I hate the Lightning Network now, I think it's ridiculous, and I think it's become a complete delusional cult.

You know, I tried to explain this to Michael Saylor once, I had the opportunity to meet him in person.

Many people have tried over the years to push the transactions per second with alternative tech,

and it's unfortunate that in the Bitcoin community, no one will pay any attention to that.

So it's kind of like, the L2 is kind of like dying in a video game or something.

I'm going to die!

But the L1 is like dying in real life.

Supported by Cascade. Use your Casper without selling it.

That's amazing. That's amazing.

So I think you brought up the point which I wanted to get to, which is, you know, obviously you're busy.

You're not only building, well, it's going to be LayerOne, though LayerOne is coming from Bitcoin.

But there's a lot more, it still needs to go into LayerOne.

And then on top of that, LayerTwo, right?

Because that's where the magic happens with the blockchain stuff, right?

So I want to get into a couple of flagship drive chain stuff.

You know, drive chain projects that you got planned, right?

Seven of them you've got planned.

I probably will get into one or two today.

So we got to start, I thought we can start with Thunder, given it's one of the early ones,

along with Truthcoin that you've been behind for some time.

So why don't we start with Thunder?

I want to get into, you know, all the stuff you're building there.

So why don't we start with Thunder?

What is Thunder and, you know, why are you specifically, you know, excited about it?

First, let me lay out this, like, picture of, like, Thunder and Zside.

Those are, like, the kind of, like, the bread and butter.

Like, these are, like, really, really good and they're really, really finished, mostly.

And then you kind of have more – we have more experimental ones.

So, like, BitAssets, BitNames would be, like, the next category of, like,

very interesting thing that's kind of a little ambitious and mostly done and mostly works

but still not quite 100% sanded down yet.

And then you have, like, more, like, confusing and ambitious, complicated ones.

These would be, like, the prediction markets.

But it's a coin shift.

And we actually – now we have some – Zside is from outside.

But we have another outside contributor, this guy Jay, who he did Elements Plus.

So it's, like, Blockstream Elements but as a drive chain.

So it's, like, an eighth one, actually.

Yeah, we have one called Photon.

Photon, which is Demos' quantum-resistant signatures.

But it's on the L2.

So that's why I was kind of thinking it kind of more belongs on L1 because this is, like,

a paranoia thing for people.

So anyway, I just wanted to lay that out.

But it's, like, yeah, Thunder.

Because Thunder gives scalability and Zside gives privacy, gives a Zcash-level privacy.

So Thunder is basically just drive chain with, like, a lot of stuff stripped out.

So it's very efficient and has a large block size that grows.

And it's been heavily optimized.

So we did a similar contest last summer.

We said, how fast can you make Thunder go?

And we tested it with larger and larger blocks and with computers of various,

you know, standardized computers and stuff.

So Thunder by itself.

And the plan for Thunder is to have actually something like 12, 13, 14, 15 maybe of these

where they're each in, like, a different region.

So at first there would just be one Thunder.

But eventually there would be, like, a North America versus Asia Thunder.

And then eventually there would be, like, a Southeast Asia versus rest of the world.

And then eventually there would be, like, North America, Western Europe,

Oceania or whatever you want to say, like, Africa plus rest of the world.

So it would kind of start splintering off organically.

And that's the idea.

So we just released one, and it has a large block size that grows geometrically.

But the idea is that it would be, you know, you'd have plenty of block space there,

and then it would fill up, and then you would launch, like, a second one.

So you have a lot of opportunity even just while you're using the first one to say,

like, make, like, your wish list of, like, oh, here's what I wish we had done differently.

You have, like, Thunder B or Thunder 2.0.

When this first Thunder fills up, because even though it's growing geometrically,

you think the adoption might grow faster than that.

And so then you can always put up the second one.

And so that's the idea is that with these L2 chains, just with the raw block size alone,

you can process all of the transactions in the world.

And I did some back-of-the-envelope, you know, napkin math about, like,

everyone in the world does three transactions a day or whatever it is.

Or, you know, you can kind of play with the numbers because some people are not making it.

Some people are really, really old or really, really young or whatever.

So you can do whatever you like with the numbers.

But it's, like, on the order of a few trillion transactions per year.

