's interesting to name both roger tried to make it bitcoin core And bitcoin cash there's no more bitcoin like it's it's just bitcoin core and bitcoin cash So we can predict that all this will happen again Well, this is I preemptively was like I for mine I got to pick something that doesn't have bitcoin in the name because I think there was a huge strategic mistake by roger too Because I I once I think I saw roger give a long talk about bitcoin cash somewhere once And I was just kind of in the audience blending in and the person I could overhear people like when we were walking away like people next to me were saying Like it was clear from the way they were talking that they these people who are normal people They kind of thought that roger veer had been talking. They like googled bitcoin or something. They didn't know that he was talking about Not btc if that makes any sense like they thought he was just chilling bitcoin and bitcoin cash is just some way of talking about btc so I was like I never had the problem with the fork. I had the problem with him trying to make it seem like that was bitcoin Like that was the issue Like a chain that was magnitude less secure. He tried to Make people believe that that was bitcoin. It was crazy. Wait speaking of which paul have you decided what difficulty you're gonna go down to? Yeah Oh, that's a good question. Now. I think it's not we were well We were gonna test boy. You're fucking both away from launch. Well, it doesn't really you know, it's like, um You're gonna wait for people to mine for fucking 11 years straight to hit a block dude Well, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna hopefully not do that because Probably like you wanted low so the interesting thing is it basically depends on what you look you think the price will be because The hash it's based the hash rate is more or less the block reward multiplied by the price So if you have or you can think it's going to be extremely profitable for a short period of time Well, as you know, that's in broad strokes what the plan is, but I don't know exactly how low to set it But so I think like probably like well, it's gotta be it's gotta be low enough It's gotta be high enough where it's not gpu mineable but low enough where it's um I'm, like probably probably a million. Oh, I gotta I got a question for you. Hold on Um, if he's doing a proof of work change Uh, wouldn't it wouldn't he want it to be? No, no, we're not talking about We don't know what luke's gonna do but i'm I wish we did We're talking about no All the way. I love shot 256d. Just keep it Love it, uh that has its own security budget. This is our favorite phrase Implications later on down the road because if one chain has shot 256, this is just a quick aside But if one chain has 256 And if one chain has transaction fees that are low and stable and the other one is growing geometrically even five percent Or five percent a year Eventually it will grow so much in within the two-week period that'll be bigger than the entire profit margin of the The other chain it'll have like a may cause problems for the in the long long long run Paul it's got to be it's got to be Bitaxe mineable. Yeah, I was thinking that's what I was thinking Well, we have some people who have a vague Why not gpu mineable you can have more people participate Right No, no, because then the rear you can't have gpu mineable shots anymore. There's Risks of too many reworks. We'll also also you you don't want it to be you don't want to be so You don't want it to be so low that somebody could come in with like a petahash and mine like a bunch of more Blocks in a you know, 10 minutes or something That's I feel like informally people have if I add up all the people who offered to mine It's like in the petahash Zone of like why didn't you take satoshi's rewards and then just make the block reward reset to 50 bitcoin instead of Well, we want to be because the only thing that matters is the revenue minus the cost so if you set the difficulty low, it's the same as improving the block reward Temporarily though, right? Well, is it though after difficulty adjustment periods? I'll get to where it needs to be It will always reach this zero profit what are called in economics is zero profit condition equilibrium, so it'll always be But the difference paul between that is that you have you basically have a mandatory lockup of those coins If you were to redistribute them to miners instead of early investors, so that'd be the clear. That'd be the clear difference Yeah, but isn't it kind of like it's all for naught right like that doesn't even really achieve anything No, I guess Right because it's just going to be it's going to be super low Like thousands of blocks will be found the first few days then it will the only question is will it overshoot? Because it goes up by a factor of four I mean it kind of begs the question then like what is the fork even trying to achieve besides firing core? We've got a fire core, baby. That's the purpose Good purpose, I mean, yeah, sure that's fine Mine doesn't necessarily even fire core because the L1 is the same as core. It's exactly the same um, but uh, but yeah, we add up these L2s Planetary scale and uh, you know the the low difficulty that is the hard fork event so Yeah, so it's not going to be the same L1 then it's going to be a different chain Oh, well, yeah, of course. I mean you're gonna you're gonna use the same code base. Yeah, sure But you're gonna be 99.9 of the code. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. He's gonna have the same code base Brian the point the point of this is to get Drivechain in without bitcoin. Yeah the merge mined L2s planetary scales eCash privacy Uh, you know, uh namespace prediction markets, etc Uh, and but in particular the ability to launch new L2 if all the L2s suck the current L2s suck Someone can launch a new L2 And wait, there's only how many else you could only launch certain amount of L2s on Drivechain, right? You're not Well, not really it's per in the bit that's 256 Wait paul, you could just keep doing it. It's 256 and it has to be but it's not a practical limit Each new one is basically dependent on minor buy-in, right? Yeah, they all just survive they basically are but the logic is it's pretty interesting it'll be pretty interesting I mean because it's one thing to you know propose that in a Network like bitcoin proper that has a sufficiently decentralized mining, you know Globally but when you have such a low difficulty and let's say you've got like 10 chuds running beta access Now it's it's a way different dynamic, right? Because it's like you're proposing a new sidechain and now you need like, you know five out of the ten chuds with beta access to To enable it Is going to hold it down watch well, I think that um, actually the fact that the pools Are sort of expert specialists I think that's actually pretty good tools Well, that's what I mean is that we have the same thing in btc is that we have a few pools So I was thinking actually that's not the worst thing for the pools to actually say right this is i'm this Okay, maybe all these customers Runner is is just as competent as the pool operator Well, I would be hoping Well, here's the thing is the prediction didn't come true in btc So I would be hoping that the foundry people like in foundry would be like, okay. Listen We've put like a team of three people full time to study all these bitcoin controversies So here's our here's our report on 110. Here's our leadership, right? But instead they just punt it back and they say vote so that we're not responsible Which I think is really disappointing. I think it's worse I thought what you were saying was that the bid xp would be easier to coordinate so that would be better So that's why I was saying well actually was it's still easy to coordinate btc. Maybe you're saying something else No, no, i'm no i'm saying like I got a Bitaxe and I I want a mine, right? So like i'm not right now. I'm just like having it on What if the hash rate is so low that someone can just spin up like a peta hash and then just start rejecting all all the proposals yes No one's