And so this software has already been tested as of the contest.

I wrote about this in the contest right up myself.

It has already been tested to basically 50 percent of the entire world's transaction throughput.

So that was last year, and stuff will continue to improve.

As I said, it will continue to improve in the sense you launch the first one,

people will actually be using it in the real world.

But that doesn't mean, like, the R&D will stop.

People will keep improving that one, and then they'll also be thinking,

oh, and when we launch the second Thunder, we could make it a lot better.

And then, of course, you can always have more Thunders.

So, of course, each time you do, you kind of split the network.

But usually if you live in North America, you mostly transact in North America.

You know what I mean?

You're mostly buying when you buy food, when you buy gasoline,

when you buy whatever you're buying.

Because the economy is so big that you can get most of what you need.

And then only a few times when you go to Europe do you have to swap your U.S. dollars for euros.

So it's actually okay to have some partitioning.

And I think that we could have – we could make one network work for a while

and then have a second network.

So this is part of the plan to scale.

And so one contrast between this and the Lightning Network,

which now I – I hate the Lightning Network now.

I think it's ridiculous, and I think it's become a complete delusional cult,

which is that we have tested – we have already tested it.

You can run the test on GitHub.

It's open source where we create a bunch of fake transactions.

By a bunch, I mean like a huge number.

And it actually – the test – like most of the time of the test is spent like prepping

with this random, giant random vector of transactions.

And then it will collect these as if they were real.

So we've already tested it to the rate of this global transaction rate,

and you can kind of see for yourself exactly what happens.

The Lightning Network, you couldn't even do this type of test.

It wouldn't even be conceivable.

No one would even imagine to do it.

And so that's – I just think we're in a completely different class of seriousness.

Lightning has all these problems with liquidity, onboarding, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera, et cetera, giant list, and we don't have any of this stuff.

So this is going to be your – as you're saying, this is a big block proposition here, right?

So this is huge, almost a gig block, right, 960 MB.

So that's the size of the block, right?

Which, again, I –

Yeah, yeah.

And obviously that means you can do a lot more transaction TPS, right?

Throughput, you can do a lot more, right?

Because Bitcoin is 3 to 7 right now TPS.

Bitcoin Cash would be, what, 200, 100 to 200.

And you are thinking with this massive block, right?

It's like, what, 11,000-ish TPS?

Probably 12,000.

I don't remember.

I have the exact numbers and the exact arguments in the contest post.

So I would be much better for people just – and the links to the tests and stuff.

So it would be better for people to look at that.

It's just easier when you have – as you say.

It's just interesting that we've tested it with those.

So, of course, when you do something like that, the full node requirement does go up.

Like it's harder to run.

But if you think about it a certain way, like imagine – like right now there's whatever it is.

It was 9 trillion transactions a year like in 2022 when I did the back of the envelope map.

But whatever, let's say it's 15 trillion transactions a year.

Those have to be stored somewhere if they're computer transactions.

So I lay out this is exactly like how it – what the cost and the expectation will be.

And we have the tests running with that.

So I think this is kind of like – this is like the best case scenario it's going to get.

And I think this is much – and then you get the Bitcoin SV people who are like, aha, big blocks.

But it's not really the same because the Bitcoin SV people, they neglect the –

if this full node gets really, really expensive in Bitcoin SV, then they've got nowhere to go.

But whereas in the drive chain world, it's kind of like if one network gets too expensive,

either everyone can abandon it or everyone can say, well, this experiment was a failure.

And we should scale some other way or we should have slightly smaller blocks but higher fee rates to deter people from using it.

So you can be much more experimental in L2.

When you have an optional L2, it's completely different from mandatory L1.

So it's kind of like – the L2 is kind of like dying in a video game or something.

You can respawn.

But the L1 is like dying in real life.

And so it's a really big difference.

And as you can see, of course, people are a lot more willing to play certain video games where you're likely to die,

like a war game, like a Call of Duty type of a game.

It's much more fun to do that kind of game when you don't really die.

So then it changes the type of stuff that – so, yeah, we're pushing the envelope on danger deliberately.

But, yeah, you can run the test for yourself and see that this achieves an enormous amount of transaction throughput.

And, yeah, again, Lightning, like it would never even – they would never even think to do this.