gonna get wicked. No one's gonna care dude. No one's gonna care to do that. Like it's a I don't think anyone's gonna care There's gonna be no money to like for how much like What do you think how much money do you think is going to be out there for the takings like in the beginning especially? Uh, I don't know but they you know, they're currently like in in private Transactions like among the currently like in the you and you can also look at something something like that. Yeah Um, but that's like the pre-launch so you don't know if that's 0.05 percent the value Uh, what is that, uh, let me see possibly yeah, that could be right Oh man, we got a a co-founder of star nine here I just noticed it's literally less than I mean you would pay more in fees To you know, probably swap Probably swap then you'd get out Swap what well, I don't know I guess What am I trying to say here? Uh, the the reason to do this project is, you know, first of all, it's kind of like a better version of like bitcoin inquisition So it's like cool just like demo but like much cooler um, and because Even at the yeah, exactly But I think the issue is that in my philosophy of btc Even though btc has done very very well and i've been in i've been a part of bitcoin for like 15 years It's done very well Uh, i'm worried that it has all of those parties didn't fund themselves. Yes, right and um Exactly. It does make you more Being rich does help you on the popularity front in case you were wondering. That's a this is see some secret knowledge. I'm just uh, Letting you guys in on the classified rich and popular Yeah Some people have it all he's only popular because he's rich You never necessarily you never know um But I think the issue is that btc might not have a future So that's i'm more concerned about btc having no future than I am convinced that ecx will be a big success I'm not gonna sell my eCash. I'm gonna hold it as a hedge. Yeah, I think you probably should I think it's not the worst decision Especially if it's see here's the thing if the price is really low then why even bother why even bother selling? So I think a lot of people And I want at least 10 of them I want at least 10 of those 10 of those rewards 10 blocks The only reason people went and sold Bcash is because it actually like, you know, it was worth doing Yeah, I know you and I we made a lot of money I made uh, I I uh, I think I didn't sell for I waited a while, but I sold a lot of that for like six months or something and then definitely in 2019 And then the other 50% trickled like I trickled like I guess yeah, what's the opposite of dca whatever the opposite Dollar cost Whatever that is, that's what I did with the other 50% jumping coin averaging. No, that's not that good, but we'll think of it Anyway, uh, yeah, so it depends so either the project would be small and it'll be a demo or it'll be Big and then it'll have some kind of relevance I think um I think a lot of people don't realize You know how different things could be so mr Hoddle and I were talking before about bitcoin core like even if you just download Our thing bit window which you can use with the btc network so you don't have to if you just Keep it with btc only Um, this is a front end for bitcoin core And it's much better uh, you know, then it's much better than certainly bitcoin course front end and Yes, exactly. Oh, yeah, dude anything is better than fucking bitcoin qt I think Do you think you appreciate bitcoin core more when they like Rip out the kernel like when it just becomes a no like well, I don't think uh, one one one issue I don't think this was intentional, but it's just a fact of the way c++ and qt work together Which is I actually really like the way qt works and we had an original version, but that's an aside It's a story for another day. It's just like you can't easily separate the c++ Source code from the Graphical source code. So it's just kind of this bizarre. I think it's a historical accident um now the question of whether or not people have had this dream of separating out the consensus from like the wallet from the Um, i'm not sure that this has actually worked really well because if you think about it In order to be a wallet you need to measure Confirmations and in order to do that you need to either validate or you need to Dial out to someone who is validating in the case of like spb or similar. So this plan to to modularize everything I think has mostly mostly failed people have tried it a lot And it sort of doesn't work and then when you when you want to give the experience to the end user You have to re-centralize everything back at the end and um, I think one thing like the b the success of the bdk wallet Is mostly because just bitcoin core sucks overall not to now we got keegs wants to say something But I just think bitcoin core sucks in general. I do want to push back on this idea that it doesn't work I do agree that there's a lot of actual obstacles in order to separately modularize everything Because you are correct that wallets do need to be able to like do kind of just in time block Validation and fetching in order to be able to actually perform their functions as a wallet But there is a very real concern about trying to uh, It's really about consensus divergence, right if you let Different implementations implement consensus in different ways I I say it like you can prevent it like but if you sort of bless this idea of a bunch of different implementations Uh re-implementing consensus you can get chain splits a little bit more aggressively and that's unfortunately the only thing that stops from double spending right, so Great care has to go into it and so I think the reason that you're seeing that it's failed is that there's a lot of Sort of inertia like core doesn't have an incentive to make it easier because You know, why would they they you know that they're I I don't want to like like talk ill of core necessarily Like I have a fairly neutral view of the the people who contributed to it I think overall it's like a noble effort, but you know, they're not perfect but either way like That just for even if you didn't assume any malice at all It's like what incentive do they have to make it easier for people to use software? That's not core, right? it's like why are they going to commit their own efforts to There was there was a pr there was a pr to merge the Enforcement rules into core and that was it was declined, right? Which enforcement rules are we talking about 5.10? Sorry. No, no, no. No. No, we're just talking about Sorry My mind just like completely you just went back to bit more. I'm, so sorry Yeah, we're talking about a lib bitcoin kernel, which is this attempt to extract the consensus engine outside of bitcoin core. Got it Isn't that a court isn't that who's doing that work? It's not being done at all I'm just saying that like getting a whole huge effort around it and it's like it's first of all technically difficult And it also doesn't necessarily help things immediately Like it's I think a lot of people sort of recognize it's useful in theory including the devs like who contribute to core itself It's just that like there are not a lot of people who really want to like make that their claim to fame, right? Yeah, I mean the one thing that's really useful about it is you just you know, at least in theory You know which code you can touch and which code you can't and you know, it's like if you touch this code you might cause Yeah, I almost think this is worse though because you know, it's like it's perpetuating this idea that soft forks or some kind of dark sorcery that third rail that we shouldn't touch and that And then if you can you can edit the front end and just tell people that they're getting bitcoin when they're not So the front end is also like kind of like mission critical Uh in a way because it's a way of stealing coins from people. I just want to highlight load bearing in practice Like how many people whose actual experience of bitcoin is actually mediated by the bitcoin core wallet front end as opposed to Bitcoin Core being embedded in other like we agree back ends for various wallets that they yeah An argument made that we should just fucking remove the the gooey front end all together I mean I would be in favor of that Nobody uses it, right? Yeah So, um, and that's how bit window works is it under the hood it downloads like bitcoin d And you know bitcoin cli basically and then it and the front end is its own thing. So that's our that's our project one of the projects that We're doing but I just want to call people's attention to the fact that even if you go back to scaling 3 Which was in 2016 10 years ago People were talking about oh lib bitcoin consensus and oh we're gonna so people have been talking about this for a really long time And then rebase hell is is hard enough Like you get stuck in rebase hell And so I just don't I kind of like don't really see this Happening like so much stuff. It's so difficult to do anything In bitcoin core anyway, and so this project seems like it's moving at a glacial pace Same as everything else stratum v2, whatever. It's just like things are just going very very slow um Is that because the complexity of the system is getting like I think it's an Greater thing. It's I think it's a part of it's part of the the bureaucracy Bureaucratization What do you what do you think of the what do you think of the of the more recent updates made to core? Mostly around policy, but which has you know Like facilitated better lightning and arc like for example Package relay and cluster mempool and these other types of things. I mean keeping up with that paul Uh, I have not I mean I I do read when there's I read about what's new um But I haven't put as much attention into it because at this point the strategy In my head is to let just let core be core and then copy that for the L1 And I also i'm a big believer in like specialization of labor. So even though clearly some people Are really really smart and you got like you're like yvonne neumann and you got your richard fineman or whatever you get Some people are much smarter than other people But really just about everyone in the world It's really hard for anyone else to do their job. Even if you're a janitor Or you're a fast food worker Uh, everyone has a lot of specialized so i'm willing to give core a lot of the benefit of the doubt on many things uh, but there are other things where I don't and I as you know, I criticize them and I say they suck and I Think the fact that everyone here, you know Unanimously agree that the the front end is terrible to the point where we're almost indifferent to deleting it Is I think no, I think the wallet so the reason it was terrible for hardware wallets, right? It was it was kind of difficult to connect the hardware wallet to your bitcoin core wallet and then sparrow came out Sparrow came out made that much easier. But today bitcoin core wallet does exactly what sparrow wallet does. So Sparrow is clearly better elect things like electrum and sparrow and Psp Is like what ends up happening is that when core needs to test that they are like That the core consensus stuff actually works they need a code base to use to test that against and like not it's not just that they need to have like the like the cli wallet Because they might also need to be able to test out psbt stuff and psbt is part of like the bip specs and whatnot And that's important that that's all interoperable as well psbt psbt made bitcoin core like basic like it might yeah, it doesn't have the flow of Of sparrow like you don't see the utxs like the UTXOs the way that little chart that he made. It's not as mighty But it does the same thing it does exactly the same thing It was in the case five years ago, but today bitcoin core's wallet You could use exactly the same way as sparrow and electrum, especially With signing transactions like, you know keys that are cold Um, other than that, I don't recommend anyone really using a hot wallet on their computer. Like I don't think it's smart Like I don't think you should keep money on your computer Your key should be cold and bitcoin core wasn't really good at transacting Um with their with people's hardware wallet, so sparrow came in filled that void But now it does basically what sparrow does and pretty much the same thing a lot of a lot of ogs don't believe that. Mr Right, well, that's not my problem. They should try it out again. They should they should go and see how it works because i'm telling you there's really not much of a difference between sending a transaction with your cold card using sparrow or Or bitcoin core, but that's only because of partially signed bitcoin transactions. That's all that's why It's so similar now before psbts. It was the pain in the ass Yeah, and that's sort of what I mean It's like if you didn't have the bitcoin core wallet at all available to you Like officially maintain infrastructure by the project. Maybe it doesn't need to be in the same code base I'll grant you that but it's like if The bitcoin core as a loose organization It's like, you know It's also kind of maybe a little bit not the best thing to think of it as a single organization But like to the extent that we can if it's not one organization that maintains both of those code bases then like it's you have Testing conditions or satisfiability conditions of the code that you ship that are not depending on or like that are not Accessible to you in your own infrastructure And so it's useful for them to maintain it But I don't know that it's necessarily like a product that they really have the staff to support as a product And it shows right like it's just not a popular choice I Think the reasons for rejecting bip39 were very very weak and most normal people are very intimidated by a long string of like weird alphanumeric characters And the 12 word thing was actually like the first Good like cultural Invention that anyone had was rapidly adopted by every other cryptocurrency What were the reasonings for rejecting it? well, I think it was like something like there's no version number or something and You know, you couldn't I saw I would I would think That's the only reason I can think of is that it's not that extensible And it's kind of like Who cares because it's just transforming an integer into 12 words and or 24 And I thought that was that was really this is like if yet another example where All these normal people who are like our customers, you know, these are like the people we want to adopt We really want them to be sovereign users the real uh full node And hold your own keys and blah blah blah And now this is the finally something that they can wrap their head around is writing down 12 words and you can tell them that it's like a password And uh, there's error correction because you know what I mean if you smudge ink It's kind of not that bad because you can usually make out which word it is still even if your handwriting is really really bad um, so I thought that was like pretty good and then I thought it was very very revealing that instead of core being like Wow, this is great. Let's just add it because it is you know what I mean? It's just like one simple transformation You just code the function and then you just say well, here's your Here's your wallet feed Uh, and then instead so this probably ended up with bdk, which is you know, basically better I think there's a bit of context here because at the time when BIP39 came out it was built by satoshi labs And electrum, so basically thomas And pavol rusnak from trezor and stick. No, that's dick slush And that's marek. So these three guys built it and then they disagreed about some very Insignificant details about the cryptography that they're going to use And that's why electrum for a while decided to use their own implementation of bip39 Even to this day you can use that for your wallet with a different set of words and it's very weird But even past this incident, which I think was the original reason why the core developers decided to stall the adoption of bip39 The entire industry has decided to use it if you're using a graphene phone you can back up your Phone basically and unlock it with your 12 words and even past this Industry-wide adoption. We haven't seen any serious conversation about Getting back