Because first of all, they know they can't actually even set it up.

So they would not even be on anyone's radar.

But this is just – everyone's still obsessed with the Lightning Network.

And they probably – you can't – it's become a cult, and you can't get people out of a cult.

It just can't be done, unfortunately.

You have to just wait patiently.

Yeah, I think I was going to bring up SWE because it's very – it seems –

I think the comparison you've done is very good because it shows Layer 1 versus Layer 2 difference, right?

Of course, I think there is a discussion to have here to discuss Node because, obviously, Nodes are going to get huge.

And, obviously, there's a cost associated to it, right?

And if you want a lot of decentralized Node, you have to think about, obviously, costs for so many people, right?

But I think I like the way you're thinking about it, that it's more of an experiment that you're thinking of doing it.

It's not a set in stone for now.

Yeah, and many people have tried over the years to do – like to push the transactions per second with alternative tech.

And it's unfortunate that in the Bitcoin community, no one will pay any attention to that because – well, first of all, because there's been years and years of just terrible tech and bad promises.

So everyone has been trained to just assume that it's all bad.

If we had sidechains, drivechains, if we had BIP300 – again, I proposed back in 2015.

If we had had it the whole time, people would be trying these new types of things as L2 drivechains of BTC.

And then everyone would be much warmer to them because they'd say, oh, this is a Bitcoin project.

And this is not like an investment scam.

You just try – you move $20 worth of coins over there and try it out.

Or in the drivechain case, you can even get – you can get onboarded directly to the L2.

So you could just say, oh, someone could just send like 10 cents to me over there.

And then you could see for yourself, okay, is this worth the tradeoff?

Because, yes, because some people have pushed the envelope in maybe an unwise way, although you never know.

Maybe it's ingenious, but maybe it's terrible because it's like maybe you don't actually want it to be – to cost 1 ten-thousandth of a cent for each transaction because maybe that doesn't actually add up at the end of the day.

Maybe that just adds up to a disastrous node cost and then a free rider problem and stuff like that.

But the point is we don't – no one really – we're not in a situation where people can do the experiment.

So we all suffer as a result because you've got all these smart people who are trying this or that.

And, yeah, the whole innovation ecosystem has collapsed as far as I'm concerned.

Like back in 2014, it was very different, and people were more optimistic.

They were more techno-optimistic.

And now, as we know, in Bitcoin, everyone's just like, oh – people say, oh, we didn't even want – we don't want – we never wanted privacy in Bitcoin.

They'll say weird stuff like that now.

And they say you shouldn't use Bitcoin.

And they have Michael Saylor saying, oh, it's digital credit.

It's digital capital.

It's digital Manhattan real estate.

But then he was saying – again, he was saying, oh, Bitcoin is money.

It's not that complicated.

He was like, what about this giant list I have of you saying that Bitcoin is all these other things?

So I don't even know what to do with some of these people.

It's kind of like I don't know.

But as we know in Bitcoin, new technology, it doesn't get attention.

In fact, it basically gets scorn and hatred and abuse.

So that's – how can we get anything – how are we going to get anything better under those conditions?

I like the philosophy because there is – I think there's a lot of experiment done outside Bitcoin.

Like you could also look at DAGs that exist where you could have instead of linear blocks, you could have multiple blocks running in parallel.

Because they exist and they've been proven.

There are projects like Subcaspa and Ethereum has even played around with it in the past.

So I think – but I like the way you're thinking about it because it really shows that it's not like set in stone.

It's like let's give it a try.

Let's see how far we can push it.

Let's understand the actual issues.

And you can only understand once you deploy it.

So I like that kind of mentality.

The old days of Bitcoin, I guess.

How Bitcoin used to be where people were pushing the envelope a little bit further.

Yeah, everyone used to take it for granted.

They used to say, well, Bitcoin is open source.

So if anyone invents anything cool, we'll just add it to Bitcoin.

Now we've gone completely to the other direction on that.

And now that's – even to say something like that is unthinkable or kind of like people would just laugh.

They would just laugh if you said that today and say, no, we don't do anything.

Bitcoin is the thing that we don't need any ideas because we're already perfect.

It's hard to run an open source software project that way, especially in a world where stuff is changing all the time.