to adopting this because it turned out to be a good idea and I do understand that to a degree like Bitcoin Core is for the people who really know what they're doing and some of them just prefer to back up their private keys on A usb flash drive or something But it's also a bit backwards In some ways like you look at the monero client. It has bip39 built-in You look at pretty much everything in the industry except for bitcoin core and it has bip39 so if anything This reminds us that in some ways core is like an ivory tower and they think that they're smarter and better than everyone else And then the market just routes around them and they're like, oh we don't care what you think we'll just build but that's that's a good thing That just shows you that bitcoin core doesn't control bitcoin Because to me it means if they're gonna fuck us on something really simple like bip39 like how many other things are they just? How are they fucking they're not putting it into bitcoin Actually as a matter of fact, I mean so that actually proves the point that bitcoin core can't fuck you because you can just Forever In fact this means like launching a new coin in It just means building a wall for something like bip39 what the fuck it doesn't mean that coins you do you can have your own Implementation and that's what I kept telling you to do. You just I don't know why you didn't do you like conflating that with like the soft fork I'm just The only thing that core can do that might actually be a perceived like block to things is consensus stuff, right? Like and that's like a very very small section of the codebase in practice And people have gotten very very clever at how to actually make it an even smaller section But the trouble is is that because we've inherited a design that you know Was set in motion before any of the industry had any wisdom about this stuff whatsoever There are a lot of warts and like I haven't like I spent a couple of years working on the lightning protocol I spent like another year working on the BitVM stuff and it's like the constructions you have to go after in order to sort of deal with the anti-features of consensus are pretty unholy And the the trouble is that now it's the stakes are so high that no one wants to actually touch consensus Um, and that's like I think people kind of misread a little bit of like core's intentions here It's like a lot of these people are just like they're open source developers. They're really really technically savvy Yes, they have opinions on the tech And that they like will say those loudly But like I think a lot of them are just like afraid of the liability like who? Who is working on bitcoin core? Really wants to be responsible for like a trillion dollar collapse because they happen to touch consensus in the wrong way, right? So like I think part of it is you're misreading intent. I completely agree. I don't it just has a wrong side effect I'm, not saying i'm not saying that this is a reason that you should like continue to like sort of You know treat them as like the high priests of the protocol I'm, not saying that you should like trust them in that way But I think it's dangerous to misattribute like malice when the real issue is like primarily like apathy right or maybe not apathy, but even just like Like some version of incompetence or a lack of confidence I I disagree. I actually think it's I think it's the opposite. I think that they've Fully realized that it is out of their control and that it is the market that must drive demand for a consensus change I mean if they were to try to make a consensus change from the top down unless it's something that is you know Super mundane or something that has already been Kind of convinced in the broader market that it's good. Like I mean, I think a good example is taproot Right, they were able to kind of shoehorn in taproot and do it through speedy trial But largely in part because the rest of the network was already on board. He had a lot of economic buy-in from a lot of participants But even that right, I mean you still needed to build large widespread support and so yeah, when you're saying when you're saying things like core are afraid to you know, like Do a consensus change I don't think they're afraid of it I think they just know that if they were to try to make a consensus change that didn't have widespread support They'd get fucking roasted Yeah, but okay. So we can see I mean you brought up taproot as an example And it's a good example because it presents the you could present the argument that there might be some like a chicken and egg problem here Like did taproot gain consensus because bitcoin core was the ones that were that were like championing the the speedy trial activation Or did they champion the speedy trial activation because it already had brought consensus like which one was it? Long before activations discussions ever I was actually part of those activation discussions when they were happening, right like the Issue was that people like there was a lot of disagreement on exactly how to activate it But like literally zero ink was shed about whether or not taproot should be activated at all, right? Right and of course Dip nine or luke claiming that like, you know Locking on timeout false is the same as like miners taking control of the protocol and all this other nonsense that dispute, right? But like it was not the case that anyone was like, hey, we don't want taproot Like that is never a sentence I heard uttered by anyone on twitter and twitter is a pretty toxic place so I mean so keegs you you Are in agreement then right? I mean core is not the place to make any top-down decisions and consensus changes It's not necessarily because they're afraid to make those consensus changes I'm sure they have their own opinions and ideas around which ones would be best or you know, like improve the protocol But it's not their place to even make those right there They kind of have to wait for the market itself to resolve Well, I really have to put back on this because I think this is really an unfair For an inaccurate frame which is to say What i'm my point of view is that we haven't had any soft walks activate I don't think anyone actually knows at this point how to do it versus how not to do it And so anyone just saying like it should be like this or it should be like that I think I just have to reject all of that. Like there is no No one knows and I think actually At least need to convince 51% of the hash rate no matter what we all agree on that Well, of course, I have this as you probably know I have this thing the Core Untouched Soft Fork where you could Do the soft fork in the second piece of software as like a meta protocol, right? And and then that would let you soft fork bitcoin without changing bitcoin core But even with that you still need 50 more percent of the hash rate or more. I think but It's not just bitcoin core. That sucks. It's also The miners also kind of suck basically, which is that everything sucks. Everyone sucks This shit exactly you guys stuck So so Sucks the trouble is that in order just one of those days I hate decentralization. I mean it is bizarre because out around the world so difficult to coordinate these mother You're all a bunch of fucking retards. If you all just ran paul's thing. We would all be in fucking kumbaya land I think we probably would if I could just outreach to every single motherfucker mining on bitcoin We don't need to because the pools could be the specialist intermediaries And then even for many of these soft forks including BIP300/301 Uh, this is just like miners Maybe making more money or having more money like overall so you would think like that would be right But instead everyone is afraid to stick their neck out for literally anything even something like OP_CAT It's very again because you can't put the cart before the horse like you can't activate a soft fork that nobody wants But isn't it the other way around like how do you know really know what people want I don't think it is I mean, I don't think it is I think you need to have actual user buy-in because I mean first of all if nobody wants it nobody's enforcing it So I don't think this has ever really been the case though So for example SegWit was mostly to support lightning, but there was no lightning when SegWit activated in the past But also SegWit also fixed other problems in the past all the soft forks were Not controversial and the fact that SegWit was had nothing to do with the details of SegWit But even SegWit was by and large not that controversial, right? I mean you had You had the big blockers who viewed it as controversial But you see the thing is that's the thing you might discount those people But everyone else was basically right to me The opposite thing isn't controversial either and that it should have been removed a long time ago and that there even shouldn't be really any standard Limits other than denial of service So I think that the whole concept was a mistake and I think it should have been removed back in 2014 or whatever when this issue first came up and I I was breading the fact that one of the first things I did as a whole like the entire Offroad. No, no, no, no, it's the same the limit The biting limit. Yeah, exactly Yeah, I agree with you I think it's about the policy to begin with Yeah, exactly and whoever pays for the block space is the rightful owner. I'm, sorry, go ahead I was just saying policy diverging from consensus is just in general not a good thing, right? Like it causes a lot of misunderstandings about what the protocol is It doesn't actually help anything as is exemplified by the fact that people direct submit to minors Now nobody can actually predict what the next block is. So people's fee estimation is all fucked up So now lightning and other layer two protocols can't actually get their justice Transactions submitted in the same way and then people lose money and everybody is sad Like it's not a good thing Asterisk in theory, I don't think any of that has actually happened in the direct mind theory We can cope about that. We've made changes off of far less Like plausible theoretical attacks. I'm just saying like well, we could also we could also talk about that Nobody actually gave a shit about fee estimation because core's fee estimation algorithm is complete dogshit and everybody uses mental spaces completely No, and there's actually there's a very simple thing like even if the fee estimation from core is dogshit Right the fact that core can still at least nominally predict what the next block looks like helps external fee Estimation algorithms do their job more successfully That's true unless unless some gigantic spam wave hits the mempool in which case they're completely out of their fucking depth Well, no, no, but but gigs is saying, you know If course mempool by default is showing all of those transactions and an external algorithm that is Looking at those mempool items those unconfirmed transactions and doing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we'll still see it, right? Right So ultimately you still want to have yeah, exactly. Yeah, ultimately you still want as close to consensus as possible. So even if Core's built-in algorithm is shit. Somebody else creating their own algorithm externally has the most like accurate data set to the parts through wonder if uh, I wonder if if if if we're gonna see a If we're gonna see OP_RETURN go up to one megabyte limit Eventually So right now it's still stuck at 100 kilobytes because of the transaction size limit But then you got these retards with their dog mode shit. Is that also policy or is that? That's policy. So that's yeah the the transactions. Well, yeah, of course it is because there's one megabyte operations that have already been confirmed but the the primary problem there is that the packing algorithm for core templates isn't good when you have Most of the block being consumed by a single transaction. It's hard to pack In you know pack around a very large transaction. So they cap it at 100k 100 kilobyte And I guess that helps the algorithm um But you know, I guess if if enough people are Consuming block space with four makers and one megabyte operations Then I would assume that that would be a forcing function for core to that policy too, and then we're just back in this whole fucking retarded loop of like Arguing, you know whether or not that's bending to the will of spam Man, that's why that's why I think we should I think we need to rip the band-aid off I think we literally just need to just remove all policy and just be done with it That's that's what I was hoping was gonna. I agree as well I think also if the 110 people Shouldn't they suffer if they are wrong? Like shouldn't it just be the worst if not that it would be that would be the reason to do it but you should say well, hey, listen, we were trying to work with you on this OP_RETURN thing and then you Went rogue with this 110 Oh, that would just be like that would just be like a cherry on top I think we should just do it for other reasons. Were we were we trying to work with them with the opportunity? No, I feel like I feel like we were not The net result of this 110 stuff is that luke finally leaves development like that would not be the worst result I agree Also, yeah, we did we did negotiate a little bit wicked because they were just gonna straight up remove Um the data carrier size configuration and they just brought it back as like a deprecated Deprecated. Yeah, they undeprecated it. Oh, okay Yeah Yeah, so not not even thought figurable, but it's not even deprecated anymore at one point. I suggested Letting the terrorists win and I was gonna say well, hey listen since it doesn't matter and they direct submit to minors anyway why don't you guys just put it back and you know, like Paul like you I think you don't want that. You don't want that bad misaligned incentive, you know, if you've got like I completely agree Or smaller miners who are just running Like some people are angry other people Are indifferent so I know it's so stupid I agree but the core does all this stupid stuff all the time like every single soft fork is like Indifferent to the old people who don't even notice it and then It helps whoever wants the soft fork. So we should really just be doing them all we should be collecting them all Gotta catch them all 151 soft. No The trouble is is that I I think that bit 110 is actually counterproductive to its own ends That's the thing it's like if it actually accomplished what it's set out to I'd be I probably have a different stance on it than I do. But the reality is is that It what? No, I would never yeah, I would never it's a terrible goal a terrible implementation and it's self-contradictory and it doesn't even achieve Exactly, that's how to achieve so it's just by baffling on so many levels He's saying if it actually achieved what the fuck it said it was gonna achieve Like you're agreeing with each other which is which is what though, which is what i'm just trying to define stopping the spam We're moving the day peg from the main chain. Come on That like spam is an incoherent idea in a permissionless network Yeah, we all know Yeah, everyone here preaching to the choir. I mean to me to me spam is literally everybody else's transaction except mine So like that's it Jeez, uh, do you have something to do with star nine? Uh, I was a co-founder of star nine, but is there is there is there a turmoil of star nine right now? uh, I Don't know i'm not there day to day. I could ask my brother who still runs it. Um, or he's the Cto, but he's not very loud on twitter. He is like basically comes and talks, you know, maybe once a year That's like the perfect person to ask I'm working. What do you think of start nines like pretty clear first day? um, I think base I have to be careful what I say here like the what I from what I understand about the personalities involved is that The I don't think that they're actually genuinely in support of 110 But I do think that it is in their interests for The I mean, they're they're I know they're they're making record. They're making notes in a box, baby to promote notes in a box The let me just say this there is an incentive for them to promote any public perception of nodes Individual power i'll