Internet speeds are changing.

We have stuff like Starlink now.

Computers improve.

The way people use a computer has changed where there was a time when no one used a computer.

Then there was only the desktop.

Now people are mostly on their phone.

Some people don't even own a laptop or a desktop anymore.

So all this stuff is constantly in flux.

And as you say, new stuff is being invented.

There was a time with USDT.

There was no USDT.

There was only like Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Then there was like Ethereum.

Then there was like whatever.

So new stuff is being invented all the time.

And then Ethereum gets invented and everyone says this idea sucks.

But then it does a little bit of success.

Then you have copycats.

You have Solana, Base, whatever the hell, Polygon, et cetera.

So you have all these – everyone is copying Evium, Avalanche.

So you have all these things being invented.

And there's no limit.

We have no way of predicting what someone will invent tomorrow.

And we have no way of knowing how good that idea is.

It could be really, really good.

I tried to explain this to Michael Saylor once.

I had the opportunity to meet him in person.

This was like years ago.

And I said there was a time before you heard about Bitcoin.

You were going through your whole life and you had never heard of Bitcoin.

And then, bang, new idea.

And you're like, whoa, this is amazing.

And I was like that could just happen again tomorrow.

Like it happened 100 times.

Maybe not, but it could.

So there's no limit to what the great invention could be.

So we've got to really be worried about how smart other people are

and what they might come up with.

So in Bitcoin we need to have like this plan for that.

The side chain is kind of like a pressure release valve.

If someone invents a really good idea,

you just take it as an L2 and then you say thank you for that great idea.

Instead, we do all this weird circus.

I don't know.

We do this weird thing.

We just say we're the best and everyone's going to come crawling back to Bitcoin

after they're done playing with meme coins.

That's amazing.

So let's move forward.

So what I was saying is let's assume this thunder will work.

Let's assume that this experiment they're going to do is going to stick

and people are going to start using it.

I just wanted to understand how the process of thunder

or this L2 or drive chain will work on eCash.

What is the process?

And this is where I think the 301 slash the blind merge mine comes in, right?

Yeah, merge mining was invented by Satoshi.

It was co-invented by him and someone else.

But he was a supporter.

Again, you can see how far we've come

and how far we've descended into chaos and madness because we had Bitcoin

and then someone brings up this thread about a BitDNS,

which became Namecoin and which I have turned into BitNames

because it's a fantastic idea.

But Satoshi helps the person invent BitNames,

and then Satoshi says, actually, we can mine both blockchains at once.

So nothing like this would happen today.

Nothing like any of this would happen today.

They'd say, oh, you don't want to even do this alternative coin.

You're a scammer for even talking about Namecoin.

But Satoshi was like, actually, there's a way of mining both at once.

He said what we should do is we should do this for every blockchain.

So Satoshi is just coming out and saying there's going to be all these different blockchains.

This is a thread that absolutely everyone should read on the original forum called BitDNS

and Generalizing Bitcoin.

It will only take you maybe like 20 minutes to read.

But it's fantastic because Satoshi clearly expects there to be many different blockchains,

and he does not care in the slightest.

He does not have any kind of like what you might call toxicity,

or he just thinks like, oh, of course people will just invent more blockchain.

But, again, you can see that's completely unlike what it's like today where it's very political

and it's very like people are very critical of each other.

They say you shouldn't even buy.

This is the only thing you need.

And so merge mining has been around for a very long time.

I tuned it up slightly in 2017, this idea of the blind merge mining.

As far as I'm aware, there is no real controversy about this where most people seem to accept

that blind merge mining is a slightly different version of merge mining that is better in some ways

and is slightly worse in a few other ways, and it itself requires a soft fork to work.

Back in 2017, that wasn't a big deal.

We did soft forks all the time.

So none of this was a big deal back then.

Today, of course, the fact that it would require a soft fork,

it would be you would make headlines today if you said something like you had the original blind merge mining idea

and then someone said we have a new way of doing merge mining without a soft fork, but it's worse.

Everyone would jump at that.

They would say that's amazing.

Of course, that just, again, it speaks to how different everything is and how crazy everyone has become for no reason.

But, anyway, merge mining is this thing Satoshi invented.

It's totally ingenious.