leave it at that. Oh, yeah and So it's not really about 110. I don't think I think it is about this idea that nodes have power and like the extent to Which that's true, but it's also There's the way that I see it going right now is that it's like if false, but useful narratives crop up they will sort of not go contested and if uh, false, but not useful or like like counter like, um Adversarial narratives go up then those will go contested And so like those two things together end up in a situation where it kind of distorts the real reality of the situation By the way, I watched mechanics latest video and apparently he still has quite a few private shares and Start nine. So he's also benefiting from like, okay. I will say this to sort of dispute that I mean I'm sure that it's not zero, but it was never um Significant to begin with Well, I mean, come on. It's all relative right mechanic might it might be significant to mechanic fair Are you calling him poor? No, he's calling his stake in the company. No, that's gonna be you wicked duck kings No, no, no kings are calling him poor not me, of course not me come on, bro I'm the poorest of all of us. No, i'm not saying i'm not saying i'm saying like it I even think it's insignificant relative to uh mechanics Like me His other holdings in other things. No, of course, of course That's why he's talking about it on his fucking youtube video every time he yeah, I get it for sure the Why why I mean, why would mechanic be following so closely? The quarterly earnings of start nine if his holdings weren't meaningful to himself so Because I I have a little bit more insight into the personality that is behind mechanic, right? Um because i've met him i've worked alongside him. I had Large numbers of disagreements with him while he was there and he left before I did and in fact he was fired from the company Uh, I didn't do the firing either right, um so I like I have a lot of like I have a lot more temperance towards You know the like the towards the the rest of like the senior team But I I will not mince words about this I do not think that mechanic is Someone that you should listen to about just about anything candidly um preaching to the choir man, what You're preaching to the choir I I still watch every single one of his videos. Yeah, but do you actually listen to his advice when he says no Yeah, all right It's like entertainment right? It's just kind of like going to the circus to watch the clowns I want to see what the other plebs are hearing and so that I can understand, you know, what type of propaganda they're Oh my god, they're repeating. I have it's very hard to understand, you know Like out of all the weird chapters in bitcoin history. I do think that this This luke OP_RETURN is probably the chapter. I understand the least well, like all the other stuff is Pretty easy to understand like okay roger veer lives japan. He has a great internet connection Oh, it's because we're getting more and more retarded and you're just such a giga brain. You can't you can't make The ramblings of lesser life forms We have to like open our minds to the possibility that there's like something that all of us have missed I don't think that's the case. But like really like I just don't understand You know, you understand what i'm trying to say like why are they even doing this for themselves? Paul I used to think that too but like because here's the thing like luke is in some ways extremely smart, right? like He was the person who came up with the fact that you can't actually do hard forks that like When the 0.8 to 0.9 release got kicked off and there was an accidental hard fork and the rest of core wanted to just like Tell everyone to upgrade he was the one who sort of set that precedent He was the one who came up with the scheme to make SegWit into a soft fork instead of a hard fork Like he does have a lot of technical chops, but he's also crazy And so why are all these other people going along with it? Like they don't go along because they're also fucking crazy. There's a lot of crazy people I know but they don't go along with his like masturbation is a sin worse than murder Literally, everyone just kind of chuckles along. They say that's our weird autistic friend. Luke. He's weird sometimes Like like you said there's a lot of times where he's pointed out something that everyone else missed and the thing is that That kind of makes people kind of treat him as this sort of like mystical like kung fu master that might know something but I so and during the last cycle with the 2021 fork of like Taproot right when he was arguing about like the lock-in on true lock-in on timeout true versus false debate And deciding like what was uh, you know minor activated what was user activated like I gave him a lot more deference but like five years have passed and he's only gotten more like incoherent or like just you know, it's like strange in his viewpoints and Also has gotten less willing to actually justify them like he it used to be He would actually lay out his arguments and I think maybe something happened when he got all his bitcoin stolen or whatever that like He just kind of went off the deep end Not he grabbed he grabbed Incorrect No, you're saying he's correct. No, I said I said he snapped So like I mean so to your point paul I think there there's always a possibility that there's something that we missed but like You know, I keep looking at this over and over again, and I don't Yeah, because that's what concerns me. It's kind of like I don't you know how like um, I don't remember what card game it is But it's like there's a card game where it's like if you lose every round You actually win the whole match But if you lose like more than half you lose it's kind of like we're losing it's like every piece of it doesn't make any sense and all the previous stuff like even like Block size war made perfect sense Michael sailor like I get it that he's like he's he's very rich And he's kind of he's media personality. So so I kind of love that even when I really disagree I can usually like wrap my head around What's happening? But in this one? I just it just seems totally bizarre to me Because paul you're trying to argue you're trying to rationalize it from the like logic of somebody who is looking at it from Like a technical perspective. I I I mean like give me give me Give me like one thing that's like happening here. That's like baffling you and I promise you I can help you like understand it From the perspective. We talked about it It's very very consistent if you actually like realize like how he's thinking about things and it all stem I mean, i'll just be straight up with you. It literally all stems from like his His religious perspective like it's it's he's a hardcore. It's very super hardcore catholic he truly believes that anybody who deviates from Like tradition and conservatism is kind of like changing things and they're the ones that are just funny Which is funny because he's a cedevacantist and like the most catholic thing is following the pope and that's like very traditional At the same time They believe that there is no other pope because the after the the second vatican the popes, uh, They started basically teaching heresy, which means that they're not popes because popes can't teach I was standing next to luke and he said like he was like oh, obviously we could do such and such as a soft fork and then he said and of course, obviously we haven't had a real pope since 1971 or whatever pope it was And so you're just like kind of like in the same breath You're just kind of like confused but the confusing thing to answer your question is that one of the most bizarre things is that 110 Doesn't do anything to prevent You know spam on the blockchain. So why doesn't make any sense? All right So i'll tell i'll tell you i'll literally tell you from luke's perspective what 110 does what 110 does Is it washes his hands in the eyes of jesus christ? That we are not condemning Uh child pornography on the blockchain because if he does not support 110, uh, he he will be condemned to hell because he is He's not standing up against you know viles things