The miners don't have to do any additional thermodynamic work.

They do need a node of each network, but that's relatively cheap because they're spending all this money.

They have all this electricity coming in, and usually they connect to the pool.

The pool does that anyway.

The pool says make this exact block, so they don't even care.

It doesn't affect them at all, which lessens the appeal of blind merge mining

because now there's so much specialization that it doesn't even matter anymore.

So nothing even.

In a way, actually, the fact that mining has specialized so much where you have people who produce the node.

You have Bitcoin Core.

You have nodes.

You have node runners, and you have the pool, who's their own specialist, and you have the hashers.

That has kind of like passively created a blind merge mining situation just based on the brand of the pool and its reputation.

So it's already the individual hasher, the guy who owns the ASIC, they already don't even see.

They're blind to most of it anyway.

They just have the brand of the pool that they either trust the brand of the pool.

So a lot of it is not necessary or maybe just kind of superfluous, but of course it doesn't really cost anything either.

It's just some software, so it's whatever.

So that's kind of the situation.

Merge mining is a very fascinating thing,

because it lets the miner collect fees from multiple blockchains without doing anything.

Yeah, the specific question I guess I wanted to understand.

I think merge mining and obviously blind merge mining is very fascinating and it's very usable.

But the thing I wanted to understand is how a thunder block, because I think it will apply to all of the drive chains, right?

So how does a thunder block in this drive chain example broadcast itself to the e-cash chain, right?

You mean L1?

To L1, yeah, because that needs to go to L1, right?

It's very important.

Yeah, because one direction is much easier than the other.

So the deposits are quite easy, because you just say that the thunder must reference the L1 node.

And that's quite easy, because in one direction it's mandatory, in the other direction it's optional.

So on one day when you run the thunder node, you're signing up for more node cost.

So you just run the L1 node plus the thunder node.

Your computer just looks at the L1 node and says, oh, someone made a deposit.

They deposited the coins.

So I just want to sketch this out, because maybe it's easier for people to understand that the whole picture is like,

you've got to have coins being moved in and moved out,

and you have to have a way of doing what they call consensus for the L2.

In this case, the consensus for the L2, finding the blocks, determining who has what money,

that is the merge mining that we already discussed.

And I bring this up because just to kind of reassure people, like, okay, this was invented a long time ago.

It's been in use with Namecoin since 2011.

And, in fact, the Bitcoin network already merge mines like 11 or 13 coins.

One interesting thing is it's impossible to tell from the perspective only of Bitcoin.

You don't know how many other chains are being merge mined.

And as another interesting trivia fact, Bitcoin BTC cannot stop.

They cannot prevent you.

It doesn't even – you can't detect it.

There may be 3,000 altcoins that are being merge mined with Bitcoin,

and you cannot stop them from being merge mined with Bitcoin, which is very counterintuitive.

Merge mining is very interesting.

With blind merge mining, you could because it's more tightly created, but it's more efficient in some other ways.

Anyway, I saw a bunch of minutiae to just say that it's exactly what you've asked.

You've asked about the most important part.

I just try to tell everyone every other part is actually easy.

And that had all been figured out before 2015.

But then I had my idea for how the coins come back.

And the idea was, this is the idea. So this is the whole idea of DriveChain. Some people think this is a great idea, the greatest idea in the world. Others hate this idea, and they think it's a stupid idea, and it's terrible. But here it is. My position on what DriveChain is – I know I'm winding this up here, but it's like, I just think DriveChain is better than the Lightning Network, better than altcoins, better than – like, I just have all these other things.

Altcoins compete better than just having a custodial L2. So I think this is our best current idea. There are roll-ups and stuff. I think those ideas are worse than DriveChain, as we can explain.

But here is – now, without any further delay, the idea is this, which is that the sidechain L2 can compress everything that it's doing, in particular all the withdrawals initiated on L2.

So the sidechain L2 knows the whole picture. It knows all the deposits. It knows all the L2 transactions, and it knows all the L2 withdrawals, and it knows everything happening on L1.

So the sidechain L2, it will be able to say this is exactly the kind of transaction that would pay out all the people who want out, and they can compress that transaction in one TXID, one hash basically.

And so over very slow periods – we're talking like three months – it would just broadcast the hash.

It's like – I have this idea, this video. If you go to layer2labs.com, we have a cool video that we made that was like – people draw out the thing.

It was before AI was invented, and it was like people drew out each – so the idea is you get Earth and Mars. Mars is like the sidechain.

And on Mars, everyone – they go to the town square, and they unfurl this big banner that has like the hash.

It's just the one thing that you need, and they hold it up there for like three months.

They hold it up, and then on Earth – okay, so this is what comes back to Earth is just this one hash, and then basically the transaction itself, which is the minimum amount that you would need to make it – you need to know – you eventually need to broadcast this in one block and pay these people out.

So somewhere, this needs to be the hash and the actual transaction paying everyone out.

This is like pay four coins to this person, pays 7.2 coins to this person, or et cetera.

You have to get that from the L2, but you can get it from any – 100% of the L2 nodes have it.

And of course, this transaction is going to be – it's one 32-byte hash, and then maybe like tens of thousands of bytes or something very, very tiny.

Now, so that is – and then on L1, you have the hash, and then the miners.

This is what they call SPV proof.

I just have the miners.

You can either increment it by one.

They have like a little counter.

They increment it by one, or they decrease it by one, or they leave it the same or something, and it has to very slowly reach this huge threshold.

So it has to match.

You have to get wide agreement from all the – this is the miners on L1.

But it's set up in a way to deter fraud basically because if you want to steal from the sidechain, you have to somehow get the – you have to make a fake transaction and get a fake hash.

And then you have to get – somehow like get everyone to go for your hash instead.

Meanwhile, every single person running the L2 node knows what the real hash is automatically.

They all know what it is.

So it's like a flagrant lie.

And then you have to somehow keep this going for three months with the L1 people each incrementing it where they don't decide either to decrease it and reject it or just to do nothing and say I don't exactly understand what's happening right now.

Let me explain that there's a couple other things.

Okay, so some people complain about how slow this is.

But actually, this is – by design, this is intentional, and this is actually a good thing because there's already these ways of doing instantaneous swaps.

And many people even do this now.

So they just use these swap providers or they just go on Coinbase and just trade the coin.

So you can always – if you want – if you find a willing participant, it goes back to the comparative advantage point we were talking about earlier where it's like you can instantly swap out.

So that's not the relevant issue, and a lot of people are confused or dismayed.

They think, wow, it's three months.

That's like an absurdly long time.

They think how could that possibly work.

But that's not the situation.

What's really happening is there would be regular people consensually swapping, and then they'd say like for $0.99 on the dollar or for whatever it is, some tiny fee, I'll pay you L1 coins today.

You give me all the L2 coins.

And then it's only the net effect.

People would passively bundle up on the L2s.

There would only be like a few people who are willing to wait patiently.

They would move.

These would be like bond traders or something because they get a tiny yield.

It's like a three-month CD or as we would call it in the US.

No one even does this anymore.

After 2008, they're like zero.

A CD.

All right.

I have some questions.

So I think I'm a little bit not sure on the three-months part.

But before that, though, I'm assuming that obviously from layer 2s, drive chain layer 2s, the block gets included into layer 1.

Blind merge mining, the hash of the L2 block does make it into the L1 coinbase.

After that, L2 goes to that.

Blind merge mining.

And there is a little bit of fee involved with that.

There's a bidding process for the L1 to include.

This is a different thing.

The main withdrawals are BIP-300.

And the blind merge mining is 301.

And it's useful to separate them because as I've tried to claim, the merge mining part is really not that controversial.

And kind of people mostly accept that part.

Whereas BIP-300 is like people have all kinds of strong opinions about it being really great or being terrible or being a waste of time or being whatever.

So I wanted to highlight what you said before about it's the withdrawals that are by far – this is the whole – everything is bet on this one problem.

And the deposits are easy.

And the merge mining is easy.

And this is the really new experimental part that will either work or not.

And it's the withdrawals.

So this is – I'm just reminding you that now you've switched completely to the other thing.

You can have merge mining of an altcoin or of an L2.

I have a very unique point of view that is not shared by many Bitcoiners.

So I say only the merge mined L2s will even survive because you are in a situation where you may be fighting the miners for the fee revenue.