being on the chain, but you laugh That's literally what it is. Like that's why he's so passionate about it because if he does not You're saying he has to keep taking every action. So if we do like a bit 110 b Or like if we just do an endless list He has to support them all because it's just a this is these are all just tests This is he's being tested in this life If they work towards like catholic beliefs and like a catholic belief system Then yeah, like if it's coherent with his internal belief system, then yeah, he will support it Probably doesn't it distract isn't it better for? Catholicism if he doesn't waste his time with frivolous What about doing you know, what about doing god's work on earth? He's doing god's work Preventing he's fighting against you know Cp enjoyers and it makes some sense They gotta hand it to you that it makes some but it implies that he has to just keep doing this forever But I suppose that doesn't matter. Yeah Well, yeah, but you know, that's also kind of what christianity teaches is that you kind of have to keep doing it forever It's a never-ending battle. Yeah, but you but even in other christians would recognize. Oh, I have to prioritize You got to pick your battles and this battle is Yeah, no, I agree with you. I 100 agree with you I'm, just you know, like if you if you look at it from the perspective of like some hardcore I take everything super literal autist like yeah, there's no prioritization It's like kind of like you just got to deal with whatever god puts in front of you, right? And so like this is luke's battle like his battle is uh, stopping c-sam spreaders or whatever Even though bit content doesn't stop it You know, it also it also he washes his hands clean of the fact that he's also not like endorsing it or condemning At least he's trying exactly he's trying I think every technical person also knows better than to fall for the the cease like it's like there's only two options like Vet every single vector of bytes that goes across the internet somehow Even that doesn't make any sense because you can xor so that's the thing is technical people know It's just a dead end. Even if you wanted to it, you can't even Yeah, and and luke has never denied it luke has just said that if this behavior continues like there's other things we can do And you know, he's brought up. Um firing the miners He's also brought up uh reintroducing transaction whitelists like so in his mind Like it's just like it's like yeah It's a never-ending battle like you you take a jab at them see what happens if they keep doing it Then you take another jab at them See what happens as long as you're not just being complacent and just like taking it Yeah, that makes sense nico, how's it going hi, how's everybody doing can I give you an example with something I actually saw irl Uh in new york city of what bip 110 is going to do so in 2020 from 2020 to 2021 like in the middle of 2021, I didn't drive a cab because I Whatever for whatever reason right? It was we had covid going on But probably one of the first saturdays after I started driving a cab again I picked up it was like I don't know saturday afternoon. It was like a 60 70 year old woman. She this woman older woman She just bought a vacuum on fifth avenue. Okay, forget about that part, right? It's the way she presented herself. She was wearing one of those regular masks Then an n95 on top And then she had a face shield That was duct-taped on the sides So you tell me what the fuck that shit did This is exactly what bit 110 is bro, like and this is a true story I still can't believe what I saw in my life because this is a wealthy woman and it was just like she was just Totally out of this world and I shit you not with the duct tape on this on the sides of the bottom of the fucking face shield she added like the top had the thing for like Like it you wrapped around her head and then the bottom and then she literally put duct tape right below the fucking masks The other masks on the face shield so that no no, I don't know what she didn't expect to get in but She was breathing. I'll tell you that much but like that's pretty much what people in time is doing here it's to relieve whatever In their consciences where they think they're safe and they're not That's all I could think of here That's it Well That's very interesting and of course luke also Remember he when he went to the the bitcoin miami I think it was the first miami beach one. So it was even after the It was the later one he came with he came with and they couldn't put the the normal Microphone the lapel microphone on him. So they had to give him the handheld microphone and you couldn't understand a word I was trying to listen to I saw it live You couldn't couldn't understand a word That was coming out of his mouth Through the mask and the weird microphone He also he also dunked the giorno's pizza frozen pizza and hydrogen peroxide to uh, clean it of the of the virus I mean you guys just proved my point. I think I heard of the hydrogen peroxide story It's literally true like he doesn't deny it either like he just tweeted about it publicly like he he tagged them or whatever He's like the giorno. Why is your cardboard box? Uh, not why is it not water sealed? Well, no, it was the it was the plastic, uh, uh wrapping around. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're right the plastic wrapping on the pizza itself Yeah, when he when he dunked it the hydrogen peroxide got into the pizza Is that stuff Okay, so I never actually thought about that. How how did he get so much fucking hydrogen peroxide? Did he just go to the pharmacy and just buy like fucking like 40? 40 bottles of hydrogen peroxide Put them in a bathtub or something. This is this is this is when he had hundreds of bitcoin I mean you can get anything you want if you have hundreds of bitcoin Yeah, but i'm just thinking about how much hydrogen peroxide you would need to dunk an entire fucking the giorno's pizza You would literally need like to fill a bathtub Full of hydrogen peroxide. Yeah, I mean you're asking maybe the right questions But at the same time like, you know, it's you can get whatever you want if you have hundreds of bitcoin I think it was a cooler I saw a photo of it. Someone showed me Okay. Yeah, you can use a cooler too. But again now you now you have a cooler full of hydrogen peroxide Which is still fucking ridiculous. I mean I mean, of course it becomes water like it it disintegrated chemically It disintegrates it becomes water it evaporates, right? Yeah, but like think about it when you go to the store like when you buy Hydrogen peroxide it comes in these little bottles. So you have to buy like 40 of these fucking bottles Yeah, no big deal. Are you just amazon it? I'm sure he did. I'm just curious about how this pizza got cooked after It wasn't sealed like did was it overcooked? No, I think I think after after he realized it had leaked into the pizzas. He probably threw those ones away and then that's when he you know tweeted at DiGiorno's and complaining. It probably would have been fine. It would have just boiled off I guess, you know I mean, obviously it wouldn't it could have changed. Would you would you eat it? Would you eat fucking pizza dunking hydrogen peroxide? Hydrogen peroxide is h202, right? So it's not that bad There is food. Yes or no. Would you eat it? I would if I you know, I don't know because uh during covid I don't know the food everyone's food Does it smell weird but I would my guess is that when you put it in the oven for 30 minutes or whatever you do to cook it. Um, my guess is that it would sell that hydrogen peroxide I would guess that's my I may I would definitely maybe smell it and take like a test bite Have you ever have you ever served at one of your parties Have you ever tried 200 Peroxide like it smells and I've never tasted peroxide but I tasted that I'm not tasting it. But like there's this greek moonshine from cyprus. It's called spiritual means which means match in greek But it's moonshine, bro like I don't even know where to buy this shit and drinking like a fucking little like my Grandmother used to drink a shot of it all the