If you're merge mining, then the miners automatically get all the fee revenue which is what you were talking about now.

And I think that's a big – a really, really big detail because it means that they will never – they will be happy about the L2 existing instead of resentful and annoyed.

Whereas if they would be in a situation where you have, for example, you have one ARK supernode or a lightning service provider is making – because remember I was saying the earth has maybe 10 trillion transactions, 15 trillion transactions per year.

So if you take $0.10 out of each or $0.01 out of each, this is hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year.

And this is something that grows geometrically over time.

So this is a gigantic pile of income.

And so if that's going to ARK supernode or lightning or whatever and the miners are getting nothing, the miners will then be annoyed.

You'll be in this disruptive situation.

Whereas with merge mining, the miners are totally indifferent between a transaction L1 or L2.

They get paid either way.

And then they're going to think, this is my favorite L2 in the world.

They're going to think we love these L2s.

That's the idea.

So we can now explain the bidding thing if you want.

Yes, please.

Yes, the L1 miner, when they mine – I've kind of flipped a little bit about merge mining around where I say, okay.

You know in the L1 – okay, when you make a Bitcoin Core L1, the coinbase transaction is the first transaction.

That's where the miner gets paid.

The miner makes – we know that that transaction is made by the miner.

So the miner has to make that because they're using it to pay themselves.

So they say, pay me all the money here.

So what they do is they put a little tiny code in there that corresponds to the L2 block.

Now they don't – it doesn't necessarily have to be a valid L2 block at all.

It could just be a random garble of text that means nothing at all.

And it could in fact be an invalid L2 block.

If it is, this just means that the L2 nodes, which are a separate thing, they will reject that block.

And they will say – because the L2 has its own coinbase where they collect all the fees from the L2 block.

And they'll just say, we didn't find a block this period.

We need to go back and mine on the – because whatever this is is not – this isn't block 700,004.

This is just nothing.

And we need to go back to 700,003 and make a new 700,004, which is exactly what they will do.

And that's perfectly acceptable.

That's how blockchains work.

But the reason I bring that up is because the blind merge mining part is that the L2 nodes and the L1 miners,

who would maybe be separate people, they can still cooperate in a trustless way.

Because every – so if you run the L2 node, you automatically – by definition, you have an L1 node also.

And you probably have some L1 coins.

So it's the same person.

The person running the L2 node –

Why is that?

Why would they have to have – if I'm running Thunder Node, why do I have to have e-cash?

That's how all the L2s work.

Even the Lightning Network works that way.

In order to run the Lightning Node, you need Bitcoin Core.

But of course, a lot of people cheat and they just do custodial Lightning.

No one knows any of this lore because nobody would care.

That's true, but it wouldn't be true for all the other blockchains because that's not true for all blockchains.

Lightning, yes, but outside of Bitcoin ecosystem –

Most L2s – some of the L2s are fully custodial anyway, so it's actually pointless to even –

like if you say liquid, in order to run a liquid node, you need to run Bitcoin Core.

And it kind of doesn't matter because you kind of can't even run a liquid node because you don't have the keys.

So it's kind of an interesting – it is a very interesting thing to unpack that like what most people have decided is that they don't even care

because they're just going to trust the brand of the project.

They're going to trust Fediment or something, and they just –

Yeah.

But if you're willing to run the L2 node, the L1 node is very inexpensive relative.

That's true.

In fact, each L2 node must have – one easy way of seeing why it's a technical requirement is that the L2 node needs to know who is deposited to it.

I see.

And how would they get that information if not from the L1 node?

You would have to like get it from someone else running an L1 node, or what's the point?

I see, I see, I see.

I think that's where I wasn't connecting with you because I wasn't getting that the L2 also has to run L1.

So I think I'm clear, a bit more clear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's also why the deposits are super easy anyway because the – since it would be required anyway.

Another thing is like how does the L2 know when the L1 turned the L2 on?

You know what I mean?

Like let's say we put out Thunder software, but people use it on Litecoin and on Bitcoin.

But they start it up on different dates.

You know what I mean?

So they don't even – it has to know like when was I created basically.

That's actually – yeah, there's a lot of questions actually flowing through.

But no, this is a beautiful discussion.

I think we can keep going.

Thank you.