time in the morning Fucking It's like fucking drinking it's like drinking like peroxide going down your fucking throat Um cheeks I missed it I had to log off but you just say you were the co-founder You were the co-founder, right? Are you still do you still have anything to do with it or no? Uh, I am not part of an operational role, um, I still have a stake because they haven't bought the rest I mean I did sell I struck a deal to sell a number of like a large chunk of my shares almost a year ago, but um There's not like I mean, I still have a pretty major stake. I didn't I don't sit on the board anymore and have it for about maybe a year and a half and then I have no operational role, but You know, I still know the founders, um still in good terms with them Um Kind of have to be because when I was my blood brother Past year's been good, huh? Oh, wait, you two are brothers Um, the cto is my blood brother. Yeah Oh, okay. I didn't know they're a good brother man disagreeing with your brother but still supporting him I mean, yeah, like he actually agrees with me for what it's worth About 110 like he doesn't I mean he has a much more tempered view I think he actually sits kind of between where I am. I don't think that he has as strong of opinion on like the fact that 110 is not sound but he also Will freely admit that he doesn't know necessarily because it's just not his area of expertise um I mean i'll tell you what 110 is good for business. All right, like you guys Right So in a marketing standpoint for business wise it's a good decision, I guess Yeah, and but he's not really he has a very hands-off approach to the way that he Engages in that side. He he runs the entire tech team. That's his only focus. He's like, let me just make the software good Um, the business strategy has largely been run by matt forever That actually even when I was there he did right like I didn't have Um much input into that Mostly because I didn't have the experience at the time. So He's older i'm guessing yeah Yeah Hey paul, I wanted to ask you Is it possible for bitcoin core to introduce changes That would Um that could not be merged into Drivechains or into eCash like some kind of anti BIP300 anti-Drivechain anti-eCash type of change All right, I was getting kicked out and I was almost I almost didn't come back I was almost like this stupid app is the worst What is wrong with the people coding the spaces I don't know It's just basic reliability Yeah, yeah, it's a completely unusable dude since the new update, uh, Go download like an apk of like an older version. It's completely unusable I know and it's basically fixed by the end of the week apparently Oh good. I also have like an iphone that I also use sometimes for different apps so sometimes I just join from the iphone, so maybe i'll maybe i'll try that but it's It's even worse than usual last week It kicked me off of my own it rogged my own space and then I couldn't even start a new space or rejoin And I was like, is this real android users can't Host or co-host, uh spaces right now because they have like a new app, but it it's Bad, it's really bad, but they're supposedly gonna fix it by the end of the week Okay, okay, that's good. So what was there was a question though Zcash question then i'll probably Get going even though this was really fun. This is from what two to seven. You guys just do this every day for five hours Yeah, I mean it depends. It's not every day. It's random Sometimes I do sometimes I don't depends on you know Okay, now what I heard the question was something like an anti-eCash soft fork and I was like, oh that sounds Very unfriendly like is it mathematically possible? For bitcoin core to have changes like have anti-fifth 300 changes that would be incompatible with with eCash Again, already it's breaking off just by not merging. They already have anti-fifth 300 Bitcoin is kind of made to append to it So like if somebody wanted to make a fork they could that's the whole point No, but his I understand this question his question paul is uh, do you think that bitcoin core could introduce like some change on purpose? Because you said that your your new eCash thing you want to basically like keep it in consensus with bitcoin core like pull down downstream Creates like some code that purposely breaks your your 300 yeah, it would be Greatly Sorry, go ahead Yeah on the two weeks or a week ago. You said basically with bitcoin core. You're just clicking merge merge merge merge merge there's just something that Would be the end of that It's an interesting question and Theoretically the answer is yes, but it would be like a kind of cat and mouse It would kind of be a little like how well 110 is a bad idea So i'll just maybe steal man. This is the the most malicious Thing everyone I can see. Mr. Hoddle. He's like grabbing a pen and a paper. He's gonna write this down He's kind of taking some notes, but the worst thing the worst thing they could do Is the most inconvenient thing would be like if we use for whatever we use for the BIP300/301 enforcer would use like op not five so like if they If we wanted to keep clicking merge we might have to Schedule some kind of hot swap of that. So if they say We're using op map 5 for some they probably wouldn't even do this because they just do op success and taproot because they're you know Sucking taproot's dick or whatever taproot's not even that cool everyone. It's just like this thing to support lightning, which is dying Yeah, that's so they uh, and it's like um taproot is kind of well, it's a different story so basically although the the eCash L1 Is almost exactly the same as bitcoin core minus like the few minimal changes That are very very small and you could see you could try the dry run Three you go on github and look and see for yourself We're up to dry run three. We'll probably do a bunch more iterations So we really like it but the L1 is the very simple part Most of the work is on the L2s and the BIP300/301 stuff is not in the L1 It's in the enforcer, which is a different piece of software So that would be the thing to target would be to target like op not Five or whatever we use and then use it for something else at that point, of course We could basically if we wanted to keep the merge merge merge We could hard fork the enforcer Over eCash land and say okay. We used op not five until this day But then we switch it to op not 79 or something or you know, seven plus nine something else, you know, because I could elaborate on that if people want but that would be like the most Annoying thing I think uh other than that not not really I don't think so because really it's just not changing Bitcoin Core. So the L1 is is very similar And the main new thing do you want me to take it down wicked? You want me to take it down? I think what you I just posted do you want me to take that down? I don't know What are we taking down what are we taking down maybe something on the nest I I don't know I don't think there's something going on where they are Um Look at do you know this person? I had a better shoot wicked. That's your respect. That's i'm i'm not talking to him. I was meaning he's a troll Yeah You want me to take it down? No, just go down So district mimi is like probably one of your favorite trolls Figure it out like you'll see what we're talking about, but she's not talking to any of us right now Oh, it's mimi I didn't even realize yeah, she's a troll She's a literal troll. All right. Anyway, I have to Good Go now this has been fun You guys are great All right. Thanks for having me up. I'll see you later. Yeah, great. I'll uh, I'll send you that list later Okay, great See you guys All right, um So I don't know if there's much else to talk about today. I think I need to eat some food. I've been eating all day Just been drinking beer Do you want me to remove it or how you feel about it? Like we can go in? I dare you what's going on. No, I know it's my account but it's attached to his mother. I'm not talking to you lady bug with ladybug I'm talking to you ladybug. What the hell? Ladybug All right, well go eat you good I guess i'll see you guys later you good you want me to get in You